Moondust

by Parallel Black

15 - Maredusa

She didn’t know what had pushed her into the woods that night. Had it been fear over what might become of the world if she didn’t do something? Had it been a sense of do-goodery that prevented her from simply running the other way? Had it been some stupid, childish want for adventure in her otherwise horrendously mundane life?

No.

When she’d been hanging onto the cliff, she’d considered simply levitating herself to safety. When they passed through the mourning manticore’s territory, Twilight shielded the group from its enraged pride. When the lonely ents gave way to the crueller plants of the Everfree, Twilight had taken the lead, tearing apart every vine and sweeping the thorns from the ground before them. Until Rarity had given up her tail for the wayward sea dragon, Twilight eagerly suggested a spell to create their own landbridge over the raging river. By the time Peace appeared, Twilight felt ready to go on the offensive, had Rainbow Dash not taken issue with how much she was starting to enjoy herself.

It would have been exhilarating.

In a flash she was separated from her friends and offered the world and more for her loyalty, but that wouldn’t have been right. It would have been the wrong kind of ending. After all of this, after being able to actually use her arsenal of spells and feel genuine terror for once in her life, to accept the nightmarish equivalent of an office job and an increase in power she didn’t need would have been a waste. Twilight Sparkle wanted to win her way.

And so, when that dark mare placed the blade against her neck, drew blood as the edge caught against her chin, and demanded subservience, Twilight could only smile and look away.

“My friends will be here soon,” she’d said. She didn’t need friends. Not this time, at least.

“They will find a corpse,” Nightmare Moon replied. “You may have made it past Peace, but I will not show mercy to those who threaten my rule.”

“Twiliiiight?!” came a shrill yell from the stairwell.

“Are ya here, girl?”

“There! Oh my goodness!”

The stallion standing by Nightmare Moon’s side drew his bow, a quintet of magical arrows lining themselves along the glowing string. He looked to her, a piece of the manticore’s mane draping from beneath his mask and the little, glowing orb hanging off his belt making a soft jingle as he moved. “Shall I?”

The nightmare chuckled. “No. Let them come. If this is the best my sister has to offer, then so be it. I will give them a fair fight, no matter how quick it may be.”

“The Black Rabbit is so merciful.”

It wasn’t even a fight. Nightmare Moon had taken her stance, sword held aloft, before the room lit up with all the colours of the rainbow. Moments later, she was dead. Peace held her corpse in her beastly arms, tears streaming down her cheeks, turning her slender face into an ugly mess of reds and pinks. The stallion stood over them both, looking down in complete silence at what had become of his Queen.

So did Celestia. She’d broken from her prison too late to help, but that was ok. Twilight and her new friends had already put an end to the threat.

Had Nightmare Moon died from a desperate last-ditch effort to bring her down? Had she been slain by a group of heroes committed to doing what was right? Had she made a single mistake?

No.

As the bright lights of balance faded and the noise in her head settled down, Twilight Sparkle found her answer. It filled her horn and her limbs, the very air around her and the stonework of the castle floor. It filled her mind with visions of lifting mountains and parting oceans, of flying to the Moon and back, of being a goddess in the flesh.

The answer was freedom, nothing more, nothing less. The adventure had been terrifyingly exciting; every dip and fall, every close call, every obstacle only made her more eager to even out the odds between her group of friends and their impossibly powerful adversary. When that time finally came, Twilight hadn’t felt a sense of justice, she had felt an excuse. Nightmare Moon had died of happenstance, of provoking the wrong mare into action.

Twilight’s smile wavered as her gaze settled on Peace’s distraught, sobbing form. She was an enemy, too. Even if she had let them across the ravine, that didn’t mean she wasn’t Nightmare Moon’s ally. As for the stallion, he was just some gleeful jester who’d dangled Celestia’s prison in front of them on his way into the castle. He deserved this.

What a psychotic little fool she was.

-----

Twilight’s hooves slid against the smooth stone surface as she regained her balance. She squinted as her gaze passed across the sunset and blinked the feeling of cold from her eyelids. She didn’t know how she’d gotten to her current standing, but by the looks of it, she hadn’t lost anything in the collapse. The strange sensation running through her body was slowly fading, leaving her with the beginnings of a nightly chill and an empty space beneath her hooves.

It had happened so fast. Her brief conversation with Peace had reached a stressful moment of quiet, and the moment after, her vision filled with gold as the walls came crashing down upon them both. Twilight caught a cough on its way out. Her frail bookworm body was still trapped in fight-or-flight mode, her throat trying to tense itself closed. She now stood atop an overturned wall, balancing precariously on a diagonal corner, her lunar shade nowhere to be found. From here she could see the last few pieces of black stone falling away and crumbling into the streets, the white brickwork and colourful rooftops of the rest of Canterlot coming back into view in the distance.

