I - Beyond the Village Gates

He saw nothing beyond the flagstones outside the village gates. The darkness allowed nothing more.

The world above had been forever black, in the place the Elders called the sky. Here, outside the walls, it stretched its jaws around him, waiting to swallow him up.

It would have gladly done so if not for two wrought iron lanterns strapped to his bandolier: one the warm and gentle glow of Sunlight, the other as cold and biting as the Moon. They were his sword and shield he held closer than all else. Lose them, and the darkness would claim him.

At his back, the village gates closed shut. Massive though they were, they moved without a sound. Silence was the rule of the world, lest It hear and come crawling.

He looked back at the gate towering beyond lantern light, at the crumbling walls where the Devourer had climbed long ago. Its noises traced an icy claw up his back, impossible to forget—the screams, then the silence.

The village braziers had endured countless cycles, but their Cinders of Sun and Moon could only hold back the darkness for so long. In time, even stone will turn to dust and smother the flames they hold dear.

But there existed other braziers—larger, grander, great enough to dispel the darkness, so wrote the Elders of his village. The Cinders remembered their birthright to the sky, and he as one of their subjects was sworn to preserve them, or Equestria would be lost forever.

And in that oath, he had been chosen to suffer the highest honor his village could bestow: one step forward, into the dark.

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He would find the braziers within the cities.

Ancient cathedrals rose high above the cityscape, and the braziers awaited him within their vast and stony walls, as the Elders wrote. He had only to wade through the expansive darkness and hope he never lost his way.

No less than two wake cycles had passed since the village gates had fallen into shadow behind him, and still the road he followed seemed without end.

Broken cobblestone marked a skeletal path. Debris of the old world came and went within the circle of lantern light—splintered trees and shattered stone, things that had withstood the decay of time, long before it and its keeping became irrelevant.

All was strangely scentless. In a world without sound and little sight, ponies made due with smell. He knew every village pony by the smell of their sweat, could navigate his home by the wood dust of his kitchen table and the musty linens in his bedroom. Even the dirt along the village pathways tried its best to tinge the air with a smell one might call familiar. But out here, simply nothing.

It smelled empty, like not even the ghost of a departed pony had wandered by in ages. There was only darkness, and it rolled forever away from Sun and Moonlight, creeping in behind to greedily swallow the world back up.

He cinched up Mother’s scarf about his neck, thankful he had decided to bring it with him. It smelled of sawdust and dry wool, and that was home enough for him.

He continued on through the silence, the only thing greater than the oppressive dark. His hooves, wrapped in cloth to muffle his steps, whispered to stones that had long forgotten sound. Often he had lain in bed, listening to the ringing in his ears as he closed his eyes for sleep, but never had it gone so long, so unbroken.

Out here, the circle of light was his world. And he carried it alone.

A stone wall reached up from the dark as Sun and Moonlight splashed it with gold and silver. Broken and crumbling, it gave way to darkness within. He stepped inside, curious.

Rubble spilled across the floor from the opening, shoring up against upturned stone tables and chairs. They stared back at him like children huddled in their beds. Beams of wood lay where they fell from a roof they no longer held, and ceramic trinkets littered the floor beneath a toppled mantelpiece. A wicker basket lay upside down toward the far entrance, torn and trampled.

All of it had sat motionless since the day the Devourer swallowed the Sun and Moon. It sent one singular thought round and round his head as he circled the place, taking it in.

A pony once lived here.

A relic of the past, a glimpse into the world he only knew through bedtime stories and the writings of the Elders. Before the Devourer, before darkness, here stood a testament to the wonders of ponykind.

It hurt knowing he couldn’t stay, but he couldn’t linger. He had only so many rations, and no idea how far he had yet to go. One final sweep of the head, and he left, careful not to disturb the rubble or whatever ghosts might reside there.

There were more houses. They lined what became a street of tightly packed cobblestone. Rows upon rows, they gathered together like ponies in line for the village well. All stood in ruins, but their faces remained recognizable as places once inhabited.

How they stretched along the never-ending road, just within lanterns’ reach. What life must have bustled through here.

Children’s shadows ran in and out of broken doorframes, suddenly pristine in their trimmings and shining brass, the adults without a care for their games. Did they, perhaps, make noise back then? He shook his head.

A silly thought.

He hefted his half cape to a more comfortable position on his shoulder and cinched up the belt of his saddlebags. The trek had taken a great deal out of him, and sleep weighed heavy on his eyelids. But he had yet to find the cathedral, and with it, a decent place to rest his head.

He followed in a long line of brave souls who once ventured beyond the gates, but as the sky remained black, how far any of them made it was anypony’s guess. For all anypony knew, he had come the farthest. Or, more unsettlingly, the least.

How many of them, if any, still roamed this wasteland in search of the braziers? It had been many birthcycles since the last Light Bearer left the village, but there remained hope another might be out here.

Survival above all. It was a tenet passed down by the Elders, to be adhered to until the very last. The darkness deserved nothing from them, least of all that they go without a fight.

To live meant to defy the darkness. There was no greater act of pride than to draw another breath, and he carried that honor with him through the streets of this decrepit city.

The houses lining the street fell away to broken cobblestone stretching into all corners of the darkness. Something gave him pause, a creeping doubt of the unknown ahead. The houses had stood like walls, things to keep the dark at bay with the memories of the lives they once held. With how suddenly they ended, the world seemed lonely again.

A noise came from beyond the receding black. He tensed, stepping away, eyes and ears fixed forward.

It was not the sound It made. Nothing compared to the Devourer’s roaring cry.

He pulled the Sun lantern from his bandolier, held it aloft, and stepped hesitantly forward.

Slowly the noise grew louder, stertorous, like those of the ponies who went missing in their sleep. At the rim of light, he came upon a pale, hairless figure.

A statue, or, that’s what it looked like. Except, it couldn’t be. It was breathing.

It looked like a pony that had died and been born again, sitting on its haunches with its head hung low. Each and every one of its vertebrae pushed outward against its skin as if trying to escape, and its prominent, sinuous ribs stretched and relaxed with every unnaturally rapid breath. A charcoal-like substance ran from its eyes.

It was… sleeping.

He kept his distance, circling it slowly so that it stayed as far away as possible, yet still within sight so that he’d know if it moved. His heart racketed in his chest, a noise that he prayed to Sun and Moon only he could hear. Slowly enough, the creature receded into the darkness, and the world fell silent again.

He afforded himself a silent sigh to gather his wits. The Elders never wrote of other things in the darkness. Nothing lived beyond the village walls but the Devourer.

But by the light of life he saw it, whatever it was. Whatever it had been, perhaps. A pony, maybe. Nothing natural, for sure. He turned back ahead, but froze just as quickly. The hairs bristled on the nape of his neck at the sight of a face floating just within lantern light.

It was a gaunt, smiling thing, its black, featureless eyes glimmering gold and silver in the lantern light. One ear hung limp, its tip chewed off either by tooth or the rot of time, the other perked forward, seeking him. It cocked its head in curiosity, and he swore he heard the faint crack of bone. Its toothy, yellowed smile gave way to a lolling tongue, and it shambled forward.

By the fuller light of the lanterns, its calloused skin glistened as if slick with water, in greater tatters than the scarf around his neck. Spines protruded from its body like bones tearing free of their prison. Broken steps on broken legs, it staggered closer, cloven mandibles opening wide to roll out a guttural, drooling hiss.

He stumbled back, too frozen to flee, yet too desperate to cower. When it leapt, he swung Sunlight at it with all his strength.

Sunlight and Moonlight were more than simple flames. They were the leftover Cinders that escaped the Devourer when it swallowed the Sun and Moon and brought the sky crashing down upon the earth. There was magic in them, magic enough to distinguish friend from foe and the power to exact revenge upon the darkness and whatever might stand in his way.

The instant the Sunlight lantern connected with the creature's jaw, it ignited in white-hot fire that rushed outward to blanket its face. It was a small display of the power the Sun once wielded, but every power came at a price, and before he had even followed through on the swing, he could see Sunlight glowing that much dimmer.

The weight behind the blow sent the creature tumbling sideways out of sight, and it let out a retching screech of pain.

A blood-freezing cry rose up behind him. He heard the heavy hooves of another creature and turned to see the first once-pony sprinting out from the darkness. He had only the time to flinch as it tackled him to the ground.

Where Sunlight showed its ire of the dark with fire and vengeance, Moonlight warded it with inexorable certainty. It was the shield to Sunlight’s sword, and as the once-pony scrambled on top of him and opened its cloven mouth to tear out his throat, Moonlight flared like a silver beacon to seemingly suspend it in midair.

It reached for him with a mindless bloodlust in its eye and a manic clack clack clack of its teeth, inches from his face. Saliva spackled his face, and its frantic, raspy breathing reeked of death and all things unholy.

He kicked out a foreleg and caught it in the knee, feeling the meaty crunch of a joint bending the wrong way. A pivot of his hips, and he used the extra leverage to bring Sunlight around and take its legs out from under it with another roar of fire.

It yelped, and that was enough to pry himself free and suck down a precious gulp of fresh air. Another hairless once-pony crawled out from the dark to the left, and he had only the wits to run.

Lantern back on his bandolier, Sun and Moon clanged together like bells as he took off in a full-blown sprint. Row after row of houses blew past him, giant skeletons whose crumbling faces hinted at more eyes watching from within.

The once-ponies trailed behind him, ever clipping at his heels. Some demonic calling stirred up an impossible energy within their warped and twisted bodies. Still they breathed as if sleeping, creatures dreaming of his rent and broken body in their jaws.

He wasn’t built for running. The village’s rations had seen to his gaunt figure, hardly worthy of the force behind his lantern swings, and the exertion already cut into his lungs like knives. If he kept this up any longer, it’d be the death of him.

He made for the nearest house, teeth gritted in hopes it was empty. The front door splintered against his lowered shoulder and blanketed the living room in a hail of shrapnel. Through the kitchen door, he vaulted over the remains of the back wall and into the next street. With nowhere to run, he flattened himself against the wall beneath the hole and covered the lanterns in a swirl of his cape to return the world to inky blackness.

Heavy hooves scraped and clambered across the wooden floor, scattering bits of rubble and grinding the rest to dust underhoof. Furniture was upended and torn to splinters, and the wooden floor creaked and moaned as a pair of hooves came closer, closer, closer—just above him.

He pressed harder against the wall, clutching Sun and Moonlight against his racing heart. They singed the fur of his chest and choked out what little breaths of air he dared to suck down. The stench burned in his lungs like acid, and he had to struggle against the urge to double over in a coughing fit. It felt like he was drowning.

He could hear the once-pony’s raspy, hungry breaths. It sniffed at the air, tested it with lolling tongue. It snorted something vile and stamped back inside, and eventually the noises faded to silence.

He willed himself to breathe silently. He sat there for a long time without moving, his ears straining for the tiniest sounds, in case they were simply lying in wait, ready to pounce when he thought himself alone. He could have waited there an entire cycle, but the adrenaline of the moment had passed, and he was spent.

He slumped down the side of the house and reclined his head against the cold stone. How safe he had been within the village walls. Confined, but safe. All the supplies in his saddlebags wouldn’t have been worth simply lying in his bed at that moment.

But the way had been lost. Those things had chased him hopelessly far from the road he first wandered, and while the street ahead beckoned him onward, he knew he would never find his way back. He gave the hole in the wall a wary glance before heading off.

He stuck to the walls, always keeping one to his side, lanterns partially concealed beneath his cape as he fumbled through the streets. Better to be half blind than run down again.

Actually, that thought got the better of him. He had barely gotten away as it was. If those things found him again, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

He sought refuge in a larger home, one less torn down by the claws of time. The upstairs bedroom had a window overlooking what remained of the porch roof—as good an escape route as any, if it came to it.

He laid himself down on the cold wood. Lanterns beneath his cape, safe from prying, hungry eyes, he closed his own and let sleep take him.

II - Shield of Feathers, Voice of Hope

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When he woke the next cycle, the first thing he noticed was the smell of old wood.

He shifted his head and felt the scratch of woodgrain against his cheek, familiar and homely. He pressed his nose into the floorboards, breathed it deep, wishing for the ghostly traces of home to linger just a little longer. He breathed out, and with it went the last vestiges of sleep.

This was not his house. This was not home. This was the Outer World, where the darkness lay its corrupting touch on all that its grasping tendrils could reach.

The room sat shrouded in darkness, save for the little spots of Sun and Moonlight peeking through the tears in his cape. They danced along the walls like children playing a game.

He rose on stiff legs to shake out last cycle’s weariness. He disliked the feeling, but held it close all the same. Pain and fear were symptoms of life, and that he felt them meant he still defied the darkness.

His mouth smacked of paste and called for the canteen at his side, but his stomach growled like the distant rumbles of the Devourer. He ate first, to silence it.

The grime went down thick, his food rationed so as to rid himself of the heavier, grittier slop first, saving the bread and dried grass for last when he’d need it most. Stale bread went down better than rotten mash.

A swig of water to cleanse his palate, and he started his trek down the stairs. He took them slow, careful not to let them creak out their complaints of a centuries-old slumber now disturbed.

Out in the street, he took care in revealing his lanterns—not all at once with sweeping cape, but with careful withdrawal. Signalling his presence, at least, he would do on his own terms. Thankfully, the streets seemed as empty as they sounded, and he set off.

The city was a masterpiece of proportions. He lost count of the rows of houses he passed, the fields that once must have been grass and the shattered stone centerpieces of the cobblestone plazas. They looked to be tiered stone basins of a sort, perhaps for some past ritual.

He heard noises down the street. A quiet shuffle through an alley quickly put them behind him.

The creatures seemed to follow a sort of code. Their noises were words to them, like how ponies used writing. As insane as it seemed, they communicated by voice.

The louder they made their noises, the larger or more dangerous they must have been. Yips and howls split the distance, cries of anger and pain, hunter and hunted. How they earned the Devourer’s ignorance was a mystery best left untouched, but regardless, he made sure to travel only in the solitude of silence.

Half a cycle passed by the time he came to a great wall of crumbling stone. Massive windows twice his size towered into the distant dark and stretched both ways for a distance he couldn’t imagine. Their sills were a good three meters above his head, and with naught the black squares beyond staring back, he could only wonder what lay inside. He followed the wall leftward, to keep his good hoof toward the wall should anything make itself known.

He traveled a long while, and the wall didn’t change, save for window after window passing him by. Something about them got his withers standing on end.

The wall itself stood tall and strong, as good as any to put his back to should he need it, but the windows themselves seemed more like rectangular eyes—watching, waiting. Hiding away whatever creatures made the ones before yip and howl in fear. His thoughts devolved into gangly claws and slavering teeth reaching out to drag him away, and so he skirted wide around the windows as he passed them, keeping them just within the rim of light should his fears come true.

But to that end, what was on the other side?

The wall continued farther than he imagined a wall ever could. Such a thing was not built without reason. What did it hide away? What had taken up residence within? Had he, perhaps, found another wall like that of his village? He had walked at least half the length of his village by now. Any further and—

Something broke the darkness ahead.

