Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot

by Equimorto

Deliver Us From Evil

Twilight didn't waste any time. She could not afford to in that situation. Neither could she afford to teleport again, not when things were as unstable as they were there, so instead she flew. She pushed herself as fast as her wings allowed her to, blasting off from her position and heading down, forward, in the same direction the front half of Nightmare Moon's body had gone.

She positioned herself as if diving. Head down, body lined up above it. But she didn't stay like that. Rather than halting, she continued to let the momentum of her rotation carry her body. She looked downwards, which from her position was looking horizontally, upside-down. She was almost falling with her back first, just barely holding it up. Her front leg stretched out in front of her face. Speeding towards the ground without any ability to see it, she took aim at Nightmare Moon again, and fired.

The half of Nightmare Moon's body her head was on barely had the time to notice Twilight. It was a horrendous thing, something that should never have been alive. The front part of her charred, consumed body, held partly up by her legs, gave way to a pooling puddle of blood where its middle section should have been. One wing had made it, the other lay somewhere between the two halves of her. The edges of her ribcage were visible, so was a portion of her spine, and pieces of her entrails spilled our from where she'd torn herself in two. She resembled a cart with its back wheels removed, only capable of dragging its carcass along.

Twilight fired, scale and spell, and forced herself to roll aside and tumbled over the ground, rubble digging into her and beating against her bones. Just barely in time, just barely before she'd collided neck first with the ground. Nightmare Moon barely had time to see her, but she did see the blast. But wrecked as she was, she could not run nor fly away, nor crawl in any direction but forward.

Instead she roared. It was not a sound a pony should have made, not something any animal or any living creature should have been capable of producing. Not a dragon, not an ursa, not any other monster born of chaos or magic. It was too deep, too great, too cacophonous, far too much to even fit inside a creature's body. It was like a glacier sliding down a mountain, like a building crumbling, like thousands of glass panes shattering, like a metal structure like a ship or a train tearing and howling and shredding under pressure and strain. It sounded like destruction, like terror, like entire cities turning to ruins.

It bent the air, it warped the space in front of her, a current of its own even without the singing, screaming magic entwined in it. The scale and the spell slowed, almost halted in mid air. But they did not fall. They did not stop growing closer to her. They did not stop growing closer together.

They touched. Close enough for the portal to swallow her, once expanded fully. Nightmare Moon's howl did not stop. It needed no air to continue, no lungs she had no working examples of anyway, nothing but her will and sheer hatred to keep pouring out of her. The portal shivered. It stopped expanding, it pulsed violently back and forth. Nightmare Moon kept on screaming.

The portal shrunk in. Collapsed on itself. The scale at its core fell, useless, towards the ground. The howl blew out, like a dam had been burst, a bubble quickly spreading over the Empire. The portal in the sky shivered and shattered, and its scale too Twilight watched fall towards the ground.

Her heart pounding in her chest, Twilight stood up.

Comments

[Speckle]

......well, damn.