//------------------------------//
// XLIX. The Night is Passing 
// Story: The Night is Passing 
// by Cynewulf 
//------------------------------//

CANTERLOT





Quiet--be quiet and wait--mum's the word around the old rugged guns perched upon the defiled walls of Canterlot. The crew moves only when they must--all of them fear discovery. They worry over each breath. Every single one is proof of their existence, and that existence is dangerous. These ponies are legionaries but they'll die quickly and without heroics--they can calculate trajectories and pick off stragglers but hoof to hoof isn't in the job description.


There are five guns spread along the wall, each fifty meters apart from the next. Close enough for communication, far enough to keep them from being taken all at once. It's not ideal, but it'll do. The truth is that little is ever ideal and no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.


This one so far had. Rainbow Dash and the small Speculatore escort had knocked the scant sentries right off the wall before they had a chance to sound the alarm. No pony had seen them.


Everyone waits for the signal. The northern Pegasi are bewildered or skeptical. A sonic rainboom? It's a myth, or it's just a trick. But the Equestrian-born are all alight with a suppressed excitement. They'll see a miracle tonight one way or another.


The plan is this:


Rainbow Dash will work her sign. The legion will begin its long advance. The guns fire after the signal, as soon as the Equestrian infantry hits the distracted Manichean force.


Confused, the attacking army turns both ways, sending soldiers to seek out an enemy that hasn't arrived, causing more confusion. When the legion arrives, it will push through a disoriented rearguard, torn apart by anti-personnel fire, and the allies shall eat away from two sides until they meet near the middle.


That is the plan. Ideally. 


Of course, as every soldier knows all too well, few plans survive contact with the enemy.











RAINBOW DASH






Rainbow laid flat against the broken roof of a bombed-out store. She was glad--fervently so--for the little watch Rarity had enchanted for her. An old trick, she'd said with a knowing smile. That old trick had been a clock which shed just enough light to be read without revealing her position.


Rainbow Dash's night vision was excellent--all Pegasi were naturally adept in the dark. Unicorns? They came close. Earth ponies? By Rainbiw's high standards, useless as soon as the sun was gone.


So she saw a lot. None of it was what she had wanted to see when she came back. Through a large hole in the roof, for instance, she could see an unidentifiable pool on the floor. She thought of it as unidentifiable even though she was decently sure it was blood because the idea of that much blood coming out of a pony was distressing and it made her want to hurl and frankly she needed to focus.


Dash wished she could shut her eyes and get centered, get hyped--like she might before flying examinations in the Academy--but you can't close your eyes and psyche yourself up behind enemy lines. You can barely avoid to blink.


The Manicheans below were pulling equipment. She wasn't sure what was in the wagon they'd probably stolen off the street, but it would be something worth wrecking.


She licked her lips. The Manicheans had brought light with them. It was really a mixed blessing. She saw this little band just fine, but outside of the tiny island of light? Well, torches and magic wisps had a way of ruining your night vision. 


Opal had gone into detail about her duty before Rainbow had left with the artillery and scouts. She had to cause a ruckus *before* she pulled off a sonic rainboom. In fact, if at all possible she had to cause a scene big enough to attract a lot of attention before she flew back out of the city and went all rainboom. 


Usually, Rainbow Dash and "making a scene" went together very well. Of course, usually "making a scene" didn't involve quite so much... Direct violence. At least, that's how it had been, long ago.


She watched the crew below, and they were definitely a *crew* and not merely a patrol. The strange cargo was unloaded at last, and it was... Mortars. Wonderful. Lucky, in a way. This would be a good place to start.


But now she had to start, and it is harder to start a fight than it is to simply continue it. Continuing a fight or ending it plays into the body's fear--to win is essentially to escape in a more secure way, after all. 


The Manicheans set up their mortars. Dash imagined what they would do. She could see how their shells would fall out of the sky like ripe fruit and...


It was time.


She didn't let them finish. Out of the darkness she ascended without a sound--except for the crack as both her hindlegs smashed hoof-first into the rebel holding a makeshift torch. He fell and his illumination went spinning away into the streets.


The others turned, but realization dawned slowly and Rainbow Dash was the opposite of slow. She hit the unicorn manipulating the whisps. Now there was no light.


One of them still had a rifle. He fired, and the shot went far wide. She snorted and charged him on ground. But he was quick in panic, and fired again.


The second shot went wide, but by an inch. Rainbow hit him low and toppled him onto his back. She reared up and dealt him two swift kicks--

Only to be caught from behind. She'd miscalculated. Cursing, she threw herself and the hanging rebel to the ground. The impact broke the other's grip and Rainbow silenced him.


There was shouting down the street. She kicked frantically at the mortars and then flew back to the roofs before anypony could see her. Okay. That was distraction enough. They would assume there were guards in the area, probably. She didn't know. Didn't care. It was time to jet.


What happened next was too quick for even Rainbow to comprehend fully. She didn't think so much as she was pulled along. Her body led from the front and her mind lagged far behind. 


Rainbow soared upwards, beyond the range of gunfire and spell. Not that any tried--or anypony that she heard. 


Faster. Faster. The world turned to darkness as she intersected a cloud and tore through it... And then she stopped, turned...


Rainbow Dash fell to Earth like a shooting star. The world around her blurred at the edges. She felt as if she herself were beginning to melt, disperse. She...


Pegasus magic is active, but in a different way than the activity of a unicorn's horn. A unicorn thinks and the world twists. A Pegasus cannot think and be in the air. A Pegasus moves. A pegasus does magic by *doing* it, by spreading their wings and grabbing onto the wind and riding it. A unicorn's mind, a pegasus' body, an earth pony's heart. And when that magic is stretched?


Unicorns have strange thoughts and visions. Earth ponies feel strange things. Pegasi... Well. Pegasi see things sometimes.


Rainbow Dash saw Twilight parallel to her. Her body was changed--Twilight was taller, thinner and yet more muscular. Her mane was wild and her horn long and sharp. Rainbow in a magical haze as she hit the perfect speed, thought she saw a scar around her throat like a hanged mare.


And then Dash had pulled up and was hurtling towards the castle, and all visions were forgotten. Below, rebels scattered or stared in bewilderment, cowering under the boom of released magical force.












TWILIGHT



Twilight took a deep breath.


Behind her, Celestia smiled and spoke kindly. "You can do it, Twilight. I think if any of my ponies can, it is you."


Twilight squeezed her eyes shut. "Walk me through it one more time."


"You'll need to manipulate the idiomatic nature of your perception/image which you inhabit here. As it is now, you are using memory and emotion. Besides it being occasionally over-revealing and unpleasant, it is dangerous and unstable. You must alter it to work like Dreamwalking."


"And I do that by..."


Celestia coughed. "Force of will. Well, essentially. As it is now, there are a few ways you could, but most of those require magic you do not know and which I do not have time or mastery enough to teach you. A good starting place would be memories of Dreamwalking."


Twilight thought about Dreamwalking. Specifically, she thought about first learning to talk in and manipulate her dreams... Side by side with Luna.


The scene changed. Celestia was gone. Luna and she were... Were... A lot of places. Twilight's head hurt as she tried to keep up with the rapidly changing background.


She focused, feeling frustrated, and around her everything solidified into the castle where Luna had "grown up". There was an apple tree and Luna stood in it's shade, watching with a flat expression.


"Celestia?" Twilight asked. "She just... Why isn't she moving like the others?"


Celestia calmly walked out of thin air and a startled Twilight fell back. She grinned in a sheepish way and bent helped Twilight back up.


"Because she's not a specific memory," Celestia said. 


"Ah." Twilight regarded the silent Luna and shivered. "It... She's so..."


And the world around her grew hazy and distinct for a moment, and then it resolidified. The false Luna was gone. Celestia was looking around with an unreadable expression.


"She... Um. Told me she..." Twilight faltered. "I liked this place," she finished.


"As did I," her teacher said.


"Okay, so from here, I try to dreamwalk, right? Did I do it?"


"It's more stable. You'll return here when you wake instead of having to rebuild the idiom every time. But I would advise you to hurry, even so. Out there, you move in real time. We need every bit of help we can. I'm not completely sure what you will find, but I know it will not be pleasant. Are you ready?"


"Yes."









CANTERLOT




It is dark, yet dawn is coming. The gate opens and it releases Luna at the head of an army.


The main force of the Manichean occupation is situated just out of typical rifle distance. So they do not hear the shouting or the orders or the stamping hoofs, but they hear the great door. The great mass of movement and intent they hear later.


The complacent besiegers are caught off guard. They scramble to set up a strong line.


And in the air rides Soarin'. Spitfire is at the head of the wedge, to his left. He sees the campfires first. But he also sees the suggestion of movement through the air and so is not taken unawares as his flight of guard ponies hurtles straight into a cloud of intercepting pegasi.


One comes with a sky-lance for his underside and Soarin' rolls out of the way and dives underneath Spitfire as she hits another flier. The lancer stays with him, pulling into the loop with him. Soarin' curses and climbs. The lancer also climbs, matching his speed, faster and then faster. And Soarin pushes himself just out of the way and then stops. He falls maybe thirty meters, maybe forty, but the lancer can't turn swiftly enough to follow. Soarin pushes back up and as the lancer stops himself and tries to dive, Soarin' catches him in the face with a hoof.


He dives back into the fray. 



The Manicheans have strong defensive positions, rifles and long streets, houses turned into hard points. They wait to send death over with fire, and behind these forward bases the main camp begins to slowly stir in confusion.


Luna has learned. The army advances but first there are screams as rebel ponies vanish in the darkness. Nightshades buck them into silence and slink away into the darkness, away from the lights the rebels hastily erect.


The Shadow is not with them as strongly now. It senses something happening here and something far away beyond the corners of the world and it's attention is divided. These are mortals with mortal fears, hearing the echoes of an army, seeing their own vanish, feeling as if a thousand eyes watch them in the night.


The gunners are waiting. They aim and load and wait. Any moment now.  Just a while longer. 



Amaranth drops from the roof and falls on the running rebel's back. He cries out because she let him cry out. Then she kicks him hard and he is gone.


She is already moving before the next Duskwatch lands. 


A panicking rebel sees movement and fires. Amaranth, fresh with blood and filled with a holy fire, can almost see the bullet sluggishly crawl past. What weakness! She rushes him, and others follow. They fall upon the whole line, silent in their exultation, still feeling the silver fire of Luna's will etched into their eyes and souls, feel it burning in their veins.


She dodges a bayonet easily. She sidesteps a hoof blade. Smirking, she dances in between soldiers and pushes them together. This one she strikes down, this one she spares. Life and death swirl around and around her, chaotic and vibrant.


The first line collapses as the Duskwatch vanishes and the ragged, screaming Solar Guard arrives in force. 


Luna on the battlefield is terror and awe. Her own soldiers find their minds peeled back, find themselves almost transported as her aura of Glory washes over them. For brief moments no bullet or blade or blow can kill them. Their kicks and swipes always are true and their rifles never miss the target. She carries the charge by force of will, her hammer rising and falling, then swinging like a scythe. Her eyes are fire and her body seems to open up into an infinite starry night, and the longer one looks the more the voids between the lights loom until you are screaming and running or crying and worshipping and neither makes any sense. Her hammer does not simply batter: it tramples. It cleaves through armor and flesh as if it were a sword. It is like a fist that breaks through flesh and comes out wet and mangled on the other side. 


Out of her mouth comes nothing but hot breath, hot like the exhaust of stars, and she could superheat armor with it. The weight of her full Glory is beginning to show, but she presses on. She continues on.


The initial line of hastily assembled soldiers is gone. Beyond them, lazy sandbags conceal a second line that begins to fire. Guards fall around her, but Luna summons arcane lightning and burns a great hole in the pathetic fortification. There are survivors. One of them is behind a machine gun, a Griffon model far more advanced than what Equestrians use, and begins firing wildly into the street. Almost a dozen guards drop in seconds as the attacking wave scatters for cover. Luna launches forward, calling up her shield.


Behind the sandbags, a petrified whitecloak is stuck with his mouth around a trigger trying to control a gun he isn't trained for, pure adrenaline filling him as he ignores the pain against his teeth and the rat-a-tat in his brain. The only thing he's aware of is the flashing and the burned smell beside him and now Luna.


He manages to line Luna in his sights, still squeezing the trigger. The gun is starting to smoke. Luna, flying with outstretched wings and hammer high. Bullets impacting against her magic, pushing at her shield, landing like a pony falling into bed and then shattering or melting. Empty shells cascading down like a waterfall, hot and rolling on the cobblestone.


All of this seems frozen for a moment. Everything is focused.


Magic shields reflect the power of their owners. Against magic, an Alicorn's shield at full power is night impenetrable. But against physical attack any shield is at a disadvantage. Repeated attacks keep the caster from reinforcing and repairing the shield...


A machine gun is the ideal weapon to destroy shields, and the Griffon-issue Talon Type 19 is the best there is.


Luna's shield does not break. Her aura burns the bullets before they can impact, and Luna sidesteps. The terrified rebel is too overcome by her Glory and his own terror to turn his weapon. It begins to glow softly in the night, and before it can overheat, Luna has cleared the sandbags and is beside him. The hammer comes down.


The guard follows up behind her.  They pour into the forward camp, sparking three dozen seperate little battles. A battle Mage hurls two rebel gunners through a window, but a bayonet runs him through. A Solar Centurion holds off a small countercharge with the revolver he levitates, until his attackers remember that they, too, can fire and that there are more than six of them by far. 


And far off in the night, the main force begins to move ponderously towards Luna's beleaguered survivors. They will wake and then it will all be over. 


At least, that is what is destined until Opal's guns begin their barrage, and throw an army caught flat footed into disorder.














TWILIGHT




In the depths of her silent dreaming, Twilight reached out for someone she did not know. 


But Celestia knew her. Celestia was watching her as she slept, watching over her still form as it lay in the grass of the sister's ancient home. Celestia also was within her, a tiny shard of a vibrant whole.



That ghost of Celestia's shadow tugged her along in the Aether. Twilight was glad for the direction, for the Dreaming felt different from this side of reality. When she had dreamed inside of the world, it has felt like slowly sinking in silty water. From the outside? Like trying to sink into brick. Yet somehow, she managed it.


Twilight soared through the chaos and dim light, past thousands of dream bubbles. 


She found the one she wanted and touched it.


She stood in a hazy winter wasteland. The wind howled around her. Snow piled up. Great evergreens loomed over her in an unforgiving darkness. Truly, this was the end the world was destined for, an end in howling winter and eventual silence. For the briefest moment, she thought that seeing Celestia had all been a dream after all, that she had failed and that the world had died anyway in her absence.


Twilight shook her head. 


It wasn't as hard to make progress through the harsh blizzard as it would have been in real life. Yet, at the same time, it was punishing. She tried to alter her perception of the world. This is not cold. I have a pegasus metabolism and I laugh at cold.


Yet it was cold even still.


Twilight didn't know Celestia's plan. She hadn't asked the right questions, really, and wasn't that strange? Except, of course, that it wasn't strange at all. Oh, she had asked questions of Celestia before, but had she ever truly doubted her?


She was hard-pressed to think of a time. The wedding, when Celestia had been so disappointed with her when Twilight had been right? Perhaps. Yes, certainly, but her doubt had been subsumed in her pain and shock. When Celestia had sent her to Ponyville seemingly without listening to her warnings about the Mare in the Moon? No, she had mostly turned that on herself.


So of course she had blindly trusted. Should she? Now there was a thought. And how would she know? How would she judge her faith in her teacher? Celestia had rarely failed her. She had been faithful, if not always forthcoming. Kind, patient. Beautiful, Twilight thought despairingly.


She felt like a traitor. And that was the moment when the mind she had been looking for found her.


Twilight felt her legs freezing first and looked down at them in panic. Freezing was no metaphor--her hooves were encased in ice. The frost began to advance up her legs like a spider web, and she struggled to free herself. One hoof came free. With a cry between triumph and horror she set it down and pulled on another, only to find the leg trapped where it was. 


BE STILL


Twilight tried. She really did, but her body just refused. Her heart would not stop hammering in her chest. She thought she had understood winter before but suddenly it felt like the very spirit of Ice was coming for her and she would be frozen in place.


She saw the eyes first.


They were blue. A light blue, like a gentle tropical sky but they lied. Because they were cold. Not just haughty, or merely unkind, merely judging, they were the very opposite of warm in every way. They made Twilight feel as if she would undo every warm and ecstatic moment spent in Celestia's summer-gaze if those eyes watched her long enough. The face was next. The whole body. 


An Alicorn stood in the trees, indifferent to the snow as she was indifferent to Twilight's identity. She would have an answer and then crush the intruder like a fly on the wall. She was a shield for the weak but no mother. She was a dagger in the night. She was the dark cold heart of winter, she whom cities would tremble before, who with a sneer could destroy whole civilizations in endless winter. She was beautiful, pure white coat and hair more golden than blond, a regal yet savage coat with iron brooches across her shoulders, green linen bordered with thick fur. She was beautiful. She was beauty itself without an ounce of warmth and Twilight despaired.


But she was not destroyed. Somewhere inside of her, Twilight found a tiny core of composure and she clung to that strength for dear life.


WHO ARE YOU, WHO WEARS A FALSE FACE? the wind asked.


"Queen Iridia," Twilight said and tried to bow. Her voice did not shake. "I come with a message from your sister. She asked me to say that winter taught her that the sun too must be harsh and that she is a fool." The last bit was hard, but Twilight said it.


Iridia did not blink. She was silent for a few seconds, and then she spoke and the wind died down.


"You wear one face yet many. I smell Celestia. I taste Luna in the air. Another I... Ah, I know who you are. The one whose name was so fitting. Between night and day, a Twilight. A fool? Certainly she is sometimes. She refuses to except certain realities. But only she would think a blanket statement such as that would appease me in some way. She is certainly not a fool. Only soft when she should not be for her own sake and too enamored with certain... Subjects."


Iridia no longer seemed hostile but her expression did not truly soften.


"I feel my daughter on you. Her... Warmth. She foalsat you, did she not?"


"Yes," Twilight said as confidently as she could.


"How does she rule?"


"The Crystal Ponies love her."


"That tells me nothing," Iridia said without a trace of emotion. "Mortals love evildoers and fools all the time."


Twilight swallowed. "Before Celestia's sabbatical, I spent a week in Imperial Center studying it's culture and administration. She is fair and has straightened out a tangled beauracratic mess. She deals honestly and openly except when she needs to be discrete, and never lies but isn't always forthcoming. She is merciful but not foolish, and generous but not blind. I was very impressed and told her so."


"Mercy," Iridia tasted the word. "She certainly did not learn it from me."


Twilight felt another chill. "I have a message."


"Then give it, interloper."


"I... It's..." It had been a long message and Twilight was frozen and terrified.


Iridia did not change her features at all. "Think about a letter, child. Imagine words being written as you hear Celestia's voice." Her voice did not change, and yet Twilight did not feel any frustration from her. It was… it was something Celestia might have said to her, but without the softening of the voice.


Twilight did so. And as she did, a letter appeared in the air between them.


"T-thank you. Can I..." Twilight was shivering all over, uncontrollably.


Iridia released the ice and Twilight almost collapsed. She shivered as the Henosian Queen read quietly. She listened as Iridia snorted to herself over some bit of the missive.


"Curious. You. This request. The taste and smell of you in the Aether. That you would be able to intrude upon my most solemn sanctum in this way at all. Very curious. I find I do not like curious things, Twilight Sparkle. But I will go. I quite believe you. You are either legitimate or the worst and yet most interesting attempt at assassinating me in three millennia. Shall we depart?"


Twilight nodded and held out a hoof.








CANTERLOT




Artillery is loud. This should go without saying, but its something that everyone always seems to forget. Often, this loudness is misunderstood. You’ll think--loud enough to hurt my ears--loud enough to send me reeling--loud enough to make me cry out.


Try loud enough to shake the world. Everything shakes. The floor rebels. The ground throws ponies off. A great boom that is almost anti-climactic because its so close it shatters your eardrums and through your bleeding ears you hear very little. You feel the thump, like a bass drum, except everywhere and a hundred times as bad, hurting now and not invigorating, driving you like a hammer. Glass or stone or dust thrown up in a great cloud, filling the street, raining down for a few seconds afterward.


Now imagine a barrage.


