//------------------------------//
// XXVI - Nightmares 
// Story: Where Loyalties Lie: Ghosts of the Past 
// by LoyalLiar 
//------------------------------//


XXVI


Nightmares






Celestia watched the shadows overwhelm the courageous unicorn.  Sombra’s magic took hold, and the pony simply toppled—whether dead or merely down, she could not tell from across the room.  With another foe defeated, Sombra’s eyes turned toward her.

Her horn flared with the speed she needed, pouring a surge of magic into Aestas Melos, and in response a shimmering shield of her own magic filled the crystal throne room.  It stretched from wall to wall and separated the open door and looming balcony from the mass of void crystals that Sombra had molded into a throne.   

Though she fought not to show it, holding the diamond-cored rapier was beginning to strain even her considerable magic. The cost of greater power came in efficiency, though neither the shield nor her attempts to heal her younger sister were trivial spells to begin with.

Time was scarce, and her options even more so. Celestia allowed herself just a moment to flick her eyes in the direction of the thestral shuddering on the crystalline floor.  Then her focus was back to Sombra, watching as shadows and green flames leaked from his eyes.  “Thestral, can you hear me?”  If the unfortunate soul heard the words, it offered no reply.  “I don’t know what charm Sombra has placed you under, but focus on my words.  Fight it.  I need you.  Luna needs you.”  Seeing no response on another brief glance, the Princess resorted to shouting.  “Thestral!  Luna needs you!”  She drew in a breath, and her eyes fell on the tan unicorn lying at the base of Sombra’s throne.  What had his name been?   “…Mirror Image needs you!”

Emerald eyes fought to look up from a nest she’d made from leather wings.  For just a moment, Celestia dared to hope; Sombra saw fit to punish her.  A massive force smashed against her shield, cracking its surface and recoiling back through Aestas and into her own horn.  It felt as if she’d been struck in the face, though her loss of focus came more from surprise than injury.

Sombra still quietly watched her from the other side of the shield.  And to Celestia’s confusion, nothing had changed.  He hadn’t cast some spell, nor even prodded at the shield.  Though his eyes leaked with magical flame, his curved, vicious horn was devoid of magic.  

“Confused, Celestia?  Can’t keep up?”  Sombra glared her way.  “For a moment, I allowed myself to fear your acumen in battle would match the deception of your tongue.”  His horn flared to life.  “I am disappointed.”

Celestia watched the shadowy thestral closely as he began to pace, not more than a leg’s length from the surface of her shield.  “I don’t know what lie you are referring to, Sombra.”

“You drove her from me.”  His horn still glowing, Sombra inclined his head toward Luna’s unconscious form.  “Were you jealous?”

Celestia shook her head.  “I never set out to ruin her love.  I—”

The piercing pain of cold bone sinking into warm flesh stole her breath.  She only barely heard the echoes of Sombra’s shout after his horn settled firmly in her side, draining blood over his muzzle.  “Liar!”  She couldn’t breathe; the pain was unbearable.  He’d hit a lung, or her diaphragm.  Agony made it impossible to tell.  All her conscious mind could feel was the tingle of arcana, unmistakable even when it gathered against the flesh of her side instead of the surface of her horn.  She had only a moment at best.  But the magic wouldn’t come.  She didn’t have the focus.

And then, as if by the magic of another, Sombra’s horn was torn from her side.  She felt cold flesh run against her, hurled by a violent and sudden strength.  The clatter of heavy bodies on crystal, the crashing of hooves and fangs, only barely preceded the wet thud of her own heavy side hitting the floor, and the crunch when its surface cracked under her weight.

Eldest tore a gash from Sombra’s throat, leaving behind a space filled with smoke and purple flame where blood and sinew ought to have been seen.  Her wings battered his eyes to keep his attention unprepared, and her teeth moved down to his shoulders and his forelegs, tearing and biting even as her hooves lashed out at the ribs of the larger pony.  Though neither thestral spoke or roared or even voiced the tones of pain, their duel was far from quiet.  Hooves and wings and Sombra’s horn scraped across the polished gemstone floor.  Brilliant orange flame crackled on Eldest’s hooves, the product of a focused and hardened empatha backed by genuine emotion.  Sombra’s horn sparked and crackled, discharging lightning wildly into the floor, but failed to strike the smaller and far faster thestral.

All at once, he swept out from beneath her.  It wasn’t a natural motion; he didn’t walk or roll or jump or even teleport.  It was as if his body had forsaken its form and become fluid, sweeping out beneath her like a fog, or a shadow.  Only a second passed and he was solid again—and not just that but whole, unharmed, looming over her with eyes flaming and horn ready for the kill.

A beam of darkness clashed with a golden shield.  Celestia’s eyes grew blurry with the pain in her side, but Aestas would not betray her.  Slowly, relentlessly, the shield grew.  Again it divided the room, separating Sombra from both Eldest and the fallen alicorns.

“Your shield only guarantees you a slower death.  Bypassing it was child’s play before, and you grow only weaker now.”  Sombra let his tongue flick briefly onto his cheek, lapping at Celestia’s blood as it ran in tiny drops down from the point of his horn.  “I know that blow won’t kill you, but you don’t have the strength to stand up to me any more.”

Celestia grimaced, slowly forcing herself to her hooves.  Her legs were shaky, her vision racked with blurs that turned the room into a mass of black and blue and white with every unwelcome draw of breath.  “I…won’t let you…enslave…”

“Enslave?”  Sombra shook his head mockingly.  “Still adhering to your lies?  What I’ve done is hardly different than you and Luna—save perhaps in subtlety.  Descending on an infant Equestria as goddesses.  Breeding yourself into the royal family.”

“We… never took their… will.  Never forced them…”

Sombra shook his head.  “Perhaps you don’t remember being a foal, Celestia, but I do.  And of all the dungeons in the world, the ideology of one’s birth has the thickest walls and strongest doors.  You let them see you as goddesses—you pay lip service otherwise, but it takes little more than a foal to see the truth.  You preach harmony to make them docile.  You reward meek submission and call it loyalty.  And every few decades, you fly down from your lofty ivory towers to deliver divine justice on the next new threat to your rule—a perfect lesson in fear.  You raise the sun and the moon with no more effort than it takes to lift a glass of wine, and let them think that they owe you something for your great sacrifice. The only difference between your slavery and mine, Celestia, is that you have had the luxury of generations to instill—”

Eldest Sister’s hoof punctured Sombra’s throat from behind, cutting off his political discourse rather abruptly.  “Sombra, you’re an asshole and everypony knows it.  If you want to fight, cut the sob story and fight.”

