Joy to the Worlds
Joy to the Worlds
Written by
VoxAdam and TB3
Based on a story idea
by Sledge115
Edited by
TB3 and Sledge115
Proofread by
Redskin122004 and DoctorFluffy
Twas’ the night before Hearthswarming, and all through the land…
… Nothing.
Oh, little foals still hung up their stockings, and played in the snow, and gathered as parents and grandparents lit a candle to mark the first of the Eight Nights of Thanksgiving, eight nights to celebrate the overthrow of an ancient reign of chaos, culminating in the arrival of the New Year...
Songs were sung, parties held, presents placed below festive trees, and mulled wine flowed like blood on the snow… red blood on the snow.
In the cities, a totem-prole on every street played low, lilting Hearthswarming music. Foals, born before and during the war, sat around trees, calmed by their mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts, wishing desperately for parents serving in the armed forces to come back home.
But even in the off-Equestrian colonies on far-off Earth, those desolate villages gathered around scattered portal stations like specks of fire in a desert, merriment could be found. Dancing and singing, celebrations of new harvests, the breaking out of food stores to celebrate and prepare for the coming Winters that not all present may survive...
The war for Earth, purification of a tainted world through ponification, placed a huge burden on the nation, and with that came the threat of dissent.
And so, as always in times of national emergency, public holidays such as this took on a greater role, the task of easing people’s fears and tensions. A call for unity, the friendly carrot to the stick of the growing police state, of the guards and constables on every corner, and the ever-watchful totem-proles.
“The fire of friendship lives in our hearts,
So long as it burns we cannot drift apart.
Though quarrels arise their numbers are few,
Laughter and singing will see us through.
We are a circle of pony friends,
A circle of friends we will be to the very end…”
Yes, this year, Hearthswarming was celebrated with a vengeance. Not even the fiercer-than-usual weather, brought on by the introduction of inexperienced, ex-human ‘Newfoal’ converts into the weather teams could damp the exchange of gifts, or quiet the wild music.
On the surface, the holiday had never been stronger. But beneath the superficial surface of tinsel and parcel-wrap, there was nothing. No bells would ring in the sky tonight, or on any night to come. No gentle magic would fill the air with its song of reconciliation and joy to the world.
Because, far from the front lines of the distant war for Earth, the domestic armies of Equestria were hunting down the avatar of the holiday, and chasing him to his death.
* * * * *
Burning lungs, hoarse breathing.
The trample of desperate hooves and the snorting gasps of a great beast in full flight.
In his trail, flowed countless armored forms, a legion of equines pounding along with the single-minded devotion of the pack. His blood was the trail they followed, and even as the powdered snow stung their eyes and the cold bit at their bones, they continued the hunt, driven on by primal magicks woven like a dark cancer into their souls.
Red blood on the snow… a sacrifice to call back the sun, when the nights were at their longest and the Winter night seemed to swallow all...
Like a locomotive engine, steaming and churning with primal motion, the great stag thundered across the mountain steppes of Adlaborn, eyes turned up and fixed upon a twinned pair of stars that hovered in stillness above the summit of the highest peak, a monolithic spire of ice and rock which bore no name.
In the valleys below, the lights of the reindeer capital, Vologda, had been snuffed out forever, and in the place of holiday cheer and the singing of countless uplifted voices in prayer, joy and adulation, a ghastly silence had beset the land, a blight more terrible than any frost.
The land of Adlaborn was dying, and its king was dying with it. This he knew for sure. The Equestrian arrows and shafts embedded in his muscled haunches and chest were but pinpricks to the old stag, but deeper, in his heart, he could feel that something had been torn away.
His core, the wellspring of love and care from which he drew his strength, had dried up, leaving the faintest drips of nourishment. Where once the fire of friendship had burned, binding his life to every loving heart on the surface of the globe, there was now only ashes, burnt cinders of coal.
The implications terrified him. Not so much for himself, for death’s sting held no fear for the Father of Hearthswarming, but for the world that until of late had been his beloved charge.
True to his kindly nature, Sint Erklass spent his last moments worrying for others, for the fate of every innocent life drawn up into this hellstorm of a war. And that same concern gave him strength, the courage to power on through pain and grief, onwards and upwards towards that towering peak, and the promise of the holiday stars.
To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall...
* * * * *
“Dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!”
The shouting pale unicorn rode a sleigh of silver, drawn by eight of the strongest chargers in the legion’s body. A pure-white cloak trimmed in fur, emblazoned with the sigil of a triumphant golden sun, protected her from the cold, and streamed behind her as if the tail of a comet.
It was an exhilarating hunt, a ride of fire and ice. The young mare, hooves looped over the forward bar of the vehicle, whooped with seldom-expressed glee as they hurtled onward, crying out encouragement to the team in the traces.
“Now Rainbow! Now Jetstream! Now Zephyr, and Drumfire! On Cloudheart! On Sharp-Ears! On Kuiper, and Skyfire!”
A ninth pony, his horn blazing with red light, led and lit the way, keeping the grounded pegasus stallions and mares aligned with the rear of the hunting pack as they charged through the shadowed and snow-dappled forest.
Whipping out along a precipitous ledge, they saw their prey ascending a high, switchbacked ridge, silhouetted against the night sky, which blazed with the coiling flames of the aurora.
“There he is! There he is!”
The pale mare whipped her head sideways, and on the far horizon saw a streak of light broach over a hundred miles of cloud.
“Daybreak’s upon us! Catch up! Go faster! We must overtake him before the sun rises!”
Behind her, shackled in the back of the sleigh, two tiny figures clung to each other, whimpering...
* * * * *
The final ascent was marked with the ruins of an ancient structure, that rose around the path like the curving bones of a long-slain dragon.
Zamok Ustyag, the castle of the Great Stag.
Sint, his hooves clattering on the broken flagstones, remembered this place well. Long, long ago, this had been his home, and where he had raised a family…
A precious, long-broken family.
Down collapsed halls long opened to the sky he ran, through nurseries and bedchambers, home now only to faded dreams, he finally attained the Highest Stair, and emerged onto the naked crown of the mountain.
Save for a single, towering sky-pine, this was a bare and windswept spot, from where an endless vista reached as far as the horizon, a canvas of mountains and valleys running from here to eternity.
It was the Northern Pole of Equus, the very top of the world. All points lay south from here.
A great zodiac had been carved into the rocky plateau, divided into thirteen quadrants. The pine tree, an ancient growth whose trunk and base was wound about with holly, ivy and mistletoe, sat upon the central axis.
