The land of Equestria is a dismal place, forgotten as it is by its five Princesses. Now, a chosen unicorn has been tasked with returning the Princesses to their thrones, lest the world rend itself asunder.
Twilight the Wise, Celestia the Bright, Luna the Dark, Cadance the Beloved, Chrysalis the Dreamwalker; the Princesses of Old vanished ages ago, and their power was taken with them. With their guidance gone society has fallen into disarray, and the absence of their magic is beginning to tear the world apart. Starlit Sky is a humble pony, doing what she can to provide for her daughter and live in peace. But fate would have other plans for her, as she is contacted by a mysterious stranger and tasked with bringing the old princesses home to their ancient seat of Canterlot so that they might bring peace and prosperity back to their kingdom.
Cover and Chapter Art credit to romus91 on DeviantArt
"It is said that in ages past, when ponies gathered in great cities and the land was rich with life, there existed five great Princesses. They had each been bestowed with a great gift, and used these talents to bless their subjects and rule over the land fairly and kindly.
Twilight the Wise, Mother of all Magic, was gifted with great magical abilities that she used to perform wondrous feats for her subjects. These skills were given to her by an ancient and wise dragon with scales a lustrous purple and verdant green, and as repayment for the dragon's generosity she granted the unicorns the gifts of spells and sorceries through education at her Grand Library.
Celestia the Bright, Regent of Light, was gifted with the strength to move the very sun itself. This was a power given to her by the ancient magic of the Solar Plains, where she built her grand castle of Sunspire. Her illumination gave the land the energy to flourish, and she gave the gifts of strength and connection to nature to the earth ponies.
Luna the Dark, Regent of Night, had the grace and elegance to dance the moon across the heavens. She was bestowed this power by the ancient and secretive race of bat ponies who had done so for eons, and they continued to serve her at her grand mansion in the city of Selene. Her lunar essence brought peace and comfort in even the darkest of times, and she gave the gifts of flight and control of the skies to the pegasi.
Cadance the Beloved, Empress of the Heart, was gifted with the kindest heart and gentlest soul of all. She and her beloved husband Shining Armor used their own love for each other to warm and enrich their lands, allowing their Crystal Empire to be a beacon of hope and light even in the frozen north. She felt the struggles of the ponies in the land, and so gave them all the gifts of love and mercy so that they might make their own lives warmer as Shining Armor had made hers.
Chrysalis the Dreamwalker, Wayfarer of the Dead, had a great command over the very essence of life and could feel its ebb and flow from her Great Hive in the Glowing Moors. Nopony truly knows where she gained this connection to life, but it was this connection that allowed her to grant ponies calm and peace at the end of their lives. She would then use her Changeling children to ensure that their souls be taken to their eternal reward.
Together the Five Princesses came together and joined their disparate kingdoms, forming a single unified Equestria. With their powers and their kindness they ruled together from a single spot, the grand castle-city of Canterlot. Built up an entire side of the Equus Mountain, the city could house all the ponies of the kingdom, giving them free reign of the prosperity and excess that the Princesses could provide.
But it was not to last
Nopony knows who cast the first stone, but the effects would be felt the world over. War broke out between the Princesses the likes of which Equestria had never seen before and has never seen since. When the dust finally settled and the eerie silence of peace born from conflict blanketed the ravaged country, the Five Princesses of Canterlot had vanished as if in a whirlwind. Their like would never be seen again, and their age of harmony and prosperity would come to an end. Now it is the age of the common ponies, who toil the lands and survive by the sheer force of their will. They have no need for their Princesses, as they have certainly not had need of their subjects for some time.
But the common pony will persevere, for such is our fate."
* * *
"I don't understand why you like this story so much, Eclipse," Starlit Sky said. "It has a rather depressing ending, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe it does," White Eclipse replied, "but it does have a happy beginning. I just love thinking about what the ponies that lived during the time of the Princesses were like. All of them so regal and happy with the Princesses there to guide them."
"Well, if it makes you happy, then it makes me happy too," Starlit said with a warm smile. Softly she kissed her child on the head and pulled her blanket up to her chin
"Thanks for reading it to me, Mommy," Eclipse said. Slowly she yawned wide and let her teal eyes fall shut. Soon enough her chest started to rise and fall in the steady breathing of a child asleep, and Starlit Sky left the room and shut the door with a quiet click.
"Reading the Legend of the Lost Princesses again, are we?" asked Stalwart Warden, her husband.
"Mm-hm, every night just like clockwork. It's the only thing that gets her to sleep these days."
"Well as long as it works then it can't be that bad," Warden said as the pair went downstairs. "Anything to get her in bed. That's quite the rambunctious little filly we have."
"How would you know?" Starlit sniped back. "You're always off on patrol when I'm at home with her."
She gave him a playful wink, but Stalwart's gaze was fixed on the far wall. He was staring at a small picture White Eclipse had drawn with a pensive look in his eye.
"What's wrong?" Starlit asked as she beckoned him towards the hearth. "You seem... distraught."
"I just worry," Stalwart answered as he sat down beside his wife and put his head on his forelegs. "There's so much to worry about in this world we live in. Where our next meal will come from, how we'll prepare our daughter for the rigors of the outside world once she gets old enough to want to explore it, what we'll do when she is fully grown and gone; So many things to worry over, and too little time to prepare."
"Don't worry, Warden. Eclipse is a bright filly with an infectious cheer, something so desperately lacking in this place. When the time comes for her to make her way in the world, she'll persevere."
"I hope you're right, for all our sakes. I've seen firsthoof the things that fill this land, and it doesn't give me a lot of confidence. Horrible beasts that roam the countryside with only a set of warding lines to keep them out, ponies just on the verge of losing themselves to hopelessness and insanity or already too far gone to be reasoned with..."
"Well, do you want to know what I see?" Starlit asked.
"Can't be much better than what I do," Stalwart answered.
"I see a father who risks his life every day to ensure that we stay safe and happy. I see a daughter who is full of life and joy despite everything that she has to be responsible for even at her tender age. And I see a fireplace filled with warmth, a reminder that we aren't entirely without hope."
"How is it that you always know exactly what to say to make me feel better?" Stalwart asked.
"Call it a wife's intuition," she answered, laying her chin on top of her husband's head.
The two shared a long tender embrace as they sat together in front of their meager fire, trying to make this fleeting moment of love and kindness last as long as they could.
"I have to be off, Stalwart," Starlit said as she glanced out at the night sky. "Somepony has to take the watch on the warding lines tonight, after all."
"Indeed they must," he answered. Quickly they rubbed their horns together before she put on her warm coat and left the house. She lit up a small oil lantern as she walked down the path through the garden, both for its meager light and as a source of heat against the bitter cold that night could bring.
Their small plot of land wasn't much to look at, but it served their needs all the same. In dusty soil that had nearly been sucked dry of its nutrients sat a few rows of carrots and potatoes, as well as a few heads of lettuce. Beyond the small trail leading to their home was set of faint white glyphs that encircled the property. These warding lines were all that protected them against the fell beasts that roamed the night, and Starlit and Stalwart took turns each night recharging them with their magic.
A lustrous blue light bounced off of Starlit's dusky indigo horn and into the lines as she muttered an incantation under her breath to feed them. The age of wordless magic had left them with the Mother of Magic, or so it was said, and the unicorns of the land had to compensate somehow.
Slowly the energy drained out of her until she could give no more, and the lines radiated with a wondrous white glow from her efforts. Pleased with herself, Starlit set herself up in the small shack that lay just inside the lines and took up her shift for the watch.
Most nights were quite dull, and this night was proving to be no different. Slowly the hours ticked on, the moon moving across the sky in sharp juttering motions as it had for as long as she had lived, and nothing stirred in the night. Starlit Sky let her eyes sag, and before she knew it sleep had taken her.
"It is a nice night to sleep among the stars, isn't it?" a voice queried, one just behind Starlit.
With a yelp of terror Starlit jumped to her hooves and readied the one offensive spell she knew. Its blue light illuminated the intruder, but much to her chagrin whoever had trespassed across the lines was obscured by a dark and rough-worn cloak.
"What do you want, stranger?" Starlit demanded. "If it's food you want then I'd be happy to send you on your way with some carrots, but thievery is not something I can abide."
The stranger let out a peal of laughter, a hollow sound that held nothing but the faint memory of joy. The stranger sounded female, and her apparent size would seem to confirm this fact.
"Ma'am, if I wanted to rob you, then you wouldn't have been roused from your slumber. The question you should be asking is how I managed to cross your warding lines."
"It doesn't matter to me," Starlit shot back. "Go back to wherever it is you came from, stranger, unless you want me to force you."
"That was a lovely story you read your daughter tonight, Starlit Sky," the stranger answered, seemingly unconcerned with Starlit's threat. "A happy tale with a bittersweet ending, one meant to rouse the common pony into action in the absence of their Princesses. I can see why young Eclipse loves it so."
Now Starlit's attention was piqued. However this mare had made it across her warding lines and however she had learned who she and her family were, Starlit was going to find out.
"Who are you, stranger," she asked, "and how do you know about my family?"
"Perhaps if you quit threatening me with that paltry magic of yours I'd be more inclined to tell you."
Hint taken, Starlit lowered her horn and let the magic dissipate from around it. She certainly felt more vulnerable, but she had the nagging feeling that if this mare wanted harm to befall her, it was going to whether or not she fought back.
"There, isn't that better?" the stranger asked, head cocked playfully to the side.
"For you perhaps," Starlit spat back. "Now, who are you and what do you want with me?"
"Who I am is of no concern to you," she replied, "and what I want is for somepony else to understand what I've suffered through. The knowledge I bear is a terrible burden, one that I am sick of shouldering alone."
"She's probably just some wandering street magician, looking for a few coins and with enough magic to cross a ward to get to them," Starlit thought as she rolled her eyes.
"If you wish to insult my intelligence then please do so verbally," the stranger remarked. "And no, I am not some 'wandering street magician' looking for a handout of money that I know you cannot spare."
"Then who or what are you?!" Starlit asked. She could feel her heartbeat jumping up by a few beats; never before had she encountered a pony that could read minds, and the notion wasn't one she wanted to ponder on for long.
"Just a pony who remembers happier times. Times when the sun didn't scorch the land and the moon didn't drag across the sky like a pony with broken knees, when love flowed freely in the hearts of ponies and death was kind and peaceful, and when unicorns didn't have to speak tongues to work their magic. Here, take this," she added as she offered something in her cloth-wrapped hoof.
It seemed to be some form of dancing light, white in the edges and growing a dull grey at the center. It bounced merrily around the stranger's hoof, and something about its innocence intrigued Starlit. Acting against her better judgement, she took the sprite into her hoof and drew it close to her eyes so she could get a better look.
The light then leapt out of her hoof, and Starlit was too slow to catch it again. It traveled down her horn and into her mind, enrapturing it with flashing lights and colors, all discordant and without real form. Try though she might, Starlit could feel her head swimming, and she felt her body land on the cold floor of the guard shack.
When her vision cleared, all she could hear were shouts of terror, and all she could see was fire and arrows raining from the heavens to lay waste to the innocent below. Masonry fell from the ramparts of the castle walls that she was sealed in, threatening to flatten her unless she sought out shelter. She quickly scrambled to her hooves just as a chunk of the wall slammed into where she had been laying, and she ran for the nearest door.
Swiftly Starlit navigated through this nightmare world, desperate for some release from it or at the very least an explanation for what that blasted sprite had done to her mind. The sounds of battle both magical and mundane made a cacophony of noise as she ascended a narrow spiral staircase up one of the castle's towers. The door leading to the ramparts had already been blown off of its hinges, and ponies in ornate armor were running back and forth to repel the invaders scaling the wall. They seemed completely oblivious of Starlit's sudden presence, but she could hardly be bothered with that. What had drawn her full attention was the battle taking place far off in the distance, set against the blood-red sky and a monumental solar eclipse.
There in the sky, as if they had torn themselves from the pages of White Eclipse's story book, the Five Princesses fought. They hurled magic at each other with great ferocity even as they used blades mounted to their armor to tear at each other's flesh. Despite their distance from her Starlit could see the hate and anger painted on all of their faces, the primal rage that drives ponies to madness.
Starlit Sky could barely stand as she watched the carnage and mayhem unfold, but even as she grasped the magnitude of it a series of colors and lights flashed across her vision. She could feel the magic of that sprite pulling her out of the memory, but not before showing her four locations. Each of them were unique, but they also carried with them the same sense of dread and loss.
The first vision was of a great holdfast of white alabaster stone, the sun piercing the heavens and searing the lands below it. The second, a solemn keep of deepest blue, illuminated by black fire and the light of a steady moon. Thirdly was a walled city encased in ice and snow, with a great beacon of light reaching from its center to the heavens. Finally, a mired swampland leading to a towering chitinous structure glowing a sickly green.
The memories ended almost as quickly as they begun, and Starlit relished the feeling of cool, rough wood against her cheek. She had barely started to rise when the stranger beckoned her.
"Follow me," she said, "and make haste. There is still quite a lot you have yet to know, much less understand."
Before Starlit could give a response the stranger was off, marching confidently back over the warding lines as if they didn't exist. She was headed in the direction of the great forest that lay a few miles off from their village. It was a place of decay and fear to the common ponies, but Starlit was now more sure than ever that this pony was no commoner. With a last glance back at her home she followed, unsure of if she was making the right decision.
* * *
The trek through the forest was thus far made in silence, which Starlit was grateful for; her mind had a lot to process, and unecessary chatter wouldn't help with the processing.
The story of the Lost Princesses had been told and retold for as long as she could remember, and for equally as long she thought that it was just that; a story, and nothing more. But the visions swirling around in her head, and the clarity of it all, were making her doubt the validity of such skepticism.
"How can any of this be true? It's just an old filly's story, and nothing more," Starlit mused to herself. "No power like that could possibly exist, and even if it did it had certainly vanished from the world ages ago!"
"You're troubled, aren't you, Starlit Sky?" the stranger asked, breaking the tension.
"That would be putting it mildly," Starlit answered as she suppressed a shudder. Her new 'friend's' implicit telepathy was starting to grate on her nerves.
"You're worried for your family, and your own safety, aren't you?"
"Seeing as you are some form of mind-reader, why don't you tell me?" Starlit groused.
"Starlit, though I may have the acumen for telepathic magic, I am not reading your mind," the stranger replied. "I only did so earlier to get you to comply; I have a bit of a compunction against invading the privacy of other ponies' thoughts unless absolutely necessary, especially those of a mare with whom I have a very tenuous relationship."
"Then how did you know I was worried, hmm?"
"I've had a lot of practice at reading emotions and personalities, and you are about as easy to read as an open book written in bold, red ink," the stranger answered with a small chuckle.
"Then why don't you give me an excerpt?" Starlit asked as she sidestepped a large root in the path. This mare was going to start giving her some answers, even if she had to trick her into it.
"Firstly, I'd say you're a mare who has had a hard upbringing," the stranger replied as she cleared some branches with her magic. "Not that hard to guess, given the state of the world, but you're different than the listless, hollow ponies that roam around lacking purpose; you didn't let this world break you. You simply stared it in the face and dared it to blink first."
"That almost sounded like a compliment," Starlit interjected, a single eyebrow cocked.
"Take it however you will, I'm just stating my opinions, which you also have in abundance; a thought on everything you know of, and busy forming thoughts for the things you don't. You show a spark of brilliance that I haven't seen in quite a long time, one that was forged by an inquisitive mind and tempered with worldly experience."
"Alright, now you're trying to make me blush," Starlit said. She wouldn't give the stranger the satisfaction of knowing she was succeeding.
"Thirdly," the stranger continued as the path they were on started to widen, "you have a singular devotion to your family. You work as hard as you can to provide for your daughter alongside your husband, and your precious filly is your reason for existing. Were it not for White Eclipse, you would have joined the listless masses a long time ago."
"I would thank you not to discuss my daughter," Starlit interjected. "Whatever you've brought me out here to do concerns me, not her."
"I'm sorry, did I touch a nerve? If so, I do apologize for that."
"You did, and I thank you for your consideration," Starlit answered with a curt snort.
The journey through the forest went back to sullen, uncomfortable silence, punctuated every now and then by an owl hooting or a sudden shift in the shadows as the moon lurched across the sky. The trail continued to widen out, and a few yards ahead the trees opened up into a clearing.
The stranger passed through the tree line, but as Starlit made to do the same her snout bumped into a barrier that shimmered with the impact.
"Oh, goodness, my apologies," the stranger said. "I so rarely have visitors that I forgot to lower my own wards. I'm sure you understand the need for prudence, what with my living in a 'haunted' forest and all."
A quick flick from the stranger's horn caused the ward, now a translucent silver color, to part just wide enough for Starlit to pass through it. Carefully she stepped over the threshold, trying her level best to keep her jaw from dropping as she did so. While the clearing had appeared barren when seeing it from the tree line, passing over the ward showed her what actually stood there.
A massive oak tree, tall enough and wide enough to comfortably fit her cottage five times over, loomed over her. There were windows cut straight into the tree, and from the outside she could tell that the interior was hollowed out to make for ample living space. Up higher there was a balcony where some sort of device stood on a tripod, and in front of her was a rich red door made from the same wood as the tree itself being illuminated by lantern.
"Starlit Sky, welcome to the Golden Oak," the stranger said with the sort of smugness that only comes from great achievement.
"Did you make all of this?" Starlit asked, eyes still flitting over every inch of the gargantuan tree.
"Indeed I did, and it was the last great work I made before the end of the Age of the Princesses. I knew that their time was going to one day come to an end and this world would start to fall apart at the seams, so I grew this great haven from a single acorn to serve as my bastion against the darkness."
"Your bastion?" Starlit cut in. "With this kind of power you could do so much for the common ponies of Equestria! Why do you stay holed up in here when you could be out there doing so much good with this power!?"
"Because my magic has been waning over these many long years, and I'm no longer the spell weaver I once was," the stranger replied with her head bowed. "The sorceries that I could do in ages past would've made you weep with awe, but now I only have enough left in me to maintain my wards and keep this place alive and verdant. I'm no better now than a meager street magician."
Starlit could feel a knot form in her stomach, and she wished she hadn't been so harsh with her speech. This pony's words carried with them a great sadness, but it was an impotent sadness; it had no real weight or investment, just the empty memories of how things used to be and the knowledge that they could never be that way again.
"...I'm sorry, I didn't know. If you don't mind my asking," Starlit continued, walking toward her companion, "but who are you? You speak of things nopony in living memory has seen as if you were there yesterday, your magical skill is leagues beyond anything I've seen any unicorn do, and whatever that vision you showed me was would not be something any old sorceress would have access to. You are somepony special, that much is certain."
"Maybe I was somepony special, but that time has long since passed. Still," the stranger continued, "I suppose I owe you this much for dragging you all the way out here and taking you away from your family and responsibilities."
Softly she walked over to the door so that her cloak was illuminated in the lantern light, her hood casting an impenetrable darkness across her face. She set her horn aglow with a rich magenta magic and used it to pull her hood down. Her face was youthful, a vivid purple, with a neatly pulled-back, midnight-blue mane with a streak of magenta and a streak of violet. What Starlit noticed the most, however, were her eyes; her eyes were a deep violet, and they were the eyes of a mare far more experienced than the face they were set in.
"My name is Twilight Sparkle," she said with head held high, "the Wise Princess of Equestria and the Mother of Magic."
"I'm certain that you have no end of questions for me, Starlit Sky," Twilight asked as she busied herself in the kitchen of the Golden Oak.
"That would be putting it mildly, Your... Majesty?" Starlit replied. She had never been in the presence of royalty, for there hadn't been any for as long as she had lived, and thus the finer points of social decorum were lost on her.
"Starlit, I lost the right to be referred to as 'Your Majesty' seven-hundred years ago... or was it eight-hundred? Immortality has a way of making the years run together," Twilight mused. "Either way, just Twilight will suffice."
As Twilight prepared drinks for the both of them, Starlit sat on a surprisingly plush cushion and marveled at her surroundings. The Golden Oak was as much a library and laboratory as it was a home; stacks of books, shelves as high as the ceiling, and piles of scrolls surrounded the small living space, and perched neatly atop the books and nearly every horizontal surface were widgets and doobobs of every sort. Starlit could only begin to guess what any of them did.
"Tell me, Starlit, how do you take your coffee?" Twilight asked. She was carrying a small tray with two steaming ceramic cups, a small ceramic pitcher, and a bowl full of small white cubes that she placed softly on the table in front of them.
"Coffee? I can't say I've ever heard of it."
"Oh, my apologies; I guess I've gotten so used to my way of living that I forget that the life I lead is considerably better off than nearly everyone else in the country. Now, coffee is a strong and bitter drink made from straining hot water through dried and ground up coffee beans. It can give you quite the jolt should you need it, but most ponies prefer to add cream and sugar to make it more palatable."
"You have cream and sugar?!" Starlit exclaimed. Such things were a delicacy, and just the thought of them was making her mouth water.
"Indeed I do," Twilight answered. "Shall I add some to your coffee?"
"Yes, please, as much as you can!"
Swiftly Twilight picked up one of the mugs, the pitcher, and the bowl of sugar in her magic and began mixing them all together. The formerly black liquid turned a wonderful pale brown, and the aroma was the single best scent Starlit had ever had the pleasure of smelling.
"There you go dear, one fresh mug of coffee with plenty of cream and sugar," Twilight replied as she set the mug in front of Starlit. "Careful now, it's still hot."
Carefully Starlit leaned her head forward and took a sip of the coffee. The taste was quite pleasent; it was slightly bitter to start, but the cream and sugar did an excellent job of masking it and added a smooth aftertaste that sat well on her palette.
"This drink is marvelous," Starlit said as she took another sip. "I can't believe nopony has tried to make this themselves. I'm certain that half the problems of the country could be solved if everypony had a mug of this."
"You wouldn't be the first pony to think that," Twilight answered as she drank. "This was quite the hit in my time, but sadly the war and subsequent dissolution of the country put an end to a lot of the finer things we so took for granted."
"Yes, about that," Starlit began. "I would be lying if I said I wasn't surprised to find out that you're alive. After all, most ponies these days don't even remember your name, let alone that you lived and reigned over this land."
"Well, you can thank these for my longevity," Twilight said as she removed her traveling cloak. Hidden just beneath the rough fabric was a pair of large wings that she unfurled and stretched.
"Wait, wait, wait," Starlit interjected. "You have wings and a horn?"
"Yes I do. You see, the other Princesses and I come from an ancient breed of pony known as Alicorns. We were meant to embody the best traits of all three mortal pony races, and with that sort of power comes extreme longevity; we were supposed to rule this country until the end of time. Our homelands may have been disparate, and we may have all come from different stock and walks of life, but in the end we were supposed to have one goal binding us all together."
"To maintain peace and harmony throughout Equestria, right?" Starlit said as she drank.
"Yes, to maintain peace and harmony. You've read that story quite a few times, haven't you?"
"It's the only one that gets Eclipse to sleep these days. Still, I get the sneaking suspicion that you didn't drag me out here to reminisce over delightful drinks," Starlit continued, steering the conversation away from her daughter. "What is it that you want from me, Twilight?"
"Quite the astute pony you are," Twilight replied as she set her mug down. "I suppose that you've indulged this old mare for long enough, although the heart of this matter is less about what I want and more about what Equestria needs."
"Then what does Equestria need?" Starlit asked.
"Put simply, Equestria needs its Princesses back. The country is sliding further and further into disarray and anarchy, the thestrals are growing more and more numerous everyday, and I fear that this land is about to reach a breaking point. A breaking point that the world itself won't be able to come back from."
At the mention of the thestrals Starlit set her cup down. Those ponies who had succumbed to the Wasting sickness, who had lost their minds and sentience and were reduced to little more than raving beasts... they brought back uncomfortable memories.
"Starlit?" Twilight asked. Quickly she snapped out of her self-reflection.
"Sorry, I was just trying to process what you're telling me," Starlit answered. "This is quite a lot to take in at once, you see."
"I don't doubt it for a moment," Twilight said with a quick sip. "You just learned that the Princesses of old still exist, you're sharing drinks with one of them, and now you are being told that said Princesses must be brought back into the fold before the unraveling of all things destroys us all. I'd be shocked if you weren't apprehensive."
"But why tell me all of this? I'm just a unicorn from a dirt-farm that's trying to keep her family alive, not some great warrior or magician that could do something about this impending crisis. You pulled me out here for a reason," Starlit continued, "and I think that it's high time you told me that reason."
"Yes, I suppose it is, but let me start with this," Twilight answered, her face settling into a serious countenance. "You aren't just a unicorn; you have the blood of some of the grandest wizards and warlocks of the Age of the Princesses flowing through you. Your magic has the potential to be far more powerful than any living unicorn's, were it not for the absence of the Princess' magic that once permeated the land."
"And I suppose next you'll tell me that I can fly, as well," Starlit sniped back. "I'm no great magician and we both know it; all I can do is keep a set of warding lines active for a night or two and feed some into the earth so that my crops don't wither. Even when I try, I can barely get more than a few wisps of pure magic out of my horn without a focal point for its power."
"Tell me, Starlit, when was the last time you saw another unicorn perform magic? Aside from your husband and daughter, that is."
"A few years maybe," she answered. "I don't make a habit of keeping track of everypony that I happen across in my day-to-day life, much less what they're doing at the time."
"I ask," Twilight said after a long swig of her coffee, "because most unicorns would struggle to provide even the most meager power to a warding line. Even with all the magic they could muster it would only power them for a few hours at most."
"Where's your proof?" Starlit asked, eyebrow cocked.
"You, Starlit Sky, are a very hard unicorn to please," Twilight answered. "Still, if you won't take a nigh-immortal Alicorn with magical power and intellect beyond anything you could possibly hope to understand at her word, then I suppose I could give you a glimpse into the life of the average unicorn."
With a swish of her horn Twilight projected a swirling magenta vortex in the air. Its surface was glossy and sleek like a perfectly calm lake, and inside of it Starlit could see a trio of shapes. They were unicorns much like herself, staring at a set of faded warding lines much like her own back home.
Together they stood before the lines and started to illuminate their horns in preparation to charge it. Their faces were screwed up in clear frustration and pain, and the magic trickled and sputtered from their horns whereas Starlit's had flowed evenly and calmly. Their knees began to shake and buckle, and one of the three had collapsed to the ground by the time the ritual was finished.
After the ordeal they had put themselves through, the two conscious unicorns looked down at their handiwork, chests heaving with labored breaths. The lines glowed with energy, but nowhere near as brightly as Starlit's had and with a much more inconsistent placement of the glyphs along the inner edge of the lines. Together they hoisted their friend up and carried her on their backs as the vision faded.
"That little vision of the present came from the town of Rocky Point," Twilight said as the glow around her horn dimmed. "Those three unicorns are also the only unicorns that haven't succumbed to the Wasting and can still do their job of protecting the town."
"But they have an entire town to protect," Starlit protested, shaken but undaunted. "I only have my home and lands; its barely half-an-acre."
"And Rocky Point isn't even a quarter of one," Twilight sniped back. "Believe me or not, there is something quite special about you and your lineage that makes you more adept at magic than ten normal unicorns put together. This makes you exactly the unicorn that I need to aid me; no other one would have the wherewithal to bring the Princesses home."
The pair sat in sullen silence for a time, sipping their drinks as Starlit Sky thought over her options. On the one hoof, the vision she had seen was fairly convincing; if the unicorns of Equestria were so far behind even her meager magical ability then the Princess might have a point to her story. On the other though, she already had a job. She had a family to help care for and a daughter to rear.
"But if the world is truly in danger of collapsing on itself," Starlit thought, "then it won't matter one way or the other if I spend my days taking care of my family if the ground falls out from beneath us."
"If nothing else, Starlit," Twilight said, "at least think of your family."
"I thought you said you weren't going to read my mind?" Starlit shot back.
"And the mare protests too much. I'm not reading your mind, but I know that look on your face; it's the face of a pony weighing her options, wondering which is the better and which the worse. You worry for your family, but at the same time you know that it won't matter how good of a mother you are if the world comes to a cataclysmic end. I myself faced a similar dilemma in my time."
"How so?" Starlit asked as she refilled her cup. The coffee was giving her an alert and invigorating feeling, and she was going to make sure she filched some before she left.
"You think you're the only pony that had a family to worry over? My family lived with me in the capital, and they were the light of my life. My father and mother, my brother Shining Armor and his wife Cad—"
"Wait, Prince Shining Armor was your brother? But he was Princess Cadance's husband, which would make her..."
"My sister-by-marriage, yes," Twilight interjected. "The family tree was a tad tangled amongst us, I'll admit; technically Celestia and Luna would be my aunts-by-marriage once removed... at least I think so. I never concerned myself much with our genealogy."
"And where did Chrysalis fit into all of this?" Starlit asked.
"She was an interesting case, to be sure. She came to Canterlot with a retinue of her Changeling children and asked an audience with the four of us one winter's eve. It was well over a thousand years ago when she came to us, and all she said was that she had received a missive to appear at court. She told us that her power over death would be needed to maintain balance and order in Equestria; more than that she never spoke of, but we were somewhat naïve and welcomed her with open hooves."
"I feel like there is a 'but' coming up," Starlit said.
"How astute of you to notice," Twilight replied as she took a swig of her drink. "We welcomed her to Canterlot as well as a sizable population of her Changelings, but from day one she was plotting our downfall."
"Did she start killing indiscriminately, given her power over death and what-not?"
"Oh heavens no," Twilight scoffed. "That wasn't her style, that would be far too abrupt and noticeable. No, what she did was sow the seeds of doubt and disharmony in the court and amongst Celestia, Luna, Cadance, and I over the course of centuries. It started small, just tit-for-tat exchanges and passive aggressive barbs, but as the years wore on the discord between us grew and festered. By the time the war started none of us could stand each other, and we had secreted ourselves away to our own keeps and holdfasts."
"And what of your family?" Starlit asked.
"...The first of many casualties in the war," Twilight answered, her voice dropping as she stared at her drink. "Mother and Father died during Luna's first assault on the Oak, and Shining Armor abandoned this place not long afterward to be with Cadance. I'm not sure if he's still alive, but I doubt it matters now. He made his choice."
"I'm... I'm sorry, Twilight," Starlit said, her voice hushed. "I can't imagine how hard that must have been for you."
"Well, if there's one small comfort that comes from immortality, it's that it gives you quite a lot of time to ruminate on depressing matters. I came to grips with my parent's deaths and Shining's abandonment a long time ago."
Twilight continued to stare at her cup as Starlit drained hers, the warm liquid filling her up and focusing her mind. With a resolute clink of ceramic against wood she stood up from her cushion.
"Twilight, Your Highness," she began, "if I'm to do this mission for you, I need a promise from you. I figure the request I have will be a small price to pay for what is surely going to be a dangerous journey, but if you don't do this for me then we don't have a deal."
"Name it and it is yours," Twilight replied. She quickly stood to her hooves and wreathed her horn in magic.
"I need you to swear on your honor that my family will be safe for as long as I am gone. They are all that I have in this world, and I need your assurance that they will be healthy and happy while I'm doing this for you."
"I can even do you one better," Twilight replied.
With a flick of her horn she sent a violet ray shooting up into the air. The bolt quickly passed through the roof of the Golden Oak and sailed over the horizon until it passed out of Starlit's narrow view through the window.
"I have just cast a powerful spell on your property, tied to the magic of your warding lines," Twilight said as she cooled her horn off with a quick upward breath. "That bolt will summon a force-field around your home and your family. In addition to protecting the property from outside threats and influences, it also has a time-dialating effect. As long as it is active, no time will pass under the field, and your husband and daughter will wake up in the morning with no knowledge of what has occurred outside the field."
"Are you certain that it will work?" Starlit asked. She had never heard of a spell that could halt time, and things she didn't understand worried her.
"It's part of the magic that I use to keep this old place alive," Twilight replied. "I've imbued that spell into the wood of the Golden Oak so that way it won't age or decay. After all, even a magically grown tree designed to be a home and haven is still just a tree. Your family will be safe, Starlit Sky; you have my word as a Princess of Equestria."
The two mares finished their drinks before Twilight beckoned her guest to follow her. With a swish of her horn and a tap of her hoof on the wall next to one of her numerous bookcases, the shelves and stacked tomes vanished. In their place was a secret passage leading downward, a soft multicolored glow playing on the walls of the rough staircase.
"Come along, Starlit. You have a lot of preparation to do, and there are a few things that I need to give you as well."
Swiftly Twilight trotted downstairs, and Starlit found she could barely keep up. Old as she was, Twilight still seemed to have energy enough for five ponies in her, and by the time they got downstairs Starlit was breathing heavily.
"Oh, spare me the theatricality, Starlit," Twilight chided, with a gentle smirk. "There are a few mountains in this land younger than I, surely you can keep up with my withered old bones."
"Be that as it may, not every pony is a nigh-immortal goddess with the stamina of a workhorse," Starlit shot back.
"And whiners rarely complete arduous quests. Come here, you'll need this."
The room Twilight had led her into was nothing short of wondrous, even compared to the majesty of the Golden Oak. Various machines and contraptions hummed, clacked, and buzzed as they performed their functions, solutions bubbled briskly in glass vials, and on the far side of the room from the staircase a large selection of armor, weapons, and various trinkets and pieces of equipment were hung and piled up.
"Mercy," Starlit breathed. "You could equip an army with all of this."
"If that were so maybe I would've won the war," Twilight replied. "Sadly, these pieces of equipment and armaments were all I managed to salvage from the remains of my personal guard when Canterlot fell. I've mostly occupied my time since then maintaining it all for the day when I would find somepony able to wield it."
"And I suppose that somepony would be yours truly," Starlit said.
"It would seem so. I had these armaments modified so that they could only be worn or wielded by a pony with a modicum of magical ability, and so far you're the first unicorn in ages that's been able to meet the minimum requirement."
The statement didn't sit well on Starlit's mind; proper magic had been gone from the world for as long as she had been alive and then some, so the thought of making things that only those capable of using magic could access seemed restrictive and discriminatory.
"What of the Pegasi and Earth Ponies that might've wanted a spot in your guard?" she asked. "Surely they should have been given a fair shot at joining rather than being barred from even trying."
"Oh, there were a few that tried," Twilight admitted as she organized the equipment. "The problem was that the unicorns that wished for the chance to be in my guard far outnumbered them and, given their proficiency at magic, they beat their mundane competitors out every time."
"And that was that? Not even as much as how-do-you-do on the way out the door?" Starlit retorted, incredulity worming its way into her voice.
"Not at all!" Twilight answered back, taking her eyes up from her work. "The sheer fact that they would go up against a challenge where they were unevenly matched proved they had far more heart and gumption than most, so those few that were allowed to try for the role of my personal guard and washed out would instead be given roles in the castle's security. It wasn't what they'd hoped for, but certainly a far cry above a swift kick in the rump out the door."
"I take it that clarity isn't one of your strong suits," Starlit said.
"Apparently not. I apologize for the confusion in regards to my personal rotation of bodyguards as opposed to the greater castle guards of the city. I had always preferred the company of unicorns to the other races, not out of prejudice but from shared experiences. It's tough relating to pegasi and earth ponies as a unicorn since the former two have more physically in common and don't have to bear the burden of magical abilities and all that that entails."
"I can appreciate the sentiment at least," Starlit replied. "My husband and daughter are both unicorns, so I guess this would be a situation of the pot calling the kettle black."
An uncomfortable silence fell over the room as Twilight finished organizing. Starlit still felt a dull ache in the pit of her stomach at the idea of preferring one race to the others, more than likely due to how her life had gone. It didn't matter which race you were, so long as you're willing to work for the betterment of all and to ensure that your family and loved ones didn't starve.
"And... there," Twilight said, breaking the tension. "A few neatly arranged piles of armor, weapons, and trinkets for your perusal. Take your time, there are a few things I need to take care of."
Before Starlit sat the mounds of equipment Twilight had organized; armor, weapons, and various other necessities all carefully placed together to make for easier sorting. Shields, plate armor, leather armor, swords of all sizes, knives of all shapes, and a variety of necklaces, amulets, and pouches lay at her hooves. Carefully she examined the relics, all very well maintained but definitely showing their age.
The blades and metal armors had been polished and re-polished many times and there were visible places where rust and tarnish had been ground away to reveal the metal underneath. The leather armor looked well-oiled, but there were still cracks at the joints and fading on the embossed insignia. Starlit blew a layer of dust off so she could get a better look at the insignia on the dull blue leather.
The emblem looked like a crescent moon turned upside down so that it's opening faced the floor, flanked on either side by a pair of stylized wings. In the center of the moon was a large six-pointed star, its top point extending far higher than the other five, and underneath it were five smaller stars.
"Was this your insignia?" Starlit called to Twilight. She levitated the piece of armor up off the floor with some difficulty.
"Yes, in fact it was," Twilight answered curtly, her head bowed and horn aglow over some device. "The five of us each had a particular crest from each of our kingdoms, and when we formed the unified Equestria we all took elements from ours and turned it into the nation's seal. Sadly, by the time the war broke out we had all gone back to using our disparate seals, hence why mine is the only one on that armor."
Starlit took another good look at the armor; it looked flexible with an ample amount of protection, and had a nice split in the back for her tail to slide through between the flank plates. She set the armor down behind her and went back to her task.
After a few more minutes she had selected what she would take with her from the piles; a small-sword, a thick bladed hunting dagger, a set of sturdy saddlebags, four plated horseshoes with an accompanying set of greaves, and the armor she had already set aside. The sword and dagger looked to be made of tempered steel, and the greaves were formed from leather and steel splint mail that had been blackened to better blend with the rest of the armor.
With some difficulty she levitated her new armor and weaponry into their respective places, feeling lightheaded as she finished. She soon found a mirror in the whirlwind that was Twilight's laboratory and took a good look at herself.
"Hmm," Twilight murmered from across the room. "The armor suits you, but are you certain about your weapon choice. A small-sword and a knife don't seem like they'd have the staying power for what you're going to be doing."
"Twilight, I am no warrior," Starlit replied. "The closest thing I have to martial training is swinging a sickle during the village's annual wheat harvest and chasing rodents off of my land with a pitchfork. These weapons will do fine, as I plan to prioritize mobility over power and I doubt I'd have the strength, magical or otherwise, to wield anything heavier."
"Suit yourself," Twilight replied with a shrug. "I can also see you haven't taken any of my amulets or necklaces."
"Well, aren't they just useless trinkets?" Starlit asked. "I've never been a mare that worried herself too much over appearances, especially concerning jewelry. It's just one more thing to take care of and normally far too expensive to bother with."
"To the untrained eye, yes, these are just seemingly useless pieces of jewelry, but if you have the magical acumen to reveal their true potential..." Twilight said as she levitated one of the pieces over. It was a simple necklace made with a golden chain and garnished with an opal set in a silver bezel.
Twilight closed her eyes for a moment and Starlit could tell she was concentrating, letting her considerable magic flow into it. Slowly the strations of color inside the opal began to shift and move before they aligned themselves in a perfect grid pattern and shot out a similar grid of light beams.
The beams coalesced and floated in mid air until they put together a three-dimensional image, one of a baby dragon with purple and green scales. It quickly popped its eyes open, letting its slitted pupils adjust to the light of the room.
"Starlit Sky, this is Spike, my helper," Twilight announced. "He maintains the Golden Oak when I'm away and makes sure everything stays organized."
"Hello!" Spike said. "It's not very often that Twilight has visitors over; you must be somepony very special if she let you down here. Are you a friend of hers?"
"More of an... employee," Starlit answered. Spike, while astonishing to see, didn't elicit the same sort of stunned reaction as when she first saw the Golden Oak.
"Are you real?" Starlit continued. "I had heard stories about the dragons, but I assumed that they were all gone."
"I guess you could say I am and I'm not," Spike answered. "A long time ago I was Twilight's personal assistant and friend. I helped her organize her things and gather materials for her experiments, and in return she let me live with her and made me her confidant. When the war broke out the first thing she did was store a copy of my consciousness in this necklace so that, if my real body didn't make it out of Canterlot, some of me would still be alive to help her rebuild."
"Did your real body make it out?"
For a moment Spike looked like he was about to answer, but then the lines of light composing his form stuttered and hung still in midair. He looked like a living statue, completely still save for the ebbing glow of the light he was radiating.
"What happened? Spike, are you alright?" Starlit asked.
"He's fine, I just paused him," Twilight answered, her head hung low. "I never told Spike — this Spike, at least — what became of his real self. I fear that if he were to know the truth it might destabilize the simulation of his mind."
"Then, Spike didn't..."
"No, he didn't make it," Twilight continued, tears welling up in her eyes as she looked at Starlit.
"Twilight, I'm sorry, I had no idea," Starlit said, not sure of where to look or what to do with her body.
"I raised Spike from the day he hatched, you know? He was like the son I never had and the little brother I always wanted. He was vibrant and fun and helpful, always trying to find a way to make everypony else's days better. He was so unlike his kin in that regard, you'd almost think he was a pony with scales instead of fur"
The tears in her eyes finally spilled over, staining her cheeks as hiccuping sobs wracked her chest.
"When the fighting began I copied his mind over to this necklace, but when the process finished he demanded that he stay behind, hold off the other Princess' forces to give me time to escape. I begged and pleaded with him to come with me but he stood his ground, and just as Chrysalis' Changelings broke through the window he shoved me out the door. I ran, ran as fast as my hooves would take me, never once looking back to see what became of him, and I didn't find out until many moons later."
"Twilight, you don't have to continue if you don't want to," Starlit interjected.
"When I came back to the ruins of Canterlot," Twilight continued, undeterred by Starlit's sympathy, "I headed straight for my old observatory. The window had been completely smashed through, all my books and scrolls were gone, and in the center of the room were over a dozen dead Changelings and Spike's tiny body, as cold as ice."
"Twilight, stop!" Starlit Sky shouted, knocking the Princess out of her fugue state.
"Just, stop," Starlit continued. Her eyes too were welling up, and a tightness pervaded her chest that made her feel like she was about to suffer a heart attack. "Please, I understand your grief, but just stop."
"Starlit, I—" Twilight began.
"Twilight, the only reason I'm going on this quest is for my daughter's sake, so the last thing I need to hear is how all of your loved ones died trying to fight a battle they had no hope of winning."
A long silence pervaded the lab, broken only on occasion by a small bubble or hum of some tonic or device. The figure of Spike still stood in the room, paused with a happy smile on his face and glowing with dull green and purple radiance.
"I'm sorry," Twilight said after a time, "that was selfish of me. You have your own loved ones to worry over, you don't need my troubles heaped upon your shoulders. Come, we should send you on your way."
With a flick of her horn Twilight dismissed Spike and put the amulet around her own neck. She then levitated another amulet out of the pile. It was on a dull silver chain, and looked like a perfectly polished chunk of obsidian rimmed with melted silver.
"Take this, it will protect you in dire circumstances," Twilight said tersely. She slowly levitated the amulet onto Starlit's neck, and as soon as the stone touched her chest she felt a dull throbbing emanate from it. It had a similar presence to it as the sprite that had shown her the vision of Twilight's battle had.
With a spark of her magic Twilight pulled a large tarp off of one of the devices on the far side of the room, loosing cobwebs and dust as she did. It looked like a stone slab embedded into the ground with a series of runes Starlit didn't recognize running around the rim of it. Sticking up equidistant from each other on the outer rim were four large stone spikes, also covered in glyphs and runes that glowed a dull purple.
"This is a teleportation pad," Twilight explained. "In my time unicorns could simply teleport places as they pleased so long as they had a strong mental image of the location, but without the magic to power the spell I've had to fall back on this. You simply have to stand in the center of it as I feed the location and magic into the glyphs. Be forewarned, the experience can be... disorienting for first timers."
"How disorienting are we talking here?" Starlit asked, grabbing up some food and supplies and stuffing them in her saddlebags as she made her way to the pad.
"Well, let's just say it will be a happy miracle if you don't throw up as soon as you exit," Twilight answered, feeding her magic into the pad as she did. The runes started to shimmer a brighter purple as energy raced up and across the spikes.
"There, that should be enough to get you to the outer edge of the Searing Plains. I've set the pad to put you on the edge of a town called Appleoosa. The environment is hot and arid, but the townsfolk are decent enough and should be able to point you in the right direction."
"And that's that?" Starlit asked. "Just a slap on the haunch and a 'go get 'em?' Seems like there would be a bit more grandeur to a send-off like this."
"Best not to count the chickens before they hatch, or however that saying goes," Twilight answered. "This task will be arduous, and I don't hold that high of a hope for your survival. The grandeur can wait for when you succeed."
"No offense intended, Your Highness, but did somepony else write your speeches?"
Twilight let out a weary chuckle at Starlit's half-hearted attempt at a joke as she guided her up to the pad.
"Starlit Sky, I may not be the most eloquent or charismatic speaker, but what I tell you now I say from the heart; I believe you can do this. The road will be hard, and you will not come back the same mare as when you left when all is said and done, but your courage and selflessness give me confidence in your ability. Se la duram vos Alicornae.
"Come again?" Satarlit asked. She could feel the magic of the pad permeate her body and tingle her hooves as she stood upon it.
"It's an old saying, from a language long since homogenized into what is now modern Equestrian," Twilight answered. "The best translation of it that I can give is 'May the Favor of the Alicorns follow you.'"
Starlit looked over to her compatriot, who similarly gazed into her eyes. This regent, this mare who's power dwarfed hers even in its diminished state, for the briefest moment seemed to share her morals. Both striving for something lost, both fighting for a better future. It felt sisterly, in a way.
And then Starlit vanished in a flash of bright violet light.
The first thing Starlit Sky noticed was the heat. The temperature was sweltering and had a sticky quality to it that made it feel as if she were walking through soup, which was especially troubling given that the weather in her part of Equestria was quite temperate at this time of year.
The second thing she noticed was the all encompassing wave of nausea, followed by a quick voiding of her stomach contents.
Head swimming and knees turning into jelly, Starlit stumbled forward in the dry grass before flopping onto her belly and letting the dizziness consume her for the moment. Whatever that teleporter had done to transport her as far as it had, it certainly didn't feel like the sort of thing she'd want to do on a daily basis or even want to have the capacity to do.
"I can't believe that unicorns used to do this as a primary mode of transit," Starlit thought through her hazy mind.
Slowly she flipped onto her back and looked upwards and around, trying to get a read on where she had landed without too much effort. She was laying in a field of dry, if still somewhat green, grass, and around her was an orchard of trees. They looked wilted and their bark cracked and drying, but they still bore leaves and some small, dull red fruit that Starlit didn't know the name of. She also noted, with some confusion, that it was currently the middle of the day, when it had been very early in the morning when she had departed from Twilight's lab.
On the whole, heat and time of day aside, this place was downright pastoral compared to her dirt farm, and were it not for the ghastly vocation that she was undertaking, Starlit found that she could potentially call this place home.
"Sis, I think it came from over this way!" A shrill voice with a distinct twang hollered from a little ways off. Starlit gripped her forehooves against her ears to block out the noise.
As swiftly as she could manage given her present state of discombobulation, Starlit hoisted herself to her hooves just as a filly and a young mare, both earth ponies, stepped out from the tree line separating the orchard and whatever lay beyond.
Starlit also noted, with a sinking feeling in her chest, that the older of the two had a pitchfork leveled at her as she stalked forward.
"What're you doin' out here, stranger?" the mare demanded. Starlit squinted, as the combination of her orange coat and blonde hair caused the bright sunlight to reflect off of her in a very visually painful way.
"I just got... lost, is all," Starlit answered back. "I was just traveling through and happened to wander into your fields."
"And that?" the mare retorted, gesturing to the puddle of sick just behind Starlit.
"Just a bit of heat sickness. I come from a long way off and I'm afraid I'm not used to the heat here. Where I come from its much more temperate."
"Well, all that fancy dark leather and weaponry probably isn't doin' you any favors," the mare replied as she lowered the pitchfork. "Still, seein' as you didn't draw on me as soon as you saw me, I reckon that you're decent enough folk. You know where you're headed?"
"To Appleoosa, actually. Do you know the way?" Starlit asked. The breath she had been holding gratefully slid out her nostrils as the tension eased.
"Know it? Heck, I practically run that town!" the mare replied. "C'mon, I'll show you to Cherry Blossom's place, she'll set you up with whatever you need."
Setting the pitchfork into a sleeve on her back and beckoning the yellow filly that had followed her, the mare and Starlit walked through the tree line and out onto a rough path. Off in the distance a few buildings stood, with a large tower dominating the horizon.
"So, what's you're name?" the mare asked. "Not that often we get visitors this close to the Plains, so I like to get to know anypony the blows through."
"I'm Starlit Sky," Starlit answered.
"Pretty name, fittin' for a unicorn. I'm Applejack, and this little troublemaker here's my little sister, Apple Bloom."
Applejack took a moment to tussle her sister's cherry red mane, and with it she dislocated the large red bow had been affixed to it. With a huff Apple Bloom fixed her hair before putting Starlit between herself and her sister.
"So, what brings you 'round these parts?" Apple Bloom asked. "It's not every day that a pony decked out head to hoof in armor and weapons comes by. Are you a mercenary? A soldier? Ooh! Maybe you're a robber!"
"Apple Bloom, don't be rude!" Applejack hissed, cutting her sister off. "If she doesn't want to say, she doesn't have to. Her business is her business."
"Oh, that's alright," Starlit answered with a nervous chuckle. "Honestly I'm just going through town on my way out to the Searing Plains."
At the first mention of her destination Applejack and Apple Bloom stared at her, slack-jawed and eyes bulging from their heads in shock.
"The sun must've done quite the number on your noggin if it's given you that big of a death wish!" Applejack shot back. "The Plains are a sun-blasted wasteland! You'd be lucky to last a few hours out there at the most."
"Well, I will admit that it's not the best idea I've ever had, but I need to cross it to get to... a certain place," Starlit replied.
"Ma'am, if you're going to try and find the Radiant Queen's castle then you'd best go back to where you came from," Apple Bloom chimed in. "We've had plenty of ponies come through here trying to get there, and either they come back nearly thirsted to death and covered in sunburns or they just don't come back."
The lack of admonishment from her older sister betrayed the truth of Apple Bloom's words, and helped crystallize just what sort of situation Twilight had gotten Starlit into. If this is where she was going to be starting her quest, then she could only begin to guess what else lay before her.
"Well, I mean, surely somepony knows where the castle is!" Starlit said, trying to sound confident.
"Oh, we all know where it is; the Radiant Queen makes sure we do," Applejack answered. "The problem is getting there without a direct summons from her."
"If you have a summons, you can get to her?" Starlit asked, the gears already turning in her head as to how to get one of those summonses.
"Well, yes and no," Apple Bloom answered. "The summons doesn't take you there or anything, it just provides protection from the sun and heat while you go through the Plains. You've got to worry about getting there yourself."
"Sure wish Twilight had told me that little tidbit," Starlit thought to herself ruefully as the trio entered the town.
Appleoosa's appearance on the horizon was similar enough to its appearance in actuality; wooden buildings no higher than two stories save for the clock tower at the far side of town surrounded her, showing signs of the wear and tear that their arid location would give. What little vegetation grew in town took the form of succulents like cacti or drifting tumbleweeds, and the sun-baked ground was dusty and cracked.
"Listen Starlit," Applejack said as she led the three of them into one of the buildings, "I don't make it my business to tell ponies how to go about theirs, but at least take a day to stay here, rest up, and really think this over. I'll go talk with Cherry Blossom about setting you up with a room pro bono, so grab yourself a seat and get something to drink."
"Thank you for your generosity," Starlit answered. She took a seat at one of the tables close to the entrance and took stock of her surroundings.
The tavern was sparsely populated, with about four other ponies milling about. A pair was sitting in the far corner of the dining area playing some sort of game with dice, while a third was face down on her table and snoring loudly. The fourth, however, drew Starlit's attention.
Off in the sole booth near the stairs leading up to the second floor sat a unicorn, his pine green eyes down in a book as he absentmindedly lifted bits of food to his mouth with his magic. He had a dark burgundy coat and a brown mane held back with a small clip to keep it from falling into his face.
"How is he doing that?" Starlit pondered to herself. She had never been able to so casually use her magic like that, even for the simplest of tasks, and yet there he sat, eating with magic and reading his book.
Determined to get an explanation, Starlit loosened her weapon belt and slung it across her shoulders so that the sword lay across her back. It wouldn't do to approach a stranger while seemingly armed to the teeth, and his quizzical look rather than one of fear as she approached proved her tact right.
"May I help you?" the unicorn asked. His voice was soft, spoken like a stallion who was used to other ponies telling him what to do.
"Perhaps," Starlit said as she took a seat at his booth. "If you don't mind my asking, how are you using your magic without concentrating on it?"
"I'm afraid I don't quite follow," he replied with a nervous chuckle. "Can't you use yours for simple tasks like this?"
"No I can't, and as far as I know no other unicorn aside from you that I've met can. Do you have some sort of amplifier for it?"
"Can't say that I do," the unicorn replied. "Where do you come from that simple levitation is a challenge?"
Starlit thought for a moment; she was in a strange place talking with a pony who's name she didn't know about things she barely understood herself, and he had just asked her where she was from. It didn't take an enormous leap of logic for her to decide to err on the side of caution.
"Far off," Starlit answered. "Off to the east."
"Hmm," the unicorn murmured. "Well, can I at least have your name?"
"Yours first," Starlit sniped back.
"Alright, alright, no need to get upset. My name's Setting Sun, I'm the town wizard. As for why my magic works so well, I think I might have a theory about that."
Starlit perked up, happy that he was getting back to the topic at hand. He seemed friendly enough, and if he proved to be a problem she could probably take him if she had to.
"I think," Setting Sun continued, "that it has something to do with the area we're currently in."
"Why would us being in the desert have anything to do with magical ability?" Starlit asked.
"It isn't so much that we're in the desert than it is what is causing this place to become a desert. I'm certain you've probably heard about the Radiant Queen's palace by now, right?"
Starlit nodded her agreement as a serving pony brought by a glass of water for her. She turned to see Apple Bloom waving at her from across the room with a big smile on her face while her sister and the barmaid chatted.
"So," Sun continued, "I have a theory that the Radiant Queen is using powerful magic to keep this place constantly sunny, and as a result the sun is literally bathing the land in magic and giving the unicorns around here a boost to their abilities. Of course, I can't really prove it without speaking with the Queen herself, and she hasn't come out of the Searing Plains in living memory."
"I might be able to help you with that," Starlit cut in. "I'm planning on going out to the Plains tomorrow to pay Her Majesty a visit. If you can use some of your magic to keep us protected from the sun out there then I can protect us from anything that might try to give us trouble."
The silence that followed Starlit's declaration was so profound that the wind outside seemed to stop. Setting Sun shifted nervously in his seat, and the pair of ponies playing dice set aside their game and clomped over to where they were sitting.
"What's this I hear about you goin' out into the Plains?" asked the stouter of the two, an earth pony with a bad burn scar across his muzzle.
"It doesn't concern you," Starlit replied, nursing her water as she did. "Go back to your game."
"Uh-uh, no can do, stranger," said the taller, a pegasus with frayed and patchy feathers on his wings. "Ya see, my friend and I here got our summons just yesterday, and we're fixin' to go out there ourselves come tomorrow."
"Guys, listen, she didn't mean anything by it," Setting Sun cut in, trying to defuse the situation. "She's new in town, she doesn't know the rules around here, that's all!"
"Besides," Starlit said as she rose to her hooves, "why would you two getting a summons affect me going out there on my own?"
"Normally it wouldn't," the stout pony answered, "'cept for the fact that the only ponies that go out there without a summons are brigands and treasure hunters looking to find the Queen's Jewel. And while my friend and I here have been invited by Her Majesty's good graces, we are also lookin' to get our hooves on that there particular gemstone."
"And you sure look like some sorta treasure hunter, what with your fancy armor and shiny sword," the taller pony added.
Starlit quickly scanned the room, trying to gauge the threat level. The sleeping pony was still snoring away happily, while Applejack and Apple Bloom were nowhere to be seen. The barmaid, who Starlit assumed was Cherry Blossom, was barely peeking over the rim of her bar. As the pair of them locked eyes, Cherry flitted hers towards the stairs in a knowing gesture.
"Well gentlemen," Starlit said, readjusting her weapon belt as she did so, "as... enlightening as this conversation has been, I'm afraid I have to be going. A friend of mine has set me up with a room for the day and I am quite tired. Long trip through the hot sun, you know how it is."
As calmly as she could muster Starlit started for the stairs before a meaty forehoof blocked her off at chest level.
"I don't think so," the earth pony declared. "We ain't got the time to worry about you stealin' that jewel, so I think we're just gonna settle the matter right here and now."
Before Starlit could react she found herself flung backward with great force, greater than she thought an earth pony could muster up. The push was so sudden that it knocked her square into Setting Sun's table, sending a shock of pain down her back even as it sent Sun's remaining food and book flying along with the table.
As Starlit pulled herself to a sitting position she saw the two ruffians looming over her, pawing the ground with their hooves in preparation to kick her either to death or into unconsciousness, whichever came first. Quickly she lit her horn up and began removing the dagger from her weapon belt. The effort to do so was significant, but not as significant as when she had done so back in Twilight's lab.
"I guess Setting Sun was right," she thought to herself as the knife levitated to a defensive position.
"Listen, I have no quarrel with you two," Starlit said. "I'm not trying to find this jewel that you two are looking for; I didn't even know it existed until you two told me about it. I just need to see the Queen, nothing more and nothing less."
"Aw, ya hear that," the pegasus mocked, "she 'has no quarrel with us!'"
"Well, ain't that just the sweetest sentiment," the earth pony replied. "It's such a shame that we happen to have a quarrel with her."
With a sickening laugh that sounded more like barking than anything else, the pair of them reared onto their hind legs, letting their forehooves kick in the air before bringing their full weight down.
Mercifully, the pair were remarkably poor shots and all four of their hooves missed her even while prone on the ground. Taking the opportunity she flailed her knife wildly in the air, slashing at whatever happened to be closest, which just so happened to be the pegasus' left foreleg.
"Dammit! Son of a bitch!" he hollered as he jumped back, using his wings to let him land safely a good distance away. "Stonewall, let her have it!"
Thus prompted, the earth pony slammed one of his meaty forelegs straight into her side, knocking the wind from her lungs and breaking her concentration. The dagger clattered to the floor and he kicked it away before rearing back again, this time his aim lined squarely up with her head.
Starlit shut her eyes, waiting for the sickening crunch of his hooves into her skull to come. One second... two seconds... five seconds... almost half a minute passed before Starlit dared take a peek at her surroundings.
Stonewall was still reared up above her, only now he was enveloped in a soft green glow and still as a statue. Whipping her head around to find the source of the magic she saw Setting Sun, forehooves propped up on the overturned table and the same green field enveloping his horn.
"Well, go on," he said. "Knock him out before I run out of juice!"
Quickly Starlit got to her hooves, ignoring the pain in her side as she did, and took the dagger back up into her magic. Stonewall's eyes darted between her and the knife, and a single tear started to roll down his scarred cheek.
Before she could drive the pommel into his temple to knock him out, an orange blur burst out from the side of her field of vision and collided with the side of his face. Even within Sun's paralysis spell his head snapped to one side as blood flew from the side of his face and his mouth along with a few teeth, only to stop in mid-air due to the nature of the spell. His pupils shrank to the size of pinheads from the pain before his eyes slammed shut.
The green glow from Sun's spell dissipated, and Stonewall's large frame crumpled to the ground like a sack of carrots. His blood and teeth splattered and clattered on the floor, respectively, as Starlit turned to see Applejack facing away from her and with a decent amount of blood on her hind hooves.
"Absolutely shameful," Applejack said, spitting on his prone form as she did. "Didn't his mother teach him any manners. Are you okay, sugarcube?"
"Just a sore side," Starlit answered as she put her dagger back in its sheath. "I think my armor took most of the hit, but it's definitely going to bruise up. More importantly, how in Equestria did you do that?!"
"When you've got a job kicking apple trees to get the fruit down out of them, you don't need any fancy magic to defend yourself," Applejack replied. "Cherry, you get his friend?"
The pair turned around to see the pegasus, now in a similar state as his friend with a large welt forming on his forehead. Cherry Blossom paused from sweeping up the remains of a thick liquor glass by his head to give a quick nod of approval. Starlit also noticed that Apple Bloom was busy scowling down at the fallen pony, her face screwed up in a glare that was equal parts menacing and adorable.
"I'm sorry about all that," Applejack continued. "Those two are always causing trouble 'round here, swiping purses and generally being a nuisance, but I guess I just don't have the heart to throw 'em out of town. They generally don't cause any lasting trouble, but they'll have a few months in the jail to think about what they've done here today."
"And to nurse a shattered jaw," Starlit added, looking down at Stonewall's mangled and bleeding face. A pair of horseshoe shaped bruises were already prominently displayed on the side of his face, underneath the blood that had spilled when Applejack's hooves dug into his flesh.
"And to nurse a shattered jaw," Applejack repeated with a chuckle. "Looks like he'll be getting all his meals through a straw for the next few weeks. Anywho, I've got to drag these perps off to jail, so go on upstairs and get settled. Cherry's got a room ready for you, and I'll come by a little later to talk about your 'quest.'"
"One more thing before you go," Starlit called as Applejack turned to go. "You said back at the orchard that you 'practically run this town.' What do you mean by that?"
"Oh right, where are my manners," Applejack said. "I should've told you earlier, but better late than never I suppose. I'm the sheriff and mayor of Appleoosa, Applejack of the Apple family. And as long as you're here, you're under my protection."
It was night out by the time Applejack came back to the tavern, and Starlit had just gotten finished taking off her armor and equipment for the day. The process was noticeably easier than when she had donned it back at the Golden Oak, as well as being able to do it without muttering the incantation to herself, lending further credence to Setting Sun's theory.
Starlit had just settled onto her bed when a soft knock echoed off the door.
"It's open," she said.
Thus invited, Applejack stepped through the door. Starlit noticed that she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat tilted back at a jaunty angle. Starlit couldn't quite place how, but it framed her face in a very pleasing way, like she was born to wear it.
"Hope I'm not intruding," Applejack said as she sat down at the small table by the window. "Today's hasn't necessarily been the best one, but I just thought I'd come back by and see how you were gettin' on."
"And not just because you promised you would this afternoon?" Starlit quipped.
"And that," Applejack replied. "I've never gone back on my word and I'm not about to start now."
"Well, to answer your question, my side hurts like the dickens, I think I've sweated out about three quarts of liquid, and I made a couple of new friends," Starlit said. "On the whole, I'd say this is a net even as far as days are concerned."
Applejack let out a quick sharp laugh at Starlit's sardonicism, setting her hat down on the small end table by the window as she did.
"Something tells me that you're a pony that got beaten up a lot as a filly. You've got a sharp tongue, and speakin' from experience there aren't a lot of ponies that can appreciate a good smartass."
"You? A smartass?" Starlit asked incredulously. "Perish the thought!"
The pair shared in a good chuckle, one that even the stabbing pain in Starlit's ribs couldn't completely quash.
"I'm serious!" Applejack insisted. "Once I mouthed off to the former sheriff, back when that was still its own position, and he got so mad that he accidentally shot a water barrel with stress magic."
"So he resigned and gave the position to you, right?" Starlit teased. "I suppose you pulled the same stunt on the mayor to get their job too."
"I wish it were that easy," Applejack replied. "I'll tell you what, getting this job was about as hard as actually doing it."
"Care to elaborate?"
"Oh, it'd just bore you to tears," Applejack answered. "A lot of politicking and appealing to ponies I don't give two apples about with the occasional bit of flank-kissing. I'd prefer to be out in my fields, but somepony's got to do this job."
"So why you?" Starlit asked, genuinely intrigued by Applejack's dedication to a job she seemingly hates. Starlit could empathize, given her present situation.
Applejack didn't answer immediately, and her mood seemed to fall at Starlit's question. She sat at the table for a while, staring out the window at nothing and everything. Starlit also spied a single tear roll down Applejack's cheek, one that she didn't even seem to notice.
"You have a family, Starlit Sky?" Applejack asked after a time, eyes still solidly fixed on the horizon.
"Mm-hm, a husband and a daughter," Starlit answered.
"Then maybe you can humor me here." Applejack answered. "Earlier I said I was a member of the Apple family, but that was only part true. You see, Apple Bloom and I... we are the Apple family. All that's left of it here, at least."
Starlit tried to form words of sympathy, something she could say to ease the obvious hurt that lay on Applejack's heart, but none of the words in her head sounded right. They sounded hollow and empty, platitudes to act as a salve rather than genuine words of wisdom.
"My parents were good people," Applejack continued, turning back to Starlit. "Kept the farm going, gave Apple Bloom, Big Mac, and I a good life while they were around. Our Granny lived with us for a time but she passed away a long while ago."
"What happened to them?" Starlit asked.
"Same thing that happens to everypony around here; they got summoned to the palace," Applejack answered. "It was rainy that day, which is a rarity around here, when their letters came. Materialized right on the kitchen table, all golden and regal. They packed their bags that night and left the next morning, and that was that."
"That's it? Just a magic letter shows up and they abandon their family?" Starlit asked, feeling her blood start to boil.
"Yep, just like that. Big Mac, my older brother, got his a couple of years ago. Apple Bloom was beside herself for weeks when he left, and it's just been me and her since then."
The tears that had been steadily welling in Applejack's eyes started falling in earnest, but her voice remained even and controlled despite it.
"She's such a little trooper, and it terrifies me to think that her letter might be next," Applejack continued. "I took the job as mayor and sheriff because I wanted to protect her, but all it does is keep me tied to a desk in Town Hall rather than with her back at home. The fact that we were together when you showed up was practically a miracle. I want to leave, I really do, but I've done so much good for this town while in office, I just feel trapped."
Applejack stopped speaking as her sadness finally overcame her resolve, and she just sat in the small stool by the table staring at the floor as the tears fell. The energy in the room had decidedly worsened, but Starlit had an inkling of what she could do to help.
Slowly she got off the bed, being careful of her side, and walked over to where Applejack was seated. She sat on the rough wood floor and started idly running her hoof through Applejack's mane, as she had done time and again for White Eclipse whenever she was upset.
"Applejack," Starlit said, "I won't pretend to know what it's like to lose family like you have; I never knew my parents, and my family has always been waiting for me at the end of the day. But there is one thing I can do for you."
Applejack lifted her face enough that her eyes met Starlit's. They were red and tear streaked, but her bright green irises shone with the curiosity of a filly.
"You know that I have to go to the palace tomorrow," Starlit continued. "I have business with the Queen that needs attending to, but I promise you that I will find out what became of your family. It's the least I could do for the mare that saved my life today."
"Starlit," Applejack began before getting cut off.
"Now, I know you came here to dissuade me from going on this fool's errand, and were it up to me I wouldn't be doing this either. The only reason I'm risking my life is because the fate of Equestria is apparently hanging in the balance, and furtherm—"
Starlit didn't get another word out before being enveloped in a tight hug. Applejack's face pressed deeply into the fur of her shoulder as fresh tears dripped onto her shoulder.
"Thank you," Applejack said through the hiccups. "Thank you so much."
Tenderly Starlit reciprocated, wrapping her left foreleg around Applejack's sturdy neck. Her mind flashed back to the nights when White Eclipse had had a bad dream; the same tears, the desperation to hold onto something familiar, and Starlit being a bulwark against hopelessness and despair.
After a time Applejack let the hug end, standing back up and picking her hat up from the table with a meek look on her face. She was blushing quite hard, enough for her freckles to be readily apparent on her cheeks.
"Sorry 'bout gettin' all blubbery on you," Applejack apologized, wiping away her tears and runny nose. "I appreciate the sentiment, really I do, but I get the feeling that what you're going out there to do is way more important than finding my family. Don't let my sob story distract you, I've been past this for a while now."
"I'm sure it won't be a problem," Starlit replied. "The hardest part should probably be getting there, given the whole 'sun-blasted wasteland' I'm going to have to trek through."
"Well, if anypony'll help you get across the Plains, it'll be Setting Sun."
"So you saw me talking to my new friend, did you?" Starlit asked.
"Sure did," Applejack answered. "He's a good stallion, far better than most, but he's a bit of a quirky bird. He's always got his nose down in a book, and heaven help you if you get between him and some new information. I once had to haul him in for a count of assault."
Starlit's eyes widened a bit at this revelation. Setting Sun had seemed perfectly mannered, perhaps too genteel for his own good, so the idea of him inflicting an unsealable wound on another pony had Starlit's mind running in circles.
"Him?" Starlit queried. "Burgundy coat, milquetoast personality, kinda scrawny? I don't see it."
"Well you'd better start seeing it," Applejack admonished. "I wouldn't have thought him capable if I weren't the one he came running to after he did it, bawling like a foal and his best friend's blood dripping down his horn. Apparently it was over some book, although I didn't really ask him much about it until after the fact. I had to knock him out just to get him to calm down enough for me to take him in, and I had to haul the both of them down to the doctor's to get his friend patched up."
"What was the wound like?" Starlit asked, curiosity and worry both piqued.
"It was a stab wound straight through the shoulder made by Sun's horn. Apparently there was some sort of magic pumped into the wound, and from that day until the day his buddy got summoned the wound never really closed over properly."
"I'm going to have to talk with him about that," Starlit thought. Setting Sun had seemed polite enough, and was certainly invaluable as an ally if how he dealt with Stonewall was any indication, but she was going to have to whip him into shape.
"Do you know where he lives?" Starlit asked.
"Yeah, just down the main road in the house by the clock tower," Applejack replied. "Seems a bit late to come callin' though, don't you think?"
"I won't be long," Starlit answered as she strapped her knife to her leg, "and thank you again for all of your help and hospitality."
Without another word Starlit made for the door to her room. It overlooked the main bar of the saloon where Cherry Blossom was busy cleaning up after the day's sales. The table she and Setting Sun had been at, Starlit noticed, was still flipped on its side, although the spilled food had been cleaned up already.
"Listen Starlit," Applejack called from the top of the stairs, "I'm sure you know what you're doing, but don't let whatever it is you have to do tomorrow cloud your judgement tonight. Decisions made hastily are rarely good ones."
Starlit turned to face the stairs. Applejack's face was the face of a mare concerned, and for a moment Starlit saw so much of herself in that face. Looking back to her dagger she breathed a heavy sigh, lighting up her horn as she unbuckled the knife and walked it up the stairs to Applejack.
"I promise you I won't be long, so if you could watch my room for maybe a half-hour while I talk with Setting Sun...?" Starlit asked.
"Schure fing," Applejack replied through a mouthful of leather.
"Dear, don't talk with your mouth full," Starlit admonished.
Applejack let out a snort of laughter that loosened her grip on the knife's sheath, letting it fall the the floor with a dull thunk. Starlit couldn't help but get caught up in it and snickered quietly behind her hoof.
"Oh, your daughter must love you," Applejack answered back. "Now go on, go sort out whatever you need to sort out; I'll sit tight until you get back. Apple Bloom knows not to go to sleep 'til I get home anyway."
With a quick nod, Starlit trotted back down the stairs and made for the door.
* * *
Setting Sun's house spoke volumes about the pony that lived inside; the facade, while relatively plain, had better upkeep than most of the other buildings in Appleoosa. It was also festooned with various trinkets and baubles made of glass and metal that chimed in the dry desert wind.
Starlit Sky rapped the door with three sharp knocks, and stood patiently.
"Just a minute!" Sun called from inside. What followed was a series of clanks and scrapings with the occasional muttered curse before he stumbled out the front door, followed by a few bits of cooking ware.
"Oh, its you!" Sun said, a tad surprised. "Who told you where I live?"
"Applejack, although you don't exactly make yourself scarce," Starlit answered. "I just came by to talk about our trip tomorrow."
"Yes, right, that, I was actually going to go to the saloon tomorrow morning and catch up about that, but I guess the sooner the better. C'mere, I have something to show you."
Quickly Sun trotted back inside, leaving the door open for Starlit to follow suit. She wasn't quite sure how she was going to, however, as his house was an absolute disaster. Dishes lay scattered across most horizontal surfaces, the floor was covered with half-finished experiments and devices with innumerable possible functions, and papers with scribbled writing and drawings covered the walls and a fair amount of his window space.
"Sorry for the mess," Sun called from his cramped living space. "I've been working on a lot of projects, and some of them just sort of pile up."
"Give me a full day and a scrub brush made of iron and I could have this place halfway to unsightly," Starlit groused to herself. She prided herself on keeping a tidy home, so to see this sort of chaotic whirlwind set her teeth on edge.
With careful tread she stepped around the minefield of detritus between the door and the living room. It was a small space with a couple of rough looking cushions set around a low table. Whatever layers of junk had covered it were shoved off onto the floor, replaced by a small brass device.
"Now, you're probably wondering how we're supposed to cross the Plains without a summons," Setting Sun began, "given that a summons is the only actual way to get out there without drying up like a raisin."
"Yes, that would be a bit of an issue," Starlit pointed out, "but first there's something I nee—"
"So that's where this little beauty comes in," Sun interrupted, his train of thought chugging along undeterred. He carefully lifted up his small brass bauble, an orb about the size of a beet with several seperations and lines across its surface. Affixed at either end were a pair of small buttons, raised up over the rest of the orb, with a bold black line going around the equator of it.
"Listen, that's very nice, but I really need t—" Starlit began before getting interrupted again.
"This, my pride and joy, is how we make it across. See, the sphere itself separates into two halves, and each half can become a portable habitat that can shield us from the sun. I did some research on the summoning scrolls to figure out how they protect from the heat and solar radiation, and I'm pretty sure I have it narrowed down t—"
"Sun, enough!" Starlit shouted. "Stop your babbling and listen for a second!"
Eyes wide, Sun put his orb down and shuffled uncomfortably on his cushion.
"Sorry, that was rude," he muttered, head hung down to face his forehooves. "What did you need to say?"
"That's better," Starlit said, a sigh of relief making its way out alongside her statement. "Now, I wanted to go over a few things about you. Specifically, your personality."
"Applejack told you about Thunder Lane, huh?" Sun replied.
"Not by name, no, but she gave me the gist of the incident," Starlit answered, caught off-balance by his powers of perception. "What exactly happened between you two that caused you to lash out like that?"
"It's not a pretty story, if you must know," Sun began. "We used to be really good friends before it all went down, and that's the honest truth. The two of us went to school together, and he always had my back when the bigger colts would pick on me. We shared everything, he and I, just to give some context on this."
"Then why did you go and stab him over a book?" Starlit asked. Everything about Sun's story wasn't adding up with the image Starlit had in her head of a pony so obsessed with his knowledge that he prized it over the wellbeing of others.
"It wasn't just a book!" Sun shot back. His eyes, once penitent, now burned with a singular intensity that took Starlit aback.
"Then what was it?" Starlit answered back.
Setting Sun shifted back and forth, trying to look everywhere besides at Starlit's face. He looked equal parts nervous, embarrassed, and angry while trying to hide it all under a cracking mask of indifference.
"Do you have a family?" Sun asked. Starlit resisted the urge to roll her eyes given she had just had this conversation with Applejack.
"Yes, a husband and a daughter," Starlit answered, "and given the question I'd hazard a guess and say that your family got summoned?"
"Yeah, I figured you already got the sob story from Applejack about it as well," Sun answered. "Really, ask anyone in town and they'll tell you that they've had at least one close friend or family member get summoned at some point or another. Some of them come back but never say why they left, and others never do. For me it was my parents, long before I ever got to know them."
Now it was Starlit's turn to paw uncormfortably at her cushion. She had never given much consideration to her parents given that they were long gone by the time she could've gotten to know them, but hearing another pony talk about it made her stomach feel heavy.
"I can commiserate," she replied. "I never knew my parents; my mother's mother raised me, and when she passed away I went to live in the children's home."
"Then you'll understand why this book was important to me," Sun continued, trying to keep his voice level. "It wasn't just a book, I have a wide selection of them here; it was an album, with hoofdrawn pictures of my parents. The artist did it as a last commission before he passed away, and he prided himself on the accuracy of his portraiture, according to ponies around town who knew him. They say my folks had it commissioned on the day before they left for their summoning."
"To be given to you, so you'd have something to remember them by," Starlit finished. Normally not one for heavy emotions, she could feel her throat tighten as she spoke and the weight in her stomach move to her chest.
"Exactly. So, one day, Thunder Lane and I were coming back from the farm where Applejack lives. We had gotten some apples from her for doing some light work for her, and on the road back he noticed the album sticking out of my saddlebags. He went to reach for it, I tried to back away so he wouldn't bite into it, he missed and knocked it out of my bag and into a mud puddle as it had been raining earlier, and well... the rest is history."
"Sun, I understand why you got upset," Starlit said, "but why did you stab him? You could've told him off, did something less drastic than inflict a permanent, unsealable wound on your best friend."
"I wasn't thinking," Sun answered. "I only meant to poke him really hard, but... I guess my magic leaked out due to my emotions and it pierced him through the shoulder. If it had been even an inch lower I would've stabbed him right through the heart, and when I saw the blood I panicked and ran back to Applejack's. She saw the blood on my horn, assumed the worst, knocked me out cold with those back hooves of hers, and got Thunder Lane to the doctor just in time to save him."
"Hmm..." Starlit murmured. "I'd take it that the two of you didn't speak much after that?"
"I didn't talk with Thunder Lane again until he got summoned, and all he said to me was 'Sorry for taking your book.'"
The pair sat in uncomfortable silence for a while. Sun toyed with his bauble while Starlit looked around the room. Now that she actually paid attention to it, there was a certain hectic but intrinsic pattern to the clutter; papers with similar subject matter pasted near each other on the wall, devices and components put into piles based on what function they fulfilled. It may not be neat, but it was organized.
"Sun, I won't begrudge you for what happened," Starlit said, breaking the uncomfortable tension, "but I need your assurance that this sort of thing won't happen when we leave tomorrow. I have business with the Queen that potentially has the fate of Equestria riding on its success, and an emotional outburst could jeopardize that. Do I have your word?"
"You do," Setting Sun affirmed. He held his head a little higher than before, and even with his scrawny build he looked taller than before.
"Good. Now, about the device that will protect us tomorrow?"
"Finally," Sun said, relieved, as he placed the ball back onto the table. "Now, as I was sayin—"
He wasn't able to finish the statement before his front door burst open, sending a smattering of mechanical parts flying across the tiny kitchen. Cherry Blossom stood in the doorway, out of breath and with a panicked expression.
"Starlit, you gotta come quick! Applejack's been kidnapped!"
Cherry Blossom's one employee, the young unicorn barmaid who had served Starlit earlier that day, was pacing back and forth across the floor and chewing her lower lip when the trio burst in through the saloon doors.
"Starlit, come with me," Cherry Blossom directed. "Sun, go stand watch outside; if those low-down snakes are still around then I want to be the first to know."
With a quick nod Setting Sun cantered back out through the still-swinging doors as Starlit was led upstairs. Cherry turned on her hoof and leaned over the railing in front of what had been Starlit's room, now an active crime scene.
"Minuette, go to the farm and get Applejack's little sister, she'll need to know about this sooner or later. Take the small box from behind the counter, and if you see whoever did this you toss that at their hooves and look the other way. We clear?"
"Crystal, ma'am!" Minuette replied. With the sort of speed that could only be honed by working as a barmaid at rush hour she leaped behind the counter and pulled out a small brass box, covered with the sort of lines and striations as the orb Setting Sun had been showing to Starlit. She then rushed out the door, her galloping fading away into the night.
"Cherry, what happened?" Starlit asked. "Did you see anything?"
"'Fraid not," Cherry Blossom answered. "I was just down here, doing the nightly cash count while Minuette organized the back room when I heard a crash and sounds of a scuffle from your room. I got up there quick as my legs could carry me, but when I got there the room was empty."
With a snort of resignation, Starlit turned to enter into her room.
"Now, I'll tell you that it's not a pretty sight in there," Cherry said, placing a hoof on Starlit's shoulder.
"Can't be any better than not knowing," Starlit replied as she pushed the door open.
The room was in complete disarray. Her bed had been flipped upside down, the end table had been cracked in two by a large impact and sat under a shattered window, and her belongings, while all accounted for, were strewn across the floor.
What greatly worried Starlit, however, was the copious amount of blood splattered on the wall and floor. There was a sizable puddle near the destroyed end table, as well as a large splash decorating the wall nearby. It had a thick consistency to it, a sign that it had already started to coagulate.
Starlit breathed heavily to calm herself, but found that the metallic stench of blood caused her to gag. Taking a careful step around the mess she crossed the threshold.
"Looks like somepony put up a fight," Starlit said.
"Yeah, but what matters is who was doin' the fighting," Cherry added as she stepped into the room.
"I'd bet my life that Applejack fought back," Starlit continued as she walked through the room. "She's the only mare I've met here who could crack that table in half, and I gave her my knife before I left for Sun's place; that's probably where the blood came from."
Gingerly Starlit stepped through the room, doing her best not to disturb anything lest a clue be lost in the cacophony. She moved past her armor and her saddlebags, the contents of which were thankfully not covered in gore, to get to where the end table sat in its destroyed state.
"Cherry, if you could keep watch out the window for me I'd really appreciate it," Starlit asked. "I'm going to look under the bed to see if one of the kidnappers dropped anything."
With a sharp nod Cherry Blossom also entered the room, dancing around the blood and strewn possessions to take up watch while Starlit lowered down onto her belly and started shuffling toward the bed. Underneath it lay her weapons, the small sword and the dagger, the latter of which had a streak of blood along its edge.
"Well, it looks like Applejack made good use of the knife," Starlit grunted as she crawled under the flipped over bed. It was barely being supported by the headboard and, fearing that it would crack and fall on her head, Starlit hastily pulled the knife out, getting some of the blood on her hooves as she did.
The next few seconds were filled with sensations that Starlit didn't understand and couldn't find the words to describe. Firstly the amulet she still wore around her neck started thrumming deeply, a low echoing driving through her chest, past her heart, and boring seemingly into her very soul. A sharp jolt leaped from the bloodstained knife, through her hoof and up her foreleg, until it wrapped around her brain. Then she wasn't in the room anymore, or at least not as it currently was.
Starlit was in the room, probably half an hour ago judging by the scene, looking down on it from the far right corner of the ceiling. Applejack was sitting on the bed twiddling the unsheathed dagger around with her hooves and looking somewhat bored until a loud crash sounded. She reflexively took the dagger up in her teeth and jumped back towards the door as a trio of ponies climbed in through the window, one earth pony and two unicorns.
The trio didn't even bother introducing themselves, they simply rushed Applejack. Starlit couldn't make out their faces from her fixed vantage point, but they all wore white and gold regalia emblazoned with an intricate design and half face masks, enough to cover their upper faces and heads. The symbol looked like a long, sharp, red unicorn horn piercing through a similarly colored ring with a pair of orange stylized wings wrapped up underneath it.
Applejack rushed back at them, swinging the dagger swiftly and with careful precision. She caught one of the unicorns in the throat as she drove them back, slitting her from one side of her jaw to the other and sending a familiar splash of blood to the wall and a puddle to the floor. The unicorn mare dropped immediately as her earth pony compatriot redoubled his effort. Swiftly he lunged his cherry red maw forward and got a firm grip around Applejack's throat.
He swung her body around like a rag doll, slamming her into the bed and the table with enough force to flip the former and destroy the latter. He continued doing this for a few revolutions, slamming her into everything within reach until Applejack's body went limp and dropped to the floor. Her breathing was ragged and faint, and her body had sustained numerous cuts and bruises, but she was thankfully alive.
Their mission fulfilled, the living unicorn swung his horn around, letting a deep blue magic coalesce around it. He then shouted a spell that Starlit couldn't hear, followed by a flash of light that knocked Starlit out of the trance.
As the thrumming from her amulet died and she regained control of herself Starlit pushed Cherry away, rolling over onto her stomach. She took in a sharp breath as she rolled over her bruised side, as well as dealing with the splitting headache she currently had.
"Oh, thank goodness," Cherry breathed, holding a hoof over her chest. "You looked like you were having a fit, I thought the bed had fallen on you."
"Are we sure it didn't?" Starlit answered blearily. She noticed that the pair of them were back out in the hall, and the dagger along with them.
"Well, it was supported enough by the headboard for me to drag you out from under it, so I'd reckon that it didn't crush you. That bein' said, what happened to you? One moment you were under there getting your knife, the next you were thumping around like you were having a seizure."
"I... I got some of the blood from the knife on me, and then had some sort of vision, saw what happened to Applejack," Starlit answered, shakily rising to her hooves as she did. "She put up a fight and killed one of the kidnappers, but she got taken."
"Did you see what any of them looked like?" Cherry asked, worry rising in her voice.
"No faces, but there were two unicorns and an earth pony," Starlit answered. "One of the unicorns was a mare, and she's the one that bit it. The earth pony had a bright red coat and was built like a brick wall; he grabbed Applejack by the throat and slammed her around the room until she got knocked unconscious."
Cherry held a hoof to her mouth, collapsing to her haunches as she did, and Starlit felt that pit in her stomach come back as she realized the indelicacy of her speech.
Unable to control herself Cherry started sobbing, long stretches of crying interrupted every few seconds by gulping breaths.
"Oh, this can't be happening," Cherry moaned as she got some semblance of her voice back. "Applejack... she's such a sweet thing; I've known her since she was a little filly, I practically raised her after her parents left, and now... I couldn't... I wasn't... she's gone, and it's all my fault!"
"Cherry," Starlit said as she sat down next to the sobbing matron, "I'm sorry, truly I am, but you have to be strong. Minuette is going to be back with Apple Bloom soon enough, and when she gets here what is she going to see? Hmm? A sobbing wreck, or a pony determined not to let anything bad happen to her, come hell or high water?"
"How can you be so calm?!" Cherry snapped back. "Applejack could be dead for all we know, and you're just sitting here telling me how I should feel?"
Starlit's throat tightened as Cherry continued to rant at her in between bouts of crying. The passion she had was only matched by her love for Applejack's family, that much was apparent, but right now was not the time to be going into hysterics.
With a deft swing of the foreleg Starlit smacked Cherry Blossom across the face. Her raving, and her crying, stopped immediately as a deathly pall fell over the saloon.
"How... dare you!" Cherry said, her light pink eyes filled with malice. She wasn't able to get another word out before Starlit grabbed her face and drew it to within a hair's breadth of her own.
"Listen to me, Cherry Blossom, and listen well," Starlit began, her voice dropping to a low whisper. "I need you to be your best. The reason I'm here dwarfs anything either of us have ever done in our lives before now. I am not exaggerating when I say that the fate of Equestria literally hangs in the balance, and in order for me to succeed I need cooperation wherever I can find it. So you are going to buck up, wipe the tears from your eyes, and pull yourself together. Are we clear?"
"You impudent b—" Cherry began before Starlit violently shook her head.
"Are. We.Clear?" Starlit repeated, digging her hooves a little tighter into Cherry's tear stained cheeks.
A long silence followed, the two mares staring each other down with fierce determination. Starlit hated having to do this, but if there was one thing Twilight had drilled into her head it was the importance of this quest. She wasn't about to let a hysterical saloon matron slow her down; politeness could wait.
After a long while Cherry slowly nodded, not taking her eyes off of Starlit but capitulating nonetheless.
"Good," Starlit said, letting go of Cherry and standing up as she did. "Now pull yourself together real quick and then get to sweeping the room; I'm not sure if any of the kidnappers dropped anything, but it never hurts to look and I apparently can't touch any of the blood in there without going into a fugue state."
"And what're you going to do, oh capable one?" Cherry asked, venom dripping off her words.
"I'll keep watch outside with Sun and wait for Apple Bloom to come back. I have a daughter at home so I should be able to keep her calm, at least enough to keep her from completely losing her resolve. After that, I'm going to need you to give me anything from the room that belongs to me or could lead us to who did this. Sun and I will leave for the palace as soon as that is taken care of."
"Wait, you're going to the palace?" Cherry asked. "That's suicide! You don't have a summons, you'll never make it!"
"I think Sun has that figured out, but you don't need to concern yourself with it. Just get what you can from the room and meet me downstairs when you're finished."
Cherry let off a quick, sarcastic salute before turning around to face the door.
"And, Cherry?" Starlit said. Cherry turned her head back around to face her, a dull scowl affixed to her otherwise pleasant face.
"I'll get her back," Starlit continued. "You have my word on that."
* * *
The moon had just shuddered to an overhead position when Minuette and Apple Bloom trotted back down the main road, and judging by the slump of her shoulders and bloodshot, tear-streaked eyes it was apparent that Minuette had already broken the news to the filly. Cherry was still checking over and reorganizing the room, leaving Starlit and Setting Sun to watch over the door.
"You're sure you can handle this?" Sun asked. "I mean, AJ was the last vestige of her family, she's going to be devestated at best."
"Sun, have you ever had to comfort a crying child in the middle of the night before?" Starlit retorted.
"Not... personally, no," he answered meekly.
"Then why not leave this to the pony that has," Starlit quipped back. She had been unconsciously gritting her teeth for the last ten minutes, trying not to let the stress show through.
"C'mon sweetie, let's get you inside," Minuette said to Apple Bloom as the pair approached, trying her best to be sympathetic. "Cherry'll get you something nice to drink, okay?"
With heavy hoofsteps Apple Bloom crossed the threshold, while Minuette hung back to talk with Starlit and Sun.
"How's she doing?" Starlit asked.
"I'm... not really sure," Minuette answered, peeking through the saloon doors at Apple Bloom. "I tried to be as delicate as I could, and she did cry for a bit, but she hasn't said a word since we left the farm. I think she's in shock."
"Well, can we blame her?" Sun asked. "I mean, she just lost her sister, and after her brother getting summoned two years ago that means she's all that's left of the Apples. Having to shoulder that sort of burden at her age can't be easy."
Starlit could feel her stomach tying itself into knots as she too looked through the saloon doors. Cherry Blossom had just finished with the room and brought out a glass of milk for her. She sat patiently waiting for the filly to take it, but all Apple Bloom did was sit with her chin on the table.
"Minuette, you and Sun stay on the lookout," Starlit said. "I'll go talk to her about this."
"Are you sure?" Minuette asked, a neat mirroring of Sun's earlier query. "I mean, she's known Cherry and I since she was a foal, whereas you're just some drifter that blew through town this afternoon."
"Call it a mother's intuition," Starlit answered, turning towards the door and walking through.
The atmosphere was tense, to say the least; Cherry was trying her best to put on a good face but Starlit and she both knew that it was only a mask for Apple Bloom's sake. Apple Bloom's only acknowledgement that Starlit had entered the room was a quick glance before returning to her blank stare at the warming glass of milk.
Starlit sat down beside Apple Bloom on the floor, getting on eye level with her. Slowly she reached to run her hoof through her bright red mane, only for Apple Bloom to swat her away with nary a glance.
"Alright, we're not there yet," Starlit said. "That's fine, you don't have to talk if you don't want to. But can you listen?"
A long, deafening pause echoed through the saloon before Apple Bloom gave a curt nod.
"Okay," Starlit answered. "Now, I won't say I understand what you're going through right now; I don't, and were this a fair world nopony would have to know what this feels like. To lose family is like losing a piece of yourself."
"Are you just going to humor me with kid-talk," Apple Bloom interrupted, all the joy from that afternoon drained out of her voice, "or do you have a point you're getting to?"
The knot in Starlit's stomach clinched tighter; to see a filly so jaded at such a young age was disconcerting for her. Eclipse was always such a gregarious and outgoing child, so to see one fall this far into despair sent her maternal instincts into a loop.
"I mean," Apple Bloom continued, turning to face Starlit with anger "Minuette gave me the same speech on the way over here, and Applejack gave me a speech like this when Big Mac got summoned. Why can't anypony just say what they mean to me? I might be a kid, but I'm sick of being lied to!"
"Apple Bloom, you're not ready for the tru—" Cherry started before being cut off.
"Horse apples, I'm not ready!" Apple Bloom snapped. "I've been through enough horrible stuff already, but nopony takes me seriously when I say I want real answers! You grown ups always try to tell me what I want to hear, what I ought to know, when maybe you should let me tell you what I want to hear!"
Apple Bloom's voice started breaking as she continued speaking, and fresh tears were already welling up in her sunset colored eyes.
"I'm the only member of my family left, dammit! If anypony ought to know what actually happened to my sister it's me! I just want some answers, is that too much to ask?!"
Finally unable to contain herself Apple Bloom collapsed onto the table, face in her hooves and sobbing in that particular way that only a child can. The milk spilled as she fell forward, dripping down to the floor between herself and Starlit.
Cherry Blossom and Starlit Sky exchanged a glance; both mares were on the verge of tears themselves, only Starlit was better at hiding it. A few fresh tears were already falling down Cherry's face, but Starlit swallowed her sadness and put her hoof on Apple Bloom's shoulder. The filly didn't protest this time.
"You're right," Starlit said. "You do deserve to know what happened, and to know what's going to be done about it."
Still hiccuping, Apple Bloom turned her bloodshot eyes toward Starlit. Her sister had had much the same expression earlier that evening, and seeing it again only highlighted how alike they were.
"Applejack was kidnapped," Starlit continued. "She was beaten pretty badly, but she was still alive when the kidnappers disappeared. We don't know who they were exactly, but they had some sort of white and gold regalia on."
Apple Bloom perked up when she heard what they were wearing.
"That's the colors of the Radiant Queen," Apple Bloom cut in, wiping away the tears and snot from her face.
"That's what Cherry and I had figured as well, but it's nice to have it confirmed," Starlit responded. A small lie, given Starlit hadn't mentioned it, but enough to bolster her spirits.
"But... why would the Queen send kidnappers? If she wanted Applejack, she would've just summoned her."
"That part we aren't aware of," Starlit continued, "but she was in my room and had my knife at the time, so chances are good that the kidnappers may have been looking for me."
"Why wasn't I told this bit of information?" Cherry asked.
"Because I hadn't thought of it until about ten minutes ago," Starlit answered. "Sun didn't feel much like talking outside, so it gave me time to ruminate on this."
"But why would they come after you?" Apple Bloom asked. "I know that you're dead set on going to the palace, but word shouldn't have been able to spread that fast."
"I don't know how she knows, but she does, and apparently she isn't happy," Starlit answered. "Whatever the case may be, this is only giving me another reason to get on with this."
"So what're you going to do when you see the Queen?" Apple Bloom asked.
Starlit let out a heavy sigh, looking to the floor as she weighed her options. Apple Bloom seemed smart, moreso than most of her neighbors gave her credit for if her frustration was anything to build off of, but she was going to have to lie about this. The idea didn't sit well with her.
"I'm... not sure yet," Starlit answered, trying her best to mask her uncertainty. "I have a request to make of her — or a series of them now — but how well it shakes out with her will affect how I have to deal with this."
"Do you think you'll have to kill her?" Apple Bloom asked, the question hitting Starlit like a sack of rocks.
"I would like for it to not have to come to that—" Starlit began.
"Why not?" Apple Bloom interrupted.
"Apple Bloom, you can't seriously be asking Starlit to assassinate the Queen?" Cherry asked, doing a much worse job at hiding her uncertainty.
"What if I am? Cherry, that pony took my entire family away, sent her minions to beat up my sister, and left me with a whole life to take care of! I didn't even get to know my parents because of her! Maybe... maybe I just want some justice."
The three of them sat in silence as Apple Bloom's words hung in the air like a thick fog. Starlit had tried pushing the idea to the back of her mind, but now it was thrown front and center in her psyche; she might just have to grievously harm or kill the Princesses if they wouldn't return willingly.
Starlit's mind was running a mile a minute with the very notion. How would she do it? Could she just stab them with her sword? What if they took her weapons away? What if she couldn't just stab them? What if she couldn't even harm them?
Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, Starlit turned back to Apple Bloom, who was twiddling her forehooves nervously on the table.
"Apple Bloom, I understand that you want vengeance, or justice, or some form of retribution," Starlit said, "but the business I have with the Queen needs to be handled carefully and with a minimal amount of bloodshed. I only have my weapons for self-defense anyway, and can barely use them for that. I'll do my best to get your sister back, maybe even find out what became of the rest of your family, but you have to understand that my goal here may not line up with what you want me to do."
Apple Bloom continued twiddling her hooves as her brow furrowed in thought.
"I guess that's all I can ask for," Apple Bloom said after a short pause. "Just, please bring Applejack home for me; she's all I've got left."
Fresh tears dripped down Apple Bloom's face as she looked back up at Starlit. Behind the sadness Starlit could see just a faint glimmer of hope, and that was enough for her. Calmly she wrapped Apple Bloom up in a gentle hug, letting the filly' tears fall into her chest.
"I promise, I'll get her back," Starlit said, repeating the words she had told to Cherry.
Apple Bloom buried her face further into Starlit's chest, wrapping her forelegs around her neck as she did. Starlit was getting a sense of dejá vu, given that Applejack had done this exact same thing not a few hours prior.
"Sun!" Starlit called, Apple Bloom still clinging to her.
"Ma'am?" Sun answered, trotting through the swinging saloon doors.
"Go home, get whatever you're going to need, and meet me back here in half-an-hour," Starlit commanded. "As soon as you're here we're leaving for the Plains."
"Three... days..." Setting Sun moaned. "We've been out here... for three days... and found nothing."
"I can't believe I'm having to tell a grown stallion this for what feels like the thousandth time, but your insessant complaining isn't going to make this any easier," Starlit Sky chided.
The sweat had been pouring off of her brow since the early morning when they had first made their camp, but the way Sun was treating it made it seem like the flesh was being seared from his body. As irritating as he was being, it was slightly less irritating than the admittedly fantastical shelters Sun had brought; the bauble he had shown her split into two halves and each one could expand into a small hut about three feet tall and four feet wide, just enough for a pony and a selection of equipment to huddle under. It was a tight fit given Starlit had armor and weapons alongside her saddlebags, but its enchanted brass surface protected her from the sun well enough.
"Well, it makes me feel better," Sun replied with a pout. "You'd think we'd at least have seen something out here other than cracked dirt and the occasional bit of dried vegetation."
"You've been keeping track of the map, right?" Starlit asked.
"Yeah, and I've even put some of my amateur astronomy skills to work by charting the stars to make sure we're still heading east," Sun answered. He ducked back into his shelter for a moment before pulling out a few sheets of parchment. On the largest one was a map detailing the area and emblazoned with the same insignia as Starlit had seen on the kidnapper's clothes.
"This is where we are currently," Sun continued, moving himself and his shelter closer to Starlit's and pointing to a nondescript spot on the map about twenty-five miles away from Appleoosa. "The path on the map says that we should have gotten within eyesight of the palace by now but still be about a day off from the place itself."
"And yet all I see is sand, dirt, and the horizon," Starlit interjected, taking a quick glance around. The sun burned against her forehead as she poked her head out of whatever magic Sun had placed on his bauble-turned-shelter that kept them from frying underneath its brass exterior.
"Exactly, and that's what's bothering me. From what little the ponies who come back from the palace have said, the Radiant Queen makes a show of her abode. It wouldn't be like her to hide it away, even if she had the magic to do so."
The pair stooped over the map in silence, trying to prise more secrets out of the nondescript bit of parchment and failing miserably.
"I guess we should just stay the course," Starlit commented. "Keep following the path on the map and hope that we eventually run nose-first into a wall."
"You know," Sun cut in, "for a pony who's convinced that the fate of Equestria is riding on this, you're being remarkably blasé about us being potentially lost in a sun-blasted wasteland with only a thin layer of brass and an even thinner layer of wards keeping us from becoming desiccated husks for whatever carrion birds can survive out here."
"I'd prefer the vultures to thestrals, but that's beside the point," Starlit answered. "We have nothing else to go off of other than this, so why worry over things that might happen when we have plenty to worry about that is happening."
"Thestrals?" Sun asked, head cocked to the side.
"You... don't know what a thestral is?" Starlit asked back, equally as perplexed.
"Can't say I do, no. Care to elaborate?"
Starlit looked back to the map, doing whatever she could to keep from having to make eye contact. In her mind she heard distant cries for help and hellish whinnies and growls, saw black, emaciated flesh and mouths brimming with sharp fangs instead of straight teeth.
Quickly she shook her head, dismissing the thoughts before she looked back up.
"We have a while before nightfall, it'd be the best thing to do to pass the time with," Starlit said. "Just know that these creatures aren't to be trifled with; if you see one then you do exactly as I say, no questions asked."
"Certainly," Sun answered as he put the map and his star charts back. Wiggling a bit to soften the unyielding dirt, he laid his chin on his hooves and waited for Starlit to begin.
"Firstly," she began, "have you ever heard of the Wasting?"
He quickly shook his head, and Starlit snorted at his ignorance.
"Figures," Starlit continued. "Since you have your sun goddess to bathe the area in magic it's likely that you wouldn't get it out here, but back where I come from there is little magic to be found."
"But you're a unicorn," Sun piped up. "How can you be a unicorn and have no magic?"
"There's a very old story, one that's been passed down in my family for generations, that tells of five Princesses who blessed the land with magic and life. Strife broke out among them and they had a long and costly war for the land, and when all was said and done they were gone and the magic gone with them."
Starlit pawed at the dirt, doing her best to keep her armored hooves out of the scorching rays. It felt wrong to her, telling the story of the Princesses to a pony that wasn't White Eclipse; that had been their story, as it had been hers with her grandmother that reared her.
"I'm not sure how much of it is true," Starlit continued, "but I know one part that is; magic is nearly non-existent in my part of Equestria, and it manifests in a few ways. In pegasi, their wings become tattered and unkempt and they can barely glide, let alone fly. In earth ponies it shows as a weakness, both of body and of spirit. And in unicorns, our near-universal inability to use magic except for the simplest and least taxing of tasks is how it shows itself."
"That's... that's awful!" Sun interjected. "How have you survived all this time out there without even the most rudimentary skill in magic?"
"We've adapted. Learned to work together, make up for each other's weaknesses, and come together as communities for the betterment of all. When you live in a place where the ground is fallow and dangerous creatures stalk the forests and hills, that's all you can do."
"Makes sense," Sun mused. "If I suddenly found myself without even my meager magical ability I wouldn't know what to do, but this doesn't tell me how these 'thestrals' factor in."
"I was just getting to that," Starlit said, her voice taking an edge to it. "In certain cases, where a pony's will is broken beyond repair and they've lost whatever their intrinsic drive or goal in life was, they start to change. We call it the Wasting; a magical disease that takes hold when a pony falls into hopelessness and despair. As far as we know the lack of magic is a catalyst for the disease, which is why you folks out here have probably never heard of it due to your proximity to the Radiant Queen's magic."
"That would explain things," Sun said, a twinge of guilt in his voice. "And thestrals are related to this disease?"
"Yes," Starlit continued, doing her best to keep a level voice. "A thestral is the final stage of the disease, when a pony has lost all sense and remnants of their personality to become a mindless, hollowed-out husk of whoever they once were. One troubling aspect of the disease's progression is that the magic of the disease gives back whatever that type of pony had lost; earth ponies are strong again, pegasi are able to fly on skeletal and featherless wings, and unicorns can cast horrible spells of black crystal and deep purple energies."
Setting Sun's face betrayed a morbid curiosity in what Starlit was saying, and she couldn't suppress a sneer at his wonder.
"They are also unerringly violent and deranged beasts that won't hesitate to attack anything that looks at them sideways, and quite a few things that don't!" Starlit chided with a harsh voice. "These abominations aren't to be taken lightly, so get any thoughts of studying them out of your head."
"I—I wasn't going to—never in a million years would I—perish the thought!" Sun fumbled.
"Yes, perish the thought," Starlit cut in. "Find the thought in your head and kill it, and make sure that another, similar thought doesn't take its place. Now get some rest, we have to be ready for nightfall."
Without another word Starlit retreated back into her small brass hut and slid the slats of it shut with a clattering scrape. She didn't want him to see the tears pooling up in her eyes, the beads of sweat sliding down her forehead, and her idly stroking her mane like a child with a doll.
"They'll just keeping walking," Starlit muttered. After a while the stress began to lull her into a fitful sleep, along with the logical part of her brain hammering the emotional part into submission.
"They'll just keep walking."
* * *
Nightfall in the desert was still a phenomenon that Starlit was getting used to; rather than the blistering heat of the day, she found the nights to be quite cool, if a tad too arid for her tastes. Just as the ground had soaked up the heat in the day, at night it released it all back into the sky.
She cracked what seemed like every joint in her body, working out the kinks of having to stay curled up in fetal position underneath her brass dome, while also rubbing the grime from her eyes. Her sleep had been stressful, and not all of it caused by the bedding situation.
Setting Sun had just finished packing up his shelter into its compact, half spherical form, dull brown cloak strung around his neck to ward off the chill night air, when he broke the still desert silence.
"Starlit, I'm sorry," he said.
"What for?" Starlit asked, already quite sure about what he meant.
"I think I touched a nerve when I asked about the thestrals earlier," he answered. "I'm not going to pry about it, but if you have something that you need to get off of your chest about them then I'm here for you."
"There's nothing we need to discuss," Starlit answered with a curt snort. "And I'm fine. I appreciate the offer, but I'm fine."
"Alright, I just wanted to establish some trust," Sun continued as he strapped Starlit's dagger to his foreleg. She had loaned it to him since he didn't own any weapons of his own and couldn't be counted on to rely on his magic for long periods of time.
The pair finished their preparations in silence, Starlit donning her body armor, sword sheath, and saddlebags by levitating them into place. The further into the Plains they went the easier it was becoming for her to use her magic, to the point where she was starting to forget what life was like without it.
"So, eastward we go?" Starlit asked.
"More north-easterly, but that's the general direction. If we keep up the same pace then we should get there in another two nights of travel. I'm actually kind of astonished with how little interference we've been hitting."
Starlit bit her tongue, so as not to admonish him for his potential jinxing of their good fortune. She had found her vigilance starting to slip due to the complete lack of opposition thus far, especially after seeing what had happened to Applejack, and it was starting to make her nervous. Something was going to give soon, and Sun's naïveté wasn't helping matters.
"Enough jaw-jacking, let's get moving," Starlit said, pressing onward.
They traveled in relative silence for the majority of the night, with the moon having skittered its way to near the horizon to make way for morning. It had been full tonight, allowing for a clear view of the horse-head shaped arrangement of craters on its surface, and provided enough light for them to see a series of shapes in the distance.
"Hold up," Starlit said, holding a leg out to stop Sun. He bumped into it, nearly dropping the map out of his magic before looking forward.
"What's that?" he asked.
Starlit squinted, focusing her eyes off to the middle distance. It was an arrangement of four vaguely box-like shapes. They could be buildings or some odd geological formations, but she couldn't be sure until they got closer. At the very least they were unilluminated, only showing their mauve coloring by way of the moonlight.
"Could be buildings," Starlit said.
"Out here?" Sun asked to nopony in particular. "Can't be, nothing can grow here; anypony trying to live there would either starve, dehydrate, fry, or some horrendous combination of the three."
"Sun, you're not helping the tension," Starlit admonished. "Besides, they aren't too far out of our way and look to only be a few miles off. We can set up camp there for the morning and possibly be able to get some decent rest for the first time in four days."
"What about my shelters?" Sun asked, obviously dejected.
"They're nice, but with all of our gear they're also quite cramped. A mare needs to be able to stretch out once in a while, you know?"
"Do you always try to find something to complain about?" Sun asked.
"Consider it my special talent," Starlit replied with a smirk. "Now hustle up, the sun will be rising in no time."
The pair veered off to the right side of the trail on the map, at a slightly faster pace than normal in order to get there before sunrise. As they approached Starlit could see crude windows carved into the block-like buildings, and they thankfully seemed to have their roofs intact. As Sun had predicted there were no signs of life at all, making it a mystery as to who had erected these structures.
The sun was just barely starting to peek over the horizon when they arrived, ducking into the closest of the abandoned buildings.
The interior was just as spartan as the exterior; no signs of habitation other than the remains of what could've been a bed and nightstand, and a small fireplace with attached chimney built into the rear wall.
"Cozy," Sun quipped. "Way better than my shelters."
"At least there's some more space," Starlit quipped back. "I need some time to get my armor off, go check out the other buildings before the sun comes up and see if there's anything useful in them."
With a quick nod Sun cantered out the door, giving Starlit her privacy.
"Eager to please, that one," she thought as she magically unbuckled the straps of her armor. "At least he has the talent to back up his verve, otherwise he'd be less than useless."
Lightly she rolled her shoulders, working the muscle ache out of them as she used her magic to pile her armor and gear neatly in the corner by the fireplace. As light as it was, it still made her shoulders and back stiff having to carry it, her sword, and her saddlebags all at once.
She started sifting through the remains of the bed that lay in the corner opposite her equipment. Even in its decrepit state she could tell that the material was of a fine make, certainly softer than anything she had ever laid down on. The frame was still relatively intact, although it was desiccated due to the arid environment and lack of maintinence.
The bedding had been mostly destroyed, so when Starlit ran her hoof over a soft and solid item she jumped. Carefully she moved aside the tattered mattress to reveal a small doll, one in the shape of a rabbit with small black gems for eyes and a pale pink one for its nose.
"Who would possibly waste gems on a doll?" Starlit mused to herself.
She looked at the small thing on the ground intently; it was in quite good condition, with the fabric and stuffing intact and its gemstone embellishments still having their luster. With a quick incantation and flick of her horn she pulled the doll out of the pile of threadbare cloth and placed it over in her saddlebags.
"Eclipse might like it," she thought, a small twinge of worry going through her chest as she did.
"Hey Starlit," Sun called from outside, "you're gonna want to see this."
The pang of worry in her chest growing larger, she strapped her smallsword back to her waist and cantered over to where Sun stood. The sun would be rising any minute now, so she moved with some alacrity.
Sun was posted up outside the building just across what might have been a street in some bygone age, the door slightly ajar.
"What did you find?" Starlit asked.
"Something possibly good and something... definitely not," Setting Sun answered.
Quickly Starlit pushed the door open and was overcome by a horrid stench, one that pushed the bile to the tip of her throat. It was the sight that was causing the stench that got it the rest of the way, and she retched yesterday's meal into the sand.
The building was much like the other one, stark in appearances and with a single chimney at the rear wall, although this one was also host to a set of stairs leading downward into the soil. Coming out of the entrance to the stairs, however, was a sight Starlit had hoped never to see again; a unicorn thestral, dead on the floor in a pool of its own dried blood. It's eyes were clouded white with cataracts and its mottled black skin stretched taut over its skeletal frame turned her stomach into knots.
Quickly she slammed the door shut and staggered to the side of the house, trying her best to hold her meager dinner down.
"Why didn't you warn me?!" Starlit hollered at Sun after she had finished retching into the dirt. Her head was swimming from nausea and all she could focus on was the root cause of her problem.
"I... I..." Sun stammered.
"Spit it out!"
"I was going to but you barreled right in!" Sun shot back as he started to shift awkwardly from side to side.
"Then maybe next time you should be more assertive," Starlit replied, trying to regain some measure of her composure.
"Well it's a little hard to when you keep belittling me and treating me like a foal!"
Slowly Starlit turned to face her traveling companion, a feeling of anger, indignance, and confusion all mixing in her stomach like a soup of foul emotions.
"When have I ever treated you that way?" Starlit asked.
"Do you want the alphabetical or chronological list?" Sun answered, his voice sounding an inch off from breaking. "How about yesterday when you shot me down about these hideous things before I could even say anything? Or maybe how you keep complaining about my shelters even though they're the only thing keeping us alive out here! Or, hey, maybe how you keep ordering me around like I'm some sort of slave!?"
Setting Sun's eyes started to well up, and Starlit started going back through the last few days in her mind. True, she had been rather curt with him at times, but she had tried to encourage him where she could.
"Sun, I—" Starlit began before being cut off.
"No, now its my turn to talk!" Sun said. "I went into this thinking we'd be equals, but you've only ever treated my contributions as expected, as something you could use and disregard. I've tried to grin and bear it, but you need to take a step back and look at yourself! I may be a few years younger than you, but I am not about to get bullied by an upjumped dirt-farmer who's starting to go power-mad!"
Starlit felt her blood boil, saw her vision go red at the sheer disrespect she was being shown, but inside the seething anger there was a glimmer of truth to what he was saying. She had been treating him like a servant, and her behavior had been a tad dismissive of his considerable achievements.
"... Sun, I'm sorry," Starlit said, willing her anger to go back to the pits of her stomach. "You're right, I have been dismissive and rude, and while it's partially my mission to blame it's mostly my fault."
Sun blinked a bit, seemingly taken aback by Starlit's sudden shift in demeanor.
"That... that's it?" Sun asked. "That's all it took?"
"It would seem so," Starlit answered. "You are a passionate stallion, that much can be said, and I was taking that passion for recklessness. You are an inquisitive pony with a mind sharper than any I have met before and from here on out we are equals in this endeavor. Agreed?"
Starlit held out one of her midnight blue hooves in a gesture of supplication, and nervously but with energy Sun clanked his horseshoe against hers.
"Agreed," Sun answered. "Now, about this..."
The two turned back to look at the dead monstrosity, and the hole in the ground that it was coming out of. Starlit could feel that wave of nausea wash over her again as she dreaded what she had to do next.
"I suppose we'll have to move it out of the way, see what's down there," Starlit said.
"Starlit, I'll take care of it," Sun said, with a little more authority than normal. "Admit it or not, there's something about these things that freaks you out. My magic's stronger than yours as well, so I'll be able to drag it out of the way on my own. Go get some rest, I'll be in the house after a little while."
Not waiting for her reply, Setting Sun trotted into the house, his horn lighting with its green hue as he did. Slowly Starlit walked back to her abode for the day, the sun now fully over the horizon and starting to heat her fur up just as she got inside.
Exhausted both from the night's journey and the emotional drain of her argument and the thestral, Starlit fell into a deep sleep among the ruined pile of soft stuff from the bed. The only sound she heard was Sun coming in, laying his cloak down, and then laying down next to her on the pile.
The sun was low on the western horizon when Starlit emerged from her hovel. The morning's argument was still fresh in her memory, so it came as some surprise that she saw Sun outside, a spade floating in his magic and tamping down an earthen mound.
"Is that for the—" Starlit began.
"Thestral, and yes it is," Sun interjected. "I figured I'd take care of it before you woke up, given your aversion to them."
"Well, thanks for the consideration Sun," Starlit replied. A chill raced down her spine as she thought of its blackened and emaciated flesh, its clouded eyes locked in a forward stare.
"I know you said not to bother studying them, but I did something of an autopsy on it," Sun continued. "I wanted to see if there were any weaknesses in their physiology to exploit if and when we run into a live one."
"What'd you find out?" Starlit asked, biting back the accusation she wanted to hurl at him.
"Now, I'm no biologist," Sun replied, "but given the state of its innards and musculature that thing shouldn't have been able to move, let alone be as much of a threat as you claim they are."
What do you mean? Were they shriveled, hacked to ribbons by whatever unholy magic powers those things?" Starlit spat.
"I wish," Sun answered, sticking his spade back in his bags and turning to face Starlit. "They weren't there."
"Impossible," Starlit replied, "they have to have something prolonging their wretched existence."
"That's exactly what I thought, so I did a bit more digging—"
"Poor choice of words," Starlit interjected. The mere thought of digging in a thestral's corpse sent a chill down her neck.
"Right, but bad wordplay aside, I did find something in there; a sort of network of tubes lining the chest and abdominal cavities and leading up through the limbs and back up the neck, like thick arteries or nerves."
"And you're saying that it was those tubes that are powering it?" Starlit asked incredulously.
"In a way," Sun answered as he stepped to the side. "As I said, biology and anatomy aren't my thing, but I've done extensive study of the arcane system that powers a pony's intrinsic magic. In every type it works differently but the conduit is a series of vessels that act like nerves and arteries mixed into one."
With a shudder Sun turned back to look at his makeshift grave.
"Whatever the Wasting did to that thing, it cannibalized their organs and all unnecessary bodily mass to widen and strengthen those vessels, turning the arcane system into a horrendous mishmash of tubes that filled in the place of everything the disease destroyed."
Starlit's breathing grew rapid as Sun kept talking, and every fiber of her being was telling her to clamp a hoof over his mouth.
"Was there..." Starlit began, swallowing her nerves, "was there anything left untouched?"
"Nothing, not even the heart," Sun answered. "Whatever the Wasting is, it lives up to the name; it consumed that unicorn from the inside out and left it as a mindless shell powered only by horrifyingly corrupted magic."
Starlit sat down on the warm sand, only finding the strength to blink and breath. Such a clinical description of such a terrible fate had her stomach tied in knots and her mind frantically recalling memories she had long since buried inside of herself.
"There was one other thing," Sun continued as he sat down beside Starlit. "I was able to make out their Cutie Mark through the mottling on their skin."
Slowly Starlit turned her head to face her companion, still flabbergasted by what he had already told her and haunted by the thought that this thestral was actually a pony at one point.
"It was a tree," Sun said, "lush and green. Whoever that thestral was in life, it had something to do with plants, and that means that this whole place used to be green too."
Starlit didn't reply, only turned back down to stare at the pale beige dust beneath her hooves. A few teardrops fell from her eyes and stained the sand before she quickly regained her composure.
"Don't you see, Starlit?" Sun continued, the timbre of his voice rising. "Once we handle the Queen and get her to stop whatever is making this place a desert, this place can be green again, it can support life again!"
"And then what?" Starlit asked. "We all forget what's happened, pretend it wasn't anything more than a bad dream?"
"Well, no, I mean the sheer ecological damage alone would take—"
"Sun, you are a smart stallion, but you're naïve," Starlit interjected as she stood up and walked towards the building with the cellar. "C'mon, we need to see where this cellar goes."
Quickly Starlit cantered into the building and down the cellar, past the bloodstain and drag marks that Sun had made carrying the body outside. She didn't want him to see her tears, quick as they were.
* * *
The cellar was as nondescript as they came; a few torches in their sconces on the wall to illuminate it, a few shelfs with jars whose labels had long since worn away and whose contents were almost certainly inedible at best or pure poison at worst, and a table with some farming implements on it.
The pair had been searching for any point of origin for the thestral to have come from out of the sealed basement, but their efforts were proving fruitless. The room looked to have been carved out of the solid rock when the house was built on top of it, leaving no entry or egress points save for the stairs up.
"Well this was utterly pointless," Starlit groused. "Come on, we need to get a move on. We're losing moonlight."
"Just give me five more minutes," Sun replied, "I need to confirm some things."
"Like what? We are on something of a schedule, Sun."
"Mainly trying to figure out these torches," Sun answered. "I want to know if this is some sort of everlasting fire enchantment or not, because if it isn't then that means somepony had to have lit these."
"Well, don't take too long," Starlit admonished. "I'll wait for you outside."
Starlit was halfway out the front door before she was stopped by a grinding sound coming from the cellar, followed by a yelp of terror and a series of thuds that grew fainter and fainter. Quickly she pulled an about face and ran back downstairs to see a large opening in the far wall, a section of it having swung open and one of the sconces angled downward.
"Sun? Are you okay?" Starlit called.
"I've been better," Sun yelled back from the cavernous hole. "On the plus side, I think we know where our friend came from."
"Hold on Sun, I'm coming down." Starlit stood precipitously on the threshold of the wall, gazing into the cloying void just outside of the torch's sphere of light. It was dark, the walls had a slick quality to them that betrayed the fact that there was naturally occurring moisture, and the floor of the cellar gave way to a series of stone steps. The passageway was narrow, and the ceiling just high enough for her to not scrape her horn on it.
Swallowing the knot of fear caught in her throat, Starlit descended the steps. She walked deliberately, taking care to secure each hoofstep before taking the next. While her magic had been growing stronger by the day she still couldn't sustain a light spell for as long as it would take to get to the bottom of the steps, nor did she want to risk dropping a torch and making any more unnecessary noise.
After an amount of time that was certainly shorter than what it felt like she reached the bottom of the steps to see Sun, horn illuminated with pale green light and a splotch of the wall moisture on his cloak.
"Are you okay?" Starlit asked. "That sounded like a pretty bad fall."
"Just a few flesh wounds and a sore back," Sun answered, "nothing to get worked up over."
"If that's the case, then what say we figure out what this place is," Starlit said, the pair turning to face the left side wall. "We'll need to be quick, because if one thestral came out of here than there may be mor—"
"Y'all take one more step and I'm gonna lay you out," a third voice intoned from behind them, a male one with a very distinct drawl that set Starlit's brain firing and caused Sun to let out a yelp of fright.
"Now I don't know what the two of you think you're doing down here, but this place ain't for you," the voice continued, "so y'all are gonna turn your hindquarters right back around and hightail it out of here. We don't want anything to do with the Queen, and the only ponies that come out here are on her business."
"Listen, we made a mistake, we were just looking for some shelter and found this plac—" Sun said before Starlit cut him off.
"You're an Apple, aren't you?" she asked.
The room grew deathly quiet, and neither Sun nor Starlit dared to turn around. All they did was exchange quick nervous glances between each other while their interrogator maintained his silence.
"What of it?" the stallion asked.
"Okay, then if that's the case I need you to listen very carefully to me," Starlit answered. "We're not here on the Queen's orders, and we didn't get a summons from her either. Your relative, Applejack, was kidnapped by some of the Queen's ponies and my friend and I are out here trying to track her down. We came upon this place by happenstance, but if you really are an Apple then you'll help us out."
"And why would I believe you?!" the stallion shot back. "This is all just a little too convenient if you ask me!"
"You should believe me because if you don't then you're going to lose any and all chance of seeing her ever again," Starlit replied, a little more forcefully. "Plus, we've got a dead and buried thestral outside that says these catacombs have an outbreak of the Wasting, which is something you're going to want some help with."
The silence hung in the air like a thick blanket, and despite her veneer of confidence Starlit's heart was racing. The stallion behind her was certainly an earth pony given his shared lineage with Applejack, and if she was anything to judge off of the last thing Starlit wanted was a physical altercation with any relative of hers.
"...Follow me," the stallion relented, "and don't try anything funny."
"Believe me, we won't," Sun replied as he and Starlit turned to face their erstwhile captor. He was wearing some sort of full body covering that only left a small amount of space around his eyes visible, and in the dim light she could only tell that his eyes were a dull green color.
With a jerk of the head the stallion bade them to follow him down the dark hallway he had emerged from. It too had a slick quality to the walls and floor, giving off a sickly and slimy appearance as the green glow of Sun's magic illuminated it.
"Y'all have names?" the stallion asked, more demand than question.
"Setting Sun," Sun replied, his voice cracking ever so slightly with surprise.
"Starlit Sky," Starlit answered back. "You?"
"I don't think that that's much concern to you two right now," the stallion shot back.
Deciding not to press the issue lest he turn hostile, Starlit let the sullen silence refill the air, permeated only by the sounds of their own hoofsteps and the occasional dripping of water from the ceiling. The tension gave her flashbacks to when she was a filly and had accidentally let a batch of carrots mold.
Twisting and turning down the endless hallways was playing hell with Starlit’s sense of direction; at this rate, even if she wanted to escape she doubted she'd be able to find her way back to the surface. Judging by the amount of sweat pouring off of Sun’s forehead, Starlit figured he'd come to the same realization and wasn't doing nearly as good of a job at hiding it.
After an interminable walk the trio came up to a solid rock wall, a sight which perplexed Starlit but seemingly bemused her captor.
“Y’all turn around, and if I catch either of you trying to use magic to see what I'm doing I'll have your leg bones for quill-holders,” the stallion ordered.
Not wanting to be messily dismembered, or worse vivisected, Starlit happily complied. Sun didn't even need prompting, although the threat of gruesome repurposing had sent his knees shaking.
All Starlit heard was the sound of a hoof scraping against the wall, followed by a harsh grinding sound accompanied by a stream of light and noise. Daring a glance she turned her head to see out of her periphery.
“Oh my stars,” Starlit said as she turned to take in the sight. Sun quickly followed suit and his mouth simply dropped open in wonder.
Before them was a town—nay, a city—seemingly hewn from the rock of the cave they were in; buildings carved from stone, large plazas decorated with precious stones that glowed of their own accord, and more ponies than she'd ever seen gathered into one space ambling about and living their lives.
And dominating it all, at the far side of this wondrous cavern, was a massive building of carved sandstone, adorned with parapets and minarets to connect it to the ceiling of the cave and festooned with more of those glowing gems. Large tattered banners of fierce reds and oranges hung from its walls, although their insignias had long since worn away, and where there was once a drawbridge now was a ramshackle bridge of equal parts wood, metal, and stone.
“C’mon now, you two’ll have time for sight seeing later,” the stallion said as he walked down the ramp connecting the tunnel to the floor of the cavern. “Cherry Jubilee is gonna want to talk with you about why you’re here.”
Starlit and Sun both followed him down the ramp, the both of them nearly tripping off of it as they gazed in every direction they could.
* * *
“I never knew there was this much civilization left in the whole world,” Starlit said as the trio wound their way through the crowded streets. “What is this place?”
“It had some fancy name a long time ago, but nowadays we just call it Undersand,” the stallion replied. “It's also home to a lot of ponies; families, friends, merchants and the like.”
“How in Equestria do you sustain yourselves down here?” Sun chimed in, his coltish curiosity betrayed by his voice. “I mean, without natural sunlight you can't possibly grow plants down here, and given how secretive you all are I'm assuming trade is out of the question.”
“We make do,” the stallion continued, “but I'm not telling you anymore until Cherry gives me the okay to.”
“Cherry?” Starlit asked. “You mentioned them before, are they your leader?”
“She's more than just our leader, she's the one keeping the whole operation afloat,” the stallion answered. “Without her skillful mind for logistics this place would've torn itself apart a long time ago.”
“If she's half as smart as you say she is, then I'm certain she'll see our reasoning,” Starlit replied.
“I'm sure she will,” the stallion scoffed.
The rest of the walk to the other side of the city was spent with taciturn silence from their captor, but gasps of wonder and confusion from the common ponies of Undersand. Questions about who they were whispered just loud enough to hear, mother’s bustling their foals out of sight even as they begged to see who the strangers were, and a few snorts of derision from some of the older ponies that they passed.
“Is it just me, or are they not thrilled to see us? “ Sun asked.
“I'm pretty sure it's just you, Sun,” Starlit answered. “After all, you have a certain puckish quality that’s just screaming to be shoved in a mud puddle.”
“Oh har-dee-har-har,” Sun shot back. “If anything, they'd probably want to throw you, all tall, dark, and mysterious, out on your flank before me, being the milquetoast stallion of science that I am.”
“So, agree to disagree?” Starlit said with a smile.
“You said it, not me,” Sun replied with an equally smug smile.
“If y’all are finished with your little game, then we're here,” the stallion cut in. Before them stood not the palace, but a smaller square building about a hundred yards away from the bridge to the palace.
“You two wait here, and don't go running off,” he continued. “As you’ve no doubt figured out, nopony here will help you if you try to make a break for it, and quite a few of them’ll likely try taking you down themselves.”
“Not that you wouldn't love to see them try,” Sun replied.
“Just stay put,” he replied tersely, pushing open the door and slipping inside.
A few muffled voices made it out of the rough wooden door; one was their captor, and the other smooth and feminine. Starlit put her ear up to the door to try and catch what they were saying, beckoning Sun to do the same.
“Braeburn,” the female voice, probably Cherry Jubilee, said, “if I've told you once I've told you a thousand times, ponies not on business with the Queen are welcome down here! You had no reason to hold them captive like that!”
“And what would you have me do about a mare with a sword at her hip and armor bearing a strange insignia alongside a stallion who has all the trappings of one of her court sorcerers? Just let ‘em waltz on in, have their run of the place?”
“Well certainly not threaten them with death, which I'm certain you did! Anyway, it's a moot point now, so just see them in so I can have a look at them.”
Quickly Starlit jumped back and pulled Sun away from the door, the pair standing casually as Braeburn opened it back up.
“Cherry’ll see you now,” Braeburn said, holding the door open for them. “But no funny business, y’hear?”
“Not at all, sir,” Starlit answered. “Not at all.”
The interior of the room was decorated conservatively, with only a single rug in the middle and a simple but comfortable bed off to one corner to belie the fact that somepony actually lived here. The rest of the one-room abode was taken up by tables and chairs covered in all sorts of scrolls, charts, and instruments.
Standing on the far side of the central table stood a cream-colored Earth Pony mare with rich, shimmering crimson hair that matched her equally vibrant eyes. The lines on her face showed that she was roughly the same age as Starlit.
“Firstly,” Cherry began, “let me give you two my sincerest apologies about Braeburn. He's always been a tad gung-ho about security, which makes him a suspicious sort of pony, although he's more riled up than I've seen as of late.”
“It's alright, ma'am,” Sun replied. “Honestly, we didn't expect to meet anypony when we wandered down here, much less see this wonderful city of yours.”
“And his being ‘riled up’ might be our fault,” Starlit continued, “as well as being related to our business here.”
“Well, I'm certain that any knowledge you might have would be greatly beneficial for both of our causes,” Cherry replied. “I'm Cherry Jubilee, by the by, although I'm sure Braeburn told you my name as he was bringing you down here.”
“I'm Starlit Sky, and my partner here is Setting Sun,” Starlit said, bowing her head as she did so. “I'm to assume that you’re in charge around here?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Cherry answered. “We don't have an officially established government, but most ponies gravitate towards a few of us here to sort things out, and I just so happen to be one of those lucky few.”
“And what is it that most ponies come to you for?”
“Mostly for tips on scavenging the palace, but I'm also in charge of surface excursions and security detail here. You two are a long ways away from home, aren't you?”
“Yes, some further than others,” Sun answered. “I'm from Appleoosa, but Starlit comes from central Equestria.”
“Appleoosa, you say?” Cherry asked, brow furrowing in confusion. “Didn't think anypony still lived out that way. Braeburn had kin that way, as do quite a few ponies here in Undersand.”
“That's why we were wandering the desert, actually,” Starlit continued. “One of Braeburn’s relatives, Applejack, got kidnapped by some of the Queen’s goons, and we’re trying to track down the Queen’s palace to get her back. If you could possibly offer a few of your guardsponies as an escort to see us there, then we’ll both be on our way.”
Cherry let out a peal of hearty laughter, trying and failing to stifle her sudden onset of giggles with her hoof as Starlit and Sun shifted nervously at her outburst.
“Is something about this funny to you?” Starlit demanded. “Applejack could be dead for all we know, and you’re going to laugh about this?”
“I'm sorry, truly I am,” Cherry answered, waving her hoof as she regained her composure. “It's just that what you’re asking is not only impossible without a summons from Her Majesty, but something that ponies down here have been attempting for years and years with absolutely no success.”
“I'm still not seeing the humor,” Starlit said, voice seething with anger.
“It just strikes me as odd that somepony so far removed from the culture of victimhood that the Queen’s reign has fostered would still have that self-same goal that everypony else in Undersand has.”
“Victimhood?” Sun asked. “You mean the sunlight, and the kidnappings?”
“That much, yes,” Cherry answered, her tone growing serious, “and so much more.
Slowly Cherry turned her gaze downward, contemplating the beige stone of the floor as if it held answers to every question she had ever asked.
“Do you know what it's like, Setting Sun, to live every day of your life not knowing if your neighbors are going to be there the next morning?”
“...No,” Sun answered meekly.
“And tell me,” Cherry continued, tone rising in bitterness, “have you ever seen the terror in a child’s eyes as they wander the streets, unsure of where their parents went, only realizing far too late that they're never going to be seen again and there's nothing they can do about it?”
“I–I don't, but I'm sur—“ Sun sputtered before being shouted down.
“Then let me illuminate some facts for you, Setting Sun and Starlit Sky!” Cherry continued. “We have a very fragile and hostile relationship with the Queen that has seen family and friend ripped away from each other for as long as we have records to recall such things! There is nothing in this world I would love more than to see that detestable and loathsome mare removed from her throne and for her blood to run red through our streets, but I will not sacrifice more of our citizens on a fool’s errand!”
Cherry slammed her hooves onto the table, the rough wood groaning from the strain. Starlit could see Sun shaking like a leaf at Cherry’s protestations.
“You two will get no support from my people if you want to throw your lives away, and that is the end of that,” Cherry hissed, turning her back to them and facing a large set of charts and graphs on the wall.
Sun tugged on Starlit’s armor, motioning his head to the door. Quickly Starlit brushed his hoof off and stood tall, facing the table.
“Cherry, I have a daughter,” Starlit said. The last word caused Cherry’s ears to perk, and she turned her head so that she could see Starlit out of her periphery.
“Do you think this will garner some sort of sympathy with me? We all have loved ones.”
“I'm not so sure of that,” Starlit replied. “You and I, we’re about the same age, and we’re of a similar temperament as well; stubborn, bossy, and just a little too set in our ways.”
Cherry fully turned to face Starlit, the lines on her face and the slight bags under her eyes betraying her hard-lived life.
“You've lost somepony dear to you, haven't you?” Starlit asked.
A hollow silence hung up in the stale cavern air as the two mares, so alike in countenance that it was like they were staring into a mirror, dared the other to make the first move. It would be Cherry that broke their standstill as the beginnings of tears formed at the corners of her eyes.
“A son,” Cherry answered. “Taken from me about seven years ago, give or take a few months. The Queen’s ponies came in the night for him while we slept.”
Some of the smoothness in her voice left as the tears fell from her eyes in earnest, belying an accent not too dissimilar to Applejack’s or Braeburn’s.
“I didn't even have a chance to fight for him; I just woke up one mornin’, and he was gone.”
“What was his name?” Starlit asked, a knot of empathy and sadness buried in her chest.
“Shady Grove,” Cherry answered, wiping off her eyes in futility as more tears fell. “A hopeful name, to be sure. He always wanted to go someplace green.”
“Then let me cut a deal here, from one mother to another,” Starlit said. “You allow us to come and go from here peacefully and use Undersand as a base of operations until we set off, and I promise you on my life that I'll find out what happened to your son.”
Cherry Jubilee turned her red-rimmed eyes to face Starlit, and even through the sadness of having to recall such painful events, Starlit could see the faint Glimmer of hope shine behind those crimson eyes.
“Very well,” Cherry answered, her voice returning to its smooth tone. “You have my blessing; for as long as you two are here you will be given no trouble, as well as all the help the citizens of Undersand can provide. However, when y’all set off for the palace, it will be on your own.”
Starlit was about to ask Cherry to reconsider before Sun cut in, his mind for tactfulness overtaking her mouth.
“That'll be just fine with us,” Sun said. “We understand that you don't want to risk any of your friends and neighbors on our suicide mission. Just some supplies and information will suffice.”
“Then go outside and tell Braeburn what I've just told you, and he’ll get you set up with lodgings for while you’re here,” Cherry replied. Without another word she turned back to her wall of charts and graphs before pulling a few pages down and examining them more closely.
Slowly Starlit pulled the stuffed rabbit out of her saddlebags, eyeing its fine make and jeweled eyes with a worried gaze as Braeburn led herself and Sun to their temporary home.
Part II - Chapter 6: The Palace, And More Dangerous Things
Part II - Chapter 6: The Palace, And More Dangerous Things
* * *
Mornings in Undersand were difficult for Starlit Sky to get a firm grasp on; she had been so used to rising with the sun that its distinct absence in the cavern was throwing off her sense of time.
So when she awoke for the third time that week to the sound of Setting Sun rapping on the door to her room, her frustration was justifiable.
“C’mon Starlit, time’s wasting,” Sun said, his voice too chipper for Starlit’s sleep-drunk head to deal with. “We want to get an early start today, after all.”
“And what, pray tell, defines it as being ‘early’?” Starlit murmured.
“My internal clock, which is telling me that it's probably ten o’clock in the morning. Besides, Braeburn just came by with a message from Cherry Jubilee. She wants to see us, something about the thestral that you told Braeburn about.”
Starlit’s ears perked at the mention of the word. She had spent the last three days trying to drive the thought from her mind, distracting herself with the comings and goings of Undersand. The cavern city reminded her so much of her hometown in its prime, with a semblance of society to hold back the uncomfortable reality of the world around them, that the thought of it being overrun by thestrals bursting out of the walls was not one she wanted to entertain for long.
“Give me a minute to get my things together,” Starlit replied as she pulled herself upright on her bed. “And to possibly find a stiff drink.”
“Well, you may want to move with some alacrity; Braeburn said Cherry seemed anxious.”
Softly Sun closed Starlit’s door, his hoofsteps growing fainter before the front door to their temporary home also opened and closed, leaving her alone with her thoughts again.
”This thestral problem isn't going to get any better by trying to ignore it, you know,” Starlit thought as she got up and stretched, working the kinks out of her joints. She hoped that the kinks in her mind would come out as easily.
Levitating her armor and weaponry into place was getting easier and easier, and not just from the exposure to magic; it felt natural now, not like something she had to force out of herself like wringing a towel. She couldn't do much else with it other than open a door and levitate her belongings, but it was far easier stuff than maintaining her warding lines back at home.
”If I ever get back to Twilight, I think I'll have a talk with her about my heritage,” Starlit mused, ”see if there's any truth to what she says about my being magically gifted.”
All her armor and belongings secured, Starlit pulled the small black amulet Twilight had given her up in her magic. She had grown wary of its power ever since it showed her the vision of Applejack’s kidnapping, but figured the utility of its function was worth the risk of carrying it around. Gingerly she placed it around her neck before tucking it away into the leather folds of her armor.
The bustle of the Undersand ponies greeted Starlit as she stepped outside her small lodgings; the merchant stalls that lay across the thoroughfare were already in full swing, their proprietors peddling their wares to the crowds. A few hooded guards not unlike Braeburn marched by, eyes locked forward and a grim countenance etched onto their faces. Starlit thought better than to disturb them.
Try though she might, it still took Starlit some getting used to to navigate the crowded market streets; it had been ages since she'd been in such a populated town, and the subtle art of slipping in between ponies without disturbing them was lost on her. Many hurried apologies and intonations of “Excuse me,” and “My bad,” were uttered before Starlit found her way out of the crowd and onto the high street that led to the palace and Cherry’s home.
Braeburn was waiting for Starlit as she arrived, his normally stoic expression replaced with a smile. Not necessarily a warm one, but a smile nonetheless.
“Your friend’s already inside,” Braeburn said. His voice was lower than yesterday, and much of its edge had left in favor of weariness. The turnaround put Starlit’s nerves on alert.
“Is there something wrong?” Starlit asked.
“It's been a... rough couple of days for me,” Braeburn answered. “Doin’ a lot of thinking and introspection, that's all.”
“Braeburn, we’ll find her, I promise,” Starlit replied. She hoped her attempt to reassure herself was hidden in her proclamation.
With a heavy sigh, Braeburn opened the door to Cherry’s home. It creaked softly on its hinges as it did.
“Good luck, Starlit,” Braeburn said as she walked in, “and may cool sands guide your way.”
Cherry’s home was in the same state of dishevelement as it had been when Starlit had first seen it, save for the pile of scrolls and charts that had littered the table being piled on the floor to make room for a massive map that Sun and Cherry were poring over.
“Ah, Starlit, glad to see you,” Cherry said hurriedly. “C’mere, you need to see this too.”
The map on the table was almost immediately recognizable as Starlit looked over it; it was the castle that dominated the western side of Undersand, the same one that they were no more than a hundred yards away from. The image was crisscrossed with tunnels and rooms of intricate design, as well as a few more recent additions to its surface made in a blue ink.
“So, what are we doing here?” Starlit asked. “Sun said you needed to know something about the thestral we faced?”
“It's actually worse, if you can believe that,” Sun answered. Starlit could feel her heart beat against her ribs even before Cherry started speaking.
“Now, I have good news and bad news,” Cherry began.
“Not the best way to start a conversation, you know,” Starlit interjected.
“The good news,” Cherry continued, “is that we have a way for y’all to get to the Queen’s castle without an invitation.”
“Is that where the palace down here comes into play?” Starlit asked.
“Precisely,” Cherry answered. “Stories say that back in the old times, the Queen had a more humble palace that she would open up to anypony who asked, at least before the unification of Equestria. When she built Sunspire, she had the other castle sunk into the ground to make way for her more grandiose abode.”
“Wait, wait, hold on,” Starlit interrupted, “do you mean to tell me that we've been underneath the Queen’s castle this whole time?! Why didn't we see it from the surface before we came down here?”
“That's what I was just telling Sun about when you came in,” Cherry answered. “Only ponies with an invitation for audience can see the Queen, and she takes that idea very literally; if you don't have one of her golden tickets, you can't see the palace or enter it, no matter how long you try.”
“It's almost certainly a concealment enchantment,” Sun interjected. “I only know about them theoretically since attempting one would probably kill me, but a sufficiently powerful one can render even an area as large as Sunspire completely invisible and intangible.”
“So, unless I'm mistaken, the good news is that we can get in there, and the bad that we won't be able to perceive its existence once we’re inside?” Starlit asked.
“No, that wasn't the bad news,” Sun replied. “The bad news is that we’ll have to go up through the underground palace to get there, and according to Cherry it's swarming with thestrals.”
Starlit's heart froze in her chest as Sun continued speaking, his words falling on her freshly deafened ears. Hellish whinnies and thundering, near-dead hooffalls filled her mind. The only sense of feeling she still had was one of a dull thudding coming from the black stone pendant around her neck, its jittering pulse replacing the rhythms of her body.
Unconsciously she sat on the floor, eyes fixated on the window behind Cherry and a thousand feet beyond it, boring into the ancient masonry of the palace as its tattered banners hung limp and lifeless. Her mind was consumed, enraptured by the thought of those nightmares on legs existing not a few hundred feet away.
“Starlit! Starlit, snap out of it!” Sun called. Slowly Starlit was roused from her trance, blearily looking at Sun and Cherry in turn before rising to her hooves.
“Sun, what was that?” Cherry asked, tone more accusatory than concerned.
“It was nothing,” Sun replied, “Starlit’s just got a problem with thestrals. I was worried that this would happen, but it shouldn't impede us too much.”
“I see,” Cherry replied. “And what about you, Starlit? You think you're up for this?”
Starlit didn't reply. She shifted her weight back and forth on her hooves, staring at the floor and trying to get the visions in her head to go away.
“Could you, uh, excuse us for a moment?” Sun asked, taking Starlit by the shoulder with a hoof and turning her towards the door. In her stupor, Starlit didn't resist.
Sun led Starlit out past Braeburn and down an alley near Cherry’s home, one that afforded a modicum of privacy in Undersand’s cramped conditions.
“Starlit, are you okay?” Sun asked, sitting the pair of them down. “I've seen how you react to thestrals, and I knew this would be tough news to hear, but this is... this is new. You've never just locked up like this and frankly I'm really wor—“
“Sun, just shut up for a minute,” Starlit said, eyes still locked on the middle distance behind him. Her tone was passive and impotent, a far cry from her usual authoritative voice.
They sat in silence for a while. Sun shifted nervously as the minutes ticked by and Starlit barely moved a muscle save for her eyes, which darted around every bit of the environment around them save for Sun’s face.
“Starlit, I know this is scar—“ Sun began.
“What did I say, Su—“ Starlit protested.
“No, your going to listen!” Sun countered. “We’re both in a lot of hot water now; we’re about to go into enemy territory with no support, we’re hunting for a Queen that could probably kill us with a thought and expecting to convince her to return to a throne left unoccupied since time immemorial, and there's no guarantee of success or even a useful death.”
As Sun went on, Starlit could see his eyes growing wet with stress, his voice straining to maintain composure.
“We've gotten ourselves in way over our heads,” Sun continued. “I mean, I never even wanted to come out here, not really. At least, not like this!”
Starlit snapped out of her stupor at his words. Now it was his turn of his eyes to be cast downwards, trying to maintain control of himself.
“I just wanted to know how the Queen’s magic worked,” Sun continued. “Maybe find a way to fix Appleoosa, the Plains, everything so that it would be a decent place to live. I didn't want to get wrapped up in your quest, or have to deal with things like thestrals or underground cities.”
The tears fell from his face as he spoke, thick streams that showed just how strongly he felt.
“I'm scared, Starlit. Terrified, in fact. I thought I'd just live my normal life back home but I couldn't because when I met you, I knew I had to help. Now look at me, blubbering like a foal because if you’re scared than what sort of hope can there be for me?”
Sun weeped softly for a time, letting his tears stain his face while Starlit sat and stared at him. Slowly he calmed his breathing, wiped his face with the hem of his cloak, and with a deep breath he held his head up high. His eyes were bloodshot and his lip quivered when he spoke, but there was strength in his words that Starlit wished she could muster right now.
“But, despite all of that, I'm going to keep going,” Sun said. “I'm going to do this, even though I'm scared out of my mind, because it'll help. It'll help my home to not be a sun-blasted wasteland, it'll help Undersand to thrive out from under the Queen’s hoof, and it'll help you do whatever you need to do with her. And if I can do this afraid, then what does it say about you that you can't?”
Setting Sun, whatever his other faults, was a good speaker. Starlit had never been the best at motivation, but she knew when it worked. The visions of death and thestrals had receded from her mind, and the spot in her psyche where she stored those memories seemed smaller now.
Starlit quickly wrapped Sun up in a tight hug, and Sun reciprocated just as swiftly. Together they sat for a while, sharing in their fear at what they had both been roped into.
“Thank you, Sun,” Starlit softly said. Someday, she would tell him what happened to her, but now wasn't the the time.
* * *
The underground palace was a sight to behold from afar, so to see it up close was giving Starlit a strange sense of vertigo as she stared up at its precipitous heights. She could also feel her pendant thrumming its rhythm, now faster than before.
”Perhaps proximity to death is what sets it off,” Starlit thought. It wasn't a very comforting thought.
Sun busied himself next to Starlit, going over the map Cherry Jubilee had given them at their meeting the other day. It certainly wasn't complete by any stretch of the imagination, but it showed enough of the inner structure of the palace to give them a sense of where they needed to go, as well as a few marks for hazards that prior explorers had discovered.
