The sky cracked, and Equestria trembled in the wake. The noise was loud enough that it echoed for miles around, filling the empty void of Her night with cacophonous reverberations.
Close to the source of the blast, a young filly bolted up awake in her bed. She knew what this meant. Everypony did. It wasn't like this was unheard of. This phenomenon had been going on for weeks. She tried to force her eyes back closed, but it was as though they were being forced to stay open by unseen hands, limbs of a malevolent force intent on enslaving her to its darkest desire: to have her not miss a thing.
It knew that every time she saw the flashes of light, the spark in her soul grew a little more dim.
It never took her very long to resign herself to staying awake for the remainder of the night. It was routine now. The routine that she had for herself every day was less a matter of some internal force driving her to make everything a certain way (as she had seen in other ponies in her family) and more of a way to force herself not to think about things as they were, and more as the way she wished they could be, but never would again.
Sometimes though, her eyes- once full of life, now glazed over like some kind of pottery experiment that didn't quite go over as well as the potter had hoped- would see things as they were, and when they did she died a little more each time.
She wasn't blind. She knew the significance of what had happened a few weeks previous. Everypony knew it.
As she hopped out of her bed and stretched out stiff limbs, she looked at the old grandfather clock that was in her room. Her mother had put it there before she left. Sometimes she'd thought about moving it back into the living room, but in the end the memory of her mother had proved too strong to break free of so easily, and the clock stayed right where it was.
Her eyes glanced outside. She could almost see the ripples still in the air, as though the very breath of Ponyville was protesting the injustice of being disturbed so inelegantly. That was impossible, of course, all in her head. Her eyesight was incredibly keen, granted, but it wasn't quite that good. Still, though, she could swear in moments like this that some wayward god found pity on her and allowed her the Sight that her mother had claimed she'd had.
She never believed her mother, about the Sight at least. That was one of the things she regretted the most, was how she never seemed to be able to convince herself that her mother was right about herself. She'd said a lot of things, most of which were incredulous. No one around her had believed what her mom said, and she'd just fallen into a rut of disbelief as well.
A tear began to well up in the corner of her eye. She knew that her mother had known that she didn't believe what she said. And in a way, she could also tell that this revelation had completely devastated her mom. She was closest to her daughter out of all her family members, and she had been convinced that of all the family, her daughter would surely be the one not to think she was crazy.
“Just another way I let her down, I guess...” she said aloud. She wasn't directing that statement at anypony in particular, not that anypony was there to hear her.. Her father had been among those drafted to fight the “good fight,” as all the propaganda posters had begun to call it. Sometimes, she almost wished she could forget that there was even a fight going on, and just go into her own little world and never came out.
Especially considering this “good fight” was the fight that had claimed her father's life, a mere three days into initial combat maneuvers.
She reached out and lightly tapped the side of her window with her wing, and the pane swung open with ease. Of all the things she could have been found to be good at, even after getting her cutie mark, she had not expected carpentry to be that thing. She'd even tried it with her other Crusader friends, back when she was more carefree, and though she had initially given up on it when it proved not to be the thing that got her the cutie mark she so desperately sought after, she'd picked it up again later and found that she was not only not half bad at it, but that she genuinely rather enjoyed the craft.
She marveled for a brief moment that her life had come so far in such a short amount of time, though not by her own choice. If she'd had her way, nothing would have changed like it did.
A breeze blew softly, tussling the edges of her curtains. Under previous circumstances, she could have found that enjoyable. Not that she didn't find it pleasurable now, mind you- in fact, the exact opposite was true. Before, it was enjoyable, but now... She closed her eyes for a moment and let the wind ruffle her coat lovingly. It was almost like her father was giving her an encouraging pat on the back, and...
She forced her eyes open and angrily swiped tears away from her eyes. She would not let anypony see her like this, the few that were left. Most had been evacuated long ago. Some had chosen to stay behind and defend Ponyville. It was all they knew, they had said. There was no way they would consent to just picking everything up and leaving.
Movement caught her attention out of the corner of her eye, and she involuntarily froze for a moment. Shadowplay across the siding of the house next to her, illuminated by Luna's moonlight. Her breath caught in her chest, and it felt like an eternity before she was able to exhale. When she saw her big sister come around the corner, though, she finally did let out her pent-up breath.
Rainbow Dash came around the corner, patrolling the streets as she did every night now. She looked up at the window, for a moment perplexed to see it open. Normally ponies didn't open up their windows at night now, so to see one open was something that would not have passed her scrutiny. When she saw part of a pair of wide eyes peek up over the bottom of the window though, she relaxed and saluted, then continued her patrol.