From what Celestia could read of the king’s expression, Sombra turning around to look her in the eyes while her forehoof was still buried in his neck did not feel terribly comfortable.

As the two dead ponies once more tore into one another with animalistic abandon, the ancient princess turned her focus back to her sister.  Luna’s nostrils flared with gentle breathing, and behind her eyelids, her eyes danced back and forth in some horror or fantasy known only to her mind.     

“Luna, please.  Whatever it is he’s done, fight it off.  If you can hear me, come back to—”

A blast of pure alicorn magic flew past her face, stealing any notion of the sentence she had been uttering.  When she looked up, Sombra had his back to her, his shoulder wreathed in shadows as if the blast of magic had torn through it.  Past him, near the fallen form of Mirror Image on the steps leading to the crystalline throne, Eldest Sister stared across the room at her foe, purple flames leaking from her eyes.

Aestas Melos aligned itself perfectly with Sombra’s back, and the diamond-cored rapier ignited in a radiant, golden glow.  Though it wasn’t truly the power of the sun, no eye looking at the blade was likely to have recognized the distinction; when the beam of brutal piercing light struck out at Sombra, it left behind no smoke, no shadowy essence in signal that the undead monarch might have avoided the blast.  

The thestral collapsed, twitching.  At first, that was all the motion he displayed.  When a wave of magic surged over his coat, Celestia tensed and raised Aestas higher.  Yet it passed to reveal no threat—only a horror that left the alicorn’s heart sinking in her chest.  Where Sombra’s rich coat had been, loose wings appeared.  When the illusion passed over his head, it revealed Eldest Sister looking back, eyes wide, with a hole through the better part of her shoulder and her neck.  

The still-standing Eldest Sister quickly shed his illusion, and Sombra grinned in Celestia’s direction as he paced forward.  “And then there was one.  Bested by a simple illusion, Celestia?  I know we had been discussing something before this irreverent corpse elected to interrupt us—” he gestured with his neck toward Eldest, and in the action, fired a bolt of alicorn magic into her side, stunning her and searing another sizeable hole in her flesh.  “—but at this point, I find my patience wearing thin.  Tell me where the Elements of Harmony are hidden, and I will ensure you and Luna both enjoy quick, peaceful deaths.  I’ll even grant you the Summer Lands you’ve worked so hard to create.”

“I won’t give you—agh!”  Sombra’s hoof drove into Celestia’s chin with a force the alicorn hadn’t experienced in millennia.  Even strengthened by endura, she felt her jaw break and blood spurt from her muzzle.  The savage uppercut hurled her off her hooves, and her wings flailed uselessly by her sides.  Before she could hit the ground, Sombra’s magic wrapped around her hind right hoof, spinning her like a ragdoll before smashing her into the already cracked crystal floor.

Priceless sheets of gemstone shattered under the blow.  The glistening of the hall’s lights in the shards that flew into the air distracted Celestia’s reeling mind from the pain.  She hardly noticed the broken crystal digging into her coat.  She just felt tired.  Worn out.  It was the strange feeling she got on lonely nights, as if the thousands of years she had lived had caught up to her, but magnified a million times over.

Sombra said nothing, but she heard him laugh.  Not a chuckle or a snide, mocking guffaw, but a real, deep, hearty laugh.  Joy, she heard from the cold depths of his belly.  True happiness.

When the shards fell from the air, she looked over the room.  Her vision blurred when Sombra’s hooves pounded into her side, but she hardly felt them.  

Was that what dying felt like?  Like nothing at all?

Mirror Image stirred in whatever vicious nightmare Sombra had wrapped around his mind, but he did not rise.

Another blow.  She tried to breathe in and no air came.  Like the way she felt as a filly, after galloping for miles in pursuit of Luna and the younger filly’s wings.

No, focus.  The thestral, Eldest, shuddered in pain as her body tried, failed, and tried again to heal the damage Celestia’s magic had caused.

When the room moved, Celestia knew she had been picked up, though her body deigned not to tell her if Sombra was merely lifting her, squeezing her, or tearing her apart.  The crystal chamber blurred, and then abruptly stopped.  Behind her, crystal rained like glass.  A pillar then, supporting the arched roof.  The sparkles were beautiful again.  Like the rain in Canterlot, when just a few beams of light bounced off the domes.

Gale loved those days.

Was it finally time to see her again?  Or Alacrity?  So many names.

...Hurricane?

Another blow shook her, and she saw Sombra’s hoof flash across her muzzle.  No feeling.  No pain.  Just the sight, as another blow fell.  And another.

And then he stopped, at the heeding of a commanding voice.

“Let her go.”

That voice… Celestia’s eyes could hardly focus as her head turned toward it.  The blurriness that filled her vision peeled away in waves, and when she focused, she saw Luna standing at the far side of the hall.

“Impossible…” Sombra growled.

And she was holding something; a brilliant diamond glistening the palest of blues.  The Crystal Heart orbited in Luna’s inky midnight magic.

“The power is fragile, isn’t it, Sombra?”  Luna spoke with utter spite, offering a thousand times the emotion she most often displayed in times of conflict.  “It seems so infinite, so unimaginable when you don’t have it.  But when you hold it, you see it’s a tiny thing.  Like a foal.  So easily smothered.”

“How?  How did recover from the spell?”

Luna shook her head, wearing a scowl.  As she spoke, her magic wrapped around Mirror Image, and the unicorn opened his eyes.  “You forget who mentored you in the art of deception, Sombra.  You may well be the second-best illusionist in the world, but you lack the eons it would take to call yourself my better.”

Sombra winced; even looking at his back, Celestia saw the pull of his expression.  “Very well, Luna.  Listen to me.  It’s over.  I forgive you.  I understand.”

Luna’s face took on a look of surprise.  “Do you still—  After all this, you would still claim to love me?”