What sounded almost akin to a blade against a grind wheel rose in volume as Twilight’s adversary dug her way to the surface. With a small eruption of stone chunks, a few tendrils of gold pierced through the last layer, followed by a large, clawed hand covered in orange-brown hair. The rest of Peace’s body came soon after, her mane cleaving away at the hole for an easier ascent. After several meters worth of glimmering steel her face finally emerged, the pale blue eyes of her pony disguise abandoned for the striking gold Twilight remembered so well.

The remains of sunset framed her body as she rose, while the moonlight reflected off of her mane and danced across her pale skin like light upon the water. This was the bipedal form Twilight had seen as she and the others reached the rope bridge; the tall mare had looked more like a ghost at first sight.

Calling her a “mare” may have been the wrong way to describe it; Peace’s true form wasn’t even remotely equine. What little of her could be called a pony was currently hanging limp and disgusting like a drenched wetsuit from her hips, the inside of the disguise coated with a soft, white interior covered in strange symbols. Peace dug her right arm into where the suit met her skin, pulling it away a little more, her other limb moving directionless past its ruined shoulder. Everything beyond it was missing, Twilight was surprised to see. The wound was mostly healed, but it was still an ugly, reddish splotch against her otherwise perfect surface. It must have been lost when the landbridge collapsed.

Twilight felt her body tense again as the waves of gold began to move. Expecting an attack, she watched as the lengths wound and twisted around Peace instead. The mare closed her eyes, her lone hand coming up to hold the side of her head as if she were standing in a shower, apparently unconcerned with her enemy being so close. Most of her hair remained behind her head, curving and tying into a similar arrangement of decorative loops and sharp ends as her disguise, with the addition of what resembled a pair of ram horns either side of a makeshift circlet which pretended to hold the mane in place.

The rest travelled down her form, criss-crossing over her front and back to hide her bareness. Her torso only possessed two bumps; she wasn’t a hairless dog, then, either. One collection formed a tight brace around her chest, leaving her belly exposed and going under the arms, one side branching away to bandage the end of her missing forearm. Another wrapped around the equine disguise, holding it against her waist like a belt. With an odd sound - a mixture between tearing fabric and a magical pop - Peace’s legs phased through those of her disguise. Gaining an extra foot and a half, she was now more than double Twilight’s height. She balanced without issue on a pair of slender, five-toed feet, lacking the tail and wings of a dragon.

She looked upon Twilight once the display was complete, her dull eyes showing no gratitude or expectation for her enemy’s patience. Her mixture of parts may have landed her in the stange realms of the draconequus, but she hadn’t shown any odd abilities beyond her prehensile mane. She was magicless, yet so utterly different. She was an alien.

Beyond her strange appearance and her otherworldly origins, there was something else that felt truly foreign about her. Something about Peace just didn’t belong. Her mere presence exuded a feeling that flooded from her lidded eyes, her closed mouth, and in some way, her hair, too. It was as if her entire being was speaking at once, and its voice held an indescribably deep anger.

A small part of Twilight was busy yelling at her to run; that little bit of Moondancer in her head shouting “I told you so!” and that this situation was already well beyond salvaging. She rubbed her right shoulder; it was going to bruise like a rotten apple, assuming it wasn’t outright broken from having a solid stone wall fall against her. It had all happened so fast she wasn’t sure how she’d avoided being crushed. Now that apologising had been thrown out of the window, that only left running or fighting, and she couldn’t let what had become of the close happen to the rest of Canterlot.

But before that, long before that, one more try. Just one more. “Peace, please…” Twilight began, carefully. “Whatever you’re trying to do here, please don’t.”

“What do you mean?” Peace asked in her youthful slur.

Twilight’s brow twitched. What? What do you mean what do I mean? There were a dozen answers to that question, every single one of which Peace should have known. “What do you… mean?”

The tall mare frowned in confusion. Some lengths of gold unravelled themselves, preparing to attack. “This will be a duel,” she stated, bluntly, abandoning the topic.

“What? W-wait, that’s not what I came here for!”

Peace pointed a single blade at Twilight’s cheek, at the tiny cut she’d given her in greeting. “You accepted my challenge. I won’t let you back away now.”