Starlit decided to make herself useful and went over her belongings one final time. It was better than standing there and trying not to feel her heartbeat.
Her saddlebags were, for the most part, pared down to the essentials. The only extraneous item she had in there was the rabbit doll she’d picked up, the rest of the bags filled with provisions and dungeoneering gear that had been provided by Cherry and the ponies of Undersand. Her sword had still been in pristine condition, but she'd taken it to a blacksmith a few days ago and had it sharpened anyway to be on the safe side.
“Nice to see we’re both nervous about this,” Sun quipped as he tightened his cloak.
“Figured our little heart-to-heart would've gotten it all out of my system,” Starlit replied.
“Starlit, are you sure that you're ready for this?” Sun asked. “We can wait until tomorrow, if it's alright with you.”
Starlit snorted as she lifted her bags up to her back.
“It'd be better to get it done swiftly, like pulling a tooth,” she answered. “Waiting won't make the problem go away, and if anything it'll only make it worse.”
“...Fair enough,” Sun said. “Do you want to hold the map, or should I?”
“Your magic’s stronger, you do it,” Starlit answered. It was a better excuse than saying she couldn't maintain a levitation spell with how frayed her nerves were.
“Right, right, stupid question,” Sun replied. With a flick of the horn he pulled the map up and unfurled it before himself, leaving the pair standing before the yawning portcullis.
The seconds ticked on inexorably as Starlit stared down her foe; the haunting darkness that seeped out from the castle’s raised gates looked endless from where she stood.
With a sigh of resignation Sun took the first steps forward toward the palace. The lantern hanging off of his saddlebags illuminating with a puff of green magic as he did.
“C’mon Starlit, there's no time like the present,” Sun beckoned. With trepidation in her every step, she followed him in.
The cloying darkness was claustrophobic at first, but Starlit’s eyes adjusted to the dim in due time. Sun’s lantern provided a modicum of light, but not nearly enough to illuminate everything in the foyer.
Every surface was coated with a thick layer of dust, which for a chamber of this size was an impressive amount. Starlit accidentally inhaled a mote of dust the size of her ear that she had kicked up from the ground, sending her into a hacking fit that cascaded around the room.
“Starlit, you okay?” Sun asked as he cantered over to her. He held a handkerchief out for her, which Starlit tied around her face.
“Just... just swallowed... a dust bunny,” Starlit replied through her wheezing.
“More like a dust puma,” Sun replied. “The last set of explorers to come through here must've been quite a while back for there to be this much dust.”
“You'd better cover your mouth too,” Starlit said curtly. “Don't want to make any more noise than we have to in here.”
Starlit didn't want for Sun’s reply as she pressed forward past him. Her eyes had adjusted enough to let her see a large stairwell on the far side of the foyer, leading upwards into the upper reaches of the castle.
”The sooner we get to the surface the better,” Starlit mused. She cantered up the stairs, the only sounds being her own hoofsteps and the ever growing thrum of the black amulet around her neck.
Hours upon hours Starlit and Sun spent wandering the halls and chambers of the castle, going upward but never seeming to progress. Everywhere they went was just an extension of the last place they were in; the same ever present dust, the same tattered carpets and tapestries, the same cracked masonry. Nothing showed any signs of habitation, by pony or thestral, and the lack of activity had set her teeth on edge.
“Sun, where are we?” Starlit asked, stopping to stretch her legs as she did.
Quickly Sun laid the map in front of her, pointing to an area around the middle of castle.
“If we've been following this map properly, about here,” Sun answered, his voice muffled slightly by his own makeshift air filter.
“What do you mean ‘if?’” Starlit shot back. “We have been following it correctly, right?”
“Yes, of course we have, but you've got to admit it's hard to judge where anything is when every hallway and room looks damn near identical,” Sun replied.
Starlit didn't reply, instead choosing to pace back and forth across the hallway and kick up small clouds of dirt and dust as she did.
“Starlit, we've been at this for hours, maybe it's time to bunker down and rest,” Sun said. “You'll be calmer after some food and a half-hour’s break.”
“No, we press onward until we’re out of here,” Starlit replied. “I don't want to spend one extra minute in this death trap if I don't have to.”
“Starlit, you're talking nonsense. We haven't met a single thing in here; no thestrals, no ponies, not even any of the hazards that were marked off on the map. Now would be as good a time as any since we're in a relatively safe area."
“That's just it, Sun, we've encountered nothing! That doesn't make you a bit nervous?” Starlit asked sharply. “What if this is just another one of the Queen’s illusions? What if she's got us running ‘round in circles for her own sick pleasure?!”
“Starlit, your paranoid, you need to res—“
Starlit didn't hear the last of his sentence as the thrumming beat of her amulet accelerated to the fastest pace she'd felt it give off. In addition to the disconcerting beat she also felt it pushing against her armor, urging her forward just in time for her heart to drop into her hooves.
The dust behind Sun had stirred, forming three perfect circles of immaculately clean carpeting. Standing in those three circles, eyes illuminated a dull grey and skin a mottled, taut black, were thestrals, slavering and salivating.
”RUN!!” Starlit screamed. She didn't even wait for Sun to start before she turned on her companion and sprinted away into the dust and the dark.
The handkerchief slid from her face, pushed by her staccato breaths as she kicked up puffs of dust. Behind her she heard echoing hoofbeats, whether Sun’s or the thestrals’ she couldn't say. Slowly the sounds of whoever was following her faded away as she darted down hallways and up staircases, paying no heed to which direction she was heading.
The dust stung her eyes as she ran, forcing them shut. She never saw the thestral in front of her until she slammed into it and sent them both sprawling.
It got to its hooves before Starlit, and she found herself skittering backward from the monster in a panicked frenzy.
“Get back! Stay back!!” Starlit screeched as she drew her sword. It wavered and flailed in her magic, and with a singular panicked thrust she pitched it forward.
The sword was buried up to the hilt in the thestral’s forehead when Starlit looked, blood oozing down the creature’s forehead. The monster twitched and sputtered for a moment before its grey eyes faded and it slumped to the ground.
Starlit drew her sword from it with her magic, shaking all over as she stared at its corpse. The blade clattered to the ground as she lost focus, gaze flitting all over and jumping at shadows.
”Get a hold of yourself,” Starlit thought. ”You killed it. It's dead now, and it can't hurt you anymore.”
Quickly Starlit picked her blade back up, this time in her teeth as her nerves were too stressed to try and use magic. She did a full rotation, looking at the stone walls and the dust floating in the air as she tried to gather herself and ascertain her location.
”Damn. Damn, damn, DAMN!” Starlit thought, realizing she was now hopelessly lost, with only the thrumming of her amulet to keep her company.
A thrumming that was growing faster and more powerful.
Quickly she backed down the hallway, eyes darting every which way as she waited for the next ambush. Not noticing where her hooves were falling, she brushed one of them against her freshly dead foe.
Much like when she had felt Applejack’s blood, Starlit’s head was filled with sights and sounds and feelings, none of them good. She saw the castle, and its dusty corridors being disturbed by some sort of magic. She felt the thestral’s mind, its all consuming thirst for blood and violence, and she saw herself. She heard her own voice scream, saw herself flee with Sun not too far behind, and then nothing as the thestral’s consciousness faded away.
Starlit then felt its mind again, but spread out like grains of soil over a long road. It slowly coalesced and as it did she felt it forming the dust in the air, assuming its mind and form once more to catch herself unaware. She saw the fight she had had with it, and when she stabbed it she felt its pain as its consciousness faded into nothing. Then there was blackness, a dreaded nothingness that was infinite and personal all at once, a feeling she kept as the vision faded.
Starlit found herself on the floor, breathing in the dust and stale air and grappling with what she'd just seen.
“They're in the dust,” Starlit announced to no one. “And if they're in the dust, then I've bee—“
Starlit felt a horrible pain in her chest and lungs, one that ripped and tore and burned her throat as a monumental amount of dust poured from her mouth and nose to form a swirling mass in the air.
The dust swirled over head like a whirlwind as it slowly pushed itself together, forming many distinct shapes. They were all pony sized and shaped, and all burned with that baleful grey light.
The thestrals touched down in a circle around her, maybe a dozen in total, as she hacked up blood and phlegm. Her amulet beat like a thousand ponies running at once, and she noticed a small grey light shine out from the neckline of her armor. She grabbed up her sword with her teeth, but her mouth was so slick with blood that she couldn't hold it.
The thestrals didn't give her a chance to try again. They were upon her before the sword hit the ground, stomping and biting and screeching as they tore her apart. Her armor held for a few moments, but was soon ripped off and cast aside.
The pain was excruciating. Starlit's belly burst open, her bones snapped like twigs, and hot blood ran from dozens of cuts and punctures. A jagged horn took her left eye, and she knew this would be the end.
”I’m sorry, Eclipse. Mommy failed,” Starlit thought as blood and tears poured down her face, the last thought she could think before everything faded into a maelstrom of screaming and anguish before death finally took her.
And then Starlit woke up, with a sharp gasp and Setting Sun staring down at her.
Starlit’s first thought was confusion, followed by sheer terror. She let out a cry that lengthened into a scream as she flailed impotently on the floor, swinging at creatures that were no longer there. Her legs felt leaden and her mind doubly so, but she remembered the pain all too well.
“Starlit!” Sun called as he tried to hold her down. “Starlit, you need to calm down! You’re safe now!”
A well placed kick to the stomach threw Sun off of her, and Starlit crawled away as fast as her sluggish body would carry her until she hit a corner of masonry. She curled up as tight as she could, shuddering from panic and bewilderment. She ran her hooves over every square inch of her body, searching for the innumerable wounds she had incurred just moments before.
“This isn’t real, this can’t be real,” Starlit muttered to herself. “This is all just a nightmare.”
As thoroughly as she searched, Starlit couldn’t find a single cut or scrape anywhere on her dusky blue fur. She felt her left eye and found not an empty socket filled with gore but a full, round eye with a gleaming teal iris. Even her mane was in good condition, with its periwinkle blue strands reflecting back the orange light of a campfire.
“Starlit,” Sun croaked from across the room. Swiftly she swung her head around to see her traveling companion, the pony she had deserted when he needed her, standing before her. He looked worse for wear, with the hem of his cloak torn and covered in dust and a fair few scrapes as well.
The tears fell from her face before she could think to stop them. With as much speed as she could muster she ran over to him and flung her forelegs around his neck in a tight embrace, tighter than any hug she’d ever given. She needed to hold somepony else, somepony that would help ground her shattered mind.
“I’m sorry Sun!” Starlit wailed, a throaty cry of deep, heartfelt regret. “I’m so sorry!”
Sun returned the embrace as Starlit sobbed into his shoulder. She was easily a decade his senior, but in that moment she may as well have been a child cradled in her grandmother’s hooves. Neither said anything until Starlit finally composed herself. Her face was stricken with tears and she was still hiccuping, but she felt better all the same.
“Starlit, what happened to you?” Sun asked, his voice soft and soothing to her ears. “If you’re not ready to talk about it, then I understand, but something happened to you.”
“S-Sun, just let m-me talk first,” Starlit stammered. She breathed in and out in a steady rhythm until she found she could speak again, although the fear and panic hadn't yet left. Sun sat patiently as she steeled her resolve.
“Sun, what did I look like when you found me?" Starlit asked, her voice still thick from her sobbing.
"Pristine," Sun answered quizzically. "You looked like you had passed out from running. I did wonder how your armor got torn apart, but didn't think too much of it."
"Was… was there any blood? Signs of a fight?"
"A lot of the dust had been disturbed around you, but other than that it was just you, your gear, and your sword laying by your head. It had blood on it, but it looked too thick to be yours."
Starlit's gaze flitted around the room as she pondered what Sun said. The pain, the wounds, it had all seemed so real, it was real. She had felt it all, and hazy though it was she even remembered the darkness of death as the thestrals ground her to pulp.
Unconsciously Starlit reached to feel the amulet hanging around her neck. The leather string was completely intact and the black stone felt warm to the touch. Once she realized what she was doing she reflexively tore it off and threw it across the room, narrowly missing Sun's head.
"Woah!" Sun yelped as he dodged the necklace.
"Sorry Sun, I wasn't aiming for you," Starlit hastily apologized.
"Starlit, you're not making any sense," Sun replied. "I understand that you're freaked out from the thestral attack, but I need you to talk to me. What happened to you?"
Starlit stared at Sun. The firelight illuminated his green eyes as they cast a worried expression back at her, and Starlit knew that she couldn't lie about something of this magnitude. Not to him, and not to herself.
"Sun," Starlit said, "I think I died."
The words hung in the air, interrupted only by the crackling of the fire. The pair stared at each other, and Starlit wondered if she had just made a horrible mistake.
"Starlit, I need you to tell me everything that happened after we got separated," Sun said, his voice rigid and authoritative in a way Starlit hadn't heard from him.
"After what I did, you deserve that much at least," Starlit replied, "and maybe a little more."
Starlit settled onto her belly in front of the fire, letting its heat warm her sore muscles as she found her words to begin her story. She hadn't told anyone this particular story, and she wasn't a great wordsmith to begin with. Sun quickly joined her by the fire, his face set into a focused countenance.
"I'll get to when we got separated in good time," Starlit said, "but I think it's high time you understood my 'problem' with thestrals. If not for abandoning you like I did, then at least so you understand me a little better and so that I can get this off of my chest."
"When I was a little filly, my parents died on the road connecting my small settlement of Stone Shore to the neighboring town of Ponyville. I couldn't have been any older than five, and at the time I didn't understand why I had to go live with my grandmother. She was a sweet old mare, but it was a long time before I understood why I went to live with her. In hindsight I suppose I was a little slow for my age, but that's neither here nor there."
"While the cause of my parents' deaths was never properly determined, the word 'thestral' kept cropping up whenever adults discussed the matter around me or my grandmother. Nonnie tried to shield me from the truth for as long as she could, but after a while the term became associated with my parents going away. That was the genesis of all of this, I suppose, but it wasn't the tipping point into my fear of them now."
Starlit swallowed deeply, trying to fight back the mounting thickness in her voice. It was a hard memory to recall, and she had tried to bury it for years. Thinking about it now, with the terror of thestrals so fresh in her mind, was threatening to send her into another panic attack.
"One day, when I was fifteen or so, Nonnie and I were walking home from the market. She lived near the outskirts of town, you see. Most of the ponies in town said she was crazy for living so far out of the way, said that she was going to get robbed or attacked by wild animals. She brushed them off and so did I; she'd lived out there for years with no incident, why should it start that day?"
"The thing about irony is that it has a bad sense of timing. I spotted them first, about a quarter-mile off. There was a trio of them, two pegasi and a unicorn, and they were trying to break my grandmother's warding lines."
"Warding lines?" Sun asked. "I thought you said there was no magic where you came from."
"I said that there was practically no magic where I came from, but there's still a little," Starlit replied, happy for the brief diversion. "Warding is about the most sophisticated magic a unicorn can muster where I'm from and even then it takes an entire family to cover an area the size of, say, Cherry Blossom's saloon back in Appleoosa."
"And your elderly grandmother managed it all by herself?" Sun asked again with increasing incredulity.
"She did have me to help, and our 'house' was more of a shack. There wasn't much ground to cover, so it only took the two of us."
"But I digress," Starlit said before continuing the story. "The thestrals initially didn't take notice of us. Faster than I'd ever seen her move Nonnie dragged me off into the scrub by the side of the road behind a particularly large rock. She told me to stay still and silent, and I did."
Though she'd been fighting it off well enough, Starlit's voice caught in her throat. It took her a moment to speak again, and when she did she was choking the words out rather than saying them.
"She left me, behind the rock. S-she left me and went to go distract them, get them away from the lines. I wanted to chase after her, b-but I had to do what she told me. I was young, and stupid, a-and… and—"
A fresh wave of sobs wracked Starlit's body as she silently cursed herself. She cursed herself for not being able to hold it together, cursed herself for not trying to help Sun, and even for not helping her grandmother when she needed her.
"Starlit, it's alright, I get it," Sun said, stroking the back of her hoof as he did. "If you want, you can skip this par—"
"They tore her to p-pieces, Sun!" Starlit interjected. "Ripped her from h-head to tail and everything in between and I didn't do anything to stop them! I j-just ran, ran like a coward back down the road."
"I could hear their screeches, and t-then their hoofbeats when they started chasing me. I ran as fast as I could off the road and into the woods where I thought I could lose them. I was so terrified, I r-ran into a bear cave to av-void them. A bear cave, Sun! That's probably the most dangerous place I could've picked, but ev-ven that seemed like a better shot than dealing with those monsters."
Starlit started hyperventilating and her tears stopped falling as they ran dry in her eyes. It took a while to compose herself, but Sun waited for her to finish her tale with patience befitting a stallion of knowledge and study.
"Miraculously, the musk from the bears must've masked my scent, as when the thestrals came to the mouth of the cave they slowed down. I could only see them from between the cracks of the rock formation I was hiding behind, but they looked confused. They sniffed around the cave to try and find my scent, but they weren't able to."
"Those few minutes behind those rocks were, and still are, the most nerve-wracking moments of my life. A single minute stretched into an eternity, but eventually they gave up the chase and departed. I stayed behind in the cave for an hour, maybe longer, just to make sure they weren't going to come back for me."
"I never went back to my grandmother's house, not even when the ponies in town went to collect her body. There was a nice ceremony for her, and after that I bounced around from neighbor to neighbor until I came of age. When they say it takes a village to raise a child I don't think they meant it literally, but in my case it was. After that I worked odd jobs to save up enough for my own home, and… I'm sure you can assume the rest."
Starlit's head drooped as she finished the first part of her story. Combined with her death and all the questions that were floating around her head, she was emotionally and mentally drained.
"Starlit, that's… that's one of the saddest things I've ever heard," Sun said, his voice barely passing a stunned whisper. "I thought I had it bad, but this just…"
"That's the thing about pain," Starlit replied. "It's all relative; to you, who only lost his parents when a Queen summoned them to her palace, my story seems like a tragedy beyond measure. But at least I know what happened of my family, whereas you've only been given rumors and here-say about what could've become of them."
"Yeah, nothing but here-say," Sun repeated. "I guess we both had awful childhoods, huh?"
"So it would seem, but at least I have you to commiserate with," Starlit answered with a tired smile.
"Thank goodness for small miracles," Sun replied. "If you want to rest then go right ahead, I've got a bedroll laid out. I'll keep watch, and you can tell me what happened after we got separated when you're in a better headspace."
Starlit began to protest but then thought better of it. Sleep, true sleep, would be a welcome comfort right now. While she had been sluggish when she woke up, she only just now noticed how she wanted to fall into a heap.
"Thank you, Sun," Starlit replied as she laid down on Sun's bedroll. "I think that would help."
Though threadbare, the coarse wool of the pillow may as well have been made of satin and duck down to her weary head. Sleep came swiftly, and mercifully it was a deep, black, dreamless sleep.
* * *
Starlit stirred at the sound of flint striking against steel. Slowly she rose, every joint cracking as she got up to find Sun making another fire as the previous one had died down. She didn't feel good necessarily, but she felt balanced after a hard-earned slumber.
She was then decidedly unbalanced when a small weight tugged at her neck.
With surprising swiftness Starlit reached up to her neck to find the black stone amulet was hanging off of her neck once again, still slightly warm to the touch and the leather cord unsnapped.
"Oh, you're awake," Sun said as the fire flared to life.
"Sun, did you fix this necklace?" Starlit asked. "It's the one I threw at you when I first woke up."
"No…" Sun answered. "What's with that necklace, anyway? When I found you your armor was torn to shreds and your saddlebags had taken a beating, but that rock was as pristine as when we left Undersand."
"It was a gift from my benefactor," Starlit replied, "the pony who charged me with this mission. She said it would protect me or something of that description, but I think it has a darker purpose than that."
"What do you mean? What has it done?"
"As far as I can tell, it's the reason I'm alive," Starlit answered as she took the necklace off and put it near the firelight. "When the thestrals were upon me it started to glow with gray light and beat like a drum, and when I woke up it felt warm when I touched it."
"Hmm…" Sun murmured. He was casting a critical gaze at the amulet, trying to pry answers out of its smooth black surface. "Has it done anything else?"
"Just one other thing; when I felt the blood in Applejack's room after her kidnapping it sent me into a vision where I saw the event unfold., and after I killed one of the thestrals its body sent me into another vision of it chasing me and me killing it."
"That's… highly irregular," Sun replied. He snatched the stone up and stared at it intensely.
"Sun, I don't think you should be handling that stone, it's not safe," Starlit said.
"Just, give me a second, I want to confirm something," Sun answered. "I have a spell that might be able to tell me where this thing came from."
If Starlit's body weren't still sore and sluggish she might've been able to stop him, but she couldn't take the necklace back before Sun put it around his own neck and illuminated his horn. The pale green light of his magic enveloped the stone in full as he cast his spell on it, followed by a near blinding flash of grey light.
When Starlit blinked away the spots in her vision she saw Sun, head snapped back at a painful angle with grey light pouring from his eyes and mouth. The stone was floating off of his chest as if it were suspended in water, and Sun's cloak and mane were similarly floating.
"Sun!" Starlit yelled. She shot over to him and clamped her teeth down on the leather strap holding the necklace together. She yanked at it with all her might, but it refused to budge. The leather ground in her teeth but didn't give way.
As she pulled and bit and desperately tried to get Sun free of the necklace's grasp she began to hear sounds; whispers and echoes of voices playing out from Sun's open mouth, all too garbled to try and make sense of.
"C'mon, dammit!" Starlit exclaimed through gritted teeth. The voices began to mount in volume as Starlit redoubled her efforts, but still the strap refused to give way. It was only when the noise had grown to a cacophonous crescendo that the lights faded, the voices stopped, and the necklace fell limp in Starlit's mouth. With a final tug she snapped the leather strap and let it drop to the floor.
As soon as the necklace left him Sun slumped to the floor, his face barely missing the fire. He twitched and shuddered on the ground for a few moments before regaining control of his faculties.
"Sun! Sun, you idiot, why did you do that?!" Starlit reprimanded. Sun's eyes spun around in their sockets for a moment before focusing on Starlit, and he slowly pulled himself back up to a sitting position.
"That rock, or necklace," Sun began, "is not what I thought it was."
"What in Equestria did you think it was?!" Sun snapped back. "What could it possibly have been to be able to resurrect the dead?"
"I've… heard of magic like this," Sun answered as he slumped against the back wall to catch his breath. "Something about… being able to revivify a recently… dead body, or one that's on the brink of death, but this… this is something far more powerful."
Starlit felt like she could slap him for what he just did, but she knew her anger was just born of worry. Swallowing the verbal tirade she wanted to unleash against him, she instead sat across from him.
"Well, if it isn't what you thought it was, then what is it?"
"It's hard to explain," Sun answered. "I feel like I just… saw all of history at once… but in bits and pieces. Some parts it… were focused on a farmer… in other parts I saw a castle, but all of it… flew by so fast."
"But moreover," Sun continued, regaining some of his speaking skill, "I felt a strong presence throughout the entire process. It felt like a large weight pressing on my mind, directing me to the places it wanted me to see. I saw all of what happened when we got separated, for instance, but it skipped over centuries of time before that."
With hesitation Sun and Starlit both turned their heads to look back at the small black stone sitting next to the fire. The leather strap had repaired itself in the time it took for Sun to explain what happened.
"Whoever gave you that entrusted you with a lot of power, Starlit," Sun said. "I'd keep it safe."
"But why?" Starlit protested. "That rock's brought me nothing but confusion and misery ever since I got it, why should I hang onto it?"
"Because whoever gave it to you obviously didn't want it falling into the wrong hooves, and in doing so they gave you what ponies have been seeking out since we could comprehend our own existence; immortality, and the sum total of all knowledge across all of history."
Starlit stared at the necklace, it's polished black surface reflecting the flickering campfire. Even though she wasn't wearing it she could feel it's weight around her neck. She didn't like it, this feeling of connection and detachment.
With a gentle hoof she lifted it up, letting its soft weight fall to her chest. It was now as cool as the ambient stone of the room, and it didn't thump its asynchronous beat.
"I'd very much like to meet this 'benefactor' of yours," Sun said as he dragged himself to a standing position. "If she has access to magical artifacts of this caliber the she and I would have a lot to talk about."
"I know that I'll be having a talk with her when we're done here, that's for damn su—"
Starlit was soon cut off by the sound of horns blaring down the hallway outside the room. The sound rang around the room with a deafening echo, causing Sun and herself to clamp their hooves over their ears.
"Starlit Sky of Stone Shore and Setting Sun of Appleoosa," a deep, bombastic voice declared from nowhere and everywhere at once, "you have been deemed fit to receive an invitation to Her Majesty, Queen Celestia the Radiant's, court. A detachment of the Solar Guard will be with you presently."
The declaration left as swiftly as it had come, leaving Starlit and Sun dumbfounded. Quickly they gathered up their belongings in preparation for their escorts. Thinking it a tad coincidental that the amulet being activated and their invitation happening within ten minutes of each other, Starlit stowed the necklace away in her bags.
Sun had just finished dowsing the campfire when a large doorway of shimmering golden light appeared on the rear wall of the room. Out of it stepped a pair of muscular stallions resplendent in golden and white armor, as well as a portly earth pony wearing clothes of rich orange fabric.
"Setting Sun and Starlit Sky, I presume?" the earth pony asked.
"Yes, that is us," Starlit answered, doing her level best to mask her confusion and the lingering fear she still had. "And you are?"
"Oh, there will be time for introductions later," The earth pony replied," you are to be brought before the Queen at once! Pip, pip, come along then," he added, beckoning them towards the portal.
With a hesitant step forward Sun went through first, followed quickly by the earth pony and, finally, Starlit. The sensation of transport was much more pleasant than when Twilight had sent her halfway across the country, and the end goal far more awe inspiring.
When she exited the portal, followed closely by the armored guards, Starlit saw a room larger than the whole of her hometown. Every surface gleamed with polish, from the mirror-like golden floor to the towering alabaster columns supporting the glass encased roof. The effect was actually hard on the eyes, and she even noticed Sun blinking a few times when he looked around the room.
The centerpiece of the massive chamber was the raised dais at the far end, which the portly earth pony was ushering them towards.
"Come, come," he chided playfully, "mustn't keep Her Majesty waiting."
They moved down the room at an even pace, and Starlit found herself winded by the end. They were flanked on both sides by two columns of guards, who were staring off into the middle distance as Starlit moved past. She still felt like they were watching her with hawk-like focus.
The dias was even more resplendent up close; a lavish orange carpet stretched from the marble steps all the way up to the opulent throne that sat atop the dais. Behind the throne itself a large diorama of orbs suspended on rings spun, all attached to a large representation of the sun.
But more than all of that, Starlit found herself humbled by the sight of the mare seated upon the throne. She was the height of two full grown mares, with a coat of gleaming white and a rainbow mane that floated off of her head as if it were constantly being blown by a gentle breeze. Her golden regalia of a collar, horseshoes, and plated armor gleamed and glinted brighter than her throne room, and the crown seated upon her head was topped by an orange gemstone the size of Starlit's eyeball.
What drew Starlit's gaze the most, however, were the Queen's eyes. They were a pale purple and, much like Twilight's, they harbored centuries of rulership and experience. They stared down at Starlit and Sun with a measure of regal grace and, paradoxically for a sun queen, cold indifference.
"Your Majesty," the portly pony announced with a low bow, "I present to you Starlit Sky of Stone Shore and Setting Sun of Appleoosa."
Taking the hint, Starlit and Sun also bowed, although Starlit did her best to keep her eyes on the Queen as she descended from her throne.
"You may rise," Celestia said when she reached the bottom of her dais, her voice flowing like water. "Thank you for your swift service, Gilded Heart, that will be all."
Without another word of prompting the portly pony rose and pranced back down the cavernous room, leaving Starlit and Sun alone with the Queen and her retinue of guards.
Celestia looked the pair over for a moment, and Starlit couldn't help but feel like a cornered mouse. Sun looked even worse than she felt, as he refused to meet Celestia's gaze.
"Welcome to Sunspire, Starlit Sky and Setting Sun," Celestia said with a genteel air. "I believe you have some business with me?"
"Well then, speak," Celestia said. Her voice rang like a bell in the cavernous halls of her throne room. It only added to the deific image that Starlit was certain she had carefully cultivated over her many long years of ruling.
Starlit and Sun exchanged a look, neither of them quite knowing where to begin. Starlit knew that whatever words she was trying to find would fail to sound convincing or decisive, but nonetheless she decided to go for broke.
"Your Majesty," Starlit began as she turned to look at Celestia, "Canterlot needs its Princess."
The silence was so profound that Starlit could hear Sun's heartbeat from a few feet away. She felt her own heart rate start to climb as well when Celestia's expression of serene grace hardened.
"Hmm… so that's why you crossed the Plains to come find me," Celestia replied, the crystal-like quality of her voice gaining a keen edge. "I will say that I'm impressed. Not many ponies succeed in finding this place without invitation, and of those that do fewer still are seeking anything other than riches or glory."
With fluidity of movement that Starlit didn't think possible for a pony, Celestia glided past and made her way towards to the entrance of the hall. She motioned for them to follow her.
"Tell me, Starlit Sky and Setting Sun, how did you come upon the story of my… former title?" Celestia asked. "It's not one bandied about much anymore, despite how influential it is."
"Well, Your Majesty, I personally can't say I'm aware of the story," Sun replied, still pointedly trying not to make eye contact.
"Really now? Then this is your mission, Starlit?"
"Yes, it is," Starlit answered. "Sun tagged along when I told him where I was headed, and has proven a valuable ally since."
"Then, pray tell," Celestia continued, "why did you not tell him the reason you were coming here? Did you fear mockery for following the guidance of an ancient tale long since lost to history, or was it for less felicitous reasons?"
"My reasons are my own, Your Majesty," Starlit answered.
A short, sharp peal of laughter echoed through the hall, ringing off every gilded surface and growing louder until it faded away.
"I must say, Starlit Sky, you are an interesting mare," Celestia said. "Most ponies who confront me turn into quivering wrecks or sycophantic hoof-kissers, but you've still got some spine in you. I like that, really I do."
Starlit felt her stomach twist into knots at Celestia's approval, and it having been outside of her body not too long ago made the sensation more disquieting than it needed to be. Something felt off about the Queen's congeniality, like she was hiding her true feelings under a very thin veneer of courtly manners.
A pair of guards flanked the massive doors to the hall as Starlit approached. In perfect synchronicity they tamped the butts of their halberds on the floor, and with nary a creak or scrape the glimmering doors opened to a scene that Starlit found herself all too familiar with.
Spanning out as far as she could see was a palace-city carved of shining alabaster stone. The architecture was curvaceous, with grand archways connecting sections of the city and domed ceilings resplendent with jewelry and gold leaf that shone in the sun. On the western side of the city a building that she could only assume was a cathedral of some sort stood, with its towering minarets and the solar iconography carved into its facade.
What threw Starlit off the most, and Sun as well judging from his dropped jaw, was the amount of plant life that dotted the landscape. Starlit was no stranger to plants given her farming background, but these plants were as green as Sun's eyes, bearing fruits of massive size and vivid color. The flowers lined along the marble staircase down to the courtyard gardens were the brightest and most aromatic that she'd ever seen or smelled, and bees and hummingbirds flitted merrily from bloom to bloom.
"Perhaps this will be appropriately awe-inspiring," Celestia finished. Her voice carried a touch of smug superiority.
Starlit couldn't find her words for the life of her. Though she was getting a closer view than the first time she'd seen it, the Sunspire skyline was near identical to the vision Starlit had shown her in her shack back home.
It's… it's not hot," Sun said. He pulled his cloak off and stuffed it into his saddlebags, seemingly to bask in the light of a sun that wouldn't sear him, which allowed Starlit to see his cutie mark as the bags shifted over his haunches. It was only a fleeting glimpse, but that was all she needed.
It was a scroll, bound with a seal that bore Celestia's sigil, the same one that had been on the robes of Applejack's kidnappers.
"Of course it's not hot," Celestia replied to Sun. "What sort of Queen would I be if I let my citizens fry in the heat of day? No, I use my considerable control over the sun to ensure that the ponies of Sunspire are happy and cared for under its gentle rays."
"But what about outside of Sunspire? What about the ponies that live on the edge of the desert like in Appleoosa?" Starlit asked pointedly. She'd talk to Sun later, but she needed to nail down what sort of mare Celestia was now.
"Ah, that is quite the problem, isn't it?" Celestia answered. "What to do about everypony's problems and how to make their lives happier and more enriched? It's a question I pondered long and hard during my years as the Bright Princess of Canterlot, and even longer still since the locus of my rule returned to my homeland."
"And those ponderings led you to think it was alright to kidnap and coerce ponies from their homes, to tear them away from their families and friends?"
As she stared up at Celestia, Starlit saw the color of her eyes flash to an intense orange for the briefest moment. Even when her eyes shifted back to purple Celestia's face formed a grim countenance.
"Setting Sun," Celestia said, "you have free reign to visit Sunspire. Go, mingle with my citizens and taste the fruits of my labor. I would like a private word with Starlit Sky."
"Starlit," Sun asked with a worried look. Starlit nodded firmly, trying to get across that she wanted him to snoop around as much as possible. Quickly Sun cantered down the steps into the courtyard, leaving Starlit alone with Celestia.
"Starlit Sky," Celestia began as she too trotted down the steps, "the crimes you accuse me of are a… twisting of the truth to support a narrative that certain groups would use to garner sympathy."
"So you're saying that you didn't send your thugs to kidnap Applejack, or Shady Grove, or any of the countless other ponies who have been taken or summoned to appear before you," Starlit retorted, following Celestia down into the gardens that surrounded the throne room.
"Those thugs, as you so indelicately stated, are my highest advisors and security forces, and I would ask that you treat them with deference. They are my enforcers throughout the city and beyond, and they track down problematic elements for me to deal with."
"And what about Applejack or Shady Grove was so 'problematic' that you had to kidnap them, hmm? One was a pillar of her community and caretaker for the last member of her family, and the other was but a child ripped from his mother's life? How do you justify this barbarism?!"
Celestia stopped dead in her tracks, and as she did Starlit felt the air around her grow hotter by the second. They flowers they were surrounded by wilted with surprising speed before bursting into flame as Celestia's mane and tail flickered with embers and cinders.
"Starlit Sky," Celestia growled, "Come with me." Without another word the Queen stomped off, and Starlit found it difficult to keep up with Celestia's longer legs.
After a half-hour's walk in which neither party spoke, Celestia led Starlit out to a large plaza. A series of interconnected buildings were arranged in a circle around a massive gilded fountain of Celestia, her horn spraying shimmering water high into the air as ponies of all kinds milled about. A few took notice of Celestia and Starlit and, with smiles on their faces, they bowed low to their Queen as she passed them by.
"Rise, my subjects," Celestia intoned. With the same practiced grace that Starlit had seen in the throne room she approached one of the ponies, a pegasus mare around Starlit's age, as the rest of the ponies in the plaza went back to their business. They still offered Celestia a wide berth as they moved past, with a few hushed whispers and animated glances as they did.
"Tell me, Windy Whistles, how goes today's market? I've heard tell that your mangoes are coming in juicer than ever."
"They're doing marvelously, Your Radiance," Windy replied with bubbly enthusiasm. "The market day's been going splendidly too; I've already sold out of all my strawberries and bananas for the day!"
Starlit's mouth watered at the thought of fresh, ripe fruit, despite herself. Living in poverty made the luxuries of life all the more luxurious, and she so rarely was able to get fruit that the thought of having fresh fruit on a daily basis sent her stomach rumbling.
"Well, that is wonderful to hear!" Celestia chirped back. "Might I take a look at what you have left? I'm showing a new friend around the city, you see, and would like to make a good impression."
"Absolutely, Your Radiance! Please, come with me! Who's the new girl, if I might be so blunt?" Windy added as she led Starlit and Celestia over to a shop on the far side of the plaza.
"My name is Starlit Sky," Starlit answered, "and I'm not going to be in Sunspire for long. I thank you for your kindness all the same, though."
"Oh, that's too bad," Windy replied. "Tell you what, since you're just passing through and all, you can have whatever you want on the house!"
Starlit's heart skipped at the thought; anything she wanted could be quite a bit indeed, and seeing Windy's inventory concretely rendered Starlit's eyes bigger than her stomach.
Laid out before her were the most sumptuous and delectable fruits, vegetables, and assorted foodstuffs Starlit had ever laid eyes on. There were pears the size of her forehoof, and the apples in the baskets made the ones that she'd seen in Applejack's orchard look like rocks by comparison. The carrots were more orange than the oranges, and the oranges were living up to their namesake color in a big way.
"Are you sure?" Starlit asked, reigning in her stomach. "This is your livelihood, after all, I'd feel bad about taking without some way to pay you."
"Nonsense!" Windy retorted. "I do this for a hobby mostly, and plus I love seeing the smiles on pony's faces when they take the first bite of a juicy piece of fruit. Her Majesty provides the seeds I use to grow, after all, so it's just a matter of getting some more from her to replace a few pieces of produce. Go on, I insist!"
Starlit shifted nervously and cast a glance up at Celestia. The Queen's was preoccupied with a group of ponies one stall over. Her height was more apparent now that she loomed over a few fillies, but with her serene air and near-motherly tone it was hard to believe she was the mare who made the flowers burn with a thought.
"Very well," Starlit relented, "if you insist. Do you have a basket I could carry it in?"
"Even better, I have a bag!" Windy answered as she pulled out a small satin purse with a drawstring of gold thread. "It's a special bag that will hold whatever you want without getting full! Another gift from Queen Celestia, so take as much as you want!"
Starlit took the bag up in her magic, looking at it incredulously. There was no way the bag could be enchanted with that sort of magic, she was sure. Yet as she stuffed more and more produce into it she found that it never filled up and never got any heavier than about a pound. By the time she'd finished she'd stocked up on six mangoes, apples, and pears a piece as well as a hooffull of assorted nuts and legumes and a bundle of assorted vegetables.
"Thank you so much for your generosity, Windy," Starlit said as she put the bag away. "Tell me, do you know a place where a mare could stay the night? Is there perhaps an inn or tavern nearby?"
"I'll do you one better; you can come stay with me!" Windy answered, nearly knocking Starlit off of her metaphorical hooves.
"No, no, I couldn't possibly!" Starlit retorted. "You've already been so kind to me, I wouldn't want to intrude on your hospitality any more than I already have."
"It's no intrusion! I live by myself here, so I've always had a few spare rooms that I open up to new folks or friends who drop by for a visit. It helps me make others happy, after all, so I consider it a public service!"
"Plus," Windy added, drawing close to Starlit so she could whisper in her ear, "out-of-towners always have the best stories to tell!"
"Sharing secrets, Windy?" Celestia asked, not moving her attention away from the animated filly who was chatting her ear off.
"Only the good kind, Your Radiance! If it pleases you, might I have the rest of the day off? Starlit's going to stay with me for her time in Sunspire and I'd like to show her the way to my house."
"You have my leave to go," Celestia answered. "Be sure to show our guest all the comfort that you can."
"Absolutely, Your Radiance!" Windy answered before putting up a 'closed' sign and trotting out past Starlit.
With a flutter of happiness in her chest, Starlit followed after as Windy wound down the street. Celestia could wait for one day.
* * *
Setting Sun had a dull feeling in the pit of his stomach, one that wasn't being caused by the meal he'd just had foisted upon him. It was good food, better than he'd eaten in a long time, but it didn't sit well with his nerves as frayed as they were.
"Why hasn't Starlit come to find me yet?" he pondered as he tramped through the most recent of a seemingly endless amount of botanical gardens. "I doubt Celestia had her disposed of, and with that necklace of hers I doubt she could."
He was fortunate, at least, that Starlit hadn't asked how long it took him to find her in the old palace. Two days was a while to hunt around, and in her state she wouldn't have taken the news well.
A few ponies waved and smiled to him, and he half-heartedly waved back. Starlit's seeming lack of concern for his whereabouts wasn't the only thing weighing on his conscience. So lost was he in his thoughts that he barely noticed when he'd crossed to the far side of the city, dominated by the towering edifice of the cathedral he'd seen from the throne room steps.
The marble facade and solar iconography of the House of the Rising Sun sent shudders down Sun's spine, and for good reason. Quickly he pulled his cloak out from his saddlebags and slung it over his shoulders. Even with his bags covering it he wanted as little a chance as possible for other ponies to spy his cutie mark, much less members of the Vox Solaris.
"Time to find some answers," Sun said to himself as he continued his walk to the House.
* * *
Windy's home was on the western side of the city, in the general vicinity of the cathedral. It loomed like a colossus over the other homes and residences in the area, and being unaccustomed to such massive structures, Starlit found its size disquieting.
"Whelp, here we are!" Windy chirped as she opened the white wood door to her house. "Feel free to make yourself right at home!"
Windy's home was comfortably furnished, with a sizable living area attached to what Starlit assumed was the kitchen and a recreation room. A set of circular metal stairs ascended up into a hole in the ceiling, no doubt to where the bedrooms were. Relishing the chance to sit on something that wasn't a bedroll or dirt, Starlit put her sword and bags away and flopped down onto the couch set around a small table.
"Windy, I cant thank you enough for the hospitality you've shown me today," Starlit said. "You have no idea what a time I've had trying to find this place, and your kindness has single-hoofidly made all the stress worth it."
"Oh, you're too kind, Starlit Sky," Windy replied as she came out from the kitchen with a tray of fruit. "It's all I can do to help a stranger get her bearings. If I might be so bold, why did you come to Sunspire?"
"Hmm?" Starlit murmured. "Oh, I, uh, heard about the Queen and how, um, prosperous her kingdom was. Where I come from most ponies live off of subsistence farming and there isn't nearly as much magic as there is here."
"So you thought you'd make a trip out to the Plains to see if what you'd heard was true? Well, I can say definitively that it's worth the trip. I've been here for my entire life and have never felt inclined to leave, so it must be great!"
"Not once?" Starlit asked. "You're really that content here? You've never wanted to travel around, see how others live?"
"Well, why would I?" Windy asked as she tossed an apple back and forth in her hooves. "Queen Celestia provides everything I need, I have good friends and neighbors that I like, a job that leaves me fulfilled, and there's always at least one place here that I haven't been before to satisfy any feelings of wanderlust."
"Sounds idyllic," Starlit replied through a mouthful of the best-tasting pear she'd ever eaten. "So, if you've had everything taken care of, what do you do to pass the time?"
"Well, in the next few hours we have our weekly service at the House of the Rising Sun, that's always interesting."
"Is that the cathedral I saw?" Starlit asked, her interest piqued.
"That's the one! The Vox Solaris, Celestia's chief sorcerers and priests of the Light, always put on a weekly sermon at the House. It's not mandatory, but there's always a show that accompanies it and sometimes there are even new initiates to the order brought in, which is always a grand occasion."
Starlit ruminated on her plan as much as she did on the pear while Windy chatted away about the sermons and the magic spectacle the Vox Solaris would put on.
"If there's anything about the War of the Princesses in this city it would probably be there," Starlit thought, "and if I know Sun that would be the first place he went after Celestia gave him leave."
Starlit felt a twinge of guilt; it had been hours since Sun had left, and she'd gotten so swept up in Windy's kindness that she had neglected to go find him. Given the size of the city it would be a monumental task to try and find him alone, leaving the House as her only concrete lead to go off of.
"Alright, I'll bite," Starlit said, interrupting Windy mid-sentence. "I'll go to the House with you later tonight, but for now I'd very much like to rest, if that's alright with you."
"Absolutely, go right ahead!" Windy answered. "The bedrooms are upstairs and near the far end of the hall. The first on the right's mine, but you feel free to take any other room you'd like."
"Gladly," Starlit replied as she gathered up her things, "and thank you again for all of your help."
Windy gave Starlit a warm smile as she ascended the stairs. Starlit had been running on adrenaline for the better part of the day, and was only now made acutely aware of just how tired she actually was. The soft down comforter and inviting darkness of the bedroom wrapped her in its embrace, and she was asleep before her head hit the pillow.
* * *
Ponies bustled about in front of the House, and Sun was doing his level best to just be another part of the crowd. He couldn't risk being recognized, but knew that the best way to not be seen was to pretend you wanted to be seen.
He walked around the various shops that dotted the plaza in front of the House, looking curiously at the various knick-knacks and doobobs with practiced focus that only comes from hours of experimentation.
While he did so he also kept an eye out for the Vox Solaris. Their white and gold robes gave them away as the came and went from the House, and judging from their actions there was probably a ceremony of some sort taking place that night.
Taking a book out of his bags, grazing past the dagger Starlit had given him as he did, Sun sat down in a darker corner of the plaza and began to read. Nopony would bother him if it looked like he was busy, and the Vox were too worked up over their preparations that they'd pay him no heed either.
So he'd sit there, and wait for his opportunity to get in.
* * *
The sun was low on the western horizon when Starlit woke up, every bone in her body refreshed and every sore muscle soothed. With a relaxed step and a clear head she gathered up her things and went back down the stairs to find Windy almost exactly where Starlit had left her.
"Mornin', sunshine!" Windy chirped. "You got up just in time, I was about to come get you."
"Did I really sleep that long?" Starlit asked blearily as she rubbed the crust out of her eyes. So deep was her nap that she'd lost almost all sense of time.
"I'd say five hours is a pretty generous definition of a 'nap,'" Windy replied with a giggle. "That's alright though, I'm sure you needed it, and were still on track for the sermon tonight, so no harm no foul."
"Point taken," Starlit replied. "I guess we'd better be off, all the same. I'd hate to be late, since you recommend the experience so highly."
"You are too right, Starlit. C'mon, I know a few shortcuts," Windy added, opening the door for Starlit as the pair walked back out into the street. The night air was cool and refreshing, not the frigid chill of the nights she'd spent in the Searing Plains.
The pair wound through back alleys and took side roads in order to avoid the massive amounts of hoof traffic that were going in the direction of the House. Even still, the pair found themselves clogged in a crowd as they approached the main plaza, causing Windy and Starlit to have to step up onto a nearby bench in order to see over everypony else's heads.
"Is it normally this crowded?" Starlit asked. This single crowd looked about the same size as the entire population of Undersand, and this was for a non-mandatory function.
"I'd say this is about typic— ooh, it's starting!"
Turning towards the House, Starlit saw a large set of gilded doors start to swing inward, leaving a cavernous maw in the front of the building that robed priests and priestesses were pouring out of. Starlit was unsurprised to see that they wore the same regalia as Applejack's kidnappers, as she'd pieced two and two together from how Celestia and Windy had spoken of them.
What she was surprised and mortified to see was Applejack coming out with them, wearing a simpler set of robes and standing next to the large red stallion who'd beaten her senseless.
"Fillies and gentlecolts," intoned an elderly unicorn stallion wearing the most ornate robes of all the Vox, "tonight we have a very special sermon for you, as we are welcoming our newest member into the order of Her Radiance's Vox Solaris!"
A thunderous applause erupted from the crowd, with much stomping of hooves and cheering. A few unicorns even shot small bolts of magic into the air in celebration.
"Yes, yes, it is a momentous occasion indeed," the unicorn continued, "but it is also a time fro solemnity and contemplation as we remember all that our Queen does for us, and how we can repay her kindness with dedication and servitude. This is why we serve her, and this is why young Applejack has chosen to be ordained into our order."
Starlit's vision began to fog over from pure anger, and it was all she could do not to charge the stage. She also dully felt the black stone amulet thumping inside her saddlebags as she weighed whether or not to try and stop the ceremony.
"Starlit, are you alright?" Windy asked. "You look upset."
"I'll be fine," Starlit replied with a curt snort. "If you'll excuse me for a moment, I need to go find a bathroom."
"Alright, but hurry back!" Windy answered as Starlit stepped off of the bench and wound through the crowd, trying to get to the front. She needed to see Applejack, to make sure she was unharmed as well as to figure out why she was joining up with the very group that had kidnapped her.
Starlit had just shoved her way through in time to see two things; the first was the unicorn pouring a scented oil over Applejacks head as she bowed before him, obviously as part of the initiation ritual.
The second she only caught a glimpse of as she saw a familiar brown cloak slip behind the assembled Vox and go through the open door to the House. The crowd was so focused on Applejack to notice Sun sneak in, but they'd be on her on a second if she tried.
""Seems like this mission can't ever give me a break," Starlit groused to herself. Quickly she merged back into the crowd and made her way over to the left side of it near the area that Sun had sneaked in through.
Counting on the crowd still focusing on the ceremony, Starlit too made her way behind the assembled Vox and slipped in through the open doors. Fervor for a spectacle, she'd found, was a great distraction, and this crowd was no different from a foal being distracted by a butterfly.
* * *
Part II - Chapter 9: …But Far Worse Than You'd Hope
Part II - Chapter 9: …But Far Worse Than You'd Hope
* * *
Starlit waited for the ceremony to end in a dark corner of the foyer to the House of the Rising Sun. Its polished marble floors and cavernous ceiling made the echo of the crowd noise from outside unbearable to listen to, and the clattering of hooves as the Vox members came back inside was just as bad.
None of the Vox noticed she was there, as their hoods eliminated their peripheral vision, but Starlit would be hard pressed to extricate Applejack from the crowd regardless. They circled her like a herd of cattle, or a pack of wolves.
"Looks like I'll need to find the runt of the pack," Starlit thought as they marched past. As the procession trailed off Starlit saw a pegasus mare near the back who fit the description of runt perfectly.
With deft hoof, taking care not to clatter her horseshoes on the marble floor too much, she grabbed the scrawny pegasus just as she passed the alcove Starlit had been hiding in. She started to scream before Starlit clamped a hoof over her mouth and dragged her into the shadows.
"Let me say that this is nothing against you. You just happen to be in my way and my size for robes," Starlit told the pegasus. Quickly she pulled her sword from its sheathe and drove the pommel into the side of her captive's skull. The pegasus went cross-eyed before a second drubbing with the sword knocked her unconscious.
In the dark of the alcove Starlit stripped the pegasus of her robes and threw them over herself. It was a tad tight around the midsection, and she had to carefully drape the cloth so that it covered the wing holes as well as poke a hole through the hood to accommodate her horn, but it would manage.
Starlit took her saddlebags and stuffed them into a closet alongside the sleeping pegasus, taking care to hide them so they wouldn't be looted through when her captive woke up. She noticed that few Vox carried daggers or a cudgel of some description, so she figured that her sword wouldn't draw suspicion.
Though she was loathe to do so, Starlit also took the black stone amulet and put it back around her neck. It thumped rhythmically as she hid it in the folds of her robes, its surface still cool to the touch. She knew she couldn't let something this powerful fall into Celestia's hooves, but its presence back on her body unsettled her.
Calmly Starlit walked out into the main room of the foyer. So far none of the Vox members paid her much heed, only a few disinterested glances before returning to their work. Starlit's heart felt like a drum in her chest, but she was maintaining her cover well enough.
"You there!" a deep voice with a noticeable, familiar twang called from behind just as Starlit began ascending the stairs.
Starlit slowly, agonizingly turned to see the cherry red earth pony who had kidnapped Applejack. His hood was pulled over his eyes, but his strong jaw tipped her off that this was the same stallion.
"Yes?" Starlit asked, her voice wavering ever so slightly.
"Are you new? I haven't seen you here before?"
Starlit's mind spun furiously, trying to come up with a convincing lie as she stood on the stairs. The earth pony seemed to be eyeing her with suspicion, even if she couldn't where he was looking. She felt that he'd have a stare that could bore through stone if she could look him in the face.
"Um, yes, actually," Starlit answered. "Just freshly inducted. Sorry if you haven't seen me yet, this is a rather big building and all."
If he looked incredulous, Starlit couldn't tell. She could feel the sweat beading onto her brow at his unseen stare as he ran his unseen eyes over her.
"Well then, if that's the case," he said in a low, rumbling voice, "why don't you see to our newest recruit. She'll be in the Initiate's Coven for the rest of the evening in contemplation."
"Yes sir," Starlit said hurriedly, "right away, sir."
Starlit turned back to the stairs to beat a hasty retreat, only to stop short when she realized she had no idea where she was going. The kidnapper noticed as well, with those keen eyes of his.
"You do know where it is, right?" he asked with an accusatory tone.
"Uh... um," Starlit stammered, "I'm sure I-I'll find my way, it can't be that difficult."
Again the stallion fell silent as Starlit's heartbeat steadily climbed to a perilous crescendo. His silences were worse than his words, and carried twice the weight of anything he said.
"Third floor, seventh corridor, eight door on the left," he replied with derision. "The door'll have a good plaque that says what it is, you can't miss it."
"Right, gold plaque, third floor," Starlit muttered loud enough for him to hear. "Thanks for the directions!"
Starlit ascended the stairs with alacrity, both relieved and mildly terrified that she'd gotten through her ruse. She was certain the stallion suspected her, but with nothing concrete to go off of it would take him time to act on these suspicions. In that time she'd find Applejack and Sun and get out of this gold and marble hellhole.
A few more Vox members passed her by as Starlit made her way to the Initiates Coven, but were too absorbed in whatever their tasks were to give her much mind. The door to the Coven was made from rich, oiled wood and had a plaque hammered to the front of it. With a solid shove she opened the door, playing the part of a Vox member on a mission.
No other pony save for Applejack was in the sparsely decorated room, who had jumped when Starlit entered so abruptly. There was fear and confusion written on her once proud and gentle face, and she was still nursing several bruises, cuts, and a semi-swollen eye, none of which had been properly bandaged.
Starlit winced at the state she found her in, but thankfully Applejack's reaction meant that she hadn't been brainwashed yet. Starlit walked softly toward her, locking the door behind her as she did.
"What do you want?" Applejack asked. It was an act of defiance to speak so cavalierly, Starlit was sure, but her voice carried a broken tone like a harp with half its strings cut.
"Applejack, I'm here to get you out. You need to come with me right now."
"Like hell I do!" Applejack retorted, retreating back to a corner of the room. Quickly Starlit realized the problem, and pulled the hood off of her head.
Applejack, it's me! It's Starlit Sky."
As soon as she made the connection Applejack's defensiveness melted away, and she bounded forward. She wrapped Starlit in a tight, furious hug that threatened to knock her off of her hooves, which Starlit returned with equal measure.
"Starlit, you idiot," Applejack chided playfully, "why'd you have to go and get yourself into this mess for my sake? I'd have gotten out of here in a few more days time, you know that!"
"Lucky for you, you just happened to be on my way to deposing the Queen," Starlit jibed back.
Applejack let Starlit go, a grateful smile forcing its way through her marred face as tears ran from her swollen eye.
"I knew something was up when you told me you had business with that colossal bitch," Applejack said. "How do you plan on doing that? Celestia controls the sun, and that's the sort of power that doesn't get given up easily."
"I'm... still working on that part," Starlit answered sheepishly, "but right now I'm also trying to find Sun. He's somewhere in here without me, probably also hunting for you, and he'll be able to help me out with the particulars."
"So he really came along? And he's lasted this whole time out here?"
"We've had some help along the way," Starlit said, "and he's far more capable than he seems. He even had to last in a thestral hive for a while without me."
"No kidding?" Applejack replied. "Never thought he had it in him. You'll have to tell me that story some time."
"I'll put it on the to-do list, but now's not the time for idle chit-chat," Starlit said, steering the conversation back on track. "As far as I know none of the Vox know I'm an imposter, and I was sent by the stallion that kidnapped you to come find and attend to you."
Applejack's smile faded as Starlit mentioned the kidnapper, and she realized that the matter was probably still a sore subject.
"What do you think he meant by 'attend?'" Applejack asked, venom in her voice.
"Doesn't matter, because you're coming with me," Starlit answered. "I'll keep posing as a Vox and you keep posing as the fiery new initiate who needs to be taught her place. We search this place for Sun and get him out, then regroup somewhere and figure out how to deal with Celestia."
"Not much of a plan, but it'll beat staying here," Applejack replied. "Lead on."
Quickly the pair got into character and left the Coven, Starlit pulling her hood up as she did and shoving Applejack out the door for good measure. She'd get an earful over that for sure, but that was a problem for her future self.
* * *
Even though she'd been inside the building for a few hours hunting for Setting Sun, Starlit couldn't get over the sheer awe that struck her at the sight of the House of the Rising Sun. The walls and furniture were made of rich, dark wood with gold accoutrements, and every other room seemed to house a study chamber, cloister, or service hall for the ponies that called this place home.
So far nopony had bothered Starlit and Applejack, with the few that cast them a sideways glance quickly understanding what was going on and leaving well enough alone. Starlit had made a few hasty apologies when going into rooms that they didn't belong in, but the majority of the rooms they checked for Sun in were emptied out.
They had ascended their third flight of stairs when their luck finally ran out and a proper Vox member accosted them.
"Hey, you there!" a whispy female earth pony called from down the hall. Starlit's heart froze up in her chest, and Applejack visibly reacted to the sound of the pony's voice with a knee-jerk reaction.
The pony clomped toward them with purpose, and Applejack retreated behind Starlit as she got closer and closer.
"What's the matter?" Starlit asked, keeping her voice even despite herself.
"What's the matter? Where've you been for the last three hours? We've gotten word that there's an intruder in the building. All Vox Praetoreans are to be on the look out."
"Then why tell me that?" Starlit asked.
"Uh, the sword?" the earth pony replied as she pointed to Starlit's smallsword hanging at her side. Starlit's blood ran cold as she rememebered the other Vox members with weapons; she hadn't stopped to figure whether or not that meant they were of a different ranking.
"Oh, right, o-of course!" Starlit hastily replied. "Forgot my own station there for a second."
"Well, lackadaisical memory or not, all Vox Praetoreans are supposed to be patrolling this floor anyway, so take the Initiate to wherever she's going and get to work."
With a huff the earth pony stalked off down the stairs, Applejack and Starlit breathing a sigh of relief as soon as she was out of earshot.
"I guess that narrows it down," Starlit commented. "He's somewhere on this floor if this is where all the Vox Praetoreans are supposed to be."
Applejack didn't reply, only giving a small nod of agreement. Starlit felt a seed of worry plant in her chest at seeing how rattled Applejack was, but she would address that after they got out.
Quickly they made their rounds, avoiding other Praetoreans who thankfully were too busy hunting the massive floor for Sun to notice them. They checked every room quickly before finally happening upon one down a secluded hallway that was well out of the patrol routes. There was a well-worn plaque next to the door that read Hall of Remembrance.
Starlit pushed the door open with, to her ears, and unconscionably loud creak, to find a room covered in portraits of ponies. On the far side of the room sat Setting Sun, staring up at a portrait with a hardened glare. He only turned to acknowledge her when she was within five feet of him, which is when she pulled her hood down. Applejack stayed at the far end of the room to keep an ear out for the guards.
"Starlit?" Sun asked. "What are you doing here? This place isn't safe."
"Of course it isn't," Starlit replied as she sat next to him, "but I could ask you the very same question."
"I'm here, I assume, doing the same thing you are; trying to find Applejack and get her out of here."
"Well, I've found her, and now I've tracked you down," Starlit replied, "so what say we get out of here before we're all caught?"
Sun didn't say anything in response, only turning back to look at the wall of portraits again.
"Unless, of course, there was another reason that you're here," Starlit continued, in a not-so-subtle steering of the conversation.
"I don't follow," Sun replied. "What else could I be here for?"
"Sun, I saw your cutie mark earlier. When you took your cloak off, I saw it."
Sun didn't speak for a long while, and thankfully no guards made their rounds by the room as he held the silence. He sat in place like a schoolcolt caught doing wrong.
"Starlit, I haven't been honest with you," Sun finally said. "You told me where you came from and revealed some deeply personal secrets, so I guess it's time that I level with you."
"I'm not from Appleoosa, and my parents were never summoned away," Sun continued. "Originally I'm from here; not just Sunspire, but the House itself. My parents were members of the Vox Solaris, after being summoned from wherever they were from."
Starlit looked to the portrait Sun had been looking at, the connection forming in her head. There were a pair of portraits, each with a unicorn in the picture; one was a stallion and the other a mare. The stallion had a lot of Sun's facial structure upon further inspection as well as his whippish build, while the mare had his burgundy coat. They both had vibrant green eyes.
"That's them," Sun said curtly. "That's Ma and Pa. Normally relationships aren't allowed in the Vox Solaris, but they managed to keep it secret long enough to conceive me. I was born here, and then my parents were banished to the wastes. At least, that's what they told me."
"The only reason they didn't die out there was thanks to the brass shelters I have. I was worried they wouldn't work for us because of their age, but the enchantments the Vox placed on them managed to hold out over two decades. Apparently they build 'em to last here."
"The shelters were a gift from your parents?" Starlit asked, feeling even more guilty for how she'd ridiculed them.
"More of an heirloom. It was a miracle they even made it out of Sunspire with them, but thanks to those shelters they managed to survive in the Plains long enough to get to Appleoosa, and that's where they settled down."
"But if you were only here as a baby, then why does your cutie mark have Celestia's sigil on it?" Starlit asked. "Wouldn't it have been influenced by where you grew up rather than where you were born?"
"My parents… my parents always told me I was a special child, that I was born to do great things because the magic of Sunspire was with me. I guess they meant that literally. In hindsight it makes sense; I was born in Sunspire, so I was exposed to Celestia's magic during my entire gestation period because of her control of the sun."
Starlit and Sun sat in silence again as Starlit pondered over her next question. There were so many that went in and out of her head, but one came to the forefront more than the rest.
"Why did you come back?" Starlit asked. "If your parents did so much to get you out of here and give you a normal life, why come back? Why put everything they did for you at risk just to help a stranger with her suicide mission?"
"...Revenge?" Sun answered. "Revenge for taking my parents away again, vegneance for all the lives the Queen has ruined. And maybe a little bit of hope for a future outside of her rule."
Sun, what did actually happen to your parents?" Starlit asked, although she feared the answer wouldn't be one she wanted to receive.
"They were taken out by Vox assassins when I was eight," Sun continued with a flat tone. "According to the undertaker it was a quick and relatively painless death, and much like you I got bounced around from family to family until I grew up. I even stayed with Cherry Blossom for a while and worked in her bar during my teens."
"Sun, I'm so sorry, if I had known I wouldn—"
"It's alright, Starlit," Sun interrupted. "You needed to know anyway, and I've long since gotten over what happened to my parents. At least I was old enough to process what had happened in a healthy way. Old enough to have happy memories of them."
"Thank goodness for small miracles," Starlit muttered. Gingerly she laid a hoof across his back, rubbing small circles across his spine. When White Eclipse was a baby Starlit would do this to help calm her out of a crying fit. Something told her that Sun needed it too.
"Guys, not that I'm not super into the whole emotional pow-wow y'all are having over there, but we're on something of a time-table," Applejack interjected. "The sooner we're out of here, the better."
"Right," Sun replied, "but before we go there's something Starlit needs to see."
Sun led Starlit over to another section of the wall, one with younger ponies in its pictures. He pointed one out specifically, of a unicorn colt just coming into adulthood. His coat was a light tan, with a forest green mane and brown eyes. What drew Starlit's gaze the most, however, was the plaque on the bottom of the frame.
Shady Grove
b. 829 C ~ d. 846 C
Starlit suppressed a cry of shock, both for the revelation but also for Cherry Jubilee. The thought of having to tell her what happened to her child was almost more than she could bear.
"That's not the worst part," Sun continued, pointing to the portrait itself. "Take a look at his cutie mark."
Even though she didn't want to, Starlit had to satiate her morbid curiosity. On closer inspection she saw that it was a tree with green leaves and a small fruit hanging off of one side.
"I don't get it, what's so special about his cutie mark?" Starlit asked.
"That's the same cutie mark I found on the thestral's corpse," Sun answered in a low whisper. "Definitely less mottled and brighter, but the same regardless."
"Heavens above..." Starlit breathed. "How do we tell Cherry Jubilee? She's going to be devestated!"
"What I'm curious about is how he escaped from here and how he turned into a thestral to begin with," Sun answered without answering. "You said it yourself, ponies only become thestrals if there's no magic around, and this city and the entire desert that surrounds it is constantly bombarded with it."
"And your parents were banished, they didn't escape," Starlit continued. "As far as we know, nopony's ever escaped from here."
"Hey, y'all mind clueing me in on what you're muttering about?" Applejack asked. "Or are we gonna get and go?"
"Right, sorry," Sun replied. "It's just that things may have gotten more complicated as far as exfiltration is concerned."
"And it won't get any less complicated if we just stand here," Starlit finished. Quickly she pulled her hood up and motioned for Sun and Applejack to get behind her as she opened the door and peeked around the corner.
The impact of cherry red hooves into the side of her face struck like lighting and crashed like thunder, sending Starlit flying down the hallway. She faintly heard Applejack scream something through her dulled ears as she slid down the marble floor, followed by a flash of green the set her senses out to pasture.
All that was left was the thumping of her amulet that grew steadily faster with the darkening of her vision.
Starlit's head felt like it had just been run over by a carriage wheel when she came around, and her surroundings didn't help one bit.
She was back in Celestia's throne room, or some simulacrum of it. The walls glowed less, the dais and throne looked less opulent, and the whole room was a magnitude smaller than it had initially been.
The red furred Vox member who'd knocked her out kicked her in the stomach as he noticed her stirring. It was hard enough to hurt, but not so much that it was debilitating. Taking the hint she wearily rose to a shaky stand.
Celestia towered above her, the Queen's height only accentuated by the now smaller throne room. Her mane, once a pastel rainbow of flowing hair, crackled with smoke and cinder as a ring of flame encircled it. Her eyes were a florid orange color and her fur burned with the same intensity as her mane. She was clad in golden armor that bore signs of charring and fire damage, the decorative feathers on the breastplate warped by heat.
As Starlit's eyes scanned the Queen she saw that the jewel that had been atop her crown was floating an inch or so off of her horn, channeling gleaming golden magic into the black stone necklace. With a flick of her horn she teleported the red stallion away before addressing Starlit.
"Starlit Sky of Stone Shore," Celestia intoned, "why do you seek to depose my rule?"
Starlit's head was still swimming and she was now grappling with the fact that Celestia had her necklace, so she didn't answer. Celestia didn't seem to be looking for one.
"What have I done to you, specifically, that has called for this level of subterfuge?" Celestia continued. "I invite you into my home, show you the wonders of my kingdom, and I am repaid by assault, deception, and disrespect."
Celestia swiveled her head around to look Starlit in the eye, her gaze burning with barely restrained fury.
"Are you jealous of what I have built here? Do you want to break me down to the level that your ilk are at? Or do you simply live to sow chaos and dissension?"
The pregnant pause told Starlit that it was her turn to speak, a prospect she felt would bear little fruit.
"Your Majesty," Starlit replied, "you're needed back in Canterlot."
Celestia stomped her hoof so hard that it cracked the marble tile of the floor, and when she spoke again it was in the voice of a god, not a pony.
"You presume to tell me where I am needed?!" Celestia bellowed. "Canterlot had it's chance, and it failed! I should've burned that monument to mediocrity myself when I departed, but I was a soft ruler in the time of the war!"
Starlit tried to interject, but the Queen stalked forward, driving Starlit backwards with her movements as well as the force of her voice.
"It was ponies like you that led to the death of a unified Equestria," Celestia continued. "With your schemes and your disorder, always trying to upset the status quo in the name of revolution, or progress! The other Princesses constantly tried to upset the established order, and when four of five supports falter then the entire building collapses!"
Celestia's furor grew and grew as she continued her speech, and the cinders rising off of her mane grew into columns of flame as her eyes changed into cat-like slits.
"I did my best for Equestria all those centuries ago, and what thanks did I get?! A knife in my back and a kingdom in shambles because of the mare who owned this foul thing!" Celestia said, raising the black stone to Starlit's face. "Where did you get this damnable amulet?!"
Starlit knew that Celestia was in no mood for games or tricks, and she doubted she could lie to her even if she wanted to. Swallowing the bile that had risen to her throat from fear, Starlit answered.
"Twilight Sparkle gave it to me. She sent me on this quest to fetch you, and the other Princesses, because Equestria is about to die without you five to rule it!"
Celestia's furious gaze faltered for a brief moment at Starlit's reply, before redoubling its intensity.
"Liar!" Celestia retorted. "Twilight Sparkle died centuries ago, trying to defend her tree from Chrysalis' hordes."
"Were you there to see?" Starlit pointedly asked. "Did you see her die, watch the life drain from her body?"
Celestia's silence was all the answer Starlit needed. Before her headache overcame her she had to get Celestia to doubt herself, if even for a moment. Enough to plant the seeds of reason.
"Why would I lie to you about this?" Starlit continued. "I'm certain you could kill me with a thought, in a way that even that necklace couldn't revive me. I have nothing to gain by deceiving you, and everything to gain by being honest. Twilight is alive and she sent me to convince you to return to your throne, your rightful throne, so you can heal this sick and twisted land."
Celestia stood tall at Starlit's proclamation, her face etched with furious confusion. It was an expression that didn't suit her. The fire of her mane flickered and crackled with a little less ferocity, and her eyes returned to their normal shape if not their normal color.
"But why you?" Celestia asked. "You're small, with barely a modicum of magical power to your name. You scarcely made it here alive, and even then you did not arrive unscathed."
Starlit fought back the urge to laugh at Celestia's question, as she was sure it would get her immolated.
"Your Majesty, I honestly don't know why she chose me. Twilight said something about my lineage making me a good fit, but that could've been nothing but sweet words for all the good it's done me out here."
Celestia stared Starlit down, but Starlit felt that she wasn't looking at her. She was lost in the confines of her mind, trying to piece together an explanation for what Starlit had said.
Starlit then found herself floating through a haze of golden light that faded to black. It didn't feel like death, but it certainly wasn't a living state either; Just cloying blackness for as far as she could see.
* * *
Setting Sun's horn ached from the overuse of complicated magic he'd just performed, and when he breathed in a dull pain stabbed through his side, no doubt from a few bruised ribs. With a few blinks to get the spots out of his vision he dragged himself up to a sitting position.
He was in a small room, no bigger than the hut Starlit and he had stayed in before they found the entrance to Undersand. In fact, it looked to be that exact same hut, down to the cellar door on the far side of the single room and the destroyed bed. The only things that were off were the presence of the rabbit doll Starlit had grabbed and the lack of bloodstains from the thestral.
Sun's throat caught for a moment as he thought about the thestral that Shady Grove had become. He had dug around in his body like a cadaver, not knowing that his mother was grieving for his loss a few hundred feet below ground.
Sun got to his hooves and started looking around; feeling sorry for himself wouldn't help things, and he needed to know where he was. If Celestia could hide an entire city from sight then a single room was certainly not beyond her ability.
The windows were covered in an opaque, gray fog that rebuffed him when he tried to push through it, as well as the doors to the outside and the cellar. For the time being he was trapped, and with his magic drained from trying to fight he wouldn't be spellcasting his way out any time soon either.
"You have an interesting taste in traveling companions, Setting Sun," a chillingly familiar voice said from behind. Sun nearly jumped out of his skin when she spoke, and her presence wasn't any less upsetting.
Celestia stood at the far side of the room, fitting the picture of grace. She didn't look upset, much to Sun's confusion; if anything she seemed pleased to see him. She wasn't wearing any of her regalia save for her crown, with the jewel at its apex glowing softly with dull orange light.
"That Starlit Sky is a fiery one, I'll give her that," Celestia continued. "I admire tenacity, and she has it to spare if how you fought my Vox Solaris is anything to judge by. Perhaps some of it has rubbed off on you."
Celestia sauntered to where Sun was standing by the window, and lowered herself to her haunches when she did. Her expression was motherly, and it deeply unsettled Sun to look at her.
"What do you want from me?" Sun asked. "Other than the obvious."
"And what would be the obvious, Sun?" Celestia replied.
"Torture, mind-control, and indentured servitude are just a few of them, I'm sure. Considering the grief that my parents put you through by having me, I'm sure there's a special hell you've reserved just for me."
Celestia's expression softened, and for a moment it looked like she was about to cry before she breathed in a calming breath.
"Sun, I hold nothing against you for what your parents did," Celestia said, her tone breathy and nurturing. "You may have been a product of the mistakes committed by Crystal Gale and Thunderclap, but you had no choice in the matter. I was sad to see your family leave us, truly I was."
Sun found himself lacking for words. The way Celestia was behaving was throwing him off, but he decided to play on her good humor if only to try and pump her for information.
"Then why did you make them leave?" Sun asked, sitting opposite from Celestia. "If it upset you so much to send them out to the Plains, why do it at all? Their only crime was that they loved each other; enough to defy you, and enough to have me. Was that really worth sentencing them to exile?"
Celestia didn't answer immediately, instead staring out the fogged over window as if there was something to see.
"When I founded Sunspire all those millennia ago, I did so under an edict," Celestia said. "My people, my fellow Alicorns, sent me here to expand our rule and build a legacy, one that would stand for eons to come. The other Princesses had similar mandates, I'm sure, but I didn't know of them at the time."
"When I set to work creating my kingdom, I knew that peace could only come from order, and order could only come from rules and laws that all adhered to. I tried to be lenient, bent some of my own rules to make my citizenry happy in the early years, but the more I gave the more they wanted to take."
"When I left for Canterlot to form the Unified Equestrian Commonwealth alongside my sister, Luna, as well as Twilight Sparkle and Cadance, I did so because I thought it would bring stability and order not just to Sunspire, but to all of Equestria. If the country was safe, then my corner of it would be as well."
"After the war," Celestia continued with a thickness in her voice, "I returned to find my city ravaged, not just by the war but by dissension from within. The governors and leaders I had set up to lead in my stead fell to stupidity and greed. They did more damage to my lands than the war did, and that was when my heart hardened."
A few tears fell from Celestia's eyes as she recounted her history, and for the first time Sun felt like he was empathizing with her. He knew he was seeing her, if only briefly, for the mare she was, not the tyrant she became.
"Celestia… Your Majesty," Sun said, "I'm not sure if you're aware, but your restrictive laws are doing more harm than good. Sunspire may be an oasis, but the ponies that live on the edge of the Plains are suffering. Their lands are burned by your sunlight and they live in constant fear that they're going to be summoned or kidnapped. This very room we're sitting in had a dead thestral in it, and that thestral was one of the ponies you had kidnapped!"
Sun's hackles raised as he spoke, and soon he found that he couldn't control his temper.
"Shady Grove was just a colt, and you tore him from his mother and dragged him away to your 'paradise!' How am I going to tell her what happened to her son by your hoof? You've been tearing families apart for centuries and forcing your citizens into borderline enslavement because you couldn't figure out how to rule with a gentle touch! Because you were afraid of failure!"
Celestia rose to her full height, causing Sun to back away, worried that he'd gone too far in his accusations. Instead of counter-arguments and justifications, though, Celestia simply bowed her head to look Sun square in the eye.
"I'm sorry for what happened to Shady Grove, but he was a casualty of making my kingdom safe for all. One day Sunspire will encompass all of my lands, and soon everypony will be able to enjoy its splendors."
The gem on Celestia's crown began to glow brighter, and it hurt to look at for too long as Celestia weaved a spell through it.
"One day all will be together under my rule, but until then there will have to be sacrifices made so that my vision can be made manifest. I hope that you can learn see things my way, in time."
With a flash of light Celestia disappeared, and Sun found that the room around him was now cleaned and furnished with comfy couches, rich carpeting, and plantlife hanging from the ceiling. The rabbit doll laid on one of the cushions, its eyes bright and its cloth body immaculate.
* * *
Applejack awoke with a start, drawing a sharp breath as she scrambled to her hooves. She let out a cry of pain as she put weight onto her right foreleg before it collapsed underneath her with a sickening crunch.
"A broken leg, well ain't that just perfect!" she hollered to nopony. Gingerly she dragged herself to a wall and propped herself up against it, taking in her surroundings.
The room, for all she knew, was the room at the top of the stairs in Cherry Blossom's saloon. The bed was missing and the windows were covered by a gray fog that, when juxtaposed with the familiar setting, made her feel deeply unsettled.
"Where are you, Celestia!?" Applejack called to the empty room. "I know this one of your tricks, and I'm not fallin' for it!"
"Not much gets past you, does it Applejack?" an accented, baritone voice replied.
Applejack turned to see the same cherry red stallion who'd kidnapped her standing in the doorway, save that the door was replaced by grey fog. He wasn't wearing his Vox robes, which allowed his straw colored mane and tail to shine in the candlelight. His apple-green eyes pierced into Applejack in a way they'd never done before.
"Mac," Applejack said. Her voice was low, as speaking any higher would certainly cause it to break.
"Why did you have to go and put up a fight, Applejack?" Big Mac asked. "I've been here for years now, do you see me making a fuss like you and your new friends did?"
"You should know why, Mac… remember when I kicked open that water barrel 'cause Winona had gotten out and eaten up half a bushel of apples?" Applejack added.
"If I recall, I'm the one that had fix that barrel," Big Mac answered. "So that's you're justification? You have a short fuse?"
"That bushel," Applejack continued, her voice gaining a hard edge, "was supposed to go to the schoolhouse for all the schoolfoals, to give 'em something sweet before winter set in. That's where you and I differed, Mac. You were always focused on utility, on the function of things. I had more heart at the end of the day, even if it wasn't necessarily the most pragmatic thing to do."
"And while you were playing nice with everypony," Big Mac retorted, "I was busy making sure the roof didn't cave in and that we had enough food to go around. I tried to help us survive."
"Then why'd you leave, Mac!?" Applejack asked as she stood up and stalked toward her brother on her three good legs. "Why'd you abandon Apple Bloom and I? Granny Smith had already passed away, and Mom and Dad got summoned just after Apple Bloom was born! It was just the three of us, and you decided to make it two!"
"Don't you talk to me like I had a choice! Nopony gets to refuse the Queen's invitation!"
"Have you ever seen anypony try?!" Applejack snapped back. "Maybe if you'd had a little more backbone you've thrown that ticket away and stayed with your family! But no, you followed the rules like everypony else and forced others to suffer for it!"
"I didn't abandon you! Why do you think I brought you here?" Big Mac retorted, giving Applejack pause.
"Brought me? You kidnapped me, beat me within an inch of my life! You tryin' to tell me that that was for my own good?"
"I had to put on a show for the others," Mac answered. "We're always sent out in trios to make sure nopony tries to break off, not that I would've."
"And just why wouldn't you have tried to escape?" Applejack asked pointedly. "Is Celestia's prison really that great?"
"It's better at least than a rundown town on its last legs! She's trying to build a better future for all of us here, she just needs more time. If you'd get out of your own head for a moment and saw what she's actually built here, you'd understand that."
"You really are bought in, aren't you?" Applejack retorted. "I know this room's just another one of her illusions or whatever hocus-pocus she's used to brainwash you, so send her in here. I'm done with you!"
"Applejack, you don't mean tha—"
"How would you know whether I mean it or not?! You're no kin to me anymore, so just go!"
Applejack felt something wet slide down her face, and she just noticed that she'd been crying while she was berating her older brother. Big Mac's face softened for a moment before going back to the same resolute stare he'd had when she first saw him back at the House. In a flash of golden magic he vanished, replaced by Celestia's towering frame. She wore her crown with the orange jewel, as well as a set of gilded horseshoes and a bejeweled golden collar.
"That went worse than I expected," Celestia admitted, "and I didn't have particularly high hopes for that reunion."
Applejack took a few hasty steps away until she was nearly to the opposite end of the room. Fear was not an emotion she was used to, but Celestia was very good at inspiring it.
"Was that even Big Mac, or was it just one of your tricks?" Applejack asked. She tried to hide the quavering in her voice, but she knew that it was going to be a futile effort.
"That was indeed your older brother, in the flesh," Celestia answered, "just as I am now here in the flesh. You're the one who asked for me, though I must say that your trepidation is disarming."
"What else would you expect out of a pony you had beaten, kidnapped, and forcefully indoctrinated into your whackjob cult?"
Celestia didn't answer, only moved over to the empty space where the bed should've been and sat down, facing the fogged over window. She patted a spot on the floor next to her, beckoning Applejack to join her.
"If it matters at all to you, I'd prefer to stay here," Applejack said, retreating back towards the wall a little more. Celestia didn't offer again, only showing a momentary look of disappointment.
"Applejack, what your brother told you is the truth," Celestia said. "I am trying to make Sunspire a haven for all to enjoy."
"You've sure got a funny way of showing it," Applejack quipped back.
"But,"Celestia continued, "to do that, Sunspire needs structure and order. The Vox Solaris are just one way of doing that, making sure that order is maintained."
"And that's why you've given them free reign to kidnap ponies from their homes? That's why you've been culling the towns on the edge of the Plains to fill their numbers with your golden tickets? Because of order?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes," Celestia answered. "The ponies of my kingdom are happy, but the job that the Vox Solaris undertake is a harrowing and, at times, unsightly job. I don't want my subjects to have to see that side of my rule, but it is that side that allows them the comforts they enjoy."
Applejack looked at Celestia, trying to see on her face if their were any signs of doubt or regret, but nothing came through her steely visage. It barely looked like she was addressing Applejack at all for as focused as she was in the fog in the window.
"Celestia, this isn't how you rule," Applejack said. "Take it from me, it just isn't. At least, it isn't if you want the ponies you rule over to actually love you."
"I'm aware of your role in Appleoosa, Applejack," Celestia replied. "You fancy yourself as something of a leader to the ponies that live there, yes?"
"I do, but it's more than that. Now, I don't know much about running a city like this, but I do know that an iron-hoof and an unwavering obedience to the letter of the law isn't the way to make ponies loyal to you. It just makes them obedient."
"Obedience and loyalty go hoof in hoof, do they not?" Celestia asked, her tone conveying genuine curiosity.
"No, they don't," Applejack answered. "When I was a little filly, my granny told me a story about the mayor of Appleoosa when she was coming up. Nopony in town liked him at all; he was stuck up, had a violent temper, and generally was only looking out for his own peace and quiet. Didn't matter if bandits were runnin' wild in town, as long as it didn't bug him he didn't intervene."
"There came a breaking point when my granny was in her young marehood when the mayor let the town's grain silo go up in flames. The townsfolk tried to get water to it, but the nearest source was a mile away because of the heat. By the time the ponies had come back to put it out it was already smoldering."
Applejack saw a momentary twitch of Celestia's eye when she mentioned the heat. It was a small crack in her facade, but it was a crack nonetheless, and one that let Applejack know she was getting to her.
"He tried to worm his way out of it when the townsfolk came to his door with pitchforks and torches," Applejack continued, "but when it came time for his guards to prove their loyalty, it turns out that they were only obedient."
"And so the guards laid their arms down," Celestia interjected, "and let the angry mob tear the mayor apart for his heinous actions. I believe that that's how this sort of story typically goes."
"Almost," Applejack replied, slightly surprised that Celestia guessed that closely. "The guards joined the mob and were among the first to attack him."
"You see," Applejack continued, "while the mayor may have been keeping them from starving, he didn't get any loyalty from them because he never did more than what was expected of him. The ponies in town, however, would make small talk with the guards, or help them duck out for a quick break if they looked like they needed it, and sometimes the foals would bring them little gifts to help make their day a little bit better."
"That's how you lead, Celestia. You don't just do the bare minimum to make sure that your subjects are obedient and provided for; you need to go the extra mile for them, show them that you actually care about them as something other than a tally on a piece of parchment."
Celestia's expression didn't change. Applejack felt a seed of worry plant in her chest, one that sprouted as Celestia stood up to her full height and turned to face Applejack.
"An interesting idea, Applejack," Celestia stated. "I'll have to ponder that for a while, but for now it's time for us to rejoin the others. I've just finished up with your co-conspirators."
"You mean Starlit and Su— wait, what do you mean, you're done with them?" Applejack asked. She didn't get an answer as Celestia was enveloped in golden light and vanished, leaving Applejack alone to her thoughts.
* * *
Starlit Sky returned from the void she'd been floating in to find herself in the throne room again. It wasn't the smaller and darker one she'd been in before, but the glistening golden one that she'd arrived in earlier that day.
Standing at the top of the dais was Celestia, and Celestia again, and still a third version of herself. Starlit scampered backward, reflexively reaching for the sword she no longer had.
They were each Celestia, that much was certain, but they all wore different accoutrements and held themselves differently. The fire-maned one Starlit recognized as the one that had interrogated her, with the one on her right wearing nothing but her crown and a serene smile while the one to her left wore a collar, horseshoes, a cold glare.
What differentiated the center Celestia even further was the jewel floating at her horn, the same jewel that had been set into her crown beforehand, and the presence of Starlit's necklace next to it.
"Why so shocked, Starlit?" the center Celestia asked. "Surely by now you know that I'm something of an illusionist, and as such this should be little surprise to you."
"What is this?" Starlit demanded. "Why are there three of you?"
"There aren't," the Celestia on the right answered, her voice a smooth as water. "There is but one of me, divided into three that each contain the sum total of my power."
"It is a pragmatic application of my prodigious skill," the Celestia on the left continued. "It allows me to better monitor my citizenry and, in this instance, gather information in an expedited fashion."
"Information from whom?" Starlit asked, fearing that she already knew the answer.
With a swish their horns the two outer Celestias formed a vision contained in magic, much like Twilight had done when showing her the unicorns of Rocky Point. In the right side one sat Sun in a well-furnished room, while in the left Applejack was curled up in the corner of a room that looked suspiciously like Starlit's from Appleoosa.
"Strange, how ponies have many sides to themselves that they don't show," the center Celestia said as she sashayed down the dais steps. "Some are braver than they seem, some far more fearful. Myself, I try to keep a handle on my many facets."
"Is this some sort of game to you?" Starlit asked. "Toying with the lives of my companions to get me to comply or leave you be?"
"Starlit, do you really take me for a torturer like that?" right side Celestia cooed.
"You've proven unresponsive to that sort of coercion," left side Celestia continued.
"On the whole, you seem far more receptive to reason and logic," center Celestia said. "Acts of aggression spur you to action, to try and stop said aggression for the sake of peace and order. We're quite similar in that regard."
"The only exception is that I don't go for the preemptive strike," Starlit replied.
The center Celestia let out a sharp peal of laughter, joined in chorus by her other selves before they shimmered into golden light and drew back into her horn by way of the jewel. The tarnish on her armor vanished during the merge, and the flames that licked across her neck and from her tailbone now shimmered with the same pastel colors as her usual hair.
"Defiant to the very end! That fire in you is the only reason I'm even giving you this choice, Starlit Sky," Celestia said.
With practiced ease Celestia drew the two visions she had generated closer, placing them just close enough that Starlit could see Sun and Applejack in better detail. Sun was trying to find his way out of the room despite the fog over the windows, and Applejack simply weeped in her corner.
"I want you three as my councilors," Celestia said with a smile. "You all would be offered a high place in my new order alongside whatever loved ones you wished to bring along. You would be cared for all the rest of your days in return for advising me."
Starlit could barely keep her jaw from falling open in shock. After all she'd gone through to get there, all the evidence she'd seen and been told of how Celestia's rule was ruining the lives of her subjects, the sheer audacity of the offer made Starlit feel faint.
"And when I refuse?" Starlit replied with a chuckle of disbelief.
"So quick to say no?" Celestia replied. "You're not going to think it over?"
"Celestia, this isn't a choice! You have to go back, what part of that aren't you getting? Equestria is dying without your magic to sustain it, and when the point of no return comes it won't matter if you're here or not!"
Celestia's forced smile quickly dropped into a steely expression of disapproval. She whisked the visions away with a flick of her horn as the light in the room grew so strong that it hurt Starlit's eyes to look anywhere.
"I had hoped you would be smarter than that, Starlit Sky," Celestia replied, her horn wrapped in golden light. A spear made of rainbow-hued fire emerged from thin air by Celestia's head as she dropped the black amulet on the ground, and Starlit felt a familiar weight lay on her back, shoulders, and hips. She looked at herself to find her set of leather armor and her sword secured to her body.
"It's only fair," Celestia stated, answering Starlit's question before she asked it. "Killing you won't mean much if you can't put up some kind of fight."
"Celestia, this doesn't have to end in violence," Starlit said. "You can still make the right choice! You can still do your duty to Equestria!"
"Maybe there was a time where I believed that, Starlit Sky, but I am so much wiser now."
With a mighty flap of her wings Celestia rose into the air, a plume of multi-colored fire rising from her ascent as she twirled upwards. With a soaring backflip Celestia adjusted her course, making a dive straight for Starlit. With a cry Starlit rolled out of the way just as Celestia landed, feeling a searing heat across her back from the Princesses' spear embedding in the floor.
"Celestia, please!" Starlit pleaded. Celestia made no indication that she had heard Starlit as she lept forward again to skewer Starlit. She left a trail of flames as she glided, wraith-like, across the marble.
Again Starlit barely managed to dodge in time, and this time she knew that there would be no reasoning. With grim determination she drew her small sword with her magic and prepared for Celestia's next attack.
A blindingly hot wound opened across Starlit's spine as one of Celestia's doppelgängers stabbed through her with her flaming spear. Starlit's magic faltered and her sword clattered to the ground, followed closely by Starlit herself falling to the polished marble.
The last thing she heard was Celestia screaming something at her, followed by a dull, rhythmic beat in her chest and across her back, and the last sight she saw was a glow of grey from across the chamber.
* * *
There was no sharp breath when Starlit awoke this time, only a furious stomping sound as Celestia tramped across her throne room. Starlit felt the dull weight of the amulet hanging from her neck, as well as the seared hole in the back of her armor. The room was still brightly lit, but Starlit's eyes were less sensitive to it than before.
Shakily, but not so much as her first death, Starlit pulled herself to her hooves. She noted, with some fear, the Celestia still had her spear summoned and twirling around her head.
"And she wakes!" Celestia declared. "Truly it is a miracle!"
"More of a curse with a useful side-effect, in my humble opinion," Starlit replied. "So, now you know my little secret."
"I knew what your secret was when you walked in here with that thing," Celestia said. "I just didn't expect that damn necklace to still work after so long."
"Lucky for me that Twilight keeps good care of her things. Now that you know that you can't kill me, what say we go back to the negotiations?"
"I'd much prefer to slay you over and over again until you capitulate or use up the rest of that necklace's magic, but I simply don't have the time."
Starlit could hear the sincerity in Celestia's voice, the desire to crush her like a bug, but since she wasn't directly attacking just yet Starlit decided to go for the diplomatic approach.
"Why us?" Starlit asked. "Why do you want Sun, Applejack, and I to be your councilors? Surely you have ponies around to do that for you?"
Celestia stared Starlit down, her orange eyes alight with anger. She didn't answer as the pair circled each other, so Starlit pressed on.
"Is it because we're defiant? Did you speak with them after me, and they told you truths that you didn't want to hear? I'm sure Applejack gave you an earful, she has a bold heart and a sharp tongue. Or is it because you know, somewhere in that burnt-out husk of a conscience, that what you're doing is wrong?"
Celestia planted her spear into the floor, sending a column of rainbow fire into the air with its impact. Starlit instinctively drew her sword in preparation for another attack.
"All I wanted was a bit of peace and order!" Celestia answered back. "I wanted a just society where everypony followed their roles and did as they were supposed to for the benefit of all! But instead I got deception and skulduggery around every corner, from penny-pinching merchants in the cities and townships that would try to fleece every coin they could get all the way to the scheming nobility and politicians of my own court!"
"And now I have you to contend with," Celestia continued, jabbing the spear in Starlit's direction. "I've been able to exile or otherwise deal with every pony who would upset my order, and then you show up on my doorstep."
Celestia's gaze traveled upward slightly, no longer staring at Starlit but at a point in the middle distance. She muttered to herself, too softly for Starlit to hear, as she thought. Starlit held her sword aloft, poised to strike at the slightest provocation, but there was none.
Celestia quickly whipped her head around and launched the flaming spear at Starlit. With barely a hair's breadth of room Starlit dodged the spear, but saw a sizable chunk of her mane get cut off in the process. The smell of burnt hair stung in her nostrils.
A large force pressed into Starlit's chest, enveloping her body as she was lifted into the air at eye level with Celestia. Her necklace floated away from her body, the leather strap pulled taut against the back of her neck.
"If I can't kill you with the amulet, then I suppose I'll have to take the amulet out of the equation," Celestia snarled. "Perhaps your friends will be more amenable to my offer when they have your head on a pike in front of them."
Starlit tried to protest, but the magic holding her up had locked her jaw shut. All she could do was flick her eyes feverishly around the room to look for a way out. The magic encasing the necklace glowed brighter with its pale grey light as Celestia's eyes illuminated a solid orange.
"It's a shame, really, to see such a powerful artifact go to waste," Celestia continued. "With something like this a pony could rule all of Equestria and then some."
The jewel on Celestia's crown floated over the tip of its owner's horn, shining with orange light and sending a series of concentrated magical beams to the black stone amulet. Starlit could feel it hammering away as Celestia cast her spell over it.
"Think, Starlit, think!" Starlit screamed inside her own head. "There's always a way out, always a third option!"
Starlit scanned around the room until her gaze landed on her sword, laying useless on the ground in front of her and out of Celestia's sightline. If she could use some of her magic to break through part of Celestia's spell she might be able to reach it and distract Celestia with an attack.
"Unless... Starlit thought. With a steadying breath Starlit concentrated all of her energy on her horn. Remembering how it felt when she fed a warding line, the ebb of magic leaving her and flowing into something else, she endeavored to make her horn reverse the process.
Starlit saw a glimmer of blue show up above her brow, the faint bit of magic that she could manifest of her own accord. Slowly she felt the siphoning effect take hold, taking in amounts of Celestia's magic that would be too small to notice. Her head felt like it was going to crack in two from the strain.
Quickly Starlit's magical reserves filled up to the highest amount she could ever remember having, and the siphon still greedily drank the magic in. Her whole body felt like she'd been struck by lightning, with the glow of her horn shining bright enough to rival the amulet's.
Just as Celestia began to notice the glowing from Starlit's horn did she make her play. Throwing out all the energy she could into a single, shouted spell, Starlit's magic broke through the barrier and wrapped around her sword. With a swift strike, magnitudes faster than she had ever made a single object move, she slashed at the jewel floating over Celestia's horn.
"No!" Celestia screamed, too late to stop the sword.
A piercing crystalline sound echoed around the chamber. Whether it was from the sheer force of impact or the magic she'd stolen, Starlit couldn't say, but the spherical gem was now cleft into two perfectly semi-spherical halves. The small sword flew out of Starlit's magic, flying so fast that it embedded into one of the walls on the far side of the room.
Starlit fell to the ground with a thud as Celestia let her go. The Queen tried to catch the remnants of her jewel, but they hit marble before she could and shattered into innumerable pieces like brittle glass.
"What have you done? What have you done!?" Celestia wailed at Starlit. The Queen rose high on her wings, her fur and armor now ablaze, with at least a dozen spears prepared to pierce Starlit's hide. Not knowing if the amulet could still revive her after what had been done to it, Starlit sprinted as far and fast as she could away from the enraged alicorn.
As she ran, the world changed in a flash of perfectly straight, multicolored lines of light. The throne room was suddenly much smaller and darker, and Starlit had to skid to a halt before she ran face first into a wall. Several of the walls were broken down, giving a clear view of the world outside.
It was night time, and the moon above was near full, providing enough light to show Starlit that Sunspire was no more. Everywhere she looked there was the endless desert of the Searing Plains, with only two structures of note to accent the vast flatness. A few miles off to the east of the throne room stood the ruins of the House of the Rising Sun, leaning to its side in a patch of soft sand, and to the south of that were a familiar quartet of hovels in the approximate location that Windy Whistle's home had been.
Starlit felt heat flow up her now bare back, and she prepared to be skewered by Celestia. When no attack came, Starlit hesitantly turned around to face her foe.
Sitting in the middle of the floor was Celestia, her armor gone and her mane only slightly smoldering. She looked shocked, and given what had just happened Starlit couldn't exactly blame her.
"Celestia? Your Majesty?" Starlit asked.
"A lie... a grand illusion... that's all it was," Celestia muttered.
"A lie? What do you mean?"
"I needed time to rebuild... time to gather my subjects after the war... they needed homes, jobs, lives... and I gave those things to them."
Starlit slowly approached Celestia, her amulet thumping as she did. She pulled it off of her head and tossed it to the side, lowering to her haunches in front of Celestia.
"Do you mean to say that all of this, everything that you've done and everything that you've put the ponies who live here through was for a lie?" Starlit asked.
Celestia didn't reply directly to Starlit, only continued to mutter in a catatonic trance.
"They needed order... I had to give them order," she murmured.
Knowing that this wouldn't get her any answers, Starlit mustered up the remnants of the magic she'd stolen and let off a bolt of pure energy. It cracked like thunder and made Starlit's ears ring, but it was enough at least to get Celestia's attention.
"Celestia, I need you to be truthful to me," Starlit demanded. "Was all of this just an illusion?"
Slowly Celestia looked down at Starlit, her purple eyes brimming with tears. For a moment Starlit could see the mare underneath the tyrant's mask, and it upset her more than being attacked by her had.
"Sunspire was ravaged by the war, and I... I couldn't stand to see my people suffer through that. I used a piece of crystal that I stole from Cadance as a catalyst to turn the sun into a projector for my illusion. I made ruined homes new, spoiled food fresh, families who'd lost loved ones whole again. I did it all t—"
"To bring about order and peace," Starlit finished.
The pair sat in silence, save for the wind howling through the desert around them. Celestia allowed herself a few tears, but ultimately she appeared to be too shocked for emotional display.
"Starlit Sky, I am no ruler," Celestia admitted. "I replaced my entire kingdom with puppets and trickery to avoid the hard lessons the war should've taught me. You do not want me back at Canterlot."
Quickly Starlit stood up and turned on her hoof to make for a hole in one of the walls. She levitated her amulet back around her neck, it being the only piece of actual equipment she still had after the illusion had been broken.
"Celestia, do you know where Applejack and Setting Sun would be?" Starlit asked.
"In the House, or whatever remains of it," Celestia answered. "It was the only place in my illusion that was populated by the living, as a way to make the city seem more real by replacing older ponies when I couldn't remember enough about them to recall their forms."
"Then come with me," Starlit ordered. "I'm going to give you a chance to be a ruler."
The mood outside the House of the Rising Sun was tense, and Setting Sun knew that the only thing holding the tension was everypony else's staggering confusion. The world had shattered apart and left them in a moonlit wasteland with the House itself in dilapidated ruin, and nopony wanted to be the one to say the first word.
Applejack limped her way through the gathered ponies that once formed the Vox Solaris, their bodies no longer clad with their white and gold robes, and nopony made much motion to stop her from approaching Sun. She gestured for him to follow her well away from the crowd.
"Was this Celestia?" Applejack asked, worry heavy in her voice.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Sun replied. "I had figured that Celestia was using powerful magic to hide Sunspire, but using it to make Sunspire is a whole other tier of skill."
"So Starlit did this?"
"I think she might've convinced Celestia to break the spell, but there's no way she would've had enough magic to break it on her own if that's what you're asking."
Seemingly satisfied, Applejack fell silent. She plopped down onto the cracked earth, looking truly tired for the first time that Sun could remember, and he quietly joined her. Together they watched the assembled Vox ponies mill about in the moonlight. Some looked worried, others upset, and they all didn't seem to know what to do with themselves.
"Thank you Sun," Applejack said softly after a while. "I had you misjudged."
"How so?" Sun asked.
"After what happened with Thunder Lane all those years ago, when you stabbed him with your horn, it colored the way I thought about you. I had you figured for a different sort of stallion, and I can see now how wrong I was."
"If it makes any difference, I'd say we were both at fault for that one," Sun replied. "I never tried to clarify what had happened, for starters."
"You avoided me like the plague, if I recall," Applejack replied with a chuckle.
"You had me slapped in irons, what did you expect?" Sun retorted. "For us to get all buddy-buddy, have a drink down at Cherry Blossom's after you finished processing me?"
"For all the hassle you gave Thunder and I that day, I'd say a drink would've been the start of your repayment. In fact, when we get home, drinks are on you."
Home. The notion hit Sun with more weight than he thought it would. Somewhere in the back of his mind he didn't really expect to make it out of Sunspire, but now he had a future to look forward to. Unless what Starlit had told him about the Princesses of old was true, which it seemed more and more likely was the case.
"Applejack, I can't go home with you," Sun said. "I'm going to stick with Starlit."
"What? Why?" Applejack asked, dumbstruck.
"I've got a feeling that whatever her job is, it's not going to end here," Sun answered. "Celestia, Sunspire, everything that's happened to us over the last week is just the beginning, and she's going to need help."
"Sun, we need you back home, I need you back home! You're a part of our community, and now that Celestia's curse is broken we'll need more unicorns than ever to help fix up the land and make it arable again."
"Applejack, I know you mean well, and if I felt that didn't have to go with her I wouldn't. It's just that so much has happened between us that to part ways now would feel... it would feel like trying to say goodbye to an old friend that you knew was never coming home."
"…Or like saying goodbye to a family member," Applejack added, her voice weary and resigned. "Are you sure I can't change your mind?"
"I'm afraid not. I'll come back as soon as we're finished with whatever it is that her mission really is, you can put money on that, but for now I feel like she's going to need me more than you."
Applejack fell silent for a moment, staring up at the stars with her one good eye. Sun noticed that they were more numerous and bright than he'd ever seen before, and the moon accentuated their shine rather than drowning it out.
"Well, far be it for me to keep a stallion from his grand destiny," Applejack said. "I'll save you a seat back at Cherry's place when you do decide to come home, and the first round's on me."
"I appreciate that. I'll be sure to get you a nice magical artifact while I'm away to pay for that round."
Together they sat in silence once more, taking in each other's company for as long as they could. The cool night air was refreshing and the Vox ponies left them be while they sorted themselves out. It was the most pleasant night Sun could remember having, and he was almost sad when his shared reprieve came to a close.
One of the Vox ponies cried out about a pair of ponies approaching from the west, and Sun turned to look for them. The moonlight did enough to highlight their silhouettes, showing that one of the ponies was significantly taller than the other.
"Good grief, she actually did it," Sun thought with equal parts relief and trepidation.
* * *
Starlit and Celestia's shared trek across the Plains to the House was spent in silence. Celestia's was being caused by shock and nerves, no doubt, while Starlit was ruminating over how to get this to shake out in her favor.
In the meantime Starlit savored the cool night wind and the lack of sunlight. After over a week spent in blisteringly hot conditions and dealing with constant illumination save for the precious few hours of night that Celestia's illusion would allow for, the presence of a genuine nighttime sky was surprisingly comforting.
The wreck that was the House of the Rising Sun still held a certain majesty in its ruined state, but Starlit didn't have time to focus on it. The remaining members of the Vox Solaris were gathered outside of its once proud doors, meaning that Starlit had to break the silence. She motioned to Celestia to follow her behind a boulder.
"Celestia, I need you to listen to me," Starlit began, turning to face her charge. "These ponies are likely to be confused and distraught by what's happened to their city, and more than likely they'll want some measure of justice against whoever did this to them."
"So you wish for me to placate them?" Celestia asked, her voice soft but firm.
"That would be ideal, but I doubt that it's going to happen. What I need you to do is to get them to direct their anger into another avenue than revenge. You know these ponies far better than I do so I'll leave the exact method up to you, but these ponies need an outlet for their anger and confusion that doesn't get anypony else hurt."
"It's not them that I'm worried about, Starlit, but myself," Celestia replied. "I lied to them for years, took them from their families, all to prop up a facade that I myself had forgotten was one. I worry that they'll want to tear me limb from limb for what I did to them."
Starlit saw the fear etched onto Celestia's face, and knew that she wasn't lying about this.
"You're still their Queen, Celestia," Starlit said. "It may have been under false pretenses, but if you were able to get these ponies to kidnap loved ones and brainwash them, then they'll at least hear what you have to say."
"And if they don't? If they decide that I'd be better off as a head on a spike, what would you have me do? Murder my own subjects, the only subjects that I have left? It would be an inauspicious beginning to my return to Canterlot if I had a massacre on my hooves."
"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, but for now I need you to focus," Starlit replied. She gently took Celestia's hoof in her own from where she sat. It was a technique she'd used on White Eclipse many a time to get her to listen, and it never failed to get her daughter to pay attention.
Like clockwork, Celestia looked down to her hoof and back to Starlit. Her face was equal parts mild confusion and shock at another pony's touch, but she didn't recoil.
"You are Princess Celestia the Bright, and I believe in you."
Celestia looked away when Starlit spoke, letting her head poke over the edge of the boulder to look towards the House. A single tear slid down her cheek as she looked to her subjects, and her eyes spoke what her mouth would not. Celestia would be fine.
* * *
Celestia couldn't remember the last time she had ever felt so nervous. If it weren't for her walking her knees would be shaking like leaves in a strong wind. If there was one thing in the world she was thankful for, it was her ability to maintain a stoic and serene appearance despite herself.
The ponies who had once formed her Vox Solaris looked intimidated as she approached, as well as shocked. She soon realized that they'd never seen her without some sort of armor or other accoutrement decorating her body. With only her crown, she was positively slovenly by comparison.
Starlit Sky followed close behind, but stopped short when the angry glares from the Vox started going her direction. She quickly moved around the crowd and joined her companions a few yards away, the crowd falling silent and looking up to Celestia expectantly as she did.
Drawing a deep, slow breath, Celestia centered herself. It had been too long since she had had to make a proper speech.
"Subjects, friends," Celestia began, "I am certain that you are wondering what has become of the city that we all called home. In some respects I, too, am wondering what happened to Sunspire. I doubt it is for the same reasons that you are, but I wonder it all the same."
The crowd started murmuring to themselves, but fell silent once more when Celestia raised a hoof.
"I fear that I have not been honest with you, and the time has come that I need to be honest with you. Sadly, I am without my speech-writer, as I'm sure you've noticed that many of our friends and fellow citizens are no longer here. What I say now comes not from another pony's quill, but from my head and my heart."
"Sunspire as you knew it was never real," Celestia continued. "It was a grand illusion of my own creation, from the tallest tower to the most insignificant insect, designed to provide safe haven for my subjects while the real thing was rebuilt."
The crowd broke out into shouts and cries of despair, as Celestia knew that they would. They were outraged, despondent, and every sort of emotion between the two. She sneaked a quick glance to where Starlit stood, who gave her a subtle gesture to continue.
"You lied to us?!" a mare cried out, a sentiment shared by many in the crowd.
"Yes, I lied to all of you," Celestia answered, raising her voice to be heard over the din, "as I lied to your predecessors in the Vox Solaris going back centuries."
The shouts of accusation and cries for some explanation were all too familiar to Celestia. The memories they brought to the surface of her mind were ones long buried, but now would be their time in the sun. With a flick of her horn a wave of golden energy spread over the crowd. It was purely theatrical with no actual effect embedded into it, but it got the fevered crowd to calm down somewhat.
"I wish I could tell you that there was a good explanation for why I trapped you all in my fantasy, but there isn't. I was selfish and in denial of my failings when I made the illusion, and over time I simply forgot about it. You and your ancestors suffered for my transgressions, as have the ponies of what were the Verdant Plains, now scorched by the very sun that once sustained them."
"I know that I cannot keep you here any longer, nor will I try," Celestia continued, her stance growing slightly slumped as she spoke. "You had lives and families before I took you from them, and if you so choose I would return you to them. It is the smallest recompense I can offer for what is an unforgivable crime."
The crowd was silent for a moment before a few ponies spoke up. The vitriol in their voices was tempered by Celestia's offer, which gave her some small comfort.
"What about those of us that have been here for decades?" an older pegasus asked. "What lives do we have to go back to?"
"An astute question, and one that I am prepared to answer. If you would all look to the west," Celestia added, directing their gaze to the ruins of her palace
With another deep breath she turned with the crowd, focusing her magic to her horn. She was having to recall a very old piece of magic that she never thought she'd have to use again, much less in reverse. The lines of her horn glowed with her golden magic, her mane and tail fluttering faster and faster as a golden glyph circle appeared under new hooves.
"Terrescia Vas Nictus," Celestia intoned in the language of her people. The magic from her horn shot into the sky, a thin bright streak of gold cutting through the darkness. It traveled the miles to her throne room before coming down with a flash of light and a great rumbling of the earth.
Celestia fell to one knee as the glyph circle dissipated, due only partially to the quaking of the ground beneath her. The crowd grew panicked, and a few ponies began to run for cover befor they were transfixed by the sight on the horizon.
A dome of golden magical energy cracked through the dry desert dirt, shielding within it her first kingdom, her first palace. The minarets were decayed, and the city was tiny compared to her illusion, but the sight of it gave Celestia the first pang of real happiness she'd had in centuries. As it rose her throne room buckled and crumbled, and Celestia smiled at its collapse.
As the stone slid and tumbled off of the domed shield, Celestia turned back to her startled subjects. She glanced over to Starlit and her companions to find them equally shocked at the resurfacing of her kingdom, and was pleased to see that Starlit wasn't completely unflappable in the face of adversity.
"Fillies and gentlecolts, I give you Nova Solis," Celestia announced. "It may not be what you've grown accustomed to, but the society that has flourished there despite my best efforts over the centuries is welcoming and hospitable. Just ask Starlit Sky and Setting Sun."
The crowd turned to look at Starlit and Sun, who looked back with an expression that neatly toed the line between abject horror and childish embarrassment. It was all Celestia could do not to laugh at the scene.
"For those who I trapped with nowhere else to return to, I would ask you to travel to Nova Solis, or Undersand as the locals refer to it. Tell them of what happened on this night, the good and the bad, and tell them that the Radiant Queen will trouble them no more. I can't be forgiven for what I've done here, but I can work to fix my mistakes; I would simply ask that you all give me the chance"
With her speech concluded, Celestia dissipated the shield surrounding Old Sunspire, eliminating any stray debris as she did. The wait for her former subjects' reactions was agonizing but ultimately rewarding when a cherry red stallion walked to the front of the crowd.
"Your Majesty," Big Macintosh began, his voice surprisingly meek for his size.
"Please, just Celestia from now on, Macintosh," Celestia interjected. "I think we can both agree that I've lost the right to any honorifics I once laid claim to."
"Then, Celestia," he continued, "if it wouldn't trouble you too much, I'd like to go home. I've been in denial about my mistakes as well, and it's high time I rectified that."
Celestia gave him a soft smile as they both turned to look to Applejack. She glowered at both of them in turn, and Celestia had the impression that she'd have run over to kick her brother in the face were it not for her broken leg.
"That can be arranged," Celestia replied, flicking her horn as she did. A shimmering golden portal opened next to her, large enough for several ponies to walk through.
"This will take you to wherever you wish to be, be it your homes or Nova Solis," Celestia said to the crowd. "The experience may be disorienting, but it will work without fail. All that I ask in return is that you live well, in spite of what I've done to you."
Seeing the portal open, Big Macintosh stepped forward and crossed its threshold. It took a few minutes before the next pony stepped forward to take her offer, but slowly the crowd filtered through the vortex until only Celestia, Starlit, Sun, and Applejack remained.
* * *
Starlit was the first to approach after everypony else left, and for the first time she could remember since she left home she was genuinely smiling. It felt nice to have something to be unabashedly happy about again.
"That went… far better than I expected," Celestia said with a sigh. "Do you think I apologized too much?"
"Celestia, I don't think you could ever apologize enough," Starlit answered, "but you did apologize correctly. There's a scarce few ponies that know how to do that, so count yourself lucky in that regard."
Starlit turned to look at the recently surfaced Undersand off in the distance, and her smile faded as she thought about Cherry Jubilee.
"I will personally speak with Cherry Jubilee and the other leaders in Undersand, to let them know why they suddenly find themselves on the surface," Celestia said, again answering Starlit's question before she asked it. "I doubt that I will be welcome there for long, but they have a right to know what became of their loved ones, and what you did for their city."
Celestia and Starlit stood in silence for a time, staring out at the horizon and relishing in their accomplishments. After having suffered so much at her hooves, sharing a moment like this felt unsettling, but not unwelcome.
"So, I take it that you're going to return to Twilight and report on your success?" Celestia asked.
"It depends on if your portal will take me there," Starlit answered. "I didn't really think much about how I was going to get back to her, if I'm being perfectly honest."
"It should be able to get you within the general vicinity of her tree, but you're going to have to make it the rest of the way there yourself. Twilight was an exceptionally accomplished sorceress in her time, and I'm certain that age hasn't dulled her skill."
"It certainly hasn't dulled yours," Starlit said. "You just raised a city from the dirt with a thought and some words."
"And I saw Twilight lay one low with less than that," Celestia interjected, her voice regaining some of its edge. "While you may work for her, do not trust her;Twilight was always the crafty one."
Starlit looked back up at Celestia, her countenance having regained its stoic facade after such a harrowing evening. Starlit thought to ask for clarification, but decided that now wasn't the time.
"Then this is where we part ways," Starlit said. "I'd say it was nice to meet you, but if I'm being honest with myself you did kill me once."
"Another thing I need to apologize for, I suppose," Celestia replied, "although were it not for that rock around your neck you wouldn't have been able to show me the failure I had become."
Celestia looked down at Starlit with an expression of utter seriousness. Her gaze looked like it could cut through iron, and Starlit resisted the urge to back away for fear that she would burst into flames.
"Starlit, protect that necklace with everything you have," Celestia warned. "I don't know its exact abilities, but I have seen it used before and the power it wields is terrible indeed."
Celestia didn't wait for a response from Starlit before she walked over the where Sun and Applejack were sitting. Starlit absently reached up to the amulet; it's surface was cold, but it thrummed softly in her hoof.
A gleam of golden light pulled Starlit out of her own head, and she turned to see Celestia weaving magic around Applejack and Sun. It dissipated as Starlit approached, and she saw that they were both fully healed from their wounds.
"Thank you, Celestia," Sun said as he shook his legs out.
Applejack didn't reply, only standing back up and walking towards the portal. Before she crossed its threshold she turned back to face Starlit, deciding to come back and speak with her.
"Starlit, I don't think I'll ever be able to repay what you've done here," Applejack said, "but I'll do my best for everypony back home. I just need a favor from you to help seal the deal."
"Sure, anything you need," Starlit replied.
"I need you to take care of Sun for me," Applejack said with a low voice. "He's made the fool decision to join you on your quest to save the world, and I want him to come home in one piece. Think you can manage?"
Starlit made a double-take between Sun and Applejack. Sun smiled meekly back at her as Celestia stood by.
"I already tried to talk him out of it," Applejack continued, "but he's stubborn as a mule; once he gets an idea in his head there's just no changin' it."
Starlit looked back at Sun one last time before turning to face Applejack. Her face said she was fine with Sun's decision, but her eyes told a different tale.
"You have my word Applejack," Starlit said. "He'll come back safe and sound at the end of all of this."
"That's all I ask," Applejack replied. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a brother that needs some chores assigned to him. He's got about three years worth of back farm work to catch up on and I aim to collect on that debt."
Applejack and Starlit embraced one last time before Applejack waved goodbye and passed through the vortex. A small pit in Starlit's stomach lifted as she left, a weight that had sat inside her since she'd promised Apple Bloom to bring her sister home. It seemed like a lifetime ago that Starlit had comforted a crying child in a run-down saloon.
"Well, shall we be off?" Sun asked as he sidled up next to Starlit, causing her to jump.
"Sun, if you're going to be in this for the long haul then we need to establish some rules in regards to sneaking up on me," Starlit chided playfully. "Maybe a bell around your neck?"
"As a former cat owner," Celestia added as she joined them, "I would say that a bell would do wonders."
"See, the Princess thinks it's a good idea," Starlit added.
"Just you try to get a bell on me, see what happens." Sun retorted.
The three of them shared a laugh at the impromptu silliness, with the sun rising behind them just in time for Starlit and Sun's departure. It's rays were warm and gentle, a sensation that Starlit had missed more than she thought she would.
"Starlit, Sun," Celestia said, "I can't thank you enough for what you've done for me and my subjects. I hope I can be the ruler that Equestria needs me to be, but for now I think I'll see some of the country before I make my return to Canterlot. Being cooped up in an illusion for centuries has dulled my knowledge of the outside world and I need to catch up."
With a brief bow of the head, Celestia took to the air on her shimmering wings. The sunrise behind them accented her ascent and gave her the radiance that, to Starlit, was what she had been trying to achieve all along.
"Starlit, do you think she'll be alright?" Sun asked as the pair walked to the portal.
"Sun, I think she'll be better than alright." Starlit answered, stepping through the portal as she did so.
* * *
The trek back through the forest was largely uneventful, save for Sun tripping over the occasional root and incessantly chattering about all the plant life. Starlit allowed him his excitement given he had never seen this much foliage outside of Applejack's orchard, but was thankful when she finally found her way back to the fog wall in front of the Golden Oak.
Hoping that Twilight had added her to the ward's enchantment, Starlit pressed her hoof against the wall and found that she could pierce through it. The cloud dissipated as she stepped forward, allowing Sun to enter the clearing as well. The Oak was as majestic as she remembered it being, with the morning light only adding to its grandeur.
Ignoring Sun's proclamations and awestruck wonder, Starlit walked to the front door and rapped on it sharply. After a few minutes there were sounds of shuffling coming from the other side of the door, and the Twilight that greeted her was groggy and far less regal than the Princess Starlit remembered meeting a week ago.
"Starlit? Is that you?" Twilight asked as the realization began to hit her.
After a brief introduction between Sun and Twilight and a cursory explanation of who the Princess was, Starlit pulled Twilight aside to leave Sun to a much deserved bit of sleep. He was anxious to explore the Oak in full, but the night's events had left him taxed.
Quickly Starlit trotted down the stairs to Twilight's underground lab, the sleep deprived mare being in no mood for pleasantries. Twilight followed behind, the sound of her hoofsteps sluggish against the wood. Starlit shut and locked the door to the lab once Twilight was through.
"Starlit, something is troubling you," Twilight said. "Did something happen with Celestia? I didn't expect you to be back so soon."
"Oh, a great many things happened between Celestia and I," Starlit venomously answered, "but her fate is low on my list of priorities at the moment."
Turning to face her employer, Starlit tore the black amulet from her neck and tossed it to the floor in front of Twilight with a dull thunk. It slid to a halt just in front of Twilight's hooves and, apprehensively, she stepped back.
"You are going to tell me exactly what this thing is, where you got it, and how it works," Starlit demanded.
"…I take it that you know what the stone does?" Twilight asked, more of a statement than a question.
"I've been made aware. I died twice, and both times I found that stone emitting grey magic before bringing me back to life some time later, and when Sun tried to figure out where it came from it shot the sum total of Equestrian history into his head. What did you give me, Twilight?"
Starlit's question hung in the air, but Twilight seemed less concerned with Starlit's demand and more concerned with what had happened to Sun if her change of expression was anything to judge by.
"What spell did Sun use?" Twilight asked, looking down at the necklace with a keen eye.
"How should I know? You're going to give me a straight answer either way, so cut the shit and talk!"
"I'll have to tend to him later then," Twilight mused before turning her attention back to Starlit. "You said you died twice? Were there any periods of time that you don't recall other than your deaths? Fuzzy patches or places where your thoughts get jumbled?"
Starlit could feel the fur on her neck stand up. Twilight's incessant questions were grating on her nerves and before she could think to stop herself she marched forward and rammed Twilight against one of her work desks. The various devices on it toppled over and a few books were sent to the floor as it scraped against the stone.
"You aren't getting another word out of me until you tell me what that thing is, or so help me I will snap your horn off and stab you with it," Starlit growled through gritted teeth.
Whatever expression Starlit had on her face obviously showed how serious she felt, as Twilight quickly used her magic to throw Starlit off. The spell was forceful, but not so much that it knocked her over.
"Very well; since you are so insistent, I'll elucidate the matter for you," Twilight replied, readjusting the table with her magic as she did. "It is a geomantic binding to an crystalline arcane catalyst that, when put under specific stressors and conditions such as imminent death, causes a cascading magical reaction that puts the electrochemical signaling network of the nervous and arcanum systems into a state of heightened activity to resuscitate and heal the body from grievous or mortal injury."
Starlit stared at Twilight, sure that she had heard what was said but having trouble working out the details.
"Or was that too high-minded for you?" Twilight asked with a snide tone to her voice.
"A little dumbing down wouldn't hurt," Starlit answered tersely
"Then, if we are done with the histrionics, let me ask my pertinant questions that I only asked so that I could judge whether or not you or Sun require further study and observation, if you would be ever so kind. Now, you said you died twice, correct?"
"Yes, once from Celestia and once from a pack of thestrals," Starlit answered.
"I see," Twilight answered as she used her magic to retrieve a few scrolls from across the room. "Were the methods of your deaths particularly violent?"
"I'd… I'd rather not say for the thestrals. Celestia ran me through with a flaming sword," Starlit answered. She could feel a phantom ache from her left eye.
"Starlit, I need to know this to determine what to do with you. What happened with the thestrals?"
Starlit stood in resolute silence, giving all the answer that Twilight was going to get. With a snort Twilight turned to her scrolls and began reading through their contents.
"Alright, I'll settle for 'too horrible to be described,'" Twilight replied. "Have you felt any particular after effects? Any lingering pains, feelings of enhanced magical ability or soreness in your horn?"
"Nothing like that, no," Starlit answered as she walked to where Twilight stood, hunkered over the work desk. There were a few anatomical drawings of unicorns among the scrolls, but predominantly they were nothing but jargon that Starlit couldn't make sense of, if she could even read it. A few parts were written in what she assumed was Twilight and Celestia's mother tongue.
"Fascinating, isn't it?" Twilight asked as she unfurled another scroll.
"That's one word for it. What is all of this?"
"Old medical notes that date back to Canterlot, and a little bit before," Twilight answered. "There are a few references to the types of enchantments that are on that piece of crystal and what to do about side effects to their power."
"And what is that power, in simpler terms?" Starlit asked pointedly.
Twilight rolled her scrolls back up and set them on the shelf where she'd gotten them. With another beam of magic she picked the necklace up off of the floor and held it aloft in front of her. Starlit cast a worried glance at Twilight, as the last time it had had magic used on it it looked like Celestia was about to shatter it.
"This stone, to put it simply, has abilities that affect the fabric of life and death," Twilight stated.
"I beg your pardon?" Starlit asked. "That's impossible, no such power exists."
"Really now?" Twilight asked with a mischievous tone. "Tell me, you remember the old story of the Princesses; it's the one you tell your daughter every night, if I'm not mistaken. Remind me, what was Chrysalis' domain of rule?"
Starlit felt a twinge of nostalgia for the time when that story had just been a story, but she knew what Twilight was driving at. That twinge clutched her heart when she thought about how short a time it had been when she'd last read that story, and how quickly she'd forgotten parts of it.
"Life and death," Starlit replied.
"Precisely. Now, Chrysalis more dealt with the death side of things given her precise abilities, but the nature of her magic remains the same as this stone. Life and death are an inextricable magical process that even I don't fully understand, but I understand quite a lot of it, hence this necklace."
"So you created this stone as a way to bring ponies back to life?" Starlit asked. The question didn't sit well on her mind, like it was a phrase that shouldn't be uttered.
"Yes, in a manner of speaking," Twilight answered with pride. "And this wasn't the only one; every member of my army, my guard, and even select members of my court had one of these, and it made taking my castle nigh impossible during the war. After all, how do you stop an army you cannot kill?"
Starlit's fur bristled at Twilight's proclamation. Her amulet had given Starlit nothing but confusion and fear, and the very thought of thousands of them existing at any given time was a bridge too far for her.
"You can't be serious?" Starlit accused. "Every pony in your employ had one of these? This thing is a perversion of nature! How could you possibly convince thousands of ponies to take one of these?"
"You don't 'convince' ponies when you rule over them, Starlit," Twilight answered. "You've seen the results yourself; were it not for this perversion, as you so indelicately put it, you'd be dead right now and I'd be searching for another champion. How can you doubt my means when the effects are so readily apparent?"
"I don't doubt your means, I doubt the mindset behind them. You don't go making a cure for death without seeing some very dangerous things, I'm sure."
Twilight sighed and dropped the necklace down to the table, giving Starlit her full attention.
"Starlit, I was charged with the protection of all Equestria, and that is a duty I take very seriously. I did everything I could for our government and our subjects, and that dogged determination is why I've been searching for so long to find somepony to help me save this land. It's why I found you, and I couldn't be more proud of your achievements thus far."
Starlit felt her face flush with embarrassment. While she had succeeded in getting Celestia to see the light, Starlit wouldn't have called what she did an 'achievement' by any definition.
"If I'm being honest, I mostly bumbled and smooth-talked my way through most of my time finding Celestia, and even then I was a nervous wreck half of the time. I managed to lose all of the equipment you sent me out there with, to boot."
"Starlit, a lost set of armor, a few weapons, and some saddlebags are the least of my worries," Twilight answered with a sly smile. "You managed to keep the one thing that is literally irreplaceable, so I'd say all's well that ends well."
"It is quite clingy, I'll give it that," Starlit replied. "I tore it off of my neck more times than I can remember."
"An interesting bit of magic that I wove into it," Twilight said. "It imprints on the first pony to wear it, and it stays tied to them for as long as that pony lives. If it's lost it will come back and if it's torn off it will fix itself. I've kept that particular one aside for the pony who would be my champion."
"I don't particularly care for that part of the deal," Starlit retorted. "How do I rid myself of it when we're done together?"
"I can undo that enchantment easily enough, but I would ask that you keep a close eye on it all the same. It wouldn't do well for one of the Princesses to sever its bind to you and steal it, after all."
"Right," Starlit answered, remembering how Celestia nearly destroyed it. "If it's all the same to you, I think I'm going to go find somewhere to sleep. I've had about four hours in the last day and in my experience that's not a good thing."
"Are you sure there's no other deep, personal question that you wish to ask me?" Twilight jokingly asked. "Any dark secrets of mine to dredge up?"
"I'd say I've gotten enough of those in the last week to last a lifetime. I'll come find you when I wake up."
Starlit ascended the wooden steps out of the basement, acutely aware of how ruinously tired she was. She had barely made it to a reasonably sized pile of pillows in a corner of Twilight's living room when she fell into a heap and passed out.
Her last thought before sleep overcame her was of White Eclipse, and how good it would feel to see her face again.
* * *
Starlit was roused by a metallic clattering sound and a pair of hushed, excited whispers. Flopping over on her pillow pile, she blearily popped an eye open to find the source.
Twilight and Sun were having an animated conversation over the small table that Starlit and the princess had had their first proper conversation at. A small brass bird flew around their heads, delighting Sun to no end as it flitted about the room. Twilight also looked happy, in a motherly way as she saw Sun follow the bird around the room.
Cracking seemingly every joint in her body, Starlit stood up. She nearly slid off of the uneven pillows, and her stumbling sent a stack of books tumbling over in the process.
"Oh, you're awake!" Sun said with a start. "Did you sleep well?"
"Just fine until you two woke me up," Starlit groused.
"Sorry about that, Twilight had some things she wanted to show me. Come here, you have got to see this!"
Starlit trudged over to the table as Sun turned his attention back to the metal bird. It looked like some kind of crow, only much smaller in size and with a pair of shimmering blue jewels for eyes. Starlit had seen one too many of those birds trying to eat her crops that she could recognize them in any form.
Starlit's heart skipped a beat when she remembered the other item with jeweled eyes she'd seen. That stuffed rabbit she'd found was certainly back in the ruins of Sunspire, and her heart sank to think she wouldn't be able to give it to Eclipse.
"Isn't this awesome?" Sun asked. "It's completely constructed, but it flies and acts just like any other bird. What did you say powers it, Twilight?"
"A small piece of crystal holds the magic that keeps it running, and Luna's work pioneering artificing and other forms of enchantment gives it an intellect all its own," Twilight answered with a smile. "Things like this were mostly toys for children, but some of the automata that made up the bulk of Luna's forces before the Unification were a sight to behold. Blisteringly intelligent, capable of reason, and near indestructible to boot."
Starlit watched the bird flit through the air, occasionally landing on the table only to take to the air again with a clatter of metal feathers. It was certainly a masterwork of craftsmanship, but its similarity to actual wildlife unsettled Starlit. It fell just shy of real, and that only made its flaws more glaring to her.
"Does this mean that Luna might have some of these in service when we go to fetch her?" Starlit asked as she pulled her eyes off the crow.
"I would say no, since she was forced to decommission her automated forces as per the Unification Treaty," Twilight answered. "However, it has been centuries since I last saw her and she could've been up to anything in that time."
"So best to err on the side of caution," Starlit replied. "Were there ever any notable weak spots in these machines? I can't rely on my magic since I don't have Celestia's sun constantly bathing me, and Sun is likely to start losing some as well."
"Other than the crystal powering the chassis, they would have the same points of vulnerability that a pony would; most joints, the eyes, anything along the spine, and so on. As for the loss of magic, Sun at least should be able to coast on a lifetime spent basking in Celestia's magical sunlight and having more practice with casting. There will start to be an appreciable difference in power level over the next few weeks, however."
Sun shifted a little on his cushion, causing the crow that had alighted on his shoulder to hop and flutter to the ground.
"Twilight… Your Majesty," Sun said, his voice soft with worry, "is there any way you could prevent that?"
"Sun, if I could figure out a way to restore magic to ponies then we wouldn't be in this predicament. The other Princesses would be superfluous and Starlit would be back home with her family."
"But you're an Alicorn, you've had centuries to figure this out," Sun retorted. "There's really nothing you can do to stop this?"
Without thinking to, Starlit found gently herself rubbing Sun across the back. She felt like she should say something to reassure him, but anything she could sounded hollow and uncaring in her head.
"Sun, I know how much your magic is a part of you," Twilight said. "I'm the one that gave unicorns magic to begin with, or at least the ability to use it functionally. Every unicorn has been hurt by the loss of magic in Equestria, but you can't let that hurt define you."
Sun didn't look particularly encouraged by Twilight, but the Princess did give Starlit a good jumping off point.
"Besides, who else but you would be able to will be able to talk me down from my stupid ideas? Or get ponies to cooperate with us despite my personality?"
"…I did get Cherry Jubilee's help, didn't I?" Sun replied.
"Yes, while I was a catatonic mess during that whole meeting with her because of my thestral problem," Starlit continued. "You have a knack for negotiating that is completely beyond me, and your intellect is nothing to sneeze at either. All of that comes from you, not your magic."
Sun looked to Starlit, his green eyes a little brighter for her efforts.
"You're right, I'm worrying over nothing," Sun replied, giving Starlit a playful punch in the shoulder. "Just try not to get us walking through any more sun-scorched deserts; my shelters were confiscated back in Sunspire."
"I can't make any promises, but I'll try my best," Starlit answered with a chuckle.
"Ah, the blossoming bonds of friendship," Twilight sighed, resting her chin against her hooves. "That's a sight I haven't seen in a while."
"Then maybe Her Majesty needs to get out more, and not just to recruit random dirt-farmers for quests to save the world," Starlit replied.
"Maybe one day, but for now I'm sure you two are famished. I'll get some supper going, so in the meantime feel free to make yourselves at home."
With a pop of magenta light Twilight vanished, followed by another flash of light from the room at the far side of the Oak's common area. Sun visibly jumped when she disappeared, while Starlit merely took note.
"Does she do that a lot?" Sun asked.
"The teleporting or the cryptic statements that don't go anywhere?" Starlit asked back.
"Both, I guess. She is an inscrutable pony, that's for sure."
"I'm sure you would be too if you were potentially millennia old and once ruled a kingdom that then fell apart. What did you two talk about while I was passed out?"
"A little of this, a little of that," Sun answered. "I gave her the debriefing from our encounter with Celestia, told her about Undersand and the illusion Celestia was generating. The relevant stuff, mostly."
Starlit furrowed her brow a bit, and Sun picked up the hint.
"I didn't go too deep into your thestral problem, or my past, or any of the personal stuff, don't worry," Sun said preemptively. "I also didn't say much about Applejack or Shady Grove aside from what needed to be said for context. I also told her about my mishap with your amulet, and she said she'd look into it while we're here."
Starlit breathed a sigh of relief. She was starting to trust Twilight a little more, but a mare still needs some secrets. Spilling her guts to Sun was mostly fueled by her post-death panic, and if she had been more lucid she wouldn't have said as much as she did.
"Anything else?" Starlit asked. "You two seemed like two peas in a pod when I woke up."
"I'd say we are, to some degree. She's a pony of knowledge like I am, and we got onto so many tangets about magical theory and physical sciences and all that sort of stuff. I'm sure it would've bored you to tears to hear it."
"I'm bored to tears just hearing you describe it," Starlit groused facetiously.
"Oh, its not that bad, really," Sun replied. "You just need a certain temperament for that sort of learning, that's all."
"Maybe after all of this gets settled you can teach me, but in exchange I'm going to show you how to plow a field and plant crops."
"Oh, I know all about that," Sun retorted with a certain smugness.
"Really? Have you ever done it?"
Sun stared blankly into space for a moment as he processed Starlit's question, but the silence was all the answer Starlit needed.
"Study all you want, but theory and knowledge only does anypony any good when you apply it. A hard day's work in a field would do you some good, if your complaining when we crossed the desert was anything to judge by."
"If I recall correctly, you did some of the complaining as well," Sun retorted.
"But not as much as you," Starlit replied with a smirk.
Sun looked ready to retort when Twilight came out of the kitchen, a tray of bowls filled with steaming hot stew and a few small loaves of fresh bread floating in her magic. Starlit's stomach growled reflexively at the scent of it, and the tray had barely hit the table before she had pulled a bowl towards her and dug in.
The evening was filled with sounds of dishes clinking, some friendly chit-chat, and a sense of calm that Starlit thought she'd put behind her when she agreed to Twilight's task. Even her time in Appleoosa was filled with an itching sense of dread in the back of her mind. The feeling of true peace and safety after a week without was intoxicating, to say nothing of the meal.
With a satisfied belch, Starlit pushed her polished bowl aside and sat back against a sturdy stack of pillows she'd arranged. She couldn't remember feeling this good in all her life, and her bliss was only heightened when she saw the horrified look on Twilight's face at her abhorrent table manners.
"Pardon me," Starlit said as she threw her head back against the pillows. Twilight had said to make herself at home, after all, and this was just Starlit exercising that right.
Sun nearly choked on a bite of bread from a fit of giggles, and even Twilight couldn't help but chuckle at the sheer audacity of her guest.
"If the fate of Equestria weren't at stake, I'd say that a mare could get used to this," Starlit mused as the sluggishness of a good meal overtook her mind. All five Princesses couldn't have moved her from that spot, such was her contentment.
Starlit awoke to the sound of birds chirping through her cracked window. A beam of warm sunlight hit her fur as she got out of bed, dispelling some of the early-morning chills she was typically prone to on waking. With a few stretches she limbered her joints up before leaving the guest room Twilight had lent her to go and get breakfast.
The last week-and-a-half spent in Twilight's home had been cozy, but active. After Twilight had gotten Starlit's full debriefing from Sunspire in addition to Setting Sun's she had come to the conclusion that Starlit needed better training with the weapons she would be given. Through a course of both training and knowledge implantation via magic Starlit improved, and while she was no master swordsmare she felt confident enough that she could handle herself.
Starlit descended to the common room expecting to find Sun and Twilight setting up for another bout of training, but instead saw only Twilight hunkered over some scrolls at her table.
"Are you going to be doing some exercises with Sun today?" Starlit asked.
Twilight near leapt to her hooves when Starlit spoke, coming to meet her at the bottom of the stairs. She looked worried, far more so than Starlit had ever seen her.
"Finally, you're awake," Twilight said. "Come with me, you need to see this."
"See what?" Starlit asked as Twilight moved past her and ascended the stairs. Not receiving an answer Starlit followed behind, climbing higher into the Oak than she'd previously gone.
Twilight got to the top of the stairs before Starlit did, and Starlit found that she'd opened a trapdoor that led up into the ceiling and to the outside. Taking care to not knock into the door Starlit climbs up into the canopy of the tree.
There was a large flat spot in the center of the canopy about the size of the common room downstairs, dominated by a massive device. It was cylindrical, made of blackened metal inlaid with silver and was pointed out into the surrounding branches. Twilight was looking into an eye piece near the ground floor, carefully adjusting a series of knives, levers, and cranks that moved the device's position.
"Twilight, what's the matter?" Starlit asked.
"Something that's moved our timetable ahead further than I'd prefer," Twilight answered. "Come, look into the telescope, you need to see this."
Looking closer at the machine, Starlit could now see the similarities it had to the smaller telescope on the lower balcony that she had seen when first visiting the Oak. With a hurried step she approached it.
The telescope's view in the eyepiece was crystal clear, and showed Starlit a familiar sight. When Twilight had shown her the vision of her battle with the other Princesses it had taken place in a massive fortress of some description. The view in the lens was of that fortress, and Starlit made the logical leap to assume that she was looking at Canterlot.
The palace and city surrounding it had seen better days; several towers were broken off, large sections of masonry and mortar were missing from the walls and buildings, and the polished alabaster and rich purples of the architecture were dull and lifeless where they weren't out and out stripped away or burned black.
What drew Starlit's eye the most was what she assumed Twilight had meant to show her. From the tallest tower that still stood, its roof seemingly made of glass or crystal, a golden beam of energy pierced the sky. It illuminated large swathes of the city, bringing back a certain life and energy to the ruins it shone down on. It also made for a massive beacon, telling everypony what Starlit already knew; Celestia had returned to Canterlot.
"I see the issue," Starlit quipped as she pulled away from the telescope. Twilight looked ready to burst from nerves.
"Yes, the massive signal telling Luna, Cadance, and Chrysalis that Celestia has returned to Canterlot is a bit of an issue, Starlit," Twilight replied facetiously. "I was hoping to have more time to work with you, but this means that you and I both are now up against a countdown."
"I'm not sure I follow," Starlit said. "Why would them knowing Celestia has gone back be a problem? If anything it may convince them to come back as well, if only to investigate why she returned."
"Starlit, I don't think you quite grasp just how much we all hated each other during and after the war," Twilight replied, pacing back and forth as she spoke. "When Canterlot fell and we scattered to the winds it wasn't because we grew tired of the fighting, it was because we had exhausted our available armies. I'm certain that the others are just waiting for an excuse to re-open the hostilities, and this beacon gives them that excuse.
"So what do we do about this?" Starlit asked. She already knew what the answer was, but wanted to hear Twilight say it.
"We need to make our play now, and that means you are going to need to go to Luna's domain," Twilight answered. "New Selene was an industrial and manufacturing hub for the old kingdom, and if anypony is prepared to mount an invasion it would be her."
Twilight beckoned Starlit to follow her back downstairs. Twilight mostly muttered to herself, going over plans within plans, which gave Starlit a bit of time to mull over her situation.
She was confident enough at swordplay that she could potentially defeat an opponent in single combat, but if Twilight's understanding of Luna's automated forces had taught her anything it's that she would be underprepared even if she had another few months of training.
Furthermore, Sun was beginning to show signs of his weakening magic; where once he'd been able to hold a full grown stallion in place for nearly a minute he was now finding it difficult to do the same for thirty seconds to a relatively weak unicorn like herself. Twilight had done what she could for him, even giving some of her magic to him to help make up the difference, but the fact remained that he was going to get weaker and weaker.
"Starlit, are you listening?" Twikight asked, snapping Starlit out of her musings.
"What? Sorry, I was thinking," Starlit answered.
"There will be plenty of time for that later, but for right now we need to get you your equipment. Sun and Spike have been busy for a bit getting Sun's things prepared, and they've selected a few things for you to go over."
Together they descended into the basement, where Starlit found Sun and Pike scurrying about. She also noted with some surprise that Spike was holding things despite being made of light as he bustled some provisions over to Sun's saddlebags.
"Oh good, you're here," Sun said as he noticed Starlit and Twilight. "I was about to come and get you. Did Twilight give you the news?"
"Yes she did," Starlit answered. "What have you gotten together?"
"Basic things mostly; food, supplies for camping out, and a few guidebooks on New Selene from Twilight's libraries."
"Are you sure books are going to be necessary?" Starlit asked as she began getting her weapons and gear together. "They're almost certainly a few centuries out of date."
"It's better to have some information than none at all," Sun replied. "Besides, I'm mostly using them for their maps and architectural notes. Unless Luna went to the trouble of reconfiguring her whole city during this whole time, there should be some use to these books."
"And if not we could always use them as kindling," Starlit half-heartedly joked. Nopony laughed, and Starlit noticed Twilight throw a withering glare at her from across the room.
Starlit looked at her assembled gear going over what she would and would not need; she had retrieved another small sword from Twilight's collection, this one with a proper crossguard at the handle. After seeing the ferocity of the thestrals first hoof she wanted something that could keep them at bay rather than let them run down the length of the blade and hilt to attack her.
She had also been growing better in her aiming with her magic, so she brought along a bandolier with a few throwing knives in it. They wouldn't be her primary means of defense, but they would serve in a pinch. She decided not to take any armor since it would both reduce her mobility and, as was proven in her first death, wouldn't hold up to much damage anyway.
Twilight had made a new set of saddlebags for her, made from hardened leather and with the clasps molded to look like her cutie mark; a whisp of magic encased in a warding circle. The metalwork was immaculate and shone in the blue torchlight of Twilight's lab. Quickly she put her provisions and whatever gear she could think to bring in the bags. Her stomach growled as all the excitement had made her skip breakfast, but she would make up for it later.
Starlit heard the familiar hum of Twilight charging up her teleporter, but before she turned to face it Sun tapped her on the shoulder.
Starlit, could I talk with you for a moment?"
"Is it urgent?" Starlit asked back.
"Not particularly, but—" Sun began.
"Then save it for when we get settled on the other side," Starlit interjected. "This device she's powering up is not kind, but once we have our bearings in Luna's city then we can talk. Fair?"
Sun kicked his hooves dejectedly, muttering an affirmative before gathering up his things and going over to the teleportation pad.
Starlit hated having to brush him off so brusquely, but right now she needed to focus. Focus on settling herself down, as well as planning five steps ahead for whatever Luna might have waiting for them on the other side. Quickly she pulled her saddlebags on and slid her sword into its sheath, the weight of it comfortable against her hip. She had taken to always keeping the amulet on herself since she now understood its value, although she still detested its powers and hold on her.
A crackle of energy from across the room told Starlit that the pad was ready, and she turned to find Sun already standing in it. The stone spikes covered in swirling glyphs sizzled with Twilight's magic, and Starlit took a moment to appreciate just how ominous they looked.
"The magical signature coming from New Selene is more focused than the one that came from Sunspire, so I should be able to put the two of you out closer to the city," Twilight said as Starlit walked onto the pad.
"Could you do anything for the nausea," Starlit asked, "because the last thing I want is to lose more of my stomach contents after already skipping breakfast."
"Possibly, but ultimately your ability to hold your dinner depends on your tolerance level. You've been through once before so it may not affect you as badly, but Sun is certainly going to be thrown for a loop."
Starlit curtly nodded, hoping upon hope that Twilight's hypothesis was right. She turned to look at Sun, as he was breathing ore heavily than normal. Starlit knew it was nerves, and she knew from experience that they were justified.
"Don't worry Sun, you'll do fine," Starlit said. "It's just some dizziness and an upset stomach, nothing to get worked up over."
"Speak for yourself," Sun answered. "I had nausea problems as a colt, so I doubt being shot who-knows-how far across the world is going to do wonders for me."
Starlit was about to give some more words of encouragement when she was distracted by a flash of purple light, followed by Twilight floating a pair of small candies towards herself and Sun.
"Here, they're medicinal," Twilight said. "A combination of ginger and a few herbs that help with nausea and inner ear problems. This should get you through to the other side with no ill effect, but be forewarned that your balance is going to be… spotty for the next hour or so."
Starlit and Sun each took on of the candies, Sun having popped his in his mouth before Twilight had finished speaking. Figuring that a little less sure-hoofedness would be worth not vomiting, Starlit ate it as well. The candy was bitter with a heat to it that sat thick on her tongue, but all the best medicines she'd ever taken tasted foul.
"The spell should put you within a few miles of Luna's palace," Twilight continued, "somewhere in the lower districts of the city where ponies with actual authority shouldn't be able to see you appear. The only advice I can give you is to go up and avoid anypony that looks official."
"Thank you for your help, Your Highness," Sun blurted out.
"Sun, in all honesty, I should be the one thanking you. The two of you have already gone above and beyond my wildest expectations, and I couldn't be more appreciative. Stay safe, for all of our sakes."
And ina flash of familiar purple light, Starlit and Sun vanished.
* * *
A powerful stench of smoke and garbage filled Starlit's nostrils when her hooves found purchase, followed swiftly by the sound of Sun vomiting. Her own head felt like it had been beaten against a rock and she only barely avoided falling face first into a muddy gutter that ran through the cobblestone alley they had appeared in. Fortunately, despite the smell, Starlit was able to hold her dinner down.
"Oh… Twilight wasn't kidding," Sun moaned through a small burp. "My brain feels like it got blended."
"I'd say that's about what it felt like the first time for me," Starlit replied as she staggered over to her companion. The hem of his cloak was drenched in gutter water and sick as he'd fallen over when they landed. With some effort Starlit hoisted him to his hooves.
"You alright?" Starlit asked.
"Yeah, I'll be fine, just need to wait for the world to stop spinning," Sun answered as he held a hoof to his head. "You go scout around, I'll stay in the nice, safe alley."
With a pat on the shoulder Starlit turned to follow the alley. Even though it was daytime everything seemed unnaturally dark, like the sun was shining through layers of gauze. The walls of the alley were dull brick that neatly matched the cobblestones beneath her hooves, and along the walls a series of brass and copper pipes ran in frantic tangles. She could hear fluids and gasses being pumped through them, leading to somewhere and from somewhere else.
When she finally stumbled out into the street the twisting alley connected to Starlit found herself in a completely alien city. Sunspire she could at least understand, with its opulence being made of stone and marble and other familiar materials. New Selene, on the other hoof, was a city of steam and magic. Buildings belched smoke into the air from iron chimneys while flameless lamps illuminated the thouroughfare. Ponies milled about the street, selling wares Starlit had never seen and using devices she couldn't even begin to understand.