Sombra nodded slowly.  “What else could I ever say, Luna?”

The thestral gasped, muzzle hanging open, when Luna’s magic tore through his throat.  “That you are the damnedest of liars and the foulest of monsters.  To betray me, I understand, but to think that you could use me?”  Her next blast of magic tore away his right foreleg completely, and the severed limb dissipated into smoke and shadows as it hit the ground.  “That I would lie with you again and rule by your side after what you have done?  Do you know nothing of me, Sombra?”  His horn met the same fate as his leg.  “Do you know nothing of loyalty?”

Sombra stumbled on three hooves, and fell to the floor even as his throat returned.  “Loyalty would lie to you.  The same way you might have spared me.  Not abandoning what we were.  What we were always going to be!”

Luna grabbed Sombra by his neck and pulled him close by.  “Loyalty doesn’t lie; it shares the truth, and when it hurts, loyalty stands by to ease the pain.  A lie is cowardice, Sombra.  And as I look into your eyes, that is all I see.  A colt who only played a stallion for fear of his own mortality.  Now the power is gone, and we both know it would take you years to get it back.  Let me make the same hollow promise you offered my sister.  It will all be over soon.”

Sombra’s eyes widened, and then he lunged forward at Luna’s neck.

The alicorn jumped back, and her arcana held the rogue thestral at bay.  Had his goal truly been her throat, she would have succeeded.  But when Sombra’s teeth gripped the Crystal Heart, magic surged from his eyes and a brilliant glow surrounded his horn.

“I’ll be waiting for you in the coming years, Lu—”  The thestral vanished before the spell could be finished.

The Crystal Heart had vanished with him.  The ensuing silence lasted only a moment, before the room shuddered.

“Princess,” Mirror Image noted in a surprisingly matter-of-fact voice, “Do I need to say I have a bad feeling about—”

In a flash of pure white from the center of Sombra’s palace, the world ended.





The return of the starry emptiness of Luna’s mindscape came abruptly, but it was a welcome alternative to eternal oblivion.  Mirror idly watched the stars in the unreachable distance, rubbing his slightly scuffed hoof against the central plate of his gilded armor.  Nearby, Eldest Sister slowly brought her own forehoof to her muzzle.  The realization that she was still alive… or at least still in one piece, appeared to have come as something of a shock.

“Guess you were right that we couldn’t die in the memories.  That’s good to know.”  He smiled at his undead companion, and for just a moment, he saw the athletic pegasus he’d loved half a decade ago—her smoky mane, curled forward over a smile so ambitious it was almost hungry.  “You alright, Cannon?”

In a startling non-answer, Eldest pounced the way only a thestral could, latching her wings and her hooves down into the non-ground of the misty void in Luna’s mind and hurling herself on the strength of six limbs into the side of her living companion.  Overtaken by the grayish purple blur, Image was toppled with the sudden force and the unnatural strength, and the world spun as he rolled.  The feeling of cold lips against his own stole away awareness of even the void, and sharp fangs drew slight lines of blood in his mouth, drawn against his tongue by the cold, slithery thing that forced its way into his mouth.

He gagged.  He struggled.  And when Eldest pressed harder in the unwelcome kiss, he bucked her in the gut with both his hind legs.  Unprepared, the blow tossed the thestral away, taking a gouge out of Image’s lip with her.

“No!”

Eldest rolled twice from the unexpected buck to the chest before she managed to catch herself with a wing.  She looked to him in shock, carrying no small amount of hurt. “Image?”

Image took a few moments to catch his breath and struggle to his hooves before he cast Eldest an icy look.  His nostrils flared and his hoof dug at the ground that wasn’t there.  “How many times do I have to tell you? Did I not make it clear that we were over?”  

“But…”  

A shout wiped out the quieter, hesitant speech.  “No!  No ‘buts’.  There’s no us anymore.  It’s been over for five years.” Image threw his weight into the sentence, and Eldest recoiled from the roaring stallion.  “Do you think I rent an apartment outside of the castle because I like the feel of a rusty spring mattress?”  Mirror moved forward, glaring down at the mare shrinking under his gaze.  “Was ignoring you in the castle halls too subtle?  Or focusing on the mission instead of putting up with your constant flirting?  How many times have I had to push you away?”

A vein throbbed visibly through the close-cut fur on Image’s temple.  Eldest needed no supernatural sight to see his teeth clench, or to count his heartbeat in the pulses of the arteries in his neck, though her mind was more focused on the tears that her dead eyes couldn’t manage to draw.   

“I know!” Eldest shouted back, eyes wide but unable to match Mirror’s gaze.  “But I hoped it was just because you didn’t understand.  Image, when you dove in front of me, to save me, I thought maybe…”  She hesitated, her fangs nipping at her lips lightly as her tail flicked back and forth.  “I thought maybe there was still something there.  I… I thought you might have gotten past what the Commander said about us… about me.  After coming out here with Luna, seeing what she’s really like… I just hoped you would understand.”

“Understand what?” Image snapped.  “What am I supposed to have seen that would change anything?  You’re still dead, Cannon.”

Eldest pulled back a hoof and stomped it into a floor that wasn’t there.  “And that’s all that matters to you?  I’m not her puppet!  She doesn’t force me to do any of this.  I chose to stay.  I…  I…”  The thestral squeezed her eyes closed, and when she lowered her head, her mane fell in front of her eyes.  “I came back for you, Image.”

Behind the mane all she could see of the stallion she loved was the way his legs shuddered.

“And when the Commander told you she made me do it… That I was some tool for Nightmare Moon to come back…”

“Cannon—”

“No, Image.”  Not needing to breathe, the feeling of choking on air was alien, a forgotten reminder of the pain of living.  “I can’t take it anymore.  I wanted to show you it wasn’t true.  I wanted to prove that I really wanted to be with you, but…  You threw it all back in my face, Image.  Every time.  I’ve waited five years for you to give me a chance.”   

Silence filled open void of Luna’s mind.  Image watched Eldest.  Eldest waited for Image.  Neither moved from where they stood, though Eldest’s wings pinched together on her back and Image’s nostrils flared in an obvious show that he was controlling his breath.

