Luna pushes through the night and into the morning. She is going faster than she has ever gone before.
Why?
Twilight is too exhausted to ask her anymore and Luna knows she will not like the answer.
Because I never arrive on time, Twilight Sparkle, she would have said. I never do. I try every time. I try and I try and I never get there in time. They always leave. Live long--oh and you will you’ll learn one day--you’ll know what its like to be left over and over and over. You’ll find out their names and then in a flash they are gone. Imagine it. Imagine the trauma of that. Play it out forever. Thousands of years. Imagine being stuck in the moon for a thousand years and then you know everyone is dead but your sister and you want to love each other and you do but there is always a gap.
Imagine if you will, bright new baby alicorn, darling on your “mother”’s lap, who knows nothing of the world you are stepping in to--imagine if you will that one day all of your friends are going to die. And you will know they are going to die but you won’t know when. Do you think you will make it in time to say goodbye? Do you think that you will be able to do that six times in a row? Twilight, I’ve found that it’s hard to do it even twice in a row.
I know her name, Twilight. I can’t pretend that I do not. Alicorns have exceedingly good memory, considering. You’ll find that out too, won’t you?
I can’t do it again. Even though I know there is no hope.
But I’m so tired of this.
Luna provides, but I didn’t. Luna protects, but I cannot. Luna watches, but I do not see until it is too late. Luna redeems but what have I redeemed?
I need to save one, Twilight. Can I not save just one? One brave little mare who could have asked of me anything and wished only to talk? Can I not save the only true Dreamer I have met in almost two thousand years? Can I not save one miserable bit of sand from the tides?
Midnight, in Amethyst City
I saw it burn but not away, the torch light steady against the wind as it began to blow hard on the streets. It blew and blew and burnt and burnt and my mind was strange and twisted still with Lily’s potion.
This is my battle so I must give it in as I feel it, in the dying.
Swift sees the first one. Or he sees the first ones, because they don’t come one or two at a time but in whole wings, swarming down like nightmares from the rooftops, filling the skies, maybe on the street. He yells and fumbles for the musket. Mine is up. It has been up for an hour and I have not moved.
Everything is focused. I catch sight of one as it lands, ready to take a running start at our barricades. Time is slow and so is the monster--I can see it flex its unnatural body, I can see its eyes as they move on its slow turning head--I am quick and it is dead. I fire the first shot and the ball catches the beast in the face and then there is no face and it falls out of the light.
I can tell you about the chittering that turns into a wall of clacking and the yelling and the cries--Reload! Reload for Luna’s sake give me a fucking weapon--Swift, up high!--There’s one coming through the top of the windows!.
I can tell you about how I didn’t even have to ask for a reload. As soon as I fire another musket is in in my hooves. I level it out the hole between the boards and I fire again. The smoke is in my eyes but I stare right through it. I feel nothing. I am not sure I feel pain anymore as I am. My teeth grind together and the percussion of the musket is like somepony stabbing me in the ears but it can’t hurt me because nothing can. I crow as I fire again. Again. Once more. Minutes have passed. I don’t know how many.
A changeling dies with his hooves and teeth tearing at the boards. A changeling dies ramming his body through the glass and into the boards, shredding him but breaking a hole near the top. Another dies when Ruby shoots it as the creature tries to enter through the breach that is just a little too small and its body lies in the gap. One manages to get one of its stingers through a gap and it grazes the reloading unicorn’s cheek.
Changelings divebomb the great doors. They shake the ancient portal. I hear some of them using magic to do… do whatever the hell they can but nothing works and the doors just shake and shake and shake like trees in a gale.
Swift knocks a changeling out of the sky. They crowd the doors now like flies, pulling at the boards, ripping at them with their fangs until they lose the fangs, pulling at them with tortured hooves until we stop them with a musketball. The unicorn work feverishly. I can hear his panting in my ear loud as a screaming baby. I can smell nothing but smoke and ash. One of them pulls at the boards at my firing spot and tries to worm in and it also falls, dead or alive, as I pivot and catch its face with both backlegs and then it is gone.
They rip more and more boards off. A dozen of them are in the air now. Ruby and Lily keep divebombers off me but I don’t know where. I only know what is front of me. Lily’s drug keeps my focus so sharp I could cut through solid steel with my eyes. Another one. I hold out a hoof. The next from the pile is passed me. It is still hot but I do not find it any discomfort. I look for another changeling. I fire--miss--again. Again. And then there isn’t another gun in my hoof and I just wave my leg around for the next--
One of them falls on me from above and it begins kicking madly against my barding, trying to get at my belly and bite and tear. I push it off, but it keeps coming.