He froze in place, every muscle in his body tensed and ready to run. He pulled Sunlight from his bandolier and crept forward, watching the darkness for the glimmer of any hungry eyes that might be looking on.

As he came closer, it became apparent that the something he saw was less a what and more a who. It was the remains of another pony—specifically, a leg, girded in three silver bands connected by a steel bar that ran its length.

Blood trailed off ahead, the scant remains of this unfortunate soul dragged away to a den of teeth. The sight of death got his skin crawling with that uneasy feeling he often felt when walking the distance between village fires, but his nose knew he could relax. This one died untold cycles ago. Blood had a distinct smell to it, and not even that lingered in this lifeless place.

He went to move on, but the way Sunlight glistened off the silver bands made him reconsider them.

They boasted a finer construction than simple ornamentation. It looked like a brace of sorts, the silver bands meant to hold the steel bar in place, which housed what looked like some sort of spring-loaded contraption. Then he noticed the fine silver point poking out the bottom, and his eyes shot wide.

It wasn't a brace at all. It was a buck knife. The coiled spring released a thin blade with the extension of one's leg and retracted it on the pull-back. Perfect for defending himself should the lanterns prove insufficient.

His stomach squirmed at the thought of touching this disembodied leg, but his mind did backflips at the prospect of a weapon—a real weapon for defending himself. The last his village had seen of sharpened steel happened to be on his fifth birthcycle, when his neighbor made the journey beyond the gate. His eyes remained transfixed by its silver sheen.

That meant this had to be birthcycles old, but even by that count it would still be sharp as the day it was forged. His eyes wandered to the leg, the only remaining piece of a brazier-seeker before him, a prize denied the victorious monster by well-crafted steel.

How many seekers had the knife serviced? Taken once beyond the gate, and from there left lying in the cold and dark, awaiting a new brave soul to claim it as their own. A darker fantasy wondered how many more after him would ponder the same.

No. He clamped its adjustable brace to his leg, a tiny smile on his face. He would break that cycle. He had a weapon now, and the next creature to step into his ring of light would get a faceful of it.

He put Sunlight back on his bandolier and continued confidently along the wall, without even a concern for the windows above him. They were less a concern and more a curiosity now.

As if the universe wanted to give him a reason to use his new toy, something made noises up ahead. It was the raspy breathing of a once-pony. He slowed his pace but proceeded, Sunlight raised overhead, confident in the steel about his back-right ankle.

Sunlight washed over the once-pony, its sickly, hairless skin paler than Moonlight at his chest. It stared at the wall as he approached.

When he was close enough to smell the disease festering in the open sores across its body, it cranked its head around like a door on a broken hinge and stared at him with unblinking eyes. Its jaws clacked together, and a glob of drool trailed to the stones at its hooves. A demonic haste brought it to its hooves, and it was already on him.

He pivoted on his forelegs to bring his hindleg around. As designed, the spring activated to the sliding of metal on metal, the blade extending to bring home an effective if clumsy strike to the once-pony’s chest.

He didn't account for its momentum, though, and despite the weight behind his kick he found himself tackled to the ground.

The once-pony screeched in pain and flailed its hooves in a manic attempt to get away from the blade. A thick, dark liquid oozed from its chest and left a trail in the dirt as it slunk backward into the darkness beyond lantern light. Its cries died off into silence, leaving him with the tremors in his legs now that his brain had a chance to process what happened.

He was lucky there had been only one. But lucky or not, he still breathed, still defied the darkness, and that was reason enough to hope. He hooked Sunlight back on his bandolier and was about to continue when a sound reached his ears.

His ear twitched instinctively, and he swivelled his head to track the source, one hoof at his cape to hide away the lanterns.

A pause, and then there it was again, a low, rumbling that vibrated in his heart. He probed for the wall behind him with his back legs, eyes locked on the darkness ahead.

Large, heavy steps and crunching gravel signalled the coming of another creature from the dark, far larger than the others. Courage gave way to common sense, and he threw his cape over the lanterns to drape himself in shadow.

The rubble at his hooves jittered with every meaty step it took, close enough now that he could smell the damp heat of its breath, pungent as a body left to rot. It stopped, and the world went silent.

Just stay quiet. Wait for it to pass. A bead of sweat rolled down his face, and he could hardly control his shaking hooves.

The creature let a low, predatorial growl roll in from the dark. The hair went up on his nape, and all sense of safety left him.

Before he could make a break for it, something smashed him against the wall. His head swam beneath a sudden weight pinning the Moonlight lantern to his chest and crushing the life from him.

He struggled for breath, his eyes gaining focus on the massive jaw of some eyeless monstrosity opened wide around him. Inches from his face, its teeth seemed to strain and grate against the sphere of silver light pulsing from the Moonlight lantern beneath his cape.

He aimed a panicked kick that caught it in the thick flesh of its long, meaty neck. Again, again, he drove the buck knife home to the sickening schlick of steel through flesh as hot blood fell in sticky splatters to the ground.

The creature didn't seem to care, driven by a mindless hunger that didn't understand the power of Moonlight. Its tongue lashed about deep in its throat, eager for the first taste of its meal. It pressed harder against the shell of Moonlight, driving him up the wall, the jagged stone ripping and tearing at his back.

He bit down a scream as his body tensed up at the pain. With Sunlight’s handle caught beneath the Moonlight lantern, all he could do was throw kick after useless kick into the thing’s neck.

Until suddenly, he was falling.

The lanterns illuminated the rectangular shape of a window as he tumbled backward through it. He fell for what felt like cycles, the lanterns dangling before his eyes as if weightless.

His skull cracked hard against stone, and his sight went blotchy. He rolled onto his side, clutching at the back of his head. The cold stone kissed him on the cheek as if reminding him that he still lived, and he sucked in a deep breath through gritted teeth. His hooves came back slick with blood. Superficial. Merely superficial.

Get up. Get out of there. But where was “there?”

He rolled onto his stomach. Rows of splintered wood surrounded him. They looked like they were benches, once upon a time.

A deafening roar vibrated in his heart and drove his ears to his skull. There was a heavy thump and the sound of cascading stone as dust rained down on him from unseen rafters. Another thump. The wall bulged inward, its individual stones breaking free and clattering to the floor in a cloud of dust.

He staggered to his hooves and backed away with his tail between his legs. A final roar reverberated in his heart before the creature smashed through the wall, and he was off in an instant, his legs as light as feathers.

Sun and Moonlight clanged together like bells as he sprinted past the splintered benches and over the fallen timber and ceramic of a crumbling roof. His breaths came in frantic gasps.

He didn’t care how loud he was. All that mattered was getting away. He was never meant to die here. Not like this. Survival above all.

He could hear it gaining on him, its heavy footfalls shaking the walls and almost throwing him to the floor as he scrambled for even footing amongst the rubble. He chanced a look over his shoulder, and his hoof caught on something heavy.

He landed square on top of Moonlight, and its sturdy cage knocked the wind out of him. Sunlight gave a shrill screech of annoyance as it scraped across the floor, scattering little bits of wood and stone. It came to a stop at a set of stairs, polished smoother than even those of the village chapel. At the top, its light flickered against rounded stone and the bas relief of a crescent moon barely visible beneath the gnawing of countless cycles.

His ears perked up, and his heart did a somersault. The brazier. He was in one of the cathedrals! Of all the lantern bearers, he was the first and only to make it this far. If nothing else, he could go out knowing he had returned Moonlight to its rightful place.

A deafening roar brought him back to the present, and he felt the thunderous steps almost on top of him.

He dashed for the stairs, gripping Moonlight’s hook in his teeth. Up the stairs in a mad scramble, he let it fly up and over the rim just as his hoof caught the final stair to send him tumbling face first into the brazier. He rolled over in time to see the creature coming at him with open jaws, and he shut his eyes, taking one final breath in defiance of the dark.

But then he took another. And another. Hesitantly, he peeked open his eyes to behold the strangest sight.

A series of long shadows held back the creature’s jaws the same way Moonlight had not moments ago. They were dark blue, yet ghostly and transparent, save for a silver sheen that trimmed their lengths. They reached back behind him, near his saddlebags where he couldn’t see. Above, a strange silver disk set the sky aglow in a dozen shades of dark blue.

Before he could marvel any further, the shadows opened wide like the gates of his village to throw the creature tumbling backward off the dais.

“Champion! We are with you!”

The sounds rang clearly between his ears, yet they were not his thoughts. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

Those were… those were words. Not just words, spoken words.

He felt the presence inside him, a blazing mote of cold fire in his chest. Its words were a mystery—for there was no such thing as a spoken language—but they carried a commanding weight all their own: fight, kill, survive.

He wasted no time in bounding down the stairs for Sunlight before the creature could get back up. He snagged it just as a long, thin shadow rose above the creature’s form.

Before he even processed what had happened, he was three feet to the left and teetering on his left hooves, as if yanked aside by some supernatural force. An ear-shattering crack split the air, and where he had been standing, a whip-like tail left a small crater and a kick-up of dust. The Moonlight shadows receded to his sides.

The creature got to its paws, and by the light of the silver disk in the sky, he got a fuller view of just how much it towered over him, made the cathedral’s wide walls seem cramped and confining.

Its stocky legs and gangly claws glistened like wet stone in Sunlight’s golden glow, and its long meaty neck, still weeping black liquid from where his buck knife struck home, ended in the perpetual snarl of a lipless cluster of teeth. A series of cracked, uneven spikes ran along its spine, tapering into its whip-like tail that now idly snaked along the ground behind it.

Though it had no eyes, it tracked his movement as if drawn to the hammering of his heart, and it let loose a roar that flecked him with hot saliva.

“Steady, Champion,” the Voice said. It sounded wary, but emboldened.

Onward, he felt within its words, and so he took a step forward.

The fang beast tracked his movements with its long neck. Despite its size, it was still faster than him, and in one swift motion, brought its claws around in an arcing swipe that he had no hope of dodging.

He braced for the strike, but felt his body lurch sideways and stone slide underhoof. The shadows stretched out in front to protect him where the blow would have caught him across the shoulder, and still he could only wonder at their power.

This presence knew strength, more powerful than anything he had ever seen, if it was able to stand up to this creature. It ignited a fire inside him. With it on his side, he was invincible.

He charged the beast again, gritted his teeth as it coiled back to strike. In a whirlwind of motion, the shadows yanked him aside just before the fang beast crushed him beneath its massive jaws. He used the momentum to bring Sunlight around in an uppercut just shy of the knife wounds pockmarking its neck.

As it had with that unfortunate once-pony, Sunlight knew its enemy and let loose and inferno that raked across its bare skin. The flames overpowered the cathedral’s silver glow in a fierce gold, and the heat brought a flash sweat to his face.

The beast staggered away from the flame, letting loose a frightful cry far removed from its threatening roar moments ago. It slammed backward into the walls and brought down clattering stones and clouds of dust.

The stink of burning skin filled his head, but he pressed forward. He could feel the mote of cold flame swelling in his chest to fill every crevice between his ribs.

“Give no respite!”

The Voice resounded in his skull. He didn’t know what its words meant, but he didn’t need to. He understood the desire in its tone, the power in its volume. The Voice was out for blood. Moonlight wanted vengeance against this creature of the dark, and he as a steward of Sun and Moon would see its wish fulfilled.

The fang beast roared as threateningly as it could, still backpedaling away, but it may as well have been whimpering with its tail between its legs. It snapped at him with another grating clack of its jaws, but the shadows glided him out of harm’s way and into position to bring Sunlight down on the same blistering wound. The flames cascaded outward and melted its flesh away like candle wax in a fire, down to the bone.

“Strike! Strike it down!”

Desperation filled the voice, and it fueled one final pivot of his forelegs. He caught it perfectly in its neck joint with his hindleg, and he felt the buck knife slide cleanly between the vertebrae.

Its head flopped like a snapped twig. It let out a little whine as it struggled to drag itself backwards before slumping to the ground and going still. All was silent save the beating of his heart.

Finally the situation caught up with him, and his legs gave out. He hacked up dust and blood, watched it mingle on the floor and tasted its grit on his lips. Every part of his body hurt, but he was alive.

“Claim your rest, Champion. You are braver than you think.”

The voice spoke softly. How sweet, how beautiful it sounded. Was he dreaming?

Dreaming. His heart had slowed to normal, and with aching legs he dragged himself to his hooves and climbed the stairs to the brazier.

Its fuelless fire burned silent and bright, rising high toward the shattered roof, where above shone the silver disk, massive and unmoving in the sky. The… Moon? It must be.

It was the embodiment of Moonlight’s power, the very being that was once devoured alongside the Sun and their lights snuffed from the sky.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” Wonder filled the voice, a near breathlessness between his ears. “For so long have I been consumed.”

His gaze drifted to his flanks in search of the Moonlight shadows. Folded against his sides, they shimmered with the faintest trim of silver.

“I do not have the strength to fly. I am but a fraction of myself.”

He closed his eyes, laying down his head, letting the soothing voice carry him adrift.

It let out a strange sound, high and ringing like the little bell his sister kept hidden in a box beneath her bed. A sound they would sometimes hushedly play with when nopony was around.

“Sleep now, dearest Champion. No evil will venture here.” He took a deep breath and let his mind relax, the voice his sole focus.

“I will be with you in your dreams.”

III - The Looming Shadow

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All was silent in the village square, sparsely lit as it was by the four braziers at each corner. He stood rooted in the middle, by the wilted tufts of grass fenced off so that the foals wouldn’t steal away the village’s rations. The world smelled as empty as the sky above him.

His sister stood to his left. She stared upward with those large, blue eyes of hers, still as a statue. Mother’s scarf hung about her neck, as it had all their birthcycles until he took his first step beyond the village gates.

Beyond the wall, the Devourer let loose a deafening roar that rumbled the earth. The rapid-fire staccato of a thousand nails being driven into stone stabbed at his ears—the Devourer scaling the wall with its colossal, centipede-like body. Soon, it would peer down at them from the darkness the fires couldn’t quite chase away.

Just like last cycle, and the cycle before that. It was always the same dream. Except this time, he could turn his head.

The Voice existed beyond the rim of light as if afraid to step inside. Drifted, more like. It took no distinct shape, best described as a twisting mass of shadows, impossible to tell where one ended and another began. Bits of Moonlight threaded through it.

It had no eyes, but he gathered the sense that it stared at him all the same. It pulsed gently within his chest, even as he saw it outside himself, ever present and curious.

The Devourer roared again, louder this time. It was above him, barrelling down with those terrible, spiralling, grinding teeth, and everything went black.

His head shot up from the cold stone of the cathedral dais. The fang beast lay motionless where it fell last cycle among the rubble and splintered benches. Moonlight shimmered on its skin, and behind him the Moonlight brazier reached its silent flames toward the sky and the Moon itself.

The Voice stirred in his chest—that little mote of frostfire that had taken up residence inside him. It licked at the side of his heart, a flame all its own that he carried within—a living brazier.

“I was hoping for a dream, Champion, not a nightmare.” It sounded contemplative, whatever these sounds meant, wondering at something he must have been doing.