Imagine this in the diseased hours between eleven and four, when the sun is a memory. Imagine that as a bleary column of white-barded ponies trots down the street towards the growing sounds of chaos a horrible whining keen fills the air. Perhaps they recognize it. Perhaps they are exhausted and don’t. Perhaps they recognize it and know already that it is far, far too late. Imagine the houses beside them exploding as if by their own volition. Imagine heat and dust filling eyes and the burning of terror and adrenaline, the thrown glass that cuts skin, the rocks which crush and the cobblestone torn up as one lands in the midst of the column. Imagine trying to find cover when the threat comes from above. Imagine what it must be like to know that there is nowhere to run for you.


It is a bit like lying flat and asking the mountains to fall on you that you might not see the wrath of an angry god.








The guns roar in the night, echoing over the embattled city. Ice Storm lands briefly on a roof with his wing. They lie flat, staying out of the line of fire. Below, a Solar Guard push has stalled as a machine gun is brought up the street. In the tight corners of the lower quarter, superior rate of fire proves supreme. You can jump back and hope to be missed by a rifle with one shot at a time. You cannot hope the same from a Talon machine gun manned by frightened but alert rebels.


Even if you’re flying. Storm signals his wing to creep towards the edge of the roof and they do. From there, he can see over the hasty barricade and to the machine gunner and his supporting infantry below. Ponies behind little walls of sandbags, huddling out of the way of bullets and magic. Fearing the first’s suddenness and the latter’s versatile agony. 


Ice Storm thinks, not as one considers a question but as one reacts to an uncovered truth, we were not made for this. No pony alive was made for this. It isn’t what we were meant to do.


Yet he does it. He taps the roof softly, but his assembled pegasi feel the vibrations in their wings, pressed to the cold rooftop. One. Two.


On three they dive into the frantic, distracted ponies below.


It is hard to really guage how effective a barded pegasus falling from a height can be if one has not seen such a thing. Suffice to say that though they are lighter than the other tribes, a pegasi hoof is still as hard as any other hoof, and even a lighter pony falling with all of his weight and added momentum is more than enough.


Ice Storm’s steel-shoed hooves hit one of the rebels in the shoulder, and he feels the crack of bone as the gunner lets his rifle fly into the air and falls against his neighbor. There is a general cry of alarm.


Others go down. Another pony abandons his rifle or any semblance of mechanized war and comes at Ice Storm with his hooves, rearing to kick. This is no longer a struggle of bullet and maneuver but of the most primal sort, the oldest sort. As Storm ducks, one hoof slides off the back of his barding and the other misses entirely. The soldier hasn’t even pulled his hoofblades forward. Storm throws him back with a push and then deploys his own with a sort of kicking motion.


They swarm. The machine gunner keeps firing, frantic to keep the street clear, knowing that there can’t be that many coming down, there just can’t be. Storm’s wing is no longer charging but bogged down in a mass of bodies. The melee has devolved into biting, kicking, wordless roars, grunts and the smell of sweat and blood. He finds an unhelmeted head in front of him and he headbutts with his own helmeted head. Something tries to hold him down and he bucks wildly at it, his nostrils flaring, his eyes wide, something instinctive telling him that his back is undefended, something remembering jumping predators in tall grass. He circles, throwing off one pony while knocking himself into another. This one bucks him hard in the face, catching his cheek and sending him sprawling. He feels something hard crack against his back and he cries out.


But there is no second blow. Instead, a rush of wind, and the cries that bring back the racial memory of jumping wolves in the dark and he is being hauled up by a beautiful monster with glowing red eyes, her face smeared in blood--her own, someone else’s, Stars he does not know he does not want to know at all--and then Amaranth is pushing him back and yelling.


Ice Storm’s wing are strikers. They aren’t made for drawn out battle. Already, the surprise is gone and loud gunfire startles him back into clarity. He takes to the sky and knows that any pegasi who can will follow him, but calls for them anyway.


They retreat beyond the initial roof, landing three streets over, sliding down one tenanment house to the next, spilling into a grassy lot. He counts. He orders, Three missing. Nine left, including himself. Better than what it could have been, worse than he had expected. He curses. But he does not hear the rat-a-tat of a Talon gun at all anymore.








Luna continues on.


The forward positions melt away. The mortar teams, sleeping or caught in lazy repositioning for the morning’s bombardment, are caught in her glow and in the path of her swinging hammer. She obliterates them. Most do not get more than a single chance to fire, if even that. She summons gales that blow them into the sky to crack and die on the streets far away. She burns them out of their stolen houses. She calls down lightning and pure arcane energy to blast their hardpoints into cinders and scorchmarks. She absorbs small arms fire. 


But the world has moved on. War has changed. A mortar team begins to zero in on her relentless path. One blast down the street, hitting friendly targets. Another, closer. Another, beyond her.


There is not another. Luna is enraged and godlike in her fury but she is no blind berserkgangr. She has moved already. She flies through the tight streets.


Behind her, the combined guards move up another street.








Four or five guns is not really that much, even when they are shooting shells that rock streets and obliterate walls.


The artillery only does so much. After the first twenty minutes of absolute panic they cause, the enemy adapts. They try to mortar the wall but that is beyond futile. Charging is suicide, but they do not know that these guns are old enough to still be using scattershot to discourage primitives with a lot of bravery and no ken of modern death. They talk to the remaining guns outside, few as they are, with magic scrying. It is not fast going.


Down the road, a Manichean crew is sighting one of the last rebel howitzers. Two earth ponies manipulating the gun. A unicorn bent over a glowing orb, struggling to keep the spell strong enough for coordinates just awhile longer, fatigued and thirsty, drug from his cot.


He does not work for long. There is no battle shout. A crystal pony charges from the darkness with a long telescoping lance mounted on his barding, and spears the frustrated unicorn through the neck. The lance is discarded with its target and the antiquated, pressure-sensitive clockwork machinery on the saddle pulls out another while the legionaire advances. Others follow behind their intrepid, silent centurion.


These are the auxilia lancae and they are very good at what they do. They have to be, on a battlefield that has changed.


Speed is their weapon as much as the lance and the pistol folded to the side of their barding, attached to an arm and worked by means of old but reliable mechanics. They do not pause at all in their charge through the lazily constructed gun nest. There is barely time to raise an alarm, and very soon no one to raise it to. 


The legion is on the Canterlot road. They come out from the helpful shadow of the mountain, and in the pitched chaos of battle they are initially ignored. 


But not for long. The Manicheans send out skirmishers to work around the guns and pick off the gunners, and one of these spots something, he thinks, out on the road. He squints, his mind cloudy as the hand of Shadow is light upon him, and rests his long rifle on an overturned cart in the road. He signals to the pony behind him to pause. Slowly, sure that it is nothing, he looks out towards the gate barricade, abandoned now as the army moves to catch the over-extended garrison.


Through the alchemical scope he sees warm shapes thundering up the mountain path and the first clear thought he has had in weeks breaks through the haze of corruption.


He is silent. He says nothing. No sudden exclamations of dismay, no horrified utterance. If anything, he is finally calm.


He gestures to his spotter and offers the scope. The other pony looks. 


They exchange glances. The Shadow’s touch--light, so light, so otherwise occupied and working too many strings--is thrown off and they know where they are and what they do fully at last. There is no conversation about what to do. The first takes off his helmet, then his barding, then his hoofblades. He shakes out his mane, takes a deep breath, and when his partner is done, they move back into the tenement houses, leaving their guns in the street.











CELESTIA


I know it’s all a bit confusing, Twilight. I know that… I may seem different. This place changes you. It’s not a safe place, but it is a good one. Don’t you feel it? A little bit, at least? If you stayed here longer, more and more you would feel the goodness of this place, ‘till at last you would hear the Song. But you’ve heard it, haven’t you? I remember that now. The Well. That was but a taste, faithful student. A terrestial shadow of an Empyreal reality. An echo, if you will.


I am better suited for this place, but don’t be fooled: this is no more my home and element than it is yours. I am simply a better swimmer.


We have all the time in the world. All the time in the world, absolutely. A second here is less than even the tiniest fraction of time in our world. Ea, the world that is, or so they used to say once now and then long, long ago.


Can you believe I’ve forgotten where that name rose from and from whom it came? Perhaps it slipped in from the outside. For the world is not yet full in its completeness, and so it lives and breathes even still, and sometimes we are visited for an instant by the shadow of the Other and the Otherwise.


What shall we talk about, before you and I attempt to do a greater thing than either of us have ever done?


What is the Shadow? It is despair, as I’ve said. Ah, I see. You mean, how is it despair.


Well, it is despair in the same way that I am light and sunshine, or in the same way that you are magic and curiosity, or that your friend Rainbow Dash is speed and great heart.


Despair is what the shadow is, but it is also what it does. We say that a pony is in despair over something--a lost loved one, a failed business, some horrible turn of events--but that is not quite accurate. I have thought about it quite a bit, you know, especially since my sister was lost to me.


If a pony says in her heart, “I shall be Celestia,” then she shall be me or nothing. And as I myself an myself and she is her own self, she is therefore nothing. She is in despair over this failure, we might say, but that is not true. She is actually in despair over herself.


Not clear? Hm.


Despair is not about the outside. It is about the inside. 


A pony who sees the self and would not be the self that he or she is, that is a pony in despair. It is something like hatred, but different. It is like avarice, but not quite. These are like shadows and despair is the great monolith caught in the light. They suggest. They outline the thing, but they are not the thing.


We live in a kind world. But that does not mean we live in a world that is always perfect or always immediately pleasant or always immediately satisfying. You know this, even if you wouldn’t say it like that. Think about when you were most buried in studies and new, wonderful knowledge. I am sure of this: in some exhausted, tired moment, or in some quiet one beside some silly pile of new books, you felt it. That the world was Good. That you had learned, and that it was Good to learn, and Good to know, and Good to be the pony that you were. You were happy, yes, but that’s not what I mean. Something… something deeper than happiness.


Perhaps when you first tried your hoof with astronomy with me, that night in the tower. Do you remember? I love that memory. I’m glad you do as well. It was a wonderful night, wasn’t it? I was so excited to show you… I confess I was thinking about Luna the entire time. You had expressed an interest in stars, and I was aching for the sister I knew must return soon, and so we worked out each other’s great anxieties. Yours was the eagerness to know, and mine was the anticipation of reunion. 


But the moment, when mere looking and admiring opened up into something else entirely. A science. Not charts and equations and memorized lists, for these are not science in the way that letters are not language. They are the outward sign, the currency with which you do brisk business. Hopefully. The almost unspeakable cut to your heart of longing, not just to know, but to be apart of a great surging something, of something beyond mere fillyhood. Something closer to the smell of salt on the wind while at sea, or of the first step up a mountain, or perhaps even of a timid knock at a door. A great question which would fuel ten thousand days of inquiry to find the answer, not a direct question but an ever circling, ever… ever…


Like a concentric set of circles. Approximation, that’s it. Ever circling, ever getting closer, like Luna and I and the sun and the moon, circling and circling in a great dance, honing in on the Ineffable. By clever arts taming it into the known, but knowing deep down that we shall never catch the thing itself but get close enough.


That is joy.


Now I want you to try very hard to imagine the opposite of that.


Imagine if even another’s learning filled you with a loathing so intense you would murder them, Twilight. I know that it is hard to twist the mind in unnatural ways.


Imagine that from the instant of creation, there was a thing which so loathed the very question that the suggestion of an approximation of an answer drove it to silence the question forever.


Is it afraid of the answer? That’s a good question! But I don’t think so. I’m not sure it cares. Or perhaps it cares more than we could even understand. That caring is what drives it to a sort of recursive madness.


It is the impetus of a labyrinth. When ponies are in despair, they walk the labyrinth and struggle to break free. Or they don’t. They are both kinds close to a kind of death, right upon that line.


The Hideous Strength, the Shadow, is the labyrinth. What dreams must it have?












TWILIGHT



Another dream, this one warm to the touch and soft like pillows, lace. A cheek. A kiss in the night on your neck, sending shivers up your spine.



Her first thought was that she would lie in every word if she tried to describe the feeling of this place, if you could call it a place. A concept? No. A feeling? Closer.
 

Physicality was limited and awkward and sort of difficult even at the best of times, and with the things one would expect it would be most easy to fit into the limits of the material. Ponies walked all the time, and it was a completely normal, mundane, material thing to do. Yet, they tripped. Walking as a pony or as anything else for that matter was limited and imperfect. There were so many different sorts of walks. One could strut, stroll, advance, proceed, patrol, wander. But what if you could casually stroll or float or breach the idea of walking itself? Or even more basic, of locomotion, of self-powered movement itself? That was what she had walked into. It occurred to her, blandly, that this was the same as the last dream, but she had been too focused on the sensation of being cold to notice. She had no idea what Iridia’s bubble had been. She had no idea what this one was. Or she had ideas, and she wasn’t sure what to make of them, so it was well enough that she had no ideas.

 
What did it look like? It was hard to make out. The world around her was elusive. One moment, it was a simple bedroom. The next, a starry night and a secluded forest clearing. The next after, if you’ll follow (and Twilight did her best to follow the ever-moving pictures) it was a simple street with ponies walking together or alone or in great gaggles, some smiling, some laughing, some just gazing about or at each other. And then it settled into a simple house. It was a normal house, like any in Ponyville. Simple, rustic Equestrian architecture of the century before—one found it still in the country. Thatched roofs. Dimly, she recalled that the style of thatched roofs had come back after a long absence. Why was that? Her mind was like scattershot.

 
Twilight shook her head. She had to focus.

 
Or, well, she had to try to focus. The house had a little garden, nothing grand or fancy. There were other houses around it, all similarly small and rustic. They all felt wonderful and refreshing. Each contained a wonderful and warm home, she knew this somehow. This felt like her home, and she had never seen it before. Her mind was filled with warm meals and warmer smiles, of sitting on the couch reading and soft laughter over morning coffee.

 
There was a little fence and a gate which she opened. A painted mailbox with flowers on it, as if a child had been allowed to decorate which made her smile like an idiot. A little homely path of stones laid in the grass. She knocked on the door—it seemed polite somehow. Her mind was fuzzy.

 
“Come in!” said a voice which she knew that she recognized, but could not attach to anypony that she knew.

 
Twilight opened the door and walked into the middle of a grand ball.

 
She wore a dress—she had never seen it before, but looking down she found that it was lovely. It reminded her of stars, and look! Stars appeared. A night sky, with a crescent moon near her flank. Like Luna.

 
And as she thought it, so Luna appeared out of the dancing, stately crowd. Her eyes shone with something Twilight’s heart recognized and leapt at but that left her mind puzzled, if pleasantly so.

 
“Shall we dance?”

 
I’m not sure I have the time to be dancing. I have to find… I have to find… Her mind said this, but her mouth opened and it said: “Absolutely.”

 
Luna swept her into a dance and led her across the swirling crowd. She heard string music, even knew the piece, and knew she must be in Canterlot. But this was all at the periphery of her mind, for Luna took the lion’s portion.
 
 
Luna. She was strong, and Twilight felt just how strong she was, but also graceful. It was like being sheltered in the hands of a gentle giant. Yet, she felt no masculinity in it, none of the tired cliché of strength but something wildly feminine that a lesser Twilight, and earlier one, would have felt envy over. She smelled of… was it lavender? But it was. And the night air in forgotten gardens. Twilight thought she could get drunk off of the smell alone. Her touch was not electric so much as it was intoxicating. As they danced, she found that her heart raced and her eyes saw more clearly. Her coat stood on end, her mind struggled to form coherent thoughts, her skin was on fire, her steps were like cannons, her lips ached for something, her body felt hot and then cool as if blown by wind, her—

 
They had passed through the crowd. Luna held her and Twilight forgot everything but the thrill and she laughed as her lover twirled her in a dance that had completely changed. No more stateliness, or rather, a form less attached to image and more to something far more formal and far more regal. She wore a circlet of gold and Luna was dressed as a queen of some savage land and Twilight didn’t care for anything but that Luna might kiss her. Not a chaste peck, or a hesitant question, or even a warm exchange, but something ferocious. Something you might call animalistic or beastial even though these words were stupid and beneath what she was feeling, but they were as close as she could come.

 
They wore nothing. She lay in soft, springy grass. Above her, stars that Luna blotted out and a full moon that had come so close. She was mad. She was losing her mind. Luna kissed her with something like hunger but to call it hunger was base. Twilight tried to pull her in but it wasn’t necessary. She felt Luna’s teeth nip at her ears, her neck, and Twilight moaned like she was in heat—worse, in fact, but it was not wanton. It was, in fact, right in a sense which she could not explain and had no time to contemplate but would have moved her to tears were it not for Luna touching her, kissing her, whispering words that she heard but that faded as she touched them with her dreaming mind. Luna possessed her while being possessed. Luna took her in the way that Twilight barely understood and she could not simply drift away into warm pleasure because it was too intense, like trying to ignore the sun or a fire as she stared right at it or lay upon it. And—
 
 
Twilight lay panting, filled with warmth and yet with a hollow ache in her heart. And her loins, if she were honest. She felt… no, she didn’t feel embarrassed by the last bit even a little bit. Luna lay beside her. They were in… they were in the room on the island of Midway, in Maldon the city that was. The gulls were crying each to each as the first cracks of dawn spilled in. Luna was so warm. Twilight was meant to be here. She felt as if she was whole. She closed her eyes, blinked really, and opened them—

 
To find that she was walking beside her friends, laughing over some shared joke. It was a clean, honest laughter that did not shy away from the daylight and there was nothing coarse about it for its brashness. It was a beautiful day in Ponyville, and Twilight relished it because it was hers, but also because it was theirs. She loved them. A thousand years, she wished them, and then—

 
She was at the door to the Garden again, looking at them. For a horrible moment she thought she had fallen back out. But before she could begin to panic, she was swept away by a tide of something like sorrow. And it was sorrow, but not totally. It was sweet even as it burned, but to call it bittersweet was folly. They were all there—the mother from Maldon and her son, who chased the Sun. Applejack and Pinkie, Rainbow and Rarity, Fluttershy and Kyrie. Luna, Celestia, Cadance winking at her and Cadance flashing her his silly, goofy grin. Her companions from school, her parents, Spike—oh, her heart quailed within her, but even this was joy!—everyone she had ever loved.

 
She found that she wept. They said they loved her and she said she loved them too, with all her heart, and she could do nothing else but love them and chose it all the same as if there were a million different ends and then—

 
Twilight took a step into what looked like a royal bedroom and then collapsed.

 
Her breathing was haggard and her face flushed as if she were laid low by the flu. Her body ached. She felt… she felt spent. Awful and wonderful at the same time. Like any moment she might throw up and yet also like could eat Canterlot out of house and home. She was shaking, Twilight realized faintly.

 
Looking up, Twilight saw her. Or, really, them.

 
Celestia and Luna. Sitting on a regal bed. Both smiled at her.

 
She trembled. She knew what this bubble was. She knew it.

 
“I… I don’t…”

 
“Hush, love. Be still,” Luna said to her.

 
“You’ve no need to defend yourself,” Celestia continued, and Twilight’s heart beat faster in her breast, if that were possible. “Will you rise and come to us, or we to you?”

 
Twilight found herself crying again. Her tears turned to sobs, great heaving sobs. “I don’t… I’m sorry… I don’t want to chose… I already chose, I—“

 
And she felt somepony kiss her and saw it was Celestia. And then Luna was there, kissing her, and she found that it was Luna who picked her up in her magic—and it was strangely warm, and Twilight could not find out why—and they brought her to the bed and they ministered to her, murmuring softly as they stroked and fussed over her mane. Celestia kissed her forehead and Luna hummed a little tune in her ear that sounded like it was ancient.

 
“I don’t understand. Why are you both here? Isn’t… I…” Twilight struggled to speak. Her sobs slowly receded into only a sort of aching numbness. “But I can’t love you both. That’s what this place is, isn’t it? Home and romance and being together and… and friends and… I just…”

 
“This is Love,” they said together. Luna kissed her again, and Twilight wanted both to weep and to sigh in contentment. “This is love,” Luna repeated. “You did not mean to be wicked in your loves, Twilight, my dearest, my love. You loved with a filly’s heart. You loved your mother, and so you loved the one who taught you to do those things which most you were made to do.”

 
“And you loved the one who was brave and sought you out, even when it could have been costly,” Celestia said, and kissed her forehead. “Luna, who invited you into her deepest places, hoping you would come, always timid and yet always bold. You were alone, and you found a soul who knew what it was to be alone, and together you found that it was good not to be alone.”

