Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot

by Equimorto

Descent

Nightmare Moon stood over Luna's body, her own blood joining the other alicorn's on the crystal ground beneath them. Her wings were singed and her face was scarred, her armour burnt and torn by heat, and the gash in her chest did not close even as her inner magic continously tried to make it so.

If she'd had the time to do one thing, she would have made sure Luna was properly dead. She didn't care how much the hollowed out crater in her chest already ensured that, she would have torn her head off and maybe crushed it too. She didn't get a chance to do that, and barely the time to conceive of it as she looked at the body in front of her.

The next thing she knew was pain, and just slightly after that the source of it in a beam of golden and purple light hitting her face with all the seeming intention of ripping it off. It burned through her skin and into her flesh, and charred the bones in her skull. All she could do was step back and instinctively put up a shield to defend herself.

The shield did not hold. Another bolt of energy crashed through it, wider than the first, and hit her square in the chest over the still open wound Luna had left. Nightmare Moon hissed and stepped back again, blindly throwing up more useless shields that the magic beam tore through while her eyes healed enough for her to actually see what was attacking her.

She'd almost expected some kind of weapon. What she saw might very well have been scarier. Twilight Sparkle, eyes alight with power and mane sparkling as it floated by itself, shot at her with spells powerful enough they would have most likely left a smoking trail of destruction all through the city and for far longer out of it if she'd missed with any one of them. None of them did. She hammered at Nightmare Moon with blow after blow of magic capable of vaporising anything in their path. Even the air took on a metallic smell as her energy sailed through it.

As powerful as her attacks were however, they were not anywhere near as strong as what Luna had previously unleashed, and did not have as much of an impact on Nightmare Moon's body. They hurt, but the old wounds healed faster than the new ones appeared, and Twilight only kept the upper end of the offensive because her enemy was still recovering.

And she was recovering. Not fully, she still was forced to remain on the defensive end of things, but Nightmare Moon slowly yet surely got better and better at holding back against Twilight's barrage of attacks. She retreated still, didn't attack, but less and less shots were actually reaching her. Her shields grew stronger, her counterspells more powerful, a few times she stalled some of Twilight's beams with blasts of her own. Twilight's blindly wrathful charge would have effortlessly torn almost any other enemy asunder, but to Nightmare Moon it was proving to be only a very, very annoying inconvenience.

Comments

[Speckle]

Luna....

She may be recovering, but Nightmare Moon no longer has the advantage in this fight, I think.