Left Behind: Sunny Disposition

by The Psychopath

Seen From Above

"Where are we going, then?" Sunny asked the alicorn.

"Up."

"What?"

Sunny was engulfed in a bubble of magic and watched the ground slowly sink away. He was about to relax when the alicorn jettisoned herself at incredible speeds upwards into the sky. So great was her speed and strength of flight that she caused a sonic boom that only just reached the stallion's ears. When his head finally stopped throbbing and his ears stopped ringing, Sunny opened his eyes to cast his gaze down, down, down onto the world below. He looked up in shock to see the horizon of his planet being caressed by the light of some distant giant of yellow light. It looked like an eye of white gold glowing over everything. High above the world, he bore witness to the tumultuous fury of the fireball that had been tormenting everypony long before his birth. It seemed so close but was so far. The stallion looked back towards the gleam. If that fiery sphere above was the sun, and the larger, spherical stone creating a huge shadow on the world was the moon, then what in the world was producing that light on the horizon?

Moon silently gestured to the world, filling Sunny with awe. He had no idea alicorns could perform feats like this. Were they in space?

He could see the mountains of the griffin empire. He could see the deserts stretching south of Equestria where odd puffs of black light and smoke emerged large enough to be seen from where he was. He could see the fractured continent past the mountains and forests to the left of Equestria. It didn't escape Sunny to see Nightmare's face in complete shock and horror upon seeing the state of the world. He had always known the broken lands to the west to be as they were, held together by titanic plants whose roots acted like bridges and created immense gaps in the sea. The landscapes in those craters were always awe-inspiring judging by the descriptions in his books.

Nightmare Moon, however, felt horror. It was the same sensation she felt when she emerged into this new world and could not communicate with anypony. What exactly was waiting for her when she took over and reunited Equestria? Tensing herself, she decided to focus on where her sister had gone rather than sink in the mire of nightmares that was this new world beyond Equestria. the Griffonian mountains seemed so quiet and still from where she was, but Celestia was somewhere down there, trying to awaken something that even she dared not meddle with.

Moon almost expected a comment from her nephew, but remembered he was sealed in her magic. Looking down at him, she saw the reflection of something distorted in the orb. There were small flashes of light, almost imperceptible from where the alicorn was floating.

"There," she said to herself.

Gathering magic into her horn, she cast a spell on the rocky titans that caused a gigantic pillar of purple 'fire' to emerge from where she saw the flashes and coalesce into a glowing, spinning ring above the mountains. It took around an hour for the king and his soldiers to reach the mountain area in dozens of extra-large, metallic chariots. Moon estimated that each one could carry around thirty ponies in them. They were followed by smaller, inconspicuous chariots likely carrying supplies. The mare bided her time as she focused her magic into her eyesight to get a better look at the incoming army and watch as they settled in a pass and several caverns around.

They barely had a few ponies disembark before they were already assailed by the fire creatures. The alicorn of the night watched impassionately at the fighting and the magic being used to protect and enhance the non-magic ponies and try to carve a path through the living flames. Sunny, however, with the spell cast on his bubble to see what was happening, was not having a good time. Moon could see him pleading for her to help them out, but this was their purpose: Die for their true queen. Their true ruler. She felt especially angry and disgusted after encountering this twisted, broken form of her sister and tried to push down a feeling rising with bile, but failed. Is this what Celestia felt when she saw her as Nightmare Moon? To see the core values of the being you once cherished twisted so completely that even their physical body changes?

Mulling over the thought, Moon left the ponies to battle and try and establish themselves. It seemed to be going well. Only a few casualties compared to the fire beasts, and more armored chariots were coming in from Equestria, but then armored chariots from the griffins came by. Unlike the ones used by the ponies, these ones were rounded like a turtle shell and covered the griffins flying them both above and below. That was something she would have to take into account later.

It was an amusing sight for Moon to see the griffin chariots slam into both ranks like wild cannonballs and disembark to attack both parties. Unfortunately, the ponies retreated almost immediately while trying to negotiate with them. It seemed the queen didn't reach the griffin emperor in time, or the message hadn't gone through. The alicorn looked down at Sunny looking up at her with pleading eyes, but it was pointless. If she intervened then the ponies wouldn't be able to negotiate in any meaningful way since a veritable god would be standing there, on griffin rock. She even saw a small column flying towards her castle near Snowden. Moon grinned, knowing she was right yet again.

