When the Everfree Burns

by SpiritDutch

Chapter 47: The Way it has to Be

Rainbow Dash had a lot going through her head, as she was blasted backwards off the second floor of the Everfree Castls's library. Mostly, pain. The fall seemed to last an eternity. The dark mist licked and curled around her, making her see things. The light swam before her eyes, changing between the foggy castle library and enshadowed forest glimpsed beyond the crumbling walls. Then she only saw the mist.
Dash hit the ground with all the grace of a falling tree. Her jaw smacked the ground with enough force to shatter a normal ponies', but in the borrowed alicorn body it served only to send a disorienting blast of pain through Dash's head. For a moment, Dash almost thought she was back in her own body, that she could feel ropes digging into her skin, and that the forest she'd seen was much closer. That feel faded, much to her chagrin.
Dash rolled into a sitting position and dry heaved. If Ancepanox had eaten anything recently the immense dizziness she was feeling would have assuredly made her vomit.

“That was was a hell of a fall. I haven't had one like that since the South Chitin Sea.” Dash mumbled, wiping the dust and drool off her snout.

A muted sound echoed around her. Rarity was making sounds up on the second floor. Dash prayed the obscuring fog worked both ways, and Rarity couldn't see her from the advantageous position.

Cautiously, Dash stood up. Her took one step and slipped on something, clattering to the floor again. Her knee knocked against something very sharp, cutting the skin.
Dash stifled a shout, cursing her accident-prone luck. She stayed still to make sure Rarity couldn't hone in on the ruckus, in which time the alicorn body's natural healing mended the cut.

During her second attempt at standing up her hoof bumped against what had cut her knee and sent it clattering across the floor. However the noises from above had abated- Rarity must have sought an alternative way into the library.
Dash stumbled around in the black fog, trying to regain her bearings. Even with a nightmare’s increased night-vision, she could hardly see a hoof in front of her face. She tripped over a fair few book piles before she came face to face with the mystery object she'd been bumping into.
It was a sword, somewhat like the cutlass backswords she’d used on ships before, but much thinner. The particular make of sabre was used by cavalryponies for slashing during a charge. Although the small armory stamp declared it to be of Manehattan make, such sabres were much more common amongst the pegasi, for earth ponies preferred lances for their knights, and unicorns preferred maces and halberds.

“Where'd this come from?” Dash hummed, turning the silvery sword over. There was something strangely enrapturing about the sabre. It was discolored, like it had been soaked in ink and poorly cleaned. Dash wasn't magically educated to explain it's sensation at the touch: She could almost swear it was vibrating, or fighting to get out of her grasp, but that feeling was purely mental. With a jolt, Dash realized it made her feel the same way as the crescent chasm south of the Everfree Castle, that had so overwhelmed her when she'd gone in to get water.

“This must be Ancepanox's. ” Dash reluctantly tucked the cursed sword under a wing. If it was going to come down to a fight with Rarity, an actual weapon would give her a chance.

But having lost chance of Rarity, Dash ran the real risk that the murder-bent unicorn would beeline to the altar and wait in ambush. That was just fine, since Dash was much more concerned about keeping Rarity distracted for as long as possible- Dash just needed to wait for Ancepanox to come out of the dream.
Then again if the past few days were any lesson, it was to never underestimate the power of things to be completely bizarre and weird.

“With how thick this fog is, the source must be really close.” Dash whispered to herself. "Rarity's altar might be in this very library."
Dash had to contend with both her own impulses, and how she imagined Rarity would act. Rarity had been wild, instinctually predatory- Dash bet that she would be on the prowl, searching for where her prey was hiding.

---

For a few minutes after Dash's plummet, Rarity stayed on the balcony. She stood still, trying to pick out by eye and ear where the alicorn body had fallen. There were a few muted sounds, but they came from several locations at once, and for sight the fog was far to thick to see any movement.
One by one, she pulled out the wooden splinters from the banister from her face, and indulged in the sharp sting as the wounds healed themselves. Alternating waves of blinding hatred and soothing pain radiated over her.

Rarity finally unclenched her jaw. It was time to start hunting again. She unwound her makeshift scarf, the tapestry her soul was bound to, and uncreased the folds. Satisfied it would hang elegantly when tied, she rewrapped it about her neck, taking care to make sure none of her glowing mane was caught.
Her head pounded with throat-clenching urges. KILL KILL KILL, they demanded.

“Never rush a lady.” Rarity harrumphed. She turned from the edge of the balcony and sought out the nearest stairwell. She had no idea where Dash would be heading now that visual contact was lost. Rarity would have to think strategically, and root the infuriating creature out of wherever it was hiding.

---

From her hiding spot among the bookshelves on the ground floor, Celestia watched Ancerpanox heave Agana over the side and tossed her down the atrium. The peacock alicorn flailed her wings to no avail, and she smashed through a table before coming to rest in the debris on the floor.

Agana whispered and muttered under her breath, her intonation changing between raging and whimpering rapidly. The back-to-back beatdowns was breaking the peacock alicorn's psyche. She struggled upright, her wings drooping.

"Celestiaan!" Agana finally said something loud enough to be overheard. "Celestia! Celestia! I need to talk to you."

Celestia waited in the shadows a few moments longer, then creapt forward. “Having trouble?” She whispered.

“Ehh... Celestiaan.” Agana clutched her head. She had a thin hole in her neck that whistled when she breathed. The murky light of the corrupting eye in the sky could not quite reach her through the stained glass skylight oculus anymore, and the wound could not heal. "I'm falling apart. This is how I felt before I destroyed my physical body. But there is nowhere left to withdraw to. This is my last resort." She gurgled.

“You seem unable to handle Ancepanox, on her own.” Celestia observed quietly.

Agana was far to disoriented to read into Celestia's tone. "She has replaced the old Nightmare of the Moon in every way. I'm reeling right now... I have been beaten at my own game. She developed a dream magic far more potent than mine."
She clacked her beak, holding her head up to face down Celestia. "I have to kill you, for her to spare me."

Celestia stood unmoving. “She's just going to kill you anyway. You must know this."

“Prepare yourself!” Agana’s demand came as a choked plea. “Do it! Now!”

“And even if she spares you, what will you do with the rest of your existance? What corner of the dreamscape would you shamble into, while Ancepanox dives deep and high, coming closer to the truths you would kill for?” Celestia arched a brow. “You were so proud, not half-an-hour ago. Now you are doing the crude math of a slave, pecking at survival.”

Agana took a step away so she was under the overhang of the floor above, out of Ancepanox’s potential line of sight, however much that mattered.
"If she comes down here, she will destroy us both! I have to think in my best interest here. If I survive, I may yet convince her of the propriety of my beliefs." Agana knew she was rambling for her own benifit more than Celestia's, for her panic only grew at Celestia's passive expression. "What else am I to do? Terror grips me! I don't want to die.”

“Nopony wants to die." Celestia said. Her brow furrowed. "Ancepanox didn't send you down here to fight me. That much is certain. She knows we will cooperate."

"This goes beyond opportunism, Celestiaan. We did some fabulous work together in our day, but that hour has passed." Agana said in a rushed mumble. "You betrayed me. I betrayed you. Whichever! I trust you even less than I do her."

Celestia remained silent.

"Your surprise attack did nothing against her. We can't beat her." Agana paced in a very tight circle. "There is no escape either! I'm sure she has devised some way to constrain us in here, to prevent us returning to Twilight Sparkle's dream. I know for certain the power of my dream is being interdicted! It makes my brain feel like mush without it."

Celestia's scowl deepened. "Ancepanox seems to think I am much more desperate and panicked than I am. Yes, I am desperate, but I am not panicked." She tisked. "I have no power without my sun. I would be powerless to resist. Ancepanox wants to see what horrible things I do, in my desperate." She laughed to herself. "Looking for poetry, my faithful student?"

"What are you even talking about?" Agana whimpered. "Dark Lady, Dark Lady, please deliver this sinner who has lost her crown. I was unworthy of you. Let me live! Let me live!"

"Worldviews and ideology isn't doing much for us now. We need power to triumph." Celestia said to herself. "I need power."

Agana continued to rant and whimper, indecisive, confused. She didn't notice Celestia creeping closer.

"Fundamentally, Ancepanox is elevated by communal power: The Tower, the Ritual, this Library, and shared dreams..." Celestia said to herself. "Can I fight fire with fire, or do I double-down on hierarchal power?"

"Alicorns can't preform the Stars' Ritual, Celestia." Agana burried her head in her hooves, then draped herself with a wing. "What would we even sacrifice?! Would it even work in a dream?"

Celestia stood Agana, her upright stance looming over the cowering peacock alicorn. "Follow my logic here. According to the Stars' Ritual, complimentary dreams plus great power equals divine magic, AKA an alicorn." Celestia said, lacking no resolve in her expression and movements. “If we flip the equation, is it not true that an alicorn can be broken down, yielding dreams and great power?"

Agana gave a halfhearted shrug. "What does it matter Celestiaan? This will end in death for us anyway."

Celestia flicked her gaze upwards, where Ancepanox would be waiting for one of their deaths. “You wanted to see what I would resort too. You are in for the show of a lifetime, sister."

---

Contrary to Celestia's expectations, Ancepanox was not watching, vulture-like, relishing the other alicorns' suffering.
The black alicorn was in one of the highest floors of the library. Here the bookshelves were mostly empty, but with a few books and scrolls tucked here and there. Many pairs of eyes stared out from the darkened corners, watching the dreamer closely for some incalculable reason.

Ancepanox was seated at one of the reading tables, staring at the wall. She wasn't think of anything, just staring, her big blue-purple eyes tracing the minutest cracks in the marble facade, the defects of the wood trim, the gaps between the wall and the bookcases. In the waking world, little defects like that would attract dust and cobwebs. But in the dreamworld, tiny overlooked details could hide whole worlds, or be genuine fissures into unplumbed depths of mind and space.

Ancepanox wondered, what was the deepest one could go? That land that lay under the starry skies of heaven, but not exist physically... How could she reach it? That had been Agana's puzzle, and thought Anceapnox had chosen to fight rather than complete it, it still nagged her.
As creatures of the waking world, mortals were used to speaking of every other realm in relation to the waking world. When Anceapnox contemplated the possibility that there was another place that, for lack of proper terminology, 'even more real' than the real world, it made her feel hollow. She felt like there was a big gap in her gut. Where was that esoteric land at the bottom of the Tower, and how could she reach it?

Ancepanox admitted, it was not the most helpful line of speculation while enemies still breathed. But she had to wonder... If she knocked down that library wall, with its cracks and gaps, would she be in a desert at the base of an impossibly tall black tower?

A strange sound bellowed up from the bottom of the atrium. Ancepanox stirred, looking over her shoulder in annoyance. Were Agana and Celestia finally having it out? The sound came again, but it was not the sound of fighting. She was at once on her hooves and peering down to see the cause.
There was no sign of movement.

Ancepanox glanced back at the wall, sighed, and vaulted over the railing, gliding to the bottom.

She was immediately struck by a very odd feeling permeating the bottom floor. It was something that shouldn't have existed in the dream without her knowing, yet Ancepanox was taken very off guard. "There's something rattling around upstairs. I can feel it. I can almost... taste it." She gnawed her lip, glancing around for sign of the other alicorns. The sense of emptiness in her gut was getting worse. She was alone.
She held out a hoof, staring at it intently, then slowly drew it up towards the skylight, then back down. There was something within, around, and without her. It was like a feeling deep in her spine. "Somepony, or something, is watching. And I find myself wanting."

"Hey! Over here!" A familiar squawking voice, broke the somber silence.

Ancepanox made a full circle, but still saw no sign.

“Think three-dimensionally.” Now that Ancepanox was paying attention, she could tell the direction. She did as she was asked, and tilted her head upward.
Above her, a horn embedded into ornamental wood trim of the bottom of the higher floor, was Agana’s disembodied head.

“Hwo ho ho, wow. You’ve been bodied.” Ancepanox could not help but remark.

“Mooneater, I've been rendered apart!” Agana’s head said angrily. "Look at how I suffer trying to obey you!"

“Wait, wait…”Ancepanox gnawed her lip in thought. “Oh oh! How about, ‘Should have kept your head on out there’. Or ‘You were headed for destruction’. NO, I’ve got it! Ahem, ‘It was a bad idea to take her head-on’. “

“Celestia is escaping with the rest of me!” Agana screamed.

Ancepanox's smile wilted. "Yeah, I can see that. I didn't expect her to break out so fast." She hummed. "Did she cause the strange aura I'm feeling?"

"How should I know! I stopped being able to sense anything at about the point by brain stem was disconnected from by spinal cord." Agana hissed bitterly.

“You know, I almost regretted not killing you. This more than makes up for it.” Ancepanox remarked. She reached out with her telekinesis and dislodged Agana’s horn from the wood. She caught the avian head as it fell. “You’re cute like this, like a little toy. I just wanna carry you around everywhere.”

"This is no laughing matter! Celestia is on her way to do something terrible with my body. You must stop her and get it back!" Agana said.

Ancepanox rolled her eyes. "Look, I can sense that Twilight Sparkle is still in my dream on one of the middle floors, so there's really no incentive for me to chase Celestia, wherever she may have gone." She shrugged. "Maybe it's better this way... She disappears into the folds of the dreamscape, I don't have to overcome my last reservations."

Agana did not seem very pleased with that.

"But it can't be over..." Ancepanox said, squinting. "Where does this strange empty feeling come from? It's almost the same as... as I felt before meeting Myriadess. Hmm." She cleared her throat. "Well whatever. If I track down Celestia, she might know."

With Agana's head in hoof, she jumped up to the floor where Twilight Sparkle was laying. The phantasm dream-things were beginning to mill in the shadows, doing the librarian's work of reshelving and transcribing the books.

“How did Celestia get out of my dream?” Ancepanox asked Agana.

“I could only see out of the corner of my eye, but I think it was a book.”

"A book? But the books represent my memories." Ancepanox scowled. She picked a random tome off a nearby shelf and inspected it. Besides the unusual words within (the memory seemed to be a stream-of-consciousness of one of Twilight's many sleep-deprived study sessions) it acted like a book would in the waking world.
"Does Celestia know a spell that lets her pry into pony's memories?"

"You think I know much more about Celestia than I do." Agana grunted. "My expertise is with dreams. If there are parallel, abstracted energy realms, I have no knowledge or access to them, memories among them."

Ancepanox tapped her chin. "Could Celestia, with her Phantom Time power, delve into the inherently temporal barrier between this existance and a memory?"

"Again, how should I know?" Agana said, increasingly annoyed.

"Unless the power lies with the concept of the book itself? Latent power of written words? Space-dream shuffling with thaumo-linguistics." Ancepanox's speculation went on. "Maybe it wasn't literally a memory, but a sub dream in the shape of the memory. I admit I'm not well versed enough it this stuff yet to know if that's possible."

"All those guesses sound wrong." Agana let out a gravelly sigh. "Unless... There could be a loophole.” Agana clacked her beak in contemplation. “Hear me out: A memory of a dream."

"Go on." Ancepanox said.

"I am entering a world of pure speculation here. When ponies lay their head down and 'dream' they have an experience in the Dreamscape, sometimes within their own dream, sometimes within other creatures', sometimes in places unknown and indescribable to even me." Agana said. "If you remembered those dreaming experiences, it could bridge dreamscape and memory-scape, if indeed those are separate realms."