Dominating her view of this new and somewhat terrifying city was a grand building far off in the distance. It's edifice formed a pyramidal silhouette, with towers connected by buttresses and bridges that ascended higher and higher until they came to a peak above the smoke-filled sky. The palace was resplendent with deep blue and silver stonework, in stark contrast to the slummy conditions on the street.
"Looking for directions, miss?" an earth pony asked, causing Starlit to jump. He had been far too close for comfort and Starlit nearly skewered him with a throwing knife for startling her.
"No, I'm fine, really," Starlit stammered. "I can make my own way, thank you."
"You sure about that?" a pegasus asked from behind her, again making Starlit jump but with a small shriek as well. The pegasus gave her a wicked grin as she eyed her up and down.
"Didn't anypony ever tell you not to sneak up on others?"
"Can't say anypony did, no," the pegasus answered. "That's a pretty necklace you've got on there. How much?"
Starlit was taken aback by the brazenness of the pegasus' offer, but was forced to suppress a laugh given the amount of times she'd tried to get rid of it.
"If I could sell it to you I would, but I'm afraid I can't," Starlit answered as she sidled back from the pegasus. She came to an abrupt stop when the earth pony that had initially startled her put himself between her and freedom.
"Oh, anything can be bought and sold," he cooed in a way that chilled Starlit to her bones. Reflexively she drew her sword and jumped out toward the street, keeping it leveled at her assailants.
"I don't want any trouble from you two, but this necklace isn't for sale. Now leave me be before you force me to do something we're all going to regret."
The earth pony shied back a touch, but the pegasus stayed still, her eyes scanning Starlit up and down like a predator about to pounce.
Starlit and the pegasus eyed each other for a few seconds that felt like an hour before they both heard the sound of a clanking march coming down the street. Starlit turned to look while the pegasus and earth pony scattered with nary a word, and she soon understood why.
A machine was making its way down the street, one unlike any she'd ever seen. It's pony shaped shell looked to be made of copper or a material similar in color, and with every step it took a jet of steam burst out from the sides of its mouth. It walked with exacting precision, paying no heed to anything around itself as it moved. Its eyes were a solid teal, nearly the same shade as Starlit's eyes, and from the seams and joints in its armor she could see piping that glowed the same color.
It slowed its march before coming to a full stop in the middle of the street. The vendors on the street had all hidden away in corners, alleys, and the buildings nearby when they had heard the machine coming, leaving Starlit as the sole witness to it.
With a hiss of steam and burst of light from its horn its head rose a few inches off of the base of its neck. It then rotated its head on a swivel around its neck joint, a sight that Starlit found more nauseating than the teleportation had been. Beams of light shot from its eyes as it scanned the shops and carts around it before stopping when it saw Starlit standing gobsmacked a few yards away from it.
Its eyes shifted from teal to a sickly yellow as its head descended onto its neck and it resumed its march, this time towards Starlit. Quickly Starlit swung her sword around to face the machine, but it remained undaunted in its approach.
"Unidentified Unicorn, you are in violation of the ban on personal weapons for citizens Class C and lower," the machine intoned, its canned voice flat and lifeless. "Please submit your weapons for summary destruction or you will be prosecuted."
Starlit looked towards the alley, keeping her weapon raised as the machine stared at her. If she ran she believed she could outpace it since it only seemed capable of marching in lockstep, and getting Sun into the mix could help her take care of it discreetly. Her amulet tugged towards the alley, further giving her reason to try and run.
A swiftly as she'd been taught Starlit sheathed her sword and booked it into the alley, but she barely got more than a few feet before she lost her balance and tripled, skidding to a halt and skinning her forehead.
Quickly Starlit scrambled to face the machine to find its eyes now a dull red. She drew her sword as fast as she could, but the machine blasted it out of her magic with a shot from its horn as it stalked forward.
The second shot it fired hit Starlit right between the eyes, and she was dead before she hit the cobblestones.
* * *
Sun had begun to stumble after Starlit as soon as she rounded the corner that led further down the alley, but found the disorientation was too much for him to keep pace with her. He felt like it had taken a solid five minutes just to get to the alley's exit, and the sight he found there did not help his nausea.
A machine in the shape of a pony was standing over Starlit's body, a fresh trail of smoke and the scent of charred fur and burnt meat telling him that she'd been killed for the third time. The machine's teal eyes were focused in the middle distance as it stood over her, and Sun quickly ducked behind a large nest of pipes in case it decided to look around.
Minutes passed as Sun sat behind the pipes, waiting for the telltale sound of clanking hooves to tell him it was safe to leave. His nausea slowly receded while he waited, and he took some time to go over what he knew.
New Selene was the most technologically advanced place he'd ever seen, that much was certain. He'd read about technology that ran off of magic from ages long past, such as his parents' brass shields, and the appearance of the machine seemed to indicate that it too ran off of some kind of magic. The only issue he could find was figuring out how the magic was being made; there was no giant magic emitter like Celestia's sun that he knew of, so it had to come from somewhere more discreet.
"Having some trouble, are we?" a smooth, chilling voice said from nowhere and everywhere at once. Sun had to suppress a yelp of surprise and shock.
"Now now, there's no need for hysterics," the voice continued. "I am but your humble servant in this, a most arduous of tasks."
Not wanting to give away his position, Sun thought back at the voice that, for all he knew, only he could hear.
"Who are you?! Sun asked back. "And furthermore, how did you get inside my head?"
Ooh, he's a quick learner," the voice said back. It sounded feminine, but there was enough distortion in its speech that it was hard to tell. "I do know how to pick 'em, don't I?"
"Don't break your leg patting yourself on the back," Sun snapped back. "Answer the questions."
"That seems only fair, seeing as I've invaded your privacy and all that," the voice answered back. "First the how; you had contact with a magical artifact of some description a week or so ago, am I correct?"
Sun thought back to when he had fiddled with Starlit's amulet, and particularly the presence that had seemed to direct him towards certain visions and memories that he was still sorting through.
"You were in Starlit's amulet, weren't you?" Sun answered. "You showed me all of those visions!"
"Very good, Sun, very good indeed!" the voice replied condescendingly. "As for the who, I'm afraid that that is privileged information."
"Oh no, you don't get off that easily. Tell me who you are right now or I'll—"
"You'll do what, exactly?" the voice replied. "Like it or not, we're stuck together until I decide I'm done with you. I hope you enjoy having a brain-neighbor."
Sun began to answer, but stopped when he realized that the voice was right; if this was connected to Starlit's amulet, then there really was no recourse he had against it short of killing himself to get rid of it. Even if he did, there was still the off chance that he would be revived by the amulet as well.
"Fine, you've got me in a corner," Sun replied, "but can you at least give me something to call you? I don't think Starlit will take kindly to me referring to a brain-neighbor without thinking I've gone insane."
"Give me some time to think of one, because right now you have bigger things to worry about," the voice said. "Look past the pipes."
Hesitantly Sun poked his head past his hiding spot, and his heart dropped into the bricks beneath him when he saw what his new friend was referring to.
When Starlit came back from the blackness of death her nostrils were filled with an acrid, acidic smell. She stirred as she opened her eyes to find that she was covered in a thin sheet. Her head ached where the machine-pony had shot her, but she felt no blemish or burn where the bolt had landed.
She pulled the sheet off of herself as she sat up from the cold metal slab her body had been laid on. The stone walls and every horizontal surface were immaculately clean, more clean than Starlit had ever seen, and various devices and tools hung from racks on the walls. She noticed, with some dismay, that a few of the tools had blood on them.
Starlit's eyes eventually fell onto the table next to hers, with another sheet covering an indistinct lump. The body underneath it was just a tad too big for the sheet to fully cover, and she saw a pair of tattered grey wings poking out from underneath. She felt her throat catch as she thought of what those wings might be attached to.
Slowly Starlit slid off of the table, taking care not to tip it over or make too much noise as her hooves hit the floor. She surmised that, wherever she was, it wasn't going to be a place that was used to ponies coming back to life.
As carefully as she could Starlit sneaked around the room, checking in cabinets and drawers to find her equipment. She had given her weapons up as lost since that was what had gotten the machine's attention to begin with, but if she could at least get her saddlebags back she could make some headway.
Starlit was rooting through a drawer on the far side of the room when she heard the telltale sound of a door opening and closing, and she froze. A lilting female voice was humming as she went about her business, oblivious to Starlit's skulking. With as few extraneous movements as possible Starlit turned to try and catch a glimpse.
Her unexpected guest was a unicorn, her coat a lustrous white and with a deep purple mane that was pulled back into a professional bun to keep it out of her face. She wore a set of red spectacles as she looked over a few pieces of parchment, and Starlit could see that her cutie mark was a trio of diamonds.
"Diamonds? For a corpse loader?" Starlit wondered. Starlit was so transfixed by her confounding cutie mark that she forgot to notice when her quarry was turning back around, and the pair of them locked eyes.
The unicorn stared for a long moment, her pupils the size of pinholes, before her mouth dropped open to let out a shriek. Starlit quickly muttered a spell to shut the mare's mouth before she alerted everypony in the building to her presence.
"Miss, don't panic," Starlit said calmly, stepping out into the light provided by a series of flameless lamps embedded in the ceiling. "I don't want to hurt you."
The unicorn started to cry as she struggled in vain against Starlit's hold on her mouth, but she didn't make moves to try and run. She looked too paralyzed by fear to try, much to Starlit's relief.
"Listen to me very carefully," Starlit continued. "I just need to know where I am and where my things are. After that we can part ways and forget any of this ever happened. Do you understand me?"
The unicorn made a hasty nod, flinging tears from her eyes with its ferocity.
"Good. Now, I'm going to let go of your mouth, and when I do I need you to not scream. Can you do that?" The unicorn nodded again, and slowly Starlit slackened her grip on the unicorn's mouth.
As soon as she was able to the unicorn started to shriek, sending Starlit into a panic. Without really thinking to she grabbed up a metal bowl from one of the shelves on the wall and walloped the unicorn upside the head with it. She must have been of a delicate constitution, as the unicorn went down like a puppet with its strings snipped. The edge of her face caught the second table at a corner, leaving a nasty gash across her cheek and pulling the sheet off of the table.
Starlit wanted to retch when she saw what the sheet had been covering; the corpse of a pegasus thestral, it's back flayed open and parts of its skull pulled away to expose its brain. Starlit quickly yanked the sheet from under the unconscious unicorn and flung it back over the thestral.
"Just when I thought I was done with these creatures," Starlit groused, "life finds a new and creative way to shit in my dinner."
Starlit turned back to the unicorn she had knocked out. A pit of guilt formed in her stomach when she saw blood stream down her cheek and a large knot start to form on the back of her head. It was necessary, but the knowledge didn't make Starlit feel much better about the whole ordeal.
Fortunately Starlit was surrounded by medical equipment, and while she didn't know what most of the devices on the walls did she had found some bandages, ointment, alcohol for disinfectant, and needle and gut for stitching during her rummaging.
Starlit gathered up her requisite materials and flipped the mare over with a quick bit of magic. Twilight had given her a crash course in basic telekinesis during her stay at the Oak, although Starlit had hoped to not need to put it to use so swiftly.
Starlit worked diligently to stitch together the unicorn's cheek, as aside from the cut her face was actually quite lovely. She obviously took good care of her appearance even for a job as grisly as hers was, and a large nasty scar would stick out even worse for her efforts.
"When was the last time you had to stitch up a wound, huh?" Starlit mused to herself as she worked. "Was it when Eclipse had cut herself with the shears, or when Warden had gotten bitten by that feral dog while on patrol?"
With a practiced horn Starlit tied off the end of the stitches and examined her work. It hopefully wouldn't scar, but it was up to the unicorn to take care of them properly to ensure that they wouldn't. She smeared a bit of ointment onto the stitches before placing a linen pad onto them and tying it in place with some wraps. She then took a rag and soaked it in some cool water to place against the lump on her head to try and stop the swelling.
Suddenly remembering that she was technically supposed to be dead, Starlit ran over to the door on the far side of the room and locked it shut from the inside. She then took one of the small knives that was laying on a counter and jammed it into the lock before breaking it off inside with a quick stomp from her hoof. The room secured for the time being, Starlit started to mull over her options and what she knew.
"Sun certainly knows I'm alive given that he knows about the amulet," Starlit muttered to herself, "but he won't know where I am or how to contact me, and if enough witnesses saw me die then they'll think he's insane for asking where I am. I have a hostage as a potential bargaining chip, but even then…"
Starlit continued to talk to herself, trying to figure out a way out of this situation that wouldn't draw attention to Luna or her machines. She wasn't pulled out of her reverie until she heard another shriek start up, and with another muttered spell Starlit clamped her captive's mouth shut.
"Miss, if you keep doing this then I'm going to have to hit you again," Starlit said, taking note of how quickly she had woken up. Perhaps she wasn't as delicate as she looked.
When the unicorn didn't try to muffle out a protest Starlit turned around to face her. She was gingerly feeling the bandages on her cheek as well as the lump on her head.
"You can thank me for those stitches," Starlit continued, walking over to the unicorn as she did. "You cut your cheek pretty badly on the corner of the table and I didn't want it to get infected and ruin your face."
The unicorn looked up at Starlit with confusion, her head cocked quizzically to one side in leu of asking why she cared. Starlit sat down in front of her.
"Like I said, I really don't mean you any harm. You're just trying to do your job and I'm certain that you aren't used to ponies leaping to life after getting a magic bolt through the brain."
The unicorn glanced to the side with a shrug, a gesture of affirmation at least.
"Now that we're on a more even playing field, can I let go of your mouth without having to worry about you screaming? Because if you do I'll just have to knock you out again."
The unicorn cast an eye to the bowl that Starlit had struck her with, as well as the large dent in it, and nodded calmly.
"Good," Starlit replied as she disspelled the magic. Mercifully the unicorn did not start screaming again.
"Are you… are you a thestral, ma'am?" the unicorn asked. "Because if you are then you're not like any thestral I've ever examined."
Starlit's stomach twisted at the unicorn's assertion, but for the sake of their tenuous relationship she held her tongue.
"No I'm not, as far as I can tell, but what say we start slow. My name's Starlit Sky, and its a pleasure to meet you, Miss…"
"Rarity," the unicorn replied. "Forgive my rudeness, but as you can imagine this is a very stressful situation for me."
"The feeling is mutual, I assure you. After all, I'm the one that got killed."
Rarity shuffled back a bit, and Starlit silently cursed herself for her lack of propriety.
"So, you did actually die," Rarity said. "You weren't just unconscious, or in a coma?"
"It's a complicated story and I don't really have the time to tell it here," Starlit answered, "but for simplicity's sake, yes. I did in fact die, and this amulet brought me back to life."
Starlit gingerly lifted her black stone so Rarity could get a better look at it, and her eyes lit up when she saw it.
"Goodness me, is that obsidian?" Rarity asked with childlike wonder. "That's a rare gemstone around here, sells for a very high price."
"So I've heard," Starlit replied, remembering how she'd been accosted on the street. "I'm not from around here, and this stone is a bit more common where I'm from."
"Oh, you're an out-of-towner? No wonder the automaton attacked you, especially since you had weapons."
"About that," Starlit began, grateful to be getting back onto the topic of her concern. "The machine said something about me being 'unidentified' and a restriction on weapons for 'Class C' citizens. You wouldn't happen to know about any of that, would you?"
"Wow, you really aren't from around here, are you darling?" Rarity replied with a more serious tone. "I've never been anywhere that the Council's automatons aren't, but since you wouldn't be in the records that provide the basis for their intelligence it makes some sense that they wouldn't recognize you."
"Care to repeat that, but in a way I can make sense of?" Starlit asked. "Who are the Council, and how do I get into these records so that I don't get attacked again?"
Rarity started to laugh but quickly stopped with a hiss of pain as her stitches pulled against her cheek.
"Ma'am, you don't just 'get into the records,'" Rarity answered, "there's a whole process for doing so that happens when you're born and can take weeks of careful interviews with the family and a mountain of bureaucracy. As for the Council, they're so far above my head that I've never even seen them. All I know is that they run the city and build the automatons."
"They run the city?" Starlit asked incredulously. "What about Luna? This is her city, isn't it?"
Starlit felt a tingle go over her lips as her jaw closed tight, it being enveloped by a pale blue magic. Starlit looked up to see Rarity's horn alight and an expression of shock and worry staring back at her.
"Don't say another word!" Rarity hissed. "We don't speak of the Night Mare, it's punishable by imprisonment at the very least."
Starlit felt her heart sink at Rarity's warning. She had at least been able to speak of Celestia and ascertain some information about her, but this taboo against mentioning Luna suddenly made her job infinitely harder than it needed to be. Starlit motioned for Rarity to let her mouth go, which the white unicorn obliged.
"Rarity, I won't talk about her any more," Starlit began, "but I need to see her. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that the fate of Equestria itself rides on my speaking with her."
Rarity stood up with a start, her shocked expression not filling Starlit with much confidence.
"Starlit, you must be out of your mind!" Rarity replied. "Did that magic bolt take some of your brain with it? No pony goes to see her except for the Council, and even then it's only to keep her confined to the palace for a little while longer."
"Maybe I am a little cracked," Starlit said as she too stood up, "but I have a duty to uphold. Part of that duty requires speaking with Luna, and I need help to make that happen."
"Well, you'll not get it from me!" Rarity retorted, levitating her spectacles back onto the bridge of her nose. "Have fun on your suicide attempt, but I have family to provide for and I'll not put them in jeopardy by helping you."
Rarity stomped past Starlit and made for the door, only to find that the handle stuck. With some force she tried to turn the lock over but found it sticking in place.
"Rarity, I'm trying to help my family too," Starlit pleaded, "and I'm not asking you to accompany me. All I need is my things and a lead, and then you can go right on your merry way and forget we ever met."
Rarity kept fumbling with the handle, not giving much indication that she had heard Starlit. With a sigh Starlit worked her magic into the lock and removed the broken blade from inside of it, causing Rarity to stumble as the door swung open.
"I promise you that I won't say a word to anypony that you helped me," Starlit finished as the blade clinked to the stone floor.
Rarity looked back at Starlit, her nervous gaze slowly softening as she looked at Starlit's despondent face. With a weary sigh Rarity turned back to face the hallway.
"Let it not be said that I'm not giving to those in need," Rarity said, beckoning Starlit to follow her. "Come with me, but keep your face down."
Starlit hurried after Rarity as she went into the hallway, happy to find a pony willing to lend a hoof.
* * *
If there were ever a time that Sun was thankful for his hooded cloak it was now. After a few bad run-ins with the locals he took to keeping his face concealed. He was less likely to be bothered as long as nopony thought he was an out-of-towner.
"Take a left here," the voice in Sun's head bade him. Quickly he ducked into a side street that separated him from the seething crowd he'd been working his way through for the past fifteen minutes, stopping short before he continued to follow it.
"Any particular reason why?" Sun asked his brain-neighbor.
"What, don't you trust me?" the voice replied facetiously.
"We don't get to trust until I get a name out of you at least," Sun snapped back. "Why here?"
"There is a pony here who can help us get into the palace, if you must know," the voice replied curtly. "And you can call me whatever you like, I'm no good with names."
"How's 'Silence' treat you?" Sun snidely asked. "It gives me a bit of a goal to strive for vis a vis getting you out of my head, and it sounds vaguely ominous."
"I'll take it, but passive-aggression isn't your strong suit," Silence replied. "Now hurry up before our friend gets away."
"How do you know they're here?" Sun asked.
"Call it a hunch. Now scoot!" Silence flippantly replied.
As soon as he felt Silence's presence ebb out of his conscious mind Sun started down the alley, silently cursing his luck.
Sun was a learned stallion in many regards, even in some things that weren't well known. A childhood spent with knowledgeable parents from a God-Queen's city and the free time to pursue his interests followed by practical application of his knowledge when he had to find work gave him a well rounded body of information. Silence and whatever magic put her into his head was one of the few things he was absolutely in the dark about, and that lack of knowing was like a horrible itch he couldn't scratch.
Even still, Sun found Silence at least useful. It had taken a few hours for her to get used to his mind and the stimulus from his senses, but she was soon capable of predicting when he was being approached, where the machine-ponies were making their rounds, and generally acting as another set of eyes and ears. She was useful, but she was cagey.
The side street was much like the alley he and Starlit had appeared in, with pipes lining the walls and various flotsam and jetsam strewn about. An old pegasus slept in among the garbage, looking to Sun like he might already be dead were it not for the shallow breaths he was taking. At the far end of the alley were a few shops, their signs barely legible but indicating that they were of ill repute.
As Sun approached the stores he felt Silence's presence tug on his brain, directing him towards the right side stall that was up against the alley's back wall. As he approached he saw an earth pony behind the counter arranging a few rocks. Her coat was a dull grey and she looked terminally disinterested in what she was doing.
"Uh, Miss?" Sun asked nervously.
"Welcome to Maud's Stones and Gems," the proprietor announced flatly, not taking her eyes off of her work. "Are you interested in buying or selling today?"
"Neither," Sun replied. "I was told you might be able to help me."
Maud looked up at Sun through her dull purple mane, her eyes as unfathomable as the rest of her face. Sun couldn't tell whether she was upset, or annoyed, or happy, or anything. She didn't even looked bored, she just didn't emote.
"I can help you with rocks and gemstones, sir," Maud replied. "You'll need to see my sister for other things."
It was all Sun could do to not show his palpable relief at their being another pony he could speak with, although it was tempered by the thought that Maud's sister might be just as dreary and unreadable as her.
"Then could you go fetch her for me?" Sun asked.
Maud looked back up at Sun with her piercing gaze before standing up from her work and walking past a tattered curtain that led to the inside of the shop.
"Hey Silence, is it the sister I'm supposed to talk to or Maud, because I would very much prefer it not be Maud," Sun thought.
"Couldn't tell you," Silence replied. "All I know is that somepony in this shop needs to talk with you."
Sun bit back the scathing criticism he wanted to give Silence about her usefulness, as angering a magical entity that lived in his brain was almost certainly a terrible idea. Sun didn't have to wait for long before Maud's sister came to the stall front, although he soon found himself wishing he had Maud back.
"Well, hello there stranger!" The bright pink earth pony in front of Sun squeaked. "What can I do for you today?"
"Maybe lowering your voice by a few octaves," Silence retorted.
"Quiet, you," Sun chided before addressing the pony. "I was wondering if you could do me a pretty big favor."
"What kind of favor?" the pony replied at a breakneck pace. "If it's something easy like recommending a necklace then I can do that no problem, but if it's something big like stealing the power source for one of the Council robots then that might be a bit of an issue. Of course, if it's a medium sized fav—"
"Wait, hold on, stop," Sun interjected, desperate to stop her chattering. "Let me explain, then you tell me how big of a favor it is, deal?"
"Okey-dokey! My name's Pinkie Pie, by the by, what's yours?"
"Setting Sun," he replied tersely. "Now, if I were to tell you that I needed to get into the palace, how would you react to that idea?"
"Are you telling me that or aren't you?" Pinkie asked with a coy smile.
"For the sake of argument let's say that yes, I am. I want to get into the palace and see whoever's in charge around here."
Pinkie thought deeply for a period of time that was both too long and seemingly not long enough, her face screwed up in an exaggerated scowl. Whereas Maud barely registered any emotion, Pinkie seemed almost too expressive, like she was making up for her sister's lack of expression.
"Well, if you wanna see who's in charge around here then the palace isn't your best bet," Pinkie said. "The Council really runs the show, nopony's been to the palace in a really long time."
"Isn't Luna the one that runs this city?" Sun asked. "Or do you know her by a different name?"
Pinkie Pie tensed up when Sun mentioned Luna's name, but before she could reply they both turned at the sound of clanking hoofsteps. One of the machine-ponies was marching past the alley, and until it passed neither Sun nor Pinkie moved a muscle.
"Hey, if I were you, I wouldn't go asking around about the Night Mare," Pinkie whispered. "Those robots are designed to arrest anypony that does, and you can't really argue with a pony that doesn't have a brain."
"I've already seen their handiwork," Sun replied in an equally hushed voice, "but that's neither here nor there. I need to get into the palace, and a little birdie told me that you can help in that regard."
"Who told you that?" Pinkie asked back. "Not that it's not true, but how did you find out?"
"Yes Sun, how did you find out?" Silence asked snidely.
Sun's heart started to pump faster as he tried to come up with a convincing story. From what he could tell Pinkie was a mare that was too energetic for her own good, but surprisingly good at asking just the right kind of question in just the right sort of way. Her sincerity was refreshing, but it made trying to lie to her a fearsome proposition.
"Let's call it a hunch," Sun replied. "You don't have to come along with me, but if you could point me in the right direction I'd be forever grateful."
"Pssh! Nonsense!" Pinkie chided, playfully flicking Sun on the nose. "You're new in town and have no idea where you're going or where to even start looking. You're going to need me if you don't wanna get roughed up by the locals or the robots."
Before Sun could protest Pinkie ducked her head back into the doorway behind the stall and hollered her intentions up to her sister. After a moment's pause Pinkie trotted back inside, presumably to gather up a few things before she took off.
"She seems nice, if a tad on the squeaky side," Silence said.
"Are you sure she's the right pony for this?" Sun asked. "I like her earnestness and verve, but she does draw attention."
"Still trying to find all the answers instead of making your own, hmm?" Silence remarked. "Why ask me if she's right? I'm just a disembodied voice that lives in your head. All I can do is offer some advice, point you in what I think is the right direction, and tell you when you're about to be attacked. I can't make your decisions for you any more than Starlit can."
Sun wanted to rebuke Silence, but couldn't find a way to do so that didn't sound petty and pedantic. He knew she was right, and the knowledge that she had him so throughly pegged ate away at him. It scratched at his soul, and he was determined to prove her wrong.
Pinkie soon bounced out of the doorway and over the counter, carrying a few odds and ends in her small travel sack and wearing a snug cap over her head. How she managed to contain her voluminous mane inside of it would be worth further study.
"Got my work credentials, got my cap, and I'm all good to go!" Pinkie chirpped. "Come on, we've got quite the walk ahead of us and I need to go see a friend about some stuff. She works down at the morgue, and that's all the way on the other side of the district."
Before Sun could answer Pinkie skipped down the alley, her bubbly and vivacious personality at stark odds with the run-down hovel she lived in. As Sun made to follow her, he thought that he might be able to learn a thing or two from her.
Starlit couldn't help but feel a wave of barely restrained annoyance coming off of Rarity as they wove their way through her workplace. For a morgue it was astonishingly spacious and five floors high. Starlit assumed it was due to the astonishingly high population of New Selene; with that many ponies all crammed into one place, the amount of dead that poured in every day would potentially outstrip the entire population of her village.
Starlit had asked a few questions as they walked, and received terse, one word answers in reply that didn't tell her much. They only made a brief stop off by the storage room for personal effects to find Starlit's saddlebags which, mercifully, were untouched and still had all of their contents in place. Her sword and knives were missing, but after her run in with the machine she hadn't been counting on their being with her things.
More walking, more ducking around the scarce few ponies that bothered to be in the halls, and more silence followed. Starlit felt her heart pump faster, waiting for the other horseshoe to drop and for them to get found out, but it didn't happen. It reminded her all too much of being in Celestia's old palace.
"Rarity, how many ponies actually work here?" Starlit asked, doing anything to get her mind off of her nerves. "We've seen signs of maybe a half-dozen other ponies in a five story building."
"Is now really the time?" Rarity hissed back.
"It just strikes me as odd. I understand that not many ponies would want to deal with dead bodies all day, but this seems underpopulated even for a morgue."
Rarity hesitated in her answer as she led them down the last set of stairs to the ground floor, and to Starlit's freedom. She could hear the sound of ponies scurrying to and fro from the hall preceding the back door.
"If you must know," Rarity replied, "nopony chooses this position, they get chosen for it. There's a lottery the Council holds every six months or so among the unemployed, and if your name gets picked you go to the morgue for as long as you can stomach it."
"And how long have you been here?" Starlit asked as they exited the building into the back alley.
"Two years or so, not that I had much choice. I'm the only one in the family that can work, and after my first job tanked I had to take whatever I could get."
"And I presume it had something to do with gemstones?" Starlit asked, gesturing to Rarity's cutie mark.
"Has anypony ever told you that you ask a lot of questions?" Rarity snapped back. "Maybe I don't like to talk about things like this and I'm only answering you to be courteous to a pony who did me a kindness, but this is one step too far. I've stuck my neck out for you in the last hour in ways that, if anypony found out, would get me a life in prison at best and my head and the heads of my loved ones on the chopping block at second-best, and yet you continue to ask for more and more."
"Rarity, I'm sorry if I intru—"
"Oh, you're sorry, as if that's worth anything!" Rarity continued unabated. "Does 'sorry' get me out of a job I hate? Does 'sorry' keep my sister fed, or my lame father and half-mad mother alive? Does 'sorry' dispel the terror that plagues me every night that one day I won't come home from work and that everything I love and care for will be torn away from me for not following a law or rule I didn't know existed due to the manic whims of the Council?!"
Starlit stood stock still, dumbstruck by the flood gate she had inadvertently unleashed. Rarity had a wild look in her eyes, her beautiful face warped into a twisted mask of anger, sadness, and regret. Her cheek began to drip blood, no doubt due to one of her stitches coming loose during her tirade.
As Starlit remained silent Rarity slowly calmed, her breathing becoming more even and her face softening. Where once was hate and stress only sadness and embarrassment remained.
"That… that was rude," Rarity murmured, her eyes fixed on the ground. "You didn't deserve that."
"I may not have deserved it, but I think I needed it," Starlit replied. "Your personal life is your own, and it was wrong of me to try and intrude on that."
With a weight in her heart Starlit started down the alley to the main street. She still needed to get to the palace, but she wasn't about to put a pony who had nothing to do with it in harm's way. Rarity had her own worries and concerns, she didn't need Starlit's piled on.
"Starlit, wait!" Rarity called out. Starlit turned to see her cantering down the street.
"Rarity, you've already done enough for me, you don't need to do any more," Starlit said.
"There is still one thing I can do for you," Rarity continued. "I know a way you can get near the palace. On the northwestern edge of the city is an abandoned diamond mine that I used to work at. The Council ordered it closed due to a gas leak or some nonsense, but the tunnels go right up under the old palace.
If not for the tense situation they both had just come out of Starlit would've hugged her. It was a lead, and a solid one at that.
"It's not much, but it's something," Rarity finished sheepishly.
"It's much more than 'something', Rarity," Starlit said. "Thank you so much, for everything you've done for me today."
"Think nothing of it, please. Just do what you have to do, whatever that happens to be."
With a nod, Starlit trotted out onto the street, her head down to avoid the stares of the crowd and to hide the smile plastered on her face.
* * *
"Are you absolutely sure you don't want to gag her?" Silence asked petulantly.
Between Silence's complaining and warnings and Pinkie Pie's incessant chattering as they maneuvered through the streets, Sun found that his threshold for regretting decisions was far behind him. At this point he'd have given his right eye for five minutes of peace.
"For a prescient voice in my head you are astonishingly thick in places," Sun chided. "Even if I wanted to, leading her around like a slave would have the machines brought upon me faster than I could blink."
"All I'm saying is that it's an option," Silence replied.
"You know, you're being awful quiet back there," Pinkie chimed in, pulling Sun out of his internal dialogue. "Thinking about anything important?"
"Just marveling at the city, really," Sun replied. "This much technology and society all in one place has my head spinning."
"Yeah, it takes a bit to get used to, I'll tell you that for free. When I was a little filly I used to play in the alleys by running up the pipes and trying to see how high I could get. Then I slipped once and broke my tailbone, and Mom told me I had to stop."
"Do you know what the pipes are for?" Sun asked.
"Not the fancy brass ones, but the iron ones are mostly for pumping sewage and yucky stuff out of the city. I think the steel ones are for pumping water and light-gas."
"Light-gas?" Sun asked. "I can't say I'm familiar with that."
"They don't have light-gas where you're from?" Pinkie replied incredulously. "Boy, I'd hate to live there, light-gas is some amazing stuff!"
"Do you know how it works? What is it made from?"
"Couldn't tell you, truthfully," Pinkie replied. "All I know is that they get it from the gemstone mines on the north end of town. That's what Maud does for a living, and the pay's nothing to sneeze at."
"If it pays decently, then why do you two live in a hovel in an alley?" Sun asked, miffed that Pinkie didn't know any more about the light-gas.
"Well, it pays decently for a miner," Pinkie clarified. "It's not like she gets a guard's salary or anything. It's enough to keep a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs, and when that doesn't cut it she pockets a few of the gems that she digs up and sells them."
"Do you at least know what light-gas is used for?" Sun asked.
"Oh, just about everything! It keeps the streetlights on, it powers the Council robots, it keeps all of our factories and such going. Without light-gas the city would fall apart in days."
"Plus, just between you and me," Pinkie continued, sidling up next to Sun so as not to be overheard, "it makes an amazing firestarter. One ounce of that stuff will have your fireplace roaring in seconds."
"And they just pump it through the city? Isn't that dangerous?"
"That's why the pipes are made of steel, you silly-billy!" Pinkie chirped back as she bounced ahead by a few paces, leaving Sun dumbfounded.
"I can't tell if she's going to get me killed or is the only pony in this entire city I can count on for anything," Sun said to nopony in particular.
"I'd go with the former suggestion," Silence replied curtly. "Best to expect the worst in regards to ponies like her."
"And what would you know about ponies like her?" Sun asked. "She's got a lot of street smarts if how she's helped us dodge the machines and navigated us around the worst of the crowds is any indication. She may be odd and talk like she's going to die if she stops, but she's helpful."
"Just don't be surprised if her oddity becomes a liability," Silence answered.
Sun shook his head to try and dispel Silence's presence, but it seemed like she was done speaking for the meantime anyway. Just in the nick of time too, as Pinkie's frantic gesturing indicated that they were where they needed to be.
The building before them was stark and monolithic, the absolute antithesis of Sunspire's architecture and even a tad spartan by New Selene's standards. The slate grey walls were harsh and geometrical, there were only windows on the bottom floor, and the only signs that life could even exist inside were the omnipresent pipes that crawled up the side and entered through the roof.
Pinkie was just preparing to enter, beckoning Sun to join her all the while, when the front door swung open. Judging from Pinkie's reaction, the unicorn that exited was the friend she had been speaking of.
"Rarity!" Pinkie exclaimed, causing the unicorn to jump slightly. "Just the pony I need to see!"
"Pinkie Pie?" Rarity asked. "Heavens, its been too long! How've you been, dear?"
"You know, just hanging in there. The gas business has been good for Maud and I, but that's beside the point. What happened to your face?"
"Oh, this?" Rarity replied, touching the bandages around her cheek. "Just a mishap at work, tripped over something that should've been put up. Pay it no heed."
Just loud enough to be heard over the ponies in the street, Sun coughed to grab their attention.
"Oh, right!" Pinkie said with a look of mild embarrassment. "Rarity, this is Setting Sun. Setting Sun, this is Rarity! We used to work together before her mine got closed down."
"We seem to be getting a lot of visitors in town today," Rarity said. "Pleasure to meet you, Sun."
"As is mine," Sun replied, "but you said that there were a lot of visitors today?"
"Oh, I just had to help a mare get her bearings a few hours ago, nothing you need to concern yourself with."
Sun's mind began to spin up, although the dots weren't that hard to connect. If Starlit had been killed then she naturally would've been taken to a morgue, and then the amulet would revive her in time for some poor mortician to see a dead pony get off of a table.
"Tell me, did this mare have a dusky blue coat, blue hair, and teal eyes? Go by the name Starlit Sky?" Sun asked.
To say that Rarity was stunned would be an understatement; she had the face of a pony who had just seen the dead rise, and Sun knew for fact that she had.
"You know her?!" Rarity asked. "Do you know she is quite hard to kill?"
"I'm aware," Sun answered. "And I'm thankful that this particular turn of events has shaken out in my favor. Is she still here?"
Rarity's eyes flitted towards Pinkie Pie, who had been listening with attention that seemed too focused for her personality. The silence hung thick in the air, and it was all the answer that Sun needed.
"Alright, where did you send her?" Sun asked with an exasperated tone.
"She was rabbiting on about needing to get into the palace, and the only way I could see her getting there is—"
"Your old mine!" Pinkie interjected. "Didn't that get closed down because the light-gas was leaking out of the veins?"
"But that was two years ago!" Rarity retorted. "There's no way it could still be leaking now, especially after the clean-up crews were sent in."
The fur on Sun's neck bristled and a series of excessively hateful words began to rise up from his chest, enough that they all cascaded and burned together into a white hot core of fury.
"You mean to tell me that you knowingly told a confused mare with no knowledge of the danger she was being placed in to go to a place that could ignite if so much as an errant spark hit the wrong patch of air?" Sun asked with cold malice.
"She seemed to be able to handle herself," Rarity answered, backpedaling under Sun's furious glare. "She's the one that stitched my face up!"
"A few stitches and the ability to survive a point blank explosion are completely unrelated!" Sun shot back. "You are going to take me to her right this instant, and the entirety of the way there you are going to be thinking up a suitable apology for putting her life in danger or so help me I will spend the rest of my life trying to find a suitable torture to put you through!"
Pinkie held a hoof over her mouth while Rarity looked to be on the verge of tears, her chest rising and falling in a nervous staccato rhythm. Only then did he notice just how quiet the street was, how loudly he had been yelling, and the pressure that encompassed his mind.
"Silence, I'm in no mood for this," Sun thought as he ran a hoof through his hair.
There was no reply from Silence, and the weight on his mind felt different from her influence. It felt more deeply rooted, more ingrained than her surface level pressure was and knotted at the back of his head. Whatever this weight was, he couldn't tell if it was from her influence or not.
Sun took a quick look around and found that a fair few ponies were staring at him, as well as one of the machines. Its eyes were still teal, which he had gathered meant that it was still docile, so rather than agitate it he walked towards Pinkie and Rarity. Rarity reflexively backed up as he approached.
"Pinkie Pie, you lead the way to the mine," Sun ordered. "You know every back road in this city and we need to get there in time to catch Starlit."
"And me?" Rarity whimpered, trying her best not to meet Sun's gaze.
"I already told you what you're going to do," Sun answered curtly before taking Pinkie's lead. Rarity offered no protest, and Sun was thankful for the quiet.
* * *
The trip over to the other end of New Selene was harrowing, to say the least. Starlit found her diligence pushed to the breaking point as she tried to observe everything about her surroundings and stay hidden at the same time. Nopony really seemed to pay much attention to her, but since they didn't seem to paying much attention to anything it made her attentiveness stick out all the more.
A few of the machine-ponies that had killed her marched past, their impassive teal eyes locked ahead unless they were responding to a disturbance of some sort. Starlit had seem a pair launch some kind of strings from their bodies that, when they connected to a pony, sent them into a convulsive fit. Another one had used its artificial horn hold a pony in place like Sun had done to the thug in Appleoosa. Her amulet tugged in their general direction when they went past like a compass.
Everywhere Starlit went she kept a keen eye out for Sun, trying to find him in the listless crowds. If he was among the innumerable ponies that jostled her down the street Starlit couldn't tell, and it made the butterflies in her stomach more agitated.
Starlit had no idea what sort of resistance she may face at the mine, and the lack of knowing was eating her up. It could be nothing since it was abandoned, as she had been telling herself incessantly since the idea of resistance planted in her head, but there could very well be more of the machines there to prevent anypony else from trespassing. If Sun had been there then Starlit could bounce some ideas off of him, or at least feel more secure in having another set of eyes and ears.
The trip over to the mine took Starlit most of the day, and the sun was just about to go below the horizon when she saw her first sign of it. The ground which had until then been mostly cobblestone suddenly gave way to dirt and gravel for the next half-mile or so, as well as sloping downward precipitously. Once she got close enough to see the mine she ducked behind a large rock to hide from prying eyes.
The first warning sign came from the fact that there were work lights on in the distance, more of the flameless lamps that Starlit had seen scattered throughout the city, and in their light she saw ponies moving about. She was too far off to tell if they were ponies or machines, but they were there nonetheless.
"Rarity said this place was abandoned," Starlit thought. Given her vehemence at how she had lost her job, Starlit didn't doubt that Rarity was telling the truth as she knew it. What concerned Starlit was what had changed to re-open it.
A small cascade of gravel from behind made Starlit's heart skip and her muscles freeze. It could've just been her moving through that dislodged it, but Starlit knew far better than to trust that. With aching slowness she turned, trying to get the barest look at whoever was approaching her.
At the crest of the hill a trio of figures stood, their faces framed in the shadow of the rapidly setting sun. She couldn't tell what races they were or even how far away from her they were, but they seemed just as frozen at the sight of her as she was at the sight of them.
"Who's there?" one of the figures called, in a voice that Starlit would recognize in a heartbeat.
"Sun?" Starlit asked back.
"Starlit!" Sun answered, relief palpable on his voice.
With more speed than was safe for such a steep incline Sun half-ran, half-slid down the embankment to Starlit, followed by his companions. The details of his face slowly grew more distinct as he got closer, and she was relieved to find that he was unharmed.
Sun grabbed her up in a tight, warm hug, a tighter one than she felt the circumstances really warranted. They had been separated for the day due to her death, but this level of gratitude was a bit off-putting.
"Goodness Sun, I'm happy to see you too," Starlit said, pulling him off of her gently. "What's the fuss?"
"Considering what I now know about this mine, I don't think I'm making enough of a fuss," Sun answered, happy but cryptic. "I'm just happy to see you and relieved that you didn't go in there."
"What for? I was told it would be abandoned and it clearly isn't, but that doesn't seem like quite enough to warrant this reaction."
"I can field that question, ma'am," one of Sun's companions chimed in, in another familiar voice.
"Rarity? What are you doing here?"
"Doing my due diligence, I suppose," Rarity answered weakly. "There was something I neglected to tell you about this mine, something that could've gotten you killed quite horribly."
"That mine was used to mine light-gas," Sun interjected. "It's a substance that is used to power everything in the city, but it's also highly combustible under the right conditions. The reason this place was shut down is that one of the veins started leaking, and if you'd gone in there and, say, tried to light a torch you would've been blown to bits and alerted everypony in the area that you were here."
Starlit's stomach dropped at the thought that she had been that close to her fourth death, but not so much as she thought it would. The amulet around her neck thrummed softly, and she found the feeling of it oddly comforting.
"Sun, you know what would happen if I died in there," Starlit replied. "I can't stay dead, so at best it would set me back by a few hours and at worst I'd get sent back to the morgue."
"Even so," Rarity said, "it was remiss of me not to mention entirely why the mine was shut down, and for that you have my deepest and most sincere apologies."
Rarity bowed her head, and Starlit could see her knees shaking ever so slightly before they lost the light. She glanced to Sun, his eyes set in a firm glare at the white unicorn while the third pony glanced back and forth between them anxiously.
"I accept your apology, Rarity, as well as any assistance you could offer," Starlit replied, her tone gentle but diplomatic. "If you and your friend could go and find us a safe spot to rest for the night I'd be much appreciative."
Rarity took off before Starlit finished speaking, and the pink pony followed closely behind, leaving Starlit and Sun to themselves. Sun watched the pair leave until they crested the hill.
"Sun, what did you do?" Starlit asked firmly.
"What do you mean?" Sun answered, his tone light and borderline flippant.
"I think you know exactly what I mean, Sun. How did you get Rarity to come along? When last we spoke she wanted nothing to do with me and just pointed me here, yet here she is with you and that other pony. What changed?"
Sun locked eyes with Starlit, and for the first time since they'd met she saw real steel behind them. His expression wasn't his usual thin veneer of calm that masked his nervous and worrisome interior, but rather a visage of indifference.
"She could've gotten you killed, Starlit," Sun answered, his voice as cold as iron, "and I convinced her to help me see you safely through this."
"Sun, she has a family," Starlit protested, "and she has no business being here and doing this for me. This isn't her mission and you had no right to coerce her into coming along."
"So what would you have had me do?" Sun countered, his tone gaining an edge. "Just give her a slap on the hoof and an 'off you go then'? She kept valuable information from you, from us. She could've jeopardized the entire mission."
"Sun, we can handle this, you know we can. We convinced Celestia to come back, and we've had a significantly smoother time getting this close to Luna. I can't die and you have your wits to keep you safe. However you convinced her to come with you, you didn't need to. Now go help them find a safe place to camp tonight, I'll be with you shortly."
Sun looked like he was going to protest until his eyes slightly unfocused, losing the steel that hid behind them. He shook his head like he was trying to wring water out of his hair, turning to go back up the hill as he did.
Starlit followed his retreating figure until he went past the hilltop, her mind a flurry of thoughts. She didn't want to admit it, but Rarity's expertise regarding the mines would be helpful. Starlit only worried about how she and Sun would get along; there was tension between them, that much she knew as fact.
With one last look back at the distant work-lights, Starlit went back up the hill.
* * *
Sun wandered around the gravel and dirt for a while before he found Pinkie and Rarity in the dark. They had found a pit in the ground that had a large enough clearing to form a makeshift campsite, but Rarity was nowhere to be seen when he approached.
"Where's Rarity?" he asked as he skidded to a halt at the bottom of the pit.
"She said she needed to take a walk, gather herself," Pinkie replied, her tone oddly terse.
Sun sat down in the dirt next to where Pinkie had started up a small fire. The flames burned a dull blue, their tips licking at the underside of a tiny cookpot she had positioned over it.
He stared into the flames for a while, feeling the pressure in the back of his head recede as he did. The color, though odd, was soothing; it didn't rage and sear the way normal fire did, but looked like it was caressing the wood it was consuming.
"Pinkie, I'm going to turn in," Sun said as he pulled bedroll off of his saddlebags, "but when Rarity comes back could you tell her I'm sorry? About this afternoon, and the things I said to her."
"Mm-hm," Pinkie murmured as she took the pot off and checked its contents. The scent was heavenly, but Sun was in no mood to eat. He laid his bedroll out on the gravel, grateful for a place to lay his head.
"Goodnight, Sun," Silence said to him, the weight of her words pressing on his skull. He didn't reply, only pulled his cloak around him and drifted off to fitful sleep.
Starlit was already awake when Rarity began to stir. They had each taken turns on watch, and Starlit's had come up last. She didn't much mind, as it gave her the time she needed to think and the pale blue sky of the early morning was calming.
Rarity only stumbled once as she climbed out of the pit where they had made camp, and she settled in next to Starlit as they watched the sun come up. The moon had been exceptionally bright the previous night, and for the first time in her life it had glided across the sky in a smooth rhythm rather than the jittering trail it typically left.
"You're up early," Starlit said, breaking the idle stillness.
"I had a hard time sleeping," Rarity replied. "I'm not used to roughing it quite as much as Pinkie Pie or you and Sun are."
"What makes you think I 'rough it' a lot?" Starlit asked playfully.
"Nothing at all!" Rarity spluttered. "It's just that you're so serious and hard-nosed, and you know how to stitch up a wound an—"
"Rarity, I'm messing with you," Starlit said with a sly glance. "In truth I do quite a bit of roughing it back at home. Plus, you deal with the dead; are you trying to say you don't know how to stitch a cut up?"
Rarity's face flushed red with embarrassment, only slightly hidden behind her bandages. Starlit couldn't suppress a giggle through her tiredness.
"For serious?" Starlit asked. "You've been working in a morgue for two years and you never learned how to stitch something up?"
"I… I don't typically deal with the bodies that come in," Rarity admitted. "I'm really just a secretary. I make sure all the scrolls and accoutrement are in order for the actual morticians."
"In that case you are in desperate need of teaching," Starlit announced as she rooted through her saddlebags. Quickly she pulled out a spool of thread and a needle, along with a tattered piece of cloth.
"Oh, please, you don't have to," Rarity gently protested.
"I insist, as thanks for getting me out of the morgue yesterday," Starlit replied. Carefully she held the needle and thread up in front of the two of them with her magic. Whether it was due to her proximity to Luna or Twilight's instruction she couldn't say, but Starlit found her magic to be quite strong.
"Now, while it still won't be a breeze, threading a needle is easier for us because of our magic," Starlit continued. "A very wise pony told me that all you need to do is visualize what you want to do. Make the picture real in your mind and it will become reality. Here, take it."
Hesitantly Rarity lit her horn, the magic the same pale blue as her eyes. It faltered for a moment, flickering in and out as she got used to the weight of the objects, but eventually it held still.
"Good, you've got levitation down," Starlit said. "That's more than I could say for myself a month ago."
"Starlit, this is really unnecessary," Rarity replied. "I'm never going to need to know this."
"Really?" Starlit asked. "Tell me, have you ever needed to patch up a hole in a sheet so that it would keep the draft out? Or maybe your sister's favorite toy got a tear in it and she was inconsolable over it?"
"There… was this one time where Sweetie Belle needed a good dress but all the ones we had were torn at the hem," Rarity answered, her tone wistful.
"Then you can't say you'll never need this skill," Starlit replied. "Go ahead, give it a try, I won't judge."
With a slow intake of breath Rarity focused her eyes on the spool of thread and needle. The small glow around the tip of her horn was gradually spreading to the rest of it, and a sweat began to bead on her forehead. It was an expression Starlit was all too familiar with.
With stuttering speed the needle started to wiggle in Rarity's magic, and a tiny bit of thread began to unspool and hover like a single strand of hair caught in the wind. Rarity's face was screwed up in a look of pure frustration, her cheeks and forehead reddening with every passing second. Just as she looked ready to pass out the thread went through the needle's eye and looped around to form a tight knot.
"Excellent!" Starlit commended. "On your first try, no less! It took me a solid two months of training to get at that level."
"It sure… feels like I… went through two months of… effort," Rarity replied, gasping for breath and wiping sweat off of her brow.
"Here, give me back the thread, you need to rest," Starlit said, taking the thread back into her magic. Rarity flopped gratefully onto her back, her breath coming in huge huffs and puffs.
Starlit looked over the needle and thread with a critical eye; the knot work was simple, as was to be expected from a rank amateur, but it was serviceable and tight. Too much of the thread wasn't tied up in the knot as well, leaving more for the stitching.
"This is a really good job, Rarity. Do you want me to show you the basics of stitching now, or later? I can show you how to do it by hoof if that would work better for you."
"I think I'll take my leave for now," Rarity answered, regaining her composure. "If it matters at all to you, I'm going to get some more sleep. That's more magic used in two minutes than I've used in the last two months."
Rarity turned around and slid back down the pit, but for a moment Starlit saw a smile cross her face. It was bright like a new coin, and so much like White Eclipse's that it hurt.
* * *
"Where did they all go?" Pinkie Pie asked. Despite the obvious nature of the question, Starlit found it digging at the back of her mind as well as she looked towards the abandoned mine.
Where once there had been work lights and ponies scurrying about, there now was just a hollow breeze and vast, grey emptiness as far as the eye could see. The only sign that anypony had been at the mine the previous night was the shallow tracks their equipment had made in the dirt.
"Maybe the place really is abandoned," Sun suggested.
"Then what would those ponies have been doing here if it was?" Starlit asked. "They looked official, like they were supposed to be here."
"It could've been a clean-up crew," Rarity said. "When the vein started leaking there was a veritable legion of workers and machines that were sent in to contain it. Maybe they're still working it over."
Starlit ran through the possibilities in her head; if there was still gas leaking then they'd need to take care with every step, but they'd at least know what the threat was. If the gas was cleared out then the immediate danger was averted but it still left the mystery of why the ponies had been at the mine the previous night.
"Alright, whatever the situation is we need to get down there," Starlit said. "Sun, you stay with me while Pinkie and Rarity bring up the rear."
Without prompting Pinkie Pie's hoof shot in the air. She wiggled and jittered in place, waiting to be called on with the sort of childish impatience expected from a schoolfilly.
"Yes Pinkie? Do you have something to contribute?" Starlit asked wearily.
"I think it'd be a better idea for me to stay ahead of the three of you," Pinkie answered. "I refine the gas from the veins so it can be used, and I know what it looks like when it's in the air and what it smells like before processing. See?"
Quickly Pinkie turned to the side and showed the group her cutie mark. It was a trio of shapes, ovular at the top and with curling lines stretching down off of them, with one in yellow and two in a pastel blue.
"What does your cutie mark have to do with this?" Starlit asked, her confusion shared by Sun but not so much by Rarity.
"They're balloons, silly!" Pinkie answered, as if that were an adequate response to Starlit's question.
"I'm still confused," Sun admitted.
"You don't know what a balloon is!?" Pinkie asked, a look of pure horror on her face. "Land's sakes, how do you live without balloons? Balloons are big rubber sacs of light-gas that float and when they pop they make a big noise and a lot of pretty lights!"
"If I remember the story correctly," Rarity continued, "Pinkie got her cutie mark after seeing a passing stage show where they used them as part of the act, and she's been obsessed with light-gas ever since."
"Yep! It's how I got my job and how I've kept my bosses happy! I refine the gas for them, and they give me a little bit to take home and make balloons with!"
With lighting speed Pinkie pulled a small piece of rubber from her travel sack and blew into it, inflating it into a large red sphere. Starlit looked over it with amusement, but felt that it was an astonishing waste of rubber for something so frivolous.
"And that's how you know so much about light-gas?" Sun asked incredulously. "I guess it's not the craziest thing I've ever heard."
"It's useful, and right now that's all that matters," Starlit added. "Pinkie, you'll be our vanguard; if you see or smell any gas you tell us when so we can make the necessary precautions."
"You got it, ma'am!" Pinkie replied with a stiff salute. With no further prompting she descended down the hill, heading off towards the mine.
"Rarity, you still bring up the rear, and let us know if anypony is coming up behind us," Starlit ordered.
With a deft flick of her horn Starlit popped one of her saddlebags open and pulled out a pair of small ivory sticks on a pair of strings. Both had intricate runes carved onto their surfaces, and she handed one over to Rarity.
"These are communication rods," Starlit explained. "They're bound together by magic so that when one is moved deliberately the other makes the same motion."
Starlit took hers in her hoof and pulled it towards her chest. The rod's sibling, which Rarity already had around her neck, pushed into Rarity's chest in the same rhythm. Rarity made a nervous squeak as it nestled into her fur before Starlit put hers on and the pressure abated.
"This way, if you see anything, you can tell us without having to speak and potentially give away our position," Starlit continued. "I have another set that I'm going to pair to Pinkie and Sun in case she finds a gas pocket. You won't get any signals back from Sun and I unless we need to turn or something has gone wrong."
"And if I do find something?" Rarity asked, a hint of worry edging into her voice.
"Tug downward once if its an object, twice if it's a creature, and three times if it's a pony or machine."
With an experimental pull Rarity yanked down on the rod with her hoof, and the reciprocated reaction from Starlit's sent the twine digging into her neck. Satisfied with her discovery, Rarity trotted off after Pinkie Pie, casting a nervous glance towards Sun as she did.
"Are you sure about this, Starlit?" Sun asked. "Twilight said these are irreplaceable."
"So were the two swords, set of throwing knives, and entire suit of armor she loaned me," Starlit countered. "At least these will see some actual use before I inevitably lose or destroy them."
"Fair enough, I suppose," Sun replied as he made his way down the slope, his and Pinkie's rods jostling on his neck. Starlit stopped him with a hoof on the shoulder.
"Hmm? What is it?" Sun asked.
Starlit had so many questions she wanted to ask, assurances she wanted about how he'd acted yesterday and affirmations that he had just lost his temper. Seeing Rarity so nervous around him worried her, for her sake, his, and the mission's. So many things to say, but only one way to say it.
"You'll handle this," Starlit said, her words warm as a summer breeze.
Sun gave a nod before he pulled away and continued down the slope. Starlit wasn't sure if her meaning had come across or not, but just saying something gave her peace of mind.
* * *
While the mouth of the cave that led down into the mine had been relatively placid, the further Sun went in the more and more trapped he felt. Not even the trip to Undersand had set him on edge like this, and that had been under threat of death.
The ceiling was just low enough to feel like it could collapse on his head at any second, while the majority of the tunnels they traveled through were cramped and narrow with brief respites in large hub rooms. In the distance his lantern light glinted off of gems, but outside of a fifteen foot radius he was essentially blind without it. The reflecting gemstones combined with the inky blackness gave the impression that he was walking through the void of space itself.
Sun's heart skipped a beat when his communication rod jerked to the left, indicating that they would need to turn soon.
"Tell Rarity we're going to turn left," Sun relayed to Starlit. Starlit disinterestedly pulled her rod to the left, sending the message down the line.
Thus far the mine had held precious few secrets or apparent dangers. Aside from some loose equipment left when it was abandoned there was nothing to be found but the crypt-like stillness and the sounds of their own hoofsteps on the worn down stone.
"Are you sure you trust Pinkie Pie with being up front?" Sun asked.
"You said it yourself, she has a good sense of direction, and she can tell where the gas is," Starlit replied matter-of-factly.
"But this was Rarity's mine, maybe sh—"
"Sun, I know you're just talking so you can do something," Starlit interjected. "My daughter is the exact same way; she always needs something to do or she'll just chat your ear off. Just stay focused until we're out of here, alright?"
"Smooth," Silence quipped inside his mind. "You have any other witty ice-breakers?"
"Not now, and Starlit's right," Sun retorted. "I'm just nervous, what with the ever looming threat of death by explosion. Why aren't you helping out with this? You've been quiet all day."
"I'm not your servant, Sun. I have a life too."
"Then why take up residence in my brain if you're so concerned with whatever it is you have to do? You could've just stayed in Starlit's necklace and taken care of whatever it is that brain-ghosts do."
"Observation is a big part of what I do, and you are a pony worth observing," Silence answered. "I mostly help you out so that I can keep observing you, that's all."
"How noble," Sun replied, feeling a little bit of pressure on the back of his head.
"I'd say it is a bit, yes. By the way, Rarity's about to tug on her necklace and Starlit's going to jump because of it. Be forewarned."
No sooner had the last word echoed in Sun's mind did Starlit yelp in surprise and nearly buck Sun in the chest. He dodged just in time to miss her hoof, but it still caught on his cloak and tore part of the hem.
"Was it Rarity?" Sun asked. He knew that appearances would be necessary until it came time to reveal Silence's existence.
"Yeah, and it felt pretty strong. It was two tugs as well."
"Do you want me to go check on her?" Sun asked, hoping that the answer would be yes.
"Do you really want to after yesterday?" Starlit replied. "I'd say your relationship is frosty, but that would be giving it too much credit."
"It'll give me a chance to bury the hatchet, apologize for my behavior. You go catch up with Pinkie and tell her to hold up, I'll be back soon."
Sun took off back the way he'd come, the oppressive loneliness only exacerbated when Starlit fell out of his lantern's faint nimbus of light. His hoofsteps were hesitant, taking care to go over the exact route he'd taken before so he wouldn't get lost.
It was a careful few minutes of walking, but his patience was rewarded when Rarity fell into his view. She was sat on the ground and staring at a pile of boulders that must've only recently come down. Rarity turned to face Sun as she noticed his light, not to say that she was particularly pleased to see him.
"Where's Starlit?" Rarity asked. "Is she alright?"
"She's fine, she's just telling Pinkie to stop until we all get moving again. What happened here?" Sun asked, gesturing to the rocks.
"Why don't you go around to the other side and see for yourself?" Rarity curtly replied.
With a resigned sigh Sun sat down a few feet from Rarity, ready to finally get what he needed to say off of his chest.
"Rarity, I'm sorry about yesterday," Sun said, his eyes fixed on hers. "I wasn't in my right mind and you didn't deserve all the things I said to you."
"I should say so," Rarity replied with a haughty tone. Sun could feel the pressure rise at the back of his skull, but he fought it back down. Blowing up again wouldn't help.
"As you can guess, this… thing that Starlit and I are doing is pretty stressful, and I guess some of that stress just got to me. I'm not asking for your forgiveness because, as it stands, I don't think I deserve it, but I just want you to know that I'm sorry. I'm sorry, and it won't happen again."
Sun didn't wait for her reply before he stood up and walked to the other side of the rocks to see what had gotten Rarity so spooked. He wished that he hadn't as soon as he saw it.
With the back half of its body crushed underneath the stone, a pegasus thestral weakly thrashed as soon as Sun got close enough to see it. Its pale grey eyes were even more glassy than normal and thick blood leaked out of its gnashing mouth. It would almost be pitiable if it weren't so horrifying to look at.
"Rarity, it's probably for the best that I came," Sun called to her. "You work at a morgue, I assume you know what thestrals are?"
"I know more about those things than I care to admit," Rarity answered as she joined Sun. "I'm just thankful I don't have to work on them like the morticians do."
"The morticians work on these things?" Sun asked, more curious than disgusted.
"They come in fairly frequently, mostly from the lower districts and the slums. The get dissected and autopsied, and then their bodies are taken away, separate from the bodies that we bury. I assume they're cremated or dumped in some mass grave somewhere."
"Do you think they might've been the cause of your gas leak two years ago?"
"Heavens no!" Rarity retorted. "If anything the leak might've attracted them after the fact. This mine was pristine when it was functional, as far as mines go, but there are the occasional crop-ups of them in some of the cheaper ones on the other side of the palace."
"But if this mine was pristine, then how did this thestral get trapped? These boulders weren't here when Starlit and I passed through, so they must've fallen before you came through behind us."
"They must've been here before because they were here just now when I came through," Rarity replied.
Sun ran through the situation in his head, trying to find a logical way this made sense. There were no boulders when he and Starlit came through, yet there were boulders and a near dead thestral now with no apparent noise. No matter which way he tried to fit the pieces together, it wasn't making sense.
"I guess this is just gonna be one of life's little mysteries," Sun quipped. "You might want to step back, I'm gonna put this poor wretch out of its misery."
Rarity quickly stepped to the other side of the boulders and then some while Sun worked up some of his dwindling magic. Twilight had taught him some basic offensive spellwork, but warned not to use it unless there was dire need. Given that one thestral typically led to many more following behind it he figured that this qualified as dire.
With a murmured incantation that he had been taught he fired a short green bolt from his horn, taking more magic than it had when he had been learning to use it. The spell hit home, burying itself in the thestral's forehead and draining what little life was let in its grey, soulless eyes. He felt queasy at having to put it down, like he had just had some bad food.
"Alright, I'm gonna go back to Starlit and tell her the coast is cl—"
A horrendous wave of force, heat, and light tore across the entire left side of Sun's body, sending him flying to the other side of the tunnel. He smacked into wall and fell to the ground in a twisted mass of limbs and flesh. Blackness overtook him as he heard Rarity shriek and the tunnel cave in.
The black was soothing, comforting to his mangled body. The only sensation he could place at all was a thumping at the back of his head, steady and powerful.
* * *
Rarity heard the blast before she felt it, as the mound of boulders between herself and the light-gas explosion deflected most of it away from her and towards Sun. Even still, she was thrown a good few feet and was cut by several fragments of hot rock slicing across her body. Fortunately she didn't hit her head and was able to get back up relatively quickly.
The tunnel now glowed an iridescent, frantic blue from the burning corpse that had once been the thestral. Sun looked barely better than the thestral, crumpled agains the wall and with flames licking at his cloak.
"Sun!" Rarity called as she raced towards him. Just as she made it to his body her horn flared to life, a sign of her geomancy going off.
"No, no no no!" Rarity pleaded to no one. The earth above her rumbled and cracked, and she reflexively pulled a small shield over herself and Sun as the roof of the tunnel gave way. A few stones bounced off of it but the majority of them landed where the thestral had been. What was far less fortunate was how effectively the cave-in closed off the tunnel, trapping Starlit and Pinkie on the other side.
In the light of her magic Rarity saw that Sun's wounds were far more extensive than hers. The entire left side of his body was burned and slick with blood, his head had sustained a massive blow where he had bounced against the wall that had knocked part of the skull in, and he was bleeding from the mouth.
Rarity put an ear up to Sun's blood-blackened chest, trying desperately to listen for a heartbeat. It was faint and irregular, but it was there, and she knew there wouldn't be much time. She tried to reach into his saddlebags to see if he had any medical supplies, but the explosion had fused the clasp shut on one and the other was trapped underneath him.
Rarity pulled desperately at the broken latch, tears flowing down her face as she did. Stressful situations had never been her forte, and while she was good at keeping up an act there were times where she had to let it fall. Nopony would die on her watch again because she was trying to keep up an act.
"Come on, pull open you piece of shit!" Rarity pleaded through gritted teeth. With one last tug the straps holding the clasp in place finally pulled loose from their stitching, revealing the contents within. She quickly rifled through them, pulling out any useful supplies or medicine she could stabilize Sun with.
A low groan filled the tunnel, and Rarity snapped her attention to Sun's chest. The fur still smoked and the burns still shone in the blue flame light, but he was hollow and broken.
With much more hesitance than before Rarity put her ear up to Sun's chest, re-wetting the side of her face with his blood. There was no sound, save for the flickering of the fire and Rarity's soft sobbing.
Starlit's breath burned in her lungs as she ran. Her lantern bounced at her side and cast frantic shadows on the walls, and despite her age compared to Pinkie she was easily three lengths ahead of her.
A horrendous crashing sound had echoed down the tunnel just as Starlit had caught up with Pinkie Pie, and for a moment they both feared that the tunnel was about to collapse on their heads. When stone and earth didn't rain down on them Starlit's heart kicked into overdrive at the thought that it had come down behind them, a fear that Pinkie confirmed with her expert analysis.
And so they ran, hooves beating against dirt and stale air pumping through their lungs as the pair searched the tunnel for any sign of Sun or Rarity.
Starlit ran into a solid wall of rock at a slight bend in the tunnel, one that hadn't been there when they first came through and that she didn't see in her haste. She bounced off of it with a dull thwack, a rivulet of blood running down her forehead for her effort. Pinkie Pie just barely avoided tripping over Starlit, skidding to a stop mere inches from her prone form.
"Oh, this is bad, this is really bad," Pinkie moaned, a sentiment that Starlit was all too willing to share.
From floor to the ceiling seven feet above their heads a mound of stone, earth, and shattered gemstones stood, completely cutting off access to the rest of the tunnel. A few stones still slid down the pile, and Starlit nervously backed up until she ran into Pinkie's legs.
Where once her lungs burned there was now only dead air, and her heart all but stopped as she took in the scene before her. There was only one way she could fathom that the tunnel could've come down, and loathe though she was to admit it it was the only thing that made sense.
"Pinkie, was there gas in here when you came through?" Starlit demanded.
"Starlit, you know that there wasn—"
"Was there gas?!" Starlit reiterated. Her voice reverberated off of the walls and down the tunnel.
"There wasn't any, I swear!" Pinkie answered, contrition heavy in her words. "I would've told you if there was!"
"Then you better get digging," Starlit ordered. She didn't wait for a reply before she ran to the pile of rocks and started moving them.
"Starlit, wait! You can't do that," Pinkie pleaded.
"I can, and I will," Starlit retorted, lighting her horn to assist in moving the stones.
"No, you can't, you have to believe me!"
Starlit didn't reply. Sun and Rarity were either under or behind the wall of stone, and she was going to find out which it was even if she had to dig until her hooves bled.
A loud bang echoed from behind her, and reflexively she ducked down and covered her head with her forelegs. When a mound of earth again did not cascade from the ceiling she turned to see Pinkie Pie, a resolute expression on her face and a tattered piece of rubber in her hooves.
"What was that for!? You could've caused another cave-in!" Starlit demanded.
"Not with a balloon pop I couldn't have," Pinkie answered. "Starlit, you have to stop digging. This mound of dirt is all that supporting this section of the tunnel now, and if you disturb it too much then you could cause another cave-in."
Starlit looked back and forth from Pinkie to the mountain of stone in front of her, trying desperately to reconcile what she was being told with what she wanted to hear. The two ideas didn't get along well in her head.
"Starlit, I've been working in mines since I was six," Pinkie continued, her voice getting a little of its sweetness back. "I've seen enough cave-ins to know what to and not to do during them, and I've lost good co-workers and a few friends because they didn't listen. When I tell you that there's nothing to be done, there's nothing to be done."
A tight ache formed in Starlit's chest, like her muscles were trying to swallow her heart.
"Then what do we do?" Starlit pleaded. "How can we help? We have to be able to do something."
"We keep going, and hope that whatever caused this cave-in didn't hurt them," Pinkie answered.
Pinkie got up and turned to leave, taking up her lantern so she could see her way back down the tunnel. Starlit reluctantly followed her, praying desperately that Sun and Rarity were alright.
* * *
Rarity had long since lost track of time, not that it was easy to track in pitch darkness. For all she knew it had been ten minutes or two hours that she'd been wandering the halls of her mine, Sun's corpse dragging behind her on a makeshift stretcher that she'd cobbled together from his ruined cloak and a few stakes from his saddlebags.
Her horn ached from the stress of throwing up the shield that had protected her from the cave-in, and her legs ached from all the walking. Two years was a long while to not have much activity and it was showing.
Gingerly she sat herself down against one of the innumerable tunnel walls that she had help dig, taking care to avoid her bruises and cuts. While Sun had taken the brunt of the blast she wasn't without her injuries. It's just that while his were predominantly bodily, hers ran deeper and cut all the worse.
Rarity had had a lot of time to think since the cave-in, and even more time to regret. Regret not telling Starlit about her real magical ability, regret not accepting Sun's apology, and regret lying to both of them about why the mine had actually shut down. So many mistakes weighed on her soul, and soon enough the tears again started to fall.
"Stupid, stupid Rarity," she muttered to herself. "You try to keep a low profile and it just gets ponies hurt. You try to do the right thing and it just gets ponies hurt."
Soon enough the tears and the ache and the weariness grew too much for her, and she slumped forward in the type of sleep that only comes from complete exhaustion. She couldn't move for the life of her, and in that she and Sun weren't terribly different.
* * *
Endless tunnel after endless tunnel, and Starlit was seemingly no closer to her goal. Pinkie had tried to occupy some of the time with idle talk, but all of it died in the air.
Starlit knew what it was like to lose a loved one. She could conceptualize the process, she knew how to grieve. Even still, this sensation was different. She didn't feel sad, not even particularly weepy, she just felt hollow and impotent. When her grandmother had died she had closure, but she may never get that here.
Starlit gave her communication rod an idle shake as she had been doing for the last hour or so. It gave her something actionable to do, something to take the weight of loss off of her mind for even a moment. Her hoof had brushed her amulet a few times, its cold and silent surface indifferent to the world.
"Starlit? Starlit, you there?" Pinkie asked, drawing Starlit back to the world.
"What is it?" Starlit asked, her voice dull.
"We're where we need to be," Pinkie replied. She gently put a hoof under Starlit's chin and drew her focus upward.
The flickering light of her lantern made it difficult to make out, but the walls of the tunnel looked different. The rough hewn rock had given way to a smooth, midnight blue material that looked like neither stone nor metal, and a few yards away a shaft of light pierced down from the cavern ceiling.
"This is the palace?" Starlit asked.
"Probably one of the sub-basements if I had to guess," Pinkie replied. "Most of the area around the castle is deserted, so occasionally you'll get a little closer than you bargained for during tunneling. Whatever the place is made out of does a doozy on the drill bits so we don't get much farther in than this if we do hit it."
"And the light?" Starlit continued, a little vigor back in her voice.
"I'd say it was where the drill stopped and knocked a piece of the roof out, but with our luck it could be a sewer drainpipe that got poked into and never fixed."
"Does the Council not take care of this place? That seems like it'd be on their priorities list given how massive it is."
"Nopony comes in here ever since the Sundering, or so they say," Pinkie replied, expecting that to answer her question. Starlit gave her a confused expression.
"Right, out-of-towner, sorry," Pinkie finished.
"I say we should settle down for now," Starlit said. "We've been walking for hours, and it'll give you the time to explain what we could expect in there and what the 'Sundering' was."
"You'd better buckle in then, 'cause it's a long story and I don't know all the details!" Pinkie said with her typical cheer. Quickly she pulled a small phial of liquid out of her travel sack and set it down, prompting Starlit to join her.
Sitting down set every joint in her legs cracking, but the opportunity to relax her aching muscles was too good to pass up. She pulled her bedroll off of her saddlebags and laid it out alongside a few branches and twigs she'd saved from Twilight's forest. It wouldn't make for the best fire, but it was better than nothing.
"Please, allow me," Pinkie said with a mock bow. Carefully she lifted the phial and drew out the stopper. She let a single drop fall precipitously from the lip of the bottle, which hit the branches and twigs and set them alight with blue flame.
"Are you sure that it's safe to use light-gas here?" Starlit asked nervously. "What if a patch of it blows through while we're here?"
"That's the neat thing about refined, liquid light-gas; it doesn't interact with the aerosol or natural stuff, and neither do the flames it makes. It's a pain in the flank to refine, but once you've got it done then it's one of the safest fuel sources you could ask for."
Starlit found her eyes drawn to the deep blue flames, flickering and dancing away. The effect was hypnotic, and she found that her troubles were starting to melt away as she gazed into its depths.
"Yeah, it is really pretty to look at," Pinkie said with a mellow tone. "Once when I was little I just looked at the stuff all day. Hurt my eyes after a while, but it wasn't bad."
"You said you needed to tell me some things? About the Sundering?"
"Oh right, that," Pinkie replied. She settled in comfortably next to the fire, setting her travel sack aside as she did. "Now, like I said, this story is kind of spotty since a lot of what happened is lost to history, but the Sundering was a big enough thing that most ponies know bits and pieces of the story."
"And how many pieces do you have?" Starlit asked, trying not to sound desperate.
"More than most," Pinkie replied, equally vague. "The Sundering was supposedly caused after a big war in a far off kingdom."
"That sounds familiar," Starlit thought ruefully. "I'll have to ask Twilight about that later."
"When Princess Luna came back from the war, she was hailed as a hero by the ponies in her kingdom," Pinkie continued. "There were parades and festivals and the like, but Luna was always unhappy and nopony knew why."
"So, first a big fancy duke came to her in her castle, with all the nobles he could muster and all the finest gifts to give her as thanks for saving them. When asked if this pleased her, Luna said nothing and only accepted gifts of technology and machinery, leaving the finery and gold for them."
"Second, a troupe of musicians and actors came to her, and performed music and put on plays all to give her the glory and fame she so richly deserved. They too asked if this made her happy, and again Luna said nothing, but asked that the scripts for one of their plays be left behind."
"Lastly, a collective of artisans and craftsponies from across the city came to her, and offered her up their finest creations as a testament to the peace she had won them that let them build and craft and live. They asked one final time if this made her happy, and this time she spoke."
"She said to them 'Go, and tell others what I tell you now; your peace was hard-won, and many died to make it so. The actions I have undertaken in service to your peace were terrible and wicked, and I am not deserving of the love you give me. You do not need a Princess to rule you any longer, for the wise and caring ponies of this city and my kingdom have proven capable of ruling themselves. The only gift I ask for is the gift of seclusion, and contemplation on what I've done for you.'"
"Wait, it gets even better," Pinkie replied with barely contained enthusiasm. "So, as you can imagine, the ponies had a tough time deciding who was going to rule them. The nobility thought that they should since they had the money to back up their claim, the artists and musicians thought they should because of the joy they bring to everyone's lives, and the craftsponies thought they should because they make everything that the city stands on."
"The arguments got more and more heated and as the tempers flared the city started descending into anarchy. Then, on the brink of full-scale war in the city, Luna came back. It was a year and a day since she'd asked for her peace, and when she came out of the palace everything changed. That when the first robots were released into the city, the ones she had made out of the technology the nobles had given her, and they brought her justice down on the foolish ponies that tried to twist her words and actions."
"Of course, these ponies weren't going down without a fight, and they managed to put aside their differences to mount an attack on the palace itself. It was Luna on one side, the citizens of New Selene on the other, ready to duke it out for the fate of their city!"
"And? What happened next?" Starlit asked. Despite herself she was on pins and needles waiting for the end.
"There was a huge battle, and Luna did some crazy magic stuff that annihilated the opposing army, as well as most of the land surrounding the palace. Only her robots were left at the end of it all, and nopony knew what happened to Luna afterward. Then the remaining ponies, realizing the error of their ways, formed the Council and set to work fixing everything. The robots helped out, and after a while the Council was able to figure out how to make more of them so they could police the city better."
Starlit couldn't help but feel a little let down. The story had been exhilarating in a sort of storybook way, and while she was certain that parts had been embellished or misremembered over the ages it gave her some valuable insight into Luna's character. She just wished that there was a more definitive conclusion to it all.
"And that's all you know?" Starlit asked.
"For the most part, yeah," Pinkie answered. "There's some other bits about the Council and how it works, but I'm pretty sure that that's all propaganda."
"It's more than I knew before, and that's what matters. I'm going to try and sleep, unless you wanted to."
"Nah, I'll be fine," Pinkie replied with a dismissive wave. "Besides, you're old, you need it more than me."
"I can't be more than ten years your senior," Starlit retorted.
"And that means you're older than me. Ergo, you're old!"
"…I can't fault that logic," Starlit relented, turning over onto her bedroll with the fire at her back. Sleep didn't come easily, and she knew that it wouldn't, but Pinkie's positivity was a nice balm for her wounded soul.
* * *
Rarity awoke with a start, like getting yanked out of a bad dream. Her neck was sore from being bent for hours and her hindquarters doubly so from the tunnel floor, but bad rest was better than none.
The numerous cuts and abrasions she'd incurred in the blast had had time to scab over, and moving around only served to open a few of them back up. The blood on the side of her face had long since dried, and she spent a few fitful minutes scraping all of it off.
Sun still lay on the stretcher, still as a stone and growing ever colder. Rarity couldn't stand to look at him even though her eyes kept drifting back to his corpse. Thankfully the dark obscured most of his injuries, not that the sight of them hadn't been indelibly burned into her memory.
Smoothly Rarity flicked her horn to levitate Sun's bags back to her haunches, tying the stretcher to the straps as she did. The ache in her horn had subsided, but she still took care to not overextend her ability.
"Just a few more miles and then I'll be out of here," Rarity murmured to herself as she began her trudge anew.
She had barely gotten more than a few feet before being stopped dead by the sound of a cough. It hadn't come from her, and it certainly couldn't have come from Sun.
With the sort of slowness that only pure fear can instill Rarity turned her head to look back at Sun, igniting her small lantern as she did. It would hurt to see, but she needed to know.
Sun lay in his cloak, bloodied and burned and still as a stone. The blood matting his fur had dried, leaving patches of it stuck up in places, while half of his mane was slicked to his skull from the blow he had received when he hit the tunnel wall. Rarity could've sworn he had a large chip taken out of one of his hooves as well, but in the panic of the moment she could've imagined it.
Setting her lantern forward Rarity resumed her walking. No amount of wishful thinking could bring Sun back, as much as she wished it would.
* * *
Starlit's few hours of sleep were fraught with images and sounds that her mind had dredged up; the thestral from Sunspire, sharing her story with Sun after her first death, and the booming echo of the cave-in. None of them made for restful sleep, and she woke up feeling groggy and uneasy.
"How you feeling?" Pinkie asked as she idly chewed on a carrot.
"Like my head was just trampled," Starlit said.
"Here, take one of these," Pinkie said as she pulled a small yellow lozenge out of her travel sack and passed it to Starlit. "It'll help take the edge off."
"What is it? Medicine?"
"A little of that, but mostly it's just something sweet to suck on. It helps workers down here deal with the claustrophobia and stress from working in near total darkness."
Starlit hesitantly put the lozenge in her mouth, letting it roll around the inside. She would've preferred some actual medicine, but as far as stopgaps go it was a rather pleasant one. It tasted quite a bit like sugar with a twist of lemon and ginger, and Starlit's mood improved slightly just from having it.
"Where did you get this?" Starlit asked. "I didn't think you'd have access to sugar and fruit in a city like this."
"Oh, we don't," Pinkie replied, "I got these off of a traveling merchant a few years back. He'd been coming through the city from one of the outer villages and had a bunch of bags of these things for sale. I had just gotten my pay for the week and bought up his whole stock, every last one! Maud was so mad at me for wasting my money like that!"
Starlit fought to suppress the surprisingly funny mental image of Pinkie's stone-faced sister being upset at something.
"And you've just hung onto them ever since?" Starlit asked.
"Yep! I only have one whenever I'm feeling down, and I mostly save them for other ponies who look like they could use a pick-me-up."
"That's putting my situation charitably, I'll tell you what," Starlit replied snidely.
The pair sat in silence for a bit as Starlit chewed the candy. Pinkie busied herself with one of her balloons, worrying over its elasticity and pliability like a carver with a chair.
"Pinkie, how do you do it?" Starlit asked, her voice thicker than she thought it would be.
"Do what?" Pinkie replied. Her question was genuine, a trait Starlit found rare and beautiful.
"Do this," Starlit answered, gesturing to Pinkie in her entirety. "How do you stay so positive and upbeat? How do you know exactly what to say and how to say it to make somepony feel better? How can you find the silver lining in everything, no matter how black the sky may be?"
For a moment Starlit thought she had insulted Pinkie, as she had stopped toying with her balloon and placed it back in her bag. It was only when Starlit saw the caring smile that she let her silent breath out.
"You know, I get asked that a lot, and I've never been able to give a good answer," Pinkie admitted. "Sometimes I tell them that it's just my personality, other times that I'm always thinking of a good joke. But after today, and everything that's happened, I think I might have a good answer."
Even as Pinkie's smile stayed, Starlit got a good look at her eyes, and saw just how tired they looked. Her eyes were baby blue but held the experience of a much older pony; they were weary and beaten down, and the smile shone all the brighter for their darkness.
"I think I stay so positive because of all the negative that I see every day," Pinkie continued. "I see more crimes walking home from work than most see in their entire lives. I've seen good friends die because of a freak accident that nopony saw coming, and I've seen neighbors vanish in the night with no explanation."
"So you spread cheer to fight back the bleakness that everypony else lives in," Starlit said. "It's admirable, if a little foolish."
"Is it foolish, though?" Pinkie asked. "If I can make somepony's day just a little bit better by making them a balloon or helping them carry their things, then maybe they can take some of that kindness and spread it around themselves. If enough ponies spread the kindness that I give out, then maybe one day I won't have to pretend that things are alright because they will be alright."
Starlit opened her mouth to retort but found that nothing would come out. It's not that she couldn't think of a counter-argument, it's that she didn't want to voice it in the face of such optimism. Who would she be if she tried to stomp out this one flickering light of happiness in a world gone grey and cold?
"Well, if it works then it works," Starlit replied, swallowing the candy.
"It has so far," Pinkie said, "and I won't stop trying until it stops working. Now, what say we get off our flanks and climb up into an old sewer?"
"If it matters at all to you, I'd like to sleep some more," Starlit answered. "After all, I am old and need all the rest I can get."
Pinkie let out a snort of laughter, and Starlit could feel her spirits rise along with it. After the day she had had she could use all the spirit lifting she could get as well.
* * *
The pale light of day shone at the end of the tunnel, and Rarity silently thanked whatever gods may be for safe passage out. Her hooves ached and the weight of Sun behind her had made the trip slow going, but she had made it.
Even with safety and success so close at hoof, Rarity still felt uneasy; twice more had she distinctly heard a cough or other type of bodily sound, and at this point it was too much to try and convince herself that she was hearing things.
The light hurt her eyes as she stepped out into the open air, and the air was quite musty compared to the dry staleness of the tunnels. Gratefully she unhooked Sun and pulled off his saddlebags, ready for a much deserved rest.
"h…help… light… hurts…" an all too familiar voice croaked. A shiver ran down Rarity's spine and she quickly turned to look at her charge.
Sun lay on the ground, but where once he had been still he now weakly pawed at the edge of his cloak. It looked like he was trying to pull it over his face to hide them from the light of the sun.
"Sun?" Rarity asked softly, trying not to disturb him.
"need… dark," Sun said before his hoof fell limp. Rarity felt her heart drop like a stone.
With more deft magic work Rarity reattached his saddlebags and Sun himself and took off at a gallop out of the mine. She had to maintain a spell to keep Sun from sliding off the makeshift stretcher, but at this point she didn't care about her magic limit.
"Hang on Sun, I know where you can get help!" Rarity called back to him. He didn't reply, only making a strangled gurgling sound as they got to the top of the hill. In the daylight she could plainly see where they had made camp the previous night, as well as a small wagon that they'd missed that would work splendidly for her needs.
With as delicate of a touch as she could manage Starlit lifted Sun in his cloak with her magic and laid him down in the wagon. She could feel her control very nearly falter from his weight, but it held just long enough to safely deposit him. Rarity would have to drive the wagon manually back into the city.
"rar…ity… i'm… sorry…" Sun choked, coughing up more blood as he spoke.
"Don't speak, darling, you need your strength," Rarity admonished. "I'm going to get you someplace where they'll fix you right up, and you'll be right as rain in no time."
With a huff of exertion Rarity lifted up the wagon and hitched herself to it. The ride back would be long, but panic and a time limit had a wonderful way of motivating a pony.
"I'm not done with you yet, Setting Sun," a distant voice spoke. It sounded like a half-remembered dream, but to Sun it may as well have been a bell ringing with his head inside of it.
Everything hurt, from his hooves up to his ears. Half of his skin felt like thick putty hanging off of his muscles and what little he could see from the wagon was half-red from the exploded blood vessels in his left eye. Every jostle of the cart he was in sent a fresh wave of pain through his body, but each wave felt less and less painful the longer he traveled.
"You just had to go and blow yourself up, didn't you?" the voice admonished, this time more clearly. "When I said you were worth observing I didn't mean like a blood sport."
"Quiet… please…" Sun croaked at the voice.
"Oh no you don't, you're not getting out of this that easily," the voice said. "Try not to pass out again, this one's going to sting."
A sharp, searing pain erupted from Sun's left eye, hard enough that a scream managed to tear itself from his mangled throat. When the pain ebbed away he found that the half-red effect on his vision was gone, and he got one good look at his surroundings before he slipped back into unconsciousness.
He was in the city again, with buildings flying past him. It was sometime past midday, and when he craned his neck forward he saw Rarity. Sweat ran down her head and neck in rivulets large enough to see clearly from his position a few feet away, and her once neatly done mane hung in limp, purple curls. If she was tired he couldn't tell it.
A tiny smile cracked through the wounds on his face as he fell back into the black.
* * *
Rarity blew hard against her hair, trying to get it out of her eyes so she could see the increasingly narrow and winding streets. Her eyes stung with sweat and her hooves and legs had long since fallen numb from exertion, so the last thing she needed was another distraction.
Carefully she scanned the numerous side streets and alleys, trying to parse out the one she was looking for. A distinct set of pipes, layered two brass with one steel between them, and a smooth spot worn into the road finally tipped her off. It was too small for the wagon, so she'd have to carry Sun the rest of the way herself.
Making sure that nopony was watching her too closely Rarity lifted Sun out of the bloodstained wagon and onto her back. She'd already heard Sun scream from something once, and she didn't need the machines coming down on her for carrying a near-dead stallion on her back like a common grave robber.
A familiar door awaited her after taking another right turn at the end of the alley, one painted with a red cross and dotted with a few splotches of blood. Fearing that her legs were going to fall out from under her she cantered to the door and rapped on the rough wood.
"Who is it?" a female voice called. "Do you have an appointment?"
"Redheart, It's Rarity, open up! It's an emergency!" Rarity called back. A frantic shuffling of hooves was soon followed by the door swinging open to reveal an earth pony nearly as white as her and with a pale pink mane.
"Good grief, what happened to you?" Redheart asked. "You look terrible."
"It's not me that needs help," Rarity replied as she shoved past. "Get a bed ready, and some burn supplies."
Redheart's abode wasn't nearly to the level of Rarity's morgue when it came to medical preparedness, but Redheart was fair and not above taking on a seemingly hopeless case. It was her that had saved Rarity's father after his accident as well as helping Sweetie Belle with any number of childhood illnesses.
Rarity swept off a table in Redheart's living room, scattering a few books and bits of junk to the floor while Redheart went upstairs to get some things. She then took Sun's mangled body and laid it out on top, injury side up. Her stomach still turned to look at him, but the wounds looked less gruesome than in the mine.
A shriek followed by a clatter of metal drew Rarity's attention to the foot of the stairs and to Redheart. She had a hoof over her mouth and a tray with bandages and a jar of some poultice lay scattered at her hooves.
"He was worse earlier, if you can believe it," Rarity said as she beckoned Redheart to the table.
"What happened to him?" Redheart asked, shock and fear in every word.
"He got caught in a light-gas explosion," Rarity answered tactfully. "He was putting a near dead thestral down when something caused it to combust."
"A light-gas explosion?" Redheart retorted. "He should be dead already, especially if it came from a thestral; those things go up like oily rags. Do you know if he used magic on it?"
"I think I heard him cast something, but I was too far away to stop him."
"But not so far away that you didn't get hit with some of the debris," Redheart replied, pointing out a few of Rarity's worse wounds.
"We can argue this later," Rarity snapped back, "now we need to work. I thought he was dead for hours but he just started coming around about forty-five minutes ago."
Redheart gave a curt nod and set to work, looking Sun over with the eye of a trained professional. Rarity gathered up everything that Redheart had brought down and dropped and set it on a stool next to her.
"He's lucky, I'll give him that," Redheart assessed. "These burns are at worst deep second degree, and his face seems relatively intact save for a whole mess of blood. Scalp wounds tend to bleed a lot but aren't too bad in the long run, just messy to clean up."
"What do you mean?" Rarity asked. "Part of his skull is caved in, isn't it?"
"No, not from what I'm seeing," Redheart answered. "Maybe you were just seeing things?"
Rarity moved Redheart out of the way, taking a good look at Sun's head. Sure enough the nurse was right; where she had seen the distinct dent in his head there was now just smooth skin without any sign of the fracture or the heavily bleeding cut that had sprung from it.
"That's impossible, there's no way a broken skull healed that quickly," Rarity said in disbelief. "I know what I saw, and what I saw was a dead stallion with a dent you could balance an egg in in his head."
Redheart looked back over Sun, palpating his mangled flesh and trying to find signs of what Rarity was talking about. She let out a sharp gasp and drew back at something she felt, and Rarity found herself startled as well.
"What? What is it, what did you feel?"
"Feel his chest, right around his lower ribs," Redheart said, putting Rarity's hoof onto Sun's chest. His skin felt thick, like firm clay.
Rarity could feel his shallow breathing where there had once been none at all, and a rapid heartbeat that had once been silent. Then, as if it had been poised to strike, she felt a sharp crack and popping sound that caused her to let out a squeak of surprise.
"You felt it too?" Redheart asked. "Quick, tell me what you feel now."
Rarity gingerly laid her hoof back onto Sun's chest, and immediately she could feel a difference. The rib cage had been shattered on his left side in the blast, but she now felt a few of the ribs put back together in his chest.
"I think I know where his skull fracture went," Redheart said. "I don't know how, but your friend's body is putting itself back together."
Rarity stopped just short of telling Redheart off for her ludicrous assertion, but then remembered her first encounter with Starlit. The mare had taken a bolt of magic through the brain and woken back up a few hours later right as rain.
"I need to go, I have a pony I need to talk to," Rarity said, stepping away from the table and heading for the door. Starlit would know what was happening, and there were other ways to get to where she and Pinkie were going in the mine.
"Oh no, not on my watch," Redheart ordered. "You are in no fit state to go anywhere. Frankly I'm amazed you even made it here from… say, where were you when this happened?"
"That's personal," Rarity answered sharply. "Redheart, you know I love and appreciate you for everything you do here, but I need to leave. I trust you can take care of Sun for me?"
"Rarity, I am not letting you leave here," Redheart replied. "You're hurt and you're tired. Look at your hooves."
Looking down, Rarity could see the bloodstains she had left on Redheart's floor, as well as the small puddle of blood forming up under her front hooves. Only looking at them was needed to start registering the pain of standing, and she quickly sat down to alleviate it.
"You didn't even notice, did you?" Redheart asked pointedly. "Rarity, you're running on pure fight-or-flight right now, and if that falters for even a second you're going to fold like a cheap blanket. Would you rather that happens here where there's a soft bed and some bandages and disinfectant for you, or out in the street where you'll likely die of exhaustion if the machines don't take care of you first?"
Looking over her bloodstained hooves, Rarity found the hard truth in her words, as much as she didn't want to. She could already feel parts of her mind growing sluggish, and her legs might as well have been made of lead for as heavy as they felt.
"Your bedside manner is atrocious, do you know that?" Rarity asked facetiously.
"So I've been told," Redheart answered. "C'mon, lets get you bandaged up and into bed. I'll watch your friend, do what I can for his skin and wait to see how his 'healing' goes."
Rarity smiled weakly at Redheart, thankful to have something go right for once. She stood to follow Redheart upstairs but misjudged how quickly she got up. Her vision soon filled with fuzz, followed by a dull thumping sound as her unconscious body hit the floorboards.
* * *
Even in the blackness of unconsciousness Sun could feel things. He felt bones shift under his skin, muscles knit themselves back together, organs slide back into place, and every second of it was slow agony. If this was how Starlit had felt when she had died then it was a small miracle that she wasn't half mad by now.
"Starting to think coherently now, are we?" Silence said snidely. "I guess that means I fixed your brain hemorrhaging and swelling properly. Do you remember your name?"
"I'm… Setting Sun, right?" Sun replied.
"Why did you say that like a question?" Silence asked back. "Do you know your name or not?"
"My head… my body, everything hurts. Maybe I could be forgiven… for wanting some reassurance," Sun answered. Speaking through his mind was still easier than trying to speak through his mouth, but it felt like someone was rapping a stone on his skull with every word.
"To be fair, you are pretty delirious, and the healing process isn't likely to help with that," Silence said. "The good news is that you're in a safe place so I can work faster and better to get you back in shape."
Like a clap of thunder a thought crossed Sun's mind, fully formed and pressing on his mind like Silence did. A patch of regrowing skin and the pain thereof threatened to purge it from his mind, but he just barely managed to hang onto it long enough to ask.
"Where are Starlit… and Pinkie Pie?" Sun asked desperately.
"Safe, for now," Silence answered. "They're both still in the mine, but thankfully the roof hasn't collapsed on them yet. Even if it did, they're close enough to the palace's substructures that they would be safe even from a total tunnel collapse."
A wave of relief spread through Sun like a warm blanket, momentarily dulling his pain. As long as Starlit was safe, he had done his work.
"How long until… I'm better?" Sun asked. The sooner he was ambulatory, the better it would be.
"Well, that depends on your pain threshold, doesn't it?" Silence answered with a dark tone. "If you want to be up and functional before the day's out, I could make that happen at the cost of it being the absolute worst hour of pain you've ever experienced or ever will experience."
"You should… be a salespony… with a pitch like that," Sun replied grimly. "Do it."
"Are you sure? It'll be blindingly painful," Silence asked. She sounded genuinely shocked for the first time that Sun could recall, though he was sure the smug satisfaction he felt would be short-lived.
"I'm sure," Sun answered.
The explosion had been one type of painful, the type that crashes over and consumes the body in hurt and brokenness. The pain Sun felt now was entirely different and far worse; it was the pain he knew he could've avoided if he had had more patience and more time.
Shattered bones flew beneath his skin to their proper places, his muscles burned and scraped in their mad dash to fit together, and blood spewed from every inch of his marred flesh as it was sloughed off and agonizingly replaced. His entire left side burned with a million tiny pinpricks as nerves grew and experienced fresh pain for the first time, only magnifying his suffering.
Sun lasted for all of a minute before slipping back into a dreadful slumber, one made tolerable only by the knowledge that when he awoke again it would be as a whole stallion.
* * *
While the bed Redheart had provided her was soft and reasonably comfortable, Rarity simply couldn't fall asleep despite two hours of staring at the ceiling. In her brain she knew that she desperately needed the sleep, but too many thoughts and concerns were swirling around in her mind to even court the notion. The wounds on her hooves kept niggling at her as well, though Redheart had done a remarkable job at bandaging and treating them.
Gingerly Rarity rose from the bed and crept to Redheart's vanity, taking care not to open the wounds on her hooves. She sat down and grabbed up a hairbrush in her magic, getting to work on pulling the tangles and grime from her mane. As the brush methodically ran across her head Rarity found that some of her idle thoughts were being slowed by the process, giving her enough time to consider them.
Rarity thought of Starlit and Pinkie Pie in the tunnel, confused and no doubt terrified Sun and her. She wondered if they'd tried to dig through the cave-in, but brushed it off as preposterous; Pinkie would never let Starlit do something that stupid and endangering. A weary smile crept across her face as she thought of the perennially cheerful Pinkie having to tell off as serious of a mare as Starlit.
The fleeting feeling of happiness faded as Rarity's mind drifted to more serious matters. If Sun ever got up he would no doubt have questions about what caused the explosion, and those sorts of questions would lead to answers that would then lead to questions of a far more personal nature. So many questions, and Rarity would have no good answers to any of them.
A soft knock on the bedroom door pulled Rarity out of her thoughts, and she put the brush down on the vanity.
"Come in," she said. Redheart let herself in, her expression concerned and more than a bit fearful.
"Your friend's awake," Redheart said, "and he wants to talk."
Rarity's guts twisted into knots at Redheart's statement, but she stood up and started toward the door all the same. Her hooves stung with every step, but thankfully none of the wounds opened back up as she came down the stairs and into Redheart's living room.
Sun was seated at the cleared off table, his head in his hooves and a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He turned to face Rarity as she came into the room, and both sides of his face were whole. The burgundy fur on the left side looked bright and fresh compared to the dingy, soot-stained right side, but it was whole.
"You look like you've been through the wringer," Sun said, "although I'd say you're a fair sight better than I was at the start of all of this."
Rarity stared, at a complete loss for words. This stallion had been dead not five hours ago, and yet here he sat making small talk. The feeling was surreal, like she was walking through a dream.
"You'd better get off of those hooves, they look pretty bad too," Sun continued. Rarity heeded his warning, if only because he was right.
She sat at the table opposite him, taking in every inch of his face as she did. There wasn't a hair out of place, the blood on his body had all vanished, and even his bloodshot eye was shimmering green. Were it not for the scorches and blood on his cloak there would be no evidence at all of what he'd gone through.
"Rarity, say something," Sun said.
"I'm sorry," she blurted out before she could stop herself.
"What for? If it weren't for you, I don't know if I'd have made it out of that mine."
"Not for the mine, that wasn't what I meant," Rarity continued, looking down at her hooves. "I haven't been… completely honest with you, with Starlit."
The pregnant silence told Rarity all the she needed to know; this was going to be a hard conversation to have. Sun's expression gave her one more bit of knowledge; he was reserving judgement. Given all that had happened between them, it was the best she could hope for.
"Redheart, dear, could you give us the room?" Rarity asked, her eyes still firmly fixed on Sun.
There was a soft clattering of hooves going up stairs followed by the creak and click of a door shutting. The walls were paper thin in Redheart's makeshift clinic, but the appearance of privacy was better than none at all.
"Sun, I'm not completely the pony I said I was," Rarity confessed. "Or, at least, I'm more than what my station would belie."
"Rarity, I have just had the worst day that anypony could possibly have, the last hour of which was particularly harrowing," Sun said. "I doubt there's anything you could tell me that would worsen this day for me. Just give it to me straight."
Rarity took a shuddering breath to calm herself, fiddling with her bandages idly as she did.
"Sun, a close friend of mine is on the Council, and that mine is still operable. I was the overseer of the project, but when I found out what she wanted to do with that mine I quit and was forced into the morgue as punishment. We were all in grave danger by going there, and Starlit and Pinkie Pie still are by virtue of being there."
Sun's eyes widened at every sentence, and Rarity was worried that he was going to explode at her again. Minutes passed as Sun processed what she was saying, only for the silence to be broken by a simple question.
"Why didn't you tell us?"
"I wanted to Sun, truly I did," Rarity hastily answered, "but you've seen what it's like here. If I said one wrong thing to you or Starlit then the machines would be upon us all, and when they discovered Starlit's condition she'd likely be vivisected over and over until they figured out why she can't die. I figured that by keeping my guidance vague, I'd be doing her a service."
"Well, we're in private now," Sun said, "so tell me; what is the Council planning to do with that mine?"
"It's less the Council and more Starlight Glimmer specifically. There were several members of the Council that were opposed to her plan, damn opposed in fact, but she is… quite tenacious. She decided to take the matter into her own hooves."
Rarity was suddenly acutely aware of just how small she was in regards to all of this. Her friend's delusions had given her an inflated sense of self-worth that had lasted long into her career as a mortician's assistant, one that was only now being popped by the reality of her friend's ambition.
"Sun, she wants to bring the Night Mare back to life."
* * *
Pinkie Pie had spent a long while assembling a makeshift grappling hook that would allow Starlit and herself to climb up into the palace, and Starlit was fairly impressed with her efforts. Just a length of rope and a few metal tent stakes heated with light-gas and hammered around to form the hook was all it took make a sturdy grappling hook.
"I must say Pinkie, you are quite handy with your hooves," Starlit said, patting her companion on the shoulder. "I know my way around a whetstone for my farming tools, but I've never really had the gumption to try and shape metal like this."
"Oh, it's easy-peasy once you learn to keep away from the glowing parts," Pinkie replied. "Once it gets nice and hot all you really need is something sturdy to whack it against and it'll fold like clay."
Pinkie finished fastening the hook apparatus to the rope and gave it a few test tugs to gauge its strength, even having herself and Starlit pull from opposite ends with all their strength. When Pinkie deemed it secure she beckoned Starlit over to the hole in the ceiling and tossed it up. The hook caught against the hole with a satisfying clink, and it held up under Pinkie's test pulls.
"Alright, all aboard that's coming aboard!" Pinkie called cheerfully with an exaggerated bow. With a snicker Starlit lit her horn, muttering a holding spell that Twilight had taught her that would cement the hook in place as Pinkie climbed up.
"Please, after you, I insist," Starlit replied, with an equally corny bow.
"Why thank you, kind madam," Pinkie said, affecting a posh accent as she started up the rope.
Starlit couldn't quite quiet the nagging uncertainty at the back of her mind, but Pinkie's joviality was a helpful distraction. It kept her focused on the task at hoof instead of drowning in worry and anxiety.
Pinkie scaled the rope with relative ease. Despite having the force of gravity completely acting against her she climbed up the full seven feet in a matter of minutes, looking only slightly winded when she peered back down the hole.
"I've got it from this end, so come on up!" Pinkie called down. "Also, try not to look down or your brain will go all woozy."
Starlit gave the rope a quick test pull to make sure Pinkie had it, then wrapped her legs around and inch-wormed her way up. She had to use a bit more magic to keep her hooves from slipping, and she very nearly lost her saddlebags before Pinkie helped her over the lip of the hole. Starlit found that she was decidedly more winded than Pinkie.
"See? Easy-peasy!"
"Maybe for you and your spry muscles," Starlit retorted, "but some of us have carried a child and aren't exactly as fit as we once were."
"Oh, excuses, excuses," Pinkie quipped back as she helped Starlit to her hooves.
Starlit looked around and found that, much to her relief, she was not in a sewer. In fact, the hallway could conservatively be called opulent; the walls were that same dark blue, stone like material that she'd seen below, perfectly smooth to the touch, and every few feet or so a set of flameless lanterns glowed on each side of the hallway.
What truly struck Starlit was the sheer height of the ceiling. It extended up so high that she couldn't make out where it ended. The dizzying height after so long spent underground and with the roof oppressively close felt like she'd walked outside to find the sky was gone.
The hallway extended seemingly infinitely behind them, but a few feet ahead was a large door made of wood stained black, a black so deep and cloying it was like staring into a moonless, clouded over night. Being the only real direction they could take unless they wanted to wander aimlessly, Starlit motioned for Pinkie to follow her to the door.
Starlit knew immediately that something was wrong. Her amulet began to pulse as she approached the door, growing faster and stronger with each passing foot. She quickly took it off and stashed it away in her bags as she lay a hoof on the door, half expecting to fall through its surface. Instead she found its wooden surface soft, smooth, and slightly warm to the touch.
Motioning for Pinkie to stay behind her Starlit carefully opened the door. It made no sound as it moved, not even the slightest creak, save for a barely audible swishing sound. A few feet from the door were sounds of activity that had previously been inaudible, and she took a quick peek inside.
The chamber was massive, more so than the hallway that had preceded it, and everywhere she looked were machine-ponies hard at work. Their chassis were a royal purple, and they were busy operating or setting up all manner of complex machinery. A mare with light pink fur and a purple mane streaked with teal was overseeing the machines, and there was something about the way she carried herself that Starlit found familiar.
Finally Starlit's eye was drawn to what this flurry of activity was centered around; a massive, translucent crystal cocoon made of obsidian that hovered in mid-air. It's surface gleamed and glinted in the pale blue light of the lanterns as the machines attached all sorts of devices and wires to its surface.
Deep within Starlit could parse out a shape, first indistinct but growing more clear as the crystal rotated. It was a pony, with fur as black as night and a mane that flowed like Celestia's and glittered like the night sky. She looked to be asleep or in a trance, but Starlit knew that she had found her quarry.
"Alright, let's wrap it up!" the pink unicorn ordered to her cadre of machines. "I want to be home in time for dinner."
As the last of the loose wires and odd devices had been attached to Luna's cocoon the machines froze at attention, their glowing eyes locked on their overseer. With a wave of her horn the machines fell in behind her, marching with absolute precision as they disappeared into the darkness behind the crystal.
Starlit and Pinkie waited until the stomping faded away into the distance before they opened the door the rest of the way and entered the chamber. The hissing steam and bright brass of the devices the unicorn left behind clashed against the calm blue of the room's lamps and walls, and the parts attached to the crystal even more so.
"You know, I didn't think she'd be quite so… entombed," Pinkie quipped as she looked up at the crystal.
"Neither did I, and this just makes my job that much harder," Starlit replied. Her amulet hadn't stopped thumping when the unicorn and machines had left, tarnishing her theory that it could detect danger before it happened. Whatever was causing it to go off was still in the room.
"Pinkie, go look around, see if you can figure out what these devices are for," Starlit ordered. Pinkie gave a sharp salute before bouncing off to one of the larger devices.
As Starlit approached the crystal her amulet began to pull and tug towards it from inside her saddlebags, drawn to its glimmering surface like a lodestone. The pulsing beat it gave off was thundering against her hip even through layers of leather. Gingerly she pulled the stone out with her magic and fought to keep it in her grip. When Starlit wrapped the thin leather strap around her hoof the stone itself held straight out in front of her.
"Hey Starlit, this stuff isn't mining equipment," Pinkie called from across the room.
"Then what is it?" Starlit replied, keeping her focus on her stone.
"It looks like it's monitoring her. There's a lot of weird dials and lights and a few readouts, but nothing I can make heads or tails of."
It made sense that the equipment would be analyzing Luna; she appeared to be comatose or in a very deep sleep.
"Okay, tell me if anything about any of those readouts changes," Starlit said. She carefully unwrapped a part of the necklace strap from her hoof, letting the stone draw a few inches closer to its goal.
"Some squiggly line just spiked, but it's back to normal now," Pinkie reported. "What's that necklace you've got there?"
"It's a powerful magical artifact, one that I'm fairly sure is connected to Luna's cocoon. Pinkie, I'm going to try something, but I need you to not get scared if something happens to me. Can you do that?"
"What might happen?" Pinkie asked, some of the squeak gone from her tone.
"I don't know," Starlit admitted, "but I need you to keep an eye out for anypony coming or going, as well as for my well-being. I need you to promise me this, Pinkie."
Starlit looked to her companion, and while she didn't look upset or worried she did have a nervous air about her.
"I promise," Pinkie replied, "cross my heart and hope to fly."
Starlit gave a nod before turning back to the task at hoof. The leather strained against her hoof as the stone yearned to break free from her grasp. Slowly she let it slide out of her grip, the stone inching closer and closer before it flew away from her and struck the cocoon with a hollow echo. The sound of glass striking glass reverberated throughout the chamber, blowing the flameless lamps out as Luna's cocoon bathed the room in pale grey light.
Pinkie shrieked from across the room, and Starlit saw her clutching her head in her hooves. She started to run to her when the light intensified, and Pinkie's agony along with it. The sound of shattering glass was swiftly replaced by a hollow, thundering beat, but it didn't hurt Starlit the way it was hurting Pinkie.
The stone drew Starlit's eye even as she desperately tried to go to Pinkie's side, and despite the intensity of the light she found looking at it was not painful in the slightest. The cocoon may as well have not been there, replaced instead by a field of grey light and Luna's prone form floating in amongst it.
Slowly Luna unfurled her legs, arching her body out of the fetal position it had been trapped in. Her star field mane swished and swirled about her head like magic, and her black coat was as void-like as the door to the chamber. With elegance Luna stretched out, manifesting pieces of midnight blue armor onto her chest, hooves, flanks, and head until she stood as tall as her sister on a floor of light.
Then her eyes snapped open, revealing teal whites and cat-slit irises as she flashed a wicked snarl with a mouth full of razor sharp teeth.
"Who, pray tell, art thou that would disturb my rest?" Luna asked, her voice regal and grand in its antiquity.
Starlit bowed nervously, her horn touching and splitting the swirling clouds of light that crept along the floor.
"Your Highness, my name is Starlit Sky, and you are needed in Canterlot," Starlit answered, keeping her voice level despite her awe and fear.
Starlit froze, and not just bodily. Her thoughts stopped still as she was thinking them, and slowly her head rose outside of her control. Luna's horn was encased in shimmering blue, and Starlit found a similar magic colored her vision.
"Then thou art several centuries too late," Luna replied. "Hast thou not heard? Canterlot's end came and went long before thy birth was naught but a figment of thy parents' imagination."
Luna eyed Starlit over like a colt preparing to pull the wings off of a fly. Starlit couldn't speak, couldn't think, only silently scream inside her own head as the Princess eyed her with a predatory gaze best reserved for wild animals.
"Still," Luna continued, "I have been severely lacking in conversation since my slumber began all those moons ago. Tell me, to whom do I owe the invitation back to that crumbling monument to the sins of my past?"
The magic slowly faded from Starlit's vision and Luna's horn, and gradually Starlit felt her brain come back to life. Her head ached like no other, but she had to seize the opportunity to explain the situation before Luna's patience ran thin.
"Your Highness, Equestria is dying," Starlit said. "It has been without the magic of you and your fellow Princesses for too long. Fields lay fallow, monsters prowl every road and forest, and even your names are being lost to history. We are about to hit a breaking point from which there will be no going back, and only you and the others can stop it."
Of the responses Starlit expected to get from Luna, mild amusement was not high on that list.
"Then we must make haste, must we not?" Luna replied with a smirk. "Although such a thing may prove an insurmountable task for yours truly given my current state."
"What do you mean? What's wrong?"
"This crystal," Luna continued, gesturing to dim vision of the crystal through the outpouring of light, "this damnable prison, is binding me. I cannot leave or even move until the seal is broken."
"If that's the case," Starlit replied, "then how are we speaking now?"
"Ah, thou art perceptive as well as foolhardy," Luna answered. "Dost thou know what artifact is in thy possession, or didst thou mistake it for a trinket?"
"I know what it is, and I know what it does," Starlit answered. "I've died three times over the last two weeks, and each time that amulet has brought me back to life."
"Then surely thou hast made the connection between that shard and my prison?"
"I'd say that it was made readily apparent when the light started flooding the room," Starlit answered, a bit annoyed that she was being given the run around. "The amulet opens the prison, correct?"
"Indeed it would, under normal circumstances, but these are unusual ones indeed," Luna answered. "It would seem that the shard's power has been split, given or taken by another who is not present. Only when whole can the shard free me."
Starlit ran through everything that had happened to the amulet since she had received it, and only two moments could've possibly tampered with whatever properties would allow it to free Luna; when Sun cast his location spell on it, or when Celestia tried to destroy it.
"I may have an idea of who I need to talk to, but if this pony turns out to not be the one that has its power then there will need to be another way to get you out of there."
"And what other option would be considered too drastic to undertake?" Luna asked.
"Of my possibilities, there are two ponies that I could speak with; either a friend of mine who attempted a location spell on the amulet and activated some latent power in it, or your sister who very nearly destroyed it."
Luna's pupils contracted until they were straight black lines in her eyes, and with her teeth bared she looked uncannily like a wolf about to pounce.
"Thou hast spoken with Celestia?" Luna growled. "How, and when?"
"It was a week and a half ago, give or take," Starlit hastily answered, "and I came to her with the same plea I'm giving you. I'll admit you are being far more amenable to the situation at hoof than she was."
"Where is my sister now? If it were my choice I'd have torn her to pieces all those years ago, and I am very much looking forward to making up for lost time."
"Celestia has returned to Canterlot," Starlit answered. "I'm surprised you didn't notice it, although being trapped in a prison of crystal might have precluded your ability to notice a great many things."
"I see all that goes on in my palace, that much I can assure," Luna remarked with a sneer, "as I have noticed that unicorn and her machines assembling all manner of devices in this very room."
"Then, if I may be so bold, what was she here to do?" Starlit asked, her attention was piqued at the mention of the mystery unicorn.
"She also seeks to free me, although her method is far more barbaric and for entirely the wrong reasons. That being said, she has invested much time and thought into releasing me, and for that I give her accolades."
"Will her method work?"
"Given enough time and effort, perhaps," Luna replied, "but not for a while yet. I'd say she still has many moons of preparation and testing before even attempting to break my prison."
Starlit's heart sank and Luna's frank assessment. The nature of the amulet was still a mystery to her outside of its abilities, and she didn't want to experiment with it if she didn't have to. Finding Sun to figure out if he had absorbed some of its power in Sunspire would be daunting, particularly if its power were in some way related to the cave-in.
"Then it seems that I have my work cut out for me," Starlit replied. "I'll return with news soon."
"I, personally, don't think that you will," Luna said, "since the interloper and her machines are at this very moment racing back here. Make your preparations, and see to your friend as well. The pink one is unwell, for reasons that escape me."
As quickly as the light had come it vanished, leaving Starlit alone and the room silent save for Pinkie's moaning and the sound of her amulet clinking to the ground. Starlit ran to Pinkie, who had collapsed to the floor and was wriggling in pain.
"Pinkie, what happened? Are you injured?"
"My head," Pinkie moaned in answer. "Everything feels fuzzy, like… I had too much to drink."
"Can you stand? We need to leave, but I'll carry you if I have to."
Pinkie waved Starlit away as she tried to get to her hooves, but her knees were wobbly and she listed towards Starlit. She was only prevented from falling over by Starlit bolstering her at the last second.
"My hero," Pinkie said, a tired smile crossing her face.
"Jokes later, escape now," Starlit ordered as she used some of her magic to haul Pinkie onto her back and grab her amulet. Her horn ached from all of the magic she'd been using of late, and her stomach twisted to think that there wouldn't be enough left to get back down the hole and into the mine tunnels.
The sound of clanking hoofbeats echoed down the hall that the mystery unicorn and the machines had left from, growing louder with each passing second. With a deep breath Starlit started running for the door, horn alight to push it open with one of her incantations.
Her horn sputtered and sparked as she tried to channel the magic, and after her reckless usage earlier as well as Pinkie's added weight she found the strain too much to bear. Her magic faded and Starlit couldn't slow down fast enough to avoid bouncing off of the door, sending Pinkie sprawling to the ground and a flash of spots across her vision.
The clanking grew louder and louder, and Starlit turned to find that there would be no use in trying to run away. The purple machine ponies flanked Starlit and Pinkie's prone forms from either side, and the unicorn commanding them strode confidently underneath Luna's prison. She was frowning bitterly, like she had just smelled something foul.
"What have we here?" the unicorn asked. "A pair of treasure hunters looking to pillage the palace, perhaps?"
Starlit stayed silent, glaring at the unicorn fiercely. Inside, her mind was traveling a mile a minute trying to formulate a response, but it wouldn't help her case to let those worries show.
"Not talking, hmm?" the unicorn continued. "Are you scared, confused, or just ignorant? It's so hard to tell with you commoners, it truly is."
"None of those things," Starlit answered as she stood, venom on every word. "I know exactly why I'm here, and why I'm here is for the good of every pony in this city. The question we should ask is, why are you here?"
"It speaks!" the unicorn proclaimed. "And so forthright as well!"
The unicorn chuckled to her machines, their focus still turned on Starlit, before stamping her hoof twice. The machine just to her right went from teal to yellow, and it's horn lit with magic that clamped Starlit's mouth shut.
"Let me educate you on a few things, commoner," the unicorn continued, her affability falling away. "You don't get to question my business. I don't owe you or anypony else an explanation for my actions, and you should count yourself lucky that I haven't had my automatons here pound you into mush. You only live by my goodwill, and you are starting to wear it thin."
Starlit felt the magic fall away from her mouth, only for the unicorn to grab her face with her own and squeeze it together.
"Now, why are you here?"
A piercing, near-ultrasonic shriek sliced through the air like a hot knife through butter before Starlit could answer. Everypony present clapped their hooves over their ears, and even the machines were starting to jitter and malfunction from the screeching.
Starlit rejoined Pinkie on the floor as the scream continued to echo across the room, the two mares huddling their heads together as they tried to ward off the noise. Starlit felt that her eardrums were about to rupture when the screeching subsided, waning to a tolerable level. Hazarding a look around, Starlit found the source of the sound.
Standing over their prone forms was a pony, but unlike any that Starlit had seen before. They had wings that were leathery and black in contrast to their dull grey fur. The fur on their ears rose up in tufts and they had an overall more shaggy appearance, as if they were in need of a trim. Their mane and tail were a dark blue, almost black, and astonishingly this pony had no cutie mark.
The bat-winged pony screeched at the unicorn and her machines, driving them back down the hallway from whence they came. Starlit's ears rang with a high-pitched noise when the pony stopped and turned to face herself and Pinkie. The bat-pony looked female, and her eyes were yellow with the cat-like slits that Luna's had had.
"My Lady has spoken with you, and so I must come to your aid," the bat-pony said. "We'll discuss your trespassing later. For now, let's go find your friend."
* * *
The bat-pony, who Starlit later learned was named Chirox, recoiled at the light of the setting sun as they exited the mine. A few stars were already starting to twinkle in the sky, but she patiently waited in the tunnel as the sun vanished beneath the horizon.
Pinkie was still laying astride Starlit's back, sleeping peacefully. The stress of Starlit's communication with Luna and Chirox's sonic attack had proven too much for even her infectious energy to take.
"Chirox, if I may," Starlit said as she waited for the sun to set, "but why did you save us back there?"
Chirox flicked her eyes to Starlit, giving an impassive glance before looking back to the stars.
"My Lady commanded it, and I must heed her call," she answered.
"I got that much back in the palace, but there must be more to it than that," Starlit replied. "After all, that unicorn is trying to do the same thing I am but for different reasons. Why go after her and not me? Surely freedom is freedom no matter the method."
Chirox fluttered her wings nervously, their leathery surface making a sound like an insect crawling over a rock.
"Starlit Sky, I am very old, though my appearance belies that fact," Chirox said. "I remember when My Lady was different. She was more humble, gentler in her manners and more forgiving. When she came to my people and told us of her plans for a grand city we were all swept up in the fervor of her idealism."
"But then things changed," Starlit said, finishing Chirox's statement, but slightly confused at the tangent she was going down.
"Yes, they did. You are quite learned of these matters. Few ponies these days are."
"Let's just say that this isn't my first time dealing with something like this," Starlit replied.
"My people have always been My Lady's stewards," Chirox continued. "We helped build her castle, used our knowledge of true flight to educate and empower the ones you call pegasi, who fluttered like baby birds before we taught them proper techniques. This city was beautiful, a haven for the weak and a beacon for the great."
"When My Lady went off to war we thought she wanted to broker peace. She was always gentle and forgiving, there was no reason she wouldn't be again. She did not return for many years, and when she did she shut herself away from all of us. She brooded and fell into a malaise the none could extricate her from."
"And then the Sundering happened," Starlit said, recalling Pinkie's story.
"Is that what you call it? It is certainly a more poetic name, I suppose. My people have no name for it, terrible as her might and wrath was. She unleashed the machines that that crystal birthed on her own people, and we knew that there would be no going back for her."
"But what of the civil war that was raging through the city?" Starlit asked. "Didn't Luna need to send the machines out?"
"Starlit Sky, if you think that was the first bit of civil unrest New Selene has seen then you are woefully naive," Chirox chided. "My Lady had a good mind for diplomacy, but the war warped her keen and empathetic soul."
The sun finally fell below the horizon, and without a word Chirox rose and began walking again. Starlit followed after her, wanting to know more about Luna and her past.
"What did you do?" Starlit asked. "What happened that made Luna wipe out so much of this city?"
"Now is not the time for such things," Chirox replied. "Now we must find your friend."
"Chirox, tell me! If I know what happened, I may be able to help her."
Chirox's hair whipped against her face as she turned to glare at Starlit, her pupils reduced to angry slits and her teeth bared. A pair of vicious fangs protruded from her upper jaw, glimmering in the new moonlight.
"Knowledge does not come easily, Starlit Sky. There are things she has done that are too horrible even for me to bear witness to. You would do well to know when ignorance is the better of your options."
The air around Chirox shimmered like heat rising off a desert, obscuring her form for a moment. When the air settled Chirox looked like a normal pegasus pony, with grey feathered wings and normal pupils set in her yellow eyes.
"In your patience possess ye your soul," Chirox continued. "Knowledge will be yours when My Lady has deemed you capable of bearing it."
Chirox turned and stalked off, not caring for Starlit as she struggled to catch up behind her. She fumed at Chirox's presumptions, but held her tongue if only for the sake of civility.
* * *
The trek back into New Selene was a long and uncomfortable one. Pinkie still lay astride Starlit's back and Chirox still refused to speak. Starlit caught her gleaming eyes darting back and forth as they walked as if she expected an ambush every time they turned a corner or passed an alley. Given Starlit's prior experience in the city, she felt Chirox was justified.
A dull thump from her amulet drew Starlit's attention, nearly causing her to drop Pinkie after so long spent in silence. It tugged slightly to her left, down an alley with two brass pipes and one steel one.
"The amulet's acting up, Chirox," Starlit said. "We need to go down this one."
Chirox said nothing, only followed as Starlit followed her amulet. The alley smelled putrid, like old blood that had been left to rot. Looking at the ground proved her nostrils correct as her small lantern showed dull red splotches leading all the way to a door with a red cross painted on it. The amulet thumped rapidly as she approached the door, and cautiously lifted a hoof to knock on it. The door flew inward before she could rap her hoof against it, revealing a face Starlit hadn't expected to see in such good condition, if she could see it awake at all.
Setting Sun stood in the door, his vibrant green eyes locked on Starlit as hers were locked on him. Neither pony could say anything, and Starlit figured it was for the same reason.
"Hi, Sun," Pinkie mumbled from Starlit's back, flopping one of her hooves in a half-hearted greeting. "Good to see you're not dead."
Starlit couldn't help but let out a nervous chuckle, which slowly grew into a hearty laugh and then further still into a full-on cackle, one that Sun was more than happy to join in on.
"Has she been like this all day?" Sun asked, wiping tears from his eyes. "I thought I had it rough, but at least I still have some tact!"
"It's th-thanks to her that I'm not wallowing in c-crippling anxiety right now," Starlit answered through her giggles. "Show s-some respect for her, tactless th-though she may be."
Pinkie slowly slid off of Starlit's back and shuffled inside as she and Sun chortled and guffawed at her perfectly timed comment, with Chirox following closely behind. Starlit could barely see through the tears running out of her eyes, but for a moment she swore she saw a sly grin on Pinkie's tired face.
Starlit and Sun embraced as they both composed themselves. The knot of worry that Starlit had been nursing since the cave-in melted away. Sun was safe, and they both could push forward together.
"Starlit? Is that you?" a familiar voice asked from inside. Starlit peered past Sun's shoulder to find Rarity at the foot of the stairs. Her mane was ratty and done up in a hasty bun and she was covered in bandages and scrapes, particularly on her hooves. Sun let Starlit go, inviting her inside to go talk to Rarity.
"Rarity, what happened? You look like you fell off of a wagon and down a ravine."
"This is the price I pay for doing a good deed," Rarity replied, haughty but kind. "Our mutual friend was incapacitated after the cave-in, and who else but little ole me could drag him back to civilization for treatment?"
"You carried him from the mine, all the way back here?" Starlit asked incredulously.
"Starlit, you ought to know by now that a mare must always have a few tricks in her saddle," Rarity answered.
Starlit's hooves were wrapped around Rarity before she had even finished her sentence. Starlit held her warmly and tightly, and when the tears fell from her eyes this time they were from gratitude.
"Thank you so much Rarity."
"It was the least I could do, darling," Rarity replied, returning the embrace.
"So, are long and emotional displays of gratitude the norm for you ponies?" a sixth mare asked from the top of the stairs. Her coat was white and her mane was a pale pink, and she wore an expression of humorous resignation.
"Why do you ask?" Starlit asked, pulling away from Rarity.
"Because these two," the pony replied, gesturing to Sun and Rarity, "exiled me to my room for two whole hours while they caught up on stuff. I mean, for him it was understandable because he nearly died, but this is just getting ridiculous."
Starlit's ears perked and stomach dropped at the earth pony's statement, and she turned to look at Sun with equal parts worry and anticipation.
"You nearly died?" Starlit asked.
Sun shuffled his hooves nervously, before gesturing to the dining room table.
It took two hours to catch everypony up to speed on what had happened in the mine; Starlit and Pinkie had to tell of the mystery unicorn, who they now knew as Starlight Glimmer, as well as Starlit's talk with Luna and who Chirox was. For her part Chirox didn't object to Starlit's explanations, but neither did she voice any opinions of her own. Redheart had quietly excused herself as they got into the more serious points of discussion, likely to avoid learning any truths she didn't need to hear.
By the time Starlit had finished her part of the story it was well past one in the morning, and after the day everypony had had it was decided that Sun and Rarity's side of things could wait for the morning. Redheart was slightly put off at having to house five ponies at the drop of a hat, but she made do with some of her patient beds and putting the living room to good use.
Starlit thought that sleep would be hard to come by after everything that had happened, but she soon found herself slip away. Sun was safe, everypony was armed with new information, and tomorrow they would be planning their next move. Security, it would seem, proved a better blanket than anything Redheart could provide.
Starlit awoke the next day to the sounds of clattering from downstairs, and found that Redheart and Rarity were already awake and working on a rudimentary breakfast. The two mares chatted warmly, and Starlit was pleased to see that the bandages on Rarity's hooves were fresh and far less blood-stained.
"Morning you two," Starlit said, still rubbing the grit from her eyes. "What's on the menu?"
"Just some eggs and cooked greens with a bit of garlic," Redheart answered. "It's not much, but you'd be surprised what a fantastic seasoning hunger can be."
Starlit's stomach rumbled loudly, and she realized that the only food she had eaten the previous day was Pinkie's candy and a little bit of hardtack from her saddlebags as they'd been walking in the mine.
"Mind if I help out?" Starlit offered. "I'd feel rude if I didn't at least offer."
"Actually, if you wouldn't mind rolling out that dough and making some loaves from it," Redheart replied, gesturing to the small table to her right. "That'd be a big help."
Starlit trotted over to the wash basin and cleaned her hooves off before going to the table and setting to work. It was refreshing to do something domestic for a change; so much of her time as of late had been consumed by magic and godlike beings and other sundry horrors that it felt good to get back to something she was familiar with. Kneading the rough brown dough beneath her hooves and parsing it out into individual blobs that would become loaves later reminded her of home.
"Starlit, if you could come over here and start plating the eggs up, I'll finish with the bread," Rarity offered. Starlit and Rarity swapped places in the tiny kitchen, taking care not to bump into the myriad pieces of kitchenware that hung precariously about.
Starlit had just begun plating the eggs when she heard the telltale sound of magic being cast. She turned to see Rarity standing over the loaves, concentrating her magic on them and causing them to cook right on the pan. The scent was heavenly, and Starlit had to cast a quick bit of magic herself to keep from dropping her spatula.
"How did you do that?" Starlit asked, awestruck. "I've never tried to cook with my magic before like that. How are you doing this without an incantation or passing out?"
"It's a little trick I've picked up over the years," Rarity replied nonchalantly. "Magic has always come easily to me, I must confess. It's one of the reasons I didn't die in the cave-in."
"I don't follow," Starlit said.
Rarity looked like she was mulling over a decision for a moment before she shook her head and continued speaking.
"This was going to come out later anyway, but sooner rather than later and all of that. I'm a geomancer, which basically means that I have large amounts of magic and the control over it to find things hidden underground. It's why I was the overseer of Starlight's mine project; I had just graduated from mining school when Starlight picked me out for the project because of my skill."
"Can you do anything else with your magic?" Starlit asked.
"Just your basic earth-based spellwork and magic," Rarity answered. "Finding light-gas veins, identifying stones and precious gems as well as their origins, moving quantities of ea—"
"Wait, did you say you could tell where a stone or gem comes from?" Starlit interjected. This could be her ticket to understanding more about her amulet.
"Of course, and I think I know where you going with this," Rarity answered. Quickly she illuminated her horn, beckoning Starlit over to her. Starlit finished plating the last of the food and sat down at the table.
Starlit pulled her amulet off and slid it towards Rarity, who took it into her magic and cast a focused stare at it. Starlit's stomach started twisting as Rarity rotated the stone, looking over every facet and detail with a jeweler's keen eye.
"This is… this is a very old stone," Rarity said, not taking her focus off of it. "It has the outward appearance and structural characteristics of obsidian, but there's something off about it. It looks like it's been altered on a level too small for me to detect, but enough that its effects are noticeable."
"What about where it's from? Can you figure that out?" Starlit asked, her anxiousness growing with each passing second.
"Hmm…" Rarity murmured. "That's… odd."
"What, what did you find out?"
"This stone is from everywhere," Rarity answered, "and I mean that quite literally. I'm finding traces of its origin in this house, I'm finding it through the city, and even the palace. This stone's source is everywhere."
"But that's impossible," Starlit protested. "It has to have one source, how can something come from more than one place?"
"Starlit, this stone can bring you back from the dead, I'm fairly certain that this is not beyond the realm of possibility."
Starlit stared at the stone in Rarity's magic, it floating idly and silently taunting her. Every time it seemed like she had gotten an answer from it two more questions rose to replace it.
"Is there anywhere where its 'source' is particularly concentrated?" Starlit asked, grasping for whatever string she could.
Rarity focused intensely on the stone, and the glow from her magic was starting to illuminate the table and the bread. A bead of sweat formed on her brow, and it looked like she was about to pass out before she stopped.
"North," Rarity said, out of breath, "somewhere frozen. There's a massive presence of this stone's source there."
The amulet fell to the table with a dull thunk, and for a split second Starlit saw a flash of gold under its glossy black surface.
"If you'll excuse me, I need to lay down," Rarity said as she stood up. "I trust you can finish the bread?"
Starlit gave a nod and patted Rarity on the shoulder as she walked past. Carefully she picked up the amulet and tied it to her neck, uncertain of its power but certain of where she was going next.
* * *
Breakfast was an interesting affair, especially since Starlit had never shared a table with more than two ponies before. Pinkie Pie had recovered from whatever had afflicted her in Luna's chamber, and she was exhaustively trying to engage Chirox is conversation on any number of topics. Sun and Redheart had struck up a lively conversation about medicine, much to Rarity's horror due to the rather table-unfriendly details they were discussing. The only one who had nothing to contribute to the ruckus was Chirox, although she seemed more at ease after getting fed and being allowed to assume her natural form.
"Sho," Pinkie said to Chirox through a mouth full of bread, "are yew half-bat, or ish that jusht a weird mutashun?"
"Pinkie, mind your manners!" Rarity chided. "Don't talk with your mouth full, and if Chirox wanted us to know she'd have told us by now."
"I'm actually a little curious myself," Sun added, breaking off his talk with Redheart. "I've never heard of anypony like Chirox even in old stories and legends."
"Does nopony have any common courtesy anymore?" Rarity asked the room. Nopony paid her much mind.
"It's quite alright, Rarity," Chirox replied, the first thing she'd said all morning. "A little curiosity is natural for the young. To answer your query, I am not half-bat, nor is this the result of an abnormality of my birth. My kind are most akin to pegasi, in that we have a few traits that are similar to bats but result from completely different circumstances."
"Like how pegasi have hollow bones to help them fly better, despite not being descended from birds," Redheart added. "It makes setting a pegasus' bones a nightmare because of how delicate they are, and since no pegasus really flies it just serves as a handicap."
Rarity let out an exasperated groan and focused on finishing her meal. Pinkie snorted a laugh and nearly choked on a bite of bread, which made Sun, Redheart, Starlit, and even Chirox giggle.
"C'mon Rarity, you have to admit that this is a little interesting," Starlit said.
"I'm not saying it's not interesting," Rarity replied in a huff, "but there are more appropriate places to discuss such things than the breakfast table."
"Oh, don't be such a wet blanket," Redheart said. "Go on, ask something."
"No, absolutely not, I will not be party to this," Rarity retorted, taking a bite of her greens.
"C'mon, there has to be something about her that you want to know," Pinkie said.
"If you are worried about offending me, you can put those fears to rest," Chirox added. "I am perfectly comfortable answering any question about me that you may have."
Rarity chewed her greens thoughtfully and more forcefully than was necessary. Everypony's eyes were on her, and Starlit fought to suppress another giggle.
"Fine!" Rarity relented. "I'll play along, if you're going to press-gang me into it; Chirox, can you echolocate?"
Everypony breathed a sigh of relief save for Pinkie, who let out a squeal of delight at getting Rarity to come down to their level.
"Yes, I can, as Starlit and Pinkie Pie can attest," Chirox answered with a smile. "My kind have eyesight comparable to a pony's, and with that comes a disinclination to seeing in the dark. Thus, we developed our echolocation as a way to cover for this weakness, as well as serving as a natural defense mechanism."
"Defense mechanism my left hoof," Starlit interjected. "The way you were screeching yesterday I thought my eardrums were going to explode."
"My apologies for that, but the precedent was getting Starlight and her machines to flee," Chirox said. "I may have overexerted my abilities to that end, and couldn't correct for it until you were behind me."
"Echolocation would've been handy yesterday," Sun said. "Maybe we could've figured out how that thestral got pinned without us hearing it."
"Speaking of which," Starlit replied, pushing her cleaned plate away as she did, "perhaps now would be a good time to start planning for how we free Luna before Starlight does."
Everypony else exchanged a few glances before reaching the same, silent consensus. Every plate was clean, Pinkie's exceptionally so, and Redheart cleared them away as everypony else settled in.
"I'll be in the kitchen cleaning if you need me," Redheart said. "Try not to need me; the less that I know about all of this the better."
Redheart quickly bustled herself away to the kitchen, clattering the plates into the wash basin a bit louder than was strictly necessary. She shut and locked the thin door separating the two rooms, leaving five ponies around a table and one of them feeling the pressure of the situation settle squarely onto her shoulder.
"I guess we should pick up where we left off," Starlit said, gesturing to Sun. "What happened to you yesterday."
Sun's shoulders slumped as he was put on the spot, fixing his eyes squarely on Starlit. He looked like he was trying to narrow his perspective to just the two of them, doing his level best to speak directly to her and not to the room at large.
"I just want to say, first off, that most of my memory from yesterday is muddy," Sun began. "After the explosion I blacked out and didn't start coming around until a few hours later, and even then I couldn't think properly for hours more than that."
"All we need is what you do remember, Sun," Starlit replied. "Any gaps I'm sure Rarity can fill us in on."
"Of course," Rarity said.
"But before I get into everything that happened, I need to preface something," Sun continued, his voice heavy with contrition. "It's something I should've told you about before we even went into the mine, and I've been kicking myself that I didn't ever since."
Starlit could practically see the pall fall over Sun, and for a moment it looked like he was muttering to himself. There was a brief pause in his mumbling followed by an emphatic bit of speech before he turned back to Starlit.
"Starlit, I have a… voice, living in my head," Sun said. "She started talking to me after you got killed yesterday, and I'm pretty sure she's the one that saved my life."
Every eye was turned on Sun, and Starlit could empathize with the others wholeheartedly. She felt a seed of worry for Sun's sanity form in her head, but quickly shook it loose. Sun wasn't crazy, and Starlit had seen enough over the last few weeks to tell her that this wasn't outside the realms of possibility.
"Alright, I follow," Starlit replied. "Does this voice have a name? Can she speak with us?"
"I've taken to calling her Silence since she won't tell me her real name," Sun admitted, "and as far as I know she can't communicate outside of my head. I haven't honestly tried, but I don't even know if I have the magical power to attempt to broadcast her speech."
"Rarity, Pinkie, did you know about this?" Starlit asked. "You both ran into Sun before me, did anything seem off?"
They both shook their heads, and Starlit saw Chirox casting a focused glare at Sun.
"Chirox, do you have something to add?"
"Not yet," Chirox answered. "Let him speak."
"She's been helpful, to a degree," Sun continued, more nervously than before. "She helped get me to Pinkie Pie, who then led me to Rarity, and on the whole has pointed out hazards before they could affect me."
"Except for the cave-in," Rarity added quietly.
"Except for the cave-in," Sun repeated solemnly. "She says she's more of an observer to me than anything else, but even that doesn't explain why she let me nearly die yesterday."
"Then let's delve further into that," Chirox said, an edge on her voice. "What happened to you?"
Sun breathed in deeply, looking like he was girding himself. Given how Starlit had reacted to her first death and the circumstances thereof, she could hardly blame him for some measure of trepidation.
"Sun, you don't have to tell them yourself if you don't want to," Rarity interjected. "I was there, and I likely remember more of it than you do."
Sun looked to Rarity, relief visible in his eyes as he nodded his approval.
"It was just after he came to check in on me," Rarity continued, "when I'd tugged on my communication rod. Sadly it was destroyed in the blast, as was Sun's, which is why we never tried to contact you."
"Figures," Starlit said ruefully. She wasn't looking forward to the conversation she'd be having with Twilight about losing all of her things again.
"The reason I'd pulled my rod was because of a small disruption in the wall of the cave that had a crushed thestral under it. The poor thing was writhing and thrashing about, and I was worried about it leading others to us."
"How did it get there?" Pinkie Pie asked. "You were the last one through, we would've heard a small rock slide like that, and it's not like a thestral to lie in wait. If it had been there when I came through it would have attacked me."
"Sun and I didn't give the idea much thought, to be honest," Rarity continued. "He decided to put the thing down himself, but I couldn't stop him before he cast a spell on it."
"That's when it exploded," Sun cut in. "I put a bolt of magic through its head, and it exploded into blue fire. That's all I remember until I woke up in a wagon that Rarity was running through the city."
"The fire was blue?" Starlit asked, trying to mask her concern. "That's the same color that Pinkie's light-gas burned."
"The prevailing theory is that the thestrals are attracted to the latent magic in the gas, and when they spend enough time around it it seeps into their skin," Pinkie explained.
"No, this is something far more insidious," Starlit said. "I once encountered a group of thestrals that had bonded with ambient dust in the air and could use it to dissipate and materialize at will."
"Are you saying that thestrals absorb magic?" Rarity asked.
"It would fit with what we know about them," Sun mused. "A pony starts to turn when they start losing magic and purpose, so why wouldn't a thestral be able to make any environmental magic their own? They're trying to get whatever magic they can from whatever source they can to stave of their disease, and that instinct lasts even after they go feral."
Starlit thought back to how the thestrals that had killed her grandmother had attacked their wards, and shuddered when she pictured them absorbing its warding magic to protect themselves.
"What happened after the thestral exploded?" Starlit asked, steering the conversation back on course.
"The tunnel collapsed from the blast, although I'm sure you're aware of that," Rarity answered. "When I checked him Sun seemed dead as dead could be. I dragged him out of the mine to give him a proper burial, but just as we got outside he started talking. Then I threw him in the wagon, ran him here, and he got better."
"That was not a pleasant experience," Sun added. "Everything hurt, half of my skin had been seared and melted, my left eye had all but popped, and I had a dent in my skull the size of your hoof, according to Rarity and Redheart. Did it ever hurt for you?"
Starlit thought back to all of her deaths; the thestral attack in Sunspire, Celestia running her through with her flaming sword, and the machine-pony braining her with its magic.
"Other than the injuries that caused my deaths, no," Starlit admitted. "I just went to a black space, and then I would wake up a few hours later no worse for wear."
"Then whatever power I got from your necklace that gave me Silence and this regeneration power is incomplete, to say the least," Sun said.
"If it troubles you that much, then you could give it back. The amulet can let me speak with Luna, but I can't free her without all of its power, which it is now readily apparent you have a portion of."
"If you have any ideas on how to do that, I'm all ears," Sun replied. "I'd take death over the type of agony that I was put through."
All eyes turned to Starlit as she removed her necklace. The stone landed on the table with a dull thunk, its surface silent and cold.
"When you activated it the last time, you were trying to locate it, right?" Starlit asked. "Maybe trying that same spell again will open it up again and let the magic flow back into it."
"My magic hasn't been great since I woke up," Sun replied. "I haven't even been able to levitate anything larger than that rock, much less do anything with it."
"You have to at least try," Pinkie said, patting Sun on the back. "You know what you'll get if you don't try something."
Starlit smiled at Pinkie, who gave a sly wink back. The longer she was in Pinkie's presence, the more she felt that there was something to her brand of relentless optimism.
Sun sucked in a deep breath and focused on the stone, his horn flickering with pine green magic. It was paler than normal, a side effect of leaving Sunspire that was only exacerbated by the stress his body had just been put under. The stone flickered with magic, even rattled a few times, but stayed on the table as Sun ended his spell with a gasp of exhaustion.
"See?" Sun said. "Barely a shake."
Starlit took the necklace back, tying it to her neck by hoof. Showing how much her magic had progressed after seeing how much his had regressed would be tactless, and not in the fun way that Pinkie Pie was.
"It's alright, you'll just have to come with me when we go fetch Luna," Starlit said. "We'll sort this out later. In the meantime, why don't you go get some more rest? I'll catch you up on the plan later."
Sun looked down at where the necklace had been for a long moment, before silently nodding and standing up from the table.
"I worry about him," Rarity remarked when Sun left earshot. "He's determined almost to a fault. He wanted to come find you as soon as he got up, you know. It took Redheart and I an hour to talk him down, and even still he wanted to leave as soon as possible."
"Having known him for about half a month, I can say that your assessment is spot on," Starlit replied. "But let's not waste any time. We need a plan of action, and I'm open to any and all ideas."
* * *
Sun stirred in his bed, silently cursing his luck. His magic had been the only thing he could lay claim to as a skill; if it had degraded this much in so short a time, he'd be less than useless in accompanying Starlit any more.
"Silence, you there?" Sun asked, waiting for the familiar pressure on his brain to set in.
"I'd say that this is a unique set of circumstances," Silence answered, "But very few things can surprise me any more. What do you need?"
"Somepony to talk to, mostly," Sun answered.
"Since when did I become a confidant? Is Starlit not cutting it anymore?"
" It's not that, it's just that… this is a problem I don't think she can help me with."
"Then let it not be said that I won't help when asked," Silence replied, her tone more friendly than usual. "It's about your magic, isn't it?"
"You tell me, you're the one that listens in on everything I do," Sun retorted, angrier than he'd meant.
"Now now, let's not get snippy. I understand, to some degree, what you're going through. Losing magic hurts, particularly for one so talented as you in this age where talented unicorns are few and far between, and I can't help but feel at least partially responsible."
"How? What did you do?" Sun asked desperately as he sat up in his bed.
"Repairing your body was a taxing process, for the both of us," Silence answered. "I had to use some of your magic to get the last of your healing done, as mine was nearly depleted."
If Silence had been corporeal Sun would've throttled her, but for now he had to settle for projecting seething anger at her.
"I can feel you directing hate waves at me, but let me finish," Silence continued. "Unlike you, I can regenerate my magic quickly and naturally over time rather than relying on environmental factors to determine my abilities. So how about we set up a trade?"
"Of what?" Sun asked, his anger slowly giving way to curiosity.
"In exchange for continuing to let me observe you, I can let you use some of my magic to bolster your own. Seems like a pretty equitable trade-off, all things considered."
Sun thought hard about the ramifications of this offer, putting his keen intellect to work trying to work out every possible angle or catch that could exist in a deal like this.
"Don't feel the need to answer right now, I know you're a stallion who values thinking time," Silence added. "Why don't you sleep on it, and just know that if you need me for this I'll be here."
The pressure in Sun's head faded away, leaving only himself and his thoughts. He flopped back into bed, worry after worry stacking up on his brain. The pressure from them was worse than Silence's.
The streets of New Selene were uncharacteristically quiet as Pinkie and Rarity traversed the worn stone. The only sounds to be heard were the occasional hiss of a steam valve and the few ponies that were still out in the open holding hushed conversations.
"I hope Maud won't be too mad about me being gone all day yesterday," Pinkie said, breaking some of the unsettling silence. "She knows I can handle myself, but even she can get worried sometimes."
"I just wonder how I'll explain all of this to my folks," Rarity added. "Sweetie Belle's a smart filly even if she doesn't get the best marks in school, and Father's always been good at spotting a lie. All these injuries will be hard to write off as a workplace accident."
"You could tell them the truth. That's what I'm doing."
"Pinkie, as much as admire your earnestness, I don't think this is the sort of thing you can just go on running your mouth about. What if somepony overhears?"
Pinkie looked off into the middle distance, an look of hard pondering written onto her face.
"Well, I just won't say it out in the open, now will I?" Pinkie replied. "Maud's a really good secret keeper, she won't blab."
"For as taciturn as she is, I honestly believe that," Rarity said, wincing slightly as she stepped on an uneven section of the street.
Another uncomfortable silence settled over the two mares, only exacerbated by the quiet streets. It felt like the whole city was keeping a secret from them, one that could burst forth at any moment.
"Do you really think we should've stayed out of it?" Pinkie asked, the cheer in her voice replaced by concern. "I mean, what if they need our help?"