The two stopped trying to evaluate the passage of time and watched as the battles unfurled with the griffins eventually taking up arms beside King Gallant. With this added pony...grif...creaturepower, the fire monsters were gradually pushed back into the crumbling mountain. Columns of highly-pressurized steam burst out from the mountains, breaking them apart little-by-little. Bright lights would glow and dim in slow succession, but Nightmare Moon knew what was happening. This was it. She just had to sense which crack Celestia was in.

There!

Moon dove as fast as possible, grinding against the atmosphere of the world and cutting a swath through several flying monsters emerging from the cracks, leaving only a trail of ashes behind her. Sunny screamed in terror the whole time. If he wasn't protected by the orb, he would have become completely flattened by the g-forces. The two obliterated a massive portion of the mountains when they crashed through it, coming up several tunnels of cooled magma that were starting to heat up again. They all led to a central chamber which Solar Flare was in. Sunny was freed from his orb and rolled around, dazed, when Moon arrived next to her sister.

The chamber was dark and the air choked every breath out of its occupants, but the sheer size of it was such that even the alicorn would have trouble conceiving of a building of its dimensions. Snowden would have been nothing more than a tiny, two-house village compared to the sheer immensity of available space.

"Go away, Luna!" Solar shouted. She focused her magic into the core of the dormant chamber, heating it up some more before it cooled again.

"I'm here to stop you from destroying everything," Nigghtmare Moon stated. "It's obvious, but in your delusional state I thought it best to explain my presence."

"How did you even find me?! There's a plethora of supervolcanoes in this world!" Solar grumbled as she focused her magic again.

Sunny and Moon braced when multiple columns of steam burst out of the ground and slid along the fractured walls like gray water.

"But it's the closest to Equestria and will tear it apart when you awaken the monstrosity here," Moon said. She looked at the ground and absent-mindedly kicked a black stone. "You claim to have nothing left in this world to protect." Solar looked at her sister with an increasingly glowing body and bared fangs. "But you have...me," Moon forced out. She felt disgust at herself for even uttering such things, but she needed to do anything to calm down her sister. "And, most importantly, you have the legacy of your daughter in the form of this young stallion."

Sunny gulped audibly and hesitantly approached the fractured alicorn. "Uh..."

"You would kill off the spawn of your own daughter?" Moon asked with a raised brow.

Solar Flare scoffed. "This isn't her. Just some dregs from dregs of the dregs of her loins," she grumbled. "I was not there to approve anything."

"Because of your own fury, sister!" Moon shouted. "You went to such lengths just because of me?! You killed and slaughtered and--"

"Enough!" Solar Flare screamed. She started breathing harder as her body glowed and the chamber illuminated and dimmed in tandem with her heartbeat. "I'm not interested in having some kind of inane 'convincery' trite sputtered my way! The time has passed for that. This world means nothing to me, and I would sooner see it burn than continue to bear witness to what was stolen from me!"

"Looks like you were right, Sunny," Moon mused. "I brought you for nothing."

"Deal with her, servants! I have to focus," Solar commanded.

A ghostly chill ran over Sunny's body before a red mist emerged from the shadows and collided with a magical barrier erected by the alicorn of the night. She skid past Sunny and let loose moonlight from her body, eliciting multiple screams of pain from the single, ghostly collusion attacking her. All the young unicorn could do was watch in horror at the sight before him. He looked at Solar Flare, trembling, but then a realization hit him. He hadn't thought of it because it became so natural to him...but Solar Flare was speaking ancient equus. Her control over the monsters was such that her speech didn't matter, and she only spoke to Nightmare Moon.

He cleared his throat and approached her nervously. "Um..."

---

Solar Flare paid Sunny no heed.

"Excuse me," the stallion muttered nervously. He squeaked when the volcano flowed brighter than he had seen yet. "What should I address you as?"

Solar Flare, panting, looked at Sunny with wide, shocked eyes. "Somepony who isn't speaking some bizarre mumbo-jumbo?" Her surprise made way for disgust. "Your accent is bizarre, however."

"Yes, well, when learning to speak a language ten thousand years old you don't exactly emulate the original accent." Sunny believed he 'had her now'. "Q-Queen Nightmare Moon taught me just as I taught her current-day equus."

"Queen?" the alicorn repeated with annoyed apprehension.

Moon glowed green, engulfing the red 'pony' in that color and prying them apart before failing and watching it snap back together and grind against the wall as it lost control of itself.

"I suggested she call herself that," Sunny explained.

"I see. And what do you want, pony? I told my sister I'm not in the mood for emotional speeches or any such ridiculousness." She cast another spell then pointed suddenly at the stallion. "And you looking like my daughter is not going to dissuade me."