He looked up at the Moon, silent as the cathedral around him. After living all his life beneath impenetrable darkness, the sight stood the hairs of his withers on end.

The more he stared, the more it amazed and terrified him. This wasn’t how the sky was supposed to be. And yet it was. He simply hadn’t known it any other way.

But one thing was for certain. He had succeeded. He had restored Moonlight to its rightful place. Only Sunlight remained, resting beside him where he left it, patiently awaiting its reunion with the Sun brazier. Halfway done, halfway home.

He rose on stiff legs that cracked and popped their complaints of last cycle, urging he lie back down to sleep away the aches and pains. But those were poisonous thoughts, as wonderfully tempting as they were. Stillness meant death, and death was to accept the darkness.

He made a quick meal of last cycle’s leftover mash and downed a greedy portion of water from his canteen. He wiped the dribble from his lips and considered what was left.

It was still more than half full, but he couldn’t help the concern welling inside him. He didn’t know how far he had yet to travel. Hunger he could deal with, but he had seen what thirst could do to a pony—the crazed eyes that lorded over a dry village well. He started forward, but the Voice flared up in his chest.

“Nay, Champion. You are still weak.” The Voice receded inward, its chill reaching up the sides of his heart as if to coax him back to his haunches. “Do not yet brave the wastelands.”

It kept using that sound, “Champion.” No other came up in its sounds quite as often. Whatever it meant, the Voice desired communication. He fished a piece of charcoal from his saddlebags, one kept in the vain hope he would meet another pony in his quest. He started simple on the stone floor:

Can you understand me?

“Yes.”

He blinked and shook his head. Don’t be an idiot. He wrote out: Yes. No. He pointed to Yes.

“Yes.”

He nodded, then shifted his hoof to no, to hear the sound it would make.

“No.”

Another nod.

Before he could write more: “Can you not understand me, Champion?” it said. “Can you not speak?”

He paused, charcoal against the stone, at a loss for its sounds. Best make a statement the voice could hopefully understand:

We do not speak. Ponies never have.

Silence. He stared at his written words, hoping for something, a confirmation of any kind. Even the faintest peep would have scratched the itch that was his desire to hear it speak.

He changed his mind when the chill nestled between heart and lung withered to the littlest breath of frost. When it spoke, no language barrier could divide him from the heartache in its words.

“We are sorry. For all our failings.”

He imagined the Voice as a pony, silver like the Moon. It looked down at its hooves, crestfallen.

He likewise stared at his hooves. The pain in its words sent a shiver down his spine. Opening old wounds wasn’t his intention, however his words managed that. He shook his head and put charcoal to stone, to change the subject.

Brazier of the Sun. Direct me.

It hesitated, in a little flicker of flame that licked up the side of his heart. After a moment’s pause, the layered shadows at his left side extended forward, tapering to a point made from a broad horizontal pair at the tip. They seemed to shimmer in the Moonlight as they pointed beyond the cathedral’s broken archway, toward a towering shadow behind the city.

“Canterlot. Atop the mountain.”

He stared awhile at the figure he only now realized was there. It didn’t appear very large. Just past the houses and the flatness beyond, it stood at the edge of sight, where land became sky. He nodded, a smirk on his lips. A quarter cycle at most, if he could avoid the creatures in the city.

He reached back to return his charcoal to his bags, but stopped, looking over his shoulder at the brazier. It blazed grand and gleaming despite the years of neglect, as if its lighting had washed away the wear of untold birthcycles. At his hooves, their conversation looked more a child’s scribbling, most certainly out of place on such hallowed ground.

Sorry, he quickly scratched before smearing away their conversation.

“You do not need to apologize. I am in your debt.”

Though happy the Moon lit his way, he couldn’t help a grander sense of emptiness of the world his newfound sight brought him. The cathedral stood atop a hill, which overlooked the city he had travelled. It stretched beyond sight, its innumerable broken houses like crumbling tombstones in a forgotten graveyard.

It all looked so small for some reason. He remembered them reaching far above his head earlier. How it all had shrunk to fit his view was both astounding and terrifying. He reached out a hoof to touch them, curious as to why, and found it stranger still that he didn’t touch any of them.

A glance at the cathedral wall. He put a hoof against it. Solid. Back to the city. He stepped forward, glancing over his shoulder at the cathedral, watching it slowly shrink away.

He had never been able to see farther than a dozen meters, even within the village. What magic existed that made things change in size to meet and leave him? Was it the light?

“What are you thinking about, Champion?”

It sounded curious, a flicker of its fire dancing somewhere near his sternum—cold but not chilling, pleasant in its own strange way. He equated it to the Voice leaning forward to look up at him, an ear askance.

He shook his head. It was certainly the light, if the Voice seemed so casual about it. Surely it possessed immense power. He had only to look at the giant carcass behind him to believe that.

Ahead, down by the tiny houses, he watched the retching once-ponies he had avoided on his journey. He probed at them with Sunlight, but they seemed unaffected. Truth be told, they appeared frenzied, but their yips and cries of pain rose to the Moon rather than to him.

“Fear them not, Champion,” the Voice said. “They are little more than a nuisance to us now.”

That word again. Was it addressing him? Was that his name? Had the Voice bestowed upon him a name?

He scratched a question into the dirt. What is it you call me?

“Champion.”

A sharp sound, full-bodied and earnest. Foreign, yet homely, something he could hold his head high and believe. And to believe was to hope, which was half the battle in this wasteland.

He started down the hill, checking the cathedral behind him. It shrank quickly at first, and slowly lessened as he continued. By comparison, the houses grew slowly, then quickly, until he came to the point where he could touch them.

“You keep looking back,” the Voice said, tinged with curiosity. It wrinkled its nose in his mind’s eye. “Have you no concept of distance?”

Scratching sounds came from the walls of houses here and there—things digging, searching for holes and shadows to escape the Moonlight. Though nothing had wandered across his path, he hid Sunlight beneath his cape, just in case.

By the pale Moonlight he watched the street stretch ever onward, as if some strange magic endlessly looped him through the same few blocks, until something caught his eye: a well, in the middle of a plaza.

It welcomed him with cold paving stones into the open market, where not a soul wandered by. There were always at least a few ponies gathering their day’s water at any given moment, exchanging nods and perhaps even a few scribbled conversations on the flagstones. To see this one as devoid of friendly faces as it was of smell… The emptiness of this place was palpable.

Cautious steps brought him to the circular crop of stones, and he peered in. He lifted part of his cape to let Sunlight reach into the darkness the Moonlight above couldn’t chase away, and it sparkled back in the distance.

He smiled. His canteen was more than half full, but he couldn’t pass up a refill. He crafted a makeshift dropbucket from a coil of rope and a clay bowl from his saddlebags, to check the water before risking contaminating his canteen. Eyes over his shoulder, he lowered it into the well. When the rope laxed, he brought it back up, and by the grace of the Cinders, it was the most crystal clear water he’d ever seen.

He downed it greedily before sending the bowl down for another. Satisfied, he tied the rope fast to his canteen and sent it down to fill. He brought it back up, tightened the cap, and strapped it to his side. A grin wide on his lips, he followed the path toward the shadow, ears forward.

“You are skilled with your hooves, Champion,” the Voice said. Its tone was impossible to place, only its faint chill resting against his sternum, as if pushing, leading onward. Not anger, nor curious or scared. Perhaps merely a statement. Silence begot silence, and he continued on, but part of him wished the Voice would continue speaking, just so he could listen.

The Moon above kept watchful company, and the Voice’s presence within his chest was more companionship than he’d known most of his life, but that closeness only served to spark his curiosity.

The Voice was the Moonlight itself—the Moon itself, or so it seemed. They were one, yet somehow separate. Perhaps the Moon hadn’t been fully restored, or couldn’t until the Devourer was cast back to whatever hell it came from.

The Moon. How it looked back in watchful silence, so bright it almost hurt to look at. Just as the Voice was a tiny mote of cold fire inside him, the Moon seemed to cast a cooling aura on the earth, tinged every lungful of air with the tiniest bite. It lent a keener sense for the rot and death that grovelled behind the walls he passed.

The city’s broken houses fell away to open plains. Sparse rocks and sparser tree trunks stood as landmarks in what was otherwise a featureless expanse. All glowed pale beneath the Moonlight, and his eyes finally adjusted to the new light source.

Unlike the village braziers he could pass by and the houses of the wasted city, the Moon sat motionless above. No matter how far he walked, it remained in its place in the sky, like a giant eye that took in all.

He recalled how the cathedral had shrunk quick then slow, the houses growing slow then quick. The longer the transition, the more steps it took to affect, and so he could only wonder how many lengths spanned the distance between him and the Moon.

The shadow, too. Still it loomed where earth became sky, hadn’t grown an inch despite his steps. How, too, the earth itself seemed to continue moving beneath him though he had travelled far. It kept regenerating, as if brought up perpetually from the black abyss that surely awaited him at its edge. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a quarter cycle journey after all.

He had much to learn about this new world.

At that, a realization came to him, a question he should have asked back in the cathedral. He stopped and scratched into the dirt:

What is your name?

The Voice flickered in his chest and seemed to grow just a little warmer, in what was, perhaps, a smile.

“Luna,” it said.

He knew not how to spell it, but the word rolled gently around his head like water in a basin. Luna. Serene, yet commanding. A name fit for a ruler. A name he could follow.

He allowed himself another long look at the Moon before he caught himself smiling, and he set on again.

IV - The Tunnel

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In time, they learned to communicate.

They started with the alphabet, first learning the noises that equated to the letters he knew and how their pronunciation changed depending on their order. It was a strange concept, but one he was eager to learn. As cycles passed, he built a semblance of understanding—no more than a village foal knew how to write, but he held that knowledge dearer than anything in the mortal world.

The Voice taught him of the world before, when the Sun and Moon traded places in the sky. When pegasi—ponies with wings!—soared through the air. When grass grew in endless fields, beneath the very ground he walked.

But most of all, it taught him of the sounds the world made, and the innumerable things that made them.

Birdsong, water babbling at the brookside, the crack of thunder on a cool summer’s night. How such creatures and things from the time of sound must have looked and felt, where water ran free across the land and the birds flew high above—cawing, chirping, tweeting, warbling. Dogs barked and squirrels chittered from their rustling branches, and foals laughed—laughed—as they played through the streets. The crackle of fire—true fire, unlike the village braziers—red and yellow and hot. It was enough to drive the imagination wild.

But always he had to rein it in when something scurried or lumbered across his path in the pale Moonlight. For the beasts and once-ponies had acclimated and now roamed the plains in search of food.

They made noise, too, but they were not the noises Luna described. Theirs were of fury and hurt, of the desire to kill and consume. They slowed his journey toward the looming shadow, but with the Voice in his chest and the knowledge it gave freely, the dangers seemed that much less.

He carried with him a link to the past, a power that knew the world as it should be—the world he sought to explore with his own five senses. The unending Moonlight and little specks of light that twinkled all around it—stars, as Luna called them—granted him the gift of sight, and yet his limitless gaze only served to whet his appetite for more.

They came across a dip in the earth, a long, twisting trench that stretched left and right as far as the eye could see.

“A riverbed,” Luna said to answer his wandering gaze. It had taken up the habit of pointing out every detail that caught his eye. Water once ran freely through the trench, enough to swallow him whole a million times over. It could have babbled a lullaby to carry him off to sleep, or roared a hellish fury after a downpour—a symphony all its own—swelled it beyond its banks. The way the Voice described everything gave lightness to his hooves.

Cycles more found them before a canyon, whose winding crags and grottos would have howled like the monsters of the abandoned city, had there been this “wind” Luna spoke of. Still more brought sight of towering wood. Long-dead trees and hollow logs stood still as a cemetery, their husks effigies of the terrible beasts he avoided in the city.

Daylight, a concept Luna had yet to describe in understandable terms, once flooded the very ground he walked with a color it called “green.” Colors beyond the sheen of steel and fire of blood and dark of dirt did not exist, not anymore, and he hadn’t a clue how to envision the trunks reaching toward a lightened sky, the Sun’s rays transformed from gold to green as the wind rustled through their leaves. Here, in a forest, all manner of animals lived, all with their own sounds that came from their own throats.

Luna regaled him with the beauty of life as it was—as it would be, once their task was done—as he followed the downward curve of the earth. Like the cathedral on the hill, the world rolled away before him with expanses beyond anything he could have ever imagined in the limited reach of brazierlight.

Far off to either side, great mountains rose from the darkness, shadowed triangles like vicious teeth reaching up to swallow the ever-vigilant Moon. They narrowed into the distance, leading him toward Canterlot Mountain in the middle.

He happened upon a pair of steel beams running along the ground, connected at intervals by wooden planks in various stages of rot.

“A railroad,” as Luna put it. A method of transportation meant for “trains.” They were loud things, according to the Voice, great lengths of steel that roared with smoke and fire to move untold weights. Yet another piece of civilization lost to the Devourer. He followed it onward, toward the base of the mountain, where he came to an all too sudden standstill.

The tracks led him to a great hole in the wall, like a mouth carved into the very rock that devoured what little Moonlight dared cross its threshold. Even Sunlight seemed hesitant, barely illuminating anything beyond the first few steps.

“It is the first of many,” Luna said. It moved higher up in his chest, as if directing that he look up. Far above, the railroad weaved in and out of more holes in the cliff side.

His eyes fell back to the entrance in front of him. He knew he had to proceed, but there was something wrong with this place, something different about this darkness. It seemed to reach out to him, beckon him inward. The pall of death hung about this place, evident in the faintest smell that floated just beneath his nostrils.

There’s something in there, he scratched into the dirt.

“I know,” Luna said. “But we must brave it nonetheless. Fear not, Champion. I am with you. Every step of the way.”

Champion. He had learned the word that sound related to. A fearless hero who shouldered the burdens of lesser ponies and stood fast when all hope was lost. A pony who stared death in the face and carved their glory into the rock of ages. So went the stories written by the firelight of his youth.

He was no champion, only a survivor. Mere luck had seen him to his age, and barely at that.

Champions didn’t exist, not anymore. Ponies lived, and that was all they could do. Survival above all. Still, if Luna could not read his thoughts—which seemed to be the case—then he could play the part. If only for the sake of hope. He stepped forward, and like walking through a wall of fog, he found himself suffused in darkness.

All was quiet, save for the gravel crunching underhoof. He drew Sunlight out from beneath his cape to hold it high against the dark. It chased the shadows away from the walls to either side, but they gathered above him like frightened animals waiting for him to pass.

“Let us be on, Champion,” Luna said. “At the top is where our journey will come to an end.”

Luna’s shadows at his sides—wings as he had come to learn—flitted and resettled. Anxious? Regardless, he desired the journey no more than it did, so he started in.

The tunnel marched ever upward into the heart of the mountain. He wasn’t used to such inclines, which settled into his legs like a well-kindled fire, but an ever-present draft from the other end kept his face cool. A quarter cycle, a half. The mountain went on forever.

