Sunset of Star Strider

by ScopeEva

Chapter 1 - The Empty Castle...

It was as quiet as a tomb, the only sound the harsh whistle of winds spilling into the empty depths of the cavernous crystalline citadel. No life was to be seen or heard, only scarce, scattered debris remained to show it was once there. Formerly a bustling metropolis and the centre of a country still steadily reviving from its thousand year absence from the world, the Palace of the Crystal Empire was empty in a way it should never have been. Not even aeons ago when Sombra ruled with an iron hoof had it been this disturbingly silent.

That was until - tucked away in a lonely side room - a tall ornate mirror flashed to life. The jewels set into its horse-shoe shaped frame sparked with an other-worldly energy that rippled out from the frame, spreading across its surface in an instant. It was left glowing so brightly with swirling, pulsing colour that it seemed white hot like the naked sun and would have been similarly hard to look at had anyone been there to see it. A moment later a form stumbled out from the swirling vortex, briefly standing tall on two legs, forelegs flailing in mid-air before the cloaked figure fell forward onto all fours. Gasping to catch her breath, the mare steadied herself and stood tense, looking about so far as to ensure she was alone before taking a moment to relax.

“I swear I’ll never get used to that damned thing,” she muttered irritably under her breath while stretching out her legs and rolling her joints. “Starswirl may have had skill but he clearly knew nothing about comfortable travel arrangements.”

With a sigh she took account of her surroundings and found herself stunned at just how utterly unfamiliar the untidy room was. Objects lay scattered and discarded everywhere; there was an overturned empty book case, papers littering the floor, what looked like a smashed clock, some broken glass and most notably a spear just lying there, alluding to a missing guard. Stranger still to her were the cold blue walls of solid crystal.

“Where in Tartarus did you move the mirror to Celestia?” she asked quietly to herself, a slither of fear working into her voice at the thought that this might actually be the mentioned prison dimension. “The caves under Canterlot maybe? A garbage dump in the caves under Canterlot?!” she continued asking to herself incredulously.

In the midst of looking around she caught sight of movement, sending her flinching back for a moment before realising it was simply her reflection in the mirror she had arrived through. It was, however, subtly unfamiliar.

“Oh… wow. I’m taller,” she said, a grin painting itself across her face as she slid back the hood of her odd, scaly black cloak, allowing her vibrant gold and red mane to bloom around her face.

The amber unicorn stared back at herself gleefully as she swept more of her cloak aside to get a better look at her body. It was only an inch or two but she knew she was now at least a little above average hight and boasted a set of lean muscles. Her horn even seemed a bit longer and sharper though she couldn’t be sure given the lack of light.

“Ha! Looking good Sunset… but I wonder,” she murmured before shutting her eyes for a moment, her grin resurfacing once more as she opened them.

In the mirror Sunset Shimmer’s cyan-green eyes now boasted a slight light behind them, much like a cat’s. To her, the room now seemed brighter and clearer, the dark a little less pervasive even if the colour was still washed out. Sunset’s grin quickly grew more vicious at the change.

“So they survived the transformation too. This is going to be too easy,” Sunset said with a chuckle, before her cloak shimmered to life with but a thought.

Instantly it began changing colour and blending with the surroundings. It wasn’t perfect by any means, given it was a salvaged older model that’s ability to adapt lagged a milliseconds behind the wearer’s movement. A trait that made it obvious when moving with any haste, erratically shimmering as it struggled to keep up. But when moving through the darkened hallways with steady caution she knew it would hide her well enough from even watchful eyes.

Taking care to tread lightly, Sunset slipped through the ajar doors and emerged into a long corridor carved out of yet more crystal. After glancing back and forth for a moment she turned and scampered off to her left, following the distant sound of howling winds. She reasoned that if she could get outside, she might be able to narrow down just where in Equestria she was.

