Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot

by Equimorto

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Stella danced through the aether, twisting and bending space like iron sand around a magnet. Light flowed around her through the deformed portions of reality she controlled, distorting her form from the outside and hiding the outside to her. She didn't need to see, she knew where she was heading, she could sense it without the need for sight. Twilight was still there, on the other edge of their void, and though she kept trying to push Stella back and away from herself the distance between them was inexorably shrinking with every moment. Stella was stronger than Twilight, and every second more confident and skilled in her control over the magic they were using. She was gaining on her enemy, and gaining more the more time passed.

Twilight began to attack. She sent out great waves of magic spreading through her makeshift dimension, like walls of light and sound aimed straight at the other alicorn traversing the ever-flowing space she controlled. Stella felt the waves coming, and faced them head on. Coated in a hypersphere of glowing energy, bright like a miniature star, she spearheaded through the walls without slowing, without flinching, without issues at all.

Twilight didn't stop there, as she witnessed Stella's continued approach. Burning through the residues of her magic, already quite taxed by upkeeping her pocket universe and controlling its shapes, she forced parts and portions of her artificial reality to solidify, to fold on themselves until they formed impenetrable barriers, to bend and shift to form the edges of a multidimensional fortress all around her.

It did not stop Stella. Though she could not pierce the walls and pass through, no more than she could pierce through the fabric of existence itself and hope to travel that way, brute force of that kind was not necessary. She could not pass the barriers, but she could circle them still. The world they were in was too far from linear from there to not be a path, and as her power reached out and reshaped the space around her she slithered and crawled past every blockade through newfound and newly constructed folds in the fabric of reality. But it did slow her down, as meaningless as speed could be in a world of shifting space.

But if simple walls could not halt the alicorn, something else perhaps could better drain her time. Not mere uniform blocks and seamless sides to a still never impenetrable structure, but something more complex, more layered. Twilight's magic shaped a titanic maze in the span of reality between Stella and her, one the other would be forced to navigate through, one that would constantly force her to find new ways around her obstacles. Not a definite solution, still the alicon would approach, but the time it would take her would greatly increase.

Twilight observed from her horizon the far star growing closer through the chambers of her labyrinth, never deterred, never tired, and waited for the moment they would clash once again.

Comments

[Speckle]

I get this feeling that Twilight has a plan...