Panting, with one leg dragging lamely behind him, Sint hauled himself across the star-rose to the boundary of Huginn and Munninn, the signs of the thoughtful sun and the mindful moon, atop the lip of the highest drop, and stared out along the Prime Meridian, the invisible line that connected the poles, the Crystal Empire, and Canterlot...
He felt his magic mingle with that of the mountain, trammelled through the zodiac signs, and Saw, with sight beyond sight, the Naughty and Nice, and everything in between...
Through this connection, he could see the whole of Equus, and its ruin. Saw Equestria’s armies marching against all, and the Lunar diarch’s stone imprisonment. The war for Earth, home of Man, hung over all, a grim blanket suffusing the sphere in madness and blood
He stopped there, great heart bursting, and struggled to not collapse. For the first time since the loss of Joulumuori, his tragically mortal wife, he truly felt the weight of his many years.
‘Dear, dear Muori… and our beautiful son Ivan, and his sweet Marya…’
With the last shimmers of his fading magic, he drew before his eyes a length of fabric that had been twisted around his antler…
‘I could not save any of them from time’s grip, not even your sister Anna, the Maiden of Flame… but you stayed, dear granddaughter, Maiden of Snow…’
… It was a scrap of clothing, a silver-blue Winter’s cloak, silken and immaculate. Starlight upon snow shimmered upon its surface, and with the merest touch he could feel the powerful magic woven into the material… and the precious soul trapped within.
The soul of the Snow Maiden. His archmage, closest counsellor, and granddaughter.
“Oh, Ilsa…” he groaned, sinking to the ground on the very edge of the ten-thousand foot drop. “We made it… we made it.”
Back to the place of his birth, where he had been sired from union of starlight and first sunrise.
The oldest being to have ever trod the face of this world, who had seen the rise and fall of the Alicorn empire, who had fathered over the flowering of the countless civilizations that followed, had returned here to die.
He pressed his face to Ilsa’s fabric, and sobbed deeply, grieving for the world. Together, wreathed in coils of snow, the last reindeer in Equus awaited the coming dawn.
* * * * *
The sleigh smashed hard against the stonework, coming to a crashing halt at the foot of the staircase. The mare behind the traces leapt clear in an instant, her cloak flashing behind her as she rushed onwards. The nine ponies who had brought her this far struggled to release themselves and follow, calling out in desperation for her to wait for them, that it wasn’t safe.
The pale unicorn paid them no heed. Duty called her, sang to her with divine promise, and the light of the Unconquered Sun blazed within her like a sword of fire, driving back all her fears… Keeping the black dog of her soul at bay, kennelled and chained, and burning away all question, and all doubt...
Yes, she would see this done.
As she tramped on, snow billowing in her wake, she magically reached into the folds of her cloak to pull out a flesh-coloured colombina mask, and slipped it over her features. Shaped roughly like the upper half of a human face, its proportions looked odd and distorted above her muzzle.
It was a visage that promised sorrow and sweet, sweet mourning.
Standing in wait upon the mountain, the huntsmares and stallions who’d led the charge had now formed ranks just below the narrow plateau of the summit.
“Is he there, Crumpit?” she asked the captain, a curmudgeonly old green pegasus stallion, whose unkempt mane and yellowed teeth were at odds with the dashing ponies under his command. He was an old monster, called out of a reclusive retirement for these last campaigns… for these wars of extermination.
“Yes…” The greenmane growled in response, and the cloaked mare saw the same ‘black dog’ she felt, prowling behind his jaundiced eyes, but advanced in age and bitterness. Now it was a grimmer beast, the revenge of a soul who had never known love, lashing out against a holiday that represented all he could never possess...
“Will you join me?” she asked, and saw him balk. “Will you come with me, and steal away Hearthswarming?”
“M’lady, I… I don’t know…”
That gave her a little satisfaction, to know even this old grinch recoiled from the foul deed that would cap off this night of blood.
‘Ponies, for all their faults and sins, are peace-seekers at heart…’ she thought to herself, with no small happiness commingled with sorrow. ‘That is why I am here.’
None of these ponies knew her name. Celestia’s Sword, some called her. Others knew her as Queen’s Justice. But she did not care much for such pompous sobriquets. There was no glory in what she did.
The silence and darkness all around was a testament to that. In the hills and valleys that surrounded this great mountain, the only lights that remained were those of the dying blazes, marked by plumes of dark smoke rising into the starlit sky. The only voices, the lamentations of the wind.
‘I send my scourge, I send my sword…’
Afraid as he was of her hideous mask, the elderly captain was yet more afraid of what to come. They all were. Terrified of what they were about to do, and did not want to do, but were still compelled to, by oath and by order.
“It’s alright,” the mare said gently, reaching out to rest a single hoof on his shoulder. “I can carry this to the end on my own. You’ve all done as much as could be asked from you…”
Pulling her hood over her face, she turned away and began to climb the final flight, which led up the stairs like a stairway towards the heavens.
“But, m’lady…” Captain Crumpit protested.
“I have given you all your orders,” she repeated herself. “Hold fast, and await my signal.”
She could feel their collective sigh of relief as she turned away, and felt glad for them.
… The fewer hooves that were stained tonight, the better.
* * * * *
Sint, tearful eyes buried in the shawl that bore the soul of his granddaughter, heard the angel of his death approaching with measured hoofsteps, and lifted his eyes to the pair of stars that hovered overhead.
“Do you know their names?” he asked softly, not turning to face his assassin, not yet. “The names of the holiday stars?”
“Yes,” came her measured reply. “In Equestria’s old tongue, they are Tarva and Alambil, and the zebras call them Tana and Bata. In both languages they are Victory, and Peace, fated to forever meet in convergence at this holy time time of year…”
He heard her pause and sigh. “But to your people, to the reindeer, they are Gerda and Kai, the young lovers...”
“Good night, sleep tight, young lovers…” he chuckled softly, remembering an old nursery rhyme, before rising unsteadily to his feet, ancient joints protesting, “...but those names are wrong. Do you love the stars, little pony?”
“I do… I’ve always gazed up to them, searching for answers, to find myself beyond myself.”
‘Ah’, he thought, with a touch of sadness. ‘This one is a seeker… ever hunting for answers, for meaning, for purpose.’
Still standing with head turned up and his back to her, he tapped a thoughtful hoof on the ground.
“Then would it surprise you to know,” he spoke at length. “That in an age so far passed that only I can remember it, Victory and Peace were once a single star… the Tear of the Lady…”
“No, Lord Hearthswarming, that is new to me…” came her reply, and it made his heart ache to hear such curiosity and fascination in the voice of a soul so steeped in blood.
“I was here…” he said regally, turning at last to meet her. “I stood right here, many thousands of years ago, on the night when the Lady’s star was rent in twain.”