Finally, Eldest could wait no longer.  “What is it?  What do I have to do to prove the Commander was wrong?  I’m not some spy.  I’m not trying to trick anypony, or kill you all off so Mistress can take over Equestria!”  The words were desperate, her voice cracking as the words fell out.  “I just wanted to stay with you.”

Image winced.  It was a small thing, a tiny crack in his forced, even expression, but Eldest saw.

“Can’t you believe me, Image?”

“I…”  When the words didn’t come, he drew in a slow breath.  Silence reigned for six long seconds before he found the strength to continue.  “I wish I didn’t.”

It was Eldest’s turn to recoil.  She pulled her hooves in, curling herself up to nearly a ball as her expression contorted in pain.  

But Image continued.  “It was so much easier listening to the Commander,” he told her.  “Because then the answer was easy.  But you’re right.  I… I know you’re not trying to trick me.  Maybe I always knew.  You and Luna have showed me that more than enough.”

“Then why?”  Eldest let herself open, just a bit.  Her wings loosened, and she paced forward a few slow steps.  “We can be together again.  Like we were before.  Don’t you want that?”

Image’s eyes fell from matching her gaze.  “Eldest—”

“Cannon,” she interrupted.  “I don’t give a damn about whatever Mistress says to all the others, you call me by my name!”  Her ferocity died in the silence that swept in yet again.  “Like you used to, Image.  When you took me to Bitaly and we danced in the Court of Rains.  Do you remember lying under the bridge, whispering in each other’s ears?”  She paced forward again, and to her muted horror, Image recoiled.  “Do you remember how you held me?”

“Cannon, please… you don’t want—”

She launched forward, hurling herself with her wings to glare into his eyes, almost muzzle to muzzle.  Though he stumbled back, she never touched him.  “I came back from the dead to be with you, Image.  Don’t you get that?  I don’t care about being a guard or fighting spirits or any of that stuff.  I only wanted the chance to be with you again.”

Image’s head dropped again.  “That’s it, Cannon.  That’s the problem.”

“What?”

“You’re dead.”

Eldest flinched, and then her eyes wandered away.  Subtle, avoiding his gaze.  On another pony, it might have meant the words had been taken well.  But Loose Cannon was never another pony.  Image knew her fiery spirit, her inability to hold her thoughts, and the heart she wore on her foreleg for all of Equestria to see.  To her, the quiet resignation was something else.

Something worse.

The quiet hurt him: a stabbing pain in his chest that would not go away, and would not be ignored, no matter how hard he focused on his breathing.  One breath, two, five, nine, on and on until his shoulders began to shudder.  Only then did some small semblance of speech finally come.  “I know the Commander was wrong.  You’ve shown me that more than enough.  I think I still love you, Cannon.  At least, I love who you were.  But when I’m with you like this…  When you hold me, I don’t feel Loose Cannon.  I wish I could.  I don’t know if I even have the strength to try.  This body…” he gestured to the leathery wings, the pearly fangs her frowning mouth revealed on the edge of her lips.  “When you try to kiss me, all I can think of is the ponies you eat.  When you touch me, and I feel the cold, I…” He settled on the truth, despite the weight he knew it carried.  “I feel disgusted.”

“Disgusted?”  Eldest whispered the word.

“I’m sorry, Cannon.  But I can’t do it.  We can’t be together.  Not like this.”

The thestral stepped away slowly, turning to stare off into the void.  Her words were flat, her eyes glossy.  In a moment of weakness, he dared to hope for tears.  But none came.  “I’m disgusting.”

“I still like you for who you are, Cannon.  None of that has changed, I swear.  It’s just… physically…”

“Do you still love me?”

Image hesitated.  “You’re still my friend, Cannon.  I—” 

“No.”  Eldest Sister looked back over her shoulder for only a glimmer of a second.  “If that’s all we ever were to you, it was my fault for not seeing it.  I…”  And then she turned to look away, leaving him with only a view of her ears as they settled resolutely upright atop her head.  “Goodbye.”

He knew he couldn’t catch her when she turned and flew.  She was an ex-Wonderbolt and a thestral.  He was just a unicorn on hoof.  He wasn’t sure he wanted to catch her.  

Lowering his head, Mirror Image turned his back on his old friend and wandered off into the depths of Luna’s mind.





Had it been hours, or just minutes?  Years or seconds?  He hadn’t been counting.  He barely noticed the countless spread of Luna’s memories around him.  His mind was just as lost as his body was in Luna’s.

However long it had been, one memory managed to snap Mirror Image out of the haze of emotions drowning his mind.

Heavy iron chains wrapped around the moving painting that hung in the air, latched together with a single titanic padlock.  The rattling of the metal was unmistakeable once he found his way close enough; something behind the chains was moving.  Between the harsh, jagged metal, some part of Luna remembered a fortress of almost spiky natural stone.  Ponies flew around the structure that reminded Image of a changeling’s horn—pegasi in brilliant golden armor, and more thestrals than the stallion had ever dared to imagine.

The reasonable part of his mind pushed him away, rumbling with a fear that shoved aside thoughts of Eldest.  He felt his legs tense; he would have run, were it not for an impossible glimpse of a familiar figure in the memory.
   
“Commander?”

The black-clad stallion in the memory didn’t hear the half-whispered gasp, but the chains did.  Groaning and creaking, rattling as if they were massive arms shaking, they shifted in place.  Readying themselves.  Loosening.

Image was a good enough soldier to see the danger coming.  His legs waited no longer.  He turned his back and ran.

The chains were faster.

Cold, harsh metal wrapped around his forelegs, his barrel, his throat, and with a violent lurch, the the world of Luna’s mind was replaced with darkness.





In an almost pleasant shift from awakening facedown in a snowdrift, Mirror Image slowly came to his senses with the feeling of cold stone being run against his back.  No, that wasn’t right.  The stone wasn’t moving.  He was.  Something was dragging him.  Something cold… but not cold like Cannon.  Cold like stone.

It took his eyes a moment to focus, and then the entirety of his willpower not to gasp.  His right hind leg was wrapped in a tight cluster of jagged rubies.  They didn’t appear to be piercing his flesh, though he hardly considered the lack of pain when he realized why the rubies were moving.