 
“But… do you even…” Twilight went slack and surrendered.
 
 
Celestia, or the Image of Celestia, smiled at her and kissed her lips, and Twilight thought it tasted of paradise. “No, to answer your question. Though I’ve tried that road before, long ago, at my sister’s encouraging. But that is not the question, is it? It is a question, obviously, but it is a sort of silly question, don’t you think, faithful student?”
 

“Quite a silly one,” Luna agreed. They giggled and Twilight found that it was the weirdest thing in a great sideshow of strangeness. “And you know, I really thought you and Morning Dew were, ah, how do they say it now? Cute together.”

 
“Oh, she was adorable,” Celestia agreed.

 
“Stars,” Twilight said.

 
Celestia looked back at her while Luna played with her mane. “You are a mare parted three ways, Twilight Sparkle, after a fashion. Here, let the real you speak to the you that you think you are: You love me, Celestia.”

 
“Yes. I do,” Twilight said, and felt her heart in her throat.

 
“You love what you think is me, the idea in your head. A perfect, untouchable master. The all-knowing, all-wise, all-powerful goddess who is your mother and the object of your deepest and most base desires.”

 
“Yes, I do,” Twilight said again, and swallowed.

 
“And you love Luna, the real Luna, who loves you also,” Luna said in her ear. “The Luna who wrote to you, and to whom you wrote, when the world was a little warmer. The one who taught you to dreamwalk and excitedly showed you her private world. The one who made the walls of her heart as clear as she could to you, that you might do the same.”

 
“I love you, Luna,” Twilight said, and she thought she might cry again.

 
“You love Luna,” Celestia agreed. “You loved me, and you loved the idea of me. You cannot love the idea of a pony, for that is not what love is, because you are lusting after an idol of your own making. Yet, the sin is not as great as you feared, for truly you loved me. Would you have come all this way for a base lust? I think not.”

 
“But is that… is that okay? I don’t really understand how this works,” Twilight said.
 

“It is. That is not to say that it is easy. Your heart cannot always be divided,” Celestia told her and then she sang a little wordless melody while Luna spoke and Twilight thought it might be a lullaby. Luna was still beside her, lower than Celestia and breathing softly against her cheek.

 
“And your heart shall not always be so divided,” she said with a tone that brought back the memory of the whirlwind before but also of the long intimate night in the ruins of Luna’s ancient playground castle. “Love is patient, Twilight.”

 
“Kind,” Celestia said, as if by rote, with a smile like a teacher and like a mother.

 
“It does not envy, nor boast, nor is it proud,” Luna offered. “Even of sisters, if it can help it,” she added with a little chuckle in Twilight’s ear. “When I can help it.”

 
“It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs…” Celestia continued on, her voice gaining momentum as if approaching some climax.
 

“Nor does it delight in evil,” Luna whispered in her ear like a lover, for she was. Her tone was serious now, very serious. “But it rejoices in the truth, Twilight.”
 

“It protects always. Always trusts. Always hopes,” Celestia added, and she kissed Twilight’s forehad, below her horn, over her eyes which fluttered shut, the tip of her nose. Twilight giggled softly. Her lips, and lingered, and Twilight felt that she might cry again and did not understand herself. “It always perseveres,” she added, and Celestia looked at Luna and smiled.
 

“Love never fails,” said a third voice. Twilight blinked, and Celestia and Luna were gone. She shot up.
 

And found Cadance standing in the bedroom’s doorway with the warmest smile yet. It was motherly, but not. Mischievous but never with a drop of malice. “Prophecies and tongues and knowledge all fail, but it doesn’t. Celestia told me all of that once, when you were… eleven, I think? I’m not sure. I’ve never forgotten it.”
 

“Cadance? Is this… is it you, or another image?” Twilight asked. Her heart ached, and yet it was not so bad.
 

“It’s me, Twily,” she said, momentarily mocking her husband’s voice. It startled Twilight into laughter as Cadance crossed the large bedroom slowly. “It’s me. I’m… well, honestly, I’m shocked to see you here. Glad, obviously. But you…” she paused, uncertain. “You seem very strange, do you know that? Not like your usual self.”
 

“It’s… hard to explain.”
 

Cadance hummed, her brow furrowing. “Yeah… yeah, I believe that for sure. I know it’s you though. I’d never forget. But, just to be sure—“
 

“Sunshine, sunshine?” Twilight offered, off-key.
 

“Ladybugs awake!” Cadance finished, and giggled. “Yup, it’s you. I may not be a real dreamwalker like Luna or as powerful as Celestia or my mother, but I have my ways. It’s like you’re mostly you, but I kind of… uh, taste? Taste works. Taste Aunt Celestia. And Aunt Luna. And…” She frowned. “Mom?”
 

Twilight nodded. “I just saw your mother.”
 

Cadance paled. “Whoa. Well… Wow, and you’re alive? I’m shocked she didn’t make you an icicle, Twilight.”

 
“She almost did, but she let me try and talk first. She wasn’t mean about it, not really,” Twilight said quickly. “I mean, I do seem… weird. I’m not really doing a normal kind of dreamwalking here.”

 
“I hadn’t noticed,” Cadance said, smirking. Then her expression changed like quicksilver. She seemed to wrestle with something, and bit her lip.

 
Twilight pressed forward. “I have a message for you from Celestia. This one is easier than your moth—“

 
“You found her?” Cadance almost shouted. She grabbed Twilight between her forelegs. “You found her! Where? Why? When? Ho—“

 
“Hold on! Wait, wait just a second.” Twilight said, and gently pushed Cadance back. “She can tell you herself. She wants you to come with me. Like, to her. After my last stop.”

 
“Last stop?”
 

“Yeah. You’re stop number two. Your mother was stop number one.”

 
“Hardest first?”

 
“No. I think… dangerous first, then the harder ones.”

 
Cadance looked bemused, then as if she were about to make a joke about being offended, and then suddenly her face twisted with pained understanding. “Oh. I… Well. I didn’t mean to do all of this on purpose, Twilight. This… special dreamwalking, whatever it is… it’s insane, you know that, right? You have the same sort of weight here as an alicorn would. Like, a real one.”

 
“You were always a real alicorn to me, you know,” Twilight said suddenly, not sure why she said it.

 
Cadance blinked, taken aback. Then, she smiled and wrapped Twilight in a hug. “And you were the best foal I ever foalsat, you know that?” She released Twilight and her expression became serious, but not grim. “But I do know what you saw and felt. I wasn’t intruding. You sort of took over my whole… everything there, I guess. So I know.”

 
Twilight looked down. “I kinda figured you would.”

 
“You and Auntie Luna. Wow.” She grinned. “Well, she is pretty good looking for her age, I guess.”

 
“Ugh. So shallow, Cady.”

 
“The shallowest,” Cadance agreed with a giggle. “Seriously, though. Twilight… I’m so sorry. This… I’ve been gone so long. I saw the beginnings of this whole ordeal, and I thought it was a foalhood crush. Had I been around a little longer, I would have been able to help you. We could have talked about it. This is sort of my domain and I really blew it for you, didn’t I?”

 
Twilight shook her head. “No, I did that. I’m the one who let it all get twisted. You’re not weirded out?”

 
“Of course not. I know true love when I see it.” She chuckled and looked somewhere over Twilight’s shoulder. “I asked Aunt Celestia about that once, when I was getting used to my… power makes it sound wrong. More like my affinity, I suppose. How would I be able to know? She said to me, with the strangest tone of voice… ‘For now, we see as through a glass, and darkly, but then face to face. Now, we know in part, but then we shall know even as we are known.’”

 
“What on earth does that mean?”

 
“For me? It meant that love isn’t simple, Twilight. It’s not math. Thank the Song it isn’t. I’m still bad at math. Shiny makes up for my woeful lack. ‘S why I married him, of course. To shore up my mathematical deficiencies. You love Celestia for wonderful reasons. She’s kind and good and gracious and understanding and genuine. She really does care about all of her little ponies and she really loved being your teacher and mentor and she really did and does love you. You loved my aunt Luna because she loved you first, because she wanted you to be a part of her life and she wanted to be a part of yours and she tried to understand you. Those things aren’t wrong at all. They never could be.” She sighed. “But love is weird, Twilight, and yes, that’s a technical term. Love never fails, but ponies fail all the time. They take things and they mess them up. I love Shiny and he loves me, but we still hold little grudges sometimes, and it takes work not to. You were growing up, and you were lonely, and you were insecure because every pony ever has always been insecure because it’s just…” she shrugged. “It’s what ponies are. And so you made a false Celestia and you tried to love it.”

 
“But it’s not her at all, is it?”

 
“Of course not. Is Celestia perfect or all-knowing or some sort of exotic empress of pure whatever? No. She likes cake too much and is overly fond of tea. She likes roses unironically and sometimes she forgets pony’s names, even though she always feels awful about it and she tries to be extra nice to them. But just because you muddled the water doesn’t mean your first love was wrong, Twilight.”

 
Twilight called on an old habit. Deflect the uncomfortably astute gaze with humor. “You like them unironically too.”

 
“Yes. Yes I do,” Cadance answered, and her smile returned but her voice stayed firm and solemn. “Do you understand what I mean, though?”

 
“I… I guess.”

 
“Hey, trust me. Expert,” Cadance said pointedly. She brightened up. “If you trust me, I’ll promise to wait at least five minutes before I start interrogating you on the juicy, sordid, scandalous bits of your whirlwind romance with my aunt. Er… okay, maybe not the sordid parts. Jeeze, don’t look at me like that.”

 
Twilight laughed. “I’m so glad to see you again.”

 
Cadance joined her and then dusted herself off. “And I’m so glad to see you again, Twilight. I’m ready when you are. And…” she paused, as if thinking. “And, if all goes well, and we make it… we should have coffee. I think you and I have a lot to talk about, don’t we?”

 
“I look forward to it,” Twilight said. She reached out her hoof, and Cadance touched it.
 
 










 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CANTERLOT




How does the Iron Bitch, Sombra’s greatest weapon, the cudgel which he wielded against the tribes of the south, the sword at the throat of Zebrahara, the attack dog which rooted out every revolt and tore the throats of every political enemy—how does Opal of the Ninth Legion lead?

 
She leads from the front. Even now.

 
It’s a bit different this time around, of course. She arrives at the crest of the first wave of heavily armored legionaries on a stretcher held between four strong stallions, propped up so she can see. Her horn glows, and at her sides two pouches filled to the brim with potions to keep her magic strong and stable. All around her, she projects a massive shield, and behind her three unicorns in light barding walk, joining with her. She is a living wall that only the strongest weapons could hope to match.
 

 
A pony’s magic is her self, her soul. Her will, Opal would amend. And Opal, Legata of the Ninth, Iron Bitch no more, possess a will of iron even so. No, of steel. Adamant. She barely seems to strain. Her eyes are hard and her broken body does not stop her even as her legs lie useless and atrophying.

 
The legion does not take the barricade at the obliterated gate so much as it dismantles it all at once. They work with deadly, formic efficiency—exactly like ants, in fact, and it is no accident. The roads and walls and cities of the Empire were built by the legions, and they build as easily as they shoot or kick. They work quickly but also as quietly as can be expected, and then as soon as the way is clear, the lancae gallop into the dark streets as their legate commanded beforehand. Behind them, slower but not by any means sluggishly, march the first cohorts of the legion. And behind them, with Rarity at its head, marches the army of House Belle behind the resurrected banner.

 
The lancae hit and run here and there, but the first waves of the legion encounter the enemy pickets and throw an army about to retain its balance on its head. The rebels go blind and don’t even know it until haphazardly armed ponies crash into their staging grounds.

 
Rarity is no general, but she is a quick study. She knows how guns work, and she has already gathered how breechloading rifles compare to the more primitive muzzleloaded shootsticks of a few decades before. Questions and a bit of reading have made her abundantly aware of what rifled shot at a high rate of fire does to a charging crowd.

 
So when her levies without guns hit the enemy, they hit them from the side or from behind, and always by surprise.

 
Two unicorns loading spare machine guns into a wagon to be pulled to what they think is the heart of the battle find themselves working quickly one moment and being borne to the ground in a storm of kicks and hooves the next. Hoofblades come out. The colorful levy bursts upon the stores of the besieging army and spreads like ants over a picnic, in all directions, with chaos and order in equal measure.

 
An army moves slowly. That being said, this one moved faster than most. Manicheans began to answer melee with measured fire, and levy soldiers retreat or died in the street. Above, guns slowly turn on the walls to face new targets as Legion rifles advance under newfound cover of booming artillery. The levies flee in the moment of shock and not a moment too soon.

 
You can’t blame them. The Shadow may touch their minds but they are not completely mindless yet. They can still try to preserve themselves in the face of direct bombardment from close range. They seek shelter instinctively, hiding behind the closest cover.

 
Which is, unfortunately for them, in the middle of an munitions dump.

 
To say they were consumed in the blast would be a bit of an understatement. Fleeing irregulars wearing Rarity’s colors three streets off lose their balance and go sprawling on the street, feeling heat on their backs.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 




 
Lunar guardsponies cower in an alley. A riflepony with a felt cap leans around the corner, returning his one measly shot at a time and then ducks back to avoid a maelstrom.

 
Fighting in a city is hell. Fighting in general is, but cities were not made for fighting. Or perhaps they were. War is the art of deception with highest stakes, and what better deception is a sniper hidden behind the curtains on the third floor apartment?

 
The Canterlonian charge is starting to encounter real resistance. Determined resistance.

 
The one rifle pony breathes quickly, his eyes squeezing shut. He is praying in his own northern tongue, all low monotone and somehow rough and lyrical at once. He swallows and turns the corner to fire again.

 
He does not slump so much as he simply ceases. His body falls like a full sack. It helps that his head is gone. The guardsponies begin to panic. One goes for the fallen rifle, and another goes for the body to pull it back. More bullets kiss the cobblestone, making one jump back. The rifle is retrieved.

 
The guardsponies hear cries and pounding hooves right beneath the boom of field guns and the cracks of rifles. They brace themselves, the new riflepony off to the side, finding to his dismay that the fall has jammed something in the bolt mechanism and he cannot reload the weapon. His fellows kick hoofblades into place loudly. They are strikers. They can take a few ponies running with heavy saddles.

 
Just as he curses and throws the weapon to the ground, three white-barded Manicheans round the bend. The guns on their backs or in their hooves flare and three guardsponies go down. Bolts are moved. The one who jumped back from the bullets is writhing on the stone. The one who grabbed the rifle tries to bolt, but the second round catches him. Bolts work. The survivors—two of them, fall on the rifle-bearing rebels. One is caught on a long bayonet and gurgles his life away. The other meets his foe and bears him bleeding to the ground. He tries to stand, curse, but has time for neither and then he has time for nothing.

 
It is a short lived victory for the panting white-barded troops. Even now, they hear the sounds of Luna’s arcane wrath growing closer and closer, and even though they do not know the source even a simpleton could understand what it meant. They fled back towards the larger emplacement.

 
Luna finds them.





 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
War has changed much faster than magic has, since Luna returned with the old lore. But old tricks don’t simply die. Brute force doesn’t stop being useful just because somepony reinvents the wheel.

 
If anything, it becomes a little more effective.

 
House Belle’s levies try to get around a machine gun nest to hit it from the side, only to find that the streets are blocked—rubble, foes, overturned carts hastily formed up into a wall—yet they press on.

 
Across the street from the hotel where the gunners are set up, a Manehattan unicorn is losing it. He is caught between panic and rage. Going Postal, he might have said with a laugh a year ago. He hates this. He hates it. He hates cowering and hear the bullets fly overhead or hit the wall or sometimes break right through the wall or smash some already cracked window.

 
They huddle in the shelled remains of a clothing store. Everywhere, he smells ash and burning, knows this place went up like a pyre. Was it put out? Did it go out on its own? Who stops to put out fires in war? Do they just go on and on? Does everything stop everywhere when ponies start killing each other? Is this the opposite of living or is it a part? Somewhere, deep in his mind, he has the absurb image of a ceasefire to form a bucket brigade to keep the clothing shop from burning when all of its wares were set fire to. If the fire even came. He doesn’t know anything.

 
Down the line, a pony scoots back to try and balance a long rifle against a broken counter. He fires only once, and then he is gone.

 
And the unicorn, his name Sunrise, lets his own weapon clatter to the ground in front of him, free of his magic’s grip. Stars. Stars and song and Sun and moon. He was going to die. They all were. Maybe every pony was going to die very soon, first here and then elsewhere. A great tide of death that rolled out from this thrice-damned city until all the earth was covered in it.

 
He lay flat and shook like a leaf in a gale. And his horn began to glow. Sunrise had always been a nervous sort, ever since he was a foal. He stuttered. He didn’t like meeting other pony’s eyes. And when he was at his most distraught, he lost control of his magic—many unicorns did, but not as many had horns who began to lay magic on everything around. Not enough to damage or move anything. Just trying to compensate for the shutdown of his mind.
 

And so, the nervous Sunrise of thirty summers, timid salarypony he, found that his horn had touched something very strange. It was heavy, but not impossibly so. Strangely shaped. Hot. He knew what it was now. The gun. One of those damned machine guns up in the hotel. How was he reaching this far?

 
He was still panicked. But something in his mind clicked, and panic became not the driving force but the fuel. Because now he was angry, like a foal kicked into a puddle by his peers is angry. Like a dog kept in the cold and starved is angry. He wanted to bite and never let go. He already had nervous feelers around the gun. He didn’t even stop to consider if it was secured. He yanked.

 
And screaming out the window came glass and a barded pony and a heavy Talon gun. Ponies keep their weapons warded, if they can. But griffons do not fight ponies very often these days. If there were to be anymore days, they would have to reconsider.
 
 
 
 
 




 
Soarin pulled out of a dive and heard the Manichean pegasus behind him crash. He did not grin, though his in gut he felt the grim satisfaction.

 
And how fitting is this? How fucking fitting, death all around him, and its all a race. It’s all tag and rough games on the practice field in the fucking offseason. Wonderbolts play rough. Every pegasus wants to be a Wonderbolt when they grow up, don’t they? Best of the best. Well,  another flier is after him and he wants to laugh but he doesn’t.

 
Well? How’s it feel? How’s it feel to have Soarin’ the Pie-Eater, Soarin’ the big lug, Soarin’ the Wonderbolt, the one you had a fucking poster of when you were not long off your mother’s sore tear, kicking you in the eyes?

 
Everytime. He wrestles briefly with the newcomer and then uses the idiot’s momentum against him, throwing the shocked pegasus down to where he lands hard against the cobblestone street.
 
You wanna race? You wanna dance? He is screaming it now, he doesn’t know if its out loud or not. Is this why? Is this why Applejack is gone and the Bolts are all scattered to the winds? Why the kid’ll never fly again and Spike is dead, dead as he can be, crushed and gone, blood and raw memory? Why he lost track of Soarin as she fell tangled up in pegasi, mane like fire, like a shooting star?


So you could all have your shot at a Wonderbolt?

 
He’s frothing with rage and he’s lost his rational mind and somehow he knows it and he’s all but rejoiced. Good. Madponies cannot grieve friends who don’t come home and lovers who vanish over the western horizon and romances that might have been falling to only the Stars knew what fate. Fleet was gone. Spitfire, maybe. Fleet had been caught in a crossfire what felt like hours ago but he knew could not be so long.

 
He lands, and everything hurts in ways he’s never felt before, but Soarin’ cannot stop. He would not even if he could. If he doesn’t press on he feels that the whole world will swallow him up. Blood runs down his legs and torn jumpsuit underneath ruined barding. His goggles are long gone. His helmet discarded. He is scored from hofblades and his mane is singed where arcane fire has whirled past.

 
Where is Spike? Where is the dragon? Does he walk yet in this city, waiting for the day to come? Does he lie forever beneath the gate?

 
If ponies go softly, as the stars guide them upwards, towards the rolling hills and swift sunset beyond the great inky blackness of space, where then do dragons go? Would Spike be there, lying the grass? Underneath the shade of a tree, book on his chest, the sound of his not-so-gentle snoring reverberating? Carried by a gentle breeze? Would the lost foals of Canterlot find him there on Spike’s hill? Would they ask to be carried?
 
Soarin’ is weeping and roaring and he does not know where he is going. His wing is lost. Scattered or dead. Wonderbolts have a bad track record of dying in the line of fire. The brightest fires glow and then they go out. Pft. Candle. Soarin’ hears Spitfire’s voice say it, sees her smile. Oh be with me in the fire, he breathes and barely registers that it is not his thought alone. Canterlot is burning. He does not catch the difference in the air, the weight of Something, because he is too busy mourning.