Cloaked and hooded, wearing a strange mask, the pale mare stood atop the staircase, scarcely out of breath. He saw her take a single step back, saw her eyes turn up, and he smiled grimly.
“It was a sign, a holy sign, that to Equus had been given a pair of foals… a pair of royal sisters, two precious girls that I was blessed to have helped raise...”
He could not speak their names, though. That wound still bit too deep, even here at the end.
“So, these are the natal stars of the alicorn princesses,” she breathed, visibly full of reverence and awe at gaining such secret knowledge. “And today is the day of their birth...”
Then her gaze, burning bright with zealotry from behind the strange mask, yet oddly hollow, met his own. “It seems fitting then that we should meet in this place.”
Sint nodded once and forced himself to stand tall.
Despite his pain and blood loss, despite the fading of his coat into a deathly mantle of silver and grey, he still managed to cut an impressive figure, towering high over the tiny mare and standing with his back to the edge of the cliff. Ilsa was wrapped around one of his forehooves, and she streamed proudly in the breeze like a battle standard.
“So, then, young seeker, you are the one sent by Canterlot?”
She approached him slowly, gracefully, ceremoniously. “Yes.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Yes,” she replied again.
“... You say it so simply.”
“For all that, I do not take it lightly, believe me, good sir.”
“Your companions… your comrades do not appear to share your sentiments.”
“They are soldiers. Whatever their cause, however righteous, killing is what they do. First Sombra, and now the war for Earth, have taught our kind the true meaning of that word.”
Her horn shone, and her cloak billowed out behind her, like the wings of some great bird of prey. A dull shard of bronze metal, encased in her magical aura, levitated out from one of several pockets held within the cloak’s folds. Then another, then two more, and three.
Soon thirteen shards, opaque and without shine, hovered in the empty air between them. Transfixed despite himself, Sint watched as the drifting pieces, woven by the mare’s will, came together in the shape of a blade, hilt and crossguard.
‘An orichalcum sword,’ he thought, heart filled with a dread such as he hadn’t felt during the long chase. ‘One of the few weapons capable of hurting a being like myself…’
Orichalcum, the rare ‘mountain-copper’ mined from this very peak. The tips of the spears and arrows that had struck him during the hunt had been plated with the rare magic metal… and even though he had closed up the wounds, its poison lingered. A plunging strike from such a blade, running him through, would be enough to finish his life.
The magic sword was now whole. But she made no move to use it against him.
“Well?” he asked, “Why do you wait? You are the Empire’s hangmare, are you not? Do what you came here for, and make an end.”
“Charging in blindly is not my way. I know that, even now, you will not go down without a fight. And I believe you deserve to understand why I do this.”
She was going to speak. Wasn’t that what people like her always did? Give in to a self-gratifying compulsion to justify themselves.
There was a soft ‘trill’ of magic at work, and Sint looked up to see the light along the horizon deepen in colour, and the aurora overhead become more agitated. And around the two of them, the zodiac signs carved into the stone of the mountain were beginning to subtly glow.
An absurd spark of hope dared to flare within the old reindeer. Perhaps he could achieve what he had come here to–
“Please don’t try anything, my good sir,” said the mare, lit up from beneath by the thrice-crowned star-sign of Babushka, the Heart, within which she stood. “I do not consider myself wise enough to plan for every eventuality, but nor did I come unprepared to this battlefield of your choosing.”
She stamped a hoof on Heart. The sharp retort of shorting magic was a harsh crack against the mournful sighs of the snow and wind. A small flurry of pink sparks erupted from the sign, and swarmed around the mare for an instant, in resonance with her…
‘She’s does this from love…’ he realised. ‘No mere monster could have triggered a response from Babushka’s sign. Twisted and wicked her deeds may be, but she commits them out of true devotion…’
Thus summoned, two guards stepped into view behind her, emerging up from the Highest Stair’s recessed alcove.
Each bore a tiny burden, bound and shackled. The smaller of the two, her coat a chocolate brown dappled with silver, reached for Sint the second she saw him.
“Grandfather!” cried the tiny fawn, her young voice aching with pain and hope, as another child, a young buck, continued to fight in futility as the two of them were dragged over to the crowning pine.
Iron nails were produced – each a full three feet long – secured to the children’s fastenings, and then driven into the heart of the tree. Sint reeled, not just from the pain he felt in tune with the sky-pine, but in confusion and horror.
‘How is this possible... the breaking in my soul confirmed that all of my kith and kin were dead… murdered…’
Then, as if in answer to his unspoken question, the masked mare removed a marble-shaped talisman from around each child’s neck. With that shielding magic gone, the Grandfather of the Reindeer people felt the children’s hearts… and knew them as truly as he knew his own name.
‘Eadmund and Lucie, second-born son and daughter of house Heavensky. Their older brother was Pyotr… guard to the Meisterburger of Volodga: he fell in the act of protecting these two… and their sister…’
His breathing seized for an instant. At the same time, he felt the scrap of cloth around his hoof grow cold with rage and grief.
‘...their older sister was Zusan, last to bear Ilsa’s mantle, as the Snow Maiden…’
He remembered a broken body, splashed like a streak of mercury across the streets of Vologda, and trembled with fury.
‘It is no coincidence that she chose Zusan’s siblings as hostages. But is it to incite my rage, or my compliance?’
“You have powerful magic, Bringer of Gifts,” the mare said, pausing to tie Eadmund and Lucie’s own cloaks back on. “I have had only the shortest time to study the workings of reindeer magic, but I know that the change from night to day is when you are at your most powerful, and this land most attuned to your magic…”
Nodding, she motioned for her soldiers to leave. They appeared reluctant, yet grateful at the same time to be made to depart from this place.
“Why are these innocents here!?” Sint demanded as they retreated, finding some strength to project into his voice. The unspoken coda drifted through the cold night air: ‘You’ve slain every other buck, doe and fawn in Adlaborn… the sick and the lame, the young and the old...’
“They are here to ensure you lie back and die quietly,” she replied softly. “Allow me to slay you without fuss and I will end their lives in a merciful flash. Fight back with the power of this mountain, and that very magic you seek to use against me will ground through that tree, and through those fawns…”
The terrible logic of it rolled over Sint like a spring torrent. Surrender to spare two children an agonised death, their flesh roasted on the bone from exposure to raw magic... or fight, to the orchestra of their screams…
Either way, this mare planned to kill all three of them, and the maker above alone knew what she planned for Ilsa. But to place the manner of the children’s death in his hooves was beyond sadistic.
“In a way, we are like two sides of a dark mirror, you and I, good sir... And that is a fact I can take no pride in. Where you personally brought hope and joy to children… one could, perhaps, even say that you brought them life... I gave them the opposite.”
