Chasing the Night

by Bright Keys

Prologue

Moonstone Gleam looked over her gear for her next trip into the Everfree. Glancing over her map, she caught sight on her next target: an unexplored section of a city that was currently creating an ugly, blank area on the piece of parchment. A length of rope for scaling any walls or collapsed roofs, a hard hat for any unexpected cave-ins, and finally some rations and camping materials in case the trek went long. With all the components collected, Moonstone Gleam set out for the lost town of Everfree...

The cobblestone roads quickly gave way to marsh as Moonstone Gleam passed a half-sunken statue of some ancient pegasus. Her main quarry today was a somewhat submerged house that drew her for reasons that she could not place, but she told herself that it clearly was a noble's house, however small, and would likely contain some good artifacts.

The door was sunken in unfortunately, and the windows were too obscured with a millenium of dust and grime to get a good look at the inside of the house, so she made her way to a hole in the top of the roof where there was already a rotting rope leading down into the home.

So, somepony else made it inside first. Moonstone thought, hopes falling somewhat. This only stalled her for a moment before she secured the rope and made her own descent, where she saw the previous explorer, long dead and crushed beneath a broken beam.

She combed the place top to bottom, only finding common trinkets, but some fine silverware and ceramic, adorned with lunar imagery. Packing the items away, taking care with the delicate ceramic, a glint caught her eye from beneath the corpse of the adventurer. She delicately moved the poor adventurer's arm to reveal a leatherbound journal, with glints of silver and more lunar imagery. It smelt of magic, presumably because its previous hopeful owner had mostly likely cast a preservation spell on it to freshen it up. A quick look inside revealed words in ancient Equestrian and scrawled notes and doodles. Whoever this was, from what Moonstone could understand, whoever had written this was close to Luna, although how she couldn't tell for sure. She put the journal in her bag, and made her way out, already thinking up the letter she would write to the Lunar Regent.

She made one more stop on her way home, the Canterlot Library to pick up a translation guide on Ancient Equestrian. This was her third time this month borrowing it, as a lot of jewelry and artifacts that she found and sold had the language written on them, and ponies liked to know what it said.

Finally sitting at home, both books opened in front of her, Moonstone Gleam finally opened the journal to the first page, labeled the fourth of Sunrise, 1246 After Ascension...