 
Surrounded. One Soarin’ and five of their harriers, advancing, wanting to end this now and move on. Do they recognize him? He wants to ask. He wants to make some daring last word and laugh and go chuckling into that place beyond all battles. Wonderbolts are heroes. Wonderbolts do what no other can do. Wonderbolts die well, a smile on their lips and a song flowing from their tongues.

 
Instead he sags. His legs are giving out. Most of the blood is his. They dive and takes flight as well, getting underneath one of them, but clipping his leg and going head over hoof on the hard stone. He stumbles back up, adrenaline pushing him onward. Just a bit longer. Just a bit longer and Spike and he would trot about to find Applejack hard at work and lunch waiting. Just a bit longer and little Applebloom would be there to tease he would laugh and Macintosh would grin and it would be what he wanted. Just a bit longer.

 
His legs finally fail him. He falls into the street. They are coming.

 
But his wings are strong and he rises with a limp body into the air, awkwardly at first and then with renewed strength. He races off and they follow. Soarin’ is the fastest stallion in the Wonderbolts. He can threat himself through the eye of a needle. It’ll be a cold day in hell before these whoresons can catch him.

 
Below, he passes the hotel where Sunrise is pulling a screaming gunner out of the window. The other nest sees him before it sees its own fliers and fires. Soarin’ reacts too slow to dodge but it is hard to hit a moving target. One shot hits a pursuer and he spirals down, his right wing half gone, his face stuck in a twisted shock.

 
And then Soarin feels a bullet tear through him, digging through his leg, going right through, embedding itself in his side. He feels another on his flank, right above his cutie mark.

 
He spirals downwards, and now he finally, finally laughs. Nothing’s funnier than a Wonderbolt going down.
 
 
 








 
 
LUNA
 
 
 
When the air changed, she felt it and at first did not comprehend the difference. Only that there was one. She stopped dead in her tracks in a cold and empty thouroughfare. Behind her, the tip of the Lunar guard’s spear began to stop. She motioned for silence.

 
Something compelled her gaze upwards.

 
It was night still. Morning was hours off. So darkness was no surprise, nor had Luna ever truly been afraid of mere darkness, even before her ascension in the Garden at the End of the World. Only knowing this can the true shock of Luna’s new reality be understood: the gathering darkness above her, so obviously unnatural now, frightened the Princess of the Night.

 
She took a step back, instinctively raising her hammer higher. The darkness in the sky was not the absence of light but something else. Or was it? She did not know, but no natural night spiraled. It did not gather into a great concentric turning overhead. She sucked in a breath.

 
“Night guard!” Her voice was still laden with her burning Glory. It hurt to talk. It hurt to do everything, actually. She was not being at all cautious and she had not burned this ferociously since long before she was exiled. “Press on! You know what you must do.” She turned to them and raised her hammer higher, above her head. They roared and with that she took to the sky.

 
What was this great evil? This weight she felt deep in her stomach, as if the darkness above—it had no mass, surely!—pressed upon the very air. Like it formed its own gravity.

 
This was no ordinary battle. She had seen what the Shadow did in the Aether where it thought it worked unseen. Celestia had not seen what it could do, but Luna had. She had touched it, after all. She knew exactly how it worked now, how it bound its tendrils into minds and pulled. She knew the unbelievable agony of the Shadow’s hook in the soul, for she had been hooked herself and forced the point out.

 
She gained altitude quickly and then stopped, far above the city, enough to see it with fresh eyes. She could see smoke and explosions from the guns that still fired. She saw the surging armies like ants filling spaces too tiny for their numbers to be of any use.

 
It was hard to concentrate. Her breathing was coming up short, now.

 
Luna folded her Glory away. Or, rather, every other time she had simply folded it away as a gentlestallion might some hoofkerchief. But this time, it radiated out from her in a great argent flash and she cried out in alarm and pain.

 
But aside from the pain, she did not suffer overmuch. She was in one piece. Exhausted. Weary. She hooked the hammer to her barding. It was cumbersome, but easier than suspending it in midair with magic in this state.

 
Above her, the darkness gathered. What was it? But she knew. The answer was so obvious, yet even as her mind proposed it, her heart rejected. The Shadow could not step so brazenly into her world. Not yet. Not while she lived and breathed. It would not!

 
Luna took a deep, steadying breath. Another. And then she rocketed up into the darkness to push it back into the void.

 
It was like flying into storm clouds, but no storm cloud had ever been like this. Lightning flashed, aye, but similarities began to run thin after that. No storm cloud seemed alive in some awful, unholy way. None of them seemed to move about her with intent or malicious purpose. But Luna knew, somewhere in her heart, that this was where she must go. Further up. Further in.

 
And in that heart, where her unquenchable flame burned, there was Another. She was not separate, but not wholly Luna. She was Luna that was, or Luna that might have been, you could say. Or Luna that would be. She called herself Lacunae, and she was an echo that was louder than the sounds that sired her. It was she that pushed Luna onwards, full of hope, just as she had given Spike the strength to be true, to stand. Just as in other worlds she would give the a lost Lunar Ranger faith and a final blessing. Just as in all worlds where Lacunae comes, she sings a song that is like anger but only to those who aren’t paying attention.

 
It was this part of Luna that heard the voices first.
 

She thought she heard Twilight. Celestia. Somepony else. She wasn’t sure who. Then others, louder, more frantic. Dozens at first. Then hundreds. Thousands. Her ears ached and her stomach churned. It was like wading into an anti-magic field horn first. She wanted to vomit. Her eyes wanted to screw themselves shut and stay that way. Some of her ardent hope faded.

 
They were all crying for help. So many lost. So many snared. What hope, really, had there ever been? Luna had tried to contend with arms and force against a thing of the heart and mind. What good came out of Jannah, chuckled the air around her. Certainly not you. Certainly not I.

 
Somehow, the weight grew more and more familiar, and yet she had no memory of a storm like this, or a darkness like this, that seemed so deep and absolute as to suggest that it had grown solid. Around her, the wind began to pick up and she furiously beat her wings to keep herself going.

 
“WHAT ARE YOU?” she yelled, adding magic to amplify her voice.

 
A THING THAT NEED NOT ANSWER TO YOU, MOTHER OF TEARS.



She seethed. “YOUR ARMY WILL FALL. YOU WILL FALL. THIS IS NOT A NIGHT BUT SOMETHING DARKER BUT MORNING WILL ERASE YOU JUST AS EASILY!”

 
YOUR SISTER SAID THE SAME. AND HERE YOU ARE, LIKE A FLY IN A SPIDER’S WEB. COME TO FIGHT TRUTH WITH HAMMERS. HOW FITTING. IT IS SO OBVIOUS OF YOU. NOTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE THE DAY WE WERE BORN.


“I KNOW NOTHING OF YOU!” Luna howled.

 
Nothing can replicate the feeling of horrified recollection that filled her, for at last she broke through seemingly solid darkness and came at last to the very heart of the Shadow.

 
And she did know it.
 
 
 
 
 
 






 
CELESTIA


 
I have withheld the truth from you several times. But lie? I can only think of one time.


How do you raise the sun? Might as well ask me how to raise a dead world, faithful student. That question might have been a bit more useful, as it turned out.


Do you remember? I see you don’t, and I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or not. There was a part of me that worried that you would always see that day as the day I lied to you. Maybe I feared you would have that day forever in the back of your mind like a seed growing until it was simply naked resentment.


You asked—how is the sun raised? And I chuckled and said something about special talents, you know how that worked. Your little eyes were bright with piercing, searching intellect even then. So you asked:


“How did you find yours, Princess?”


Did I sputter? Did memory overtake me and betray my dismay? It certainly feels like I let my carefully schooled façade slip. But I’m sure I didn’t.


“Oh, I’ve had it as long as I remember,” I told you.


There are few who have known more than half the story. In Sarnath they sing of our journey into Jannah only a few years gone. The return and how we confronted Sombra in the snowy revolt, the overthrow of High King Discord—those parts are common knowledge. But what before? There is a gap, isn’t there? There is not such a gap for me, of course. I was not born out of the sea to fight Sombra, after all.


I did not tell you because you were too young to understand. There are some things too terrible to talk about and not have them understood. Luna and I do not talk about what we saw after Jannah. We made a promise never to make the other talk about it.


So, perhaps one day... No, I won’t get your hopes up. If she never tells you, never hold it against her. But I shall tell my half.


When I was born out of the Song, I knew two things: Luna would come and she would need me, and one day when I met a certain bearded mage (I only knew that I would meet someone strange and new, not who he would be!) that I would return home and pass into the very shores of the world, and I would find a Garden there. I suppose I also knew that I would go in. I had a feeling Luna was meant to do the same.


I had never yet left and did not plan to do so, so you may imagine my confusion. Alive but ten minutes and I was already saddled with some incomprehensible duty. But I did not need to pursue either right away. I had a little time before my sister was born out of the Well. And then she came. And then the discordant sound, and then the fleeting darkness in our sky, and then… and then a few years later, we left. Luna and I found the ruined estate that you’ve seen. And then we wandered as roving adventurers.


And then one day, we sailed back towards the East. I remember that day very well. We pulled into a little port that’s long gone now. It was destroyed during the Schism and never rebuilt—they renamed it Alicorn’s Landing afterwards—and we were only a tall tale to these ponies. I remember teasing my sister about finding some winsome lass in town and she teased me about finding some scrap of paper with writing in the mud and holding up traffic in town. We docked. I paid the harbor master and chatted with the old stallions who played chess by the wooden piers. And then… and then I saw Starswirl. I knew he was the one I had been destined to meet. He was young, but not that young. Already given to his fits of vision. And he had one when I spoke to him, and then after we had been with him for a few months, we left.


Back east. Valon. Tar Salba. The Spine. Hyrogen, and then the veldt. We raced across the continent, with companions in tow. It is a long story, and I think it would be a wonderful one if it were not for the end.


We were betrayed in Jannah. Thousands of years and still it boggles my mind. Our companions died, some in the streets, one on the plateau. The last beneath the great walls, with a song. I miss them still, for all but one… they were wonderful and brave.


We were alone after that. After Jannah, the wetlands for weeks. Canna. You’ve seen it all, by now.


The voice that had whispered in my ear at birth told me to go up with her together, and so all of our frustrations and sorrow and… and anger at each other, fierce bitterness, faded into a mutual fear. We held each other and remembered that we were sisters again. We went up, we walked the whole way together, whispering, holding, waiting. We fell into the water together.


And we did not see what you have seen. We were taken elsewhere.


We saw things.


I saw… I saw myself. How I had been, when I was young. I saw myself in royal finery. I saw the nights after Luna was vanquished when I mourned with drink and solitude every night, though I didn’t know why. I saw millions of moments, meaningless at the time, that came true later.


I’m shocked now that I did not see you.


But I saw other things too. I saw… Well. I did not see so much as I was informed. My sister would be laid low, a kingdom laid low, and I would be powerless. That I had a great thing to do that I would not want to do. That if I did not do it, everyone on earth might suffer. Or they may not. Imagine my frustration. But no matter what I did, Luna would suffer. It was very clear about that bit. Oh, very, very clear. Sometimes I think my complacency later was just me running away from how awful it was going to be when she suffered and I could do absolutely nothing. It told me one last thing, and that was…


I’m sorry. Yes, I’m alright. Just… distressed.











RARITY


They all saw the storm above. But it did not change that much immediately. Wars do not stop in moments, however much we want them to. There is no ceasefire at a single word. Perhaps in some other world, in some other when, they might stop for Hearth’s Warming. But even there, she doubted it would stop for long.

 
More and more the battle for Canterlot devolved into something far more primitive than the mechanized campaign it had been. Ponies, unlike the griffons whose weapons they had studied, do not have talons or fingers. It is hard to charge with rifles, bayonets high, and it was a waste regardless. Whereas it was prohibitively difficult to fight at close range for earth ponies trying to manipulate griffon-influenced designs built for ponies without the experience of Griffon mountain warfare.

 
It’s come to knife-work, she thought with a sneer. Absurdly. She was starting to lose her strength, and here she was thinking.

 
Well, knife-work wasn’t so different from what she was used to. Precision and poise and swift efficiency, darling.

 
Rarity called up her shield for the brief second it took to reflect the hoofblade of a rebel earth pony. She’d already found she could grab weapons out of the earth pony soldier’s grips. That had been a boon. She could handle a melee opponent. Just keep them from being too close.

 
All around her, the Manhattan relief force was a roiling mess. Now that it was down to knife-work and magic in these cramped quarters, they were faring far better. Fillydelphia was a tough city, but so was Manehattan when it really wanted to be, and it was absurdly funny to recall that they were rival burgs. What sweet, fitting absurdity. Yes, lets fight it out here at the end, the absolute most foolish of resentments, while the sky begins to eat itself.

 
Rainbow flew back in again—Rarity didn’t know where she got to when she took off—and slammed into one of her attackers and picked up the second in her way. She didn’t strike so much as hug and then release. It was honestly horrifying, but Rarity didn’t have time to think about it. She took the opportunity she’d been given and retreated back into the fold. Around her, the levies of her House surged to cover her withdrawal. Some (Song that birthed the Stars, Celestia! They were so young!) shouted her name as they passed. They said it like ponies had called to Celestia.

 
She felt weak in every way.

 
Rainbow was worldess when she landed and began to hurry Rarity along, back towards the support corps coming up towards the front of the melee. Fluttershy would be there. She saw the signs of damage on the connection between Rarity’s prosthetic and her flank. Some blood trickled down the metal. If you looked closely, you could see how one of the “straps” that held it firmly flush with the amputated leg had been deformed and stabbed into the old wound.

 
Rarity shuffled. She said nothing. She wasn’t sure she could without screaming. Her magic was so strong, but it burned to use it without the utmost care. Her head was on fire. It felt like her soul was, too.

 
Two Manhattan medics caught up with them and Rarity’s quartermaster followed, knowing her leg would cause her trouble. The unicorn with the hammer and tongs on his flank stared blankly, swallowed, and then dug through a saddlebag for his tools. “Milady, you need to lie down. I can’t do this with you standing up, it’ll be—“

 
“There is not really… a place to do that safely,” Rarity struggled to whisper, and then hissed.

 
Rainbow took over. “Okay, we need to move her out of the way. I don’t want some lucky son of a bitch getting a shot at her while she’s out of a crowd. You and you, with me. You go back to Flutters,” she said to the other medic. “Tell her Rarity is okay, but she should get her team closer to the fighting and start trying to pull back our wounded if she gets a moment to spare. We need to save them, and their tripping up our advance into the Square. Got it? Good. Remind her about shields, okay? C’mon, Rares…”

 
Rarity limped with her, and the pain was worse with every step, oh Celestia, how was it worse? How could it get worse? She was openly crying now. It was like she was only now feeling what it was like when they lopped off her leg. Rainbow was pulling her along, trying to get her to safety. She kept up a litany of little encouragements and comforting words. “You’re gonna be okay. Metalhead here can fix it. Just don’t look, okay? Just keep up with me. You’re doing great. You’re great. Just a little bit longer.”

 
Rarity was dimly aware that adrenaline had kept her from examining her wounds. Also, general danger. Also-also, proximity with murderous puppets of an angry god. But they hadn’t seemed so awful ten minutes ago. Was she bleeding much? How do you tell? The warmth, she supposed. But she felt warm all over, like she’d run for miles. She sort of had run for miles, hadn’t she?

 
“Hey, doc, she’s gettin’ a little wobbly on me—“

 
“Just keep her awake and up, I’ve got something to help but we need to get there soon!”

 
“There’s one, you see? Alchemist’s shop. You run ahead, clear a counter off so we can lay her down. Lady Dash, I can help you on the other side and we can keep her weight off the prosthetic.”

 
Rarity felt them lift her slightly so that only her front hooves touched the ground. How odd. But it did make a lot of the pain go away, and she knew her head would clear.

 
“I’m not a damn lady,” Rainbow Dash griped from her left.

 
“You absolutely… are,” Rarity said, still panting.

 
They got her inside and on a counter. The quartermaster’s tools went to work. The medic made her drink something. They used an awful lot of magic. She couldn’t look down to see what had happened, but she felt them fix it and she had plenty of ideas what it might look like.

 
“You’re doing great. Don’t move much, okay?” Rainbow said, filling her vision. Something about the magic had made the hazy dizziness return. Rarity wanted to kiss her rather badly.
 
“I won’t,” Rarity said thickly.

 
“Okay. Okay, good.” Dash was dancing from hoof to hoof. “Okay. Oh gods, okay, oh hell, can’t you go any faster?”

 
“I’m trying,” said the quartermaster. “It was made for accidents and wear and tear, not to withstand arcane blasts and bullets!”

 
“Shit, she got shot? I didn’t—“

 
“Here, you see? Hit here and ricocheted off. Or fragmented, more like, shrapnel’s all up the flank. Now please move back so I can work! Medic, help me here, I’ll need…”

 
Rarity felt something break through the medic’s numbing spell and she screamed as they moved her leg. She looked down.

 
A blow had turned the articulating, smooth sides of her new leg into a mangled hazard. Oh… oh Celestia, it had dug right through her skin. How had she walked? Was it the wild magic? Oh… oh. She was going to fai—

 






 
 
 
 
 
PINKIE PIE
 
 
Twilight being gone super sucked. Like, forever suck.

 
She sat in the grass, bored and a little worried. Okay, a lot worried, but she was trying! Tradey didn’t want to play tic-tac-toe again because she was really, really bad at it and was generally sort of grumpy. For once, Pinkie didn’t blame her for it at all. For one, she’d forced the Petrahoofan pegasus (she couldn’t even appreciate the fun alliteration) into roughly a hundred games. But mostly it was Twilight.

 
She’d been gone for thirty minutes, which wasn’t really that long. Pinkie had always been great at keeping track of time. Scary good. She just knew. Needed five minutes? Pinkie gave you exactly three hundred and one seconds. The extra second was, of course, because you needed the first three hundred and probably you needed one to turn back around or walk back into the room. So she gave it to you before charging in after.

 
So Pinkie knew, in a frighteningly objective way, that Twilight had not been gone that long. But it felt like days. Okay, no, more like hours. They had just sort of moved away from the door/gate/pillars and sat on the path in a little circle. Just waiting.

 
They speak very little. Almost not at all. She wonders what the other ponies feel about the roses and the path and the mountains. She loves them. Pinkie sincerely thinks that it is worth great suffering, just sitting on the path to the shore. She doesn’t really know about the shore. But somehow, she does. She has half an inkling about what’s right behind those mountains. She doesn’t really need to go see it, of course. She’d happy on earth. Earth has roses like these. Earth also has cake, and cake is the best. And friends.

 
Pinkie is not the smartest pony. Which is not, of course, to say that she is a particularly foolish pony. She has a solid head for figures and geometry comes to her as easy as air and parties. She can juryrig whirlycopters and rewire a house and only get shocked like five dozen times. Okay, she was actually rusty with electricity? But the point was that Pinkie was smart about useful things. She didn’t think much about the Capital Letter Stuff. She thought about them, yeah, but…

 
Somethings are just way more simple than smart ponies like Twilight thought. They just sailed right over the obvious looking for something that would challenge them. But sometimes the truth is like a grazing cow in a field. It’s hard to miss. It’s big. It’s slow. It’s not really flashy and it doesn’t change as much. Okay, truth doesn’t chew grass and it isn’t named Bessie. But she thought it was a good picture. Truth wasn’t always a dragon you had to kick in the face.

 
So she rarely doubted that the world was Good. She didn’t doubt that Twilight would come back to them. She basically had to. There wasn’t anywhere else to go, right? She had come out of the water before, and she would do so again. Maybe she would smell better, if nothing else. And by “if nothing else” Pinkie could not imagine her coming back alone. But she supposed that Twilight might.
 
 
She hoped not.

 
“What do you think she’s doing?” Applejack asked.

 
They all looked over at the gate.

 
“I dunno!” Pinkie said with a shrug. “Probably doing her whole smart science magic thing with the pool. I kinda miss crazy mad science-light.”

 
“Me too,” AJ replied, her voice low.

 
“She was being angry scientist?” Tradey asked, confused. Pinkie laughed.

 
“I believe it is an idiomatic phrase?” Kyrie said, her pretty voice making Pinkie feel like she was younger than she obviously was. “Mad as in madness. Insanity. The losing of one’s wits. I am not sure what a, ah, scientist is… exactly.”

