• Published 14th Apr 2017
  • 3,139 Views, 139 Comments

To Outlast - Camolot the Creator



Matt has always wished to visit the world of Equestria. He finally makes it, only to find an empty world barren of life. What happened? Where is everypony?

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XI: Watch

I shifted slightly, mumbling something incoherent as I was jogged out of sleep. For a moment I was confused, memories and actual surroundings blurring together through my gaze as my mind tried to form itself from the mist that follows a good, long sleep. I jerked and blinked, shifting, as everything snapped back into focus and I remembered where I was.

The reason I had awaken was that Luna had shifted away from me. All night, I realized, her back had been pressed against mine in another one of the mutually-reassuring gestures that we had shared from the moment we'd killed the tarwolf. Now, however, she'd stood up and was eyeing the door, gently trying to press down the handle and open it quietly.

I shifted one of my hands out from under the blanket that covered me, checking my phone. The screen read 4:16 AM in white letters, but it didn't feel that early. A flicker of thought in me recalled that Ponyville was roughly located in what was essentially comparable to the center of the US, but on Equus. Perhaps the two hour time difference between Oregon and, say, Kansas or Colorado was in effect? I set the phone down and slapped my cheeks a little. Clearly, I wasn't awake enough, given the random tangent of thought.

The shifting motion and the sound of the small, invigorating slaps had alerted Luna. She glanced back, licking her lips, and I sat up and met her gaze in response. She held it for a moment, then turned back to the door and swung it wide open, trotting out into the hall. I pushed myself to my feet, intent on following her, but an errant breeze from the movement of the door reminded me that I'd undressed slightly the previous night.

By the time I'd thrown on my clothes and exited the room, the blast door had already ground wide open. I passed through it, adjusting my hoodie and following in Luna's hoofprints, which lead through the dust that'd settled since last night in both the security booth and the maintenance area beyond. I pushed the exit door wide open, stepping out into the barely-pre-dawn light.

It didn't take long to find her. Luna had perched herself atop one of the buildings, looking east towards the lightening skies that indicated the coming of the sun, light blue mane and tail ruffling slightly in the passing wind. I approached from the ground, scouting about for a way up to where she'd decided to sit. Quickly enough, I found a series of rungs sunk into the concrete of the building itself, leading up to the roof for whatever purpose. Regardless, I was thankful for the easy route, swiftly making my way up to the flat, stainless steel surface that made up the slanted roof of the building.

Luna didn't react to my presence as I shimmied myself up and got my footing on the metal surface. I made as little sound as I could, crossing the distance between the ladder and where she sat, overlooking the expanse beyond the fences of the compound and flopping down next to her. She spared a glance for me at that last, but neither of us said anything or did anything beyond her glance, and one of mine to follow hers. We simply looked outward, towards the horizon.

Beyond the abrupt stop of the roof and the barbed wire fence that encircled and fortified the compound, green fields of grass stretched over low hills as far as we could possibly see. The Everfree consumed the view to our right, dark trees pressed together so close as to make it appear that night continued ever onwards beneath their intertwined branches and thick bushels of leaves. Far and beyond the trees of the Everfree and the rolling grassy rises encircling the town and Twilight's castle, which glittered and sparkled in the low morning light behind us and threw bits of refracted light here and there over the compound, mountains stood tall and proud. The bases, where the short hills began to rise into peaks against the foundations of the towers of stone, were shrouded in blackness still, which shifted up the stony sides to a deep purple, before shifting to a shimmering yellow-white where the snow that enveloped their caps reflected the coming sun, giving a hint of its light to those places below the high altitude where the sun had technically not yet risen. Clouds ambled through the sky, criss-crossing the pools of colour that started with the yellow of the horizon where the barest hint of the orb that was the sun was just peeking over the landscape, shifting to orange, then a light blue of the normal sky before changing to a deeper blue and purple that was the lasting vestiges of the night, forever chased in circles around the planet by the lifegiving ball of fire that was Celestia's domain.