The silence carried on with them, settled over his shoulders like a heavy shawl. It had him looking up to see the Moon more than he liked to admit. After the first taste of light, it was an impossible grace to forget. He’d see it again once he reached the end of the tunnel, and the thought lent strength to his step.

His mind wandered to Luna and the mystery of the Voice itself. The wings at his sides, its swiftness in battle, the strength to raise the Moon and forever hold it aloft for all to see. To meet it in the flesh would be a humbling experience.

But to that end, what did a pony who was the Moon look like?

He had his previous impressions: tall, powerfully built, of strong bust and broad shoulder. Silver as the Moon and doubtlessly just as breathtaking to behold.

The Moon. Those back home surely marveled at it. The village. Home. His little house of stone and mud. His bed, the musty, moldy stack of hay he had taken to nibbling on in the waning hours of his sleep cycle whenever the village stocks ran low. The table at its foot, the one Mother had made before she had been taken for raising a cry of madness to the dark.

“What plagues you, Champion?”

He blinked away the memory, then shook his head. Its brow in his mind’s eye furrowed in concern. It didn’t need to know.

Champion…

A champion didn’t harbor feelings of home, didn’t let them deter him from reaching his goal. He didn’t want to be a champion, but he had been chosen. Keep moving. Find the Moon. Survival above all.

The Moon called to him. Luna called to him. He had to see it again. It was all he could think about.

The tunnel crawled a slow curve in its ascent. He wouldn’t have noticed it, if not for how the brick bowed out from the earth that sought to retake the space it had long been denied. Here and there it had succeeded in pushing back a section of wall, leaving him to step, hop, or otherwise clamber over. Always the path lead up, and ever onward he marched.

See the Moon. See Luna.

A smile crept onto his face, the tiredness in his legs all the less noticeable with every step. Just a little farther, and he could rest in the open Moonli—

Something thumped to the ground behind him.

He swung around, Sunlight outstretched to chase away the dark. Less than two lengths away, the upper half of a once-pony lay on the tracks, its legs bent at unnatural angles. A bloody mess of a spine protruded from the remains, and thick strips of flesh had been peeled from its shoulders like bark from a tree. Its eyes were missing.

He looked up, and from the darkness two glowing coals stared back at him.

A mass of mottled feathers, black as the pre-Moon sky, landed on top of the now forgotten meal, crushing its skull with massive raptor claws. Blood matted its facial feathers, and bits of gore dangled from the chips and cracks in its beak.

It turned its head to stare at him with a single eye, its pupil dilating to better take him in. A series of rapid clacks emanated from its beak, and out purred the grotesque mockery of a raven’s caw.

Luna flared up in his chest. There was a rapidness to the way it flickered, as if the flames licking at his insides were the Voice’s heartbeat pounding alongside his.

“Champion, do not think to fight this, not here. ’Twill be the death of us.”

Never in a thousand birthcycles would he have ever considered standing his ground against a creature like this—this, raven, as he surmised from Luna’s descriptions of the beforetimes—here or otherwise. He took a hesitant step backward, trying his hardest to not let his fear show on his face. But it was hard to hide the weakness in his knees, the dryness in his mouth.

The raven matched his steps with heavy footpads and the scrape of talon along stone. Head low to the rails, its crest feathers rose up all down its back, and out spread massive, tattered wings that made the tunnel feel suddenly cramped. It let out a screech from the darkest depths of Tartarus and was on top of him in an instant.

Its monstrous weight smashed him to the ground, the rotting crossties digging into his back. It stabbed at him with its beak, but Luna had its wings up to shield his face.

“Hold fast, Champion,” Luna said as if through gritted teeth. “Ready your strike.”

Waiting to act was the last thing he had the courage to do. He kicked at the tough leather of its legs with his buck knife, but the raven seemed more concerned with weaseling its long beak through the feathers of Luna’s wings.

It forced its way through and opened wide to clamp down about his head, but Luna spread its left wing wide, giving him the opportunity to smash it in the throat with Sunlight.

There was a flash of white-hot light as Sunlight gave the word “fury” new meaning. The torrent of fire it let loose glinted off the wet stone walls and roared in his ears.

The raven squawked and stumbled sideways into the wall. Bricks fell clattering to the stone and dust rained from the ceiling, kicked up into a storm as the raven beat its wings for balance.

Sunlight back on his bandolier, he was on his hooves and out of there as fast as his legs could carry him. Fallen stone and twisted metal did nothing to slow him down. He heard its lumbering steps behind him, and it gave another horrifying screech that snapped his ears flat down.

“Fly, Champion! It gains on us!” Luna pumped its wings to give speed to his step in what little space the tunnel allowed, but he feared it wasn’t enough.

The tunnel veered rightward, climbing ever steeper and sapping the strength from his legs. A fierce fire kindled in his lungs.

His mind flashed back to the image of that once-pony, the half-eaten meal the raven had ripped to pieces. That would be him if he didn’t push harder, but he didn’t have much left to give. If only…

The tunnel straightened out again, and far ahead the faintest speck of silver broke the darkness. His heart did a backflip.

The Moon. He gritted his teeth and fought through the pain.

The exit came closer with every haggard breath he took. It was so close, he could see the shadow spots that dotted the Moon’s surface. But just before breaking free of the darkness, a sharp pain shot through his hindleg.

The raven had caught him by the ankle and dragged him back into the dark, Luna’s wings flailing helplessly at his sides. The chips and cracks in its beak acted as a serrated edge that tore into his skin as much as it crushed.

He screamed in pain, aiming wild kicks at its face with his buck knife, but its feathers were like steel and his blows glanced off uselessly.

“Focus, Champion!” rang Luna’s Voice between his ears. “Aim for the eyes!”

He sucked in a deep breath through gritted teeth and centered on its words. A glance over his shoulder at the raven’s blood-red eye, and he aimed a kick that would have sent another pony through a wall. His hoof sank a good two inches into the jelly-like substance, and the blade engaged to the sliding of steel and a screech of pain.

But rather than let go, the raven bit down harder, and he felt the hot breath pour out its nostrils like steam. It lifted him into the air by his ankle and slammed him to the ground. His teeth clacked together, and the blow jolted through him like lightning.

The next few moments were a blur. He felt himself yanked sideways into the left wall, and his head went fuzzy. There was another impact on his right side. The ceiling, the other wall. He couldn’t tell anymore.

The next thing he knew, he was on his stomach again, Sunlight lying inches from his face, still chained to his bandolier. Its golden fire danced frantically within its cage as if trying to snap him out of his haze.

The raven’s steps rumbled the ground beneath him, and before he could get his bearings, it yanked him backward to clamp down higher up on his leg. The sharp pain sliced clean through his head fog.

He aimed a series of frantic kicks at the raven’s eye, his hoof sinking farther with each strike until there was nothing left but a leaking mess down the side of its face.

That was seemingly enough to punch through whatever rage had consumed it. It let go of him, squawking in pain, and he scrambled free for the exit.

The moment he stepped into the light, Luna spread its wings wide in the freedom of the open air. “Follow the tracks. We still must flee this beast.”

As Luna spoke, there was a blood-chilling screech and the collapsing of stone. Behind him, the raven had crashed through the exit, its head having smashed out the top support beam of the tunnel entranceway. Boulders twice his size crashed into place behind it to block off the entrance.

He heard the snort of hot breath from its nostrils, and it snapped its head aside to skewer him with its glare. There was murder in its eye. It spread its ragged wings, wider than Sunlight’s reach wingtip to wingtip, and let out a terrifying screech that left his ears ringing. It charged, its full weight sending tremors through the earth that almost shook him from his hooves.

“Do not waste precious seconds staring. Fly, Champion!”

He broke into a sprint for the far tunnel entrance. It was a good three hundred feet away, just across a bridge that looked beaten down by endless cycles of disuse. He was sure of his footing on each and every crosstie, but he couldn’t help looking down between them at the distant earth. He had never known the concept of heights, but he had broken his pastern once falling from the roof of his home. He didn’t want to think what would happen should he fall here.

Just as he reached the midway point, a shadow passed over him. He heard the beating of wings and turned in time to see the raven’s talons outstretched as it came crashing down on top of him. It pinned him on his back, supported only by the creaking wood of two crossties digging into his haunches and shoulders.

Luna kept the raven from crushing him into a paste, one wing clenched in its talons, the other struggling to hold its monstrous weight off of him. Its fire flared out to fill in the crevices of his chest with the chilling touch of the Moon, as if straining with every ounce of its power.

“Strike it, Champion! Drive it off us!”

He tried unhooking Sunlight from his bandolier, but he could barely think over the raven’s constant screeching and the sight of that beak opening wide above him.

It stabbed at his face in a blind rage, its beak leaving inch-long dents in the wood where he moved his head just in time to avoid it. Feathers danced wildly in the air with every beat of its wings, all sense lost to the madness driving it to kill. It caught him by the left pastern when he tried shielding his face, and it twisted and jerked it in an attempt to tear his leg clean from his shoulder. Blood dribbled on his face, and he screamed as it bit down to the bone.

With his free hoof, he managed to unhook Sunlight, but as he brought it overhead to strike, the wood beneath him cracked and he lurched downward an inch. It jolted him from the moment, and he stole a wide-eyed glance over his shoulder, toward a few pebbles falling to the muted blues of the earth far below.

“The railway will not hold, Champion,” Luna said. “Strike it now!”

The raven placed a claw on the crosstie to the right of his haunches for better leverage, but just as it shifted its weight, the crosstie snapped. It fell through the gap between the rails, and his lower half went with it.

He had only a moment to turn and grab hold of the crosstie beneath his shoulder blades to keep from falling. He hooked his pastern under the rail to brace himself just as the raven caught him by the hind leg, its monstrous weight pulling him taut and popping his shoulder out of its socket. It was all he could do to bite back a scream.

It let out a shriek and beat its wings as it dangled upside down from the single claw. His buck knife’s steel brace moaned within its vice-like grip, the only thing saving his leg from being crushed to a pulp. It was the smallest of silver linings in a situation gone to Tartarus, and it started up a little earworm in the back of his mind.

He was going to die. He was going to die if he didn’t get this thing off him. Death had been an ever-present and recurring fear in his cycles outside the walls, but Luna had been there for the worst of it. The Voice kept him safe and had guided him across this vast and strange land. But Luna, for all its strengths, couldn’t fly. If the raven had its way, or the crosstie gave out, death would come for him. He would see it coming all the way down, and there was nothing he or the Voice could do to stop it.

He swung Sunlight frantically at the claw gripped about his leg. It was a shoddy strike, but Sunlight knew its role and out poured its golden flames to boil away even the thickest parts of its calloused skin.

The raven screeched and beat its wings in retaliation, but it knew better than to let go. Rather, it reached up higher with its other claw to try and grab him by the haunches. It meant to climb him.

“Back, foul demon!” Luna shouted as it buffeted the claw away with a wing. It brushed a primary along Sunlight to coax out a little tongue of fire. “Fear not the pain, Champion. Fear only your own hesitation. Take heart in your strength, and you shall never know failure. Strike hard, strike true, Champion, for I am with you!”

He let Luna’s words flow through him, felt the chilling flames flicker in his chest. It knew the truth of what it said. All he had to do was believe.

With a grit of his teeth, he channelled that belief into another strike at the raven’s claw. His aim was true, and again the flames washed over its blistering skin and made little embers of the down feathers at the base of its leg.

But the raven was far quicker than he realized, and just as determined. It reached up with unnatural speed to catch his forehoof in its beak.

He screamed, the little bones in his pastern cracking with every twist and jerk it made. His blood ran freely to splatter its face, and it bit down harder as if relishing the scent.

It wanted him to let go of the lantern, but doing so meant death. Survival above all, and he gripped Sunlight tighter despite the pain.

“Stay your hoof, Champion,” Luna shouted as Sunlight dangled just beside the raven’s good eye. A rush of sound above prompted he look up to see Luna’s wings framing the Moon far above. They seemed to glow with an inner Moonlight all their own. “On this day, demon, we drive thee back to the depths of Tartarus. Sister, find thy mark!”

The shadows surged downward toward the lantern, and a rush of sound turned flame to inferno.

The raven shrieked as its feathers took up the blaze. It let go of his leg to fall into the distance, wings flailing in a pathetic attempt to fly. Burning feathers danced in the darkness like fallen stars, until its cry cut abruptly short.

He stared at the burning speck on the distant earth far longer than he should have, until he realized his hind leg was on fire. He flailed in surprise before re-hooking Sunlight and scrambling up onto the crosstie to bat away the flames. With the final bits of adrenaline leaving him, he closed his eyes and let out a deep sigh.

Luna made a strange repetitive noise, loud and full-bodied. It seemed happy, though he couldn’t say for certain. Was… Was that laughter?

“Come, Champion,” Luna said, most definitely happy. He could imagine the twinkle in its eye, the smile on its face as it said those words. “The beast is slain. Raise with me your victory cry!”

The Moon shone brighter than ever, as it well deserved after such a battle, and the stars twinkled in time with its laughter. Even Sunlight seemed to flicker merrily in its lantern, satisfied with its contribution regardless of how much dimmer it was for it.

Part of him wanted to join in, but he looked away, ears flat back. He had laughed once as a child. His father beat him for it.

“Do you not wish to join me in merriment? Cheating death is a most fitting occasion, would you not say?”

Still he averted his gaze from the Moon, but his eyes came around to the cliff, and just how far the ground looked from where he lay. A smirk found its way to his lips, and one ear perked up. He snorted.

Luna chuckled. Softly, “I see a mere snort will have to suffice. Very well, Champion.”

He rolled to his side to take stock of his injuries, but wavered when his hoof found open air between crossties. He should probably get to solid ground before anything else.

He hobbled to the far end of the bridge, careful not to put weight on his dislocated foreleg, and took comfort in the sweet sensation of solid rock beneath his hooves. Oh, after what he just went through, he never wanted less than two hooves on the ground for the rest of his life. He gave the ground a loving pat before tenderly sitting down to inspect himself.

He tested the crook of his dislocated foreleg. It throbbed from the pain of playing the part of fulcrum and holding the weight of that raven beast, but it was nothing compared to the fire in his shoulder, which felt like Sunlight had given it a healthy dose of divine fury.

His right forehoof shimmered with coagulated blood where the raven had gotten hold of his pastern. That would need cleaned and wrapped, same as his back leg, where the raven got him before escaping the tunnel. He’d get to those later, though. As important as preventing infection was, he couldn’t do much self care with only one forehoof. He hobbled over to the cliff side.

There, he undid the straps of his bandolier and saddlebags and set them aside. He took a strip of bandage from one of the many pockets of his saddlebags and tied Sunlight around the pastern of his dislocated foreleg. Gently, he lay down, easing Sunlight over the cliff side, and he relaxed his shoulder so that Sunlight’s weight would pop it back into place. It was a trick Mother once taught him after a particularly bad argument with another colt.

“Champion…”

On any other occasion, he would have simply looked up at the Moon to indicate his attention. But something weighed heavy on the Voice—a sentiment, perhaps a tinge of worry in the way it trailed off. He looked up hesitantly.

