The Day the Sky Changed

by Midnightshadow

To Save Eden - Chapter 1

The Day the Sky Changed
Part 2

To Save Eden
Chapter 1

Note: Okay ponies, I didn't intend originally to post this yet, nor here, but... I'm interested in hearing what you think. I don't think there are all that many watching particularly this story as it was kind of a one-shot, so it's as good a place as any to drop this strange piece which my muse demanded I write. It is raw, unfiltered, un-checked and un-edited but you may find it interesting. I don't usually write in this style, but this time it fit. I will be editing it once finished (it will be in two parts).

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“Midnight Shadow, attend your princess.”

It was not a request, it was a command. I pulled myself blearily out of bed and staggered onto my hooves to see Princess Luna standing before me. I momentarily had a flash of embarasment at being naked, but as my memories returned and the beffudlement of sleep left me I remembered, I don’t wear clothes any more.

I was a pony, a unicorn pony to be precise, dark blue of pelt and sunset-hued of mane and tail. Marked as one of Her Royal Highness’ subjects, she had sought me out oh-so-long ago and hired me.

The confusion was due to the simple extra fact that was so easy to forget. I had not been born a pony. I had been born a man, in a world all but long passed for the majority of the population. Memories flashed through my mind of a desperate flight across a dying landscape, snatching what solace could be had, of my last meal as a human, my first meal as a pony. I had been Converted many, many years ago. It shocked me sometimes, thinking just how many years and how little I had aged. Maybe it was because I was a unicorn, maybe it was my second body. maybe it just didn’t show.

“My princess,” I spoke formally, bowing, “to what do I owe this honour?”

“No time for that now, Shadow dear, I need you to follow me. Your old room-mate and her five friends have already made haste. You and I are also taking the express route.

I hung my head, I hated long-distance teleportation.

What seemed like moments later, for truly not much preparation had been necessary, the rumbling thunder and flashings of light surpassed and my vision cleared to reveal a bubble.

“The Border? My Lady?”

“Aye, Midnight, the Border between our world... and your old home.”

“This, this makes no sense - Equestria is the bubble, Earth...”

Luna shook her head, sadly.

Many years ago, before I had hooves, an island nation appeared overnight in the middle of the Atlantic. This island nation was no ordinary island. More miraculous than its appearance was its inhabitants. A great, almost invisible barrier protected it from the human world, Mundus Mundi. Inside the 'bubble' lived a peaceable race of equines. They spoke, they dressed, they built. They lived and worked in great communities, even cities, but that wasn’t all. Split into three main races, the earth ponies were not unlike, externally at least, our Terran ponies had been, according to the history books. Morphology was where the similarity stopped, however. They were intelligent, some intensely so, and immensely strong. Next came something even more wondrous, the pegasi. Like the winged beasts of legend, these little ponies ruled the skies and lived and worked amongst the clouds. Literally, they walked upon them as if they were solid ground. Even more amazing than that, a third race. The unicorns. These creatures were equine in shape, with a horn adorning their foreheads. Imbued with some indescribable and indecipherable power to manipulate reality around them, they could work real magic.

Ruling them were the most amazing creatures of all. Two winged unicorns, referred to as alicorns, sat on the throne; twin princesses. One of the day, her multi-coloured mane sparkling with all the colours of the aurora and as beautiful as the day is long - Celestia. The other, dark blue, with a mane that shone with the fires of the night sky. My princess, the one I owed my full allegiance to. Luna. I adored the day, but the night was what I called home. I couldn’t understand it, but I had an affinity, something which I can only assume my princess saw when she took me into her employ.

And now, she had come to request my service.

“The barrier?” I repeated, “It has... inverted?”

Luna nodded, sadly, “The planet is falling sway to Equestria. Soon, there will be no more Earth. All will be ours, and mankind will be but a memory.”

I hung my head. The peaceful genocide, they were calling it. The good war. The friendly conquest. Euphamisms for the most bloodless, friendly and good-natured act of mass destruction carried on and on.

It was a terrible thing, when you thought about it. The nation, the realm, of Equestria had expanded its borders. The magical barrier had grown somehow along with the landmass. Soon it crossed the oceans and began to swallow the continents of Earth. Animals and plants were unaffected, but higher forms of primate life - mankind and the great apes - were struck dead by it. Indeed, the barrier was nothing but a soap-bubble to everything else. To humans, it was an immutable object. A fact that had struck down many would-be terrorists and refugees alike before they’d learned.