Ancepanox wasn't really listening. The strange feeling in her spine was growing and growing. She had an unshakable feeling of being watched now.
Being watched... Watched...
Something from beyond was watching her, the library, and the whole drama. It had been watching when she'd met Myriadess. It had been watching when the Tower broke- every time it broke, once across all time.
"Celestia actually bucking did it. She used Dark Magic." Ancepanox whispered. She cocked her head back. The dark splotch in the sky, the corrupting eye that represented Agana's magic, stared back. "Holy buck. She used my dream as a big semaphore to shout her message into heaven, like you were intending to do."

Agana. whose train of thought was still with books and memories, gawked in confusion. "What?"

"Using your body, a context they understand, Celestia somehow gathered enough magic to fire a message into heaven!" Ancepanox gave a little laugh, awestruck. "But... That must mean she's still here, in my dream."

There was a shuffling noise, then a noice like rain on grass. Ancepanox reluctantly turned around.
Celestia was there staring, motionless, Agana’s headless body shifting idly at her side.

Ancepanox and Celestia locked eyes. The sun princess was missing one of her wings, which would have given her a comical appearance if not for the tired look and her tight-lipped frown showing something between sadness and dejection. Ancepanox went to step forward, but the sun princess acted faster.
‘No’, Celestia mouthed.

Ancepanox was able to enviously assess Celestia’s magical trap as a true masterwork of spellcraft, even as it impacted against her shoulder and blasted nearly half of her away. Like one of her signature solar beams, but using the power of the corrupting eye, distilled and concentrated into a single purple bolt of magic that bloomed into an inferno of soul-rending energy. It was the kind of spell a pony spent years getting the math and patterns right for, and weeks preparing to cast, and Celestia had whipped it up in a moment. Ancepanox’s admiration dwindled, like the rest of her, until the blinding light faded and her remaining parts flopped to the ground. For the second time in so short a span, Ancepanox's dreaming form dissipated away.

Agana watched in shocked silence, unable to tear her eyes away from the smoking aftermath of the spell. Celestia moved forward confidently, and Agana’s body floated in its weightless way to her heel. The dream-scribes withdrew back into the shadows, their glowing eyes darting between Celestia and the ashy residue of their dream-host.

“Just like I said, Agana. Decompose an alicorn, and you get great power.” Celestia said in an empty monotone, kicking at the pile of ash. The stump of Celestia’s own wing twitched. “She will regenerate very soon- She has multiple dreams to call upon, and unlimited tries at life. We can't win an attritional battle. I only have so many of my own limbs I can eat."

Agana’s head distractedly glanced between Celestia and the ashes, which were even then putting out coursing trials of darkness to reconstitute itself. “Whatever you've done, I want no part of it. Escape with my body if you have to, but let me live! I- I- I can still make a deal with her. The Mooneater can keep me around. You too, if you say the right thing! We would be alive, but subservient.”

“Quit your babbling. I had a similar choice with Luna. No deals, I said to her, no compromise. She beat my castle into the ground, and I along with it. Then at the height of her victory, she refused to finish it, so I did.” Celestia recalled, with all the emotion of remembering a tooth pulling. “There will always be a hint of sanity and compassion within the ponies fallen to the Dark, but is it really enough? Perhaps is even worse than if they were entirely insane, their having that sliver of one’s self knowing how wrong her actions and existence is.”

Celestia turned to Twilight Sparkle. "Oh Twilight..." The pony had slept through so much change. "If I had known fighting you when you were Forlorn Spark would lead to this moment, I may have let you kill me. Who could say what would have resulted then. It would have been better than this." She pulled Twilight up with her magic. “If it were I who had been bent to the capricious will of evil egos, I would need to be destroyed. So it is with my dear sister. She is lost. Stopping her will save ponykind. Ending her will be a mercy to her memory and her soul.”

“Celestia, old friend, I worry about your sanity.” Agana chirped nervously.

“Concerned? Ancepanox's existence is, after all, similar to your own.” Celestia appraised. Her grim mask almost cracked as she smiled slyly. “You are right to worry.”

Agana’s eyes shot open. “Celestiaan don’t do it!” Celestia picked up the head and tossed it into the corner. “CELESTIAAAaaaa…” Agana wailed until she ran out of breath. Her yells were muffled by the pile of scrolls she’d landed in. “You can’t do this to me!”

“This isn’t about you!” Celestia went to work as she talked, grabbing Twilight and preparing her spell. “I can not, WILL not, let anypony take away what I have toiled for for centuries! My life! My EXISTENCE as a THINKING creature can not be subject to the whims of a monster like Ancepanox. A time may come when I can rest, knowing I will be in good hooves, who will celebrate and care for me, as I did for ponykind. But that is not tonight. If I must make a deal with the higher powers to see it all through, I will.”
Celestia did not chose a memory at random. She very deliberately levitated an old, decaying pamphlet from between two larger books. She weighed it, reluctant. “Good bye, Agana. Ancepanox will kill you before she catches up to me. It has been exciting, hasn't it.”

“Celestia!” Agana yelled, helpless to do anything but. . “Celestia? H- Hello?”

Celestia’s parting was marked by the crack of magic as she, Twilight, and most of Agana teleported away into the abstruse depths of the memory.

---

They winds of the moon began to billow, churning up the grey dusts of the seas and peaks. Eyes from above and below were beginning to turn to that luminous rock. At last, worship befitting that celestial sphere would be given.
Blood and souls. Dark. Gods and gods, gods and mortals, mortals and mortals. It was the way it had to be.

Luna felt a tingle in her spine. They were being watched. "Are you coming, Celestia?" She whispered. "Not for me, but for one above?"

---

Ripple Wreath rubbed his eyes. He was among trees, with fat grey trunks rooted into packed dirt, in a real of thick fog.
"Oh, this place again." He muttered. "How did I get here this time?" He'd been knocked onto death's door, hadn't he, by that horrific monster of vines that had imprisoned Agana. It had sliced up his transformed body and bled him white. "Damn it all. How do I get back from this one?" He asked himself. He chose a decent looking boulder embedded in the earth to sit on while he considered his options.

Up from the shadow crawled a terrible queen of misery. Her pony torso was fused abhorrently to the abdomen of a great indigo spider, whose long chitinous legs scraped deafeningly against the sides of the pit from which she came. She had no horn, but her mane of tartauric smoke sparked with daemonic energy.
Upon emerging from the infinite deep, the queen laid her multitudinous eyes upon the pony dreamer trespasser. Wreath was looking glum, having taken a seat at the edge of the pit, trying his hardest to ignore his dour surroundings.

“What brings you to the purgatorial wastes of the Forest, sir knight?” The forest queen asked. It being that arachnids have no lungs, her words were wheezed and rattled.

Ripple Wreath looked up at the half arachnid queen. “I'm mad. I was having a great time being a wolf-thing, but I was killed.” He sighed deeply. “Maybe I’ll get used to peace, my woes carried away on these, um, decidedly stale currents.”

“Oh, well that is unfortunate.” The forest queen said sympathetically.

“I’m not even sure what on earth it was this time. Some kind of rock-tentacle thing. An old god, things unconceived of my me before this dark night.” Wreath laid back in the leaf litter and stared up into the mist-shrouded canopy. “You know, you see some weird things in life. Up in Prancia especially, where the thick forests there hide all kinds of chimeras and half-this half-thats. But this adventure to Canterlot has all but taken the cake.” He bit his lip. “Adventure. It sounds so innocent. What sane stallion would label this night as an adventure.”

“I don't know much about the waking world, expect for what passers-by tell me." The forest queen said. "Listen there... Perhaps you can hear the souls of the newly dead plodding along." She went silent, and Wreath listened for sounds in the mist. Indeed he heard muted sounds at a distance, silent moans, crunches, creaks, groans. "They are how I know this part of the Forest is near a place called Canterlot. It is through them I know some things: A thing called Celestia reigns above that city. Before her, mortal kings called the Blackhorns, a lineage I myself have met as they march the dead's way. They were sullen with severe eyes, the Blackhorns."

"Yeah, okay." Wreath pretended to act interested in the forest queen's anecdotes. "How things were doesn't do me much good. I want to be away from Canterlot. It's too savage for me. I want to be back North, nestled among the pony-eating beasts of the woods and mountains. At least then I wouldn't have to worry for my sanity." He chuckled, a sinister smile growing. "Still, I can't deny its been its own kind of fun. Getting lost among ancient statues, fighting alicorns, feeling the blood shooting through my veins. It's not just adrenalin. It's... A testament of existance. I'm doing something POWERFUL and MEMORABLE." He laughed darkly. "Dying after a few more good experiences like that wouldn't be so bad. As it is, I can't help but feel I went too soon.

“I can't say I know what you mean. Dwelling in this forest doesn't lend itself to the kind of excitement you're talking about.” The queen pulled herself fully from the pit and found a spot to rest her abdomen, twisting herself into a rough approximation of sitting.

“It's funny, in a way. Ostensibly my family sent me to train with Glori Sabonord to learn how to be a hardy knight. And yes, she was hardcore. But even Glori wasn't wild enough to break through my shell. I needed real blood, real death, before I could understand." Wreath nodded, his smile growing bigger. "Is it a curse, or all in my head, how I could relish the squealing deaths of everypony that ever wronged me? When did I snap? When I decided immortality could be achieved through perpetual hate? Yes, yes, I devoted myself to that decision so thoroughly it brought me back to life. How can a decision like that not drive a pony mad."

The queen clasped her hooves together and mulled over Wreath’s words. “I do not often meet mortals like you. Or are you mortal? If an alicorn has cursed you, your state of existance could be in doubt."

I don't care about the doubt. I'm not in any existential angst anymore. I've discovered what I like and what I'm good at.” Wreath said sharply. "I know what I'm after. It’s the emotion. I crave it. I want somepony to look at me, and be totally, truly afraid. So afraid they forget everything else.” Wreath said with shaky breaths. “Everybody made fun of me before I went off to become a knight. Even then I only got respect when I wore the helmet."

"So?" The queen pointed out.

"So I want my mother or father to look me in the face, free of that helmet, and see just how powerful a pony who's embraced hate can be. There's no doubt they'd be afraid. But that's not enough for me, no. I have to become more, like I know I can. I beleive in myself. I have it within me, that friend or stranger could see me at a mere glance, and forget all that they know in the face of the terrors they will feel, for my power and pain."

The queen remained silent for a long time, just staring at Wreath. Wreath just went back to looking up at where the sky should have been.
“Here, at the end of things, ponies have no reason to be coy or hide what they truly think. Thus I can say with a measure of certainty, that those are not normal feelings."

“I don't think I much care about what was normal. I have no desire to bend to the will of consensus. I have only two souls I must obey now- My own, and Ancepanox's. Are my thoughts abhorrent thoughts? Yes. But nopony has the power to punish me for them.” Wreath fiddled with a wayward strand of his mane. “How can anypony look at me with a straight face, and say democracy, normalcy, or consensus matters in a world where a prince can level cities. That magesty used to belong to Celestia. Now it belongs to Ancepanox and me."

The sound like a choked gasp cut her off. From a point not far off the ground, a sphere of total darkness spread forth. The haughty and ragged form of Ancepanox stepped out from the breach in the world before it closed. She looked around.

“Not so hasty, my progeny." Ancepanox said. The black alicorn looked very solemn, but thankfully Wreath was not the object of her frustrations. "We have work still to do."

Wreath and the forest queen shared a look of shocked bewilderment.

“Lady Ancepanox!” Wreath stammered out. He jumped to his hooves, then knelt, bowing his forehead to the dirt. "My lady... I had given up hope of seeing you again. I've been thinking so much about you."

"I'm charmed, Sir Ripple Wreath. I have been thinking of you as well." Ancepanox pushed wreath back into standing position. "Firstly, my hearty congratulations for whipping Agana."

"Thank you my lady. She hardly put up a fight." Wreath bowed his head again.

"Yes... She's certainly an odd one. She escaped into the dreamscape you see."

Wreath cleared his throat. "I wouldn't know about all that stuff my lady."

"Of course. Sufice it to say, her soul survived, manifesting in another realm like the one we're in now." Ancepanox explained. "She tried to use her power to conquer one of my friend's mind and..." She trailed off, seemingly noticing the forest queen for the first time. "Umm, help there.

The forest queen fidgeted, her arachnid half twitching madly. "You should not be here, necromancer, alicorn. Go back to the walking world. You have been the cause of no small amount of woe for this stallion, and you come to torment him more."

"Don't talk to her like that." Ripple Wreath scowled. "I'm sure she has good reason to be here."

Ancepanox shifted on her hooves, her sullen eyes shifting between the two. "Don't be a buckwit. I'm here for you, of course."

"Yes, my lady.” Wreath sighed and closed his eyes. There was something about the alicorn's presence that relived the subtle tug of longing at his heart, and filled him with a hint of undiluted pleasure. "I suspected but didn't dare be so arrogant as to assume."

"Ripple Wreath, you may dispense with the formalities. I've seen inside you." Ancepanox smirked. "Yes I have caused you suffering. I regret that I shared my curse with you, using you like a filthy rag to assuage my own needs."

"My lady, Ancepanox, you have no need to feel that way. You've liberated me. If there is anything to regret it is that it was not a happy, consensual experience." Wreath gnawed his lip, trying to voice his feeling without offending her. "If you want to make amends or, if you wish it, recompense, I can not object."

The forest queen was looking very annoyed by the apparent harmony between the two ponies.

"Then we are of one mind, or at least, of linked minds." Ancpeanox nodded. "I am here to restore you to life. I don't think necromancy will be necessary- because of the nightmare, your body has not entered the death state that rejects its own soul. I can send your soul back, and you can rest there, until I come for you."

“Okay.”

Wreath nodded slowly. There was a small part of him, as there is in every mortal, that craved the aluring restfulness of the forest. He'd endured brutalization and punishment beyond what a mortal could sustain. Of course, his rational mind was fully committed to the purposes of hatred, battle, and progress. There was more yet to be done. "Thank you Lady Ancepanox. I would rather wake up right away though, if that's possible. I have unfinished buisness."

"I can do that." Ancepanox agreed. "I'm very proud of you, Sir Ripple Wreath. You've progressed greatly in the short time I've known you."

"I owe some of that to you. That dark manifestation, when I was by the river contemplating letting myself die... You told me what I needed to hear." Wreath said, somewhat cheerlessly. "Lady Ancepanox, I will continue to serve you however I can. I will remain in Canterlot under Astral Nacre's wardship until you come for me."

"That suites my purposes." Ancepanox said.

Wreath turned to the forest queen. “Thank you for the company, mis. I am glad to have met you."

"Just leave already." The forest queen sighed. "This is a place for the dead. You mortals should go play somewhere else." Still, the she gave a deep curtsy, or the closest equivalent her rotund abdomen and eight spindly legs could allow. “Never hurts to be polite, I suppose."

"Be seeing you." Ancepanox grunted to the forest queen.
Taking a step back from the others, Ancepanox squeezed her eyes closed in concentration. The sphere of dark, that cosmic eye, swelled into existance. "Alright Ripple Wreath. Let's get you back to your dream."

“Right.” Wreath sighed, and stepped into the sphere.

Wreath experienced the transition poorly, for even at its gentlest the forest grew attached to the lost souls passing through. He felt a pain as though an icicle was being jammed into every inch of his body, then a tortuous stretching that threatened to rip his soul apart, then a squeezing contraction that threatened to crush him into a forgettable pinprick. A thousand shooting stars filled his vision, all crashing down upon his spine and beating him until he regretted ever existing.
He’d never woken up so sore. But then, seeing the grey stone in front of his face, he remember that it was just another dream. The cosmic eye had delivered him in a jumbled heap on the top of his family’s keep.

