Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot

by Equimorto

Heartdive

Celestia felt something. It was not too dissimilar from probing a space with her magic, and feeling something was there, and at the same time it was infinitely different from it. She didn't know exactly what she was doing, she didn't fully understand it, but she felt she understood it enough to know what she had to do.

The place, though it wasn't really a place, was dark around her, or that part of her that was there. Part of it was a natural darkness, a calm deep blueness that belonged to that place. The rest was a rot, a pitch black stain spreading and taking over, cold and sickly and suffocating. Celestia knew she didn't have much time.

But there was something there. She'd felt it. All the way down at the bottom of that abyss, sinking and drowning in the blackness flooding over it but still there. She dove forward, downwards, towards the thing she'd felt. Deeper with every moment, and the deeper she went the more black took over the blue around her. Soon she felt like she was moving through thick patches of algae and dirt, where before she had been swimming unobstructed in clear waters.

It was dark. The darkness came over her vision, over her senses, it pushed her away and pushed the thing she'd sensed further down. She needed light, but there was no light there. The thing had had light once, but the rotting blackness had swallowed it whole.

But she could not give up. She opened herself, let out her own light. The darkness began to feast on it, burrowing into her like maggots, assaulting her like a ravenous pack of eels. But it allowed her passage. She ignored the pain as she swam deeper and deeper, as the darkness parted and morphed into tendrils that sank into her, consuming her light. A price she was willing to pay, she had much of it to spare anyway.

Deeper and deeper, moving barely faster than the thing she was trying to catch up to, feeling its presence grow weaker and weaker even as she got closer and closer to it. Forced to move as fast as she could, forced to endure as the darkness feasted on her. It was exhausting. Her thoughts grew hazy, her being sore, for moments she risked losing herself to it. Losing her consciousness and sinking into the blackness.

She endured. The darkness in front of her parted once more, once more swarming to her open wound to consume her light, and for the first time it revealed something other than more darkness as it did.

It had no definite shape or colour, nothing that she could focus with eyes that weren't there in the first place. But it was there. Weak and cracked and losing itself, dimming and dulling and scarred. She took it with her. Shielded it from the hungry pack around them. Then upwards. Her wound always open, darkness always eating at her. She had light enough for it.

All the way up to the top, up to those last shreds of blue the rot still hadn't consumed, cradling the dying thing she'd rescued from the abyss. Her wound still open, her light still exposed, but the darkness hadn't followed them there. She looked at the thing as much as she could look, felt it close to herself, felt it cold and shivering and fading.

She had light enough for both. She held it close, and poured herself into it, and lit its light anew with hers and filled its cracks and mended its scars, and gave it new colour as she sacrificed her own. She had enough to spare, and she would have rather lost it all than let go of what she'd rescued. The darkness shone in its calm blue, the rot receded.

Celestia opened her eyes. Luna was there, cradled in her hooves. Eyes closed, a river of blood over her chest. But no wound there anymore. Breathing, however slowly, however softly. Unconscious, weak, but alive. And that was all that mattered.

Comments

[Speckle]

HOLY SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!
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Luna lives ;-;

[Saix]