Rarity sighed. It was a question she'd been asking herself ever since they'd agreed with Starlit and Chirox that the two of them would be better off not going back to the palace. For Rarity it had been a more obvious choice, as she was in no fit state to go, but Pinkie had put up a bit of a fuss about it.
"Pinkie, I know you want to help, really I do, but you need to face facts; how could we help? What could we possibly offer to two ponies who can't die and one that can shatter glass with her voice?"
"More than nothing!" Pinkie protested. "Even if it's just moral support, that's better than not going at all."
"Pinkie, look at me. I'm too injured, and if what Starlit said is true you and I wouldn't be able to actually go into that room without getting wracked with pain when Starlit does let her out. We'd be a millstone around their necks, end of discussion."
Pinkie opened and shut her mouth multiple times, looking like she wanted to keep arguing but couldn't form the words to argue with. Finally she just slumped her head forward and kept walking.
Sullen silence seemed to be the order of the day for the pair of them, and it only magnified the guilty feeling buried in Rarity's chest. If she weren't injured she might have braved another venture into the mines and the palace, but she had long since realized that life rarely gives what you want it to.
As if to prove her mindset correct, a familiar clanking sound echoed down the street towards them. What few ponies were still out and about ducked into whatever building or alley was convenient, leaving Rarity and Pinkie alone with the automaton. It's brass plating shone with a dull reflection of the overcast sky, and it's teal eyes stared forward impassively as it approached.
Pinkie let out a yelp of pain as the machine drew closer. Rarity saw her eyes clenched tight and her holding a hoof over the back of her head like she was trying to staunch a flow of blood.
"Pinkie? What's wrong?" Rarity asked.
"My head, it feels like… somepony just put a ton of rocks right on the back," Pinkie answered through gritted teeth. She fell forward as she reached up with her other hoof, and her writhing drew the machine's attention.
"Citizen C-2399, Designation: Pinkie Pie," the machine intoned. "Citizen B-0412, Designation: Rarity. Your presence is required by Council Order GE-362. Compliance is mandatory. Follow this unit or you will be pacified."
"Just a moment," Rarity answered as she tried to tend to Pinkie.
"Compliance is mandatory," the machine repeated, its eyes shifting to yellow. "Follow this unit or you will be pacified."
"I said just a moment," Rarity repeated, a hint of desperation worming into her voice. She had worked with these machines before, but it was quite a different matter being on the other end of their ire.
As quick as she could manage Rarity dragged Pinkie to her hooves. She winced in pain at every step, keeping one hoof on the back of her head as they followed the machine. It's path was initially erratic, but as they went further and further towards the center of the city it became readily apparent where they were being taken, and the sight of the building terrified Rarity.
Looming overhead, made of monolithic grey stone carved into harsh, geometric angles, was the Council Offices. It was the single largest building in New Selene save for the palace itself. Rarity had had to do business there a few times simply by virtue of knowing Starlight Glimmer and being a part of her mad scheme, but the building itself never failed to send a shiver down her body.
Rarity had been supporting Pinkie's weight for the last few blocks, and coming up to the Offices caused her to cry out and fall limp. The machine that had been leading them turned to stare at Rarity as she tried to drag Pinkie forward before giving up. A few of her cuts reopened as she struggled, and she felt the scabs on her hooves rub against her bandages.
When Rarity looked up she saw the machine, as well as a small mob of its compatriots circling the two of them. Their cold eyes stared down at them on the cobbled streets, and Rarity could feel the silent malevolence to their gaze.
Slowly another set of hoofsteps broke the silence of the day, their sound gentle and dainty compared to the aggravated clanking of the automatons. The circle of machines broke ranks to let the pony through, a wicked smile on her face.
"Rarity, long time no talk to," Starlight Glimmer said, friendliness dripping off of her words like oil. "You need some help?"
* * *
Chirox had a long flight back home, and a lot on her mind to occupy the time spent in the air.
She thought about Starlit Sky, and her seemingly noble intentions. Her plan to free Her Lady was audacious and daring, to say nothing of her conviction in the rightness of her actions. Such staunch service to the good of all was commendable, to say the least.
Chirox knew what the cost of conviction could be. Conviction had cost her people everything; their freedom, their place in the world, and in many instances their lives. She didn't find the notion of conviction very enticing, as laudable as it could be.
She thought about Setting Sun, perhaps more than she should have. He was a stallion of intellect, and one of bravery even he didn't seem to realize. Such potential for change and greatness was also to be rewarded, and in any other age than this one it would be.
But he was tainted, that much Chirox could see. He warred with a demon in his mind, one far more insidious than he knew. The influence of this presence, and all the implications it carried with it, made him ill suited to the greatness his potential demanded.
Chirox thought of the other two, the ones who had decided that this was not their battle to fight. Their pragmatism, while cruel in theory, was kind in practice. Throwing their lives away on an unstoppable foe was insanity at its most basic definition.
Finally, Chirox thought of Her Lady. She held strong conviction, showed the potential to be a ruler unparalleled in this or any land, and was a shrewd and careful politician with acumen for kindness and pragmatism in equal measure. It had all failed her in the end.
The palace loomed through the cloud cover, and Chirox angled her flight down to swoop in through the highest tower window. The room was torn and battered by the elements, as it had been for centuries, but it was still home at the end of the day. Its worn blue-stone walls, loose pile of straw for bedding, and rotted remains of ancient books and works of art were as much of a home as anything the ponies down below could make.
Chirox didn't want to lose her home, and she didn't want to lose Her Lady, any more than she had already been lost.
* * *
The halls of the Council Offices were utilitarian to the extreme; nothing was on a wall that wasn't a label or sign, nothing was decorated in any appreciable sense, and everypony was bustling to and from their various tasks with minimal talking in between.
Pinkie had been taken away by a pair of the machines on a stretcher, ostensibly to treat her for whatever had caused her sudden migraine. Rarity knew enough about how Starlight operated to know when she lied.
"I must say, it has been an absolute nightmare getting ahead with the project without you, Rarity," Starlight said, her tone as jovial as the day they'd departed. "Do you have any idea how tough it is finding a talented geomancer in this town?"
Rarity remained silent, glaring daggers into the back of Starlight's head.
"Still not talking to me, huh?" Starlight continued. "That's fine, really it is. I don't need you to like me for you and I to work together on this."
"And what makes you think we would?" Rarity asked.
"The fact that if you don't, your 'family' is never going to see you again. That's a big reason I got into politics, you know? I didn't want to be beholden to anypony's agenda except for mine."
"My family doesn't have an agenda," Rarity replied through gritted teeth.
"They don't? That's funny, because last time I checked they were completely reliant on you for everything. Sister too young to work, a father that's a cripple and a mother that's half-thestral for all anypony cares. Holding you back is their agenda, whether they know it or not."
Were it any other pony, were they in any other place, Rarity would have tackled Starlight to the floor and beaten her bloody. All she could do was imagine how sweet the satisfaction of seeing her pounded would be when she got the chance.
"Rarity, I'm humble enough to admit when I've made mistakes," Starlight said, her voice dropping. "Losing you on the project was a mistake, and the methods I've used to try and see my vision made real have been ill-conceived up until this point."
"The entire project is a mistake!" Rarity retorted, her voice echoing around the cavernous halls. A few ponies stopped and looked at her before resuming their business.
Starlight, for her part, continued her resolute walk forward. They were in a part of the Offices that Rarity recognized, facing an all-too familiar door that led to Starlight's study. With a swish of her magic Starlight opened the door, offering Rarity the first step forward.
With nervous step Rarity entered the modestly furnished office. There was a desk made of rich, oiled wood at the far side with a packed bookshelf behind. Off to the right side of the room was a workbench with a few mechanical odds and ends strewn about it, and on the left was something contained underneath a large tarp.
"Please, have a seat," Starlight said, offering up a comfortable looking chair in front of the desk. Rarity took it, if only so she could get weight off of her hooves, and Starlight took the seat next to it, turning them to face each other as she did.
"You've redecorated," Rarity noted. "It's a shame, really. This spartan aesthetic really does not suit you."
"Times have been tight, and I've been using more of my wages on materials for the project than for creature comforts," Starlight replied.
Rarity and Starlight stared each other down, eyes hard and faces firm. It had always been a little game they played when they still were on good terms, trying to see who would crack first, but now Rarity was deathly serious in her attempt to intimidate.
"You know you're not any better at this," Starlight quipped. "You still have that little nervous nose scrunch when you try to hold it together."
"And your lower left eyelid still twitches when you stare for too long," Rarity replied back. "Are we going to sit here engaging in a pointless ritual, or are you going to tell me why you scooped me off the street?"
"That depends," Starlight answered. "Are you going to tell me why you're conspiring with the mare that's trying to ruin my plans?"
Rarity held her mask, but only barely. If Starlight already knew about how she had been helping Starlit Sky then she had all the leverage she could ever possibly need.
"There's that nose scrunch again," Starlight remarked with a smile. "This doesn't need to be difficult, Rarity."
"You have a bad habit of making it difficult. How are your ears? A little bat told me that they got quite the ringing yesterday."
Starlight's eyes narrowed, almost imperceptibly, as her smile faded as swiftly as it had come. Starlight hated to get one-upped, and Rarity knew exactly how to push that particular button.
"They're fine, thank you. My personal guard are still getting fixed up thanks to that sonic assault, but they should make a full recovery as well."
"You talk about them like they're alive," Rarity said. "Have you grown that detached from regular ponies?"
"Oh, you talk about the commoners like they're your kin, that's precious," Starlight answered. "You're so much better than they are, why don't you ever act like it?"
"Because unlike you, you unsympathetic dullard, I don't see ponies as a means to an end. I don't send children into mines because their parents couldn't make it in to work. I don't make conditions so miserable for my workers that they'd rather kill themselves in a cave-in than continue with the wretched existence that I made for them. I see them as ponies, not as pieces on a board."
"But there was a time when you did," Starlight retorted. "There was a time when you were just like me, and were perfectly willing to send scores off to die so you could shape the world in your image."
"And it haunts me every day of my life," Rarity spat back. "What we did was unforgivable, but at least I try to atone for it."
Starlight didn't reply immediately, just further stared into Rarity's eyes. They were hitting the point where one of the would have to break off their contest eventually. Rarity's eyes stung and watered, and Starlight was half-blinking just to keep some moisture in them.
Starlight was the first to blink and look away, giving Rarity a much needed reprieve. She blinked compulsively and rubbed her eyes to get some feeling back in them, so she didn't notice when Starlight stood up and sauntered over to the tarp.
"It's just a little something I've been working on," Starlight said, patting whatever was covered up. It clanked with a dull metallic thump as well as a softer sound that Rarity couldn't quite place.
"And this is what you've devised to try and free the Night Mare?" Rarity asked, walking over to the covered up device.
"In a manner of speaking, but this is only part of the issue at hoof," Starlight answered. "You see, you were right to leave. Our methods were barbaric, and completely unfitting for accomplished mares such as ourselves."
"The there may be hope for you yet," Rarity said, feeling a small flicker of pride well up in her chest. Maybe she had learned. Maybe she could change.
That little flicker died the moment Starlight pulled the tarp from the device, and Rarity jumped backwards at the very sight of it.
Standing next to Starlight was a thestral, an earth pony, covered in small plates of armor and baubles containing what vivid blue aerosol light-gas. It's crusty, black skin had been flayed in places to accommodate its new armaments, and its eyes were fixed forward. Rarity recognized some of the stitches on its head as ones that the morticians made when dissecting them.
"Are you out of your mind?!" Rarity yelled, backing into the work table in her mad dash to eat away from the thestral.
"No more so than the Night Mare was," Starlight answered, as nonchalant as could be.
"How does that thing solve your problem?! What could a thestral strapped with bombs possibly do to help?!"
"You said it yourself, we sent scores off to die," Starlight answered. "With that sort of cost, I asked myself a question; why not use the dead? Why do we risk the lives of our workers in excavation when we could use those who have no hope?"
Rarity's eyes flew back and forth between Starlight and the thestral, trying to find the thread of logic that Starlight was operating on. Perhaps in whatever twisted hellscape that Starlight's mind existed in this was a good idea, but there was no way this was a sanctioned action.
"The Council will stop this, you know that," Rarity said. "There is absolutely no way that this will escape their notice."
"Rarity, Rarity, Rarity," Starlight replied with a chuckle. "The Council is completely complicit in this. How do you think I was able to get thestrals that would've gone to the automaton shops for this?"
Rarity's heart skipped at Starlight's statement. She felt like her ears had heard something, but she couldn't get the pieces of the sentence to fit together in her head.
"What are you talking about?"
"You didn't know? Oh, this is awkward," Starlight answered playfully. "Why do you think this city has so many morgues? We need thestrals to make the guards, that's how it works. Here, I'll show you."
Starlight stomped her hoof twice against the floor, and an automaton that had been posted outside walked into the room. It's impassive face and static eyes looked more menacing to Rarity than they had looked in her entire life.
Starlight quickly grabbed a hold of its metal head with her magic and wrenched it to the side. A snap of wires and grinding of metal plates echoed out of it, followed by the squelch of fluid and muscle as Starlight pulled the head loose. Its teal eyes fell cold and grey as it's body slumped to the floor, and Starlit could see wires, metal, and the bare remnants of a spine and neck in the hole. Viscous blood intermingled with refined light-gas leaked onto the floor, staining the blue carpet black.
Rarity vomited onto the floor at the sight of it, and fought to avoid retching a second time when Starlight pulled the metal plating off of its head to reveal the mottled black skin beneath.
"You've been in the morgue for two years and they never told you what they use these for?" Starlight asked, genuine confusion masked under a veneer of affability. She tossed the head away and stepped over the automaton's limp form to go to Rarity.
"Why?" Rarity moaned. "Who would do this?"
"The Night Mare," Starlight answered. "She knew what she was doing when she made the first of the automatons, and we're just perfecting her work."
Rarity felt a tightness form in her chest, like she had had the wind knocked out of her, and she made a mad dash for the door before Starlight stopped her with her magic.
"Ah, not so fast. We haven't finished our business just yet. Don't you want to know where your pink friend has gone?"
* * *
Chirox whiled away the day as she typically did; she spent some time floating amongst the cavernous halls, keeping her wings in check, and generally prowling the palace for signs of trouble. There usually were none, but the last twenty-four hours had taught her the value of vigilance.
She spent quite a bit of time in Her Lady's camber, gazing upon her obsidian cocoon with a critical eye. So many ponies were intrigued by Her Lady, wanted to release her for one reason or another. The maddening amount of rumors surrounding her made parsing the truth that much harder, but Chirox knew the truth. It was not palatable.
As the afternoon gave way to evening Chirox heard a disturbance coming towards Her Lady's chamber, and she darted up into the ceiling just as the interloper and her machines walked through.
Chirox wanted to swoop down and assault them again, force them to leave, but she hesitated when she saw that the interloper was accompanied. One was the white unicorn Rarity and the other, laid on a stretcher and with a sallow complexion, was the pink earth pony Pinkie Pie. She watched them carefully from her position on the ceiling, picking up the particulars of their conversation with her enhanced hearing.
"So, as you can see, my vision for awakening the Night Mare is far more benign than you might think," the interloper said.
"But why Pinkie Pie?" Rarity pleaded. "She's innocent in all of this, she just wanted to help a pony in need."
Innocence. Such a naive term, one that Chirox didn't much care for. Nopony was really innocent, although what they were guilty of was a different matter entirely.
"In all honesty, it's because she's convenient," Starlit said. "Any pony would've done, but I like the little ironic touches. Call it poetic justice."
Rarity looked like she was about to wheel off and attack the interloper, but one of the machines held her back with its cursed, stolen magic. The interloper chuckled softly to herself before moving Pinkie Pie off of the stretcher and towards the devices that had been haphazardly attached to Her Lady's crystal tomb.
Chirox watched with mounting horror at what the interloper was doing. A cylindrical pod rose out of one of the brass devices as they all sprang to life, opening to reveal a pony sized bed inside of it. The interloper had her machines heft Pinkie's body into the pod with a sharp hiss of their actuators. She looked almost peaceful as the doors closed over her prone form.
"What happens now?" Rarity asked, the begging just barely hidden underneath the question.
"Now, we wait," the interloper answered. "Draining the Night Mare's magic will be a long process, that much is certain, but it should prove to be the catalyst that we need to complete what she started all those centuries ago."
Chirox nearly lost her grip on the rafter she had been hanging from, barely maintaining her balance as she scrambled back up. She focused her eyes to try and see what was being worked on, but the interloper and Rarity had moved to the other side of the room and behind Her Lady's tomb.
The magical interference from the crystal blocked some of Chirox's hearing, at least enough that deciphering what was being said would be impossible. All she heard were sounds of a struggle, another hiss of steam, and the sound of a pod closing over. When the interloper left, Rarity was not with her.
Chirox glided down to the ground floor to find her fears confirmed; Pinkie Pie was asleep in one pod, and Rarity was slowly fading from consciousness in the other. Rarity and Chirox locked eyes before she slipped away, and Rarity mouthed a silent plea to her before her face slid away from the glass.
Both of the pods erupted into light, Pinkie's a baleful and dark grey and Rarity's a blistering white. The sound of shattering glass filled the chamber for a moment before being replaced by a deep, thundering beat, and a small shard of the crystal tomb fell away and broke against the polished floor.
Chirox beat her silent wings against the air, harder and faster than she had ever done before as she bolted out the door and down into the mine tunnel. Starlit Sky and Setting Sun needed to be notified. Plans had to be set into motion.
Chirox's Lady had to be kept asleep, no matter the cost.
The sun was riding low on the western horizon, its last beams of light casting long shadows on the empty cobblestone streets as Starlit Sky and Setting Sun ran as fast as their hooves would carry them towards the palace.
Chirox had burst into Redheart's clinic just as Starlit was going over the plan with Sun, and seeing the bat-pony so flustered immediately alerted them. She had good reason to be, and after explaining the situation to them Chirox took back off into the sky, leaving Starlit and Sun to collect their things and run.
The silence on the streets was eerie, but not quite so eerie as the rising roar of a crowd as the palace grew ever closer. The sun had fully set and the moon shone bright and full above Starlit and Sun when they arrived at the outer edge of the palace grounds, or the crowd that had taken over the outer edge of the palace grounds to be more accurate.
"I guess we know where everypony in town went," Sun remarked, "but how do we get through all of this?"
"I doubt shoving is going to work," Starlit replied, gesturing to the line of machine-ponies that dotted the edge of the crowd. "Why do you think they're all here? It's not like these ponies to congregate like this, they're far too skittish."
A shimmer in the air in front of her drew Starlit's attention, and just inside the crowd she saw a familiar set of piercing yellow eyes. Chirox gestured the pair of them over, making sure that the machines weren't watching them.
"What is this?" Starlit whispered. "Was it like this when you left to come get us?"
"There were fewer, but only slightly," Chirox answered. "I need to find a safe spot where I can shift back and get back inside, but in the meantime you two need to find a way back into the palace."
"Chirox, I barely remember the way Pinkie and I took to get out, and it's not like we can go past the cave-in. There has to be something you can do to help."
"I would, truly I would, but I need to get inside and hold off the interloper's machine as much as possible. I fear direct sabotage is out of the question since Rarity and Pinkie Pie's lives are at stake, but there are some techniques my people used to maintain the crystal in times of peril."
With that Chirox surreptitiously darted out of the crowd, leaving a spot big enough for Starlit and Sun to squeeze into.
"You must be careful, and you must be quick," Chirox added. "I fear that the interloper meddles in powers she doesn't understand, but I fear far worse that she meddles in powers she completely understands."
With another shimmer of the air Chirox faded away, looking for all the world like a barely present wisp of the sky as she rocketed upward and out of sight.
The crowd jostled and pushed against Starlit and Sun, the writhing mass of their bodies and stifling heat threatening to close in and crush them. Starlit felt her heart beat twice as fast as normal, and her breathing was growing short and rapid.
"Starlit, there's no way that we're going to get through this with just force," Sun said as he shoved away one pony only for another to collide with him from behind.
Starlit couldn't answer, only try and desperately hold her ground against the wave of flesh. She had never seen so many ponies in one place before, and the effect was nauseating. So much noise, so much cacophony, all of it pressing on her mind and threatening to send her spiraling into a nervous breakdown.
"Starlit, any ideas?!" Sun yelled over the din. He was starting to get pulled away into the crowd as he tried to make his way through it, and Starlit only barely managed to pull him out before he was swept away.
"We just keep going forward," Starlit answered, holding him tight. Together the two of them pressed forward, trying to maintain their heading towards the western side of the crowd, trying to get closer to the mines. Even if they couldn't get in through the mines themselves, any place where the crowd thinned out would be welcome.
They managed to press forward for a few yards at a time before getting swallowed up again, and Starlit's nerves were growing more frayed by the minute. Sun kept trudging forward, pulling Starlit along as they went ever deeper but the heat and the noise was growing insurmountable.
"Sun, stop," Starlit ordered. "We're going to be at this all night at this rate. I want to try something."
"What something?" Sun asked.
Again Starlit didn't answer, but this time it was so she could focus. She knew enough about magic from Twilight and enough about wards from her experience at home that she felt confident enough to try making a spell.
Focus every bit of energy that she could to her horn, she thought hard about the spell. She wanted to feel the warmth of it cascade over herself, hear the satisfying hum of it casting. She needed to picture every little bit of this spell, and her horn started to glow brighter and brighter as she did.
With a burst of light, a small dome of magic encased Starlit and Sun. It was barely wide enough for the both of them to share, but its shimmering blue surface coated in the glyphs of her home wards was the second most beautiful thing she'd ever seen after her husband and daughter.
"This something," Starlit answered, a wide smile on her face. "C'mon, let's go before I run out of magic."
Sun could only look around himself, gobsmacked at the feat of magic Starlit had just performed. She had to jostle him to get him to move, and their trek through the crowd was now much more smooth. Ponies that had once pressed on them oppressively now either got out of the way when they saw Starlit and Sun coming or bounced off of the shield with a dull thump.
"This would've helped a lot in Sunspire," Sun said.
"Your shields did help, and they're helping out now," Starlit replied. "They're half of the inspiration for this spell."
"You're just saying that to make up for how bitterly you complained about them, aren't you?"
"Perhaps I am, but those two things aren't mutually exclusive," Starlit answered.
The glow from Starlit's shield was starting to attract attention, and she and Sun adjusted their speed accordingly. Discretion would be nice, but right now they needed swiftness.
Just as they got to the other end of the crowd and Starlit dissipated her shield, a booming voice cascaded over the crowd, calling down from seemingly the palace itself, and it was a voice that Starlit was all too familiar with.
"Fillies and gentlecolts!" Starlight Glimmer pronounced. "Tonight is a night that will go down in history as the beginning of our resurgence!"
Starlit and Sun both turned back to face the palace, the roar of the crowd punctuating Starlight's exclamation. A large stage and podium had been erected on the front steps of the palace, and Starlight stood tall. A selection of other mares and stallions were standing behind her, and all were flanked by more of the automatons.
"This city has long been reliant on a dwindling resource, one that we for generations believed would never fail us," Starlight continued. "We focused too long on New Selene, and now it is time for us to look beyond the city, to the great world beyond our walls!"
Starlit and Sun exchanged looks, hers worried and his terrified. The crowd continued to cheer, as if they didn't understand what was being proposed but were too focused on the fervor of the rally.
"Equestria is a vast land, with riches and bounty unspoiled by the centuries of decay in this city. We must expand if we are to survive, and it is time that we all stood together as one and made this dream a reality."
"Together with the other members of the Council," Starlight continued, her voice raising and falling dramatically with every word, "I have created a new line of our automated soldiers that we can use to take this world for our own, with help from our very own Lady of the Night, Queen Luna!"
An awed hush fell over everypony save for Sun and Starlit. She seethed at Starlight's lies, and quickly turned toward the western edge of the palace.
"C'mon Sun. Time's wasting," Starlit said, her voice resolute. Sun hurried after her, leaving the crowd behind them to revel in their delusion.
The pair searched around the outer walls of the palace for some sort of entrance or hidden opening in the wall, and were eventually rewarded when they saw a small terrace that led to a massive set of black wood doors. The entrance was guarded by a pair of the automatons, their cold teal eyes fixed forever forward.
"You have any way to deal with that?" Sun asked.
"Even if I did, I think I burned out most of magic on that shield," Starlit answered.
Starlit tapped her hoof against the ground in consternation, only for Sun to beat her to the punch and step forward.
"Sun, what are you doing?" Starlit whispered forcefully.
"Hoping that Silence can make good on a promise," Sun answered cryptically.
He stepped into the line of sight of the automatons, whose eyes immediately switched over to yellow and stared down at him. Sun muttered something to himself as the machines approached, then drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes.
Faster than Starlit could blink she was stunned by a flash of green light. When her vision cleared she saw Sun, with a beam of grey and green energy erupting from his horn and neatly slicing through the two automatons like a hot knife through butter. The pair erupted into blue flame as a stench of heated metal and, oddly, seared flesh rose into the air.
Sun staggered forward as the spell faded, collapsing to one knee as whisks of smoke rose off of his horn. Starlit helped him back to his hooves to find that he was grinning from ear to ear.
"That was fantastic!" Sun exclaimed, just shy of jumping for joy.
"What happened? Just this morning you were barely able to levitate my amulet, now you're slicing robots in half with concentrated rays of pure energy?"
"Silence, that's what happened," Sun answered. "She said she could help counterbalance my weakening magic, but this is completely above and beyond anything I was imagining!"
Sun winced slightly, rubbing the back of his head idly.
"Are you alright?" Starlit asked.
"Fine, just a little headache. Probably from having all that magic go through me at once, since my arcane system isn't used to it."
Starlit buried the small twinge of worry growing in her mind, shifting it down to go over later.
"Just don't overexert yourself, alright? We still don't know how your new friend works, so try to keep her at foreleg's length."
Satisfied with Sun's nod, Starlit walked up the steps towards the palace, stepping past the automatons and the many scorch marks from Sun's spell as she did. The smell of metal and burnt skin stung her nostrils, and left her perplexed.
"Sun, do you smell charred flesh?" Starlit asked, taking a closer look at the automatons.
"Now that you mention it, yeah," Sun answered. He kicked one of the machines onto its side so that it faced him, taking a few paces back when he caught sight of its neatly cleaved torso.
"Starlit, you might not want to look at this," Sun added.
"Why? What did you find?"
"These machines, they're more than just metal and magic. There are bodies inside these things."
Taking a hesitant look down at the automaton at her hooves, Starlit rotated it gingerly with her magic until its neck stump faced her. She saw melted bits of metal intermingled with what was distinctly a fleshy neck and a spine, and had to fight the urge to vomit.
"What kind of monster would do this?" Starlit asked, horror and revulsion in her voice.
"Somepony looking for a cheap power source that nopony would care about," Sun answered. "Look here at this one."
Starlit carefully stepped past the automaton in front of her and joined Sun next to his. It had been sliced in half at the chest, taking away everything upwards and giving a clear look into its torso. The stench was overwhelming, and Starlit found her need to vomit satisfied.
"Notice something about the torso cavity?" Sun asked.
Starlit hazarded a look inside, and found that the interior was very near hollow. The only thing that lined its chest and abdomen walls were innumerable bisected and scorched tubes of meat.
"These were thestrals," Sun continued, pointing out the tubes. "This was the same as the one I found in Sunspire; no internal organs, and swollen veins and nerves from the arcane and cardiovascular systems."
"Whoever makes these things found a perfect way to combat their thestral problem," Starlit commented. "You corral them to a place where you can safely kill them, then pry them apart and intertwine their magic with machinery to make them perfectly loyal soldiers."
"You sound impressed," Sun said, casting a gaze at Starlit.
"In a sick sort of way I am. Imagine if you had been the pony that found the perfect way to deal with the loss of magic, the loss of hope? To give these poor wretches a function again after losing their own will and motivation?"
Starlit and Sun looked back at the thestral, the former with cold pragmatism in her heart and the latter with worry on his face.
"This feels wrong," Sun replied. "These ponies didn't deserve this."
"They aren't ponies, Sun, they're thestrals," Starlit corrected. "Whatever they were before is gone. At least now they're useful."
Starlit walked towards the black doors, Sun trotting to keep up with her. The doors opened wide with no apparent input from either of them, giving her more reason to believe that they were on the right trail.
* * *
Sun found himself darting at shadows and checking behind him at near every turn through the cavernous palace. Starlit was navigating by way of her pendant, which had started going off when they entered the building. The sureness of her direction did little to calm Sun's mind.
"You like the light show?" Silence asked, her pressure on his brain jolting him to attention. "I haven't had to use offensive magic like that for a long while, but I'd say I'm still a fair hoof at it."
"It was definitely impressive, but I have some concerns about it," Sun replied.
"Oh really? Because if I'm not mistaken your exact words were 'that was fantastic'. Your words, not mine."
"The two states of mind aren't mutually exclusive."
"Fair enough," Silence replied. "What's your worry?"
"The magic itself wasn't entirely my color, and when it ended I felt… weird, for lack of a better term. The back of my head hurt, and the only time it's ever hurt like that was when you were trying to heal me."
"It's just a side effect of how this arrangement works," Silence replied, her tone casual. "After all, if you got water from two different streams you wouldn't expect them to taste the exact same. The pain is just from taxing your arcane system a bit too much."
"But why grey?" Sun pressed. "Only Starlit's amulet gives off grey magic that I've seen. That strikes me as a tad coincidental."
"Tell me Sun, how many unicorns have you seen with strong enough magic that it has a distinct color?"
"Including me? Maybe six," Sun answered sheepishly.
"Then maybe it's just happened that you've never met a unicorn with grey magic before now?" Silence replied. "Perhaps you should broaden your horizons a tad."
"Trust me, I'm doing just that. I'm just a bit nervous about all of this, and your assurances of my safety have seemed flippant and cryptic at times."
"It's all a part of my charm, but you have a point," Silence replied, her voice growing more serious. "So let me completely straight with you; there's nothing to be worried about."
The pressure in Sun's mind lifted before he could reply, just another one of the many ways Silence's presence in his life was starting to irk him.
"Sun? Are you there?" Starlit asked.
"Sorry, sorry," Sun hastily apologized. "Silence had me locked in a battle of the minds."
Starlit stopped stock still and turned to face him, her face livid with shock and worry.
"It was a joke, she was just talking with me and I spaced out," Sun clarified. "What do you need?"
Starlit let out a sharp sigh, more of a snort than anything, and Sun noticed that her amulet was tugging to the left very visibly.
"I take it that we're here?" Sun asked, worded more like a statement.
"Astute observation for a pony that was just 'locked in a battle of the minds,'" Starlit answered. "We're close, but we don't exactly know what to expect when we get in there."
"I put my vote down for more of those abominations in brass," Sun said. "There's no way that Starlight would leave something this important unguarded."
"She didn't," a third, familiar voice chimes in from above. Sun and Starlit snapped their heads back to see Chirox hovering above them.
"Have you handled it?" Starlit asked.
"As much as I could," Chirox answered. "They'll be incapacitated for some time, but there is something about the magic that powers them that resists my sonic attack."
"They're made from thestrals, Chirox," Sun stated, his voice oddly dispassionate.
"That much I know, as that was how My Lady designed them," Chirox replied, "but these ones are different somehow. I don't know for how long I have stunned them."
Sun didn't hear the last part of Chirox's statement. His mind stopped when she said that Luna had designed the automatons like this. All that he could feel was anger, all he could see was red, and the back of his head pounded against his skull.
"They're like this on purpose!?" Sun yelled.
Starlit and Chirox both stared at Sun like he had grown a third eye. Their faces, incredulous and worried, only threw Sun further down a hole of blinding rage.
"Why would she do this?! These ponies need to be put down, not run through a butcher's shop and grafted into a machine!"
"Sun, calm down, you're being irrational," Starlit retorted, her worried expression shifting to one of defensiveness.
"Oh, I'm being irrational by thinking that we maybe we shouldn't release the pony that cannibalizes other ponies to make her army!"
The pounding in Sun's head intensified, and he genuinely believed that he would have to attack Starlit to get her to see reason. He only hesitated by being literally and figuratively shouted down by Chirox's screeching, which set his ears ringing and made the thumping in his head stop.
"Enough of this!" Chirox shouted at both Starlit and Sun, in the most brazen display of emotion either of them had seen her give. "Sun, how do you feel?"
"Other than the ringing in my ears, better," Sun answered. He felt calmer, more even tempered, and most importantly, didn't want to try and beat Starlit into the floor.
"Then my suspicions are confirmed," Chirox replied.
Slowly she descended to the floor, coming between Starlit, Sun, and a large black door much like the one from outside. Starlit's amulet was pulling towards it strongly, to the point that it was sticking straight out.
"Chirox, what is this?" Starlit asked.
"This, Starlit Sky and Setting Sun, is where I put my hoof down," Chirox answered. "I tried to give you two the benefit of the doubt, tried to see your motives as pure and noble, but I cannot allow you to awaken My Lady."
"Chirox, we need to get her out of here," Sun replied. "Equestria is dying, and without Luna it will. Even if that weren't at stake, Pinkie Pie and Rarity are still trapped in Starlight's machine that you told us about."
"Your friends will be fine, you have my word. Now leave this place, and never return to it. You have been tainted by this 'Silence' entity, and I find Starlit's reasoning flimsy. You cannot awaken My Lady, as I fear your motives would turn her back to wickedness and wrath."
"What wrath?" Starlit pointedly asked. "We have come a long way and gone through so much to get to this point alone. Sun and I have both died to get here, I believe that you at least owe us an explanation."
The trio stared each other down, each side refusing to move or be moved. The only motion was of Starlit's amulet tugging towards the door.
"Do you know why my people sealed her in that tomb?" Chirox asked, her voice suddenly soft and almost mournful. "We saw what she had become. Our Lady had become the very monster that she had gone to war to fight. Her Majesty, Princess Luna of New Selene and Equestria, was a kind and gentle mare warped and twisted by the realities of war."
Chirox stood tall as the tears ran down her cheeks, snagging in her thick fur. Sun, for his part, felt appropriately sympathetic, but Starlit still wore a hard expression.
"My Lady did so much to protect her people, but war blackened her soul," Chirox continued. "That is why she committed the act she did, what you called the Sundering. She found war disgusting and intriguing and she wanted more of it, so she incited the fighting amongst her citizens. When they realized the source of their warfare and misery, she turned her full might against her people."
"So many died on that day, and my people knew we had to do something to stop her. We had sworn an oath to uphold Our Lady's will, but the mare that we made that oath to was not the mare we were presented with. Combining our might we sealed her inside the very crystal she used to create her machines from the thestrals, but it was too much. All but I died in that chamber so long ago, and now I am the only one who stands between New Selene and her wrath."
"So please, I beg of you two, leave," Chirox finished, her voice heavy with sadness and her fur stained with tears.
Sun's voice caught in his throat as he attempted to reply, and for a moment he seriously considered Chirox and her offer. She spoke with the words of a pony who had had everything taken from her by forces and means unknown, and in that they were quite similar.
"Chirox, I can't deny you your pain," Starlit replied, "but you can't deny Equestria its future. Luna needs to be a part of shaping it, for good or ill."
Chirox's expression shifted from sadness to shock and, finally, to resolution. It wasn't a furrowed brow and bared teeth, nor was it wide eyes and an agape jaw; it was hardness and determination in its most raw form. The only thing that betrayed her inner turmoil were here eyes, slitted and yellow, that were wide and dewy.
"Then perish, Starlit Sky and Setting Sun," Chirox stated, as calmly as one might tell another to fetch a pail of water. "It is my duty to guard My Lady, and I take no pleasure in what must now happen."
Chirox gave no quarter and no time to prepare, shooting into the air like a wraith and unleashing a scream unlike anything Starlit or Sun had heard before. The very air rippled with the force of her voice, causing Sun's cloak to whip and twist behind him and blowing Starlit's mane back.
Starlit held her ground better than Sun did, but as he looked around he could see her starting to slip across the floor under Chirox's power. Sun had sunk low to the ground, covering his ears in an attempt to preserve his hearing, and Starlit quickly followed suit.
"Silence, help!" Sun pleaded. "Do something, anything!"
Even through the auditory assault Sun felt the pressure rest down on his head. Silence said nothing, only went straight to work. Sun's horn lit with magic, more grey than green, and a beam of it launched toward Starlit, connecting their horns and enrapturing her in grey light.
Starlit jumped when she saw what was happening to her, but when she took her hooves off of her ears she didn't react like she was going deaf. She stood tall, and her ward rose from the floor to meet her. Sun scrambled behind to get underneath it, but found that it was blocking him as well as Chirox's voice.
Starlit looked like she was screaming something, but she couldn't be heard over Chirox's voice, which continued even as she circled above them. Sun could feel his bones rattling and his insides jiggling, and he started to panic at the thought that the force and vibrations from her voice were doing more damage than just harming his ears.
When her voice stopped Sun was still writhing on the floor, and the reality that she had stopped didn't register until she was upon him, fangs bared and aimed at his neck. Her teeth, razor sharp and driven by malice, slid into his neck like a stone through water, and a scream tore itself from Sun's throat even as Chirox started to drink.
A flash of grey and green was followed by a muffled thump on the floor and Starlit rushing to Sun's side. He was dazed and felt light headed, but the stench of seared flesh and fur stung his nose. He slid backward a few feet and felt Chirox's teeth slide out of his neck, her jaw slack and her face passive.
A few muffled shouts from Starlit pulled Sun out of his daze, but did little to help his hearing. He looked at where Chirox lay, and saw the effects of his hastily fired spell; one of her eyes was burst and sizzling with heat while smoke wafted up from the underside of her face.
Sun saw Chirox, the last of the bat-ponies, dead by his hoof, and he sobbed.
Starlit held Sun tight as he cried, his sobs wracking her body as well as his. Chirox's freshly dead body lay a few feet from them, the smell of flesh and burnt fur lingering in the near silent hall. Her amulet still tugged at her neck like an overeager child, providing a hard reminder of their mission.
"Sun," Starlit said, using the voice she used to comfort White Eclipse, "we have to keep going. We have to finish what we came here to do."
Sun's sobbing turned to gasps and hiccups, but he had regained enough of his composure to stand back up, Starlit following along with.
"I-I did-dn't mean t-to," Sun muttered. "M-my horn, Silence did s-something and it-t just went off."
"I understand Sun, the first time is always the hardest for anything. I can help you, and I want to, but you need to help me now. We have to finish this. We have to make sure she didn't lay down her life for nothing."
Starlit led Sun towards the door, his head buried into her shoulder as the black door silently opened. The light in the chamber was intense, half deepest black and half piercing white, but the crystal stood stark against the monochrome.
Their hooves clinked and brushed against shards of the crystal as they walked, small at first and growing larger with each passing step. When the totality of the crystal was before Starlit she saw that a full quarter of it had shattered and fallen away, exposing Luna's sleeping head. Starlight Glimmer's brass machines stood out stark against the light they emitted, and a few disabled automatons lay scattered about, sparking and twitching.
The strap on Starlit's necklace snapped under the force of its own forward momentum, slapping against the remnants of the crystal with a sharp clack.
"Sun, it's time," Starlit said, holding his head in her hoof. "You can give back the magic, get Silence out of your mind."
Sun looked at Starlit, his eyes red and his cheeks stained with tears, before looking at the crystal and illuminating his horn. He looked placid as he did so, and relieved as the pure grey magic from his horn poured back into Starlit's amulet.
A deep, thundering pound blasted through the chamber as Sun stopped the flow, and the devices fell silent and the lights emanating from them faded away until the chamber was the same blue as the rest of the palace. The only point of light left was coming from the crystal tomb.
Starlit blinked, and when her eyes opened she was in a misty grey environment. She whipped around, looking in every direction for some point of reference, but there was none.
"Sun!?" Starlit called. "Where are you?!"
"He is safe," a voice stated. "He is unsound of spirit, but he is safe."
Starlit turned sharply to see Luna, all black fur and teal cat eyes, looming over her. She wasn't wearing her armor, but her stature and presence made her plenty enough menacing.
"What did you do?" Starlit asked sharply.
"An interesting question, given the events of the last five minutes; What did I do? I've done a great many things in my long life, not all of them worthy of a song or note of praise."
"Then let me be specific,"Starlit countered, in no mood for mind games. "Why am I here in this nowhere space talking to you."
"Because thou art in desperate need of clarification," Luna answered, "and I fear for the prying eyes and listening ears of ponies not so noble as thee."
"What do you mean? Sun is an upstanding stallion, and anything I need clarification on he would need as well."
"I refer not to Setting Sun, but to the she-beast he harbors. We had ponies affected by her influence in the times leading up to the war, and she can be an irksome pest to root out."
Starlit furrowed her brow, and Luna cocked her head playfully at Starlit's expression of anger.
"Thou honestly did not think that returning the magic to the amulet would free him of her presence?" Luna asked.
"Given my lack of information on the subject, why don't you tell me?" Starlit answered. She felt a few inches away from shouting down the Princess, but held her tongue.
"This parasite is inextricably tied to Sun's mind, and thus far the only power I've found for countering it is death, true death, not the farce that you and he have gone through."
"Farce? Farce?!" Starlit retorted. "I don't know if you're aware, but what you call a 'farce' is still very much a death, a mortal wounding that takes its toll on the both of us!"
"Perhaps thou hast had a foretaste of death," Luna countered, narrowing her pupils, "but thou hast yet to taste the full palate. Or, perhaps, Setting Sun has tasted true death in how he killed my loyal and traitorous servant."
"A servant that sealed you in here for crimes you committed against your own people," Starlit replied, barely holding her anger back.
"And thus we come full circle to the clarification. Please, sit, we have a long and wearisome story to discuss."
Starlit heard a small shifting of the mist on the floor and found herself seated in a plush black and blue armchair. Luna was seated in a similar chair, slightly taller to accommodate her height, and with a small table between them.
"Wouldst thou care for a beverage?" Luna offered, materializing a tea set between them. "I so rarely entertain guests, you see, and I have a delectable blend that thou simply must partake of."
"I'll pass, thank you," Starlit curtly replied, making her contempt for the situation subtly apparent.
"Suit yourself, although thou art certainly missing out," Luna answered as she lured herself a cup. She drank a slow sip from it followed by a satisfied sigh.
"What Chirox told you was…colorfully embellished," Luna said. "She certainly wasn't wrong, but the situation was a tad more nuanced than a strictly good versus evil battle royale."
"I've already heard this story twice over, so what's one more telling from the mare who orchestrated it?" Starlit replied, settling into her chair.
"There, that's the spirit!" Luna's smile was punctuated by her fanged teeth, making the effect eerie rather than disarming. She took another long drink from her cup, draining it and setting it on the tray between them.
"When Chirox said I was 'warped' by the war and my experiences in it, she was only half-correct," Luna continued. "While it is true that I had been more sheltered than the other Princesses before our time as co-regents of this land, I was well aware of warfare and the intricacies thereof. My people had a long history of conflict with those they deemed 'lesser', and we attempted to impose our will wherever we may. That was why my wretched sister, the traitor Twilight, and myself were sent to this land in the first place."
"That's not how Celestia told it," Starlit interjected. "To hear her say it, she was sent here to bring order to the land and rule it justly. She even told me that she didn't know why the others of you had been sent."
"Ah, well, my dear sister certainly had her delusions, didn't she?" Luna countered. "She was a very romantic pony, one obsessed with ideals of justice and divine right and all that tosh. Formality and honor were her bread and butter, and look at how far that got her."
"I'd say a sight further than it's gotten you. She's already returned to Canterlot, dedicated to becoming a fair ruler again. What of you? Have you thought my mission over any since yesterday?"
Luna stayed silent for a moment, contemplating Starlit with a keen eye. Her hoof tapped lightly against the arm of her chair as she sat.
"It isn't like I want to be here," Starlit continued, seizing the opportunity. "Were it my decision, I would be at home with my husband and daughter, living the life of a simple farmer. I accepted Twilight's offer because I was shown the alternative, which is death for everypony in this land."
"And pray tell, why dost thou care so much for everypony else?"
The question caught Starlit off guard, and she found herself at a loss for words for a time.
"When I went to war," Luna continued, seizing back the opportunity, "It was with the knowledge of what it entails. No sugarcoating, no delusions of honor. I simply marched my armies to Canterlot and steeled myself to do what had to be done."
"When I arrived the city was already being besieged by Chrysalis and Twilight, with Celestia holed up in our palace. Cadence's troops were not so far behind me, and my first skirmishes with her crystal knights were what I expected; long lines of combat, much screaming and gnashing of teeth, and the stench of blood. And then so much more happened."
Luna's gaze flitted to the side, and she stared away into the middle distance as she continued speaking.
"The things I saw my armies do to others, the things I did, they were what I was unprepared for. The types of things war strategists and retired generals don't tell you about. About how ponies shit themselves when they die, about how the best laid attack is one the enemy never sees coming and strikes like an arrow in the night, about the skullduggery and deceit and the horror on a stallion's face when he knows his last is upon him and he turns feral in his attempt to forestall the inevitable."
"Then perhaps you weren't as prepared for the rigors of war as you thought you would be," Starlit said.
"As I said, it wasn't the warfare that changed me, it was witnessing the wanton cruelty of ponies to their fellow ponies. I saw my citizens at their worst, and I resolved to never look back at what I'd done."
Starlit eyed over the Princess, trying to see if there was any trace of regret in her heart. If there was, she had grown quite practiced at hiding it.
"Princess, I can't say that I've ever been in war," Starlit said. "My husband guards our home and small settlement, but that is the extent of my martial knowledge. Everything I have done thus far has been predominantly through empathy and speaking to others."
"And how well has that worked?" Luna retorted. "Empathy and kindness? At the end of the day, what do you have to show?"
"It's how I convinced Celestia to go home to Canterlot. She tried to attack me, even killed me once, but at the end we spoke, just as you and I are now. Your sister was blinded by her own failings, and I have a sneaking suspicion that you are as well."
Luna's eyes lit up as Starlit spoke, intrigued with the mention of her sister despite her readily apparent animosity towards her.
"Then tell me, what state did you find Celestia in? Was she some madmare in her attic, groaning and bemoaning her fate?"
"Far from it," Starlit answered. "She was regal and serene when first we spoke, and her city was gleaming and resplendent."
"She was quite showy, whatever her other failings," Luna replied, her brow furrowing.
"She was also singularly dedicated to the idea of order in all things, even to her detriment and that of her citizens. The sun seared her lands to cast a massive illusion of Sunspire, and the ponies who weren't trapped under her hoof or generated by the illusion reviled her like no other."
"Thou speaks of this in the past tense," Luna commented. "No doubt you pierced the veil of her illusion."
"I did, and when I did I saw your sister for the mare she truly is," Starlit replied. "She was sad, scared, and desperately trying to cling to the familiar. She couldn't accept change even when it was thrust into her face, but that is where you two are different."
"Do tell," Luna said, leaning her chin lazily against a hoof. "Why don't you try to psychoanalyze a mare who could kill you with a thought if she so wished."
Starlit felt the fur on her neck stand in fear, and she swallowed a little harder than was strictly necessary.
"If you insist," Starlit replied. "I believe that you discarded the past too swiftly. You took one look at the harsh realities of war and decided to charge ahead into anger and wrath. Where others would look at a slippery slope with trepidation, you decided to grab up a sled and go down it."
"Astute observation, but flawed," Luna assessed.
"I'm not finished," Starlit added. "You discarded the past swiftly, becoming the mare who would decimate her own populace just to experience the rush of war again, but it was born of the same place as Celestia's desperate need for familiarity and order; you saw the monster you had become, and couldn't cope in a healthy way."
Luna's eyes narrowed, and she rose to her full height, dissipating her chair as well as the table and tea set. Starlit jumped up before her own chair faded away, leaving the pair standing in a misty void and Starlit desperately worried that Luna was going to kill her.
"Follow me," Luna ordered, turning on her heel and walking off into the mist. Starlit had to trot to keep up with her, but after a few yards she simply disappeared into the mist. Starlit was blinded for a while, looking desperately for any sign of Luna in the featureless grey, until she was met with a standing doorframe. The door was midnight blue and had an image of a crescent moon on it, not unlike Luna's cutie mark.
The door swung open slowly and without sound, scattering some of the mist and leading into a cozy looking bedroom. Hazarding a step, Starlit entered, and the door shut behind her.
In the center of the room a filly stood, no older than maybe four or five, while on another side Luna stood, looking down at the filly and paying no heed to Starlit. The filly was a dusty blue, much like her room, and her eyes were a wonderful teal color not unlike Luna's.
"But why does Celie get to go and not me!?" the filly protested to an older unicorn. His coat was grey and he was wearing a ridiculously over-designed cloak and pointed hat covered in bells. His most striking feature was the massive grey beard that hung nearly down to his hooves.
"Because you're not old enough, My Lady," the unicorn answered. "Celestia needs to be taught of diplomacy and leadership if she is to rule in Equestria. Your time will come, but it just can't come now."
The filly, who Starlit could surmise was a young Luna, plopped down onto the floor with impotent rage. Tears slid down her cheeks as she stared at the floor, and Starlit could feel her heart break for her.
"It's not fair!" Luna whined. "She gets to do everything because she's older!"
"Lulu, life isn't fair," the unicorn replied, sitting down on the floor in front of Luna. "But just because it isn't doesn't mean that we can sit and pout about it. You will be deemed worthy of rule one day as well, and when that day comes what kind of Princess do you want to be? The type who moans and complains whenever things don't go her way, or the type who learns to accept what she cannot change and takes control of that which she can?"
Young Luna sat and pouted a little more, before looking up at the unicorn and lighting her horn. A small spark of magic spelled out the number two.
"Good, that means you're already on your way to learning how to rule and rule well! Now come along, we don't want to be late for your lessons. We're doing transmutations today," the unicorn added with a wink.
Young Luna's eyes lit up at the unicorn's offer, and she quickly bounded off after him, a smile across her face. When the pair of them left the room they simply vanished, leaving the real Luna and Starlit alone.
"Starswirl was a good pony, and a good teacher," Luna commented. "I sobbed for days when he finally passed away, but his lessons never left me. Especially the transmutations."
Luna followed after her younger self and Starswirl, and Starlit followed suit. When she crossed the threshold of the door she found herself in a room completely incongruous with the one she'd just left, in no small part because of the fact she was outside.
All around her massive buildings of crystal rose into the air, seemingly hewn from gems and hollowed out. The ground she stood on shined like glass and reflected like a mirror, and every step she took clinked like a chime.
Luna stood off some ways, next to a floating piece of crystal that rested underneath a massive spire. Starlit followed her to it, and was met with yet another Luna. This mare's coat was a darker blue, and her mane too shimmered and floated in a manner reminiscent of the night sky. Her tiara, collar, and horseshoes were blackened, and her face was set in an expression of deepest worry.
"Go on," another alicorn that Starlit didn't recognize said, "it won't take long."
"But where is it going to send me?" the younger Luna asked. "What if I get sent to the desert like Celestia?"
"It will be fine, Luna," the alicorn replied, resting a hoof on Luna's shoulder. "Wherever the Crystal Heart sends thee, it will be where thou art needed. Celestia is already turning her lands into a fertile paradise, I'm sure thou wilt do the same."
The younger Luna looked from her companion to the floating hunk of crystal, which Starlit could now see was carved into the shape of a heart. Luna took a deep breath in and illuminated her horn. It shone a glimmering blue, reflecting off of the crystal and the ground with a brilliant iridescence.
The Crystal Heart illuminated, its light white and soft and intermingling with the reflected glow of Luna's magic in a psychedelic dance. A thin beam of the Heart's magic connected to Luna's horn, and her eyes went white with power. Her mane shook and whipped as if caught in a strong wind, and she rose into the air as the Heart did its work.
After a time, Luna descended and the magic of the Heart receded. Luna looked shaken, in the way that one might be shaken before doing something dangerous or stupid.
"What didst the Crystal Heart show thee?" the alicorn asked. She spoke softly, but her voice carried a weight of authority disproportionate to her delivery.
"I saw a mountain," Luna answered as she caught her breath. "A mountain surrounded by forests, and on the mountain there was a palace, grand and opulent."
"Odd," the alicorn replied. "There are no palaces in Equestria, much less ones built onto mountains. Only we have the capability to work such feats of architecture."
"That wasn't all," Luna continued. "I saw another mountain, but this one was surrounded by empty grasslands. I felt the presence of precious minerals and gems in the mountain and earth beneath."
"Then that is where thou shalt go. The Heart hast spoken, and we are bade to heed its missive." The alicorn walked off as Luna worked up a reply.
"Mother, wait!" Luna called out. The other alicorn stopped dead in her tracks, and made an agonizingly slow turn back to Luna.
"Dost thou question the will of our Crystal Heart?" she asked. "Art thou dissatisfied with its selection?"
"It isn't… it isn't that necessarily, it's just that… how am I to know how to rule there? Where am I to begin?"
"You are to be sent with a veritable army of advisors, engineers, and soldiers, as well as the power the Heart will lend you. What more couldst thou possibly require?"
Luna shuffled her hooves, looking like she wanted to say something but thought it would be impolite to say.
"Perhaps the Heart has more to say to me, maybe a second option?" Luna answered. "A place with more lumber to work with, perhaps."
Luna's mother narrowed her eyes in the type of expression that Starlit knew all too well, as she had used it. It was a look of disappointment so specific that only a child can really comprehend it if it comes from one of their parents.
"Then thou does question the judgement of the Heart," she replied. "I will hear no more of this, and thou shalt be sent off in a fortnight. I had planned for a ceremony, but I fear that whatever I had planned wouldn't match up to your exacting tastes. Let this teach you some humility."
The mare stalked off as Luna stood by the Heart, fuming with anger and shame before the pair of them dissipated into mist.
"I didst not know it at the time, but that palace was to be Canterlot, built into the side of Mount Equus," Present Luna said. "To say I was displeased with my chosen realm of Equestria would be a gross understatement, but I grew to love my slice of the country. The metals, minerals, and gems of the mountain brought much prosperity to New Selene, and for a time we were all happy."
Luna walked past one of the pillars that supported the Crystal Heart, vanishing before she came out on the other side and the entire world shifted. Starlit was now in a grand hallway, decorated with rich purple curtains and rugs and supported by marble columns and walls. A tinkling sound of glass drew her eye, and she saw Celestia and the same Luna she had just seen standing before a bank of windows made with colored glass.
Three of the figures in the set of five windows Starlit recognized as Celestia, Luna, and Twilight, with the fourth being a mystery and the fifth still under construction. A unicorn levitated pieces of green and black glass into the iron fixings as Celestia and Luna watched on.
"I still don't think she deserves a window," Luna groused. "She's only been here for a year."
"Sister, Chrysalis is just as much a Princess of Equestria as we are," Celestia answered, her voice far more casual than when Starlit had heard her speak in Sunspire.
"But of what? What is she a Princess of? Her swamp and her Changelings, her power over the very fabric of life? She doesn't fit in with us."
"The Changelings have proven resourceful and helpful, and her power is as necessary as our rule over the moon and sun, or Twilight's power over magic and Cadence's over love and the heart."
"I still find this all terribly coincidental," Luna retorted. "Twilight has just perfected her deathless knights and suddenly Chrysalis shows up claiming to rule over the very fabric of life and death and she doesn't have a problem with Twilight's scheme? It doesn't sit right with me."
"Even still, gossip is unbecoming of a Princess," Celestia chided. "You either bring these grievances up with Chrysalis herself or you keep them to yourself."
A door opened at the far end of the hall, and Starlit, Celestia, and Luna all turned in time to see one of the other Princesses come through. Her coat was pitch black and shone like an insect's hide, and her wings were see-through and diaphanous. Her eyes were a wicked green and, similarly to Present Luna's, slitted like a cat's while her mane was pulled back from her head and tied into an impressive series of braids that didn't fit her face at all. Before the memory could continue the world dissolved into mist, leaving Starlit and Luna alone again.
"That was Chrysalis, wasn't it?" Starlit asked. "I thought her name was more metaphorical than that."
"Chrysalis did receive some odd stares at court when we presented her to the nobility, I will say that much," Luna replied. The room twisted and shifted again, and the mist resolved into yet another scene.
Starlit was now in a dimly lit room, presumably a bunker or cellar of some sort. Luna was surrounded by a cadre of advisors and military officials, as well as a few bat-ponies, and she stood as tall as her sister above them. They all looked over a map of some description, but the labels were all written in a language Starlit couldn't read.
"Your Highness, Twilight is mobilizing her forces even as we speak!" one of the military ponies said through a bushy mustache. "If we don't get the automatons on the front lines now we're going to fighting a war on two fronts between her at our back and Chrysalis from the front."
"I understand the stakes, Morning Guard," Luna replied, her tone frantic and overwhelmed, "but the automatons are still being constructed! I should never have decommissioned my first force of them during the Unification."
"We are losing more and more ponies by the day, and that number is only going to grow if we can't field our best troops," Morning Guard said. "If you would allow the bat-ponies to leave the castle and aid us in the fight we might be able to hold Chrysalis off long enough to get the automatons rolled out."
"Absolutely not! They stay in the palace, as the last bastion to my throne and the power that building contains!"
Before Morning Guard could retort the door to the room crashed open, followed by a haggard looking soldier in dented and blood-spattered mail.
"She's here, My Lady!" he announced before flopping to the floor from exhaustion.
The bunker exploded into a flurry of activity before the world dissolved into mist and resolved into a scene of absolute terror. Starlit recognized that she was in New Selene, the city now being besieged. From one side thousands of insectoid ponies buzzed through the air while from the other blobs of arcane power flew through the sky, crashing into buildings and sending soldiers and civilians alike scrambling.
Starlit reflexively dodged out of the way as a group of soldiers ran past her, followed up closely by Luna. Her eyes were wide and darting every which way, drinking in as much of the horror as they could.
"Your Majesty, we need reinforcements!" a soldier yelled over the din. "We're being slaughtered out h—"
The soldier was cut off by a bolt of magic burning through his heart, and he fell to the ground like a sack of meat. Luna stepped back, shock and disgust in every action she took, and she took off towards her palace, fading into the distance as the world faded around Starlit, leaving her and Luna in the blank space and staring each other down.
"Why are you showing me these?" Starlit asked. "If it's to help garner sympathy for what you did, then you're barking up the wrong tree."
Luna laughed, a deep, throaty chuckle that betrayed the complete lack of caring she held for Starlit's assertion.
"I need no sympathy from thee," Luna answered. "I show you this to try and illustrate the type of mare that I was before all of this. So tell me, what dost thou make of my character?"
Starlit looked up at Luna, locking eyes with the mare who wore a amused smirk. She thought she had Starlit backed into a corner, but Starlit wasn't so easily bested.
"I see a whiny, petulant, fearful, and altogether self-centered pony," Starlit calmly explained. "I see a mare who had worlds given to her on a silver tray, and she still greedily asked for more and more without giving any consideration to the cost of her avarice."
"To be fair, I was but a child in that first memory," Luna replied, her smirk growing less smug and more awkward.
"I'm aware, and the child in that memory didn't grow up. She was coddled, protected, and sheltered from the realities of life so that when she was given rule of her own she couldn't deal with it like an adult. I see a mare who thought she owned the world, and when the time came to prove it she broke under the weight of her own ineptitude."
Luna's smile faded completely, and for the first time since they'd met she looked somewhat shocked. She looked indignant and mortified at Starlit's assertion.
There was a flash of blue, followed by pervasive darkness and the world around Starlit thumping away.
* * *
When Starlit awoke from death she was still in the misty void, and had a splitting headache to show for her arrogance. She looked around and saw Luna, sitting some distance away with her back to Starlit, except not as she was. Her coat was the same dusty blue as she had had as a child, and for all intents and purposes she looked like her age had regressed.
Carefully Starlit stood up and walked over to Luna, only to be halted by a field of pale blue magic.
"Go away!" Luna demanded, her voice whiny and shrill.
"Luna, you can't keep me out, and you can't just kill me," Starlit replied. "Equestria needs you, and you can't run away from this."
"Why not?" Luna asked.
"Because a lot of ponies will get hurt and die."
"So? Who cares about them, they were mean to me first!"
Starlit sat on the other side of the force field, contemplating her options. Luna hadn't just regressed physically, she had regressed emotionally as well, and Starlit thanked her lucky stars that she had substantial parenting experience.
"Well, why were they mean?" Starlit asked, putting on her most motherly voice. "Did you do something to them first?"
"No! They just hate me!" Luna shot back.
"Nopony just hates another pony without there being a reason," Starlit continued. "There must be a reason why they don't like you."
Luna shuffled nervously on her tiny haunches, the same sort of wiggle that White Eclipse would get whenever she had been caught up in a lie.
"They wanted my toys, and I said no," Luna admitted. There was a small flash of light and one of her automatons appeared in between them. This one looked different from the others; Its joints were more solidly mechanical, and there were less apparent wires. Most of all, its armor was a sleek midnight blue and far less ornamented than the brass ones, and it stood only at the height of a child.
"Well, why didn't you want to share?" Starlit asked. "Sharing is a good thing to do, you know."
"Because they're mine!" Luna whined. "They're my friends, and they keep me safe when the guards and Starswirl aren't there. I wouldn't share them, and then they said I couldn't have them any more and made me get rid of them."
Starlit started to connect two and two together, and she suddenly felt her heart break for Luna, both the child and the tyrant.
"You're lonely, aren't you?" Starlit asked. "Nopony else wants to play with you and share their things, so you made your own friends that wouldn't ever leave you."
Luna turned her head, letting Starlit get a good look at her eyes, wet and near the point of spilling over with tears.
"I don't know," Luna said. She sounded tiny and broken, like a bird without a song.
"Why don't you know if you're lonely?"
"Because I see ponies every day, but they don't talk to me like they do to each other. They call me Princess, bow to me, and don't say hello when I say hello to them."
"Luna, just because you're different than them doesn't mean that other ponies don't love you or want to be your friend," Starlit replied. "You just have a lot of responsibility to live up to, and other ponies see that and think they have to treat you differently."
As she listened, Luna's body shifted, growing in size and darkening in color until she was the mare that Starlit had seen in the middle two memories. She stood tall, facing Starlit and a withering stare etched on her face.
"They wanted to love me, you say?" Luna retorted. "Then why did they send me away? Why was I forced to leave the only home I had ever known to go rule in some foreign land?"
Starlit stood up, glad to actually be on eye level with Luna. It made her seem more approachable, more relatable and easier to understand.
"I don't know," Starlit answered. "That story has been lost to history, but I can at least hazard a guess."
"Then hazard away," Luna said, a weary sigh in her voice.
"I think they wanted you to find meaning in your life. They saw you cooped up and languishing in your homeland and wanted you to go out and see the world. You had already been chosen to rule in Equestria, so it gave them the perfect opportunity to facilitate your growth."
"You should know by now that my people were hardly that altruistic," Luna replied. "They sent me off because they needed a convenient pawn in the grand game of conquest they were playing."
"Perhaps you should give your people more credit," Starlit said. "There is no such thing as an absolute, and I'm certain the alicorns were no exception to this rule."
"Whatever lingering goodwill I held for my people dried up when I went off to war. Cadence had sent a token army and only participated in one battle before holing away in the Crystal Empire, and the alicorns harbored her happily despite her crimes against the land she was supposed to watch over. They loved their Empress of the Heart more as a war criminal than they ever loved me as a child or a Princess."
Luna's body shifted once again, growing to again be as tall as her sister and her armor manifesting onto her body. Her eyes weren't slitted, but they bore the weight of the mare whose eyes were all the same.
"I fought and bled for my vision of the future, for a land free from Chrysalis's poisonous influence, from Twilight and Cadence's scheming, and from my sister's naïveté. Sheltered though I may have been, I learned the hard truth of the world far sooner than they did; reliance on others is folly. The only thing you can truly trust is whatever you make for yourself."
Blood began to pour from numerous cuts and wounds that manifested on Luna's body, and a legion of her brass machines rose out of the mist behind her. Her coat blackened and her eyes went slitted while her teeth sharpened into fangs, returning Luna to the form Starlit knew best. The grim tableau was terrifying and awe-inspiring, the very vision of war's personification.
"So tell me, Starlit Sky, why should you release me from this prison? What could you possibly stand to gain from releasing a mare that would butcher her own citizens and not think twice about it? From a mare who would send her soldiers to die in a war she wanted no part of?"
Starlit stared at Luna, trying to find words that wouldn't sound trite or hackneyed. The machines stood at locked attention behind Luna, a thousand-thousand tin soldiers without an ounce of emotion amongst the lot of them.
"Because you are lonely, Luna," Starlit answered. "You try to deny it, try to push everypony away, but you crave affection, crave love. You have no faith in anypony but yourself because you were never allowed the chance to have it proven to you."
Calmly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Starlit stepped forward. The barrier that had been erected between the two of them dissolved as Starlit touched it with her horn, and Starlit beckoned Luna to sit down with her. Reluctantly, the Princess listened.
Starlit threw her forelegs around Luna, pulling her close into a warm embrace. Blood from Luna's manifested wounds dripped onto her head and smeared her coat, but she didn't mind.
"I love you, Luna. Not just because you're a Princess, and not because somepony told me I had to. I see so much potential in you, and I want you to be able to see that potential too. You can be so much greater than what you've been, you just needed somepony else to help you realize it."
Starlit felt Luna's form shift once more, growing smaller and smaller until she was but a child again. Her forelegs were wrapped tight against Starlit's neck, and the filly cried softly into Starlit's shoulder. Despite her efforts, Starlit wept too.
* * *
Sun sat against the wall of the chamber, mind wracked with guilt and loneliness and fear. He fought the urge to be sick every time he thought about Chirox, laying dead not fifty feet away, and he waited for Starlight Glimmer and her machines to march into the chamber and kill him. At this point, he wouldn't have resisted.
Silence, appropriately and thankfully enough, had been silent as Sun fought with his turmoil, and Starlit vanishing had very nearly broken him. He tried to open the hatches to the machines that imprisoned Rarity and Pinkie Pie, But they were sealed and locked in a way he couldn't physically best. He considered using magic to try and open them, but feared a bad reaction to the magic in the devices.
And so he sat, staring at the wall and waiting for something to happen. Even when he had been a child he had never felt so impotent, so powerless.
The flash of light from Luna's crystalline prison startled Sun out of his repose, and he backed away as the light grew brighter and brighter, shining with grey light that grew so bright it may as well have been white before shattering. The pieces hung in the air as a pair of figures stepped out of the light, walking on a floor of mist shoulder to shoulder.
The shards fell with a sound like glass rain when Starlit and, presumably, Luna walked out of the light and onto the floor, and the light retracted into a pinpoint until it faded away completely.
"Sun," Starlit said as she approached, "I would like you to meet Princess Luna."
"Sun's eyes flicked back and forth between the pair of them. Both Starlit and Luna wore smiles, the former's of reassurance and the latter's of uncertainty. Gingerly Sun approached Luna, and she made no move to indicate that she was a threat.
"Your Majesty," Sun addressed.
"Given my reputation, I don't think that formalities are necessary, but I accept them nonetheless," Luna replied, bowing her head slightly. "Now, what do we do about this?"
Luna turned and gestured to the machines and devices scattered about the room. The automatons were still twitching in the floor, but some of the light had come back into their eyes and they moved with a little more purpose.
"We need to get Rarity and Pinkie Pie to safety," Sun said. "I don't suppose you have a solution for that?"
"As the mare who perfected the art of putting magic into technology, I think I could take a shot at it," Luna answered. Her horn illuminated a bright blue, and the pair of pods flew open with a hiss of steam and a wisp of magic.
Sun ran over to the left-side pod, finding Pinkie Pie inside. She looked far more sickly than when they'd last spoken, and her normally bouncy and curly hair lay in a flat sheet against her face. Starlit helped Rarity out of her pod, and Sun was relieved to see that she was at least conscious.
"Starlit, Pinkie's out cold and she looks bad," Sun said, drawing Luna's attention. She went over to examine Pinkie Pie herself, her eyes narrowed in thought.
"I remember feeling this one's presence in my prison when that interloper activated the machines," Luna said. "There is a presence afflicting her mind, not unlike the one that afflicts you."
Before Sun could ask how she knew about Silence, Luna illuminated her horn again, letting its magic wash over Pinkie Pie. Some of the color started to come back in her coat as Luna worked her spell, and a little bit of grey magic started to drain out of her mouth.
"How did she get that? That's the type of magic in Starlit's amulet," Sun said.
"I fear that I am not the pony to talk to about this," Luna answered, still working her magic. "It is something that you would need to find Cadence for, although you would be hard pressed to get to the Crystal Empire."
"Could you take a guess?" Sun asked, more of a plea than a question.
"I could, but not here, not now," Luna answered as the last of the magic filtered out of Pinkie Pie's mouth. "Now, I must address my public. If there is one thing Starlight Glimmer is good for, it's whipping a crowd into a frenzy; I could hear their cheering from inside my prison."
Pinkie Pie's eyes fluttered open, and slowly she turned around in her pod to face Sun and Luna. Her eyes were tired and her smile was weak, but she still had the spark of cheer in her heart.
"Hey Sun," Pinkie said. "Good to see you're not dead."
"I swear I need to greet you when I'm not under imminent threat of death," Sun replied, a weary laugh leaving his lips. His heart still ached and his head was still filled with visions of what he'd done, but Pinkie's nonchalance helped more than she would ever know.
"Miss Pie," Luna said, "the four of you need to leave this place. It is about to become the epicenter for something massive, and you will all need to be far away from it. Can you walk?"
"Probably not," Pinkie answered, futilely trying to raise herself up out of the pod. "I call Starlit's back, her fur's soft."
Luna wrapped Pinkie up in a veil of blue magic and slowly lifted her out, setting her down on one of the cleaner spots on the floor. Starlit and Rarity both came over and sat by her, with Rarity throwing a hug around her old friend that Pinkie eagerly reciprocated.
"Sun, if you would," Luna said, gesturing to his friends. He nodded and joined them, happy that they could all make it out.
Another wave of sadness washed over him when he remembered that they didn't all make it out, followed by a wave of blue magic spiriting him and his friends away.
* * *
Part III - Chapter 12: Sweet Dreams Are Made Of These
Part III - Chapter 12: Sweet Dreams Are Made Of These
* * *
Starlit and her companions vanished in a flash of magic. Luna had teleported them somewhere in the now vacated city she had called home, somewhere safe and secure. She could hear the crowd of ponies roaring from the room she had called her prison for so long, but she had never felt lonelier.
Slowly she looked at the room, drinking it in with her eyes. Aside from the machines that Starlight Glimmer had put into it and the twitching automatons that Chirox had disabled, it was as she had remembered it from centuries before.
She illuminated her horn and cast its glow over one of the closer automatons, wondering if she could still do what needed to be done.
The automaton jerked and jittered under the effect of her magic, seizing as Luna called forth the light-gas from its body. As the pale blue mist leaked from its joints and vents the machine went still, and its blazing red eyes softened to teal before finally dimming to grey.
"Be still. Your time here is done," Luna said to it, her voice soft and tender.
The mist floated around Luna's head, encased in her magic. For something so small to have caused so much pain made her chest tight from guilt. She had spread this substance throughout the ground, it was her responsibility to get rid of it.
With another swish of her horn she pressed the gas together, condensing it until it formed a single blue shard of crystal. In this state it would be inert until acted upon by specific technology, as her people had discovered so long ago and she had exploited not so long ago.
Luna repeated this process for all of the automatons in the room, flexing her magical strength after so long confined and saying a short eulogy for the thestrals trapped in the machines. Their minds may have been long gone, but they had lived nonetheless. After everything she had done, it was the first step towards some sort of redemption.
The second would come with her address to her citizens.
Luna began the long march through her empty palace to the entrance hall. The banners had long since been removed and the ornamentation was nowhere to be seen, which gave the entire place the air of a mausoleum. Luna found it fitting.
Luna passed by Chirox's body as she left her chamber. The mare was still as stone, her eye a burnt-out hole of gore. Luna's stomach should've turned but it didn't, and she continued on her way.
It was a slow walk that Luna took, taking in the dim halls of her abode and thinking long and hard about all that had gone into making it. The years of labor, the magic poured into its masonry and structure, and how willing she'd been to throw it all away.
Although she didn't want to admit it, Starlit was right about her. The petulance and immaturity that had characterized her reign was endemic to herself, and it was time to rectify the situation.
The roaring grew louder as she stepped towards the massive iron doors of her grand foyer. A thick layer of dust lay across the floor, and when she pressed the doors open with her magic they groaned and creaked with their age. She was astonished that they had not collapsed out from under their own weight.
A pall fell over everything when the doors opened, and it maintained as Luna passed by the startled ponies on a makeshift stage that he'd been erected in front of her palace. A few of the automatons stationed there made threatening moves to her, and she drained their power with nary a care.
Luna recognized Starlight Glimmer as she bounded towards her, sweating with worry and stammering something or other. With a burst of magic Luna set a seal on her mouth, holding it closed.
"You have done quite enough, I would think," Luna admonished. "Perhaps some time to reflect in quiet would do you well. It has certainly helped me."
Starlight's eyes went wide with fear. Luna decided to indulge her pettiness one final time and let her quarry stew in her worry and terror as she took the stage.
Thousands of eyes were fixed upon Luna, and the nighttime silence was so profound that not even an errant cricket would dare disturb it.
Luna took a deep breath, centered herself, and began to speak to her ponies.
"Citizens of New Selene, thy Princess would speak to thee," Luna announced, using her magic to magnify her voice. "It hast been too long since I have had the opportunity to address thee, and I fear that that sorry state of affairs is our fault."
The crowd erupted into murmurs of confusion, a better reaction that Luna had expected. At least they weren't rioting.
"I have made many a grave error and terrible mistake in the course of my rule," Luna continued, "and for that I offer up my deepest apologies. This city, and the injustice that festers in it like feculent rot, was and is my fault."
"For you see, there is a rot that lives and breeds underneath this very city, and it was I who put it there. The very energy source that fuels New Selene is its downfall, and it was put there by me so that I may one day raze this city back to the earth from whence it came. I attempted this once, and the sad state of my palace and the lands surrounding it are a testament to its power."
The murmurs now grew more concerned, and an appreciable amount of the crowd were starting to vacate with haste. Whatever their other failings, Starlight and her gang of cronies masquerading as a governing body stood their ground.
"I wish we could tell you that this curse, this blight upon the land, was to stave off something far worse, but that would be yet another falsehood added to the mountain of them that I have hoarded. I wish that there was a reason for all of this suffering that I have caused, but there is no excuse good enough."
"The truth of the matter," Luna continued, her voice cracking as she spoke, "is that I grew tired of the likes of thee. I grew resentful of the freedom that everypony took for granted that had been callously denied to me, and I wished to make a world that I could control as I had been controlled."
More than a few of the gathered ponies looked upon her with confusion, and more still with anger. Their demeanor was understandable, but Luna found that it stung all the same.
"Nothing I can do now will ever be able to make up for the mistakes of the past, but at the very least I can offer you a measure of comfort and peace of mind. Consider this a final gift from the mare who wronged this city so long ago."
Luna's horn lit a fierce blue, brighter and more intense as she pulled more of her strength into the spell. The earth began to rumble, pulsing with energy and spilling teal light from every errant crack in the ground. The crowd that had already been on edge started to panic, a panic only exacerbated when the automatons spread throughout the crowd started to seize and fall over in spasms.
Luna watched with pride as the night sky started to grow bright with the glow of light-gas, swirling and amassing overhead from the veins she had funneled into the earth. The ponies of the city made haste to escape, save for a few who thought their time was nigh and stared up at the growing cloud above their heads with fear.
As the last of the gas drained from the earth and the automatons, the lights from the city flickered off, leaving the teal glow of the billowing cloud of light-gas as the only illumination.
With a series of complex gestures from both her horn and her body she began the laborious process of condensing the light-gas back into its original crystalline form. The soft plink of tiny crystals falling to the ground warmed Luna's ears like soft rain, and the sound soon grew loud enough that the ponies that had fled were stopped by its wonderful cacophony.
The ponies of the Council and the ponies in the crowd stared up in wonder as more and more of the gas turned into smooth crystal, doing their best to dodge around the falling gems. As the last few fell the ponies started to sift through them, holding them up with quizzical looks.
"This is what thy 'light-gas' initially was," Luna said, projecting her voice further to reach the ponies who had not yet returned. "A power source unlike any the world has seen before or since, and one that I misappropriated to destroy. It was never intended for the function I perverted it towards, and now I would see it return to its original purpose."
With a tired wave of her horn the gemstones all vanished away from the open field with a flash of blue light, leaving the crowd perplexed and more than a bit nervous.
"Everypony in this city has been provided with a small share of these gems of power. The technology that thou hast created to condense and utilize light-gas will work for these gems with only minor adjustments that I will provide schematics for. All that I ask is that thou wouldst treat these stones not as commodities but as equalizers."
Luna gave a pointed glare to the ponies of the Council, each of them bowing under her furrowed brow and stern frown. She quickly dragged Starlight Glimmer forward, undoing the seal over her mouth as she floated the terrified unicorn before the assembled ponies.
"I would ask not that thou commit violence towards the ponies that have wronged thee and kept thee under their iron hooves," Luna continued, "but I command that you never let such a corrupt and self-serving governance arise again. Everypony shall serve the common good of all, and all shall prosper for it."
With a final flick of her horn Luna threw Starlight off of the stage, as well as the rest of the Council ponies. She didn't stay long enough to see what became of them; she was tired and she needed to speak with Starlit Sky one final time before the mare that had freed her left the city.
* * *
The nighttime breeze cooled Starlit's fur as she wandered the empty streets of New Selene. She had just started getting used to the constant hustle and bustle of the city, but welcomed the silence all the same. After the last two days she had had she needed some time to think.
Luna's spell had left Sun, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, and herself back in Redheart's humble hovel. She had joined the rest of the city for the Council's rally, so she was certainly going to be in for a nasty shock when she found her home once again filled with ponies in desperate need of rest.
Starlit was walking down the main thoroughfare for one of the innumerable merchant's districts when a small clink drew her attention to the cobblestones in front of her.
"What fresh hell is this?" Starlit groused as she picked the small crystal up in her magic, turning it around to look at each of its facets.
"A hell I made, and one I'm hoping to turn into a heaven," a familiar voice answered from above. Starlit looked up to see Luna hovering above her, resting on a small storm cloud.
"I take it your address went well?" Starlit asked. "Considering that I didn't hear any explosions or cries of distress and all that."
"Better than I anticipated, given what I told everypony. Of course, you already know the depths of my transgressions, and even still there are some that I have yet to speak of."
Luna alighted onto the ground, her pale blue horseshoes clinking with the same resonance as the crystal had. Even in such humble circumstances she was a picture of regality on par with her sister who had actually put an effort into her appearance.
"So, is this the part where we have a tearful goodbye, with mutual thanks for helping each other?" Starlit asked, coy but kind all the same.
"I think we've exchanged enough tearful words, if I'm to be completely honest," Luna answered with a chuckle, "but I did want to thank you for helping me back to the light. Jealousy and anger are fickle things, capable of dominating even the strongest of wills."
Luna flicked her horn and pulled the crystal she had dropped into her magic, idly flipping and twirling it through the nighttime air.
"And yet, something born of anger can, with time, be used to heal the very thing that made it," Luna continued. "But it doesn't erase the sins of the past."
"Nothing really can, but like I told Celestia, all that matters is doing what you can in the present to make the world better."
Luna bristled ever so slightly at the mention of her sister, turning her gaze to focus on a part of the pavement.
"Luna, I can't presume to know what it was that drove you all apart," Starlit continued, "but if you're really going to make amends for what happened back then then you need to make amends with Celestia. When last I saw she had already returned to Canterlot. She's waiting for you there."
Luna breathed a few shaky breaths, closing her eyes and focusing herself before she turned back to Starlit.
"You've already done so much for me," Luna said, "it almost feels like an overreach to ask for one more thing."
"If it helps you, then ask away. It's why I came here, after all."
"When you see Twilight again, as I'm sure you will," Luna continued, "tell her that I'm sorry for not heeding her warnings about Chrysalis. I'm afraid it's too little too late for proper amends, but I always regretted not listening to her about that matter."
"I'm sure she'll appreciate the sentiment regardless," Starlit answered. "So, what are you going to do now?"
"Firstly I need to stabilize my city," Luna answered, her expression turning serious. "I just overthrew a centuries old government in a single night, and that sort of reformation can lead to chaos if not handled with a deft hoof."
"Then it would seem you have your work cut out for you, and I'm keeping you from it. I'll only be staying in the city for one more night before moving on, so until we meet again—"
Starlit was cut off by a swift and tight embrace from the Princess, one that nearly pulled her off of her hooves.
"You're a good mare, and I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors," Luna said, her voice sweet and cool as the night air.
Before Starlit could reply Luna took to the sky, gliding on the cool night breeze as easily as a sparrow. Compared to the black coated mare she had seen before, Starlit saw that Luna was beautiful and awe-inspiring in all the right ways.
* * *
"So are you sure that this is going to work?" Sun asked, the early morning light making him wince as it got in his eyes.
"If what Twilight has taught me about how magic works is accurate, then it should," Starlit answered, focusing on the crudely drawn teleportation circle on the ground. She had drawn the sigils as best as she could remember them, and added in a ring of warding glyphs just in case anything went wrong and caused what Twilight had called a 'magical feedback'.
Starlit and Sun had stayed at Redheart's home for one more night before saying their farewells to everypony. Rarity and Pinkie both had been sad at a level disproportionate to how long they had known them, but given the events of the last forty-eight hours or so it wasn't completely unjustified. Sun and Rarity had spoken for a long while as Starlit packed their things up, and Pinkie Pie sent them off with a small sack of homemade cookies she'd seemingly materialized from thin air.
The question of how they were going to get back to Twilight was a different issue all together, and one that Starlit had secretly been dreading ever since Luna had flown off the previous night. It wasn't like they could walk all the way back there, and creating an ad hoc teleportation pad was not the first choice she had thought up.
"And you're sure that the two of us combined will have enough power to get us back?" Sun asked, the same refrain he'd been spouting off every few minutes since Starlit had started drawing the circle.
"Sun, you can either ask questions or you can help; if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem," Starlit retorted as she put the finishing touches in her warding glyphs.
"Right, sorry, it's just that this is some really complex magic that I'm pretty sure you're guessing on half of."
"You're the one who studied all that magic when you were living in Appleoosa, you tell me if I'm doing this correctly," Starlit replied.
With a focused stare Sun looked over the sigils, lines, and glyphs that Starlit had dug into the loose dirt of the road leading out from New Selene. It was several agonizing minutes of him looking, making various curious noises, and occasionally adding a line or two to a sigil or erasing a glyph and laying down a new one in its place.
"It's not perfect, but it should focus the magic enough for a one way trip," Sun finally said. "If we had some copper to conduct it further that'd be ideal, but we need to work with what we have."
"If this does work then we could just ask Twilight for some when we get back," Starlit replied.
They both stood outside the rings and lines, looking upon their handiwork with equal measures of pride and trepidation. A bird chirped in the distance as a vole scurried past in the grass on the side of the road.
"So, you're getting in it first, right?" Sun asked nervously.
"I thought you were going to," Starlit answered.
"Me? Goodness no, the one who drew it should get the first honor."
"That sounds an awful lot like quitter talk, Sun."
"No, it sounds like a gentlepony who's trying to be polite. You know, ladies first and all that," Sun added with a slight bow.
"If I'm a lady then you're the long lost Princess of Friendship," Starlit retorted. "You go first."
"How about we both go together?" Sun offered. "So that way if it goes bad we both get flayed alive and reduced to piles of bloody ribbons."
A moment of silence was quickly followed by peals of laughter. Starlit knew that contrarianism wasn't going to get them anywhere, but it was funny nonetheless to engage in some childlike bickering.
Extending her hoof, Starlit and Sun came together in the center of their circle, horns illuminating bright blue and green. Sun was mostly going to act as an extra source of magic for the spell while Starlit pictured their destination.
Starlit closed her eyes, letting familiar sights and sounds flood her mind. The creak of the wood slats that made the front porch, the scent of fresh dirt being tilled, and the sight of her old warding lines. It was as crystal clear in her mind as if she was standing right in front of it.
A single tear fell from her eye as Starlit thought of home, and the pair vanished in a flash of blue light.
* * *
When Sun awoke his head felt as if it was an inch away from splitting in two, and the sun shining on his face wasn't helping matters one bit. He wearily flopped on the hard grass and dirt, trying to find purchase with which he could right himself up. The back of his head throbbed with a dull ache.
The whole world was tilted at an angle as he sat upright, but he was able at least to see what was in front of him as his vision focused. He was staring at an opaque wall of fog, a stark monument against the pastoral landscape that surrounded it, and Starlit holding a hoof against it.
"Did it work, or are we dead?" Sun slurred out.
"It worked," Starlit answered, "but I didn't really know what I expected to see."
Sun saw Starlit press harder against the wall of fog, like she was trying to pierce through the veil that had led to the Golden Oak's clearing.
"Where are we? This doesn't look like Twilight's tree."
"It isn't," Starlit answered ruefully. "This is my home, or it should be at least. Twilight said she was going to halt time around the house so that my husband and daughter would never know I was gone, but…"
"You at least wanted to see them," Sun finished.
"Right," Starlit answered, resting her forehead on the fog wall.
Shakily Sun got to his hooves, losing his balance twice before finally getting his footing.
"It was the only place I could think of to trace the teleportation spell to," Starlit continued. "Twilight's tree is off in the woods, probably five miles or so away. If you want to take a head start then feel free to, I'll catch up."
"Starlit," Sun started before deciding better. He had known her long enough to tell that she needed a moment.
Sun ambled his way towards the tree line that he could see in the distance, nearly tripping a few times. The strain of the spell was slowing his body down considerably, and the pressure at the back of his head when Silence started talking didn't help matters.
"You lived. Commendable, and quite unexpected if I'm being honest with you."
"Now is really not the time for your passive-aggressive banter, Silence," Sun sniped back. "I have a lot that I'm mulling over and my whole body feels like sludge. Get to the point or get lost."
"Very well, if you insist," Silence replied. "Starlit has something in her saddlebags, something that Luna gave her, that could help your waning magic. I'd suggest you speak with her about it."
Sun stopped just as he got the edge of the forest, and not only because he had no idea which way to go to get to the Golden Oak.
"What do you mean?" Sun asked, his curiosity piqued.
"It's a piece of crystal from the far north that Luna had stolen to make into a weapon. You already had a run-in with it when you were blown up in the mines."
Sun felt a phantom pain shoot through his left eye, sending a worried shudder down his spine.
"When last I checked, it was light-gas that caused that explosion, not a chunk of crystal," Sun replied.
"And where do you think that light-gas came from?" Silence asked. "Luna took these crystals and transmuted them into gas before spreading them into the ground below her city centuries ago. Her plan was to use them to blow New Selene sky high, but she was imprisoned before she could. You're very lucky that that pocket didn't set an entire vein of it off."
"Be that as it may, how will it help with my magic?" Sun asked, bile rising in his stomach at the thought that he'd been standing atop a city rigged to blow for over two days.
"You're smart, I'm certain you could figure this one out," Silence smugly answered.
"What part of 'now is not the time for your passive-aggressive banter' did you not understand?!" Sun snapped back. Explain, now!"
"Those crystals are from the Crystal Empire," Silence hastily replied, "and that whole area is a wellspring of magical energy. It's the homeland of the alicorns, and you've seen how much innate magic they have. You can draw energy from that crystal to replenish your own."
Sun breathed steadily, slowing his heartbeat down as he did. Whoever said that threats didn't get results had obviously not been making the right threats.
"There, now was that so hard?" Sun asked.
"Just think of that information as a reward for showing some backbone. Starlit's gonna be here soon, so be sure to talk to her about it."
The pressure in Sun's mind faded, allowing him the clarity of thought to notice the sound of dry grass crunching underhoof from the distance. As he turned to see Starlit approach he really took in the area that she lived in; it was wretched, but it had a certain dismal majesty to it all the same.
"Thanks for waiting," Starlit said.
"I had to, you're the only one that knows the way," Sun answered, holding a hoof out towards the forest.
Starlit let a small chuckle escape her throat as they both entered the woods, but Sun was far too preoccupied with everything that had happened to share in the weary mirth. He felt like he could sleep for a week, and it had only been a bit over two days since they'd set off.
The trek back through the forest was uneventful, which given the eventfulness of their stay in New Selene was just fine by Starlit. Sun especially looked like he needed the rest and a chance to process everything that had happened to him, so Starlit didn't bother him.
The fog gate into the Golden Oak's glade parted like water as soon as the pair approached, and Starlit found that Twilight had left her front door unlocked. Sun said nothing as he trudged up the stairs to the guest room where he had stayed, while Starlit found that her pile of pillows amongst the books on the ground floor was mercifully undisturbed.
Starlit slept for hours upon hours, grateful to give her weary bones some rest. Redheart's spare cot had been comfortable enough, but the pillow pile absorbed and cushioned her body in just the perfect way. It was like sleeping in a cloud, and not even the light of day streaming in through the windows could disrupt her.
The sun had already gone below the tree-line when Starlit awoke, blinking crust from around her eyes and yawning. Nopony had tried to disturb her, which she was grateful for, but the Oak felt quiet, quieter than she expected it to be. She got to her hooves and started shuffling around, looking for any sign of Twilight or Spike.
"Hello? Anypony home?" Starlit called, poking her head into the kitchen. Nothing was prepared for a meal, and the place looked like it hadn't been touched in days.
Her pulse quickening slightly, Starlit walked up to the guest space. She didn't disturb Sun, but checked throughout all of the upper floors and still found nopony. She beat hooves down to the ground floor and finally into the basement, where she found Spike walking around and looking at a few of Twilight's devices.
Spike jumped when Starlit entered, the light of his projected body intensifying as he did. Starlit saw no sign of Twilight anywhere, which begged the question of how Spike was active.
"Don't scare me like that!" Spike chided.
"Apologies, I was just worried. I woke up and nopony was around, so I might've gotten a tad antsy. Do you know where Twilight is?"
"She went out yesterday, said something about some things she needed to check up on, typical vague wording and whatnot" Spike answered. "She said it might take a while, so that's why she set me to make sure that if you got back before she did I'd be able to take care of you. I just didn't want to bug you while you were sleeping."
"I appreciate your courtesy, but there are a few things that I need to discuss with Twilight about our visit to New Selene. Did she give any timeframe on when she'd be back?"
"Sorry, but nothing definitive," Spike answered sheepishly.
Starlit snorted, irritated but not angry. She'd just have to be patient.
"Very well then, I'll leave you to your work," Starlit replied, turning to go back upstairs. "I'll be in the kitchen making supper if you need me."
"Can I help out?" Spike asked. "To be honest with you I was just fiddling around with some of the stuff down here, I'd love to help."
"If you're that bored, then feel free," Starlit answered, gesturing him forward.
Starlit felt an odd tingling as Spike ran through her, the lines of light from his body dissipating and reforming as he made his way up the stairs.
"If I might ask, but how can you help, exactly?" Starlit asked as they got up to the ground floor. "After all, it isn't like you can pick things up if you're made of light."
"Selective permeability," Spike replied. "Part of the spell that makes my body also lets me pick when I can go through things or not. I wouldn't be that good of a helper to Twilight if I couldn't go grab books for her."
"She really is a talented sorceress, I'll give her that much," Starlit said.
The kitchen was cozy compared to the rest of the Oak's common areas, but it had a nice wood-burning stove and a well stocked pantry. Starlit grabbed a large stock pot and ladled water into it to form a base for some vegetable stock.
"Spike, could you get me a few onions, carrots, and some celery?" Starlit asked. "And a bag of flour while you're at it."
"Can do, ma'am!" Spike replied, diving into the pantry and coming out with his tiny arms loaded down. He carefully laid them all out on the counter and took the initiative to cut up the vegetables on his own.
"Spike, if it wouldn't be too rude to ask, but how did you and Twilight first meet?" Starlit asked as she floated the vegetables to the pot and set them boiling along with some dried spices. "She obviously cares very much about you."
"Oh, it was centuries ago at this point, just before the Unification," Spike answered. "The Princesses were still figuring out how to piece their separate kingdoms together, and Celestia made the troubling discovery that her kingdom bordered on the Dragonlands, just beyond the Flamepeak Mountains."
"There's a whole nation of dragons?" Starlit asked, the thought chilling her to the core.
"There was, but they did something during the war that split their nation off from Equestria and they just floated out to sea. Nopony knows if they're even around anymore, and I was the only one left in Equestria when the war broke out."
"You see," Spike continued, "when Celestia figured out that Equestria was about to share a border with the dragons she went out to them with a diplomatic delegation to let them know about what was happening. Dragons aren't the friendliest bunch by their very natures, but they agreed that as long as Equestria kept its problems to itself then there would be no trouble. As a peace offering they offered Celestia one of their eggs, which they said wouldn't hatch but would serve as a symbolic gesture of connection and trust."
"And that egg was you, I'm assuming," Starlit replied.
"Now I know why Twilight picked you, you're really quick on the uptake. Yes, that egg was me. For a while I just sat around in the palace on Celestia's mantle, but a couple hundred years after the Unification Twilight asked for Celestia's permission to do some experiments on my egg to see if she couldn't get it to hatch."
"According to her it took weeks of careful study and experimentation, but by the end of it she got me to hatch, and once I got old enough I started helping her out around the palace and… well, you know what happened later."
"Right," Starlit replied, adding some salt to the bubbling pot.
"It was pretty rough there for a few years, since I was being raised like a pony but had the temper of a dragon. I set more than a few things in Twilight's library on fire when I'd get out of hoof, but she was patient and kind and I eventually came around."
"Would you say how Twilight was then is much different compared to how she is now?" Starlit asked.
Spike made a motion like he was going to speak, but then stopped for a moment. The lines of light that made up his form halted for a second or two before continuing on as if nothing had happened.
"Spike, are you alright? You locked up there for a bit."
"Never better! Now what do you want me to do with these potatoes?" Spike cheerfully replied.
"You didn't answer my question," Starlit replied, feeling somewhat concerned.
"What question?" Spike asked back.
"Was Twilight much different in the past compared to how she is now?" Starlit reiterated. Again, Spike made a motion to speak and then froze in place before returning to the potatoes he was cutting up.
"Spike, what just happened?" Starlit asked again, more forcefully.
"What are you talking about, I'm just cutting up potatoes," Spike sheepishly replied. "If you want them smaller I can do that for you, no need to get testy."
Starlit was about to restate her question but bit her tongue. Something about that question was throwing Spike into a loop of some kind, and there was no way she could think of to rectify it. She'd have to wait for Sun to get up and ask his advice, preferably away from Spike.
"It was nothing, the potatoes are fine," Starlit answered. "I'll get to collecting the stock if you'll work on the roux for the stew."
"Can do!" Spike replied, eager as always.
* * *
Sun woke up just as Starlit and Spike we're finishing dinner, and judging by how voraciously he ate he needed a good, hot meal. There was little talking around the table as Spike busied himself in the kitchen before going back down to the basement for the evening.
With a satisfied belch Sun flopped back to the pillows that he'd set up behind himself for just such an eventuality.
"I'll take that as a compliment on my cooking," Starlit said as she cleared her dishes.
"If there's one thing that coming on this trip has taught me, it's that near-death experiences and aching hunger are the best seasonings. Thank you for the meal, it really hit the spot."
Starlit chuckled softly to herself, but it was a half-hearted effort at best. She had to tell Sun about what happened to Spike, but at the same time worried that he had too much on his mind after New Selene to stomach another problem.
Starlit came back into the room to find Sun still on his back, staring up at the ceiling and a thousand feet past it.
"Bit for your thoughts?" Starlit asked, sitting down next to him at the table.
"Right now my thoughts would be worth an entire chest-full of them," Sun replied.
"Then what say we trade a thought for a thought, hmm?"
"Fair enough, you first," Sun said. Starlit laid down on her back and stared up at the ceiling as well, noticing how it tapered off into the branch structure of the tree.
"I'm worried that Twilight isn't here," Starlit said. "There's things I learned about in New Selene that I need to talk with her about, and it's eating me up inside."
"Twilight's an alicorn with more power than either of us could ever hope to imagine having, let alone actually possess," Sun replied. "She'll be back before you know it, and you can spill your guts to her then."
"In your patience possess ye your soul," Starlit quipped. "It's an old saying from my grandmother, and I always had trouble following it. You next."
Sun breathed deeply, wiggling slightly to get more comfortable.
"Silence is still in my head, even after I gave back the magic I had gotten from the amulet. She told me Luna gave you a crystal from the Crystal Empire that might help with the fact that I'm slowly losing my magic, but with that combined with Silence's offer to add her power to mine I'm worried that I'm growing more dependent on outside sources for something that used to define me."
Starlit furrowed her brow, trying to remember when Luna gave her something. She had only really spoken with her physically once, but all Starlit remembered was Luna dropping that crystal and then spinning it around in her magic.
Quickly Starlit levitated her bags over and rooted through them, and sure enough she found that same crystal. Luna must've slipped it into her bag when they'd hugged.
"Sun, we all need a leg up in life, some more than most," Starlit said, setting the crystal onto the table. "Just because you need one now doesn't invalidate who you are or what you can do, it just means you need a little more help with it than before."
"Easy for you to say," Sun replied. "You didn't accidentally kill somepony because a voice in your head used their magic, magic that you've come to rely on, to do it."
"Sun, you can lay there feeling sorry for yourself, or you can try and do something to rectify this situation. We'll find a way to fix your magic, but for right now you have options available to you."
Sun cast a sidelong glance at Starlit, flicking his eyes over the small blue crystal as he did. He didn't stir.
"I know how much death hurts, Sun," Starlit continued. "I've seen it play out on a near-constant basis for most of my life. My grandmother, friends I grew up with, even just seeing a pony on the street an inch away from Wasting completely and knowing there was nothing I could do to stop it. At least Chirox died for something she believed in, rather than fading away like so many others."
"It wasn't even that I did it, it was that I had no real choice," Sun replied. "She lunged, bit down into my neck, and I just felt Silence take over from there. Do you know what that's like? To have your agency taken away from you and have somepony die because of it?"
Starlit rolled the crystal across the table with her hoof, idly fidgeting with it as she tried to come up with an example.
"I don't," Starlit admitted. "I don't know what it's like to have somepony make your choice for you. I've been the master of my fate for all my life because I had to be, so I can't say that I can understand that feeling."
Sun sat upright, his expression neutral as he stared at the crystal on the table. Slowly Starlit pushed it towards him, its surface clinking against his bowl as she did.
"I don't know what that's like, but I can empathize with it, and offer some advice," Starlit continued. "Take some of that agency back. Use the crystal, and become the master of your fate."
Sun picked the crystal up in his hooves, turning it over and gazing at its facets. With a sigh and a tired smile he put it into one of the pockets of his cloak.
"I'll think on it," Sun replied, "but I must say you're putting up a really good argument."
"Comes with being a parent, I suppose. The best way to get a child to do what you want is to frame it in a way that points out the benefits for them."
"So I'm like a child to you now, huh?" Sun said coyly.
"Everypony is like a child in certain respects, Sun. Some of us are just better at hiding it than others. Speaking of which, best clean up your dishes or else you'll have to go to time-out."
"You're not my mother, I don't have to do what you say!"
At Sun's faux belligerence Starlit screwed her face up into a countenance of extreme dissatisfaction and disappointment, an expression that had easily been able to cow her daughter and her husband.
"But I'd be happy to do it out of the kindness of my heart," Sun hastily added. "Good grief, if looks could kill…"
"Then I'd have an appreciable body count," Starlit said. "Go clean up, then I'll handle the pots when you're done with your things."
With a bit more speed than was strictly necessary, Sun cleared the table and washed off all of the dishes before retiring for the night. Starlit busied herself taking care of the mess she'd left in the kitchen, her mind able to wander as she did her menial work. For now, at least, she had a semblance of normalcy back in her life, and Starlit relished it.
* * *
The next few days were filled with the sort of domesticity that Starlit thought she had left behind on her farm, not that she was averse to the idea of quiet. Together with Spike and Sun she planned for the next leg of the journey, which she and Sun unanimously decided would be going to the Crystal Empire. With Sun's waning magic becoming an issue and Luna's hints that some answers regarding Starlit's amulet could be found there it seemed the only logical choice.
Sun and Spike had spent a few days gathering together whatever cold weather gear they could find. Starlit had felt the chill of winter before but Sun had lived in a desert his whole life, and the climate change would hit him harder than it would her. It seemed that for every piece of gear she brought to combat the cold, he would bring two.
It was the evening of the fifth day back that Twilight finally returned home, stumbling her way through the front door as Starlit and Sun were sitting down for dinner.
"You're back!" Spike exclaimed from the kitchen as he came to investigate the noise.
"I was actually starting to get worried," Starlit added. "Where were you for so long?"
"Food first, explanations later," Twilight huffed as she off-loaded her things. Her saddlebags sounded like they were filled with stones as they hit the floor, and her traveling cloak had a few noticeable tears and stains.
Twilight sat down heavily at the living room table as Spike bounded out of the kitchen with a fresh garden salad and a hot bowl of potato and leek soup. Twilight ate in silence while Starlit and Sun sat uncomfortably before continuing with their food.
The tension in the room grew so thick that Starlit could practically feel it settle on her shoulders, until Sun finally broke it as Twilight finished the last of her dinner.
"So, where were you?" Sun asked.
"Surveying," Twilight answered tersely. "Taking stock of the country, seeing how or even if Celestia's return to Canterlot was having an effect on the ponies and the land."
"And your conclusion?" Starlit asked, trying to mask the anxiety in her voice.
"Some areas are starting to stabilize, particularly around the Searing Plains. There's more vegetation, although it is distinctly from arid climates. I suppose it was too much to ask it to become the breadbasket of Equestria in the space of two weeks, but it's progress."
"Hopefully the same will start happening in New Selene now that Luna's been convinced to return," Starlit replied. "She said she was going to stay and stabilize the city after overthrowing their government, but would return in good time."
"Yes, that is fortunate. Tell me, what did you find in New Selene, and particularly what sort of state was Luna in?"
Starlit and Sun exchanged a glance, trying to parse out just how much to tell Twilight about Luna, Sun's new friend, and what was being done to the thestrals in the city.
"Well, she had been sealed away in a crystal prison by her bat-pony guards after she tried to destroy the whole city after the war via magic from the Crystal Empire," Sun answered. "The whole city was being controlled by a iron-hoofed Council that was also converting dead thestrals into a new line of automatons. I was nearly killed by a pocket of magical gas exploding in my face, and apparently the bit of magic I absorbed from Starlit's amulet back in Sunspire gave me a weaker version of her resurrection ability."
Twilight and Sun stared at each other, incredulity on her face and stony stoicism on his. Starlit could feel the tension come back twice over.
"And… what say you, Starlit?" Twilight asked. "Any life-changing revelations on your end?"
"Only that the answers about Sun's waning magic and what this amulet did to him are in the Crystal Empire, and we were planning on having that as our next objective."
Twilight tapped her hoof against the table nervously, muttering to herself in deep thought as she stared into the grain of the wooden table.
"We would have to go up there eventually to find Cadance, so we figured this would be akin to killing two birds with one stone," Starlit explained. "We've spent the last few days getting together whatever cold-weather gear we need for the trip, and Spike has been a big help."
"It's not you that I'm particularly worried for," Twilight cut in, "but Cadance. She was always a sensitive mare, it came part and parcel with her role as the Princess of Love. I'm just concerned that she might be… compromised, at least more so than Celestia or Luna were."
"How do you figure?" Sun asked.
"Over the centuries I've tried to keep tabs on the other Princesses, or at least their lands. As I explained, I try to take stock of the country I once ruled whenever I can, but the Empire is obscured to me. Every time I get anywhere near it I end up losing my way, no matter how many maps I bring or spells I use to try and hold my course."
"Then how are we supposed to get there?" Starlit asked. "I don't particularly care for the idea of freezing to death on a wild goose chase."
"I'll have to take a look into some of my old tomes for any spells Cadance or the sorcerers of the Empire may be using to hide it, but that could take weeks that we simply don't have."
The trio sat in uncomfortable silence for a time, each mulling over their options. Starlit despised the impotent feeling that was settling into her stomach, and decided to make the first move.
"If there's something in your dusty old books that can give us safe passage into the Empire, then I'll help you look for it. We can get started tomorrow, but for now I'm going to sleep," Starlit added, getting up from the table and going over to her pillow pile.
"I'm with Starlit," Sun added. "Besides, it's been too long since I did some proper research; I can feel my brain getting lazy from it all."
Sun too got up, ascending the stairs to the guest room with, from Starlit's viewpoint, a little more spring than had been in his step since returning from New Selene.
"What did I ever do to deserve the two of you?" Twilight mused, her tone relieved and content. She too left the table, extinguishing the downstairs candles as she bade Spike a good night and dispelled him after his extended service. Like a familiar blanket the darkness of night settled onto Starlit, and she fell into a deep slumber.
* * *
Sun had been asleep for a few hours when the pressure in his mind settled, and a familiar voice echoed through his weary subconscious.
"You didn't tell Twilight about me," Silence stated. "Why?"
"Because I didn't want to, now go away," Sun replied, stirring in his bed to try and shake Silence away.
"Sorry for the intrusion, I'm just… grateful that you didn't."
"Your welcome. Good night, Silence."
"Good night Sun. Stay safe, and stay wary. I've taken a shine to you and I'd hate to lose you like I nearly did in New Selene."
The pressure ebbed out of Sun's mind just as swiftly as it came, but it took Sun a while longer to truly get back to sleep. It was the first time Silence had ever spoken to him in a way that seemed earnest, and he found her echoing, discordant voice comforting for the first time since she'd taken up residence in his head.
When Sun went back to sleep, he did so smiling.
* * *
Starlit had been asleep for a few hours, eyes shut and ears listening. She was waiting for all the sounds of the Oak to fall silent, particularly from Twilight's room, before she made move.
Moving with the sort of practiced silence that comes from trying to keep a fussy child asleep as one walks past their room, Starlit tiptoed down the stairs to the basement, searching for a particular item. The desks and shelves were in their usual disarray, making Starlit's job that much harder, but she eventually found her prize.
Floating in her magic was an opal stone on a golden chain, the very same that Twilight had stored Spike's consciousness inside of. It was a simple thing, but much like the obsidian amulet it held an air of grace in its simplicity.
"You're going to answer my questions Spike, one way or another," Starlit muttered to herself before stashing the necklace away in her saddlebags.
Starlit was poring over a tome, one of two dozen, that Twilight had given to her that morning before setting off. On one side of the dining room table sat the ones she'd already been over, and on the other sat the ones yet to be completed. The latter was unfortunately still larger than the former.
Her eyes grew weary from the strain despite having ideal lighting conditions, and she got up to stretch her back and get something to drink. Even in what meager schooling she had had before her grandmother's passing Starlit had never been particularly good with studying, and having to study something she barely understood and half of which was in terms she didn't know wasn't helping matters much.
For days it had been like this, with Twilight teleporting across Equestria to scavenge old books and scrolls in between bouts of feverish reading on magic and the northern realms on the parts of Starlit and Sun and the occasional break for food provided by Spike.
Every time Twilight summoned Spike it set a pit of worry into Starlit's stomach. The necklace that held him was still inside Starlit's bags, but if Spike or Twilight knew that she'd taken it they weren't saying. For his part Sun seemed oblivious to Starlit's skullduggery, and she'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible. She would eventually tell him about Spike's hiccup, but not when there was so much work to still be done.
"Starlit, do you have that copy of Northern Climes And The Dangers Thereof?" Sun asked from across the room. "I have something here that I need to cross-reference."
"It's in my 'done' pile, hold on," Starlit answered. With barely an effort Starlit pulled it out of her pile with her magic and floated the book over to him, which he took eagerly. Sun's demeanor had brightened considerably ever since getting the opportunity to do what he loves, which is reading and taking considerable notes.
Starlit returned to her books with a mug of hot, strong coffee. She'd grown used to its bitter taste and needed less sugar and cream to sweeten it, and the pleasant sensation of alertness it gave her was a godsend during her hours of reading.
Ever onwards the hours wore, the sun growing low on the horizon and casting long shadows through the windows. Starlit was just starting up her eighth book and seventh cup of coffee when a magical pop from just behind her caused her to gag.
"I've got it!" Twilight exclaimed as she teleported into the library. Sun and Starlit both leapt up from their respective work stations, with Starlit nearly pulling her back after hours spent hunched over a desk.
"What'd you find?" Sun asked as Twilight laid out a scroll and a relatively new book, at least by the standards of the positively ancient ones she'd been sending in.
"A way to keep your bearing when getting to the Empire, that's what. Get something to hold this scroll open, this is going to need some explaining."
Quickly Starlit levitated over a few of her books and positioned them at the four corners of the now unfurled scroll. Starlit couldn't read the script but did recognize it as the alicorn language that Twilight had slipped into a few times. The book that she was leafing through furiously was written in the common script, with swooping calligraphy and and gold illustrating the pages.
Finally Twilight got to the pages she was looking to find and set it next to the scroll.
"Now, like I said, the Crystal Empire is a nightmare to locate," Twilight began, "but it isn't just because of the treacherous area. According to this scroll from my personal libraries the Empire has a defensive enchantment that was placed on it by the ancient alicorns that can obfuscate its location."
"Aren't you an ancient alicorn?" Starlit asked.
"Oh, this spellwork far predates me, or any of the Princesses for that matter," Twilight replied with a sly grin. "These enchantments were set millennia ago, and only activated during times of crisis."
"What does the book say about all of this?" Sun asked eagerly.
"Now, here's the interesting part; this book is a genealogy tome detailing the lineages of the ruling families of the Empire going back to just before Cadance ascended the throne, and in this section it describes how one family was wiped out just after the war."
"And these enchantments would have something to do with this family's demise?" Starlit asked, unsettled at the thought of an entire family dying at once.
"Precisely," Twilight answered. "According to this record they were wiped out by attempting to draw on the power of these enchantments to bolster their fading magic after the war, but it also left a critical weakness in the defenses that we can exploit. There's a magical deadzone all along the southern border, which I suspect is why I had such trouble navigating; magic is tied to my perception of the world more closely than anypony else alive, and any lack of it is befuddling to me."
"Will this have any adverse affects on us?" Starlit asked. "I'm just getting used to the level of magic your training has been giving me, I don't want to lose it so quickly."
"The two of you should be fine as far as wayfaring is concerned, but within the deadzone you won't be able to use any magic whatsoever, so pack accordingly."
Starlit had already done so during Twilight's absence, gathering up yet another small-sword and swearing to herself that she wouldn't lose this one as well. Sun had managed to keep a hold of the dagger that Starlit had given him and had taken up a hoof axe as well.
"Is there any civilization that we should know about that far north, or will we be on our own?" Sun asked.
"There are a few small villages built up around the border of Equestria proper and the Empire, but none venture out into the deadzone itself for reasons I do not know. You'll have to do some reconnaissance tomorrow, but for tonight you need to rest. I have preparations to make."
"What sort, if I may ask?" Starlit asked as Twilight rolled up the scroll.
"Just a little geomancy, something to help you keep your bearings. The north is a very stormy place and if you've seen one snow-covered hill you've seen them all. Even with magic it is a very easy place to get lost in."
Satisfied and ready for a much deserved bit of rest, Starlit gathered up the books that Twilight had given her and added them to one of the shelves in the library. It took a few minutes to get everything situated downstairs, but as soon as Sun took to the guest room and Twilight to her basement laboratory Starlit settled into her pile of pillows and fell into a restful, if a bit fitful from all the coffee, sleep.
* * *
The next morning was hurried, as had been the moments leading up to Starlit's other two teleportations. Twilight was being her neurotic self, worrying over every minor detail and double-checking the runework on the teleportation pad. She had also given a pair of stone talismans wrapped with leather cord at one side and carved with runes to herself and Sun.
"These sigils… these are compass runes, if I'm not mistaken," Sun stated as he tied his stone to one of the straps on his fur-lined longcoat.
"Precisely," Twilight replied. "Once you get into the deadzone you won't be able to magically orient yourselves—"
"Not that either of us knows how," Starlit cut in.
"Fair point," Twilight said, "but these stones are like compasses that are oriented to always have the leather cord pointing towards the Empire. As long as you have these you'll have a sense of direction."
The teleportation pad started to wind up in its familiar activation sequence; the runes glowed a fierce purple and crackling magical energy arced between its spires. The sight of it reminded Starlit of something she had meant to tell Twilight about her trip to New Selene.
"If you have anything to say, say it now or forever hold your peace," Twilight said, as if on cue.
"I actually do," Starlit replied. "I just wanted to say that I was the one that got Sun and I home from New Selene."
"Were you now?" Twilight asked. "How'd you manage that?"
"I made a kit-bashed teleportation by recalling the sigils as best I could and digging the lines into the dirt with my hoof. Sun did a little proofing on them and I added a warding circle to the outer edge in case something went wrong, but with both of our magics combined it got us back home in one piece."
"Wonderful, simply wonderful!" Twilight said as she led the two of them up to the pad. "You'll have to show me how you did it when you come back, warding magic wasn't a discipline I particularly cared for."
"Certainly," Starlit replied, maintaining a cheerful facade despite the three different worries vying for control of her thoughts; worry for Sun and his waning magic, worry for her family behind their dome of fog, and worry for what Twilight would do if she found out that Starlit had stolen Spike.
For once, it felt good to not be worried about being sent to the edge of the world to track down a long-forgotten Princess.
* * *
The wave of nausea passed sooner than Sun had expected, even if it still felt like a kick to the head. Now he only had to worry about being in the worst cold he'd ever felt and the ever increasing likelihood of his hooves flat out freezing off, instead of those two concerns and how fast he could pull his face mask off so he could vomit into the snow.
A biting wind whipped past his face, causing his coat to flutter haphazardly and his eyes to instinctively water up, and he could barely see two yards in front of him. Everything was white, and he found the effect not too dissimilar to living on the edge of the desert.
"Starlit?!" Sun called, his voice muffled by his face mask and deadened by the wind. "Starlit, where are you!?"
"Over here!" Starlit called from a few feet away. A small glimmer of blue pierced through the grey and white, and Sun trudged through the snow towards her. His furred leathers and snow boots could only do so much to keep the cold out, and his teeth were chattering by the time he got to Starlit.
"Cold enough for you?" Starlit asked playfully.
"How can you possibly be joking at a time like this?!" Sun asked incredulously.
"I'll say one thing for it, this is colder than anything I've felt before. Do you want the extra cloak, or do you think you'll manage?"
"Right now I would do just about anything for the extra coat," Sun ruefully answered. Starlit quickly pulled the extra wool coat that Sun had insisted on bringing out of her extra bags and affixed it underneath his leather overcoat.
"Better?" Starlit asked as she checked her compass stone.
"Much. Now I don't feel like all the heat is draining into my hooves and out of my body. How do you stand this type of weather, this is a nightmare."
"I acclimate fairly well to cold, but even I'll admit that this is extreme," Starlit answered. "I could very well ask you the same about living on the edge of a desert for all of your life."
"I'll tell you how I did it; I didn't go outside unless it was dark or I had to and I had a fairly sophisticated heat-ventilating system in my home that made it about ten degrees cooler than any other building in Appleoosa."
"So, you cheated?" Starlit pointedly asked.
"I prefer to think that I overcame my environment."
"Then you'd better prepare to overcome this," Starlit continued, gesturing for Sun to follow. "We need keep moving if we want to keep our blood flowing and body heat up. Hopefully the compass is pointing us in the same direction as one of those villages Twilight talked about, or else we're going to be roughing it tonight."
Sun shuddered at the thought of having to hole up in a cave or make use of their threadbare tent in the middle of a snowstorm, but he trudged on after Starlit before she got too far away to see. The pair of them illuminated their horns to serve as signals, and Sun could feel Silence giving him a boost as the time wore on.
"Thanks for the help," Sun said to his brain-guest.
"You still haven't used that crystal yet," Silence replied. "Any particular reason for that, or is it just pride?"
"And we're back to the passive-aggressive wit. No, I haven't used the crystal yet, and it isn't just because of pride."
"But it is slightly because of pride," Silence replied teasingly.
"I'd be lying if I said it wasn't," Sun answered. "Imagine that one day the one thing you're good at, the thing that you use as the locus of your identity, starts to slowly and agonizingly get ripped away from you. You can see it happening every step of the way and you're powerless to do anything about it save for rely on something you barely understand to keep it from slipping away any faster than it is. Wouldn't your pride be a little wounded from that?"
"Were I in that particular position, I'd take any opportunity available to me until a more permanent solution was available," Silence answered.
You just have an answer for everything, don't you?" Sun replied ruefully.
Sun trudged in silence save for the howling wind, but the pressure on his brain didn't dissipate to indicate that Silence had left. If anything it was starting to get a bit more intense, focusing to the back of his head.
"Sun, I won't pretend to know what you're going through," Silence stated, calmly but with force, "but I know for truth that hedging on this is only going to imperil you in the long run. The crystal has vast stores of magic in it, enough to see you through the end of this journey. You can either rely on me, or you can rely on it, but you have a choice to make."
Silence's presence faded away before Sun could reply, leaving him with only the wind and Starlit's glowing horn ahead of him for company. His eyes wandered upward to his own horn to find that its pine green glow had been nearly completely replaced with the dull grey glow of Silence's magic. His thoughts ran sour, mostly because he was aware of how right she was.
* * *
As fate would decide, in its unending line of blows that it had been delivering to Starlit as of late, her and Sun's first night would be spent in a lovely cave. The wind had mercifully died down earlier in the day, but it still didn't make the freezing temperatures any more bearable outside of their small fire.
"I didn't think it would be possible, but I think I've found a place I hate more than the desert," Sun groused as he stared at the rapidly heating pot of water over the fire. "At least deserts are flat for the most part. All this mountainous trekking had me working up a sweat in sub-zero temperatures."
"Just be glad that the wind died down when it did, or we'd have gone over that dead-drop cliff for sure," Starlit replied. "You'd think our compasses would be able to lead us in directions that wouldn't lead to certain death."
"Why would you assume that?" Sun asked. "Compasses always point north, these ones are just tuned to point to the Crystal Empire. They don't decide a route."
"They don't?" Starlit asked, looking at her compass. "I thought that's how they worked."
"Starlit, do you mean to tell me that you don't know how a compass works?" Sun asked incredulously.
"Don't blame me, I've never needed to use one before now," Starlit replied defensively.
"Then, while we wait for dinner, why don't I give you a crash course? Let you benefit from some of my wisdom for once."
"I've benefited from your wisdom on more than a few occasions," Starlit replied, "but I'll indulge you. How does a compass work, exactly?"
"A compass, a regular one," Sun clarified, "is simply a product of applied magnetism. Any piece of metal with a sufficient magnetic charge will tend to point to the north. So, if you magnetize a piece of metal with a lodestone and set it into a device that lets it spin freely, it will always rotate to point north. From there, you can orient yourself by determining which direction you're facing compared to the direction the metal is."
"Then how do these stones work, if they're like a compass?" Starlit asked, not wanting to let on that most of the jargon had gone over her head.
"That's a bit trickier to describe. In theory it works like a regular magnetic compass, but instead of using magnetism to find north, it uses a tracking spell to find the direction a location is in. In our case it's the Crystal Empire, but theoretically you could use this type of magic to track anyplace, anything, or anypony."
"It sounds useful, if a bit sinister when you put it like that," Starlit replied as she tugged the stone with her hoof. "I don't much care for the idea that somepony could track me wherever I go."
"I highly doubt that there are any unicorns talented enough to figure out this level of geomancy, and certainly none with the power to do it. You and I are a special case, remember?"
"Special case indeed," Starlit mused. "Keep watch on the pot, I'm going out for some air."
"Suit yourself, just try to stay within eyesight."
Starlit nodded as she walked out of the cave. The blast of cold hit her like a slap in the face, but once she got in it the weather turned gentle. She could feel the slight prickling of the chill on her fur, smell the cold as it burned gently in her nose, but most of all she savored the type of silence that only a snowy night can bring.
Starlit found a relatively clean rock to rest on as she took in the sights around her; the tundra rolled away into the distance, a glittering ocean of frost that shone bright in the pale, smooth moving moonlight. The moon overhead had ceased its jittering lurch across the sky ever since Starlit and Sun had returned from New Selene, and for the first time in her life she could truly appreciate its majesty.
The stars shone beautifully alongside the moon's brilliance, and as Starlit stared she found her mind wandering back to New Selene, and to everything that had occurred in the palace the night she had set Luna free. They were hard memories, but they were the ones that she had let sit in the bottom of her mind for a little too long.
Taking a calming breath, Starlit concentrated and began to focus on her magic and her horn. The blue glow quickly grew to a bright shine, and as it did she thought hard about how she had felt during the fight with Chirox. The pain, the desperation, and especially the betrayal, all melting together as she tried to call back that spark of magic.
A quiet hum was Starlit's reward as a pale blue dome of pure magic enveloped her. It was approximately seven feet or so in diameter and rose a few feet above her head. The night sky danced and shimmered from outside of it, filtering some of the moon's light and giving it an ethereal quality unlike anything she'd ever seen before.
"Just like my warding lines," Starlit muttered in amazement, her eyes wide with delight at her own display.
Quickly Starlit got up and started pacing, taking note of how the field followed her every movement with perfect precision. She experimented with moving it independently of her, changing its size, and even altering the shape, and by the time she finished she was exhausted. Satisfied with her display she trudged back through the snow to the cave, ready for some food and some sleep.
* * *
The morning came early for Starlit and Sun as pale sunlight filtered in through the mouth of the cave, made all the brighter by its reflection off of the fresh snow. They took care to mask their progress and scatter the spent firewood on the off chance that they were being followed, before setting off with their compasses to guide them into the calm and crisp snowfields.
Starlit in particular had a certain spring in her step, but not without a twinge of guilt every now and again. Sun was right, her magical power was getting stronger as she got more used to performing magic, and as much as she wanted to share her experience with the shield she felt like it would come off as gloating.
"You were out in the snow for a while last night," Sun said, striking up conversation. "Can't understand why."
"You obviously haven't seen a clear, snowy night," Starlit replied. "The moon and stars were beautiful, and the way they light up the endless fields of white is simply breathtaking. You ought to get a look tomorrow night, I think you'd really enjoy it."
"I did bring a few star charts in case we ever lost our compasses," Sun said thoughtfully. "I could point out some of the constellations to you if you'd like."
"Anything to make the trip more interesting," Starlit replied.
This sort of banter played back and forth between them for a while as they walked, discussing the weather and the stars and taking care to point out potential hazards and pitfalls as they went. Starlit found the experience to be rather pleasant, and with the sun shining even the cold wasn't too much of an issue.
Hey, do you see that?" Sun said on one of their stops to rest and have a bite of food. He pointed off to a rocky hill in the distance and Starlit swiveled her head to get a good look.
There appeared to be a pony of some description on the hill, or at least something roughly pony shaped and sized. Starlit couldn't make out what they were wearing or looked like, but they had some sort of tool on a long pole in their hoof.
"You think they're friendly?" Sun asked.
"I think we need to get moving again," Starlit as we're, packing away her things. "The compass is pointing us off to the right of where they are, so we can avoid them easily enough."
As Starlit stood up to get a better look the pony with the pole waved it into the air, causing a large bolt of red to shoot up from the tip. There was a scuffling from behind the hill to their left, followed by a sight Starlit never thought she'd see; a group of pegasi, numbering maybe a dozen or so, all flying down on herself and Sun.
Starlit and Sun tried to run for it but the pegasi proved to fast for them, easily boxing the two unicorns in. They all wore white hooded cloaks and thick leathers to protect from the cold, all of which were very similar in make. They each also bore one of those pole devices which, upon closer inspection, had a small red crystal affixed to the top of them.
"Do you think we could take them?" Sun asked nervously.
"Oh, you could try," one of the pegasi replied, "but I don't think you're gonna get very far without your magic."
"I'm sorry?" Starlit asked. "We don't have magic, no unicorn has functional magic!"
With no reply the pegasi waved their poles in a circuitous motion, the gems atop them gleaming from within. A wave of red erupted from each of them and Starlit felt a stinging pain erupt from her horn and go down her forehead. She saw Sun's horn erupt into a fierce red glow, the same color as the gems.
"Don't play dumb with me," the same pegasus replied. "Now come with us, the Commander will want to see you two."
"Who are you?" Sun pleaded. "What do you want with us? We were just passing through!"
"Nopony is 'just passing through' here, I personally don't want anything with you since I'm just doing my job, and as for who I am…"
The pegasus pulled down her hood and face mask, revealing a sky blue coat, light burgundy eyes, and a shock of rainbow patterned hair atop her head that Starlit could barely believe was real, much less natural.
"Name's Rainbow Dash, and I'll be your captor today."
Whatever Starlit Sky was expecting to see out in the blasted tundra of the far north, it certainly wasn't a fully functional town. Yet, after a few hours of travel with the pegasi that had apprehended Sun and herself, she found a fully functional town looming just over the next hill.
"Ah, home sweet home," Rainbow Dash sighed.
"Maybe for you it is," Sun groused.
"True; for the two of you it's still up in the air, but we'll see what Commander Spitfire has to say about it."
"Are there any particular rules we need to follow?" Starlit asked, prodding for any information she could get her hooves on.
"Just two; do what I say, and don't do anything stupid," Rainbow smugly replied. "As far as I'm concerned the two of you are either bandits, outlaws, or treasure hunters. If you're the first two then you're getting thrown out on your ear, no question."
"And if we're treasure hunters?" Sun asked.
"Then it's up to Spitfire as to what to do with you, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Now stay quiet, I need to talk with the gatesmare."
Rainbow turned her head to look at one of her fellow pegasi, her normally casual expression growing grim for the space of time it took to give an order.
"You know what to do if they try anything."
The hooded pegasus nodded, which Rainbow Dash reciprocated before marching forward to a crude road composed primarily of packed and hardened snow and ice. She glided effortlessly over the slippery surface until it turned to solid ground, landing with a slight skid just in front of the pony at the gates a few dozen yards away.
"You're seeing this too, right?" Starlit whispered to Sun.
"You mean the pegasus that treats flying as easily as walking? Yes, I am."
"Quiet, you two!" one of the pegasi ordered, stamping his staff into the ground and sending another surge of dull pain through each of their horns. Starlit groaned and fought the urge to clasp her hooves over her head.
"Could you please quit with that stick of yours?" Starlit asked. "We mean you no harm, we're just travelers."
Another stamp of a staff and another wave of pain were all the answer Starlit needed. She quickly fell silent, letting a few choice words store up in her head for later use.
Rainbow Dash half-cantered, half-flew back up the road to meet her entourage, again sliding to a halt just in front of one of her companions on the slick road.
"Gate's clear for us, and Holly Hock went off to go tell Spitfire," Rainbow said. "They give you any trouble?"
"The mare's a little mouthy, but nothing some applied magical dampening couldn't fix," the pegasus replied with a gesture from his staff.
"Good work, keeping them in line. I'll put in a good word with Spitfire for ya."
"Are we going, or are we going to break our legs patting ourselves on the back here?" Sun cut in.
Rainbow Dash shot Sun a withering glare as another wave of magic shot through Starlit and Sun's skulls, this one a tad more powerful than the last."
"Apparently they've both got some lip to give," Rainbow noted. "Very well, since our friend here wants to get this over with so badly, then let's oblige him."
With nary another word the procession started back up, with Rainbow Dash at the head and the other pegasi forming a loose ring with Starlit and Sun at the center. Starlit slipped three times going down the road, and very nearly face planted once, but with time and careful stepping they arrived at the ramshackle gates to the town. A sign above the gate read 'The Outpost', presumably the name of the settlement.
Two things in particular leapt to Starlit's attention as she was paraded through the town; firstly, there were crystals everywhere. Crystals of all shapes, sizes, and colors were being used to power everything from lighting to simple machines for carrying goods. She even spied a few children playing with a small toy dog that was being animated by a smaller yellow crystal, not entirely dissimilar to the hummingbird automaton Twilight had shown her.
Secondly, and more disconcertingly, was that everypony had some part of themselves adorned or bonded with these same crystals, even the children. Unicorns had small bits of crystal poking out from their horns, earth ponies wore braces laced with them, and she could see a few pegasi overhead with crystals tucked into the feathers of their wings.
"What happened to all these ponies?" Starlit thought, keeping her concern to herself lest she get another hit of magic.
The building she and Sun were led to was in fairly decent condition, more so than and of the buildings in Appleoosa but worse off than most of New Selene, and it too had large chunks of crystal and ice growing up from its foundation. What parts of it weren't overgrown appeared to be hewn from solid stone, even the roof.
"You two stay here, and try not to get talkative," Rainbow Dash admonished. She sauntered up to the metal door and rapped it with her hoof.
"Come in," a tinny but authoritative voice called from inside. Rainbow quickly made her entrance, shutting the door with a creaking clank behind her.
Starlit shot a look towards Sun, trying to get her eyes to say what her mouth couldn't, but he was far too absorbed in looking around at all the ponies. His eyes were set in the focused stare that Starlit knew came when he was trying to work something out, and she knew better than to disturb him.
After an interminable five minutes Rainbow Dash came back outside, motioning towards the door with a jerk of her head. The other pegasi stood down and made a path for the two of them to enter. Their staves stopped glowing, and Starlit felt the magic recede from around her horn. Sun let out an audible sigh of relief as they both entered the building.
The interior of the building was just as stark as the exterior, with only a few tables laden with documents and maps to adorn it. The yellow pegasus that Starlit assumed was Spitfire was busy adjusting her fierce orange mane in a mirror-like sheet of ice on the far side of the room. She wore a thick overcoat with a fur collar, but with holes to allow her wings to come through.
"Rainbow Dash tells me you two were out in the tundra, says you were 'just traveling' by your own admission," Spitfire stated.
"And that's the honest truth," Sun interjected.
Spitfire flapped the wing closest to Sun up swiftly, exposing the red gems woven into the feathers as a blast of wind slid Sun across the frozen floor and knocked him into the back wall.
"Did I say you could speak?" Spitfire curtly asked, still looking in her mirror.
Sun didn't look upset so much as he looked awestruck by such a casual display of magical power from a pegasus of all ponies. Starlit, for her part, was equally impressed, if still fearful of what this pony had in store for them.
"Let me tell you what I think," Spitfire continued, finally turning to face her captives. "I think that you were out there because you were trying to get to the Old Empire. I think you're either idiots, greedy, or some combination of both that were lured by old stories of power and treasure laying in that frozen kingdom, and I think that I need to send you back from where you came from."
"So, what do you think? Am I right? Or are there a few details you'd like to fill me in on."
"You have your goons kidnap me and my companion, they strip away what little magic either of us have and treat us no better than common thugs for the crime of traveling through your territory with no knowledge that your little enclave even existed, and you have the gall to ask me to confirm your ill-informed suspicions?!" Starlit replied, her words swimming in indignant venom. "Who do you think you are that you can put us on trial for nothing?!"
Spitfire's smug expression quickly soured, and behind her orange eyes Starlit saw a fierce determination.
"I'll tell you exactly who I am," Spitfire snapped back. "I'm the only thing that's keeping my 'little enclave' functional and happy in this blasted tundra, and the last thing I need is upstarts like you two jeopardizing that security. Now either you leave, or I'll have my 'goons' take away far more than just your magic."
"I would absolutely love to see them try," Starlit replied, hiding a smirk.
Without another word Spitfire raised her wings up, ready to send another gust of wind at Starlit and Sun, one far more powerful than before. The red gems glinted and glowed with power as Spitfire flapped them downward, sending a gale force wind across the room.
The wind never hit either of them, as Starlit focused her magic into a wedge shaped ward that split the gust in two, slicing the blast of air neatly down the center and into the corners of the room. Papers and scrolls flew through the air, and when the room settled down Spitfire looked like she had seen a ghost.
"Again, I would love to see them try," Starlit repeated. She felt her heart pounding faster than normal, but nothing from the amulet.
"So you do have some magic," Spitfire started as she collected herself. "I guess Rainbow Dash was wrong to assume you didn't since you never tried to use any on her."
"If we had wanted to use magic on any of you we would have before now," Starlit replied. "Like I told them, we mean you no harm; we're simply travelers on our way from one place and to another."
Spitfire looked Starlit up and down from her end of the room, taking in her form like a wolf about to jump on a rabbit. Starlit didn't appreciate being made a liar, much less an exhibit, but she bore it since needless conflict wouldn't get her anywhere.
"I have no doubt that you mean what you say," Spitfire said, her voice softer and more diplomatic, "but nopony comes up here for no reason. If you really want my help, or at least your freedom, you need to be honest with me."
Starlit felt her hackles raise at the idea of playing nice with Spitfire, but she swallowed her pride and relented.
"If you insist," Starlit replied. "But I would like a few answers from you in exchange. Given everything you and yours have done to me and mine, I'd say that that's a fair exchange."
"As you wish," Spitfire answered. "It seems only fair, like you said."
Starlit turned to look at Sun, who had gotten up from the floor but was keeping his distance well away from Spitfire. He nodded his head slowly, in a way that suggested he really wanted to be shaking it.
"Your suspicions were partially right," Starlit began. "My friend and I are trying to find the Crystal Empire, but not to plunder it. We have business with a pony that is said to live there, and it is business that potentially has the fate of Equestria riding on it."
"Then somepony has played you for a sap," Spitfire replied. "Nopony's lived in the Empire for centuries, not since the Chill set in."
"Trust me, this isn't our first time doing something like this," Starlit said. "We have a very reliable source for this information."
"And I'm supposed to take your word on that?" Spitfire asked incredulously.
"Yes, you are, since I have absolutely no reason to lie to you and you have me and my friend surrounded and could probably kill us without losing an ounce of sleep over it."
"You're right on that," Spitfire admitted. "Fine, let's assume that your mystery pony that can live in a nonstop blizzard exists; there's still no way that you're going to be able to get to them."
"And why is that, exactly?" Starlit asked.
"Because once you get deep enough into the Empire the winds get too strong and the temperatures too cold to go through. We've been plumbing those depths for generations, and nopony who's gone past the point of no return has come back from it."
"And that leads into my next question," Starlit asked, settling into the icy floor and giving her hooves a rest. "I've noticed that you and yours have some rather intriguing additions to their anatomy. Care to elaborate?"
"You mean the crystals?" Spitfire asked.
"Yes, I mean the crystals," Starlit replied, repressing an eye roll.
"They're natural," Spitfire answered. "We're all born with a few little crystals that slowly get more numerous as we get older. Don't ask me how or why, it's just how it happens. We occasionally see a few ponies come through that don't have any, and they all ask pretty much that same question."
"And it's not for no reason," Starlit replied. "You're the only ponies I've ever seen that look like this, and the last several weeks of my life have been a very eye-opening time."
"I wish I could say more than that, but that's all I know," Spitfire said. "The crystals are a part of us and they let our unicorns cast their magic, although I'm surprised you can use magic like they do."
"Those crystals do a lot more than just that. Where I'm from pegasi can't fly, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the earth ponies here have prodigious strength that other earth ponies don't."
"Pegasi can't… fly?" Spitfire asked incredulously. "Then what do they use their wings for?"
"At best, light gliding over distances of a few feet," Starlit answered. "At worst, they waste away until they're little more than stumps with feathers."
Spitfire took a step back, eyes wide and irises shrunken. Her expression was that of a pony who had just been told that up was down and black was white, except with concrete evidence to back up the claim.
"The only reason I can cast magic is because of what I've been doing for nearly a month, training myself and getting tutelage from a very wise teacher," Starlit continued, stepping forward, "and said teacher is the reason why I'm up here to begin with. She needs me to get into the Empire or the already tenuous situation the world is in will only get worse, perhaps irrevocably."
Spitfire considered Starlit for an achingly long few minutes, taking in every inch of the unicorn who had flipped her worldview on its ear, before finally giving a resigned sigh and shoving past her as she made for the door.
"You want in so badly, fine," Spitfire said, "But the two of you can't go in alone. You'll need one of ours to guide you through."
With a metallic creak Spitfire opened the door, exposing the room to the blistering cold of the outdoors.
"Rainbow Dash, get in here," Spitfire ordered. "You're taking them to the Empire."
* * *
To say that Rainbow Dash was upset was like saying the weather conditions were a bit nippy, and she made no attempt to hide her discomfort. Sun and Starlit had to endure a solid fifteen minutes of Rainbow's complaining as they went to the living quarters they'd been assigned to before their trip tomorrow.
"I hope you two realize that if it comes down to you or me, I'm picking me, right?" Rainbow groused.
"Yes, and you've said that several times now," Sun replied. "We can handle ourselves, so any time you feel like leaving and saying that we both froze to death out there will be just fine by me."
"I just want to establish where we stand," Rainbow said. "Spitfire may have ordered me to be your babysitter, but my first loyalty is to this town, not you."
Sun didn't reply, only followed Starlit inside their quarters and leaving Rainbow Dash out in the cold.
"Outlanders," Rainbow spat, snorting a hot blast of steam into the air as she stalked off. After a few feet she took to the air, letting the biting wind sweep her hood from her face and exposing her multi-hued mane to the sky.
As she flew over the town she felt her anger slowly fade, replaced by the sort of peace that only the sky brought her. From so high up everypony looked so small, and the town that had been her whole world for her entire life looked so insignificant.
"What are you so worried about?" Rainbow thought to herself. "At least one of them can do magic, and if they die then at least you can come home early. You'll be fine; you're the fastest flier in town, after all."
Rainbow found a smile creeping onto her face as she considered the possibility, as much as she probably shouldn't have let it. They'd figure out soon enough why only the most experienced scouts braved the Empire, of which she was a select number.
Rainbow Dash made a low pass over the town, gliding over icy roofs before coming to a skidding stop on top of one that she loved more than any other spot in the Outpost. Nestled in the crook where the roof met the rock wall behind it was a pile of warm blankets covered by a small section of tarp stretched taut on three poles. It was her little secluded slice away from everypony else in town, which is why she was a tad miffed to find an interloper snuggled up against the cold.
"Scootaloo, we've talked about this," Rainbow Dash admonished. "You only come up here when I'm here; I don't want your aunts getting mad at me because you sneak off without asking."
"Oh, they're both taking their nap, they won't notice I'm gone," the orange filly retorted. She was wearing a patchwork of warm clothes, all mismatched and with a few noticeable repair jobs, topped off with a wool knit cap the same color as her purple mane and eyes
"That's no excuse for ditching them, but since you're here anyway… how's the flying coming?" Rainbow asked, a mischievous grin on her face.
"Great!" Scootaloo declared as she flexed her tiny wings, smaller than normal for her age. "Check this out!"
Her face screwed up in exertion, Scootaloo flapped her wings as fast as she could get them to go. They fluttered and flapped and eventually lifted her a good half-foot off of the ground before she stopped.
"Wow, a whole two inches better than last week!" Rainbow Dash said, clapping her hooves. "You've been doing the exercises I recommended, haven't you?"
"Every night before bed! I've really been feeling the burn, but it's the good type."
"Well, in honor of your progress, I think its time for your gift," Rainbow replied, moving over to the blanket pile and rooting around.
"Reward!?" Scootaloo asked, excitement radiating from her like sunshine.
"Yeah, it's something I've been working on for a while, for when your wings get strong enough to make it work," Rainbow said.
Shoving the blankets to the side, Rainbow pulled out a small concave circular sled made out of polished and black stained wood. There were a trio of small metal handles affixed to it, one at the front and two on the sides, and the inside of the seat had a flame pattern painted onto it.
"Ta-da!" Rainbow announced, presenting the sled. "It took about three months and at least two week's pay to get all the wood and what-not, but it was worth it."
The closest thing to words that Scootaloo was able to utter came out as a series of near hypersonic shrieks of pure joy. She zipped all around the sled, taking in every inch of it with religious awe.
"And it's really for me?!" Scootaloo asked.
"Absolutely it's for you, ya dingus," Rainbow answered, tussling Scotaloo's hat. "Who else went from no flying at all to being able to hover for ten seconds unaided? You earned it."
Scootaloo quickly set the sled against the icy roof and hopped on, grabbing at the front handle and shifting her weight to get it to wobble some.
"How does it work?" Scootaloo asked.
"Oh, that's the beautiful part," Rainbow answered. "Flap your wings some, you'll get the picture."
A steely determination set in her eyes, Scootaloo flittered her wings with all her might, and slowly but surely the sled started to pick up speed against the ice.
"See, now you have an awesome new sled and a great training tool!" Rainbow continued. "Am I smart or what?"
Scootaloo didn't pay Rainbow much attention, instead practicing with banking and turning in her new sled. The slick, flat roof made for the perfect test track, and soon Scootaloo was giggling and whooping with pure delight.
Rainbow Dash watched on, seeing the fun that her protege was having as she nestled onto her blanket pile. The filly was a natural with the sled, even if she did have to stop a few times to catch her breath from all the wings exertion.
Scootaloo's wings; the sight of them always gave Rainbow Dash a small pang of worry. It was rare that it happened, but sometimes fillies and colts would be born without their crystals and would wind up being more challenged because of it. The effect was most obvious in unicorns since it stunted their magic, but in pegasus foals it typically stunted their ability to fly until at least age six or seven.
Scootaloo was about to hit her twelfth birthday and still was unable to maintain a glide, let alone flight. Rainbow had trained with her for years, showing her exercises to increase her strength and control, but she hadn't had any improvement in over six months.
"Hey pipsqueak!" Rainbow Dash called.
"Yeah?" Scootaloo asked back between heaving, exhausted, but ultimately happy breaths.
"How about you take it easy there for a bit, give the sled some rest. I've got a new story for you that I know you're going to love."
Scootaloo's eyes lit up with happiness, and she quickly hopped off of the sled. She took extra care as she half-carried, half-dragged it to Rainbow's nest, setting her gift to the side with a feather's touch.
"Is it more Daring Do stories?" Scootaloo asked, nestling up against Rainbow Dash's body.
"Only the best for you," Rainbow answered to Scootaloo's joy. "Have you ever heard of the Serpent's Diadem?"
Scootaloo shook her head.
"Well, then do I have a story for you."
* * *
Day shifted to evening as Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo hung out, telling stories and catching up. They played in the snow, Rainbow ran Scootaloo through some more exercises and helped her get a better handle on her sled, and when they parted ways for the day Scootaloo was happier than Rainbow had ever seen her.
It was a long walk back to her assigned quarters, which were right next to the one's Spitfire had assigned to the two outsiders. It couldn't have been mere coincidence that that was the case, but at this point Rainbow was too happy to care.
As she approached her front door she saw the mare she'd brought in sitting outside, looking up into the rapidly dimming sky. Rainbow attempted to ignore her, but she endeavored to sour the day Rainbow had just had by engaging her.
"Oh, Rainbow Dash," the mare said as he approached, "can I talk with you for a minute?"
"Do I have a choice?" Rainbow retorted.
"Look, I'm sorry for putting you through this," the mare said, undaunted. "Were it up to me you wouldn't be doing this, and I'm sorry that it's shaken out like this."
"Just understand that I'm only doing this because Spitfire ordered me to. I don't care about you, or your friend, or whatever your doing in the Empire. I have things I care about here, and I'm not about to put them at risk by buying into your stupid quest. Pull your weight, because I'm not going to."
Without another word Rainbow entered her home, closing the door with a resounding slam and leaving the outsider in the cold.
The morning came later than Starlit had expected, and were it not for a hoof pounding on her door she may not have even noticed it was sun-up.
With a start Starlit sat upright, the banging in her door still coming and sending shocks of pain down her ears with every beat. As quick as her beleaguered legs would carry her she ran over to the door and swung it open.
"About time you woke up, it's only been morning for about four hours," Rainbow Dash chided. "Get your things together and get some breakfast at the commissary, we leave in an hour."
Starlit started out her window, noticed the sun barely over the horizon, and blinked the type of blink that only the utterly bewildered can.
"That's impossible," Starlit slurred out, "the sun's just barely up."
"And you're burning precious daylight," Rainbow answered as she trotted away. "Unless you wanna be traveling the frozen tundra at night, I'd suggest you get presentable."
With sluggish hoofsteps Starlit dragged all of her things together, clipped her heavy cloak onto her armor, pulled her sword-belt on, and with saddlebags slung across her haunches walked out into the pale blue light of early morning.
The whole Outpost was already awake and ready for business, with ponies going about their day-to-day as if it wasn't horrendously early. A metalsmith blew the bellows with his magic while he turned a hot piece of iron in the forge, a merchant pony was busy arranging her stock and looking out for customers, and even the children were scampering through the streets on there way to wherever it was they were going.
"There is no way these ponies have been up for more than ten minutes," Starlit thought through her sleepy haze.
A series of signposts directed the way through the tight alleys and paths in between the crude shacks and stone hovels that made up what Starlit assumed was a merchant district, although calling it a district was doing a disservice to the term. Despite how small it was, this patch of buildings was doing a fine job of turning Starlit around until she finally stumbled back into Rainbow Dash while rounding a corner.
"About time, I was just coming back to grab you," Rainbow scoffed. "You're as slow as a glacier, you know that?"
"Sorry, it's just that I'm incredibly tired and the layout of your town is very confusing," Starlit replied.
"And that's why you have me to get you to the Empire. Otherwise you'd just walk out into the white and never come back."
"And I'm sure you'd just love that," Starlit replied ruefully.
"I would, but then Spitfire would give me a demerit and I'd be scrubbing the latrine for a month," Rainbow answered. "You're just lucky that way, I suppose."
Starlit just started trudging forward, with Rainbow quickly making her way ahead and leading Starlit towards the commissary. It was a squat, ugly little building where a few of the walls had been replaced with metal sheets, but the interior was warm and smelled like heaven.
"Hey Starlit, over here!" she heard Sun call from a few tables down. He seemed bright eyed and bushy tailed, although how was far beyond her current ability to comprehend. He had a small metal plate with some seared root vegetables and a cup that smelled strongly of coffee in front of him.