Attached to the rubies—no, made of them—was a creature out of a nightmare.  Where flesh ended and gems began, the unicorn could hardly tell.  The tips of the spurs and crests in its ruby exterior gathered an unnatural frost in the air.  For shape, it might have been a pony, nearly the equal of Soldier On.  But despite her size, at least On’s coat and mane looked like a pony.  This thing had a row of crystalline spines in place of a mane, an aura of unnatural frost trailing where its tail ought to have been, and teeth of serrated rubies that put even Cannon’s thestral fangs to shame.

His heart skipped a beat when it looked back at him.

“Had I wanted to kill you, you would never have woken up.”  The creature’s voice wasn’t equine; it rumbled, cracked, and echoed more than Image imagined the darkness around him had any right to echo.  “Restrain your apprehension.  We will not need long to decide your fate.”

Though his mind was confused, the unicorn’s body knew what to do on instinct.  He reached for one of the spear holsters on the sides of his gilded armor, and found it empty.  “What…?”  

Image wasn’t sure where the question was leading, but the creature clearly thought it—he?—did.  “I am the Mistress’ finest creation.”  He spoke very slowly, and left long pauses between his every thought.  Whether he feared biting his own tongue, or was merely intent to speak with deliberation, Image couldn’t guess.  The pony dragged him along the dark stone further and further, until ahead he saw some glimmer of light.  “In life, a crystal.”

As the creature’s words continued to grate and grumble from its stony lips, the world around Image opened up in light: a fiery orange and purple sky that still managed to be filled with the glimmering of innumerable stars.  Perched still in the sky overhead, a crescent of fire where the moon sat just off-center of a total eclipse of the sun.

His guess was right; he knew the time.  The Twilight War.  The only question that remained was the place.

All around was harsh black stone, not so much constructed as poured or molded into spires that reached up into the sky and looked down on a wide and ice-ridden strait.  The unnatural chill in the air identified Stalliongrad more clearly than any sight or smell could match.  Yet none of the land looked familiar, nor the coastline.  Instead, all he could see were the boats gathering around the island fortress he found himself being dragged across.  Dozens and dozens of tall-masted, white sailed ships flying a single golden sun in the strange dusk.

“Now I am something more,” the creature dragging him concluded, finishing a thought Image had nearly forgotten.  Looking at the creature in better light, the answer would have been obvious.

“You’re a crystal pony thestral?”

“The only,”  it intoned coldly, continuing its inexorable march.  “Even in life our bodies are resistant to your magic.”  The sky was stolen away again; whatever balcony they had walked onto was crossed, and replaced by claustrophobic hallways unlit by flame or crystal.  “Only in her full glory did the Mistress find the might to raise one of my kind to take a place at her side.”

As he was dragged along in silence, struggling to think through the constant unease of the dark and the disruptions of the bumps in the floor, Image focused on his education—all the battles he’d read about after Luna’s return and redemption.  The loss of Everfree City and the creation of the forest.  The escape to Stalliongrad—but that was the city proper, not some island fortress.  Fleeing to Zebrica and recruiting the griffons.  And then…

“This is the Castle of Midnight,” Image whispered, more to himself than to the thestral.

The thestral stallion scoffed.  “Do you intend to state the obvious?  Or were you foolish enough to somehow arrive here without knowledge of your destination?”

“Well, if I’m being honest—” 

“Don’t vaste your breath humoring him, Eldest.”  Image’s ears perked at the distinctly Trotsylvanian accent off to his right, somewhere in the dark.  He barely heard the mare’s hoofsteps drawing closer, but when she spoke, she was no more than an inch from the tip of his ear.  “I vill have his mind, and then I vill take the meat.”

The crystalline corpse, Eldest, growled.  “You think he is yours, Second?  I claimed him.  I am Eldest.”

The mare snorted back.  “Eldest in title, perhaps.  But you’re no mage, and you’re no match for Celestia’s champion.  What good vould his blood do you?  Do you honestly believe you could fight the Commander?”  Image’s ears perked in the darkness, and though he could see neither Eldest nor this Second Sister, their sudden silence made it clear that they had noticed.  “You know that name, unicorn?”

Eldest chuckled, a grim and grating noise like heavy stones scraping against one another.  “Now you are the one humoring him.”

A spark of blood red light pierced through the darkness, illuminating the tip of a unicorn’s perfectly straight horn—something about the fact tickled Image’s attention, though the expanding light quickly quashed the thought.  Second Sister was a markedly small mare for a unicorn, regarding Image with an expression equally mixed between amusement and hunger.  Her neck and shoulders were clad in blackened steel armor, emblazoned in what looked like archaic Bitalian text.  His eyes followed the collar past massive letters, SPQC and up to the slits for her leathery wings.

The unicorn blinked twice, making sure his eyes weren’t lying.  “You’re an alicorn thestral?”

Second Sister cocked her head.  “You must have been clever to get in here, through all our guards.  Figure it out for yourself.  I’m more interested in your little gasp vhen I mentioned the Commander.”  The thestral’s tongue danced across her fangs.  “Did you think the Mistress didn’t know about Celestia’s little experiment vith necromancy?  That ve weren’t sure vhat your ‘secret’ mission to Everfree was for?”

Image momentarily considered trying to lie, and then thought the better of it.  It wasn’t like they could actually kill him, assuming the flash at the end of Luna’s memory of Sombra had been as lethal as it felt—though they could probably make it hurt for a bit.  “Well, no,” he told Second Sister with as honest an expression as he could manage.  “I didn’t know Celestia used necromancy.  What does that have to do with the Commander?  And—what is that?”

That was the unnatural chill that flowed down Image’s back like water, under not only his armor but his coat and his skin.  It managed to at once freezing him and leaving him with a terrifying sensation of vertigo as the darkness around him seemed to grow thicker.  It ate his sight, swallowing up the little glimmers of reflection on the closest walls, and then devouring the light from Second Sister’s horn.

“Mistress,” Eldest and Second intoned, almost in unison.

All Image saw were her eyes in the darkness.  Teal.  Slitted.  “What have you found, Eldest Brother?”

The thestral shrugged.  “An idiot unicorn with his horn broken the way my people did in ancient days.”

