chapter twenty seven
Changeling Heart and the New Moon
chapter twenty seven
The changelings’ outbreak, the raising of the shield of Canterlot: these things had yet to occur when Luna awoke. Consciousness bulled its way through her on a tide of sensation, blurring out all thought. She could feel the grit beneath her and the sting of scrapes. She could feel the downpour falling atop her; the way the rain seemed to drip through her coat, her skin, right down into her royal bones. She could feel the ache of something deeper altogether.
Luna opened her eyes only to have them pelted by the rain. Blurred, seeing nothing and making sense of even less she shut them again.
“My lady liege?” A voice, calling to her. She felt she should know it, but for all the sensation - the prickle of thousands of raindrops not least of all - thought was so much slower in coming, so much more confused than the hectic, meaningless dance of the raindrops.
She tried to put a name to the voice and, failing that, tried to figure out where she was.
“Princess. Princess, please answer me.” The touch of a soft, yet insistent hoof at her shoulder added itself to the list of sensation to make sense of.
She had been...somewhere. A house, of sorts. Homely, but dignified and warm. No, a castle, left to the ravages of time. The two images clashed behind her eyes.
There had been...foals. Yes, that much was certain. They’d usurped her in the moment of victory, using a magic that...no, she’d been visiting them, baring her story.
It’d been night. The everlasting night. No, it’d been day like any other. Again, the contradiction within her own memory made only for more confusion.
“Luna? Come on, Luna” The pushing became firmer, rocking her back and forth a tiny measure.
That was her, right. Of course it was. The colt’s concern was finally met with a groan and Luna, diarch of Equestria, hazarded her eyes a second time. Blinking the rain from them she could make out a wing, not hers, but sheltering her face from the weather. A dusty, darker colour and further on a cutie mark, a crescent of the moon.
“Wane?” she managed through a bout of coughing. “Wane, what is happening?” Luna hefted herself upright, all sorts of parts of her complaining about the exposure and mistreatment. Her faithful, if trembling, steward looked away then back again as if stalked by something unseen.
It was a feeling she could relate with. The dark castle, the conflict, she pushed the images aside far as they would go. “Where is Chrysalis?”
Wane shivered uncontrollably, looking this way and that with every short breath, sometimes even more so than that. “Chrysalis?” he managed to stammer out through his trembling jaw. “No, no...I haven’t...it was just you. I had to find you.”
It was some personal nightmare that peeled his eyes so wide, fear that kept him attentive. She’d never seen him like this, and all the while Luna did her best to ignore the absurd notion echoing through her mind that she’d never seen him before in her life. Or had even seen this city, for that matter.
“Luna, please...” his words trailed off, eyes wide, pupil and all. He looked off to the distance. “Do you feel-”
The back surge of magic hit Luna just as the roar on the wind did, not a howl of anything living but the air itself, shaking like thunder. Both sensations came through so strongly that the source could as easily have been the next street over as the far side of the city, there was no way to tell. Luna doubted finding that out necessary anyway: the outburst had come from the direction of the where the changelings were being kept, and there were no prizes for guessing who was behind that forceful display.
She didn’t even think, the alicorn merely turned to face it like some animal challenged for its territory. Wane put himself before her.
“No, please my dark lady, Wax is...we need you!”
Luna ignored him. Black wings flared, and the water was banished from them in an explosion of droplets.
“Chrysalis has overstepped herself by far,” she growled through gritted teeth. Pain and dizziness flashed through the alicorn, here and gone in an instant. “No light but my moon, my stars! No Queen but-” another flash tore through Luna, whipping the snow globe of her mind into a blizzard of disparate little pieces, colliding and rebounding.
She arched her wings over herself protectively, sheltering her eyes with her hoof until the worst of it passed.
What has happened to Wax? She clung to the thought greedily, a lifeline in the storm of confusion tearing through her. She struggled to keep the world straight and still in her eyes, while every shadow was slick as oil, twisting up into the air and dancing - or writhing - towards her. Wax. Wax. Wax. Even more so than concern for his wellbeing Luna held the thought as a focus. A still point when everything else was changing, caught in flux.
“What has happened,” she managed to ask, her voice strained, tiny and hidden behind hoof and wing. She lowered them after a steadying breath, following Wane’s awe stricken gaze to the crackling, sputtering gouts of magic that crawled backwards across her feathers and flesh, undoing the transformation that had surfaced. She could still feel it though. Still there, under her skin. Still squirming to twist her entirely.
“Ignore that. Just...focus.”