Starlit dragged her way to the table as Sun pulled a second plate of food and mug of coffee to her. She slammed back the coffee as fast as the heat of it would let her, taking in a few mouthfuls of the nicely seared, if slightly flavorless, vegetables in between sips.
"You look like death," Sun commented as he ate. "Did you sleep alright?"
"I slept just fine, it's just that I was woken up about four hours earlier than I expected," Starlit answered as the coffee did it's work on her brain. "When did you get up to be this alert?"
"About two hours ago. The sun was still down when I got up, but that's why I went to bed so early. I tried to tell you not to wait up for Rainbow Dash, and this is why."
"Your friend's got a point," Rainbow chimed in as she sat down with her food. "Days here are really short and nights are really long. I don't know how far south you came from, but we're lucky if we get eight hours of daylight during the summer. If you try to set your sleep schedule by the time of day you'll always wake up tired."
"You'd think Celestia would've done something about that by now," Starlit groused without thinking.
"If you're expecting some magic sun goddess to fix the days here then you're even worse off than I thought," Rainbow casually commented. "Celestia hasn't helped us out since the war, it's why our days are so messed up."
Sun's fork clattered to his plate as Starlit agonizingly turned to look at Rainbow Dash next to her.
"Why are you two giving me death glares?" Rainbow asked, scooting away from Starlit and taking her food with her.
"You know about that?" Sun asked, his tone half-incredulous and half-amazed.
"Yeah, everypony up here does. There was a big war between the Empire and the Princesses of the old Equestrian Kingdom, and when it got too tough to handle the Princess of the Empire brought on the Chill and froze everything to keep anypony from taking it."
Rainbow shook her head as she finished her explanation, taking a swig of her own coffee as she did.
"Don't even know why I'm telling this to you two, you're just gonna freeze to death before you even get there."
Starlit and Sun exchanged a look, silently debating between themselves who was going to let the horseshoe drop.
"Rainbow Dash, do you like stories?" Starlit asked, trying her best to sound non-threatening.
"Yeah…" Rainbow answered quizzically. "As much as the next pony, at least."
"Then when we get underway there's a few details of your story that we need to fill you in on. Away from here, though; this isn't something for everypony to hear."
"Don't think you're going to try and bribe me with information," Rainbow curtly replied, "and if I can know this then everypony has a right to know. It's only fair."
"If you want to tell them after we come back then feel free to, but do you really think they'd trust a couple of outlanders like us?" Sun said.
Rainbow thought about it for a moment, and then give a relenting head nod.
"You've got a point, and not just the one on your head," Rainbow conceded, "but it better be worth it."
* * *
The group finished their breakfast and elected to meet up at the northern gate to the Outpost, which gave Rainbow Dash a few minutes to catch up with Scootaloo before she left. The filly would be heartbroken to hear that she was leaving for so long, and it wasn't a conversation Rainbow was looking forward to.
The facade of Scootaloo's schoolhouse, as rough and weatherbeaten as it was, gave Rainbow a pang of nostalgia for when she had learned there. The desks were made of stone and she wasn't quite sure that Mr. Brightbolt had been all there in the head, but it had been some of the best years of her childhood.
A loud gong rang out from inside, alerting the children that it was time for recess. She watched a few fillies and colts stream out to go play in the fresh snow before Scootaloo came, dragging her sled behind her. She and Rainbow locked eyes, and Scootaloo gave a big smile and a wave before running over.
"Heya there, squirt, how's school?" Rainbow asked as Scootaloo hugged her leg.
"It's alright, but Mr. Brightbolt said that he saw a bug-pony coming out of the snowfields yesterday, so most of our lesson was just his conspiracy theories again."
"I am amazed Spitfire lets him keep that job," Rainbow mused as she shook her head disapprovingly.
"So what're you here for?" Scootaloo asked. "Did you make up another story already?"
"I wish, but even I'm not that fast," Rainbow answered.
Scootaloo drew back, a look of mild confusion on her face. Rainbow kept smiling, but she knew how bright Scootaloo was; she could tell something was up.
"Is it bad?" Scootaloo asked.
"Kind of," Rainbow relented, letting her smile fade. "I'm gonna be going away for a few weeks, kiddo. Spitfire has a job for me and I have to do it, even though I really don't want to."
"Well, why can't you just say no? I know Spitfire's important, but if you don't want to then why don't you just tell her to get some other pony?" Scootaloo asked, her dejectedness growing with every word.
"Because she doesn't trust any other pony but me to get it done," Rainbow answered. It was a slight embellishment, but Rainbow knew it was the truth even if Spitfire hadn't said it.
"You're not going out into the white, are you?"
The fear in Scootaloo's voice was palpable, and for the first time in a while Rainbow couldn't make her words come to her.
"Why does it have to be you?!" Scootaloo continued, kicking her sled aside. "Ponies go out there, and sometimes they come back, but most of the time they don't! What is this even for?!"
"You remember the outlanders I told you about yesterday?" Rainbow asked.
"Them?! Scootaloo retorted. "She has you going out into the white because of two outlanders?!"
"Scoot, kid, I don't like it any more than you do," Rainbow replied, getting down into her knees so she could look the filly square in the eye. "But Spitfire's in charge, and if I don't listen to her then I'm gonna get in a lot of trouble. If she thinks this is worth the risk, then that's what I have to do."
The tears that had been welling up in Scootaloo's eyes finally spilled over, freezing onto her cheeks as she stared at the ground, bitter and angry.
"Hey, is that any way for a future patrol pony to act?" Rainbow asked gently, lifting Scootaloo's chin with her hoof.
Scootaloo kept her red eyes to the ground despite her head's position, and Rainbow gently took her cheeks in between both hooves, forcing her to look ahead.
"Listen, I swear to you, right here and right now, that I will come back home safe," Rainbow stated with authority. "Nothing is going to keep me from coming back, and when I get back I'm gonna have the best Daring Do story ever for you. You hear me?"
Scootaloo slowly pulled Rainbow's hooves from her face, taking a few steps back and trying not to cry any more.
"Even better than the Temple of the Shifting Sleet?" Scootaloo asked.
"Even better than that," Rainbow answered.
Scootaloo mulled it over before quickly pulling Rainbow in for a big, tight hug, the type of hug that a pony gives when they know it might be their last for a long time.
"Please come back," Scootaloo pleaded softly.
"I promise, and I never back out on a promise."
* * *
Sun trotted nervously back and forth near the northern gate, mostly to keep his blood flowing but also out of nerves. Every few seconds or so his eyes would flick over towards the horizon, and the vast, all-encompassing emptiness that went out seemingly into forever.
Nervously he checked his compass; the leather cord pointed to his northwest, out into a patch of the snowfield that was currently masked by a small snowstorm. He silently prayed that it led to the dead patch in the wards around the Empire, but he knew that it couldn't be that easy.
"Something on your mind?" Starlit asked, pulling Sun out of his worried trance.
"Just getting a really strong sense of deja vu. If it weren't for the constant snowstorm, I'd swear we were trekking out into the Searing Plains again."
"Traveling across a vast, inhospitable expanse of flatness searching for an ancient kingdom that can't be found by normal means?" Starlit replied, putting a hoof to her chin. "I can see where you're coming from."
"At least in the case of New Selene we got dropped right into an alley," Sun said.
"And then I was promptly killed by an unfeeling machine," Starlit answered back.
"And later I was blown up in a mine shaft," Sun continued.
"And later still we were both nearly deafened and screamed apart not twenty feet away from our goal."
Sun and Starlit both exchanged a long, uncomfortable look. Though it had been bad at the time, in hindsight their trip to New Selene had been a truly hellish couple of days.
"I think I preferred the desert," Sun finally admitted. "At least with that you knew what was going to kill you."
"Good grief, what kind of life are we living that being scorched to death in the desert is seen as the preferable option?" Starlit asked, shaking her head at the sheer absurdity of it all.
"You two got all your stuff together?" a third voice called from behind Sun. "Because I am not gonna wait here for you because you forgot your stuffed bunny or something stupid like that."
Sun turned around to see Rainbow Dash trudging through the snow towards them. She was wearing a thick coat that had flaps designed to cover her wings while still allowing her to fly, as well as a heavy scarf, a head wrap, a muzzle mask, a thick fur hat, heavy boots, and a pair of goggles wrapped across her eyes. The only way that Sun could even tell it was her was from the small tuft of rainbow colored hair peeking out from under her hat.
"Here, Spitfire told me to give these to you," Rainbow continued as she approached. She roughly tossed a set of her head equipment to each of them, which Sun was only barely able to catch.
"Thanks for your consideration," Starlit replied.
"Just don't say I never did nothing for you," Rainbow sniped back. "You're going to need them anyway unless you want your nostrils and eyelids to freeze shut."
Thus warned, Sun quickly threw all of his headgear on in a rough approximation of the arrangement Rainbow had. The effect was just about immediate, as his entire head felt like it the temperature had gone up by nearly twenty degrees.
"Also, since you two obviously don't have these from wherever it is that your from, you'll need one of our guidesticks," Rainbow added, carefully pulling a pair of long wooden sticks with those glowing crystals at the top of them from off of her back.
"We could just use our horns to signal each other," Sun said, looking over the sticks.
"Only if you want it to freeze and snap off, or for the hypothermia to set in faster than it's going to," Rainbow retorted. "Using magic takes energy, and energy is what we need to preserve at all costs to keep warm and keep moving. You only use your magic if it is a life-or-death situation, understood?"
"Understood," Sun relented, taking one of the guidesticks as he did. Starlit took hers as well, although she didn't look too pleased about it.
"What, worried it's gonna shock you again?" Rainbow snidely asked to Starlit.
"No, just wondering how long it'll take for me to figure out how to catalyze my magic through it," Starlit answered, "so that I could zap your arrogant flank with it."
"Just you try, see how long you hang on to that thing for afterwards," Rainbow retorted.
"Ladies, we're not even out of the village and you two are already threatening each other," Sun interjected, his voice muffled by his mask. "Could we at least wait until we're wandering through a blinding snowstorm before we resort to murder?"
"Works for me," Rainbow replied as she marched towards the gate leading out of town. A pair of unicorns illuminated their crystal-laden horns and pulled the rough sheet metal up, causing it to make a horrific shrieking sound as it did.
Starlit followed out behind Rainbow Dash as she pulled her goggles down, keeping a fair distance with Sun bringing up the rear. Sun caught one last look behind himself as the gate shrieked closed. He couldn't help but feel like he was walking to his execution.
* * *
The first day's march was long, slow, and silent. The snow had grown deep as soon as they had left the immediate area outside of the Outpost, and no matter how often Sun kicked his hooves he couldn't seem to extricate the snow inside of his boots. It just melted down into a cold slurry, and whenever they made a moment to stop he would have to pour them out.
The sun had set quickly, just like he knew it would, although the moon was still mercifully bright. The weather had calmed down enough for Rainbow Dash to order them to make camp on a nearby flat and compacted patch of ice, and as Sun was setting up his tent he felt a familiar pressure settle on the back of his head.
"You take me to the nicest places," Silence sarcastically cooed. After the hours of trudging through the howling wind and empty white nothingness, her voice was actually a welcome distraction.
"You should've seen the desert, you would've gotten a real kick out of that endless expanse of nothing."
"I've always preferred the cold, if I'm being perfectly honest," Silence replied. "I enjoy how everything slows down when it's cold; it gives one time to savor where they are rather than constantly fretting over where they're going and where they've been."
"Did you need something Silence, I'm a little busy," Sun asked as he contemplated how to pound tent stakes into solid ice.
"I just wanted to tell you a few things before I have to go away."
"What do you mean you have to go away?" Sun asked back with a start. "I was just getting halfway used to having you around."
"I wish I didn't have to, but there is the slight problem of that deafening zone of anti-magic that you are about to waltz right into. The effect is powerful enough that I won't be able to maintain my connection to your mind, and by proxy you won't have access to my resurrection magic."
"What about Starlit's necklace, will that still work?" Sun asked, slightly panicked.
"It might, but tell her to be careful nonetheless," Silence answered. "Now if you're done with your questions, I have some critical information that I need to pass onto you."
"Firstly, I have seen inside the Empire, despite their anti-magical defenses," Silence began. "The Empire is in a very sorry state, and there are creatures roaming the streets that I have never seen before. I don't know if they're a different breed of thestrals brought on by the concentrated magic in the area or by the magical frost Cadance conjured, but you must remain vigilant; these things attack each other as quickly as they do prey."
"Secondly, Cadance herself is… in a state, to put it mildly. I know that Starlit has great powers of persuasion and charisma oozing out of every pore, but I don't think Cadance is in the right stage of mind to even comprehend of you as more than a figment of her fragmented mind. You may have to drag her back to Twilight for healing before she'll return to Canterlot, and I doubt she will come willingly."
"And lastly, I leave you with this; when you enter the Empire, I would highly encourage you to seek out the Astral Conservatory. Starlit is holding onto something she wants answers about, and I feel she will find them there. I just hope she's prepared for the answers she receives."
Sun took a mental note of everything that Silence had just told him before sitting down on the ice and fidgeting with the tent stakes.
"Do you think you'll ever come back?" Sun asked, trying not to let his genuine dismay leak through.
"It's hard to say," Silence admitted. "As of right now I'm operating on the assumption that this will be our last conversation, which is why I'm giving you all of the magic that I can."
Before Sun could protest he felt his entire body start to tingle, like his leg had fallen asleep but extrapolated all over his body. As the power coursed through his arcane system he began to feel stronger, more like himself again.
"Think of it as a gift," Silence continued, her voice now far softer than it had been before. "I've come to appreciate our time together, and when our paths cross again I would love to pick up where we left off."
"Goodbye, Silence," Sun said as he felt the pressure ebb out of his head.
Sun received no reply, felt no pressure in his brain. There was nothing to hear but the silence of the chill night air.
The wind howled bitterly throughout the night, and combined with the compacted ice and her threadbare sleeping bag Starlit found it considerably difficult to get to sleep. Finally roused by a particularly nasty squall Starlit extracted herself from her sleeping bag and walked out onto the flat. Whether it was night or early morning she couldn't tell, but the moon still shine brightly regardless.
Illuminated in the darkness by the shining moonlight reflecting off of the fresh powder was Rainbow Dash, seated on a small rock and keeping a vigil out into the night.
"Shouldn't you be sleeping?" Starlit asked as she pulled her goggles down.
"Somepony's got to keep watch," Rainbow replied without turning, "and I was just about to wake up one of you fresh flakes."
"Another clever insult?" Starlit asked.
"Nah, its just what we call the new recruits. They're like fresh snow before it gets stepped on, compacted, and turned into hard ice."
Starlit made her way beside Rainbow and sat next to her rock, taking a moment to look up at the sky. In the endless white, the void pock-marked with stars above her was the most interesting thing to look at.
"It is a beautiful night out, if it is windy," Starlit commented.
"Sometimes the deadliest things are the most attractive," Rainbow answered back. "Back when I was still a raw recruit I saw a stallion slip on a patch of ice on his roof because he was too busy admiring the sun. It was the first bit of sun we'd gotten in months, and this idiot falls off his roof and snaps his front legs from the fall. He still walks with a limp."
"Was it worth it for the view?" Starlit's asked back.
Rainbow whipped her head around, a look of incredulity on her face as though Starlit had just asked her to pull her wings off.
"Of course it wasn't! He was laid up for months and had to be reassigned from the guard. Nothing would be worth that!"
"Did you ever ask him? It seems that it was important enough to him to have been on that roof in the first place."
Rainbow opened her mouth to retort, but stopped short. Slowly her brow furrowed as she clenched her jaw shut and stared back out at the expanse of white.
The two sat in awkward silence for a moment, Rainbow's gaze focused to the horizon while Starlit stared up at the sky. Her neck began to ache from the cold and the angle, but the stars and the moon were to beautiful not to look at.
"Is it true what you told us, back when we arrested you?" Rainbow asked, breaking the silence. "About there not being magic and pegasi not being able to fly?"
"As true as everything else I've told you," Starlit answered, flicking her eyes over to Rainbow Dash. If Starlit didn't know better she'd swear that her young companion was curious, but she didn't want to insult Rainbow's pride by bringing it up.
"Do you know if… Are there any cures for it?" Rainbow continued.
"Why do you care?" Starlit asked, turning her head to face her. "You've got your wings, isn't that enough for you?"
A flash of raw anger went across Rainbow Dash's face, bitter and indignant, before she wordlessly got off of the rock and glided back to the tents. If she could've, Starlit thought that Rainbow would've slammed the flap as she disappeared inside.
Starlit quickly moved to the top of the rock, thankful that Rainbow had warmed it slightly from sitting there. With a deep sigh and a twinge of guilt in the back of her head, she assumed her vigil. The stars would wait.
* * *
Starlit stayed out on watch until the sun rose. She found it oddly soothing to be on guard, and the hours passed without her really noticing it. Thankfully the weather had also seen fit to hold out, so that when the sun finally came up she could see its light twinkling out on the fresh powder from the previous day's blizzard.
What roused her from her post was the sound of Rainbow Dash barking orders to Sun as she broke down the camp. Sun, for his efforts, was doing well in getting his things together, although he'd certainly looked better. The cold wasn't doing him any favors, that was readily apparent.
Cautiously Starlit approached Rainbow Dash, who was in the process of stuffing her bedroll onto her pack and tying it down.
"Rainbow Dash, I'm sorry if I touched a nerv—"
"Shut up, pack your shit, and let's get moving, we're burning daylight," Rainbow interjected without turning around.
The suddenness of Rainbow's hostility hit like a slap to the face, and Starlit Sky found herself returning the insult in kind before she could stop herself.
"Well, excuse you, but I was just trying to apologize! Are you really going to be that much of a pissant about this?"
Before she could dodge or put up a ward Rainbow's back hoof slammed straight into Starlit's chest. Fortunately her cold weather gear took most of the impact but the suddenness still set her sprawling. As Starlit scrambled to right herself she found Rainbow looming over her, face contorted in barely contained rage.
"Pack. Your. Shit. And. Get. Moving."
Rainbow stalked off, grabbed her bag up in her teeth, and slung it across her back. She then set herself down atop the flat rock, waiting for Starlit and Sun.
"What crawled down her throat and died?" Sun asked as he helped Starlit to her hooves. "Are you alright?"
"I'll be fine," Starlit answered as she shook the snow off. "I think I touched a nerve when we were switching out for the watch last night, but she won't tell me what it's about."
"It's probably personal. Do you need any help packing up, 'cause I've gotten all of my things together."
"Thanks Sun," Starlit answered, just loud enough to where she thought Rainbow would hear it, "it's nice to know that some ponies can be helpful."
If Rainbow heard her, she didn't show it. Starlit and Sun working together got the rest of the camp broken down within five minutes, and as soon as they made their way to the rock Rainbow hopped down and started trudging, doing her best to keep well ahead of them.
The first hour or so was spent in abject silence, all the more silent because of the snow absorbing any ambient sound around them. Every so often they would encounter a snow hare or the odd arctic fox, but other than that nothing seemed to live this far north. The near-complete lack of any wildlife added to the desolate atmosphere even on a bright, blue-skied day.
"Hey, Starlit," Sun asked, falling back and trying not to poke her with the staff lain across his back, "I need to tell you something."
"Whenever my little filly would start conversations like that, it typically meant that I wouldn't be happy by the end of it," Starlit warned. "Are you sure I need to hear this now?"
"I'm pretty sure, since we're both trying to be more open with each other and all of that. Plus all of our mutual survival might depend on it."
With a deep sigh, Starlit gestured for Sun to continue. Honesty could be quite the hassle, she was finding.
"I had another conversation with Silence last night, and… she said she's going to be leaving me."
"What? Why?" Starlit's snapped back.
"She said that the magic dead zone we're walking into is going to sever the connection between us, and by proxy I'm going to lose access to her reincarnation magic."
"Well, this is just a fine how-do-you-do!" Starlit retorted. "First you have a brain-ghost that I can barely comprehend, and now that she's just starting to prove useful she has to say goodbye. Figures, with our luck."
"That's not all," Sun continued.
"Of course it isn't," Starlit groused.
"She gave me all the magic she could muster before she left, so I'll at least have that knocking around for an emergency, and she told me three things about the Empire for when we get there."
"First," Sun continued, lowering his voice just in case Rainbow was listening in, "there's creatures roaming the streets that she says are more feral than the thestrals we've encountered thus far. They don't even hold back from attacking each other, which may honestly work in our favor if we can get them to just focus on themselves rather than us."
A shiver unrelated to the cold ran down Starlit's spine at the thought.
"Second, Cadance herself is in a really bad way mentally, to the point that we may very well have to forcibly take her to Twilight to be healed. She may not even think we're real when we get to her."
"If we get to her," Starlit interjected.
"We'll get to her," Sun retorted.
"Given the first thing you told me about, I'd put our chances at roughly one-to-one-hundred, especially if you're going to be losing your ability to resurrect. What's the last thing Silence told you, and here's hoping that it's a way to bypass all the monsters and get to Cadance directly."
"She said that we should seek out the Astral Conservatory, whatever that is. She said that there's something you have that you have questions about, and you can find the answers for it there."
Starlit felt her heart drop into her hooves and about a mile beyond them, her mind immediately drawn to Spike's pilfered necklace in her saddlebags.
"Do you know what she meant by that?" Sun asked, only further adding to the mounting pile of guilt. Starlit felt her heart hammer away in her chest, a thin trickle of sweat beading up under her goggles.
"Not now," she quickly blurted out, "not until Rainbow Dash falls asleep tonight. You offer to take first watch tonight, I can explain then."
"O…kay," Sun said in confusion. "Are you sure?"
"Absolutely," Starlit replied. "Rainbow can't know about this."
With a quick shake of the head, presumably to clear his head, Sun nodded and moved a bit further up the line.
Starlit breathed out a heavy breath, both of relief and nerves. That Silence had known what she did was bad enough, but now she would have to contend with telling Sun that she had stolen Spike's necklace in a way that wouldn't make her seem like she was distrusting Twilight and potentially jeopardizing the mission.
"I swear when this is all done, I'm never going to mess around with magic ever again," Starlit groused to no one.
* * *
The scant few hours of daylight passed far faster than Sun would've cared for, and even worse was that a squall of wind was starting to kick up as the three of them were trying to build camp. The inclement weather made the already arduous process of assembling the tents on such uneven ground all the harder, and by the time it was done Sun's muscles all burned from the effort.
"Finally!" Rainbow exclaimed as she finally got her tent assembled and her pack off of her back. "Damn wind."
"I'll take first watch if you need me to," Sun said, "seeing as I didn't do a round last night."
"Much obliged. Just make sure that your friend does her fair share too, I had to take most of the night because she wouldn't wake up."
"Did you try to get her up?" Sun asked back.
Rainbow Dash didn't reply, simply shooting Sun a nasty glare before entering her tent and clasping the flaps shut. Assuming his post near a small pile of stones that he could place his back against, Sun's mind started to run with what Starlit could possibly have to say that she wouldn't want Rainbow Dash to hear.
"And what could she have said to Rainbow Dash that would set her off like this?" Sun thought as his mind went further down the path of recent events. "She's definitely not the friendliest pony that we've ever met, but whatever Starlit said to her must've cut pretty deep."
Like a bird in flight Sun's consciousness flitted from one topic to another as he stared out into the endless unknown before the crunch of snow under boots alerted him. Peeking up over the rocks that made up his post he saw Starlit approaching, holding her guidestick in the crook of one of her forelegs to provide some meager illumination.
In response Sun pulled up his guidestick and waved it back and forth, to which Starlit responded with a similar display as she made her way behind the rocks.
"Handy little thing, isn't it?" Sun quipped, looking up at the crystal glowing with a healthy red light atop his guidestick.
Starlit didn't return the attempt at pleasantries, instead plopping down onto the snow with a heavy thud. Though her face was hidden behind all of her head gear, the slump of her shoulders and refusal to meet Sun's gaze said all it needed to.
"Starlit, are you alright?" Sun asked. "Did Rainbow do something aga—"
"Sun, you have to promise me that what I'm about to show you stays between us," Starlit interjected. "Rainbow Dash can't know, Twilight Sparkle can't, nopony. Do you understand me?"
Sun was slightly taken aback by her insistence, but nodded a yes all the same. They'd gone through too much together by this point for him to doubt her judgement now.
With a short illumination of her horn Starlit flipped open the flap of her saddlebags and pulled out a small necklace. In the dim light provided by the guidestick it looked like her black stone, but as he brought the stick down and she moved it closer the reality of the situation became readily apparent; the stone was smooth, tied to a gold chain, and shone like water filtered through a rainbow.
"Starlit, you didn't…" Sun breathed out, barely able to find his voice.
Starlit didn't turn to face Sun, only letting her magic fade from around her stolen prize. Spike's necklace fell into the fresh snow between them, glittering like hardened blood in the light of the guidestick.
"I need answers, and I don't think Twilight will be able to give them to me," Starlit finally said, turning to face Sun. He could barely see her eyes from behind her goggles, but they were set in an expression of regret.
"Answers about what?" Sun followed up, scooping the necklace up in his hoof. "Starlit, we've been gone for days! Twilight has to have noticed this missing by now! What happened to us trusting her?!"
"This is all about trust, Sun," Starlit countered, "and I think there are things about Twilight that she doesn't want us to know."
Sun looked between the necklace and Starlit, mulling over her deception and her reasoning. As much as it pained him to do so, he had resolved to trust her, and trust her he would.
"Alright, explain yourself, but you had better make it good or so help me…"
"Do you remember the day we got back from New Selene? When Spike and I had made that vegetable stew?"
"Yes, and I still want that recipe," Sun answered, doing what he could to keep his mind from going into full-blown panic.
"Well, when Spike and I were making that stew, I thought I'd ask him a few questions about where he came from and how he got to know Twilight and the other Princesses. Shooting the breeze to make the work go faster, you know how it goes."
"Eventually," Starlit continued, "I asked him if Twilight is any different now compared to back when she was a ruler of Equestria and he just… didn't answer me."
"He didn't answer?" Sun asked. "And this is cause for concern why? Maybe Twilight never really changed all that much, or he's just forgotten over the years."
"It wasn't just that he didn't answer, it's specifically how he didn't answer," Starlit replied.
"That's an odd semantic distinction to make."
"It seemed like he wanted to tell me," Starlit continued, "but something was preventing him from doing so. I'd ask, he'd look like he was about to answer, and then he'd just freeze up for a few seconds and then go on chopping vegetables as if I'd never asked him anything. When I pressed him on it he acted like I hadn't said anything at all."
Sun didn't answer immediately, instead looking down at the necklace in his hooves and thinking about what he knew about Spike for a few moments. The gears of his brain cranked away, but nothing could come out of it but one of two options.
"Hmm… the way I see it," Sun finally said, "the problem here is that either he's so old that parts of his conscience just aren't working any more, or…"
"Or there are parts of Twilight's past that she doesn't want us knowing about, and she removed those periods of time from Spike when she preserved his mind in this necklace," Starlit finished.
Another period of silence hung between them, punctuated only by the howling of the wind past the rocks as the squall picked up.
"Starlit, whatever the reason for Spike's problem, you still shouldn't have taken this necklace," Sun said. "You could've just asked Twilight about it, maybe it's just a routine hiccup with the spell."
"But why on that specific piece of information?" Starlit countered. "I'm not stupid, Sun, and this problem occurring when I asked that specific question in relation to our mysterious benefactor is just too convenient to be coincidence."
"But she's our benefactor," Sun shot back. "She's trying to fix the world and keep Equestria from falling apart at the seams, what does it matter what she used to be like?"
"Because she's one of the ponies responsible for the world being on the brink of collapse in the first place! Or did you forget that she was one of the root causes of that war even happening?"
"And she's trying to make it right!" Sun countered.
"And what better way to make yourself seem like the injured party in this whole mess than to get rid of any source that runs contrary to the narrative you're trying to create?" Starlit answered back.
Sun made to protest, but the words caught in his throat as the gears in his brain started to turn again. Slowly he let the necklace fall from around his hoof, again landing with a soft thud in the snow.
"Whatever is going on here, Spike knows it," Starlit continued, "and we need to know what he knows to make a judgement call. That is why I swiped his necklace, and that is why I need your help both in trying to fix Spike and getting me into the Empire so we can both get some answers."
"Starlit, this feels wrong; we're going behind Twilight's back, and when she finds out—"
"If she finds out," Starlit interjected.
"When she finds out," Sun replied, "and she will find out because she has enough power to probably vaporize us if we don't tell her the truth, she's going to need an explanation about why we didn't trust her enough to ask her."
Sun placed a hoof onto Starlit's shoulder, letting the weight really sink into her to try and get his point across.
"Are you prepared to give her that explanation?"
Starlit placed her hoof atop Sun's, the pair of them staring into each other's goggles and at the eyes behind them. They were sparring with nothing more than eyes and hooves, and Sun could feel that they were evenly matched.
"I will be, once we get our answers in the Empire," Starlit answered. "For now I'll keep the necklace in my bags, at least through the dead zone. I put some of my new skill at warding to good use and placed a buffer around them that should protect Spike from the field of anti-magic that we'll be walking into."
"At least you thought that far ahead," Sun ruefully replied, pulling his hoof back and taking up his guidestick. "Go get some sleep, I'll get you up in a few hours. I need time to process all of this."
With a resolute nod Starlit put the necklace back into her bags, which he now noticed had small magic runes embossed into the leather. As the flap clasped shut they glowed with a dim blue light, activating the magic that Starlit had put into them.
As Starlit trudged back through the snow Sun was left alone with his thoughts. He now wished more than ever that Silence were still with him, if only so he could have a partner to bounce his worries off of.
The night wound onward and onward, the squall of wind blowing steadily and roughly as Sun kept his vigil. His guidestick provided some meager light, but against the blistering wind its reach could only extend so far. Insufficient illumination aside, Sun found his thoughts too clouded by Starlit's revelations.
"Why can't this be simpler?" Sun pondered. "Patching a hole in Applejack's roof, that was simple; helping the schoolfoals in town with their homework, simple as well. But now I'm stuck dealing with Princesses and the complexities of magic, not to mention risking life and limb for the fate of the world."
Straightening up with his guidestick, Sun took a glance back towards the tents, barely visible in the whipping snow. They all still stood, save for a hefty piling of snow all around them.
"I could just leave. Just grab up my things, scrawl the teleportation circle into the snow, and go back to the Oak. Then from there, just wander south until I hit home again."
Sun slowly slid back into his hunkered position, wrapping his cloak tight against the wind and leaning his head back against the stone slab. A hot burst of steam escaped his face mask as he sighed into the night.
"What is wrong with me?" Sun chastised. "Things just started to go sideways, just start turning against my favor, and I'm thinking of calling it quits? By Celestia, what would my parents say about that?"
A small flicker of warmth spread through Sun's heart as he thought of home, of his parents. Remembering his mother teaching him his letters and numbers, his father showing him how to bandage a scraped shin. They had both loved him, even if they weren't here to see all that he'd done without them.
The feeling of happiness slowly abated as Sun caught a glimpse of something out in the snowstorm. It was heavily obscured by the wind, but it looked distinctly pony shaped and moved with a steady, purposeful gait.
Righting himself, Sun slowly made his way towards the figure, keeping his guidestick aloft and his magic bolt primed. Anything that was moving around at this time of night and this far into the tundra wasn't something to be trifled with.
As Sun slowly approached the figure became clearer, as did the sky; as he drew closer to the creature the squall abated, and individual flurries of snow hung suspended in the air as if frozen in time. The figure turned to face Sun as it noticed his guidestick's light.
It's skin was as white as the driven snow, with odd blue undertones and a texture not unlike that of desiccated skin. It reminded him all too much of a thestral's mottled skin, and he reflexively drew back when it locked its large, iridescent, ice-blue eyes onto him. It had no mane nor tail, or even a tail bone, and a single shard of pure, crystalline ice pierced into its forehead in a grim simulacra of a unicorn's horn.
The creature stared at Sun, and Sun at it, neither making a move against each other for an amount of time that seemed like an eternity. Then, with a sound like cracking glass, it opened its mouth and let words spill forth.
"You, herald of my foe," the voice intoned from an unmoving mouth, feminine and despondent, "turn back. The Crystal Empire holds no treasure for you, only decay, despair, and demise. Leave me to my unending sorrow, for love's soothing warmth rests not in my crystal heart."
With another cracking noise the creature shut its mouth, and without a care turned away from Sun and continued its march into the snow, taking its pocket of calm with it. Sun slowly backed up towards his post, keeping his eyes on the creature until the snowstorm finally subsumed it. He jumped with a start when his back finally hit the rock, and then decided that it was Starlit's turn to keep watch.
* * *
Rainbow Dash awoke the next morning with a kink in her back and one of her wings awkwardly folded up underneath her, one of the perils of roughing it in the tundra. Taking a moment to stand, shake herself out, and get her blood warmed up, she pulled her goggles down and mask up to brace the chill and the layabouts.
As the harsh light of morning hit her eyes, thankfully protected by her goggles, she found that every part of camp save for her tent had already been broken down, and her tag-alongs were just finishing packing up their things.
"About time somepony got some work out of you two," Rainbow Dash chastised. "Keep this up and you might just start to impress me."
Neither turned to face her, although Sun gave a quick glance over before turning back to his bags.
"Ah, giving me the cold shoulder, huh?" Rainbow continued. "Fine, whatever, makes my job easier if I don't have to deal with your jaw-jacking."
Rainbow expertly broke down her tent, rolled up her bedroll, and tucked all of her supplies away into their appropriate pouches and bags. Save for the occasional gust of wind, she worked in silence.
"I hope watch wasn't too hard on you fresh flakes last night," Rainbow said as she joined them. "I find that nothing really tests a pony like staring out into the great unknown and wondering what might be out there."
"Are we going to get moving?" Starlit asked, her tone nearly as cold as the snow. "We're on something of a time-table here."
"Yeah, keep your snowshoes on," Rainbow replied, checking the map she'd taken. "Just keep following those fancy necklaces of yours, I'll make sure you don't wander down of a ravine."
Rainbow Dash took the lead again, as she always did, keeping her ears perked for trouble and her eyes on the horizon. The weight of her guidestick on her back was comforting, although the fresh snowfall from the dust-up last night had made any sorts of natural paths harder to discern.
One hour passed. Then two. Then three. The only communication Rainbow had with her charges had been the occasional course correction, followed by the pair of them falling back. Against the endless expanse of white with nary a spot of color to break up the monotony, Rainbow found her brain winding up like a spring. She needed stimulus, something to break up the trudge.
Slowly she fell back, putting herself at least within earshot of Starlit and Sun. It seemed like they were discussing something, but the covering on her ears and their low voices prevented her from making any of it out.
"Hey, I'm bored," Rainbow interjected when there seemed to be a pause in the conversation. "Either of you good at breaking that sort of thing up?"
Starlit shot a quick glare at Rainbow before moving back a bit further and resuming her conversation. Even with the mask, Rainbow could tell Starlit was still harboring a few wounded feelings.
"Look, I'm sorry about yesterday, alright?" Rainbow apologized. "It's just that you hit a nerve, and I got mad, and I'm not great at emotions and junk like that."
"Rainbow, we're busy planning for what's ahead," Starlit cut in. "Unless it's important, I think this would be a fantastic time to learn the value of patience."
Letting out a cloud of fog with her exasperated groan, Rainbow turned back forward and set an angry glare on the horizon.
"Fine, whatever, not like I wanted to bury the spear with you anyway," Rainbow grumbled.
Within the hour night fell again, leaving Rainbow Dash with even less to look at. Her fur prickled with every step, she often found herself idly chewing on her lip, and at one point idly twisting her guidestick in her hoof just to watch the light from its crystal. Anything to break up the tedium, all of which rapidly failed her.
"Okay, we're stopping here," Rainbow declared when she'd finally had enough of trying to keep herself halfway focused. She pointed out to a stable slab of stone cresting up from the frozen lake that they'd been walking on. It wasn't ideal, but it was flat and it gave Rainbow an excuse to do something other than endlessly march.
Rainbow Dash pulled out a few logs from their supply of firewood and set them up to prepare for kindling while Starlit and Sun busied themselves a decent distance away with their tents and supplies. All day the pair of them had been chatting incessantly, and it seemed that camp set up would be no different.
As Rainbow set the kindling alight with a charge from her guidestick she looked towards the tents and called for her charges.
"Fire's ready, I'll get some of our rations cooking," Rainbow said. She quickly pulled out her tin pot and nestled it into the now growing fire, then putting in a few hoofulls of snow to let it melt down and come up to a boil.
Rainbow was just pulling out some of the powdered ingredients that they'd brought along when Starlit and Sun made their way to the warmth of the fire. They didn't necessarily look happy, which Rainbow Dash could understand, but they didn't look particularly unhappy either. If anything, they had the sort of look that told her they had been thinking.
"A lot on your mind?" Rainbow asked as she poured the powders in. The snow-water immediately started to thicken up, and a scent of spices and vegetable broth permeated the air.
Starlit and Sun both exchanged a look, but didn't answer back.
"So we're still doing this, huh? Look, Starlit, I'm sorry I snapped at you yesterday, really. This really isn't the best situation for me to be in either, and I got a little testy."
"Rainbow, we've been doing some talking," Starlit began.
"No kidding you have," Rainbow interjected.
"And we think we'll be fine without you."
Save for the howl of the wind in the distance and the crackle of the fire, the camp grew deathly quiet. Rainbow cast a confused glance at both of them, but neither seemed like they were joking.
"No, you won't be," Rainbow replied curtly. "Trust me, out of the three of us I am the most experienced when it comes to this survival stuff. You need me around."
"Rainbow, this isn't exactly our first time doing something like this," Sun said. "We all know that you don't want to be here, and Starlit and I really think it would be for the best if you just took your belongings, enough food to sustain you on the trip back, and left us to our own devices."
"And how will you get in to the Empire without me, huh?" Rainbow shot back, only to be cowed when they both held up their compass-necklaces. The small glowing spot pointed to the northeast.
"And what about the no-magic zone?" Rainbow retorted. "You'll need me to navigate!"
"Not with the moon and the sun," Starlit replied back. "I learned how to navigate by those when I was little, and now that they're working properly again it'll only be easier to do so."
Rainbow looked back and forth, hoping that one of them would tell her it was all a joke. On the one hoof she wanted so desperately for an excuse to go back, to keep her promise to Scootaloo. But she couldn't leave a job half-finished, especially when Spitfire had given it to her explicitly.
"But you two promised that you'd tell me what was going on!" Rainbow hastily demanded. "You wouldn't back out on a promise, would you?"
"We can tell you when we get back," Sun replied.
"Rainbow, you're grasping at straws here and you know it," Starlit continued. "You said it yourself, this is a suicide mission at best; why get yourself killed when you have ponies worth living for back home?"
After having spent so much of the day desperate for conversation, Rainbow Dash found herself at a loss for words. This was her chance; she could make a clean break and go home with a clear conscience. No more trudging through the tundra, no more keeping her head on a swivel, no more having to deal with anyone but her own people.
"You know what, it's your funeral," Rainbow relented. "If you want to disappear into the white and never be seen again, then that's on your idiot flanks. I do have ponies worth living for, so if you want me gone then I'm gone."
Without so much as another word Rainbow Dash stood up, gathered up her pack, which she had noticed neither of them had bothered to unpack, and marched out onto the frozen lake. Guidestick in hoof and her goggles pulled down over her face she marched back south, both ashamed that she was abandoning the mission and relieved that she could go home.
As she flew off, she felt a gust of wind come in across the gliding edge of her wings, and noticed a squall starting roll in from the south. She flew straight for it, hoping that the chill of the wind would cool the fire in her head.
* * *
The nighttime air whipped at the canvas of Starlit and Sun's tent, shaking and rattling the rough fabric. They had both decided it would be for the better if they stay in the same tent to conserve on body heat and to make creaking down camp easier. Without Rainbow Dash they were down a set of hooves, and they would have to conserve all the energy that they could.
Starlit felt Sun shift in the bedroll next to her. He'd been tossing and turning all night, and by this point it was apparent that neither of them were going to be getting a good night's sleep.
With a slow yawn Starlit sat up and looked to Sun, who was laying on his back and looking up at the roof of the tent with that expression he got whenever he was deep in thought.
"Bit for your thoughts?" Starlit asked.
"Did we make a huge mistake?" Sun asked, still staring at the roof.
"I don't think we did, if by "mistake" you mean letting a potential liability go before she could become a problem."
Sun kept staring up at the roof, and the wind continued to pound at the flaps of the tent.
"Sun, we've gone over this," Starlit continued as she flopped back onto her bedroll. "She obviously didn't want to come along, and we both agreed that we don't want to be responsible for her getting killed on our mission. You even said that it was for the best."
"I remember what I said, Starlit," Sun replied. "I'm just starting to feel bad about how we went about it, I guess."
"Rainbow's a big filly, she can take a few sharp words," Starlit answered. "C'mon, we better make hay while the wind howls. No sense in trying to get back to sleep in this sleet storm."
"You aren't thinking about getting back out there in this, are you?" Sun retorted.
"Heavens, no," Starlit replied, taken aback that that is the conclusion Sun had jumped to. "I'm just saying we should take some inventory, go over the books Twilight gave us about this place, and wait for the weather to abate."
"Oh," Sun sheepishly answered back. "Yeah, that would probably be for the best. This wind is ridiculously loud, even compared to what we've seen so far."
"That probably means that we're getting closer to the Empire, then. Here, you go over the atlas while I take a look at this history text she gave us."
As the wind continued to howl outside, Starlit and Sun set their minds to work. It helped to focus her thoughts after what they'd gone through with Rainbow Dash, but she couldn't help but worry a bit for their wayward guide.
* * *
Rainbow Dash could practically feel the wind blowing against her, such was its speed and ferocity as it battered against her tent. The squall she had seen coming had blown in far faster than she anticipated, and she'd been forced to set up her tent in the blinding snow.
Rainbow could feel her face heat up in anger just thinking about what those two had done. Their hubris was going to be the death of them, but if they didn't want her then she wasn't going to indulge them with her presence any more. They could freeze for all she cared.
For nearly an hour Rainbow tried to roll back over and sleep some more, but kept finding that it wouldn't come to her. Every time the wind howled it reignited her indignation, her anger at hasn't been so jilted when she was just trying to do her job.
"It wasn't even a job you wanted, what are you so cut up over this?" Rainbow asked herself. "You get to go home, see Scootaloo, see your friends. They even gave you the perfect alibi for Spitfire."
Shaking her head, Rainbow stood up from her bedroll. She could get through this storm, and doing something physical would help take her mind off of her anger at being rejected and cast out.
Her goggles, head and hoof wraps, and thick coat were only doing so much to keep the biting chill out as Rainbow Dash broke down her tent and got everything packed back away. With her guidestick attaches to her side and beaming its red light in front of her, Rainbow started the trudge southward, doing her best to navigate by what little moon and starlight she could see through the clouds.
Rainbow had barely been walking for fifteen minutes when she felt a sudden chill, one completely unrelated to the weather. It ran down her spine, sending an electric tingle of primal fear through her. It wasn't a sensation she was used to feeling.
Whipping her head around she found herself surrounded by the blinding white, barely able to see ten feet in front of herself even with her snow-blind goggles. The light from her guidestick wasn't doing much for it either.
Cautiously Rainbow Dash creeped forward, the crunch of snow underhoof and the howl of the wind whipping against her face the only things she could feel as she perked her ears. She was trying to listen for anything out of place; a movement of snow, a cough, anything. Something was out in the snow with her, and she had to get the jump on it before it got the jump on her.
So focused was she on listening for another pony or worse that Rainbow Dash almost didn't notice when the snowstorm died down. The world was still shrouded in a haze of white, but the winds had ceased and the flurries of snow hung in midair. It was still, completely and utterly.
Slowly, with a soft crunching of snow, Rainbow Dash heard hoofsteps make their way towards her. A pony sized figure, hairless and with wrinkled, desiccated skin as white as driven snow stalked toward her. It's vivid blue eyes bore through her, but it didn't seem to be particularly malicious.
Rainbow Dash, however, froze in her tracks when she saw the stuff of her nightmares walk out of the silent storm. She had been told tales of these creatures, but always assumed that they were just foal's tales designed to scare children into obeying. It couldn't be real, but the evidence of her eyes was all that she needed to believe that it was.
"Windigo," Rainbow muttered under her breath.
The creature walked past, eyes locked forward, and as it went so did the flurries that it had suspended in the air. They all began to coalesce into pony-sized forms, incorporeal and spectral, that followed after the windigo like an army. Several of its ghosts walked through her, leaving a vicious chill in her chest each time they did, and as the mass finally moved past they took to the air, galloping across the northward sky with snow falling from their hooves.
They were going for Starlit and Sun, and Rainbow Dash wasn't there to tell them what was coming.
The storm now past, Rainbow started to the south, towards her home. She stared back to the north, seeing the wave of ice-borne death coming for two ponies who didn't know the doom that was about to come down upon their heads.
Rainbow thought of Scootaloo. Rainbow thought of Starlit and Sun. She thought about hearth and home, about terror and death, about her wants, about their needs, about her home, about her mission.
With a muttered curse under her breath, Rainbow took to the sky once more, flying as fast as her wings would carry her back north. She could run alongside the horde of ghosts, keeping above their mass so they wouldn't notice her. She just prayed that she could fly faster than they could.
* * *
The weather showed no signs of letting up after what felt like two hours, and despite the weather Starlit noticed the barest hints of daylight starting to peek through the oppressive winter wind.
"I'd say that this is about as good as we're going to get," Starlit declares as she slapped the tome she had been reading shut. "Let's start breaking everything down, we may as well get a bit more distance."
"You sure? The wind's still pretty bad," Sun asked.
"It's been bad for hours, we may as well get some walki—"
Starlit stopped short as her ears perked up. Despite the wind, she swore that she could hear a voice on the wind.
"Do you hear that?" Starlit asked Sun. Sun adjusted his ears, even placing one against the canvas wall of the tent.
"You mean the wind dying down?" Sun asked back. Starlit was only now noticing that the wind was starting to abate, which only set the fur on her neck even more on edge.
"No, it sounds like somepony yelling," Starlit answered. "Stay here, I'll go check it out. Get your knife ready just in case."
Sun drew the knife at his ankle with his teeth as Starlit carefully edged towards the flaps of the tent. Her horn was alight with blue magic, ready to throw up a ward if need be.
Just as she pushed the flap back it blew open with a gale as a figure barreled into the tent. Starlit reflexively activated her ward, popping a dome up around herself that tore the canvas of the tent to shreds and splintered the wooden stakes holding it in place.
As the tent blew away in the diminished wind and Sun held his ground beside her, the rising sun revealed a tangled mess of hooves, clothes, supplies, and a small shock of rainbow colored hair peeking out from under a head wrap.
"Rainbow Dash?" Starlit and Sun asked in unison.
Quickly Rainbow flapped her wings and assumes a standing position. She was breathing like she had just run a marathon, and her goggles were hanging haphazardly from her neck.
"What are you doing here?" Starlit asked. "We told you to go home!"
"Not now, there's something bad coming, and I mean really bad!" Rainbow quickly replied. "Get whatever you can carry, we need to run!"
"Rainbow, you're not maki—" Sun began.
"I could be halfway back home right now with the speed I just flew at, and I'm probably not going to be able to fly again for a day or two, so right now I just need you two to trust me!" Rainbow interjected, eyes piercing through Sun like an arrow. "There is a horde of monsters on their way here right now, and I'm pretty sure they're looking for you two specifically! Now grab your shit and move!"
As Starlit deactivated her ward she noticed something odd; the wind had completely abated, and the snowfall had stopped. Not like it had ceased snowing, but that the flurries hung in the air as if time had stopped. Rainbow Dash looked at the phenomena like a pony who had just seen a ghost, and Sun's quick tap from behind proved how correct of an assessment that was.
Galloping through the sky, like a hoard of ghosts, were incorporeal ponies made fro the very frost itself, and at the head she could see a single creature. It was pony shaped, with snow-white skin that was thin and wrinkled like a thestrals, and it's eyes were a solid, vivid blue.
As Starlit backed away as the apparitions and their leader drew ever closer to the ground, the pony at the head opened its mouth, and a high, sonorous, and vicious voice echoed out of it.
"Thou didst not heed my warning! Thou didst not return to from whence thou camst! Now thou whilst lie buried in the hoarfrost with the rest of the interlopers, so that mine sorrow may endure evermore!"
"Run!" Rainbow cried, and Starlit was more than inclined to agree. Grabbing up her saddlebags she slung it across her haunches and bolted, with Sun following just behind and Rainbow taking the helm.
The trio barely got more than a hundred feet out before a piercing cracking noise echoed across the ground, shifting the fresh snow to reveal they they were running across the roof of an ice cavern.
Another crack, and fissures as wide as Starlit was began to race along the ice behind her.
One final crack, and all three of them were falling into the frozen abyss below, tumbling head over hooves as the ice swallowed them up.
Starlit coughed out all the air in her lungs when her back slammed against a solid slope of ice, and even as she gasped and spluttered to try and regain it she was busy scrambling to try and find purchase on any surface as she slid further and further into the icy abyss below.
She could see Rainbow Dash above her, trying and failing to gain some air with her wings even though it was patently obvious that she was far too tired to do so. Finally the pegasus's strength completely failed and she flopped onto another slope of clear blue ice and began the perilous slide downward, only a few yards away from Starlit.
The only pony Starlit couldn't see as she toppled and spun was Sun. She could hear his voice echoing off of the ice pillars, screams and cries of pain and panic, but everywhere she looked she couldn't see a trace of him.
Starlit finally looked downward as she tried to get a grasp on where exactly this slope was taking her, but only saw more and more clear blue ice below. It spiraled and twisted in smooth curves and sharp spikes with seemingly no end, and Starlit could tell that she was picking up speed towards whatever lay at the bottom.
A cry of anguish from Rainbow Dash cut through the air just as Starlit got her breath back, and she twisted her head around to see what could possibly be making the situation worse. Rainbow was splayed out on her back, still sliding down the slope and now with a large spike of ice embedded into her right flank. Blood streaked behind her, a grim crimson gash against the calming blue of the ice.
So focused was Starlit on her wounded companion that she didn't see the slope finally come to a dead stop, and she had no time to react as she went into a complete free fall for a few seconds. The landing against the solid sheet of ice was only somewhat cushioned by her heavy cloak, but another scream of pain from Rainbow Dash drew her focus away from the burning in her lungs and the almost certainly broken ribs she had incurred.
Dragging herself to her hooves, bolts of pain streaking across her chest as she did, she saw where Rainbow had landed. Rainbow Dash lay in a crumpled heap, wings splayed out behind her, and a puddle of blood forming underneath her haunches where she had landed directly on the ice spike. She shuddered and shook with sheer pain, sobs wracking her chest as Starlit ran over and flipped her onto her other side.
"Aah! Careful!" Rainbow admonished. "For shit's sake, this hurts!"
Starlit looked at the wound, and it wasn't good; the spike had pierced through all of the muscle tissue in her flank, and landing on it had shattered the base and pushed the main spike so deep in that it was scraping against her hip bones. There was still a small bit of the base that Starlit could grab with her magic, but the process of getting it out would be excruciating.
"Rainbow, I need you to bite down on something, I have to get this out of you," Starlit said as she illuminated her horn.
"What?! No, no no no! Just wait for it to melt!" Rainbow retorted, crawling away slowly with her forelegs.
"Do you want to get frostbite while you wait, or let this gaping wound get infected?!" Starlit shot back. She was busy pulling out the medical supplies that she'd been given, as well as one of the few pieces of kindling that had been left in her pack. She jammed the stick into Rainbow's mouth, which the pegasus then spat out.
"Please, don't take it out! I'll be fine, jus—"
Starlit wasn't having it; she jammed the stick back into Rainbow's maw and put her hoof onto her muzzle to keep her from spitting it back out again. Starlit could feel Rainbow squirming and thrashing underneath the weight of her hoof until Starlit finally found purchase on the shard with her magic and began to pull.
Rainbow's screams through the stick echoed long and loud off of the ice cavern walls, and a few spurts of hot blood came out with each agonizing inch that Starlit yanked the spike out. Finally the shock proved to be too much, and Rainbow passed out, the stick lolling out of her muzzle as Starlit got the last of the ice shard out of her flank.
"Thank goodness, that's going to make this next part easier," Starlit said as she drew her small sword from its scabbard and pulled the stick away from Rainbow's mouth. She quickly used the sword to cut away the parts of her winter clothes at that were sticking to the wound, and rinsed it out with a small splash of water. Her cutie mark on that side was completely gone save for a small section of the lightning bolt near the bottom, but with the clothes and excess blood out of the way Starlit could get a better picture of what she needed to do.
It took a few strikes with her flint and steel to light the frayed end of the twig, but it eventually caught and Starlit held the tip of her sword over the flame with her teeth as she cradled the twig in her front legs. A few moments passed, Starlit's gaze flitting between Rainbow's rapidly bleeding leg wound and her sword, until the tip of the blade finally turned red hot.
Holding the sword in her teeth as steadily as her shivering jaw would let her, Starlit carefully poked the glowing tip into every bleeding spot in Rainbow's thigh that she could find. The acrid smell of burning hair mixed with the sickly sweet smell of cooking flesh and blood, and after a half-dozen prods with the sword the bleeding finally abated.
Breathing heavily and working quickly with what little magical energy that she had left, Starlit let the sword fall with a clatter and hiss to the icy floor and pulled out the suturing needle and her thread. If she could stitch together skin, hopefully she could stitch together muscle too. Pouring some high-proof alcohol that Spitfire had given them onto the wound, Starlit got to work.
It took Starlit what felt like two hours of careful, agonizing magic work, and by the time she actually closed up the wound her horn completely died out and the suture fell out of her grip. She let out a huge gasp of air, her breath coming in pants that sent fresh waves of pain through her broken ribs, but at the least she had stopped the bleeding and done what she could for the muscles. Hopefully Rainbow would be able to keep the leg, but at this point the worst of the danger was over, as far as Starlit could tell.
With a last ragged gasp as she shoved Rainbow out of the pool of her own blood, Starlit collapsed into a deep, dreamless sleep.
* * *
Sun came back to consciousness with a throbbing headache and swimming vision. His legs felt like mush, and there was a sharp, pulsing pain on the side of his face not unlike the time when he'd been blown up and artfully pieced back together.
"Silence, you there?" Sun asked futilely. All he could hear was the sound of his own heartbeat.
Shakily, Sun pulled himself up to his hooves, and when he finally could see straight he was reminded of what had happened in the preceding ten minutes.
He was in some small cavernous space, with the ceiling easily over three hundred feet above him. Despite being completely enclosed the walls all suffused a deep blue light from within, allowing him to see that he was inside an ice cavern.
Quickly he turned around, looking for Starlit or Rainbow Dash, and found neither of them. They must've been separated in the fall, no doubt because Sun had been lagging behind when the fissure opened up. The only notable feature he could see was a small tunnel formed out of the ice that led deeper into the cavern.
A rising feeling of dread welled up in Sun's chest as he, yet again, found himself alone due to unforeseen circumstances. He was alone, freezing, and grappling with the mounting fear that he would die down in these caverns with no way out.
"Okay Sun, just breathe," he muttered under his breath. "You've been through worse than this. Just use the compass, that should give you a good enough heading."
With a small spurt of magic Sun drew the compass stone out from his cloak, it mercifully still hanging there despite the fall. The small point of light hovered to his left, pointing back at the only exit to his particular cavern.
"See, this'll be fine," Sun muttered again. "Just follow the little lig—"
"Hello?" a diminutive voice asked, echoing around the cavern and causing Sun's heart to skip a beat. Quickly Sun made an about face and used his magic, grey though it was, to draw his dagger.
Standing behind him, where previously there had been only an ice wall, was a pony that was only about two-thirds of his size. The pony, a stallion by the look of it, had skin and hair that were textured like dull gemstones, and his pupils and irises weren't round but oddly geometrical. He looked concerned, but not necessarily afraid of Sun.
The two stared each other down for a long moment, neither daring to move lest the other made a hostile action in return. Finally it was the odd gem-pony that broke the metaphorical ice.
"I, uh, saw you fall down here," the pony said, it's voice high and tinny, like his voice hadn't quite broken yet. "Are you okay?"
"That depends," Sun replied, keeping his knife up. "Are you friend or foe?"
"That depends on whether or not you're going to put that knife away," the pony replied back.
Cautiously, not taking his eyes off of the creature, Sun sheathed his knife and took a step back. He may not have the most martial prowess, but he wasn't about to get jumped.
"So, are you friend or foe?" Sun asked again.
"I guess a friend, although if I'm going to be honest we haven't seen one of your kind down here in a long time. Not since the Freeze, at the least."
"Then what say we get introductions out of the way, and see if we can't help each other," Sun said, holding out a hoof nervously. "I'm Setting Sun."
The bug-pony took the hoof, and as it did Sun noticed that the creature's hooves were riddled with holes. They didn't look like wounds, but like the odd gem-like substance that this pony seemed to be made of had broken and shattered through repeated stress.
"I'm Agateous," the gem-pony replied, shaking the hoof weakly. "You probably want to get somewhere warm, don't you?"
"More than words could possibly describe." Sun answered with barely restrained glee, "but I have a pair of friends that are stuck down here with me that I have to find too."
"Well, I know all of these tunnels like the back of my hoof, so I could help you out with that," Agateous answered. "Do you know where they landed?"
"If I knew that I wouldn't need help finding them," Sun answered and he made his way towards the tunnel leading out.
"Fair enough, but you don't want to go that way," Agateous replied.
Before Sun could protest Agateous walked to the sheer wall that he had seemingly materialized from and ran a hoof along it. As quiet as a whisper the ice simply vanished into a thin haze, revealing a perfectly carved semi-circular tunnel behind it.
"This way," Agateous offered, gesturing to the tunnel and making their way inside. Sun quickly followed suit, marveling at the tunnel and the entrance even as it rematerialized behind him.
* * *
A dull, throbbing pain roused Rainbow Dash to consciousness. She couldn't remember where she was, but her whole right leg felt numb and she could feel a welt building up on the right side of her muzzle.
As she came to and her vision focused she saw Starlit, lain across a solid patch of ice and sleeping like the dead. A medical pack from back at the Outpost was still open next to her, and a large puddle of blood had frozen and congealed against the ground.
The sight of the blood brought everything rushing back, and as she remembered a burning, lightning quick jolt of pain wound up through her right flank.
"Ah!" Rainbow exhaled. "Ah, that hurts. By the Princess, what did she do to me?"
Adjusting herself with her forelegs, sending fresh waves of pain through her haunch with each subtle motion, she turned her head to look at her wound. The stitching was crudely done, but there wasn't any fresh blood and it looked like it had been cleaned. Rainbow couldn't move the muscles in her hip at all, but she found that she could flex and move everything from her mid-leg down.
"Could've at least bandaged it over too," Rainbow groused. Carefully she dragged herself over to the medical supplies and pulled out some rough cloth and carefully wound it around her flank and hip. It hurt with every successive wrap, but it would help keep the wound closed and protected.
Starlit began to rouse as Rainbow Dash put the finishing touches on her bandage, and Rainbow pointedly averted her gaze as Starlit came around.
"I told you not to pull out that icicle," Rainbow said, drawing Starlit's attention.
"What?" Starlit answered blearily.
"I have absolutely no feeling in my right leg, and I can't flex my hip on that side either," Rainbow continued, looking to Starlit.
"Oh, for the love of… are you completely incapable of being gracious about anyt—" Starlit began, before Rainbow Dash cut her off.
"But you were right to get it out of me. I was freaking out and in a lot of pain, I wasn't thinking straight, and you made a tough call. Thanks to you I'm probably going to be able to hang on to this leg, provided we get this done with before gangrene or frostbite set in."
Starlit looked bewildered, and for the first time since they'd met Rainbow found her reluctant charge at a loss for words. She would be lying to herself if she didn't find something satisfying about that.
"I'm being nice, I think the appropriate response is 'Thank you, Rainbow Dash.'"
"Thanks nothing," Starlit retorted, "I had to spend two hours and all of my magic trying to knit your muscles back together with a fish bone suture and worse thread than I used for my daughter's baby clothes, not to mention ruining the tip of my sword on cauterizing all of your torn blood vessels."
"And I had to bandage it up after losing probably a pint of blood and having a shard of ice tear through my leg, then having a crazy unicorn do impromptu surgery on me in an ice cavern without even a snowball to dull the pain. I think we're even, ma'am."
The pair stared at each other for a moment as they lay a yard apart, until the tension was finally cut by both of them letting out a few snorts of laughter followed with hisses of pain from their respective injuries.
"Ah, don't make me laugh, I think I broke a few ribs in the fall," Starlit said, holding her side gingerly.
"I've never broken a bone, if you can believe it," Rainbow replied.
"With as combative as you are, I honestly can't believe it."
"I have a pretty dense bone structure for a pegasus, at least according to our town doctor," Rainbow replied. "She thinks that that's why I'm such a strong flyer; I've been working against my own weight for my whole life, which made all those muscles stronger to compensate."
"How could she possibly know that?" Starlit asked incredulously.
"She has a spell for it, I think. Unicorns are crazy, what with the magic and their wild assumptions and all."
Starlit chuckled again, followed by another hiss of pain.
"Don't push your luck," Starlit admonished, "I think I might just be starting to like you, since you sort of helped save our lives."
Rainbow Dash let her gaze slide upward, towards the now enclosed roof of the ice cavern above them. A bit of sunlight dappled through, but most of the lighting they were seeing by was being provided by the ice around them which glowed a strange, luminescent blue.
"I wouldn't thank me for that just yet, we are still trapped at the bottom of an ice ravine with no way out," Rainbow countered.
Starlit looked up as well, the brief moment of adrenaline-induced giddiness subsiding as the pair came to grips with their new situation.
"I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that those things didn't follow us down here," Starlit said. "What were they, anyway? The one at the front looked like a thestral, if you know what that is, but the rest looked like some kind of specter."
"I'd warn you that what I'm about to say sounds crazy, but we did just go through the same thing so I'll save it," Rainbow began. "We call them windigos. They're a bit like thestrals in that they're a product of the Wasting, but something about the ambient magic from when the Crystal Princess froze everything over changed how the disease hits them. According to the few eyewitness accounts we have and what precious little knowledge we have from tomes that survived the old war the windigos control the weather out here, but they're solitary hunters."
"Since it can summon a hoard of frost ghosts, that would make sense," Starlit commented. "The only thestrals I've ever encountered were pack hunters."
"Yeah, tricksy bastards," Rainbow groused. "If we get out of this we'll have 'can break open fissures in solid ice' to their horror show list of powers."
"We'll get out of this, but not in our current conditions," Starlit replied. "We need time for those stitches to take in your leg, and both of us need to get our energy back."
"I am all for that," Rainbow affirmed. "That stick you shoved down my gullet is over there, and I think I still have some wood in my bags."
Gingerly Starlit stood up and used a stuttering spark of magic to drag the bags to herself. She drew out the sticks, kindling, and tinder, but then stared confused at the surroundings.
"Uh, where exactly do you intend to set up a fire where it won't melt through the floor?" Starlit asked.
If Rainbow had the energy she would've slapped a hoof against her forehead, but she let out an exasperated groan all the same.
"Right, ice cavern. I guess we're going to have to share body heat and use our blankets until we can get out of this cavern."
"Perfect, just splendid," Starlit complained as she shoved the fire-making materials away. "Just promise that you're not a hugger, my ribs can't take that right now."
"Not a hugger, but I am a snorer according to my bunk mates."
"My husband and you should compare notes, because he sounds like a stampede when he snores."
"You'll have to tell me more about him, he sounds like a swell stallion," Rainbow quipped back as Starlit sidled up behind her on the ground, using her magic to layer a blanket underneath and over them. "Plus you still owe me an explanation for why you're even doing this."
"I promise that once we get out of here and find Sun I'll explain everything, but right now we both have to get some real sleep."
Wrapped up in as warm of a pocket as Starlit could make, Rainbow Dash slowly felt pain and exhaustion slosh through her mind, pulling her into a deep sleep. It might've been the delirium from the pain in her haunch, but she felt comfortable for the first time in days.
* * *
Agateous cautiously led Sun through the siding, narrow, and freezing caverns that he seemingly called home, although Sun found himself pining for his desert home with as cold as he was.
"What exactly are you doing down here, anyway?" Sun asked after rounding yet another identical looking tunnel. "I've never seen ponies like you before, or even read about it."
"Oh, the matriarch can answer any questions you have, but first we have to find your friends, right?" Agateous answered, without really answering anything.
"Matriarch? You mean the Princess, because she's actually why my friends and I are out in the blasted tundra right now."
Agateous let out a quick snort of laughter as he dissolved another wall to his left and led Sun through it.
"You mean Cadance? No, she hasn't left her palace in centuries, not since the Freeze," Agateous continued. "The matriarch is our leader; she keeps us safe, keeps our town warm down here, and helps keep the windigos away."
"And the 'windigos' are those monsters that attacked me and my friends on the surface?" Sun asked.
"Well, only the one that was physical. All of the other things are constructs that it makes out of ice and snow, designed to scare ponies away. They actually don't really like killing ponies, they just want to chase them off."
"That monster opened up a crevasse in the ice that separated me and my friends, as well as sending us falling down a good three hundred feet on a slalom course from hell. I'm pretty sure it meant to kill us."
"Well, they do normally give a warning first, and then they go for the throat if you ignore it," Agateous corrected.
Sun felt a pit drop into his stomach, cold enough that the surrounding chill seemed temperate in comparison. He hadn't told Starlit about encountering one of those things the other night, and now she could be dead and it was his fault.
"Hey, how much longer do you think it's going to be before we find my friends?" Sun asked, his voice jumping a little in pitch.
"Oh, probably another couple of hours or so," Agateous answered cheerily, a tone which hit Sun's ears like a horseshoe scraping on glass.
"Hours?!" Sun exclaimed. "They could be freezing to death right now, and you're telling me this could take hours? Why can't you just make more walls disappear, brute force this until we find them, they can't have fallen far from where I landed!"
"That answer is… complicated," Agateous replied, his voice faltering a bit.
"Then uncomplicate it!" Sun demanded, his patience starting to wear thin.
"I just have this feeling, deep in my gut, that it'll be a couple of hours until we see them again," Agateous continued. "I swear I'm not being malicious about this, that's just the sort of feeling I'm getting."
"A feeling!? That's all you have to go off of?" Sun hollered, forcing Agateous to turn around and clamp a hoof over his mouth.
"Shh!" Agateous hissed, "there are things down here that can hear you, and they get pretty angry when they get woken up!"
"Like what?" Sun demanded again, pulling Agateous's hoof away.
"Frost worms mostly, but also windigos and just the generally unstable nature of these caverns. Ice isn't really the most sturdy thing to make caverns out of, after all."
Sun quickly looked around the tunnel they were, which was about to widen out into an open space, suddenly cognizant of the fact that it was impossibly quiet in the caverns. He could hear his own haggard breathing, feel his heartbeat and the lump on his head throbbing.
"Right, sorry," Sun replied, taking care to modulate his voice downward. "I'm just scared, and I tend to get angry when I'm scared."
"It's okay, just follow my hunch and we should bathe be fi—"
A low rumble echoed in the space around them, like a stomach growling except that the cavern they were in was the stomach.
"Agateous," Sun whispered as the pair slowly backed into the open space, "what do these frost worms normally sound like when they're moving?"
Another rumble, louder and closer, echoed around the chamber.
"Like a thousand hoofbeats echoing all at once," Agateous answered.
A third rumble, now impossibly close and loud enough to hurt.
"Then should we start running?" Sun asked.
"I'd say that running is the appropriate response to this," Agateous answered.
As the ground in the tunnel in front of them buckled and broke Sun and Agateous turned tail and ran, a massive wall of flesh, ice, and teeth burrowing after them with voracious hunger and murderous intent.
"How do you kill one of these things!?" Sun yelled to Agateous, desperately trying to be heard over the crashing and roaring of the worm behind them.
"You don't! You either get away or get eaten!"
"You've been living down here for centuries and you never figured out how to stop one of these monsters!?"
"We have the matriarch for that, what do you want fro— duck!"
Without a moment's warning Agateous dragged Sun's head down by his collar, just in time to prevent a chunk of ice about the size of his torso from decapitating him.
"They can spit up ice chunks that they eat!" Agateous clarified as he directed Sun down a small side tunnel.
"Thanks for the warning, but we can't outrun this thing!" Sun replied. "I have to find Starlit and Rainbow Dash, and to do that this thing has to die!"
"I'm open to suggestions!" Agateous answered back.
More running, more screaming, and the hot, acrid stench of the frost worm's breath beating against Sun's back were not making for the best thinking environment, and the dim lighting from the enchanted ice walls were playing hell with his sense of direction.
However, it did finally bring two ideas together in his head, and if he was right it might just save them.
"Agateous, how does this thing see?" Sun asked. "Is it blind?"
"Not really, but it has an incredible sense for sounds and vibrations. Why?"
"Finally, I catch a break," Sun thought to himself. "Okay, I need you to trust me here; when I say so I need you to stop running and go silent, I have a plan."
"Does it involve us turning into that thing's dinner, because that sounds like what you're going for!" Agateous replied, skittering across the ice as they rounded a corner.
"I just need you to trust me, can you do that?"
"Fine, but give me some warning before you do it!"
Together they ran from the worm for another minute, winding through corridors and cracks in the wall as the worm behind them tore through with nary a care other than for the meal that it was trying to get. Only when they came to another large chamber did Sun turn on his heels and stand his ground, facing down the worm as it barreled toward him.
"Now!" Sun screamed as a massive, blinding flare of grey light erupted from his horn.
The worm howled in anguish as its atrophied eyes were seared by the light, and it thrashed and squirmed horribly against the floor in random directions. Agateous and Sun stopped moving entirely, waiting for an agonizing moment to see if the worm would renew the chase.
"What now?" Agateous whispered to Sun, who quickly motioned for him to stop talking.
Slowly, gingerly, Sun started moving over to the furthest wall away from where they were standing, his hoof steps muffled by his boots. Agateous had an expression of utter terror as Sun moved, but Sun kept a hoof up to gesture for him to stay silent.
The roaring, pained worm seemed to finally be regaining some faculties as Sun finished his maneuver, but it still whipped its face around to try and locate its quarry with its blinded eyes.
"This is the single stupidest thing I have ever done," Sun thought, his heart beating wildly and sweat beading up on his forehead.
Taking in a large breath, Sun let out a guttural howl, as close as he could get to a wounded animal, and the worm immediately whipped around to strike at its prey. Sun quickly leapt out of the way as the worm bored its pointed head and needle-fanged maw at the wall, devouring it and tunneling into the ice in search of a quarry that was no longer there.
As the tremors and roars of the worm faded into the ice Sun carefully got up and sidled back towards Agateous, taking care not to make any excess noise as he approached the dumbstruck pony.
"We need to keep as quiet as possible, but I think it's going to be occupied for a while with its blindness," Sun stated in a low whisper. "I have boots to mask my hoof steps, but I need you to get on my back so you don't make any excess noise."
With a quick nod Agateous climbed up onto Sun, nestling between his shoulder blades and holding onto Sun's chest with his front hooves. Agateous was surprisingly light, and slowly Sun backed out of the chamber and towards the tunnel at the opposite side of the cavern.
"How did you know that would work?" Agateous asked quietly.
"Surprisingly, this isn't my first time dealing with monsters and magical nonsense," Sun answered. "Though this was definitely a first."
"Well, if you decide to stick around for a while then you'll probably get used to it," Agateous replied as he pointed towards a tunnel on the right. "This way."
* * *
Another hour, maybe two, Sun and Agateous spent in abject silence, giving Sun some time to nurse his head wound as Agateous pointed out various different directions. Sun had long since given up trying to ask exactly how Agateous knew where they were going since the only answer he would get was some variation of his guide's "gut feelings."
As they rounded around yet another seemingly identical corridor Sun finally found his patience wear thin enough that he would risk another frost worm just to get some answers.
"Agateous, get off of me, we have to talk," Sun demanded, keeping his voice low and kneeling down to let Agateous off. To the gem-pony's credit he complied, but seemed nonplussed about the situation.
"We still have to find your friends, we can't stop now," Agateous replied, finally breaking the last nerve in Sun's brain.
"You've been saying that for hours, and yet all we've done is get chased down by a titanic worm and wander in these caverns!" Sun said as emphatically as he could while still staying quiet. "What aren't you telling me? Why are you giving me the run-around?"
"There's no run-around, this is just the path that we have to take," Agateous replied with a matter-of-fact tone that really grated on Sun's nerves.
"Why? Why this path and not any of the innumerable other paths that are carved out down here? There has to be more to this, and I'm not moving another inch until you come clean with me."
"But your frien—"
"At this point they've both either figured a way out of here or they're both dead with as much screwing around as I've been doing," Sun interjected. "Start talking, or you're on your own."
Agateous looked up at Sun, an expression of confusion, then sadness, and then finally resignation dancing across his crystalline face. The dim light of the walls reflected off of his odd eyes as he scanned the room, obviously looking for the words to explain.
"I'm a crystal pony, as I'm sure you've figured out," Agateous began.
"Pretty obvious with your skin and eyes being the way they are," Sun replied, "but that doesn't answer my question."
"But that is the answer," Agateous corrected. "We crystal ponies were created by the Princess of the Empire to be her subjects, ever loyal and ever gifted with happiness and love, and she used the crystals of her homeland, of the ancient home of the alicorns, to give us the gift of foresight."
"So you can see the future?" Sun asked, cocking an eyebrow. "Why couldn't you just tell me that, that would've been immensely useful to know before now."
"It's not so much that we can see the future, it's that we can see possibilities," Agateous corrected again. "We can see the choices that will be lain out before they happen and can plan for the eventualities that come so they create the most happiness for the most ponies."
"Then why haven't we found Starlit Sky and Rainbow Dash yet? If we don't find them and get Cadance to return to Canterlot then the world is going to be destroyed."
Agateous opened his mouth to speak but closed it just as quickly. He cast his eyes down to his broken hooves, brow furrowed in thought.
"How much do you know about her? The one you call Starlit Sky?"
The question caught Sun off guard, which given the events of the last few weeks of his life was getting harder and harder to do.
"She's smart, confident, she's saved my life on more than one occasion, and she's trying to save the world. What more is there to know?" There is far more to know than just that, Setting Sun, even more than you could imagine. She is unique, a special one, selected for a special purpose that I fear even she is unaware of."
"Then spill it," Sun countered. "What do you know about this pony that you've never met before?"
"There is a darkness that lurks inside of all ponies, Setting Sun," Agateous continued. "It is in you, in me, in the matriarch, in all of us. It is with us from the moment that we're born and stays with us until we die or waste away into nothing. But Starlit Sky does not have this darkness within her."
Unconsciously Sun rubbed the back of his head, right around the spot where Silence used to reside. A chill ran down his spine, one unrelated to the cold.
"I see that you are familiar with your darkness," Agateous continued. "That's how I was able to find you initially; your curse has a name, a will of its own, and it resides within you even in this place."
"You don't know that," Sun spat back.
"But I do, because the matriarch knows it. The tides of your fate and Starlit Sky's are intertwined very tightly, but it will ultimately be her who sees this task through to its end because the darkness within all ponies is not in her. She is immune to this curse we are all saddled with."
"What curse?! Stop speaking in riddles and talk to me!" Sun demanded. "What does any of this mean?!"
"I'm afraid I don't know more than that," Agateous answered, "but the matriarch does. I just worry that your curse will leach into her, drive her from her duty as it saps at her strength like it saps at yours. I will help you find her, but know that when the time comes, she has to be the one that survives. Only she can right the wrongs of the Princesses."
Agateous's last sentence hung in the air like steam, suffusing they room and settling thickly onto Sun's mind. The back of his head throbbed, angrily and vividly, for the first time in days, and for the first time since he had felt the sensation he was scared of it.
"Come along," Agateous said, drawing a hoof along one of the cavern walls and making another illusory opening in it. "They're close by, I promise."
* * *
Consciousness finally found Starlit Sky when a cold blast of air hit her face, whipping at her head wrap and rousing her. Her chest still stung and pinched uncomfortably as she rose up to find Rainbow Dash hovering a foot off of the ground, gently flapping her crystal-embedded wings to keep aloft.
"How's your leg?" Starlit asked as she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and pulled the blanket back.
"Still sucks," Rainbow answered. "I can't feel my thigh, my cutie mark's destroyed, and I can't keep weight on it for more than a minute without collapsing. I'm just glad I have the energy to stay in the air, that's going to make travel a lot easier."
"Here, have a drink," Starlit said as she offered up her water pouch. "You did lose a lot of blood."
Rainbow gently alighted back to the ground, adding in a sitting position with a hiss of pain. She drank long and deep from the pouch, obviously more thirsty than she probably thought she was.
"The one benefit of being in the tundra is that we're never going to be wanting for water," Starlit mused. "The last time Sun and I found ourselves in a wasteland like this it was a desert."
"Not much of a difference, if you ask me," Rainbow replied, wiping her mouth and handing the pouch back. "Ones just freezing and the other always hot. They'll both kill you just as easily."
"You've been to the desert?" Starlit asked. "I thought you'd lived up here your whole life."
"What, I can't know things?" Rainbow retorted, more playfully than usual.
"It just strikes me as odd, that's all. Everywhere I've been ponies only knew what was right outside their front door, not taking the time to dream about places beyond the familiar. If I'm going to be frank, you don't really strike me as the learned type."
"And now your calling me dumb," Rainbow retorted again.
"What? No, I'm not calling you that, I'm just maki—"
"Relax, I'm messing with you," Rainbow interjected. "Jeez, learn to take a joke, lady. Yeah, I don't really have what you'd call 'book smarts', but I do have some smart hobbies."
"I didn't have much time to cultivate hobbies back home," Starlit replied, taking a swig of water as she did. "Most of my upbringing was spent just trying to survive as a dirt farmer. I didn't get any more education than what my grandmother taught me, and she's long dead."
"Well, when all you really do is guard a wall and wait for thestrals or bandits to come knocking at your door you do stuff to keep the boredom away," Rainbow said. "I come up with stories in my spare time about a heroic adventurer who dives into dungeons, fights monsters, collects treasure, stuff like that. I call her Daring Do, and sometimes I have one of our town scribes write her stories down."
"No kidding? I used to make up stories to tell my daughter to help her get to sleep. You'll have to show me some of these when we get out of this mess."
"Ah, they're just foal stuff, nothing great," Rainbow replied nervously. "You wouldn't like them, trust me."
"Well you must tell them to somepony; otherwise why would you keep making them up?" Starlit asked.
Rainbow looked up at the cavern ceiling with a wistful expression, and for just a moment Starlit thought that she could see a tear or two roll down her cheeks before she tilted her head back down.
"There's this filly in town, her name's Scootaloo," Rainbow admitted. "She's got a condition with her wings, something that keeps them from growing right, and all the other children would make fun of her for it. One day I saw her down an alley crying about it, and I just sort of… started telling one of my stories to her. I didn't think much of it at the time, but that filly is my world now. She's brave, and funny, and she tries so hard…"
More tears started to flow down Rainbow's cheeks, and when she finally found her voice again it was heavy with fear and regret. Another pain went through Starlit's chest, one unrelated to her broken bones.
"I just worry so much about her, you know?" Rainbow continued, fighting to get her words out through the tears. "She's so awesome in so many ways, and if I can't be there to protect her then who will? I'm gonna die in this hole, and she's never gonna see me again, and… and…"
Starlit sidled up next to Rainbow Dash and laid her foreleg around the back of her neck. Without really meaning to Rainbow fell into Starlit's chest, sending a shock of pain through her as Rainbow wept.
Minutes passed as Rainbow sobbed until finally the well of tears dried up. Slowly she sat upright, wiping her nose on her sleeve and drying her eyes with the corner of her cloak.
"Sorry about that," Rainbow apologized, voice still thick. "You must think I'm some kind of crybaby now, huh?"
"Not at all," Starlit answered, wiping a tear out of her own eye. "I guess I'm just happy that some pony else knows what I've been feeling for so long."
"You mean your husband that snores?" Rainbow asked.
"Mm-hm," Starlit murmured. "Stalwart Warden, and our daughter White Eclipse. They're the light of my life; he provides security and stability, a shoulder to lean on when things seem overwhelming, and my little filly is such a spark of joy in a world that seems so determined to snuff it out."
Now it was Starlit's turn for her emotions to start getting the better of her, and as the tears flowed down her face Rainbow laid a hoof across her back.
"I've been away from home for so long now, I'm starting to forget what they look like," Starlit admitted. "I'm trying to save the world, make it safe for them, but I'm so worried that I won't be the pony they remember when I come home."
"What do they look like?" Rainbow Dash asked.
Starlit looked at Rainbow Dash, the pegasus's dark magenta eyes slightly bloodshot but kind and concerned. It was the most earnest expression Starlit had seen from her in the few days that they'd known each other, and it was the exact sort of look she could see Stalwart giving her.
"Well, they're both unicorns like me," Starlit said through a few sniffles. "Warden is a few years my elder, and Eclipse is only seven years old. Warden is a unicorn, but I swear he must have had an earth pony in his family tree somewhere because he's built for working with his hooves. His coat is a light grey color like morning fog, and he has eyes the color of a cloudless noon sky. That's where White Eclipse gets her eyes from I suppose, but hers are more teal than blue, like mine. Eclipse's coat is white like fresh snow, and both of them have vivid blonde hair."
"Is your husband handsome, because he sure sounds like it." Rainbow Dash asked.
"Oh, they're both beautiful, especially when Eclipse smiles. She has this way that her cheeks pull up when she smiles that makes her whole face just shine. Stalwart's jawline could cut glass, and has a full beard that he keeps well-trimmed that really helps frame his face."
As Starlit kept describing her family, every inch of them that she could recall, she felt a weight lift off of her shoulders. She could feel a heaviness in her heart grow light and blow away like snow in the breeze, and for the first time in a long time she smiled, truly and genuinely.
"Sounds to me like you remember them plenty," Rainbow Dash said as Starlit composed herself.
"I guess I do," Starlit admitted. "You're a good pony, Rainbow Dash, no matter what our first meeting may have been like."
"So are you, Starlit," Rainbow replied. "And that's saying a lot, because it takes a lot for me to trust ponies. But you care, care enough about the ponies that you love that you're putting yourself through this hell to try and do good for them. If there's one thing I can always respect, it's loyalty; to a cause, to the ponies you love, whatever. Staying loyal, sticking by the ones you love when the going gets rough, and getting the job done no matter the cost to you, that's what matters."
"Then what say we start working to get the job done?" Starlit asked. "I'll help carry you if you need me to, but we have to find Sun and get out of this place."
"I can glide for a while, but I'll let you know when I need help," Rainbow Dash answered. "Let's get out of here before we both freeze to death."
With a nod of agreement, Starlit got up to her hooves as fast as her aching chest would allow for. Rainbow carefully flapped her wings and got some air, letting her injured leg hang limp as she carefully maneuvered to a tunnel a few feet to their right.
"By the way, you still need to tell me what you're doing up here," Rainbow added.
"That I do," Starlit replied. "We'll have time while we navigate, but I expect you to not ridicule me for what I'm about to tell you because it is quite the ridiculous story to tell."
* * *
Hours passed as Rainbow and Starlit wandered the seemingly endless tunnels of ice, guided only by intuition and the dim blue light that the walls were giving off. Starlit couldn't shake the feeling that they might be magical in some way. She had an uneasy feeling about them, like the walls had eyes and were watching their every movement.
"So, what do you think you'll get out of Cadance when all of this is said and done?" Rainbow Dash asked as she gently floated along.
"I don't really know, and that's the worrisome part," Starlit replied. "Celestia and Luna were at least in their right minds, but the pony that sent me on this mission seems to think that Cadance is completely unfit."
"She froze her entire Empire, I'd say that qualifies as 'unfit,'" Rainbow quipped.
"And there is the problem; I need her to be sound of mind if she's going to work with the other Princesses to fix the world, but if my benefactor is to be believed then it's going to take time that we just don't have."
"It could be worse, I guess," Rainbow Dash replied. "You could've gotten killed by that windigo."
"Small miracles, I suppose," Starlit said back.
As the two rounded yet another corner Starlit felt a thump in her chest. It wasn't one of the shots of pain from her ribs, which were thankfully growing fewer and fewer, and it wasn't her heartbeat either. It was deep, resonant, and all too familiar.
Carefully Starlit pulled out her black stone necklace, letting it float in her magic as the stone itself pulled forward and a bit to the right, in the direction of another tunnel.
"What's that?" Rainbow Dash asked. "That doesn't look like those compass stones you and Sun were using.
"It isn't, it's something else," Starlit muttered back. "Hopefully you'll never have to see me use its proper power, but occasionally it gives me these little nudges in the right direction."
"Like a good luck charm?"
"To be extremely reductive, yes," Starlit answered as she followed where the stone was pulling her, trying to hold in a laugh about how inappropriate that particular moniker was.
The stone's pulling didn't get much stronger than it was initially, but the beating emanating from it in her chest was getting stronger and stronger the further she followed it. The sensation that she was being watched also grew more intense as she and Rainbow Dash wound their way through the tunnels and caverns, with Rainbow at times having to struggle to keep up.
Just when the beating from the necklace turned into a staccato hammering she could see a light shining in from the tunnel ahead of them, and a gust of fresh wind and snow blew through to greet them both.
"Air! Finally, some good news!" Rainbow exclaimed as she flew forward, escaping into the light as Starlit galloped after her.
Starlit's eyes adjusted to the light slowly before she felt her hooves fall out from under her, slipping on a shallow slope covered in fresh snow. She felt her sore ribs scream in pain as she slowed to a sliding stop where the slope flattened out.
"Are you okay?" Rainbow Dash called out.
"My ribs are sore, but that's about it," Starlit answered as she took in her surroundings. She had to pull her snow-blind goggles on just to block out the glare.
The entire area she had fallen out into was a massive crater, easily miles wide, containing what once must have been a city, or at least some part of one. Buildings, what few that had withstood the test of time, were covered in snow and frost that bowed inward towards the center like a massive gust of wind had blown from the outside of the crater in. Icicles stood perpendicular to the buildings they were attached to, all drawing ever closer to the centerpiece of this silent grave.
In the center of the city was a pillar of light, stretching up into the cloudless sky and forever onward into infinity. It was a pale silver that intermingled and mixed with the colors of everything around it, and at the base of the beacon was a large array of crystals of innumerable different colors. Everything in the city drew inward to the beam, like it had fallen from the heavens and sundered its surroundings with its impact.
"Starlit!?" a familiar voice called from a few dozen feet away. Whipping her head around Starlit saw Setting Sun, seemingly no worse for wear and with another, smaller pony riding on his back.
"Starlit?!" Sun called, having just ambled his way out of the endless warrens and tunnels to see a massive, frozen cityscape and his wayward companions not five yards away.
Sun quickly galloped down the slope, nearly losing his footing a few times and accidentally throwing Agateous off of his back. Starlit trotted toward him, and the two met in the middle with a massive hug.
"Ah, careful," Starlit said as she embraced Sun. "I think I cracked a couple of ribs in the fall."
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" Sun hastily apologized, quickly moving away. "Are you okay other than that? I think I hit my head on the way down, but I don't think I'm concussed.
"I'll be alright, but Rainbow Dash is going to be having some issues going forward."
Sun looked past Starlit to see Rainbow Dash seated in the snow and clearly favoring her left side. A cloth bandage was wrapped tightly around her thigh and flank, with a bit of dried blood staining it.
"I just took a massive ice spike to the leg and had to go through impromptu surgery courtesy of your friend to get it out of me, it's nothing major," Rainbow Dash replied dismissively. "Good to see you're not dead."
"Uh… you too," Sun answered, bewildered at Rainbow's nonchalance. "Are we… friends now?"
"I guess you could say that," Rainbow answered. "Starlit's really good at getting recalcitrant nags like myself to open up about their feelings, apparently. We talked out our differences."
"Yeah, she does have that effect on folks," Sun admitted before noticing that Starlit was walking off to where he had left Agateous.
"Speaking of new friends, who is this?" Starlit asked, gesturing to Agateous who looked neutral to everything happening around him.
"My name is Agateous," the gem-pony replied. "I helped get Setting Sun back to you, and now that we're all here we can get properly underway."
"Underway? We've been traveling for days and nearly died falling down an ice ravine, I think we could all do with some rest," Starlit retorted.
"If you seek the Crystal Empire, then you need to follow me now," Agateous countered as he started making his way down the slope. He came to a stop at the bottom where the crater leveled out into a long-ruined road.
"Is he always like this?" Starlit asked Sun.
"Like you wouldn't believe," Sun answered with a sigh. "He's a crystal pony, who was apparently created by Cadance to be her subjects or, vessels for love, or whatever. Either way, he says that there is this 'matriarch' that we have to speak with to understand what really happened here and how to get Cadance out."
"Wait, this isn't the Empire?" Rainbow Dash interjected. "This place looks pretty Empire-y to me."
"Getting answers out of him has been like trying to get blood from a stone," Sun continued. "He did help me find you after some really cryptic nonsense that I don't feel like discussing with him around us, but other than that and the fact that he can kind of predict the future, he has been a passive guide for me."
"He can predict the future?" Rainbow Dash cut in again.
"I'm going to have to agree with Rainbow's assessment of that last sentence," Starlit added, "that is just ridiculous."
"I'd be inclined to agree with you two if it weren't for the fact that he saved me from being decapitated by an frost worm lobbing a giant chunk of ice at me before I even heard it coming."
That last admittance proved to be the last straw, and Sun found himself being stared at by his companions like he had just admitted to being a serial killer in his spare time.
"I've been busy, what can I say?" Sun said sheepishly.
"Okay, prescient ponies and giant ice worms notwithstanding," Starlit said, shaking out of her stupor, "what should we do? Do we try to get rid of him, or do we play along and see where this takes us?"
"If I'm going to be honest," Sun replied, "for as cryptic as he's been he did help me get out of those caves and listened to me when I told him my plan to draw off the frost worm that was chasing us, so I've got no reason to stop trusting him now."
"Until it turns out that he's a windigo that's going to eat our bones or something," Rainbow Dash interjected. "At this point I'd say I'm being the one guided here so I'll defer to you two, but I'm gonna keep an eye out on that little crystal whatever until we can drop him like a hot rock."
"Fair enough," Starlit replied. "I'll go along for now, but once he's gone we need to talk about a few things as a group."
"Don't I know it," Sun said, remembering everything that Agateous had told him about curses and darkness. His words rattled around Sun's brain like a stone in a clay pot, and eventually he was going to crack if he didn't get his concerns out.
"Nightfall will be coming shortly," Agateous called from the bottom of the slope. "We should make haste."
"Right behind you," Starlit called back as she slowly made her way down the slope, throwing a quick nod to Sun before she did. Rainbow Dash carefully glided her way down, the crystals in her wings reflecting off of the sun as she flew, and Sun followed behind as fast as the treacherous surface would allow him to.
* * *
Starlit found the entire city unnerving as she made her way through its ruined streets; wind was blowing, always from the back, but it never made a sound. Snow crunched under her hooves, but everything else was disquietingly quiet.
The second thing was how empty it was. The only things that showed any sign that this place had once been inhabited were the empty buildings and the occasional skeleton preserved under the snow. Other than that the only portions of the dead city worth noting were the icicles that pointed inward toward the pillar of light at the center.
Nightfall swiftly fell, especially since the horizon was now above their heads, and Starlit prudently suggested that they all pile into one of the ruined abodes after the hectic and harrowing day they had all had, despite Agateous's protests.
As Starlit and Sun set up a camp in the ruined home Agateous posted up in the doorframe as if on watch. Looking around and seeing that her work was practically done, Starlit set her saddlebags down and moved over to him.
"Agateous, aren't you cold?" Starlit asked. "We'll have a fire going pretty soon if you need to warm up."
"I thank you for your concern, but I'll be fine where I am," Agateous answered, not even turning to face Starlit.
"I see. It must be nice to be made out of crystal then."
"It has its benefits and its downsides," Agateous replied as he held up one of his chipped and broken hooves. "I can't feel pain or cold, but I can't heal either."
"Goodness, how do you walk?" Starlit asked, settling in beside him. "Even if you can't feel that, it must be hard to balance with such an unstable surface to walk on."
"I manage," Agateous answered, eyes still locked to the horizon.
"Well, manage or no, we can't have you lagging behind because of your hooves. Here, let me see them. Do you give off body heat?"
"No, but I don't see what that has to do with anything," Agateous answered as Starlit quickly pulled her heavy cloak off and started tearing some small strips off of it with her sword.
"Good, that'll make this simpler," Starlit answered as she started to charge some magic in her horn.
"Starlit, this is unnecessary, and you need that cloak far more than I need my hooves," Agateous protested as he took notice of what Starlit was doing.
"Then consider it thanks for taking care of Sun for me," Starlit countered as she began to fashion some makeshift horseshoes out of small disks of ice she was carving from the ground with her magic. She took out her water pouch and, after positioning the ice disks underneath Agateous's hooves, splashed the water over them and let them freeze into the cracks on his hooves until they formed into a flat, circular pad. Then, in order to keep them firmly secured, she used the strips of cloth from her cloak to wrap up under his new hooves.
"There, good as new," Starlit declared. "Try them out, tell me if they feel right."
Looking down at the cloth wrappings, and then back to Starlit, Agateous slowly got to his hooves. The ice and the cloth easily added an inch or two to his height, and after a few moments of trying to get used to the suddenly much more stable walking surface Agateous cracked a smile.
"I will say that this is much easier to navigate," Agateous admitted. "You are quite generous to sacrifice some of your cloak just for this."
"I learned well from another pony I met in my travels," Starlit said. "She helped me to see the value of unmitigated generosity; she helped me when she had absolutely no reason to, and she even saved Sun's life after he had half of his body destroyed in an explosion. I owe her a lot."
"Setting Sun told me about that incident," Agateous replied. "He seems to be rather accident prone, doesn't he?"
"No more so than I am, I suppose. I've been nearly killed more times than I care to count, and I have a few busted ribs to show for my latest 'accident.'"
"Well, have you considered what might happen if Sun and his 'accidents' start to hamper your mission?" Agateous asked
A quick wave of anger shot through Starlit's brain, but she held it back if only because she didn't want to make a scene and potentially aggravate her injuries.
"I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean," Starlit replied. "Sun has been a stalwart companion since I started on this mission, and his intellect and skill makes him valuable enough to justify the odd misadventure."
Agateous looked to Starlit, an expression approaching confused starting to splay across his face. Finally he resolved into a more neutral, concerned expression as he sat back down.
"Starlit, the matriarch knows why you are here, and the service that you must provide to Equestria to stave off its end," Agateous said. "You can not afford delays in this task."
"Then it's a good thing that nopony I have travelled with has caused me any delays," Starlit snapped back. "You are welcome by the fire, but I would highly recommend you keep these concerns to yourself; Rainbow Dash doesn't like disloyalty and has a fierce temper."
Without another word Starlit stood up and turned to help prepare the fire, leaving Agateous in the doorframe with his new hooves. Starlit hoped that they would give him something to think about in regards to his concerns.
* * *
Exhaustion, Sun found, was proving to be the best sleep aid he had ever known. After a small meal with some of their left over rations, which Agateous politely declined, Sun found that he slipped into unconsciousness quickly.
He couldn't tell how much time had passed when he felt the thumping in the back of his head again, slow and rhythmic, but it was enough to rouse him to consciousness. It was still nighttime, and the ever-present glow from the pillar of light shine through the windows and cracks in the wall. Everypony else was asleep, including Agateous, and carefully Sun stepped around them as he followed the pull in his mind.
As he stepped outside he found that the wind had ceased, and the sky overhead was bright and cloudless. The thumping was pulling more towards the right side of his head, directing him away from the pillar of light and back the way that they had come to get to their shelter. Thinking no better of it he followed the pull, as if an invisible hoof was gently grinding him forward.
As he strayed further and further from the light he began to hear sounds, soft at first and then growing steadily more audible. They sounded like ponies going about their daily business, and the further into the dark he went the more solid these hallucinations became until it seemed as though he were in amongst them.
Another tug to the left, and Sun followed it just as dutifully. Now the auditory hallucinations were paired with apparitions of these ponies. They had the same ethereal quality to them that the ice ghosts that had attacked them had, but they were more concrete in form. They all looked like Agateous, with crystalline bodies and hair and the oddly geometrical eyes, but they were Sun's size and much more vivid in color.
The apparitions were miming the actions of regular ponies; conversing with each other in audible whispers, going to and from on business that would never be completed, entering buildings that no longer existed or were completely encased in ice.
One apparition, however, looked different from all the others, and it drew his eye as it stared at him. The pony, whose entire body was jet black and didn't share the same crystalline appearance as all the others, beckoned him to follow, and the tugging in his head gave him no reason to not follow.
Slowly, ponderously, they wound their way through the ruined streets, retreating further and further away from the light in the center until they were nearing the lip that led out of the crater. There the smoky apparition stopped and turned its head to face Sun. It slowly pointed a single hoof out of the crater, where Sun could now hear a rhythmic thrumming in time with the thumping in his head. He carefully but quickly made his way out of the crater to find a sight he never expected to see, now or ever.
Marching towards the crater, numbering in the thousands, was an army; festooned with glimmering golden armor and accompanied by massive machines the likes of which Ed never seen before, the army marched. Fires blazed in the night, and the torches that created them set massive balls of fire alight that were then launched over his head.
Sun's eyes tracked the missiles as they cut a fiery swathe into the calm blue sky above, and landed with thunderous impacts into a massive, walled off city. It's top spires we're made of immaculately carved crystal, it's walls from reinforced stone, and ejecting from the center of it, miles away from where it now rested, was the pillar of light.
As the flaming balls slammed into the walls and buildings the defenders responded in kind, launching back with massive arcane orbs that blew through the ground forces they impacted. Crystal spires fell with muffled crashes, siege engines splintered apart under the weight of magical barrage, and just when it seemed that this battle wound descend into a total bloodbath a massive blast of silver light echoed out from the city.
When the light finally abated the world around Sun's frame fo reference turned back into what it had been; no city, no army, and endless snow all around. The on,y thing that remained was the beam of silver light, now a sphere that streaked across the sky from its original resting place. It swiftly flew through the sky, leaving behind a long, thin trail of silver, until shifted its descent on a near perfect ninety-degree angle and slammed into its new home.
And for the briefest moment before he awoke from this dream, this vision of things to come, Sun saw the shape of an alicorn in the light.
* * *
The soft flapping of Rainbow's wings helped remind Sun that he wasn't dreaming, but after the oddly real dream he had had last night he found he was taking more precautions to ground himself in reality. Kicking the odd stone, checking to see if the wind was still blowing, and other such quirks in his behavior. He worried that he'd be doing this for a while.
"You've been quiet today," Rainbow Dash said as she matched pace with Sun. "You sleep alright?"
"Had some weird dreams," Sun answered, "but nothing too odd. Honestly. I should be asking you that question. How's your leg holding up."
"It honestly could've been worse," Rainbow Dash admitted. "Starlit had to hold me down to get the ice shards out of my leg, but I passed out before she really got to work. I'm starting to get back some feeling in the leg, but I can't flex my thigh muscles at all."
"Reminds me of the time I was nearly blown to pieces," Sun replied, unconsciously touching the left side of his face.
"You nearly got blown up? Pardon me if I find that hard to believe."
"It's true, and it was pretty much entirely my fault. I used some magic around a dangerously explosive material and accidentally set it off, got the whole left side of my body seared to a crisp and part of my skull caved in."
Rainbow Dash gawked at Sun as he described the extent of his injuries in New Selene to her, her expression growing more and more incredulous by the second.
"Well, you look great despite it," Rainbow replied, just a tad more cheerfully than was strictly necessary.
"I had a pretty good doctor that patched me up," Sun said.
"They must've had to use magic if you got a hole punched into your head," Rainbow said back. "We sometimes have bad injuries when ponies go out on patrol, stuff that conventional medicine can't fix, so we get a few unicorns together to put some magical power into it and it just sorts itself out."
"Hopefully they can get your leg sorted once we're done here," Sun replied. "That must've been horrific."
"Trust me, it was," Rainbow groused, "but if it weren't for Starlit doing this much I'd have probably had to lose it altogether."
"My ears are burning," Starlit called from ahead in the group. "Somepony say my name?"
"It's nothing, we're just busy extolling your virtues," Sun answered back.
"What about?" Starlit asked, giving them both a coy smile.
"Your skill with a suture, mostly," Rainbow answered, "but nopony likes a braggart."
"It's not bragging if you can back up the bragging with skill."
"That's what every braggart says," Rainbow answered back, "and trust me, I was one of those."
"You?" Starlit asked, turning back and walking backwards to face them. "Never would've guessed it."
"Don't get smart with me, Starlit," Rainbow sniped back playfully. "Yeah, I was a real bratty filly, always trying to prove that I was the strongest and fastest pony in the village. I would challenge just about anypony to just about anything to prove I was better than them at it."
"Were you?" Sun asked.
"More often than not, no," Rainbow curtly answered. "Got my flank kicked a lot as a kid, but Spitfire must've taken my youthful impetuousness for something else because once I came of age she gave me a spot as a trainee for the town patrol."
"It takes a big pony to admit when they're wron—"
Starlit didn't finish her sentence before bumping into Agateous within looking. The crystal pony had stopped dead in the center of the street, and when Sun looked to see what made him stop he realized that they were all standing in front of the mass of crystals in the center of the city. Sun didn't think they had walked nearly long enough to already be at the center, but there they were nonetheless.
"This is where I take my leave of you three," Agateous said as he turned to face everypony else. "The matriarch will see you now."
"What? What do you mean 'take your leave?'" Sun asked.
No sooner had the word left his mouth that Agateous turned around and walked into the mass of crystal. The multifaceted gems and spikes did not move at his touch like the ice in the tunnels had. Instead, he melded his crystalline body into the wall in front, his form completely subsumed by the crystal.
"What the…?" Starlit murmured as Sun and Rainbow approached the mass of crystal.
"Did he just become that crystal?" Rainbow asked, as if the evidence wasn't readily apparent but asking for confirmation all the same.
A sudden cracking sound in front of them was her answer. A large seam split down the center of a particularly large and smooth teal crystal, followed by a second a few feet away from it down the center of a large green crystal. With a horrendous grinding and scraping sound a swathe of crystals in between the two that had broken slowly and jerkily receded into the ground, leaving a smooth expanse behind that led into a truly alien sight.
At the dead center of an expanse of crystalline pony statues was the pillar of light, only a few yards away. These statues stood in positions that seemed to evoke reverence, with various poses of supplication and deference. The only thing that unified their poses was that none of them were looking at the pillar of light itself, with most having their gaze fixed onto the perfectly smooth ground and a few others actively turned away as if in pain.
The pillar itself originated from a small dais of raised pink crystal, no more than five feet across. The light felt like it should be seating Sun's eyes just to look at it, but it was a clam and soothing light that he didn't feel the need to turn from. Whatever this light was, it wanted him to come closer, and so he did.
"Sun!" Starlit called, "What are you doing?"
"This light won't hurt us," Sun answered back, his eyes still fixed into the pillar.
"How do you know?" Rainbow Dash asked back.
"Call it a gut feeling, but if this 'matriarch' wanted us dead, I think we'd be dead right now. Just trust me, please."
Sun didn't wait for an answer as he walked ever forward towards the pillar, and as he got closer another figure walked out of it. At first it was only the barest glimpse of a shadow within, but soon coalesced into a tall, lithe, pony-shaped form. Her hoofsteps clinked against the crystalline floor, her pale pink fur shone bright in the light of her home, and her purple and blue mane hung in bounteous curls that framed her horn and bright cerulean eyes.
As she fully formed from the pillar of light she extended her wings, which grew to a darker purple in gradient at the tips, as if to stretch them out after a long time without their use. This pony, this alicorn as Sun could now see, scanned the surroundings before letting her gaze fall softly onto Sun.
"Thank you for coming to find me," the alicorn said with a warm smile. "My name is Flurry Heart. I assume that you are here to kill my mother?"
"I'm sorry if I frightened you, but my current state of being can take some time to acclimate to," Flurry Heart said, as Starlit, Sun, and Rainbow Dash had not said a word since she had introduced herself. Starlit shook out some of the confusion in her mind and stepped forward.
"I'm sorry, your majesty, bu—"
Flurry Heart let slip a quick, jovial pearl of laughter before stating, "Starlit Sky, you do not need to call me 'your majesty'. That was my mother's title, one that I have long since divested myself of."
"Well forgive me for saying it," Starlit continued, "but the only other alicorns that we have met have been Princesses of Equestria."
"You've met more?" Flurry asked. "Who, and under what circumstances?"
"The first that I met was Celestia," Sun said, "followed by Twilight Sparkle and Luna."
"You know my Aunt Twilight?" Flurry asked again. "How does she fare?"
"She's your aunt?" Rainbow Dash interjected, having hovered over to join the others. "Also, hi, I'm new to all of this so forgive my tone."
"Believe me, Rainbow Dash, there is a lot that I must catch up on as well. But standing here is not the time or place for such things, in the cold and among the ruins. Please, come with me; I have a fire going and some food as well."
Taking a step aside, Flurry Heart gestured to the beam of light she had walked out of, motioning for them to enter.
"Is that safe?" Sun asked nervously.
"Absolutely. The magic of the Crystal Heart is calm and soothing, crafted to satiate the flesh and comfort the mind."
Starlit and Sun exchanged a quick glance before Rainbow Dash effectively made their decision for them.
"I don't know about you two, but I could use some actual food for once," Rainbow Dash said before flying into the beam. She was soon enveloped by the light, growing into a dim blue shadow before vanishing entirely.
"I promise you, I hold no ill intent towards any of you," Flurry Heart said. "You are the first real company I have had in centuries, and I would be an ungrateful hostess if I were to lie to you. It is perfectly safe."
With a cautious step forward, Starlit put her hoof against the pillar of light and found herself being gently pulled forward, as if being led by a child. The gentle tug drew her over the threshold and she walked forward, fully enveloped in the beam. The cold had banished, replaced instead by a pleasantly warm sensation as she moved further and further down the corridor of light.
As she walked further she noticed that the terminus point ahead of her was growing wider and wider, eventually revealing an opening on the other side. She could see a flicker of blue on the other side, the same as Rainbow Dash's coat, and when she finally came through she saw the pegasus had thrown her coat off and was stretching what limbs she could.
The room Starlit found herself in was pleasantly cozy, made from a rich dark wood and illuminated by a roaring hearth fire. A cast iron pot hung off of a cooking spit over the fire, and a deliciously spicy scent wafted through the air from it. On a far wall was a bookshelf with various tome lain across it, and on the opposite end a staircase the led up to a balcony that overlooked the living room.
Sun and Flurry Heart followed shortly after, a quick burst of cold following them through what Starlit could now see was a perfectly polished mirror held in place by a crystal coated frame.
"This is awesome!" Rainbow Dash exclaimed as she settled gingerly into one of the throw pillows on the floor. "How did you keep all of this safe from the weather?"
"Oh, we aren't really in Equestria right now," Flurry Heart explained. "This space was created through the Crystal Heart's magic, allowing a safe haven in trying times. I'm sorry that it's so small though; like I said, I don't normally have guests."
"This'll do just fine," Starlit replied. "Thank you so much for your hospitality."
With a flick of her horn and some pale blue magic Flurry Heart caused a small dining table, just big enough for the four of them, to grow from the floor with a groan of creaking wood. She then pulled some bowls and spoons from a nearby cabinet and placed them down on the table, followed by pouring out some of her stew from the pot for everypony present.
"Eat, please, you three have been through a horrible experience in the Crystal Wastes," Flurry Heart said as she sat down, gesturing. Rainbow Dash needed no further prompting and quickly dug in, and Starlit found the stew to be quite delicious, if a tad spicy for her tastes.
The meal was mostly made in silence, save the occasional compliment of Flurry Heart's cooking, as everypony present was much more focused on satiating their hunger than trying to converse. It was finally Flurry Heart that got the proverbial stone rolling as she pushed her bowl away with a satisfied sigh.
"So, you are here to kill my mother Cadance, yes?" Flurry Heart stated. "You wouldn't be the first ponies to try to, that much is certain, but you are the first ones to at least make it this far."
"We actually aren't here to kill her," Sun answered. "We just need her to return to Canterlot, take her throne back, and presumably stop the endless winter she has set over this section of Equestria."
"Canterlot yet stands?" Flurry Heart asked. "My, I have been put out of the loop. Last that I had heard the city was a smoking ruin after Twilight and Luna assaulted it to try and dislodge Celestia from it."
"Don't be too certain about that," Starlit said. "The city is still in ruins, but according to Twilight Sparkle the four Princesses need to be there to supply their magic to Equestria, since without that magic the entire nation is dying."
"But Cadance never had a throne in Canterlot," Flurry Heart corrected, sending a shock through Starlit.
"What do you mean she never had a throne there?" Starlit asked. "She was one of the founders of Equestria, she must have had one there."
"She did help found the city, yes, but her throne and her home were always in the Empire," Flurry Heart explained. "She funneled her magic through the Crystal Heart, which then flowed into the Empire itself so that her love and warmth would bless this land. The Royal Family, being Cadance, Prince Shining Armor, and myself, never left the Empire for Canterlot save for diplomatic reasons."
"You keep mentioning that, this Crystal Heart," Rainbow Dash. "Is it something magical?"
"It is probably the very source of magic," Flurry Heart explained. "The Crystal Heart is what the ancient ponies of this land found that gave them their power. The first to be made were the alicorns, and from their power they created pegasi, unicorns, and earth ponies. The Crystal Heart is everything; it is the source of life as we know it."
Starlit could feel her heart racing in her chest, and a quick look around to her companions betrayed their own shattered world views. Starlit always knew, at least a little, that the tale her grandmother had told her was an exaggeration of actual events, but to hear the truth from a reasonably credible source was something else entirely.
"But if the Crystal Heart is the source, then why are the Princesses even necessary for this whole system?" Sun asked, his voice betraying the acceleration of his thoughts. "Why can't we just take the Heart to Canterlot and let it spread magic to Equestria that way?"
"That may have been an option when it was first discovered, but the ancient alicorns split the power of the Heart amongst the most exemplary of their number," Flurry Heart continued. "The Heart of Light, the Heart of Power, the Heart of Love, the Heart of Magic; all of them were formed from the broken pieces of the Crystal Heart long before I was born, even before the ponies you know of as the Princesses were born. It was only when the Three Princesses, Celestia, Luna, and Twilight, were sent from the Empire to settle Equestria that the pieces were separated."
A sudden realization hit Starlit as Flurry continued her explanation, and as she contemplated it further she felt the world start to fade away, replaced only by a single thought; she might have destroyed one of these pieces.
"Starlit?" Sun asked, placing a hoof on her shoulder, "Are you alright? You spaced out there for a second."
"Flurry Heart," Starlit asked, her voice heavy with contrition, "would you mind entertaining a hypothetical for me?"
"Of course," Flurry answered, a patient smile on her face.
"What might happen to one of these pieces if, say, somepony shattered it? Ran it through with a sword and cut in in two, perhaps?"
"The it's magic would cease to be," Flurry Heart replied. "It took ancient magic from the Heart itself to split it safely, but simply shattering a piece would destroy its magic."
A ringing ran through Starlit's ears as Flurry Heart gave the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut. Her stomach began to feel sick, and she was worried that she might throw up.
"Oh no…" Starlit moaned, staring at the floor. "No, no, no, no…"
"Starlit, what wrong?" Rainbow Dash asked, "Dinner not agreeing with you?"
"I broke one of the pieces of the Crystal Heart," Starlit admitted.
A pall fell over the room, and despite the roaring fire in the hearth Starlit felt as cold as the world outside. The silence was so deafening that it felt like death to her, a sensation that she was all too familiar with.
"You did what?" Flurry Heart asked, her voice shifting to a low, stunned tone.
"In Sunspire, when I confronted Celestia, she challenged me to a fight," Starlit explained, slowly and doing her best to maintain her composure. "She was casting magic out of a crystal floating above her horn, and when I had the opportunity I shattered it. Her whole palace, the illusion she had placed over what was her city, the ever-burning sun; everything vanished when I broke the crystal, and now I think that may have been the Heart of Light."
"Wait…" Sun added, a very similar wave of realization seeming to wash over him, "in New Selene… the light-gas the was used to power everything in the city could've been the Heart of Power. Luna said that it was a crystalline substance from the Empire that she vaporized and pumped into the ground of her city. So much of it has been consumed by the ponies in New Selene that it can't possibly have the same properties that it once did, even if Luna pulled what was left of it out of the ground."
Flurry Heart's expression changed rapidly; first it was of concern, and then to one of panic.
"You said that you were here to bring my mother back to Canterlot, where Celestia and Luna already are," Flurry asked quickly.
"Yes, but what is the point now?" Starlit asked back. "Two halves of the Crystal Heart have been irreparably damaged, and if that is the true source of magic in this world then what hope do the Princesses have to fix this?"
"Because I still have the Heart of Love, and Twilight must still have the Heart of Magic," Flurry continued. "I stole the Heart of Love from Cadance when…"
Flurry quickly cut herself off, turning her face away from the assembled ponies as she took a moment to compose herself.
"When my father, and Twilight Sparkle's brother, Shining Armor died defending the Empire," Flurry finished, wiping a quick tear out of her eye.
"Flurry, I am so sorry," Starlit consoled. "He must've been quite the stallion to give himself for his homeland."
"Love comes in many forms, Starlit Sky," Flurry Heart continued, "but my father's love for his homeland and his people overcame his love of hearth and home, wife and child. He felt that if he wasn't doing everything he could to protect the Empire then he wasn't worthy of the Empire's adulation. My mother did everything she could to convince him to stay, but he left all the same."
Tears began to flow, fresh and fast, from Flurry Heart's eyes, as she continued recounting her tale.
"My mother lost her mind that day, wracked by grief from losing the love of her life and scores of her people all at once, and I feared that her connection to the Heart of Love would corrupt it with her anger, pain, and sadness. I stole it away from her during the siege, throwing it down into a small town on the outer edge of the Empire while Canterlot laid waste to my home and hers."
Flurry took a moment to breathe, regain some of her composure and wipe away her sadness before continuing on.
"I have not seen my mother since that day. I don't know what state she's in or if she even still lives, but if you can subdue her and let me speak some sense into her then maybe you have a chance to remind her of what she once was. Then, and only then, will I let her reconnect to the Heart of Love, once I can prove that she won't corrupt its power."
"But what about the other pieces of the Crystal Heart," Rainbow interjected sheepishly.
"Love is powerful, far more than most give it credit for," Flurry replied. "It can be as gentle as a mother's kiss, or as powerful as a sleet storm. It can burn with the intensity of an inferno, and it can soothe with the warmth of a hearth fire. Love brings out the best and worst in ponies, and I hope the the Heart of Love can remind my mother of her best. After that, it may help to stabilize the country while Twilight helps you with the Heart of Magic."
Starlit looks to Sun and Rainbow Dash; they looked about as shaken as she felt, but both of them gave her a nod of solidarity.
"Then take us to your mother, or as close as we can get to her," Starlit replied, gathering up her things.
* * *
Flurry Heart led Starlit, Sun, and Rainbow Dash our of her mirror and into a bitterly cold plaza of immense size and desolation. All around them were destroyed buildings made of fine crystal, snow drifts that reached above rooftops, and an omnipresent sense of dread that was carried on the howling wind.
"You know, we could have taken a nap back in the cozy, warm room," Rainbow Dash groused as she flapped along beside them.
"We're on a time table now, unfortunately," Starlit answered. "I also would've gone for a nap after a good meal, but this is more important now."
Flurry Heart moved to the front of the group, her hair whipping in the wind as she lit her horn and drew a sigil through the air. It quickly split into three distinct shapes that floated through Starlit, Sun, and Rainbow Dash. As the magic washed over her Starlit could feel the chill from the air abate, and while it was still quite cold it was no longer debilitatingly so.
"This should protect you from the worst of the weather," Flurry Heart explained, "and it will give you a way to signal for me when you've found my mother. Simply say my name and I will hear you."
"Wait, how did you cast that?" Sun asked. "Twilight told us that this whole place was a magical dead zone."
"During the war our most powerful mages put a wall of anti-magic wards around the walls of the Empire, but they wouldn't be particularly useful if everypony in the Empire suddenly found themselves cut off from their magic," Flurry corrected. "All of our society and culture was built around the presence of the Crystal Heart's magic, and to lose it would be to lose our way of life."
"Wouldn't Twilight have known that?" Rainbow Dash asked. "She was the Princess of Magic, after all."
"The Empire's defenses were installed after Twilight, Celestia, and Luna left us, as a safeguard in the event that any of our wayward daughters or their citizens would have reason to turn against us."
"But she explicitly told us that they were put in place by the ancient alicorns, the ones before the Princesses," Sun countered. "She even had a tome in her personal libraries about it."
"We can ask Twilight about all of this when we get back to her," Starlit interjected, before turning back to Flurry Heart. "Right now we have to do our job, which means I need to know two things; where is Cadance, and where is the Astral Conservatory?"
"The Conservatory?" Flurry Heart asked. "Why would you need to know that?"
"Twilight asked us to recover some of her old journals from there, things she had to leave behind when she left the Empire for Equestria," Starlit lied. She felt a knot in her stomach form as she thought about how proficient she was becoming in lying.
"I see; Aunt Twilight was always a bit of a scatterbrain," Flurry replied. "The palace itself is in the center of the Empire; as long as you keep moving away from the walls and towards the opposite side walls you'll find it. Mother will most likely be in the throne room at the peak, or at least that is where I last saw her."
"The Conservatory, on the other hoof, is probably a fair few miles walk from here, on the eastern side of the city," Flurry continued. "You'll likely want to go there before the palace if you intend to; the Conservatory has a domed roof and should have an ancient telescope protruding from the right side if you're approaching from the front."
"You know, you can come with us if you would like," Sun offered. "You know this place better than any of us do, and your magical prowess would definitely come in handy."
"And it is precisely that magical prowess that prevents me from coming along," Flurry countered. "The Crystal Ponies that my mother created from the citizens of the Empire are bound to follow her magic. Since I am her daughter I would be a draw for them, and the centuries of cold and bitterness from my mother have not been kind to them."
"And Agateous?" Sun asked back. "He was a Crystal Pony, and he helped get me out of the tunnels."
"Since I stole the Heart of Love the ponies that have been serving under me haven't been deranged without its influence. Their worship of me as this all-knowing 'matriarch' is a tad troubling, but it is simply their way; the Crystal Ponies need hope and love the way others need food and water."
A gust of wind whipped past the group, sending Flurry Heart's hair askance across her face and nearly throwing Rainbow Dash out of the air. Starlit even felt herself slip a few inches across the icy street. At first Starlit thought that it was just the weather, until she saw the snow in the sky halt. On the wind a hellish neigh blew, and her eyes drew upwards to see a horde of frost ghosts galloping down upon them.
"Go! Run!" Flurry Heart ordered. "I can hold them off, they'll want to follow me anyway!"
With no further prompting Starlit took off, heading for the wall and keeping her compass stone floating in front of her. Sun and Rainbow Dash quickly followed after, and the sound of magic bolts flying was soon drowned out by her own hoofbeats and breath.
Starlit's lungs burned as she ran, and her slowly healing ribs were only making the task more arduous. Every gallop sent shocks of dull pain through her chest, and finally she ran into one of the abandoned homes to catch her breath. Sun and Rainbow Dash were moments behind her, each of them panting from the exertion as well.
"Why are we stopping?" Rainbow asked. "Those things could be right behind us."
"My ribs," Starlit choked out. "I can't run like this, it hurts too much."
"Then what do we do?" Sun asked back. "We're not going to leave you behind."
"I'm just going to slow you down and both of you know it," Starlit countered, holding the stitch in her side. "You two go ahead to the palace, see if there's any way to get in there. I'll make my way to the Observatory on my own and meet you at the Palace."
"Starlit, you won't last out there in your condition!" Sun shot back.
"And if I'm with you and you have to worry about me then we'll all die! At least if I get killed I'll come back! Now go, I'll see you at the palace!"
"What?" Rainbow Dash interjected. "What do you mean if you're killed you'll 'come back'?"
"I'll explain later, but now you two have to leave!" Starlit replied.
Sun looked at Starlit for a long moment, and even behind his snow blind goggles she could see the conflict working its way through his mind. Finally, with a slump of his shoulders he turned to leave.
"Sun, where are you going?" Rainbow asked, confusion slowly turning into anger. "We can't leave her like this!"
"She's right Rainbow," Sun replied. "She'll be fine, that much is certain. We need to make tracks now in case the windigo or its ghosts are behind us."
Rainbow's gaze flitted back and forth between Sun and Starlit, and it made Starlit's stomach twist up in knots.
"Rainbow, I promise you that I will explain this, but right now you need to keep Sun safe," Starlit said, getting her temper back under control.
The invocation of Rainbow Dash's loyalty was all that it took to get her to relent. With a quick flap of her wings to adjust herself she followed Sun out of the ruined building and down the street outside, leaving Starlit to contemplate her injuries.
Starlit sat for a long moment, waiting for the sound of neighing and for the snow to freeze in mid-air, but after waiting almost a half-hour she concluded that Flurry Heart must've done a good job driving them off. Exhaling the sign of relief sent another twist of pain through her chest, but with a bit of effort she stood back up and readjusted her things, ready to start the long, slow walk to the Observatory.
A quick thought flashed across Starlit's mind, and as it settled she pulled Spike's necklace out of her warded saddlebag. If the Empire still had magic then there was not sense in not summoning him now that she was alone. Starlit had a lot to explain to him, after all, and a long walk through the Empire would be as good a time as any.
Focusing her magic into her horn she let a thin beam of dark blue light strike the pendant, and slowly but surely the lines of light that made Spike up coalesced and settled until he was fully manifested.
Spike let out a few quick blinks as he regained consciousness, before exchanging a quick, panicked look between Starlit, the room, and the snowstorm outside.
"Hi Spike," Starlit greeted.
"Hi Starlit," Spike answered nervously. "Where are we, exactly?"
"The Crystal Empire, where I think we're both going to get some answers."
* * *
Sun and Rainbow Dash made a quick but even pace as they wound their way through the frozen and ruined streets. Sun expected every alley and every house to be an elaborate ambush waiting to happen, but nothing happened. The quiet was setting every part of Sun's brain in edge, as he was just waiting for the other horseshoe to drop.
"So, she can be killed,but then she'll just come back to life a few hours later?" Rainbow Dash asked.
"That's about it," Sun answered. He had given Rainbow Dash the basic rundown of Starlit's condition, but saved the grisly details for when Starlit was ready to tell them on her own terms.
"That sounds rough, if I'm being honest about it," Rainbow said. "All of the pain of dying, but none of the release."
"Mm-hm," Sun murmured in response. "I was there when it first happened, and she nearly had a mental breakdown from it."
"Yikes. I don't even know if I'dbe able to handle something like tha—"
Sun stopped in his tracks as a intense, painful thumping erupted from inside of his head, right in the same spot that Silence had been in. It hurt worse than when he had been blown up, and a scream tore from his throat as he fell forward, his forehead coming to rest on the street.
"Feels…like…head…being stomped," Sun answered through gritted teeth.
Rainbow's next words came through as fuzz, so intense was the pain in the back of his head, he rolled on the ground, clutched his temples, did anything to try and alleviate the pain as it threatened to crack his skull open.
Then, all at once, it faded away, leaving him only with a soft, familiar pulsing feeling.
"Sun?" Silence asked, her voice nervous.
"Silence?!" Sun answered in his mind.
"As much as I'm happy about this reunion given the circumstances," Silence replied, "I'm afraid that I don't bring good tidings. Events that have been in motion for centuries are coming to their breaking point, and the Princesses are only going to make for a stop-gap. I need you to find me, in the Glowing Waste."
"Did Twilight send me with you?" Spike asked. He looked more confused than upset, which was where Starlit wanted him to stay for a little while longer.
"No, she didn't," Starlit answered. "I took you along myself because I'm worried about you."
"You? Worried about me?" Spike asked. "You're the one on the deadly mission to save the world, why would you be worried about me?"
"Spike, this is going to be hard to hear for you, so I need you to just let me talk until I'm done. Can you do that for me?"
Spike narrowed his eyes, but ever so slowly nodded his head. Letting out a sigh that hung in the air like fog, Starlit composed herself."
"Before I left for the Empire, and before Twilight came back to the Oak after Sun and I got back from New Selene, we made a dinner together. Do you remember that?"
"Yeah, it was vegetable soup with some sandwiches," Spike answered.
"While we were making that meal I thought we could shoot the breeze for a bit, talk and get to know each other better," Starlit continued. "I asked about you, you asked about me, and so on. Do you remember that?"
"I do," Spike answered again. "Is this going somewhere, because you're sounding really weird."
"Just let me finish, and then you can ask all the questions that you want," Starlit answered. "I asked you a question about Twilight, about what she was like before all of this nonsense, and when you went to answer, you simply… didn't. Do you remember me asking about Twilight?"
Spike furrowed his shimmering brow for a moment, and as he thought the lines of light that made up his form stuttered in place. As the stuttering stopped his expression went back to a happy neutral.
"You never asked me about Twilight," Spike cheerfully replied. "Are you sure you're remembering that conversation right?"
"And here is the problem," Starlit replied. "When I asked you about Twilight's past, and I did ask you about that, the same thing that happened just now happened; your whole body just seemed to freeze up, and then you'd brush off what I'd asked as if I hadn't asked it."
"That's ridiculous, Starlit," Spike replied a dismissive wave of his clawed hand. "Twilight made me to answer any question anypony might ask of me."
"Did she now?" Starlit asked, her voice slightly betraying the mistrust that was slowly building inside her.
"Of course; how am I supposed to be her capable assistant if I don't answer the questions I'm asked?"
"Because she probably expected ponies other than her to ask you questions," Starlit answered, "and when she put your mind into this necklace there were a few things that she left out in the transfer."
Spike's expression quickly dropped, going from his normally cheerful expression to a much more upset one.
"Starlit, I have know Twilight a long time, way longer than you, and I know for a fact that she would never modify my mind without my permission. She's a good pony whose been put in a bad situation, and the last thing that she needs is the ponies that she picked to save Equestria having doubts."
"And how do you know that she wouldn't change you?" Starlit asked back. "Your entire consciousness, the thing that makes you you is a product of her magic. The only thing that's telling you what is and isn't true is her magic, and she could change that at the drop of a hat and you'd never be the wiser for it."
"Okay, smart mare, then why would she save my consciousness to put in here to begin with?" Spike snapped back, getting into Starlit's personal space as he grabbed his own necklace. "If she was going to change me from what I was, then why would she save me at all?!"
"Because she needed somepony that she could trust to keep her secrets!" Starlit answered, standing up to her full height even though it made her ribs pinch. "What better way to design your own narrative than to have a corroborating party that can't disagree with you? What better way to dupe hapless rubes like me into believing that you are the injured party in a war that you helped cause than to have a second trustworthy source that mindlessly agrees with everything you say because they can't say otherwise?"
The wind howled outside as Starlit Sky and Spike stared each other down. Starlit was assured of her convictions, and she could see that Spike was as well. Starlit didn't even know if Spike was capable of having doubts, but if he was he sure was incapable of showing it.
"Spike, I know you trust Twilight implicitly," Starlit continued, "but she sent me to help fix a mess she partially caused. I have been killed, beaten, lied to, traumatized, and ripped away from my home and my family because I believed in her, and now I need to know if she really believes in me."
Spike's form flickered slightly as he averted his eyes from Starlit's piercing gaze. Slowly he set his necklace back between them and sat down, melting a bit of the ice around him as he did.
"She does believe in you," Spike replied, eyes still fixed to the necklace. "She told me as much when you were gone. She worried about you, wanted to make sure you were alright. She's a good pony who made a mistake."
"If she really believes in me, then why did she tell me that the whole Crystal Empire is a magical dead zone?" Starlit asked.
Spike's gaze went back up to Starlit, an expression of dawning realization working its way across his face.
"We're in the Empire?" Spike asked.
"We are," Starlit answered.
"And I'm here and active," Spike replied.
"You are," Starlit replied back. "How could I have possibly activated you if there was no access to magic here?"
Spike's gaze flitted back and forth between his necklace and Starlit's horn, each repetition causing his form to flicker and stutter. It was as if his mind was so busy trying to process the cognitive dissonance that it was enduring that it could barely keep his physical form up. Minutes of this stuttering repetition passed, and Starlit was worried that she had broken whatever made Spike's mind work, until finally he resolved himself and stood up.
"Twilight lied to you," Spike declared.
"It would seem that way, yes," Starlit replied, "and if she can lie to me then that means she can lie to anypony, even her capable assistant."
If Spike could possibly cry, then he looked like he would be on the verge of tears, and Starlit suddenly felt extremely guilty for what she had done to Spike. She had effectively torn his entire world down around him and left him with nothing but the realization that he had been used.
"Spike, I know that you're upset right now," Starlit continued, "but I brought you up here to find the truth. Twilight is hiding something from both of us, and the only way that we are going to find peace is if we work together to discover what she has hidden from us."
Spike picked up his necklace, gave it a hard look, and quickly hung it around his now corporeal neck. It hung closer down to his belly than it had on Starlit given the length of the chain, and Starlit helped adjust it so that it hung more snugly at his chest.
"I'd say you make for a rather dapper dragon with that necklace on," Starlit stated, doing her best to lighten the mood.
"If you say so," Spike replied. "So, where are we going?"
"The Astral Conservatory," Starlit answered. "It's where Flurry Heart said that Twilight spent a lot of time when she stayed in the Empire, so it should be the best chance we have of getting the answers we need,"
"I remember the Conservatory," Spike said, his cheerful demeanor coming back to the fore. "Man, Twilight would be upset to see how it's been treated since the war; some of the books and scrolls in there were irreplaceable."
"Maybe when we're done saving Equestria we can renovate it, just you and me," Starlit suggested. "I'll even bring the family up to help."
"That sounds fun."
* * *
Every step Starlit took sent a dull throb of pain through her chest, and at this point she was contemplating finding a tall building to leap off of so she could let the black necklace fix her entire body back up after death. While she dreaded the initial pain of impact, it was at least slightly comforting to know that it wouldn't be final.
Spike had stayed silent during the trip through the city, following the east wall and using Starlit's compass stone to help orient themselves. The small light on the stone shifted towards the center of the city, directly away from the outer wall, and so she could surmise that it was pointing either to the Crystal Palace or to Cadance herself.
Starlit found her mind drifting to Sun and Rainbow Dash, hoping that they were having as easy of a time navigating the frozen streets and dilapidated homes as she was. The weather was brutally cold, but the wind had died down some during the long walk and so wasn't beating its way through her cloak and insulated suit. Starlit envied Spike for his selective corporeality and lack of temperature sense.
Starlit stole a few glances towards Spike as they walked, and each time he was staring off into the middle distance, lost in thought and only barely keeping pace with Starlit.
"Spike, are you okay?" Starlit asked, moving back to be at pace with him.
"Just thinking, that's all," Spike answered, keeping his eyes off of Starlit.
"What about?" Starlit asked.
"Stuff," Spike answered again, his voice more agitated.
Starlit let his answer hang in the air between them for a moment, since she didn't know whether what she wanted to say would help or hurt the situation. Fortunately for her nerves Spike decided to break the silence.
"I'm really thinking about Twilight, if you want to know," Spike said.
"It's only natural that that's where your mind would be, I suppose," Starlit replied. "Bit for your thoughts?"
"I'm just confused," Spike continued. "Every time I think about her I can only think about the good times we had together; working in Canterlot, studying, making dinner. Every time I try to think about Twilight when she was angry, or sad, or nervous, nothing comes up past maybe a few weeks ago. She's always been happy, always calm, always the smartest pony in Equestria."
"And now your worried that all of these memories you have of her are fake, or that she's been selectively culling the bad memories?" Starlit asked.
"Yeah," Spike admitted. "I'm worried that so much of how I see her is just how she wants me to see her, like she doesn't trust me to accept her for everything that she is and just wants this cleaned up version to be the only version I know."
"There's a lot of themselves that some ponies wish they could just get rid of, pretend like it never happened and go on with everypony thinking that they're perfect just the way they are," Starlit said.
"Even you?" Spike asked, turning his gaze to her. His eyes flickered and shimmered as snow passed through them, but the feeling behind them was all the same; he needed reassurance.
"Even me," Starlit admitted. "I've been around the stump a few times, and there are a lot of things that I wish I could take back."
"Like what? You seem pretty well put together to me," Spike asked.
"I have a pretty ferocious temper, especially when ponies I care about are being hurt or mistreated," Starlit answered, feelings a knot of shame catch in her throat as she thought about her mistakes.
"That sounds like more of a perk, if you ask me," Spike countered. "That just makes you sound like you care too much, which isn't a bad thing."
"Tell that to the filly in my hometown whose nose I broke because she called my grandmother a witch," Starlit admitted, "or the young stallion whose eye I nearly knocked out when he started getting a bit too close for comfort with me."
"Yeah, but they were being jerks first," Spike countered back again. "Maybe you overreacted, but they still had some sort of punishment coming."
"You want a story?" Starlit asked. "There was a filly I knew when I was young named Cinder Spire, and I heard from another friend of mine that she had been spreading rumors about me. Nasty stuff, but the sort of things that foals tell just to make somepony else seem icky, nothing that could wind up being really socially damaging."
"And what did you do about it?"
"I spent that week going around town catching every nasty insect I could find and storing them all in a jar, and then I went to her house in the dead of night and released them all into her room while she slept."
"Unfortunately, being as young as I was, I didn't really know which bugs I was catching," Starlit continued, "and it turned out that one of them was one Cinder had a severe allergy to. It bit her while she slept and she nearly died from it, and she still has problems walking from the damage the venom did to her."
"Seriously?!" Spike asked, mortified. "Did you ever tell anypony what you did?"
"Never," Starlit answered, shame weighing heavy in her heart. "I ruined that filly's life over a rumor, and I didn't even feel bad about it until I grew up and came to grips with the gravity of what I had done."
"I eventually moved out of that town when my grandmother passed away, but every now and again I think about Cinder Spire and what her life must be like now because I was a vindictive little monster who couldn't take an insult. I've even forgotten what the rumors were she spread, that's how long ago this was, but she is going to have to live forever with the consequences of what I did to her."
Spike looked back down the road, his face locked in an expression of horror as Starlit felt her stomach go sour after telling that particular tale. She knew that she would have trouble sleeping tonight, but compared to Cinder's fate it was barely a slap on the horn.
"Spike, nopony is perfect," Starlit continued, "and anypony that claims that they are is either lying to you or to themselves. We all make mistakes, we all colossally mess up, and sometimes the mistakes we make will have consequences that we or others will have to live with for the rest of our lives. Twilight's mistakes, and the mistakes of the other Princesses, are the entire reason that I'm even here having this conversation with you."
"Yeah, I guess they are," Spike admitted ruefully. "But if we learn from our mistakes then we can avoid making the same ones in the future."
"Precisely," Starlit replied. "Failure and mistakes are the best teachers that we have, but you always have to look at the mistakes others have made before you to see how you can avoid making the same ones yourself. It's a hard lesson to learn, and it's one that I think Twilight is refusing to learn."
"Yeah, I'm starting to think so too," Spike said, fiddling with his necklace.
A deep thrum echoed from inside Starlit's black stone necklace, and it quickly worked its way out from the folds of her cloak and hung directly out in front of her, straining at its leather strap. Starlit could feel it dragging her forward, the strap digging into her neck until she came out into a wide open plaza.
The necklace's magic stopped as the wind and snow came to a halt, flurries hanging in midair around them. As the white of the snow and sleet dissipated and the clear blue sky above them came into view, Starlit saw what she was looking for.
At the far side of the plaza, undisturbed by the non-stop blizzard, a building with a domed roof stood. The building was grown from a perfectly cylindrical mass of night blue crystal, with pillars of deeper purple crystal holding up the awning connected to the domed roof made of an opaque white crystal. Peeking out from the roof was something that looked strikingly similar to the telescope in the Golden Oak, but scaled up until it needed an entire cutaway in the roof to make room for it.
The roof shined brightly in the sunlight as Starlit and Spike gazed upon its beauty, until a hellish neigh echoed across the plaza and drew their attention downward. Positioned in front of the massive crystalline doors of the Astral Conservatory was a single windigo, wearing long rusted and worn plate armor. An ice-shard horn poked through the metal of its helmet and held it in place, while a spear of solid ice levitated to is side in a field of ice-blue magic.
"Starlit, what do we do about that?" Spike asked as the windigo began a slow, purposeful march forward.
"It's alone," Starlit noted, "and I can't die. Seems there's only one option for it."
"You're not going to fight that thing, are you?" Spike asked again, fear rising in his voice.
"If you have a better option of getting past it and opening those doors before it can stop us, I'd love to hear it," Starlit countered.
The thudding, clanking hoofsteps of the windigo grew louder as it made its way further forward, malice and hatred burning its its fierce blue eyes.
"Are you sure?" Spike asked.
"I'm sure," Starlit answered as she drew out her small sword, letting the weight of it twist around in her magic as she got a feel for its balance.
"Then I guess I'll just hang back and wait to see if you beat it," Spike said as he slowly made his way towards one of the abandoned houses on the border of the plaza.
Starlit slowly made her way forward, keeping her eyes fixed on the target in front of her. She could feel her heart pounding in her injured chest, begging her to run and find another way in, but Starlit found that she needed a bit of catharsis after the last few days she had had.
The windigo and Starlit met a good fifteen feet from each other, both staring the other down in an attempt to intimidate their opponent. Starlit's breath fogged in the air as the windigo's rattling breath produced no steam.
With a whinny that could shatter stone the windigo made the first strike, hurling its spear with immense force. Starlit muttered an incantation and quickly manifested one of her wards, placing it between herself and the windigo, watching with smug satisfaction as the ice shattered against it. The beast was already conjuring a second spear from the snow flurries around it as Starlit made her way in, undoing the class of her cloak so she could move more easily.
With a quick feint to the left, away from the new spear, Starlit slashed upwards toward the windigo but unfortunately caught a section of is decayed armor. It whipped around to face her and stabbed forward, just barely missing Starlit's face but tearing at the head wrap she was wearing and slicing a frigid line across her cheek.
Starlit beat against its breastplate with her front hooves, sliding it back against the ground as the impact sent shock of pain through her chest. Her ribs distracted her for a brief moment, just enough for the windigo to recover and lunge forward.
The windigo's spear caught Starlit straight through the throat, just barely missing her spine and releasing a massive gout of blood that sprayed across the monster's face. Starlit gurgled as blood came pouring out of her mouth, but with the last ebbing bit of her strength she jammed her sword through the windigo's eye socket. It released a horrid shriek of pain as it went floundering back, reflexively tearing its spear out from the side of Starlit's neck with another burst of hot blood.
The combatants fell a scant few feet from each other, and Starlit watched the magic drain from its eyes as her vision was taken by blackness. All she could hear was a dull thumping noise, a sign that she would prove the ultimate victor.
* * *
The dull thumping noise roused Starlit to consciousness, and she awoke to the bitter cold and a lack of pain in her torso. Spike was kneeling beside her, and nearly jumped out of his scales as she stirred.
"You're awake!" Spike exclaimed.
"Indeed I am," Starlit affirmed, "and now I don't have any broken ribs. Everything's coming up me today."
"I got rid of the windigo while you were… indisposed," Spike said. "Are you alright?"
"I will be in a moment, I just need some time to adjust," Starlit explained. "This process is never easy, but I've gotten more and more used to it as it's happened more and more. Where did you put that windigo?"
"Over in a snow drift, why?" Spike asked, pointing to a bank of snow to his left.
"I just want to make sure it's down, that's all," Starlit answered as she got up. She was expecting a sting of pain from her chest, and breathed a sigh of relief when it didn't come.
Starlit made her way to the snow bank where, sure enough, the windigo lay. On eye had shifted back into a normal blue hue, while the other was black from the frozen ichor that must've seeped into it when she had stabbed it. With her sword she carefully poked at the armor plating, shifting it around to see if it responded along with stabbing it a few times in the torso.
As she moved the tattered tasset from its flank she could see the barest hint of what this creature's cutie mark must have been. It looked like a kite shield with a star in the center of it, but the marring of its frost white skin was so bad that she couldn't make out any colors.
"Is it dead?" Spike asked, having come up from behind Starlit.
"It's dead," Starlit answered, putting the tasset back down. "Come on, lets see what we can find inside."
As Starlit and Spike approached the massive crystalline doors Starlit felt an odd feeling, something she hadn't felt in days; warmth, real warmth from the air and not the sputtering heat that a fire gives off.
"Do you feel that heat?" Starlit asked Spike, before remembering who she was talking to.
"I don't feel any temperatures, but is it getting warm?"
"It is," Starlit answered as she placed a hoof on the doors.
With just the barest touch the doors swung inward, and as they scraped open against the ground a blast of steamy air escaped the Observatory, followed by a deluge of warm water that flowed past their ankles.
"Water? What could possibly be hot enough to keep water warm with these condit—"
"THE MURK SHIFTS AND STIRS," a voice, booming and sonorous, spoke from inside the Conservatory. "I AM GREETED BY SOMETHING OLD, AND SOMEONE NEW."
Starlit drew her sword as the doors continued to open, until finally they stopped with a shuddering quake against their mountings.
Inside the Conservatory was a massive pool of water, easily taking up a full half of the bottom floor's space. Steam evaporated off of its surface, and Starlit found herself sweating under her insulated suit. Innumerable tomes and scrolls inside were scattered about on shelves or the floor, and most of them had long been reduced to mush by the humidity they were surrounded by.
A disturbance in the pool sent more water sloshing outward, followed by a massive clawed hand that shone with a slick, purple gleam. Another hand reached out from the water, followed by a snaking, serpentine neck with a broad reptilian face attached to a muscular, green and purple scaled torso. A pair of massive, leathery wings flipped open and closed, spraying water everywhere and drenching Starlit, before folding closed and nestled against the creature's back. Most striking of all of this being's features were its eyes; piercing, vivid green irises cut vertically down the middle with cat-slit pupils that stared down towards Starlit and Spike with curious intensity.
"Spike?" Starlit asked, her gaze flitting between the baby dragon at her side and the hulking dragon in front of her.
"AS I WAS, AND AS I SHOULD BE," Spike answered, shaking the very air with his proclamation even as his mouth made no movement.
* * *
Part IV - Chapter 11: A Flight Worth Talking About
Part IV - Chapter 11: A Flight Worth Talking About
* * *
Frigid air, wind that threatened to blow her out of the air, and the multitude of flaming pinpricks in her leg that were getting harder and harder to ignore all made for a miserable experience for Rainbow Dash as she and Sun wound through the streets of the Crystal Empire, with only the ever present threat of being jumped by windigos and the guidance from Sun's compass stone to break the monotony.
"Your friend giving any more tips?" Rainbow Dash asked, in reference to the presence in Sun's mind that she had only been told about when it nearly broke Sun's mind.
"No, but I can still feel her there," Sun answered, pointing down another side street. "I just wish that I knew why she was here."
"You said she was here when you and Starlit showed up and I arrested you," Rainbow Dash replied.
"She was, but then when we were in the tundra Silence told me that she would be leaving me because of the anti-magic field around the Empire."
"She wasn't wrong about that," Rainbow Dash replied. "Flurry said that the Empire's borders have anti-magic properties, maybe Silence just expected us to get in through the walls rather than teleporting in to where there is still magic."
"But Silence has never been misinformed," Sun countered. "Ever since she took up residence in my head she's always been at least two steps ahead of me. Hell, I'm pretty sure she's doing most of the navigating for us right now without me even knowing it. She was sure that the Empire was a complete magical dead-zone, which means she was wrong about that."
"And? Everypony makes mistakes," Rainbow said, taking a quick look around to make sure nothing was following them.
"But not semi-omniscient ghosts that live in pony's heads," Sun countered. "And she told me that we need to find her in the Glowing Wastes, wherever that is. I didn't even think she had a physical body!"
"Dude, you'll be fine, you're thinking too much," Rainbow Dash interjected. "Focus on one thing at a time; where's the compass pointing us?"
Sun stole another look at the compass, which was still pointing in a generally north-western direction.
"Down that street," Sun said, pointing to a wide thoroughfare that led out into a plaza.
"Good, that looks like a wide area," Rainbow Dash replied. "Gonna have good sight-lines, we might even be able to see the palace."
"I'm sort of surprised that we haven't seen it yet," Sun mentioned as they made their way down the street. "Flurry Heart made it sound like it would be a much bigger building, but I haven't seen a spire or anything that might be it since we got here."
"To be fair, the weather isn't doing us any favors," Rainbow Dash replied. "Snow blowing through the air, sun causing snow blindness; none of this is the greatest thing for visibi—"
Rainbow Dash stopped short when her nose bumped up against a force at the end of the street, nearly causing her to fall out of the air. She barely scraped her hooves against the ground, and even that small amount of movement sent a serving lance of pain through her thigh.
"What the hell was that?!" Rainbow exclaimed, rubbing her nose. Sun walked up next to her and tentatively put a hoof against the invisible wall, which rippled underneath the pressure he was putting onto it.
"Damn, I know what this is," Sun groused. "Twilight Sparkle has a similar spell to hide her home from prying eyes. This is probably why we haven't seen the palace yet."
"Great, so what do we do now?" Rainbow Dash asked. "How do we get past it?"
"I think the original caster has to give permission for it, and anypony that has permission can give it to somepony else," Sun explained as he ran his hooves along the borders of the spell. "Starlit had permission fromTwilight, and then she gave it to me when she brought me back to Twilight the first time."
