Duskmaker

by I-A-M

Chapter 5

Luna struck the permafrost like a thunderbolt as whiplash arcs of poison light spat and slashed around her. Wherever they struck, the earth boiled and blackened, wherever they passed, the air turned rancid and noxious.

After less than four minutes of combat, a cloud of otherworldly toxins had already thickened in the air.

Assuming they weren’t rendered to paste by a passing impact from one of the immortals hammering each other, or reduced to their constituent molecules by a pulse of reality-cracking magic, any mortal pony, no matter how hardy, would suffer catastrophic lung failure within seconds of stepping close.

Luna was merely starting to breathe hard.

“Bastard!” Luna swore, turning a tight spiral in the air as a lash of bloody gold sliced beneath her, trying to take her out at the knees.

All six of her blades rocketed forward from their orbit around Luna, shot from the arbalest of her thaumic aura on tight-strung cords of telekinetic will. Four of them struck off-center of the Sun Dog, and its aura flared as it sent them spinning away only for the narrow lines of power linking them to their mistress to snap taught and reel them back in.

One blade struck center mass only to be deflected with a deafening clap of light and sound, and be sent spiraling away.

The sixth and final blade, the one whose name was left unspoken, and which had followed in the shadow of its scattered sister, punched through the weakened barrier and instantly superheated to an angry red as it sliced through wards and defensive sorcery to bury itself with a dull, almost wooden thunk in the Sun Dog’s left eye.

Its agonised howl was unearthly, and Luna’s vision swam and bucked with vertigo as the Sun Dogs unwholesome psychic presence hammered the bulwark of her mind, slowing her for an instant.

It was an instant too long.

A lash of light-eating radiance struck a hammer’s blow across her shoulder and chest, buckling her pauldron and scarring her peytral as it sent her spinning backward, flank over withers, to land in an undignified, smoking heap almost fifty meters away at the end of a blackened scar of split earth.

Luna groaned as she turned over with a graceless flop while the Sun Dog thrashed and howled nearby, its massive body cracking the earth with its agony. Her ears were ringing and she could taste blood. Every inch of her body ached with the force of the blow dealt to her and even her near-divine biology was laboring to keep the toxins of the Sun Dog’s radiance at bay.

But she could not yield.

If she fell back, if she faltered, then the Sun Dog would retreat to the Dreamtime, lick its wounds, and return even more dangerous, and with a grudge. For all she knew, it would return and attack Crysopolis itself. But if she could keep it here until sundown passed then it would be trapped for another day at least.

Long enough for Celestia to arrive with reinforcements.

So Luna stood.

“Pray,” Luna spat as she staggered drunkenly to her hooves, flared her wings, and grinned through bloody teeth, “is that all thou dost possess?”

Luna wasn’t sure if the Sun Dog understood her, but its enraged howl cheered her as ichor leaked from its punctured eye.

At least, Luna was passingly certain it was the Sun Dog’s eye. One of them at least. The creature had no discernable biology. Luna couldn’t even make out any true details. It was surrounded by a permanent corona of moldy light that devoured everything healthy around it. It was only called a Sun 'Dog' because the dark, amorphous shape inside the well of shadowlights was vaguely canid.

Tendrils of noxious light spilled from its healing defensive aura, but the wound struck by her weapon refused to close fully. The blade was made for that after all, piercing even the most thorough and powerful of defensive spells and the hardiest of hides and armor.

No other weapon would be suitable for an assassin.

The Sun Dog howled again, rattling brain as it thundered across the tundra towards Luna. Every beat of its alien paws left dead earth seared beneath it, and every breath from its panting maw thickened the poison in the air.

“Craven beast!” Luna snarled, lighting her horn and flourishing her head.

Two dozen glimmering motes leapt into existence around her that flickered for a heartbeat before lancing out like needles of cold light. Each one pierced into the Sun Dog, bending and twisting at hard, unnatural angles as the Sun Dog jinked and bobbed around to avoid them, looking oddly graceful despite its bulk.