“A castle?” Ancepanox was pacing along the edge of the ramparts. “Is this your home? That’s sweet, in a way. Always dreaming of home, you are.”

“Sweet isn’t the word I’d use.” Wreath groaned as he took to his hooves. He looked to the rampart just behind Ancepanox, where he had fallen last time he was there. He remembered that monstrous tangle of flesh that had pulled itself out to torment him. “The idea of home doesn’t exactly fill me with happy thoughts.” He looked around, slightly more closely. "I don't think this is home though."

"No?"

"I mean, it similar..." Wreath turned a full circle, taking in the landscape. The castle jutted out of a rocky island in the middle of the river. On either side of the flowing cold waters, a small strip of land that abruptly rose into mountains many times higher than the castle. "But the details are all wrong. The mountain face, the colors of the trees, even the smell of the air. This castle is not home."

Ancepanox pursed her lips. "I don't think that matters all too much." A castle parting a river, betwixt two mountains. There was a theme there but Ancpeanox's didn't care enough to delve into it yet. Better left for another time.
What was more interesting was the possibility that, like the cathedral-library, the land beyond the limits of the dream was connected to that yet-only-hinted esoteric place, the base of the Tower, a land of dreams. Ancepanox had to ignore the temptation to launch into the sky and try to fly to that mysterious place.

"So I will wake up, my body healed, right where I fell." Ripple Wreath's words brought Ancepanox back to the present. "Better not the later. I don't want to stay here." Wreath frowned. "So what do you really want. Why did you fetch me."

Ancepanox smiled sadly. "It's not complicated, though I'm shamed that I do indeed have some ulterior motives for saving you again. You see..." She cleared her throat and pushed back strands of her mane. "I need your help to corner and kill Celestia."

“Celestia? CELESTIA?!” Wreath's jaw fell open in disbelief. “The empress is still alive? But...”

“Ehh, well, somewhat alive.” Ancepanox rolled her hoof around gesturally, weighing responses. “More than is best for her. I didn't know either, when we parted. ”

“So, you were wrong when you said you killed her, but now you want to make that claim true.” Wreath gasped like a fish, lost for words. “My lady, I don't want to deny you, but I don't know how I can help with a thing like that.”

Ancepanox grinned. "Okay, here is the quick explanation."

Some minutes previous

When Ancepanox had regained a sembelance of conciousness after being blasted out of her own dream by Celestia's attack, she found herself in a small cottage. It was a humble place, made of wood and thatch, with stone foundations. It had all the amenities of a comfy peasant domicile, a fireplace with a cauldron, a few tables covered in belongings, and the prized bed at one end with curtains around it.
Then there were the cottage's inhabitants. They were ill defined, hazy things, pony-like in shape but obscured by shadow, like Celestia had been the first time Ancepanox had met her atop the Tower. Yes, the dream of the cottage was degraded, and the faces of the ponies inside it had been forgotten.

"This is the dream of one of Glori's knights I hunted." Ancepanox said to herself. "He dreamt of home. That's very nice for him."

But the dream was her's now, taken when she'd hunted him, as with dozens of other victims. It's time had come.
Ancepanox let out a long sigh. Releasing her hold on the dream. All the details of the cottage, the products of a dreamer's life, dissolved away, until all was black, and Ancepanox was a pinpoint of purple in a vast emptiness.

The cottage dream had been sacrificed to give her new life. That is how she could survive being killed in her own dream.

Reaching out in the blackness, Ancepanox became aware of the other stolen dreams, the other ponies she'd fatally hunted- There were nearly fifty of them still powerful enough to restore her, if the need arose. Over time, they would fade and dissipate on their own, for a dream held but not nourished would wither. Ancepanox would need to get new dreams once that happened.
Finally Ancepanox brushed against the object of her search, her own dream the Cathedral-library, and reentered it.

Agana's head waited patiently in the pile where she'd been tossed. One of the shadowy dream-denizen scribes uncovered her while fetching a scroll and, acting annoyed that somepony had put a disembodied head out of place in the organizational system, had set her on a nearby lectern before wandering off. Now sideways of the lectern, Agana awaited Ancepanox to return.

Agana was no stranger to being alone. She had been lashed in place in the Vacuous Arcanum for almost a thousand years, her only company being the intermittently active statue golems. To survive the crushing loneliness, Agana had spent most of that time with her brain turned off, hibernating, letting her consciousness float in the dreamscape. That was where she'd honed her dream-powers, crafted her ideology, and nurtured the corrupting eye.
How depressing that none of that mattered now. What was to come next? How could Agana move forward?

The pile of ash on the library floor stirred. Like a sleeper coming out from under their covers, Ancepanox tossed and turned, pushing out of the ash.

"I looked and beheld an ashen horse, and her name was Death. Hell followed her." Agana joked to herself. Then aloud. "Mooneater, are you lucid?"

"This is less fun than next time" A groan came back. "Celestia did a much better job destroying me this time."

“I sympathize.” Agana said with bitter sarcasm. “Celestia is getting away, but my all means, you can take all the time you need.”

“You know maybe I will.” Ancepanox sat up and stretched her limbs. After a few minutes of the exercise she trotted over the the lectern Agana had been set on. “So, Agana, how are you adjusting to your de-truncation?"

"Is this how you are going to spend your time? Bothering me?" Agana growled.

"Yes, because I think you're a cretin and deserve to have it pointed out to you. I also enjoy it very much. It's just about the only thing keeping me from grinding my teeth down." Ancepanox said, voice dropping into a seething growl. "Celestia knew I would have let her get away, if she just kept her hooves off Twilight. She's taunting me, leading me, inviting me to follow her. You facilitated this, by letting her decapitate you! Idiot! I told you your neck was your weak point!"

"I'm sorry, but I have as much at stake as you.” Agana shot back.

"And significantly less ability to do anything. You're a freaking head! I could kick you like a ball. In fact, that probably how you got wedged in the ceiling."

"As a matter of fact-"

"Shut up. You don't speak unless I'm asking a question. That's how this relationship works now." Ancepanox glared. The black alicorn closed her eyes, trying to release the bubbling passions she felt welling up inside herself. There was a time for those raging emotions, but at present she needed her reason and cool-headed intellect to chase Celestia. When the sun princess was caught and the hunt began, that is when she would let loose.

And then there was Agana. Oh Agana, she thought, I really do hate you. But Agana could have her uses. Ancepanox had kept her alive for her knowledge, and that still remained her choice- Cutting Agana in half, metaphorically as all things in the dreamscape were, had separated her brawn from her brain. Ancepanox was not to fussed about the part Celestia had taken. She needed that brain, and what it could do for her.
"Tell me how your power of the corrupting eye works." Ancepanox demanded.

"An eye is a tool of observation, but also understanding, interpretation, and subjectivity. In the abstraction of the dreamscape these things take on special meaning." Agana explained.

"You've told me all this before." Ancepanox said impatiently. "And the lesson was not lost on me. That's how I've been traveling the dream." She gestured with her hoof, and the sphere of darkness briefly flickered beside her.

"Yes, I've seen that kinda of power before. The 'Cosmic Eye', it was dubbed. The Dark Lady used something similar when she walked the Bright World. It was her main method of controlling mortal behavior." Agana agreed. "But where the Cosmic Eye has an inherent inclusiveness to it, joining dreams from within, my power of the Corrupting Eye gives observance from above."

"There is an inherent hierarchical-ness to your power, then. The premises of your power are built on your ideology of domination and strife." Ancepanox said. "I'm beginning to realize, your beliefs and Celestia's are two sides of the same coin. She believed in the hierarchal place of the Sun, you of the Dark Lady." Ancepanox scratched her nose. "Key word, 'believed'. I don't know who Celestia is soliciting to, but stealing your body is the first step for her to find a new patron."

“That is an utterly stupid theory, Mooneater! Celestia does not have dream powers. She is running to hide, nothing more.” Agana spat back scathingly.

“We're about to find out, won't we.” Ancepanox grabbed Agana’s head with her magic. “Well, as soon as I figure out where- Hold on, is this the memory she used.” A slightly singed book was laying on the ground, undisturbed by the dream creatures tidying the rest of the library.
When Ancepanox picked it up she could feel the residual energy from Celestia’s spell. “This is an old memory. I..." She pressed her cheek against it. "I have a bad feeling about this."

“What does it matter? Less talking, more chasing!” Agana screeched.

“Okay okay.” Ancepanox nickered. "Just give me a second to, you know, learn the memory spell."

From the faint traces of Celestia's spell on the memory book, Ancepanox could glean the basic patterns of the magic.
Celestia had been familiar with the memory. Perhaps she was it's subject. Was that how she had escaped into it?

slipped through the fabric of the dream into the memory?

"From what I can tell, these memories are part of the dream. Celestia used your body and power to force her way in, like you did to Twilight's." Ancepanox explained. "Amusingly there is a thaumo-linguistic bend to it. I could rewrite the memory if I replaced pages of the book. There's power and meaning in words..."

"So? Is this all sentimentalism or can we chase her?" Agana crowed.

"Of course we can chase her." Ancepanox said. She thrust a hoof forward, upturned, and the dark sphere of the Cosmic Eye blossomed before her, swelling to her height. "My dream powers will take us anywhere she can go." She picked up the memory book and tossed it at a bookshelf. "After you, Agana."

Agana’s only response was an irate glare.

“No? Fine.” Ancepanox snorted. “Allons, à la victoire!” She vaulted into the sphere, carrying Agana’s head behind her.

---

The moon began to tremble under Luna's hooves. Luna jumped up, but the vibration died away.
Luna was starting to realize the scope of the coming problem.

"Perhaps... It is time, for the first time in a millennium, to call upon my loyal subjects." Luna said. "The Moon denizens deserve a chance to protect their home."

---

With an imperceptible whine, the Cosmic Eye opened.
Ancepanox stepped out into the new realm and looked around.

It was a stormy day in Canterlot, on a manner of speaking. The castle and city around them was being battered and twisted by waves of surreal energy in the sky, turning the gleaming towers and stately blocks into cracked and blackened husks. Ponies were screaming in terror and running in every direction. It was apocalyptic. It was chaos.

“Fillies see the world in interesting ways. Ominous, isn’t it.” Ancepanox was solemnly amused at the burning city around her. “I recognize this day. Yes, I can see why Celestia picked it."

“Ominous indeed.” Agana took note.

"Canterlot isn’t usually like this. This was a special day. The best day, in fact, when I earned my mark.” Ancepanox looked to the strange colors in the sky, probably the closest match for what had really happened that day. Twilight hadn't seen the waves of energy that had filled Equestria's skies when Cloud Creche exploded, being inside a building at the time. She had seen paintings and heard descriptions, but none matched her memories of the moment, burned into her mind from her magical senses.
"You're about to see Twilight Sparkle's defining moment. This is when she stopped being just another filly."

Agana pondered this. "Have you considered that there may be more to this moment than you ever realized?"

"Piss off. You don't know what you're talking about.” Ancepanox spat with a sudden venom. She began trotting where she knew she was needed. “You’re like a damn mother in law! Gods forbid I meet whatever pathetic issue your likes would create. I would marry it and I would loath it... But I think I would love it all the same."

"Mooneater you are making less sense by the moment." Agana chirped. “The closest I came to companionship was with Celestia, as a matter of fact. The falling out was explosive. The kids were left to me. Statuesque about the whole dirty affair, they were."

"Right." Ancepanox grunted dissimissively.
All the same she could not entirely dismiss Agana's question from her head. With all she had learned about the nature of the world, it was not so rash to take another look at even the most closely held, sacrosanct memories. The coming minutes would be very interesting.

She quickly came to entrance of the dream-warped counterpart of the unicorn academy. Like the rest of the memory, the city here was distorted and chaotic, the very buildings taking on warped and surreal proportions. She sky overhead was even brighter with its surging colors.

"And here we come to the center of it all." Ancepanox said.
True to Ancepanox’s expectations, the Examination Tower was unexploded, despite the Rainboom already happening. The closer they got, the slower things around them seemed to move, until everything but the two alicorns was frozen. The memory had stopped progressing. Any farther, and the Examination Tower would explode.

“Celestia is up there. I'm sure of it.” She pointed for Agana’s benefit.

"At the top of a tower, hmm?" Agana said.

"Yeah, that's the examination tower of the unicorn school. Prospective students have their magical acumen and control tested." Ancepanox said. "I was subjected to a battery of trails. I failed almost all of them, until... Well, you'll see how this memory ends."

Agana glanced up to the coruscating sky. "I can guess."

Giving the portentous tower its due, Ancepanox took the proper rout to enter, through the main hall of the unicorn school. The place was vague and undetailed, for at that point in memory Twilight had only once seen it, and even then had been distracted by stress and apprehension for the coming test.
Ancepanox was feeling a little bit of that.

"But I invite you to think harder, Mooneater, about this moment." Agana said.

"I'd be a fool not to recognize the symbology. A tower, like the Tower of the Bard. A moment of destruction, like the destruction of Bard." Ancepanox said. "But it's sheer coincidence."

"I think we are about to find out." Agana said, much more softly.

Ancepanox was starting to feel the strange feeling in her spine again. Celestia was close. The black alicorn reluctantly kept moving, mounting the spiral staircase to the top.

But an unexpected voice brought her to a halt.
"...very nervous. She can hardly hold her patterns. Poor filly."

That was Twilight Velvet's voice! The other pony in the conversation made Ancepanox bristled until she realized it too was just a part of the memory.

"That's natural. Encourage her to keep trying. We only have a bare minute before the shockwave reaches us." Celestia said at a whisper. "Make sure everypony is standing in the right position."

"Of course princess." Twilight Velvet's sarcasm using the word 'princess' could not have been more emphasized. "This moment is monumentally more important to me than you. Those judges will be in place if I have to nail them to the ground."

"Quite." Celestia said flatly. "Get going then. Thirty seconds. Make sure Twilight is using her magic when it hits. If you'll excuse me, Sunset Shimmer just teleported nearby."
The telltale crackle of teleportation magic filled the stairwell, quickly followed by hoofsteps up the stair, then a door creaking open.

Ancepanox realized she had been biting her tongue hard enough to draw blood.
"No bucking way. No way. No way." She murmured to herself. "This is a trick. Celestia has done nothing but lie to me. She has no idea who or what I am. All those 'explanations' were lies, and so is this. ALL. LIES."

"I thought the dream of the Tower was inherited." Agana said, awed by what they'd heard. "Congratulations, Mooneater. You were created by an occult ritual."

"Yeah, heh heh." Ancpeanox laughed emptily, shaking her head. "Celestia has quite the imagination. Heh... Imagine if this was real. Imagine if this really happened."

"I don't know why you're reluctant to embrace this idea. Hundreds of fillies and colts were sacrificed to manufacture within your head the facsimile of the most powerful dream of all ponykind." Agana continued. "Certain things start to make more sense this way. Celestia did not, as she implied sit pretty for hundreds of years, her ambition of mortal usurpation languishing. She took active measures, made active strides. Yes... She took what she learned from me, and applied it."

"T- This is post-hoc fantasy! Celestia's plans never made sense, were always contradictory, and this FARCE doesn't change that." Ancepanox hissed. "She's trying to get in my head, and you're helping her. Don't forget, you cur, that without me you have no hope of getting your body back!"

"Mooneater there is no shame in being manufactured. The Dark Lady made all us Dark Ones, after all." Agana began, but fell silent after seeing the seething look Ancepanox was throwing her.

As tense as a pulled spring, Ancepanox climbed the rest of the spiral stair to the top landing; It was a long climb, with the steps outrageously tall- Filly Twilight had had a difficult time, and her memories of the place had always been imposing.