Oh no, she’s clueless! Twilight thought, right before the reality of the situation hit her like a train. She felt the cut. Oh god, I’m clueless! The pain was greatly overshadowed by her throbbing shoulder so she had almost forgotten about it, but it was now clear what the cut represented: Like the slap of a horseshoe across the face, it was a challenge, and she had accepted it without hesitation. In spite of everything she’d been hoping for and in spite of everything she’d tried to say to the strange mare, Twilight had doomed herself to fail by not simply healing the damn thing first.

The sound of metal crunching around stone was immediately followed by Twilight’s vision going black as a dark mass of stone came flying toward her. Her hooves moved before she knew it and the section of broken wall crashed into the ruins behind her. She leapt out of view, feeling Peace’s eyes on the back of her head all the while. Her hooves scuffed along the slanted landing and she yelled as her shoulder flared up, jolting the leg out from under her as she went. She met a vertical wall next, frantically scrambling to get her bearings against the slant to keep herself moving. The golden blades whistled through the air not too far behind.

Twilight scuffed her way along the angular trough, eyes scanning for another route that would let her escape. She hadn’t truly known what to expect, but this, all of this, was too much. There was no need for this show of force when they could have at least spoken to one another first. Peace had lain there like a tiger skin rug at a dingy dead-end, mane stretched out in every direction. Twilight said what she came to, but Peace hadn’t said a word. She’d just turned her head, the false skin of her pony neck crimping like thick fabric, and then her mane returned, bringing half the district down upon them both. It was all so unreasonable.

“Come out,” Peace commanded calmly. Her body floated along with her hair acting as countless legs, her real limbs hanging purposeless in the midst of the strange display.

Twilight ducked in place as another section of wall crashed nearby, far too close for comfort. Maybe if she just stayed put then Peace wouldn’t find her; without the elements she was way out of her depth anyway. The image of Rainbow Dash’s bleeding body came to mind, after those golden bandages had tried to tear her to shreds. That had only been a few small lengths of severed hair. Twilight shuddered to think what Peace would be capable of should she get a hold of her. It wouldn’t be a painless death.

She spared an upward glance as a shadow fell upon her.

“Found you.”

Her horn sparked to life, emitting a transparent, purple shield over herself. Barely an instant later it was filled with blades, cracks running between each as the pale aura around Twilight’s horn pulsed. Another burst of power fused the cracks back together and the shield grew in kind, pushing away at the attacks. More joined in to push the barrier right up against its caster, slashing and stabbing against the surface.

A flight of terror rushed through her mind as she felt a cold wall of stone gently press against the back of her head. Peace continued, unrelenting, her eyes wide through the splintering shield. A small part of her had hoped Peace wasn’t really trying to kill her; it was clear she and her allies were much tougher than ponies, so maybe surviving the landbridge’s collapse was a reasonable thing to expect back on the Moon. The look in her eyes made it clear that there’d been no hope of making up in the first place, at least not in the way Twilight had presented it.

The pressure began to build, the sounds of clashing steel clamouring inside her ears. This isn’t working! I’m going to die! Twilight’s mind screamed. The crevasse she’d slid against already made it difficult to move, and her shield was now touching the tip of her horn, the spot of contact starting to fade back into her aether veins against her will. “S-stop!” she cried. “Please, stop!”

Again her horn’s light grew and the chill of Spirit Magic flushed her cheeks. It didn’t matter what the payment would be if she was going to die here. The shield grew once more, glowing brighter and enveloping her from head to hoof, its shape locking it in place against the trough she lay in as threads of silver magic spread through it. Peace didn’t pause. As her blades continued to strike, Twilight spied a few starting to curl together into a ringlet that would spell her doom.

She finally stood, the shield rising to push back against the onslaught, her wounded shoulder burning under the pressure, and she ran out from under her defense and away. In the midst of her terror her ears picked up the sound of metal scraping against stone as the spring-like weapon followed her a ways before losing its intended tension.

Think, Twilight! her mind yelled, the carefully organised lists and folders of her mental map trying to reconfigure themselves to keep up with the pace. What can I do to restrain her? Is there a way to cut through her mane?

As if on cue, several flashes of gold at the corner of her vision preceded a nearby wall bursting into pieces, revealing a net of thin hairs flowing toward her. Twilight lit her horn once more only for the net to give way to a collection of stabbing points, pushing the shield against her and knocking the air from her lungs. Peace emerged from the hole, her mane extending onwards and upwards, taking Twilight with it high above the ruins.

Her chest burned from the strain, the ever so slight sting of her cheek somehow making itself known past everything else. Peace, please. Just let me go, I don’t want to fight you!

All she could do was defend. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt her.