The eyes slowly drifted down, until they were out of sight. The face that was attached to them looked weary enough to sleep forever, but sadly that was not an option.
As soon as she saw Rainbow Dash go around the corner, she closed her window and returned to her bed. Her eyes were about to close, though she doubted she could ever go back to sleep again, when they opened back up again. Something just told her that closing her eyes was not going to be a very good idea, especially with the nightmare that had been plaguing her for the past few nights. The one that ended with her sister's life draining from her eyes as she breathed her final breath.
And although the alternative was even less appealing, at least it didn't affect her directly as much as the nightmare did. So, as she lay staring at the ceiling, she thought about what had brought them to such devastation to begin with.
She remembered the first day that the Shadowbolts were sighted, flying over Canterlot. Since before that point, they had only been a device born from the shadowy tendrils of Nightmare Moon's “ghost form,” as Rainbow Dash had described it at one point, nopony knew what they were, or what they could do. They would soon find out.
The Shadowbolts had proven to possess abilities far greater than even Celestia had predicted, and as such had caught the Royal Guard completely off-guard. The first time her Guard had met the Shadowbolts in combat had been disastrous. Their hooves had glowed with energy dark and foul, and in a blink of an eye the entire Guard had been incinerated before the Princess' very eyes.
With a signal from what was later determined to be only the initial wave, more showed up. The ten or so that had been spotted at first, had suddenly become hundreds, then thousands. There were far too many of them to combat, and with each having similar powers to the advance force, they soon outpowered even the Sisters.
Canterlot fell in a matter of hours. After that, they had begun to spread their influence to the surrounding areas, and had inevitably made their way onto Ponyville soil.
Theories abounded as to where the Shadowbolts had come from, what had made them, what fueled their seemingly limitless darkness- at least they had, until they had begun to crack down on the flow of information between the major cities that they'd taken over. Some claimed that they were the sons and daughters of Nightmare Moon herself, birthed from a union between the Moon and some bastard demon god from a faraway land. Others thought- blasphemously, at that- that they had been created not by Nightmare Moon, but by her former vessel, the Princess of the Night, as an attempt to wrest ultimate control of Equestria from her older sister.
Nopony knew anything for sure, except that somehow Ponyville had become some sort of bastion against the forces of the Shadowbolts. They had tried to take over the town no less than five times in the two weeks since the initial attack on Canterlot, but each and every time they had been repelled by those who had stayed beyind to defend their homesteads.
It hadn't been that many of them that had remained, either. Some had stayed because they had no choice; their entire lives had been spent in Ponyville, and thus had no place else to go to call home. Others had stayed because of a sense of honor and duty; Rainbow Dash had been one of those. Her sister had stayed behind to help her, much to Dash's chagrin, and at first she had tried to forcefully put her younger sister on the bus that had shuttled the departing ponies away from Ponyville.
After a very loud and public scene, Rainbow Dash had eventually just given up and allowed her to stay. And, though she'd never admit it, she'd been incredibly heartwarmed by her sister not wanting to leave her side for anything. That just meant that the bond she thought they'd shared was stronger than any- striong enough to make her want to potentially die for her, if she had to.
And truth be told, she felt the same way about her sister too.
Rainbow Dash had forebade her sister from one thing though, and that was ever engaging in combat with the Shadowbolts. In spite of all the bravado that her sister put on, Dash knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that her sister was in no way prepared for real life-or-death combat. Dash herself wasn't prepared for it, and not only had she been the veteran of four engagements with the Shadowbolts, but she'd been a prized Element of Harmony, in what seemed now to be a previous life.
Her sister had protested mightily at first, but after being around for the first official attack on Ponyville, she'd come to realize that Dash's words were not ringing hollow. She'd seen what the Shadowbolts were capable of, and she finally knew that she wasn't going to be of any help to Dash.
If anything, she'd only be a hindrance. Dash couldn't afford to take her concentration away from the fight, and if her sister was involved, she'd be torn between fighting the enemy and keeping her sister safe. Not only that, but maybe she might do something that would end up with her getting in Dash's way, and if she in any way contributed to her sister getting hurt, she'd never have forgiven herself.
So she sat by the wayside with a shattered heart and an irreparably broken soul, waiting on the day when life as she knew it would return and normalcy would prevail again. If that ever happened. She doubted sincerely that it would.
She closed her eyes, intending only to rest them. As soon as her eyelids met, though, her consciousness dropped away, and she slept.