 
“Y’all didn’t have those?” Applejack asked. “Sounds mighty nice, no offense to Twi. Maybe unicorns made themselves useful.”

 
“Oh, are we dissing glowicorns?” Pinkie asked, because Pinkie was excited for almost literally everything. “Cause like oh my gosh why do they get to have magical hands? I want some.”

 
She hardly noticed how they all visibly paled. “Uh, forget I said anythin’,” AJ mumbled.

 
They fell quiet again. But only for a little while.

 
“Do you think she will be back soon?” Tradewinds asked. “I worry. Twilight is not at fighting… uh, does good work? Am bad at good and well sometimes.”

 
“I ain’t the one to ask,” AJ said with a smirk.

 
“She does have her magic still,” Kyrie said, but she sounded doubtful. “Besides, there is not much a warrior would have over any other creature in the Garden. There is not any enemy there to fight.”

 
“There is always room for knife,” grumbled Tradewinds.

 
“It is a peaceful place, or at least it was the last time I was here. Which… was a very long time ago,” she admitted slowly. “But it felt the same from the bridge and it feels the same now. I…” She paused. Blinking. “I… Oh…”

 
They all focused on her, picking up the first notes of distress.

 
“What is it, sug?” AJ said, rising from her haunches, her hat pointing towards the sky, like it might slide right off.

 
“I feel… I feel like something pulling me up into—“

 
Kyrie collapsed. The others cried out in alarm, crowding her until Applejack pushed them back, giving her room to breathe. And breathe she did, quickly, like a mare recovering from a marathon.

 
That was when the sky begin to explode.

 
It didn’t actually explode. But everything got brighter and brighter. They all had to shield their eyes.

 
But Pinkie just grinned up into the brilliant radiance. Here it was! She had been right all along. In her heart of hearts she had known, a little fire that could not be quenched: it was going to come out all sunshine and rainbows, wasn’t it? Kyrie would make it. They were all going to make it. She just knew.
 
 
 
 










 
 
TWILIGHT



The last one wasn’t a dream, per se. It was more like… a presence. Something that was always in the Aether.

 
Twilight flew through the strange not-dark. It really was beautiful, she thought. It reminded her of Luna and her heart ached.

 
Maybe it had been a whim, or a mental aid to help her move more ably, but she had imagined her Dreaming self into the shape of an alicorn.  It was strange, and she hoped that Celestia didn’t see or any other alicorn for that matter. It was embarrassing. Twilight liked being a unicorn. It was just convienent, having wings. It was easier to think of herself as flying through the aether. She had thought about being a pegasus for a second but then she thought about Rainbow Dash laughing at her and couldn’t maintain the shape. Thanks, Rainbow.

 
Celestia’s words weighed on her. More and more, Twilight felt confidant that Celestia’s plan would work. Whatever it was. Already she held Cadance and Iridia between her hooves and chest like valuable diamonds. Two more. With all of this power in one place, added onto Celestia’s monumental strength and know-how… how could they lose? The bomb thing was obviously a joke, but the raw power might not be.

 
Why hadn’t she done something like this already? Well, apparently Twilight had been a miracle.

 
Imagine trying to fence with a master with weights on your arms and a massive hangover. That was what it had been like to be Celestia for over a year now. This creature was just so much better suited for the battlefield he had chosen. It was a testament to Celestia’s indomitable will that she had lasted so long and kept the thing occupied. But she certainly hadn’t been able to spare even the energy to keep more than a cursory glance backwards into the world, let alone contact her sister and round up the sort of firepower that her slowly forming plan would need. She had had only one hope.

 
Someone will find me.

 
And she knew that it would happen. Or really, she had the utmost faith in her sister and Twilight to recognize the danger. She had not foreseen the difficulties that had shrouded the problem—Manehattan, the Las Pegas food riots, all of it—but Celestia had been right. Eventually.

 
So while Celestia fought, Twilight gathered. It was a long way to go to run errands, she thought crazily, but she had a feeling about… well. Whatever it was that Celestia was doing, exactly, she had a feeling that Twilight had a bigger role to play than errandmare.

 
The Presence she sought was closer now. She knew it well, of course. Intimately, even.  

 
Twilight swallowed. She wasn’t sure what to expect. The other two encounters had been… well, one had been harrowing and the other had left her weak and tear-streaked, so “intense” worked well enough as a descriptor. How would she even begin to describe Cadance’s dream-world? Beside weird. Thank Celestia she wasn’t dreaming about Shining. Only way that could have been worse.

 
Not that it had really been that bad. Some parts. A few.

 
The Presence was here. She bit her lip and stopped for a second. It was a kind of absence, even though it was presence. Twilight thought of it like a bookmark. It was definitely something. But it was also a placeholder for the real thing, which was her reading the book.

 
She flew into the placeholder—
 
 
And tumbled end over end, a unicorn again, off a great hill. She cried out, trying to hold on to some anchor with magic, but found that her magic did not respond. Beneath her she felt something hard and it cut at her.

 
And then she realized that her magic wasn’t just not responding. Because it was gone.

 
Twilight panicked. That would put it mildly. She began screaming until she rolled to a stop somewhere. Her eyes were shut. She didn’t want to see the world around her. She had to get her magic back, why wasn’t her hor—

 
Her horn was broken.

 
Slowly, very slowly, Twilight let her hooves fall to her sides. She didn’t scream anymore. She just… she stopped. Everything stopped. She felt it again. Still broken. A nasty crack. She could feel the only partially healed appendage ache, and when she touched what was left of the tip, she felt a searing pain, like someone pressing a hoof on an open wound. She felt no blood or the tell-tale thrum of magic, wild or restrained.

 
Twilight opened her eyes, and realized that she had rolled over a pile of bodies.

 
Canterlot was almost entirely destroyed. If this even was Canterlot, anyway. That was how little was left, and a heavy smog and smoke lay over everything. She coughed, but didn’t move. There was another pile a little while off, burning. And another. And another. There were a lot.

 
“I cant do…” Her mouth felt dry. The air did, as well. Only now she noticed the snow falling and the far-off thunder.

 
A unicorn can survive her horn being broken. With luck, and strength, and pure will, she can learn to cast magic with even only a tenth of her horn. Prosthetics—silly looking things, but useful—could bring most of the ability back. Some say that a very, very good mage could cast even with an amputated horn. But it took time. And it wasn’t every time. Plenty of powerful unicorns had broken their horns and never recovered.

 
She tried to feel for anything magical at all and felt nothing.

 
This is what dying must be like, she realized with a perverse sort of calm. Exactly like it. Maybe she had died already.
 

Twilight did not know how long she sat there, staring at the ashes in front of her. But eventually, she heard something and she rose and stumbled and looked. She followed the sound dutifully, but did not call out to whoever it might be. She had to have been tricked. There was really no other way. This couldn’t be—

 
She recognized the sound. It was familiar. Very familiar. She saw the source now, a vague shape through the ash clouds. Twilight broke into a canter, feeling that she had to know, had to be sure. She broke through the ash.

 
There, she found three alicorns. One, to her right, weeping upon the floor, her eyes wide open as if she had seen something that could never be unseen. One, in the center, staring angrily like a terrier against the third, in full barding and looking faintly like Twilight remembered the Nightmare—but somehow not as sinister as before.

 
The third she did not recognize at all. At least, she could not identify it, but she recognized its features, for they were so close to Luna that at first she thought the smiling creature was Luna. Luna that was, long ago, maybe.

 
“You are a liar,” said the Not-Nightmare. “You have always been a liar.”

 
I HAVE ALWAYS TOLD THE TRUTH, insisted the smiling Thing.

 
“You led us astray! You are the source of all of Luna’s long woe.”
 

HARDLY. DID I CHOSE WHOM SHE LOVED? DID I CHOSE WHAT SHE DID OR LIKED OR WANTED? NO, NOT I. BARK, OLD BITCH, BARK AS MUCH AS YOU’D LIKE. IT SHALL NOT HELP YOU.


The Not-Nightmare growled and it was so bestial a sound that Twilight cowered. “You will rue the hour in which you showed us this final lie, Shadow. Celestia lives!”

 
“Celestia lives,” Twilight breathed.

 
“I did it!” The weeping Luna cried. “It was me! I was its… its… It rode into this world on my back! The womb which birthed me was its cradle! All of this death… a whole world ruined because I was born! Were that I had not been!”

 
“It’s a lie!” The Not-Nightmare said. She dared not take her eyes from the Shadow—Twilight realized with a jolt that it was the Hideous Strength itself, and she started to shake in terror—but she bared sharp fangs. “Tis a lie and not even a good one! We know of you! Your birth was a correlation and nothing more, foul recursion. I was born on the same day that you were, but Luna and you are not kin and you are not fit to be even Death’s bondsman.”

 
AH, BUT DO YOU NOT SPEAK TO DEATH?


“I already have,” whispered the Luna on the ground and she shook. “Oh, sister! You can’t be… I didn’t mean to bring it… I deserve your scorn. I deserve to die a thousand thousand times. I deserve every ounce of pain that there is. I should be burned alive for what I brought with me. You should have smothered me as a newborn!”

 
“We already have,” agreed Luna. “And you are not Her. You wish you could be, couldn’t you? Tasteless, faceless, genderless, loveless—you wish you could be something that was not the antithesis of Creation, don’t you? I stick my hoof in you and what do I find? That I taste nothing! I smell nothing! Because you are NOTHING.”

 
Twilight slowly edged around the ongoing dispute. She had already been visible, but neither seemed to have noticed her. Or, if they did, they ignored her. The Luna who wept on the ground ignored everything.

 
BELIEVE OR NOT, the Shadow boomed. WHAT CARE I FOR THE SCORN OF CREATION’S MISBEGOTTEN BASTARD? RUNT OF THE LITTER? I ENJOY YOUR AGONY. AND YOU? YOU ARE AN IMAGE. ILLUSION. YOU TALK OF NOTHING, AND WHAT ARE YOU? I NAME YOU: LACUNAE.


The Not-Nightmare seemed to fade in and out for a moment, but then she was solid again. Twilight kept moving closer to the Luna on the ground. She thought she saw this other’s eyes flicker towards her.

 
Come no closer. Wait.


Twilight froze.

 
“Do you not have an army to lose?” Lacunae sneered.

 
The Shadow growled at her. They both looked like they might pounce at any moment.

 
Twilight Sparkle, hear you me, said a voice in Twilight’s head, clear as a cloudless day, I will draw its baleful eyes away. You must go to Luna. You must go to me. One day, if she can, she will explain. Or, if we meet again, I shall. If I survive. Wait until I have struck the first blow!


I WILL CRACK YOUR FRIENDS BONES AND HAVE MY HORDES DRINK OF THEIR MARROW LIKE FOALS WITH SWEETS, FALSE ONE.


“And yet an adolescent dragon with me holding his hand keeps you out of a half-conquered city and then slips past your chains into his reward,” Lacunae said, and Twilight’s heart all but stopped.

 
You were there with him?


And then Lacunae jumped, a hammer materializing out of the ash and with her magic she bore it down. But the Shadow jumped away, still looking like a younger Luna, and began to laugh. COME AND WASTE YOUR STRENGTH. KNOW THAT EXISTENCES SUCH AS YOURS ARE FUTILE AND THEN YOU WILL STEP ASIDE AND LET ME ERASE THE MISTAKES.


When Lacuane had pushed the darting Shadow away, Twilight ran to Luna and tried to hold her up.

 
“Luna!” she cried, her horn forgotten.
 

Luna stared off into nothing. Shock, Twilight though, panicking.

 
“She’s dead. She’s dead. The last thing I did was ask her to get me… chickpeas… the… I didn’t even forgive… I didn’t ask… She’s dead. I brought her murderer.”

 
“Celestia lives,” Twilight said. “Luna! She lives.”

 
“We are twins, born of the same mother and the same blood. What if I am no better? Celestia took pity on a monster and I have failed her. OF course I did. I am a monster. I was… I was…”

 
Twilight shook her. “Luna! Snap out of it. Please!”

 
“Celestia…”

 
Twilight kissed her hard, but nothing happened. She shook her again.

 
Twilight slapped Luna across the face.

 
Luna blinked. She stared at Twilight with her tear-streaked face. “Celestia is dead. When I was born, so was the true Nightmare. I was just its shadow. I caused all of this.”

 
And Twilight thought for a moment that she believed it.

 
It made an awful sort of sense, didn’t it? Born together—true, it could be correlation, it needn’t be actual causation. Luna had never heard the song—she came in at the end, so said Celestia. Luna had become Nightmare Moon, and threatened to shroud the world in everlasting night. The Hideous Strength, the Shadow, hadn’t it done the same? Hadn’t it tried to starve them all out so it could ruin everything in sight at its leisure?

 
If there was no basis at all, then how could Luna have believed it so readily?

 
“Luna, Celestia—“

 
“She’s dead. I already know,” Luna cut her off. Her voice sounded so awfully hollow.

 
“She lives! Celestia lives.”

 
“You should not lie,” Luna said almost absently. “In Sarnath they said Gan punished liars.” She wasn’t looking at Twilight. She looked right over Twilight’s shoulder at some far off nothing. “She’s dead and its my fault.”

 
“She’s alive and you didn’t do anything,” Twilight said. But now she wasn’t sure.

 
She hated that she wasn’t sure. She hated it so much.

 
And then all of a sudden, Twilight stopped. She ground her teeth together. She had only one thought. A hard and vulgar little thought. She rarely cursed. It had always seemed beneath her. And yet. It was: Who the fuck cares?


Faith need not always come in pretty packaging.

 
She hauled Luna to her feet, and it was no easy task. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said firmly. “Well, I mean, about Celestia. First off, because she’s alive.”

 
“Say true?” Luna said softly, as in a dream. Which, Twilight supposed, she was.

 
“Yes. Living and breathing. She misses you. I’m actually here to bring you to her, if you’ll come.” And I’ll carry you off if you don’t, she thought, and somehow she knew that if Luna refused to believe her she really would.

 
But light and life was beginning to return to the alicorn’s eyes. “The sooth? You speak what is true, Twilight of Ponyville?”

 
“I would not lie to you.”

 
“But the Shadow…”

 
“You’re believing Eldritch embodiments of despair now?” Twilight challenged. “Celestia told me it wasn’t you who brought it, and that you were only its first victim. I believe her—won’t you? Because its true, whether you believe her or not. Come with me.”

 
“I…”

 
“I love you,” Twilight said. “I do. With all my heart. I want us to Dreamwalk again and laugh again. I want this whole stupid business to be over with. Come with me. Let’s finish it.”

 
“Yes. It is time it was finished, isn’t it? One way or another,” Luna said with wonder, and when Twilight reached out her hoof Luna took it.

 
 
 






 
 


 
CANTERLOT
 
 
Hours.

 
The night wears on, but it does not get lighter, not truly. Black turns to gray, but the sun will not rise.

 
The Manicheans are truly pinned now between two armies. Three, if you really separate them out. They are all falling back into the Fountain Square, where Celestia once a year would hold court outside, in the public air. It is a massive place. It can hold thousands of ponies if it has to. It probably will have to, soon enough.

 
Spitfire is back in the air and she’s pissed. She’s never been this pissed in her life. She has no idea where any of the other Bolts are. She knows they’ll be fine. Right? They have to be.

 
Wonderbolts do have a delightfully colorful history of glorious death. An ancient history, yes, but still a colorful one.

 
She’s linked up with a pair of Imperial fliers, who salute her right away. Even in the Empire, ponies know who Spitfire is. They barely recognized her, torn and angry and missing about half of her barding, but it only took a few words to get them formed up.

 
What does she do? She takes their orders as her own. Luna’s army has lost a lot of its coherency—its hard to keep a disparate army of haggard guardsponies and mostly green personal levies working together very effectively, and in a city like Canterlot, with its mazelike streets?

 
They fly over the streets. It’s amazing how empty the city is in some places. Like nopony has ever lived there at all.

 
“That’ll be it, then,” Spitfire says to herself. She yells this back to the others, and gets a curt wave of affirmation in return. Yes, this’ll be it.

 
They’re all surrounded now. She’s flown the perimeter of the entrapped army. It’ll be only a matter of time now.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 
Rainbow Dash lies panting in the street. She is utterly spent. Hours of flying and fighting, then pulling back to fly and fight again. Over and over and over. Fifteen, that’s what the Solar officer yelled at the other harriers. Fifteen and then back into the air. They need the pressure. They have to keep the bastards on their backs.

 
She lies flat like she’s dead. She feels a little dead, even though she’s hardly got a scratch on her. That’ll change, she knows.

 
The armies are all mixed up, now. The legion is orderly, but without Luna to coordinate between the levies and guard, the Canterlot line is shaky. Rarity’s Manehattan army is even more chaotic. But they fight surprisingly well. It’s amazing what a thousand ponies filled with righteous fury can do in close quarters with a little magical help, really.

 
But Rainbow isn’t thinking about that much. She’s hardly thinking about the battle, even. It’s hard to think about the battle, or really any battle, in of itself, as you would any other abstract thing. Battles are… big. Huge. And ponies are, after all, small. Much too small to wrap their minds around the workings of such a thing. Too many moving parts. And even if you could follow them all, could you really see a pattern? Or would you fool yourself the way generals do, that it’s lines and charts and troop numbers? That there isn’t luck and story? That there isn’t blind trembling fate and stupid bravery and a lot of very wise cowardice? No pony could ever handle it, that’s for sure, for damn sure. You can set your watch by that, if you want.

 
What does Rainbow think about, then? Mostly Rarity. The battle she thinks about in the context of Rarity. An exhausted, bleeding Rarity with mild thaumic poisoning which she gave herself, which just stunned Rainbow, had been pulled back from the fighting. She was in a hastily erected base closer to the gate.

 
Dash wanted to be there. She wanted to be there so badly.

 
Because, and this will be a shock, in a way she didn’t care about any of this at all. Battle is a lot less about glory and more about wanting to go home. Everypony just wants to go home and never leave again. Where’s the glory? She thinks maybe the glory is in how you’re all together. That all the glory is in the charge, in the way spirits mingle in the heat of the oil press—it’s a fitting image, she sees it in her mind, and hears the old pegas word for it. The glory is in the way that it makes your neighbors your brothers and sisters and lovers, that you would die with these and not be ashamed.

 
Afraid still, maybe. But never ashamed.

 
She wants to go home, but where is home? Wherever Rarity is. Fighting to stay alert, she wonders where they will live. Rarity’s nobility now. Canterlot, she guesses. Yeah. A big house in Canterlot. She can convince Rarity to order a really fluffy bed that’ll almost be as good a cloud, but warmer. Much warmer. Wait, would she live there? Dating is weird. Rarity and her are weird. Life is…

 
Weird doesn’t seem to cut it, what with everything being more or less on fire.

 
Battles wear on, you know. They just keep going sometimes, one hour rolling into another. An hour of nothing followed by sixty seconds of absolute hell, and then another hour of nothing. Hours of intense horror and the threat of pain followed by little minutes, little pockets of breathing and water and whimpering into the silent night, and then more. It drags on—don’t you feel it dragging on? The horror, the thrill, it’ll grow boring. Even the part with the killing. Perhaps that’s a mercy. If warriors grow too accustomed to the smell of death when this happens, what would it be like if the excitement never died? If you didn’t get tired and want to go home?

 
Real battle is like trying to stay up while dogs are howling on every street and someone keeps trying to break in, all in a hurricane, except a hundred times worse. Every sound pricks at your ears. Tiny shifting, cloth on cloth, even your own movements, just become part of a great white noise. Stay up enough, keep going long enough, you’ll shut down. See things. Colors that aren’t there, that you couldn’t describe if you tried, that you don’t want to describe, by all the gods of a thousand lands, and the feelings you get crawling all over you—

 
We’re just not made for this, Rainbow thought lazily.

 
Rarity would be okay, but Dash felt like she should be there. She was the Element of Loyalty. If that even mattered, now. The Elements didn’t work against everything. They weren’t a cure-all for every problem. They were powerful tools, and she was a powerful friend, but even loyalty in the end is like throwing rocks at tanks.

 
Except Dash will never accept that, say sorry. She probably should! But she won’t. She doesn’t, as she rests and tries not to pass out. Breath in. Out. In. Out. One two three. She’ll make it. She’ll be ready to go. She has to. You never stop. You never drag behind. You lead from the front. You do the job in front of you.