“I… I couldn’t help but notice, whilst you battled the demon… What happened to your cutie mark?”

Eyes still locked with the Moon, he cocked his head. He withdrew the charcoal piece from his nearby saddlebags.

My what? His heart beat alone in the uncomfortable moments that followed. I didn’t mean to offend, he scribbled hastily.

“No, you did not offend.” The Voice sounded nothing like the proud warrior it had moments ago. It sounded broken, defeated, its tail between its legs and head hung low to the dirt. Even its chilling flame seemed all but snuffed beside his heart. “I am sorry… For everything I have caused.”

The Moon still watched him from above, silver as the cycle he brought it into being, but the stars seemed to have retreated further into the night sky. Guilt hung heavy on its words, an emotion he had not expected of the all-powerful being inside him. It knew of the world before the darkness, and certainly what had caused it. The questions inside him demanded answers, but how best to ask them? He started with the simplest.

Why is the world the way it is?

Silence lingered uncomfortably long as he stared at his question, and he couldn’t help but picture Luna with downcast eyes. When it answered, its tone couldn’t be mistaken for anything but regret.

“I dreamed.”

V - The Pony That Was the Moon

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“Long ago, before the darkness came to this world, I ruled Equestria alongside my sister, Celestia. Powerful and just, we brought prosperity to the land for countless centuries. Sister protected our little ponies by day, when they frolicked and played beneath the Sun, and I by night, when the dark and quiet brought their souls to rest safe within my own. But then… Then the dreams came.

“They began as whispers, little tricks of the light in the corners of my eyes as I drifted through the void of dreamspace. Manifold were the dreams of our little ponies, ever innocent and beautiful, but it was not uncommon for the occasional pony to conjure… less-than-savory fantasies.

“Those too feral I nipped in the bud easily enough. A simple twist of the magic in our melded souls and they were no more. But these were persistent, of a subtly different nature than those dreamt by our subjects.

“I first assumed them vestiges of Nightmare Moon, nothing more than faded echoes of her malintent. But still, something seemed off. They were stronger, held more substance, more meaning than the single-minded nightlust of that monster.

“And, they were recent.

“Inward reflection recalled the Tantabus, a being I had brought to life within my own dreams as a means of never forgiving myself of the evil I had committed as Nightmare Moon, but still my search had not yet reached a conclusion.

“The Tantabus had no hoof in the dreams—or, figments of dreams, I should say. The visions were not quite whole enough to warrant such a title. No, the Tantabus has remained dormant since that fateful night I came to terms with my guilt. Whatever the source, I became certain as the nights passed and the whispers grew louder that I was never meant to find peace. Still, I sought it with a fire in my heart all the same.

“If ever there was a sliver of happiness I have felt, it was in the cherished few slumbers after the Tantabus no longer ruled me.

“So I peered deeper into the dreamscape, into the darkness beyond the stars of the universe’s subconscious. Out there, in the furthest reaches of non-existence, I knew my answer awaited me.

“I cast aside my duties as the steward of night and took flight into the nothingness beyond the spiralling galaxies of slumber-thought, into the darkness that no pony—not even I—had tread.

“In the dreamscape, time is irrelevant. I journeyed on into that void for centuries. In the waking world, my search lasted months. I could hear Sister’s voice in the back of my mind, at my bedside in the real world, begging me to wake up, to snap from whatever nightmare I had mired myself in. I ignored her voice, and that of the countless others. They did not understand my quest. They did not hear the whispers, feel the silent tug at their hearts, leading me ever onward into the void, the universe of dreams but a speck in the distance behind me.

“There was no boundary in that endless expanse, yet I knew I had ultimately come to a threshold. Take but another step, and I knew not what would transpire.

“But I had to. I had at long last narrowed down the source, found a loose string in the fabric from whence the voices called me. Naught but a shadow among shadows, it awaited me, curled in a manner resembling a finger beckoning me closer. My quarry seized, I swelled at the thought of laying to rest the ever-burning questions in my heart.

“I… I pulled. A-and before me… Before me opened wide a darkness blacker than death.

“I woke from my dream-turned nightmare, aides at my side, ever vigilant for my return from the dreamscape. I remember the relief I felt as I found myself surrounded by the familiarities of my chambers. But slowly, I came to realize the gravity of my quest. I was a fool to think I had escaped my nightmare, if such a thing could even be called so.

“For a nightmare ends when one wakes.

“So it was that my chambers were torn asunder to that blackness, that infernal screaming, grinding, crushing noise, and a pressure greater than the deepest oceans pressed down on me. I could not breathe as the darkness took hold—a maw, a titanic monster reaching from beyond the fringe of imagination. I… I heard the screams of my beloved subjects still at slumber, their souls drifting within my own, gnashed apart by spiralling, grinding teeth.

“Do you know what it is like to have your soul torn in two, Champion? I pray you never will. Such torture would break even the greatest pony.

“And I… I am not a great pony…

“The pain I remember. It bored out my eyes and throat, that light—that terrible, immolating fire. I rose a soundless scream to the heavens that from thence existed only in the pit below me. ’Twas all I could do to hold on in that spiralling abyss, but even that was not enough. I felt the pane of my sanity shatter, and I slipped into the ease of absolute nothingness.

“For the longest time, there was nothing but the churning of the dreamtide. A different wash of slumber-thought, as if the baubles of everypony’s dreams had been broken open and their contents poured into a single basin. I had not my sense of sight in that place. I believe myself better for it. I felt the dreams, how they washed over me, bathed me in the thoughts and terrors of those I had betrayed. Theirs were the wracking pains, the torture of ceaseless slumber made dark by my brash curiosity.

“I listened to their screams in the rush of the tide, low and distorted whenever my shapeless being sunk below the surface. One by one, new voices lifted themselves up to join the chorus. I can only imagine them to be ponies you might have known, Champion, brave ponies who had failed in their search of our braziers.

“Eventually, I heard Sister’s voice among the din, and soon followed Twilight and Cadance. Their voices I held closest, sheltered within the span of my wings to whisper words of solace. Of hope.

“And so I existed for countless eternities in that damnable monstrosity’s gut, forever cursed to know my curiosity had brought doom upon all I held dear.

“That is, until you arrived, Champion.

“I felt you near the brazier, the light of my Moon drawing near. My mind slowly found itself, collected like oil at the surface of water. Sight returned to me, and I saw beyond the darkness the cathedral miles below, our Lights about your chest and the fear in your eyes.

“I reached out to you, fearful you would become just another scream in my ear, another victim of my hubris. But the weight of the dreams churning about me held me in place, became viscous the more I struggled. ’Twas then you found the courage to return my Light to the brazier, and with it, my strength.

“I broke free of the madness and came to your aid the only way I knew possible. I made you my vessel, and I am eternally grateful.”

He listened, staring into the gentle flicker of Sunlight dangling against the cliff face below him. His shoulder had long since popped back into its socket, but he hadn’t moved out of fear of interrupting Luna’s story. He rose, careful not to lose his balance after lying for so long, and hobbled in from the cliff, where he sat down and worked his scarf into a makeshift sling.

He stared at Sunlight where he had placed it on the earth, and when no more words came, he shifted from one flank to the other and withdrew the charcoal. Questions whirled in his head.

Why not take back your own body instead of sharing mine?

“I cannot. Whatever accursed nature the hellspawn is bound by holds my physical form captive, as well as the majority of my strength. The brazier weakened its grasp on me, true, but not enough to set me free in full, it seems. Besides, the timeliness of my arrival would have been… less than optimal.”

He thought back to the moment the brazier caught fire, how Luna had shielded him from that cluster of teeth the same instant he turned around. He blinked the image away and shook his head. Eyes downcast, ears flat: Where did these monsters come from?

“I know little of what has transpired since waking, Champion. Perhaps it would be best if you shared your knowledge of the world.” Luna drifted toward his rib cage, seemed to prop itself up on them to better read what he had to say.

He stared at Sunlight a moment longer, then wiped away his last question. It’s been dark all my life. We aren’t allowed to speak, according to the Elders.

“Who?” Confusion tinted the inflection. Odd, certainly. The Elder Council had existed since before the Devouring, or so he was told.

The Elder Council. Our guides and protectors. They are the ones who pass down the edicts and rites we live by, such as survival above all.

“I see…”

Silence took hold, and he stared absently into the tunnel ahead, awaiting whatever contemplation had stricken the voice. They were close, so close that the castle’s highest towers were visible in the Moonlight, just above the cliff face. Their rooftops shimmered faintly, almost the color of Sunlight, despite untold birthcycles of neglect.

“This Elder Council,” Luna said, its tone one of searching. “They are the ones who declared silence of my little ponies?”

He nodded. Silence is mandatory. Those that make noise are taken away.

“To where?” Though it possessed no eyes, its glare was sharp on the back of his head, and he wilted beneath the sudden chill that spread through his chest.

I don’t know. They go away. Sometimes they don’t come back.

“What sort of oligarchy imprisons its own people for making noise? Why bother with such a restriction?”

That was an answer he had witnessed. The shudder that ran through him added jagged points to the name, The Devourer. It is attracted to sound.

“The Devourer? Perchance, do you mean the…” A sharp intake of breath, and its chill receded to the space beside his heart.

He nodded. He remembered it vividly. The screams, the silence, the Devourer’s roar that shook apart the houses around him. It was the same as the dream he dreamt every sleep cycle.

Luna remained silent, its thoughts thrumming in the pit of his heart. “A fitting name.”

He wiped away his last statement, mouth slanted at the thought of what he should ask next. He set charcoal to stone and—

“Champion,” it said, contemplative. “In your dreams, there is a filly beside you. Grey. Blue eyes and brown mane. She, too, gazes into the darkness above the village wall. Is she close to you? A family member, perhaps?”

He looked aside, ear cocked, then nodded. My sister, he wrote.

“You have family, then, inside the walls?” Its chill pressed against his ribs, as if leaning forward.

He shrugged. Only her. Father left in search of the braziers birthcycles ago, and Mother was taken away for screaming.

“Oh,” it said, retracting to the space between heart and lung. “I am sorry.”

He raised an eyebrow. Why?

“W-why? You cannot…” Above, the Moon’s light faltered but a fraction of a second. “It is natural to offer condolences for departed loved ones. They are your family, are they not?”

He scrunched his brow, head cocked. Loved ones?

No answer.

Luna?

“I am here, Champion.” The voice trembled. “I-I was simply thinking. N-nothing more.”

He watched the stars twinkle in the night sky. They seemed withdrawn, as if they were afraid. He didn’t need speaking experience to know the turmoil in Luna’s heart. It gripped at his own, like a frightened filly wrapping its hooves about its mother. Something he wrote struck a chord, resonated with something it didn’t want to say.

Luna, he wrote. How long has it been since you searched for the whispers?

“I do not know,” it said, a semblance of recollection about it. “As I said… time is irrelevant.”

He paused. Is?

“Was,” Luna said. “Forgive me… After so long alone, the passage of time still feels but a lie. You should rest, Champion. We near the end of our journey, and the shadows will only grow darker.”

The end of their journey. It was a strange prospect. Granted, that was the intended outcome, to return the Cinders to their braziers and the Sun and Moon to the sky, but the closer they came, the further away it felt.

The distant tops of the castle towers twinkled in the Moonlight, but he had no idea what lay between. If he had only worse things to look forward to than the raven beast, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see what was on the other side of the tunnel.

The Moon watched him from its place in the sky, curious as to what he thought. He was sure of Luna’s conviction to defeat the Devourer and restore those who had been lost, but he wasn’t so sure of his ability to live up to that.

He was no champion, no great hero of ages past. He was a small and frightened pony who knew so terribly little of the beforetimes and the future in store.

Loved ones…

What did the Voice know that he didn’t? What meaning to that phrase had the Devourer stripped away in the cycles gone by?

Though Luna had answered the questions he wondered at all his life, it only raised more and far too many fears of what lay ahead.

But that was next cycle. The shadows and dangers to come belonged to his future self. For now, he had earned his rest.

He laid himself down on the cold stone and curled himself around Sunlight. Its warmth was a blessing on this chilly mountaintop, and he stared long into its light, cherishing the moments before his inevitable dream of gnashing, grinding teeth.

For all anypony knew, it might be the last time he ever saw it.

VI - Canterlot

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Thankfully, nothing awaited him in the next tunnel but broken stone and twisted rails.

The tunnel led him higher through the mountain, steeper than the previous. He considered himself lucky they defeated the raven beast where they had. He wouldn’t have made it through this tunnel with that creature on his heels. It was bad enough with his leg in a sling.

He made it out the other side of the tunnel to see the great gates of Canterlot looming on the far side of a wide chasm. They glowed a ghostly white in the Moonlight, in stark contrast to the blacks and greys of the mountainside.

“We will be there soon, Champion,” Luna said. Eagerness tinged its words with hope, and it flitted its wings at his sides.

Something about the gates kept him from sharing in its eagerness, though. It seemed like a veil had draped itself over the whole of the city. It stole away the glimmer of the stars just above the walls and cast the lower half of the Moon in shadow.

“We must keep moving. Every moment we tarry is another your supplies dwindle.”

He broke his gaze free of the city’s gravity long enough to look at his saddlebags. They were lighter than when he left. Far lighter than they should have been. He had maintained a tight regimen on rations, ensuring equal shares as the cycles passed to account for a homeward journey. The more cycles that passed, the more he tightened his saddlebags to compensate. He was almost out of notches.

But the concern tugging at his heartstrings didn’t stem from hunger. Hunger was but an old friend. He looked to his canteen, snug in its pouch at the forefront of his saddlebag. He had maybe a cycle’s supply left if he didn’t cut back on an already dangerously low intake.

“You will find water in Canterlot, Champion,” Luna said as if reading his mind. “Its wellsprings draw from the deepest watersheds that run all the way from the Crystal Empire. I cannot speak for sustenance within its walls, but surely water will be in no short supply.”

He blinked back to reality and faced the city. Luna was right. Forward was his only option for survival now.

The rails veered rightward to hug the mountainside in its approach. It lengthened the journey considerably, but was all the better for it. He’d had enough of bridges for one lifetime.

A quarter cycle’s walk brought him to the massive steel gates he saw from a distance. They were twisted and bent inward like some giant creature had torn through them. Sunlight beneath his cape, he slipped through and scrambled up onto the train platform. There, a faint mist skirted the pillars supporting a collapsed shelter.

He followed it toward the exit, careful not to disturb the stone and debris that littered the place. There were many nooks and crannies, and any one of them could be hiding any form of unwanted attention.

“Left,” Luna said as he made it to the street. “Follow the street. There you will find a courtyard, and a chance to slake your thirst, if the springs yet flow this far.”

As good a lead as any. He set on, keeping to the shadows.

It was eerily quiet in the city. Street after street passed by with not even the ghosts of shadows keeping watch, but the pall of death hung like perfume just under his nostrils. The creatures of the dark were about.

The veil that earlier had hidden away the bottom half of the Moon draped it completely now, and the stars were sapped from the sky. The Devourer was here. No other evil could do such a thing.