Sunset’s ears twitched under the hood each step of the way, unconsciously trying to pick up on anything missed by, or beyond the range of her nervous darting eyes. The place - wherever it was - had been abandoned and in a hurry by the looks of it. Debris were scattered all over just like the room the mirror was in. After stepping over a fallen pedestal and an expensive looking vase that now lay smashed across the floor, Sunset caught sight of a discarded newspaper. Its header proudly proclaimed it was the First Free Empire Press, a paper she had never heard of before but the interesting part was the date. By her count it was published roughly two years ago, though definitely after her last visit. With an uneasy frown she levitated it into her saddlebag hidden under her cloak for a closer look later.

As she made her way through the hallway towards the sound of rushing wind it began to get colder. Not that it hadn’t been cold before but the winds were noticeably sapping any warmth from the air around her.

“Maybe this is some place high up on mount Canterhorn, above Canterlot,” Sunset wondered to herself quietly, memories of walking mountain-trails and the occasional climbing or camping trip coming back to her. “Some place only the Princess knows how to get to I bet. Would make sense if she’s figured out I’ve been paying her uninvited visits.”

Eventually her steady and stealthy pursuit of the sounds of the outside world - and hopefully a landmark to determine her location – ended with a gaping doorway. She looked on at the sight with concern; the doors had been bashed inwards with such force as to sheer one of them clean off its hinges. The cutting winds that forced their way through, carrying a nasty chill with them, offered further deterrence. However her ever insatiable curiosity beckoned her forth, to the balcony beyond them.

Beyond the doorway, those cold winds howled ever louder as a light blizzard danced across the view. Edging out to peer through the haze of airborne snow she soon found she wasn’t nearly as high up as she had thought. Much to her astonishment an unfamiliar city lay sprawled before her, blanketed with a good foot or two of snow. Its construction mirrored the building she was currently in; each house, hall and shop wrought out of crystal of one soft shade or another.

Sunset craned her head back to look around and up at the towering structure she was now in. Under her an archway that her current balcony sat centred atop, while the wider supports tapered up at a steep curve before splitting into three towers far above her that easily surpassed some of Canterlot Castle’s tallest.

The sight was a bleak one, doused in the muting fog of snow and devoid of the living or any sign of their recent activity.

“Again… where in bucking Tartarus am I?!” she exclaimed, panic now seeping into her voice. “This isn’t anywhere in Equestria, did the Princess seriously just banish the place I’d been banished to?!”

The idea was outrageously childish but seemed to somehow be true, and the only forthcoming explanation for the mirror’s presence in this frozen ghost city.

Her contemplation of the empty city was broken with a change in the wind. A sound similar enough to almost blend in with the wind but alien enough to make her ear twitch, their artificially enhanced hearing enough to pick out the subtle difference and set off alarm bells in her head.

Sunset immediately spun about and dropped into a defensive posture; letting old instincts take hold to find herself ready with her horn lit. She wasn’t a moment too soon as an ominously prehensile cloud of black smoke appeared from the depths of the palace, surging towards her. With a vicious smirk she let loose a teal stream of concentrated cutting magic, something that could leave a nasty but clean hole right through a pony. The smoke however simply growled and split in twain at the point the beam would have made contact.

Thinking fast she let loose another spell, an unstably charged dispersal spell; the sort meant to drain a pony’s magic or cancel out the effects of an already active spell. With her own little twist on the spell it spat forth like a shotgun blast, showering the smoky entity with smaller charges. It reeled with an unpony-like howl as its form was disrupted, but only for a moment.

Unfortunately it seemed it wasn’t enough, that whatever this thing was it had been holding back in the name of stealth. It swelled upwards and around her, a towering figure that threatened to come crashing down upon her as two crimson red eyes, aglow with baleful magic manifested in the depths of the living shadow.

Sunset Shimmer knew she was in a poor position to fight however, and so flight became priority. In a flash of light she vanished, a split second later the semi-blind teleport deposited her back down the corridor she had approached from. Quickly breaking out into a gallop, Sunset made haste back towards the mirror room. She didn’t want to leave so soon but she wouldn’t take an unnecessary risk fighting this unknown, so Sunset took the smaller victory of outmanoeuvring whatever monster this was in stride. Besides, once she reached the mirror she could make the choice of fleeing altogether, or summoning a few nasty surprises.