So when it comes back my head meets its head and the thing’s horn misses me only barely and it falls back, holding its head. I am on it in a flash, beating, screaming. Another one knocks me off, and I am a whirlwind of blows.
I only remember my hoofblades for the third one. I kick them out and then do a half-kick that catches it midway and stops the bastard cold.
More pour through, dozens of them, jet black, cancerous, chittering and hissing, teeming with awful life. I turn to face the next one and find Swift running, his wing half-out, the air rife behind him. I follow, never having heard the call to fall back--
This is my battle, and so I tell it as I know it: I tell it by the deaths.
Swift
The first Ranger to die in Amethyst City is Swift. It was a lucky blow, a perfect juxtaposition of time and space. The reloader with us had been grazed by one of the stinging mutants and gotten enough venom to weaken him, and he was managing to push pre-loaded weapons into our hooves while also trying to reload the ones we shot, all while keeping himself out of the clutches of any of the enemy that broke through. It was too much. He got slower and slower and then he passed out. Swift caught him as he fell, and then yelled hoarsely for me to come back with him, that we needed to leave. The changelings were everywhere. The great doors were lost, and let them be. Everyone that broke through flew right into the firing zone. When I didn’t hear him, he kept calling and shrugged the unicorn onto his back.
Swift didn’t see me go under in the melee. He thought I was right behind him but I was not.
If he had known, he might have turned. He might have chosen the unicorn reloader over me, but he might have chosen me over him. If he had known… if he had known what things he could have done! But he did not know.
He also did not know what killed him. As I turned to see him, he was pushing back towards the barricade and a changeling fell on him. It’s stinger lashed out. Once. Twice. Three times. And he never moved again. It was a matter of seconds. First he moved and then he did not move and Lily was screaming and then the creature exploded and a barely conscious unicorn was crawling away, woken by the fall.
The unicorn from the Crystal legions was the second pony to die in the siege. I ran towards him but two changelings fell on him, picked him up, and threw him down. He missed the barricade by an inch, but he was dead and nopony retrieved him.
I pulled at Swift. I begged him to run but then I let go because his face was gone and caved in, the puncture wound in his chest… he wasn’t there. There wasn’t anything left of him now. I ran.
Ruby hopped over the side of the barricade and helped me climb over, my hooves frantically looking for purchase, my eyes wide, my heart beating in my chest. I felt like my whole body was on fire and I didn’t know if it was the drug anymore. The monsters swarm around us, diving and then pulling away, trying to get close enough to grab the groundpounders or hit the rest of us with a stinger. Some of them have hoofblades, long and serrated, and when they dive down only quick motion saves your head.
The attacks come in stages. There is a huge initial rush, perhaps thirty or more of them, all swarming the entrances and divebombing down at our barricade. At least one is caught on the spikes. We fire, a few fall, they swipe, we lay low, it begins again. They linger, diving in pairs and trios while the rest run interference, keeping up a steady pressure. And then they disperse. The mansion is full of them by now, at least the bottom floors. Everywhere is full of them.
How many die? Perhaps half a dozen every attack. Swift and I accounted for about nine by ourselves, but the lgeionary reloader lies flat on his back in the middle of the barricade, his eyes unfocused and glazed over, his limbs limp. The refugee unicorns are quivering, miserable ruins, pleading for their lives, hooves on their heads, as they do their best to keep up with how fast we fire. It takes the legionary unicorn twenty seconds to prepare one of their muskets and about three seconds to supply a shooter with a fresh one, pre-prepared or otherwise. It takes these two about forty seconds to load. They spill powder but not much.
A legioanry dies when one of the stingers shoots right through his barding and pierces his shoulder. He shakes, shocked, and tries to pull away, but by then it is too late and the poison is in him and he begins to scream only for his voice to die in gurgling as he falls convulsing to the floor as his killer returns to the sky with a hiss.
Three dead in Amethyst.
Yuletide
Another legionary dies before him on the fifth attack. An hour in, and the guns are hot and the smoke never fully clears and the great hall is littered with bodies but never enough.