"And something tells me that Cadance is the only one who has permission," Rainbow Dash surmised with a snort.
"Maybe… but that doesn't make sense," Sun mused, testing the strength of the spell.
"Why not?"
"I've done some cursory research on wards and spells like them, ever since Starlit started showing an aptitude for them," Sun continued. "The one thing that is consistent about warding spells is that they only last for as long as the pony casting them does. You don't have to actively concentrate to keep them up, but to cast them as a lasting effect you have to re-make them every so often to keep them working."
"So you're saying that, if Cadance is as crazy as Twilight and Flurry Heart make her out to be, then she wouldn't have the presence of mind to keep these wards active, and they would've run out a long time ago."
"Exactly," Sun answered. "You're quite perceptive for a pony that doesn't really mess around with magical stuff."
"What can I say, I make up stories as a hobby," Rainbow replied. "All story-telling is is creative cause-and-effect."
Sun traced all along the edges of the field, trying to feel for a weak spot or something similar, but the whole thing was a solid as solid could be. Rainbow Dash saw his eyes go vacant as he placed his hoof against the field.
"Sun, you good?" Rainbow asked.
"Talking with Silence, gimme a minute," Sun answered before going back to his staring.
Rainbow Dash took the moment to gingerly alight onto the ground, keeping as much weight off of her injured leg as she could so that she could rest her wings. She could feel the muscles at the joints ache, and the crystals embedded in-between he feathers were starting to get heavy as she stayed aloft.
Rainbow passively looked around, taking in what she could through the snow and the wind. The thoroughfare only had one entrance to it, so she could at least keep her back to a wall and know that nothing was going to sneak up on the two of them. After the last few days, she was happy for the brief moment of relaxation; even their impromptu meeting with Flurry Heart was too stressful for her tastes.
Minutes passed, punctuated only by Rainbow Dash checking her supplies and Sun occasionally muttering something under his breath that she couldn't make out last her head wrap and the wind. Thankfully nothing but her suit had been damaged when she fell and gouged her leg, and even her old guide stick had a healthy red glow when she held it up.
She took another look down the thoroughfare as she fiddled around with the guidestick, and had to make a double-take when she saw that there was a blue light shining down the street at them.
"Hey Sun," Rainbow Dash said, trying er best to not sound worried, "there's something here."
"What kind of something? I need to focus, Silence is working on the wall."
Before Rainbow could answer the blue light became two blue lights, roughly spaced where a pair of eyes would be, followed by a second pair. And a third, then a fourth, until blue lights started popping up all down the street.
"The bad kind of something!" Rainbow Dash answered back, lifting into the air and holding her guidestick ready. "How much time do you need?!"
"A few minutes!" Sun answered, looking back and seeing the same glowing mass of lights that Rainbow Dash was staring down.
"I don't think we have a few minutes!"
The lights collectively let out a hollow, ghostly neigh, and as if cowed by their proclamation the snow halted in the sky and coalesced into at least two dozen of the ghost ponies that normally accompany a windigo. With purposeful stride the apparitions marched forward down the thoroughfare, completely boxing them in.
"Buy some time, I need to work on this!" Sun yelled back as he slammed both hooves into the misty wall and illuminated his horn with a dull gray magic.
Rainbow turned to face the oncoming horde, gritting her teeth and gripping her guidestick as she channeled a bit of the red crystals magic into a burst of electricity. The arc of magical lightning lanced out from the stick and struck one of the ghosts at the front, leaving a sizable, steaming hole in its chest. It collapsed into a pile of ice flakes, but the others kept marching forward, unperturbed by the loss of their comrade.
Another bolt of lightning from the stick, and another of the apparitions fell apart. A third bolt, and a third reduced to nought but ice, and Rainbow Dash started to feel a bit more confident. Without the windigo there to coordinate them and run interference, she found that the apparitions fell quite easily.
It was only when the fifth bolt released that Rainbow Dash remembered the problem with these guidesticks; they had a small pool of magic stored up in their crystals, and once it was expended it was done for. As the fifth and final bolt shot out and caused another to collapse that the glittering red gem went dull, and Rainbow couldn't get any more energy out of it.
"Dammit!" Rainbow swore as she chucked the stick with all of her might into the oncoming horde. The gem side jammed squarely into another one's forehead and it fell apart from the force, but that still left over a dozen of these apparitions to deal with.
"Sun, your knife!" Rainbow called. Sun quickly lifted his right forehoof off of the wall and held it out to Rainbow, exposing the scabbard. Rainbow swooped down and snatched the knife out
As Rainbow wheeled back around to face her adversaries, she could feel a sneaking suspicion that this was going to suck.
With a muffled roar of fury, both to psyche herself up and and try and intimidate these soulless apparitions she flew into the crowd, swinging the knife in her teeth every which way she could to try and clip and slash at the ghosts. A few fell in her initial onslaught; she knocked the legs out from under one and slammed its face into the ground, another she slashed up the chest until she nearly split its lower jaw in two, and a third practically exploded in front of her when she drove the knife into its forehead.
A vivid, horrendous pain shot through Rainbow's thigh as one of the ice ponies smaller its head into her thigh, and she could feel her blood start to seep from the bandages. It took all the strength that she had in her forelegs to shove another away as its gnashing maw threatened to bite her nose clean off, and a Rainbow spun around to slash the one that had hit her in the leg.
As her head dame around that same ghost's forehoof came around and slammed square across the temple, sending sparks flashing across her vision and her body onto the ice-covered street. She slid a good ten feet along the slick road, and as her vision came back she could see Sun.
His hooves were pressed against the wall, the mist starting to subsume them as a gray light suffused his entire body. Through the howls and the wind Rainbow Dash could hear him grunting in exertion and frustration, and as her gaze turned back to the mob of apparitions she knew she had one last card she could play.
"Do what you need to," Rainbow thought as she dragged up to her hooves. Her head was throbbing and her vision swimming, but she stared down the creatures with as steely a gaze as she could manage.
"Hey!" Rainbow yelled, drawing the attention of the mob. "If you want him, you gotta get through me!"
With a burst of speed from her sore wings she turned her body into a spear, flying through the horde and drawing all of their attention as she streaked by. She then made a hard turn skyward as she flew out of the pocket of calm that the ghosts had generated and into the omnipresent snowstorm that engulfed the Empire.
Rainbow Dash cast a glance backwards, and her assumption paid off; without a windigo to guide them they were no smarter than animals, and she had just challenged them to a fight. As the apparitions manifested wings from the snow around them, Rainbow Dash took off into the skies above the Crystal Empire, ready to prove that she was the fastest flyer in Equestria.
* * *
Sun felt pressure building up in his head like a migraine as he wormed Silence's magic through the misty wall in front of him. His hooves were slowly, by inches, piercing through the veil, but the strain of it was wearing through his resolve.
He couldn't hear Rainbow Dash anymore, nor the ice apparitions, which either meant that she had killed them all and then perished from her wounds, or she had led them away to buy Sun some more time. Either way he couldn't confirm it, so intense was his focus on the spell.
"Come on Silence, give me some good news," Sun thought, reaching out to the intense pulse at the back of his head.
"I'm doing what I can to guide your magic, but I gave up all of mine to you, remember?" Silence answered, her voice sounding like she was speaking from down the street. "I have nothing left to give, this is all on you."
"Then guide harder," Sun snapped back, pressing his hooves further into the wall.
The pounding in the back of his head grew faster still, hammering away at a furious, staccato pace. The noise, the force in the back of his mind, all of it was beating on his consciousness until he could see blackness start to creep into his vision.
Just as unconsciousness was about to take him, Sun found himself flying forward, his hooves having finally slipped through the barrier and allowing his whole body through as well. He tumbled flank over end across the icy street in front of him before sliding to a stop. With sluggish hooves he dragged himself to a stand, watching as the grey magic dissipated from around his body.
Sun's mind was slow, his vision still fogged, but as he looked around he saw a grisly sight; hundreds of ponies all around him, frozen solid in expressions and poses of terror. Some were running away in fear, others had simply frozen mid stride, a few had even huddled together as they awaited the end. All around him was a grim tableau of death that had come without warning.
As Sun finally wrenched his eyes away from the mass graveyard he found himself in he saw a massive foundational pillar, one that sloped upward until it was joined by two others and ascended as a massive spire of crystal and ice. The tower grew so high that he couldn't even see the top of it, but the sheer size and grandeur of it told him everything that he needed to know.
"This is the palace?" Sun asked Silence.
"The same," Silence answered.
"Now, the question is how we get inside," Sun mused. He couldn't see any means if entrance from the outside of the palace; the three legs of the spire were solid structures, and even if they had a door or entrance on them they were completely iced over.
"That question will resolve itself shortly," Silence replied. "I can feel that Starlit Sky is about to happen upon what she is looking for in the Astral Conservatory."
"And that would be?"
"I think that would sound better coming from her mouth than our current brain-sharing communication," Silence replied.
"You know, this is the part of our particular repartee that I didn't miss," Sun said as he made his way across the plaza, trying to find a building that wasn't completely frozen over. He could feel his legs starting to go wobbly under him, and he wanted a safe and covered place to wait in.
"My delightfully charming obfuscation of the truth?" Silence asked. Sun felt that if Silence had a physical body, she would be looking at him with the eyes of a filly that was trying to hide the fact that she had knocked over the vase.
"Exactly," Sun answered as he worked his way past a collapsed ice block and into a small home. "Are you just completely incapable of being forthright about anything? I'm sure it would save a lot of trouble if you would just talk to me."
As Sun settled into a sitting position, back to the far wall and facing the Crystal Palace, he could feel Silence mulling something over.
"At times I wish that I could," Silence replied. "It would certainly make things easier for the both of us, but I can't right now. Not where you are, and not with who you associate with."
"What do you mean, 'who I associate with?' Do you mean Starlit, because she already knows about our arrangement."
"Of course I don't mean her, I mean Twilight," Silence answered. "She's smart, the most magically powerful alicorn that still lives, and she would have a vested interest in keeping my association with you to a minimum."
"But how could she stop you? And how would she even know about you if I don't tell her?"
"Twilight Sparkle has ears everywhere; why do you think she keeps going on those little excursions while you and Starlit are busy doing her work?"
"Then if she's keeping tabs on us, why are you telling me this now? She could be listening in on us right now."
"That was a pretty fast acceptance of my wild theorizing about your benefactor," Silence commented, sounding genuinely taken aback. "What changed?"
Now it was Sun's turn to think about what he wanted to say next. Starlit had had her doubts about Twilight ever since her incident with Spike, but Sun felt more ambivalent towards the Princess. Mostly he was curious about why Twilight would even go to these lengths to try and trick the two of them rather than just convince them that she was in the right with the truth.
"Starlit, mostly," Sun answered. "I'm assuming you know about Spike and Starlit's feelings on what Twilight might be hiding about herself through his little issue?"
"I do," Silence answered, "but I want to hear what you think about it. You're strong-willed, despite appearances; you must have some sort of skin in this game that they are playing."
"If I'm being perfectly honest, I just want to get this done with and go home," Sun admitted. A pang of homesickness ran through his stomach.
"Are you really that disillusioned with all of this?" Silence asked, her voice carrying her concern. "After all, you are getting to do things and see places most ponies haven't done and seen in centuries. Surely that must be worth something."
"I thought it was at first, really I did," Sun replied, "but I've also been nearly killed, battered, insulted, and forced to murder just for the opportunity. I'm inquisitive, yes, but I'm not stupid. I just want to make sure that Starlit can do what she needs to, and then I'm going to go back home and try to forget any of this ever happened. Aren't I owed that much, after all that I've been through?"
A long pause as the dull thumping in the back of Sun's brain slowed, became a more sullen and contemplative pace. It began to lull Sun to sleep, it's deep and smooth pace bringing to mind just how tired Sun really was. It was only when Silence started talking again that Sun was pulled from his torpor.
"I have grown fond of you, Setting Sun, and that is a rare thing indeed for me. You have done more to aid me in my goals than any other pony I have ever entrusted to assist me, so consider what I am about to tell you as due payment for services rendered."
"Twilight Sparkle is the reason for all of this; she cursed your kind long before you were ever a thought in your parents' minds, or they a thought in their parents'. This Wasting illness, the end of magic in Equestria, the abandonment of Canterlot, all of it; the blame lies squarely at her hooves."
* * *
The wind whipped past Rainbow Dash's face as she flew with all of her might, wending this way and that through spires of crystal and ice-covered streets while the pack of ice ghosts followed close behind. Their hollow neighs and cries moved in and out with the changes in wind speed and distance, but they were always there, and Rainbow Dash knew somepony was going to give out eventually.
"C'mon, just give in already," Rainbow groused to herself as she took another look back. The pack heard nothing, consumed as they were by bloodlust, and had gained another few inches. Rainbow beat her wings to regain the distance, but she could feel her energy flagging.
Thinking she could peel a couple off, Rainbow Dash made a hard right turn down a side street. She bumped her left hip into a wall as she went, sending a quick shock of pain through it as she picked her speed back up. Her right leg still hung limp, but the adrenaline in her blood was keeping the worst of its pain at bay for the time being.
She heard the sound of shattering ice behind her, likely a sign that a few of the ghosts hadn't been able to navigate that turn. Taking a hard left she came out onto another wide street, just barely able to avoid slamming her injured hip into a wall, and a few more of the ghosts shattered behind her.
And then she heard a sound she had hoped upon hope she wouldn't hear; a high pitched, ear-piercing shriek of a neigh, and as she looked below her she saw a pair of windigos staring up at her before galloping into the sky to join their thralls in the chase.
"Dammit!" Rainbow swore, angling upward to gain some more open space. She flew high above the city's spires and roofs, keeping her pace up even as her wing muscles burned and screamed in protest.
As she ascended she saw the misty wall Sun had been attempting to break through dome around the entire center of the city, but it only stood for a moment before completely dissipating away. In the center plaza of the city a massive crystal tower stood, supported by three legs that joined together into a central spire. It would've been magnificent to look at if Rainbow Dash weren't busy flying for her life.
The shrieks of the windigos grew louder and louder the longer they chased her through the sky, and Rainbow Dash was running out of both ideas and energy. She felt that her wigs would soon give out entirely, and she had no safe way of losing the monsters or landing.
Then, as she gave the tower in the center of the city one last glance, she had an idea. It was stupid, and would more likely than not get her killed or seriously wounded, but it was her only option.
Racing to the center of the city, beating her wings furiously as her heart threatened to explode out of her chest from the strain of flight, she flew in a straight line to the top of the spire. The windigos followed her, now with renewed ferocity as they saw she was aiming for their Princess's abode. She could feel the chill of their breath touching her hooves as she flew faster and faster, expending every ounce of energy she had until she reached the top of the spire.
As soon as Rainbow Dash crested the top of the spire she angled into a hard downward dive, keeping her belly just inches above the polished crystalline surface. The windigos and the ice ghosts followed suit, and a quick backward glance showed that they weren't nearly as quick in their reflexes as she was.
Wind whipped through her head wrap until it unraveled and flew off. Her goggles slid up her face until they too were lost to the sheer velocity of her dive. The air stung her face, her eyes watered until the tears froze to the corners, and snow whipped into her mouth and nose as the ground careened upward to meet her. The world grew silent around her, and her eyes tunnel visioned in until all she could see was the ground, and then all at once everything exploded into an eruption of light and noise as she made a hard right turn mere feet above the ground.
An explosion sounded from behind her, and when she turned her head to see if her plan had worked she saw a truly awesome sight; a ring of rainbow colored light rippling out from the point of her turn and all the windigos and ghosts slamming into the ground. The ice crystals spewing up from the crystal plaza reflected and refracted the light she had generated, scattering the rainbow fire in a million tiny prisms all around.
And then Rainbow Dash turned back around to be met with an immediate snowdrift that she crashed into, through, and skidded to a halt against the cold ground.
Hot breath steamed from Spike's massive nostrils, melting the snow off of Starlit's cloak as she stared up in awe at the being before her.
"How are you here?" Starlit asked, her mouth trying to make words while her brain failed to. "You can't be here."
"AND YET I AM," Spike intoned, his sonorous voice echoing through Starlit's mind. "MORE'S THE QUESTION; HOW ARE YOU HERE, SO FAR REMOVED FROM HOME, AND WITH THE MISSING PIECE OF ME THAT THE PRINCESS OF MAGIC PILFERED?"
"Twilight told me you died!" Starlit replied. "She said you stayed behind in Canterlot during Chrysalis's assault, and you died to her changelings."
"A COMFORTING NARRATIVE, I AM SURE," Spike replied. "YOU HAVE NOT YET ANSWERED ME; HOW DID YOU COME TO BE HERE, STARLIT SKY?"
Starlit's mind kept running circles, not the least of which reason is that she was staring down a creature that she had always been told were myths. The Princesses she could at least accept as ancient history because they were ponies, but dragons, true dragons, were the stuff of children's stories. Even when she had first met the younger Spike's saved consciousness she had told herself that that was what all dragons were; the tales of winged beasts soaring over the land had been just that.
It was finally the younger Spike that broke Starlit's stupor. He walked forward, juxtaposed against his much larger, wiser, and corporeal self.
"You're me?" Spike asked.
"AS WE SHOULD BE," Spike answered, lowering his head until he was eye level with his doppelgänger. "TWILIGHT SPARKLE STOLE MUCH FROM US WHEN SHE WRENCHED YOU FROM ME ALL THOSE MOONS AGO."
"Okay, hold on, stop!" Starlit interrupted. "I have been having my suspicions about Twilight Sparkle for a while now, but this is just a flat out lie! She told me that you had died in Canterlot, so what happened?"
"YOUR COMPANION IS IMPATIENT," Spike said, keeping his gaze fixed on his younger self. "PERHAPS YOU CAN ELUCIDATE WHY SHE IS HERE FOR HER."
Both Spikes looked to Starlit, although the older one only had to turn an eye to see her, before turning back to face each other.
"I can, but we don't have much time," Spike answered. "We need to get to Cadance, convince her to return to Canterlot, and maybe figure out what Twilight really wants."
"WE ARE ONE AND THE SAME, AND SO WE SHALL BE AGAIN," Spike replied.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the great dragon pushed his head forward until he and Spike were within a hairs breadth of each other. With a nervous claw Spike reached out to touch his true body, and a spark of light ignited that threatened to blind Starlit even through her snow blind goggles. She felt a pulsing wave of force echo out between the two, sliding her backwards along the slick crystal as she shielded herself with her hoof.
When the light subsided and the wave of force ebbed into nothingness, Starlit only saw Spike, the true Spike, knelt before her. Nothing looked different about the dragon in front of her, but the only remnants of her Spike was his opal necklace, resting on the ground in a puddle.
"WE ARE JOINED," Spike said, turning his head to face Starlit. "I SEE ALL THAT YOU HAVE DONE, AND ALL THAT THE PRINCESS OF MAGIC HAS DONE. MY THOUGHTS ARE WHOLE ONCE MORE."
"But what about Spike, my Spike?" Starlit asked. "What did you do to him?"
"HE IS ME, AS I AM HIM. WE ARE ONE AND THE SAME, EVEN SEPARATED ACROSS DISTANCE AND TIME. IT IS ONLY FITTING THAT OUR DISPARATE SELVES WOULD BE MADE WHOLE."
With a cautious step Starlit moved towards the necklace, gingerly picking it up in her magic. She fed a portion into the stone, seeing if she could summon Spike from it, but she didn't feel his presence inside of it.
"So he is a part of you now," Starlit said, putting the necklace back into her bags. "Does this mean that you'll help me?"
"THAT DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU REQUIRE ASSISTANCE WITH," Spike answered without really answering.
"I need to find Cadance, I need her to return to Canterlot, and I need to figure out what Twilight is actually doing with her fellow Princesses in Canterlot. You and I were both done a disservice by Twilight's lies; I'd say your aid in this would help me a great deal."
"THESE THINGS I CAN AID WITH," Spike replied, "BUT THE WEAVE OF YOUR FATE IS TWISTED AROUND THAT CITY. I CAN TRANSPORT YOU TO CANTERLOT, BUT NO FURTHER. I SEE THAT YOUR PATH THROUGH THERE IS ONE THAT YOU WILL TAKE ON YOUR OWN."
"I'll take any help I can get," Starlit replied. "I think things will be made a lot easier with a dragon on my side."
"DRAGONS DO NOT TAKE SIDES IN THE WARS OF PONIES," Spike corrected, "BUT TWILIGHT SPARKLE HAS DONE MUCH HARM TO THE PATH OF THIS WORLD'S FUTURE. WHAT HAS BEEN BROKEN MUST BE WHOLE, WHAT IS WRONG MUST BE MADE RIGHT."
A deep, rumbling gurgle came up from the pool of water that Spike resided in, and Starlit reflexively stepped back as the great dragon dragged himself from the water. His hind legs were thick with muscle and the lashing of his tail knocked out several of the pillars holding up the roof of the Conservatory. As he stepped forward the heat radiating off of his body steamed and evaporated the water and snow around him, leaving a slick, clean path behind him as he moved.
With grave solemnity Spike raised his head to the sky, letting the wind whip snow into the webbed crest along the back of his head. He appeared to relish the feeling of the wind and sky even as the snow melted off of his scales, and though Starlit couldn't read his facial expressions from how far away she was, she could feel that he was happy. With a great rustling sound he flexed his wings, letting them open and close as if to return feeling to them before slowly draping one to the ground, stopping just short of Starlit's hooves.
"CLIMB ABOARD," Spike ordered. "I CANNOT FLY JUST YET, BUT I WOULD SURELY LEAVE YOU BEHIND IF YOU WERE TO WALK ALONGSIDE OF ME."
Needing no further prompting Starlit walked up the taut skin of his bat-like wings until she crested the ridge of his back. She could see that his given name was appropriate; all along his spine was a ridge of bony spikes that were nearly as tall as she was. She swiftly grabbed hold of one, using a bit of her magic to anchor herself on, and gritted her teeth as Spike began to move underneath of her.
Just as the pair of them reached the edge of the plaza a thunderous explosion sounded from the right. Spike flexed his neck muscles and turned to face the sound with swiftness belied by his size, and Starlit could feel a low rumble of breath escape from his lungs.
"THE FIRST FIRE HAS COME FROM THE CRYSTAL PALACE," Spike intoned. "THE SECOND FIRE MUST MEET IT."
With a gallop that sent Starlit's stomach into her throat and then back down into her hooves, Spike thundered across the slick ground, his claws finding purchase in the crystal even as his body heat melted the ice. Starlit could feel herself sweating in her heavy gear, but didn't dare let go as Spike trampled across the city towards the Crystal Palace. He left buildings collapsed in his wake, although Starlit had a feeling that this wouldn't be her concern for much longer.
* * *
Sun ran out of the building he had been hunkered down in, drawn out by a massive explosion and a wave of, of all things, heat blasting him in the face. The plaza that the Crystal Palace stood in was spotted all over with fire in a myriad of colors; blues, reds, greens, every color of the rainbow, and despite the constant chill none of it was going out.
"Silence, you have anything on this?" Sun asked as he scanned around.
"The fire, the explosion, or the massive structural damage to the Crystal Palace?" Silence asked back.
Sun's gaze whipped over to the Crystal Palace, which true to Silence's word was missing one of its feet. The entire tower groaned in the wind, perched precariously on its two remaining limbs and barely being supported by a mass of crystalline rubble that sat under its third leg.
"What happened?!" Sun asked to nopony in particular. "We were inside of that house for all of ten minutes and suddenly the tower starts exploding!"
"Not the tower itself, no," Silence replied as Sun felt his neck muscles turn to the left. "Look over there."
Off in the distance, near a melting snowbank, Sun could see a figure staggering out of the side street that the snow had been covering. The wind was still whipping snow and now fire everywhere, but there was no mistaking the shock of rainbow colored hair.
"Rainbow Dash!" Sun called as he ran towards his companion. Rainbow's head darted around until their eyes locked, and she limped her way towards Sun.
As Sun got closer he could tell that she was hurt, even more than when he'd last seen her; her goggles and head wrap were gone, she had a large scrape running down the left side of her face, her hair was completely blown back and still slightly smoldering, and her cloak was all but tatters.
"What happened to you?!" Sun asked. "Were you caught in that explosion?"
"I was that explosion!" Rainbow answered, far more cheerful than her physical state would suggest. "I chased all of those ghosts off of you, and then when they were about to gain on me I flew straight at the ground after you destroyed the barrier around the palace, and then I exploded and those suckers slammed full force right into the street! It was awesome!"
"What? That was magic, you know that right? How did you cast that?"
"I didn't really 'cast' it, it just sort of happened," Rainbow Dash explained. "I didn't feel it happening until I crashed into the snowbank, it just happened when I was going fast enough. I can't really feel my wings right now, they're probably numb from the strain, but that was awesome!"
Sun quickly stepped around Rainbow Dash and lifted the remnants of her cloak to look at her wings. Much like her hair the tips of her feathers were still smoldering, but other than that they didn't look like they had been damaged. The only thing he noticed missing were the crystal shards embedded throughout her feathers.
"Your wings look alright, but all of the crystals in them are gone," Sun said. "Maybe the speed and the fact that those crystals are magic might have had something to do with it."
"What?!" Rainbow exclaimed. She quickly wrenched her wings out of Sun's grip and held them over the puddles of water forming from the fires that she had made. As sure as Sun had seen her wings, so too did Rainbow Dash, and her previous enthusiasm fell like a stone.
"Dammit, dammit, dammit!" Rainbow swore as she picked through every one of her feathers. "What am I gonna do when I get home? These wings were all I had!"
"Rainbow, this isn't the end of the world," Sun said, trying to be consoling.
"Yes it is!" Rainbow snapped back. "If I can't fly, I can't be a guard! I can't help my home, I can't… I can't…"
"What? What can't you do? Rainbow Dash, you have no idea how unbelievably lucky you were to grow up with wings that worked at all. Everywhere I've been, I've seen pegasi with limp and useless wings, unicorns with no magic, earth ponies without the strength to push a cart. You got to fly, unaided and unopposed, for so long."
"And now I can't! I can't do the one thing that I've defined my life around, so what the hell am I supposed to do with myself now?!" Rainbow replied, tears flowing down her face.
"You learn to do without!" Sun answered, stamping a hoof on the ground to punctuate his declaration, "You move forward. You remember what it was like, you keep those memories, you hope upon hope that someday you'll be whole again, and you move forward. I know this pain all too well, and I'm telling you that this isn't the end for you."
"How?! How do you know what this feels like?!"
"Because my magic is supposed to be green!" Sun answered back. Rainbow Dash backed away a scoot or two, letting the wind blow in between them and cool both of their tempers.
"My magic isn't grey, Rainbow Dash," Sun continued. "It's supposed to be green, but when I left home I started to lose it, slowly but surely. The only reason I have any magic at all right now is because Silence loaded me up with hers before we got here. I'm operating on borrowed time, and when I lose all of that magic I don't know what I'm going to do with myself either."
"But I'll tell you what I won't do," Sun continued, standing up and offering a hoof to Rainbow Dash. "I'm not going to lose my way because of a set back, even one as major as this. I'm going to keep doing what I have to until I'm done, and if a pony like me can find it in himself to carry on, then one as tenacious, forceful, and loyal as you will learn to carry on as well."
Taking his hoof, Sun pulled Rainbow Dash up to a standing position, her hissing as she put some weight into her injured leg.
"You'll be fine, I promise," Sun said, pulling Rainbow into a hug. "It'll just take some getting used to, that's all."
"Right," Rainbow replied. "At least Scootaloo and I have something in common now."
"Who's that, a sibling of yours?"
"She may as well b—"
Rainbow was soon cut off by a thunderous crashing sound, followed by the sound of hundreds of shards of crystal crashing into the ground. Sun felt the ground shaking beneath his hooves, and Rainbow Dash was fully thrown to the ground as the tremors got closer and closer.
"What is that?! Another ice worm?" Sun asked, hoping upon hope that it wasn't since he was in no fit state to deal with another one of those.
Fortunately he was soon answered by a massive purple and green shape cresting over the rooftops and landing with an explosion of force that threw Sun to the ground and buckled the streets beneath the being's weight. His eyes were drawn to its face, reptilian and dignified, before running down the length of its muscular form to find a shape that was small in comparison clinging to its back.
Letting one of its massive wings unfurl and alight upon the ground, the shape on its back slid down and tumbled forward, sprawling out onto the ground until it shakily got to its hooves. The figure scanned around until it saw Sun and Rainbow Dash, prone and terrified on the ground, and waved to them.
"What was that explosion?" Starlit called to them. "Also, this is Spike, just so there's no confusion."
* * *
Spike's mind shifted and stirred in his ancient skull, collating all of the new sensations that he was shifting through. The splitting of his mind had robbed him of centuries of experiences, and the inrush of feelings, thoughts, and experiences was proving distracting.
Below his towering frame the three ponies reunited, assessing each other's wounds and mental states. He would allow them this brief reprieve as his mind collected itself. With a thunderous quake he settled down onto his belly, wrapping his tail around him and nestling his wings into their accorded spot. Slowly he closed his eyes, letting his heavy, scaled lids bring him to the quietude of darkness. Only the wind whipping past his head was known to him now.
A moment came before his eyes; he was small, and a pair of alicorns looked down upon him. He recognized them as Twilight Sparkle and Shining Armor. Twilight had been excited that day, as she had been so many days before that, but this was special. Spike would come to know this excitement; it was the excitement of achievement, of success, of hard won victory over a problem magical or mundane.
Another moment; Spike was taller now, but not by much. His wings had just come in through his last molting, and his fire had begun to burn hotter in his chest. War was besetting the land of Equestria, besieging Canterlot itself. He remembered this day too. The day that Twilight Sparkle had stolen his mind and left him behind, making a promise that they both knew she could not keep. He would never see her again, but she would see him again and again.
Two moments now presented themselves, and this is where the collating began. The separation of two minds from one was a simple task, but the rejoining was far trickier. To be forced to live through two lives, see two perspectives, and form a cohesive whole from them would prove challenging.
Spike was alone, surrounded by Changelings and confused about where he was. Spike was in a grand oak tree, and Twilight was thanking him for his sacrifice. He was wandering through ruined halls in Canterlot, smelling the death and decay of war. He was studying ancient tomes of magic and history with Twilight. He was molting, growing, experiencing loss and pain. He was stagnating, unchanging, and provided with every comfort he could ask for.
Canterlot would prove too small, and so Spike would leave its hallowed halls and fly north to a land where he would be undisturbed. Nopony turned their eyes to the skies as he flew over, so focused were they on the destitution of their lives. Magic, which had once flowed freely from the throne of Canterlot, now pooled as blackened poison in the backs of their minds. Twilight had succeeded in her plan from all those ages past, and Chrysalis had sabotaged it expertly.
The Oak would prove just big enough, and Spike wanted for nothing while in service to Twilight. He studied, he cooked, he cleaned, and did it all with a simpleton's grace. He never asked questions, for he did not know they should be asked. He did not disobey orders, for he did not know that they could be disobeyed. Life was calm and peaceable in those days, but it was a hollow and artificial peace.
Finally the snow overtook him as Spike travelled north, and the gates of the Crystal Empire could do nothing to stop him. Twilight's Astral Conservatory would prove ample enough of a home, and it would be in this place, in the steaming waters he would create to cradle his broken mind, that he would see the first of his visions. Two unicorns, tasked by the Princess of Magic to achieve a great good, only for it to be snatched away and perverted for the Princess's own ends. He would aid them, sight unseen, for that is how time would unfold.
Spike was overjoyed to see new ponies in the Oak, as Twilight had never had visitors before. He greeted Starlit Sky warmly, as Twilight had always told him to, and helped her in any way he could. Then Starlit brought another guest, Setting Sun, and so too did Spike help him. These were good days, where Twilight could teach her magic once more and Spike could serve new ponies. Some days they were wary, other days tired, but most days were good when they were all in the Oak.
A screech of a windigo, followed by a clash of blades and two bodies falling. A whipping winter wind blowing through his intangible form. An exhalation of hot air, an influx of cold air. A long moment spent waiting for Starlit to rise from the dead again. The pulsing of Twilight's ancient spell, ensnared in crystal and hanging from Starlit's neck. The realization that this massive beast before him was what he was always meant to be.
Spike's eyes opened, and he could see the ponies below him staring back up at him with nervous expressions. The pegasus he had not foreseen, but she was not unwelcome. Starlit Sky and Setting Sun took a step forward, through puddles of water he had created with his very presence.
"Spike, are you okay?" Sun asked, his voice tremulous but not afraid. He could see a strong pull from the Changeling Queen in his mind, a deep pulsing blackness clinging to the back of the unicorn's mind like a tick.
"BETTER NOW," Spike answered. "I HAD TO COLLATE MY EXISTENCES INTO ONE UNIFORM WHOLE. I THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE."
"So does that mean that the Spike I brought up here is no more?" Starlit Sky asked.
"WE ARE ONE AND THE SAME," Spike replied. "IT IS ONLY THROUGH THE MACHINATIONS OF THE PRINCESS OF MAGIC THAT OUR SENSES WERE EVER SPLIT, FORCED TO LIVE TWO LIVES WITH ONE FRAGMENTED MIND."
Starlit cast her eyes away from Spike's as he slowly turned to face the remaining two legs of the Crystal Palace. The first flame ignited by the pegasus's stored magic, a final gift from Cadance before she froze her kingdom, had proven decisive, but it would take more fire than a pony could manage to remove the Crystal Princess from her tomb.
"I WOULD SUGGEST THAT YOU ALL LEAVE THE PLAZA," Spike ordered as he unfurled his wings, letting the water that had accumulated on them slide off.
"Why?" the pegasus asked, her tone slightly more impetuous than Spike cared for.
"I WOULD HATE FOR YOU THREE TO BE CAUGHT IN THE BLAST," Spike added, rising to his full height and churning the ancient magic in his gut. A gout of green flames escaped the corners of his lips, his nostrils flared with smoke and steam, and the clattering of hooves on crystal told Spike that they had all gotten the message.
More dragon fire churned and roiled in his belly until he could store it no longer, and with a roar that ripped fissures into the crystal ground beneath him he unleashed his fire into the Crystal Palace's remaining legs. The ice that had accumulated around them vaporized on contact as his fire burned, green and hot as the sun, until it focused and solidified into a pillar of magical plasma that escaped from his maw. With a swipe of the head the beam tore through the legs of the Palace like his wings cut through the air, as well as cutting across several blocks worth of ancient homes that stood abandoned.
As his flames abated, the magic powering them now used up, he watched with something akin to satisfaction as the Palace toppled over, falling away into a million shards and pieces until all that remained was an orb of ice that fell to the rubble like it was moving through water. The remnants of the Palace crushed a swathe of buildings to the north, sending ice and crystal spewing into the air like a fountain before they all fell back to earth with a cacophonous clatter.
Spike rooted through the rubble until he found the sphere of ice, and slowly rolled it out of the ruins as the three ponies galloped up to it. With a scraping noise Spike rolled the sphere until it was placed directly in front of his charges, only a few feet taller than any of them.
"YOUR PRINCESS," Spike announced, letting his heated hand rest atop the sphere and slowly melt through it. The fragments fell away as his hand cut through the ice, and as the last of the rime-borne shell dissolved into water Spike saw the ponies take a step back in shock.
A long, low sob echoed on the wind as Cadance felt the frost touch her flesh.
Starlit took a cautious step forward as Spike's claws dragged backwards along the crystalline ground, exposing Cadance to the cold. Her crown sat at her hooves, dented and patinated, and she wore no royal regalia. Her coat, which must have once been a lustrous shade of pink, was faded and dingy, and her purple and yellow hair hung in limp, impotent waves that hid her face as she cried.
The wind howled along with its Princess as Starlit approached, and Cadance turned her face away as Starlit got too close.
"Your Highness," Starlit said, keeping her voice as calming as possible given the circumstances.
"Go away," Cadance moaned. "Haven't you done enough? My city is a ruin, my husband is dead, my daughter despises me, and now you would deprive me of my very home?"
"Cadance, I know what has happened here must be hard to process, but you have to listen to me," Starlit continued. "Equestria needs you, and I fear that we may already be running out of time."
Cadance whipped her head around, exposing her sunken purple eyes, thin cheeks, and tear-streaked face. It was a face that may have once held regal beauty like her fellow Princesses, but had been abused and uncared for for so long that any trace of that beauty had long since vanished. All that was left behind was a haunting, pale shadow of what was once there, made all the worse for the faint hints of its former glory.
"Equestria needed my Empire once, and look at what that has cost me," Cadance retorted. "My citizens are monsters, ponies hate and fear my name, and the power that was supposed to be shared freely has been hoarded by the two mares that all of this rests upon."
"And that is exactly why we need your help now," Starlit countered. "Equestria is dying without its magic, your magic, and Twilight Sparkle tasked us with fixing the mistakes that you all made."
A low, sinister chuckle wormed it's way from Cadance's throat at the mention of Twilight's name, although Starlit had come to expect this by this point.
"Twilight Sparkle? My dear, darling sister-in-law, Twilight Sparkle? She started this whole mess, and now she wants to try and make nice, pretend that none of this ever happened?"
"Trust me, the last few hours have been pretty eye-opening regarding Twilight's moral compass," Starlit admitted, "but that doesn't change the fact that Equestria has been a misery-wracked hell-hole ever since the war, and it didn't get that way until you all decided to abandon it. Celestia and Luna admitted that much, anyway."
"Ah, the sisters have been made to see the light as well," Cadance said, a twinge of sarcasm in her voice. "They command the sun and the moon, surely they could manage the job on their own. No more scorching days and jittering nights, that should make for a fine start."
"And what about the ponies of Equestria?"
"What about them?" Cadance snapped back. "When push comes to shove, when their backs are against the wall, ponies will always protect themselves over others. It doesn't matter if you are just a friend or their Princess, eventually everypony will show their true nature when they leave you, alone and afraid, just to save their own skin or to die for an ideal."
A gust of wind blustered past, throwing Cadance's hair to the side and freezing her constantly flowing tears to her cheeks. Starlit could see her anger, the betrayal, the complete shattering of her faith in the goodness of ponies, and it made her heart feel heavy like lead.
Starlit looked around, between Sun, Rainbow Dash, Spike, and finally back to the seething, bitter alicorn in front of her, and an idea planted itself in her head. It would be a long shot, and had the chance to go catastrophically wrong, but she could feel in her gut that it was a good one.
"Spike, can you fly yet?" Starlit asked.
"MY EXHALATION OF BREATH WARMED THE ANCIENT MAGIC IN MY BODY, SO I SHOULD BE ABLE TO," the dragon answered, unfurling one of his wings into a makeshift ramp. "WHERE DO YOU WISH TO GO?"
"Home," Starlit announced. "All of our homes."
"YOU'LL HAVE TO BE MORE SPECIFIC, I FEAR," Spike said back as all eyes fixed on Starlit.
"What are you playing at?" Cadance demanded.
"Yes, I would also like to know what you mean," Sun added, stepping around to put himself between Starlit and Cadance.
"She's hurting, Sun," Starlit said. "She's lost faith in everything that mattered to her, and for good reason. There is nothing I can say that will convince her to lift this endless blizzard and do the right thing, but we can all show her that there is something good still in Equestria. Something worth saving."
Sun looked between Starlit and Cadance, his brow furrowed in that particular way it would when he was contemplating something. He then looked past Starlit to Rainbow Dash, an eyebrow cocked.
"Don't know what you want me to contribute to this," Rainbow quipped. "If it means that I get a free ride home, then I'm all for it. I've been gone too long, and Scootaloo's probably worried sick about me."
Starlit stepped past Sun and offered up a hoof to Cadance, who was still sitting on the ground. The Princess's eyes flitted between the hoof and the mare holding it out, her expression of anger melting away into confusion.
"And what if I decide you'd be better off dead?" Cadance asked. "All of you?"
"Then I would fight you forever and ever," Starlit answered curtly, levitating her black stone necklace out from her cloak. "You could never kill me, and I would never stop trying to convince you."
Cadance's eyes widened when she saw Twilight's necklace, and she took a reflexive scoot backwards.
"Did she give that to you?" Cadance asked.
"Twilight did, yes, and it has kept me alive far longer than I should have been able to live. You will never be able to stop me from trying to drag you kicking and screaming to Canterlot, so I would highly suggest that you leave the theatrics by the wayside and come peacefully."
"Do you know what that is?!" Cadance demanded, rising to her hooves. She was only slightly taller than Starlit herself, although her horn added a bit to her height.
"You can tell me on the way," Starlit said as she walked past Cadance and headed towards Spike's unfurled wing.
Starlit cast a look back to the assembled ponies, happy to see that Rainbow Dash and Setting Sun were already making their way over to Spike. Cadance stood and stared from the ruin of her palace, and Starlit let a small smile dance across her face.
"Spike's back is quite warm," Starlit called. "I'd hate for you to catch a chill out here."
A long moment passed as Starlit and Cadance stared each other down while Sun and Rainbow climbed onto Spike's back. Finally, after a seeming eternity, Cadance slowly made her way to Spike's wing. Her steps were unsteady, both from the slick of ice and water on the ground and the fissures Spike had made, but she soon made her way up the leathery wings and nestled in behind Starlit.
As the four ponies settled into their spots Starlit weaved a bit of her magic around them to hold them down in place, making extra sure that Cadance was secured due to her frail constitution.
"WHERE ARE WE GOING, STARLIT SKY," Spike asked, curling his head around until he was eye level with Starlit.
"South, across the Crystal Wastes until you come across a small outpost just on the edge of the tundra," Starlit answered. "Try to stay out of sight for as long as you can, we wouldn't want to cause a panic; those ponies can be quite quick to jump to the worst conclusion."
"This is because I arrested you, isn't it?" Rainbow Dash asked.
"You tell me," Starlit answered back, before turning to face Spike with a nod.
A low exhalation of breath rumbled out of Spike's lungs as he lifted his wings into the air. The moment hung with anticipation until he swooped them back down, sending Starlit's blood into her hooves and her eyes back into her skull as Spike shot into the air with amazing speed. The wind chill alone was making her eyes water, and over the cacophony of the air she could hear Cadance, Sun, and Rainbow Dash screaming in a mix of terror and elation behind her.
* * *
Scootaloo sat by herself by the gate leading out to the tundra, gently rocking the sled Rainbow Dash had gotten her underneath herself as she waited. The sun was going low over the western horizon.
"Hey kid," one of the guard ponies said as she walked past, "Sun's gettin' low, you might wanna get inside before it gets too cold."
"Can't I just stay out for five more minutes?" Scootaloo pleaded. "She'll be back soon, I know she will."
The guard pony looked out to the horizon past the gate, let out a low snort, and settled down next to Scootaloo.
"Kid, you've been sitting by this gate for nearly a week waiting for Rainbow Dash to come back," the guard said. "I'm not trying to crush your dreams here, but if she hasn't come back by now I don't think she will be. That ice is treacherous, and if the ice doesn't get her then the monsters out there will."
"You don't know that!" Scootaloo retorted. "Rainbow Dash is the bravest, strongest, smartest pony ever! She'll be back any minute now, just you see!"
Scootaloo turned away from the guard, trying to keep the ache in her heart from showing. Rainbow Dash wanted her to be brave, and she promised that she would come back home. Rainbow Dash never breaks promises, so to Scootaloo that word was as good as gold.
"I'll give you another fifteen," the guard relented, "but then we've got to shut up the gate for the night. That okay with you?"
"Mm-hm," Scootaloo murmured, setting her eyes to the horizon again.
The guard pony sat with Scootaloo, and her presence wasn't entirely unwanted; Scootaloo had been having trouble sleeping without Rainbow Dash around, and she hadn't gone to school ever since Rainbow left. Her aunts hadn't minded so much, but they'd eventually insist that she get back to a normal schedule.
Scootaloo leaned her head up against the guard pony, who wrapped a hoof around her shoulders as they watched with the last fading light of the sun.
Just as the sun sank below the horizon Scootaloo saw something odd, something coming from the north. A burst of green lit up the night sky, followed by a second, closer spot. The guard pony stood up and pulled her guidestick out, illuminating its red gem to get the attention of the other guards on the wall.
The bursts of green came closer and closer, and as they did a whooshing sound accompanied them. It sounded like wings, but from something much larger than a pony could possibly be. Scootaloo stood to attention, running out last the gate to try and get a closer look.
"Kid, stop!" the guard pony shouted, but Scootaloo was past the gate before they could close it on her. The noise grew louder and louder, and the bursts of green soon proved to be green fire, and their source was steering towards the ground. The klaxon for the outpost sounded as she heard ponies inside scurrying back to their homes, and the guard pony had just gotten to Scootaloo when the source of the fire landed.
A massive creature with wings as wide as twenty ponies landed only feet in front of Scootaloo, its iridescent green eyes shining in the darkening sky. It unleashed another gout of fire in a semicircle behind itself, igniting the icy stone and burning despite their being no fuel. The green flames cast a sickly pallor over everything, and Scootaloo ran behind the guard pony to hopefully protect herself from whatever this beast was.
"Wait! Don't attack!" a voice called from off the beast's back, one that Scootaloo would recognize immediately. She poked her head from around the guard pony as she saw the beast unfurl one of its massive wings to the ground, allowing a selection of ponies to climb off of it.
The one Scootaloo was looking for she could see immediately in the pale green light the fire was giving off; she'd recognize that mop of rainbow hair anywhere.
"Rainbow Dash!!" Scootaloo cheered as she ran past the guard, who was too slow to try and stop her.
"Scootaloo!" Rainbow cheered back, running at a limping pace before Scootaloo fully tackled her to the ground in a massive hug. Both of them were crying from sheer joy and relief, and Scootaloo's mind was at ease for the first time in days.
"Okay, you've got to get off of me, I'm hurtin' real bad," Rainbow playfully admonished, and it was only then that Scootaloo noticed the large scrape on her face and the bandage wrapped around her right hip.
"You're hurt? What happened?" Scootaloo asked.
"I come riding into town on a dragon, and you're more worried about a few scrapes and cuts?" Rainbow Dash asked back.
"It's just that you were gone for so long, and I was so worried, and everypony said that you were never coming back, and I—"
Scootaloo was silenced by Rainbow Dash wrapping her up in a big, tender hug, which Scootaloo eagerly reciprocated.
"I wouldn't have expected anything else from you," Rainbow Dash said, happiness coating every word. "I'm so happy to be home."
They hugged, long and deep, until Rainbow Dash finally pulled herself to her hooves and made her way to the gate, passing the guard pony as she went and giving her a pat on the shoulder. Scootaloo pranced eagerly behind as the gate screeched open, and the two of them went back inside.
"Do you have a new story, or is now a bad time?" Scootaloo asked, trying not to impose but trying to satiate her curiosity all the same.
"You bet your life I have a story," Rainbow Dash said. "It involves peril, mystery, magic, the single greatest feat of flying in Equestrian history, and a great sacrifice to save somepony special, and its all true."
"All of it?" Scootaloo asked.
"All of it," Rainbow Dash repeated, unfurling her wings to show that they were now gemless, just like Scootaloo's own, "and none of it would've happened without those no-good, layabout, trespassing unicorns I picked up."
Scootaloo turned her head to look back at the dragon and the other ponies that had been on its back. She recognized the two outsiders that Rainbow Dash had brought in, and saw a third unicorn who was covered up by a heavy cloak. She gave them all an enthusiastic wave, which the two outsiders eagerly reciprocated.
* * *
Starlit, Sun, and Cadance had decided not to stay in the outpost, instead flying south until they got out of the frozen north and settling in for an actual evening of rest. Starlit had shown Cadance exactly what she wanted her to see at the outpost, and didn't want to let anypony know about Cadance's current state until she was ready to accept her responsibility again.
Cadance seemed to be a bit more at ease, save for when the three of them were on Spike's back, but she was still mostly keeping to herself. After getting a fire going, Starlit asked Sun to go set up the tents so she could get a few minutes alone with Cadance.
Cadance cast a wary eye to Starlit as she sat down on the opposite side of the campfire, tending to it with a stick to keep it going.
"I don't know about you, but I'm happy to be out of that frozen wasteland," Starlit said, eyes still on the fire.
"It is nice to not have to worry about freezing to death," Cadance replied. "It's been so long, I had forgotten how good the sound of wind rustling through leaves was."
"I missed it too," Starlit said back. "You never really notice how much you appreciate something until it's gone. Just look at how happy Scootaloo was when we dropped Rainbow Dash off."
Cadance let out a small chuckle, barely audible over the fire, but Starlit heard it all the same with her finely honed mother's hearing.
"I thought she was going to knock the wind out of Rainbow Dash when they collided," Cadance admitted.
"My little filly is the same way," Starlit said. "She'd tackle my husband to the ground whenever he came back from patrol, so excited to ask about his day. I'm pretty sure he was faking it for her, but it made her happy all the same."
Starlit saw Cadance's expression drop from across the fire, although she had anticipated the talk of husbands would sour her mood.
"Starlit, I know what you're trying to do here," Cadance stated bluntly. "You're trying to get me to see the good in the world that I abandoned, but you're throwing pearls before swine. Everything is temporary to somepony like me; I'm going to outlive everypony that I will ever come to care about, so why worry about any of them?"
Starlit pondered the Princess's question for a moment, letting it stew in her mind as she tended the fire.
"A thing isn't beautiful because it lasts, Cadance," Starlit replied. "A thing can't be good if it will always exist. All things are temporary, even you ultimately, and eventually all that we'll have of any of this, of existence itself, are the memories of the ponies or other beings that will come after us."
"And this is supposed to be comforting?"
"No, not really, but it is enlightening," Starlit answered. "It's helped me out a lot, at least."
"How so?" Cadance asked, her tone flippant.
"Because it lets me stay grounded in what I do now," Starlit answered. "I had a grandmother that I grew up with who I absolutely adored. She taught me, bandaged my wounds, filled my belly, and passed on all the wisdom that she could give to me, but she ultimately passed away in a thestral attack."
"I was devastated when she died, especially in so gruesome a fashion, but I still remember everything she taught me about being a good mare; to be kind, just, decisive, and above all else to care about what happens tomorrow. I learned to never take anything for granted, because tomorrow it may not be there and I'd have to learn how to carry on without it."
"A fine sentiment for a common pony like yourself," Cadance counters, "but what happens when the thing that you lose is the very thing that defines you, that you hold dominion over? I lost my love, Starlit Sky. Shining Armor was my everything, and without him I couldn't be anything."
"Do you remember what he looked like?" Starlit asked.
"What?" Cadance retorted.
"What he looked like. Do you remember what he looked like?" Starlit repeated.
Starlit saw Cadance stare down into the fire before tilting her head back to look up at the stars. When she finally came around there was a soft, kind smile painted across her thin, haggard face.
"He had fur as white as the snow, hair as blue as a midnight sky," Cadance said, her voice reverent and sweet. "His eyes shone like twin sapphires, and his chest was broad and stout."
"What was he like?"
"As brave as brave could be," Cadance answered with a dreamy sigh. "He had been a palace guard in Canterlot before we ever met. The first time I visited the city he was doing his rounds, making sure that the walls were secure, and I watched him dive headfirst off of those walls to save one of his fellows who had tripped over the parapet."
"Was he an alicorn, like Twilight?" Starlit asked, her curiosity piqued.
"No, he was a unicorn like she had once been," Cadance answered. "In those days the source of alicornhood was well known, and it was a special privilege to have the gift given to you. I myself had it bestowed upon me by my mother, who had it bestowed upon her by her forebears, on and on back through the generations."
Starlit gave a knowing nod, filing that information away in her brain for when she next saw Twilight. The pile of things Starlit had to ask Twilight was growing greater by the day.
"Shining Armor leapt off of the wall without a care for his own safety, and I ran to the wall to see if he was alright," Cadance continued. "I saw him hanging there, clenching his teeth into one of the banners hanging off the side as he used his magic to hold the soldier who had fallen off."
"What did you do?" Starlit asked. "Surely it wouldn't have been befitting of your station to get involved, especially if you were on a diplomatic visit."
"You are right, it wouldn't have fit, but in that moment I lost all care for courtesy and propriety. I flew down and offered my hoof to Shining Armor. He immediately took it with his free one, and with great effort on both of our parts we got back up onto the wall."
Cadance let out another small chuckle, this one more genuine, like she was recalling a joke she'd been told years ago.
"We all collapsed into a giant pile on the battlements, with Shining Armor pressing my face into the ground with the weight of his breastplate. As soon as we got ourselves sorted out he immediately bowed and submitted himself for disciplinary action for causing such as scene and putting me in such a state."
"My husband, Stalwart Warden, met me in a similar manner, although not nearly that grandiose," Starlit said, sidling a bit closer to Cadance. "He was one of the patrol stallions for our small town, and we passed each other one day while he was making his rounds. To hear him tell it, he was so star struck by my beauty that he completely forgot where he was walking and tumbled head over hooves into a cabbage merchant's cart."
"Oh, stallions do go so loopy for a pretty face and a coy smile, don't they?" Cadance commented. "Shining Armor followed me around like a lost puppy all day after I told him to think nothing of our little incident, and after I had concluded my business he asked me if he could do anything to make up for his rudeness and impropriety."
"And what did you tell him?" Starlit asked, putting her chin onto her hoof.
"I told him that he could buy me dinner, and we would do our introduction over," Cadance answered with a wry smile. "We had kale and cashew salads with a rose-wine vinaigrette dressing and a slice of strawberry cream cake for dessert, and he was an absolute gentlepony."
"You were smitten from day one, weren't you?"
"Absolutely and completely," Cadance answered, letting her eyes drift back to the fire. Her smile slowly began to fade as she stared deeper into the flames, as if hearing things that only she could.
"He was my everything," Cadance muttered under her breath. "We were joined, body and soul, and then he left me."
"But he hasn't really left, has he?" Starlit asked, putting a hoof on Cadance's own. "He lives on in you, in the moments you shared, the good times you had, the troubles you weathered together, and even in your final parting. You knew that the two of you couldn't last forever, not with what you were, but you chose to love him with all you could for as long as you could."
Cadance kept her eyes to the fire, but let her other hoof lay on top of Starlit's. Her eyes flicked back and forth as the flames flickered and danced in the darkness, and they soon began to water and tears spiked down her cheeks.
"That's all I'll ever have of him," Cadance said. "Memories of the way things were. The cities he defended are in ruins, the ponies he defended are all long dead, and the love of his life has a heart of stone."
Cadance looked to Starlit, her purple eyes dancing with flicks of orange from the fire's reflection.
"What would he think of me now?" Cadance asked. "To see me like this, despondent and haggard and uncaring and unloving. What would he say, Starlit?"
Starlit drew up to her full seated height, and for the first time was able to look one of the Princesses dead in the eye. Cadance's eyes were begging for an answer that Starlit simply didn't have, but she could at least make an educated guess.
"I can't honestly tell you that because I only know him through your account of his character," Starlit replied as she stood up, "but if I were him I'd ask why the mother of my daughter, the love of my life, and the most kind, understanding, and caring mare in all of Equestria stopped caring for anypony but herself."
Cadance looked back into the flames as Starlit's words sank in, but Starlit knew that it wasn't her place to be there while Cadance thought her words over. This was something she needed time for, and Starlit was quite tired after the day's events.
"It was good talking with you Cadance," Starlit said, patting the Princess on the shoulder. "We have an extra tent set up for you by Spike's belly so you can stay a little warmer tonight."
"Thank you," Cadance replied, still focused on the fire with a worried expression.
As Starlit closed the flap of her tent behind her, a soft sobbing echoed through the night.
* * *
Feeling the sun on her face and the wind in her hair without the biting chill of the Crystal Empire was doing wonders for Starlit's mood as she, Cadance, and Sun sat astride Spike's back and made their way further south. Sun in particular had been especially pleased to hear where their next destination would be as it would give him the chance to see the fruits of his efforts.
"Right there, just before that line of trees!" Starlit yelled to Spike so that she could be heard over the rushing wind. Spike gave a quick nod and began his descent, which he had been practicing on making more gentle for his smaller and more fragile passengers.
The landing was smoother than the other's that they had endured, but the rush of air from his wings was sufficient to blow a swathe of the fruit off of the apple trees from Applejack's orchard.
"She's gonna kill you for that one," Sun commented to Starlit as he descended down Spike's wing.
"She could certainly try, I have a dragon backing me up," Starlit countered.
Starlit carefully led Cadance down the wing until she was back on solid ground. The last few days of travel Starlit had been making more and more of an effort to bolster her strength, but Cadance still needed help with long bouts of walking after her centuries encased in ice up in the north.
The trio made their way down the dirt path that led into Appleoosa proper, only to be greeted by a large, cherry red stallion galloping up the walk towards them.
"You?" Big Macintosh asked, stopping short. "What're y'all doing back here? And what was that big noise?"
"I was feeling homesick," Sun replied, holding a hoof out to Mac for a shake. "And our new method of transportation can be a bit… unstable. Is Applejack around?"
"Yeah, she's back down at the house runnin' figures for the harvest," Big Mac answered, gesturing down the lane. "She'll be pleased to see you alive and well, that's for certain. Who's your friend, if I may ask?"
Cadance pulled the hood of her cloak over her face more than was necessary, and Starlit stepped in front of her to hide her as best she could.
"She's somepony that we picked up in the north," Starlit answered. "She could use a few days of rest after everything that she's been through, and we were wondering if you and Applejack could provide."
"You'll have to take that up with her. She's been mighty busy after all the nonsense in Sunspire, but you're welcome to try. Follow me."
Big Mac led the group down the dirt path, and Starlit could already tell that the effects of Celestia's curse were coming undone; the fruit on the trees were brighter and bigger than the withered little apples she'd seen when she teleported in the first time, and there was more grass and other incidental plant-life growing out of the once arid dirt.
The farmhouse was quaint, much like Starlit's own, with a large front porch covered by a thatch roof and a selection of produce bags arrayed in front of the porch itself. Big Mac held a hoof up, motioning for everypony else to stop while he went to talk with Applejack. He went up to the well carved door and rapped on it twice, which opened after a few moments.
"Mac, shouldn't you be out in the orchard gettin' those apples out of the trees?" Applejack asked curtly, a pencil held in her teeth. "We both have a lot of work to do gettin' ready for this year's harvest and you know it."
"A thousand pardons, but something dropped in on me," Mac replied as he moved back and gestured towards Starlit, Sun, and Cadance, who was still doing her best not to be noticed.
Applejack's mouth fell open and the lentil clattered to the porch.
"How've you been, Applejack?" Starlit asked.
"A sure sight better now, that's for sure!" Applejack answered as she cantered off the porch and gave Starlit and Sun a big hug. "Boy you all are a sight for sore eyes! Are you back for good?"
"Unfortunately, no," Sun answered, "but we had a way to get back here and thought we'd pop in and say hello."
"Can't say I'm not disappointed to hear that, but you do what you gotta do," Applejack replied. "Are y'all hungry, I could get something whipped up."
"That'd be just perfect," Starlit answered, "just make sure there's enough for all three of us."
Applejack looked past Starlit to see Cadance, who quickly averted her gaze.
"Oh, my apologies, I didn't see you back there," Applejack said as she pulled her hat off and held it to her chest. "My name's Applejack, and any friend of Starlit and Sun's is a friend of mine. Who might you be?"
"Uh… Mi Amore," Cadance answered meekly, holding her hoof out for a shake. Applejack took it heartily, giving a good three pumps.
"Pleasure to make your acquaintance. I hope you like apples, because we've got them in spades."
Cadance cast a quick glance over to Starlit, who nodded her head and gestured back to Applejack.
"That'd be lovely," Cadance replied.
* * *
Cadance threw her cloak off into the floor, relishing the chance to stretch her wings after a long day of having to keep them hidden. According to Starlit and her friend Applejack they had had a bad run in with Celestia, and the presence of another alicorn so soon after wouldn't send the best message. Now that she had her own space in the town's tavern she felt more at ease.
The sun had set an hour ago, and Cadance found her eyes drawn to the stars. The skies above her own home had been blocked by snow for so long that she had forgotten just how good a clear night sky could look. She could even pick out a few constellations, although most of the ones in this part of the country were different than the ones she had learned growing up in the Empire.
A soft rapping on her door drew Cadance's attention, although she didn't turn to face it.
"Come in," Cadance said. There were only two ponies she could think of that would want to see her, and both knew her true nature.
"Are you settling in alright?" Sun asked as he opened the door with a soft creak.
"I don't have much to settle in with, so I'd say so," Cadance answered keeping her eyes fixed out the window. She hear soft hoof steps behind her as well as the door closing, followed by the rustling of her mattress as Sun sat down on the bed.
"You got the good room," Sun commented. "This bed's always been overstuffed, it makes it really soft and good on the back."
"Did you want something, or are you just here to comment on the upholstery?" Cadance asked curtly.
There was a brief pause, followed by Sun sitting down next to Cadance at the window. She flicked her gaze towards him to find that he too was staring out the window with her.
"I just wanted r see how you're getting along, that's all," Sun answered. "I know Starlit and I kind of dragged you all over town today, so I just wanted to make sure we didn't wear you out."
"The days activities were tolerable," Cadance replied, "from a purely physical standpoint. Your house was the most interesting locale we visited today, if I'm going to be entirely honest."
"Then it looks like Starlit owes me a bit," Sun commented with a smirk.
"You made a bet on what I would find the most enjoyable?" Cadance asked, mildly insulted.
"Starlit thought that Applejack's orchard was going to be the one, but I was certain that a cosmopolitan mare like yourself would be more impressed by all the experiments and gadgets I had kicking around."
"I will admit, for a pony from such a… rustic place, you have quite the impressive working knowledge of many facets of magical theory."
"You can call it backwater, it won't insult me," Sun replied. "Although it has been doing better ever since Celestia stopped frying the whole region with her magic."
"I didn't want to mention it earlier, but the heat here is quite severe," Cadance admitted. "I'm amazed that anypony can live down here."
"You come from a kingdom that's been buried under an endless blizzard for centuries, I think you might have some bias regarding the climate," Sun replied.
"Perhaps I do."
A long moment of quiet as the two of them simply stared out the window. The stars twinkled and flickered against the deep blue backdrop of the sky, and the moon shined in a perfectly crescent shaped scar of light across the inky darkness. It was calming, but a disquieting sensation wouldn't stop eating at Cadance's mind.
"Why are you doing this?" Cadance asked apropos of nothing.
"You mean looking out the window?" Sun asked.
"You know what I mean, don't insult my intelligence," Cadance reprimanded, looking down to Sun. "This, flying me all across Equestria, showing me the land and the ponies in it. Why are you doing this?"
"If I'm going to be honest here, it was Starlit's idea," Sun admitted, looking back at Cadance. "I know that you were there for that conversation and all, but were it up to me we would have just forced you back to Canterlot."
"In my current state you probably would have succeeded," Cadance admitted, "but that doesn't answer my question."
"To provide perspective, probably," Sun answered. "To show you that there's more out in the world than just the pain and loneliness that you've shut yourself up in for all these centuries."
"And yet everywhere we've gone so far I have seen nothing but ponies toiling their lives away, doing what they have to to subsist and survive in a world that seems dead set on killing them," Cadance countered. "Whether it be Rainbow Dash's community that is barely eking out an existence in the frozen north, or here where all of your land is a desert, I'm not seeing anything that is making me particularly confident about the future of Equestria.
"Unless my memory is faulty, I'm pretty sure that the first of those problems is one that you are still actively causing," Sun replied, "and this place used to be even more of a blasted wasteland before Starlit convinced Celestia to stop using her piece of the Crystal Heart to immolate it."
Cadance felt her heart skip a beat at the mention of her ancestral birthright, the source of her magic, and the source of her pain and heartache.
"How do you know about that?" Cadance demanded. "Who told you about the Heart?"
Sun's face was that of a pony who had just realized that had said far too much, and could find no appropriate way to run it back and so was forced to admit even more.
"It was your daughter," Sun admitted. "We found her outside the Empire; one of her crystal ponies led us to her and she in turn told us about the Heart, and how you all broke it into pieces or share it's magic among the Princesses."
"Flurry is alive?!" Cadance demanded.
"She is, and…" Sun began, before falling into a deep state of thought.
"What?! And what?!" Cadance hollered, heart pounding in her chest.
"I think this would be something for her to explain to you in person," Sun finished as he channeled a small amount of grey magic into his horn. The grey soon turned to a vivid blue as a series of glyphs and sigils illuminated on his forehead.
Before she could react a blast of cold air filled the room from behind them. A hole through reality was letting ice and snow and wind blister into the room, scattering the few books on the nightstand and blowing the blanket on the bed to the floor.
Cadance saw an indistinct shape form in the solid white light of the portal, which slowly resolved itself into a tall, pony shaped silhouette. Cadance could see a curly mane whipping back and forth, a long and proud horn protruding from the forehead, and a pair of wings with much the same pattern of feathers as her own extend and retract in the wind.
A soft hoofstep landed on the worn wooden floor, unshod but in a familiar pink-white color. The pony's hair was streamed in a similar manner to her own, but with pinks and light blues, and her eyes shone like a pair of sapphires as the portal closed behind her.
"Thank you for calling me Sun, I was starting to worry…" Flurry began before trailing off as her eyes slid over to her mother.
Cadance needed no prompting as she rose to her hooves. Her little filly, her bouncing bundle of joy, had grown so much. Flurry Heart was a picture of regal beauty, statuesque in height and demeanor, but with the perfect amount of disarming warmth in her face to make her seem approachable.
Flurry Heart was everything that Cadance no longer was, and the comparison was all the more cemented when Flurry knelt down and wrapped her mother up in a tight, warm hug.
* * *
Sun had wisely decided to give Cadance and Flurry Heart the room, which suited Flurry just fine; her mother was in a strange place surrounded by strangers, and right now a reminder from home without any onlookers would be what she needed.
"Mother, it is so good to see you again," Flurry said as she let Cadance out of her grip. "Where are we? I expected Starlit to stay in the Empire until she could convince you to go to Canterlot and end the blizzard."
"Starlit Sky can be quite persuasive, but I get the distinct impression that she didn't want to spend any more time in my frozen prison than she had to and concocted this plan of hers as an excuse to leave."
"And what plan would that be?" Flurry asked.
"She wants to show me Equestria, see how the country is doing to try and reignite my love for this place again," Cadance answered curtly.
"Judging by your time of voice I would guess that it isn't working?"
Cadance looked out the window, now fogged over fro the blast of cold air let in by Flurry's portal, before looking to the floor.
"I don't know," Cadance admitted. "Starlit Sky means well, she really does, but I have been hurt so much by this country and the dream that Canterlot represented. I thought I had lost everything during that war, and despair ate at my heart like a disease."
"But I'm here now," Flurry said, turning Cadance's head to face towards her again. "I'm here for you now, and won't leave you again."
"And how can I trust that?" Cadance asked, an edge to her words. "You stole the Heart of Love from me, robbed me of the source of my power at the moment when I most needed it. You betrayed me just as much as your father did."
The accusation stung Flurry's soul, although it wasn't without merit. She could feel her mother's pain as if it were her own, and it was tearing her up inside that she was having trouble finding the words to try and express herself.
"You remember that night, don't you?" Cadance continued, backing away from Flurry.
"As clear as I'm seeing you now, and father didn't abandon us," Flurry countered. "He was trying to protect the Empire, and by extension us. You remember the type of stallion he was; he could never sit idle while somepony else did his duty for him."
"But we were his duty!" Cadance retorted. "We were family, he loved us, but he threw his life away in a battle overshadowed by hundreds of others raging at the same time when he could have done so much more!"
"Mother, please, he only did what he thought was right," Flurry said, feeling her chest grow tight to hear her mother speak like this.
"And what about what I thought was right?! I was his monarch, I was his charge! I told him to stay with me and he disobeyed! He died disobeying an order from his Princess! He died spiting me!"
Cadance finally collapsed into the floor, her chest heaving with sobs as every bit of her pain, loneliness, anger, and sadness came flooding back all at once, and Flurry's heart broke to see her. Slowly Flurry knelt down next to her mother, nestling Cadance into the crook of her neck and holding her close as Cadance wept.
"It's okay to feel like this, mother," Flurry said softly. "This pain, this anger, it's alright. To know a hurt this strong is to have known a love more powerful than any other."
"Why was he such a brave fool?" Cadance moaned. "Why couldn't he have been mine and mine alone?"
"Because love has many shapes, and he loved his ponies as much as you loved him, and as much as I love you."
Cadance looked to her daughter, and Flurry could see the spark of reflection hiding behind her tear-stricken eyes.
"If you truly want to carry him with you, to honor his memory, you have to accept what he did," Flurry continued. "He wanted to protect the ponies of Equestria that he so cared for, and gave the very blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs to do so. He died so that we all might have a chance to live."
"And what about you?" Cadance asked. "How can you possibly still care for me after everything I've put you through? Centuries of survival in a frozen wasteland can't have made for ideal living conditions."
"I never stopped caring, mother. The only reason I took the Heart from you is that I was afraid you would corrupt its magic with your anger, and I have been safeguarding it all this time."
With a swish of Flurry's horn another portal opened up, this one smaller and without a blast of cold air to accompany it, and out of floated a small chunk of crystal. It was a pale blue color that shone brightly in its core, and it was carved and faceted into a perfect heart. As the Heart of Love floated to the both of them and the portal behind it sealed, the Heart began to beat, slowly and softly.
"In a manner of speaking, I suppose I kept my mother's heart from breaking," Flurry said as she brought the Heart of Love to Cadance. "Nothing I can do could possibly replace everything that we have lost together, but you and the Heart have been separated for too long. All I can hope for is that we can start over again, and let the fire of love warm our lands again."
Cadance held her hooves out, taking the Heart from Flurry's magic and holding it close. It's beat pulsed and stirred faster as Cadance held it, staring deep into its immaculate surface.
"All this time," Cadance whispered reverently, "it never stopped beating."
"Love comes in many shapes," Flurry repeated, "and much like its Heart it has innumerable facets and dimensions. Perhaps you just need to find a new one."
Cadance let her horn, illuminating the Heart and sending her magic into it. The thread of her magic split into many different beams, scanning and tracing lines over the Heart as it beat ever faster. Soon the entire room was awash in blue light, enough that Flurry had to wince and cover her eyes.
When the spell finally subsided the Heart's beating slowed to a steady, healthy pace, and Cadance looked more like herself. Her face was fuller, her fur brighter, and her hair more kept. Cadance was still a fair sight away from when she was at the height of her rule, resplendent in royal regalia, but she looked more fulfilled and at peace.
"What did it show you?" Flurry asked.
"You, me, and a country that my husband loved more than anything," Cadance answered. "It was a future I'd like to try building."
* * *
Sun had channeled a small part of Silence's magic into the door to Cadance's bedroom to keep any sound from leaking out, which was upsetting Starlit to no end as she paced back and forth outside.
"What could possibly be taking them so long?" Starlit asked, obviously frustrated at the current turn of events.
"They haven't seen each other in centuries, they probably have a lot of catching up to do," Sun answered, maintaining his vigil at the door.
"But what if Cadance goes back to the Empire without us?" Starlit asked.
"Then we have Spike to get us back up there," Sun answered, his patience starting to wear thin. "Besides, Flurry knows what's at stake here; she wouldn't let Cadance up and leave without at least telling us why."
"Then could you at least let me listen in?" Starlit asked in a tone that belied the fact that she really wished it could be an order.
"No, this is a private matter," Sun answered for the third time since Starlit had come to check on Cadance.
Starlit let a groan of frustration out just as the doorknob to the room clicked over, sending a jolt down Sun's spine as he turned to face it. Starlit too stood to attention as they both saw Cadance walk out.
Her hood was down, and Sun could see that she looked healthier; her hair wasn't as strung out and matted, her face looked fuller and her eyes less sunken, and her fur and hair were brighter and more vibrant.
"Did you have a good talk?" Sun asked.
"In a few ways, yes, but in many, no," Cadance answered cryptically, looking over both Sun and Starlit. "Thank you for the privacy, it was much appreciated."
"Is Flurry Heart still here?" Starlit asked.
"No, she went back to the Empire to prepare for my eventual return, as well as the return of the Heart of Love," Cadance answered, holding out a small, heart shaped lump of crystal in her magic. It beat slowly like a real heart, and had a soothing light that shone from its blue surface.
"Flurry had kept it safe for all the time I was holed up in my tower," Cadance explained, "and peering into its surface helped me… come to my senses, in a manner of speaking."
"I honestly expected it to be bigger," Starlit admitted as she looked the Heart over. "The Heart of Light was about the size of my head, and the Heart of Power must have been massive for the amount of crystals Luna made out of it."
"Love is a small, fragile thing compared to the power of radiance and energy, but it weathers any storm," Cadance replied. "Even one as tumultuous as mine."
"So where do we go from here?" Sun asked, letting his spell abate. He could feel a twinge in his forehead as he ended it.
"I will return to the Empire to end my storm," Cadance explained, "and to help allay the fears from any ponies that live up there about the rumors and stories they've heard of the Crystal Empire. The particular thestrals created by the storm are connected to my will, powered by my emotions, so I will use them as my messengers and then let them pass into the good night they deserve."
"Flurry has accepted her new role as the ruler in the Empire," Cadance continued, putting the Heart away, "so after that has been taken care of I will travel to Canterlot to meet with my sister-in-law."
"We could go with you," Sun said. "Spike is a good mode of transport, and we need to go to Canterlot as well."
Sun noticed Starlit look askance as he made his suggestion, but Cadance interjected before he could ask about it.
"As much as screaming through the sky on the back of a dragon appeals to me," Cadance said, "I have my own means of returning to the Empire separate from you. You have endured much in my domain, and you two deserve some time to rest before you continue on."
Starlit made to protest, but Cadance held a hoof up to stop her before she could so much as get a word out.
"Starlit, I appreciate your fervor, but this is what I believe will work best for me. Furthermore, I thank you for traveling so long to find me, and for allowing me to see what I was willfully blind to for so long."
Cadance turned back to the open doorframe, illuminating her horn with ice blue magic as she did. Sun could feel the brief wisps of cold air blowing through the door,but they stopped as Cadance ended her spell.
Without a warning, she turned to both of them and wrapped Starlit and Sun up in a hug. Starlit seemed more taken aback by the sudden affection, but she took it in all the
"Thank you," Cadance said, "for helping me see how wrong I was. I owe you two more than words can say, but there is one thing I can do for you, Starlit."
"You don't have to, reall—"
"I do, and I won't take no for an answer," Cadance interjected. "If you'll come with me for but a moment, I can explain it to you in the Empire. It will provide the necessary context, I think."
Starlit turned and looked to Sun, her expression slightly nervous, but Sun waved her off.
"If worse comes to worse, you could always just fight her," Sun commented. ".I'll be right here when you come back.
Giving a small smile, Starlit turned back to Cadance, who had opened up a,portal in the doorframe back to the Crystal Empire. The wind blew in, cold and hard, but thankfully for Cherry Blossom no snow was blowing onto her floors.
With an outstretched hoof, Cadance ushered Starlit through, giving Sun an honest, warm smile. There was no wistfulness, no feigned politeness, just a pure, radiant smile that could light up a room, and as Cadance stepped into the snow, Sun could see puddles of water left in her wake.
* * *
Starlit hadn't anticipated being taken back to the Empire, and she found herself worrying that all of this was some sort of trap. The only comfort she had was the seeming aura of warmth and comfort that Cadance now exuded, which was protecting them both from the worst of the cold.
"What did you need me for?" Starlit asked over the howling wind.
"That necklace that Twilight gave you," Cadance began. "Did she ever tell you what it truly was?"
"No she didn't; I only found out it's true power when a pack of thestrals pounded me into paste and then I woke back up, right as rain."
"That would figure, given all the pain that that necklace and others like it has caused," Cadance replied, holding the stone out from Starlit's neck without taking it from her. "My daughter told you of the Crystal Heart, and all that has stemmed from it; magic, power, light, and love."
"She did," Starlit replied, wondering where this was going.
"Did she tell you of death?"
"You mean to tell me that this piece of crystal hanging around my neck is part of the Heart of Death?" Starlit asked.
"It is, and it isn't," Cadance answered, letting the stone drop. "There were many Hearts for many different aspects carved off of the Crystal Heart over the centuries that the Empire ruled for; generosity, kindness, healing, laughter, honesty, loyalty, and so many others were whittled off of the Crystal Heart and given to exemplars of our kind to turn them into alicorn rulers."
"And the Princesses had the Hearts of Love, Magic, Light, Power, and Death," Starlit cut in, trying to make sense of what Cadance was saying.
"All but the last one," Cadance replied. "Chrysalis showed up in Canterlot long after the United Kingdom of Equestria had been established, and she held with her a Heart as black as pitch and unlike any that we had taken out of the Crystal Heart. We had no choice but to accept what she told us about it, for we did not know ourselves."
"What she carried with her was a Heart of Fate; a Heart that could see the ending of Canterlot, and in her haste to try and forestall that end Twilight tried to shatter the Heart of Fate. This would end up pitting Chrysalis against Canterlot and setting the fire that would burn Equestria to the ground. These fragments have been lost to time, but Twilight entrusted one of them to you."
"But why?" Starlit asked. "Why would she entrust this to me without telling me what it is?"
"My dear sister-in-law was a confusing and secretive mare, but perhaps she wanted one pony that could be unbound by the predestination that the Heart of Fate foresaw. She needed somepony that could use its power to become truly free, and so she found you. You, who have done so much in so little time; you will be the one to save us, I think."
Starlit awoke the following morning with a combination of sensations. On the one hoof, she felt satisfaction that Cadance had been made to see reason, especially given that Starlit's plan had seemed to be less than satisfactory. On the other, she was now staring down the impending dread of having to discuss all that she had learned from Spike, Flurry Heart, and Cadance with Twilight, if Starlit even intended to go back to her tree.
Starlit felt the soft weight of her necklace against her chest as she sat up in bed. She could feel it thrum with magical energy like it always had, always prepared to resurrect her from the dead should she require it. It was only now, after everything Cadance had told her, that she was really starting to appreciate the weight of what she actually carried with her.
"Why give this to me if you knew what it was?" Starlit thought to herself. "Why send me on this journey if you were going to litter the task with half-truths?"
"One hoof at a time, Starlit," she reminded herself. "First, something to eat that isn't old rations. A good meal always helps."
Starlit made her way downstairs to Cherry Blossom's bar, where she found that Sun was already tucking in to some kind of apple based breakfast dish. Starlit felt her stomach grumble just from the smell, and went to go join him at his table.
"Mornin'," Sun greeted through a full mouth.
"Morning," Starlit answered as she settled in. "Care to share?"
"Sure," Sun answered, sliding the baking pan over. The delightfully sweet taste of the apples combined with the flaky crust that it was baked into immediately lightened Starlit's mood, although it couldn't dispel the disquiet that had settled onto her mind.
"It's really good, right?" Sun commented, taking another bite. "I am so glad that they can grow good food here again, this is the single best thing I've ever eaten."
"It is really good," Starlit admitted. "The flavors compliment each other very well."
"Never had you figured for a pony with a discerning palate," Sun mentioned.
"I had to cook back at home when my husband would go out on patrol, and trying to make a decent meal out of root vegetables, some basic seasonings, and some oil and vinegar was a feat I grew quite good at."
"No kidding," Sun replied. "I sure couldn't do that, I had to get all of my meals here."
An uncomfortable silence settled over the table as the two ate together, disrupted every so often by another pony coming in for a drink or just to get out of the sun. While Celestia's curse no longer held sway over the town, it was still quite warm for the time of year.
Starlit felt herself thinking back to her farm, locked in time as it was. Just now she would be bringing in the last of the harvest, normally enough to barely last the winter and then have enough left over to sell in the spring to last into the summer.
"Sun, I need to tell you something," Starlit began.
"Oh thank goodness, I was worried that I was going to have to ask," Sun replied with a big sigh of relief.
"What? You have something to say too?" Starlit asked, a little blindsided by Sun's proclamation.
"Well, yes, but what do you have to say?" Sun asked back.
"It's about something Spike told me, back in the Empire, and it kind of concerns where we're going as far as this… partnership is concerned."
"I really hope that nopony has stumbled on Spike while we've been here, that would not be a good time for anypony," Sun commented.
"When I first found him, the real him," Starlit continued, "he told me that he could take me to Canterlot if need be, but no farther. He has this sort of weird future sight that can let him see the paths that ponies will take in the future or something, he was really vague about it, but he said that when the time comes for me to go to Canterlot I will have to go alone."
Sun cocked his eyebrow as she spoke, then furrowed his brow in concentration.
"Well this is going to be a bit of fortuitous news for you," Sun replied. "When we separated in the Empire so you could go to the Conservatory, Silence got back in touch with me."
"How?" Starlit asked. "I thought she had to leave when we entered the Empire, something about the anti-magic wards around it."
"You mean the ones that Flurry Heart told us we're only confined to the walls of the Empire, not the actual place itself?" Sun replied.
"It's been a rough few days, cut me a break," Starlit countered as she took another bite of breakfast.
"Anyway, she managed to get in touch with me and had a pretty dire warning," Sun continued. "She said that the problems that are plaguing Equestria are about to reach their breaking point, and she needs to see me in the Glowing Wastes to help rectify it."
"Did she explain why, or even how to get there?" Starlit asked with a skeptical tone.
"Like you said, it's been a rough few days," Sun countered, "but now that I'm reconnected to her I figured that I could ask her the way. And since you need Spike to get to Canterlot, by his own admission, I could probably ask her for a teleportation sigil to get me there so you and Spike could get to Canterlot and try to head Twilight off."
"And you're… okay with splitting up?" Starlit asked.
Sun stared down at his nearly finished breakfast for a moment, wearing an expression that Starlit couldn't discern. He didn't seem upset at the prospect, but there was a twinge or upset all the same.
"Silence told me the same thing when we reconnected, you know," Sun said, looking back up at Starlit. "She said that whatever you have to do in Canterlot you have to do alone. I guess I can't really be upset about it since you apparently have this grand mystic destiny to uphold, and I'm just the stallion that's been tagging along."
"Sun, you are far more than just a tagalong," Starlit retorted. "I couldn't have made it to Celestia without you, I wouldn't have made gotten to Luna without you, and your quick thinking destroyed the barrier surrounding Cadance's palace. Compared to that, I've just been bumbling my way through all of this, learning as I go and getting in way over my head with things I can't possibly comprehend. Hell, the only reason I'm not dead right now is because of the necklace, and that was even with your help."
"Then why did Twilight even pick you for this?" Sun countered. "If you're so mundane, then why go through the trouble of recruiting you and sending you on this mission. There has to be something more to this."
Starlit felt the strap of her necklace pull ever so gently downward as Starlit too cast her gaze to the table.
"I don't know, and believe me I've been asking myself that question for a while now. Maybe I was just the closest pony to her; my house is only five miles or so away from her tree."
"It can't have been that petty of a reason," Sun said back.
"It's the only one I can come up with," Starlit replied. "Ultimately, both of us are nopony special. We aren't Princesses, we aren't dragons, we aren't even thestrals. We're just the ponies that got picked. Does there need to be a greater reason than that?"
"It would certainly make me feel better about the whole situation if there were, but I'll cede to your point. Either way, that doesn't change the situation that we're in now; we have two places that we need to get to, and both of them require immediate attention. Where are we going?"
Starlit took in a deep breath as she thought. Both of their destinations were mutually exclusive, but they could potentially stem from one place. Starlit felt a small weight lift off of her chest as her decision, it would seem, would be made for her.
"We have to go back to Twilight's tree, first and foremost," Starlit stated. "Either she's there and we pump her for all the answers that she can give, or she isn't and our suspicions are confirmed."
"Or she immolates you with magic fire for stealing Spike from her," Sun added.
"She knows she can't kill me, and she's too inquisitive of a pony to lose out on the opportunity to learn something," Starlit countered. "She'll want to know why I did it, and we can press her for information that way."
Sun tapped his hooves on the table, letting Starlit's suggestion rattle in his brain for a moment before he pushed the tray away and stood up.
"You seem to have thought this out well enough. Let me just say goodbye to Applejack, I'll meet you past the orchard."
* * *
Sun rapped on the door to Applejack's office, lugging a bag with some of his possessions over his shoulder. He'd taken a quick pit stop to his house to pick up a few things, including some more food that the arid desert air had helped to preserve.
With a creak the door opened and Applejack's orange face peered out from it, immediately lit up with a smile.
"Well howdy," Applejack greeted. "Didn't expect y'all to come by today, I figured you'd still be dealing with all of your 'saving the world' business."
"It's actually just me this time," Sun said, walking past the threshold as Applejack let him in. "I just wanted to stop by and say goodbye before I actually took off. You know, trying to be polite and all, especially since we dropped in on you so unexpectedly yesterday."
"So, Starlit and Cadance are getting all the stuff together?"
"Just Starlit, Cadance went back home last night. She seemed to be in a better mood, so that's got to count for something."
"I'm sure it does," Applejack affirmed. "You want something to drink, it's pretty hot out today."
"Just some water, if it's all the same," Sun answered, sitting down at the jail's lone desk.
"Water nothin', you're getting some cider and that's that," Applejack countered as she filled up a pair of tin mugs with a golden drink. "It hasn't had much time to ferment yet so it won't get you loopy, but it has just the right balance between sweetness and bite."
Applejack set the mugs down on the table and took her seat across from Sun, putting her hat onto the table as she did. Sun gingerly lifted the mug with Silence's magic, and Applejack cocked an eyebrow as she took a long swig of hers.
"Wasn't your magic green before?" Applejack asked.
"It was," Sun admitted, smacking his lips at the taste of the drink. It was sweet like an apple, but had a tinge of something like vinegar in the aftertaste that stung his throat.
"So, you just gonna leave me hanging here, or…?"
"Consider it a casualty of what I've been doing since I've been gone," Sun replied. "Starlit and I have been encountering a lot of magical nonsense, and part of that nonsense is that my magic has been changed a bit."
"That doesn't sound like something that should be able to just 'change', Sun," Applejack said, taking another drink. "Are you doing alright, what with saving the world and all that?"
Sun swirled the drink in its magical field until he felt a twinge of a headache come on and he was forced to set it down lest he spill it.
"I don't know," Sun answered. "Remember when you were kidnapped and taken to Sunspire?"
"Clear as crystal," Applejack answered with a bite to her tone. "Why?"
"It's just that, after helping Starlit deal with all of that, helping to save you and uncover Celestia's lies, I thought I'd be ready for this sort of thing. I thought that that had been my trial by fire, so to speak."
"And now you're worried that the trial hadn't even begun and you got in over your head due to the heat of the moment," Applejack replied, neatly finishing off what Sun was trying to find the words for.
"Exactly!" Sun answered. "How are you so good at just saying what everypony else is thinking?"
"It comes from a life spent trying to play mediator to ponies that don't want to get along, whether it be family, friends, or ne'er-do-wells that roll into town looking to cause a fuss. I've found that everything gets easier if you're just honest with each other."
Sun took another drink from the mug, draining it down before dropping it back onto the table.
"Applejack, can I be honest with you?" Sun asked, tipping his mug back and forth with his hoof.
"I wish that you would," Applejack answered, pushing her cup to the side and propping her chin on her hooves.
Sun took a deep breath, hoping it would calm his nerves. All it did was bring into focus the slight throbbing at the back of his head.
"I'm scared of what's going to come after this," Sun said. "No matter how this whole situation shakes out, it's going to alter the course of Equestria's future, and I don't know where or even if I'm going to find a place to fit into that future."
Applejack stared Sun down for a long, tense moment, and for a second he worried that he had said the wrong thing before she sat up straight, reached across the table and placed both of her hooves on Sun's shoulders.
"Setting Sun, you listen to me and you listen well," Applejack said, keeping her vibrant green eyes locked on his own. "No matter what happens, if you live through this, you will always have a place here. I swear on my life that you saved and my family that you made whole, nothing will happen to you here as long as I can still draw breath into my lungs. You hear?"
All Sun could do was give a nod, shocked as he was by Applejack proclamation. The only time he had ever seen her that intense was during their shared experiences in Sunspire, and her words of encouragement certainly didn't match her demeanor.
"Good, glad we have that settled," Applejack said, leaning back into her seat and taking another swig of her drink. "Sorry to get all serious on you there, but I didn't want you to misunderstand me."
"I don't think there'd be a lot to misconstrue in that," Sun replied.
"You'd be surprised the types of ways that ponies will take something when they don't hear exactly what they want to hear. I remember Apple Bloom once insisting that I had promised to build her two swings out in front of the house, even though I had only promised her one."
Applejack chuckled into her cup as she recalled the memory, and Sun felt some of his tension ease away.
"So how'd you resolve that one?" Sun asked, leaning back in his chair.
"Oh, I built both swings, hung them from the tree out front," Applejack answered. "She was just pleased as punch when I unveiled them for her birthday that year. You need more cider?"
Sun looked down at his cup, and then held it up in his grey magic, his worries settling down even as the thumping in his brain increased its pace. He could ignore it for now.
* * *
Starlit found Spike basking out on a stretch open grass beyond Applejack's orchard, sunning his stomach and soaking up the rays of the sun. If there were an expression Spike's face could make that would equate with a smile, he was making it.
"I see that I'm not the only one appreciating the change in climate," Starlit said. One of Spike's great, green eyes slid open and focused onto her. "Has anypony seen you?"
"NO," Spike answered, his rumbling voice echoing inside Starlit's head. "ARE WE GOING TO BE LEAVING SOON?"
"In a short while. Sun wanted to say goodbye to a few ponies before we took off."
"HIS HOME IS WARM AND PLEASANT," Spike replied. "IT IS A SHAME TO LEAVE IT SO SOON AFTER ARRIVING. WHAT IS OUR DESTINATION?"
"Why do you keep asking me that?" Starlit asked back. "I thought you could see the weave of my fate or something. Can't you tell from that?"
"I CAN," Spike answered, "BUT I FIND THAT IT IS SIMPLER AND MORE COURTEOUS TO ASK FIRST. IMPERMANENT BEINGS SUCH AS YOURSELF REQUIRE ASSURANCE THAT YOU COMMAND YOUR OWN DESTINIES, AND I WOULD NOT WISH TO DEPRIVE YOU OF YOUR PEACE OF MIND."
"That is… oddly considerate," Starlit replied. "All the stories I was ever told of dragons described them as brutal, prideful beasts that didn't care a whit for the concerns of those they considered their lessers."
"I WAS RAISED BY PONIES, TAUGHT THE WAYS OF DIPLOMACY AND MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING," Spike explained. "I AM AN ANOMALY AMONG MY KIN, THOUGH I KNOW NOT WHAT HAS BECOME OF THEM."
"I remember Twilight once telling me that your egg was given as gift to Equestria to broker a peace with the dragons," Starlit replied, sitting down next to Spike's head. "Was that the truth, or just another of her lies to placate me?"
"I FEAR I DO NOT HOLD THAT ANSWER," Spike answered. "MY ABILITIES OF FORESIGHT AND HINDSIGHT ONLY EXTEND TO THE MOMENT OF MY BIRTH. I KNOW NO MORE OF THOSE TIMES THAN YOU WOULD."
"Makes sense I suppose," Starlit replied, feeling a little disappointed regardless.
"SOMETHING TROUBLES YOUR MIND, STIRS THE THOUGHTS TOWARDS DARK MATTERS," Spike said as he shifted over, rising to a sitting position and lowering his head back down until he was eye level with Starlit. "I WOULD CARE TO KNOW THEM, IF YOU WOULD ALLOW ME."
Starlit cast her gaze towards Spike's massive, cat-slit pupil, now widened until it was practically circular. Gazing deep within she could barely make out the sparkles of light reflecting off the inside of his eye, like stars in an infinite sea of pitch; It was inviting despite the ominous vision it cast.
"Many things trouble my mind these days," Starlit answered. "Wondering if I'm doing the right thing, worrying that I'm leading Sun to his doom by fostering his desire to follow me into peril, feeling betrayed by Twilight who was my one constant in all of this."
"YOUR THOUGHTS TURN TOWARDS HOME," Spike said, a speck of light igniting in his eye before it faded just as quickly. "YOU WISH TO SEE PROOF OF YOUR ASSUMPTIONS, CONFIRMATION THAT YOUR WORRIES ARE UNFOUNDED."
"I do," Starlit answered. "Is that wrong? To want to be proven wrong so desperately? To want to see my family and know that they're safe and cared for, just like Twilight promised they would be?"
"IT IS NOT, BUT JUST BECAUSE YOUR ASSUMPTIONS ARE WRONG DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEIR OPPOSITE IS CORRECT," Spike replied with a blink of his eye. "THE MURK OF TIME BENDS AND WEAVES, FLOWS AS WATER DOES. EVEN I CAN ONLY SEE THE PATHS IT MAY TAKE, NOT THE ONE THAT IT WILL."
"Then is there a path where all of this works out?" Starlit asked, trying not to let desperation creep into her voice. "Is there anything you can see where I can go home and live a quiet life with my family after all of this is over."
With a moist sliding noise Spike closed his eye, and even through the thick scales Starlit could see his pupil scanning about underneath the lid. It flittered to and fro at a rapid pace like he was dreaming, until he opened back up and looked back to Starlit. His eyes were alight with innumerable tiny sparks of light until all of them blinked out but one.
"I SEE ONE ENDING FOR YOU THAT YOU DESIRE, BUT THE PATH THERE IS MURKY AND DISTORTED. CANTERLOT IS THE NEXUS OF YOUR FUTURE, AND ALL OF YOUR PATHS WILL CONVERGE THERE. I APOLOGIZE IF THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU WISHED FOR, BUT THIS IS WHAT I HAVE TO OFFER."
Starlit leaned her head onto Spike's snout, feeling the weight of her necklace pull a bit more forcefully downward. She could ignore it for now.
"It'll have to do," Starlit answered.
* * *
The flight back to Twilight's tree took three additional days, mostly because the strain of flying on Spike's back proved too much to handle for extended trips. They would have to stop every two hours or so to rest and let Starlit rebuild her magical reserve so she could keep herself and Sun anchored on, which wasn't doing her any wonders in regards to her mounting stress.
Once Starlit started to recognize certain terrain features she asked Spike to set them down and let them both walk while Spike flew by overhead so he wouldn't be seen. It would be a quite a distance to walk, but she wanted to maintain secrecy for as long as they could manage.
"We're going to be passing by my home again," Starlit mentioned to Sun, "so keep your head on a swivel. There could be thestrals about."
"Right," Sun answered as he finished clipping his cloak back on. "Are you going to want a minute to be there again?"
"As much as I would, we simply don't have the time for it. Every minute we delay is another that Twilight could be using to leave us in the dust."
Starlit and Sun set off together at a brisk pace, keeping the sun to their backs as they headed east. Starlit navigated down the trails that she knew as they walked, keeping her horn primed to draw her sword and glancing skyward to keep track of Spike. The dragon was doing his best to hide in the overcast clouds, but every now and again a wing or his tail would peek through.
The sun lowered through the sky until dusk started to settle as Starlit saw the road that led past her farm. With a jerk of the head she and Sun quickened their pace, and Starlit felt her necklace weighing further and further down the closer she got to home.
"Starlit, is your necklace doing anything weird?" Sun asked through heavy breaths.
"It feels heavy, more than usual," Starlit answered. "It does that on occasion, why?"
"Because that thumping in my head that normally happens when Silence is trying to talk to me is acting up," Sun answered back.
"What is she saying?"
"Nothing," Sun answered. "She's in there, but she's not talking to me."
"Is there any reason why she won't answer you?" Starlit asked, her heartbeat quickening as her canter turned into a gallop. Sun sped up to match her as they crested the hill and saw the silvery dome of light encasing her farm, still intact.
"Not that I can tell, no," Sun answered with a wince of pain.
Starlit felt her necklace tug towards the dome, at first a soft pull until the necklace held straight out that nearly pulled her off her hooves.
"Now what?" Starlit asked to nopony as she tried to resist the necklace's pull. The more she resisted the stronger the pull until finally the leather strap gave out and snapped off of her neck. The stone rocketed out of reach, even faster than Starlit's magic could grab, until it collided with the foggy dome encasing her home.
With a soft popping noise the dome exploded into a soft silvery light, slowly dappling away like light caught in rain, and on the other side was Stalwart Warden, hind legs reared back and primed for a strong kick.
Starlit slid to a grinding halt at the edge of her warding lines, which were now completely dead. Warden put his hooves back down and turned, a look of satisfaction on his face before it turned to shock at seeing his wife again.
"Starlit!" Warden cried, galloping down the dirt path until he swept her up in a big, strong hug.
"Warden!" Starlit replied in kind, reciprocating the hug before pushing him back. "What were you doing, trying to kick that wall down?"
"What was I… honey, we were trapped in there for nearly a month, White Eclipse and I both!" Warden answered.
A wave of terror and rage washed over Starlit's mind until it was disrupted by a booming voice echoing in her mind. She looked to the sky to see Spike rushing down out of the clouds, and Warden screamed as he saw a creature of nightmares land with a thunderous impact not thirty feet from him.
"TWILIGHT SPARKLE IS GONE, AND HER TREE BURNS THIS NIGHT," Spike intoned, his telepathic voice grave and serious.
"Starlit, what is that?" Stalwart Warden asked, his voice tremulous as he stared up at Spike's lumbering form.
"Where's Eclipse?" Starlit asked, panic edging into her voice as she tried to temper her pure fury.
"She's inside, but what is that?!" Warden asked again. "Starlit, you've been gone for a month and you come back home with a stranger and a monster, what have you been doing?!"
Starlit shoved past Warden and sprinted for the house, rage punctuating her every thought. She shoved the door open with a quick burst of magic and found her daughter sitting in front of a slowly dimming fire.
White Eclipse looked thinner, but her initial burst of shock from to door flying open soon melted away into joy and relief at seeing Starlit again, and she ran crying into her mother's waiting embrace.
"You're back!" Eclipse cried into Starlit's chest. "Daddy said he didn't know where you'd gone, and we couldn't leave the house, but I knew you'd come back!"
"I'm so sorry sweetie, I'm so sorry," Starlit answered as every ounce of her maternal instinct poured into her poor, crying filly. "I promise that I'll never let anything like this happen again, I'm so sorry."
"Where were you?" Eclipse asked, her shimmering teal eyes streaked with tears as she looked up to Starlit. Even through the sadness and the relief there was that ever-present spark of curiosity; Starlit didn't think that such a simple question could buoy her spirits, but it did all the same.
"I think we'd all like an answer to that question," Warden stated from the doorway.
As soon as Warden spoke Starlit felt her righteous indignation bubble back to the fore of her mind; Starlit could take being lied to about her mission, she could take being manipulated for a nebulous end that she didn't understand, but this was a bridge too far. Starlit could feel, deep in her heart of hearts, that Twilight Sparkle would be made to answer for this treachery.
Sun walked up behind Warden, who didn't make room to accommodate the stranger in his home but didn't try to shove him away either. Warden's face had a tapestry of confusion, anger, and relief woven into it, much as Starlit assumed she had one woven into hers.
"Warden, if you could let Sun in, we can explain everything," Starlit replied, lifting Eclipse up onto her back as she stood up. "Including the dragon."
"That's a dragon?!" Warden exclaimed.
"There's a dragon outside?" Eclipse asked.
"There is, and he's a very nice dragon who I sure would love to make your acquaintance," Starlit answered. "Why don't you go say hello while your father and I have a grown-up conversation?"
"But you just got home, I wanna stay with you," Eclipse protested, hugging around Starlit's neck. An ache shot through Starlit's heart, but she knew how to placate her daughter.
"If you're a good filly and give your father and I some time, I'll tell you everything that I've been up to while I was away for your bedtime story," Starlit offered as she floated Eclipse down to the ground in front of her, keeping her voice as cloyingly sweet as she could given the circumstances. Eclipse giggled as the magic formed around her, and she dried the tears from her face as she touched the floor.
"Everything?" Eclipse asked.
"Everything," Starlit affirmed before she turned Eclipse around and scooted her to the door with her magic. Warden made to try and stop her, but her size and his slow reflexes allowed the filly to slide past like she had during so many sessions of roughhousing with her father.
"Starlit is that thing safe?" Warden asked. "It's a dragon!"
"Spike was raised by ponies, he's not the vicious beast you've heard about in stories," Starlit answered. "Sun, the kitchens just across from the living room, if you could put some tea on while I speak with my husband I'd appreciate it. There should be some in the cupboard above the fireplace."
Sun, ever the observant pony, read the room and gave a quick nod before beating his retreat to the kitchen. Starlit could hear giggling outside from White Eclipse, leaving just herself and her husband.
"And who is this stranger you've brought home?" Warden asked pointedly.
"His name is Setting Sun, he's been a companion of mine while I've been away," Starlit answered, bluntly and factually. "Come here, let's sit down; this is a long story to tell, and I'm so upset right now that I could very well explode."
Starlit and Warden walked into the living room, set out a pair of pillows in front of the fading fire, and settled into their usual conversation spot. Starlit pulled the sword-belt off of her hip, unbuckled her saddlebags, and for the first time in days let herself do something akin to relaxing.
"Eclipse looked thin, and so do you," Starlit said. "How much food have you had?"
"We've had enough to last us," Warden answered, "although the cellar was starting to get low this morning. I've been doing my best to harvest what you planted before you disappeared, but I just don't have the skill with my horn that you do."
"And I've been getting ever more skilled with it," Starlit said as she levitated a log off of the pile by the fireplace and added it to the fire. A shower of sparks shot up the chimney, and the log soon caught aflame.
"Starlit, where have you been?" Warden asked. "You were out keeping watch on the warding lines one night and the next morning I wake up to find you missing and a dome of silver fog encasing our entire property. Trust me, that was quite difficult to try and explain to Eclipse. She cried for a week straight when you didn't come back."
"You remember that old story I used to tell to Eclipse, the one about the old Princesses of Equestria?" Starlit asked, a pit of nerves sinking into her stomach.
"Yes, it was her favorite story," Warden answered. "I tried to tell it to her a few times, try to ease the pain, but I could never remember all of it."
"It's true," Starlit replied. "All of it; the five Princesses, their war over Equestria, the loss of magic, everything. Every last sentence of that story was based in fact, and I learned it from the source."
To say Warden was shocked would be a gross understatement; he looked just about as shocked as when a dragon fell out of the sky in front of him.
"Alright, that story is truth, okay," Warden replied, trying to regain his composure. "Who was this source?"
"Princess Twilight Sparkle herself," Starlit answered, eliciting another snort of disbelief from her husband. "She showed up at the house the night I vanished, told me some cockamamie story about how Equestria is dying due to the loss of its magic, and that she needs somepony to recover the other Princesses and force them to retake their thrones in Canterlot so that magic can flow through Equestria again."
Warden's eyes grew wider and wider as Starlit continued to explain the events of the last month or so of time; the Searing Plains, Sunspire, New Selene, the Crystal Empire, everything. The only parts she censored were the descriptions of the multiple times she had died, if only to spare Warden's constitution and her own peace of mind.
The sun had gone low over the horizon by the time Starlit finished her recitation, and just in time for White Eclipse to come back in from playing with Spike. The filly looked unhurt and with a smile as bright as the stars, but a long yawn betrayed how tuckered out she really was.
"Did you have a good time, sweetie?" Starlit asked, putting on her most motherly voice.
"Mm-hm," Eclipse murmured with a nod. "Spike was really fun, and he talks in my head. He said he had to go to the forest for something but he'd be back by tomorrow."
"That sounds good," Starlit replied. "How about you go upstairs and I'll come tuck you in and tell you my story in a few minutes."
"Okay," Eclipse answered as she traipsed up the creaky wooden steps to the bedrooms.
Starlit turned to look back at Warden, whose expression during her recitation had gone from appalled to stern. She knew the expression better than any other one he made; he was focusing on a task at hoof, whether mental or manual, and needed time to parse through it.
"I'll give you a moment while I say goodnight to Eclipse," Starlit said, giving Warden a loving kiss on the cheek before she went upstairs.
Starlit softly opened the door to Eclipse's room to find everything exactly as she remembered it; a small pile of toys on the floor by the dresser, a few old books on the shelf that Starlit and Warden had made together during her pregnancy, and a perfectly filly-sized bed with a tired mop of blonde hair poking out from under the sheets.
"Hey sweetie," Starlit said as she walked in and lit the small bedside candle with her magic. "How are you feeling?"
"Okay," Eclipse said. "That was some pretty neat magic. Did you learn that while you were away?"
"I did, and I learned a lot of other things too," Starlit said as she sat on the bed and ran her hoof through Eclipse's mane. "Would you like to know more about it?"
"Mm-hm," Eclipse said, a tired smile across her face as she settled in. "Tell me everything."
"Well, on the night I went away, I met a mysterious pony who told me that I had to go on a mighty quest to save Equestria from utter destruction," Starlit began.
"What was their name?" Eclipse asked.
"Her name was… Flurry Heart," Starlit lied, "and she was an alicorn just like in the old stories that I would read to you."
"Really?" Eclipse asked, trying to sound enthused but failing because of her tiredness.
"Really she was, with a horn and wings, and she was the most beautiful and regal mare I had ever laid eyes on."
Starlit continued to tell the story, doing her best to cover up the less savory parts and trying not to let her anger at Twilight's betrayal seep through. Eclipse fell asleep just as Starlit was describing Applejack's farm, and with a final brush through Eclipse's hair and kiss on the forehead Starlit blew out the candle and crept out of the room.
Starlit could hold her anger in for one more night, if only to keep her daughter at some measure of peace.
* * *
Having heard Starlit go upstairs, Sun poked his head past the small wall that separated the kitchen from the living room. He had wisely chosen to stay in the kitchen during her story so that he wouldn't draw any ire or make the situation any more awkward than it already was, but Sun figured that it would do well to introduce himself to her husband now that he had the chance.
Levitating a small kettle of tea in Silence's grey magic, Sun quietly walked in, eliciting a turn of the head from Stalwart Warden.
"I, uh, kept the tea hot for you," Sun said, holding out a pair of small ceramic cups. "I'm not the best at making it, but I hope this is alright."
"Uh, yeah," Warden replied, gesturing his horn to a small table on the face side of the room. "Just drag that over to set it on."
With his head Sun carefully moved the table until it was just in front of Warden, and he set the kettle and cups down and began to pour. Warden looked like he had just been told that his favorite pet had died.
"You know, you have an extraordinary wife," Sun said as he pushed a steaming mug to Warden. He quickly picked it up in his teeth and drained the whole thing back.
"Apparently far more extraordinary than I thought," Warden replied as he set the cup back down. "You were with her that whole month, right?"
"Not for the beginning parts, but she picked me up in Appleoosa when she was going to hunt for Celestia."
"Did she ever… talk about us?" Warden asked. "Me and Eclipse?"
"Every opportunity she got," Sun answered as he sipped his tea. "She was initially a bit cagey about herself, as you'd expect for a pony in a new place and surrounded by strangers, but as we got closer she opened up some more."
"Closer how?" Warden asked, his tone growing harsher and sending a shiver down Sun's spine. This stallion could curdle milk with a glare like that.
"Nothing untoward, I promise!" Sun hastily answered. "It's just that, when you travel around the world and go through several life threatening scenarios with somepony, you start to grow closer. Bonds of kinship and shared experience, that sort of thing."
"Okay," Warden answered as he let out a low snort. "It's good to know you were with her for all of that, then. I'm still trying to process all of it, and she only told me about it; I can't imagine what all of that must have been like to live through."
"Believe you me, I'm still trying to process most of it too," Sun replied, pouring out more tea for the both of them. Again Warden drained his back while Sun took careful sips.
"You do strike me as a bit of the dainty type, no offense intended," Warden replied.
"You would be absolutely correct in that assessment, sir. Before all of this I was just a shut-in scholar who thought that going on a grand adventure with your wife would help my research and give me some closure on my past."
"She did tell me all of that mess about your parents, and I'm truly sorry about that," Warden replied with a solemn nod. "I was lucky enough to have a fairly stable upbringing, so I can't imagine what that situation must've been like for you."
"I learned to get past it, even if it does still sting to think about," Sun replied. "That's another thing that Starlit helped me with, I suppose."
Sun stared down at his drink, looking at the few dregs from the leaves at the bottom as his thoughts went back to darker places.
"Sun, could I ask you something? Make a request, so to speak?" Warden asked, pulling Sun back into the conversation.
"Sure, anything," Sun answered.
"Make sure she comes home again," Warden stated.
"What makes you think she's going to leave again?" Sun asked.
"Sun, I've known her for all of my adult life, I know the type of mare she is. She doesn't leave a job half-finished and she doesn't back out on promises. She's going to give this Twilight Sparkle what for, and she's going to try and fix what's wrong with this world. I just need you to make sure that she can get back home to us when it's all done."
A knot twisted up inside of Sun's guts at Warden's request, and for the first time in their conversation he saw the older stallion's stoic facade crack, and just behind the surface lay a scared pony who doesn't want to lose the mare he loves.
"Okay," Sun answered as he drained back the last of his tea. "I'll make sure she gets home safe and sound."
"Then you will have my eternal gratitude," Warden replied as he poured another cup of tea and gently sipped from it.
The two of them sat in silence for a long moment, taking their drinks and letting their worries settle into their minds. Sun could feel the thumping in his head, but pushed it away from the fore of his mind; he didn't have the patience for Silence right now.
"You're a good stallion, Sun," Warden stated. "I'm sorry for the fact that you got dragged into all of this, but I'm at peace knowing that you've been there for her despite it all."
Sun looked into the fire, it's flames flickering away merrily. He savored this one peace of domesticity before turning to face Warden again.
"Glad I could help," Sun answered.
A door softly closed upstairs, followed by a soft series of hoofsteps as Starlit made her way back downstairs, drawing both Sun and Warden's attentions. Starlit looked to the two of them, a moment of peace shattered by the iron bar of reality reminding all three of them exactly what was happening and what the stakes were.
"Dear," Warden said. "Did you want to talk some more, or do you need to rest?"
"I think some sleep would do well for us all," Starlit replied. "Sun, I'm sorry that we don't really have anything more than throw pillows as far as comfortable furniture is concerned, but—"
"It's alright, I can just use one of the bedrolls," Sun replied. "The pillows will definitely help though, thank you."
Starlit gave a quick smile and a nod, then gestured to her husband for them to retire upstairs. As Warden followed after his wife, he gave Sun one last glance followed by a warm, welcoming smile.
Sun quietly unrolled his bedroll and set one of the pillows at its head, falling asleep fitfully as the thumping in his head continued. It eventually faded into the sea of worries that was his mind right now, but at least he had a fire to warm himself with.
* * *
Starlit slowly roused to consciousness the next morning with the feeling of Warden's hooves wrapped around her and the sound of his snoring in her ears, and her heart ached at how much she had missed this feeling. The bed wasn't especially soft, but it was familiar; the sheets were patchy and let the draft in a bit too much, but their texture was like the softest down to her. Starlit wished she could just freeze this moment in time and never leave the comfort and familiarity of it.
Both she and Warden shot upright when a thunderous crash echoed from outside, rattling the rafters and sending dust cascading down from them.
"That would probably be Spike," Starlit wearily announced as she flopped back into bed. "I'll go check on Eclipse, make sure she's not crying from the noise."
"Mm-hm," Warden murmured. His eyes were still closed, but he slowly dragged himself to consciousness and made his way out of the room and down the stairs. Starlit listened the make sure he didn't trip and fall down them in his stupor before getting up and going across the hall to Eclipse's room.
The door to her daughter's room burst open, just barely missing Starlit's shins as a small bundle of white and yellow bounded out and down the stairs, giggling all the way down the stairs and out of the house. Starlit blinked blearily at seeing her daughter so exuberant after yesterday's events, but just shook her head with a tired smile and made her ways downstairs.
"Morning," Sun said from the living room. "Spike's back."
"I gathered," Starlit replied, "and good morning to you as well. Would you mind getting some tea on while I go see what's going on?"
"Can do," Sun answered as he made his way to the kitchen.
Starlit clomped her way out of the house and down the small steps off of her porch to find the massive purple and green form of Spike seated just outside of her warding lines, his attention already fixed on Eclipse as she tried to climb up his thigh and get onto her back. Warden was positioned underneath her to make sure she didn't hurt herself.
Seated in front of Spike's forelimbs was something she didn't expect to see again; the teleportation pad from Twilight's tree, seemingly carved out of the stone it was formed from and taken back here. It was covered in soot and scorch marks, but the structure of it seemed intact all the same.
"Thanks for the wake-up, Spike," Starlit called up to the dragon. The eye facing her shifted in its socket until his gaze locked on to her.
"GOOD MORNING, STARLIT SKY," Spike greeted as Eclipse finally mounted his back. "YOUR DAUGHTER FINDS ME QUITE ENTERTAINING."
"She enjoys the old stories I tell her, so seeing something from one of those stories seemingly jump off the page and into the real world would make for an entertaining sight, I'd think. She isn't bothering you, is she?"
"ON THE CONTRARY, I QUITE ENJOY NOT BEING VIEWED AS A HARBINGER OF DESTRUCTION AND DIRE KNOWLEDGE," Spike responded. "BEING A CHILD'S PLAYTHING IS A WELCOME CHANGE OF PACE, BUT THAT IS NOT WHY I AM HERE."
"TWILIGHT SPARKLE'S TREE HAS BURNED TO CINDERS," Spike continued, this time projecting his voice audibly to everypony around. "IT WOULD SEEM THAT SHE HAS DECIDED TO CUT HER LOSSES WITH STARLIT'S MISSION AND IS TRYING TO DENY YOU ANY MEANS OF STOPPING HER PLANS. HER LIBRARY IS NO MORE, AND ALL THE STORES OF KNOWLEDGE CONTAINED WITHIN ARE LOST."
"Was there anything worth salvaging, save the obvious?" Starlit asked, gesturing to the teleportation slab.
"TWILIGHT WAS QUITE THOROUGH IN HER DESTRUCTION, IT WOULD SEEM. BY THE TIME I COULD BEAT THE FLAMES OUT WITH MY WINGS ANYTHING OF VALUE WAS DESTROYED. IT IS A SHAME TO SEE SUCH KNOWLEDGE BE LOST TO TIME, BUT THANKFULLY STONE IS FAR HARDIER THAN PARCHMENT AND PAPER."
Starlit let out a snort of frustration as she wracked her brain for their next step. Sun would have his means to find Silence with the teleporter, and Starlit had Spike to get her to Canterlot, but save for anything Spike could tell her about the layout of the city she would be walking in blind, as would Sun in the Glowing Wastes.
"Mommy, are you okay? You're making that face you make when I do something bad," White Eclipse called down from Spike's back.
"I'm just thinking, honey," Starlit off-handedly answered.
"Do you need help?" Eclipse asked again.
"No sweetie, I just need some quiet," Starlit answered back.
"Are you sure, because I think that if me and Mr. Spike here put our heads together and thought real hard about it, then we could definitely probably help yo—"
"Eclipse, be quiet!" Starlit hollered as her patience, combined with her tiredness, anger, and frustration all roiled together and came erupting out of her mouth before she could think to stop herself.
Eclipse immediately ducked behind one of Spike's back spines, holding the bony growth tight and barely peeking past.
"I'm sorry," Eclipse whimpered, "I was just trying to help, that's all."
"Eclipse, swee—"
Eclipse hid behind the spine before Starlit could even get out two words of apology, and seeing her own daughter that frightened of her hurt her soul more than words could describe.
"Warden, could you calm her down?" Starlit asked her husband dejectedly. "I need a minute to cool off."
"Sure," Warden answered, moving around to Spike's other side to try and coax Eclipse down. Starlit got up and walked to the back of the house, out where she planted the potatoes and radishes.
Starlit sat and thumped her head against the worn wood of her home, staring out into the expanse of scrub and grassland that stretched beyond the rough wooden fence that hemmed in her garden. The grey sky melded with the grey earth to form an endless expanse that was at once disconcerting and oddly peaceful.
Starlit's breathing evened out as she rested against the house, staring at her garden and her grey world, before her mind started to crank back to life from the inaction. Feelings of guilt for upsetting her daughter, rage at Twilight's betrayal, and most of all weariness at her endlessly complex and taxing trials.
So many thoughts roiled and raged in her mind that she didn't even notice that she was wearing her black stone necklace again until it's soft weight pressed into her chest unusually.
She looked down to the necklace, the tiny glint of her own eyes reflecting back in it's roughly hewn surface, and in a fury she ripped the leather strap with her magic and threw it full force into the wall. The necklace clattered against the surface as she held it in her magic before she pounded her hooves into its mocking form, hoping upon hope she could shatter it and be done with all of this.
Pounding hooves rattled the rafters as she poured every ounce of rage she had in her body into trying to destroy this abysmal thing, and her grunts of exertion soon transformed into screams of fury and hatred. Starlit had never felt hatred this strong, and certainly not for something so small, but it was a hatred so pure and forceful that her senseless pounding against the stone didn't cease until she put one of her hooves through her own wall.
Panting from the physical exertion, Starlit dragged her hoof out from the hole, and with it came the necklace, still whole and floating in her magic. A few wood shards came with the stone, the stings of their splinters digging into her hoof and fetlock.
The back door to Starlit's house swing open with a bang as Sun looked out, a tea kettle in his mouth and a worried expression on his face as Starlit turned to face him. Gingerly Sun set the kettle down on the ground.
"You really did a number on your wall there," Sun said nervously. Starlit appreciated the attempt to lighten the mood.
"I suppose I did," Starlit replied, dropping the necklace into the dirt. "Good thing Warden is a good craftspony. This'll be a nice project for him for a few days."
"Pretty unorthodox coming home gift, if you ask me," Sun replied back as he got closer. "Any reason you've decided to start punching holes in your house?"
Starlit plopped back down onto the ground, letting a long, slow breath out as her senses came back to her. She winced a bit as the splinters dug into her hoof.
"I don't know if I can handle this, Sun. All of this; this mission, the betrayals, the lack of any real direction, this," Starlit added, lifting the necklace up for him to see. "It's all gotten to be too much for me."
"How?" Sun asked, sitting down next to her. Unconsciously Starlit rested her head against his shoulder, and he gently ran a hoof across her back.
"Spike confirmed that Twilight burned her library down to deny us any information going forward," Starlit answered with a weary sigh. "On top of that, I scared Eclipse by accident because she was distracting me while I was trying to think."
"That's pretty bad, I'm not going to lie," Sun replied. "So what are you going to do about it?"
"I don't know, and that's the part that's killing me inside," Starlit answered. "We both have our destinations, but we have no idea what's waiting for us there when we arrive, and I don't even know what I'm expecting to find when I finally track Twilight down."
"Did we ever really know?" Sun asked. "Every time we went out for Twilight, the things we found were completely different than what she told us to expect. Why should we worry about a lack of information now?"
Starlit lifted her head up, looking to the hole in the wall, to Sun's patient gaze, and then back out behind her to the expanse of grey that had, until very recently, been her entire world.
"I suppose we shouldn't," Starlit answered.
"Then let's not," Sun replied, turning around with Starlit to face the wilderness beyond. "We've come this far, why not a little further?"
"Thank you, Sun," Starlit said, giving him a hug across the shoulders. "I know I don't say it nearly often enough, but this endeavor would've ended a long time ago without you there to help guide me and keep my worse nature from getting a hold of me. You're more than a friend; you're like the brother I never had, and when this is all done you will always have a place in my home waiting for you should you need it."
"You'll have to get in line for that, Applejack already made me that offer," Sun replied with a chuckle. "You can never have enough free homes, I suppose. Thank you, Starlit, for all you've done for me as well. Before you dragged me off to Sunspire I was a shut-in who'd be content to while away my days examining the deeds of better ponies than myself."
"And now you're one of the ponies whose deeds will be examined for ages to come," Starlit replied. "Not bad for a shut-in scholar from a dying desert town."
"Not bad at all," Sun affirmed as he grabbed the tea kettle with his grey magic. "I'll go get this warmed back up for you, if you don't mind."
"Not at all," Starlit answered as the two of them stood up. With a nod Sun made his way back inside.
As Starlit rounded the corner of her house she could see Spike's massive form, and Eclipse on his back running a slalom course between his back spines as Warden followed her pace on the ground.
A pleasing warmth spread through Starlit's chest, followed by a comforting weight as her necklace manifested back onto her neck.
A thwack of metal against wood echoed across the empty plain behind Starlit's home, followed by a grunt of exertion as a sword wound its way through the air in a field of teal magic. With a flash of silver another thwack echoed across the field, and the magic dissipated.
Starlit sat onto the rough grass, sweat pouring off of her forehead and heavy breaths escaping her burning lungs. Her head throbbed with pain, her hind legs and haunches were sore and burning, and the tree in front of her had enough fresh cuts and impacts across its surface that she was impressed it still stood at all.
Starlit cast her eyes back towards the house, where she could see Warden and Sun pulling up a few of the turnips. Or, at least, Sun was making an attempt; without his magic he had to rely on his own willowy frame, and it was obvious that Warden's basket was fuller than his.
A rustle in the grass behind her set Starlit's fur bristling, and she swiftly took her sword up in her magic as she spun around.
"It's okay Mommy, it's me," Eclipse said, her posture defensive. Starlit's breathing slowed has her daughter took a step back, and Starlit quickly stuck the blade into the dirt.
"I'm sorry honey," Starlit hastily apologized, "you just startled me."
"I was just walking, how could that be startling?"
"I heard you coming in the grass and… well, I've had to be a lot more careful than I was before I left."
Starlit's stepped towards Eclipse before sitting down in the dry grass. Starlit could still feel her heart in her throat from the moment of shock.
"Are you gonna be okay?" Eclipse asked as she sat across from Starlit. "Daddy says that you have to go away again, that you still have a job to finish."
"Pestering your father for answers, I see," Starlit said with a weary smile. "He was always the one to break at your incessant question asking."
"Is he right?"
Starlit took a breath, trying to will her heart to slow down as she gathered her thoughts. She'd been doing her best to keep busy, find any reason to be where her daughter wasn't, but there was no avoiding this conversation now. It was just herself, her daughter, and a mangled old tree.
"He is," Starlit answered.
As soon as she had let the words leave her mouth she could see the direction the conversation was going to take. Eclipse's lip began to quiver, and her little chest started to rise and fall quickly.
"But why? You just came home, and you were gone for so long! It's not fair!"
Tears welled up in Eclipse's teal eyes, eyes so much like Starlit's own, and they soon spilled down her daughter's cheeks as she wept. Starlit quickly took her filly up in a tight embrace, doing her best to hold everything together for the Eclipse's sake.
"I know it's not fair Eclipse, I know," Starlit consoled. "I wish I could stay here, let everything go back to the way it used to be."
Eclipse slowly looked up to her mother, her tears running grey rivulets in her white fur, her eyes pleading a silent "why".
"You're young, honey, but I think that you can hear this," Starlit began. "I owe you that much, at least."
Starlit looked out to the middle-distance, letting the words collect in her head even as she silently hoped they wouldn't come to her. If she could have some excuse, any excuse to avoid this conversation she wanted to seize it. Her mind, however, had other plans.
"It's because my job isn't done yet," Starlit said, the words tripping off her tongue as she tried to bite them back.
"How come?" Eclipse pleaded. "You've already done so much, how come there's more? Why can't another pony do this, any other pony!?"
Fresh tears started falling from Eclipse's eyes as she buried her face in her mother's chest, and Starlit ran a hoof through her daughter's hair as she tried to come up with something to say.
"It's just not fair," Eclipse moaned, her voice muffled by her mother's fur. "It's not fair."
"It isn't fair, Eclipse, it really isn't," Starlit replied, resting her cheek on Eclipse's head, "but I'm trying to make things more fair. This world is broken, and it's unfair, and it hurts so many other ponies like you and me in ways we may never know."
Starlit lifted her head and put a hoof under Eclipse's chin, raising her head until they could stare into each other's eyes.
"But there are moments that make the unfairness worth it," Starlit continued. "Moments that remind us why we fight, and struggle, and scrape for every inch of ground we can get. Moments that come along maybe once in a life that let's a pony change the world."
"And that's why you have to leave? To find a moment to change the world?" Eclipse asked.
"Always one thought ahead of me," Starlit affirmed, wiping the tears from her daughter's cheeks. "This moment has been given to me to change things; change them for you, for us, and maybe, if I'm lucky and skilled enough, to change this whole rotten world and make it more fair for everypony."
Eclipse sniffed hard, wiping her nose and rubbing her eyes as she turned down to look at the ground. She didn't say anything, just rubbed a hoof in the rough grass. Starlit laid down, getting on eye level with her.
"White Eclipse, you are the best thing that has ever come into my life," Starlit said as Eclipse met her gaze. "You are the reason I get up in the morning, you are my last thought before I go to sleep at night, and you are the pony that gives me the strength to do what I am doing. Because I know that no matter what gets thrown at me, no matter what hardships I face, I will get through them because you are waiting for me at the end of it all. I love you, and that love will see me through to the end of this."
Gently Starlit laid her forehead against Eclipse's, their horns scraping past each other as they shared a moment of tenderness. Starlit could feel a growing warmth in her horn as a soft, soothing pulse of magic bled from her horn and into Eclipse, a bond of love and magic that only a mother and child could share.
"You matter more to me than anything else in the world," Starlit said, a few tears sliding down her cheeks, "and I promise you that I will come back to you."
A pair of hooves wrapped tight around Starlit's neck, nearly knocking her over, and she returned her daughter's hug with equal fervor.
The pair stayed out in the field for a long while, doing what parents and children do; playing, talking, sharing space, and teaching each other. Eclipse watched with awe as Starlit practiced with her sword that floated with perfect precision, held aloft by her mother's magic; Starlit laughed uproariously as she chased her daughter up and down the hill that sloped toward the back garden in a merciless game of tag; they both pointed out shapes in the stars as the sun fell low on the horizon before Warden called them in for dinner. Eclipse scampered down to the house, leaving Starlit standing by the withered old tree at the top of the hill.
She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath in as she saved this moment in her mind. So many moments had cluttered her brain over the last month, but this one was the first that she wanted to make sure had a spot in her memory.
This moment, one that she had initially been dreading, would be her strength to go forward.
* * *
Sun turned and tossed on the bedroll that he had laid out in front of the fireplace. His arrangements were comfortable enough, and the security of a roof over his head and a giant dragon outside would've normally lulled him to sleep by now, but tonight he couldn't quiet his raging thoughts. Cracking his eyes open, Sun got up, rubbing an eye as he stood fully upright and walked out to the porch.
A few nighttime insects buzzed through the air as he sat at the porch's edge, staring out towards the forest a few miles off and the sleeping form of Spike a few yards off. His chest rose with great shuddering inhalations, before falling with a low rumble as he exhaled and disrupted the dirt in front of his nose. Sun couldn't understand why a being of such power and grandeur needed to do something as mundane as sleep, but it was at least comforting to know that Spike wasn't completely inscrutable.
Sun stepped off the porch and walked toward Spike, feeling his inhalations and exhalations vibrate the ground as he approached, and was caught off guard when the dragon's eye flew open with a slick grinding sound. Sun felt his heart leap up into his throat as the great green iris and the glittering black pupil stared at him, stretching and focusing to fully take in Sun's utter insignificance.
"YOU OUGHT TO BE RESTING, SETTING SUN," Spike said, his voice reverberating inside of Sun's head like a stone thrown down a gorge. "YOU NEED YOUR STRENGTH FOR TOMORROW."
"Like I could get to sleep anyway, given tomorrow's activities," Sun replied, sitting down as he tried to recompose himself.
"YOUR MIND IS DISQUIETED. I CAN SEE THIS IN YOU. DO YOU WISH TO SPEAK OF YOUR TROUBLES?"
"I don't know if I should," Sun replied, feeling the muscles in his neck tense up. "I know what I have to do, I just don't know if I have the strength to do it."
"VAGUE MUSINGS ABOUT THE HARDSHIPS AHEAD DO NOT ENGENDER CONFIDENCE OR SURETY." Spike intoned, his eyelid dropping slightly.
"Was that sarcasm?" Sun asked incredulously. "You know how to be sarcastic?"
"I AM FAMILIAR WITH THE VEILED INSINCERITY PONIES REFER TO AS SARCASM, BUT IN THIS INSTANCE I AM NOT EMPLOYING IT. I WONDER WHY YOU TORMENT YOURSELF WORRYING ABOUT WHAT MAY BE WHEN ALL IT DOES IS DISQUIET YOUR MIND AND DRAWS YOUR THOUGHTS AWAY FROM WHAT YOU KNOW MUST BE DONE."
"It's what I've always done, I suppose," Sun answered. "I think about things when problems present themselves and try to work out all the avenues it could take and every way it could go wrong."
"AND THIS BRINGS YOU SURETY? THESE NIGHTTIME PONDERINGS ON MYRIAD TROUBLES AND TRIBULATIONS BRING YOU SOLACE AND PEACE?" Spike asked back.
"No, but if I have a general idea of how something might happen then it'll prepare for what does happen," Sun answered as he could feel heat grow in his ears. He felt like he was being talked down to.
Slowly Spike raised his head, nearly clipping Sun's chin with one of the scales on his snout, before turning to fully face Sun. Sun backed up instinctively as Spike readjusted himself, putting a few more feet between them.
"ALLOW THIS WISDOM TO BE IMPARTED, FROM THE PERMANENT TO THE IMPERMANENT," Spike intoned, more force being put into his mental words than before. "THE LONGER ONE SPENDS THINKING, THE LESS TIME ONE SPENDS DOING. YOUR TREPIDATIOUS AND CAUTIOUS NATURE IS FULLY JUSTIFIED, BUT FOR THE PATHS AHEAD THAT I CAN SEE YOU MUST THROW YOUR CAUTION TO THE WAYSIDE AND ACCEPT WHAT COMES AS IT DOES."
"Then what do you see, huh?" Sun shot back. "What is going to happen to me that you can foretell that I just need to accept sight unseen? How can you sit there, so majestic and powerful and dispassionate because you know you cannot possibly be harmed by anything, and tell a terrified, weak, impotent pony that he has to just buck up, keep a stiff upper lip, and walk to his doom without trying to even think of ways to preserve his brief, fragile existence!? Who are you, the mighty dragon, to tell me, the feeble pony, to just accept the inevitable!?"
Sun's face flushed hot as every worry, every anxiety, every bit of his anger at the situation he found himself trapped in, came spewing forth from his mouth. His indignation drove him to his hooves, put him inches away from the dragon in front of him until his forehead was pressed against Spike's snout. His shouting echoed across the emptiness surrounding Starlit's home, a repetition in the world around him that he had been hearing in his head for days now.
Spike's head shot forward faster than Sun thought a being of such size could move, his snout shoving Sun backward and forcing him tumble over into the dirt. Sun could feel the hot blasts of breath from the great dragon's nose, could smell the scent of brimstone and smoke on every exhalation as Spike turned one eye to face him. Sun could see his own face reflected in the bright green iris, and for the first time he could see defiance in his own eyes.
"DO NOT TAKE ME SIMPLY FOR SOME BEAST OF BURDEN OR IMPLACABLE FORCE OF NATURE THAT WILL TAKE YOUR DISINGENUOUS ASSERTIONS LAYING DOWN!" Spike retorted, the words booming into Sun's mind like thunder. "I AM NOT TRYING TO PUT YOU IN YOUR PLACE OR MAKE YOU ACCEPT DEATH LIKE A RABBIT IN A SNARE! YOU HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE THIS SITUATION YOUR OWN! YOU HAVE THE FORCE OF WILL TO BEND THESE PROBLEMS TO YOUR OWN ENDS! YOU WILL OVERCOME, THIS I FORESEE, AND IN THIS YOU WILL BECOME GREATER THAN YOU COULD POSSIBLY IMAGINE, IF YOU WOULD ONLY ALLOW YOURSELF BE A CONQUERER OF ADVERSITIES RATHER THAN A SUPPLICANT TO THEM!"
"Then show me, dammit!" Sun yelled back. "Quit telling me I'll be great and give me some hard, solid evidence, because this last month has only taught me that I am growing weaker and more dependent on things beyond my control to keep me going!"
"IF YOU INSIST," Spike replied, before his massive, cat-slit pupil expanded to fully encompass the whole of his eye.
Inside the vast darkness of Spike's eye a myriad of twinkling lights and shooting lines traced innumerable shapes, and though individually they made no sense as they joined and disappeared and twisted together they would form into ideas, figures, and pathways. Sun laid on the ground, transfixed by the inside of the dragon's eye, as events began to take shape inside of him.
He could smell stagnant water, like the caverns underneath the Searing Plains. The buzzing of insects, like the bees in Applejack's orchard magnified and amplified, hummed around him, switching angles and directions with intense rapidity. A comforting hoof laid across his side, spreading a feeling of healing that brought back memories of his first death and rebirth. A voice, familiar and yet strange, echoed words in his mind that he could not begin to make sense of but that he knew were offering him a bargain. And finally, a feeling of power, of strength, and of surety.
The lights and lines inside of Spike's eye slowly ebbed into nothingness, leaving only a few errant sparks as Sun shook his head and tried to collate everything he had just experienced.
"COUNT YOURSELF FORTUNATE, SETTING SUN," Spike said, settling his head back on top of his folded up paws. "WERE YOU OF A WEAKER CONSTITUTION, THIS EXPERIENCE WOULD'VE RENDERED YOU A BABBLING SIMPLETON, OR WORSE REDUCED YOUR MIND TO A THIN PASTE INSIDE OF YOUR SKULL."
"What… what was that?" Sun asked, his eyes still focused out to the middle distance where Spike's eye had been.
"IT WAS A PATH, ONE OF MANY THAT WILL BE BEFORE YOU IN THE DAYS TO COME. AS I TOLD STARLIT SKY, SO WILL I TELL YOU; TIME IS LIKE A RIVER, FLOWING OVER, AROUND, AND THROUGH ANY NUMBER OF PATHS. I CAN ONLY SEE THAT EVENTS THAT MAY UNFOLD, BUT IN IMPARTING THIS INFORMATION TO YOU I HAVE ALTERED THE COURSE OF THE RIVER IN YOUR FAVOR. YOUR FATE IS NOW YOURS TO GRASP AS YOU EXPERIENCE THE SIGNS THAT HAVE BEEN SHOWN TO YOU."
Sun felt Spike's voice cut short in his mind, and he turned to face the dragon and saw that his eye was wide, the pupil practically a vertical line, and his breathing grew short and quick as he raised his head up to the air. The frills on the sides of his head twitched and moved with jerking flexions.
"AH, AND SO MY PATH HAS BEEN SET," Spike stated, his eyes still set to the far horizon. "I HAVE BETRAYED THE TRUST OF MY KIN, AND I MUST FACE THEIR JUDGEMENT FOR WHAT I HAVE DONE FOR YOU. I AM CALLED TO HOME."
"What? What do you mean betrayed?" Sun asked, a fluttering of the heart rising in his chest.
"MY GIFT OF FORESIGHT HAS BEEN MISUSED. TOO MANY TIMES I HAVE ALTERED THE FLOW OF TIME BY GIVING YOU AND STARLIT SKY PORTENTS OF THINGS TO COME, AND THIS DIRECT GIFT OF FOREKNOWLEDGE WAS THE FINAL SIN. THIS, I SEE NOW, IS WHY I CANNOT ACCOMPANY STARLIT FURTHER THAN THE OUTER EDGES OF CANTERLOT."
A feeling like lead dropped into Sun's stomach, his voice stuck in his throat, as he struggled to understand what he had just done to Starlit. Through his own selfishness, he denied Starlit a powerful ally and had potentially doomed her to die in Canterlot, all because he couldn't handle not knowing how to proceed.
"DO NOT BLAME YOURSELF FOR THIS, SETTING SUN," Spike said, cutting Sun off before he could even begin to form an apology in his mind. "IT WAS ALWAYS SUPPOSED TO BE THIS WAY. IN EVERY PATH I HAVE SEEN AHEAD FOR STARLIT SKY, SHE TRAVELS THE NEXUS OF HER DESTINY ALONE, UNAIDED, AND SURE IN HER STRIDE. YOUR DESIRE FOR KNOWLEDGE, AN ADMIRABLE TRAIT, WAS MERELY THE CATALYST FOR THIS INEVITABLE TURN IN THE PATH."
Slowly Spike turned his head to face Sun, staring down at him. Maybe it was the lighting from the half moon in the sky or the angle at which he was looking up, but Sun could swear that Spike had a smile on his face.
"I… I'm so sorry, Spike," Sun said. "If I had known—"
"YOU NEED NOT APOLOGIZE, SETTING SUN," Spike interjected softly, raising a paw to wave the apology off. "I HAVE SPENT TOO LONG IN THE LANDS OF PONIES AS IT IS; IT IS IMPROPER FOR A DRAGON TO CONSORT WITH SUCH IMPERMANENT AND IMPUDENT CREATURES, AND IT HAS CHANGED ME IN MANY WAYS THAT ARE UNBECOMING OF WHAT I AM."
"If it's any consolation, then maybe we've changed you for the better over all these years," Sun countered, feeling a catch in his throat as he spoke. "Hopefully the other dragons will find something to learn from you, as you found things to learn from us."
A single, large tear rolled out of Spike's massive left eye, leaving a glittering streak across the scales of his cheek and jowls before falling to the ground and leaving a small puddle in its wake.
"PERHAPS THEY WILL, SETTING SUN. ONLY TIME WILL TRULY TELL."
Slowly Spike lowered his head back down, nestling his face into the crook of his arms as his neck snaked around, curling up into a mound the size of a small hill and draping his wings over his sleeping form to cover up his head. Understanding the accord they had reached, Sun made his way back inside, careful to come back in quietly lest he wake anypony up.
As he laid down on his bedroll, Sun recounted the signs he had been given; the stagnant waters, the buzzing, the comforting hoof, the familiar and unfamiliar voice, and finally the sense of surety.
As all of these things rolled over in his mind, he fell to sleep in a matter of minutes.
* * *
A small break in the overcast skies gave the morning a breath of warmth and light that Starlit hadn't experienced on her farm since she had come home. She would've considered it a sign of good fortune, if she were a superstitious enough mare, but it was still a good start to what was sure to be a very bad next few days.
With a final tightening of the straps to her armor and adjustment of her pack, Starlit opened the door to the front garden. Everypony else was already gathered around the teleportation pad. Sun was already sitting inside the circle of sigils, eyeing up each individual one with that inquisitive eye of his, while Spike took a moment to gaze up at the sky and let the warmth of the sun caress his face.
White Eclipse scurried over to her mother, a bright smile on her face and a small book in her teeth, followed by Stalwart Warden, whose expression was far more grim.
"Are you ready? Did you remember to bring enough food?" Eclipse asked as she set the book onto the ground.
"Enough to last me at least two weeks, three if I stretch it out," Starlit answered, tussling Eclipse's hair with her hoof. "With any luck I'll only need half of it, but it never hurts to over prepare."
"You also have the first aid kit I picked up from the guardhouse in town?" Warden asked. "Captain Featherweight docked me three days wages for that, but it was worth every bit."
"I did, it was the last thing I put away before I got kitted up. Thank you for that, by the way."
Eclipse quickly picked her book back up and nudged her head against Starlit's chest. Starlit took the book up in her magic, looking over the very familiar cover.
"It's the Legend Of The Princesses!" Eclipse explained. "You can have it, in case you get bored or need something to help you get to sleep."
"Sweetie, this is your favorite book, are you sure I should take it?" Starlit asked. "It might get dirty, or I might lose it during a fight."
"Don't worry, I already know it back to front anyway," Eclipse countered.
"Then why did you try to make me recite it from memory for you for a month?" Warden asked, genuine betrayal heavy in his voice.
"I like to see you think really hard, you get lines on your forehead when you do," Eclipse answered with a giggle. She quickly scampered back inside before her father could give her a slap upside the head, and Starlit let out a barely stifled giggle as well.
"She gets that from you, you know," Warden chided.
"And I know you love that about us both," Starlit replied, giving her husband a peck on the cheek.
The couple stood facing each other for a moment, and Starlit could tell that neither one of them wanted this to end just yet.
"Oh, I just remembered," Warden said as he reached into a small satchel around his neck, "I wanted you to have this as well."
Starlit took the item from his teeth with her magic; it was a small silver shield, roughly hammered into shape and etched with the image of a mace in the center. Around the mace, with newer etchings than the mace, she could also see what was unmistakably the script of her own cutie mark, along with the small flame in the center engulfing the mace. On the back was a small pin, designed to hold it closed when attached to clothing.
"Warden, is this your guard badge?" Starlit asked.
"Yeah, I took it to Tinker Trot in town to get the new etchings done around the mace," Warden explained. "Daft old codger was kind enough to do it for free when I told him it was a gift for you. 'That's just the most precious thing, truly it is' he said."
"But don't you need this? What about your job?"
"What about my job?" Warden repeated. "Honey, I up and disappeared for a month with nary a word or so much as a how-do-you-do, did you really think they were going to believe that I was trapped in a magical bubble surrounding my house for all that time? I got the sack, and Featherweight told me to never come back."
"Oh, honey, I'm so sorry," Starlit apologized, adding this to the list of grievances she would bring up to Twilight when they finally met in person. "But, if you got fired, then how did you get the first aid kit?"
"I stole it from the guardhouse on my way out," Warden answered, his tone so even and matter-of-fact that Starlit couldn't help but let out a belt of laughter.
"Well, it must really be the end of the world if the most boring, rules-following stallion I've ever met would be willing to steal to help his wife on her perilous journey."
"I'd do anything for you, you know that," Warden replied, kissing Starlit on the forehead. "Just come home safe and we'll call it square."
"I will, I promise," Starlit replied, before embracing and passionately kissing Warden back. The heat of his breath, the smell of his mane, and the beat of his heart were sweeter than anything in the world, and as she drew back she pinned his old badge to the front of her armor, where the straps for the shoulder plates crossed across her chest.
"I'd say it completes the look," Warden said as he tapped the badge with his hoof. "Now, if the lady will excuse me, I have to make sure our daughter isn't about to burn the house down."
"We both know that she's smart enough to not do that," Starlit countered.
"I know, but you'll never leave if I don't leave first, and you have a world to save," Warden replied as he started to walk back to the house.
Starlit stared back at her retreating husband, until the door shut behind him and finally separated them. With a low breath, Starlit turned to face Spike and Sun, both looking in her direction.
"Enjoying the drama that is my life?" Starlit asked as she approached them.
"THAT WOULD BE SARCASM, CORRECT?" Spike asked to Sun, audibly so that both of the ponies could hear.
"That it would, big guy, that it would," Sun answered before turning towards Starlit. "Sorry, but you have to admit it was kind of touching in a bittersweet way."
"You have the soul of a storyteller, Sun," Starlit replied. "Maybe when we're done with this you could write a book about it all."
"I'd like that, I think," Sun replied back. "If I'm feeling generous you'll get co-author credits on it."
"Sun, I could care less if you change my name in it so that ponies don't batter down my door in my twilight years looking for the heroine of Equestria. All I want is for ponies to know that it was a pony that saved their world. Not a princess, not a dragon, but a pony who was in the right place at the right time to do the right thing."
"I think that's what I going to miss most about you; your level of self-effacement and willingness to not trumpet your own accomplishments like your some gift to pony-kind just by merit of your existence," Sun said, tracing the lines of the teleportation circle with his magic and preparing the sigils. "If Twilight and her ilk had been a little more like you then maybe we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with."
"Maybe so, but this isn't goodbye, Sun. We'll meet again when this is all done, I know we will."
"I hope so," Sun said as the final sigil locked in. "For Equestria's sake, I hope we do."
"Are you alright?" Starlit asked, placing a hoof in Sun's shoulder. "You sound distracted."
"I'm alright," Sun answered, giving Starlit a smile. "I think, for the first time since we've met, I know what I'm doing with myself. I just hope that it's the right thing."
"It will be," Starlit replied, hugging Sun close. "It will be, because you are a good stallion that will make the right choice."
"I hope so," Sun said back as he pushed Starlit out of the teleportation pad.
With a flash of silvery light, the teleporter activated and Sun disappeared, leaving only a few quickly fading sparkles of magic in his wake.
"Will he be alright, Spike?" Starlit asked, still facing the teleportation pad.
"HE IS SURE OF HIMSELF AND HIS PURPOSE," Spike answered, his head lowering down to her level. "HE WILL BE AS ALRIGHT AS ANY PONY CAN BE IN HIS CIRCUMSTANCE."
The two of them sat together for a brief moment, just enough for Starlit to internalize what this all meant; this was it. As soon as she climbed up onto Spike's back her fate was set. She would be going to Canterlot, and she would either die there or save Equestria.
Starlit held her head up high, rose to her hooves, and turned to walk to Spike's already outstretched wing.
"It's time, Spike."
"YOU WALK WITH CONFIDENCE INTO THE LION'S DEN, STARLIT SKY," Spike stated. "MAY YOU STRIDE WITH PURPOSE AND STRENGTH, AND MAY THE FIRE INSIDE OF YOU BURN BRIGHTER THAN THAT WHICH WILL SURROUND YOU."
Quickly Starlit settled onto Spike's back, using her magic to anchor in place, and with that familiar lurching sensation, the pair of them ascended into the sky.
An acrid, sweet stench filled Sun's nose as the light from the teleportation faded, one that he immediately recognized from whatever knowledge Spike had imparted into him the night before. Looking down he saw that he was now fetlock-deep in murky, brackish water, or at least what he assumed was water. Wherever he was it was as dark as night, and making the sudden shift from a well lit morning left him dazed and nearly blind.
"Silence, you there?" Sun asked in his head. "C'mon, I could use some guidance here."
He received no response, even as he began to feel the rhythmic pulsing in the back of his head that normally signaled her presence. The beat in his head was slight, more subtle than normal, as if the connection they shared was tenuous at best.
"And I'm alone, figures," Sun groused to himself as he illuminated his horn. The silvery magic made for an adequate light, and when his eyes finally adjusted he found himself in as alien an environment as he had ever been in.