I, myself, had been witness to it’s devastatingly implacable nature when kidnapped and driven across the country by madmen seeking to gain entrance to plunder Equestria. I had lied, sort of, by omitting the fact that whilst the barrier would accept me, and the van I was being held in along with my friends, it would never, ever accept them. When the van had progressed through the barrier, the men inside it... had not.

Years later the griffons and the dragons would wage a short war on mankind for what had to be imagined tales of slights and misdeeds from ages past. They had erected their own shield barriers and wiped out whole settlements of humans in an instant. Whole cities struck silent as their populace were reduced to something of the consistency of chunky salsa inside their own homes, unable to escape the invisible hand of fate.

War had not come en masse, for the humans could not strike back and Equestrians do not lightly make war, but they did render such cross-realm traffic needlessly difficult and harsh for friend and foe alike. The attacks had stopped.

Now... now the barrier had inverted. Where once tiny Equestria was at the mercy of whatever vagaries had permitted its expansion in the first place, now the last refuges of mankind were under final assault.

It should all have been so easy to avoid, except for that stubborn, proud, amazing human nature. In an uncaring universe that seemed hellbent on their destruction through sheer apathy, mankind had grown strong on the backs of bribery, threats and extortion. we extolled the virtues of peace and friendship whilst embodying cruelty and viciousness. We, quite simply, raped, pillaged and murdered our way to the top of the foodchain. If nature was red in tooth and claw, then so was Man. Some thought it terrible, awful, but I didn't agree with this. In an uncaring universe, you must be strong, you must fight. Man fought. It had made me proud, in a way.

Then one day, so very long ago, I had given all of that up. Equestria was set, from the beginning, to wipe mankind from the face of the planet, so the Equestrians and our best and brightest came up with an alternative to mass extinction. Assimilation. We were offered a choice, a potion which would transform a human into one of the three pony forms. Once we were Equestrian, we could escape crushing inevitable death and pass through the barrier unharmed. I had changed myself relatively quickly, safely and without issues. I had become a unicorn, so long ago was it now that I barely remembered my own name. I'd spent more of my life as a pony than as a man, so my allegiance to that old tribe was one of formality and my own sense of fairplay.

For years afterwards I had looked into the mirror and wondered if the man I had used to be had died. Sometimes I wished he had, othertimes I wept for his memory, but mostly I was happy beyond the dreams I had ever had before.

I was... relatively famous for a while. The princess’ student, a newfoal at that. Seemingly inept at magic, posessing no great and obvious skills above the norm, the princess had seen something in me. She had patience, nerve, and forethought.

Now, years later, I was an accomplished mage and a well-learned scholar of the new forms of physics which linked our two realities. I, almost alone of my kind, understood the barrier between Earth and Equestria.

“Then why are we here? Surely there are no humans left?”

Luna shook her head, “No, the fools refused the potion. They would rather die on two legs than live on four. They come here, to the centre, to live, pray and wait to die.”

“Is there nothing we can do?”

“I refuse to be a monster!” Luna shouted, suddenly, taking to the air, her eyes glowing.

“You... can turn back the tide? Keep this little bubble of reality alive for them?”

The alicorn princess shook her head, “rip our universe in two as if it were some plaything? Nay, I have not that power, little one.”

“Then they will die.”

“No, dear student, I have an alternative.”

“But... what? What can you do? There is no place left on Earth for them to go!” I cried, stomping my forehooves angrily. It was then that she smiled, and I looked up.

The answer was above me. It was ludicrously obvious. It had been there for so long that I forgot about it. Even I, dweller of the night.

“You’re going to send them to the moon?”

Luna smiled again. I shivered. “No,” she said, “nothing quite that simple. I am going to build them a world. See, even now my herd comes. My children. This is what Celestia feared, when the Madness was still upon me, before I was healed and that healing broke the Seal. She feared I would call upon my people and take them to battle.”

“Why...” I gasped, watching as thousands upon thousands of unicorns, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, trudged across the landscape. Some were solemn and regal, others laughed and played, but all of them looked at Luna, “why are you calling them all here?”