A mutant grabs her right off the barricade as she leans over to balance her musket and get a better shot. She screams and screams, flailing like a fish torn from the water or a baby from it’s mother’s breast. Yuletide, Knight-Commander of the Nineteenth, jumps up after her, his wings opening. The changeling only rises long enough to throw her down and it meets Yuletide in midair.
The commander is distracted by the falling legionary, her legs useless in the night air, her back hurtling towards the floor. He reaches out--
And a hoof catches his face and twists his head around and he falls right after her. Two more dead in Amethyst. Five gone in the first hour.
The barricade is in ruins by hour two.
Last Call fights upon the torn remainder, roaring his invincible fury. He kills four of them before they bowl him over and a spike catches him. He tries to move but before he can they fall upon him with fangs and hooves, even as we try to pull them off.
They come in waves because it is how they avoid too many casualties. We can’t use a volley to break their swarm. We have to pick targets. More than half of our shots miss. We slow down to two a minute. We’ve exhausted the pre-loaded guns. The loaders are cut and bruised and whimpering.
One of the loaders dies during the third hour. He’s grabbed and carried off into the air, and nopony can grab him fast enough to stop him from going. He’s screams. He cries. He begs us to save him and then a hissing mutant throws him back down at us and his head lands first and there is an awful snap and blood pools out of his mouth and his eyes.
One dives for me in the third hour and I step to the side and watch its stinger shoot by me in slow motion, my strange intoxication making it all play out so slowly. Ponies dying in hours instead of minutes or seconds. They just linger on. They seem alive longer for me. I push one leg up and my hoofblade catches the changeling’s stomach as he flies overhead and that is another dead and the black, thick, syrupy blood runs down my… my…
How long does it continue? They come ess frequently now but more urgently. They’ve lost so many but so have we. Another legionary dies. How many are left? Only one reloader who isn’t reloading anymore because he’s too busy crying and the legion one finally passed on by hour three.
Soft Fang
We use a lull to gather up a few muskets and flee up the stairs to the turns and that is where Soft Fang dies.
Ruby first, then me, then Lily, then the legionaries that are left, then the last reloader, blubbering a shaking, then Star Brand and then Soft Fang.
Sprint up the steps, fast as you can. The lights all swimming around you, the sound like a parade in your head, some foreign force driving you to strange thoughts and unwelcome feeling. Time gets closer to normal flowing all around me and that I am glad because of what happens next.
We are safe until Soft and Brand are hurrying us through the hallways and trying to re-shut the door we had come through to buy a little more time. But as they push,, the changelings that had been waiting in the wings broke cover and swarm over the bannister.
We cannot go to them and they cannot come to us.
They begin their final battle. Soft Fang keeps three mutants from grabbing ahold of him, dancing out of their reach, ducking under their blows and their teeth, kicking them hard when he can. His blades come out--he catches one--the others dive in but he is ready. He pivots on his front hooves like I do--for who taught me it but he in the practice field of Station Nineteen?--and catches them both with his powerful backlegs. They go flying back over the bannister. One of them tries to fly and catch itself but ends up ramming its face into the chandelier and falls regardless.
We try to keep running but also to look. The Rangers lag behind as the others continue. We yell for Soft and Brand to run. Maybe they do not hear us but maybe they do--I like to think they do not, and I think it even as I yell, for if they heard my voice why would they not answer? What would keep them from breaking off and fleeing to the safety of our company?
And maybe they heard the song we would all hear soon, the very beginning of it.
Star Brand rolls out of sight, locked in battle with a changeling. Soft has taken down seven. The eighth is on his back as he bucks the seventh with his hoof, burying his hoofblades in the thing’s neck. He tries to shake the monster off and then it bites him. He falls and rolls and the thing hisses loudly as its chitin cracks under the weight and the force, and then Soft is kicking down at it. But he grows slower. He turns and seems to see us at last and he starts to walk, slowly and surely like his voice even measured, and then he is swept away by two, maybe three fast moving black shapes and we see him no more. Star Brand jumps through the doorway out of nowhere and then bucks it closed with a cry and rushes for us with wide-eyes and blood weeping from his face.
“For fuck’s sake!” He pushes Ruby and I onward.
The door behind us groans and buckles. The dark hallway fills with the sound of changelings.
Hour five finds us firing out of the barricades. The changelings begin to make themselves scarce and our reloader has the last of Lily’s other drugs, much milder. He mumbles to himself about the mad things he sees that are not there and loads slowly but deliberately.