 
You never, ever let your friends down. She would never let Rarity down. She would do the job in front of her. She would not let Twilight down. She would not fail Fluttershy or Pinkie. She would not dishonor her lineage, as it was, before Applejack. Before the face of her father, she would not relent.

 
She was standing a few seconds before the officer came back. She hadn’t even bothered to notice his rank.

 
“Just do the job in front of you,” she says out loud to nopony.

 
Except she’s telling it to herself, and she adds: I’ll be home soon. It’ll all be over soon.


One way or another.

 
 
 
 






 
 
CELESTIA



 
What will you do with me, Twilight? Sleeping there, gathering as you were bid. My missionary in a foreign field, my lamb sent to the wolves… what will you do with me, when the time comes?


What will I do with me? That’s the real question. So many questions. Have you ever noticed how many questions there are, I wonder. Going further, you must have noticed how many questions that have been dogging your every step this whole way. I felt them all in you, hundreds and hundreds, mundane and profound alike. Your whole quest—I saw it all, you know!—was just a big question. “Where did Celestia go?” maybe. Or, “What is Celestia doing?” or “Why is the world like this?”


But you know, I think the real question for you is, “Who is Twilight Sparkle?”


I think that Twilight Sparkle is dedicated, maybe too dedicated. I think she is kind to her friends, and that she tries hard even when she isn’t doing all that well at actually being a friend, and that’s why it all works. I think that she loves as a matter of fact. I think that she weighs and measures and deliberates. I think that she’s hesitant to change her insides even as she’s perfectly willing to alter her understanding with the harsh facts set before her in unnumbered graphs—that’s a paradox right there for you, my dearest and most faithful student. I think Twilight Sparkle has faith in her friends, and that she’s worked hard at trust, that she’s grown.


Personally, I believe in her. I know that she’ll do the right thing, for the right reasons, and in the right way.


Words come to me sometimes, across the brilliant eternities. They always have. Passages and poems, sermons and desperate pleas. Snippets, really. The one that just floated to me was: I’ll set my watch and warrant by it.


I’m sorry, Twilight. I hope that one day, you’ll forgive me, for you know not what you do. I can’t tell you my plan. Not yet. I know that you think that I am strong, but am I? Never as strong as you hoped I was. I am so weak. I am so quick to find the path of least resistance. I avoid doing hard things. I think that’s natural, but so is wasting sickness and that does not mean that either is good. I learned to delegate and put off and play a long game. I thought I was being very, very clever, like some sort of silly chess master. Everypony really believed me. And maybe it isn’t entirely a lie. I do have a grand plan, after all.


But I couldn’t tell you my plan. Not until it is all but accomplished. Because I know what you’ll say, and you’ll be right because you so often are, and your voice will break and tear my heart in two. You’ll employ that frighteningly sharp logic of yours. And in the end, I will not carry out the only hope for our world, the only REAL plan… because you’ll be right. But you’ll also be very, very, lethally wrong.


What will you do with me, Twilight Sparkle? What will you do with yourself?


Who will you be if this all goes well, I wonder?


What will any of it be?













TWILIGHT



When she was in the aether again, Twilight almost wept. Her horn! She felt her magic again, flowing through her and through all the aether. It was the wind in the strange otherworldly valleys and crags and clouds and mists. She loved it. She always had.

 
Twilight looked down and felt the warm glow of alicorns she had gathered together pressed to her breast. She could hear them. They were singing, she thought. Perhaps she heard it as song because Celestia was still with her, somehow, and because she had been in the Well. Be strong, my love, said Luna faintly. Please, let me see my sister again.


All ready when you are, Twily!


Be unwavering, young Sparkle.


One more to go. And she already knew where to find her.

 
 
 

 
Kyrie sat with her friends. Something inside of Twilight cracked at seeing them. She read the worry on all of their faces. How long had it been? She didn’t know.  But not long, if luck was with her.

 
It had taken some experimentation, but dreamwalking from outside the world was rather different from entering the Aether from the inside, and with a little bit of mental gymnastics, she could see the physical world. In the distance, she felt something like a fire and thought to herself that it must be Canterlot. She almost saw it… saw it burned to a crisp again, all wasted and destroyed and filled with the dead, and almost the aether mists around her began to form that world.

 
But Twilight mastered them and they rested.

 
Kyrie. She had come for Kyrie. The last.

 
Twilight reached out and spoke, but it was Celestia whose words issued forth from her mouth.

 
“Kyrie! Eldest sister, I humbly beg an audience with you, if you would come!”

 
Kyrie stirred below her on the path, seeming like for all the world a pony with an annoying headache. She mouthed a what? And then Twilight spoke with her own words.

 
“Kyrie! Look up! Not with your eyes. Look up and take my hoof. Celestia needs you. You have to trust me!”

 
What will I do? Where are you taking me to? Kyrie cried in her mind as her body wavered. No! Please, I beg you, I have already lost so much. What will this world take from me this time?


“Nothing that do you not give freely!” Celestia said.

 
“We’re all together,” Twilight said. “Please. You’ve waited so long. You’ve lasted so long… it has to be for something, Kyrie. I know you’re scared. Take the leap, and it’ll… it won’t be easier, but you’ll know it’s the right choice. Don’t let it all be for nothing.”

 
Already, as Kyrie fell to the ground, muttering something, she saw a ghostly Kyrie rising with fear in her eyes but a hoof outstretched.









 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CELESTIA
 
You wake, and through four bright portals walk four of the most powerful ponies to yet walk the earth.

 
You’ve done so well. You’ve been so brave. I could sense your confusion, your fear, your effort. I could not be prouder of you. I’ve always been so proud.

 
We leave the dream world before you fully regain your senses and we are back again in the Image you first inhabited rationally in Eternity: the Last City. The sun seems older now. Older and closer. The city seems even worse for wear. It is all falling apart.

 
I greet them each in kind as you sit between us, shaking your head and groaning from what I can only assume is a splitting headache.

 
“Kyrie, Eldest, you honor me,” I say and I mean it. I am humbled that you have come. Your obligation was perhaps the least.

 
“Sister,” Kyrie says happily. “It is good to see you again.” I can tell she is frightened. Good. She should be. We all should be.

 
“Iridia, sister.” I bow, and she seems taken aback a bit when I rise to see her again. It is hard to tell with Iridia, though. She has had an iron mask for a long time. I miss when it came off more often. “I am honored by your trust.”

 
“I have never withheld my trust from you,” Iridia says, a tad coldly, but she says most everything coldly. “You have always been of the White. Even when you were being a fool.”

 
I smile at her warmly, and—miracles do happen, even in hell—she returns the smile, if with much more restraint than I show. For my part, my smile becomes a huge grin. This is probably a good sign.

 
“Cadance,” I say. “My niece, I am delighted to see you again. It has been far too long.”

 
She bows to me, and I nod to her. “Same,” she says, a little bewildered, I think. She keeps looking around everywhere. Ah, youth.

 
I turn to Luna, and her visage shocks me out of my calm. She… she is weeping. Pale. She looks like she has seen a ghost.

 
“Is it… it cannot be… I had almost…” She takes a few staggering steps towards me. “Sister?”

 
“Hello, Lulu,” I say gently. “It’s me. And it’s you,” I add.

 
My sister… O Luna, O Lost, my dearest and first true bosom companion. You’re shaking. I cross to you without another moment of hesitation and I hug you more ferociously than perhaps I ever have. And you begin to sob in my embrace.

 
“I thought you’d died!” She cries into my chest. “I thought it was my fault. I thought you’d… that you’d gone away because I hadn’t been able to save you or… or…”

 
I try to shush her, but she presses on.

 
“I… I talked to It. And it said… Celestia, am the cause? Am I its anchor? Are you here because of me? I don’t want to go on forever knowing that it was my fault. Please, by the Song, tell me the truth.”

 
Oh. Oh no. I see it now. I know why she trembles, why she looks up at me with these eyes. I feel a rage I have not felt in… perhaps ever. That this would be his final injury to my sister. For Luna was always my sister, more a sister to me than the others. We were a part of them but always in our own system, our own little corner of the galaxy. I burn with rage.

 
“You are a beautiful creation,” I say, holding it in check only barely. “Though two things happen in a single day, one does not cause the other. You no more brought it into being than Twilight did. It will not have you again,” I add. “I will make sure of it.”

 
She continues to weep, and I stroke her mane. Why could we have not done this a thousand years ago, sister? Why did we fail in love? That failure has always been so bitter, and in this moment before the end (one way or another) it is the most bitter thing in all Creation to me.

 
I look over her head to the others. Even Iridia looks on with compassion, her face softening. Luna may have learned war at our ascension, but it was Iridia who taught her to use the hammer. The most frigid daughter of the Song has a soft spot for Luna. It is part of what has kept us tethered together in love these years. It is also why she alone I allowed to visit me in my mourning and we mourned together after the Schism. She approaches and lays a hoof on my sister’s back. Cadance comes too, and then Kyrie, timid even now. And then… and then you, Twilight. You’ve risen. Has she called you forth with her great sorrow? You come and squirm between her and I, and to my mild surprise I find I do not begrudge you this, for you embrace us both and you kiss away her tears and whisper and I am so grateful for that.

 
As we are like this… I am so sorry, Twilight. I touch each of their minds. Cadance is the hardest. Iridia eyes me with those hard, icy eyes and I see… I do not know what I see. But not disapproval, not as the others have. Cadance—I’m lucky she’s behind you—pulls away in shock, staring at me with horror. Kyrie begins to weep and bows her head. I feel her relief and I’m ashamed to say that for an instant I resent it. But she has done enough. It is not hers to do this thing. It is for you and I, Twilight, to do it. Luna is… Luna is last. I touch her mind.

 








TWILIGHT



She held Luna and cried with her. Everything was just too much. The dreamscapes, the vision she saw that Luna had been trapped in, her friends, Canterlot… it was just too much for one little pony to bear, even surrounded by the closest things to goddesses that walked the earth. Surely this was the lowest they could go, and also the highest moment.

 
They let Luna and Twilight cry. She did not see Kyrie crying and trying not to look any of them in the eye. She also does not notice that none of them will look her in the eye, or even directly at her. She did not notice because when one is invested in being wracked in sobs, the important things often slip by. She will learn this lesson the hard way.

 
She did not notice when her mentor, her beautiful teacher, touched Luna. She did notice how Luna recoils as if struck, speechless and once more afraid.

 
“No,” she says. She slumps. But she doesn’t say anything else.

 
“Luna, I told you she was alive,” Twilight said, between coughing and sobbing. “I told you. Celestia lives. The sun is going to come back.”

 
She did not understand why this made Luna cry even harder, but emotion is a strange thing.

 
Perhaps thirty minutes past. It was hard to say how long, in such a place as this. First Iridia, then Kyrie, and then finally a stricken Cadance all stepped back. Celestia was the last to depart, leaving Twilight holding Luna, who lay on the floor.

 
But Luna rose. She stumbled back, and Twilight… Twilight was in the middle of them all again. She wasn’t sure what to do or where to go. The atmosphere changed. It was almost… formal? Suddenly, she felt that she did not belong here. She was only a little pony. These were… these were the “real deal” Applejack might have said. She just played with magic. These ponies were magic in a way she could never know.

 
They all looked to her. Celestia shook her head, and Twilight looked away slightly.

 
“Will you stand beside me?” Celestia asked.

 
And, stars help her, she could do nothing else but say yes, she would. She sat on her haunches at the right side of Celestia as the Princess of the Sun addressed them each in turn. All  the while, Twilight found herself more and more confused. She felt a fierce hope. Celestia had a plan. Didn’t they see? They had to know that it would work. Celestia had brought together all the power this world had in one place. Together, these five could turn back whole worlds. She knew it. One way or another, even if not with raw power. Thousands of years of experience were shared among them. Even Cadance could keep up for a short while. And yet they looked like she struck them, all but Iridia, when Celestia called their names.

 
“Kyrie, Eldest. You who were Pestilence, marked by Quarantine.”

 
“Aye,” Kyrie murmured. “You name me truly, Celestia.”

 
“Cadance, you who were Famine, as you starved for your city’s welfare.”

 
Cadance sniffed. “Yes.”

 
“Luna, who was War, who broke the darkness with her hammer as she did of old.”

 
“Tia, please.”

 
Celestia went on. Twilight grew more puzzled. Her confidence was beginning to waver. What was going on?

 
“Lulu, will you name me?”

 
“Not yet,” Luna said, and she bit back a sob. “Why would you… I cannot—“

 
Celestia sighed and seemed to be steadying herself. “Luna?”

 
“Celestia, Death that was and is and shall be, who vanished into… into the west,” Luna managed, and then choked.
 
“That is fitting enough,” Celestia said. “We four are all here. As my vision in the Garden fortold.”
 
“We are humbled that you shared it,” Iridia said quietly.
 
Celestia said nothing at first. She cleared her throat.

 
“I see you, Kyrie. In the way we have always done this, I give to you a new name to wear: Sacrifice, for you endured and gave everything to seal the breach.

 
“Iridia of Henosia, my sister, you I give the name Justice, for that is what you are to me. Even when we have differed, always I knew that you served the straight and the right.

 
“Cadance, I name you Love with only a small apology, for this is the only name you will have of this sort, and it is already your name. But you too are an alicorn. Love, who bore great sorrow and pain for her love. No greater love can there be that would die for the sake of another. Would that there were a thousand of you.”

 
Cadance began to cry openly now. Twilight felt… it was just confusion now. She was beginning to be afraid. What was this? Had… she didn’t remember saying anything that would have sparked such a ritualistic air when she called them all to Celestia’s aid.

 
“Twilight,” she said, and Twilight almost jumped and turned to face her teacher, who smiled at her in a heartbreaking way. “I name you Faith, and you are the only one of our children to hold a name such as this. For you are the one who went to the far ends of the earth and did the impossible because you would not abandon me or what you knew in your heart was a good world.”

 
Twilight just gaped at her in shock. To be included was… She wanted to ask what this meant. She wanted to know.

 
“Luna—“

 
“Sister, please,” Luna almost… was she begging? Now Twilight was truly afraid.

 
“Luna,” Celestia said again, softer this time. “Will you give me this grace?”

 
“Yes. Stars strike me down if they can, yes,” Luna said. “Please, sister.”

 
“Luna, who is Hope. You who fought against Despair itself, that Hideous Strength, for a brighter future. Even when you were all alone.” Celestia took a deep breath, and then she said softly.

 
“I ask for your gifts.”

 
Kyrie came first, and she bowed before Celestia. Her whole body glowed, and Celestia seemed to sway as if faint. “This—“ she began, but Kyrie shook her head, and Celestia nodded.

 
Then Iridia. Iridia did not bow. She hugged Celestia. It was not a stiff, formal thing. Twilight caught a glimpse of what lay beneath the cold iron mask as Iridia held her younger sister tightly and whispered something in her ear as Celestia hugged her back. They glowed bright. When they parted, and Iridia went to stand beside a weak looking Kyrie, Twilight saw that now Celestia seemed to glow permanently.

 
Cadance came, and bowed. And then she kissed her aunt on the cheek, and said, “May you reach the top and find what it is you wish,” she said, her voice trembling. And for good measure, she hugged Twilight before returning and kissing the other cheek. Celestia glowed brighter and Cadance seemed suddenly to grow somehow… less. Almost gaunt. She stumbled over to her mother and they embraced.

 
Luna came, tears running down her face, and surprised them all by kissing Celestia on the lips firmly and lovingly. Celestia’s glow increased what seemed four times. Twilight gasped. She wasn’t sure the kiss was less shocking than the light, even though she at least understood the kiss. When it was ended, she stepped back from Luna, looking horrified. “No! No, you cannot. I cannot take this from—“

 
Luna shook her head and gave her the smile a pony gives before the gallows. “You cannot take it because you cannot take from me what I freely give.”

 
Celestia bowed her head, as if ashamed.

 
“Just one more sisterly prank,” Luna said and coughed as she choked up.

 
Celestia laughed, and Twilight thought she was also crying. “You got me,” she said. “Got me fair, Lulu.”

 
“Tia, I love you dearly. I love you more than the moon and stars.”

 
“I love you more than the sun’s warmth and the green grass, Lulu. Always,” she added. “Always.”

 
Luna stepped back. “May I come with you?”

 
Celestia nodded. “Yes, as far as you can. Perhaps even to the end.”

 
Luna looked down. “Aye.”

 
And now Celestia turned to Twilight, and Twilight took a step back. “What is going on, Princess?” she asked. “What is all of this. Why are you… I mean…”

 
“It’s time, Twilight,” she said. “It is finally time. You have done well, and I am proud of you. May I ask of you a favor?”

 
“Yes,” Twilight said automatically.

 
“Will you not give me a gift, as these have?”

 
Twilight swallowed. “As Luna did,” she said, without knowing why, and Celestia nodded and—it was beautiful, of course it was—she smiled in a way that was almost mischievous, almost as if even here she might laugh.

 
Celestia bent down a bit, and Twilight kissed her and found that her dream was right, and Celestia tasted of paradise.

 
But she did not become weak or grow gaunt. This confused her even more. But Celestia looked… at peace, somehow.

 
“Shall we go, then?” she said to Luna and Twilight. “To the end.”

 
“To the end,” Luna said miserably.

 
Twilight said nothing.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
SCOOTALOO


I’m so glad you didn’t come, Scootaloo thinks as she walks stiffly through the streets. I’m so glad that you’re safe up in the palace. Sweetie, I wish I were there.


She and the levies she had trained wandered through the now quiet streets like ghosts. Scootaloo knew she must look like some sort of ghost herself, staring off into space like she was. But it was hard not to be… shellshocked. That worked. Shellshocked. She had been on the wings of the Canterlonian defense, and only now had the fighting begin to wind down.

 
She refused to let her soldiers bother the bodies of the dead. Let the Lunars or the Imperials poke at corpses. Scootaloo would let the dead lie in peace.

 
She thinks again that she is so grateful that Sweetie Belle had backed down.

 
“You aren’t a soldier, Sweets. You’re just brave, and I love that, but you’ll be a liability,” Scootaloo had said, trying to sound confidant.


“I’m not a child. I should be with them. They serve my House,” Sweetie Belle had replied, frowning severely. Outside, in the streets, there was blinding activity. Civilians were awake. Scootaloo heard songs and shouting and frantic mustering and knew this conversation needed to be over soon. She had a time limit and Sweetie Belle would press her advantage.


So Scootaloo put her hoof down. “I’m not taking you. I’m your marshal, you know, and this is me serving your house by keeping you here. I’m not doing my job if I let you come with us.” She took a deep breath and ran roughshod over Belle’s objection. “You barely know how to put your barding on, you’ve never really shot a gun and meant it. You’re laughably bad with hoofblades, even though I’m proud you tried. Your magic isn’t really geared towards combat at all. You won’t be able to keep up with us—our levies are fast and hard hitters, harriers, and flankers. We’ll be a quarter of our speed protecting you in a battlefield that will just be too much for us trying to run an escort mission or for you… Oh, hell. Sweetie, please, just listen to me for pony’s sake. Stay here for me.”


Sweetie sat back on her haunches. “I don’t want you to go.”


Scootaloo hadn’t want to go either. And now that she had gone, and she was here, she found that she was no better as a pony for the experience. Oh, she would be a cautious one. She might even one day be able to look back and say that it was better to stand than it would have been to cower.

 
But at that moment, she did not feel at all that it was better to stand. Scootaloo was brave. But all her life, bravery had meant taking that big ramp with her scooter, or going in for her first kiss. Bravery meant rolling the dice and doing something truly, inarguably awesome, and life would be better afterwards. This hadn’t been about bravery at all. Maybe, when it was all heroes and wizards and knight-errants, maybe then it had been about things like bravery. She hadn’t felt brave at all, herself. Mostly, she’d been scared shitless or furious or just plain tired.

 
She was mostly tired now. A little afraid. A little jumpy. But mostly tired.

 
She navigated around another dead body, hardly looking at it. It wasn’t because she was cold and uncaring, because Scootaloo cared a hell of a lot about stuff. It was because she was just too boneweary to do much more than sleep or cry or lay somewhere. She wondered if there was anywhere she could take a nap in the street that didn’t smell like death or worse.

 
The Manichean rebels were all bottled up now. It would just be a matter of time, she was sure of it. Or, rather, she fervently hoped that it was true. The sun hadn’t risen yet, though. That part of the vision Luna had given them was a little late in coming. She guessed that it was because Luna was busy.