The scene that met her was familiar indeed. The sun was just peeking around from the eastern horizon, greeting the moon as it was lowered beyond the horizon to the west. She roamed the streets, as she had during each night previous. It was a dream, of course, and since the dream had started with the sunrise, there was no way that she could have known that she'd been walking all night.
This was a thing that she knew, though, and she didn't quite question it.
She looked up at the rising sun and she saw a silhouette against the flaming orb. She knew who it was. She'd had this dream too many times before not to know. Pretty soon, she would be able to make out that it was Rainbow Dash, coming home from the war, ready to begin her new-same life under the banner of peace.
As the silhouette became more clear, though, her ennui gave way to shock, though. This dream was different from the rest. Chief of which, was that it was not Rainbow Dash that she saw coming towards her. It was, in fact, one of Rainbow Dash's old friends, a mare that she'd known from the days when she worked for the Canterlot weather factory. Rainbowshine was her name. Her sister had marveled that their names were so similar, and when she'd heard the rumor that the two were involved romantically, she wasn't surprised in the slightest- mostly because she'd been the one to start the rumor to begin with, but that was entirely besides the point.
“R-Rainbowshine...?” she called out weakly. Usually she never talked in her dreams. Not these, anyways. She'd been silent in all of them up until this one. And now she was talking? Things were out of place, indeed.
She saw Rainbowshine smile as she approached her, and she thought she returned the smile. The look on Rainbowshine's face told a different story, though.
“There's not much to smile about, is there?” Rainbowshine asked, as though she could read her every thought. She didn't figure there was much use in denying it, so she simply shook her head.
Rainbowshine laughed mirthlessly. “Yeah, that seems about right. If you see Dash again, tell her that I still think about her. Oh, by the way. You might want to wake up now.”
She wondered what she meant by that for a moment-
The world seemed to shatter all around her at that moment, and her eyes sprung open. The loud explosion was still reverberating in her ears as she jumped down off her bed and sprinted over to the window. She'd been wondering when this would happen again; it'd been a few days since the Shadowbolts had been repelled, and she'd figured it was only a matter of time before they tried it again.
As she reached the window and looked outside, she saw a streak of rainbow mane fly at top speed past her house. Rainbow Dash was at it again, and she almost smiled at the thought of her big sister putting her life on the line to protect her and the others she loved.
A flicker of yellow and orange caught her eye, and as she focused in on it her eyes widened. She saw another mare flying around, avoiding the purple-black bolts of energy tossed at her by the Shadowbolts. She was fighting two of them, expending a lot of effort to dodge their attacks and land some of her own.
She remembered Dash talking about her a lot. If she remembered correctly, the pony she was now seeing was the captain of the Wonderbolts- Spitfire, she realized. When she remembered her name, her mind was opened up to something that genuinely did cause her to crack a smile. The Wonderbolts were now in Ponyville en masse. She could see them flying around, fighting the Shadowbolt forces.
She'd heard from Dash only a few times over the past two weeks, and during one of those brief moments of contact, Dash had told her of a plan she'd been hatching to bring the Wonderbolts to Ponyville, to maybe put an end to the sieges once and for all. She'd been tempted to believe Dash, but with everything she'd heard of the roads being rife with Shadowbolts, stopping anyone and everyone who was trying to move from city to city, asking them if they were smuggling any goods in or out, or if they had any information that they could wring out of them.
With all this information, she'd thought from the beginning that the plan to get the Wonderbolts to Ponyville was never going to be anything but a pipe dream. And yet here they were.
Her eyes found Dash, as she held her own against three of the Shadowbolts. They were firing off dark magic bolts in seemingly every direction. Dash was just too fast for them, though, and that was her single biggest advantage in their contests: they may have access to magics that the pegasi and Earth ponies could never have, but Dash wasn't called The Fastest Pony in Equestria for no reason, and the Shadowbolts never could keep up with her. Any hits they scored on her were minor glances, and often entirely by chance.
She was just that good.
She was mesmerized by the fight. Any time one of the Shadowbolts got hit too hard, by a hard-thrown hoof to the face or being tossed onto rooftops by a pegasus throttling them with their wings, they would simply dissipate as though they had never been there at all. More kept coming, though, sometimes five for each one they killed. It was the proverbial bog hydra all over again, except this was no mythical beast that mothers and fathers used to scare their kids into not going into the Everfree Forest when their curiosities became too much for them to handle.
She almost didn't see it when it happened. Dash had just gotten rid of another Shadowbolt when a shadow darted out of the darkness, lit up only by Luna's light. A familiar purple-black aura sprouted around the Shadowbolt's hooves, and it clasped its hooves tightly together before firing off a targeted blast at Dash's wings. It hit her square between the wings, and Dash cried out in intense pain. Her wingbeats faltered, and she struggled to right herself as she tumbled down towards the ground and out of sight.