"I... always loved my sister's sunrises."

My head twitched in Luna's direction, her voice so low that I had to strain just a little to catch her words properly, but I said nothing and made no sound.

"My night is beautiful enough, I suppose, and seeing how the ponies loved it was more than I could ever dream. But... I don't think that there could ever be something so magical as watching the ponies gather for the sunrise and sunset." A small, wistful smile stretched its way across her muzzle, her eyes clouding slightly. "There were whole... societies, I suppose you'd call them, devoted to watching the beginning and end of the day. Heralding, they called it, both of the night and day. They always thought of the sunrise and sunset not as the end of the night or the end of the day, but the beginning of both. A cycle of vigilance, sun and moon keeping watch while the other slept. It was they that first invited me to anything, you know. I'd hardly been settled in the castle when one of them showed up to personally hand me an invitation.

He was an excited little colt, not more than twenty years, a pegasus. I'd been surprised at that, as most of the ponies I'd seen in Canterlot up to that point where unicorns, but I hadn't grasped how far my sister had gone and how thorough she'd been in mending and closing the gaps and scars between the three races of pony. He'd been shifting back and forth on his front hooves, fidgeting with this little white and blue envelope with my name written on the front. I'd happened to be walking close by, I hadn't- um, I didn't sleep particularly well the first week or so. He'd been eager to deliver the message, and had been trying to convince one of the guards to allow him through so that he could deliver the envelope in pony, insisting that it was important that he get it to me so that he could immediately receive my reply."

Her eyes were staring at a cloud that was dyed gold, orange and blue, as the orb continued to slip up over the horizon and the dark colours retreated from the sky. An amused grin replaced the wistful one.

"He'd nearly fainted of shock when I'd trotted up and asked what was happening. Couldn't get a single consecutive word out, and nearly shook his plumage out of his feathers, but he managed to hand me the invite before he'd bolted for the entrance. And thus, there I sat, with an envelope addressed to me and a pegasus that I was entirely certain at the time had fled out of fear.

After a bit of confusion, and, I admit, a bit of sadness on my part, I opened up the envelope and read the letter inside. That, too, had been addressed to me, and I felt..."

she put a hoof to her chest, expression screwing up slightly as she thought.

"I'm not sure how the exactly summarize how I felt in that moment, that some ponies had willingly decided to communicate with me personally. But then I opened up the envelope. Inside this thing was a simple piece of paper, surprisingly thick and heavy, and when I'd opened it up a little metal badge fell out. It was silver, set with obsidian, and it depicted a large, white moon.

The letter itself had been handwritten, not typed or copied. I thought it would be fearful to some degree, the sort of 'we're being good, don't kill us' that I got quite commonly in the early days of my return. However... this letter? It was excited. The pony, somepony named Colour Chaser, had scribbled out a long letter that packed the whole page with words so dense it was hard to read!"

She chuckled lightly, grinning that self-same amused grin.

"It was obvious that he was frankly ecstatic to send the letter, to say anything to me. He said that the sunrises and sunsets had gotten exponentially better when I'd come back, and he thanked me again and again for making such beautiful sights even better. Not once during the entire letter did her refer to me once as a princess, or by any title, and he showed no real deference, as if he was speaking to a friend that had done him a good turn. In fact, he said, he'd even inducted me to the society and had a custom badge made for me at his own expense, just as thanks for the work that I and my sister had done in painting the skies with their colours, and said I was free to join them in their observatory every day, at sunrise and sunset, like any other member."

I scooted a little closer as her head tilted back, eyes closed, remembering. Her eyes opened a moment at my movement, fixing me with a gaze, before they slid shut once again.

"You don't know what that meant to me, to be asked without coercion to attend an even by a pony, not because I was a princess, not because I was Celestia's sister, but entirely because he loved what I'd done and felt that he wanted to reward that effort."

My fingers tapped the steel beneath me. "So... what happened?"