 
She glanced up at the strange pools of darkness above all their heads, still circling and sometimes thundering.

 
And so it was for this reason that she did not see Dash until almost right on top of her.

 
They stood in the street, twinned pegasi with heavy eyes and wobbly legs, covered in muck and sweat and blood, barding torn and mane singed. For all the world, they could have been sisters.

 
Scootaloo hesitated. She blinked, and then squinted. “Dash?”

 
“Squirt? Scoots?”

 
Even exhausted as she was, Scootaloo’s heart still beat fiercely, and forever that heart had room for Rainbow. Slowly, she advanced, and slowly her smile grew until she was flinging her forelegs around Rainbow’s neck and they both went sprawling. And Scootaloo started laughing, and then the laughing became outright bawling, and Rainbow was hugging her back and telling her it was okay. It was going to be okay. What an awful lie. She believed it anyway.

 








 
TWILIGHT




Iridia and Cadance left together. Kyrie left slowly and with obvious trouble. Twilight hugged before she went, and found that Kyrie seemed to shy from her touch at first.

 
Luna, Celestia, and Twilight stood facing each other in the center of a great chamber.

 
“Day, Night, and the Time Between,” Twilight murmured to herself. The joke was no more funny than it had the first time she’d thought of it.

 
“You did not ask me to name you,” Luna said softly.

 
“I knew you would want to come. I will ask you on the way,” Celestia answered, then seemed to stop and think. “If you still wish to, when we are there.”
 

“Of course,” Luna said. She seemed almost wooden. Stiff and tired. Twilight thought, worried, that she seemed to be holding in some great feeling. “I…”

 
“Luna.”

 
“I know you won’t be… persuaded. It isn’t because of me? Because in my mind I hear a little voice that says that you have always been the kind to do things for ponies that they would never ask of you.”

 
But Celestia shook her head.

 
Luna closed her eyes. “It might not work. Or when you—“

 
“Let us go, Luna,” Celestia said, firmly but without raising her voice.

 
Twilight looked from one to the other. “Where are we going?” she asked.

 
“The good ship Luna,” grumbled the Princess of the Night, and she seized both of them with her hooves—
 

 
 
 
 



 
Luna had not found the heart of the darkness after all. She had been drawn away and fooled.

 
Now she hovered high above the ground, suspended as it were by the smoky tendrils that curled around her legs and snaked about her wings.  None below suspected that she did not even now do battle.

 
And Luna would no longer disappoint them, for her eyes opened and she snarled. Twilight saw through her eyes and felt the burning as Celestia’s newfound Glory filled her and radiated from every pore, enflamed her coat and mane, poured out of her eyes like searchlights. It hurt, so badly. She felt like at any moment she might melt.

 
“Will nothing dissuade you?” Luna asked the air.

 
“We’ve already spoken at length.” Once again, Luna speaking, but with a different sort of rhythm. She tapped her head. “You know this.”

 
“THEN LET US GO OUT TOGETHER!” Luna launched herself back into the darkness, letting her hammer fall to earth unattended.

 
Twilight could not do what they did, but she could feel and she could watch. Had she been in her own body, she would have howled in agony—

 
And suddenly she found that she could do something. She pushed and pushed.

 
And then she was outside of Luna, flying beside her. Was it Luna that was faint like a shade, or herself? Somehow, she knew that her body wasn’t really here. Not yet. But where was it? Where was Celestia’s?

 
Luna continued on. From the ground, looking up, she must have looked like the sun itself in the heart of the darkness. And it was so very dark. It seemed with every passing second that the dark clouds moved closer and closer, and that soon they might be strangled in them.

 
Below, they would see the sun shining down briefly. Or a comet streaking through the sky before the sun rose, perhaps. They might look up with astonishment and wonder what this sign meant. Twilight was the sign and she wondered what she meant.
 
 
“Celestia!” she shouted, hoping that she could be heard. “Celestia! What are we doing? What is going on?”

 
“A moment longer, sister! Just a moment!” Luna, she thought. Maybe.

 
“All will be revealed, Twilight. I feel it, Luna!”

 
“It’s strong! I feel the air grow thick and the force it gives off… it’s like—“

 
“An anti magic field!” Twilight supplied.

 
“Yes, but stronger!”

 
The wind picked up. The clouds moved in. All around them, everything grew cold and the darkness began to move in to swallow them up in earnest. It had taken the bait.

 
And it happened to let its army go in its lusts.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Twilight floated. More than this, she waited.

 
She did not ask where she was. One gets used to never being sure after awhile in the Eternities. Perhaps that question would never be answered. Twilight thought that she was not really here at all, in a way. Or, more accurately, perhaps the outside had not quite fully penetrated the outer hull of Earth but simply bent it inwards to allow Twilight to be here without leaving the outside at all, as is she were walking on a balloon filled with water.

 
Everything around her was dark and she saw nothing. This could mean a lot of things, so Twilight tried not to panic.

 
“Celestia? Luna? Are you there?”

 
Nothing.

 
“Hello? What happened? Where am I?”
 

Nothing.
 

The darkness pressed at her and she found herself breathing faster and faster. She tried to control her breathing, like Celestia and Cadace had taught her. In and out. In. Out. In. Out. Don’t panic about the--
 

It’s nice to finally meet you. Well, again, in a way.
 

Twilight looked up, and she saw…
 

She saw…
 
 
At first, it looked like a snake--no! A lamprey!--miles and miles long, coiled over and over on itself filling everything, and she thought she might fall upon it and be found among the folds or crushed like a grape between grinding scales. Song’s mercy, how large was it? Was it endless? She wanted to scream, but she didn’t, because she saw its great soulless black eyes staring up at her with a hunger that she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. It hated. It hated everything.
 
 
But then it changed, and what was it then? Why, it was none other than a mirror. That is, herself, walking out of the darkness. Somehow, Twilight could still see her.
 
 
 
“What?”
 
 
It is good, I said, to finally meet you. Face to face, the real thou and the real I. No flesh to mask us. I have been wanting to speak to you, the other Twilight said. She winced. The voice stabbed into her brain. It looked so, so close to the real one. So close that Twilight almost doubted that she was the real one for a moment.
 
 
“Who are you?” she asked, but she already knew.
 
 
“Why, I am the hope of all flesh,” said the Shadow, now using her mouth, talking normally. Twilight no longer felt her in her mind but heard her.
 
 
“And that means what, exactly?” Twilight asked, glancing around. The Princesses would know what to do. Whatever Celestia’s plan, she wouldn’t leave Twilight, would she?
 
 
“Would you like to talk? Or shall I devour you first?” Shadow Twilight said casually. “It’s all the same to me. Talking is tasting is knowing. How does your Celestia say it, the bright one? ‘Then I shall know, even as I am known’?” It chuckled. The sound was not Twilight’s laugh but awful and wet. “Oh, I would know you. As you would know me. Absorbed. Pushed back under the rind. Your will is my will is your will,” it said and cocked its head to the side. “But variety is the spice of life. Even when you don’t want there to be either. So. Talk? Or consume?”
 
 
“Talk,” Twilight said, swallowing. She thought of the first vision.
 
 
“Oh? I love the ambiguities of language, if nothing else. Talk, as in an answer? Talk! Like a command?” The thing giggled and Twilight was repulsed. The Shadow flashed a grin at her filled with sharp teeth in her own perverted reflection’s mouth. She noticed now that her eyes were wrong. They kept… changing. The shadow just wanted to play with her.
 
 
Celestia, where are you now?


Luna!

 
“An answer. It was an answer.” Twilight could feel her throat threatening to close, as if squeezed from the… outside… could it all be that cruel? Had she been ripped from her teacher and lover and been taken already, been consumed already? Or was that literal?
 

“Hm. Who do you say I am, Twilight of Nothing?” asked her own body.
 
 
Twilight cleared her throat, but it didn’t help much. “The Sh—“ She coughed, and decided that she must be bold. She must hold this thing’s attention. If she was doomed, she must sell herself dearly. LOOK AT ME! “Shall I name you directly, or describe you? They are very different answers, Skinwalker.”
 

“Oh! A jab at my mask, how droll. I had expected that one. But not the choice. The choice is the thing, isn’t it?” The Shadow licked its lips. “Never expected that. The choice is the thing,” it repeated, as if reminding itself. “I cannot resist a parting of the ways. Killing half the future, perhaps. Describe, Twilight of Nothing.”
 
 
Twilight tried to steady herself. She was alone now. No more relying on alicorns, at least for this. She opened her mouth, but was pre-empted.
 
 
“Wait. First, I’ll guess your first. Is it to be, ahem,” the thing cleared its throat and somehow it sounded like gnawing teeth. “Destroyer.”
 

The Shadow grinned at her with those sharp, waiting teeth again. Twilight had in fact, not been planning to say that first. So she smiled.
 
 
“No,” she said, easily.
 
 
She saw her own eyebrows raise on the creature’s stolen face. “Oh? Well, I can tell you don’t lie. Go on. What a curiosity you are.”
 
 
“Perverter,” Twilight began. “Corrupter. Ruinous. Vast. Powerful. Patient.” But growing less so, I think. “Destructive. You are, in fact,” she continued, remembering something she’d been told, “something much like a sickness. A sickness right unto death.”
 
 
She didn’t have time to remember if it had been Luna or Celestia who had said that. The creature chuckled.
 
 
“Oh, how I hate you. But excellent work, if a bit pedantic. But you were a… what? A bookworm, but not much of a poet were you. Now, a name. Let this little palaver continue.”
 

“Despair,” Twilight said. “You’re despair.”
 
 
The other Twilight tsk’d. “Ah, that’s a bit more like the rest. A pity. So perceptive, Twilight of Nothing, right up until it’s inconvienent. No, I am not despair. How about… Truth?”
 
 
Before Twilight could respond—and how did you respond to that?—the creature vanished and Celestia was there beside her. Twilight was about to cry out in alarm, but found a hoof on her mouth, hushing her.
 
 
“Don’t say anything. I’m not here.” Celestia grimaced. “Yes, I am the part of Celestia that she left behind. Yes, I’m still here. Yes, probably for a long time. No, I can’t get you out of here, and no, you aren’t beyond saving.”
 
 
Celestia was gone, and the creature was back. “Truth,” it continued, as if nothing had happened. “Tell me, do you think this world is good? Don’t spit your learned by rote catechisms at me. Do you really, truly think that it is? Do you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, ‘ah, what a good day to be alive,’ and prance out into the sun and everything is perfect and exactly how you want it?”
 
 
“I wouldn’t say that exactly,” Twilight admitted. Where had Celestia gone—
 
 
And she was back and the Shadow vanished again. “I’m staying as low as I can. If it finds this part of you, it may undo everything. It is brilliant, but possessed of the vanity of genius: it thinks that it cannot make mistakes, just calculated retreats. It doesn’t learn. Keep talking to it. You weren’t as connected as Celestia was, but she’s found your spirit and she’ll reel you in.” Not-Celestia grimaced as if disgusted. “Don’t let it touch you, if you want to leave this place.”
 
 
Twilight wanted to ask, my what? But Not-Celestia vanished again and once more, was replaced by a grinning shark-toothed Twilight.
 
 
“Yes. You’ll be so hesitant about it. Maybe you could give me a rousing speech about the innate goodness of ponies, if I let you. Or zebras, or whatever. You might talk to me about beautiful the world is or how full of life and music and joy and all other sorts of things that are only valuable because you made them valuable. Why is any of that good?”
 
 
Keep it talking. She had to keep it talking. “Because… I mean, they just are,” she said, trying to get it to explain. If the thing wanted to monologue like a cheap villain, she would let it.
 
 
It advanced then. Twilight retreated, but didn’t turn her head.
 

“No, not really,” it said evenly. It kept walking.
 
 
Twilight kept backing up. Gods, I think it might really try to eat me, she thought.
 
 
“Then why?” Twilight asked, her voice tight and beginning to sound distressed even in her own ears.
 
 
“They don’t!” said the Shadow with something like glee, but the emotion never reached those changing, shifting eyes. Twilight didn’t think any emotion reached them ever. Intelligence and feeling and all of it was just a tool. Not really a part of this creature, but something like a detachable tool. A hat, perhaps. Easily taken off again. “That’s just it! I was born into this world, and I did not want to be! And it is all a huge, ridiculous mistake. Im shocked you don’t see it, bright as you are. Music and joy and kindness, honestly? Children talk about things like that. Stupid ones. The stupidest,” it amended. “Existence molds you into a tight little corridor. You can exist or not exist, and that’s it. No other choices. I don’t like it. It’s not fair. I didn’t want to do either.”
 
 
A self that would not be what it is, Twilight thought, paraphrasing Celestia.
 
 
“You can’t run forever. I really will eat you alive, you know. Your body just vanished. I’ve done it before, a few times. I start with the eyes,” It added helpfully, as if this were normal conversation. “Do you know what I choose next?”
 
 
Twilight couldn’t even pretend to talk to this monster anymore. She began to hyper-ventilate. Because she very much believed it. Ponies are, after all, mostly herbivorous and certainly originally a prey species. She knew what those teeth could do. Ages of racial memory were screaming about those teeth.
 
 
“N-no.”
 
 
“Better answer than most! Mortals always expect the tongue, for some reason. Do you not see how much they are mistakes? Of course not the tongue, simpletons, how else will you scream or make those wonderful noises?”
 

It was getting closer.
 

“You’re wrong,” Twilight said, trying to keep it talking, knowing it wasn’t going to be distracted much at all about anything.
 
 
“’You’re wrong!’,” it mocked.
 
 
“You don’t even have reasons,” Twilight said, and now she realized it was probably true. And that just made her furious. “You don’t have any at all. Just wanton annilation. You’re just a killswitch,” she spat.

 
It really didn’t seem to care.
 
 
And then Twilight felt like she was being yanked back into—
 
 
Another darkness, but Luna was there and Twilight looked out her eyes again.
 

This new darkness was different.  It was not nearly as featureless. For up ahead, Twilight could see a strange purplish light which cast a low, eerie glow.
 
 
“It’s doing something,” Luna said.
 
 
“It is preparing for me,” Celestia said with her sister’s borrowed tongue.
 
 
It just wanted to screw with me, Twilight knew.
 
 
“It has known of you for awhile. No doubt it wished to pay you in kind for the destruction of the physical form it had hoped to inhabit long enough to destroy,” Luna said with her own voice.
 
 
Is this it? Is that where we’re going?


“This is it,” Celestia said, and she felt like Luna said it with her in unison.
 
 
 
Luna flew into the heart of the storm.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Twilight had the sensation of being shook awake.
 
 
She tried to open her eyes, but could not feel her body. Everything around her was darkness.
 
 
Last ticket to the station. “Last stop,” Luna said bitterly in her right ear. If she still had an ear.
 
 
“Last stop,” Celestia said sadly in her left.
 
 
“What is your plan?” Twilight asked, glad she could still talk at least. “Celestia, I’ve come with you so far. I walked so long. Please, Stars, just tell me your plan. Stop hiding from me!”
 
 
There was a long silence.
 
 
“You owe it, sister,” Luna said. She sounded… not angry. But close.
 
 
“I know I do,” Celestia said. Her voice wavered.
 
 
“Tell me!” Twilight felt like screaming. She was tired of not knowing. She was tired of questions! “What are you doing?”
 
 
But Celestia didn’t answer.
 
 
“Luna,” she said instead. “Luna, will you not name me?”
 
 
“I knew you would ask,” Luna said, as if stricken. “But… is this not…. Is this not too far?”
 
 
“It is the closest I will ever get,” Celestia said.
 
 
Luna’s breathing was heavy, as if she were on the verge of turning and running. Twilight would have been livid but she was now afraid again.
 
 
“Mercy,” Luna choked out. “I name you Mercy in your hour of birth, for you would save the world from its own sickness.”
 

Celestia let out a long, soft sigh in Twilight’s ears. “Thank you. Twilight, do you know how your race was born?”
 
 
“Thaumus,” Twilight answered, confused. Why did this matter? It was all… well, not legend. Ancient history.
 
 
“How?” Luna pressed her.
 
 
Instead of the questioning one, now she was the one who answered. Twilight wasn’t sure she liked it any better. “Alicorns are like… they can be like seeds,” she said. “They give their lives and create a new species. If they want to. A lot of them did, or that’s the story.”
 
 
“It is a true one,” Celestia said.
 

“Aye. I told you of Aurora and Thaumus, did I not, Twilight?” Luna asked her.
 

“Yes, I think so.”
 

“When one of our brothers or sisters would undertake this beautiful task, we would gather around them,” Celestia said, sounding for all the world like Twilight was thirteen in her private study again, being lectured to on history, “They would name us, and we would name them. That is why you are a unicorn: that name was born when Thaumus left us. And then they would go out and there would be... a great conflagration. A great release of magic.”
 

Twilight slowly, very, very slowly, put the pieces together.
 
 
Sometimes, the truth is so obvious that it hides in broad daylight. It just sits there and looks at you and waits to be noticed. And you do notice it, but your eyes won’t look at it for more than a few minutes because it is just too awful to bear, or you think it is too awful to bear because you do not know anything about what is or is not too awful.
 
 
Twilight began to grasp where this was going.
 
 
“Oh, gods,” she breathed. She was beyond horror.
 
 
 
 
A bomb, Celestia said with a grin. Right in its throat.
 
 
 
 
It wants me. It has dueled here with me, both to keep me from interfering and stabilizing the world, and because it sees me as its prime opponent. If I let my guard down but a moment—
 
 
 
 
Cadance, Iridia, Kyrie…. Stricken. Kyrie, relieved. Luna, devastated.
 
 
 
She touched them. Time moves… weird, Twilight said or heard no counting how many times in a dozen variations across her journey. Time moves strangely when you start getting near the end of the world—
 
 
 
 
--all the time in the world, Celestia is saying. Hours here or days, even, and outside of here only—
 
 
 
 
A second. At most.
 
 
 
 
Enough time for long conversations.
 
 
 
 
 
And explaining necessity.
 
 
 
 
 
“No,” Twilight said. “No.”
 
 
 
 
“What do you do when the wolf is at thy door?” Luna asked, her voice breaking. Twilight was suddenly furious with her. How could she let this happen? Didn’t she know? She wanted to scream at Luna—didn’t Luna know what she had suffered to find Celestia?
 
 
“You send it away,” Celestia said, as if she had been the one to explain it this way. She probably had. “But what if you know that the wolf will come back? You know for absolute sure that it will? If it comes every night, and if you send it away…”
 
 
“It comes back again.” Luna was struggling. “And again. And again. And again.”
 
 
“Taking more and more each time,” Celestia supplied gently. “You will starve or it will finally break down your battered door—“
 
 
“And every… and every….” Luna was going to cry again. Could they cry without bodies? Where were they? Twilight wanted to scream but found that she couldn’t. Because screaming would have meant it was happening. It couldn’t happen. Not like this. Please, please, please not like this. Anything but this. She was already all the way at the end of where this path was leading.
 
 
“And every time, it gets a little easier for the wolf, and harder for you,” Celestia finished for her. “Every time, the door gets a bit weaker, and you have a few less chickens. Every time, your chances decrease, because this wolf learns. It waits. It… dreams. But mostly, it learns. It is pure unadulterated will to annihilation. You have felt it. No, I take it back. Not yet. You won’t, I think. But I have,” Celestia said.
 
 
“Will you not turn back?” Luna begged. “Please!”
 

“You know I can’t, Lulu.”
 
 
“Don’t call me that! Not here! Not right before… not… not again. Not another one. I won’t bear it. I’ll die. Not another!”
 
 
“You are right. Not another. It broke through at Jannah. It has been pulling the strings of slaughter since then. You remember Maldon.”
 

“Aye,” Luna said, more sob than word.
 
 
“I saw Manehattan in Twilight’s memories. Imagine Manehattan forever, sister. Or remember it when I showed you what that would be,” Celestia said.
 
 
Twilight wanted to see them. She had to… no! No seeing! If she saw them, if she saw Celestia’s lips moving, saying what she was saying, then it would be real.
 

“There must be some other way! Its army is through.”
 
 
“It has more.”
 
 
“By the gods, do you think of yourself ever?” Luna roared at her. “Think you of me! Of Twilight! Of… of anypony! Of yourself! Don’t do this. Please. You don’t even…” but Twilight realized she couldn’t make herself say that it wouldn’t work.
 