“We need to move some forty thousand humans and all that they have through the vacuum of space to an airless planetoid and then transform it into something liveable. It will take more than just you and I.”

I blushed, her chiding words couched in a beneficient smile that warmed my heart, “Then am I to join the herd?”

“No, Midnight, for you are the fulcrum. Your magic is not so great and powerful, little mage, but your mind is quick. More to the point, you are my scribe, tasked with recording history. This, then, is history in the making. the last act of Ponykind for Mankind which will cleanse us of our sins.

My mind latched on to one word: fulcrum.

“My princess, what is it that you want of me?”

“You must observe, Midnight. You must stand and watch, for every act needs an observer. An act as large as this... requires a special observer. Raise your horn skyward, unicorn, and receive my blessing.

I did as I was told. When a goddess asks you to do something, you do it. Never had she done me wrong but still... I was scared. I closed my eyes and trembled. there was the lightest of touches on my horn and what felt like a jolt of power shot through me from that point at the very tip. it burned, scouring through my frame like a wave of flame. I cried out and opened my eyes... and saw.

We were in the air, now, thousands of feet in the air. Below me stretched the earth... more than that, below me stretched The Earth. The Last of The Earth. it was enclosed in a translucent bubble that was the apparent texture of soap, iridescent and gleaming. And shrinking. Around it was an unending tide of colours. Ponies, in their millions, all advancing. Each one a unicorn. There were earth ponies directing the hoof-traffic, pegasi reporting on motions and flitting back and forth with updates, but the vast number were unicorns. I could feel them now, feel them as if they were the sun, a warmth on my body. I communed with them and my mistress on some deep, instinctual level that sang in the blood.

“You hear it, don’t you Midnight? The herd?”

I nodded, a ridiculous gesture whilst hanging in space. I laughed, throwing back my head and emptying my lungs with mirth. My voice, greatly expanded, rocked from horizon to horizon. I felt alive, more alive than I ever had before.

“Easy, Midnight, easy. Take it easy. You’re not used to such power flowing through you. It is alicorn magic, tapped through me, that I freely lend you for this task.”

“Am I, then, an alicorn?”

Luna laughed at my pretentiousness, chastising lightly, “Nay little one, you are but a unicorn. This, above all things, is why you must be careful. The candle that burns at both ends burns twice as bright, but half as long. Take care lest you burn out.” she punctuated the last two words with a physical tap on my chest. I lowered my gaze in shame.

“You have grown accomplished with magic, Midnight Shadow, but you most excel at manipulation of the physical. This is a common trait amongst converted newfoals, one noticeably lost from your offspring. I believe it is something to do with the way your minds work. The unicorns you see beneath you are newfoals, like yourself. They pledge themselves to Equestria when converted and my sister and I see every one as they visit us in their dreamstate. My sister claims those of the day, I those of the night. It has ever been thus. Some, most, like yourself, embody a little of both.”

“I never knew.” I said

Luna shook her head, “If you had thought to ask the question, you would have known. still, this lecture serves little purpose now. My herd will do what they must. They will lift the entire western seaboard into the air, take mental hold of it, and transport it to it’s final location. You, Midnight, will make sure that it and them arrive safely and, more importantly, stay safe.”

“What is there on the moon to cause harm?” I laughed

Luna sighed, “Sometimes I despair. There will be two things on the moon that are dangerous beyond measure. The first, silly stallion, is lack of an atmosphere.”

My cheeks reddened, burning, “I know a spell for creating a bubble of air.”

“Aye, this I know. Many times have I replayed your attempts at conversing with the fishes in the seas, including the times you almost drowned and my personal contingents of guards had to rescue your silly hide, coughing and spluttering from the depths.”

She laughed again at my discomfort, “You lived, and you learnt. This, then, is the same task.”

“My princess,” I asked, “if at atmosphere is the first danger, what is the second?”

“Man.”

Comments

[Banksyt]

This is going well, you make the connection from the "prologue" to the first chapter quite well, i humbly ask for more.

[Windchaser]

I spy a Blade Runner quote!

Good to see that this story is getting some progression! Keep it up Midnight!

[Meta Knight]

I like where you are going with this story!

[FanOfMostEverything]

Hmm. Not sure how they're going to address that second hazard...

Great stuff, and a refreshingly less dark read after the first chapter. I look forward to seeing the Big Move.