She smiled wide. "I went. To that sunset meeting that day, and then to the sunrise the next morn, and the next, and the next... whenever my schedule allowed, I attended their meetings and watched the sun rise and set countless times. And you know what?"

"What?"

Her voice lowered to a whisper, a single tear shining like crystal as it formed and made a trial down the side of her muzzle, dripping off and splashing quietly on the steel.

"They... called me Luna. Not princess, not Nightmare, not anything. Just... Luna. Luna the pony, the painter, the artist... that was what they called me, that first time and forever on."

We sat there for a minute more, then, almost in tandem, we leaned against one-another.

"Do you miss that? Those ponies?"

She nodded, a bit of solemness leaking into her wistful expression. She didn't need words to express how much she did miss them, and I didn't need words to understand.

The sun was over the horizon now, the brilliant colours of the dawn slowly shifting towards the straight, clear blue of day. Sunlight was even penetrating the rustling expanse of trees to our right, dotting the ground underneath them with green and gold visible even from here. The last vestiges of night on the western edge of the sky vanished with the encroachment of day, driving out the darkness until night fell again.

"You know... I lived in a city. It wasn't the greatest city, but it was where I lived. There was a train station just outside my building, and the trains would begin to run before dawn, so sometimes I would go down and board one bound out of the city. On the outskirts of it all, at the edge of the skyscrapers and apartment buildings, all that steel and glass and concrete, there was this college. I never attended, as such, but I didn't go there for the classes. See... the college was right on the banks of the river that ran next to the city, and it only had long, lower buildings that didn't block a view of the mountains that surrounded the city, or the river. So, I'd ride that train to that college, I'd walk into this little coffee shop that was part of the main building near the tracks, and I'd sit and watch the sun rise over the mountains and river. There's not a lot more peaceful things than that."

She nodded, quirking just a bit of a grin that was matched by the one that ever so slightly stretched my face. We sat there for quite a while longer, watching the sun climb in the sky, not particularly determined or really wanting to do anything... but, in the end, there were things that we had to do. No matter how much either of us wanted to sit there and bask in the warmth of the sun, the fact that the timer continued to run down in the compound's deeper levels tickled at the back of our minds and refused to leave us alone.

It was with reluctance that Luna finally shifted her wings and cracked her joints as she stood, I myself doing much the same thing as I stood and stretched, letting out a low breath of relief as my spine made a number of popping sounds. I made my way to the ladder off of one side of the roof, but Luna was more fortunate than me, able to simply glide to the ground by opening her wings and hopping off the edge of the steel roof. I jumped the last few rungs and landed just as her hooves made contact with the concrete, wings flapping twice to ensure her balance before pulling in flat against her sides.

She made to make her way back to the maintenance area and back towards the open blast door, but hesitated in her hoofsteps as I approached. She ruffled her wings and, after a moment of seeming indecision, turned back towards me and inclined her head.

"Thank you, once again. For last night's rest, and for sitting with me."

I waved away the gratitude. "Think nothing of it. You needed help, so I helped, and that's all there is to it."

She smiled. "You sound like our... our sister." The smile shrank a little at that, but was quite suddenly replaced with a determined expression, her hooves slamming themselves into the concrete. "I know that I did not put much stock in what you said last night, but... you were right, though I might have been loathe to admit it in the moment. She is out there, somewhere, with everypony else, all of the friends that I have made in the few short years I had. Twilight, Cadence, the Elements... Discord, even. Though my sister was not particularly fond of him, some of his pranks and jokes were quite amusing, though she was always hard pressed to deny that she had ever found anything that he said or did to be amusing in any way."

"You know, I'd like to hear some of your other stories sometime. I have to admit that I enjoyed listening."

Luna attempted shoved me playfully with a wing, and I danced around it, chuckling, as we made our way back through the compound's courtyard and towards whatever mysteries lay deeper in the concrete tunnels.

Author's Note:

A bit of a shorter chapter this time, but I wanted it to just be this scene and nothing else. Including other things... taints the poignancy of this scene, I feel. Maybe I'm wrong, but eh.