For a moment, still overwhelmed by the revelation of the two hostages, Sint did not quite understand. Then the awful realisation hit him.
“Sweet Harmony… the other fawns…”
“Yes…” she said quietly. “I sat them on my lap, too… before the deed… I sang them to sleep, guided them to beautiful dreams, before I slit their throats...”
In all his countless eons upon this world, the ancient stag had experienced much of the vast gamut of emotions known to thinking beings. Yet this was possibly the first time he could feel something like an anger born of the fires of Tartarus.
“You…” he whispered, voice dripping with loathing. “Why?”
“Because it wasn’t clean.”
Of all possible responses, this was not the one he would have expected.
“What?”
“It is as I said. We came here to kill. There are no two ways about it. But the manner in which we take a life is important. I am a dreamweaver, a mage of the mind. It is the least expected of me, to use my talents to ease the passage of those I slaughter…”
She stepped up towards them, magic sword tracing slow orbits around her head. “Yet in the eyes of justice, some murders are easier to absolve than others.”
Sint shook like a tree in a gale, taking ragged breaths at the horrid compassion of this butcher.
“You dare... expect absolution… after what you’ve done?”
“No…” the mare replied tonelessly, “No… Good sir, how can I ask forgiveness for the unforgivable… How could anyone call themselves a good person, after doing that?”
“And yet, you still did it.”
The masked mare accepted his judgment without rebuke. “I have no illusions that what I do tonight is evil. But it must be done, because Celestia wills it.”
Sint squeezed his eyes shut, pained at the sound of the name. “Her… the one I told stories to when she was only a foal… not content to destroy the humans, she now turns to destroy us...”
‘You whom I called daughter… how can you have come to hate me so…’
“Is this what she wanted?” he asked. “The Celestia I raised was never so cruel.”
For the first time, his executioner let a hint of pity show in her voice.
“Yes. The humans will be saved, and will carry Equestria to new heights with their brilliance and imagination,” she said. “Ponykind has grown up, Bringer of Gifts… and now, we must learn to live in a world from which you are absent, to weave our own dreams. Would you rather fade away, while this new world moves on without you? I think not.”
The mare brought the sword to his chest, and pressed the tip to his fur. “This is a good death, worthy of one who has brought such warmth to so many hearts...”
She trailed off solemnly on those last words.
“What of your heart, murderer?”
“A question well worth asking…” she said, slowly walking in an orbit around him, keeping the sword in place, ready to bring it down. The magic of the mountain could be felt now as a hum rising through their hooves, colourful nodes of power glimmering within the branches of the immense pine.
Above, tendrils of the aurora seemed to reach down towards the carved Zodiac signs, like outstretched human fingers, almost brushing the two of them...
‘NOW!’
Sint reared and kicked the sword down with one hoof, before lassoing a passing trail of skylight with his antlers and cracking it like a whip. Immediately, the mare yanked the blade back with her magic, throwing it up to block the bolt, which splashed like water on the sword’s surface.
“Very bold, most cunning…” she said calmly. “Using the passive magic as a weapon…”
She held up the sword, and Sint, struggling to find another whiff of aurora to fire at her…
… realised that she was only holding half of the blade.
Her horn flashed from beneath her hood, and he felt something hot and toxic fire up below him into his gullet, tearing through flesh and bone, before bursting from his back in a fountain of ichor.
It was the other half of the sword.
“Raaaagh!”
Blood, so rich and deep in colour to almost appear black, poured out in a meaty torrent onto the ground. Almost immediately the wounds closed up again, but the taint of the mountain-copper bit like frost, slowing him down.
He half expected her to praise his courage or strength, but there were no words. Instead, now wielding both halves of the sword like daggers, the killer came at him, whirling the blades about her person.
They fought. As the burning sky latched onto the mountaintop, they orbited around the glowing pine and its bound hostages, striking and weaving.
Sint tore raw magic from the air and cast it in thunderbolts of wrath, drawing not even a single thaum from the ground below. Eadmund and Lucie’s silence heartened him, and with each blow he spared them a glance, relieved to see they were still unharmed.
The mare however was agile and quick, and whereas he was struggling to incapacitate her with the magical equivalent of a hammer, she was armed with a pair of scalpels, wielded with lethal intent, darting in to slit tendons and rupture arteries.
Every blow took its toll. More and more of Sint’s soupy blood burst and poured across the zodiac rose. And as they fought, the slower his wounds closed, and the weaker his blows and thunderbolts became…
He fell. A steaming, bloody mess, he collapsed to the ground, unable to give any more.
“A mountain sacrifice…” she panted, staggering over to him. “A ram offered in place of a child…”
“What… are you… blathering about…” he wheezed.
She sank to her haunches beside him and reformed the twin shards of orichalcum into a single whole, poised over his neck. The hangmare, dithering...
“Good sir, please, let me tell you a story of the human world. It’s only fair and just, the least repayment I could offer for all the tales you told in your life, many of them from the dawn of our world.”
Sint did not speak, but closed his eyes and looked within, feeling the hum of the magic building in the core of the mountain.
“There was a human Patriarch…” the mare panted. “...who begged to be blessed with a son. In time, the Lord God he worshipped answered his prayers, and gave unto him a beautiful boy-child, one with a lovely name… It meant ‘he laughs’. But, when the boy-child was not even full-grown, the Lord tested the Patriarch’s faith. He was ordered to take his son, climb atop a mountain and there, to bind his only child and sacrifice him. Then, at the last moment, with the knife upraised in the Patriarch’s hand, the Lord sent his messenger with a new command: to spare the child...”
She sighed and smiled. “Thus the child, ‘he laughs’, lived and grew to a great age, and through him the Patriarch became the father of many nations. Their legacy lived on, in a renowned emancipator and leader named in honour of the Patriarch… and the son’s name in turn was bestowed upon two great dreamers, one of whom unlocked the secrets of gravity and the celestial spheres... and another who wrote beautiful stories about thinking machines, and the foundation of wondrous star civilisations...”
All this was delivered with fervour and passion. To his well-versed ears, the way she spoke of such things indicated how dearly she held them. Whatever her cutie mark, concealed as it was beneath the fur cloak, chances were strong that it related to the sights in the night sky. Almost certainly she was born under the star of Svovlisti, the dreamer...
Sint opened his eye and saw tears in her own, staining the mask. Carefully, he reached up with his hoof and wiped them away with the edge of Ilsa’s cloak, ever conscious of the sword poised upon his neck, and the children bound upon the tree.
“A beautiful tale, little Weaver… but I sense you’ve yet to come to the crux…”
“Yes,” she said. “Though the Lord spared the Patriarch’s son, he still demanded a sacrifice, and so a ram was brought forth instead.”