“Courage, Champion,” Luna said. “We are in its domain now, true, but we still hold the key to its demise. Always remember that you are its greatest threat.” It pressed against his ribcage, directing him forward, and they continued on.

As Luna promised, the street ended in a plaza easily the size of his village. The flagstones that welcomed him in had seen better days, but had weathered the cycles far better than the crumbling ruins around him. In the center of the plaza sat a fountain that would have been a breathtaking work of some strange two-toned stone if not for the wearing of time.

His heart ached at the sight of another raven beast hunched over beside it. It had its wings spread to shield its head from view, and it made quick, jerking motions at whatever unfortunate creature it had hidden away behind its wings. He could hear the wet sounds of meat and gore from here.

“Follow the leftward intersection,” Luna said. “The grid follows a semicircle, and there are more fountains along the street ahead.”

But the water… He could see it glistening from here.

“Champion. You know it is a fool’s hope that plays in your head. Please. Let us be off.”

He bit his lip, but nonetheless conceded. It was right. Trying anything now, especially with his leg in a sling, would be suicide. With a quiet sigh, he skirted the edge of the plaza, keeping to the shadows.

As he expected, the creatures became more numerous near the city’s center. Often he had to duck into a building or alleyway whenever one came by, rooting through the rubble for something to eat. His movement devolved into dashing between houses and long cycles of sitting by the windows, waiting for his next move.

He passed the time conversing with Luna.

It’s getting worse, he wrote slowly to keep his strokes silent as he eyed two passing once-ponies.

“They are drawn to Its power. And, presumably, they are afraid.”

Afraid? He glanced outside. Now was his chance. He jumped out the window and sprinted for the corner building diagonal to his, leaping through its abandoned storefront.

Rows of shelves lay broken and strewn across the floor. A flurry of dust kicked up by his entrance danced in the Moonlight filtering through a hole in the ceiling. Nothing was in here as it appeared from across the way, and he followed the width of the building as far as it would go, where he set up by the window for his next move.

His foreleg flared up every time, as it still hadn’t healed from his fight on the bridge, but he needed all four hooves right now, and so he did his best to ignore the pain.

Afraid of what? he scribbled.

The voice laughed. It was a little laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. “You, Champion. Do you not remember what I said earlier? You are the instrument of their destruction. You brought the Moon back. You… You brought me back.”

The Voice tinted soft on its final sentence, and it pressed itself against his heart. He took it as an unspoken thank you.

“I only pray that we have the strength to live up to the challenge when the time comes. Or perhaps…”

He waited for it to continue. When it didn’t, he blinked. Perhaps what?

All was silent, and the street was clear. He jumped through the window and made a break for it down the street. Just before he got to the next storefront, a pack of once-ponies shambled across the intersection ahead, and there was no alleyway to duck into. They perked up at the sight of him.

His withers bristled before he took off the way he came.

They were hot on his heels, their yips and snarls like needles on the back of his neck.

He led them on half a block down the street, but it was clear he couldn’t run in his state. His hoof throbbed in time with every step, and a searing pain flared up in his hind leg where last cycle’s wound reopened, the bandage growing red with blood.

Gritting his teeth, he dove through the nearest storefront and vaulted the bar counter for the back door. A quick pivot on his good hoof, and he kicked the door open. But instead of diving through, he slid beneath the counter, curling in his hooves and tail just as the once-ponies trampled in. The door swung back and forth on squeaky hinges, and he hid away Sunlight beneath his cape, praying to the Cinders they would fall for it.

They took the bait. The bar counter creaked and moaned as they clambered over the counter—jumping, climbing, falling over, hooves scraping on the slick tile floor.

He held his breath, afraid to make the slightest sound. All it would take was an errant turn of the head, and they would see him huddled there waiting to die.

But luck was on his side. They shouldered through the swinging door, and their noises faded to silence. He ducked out the front as soon as he felt safe, putting ample distance between himself and the store.

He found a small house at the end of the street whose corner location commanded a dominating view of the cross streets, a good place to rest this cycle. Such a view would give him plenty of warning should anything come looking for him.

He peeked inside to find the remains of a living room—broken chairs and a couch that had been torn to shreds, its stuffing strewn across the floor alongside splintered boards from the walls. The stairs leading up had all collapsed save a few jagged floorboards rising up toward the darkness. Wallpaper peeled down what little remained of the walls, revealing the rot that scented the otherwise stale air. He wrinkled his nose at the smell, but it looked clear, so he hobbled in and lay down.

“The castle is not far from here,” Luna said. “When you are ready, continue north through the gate across the way and you will find the main street leading to the castle.”

He nodded. That seemed simple enough. He took a swig of water to quench his thirst and then withdrew the charcoal from his bags.

What was it you were going to say earlier?

“Nevermind it, Champion. ’Tis better to focus on what lies ahead.”

He frowned at the wood beneath his hooves. He was focusing.

There’s something you’re not telling me.

Luna dipped down lower in his chest, and its flames seemed distant, afraid to touch him. “Do not trouble yourself with it, Champion. It is my burden to bear, not yours.”

This had to do with its fears that cycle on the bridge, didn’t it? Over the course of their journey, he had gotten better at reading Luna’s movements within his chest, and vocal attributes like inflection were no longer foreign concepts to him.

Luna was going out of its way to hide something. And that was a problem.

And you are mine. He scratched the words into the wood harder than intended. He didn’t mean to be rude, but he needed to know what it was if it was something big enough to worry even the Voice.

“Ah, true, Champion, but I am certain. It is… It is better this way.” Its final words were a near whisper.

His frown got bigger. He could recognize hesitation when he heard it.

It is my duty to find the Sunlight brazier, and I can’t do that if you’re hiding something important from me. And—he hesitated—I don’t want you to get hurt.

A pause. “That is… That is noble of you, Champion, but y-you would not like the answer. It is my burden… Please.”

The sound of cans tumbling to the ground rolled in front the next room over. From a cellar staircase in the back shadows of the room shambled a lone once-pony, and its hungry eyes locked on him. Half its jaw was missing, and its tongue lolled out the gaping hole in its cheek. It charged at him before he could stand.

Luna threw its wings up like a shield, catching the beast just under the chin with a wingbone. It threw the creature’s momentum off enough that its jaws snapped closed just shy of his muzzle, and it tackled him over backwards.

It landed on him with its full weight, jaws snapping frantically and drool speckling his face with long, slimy strands. He got his hooves underneath its stomach and pushed as hard as he could, sending it sailing across the room. It crashed through the kitchen wall, letting out a yelp of surprise.

He was on his hooves as quickly as his aching body would allow. Fighting was a bad idea with his bad leg, but there was no running from this one.

“You are in no state to fight, Champion.”

He gritted his teeth as it said those words. What did Luna know about how capable he was? It was keeping secrets from him, and he aimed to prove a point. He staggered through the doorway, unhooking Sunlight from his bandolier.

Luna shielded him with its wings. “Champion, do not risk—”

He pushed its wings out of the way and swung at the once-pony.

As mindless as they seemed, these creatures understood danger. It backed away as Sunlight swung past, and it used the opening to lunge at him.

Luna buffeted it with a wing to send it crashing into a cabinet. “Champion! Cease this foolishness!”

The once-pony snarled at him, bits of spittle flying from its broken teeth. Mindless and persistent, it scrambled to its hooves and lunged at him again. Luna put its wings up to block, but he wasn’t having any of it.

He swatted its wings away and just as the beast leapt, he brought Sunlight up into its jaw like a club. The blow snapped its neck back at an unnatural angle, and the rolling flames threw a harrowing shadow across the ceiling. He used the momentum to bring his hind leg around and catch it in its exposed throat with his buck knife.

It crumpled to the ground, its snarls reduced to bloody gurgles. It tried dragging itself away, but he caught it by the tail, yanking it back and pinning it to the floor. It kicked and tore at him with its hooves, and it snarled murder as it reached up to bite him.

He beat its face in. Dark blood splattered warm across his face as his hoof sank deeper with every hoofbeat. His shoulder was ablaze with pain, but he bit down on his tongue until the sour tang of iron filled his mouth.

The moment passed, and all too suddenly he became aware of all that transpired. He heaved for breath, staring at the unrecognizable mess beneath his hooves, before turning aside and scrawling with its blood:

Tell me

Silence followed, as long and unbroken as death.

“I… I was not forthright with you earlier, Champion.” Luna had shrunk in on itself, its flames all but extinguished. There was fear in its voice.

He took a deep breath to settle his wits and hobbled over to the wall, where he withdrew his charcoal. About what?

“My dream. I… I did not tell you the truth of my dream.”

The one of the whispers? Before the Devourer destroyed the world?

Another pause. Luna trembled inside, low down in his chest. In his mind’s eye, the great pony hid its face, fighting back tears.

“The Devourer never destroyed the world, Champion.”

It never what? What kind of ridiculous statement was that? The darkness was real. The Devourer swallowed the Sun and Moon ages ago. The Voice itself witnessed it. The Voice itself was the victim. All that survived was his little village within the walls. That alone was proof enough.

But I’ve seen it, what it can do. You’ve seen my dreams.

“That is not what I mean…”

He frowned at his words etched into the wood grain. It was stringing him along.

Then what happened to our world?

It pressed itself against his ribcage, to get as far away from his heart as it could be. It spoke in barely a whisper.

“I never woke from my dream, Champion. The darkness, the Devourer… You. It is all but a part of my dream that I cannot escape.”

The charcoal hung loose in his mouth, and he furrowed his brow. Luna, that’s ridiculous. I’m talking with you right now.

A long pause. “I know, Champion…”

He stared at his words, slowly shaking his head. What in the world did it mean? It couldn’t possibly… His ears fell back, and the charcoal fell from his mouth.

He blinked to, scrambling to pick up the charcoal. That’s nonsense. I’m not a dream. I’m a pony. I’m real.

“You are real in my dream, Champion. I do not deny that. I have dreamed you, and here you are, real as the Moon and stars above. But this world is nothing more than the shattered remains of a dream… the one I originally left in search of the whispers.”

That makes no sense, he wrote frantically. I exist. You said ponies were caught in your dream from the Devourer. Am I not one of them?

“Are you? Champion, what is your name?”

His withers bristled at the rebuttal. He ground his teeth into the charcoal, and his heart hammered in his chest. It was wrong. Luna was wrong.

The village never assigns names to its ponies.

“But you would still have a name.” Luna flared up, rising higher toward his heart, as if daring to look him in the eye after all it had said. “A name from the real world. No matter how broken, no matter how deep, one never loses their sense of self in a dream.

“I loathe the words as much as you, Champion. Truly, I do. But it does not change the way things are.”

He scowled at the chicken scratch that littered the floor around him, charcoal rolling back and forth in his teeth, the nicks from his teeth growing larger the harder he bit.

But I dream.

Silence. Sunlight threw his shadow across the wall, and for a moment, he thought maybe Luna would relent with its vile words. At last it spoke, and it sounded as if every word were a tear running down its face.

“It is the same dream of your village every night. There are no sounds or color or love. There is no Equestria in your dreams, Champion. Anypony would dream of more than darkness, even in a nightmare. That much I know.”

He looked up at the Moon. His heart beat fast, not for fear or flight, but for an intense yearning to prove the Voice wrong. It couldn’t be true. Luna couldn’t be telling the truth. Could it?

“They call to me, Champion. Sister, Twilight, Cadance. All our little ponies… trapped in this purgatory of nightmares I have brought forth. I hear their screams even now, but cannot reach them.

“But I know I can.” Luna rose up toward his clavicle, as if peering upward through the ceiling at the Moon and stars. It beat its wings at his sides to kick up a layer of dust before refolding them. “My dream has broken me from the Devourer’s hold—my lantern that you tossed to the brazier. So, too, should the one at your chest save Sister. I know not what powers birthed them or the braziers, as I had not created them whilst here, nor am I certain what maintained my dream when the Devourer destroyed all others, but I know from the bottom of my heart that it is the key to drawing her from that ocean of nightmares and into this world, that we may combine our strength and banish this darkness.”

A whisper of hope: “That we might wake.”

He looked back to his shadow dancing on the wall, then at his hooves. He stared a long while before taking up the charcoal.

You wish to save your kingdom from a mistake you’ve made, and you need my help to do it.

“Yes, Champion. I cannot bear the thought of my subjects suffering any further for my mistakes.”

Even if I was a dream, you’re asking me to help you wake up.

“I… I am. I must wake to free them from this accursed slumber.”

But you said it yourself. Dreams end when we wake up.

“Y-yes, Champion,” it whispered. It withdrew to the bottom of his chest again. “They… They do.”

Silence hung between them. His mouth hung open a sliver as he stared into his words. Slowly, he bit down on the charcoal, and his eyes filled with tears.

“Champion, I know what this is asking of you, but please—”

He scraped his hoof across the floor to drown out the Voice. He snorted, staring long and hard at the streak it made in his words, like a knife through skin. He blinked away the tears, and with teeth gritted, wrote:

If you are my dreamer, then I am your dream. If you wake, I disappear.

What little of its flames dared reach up toward his heart flickered out, and its wings lay limp at his sides. “Champion, I did not mean it that way.”

He scrubbed away his message to write another. I may be your dream, Voice, but I am still me.

He threw the charcoal aside and staggered to his hooves, cinching up his bandolier. The words stared back at him, as if to mock him for his gullibility, before he hobbled onto the street and away from the castle.

VII - Justice

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Cycles passed in silence.

The city was impossibly large, and there was no end to its maze of streets. Which was good. More time to walk. More creatures to fight.

He took to the habit of hunting the smaller ones. A lone once-pony staggering through the streets, a pair staring at the wall of a darkened room. He killed them all.

His buck knife forgot the shimmer of steel, and Sunlight found a new home strapped to his foreleg, its gentle glow ever ready to destroy whatever dared shamble across his path.

He was not without his own injuries. Scars traced a path up his legs, a few finding their place among bare patches of skin along his face and jaw. His trek toward the main street started at a bold stride, brought low to a trundling walk, to a staggered limp.

But the adrenaline pumping through his veins, the throbbing in his forehoof, the creaks and pops of joints begging for rest. They were life. They were real.

The water fountains he earned through sweat and blood, and he drank his fill. He slept his cycles in the open, Sunlight welcoming anything stupid enough to think him defenseless.

But Sunlight was not the grand beacon it once was. Where once a roaring fire burned bright to push back the darkness, there was now a reserved flame that seemed all too aware of its mortality. Still, it heeded his thirst for self-actualization, and so it remained his sword against the foul and twisted.

All the while, the chilling flame within crept back into the sky to veil the stars. Even the Moon fell deeper into shadow, its light like an eye closing shut, unable to bear what had become of him.

Or perhaps it was its own shame it couldn’t bear. Good. Feeling guilty was the least it could do.

Luna’s wings lay folded at his sides. Not a twitch, not a flutter, not a word. It was better that way.

One way or another, this journey was his last. Flee, and the darkness would eventually consume him. Fight, and the brazier would rebirth the Sun, ending the dream and himself.

Survival above all, and he was determined to follow that Creed until his final breath.