But not even the Sun Dog could move faster than starlight.

Bright needles dove through the broken shell of its aura, puncturing into the thing's facsimile of skin, only to vanish for a moment.

And only a moment.

With a sound like steel splitting through rotten leather, two dozen spears of cold light erupted from the Sun Dog’s flesh like grotesque, petalless blooms. The Sun Dog thrashed for a moment as Luna spread her wings and bolted into the sky.

Ravenous light followed her, spilling from the flesh of the Sun Dog to chase her, nipping at her tail and the fetlocks of her rear hooves. Luna gritted her teeth as the nearness of the poison light blackened her fur and stung the skin around it as the tendrils closed with her. The clouds roiled above her, twisted by the unnatural air and toxic fumes, the smell was a charnel house stink underpinned by the cloy of gangrene, and Luna could feel it spreading through her lungs and thickening her blood.

Her divine biology wouldn't last all that much longer at this rate.

“I’m sorry sister,” Luna snarled as she twisted, turned, and dove between the spirals of light, wincing as she felt feathers and the surface of her coat cook at the deadly proximity.

Then she was through, bolting past the fusillade of lashing, hungry light as she poured every ounce of power into her horn only to cast it skyward.

The heavens rocked and quaked, and the pestilent clouds buckled with a silent scream as pure starlight lanced through them. The sun, already lowering, shuddered in the sky as Luna’s strength, ever the equal to her sister, attuned to the silver disk of the moon and pulled it into the firmament by main magical force, buckling Celestia’s solar sorcery.

Luna could feel her sister’s shock echo across the heavenly spheres like a dissonant note in an otherwise perfect harmony, and a pang of guilt lanced through her heart.

“Forgive me, Celly.”

This was a death sentence and Luna knew that even as the Sun Dog rocked and staggered, its alien mind suddenly cognizant that it had been robbed of its window of escape. With its shock, the tendrils of virulent power it had been striking with flickered and vanished, but Luna could see them reforming around it.

It had her dead to rights.

By forcing the moon into the sky against both the natural order and the will of her sister, Luna had hemorrhaged the native power of her wellspring. Once she relinquished her grip on the moon, the source of her divinity, for the night, it would take everything she had left with it.

And it would be so easy to let it.

Luna was tired. She was more tired than she could remember being in a very long time. Millennia at least. Her body ached, her head pounded, her lungs burned, and every inch of her was begging to just sleep.

But she couldn’t.

If she closed her eyes now, then that would be the end. If Luna let this thing go on to rampage, even in its injured state, it could still reach Crysopolis in an hour… maybe less. It would wreak untold devastation and end countless lives before Celestia could teleport to the Crystal Empire and put it down for good.

‘Breathe,’ Luna commanded herself as she tightened her grip on the moon.

It was starting to burn, but she needed its strength for now.

Just a little while longer.

Forcing herself to stay conscious, Luna bared her teeth as the Sun Dog rallied, steadied, and bloomed with power around the silver-blade wounds that still jutted from its skin and which were keeping its false flesh from closing and healing.

It was reaching for her with coils of light, trying to find purchase on her, to drag her down to its level where it could end her once and for all. But not even Celestia had been able to drag the moon from the sky. No, even the Alicorn of the Sun had been forced to settle with caging Luna among the stars, and Luna would be damned if this patchwork jumble of hate, shadows, and ill will would outdo her own sister!

With a single breath and an almighty scream of ‘HEEL!’, Luna split the sky and poured the sea of stars itself down onto the Sun Dog’s head, and at the clarion crash of Luna’s command, a pillar of light fell like the death of night in a blinding, concussive peal of purifying starlight.

“Bow!” Luna snarled as she struck the ground, her horn searing white-hot as she channeled the power of a celestial body untethered through her body and soul. “Kneel! Scrape and grovel thou mange-ridden mongrel!”

A strange, almost puppyish yip of agony was ripped from the Sun Dog as it struggled to escape the hammer of light that Luna was pouring down over it. It was like watching a jackal trying to escape the battering force of a waterfall while simultaneously drowning in it, gasping and convulsing as it desperately tried to flee.