“Luna,” he began, hesitant. Afraid. “Are you-”
“Alright? No. But I can handle it.” Luna sighed, then gave a sad attempt at a chuckle. “Somepony else will have to nanny our not so little changeling. I do always seem to miss the most interesting times. I am certain the good captain and dearest sister of mine will have stern words for me in any case, provided there’s something of me...well. Let’s not dwell on that matter.” Luna held her head again, as if the rather dreary light of the stormy evening were burning and blinding to her, much more used to the darkness. She didn’t have the strength to deal with the Queen. At least, not the strength to control the rampancy of her power.
Indeed, mere seconds ago her eyes, hidden from the world, had gone to pinpricks. Or rather to slits, like twinned slivers of darkness. From certain angles they still looked to be that way, but Wane spoke nothing of this.
“Tell me everything,” she commanded, leading away from the calamity surely riled up by the changelings.
Her servant, held prisoner within the castle. Subject to something unnatural. Something monstrous. In her hazy thoughts, Luna had to remind herself that her sister wasn’t to blame. Her sister, so faultless, so immaculate. Pristine, perfect Celestia. The familiar wave of vertigo pounded through Luna. She growled and grit her teeth so that she would not cry out her frustrations. She hardly noticed the shield spell rising over the city, not that it would have mattered to her anyway.
When her head was her own once more, she could see, no, more than that she could feel the crackling, jittering darkness welling up through her skin, filling out like ulcers that crept eagerly across her form. The further they spread, the greater the alicorn’s sense of self became.
Even so, Luna’s memories battered at her. Flashes faster than she could count, images, thoughts and feelings. “They named a festival for me? How quaint.”
Not like this. Not again. Before the dark mare even knew what was happening, her horn flared with the pale light of the moon. The luminescence turned back over her, stinging and scalding incessantly. The darkness fled.
Luna picked herself up from the ground, something she felt she’d had to do more than enough of lately. She didn’t recall falling, but then again, it hadn’t been her she’d knocked down, had it? At least the rain had stopped, some small corner of thought spat out sarcastically.
She opened her wings to the air, hoping herself steady enough to fly. Luna gave a few experimental flaps. It looked surprisingly promising.
“Come on,” she said. Wane took heart from her confidence. She could not fly far, nor high or fast either, not frayed as she was, but Luna did not worry herself with these things. She thought only that she did not have far to go, and that she could manage high enough and fast enough to do it. “You trust me, Wane?”
“Of course,” he said, running and leaping into flight alongside her. “Always. Even if you become-”
“Nightmare Moon.” Something within her, dark and coiled, cocked a pointy ear at the name. “You can say it. And it will not come to that. I will save your brother, I will end this crisis with Chrysalis, and I will undo the damage to myself.”
Luna winced with another of the sudden waves of dizziness, forcing herself to keep one eye squinting forwards as she flew onwards through the twisting confusion. It passed and she carried on, steadying herself on her wings.
“Just not in that order.” Luna grimaced, clamping her teeth together before speaking again. “I know what I have to do. We go to the castle gardens.”
In the tranquility of the gardens it was almost hard to imagine that things were in such turmoil. The throbbing in Luna’s head, the omnipresent barrier encapsulating the city and the occasional echoes of magic wafting up from its lower districts helped with that.
Luna landed, settled to a walk, then a standstill. Before her stood a statue very much unlike any other. Wane was a pony haunted, but not by the spirit of chaos bound in stone.
“Right here. This is where we were. Looking for you. Shining came and Wax...Wax changed. Something happened to him. I just know. I can feel it.” He sat, staring off at nothing in particular. Luna had little for him in the way of consolation. “Shining Armour took him away, then I came and found you.”
As if she hadn’t wanted to give the good captain a right good kicking already.
Luna stood before Discord, steadying her breathing, finding what calm she could in her ravaged mind. His petrified form brought up a surge of emotion within her, not least of all fear and vitriol. Even so, she knew it would have to get worse still before it got better. At least in the shadow of the draconequus the nightmare quieted within her.
“Are you going to free him?” Wane asked, almost numbly, disbelieving the notion. For good reason as well.
Luna closed her eyes and did not open them. “No.” Her lips pulled up at the edges in a flicker of a smile. “Today of all days, I do not think we need any more chaos in our lives. Perhaps he even set the seeds for all this.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was long ago, and far away. It does not matter.” Another surge of spinning, flashing dizziness tore through her, yet Luna barely faltered this time and only a slight shudder and quickening to her breath gave it away at all.
“What matters is how I feel. How I felt,” she amended with a whisper, holding a hoof to her heart. “And how I must feel again.” Louder, not to declare it to Wane but to the world, she spoke again. “I have been running from this for so long. Too long.”
Luna slammed her hoof into the hard packed ground, flaring her wings wide.