An occult ritual... To turn a hapless filly into the vessel for a dream... A dream that meant so many complicated, unclear things, but above it all a clear message of power.

Ancepanox ground her teeth. She didn't have dwell on it. She just wanted to kill Celestia even more. She felt so wound up she feared she might crack.
Her spine tingled like the dickens. Celestia was just on the other side of the door, in the examination theater.

"This is obviously a trap. Like she did in my library, Celestia needs to pull me into situations where she has time to prepare." Ancepanox said, voice cracking over the tenseness in her throat. "But I don't care. I'll bear any attack, if I can see her dead."

"Mooneater, be careful. Celestia has proven she has more than magical attack." Agana said. "That conversation on the stair was obviously not from your memory. If Celestia could tamper and add it, she will do more."

"Let her." Ancepanox pushed the door open.

The room beyond was radiating raw emotion like nothing Ancepanox had ever experienced before. It went beyond all encompassing. Ancepanox felt as though she were standing before a flaming wind. It flowed around her, infusing her with its overwhelming energy. It was too much for her.

She could not tell how she came to be inside the examination room. She was in the top aisles, looking down at the day’s subject.
It was herself, of course. Oh yes, there was little Twilight Sparkle trying to hatch a dragon egg. She jumped and she gestured and she cast pathetic little spells. What could the innocent filly have known about incubating it in volcanic temperatures, or rough way in which she would need to pry the shell apart to free little Spike within?

At three points of the room, the teachers conducting the examination. They stood in place, ostensibly to examine Twilight's efforts and technique from different angles. More than a cursory look showed Twilight Velvet and Night Light, the last two points of the room-spanning circle, were holding them in place with magic.
The three judges were each of a diffferent pony tribe: Earth pony, pegasus, unicorn.

"You were the first one that worked." Celestia's cool voice tickled Ancepanox's ear. "Hundreds of years ago, fresh off my collaboration with Agana, I tried built my own child. It did not end well. My mother sun twisted fate around and led to her premature, awful death. Then, I tried with each of the Stars. Those efforts ended miserably too. I don't think any of the spawn of those dalliances made it past infancy."

"I don't understand. Your goal never made sense." Ancepanox muttered, eyes glued to the scene down below. Little Twilie was starting to cry, but still threw herself at the effort, shaking the dragon egg with her telekinesis.

"I don't want to die. Death... Fuck death." Celestia said stonily. It was the first time Ancepanox had heard the princess swear. "I was a creature designed to die. I was meant to be replaced. My individuality mattered for nothing. My mother sun would absorb one Celestia and spit out another, to perpetuate her control over the Bright World. You ponies get your mark, emblazoned on your flank. I had the brand of my enslaver, who it was known was going to devour me, after I had outlived my usefulness."

"What does this have to do with me?" Ancepanox demanded.

"When Anima Astral Nacre saw the decay of the Ancient Alicorns, she devised a way to live past their race's death. She entered a pony form, where she would dwell until such a time she could return to alicorn form, or even return to heaven." Celestia said. "I don't need to return to heaven. I just need an alicorn body powerful enough to fight my mother sun. I don't have to win. I just have to grind her to a draw."

"She's what gives you power and life!" Ancepanox exclaimed.

"Celestia the First realized the were other potential sources of power. She died before she could see it through. I intended to be the one who finished what she started." Celestia's tone turned sharp, reaching levels of rage to match the other emotions churning in the room. "A pony body ascended... capable of containing the united strength of all mortalkind... That would save me. I could sleep again. I could..." Celestia's voice trembled. "I would have solved that last fear, for all of us. Don't you see? I'm mortal too! I have that mortal fear of death! No other alicorn was saddled with a twisted kind of mortality like I was. Alicorns are supposed to be perpetual, but I was built with an expiration date. I have to rebuild myself, unshackle myself."

"You wanted to steal my body." Ancepanox finally allowed herself to look back at Celestia.
She was barely two hooves from the sun princess, who was hunched over in the next row of the examination theater. Celestia looked demonic, her hair on end, her mane flowing like steaming lava. Her eyes were black save for pinpoints of yellow.

"That ritual in the Everfree Castle throne room was meant for me. Twilight had to go and get a big ego. Fine by me, one body is as good as another, except that the newly branded 'Forlorn Spark' has split you off. You summon Nightmare Moon, which allows my Sun to possess me, and she kills Spark." Celestia ranted, her head bobbing back and forth in nervous rhythm. "One way or another, I have to get in control of a body. I have to live. My empire is waiting for me to come and tame it, to consume it. Ponykind will be harmonious with me. Together we can stand against the Sun."

"You're loonie. You have no idea what you're saying anymore." Ancepanox uttered. "You're lies have reached a breaking point."

Celestia stood up. "Decide for yourself how much of any of these possible truths you wish to believe. Who knows, sister. Who knows if it even matters. What matters is you and me." Her pinpoint eyes, bleeding light, slid over to little Twilight Sparkle. "And her."

The dreaded moment came.
Little Twilie screamed in pain and clutched her head. The anguish at far away Cloud Creche reached into her soul and pulled. She convulsed and was lifted into the air, and the hot wind blew about the filly, becoming hotter still to sear away the walls layer by layer. The three judges were surrounded by their own maelstroms of magic, and were torn into sinuous ribbons.

Physics finally caught up to the magic, and the tower exploded.

But when Ancepanox opened her eyes again, she was still at the door, hoof outstretched in preparation to push it open.

“Did I…” She began to ask Agana, but she stopped herself.

The world beyond the threshold was blank, empty of any and all meaning. The top of the tower had been torn out of the memory.

"Urhhh." Ancepanox groaned, clutching her head. "Celestia jumped memories."

"Can we follow?" Agana asked. "Did you see me body with her?"

"Yes and no, respectively." Ancepanox pushed down her mental pain at the memory's mutilation. "She is hopping towards an escape, but the Dark magic she's using is decaying her rapidly. She may not make it out of my memories."

"You don't have to explain to me. Just get us to them." Agana demanded.

Ancepanox swiped her hoof and the Cosmic Eye carried them on.

The dream magic deposited them on cold marble.
They were inside Canterlot Castle, in one of the ground floor hallways. It was much more normal and proportional, so the memory must have been more recent.

“I think this is the day I left her.” Ancepanox gnawed her lip. There were no obvious signs of the date, but the overall decor was rather like that of those years. “Throne room.” She grunted. “She’ll be in the throne room.”

Just to be safe, she summoned up her sabre. Wasting no more time, she teleported up to her destination.

As expected, Celestia and Twilight were at the other end, beside the great gold throne. Unlike last time, Celestia was not letting this memory play out. She had cut to the chase: Twilight was on the floor, bleeding from a self-inflicted stab in the gut.

"If you had been a less important pony to my plans, this is how you would have ended up." Celestia let her voice echo across the throne room. "Nobility, commoner, mage, or farmer. This is the fate of offending your princess."

"She's farther gone than you implied." Agana whispered.

Celestia went on. "I have destroyed my creations before. Clearly, I should have done the same to you, sister."

"I'm not your bloody sister. I'm a mare of her own creation. No one is responsible for me: I alone made myself what I am." Ancepanox replied. "Yes, when I was Twilight, I had ponies who built me up and helped me. It takes a village. That pony is not me any longer."

"Whatever." Celestia wavered her hoof dismissively. "I made the Bright World what it is today. The whole planet bows to my empire. The wealth of eight continents flow into Equestria. My ponies live in the closest thing to paradise that mortals have ever achieved. When I return to them, they will give themselves up to me, for me, with me. Harmony will power us. Harmony will rule us."

"You don't know what that word means anymore!" Ancepanox took a step forward.

Celestia's dark eyes narrowed. "I will do anything I have to, to correct my mistakes. I can't kill you retroactively, but I can get close.

The throne room crunched, obliterating everything past Ancepanox’s hooves, like had been done to the tower. Where had been living memory, was empty white.
“This is bad, Mooneater. Celestia is in some state of dissonance with the Dark magic she is using. She is beyond mad. Ooh, my poor body...” Agana wailed nervously, searching in the abject blank for any sign of where Celestia had gone. “We are at a severe disadvantage if we continue-”

“I don’t give a buck about this avant garde theater crap.” Ancepanox interrupted her loudly. “I swore to put an end to her. I will.”
The cosmic eye shuffled them along.

Running? Ancepanox was running. She felt an ache in her muscles as though she had been at it for hours. She was on the mountainside road above Canterlot, coming down from a visit to the solar monastery.
It was the dead of night, and the white moon hung low over the city. Yes the only think the gentle light illuminated was the southern watchtower, for upon it was Celestia, watching her and judging her from on high.

“You have been teleporting around all day. Good. It is ill fitting for a monarch to remain idle.” The sun princess praised, her whisper sounding from thin air despite her being kilometers away. “The empire is well, but I wonder for you. Have you found fulfillment?”

“Celestia, you have to realize you brought this on yourself. We didn't have to be enemies.” Ancepanox shouted back.

“I have tried to work with equals before. Luna, Agana, Sunset Shimmer... All betrayed me. There can be no equality." Celestia chided.

"And yet you want harmony?" Ancepanox scoffed. "You damn alicorns! You care more about your hierarchies than the lives of others!"

"Your words drip with hypocrisy."

"All the evils I've perpetrated have been because of YOUR system. Do you think I want to kill, dominate, and destroy?” Ancepanox howled.

Celestia's acidic laugh carried like crystal in the cold air. "Yes." There was a flash of light. Celestia teleported right up to Ancepanox, lightly lower on the slope of the path. "Is this how the 'self-created mare' conducts herself? Immediately throwing blame everywhere, pushing off responsibility for her actions?"

"I'm taking responsibility, by killing the source of my woes." Ancepanox rumbled.

“Insolent as always, Moon.” Celestia chided. “You dishearten me.”

"Where are you taking this?" Ancepanox asked.

"This merry chase, you mean? To the end.” Celestia shook her head sadly. “The Tower points towards heaven, but there's a waystop before we can reach those most lofty heights." She looked over her shoulder. "Hmm. I threw Twilight off the watchtower before I teleported here. We move on. We move forward. We move up."

Huge swaths of Canterlot winked out of existance, becoming that same white void as in the other memories. Celestia, and all the ground between her and Ancepanox, disappeared too.

“GET BACK HERE!” Ancepanox snarled, leaping into the air.
The cosmic eye moved her to places beyond, and as the layers of memory flittered by she saw Celestia passing near. They clashed, their willful attacks cutting through thousands of iterations of place and time. The euclidean aspect of the memories melted into incomprehensible concepts, wavering light, miasmatic dark, spots of blank whiteness, and muddied consciousness.
Ancpenaox chased Celestia back and forth through the years. Celestia moved with ethereal grace, taking up the role she had been remembered in, or some new interpretations. Always though, Twilight Sparkle was different, perverted in her form and function. The poor mare suffered death, mutilation, humiliation, absolute power, absolute helplessness, and the betrayal of her dear Celestia. She was young becoming older, and old becoming young, down to just born, and up to death’s door.
Time ceased to have meaning, and yet as it passed in myriad picoseconds Ancepanox felt her emotions toyed with in a million million ways. Celestia jerked her like a puppet on strings, exposing her to the worst a maddened mind could conceive of. The black alicorn felt overwhelming rage at what she saw until it was simply too much. For what felt like a hundred years she held that rage and used it to fuel her pursuit. But the disgraces Celestia inflicted upon Twilight Sparkle became common to her, and the shock and outrage of it all dulled, until Ancepanox could only feel tired.

It was then Celestia ran no more, and neither did Ancepanox chase. They had arrived upon the moon. The memory of the moon, that is.

The memory forms of Twilight and Nightmare Moon sat in the grey, looking longingly up at the earth and wishing to return. They would, and for both of them it would be the transition into their next state of being; They would be more.

Celestia's black gaze lingered on the two forlorn dreamers. "This is it. It's very peaceful here." She shifted on her hooves. Out of empty space, Agana's headless body appeared and stood beside the sun princess. "When we meet on its real-world counterpart, it will not be nearly so calm."

"It's not too late. We can still talk." Ancepanox said, lying with teeth bared. "We can both get out way."

Celestia let out a short laugh. "That is the kind of thing I would say! Oh, my dear sister... You have said it yourself. Our goals are fundamentally, irreversibly, opposed. Neither of us will compromise."

"Then next time we meet, there will be no words, just the fight." Ancepanox bowed her head. "And I'll kill you. I'll kill you with my bare hooves."

"I imagine so." Celestia alowed herself a thin smile. She grabbed Twilight Sparkle with her telekenisis, dragging the unicorn away from the memory Nightmare Moon. She case her last escape spell.
The starscape behind them hollowed and cracked. Celestia and company faded from the realm of memories, and escaped into the dreamscape at the only point in which it merged with physical reality: The Moon in the sky above Equestria.

Ancepanox found it difficult to care.
She watched the Nightmare Moon of memory, differing only slightly from her. That Luna possessed an unworldly grace and beauty, while she was ragged, savage, and ugly. That Luna suffered the exile of a failed rebellion with patience and composure, while she pursued in outrage over so selfish a slight. That Moon was alone, and so was she.
Ancepanox knew with all her heart her hate was valid. She would destroy a thousand mortals to end Celestia. There would be no forgiveness, no patience. Vengeance deferred was vengeance lost. That was the lesson from Luna's failure.

Ancepanox obliterated the memory, letting the stars and grey dust turn white. Nightmare Moon, solitary in her earthward longing, faded to blank.
Now Celestia was trapped, unable to reenter the memories.

"Now I am the only pony in all the world to have dreamwalking powers." Ancepanox said into the void. "Celestia, Agana, and Twilight Sparkle have joined Luna as prisoners of the Moon. Humph. The judge will be visiting, all too soon."

Ancepanox wandered through the memories for a while. The damage from the battle was severe, but she did what she could to repair it. She eventually found where she’d left Agana’s head and picked her up. The ungrateful deava tried asking her questions, then began shouting threats, but she ignored it all.

After a while she stopped in one of her memories from when she was eleven years of age. It was in Celestia’s personal quarters where, if Celestia and Twilight had been there, the sun princess would be teaching her protege about the paths of the stars. Ancepanox looked to the window where they would have been using a telescope, and the ancient astronomy book that they would have been consulting.
Content, she set Agana’s head on the boudoir table and settled herself on Celestia’s bed. Life is bliss, she thought idly to herself.

---

“That just raises more questions!” Ripple Wreath protested, rowdy for such an unsatisfying end to such a drawn-out story. “None of that made any sense at all. The only thing that made sense to me was that Agana went to your dream after she died, and even that is bloody confusing. Like, who the hell is Twilight Sparkle!”

“Twilight Velvet’s daughter, obviously.” Ancepanox rolled her eyes. “What’s not to get? I need you to kill Celestia because I can’t bring myself to. It’s a simple as can be.”

“No, it’s not.” Wreath emphasis. “You just said she’s trapped. Why bother?”

“Imagine two snakes. One is black, the other is white. They eat each other’s tails: The black one because it hates the white one, and the white one because it is necessary. Only the black snake decides it can’t be bothered, so it hired the wolf to kill the white snake so a certain smaller white snake can be born.” Ancepanox elucidated. “Celestia is the saturnine consumer, and Twilight and I are the children. Now, the saturnalia has ended, and I am the jupiterian usurper.”

“Thanks. That clears it all up.” Wreath snarked. He sat down and scratched his ear. “Especially the part where you need me to be the one to kill Celestia.”