“Thou art nothing!” Luna bellowed. “Thou art filth!”

The light grew brighter, hotter, and deep inside the aura of the Sun Dog a single point of light glimmered, and a name unspoken, writ in runes only a handful of ponies left on the face of Equus could read, burned and writhed on the surface of an ancient blade.

“Thou thinkest us brittle?!” Another pulse of light struck the struggling Sun Dog to the earth. “Thou thinkest us weak?!”

Another hammer beat the hoary beast into the permafrost.

“We are Luna!”

Bones manufactured of hate and shadow snapped and cooked under the brutal light.

“Daughter of Adamance!”

The Sun Dog was thrashing now, it’s flesh burning away faster than its unholy regeneration could keep up with.

“Last of the Duskmakers!”

A maddening howl rived the sky.

“WE ARE THE MOON INCARNATE!” Luna roared. “AND WE ARE NOT THE LESSER LIGHT!”

In the sky above, for the briefest moment, the Moon shone like a silver sun, blotting out the stars with her radiance before fading and returning to her soft, gentle illumination of the night sky.

Meanwhile, far in the north, in a crater that was two dozen meters across and blackened to carbon, rested a set of mutant bones that could never have belonged to a creature made from nature and the good earth of Equus. At the edge of the crater, a lone alicorn stood. Her mane flickered and shone with dying stars as she wavered in the faint breeze of the tundra, and in a moment known only to herself, she smiled.

“See sister?” Luna whispered softly to nopony. “We— I can be brighter than you.”

Darkness closed around Luna’s vision as she toppled over, falling to the ground in a clangor of beaten flesh and shattered armor. Every breath was a labor, and every beat of her heart was a struggle, and in that moment she thought she saw something.

“I know you,” Luna muttered thickly.

A hooded figure, massive, and wearing a ragged cloak browned with age and shredded by the fierce winds of the north, stood over her. Eyes like garnets set into a hidden face stared down at her and for a moment something tickled the edge of her memory.

“You’re a fool,” the vagrant rumbled. “A fool of a mare.”

Luna’s eyes widened, but there was almost nothing left to her. Certainly no magic, and not even the strength to stand. But there was strength enough to speak, if only barely.

“The vagrant,” Luna said through numbing lips. “The… the plaza—”

“Color me impressed, though, Princess,” the vagrant said as he tipped his hood back to let his leonine mane of obsidian flow free. “To best the Sun Dog alone, even starved, is a thing of myth…”

Before Luna passed out, she forced one final word past her lips in a hiss of hate and rage that took the last of her strength from her on its way out.

A single name.

“Sombra.”

Comments

[Jade Dawn]

“Thou thinkest us brittle?! Thou thinkest us weak?! We are Luna! Daughter of Adamance! Last of the Duskmakers! WE ARE THE MOON INCARNATE! AND WE ARE NOT THE LESSER LIGHT!”

Awesome. Also title-drop. :)

[Tillion]

yeeessss

[Reese]

"and grinning through bloody"
"and grinned through bloody"?

"paws lefts dead earth seared"
"paws left dead earth seared"?

"two dozen spears of cold light erupting from the Sun"
"two dozen spears of cold light erupted from the Sun"?

"Luna split the sky and pour the sea of stars itself"
"Luna split the sky and poured the sea of stars itself"?

"the vagrant said as he tipped her hood back to let his"
"the vagrant said as he tipped his hood back to let his"?

Well, I think a few people may possibly have noticed something happening there. :D Both personal and wider-spread interesting times ahead, it looks like.
Thank you for writing. :)

[Ice Star]

Very, very, very stellar stuff. Luna being so absorbed in the art of violence was absolutely smashing.

Now that the lovely goth lad has shown up, when do he and this goth lassie horse do the kiss? My poor heart wants that sweeter slow-burn romance but at the same time I need something to gush over too.

aaaaaaaa