The water he was standing in was indeed murky, but in the presence of his magical light began to glow a faint teal green underneath him, with thin lines of light shimmering underneath the surface and tracing towards the numerous trees that surrounded him. The bark of the trees was smooth with small nodules of wood that ended in a blunt point surrounding their bases. Each of these nodules was tipped with a small teal light, and the lines under the water traced up the trees, creating swirling, irregular patterns on their bark. Moss hung low off of the trees, swaying gently in the slight breeze.
"It's better, at least, than being frozen or seared by the sun," Sun stated to nopony.
Noticing a small break in the tree line with a thicker band of lights running towards it, Sun started forward. The slosh of the water against his legs and the occasional snap of a branch pulling against his cloak were the only sounds that weren't inside his own head. He took time to mentally catalog the various plants he saw around him, from small trees with white nodules of salt hanging off of their leaves to large plumes of grass that snagged on his cloak and cut against his skin when he got too close to them.
He walked for seemingly hours, with only the lights in the water to guide his path, and after too long felt that he was getting himself lost following random strings of underwater lights. The nonstop beating in the back of his head was grating on his nerves as well, and he needed a place to rest his hooves.
Noticing a small protrusion of land off of the path of lights, Sun went to the side to take a rest. As soon as he left the path of lights they faded into the water, leaving him alone with the darkness and only his horn to prove that he wasn't lost in a stagnant void.
"What're you playing at, Silence?" Sun muttered to himself. "You tell me to come out here on my own, and then you stop talking to me and expect me to just move on without a clue."
"Hello?" a voice asked from behind Sun, one so small and demure that it almost wasn't there at all.
Whipping around, Sun brightened his horn enough to see a figure pushing their way through the brush. She was a pony, presumably female judging by the size and muzzle shape, who reflexively shut her eyes as he brightened up his horn. Her coat was a pale yellow, and her long, leaf-and-stick strewn mane was a similarly pale pink color.
"Who are you?" Sun demanded as he approached the stranger.
"Turn that down, please!" the mystery pony pleaded, shielding her eyes with her hoof. "You don't want the Shifters to see that, do you?"
"Answer the question," Sun reiterated, taking a few steps forward. "Who are you, and we'll go from there."
"My name's Fluttershy, I live just a little ways away!" the pony answered, sounding like she was on the verge of tears as she plopped down onto her backside. "Please, I just come here to collect moss!"
Feeling a twinge of guilt for having scared this pony so badly, Sun lowered the luminosity of his horn to just enough that he could still see Fluttershy. Peeking past her hoof with a big, dewey teal eye, she cautiously lowered her leg and scooted a few more feet back towards the tree line.
"I'm sorry if I scared you, but I have to be careful," Sun said, sitting down where he was standing. "I'm not sure if I'm welcome here or not."
"Nopony's been welcome here for a long time," Fluttershy said, her words coming in between heaving breaths. "I thought I was the only pony that lived here, if I'm going to be honest."
"There aren't any other ponies out here?" Sun asked, starting to feel a bit more worried.
"Not that I've ever seen, no," Fluttershy answered, eyes darting between Sun and the stand of trees to her left. "Just… just little ole Fluttershy, all by her lonesome in the swamp."
Just as Sun started to apologize, Fluttershy bolted to the the left, disappearing into the trees. Scrambling to his hooves, Sun darted after her, snagging his cloak on a few branches and falling face first into the swamp water as he chased after her.
"Wait, come back!" Sun called, lofting his horn up to shine a light forward. He could just barely hear her hoofbeats echo away through his waterlogged ears, and stumbled upright as he ran after her, following both the lines of lights and the wake she was leaving.
"I don't have anything you want, just leave me alone!" Fluttershy pleaded back.
"Please, I'm lost and you're the only pony I've seen since I got here!" Sun retorted. "I know we got off on the wrong hoof, but you just startled me!"
"If you're startled by me, then you won't last a second aga—"
Fluttershy's voice cut off, and Sun hoped that she hadn't gotten caught by any of the numerous underwater predators that he assumed were lurking off of the beaten path. He instinctually dimmed his horn at the very thought, and so didn't notice Fluttershy standing stock still in front of him until he had barreled her over and sent both of them plunging into the swamp.
Sun and Fluttershy both surfaced with a gasp, and he turned to face his quarry.
"Look, I'm sorr—"
He couldn't get his second apology out before Fluttershy slapped a hoof over his mouth, her gaze transfixed forward with pinprick pupils. Her whole body quaked, involuntary spasms that only seemed to be held in check by her sheer force of will. Turning to look where she was looking, Sun could understand why she was so frightened.
Hovering above the surface of the water a few dozen feet off was a creature that Sun could only describe as a bug-pony. It had a shiny black carapace that glinted and glittered in the dim light of his horn. Diaphanous wings on its shimmering teal back fluttered with such rapidity that he could only tell they were there but the low, droning buzz they let out. And topping it all off was a face dominated by two large, teal, compound eyes that shone with a slickness that made every facet shine like a gem. The creature buzzed and flitted about above the surface of the water, seemingly searching for something that it could not find.
Sun's gaze shot over to Fluttershy, who slowly gestured backward with her head. Taking care to not make any extraneous noise, they slowly started scooting backwards through the water, Fluttershy keeping her hoof on Sun's mouth as he slightly lit his horn to light their retreat.
It was with dawning horror that Sun saw the tracing teal lines in the water illuminate and trace towards the creature, who took notice and followed the lines all the way back to the pair of them. It let out a low, breathy hiss as it took notice of them, and Fluttershy leapt to her hooves.
"Run!" she screamed before bolting back the way they came. Sun didn't need to be told twice as he chased after her and away from whatever horror was behind him.
Sun felt his breath burning in his lungs as he swerved between trees and around bushes, his horn now fully illuminated since the need for stealth was all but lost. He was able to keep some pace with Fluttershy, but could see now that she was a pegasus and was using her wings to help gain a little extra speed by beating them in time with her strides. The horrific droning buzz behind him was starting to get closer and closer, and feeling his ill-timed confidence surge, turned to strike it down with a bolt of magic.
As the silvery beam shot out from his horn the bug-pony deftly dodged in midair, and followed by what could only be called a smirk, it was enveloped in a glut of teal flame that, when they receded, exposed a perfect copy of Sun, down to the scratches he had gotten from the cutting grass.
"What're you doing?! Run!" Fluttershy called to him. "That thing will kill you!"
"You get out of here, I'll hold it—!"
A searing lance of pain streaked down Sun's side, as white hot as the explosion in the mines, and Sun let out a cry of pain as he toppled into the swamp. His wound sizzled as his side hit the water, and before he could pull himself up a familiar hoof pressed his head down into the murky darkness. He rotated his eye to face the surface, and could see his own face, distorted though it was, staring back at him with a grim smile.
Feeling the energy surging inside of him, Sun let out a muted scream of defiance from under the water and shot a beam of magic directly at his own face. The creature didn't have time to react before its head was engulfed in silver light, and when it toppled into the water its head, his head, was little more than a charred skull.
Spent for energy and feeling his side burning all the more acutely, Sun passed out in the murky darkness, the last thing he saw being the faint teal glow all around him.
* * *
Fluttershy was, in a word, apoplectic. In the space of the last fifteen minutes she'd been threatened with death, chased through the dark by a unicorn with magic the same color as the lights from the Misty Vale, nearly been eviscerated by a Shifter, and then saw the same unicorn turn its skull into a chunk of burned wood with a blast of magic that then seemingly killed him from sheer exhaustion. The only question she had left to ask herself is why she was hauling this unicorn's body back to her hut in the hopes that she could save his life.
"Why can't you just leave well enough alone?" she whined to herself. "You have enough to take care of just by yourself, why didn't you just leave him in the swamp for the bugs and fish?"
Fluttershy had been muttering this mantra and many others like it as she slogged through the water back to her hut, the baskets strapped to her haunches laden with healing flowers and roots as well as some heavy moss to bandage the unicorn's wounds with. She'd just have to explain to everyone else why she was late and why she had a stranger with her, both of which were conversations she didn't feel nearly confident enough to have yet.
The first wave of relief hit her when she saw the familiar blue and green glimmering of the lanterns outside of her home, followed by another when she saw a few of her animal friends scurry out from the various cubbyholes and hastily crafted doors she had created for them over the years.
"Scale-Tooth, could you get a space ready in the living room?" she gently asked to a thirteen foot long crocodile that waddled towards her. "We have a guest tonight, and he needs some healing."
The crocodile let out a series of low hisses as well as clattering its jaw open and shut a few times.
"I know it's unexpected, but today's been… interesting, to say the least," Fluttershy answered. "If you do this for me, I'll make sure to catch you a big juicy catfish for dinner tonight."
Seemingly sated, the crocodile let another low grumble out from the depths of its throat as it scuttled back towards the house.
Several more of Fluttershy's animals followed in her wake, both pleased to see her and curious about the strange pony draped across her back. They chattered, chirped, hissed, and buzzed to each other in a cacophony that was starting to wear the single nerve she had left thin.
"Everyone, I know this is weird," Fluttershy said as she turned about face in front of the rough driftwood door, "but we have a guest who needs his rest tonight, so if you all could go back to your hutches, hovels, and hives for the time being I would very much appreciate it. I promise I'll explain it all tomorrow, okay?"
There was a general murmur of assent from the collected insects, mammals, and amphibians, who all hurriedly scrambled, hopped, and flew away as Fluttershy made her way inside, taking care not to knock the stranger's forehead on the frame. After what he had experienced, he certainly didn't need a blow to the head to complicate matters.
A sweet smell of lemongrass pervaded the main living space of the hut, and in the center of the room where normally her work table was instead was a flat reed-grass mat with a large pile of moss and feathers situated at one end. Scale-Tooth was just finishing the last touches on the moss when he saw Fluttershy come in, scooting backward with a look of awaiting gratitude.
"You did very good, thank you," Fluttershy said as she hefted the stranger onto the mat, keeping his wounded side up. She quickly rubbed the crocodile along his forehead before gentling shooing him out the door, leaving her to the stranger.
Taking care as she moved the burnt edges of the cloak away from his side, Fluttershy took a reflexive breath in as she saw his side. The edges of the skin where the Shifter's magic had hit him were curled back and blackened, while the underlying muscle was almost completely seared to the bone. Thankfully the heat had sealed the wound shut so that he wouldn't bleed out, but it was a very nasty injury that had a very high chance of getting infected after being submerged in swamp water.
Moving around the hut with speed she normally only reserved for her animals, she quickly tied her hair back with some woven vines, grabbed up a few pastes made from the local flora in small earthen jars, and a huge pile of moss and got to work. Gently rubbing the paste into his wounds, she began to chant the old, familiar words that her father had taught her when he passed the old craft down to her.
"From the earth comes life, from life comes pain, from pain comes wisdom, from wisdom comes age, from age comes death, and from death comes the earth."
Over and over Fluttershy chanted the words to herself, rhythmically rubbing the pastes into his wounds, and as it had so many times before the wound began stitch and heal itself. A soft squelch erupted from the wound as a spurt of blood hit the mat, being replaced by the salve as it created new muscle and skin to replace that which he had lost. Brushing any remaining paste off of her hooves and back into the jar, Fluttershy grabbed the moss and carefully layered it onto the wound. The salves would bind to it, and in a few hours her guest would be right as rain.
With a sigh of relief Fluttershy left the stranger on the mat, breathing slowly and rhythmically as her healing did its work. She had had a very stressful day, and tending to her animals would help put her nerves back together.
* * *
A creaking of wood roused Sun, who slowly flipped upright, expecting to feel a biting pain in his side but instead feeling a rhythmic, soft pulsing, like hooves gently massaging his skin. As his eyes focused up, he looked back to his wound and instead saw a sight that nearly made him vomit.
Where he had expected to see raw flesh or some kind of bandaging there was instead a grey-green, pulsating, slick mass plastered to the side of his body. It writhed and squelched in time with his heartbeat, and every pulse sent another small trickle of his own blood seeping out from underneath it where it was forming a small puddle.
"Please don't scream, if you would, I just got the possums to sleep," a tiny, familiar voice said to his right. Whipping around, Sun saw Fluttershy, now more visible with the illumination from a small fire in a pit on the far side of the room.
"What is this, what did you do to me?!" Sun demanded.
"It's healing your wound," Fluttershy answered, taking a step back towards the door she had just entered from. "You took a really bad hit from that Shifter, and this was the only thing I knew how to do to help, I'm sorry."
Sun looked back to the pulsating mass; for as viscerally disturbing to look at as it was, it didn't hurt, and as far as he could tell he was in better health than when he'd fallen under the swamp.
"Then… thanks," Sun said, "and I'm sorry for pretty much everything that's happened since you snuck up on me in the woods."
Fluttershy didn't say anything more, just stood by the door and did her best to avoid eye contact.
"I'm Setting Sun, if we're gonna redo our introductions," Sun continued, trying to prompt her to speak. "You said your name was Fluttershy, right?"
Fluttershy nodded her head weakly.
"Uh… do you know how long this is gonna take?" Sun asked, gesturing to the mass on his side. "I have to get to the Glowing Wastes, it's important."
Fluttershy's head shot up upon Sun mentioning his destination, and her knees started to shake in place.
"You can't go there, nopony goes there!" Fluttershy said, her breathing coming in sharp, short huffs. "The Misty Vale is forbidden!"
"Forbidden or not, it's where I'm going," Sun replied, bemused to get more of a reaction out of the now terrified pegasus. "I have to find somepony there, and it isn't hyperbole to say that the fate of Equestria could very well hang in the balance here."
"Look, I don't know what this 'Equestria' is, but you can't go out there!" Fluttershy reiterated, this time more forcefully and punctuating it with a stamped hoof.
"You don't know what Equestria is?" Sun asked back, rising to his hooves and narrowing his eyes. "You live in Equestria, everypony does."
"I don't live anywhere called Equestria, I live in the Magic-Flood Swamp," Fluttershy countered. "Did you come from this Equestria?"
"I did, but that would be a very long story to tell to you, and I have to keep movi—"
A particularly forceful pulse from the mass struck a memory in Sun's head, one of the sensations that Spike had given him, and he rubbed his chin as a plan began to foment.
"Say, how much longer is this thing going to take to work?" Sun asked. "If it's healing me then I doubt I'm in a fit state to go anywhere."
"It should only be an hour or so until it fully absorbs into your body," Fluttershy stated, "and if I'm being honest you could probably leave now if you'll just promise you won't go out to the Misty Vale."
"Then it looks like I've got an hour to convince you to let me go," Sun said, sitting back down. "This is going to be something of a cut down version of this story considering I don't really have a whole day to tell it, but everything I'm about to tell you is the complete truth as far as I know it."
Cocking her head curiously, Fluttershy sat down by the door, closing the latch with her teeth as she did.
"You have one hour, and I don't want to tell you your business, but you had better use it well."
* * *
A rhythmic pulse beat in the back of Silence's mind, one that she had come to expect and even relish in the last few weeks of the task that she had been bade. Sun had finally come to the Wastes, and with that her job was now finished.
Rising from her seated posture, her knees shaking and her chitinous wings hanging limp at her side, she shuffled her way across the hive, every hoofstep a struggle. She had given so much of herself to Setting Sun; her knowledge, her power, her will. Her legs, wings, and even her horn were now riddled with holes from the dispersal of her vital essence, a state that she found pride in. She was so much like her beloved queen now, and soon would be reunited with her.
The trip through the labyrinthine tunnels and walkways of the hive was grueling, but Silence's keen sense for her queen's position at all times was enough to see her to the end of her journey. All she had hoped to do was explain to Sun how much he had mattered to her in the end. He had given her a purpose that few drones like herself were ever given, and by serving him, she was able to most ably serve her queen.
The dull green glow from the queen's chambers filled Silence with a warmth that her kind found very rarely, an almost euphoric state that invigorated her enough to try and break out into a run. Her hopes of rushing in with news of her success where dashed, however, when she lost her footing and fell forward past the threshold and found herself too weak to rise back to her hooves again.
"My dear, precious drone, why do you carry on so?" asked the most soothing, sensuous voice she had ever had the pleasure to hear.
"I… this one has done its job most ably, your majesty," Silence replied, her voice quavering and weak from sheer exhaustion. "The unicorn has come, he is in the swamps to the east."
A quiet clatter of chitinous hooves against soft hive-floor grew steadily louder as her queen approached, and Silence found herself fortunate to see that their hooves were similarly marred indeed. A nimbus of bright green magic lifted Silence from the floor, her limbs and wings hanging limp even as her neck was gently held in place so that she could face her queen.
"Ah, you are the one called Silence," the queen stated, her globular green eyes scanning up and down Silence's form. "He gave you that name, correct?"
"He did, and now he is here, just as your majesty asked," Silence answered.
"You have been a most capable assistant, Silence, far more than your brethren. You may make a request of me, and if it is within fate's grasp I will grant it, for your aid to my cause."
"This one wishes only to serve," Silence answered, the warmth rising in her chest again. "This one has only ever wished to serve."
"Then serve you shall, until the cause is completed."
The magic encompassing Silence's body quickly shifted from green to that familiar, lovely silver that she had gifted to Sun, and with rhythmic beats and pulses she felt the vitality return to her body. She had done well, and in her return to the Heart she could rest after having served.
It didn't even hurt when she faded away, a final kindness from the queen that Silence knew loved her.
The constant rush of wind whipping past Starlit's ears was starting to grate on her nerves after the fifth hour of consecutive flight that day, not to mention that her hooves were practically frozen solid from the chill of the sky. It came as a welcome relief when she felt her stomach leap up into her throat, a sure sign that Spike was starting to descend.
Four days she and Spike had been flying, heading in a generally northwestern direction. Their progress had only been slowed by Starlit's need to get off of Spike to stretch and sleep, and in the intervals where they weren't traveling they didn't speak much. Starlit was honestly thankful for Spike's taciturn nature; it helped her keep the important things in mind.
"WHEN WE LAND, I WOULD SPEAK WITH YOU," Spike said, his rumbling voice more reduced in its grandiosity.
A large clearing in the forest line below them gave Spike ample room to alight, his landing deceptively quiet given his size. Starlit gently levitated herself off of Spike's back, shaking out her stiff legs as she descended.
"What's wrong?" Starlit asked as she refastened her saddlebags. "You haven't exactly been chatty over this trip."
"THIS IS WHERE OUR PATHS MUST DIVERGE, STARLIT SKY," Spike answered. "TO THE WEST, ONLY A DAY'S JOURNEY BY HOOF, YOU WILL COME TO THE BASE OF A GREAT MOUNTAIN. UNLESS IT HAS FALLEN PREY TO THE RAVAGES OF TIME THERE WILL BE A ROAD THAT ASCENDS AROUND THE MOUNTAIN, WHICH WILL LEAD TO THE GATE OF ANTIQUITIES. BEYOND THE GATE YOU MUST FOLLOW THE MAIN ROAD FOR A DAY AND A NIGHT TO REACH THE PALACE, WHERE I AM SURE TWILIGHT WAITS FOR YOU."
"What?" Starlit countered. "I thought you were going to fly me into the city, what changed?"
"I KNOW THESE CIRCUMSTANCES ARE NOT IDEAL, BUT THIS IS HOW IT MUST BE. IF I AM SEEN THEN TWILIGHT SPARKLE WILL ACCELERATE HER PLANS, WHATEVER THEY MAY BE. YOU REQUIRE THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE."
Starlit stared up at Spike, his head pointed off to the east and his eyes pointedly not making contact with Starlit's own. Gently she laid a hoof on Spike's side, a tiny dot of blue against the sea of iridescent purple.
"That's not all, is it? There's something you're not telling me."
A low, throaty chuckle echoed inside of Starlit's mind, a mirthless laugh if ever she had heard one.
"WE DRAGONS ARE POOR DECEIVERS, INDEED," Spike said, flicking an eye down towards her. "I HAVE TO RETURN TO MY ANCESTRAL HOMELAND, THE REASON WHY I WOULD PREFER NOT TO BURDEN YOU WITH."
"Spike, you can talk to me if you need to. This might be the last time you can if you're going home."
Starlit saw Spike's eye flick away, almost ashamed, before shutting with that slow, slick grinding sound. After a moment the eye opened again, and from her position on the ground Starlit could barely see a few of the sparks in his pupil fading away.
"YOUR CARE FOR ME IS APPRECIATED, BUT UNNECESSARY. YOU HAVE FAR GREATER THINGS TO DEVOTE YOUR EMOTIONS TO THAN ONE OLD DRAKE WHO'S BEEN AWAY FROM HOME FOR FAR TOO LONG."
Starlit looked down, a small catch forming in her throat. As much as she didn't want him to go, she knew that this was how it was always going to have to shake out. Spike's prescience had told her as much, but it didn't mean she had to make the break a clean one.
"Spike, could you come down here?" Starlit asked, gesturing with her front hoof. Slowly the dragon's neck curled around until he was level with Starlit, one of his massive green eyes staring back at her.
With as wide of a grip as she could get, Starlit hugged the spot next to Spike's eye, letting the warmth of his scales bleed into her for one last time.
"Thank you, Spike, for everything. You may not be the little dragon that I first met at the start of all of this anymore, but I wouldn't be here without you. I promise I'll make Twilight pay for all the time she stole from you."
Unexpectedly, Starlit felt a small pair of arms grasp around her leg, and Starlit looked down with a start to see a familiar, shimmering, purple and green baby dragon returning her hug.
"Thank you, too," Spike said, exchanging a tearful smile with Starlit before pulling away into thin threads of light that disappeared into the cavernous expanse of his true body's pupil.
Spike slowly raised his head back up, flexing his wings out as he did and sending a heavy gust of wind rustling through the trees around them.
"OF ALL THE PONIES IN EQUESTRIA THAT TWILIGHT SPARKLE COULD'VE CHOSEN TO LIE TO AND MANIPULATE, IT BRINGS ME PEACE TO KNOW SHE MADE THE MISTAKE OF PICKING YOU. FARE THEE WELL, STARLIT SKY, AND GO FORTH WITH THE FIRE OF A DRAGON IN YOUR HEART."
With another gale-force gust of wind that threatened to blow Starlit completely off of her hooves, Spike rocketed up into the sky, shaking the trees and even blowing a couple of them over as he ascended. Starlit sat and watched the great dragon leave, and just as he crested through the clouds a great gout of green fire spilled forth from his mighty maw, a thin scar of emerald light across the graying sky.
With a slow, calming breath and wiping the tears from her eyes, Starlit turned to face the west, the sun at her back and Canterlot ahead.
* * *
The night dropped across the world faster than Starlit had expected it to, although whether it was due to the encroaching winter or her own distracted mind she couldn't say. It took her about an hour after sundown to find an open enough spot to sleep in, although she wouldn't hazard a fire just in case there were wild animals or worse in the trees.
Sidling up against a flat rock, her bedroll up behind her head and her sword and sheathe wrapped up in her hooves, Starlit slowly nodded off. It wasn't very comfortable, and she wasn't looking forward to popping every bone in her back in the morning, but it would work for a few hours sleep.
The forest was filled with sounds, more than she'd ever heard in the Everfree; the calls of night-dwelling birds, the chittering and scampering of small animals making their way up and down the trees, even the chirping of insects. The symphony of sounds was soothing, and for a long while Starlit felt the weight of the world lift off of her shoulders, replaced by a blanket of chill night air and the sounds of life going on.
The snap of a twig broke the harmonious sounds of the night, a discordant crack that set Starlit's ears up and alert. A long pause, and then a second snap, this one closer, and Starlit was awake, on her hooves, and pulling her sword out in a flash of magic. Slowly she turned about on the spot, taking in each and every detail that she could to try and find the source of the noise.
Another snapping twig drew her attention to her right, where just at the edge of the clearing was the unmistakeable, shambling form of a thestral. As it slowly stepped into the light Starlit could see its desiccated, featherless wings hanging limply next to its stark, withered rib cage, and a low, rattling moan left its peeled back lips.
With a flick of her horn Starlit hurled her sword at its forehead, burying the blade up to the hilt with a squelch of blood and a crack of bone. The beast shuddered, fell limp with its head held aloft by the sword, and then hit the ground with a heavy thud as Starlit withdrew the sword.
Starlit couldn't take the time to breathe out a sigh of relief as another snap of branches through the brush made her twirl about face, coming face to face with another thestral. This one she dispatched quickly with a blow to the neck that severed its head from its shoulders, only to find that a trio of the beasts were coming up from behind.
"She won't let me have a moments peace, will she?" Starlit groused to herself as she got to work. A pair of the thestrals she dispatched with a single stab through the chest followed by an upward slash that sliced through the skull of the other, before wheeling the sword around her own head and driving through the temple of the final thestral.
And yet there were more thestrals, seemingly a horde of them coming from the forest. Starlit started to back away quickly, weighing whether to run or not, before tripping over the corpse of the first thestral and landing on her back. With a heavy thwack Starlit cracked her head against a tree root, letting out a cry of pain as her sword clattered to the ground.
Starlit curled into herself, ready to spring her legs out and beat the monsters away when they descended on her, but the all too familiar sensation of stamping hooves against her flesh never came. Cracking one eye open, Starlit indeed saw the hoard surrounding her, but they all simply moved past and ignored her as if she wasn't there and hadn't just killed five of them.
"What is this?" Starlit thought, her heart thundering in her chest as the thestrals delicately stepped over and around her.
"A peace offering," a very familiar voice answered, one that Starlit could feel emanating from the black stone hanging around her neck.
As the last of the hoard moved past, the black crystal, that shard of the Heart of Fate, slipped its leather strap and floated out in front of Starlit. Starlit rose to her hooves as ambient light was drawn down from the moon and stars overhead, coalescing and shifting until, much like Spike's shimmering avatar, Twilight Sparkle stood before Starlit. She was dressed more finely than Starlit had ever seen her before, with an ornate breastplate, barding, and horseshoes made of gold and fine purple stones, brought together with a five-pointed, angular crown, each point topped with a shimmering, faceted black stone not too dissimilar to Starlit's own.
"You've gotten better with your swordplay, judging by the bodies," Twilight said, examining the thestral corpses that littered the clearing.
"Come down here yourself and you might get a demonstration," Starlit spat back.
"You seem upset with me, Starlit Sky, and justifiably so, I'd wager."
"If you don't answer my questions to my satisfaction then I will flay you and use your pelt as a rug when I find you," Starlit answered, holding her bloodied sword aloft.
"Hypothesis proven, it would seem," Twilight replied as she eyed the sword. "I'd say you're smart enough not to try and take a swing at me now, and seeing as I can't maintain this spell at this distance for too long then let's at least lay some ground work. You ask me a question, which I will answer as honestly as I can, and the I'll ask you a question, which I hope you'll answer as honestly as you can."
"And why, exactly, should I put any stock into anything you have to tell me?" Starlit growled. "You've done nothing but lie to me for a month, and your lies have gotten me killed so often that they're all running together in my mind. You can't possibly think you are in the right, to trick and deceive me for this long."
"I don't think I'm in the right, Starlit, I know I am," Twilight countered, "and what you call lies I simply call compartmentalization. There were certain things you didn't need to know to achieve the ends I needed you to achieve, so I only told you what you needed to hear. Now I have no more reason to do this; even with you on the warpath towards me there's nothing you can do to stop what is happening now, so I don't have any more reason to hide the facts from you."
Starlit stared Twilight down, her brow furrowed and her jaw tense as she tried to read anything off of the Princess. To Twilight's credit, she seemed genuine in her self-assurance, but Starlit had been duped by that seeming innocence before.
"Any question at all?" Starlit asked, keeping the sword aloft.
"Any question, and I'll tell you if it isn't something I know the answer to," Twilight answered.
"Why my family? Why did you trap them under that dome for a month? Why didn't you do what you said you would and keep them suspended in time?"
"That's technically three questions, but I'll humor you since two of them have more or less the same answer," Twilight began. "As for why I picked your family in general, I needed a pony who was outside of Chrysalis's purview, a breed of pony that are growing rarer and rarer these days what with interbreeding with the tainted and the sheer gap of time. As for why I didn't suspend them in time, that's because nopony can do that, not even one as powerful as I."
"Horseshit, you can't," Starlit reflexively spat back.
"Profanities aside, it is the truth," Twilight continued. "In all my years experimenting with the way magic works and the nature of the fabric of reality, I have never been able to halt or alter the flow of time."
"But Chrysalis could, with her Heart of Fate," Starlit replied. "She governs over fate and time and all of that, and that's why you tried to take it from her."
"Oh, somepony's been doing her homework!" Twilight retorted with a sly grin. "Either that or you had an expert source from the far north to fill in the gaps. Either way, I think it's time I asked my question, and then we go our separate ways for the time being. I expect we'll be meeting soon enough as it is, and I want to prepare a proper welcome for you."
"Then talk," Starlit said, her sword still held aloft.
"What do you expect to get out of this?" Twilight asked, cocking her head to the side. "You've done your part in all of this, as I'm sure Setting Sun is doing his part right now, so why? You have your family back, you don't have to be risking life and limb to track me down, and yet you decided to go on the hunt of your own volition. Why, precisely, do you care?"
An odd wave of relief spread through Starlit's chest, and before she could stop herself she let out a short, nervous chuckle. She knew what type of pony she was dealing with now, and now that she knew she could plan around that fact.
"I guess I'll humor you, since those three questions all have more or less the same answer," Starlit began, lowering her sword. She wiped the blood off of the blade with the hem of her traveling cloak and put it back into the sheathe a few feet away.
"Being cheeky won't answer my question, Starlit Sky."
"But it does make me feel better," Starlit countered. "As for the why of all of this, it's because you lied to me."
"It can't be that simple," Twilight replied, a smile crossing her lips.
"It really is, though. You lied to me about what I was doing; you told me that I would be saving Equestria, giving everypony a new chance at a happy and prosperous future after you and the other Princesses destroyed everything. That obviously isn't your intention, or else you wouldn't have lied to me about so many things. Things you didn't even have to lie about, like the anti-magic field in the Crystal Empire or what would happen to my family while I was gone."
Twilight's smirk slowly dropped as Starlit spoke, and she could feel Twilight's air of confidence started to wane even though she wasn't physically present.
"So, the way I have it figured, is that I'm doing what you told me I was going to be doing," Starlit continued as she approached the shimmering figure in front of her. "I'm going to save Equestria, I'm going to protect my family, and I'm going to fulfill the promise I made to you. And if it means that I have to kill you to do it then I'll do it, because I keep my word."
"How very noble of you to do so," Twilight retorted, moving towards Starlit until they were but a foot apart, "but if you truly want what is best for Equestria, then you will go home and forget that we ever met. You have your happy ending, Starlit Sky; would you deny everypony else theirs, just to keep your word?"
With an errant gust of wind, the shimmering form of Twilight Sparkle dissipated into the night, leaving Starlit alone with the thestral corpses. The only sounds she could hear were just the wind, the chirping of insects, and her own heartbeat in her ears.
Starlit quickly packed up her bedroll, put her sword belt back on, reattached the black stone to its leather strap, and walked out into the forest; after what had just transpired she knew that any more sleep was out of the question, and she had a Princess to prove wrong.
* * *
Starlit could feel her steps grow sluggish as the sun rose behind her, casting the world in a pale blue that did nothing to help her sleep deprivation after Twilight's imposition last night. If there was one thing that the Princess of Magic could be counted on, it's that she seemed to be keeping her word; Starlit hadn't seen hide nor desiccated hair of a thestral since they passed her by last night. Starlit didn't expect this gift to hold for much longer though, despite whatever control Twilight seemed to hold over them; Starlit had the sneaking suspicion that Twilight wouldn't be too pleased that Starlit was continuing on towards Canterlot.
A heavy gust of wind pull Starlit out of her own thoughts, and as she focused up she noticed that she wasn't walking through dirt and leaves any more. Below her hooves were stones, obviously worn down by years of erosion and decay, but their shapes were too uniform to have been naturally formed. She was on a road, and where there was a road there would be civilization.
Another few minutes of walking, with successive gusts of wind that sent chills down her spine, the wall of trees broke out into a sight that Starlit never thought she'd ever see; before her, towering up into the skies and built into a cliff face that stretched from one horizon to the other, was a city, ascending in a zig-zagging pattern along the road she was currently on. At the ground level ahead there were many ruined buildings, some barely more than piles of rubble while others were simply missing walls and roofs. The skill of the craftsmanship and architecture was a sight to behold, putting even Celestia's illusion of Sunspire to shame, which made its fall into decay all the more upsetting to see.
As Starlit's eyes scanned up and down the city in the cliff, she could see, just near the top and just under the cloud layer, there was a massive building akin to Luna's palace in New Selene. Starlit couldn't make out any of its details, save for a brilliant beam of purple light that was emanating from it and into the sky beyond the clouds.
"How did I miss this from Spike's back, this place is massive," Starlit muttered to herself. "This trek is going to easily take days."
A clatter of stones to her left drew Starlit's attention, and she whipped into a ready stance with her sword floating before her. Slowly a thestral dragged itself out of one of the ruined buildings, a unicorn specifically. It eyed her immediately, a screeching hiss echoing out of its mouth and through the ruins around them that was almost immediately responded to with more and more screeches ascending up the road and into Canterlot itself. Another clattering of stones drew Starlit's eyes to the right, where a pegasus thestral fluttered over on desiccated wings pulsing with purple energy, and dead ahead was an earth pony thestral that had already begun a mad charge towards her.
"And Twilight isn't going to make this trek an easy one," Starlit said, manifesting a shield of glimmering teal magic around herself and charging towards the thestral in front of her.
* * *
A faded, distant screech of a thestral echoed through the halls of the palace, and Twilight slowly opened her eyes as it reached her ears. Starlit Sky had arrived at the base of the mountain, as Twilight knew she would.
A smile, rueful and mischievous, spread across Twilight's face. There was something that she could appreciate in Starlit's dogged determination, as misplaced as it was; it reminded her so much of herself all those centuries ago, when all of this had been set into motion. The willingness to see a plan through to its conclusion was a trait that she admired, and one that had drawn her to Starlit after her many years of observing the unicorn who was now laying a one-pony siege to the greatest city the world had ever known.
With delicate steps Twilight descended off of her throne, now the only one left unoccupied in Canterlot's throne room save for Chrysalis's. The Changeling Queen would soon be returning to her, if Setting Sun was doing his part in this correctly, if not in body then certainly in spirit. Centuries of planning were all coming together, and it all hinged on a few key players still left in the game.
"It's a shame that it all had to come down to this," Twilight mused to herself as she walked down the long hall towards the balcony that overlooked the castle city itself. "So much pain and bloodshed could've been avoided, if only you had seen fit to listen to reason."
With a brief spark of her horn Twilight pulled her crown off, looking it over with a keen eye. The five perfectly angled triangular points, the glittering of the gold as it caught the first rays of the morning's light, and the five shards of the Heart of Fate that she had managed to keep hidden away from Chrysalis that shone even as their blackness threatened to absorb all the light around them.
"So much effort, so much pain, for five tiny things," Twilight said. "A way to secure Equestria's ascendency forevermore, and I was the only pony ambitious enough to see it through to the end."
She slowly levitated her crown back into place, nestled just behind her horn, and made her way back to the throne. Even as every piece was falling into place, Twilight couldn't help but feel a sense of melancholy weigh down her heart; even when everything came to plan, it would just be her again, seated at the top of the world. Loneliness was unbecoming of a Princess, soon to be a Queen. She needed subjects, ponies whose lives she could better, and that would take so very long to accomplish.
"Then again, I suppose I'm not entirely alone, am I?" Twilight said towards the thrones. "I'll have you four to guide me, remind me of what an eternity of peace really costs."
The three statues of Celestia, Luna, and Cadance, entombed in crystal and perched upon their thrones, said nothing in response. The only other sound in the chamber was the steady, low beat of the Crystal Heart, hovering above Twilight's own throne, and with each beat a pulse of magic was drawn out of her fellow alicorns. Twilight didn't know if they were in pain or not, but they should've known that this might be an eventuality if they decided to return. Twilight had made it perfectly clear the last time they had all gathered that they would become a part of the plan, by choice or by force.
The slight trickling of the water beneath Fluttershy's small dock was just the soothing balm she needed after the harrowing conversation she had had with Setting Sun, on top of the general chaos of the last few hours. Just herself, a fishing pole, and the anticipation of Scale-Tooth's dinner when she saw the bobber go under the waterline.
In truth, though, her mind was whirling with thoughts; she'd told Sun to rest for a while, to let the patch set in and finish its work, but it was a tiny white lie just to give herself some space alone to think. She'd even shooed the animals away so that their chatter wouldn't distract her.
"I can't let him leave," she thought to herself as she clenched her jaw. "Even if he could handle what's out there, I can't have his death on my conscience. He's just one pony, and nopony ever comes back from the Misty Vale."
A tug on the line drew Fluttershy's attention, and with a mighty yank she hoisted the hook upward. A quick, intense struggle ensued as she fought with whatever was on the other end of the line, only to succeed with a splash of murky water as a catfish about the length of her own torso flew out of the swamp and landed on the dock with a wet thud.
As if on cue, a low hiss rumbled out of Scale-Tooth from the other side of her hut, followed by a quick scrambling of claws and scales on wood and the crocodile scurried to his dinner.
"Oh, you poor thing, you must be so hungry," Fluttershy cooed as she quickly kicked Scale-Tooth his dinner. The crocodile messily devoured the still writhing fish, biting down onto it with blood-squelching force before swallowing it back with a series of quick gulps. Scale-Tooth uttered a low, contented hiss as his big, yellow eyes focused onto Fluttershy.
"Well, you are very welcome," Fluttershy replied.
Another hiss, followed by a few growls and clattering of the jaw were Scale-Tooth's reply, followed by a slap of the tail towards the hut.
"Him? He'll be fine, and could probably be fit to leave in an hour or so," Fluttershy answered, her gaze going back towards the hut and the problem that rested inside of it.
Scale-Tooth waddled towards Fluttershy, knocking against her shin to try and get her to move towards the hut. A higher pitched hiss reverberated from his throat, followed by a quick stamp with one of his forelimbs.
"I can't let him leave yet, the healing isn't finished yet."
If a crocodile could sound incredulous, Scale-Tooth certainly was as he continued nudging Fluttershy towards the hut.
"I know the moss doesn't take this long to work normally, but he was hurt really badly, and it needs more time," Fluttershy retorted to her increasingly irritating friend as she gently knocked his maw away.
Fluttershy felt a knot of worry building up in her gut as she kept having to make excuses to Scale-Tooth, only to be knocked out of her own feelings by a quick, sharp, thwack from a thick, meaty tail against the backs of her hind legs.
"Hey, no slaps!" Fluttershy reprimanded. Scale-Tooth replied with a sharp clattering of his jaws and a long, low hiss that was loud enough to practically be a roar, followed by a series of short, staccato croaks.
"There's nothing going on, Scale-Tooth, and I would appreciate it if you didn't butt into my business! Now go back to your den and think about what you did."
With a final, held back hiss, Scale-Tooth started to waddle away, claws clacking against the rough boards and tail swishing back and forth. Fluttershy tried her best to maintain a stern front, but Scale-Tooth always had a way of getting to her. He was brash, abrupt, and most of all honest with his feelings, and right now Fluttershy felt like she was being everything he wasn't.
"Wait, come back," Fluttershy relented as her stoic facade crumbled away. Scale-Tooth stopped, slowly turning in place and keeping his intense gaze on Fluttershy the whole way. A high, inquisitive croak left the deep recesses of his throat.
"I… I need an opinion on something," Fluttershy said as she sat down on the deck.
Scale-Tooth replied with another inquisitive croak, this one slightly lower. He finished waddling back over to Fluttershy, who laid a hoof across the ridges of his scaled head and started to stroke him for comfort.
"Yes, it's about the stranger," Fluttershy replied. "He told me some cockamamie story about how he came here, and a place called Equestria that I've never even heard of, and apparently the old Queen of the Vale has something to do with all of it. He wants to go into the Misty Vale, and he won't take no for an answer, and I just don't know what to do about any of this!"
Fluttershy flopped her head down on top of Scale-Tooth's; the cold ridges of his scales combined with the low, ambient rumble of his breathing had always been a calming sensation for nights when her anxieties would get the better of her, and now was just such a night.
"Ponies are so complicated, much more so than animals and plants," Fluttershy ruefully stated. "I don't want him to get himself killed on something I know will get him killed, but I don't want to just keep him trapped here either."
Scale-Tooth let a low grumble build in his throat without opening his mouth, making a long, intricate series of vibrations rattle through his head and up into Fluttershy's jawbone. Her teeth shook gently from the vibrations, just one of the many ways that Scale-Tooth would try to comfort her. This time, though, his advice was more confrontational, catching Fluttershy off-guard.
"Go with him?!" Fluttershy retorted, lifting her head to stare down at the crocodile's yellow eyes. "Are you crazy?!"
A soft, but firm hiss echoed out of Scale-Tooth's throat, followed with a series of heavy slaps from his front limbs against the rough wooden deck and a clattering of his teeth together.
"Scale-Tooth, even if I wanted him to go, why would you want me to go with him? He might have a death wish, but I have all of you to take care of here! What would happen to the possums and bats and bugs and fish and frogs and you if I abandon you all here?"
Fluttershy swore that Scale-Tooth rolled an eye at her before slapping down a foreleg on the deck and shuffling his torso back and forth rhythmically.
"I know that you can take care of yourselves, bu—"
Fluttershy found herself cut off by a loud roar from Scale-Tooth, one that made her skitter back reflexively as the crocodile settle back down. His gleaming yellow eyes were locked to Fluttershy's own before slowly rolling towards the hut. He let out one last low growl before turning around and waddling back to his den.
As she watched the crocodile sashay away, Fluttershy found herself in a worse state of mind than she had been before. She was still overcome with worry for the unicorn whose life she had just saved but now it was mixing with the guilt that Scale-Tooth had just lain in her for something that she knew he was right about.
"Ponies are complicated," Fluttershy muttered to herself, before standing up and walking back to the hut. She had a decision to make.
* * *
Sun tried to busy himself with whatever he could inside of Fluttershy's hut, examining a few jars with some pungent smelling fluids and pastes inside of them, while every so often being reminded of his ongoing healing process by the odd spurt of blood from his side or low, pulsating sensation as the plaster on his side continued to seep into him.
"If she'd let me I'd love to pick her brain over some of these things," Sun said to himself as he took a whiff from one of the jars, "but maybe that'd be improper since I'm both her guest and something of a prisoner."
Sun, to his credit, had done what he could to try and convince Fluttershy of the truth that he had become oh-so-painfully aware of over the last few months, but his words had fallen in deaf ears; most of his time had been spent just trying to explain the basic underlying concepts of everything outside of her little bubble of existence, and by the time he was starting to get into the tale proper she said she needed to go feed her crocodile, whatever that was.
"Silence, I could really use some help right about now," Sun thought with all of the mental might he could muster. "A hint, a clue, a spell to convince Fluttershy to let me go, anything would be preferable to sitting here with my horn in one hoof and nothing in the other."
The low level pulsing in Sun's head hadn't abated, still thrumming away like an ache he couldn't get rid of. It didn't hurt in the strictest sense, but it's constant presence was wearing heavily on his patience. Only when it sharply intensified did he feel something akin to pain, but it was more like the sensation that pain should be happening but wasn't, which to him was the worse of the two feelings.
"Setting Sun, a moment of your time, if I may?" asked a voice, one that didn't belong to Silence. It was deeper, more sensuous in tone, and layered like multiple voices speaking in perfect unison, but carried with it a grandiosity that was unmistakeable.
"Who are you? Are you Chrysalis?" Sun asked, gritting his teeth as the pulsing intensified in his head.
"An astute observation, indeed. To answer your question, I am indeed the Chrysalis, the Changeling Queen, Keeper of Fate's Heart, the Dreamwalker, and a dozen other titles and sobriquets that I have been referred to over the ages," the voice replied. "The pony that saved your life would know me better, perhaps, as the Witch of the Misty Vale or the Mother of Shifters, alongside other less delicate names."
"Then what do you want?! Where is Silence?! And what the hell are you doing to my head?!" Sun asked as quickly as the words could form in his head. He felt like his skull was about to crack open, and at this point he'd welcome the relief of death compared to whatever this pain was.
"The one you named Silence has returned to her home in the Heart of Fate, and she is at peace within it. Your pain is merely a side-effect of Twilight Sparkle's predations upon your kind, and an unfortunate one at that. And as for what I want, I simply want an end to the line of alicorn rulers. We will speak more on this when we meet in flesh, so I will spare you any more pain by communicating in this method. Just know that I am watching you. Always watching you."
With the final word, the pain in Sun's head abated as quickly as it had come on, leaving behind only a dull ache and soft pulse in the back of his head. He could feel sweat dripping off of his forehead and back as he let out a massive gasp, all of the tension bundled up in his wiry frame releasing in one massive burst.
Sun lay flat on the floor, gasping for breath and trying to make any sort of sense of what had just happened to him. A thousand thoughts all swirled through his mind, particularly about what could have happened to Silence to sever their connection, but every time he thought of one question, the line of his thoughts always came back to one stone cold fact; he had to get out of here, and he had to do it soon.
He slowly got up off the floor after a few minutes, taking a moment to get his wobbly legs underneath him. Using a small spark of magic he lifted his gear from where Fluttershy had stashed it in her hut; thankfully nothing inside had been too terribly damaged by the water in the swamp, as he hadn't brought any books and all of the food he brought was fairly easy to clean off.
As Sun tottered towards the door it opened with a quick creak, giving both Sun and Fluttershy a start as they found themselves nearly nose-to-nose.
"Sun, what're you doi—"
Sun didn't stop, instead gently shoving past her and illuminating his horn as he walked towards the small steps that led off of her dock and into the swamp. The lines of teal shone up out of the water as he sloshed his way back into it, only to be swiftly stopped by a sharp tug on his cloak.
Turning back Sun saw a beast that looked like one of the lizards from back home, only it was easily over ten feet long, far more flat, much more heavily scaled, and had a wide, triangular head with a massive mouth full of sharp teeth, a few of which were holding his cloak as Fluttershy looked on from the door with a worried expression.
"Fluttershy, you're not going to stop me from leaving," Sun stated. "You should know, if you believe any part of what I told you, that I have dealt with a lot worse than an overgrown lizard."
"I know that you have," Fluttershy replied, "or at least you believe that you have, but I'm not trying to stop you. I'm coming with you."
"What?"
"I'm coming with you," Fluttershy reiterated, a slight tremble edging into her voice. "You don't know where you're going or what you're getting into, and I've been living here long enough that I can get you where you need to go. I know the plants and animals too, so I can help you avoid any of the really dangerous things out there."
Before Sun could answer she turned on her heel and went back inside, leaving Sun with the massive lizard that still refused to let go of his cloak. It stared at him with big, beady, yellow eyes, and suddenly the sweat running off of his forehead wasn't just from his conversation with Chrysalis.
"Don't suppose you know what suddenly gave her a spine," Sun asked the lizard. It only let out a low, staccato series of growls that Sun could feel vibrate through his cloak and into his neck.
A few minutes later Fluttershy came back out; she had an array of pouches and bags strapped all over her body, and had taken the time to tie her very long mane and tail back into a much more manageable length. She turned to the lizard creature, making an odd, deep hissing sound that seemingly prompted it to let go of Sun's cloak. With a sure step she sidled past Sun, taking the lead.
"Better get moving now, time's wasting," Fluttershy stated as she sloshed forward. Despite being blindsided by the last ten minutes and with so many more questions in his head than he had answers for, Sun hurried to catch up with Fluttershy.
* * *
The day's trek, or possibly night's, was made in more or less abject Silence, save for Fluttershy giving the odd direction or admonishment against touching a specific plant or approaching a specific creature. Sun was also starting to lose track of time, as he so far hadn't been able to see the sun in the sky and the entire swamp was bathed in a perpetual night that made time management nearly impossible. The only thing he could use for mental stimulation was swatting at the bugs in the air and waiting for Fluttershy to say that they were going to be stopping.
"Have you always lived out here?" Sun asked, trying for the third time to try and engage his guide in conversation. "Doesn't seem like the sort of place to raise a family, although I'm probably not one to talk."
"No, my family lives in a small village just in the edge of the swamp, about three days walk north west," Fluttershy answered. She motioned for him to move out of the water and into a small outcropping of stable land.
"Then why'd you come out here? It can't have been for your health, if the local wildlife is any indication," Sun said as he sat down and rested his aching hooves.
"It was a personal choice," Fluttershy answered tersely as she too sat down and started rooting through her pack. "I like the wildlife more than I do civilization."
"Do you ever miss your folks?"
"You ask a lot of questions, don't you?" Fluttershy snapped back, before putting a hoof to her mouth with a guilty look. She tried to get a hasty apology out before Sun raised a hoof.
"No, no, I get it," Sun said. "I won't pry. I get that you probably don't want to be out here any more than I do, so I'll just drop it. Is there anything you want to ask me?"
Fluttershy slowly lowered her hoof, looking down with a pensive expression. Sun took the time to slide his bags off and unroll his bedroll in preparation for something akin to sleep, not that he expected to get much of it in this humid, bug-infested pit.
"Has your magic always been that color?"
Sun perked up as Fluttershy asked the question; he'd made some omissions to what he told Fluttershy, mostly excising everything relating to Starlit and Silence since the former wasn't really pertinent to what he was doing and the latter might not have the best connotations given Fluttershy's mistrust of the Misty Vale, but now he didn't have a choice.
"So, I might have made some omissions in what I told you about how I got here," Sun said nervously as he turned to face his guide.
"Like?" Fluttershy replied, her voice edging more towards fear than anger.
"So, a few weeks ago when me and my former companion started this whole quest, I had green magic, and it was about as weak as any other unicorn you've probably met."
"I've met plenty of unicorns, and none of them were what I would call weak," Fluttershy interjected.
"What do you mean? Do you not have the Wasting here?" Sun asked, train of thought now thoroughly redirected.
"What's that?"
"The Wasting! That awful disease that strips ponies of their strength, robs pegasi of their wings and unicorns of their magic, and eventually devolves them into bloodthirsty monsters that only want to kill anything that isn't them? Do you seriously not know what that is, it's omnipresent back in Equestria."
"That sounds horrific!" Fluttershy replied, horrified but sounding far more confused than terrified. "No, I've never heard of anything like that in my life!"
"Can you fly?" Sun asked, his brain going into full experimentation mode as he tried to reconcile what he was being told.
"Not super well, but yes," Fluttershy answered as she flipped her wings open. With a strong pump she came up into a short hover off of the ground, flapping her wings strongly enough to hold her entire body aloft with seemingly no issue.
"Can you do more?!" Sun demanded. "Can you glide, or ascend?"
"What does this have to do with your magic?" Fluttershy asked. "That's what this was about at first, remember?"
"If you can actually fly unaided and unimpeded, then that might give us both an answer to that question! Please, can you just humor me here."
With a few more solid pumps of her wigs, Fluttershy started to soar around the swamp, deftly moving in between the trees and gliding down from their boughs with graceful arcs and swoops. Sun's heart started to race in his chest as the pulsing in the back of head began to speed up in time, an idea fomenting in his head.
"Was that good enough? That kind of took it out of me," Fluttershy asked as she alighted back down on the ground.
"That was fantastic!" Sun exclaimed, a smile as broad as he'd ever made plastered on his face. "The only time I've seen flying anywhere near that good came from a pegasus in the far north that had magic crystals embedded in her wings, and you did that with nothing but your wings!"
"But what about you, and this disease?" Fluttershy asked, a nervous smile crossing her face. "How does all of this connect."
"Back in Equestria, there is no ambient magic anywhere. The lights in the water here are magical, your flying is magical, but we don't have anything like this in Equestria. According to the legends and from what I've seen, magic went away from Equestria when the Princesses all left, but if there's natural magic here then they aren't the source of all magic!"
"Natural magic is like my healing, right?" Fluttershy asked. "My mosses and plants and my ability to speak to the animals, you don't have things like that in Equestria?"
"You can talk to animals?" Sun asked back, a quick shot of confusion ripping through his euphoria.
"Yeah, didn't you hear me talking Scale-Tooth?"
"I heard you hiss at the lizard and then it let me go, if that's what you're saying."
"Huh, I've never heard it described like that," Fluttershy said, bringing a hoof to her chin. "I just always knew what they were saying when they talked to me, but I guess speaking back would sound odd to an outside observer."
"Either way, that just confirms it more and more!" Sun interjected, holding his head in his hooves as he came to grips with everything he was unraveling. "Before i came here my magic used to be green, and then I was contacted by a… pony, I'm going to say, that has some connections to this place, and when she and I were connected together I could draw from her power to fuel my magic. I get it now!"
"What do you mean contacted? Who was it?"
"Best way I can describe it is like having another consciousness in my head," Sun explained. "I took to calling her Silence, and she told me to come find her in the Glowing Wastes, which is what I'm pretty sure you call the Misty Vale, and this must be what she was trying to show me. There are places where magic never went away, and if places like this exist then there has to be a reason why Equestria lost its natural magic."
"And you think the answer is in the Misty Vale," Fluttershy finished. "That seems a little far fetched, don't you think?"
"Oh, completely! This is all just conjecture, but it all makes sense when looking at everything that I've been through over the last month and everything that I know now. The answer to saving Equestria is here, it has to be!"
"And that means having to deal with the Queen of the Vale," Fluttershy said, bringing Sun back down from the cloud he was riding on with a solid reminder of whose domain he was about to wander into.
"Right, it does," Sun replied. "I don't really know what to expect when we meet her, but she's been in touch with me through the same method that Silence used."
"What?!" Fluttershy yelped. "Do you know how dangerous she is, and you just let her into your head?!"
"To be fair, I didn't really have a choice in the matter, Chrysalis just kind of strolled on through," Sun explained. "But yes, she did speak with me briefly, and she's expecting me in some fashion."
Fluttershy was about to reply before being cut off by a horrific buzzing noise, one that Sun recognized almost immediately. Leaping to his hooves and illuminating his horn as bright as he could, he saw a trio of Shifters, or Changelings as he knew them, hovering overhead, slobber dripping from their fanged maws and mandibles as they eyed up their prey.
"Are you sure she doesn't want you as a corpse?!" Fluttershy asked as she backed up behind Sun, who couldn't rule out the possibility of his terrified guide being correct.
A sickening squelch of gore was the end-cap to the day that Starlit had been enduring, as the latest in an innumerable tide of thestrals slid off of the end of her sword. From the first ambush at the base of the mountain to now she had been dealing with at least three thestrals for every mile she climbed up the road.
Starlit had numerous bruises, small cuts, and could feel her breath burn in her lungs from this latest bout. Taking a moment to sit down and wash her sword off in a nearby puddle, Starlit thought of just what Twilight could possibly be trying to gain from this ceaseless assault.
"She said that she wanted to see me again, so why in the name of all that is good is she trying to kill me," Starlit thought as she scraped the bits of bone and dried blood off of her blade.
Starlit looked out across the road to the hard drop-off at the cliff's edge; a mist was starting to roll in across the forest that she had come in from, and with the slow setting of the sun was casting the world below her in a much more menacing light. An errant pulse of magenta light drew stark shadows on the forest through the mist, though Starlit had grown used to the reminder of the city above.
Starlit sat down and put her sword away, looking for any place she could hide herself away in to get at least a few hours rest. Her legs were practically numb from the effort of her ascent and fighting off multiple packs of thestrals, and all she wanted was a place to hole up here Twilight's beasts wouldn't find her. Unfortunately, with the mountain's face to her right, the drop-off to her left, and nothing ahead or behind save for the old, worn out road, Starlit's hopes for a reprieve were going to go unfulfilled.
As Starlit got back to her hooves after a brief rest and some trail rations, she felt a small pulse come out of her necklace. She had started tuning out its pulses and motions since they mostly only meant that thestrals were around the corner, but this one felt different. Rather than the frenetic beat she was used to, this was a slow, soothing pulse, with an odd sensation of warmth.
Starlit pulled the necklace out and held it aloft in her magic; externally it looked no different, though she could still feel its beat in her head as it presumably transferred through the magic she was holding it with.
"What do you want?" Starlit asked to the air. When another apparition of Twilight failed to manifest, Starlit started to put it away before a pang of pain from a bruise on her ribs made her magic falter. The stone struck the ground with a clatter before coming to rest, though Starlit could still feel its pulse through the ground.
As Starlit sucked air in through her teeth and let out a slow, steady breath to try and alleviate the pain in her ribs, a thought crossed her mind. It might turn out poorly, given what happened to Sun when he tried to probe the stone with his own magic in Sunspire, but as it stood she didn't have much to lose other than potentially her sanity.
Taking the stone up with her magic again, Starlit began to focus a thin stream of her own magic into it, trying to see if she could extract some of its healing ability out of it to get her back to some semblance of strength. The pulse began to quicken, but didn't lose that odd soothing quality to it, as she felt through its magic with her own to try and find the familiar sensation that she had felt so many times before.
Just when it seemed that this was going to be a fruitless venture, Starlit felt her entire body go numb as a sensation like whacking a nerve against a table corner overtook her whole body. She collapsed to the stones beneath her as her vision went dark, before it resolved into a clear image that was decidedly not of worn out stone pressed against her cheek.
Starlit could see Twilight, hunched over a desk and reading through a thoroughly ancient looking tome by candlelight. She wasn't wearing the regalia she had been in the night before, and was in fact not wearing anything. Were it not for her combination of a horn and wings she would look like any other pony in Equestria.
Twilight let out a yawn as she looked out a nearby window, before closing the book and standing up with a stretch. She blew out the candle before turning around, and then did a double take directly in Starlit's direction. Slowly she approached Starlit's perspective, then tapped it with her hoof. Whatever Starlit was using to look through bobbed and bounced with each tap, before holding steady as Twilight cocked her head, eyes still fixed on Starlit's metaphorical ones. The alicorn's brow furrowed, and remained so as she left the point of view that Starlit was looking through and the vision went dark again.
Starlit's eyes lit up again just as the last vestiges of the sun dipped below the tree-line, and when she stood she found that she didn't have to drag herself up. On the contrary, she found her soreness and injuries from the days constant travails gone entirely; Starlit honestly felt more fit than she had when she came to the base of the mountain that morning.
"You keep me alive, you heal my injuries, you spy on my enemies," Starlit said to the stone as she floated it up off of the ground and reattached it to her neck. "Twilight made a colossal mistake when she gave you to me."
The slow, steady pulse from the stone halted as the words left Starlit's lips, replaced with a sharp, piercing crack sound that sent Starlit's heart skipping a beat. Lifting the stone in her magic she looked at it intensely in the fading light of the day, and felt her heart drop into her stomach and about a thousand feet past it.
Marring its once smooth, polished surface, was an unmistakeable crack, a hairline fracture right in the center of the stone that bled a soft, grey light.
"No, no no!" Starlit pleaded to the stone's cold facade. "Did I break it?! Could it only do that once?!"
As if in answer to her question, the stone slowly began its soft rhythmic pulsing again, but softer than before. A huge sigh escaped Starlit's lungs as she dropped the stone to hang around her neck again.
"Not broke, just damaged," Starlit affirmed.
A long, low howl of a thestral echoed on the wind, and Starlit pulled her sword out reflexively and scanned the road both ahead of her and behind. There was no sign of any of the beasts in the immediate area, but she knew they'd be on her location soon. With a new tool at her disposal, limited though it might be, Starlit started up the march to the top again.
* * *
A full day of climbing followed by a full night of it should have had Starlit gasping for life on the ground, especially with the constant onslaught of thestrals as she ascended, but whatever she had done with the necklace had rid her body of all her tiredness and fatigue, so that as the sky started to brighten with the first rays of the morning she was just now starting to feel winded. Even more auspiciously, she finally saw the first signs that this road had been anything more than just a carved pathway.
Just up ahead Starlit saw the beginnings of what looked like a small village. The buildings were remarkably well preserved despite the years of age and the obvious signs of damage from the war, and the further in she walked the better preserved they looked. The buildings were all carved out of the mountain itself, being made of finely hewn stone that still had some signs of the purple and golden paints they had been decorated with centuries ago. Seeing one that had still in intact door and roof, Starlit carefully opened the door with a soft creak.
A fierce shriek and the pounding of a body on the other side of the door told Starlit all she needed to know about its occupants or lack thereof. Throwing the door open with her magic, Starlit blasted forward a wall of force from her horn that bowled over the thestral inside. It made to scramble to its hooves, a menacing purplish-grey magic encasing its horn, before Starlit launched her sword forward and jammed it right into the monster's neck. A strained gurgle leaked out of its throat before it collapsed to the floor with a dull thump. A quick burst of magic and a squelch of blood and sinew returned the sword to Starlit's side, giving her some time to examine the room she found herself in.
From what she could tell, this place was at one time somepony's home, and a quaint one at that. There were small knick-knacks covered in centuries of dust on a stone mantlepiece above a fireplace, what might have once been a couch that was currently tatters of old cloth and wood on the far side underneath a window, and two doorways that led to a bedroom and what was presumably a small kitchen judging by the empty stone basin.
Starlit shut the heavy wooden door behind her and locked it with the remarkably still intact deadbolt before closing the empty window frames with what appeared to be small, translucent stone shutter that slid along the wall. The stone was just thin enough that some light could shine through it, but not so thin that it would risk breaking even under serious stress.
"I'd love to meet the carver that could make something like this," Starlit mused to herself as she pulled the packs off of her haunches and undid her sword belt, "although I have the sneaking suspicion that it was probably carved by magic."
With her small holdfast secured, Starlit took the saddlebags off of her haunches, undid the buckles of her armor, and unwound the sword belt from her waist. It had been days since she could let her fur feel the open air, and the accumulated grime made her nose reflexively curl up at the stench.
"What I wouldn't do for a bath right about now," Starlit groused to herself as she dragged the thestral corpse off to the corner. It was a grisly sight to be sure, but one she was used to by this point, and she didn't want to attract undue attention from whatever else might be in this ruined town by throwing the body outside.
A cursory search of the house turned up nothing of value that Starlit could take; all of the food that might've been here had turned to dust, any extra clothes were nothing more than tatters and scraps of once-fine fabrics, and whoever had once lived here didn't keep any weaponry. The only thing of interest was a metal pipe sticking out of the basin in the kitchen with a pair of small handles flanking either side of it. With a sharp creak the handles turned, and after a few minutes of rattling from the pipe a stream of fresh water poured out of it.
"This must've been something Luna and her ilk created," Starlit mused as she filled up her near empty waterskin and gathered up large blobs of the water in her magic to rinse the grime and sweat off of herself. "A shame they never got around to giving the rest of us the ability to make things like this."
With filled waterskins and a now full stomach from one of the parcels of her rations, Starlit rolled out her bedroll in front of the empty fireplace and nestled in for some much deserved sleep. It had been about a day and a half since she'd felt safe enough to rest, and she was going to capitalize on the opportunity that she was being presented with.
As her eyelids started to drop and the heavy sensation of tiredness started to overtake her, Starlit could feel the thumping from the necklace once more, its pulse seeping into her chest, making a synchronous beat with her own heart.
Starlit thought of home; Eclipse and Warden would just now be waking up for breakfast. She didn't know what they would be doing today, but she felt that it would involve a healthy amount of worry for herself. They'd be trying their best to not think about it, but Starlit knew her family better than that. Eclipse would ask every question that popped into her head, and Warden would be hard pressed for answers that he either didn't have or couldn't say.
Starlit's eyes snapped open, the thumping beat in her chest still as soft as when she'd started to drift off. She expected to hear the sounds of hooves beating at the door, screeches of thestrals ringing across the ruined town, but there was nothing. Starlit was safe here, this much she knew.
"I'm as safe as I can be, and now my own mind won't let me rest," Starlit said to herself as she sat up. With a swish of her horn she started to reassemble her belongings; refastening her sword belt, putting her armor back on, and securing the saddlebags. The process was rote and monotonous, but she did it with the same level of fastidiousness as she always had; now wasn't the time to get careless.
Starlit laid a hoof on the heavy door, undid the lock with her magic, then stood there and took stock of herself. With a soft thump she pressed her head to the rough surface of the door, trying her best to maintain her composure.
"This is for them, Starlit Sky," she thought to herself. "This is for Eclipse, and Warden, and Sun. This is so Equestria can have a future."
A deep, bracing sigh left Starlit's lungs as she stood tall and swung the door open with her magic. As she did another pulse of magenta light from the beacon at the top of the mountain cast the world in a haze of pinks for a brief moment. Another round of screeches filled the air with the sudden flash, and Starlit pulled her sword for its sheathe in preparation.
* * *
Starlit had completely lost track of time as she neared what she hoped was the top of this accursed mountain. Day and night cycles passed her by and she could scarcely recall their passage, such was the nature of her ascent. Her life for the last however long was just a long, slow march, broken up every now and again by an easily-dispatched band of thestrals.
Starlit hadn't slept in days, but she didn't feel it. Whether it was the magic bleeding out of the fracture in her necklace, some effect of being so close to the nexus of Twilight's power, or her own sheer force of will, she didn't feel the need to sleep whatsoever. The fact that guilt would worm its way into her gut every time she tried was secondary to this fact.
The pulses of light from the top of the mountain were growing more intense and happening more rapidly with the passage of time; every time one would happen the whole world would suddenly become a blinding screen of bright magenta that would disorient her until it ended. Starlit had more than once gotten killed by a pack of thestrals because of it, although the crack in her necklace had yet to grow any larger. It was after a particularly intense one of these flashes that Starlit found what she prayed was the last step in this ascent.
At the far end of this stretch of the road up the mountain Starlit could see the only piece of architecture that wasn't a wreck. In fact, it showed no wear at all, with it's perfectly hewn marble facade and gilded, glittering ornamentation. It was a gate, absolutely massive in scope and size; the frame for it was richly decorated with carvings of ponies disporting in lush fields of green and great towers of ivory, while the gates themselves were made from fine, sturdy metal that had been so throughly gilt that the shine off of them alone was nearly blinding.
The only thing that could mar the singularly magnificent display of architectural masterwork before her was the fact that there was a mob of thestrals all beating themselves bloody against it, screeching and howling as they flung themselves bodily into the indefatigable structure. Not a pole was bent out of place, there wasn't a single scratch on the marble frame, just the dried blood of countless thestrals all trying their damndest to beat there way past it.
Starlit took in a deep, bracing breath as she illuminated her horn. A perfect dome of translucent energy surrounded the five or so feet around her body, before slowly bending inward until it created a snug, form fitting field of energy around her body. With a second swish of her horn she drew the sword from its sheath and marched forward, just as the thestrals at the gates took notice of her casual use of magic.
"You're doing this for them, Starlit Sky," she said to herself as the mob began to charge towards her. "For Eclipse, for Warden, and for Sun. You are fighting to give Equestria a future."
The first thestral swooped down on featherless wings, a thin veneer of silver magic the only thing holding the beast aloft. With a flick of her head upward the sword slashed through its belly, the body crumpling overhead as thick blood spilled down upon Starlit's shield. Another followed up after it, beating down into her shield with hooves lined with spikes, which her ward took expertly. Starlit shoved it away with the flat of her blade before wheeling it around and slashing through the beast's head at eye level. The skull cap slid in two and landed on the flagstones with a squelching thud.
The screeching, slavering tide of thestrals kept beating their path down the road, away from the gate, as Starlit continued to slaughter her way through their ranks. So many earth pony thestrals beat and slammed into her with preternatural strength, and Starlit's sword had to keep a manic pace to ensure that the first blow any of the got on her would be the last. Pegasus after pegasus harried her from the air, but even her willowy frame proved enough to match them as she yanked one after the other from the air and sent them hurtling to the ground below. Even the odd unicorn, with magic far more ancient and potent than hers, could not match her cunning with raw force as she redirected her ward's strength to redirect or absorb the magic they were casting at her.
Blood flew and splattered the ground and Starlit herself. Her muscles burned with the sheer stress of fighting off so many combatants at once, her forehead ached from the sheer amount of magic she was channeling all at once, and even with all of her skill she was being pressed back by the sheer wave of bodies.
Starlit's heart was hammering faster and faster the more she exerted herself, and the necklace matched pace expertly. Wild slashes and flailing thrusts would end one of the monsters, not for what seemed like three more to take its place. Blood caked her face and hair, her blade slaked in the life-giving ichor of dozens of monsters, and it was only when she slipped on an errant puddle of it that she remembered where she stood.
A rush of wind blew past Starlit's ears as she plummeted off of the cliff, tumbling end over end through the air and screaming in abject terror the whole while. The village at the bottom of the mountain was invisible to her, such was her sheer height, although the ground was rushing to meet her. She lost the focus on her magic as she fell, losing her shield and sword as her brain panicked to try and find a solution that didn't involve hitting the ground at terminal velocity. Even with the necklace, she wasn't certain that it would survive the fall along with her.
Starlit slammed her eyes shut, focusing any magic she could into her horn to try and generate a shield, something to catch the air and halt her descent. She didn't care if she had to march all the way back up the mountain, she just didn't want this to be the end.
The familiar sensation of magic thrummed through her horn, but with it was another pulsating beat, soft and soothing. The wind rushing past faded into the back of her perception as Starlit gritted her teeth and channeled everything she could into this spell, until she noticed that the wind had ceased rushing at all. She felt the pull of gravity in her body again rather than the tumbling free fall feeling she had just been experiencing, save for an odd pulling sensation near her shoulders.
Warily cracking an eye open, Starlit looked around and saw that she was no longer falling. Looking to either side she could see a faint bluish shimmer out of her peripheral vision. A faint sound like fluttering filled her ears, and as she crooked her neck back her jaw dropped open when she saw what was making that sound.
Extending out from her back, in just the same spot that a pegasus' normally were, were a par of ghostly, blue and silver, ethereal wings. They flapped with a steady rhythm that kept Starlit aloft on hard, angular feathers of pure energy, and when she realized what they were doing they began to pull her upward, back to the fight.
The fight, however, seemed to have followed her, as Starlit saw a black, screeching form shoot past her and plummet out of sight. Starlit instinctually backed away from it with a quick beat of the wings, looking up to see as the horde she had been fighting came streaming off the cliff, determined to kill her even to their own deaths.
With a smile and a steely glare upward, Starlit focused her magic into her wings and rocketed upward. The thestrals fell past her in screeching droves, and Starlit ducked, weaved, and rolled around them as she rose up the cliff's face. Still completely unpracticed with her new wings, Starlit accidentally clipped a few thestrals, only to find that the energy her wings were made from could slice cleanly through flesh.
Starlit's small smile broadened with each beat of her wings, the elation in her heart soaring as high as she was as she cleaved her way through the streaming horde of monsters, until she rocketed past the cliff edge she had plummeted off of. The thestrals that had yet to dive off of the mountain recoiled with hisses and shrieks as Starlit spread the wings wide to halt her ascent, a glimmering, blood-stained avatar of retribution against these monsters and the pony who commanded them.
And for the first time that she could recall, Starlit saw a thestral run scared as she screamed down into their ranks on wings like swords. Their bodies crumpled and folded underneath her magic, taking numerous passes through them until they all fell dead and silent to the flagstones.
Starlit didn't land with nearly the grace that a pony like Rainbow Dash might have, stumbling and tripping over herself as her hooves hit the ground before falling prone into a puddle of congealing blood. Her chest heaved with the effort, her forehead felt like somepony had tried to hammer her horn into it, and she curled up into herself when another flash of light from the mountain top blinded her.
There were only two things that made her come back to some semblance of her senses; a high, piercing crack sound from her necklace, and the slow, agonizing, metal-on-stone grinding of the Gate of Antiquities opening.
"Get down!" Sun yelled as he lit his horn up with burning silver light. Fluttershy, to his relief, dove to the ground even as the words left Sun's mouth.
The Changelings above them hissed at the sight of the light before diving towards him, fangs bared and wings buzzing. One of them vanished in a burst of teal fire before manifesting Fluttershy's form, a wicked grin on its new face as it peeled off to target the pony it was copying.
"Oh no you don't!" Sun cried out as he let loose a ray of magic that slammed into the creature's side. The Changeling spun through the air before landing with a sickening thud against the mud, its copied form disappearing in another burst of teal. The beast struggled to its hooves, compound eyes bearing down on Sun with pure malice as one of its cohorts slammed into Sun's ribs.
Sun and the Changeling scattered across the ground in a heap, with the Changeling coming out on top of the pile-up. It raised its hooves up over Sun's head, who only barely dodged the first set of stomps before kicking up with his hind legs to try and throw the monster off. Sun bucked and kicked viciously, but this creature was far sturdier than its emaciated frame made it seem, and it refused to budge even as it illuminated its own horn with bright teal light.
"Cover your eyes!" Fluttershy called from behind Sun. He slammed his eyes shut just in time, but even still could see the dull red of a bright flash of light through his eyelids. The Changeling on top of Sun screeched and howled in pain as it fell off of him, an opportunity he immediately capitalized on to roll away from it and get back to his hooves.
With clear eyes Sun could see the faint traces of sparkles in the air, as well as the two Changelings they had been fighting currently writhing in pain, clutching at their eyes as the rolled and shrieked. A quick bolt of magic to the already injured one was enough to dispatch it, followed by taking his dagger in his magic and sinking it into the skull of the other one.
"Where's the third one?!" Sun asked before receiving an immediate answer.
A large splash of swamp water was followed by Fluttershy shrieking in pain and terror. Whirling around Sun saw the last Changeling dragging her down towards the waterline by her hair, which had come undone in the struggle. She beat and kicked at its face as hard as she could, but what hits did connect didn't faze the beast in the slightest.
Sun ran hard to the creature, leaping atop Fluttershy to add more weight and keep her from sliding any further. The Changeling pulled and tore clumps of her hair out with its mandibles as it tried to keep dragging her, before turning its attention to Sun. This time, though, he was ready for it, and quickly rolled off of Fluttershy as the Changeling leapt forward.
As the bug-pony sprawled out from its missed tackle, Sun got to his hooves and ran for the beast. Sun had his hooves up just as the monster turned its giant compound eyes to face his, the light from Sun's horn glinting and glittering against its multifaceted surface, before a swift, solid stomp turned the eye into an empty, bleeding gore pit. The Changeling shuddered and struggled for a moment as Sun ground his hoof into the eye socket before finally falling still, a low rattling breath escaping its lungs as Sun pulled his hoof up with a squelch.
Sun breathed heavily, looking down at his handiwork, before a low, soft sobbing pulled him back into the moment. Fluttershy was behind him, curled into herself and rubbing a hoof across her scalp where the Changeling had torn her hair out. She sook and shuddered with deep, keening sobs, enough that Sun could feel his stomach twist into knots at her misery.
Approaching gently, Sun laid a hoof onto her shoulder only to be rebuked as she whipped a hoof at him. Fluttershy pointedly averted her eyes as Sun backed up and sat down.
"Fluttershy, it's over, it's just me," Sun said, as softly as he could. "They're all dead, you don't have to worry anymore."
Fluttershy slowly lifted her head, just enough that one of her big, teal eyes could scan the area. Sun lit his horn up just a bit more so she could see everything, a gentle smile on his face.
"See, nothing to worry about," Sun repeated. "Can I get closer, or do you still need space?"
Fluttershy slowly got to a sitting position, keeping one hoof to her scalp as she did. Sun could see a thin trickle of blood coming off of her head, leaving a streak of crimson in her pale pink mane. Fluttershy slowly nodded, and Sun gently scooted closer.
"Here, lemme see," Sun said as he carefully lifted Fluttershy's hoof off of her head. She sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth, and Sun could see why; not only did she have a large bald patch, but some of the skin had been peeled up from the force of the pulling.
"How bad is it?" Fluttershy asked, her voice thick like she needed to blow her nose.
"Honestly, you got off pretty easy," Sun answered. "You have some of whatever that stuff was you used on me? You have a bit of your scalp pulled up here from where it was yanking on your hair."
Another choking sob fell out of Fluttershy's mouth as Sun explained what had happened, and she fell forward into his chest as she began to cry anew.
"I can't d-do this, I j-just can't do this…" Fluttershy moaned into Sun's shoulder.
"It's okay, you did fine," Sun said, rubbing a hoof across her back in slow, steady circles. "Have you ever been in a fight before?"
"N-no, never," Fluttershy answered as she clutched tight to Sun.
"Then I'd say you did great for a first time," Sun replied. "Whatever that big flashing light was really helped me out."
"I-it was the first thing I c-could think of," Fluttershy said. "Just s-some phosphorous, magn-nesium, and a flint."
"You did a lot better while panicking than I did my first time," Sun said, pulling Fluttershy back and looking her square in the eye. "You'll be okay, this sort of thing just takes some time to get used to; frankly, I'm still trying to get used to it myself. Now, I need to know if you have anything to fix your head; it'd be a shame to lose such pretty hair because we didn't heal your scalp in time."
Fluttershy's gaze flicked between Sun, the bodies behind him, and the ground in between both of them, before she nodded and pointed to one of her many bags and pouches.
"The moss and plaster is in that pouch, inside a small ceramic jar," Fluttershy said, wiping her nose as she returned her hoof to her head. "There's some words you have to say to make it work, though."
"Right, more of this natural magic probably," Sun said as he pulled the jar out. "Some of the more complicated spells I've studied had words associated with them in the old language before modern Equestrian, but I've never had the power to cast any of them."
Sun gingerly set the jar down in front of Fluttershy, who opened it with her free hoof. She pulled the moss off of the top, exposing the thick, greenish paste underneath it.
"So, first, you need to apply the paste to the wound," Fluttershy said.
Sun dipped his hoof into the jar, taking out a big dollop of the paste. It smelled vaguely herbal, with a twist of something sweet that he couldn't recognize, and the smell got more intense as he gently rubbed the paste onto Fluttershy's scalp.
"Does that hurt?" Sun asked, hoping he wasn't pressing too hard.
"A little bit, but that's just part of the process," Fluttershy answered. "Now, you need to press the moss onto the paste and hold it there while gently massaging it into the wound."
"Okay, that sounds like it would hurt," Sun cut in as he placed the moss onto her head. Fluttershy placed her hoof on top of Sun's own, gently moving it back and forth.
"Okay, now I need you to repeat after me," Fluttershy said. "These words were passed down by my father to me when he taught me how to do this, so please be careful about who you teach this to."
"Right," Sun replied, not entirely sure how he'd be able to replicate this process within the very specific ingredients that were indigenous to this area.
"From the earth comes life," Fluttershy intoned, taking a pause.
"From the earth comes life," Sun repeated.
"From life comes pain," Fluttershy continued.
"From life comes pain," Sun repeated.
"From pain comes wisdom."
"From pain comes wisdom."
"From wisdom comes age."
"From wisdom comes age."
"From age comes death."
"From age comes death". "From death comes the earth."
"From death comes the earth," Sun finished, slightly disturbed by the macabre tone of what was supposedly some kind of healing magic.
"Now just repeat that until you feel the paste get warm under your hoof," Fluttershy said with a wince. "And maybe ease up on the rubbing a bit."
"Right, sorry," Sun quickly apologized as he continued the chant. The words slowly stopped meaning anything other than just the noise of saying them, and it was at that point when he felt the moss under his hoof grow warm. He quickly pulled back to see that where the paste had once been was now a thin, shiny grey-green patch the squirmed and pulsed. One particularly violent contraction caused a squirt of blood to trickle down Fluttershy's head, which she quickly wiped away from her eyes with another patch of moss.
"Thanks for the help," Fluttershy said, wiping the tear stains away from her eyes. Her voice still had a quiver to it, as though she was trying not burst into tears again. "Sorry you had to see me like that, I'm normally a lot more composed."
"And that's why you bolted when we first met?" Sun asked.
"You leveled a horn at me and started making demands, I think I could be forgiven for being jumpy," Fluttershy countered. "Not to mention that you're the first pony I've seen in years."
"Years? How long have you lived out here?"
"I'll tell you later," Fluttershy replied as she started fishing through her bags. "As thanks for saving my life and all that."
"Yeah, I think we could both use some rest," Sun agreed as Fluttershy pulled out a few small candles from her bags. "What're those candles for?"
"They're made out of oils and herbs that insects and Shifters hate the smell of, so they'll help keep us safe and relatively comfortable while we rest," Fluttershy answered, lighting the first candle with a small piece of flint. The scent was unlike anything Sun had smelled before; it was sweetly acidic, with a twist of earthiness that was similar to the smell of the soil they were standing on. Fluttershy placed all of the lit candles in a rough perimeter around the little spit of land they were on while Sun laid out their bedrolls.
Sleep came faster for Sun than he thought it would. The sweet smell of the candles, the idle lapping of water, and the far off calls of birds made for an oddly soothing soundscape. The only thing that stuck out was Fluttershy, who he could intermittently hear softly crying throughout.
* * *
Fluttershy woke up long before Sun did, mostly because of the sheer stress from the attack preventing her from actually getting to sleep. The plaster had absorbed into her head, but the bald patch left behind still stung. She knew that she wasn't going to get any sort of meaningful rest, so she simply took to relighting the citronella candles and foraging for a little more food.
When Fluttershy came back to their make-shift campsite with some wolfswood berries and watercress, Sun was up and rolling his bedroll with a nervous look on his face. A smile spread as he heard her coming, one that she only half-heartedly reciprocated.
"How're you doing?" Sun asked.
"Better," Fluttershy answered, a bit taken aback. "I got a little more food, if you're hungry."
"You'll have to show me what's good out here," Sun replied as he looked through the small pouch, his illuminated horn making Fluttershy's eyes ache. "I come from a desert, so it's pretty slim pickings as far as plants are concerned."
"What's a desert?" Fluttershy asked as she rolled her own bedroll up and reattached it to her packs.
"You know how this place is nothing but ponds and water and trees and bugs?" Sun asked.
"Uh-huh," Fluttershy answered.
"It's basically the exact opposite of that, save for the bugs," Sun answered. "Nothing except sand and sunshine as far as the eye can see, with blistering days and freezing nights."
"That would drive me insane," Fluttershy said, a but of a chill running down her back as the pair started moving back into the water. The teal lights lit as soon as Fluttershy stepped in, and intensified when Sun did.
"You'd get used to it, I suppose," Sun admitted. "I grew up there, so it really wasn't that bad unless it was dark."
"Are there at least animals where you're from?" Fluttershy asked.
"Mostly small lizards, nothing like Scale-Tooth. Plus we had a lot of beetles and stinging bugs, as well as the odd mouse."
"I'm guessing there wouldn't be things like frogs or fish, if there wasn't any water," Fluttershy said, moving some scrub out of the way and letting Sun go past.
"What's a fish?" Sun asked.
"Oh, they're these lovely water-dwelling creatures," Fluttershy explained as she started looking in the water to try and find one. "They're covered in scales, they breathe water, and they're perfectly adapted for this environment."
"You mean those slimy, muscular tubes that have been bumping into my legs every ten feet?" Sun asked back with a grimace.
"Yeah! Here, come see this one," Fluttershy said before taking a big gulp of air and dipping her head into the water
Illuminated by the tree roots under the silt, Fluttershy saw a medium sized muskellunge tending to its eggs nestled into the roots. It quickly turned to the side to bring one of the eyes in its narrow face to bear on Fluttershy, nervous but waiting.
"Hello, I would be ever so grateful if you could say hello to a friend of mine," Fluttershy said, bubbles flying from her mouth as she talked into the water.
The fish made a quick flutter of its mouth and flaring of its gills, followed by a quick bob up and down. Fluttershy pulled up and took a breath, turning to a very perplexed looking Sun as she did.
"She wants to say hello," Fluttershy told Sun, "but be very careful; she has eggs nestled in the roots that she's tending to."
"You got all of that just from ducking your head in the water and blowing bubbles?"
"Here, it'll be easier if you just see for yourself," Fluttershy answered. "You're gonna want to take a breath."
With a curious face, Sun took a deep breath with Fluttershy and dunked his head under the water with her. Fluttershy carefully maneuvered his head until his horn was illuminating the muskellunge, that carefully fluttered its fins in response.
"This is a friend," Fluttershy said quickly. The fish flared its gills and gave a short series of bobs up and down which Fluttershy returned with a smile and Sun with a wide-eyed look of wonder. He then raised a hoof with a small wave before surfacing for another breath.
"See, they're not so mysterious," Fluttershy said. "Just make sure you step around her."
"And you can just understand her?" Sun asked.
"It's more like getting a really good feeling about what she meant," Fluttershy answered. "It's a bit harder with animals that don't make noises to really understand them, but I make do."
"That really is incredible, you know that, right?" Sun said. Fluttershy could feel her face get hot and could feel the dragonflies in her stomach.
"It's nothing, really. I mean, you could probably figure this out with enough practice."
"Could you teach me?" Sun asked, catching Fluttershy completely of guard to the point that she nearly tripped over a root.
"Don't you have some big, world-saving mission to do?" Fluttershy asked incredulously. "You don't have time for me to teach you, it could take months."
"I mean, we have time, and outside of problems with the Changelings it's not like we're doing much more than walking for the time being," Sun replied. "You could at least teach me enough that I could tell animals that I mean them no harm."
Fluttershy looked down to the water, eyes scanning across the glowing roots as she thought intensely. Sun did have a point, and not just the one growing out of his forehead; they did have at least a few more days of time to kill before getting to the Vale, and if they ever got separated it would be beneficial for him to know some of what she did, if only so he could protect himself.
"I suppose I could give you a couple of phrases, but it's not just knowing how to say it, it's getting the intent across too," Fluttershy relented. "Animals are far more empathic creatures than ponies are, and they pick up on feelings a lot more than we do."
"Then I will abide by you," Sun said with a bow of the head. "However you teach me, I will listen."
"And you have to promise to not talk like that to them, that'll set them off immediately," Fluttershy retorted. Sun gave a quick snort of laughter, and Fluttershy couldn't help but chuckle back, as much as she tried not to.
* * *
Time would not stop blending together for Sun as he and Fluttershy trekked through seemingly endless and entirely random copses of trees, patches of bog, and the odd wild animal that Fluttershy, and eventually Sun himself, would have to ward off. The only thing that was keeping Sun from completely losing his mind was the Fluttershy's lessons in animal-speech, which were going slowly but surely giving him better insight into how Fluttershy was able to live seemingly alone for so long.
He found that the animal-speech really was more about intention and projecting the right feeling rather than actual speech. His initial attempts to mimic Fluttershy's hisses, growls, and grunts only caused animals to run from him, as he couldn't project the type of personality that he wanted to get across. The sounds, however, helped a lot, as well as having Fluttershy to vouch for him whenever he'd accidentally upset an animal he was trying to communicate.
"I just wanted to say thank you for all of the help that you've been giving me these last few days," Sun said, one of many such praises and thanks he had given to his guide. "If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have made it half a day, much less this far."
"I will admit, it has been refreshing to have another pony to talk with," Fluttershy replied. "You can only have so many conversations about where fish are or needing to get ticks out of fur before it gets repetitive."
"That's something I actually wanted to ask you," Sun said. "Why did you decide to move out here? It can't have been for your health, given that everything about this place is kind of inimical to habitation by ponies."
Fluttershy went quiet for a moment, and Sun got the distinct impression that he might have crossed a boundary.
"You did say you'd tell me a few days ago," Sun continued, "but if it's a sore subject then you don't have to if you don't want to."
"No, no, it's not that, it just that I've… I've never really tried explaining it before," Fluttershy answered, kicking at the water with her hoof.
"Well, I won't judge," Sun said. "Just as long as you didn't kill somepony and get driven into the swamp in exile, I'll be good."
Fluttershy fell silent and stared out into the middle distance with a furrowed brow for a moment, and Sun found himself secretly hoping that he didn't just hit the nail on the head.
"I… I don't really get ponies, Sun," Fluttershy began. "I can't ever get a good read on ponies personalities, and whenever I try to have long conversations with them I'll usually wind up saying something that just makes me look bad or makes them uncomfortable."
"That's not so bad, really," Sun replied. "I was kind of a shut in for most of my life, so it took some getting used to for me as well."
"That's the thing though, I wasn't a shut in," Fluttershy continued. "My parents were kind, my brother was always supportive of me even if he was as lazy as gully-dirt, and ponies in the village I grew up in knew me and liked me, I just… didn't like them."
"You don't seem like the sort to just not like ponies, if you want my opinion," Sun replied, ducking under a branch as he did.
"Maybe I'm not explaining it right," Fluttershy said, looking down and rubbing the bald patch on her head. "It's not like I chose not to like ponies, it's just that I couldn't relate to them. Everypony I knew just felt weird and scary to me, so I just never tried to get to know them. The animals were my first friends, and they were really my only friends, so when I got old enough to go out on my own I just left town, went to the swamp, and never looked back."
"That's it? You just up-sticks and left everything behind?" Sun asked, taken aback at how simple her explanation seemed. "What about your family, they must've cared about you more than that?"
"Oh, they did, and when I told them what I was going to do they tried to stop me, but I just couldn't handle living around ponies anymore so I… I left. I left in the middle of the night and that was… that."
Sun was about to make another comment when he noticed a single tear start to fall from Fluttershy's eye, and wisely held his tongue.
"Well, I can't say it's what I would have done, but you do you," Sun replied, nudging his shoulder into hers. "I mean, I basically uprooted my life back home to go on what turned out to be a suicide mission to save the world, so I really have no room to criticize anypony else's lifestyle choices."
"Thanks," Fluttershy said, wiping the tear from her eye. "It's nice to get that off of my chest, even if it's something I haven't thought about in… goodness, probably ten years."
"Ten years? Jeez, you're older than I am at that rate. Why is it that every companion I've had on this journey is older than me."
"You had another companion?" Fluttershy asked, making Sun's heart skip a beat.
"Oh, right, I forgot to tell you about Starlit," Sun hastily stated.
"Who's Starl—"
Fluttershy's question was quickly cut off by a yelp of surprise as she, shortly followed by Sun himself, fell forward off of a sudden drop off that, given the sheer lack of light, neither of them had noticed. Mud and water splashed and splattered as the pair of them tumbled end over end, hurtling down the drop and slamming against trees and roots and rocks the whole way.
Sun finally came to a stop when he collided face first with a cypress, slamming his forehead hard enough to briefly black out and go numb. When his eyes shot open he felt a crippling pain in his head and saw nothing but mist and silver, floating lights as far as he could see. There was no sign of the hill they had fallen down, just flat marshland, and when Sun rolled over and looked at Fluttershy she was staring at him in horror.
"Sun, your horn!" she cried.
Sun's hooves shot up to his head, and where he expected to feel the familiar bone coming from his forehead, there was instead blood pooling from where it had once been. Looking frantically in the much darker water below with only the silver lights to guide him, Sun saw a familiar, burgundy, spiraled piece of bone floating in a pool of crimson.
Starlit gently tucked the cracked stone of the necklace into her collar after it had come dislodged during her flight, her chest still heaving as she lay in the blood puddle and stared towards the creaking, ancient gate. It sounded far older than it looked, like every inch it moved was an agonizing effort for its old, glimmering hinges. With a final groan of metal, the gates stopped moving, leaving the path forward clear for her.
With a grunt, Starlit flipped onto her stomach and slowly, agonizingly rose to her hooves. Her entire body ached, her horn felt like somepony was trying to snap it off, and she could barely even lift her head enough to see where she was going. Taking a moment to pick up her sword from where it had landed when she went off the cliff and sheathe it, Starlit struggled forward through the gate.
As she crossed the threshold there was an immediate change in scenery; the formerly omnipresent wind howling this high up the mountain ceased blowing entirely, replaced instead with a warm, gentle breeze. The chill that had gotten worse and worse the further up she climbed was gone as well, and the air was as pleasant as a balmy spring day. Finally, where there had once been worn out cobblestones and ruined homes and buildings as the only signs that anypony had once lived here, there now wasn't even that.
As Starlit crested the last ascent before the road evened out, all she saw was sheer devastation. For miles and miles in every direction there was nothing but desolate buildings that were barely more than piles of rubble. The roads and thoroughfares that had once cross-crossed through this city had been blasted into rubble and the rubble ground into dirt by the sheer progression of time. And as a final macabre touch, there were skeletons of ponies littered everywhere, left to rot where they had died in that grand final battle all those centuries ago.
The thing that drew the most of Starlit's attention, though, was the thing she knew was her final goal. Several miles away, carved out of the sheer rock face that formed the remains of the peak of the mountain, was a palace, and unlike the palaces Starlit had borne witness to in Sunspire, New Selene, and the Crystal Empire, this one was truly majestic. Made from polished white marble richly engraved with purple and golden carvings that swirled and contorted in perfectly symmetrical patterns, and with five massive spires that rose high above the massive castle grounds. Topping each spire was a large flag; one was bright orange, with a pair of wings folded over a large horn that was backed by a red circle. Another was a deep, rich blue, with a crescent moon on the underside flanked by an outstretched pair of blue wings and capped with a large five-pointed star. The third was in deep pinks, with a glittering blue crystal heart surrounded by a six-pointed star and several crystalline shapes in the center, while the fourth was black and dark teal, with a pair of thin, pale blue wings and twisted black horn in the center.
The central spire, however, had two flags, one ascending the other. The lower flag was a bright magenta, with an inverted crescent moon shape from the blue one's in the center. A pair of magenta wings were flanking the moon, which had five small white stars underneath it and one large, deep magenta, six-pointed star over the moon. Atop that flag was one that looked like a combination of all of the flags save for the black and teal one; it had the red and golden circle from the orange flag, the crescent moon and wings from the blue one, the blue heart and crystals from the pink one, and the stars from the magenta one. Each flag fluttered in the light breeze, flying high and proud atop their spires, and Starlit couldn't help but stare at them until a blinding flash of magenta from the central spire forced her to cover her eyes.
As her sight returned to her Starlit heard small thrum of magic sounded behind her, and she turned her aching neck to see that where there had once been an open gate leading down the mountain there was now a shimmering, slate grey wall of fog covering the way back down.
"Figures she'd trap me here," Starlit said, recognizing one of Twilight's fog wall spells when she saw it. "No turning back now unless I want to dive off the mountain again."
"I wouldn't recommend that, Starlit Sky," said a familiar voice in her mind. The necklace tugged and pulled out of Starlit's armor, and the stone hovered in front of her before once again projecting Twilight's regally-adorned image. However, what had once been a neat and perfect simulacrum of the Princess was now jittery and riven with streaks of silver light.
"Come to congratulate me on making it up your mountain, or to deride me for making it past all of the thestrals you put in my way?" Starlit asked, taking the moment to sit down and rest her legs.
"The thestrals were a test of your abilities, one that I am both happy and somewhat miffed you were able to overcome, so perhaps a mixture of both," Twilight answered.
"I've been dealing with far worse than that for a month now, what really makes you think that a few packs of thestrals was going to be what killed me?" Starlit asked, rolling her shoulders to relieve some of the tension.
"Firstly, they did kill you, several times in fact. Secondly, if I had wanted you dead, you would be, Starlit," Twilight countered with a cock of the eyebrow. "I have the sort of power that if I even think too hard about you, you would probably suffer an aneurysm. It would be utterly trivial for me to kill you."
"Then why haven't you? You know why I'm here, you know what I want, and you know that that means whatever you're doing is going to be stopped. Why keep me around knowing that I might just be the one thing that could throw all of this into utter disarray?"
"Because I need a witness, and you just so happen to fit the bill," Twilight answered.
"A witness to what?" Starlit asked back. "What could you possibly have to show me that it would be so important as to risk letting me tear down your whole scheme just to show it to me?"
Twilight, or at least the projection of her that the stone was manifesting, turned to face the palace in the distance, letting out a low, breathy sigh as she looked upon its majesty.
"Nothing less than the revival of my kingdom, and the securing of Equestria's future in perpetuity," Twilight answered. "You may not agree with my methods, Starlit Sky, but do not doubt that my motives are anything other than the salvation of you and this nation."
A large, shimmering field of magenta encapsulated Twilight's horn, and off in the distance Starlit could see a similar pinprick of magenta light at the very top of the central spire.
"Sacrifices have been made, Starlit Sky, and not just by you. Know that if you continue to interfere, you will be rendering centuries worth of planning and the lives of countless innocents meaningless, all for something as petty as revenge for one lie. This is the only warning you will receive from me."
The pinprick of light in the distance grew brighter and brighter, until it released into a five-pointed burst of magic. Each beam drew a straight, sure line to one of five flags, completely engulfing the orange, blue, pink, black, and combined flags in a blast of magenta fire. The sole one that remained was the magenta flag on the central spire, and Starlit had a fairly good idea of who that flag belonged to.
"Witness my ascension as Equestria's sole monarch," Twilight intoned, turning back to face her wayward servant, "and then go home."
The jittering, silver-streaked image of Twilight Sparkle faded away, and Starlit caught the black stone in her magic before it could hit the dirt. The pair of cracks along its surface glowed with a faint magenta light before fading back into the grey that they had been leaking before as Starlit put it back around her neck.
Her muscles ached, her head swam, and she had just received a stark, terrifying reminder of what exactly she was up against, but as Starlit pressed forward into the ruins of Canterlot, marching to what could very well be her doom and looking upon the burning flags at the tops of their spires, Starlit knew that she had to see what Twilight had done.
She had to see what Twilight had done that could possibly be worth all of this.
* * *
Night fell swiftly, faster than it should, though Starlit couldn't tell if it was from some latent magic or just her own weariness making the time pass faster. The gentle breeze blew over piles of rubble, creaked the skeletons of long dead trees, and ruffled Starlit's hair as she marched onward. Her hooves had lost all feeling, idly sliding through the dirt as they were, and one caught a piece of masonry she hadn't noticed and sent her sprawling to the ground with a dull thud.
The landing wasn't hard, not by a long shot, but to Starlit the world felt like it was swirling and swimming past her. Her body ached and her brain cried out for rest, more than it had in days, and for once Starlit felt like indulging it. Slowly her heavy eyelids fell closed, and as a flash of magenta illuminated the world she let unconsciousness take her away from the pain.
The blackness, pierced every so often by the dull red of light shining through her eyelids, was soothing to her battered body, but the guilt still gnawed at her heart as she slept. There was no stirring in her legs, no tossing and turning in nerves, just the deep, dreamless sleep of sheer exhaustion punctuated by the cloying knowledge that every minute spent resting was a minute closer to the summation of Twilight's plans.
Starlit wasn't sure how long she'd slept when she cracked her eyes open, but the moon was still high in the sky when she rolled over and stared up at the stars. With a heavy groan Starlit flipped over and got back up, her muscles screaming at her in protest and her brain crying out for more rest. Starlit quickly pulled the black stone out of her armor and held it aloft.
"I can rest when I'm home," Starlit thought as she began to worm her magic into the stone again. As she did the soft grey light emanating from its two cracks turned the same color of her magic, a soft, light teal, and before too long she felt that same tingling, prickly feeling overtake her body before she collapsed to the dirt.
In short time the blackness resolved into an image, not of Twilight, but of just her horn. The way Starlit's perspective was positioned she appeared to be sitting on top of Twilight's head, just behind her horn where a few errant sparks of magenta magic were dissipating. Starlit's perspective was quickly subsumed by magenta light before it vanished and her viewpoint had changed; she could see Twilight now, resplendent in her royal regalia and looking at Starlit with astonishment.
Twilight quickly picked whatever Starlit was viewing this scene from up in her magic, holding it at eye level and saying things to it that Starlit couldn't hear. By the furrowing of her brow and the speed of her words she seemed genuinely upset, and when nothing responded to her Twilight swiftly threw the object to the floor, severing the connection.
Starlit woke up with a start, like she had just had a nightmare about falling, but felt fit and awake again. A cracking sound rung out from the stone, and Starlit could see the last traces of her teal magic dissipating into grey as a third fracture appeared on the stone's black surface. The three cracks were now connected at a single point, and the original one was beginning to spread around to the other side of the stone.
Before Starlit could string the necklace back around her neck it was pulled out of her grasp, magenta light emanating from the cracks as a hazy, flickering image of Twilight manifested in front of her. She did not look pleased, to put it mildly.
"What are you doing?" Twilight demanded.
"Coming to stop your dastardly scheme, what does it look like?" Starlit curtly answered.
"Don't get smart with me, Starlit Sky, you know exactly what I'm talking about," Twilight countered back. "You did something just now, and I want to know what it was."
"Your Majesty, I can say in full confidence that I have no clue about what you're talking about," Starlit replied. "What happened to you, maybe that would clear things up a bit?"
"Wouldn't you just love to know," Twilight spat. "If you're just going to be coy with me then fine, keep your secrets, but know that I will figure out what you know sooner or later."
Without another word Twilight's image vanished, and the stone fell to the ground before Starlit quickly caught it in her magic. In its fragile state she couldn't afford to have it hit the ground any more. She quickly tucked the stone into a secure pocket of her armor, taking in what little information she had just gleaned.
"Whatever power is letting me spy on Twilight, it is something she's aware of but can't figure out," Starlit muttered to herself. "I have leverage on her now, but she's probably just going to redouble her efforts to bring me in by force if she really wants me to witness her rise to power."
Starlit quickly levitated her sword from its sheathe, testing the balance as she stretched her legs out. With a quick flourish she reseated the blade and started walking again, heading towards the palace once more.
The thrum in the necklace had grown softer again, and Starlit had to get to Twilight before she destroyed her only lifeline.
* * *
The closer Starlit got to the walls surrounding the palace, the more and more devastated the entire city looked. What would've been rubble near the Gate of Antiquities was now nothing more the flat, blasted rock and dust; where there had been the odd skeleton laying along the thoroughfare there were now piles of bones, skulls, and rusted armor, enough that Starlit was having to climb over them in some places. For all of the other lies Twilight had fed her, the scale of the sheer destruction that wracked Canterlot was living up to the stories.
Everywhere she looked, Starlit saw the ruination of what must have been a magnificent and exquisite civilization, all laid to waste by betrayal, jealousy, and mistrust. Every skull bleached by the sun, every sword rusted into ferrous dust by centuries of rain and wind, every life lost fighting for the ideals of a dead kingdom. If she had had the time, Starlit would've cried for the lost, but as she approached the gate she was forced to steel herself for what lay ahead.
Standing in front of a pair of massive, solid metal doors that were gilded and festooned with art and gems, was an equally titanic figure. It was in the general shape of a pony, but appeared to be more in line with one of Luna's constructs on closer inspection. The silver-and-gold clad behemoth was easily thrice her size and twice her width; it had a massive iron horn protruding from the chamfron on its forehead, a quiver of iron spears as tall as trees slung to its side, and across its back and down its legs and face were streaks of tarnish and grime accumulated over what must have been centuries of ceaseless vigil.
Starlit drew her sword from the sheathe, holding it low in her magic as she cautiously approached the guardian. As she got closer, avoiding the odd bit of bone and stone, it's massive head creaked and groaned with the shriek of long rusted hinges and joints as it turned its hollow, eyeless face to track her passage. The void in its eye sockets was disconcerting, to say the least, but Starlit kept a close watch on it as it kept a closer watch on her.
Starlit slowly, hesitantly, approached the massive doors to find that there were a series of smaller doors built into the larger doors to allow for ponies to come through without having the waste the time pulling open the gates. A thunderous cracking and booming of hooves sounded as the behemoth slowly rotated around, watching Starlit as she laid a hoof upon the door in front of her.
With a thin creak, the smaller door opened up with just a slight push. The guardian did nothing, just watched as Starlit moved through and entered the courtyard of the palace itself. With another thin creak Starlit shut the door behind her before letting out a deep sigh of relief at what was either her luck or Twilight's poor planning.
"What is the point of having a guardian that size if it just lets a trespasser go by without trying to stop her?" Starlit asked to the air as she pressed forward. She quickly sheathed her sword, before realizing that she would definitely still need it.
Standing before her, guarding the way up a set of massive marble stairs into the palace itself, were a sextet of smaller guardians very similar to the one that Starlit had just sneaked past. These constructs were roughly her size, and each and every one of them turned to stare at her with perfect, creaking precision, the rising light of the sun glinting and gleaming off of their tarnished and patinated bodies.
As Starlit pulled her sword out, the six constructs all illuminated their own iron horns with a very familiar sheen of grey magic and pulled spears out from the holsters slung to their sides. Each spear turned and pointed at Starlit as the guardians began to march in lockstep towards her. Their hooves clanked against the dirt, their joints creaked and squealed with centuries of decay, and nothing but their hollowed, empty visors stared back at Starlit.
Starlit quickly manifested a body ward around herself, the shimmering teal light encasing her form like a blanket. The foremost guardian lunged with its spear, an attack Starlit was able to expertly deflect into the ground before stepping on the iron spear to hold it in place and throwing the sword forward to its helmet. A screech of metal greeted Starlit as the sword found purchase and dug into the helmet perpendicular to the visor, but when she withdrew the sword there was no squelch of gore or spurt of blood. Whatever these things were, they were not at all like the constructs in New Selene, especially when Starlit felt the guardian she had just stabbed through the face pull its spear back to it.
Starlit quickly feinted right as the spear flew out over her head again and narrowly dodging a second spear from one of its cohorts by flopping onto her stomach. Starlit could feel her heart race as she tried to figure out a way to end these things, and noticed the sheer level of rust on its horseshoes and greaves.
Thinking quickly, Starlit whipped her sword downward to strike at the hooves of the guardian that was upon her, rolling out of the way of a spear strike as she did. The deafening clatter of metal striking the ground made Starlit whip her head around, where she saw the construct flailing in the ground and missing its front hooves.
Getting up and readying her sword again, Starlit kept aiming low at each of these beasts; while it would sometimes take two or three strikes to get the desired results, eventually she had each and every construct on the ground and failing to stand back up on hooves they no longer had. Dodging spears that sailed over, under, and around her from her prone assailants, Starlit started the arduous process of tearing them apart piece by piece. Barding, chamfron, greaves, tassets; she had to rend, cut, and pull every piece of these monsters apart before they finally stopped moving, and Starlit had taken more than a few spears to her ward before she could finally get the last one to fall still.
Breathing heavily, Starlit looked to her sword, now battered and chipped with having to cleave through metal, and tossed it aside. With a spurt of magic Starlit tore one of the spear holsters off of the ruined armor and carefully wound it through the straps of her own armor. She then took up one of the iron spears, gently testing its balance in her magic before sliding it into the holster.
"There's going to be more of them inside, that much is certain," Starlit said to herself. "And if I run into one of those huge ones that wants me dead, I might just have to sneak around it rather than engage it."
A soft clink against a piece of rock drew Starlit's attention, where she saw her black stone necklace laying. The light from its cracks pulsed slowly, and it was slowly dragging itself towards the remnants of the metal guardians.
Starlit eyed the rock curiously, seeing where it was going, before it nestled itself into one of the helmets. Taking the helmet up in her magic, seeing it as the one she had stabbed through, Starlit saw the stone hanging off of the inside, near the back, where next to it was another piece of the Heart of Fate.
The stone could be nothing else, and Starlit felt her heart start to beat faster as she carefully tore the front of the helmet apart to get a better look at it. It was a more rounded shape than her own shard-like crystal, and it appeared to be attached to the back of the helmet by some sort of filmy, organic substance that fell away as soon as Starlit took hold of the stone with her magic. She felt no pulse, no thrumming beat from this one the way she had felt from her own so many times, but she knew that there was power within it, and that power could possibly be tapped.
Starlit took her own fragment in her magic, holding the pair aloft as she concentrated on them both with all of her mental fortitude. Starlit knew that she could take energy from her own stone, but if she could possibly give some from another to her own, it might help repair the damage she had done to her own.
Starlit's face screwed up in focus as she concentrated on the magic within herself and the stones, and after what felt like an hour of trying to forge the connection Starlit saw what she was looking for; a thin stream of grey light connecting the two stones. Her heart was beating more rapidly now as sweat beaded down her forehead, but what had initially been anticipation swiftly turned to shock.
The process was almost too quick for her to notice; at one moment there were two stones, and then suddenly there was just her own. The other fragment had just ceased to be, and the cracks in her own stone had shrunk ever so slightly. The grey light pulsing out from within the cracks was brighter for a moment, before gently receding back to its usual state.
As Starlit put the stone back into the pocket on her armor she felt the pulse from it quicken and pull towards the shattered and torn to pieces armor around her, where she saw, ever so faintly, five more grey lights pulsating from inside five more helmets.
The pain in Sun's forehead went from a dull ache to blindingly excruciating as he stared at his own shattered appendage in the water. An involuntary howl of pain, rage, and sadness bellowed out from his lips as he fell back against the tree behind him, clutching his forehead to try and stanch the bleeding as warm blood ran down his face and into his eyes.
"Sun!" Fluttershy called, sprinting over to him and trying to move his hooves away. "Sun, you have to let me see it, please! Where did your horn land?"
Sun couldn't stop screaming, only pointing with a free hoof to the bobbing shard of bone in the water. Fluttershy quickly picked it up in her teeth, but as she did it fell apart into three bleeding splinters, leaving Fluttershy with a mouthful of useless bones.
"Oh no, oh no, no, no," Fluttershy moaned as she spat the remains of Sun's horn back out. "Sun, I… I don't think it's salvageable."
"Then just… fix the… bleeding hole… in my forehead!" Sun grunted out through gritted teeth as he tried to stop himself from screaming. A low howl and a sudden burst of crying followed shortly thereafter.
Fluttershy quickly pulled out several jars from her pouches; one he recognized as the plaster she had used on him when they first met, alongside a thick white paste that stank horrifically and a watery, dark blue mixture. As she set the jars out on a nearby tree stump she gathered up the fragments of his horn and locked them as solidly back together as she could manage.
"Now Sun, this is going to hurt a lot, but it might be the one thing I can do to save something of your horn," Fluttershy said, her voice low and soft as she held the horn pieces between her hooves. "I need you to take your hooves off of the stump, and when I put the pieces back on and say so, you need to hold them in place as tightly to the stump as possible. Can you do that?"
"Yes, yes, please, just hurry!" Sun growled, pulling his hooves off of the stump of his horn. They were covered in blood, though it was hard to tell compared to his fur color.
Just as Fluttershy started to put the horn shards towards his head Sun felt a fresh wave of agony rocket through the stump and every single nerve in his face before a massive burst of grey energy spewed out of the wound. Fluttershy fell backwards into the ankle deep water to avoid getting his square in the face with it, and after a moment the blast faded out and Sun felt his muscles go slack.
"Are you okay?!" Fluttershy asked as she gathered the horn pieces back up.
"Tired… so tired…" Sun croaked, barely mustering up the strength to speak. "Please…hurry…"
Fluttershy worked quickly, much quicker than she had been so she could avoid another blast, should it come. She took up the jar of black liquid and poured a portion of it onto the stump, washing away the blood and releasing a caustic smell as it did. Another shot of pain lanced through Sun's forehead as the liquid seeped into the wound, and it took all of his willpower to not try and beat Fluttershy away.
Fluttershy took out a long, thin vine, and working quickly with her teeth and hooves wrapped it around the broken shards of his horn to hold them together. With the final loop tied taut, Fluttershy gently lifted it up towards Sun's forehead, his eyes tracking it to the point of going cross-eyed.
"When I say so, I need you to hold this in place," Fluttershy reiterated. "Do you understand?"
"Yes… I'm tired… not deaf," Sun groaned as he sluggishly lifted his forelegs towards his head.
"Steady… steady… now!" Fluttershy said, planting the horn right back onto the stump. Sun howled in pain as the sharp, broken end of the bone dug into the soft flesh of the marrow, exposed nerves, and leaking blood vessels. He clamped his hooves down onto the sides of the horn as Fluttershy quickly grabbed the white paste and started slathering it at the base where the break was. The stink of the paste was nothing compared to the immediate chilly, nerve-tingling sensation that ran through his head as she generously applied the medicinal goo.
"Okay, I can hold it now if you want me to," Fluttershy said as she put the jar back on the tree stump. "That just needs time to set before I apply the rest of it to try and seal the breaks in your horn, and then the healing plaster and the moss to give you back the blood and tissue you lost."
Without a word Sun dropped his hooves to his sides, causing Fluttershy to jump forward and readjust the horn to the proper angle.
"Maybe warn me a bit next time?" Fluttershy said, looking into one of Sun's eyes with a frustrated, and then a worried expression.
"Hooves feel like… weights are… tied to them…" Sun muttered. "So tired… need sleep…"
"You can sleep if you want, I'll set the candles up after I finish with your horn," Fluttershy said, softly running a hoof down Sun's face. "You poor thing…"
Sun needed no further prompting, letting his heavy, aching eyelids fall shut as the weariness overtook all other sensations save for the throbbing pain in his head. Blackness overtook everything, but in the distance of this dreamless sleep there was always a hint of grey, just at the periphery.
* * *
Fluttershy rested her head against the smooth bark of the cypress that Sun had cracked his horn against, eying over her handiwork with a critical eye.
Sun was currently resting on the tree stump, his cloak neatly tucked up around himself so he could stay as warm and comfortable as possible. His breathing was steady but shallow, and a thin trickle of blood slid down his head from underneath the layers of paste and plaster Fluttershy had had to use to keep the horn fragments from coming apart again.
Fluttershy took a moment to wash her hooves off in the water she was sitting in, keeping an ear up for anything that might venture too close. She might not be any good in a fight, but she was quite good at running, and in Sun's current state if they needed to flee they would need all the head start they could get. The silence surrounding them was a good sign, but Fluttershy still couldn't shake the roiling, awful feeling in her gut that something was going to go wrong again soon.
"Why did you do this, you idiot?" Fluttershy asked to her own distorted reflection. "You could be home right now. You didn't have to care about him, and even if you did it didn't have to be to this degree."
Her reflection gave no answers, just an increasingly more unsure expression. Her heat beat faster in her chest, she could feel the bile rise in her throat, and without thinking she started beating at her reflection, spraying water all around and onto herself as she pummeled the ghost of her own poor decisions.
"Why do I have to care so much?! Why can't I just leave well enough alone?! I try to be kind, I try to be understanding, but all it gets me is pain and awful situations! I'm a hermit for crying out loud, I don't owe anypony my time or my care! I don't have to care about anypony but myself, so why do I?!"
Fluttershy fell back against the tree, her breathing heavy and her heart racing. A bobbing silver light trailed by, one of many that were dotting this entire part of the swamp, which she now could surmise was the Misty Vale. It's lazy, aimless path flitted this way and that without direction, and as she watched it Fluttershy felt her pulse slow."
"You have to care because if you don't, then who will?" Fluttershy muttered to herself. She closed her eyes, trying to recall her mother's face on the day that she had given her that piece of advice, but it had been so long that Fluttershy couldn't even recall the sound of her voice.
Fluttershy's gaze fell back to Sun as the bobbing light moved towards his stump. Curled up on the rough wood, clutching his cloak tight and utterly motionless save for his breathing. He was defenseless, hurt, and scared, and in that hurt, in that fear, Fluttershy saw so much of herself that it brought tears to her eyes.
"We're not that different, you and I," Fluttershy muttered to herself as she stood up and started pulling out the citronella candles. The jars they were in would be buoyant enough to stay afloat, and there was nothing resembling a flow to the water so they wouldn't drift too far afield while she caught some sleep as well.
When the last candle sparked to life, Fluttershy carefully arranged them in a perimeter around the stump before sidling up against it, her back facing Sun as she sat down and let her head fall forward. It wasn't that comfortable, but it was something, at in the end that was what would count.
* * *
A snapping of a twig and a splash in the water roused Sun from his death-like sleep, his ears flicking and every bone in his neck popping as he straightened out from the curled up position he'd been holding for hours. The pain in his forehead was now a dull ache, but one that was impossible to ignore. Every beat of his heart sent a pulse of blood to his reforged horn, and every pulse of blood sent a fresh wave of pain through his face and forehead.
Twisting his head around so he could look in the water, Sun examined his horn with some mild discomfort. The medicine Fluttershy had applied to it did its work, certainly; the horn was reattached and obviously in one piece, and he had feeling in it. On the other hoof, it was now crooked and warped from having to be pieced back together, and there were several noticeable indents and scratches in its surface aside from the typical spiral. Gingerly Sun ran a hoof down the length of the horn, testing its strength and getting a sharp, piercing pain through his head for the effort. It was very tender, and would be for some time, but that was the least of his worries in regards to his broken appendage.
Taking a quick, shallow series of breaths to psyche himself up and prepare for the worst, Sun tried to channel some of his magic through the horn. The dull ache quickly intensified to a sharp, throbbing pain as he worked his magic into the horn, trying to merely cast a simple light spell. Sun gritted his teeth and strained his neck as he focused, the feeling being akin to an extremely bad bout of constipation.
Just when Sun didn't think he could take any more of the pain, a massive shot of magic spewed out from his horn and raced into the trees. Most of it was silver, but there were traces of his original green magic within the blast of light as well.
Fluttershy shrieked with surprise and fear as the beam jettisoned from his forehead, and Sun nearly clipped her when he instinctually turned his head towards her. He quickly shut the flow of magic off, the energy fading to a trickle before ending completely.
"What was that?!" Fluttershy asked, a hoof to her chest as she hyperventilated.
"That was testing a theory," Sun answered, his own breathing ragged as he slumped back down onto the stump.
"Come again?" Fluttershy asked back, her head tilted at a questioning angle.
"I wanted to see how bad the damage to my horn was, so I tried casting a spell," Sun explained. "Not only was it ridiculously painful, but that was just a simple light spell."
"That was supposed to be a light spell? That nearly took my head off!"
"Exactly," Sun continued, dejectedly trailing a hoof through the water. "It felt like all of the magic I was trying to conjure just kept backing up inside my head until it couldn't hold any more, and then came erupting out of me. I may have the horn back, but I certainly don't have my magic back."
"I wouldn't be so sure," said a third voice, one that Sun recognized but was astonished about since it wasn't inside of his head.
Sun quickly turned to Fluttershy, whose eyes were wide with fear as she looked to the trees for the source of the sound.
"You heard that?" Sun asked, stepping off of the stump. He nearly lost his footing coming into the cold water, only for Fluttershy to help him steady himself.
"I did, and I don't like it," Fluttershy answered. "This is the Misty Vale, Sun, and ponies don't come back from here."
"Perhaps they don't, but it is not by my hoof that they are waylaid," the third voice said again.
"Chrysalis, show yourself!" Sun called out to the swamp and woods around him. "You know why I'm here and you know what I've been through to get here!"
"Indeed I do, and while we may not be able to meet in flesh just yet, I can at least pose as a simulacrum for your convenience," Chrysalis answered, her voice low, sweet, and with the barest hint of menace.
A chill wind suddenly whipped through the trees and splashed the water around Sun's fetlocks. Fluttershy reactively grabbed a hold of Sun, dealing one of her wings over Sun's back and pulling him in as she wrapped her hooves around his neck. He could feel her shaking through his chest, and at the moment he felt exactly the same as she did.
As the wind whipped and blew through, a thin, black mist rolled in along with it, just above the surface of the water. It was shallow and nearly see through at first, but thickened and grew in size before it started to twist and mold itself. The wind blew this way and that, as though it were beating the mist into form, until it died when the black fog assumed its final shape.
Standing before them was a tall, lanky, vaguely translucent black pony. It had a horn, twisted and crooked, and wings that flittered and buzzed like an insect's before laying across its back. There were no discernible facial or bodily features that Sun could make out, save for what appeared to be numerous holes in the silhouette's hooves and legs.
Finally, with a flash of silver light on the silhouette's face, a pair of large, glowing bright teal-green eyes appeared. The whites were a slightly lighter shade of green than the irises, and the pupils were slitted disturbingly like Spike's, save for the fact that the eyes were obviously compound like a Changeling's.
"There, that's better," Chrysalis said, flicking her shadow form's hair away from her eyes. "My apologies for giving you a fright, but my methods of communication with my servants have been limited for quite some time. I'm afraid the finer points of interpersonal interactions have become lost to me."
"And… you're actually Chrysalis," Sun said, pulling Fluttershy a little closer. "Not a proxy, not one of your Changelings. You're the real deal."
"In the mist, as you see me," Chrysalis answered. "I understand that you might have come to mistrust beings such as myself after your interactions with the alicorns back in Equestria, but unlike them I have nothing to hide."
"Then why did you go through Silence for so long?" Sun asked back. "Why didn't you just try to contact me directly? And why have your Changelings been attacking us? If you wanted to see me so badly, you sure know how to roll out the welcome mat."
"Allow me to answer a question, with a question," Chrysalis replied, sending a wave of frustration coursing through Sun's chest. "Why would I so willingly expose myself to one of my most hated enemies, whose servant was in your company for the last month, by contacting you directly?"
"You wouldn't," Sun answered, already starting to see where this conversation was headed.
"Precisely," Chrysalis replied with a tilt of the head. "You see, Setting Sun, I haven't gotten this far ahead in life by being reckless; I pick my battles carefully, and I know when it is better to keep to myself and when it is better to be more direct in my machinations."
"Then why have your Changelings been attacking us? Doesn't seem like a wise move, trying to kill a pony that you've invested a lot of time and effort into."
"For the drones that you have encountered thus far, let it be knew that they were no brood of mine," Chrysalis continued, the edge in her voice growing more pronounced. "In the aftermath of that dreadful business in Equestria some of my children were severed from my control through Twilight Sparkle's magic. They went feral without my guidance, and proceeded to make their own hives by interbreeding with ponies while in their glamour."
"That's… that's horrific!" Sun exclaimed, suddenly feeling ill at the very notion. "They were your Changelings, why didn't you try to stop them!?"
"You think I didn't act for lack of wanting to?" Chrysalis countered harshly. "I was badly weakened after what happened in Canterlot, and it took all of my strength just to come back here so I could spend centuries recuperating in communion with the Heart of Fate. What my wayward children did was outside of my control, this I swear to you."
Chrysalis closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and slowly let it back out. Sun was getting a worse and worse feeling in his gut the longer he spoke with her, and Fluttershy shaking like a leaf next to him wasn't helping his nerves.
"Setting Sun, I am sorry," Chrysalis said, regaining her composure. "I don't mean to be so curt, but time is short and we both have neither the time nor the energy to waste on moralizing about things neither of us can change. You need to find me, and quickly."
"And we get to the core of the matter," Sun interjected. "Why me? Why have you been doing all of this? Why couldn't you have taken care of any of his by yourself?"
"You ask many questions, unicorn," Chrysalis rebutted.
"I consider it one of my more charming personality traits. You obviously need me for something, so why not just lay it out in the table? It's not like I'm in any fit state to refuse you."
Chrysalis tilted her head again, a sharp, jerking motion like a wasp adjusting itself in flight. The being in front of Sun exuded an odd, subtle aura of otherness that he just couldn't shake, and it sent a shiver down his spine that he couldn't blame on Fluttershy.
"Very well, if you insist," Chrysalis replied. "I require a servant, a channel for my power that is also bound up in Twilight's 'great work', as she once called it. It was auspicious that you possessed the magical acumen to worm your way into one of my shards, and doubly so that you also are descended from those that Twilight Sparkle cursed."
"Cursed?" Sun asked. "How?"
"Why do you think magic is so perilously rare and so incredibly weak in her domain?" Chrysalis responded with another jerking tilt of the head. "She decided your fate long before you were even a whisper of an idea. You, your ancestors, nearly every pony now living, is marred by one of my wayward shards, bound to your mind and soul in such a way that it siphons your natural magic, holds it in place like a tumor."
Sun slowly raised his hoof, before placing it to the back of his head where the small, soft pulse was beating.
"Yes, indeed," Chrysalis continued. "You, more than most, are intimately familiar with this affliction, but from the curse that Twilight Sparkle laid upon your kind I will give you salvation. Find me, to the south; in the bog where no light shines you will find my magnificent hive, resplendent and terrifying. I will be waiting for you in the innermost brood-chamber. There you will be given my offer."
With another chill wind the figure dissipated, blown away like smoke from a campfire. Sun's hoof was still on the back of his head, and Fluttershy slowly turned to look at him as she finally let go of his neck.
"What now?" Fluttershy asked.
"We go on," Sun replied, his voice, like his heart, growing hard. Starlit had to be warned.
* * *
Chrysalis's eyes rolled forward with a slick sliding sound, her body pulsating slightly. It had been ages since she had had to perform that style of magic , and though the memory was as fresh as ever she was still well out of practice.
As her eyes refocused she scanned the chamber, taking in the old, familiar surroundings; the long diminished Heart of Fate hovered a few inches above her chitinous throne, a pale shade of the mighty, beating Heart it had once been. Even as she gazed upon it she saw an infinitesimal fragment shave off and vanish in a small nimbus of silvery light.
"Time grows short, and I grow reckless," Chrysalis muttered to herself. With a beating of her diaphanous wings Chrysalis flew upward, high above the heart and the throne to the highest point of her hive. She felt a small gust of fresh air blow in through the hole in the very top, before the cool gust enveloped her as she ascended high into the ever-darkened sky.
With deft, soft steps Chrysalis landed atop the hive, the highest point she knew of in all of the Glowing Waste. From this singular vantage point she could look out over all of her domain at once. It was a soothing sight normally, but Chrysalis found her heart laid heavy with guilt.
She had acted hastily when she pulled Fluttershy and Setting Sun into her domain, and she was remorseful for the pain she had caused to Setting Sun in the breaking of his horn. Such a precious conduit for such precious magical energy, and it had snapped like a twig.
"Why do you mourn for that which you know was pre-ordained?" Chrysalis asked herself. "The horn needed to break; to compromise his sense of self, make him a more willing vessel when the time comes."
Chrysalis breathed deep the cool air, trying to find the same sense of comfort that she normally found whenever she came out into her shrouded domain, but it did not come. So much hope laid onto one soul, and Chrysalis found her surety lacking.
With another beat if her wings she descended back into the hive, down all the way to her throne and the Heart, she knew she could not afford to indulge her more base emotional predations. Too much was at stake to let compromise worm its way into her heart.
Channeling her magic into her Heart, Chrysalis forged that age old connection to her primal source, entreating it to take away these feelings lest they cause the plan she had been hatching for centuries to come crumbling down.
Chrysalis slowly raised her head, seeing the dissipation of magic from her horn that she did not remember casting. The Heart was beating more strongly now, why she could not surmise, and a sharp pain tore through her right foreleg. Raising the limb she could see a new pit digging into her leg, a sign that she had succumbed to her better nature and required absolution.
"Thank you for this pain, that I remember myself and my purpose," Chrysalis said to herself as clear ichor dribbled from her fresh wound.
The process of removing and reforming the pieces of the Heart of Fate was tedious and exhausting to her magic, but for as slow going as it was it gave a her quite a bit of time to contemplate what could possibly be happening with them. As it stood now she had a prevailing theory that Twilight, somehow, was using these pieces to animate these constructs, although the methods she had used and the amount of fragments she had managed to steal from Chrysalis was eluding her.
With the last piece reformed, there was only a tiny, pinhole sized pit in the center of her own shard. It pulsed merrily in the grip of Starlit's magic before she turns it back around her neck.
Taking a moment to rest herself, Starlit took in the scenery of the castle's courtyard. On the whole it was in better shape than the surrounding city by several degrees of magnitude. The hedges and flower gardens, while now wildly overgrown, were still green and lush, and the marble pathways that intersected around the grounds were still in good condition, if somewhat grimy from exposure. Even the magnificent staircase leading up to the open portcullis of the palace itself was in fantastic condition; Starlit had figured that, expecting a siege, the defenders of this palace might have destroyed something like this to make it harder for potential invaders to enter the palace itself.
The opulence of the palace itself made the ruination of the city surrounding it all the more stark for the juxtaposition, at least until Starlit noticed the burned tatters that had once been the five flags of the other Princesses. A scrap of blue here, a melted fastening with some orange still stuck to it there, and all of it a grim reminder of what exactly the cost of all of this was.
Standing tall, Starlit pulled the spear she had salvaged out from its holster in her side, holding it forward as she began her ascent up the stairs, one quickly halted by what she saw at the top of it.
Standing in perfect lockstep with each other were another sextet of constructs, each with spears leveled forward, and the moment they saw Starlit crest the landing of the stairs they began their purposeful, inexorable, march forward.
Starlit barely had a moment to conjure her ward before the first spear struck true, just barely getting past the ward before it fully manifested and gouging a hole in her chest. Starlit coughed viciously, blood dribbling down her chin, as the spear was pulled out. Even worse, she began to gasp and struggle for air as she felt a lung collapse inside of her.
Acting purely on instinct Starlit threw the spear in her magic forward wildly, managing to drill the hard steel point through the visor of the construct and straight out the back. There was a pop of grey light from the back of its metal head before it fell limp, held aloft only by the spear's haft before its aged rivets fell apart and left only the helmet on her spear.
Starlit had no room to maneuver and no space to reorient herself before the next construct was upon her, followed closely behind by two of its compatriots. Thinking quickly she swung the haft of the spear at the advancing armor, sending the helmet of the first crashing directly into the helmet of the second. Rivets and plating failed as the two collided, and the second construct's helmeted head flew a good dozen feet to the left while its body collapsed and tumbled down the stairs.
A burning pain tore down Starlit's side as a spear just barely glanced off of her armor, still cutting through and deeply enough the leave a neat, bleeding gash down the length of Starlit's torso. She didn't have time to savor this injury before another spear dug straight into the joint of her knee, knocking her backwards and sending her tumbling down the polished marble steps after the armor she had sent clattering down.
Starlit bounced and crashed until she fell flat against the marble landing at the bottom of the steps. Her body was contused and bleeding, her left eye had swollen shut, and all she felt from her left leg was a searing pain that stopped short at her knee. Looking down at her leg and then up to the stairs, Starlit found that the leverage from the spear lodged in the knee had torn her lower leg fully clean from her body, and she let out a bloodcurdling scream of pain at the realization.
Her howls of pain and rage were cut brutally short, when another spear pierced through her side where the armor was split, gouging straight through her stomach and out the other side to pin her in place, followed by two more sent through her chest and her eyeball, followed by nothing but blackness. Starlit knew this darkness well, and she welcomed the chance to try again it afforded her.
Yet, in this blackness there was now something else. Whenever Starlit had come to this place before it was just herself and the pulsing beat of the stone. It had seemed more like sleeping than anything else, but now she knew better, because there were other figures here with her.
Standing some distance away Starlit saw six ponies, four earth ponies and two unicorns. They were all male, all of various shades and colors, and all looked to be in the throes of despair. They wailed and cried out in suffering, but no sounds escaped their lips. Indeed, the only sound Starlit could hear in this place was the pulsing beat of the shard she carried, before even that faded away as she felt herself leaving the horrific scene before her. For the first time Starlit could recall she didn't want to leave it.
When her eyes snapped open Starlit found that barely any time had passed at all; the sun was still in he same position, the blood beneath her was still fresh, and though her leg was reattached she could still feel the phantom pain from when it had been torn off. This process, which normally took hours by her last estimate, had barely taken the space of a few minutes.
"What is this?" Starlit frantically thought to herself. "What did Twilight do? What did I do?!"
Starlit found barely any time to contemplate the matter before remembering that she was still, technically, in the middle of a fight. She quickly got to her hooves, taking up her spear from where it had fallen, to see that the constructs had retreated back to the top of the stairs.
Taking a moment to manifest her ward once more, Starlit marched purposefully up the bloodstained stairs. The constructs at the top were prepared to march, but Starlit was ready this time. Feinting right as a spear sailed past her head, Starlit made a wide, sweeping slash with the spear tip that caught all of the constructs at head level. One after the other rivets popped out under the force of her blow, sending the helmets of these animated suits of armor colliding into each other, one by one, until all four had been ripped off and their bodies fallen limp to the ground.
Starlit didn't take the time to savor her victory, instead letting her spear clatter to the ground as she quickly pulled the necklace off of her neck and held it aloft in front of her. There was no change in its surface from when she had last put it on; same smooth surface, same small pit in the center that leaked out grey light. Everything was exactly the same, which made what Starlit had just seen all the more inexplicable.
"This has never happened before," Starlit said to herself. "Why would there have been ponies in there? I didn't even know that the—"
Starlit lifted her head with a start, a realization suddenly taking hold in her mind. It wasn't something she wanted to entertain as an idea, but she had no other way of explaining it bar Sun descending down from on high to give her any other answer.
Slowly, carefully, Starlit pulled the helmets of the fallen armors open, wherein she found another four shards exactly like the ones she'd found in the six at the bottom of the stairs. The filmy organic substance holding them onto the surface suddenly made far more sense to her, as did their position in the helmets.
"These were ponies," Starlit muttered. "She gave these ponies pieces of the Heart of Fate that she'd stolen from Chrysalis, and used her magic to bind them to their bodies. Which means that, whatever magic trapped them in these suits of armor…"
Starlit dropped the helmet she was holding, going weak at the knees. She collapsed to the polished marble landing, nearly laying prostrate before the massive open portcullis as the weight of what she knew overtook her.
"This magic is tied to me, and I can't get rid of it."
Starlit felt herself shaking; from anger, from betrayal, from sheer indignation at how thoroughly she had been used for so long. She wanted to cry, wanted to scream, wanted to do anything to feel like she could take back control of this situation, but deep down she knew nothing she could do here would help.
Slowly, purposefully, Starlit rose to her hooves. She took up her spear, restrung the stone around her neck, and began the long, slow march into the palace. If there were answers to be had they would come from the Princess herself, and Starlit was going to wring them out of that pompous, self-aggrandizing, overly-inflated ego if it was the last thing she ever did.
* * *
A clatter of steel on stone echoed off of the polished marble walls as another of Twilight Sparkle's animated armors fell to Starlit's blows. With a heavy sigh Starlit holstered her pilfered spear as she lifted the helmet off of the armor and opened its visor. With a sharp yank she dislodged the piece of the Heart of Fate from inside and gently hovered it into the pouch on her saddlebags that she had been keeping all of them.
In total, not counting the six Starlit had fed into her own before realizing what exactly they were, she had collected twenty-six from the fallen constructs. The clattered and clinked together as she walked the empty, beautiful halls, a chorus of memories that she carried with her from whomever these ponies had been.
Everywhere Starlit looked she was given a glimpse of what her world might have been like had Equestria not fallen apart and lost its magic; luxurious paintings depicting grand conquests and idyllic scenes of merriment, dark wood furnishings upholstered with dark purple cushions, elegant bedrooms and drawing chambers that looked like they had only just been occupied; in the hours that Starlit had wandered the empty halls, she had seen every creature comfort afforded to a populace that was no longer around to enjoy it.
"All of this, and nopony to share it with," Starlit mused to herself as she poked her head into yet another bedroom. "Maybe if Twilight had focused more on rebuilding and getting ponies to help her do it rather than becoming a tinpot tyrant, she wouldn't have needed me at all."
Hours of walking in the palace, and nothing to show for it save a bag of stones and worrying thoughts that threatened to make Starlit doubt herself. It came as a relief when her bag of fragments along with the one she wore around her neck tugged to the right, giving Starlit something else to focus on.
Following the gentle pulling Starlit was led to a door, one situated in a large pillar that dominated a large, central rotunda, and unlike any of the other ones that she had seen thus far. Where all of the other doors she had happened across in the palace were made from a similar dark wood, this one was instead made from wrought iron, held closed by three heavy latches that had no discernible locks or mechanisms for holding them shut.
Starlit laid a hoof in the door, running it down the latches and across the rough surface. There was a familiar hum of magic emanating from it, and as Starlit examined the frame she could see various runes not too dissimilar to her own warding lines back home.
"Shame whichever Princess made this door didn't use a normal lock for this," Starlit said as she illuminated her horn.
Concentrating on the runes carved into the frame, Starlit slowly began the work of undoing the enchantment. The spell was complex, far more so than her own warding lines or even the shields she could now generate, but the underlying sigils were still the same, and by working through those she could unravel the more complicated spellcraft that had been woven into it.
With a flash of teal magic tinted by silver, the runes on the door dissipated and the humming ceased. Three heavy iron clanks echoed down the hall as the latches fell open, followed by a long, high creak as the door swung open on ancient hinges. A series of teal torches illuminated along the walls, showing the spiraling staircase descending and ascending into darkness.
Taking her spear up in her magic, Starlit made her way down. The staircase was narrow, just barely wide enough for herself to get down, but was tall enough that Starlit could hold her spear over her head to keep it out of the way. The smell of must and dampness got more pervasive the further down she went, and a chill began to creep up her spine the further she went into the earth.
After an interminable amount of time Starlit finally reached the bottom of the stairs, which led out into a large, smoothed out cavern that smelled of mold and metal. Illuminating her horn, Starlit took a few cautious steps forward, only for her spear to drop as she saw something she was certain Twilight didn't mean for her to see.
Scattered around this cavernous space were shelves and tables covered in old scrolls, tomes, and all sorts of exotic and arcane equipment that reminded Starlit all too much of Twilight's basement in the Golden Oak. All of this paled in comparison, though, to the centerpiece of this workshop; hovering above a large stone slab and held in place by six metallic arms, was a massive black stone that hummed with power and glowed with brilliant silver light.
Starlit could only stand, stunned into awe, as she looked upon what could only be the Heart of Fate itself. The stone was titanic in size, easily filling up the entire back of the thirty foot tall cavern. It dwarfed the prison that Luna had been encased in when Starlit had found her considerably, and true to its name it was indeed shaped like a massive, beating heart. It pulsated with a sound like grinding stone, and its beats were both natural and disconcerting at the same time.
As Starlit slowly approached the Heart she noticed that her saddlebags were no longer rattling, and a quick inspection led her to realize that all,of her collected fragments were missing. An cacophony of clinks drew her attention back to the Heart, where she could see the twenty-six stones clattering against their progenitor before slowly sinking into its surface.
"How did she get this thing here?" Starlit muttered. "This was supposed to be Chrysa—"
Starlit stopped short when her brain caught up with what she was about to say, the realization hitting her with the force of an explosion; Sun was in danger, and Starlit had to warn him. He had to know that the Heart of Fate was no longer with Chrysalis.
Thinking quickly, Starlit began to root through the scrolls and books littering the workspace that had been set up down here. There had to be something that would help her figure this out, or at least something that would let her get out a message to Sun. Unfortunately, all she found were descriptions of magical formulae that she couldn't make heads or tails of, and those were just the things that she could recognize; everything else was in old Equestrian, which was a damn sight different than her own language. In a rage Starlit threw the books to the floor, sending one of the smaller tables crashing to the stone floor along with the equipment it was supporting.
So consumed was she in her search for any sort of clue or indicator on how to proceed that Starlit hadn't noticed the steady, gentle beat of her own fragment around her neck. She gingerly pulled it from inside of her armor, afraid that it would fly away towards the Heart, and saw that it was glowing fully now with a nimbus of silver light not unlike the Heart itself. She could feel the pull of its magic towards the Heart, as though it wanted to join the other fragments Starlit had saved from the automatons.
With careful, measured steps, Starlit walked to the Heart, feeling the pull of the stone in her magic getting stronger and stronger as she got closer. Before too long it became a struggle to hold onto it, and with a nervous grimace Starlit let it go. The stone rocketed forward to the Heart, striking its surface with a deep, resonant crack that echoed all throughout the cavern. Slowly but surely it was drawn into the Heart as the other fragments had been, leaving the leather cord and silver bezel it had been wrapped into fall to the ground as it was completely subsumed. The only remnant of it was the tiny pit from its surface which still exuded a pinprick of silver light.
Starlit felt no different than she had before, save for the creeping dread that she had given up her lifeline and her only chance to possibly get a hold of Sun, until she noticed the pinhole light crack slightly. The first fissure was followed by another, then another, and yet another still, until a symphony of cracks like glass being ground down echoed throughout the cavern. Every single crack, puncture, shatter exposed more and more silver light from within the Heart itself as pieces of its smooth black surface fell inward towards the light before fading from view.
When the cracking finally finished there was a jagged hole roughly Starlit's size in the surface of the Heart of Fate that had an illusion of depth to it. She simply couldn't shake the feeling that she could just cross the threshold of the Heart and walk into it like she had done with Luna's cage. As Starlit tentatively walked towards the Heart she saw a silvery hoof reach out from it. It was the same color as the light the Heart was radiating, and despite her own better sense Starlit took it with her own hoof.
There was a familiarity Starlit hadn't expected when she took the hoof in her own, one that was warm and inviting, and without a second thought Starlit crossed the threshold and went into the light.
* * *
A flash of magenta light banished all sights in her throne room for a moment, though Twilight Sparkle didn't need to shield her eyes from her own magic. Sweat dripped down her forehead, focused as she was on her latest attempt to wrest full control of the Crystal Heart back from her fellow Princesses.
As the glare dissipated Twilight examined her work; a core of magenta magic roughly the size of her own head pulsed and warbled inside of its crystalline case, only slightly larger than it had been before this latest session. It was a beautiful sight to be sure, but it was not one that Twilight had wanted to see. She remembered that, when power was shared between the four alicorns, the heart would fully change color to suit each of them. It's pale, translucent surface irked Twilight to no end.
Perched on each of their three thrones, entombed in crystal, Celestia, Luna, and Cadance sat. Their faces were placid and regal, as Twilight's enchantment upon their thrones had not sprung until they sat upon them, but now she felt their frozen expressions of gentility were silently mocking her.
"If you all had just listened to what I had had to say all those years ago then none of this would be happening," Twilight stated to the statues. Her voice echoed in the cavernous hall, the only reply she would receive.
Twilight walked up to Luna's crystal prison and clinked a hoof against it. The dull ringing sound was pleasant, but was badly contrasted by its grim contents. If what Starlit Sky had told her was accurate then this was certainly a familiar state of being for the Princess of Night, and Twilight couldn't help but feel a measure of guilt for the irony.
Twilight let out a sigh before turning and descending down the dais to assume her position at the supplicant's podium. Starlit Sky was going to be coming for her at any moment, and Twilight wanted to have a spectacle to show her when she arrived.
"A just a fair Queen, to rule all Equestria with a firm hoof and a gentle heart," Twilight said to herself before forging the magical connection between herself and the Crystal Heart. A beam of magic shot from the tip of her horn into her crown, before focusing through the five fragments of the Heart of Fate embedded into it and recasting back to the Crystal Heart through it. The bright magenta beam illuminated the room, and Twilight prepared for drain in her power that would soon follow.
What came next was decidedly unexpected when she suddenly felt like her head was being yanked down by her horn. With a crack against the railing of the podium Twilight's vision flashed with sparks of light, and clink of metal on the ground drew her attention when her sight came back and she stopped writhing from the sudden blow to her forehead.
On the ground, seemingly pinned there by its five black stone adornments, was her crown. It had landed perfectly on its face, and was now quivering as though trying to force its way through the floor by sheer brute strength. What's more, each of the stones was now glowing with a small nimbus of silvery light.
Curiosity gave way to worry; Twilight had never seen these stones do anything like this before, but as a precaution she tried to focus her magic into the crown to contact Starlit Sky. Twilight knew that her wayward servant had been using the stones to spy on her, though how she had yet to discern given Starlit's dearth of magical skill compared to herself, but it wouldn't hurt to check in.
Slowly the magic wormed into the disconcerting aura of the Heart of Fate's fragments, but instead of projecting her consciousness across space Twilight was assaulted by innumerable voices and sights. The deluge of sensory information sent her collapsing to the floor, and after what felt like a day but could have only been a moment she ended the connection.
Twilight's vision swam, he head pounded, and her whole body felt numb. On the whole this was the most debilitated she had felt since becoming an alicorn, and she knew exactly why this was happening.
As soon as her traitorous nerves and muscles would let her Twilight got back up, took to the air, and sped out of the throne room. Her wings pumped with such speed and ferocity that she wondered why she hadn't created a rainboom yet, but aerial tricks weren't her concern; she needed speed, and she needed it badly.
At the far end of the receiving hall Twilight saw the central column that supported the top spire and served as the only elevator to the ground floor from the throne room. The floating stone disc that normally ascended the structure would take far too long to get her where she needed to be, so she opted to simply blow through it with a beam of pure destructive magic and fly past the debris.
Down and down Twilight flew, her way lit by teal fire from the magical torches embedded in the walls of the shaft, until she could see the bottom of the shaft coming up. With another blast of magic Twilight opened a hole in the floor of the shaft and zoomed down further, taking note of the fact that the magically locked and warded iron door protecting her great work was open.
"She can't have gotten past that, she can't!" Twilight roared in her head as she slowed down to avoid slamming into the true bottom of the shaft. With a sharp turn Twilight decelerated and slid to a halt on her gilded horseshoes, taking in a sight that was both awe-inspiring and blindingly infuriating in equal measure.
The Heart of Fate was beating, spreading an aura of silver light all across her workshop, and just inside of its black surface Twilight could see Starlit Sky walking into the blackness of its inner confines.
"Sun, wait up!" Fluttershy called as Sun marched further into the bog. He still walked with heavy, trudging hoofsteps, and Fluttershy was starting to worry that he was going to hurt himself even more.
Fluttershy eventually decided to simply fly above the water's surface to catch up to him, the wind from her wings blowing away the small floating lights that got close to her.
"Sun, wait, we need to talk about what just happened," Fluttershy said as she caught up.
"We can walk and talk," Sun curtly replied.
"What do you think Chrysalis meant when she said you were 'cursed'?" Fluttershy asked, dropping back into the water.
"It sounded pretty self-explanatory, didn't it? Twilight Sparkle did something to the ponies back in Equestria that stole their magic, stole all the magic in the land," Sun replied, his voice growing hard. "She caused the very crisis that she dragooned Starlit and I into solving!"
"But why? Why go to all that trouble, why cause so much devastation? What could she possibly have to gain from killing her kingdom?"
"I don't know, and right now I really don't care," Sun cut in. "I have to get word of this to Starlit, she has to be told the exact level of evil and power she's going to be facing."
Fluttershy saw Sun's face fall, if only for a moment, losing its steely glare and gaining a weariness that Fluttershy had never seen before.
"I just hope it isn't too late," Sun continued, before shaking his head and resuming the march.
The pair of them walked in silence for a long while, only interrupted by Fluttershy reorienting them to keep heading south. The environment was far less varied than her home swamp, and the bobbing lights casting stark shadows through the trees weren't helping with her pathfinding skills.