So he wandered and fought, on his own terms. The bruises, scrapes, and scars were his own, from his own battles. The water he drank from the fountains and the breaths that filled his lungs with life he earned for himself. By himself. Survival above all.

But the fire of contempt could only burn so bright. Slowly, as the flame in his heart smouldered and his food rations dwindled, he sequestered himself to the narrow alleyways and darkened corridors, where the beasts didn’t roam and brick and mortar muffled their cries of hunger and pain. A dozen lonely cycles brought him to the upper floors of buildings and their crumbling rooftops, and the gentlest urge, like a hoof beneath his chin, drew his gaze upward.

For the first time in a dozen cycles, he gazed at the Moon without scoffing, without anger. And the Moon gazed back.

“I am here, Champion,” Luna said. The voice flowed like water from his canteen, eager to rush down and surround him, yet afraid to overstep. Even the stars seemed to twinkle with care. “I never left.”

He let its words fade into silence, content merely staring, his eyes tracing the shadows that pockmarked the Moon’s surface. At last he blinked, and a hoof reached to his saddlebags to withdraw the charcoal, only to remember he had abandoned it long ago. He set his hoof down, ears downcast, eyes no longer able to meet the Moon.

A wingtip touched beneath his chin, directing his gaze back up to see its light as grand as the moment he lit the brazier. “I do not need to read your words, Champion. To know you even wish to speak with me is more than I deserve.”

He could see it smiling in his mind’s eye. Weary, but genuine.

Its free wing ruffled at his side, stirring up the stagnant air. “Lead on, Champion. Wherever your heart desires. I am with you.”

His gaze dropped to his hooves, then across the distant horizon, where a wall of stone girded the cluster of Sunlight-rimmed towers that was the castle.

He had been raised to understand functionality, prize utility. A broken toy was repaired with sticks and stones found in the street, just as a canteen was strapped tighter to one’s saddlebags than anything else. What couldn’t be used or repurposed was cast aside. In these difficult times, that included ponies.

A capable stallion cared for a family unit, like his father. One that could not found himself in the fields, or the workshop, toiling at the seams of cloaks and the metal of tools beaten dull by the worthy. Those of able body and stout will stepped forth into the dark. His turn had merely been protocol, he the next most capable candidate.

It was an honor to be selected, to become the one everypony believed ready to save the world—the strongest and the bravest of them all.

But strength and bravery had wilted in the face of death. In their place the Voice came, saved him from becoming nothing more than a hopeful scrawling on the village walls, and where it dwelled in the deepest depths of his heart let courage take root. It gave him something to fight for, something to look up to, to believe in. The Voice gave him hope.

Luna gave him hope.

Was it merely a sense of repayment stirring in his chest? An ounce of salt for a strip of cloth at the tailor’s? As went life in the village, the Voice sought a trade. And that moment after the brazier swathed the cathedral in blue and silver, when the sky flashed and the world was ready to end with a cluster of teeth and a deafening wail, was his life not forfeit to its will? Even the fact that he still breathed the rotten air of this decaying city he owed to the Voice. But all the same, was his life worth trading for another?

It was right, though—about his life. He was not real, not in the explicit sense of the word. The very moment it spoke, its words rang true deep in his bones. The cracks in the façade of his reality were there, the missing details of his existence and that of the village. He didn’t truly exist. He was nothing more than a dream.

But he felt, same as anypony Luna could call real. He felt denial and anger, sadness and acceptance, happiness and fear. He: a dream, a figment of some voice’s imagination. He lived, breathed, hurt. His were feelings both raw and real. How could he be simply nothing?

Regardless of what the Voice said, no matter how true its words were, he was a pony. No amount of truth or imagination could change that. Nothing could take that away from him.

He was real, and he had to survive. Survival above all. That was the law of life.

To that end, his life was priceless. By the edicts of the Council he could not barter his life for another, not even a million others. Stepping forth into the darkness to face its dangers on behalf of the village was merely the community as a whole baring its teeth against the end.

But now that he knew the outcome of his journey would destroy him, the village, and everything he knew… It conflicted with the very core of his beliefs.

He owed the Voice. That much nopony could argue. One for one—he for Luna—perhaps. But one for tens of thousands, plus itself? Such a trade lay vastly in the Voice’s favor. It hadn’t earned such a trade.

But that was the gamble. Even with every safeguard, every intention of survival, he had resigned himself to that possibility of failure, the failure that befell every lantern bearer before him. And if he had made that promise to the village, did the dreambound ponies—did Luna—not have a right to that promise?

It was not an equal trade. One for one, always and forever. But still…

He held in his hooves the power to stand, to walk, to live and breathe, to fight and die that had been taken from these ponies. They could do nothing to save themselves from the darkness.

Was his life in trade for that of countless others really fair? He blinked, and the towers glistened steadily in the distance.

No. It was not. But it was right all the same.

He stood, brushed himself off, and climbed down a slant of rubble into an upper-floor hallway, toward the castle.

≈≈≈×≈≈≈

“We are almost there, Champion.”

He allowed himself a glance up from the ledge at his hooves. The castle towers stood tall in the Moonlight, almost seemed part of the backdrop itself for how they glinted like the stars around them. Back to the ledge. It was a four-story drop. Below, a once-pony shambled through the alleyway.

They’d become more numerous the closer he came to the castle. By this point, it had become safer to simply leap from building to building than to risk the dusty back alleys between them. But this… This gap was a whole different level of dangerous.

“We can make the jump.”

Certainty sharpened its words to a swordpoint, and for a moment he almost believed them. But none of the previous alleyways were quite as wide as this one—nearly four lengths across. It was a cross-path for carriages and important couriers, Luna had said, as if that mitigated anything.

Had it been at the start of their journey, he might have felt some level of confidence about this. As it was, his bones ached, his foreleg throbbed with an infection he couldn’t cure, and his stomach begged for rations he no longer had. How he had made the last few jumps surprised even himself.

“Trust me, Champion.” It spread its wings wide to catch the starlight as if the stars lived within the individual feathers.

He took another glance down to the alleyway below, where another once-pony tramped in. The two started snapping and snarling at each other over what looked like a rat the first one had caught.

No chance sneaking past that. He took a deep breath, eyes back to the hole in the wall across the way. He then stepped back, hiding Sunlight beneath his cape. Not that it concealed much of its light any more. It and Mother’s scarf had been reduced to tatters in his aimless cycles. As such, it threw splotches of yellow along the broken walls around him, like starlight he could actually reach out and touch.

He shook his head. Four lengths. Luna’s wings waited half open at his sides. He could make it.

He dashed forward, Sunlight thumping against his chest, hooves pounding on stone. He planted his final steps on the building’s ledge and forced everything into his hind legs.

Sound rushed in his ears as Luna spread its wings to give a downward burst. He stretched himself long to reach for the ever-rising ledge. His front hooves cleared it, but he caught the jagged concrete with his back-left shin. He collapsed amidst the rubble, clutching at his leg, face screwed in pain.

He sucked in a sharp gasp and blinked away the tears. Blood ran freely in sticky streaks from a deep gash in his hindleg, almost to the bone, bits of rubble embedded like a grotesque mockery of gemstones in bedrock. He grimaced and looked away.

He washed it clean with precious water from his canteen, then wrapped it with a strip of Mother’s scarf. It throbbed painfully as he stood up, and he favored it down the hallway, teeth gritted, breaths sharp on every step.

The voice was silent. At least it knew when it was wrong. Guilt seemed in no short supply. Not that it didn’t have enough reasons to brood on such things. What it must be like to know an entire civilization fell into never-ending nightmare because of its curiosity. It was bad enough holding that responsibility for oneself.

He looked down at Mother’s scarf about his neck, and his ears fell back. He stopped and touched a hoof to it where it draped over his heart.

What pain was this, this twisting, writhing in his chest? About the dreambound ponies, whenever their fate crossed his mind. The more he thought of them, of Luna’s quest to free them, the more this feeling took hold. Something was wrong. These thoughts. An emotion of sorts?

Anger, fear, happiness—even greed he knew well. They were instincts meant to arouse responses of survival. A means of staving off the end in an empty life. But this was not an emotion he had ever experienced, or even been taught. There was no word in their written language for it. He was not the victim, nor the perpetrator of what befell Luna’s ponies, yet there remained an undeniable connection, a desire to set things right. These ponies he knew nothing about, had never met, who would never know him or his sacrifice. They could give him nothing in return, yet their soundless cries rose up in his heart.

What had he done that no other ponies before him had? His ears drew forward, toward the rubble at his hooves, and he released a slow breath. He already knew the answer to that.

He had accepted death. Or, at the very least, knew that he must die. The Voice had set before him an impossible task, but it was his all the same. It was practical, but not for himself. No longer survival above all, but survival of another. The very idea sent a shiver through him.

Still, it felt… It felt right.

Death, for him, was guaranteed. No path remained where he saw the end of the darkness and stood beneath the light of Sun and Moon, heard the noises of the world before, birdsong in the windswept boughs of trees, the laughter of children unafraid of what skittered in the void beyond the walls. Darkness was his, now and forever. He was but a dream, a nothing born into a world of nothingness.

But in this world of greater nothings he carried within himself the very being that held it all together, the Voice ready to lead him toward an end where life and all the beautiful things of the world went on. The end he wanted. He had the power, if only to put one hoof in front of the other.

He chose this.

And that was… That was something.

“Champion?” Luna said. The Moon gazed down at him through a hole in the roof. “What troubles you?”

He took a breath. It was alright. For Luna. For them. He shook his head and continued on.

“Champion,” it said after a while. The sharpness of its tone drew a wince from him, and he came to a stop. “I have lived my fair share of millennia. I know a pony who is hiding something when I see one.”

A moment of silence, then, softly: “I wish to make amends. I can only do so if you are open with me, as I now am with you.”

He set his hoof down. For all the rubble beneath him, there was no pattern, no scattered chaos that could carry his mind away from the moment. He sighed and sat down.

A hoof reached for his saddlebags, but remembered he still had no charcoal. A sliver of concrete lay amidst larger chunks and shattered pebbles. Worth trying. He grabbed it and scrawled against the floor.

It hurt his teeth to press hard, as the stone made no effort to etch his words, so he had to use his hoof to muscle his scrawling letters into the stone. They were hardly legible and it took twice as long, but they sufficed.

This feeling. I’ve never felt it before.

The Voice didn’t reply immediately. The twisting flame in his chest coiled tighter in the silence, until a curious tone answered back.

“What feeling is that, Champion?”

He hesitated on how to describe it, but settled on the best he could think of. The effort of this new form of writing took its toll, and his weary foreleg could bear no more than fragments and half-sentences.

A need Like water Must do for your ponies Because they cant

“You have claimed ignorance to love, Champion, but you have never felt the need to defend the innocent? Do these Elders of yours not preach such deeds?”

There was that word again: love. What did it mean? He shook his head, refocusing on its question.

We help Always But survival above all We accept but I feel urge to fight despite

“So you seek to give of yourself for the sake of others.” It was not a question, but the power of its tone deserved an answer regardless.

Yes

Silence. His heart beat in the stillness, and he flicked his ears about, straining for a response despite knowing it would only come from within. Luna’s power pressed down upon him. Not forcefully, but as that of the wool blanket Mother draped over him whenever he sat shivering by the dying embers of the hearth. Only after a moment did the brush of feathers against his hooves draw his gaze to the wings wrapped about him.

“Justice,” it whispered. “It is justice that you feel.” The Moon shone brighter and, for once, warmer. “Take heart, Champion. Hold true to this feeling, and you shall know invincibility.”

He stared at the words scrawled into the stone at his hooves. Justice. The ponies in the stories, the heroes—the champions—he read about by the firelight of his youth. The deeds they accomplished and the nightmares they overcame for the good of the village cycles long past. Did they know of this justice when they stood tall against the darkness, when they cast aside their fear and stood firm against the unknown?

The stories always wrote of their struggle to survive, even when they failed. But there must have been more to it. They fought for the village, died for the village. There was a sense of community only these ponies seemed to understand, a perversion of self-survival—rather, an extension of it over the rest, the survivors. Would they be heroes if they hadn’t? What more was there to it?

This thing, this word: love. Luna had used it when referring to the innocent. It spoke of it as a tool, or maybe a responsibility over its ponies. The voice was a leader in the world before, the ponies its charge, like his sister in their family unit. To command ownership, leadership, guardianship. Did love mean all these things?

There had to be more.

“Champion,” Luna said softly, as if careful not to startle him. He stirred, and before him lay the scribbles of their conversation, his thoughts and fears laid bare to the voice that sought his trade. “We must be off. We cannot tarry any longer, for your sake or mine.”

His stomach growled, and a twinge shot through him. Luna was right. Time remained their biggest enemy now. At least, until they found the brazier. He placed the concrete sliver in his bag and started forward on creaky legs.

“We are almost there. This was once the Hall of Champions.” Its flame within flickered—a tiny smile. “It is the last building along the castle mall. Find the stairs. There is a balcony atop its highest tower. From there we can survey for an entrypoint.”

The staircase awaited him at the far end of the hall, just past a catwalk that gave a clear view of an atrium below. He could only guess as to what marvels he would have seen had it stood in its true glory.

It was dark in the stairwell, the Moon’s light able to peek through only a few cracks in the walls. The stairs themselves fared little better than the crumbling walls and shattered flagstones of the atrium. He stumbled on a broken stair and turned to watch its rubble fall into the distant darkness below.

The gash in his hind leg throbbed the more he climbed, and he swore a silent prayer to the Moon when he reached the top floor. There the Moon answered with a soft pool of light on the checkered floor, cast through the balcony opening at the far end of the empty room.

He stepped toward it, the glint of fake Sunlight drawing his eyes down from the Moon to Canterlot Castle. Even destroyed as it was by the Devourer and the passage of time, it was a breathtaking sight.

Dozens of ancient and crumbling towers reached ever toward the Moon as if vying for its favor. Their golden parapets twinkled like tiny points of Sunlight to join the stars in their little dance far above a wall that cloistered them so royally from the squabbling houses and dilapidation of the city. Moonlight glowed off the wall’s surface to give it a strange and holy aura, as if there was magic within each and every stone.

A gate, made of the same Sunlight shimmer as the tower tops, stood tall in the center. Its surface stood testament to the wearing of the cycles. Long cracks like the scars of the Devourer itself gouged deep into its face, and a large hole was missing from the top half, as if torn away by something wanting in.

At the foot of the gate, atop a bridge spanning a barren moat, slept a monstrous beast of mangy fur and massive fangs. It lay with its head on its paws. Around it were the scattered bones of once-ponies and raven beasts, picked clean and left to perfume the air with their rot. The gore carved out a vague boundary around the mouth of the bridge, a warning to other shamblers that death slept nearby. Even at their distance, he could hear its growling snores as if he stood beside it.

He felt the cold grip in his heart as the sight sank in. Not of his own worries, but that of Luna’s. Whatever bold face it tried to wear in the brightness of the Moon and shimmer of stars, it couldn’t hide from the cold, squirming doubt in his chest.