Star Brand
Star Brand dies a little after the fifth hour, poisoned during his close encounter. Ruby holds him as he dies and sings a wordless tune over him as he tells us that he is tired.
The sixth hour and we are almost out of shot. One of the barricades was half-dismantled but I got to it in time and beat the attackers back down the hallway. We close in, pull back. Lily and Ruby and I are alive. Two legionaries by the sixth hour are alive. The reloader, crying and staring in turns, is left.
I can’t say anything. There isn’t anything to say.
The barricades are too hard to defend--too many angles, too few of us, no way to use our muskets effectively with hooves to load. We retreat through rooms, holding doors as long as we can. The sun is rising outside.
An image: Ruby and I, side by side, our backs holding a door from breaking. Lily with our last musket over our heads, waiting for a hoof, anything, to break through that door. It does--right above our heads--she fires, and the sound is like thunder and there is the soft yet frightening sound of connection and then the stench of their corrupted blood but the door does not stop shaking and bowing inward.
How many have we killed? Thirty? Forty? More? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m crashing. Lily knows it she sees it in my eyes I know she does. Ruby is fading. The refugee doesn’t cry anymore. We found a table to place over the door as we lie flat on our stomachs in a room of beautiful furniture and abandoned things.
No changelings. Not right now. They will return. Any moment now they’ll be back, hissing and pounding. We couldn’t hold the barricades in the hallways with how few we had left… and now there’s nothing but running.
I catch Ruby’s eyes and I crawl on my belly over to her. She reaches out a hoof with a smile and I touch it with my own, and then I bury my face in the rug. I’m not sure what happens. It’s a cross between a sob and dry heaving. She touches my mane with her other hoof.
I try to say something but words are beyond me and maybe that’s better. What am I going to say?
I just want to go home. I just want to go home.
Lily
Lily dies in the seventh hour, with morning bloom. We are on the run, moving from room to room. The civilian got seperated. He’s dead. The legionaries split from us half an hour ago--we went right and they went left, us deeper into the compound and them making a break for the back gate. I do not know if they survived but we heard changelings looking for us.
Lily dies when she pulls a changeling from Ruby’s back and the monster turns on her. They are locked in battle, rolling together and then she comes up--Lily, a fierce mother who would save her child from the precipice of hell, the potion maker, the healer, Lily with the the kind eyes--a changeling barrels into her and she loses her balance. She does not scream. It knocks the air out of her.
They tumble out of a tall, broken window and I do not see what happens.
Lily was the one with the trigger for the powder.
Ruby and I running back through the grand hall five minutes after Lily is gone. The remains of the attacking force chase after us, and we are alone except for them.
She never had my stamina. She lags behind by a step. I call for her to hurry, gods, please hurry, but she just can’t anymore. She just can’t.
One of them knocks her down and falls on her with a gleeful hiss. I turn and do my pivot-kick one last time.
Morning light streams through the windows like divine grace, and so now we all see each other without the night in the way, in a full array of color. I see their ugliness and their twisted wrongness, and they see my boneweary despair perhaps, or my anger, more likely. Or how alone we are.
Ruby
I bring Ruby to rest in the cellar. The swarm, what is left, is waiting outside. They’ve lost at least half of their number and they aren’t in any hurry, so why come in after me? Perhaps I could work some trap and still triumph. No, they’ll starve me out or wait until I try to escape.
Ruby mumbles as I carefully let her fall from my back.I try to ease her up against the wall, but she whimpers when I move her. Waiting for changelings to burst through, I stroke her mane.
“Ruby? Hey, Ruby?”
“Hey.”
Her voice is so soft.
“Ruby, he was all over you. I…”
She hums. She tries to look up at me.
“Ruby, I’m sorry. Ruby? Ruby, please say something. I love you, please say… say…”
Ruby dies quietly in the cellar.
I sit in front of the cellar door, waiting to die.
Soon, they’ll come to me. Or, alternatively, I will go to them.
Eventually, I think I doze for a moment, and I see Luna there before me. She is dark and lovely, and her eyes are alight.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“No… no it isn’t. You will not survive.”
“No one else didn’t either,” I say, feeling like I might fall over. “I’m coming down from something. Ruby is dead. She won’t move anymore.”
“Child… child, you are done. You cannot continue.”