Ancepanox was silent for several minutes. “Admittedly, I’m doing you poor by asking that of you. I’m afraid I won’t be happy. She needs to go, but… But I'm gripped by a fear that I'll be fulfilling a role I don't want to fill. I don't want to play their alicorn domination games, or go along with their twisted ideologies. I just want them dead.”

“Well, you can’t guarantee-”

“Exactly.” Ancepanox cut him off. “That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Uh huh. That’s ignoring what you just said all that stuff about the dynamic between you two.” Wreath sighed. He should have figured there was no way he was going to survive the night with a shred of his sanity intact. And yet something told him that Ancepanox had a similar worry, and that meant there was something she wasn’t telling him. “Does Celestia stir anything in you?”

“What are you implying?” Ancepanox narrowed her eyes.

“There’s something more to your story.” Wreath challenged, straightening up. “ Are you or are you not the alicorn who slaughtered hundreds of ponies in a bloodthirsty rage?”

“I am.”

Wreath gulped. Here came the risky part of his argument. “But you didn’t kill Glori, or me. Because, like you said, you're not a part of their game. I'll tell you why you didn't kill Glori, and you didn't kill me: You knew our names and story. Knowing the least bit about us meant you couldn’t bring yourself to end our lives. Then with Agana, and now with Celestia!”

Ancepanox clenched her jaw angrily, but did not deny it.

“So you had Agana do it, and she could not. Now you’ve come to me.” Wreath pressed. It was for her own good that he berated her, inciting her to be more. “You have the ability, don’t you? So this is an problem of WILL.”

"Yes, and?"

"My Lady, listen to me. This is a weakness you have to overcome. You KNOW you have to follow through. You said yourself, destroying Celestia would end the woes that have forced you to evil acts. You must commit, my lady. You have to press on against this doubt!"

Ancepanox closed her eyes, let out a sigh, and shook her head. "I killed Chrysalis and Myriadess. Your thesis doesn't hold up."

Wreath stood up, trotted over to the alicorn, and slapped her. "My lady, you'd better-"
The slap Wreath received in return knocked him clear across the roof area, and he collided with a stone merlon.

Ancepanox was looming over him when he stood up. "You think that was any good way to make a point, little pony? I could destroy your mind in a second."

Wreath sucked in a breath, braced himself, and tried to slap her again. Ancepanox didn't let him, pushing him back with a hoof until he was pinned against the wall by his neck. "ghhhh" He gurgled, trying to speak around the hoof asphyxiating him.

"OOooohhh." Ancepanox shivered. "Don't do this to me Ripple Wreath." She shifted her grip, holding his neck with both hooves. She played with applying more and less pressure. "I could break you in a moment. I could break this whole damn world..."
She slackened her grip, letting Wreath go. "You know... I'm god. I'm the bucking god of this planet. The sun is trapped. The moon is powerless. I'm as close to immortal as I could be. I'm the queen. I'm the princess. Every single living creature on this planet lives because I let it, and will die when I deem it."

"Yes my lady." Wreath said quietly. "You are powerful. That makes you worthy. Nothing else, especially the past matters."

Ancepanox opened her mouth to agree, then paused. "No." She shook her head. "Twilight Sparkle matters."

Wreath glanced away, disappointed.

"What I've done, I did for her. Twilight Sparkle deserves to be liberated from Celestia. Celestia, in turn, will be judged for what she's done to Twilight."

"That's all very good, Lady Ancepanox. Eventually I hope you extend this justice to all ponykind, as is your mandate." Wreath said. "And here we come to the original point. You have a barrier you are trying to overcome. Will you?"

---

The nonexistent Moon winds whispered strange things.
Luna, hiking one of the lunar peaks on the way to a village, grit her teeth. They were coming. They were going to use her moon for their blasphemous works, and for their battles. Not if Luna and her army had any say.

---

After what seemed like hours after Ancepanox left, she returned to the memory of Celestia’s chambers where she’d left Agana’s head.

“GAH! Finally!” Agana sputtered angrily. “I was beginning to think you would never come back, Mooneater.”

“Here I am.” Ancepanox shrugged, throwing herself onto a sofa. “You are proved wrong, yet again.”

Agana scowled. “Does that make you happy? Proving ponies wrong, that is?”

“Happy? No. I doubt anything could really make me happy.” Ancepanox pulled a crystal glass from one of Celestia’s cabinets, followed by a wine bottle.“Momentary bursts of pleasure, sure. But not happiness.”
She snapped off the neck of the wine bottle and poured into the crystal glass until it overflowed. She took a sip and frowned. “This is literally rubbing alcohol.” When Twilight had formed the memory, that was the only alcohol she'd known.
Sighing, Ancepanox gulped the glass, then the bottle, the them into a wall where they shattered.

Agana didn't know what to think of Ancepanox's emotional fragility. The black alicorn swung wildly between moods at the drop of a hat. She could stay mad for longer than it took to punch, and didn't stay calm long enough to have a conversation.
Under her visage of power and strength, Ancepanox really was just a young mare, force into a world she was unprepared for.

“So, what did your friend advise we do with Celestia?” Agana asked cautiously.

“Kill her.” Ancepanox laid back in the sofa. “He thinks I should take over Equestria."

“You jest, but I see having an empire ruled by the Dark Ones-”

“Not ‘the Dark Ones’! ME!” Ancepanox shouted Agana down. “Do I look like a ‘Dark One’ to you? You say that like I’m some face in a crowd, a nopony! ‘Oh look, there goes another Dark One’. I’m the THE Dark One. SAY IT! Say ‘Ancepanox, the Nightmare of the Moon.’ Say it!”

“Mooneater, you are getting too aggressive for me.” Agana mewled, casting her eyes to the floor in submission. “You know I meant no slight. I was stating a fact. You are one, yes? And you are Dark, no?”

Ancepanox rolled onto her stomach. "You're going to get me talking. I've been consciously avoiding veering into the longwinded rants. But heck, if I'm ever going to learn to be an alicorn, I better get used to it."

"You don't 'learn' to be an alicorn. You just are." Agana said with a mild snark.

"So am I or aren't I? What is alicorn-ness? Is it biological, mental, spiritual, or magical?" Ancepanox posed. "I know the semantic canards. Ali-corn, defined by its 'otherness' to ponykind. But I've seen that the spectrum of alicorn-kind has itself a spectrum of how it differs from mortals? So I ask, what is the one certain feature of an alicorn, instantly recognizable, that could never be feature of mortals?"

"What do you mean?" Agana asked.

"Why are the Stars not alicorns? Why are demons not alicorns? I met this freaky dream spider-pony in the Forest, and I wondered, why is she not an alicorn?" Ancepanox counted off. "On the flip side, why are you an alicorn? Why do you emphacize your alicorn-dom over deava-dom, when your rhetoric would imply the opposite? Was Myriadess an alicorn even being just a soul in a platinum sphere? Can you stop being an alicorn, then resume? Is alicorn-ness a sliding scale, or a binary state?"

"That is many questions at once." Agana grunted.

Ancpeanox lay her head back down. "Take you time."

Agana went silent for what had to be at least twenty minutes. Finally she sighed. "I don't know."

"Figures."

"What would you prefer the truth to be?"

"Well, it would suite my purposes if Alicorn was an identity. Concepts of alicorn-ness may be as constructed and arbitrary as any other social construct. The name of 'alicorn' may just be a signifier, broadly recognized but still arbitrary." Ancepanox said. "This is not for my benefit though. It's because I've decided that I absolutely loath alicorns, and it would be convenient for me to be able to exclude or include you or Luna or anyone else into the definition as it becomes expedient."

"Mooneater I love your cynicism." Agana said. "However, this is missing the forest for the trees. You have to decide to go after Celestia, or no."

Ancepanox ignored her. "I think the next few hours will prove if my thesis is true. I told Twilight I was a god. She seemed to be accepting or even welcoming of that claim. But how will that shake out when I tell my friends that? They saw my power even when I was Twilight Sparkle. Perhaps they will think about who I was before, with my power and stature, as some kind of pre-alicorn. Hmm. Ideas of fate, and identity... Very interesting questions."

Agana clacked her beak in annoyance. "Stop playing about. Are we going to go after Celestia or no?"

"Can the idea of the alicorn change in the popular imagination? I mean, people have some vague awareness of there being alicorns before Celestia, but only in accademic circles could anyone have even put a name or description to any of them. The idea of the alicorn is wedded to the idea of Celestia. But she will die. What will it mean if I come to them and present myself to an alicorn, will they adapt their view, or reject changing their ideas of alicorn-ness?" Ancepanox droned on. "It doesn't hurt that I have the same build and basic features as Celestia. Hell, if I was clever about it, I could try to pass myself off as a 'changed' Celestia, if that would make them accept me better."
She rolled onto her back. "This is accepting the assertion that I should be among ponies. I don't know... The next few hour will decide. In the next few hours, I'll find out what an alicorn is."

"You exhaust me Mooneater!" Agana shouted. "You are giving me a headache."

"Now much of an accomplishment since you're all head." Ancepanox said. "Also, quit derailing me. If you don't like me asking questions, say so, and I'll spare you."

Agana made a sour. "You are going to kick me out that window if I say that."

Ancepanox chuckled. "Yup."

"It's not that I'm not enthralled by your questions. You are a fledgeling, exploring, questioning. I have myself spent time exploring like that, and hearing you relitigate the same things gives me great anxieties." Agana said, her voice dipping into a soft sentimentality, but that did not last. "But nothing gives me more anxiety than contemplating losing my body forever! Gods damn it Mooneater, go kill Celestia and get my body!"

Ancepanox sat up. "Agana, do you have any intention of being a good girl?"

"That is an incredibly nebulous question." Agana said, chuffed.

"I mean, if hypothetically you had every power restored to you, and I let you off free to do whatever you wanted in this world, would you stop trying to kill ponies?" Ancepanox asked.

Agana's glare intensified. "You have built on the premise that not killing ponies is 'good', and on the premise that you are the arbiter of my behavior. I can not answer that question."

"I see." Ancepanox said softly. "If I decided that I have a moral obligation to fight alicorn-ism wherever it exists, though words where possible, with violence when necessary, what you you say then?"

"Alicorn-ism? What in gods' name are you trying to pull."

"Imagine a kind of cultural alicorn, separate but comparable to the physical alicorn-"

"Go to hell, Ancepanox!" Agana exclaimed. "You are trying to create the rhetorical framework of destroying us all, and I will not have it! We are proud creatures! Hypocrite! Blasphemer!"

"I can't punish you for crimes you haven't committed yet. If I want to preemptively punish any new alicorns the intrude on my planet, their crimes need to be obvious and clear." Ancepanox said.

Agana lacked the words to describe the tugging nervousness of what she was hearing. "Is there any chance you are entertaining hyperbole, to teach me the error of my ways?"

Ancepanox smiled. "The next few hours will decide."

"You keep saying that." Agana growled.

"And it's never a lie." Ancepanox said. She rolled onto her back, testing awkward ways to lay without crushing her wings. She let out a breath, scratching the nape of her neck on the cushion.
She could have stayed there as long as she wanted. Time moved strangely in the dreamscape, and that apparently extended to memories as well.
"I wish it could be so easy. I can see the appeal of just abandoning all the struggle and responsibility. Being stressed and angry all the time is tiring to say the least. I don't know if I'm ready for a life of struggle and responsibility on that scale. It's... intimidating as all hell."

"That is the greatest tell you are not a true alicorn. A real daughter of the stars would grasp your opportunities by the horn and drive them forward for all they're worth." Agana said.

"Until they breakdown into mental anguish, like Luna, like Celestia, and like the ancient alicorns. You're not as durable as you think." Ancepanox said. She sighed.
"I'm thinking about eyes. Yes, eyes. Looked at from a distance it is just a circle! The circle: A continuous line. The eye is like that most aboriginal of life, the embryo, with a vital core surrounded by protective shell. It grows and shrinks, and it will be the conduit of our understanding. I grew another eye tonight. I can open and close it as I please...”

“Good gods, I'm surrounded by literal maniacs.” Agana lamented. "Mooneater, was drinking that rubbing alcohol a good idea?"

“I’m talking about eyes. Many cultures call it the window to the soul. With them we blink, wince, cry, scowl.” Ancepanox hummed. "I see dreams with mine. I see cosmic possibility. With it, I direct many eyes to peer into the abyssal heart of the spaces above. If the cathedral-library is my Tower, than the eye that reads its secrets is my climber."

"I will admit I have dabbled in obscurantism but you are taking it to new heights." Agana said. “Poetry. Pure poetry.”

"Thank you, I try." Ancepanox said quietly. "I needn't get into what your eyes see. You've been telling me all night about how your eyes see sin. Or they did, before Celestia stole it. Heh, I still find it absolutely hilarious you talked so much about domination and all that, and at the end of it all, you were the one who got dominated."

They sat in total silence for many minutes. Ancepanox rested her head, but the building discomfort in her spine stoped her from being comfortable.
After a while she rolled into a sitting position, too giddy and uncomfortable to delay and longer.

“That's it then. It's time.” She uttered.

“Oh yes! Time to kill Celestia!” Agana said exultantly. “Let us go forthwith and scour her from all existence! Then we get my body back.”

Ancepanox remained sitting on the couch, looking at Agana’s head covetously. Those purple eyes held no kindness in them. True to the poetic portrayal, they saw darkness.

“W- What is it Mooneater?” Agana squawked in unease.

Ancepanox blinked, a slow and almost lascivious blink that could not keep Agana from seeing the stirring fire behind the mare. “Agana, going into this last battle, I need all the power I can get. I can't let there be any detractors or distractions. I'm sure you know what that means."

Agana grew gravely silent for a time. "Yes. I know. I could help though."

"You could. You won't." Ancepanox shook her head. "As consequence to forming my Cosmic Eye, I started to hear things, whispers, thoughts. It was mostly muddled, but I just heard your last thought loud and clear."

Agana let out a mournful caw. "Oh... I should have expected that sooner or later. In my defense, planning to betray you is hardly the worst I could have been thinking. It is in my nature."

"I know. This will be in my nature." Ancepanox said, regretful, but resolute. "Goodbye Agana.”

---

It had taken Dash far longer to climb the castle’s roof than if she had working wings, especially while having to keep a wing pinned against her side to hold the sabre. But afterwards she appreciated the view a lot more.

From her vantage point above the library, she had an uninterrupted view of hundreds of square kilometers of the forest, in all its green floral glory. The moon was full, and it’s silvery light had all the forest beasts clamoring for each other’s attention. The Everfree’s northwestern edge, terminating at the Dneighper and Ponyville, could just be seen.
By comparison to this wide world, Dash thought idly, we are very very small.

Unexpectedly, a shadow passed over the castle. Shocked and confused, Dash looked up to see what behemoth was above.
She only caught the briefest of glances, but she could have sworn that the Mare in the Moon had returned. But to scrutinous looks, the moon was still as plain as it had been all night. The shadow was gone.

“Weird.” Dash scratched an itch where the helmet met flesh. She corrected her assertion: Compared to the vast heaven, the whole world was very very small. That made ponies microscopic specs. How outrageous was it that those specs could even consider the vast infinities of space, let alone challenge them.

Remembering why she had climbed up, Dash clambered across the connected rooftops towards the throne room. She went slowly to make no noise, and crouched to avoid making shadows.
The battles with Celestia and Forlorn Spark had left the castle walls and roof a crumbling mess, to the point that it was fairly foolish to even leave anypony inside. Dash felt the unsteadiness of the structure beneath her as she neared the center of where the fighting had been- new gaps and scorched chunks of the roof were the exit punctures of spell that had missed.