She pressed down with the blade.
“The humans are that boy. You and your ilk are the ram.”
Softly, she nuzzled against his hoof, cheek pressed close to Ilsa.
“Goodbye…”
And Sint, feeling the energy of the mountain come to its zenith, and the sun mere degrees from breaking the cover of the far horizon, threw himself up into the blade…
“Augh!”
… and Ilsa, animated from within, unwound herself from around his hoof and spread like a second skin over the mare’s masked face, blinding and gagging her.
The stag’s blood, tainted with orichalcum, poured out upon the sign of Podevin, avatar of Vengeance, and as the mare tore Ilsa away from her, she saw too late… saw how his scattered blood, spread by their fight, formed a circuit connecting all of the star-signs, isolating the pine tree.
“No…”
The mountain growled, the blood boiled, and ignited with arcane power.
“Yes…”
The flash was blinding, the roar of energy indescribable, crackling lightning singing in harmony with the scream of the stars, and the screams of Sint and the mare, lying prostrate across the trunk of the circuit.
“Don’t give up now, grandfather!” cried a ghostly voice. Looking skyward in his spasms, Sint saw Ilsa’s cloak caught in another coil of magic, its energy lending her an insubstantial body of light and shadow. “Save the fawns!”
Aurora-flames burning on his coat, wheezing, unable to stand, Sint dragged himself across the plateau to the children, roaring and screaming as he fastened his jaws around the chains that bound them, and tore them to scrap with a final rear of his muscles.
“Grandfather!” cried the tiny doe, Lucie. “You came back for us!”
“Let me help you, sire!” called her brother Eadmund, forcing himself under Sint’s barrel and struggling to help the colossal stag stand. The love in their hearts was like a shot of adrenaline. He managed to scramble to his hooves.
“Little ones, climb on my back, and hold tight… we must dash away…”
“Where are we going, sire?” asked the young buck, even as he helped his sister into place.
“Away from here, to another world…”
He had only intended to save Ilsa, to protect her from whatever foul magicks she would be subjected to in Canterlot, but now – now he had these fawns to care for as well.
“... to Earth.”
“You, shall not, flee!” came a defiant cry. To his utter surprise, Sint saw the mare climb to her hooves, even as wild magick boiled like plasma around her.
Something flashed in her grasp. That was when he saw the orichalcum blade, and how she was using it to divert the worst of the energy off of herself.
‘Such cleverness, such bravery… why must she fight for a fallen mistress?’
“Give it up, Weaver…” he called out. “You cannot fight the magic of an entire realm alone…”
“I can try!”
Her horn glimmered, and he saw the blade split back into its thirteen components…
“For her, I will try anything!” she screamed, whereupon she telekinetically hurled a shard into each of the zodiac signs.
A terrible explosion was heard across the valley.
The double-short shattered each quadrant of the zodiac in a colossal eruption of stone and magic. Sint dimly heard a voice screaming in pain, realised it was his own as he shared in the wreck of the mountain…
And the pale mare was rushing for him, charging across the exploding ground, cloak and mask torn away, her horn lowered.
He turned to face her as if wading through a sea in full flood, turned to shield the children…
… felt her horn punch straight through his chest, and pierce his lung.
“Ah...”
It was a tiny, surprised sound, more a sigh than a gasp. They stood frozen in a tableau, the mare with her forehead pressed to his chest as if seeking comfort in his embrace, and the two fawns clinging, silent and horror-struck, to his back.
Around them, the magic flared like writhing snakes. The pines was burning, the mountain groaning, the wind rising.
“Blood for blood,” he gasped, feeling his sanguine lifeforce bubbling from his lips. Even this wasn’t enough to kill him, but it heralded his end. “Why… why should there be a sacrifice at all?”
The mare trembled, horn still embedded in his barrel, eyes held down. He could hear her sniffling, and in this moment of connection, could feel the size and weight of her heavy heart...
“Because the ‘why’ does not matter. It was a commandment from on high, and the consequences of failing to obey a divine mandate are terrible....”
She paused, and he sensed the tears falling from her eyes.“When the Lord instructed a great human king to kill every last man, woman and child of another people, the king disobeyed when he spared the others’ ruler. But the Lord’s wrath at that was mighty. His messenger took it upon himself to kill the other’s ruler, and the king became tormented by a dark spirit, which only the harp-playing skills of a young man – who'd made a name for himself slaying a giant – could ever hope to soothe. That man obeyed the Lord and went on to lead their people to greatness.”
Finally, the mare told him what she could have told no being with long to live for. “A dark spirit has haunted me, too, ever since I was a child. And no gift of yours could make it better.”
‘Melancholia...’ he realised, struggling to remain standing. ‘The most insidious of cankers.’
“I used to wonder why I was born this way, unable to feel joy or pleasure for long, despite my privileged circumstances... But I don’t need to ask anymore. Now I know. People like me were not made to bring happiness into the world. Instead, it's our task to commit the most impure of evils, so that others don't have to. Because we can take it.”
‘Our task to commit the most impure of evils…’
The mare before him had taken her blade to the throats of innocent children. She knew it to be a vile, despicable deed. She had done it so this ‘uncleanliness’, the full depth of the atrocity committed here by the armies of Equestria, would not rub off on her comrades.
By her accent, he could tell she was from the noble stock of Canterlot. Yet, through her acts, she had lowered herself to the role of an untouchable. And she understood and accepted this.
Sint’s vision was fading, but he kept his gaze fixed, looking out across the top of the mare’s head towards the horizon, waiting for the flash of flame that would mark the true morning...
“Good sir, you remind me of a friend I once had. He, too, said my god was cruel... more than his ever was… Both of you called Her cruel, in the way a person who’s never lived in your frozen home would say that snow is cold. You know, but you do not understand…”
She pressed her hooves to his chest, and he felt her muscles strain. His cavity tore as she withdrew her bloodied horn from it by an inch.
“Shall I tell you how cruel the Goddess Celestia can be? Sometimes, She does not allow our hearts to be hardened.”
And then, with an agonised cry, the mare ripped her horn back in a blazing arc, rending tissue and muscle and broaching his chest in a shimmering arc of fire… just as the sun peeked above the skyline, its blazing light subsuming the light of the natal holiday stars…
Like water meeting a scalding hot skillet, the results were immediate.
The boiling magic, arcing from the mountaintop, converged on the tip of the pine, reached skywards and latched onto the twisting core of the aurora… the two energy sources merged into a pillar of uncontained magic… which lanced down like a bolt from the heavens… and struck the summit, pierced the mountain to its foundations of stone, and shattered them.