The filly let out an involuntary gasp as she raced out of her room, throwing her door open and vaulting down the stairs three or four at a time. Her mind was not working properly, and should she have looked at the situation from a rational, outside perspective, she would have known that what she was about to do was neither warranted nor wise.
She didn't bother with such thoughts at that moment, though. All she could think of was saving her sister, and getting her out of harm's way.
She flung her front door open, entering the crisp night air. She grabbed her scooter that was leaning up against the ornate post that decorated her front porch and pushed off into the night. She rocketed towards where she thought she remembered Dash falling. Out of the shadows, a Shadowbolt leapt out, but with preternatural reflexes she performed a trick on her scooter, flipping the back end around and clubbing the Shadowbolt squarely on the side of its head. It fell by the wayside, and she continued on.
It took her a minute or so to reach Dash. She knew how to use the night shadows to her advantage; she'd had to sneak out before to meet up with her marefriend before the two of them became a public item. With this training (of sorts), she'd been able to make it over to Dash without triggering the ire of any more Shadowbolts.
She found Dash laying atop a bush. The acrid smell of burnt wing feathers and fur hit her like a truck, and she almost staggered and gagged. She dropped the scooter on the ground and ran over to Dash. The wound was nasty; it had bypassed her Wonderbolt armor, issued especially to them by Celestia herself to keep them alive while fighting, and scored a hit straight to her back. It had burned away most of her skin. She could see rivules of blood dripping from the crater-like wound, though it had seemed to have mostly cauterized itself from the heat of the blast.
Dash's eyes fluttered open when she sensed her approach, fear subconsciously creeping into her eyes as she thought about the Shadowbolts and if one had come to put her out of commission permanently. Her concern gave way to shock and a bit of anger when she saw who it was.
“Scootaloo!” Dash hissed quietly, trying to convey her anger but not to attract the attention of any Shadowbolt. “I thought I told you not to come out here when there's a fight-”
“I can't!” Scootaloo whispered harshly. “I'm sorry, but I just can't.” Tears were welling up in her eyes again, and she brushed them away angrily. “I told you a long time ago that there may have come a time where I would have to disobey you. You didn't believe me, but this is that time. I'm not leaving you here to die-”
“You have to!” Dash screamed, no longer caring about whether or not anypony heard her. “The Wonderbolts' presence here was supposed to be a distraction! There's something coming that is going to be the end of this horrible conflict, once and for all!”
Scootaloo barely noticed the air all around her grow thick with Shadowbolts. It seemed as though they had all gathered in Ponyville, every last one of them, all to see this moment. The mighty had finally fallen, and the resistance was dwindling. Or so they thought.
“What is coming?!” one of the Shadowbolts asked angrily.
“Nothing,” came a reply from a particularly ugly Shadowbolt, that Scootaloo almost assumed was one of the leaders. “We've been monitoring the flow of information in and out of here for almost a week and a half. Nothing has even come close to being information of that quality.”
Rainbow Dash half laughed, half coughed, blood pooling at the corner of her mouth. “You don't know everything. Celestia has been waiting for the right moment for days now. And now that you're all here to celebrate your victory, your end has come.” She looked at Scootaloo. “The spell I had Celestia cast on you was only going to protect you as long as you stayed inside like I told you to. And now that you're out here...”
Scootaloo wiped the blood from Dash's mouth. “I don't care. I never did. All I wanted was to protect you, and if I couldn't...” She sniffled a bit, then composed herself. “Then I wanted to die with you.”
She interlocked hooves with Dash, and Dash couldn't help but smile. “That's my sister...” she said softly. “I couldn't ask for more...”
As Scootaloo buried her head in Dash's chest and began to cry for what she could only assume was her last time, she heard a trumpet sound in the distance. She'd heard it before. It came from one of Celestia's personal guards, to herald her coming. And she knew instinctively, that it was the last time she would ever hear that noise, or Dash's voice... Or anything, for that matter.
And as she clung to the only pony she'd ever truly loved, and cried as Dash screamed something incomprehensible, a light as blinding as the sun itself filled her vision, making it so where she saw nothing but an intense white.
She heard screams, she felt her coat begin to flake away from the intensity of the blast. And as she opened her mouth to scream, she felt herself begin to fall into the void, and as she did, she smiled at what she felt. It was something that she'd been hoping to feel for a very long time, but it had eluded her for so long. Not peace, not elation, but simply...
Nothing.