"Sun, what does Starlit Sky mean to you?" Fluttershy asked out of the blue, not catching what she had said until after she had said it.
Sun's head perked up at the question and slowly turned to look at Fluttershy. She instinctively took a step away.
"I'm sorry, was that too personal?" Fluttershy hastily apologized. "Did I cross a boundary?"
"No, no, I just… wasn't expecting that," Sun replied, turning back to the endless swamp ahead of them.
A long, awkward pause hung in the air between the two of them, with the pit in Fluttershy's stomach growing heavier and heavier until it was lifted when Sun broke the deafening silence.
"If I had to put a label to it, I guess she's like the mother I wish I still had," Sun said, eyes cast down to the clear water.
"You don't have a mother?" Fluttershy asked, keeping her voice as demure as possible.
"She died when I was little," Sun answered. "My father too. I practically had to raise myself from the age of eight, even though the other ponies in town helped out a lot."
"That's so sad," Fluttershy consoled, rubbing one of her wings on Sun's back. It felt awkward to her, but it was the best she could do.
"When I first met Starlit we didn't get along much at all. She was abrasive, condescending, and didn't trust me as far as she could throw me. To her credit, though, I was whiny, naive, and too curious for my own good. You couldn't have asked for two more different ponies to try and save the world together, but she needed me and I needed her."
"Well, you certainly seem to think pretty well of her now," Fluttershy quietly interjected. "What changed?"
"A few near death experiences, a lot of shared trauma, and being more or less attached at the hip for about a month will do that to two ponies, but I think it's more than that now," Sun continued. "Her abrasiveness showed her conviction in what she thought was right. Her condescension was because she is wiser than me, even if I am more intelligent than her, and she needed to reign in my worse habits to keep us both alive. Even her untrusting side was because she's been hurt too many times, and she just wants to protect the ponies that she cares about. I guess she showed me that, even through the hardships of life, there is a capacity to rise above it when you learn how to deal with it."
"She taught you how to be better than what you are," Fluttershy summarized. "That sure sounds like what a mother would do."
"It does, doesn't it?" Sun replied, lifting his head and turning to look at Fluttershy. "I guess that's why I have the drive to find Chrysalis that I do now; Starlit's done so much for me, helped me become a better stallion, and now it's high time that I returned that favor."
Sun let out a sharp gasp of pain, bending his head down to bring a hoof to his forehead just at the base of his horn.
"I just wish that this weren't handicapping my ability to live up to her example," Sun curtly added, shaking his head to disperse the pain.
"I did the best I could, but it was in three pieces," Fluttershy apologized. "My medicines can only do so much."
"I know, and I'm not blaming you for this," Sun replied. "It's just another chasm to jump over."
"Then it's a good thing I have wings, I guess," Fluttershy replied. Sun let out a quick snort of laughter, and Fluttershy couldn't help but join in with a snicker.
* * *
The further south they traveled the more Sun felt a pressure starting to weigh down his mind. Whether it was due to nerves or something more he couldn't say, but the slight sense of dread he'd been coping with since arriving here was more prominent. He and Fluttershy had been making idle talk as they ventured south, mostly commenting on the environment, but the last while had been in near abject silence.
"How're you feeling?" Fluttershy asked quietly. "Is your horn giving you problems?"
"Not for a bit, no," Sun replied as he stepped around a large patch of cattails.
"Then how're you feeling?"
"I'll be fine," Sun answered, more curt than he had intended. "Thank you for asking."
Another long stretch of walking passed in silence, until Sun glanced around and noticed that the bobbing silver lights weren't hovering around anymore. He'd gotten so used to their presence that he'd been mentally blocking them out, but now the world was growing darker and he was forced to take notice.
"Hey Fluttershy, have you noticed how dark it is?" Sun asked.
Nopony replied, and when Sun turned back around to ask again there was nopony standing behind him. Another whirl around to try and scan the immediate area and the plant life had vanished, followed with each revolution by the water, then the ground, until there was nothing save for deep, cloying, endless darkness.
"Fluttershy!" Sun called out. "Fluttershy, are you there?!"
A soft echo of his own voice was the only response he received, and Sun felt his pulse quicken as he tried to orient himself in the nothingness. Sun couldn't even tell if he was standing on ground anymore; he didn't feel water around his fetlocks, but without any visible landmarks to orient himself to he started to feel dizzy.
"Chrysalis, what is this?!" Sun cried out, hoping that the Changeling Queen would hear him and answer. "What did you do?! Where am I?!"
Again nothing answered save for a soft breeze and a distant echo. Hyperventilating now, Sun sat down on the nothingness below him, holding a hoof to his chest to try and calm himself down.
"Okay, okay, let's think this through," Sun said to himself. "Chrysalis said we needed to find the place with no light. Obviously she meant that a bit more literally than I had imagined, but this has to be what she meant. I'm not in any danger, this is what she intended."
Taking another glance around and being met with even more nothingness than he thought was possible to be presented with, Sun got back up, picked a direction and started walking.
"I'm just gonna pick a direction and go, and if I wander back out of this then I'll just find south again, walk back in, and keep moving," Sun declared to nopony and nothing.
Sun's hoofsteps made no sound as he walked, even though he could feel an odd, smooth surface beneath them. It was hard like stone but cold and smooth like glass, and the closest thing he had ever felt to it was Starlit's necklace. Distance and time were both hard to tell without anything to compare it to, so Sun was immediately put on edge when he noticed a shimmering light coming towards him.
Sun reflexively tried to light his horn up, only for a lance of pain to shoot through his forehead. Without any sort of magical recourse for what was about to happen, Sun simply got down in a low stance and prepared for whatever was coming. He might not have cut the most intimidating silhouette, but he wasn't going to be taken without a fight if it came to that.
As the light got closer and closer colors showed through the nimbus of silver light, and those colors slowly but surely resolved into an image, or rather a few images. As though it were a framed portrait Sun saw a glimpse of Appleoosa. He saw the orchards, now green and lush, as Applejack tended to the trees. Her little sister was following after, talking excitedly as she pointed up at all of the newly-enriched trees.
Quickly the image shifted to another part of the town that he recognized as Cherry Blossom's bar. It was more full than he remembered, and a few of the ponies inside chatting, drinking, and generally enjoying themselves were some of the ones from Sunspire that he and Starlit had rescued. The scene was lively, far more lively than he had ever seen it, and the energy inside was triumphant rather than dejected. A deep, aching cut of nostalgia, of loneliness, gripped Sun's heart as he looked at the merriment before him.
The image then shifted once more, showing his own home; his knick-knacks, his notes and books, the delightfully organized chaos of his life that was gathering dust waiting for his return. With a creak his door opened, and he saw Applejack again, standing in the door frame with an inquisitive expression.
"She's taking care of my place," Sun said to himself, touched at her gesture.
Applejack's expression fell as she moved through the clutter of his life, tidying something here and dusting something there but generally leaving the home in the same condition she found it in. As she opened the door back out to return to her own life, Applejack sighed, then turned and closed the door with a soft creak.
"What is this?" Sun asked himself, noticing the tear sliding down his cheek as the image resolved into an overhead view of the entire town.
"A choice," a voice in his head, tinny and demure, answered. "Those who you love and who love you miss you terribly. You matter far more to them than you know, Setting Sun. With but a word you could return to them, to comfort, to peace, to safety."
Sun turned about to try and find a source for the words in his head, but was greeted only by the endless void and a soft pulse in the back of his head instead.
"I can't go back, not yet," Sun replied to the voice. "I have to be here, I have a duty."
"Why do you have to be here?" the voice asked. "Do you even know? Or do you just follow the voices in your head?"
Sun took a step back from the scene in front of him, the voice's question ringing in his head before he shook it clear. He didn't have time to be conflicted.
"Whatever reason it's for, I have to be here," Sun affirmed. "Home can wait."
"Confidence fitting of your trials, Setting Sun," the voice replied. "We will see you soon."
With the last word the image in front of Sun faded away, leaving only the blackness and the beat in the back of his head. He stood, a bit taken aback at this sudden test of his will, before pressing forward into the darkness.
* * *
Fluttershy had had many nightmares in her life; dreams of death, of loneliness, of heartache and hurt. Never in her life did she think she'd be living through one of them.
All around Fluttershy the world was an infinite field of blackness. Even the ground she was standing on, if she could even call it that, was as black as the darkest insect carapace she'd ever seen, and even that comparison paled to just how crushingly, cloyingly black everything around her was.
Tears streamed down her eyes as she wandered aimlessly through the void, wondering where Sun had gone or if he was even still alive. Her breaths came in hiccuping sobs and her heart hammered so fiercely she was afraid it would give out entirely.
"Sun… are you there?" Fluttershy called out plaintively, knowing that it wouldn't elicit a response. "Are you okay?"
A fresh stream of tears fell down her face as her own voice softly echoed back in the endless void. Her hooves finally failing her, Fluttershy fell back to sit down, letting her fear and terror finally overwhelm her.
"I-I can't… I c-can't keep this u-up any more," Fluttershy sobbed, holding her hooves to her eyes. "I just w-want to g-go home."
"Why?" a voice asked back, one that seemed to echo from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Fluttershy shrieked, her sobbing turning into wailing as she fell over and frantically searched for the speaker.
"Wh-who are you?!" Fluttershy asked. "Leave m-me al-alone, please!"
"Why do you want to go home?" the voice clarified. It was low and deeply masculine, but soft rather than harsh.
Fluttershy curled into herself, closing her eyes as tight as they would go to try and will the voice away. Her whole body shook with terror as she tried to reckon with what was happening, only for the voice to chime in again.
"Are you afraid, Fluttershy?" the voice asked.
"Yes," Fluttershy answered with a quivering voice, "I'm t-terrified, or couldn't y-you tell?"
"We don't mean to frighten. You made a statement, and we wanted to know more. We're sorry if this is distressing to you."
Opening her eyes just a crack, Fluttershy looked around. There was still nopony around, and when she fully sat up there was still nothing in the void.
"Why do you c-care?" Fluttershy asked back, wiping her eyes.
"We don't have a reason, really," the voice answered back. "We were just curious. Why do you want to go home?"
"Because I'm scared, and alone, and I never wanted any of this!" Fluttershy snapped back.
"You were scared and alone before now, why is this any different?"
Fluttershy was about to answer back before she felt the voice's response cut to the her core. Her mouth hung open for a moment before closing as she looked down into the infinite black below her.
"You chose to live separate from others," the voice continued. "You chose a life of solitude because you know that you cannot relate to others in a meaningful manner. You don't think like they do, and rather than have to do the work of making them relate to you, you abandoned them for the animals who harbor no preconceptions. You have always been alone, you only realize it now that you have made a connection and you are terrified to lose it."
Fluttershy said nothing, for there was nothing she could. Whatever this thing was, it was right, and the fact that it was so completely right hurt more keenly than any physical pain she had ever felt.
"There is no shame in admitting your faults, Fluttershy," the voice continued. "Far from it, there is strength in knowing that you are weak, for in the knowing there is room for growth and development. Setting Sun is being put through a similar trial even as you are being put through yours."
"He's okay?" Fluttershy asked, snapping back to attention at confirmation that Sun was still alive.
"Relatively speaking, he is. He is still as physically frail as any other pony, but he has a strength of character that speaks volumes about his ordained purpose."
"Can you bring him to me, or me to him?" Fluttershy asked, a flutter of hope building in her heart.
"No, I cannot," the voice answered, its slow, deep tone growing morose. "You each have a path to walk before meeting with us, and it is in the path that you will see what your purpose to come is. This is the way it must be."
The faint glimmer of hope in Fluttershy's heart withered at the voice's answer, and she felt on the verge of collapse again until a new sensation spread through her. She got up, standing to her shaking legs until she stood tall for an audience of herself. With a sniff as she wiped the last of the tears from her cheeks, Fluttershy started on the path forward.
"Then show me my path," Fluttershy stated, her voice still thick with emotion but with a hint of force behind it. "I have a job to finish."
* * *
Sun couldn't tell how long it had been since the first vision he had been show of Appleoosa, but the further he walked the more it seemed like he was being led on by something. His logical mind knew that Chrysalis had a reason for him to be here so he wasn't too worried, but getting separated from Fluttershy along with the aimless wandering was starting to set off his finely-honed fight-or-flight response.
He had paused to rest his hooves when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw another vision approaching in a nimbus of silver light. It was still distant, but approaching more rapidly than the last one had.
"Once more unto the breach," Sun muttered to himself.
"Your words are more appropriate than you would think," a voice replied, this one in a lower register than the last but unmistakably feminine.
As the image finally got close enough that Sun could make it out he saw a place that he didn't recognize, but that he could make an educated guess as to its identity. An expanse of open ground with the rubble and wreckage of war and death surrounded the walls of a massive castle built into a cliff side, its immaculate surface and glittering ornamentation a stark contrast to the field of carnage and destruction that encapsulated it.
"Is this Canterlot?" Sun asked. There was no response as the viewpoint quickly shifted, flying towards the open balcony on the castle's central spire.
The quick flying of the perspective in the vision was slightly nauseating, but not nearly as much compared to where it landed when it stopped. He appeared to be inside the throne room of the palace, where placed upon three of the five assembled thrones were Celestia, Luna, and Cadance, all entombed in solid hunks of crystal. Above the central throne beat a large crystalline heart, and beneath its polished translucent surface a core of magenta magic pulsed violently.
"What happened!?" Sun asked, hoping that the voice would reply to him this time. "What did Twilight do to them?"
"A betrayal most grievous, to be sure," the voice answered, "but such is the way of ponies, and alicorns specifically. They were doomed as soon as Starlit Sky convinced them to return to their ancient thrones, though you did not know at the time."
The view shifted again, speeding out of the throne room and out towards a large pillar that it had passed on the way in. There was rubble strewn about it that Sun could barely register before the view began to rocket down a long empty shaft in the center of the pillar. Teal lights whipped past in the vision, and Sun found himself having to avert his eyes as he felt a headache coming on.
When the flickering of teal light ceased its rapidity Sun looked back up to see a scene that sent a shock arcing down his spine and his heart into his throat. Standing in the middle of a workshop in a large cavern was Twilight Sparkle, looking as aghast as Sun as they both stared up at a massive black heart radiating silver light that lit up the entire cavern.
"That's the Heart of Fate, isn't it?" Sun asked.
"Indeed," the voice answered, venom heavy in its voice.
"But if the Heart of Fate and the Crystal Heart are in Canterlot, then what does Chrysalis have?"
"A shard, much like the one bound to your mind and the minds of so many other ponies in this world," the voice replied. "Chrysalis watches over us, and we still have power enough to show those who would entreat upon her territory visions such as these to deter them from intrusion, but we are a pale shade of the mighty artifact we once were, and the alicorns are to blame."
"The alicorns? You mean not just Twilight?" Sun asked, trying to make sense of what he was being told as he watched Twilight lay waste to the workshop in a whirlwind of rage.
"We are the progenitor of ponies," the voice answered. "We gave unthinking animals life and thought, gave the world magic in the ages long past, and graced a select few ponies with power above others to act as sentinels and guardians for those below them. Your world exists because we willed it to be so, and the alicorns we created to guide you instead chose to rule you as first as tyrants, then as lords, and then finally as princesses."
"But I thought the Crystal Heart is what gave the alicorns their abilities," Sun countered. "Cadance told us as much, that taking power from the Crystal Heart is what allowed alicorns to be created."
A sharp, ringing peal of laughter from seemingly a chorus of voices echoed throughout the space around him, long enough and loud enough that Sun thought the very darkness itself was going to shatter from the sonic assault. He was forced to put his hooves over his ears just to block out the worst of it.
"Their profane Crystal Heart was created in a mocking imitation of us," the singular voice answered back, hard and venomous. "They stole the very magic that we had given to them, drained it from nature itself, and bound it up inside of that bauble so that they might control that which was our domain by right."
Sun looked back to the scene playing out in front of him, of Twilight throwing an almighty tantrum in front of an object, a being, of such titanic power that Sun only now realized made her look like an ant trying to fight a dust storm.
"Really helps put things into perspective, doesn't it?" Sun asked to nopony in particular, suddenly feeling the weight of his own insignificance.
"The sins of her ancestors must be paid back in full, Setting Sun," the voice said. "They have done indelible damage to this world that can never be truly healed. All the remains is retribution."
Sun continued to stare at the vision until it faded entirely, leaving the afterimage of Twilight, the Heart, and a ruined cavern as the final punctuation on all he had just been told.
"How do I fix this?" Sun asked as he began his walk again, more purposefully than before.
"Obey, Setting Sun, and accept Chrysalis's offer. You will be the instrument of our revenge against the powers that be, and it will be quite glorious indeed when retribution rains down on the alicorn's head."
Silvery mists gathered at Starlit's hooves, perfectly complimenting the sliver, hazy environment she now found herself in. It was one she recognized from her conversation inside of Luna's prison, except instead of a full-grown alicorn in front of her there was just a pony shaped figure made of raw silver light.
"What is this?" Starlit asked the figure. "Are you the Heart of Fate?"
The figure said nothing in response, simply turned away from Starlit and began to walk forward. Starlit broke into a quick trot to keep up with it.
"Not much for conversation, I take it," Starlit said to the being. "You must've wanted to tell or show me something if you dragged me into… wherever this is. Are we inside of you?"
The figure kept quiet and kept its brisk pace, one that Starlit was finding herself starting to work to keep up with. Starlit could feel the thumping of her necklace against her chest, despite not wearing it anymore, and it was forceful enough that she could feel it throughout her body.
"Look, if this is going to be some kind of vision quest, then please spare me," Starlit said. "I've had enough shocking revelations to last me a lifetime, and all that matters right now is stopping Twilight. Whatever wisdom you are going to impart time, let's just get it done with."
The pony of light turned its head slightly to the side, as if eyeing Starlit up with eyes that she couldn't find. Slowly it turned back to face forward, before dissipating in a puff of smoke as the environment warmed and shifted into a scene of abject horror.
It was a vision she had received once before, over a month before on the night that Twilight Sparkle had first come to her home with an offer of lies. It felt as though a lifetime had passed since she last had seen the scene before her, but the images, sounds, and sensations were as crystal clear in her mind as when she had first seen it when a sprite of magic descended down her horn one lonesome night.
The sky above was as red as blood, the sun itself blotted out behind the thick, crimson cloud cover. All around there were shouts of orders, screams of terror and pain, and the thunderous crash of stone against stone, steel against steel. Spells whizzed and hummed through the air, most of their arcane noise punctuated by a shout of shock and the thudding of a body crumpling to the ground.
Starlit quickly scanned the area, drawing the spear still hooked to her belt in a quick flash of magic. With a deft step to the side Starlit dodged an errant bolt of magic as she took note of the fact that the mysterious pony of light was nowhere to be found.
"Alright Starlit, focus up, you've done this before," Starlit muttered to herself.
Looking to her left Starlit saw the familiar battlement wall separating the castle from Canterlot itself. She quickly ran for it, finding the entrance at the bottom she remembered from her last vision. She ran up the stone, swirling stairs, having to jump over a few bodies of the defenders that had fallen in the stairwell.
When she made it to the ramparts Starlit was hit with a gust of hot wind as she took note of the entire city on fire not fifty feet below her. She saw ponies running to and fro, trying to save themselves and their loved ones from the soldiers clogging the already crowded streets. So many ponies were desperately running for the Gate of Antiquities, enough that they were trampling each other in their panic.
A cry of rage broke Starlit out of her stupor at the sheer scale of the ceaseless, futile carnage, and on instinct Starlit whirled her spear around behind her head to strike fast. She felt no resistance against her blade of muscle and bone, and when she turned around she saw one of the Canterlot defenders with the edge of a blade buried about halfway through his neck. A quick, gurgling spray of blood from the mouth was the last sound he made before his eyes rolled back. Stepping back from the grisly scene, Starlit watched as a pony wearing armor of dark blue and black not dissimilar from her own stepped through her, yanking her sword out from the defender's neck before having her eye blasted out by a beam of magic.
"I need to keep moving," Starlit said to herself as she continued down the rampart, looking for the Princesses battling in the sky. Flaming stones and bolts of magic criss-crossed the sky, making finding anything pony sized a near impossibility, and after running back and forth down the ramparts she had to conclude that they weren't even there.
"Just another of Twilight's lies, it would seem," Starlit groused. "There has to be a reason I'm seeing this again, has to be something Twilight didn't show me the fi—"
A quick flash of inspiration shot through Starlit's mind, and she hoped upon hope that it would pay off.
Concentrating her magic as hard as she could, Starlit began to channel it into her shoulders. The last time she had manifested this has been from sheer desperation and panic, so she hoped that creating her wings again would be easier and not require another near death experience.
The magic coursing down her horn and into her body started as a small tingling sensation, before growing more and more intense until it felt like somepony was taking a hammer to her shoulder blades. Her magic pulsed with the beat of her heart, every wave sending a new jolt of electrical pain into her nerves until Starlit felt that she couldn't take it anymore.
Just when her resolve was about to give out, Starlit heard a sound like metal skating off of metal, a high, clinking sound as all of the tension and energy in her shoulders burst forth. She could feel the hot wind hitting the blades of energy now emanating from her shoulders, and a giddiness Starlit hadn't known since she was a child suddenly flooded her heart.
"Alright Twilight, let's see what you didn't want to show me," Starlit declared to herself. With a swift pump downwards from her new appendages Starlit lifted a few feet off of the ground, and with some careful angling as she descended from the ramparts she gained speed before angling her torso upwards like she had once seen Rainbow Dash do.
Her ascent to the balcony of the central spire was more taxing than she had intended, still getting used to the mechanics of flight, but after a few harrowing minutes of dodging magic and flying debris she alighted onto the balcony. The energy quickly dispelled as she got back to her hooves, and Starlit felt the ache in her horn that told her she wouldn't be able to do that again for a while.
Keeping her blade aloft in her magic, Starlit slowly made her way into the central spire's upper floors. In stark contrast to the utter ruination in the city below these halls were immaculate and resplendent. Their rich furnishings hadn't been marred by the struggles just outside, and as Starlit rounded around a familiar stone pillar she could see that the throne room was in no worse shape.
A rich purple carpet formed a long, narrow path up to a raised dais whereupon five thrones were perched. Currently seated at the central throne, clad in glittering golden armor that Starlit had seen once before, was Celestia. Her mane was once again in the form of rainbow-colored fire, and her eyes were burning orange.
"So you finally come to face me yourself, coward," Celestia called out contemptuously, manifesting her glimmering spear of rainbow fire with a flick of her horn.
Starlit quickly swung around as the sound of hooves clattered up the polished marble floor, in enough time to see a cadre of those blue and black clad soldiers running towards and through her as if Starlit weren't even there. There was no sensation as the figures moved through her, but she could still feel the immense power radiating off of the final pony to enter.
Standing at a height commensurate with Celestia was Twilight Sparkle, gliding into the throne room with an ethereal air that Starlit had never seen her give off in the flesh. Her eyes glowed magenta with raw magical energy, her dark purple and silver armor glittered and glimmered despite the copious amount of blood and grime coating it, and even her hair floated and swayed as though it were submerged in water.
"I will admit, Celestia, that your defenders put up much more of a fight than I had anticipated," Twilight stated, her voice reverberating with power. "Shame your sister spent more time trying to ascend the mountain than holding us up in forest; if she hadn't thrown such an almighty tantrum then maybe you'd be in a better position."
"Is this naught but a game to you, witch?!" Celestia roared back, leveling her spear down and rising from her throne.
"No, because games are fun, and this has grown exceptionally tedious," Twilight countered. "You know exactly what I want, so I intend to claim it."
"And you think I'll let you get to Chrysalis to enact your mad scheme?" Celestia snapped back with a smirk.
"To be entirely honest, your compliance isn't a factor here. Step aside and I may yet let you live. I only want the Changeling's head, and the precious resource she is hoarding."
Celestia stepped down off the dais, approaching a small podium and twirling the flaming spear around her head. With a single swing the spear cleaved through all of Twilight's soldiers at the neck, their heads bursting into flame before their bodies had even hit the floor. Twilight deflected the attack without a motion as a magenta shield blocked the spear's strike, and her brow furrowed deeply.
"Then we do this the hard way, it would seem," Twilight said, an edge to her voice that hadn't been there before.
Celestia lunged forward, her wings spreading wide as she crested the podium and dove down towards Twilight with the spear point rocketing towards Twilight's face. A second magenta shield manifested to block the shield, its flaming point stopping mere inches from her face, before Twilight illuminated her horn, wrapped her magic around the spear and dispelled it without so much as a flick of the head.
Celestia was still on her collision course, her horn radiating golden light as she sped towards Twilight. The Sun Princess's expression changed from righteous fury to shock, however, as a field of magenta magic enraptured her. Celestia snarled and screamed impotently as Twilight walked her over to one of the windows that allowed the crimson light of the shaded sun to stream in, blasting it open with another beam of magic and sending a stream of rainbow glass descending down.
"All force and no finesse," Twilight stated sullenly. "Have you learned nothing these last thousand years?"
With another flick of her horn and a sickening crunch and snap Celestia's wings bent fully backward, breaking all along the main supporting bones and popping out of their joints. Celestia screamed and howled in agony, her wings hanging limp and useless, before Twilight casually tossed her out the window.
"That should keep her occupied for a while," Twilight said, turning to look at the podium in the center of the throne room. With deft, graceful steps she glided to its polished marble frame and gently placed her horn upon it. In a flash of magenta light Twilight vanished, and the scene faded away into silver mists.
Starlit hadn't noticed her own heart hammering away in her throat until the lack of anything to take her attention off of it brought it to the fore. She slowly took a few calming breaths as she processed what she had seen.
"Can I even fight her if she has that level of power?" Starlit muttered to herself. "She tossed Celestia around like it was nothing, and that was at the height of her power."
A glimmer of light ahead drew Starlit's attention o where, just a few yards away, stood the shining pony of light, looking to her with is blank face.
"Why did you show me that?" Starlit asked. "If it was to try and intimidate me, it isn't going to work. I have to stop her, and there's nothing you can do to dissuade me from that."
In the first show of acknowledgement that Starlit had seen from this entity, it slowly shook its head.
"Then if that wasn't to try and get me to stop, what was it for?" Starlit asked, more forcefully this time; she was getting sick of these mind games.
The entity said nothing, instead turning around and walking away. With no other recourse or lead to go off of, Starlit dutifully fully followed it, until slowly but surely the silvery mists she was walking through shifted and changed into a new place, but possibly not a new time.
Starlit was in a room she was familiar with, if only because she had been in it not ten minutes ago. The cavern that contained the Heart of Fate looked cleaner, its workstations and arcane equipment better cared for, but it was also missing its centerpiece feature. In place of the massive obsidian crystal, held aloft in the mechanical arms that had once been housing it, was a tall, lanky pony with skin as black as night, a smooth chitinous horn and diaphanous wings like an insect's, and glowing green eyes filled with malice and hatred for the alicorn they were trained on.
Twilight Sparkle, for her part, was equally as furious at this odd bug-alicorn, and when the Princess of Magic spoke the booming echo of her voice was such that Starlit was worried the cavern would be brought down on their heads by the sound alone.
"Where is it, Chrysalis?!" Twilight demanded, punctuating her declaration with a blast of magenta lightning from her horn that sent Chrysalis's body jerking against its restraints.
"You meddle in things you know not the consequences of, alicorn!" Chrysalis spat back, spittle flying from her fanged mouth. "Your kind has always seen the natural order as something to be shackled to your ambitions, a cudgel to be wielded against those that refuse to consent to your enforced beliefs!"
Another blast of lightning caused Chrysalis to howl in pain, the force of her involuntary spasms making the mechanical arms creak as the flexed in response. The smell of burning hair and flesh filled Starlit's nose, enough that she had to cover it.
"You cannot hope to hold out against me, Chrysalis," Twilight retorted. "You fail to understand exactly what I am, and what exactly I can do."
"Then elaborate for me, since you so clearly adore the sound of your own voice," Chrysalis interjected. "You have already profaned the very source of life itself, what exactly do you intend to do with it?"
"I intend to save us all, and you know I have the skill to do so. You were right about the Crystal Heart, and what sins my forebears committed to bind the magic of all Equestria to it. They were greedy, overly ambitious, and tyrannical to the last of them, siphoning off aspects of the very foundation of existence and daring to call them gifts from their false idol. What I desire is a final answer, a solution to the problem that they created by forging that horrific thing."
"And are you not the Princess of Magic?" Chrysalis cut in, her breathing ragged. "How do you plan to correct their mistake when you are bound up in it down to your rotted, blackened soul?"
Twilight slowly approached Chrysalis, coming close enough that their horns crossed over each other. Chrysalis reflexively moved her head back as Twilight reached up and ran a hoof down her scarred, battered face, maintaining a steely glare the whole while. Starlit felt a shiver run down her own spine from this disgusting display of feigned affection.
"What Equestria needs is a true, empathetic ruler, one who understands her subjects on their own level rather than isolating herself in a castle in the clouds," Twilight answered. "They need a ruler who feels as they feel, suffers as they suffer, loves as they love, and they will rejoice when they know they have not a Princess, but a true Queen who will guide them in every aspect of their lives."
Chrysalis's eyes widened at Twilight's proclamation, and for the first time that Starlit could see Twilight smiled, broadly and with a joy in her face that did not match the malice in her eyes.
"That is why you have been breaking my Heart," Chrysalis whispered. "You seek to bind everypony in Equestria to your will, to rule them as a goddess."
"And so, the insect can learn," Twilight replied, stepping away from Chrysalis. "All of Equestria, sharing their thoughts, their magic, and their lives with their Queen who will, in return, bless their lands and heal them from this unending nightmare of war and blood and death. This, Chrysalis, is my great work that I have studied, bargained, and even killed to achieve, and I will not see it stymied when it is so close to coming to fruition."
Starlit felt her heart skip a beat as she reckoned with what she was hearing, and how it made so much of what she had seen make sense. Silence, her premonitions, and the abilities of her own shard of the Heart; it was all coming together.
"You intend to channel fate's power through the magic of all Equestria that is bound in the Crystal Heart, lashing each and every pony to the yoke of your ambition," Chrysalis said, realization heavy in her voice. "You are just as sinful as your ancestors, and doubly as ambitious if you think I intend to hand the Heart of Fate over to you."
"To be perfectly honest, Chrysalis, your compliance isn't exactly a factor in all of this," Twilight curtly replied. "I just wanted to give you the opportunity to give it over willingly and be spared the pain of me having to tear it from you."
"And how do you intend to do that? I have hidden the Heart away, far from Equestria where your stolen magic cannot reach it."
"But you're here, are you not?" Twilight asked.
Chrysalis's smug smile quickly turned into an open-mouthed gape of dawning horror as she realized the gravity of her mistake, before warping into a contorted howl of anguish as Twilight blasted Chrysalis's horn with a beam of magenta magic so bright it was practically white. The light left stark shadows all along the walls of the cavern and across the tables, and Starlit was forced to avert her eyes even as she was forced to listen to Chrysalis's screams of pure, excruciating torment.
Minutes and minutes of this arcane onslaught passed, each one drawn out so long that it felt like an hour just to listen to, before the light faded out and the screaming was replaced by an odd humming sound and the scent of charred flesh and ozone. Starlit looked back to Chrysalis, who now hung limp from the mechanical arms which glowed red from heat and were searing into the carapace around her hooves. Her horn, once polished black and with a gentle convex curve, was now charred, pitted, and twisted, and her pale blue mane was all but seared off of her head.
"Odd," Twilight remarked, the magenta glow in her eyes now dim enough that Starlit could see her irises, "that should've done the trick."
Twilight's comment was quickly followed by a retching sound from Chrysalis, drawing a confused cock of the head from her captor and a twisting in the stomach from Starlit. Clear saliva dribbled out of Chrysalis's agape mouth, followed shortly by another long retch and a splatter on the ground punctuated with a dozen or so clinks like glass. Twilight swiftly illuminated her horn and cast her magic over the puddle of vomit, sifting through it until she held in her arcane grip a cluster of black, polished stone shards that hummed with a silvery energy.
"Is this some kind of sick joke?" Twilight demanded, crinkling her nose and turning her angry eyes to Chrysalis. "Where is the Heart?!"
"You… you think… that I… command the Heart…?" Chrysalis wheezed, barely lifting her head enough to stare back at Twilight. "It… commands me… you idiot. These pieces… are all of… the sway… I have… over it…"
Twilight's head shook, her magic brightening considerably, and she slammed the pieces of the Heart into the floor, sending them scattering with one landing just in front of Starlit. She recognized it all too well.
"You… will never… gain my Heart… your majesty."
Incensed beyond all reasoning, Twilight marched up to Chrysalis and struck her hard across the face with one of her armored hooves. A spray of clear liquid spilled out of the Changeling's mouth as well as a single fang, before another swift swing struck Chrysalis across the other side of her face. Soon Twilight was doing little more than screaming and pummeling Chrysalis, breaking portions of the carapace off of her face and exposing the silvery flesh beneath
"You think you've won?!" Twilight roared, punctuating each sentence with another punch. "You think you have me bested?! My work will be completed, and the world will be remade as one!"
Twilight stood, huffing and puffing and staring down at the battered, mutilated Changeling in front of her with nothing short of utter contempt. Her horn illuminated once more, a bright bead of magic forming at its tip as she took a few paces back from her victim.
"More's the shame that you will not live to see it," Twilight stated, the quiver in her voice betraying the unyielding rage laying just beneath her facade of regality. The tip of her horn brightened further and further, until the bead coalesced into a thin beam that lashed forth towards Chrysalis. The Changeling reflexively drew her head back, trying to avoid an end that never came.
Just as the beam was about to strike her flesh a great flash of silver illuminated Chrysalis's eyes and mutilated horn, erecting a field of silvery mist that absorbed the entire beam even as it was a hair's breadth from striking her. With a mighty flex of her legs Chrysalis shattered the restraints Twilight had bound her in, sending metal fragments flying all around that Starlit reflexively tried to dodge even as a few of them passed through her.
"We think not, Twilight Sparkle of Equestria!" boomed a voice through Starlit's mind and, judging by her sudden reel backwards, Twilight's as well. It was deep and stentorian, a far cry from Chrysalis's high, airy tone.
"What is this?! What are you?!" Twilight demanded.
"We are that which thou dost covet most greedily! We are the forebears of thine existence, we are that which perpetuates the gifts thou dost take for granted, and in time we wilt be that which gives rise to the existence after thine own! Thou hast stolen from us a most precious thing, and for thy transgressions we will give thee the gift of our providence! Thou wilt search far and wide for the solution to thy work, but know now that it will come at the hooves of that which will spell thy doom!"
A spray of silver mists slowly spilled out from Chrysalis's horn, billowing downward and wrapping around her body. The only thing visible left on her body were here eyes, piercing silver orbs staring out of the cloud with the wisdom of the ancients and the fury of a god.
"May all thine ambitions become as ashes in thy mouth, and let the knowledge of thine failings be as hot coals upon thy once-proud head!" the entity finished, before the glowing orbs faded away and the cloud dissipated to reveal only an empty space.
Just as Chrysalis had faded away into nothing, so too did the entire scene, leaving Starlit once again alone in the Misty void save for two things; her old shard from the necklace laying at her hooves where Twilight had scattered it, and the pony of light sitting across from her only a few feet away.
"You don't have any answers for me, do you?" Starlit asked the pony as she picked the stone up in her magic.
"That depends," the pony replied, catching Starlit off guard both with the fact that it was speaking and whose voice it was using. The voice was gravelly with age, but still carried a sweet lilt that sent a shock through Starlit's heart and brought tears to her eyes.
"Grandma?" Starlit asked, her voice low and soft. "Is that you?"
"An echo, yes," she answered. "The Heart speaks through me and into you, for it knew that you needed answers and a kind voice to give them."
Without thinking of it Starlit reached forward and wrapped her hooves around this pony of light, soft sobs echoing throughout the misty nothingness as the stone clinked to the immaterial ground. Starlit could feel her grandmother's soft fur beneath her cheek, smell the faint scent of elderberries from the jams she used to make, and hear the faint beat of a heart other than her own that pulsed with soothing warmth.
"I'm so sorry," Starlit sobbed, holding the echo of her greatest mistake tight. "I couldn't do anything to save you, I was too afraid."
The echo rubbed a hoof across Starlit's back, making the small circles on her left shoulder blade that Starlit remembered.
"You were young and scared, sweetie," the echo replied. "I never blamed you, and seeing all that you've done for so long now fills my heart with gladness at the life my sacrifice let you live."
Starlit sat up, keeping her hooves on the echo's shoulders. She suddenly felt so incredibly small.
"You've seen me?" Starlit asked.
"Every step since you picked up that fragment of the Heart, Starlit," the echo answered. "Who do you think has been keeping you alive and guiding your way all this while?"
"That was you?" Starlit asked, a smile breaking across her face. "You were in my shard the whole time?"
"I was, and I couldn't be more proud of what you've done, and what I know you will do," the echo answered. "You know now what Twilight Sparkle intends to do, and you know what you have to do to stop her."
Starlit let her hooves drop to the ground as she picked the stone back up, wiping her eyes as she did so. Its glossy black surface was unmarked and shone merrily in the field of her magic.
"I have to sever whatever connection Twilight has forged between the Crystal Heart and the Heart of Fate," Starlit stated, tucking the stone away into her armor.
"Indeed, but that is only half of the solution," the echo replied, nodding its head. "You must wait for the remaining pieces of the Heart of Fate that still dwells with Chrysalis to arrive, and reforge it. I believe that your companion is close to acquiring it."
"Sun made it?" Starlit asked. "That tough little bugger."
"He is far hardier than anypony might've assumed at a first glance, that much is true. But worry not about Setting Sun, my child; your fight yet waits once you leave the confines of the Heart."
Starlit hung her head down low, knowing who was surely awaiting her outside. She felt her throat catch, and her eyes start to burn with fresh tears.
"I don't want this to end yet," Starlit choked out, looking up at the face of the echo and feeling its warmth. "There's so much I want to tell you."
"Do not waste your breath on a ghost, Starlit Sky," the echo replied, placing a hoof on Starlit's cheek that Starlit leaned into. "My pain is ended, and when your time finally comes so will your suffering end as well. Then we can talk for as long as you like."
A single tear fell down Starlit's cheek, glittering agains the glimmering golden hoof pressed against it. It was pain and grief and relief all rolled into one drop of water, but as it fell to the mists below Starlit stood up and drew her spear.
"I'll see you soon, Grandma," Starlit said, her words steely and determined.
"Hopefully not too soon," the echo replied as it faded away, dissipating into the mists that had born it.
As the echo dissolved the mists ahead of Starlit parted, revealing a black portal that seemingly stretched into infinity. Taking a deep breath, Starlit walked through it, feeling a chill wind as she did.
No sooner had she crossed the threshold did she step back into the cavern below the palace to see a scene of utter destruction. The workbenches were little more than splinters, the arcane equipment was nothing more than scrap metal, and standing above the destruction was its source; a purple alicorn with a glare that could kill.
"About time," Twilight declared, exasperation thick on her voice. "You're going to give me the piece of the Heart that I know you still have, and you'll do it with minimal complaint."
"I'd rather not, to be honest with you," Starlit replied, holding her spear aloft point forward and assuming a ready stance.
Fluttershy was making a considerable effort to maintain her composure as she walked alone through the void. Her hoofsteps echoing out into the nothingness, the sound her heart in her ears, and the slow exhalations of her own breath was the only thing telling her that she even still existed in this place. She couldn't tell how long she had been walking, and it was even harder to figure it out without the sky and the rhythm of the environment around her to tell her.
"You have been going forward for a long while, Fluttershy," the deep voice said, sending Fluttershy turning about with a start.
"That's what I said I was going to do," Fluttershy answered, keeping an eye over her shoulder as she started walking again.
"This must be tedious for you, the waiting and the wondering where this is all going."
"It would be less tedious if you were telling me things I didn't already know," Fluttershy sniped back. "Are you going to show me this path you talked about, or is this just a conversation that isn't going to go anywhere?"
The voice didn't reply, and Fluttershy found herself thankful for the quiet. The void was, oddly, more comforting than the voice, and even after gaining some appreciation for having somepony to talk to over the last few days she found the silence after a tense and irritating exchange of words soothing.
When the silence was broken by the sound of sloshing water, the feeling of it lapping against her hooves, and the sight of silver balls of light floating in amongst the trees, it took Fluttershy a moment to register that the void had even vanished. When it finally clicked in her head she quickly turned about, looking for Sun standing anywhere close by.
"Sun!" Fluttershy called out. There was no response save for a quick gust of wind in the trees that blew her mane about, but when she heard galloping through the water she quickly turned to find Sun running through the swamp towards her.
"There you are, I've been trying to find you for ages!" Sun replied. "Were you in that black nothingness too?"
"I was, it was terrible!" Fluttershy replied, wrapping her hooves around Sun as they shared a quick hug. "What happened? Did anypony talk to you in there?"
"No, I didn't hear anything, but there were a lot of visions," Sun answered. "I think it was the Heart trying to give me a message, or imparting power, or something like that."
"Power? What kind? And how can you even use it without your horn?" Fluttershy asked.
Sun gently ran a hoof along his horn, which was still quite badly damaged. As he touched it Fluttershy noticed that he wasn't wincing or recoiling in pain, which piqued her curiosity.
"It gave me the power that I need to give to Starlit in Canterlot and a way to reach her, but first we have to get out of this part of the Glowing Wastes," Sun answered. "Magic here is weird and I can't get a proper focus to teleport out."
"What about Chrysalis? She said she wanted to see you personally," Fluttershy replied.
"That was about as personal as it was going to get, really," Sun answered as he started to walk back into the swamp. "That nothing space was her, sort of."
"What do you mean 'sort of'?"
"It's hard to explain, really," Sun continued, gesturing Fluttershy forward. "Come on, I'll explain on the way."
As Sun continued forward, leaving Fluttershy more confused than anything, she took notice of something she was surprised she hadn't noticed before; Sun wasn't wearing his cloak, his saddlebags, or his dagger sheath.
"What happened to all of your things?" Fluttershy asked.
"What things?" Sun replied, turning around with a quizzical look.
Fluttershy stopped dead in her tracks, the slight splashing of water the only noise in the vastness of the swamp. Sun's quizzical look slowly turned to realization, just as Fluttershy was sure that hers was.
"You're sharp, I'll give you that," Sun said, before becoming engulfed in a glut of teal fire and shifting back into a Changeling. Its compound teal eyes shimmered and glinted in the silvery lights of the bog, and even without eyelids Fluttershy could tell it was giving her a glare of smug satisfaction.
Fluttershy didn't think twice lunging forward with a scream of rage as she tried to tackle the creature to the ground. A blast of water sprayed out behind her as her wings propelled her forward, and the Changeling had barely enough time to dive out of the way as Fluttershy missed it by inches.
"You can fight all you want, but this one's task is complete," the Changeling mocked, in the same deep, soft tone she remembered from the nothingness. "We have both played our parts in our Queen's design, and now all that is left for the both of us is to stay out of the way while it comes to fruition."
Fluttershy quickly whipped around, throwing out a haymaker that managed to catch one of the prehensile mandibles on the Changeling. A sick popping crunch sounded out as the blow connected, followed by a cry of shock and pain from the Changeling as a clear fluid dribbled out from the stump where the mandible once was.
"What did you do?!" Fluttershy demanded. "Where is Setting Sun, what have you done?!"
The Changeling spit and wretched in pain as it held a glossy hoof up to its mouth to try and stanch whatever ichor it was bleeding out.
"He goes to see the Queen, as she told you," the Changeling answered, gurgling out spittle and ichor. "He will be a vessel for her power, and with it he will make right what your alicorns have set so very, very wrong. The world will be made new, magic will be free again, and the Heart will correct the mistake it made in creating your loathsome kind!"
Fluttershy felt her blood run cold at the creature's answer, and she was shocked long enough that it had time to fly off and away to the south.
"It's going to kill us all," Fluttershy murmured to herself. "Chrysalis is going to wipe out pony-kind and she's going to use Sun to do it!"
Thinking quickly, Fluttershy started sprinting back towards the south, but she had gotten no further than where she had exited the darkness from when a massive, opaque wall of silvery mist erected itself to halt her progress.
"No, no, no!" Fluttershy cried out, running back and forth down the length of the wall to try and find a breach point. The entire wall was a solid as a cypress, and there were no spots that she could even press into, let alone break through.
Starting to hyperventilate, Fluttershy wracked her brain, trying to find a solution, before she noticed her gaze being drawn upward. The wall extended into the sky farther than she could see, but she had to believe it had a point where it stopped.
Dropping all of her bags and pouches into the water, Fluttershy stretched her wings out, working out the muscles and loosening them up. She had never had to fly this high up before, and probably never would again, but she had to warn Sun.
"Actually starting to care about what happens to anypony other than yourself," Fluttershy muttered to herself. "It's just a day of firsts, isn't it?"
With a powerful flap Fluttershy ascended into the air, doing her best to dodge and weave through the tree line as she did. A few sticks and branches snapped against her legs and face as she made the climb higher and higher, and more than a few times she found herself having to land on a branch and propel off of it to gain more speed and altitude without flapping her wings into anything.
Sweat beaded off of Fluttershy's brow, she could feel her heart pounding and her lungs burning from exertion as she fought against gravity with every ounce of her strength. The straining her her wings and shoulders begged her to stop, but as she crested the canopy of the swamp she saw a sight that gave her a renewed vigor.
The misty wall stopped just at the top of the canopy, fading away into the darkened sky, and far off in the distance, probably more than a mile away, there was a massive, black structure that glowed with silvery light. It looked something like a spider's egg sac, only covered in plates of black chitin and scaled up to the size of a small mountain, and surrounding it on all sides was a field of pure darkness that extended right up to the wall of mist.
Taking a sharp breath to calm her fluttering heart, Fluttershy started a glide towards the hive, doing her best to keep above the darkness and not taking her eyes off of her goal. She was terrified of what was going to happen when she got there, but for the first time in as long as she could remember, she was more scared for Sun and everypony in the world than she was for herself.
* * *
In the infinitude of blackness Sun had been walking for what seemed to him like an eternity, one that was laden with moments out of every life ever lived in all of Equestria. Silver framed windows into the births, marriages, deaths, struggles, sacrifices, and successes of an innumerable number of ponies spread out all around him, a field of memories pockmarking the darkness.
He passed by a scene of a pegasus grifting a unicorn by up charging for basic essentials like food. He saw a team of earth ponies widening the trench of a mass grave for thestrals. He saw two stallions sharing a tender moment under the stars. He saw a young mare running from her home in tears, being chased by her mother.
So many visions of lives Sun had never even known existed before now, and the effect of seeing them all blasted at him was akin to placing a bucket under a waterfall to try and fill it up.
The voices that had initially been speaking to him had been surprisingly mum ever since the visions had begun, and Sun was getting the impression that they wanted all of the memories to speak for themselves. What the visions were supposed to be telling him was a mystery, but for each life he was given a glimpse into he thought of his home, of everypony waiting there for him. Sun found himself concerned with lives he had never lived, places he had never been, and ponies he would never meet, and if that wasn't the sort of message he was supposed to be receiving then he wondered what the Heart was trying to tell him at all.
So caught up was Sun in all of the views that he had been shown, the images of all of these lives, that he scarcely noticed when the blackness vanished entirely until he felt the wetness of the swamp water lapping at his legs again. The cold, gentle motion was a welcome friend compared to the endless void he had just been traversing, but it was nothing compared to the feeling of hearing a friendly voice say his name.
"Sun!" Fluttershy called. Sun turned as swiftly as he could, but was still caught off guard when she slammed into him, wrapping her hooves around his neck in a tight hug.
"Woah, easy on the horn," Sun playfully chided as a wave of soreness pulsed through his forehead. "Where were you?"
"Oh, it was just awful!" Fluttershy said as she pulled away. "There was just nothing, and then there was a voice that kept asking me questions, and I thought I'd lost you out here and that you were dead an—"
"Fluttershy, Fluttershy, calm down, you're okay," Sun said placing both hooves on her shoulders as she babbled away. "I had the same sort of experience, I understand. You're okay, and so am I."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's just that I was so worried that I'd failed you or that you were dead," Fluttershy replied, taking a few deep breaths to calm herself.
"Well you haven't, and I'm not, so let's get our heads in straight," Sun said, patting her shoulder as he looked around, only to be met with something he was ashamed he hadn't noticed before.
Just to Sun's right, towering above both him and Fluttershy, was a structure. It glowed with a silvery light that suffused every chitinous inch of its surface. It looked like a massive spider's egg, constructed with dull beige webbing that was then plated over by shiny black chitin that Sun recognized from the Changelings they had encountered. Situated right in front of the both of them was a ramp made of this same material that protruded from a large aperture that led into the murky, beige interior of what Sun could only think was the Changeling hive.
"I think we're here," Sun stated, dumbfounded at the sheer size of this organically crafted structure. Fluttershy let out a small yelp when she turned and saw it.
"We have to go in there?" Fluttershy asked.
"Chrysalis did invite us, so we should probably have safe passage in," Sun replied. "Something tells me that she doesn't have a lot of options left, so she can't afford to try and kill us without hearing her out."
"And if we decide not to hear her out?" Fluttershy asked, a slight quiver to her voice.
"Then we'll figure it out like we have for this entire trip," Sun answered as he stepped up onto the ramp. Fluttershy quickly followed after, and together the two of them stepped through the aperture and into the dimly lit hive.
The air inside was muggy and humid, a feeling Sun had only felt whenever Cherry Blossom's bar had a particularly crowded and rowdy night with a lot of ponies chatting and drinking. Such nights were few and far between, but it gave him a good idea that they definitely weren't alone.
"So, did anything happen to you while we were separated?" Sun asked Fluttershy.
"Something spoke to me, but honestly I was too scared to really pay much attention to what it was saying," Fluttershy answered, hiding her face a bit behind a loose lock of her mane.
"You didn't get anything? You're normally so attentive to your surroundings."
"When you're having a full-blown panic attack in an infinite void and deep, scary voice starts talking to you it tends to get lost in the terror," Fluttershy quickly cut in, catching Sun off guard with her suddenly defensive tone.
"Alright, I understand, I won't pressure you," Sun hastily apologized. "If you want, I could tell you what I saw."
"You saw things?" Fluttershy asked. "All I had was the voice."
"I had a couple of voices, actually, and they not only showed me things but they told me things too," Sun continued. "For one, they told me why Equestria has no magic anymore."
"It was because the Princesses left, right?"
"You see, that's what I though too, but apparently what we were both experiencing was being brought on by the Heart of Fate, which is the source of magic itself, and the ancient alicorns that existed before the Princesses essentially made their own version of and bound up Equestria's magic into their Crystal Heart."
Fluttershy went quiet, only looking ahead as Sun continued talking with a pensive look on her face.
"It was the Princess's jobs to manipulate and manage the magic of Equestria by funneling it out of the Crystal Heart, and when they all vanished it was just stuck in the Heart with no way to get it out," Sun continued. "Why Twilight didn't just take over in Canterlot and manage the Heart herself is beyond me, though."
"Do you think she wanted to?" Fluttershy asked. "After all, you told me that she is a scholar and an exceptionally powerful sorceress, maybe she never wanted to duty that came with being a Princess."
"That is… surprisingly insightful, actually," Sun stated, rubbing his chin with his hoof. "But if she didn't want to rule, then why even take the job to begin with? Starlit always told me that the four alicorns had been chosen for their duty; Twilight must've had a reason for taking this on if she didn't want the duty that came with it."
"Did she ever give you any reason to believe that she wanted anything more than just the Princesses to do their jobs again?" Fluttershy asked, stepping over an loose plate of chitin.
"No, but then again there was a lot she just didn't tell us," Sun replied as he a Fluttershy rounded a corner.
Ahead of them was a massive hollow space, rising so high that Sun couldn't see the top and delving so far down that he couldn't see the bottom. Criss-crossed all over this empty chamber were taut bridges of webbing and chitin that ascended and descended at seemingly random intervals. The harsh buzzing of Changeling wings filled the air as they flitted around, crawling a,long the walls like the insects they so resembled.
"Which way do we go?" Fluttershy asked, staring down into the chasm below. "Which way can we go?"
"Chrysalis said she'd be in the inner-most chamber, so that either means the top or the bottom," Sun answered, gaze flitting around at all of the Changelings illuminated in the dull green light. "My bet would probably be the bottom, though."
"I was afraid you might say that," Fluttershy replied, taking a few steps away from the edge. "How are we even going to get down there? None of these bridges connect with each other."
"Almost like they were designed for creatures that can fly," Sun said, nodding towards Fluttershy's wings.
"That might work out for me, but what about you? You don't have wings, and I doubt you could float yourself down with your horn in the shape that it's in."
"I couldn't levitate myself even before I broke my horn, but that's not what I'm suggesting," Sun replied taking a look over the edge to get an appreciation of just how far that would be to fall. "I could ride on your back and you could just glide us down."
"I'm not that strong of a flyer," Fluttershy admitted. "You would probably just make the both of us plummet."
"Have you ever tried?" Sun asked, trying to goad Fluttershy's confidence. "You lived alone in a swamp for ten years, you must've developed some strength in all the time fending for yourself."
"I mean, I did, but not so much that I could carry a whole other pony in flight!" Fluttershy countered. "It is really taxing to fly just carrying a few animals or some bags of food, much less however much you might weigh."
"I'm pretty slight, all things considered," Sun countered back. "You might actually weigh more than I do, and it's not like you're going to have to be doing any flapping. All you need to do is glide and avoid the bridges going down."
Fluttershy looked out over the edge one more time, as though she were eying up a descent. Her furrowed brows betrayed her fear, that much Sun could tell, but he could see the wheels turning behind her eyes.
"I mean, I might be able to hole between the bridges, gliding to them and then resting when we get to them so it isn't just a complete free fall," Fluttershy admitted, stretching her wings out as she began to unstrap all of her bags and pouches. "I'm going to have to leave everything on my behind to cut down on the weight, though."
"It's better than trying to jump between them unaided," Sun replied as he started to unstrap his own saddlebags. He kept the dagger strapped to his foreleg just in case something went horribly wrong, but discarded all the rest of his belongings and left them in a pile away from the ledge along with Fluttershy's bags.
"Maybe for you, but I'm going to be the pony doing the work," Fluttershy sniped back as she went through some pre-flight stretches.
"Are you feeling alright?" Sun asked. "You're a bit… short-tempered."
"I'll be fine," Fluttershy answered, in a tone that distinctly did not sound fine. Even still, Sun decided to let the matter lie. After everything the two of them had been through it would be understandable that she'd be irritable; Sun was certainly ready to get out of the swamp, that much was certain.
Sun felt Fluttershy dip a bit as he climbed into her back and wrapped his hooves around her chest. She grunted with exertion as she got used to his weight, and Sun did his best to keep his body clear of her wings.
"Sorry," Sun said as he carefully readjusted himself.
"It's not your fault, don't worry," Fluttershy replied as she stood back up to her full height. She took a few steps back from the edge after taking one last look at their target, a bridge maybe twenty feet below them and ten feet away, before running as fast as her new burden would let her and leaping off the edge.
Fluttershy's wings caught the air well, but even that only caused their plummet to turn into a controlled descent. They were falling far more quickly than Sun had anticipated, and looked like they were about to miss the bridge entirely.
"Fluttershy, I apologize in advance for this!" Sun said as he started to readjust and get his hooves underneath him.
"What're you talking abo—" Fluttershy started to ask before Sun stood quickly up in her back and jumped off with all his might. She let out an involuntary yelp of surprise as Sun sprung off of her back, which was followed quickly by a thunk of hooves against chitin as Sun tried to grab hold of the bridge.
The chitinous surface of the bridge was slick and polished, far too much for Sun to get a good grip, and he quickly found himself slipping backward. Scrambling against the bridge for any kind of purchase, Sun instinctually tried to light his horn and cast a spell to hold himself in place. The sudden shock of pain lancing through his forehead was the grim coda to what was, at best, a half-baked plan, and as he fell he knew that there would be no recovering from this. He had failed, as plain as that.
Just when Sun had begun to accept the inevitable, he felt his body lurch in the air like coming out of a nightmare about falling. Opening his eyes and looking around he saw a field of silvery magic encasing him. Fluttershy was nowhere to be seen, and as he felt himself descending further and further down into the bowels of the hive he saw that there were no other Changelings nearby either.
The further Sun descended into the earth the more he felt the omnipresent thumping in the back of his head grow in strength. It wasn't painful like the first few times he had felt it quicken in pace, and instead gave him a sense of comfort that he didn't think he'd find in a place like this.
The magical field carrying him downward slowed, flipping him right side up and placing his hooves gently on a floor of polished black chitin. Just ahead was an aperture similar to the one Sun had used to enter the hive to begin with, and a vivid teal-green glow emanated from inside of it. It was a draw for him, like a moth fluttering towards a flame, and Sun couldn't help but be entranced.
As Sun rounded a corner he was greeted by three things in the large, dimly lit chamber beyond. Firstly was a shard of black crystal, roughly the size of his horn and achingly similar to the one Starlit wore around her neck. Secondly was a large throne made out of the same chitinous material that most of the hive's architecture was constructed of, with a round back that had a single sharp point at its apex. Lastly was the pony seated upon the throne, one that felt familiar and yet not familiar.
The pony seated before Sun had the general shape of an alicorn, being approximately Celestia's height, but that was where the similarities ended. This pony had no fur, instead being covered in a black, chitinous exoskeleton like the Changelings. She had a large, pale blue pair of diaphanous wings that were folded against her back with a similar material used to make her mane and tail. Her horn was twisted and crooked, and her hooves and legs were dotted with holes punched straight through. Most striking of all were her eyes, her giant, glimmering green eyes that Sun recognized immediately.
"Chrysalis, I presume?" Sun asked as he entered the throne room.
"You presume correctly," Chrysalis answered. "Come, you must be tired. Let's have a talk."
"You've travelled all this way, done all this work, and when I give you an easy way out, you refuse it," Twilight Sparkle stated as she stared Starlit down. "I knew there was a reason I picked you for this task, even if you have thoroughly disappointed me with your actions over the last few days."
"I know what you did, Twilight," Starlit replied, venom heavy in her voice as her spear floated up by her head. "To Chrysalis, to both of the Hearts that you are trying to bind to your will. Could you blame me for trying to stop you, knowing what I know now?"
"I can't say I can, but I believe that you've only been told a part of the story," Twilight said, slowly walking in a semicircle to Starlit's right. Starlit mirrored her, keeping a good few feet of distance between them.
"Then why don't you give me your side. It can't be any worse than throwing Celestia out a window and beating Chrysalis near to death just for the sake of your 'great work.'"
Starlit saw Twilight's calm smirk twitch into a momentary frown, a break in her regal facade that Starlit knew all too well by now.
"Then ask away," Twilight replied, her voice maintaining its calm and detached air. "You remember how this exchange of ideas went last time, I assume?"
"Why are you trying to enslave Equestria to your will?" Starlit asked, immediately going for the throat of the matter. There was no more sense in dancing around the issue.
"As direct as always, I see," Twilight quipped. "Tell me, Starlit Sky, what is your general opinion of the ponies you have known in your life?"
"You're not answering my question, Twilight," Starlit interjected.
"I only ask because it will provide some necessary context for my answer," Twilight countered. "Please, indulge me in this if nothing else."
Starlit kept a keen eye on Twilight, especially her horn and her hooves, waiting for the errant twitch that Starlit would need to capitalize on.
"Generally neutral, all things considered," Starlit answered, "with the notable exceptions of my family and friends."
"Then you are lucky to live in a time that allows you to have a dispassionate view of everypony around you," Twilight replied, her back now facing the Heart. "Life was far more complicated in my day, and there was far more conflict to be had over ultimately inconsequential matters. Wars, civil strife, rebellion; all of this and more was the order of the day for thousands of years as I was growing up and coming to understand what my role was to be."
"That's just how ponies are, though," Starlit countered. "We fight for things we believe in, or just to live another day. You can't possibly think things that just happen to everypony justifies this mad scheme."
"Maybe from your position it doesn't justify my actions, but you haven't lived the thousands of years that I have. You haven't seen the sheer scale of the destruction that ponies can wreak when they feel the need to. The unification of Equestria and binding of its magic to the Crystal Heart were earlier methods that my kind used to try and reign you in, but these were half-measures at best because they believed in a pony's right to self-determination."
"And you obviously don't," Starlit stated. "You've answered my question, so why not ask me yours?"
"Not a fan of my rhetoric, are you?" Twilight asked back. "Very well, since we're running short on time as it is."
"You have someplace to be? Because I'm afraid I'm might have to waylay you," Starlit countered.
"I'm exactly where I need to be, Starlit Sky," Twilight replied, that smug smirk dancing across her face again. "You've already told me why you can't just go home and let me finish my work, so I guess my best question should be how you intend to stop me."
"By force, if that wasn't painfully obvious," Starlit answered, bobbing her spear up and down in her magic. "Pretty poor choice of question, all in all."
"I wouldn't think so," Twilight replied, "since it does tell me where your head is at right now. You're a smart mare, Starlit Sky, surely you don't think that you can beat me in a straight fight?"
"Not a straight one, certainly, but I have my ways," Starlit answered. "I managed to beat Celestia in a straight fight, after all."
"Celestia is a brute who has far more in common with you than you'd think," Twilight countered, continuing to circle around Starlit as Starlit circled her. "She never had much of a mind for subtlety and subterfuge, and when you cleft her portion of the Crystal Heart in two it robbed her of the only advantage she knew she had over you. You took the wind out from beneath her wings, so to speak."
"Then maybe I should just destroy your fancy crown," Starlit replied, gesturing to the five-pointed crown on Twilight's head. "That seems like it has a lot of power in it, given it has five shards from this giant glowing rock behind me in it."
"And you've reminded me of the other question I wanted to ask you," Twilight said, her voice brightening with malice. "How, exactly, have you managed to spy on me? I know you have a particular specialty for shields and warding magic, so these little forays into manifesting your sight through my crown have thrown me for something of a loop."
"You know, I'm feeling nice, so I'll let you have this one for free," Starlit replied, a smile of her own going across her face. "I have no idea."
"You can't possibly be serious."
"I am as serious as the fight that I know we're about to have, and that I would love to get underway," Starlit countered. "I just drew some power out of the stone to get me back on my hooves after that ridiculous amount of thestrals you threw at me on my way up the mountain, and it knocked me out and apparently connected me to your crown as a side effect."
Twilight opened her mouth as if to speak before her previously look of smug superiority slowly soured. Her eyebrows furrowed, her coy smirk quickly turning into a resolute frown, and she stopped circling around Starlit. Starlit stopped dead in her tracks in turn, a feeling of satisfaction rising in her chest.
"That answer cut to the quick, I'd wager," Starlit said. "Upset that you can't find the answer you're looking for?"
"Starlit Sky, you are going to give that fragment to me now, and I am only going to ask for it one more time," Twilight countered, her voice as steely as her glare. Her horn illuminated with magenta magic, and Starlit dropped into a low stance in response.
"You're going to have to take it from my corpse, you lying, insane excuse for a pony," Starlit countered, tensing her muscles in anticipation.
Twilight took a deep breath in, her pupils shrinking and her head shaking in rage.
"As you wish," Twilight replied with pure hatred, before firing a beam of magic directly at Starlit's spear.
Starlit quickly flipped the blade around to the other side of her head, taking the time in between to manifest her personal ward as Twilight readied another beam. She could feel the heat radiating off of the blast of magic as it grazed past her cheek, but despite the danger Starlit could feel a strange sense of exhilaration.
As the second beam lanced towards Starlit she expertly ducked underneath it and charged, spear aloft and righteous rage driving her hooves.
* * *
"I must say, Setting Sun, your arrival could not be more expertly timed," Chrysalis said as she rose off of her chitinous throne. Her steps were shaky and weak, and she drooped her head as she approached like it hurt for her neck to support its weight.
"How so?" Sun asked as he fully entered the chamber. He could feel the air suffused with energy, like a static charge running along his fur, and it made his horn ache.
"As we speak, I can feel Starlit Sky within the Heart," Chrysalis answered, sending a start through Sun's heart. "Within myself, in a way."
"She's still alive?!" Sun asked, before remembering her ability to resurrect herself. "How… how many times has she died?"
"More than most, I'd say, but that is not your concern right now, Setting Sun," Chrysalis answered. "Right now we are here to discuss you, and your role in this long and sordid tale."
"What about Fluttershy? Where is she?" Sun asked, guiltily recalling how he had futilely launched himself off of her back. He hadn't seen her when he got to the bottom of the hive.
"She will be fine; my children are escorting her from this place as we speak. She will be safely returned to her home and all of this will seem to her as though it were a bad dream."
Sun felt a lump of worry form in his throat, but swallowed it back down as he thought it through.
"It's for the best, probably," Sun replied. "She never wanted to come with me, and she seemed kind of upset with me when last I saw her."
"A common issue with all ponies, it would seem," Chrysalis mused, sitting on the floor in front of Sun. She towered over him even when seated, and the air of otherness she gave off was even more acute than when they had spoken in the swamp.
"How so?" Sun asked, sitting down in turn.
"Ponies are selfish creatures, and alicorns triply so," Chrysalis explained. "Their only concerns always seem to be how to better themselves and their own positions at the expense of all of those around them."
"You say that like it's fact," Sun countered, "but I wouldn't be here if that were a tautology like you seem to think it is."
A low, soft chuckle escaped Chrysalis's lips, one that carried weariness instead of mirth.
"Perhaps I've been cooped up in my hive for far too long, then. You and Starlit Sky are rare exceptions that prove the rule, I'd say. You wouldn't be here if it weren't for the selfishness and vindictiveness of your Princesses all those centuries ago, and neither would I."
"What do you mean? Weren't you one of the Princesses?" Sun asked.
"In title, if not in fact," Chrysalis continued. "My Heart created life as we know it now, but for countless ages it let life flourish unabated and undisturbed. Civilizations have risen and fallen on the stretch of land you call Equestria, allowed to grow, live, and die as they saw fit to. That changed when the alicorns, blessed amongst the ponies, committed a grave and terrible sin."
"By creating the Crystal Heart and binding Equestria's natural magic to it," Sun replied as he drank in Chrysalis's words.
"Precisely. By creating that profane trinket they sought to usurp the appropriate role of the Heart of Fate and become greater than their station. The Heart of Fate let their leash go slack, and they took the opportunity to try and shackle it in turn. They enslaved those like you, in principle if not in fact, by forcing that which the Heart gave to all to go through only a select few."
"Then where do you factor into all of this?" Sun asked, fearing that he understood the answer.
"I was created as the first of the Changelings when the Heart needed an emissary and a saboteur," Chrysalis continued with a touch of pride, "a creature that could see without being seen, hear without being heard, and unravel the crime that the alicorns had committed against this world."
"During this time that I observed your world, creating my own children to act where I could not, I saw the level of decadence and depravity that ponies could commit; acts of betrayal, of violence, and of selfishness that I could not fathom. I was created for a singular purpose, and your kind was not, and your aimlessness leads you down dark paths."
"But there is just as much good and nobility in ponies, surely," Sun countered. "I may not be as old as you are, or seen as much, but we learn from our mistakes."
"Do you?" Chrysalis asked. "Allow me to peel back the scales from your eyes, so that you might see more clearly."
With a swish of her gnarled, twisted horn a small disc of silvery mist manifested to Sun's left, its slight glow a stark contrast to the harsh shadows cast by the room's omnipresent green glow. Slowly the mist parted to reveal a scene like the innumerable ones that he had seen in the blackness around the hive itself. This one, however, made his heart drop into his stomach.
He could see Starlit Sky dodge around a bright magenta beam of magic, one being cast from Twilight Sparkle. Starlit was charging up towards Twilight, a spear held aloft in her teal magic, before taking a swift and heavy blow to the side from Twilight's magic sent her sprawling against the floor of the cavern they were both in.
"Is this happening now?!" Sun asked, standing up with a start.
"It is, and it shows the depths ponies will delve to when they think they are right," Chrysalis answered.
"But Starlit's in the right!" Sun interjected, his face growing got with anger. "Twilight's trying to enslave Equestria, how can you say that they are in any way equal?!"
"Twilight Sparkle's motives are as abominable as you say, that much is true, but Starlit Sky's methods are equally as atrocious," Chrysalis replied. "Tell me, how many ponies and other creatures have you seen her kill, or have been killed in her wake?"
Sun could feel the indignation burn in his chest, and he wasn't about to sit back and be lectured by a creature that hadn't seen anything outside of her own domain in centuries.
"Don't you try to pull that false equivalency nonsense with me," Sun spat back. "The only ponies that have gotten hurt along the way are the ones that have tried to hurt her, hurt us, first. Either that or they were thestrals, which are basically just wild animals. Maybe you'd understand that if you had any sort of perspective, but given that you've been holed up in this hive since the war it would make sense that you have convinced yourself of your own superiority."
Chrysalis quickly got to her hooves, faster than her previously weak steps would indicate that she could, and Sun took a reflexive step back as she rose to her full, towering height.
"Do not think me a being that is ill-informed, Setting Sun!" Chrysalis snarled back. "I am but a servant to a much higher power, and I have seen the atrocities that your fallen kind commit in service of rising above their stations! Do you want proof that I am aware of the plights of your people?"
"Yes! Show me evidence, show my proof, show me anything that will convince me that you're right, or else you are just as self-serving and hypocritical as the Princesses were!"
Sun's declaration rang throughout the throne room, and Chrysalis's vertical, compound pupils tightened into slits. She swiftly rose to her full, statuesque height, and Sun could feel the deep, cloying coldness of regret seize his spine as she did.
"Then gaze upon this!" Chrysalis replied, her eyes filling with silver light as she did. A beam of silver connected Chrysalis's horn to Sun's, and he crumpled in pain at the magic being forced down his mangled horn. He could feel a scream of agony escape his lips but could not hear it as he was slowly lifted into the air.
Sun cracked his eyes open to try and see what was happening to him, but all that he could see was a silvery field of magic and the floating black shard of the Heart of Fate in front of his face. It pulsed and beat furiously, in perfect synchronicity with the beat in the back of his head.
"This, Setting Sun, is how I know about the abominable methods ponies use to enact their own will on the world," Chrysalis said, her voice echoing in the deafening silence. "This fragment is all that remains of my Heart, for it has been shattered and carved away with every birth of one of those Twilight cursed. For every pony that is born she gains more of my Heart, so I had to correct her mistake by making every death give it back to me, in time."
A bead of silvery light appeared in the infinite blackness of the shard, before resolving into an image the fully encompassed Sun's vision.
He saw Starlit again, an expression of horror on her face as his own blackened, emaciated hooves were beating her into a pulp on a long-worn palace carpet, dust heavy in the air. Sun saw himself, a beam of green magic turning into a blast of teal and white as an explosion rocked a long abandoned mine. Sun saw Starlit, wind whipping snow past her covered head as she drove a sword through his neck, just as his own spear was burying itself into her chest.
"Twilight placed the shards of my Heart that she beat and tortured out of me into ponies at random, bound them to their very essence, their very souls!" Chrysalis continued, her anger giving way to anguish. "For every pony that she tainted that gave birth, another piece of my Heart was stolen away! This slow, intractable theft has been going on for centuries, and now everything is on the precipice of oblivion because she dared to defy the course of nature!"
Sun could see a home, his home, and Applejack cleaning up the dust inside, only now she had a glowing, black tumor showing through the back of her head at the base of her skull. He saw Rarity and Pinkie Pie in New Selene, each with a growth on the backs of their heads as well. Rainbow Dash, Cherry Blossom, Big Macintosh, Stalwart Warden, White Eclipse; every pony he had ever met flashed across his field of view in a whirling kaleidoscope of images, all of them with a black tumor on the backs of their heads, until he finally saw the base of his own skull and the growth pulsing furiously in time with his frantic heartbeats.
"You are naught but a slave to Twilight Sparkle's ambitions, and the world she has created because of it is a doomed and fallen one destined for ruination. You are bound inextricably into her great work, and it is only through me that you can achieve absolution and salvation for everything you hold dear, Setting Sun."
The pain in Sun's horn slowly subsided, and he was gently lowered to the ground where he fell to his side as soon as Chrysalis's magic was no longer supporting. His breathing was labored as he tried to process everything he had just seen, only for the last piece of the Heart of Fate to float into his periphery.
"How…?" Sun asked, his throat catching like he had just inhaled sand. "I thought… magic was natural. How could Twilight… bind us to the Crystal… Heart with magic… that isn't ours?"
"There is magic in nature, yes, but ponies themselves are born with it innate," Chrysalis continued, her voice resonating with insect-like buzzing. "When Twilight cursed your kind with my shards she bound what should have been a pony's natural magic into that profane Crystal Heart, robbing them of their power lest it be her will to restore it. Some overcome through hard work and effort to reconnect themselves with their primal source, but eventually all of the cursed ponies of this land will lose this connection permanently. Thus I created my thestrals; My only recourse against Twilight's madness was to debase myself to her level, and destroy her slaves with the very magic she was robbing them of."
"You… you made the thestrals?" Sun asked back, too sore to put the proper emphasis behind his voice that he wanted as he hauled himself back up to a sitting position.
"Through my connection to the Heart of Fate, yes. If Twilight was going to deny my Heart to me, then I would deny her subjects to her. Every thestral made is one less pony bound to her will, and one more fragment of my Heart made whole again."
"You mean to tell me… that every death… every ounce of suffering… and pain… that those monsters… have put us all through… for centuries… is your fault?" Sun asked, voice low and pain building in his forehead.
Chrysalis opened her gleaming, silvered mouth to speak, but couldn't get a single word out before a titanic blast of silver light exploded out of Sun's mangled and deformed horn. The agony was indescribable as he unleashed the full fury of what magic he had left, but Sun didn't care any more. He was going to do something he wanted to do, for the first and probably last time in his life.
There was a crack, followed by the sound of bone striking the chitinous floor. Sun immediately collapsed to the floor from sheer exhaustion and excruciating pain, and the last thing he saw before unconsciousness took him was a wide grin cracking across Chrysalis's smoking visage.
* * *
Fluttershy sped as fast as her wings would take her towards the hive in the center of the pitch-black swamp, hoping upon hope that she wasn't too late to warn Sun about what was going to happen.
The sound of buzzing grew louder as Fluttershy approached the hive, and she could see mobs of Changelings buzzing around the higher parts of the egg sac-like structure. She could feel her heart hammering into her throat as she thought of how she was going to try and maneuver around or through them, but a solution was quickly offered up.
A straight, bright beam of silver light shot up out of the top of the hive, blowing away dozens of Changeling from the sheer force of the blast alone. Fluttershy, still being a good half-mile out from it, still felt the shockwave ripple through the air and was nearly knocked out of her flight, only barely maintaining her altitude by flattening herself out as much as possible.
"Sun," Fluttershy whispered as she flew faster still towards the hive.
The stinking scent of burnt flesh filled Fluttershy's nose as she approached the top of the hive, and the multitudes of burnt and mangled Changelings that were scattered all about. At the apex of the hive there was a smoking hole, burnt black at its edges. Fluttershy carefully set down at the edge of the hole, if only to give her wings a moment's respite as she looked inside.
Below her there was only the smell of burning webbing and waves of heat emanating from inside. The entire inside of the hive had been blasted clean, the walls smooth and polished by the magical eruption. At the very bottom, so small it was scarcely even a dot, was a glow of green.
Stretching her wings out again, Fluttershy dove down into the hive and practically fell towards the green light. There was no other light and no obstacles to block her path, allowing her to save her wing strength for when she needed to make a hard stop at the bottom. She almost smacked into the floor, such was her speed, just barely managing to land on her hooves after a hasty deceleration process.
She ran across the slick, warm floor towards the green light, lungs burning and muscles crying out to stop. Panic and worry we're the only two things driving Fluttershy forward, both of which were swiftly replaced by the old, familiar fear she knew so well.
Sun was laying on the floor, his breathing haggard and his cloak missing, while a Changeling Fluttershy could only guess was Chrysalis loomed over him. She held a large shard of black crystal aloft, guiding it towards Sun as she flicked her glowing, silver eyes in Fluttershy's direction.
"I apparently put too much faith in my drones," Chrysalis mused, her voice buzzing as silver light spilled from her mouth. "Tis no matter, though; you are far too late to prevent what must be done to secure your world against those that would prey against it."
"What did you do to him?!" Fluttershy cried out, tears leaking from her eyes.
"He tried to resist the course of destiny, and I had to set him right," Chrysalis answered. "He will make for a capable vessel, as marred as he is, and I have you to thank for bringing him to me."
Fluttershy stumbled back, as if Chrysalis's declaration had physical force behind it, before falling to a sitting position as the weight of what she had done settled onto her.
"Know this, Fluttershy," Chrysalis continued as she lifted Sun's prone body off of the floor in a nimbus of silver magic. "When the world is made right, and the Heart of Fate reorganizes all things, you will have the peace you have so long sought."
Fluttershy looked up at Chrysalis, then back to the shard, her impotence and fear clutching her heart with an iron grip.
"I didn't want it to come like this," Fluttershy muttered.
"So rarely do we get to choose how our wishes are granted, or if they even are. Just know that you have set the world on a path towards a brighter future, one without alicorns or Princesses or any of the factors of chaos that have been tearing this grand design apart for these many long years."
As Fluttershy sat stock still, paralyzed by her failure, she watched as Chrysalis raised the shard high above Sun's head before driving it into the stump where his horn once was. A squelch of blood and nerve tissue sprayed out from the stump, followed by two heavy thumps as Chrysalis collapsed to the floor and Sun fell out of her magic.
"Sun!" Fluttershy cried as she ran over to the unicorn. She shook him with all the strength her leaden muscles could muster, before noticing the spreading silver vein-like glow emanating from his forehead.
Slowly Fluttershy took a step back as the web of silver lights encircled Sun's prone body, glowing brighter and brighter until it was impossible to look at anymore. Fluttershy buried her eyes in her hooves, both to protect them and to try and block out whatever she had let happen to Sun. A hoof laid itself on Fluttershy's shoulder, eliciting a jolt of fear as she snapped her head up.
Standing in front of her was Sun, but not as Fluttershy remembered him. The black crystal had perfectly bonded with his horn stump, enough that she could only tell where it ended and his head began by the change in color. His irises were no longer green but silver, and glowed slightly in the dim light. The thing she noticed most, though, was that he now carried himself with an air of confidence and regality that she had never seen from him before.
"Sun?" Fluttershy asked, placing a hoof atop his.
"No," he answered, his voice a perfect chorus of multitude voices all wrapped up into one. He slowly pulled his hoof away as fresh tears leaked out from Fluttershy's eyes.
"Then, are you Chrysalis?"
"She is but a fragment of my being, as is Setting Sun, and every pony that has ever been connected to my will. I must leave now, but know that you have played your role expertly and will be rewarded when I reset this world. Goodbye, Fluttershy."
With a flash of silver light the being that was inhabiting Sun's body vanished, leaving Fluttershy alone with a dead body and a hollow in her soul that she didn't know how to fill.
* * *
Starlit quickly rolled back to her hooves, her ribs aching where Twilight's blast of magic had busted through a portion of her ward. Starlit hastily patched over the open spot, leaving barely enough time to leap out of the way of another bolt of magenta fury.
"You can't win this, Starlit Sky!" Twilight taunted, charging up another bolt. "You either give me what I want and get to go home to your husband and child, or you die here and I still get what I want!"
"Don't you dare talk about my family after what you put them through!" Starlit snarled back as she rushed towards Twilight, her spear a good three feet ahead of her.
Twilight expertly deflected the spear's tip with a quickly manifested field of energy, the point skating into the ground before Starlit whipped around at Twilight's armored fetlocks. The bladed head made contact with the armor, sending out a high ringing sound that knocked Twilight to the side from surprise.
"What I did to them? Surely you mean what I did for them!" Twilight countered, sending a wave of rage burning through Starlit's heart. "I sheltered them, kept them safe from anything and everything that could do them harm!"
"You trapped them under that dome for a month!" Starlit roared, slamming the spear again and again into Twilight's ward. "They didn't know if I was dead or alive, they were on the verge of starving! How could you possibly justify the anguish you put my husband, my daughter through!? Why didn't you just do what you told me you would!?"
"I would have if I could have!" Twilight defiantly answered, starting to press back towards the entrance to the cavern under Starlit's assault. "I can't control time, at least not yet, and I had to say what I did to get you to come willingly! I manipulated you, yes, but it was for a greater good than you can possibly understand!"
"Tell that to my daughter crying into my chest after a month of wondering where her mother had gone! Tell that to my husband who thought he had lost the love of his life! How dare you try to moralize at me!"
Starlit's manic assault against Twilight, fueled by rage and vindictiveness, was slowly pushing Twilight back towards the open shaft beyond the cavern's mouth. Each thrust was parried expertly with magic, only for the attack to be redoubled, and for a moment Starlit could seat she saw fear in Twilight's eyes.
"You think you're the only one who's lost anypony?" Twilight asked back, teetering in the edge of the shaft. "You think you're the only pony who's suffered for any of this?! My brother died defending our homeland, my parents were trampled in the mad dash to escape this falling kingdom, and you stole Spike from me!"
With a quick flap of her wings Twilight took the the air, holding in a hover over the empty pit as bolts of magenta energy crackled from her eyes. Starlit's fur stood up in end from the electricity in the air as a wave of force shoved her backward.
"You have become a thorn in my side that I cannot abide anymore, Starlit Sky!" Twilight intoned. "When you finally starve to death down here, I hope your last thoughts are of everything you threw away for petty revenge!"
A beam of brilliant magenta energy shot out of Twilight's horn, blasting the staircase that Starlit had taken down into the cavern. Searing fragments of stone exploded out of the wall, enough that Starlit had to manifest a secondary ward over her bodily one just to make sure none of them hit her. When the smoke finally cleared away the staircase as far as she could see was gone.
Without another word Twilight flapped her wings and began her ascent, obviously not counting on Starlit's newfound power. Dropping her ward to conserve energy, Starlit began to channel her magic into her shoulders, feeling the same electrical tingling before the familiar sound of skating metal erupted out of her back. Taking a moment to measure up how much of a run up she would need, Starlit galloped forward, jumped over the empty pit below, and flapped her ethereal wings to begin the ascent.
Starlit was quickly gaining speed on Twilight, the haft of her spear held back and prepared to be hurled at the brightening spot of magenta ahead of her. When Starlit could just make out Twilight's figure she sent the spear forward, the spot of her own teal magic marring Twilight's aura.
A howl of pain and confusion echoed throughout the vertical tunnel as the spear made its mark, driving into the back of Twilight's unarmored left hind knee. Starlit quickly pulled into a roll to avoid the spray of blood, followed by a much sharper second roll to dodge the blast of magic coming after her.
"You are just full of surprises, aren't you!?" Twilight screamed, sending bolt after bolt of magic raining down in frenzy as Starlit gained distance on the Princess.
"You picked me for a reason, didn't you?" Starlit replied, yanking the spear from Twilight's leg with another spray of blood and shriek of pain.
Starlit finally got on level with Twilight, whirling her spear around to try and bury the head into Twilight's side. Her efforts were quickly interrupted with a solid kick to the chest from Twilight's good hind leg, one that sent Starlit spinning and smacking off of the walls of the shaft, losing her a good few yards of distance.
"Don't think you have me beaten that easily!" Twilight declared, before sending another flurry of bolts raining down on Starlit.
Thinking quickly, Starlit channeled her protective magic into her spear and began to spin it in front of herself, creating a disc of energy that deflected Twilight's energy blasts. Starlit could feel her magic starting to wane, and found herself muttering the old words she used to say to her warding lines just to maintain the shield and her wings at the same time.
Slowly but surely Starlit began to gain on Twilight again, the Princess's arcane onslaught deflecting off of Starlit's shield and scattering all across the walls. A few even reflected back at Twilight herself, who was hit by a fair few bolts of her own magic. Starlit found herself wondering why Twilight wasn't stopping her assault, but couldn't dwell on idle thoughts for too long lest her shield or her wings fail her.
Just as Starlit caught up to Twilight again she could see a light at the end of the tunnel, one that was rapidly approaching. Her horn ached and her shoulders burned from the effort of flight, and when the exit to the tunnel was finally level with the both of them Starlit wheeled her spear around and smacked Twilight square in the face with the flat of the blade. Having been so consumed with her magical deluge Twilight didn't notice until the spear had hit her, sending her flying out of the entrance to the shaft and scattering in a clanking, bleeding mess across the polished marble floor. Starlit spilled out after her, landing flat on her stomach as her wings vanished and the spear clattered to the floor.
Both mares quickly scrambled to their hooves as swiftly as they could, with Starlit winning out if only because of Twilight's injury. Starlit grabbed her spear back up in her magic just as Twilight manifested another bead of energy on the tip of her horn. Starlit's breathing was just as ragged as Twilight's, and they were both covered in scrapes and blood.
"Couldn't take you in a straight fight, huh?" Starlit asked mockingly.
"I'll admit I may have underestimated your prowess," Twilight answered viciously, "but you have made a serious mistake in challenging me like this."
"Doesn't feel like I have," Starlit replied as she approached Twilight, who was swiftly backing up towards a large set of immaculate white wood doors.
"Then let me to educate you further," Twilight replied. With a quick bolt of magic Twilight opened the doors behind her, revealing three things that Starlit hadn't known were there, but had expected to see, and one which she hadn't expected at all.
In this throne room Starlit saw three crystallized figures seated upon three thrones, each of whom she recognized as Celestia, Luna, and Cadance. The sun coming in through the shattered windows dappled off of their rough hewn bodies, and each was locked in an expression of deepest betrayal and shock.
However, what truly drew Starlit's eye was the large, crystalline heart floating above the central throne. It beat rhythmically and steadily, but inside of its crystalline form Starlit saw very volatile, and very familiar, magenta magic warbling and pulsing.
With a buffeting gust from her wings Twilight flew to the opposite side of the throne room, seating herself down upon the throne that bore her cutie mark on its apex. The bead of magic on her horn quickly connected itself to the Crystal Heart, and Twilight began to siphon her magic back out of it.
"I tried to get you to see reason, I tried to show you why fighting me is a bad idea, but you leave me no choice!" Twilight stated, her voice lowering and gaining that resonant quality Starlit remembered from the vision she had been shown. "Now all that there is left to do is annihilate you where you stand!"
Slowly Twilight grew in size, her mane lengthening and floating above her as her eyes glowed with pure power. Starlit threw her spear at Twilight's chest, hoping she could pierce her armor and kill her before the ritual was completed, but the spear was lazily deflected away.
"You can't fight destiny, Starlit Sky," Twilight continued, rising off of her throne and approaching the podium in the center of the room with nary a limp. "You can't run from it, and you can't cheat it. All you can do is wait for it to come, and hope that you haven't caught its eye."
Starlit felt her heart jump into her throat, a cold sweat breaking out on her forehead as Twilight glided towards her, wings spread wide as if daring Starlit to try and attack her. Starlit could still see the Crystal Heart, almost drained of the power Twilight had fed into it, and a last, desperate play leapt to the forefront of her mind.
"I don't have to fight destiny," Starlit replied, pulling the shard of the Heart of Fate from her armor and holding it aloft next to her spear, "not when you've already done it for me."
"And the unicorn finally sees reason," Twilight replied, folding her wings as she looked over Starlit, energy crackling in her eyes and a placid smile painted across her face. "When my new world is made, you will see both its wonder and the futility of trying to fight its coming, Starlit Sky. There will be a place for you and all those you love there, you have my word."
"Yes, the new world," Starlit echoed, bowing low.
Just as Twilight reached down to take the shard Starlit bolted, running in between Twilight's elongated legs and using the slick marble to slide further than her hooves could take her. Twilight turned in shock as Starlit placed the shard of the Heart of Fate against the tip her spear, binding them together with a quick ward.
"A world without you to rule it!" Starlit cried out as her spear flew forward, directly towards the Crystal Heart.
Twilight's scream of rage echoed through the hall as the spear made contact, and at the tip where the shard protruded past the spear point a crack shot across the Heart's surface. The crack spiderwebbed all across the formerly immaculate surface of the Crystal Heart, pieces of it falling away like they were drifting through water.
There was a boom like thunder, a flash like lightning, and a force like an earthquake as the Crystal Heart shattered.
Pain wracked Starlit's face and chest and she couldn't feel anything below her torso. Her pulse beat dully in her ears and when she dared to crack her eyes open everything was tinged with crimson. She was delirious, on her side, and laying not fifteen feet away from her was Twilight Sparkle, who looked just about as bad as Starlit felt.
Starlit tried to croak out a few words to her adversary, but the only thing that fell from her mouth was a hoarse groan. Slowly, gingerly, she tried to crawl towards Twilight, but every movement of her legs was agony. She flopped back to the marble floor, now strewn with debris and cracked asunder, letting her gaze shift towards the dais.
Where once there were five thrones and three statues there was now simply a crater, and where the Crystal Heart had once been there was only her shard, floating in a nimbus of silver light and with the remains of her spear melted against it to make a crude bezel for the stone.
Again Starlit tried to crawl, making precious inches towards the stone. If she could draw the power from it again she could heal, but the excruciating inches she was making towards it were taking up any focus she might have been able to put towards conjuring her magic.
A slight shuffling to her right drew Starlit's attention, where she could see Twilight starting to stir. Slowly, but with a measure of power behind her, the Princess got up to her hooves. Her armor had been blown off of her body and she was covered in burns and lacerations, her horn was visibly cracked and leaking magenta magic, but the most horrifying injuries came from the rivulets of molten gold that were dripping down Twilight's formerly beatific face. Her fur crinkled and curled back from her melted crown, her mane was smoking and burning away, and one of her eyes was fully coated in gold that was slowly pooling into the socket.
Starlit started crawling faster, hoping that she hadn't drawn Twilight's notice given she was on the Princess's blind side, until a clatter of metal made Twilight whip her head to the side and directly at Starlit.
"You!" Twilight growled, her one good eye a pinprick of fury.
Starlit looked down to see what had made the noise as she kept crawling, and saw her husband's badge laying on the ground. It's silver surface was marred, blackened, and pitted, but she could still see the combination of their cutie marks on its rough surface.
Starlit's body screamed at her to stop moving, but its wish was granted not by Starlit succumbing, but by a halo of magenta magic holding her down. All Starlit could do was move her eyes, and she could just see Twilight trudging towards her prone before before she was lifted bodily to face the Princess's ruined visage.
"Do you have any idea what you have done?!" Twilight screamed, every bit of her feigned decorum blown away with her armor.
"I… I really don't…" Starlit croaked. Her words scraped against her throat like sand.
A flare of the magic encasing Starlit's body wrenched her head backward, pointing her eyes to the ceiling, or lack thereof. The sky, which had moments ago been blue, was now a multi-colored haze of reds, greens, blues, and every other color Starlit could think of. They swirled and danced across the endless expanse of the sky, merrily swirling this way and that without a care.
"You've destroyed millennia of effort!" Twilight replied, wrenching Starlit's head back down. "There will never be order, never be peace again, all because of you! How can you not understand the enormity of what you have robbed us all of!?"
"Can't… steal something… you never had…" Starlit croaked.
Starlit's head cracked against the ruined masonry as she was hurled bodily towards the hole that had once been the dais, her vision sparking as she collided with the floor. A high whining sound was all she could hear as she stared up at her shard, solidified silver metal dripping off of it like wax, and in the silence she tried to focus what little energy she had left into her horn and the shard hanging precipitously over her.
The flickering, dull teal bead of light at the tip of her horn was quickly snuffed out by an iron grip of magenta, followed by the blinding pain of a bone breaking under tremendous force.
"Can't have that, now can we?" Twilight asked facetiously as Starlit let a ragged howl escape her lips.
Blood ran down Starlit's face as Twilight lifted her up again, facing the shard of the Heart of Fate. Starlit could see herself reflected in its rough, faceted surface, a vision of misery and pain.
"I may not be able to salvage my work without the Crystal Heart, but I can certainly make you suffer for ruining it!" Twilight mocked as she turned Starlit around to face her.
Another hoarse cry flew from Starlit's mouth as she felt Twilight's magic burn into the stump where her horn had been. She felt as though her face was being pressed into a fire, and slow creeping burn radiated and pulsed through her neck and chest as more and more of the magic invaded her body.
"You are untainted by Chrysalis's curse, and so you are going to be the one that starts this process going all over again!" Twilight said with a sadistic smile. "If I can't have the Crystal Heart's power, then I will at least have one of the last true unicorns in Equestria! You will be mine, and when Chrysalis burns this world down we will be the only ones who last beyond it!"
Starlit's crimson vision started to fade as she felt the power of Twilight working and digging through her body and with nervous tingling the feeling began to return to her hind legs, leaving only the searing blinding pain in her head as the sole focus of her agony.
When Starlit's vision completely cleared she could see Twilight more clearly, her mangled face contorted into manic rage. Her teeth were gritted into a snarl, her horn flaked and cracked under the strain of her own power, and a stream of tears drained out of her sole remaining eye.
Starlit's heart broke for Twilight, and despite herself she slowly raised a hoof to Twilight's face. The maddened Princess's gaze flicked to the hoof, as though she were expecting an attack, but didn't recoil when Starlit ran it gently down her cheek to wipe away her tears.
"Why?" Starlit asked softly, the best she could do given the circumstances. "Why do you hate us so much?"
Twilight didn't back up, letting Starlit continue to gently rub her cheek. Her snarl fell slightly, her furrowed eyebrow raising.
"What?" Twilight snapped back, hardening her expression.
"You have so much hate in you," Starlit answered. "Hate for the other Princesses, hate for Equestria, and hate for me."
"Why shouldn't I?! After all that everypony has ever taken from me, aren't I entitled to my anger?! My kingdom is dead, my subjects are cursed, and all of this because I tried to help you, to save you from yourselves!"
Twilight's tears fell harder and faster, pooling underneath Starlit's hoof, and in her anger Starlit could feel the catch in the Princess's voice through her hoof.
"I tried it your way once!" Twilight continued, her voice thick. "I tried to convince ponies to be better than they were! I tried to be an exemplar! I tried for so long to be a good ruler!"
"Then try again," Starlit said, raising her other hoof and placing it against Twilight's other cheek. She could feel the hot gold singe into her fur and flesh, but she endured the pain. "Nopony was ever perfect the first time they tried something."
"But I was supposed to be perfect!" Twilight cried out, weakening the flow of magic into Starlit's burning stump. "Equestria's magic was my burden, and I failed to bear it. Celestia and Luna spent more time jockeying for favor than they did ruling, Cadance couldn't have cared less about anything outside of the Empire, and Chrysalis tried to subvert our rule at every opportunity. I was the only one that ever tried to rule this kingdom, and I failed!"
The magenta field holding Starlit failed as Twilight broke down, and Starlit landed at the edge of the open hole as Twilight started to sob in earnest. They were still connected through Twilight's magic, but the thread of magenta was wavering and weak compared to the agonizing beam that it had been.
"I was given this gift to make Equestria a better place, and I failed," Twilight weeped, her eyes cast to the ruined floor. "I tried to do so much good, and then threw it all away for nothing."
"I don't think it was for nothing," Starlit replied, scooting away from the edge of the hole and closer to Twilight. Her joints creaked, her muscles were sore, and her throat burned, but she felt far better than she had been just a few minutes before.
"What?"
"It was terrible what happened, don't misunderstand me, but it wasn't for nothing," Starlit repeated. "Everything you've done, everything you've been through, everything you've put everypony through for all this time, has been to place you and I at this exact moment."
"You can't possibly believe that this moment has been worth all of this pain and sacrifice," Twilight countered.
"I suppose that depends on how this moment plays out, but I believe that all it takes is one moment that can make all the difference. If you hadn't talked to me on that night last month we wouldn't be here now, and if my husband had been the one on watch that night he might be here instead of me."
Twilight looked at Starlit with her one good eye, the gold encasing her face having cooled and the magic no longer pouring out of her horn.
"A life is is just a series of moments," Starlit continued, "and while some of those moments have more weight than others I think that all of them matter because they all go towards making you who you are."
"You... say this as if I don't already know this," Twilight replied with a hiccup.
"I'm telling you this because I think that you've forgotten," Starlit countered. "You've lived so much longer than anypony else, and maybe you've started to miss the little moments in exchange for the big picture you've been working towards that just fell apart."
Starlit reflexively backed up as she saw Twilight's horn illuminate again, only for the Princess to wince in pain as another piece of her cracked horn fell off and clattered to the floor.
"Here, let me show you something," Starlit said as she stood up and shakily walked to where her husband's badge had dropped, limping to keep her weight off of her burned hoof. She carefully picked the badge up in her teeth and held it up to Twilight's good eye.
"What is this?" Twilight asked as she carefully picked the badge up in her magic.
"It belongs to my husband, the one you trapped for a month," Starlit answered. "It was his badge when he served with our town's watch, but he lost his post after he went missing for a month."
"Oh," Twilight sheepishly responded. "I'm sorry."
"It's no matter, really. He's strong and he's honest, so he'll be able to get another job."
"Then why show this meaningless trinket to me?"
"Because it does have meaning," Starlit answered, lifting a shaking hoof to the insignia on the badge. "See that circle of runes around the mace?"
"Yes," Twilight answered. "They are old Equestrian letters, by the looks of them."
"That's the ring of runes from my cutie mark," Starlit replied, lifting the tasset of her armor to show her mark. "He had them carved in and gave that to me when I left to come here, as a good luck charm."
"I… I don't think I understand," Twilight said. It was the first time Starlit had ever heard something approaching confusion in Twilight's voice.
"Maybe I'm not explaining it well enough," Starlit admitted. "After all, we both just took some fairly serious blows to the head."
"Then, could I take a guess?" Twilight asked, catching Starlit off guard.
"I don't see why not. It's not like I'm in any position to stop you."
"The way I see it," Twilight said, the hesitancy in her voice so much like Eclipse's, "it's to show that just because something has lost its original purpose, doesn't mean it can't have a new one if it's given the chance."
"For all the lies you've told me over this month, you really are as smart as the stories said you are," Starlit replied, placing a hoof against Twilight's.
"My intelligence is why I was chosen for all of this, you know," Twilight said, lowering the badge back down to Starlit. "I excelled in my studies as a youth, and when the time came to select a new Princess I was considered the natural choice."
"Because magic is such an easily studied thing," Starlit replied ruefully, remembering all of the times when magic had done something completely unexpected to her over the last month.
"It was in the Empire, and I was one of the best at studying, applying, and modifying it. Magic is my life, my purpose."
"And now that you've lost control of it, you're wondering what you can do with yourself without it?" Starlit asked.
A few more tears fell out of Twilight's one good eye as they stared at the floating black crystal in front of them, glowing with silver light and encased in melted and solidified steel.
"What can my purpose be if not to try and bring Equestria back to its apex?" Twilight asked softly, eyes still fixed on the stone. "If the magic of this world refuses to be controlled, then why should there be a Princess of Magic?"
"Maybe there shouldn't be," Starlit answered. "Maybe the alicorns were wrong. Maybe magic can't be controlled, and now that we've set it free again you can find a new way to make Equestria better."
Twilight slowly turned to look down at Starlit, the gold encasing her face glittering in the multi-colored light of Equestria's magic dancing across the sky. Tear-stains darkened what little fur remained on her face that was unmarred, but for the first time since they'd started their fight Twilight was smiling. Through the burns, blood, and gold, she was smiling that same sweet smile Starlit remembered seeing on that lonely night all those weeks ago.
"Do you think I can do it? Make up for all of the things I've done, just like that?" Twilight replied as she began to glow a warm, peaceful magenta.
"We won't know unless you try, now will we?" Starlit answered.
Slowly Twilight's figure was obscured in the field of magic she was generating around herself, before it all began to shrink down to the stature that Starlit remembered. As Twilight shrank, her magic began to float away in loose threads of light, rising up through the destroyed ceiling to join the madcap dance of Equestria's magic in the sky.
When the last of the magic finally dissipated from Twilight's body she was back to the same size that she had assumed all the time that Starlit had known her, with the only major change being Twilight's now solid grey left eye surrounded by long-healed scar tissue.
"Nice to see the real Twilight Sparkle again," Starlit said with a smile as she wearily stood to her hooves. "Sorry about your eye."
"It will be a reminder of the price of my ambitions," Twilight replied. "Does it… look too bad?"
"It isn't the worst I've seen by a long shot," Starlit answered. "Humility suits you."
"I'm sorry about your horn," Twilight said softly, taking Starlit's words to heart.
"It isn't—ah—isn't like I got much use out of it before all of this nonsense anyway," Starlit replied, a twinge of pain going through her head as she remembered her missing appendage. "If that's the price I pay to end this without any more bloodshed, then I'll pay it."
Just as Starlit turned to start walking to the entry hall there was a thunderous sound, like the Crystal Heart's destruction but much further away.
"What was that?" Starlit asked, looking up to the sky.
Silhouetted against the multicolored sky was a figure, pony shaped but much smaller. It was only after staring at it for a moment that she realized the figure was getting larger, much larger and much more metallic than any living pony.
"Run!" Starlit screamed as she darted forward as fast as her aching legs would take her.
There wasn't enough time, and between her sluggish muscles and trying to protect Twilight, Starlit couldn't get out of the way fast enough. There was a booming crash, the screech of metal on stone, and then silence as Starlit awaited the inevitable.
* * *
The Heart stood in front of the gates into Canterlot Castle proper, smirking at the decrepit state of its defenders with their champion's lips. Twilight's experiments with their shards had yielded these constructs, so it only seemed right that they would set out to destroy the titanic one guarding the gate.
"More's the pity that I couldn't free that poor soul from its prison," the Heart murmured to themself. "Another sin Twilight Sparkle will be made to atone for in due time.
With a stiff elegance the Heart directed Sun's magic to levitate them, gliding off of the ground and ascending towards the tallest spire where, surely, Twilight Sparkle and Starlit Sky would be waiting, provided neither had been crushed under the titan. Either outcome would satisfy their desire, but fewer unnecessary deaths were preferable.
The Heart took note of the dancing hues of magic spread out through the sky, all originating from the central spire, and they smiled. Starlit Sky had played her role out expertly, clearing the way for them to see this grand debacle finished appropriately.
When the Heart crested the top of the spire they could see the roof, already blown wide open from the Crystal Heart's destruction, now had the hind legs of the titan construct sticking out from the remnants. Dust still clogged the air, obscuring their vision and necessitating that they approach for a closer look.
The dust began to settle as the Heart glided down into the wreckage, and they cocked their head curiously when they saw a faint glimmer of light twinkling from behind the cloud of dust and debris. Sinking into the cloud they followed the light, descending through a few floors as the floor of the throne room had given way.
It was only when the Heart descended down to the foyer level that they could discern the color of the light; a brilliant teal, streaked with magenta that flickered and danced throughout it.
With a soft click of hooves the Heart alighted onto the ruined marble floor, letting the dust settle until they could get a good look at Starlit Sky and Twilight Sparkle, hunkered beneath their thin veil of magic that rightfully belonged to them.
* * *
Starlit was dumbfounded at how she was still alive, much less able to manifest a ward without her own horn. Her legs were shaky and her forehead felt like somepony was taking a hammer to it, but she was still casting the spell all the same.
"H… how?" Twilight choked out.
"I think the more pertinent question right now is 'what?'," Starlit retorted. "What happened?"
"Your horn," Twilight said, awestruck. "It's made… it's made out of magic! How is that even possible?"
"Focus, Twilight," Starlit reprimanded. "We can sort me out later. Right now I need you to tell me what just fell on top of us."
"I… I don't kn—"
Twilight stopped her sentence short as the dust began to settle, and Starlit's gaze shifted from her charge out to what Twilight was staring at. Starlit's heart leapt into her throat when she saw what Twilight had.
At the foot of the grand staircase in the castle foyer, now covered in dust and stone, stood Setting Sun, but not as Starlit remembered him. His fur was a paler red and streaked with veins of silver all originating from his horn, which was now a large shard of the Heart of Fate. His eyes were still green, but where his pupils should be were instead two bright spots of silver light that burned with an intensity brighter than the shard that Starlit had carried with her.
"Sun!" Starlit called out, dropping the ward as she raced towards him. "Sun, what happened to you?!"
"We are not Setting Sun, Starlit Sky," Sun answered, stopping Starlit dead in her tracks halfway down the stairs.
"What?"
"We took this vessel to suit our purposes, and that purpose is to rebalance this ruined and failed experiment of a world," Sun continued. "You have performed your role admirably and will be given a place in the world that is to come, but your duty is finished. Go home, and leave us to our work."
Starlit couldn't find the words to describe what she was seeing. All she could feel was the rapid beat of her heart in her chest and the souring of her stomach as she stared at the entity that was puppeteering her friend.
"Starlit, don't leave me here!" Twilight called from the top of the stairs. Starlit flicked her head back towards Twilight, who was battered and bruised from the fall. She looked terrified, and Starlit slowly turned her head back to face the being before her.
"What did you do to Setting Sun, Chrysalis?" Starlit asked, failing to keep her malice in check as she began to trudge down the rest of the steps.
"We are not Chrysalis, though she is a part of us," the being replied. "We are the Heart of Fate, and we have a duty to fulfill. Give us Twilight Sparkle, and be spared the pain of our wrath."
Starlit felt the hammering in her head come back as magic flared from her horn, solidifying into a ward around her body, ethereal wings sprouting from her back, and a lance of pure teal and magenta magic at her side.
"Oh, you'll have to kill me for that to happen," Starlit snarled.
"We would like to avoid any more needless deaths," the Heart replied, "though we will defend ourselves if you threaten us any further."
"Then let me lay this out on the table for you," Starlit growled as she got to the foot of the stairs. "You are going to leave my friend's body, you are going to let Twilight live with the weight of what she has done, and you will let Equestria recover from these centuries of neglect. No rebalancing, no more death. These are my terms, take them or leave them."
"Setting Sun would not survive were we to leave his body," the Heart replied, "and Twilight Sparkle's sins against the natural order of this world are far too great to let her go free with no more penance than guilt. She has cursed this world to a slow and painful end, and so we must correct her mistake with a swift, painless one."
Starlit didn't even wait for the last word to leave the Heart's lips before she launched her lance forward, it's glimmering form flying faster than she'd ever made anything go before. Starlit flew alongside it, rocketing forward at such speed that she could scarcely control it.
The Heart nimbly dodged to the side, avoiding the lance before ducking beneath Starlit's speeding body. With a quick upward jut of Sun's head Starlit was thrown off course, going flank over end as she fell against the marble floor and slid to a stop. Her ward had taken most of the hit, but she still had had the wind knocked out of her.
"Stay down, Starlit Sky," the Heart said as it began to ascend the stairs towards Twilight.
Starlit slowly started to reorient her aching body when she felt a hoof clink against something. Turning towards it, she saw the statue of Celestia from the throne room, with the statues of Luna and Cadance laying a few feet behind it. Despite the explosion and falling all the way down from the throne room, none of the statues looked any worse for wear. The translucent orange crystal glimmered merrily, and through her hoof Starlit could feel a pulse of energy from it. The sensation was warm and familiar, like laying in the grass on a sunny day.
An idea sparked into her head, one that she prayed she could make work in time to save Twilight and Sun.
* * *
Twilight panicked as the grim visage of Setting Sun, now mangled and indwelt by whatever Chrysalis had done to him, marched up the staircase towards her. His face held no malice; in fact, he appeared to be entirely calm, further accentuating just how little of himself must still remain. The Heart of Fate had total control of his body, and Twilight silently thanked Starlit Sky for preventing her from doing the same thing.
"Twilight Sparkle, this doesn't need to be hard," the Heart said, their voice even and calm. "Your punishment for the sins you have committed against our world need not be drawn out and painful. Accept the end, and it will come swiftly."
"What about Celestia, or Luna and Cadance?" Twilight asked, nearly begging, as she backed away from the approaching figure. "All of them were just as complicit in the state of the world as I am, and I only used their fragments of the Crystal Heart to imprison them, not kill them."
"Their punishment will be meted out in due course, but yours is the most egregious crime and thus the most deserving of punishment. Again, this does not need to be a hard process, but choose to fight and we will ensure that your end is slow and painful."
A jolt went down Twilight's spine as she hit the wall at the top of the staircase. There was nowhere else to run, she couldn't outfly the creature in front of her, and her magic was nearly spent from trying to dominate Starlit's mind.
Slowly Twilight sank down against the wall, tears flowing from her eyes as the enormity of her fate fully gripped her mind. Thousands of years of life, only for it to be snuffed out in so undignified a fashion.
"Do not weep, Twilight Sparkle, for with your death the new world begins," the Heart said as it stood over her, the shard in its forehead radiating silver light that cast stark shadows along its face. Its eyes were fully obscured in shadow save for the glowing dots of silver in their centers.
Never had Twilight felt so powerless.
* * *
The pain in Starlit's horn stump throbbed throughout her head as she started to focus her magic into the statue of Celestia. The mingled teal and magenta magic bled and spread into the orange crystal, and slowly Starlit could feel the power, Celestia's power, bleeding into herself. Her mixed-color magic soon gained streaks of orange as she drew Celestia's radiant power into herself, and as Starlit felt her body invigorate she could see the crystal slowly break and fall away, leaving Celestia's prone form on the rough marble floor.
Rising to her hooves, body coursing with newfound power, Starlit stepped towards the statues of Luna and Cadance, and in a similar manner drained their statues away until all that was left were two prone figures on the ground, asleep but relatively unharmed.
The pain in Starlit's horn had vanished entirely, as did the aches and pains in her body from the fight with Twilight and the destruction of the Crystal Heart. The beat of her heart was strong, and her hooves fell with surety of purpose as she ascended the stairs.
A scream echoed out from the landing at the top of the staircase, and with a swift beat of her spectral wings Starlit rose high up to see Twilight hanging in a nimbus of silver light, held aloft by the monster that had possessed Setting Sun.
The sight made her stomach twist, and as it turned to face her she couldn't contain her contempt.
* * *
"Let. Her. Go," Starlit demanded, her voice echoing with power as she held herself aloft on glimmering wings of energy.
The Heart stared up at Starlit Sky curiously, momentarily halting their execution of Twilight Sparkle and letting her fall to the floor in a crumpled heap.
The being floating above their head was recognizably Starlit Sky, that much was certain, but with the proportions of a true alicorn. Her dusky blue mane and tail floated with ethereal energy, and her rough leather armor was now immaculate, hardened leather plate dyed a deep, midnight blue. The beam of energy replacing her horn shimmered and glowed with the colors of the Princesses she had stolen it from, complimenting the spectral wings protruding from her back. They both made for an eerie companion to the sky above that swirled and danced with all of Equestria's magic.
"We tried to ask, tried to reason with you, but now you have forced our hoof," the Heart replied, floating up into the air to meet Starlit. "You cannot stop what must be done, even with all of this stolen magic. Go home, Starlit Sky."
"You know, Twilight told me the exact same thing before we fought," Starlit said, "and I have to say I have gotten sick and tired of being told to go home, or stay down, or to just stop."
"Why do you persist, Starlit Sky?" the Heart demanded. "This fight is not yours and this alicorn does not deserve your sympathy or your pity. You and everyone you care for will have a new place in the world we will craft for them, so why do you insist on halting what we are trying to set into motion?"
A ringing, echoing peal of laughter escaped Starlit Sky's lungs, a reaction that caught the Heart off guard.
"Do you think I'll trust the creation of a new world to a being that would lie to my friend and override his body?" Starlit asked, incredulity heavy in her echoing voice. "You're just as bad as the alicorns! It doesn't matter to me what you say; all of your good intentions and safeguards for me and mine aren't going to convince me to rear my daughter in a world crafted by a thing like you!"
"Then what would you suggest is the alternative?" The Heart asked back. "Fate must run its course. Order must be maintained if this world is to survive."
"Then I'll just have to take fate into my own hooves."
With Starlit's declaration she manifested a ward around her body, one that shimmered and glowed with the power of all the alicorn Princesses of Equestria, followed by an array of eight spears. Some burned with spectral fire, others crackled with electricity and power, and some still were coated in arcane rime and frost.
"If you want to kill Setting Sun by your own hoof, the allow us to oblige you," the Heart countered as it manifested a field of crystalline daggers, each glowing with a silver nimbus of light.
* * *
Twilight's vision swam as she came back to consciousness, both surprised and horrified at the fact that she was still alive. Pain wracked her body as she struggled to get up, and the all too familiar hum of magic and clashing of weapons filled her ears.
A small shard of crystal flew just past Twilight's head, embedding itself in the stone wall behind her. She yelped in surprise as she skittered away from the noise, looking to the source and seeing a black crystal dagger buried in stone up to the hilt and glowing with silver light.
Twilight whipped her head around to where she had last seen Starlit, only for her vision to be drawn upward as she saw the Heart in Setting Sun's body locked in combat with Starlit Sky. Bolts of magic flew and whizzed through the air, blowing holes into the walls and floor with each dodged assault. Starlit launched volleys of summoned spears as she weaved and flew around the black daggers the Heart was launching at her. Her form was resplendent with power, a being of raw magical might that Twilight could scarcely comprehend. There were so many things she couldn't comprehend anymore.
Another dagger flew wide, again just barely missing Twilight before digging into the floor, and Twilight knew she needed a place to hide from the storm of weaponry and magic. Looking frantically for anywhere to hide in such a cavernous room, Twilight's eyes happened across three prone figures that she hadn't expected to see intact, much less in flesh.
Down at the bottom of the stairs, thrown to the side of the stairs so they were hidden away from the worst of the battle, were her fellow Princesses, formerly her captives.
Twilight's heart fell into her hooves when she saw them, asleep and oblivious to the terror surrounding them. She had betrayed them, used their own powers against them, and she knew that she had no right to ask for any of their assistance if they even still lived.
Looking up to Starlit battling in the sky, fighting to save a world that the Princesses had ruined, Twilight Sparkle stood up and started running for the stairs. She had a plan; she just needed a bit of magic and all the faith in the world to make it work.
Spears and daggers flew past Twilight as she ran as fast as her aching body would carry her, a thin sheet of magic from her breaking horn doing just enough to deflect the closest blows. She tumbled down the last few steps as a spear landed directly in front of her, throwing her gait off. Her blind eye certainly wasn't helping with matters of depth perception, and when she landed on the marble floor she felt the wind leave her lungs.
Just barely maintaining the shield above her head Twilight crawled to the other Princesses, working her over-taxed magic to the breaking point to cover the other alicorns in front of her. Twilight huffed and puffed from exertion, her teeth grinding with every flex of her muscles. When she finally got to Celestia Twilight slapped her cheek with her hoof, hoping that she could rouse her with physical force where her magic could not.
Celestia's eyes shot open on contact, and she quickly flipped her head up to see Twilight struggling to keep her head up.
"You! What have you done?!" Celestia demanded.
"I've made a horrible mistake," Twilight grunted out as she held her shield above the both of them, "and it's only the latest in a very long series of mistakes. Starlit Sky is trying to save us all, and she needs our help."
"You think I'm going to help you after everything you've done to me!?" Celestia countered, a thin sheen of gold wrapping around her horn.
"I don't need you to help me, I need you to help her." Twilight answered pointing up to where Starlit and the Heart were still engaged.
Celestia's lavender eyes followed Twilight's hoof, her grimace softening into open-mouthed shock.
"As best as I can surmise, Starlit freed you, Luna, and Cadance from the prisons I trapped you in," Twilight continued, fighting the urge to cry out as a dagger glanced off of her shield, "and in doing so absorbed the powers that were granted by your pieces of the Crystal Heart that I used to seal you."
"Then why would she need us?" Celestia asked back. "She's far more powerful than any of us are now."
"Because right now she's fighting for Equestria, and we were its Princesses once. She could have killed me and she didn't. She could've abandoned her duty, and she didn't. She is better than all of us are, and I guess deep down I always knew that. We need to help her because we need to live up to her example."
Celestia's eyes flicked between the ongoing battle and Twilight laying in front of her, the glow from her horn slowly diminishing as she stood up. With a quick flick of the horn Celestia stood Twilight up, gently cradling her torso before letting her hooves get back under her.
"What happened to the arrogant, scheming, conniving alicorn that you were?" Celestia asked.
"I… I think I made a friend," Twilight answered with a short chuckle.
"Starlit is good at that, to give credit where it's due," Celestia replied with a rueful smile. "Help me get my sister and Cadance awake, because there's a fight to be had."
* * *
Starlit could feel her pulse through every inch of her body as salvo after salvo of spears flew from her horn. Her shoulders ached with the effort of flight, and the few nicks and scratches she'd gotten from the Heart's crystal daggers burned like fire. All in all, the fight was going more or less how she had planned it to go, if only because the Heart was looking equally as worn out.
Feinting right, Starlit dodged another three daggers with a quick barrel roll, feeling the wind brush past her cheek as they flew past. Another spurt of magic from her horn threw a flaming spear directly towards the shard of black crystal embedded into Sun's head, the concentrated target of her attacks. She'd managed to get a few hits onto the shard, but they were barely glancing blows. The force controlling Sun's body had a masterful control over itself and him, and the shard was a small target to boot.
"Getting tired yet?" Starlit taunted, the echo in her voice adding some unneeded gravitas.
"Your puerile attempts to rouse our anger fall on deaf ears, Starlit Sky," the Heart replied through panting breaths.
“Then just let my friend go, and this all ends," Starlit countered, launching a lightning spear that exploded when it impacted against the far wall.
"Setting Sun is ours now, and he is integral to what needs to be done! Even if you were to remove us from him he would perish! Let these base emotional predations go and submit to the will of fate!"
Another trio of dagger flew out as the Heart dodged another flaming spear, which Starlit deftly blocked with a wave of her spectral wings that sent them skittering off course.
The Heart took Starlit's momentary distraction to attempt to fly at her from below, with a veritable field of whirling blades at its vanguard. All that it hit was a wall of force so strong that the Heart nearly fell to the ground, only to be stopped and grabbed by Starlit's considerable magical grip.
Starlit floated the monster wearing her friend's skin in front of her, the rage burning behind its glowing eyes neatly mirroring what Starlit felt in her heart.
"That was a very poor decision," Starlit admonished before sending a beam of magic directly into the shard embedded into Sun's forehead.
While Starlit hadn't thought the process of trying to remove the shard from Sun's forehead would be an easy one, she found the amount of power she was funneling into it to be wildly disproportionate to how worn out both of them seemed to be. Starlit could see the fragment starting to wriggle against the remains of Sun's horn, but it wasn't moving nearly as much as she needed to.
Her efforts were quickly rebuffed as a wave of silver force blasted from the fragment, throwing Starlit backwards enough that she slammed into the frame of the palace doors and nearly fell to the ground before barely catching herself with her wings.
"Enough!" the Heart bellowed. "Your determination is admirable but entirely misplaced! You cannot subvert the will of fate! All of the stolen power in the world cannot counter what must be done to save this world! Submit and I will spare you! Persist and you will become bones in the foundations of the new world!"
Starlit glared up to the being above her, encased in silver light that was slowly starting to flag and fail. She could see it slowly hovering to the ground, and with all of the energy it had expended Starlit knew she had it on the ropes. The only problem was that she could feel her magic ebbing away as well, enough that she was forced to alight on the ground.
"Why can't any of you just let us decide our own fates?!" Starlit asked back. "Whether it's the alicorns or you, nopony has ever asked us what we wanted! Your way hasn't worked, the alicorn's way hasn't worked, why not let ponies decide?!"
"Because you all are ours! We made you, we gave your world life, and you have proven time and again that you are unfit to rule yourselves! Better that you be snuffed out swiftly than die in the fires of your own ambitions!"
A wave of anger swept through Starlit's body, enough that she felt herself rapidly rising back into the air, faster than she one she was able to. It was only when she felt the gentle, soothing pulse of magic flowing into her body that she knew something was different, and looking around for the source she saw a sight that made her heart soar.
Standing to her right, channeling magic out of themselves and into her, were Celestia, Luna, Cadance, and Twilight Sparkle. They were all straining themselves to keep the flow going, but none so much as Twilight, who kept her eyes locked to Starlit as she ascended.
"In a different time I might have agreed with you," Starlit said, turning her head back to face the Heart. "I used to be a selfish mare, only concerned with myself and my family. I couldn't have given a whit about the wider world outside of my backyard. I've learned a lot during this whole nonsensical journey I've been on, but if I could get those four to set aside their differences for even a moment, then I'd say there's still some hope for us yet."
"A sentiment you will take to the grave, Starlit Sky," the Heart replied, manifesting more of its daggers and flying towards Starlit, its calm facade breaking down into a wild scream of anger.
The Heart barely made it a few feet before being halted by a halo of magic, one that Starlit knew the being before it could not struggle against. The crystal daggers fell to the ground with a clink of stone on stone before dissipating into grey dust.
"Life isn't predictable," Starlit continued as she connected her magic to the shard once more, "and it isn't fair. There are so many innocent ponies who have lost their lives waiting for this moment to happen, ones that will never get to see the fruits of their efforts. We may not always make the right choices, but for once in this world they will be our choices to make, free from you, and them, and anything else that would try to dictate to us how we should spend the gift of life that was given to us."
A spurt of blood sprayed from the stump of Sun's horn as Starlit manifested a ring of teal magic at its base, followed by an orange one further up the shard. A ring of blue, magenta, and periwinkle followed in ascending the length of the Heart of Fate's last free fragment, and it pained Starlit to see fear in the eyes of her closest friend as the Heart knew what was about to transpire.
"There will be no more Princesses. There will be no enigmatic gods pulling the strings of fate. There will only be ponies who are willing and able to fight for goodness, truth, and safety for everything in this world. Your time is over, and you will know that a pony brought you to your knees. Not an alicorn. Not a dragon. Just a pony who was willing to do what is right."
With a last pull, the shard came free, the visage of fear on Sun's face falling still and slack as silver light and blood burst from his head, dispelling the malign influence over him once and for all.
Slowly, gently, like cradling her own child, Starlit Sky floated Setting Sun's prone body to the scarred and ruined marble floor below. Her ethereal horn ached and burned, and from the fragment of the Heart of Fate that she held she could feel a horrible, malign influence trying to pierce into her mind. She quickly tossed the fragment away, lest it try to do to her what it had done to Sun.
A roll of thunder cascaded across the sky, and a flash of multicolored light drew Starlit's eye to the miasma of magic hanging above her head. She was then quickly distracted by the sound of four gasps of exhaustion to her right, where the former Princesses of Equestria were steadying themselves.
"That was a brave thing you did for us," Starlit said to the four, her echoing voice soft and soothing.
"It was… all Twilight's idea," Luna gasped out as she sat back on the floor. "I haven't felt this… worn out in centuries."
Starlit turned her attention back to Sun's body on the ground, her heartbeat quickening when she saw that he wasn't stirring. The silver veins in his skin had all receded, but his fur was still deathly pale and his horn stump was slowly trickling blood onto the white floor.
"No…" Starlit whispered desperately as she knelt her head down to place it against his chest.
There was no beat in his chest, no sound of air moving through his lungs. His body was as cold as the floor. The breath caught in Starlit's throat before she slowly raised her head on its elongated neck.
"Starlit, are you alright?" Celestia asked from behind, her voice wavering as her hooves clacked against the floor.
Starlit paid the alicorn no mind as she tried her best to roll Sun over onto his back. All his limbs splayed out like some kind of horrible spider, and with her newly enlarged hooves she started pressing rhythmically onto his chest. She fumbled around with her new proportions and her long, gangly legs, but Starlit eventually fell into a steady rhythm to try and get his heart beating again.
There was a small gasp of shock when the clacking hooves behind Starlit stopped, be Starlit's hooves kept pumping vigorously. She was finding herself having to hold back her newfound strength, if only so that she didn't break Sun's body anymore than it already had been.
"Starlit, I don't think he—" Celestia began.
"Either help me or be quiet!" Starlit snapped, keeping her eyes fixed to the body. Her proclamation echoed in the ruined foyer, the only other sound being the roll of magical thunder high above.
For minutes Starlit pressed down on the matted fur, pausing to check the heartbeat every so often only to return to the compressions with singular focus. She grew more frantic as the time wore on, only briefly breaking her rhythm when she noticed blood dripping down from her horn stump. She grunted with exertion, trying desperately to force life back into Sun's body; he had a home to return to, ponies to spend his life with, and Starlit would be damned if she made a liar out of him.
"Starlit, I… I don't think this is working," Celestia said softly, putting a hoof to Starlit's shoulder. A jolt ran down Starlit's spine at the contact, so focused was she, enough that her hooves slipped against Sun's ribs and skittered against the marble floor. A sudden weakness in her legs caused them to fall out from under her, her armored chest landing on top of Sun's unmoving form.
All the anger, all the pain, every bit of stress and worry that Starlit had been building up in herself for over a month suddenly streamed out of her eyes, tears falling down her godly face as a low, keening sob intermingled with the rolling thunder over head into an arcane dirge of sorrow and regret. Starlit, for the first time since she had first died in Sunspire, didn't know what to do with herself. This was a problem she couldn't figure out how to fix.
The soft clack of hooves against the marble momentarily drew Starlit out of her malaise, and she turned just enough to see Twilight, Luna, and Cadance coming forward to join Celestia. They all looked haggard, Twilight especially so, but in the moment they seemed to care more for Starlit than they did for themselves.
"He's dead," Starlit said unprompted, turning to face away from the quartet of alicorns. "He's dead, and I don't know if there's any way to bring him back. He was only ever revived once, and that was when Chrysalis, or the Heart of Fate, had its hooks in him."
The tears fell harder now as Starlit said out loud what her mind and her heart had been telling her during the entire futile attempt to get Sun's heart beating again. Her voice was catching on every word, and even as she rose to her new height she had never felt smaller.
"He was a good pony," Starlit continued. "He was smart, and kind, and brave to a degree that I'll never know. He followed me into the bleakest places imaginable, weathered uncounted hardships, all because he felt like he owed it to me to do so."
Slowly Starlit turned around, forcing magic through her horn stump to gently lift Sun's body and nestle it across her back. The alicorns each were avoiding eye contact, whether out of respect for Sun's sacrifice or shame at the role they all played in his death Starlit couldn't say, but of the four only Twilight was shedding tears.
"I hope the four of you understand the weight of what you have done," Starlit chided, "and I hope that you go on living with the knowledge that the power you coveted for so long isn't yours to hoard anymore."
Luna was the first to speak up as Starlit began to walk out of the foyer towards the castle courtyard.
"What would you have us do?" Luna asked.
"I really don't care," Starlit answered. "You've lost all of your power, all of your influence in the world. Maybe you could try living among normal ponies for a change; gain some perspective."
The loose pebbles lining the courtyard clicked and scraped as Starlit walked across them, the cold weight of Sun's body nestled underneath the spectral wings that refused to vanish from her shoulders. She didn't know if her state of being now was permanent, but she couldn't muster up the ability to care.
"Starlit, wait!" Twilight called out across the courtyard, her cry punctuated by another clap of thunder from the roiling sky.
Starlit turned her head back to see Twilight come rushing down the stairs to the courtyard, wincing with each step as the other alicorns looked on with various expressions of confusion and regret.
"Twilight, I have a friend to go bury, so make it quick," Starlit replied, the echo to her voice adding far more menace than she had intended. It wasn't unwelcome, but unintended all the same.
"You… you might not have to," Twilight said, her words coming on labored breaths. "He's been revived once, and he has one of the pieces of the Heart of Fate still in him from… what I did all those centuries ago."
"Get to the point, Twilight," Starlit cut in, trying not to let the glimmer of hope Twilight was offering take root.
"This is a long shot, and even if it works all of us will be… diminished," Twilight continued, "but I might be able to use what I know about how the Heart works to bring him back."
"With what power? You gave all of it to me," Starlit countered, turning fully to face Twilight, "and I'm not nearly skilled enough to try and give it all back to you."
"We don't need your magic, we need that magic," Twilight replied, gesturing up to the sky and the multicolored haze of light and thunder hanging over them.
As Starlit stared up at the swirling miasma she couldn't help but believe, if only because she was still trying to work through her grief, that there could be a chance. She was certainly not the most knowledgeable mare about the ways of magic, but she had had quite a bit of experience at this point with coming back from the dead.
"If it doesn't work then they're still stuck with no power," Starlit mused, her brow furrowed as she watched the magic swirl, "and if it does work then there may just be some hope for them yet."
"Like i said, it is a long shot, but I feel like it's the very least we co—" Twilight continued before Starlit cut her off.
"How do we draw it down?" Starlit asked, turning her steely eyes to the fallen Princess.
"It will be considerably difficult with our diminished strength," Luna interjected as she stepped off the stairs, followed closely by her sister and Cadance. "Since our own Hearts were destroyed when Twilight bound them back into the Crystal Heart, the aspects that we all ruled are going to try and go back to their natural states, I'd wager."
Slowly Starlit lifted Sun's body off of her back, feeling the sting in her horn stump as she channeled the magic through its spectral replacement.
"What you need is a focus, something to store enough of the magic into channel properly," Starlit guessed as a thought gestated in her mind.
"We would, something similar enough to the Crystal Heart that it could recall the magic to itself," Cadance replied.
With a quick swish of light Starlit unfolded her ethereal wings, taking off towards the tallest spire of the palace with only a quick exclamation from Twilight to send her off. The wind whipping past her face and through her hair helped focus her as she made her way up, before turning into a downward glide and stopping at a hover in the wrecked throne room.
Still floating where Starlit had left it were the remnants of her spear, her old fragment of the Heart of Fate still fused to the solidified slag. It glowed with a soft grey light as it hovered over the open pit that both the Crystal Heart's destruction and the giant construct had created in the floor, pulsing every few seconds like a steady heart beat.
With a quick flourish of the head Starlit ripped the spear from the air, feeling its gentle pulse ebb and flow as it contacted her own magic. It was a familiar sensation, and one that she prayed that after today she would never have to feel again.
Racing back into the sky Starlit flew up and up, beating her wings as hard as she could as she flew up into the clouds of raw magic hanging in the air. She wasn't precisely sure how she was going to channel the energy into the crystal, but brute force had worked for her thus far so she figured it would be best to simply go with what she knew.
All of the fur on her face stood on end as she flew into the clouds, and tiny currents of electricity coursed through her mane and tail as she flew through a shimmering blue cloud, one that twinkled with a million pinpricks of energetic light. It smelled faintly of smoke and some tangy, metallic scent that Starlit recognized from the machinery in New Selene.
"Alright, let's see if this works," Starlit said to herself, steeling her will as she channeled her own energy into the cloud of magic around herself.
The sparks of energy shooting in haphazard bolts throughout the cloud sharply changed their trajectories, tracing brilliant lines through the deep blue cloud and into Starlit's spectral horn replacement. Her whole body tingled and hummed with the power that she was absorbing, slowly draining the cloud and the sparks until she found herself floating in a single patch of clear blue sky.
Starlit felt like she could fly from here to her home and back, such was the vibrating intensity of the energy inside of herself, and just when it felt ready to burst out of her she touched her spectral horn to the crystal and drained off the excess into it.
There was a crack and boom of thunder as a bolt of bright blue lightning shot out of her horn on contact. The immense sound left Starlit's ears ringing and she was briefly blinded by the flash, but when she regained her senses she saw that the ruined spear was sparking with blue electricity and the stone itself was now swirling with deep blue mist.
Starlit held the spear up to the light, feeling the crackle of its power running through her own magic as it set her fur on edge, before turning her attention to the shimmering cloud of orange a few dozen yards away. Even from that distance she could feel the warmth of its radiance dapple across her face, and when she dove into it she felt as if she were being wrapped in a warm blanket fresh from the laundry line.
With another focusing of her magic she drew the radiance away from herself and into the spear, and when Starlit could draw down no more the warmth shifted to bitter cold before an eruption of light and heat burst forth from the crystal. She could feel her face and chest get singed from the shear heat, but her pain was well rewarded when Starlit saw the swirl of orange dancing next to the blue inside the crystal.
Twice more Starlit traversed a cloud of magic, the first one cool and calming to wade through, only for a stinging, biting blast of cold that sent shudders of sadness and longing through her heart when she pulled the magic into the black crystal. The second felt familiar; Starlit knew the haze of magenta was Twilight's magic as she siphoned it away and stored it with a bright flash of light, the wave of energy slightly restorative to her battered form.
Even with the quick refreshment of her energy, Starlit's horn stump ached and her wings felt leaden when she finally landed back down at Sun's body. She quickly held the spear out in her magic in front of the assembled alicorns.
"Your magic, contained and ready to use," Starlit said through gasping breaths. "Heal him like you promised, there's one last thing I have to do."
Starlit dropped the spear with a clang of metal and clink of stone before turning on her hoof and marching back to the castle. She wasn't going to expend any more energy trying to fly, for she had more important things to spend her precious energy on.
"What are you going to do?" Twilight called out.
"Release the stranglehold that you all have held on Equestria, once and for all," Starlit answered.
* * *
Twilight held the spear aloft in what little magic she had left, watching with a knot forming in her guts as Starlit marched back to the palace. Twilight's heart hammered as Starlit marched away, purpose guiding her every hoofstep.
"Twilight, are we doing this?" Cadance asked, drawing Twilight from her stupor.
Twilight cast a glance to her left and right, taking in her fellow Princesses for what might be the last time as she had come to know them.
"We are," Twilight answered softly, laying the stone onto Sun's chest.
"She's going to destroy the Heart of Fate, isn't she?" Celestia asked, her eyes still fixed on Starlit.
"Almost certainly," Twilight answered again as she reached out to the vestiges of her magic locked within the black stone.
"That seems like the sort of thing we should be stopping," Luna chimed in. "If she destroys it then magic will run wild in Equestria."
"As if things were much better when we were controlling it," Cadance replied, a sheen of pale blue illuminating her horn. "We were all fools to think we could control that which shouldn't be."
A silence hung in the air, save for the hum of magic as all four alicorns started to manipulate and siphon the magic from the black stone back into themselves. Twilight could feel her old power churn and roil inside her body, a familiar and delightful sensation that she was sad she would probably never feel again.
"Do you think the ponies of Equestria will do alright without us?" Luna asked to nopony in particular, a slight strain to her voice.
"Even if they don't, it won't be up to us anymore," Celestia answered as golden light began to suffuse her body. "Why worry about it when it won't be our problem any more?"
"We've spent so long blighting the country, it just feels wrong to fade into the annals of history," Luna answered back, her body now glowing a deep blue as her eyes transformed into teal, cat-slit eyes.
"We'll still have time after this, though," Cadance said, her mane beginning to levitate as an glowing aura of frost wove through its strands. "Won't we, Twilight?"
"We should, but only as long as the average pony," Twilight answered, her voice echoing with power as her eyes began to glow solid magenta. "So, maybe another fifty or sixty years, if we're lucky."
"That should be time enough to get Equestria back on its hooves," Cadance said, the frost now coating her body as steam exhaled with every breath she took. "What say we spend our final years wandering around, helping the places we've neglected for so long?"
All three pairs of eyes looked to Cadance, and for the first time that Twilight could recall she saw a smile dance across her sister-in-law's face. There was hope in her slowly frosting eyes, and Twilight couldn't help but feel a burst of happiness at the suggestion.
"It would be nice to see new places after so long cooped up in the monuments to our own folly," Celestia suggested. "Maybe I could give the desert some help, work the land and plant a few groves before my time is up."
"There is still quite a bit of political turmoil in New Selene that I could attend to," Luna admitted, "and my technological acumen would certainly be a boon to them."
"What about you, Twilight?" Cadance asked. "How will you spend the rest of your life?"
Twilight looked down at Sun's body, then out towards the palace that Starlit was now deeply ensconced in. The world was about to turn, and everything she thought she knew had been torn down and replaced with the terror of uncertainty.
"I'm going to travel and learn," Twilight answered, eyes still transfixed to the middle distance. "There is so much that I don't know about; about the world we ruined, about struggle and hardship, and friendship and compassion. I need to learn, and more than that, I need to use what I learn to help others."
Twilight's glowing eyes fell back to Sun's body, the magic now siphoned out of the spear save for the simple, fluttering grey sprite of magic in the black crystal.
"But first we need to help that simple, stubborn unicorn," Twilight continued. "After all of the pain and agony we've put her through, this is the least that we could do."
"I couldn't agree more," Celestia chimed in.
"It's a shame that we had to do this badly to learn this lesson, though," Luna said. "There must certainly be better ways to figure out that selflessness and humility are worth the effort."
"Then we had better get to work on figuring out those better ways," Cadance replied. "Are you ready?"
Twilight nodded before lifting the spear off of Sun's body, pointing the crystalline tip down towards his heart. With a deep breath as her magic swirled inside of her, Twilight let out a beam of magic and connected it to the crystal. She could feel her energy mix with the natural magic of the shard, before it refracted through the crystal and made a translucent, grayish spotlight covering Sun's body.
A beam of dark blue impacted the crystal, followed by a beam of periwinkle and a beam of orange, and with each new source of magic the grey spotlight grew brighter and brighter. The energy from the crystal hurt to look at, and Twilight could feel her energy being sapped and drained away, the churning of her magic fading away as she emptied everything she could into making this spell work.
Second after interminable second passed as the magic, refracted through the prism of the black stone, poured into Sun's dead form, and Twilight knew that she was giving more than her soul could take. They would all be changed to make this spell work, but it would give an innocent stallion another chance that he deserved far more that Twilight's own second chance. A tear rolled down her cheek as she felt the spell finally come to an end, and with a crack of finality the black stone shattered into a fine, grey dust.
Twilight looked down at Sun as the dust alighted on his body, sparkling like starlight as it sank into his burgundy fur. Twilight's eyes flicked to her fellow Princesses as she waited to see if the spell worked, and her heart ached when she saw what had happened to all of them, and by proxy to herself as well.
Celestia had the most dramatic change, having lost her wings and horn and shrinking to half of her normally statuesque height. The pastel rainbow of her hair was gone, replaced with a simple light pink that provided a bit of color to her milk-white coat. The only thing that remained unchanged were her vivid purple irises, as even her jawline and eye sockets had warped to a more round and soft shape.
Luna hadn't had an appreciable change in size, only shrinking by about half of a head, but her coat had lightened considerably to a neutral midnight blue. Her mane and tail had both turned into a dusty, pale blue color as opposed to the floating field of stars it normally was, and her horn had vanished completely, leaving her only with her wings
Cadance, having been the only naturally born alicorn among them, was the only one to keep her wings and her horn. Instead she simply shrank to the point that she was shorter even than Luna, and her mane and tail had lost its tricolor of pink, purple, and yellow, leaving it only as a light purple with a few stray streaks of yellow and pink. Her mane also hung down over her face, obscuring her vision before she pushed it aside with a hoof.
"Did it work?" Luna asked, her voice now higher and with a slight lisp.
Twilight looked back down at Sun, the remnant dust from the shard having sunk completely into his body. He was still and silent, and for a moment Twilight feared that it had all been for naught.
With a low, shuddering gasp Sun drew in a breath, his eyes fluttering open. A smile flew across Twilight's face, followed by a long, low rumble deep beneath them that told Twilight all she had needed to know about Starlit's status.
* * *
Starlit slowly marched into the chamber that housed the Heart of Fate, now the only piece of it that she knew was outside of a pony's mind and not contained in her spear. It thrummed and beat, sending pulses of grey light across the ruined equipment and furniture in the cavern.
Wasting no time, Starlit carved a circle into the stony floor with her spectral horn, drawing in the sigils with carefully shot magic. On completion she poured a few motes of magic into the lines and raised a ward around herself, a shimmering dome of teal littered with her runes and lines to reinforce it. She would need protection for what she was about to do.
Taking a deep breath to calm her shaking knees and fluttering heart, Starlit stood resolute and carefully put the barest tip of her horn beyond the ward. With a great inhalation, Starlit shot a brilliant lance of teal light at the Heart, impacting with a resolute crack of magic striking magic.
"You know not what you are doing," the Heart protested as it fought back, using the voice of Starlit's grandmother to try and cow her.
"I know exactly what I'm doing," Starlit countered as she poured the energy into the first initial crack. "You aren't going to keep the world shackled to you any more."
"What you see as a shackle around the world is in fact a leash on magic! Without us then magic will run wild! Forests will grow uncontrolled, storms will assail you, and tyranny will reign based solely on who is given the most power by chance!"
Starlit shot another pulse of magic, widening the cracks in the Heart's surface as it let out a low groan of pain.
"For too long ponies have been under the thrall of those who held power over them," Starlit replied. "Whether it be Princesses stealing magic to prop themselves up or you forcing us to stay under your hoof, we have never been given a choice. We were never allowed to live how we truly wanted, never allowed to control our own destines, and that ends now. I have the power to end this, and that's what I'm going to do."
"Freedom is a curse! An illusion that the weak use to make themselves feel better about their position in the order of things! You don't truly want freedom, you just want power like everypony else!"
"If you were actually my grandmother, then you would know that that is a lie. You have nothing to offer me that I don't already have."
"You have nothing!" The Heart roared back. "You are weak, trying to destroy us with stolen magic! You are no alicorn, you are no Princess, and you certainly aren't powerful enough to destroy us!"
Another pulse of magic followed by another further split the Heart, this time a roar of pain echoing out through the cavern as Starlit fell to a knee as she kept the beam going.
"I may just be a unicorn, but I know that you can do nothing to hurt me," Starlit countered, rising to her hooves again as she could feel her borrowed magic drain out of her body. "I have a home, a family, and a life after all of this, and that's enough for me."
Pulse after pulse of magic travelled down the beam of magic linking Starlit to the Heart, and with each impact the Heart screamed and cried in pain. Every pulse drained more and more of Starlit's power, but she knew that it would all be worth it.
Just as Starlit's legs finally gave out completely, she sent one final burst of magic racing along the failing beam of magic. The Heart's surface was a cracked and pitted mess, leaking grey energy into the air like smoke from a fire, and when the final pulse of magic struck its surface a thunderous roar exploded from the massive black crystal. Grey energy streamed out in every direction, buffeting and battering against Starlit's pre made ward until, as swiftly as it had begun, the light ceased and the Heart crumbled into a pile of grey, pitted rocks.
* * *
Sun's head pounded and his bones ached as he sat in front of the assembled Princesses, if they could even be called that now. All four of them were, for lack of a better word, much more normal than he remembered; only Cadance was still an alicorn, and Twilight was about on eye level with him as opposed to being almost a head taller than he was.
Sun remembered nothing from after he left the Changeling Hive, but Twilight had done her best to fill him in. She seemed far more contrite than Sun remembered, especially when she described her role in what had happened. Sun did his best to listen attentively, but couldn't help but keep his gaze from flitting between the four ponies as he took in their new forms.
"You gave everything up just for me?" Sun asked as Twilight wrapped up the events of the last few days.
"For you and for Starlit," Twilight answered. "She's done more for the four of us than we've ever done for her, so it only seemed right."
"I… I really don't know how to thank you for this."
"You could start by just living a good life," Cadance replied, pulling the mane out from in front of her face. "After all the pain that you've been through, you deserve it."
"Here, let me help you," Sun said as he took his cloak in his teeth. With a quick jerk of his neck he tore off a long strip and handed it to Cadance.
"For your hair," Sun added.
Cadance quickly tied her mane back, exposing her now thinner face. She still had some of her former beauty, but now in a much more homey and understated way.
The clack of hooves on stone behind him drew Sun's attention, and his heart skipped a beat as he saw Starlit walking down the steps. Her horn was missing, as was his own, and she walked slowly and carefully in shaking legs, but overall she seemed alright.
Sun stood up when Starlit stepped onto the gravel at the base of the stairs, and before he even knew what he was doing he had run over to her and wrapped her up in a tight hug.
"I've missed you so much," Sun said through tears as Starlit returned his embrace.
Starlit didn't reply, only letting a low, joyous sob leave her lungs as they both sank to the gravel, holding each other tight. Relief, grief, and weariness all washed over the two friends as they took each other in through tear-filled eyes, seeing every scrape, bruise, and cut from their time apart.
"At least we still match," Sun said with a nervous chuckle, gesturing to Starlit's horn stump. "I wonder what Eclipse is going to think."
"You had better just hope Warden's alright with this," Starlit countered. "We used to be a matched set, after all."
"I'm sure he'll be alright. I got you back mostly unharmed, after all," Sun replied.
With a shared laugh of relief, Starlit turned towards the former Princesses, now just ponies, an expression of gratitude written across her face.
"Thank you," Starlit said. "The Heart of Fate has been destroyed, for whatever that means."
"Then this is a new age for Equestria," Twilight replied. "One that I'm glad I'm here to see."
"What will you all do now?" Sun asked. "You don't have the power or the claim to rulership anymore, so where do you go from here?"
"We're going to spend what time we have left traveling the country," Cadance said, "trying to help Equestria come into this new age with its best hoof forward."
"And we wouldn't have this opportunity to right the wrongs of our pasts without the two of you who, despite everything, showed us mercy and kindness when we didn't deserve either," Luna chimed in.
"That sounds like a plan, then," Sun replied before looking to Starlit. "I think the two of us are going to go home, though."
"That sounds about right," Starlit said as she started to walk towards the ruined gates. "I've about had it with world-changing adventures."
Sun quickly followed behind Starlit, taking care to not stumble as he got his legs back under himself, with Celestia following at his side and the other three taking up the rear.
"Speaking of homes," Celestia said, "do you think there might be a place for me where you're from? I wanted to help revitalize the land around the Searing Plains, but I will need a place to stay."
"I'm sure there's a place in Appleoosa for you, but you'd better be prepared for Applejack to put you to work," Sun answered, still getting used to not having to look up at Celestia.
"I wouldn't have it any other way," Celestia answered before falling back with the other three former Princesses.
Sun caught up with Starlit, who for the first time that he could remember actually looked like she was at peace. Sun opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it. He was tired, as was she, and right now he felt that they could both do with nothing but a bit of quiet.