Sint did not perceive any of this, even as the shockwave picked him and the mare up off their hooves and hurled them back, out over the edge of the bursting peak, over thousands of feet of open air. No more than he heard Eadmund and Lucie’s panicked cries, or saw Ilsa’s cloak coiling down like a diving pegasus, twisting itself around his and the fawn’s barrels, hugging them close together…
“Dash away, grandfather! Dash away! Dash away!”
… No, his eyes were solely on the broaching sun, its brilliance and beauty sparkling on the tears threatening to fill his vision.
“Happy Birthday, Luna… Celestia…” he breathed.
Sound and pain came crashing back into his senses. The world was full of tumbling ruin and vitrified rock, and the downward acceleration of gravity...
And Ilsa’s cries.
“Dash away! Dash away! Dash away!”
His aching limbs stirred in freefall, first into a trot, then into a gallop. His own reserves of power were depleted, but the meltdown of his home and birthplace released with it a wave of magical potential, and as his hooves blurred, he felt them catch on that wave.
Then he was surfing it, leaving blazing hoofprints of fire in the sky, faster-and-faster-and-faster...
“To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall! Dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!”
And then they were gone.
* * * * *
“She’s stabilised!” cried the pale mare, the glow of healing magic fading from her horn as she rose from tending to a crashed pegasus. “Who is next?”
Her own wounds were ignored, unimportant. Only the wellbeing of her legionnaires mattered. She estimated at least a third of them had survived, but not all of them would last the day unless she cauterised and sealed and set broken limbs and–
“There is nopony else, m’lady…” old Captain Crumpit said softly.
Looking around, the mare saw he was right. The surviving troops, those thrown clear by the blast or snatched from the sky by their airborne squadmates, as she herself had been by Crumpit, were all alive and either in magic-induced comas, or assisting those too injured to walk.
Cloak and mask gone, her only concealment now was a spell cast to cover her cutie mark.
“Alright. Find the sleigh, see if it is serviceable…” she said. “Load up the worst wounded and dispatch our swiftest flier to Canterlot with a report…”
“It’s all taken care of, m’lady…” Crumpit stressed. “Please, just rest for a minute…”
He almost had to drag her away, but when her eyes were torn from triage, she fell silent.
“Oh, by the Sun…”
They stood on what had been the gentlest flank of the unnamed mountain, where a long saddle connected it to the rest of the range of peaks. Above them should have been the ruins of Zamok Ustyag, and beyond that, the flat-topped column of the summit.
“It’s all gone…”
Now, an open caldera opened before them. The bulk of the mountain had melted down and to one side. Hot, piping magma lay freshly exposed in the gullet of the open maw, far below.
On that open side, an immense pyroclastic flow had swept down through the valley in which the city of Volodga had stood, and buried it all. Only a sharp breeze allowed them to see even that much, driving the fumes and smoke off towards the wastelands.
All around them, glaciers lay shattered and melting. The floodwaters they released would scour the land even further. Torrents and cataracts would wash away the silent, desolate villages, and the burning forests.
The destruction of Adlaborn was complete.
Seeing her work, basking in the heat of the magma rising in the caldera, the mare shivered in fear and adulation at a divine mission brought to as near-perfect a conclusion as possible.
“Hereby do I make this sacrifice to Celestia,” she recited piously, clasping her forehooves in prayer. “Tis’ an act of destruction, not performed out of lust for blood, but so the world may be recreated in Her Image, like the ashes from which the holy phoenix is reborn…”
The ritual concluded, the noblemare slumped back in the slushy snow. Crumpit however remained standing, and unless she was much mistaken, she thought she saw a touch of sadness in the pegasus captain's yellowed eyes.
“Perhaps… perhaps Hearthswarming can be brought from a store…” he said feebly, and she shook her head in response.
“No… it meant a little bit more,” she replied, exhausted. “I don’t think we will see the true spirit of the holiday again.”
The miserly old stallion said nothing, but continued to stare out over the peaceful desolation.
“It needs a name,” he said at last, waving a hoof at the newborn volcano. “Your name, perhaps?”
The mare considered that, reflected upon the name she bore from day-to-day in civilian life, and again shook her head.
“He called me ‘Weaver’, at the end… a nice name, but not one suitable for this…” she said, feigning a tired smile. “How about your name. ‘Mount Crumpit’ has a ring to it.”
“I don’t want it…” he scowled.
“You have that right,” she shrugged. “Captain, you’ve done me a great service tonight. I will not forget that. But tread with care. You asked my name, which, alas, I cannot give freely. Should it become known to you, like you now know my face… your own name, I’m sorry to say, will be as worthless as that of Lyra Heartstrings.”
She wondered if he noticed how she didn’t pronounce those last two words with the anger and scorn expected when describing the arch-traitor of ponykind.
In any case, he stomped away, huffing. “Let Her Majesty have the darn peak, then!”
‘Mount Celestia’, thought ‘Weaver’ to herself, considering the broken, flaming wreck that not long before had embodied a wild, primal beauty and majesty. Before she could carry that idea further, the realisation of Sint Erklass’s escape sank in.
If Queen Celestia found out that not all the reindeer of Equus were gone from the worlds, then she would be punished for this failure, as she had been punished before. Momentarily, Weaver contemplated lying to her sovereign, fooling her into believing the mission was a full success...
No. That would not do. Her whole existence was one of penitence.
Meditatively, the pale unicorn – Celestia’s Sword, Queen’s Justice, Weaver – caught a razor-edged shard of rock and levitated it up to her own neck.
Someday, eventually, she would drive it home. On the eve of victory, when ponykind stood on the verge of perfection… with only one last impurity to wash away…
But not today. Today was a new day. She dropped the makeshift knife and stared out across the holocaust of Adlaborn.
The Last Hearthswarming had dawned.
“Praise the Sun.”
* * * * *
“Mom, are they coming tonight?”
The mare stopped in her tracks. Her son had persisted in his efforts to stay awake long past midnight, awaiting the magical sound of reindeer bells that permeated his childhood. Of course, it was only a matter of time before Frost Wind noticed their absence...
“Mom?” he asked once more.
Snowdrop reluctantly turned around to face her youngest son. Sure enough, he was lying on the bed, eyes wide open. Snowdrop sighed; her older son was stubborn, and as fate would have it, Frost too shared this trait.
“I… don’t know, Frost,” she replied. A bold lie. The letter she received had been so clear, and she could recite it from memory. Captain Winter Truce, it said, has served with great distinction…
And, now Frost would soon be of age, too.
“Well, um, why didn’t they come last year? Sint can’t miss Hearthswarming, right? And why isn’t Winter coming home? He promised he’d be here for Hearthswarming, with cousin Stellar...”