Dash of all ponies was unlikely to be weepy about the destruction of old things. Old stuff was meant to be tossed away and replaced, and old stuff that happened to survive didn't suddenly give it value as an 'artifact' or ruin. She still felt bad for the damage to the castle.

She reached the side of the castle, and after watching from a distance for sound or movement, crept to the lip of the roof, overlooking the great roofless space of the throne room.

The corpse arrangement, comprising of Celestia and Chrysalis, was still undisturbed between the two shattered thrones. Twilight had either crawled or been moved closer to the broken stained glass window, but was to all inspection just as comatose as she had been all night.
But Applejack was missing.

“Not good.” Dash hissed. Either Rarity had gotten wise and had already doubled back to nab Applejack, or the nightmare earth pony had awoken on her own and wandered off. In either case, if Rarity got a hold of Applejack, then went back to wherever her other altar was (and Dash still had no idea where that might be), there wouldn’t be much Dash could do to stop the enraged nightmare unicorn from painting the walls orange. Or blackish-orange, or blackish-orangish-red.

The fleeting shadow over the castle returned. This Dash immediately jerked her head skyward to spot the cause.
There WAS a face on the Moon again, but not Nightmare Moon! The profile, a alicorn mare with a billowing mane, was unmistakable that of Celestia.
No sooner had Dash realized what it was then it vanished, leaving the Moon blank once more.

Dash had no idea what that haunting profile implied, but it could possibly be anything good. Who knew how many ponies across Equestria had been quick enough to see it, and then understood what it was. Dash's anxieties just kept growing: Rarity was looking like the lesser threat here!
But Dash took a small solace knowing Ancepanox had promised to handle the dream side of things, so Dash could focus on the physical world. The borrowed alicorn body gave Dash many reasons to be confident, and reminded of her of the duty to fight for her new friends.

Deciding her course, Dash turned away and clambered back towards the library roof. On her way, she grabbed every protruded nail she could work out from the remnants of the castle's wood framing.
Then Dash found a sizable gap in the ceiling and hovered over it, waiting.

---

The in the labyrinth of the castle's hallways, Rarity was ignorant to the other hunter's machinations. She was paralyzed by choice, unsure if she should run to protect her altar or go back and grab the sleepers. So she walked directionlessly, leaning on random chance to bring her to Rainbow Dash.

"That blithering tomcolt. Who knows what a dumb pony like her will do. She is too unpredictable. I have no idea where that opium-rotted brain of hers will take her." Rarity seethed. Of course Dash had never even mentioned opium besides vague references to drug fugues in Chitin, but Rarity could not help imagining Dash in the place of the most tasteless depiction of a changeling in a hazy drug den laying about and occasionally wheezing. It made Rarity even angrier, to contemplate such a pony had power over her.

But being alone with her thoughts, the first time in a while that she wasn't presented with immediate stimuli, gave Rarity time to think.
She knew herself to be not so much Rarity, as Rarity's nightmare. The idea of Rarity slumbered, while all that was avaricious, disdainful, and hungry about Rarity swelled into the Dark power that had been infused into her on the Tower. Rainbow Dash and Applejack could plausibly coexist with their nightmarishly enhanced emotions. Rarity could not, had not, and was thus overwhelmed.
"Does Rarity accept me? Would Rarity disown me? I exist to advance her goals. In time she could come to accept my ways. That's when we could become one again, and the nightmare folds back into the whole." She mumbled to herself. "Is it so with all nightmare ponies? If the contradictions were heightened, would Applejack and Rainbow Dash become as I am? And on the rival direction, if Ancepanox and Twilight become more alike again, will they congeal back into a single pony?"

Such wandering thought were brought back into focus by a head-splitting surge of raw emotion, mostly rage and hatred, that brought her to a sudden froth. Her every muscle spasmed before she brought herself back under control.
She needed blood! She needed to kill! She wanted to pain and write in red. She wanted to taste it. She wanted to hear their screaming.

What the hell is wrong with me?
But momentary doubt was washed away by the nightmarish urges, and Rarity felt a renewed sense of urgency. She had to find Dash NOW.

Rarity put on some speed, sweeping through the halls like a foul wind, making curling eddies in the think back fog where she encountered it. Here and there she got whiffs of Dash or other creatures, but her senses were too untrained to pinpoint where they were.
Rarity had very little knowledge about the floor plan, save for the path she’d always taken to and from her Nightmare altars. She took several wrong turns that left her in dead ends or outside.

“How does this even happen!” She rumbled. A few detours previous she had been in a decrepit tower, and now she was in a dank cellar somewhere underground. Dust piles were all that remained of the cellar's stock.
She turned around, but could not find the way she’d come in.
“I am caught in a thousand year old maze. How utterly humiliating!” She was ready to smash through stone if she had to.
So she did. She had no teleportation, and no spells for unlocking hidden doorways, but she did have at that moment a tremendous amount of raw dark magic.
Guessing the general location of the exit, Rarity bashed against the packed-earth wall with a sledge of magic. The whole room shook from the impact, and chunks of the ceiling fell around her. It took several more times before she caved into another hallway, by which time most of the cellar had collapsed. Silently satisfied with herself, Rarity quickly returned to a higher floor.

That satisfaction dried up as she came out directly adjacent to the library. She had gone in a giant circle. “I had might as well look here again, while I am here.” She ground her teeth.

Not one second later, she heard a clatter from the voluminous library, betraying somepony's presence. It was no doubt Rainbow Dash, come to fumble among the books in search of the altar.

Rarity flashed her teeth, her ire rising. It was time to strike.
Creeping into the library Rarity went. Her thrill grew, as did the burning feeling in her brain and muscles. She prayed the nest kill would relieve it.
Here the black fog was as thick as soup, threatening to suffocate her every breath and swallow her up whole. She had to move by memory, keeping an ear for any sign of Dash.

A mild confusion to her was that the mist it was not the same 'consistency' as what she knew.
Rarity knew the fog was like mirage of sorts, a visual corollary to a dark aura that grew out of control. When she had been the cause of it, she had been flush with so much dark it was spilling out of her, thus the fog. It had been humbling to watch Ancepanox absorb it all so hastily. Now, if somepony else's dark was creating the fog... Rarity raged to imagine Dash playing around with her altar!
Rarity was too emotional to realize the glaring error in her logic.

A muted clink, what most certainly the sound of iron horseshoes against stone, reached her ears. It must have been close, just a few meters away. Rarity paused to listen for more, and was satisfied to hear it get closer. The clinking stopped, so Rarity cautiously approached the last spot, ready to attack. But there was still no sight of anypony else in the library, besides a very vague awareness that Dash was near.

Clink. The sound of a metal hoofstep was right in front of her. Rarity should have been almost running into Dash, she was so close.
"Where are you." Rarity whispered.
Rarity hadn’t even taken a step forward when something small and hard smacked her in the back of the head, pinging like what she had thought were shod hoofsteps.
“Ouch!” She squealed, but instead of shying she spun around and caught the offending projectile in its bounce. It was a big rusty nail, like the kind used in the castle’s carpentry. “What?”
That was when Rarity realized she was actually being the one ambushed.

Dash pounced from above. Her swooping tackle caught Rarity’s midriff and carried them both another two meters until they smashed into a bookshelf. Rarity roared and lashed out blindly with her magic, turning the air to a storm of energy and sending Dash scampering away. The bookshelf collapsed moments later, burying Rarity in hundreds of heavy tomes.

---

A few minutes earlier.

Wakefulness slammed into Applejack like a tidal wave. Her eyes flew open and she jerked to her hooves. Her head swirled and pounded, as she coped with conflicting thoughts and nausea.

"I'm real sore." She gurgled. She only had scattered recollections of being strung up and tortured by Rarity.
For some reason, she had the most peculiar and gut-wrenching thought, about stillborn dreams rotting inside her own brain.
Applejack staggered a few steps and dry heaved. The putrid thoughts mostly faded. "Ho boy." She wiped her chin. Her head was still swimming. She released a short breath, then adopted her clipped Manehattan accent. "I don't want to be left alone with my thoughts any more than I have to be." Nightmare urges of domination clashed with empirical reality: She was whooped.

What is my dream, she wondered, if I could jump inside my own head. Would it be home, or Manehattan? Something, or someplace else? She did not imagine it was something as lofty and esoteric as the Tower.

Celestia's corpse was still on the throne, and the dead changeling was beside her, where Rarity had left them. Twilight Sparkle, however, had been moved from what Applejack remembered. Applejack's brain-buzz grew the longer the looked at Twilight, so she turned away and considered her next move.

"I remember... Twi saving me by fighting off Rarity." Applejack said quietly.
Blind, she wandered into the fog.

But dazed as she was, she could not navigate. “Ah, shoot. I’ll never find the way outta here.” He best hope was encountering Twilight or Rainbow Dash.

“Twilight? Dash? Y’all round here? Twilight?” Applejack’s called out.

She suddenly heard shouting, and rushed towards it, bouncing off walls a few times. The fog was making her head swim, and she hardly noticed when she tumbled over a pile of books and fell onto the cold stone. She came nose to nose with Rarity, who was temporarily dazed from the attack from above. Applejack lifted her eyes to the foggy outline of the nightmare alicorn, though its voice was distinctly a rougher version of Rainbow Dash's.

"Applejack?" The alicorn balked. "Get up! Get up and get out of here! She's not gunna-"

With a roar, Rarity threw herself up, knocking Rainbow back. Still a bit dazed, Rarity charged blindly, and Dash was just quick enough to dodge, letting the unicorn crash into a bookcase which collapsed on her.

Dash felt the alicorn's heart pounding from the adrenaline. It had the power of an earth pony, like Dash had never felt before. "I feel like a bull rider. But I'm inside the bull." She muttered.

Before she could plan any more, a thump sounded from the collapsed bookcase. Rarity was alive and kicking, it seemed.

"And there are two bulls." Dash ground her teeth. She needed to get to higher ground again and prepare another ambush.
Dash jumped onto one of the rotten bookcases, and from there an intact roof beam, taking her just above the level of the dark fog.

But... The air above the fog did not seem any lighter than within! In fact, it felt much colder! Dash looked up, but the Moon had no explanation. Still Dash could not shake the feeling of a swelling dread emanating from the pale satellite. It's energy was growing, bathing the Everfree Castle in a kind of negative light.

“Buck buck BUCK! I can't take this anymore! Sparkle needs to wake up and take control of this body again!" Dash swore. She made a wild jump for it back into the fog, landing square on her hooves and making a run for it. She had to get away! This wasn't fun anymore! She just needed to nab Twilight Sparkle's sleeping body and escape into the forest. Hopefully Applejack would have the sense to run too.

Rarity was so angry she felt calm. Methodically, one by one, she thinned the pile of books atop her with telekinesis, all the while counting down to the ungodly reckoning she would bring down upon Dash and Applejack. In her mind she imagined pulling their teeth out, strangling them with their own severed hooves, and the excruciating agony that would throw them into.

She burst out from under the last few layers. She listened to the echo of the clatter, and to the microscopic eddies in the mist. There was no sign of anypony.

“This is a most distressing state of affairs.” Rarity seethed to nopony. She turned one way, then another, admiring her how the muscles under her charcoal-colored fur moved. She wanted to be using those muscles to kill. The dark magic around her began to coagulate and thrash without her consciously meaning to, so filled was she with single-minded desire to destroy.

Then Rarity heard a tiny voice, distressed and desperate. Somepony was whispering nearby.

Rarity grinned evilly. It didn’t sound like either of her current opponents, but just about anypony would do for her to act out her overpowering urges. She didn’t give much thought as to why a stranger would have wandered into the castle. It could have been one of the fillies, and if that were the case Rarity would try to be restrained in her fury. Try.

She moved as quickly as she could without making a sound, slithering over the cluttered floor and through the fog with fluid grace.
She found herself being led on a familiar path, in the one corner of the library she knew from her pilgrimages. In the farthest, plainest corner of the great library hall, she came to the hidden threshold. Within the hidden space was the shrine of her Ponyville cult, where her secret second altar was.
The fog was chokingly thick, confirming the source.

Rarity didn't care that the whisper she heard would therefore be a plea to the Dark Lady, at the base of the secret shrine. She just wanted to kill, no matter who it was. No matter who.

Rarity stepped into entering the annex with her magic charged, ready to turn anything short of a dragon into pink mist. It was not Dash, Applejack, or anypony else she expected to find kneeling before the shrine: Astern statue of Nightmare Moon, the same that was broken off from the pedestal at the mass grave out in the Everfree Forest.

Fluttershy was prostrate in a small circle of candles, whispering a prayer at the altar. At her hooves was a devotional, crocheted from wool, depicting of a solar eclipse. The hoofwork was exceptionally detailed, but frayed from the haste of its creation.

"Fluttershy?" Rarity just stared, too choked for words. A painful ringing sounded in her heads and painful spasms rolled up her back, the consequence of denying her urges.

"Wha-" Fluttershy looked up, startled. She saw Rarity, and eyes widened to the size of disks. The terrifyingly beautiful visage of the nightmare unicorn towering over her was what she had been hoping for and dreading. "N- N- N- Nightmare!" She squeaked, pushing herself back into the corner of the hidden annex.

No, Rarity bewailed aghast, why did it had to be Fluttershy. She felt her lips involuntarily curl back to show her fangs. "What are you doing here?" The concerned question came out harsh and demanding.

"I- I-" The little yellow pegasus stuttered, trying to compose herself. She could not keep eye contact with the nightmare's intense gaze. "M- My Lady. Please bring back the sun!"

She doesn't recognize me, Rarity realized.

Fluttershy must have mistaken Rarity’s internal conflict for displease, for she squeaked and bowed even lower. “N- Not that I don’t love the night! I- I do, I swear! But it is too dark, and too treacherous. My animal friends are scared, and so many of them can’t get food or warmth without the sun.”

Rarity just stared, her forced look of impassivity wavering on collapse.

“A- And the village is suffering. Our crops are starting to die, and… and…” Fluttershy began to tear up. “And we will too. Some of my friends are already missing, and I’m so scared! P- Please, Nightmare, nopony was more devoted, caring, and generous than your Rarity! I beg you help us!”

The hidden annex had a tiny slot, that in the dead of night the moon could shine on the statue. Despite the fog, a little of that light did get though, a stark beam in the sooty blackness.

Rarity could nearly feel herself physically falling apart. She didn't know how Fluttershy’s plea cut through her madness and struck at her heart, but it did. She had to answer, but could think of no sensical response. “I- I-” She choked out.

Fluttershy looked up from the ground, openly weeping. “Please! Please!”

Rarity felt an echo in her head like a pebble in a bowl. It was that word. She watched how the lips pouted before the ‘p’, and how the rest of it just spilled out until those yellow lips drew back to hiss the ‘s’. It was a juicy word, like an overripe tomato splattering against a wall. Rarity replayed it until it no longer made sense to her. It was just sounds, the whine of a hysterical pegasus.
How does ‘Rarity’ sound, the corrupted unicorn wondered. Just another noise that ponies make. Rarity was profligate, filth, the opposite of its supposed meaning in every respect. Yet it sounded so pure when Fluttershy said it, so clean of the dark grime it had accumulated.
Rarity felt like she was falling backwards. Her head swam with vertigo... Every time she thought a thought, there was an echo. Rarity the nightmare and Rarity the pony were colliding and clashing. She felt like she might burst like the ripe tomato in her mind's eye.

“...sorry...” Rarity hissed.

“Y- You’re not going to help?” Fluttershy sniffled.