Twilight’s hooves lit up as she cast Rudolf’s Run, the spell that had saved her from stepping on any of Peace’s hairs. Immediately she felt the force of gravity fade and the sensation of air rushing past her slow as her hooves found an invisible surface to anchor themselves to. Her magical aura disconnected from her shield and she slid past it into midair, Peace’s tendrils following it a ways before retracting back to the ground.

Steady yourself, keep your distance, then try to restrain her, she told herself, regaining her breath. Multiple shields might help, but I need to find a way to stop her from moving, otherwise I’m dead. Her hooves wobbled beneath her. Rudolf’s Run wasn’t quite cloud-walking. It was an odd spell that tied one’s movements to the wind, mainly used by the pegasi maintaining Canterlot’s underside. On a day like this with only a whisper of a breeze, one could travel as they wished, so long as they had enough magic to pour into each step and a clear enough head not to send themselves floating higher and higher.

Peace watched from below, looking calm beyond her furrowed brow. Perhaps the spell could be cast on her to leave her disoriented? No, she’d just attack indiscriminately. Twilight had enough power to force Peace onto her strange, front-facing knees, but her main body wasn’t the issue. There must be something. There’s a spell for everything!

Peace’s mane cut her thinking short as tendrils swarmed into the air after her, a few others grappling onto the nearby ruins to lift her body higher. The glow of Twilight’s horn grew brighter and a trio of shields appeared before her, taking the opportunity to grow larger than her previous attempts before the blades reached them. Twilight swayed in midair as they struck, her hooves struggling to keep her upright and her shields once again starting to push against their caster. Sure enough, however, they were stronger in numbers, and the distance stole some of the attack’s momentum.

This is my chance! Twilight thought. She enveloped the strands in her magic and pulled, testing her strength against her foe’s. The blades resisted for a moment, the pressure on the shields fading… before they flowed effortlessly out of the field and past all of Twilight’s defenses. The colour drained from her face as she felt cold metal slowly looping around one of her legs, and as her spell faded from her hooves she realised her miscalculation.

The landing was rough. A bed of levitation saved her life, but Twilight knew something was broken. It had to have been. She opened her eyes to blurred vision, an overwhelming feeling of sickness flowing down her face. She lay against the hard stone, all four hooves intact and twitching as she tried to make sense of what was going on, before a large, reflective blade filled her vision.

“You lose,” spoke Peace. From here she looked even taller, the unmistakable gold of her eyes visible through the fuzz and the white sphere that was the Moon framing her face.

Twilight brought a hoof up to rub her eyes. She tried to stand, but found her back legs tied in a bundle of locks. Am I about to die? she wondered. “Please don’t.” I never wanted any of this.

The mare let out a little cry as she was yanked up off the ground by a length wrapped around her horn. She could feel more blades around her; two against her neck, another for each limb, ready to hack her to pieces. “I won’t kill you,” Peace said, “but I want my reward. You took my arm, so I want one of yours.”

“O-oh…” Oh gods, no. “I-is that… all?”

“Do you want to die with your honour, instead? I can do that, too.”

No, please. Twilight tried to move her body, but the will was draining out of her. Don’t let her do this to you. What happened to Nightmare Moon was an accident! “Are you… going to hurt anypony else?” she asked.

“I won’t. I know you aren’t all powerful, so your kind isn’t a threat to my Queen.” The tendril around her horn tightened. “I could take this, instead. Choose.”

No. Anything but that.

“No.”

“Choose!” Peace shouted suddenly, giving the unicorn a shake, the fur of her bear-like arm bristling. The slender features of her face descended into a raging scowl that filled Twilight with dread.

You idiot, I meant my horn! Don’t take my horn! Twilight opened her mouth to respond, her tongue hesitating. “No, n-not the horn. Please not my horn.” She felt the blades come to a rest against her shoulders and haunches.

“Choose.”

She clammed up, her lip quivering. Once again, the image of Peace holding her fallen queen played in her mind. She deserved this. She definitely deserved this, but she didn’t want it. For all her apologetic prose and desperate admissions of guilt, Twilight wasn’t enough of a mare to take her punishment laying down.

“I…” she began, wondering how long she could delay the inevitable, “I didn’t want to fight you. I didn’t want any of this. I-I just wanted to talk, and l-let you know how much I hoped Luna was ok.” I don’t know if I’ll be able to live with myself if I can’t do at least that much.

“So you can finish her off?” Peace accused, sullenly.

“No. No!” Twilight’s brow furrowed, the fear giving way to something worse. “Why don’t you get it?!” the unicorn spat. She levelled Peace with a pair of sour eyes. “I don’t want to fight you, so why the buck are we fighting?! For some stupid revenge?”