His mother couldn’t bear to look at him, nor answer his questions.
To Frost, it struck him as odd that the reindeer, the jolly people of the north, wouldn’t come to Equestria with their gifts, as they always had since the First Royal Hearthswarming.
But after Queen Celestia declared a new era, after the Element Bearers opened the portal to an alien world, the reindeer had stopped coming. This was only the third Winter without their gifts, their wonderful, wonderful gifts. And Frost didn’t like it. At all.
“I’m sorry, Frost, but your brother’s not coming home. Not with Stellar. Your uncle wouldn’t like it. Now, goodnight.”
She leaned down to kiss her son to sleep. Frost would have none of it.
“But what about Sint? Will he be coming?” he repeated plaintively. “It’s just not the same anymore. Ms. Glimmer and Comet left, why can’t we? Cousin Stellar left, Winter left, why can’t we too?”
To Frost’s dismay, his mother rose up and steadily trotted away. There was an odd, troubled expression on her face. She turned off the lights, basking the room in moonlight, before giving her son a final kind, yet sad look.
“Goodnight, Frost. Sweet dreams, and a Merry Hearthswarming...”
With that final statement, Snowdrop closed the door, leaving her son alone with his thoughts.
Yet Frost Wind could not sleep that night. His mind was adrift. Remembering, forgetting. For him, this year’s Hearthswarming was Hearthswarming no more, and none of the other fillies and colts’ happiness, turned as it was towards honouring Celestia, could make him think otherwise.
Where were the Reindeer? Where was the joy? Where were the gifts? Frost missed those. Now, every class, every talk steered to how Celestia was kind, how Celestia was generous. And it had been like that since they found Earth.
Above the skies of Vanhoover, above the Winter clouds, were the moon and stars. But the clouds did not let them shine through, tonight. And what of the stars? The stars wept for the beauty that had been, the horror that was, and the beauty to come.
On another world, the night between the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth days of December marked many things in different hearts.
In 1836, old Jacob Marley died. Seven years later, his tortured spirit set forth on this very night to bequeath a warning on the condemned sinner’s only friend, and so set in motion a timeless tale of repentance and reclamation.
For those of the Hebrew faith, this season was the time of Hanukkah, marking the historic rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, where by a miracle, a single night’s supply of lamp-oil lasted for a full eight. Hence the lighting of the blessed menorah, in remembrance.
For many followers of the Christ, this night marked the Advent, the night of the Messiah’s birth. Historical accuracy of the date did not matter to these worshippers, simply asking that mankind celebrate the Son of God, born upon Earth as mortal flesh.
But other preparations were in hand too, for the observance of Kwanzaa, the young but passionate celebration of African culture, and the seeing in of the new year. And many, the majority in fact, simply made merry and celebrated in family and friends, with no theology or philosophy in mind other than honest gratitude for what blessings they had.
In Japan, tonight was a night of romance, the night of young loves. In other places, a season of fasting and solemnity. But ever since the time of the Roman Empire, and the celebration of the Winter feast of Saturnalia, this time of the dying year was also a time in which to put forth a little light of the heart against the dark and cold and snow.
Those same practices continued, under other names. Let us perhaps lament the rampant commercialism of the season, and allow ourselves a wry ‘humbug’ under our lips. But still we turn on the TV and radio to experience another yet account of the tale of Ebeneezer Scrooge, and laugh, groan and bemoan this year’s Christmas episode of Doctor Who – sandwiched between the inevitable repeats of Die Hard and Home Alone.
We take it all in good cheer…
* * * * *
For Earth, struggling under the burden of war with the Equestrian Solar Empire, that cheer is needed more than ever.
It is Christmas Night, 2021. More than five years ago, the gateway to the magical land of Equestria, a pink breach in the fabric of reality, manifested within a grassy field above the underground scientific facilities of CERN, outside of Geneva.
Gone now, that facility. Just like more than half of all that Man ever built on this Earth.
Christmas is said to be a time for giving and for sharing. But the Equestrians brought humanity a poisoned gift. A serum that steals away the human form of any who drink from it, and then compels them to join the pony herd.
The war that has waged since has been great and terrible, with an ever-evolving cast of heroes, villains and victims casting their coins into the pot. At this moment, somewhere, somewhen, there is someone fighting. Whichever allegiance they claim or flag they wear, the only peace they can find is in the mind, if at all.
Far from all that though, consider a small town, somewhere in Alaska, so deep within the Arctic Circle as to always be bound within the grasp of night.
A wartime train rolls through town, a nightly freight of empty tankers bound for the refineries at North Pole. The locals jokingly call it the Polar Express.
The locomotive’s mournful whistle echoes in the pristine snow and dark, lending a certain majesty to the sounds of carols emanating from a small church, the music of their morning mass resounding all around.
There comes a crack like thunder...
* * * * *
Sint crashed down hard onto a wooded slope, plunging from the sky in a ruinous dive, shattering several trees as he fell.
He had been walking in the air, floating in the moonlit sky… and then he had fallen, with no more magic or spirit to give.
“Eadmund, Lucie…” the great stag coughed, seeing his own blood staining the fresh snow before him. “Are you alright?”
He felt them stir, mewling responses in the affirmative. Sint sighed in relief, too weak to even move. He could not feel his hind legs, or indeed anything beneath his shoulders.
He was spent. All of his efforts and expended energy had merely hastened a process that began with the breaking of Hearthswarming faith.
“Celestia…” he sobbed, a wretched, bloody cry torn from deep within his fading soul. More fresh flakes of snow sleeted down from the sky, settling already on him… soon he would be nothing but that, a sad little mound of snow.
Far away, he heard the singing of voices, raised in what was unmistakably a festive carol.
“... of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…”
He weakly managed to lift his head and saw, through the drifting snow, lights in the distance, down the slope. The voices came from there, and he could feel the emotion they carried.
“... everlasting light. The hopes and fears of all the years, are met in thee tonight…”
It was familiar to him, as surely as the scent of eggnog and mince pies. Not Hearthswarming, but something much like it.
“Sublime…” he breathed softly, letting the soothing words wash over him before calling out to the fawns. “Little ones, my darlings…”
“Grandfather?” asked tiny Lucie, weakly coming around to stand beside his face. Eadmund came alongside her, and butted the great stag with his little fawn’s head.
“Get up, sire, please get up!”
“It is…” he groaned. “Too late for me. But not for the two of you.”
He weakly pushed one hoof through the snow, pointing down towards the twinkling lights in the middle distance.
“Follow the singing, children. Follow the singing, and be safe… Eadmund, you look after your little sister now, and be brave, the two of you.”