Her confident smile was dropped when a sharp shadow seemed to spear through the floor below her before a number of jet black crystals sprouted in her path. Rapidly they spread across the hallway and forced her to skid to an abrupt halt as they grew at a rate of inches by the second, quickly becoming too tall to jump. Unperturbed she simply lit her horn once more to teleport past them.

Only, as soon as she did, she felt something wrap and contract around her horn, almost as if there was a thorny vine digging into it. She only caught a glimpse of the doorway and the mirror beyond it before her spell was inverted and she was violently catapulted back beyond the wall of crystals and into the waiting cloud of smoke.

Panting from the exertion of being violently forced to reverse her own spell, Sunset had to painfully force her next spell. A simple concussive blast that shattered and cracked many of the crystal growths, but sadly did little to remove the messy barrier of criss-crossing crystal spikes now formed.

A deep throaty chuckle drew her attention back to the creature now more lackadaisically closing in on her.

Sunset simply snarled back at it, whipping around and dropping into a crouching stance once more. “Fine, we fight! I’m not out of tricks yet anyway!”

A wave of fire washed out from around her, driving apart the shadow long enough for her to gallop through it in the other direction, back down the hall way. Contrary to her statement she would be more than happy to try and circle around and find another way back to the mirror room. Unfortunately the creature or whatever it was simply repeated its action, filling the opposite end of the hallway with a barricade of jagged crystals that sparked with dark energy.

Turning about, she threw out another unstable blast of a disruption spell that shredded through the creature’s form. It convulsed and howled yet persevered to climb into the air while sweeping around her sides once more, planning to envelop her as it first had. In an act of last ditch desperation she projected a bubble shield around herself as it congealed around her and blocked out the light leaving her only illuminated by the cyan glow of her magic.

She felt the pressure pressing in on her and grit her teeth. “I’ve come too far. It won’t end like this! Not to some demented cloud of smog!” Sunset declared loudly, more for herself than the thing that assailed her from beyond the thin film of magical protection.

Her magic had always been strong; Sunset Shimmer knew she could boast being the strongest Unicorn in Equestria even if she had been replaced as Celestia’s student. This thing was sapping her strength fast though, she had to act before she lacked the energy to do so. Remembering how it had reacted to her earlier display, with a spark of magic she modified her bubble shield, setting it alight with fire. The inefficient trick worked well enough, and she breathed easy for a moment as the shadows were burnt away with a pained hiss allowing her to recoup her strength, albeit slowly.

The respite only lasted a moment though. From around her smaller black crystals with an ominously dark purple aura began to slowly sprout up around her. Sunset had an unsettling feeling they would pop her shield like a balloon if she just sat there.

Eyes darting about desperately, Sunset searched for any avenue of escape but the only thing she could see was the faint light from the top of the hallway where the crystal wall hadn’t quite reached yet. A split second later she realised that was all she needed to see.

The spell she wanted was tricky and dual casting it while holding her shield was even trickier but it was do or die and Sunset Shimmer had no intentions of dying. Ever. In an instant she felt her stomach lurch as she began to fall… upwards.

She nearly crashed into the ceiling and would have, had the spell not included the safety feature of reorienting her to the new direction of gravity. In spite of the shock Sunset wasted no time in throwing herself forward, galloping along the ceiling, through the obscuring fog of her enemy, over the wall of crystals… and straight into a barricade of similarly black, thinner crystals pointed right at her like a cluster of spears.

Sunset screeched in pain as she impaled her own shield on them instantly forcing magical feedback through her body. The shock instantly caused her spells to fail, shield shattering as gravity returned to normal harshly yanking her downward into the waiting cloud and its smug red eyes.

Sunset never reached the ground, instead she tumbled endlessly within the thick shadow smoke, forcing her to breath it in as she gasped for breath and hack it back out in coughing fits.

Desperately she reached out with her magic for one last spell, or rather set of spells. Concentrating she pulled the disparate elements from the air around them to a single point. Then, having gathered the minute but thankfully sufficient quantity of deuterium and helium, she pressed it tightly together with all her remaining magical might.