“I can go a little longer.” She comes closer and I feel cold. I shiver. “Maybe not,” I say. “Maybe… I can’t keep going. Help me.”
“I could give you a final grace. You could fall asleep and fade into painlessness for when they come. You need not suffer. Please, please take it.”
I stare at her. “I was too awkward to say this but I think you might be the most beautiful mare in the world,” I say. “I don’t want to stop feeling. I don’t want to forget even for... for a few minutes.”
“You’re going to die. Please, I can’t--”
I open my eyes. I am lying flat on the cold cellar floor and only I am here. And Ruby.
Why are we here? Why am I alive, when all the others are dead? Am I faster or stronger? No, I think that I’m just lucky. Very lucky. I could have died so many times, and I didn’t. I could have died days ago when I went one on one with that changeling. I could have died from a freak accident in Ranger School. I could have died as a child. I could have died at any time and maybe that means that it is stupid to ask why I have to die now when I didn’t so many other times.
It’s so wrong. I never wanted to fight anyone. I didn’t want to kill anypony. I wanted to help… I wanted to save foals in snowdrifts and keep timberwolves away from villages.
But I did anyway. I hurt and killed. I killed with my hooves and a musket and blades but I think the most I killed with my heart. I killed, and not the things I held or wielded. They were only the how because the what was me, Midnight. Midnight Aria. I killed them.
I didn’t want to but I did. So maybe I did want to.
My friends are gone and I will be too and now I don’t even know why. Ruby is gone and I never said that I loved her until she was dying. Lily is gone and I can never thank her again.
Luna, Ruby… sweet, sweet Ruby.
Where are you, Luna? Why aren’t you here? Where is your protection? When do you provide? But maybe you don’t do these things always just like I couldn’t protect and I could not provide, even though I tried so hard to do so. You talked to me. I know that you can’t be indifferent to us.
Maybe you try just like we do. Maybe those words aren’t guarantees but rather promises of a slightly different sort. That you will try. That you will always try. Please, always try.
I just want this to mean something, and I’m also afraid that wanting it to mean something will make me force a meaning that is wrong. But it has to mean something.
Luna, please keep trying. If you cannot protect or provide this time, redeem. Redeem us in our solemn hour. I don’t want the gift you offered, if I really saw you at all. I don’t want to sleep away the last moments I’ll ever see. I want to be alive. So instead, redeem us. Please make something of what we have done. Make it mean something. Whether that is saving those civilians or something else, redeem our suffering.
Redeem us.
Midnight
In the ninth hour, as the sun blazed over the frozen plains and on an unreal city, a pony emerged from the cellar where the Governor-General had stored his finest wines.
Her duster and barding were torn and stained with blood. Her hat was askew and her mane was wild and soiled. Her face was… strange. Her eyes not quite focused. She wore no hoofblades. She wore no barding. Her emblem she wore around her neck, with another one which bore another pony’s name.
She walked quietly into the grand hall and was not disturbed.
There were changelings there. They lined the bannisters. They covered the floor, dead and alive. They surrounded her, buzzing and chittering. She stared at them.
They did not strike the first second. Or the second.
There were many dead. Perhaps more than half of them.Midnight thought she had killed at least seven herself, and the others? They looked almost afraid of her, as if she might take another ten at least when she finally went.
They may have noticed that she bore no weapons and feared this also and what it might mean.
Midnight looked out past all of them, towards the sun that shone through the broken glass. She thought to herself that it was lovely, wasn’t it? So beautiful, so bright. Everything was so much brighter up here.
She had feared the storms that came down from the mountains once. They had swept down from Canterlot and when the winds howled across the mouth of the caverns they were like a roaring dragon. She had feared that sound more than anything. She had feared the storm; she now became it. She smiled.
“Rangers Fly, you poor bastards.”
She flared her wings and flew for the sun.
And then without any warning, they fell upon her. But they could not keep her. Midnight sailed through the holes in the boards they had made. They followed, hissing at her heels, as she flew over an unreal city towards the sun that burned in her eyes. Was this what is was like to be a daypony?
They followed and she chased. Batponies aren’t as fast as pegasi, but what is? They were as fast as changelings easily. And she was a ranger.
And she began to scream wordlessly, full of anger and full of something worse than loss and then eventually they caught her and she went hurtling down, fighting them off the whole way, falling falling falling down towards the snowy plains, and then they were off of her and she pulled up or tried as the white raced up to meet her.