Children of Darkness and Light

by Aquaman

Beginnings

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“You know what happened next. Don’t make me say it. Don’t… this was a mistake. We shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have brought you here. I should’ve sprinted back to camp and grabbed a rifle and charged back up here and…”

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The two alicorns stood still and strong as stone, expressions mirrored, horns aglow. Garnet thought about stepping in between them — thought about it then and thought about it later, through sleepless nights and shortening days filled with paperwork and ticker tape and soldiers kissing nurses in the middle of cheering, rabid throngs.

Flurry blinked first, then blinked again as a wan smile played across her lips. “You did it,” she muttered. “You were finally honest with me.” She shook her head, and her smile grew with the volume of her voice.

“Thank you, Twilight.”

Garnet couldn’t believe what he’d heard. For a moment, it didn’t seem like Twilight did either, until then Flurry took a step back and gave a small, tight nod. “You’re right,” she said. “An invasion is a terrible idea. It’ll cost billions of bits, thousands of our soldiers’ lives, and even if we won, we’d leave millions of civilian casualties and hundreds of miles of destruction behind us. It’s not worth it. All it’d accomplish is making an even bigger mess.”

Now Twilight’s face softened, and flushed, and blossomed with a grin that Flurry returned in kind. She offered her niece a hug, and Flurry embraced her aunt like the family she was. Only Garnet saw that Flurry’s eyes stayed open — focused on the city in the valley, then flicked to the skies above it. She never looked at him. He wouldn’t have done anything if she had.

“You’ve been through a lot,” Twilight said as they pulled apart. “Too much for anyone, Princess or not. And I… what I said to you, I should–”

“No. Don’t take it back, Twilight. You meant it.” Flurry’s lips twitched into what could’ve been a smirk. “And I’m grateful you said it. You have no idea how much I needed to hear that from you.”

“Then… you’re welcome, I suppose,” Twilight chuckled — almost giggled. So innocent. So naïve. “So… what now?”

Flurry sighed, eyes rolling up in thought, something hollow in her pretty smile. “Guess I’ll call my scouts back. Tell the Alliance forces to stand down. Shouldn’t take long. It’s as good as done already. And in the meantime…”

As Flurry trailed off, a distant droning buzz rose in the air. Garnet followed Flurry’s gaze — targeted, not searching, because she’d already known exactly where to look — to a little black speck of an ornithopter emerging from behind a cloudbank to the east, steadily crawling across the sky in the direction of the city.

“Might want to start with that one,” Twilight said, nodding towards the aircraft she’d finally noticed. “They’re getting pretty close.”

“Oh, that?” Flurry replied. “That’s not a scout.”

Twilight’s brow furrowed. “A troop transport?”

Flurry shook her head. The thopter didn’t change course.

“Then… what is it?”

Flurry didn’t turn around. The thopter was headed right for the city. Squinting, Garnet could barely see a number stenciled on its nose: “82.”

“I meant what I said too, Twilight,” Flurry murmured. “You didn’t follow through last time. You left a mess behind. And you were right: I’m not a Princess. Not like Celestia, or my mother, or you.”

The thopter reached the city’s core, and a tiny dark spot dropped from its belly — just one bomb from one craft, unlike any other raid Garnet had ever seen. As it fell, the thopter which had carried it sped up and rose rapidly, tearing back behind cloud cover with far more urgency than any anti-air defense could warrant.

“Flurry, what is that?” Twilight asked — louder, more intently, frightened, too late.

“You only ended one war,” Flurry croaked. She turned around and lit her horn, and Garnet saw black, yawning death in the eyes of a mare who would never, ever die. “I’m going to end all of them.”

Twilight began to say something, Garnet flared his wings, Flurry shut her eyes — and the bomb went off.

There was no point in describing it: the impossibly bright flash, the opaque arcane shockwave, the sight of buildings and creatures alike shriveling and crumbling into dust, as the bomb built for the cause he served pushed everything in its path through a thousand years of entropy in an instant. Because it had happened, and Garnet had seen it, and there weren’t words wretched enough to make the Guild that had designed the fucking thing understand what it felt like to watch the world end.

It didn’t matter what happened next: the spots in Garnet’s eyes that even Flurry’s shielding spell couldn’t protect them from, the tears falling from Twilight’s when the bomb’s energy finally dissipated, the serene calm with which Flurry teleported a typewritten message to Alliance operators who would ensure it was passed on to the Mizuman Emperor. There were hundreds of thousands of his citizens who would hear neither the Alliance’s demand for unconditional and immediate surrender nor its promise to rain these bombs down on every city, town, and county that refused, because they’d been born to die as the opening statement in a media-laundered political debate.

And anything Garnet could say now would be as impotent as what had been said then: his own thoughtless groan of shock, Twilight’s broken whisper of “What have you done?”, and most of all Flurry’s impudent reply — “What I thought was right.” Because Spike knew it all already, and he’d seen what Flurry’s brutality and Twilight’s rage had accomplished, and he’d forced Garnet to tell it to him anyway out of some infuriating need to know the truth.

Well, here was the truth, Spike: you weren’t there. You didn’t save them. You did nothing to stop this, and you have to live with that just like everyone else. And if you think one conversation with a traumatized, AWOL staff sergeant will give you the answers to any miniscule part of this, you’re out of your pretentious, Guild-worshipping, useless fucking–

Comments

[Ciphers]

“You only ended one war,” Flurry croaked. She turned around and lit her horn, and Garnet saw black, yawning death in the eyes of a mare who would never, ever die. “I’m going to end all of them .”

[Sunny]

Even kept the radio code, lots of little history throwbacks here