“Hmm…”  The room’s darkness was driven away by a piercing teal light.  Though the visage of Nightmare Moon could hardly be called a surprise, it nevertheless made Image shudder.  She loomed over him with all of Celestia’s height, but none of her grace or calming presence.  As she leaned forward, Image took note of her periwinkle armor—wrapped not in gold like Celestia’s but rare and potent lodestone.  It wouldn’t eat magic the way the Commander’s void crystal armor did, but the sheer mass of the precious stone would be far more resistant than his own gilded armor, and it rendered her all but immune to the magic of any mortal unicorn; if she decided to torture him or kill him, the sinking feeling in his gut warned that he wouldn’t be able to stop her.  

His analysis disappeared from his mind when a mouthful of carnivorous fangs descended into his view.  Nightmare Moon’s teeth were mere inches from his muzzle, and they parted with a visible hunger.  

“You…”  She spoke with none of the caution that defined Luna’s voice.  Commanding and unhesitating, there was no doubt her pause was for effect.  

Image closed his eyes.

“Are you not the soldier who fought at my side against Sombra?”  Image opened his eyes, and saw in Nightmare Moon not hatred or malice, but confusion and curiosity.  In that brief flicker, he saw Luna.

“Mistress?” Eldest Brother questioned.  “You know this pony?”

“Only for a matter of minutes,” the Nightmare replied.  “Yet he and a thestral fought alongside me in one of the most dangerous battles of my former life.”  Her slitted eyes returned to Image.  “Whatever my sister’s forces may say, I honor those who stand beside me.  I hope that is why you have returned.  If memory serves, your name was Mirror Image?”

And then something strange happened.  Nightmare Moon smiled.  Genuinely.  Not hungrily, not forcefully (despite her prominent fangs), but with a broad curve to her cheeks, and even dimples.  Not at all what Dead Reckoning had described with a black spiderweb scar burnt into his chest.  Not the horror foals imagined at the end of autumn.  A real pony.

Image nodded, still unsure.  “Yes… Princess.”

The title earned him a brief glare, though Nightmare Moon said nothing about it.  Instead, her focus slid across his body.  “You haven’t aged a day; you ought to be ninety years old.  What are you?  What magic has made you last this long?”

Second Sister rolled her eyes.  “No doubt another one of your sister’s ‘champions’.  He certainly looks like vhat the necromancer’s spell might spit out, and if he vas strong enough to stand against Sombra, he vould seem worth the effort.”  The potential alicorn thestral shook her head in a show of scorn.  “Let me eat him, Mistress; the spell vill give me far more magic for my battle with the Commander.”

Mirror Image’s ears perked.  “The Commander?”

“And now he knows too much to be left alive.”  Eldest’s crystalline hoof smashed against the stone mere inches from Mirror’s ear, leaving behind a painful ringing.  “Clever of you, Second, forcing our hoof against him.  Your reputation for bloodlust is well deserved.”

Nightmare Moon’s feathered wings extended.  “Silence, both of you.”  After a pause as if testing the quarrelling thestrals, the black alicorn smiled.  “Whatever he is, I am the ruler of this land.  I see no need to simply kill him.”  That same smile crossed her face again in pride, yet for all the armor and all the show of power, Mirror Image wondered if she wasn’t somehow more mortal this way; more alive this way than the restrained and terse Princess Luna he knew in reality.

“Second Sister,” Luna continued.   “As I said, he fought alongside a thestral—one I had not created.  For that alone, I am inclined to see where his loyalties lie before I jump to any condemnation.  It might be that he is sympathetic to our cause.”

Eldest snorted.  “After infiltrating the castle?”

“We shall see the truth shortly.”  The teal magic around the Nightmare’s horn—the only real light in the room—grew piercingly bright.  Slowly, her neck coiled and her horn aimed squarely between his brow.  “Relax,” she cautioned, “and this shall not hurt.”

Flashes of memories too fast to see.


Luna’s mind. 


 Shouting.


Cannon.


He felt pain, and sorrow, and anger, yet he could not comprehend them.  Too fast.  Too sudden.


Sombra.


Krenn.


Bag with a Heartbeat.


Was it his eyes seeing, or his mind?  Through the teal glow, he could hardly remember.


Cannon—alive.  


River Bank.


Kiss.


Tears.


Reflection.


Shouting.


“Ah.”  The Nightmare spoke as an expression of comprehension, though it carried an expression of humor.  “So all this was for the thestral?”

Image cocked his head.  “What made you come to that conclusion?”

“Your mind,” Nightmare Moon replied with her now familiar wry grin on her fangs.  “Don’t look so pathetic, Mirror Image.  I’ll give you a gift.  Mortal stallions are so indecisive.  Always wondering, always stressing over whether or not they have chosen the right partner for what little life they enjoy.  Cease your mental debate and pursue her.  Your ‘heart’ has chosen her.”

Image looked up at Nightmare Moon—Nightmare Moon—and found his mouth opening and shutting in rapid succession.  Finally, he found some measure of a word.  “Did… did you just give me dating advice?”

“No, I read your mind,” she replied with a harsh amusement.  “You decided everything I told you; I only recited it.”

“Okay…” Image swallowed hard, genuinely lost for what to say next.  “So are you going to… let me go?”

Second Sister chuckled into her hoof.  “Vell, he’s funny enough to excuse his foalishness, but he still knows that ve know about Celestia’s champion.  It isn’t as if he can be allowed to leave the castle alive.”

Image cocked his head.  “Who’s the ‘Commander’?  That’s who you mean, right?  Why do you keep bringing him up?”

“Does he genuinely not know, Mistress?” Eldest Brother asked. 

Nightmare Moon shook her head.  “He has met the stallion before.  But he has no idea. Second Sister can explain when you go with her.”

“Excuse me?” Second raised a brow in the Nightmare’s direction.  “Mistress, are you suggesting I let him go?”

“No.  I am directing you to take him with you.  He proved competent in battle with Sombra; he is skilled enough to stand with you against Hurricane.”

Second stomped a hoof, cracking stone.  “He’s a unicorn!  He can’t fly, his magic can’t get through Hurricane’s armor.  He’s a liability if I try to protect him, and meat if I ignore him.”

“Consider this a command, Second.”