“I can't raise the sun.” Rarity lurched forward, pressing a hoof against Fluttershy's chest, pinning her. She could smell her, and drooled. "I can't even lower the moon. I can't save Ponyville. I might want to but I can't."

Fluttershy could speak from a combination of sheer terror and the hoof on her chest.

But Rarity didn't follow through. The nightmare was losing its hold, and the pony was beginning to shine, like a brilliant beaken in a head full of darkness and fog, a call back to the light she felt from Fluttershy.
"But I can save you." Rarity whispered, calmly, familiarly. “I can make the night a little brighter, for you.”

Rarity released Flutershy and turned to the shrine. She bent down, smothering the candles with her flowing mane as she jabbed her forhead against the stone. She was as a appellant to the savage statue of the Nightmare of the Moon.
Rarity gripped the tail of her makeshift scarf, the tapestry binding her soul, and pulled it off in one motion.

Nothing happened. The nightmare did not abate like she’d expected.

“Oh.” Rarity said, feeling a bit silly. She looked back at Fluttershy. “Well, um…”

Fluttershy was just sitting quietly, trying to work through her fear and confusion.

The whole affair had given Rarity's rage some time to cool. She set her stance, ready to get back into her battle against the heretics Dash and Ancepanox as a rational and deadly agent- She promised to herself she would not lose control again. Even a nightmare had the standards of a lady to live up to.
“Stay here, if you will. I have some business to take care of.” Rarity dusted herself off. “But it is best you stop praying to the altar. In this strange night, you have been creating this dark fog. The other nightmare have been trying to track you that way."

“O- Other nightmares?” Fluttershy whimpered.

“Yes. I'm not your god. I'm not the Dark Lady. She has yet to descend. In her place a thousand horrors have awoken to exploit this dark night. Among them, the Nightmare of the Moon." Rarity said, and Fluttershy threw her gaze to the fierce statue, reverent but afraid. “But she is a very different nature than we thought. I shant lie to you, Fluttershy, but we are not gods. Truly the only thing setting us apart from pony is how wretched and sinful we are, quite literally.”

Fluttershy was on the edge of tears again. But not for fear, but for sadness, and her sympathy in the face of the awful curse laid upon the unicorn before her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Oh hush now. You have nothing to be sorry for.” Rarity held out a comforting hoof, but it began to shake and clench. The nightmare unicorn drew it back: She wasn't completely in control of herself yet. “From what I said, you have two options. Return home and forget about all of this madness, and forget this faith. Or, you may stay, and witness some very interesting things, as we claw our ways back from the clutches of insanity."

“I… um…” Fluttershy glanced around, searching for an answer in the corners of the room. “When you put it that way…”

“No, dear, I would never be so uncouth as to force an answer from you now. That would be simply unladylike.” Rarity apologized, flashing a shining, teethy smile. “And I am nothing, if not ladylike.”

“I agree.” Fluttershy said in a hushed tone. "... Rarity."
The truth of the unicorn’s identity was beginning to dawn on Fluttershy, but it surprised her less than she would have expected. So, Rarity had finally delved too deep into dark magic and suffered for it. On the one hoof Fluttershy was relieved that Rarity was not missing, hurt, or trapped in a much worse way. On the other hoof, what strange and terrible a fate it was to be twisted into a nightmare!
Fluttershy could at least celebrate that her dearest friend wasn’t dead. There were worse things in the wings if she was to be believed.

She was about to say something when all the candles in the room were snuffed out. A deathly chill settled over them, and the entire castle. With Fluttershy no longer praying at the altar, the black fog was beginning to dissipate, but a much more sinister presence was asserting itself now: A malevolent thing as yet unrevealed, not Ancepanox, and not Agana. What was it, it's oppressive aura filling the air?!

Rarity ran out of the hidden alcove, panicked to discover what this new evil force was. She ran into the library, tripping over stacks of books until the fog disipated away? Rarity looked around, to discover some faint light was negating the dark fog just like Ancepanox had. The light was coming from above, from the holes in the library ceiling.
It was the Moon. The pale orb looked almost twice its usual size, and had becomed tinged with a deep visceral red. Rarity could not pull her eyes away from it, and most horrifyingly of all, they could feel that most unholy of presences up there watching them back.

Fluttershy peeked out of the hidden alcove, her eyes darting up to the blood moon. “Maybe I should go back to praying.”

“Not a bad idea, all things considered.” Rarity could see an unparalleled malevolence in the eyes of the moon silhouette, to which her hatred and grudges were a pale shadow. Whatever had taken over the moon contained an anger and fury to match anything Rarity had seen so far that night.

Unbeknownst to them, Applejack was observing from a corner of the room. While Dash had fled and Rarity run about like a bronco, Applejack had slinked into the corner, giving subtlety a try. It didn't suite her. She fidgeted constantly, her own instincts and the nightmare curse demanding she act, quickly and violently.
Her patience was paying off. Rarity had pulled off her makeshift scarf. Applejack didn't know what that represented, but she had the feeling the nightmare unicorn was vulnerable now.

She stood up and approached Rarity. "Does that moon scare you, Rarity? It ran Rainbow Dash off." She said, slipping back into her Manehattan accent. "Somepony or some god is angry with us."

Rarity's ears flicked at the sound of Applejack's voice. "This isn't the time." She said harshly, but fear was seeping into her voice.

"This is exactly the time Rares." Applejack hissed, drawing closer. Her blood boiled for everything she’d suffered at the unicorn’s hooves. She was tired of reconciliation, tired of playing nice. Everypony else was using the wretched night to exact their petty revenges. Why couldn't she?

Fluttershy's eyes fixed on the new nightmare pony. "A- Applejack?"

“You back to prayin, Fluttershy.” Applejack whispered, drawing herself up and preparing for battle. Yes, she was certain Rarity was weakened without the scarf. Applejack promised herself she would act without remorse, and without mercy; Like bucking a dead tree to shake the limbs off. “You ain’t gunna wanna see this.”

---

Rainbow Dash, to her credit, did not mindlessly flee the castle. She scampered across the roof and dropped down into the throne room, where she ran over to Twilight Sparkle's limp body.
"Get up! Get up!" Dash shouted. She struggled to find the most efficient way to carry the small pony body. “How ironic is it that being in this alicorn shape makes me more useless?”

The eerie moonlight began to penetrate into the throne room. The atmosphere became unbearable. For what must have been the fifth time that night Dash was presented with the choice of abandoning them or staying. Why did the cruel world keep foisting such awful dilemmas on her?

Dash scrunched her face, then with a pained and choppy sigh, put Twilight back down. She felt a familiar tingle in her brain, like a psychic voice was trying to speak to her but not quite audible.
"I'm not the right pony for this. I knew that from the start. I held down the fort long enough to make the difference,"

Three screams echoed nearby down the castle halls, reaching the throne room like a cacophonous orchestra. Dash recognized two of anger, Rarity and Applejack, but not the one of terror, who sounded like a mare.
"Last time to enjoy the feeling of this body." Dash mumbled to herself. She checked Twilight was laying evenly and galloped in the direction of the yells and snarls she heard.

With the dark fog clearing up, Dash could see the entire situation upon entering the library. Applejack and Rarity were tangled together in a battle to the death. Sprays of black blood covered the floor, staining the brick and wood and the covers of the priceless tomes they rolled over in their mindless melee.

Taking a step forward to stop the two, Dash bumped into a small mare she hadn’t noticed. A pegasus mare with a coat the color of withered daffodils, and a mane as silky and pink as the soft tissues that built that innocent little body. Dash stared into radiant, tearfully eyes, and knew she had seen the mare before. From a time before fear and guilt, that mare and Dash had played and laughed in the fluffy skies of Cloudsdale.
“Fluttershy.” Dash gurgled. She recognized the little mare, a figment of a memory from a time she'd tried to forget. She remembered such a yellow and pink filly off to herself, hugging the edge of the cloud to stay out of the way of the other rambunctious fillies and colts. "You died... at the Cloud Creche! The Rainboom!"

Was transfixed by the deep blue eyes of the big black alicorn leering over her. Just as menacing in life as depicted on the makeshift altar in the alcove, the Nightmare of the Moon. But those wild eyes were filled with a silent desire and need to be recognized and forgiven, but Fluttershy could do neither. "My lady." Fluttershy whispered.

Dash grabbed her head and shook out her confusion and turmoil. She wasn't there on her own behalf. She had held down the fort long enough! She begged to be released from the alicorn body and get her own back. Maybe Fluttershy would recognize her then. "Make this stop already! Please I just want this to stop!"

The chaotic brawl between Applejack and Rarity continued and loudly and viciously as enraged cougars. Fluttershy, her attention torn between the fight and the shivering alicorn cowering next to her, was on the verge of breakdown. SOUND, CONFUSION, CHAOS. And the light of the moon overhead was getting painfully bright, so much Fluttershy thought she could almost hear it. "Make it stop. Make this stop." Fluttershy pleaded an echo to the alicorn's mutterings, directed to whoever was listening. She nudged Nightmare Moon's hoof with her nose.

Dash jerked her hoof away. She felt the insidious burbling urge... the nightmare urge, compelling her to destroy. With the alicorn body's strength, Fluttershy could be crushed in one quick stomp.
But there was the other urge too, the death drive that had been haunting her since the night's inception.
In that moment, Rainbow Dash had no doubt that it was the deepest, darkest, most horrible point of the night. The worst had arrived. Rarity and Applejack had lost themselves to the nightmare's animalistic passions. Dash wanted to lose herself too. Nothing made sense anymore, and her mind was frayed from the bombardment of stimuli and conflicting urges.

"Everything here leads to death." Dash still had the sabre she'd found. She untucked her wing and let it drop to the ground. She picked up the sabre in the curl of her hoof and limped towards the two entangled nightmare ponies. "Ancepanox keeps showing up when death is near. I wonder... What'll happen this time?"

Rarity and Applejack didn't notive the third nightmare until it physically bumped into them. Like drunken brawlers they both struck out at the intruder. Applejack pulled away from Rarity long enough to buck the alicorn in the side, kocking her to the side. Rarity, snatched up the silver sabre and jammed it into the dark alicorn's breast, just under the seam of the curiass.

Then nopony moved.
Fluttershy, transfixed by her fear and confusion, looked from pony to pony. It was unsettlingly calm all of a sudden. Even the painful light of the moon seemed to have abated.

"I..." Rarity was coming to her senses. She rubbed her eyes, affirming the body in the growing pool of blood was indeed Ancpeanox's. "I didn't mean to." She choked out.

Applejack, who had been much more lost into bloodlust, regained some semblance of reason by the shock. "You killed the best hope for us to go back to normal." She falling back into her drawl. "Hell, Rarity, you killed our hope of getting the sun back! Damn fool. It was me you were supposed to be hitting, not her!"

"I didn't mean to!" Rarity, trembling, wiped her brow with a hoof but only managed to leave a smear of blood across her forehead. Her head was a swimming mess of battling emotions. Her nightmare urge felt like a fire just under the skin, demanding she get up and keep killing. She slumped to her hindquarters. "What is going on! Why can't I have my head back!"

Applejack sniffled, trying to hold her aggressive stance through sudden tears. Her head was pounding. Rarity's weakness and remorse was MORE of a reason to pummel her... wasn't it? She wasn't sure which where her own thought and which were the nightmare's.

As Rainbow Dash had seen, the deepest, darkest point of the night had come. But it could not stay, because Dash's second observation, that Ancepanox came 'round when death grew near, was also true.
The alicorn body spasmed, it's eyes thrown open. The light of the blood moon dimmed even farther, and the chill in the air grew sharper.

Fluttershy wasn't sure what happened, but all of a sudden, both Rarity and Applejack grabbed their heads, screaming unintelligibly, then collapsed to the ground beside the bleeding alicorn. Fluttershy was frozen for several seconds before the rushed over to the pile of them. Rarity and Applejack were still breathing, but appeared to have fallen suddenly into a deep sleep.
Fluttershy clutched her little knitted devotional against her beating heart, trying to decide the next course of action. She sat that way for a while... but perhaps if Fluttershy had watched closer she would have seen that Nightmare Moon was also still breathing, her chest rising and falling very very slowly despite the sword jammed into it.

The experience of falling asleep had not been nearly as sudden or comfortable for Rarity and Applejack. One moment they were in the castle library, babbling and lamenting, and the next they found themselves amongst a world of light and color assaulting their senses.

A pulse of purple filled the ever-shifting void around them. They tried to move but everything seemed to be slowed down. They looked themselves over but even that was shifting and wavering.

From around them a voice came, then a figure apeared. A ghost , as gigantic as a manticore. It opened it’s mouth and an unholy roar echoed through the castle, and ragged and commanding though it was.
Ancepanox looked more like a concept than a pony. Her purple eyes shone out from under a crown of abyssal darkness, but a multitude more opened and closed across what could have been her face. Her body remained vaguely equine, but with radiant darkness issuing off of every edge. The longer one looked, the more it seemed to shift and change it’s shape. White tendrils emerged and retracted from luminous regions that appeared and disappeared across different points on her body.

"Hello girls." The all-encompassing sound came. "Welcome back into the dreamscape. We are on the hunt for Celestia, who has set herself against us and all ponykind. I ate Agana, Suzerain of Sin, and taken enough power to take us all the way to the end."

Applejack croaked out an unintelligible accession, and tried to kneel, head bowed to the nebulous shape. Rarity took a moment longer, thinking back to the black alicorn bleeding on the ground in the library, in contrast to the horror above her.

Seeing Rarity’s confusion, Ancepanox laughed; A terrible, head-splitting sound like tearing glass. “Yeah, I'm having a hard time keeping my manifestation together. I'm having a hard time keeping my whole self together! I'm twenty different ponies jammed into one skull. You understand what I mean, even if its just pony and nightmare in your heads. We're not meant to exist like this. It's driving us insane!"
The ghostly visage warped and shifted, coming more to resemble the dark alicorn body but still strange in ways that revulsed the senses "But if we run down and defeat Celestia once and for all, then I'm sure I'll have the power to resolve this. I'll become whole, and you ponies can be whatever you want to be."

A shimmering light cascaded through the vivid world, falling into place in between Applejack and Rarity, resolving into the shape of Rainbow Dash's nightmare pegasus form.

"You can ask questions on the other side. This ride is almost over, and hopefully things will make more sense there." Ancepanox said. "I'm sorry it had to be you three... But you've propelled me into this stage of existance, and I need you there to finish this project. I'm your progeny as much as you are mine."

This shifting and changing world of color became blinding. The nightmare ponies' remaining grip on reality fell away, and their consciousnesses were awash with numbness. Eventually that faded, as did the blinding light.

When they regained sense of direction, Rarity, Applejack, and Rainbow Dash discovered themselves in an endless grey plainscape. But the pot-marked landscape and twinkle of stars overhead betrayed that this was not another fold of the Dreamscape.

---

The darkest moment of the Eternal Night was finding the skies above Equestria as desperate and confused as the lands. Sunset Shimmer struggled to hold onto life. Seconds before, she was powerful and triumphal, using the power of the sun to burn away Astral Nacre. The next moment, the exhaustion and lack of air made her crumple to the airship deck.

“Damn it all.” Sunset tried to curse, but there wasn’t enough air for even that. Her legs gave out and she collapsed onto her back. Too weak to sustain her grasp on the magical sun she’d summoned, she watched it burn itself out within seconds. The airship became very still and quiet, and without anything to give light or heat, as uninhabitable as cold space.
She was very close to the edge of what could be considered the Bright World. Yes, Sunset was right on the edge of space. Out beyond that invisible barrier were all the wonderful and horrible things that roams the untold reaches of the cosmos. Some of them could be called gods, some demons.