The blades went still, and Twilight felt the freezing cold of the Spirit Layer flood through her body.

“No, I didn’t mean- I didn’t mean it was stupid!”

Peace’s anger seemed to soften, her eyes gaining a sense of exhaustion as their marigold glimmer faded. “My Queen said not to kill you, but…” Her lone arm reached out, its giant, orange-brown claws wrapping around Twilight’s forehead. “I… can’t. I want to kill you so much. If you hadn’t been there, none of this would have happened. If you had joined her, she would have only killed the others. I-if I-” Her face tightened again, her lips almost forming a pout as her eyes glazed over with tears. “If I hadn’t shown you mercy back then, the Black Rabbit could have won. I’m not worthy of her rule. She should have left me behind.”

The claws began to squeeze. “P-please don’t! I’m sorry! I-I only wanted to make things right!”

“Hoooe,” Peace breathed, a tiny, almost humoured smile appearing on her face. “I can finally fix this.”

“STOP!”

Something snapped, but it wasn’t her skull.

The hair wrapping around Twilight’s horn shimmered as a tendril of energy rushed along it, its grip loosening and its metallic sheen going with it. Peace released the mare’s forehead, pulling her arm back in surprise as Twilight flumped to the ground. The tendril fell slack and lifeless to the floor, but the rest closed in. Once again, the aura jumped from Twilight’s horn. Peace’s blades had barely broken the skin before they, too, lost their strength and went limp.

Peace stepped back, unravelling her adversary’s back legs, her clawed fist slowly clenching as the seconds ticked by. “What happened? What did you do?!” she demanded.

Twilight didn’t have an answer, but she knew she had the upper hoof. Confusion was a dangerous state for Peace to be in, but it was better than what had come before it. With her joints aching and bruised, Twilight stood. Aside from the aura of Spirit Magic around her horn she felt warm. More than the fading heat of the day, the warmth came from within, flowing through her body and leaking from her cuts and bruises; a shield, enveloping her like a hug from her mother to keep her safe through the dark winter nights.

Another blade, aimed straight at her head. Another disorganised burst of magic, and it flicked her harmlessly between the eyes. The affected lengths now hung from Peace’s scalp, lacking the distinctive sheen that had made them look so terrifyingly beautiful, their normally uniform edges scattering into individual hairs as they met the floor.

“You lost,” Peace stated, her normally flat tone a dark storm of anger. “Give me a leg, or I’ll tear it off with my bare hands!”

The irony of the statement didn’t seem to click. “No,” Twilight replied, firmly. “Why should I when I never wanted to fight you in the first place? I don’t know what life was like wherever you came from, but killing and maiming each other isn’t how we settle things here. We talk things out and come to a peaceful agreement, like I was trying to do before you decided to start assaulting ponies and destroying things!”

The scowl on the alien’s face finally grew deep enough to reveal hints of age and the faintest signs of wounds long gone. “Hypocrite,” she seethed.

Peace’s entire mane unravelled from its decorative display, the loops shrinking and the fake circlet vanishing into the mass of gold. The threads making up the ram horns grew to frame her head while the rest extended behind her, becoming a wall of sharp edges. The surface twisted and the lengths retracted once more, flowing together to form a number of much larger weapons. Rather than blades, they were true swords and the heads of giant spears; simplistic in shape but no less terrifying to see.

Peace smiled, finally baring her fangs, and let out a quiet, wheezing laugh, “Hoooe-hoe-hooe. Nightmare have mercy, I’m going to enjoy thi-”

Through the last reddish-purple flickers of sunset, something moved. The light danced across its form just as it did Peace’s weapons, revealing an equine shape wreathed in empty air. The figure had already landed a blow to the tall mare’s chin before she could attack, and Twilight let out a yelp of surprise as she was lifted from her hooves and up. Peace steadied herself with her locks, her limbs hanging uselessly while her bruised mouth curled into a dissatisfied frown. Mere moments passed before the entire scene was engulfed in a plume of flames, but the scream that echoed from within was one of fury, not pain.

Comments

[Venerable Ro]

Twilight continues to prove herself a masterful diplomat I see...

[Comickook]

Well, little I can say beyond great job on the exchanges, action, characterizations and future chapter set-up. Really enjoyed Twilight's flashback to the battle with Nightmare Moon and the bits of self-reflection while she was dodging Peace's attacks and trying to defend herself. And, yeah, Peace still proves to be too stubborn for diplomacy though Twilight still gets points for even trying it. The description of Peace's real form was appropriately nerve-wracking. At least back-up arrived at exactly the right moment.

VERY definitely looking forward to more of this.