Seemingly without warning the bright and burning light of a miniature star burst into existence, searing away at the oppressive living smog. It howled and growled with pain, suddenly releasing its quarry, letting Sunset fall to the floor with a painful thump. She cried out in pain but did not release her hold on the precious mote of light, nor the small umbrella of shielding that prevented her from being burnt and irradiated by her own creation.

Unfortunately, for all her effort, her enemy was not neutralised by the hail-merry of a casting, despite the potency of its light. With an animalistic grunt, a poisonously purple bolt of burning magic, encapsulating a small black, seed-like crystal was fired back at the unicorn.

Immediately Sunset’s world was pain and agony once more as the spell impacted directly upon her horn, that crystal like seed stabbing into the precious carnitine spiral. Immediately all concentration was lost, the light of the magically forced fusion reaction exploding out in a small woofp. The spell’s effects did not end there, for the crystal now set in Sunset’s horn parasitically drank in the magic she desperately tried to channel, only feeding the growth of further black spurs.

Only as Sunset began to realise this and try to think of an alternative, did the entity sweep back in with a guttural chuckle and smother her once more.

“No! No… Not…” was all Sunset’s strangled voice managed to wheeze out in fear as a few meagre sparks of fire spurting weakly from her horn in spite of the crystals strangeling it. The enveloping cloud cared little for the fast fading struggle she put out, fighting futilely as her strength was sapped. The shadows clung to her and hugged her like an anaconda around its prey, all the while stealing her energy with mere contact alone.

Sunset felt her magic fade.

The world around her dimmed.

Soon, so did her last desperate thoughts.

She fell limp, her consciousness snuffed out.

But to what would have been to her surprise had she been conscious, she was not discarded on the cold hard floor or run through with a lance of black crystal. Instead the shadows made to cushion her and steadily carry her away, the black crystal barricades crumbling into dust around them now they had served their use to their creator.

An amused chuckle filled the empty halls, accompanied by a deep but wispy voice.

“A remotely worthy opponent after all these years. Unfortunate you came into this fight so very blind; if only you had time to properly prepare you might have stood half a chance. I do so relish a fighting spirit instead of those cowards who rely on artefacts to fight for them.”

The cloud of shadows swept along, caressing the mare almost soothingly as it and its captive crept into the throne room. She only whined in subconscious fear, adrenalin driving nightmares in her unnatural unconsciousness.

“Fear not brave little unicorn, this will not be your end,” it whispered in a mocking imitation of comforting care as his dark shadow sunk into the floor. “I do hate wasting true talent, and we have much to discuss regardless.”

The floor beneath them seemed to crumble in on itself as it fell away revealing a shaft and staircase through thick crystal floors, solid rock and impossibly, the thin air beneath the Crystal Palace’s elevated architecture. Swiftly the shadow thing and its captive descended, before the floor remade itself, crystals interlocking like a set of jagged teeth closing shut and swallowing them whole.

The cold crystalline citadel was once more left as it now had been for nearly two years.

As quiet as a tomb.

Author's Note:

Okay! So, first story I've actually put out in a while. Not going to lie, mostly putting this out as a trial to see how people react. Wanted to build up a nice big backlog of chapters first but my perseverance failed me and the story been sitting stagnant for a while. Fingers crossed actually publishing something will help reinvigorate me a bit.

Well, I hoped you enjoyed this little start to the adventure. Do please leave a comment if you did. Likes are nice but feed back is so much more satisfying. Plus I like to engage with my readers, get their perspective on things.

(Last Updated 02/06/12023)

Comments

[Byakura]

Looking good so far, i wait the next chapter to see more

[D48]

Well, that’s very interesting. Taken on their own, both the description and first chapter seem to have a lot of potential, and the fact that they don’t immediately connect implies this is going to be a wild ride. Throw in the fact that you managed to throw a major curve ball to subvert expectations, and I’m definitely looking forward to future chapters.

[technofan]

10306128
Yes, this is peak writing and storytelling. Best ive seen in a new story for about half a year.