“We’ll come back with help…” swore Eadmund, who was trembling with barely suppressed fury. “And… I’ll make this right, I promise. We’ll… I’ll find that wicked mare, and make her pay.”
“Oh?” groaned Sint, managing to lever his weight up on his aching forelimbs. “Are you willing to make the Vow of Podevin, young buck? Are you willing to wade through a sea of blood, to be a Spirit of Vengeance in memory of your Good King?”
The young fawn trembled, and began to nod. “Yes. The Equestrians betrayed us, Grandfather. Celestia has turned her back on Harmony. Sire… my king, for you I’d go through Tartarus itself. I’d…”
“... become like the pale mare,” his sister finished for him. “Brother, think of what you're saying!”
Sint reached over and stilled the buck’s trembling.
“Listen to your sister, Eadmund, for she speaks from the heart. I care for the health and happiness of all. Yet if you fall into the mirror of the Weaver’s deeds, you’ll lose those blessings, as she has done, and die in sin…”
“But she was sad…” wept Lucie. “Is she really so bad?”
So kind a child, so quick to forgive the one who murdered her family. It almost broke Sint’s heart for him to shake his head and crush those thoughts. “So long as she commits evil in the name of good, her condemnation grows, and it will take much for her to cast off the chain she has girded upon herself.”
He leant close and allowed her to bury her face in his mane.
“Absolution isn’t always a gift granted easily, nor is it mine to give. That poor mare, driven to madness by a torture inflicted upon her from birth, bears a heavy heart for her crimes, but a guilty conscience is neither repentance nor forgiveness. She is a lost soul, kinder than her mistress perhaps, but all the blood she’s spilt cries out for a reckoning so great, she may find herself atoning into long eternity before Justice and Mercy strike a balance.”
“Then please,” begged Eadmund. “Let me deliver that reckoning. I can learn to fight, I know her scent, I saw her face…”
The fawn’s words were silenced by another bout of Sint’s coughing, hacking breaths, struggling to purge his failing lungs of fluid.
“No, I forbid it. I cannot know where that mare’s path will end, yet I would not wish either of you to chase down her sulphurous trail, in my name or that of Vengeance…”
Gently he leaned to one side, so that his antlers came to rest between him, a gnarled branch upon each child’s shoulder.
“... Instead, please tread in my own hoofprints, my last, dear pages… my squires.”
There was a small hum as the final embers of his magic flowed along the connection, and he saw the two children stand a little taller as he anointed them, a little stronger. The shadows they cast seemed deeper, and the light in their eyes burned brighter and wiser.
“Brave and great I know you shall be in the fullness of time, and the majesty of Adlaborn and our peoples will be upon you, and the last of my authority o’er Hearthswarming shall dwell within you, and be your office…”
He shifted to look them in the eyes, hoping he had enough strength left to instill a new destiny upon two orphans cut off from their old fates. It was the most precious gift of all, a future.
“... And Hearthswarming shall also be your responsibility. Live as our most treasured holiday begs we live, with compassion and love for all. Care for the sick, clothe the poor, feed the needy. Draw blood with sadness, only in the defense of the innocent from evil, and never withhold a merciful deed or kindly smile. Do not preach these virtues with words, be they true or false, but remember me and our family through the deeds of your hooves and your hearts. Honour Hearthswarming as long as you shall live, and thus bestow upon me the greatest gift an old fool could ask for… Can you promise me that, Sir Eadmund, Dame Lucie?”
“We can…” they both nodded, tears in their eyes.
Then he blessed them, weakly painting a faint star-mark in his own blood on each of their foreheads to complete the ceremony of knighthood. Langhorne, or ‘Justice’ for Eadmund, and Claraprinz, or ‘Valour’ for Lucie.
“Now go, my pages… my children. Follow the singing, follow the lights.”
Again they begged and pleaded for him to try and stand, to come with them, but he would not be swayed. At last, his desires for them persevered.
“Th-thank you, Grandfather,” sniffled Lucie, the shawl that was Ilsa wrapped around her neck.
“We will come back,” promised Eadmund.
Then, clumsily, but with much love, the two fawns draped the silken shawl over his broken, heaving shoulders, kissed his muzzle, and then disappeared down the slope, moving with the natural grace of their kind in Winter.
As they went, Sint saw the faint flash of auroral magic around their hooves. He wept fresh tears of joy. In those fawns, Adlaborn, and the spirit of Hearthswarming, would survive forevermore.
The dying king tugged Ilsa a little tighter with his good hoof, and they cried together.
“You did not go with them… why?”
“I could not leave you, grandfather… and while either of them would be a wonderful bearer for me, I could not bring myself to even offer them that burden. Let them come into the gifts you bestowed upon them in their own time, let them grow...”
“You are so full of wisdom and care, my great, ever-young counsellor…” he breathed fondly, feeling his heart slow. “Ilsa… what can you see, of this world’s future…”
“It… it is still undecided,” she answered at length, and remained silent for a time, until he suddenly felt her tighten across his shoulders in surprise.
“Oh… oh, it’s beautiful…I see, I see us, grandfather, and...”
She dissolved into ethereal sobs. “And Lulu and Celly too. I don’t know how it’s possible, but I can see the four of us, together… I think, I think they are our counterparts from another, better world, one untainted...”
“Another Luna… Another Celestia…” Sint said, with difficulty. “Please, Ilsa, describe them to me.”
And she did, detailing what she could see of a Hearthswarming yet to come, and a tearful family reunion.
“Celestia is herself, but more radiant and kind than she ever was… and Luna is… so changed. Glorious and full of promise as a new moon, smiling and bright. You are still in your prime, resplendent and joyous. And I have a new bearer, I think she’s one of the sky nomads. I can sense her spirit… she’s showing Celestia some acrobatic tricks… I think she will make me as skilled a stave-fighter as Zusan taught me to master a bow...”
On and on, through shared tears and joys.
“There’s a third alicorn, a pink mare… I think it’s Princess Cadenza, but she’s been transformed… the spirit of Hearthswarming burns within her like a fire incomparable… she keeps near to Luna, I think they’re bonding as family… she tells bad jokes…”
“Are they happy, Ilsa?”
“Yes…”
“...”
“There are tears and sorrows, but they are full of joy to be together. It’s beautiful, grandfather…”
Silence…
“Grandfather?”
Sint Erklass does not answer, and never shall, no more. Ilsa sobs long and hard, unable to do anything but caress her only family’s silvered fur from within her prison of cloth, begging for him to wake, to stir, to live again…
… Suddenly, a gust of wind catches her, and sweeps her away, up into the darkened sky, away from the great stag, and into the great unknown.
“GRANDFATHER!”
And then there is nothing, but the silent holy night.