Second’s wings burst into flame, overriding the teal magic of Nightmare Moon’s horn and fully illuminating what appeared to be a ruined throne room.  Without further comment to her mistress, the thestral gestured toward a door.  “Follow me, Mirror Image.”

“Um…”  Though Mirror followed the thestral, his mind raced with questions of just what he had gotten himself into.





The parapets of the Castle of Midnight looked out over the vast stretches of the Stalliongradi coast in the perpetual dusk.  Hastily constructed forts and sailing ships with hulls plated in skysteel faced off against the fortress.  Closer, on the near-side of the water, a massive courtyard below was filled with ponies, dragons, and a few scattered elk.  But above all were the thestrals.  Hundreds of them, assembling fortifications and distributing weapons.

Image glanced over to the arched doorway into the castle, where Nightmare Moon was presumably watching him.  She had to be… right?  Otherwise the memory would have ended; she couldn’t remember him if she wasn’t aware of what was happening.

His mind only returned to the army when Second Sister’s frigid shoulder brushed against him.  Despite the motion, she said nothing.  He looked down at the army again, and his mind flew to the ghost stories he’d heard from the older members of the Honor Guard.

“Are there really four hundred?”

Second Sister nodded.  “Four hundred twenty four, myself included.”

“Three hundred seventy sixth sister is kind of a mouthful,” Image told the figment of Luna’s memory.  He’d hoped the levity might earn a smile, but instead, Second glared at him.

“Mistress vent too far.”

Image was almost flabbergasted.  “You don’t support the Night Guard?  I thought you would all—”

Red slitted eyes rolled in their sockets.  “You do not understand, Mirror Image.  I have been Second Sister long enough to know that Mistress vould be better off without thestrals—to say nothing of us.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?  She keeps you for a hundred years, right?”  Image took notice of the ensuing silence and shrugged.  “I know you’re not allowed to talk about your pasts.  Sorry.”

A frigid wheeze caught the stallion’s ear, and it took him more than a few moments to realize the thestral had exhaled.  No, sighed.  “In life, my name was Aestas Celsus.  Summer, to my friends.”

“Really?”  Image asked.  “Just like that?”

“You vill find I have much more freedom vith my speech than my vould-be peers.”

“You mean the freedom to choose between ‘V’ and ‘W’?” he asked, teasingly.  A frigid gust swept through the watercolor dusk sky, tussling the short rough hair of the stallion and the carefully sculpted scarlet mane of the walking corpse alike.  Mirror offered it a quick shake of his head before speaking up again.  “Your accent is Trotsylvanian.  But your name is… Bitalian?”

“Cirran.”  She scowled.  “I died the year Equestria vas founded.”

“That’s a lot longer than a hundred years.”

Summer rolled her eyes again.  “Vhat’s a few thousand years between monsters?  I won’t bore you vith the details of the wars that led me to that death.  Vhen Celestia and Luna—”

“You call her that?”

“Never to her face.”  The corner of Summer’s mouth twisted up for a flash of a grin.  Only a moment later, her tufted ears fell back again and her leathery wings pinched against her back.  “It vasn’t more than a few decades after Celestia and Luna came to Equestria that there vas a…” Summer hesitated, looking down at the courtyard below.  “…a conflict.  The Night Guard vere slaughtered.  All but me.”

Image knew better than to speak up.  His eyes watched as the thestral’s shoulders rose and fell.  “Luna summoned me.  She vas lost in rage, and sorrow, and who knows vhat else.  She gave me one command.  The cruelest command.”

“The kind you can’t disobey?”

Summer nodded.  “She told me ‘Make sure this never happens again.’  That vas my order.  Do you understand?”

“I think so…”

She scoffed.  “You have no idea, Mirror Image.  No idea vhat it’s like to have free will stripped from you.  The magic keeping me in this sick form knew that if I ever went back to Luna, she vould free me, and my command would be a failure, so I had to hide from her.  If I died, I vould fail, so I started eating ponies in the night for the magic I needed to keep my body moving.  Not one a year, but nightly.  Vhen I had to upkeep the spell myself, the magic made me take this.”  Her hoof struck the horn on her brow.  “Vhen I lived, a unicorn named Vintershimmer made a spell to transplant a horn.  The poor mare screamed so much.”

Image shuddered.

“I’m a monster, Mirror Image, and I can’t do anything to set myself free.  It’s long since driven me mad.  At times, vhen I close my eyes, I see friends who died centuries ago.  I learned to like the taste of blood.  Do not dare to tell me you think you understand.  Even she has no idea, after I explained it to her face.  The old Luna might have pitied me, but Nightmare Moon saw me as a tool.”

“She found you?”

“I came to her,” Summer answered.  “Vhen she started mass-producing thestrals for the var, the spell finally buckled.  Finally let me accept that confronting her vas vorth making myself known.  I hoped she vould free me.  I prayed to the old gods of Cirra, but I seem to have outlived them.  Nightmare Moon saw the strongest of her servants.  A thestral who had spent millennia mastering stealth and magic.”  Her tail whipped back and forth once, harshly.  “She vasn’t wrong.”

“She’s making you fight?”

“She gave me a new order.  One order.  And if I complete it, she vill let me go.”

“What order is that?”

“Destroy the Commander, and then return to her,” Summer replied with a genuine smile. Image leaned away from the mare, and her head swept away from the scene below to focus on him fully.  “You still don’t understand? Luna thinks it’s motivation, as if I had the free vill to bother vith whether or not I cared.  If I kill him, I’ll come back to her—the order is more direct than the one to protect the Night Guard.  And when I do, she vill release me.  But if I fail, both orders still bind me.  So I cannot fail, no matter vhat magic Celestia has used on him.”

Image cocked his head.  “You mentioned that before.  You said you thought he was like me… immortal, or something? Did she raise him as a thestral?”

“No.”  Summer shook her head.  “Something ‘purer’.  In those early days of Equestria, there vas a necromancer—Mortal Coil.  He vas an egotistical ass,” she added a snort of scorn to the comment before continuing, “but also something of a magical genius.  He wrote a spell to grant himself immortality, and in doing so, accidentally developed a vay to raise a pony from the dead.  Not animate them, but truly resurrect them.  That’s vhat the Commander is.  Fully and completely alive, in a body that vill never age—”

Image’s mouth fell open.  “You mean he’ll still be alive in a thousand years?”