"I wasn't trying to dissuade you. More like, I'm a historian and wanted to know of the past and learn from somepony who lived through it."

"Ask my sister."

"I did, but that's just part of what happened back then." Sunny smiled nervously. "I wanted to hear your side to it."

Solar chuckled. "What does it matter? You'll all die anyways."

The unicorn thought hard and said the first thing that came to mind. "So you would destroy your daughter's legacy?" Sunny asked nervously. He saw the alicorn hesitate in casting her spell. "I don't just mean me. There's likely a bunch of her work left around today, even with all the time that passed. We wouldn't be able to look for it if you destroy the world, and I and my family are your best bet to trace that legacy back to its origins."

Solar was about to respond when one of the hollow chambers belched out a contingent of armored ponies, a few griffins, and King Gallant. They screamed in surprise when Moon shot past overhead, engulfed in a weird, semi-transparent film of red. The ghostly entity fighting her popped into existence before the group, its body shifting, blinking in and out of existence rapidly. Dozens of ponies clawed at the form they were forced to take before being pulled back in by Solar's curse.

"What in Hades is that?!" Gallant shouted in horror.

Solar chuckled. "Well done, stalling for time."

"B-but I didn't--"

The automaton pushed past the soldiers and tackled the ghostly abomination. While the face it was given was stale and emotionless, the spirits coalesced within were startled. The doll engulfed its hood in red, arcing magic and struck the ghost multiple times before it managed to throw its assailant off of it.

"I didn't think you'd have trouble with a ghost, alicorn," the automaton taunted.

Solar Flare looked at the possessed doll with a bizarre, deep interest. She slowly straightened herself in front of Sunny as her eyes widened. She stared at the creature, her heart having seemingly frozen solid with the cold sensation coursing through her.

"Oh. If it isn't Princess Celestia's fragment. I thought you were taken care of definitively," the doll mused.

King Gallant looked at it, perturbed, then his gaze shifted to the fiery alicorn that was starting to tremble violently. "What did you say?!"

"You! You're the one! You killed me and stole everything from me!"

"I might've overstepped..." the automaton squeaked.

Solar turned to Sunny and jabbed him in the chest several times with her burning hoof as she spoke to him. "You want to see the world not be destroyed?! Too bad! You'll all die like I did!"

"Sister no!" Nightmare Moon shouted.

Everyone evacuated from the mountains as they crumbled around them. The sheer magical force Solar Flare managed to conjure with the fury that birthed her existence in the first place jolted the slumbering Gigantis Vesuvius Vulcan beneath them awake. She laughed maniacally realizing that she didn't need to directly influence the creature and watched as it rose from its slumber.

The onlookers, however, were less enthused. Griffins watched, horrified, as their homes were ripped apart by a creature none of them were able to imagine even in their greatest nightmares. The titan had awoken and its immense form rose high into the sky, its six, bulky legs carrying it aloft the ground. Every step of its calcified, black obsidian stones that served as feet caused earthquakes, shaking apart whatever was left and wounding the planet with every step. The land cracked apart under the powerless eyes of the soldiers, Nightmare Moon, and Sunny as they watched Solar Flare laughing so hard that tears of lava streamed down her cheeks.

Author's Note:

I decided to publish my own non-pony books myself. I currently only have Reverting Scales (book 1) out right now which you can get on Kindle for 5 dollars or in paperback for 12. If you can't or don't want to purchase it, I would be grateful if you could share it.

The main character is a dragoness that starts out as a 'thing' developping in her egg and grows into a drake over the course of the story. It was partially inspired by Tui. T. Sutherland's Wings of Fire and E.E. Knight's Age of Fire books where dragons are the main characters.

Naydrus is a dragon born to immense parents who live with and serve humans. When the dragonling hatches, it is revealed that she doesn't look anything like her family and she has a passion for fighting. However, she also carries a deep hatred for the hominid 'caretakers'. This inspires her escape from the city through the sewer system and find other dragons that share her mindset. However, the world is a big place and very old. Much has happened and continues to happen without Naydrus being aware of it, causing her to cross paths with dangerous individuals and end up in hazardous locations.

You can find it here. It's available on every Amazon. This is just the US link.

Comments

[Skarsnik]

Damn, wanted to read your book (I have a soft spot for dragon) but not available on kindle on EU ;(

[The Psychopath]

11809709
Which Amazon do you use? It's available everywhere.

[tsaukpaetra]

Inconvenient timing! What's next, the bird falling in?