 
“Twilight, it is time for you to open your eyes,” Celestia said.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Twilight stood with them on a cliff overlooking a great coiling mass. It was the Shadow—but unlike before, the image did not vanish. It continued. A snake—lamprey, serpent, devil—continuing for miles. Forever, more like. Enough to wrap the world in itself and squeeze. Enough to devour whole cities with ease before it even noticed.
 
 
She began to shake.
 
 
“Where are we?” she asked. And then the wind began.
 
 
“Nowhere,” Celestia said with a tired smile. It was the most tired smile Twilight had ever seen. “Nowhere, in a way. Your mind can’t see what the heart of the beast is without trying to change it all so you don’t go mad at once. It’s trying very hard. You probably still feel much of the effect.”
 

“And… and you can?” Twilight asked.
 
 
“Oh yes,” Celestia answered grimly. “I see it just fine.”
 
 
“You’re the bomb,” Twilight said. “That’s why you wouldn’t tell me.”
 
 
Celestia nodded.
 
 
 
Twilight began to hyperventilate. Again. “And I dragged all of them here and they… they gave you power somehow.So you could…. So you could just dive right in and kill yourself Celestia please don’t!” She was on her stomach at Celestia’s hooves, shameless. Shameless as any sordid dream she had had. “Don’t leave me for Tartarus’ sake don’t leave me please please please please…” she continued on like this. A dozen “please”s at least. She couldn’t cry. She couldn’t be sad. She was too busy denying everything. It was all a dream. A nightmare. It had to be. She had to still be on the road. They had camped in the mountains! That was the last thing that felt real! She would wake up in the mountains. Hills. The ones before the bridge and the Garden! Tradewinds would wake her up and she would go and find Celestia. She would find a Celestia that wouldn’t…
 
 
“I could not afford to tell you until now, because I knew that if you could, you would persuade me. Because I love you too much. Because I am a very, very selfish pony,” Celestia said. And she knelt, and Twilight realized that her face was contorted in pain.
 
 
“Please,” Twilight said, but she knew she had lost. She was going to lose everything. It had all been for nothing. “Why did I even come?” she whispered. “I killed them. I almost got my friends killed. Pinkie got shot. We all killed. I suffered so much. Why did I do any of it if you’re just going to die? That’s not how it works.”
 
 
“Isn’t it?” Celestia whispered. “You know that when you set out, it was always possible I would already be dead. You never spoke it—“
 
 
“I warned it might be so,” Luna said, and she sounded miles away.
 
 
“But you can’t leave me,” Twilight said. “Not again.”
 
 
“I would that we lived in a world where…” Celestia winced. Twilight clung to her neck now. “I am not going to lie to you anymore. Even by omission. I am scared, Twilight. I am so, so scared.”
 
 
“You’re going to become a race of… of what?”
 

But Celestia shook her head. She was weeping too, now.
 
 
“I wanted to have foals,” she said, and her voice broke. “But I never found a pony that I could not think of as my sisters’ son. I adopted, but I never… I loved them so dearly, but Ionged for birth. I will not bear a new race, Twilight, but only old ones. When we… Oh, song, it burns. When we dissolve in the act, we are filled with all kinds of energy. It can be channeled. It was a way to cancel the transformation, but none ever… used it.” She was sobbing. “I have to be the only one who does. If I feign a desperate assault, and it wins, it will… I will be devoured, but as it does so I will destroy it. It will let me in to its utmost places, satisfied after I have riled it into a hot rage after it was held off so long—“
 

“And then it will be finished,” Luna said.
 
 
“I will be accomplished,” Celestia said.
 
 
“But you can seal it, right? Without dying? If you can kill it, surely you could just push it back out wherever it was before!” Twilight cried.
 
 
She would not win.
 
 
“Yes, I could. But it would be back, don’t you see?”
 
 
She did see.
 
 
“Why couldn’t it be me?” Twilight sobbed. “Why couldn’t you go back, and I be the one who jumps off the cliff with this stupid suicide plan?”
 
 
“Because I am a very selfish pony,” Celestia said. “I love you, Twilight. You have done enough. Almost, at least. There is one last thing.”
 
 
“I won’t. I won’t do it. Not if it helps you leave.”
 

Twilight wanted to hate Celestia for the only time in her life. She wanted to hate her forever until the sun went out—wouldn’t it?—and until the world died. She wanted to hate this perfect, beautiful, crying alicorn for leaving. For dying. For making Twilight survive when she no longer wanted to at all.
 
 
But she just couldn’t.
 
 
“Stay with me until I leap,” Celestia said.
 
 
“I don’t want you to leap,” Twilight moaned. She was damned. Everything was.
 
 
“I know. I do not want to. Your task was to buy me this chance. I am sorry you have been so ill-used. I could not let it see what I was doing. I could not gather them. But you could. But… this is your real task. Your final task. Please stay with me, Twilight, as you love me. I don’t want to…” She had to take a steadying breath. “Stay with me until the end.”
 
 
“I will,” Twilight said, and she hated herself, even if she couldn’t hate Celestia.
 
 
“Thank you,” Celestia said, wincing as if in pain. And then, at last, her control broke. She had held on for so long. She had kept a straight face, acted as if the world would go on and she would go on with it, for so long and every tear and wracking sob and hopeless wail she had saved up came rushing out of her. Twilight clung for dear life. She did not know what to do. She didn’t know if there was anything at all to do.
 
 
There are things, mark it well, that nothing can make right. That will never, ever be right.
 
 
“It’s so cruel,” Twilight said into Celestia’s ear. “Maybe it was right. Maybe the whole thing was a mistake. Some sort of sick joke. Like a long set up for a punchline that just never happens. No payoff,” she said, “no reward. Just ‘everyone dies, thanks for listening,’ and then the curtains go up. Or if they live, you don’t care anymore. That isn’t how stories go. I’d know. I’ve read a lot.”
 

“But this isn’t a story,” Celestia said, trembling.
 
 
“Yes it is,” Twilight said. They rocked back and forth. “Yes it is. This is a story. And you are a pony, just like me. I know that now. You’re Princess Celestia and you’re perfect and wise and everyone’s mother.” That last bit made both of them laugh strange, broken laughs. “And you’re a pony. Just a pony. You like...” She couldn’t finish. But she had to. It was important.
 

“You are just a pony,” Twilight began again. As she spoke, she found her voice grew calmer and stronger, and Celestia began to cling tighter to her. “Just like me or Applejack or Rarity, but definitely not that much like Pinkie—“ Another strangled laugh—“You like cake and tea and gardening, but you don’t get to do it much yourself anymore. You like reading and you like the biggest, thickest, most boring books in the world but every now and then you like something that’s light and silly because it makes you smile. You raise the sun every morning but still wish you could sleep in.
 
 
“I think… I think this is a story. Maybe everything is. I mean, if everything is a song, why couldn’t it be a story? Songs are stories sometimes, right?”
 
 
“They are,” Luna said quietly. She sat behind them like a shrouded mourner.
 
 
“And not every story ends like I want it to. I don’t want you to go. I love you. My mom used to say, when I asked her about writing her novels, that she didn’t make the story. It drug her along and she went where it went. I didn’t know what she meant. I thought she was trying to be poetic. This isn’t poetic at all.”
 
 
 
“Not even worth a proper…” Celestia coughed. She had worked herself into it with her wailing. Her throat was no doubt dry and mangled—Twilight had felt her cries like they too bore the combined power of the still-living alicorns. “Not even worth a proper tragedy?”
 

But Twilight shook her head. And somehow, she knew what she wanted to say. She wasn’t sure she could say it. Right now, it didn’t seem right. It seemed so out of place. Her heart wasn’t in it.
 
 
Was it?

 
Maybe.
 
 
“I don’t believe in tragedies. I always thought that they missed the point,” Twilight said. 
 
 
Celestia looked up and then turned to cough again before she stroked Twilight’s cheek. “What was the point? Remind me, as you love me. The Glory is beginning to weigh down on me. It’s heavy, Twilight.”

 
“It’s still good,” Twilight said, even as it tasted so bitter. Because it was her heart that said it, she still ate what was before her. It was bitter, but it was her heart. She could not turn away. “It’s still so good, all of it. All of those shining things. Aren’t they? You’ll save them all. Even me. Even though I don’t deserve it.”
 
 
“Don’t you?” Celestia said. “You came all this way. "
 
“To sit at your deathbed.”
 
 
“I think you knew all along that was where you were going. You’re so wonderfully perceptive sometimes,” Celestia said. “Maybe you knew before I did, even. But you wouldn’t say. Because you were going to try your best, weren’t you? I stole it from you. I didn’t let you try. I’m sorry. Do you hate me for it?”
 
 
“I can’t. I know you won’t listen now. Not here.”
 
 
“It wouldn’t let me go back without a fight regardless, now,” Celestia said.
 
 
“Time grows short,” Luna reminded them, her voice low.
 
 
“Time is always short,” Celestia agreed. She kept stroking Twilight’s cheek. Twilight placed a hoof over hers. “Always. Even for us. You called yourself a worm in my presence. Do you still feel that way?”
 
 
 
 
Twilight thought. “No,” she said. And there were more tears trying to come, but she brushed them aside. Crying kept her from talking. She had to keep talking. “Because you’re a pony, just like me. I was wrong to ever forget that even for a moment. I love you, Celestia.”
 
 
“And I love you, Twilight. I… You were like my own daughter, Twilight,” she choked out. “You were. You are. You shall be. Carry me in your heart. Take what is left and go as far away as you can, until you are back at home, and plant me in some quiet place with shade and flowers. Remember me to your children and to their children, and to all my little ponies. Talk of me to Luna, and to my sisters. But do not cling to me like you are going to drown. You must keep going, do you understand? I go to do a g-greater thing than that which I have done before, and so must you. There’ll be… the sun will continue. The moon too, when we are gone. And you must see them. Do you understand? They need you. All of them. When I am gone, you are all I can leave them. The last piece of me I leave with you, and it will restore your body as the song sings it back into the world. Please don’t leave my world alone. Please don’t be alone.”
 
 
Twilight wanted to jump with her into the pit. “I won’t,” she promised. “Either of those things. I’ll go back. I will remember you to everyone. I’ll… I’ll keep you with me. You’ll have never left,” she said and it was a lie but also not a lie. “You’ll have never left. You’ll have never died.”
 
  
“The last enemy,” Celestia said, and her voice became harder and more determined. “The very last enemy that shall be defeated. I will see her today, and you will follow me much, much later. And we shall both pass through her. I know it.”
 
 
Celestia bore Twilight up, and she did not resist. She found that she had no will to do so even as her heart screamed at her to resist. Celestia stood regal and tall once more upon the precipice, and below her…
 

“Luna, be with Twilight. Twilight, be with Luna. Be enough for each other, as much as ponies can. Never be alone again. I bless you: that you see the truly brighter days. That you march onwards, side by side and in love, towards some greater dawn. Do you hear me? Will you do this?”
 
 
“Yes,” they said.
 
 
“Then you have my blessing. Luna is right. I can sense it growing impatient. I must put on a good show before I let it take me.” She paused, as if suddenly shy. Or stalling. Twilight would never know. “Luna, I love thee,” she said, and for a moment, Twilight thought she saw Celestia as she had been ages before, on Jannah’s heights. “Twilight, I love thee.”
 
 
“I love you, too. I always have,” said Twilight, and her voice sounded like she had died already. “Celestia, give me something to take with me, if you must send me away or leave. Please. Something. Anything.”
 
 
 "As you wish.”
 
 
And Celestia kissed her. It tasted even still of paradise, with no ash and no drop of bitterness. Only pure sweetness. Only love, and no shadow of turning.
 
 Goodbyes are never happy. Goodbyes are the worst possible things in this world. Short or long, nothing is good about parting. Only what might be pieced together in the absence of the light of another do the little lives find solace.
 
 
Celestia took a step towards the edge. She turned back. In Twilight’s mind, a tiny voice said that she would not do it. She would come back with them. She would rise into the air and defeat the monster and cast it down. She could do it. Celestia could do anything.
 
 
Nopony could do what could not be done. Push, yes, but not defeat. Not destroy.
 
 
“Hail, Mercy,” Luna said, her voice tight and pained. “Well met. Go with all of my love.”
 
 
“I don’t want to say goodbye,” Twilight said, trying not to cry in front of her again. Not again. Every time she started it started again. Trying not to beg.
 
 
“Then don’t.” Celestia smiled at them. She shuddered. “Never say those words, then. Ever. May you find home again, Twilight Sparkle, of the True West. May you find home again and may you live in happiness forever. I am going,” she said, almost as an afterthought. “I am going now.”
 




 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
She did not turn and leap daringly into the air.
 
 
 
 
 
She took a step backwards and, Twilight could not believe it, fell backwards into the Heart of the Shadow.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Twilight stood as a statue does, without thoughts at all. She was a husk.
 
 
 
 
 
Celestia rose back into the air, and now Twilight saw that only with the greatest effort had she kept herself from releasing all of the energy she had gathered. All of that time, she must have been in agony. For now she shone like the sun.
 
 
 
 
Twilight’s mind interpreted what her eyes could not comprehend with images crafted to do the work. She saw the great beast’s head rise into the air far away, and the sun battled with it. For a moment, her heart beat wildly in her chest—Twilight knew she would not, but it felt like Celestia would strike Despair down. But she did not. Of course she didn’t.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In Canterlot, the Shadow let loose its armies. It hardly remembered the battle now. Celestia had resisted it face to face for almost two years now, and finally it had won. It crowed with delight, and out of the sky came a sound that no pony understood, but all feared. The abandoned rebels cast down their arms, weeping, surrendering, hiding in every hole they could find.
 
 
 
 
 
 
The sun burned hot over Canterlot, but it was not the true sun.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
And then it took her. Celestia faltered. The light dimmed, as if she had burned out. It took her. The thing lashed out, and suddenly, it was if the whole body had become pure shadow, and the sun was eclipsed in the valley of death.
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
Luna grabbed her.
 
 
 
 


 
 
Twilight was hardly aware of it. She just kept screaming. She could scream now, finally. “CELESTIA! CELESTIA! NO!”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
She knew only pieces.
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
Luna bursting from the shadows, but too weak—too weak by far. She had given far more than Twilight knew. Or would guess at.
 
 
For Twilight was pulled by Celestia’s reflection, the little candle of her soul which was now Twilight’s as well, and the song burst forth over Canterlot and the ponies within that city all heard it and they wept. It was but a moment, and none could explain it.
 
 
And Twilight was whole again. Mortal and physical. She stared out at the sky. The shadow around her and above her thundered and thundered and then…
 
 
And then the sky broke.
 
 
 




There was a light so blinding that all the world saw it. In Canterlot, they scrambled away. In Manehattan, they trembled in burned out burroughs. In the Zebrahara, the villages plagued by monsters woke and stared up in awe. In the West, they prostrated themselves and thought surely this was the end, the Very Last Day.
 
 
 
 
The light was both in the world and below it and above it. Everywhere that the Hideous Strength was, Celestia’s final generative fire burned it. To the four corners of the earth, she chased her final enemy, and when the earth was purged her fires followed it, unquenchable, into the space beyond the world and the space between the universes, which she called Eternity, and she smote it down and burned it from existence.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In every corner, the world felt the sudden weight disappear, and they were amazed. In Manehattan, they shouted. In Canterlot, the survivors weeped with joy and embraced. In the Zebrahara, they danced.
 
 
 
 
Because the sun came up, and nothing held it back any longer. The true sun, and not its mistress.
 
 
 
 
 




 
 
 
 
But Twilight did not see or notice any of this. She fell back towards the earth, barely able to move. Her magic completely failed her. She was burnt out. Her whole body felt strange and new. She was only a unicorn. There was a price for cavorting in the realm of the gods.
 
 
But she could think.
 
 
What she thought was: I am going to die. And she thought it very calmly, she did. It was simple physics, and Twilight had loved that class, and not only because Celestia had taught her. Because physics made sense. Nothing else was making sense anymore. Or ever would. But that was okay, because in a moment she wasn’t going to care.
 
 
Where’s Luna?


Twilight didn’t blame her. She wasn’t really aware enough to do so, and even had she been, she would never have laid the blame there. Luna was probably in bad shape from giving power to Celestia… and she supposed, with a rather detached air, that having a unicorn materialized right out of your soul probably took a lot out of a pony.
 
 
She was going to see Celestia again.
 
  
She smiled.
 
 
 The ground rushed up as if to embrace her. Twilight stretched out her forelegs and rolled over to face it. She would die this way and be happy. This was how stories ended. One last death and the stage is empty, the lights go up, the people file out. The final act ends with the tragic death at the end of the arduous trek and quest. Maybe she did believe in tragedy. Wasn’t this how tragedies played out? Who could save her now?
 
 
 
She could see individual ponies, or could convince herself that she did. So many. She hardly saw the death and the destruction. Canterlot. She had come back at last. It had been so long—was her mother up for writing anymore? Was Spike… was Spike…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Luna grabbed her then, wrapped both of her forelegs around Twilight. She put her whole body around her, all but smothering the living missile.
 
 
Twilight was too shocked to ask how. “Luna!”
 
 
Luna couldn’t speak. She was straining. Her wings pushed at the air furiously and her horn lit up like a fire and Twilight could see veins in her neck bulging and then glowing. Below, she did not see how Luna pushed so hard against the cobblestone that she broke it, made it concave fifteen meters down, into the catacombs until she crushed those as well and would have gone beyond.
 
 
But they slowed. They slowed, by all the Gods that ever were. Twilight tried to speak, but her mouth was too dry and her vision was going.
 
 
And Luna hit the earth with Twilight safe in a magic barrier. Slower, but still she hit the stones with the force of a cannonball. 
 
 
The dust rose and rose, and then as it cleared, it found Twilight atop a trembling, pale Luna. She crawled off, dazed but mostly unharmed. She tried to stand, but could not. Luna did not say anything. She grew still.
 
 
Twilight crawled back to her, feeling her strength going. She wouldn’t stay conscious much longer. “L-luna? Luna, are you alright?”
 

Luna’s breathing sounded labored.
 
 
And then panic returned. Twilight pushed her softly. “Luna? Lu…. Luna? Luna! Oh, no. Oh no oh no Luna don’t,” she groaned. “Not now. Not you, too. Don’t leave me. Don’t do this, please, oh gods.”
 
 
Luna wheezed. “Twilight…”
 
 
Twilight was at her side still, kissing her face, her lips, her chest. “Luna, oh thank the stars, you can speak. You’re alright.”
 
 
“I am… I am not.”
 
 
Twilight went slackjawed. “But…”
  
 
“Twilight, may I see you? Love, come closer and let me touch you.” And she raised a hoof to touch Twilight’s face and Twilight with shock found it bloody. Her armor was more than dented—it was destroyed. Her hoofblades had snapped up and eviscerated the other foreleg. Luna’s blood stained her cheek, but Twilight was too horrified to care.
 
 
 
“You gave her your immortality. Your endurance. Long life,” Twilight said numbly.
 

“Aye. I would not bear to outsurvive her. Or you. I am sorry,” she said. “I could not do it again.”
 
 
“Oh, Luna…”
 
 
 “I kept…. I kept just enough.” Luna said, and Twilight’s eyes widened. “Celestia told me all, when she touched me, and we went deep in my mind. She said… She said…” Luna coughed. Blood. “Come closer and kiss me. If this does not work, I would like that at least. If you are not repul—“
 
 
Twilight kissed her. “No,” she said. “No, you can’t. I refuse. I won’t let you. You aren’t allowed.”
 

“Allowed? You… you would order a princess? Wonderful.” Luna clung to her as best she could with her shattered limbs. “Twilight, I am going,” she said, and the similarity was too much. Twilight began to sway, weak to the point of collapsing.
 
 
“No.” 
 
 
“Tell the soul which rides withi…” She struggled to explain.
 
 
But Twilight was a smart pony, after all. And Twilight took as deep a breath as her bruised chest allowed. Please, Celestia. Even if you’re only a reflection. This is why I have you. This is why she left you behind, even if she didn’t know. Please. I know you can do something. So do it, damn you.


Twilight kissed Luna again and willed the reflection of her teacher to jump into the soul of her lover.
 
 
And Luna took a rattling breath and then turned hot to the touch.
 
 
 Twilight felt a magic so great that it cut through the haze of her burnout. And she knew it, because she had always loved magic.
 
 
“It’s…” 
 
 
And Luna vanished like steam, and Twilight fell against the earth and knew nothing further.