“No,” Summer answered firmly.  “He dies tonight.”

Image looked down at the catapults and military stormclouds being assembled below, and then leaned back on his flanks.  “You know, that would have been a really great time for the battle to actually start.”

The thestral laughed at that.  “Celestia is nothing if not a conservative soldier.  And the Commander knows that his little team of elite soldiers von’t survive trying to take the fortress early.”

“The Honor Guard?” Image asked, barely surprised by the thought.

Summer shrugged.  “If that is vhat they call themselves.”  The mare looked around at the dusky sky and then turned back to him.  “I’m being rude.  Vhy not tell me about yourself?”

Only a moment’s hesitation preceded Image’s first statement.  “Ah, Tartarus, why not?”





Luna caught a glimpse of an altogether too mortal strand of her mane at the edge of her vision.  Pulling her body off of frigid flagstones, she reflected that it was a tragically appropriate representation of the way her entire body felt.  Joints ached, muscles burned, and the agony she felt at the base of her horn was making it hard to see straight.

“That was… perhaps not worth repeating,” she whispered, more to test her own hearing and to hear her own physical voice than for any intention of communication.


“So… you’re really from the future?”


The phantasmal voice caught Luna off guard, and her head swiveled back and forth trying to locate a speaker.  When her eyes met darkness, she ignited her horn.  A teal light swept over a surprisingly large room filled to brimming with bookshelves covered in ancient tomes and heavy chests and crates.  Seven stone arches offered egress, and at their center, a podium supported a particularly heavy tome.


“I am.  You won’t like it.  Luna loses tonight.”


The speaker was nowhere to be seen.  Worrying, Luna wove together a more complex spell, searching for any crease or fold in the magical field of the room that might hide a pony from sight.  Yet the voices ringing in her mind were nowhere to be found.


“Well… Do I win?”



“I don’t know… but I don’t think so.”


“Mirror Image?”  Luna slapped her own brow with a wing, and then focused her mind on the necessary spell.  The pain took over her sight, but it lasted only a moment.  When it subsided, her ears rang with the sound of gilded armor and flesh tumbling in a single ball across the stone floor.  “Bodyguard.  Eldest.  I trust your time in my mind saw you unharmed?”

After a few moments of rather violent disentanglement, Eldest Sister glared at Mirror Image.  “Everything’s fine, Mistress.”  Luna took note of an icy forcefulness usually absent in the happy-go-lucky mare’s voice.  “Where are we?”

“We—rather, I—have not yet discovered.  I only just dug my way out of the plane within Tirek’s Satchel.”

Mirror Image stood up slowly, rolling his neck.  “Sorry, I didn’t follow.  I’ve been about neck-deep in crazy magic for too long.  Can you run that by me in smaller words?”

Luna nodded.  “Magic can ‘fold’ space to make two points that aren’t nearby become adjacent to one another, but it cannot usually create new space from nothing.  When a unicorn enchants a bag like Tirek’s Satchel, they link the space inside the bag to a larger physical location elsewhere in the physical world.  When you so cunningly flung us inside the bag to escape the explosion of void crystals in Krenn’s throne room…”  Luna slowly stopped as the memory came rushing back.  After several seconds of silence, she coughed into her wing.  “…after you saved us, the part of the spell that was sustained at the side of the bag began being eaten by the void crystals’ ash and collapsing.  You might imagine it like a circus tent losing its supports.  While both sides are held up, such a tent is open and easy to navigate.  But remove the supports, and one inside finds themselves entangled in miles and miles of fabric.”

“Huh.  Alright.  So… why stick us in your head?”

“In order to escape the collapsing bag’s magic alive, I had to navigate the… the ‘fabric’... without piercing any of it.  If I tore through the spell, we would have been ripped to tiny pieces and thrown out of the bag.  I had to work quickly to move my physical body between the magical boundaries—precise and dangerous work.  Keeping your physical bodies with me would have made the task nearly impossible.  So instead, I put you in the safest place I could think of at the moment.”

Eldest Sister merely nodded.  Image awkwardly scratched the back of his neck, chuckling like a colt caught with his hoof in a cookie jar.  “Well, Princess, neither of us got hurt—”

“Speak for yourself,” Eldest almost spat.

“—but I just want you to remember that neither of us fought next to you against King Sombra, and I wasn’t actually there at the Castle of Midnight either.”

Luna cocked her head.  “You entered my sealed memories?”

“Well, I wasn’t trying to.  I just walked up to a memory with all these chains around it, and the chains lunged out and pulled me in.”

Luna shuddered.  “Do not do so again.  We shall have to speak to Celestia about this.  In the meantime—”

Whatever the Princess had been preparing to say, she lost her thought to the unmistakeable echo of hooves on stone.

“…don’t know where he went, but he wanted to talk to you, Roscherk.  In the meantime, Twilight, we’ll have a look and see if we can’t find Shining Armor.”

Luna opened her mouth, only to find Mirror Image holding up a hoof at her side, cautioning her to silence.  Instead, the trio of ponies listened closely to the next voice that spoke up.

“You still haven’t explained how we’re going to find him down here, Foresight,” Twilight Sparkle complained, unmistakeably.  “Shouldn’t we be talking to your guardsponies, or seeing if anypony has seen him in other parts of the Domain?”

“Trust me, Twilight,” Red Ink’s harsh voice echoed from upward—down a flight of stairs leading up from one of the archways.  “Even if my brother is an ass, he is the best when you really need to find something.  Or somepony.”

“How kind of you, Roscherk.  I didn’t know you—Princess Luna!”  Foresight rounded the corner, and almost immediately dropped to a knee.  Twilight Sparkle wasn’t far behind, the rose light of her horn illuminating a stairway leading some substantial way up from the darkness that played host to the archway.  Red Ink, who trailed the group, leapt over the two unicorns and spread his wings to glide to a rest at the foot of the stairs, nearly at a foreleg’s length from Luna.

“Princess… what in Tartarus are you doing in the basement?”

“Well,” Luna began, glancing knowingly at Mirror and Eldest.  “That is a bit of a long story, Captain Ink.”