Sunset tried to crawl towards the edge of the airship. How was it still rising? The balloons should have popped long before that altitude.
Using the last of her energy, she pulled herself to the lip of the deck, but was too weak to go further. She could see the very curvature of the world, the bumps of mountains and the stains of clouds and storms. It was so far away to her now, as darkness crept in from the corners of her vision.

But there was something else up there with her. The Moon, in all it’s grey-red vastness that filled the dark skies beyond what whould have been natural or possible, leered down at her, taunting her for her arrogance and pride.
Sunset Shimmer felt a presance in that red moon's light. Something... or somepony... was aware of her.

"Celestia?" Sunset mouthed, for she could not whisper. Why would Celestia's aura be on the moon? Was that why the moon had turned to evil and red? It made no sense to her.
Sunset searched uselessly to spot any sign or spot on the pale-red satellite, anything to let her know that familiar sensation was not just the fantasy of an oxygen starved brain, but it was really Celestia up there watching her.

I did this this for you, Sunset said inside her head for hope of being heard. And either the Ritual would soon be cast and Celestia would walk the waking world again, and Sunset Shimmer would be walking the lands of death with her princess. Either way they were soon to be reunited.

---

It was not nearly so peaceful in the lower atmosphere, where Entanglement Theory fought against the wind and turbulence to make sure Sunset Shimmer's fantasy took place in life and not death. It was bitterly cold even without the whipping gusts that tore planks off the deck. With how quickly the old cargo airship was coming apart, it was highly unlikely they would be able to land safely

It was not Entanglement Theory's goal was to survive. Her goal was to complete the Ritual, and complete the work she and Sunset had been building towards for years. The wind threatened to sweep her off the side but she ignored it, drawing patterned runes, connecting wires, running back and forth across the heaving deck.

“No batteries. Makes things complicated.” She mumbled, untying the puzzle in her head. The years of planning weren't going to do much good in a system with no redundancy. Entanglement Theory did not like changing procedure on the fly, but with the loss of the batteries then Astral Nacre showing up, there was no salvaging the original plan.
"Think! Think! What can replace batteries." She asked herself as she put the finishing touches on the last rune pattern, a smear of ink on the stone slab.

Entanglement Theory's thoughts went to the other pony to have preformed the Ritual, Twilight Velvet. Entanglement Theory did not like to think about Velvet, even less than she liked to think about Twilight Sparkle. She didn't like to imagine how the contrivances of dream and reality that allowed her exist in the waking world could break if she encountered those ponies. At the same time Entanglement Theory felt a yearning for them and she felt pangs of regret she had to leave so soon... But if she did not then the curse that had stolen her eyes would visit a most horrific fate.

Twilight Velvet used ponies as magic batteries." Entanglement Theory pushed out her feelings. "But the trio she used for her Ritual were nobles with elder one blood." She glanced at the four lobotomized drone ponies she had at her disposal. If she tried to use those fragile souls as magic batteries they would pop like water balloons, and the Ritual would be ruined.
"Then... That leaves just one pony to act as a capacitor." She gulped. "Me."

And so, Entanglement Theory initiated the final step in the long and winding sequence she had been following all those years. It was time for the Ritual.

One pony, bound to the stone slab at the center of the deck. Entanglement Theory chose the yellow unicorn stallion, since she had two of those. The drone did as he was ushered and laid on the chunk of rock, allowing Entanglement Theory to claps his hooves in iron shackles and to jab copper leads into points across his body.

Three ponies, to use as foci, in the precise angles they'd deduced from the other experiments. At Entanglement Theory’s order, the three other experiments stumbled into position, circumscribed around the slab 16.7 degrees apart. An earth pony, a unicorn, and a pegasus, just as required. Entangelment Theory shackled them down too, and laid the last of the copper wire along the deck over her previous chalk outlines. The foci pony mutely accepted her hastily shoving them into the exact position. Their dull eyes followed her around: Should she be proud or ashamed that she had accomplished the same thing as Astral Nacre with her own flavor of zombie? It was much towards the same goal or perfection.

One pony, to act as the ritual caster. Theory’s heart was beating against her chest, fear and anticipation building up within her. She took her place opposite the foci and attached herself to various wires, finishing off by slotting a conduit over her horn. The unwieldy spur of bone would finally have its use. With the help of her machinery in the bowels of the airship, even Entanglement Theory's meager magical power would be enough to see the Ritual to completion.

And finally, one pony to receive the gift. Sunset Shimmer was far far above, the little scout airship barely a dot against the big pale-red moon. Entanglement Theory had to shield her eyes against the intense moonlight, but a feeling deep in her heart promised her that Sunset was still on their airship. As long as the Ritual was aimed correctly, Sunset would still receive its power. And then it would be over.

The end was so close. So much preparation, so much had gone wrong, but the end was still in sight.
"Get Ready, Sunset" Entanglement Theory whispered. She took the final tool in her hoof: An obsidian knife, flaked with gold, with a handle emblazoned with a yellow sun and purple stars. This was a Star's dagger, lovingly recreated to use for the Ritual.
Entanglement Theory's eyes settled on that silly little emblem, the sun and stars, that Sunset Shimmer had insisted to put on all their custom equipment. After they'd first met those years ago, and once Sunset had learned the language, her attempts to describe her native Equestria and its pony inhabitants had come across as charming fantasy. Sunset had boasted about how her mark, the yellow and red sun, evoked the symbol of her god-princess Celestia. From that Entanglement Theory had often wondered what her mark would be, despite Sunset's promises it would be a purple star circumscribed by five smaller stars.
All these years later Sunset Shimmer's promise had turned out to be true, but not because Sunset had some special insight into her soul... but because Sunset had seen it on that other pony. Yes, Entanglement Theory knew herself to be the mirror image of that other pony, that other Twilight Sparkle. And when it was over and she returned to her home, she would not be able to forget that her existance was a derivative thing, and that her entire dimension was only the twisted refection of this place called Equestria. Maybe Equestria itself was a derivative and fanciful reflection of an even more real place, yet unknown and unreachable!

Entanglement Theory did not have the luxury to dwell on it any longer. Trying to change this harsh reality was part of the reason she'd been cursed.
At that point, she only existed to support Sunset Shimmer's quest for gods and truth.

“We begin the ritual.” Entanglement Theory announced.
Purple magic sparked to life at the tip of her horn, then arced to the conduit. The airship lurched and shook as the arcane machinery in the cargo hold groaned to life. The magic traveled through each of twenty devices: Diodes, frequency adaptors, transitional infusers, patterns changers, all things to recreate a spell she would otherwise be unable to cast.

The spell came back to her as an angry and tempestuous power, coursing and scintillating through the wires. It reached the three foci ponies simultaneously, throwing them into soul-shattering agony. Entanglement Theory watched as the spell sent her drones into spasms and shrieks, but she knew they would hold up, for she had tested the limits of the pony soul and this was far from it.

From the foci ponies, wisps of dark power streamed through the air directly into the unicorn on the slab. At first he was placid, taking no care for his fellow experiment’s pain. Slowly, his look of dumb contentment faltered, and became more and more gruesome. He began to shake uncontrollably, and the muscles and flesh under his skin convulsed from the obscene magic forced upon it. He looked to Entanglement Theory, his eyes pleading for her to stop.

“Not yet.” She commanded, and poured more magic into the hellish devices. A murky light began to flood out from the foci’s eyes and mouth, and even their mistress’s order was not enough keep them on their hooves. They fell but continued to be fed the fell power, and so continued to emit the transformative magic into the unicorn.

His fur was no longer yellow, and he was no longer just a unicorn. With every mote of magic he became something different from what he had been. His forehead cracked and spurted blood as his horn pushed further out of his head, and as he opened his mouth to scream in pain his muzzle reshaped itself as well. His spine writhed and twisted within him like a snake, until the spell decided what it wanted and red wings erupted from his sides. His legs grew longer, his frame more regal, his mane and tail grew to thrice their their length.

An alicorn. Entanglement Theory grinned in grim triumph. Success so far.
She ended feeding magic into the device and detached all the wires to herself. Several seconds later the return spell ended, and the cracking power moving humming through the copper wires died away. The foci ponies stopped their spasming, but they had already died. Hopefully that had not caused any problems in the alicorn.

Entanglement Theory took a moment to cool down and catch her breath, but the task was far from over.
She took a step forward, standing over the shackled alicorn she had created. He was beautiful, the product of the most carefully measured ingredients and procedures. By all means this was the end of the end of the sequence- Pony magic had apotheosized, and through rigerous research and examination of the pony, the resulting alicorn was as 'pure' as could be achieved by mortals.
If Entanglement Theory and Sunset Shimmer wanted just any old alicorn, this would be the end. But they wanted a very specific alicorn and her very specific power. Their research assured them it could be possible... to sacrifice one alicorn for another.

Entanglement Theory passed the obsidian sacrifice knife from one hoof to the other, her eyes roaming the alicorn's sculpted body. What did it feel like to be a living god? Was it like a pony but more powerful? Did their cosmic nature mean they experience existance differently? Sunset Shimmer could talk for hours about Celestia, but it was never clear if the late princess was more pony than god, or god than pony.
“Hello.” She whispered.

The alicorn was conscious, but dazed and confused. He tried to bring a hoof to his head but could not for the shackles. “Uuuh…” He gurgled, trying to focus on Entanglement Theory with his new eyes. “W- What…”

“What will you be called?” Entanglement Theory asked. The experiment should remain nameless, she knew. It was best to remain clinical.

“I- I’m Salty. Or am I… Saph?” He slurred, trying to sort through the memories forced upon him from the foci. “Or Trompare?”

“No, no. Those were your past names." Entanglement Theory glanced to the burned out foci ponies sizzling on the deck. "You should have something meaningful. You are fleeting, but that doesn't mean you should be in the history books."

The disoriented alicorn fought through the cloudiness of his mind to think for a moment. “Celestia?”

Entanglement Theory laughed despite herself. Ironic final words. "Nevermind. You'll just be the 'Final Experiment', like Sunset wanted.”

She clutched the obsidian knife in her forehooves, rearing up in defiance of the winds. The alicorn saw what she was doing and let out a wordless yell of protest, before the black obsidian came plunging down into his heart.

The knife, an enchanted sacrifice blade in the style of the Stars, funneled the alicorn’s soul into the last machine. In the cargo hold, a device of glass and copper held a princess’s golden horseshoe, and it was into that device that the magic coursed.

Entanglement Theory counted the moments, and then yanked the blade of sacrifice out of the murdered alicorn. Glowing with magical energy and blood, the knife began to shake violently. The shear amount of magic extracted was proving too much for the apparatus down below.

Entanglement Theory had seconds to act until the machines exploded and the airship with them. This is where batteries and capacitors would have come in handy, she mused. Now she moved on to the last and most dubious step of her plan.
A second Apotheosis.

She flipped the obsidian knife around, so that she was holding point towards herself. “Calm. Clam.” She repeated, trying to keep the trembling of her hoof to a minimum. With a grunt, she jabbed herself in the stomach.

The pain was exquisite! Theory gasped. All of an alicorn’s magic was pulsing into her, burning her up from the inside.
She had to focus! She was the battery now, but still the caster! She stood up, holding a hoof on the knife to keep it lodged in her gut. Light poured out of her eyes, mouth, ears, and her entire hide took on a luminous glow. Already, the uncontrolled alicorn magic was bashing at her insides in a destructive attempt to mutate her.
From a festering pit of Dark in her abdomen, a formative consciousness fought back. The curse rejected the foreign magic. To Theory, it was like her innards were at war with themselves.
“Graaaah!” She screamed, trying to control her breathing. “Gotta cast it now. Gotta cast it now!”

The Dark kicked out, threatening a premature birth if its host did not remove the irritant. “Fuuuck!” Theory was on the verge of passing out, but dutifully oriented herself to the target. “Get ready Sunset!” She warned through clenched teeth.

She tried casting a bolt of magic up towards the skiff and Sunset. The alicorn magic suddenly had a pressure release, and in a torrent of golden energy it streamed off her horn into the infinite sky. For what seemed like forever to her frazzled mind, Entanglement Theory stood fast while an alicorn soul’s worth of raw power coursed straight through her skull on it’s way out. Until finally it was over.

Entanglement Theory collapsed onto her haunches. A great feeling of emptiness overtook her. For a few glorious seconds, she was divine.
Theory watched the golden bolt of alicorn magic hit the skiff high high above. A flash of light, and then the profile of the skiff dissolved away. There was no sign if Sunset had received the power.

"Ah... How miserable... being left in suspense." Entanglement Theory gasped, squeezing her eyes closed. For her own sanity, she had to believe that it had worked. Even now that divine magic was coursing through Sunset Shimmer, to be channeled into resurrecting the one alicorn that mattered.
Theory's leg went numb, and she couldn't keep the obsidian knift from sliding out of her skin. Blood welled out. of the thin cut.

Her one solace was that the Dark curse residing in her abdomen curled back into restfulness.

"Time to leave this world." Theory said shakily.
Slowly she reached up with a hoof and nudged off her enchanted spectacles.

The haunting visions were around her again, dead ponies giggling and pointing at her. The four fresh sacrifices, including the yellow stallion, were there among them. So much dead that she had created, all to this end! There would be no more.

The grey eyed griffin sorceress Black Bell was standing over her now, bemused but also impressed and admiring. "That was amazing work. I never imagioned an outworlder like you could have managed it."

“Yep.” Theory said acidly, trying to stem the bleeding at her abdominal puncture with a hoof. "I'll be the gossip topic among your Star friends for months and months."

Black Bell delighted at Entanglement Theory suffering, pushing the ghosts out of the way to leer over the wounded mare. "Don't be like that. I learned a lot watching you. I don't have much use for that knowledge, but I have it and that pleases me."

"And since I satisfied your voyeuristic pleasures, you'll help me, right?" Theory asked harshly.

"With the bleeding, the abortion, or the iminant crash landing?" Black Bell laughed.

"With Sunset, damn you! You have to protect her. I'm going home and I can't protect her any more. If... If she..." Theory was interrupted by a fit of coughing. Blood and phlem dripped down her chin. "The Dark gods will curse her like they did me. She has to be kept from making the same mistakes I did."

"You silly, ignorant cat.” Black Bell leaned down and pushed Theory’s hoof away from the wound, placing her own talon on the spot. Magic danced between the digits, and the skin and tissue healed itself. “That curse saved you. It's given you sight beyond sight! Smacks of ungratefulness you want to go purge it, and selfishness you want to keep it from your friend."

Entanglement Theory jumped up and head-butted Black Bell in the chin, making the griffin stumble backwards and trip into the crowd of listless ghosts. "Don't you dare talk about her like that! You and I might be worthless cynics but Sunset is different. She believes in somepony! She's traveled across dimensions for what she believes!"

"She believes in a fraud, and once she realizes that, then I'll be the one laughing." Black Bell brushed herself off, then let out a guttural laugh. "Oh little outworlder, I hope you find a way back into our world. It's been fun."

"So long and go to hell.” Entanglement Theory put her hoof on the spectacles, now fallen to the deck beneath her. She hesitated, casting a last long look towards the big pale-red moon, in useless hope that Sunset would be there. She put her weight down, crushing the glasses flat, and the last layer of enchantments within them activated. In a blinding flash of yellow magic, the purple mare was whisked off.

In warm sands where a white sun was just dawning, far distant very near to Equestria, an upright creature appeared. It admired the trackless dunes and glowing twilight, then turned away and padded towards home.