“Discord!” she bellowed in the royal voice of old. “I don’t have to accept what you did to me. I don’t have to forgive you.” She paused. She did not cry - not physically, but somewhere inside she felt those things all the same. “I don’t have to forgive you,” she repeated softly. “But I choose to. At long last, I choose to.”
It started as a chill breeze, growing, wailing louder and louder until it was a gale of magic, with Luna at its eye. Her own eyes blazed with light, and the darkness of the nightmare that plagued her crackled in excitement all along her form, whipped into a frenzy by the magical wind.
She held her hoof out, for a moment it seemed that might be all that would happen, but with a moment’s passing something came of nothing there, just outside her grasp. Like a star gone black it looked, flickering with a hollow light at its edges. It widened, stretched and spinning fast, too fast to comprehend, a dizzying portal with Luna in the heart of the maelstrom. Her mane and tail were shredded and recomposed endlessly in the roaring sound, but she seemed hardly to notice.
The erratic, electric black energy seething along her hoof strained further forwards, into the whirling abyss, grasping at the air as tendrils and talons. Luna would take back what had always been hers and, on that note of determination, plunged the rest of her forelimb into the portal.
Somewhere between rage and delight, Chrysalis was having a pretty interesting time of it. The Queen of changelings was keeping on the move, staying one step - more often a wing, really - ahead of the guards that hunted her. In the distance she saw yet another flash of changeling magic and knew her people were holding their own. Pride and concern both fought for prevalence within her, but the Queen gave way to neither, instead keeping her attention to the issues she could still do something about.
The guards were mostly behind her now as she bore ever nearer to the castle. Welts and still-smoking chitin singes ranging across her chest and flanks attested that be it as it may, she’d still have to fight her way in, with an alicorn and an unfortunately competent captain to deal with when she got there.
With a moment to breathe Chrysalis ducked into an alley and changed. If only the guards did not wear armour, she might have made for a more perfect illusion of one. She didn’t even notice what she became. The appearance of earth pony, unicorn or pegasus, she didn’t bother to take note of which. Even the basic colours of her illusion failed to register with her. Time she might have wasted doing so she instead used to press further on.
She slammed into the ground with a yelp of surprise and bewilderment. It was as if a hammer, one made of coldest ice had slammed down on her lungs, her spine, her legs. The fragile illusion shattered under the magical impact, striking beyond the physical.
Then it turned to claws, digging through her, scrounging about under Chrysalis’ own magic, drawn like a predator to the scent of blood. Before there was time to think or to act, the invasive magic snatched at one of the jewels she carried with her. She had only time to recognize it as the stormy gray before the presence twisted in on itself and withdrew, leaving the stunned Queen of changelings gaping for breath and shivering, like the sudden assault had torn her very fangs from her.
For what seemed to happen far too often, Chrysalis heaved herself up from the dirt. Seeing no alternative, and not really caring for one, she reluctantly opened herself to the remaining two jewels, letting new power flow into her. She didn’t have much further to go now. The castle, and all that were within, awaited.
Stats
Page generated in 0.032 seconds
Total duration
1,003 users online
1,787,645 hits today, 2,561,572 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
The bold messed up somewhere halfway through the chapter.
It's nice to see things falling in to place nonetheless.
2068172 thanks for calling that out. should be fixed
Well it seems that the end is nigh. I have to say it was quite lovely to see Luna accept that part of herself; it shows a good deal of maturity on her part. Granted, it more than likely will blow things even deeper into Hell than they already are, but it's looking to be a pretty sweet ride. I'm looking forward to the final confrontation.
Man I shouldn't have stopped put this in my to read list those months ago. Now I'm lost and not sure what's going on.
Wow, Crysalis is too brash for her own good. Something just stole 1/3 of her power and she still keeps doing what she's already made up her mind to do.
I bet Luna takes back all three just in time for Crysalis to reach the castle gate. Won't that just make her day.
Yesss Yes! More action! More chapters, Mwa-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Hey it's almost morning, methinks it's time to get some sleep.
And the dramatic confrontation nears, though I was hoping to get to it this chapter, what we have is enjoyable.
Although, now I have to wonder if Luna's guard can get the bits of his heart back by accepting them , were he lucid, or if they even are things he couldn't accept. It's possible she cut out feelings he'd come to peace with, though that'd be throwing another variable into her test.
My only complaint on this chapter, is that more detail about what Discord did that she was accepting would have been very good to have here.
2072425 my apologies, but this was mentioned before, albeit breifly. -
I hope this helps with the context and understanding about her little monologue to the Discord statue.
I just hope she manages to punch shining in the balls.