He withdrew the concrete sliver. In?

“Yes. This is our entrance.”

That thing, he wrote. He couldn’t tear his gaze from the sleeping form, the rise and fall of its massive, furred chest. Even for how the Moon washed away color, he could see the blood caked to its muzzle, swore he could smell it. Can’t pass

“We need not get past the wolf, Champion, nor even raise a hoof against it. We must merely get over it. The opening in the gate.” It extended a pair of feathers toward the hole in the top half of the gate.

The hair stood up on the back of his neck. Over? Insane Distance Even as he wrote those words, he gauged the distance, almost—

“At least twenty lengths, yes.”

Last jump was—

“Four. I know, Champion. But we are far higher.” The stars twinkled its certainty, and it gave its wings a few test flaps. “We can make it. I can make it.”

The Voice was right in that they were farther up, but no. That… wolf thing. If they didn’t make it… He shook his head. It was impossible.

Another way, he wrote. Must be

The Moon flickered but a fraction of an instant. “Nay, Champion. ’Tis the safest way in. There are a few secret entrances about the city, but I refuse to delve the crystal caverns. After restoring the Moon to the sky, I fear what manner of evils have retreated to its impenetrable darkness.”

His head still shook of its own accord. Luna no Too far Youre not strong enough You said too

“Then would you rather chance the caverns?” Luna’s words stabbed like daggers in his chest, and the stars above flared to life. “Would you rather step blindly into that dark abyss where the teeming horrors await you with tooth and claw? You do not know the passage through that labyrinth, Champion, and Tartarus be damned, neither do I!”

The stars regressed to their normal twinkle, and the Moon seemed to fall into shadow, as if the Voice were scolding itself for its outburst. Silence reigned for untold moments before the Voice continued in a reserved tone.

“I know the layout of the caverns’ upper reaches, but where and how they connect… I do not trust we have the time nor the strength to chance them. Nay, the caverns are not an option. You have carried us far, Champion, father than I could have ever truly asked of you. Now you must allow me to repay the favor. You must jump, and believe.”

He stepped forward again, eyes slowly coming around to the gate and its hole that seemed smaller than ever. He sucked in a breath, held it, defied death with its slow release. Four lengths, to twenty. He lowered his head, ears falling back.

Before he could put concrete to stone, Luna spoke in a near whisper. “You are not the only one who wants to see this through. You know this, Champion, deep within your heart, that I want nothing more than to light the brazier and return the Devourer to Tartarus. I would gladly lay down my life for those of my subjects, but death I spite with bared teeth and unfurled wing until our task is through.”

His heart squirmed in his chest, and he couldn’t help the tremors shaking the sliver in his hoof as he held its point against the floor. I am afraid

He released the sliver from his grasp and set his hoof to the floor, but it did little to stop the tremors. A wingtip tucked beneath his chin and coaxed it toward the Moon’s gentle glow.

“Do not fear the darkness ahead, Champion. I am with you, as I have always been, as I always will be.”

He took another breath, and the Moon seemed to smile down at him, casting off the shadow hanging over Canterlot. He smiled back, but the creeping doubt drew his gaze back to the scrawlings on the floor and drained the smile from his face.

Im not strong enough

“You are strong enough, Champion. You have overcome your fears of death and found within yourself the courage to seek justice. That is a strength few have ever found.”

For all the steps he had taken to reach this very spot, had he really? Death was forever, a darkness no light would ever penetrate, not even Sunlight that glowed so radiantly against his chest. To feel its warmth ripped from him, to feel his heart beat its very last and his breath leave him to never be drawn again. He couldn’t bring himself to write it.

What if—

“Shh… Fear not the darkness,” Luna whispered. “Whatever evils lie ahead, I am here. Every step of the way. Now, lie yourself down. Close your eyes. I wish you show you, Champion…”

He drew a slow breath, then released it. Not to spite death or darkness, but to calm himself and focus on Luna’s words. A heaviness overtook his eyelids, and it seemed the weight of the Moon laid itself upon his shoulders coax him to the floor. He rested his head on his forelegs and closed his eyes while Moonlight pooled around him. As he drifted into darkest slumber, there was, faintly, the soft touch of lips against his forehead.

“… What it is you fight for.”

VIII - The Goddess Beheld

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Something hissed in the haze beyond his eyelids. He clenched his eyes tighter and put a hoof to his face to block the light drilling through his eyelids. A grimace found its way to his lips as the ambient noises drew him further from the realm of sleep. He took a deep breath, and into his brain rushed a myriad of scents he had never smelled before. The sensation snapped his eyes open.

He lay on a bed of grass, but that was impossible. It wasn’t brown. It was a different color, and it expanded into the distance, tall and bobbing and thronged with tiny spines as delicate as the hair of his fetlock. He stared for what could have been ages. Was this what Luna had talked about cycles ago? Was this… green?

He touched a delicate hoof to them, fearful they would snap and crumble away, but they bent and waved at the touch of his hoof, reached up around it as it passed them by. They were soft, so soft. Their gentle sensation at the tip of his hoof seemed to ask he reach out and touch them all.

Around him rose patches of this green in bunches of leaves that belonged to plants that didn’t grow in the village and had no names or even the words to describe them. Packed with green and the dancing shadows of the light from above—long and trailing, feeling, creeping winding weaving crawling overtop and through the rest with leaves narrow and round and spiney. Between and around them sprouted stems and leaves hung low with reds and blues of berries and flower heads, all vying for his undivided attention.

He had seen a flower once. It was a sickly little thing that grew in the village chapel, in a little pot beside the Moonlight brazier. He was never allowed near it. But here in whatever place he had awoken he could reach out and touch them. All of them. And how they bent their slender necks, curled their silky petals. So bright. So vibrant! It was as if the world had peeled away a film from his eyes he never knew existed.

At seemingly random intervals in all directions, massive pillars of stone towered over the endless green. Deep cracks ran their lengths like parched earth. He rose, taking slow steps toward the nearest pillar.

No. These weren’t stone. He placed a hoof against one and almost recoiled at the texture. Wood.

It was a tree. An honest, living tree.

The bark’s miniature canyons reached skyward, where millions upon millions of leaves of this most vibrant green waved and hissed at each other. And farther still, a peaceful blue hung in the ceiling of this place, hidden away, peeking through the leaves.

One spot above in particular glowed brighter than the rest. It tinged the leaves a blinding color at its center, bleeding outward where it rimmed each individual leaf in the color of not-quite fire. It was the same color of Canterlot’s towers. Not the faint glint beneath Moonlight but a shining, blinding light that stung the eye to see. Sunlight. His ears fell back against his head, his jaw slack, and he stared all the more through the sting.

A shrill sound came from above, and something flitted overhead. He ducked on instinct, but perked up as a winged creature no larger than his hoof alighted on a branch. It bobbed up and down, the branch supple and willing to bear its weight. There it turned its head in quick, twitchy motions, its black beady eyes set within the most brilliant blues and whites and streaks of black taking in the world. The shrill sound came again, and he saw, to no illusion, its beak open and shut.

This tiny feathered creature made the sharpest of sounds, as if it were calling to him, to the world. It dipped low on its perch, and in one swift motion took flight to leave the branch bobbing in its wake as it disappeared into the green beyond.

And as he stood there, gazing into the endless green, he opened his ears, and the sounds of a million living things made themselves known.

He knew of the words, those that meant sounds, but which was which? Were these chirping or squawking? Barking or chittering? The treetops hissed and swayed, their boughs dancing in the light of a blue sky.

As he gazed upward, a soft presence brushed across his face and through his mane, cool as Moonlight. It whispered in his ears, slow and hollow, but full of well-wishing.

Wind? Was this wind?

Where was he?

There was another sound. High, bubbly. He’d heard it before. Luna made it after they defeated the raven beast in the tunnel. Laughter. But this one was different. Younger, perhaps.

He turned, and there a white-coated filly peeked at him from around a tree with wide eyes, greener than all the world around him. She flicked an ear before ducking away, laughter trailing off to hide amidst the birdsong and chatter of this place’s little creatures.

Another pony beyond the village walls? A filly no less. She wanted him to follow, so he set off after her.

He pushed aside branches that swished back into place, crunched dried leaves and snapped twigs beneath his hooves. The air was thick with noises of the forest, but thicker still it filled his lungs with its scents and a seemingly dense presence, like when he lowered his head into the village well. But rather than a mustiness, it tasted of something different. Warmer, headier. Fresh. Whatever it was, it beckoned him onward, toward a strange sound he’d never heard before.

It was that of water sloshing around in a bowl, poured from one to another to another without end. When he stepped through the bushes, the sight of water greeted him, but not how he imagined it.

It ran along the ground, through a dip in the earth almost three lengths wide. It washed overtop rocks and sticks. Leaves floated on its surface, carried aloft on its flow downhill. The sound came from where it splashed against a particularly large rock and bent around the far side of a thicket of trees.

A riverbed, Luna’s voice played in his head as clear as when he first crossed that dry, Moonlit plain cycles ago. The filly laughed on the other side, water dripping from her coat. She smiled at him through the curtain of beet-red mane plastered to her face.

He gave the stream a glance, then a tentative step. Cool to the touch, it rushed up the side of his hoof and around in its journey downstream. He took another step farther in. It was deeper, and his hoof sank to the knee. Hesitation drew him back a step, but curiosity nudged him forward with gentle encouragement.

Splish went his first hoof back into the stream. It was cool and inviting. Splash went his other hoof, and he swished and sloshed them around in the water, feeling it roll past him as it soaked through his fur. He stamped and stomped to the kerplunk of water splashing everywhere and relishing the sounds and just feeling alive.

He lost his balance and toppled into the stream. He scrambled to his stomach, the stream coming just to his withers, and he shook the water out of his mane, which clung to the side of his face in wet strands. He was out of breath, but he wore the biggest smile he could remember, lying there, soaked to the bone, listening to the water dribble back into the stream. And still it rolled past him, carrying his eyes down beyond the thicket at the bend.

Leaves rustled ahead, and he turned in time to see the filly taking off into the bushes. He got up and followed at a gallop, making sure to splash as much as he could all the way across.

On the other side of the stream, the trees grew thicker the longer he followed the filly, the brief glimpses through leaf and vine like the blink of an eye. But that was all he needed to see without a doubt: there were two of them. They looked like sisters.

Twins, perhaps, and they laughed the same laugh, scurrying between bushes, beneath low-hanging branches blooming with leaves broader than his head, their large green eyes turned back his way.

The feathered creatures overhead, the little furry things scampering through the leafy forest floor, the rich smell of dirt and grass filling in the deepest reaches of his lungs as his coat started drying. It was all so much, yet not enough. He shed his cares for the wheres and whens, the hows and whys. Here, now, this place was new and lush and beautiful. He and the fillies were beyond the village gates, but also beyond the darkness. It held no sway in this strange and wonderful place. Here was safe, wherever here was.

Ahead of him, the trees gave way to an open field, and there he saw a figure. He stopped, curious yet hesitant, unable to judge its shape between the trees. Something within his chest urged him onward, a sense deep down that whatever this figure was, it waited for him, was part of him. Gingerly, he stepped from the thicket.

It stood among shoots of purple flowers bobbing in the wind. He paused not two steps out from the last tree, and what little breath he still held left him as his ears fell back against his skull.

It was the Voice. Not a formless mass of shadows watching from the corner of his nightmare, or an obscure imagined pony in his mind’s eye. It stood full-bodied before him, tall, graceful as the Moon.

No. Not it. She.

Starlight twinkled in the swirling mists of her mane and tail, little wisps breaking free like embers from the hearth to travel with the wind. On her head, she wore a tiara as black as onyx, and from her forehead rose a long projection that spiralled to an elegant point. She stepped forward on slender hooves dark as the Moonlit sky, wearing silver horseshoes that flashed in the Sunlight. Her wings at her sides bobbed in time with her stride, their tips long and lithe as the curves of her chest and flank.

But what amazed him most of all was her smile. He had never seen such an enchanting smile, full of all the well-wishing such shining turquoise eyes could ever impart.

“Hello, Champion,” Luna said as she strode near. She put her wings out to corral the fillies, where they hid behind her hooves to peek out at him. “Or, should I say, good morning?”

Luna swept a wing behind her. “Welcome, Champion, to Equestria.”

Beyond her lay a valley and long rows of mountains stretching into the distant blue. Canterlot Mountain rose above them, far removed in its majesty from the dark and decaying tunnels he had climbed. Canterlot itself sat perched at the top, shimmering in the Sunlight like a diamond only half unearthed. What looked like mist fell from it in long streaks for a body of water below. A forest huddled against the water’s edge, and endless fields of grass spanned the distance between, bobbing in ceaseless waves beneath the wind.

“This, Champion…” Luna said, stepping up beside him, eyes trained on something in the distance, her ever present smile growing by the second. “This is what you are fighting for. The birds and forests, the open air and the ponies you will soon see.”

He stepped forward, eyes dancing about to take it all in. His legs tingled in a desire to race out there and see and hear it all, to smell what there was beyond the purple flowers at his hooves and the white-flowered bushes along the tree line behind him.

“Do you see it?” Luna said. She pointed a wing at a smidge of color across the plain. “That little bundle of colors between the forest’s arms. That is Ponyville. I should think it is what your village used to be before darkness fell upon my dream.”

He perked up his ears. His village? He looked to her, and her questioning eyes met his.

“Would you like to see it?” she asked.

He nodded eagerly. All his life he spent in darkness, surrounded by ramshackle huts and dying grass. Even from this distance, the little speck held more color than his village ever had in his life.

Luna chuckled and said, “Very well.” Wearing a smile, she closed her eyes and bowed her head.

The projection at her forehead glowed a deep blue, and the world smeared as if he were staring through a dirty window. The ground shifted so that he had to catch himself from falling. Colors wavered and reformed, and the grass beneath his hooves became hard-packed dirt. When he regained his balance, they stood amidst a town square filled with ponies.

Their smiles were as bright as their coats of colors he couldn’t name—different shades of blue and Sunlight and green and many more beyond. Some had either projections from their foreheads or wings like Luna, and some had neither like himself. A little stampede of foals chased after a red ball for some reason, but their laughter was something he wouldn’t soon forget. The buildings themselves stood tall and clean with colors beyond even those of the ponies, and a mouthwatering aroma unlike any other drifted on the air from a building of dots, lumps, swirls and all sorts of odd, brightly colored shapes sticking from its walls.

He stepped toward a nearby mare, reached out to shake hooves in greeting, but she didn’t regard him in the slightest. He frowned at her, confused, until she saw something behind him and walked straight through him. It sent a wave of chills down his back.

Luna laughed. “’Tis a dream, yes, Champion, but we are not a part of it. You do not exist here, nor do I.

“This particular dream is of the last time I visited this place,” Luna said. She, too, stood captivated by the goings-on, her eyes dancing between pony and house and ball and whirling disk the foals threw. “There was a concert that night. Jazz, if I recall. Would you care to walk with me?”

She smiled at him in a strange manner. Something about her easy smile—the way she arched her brows, eyes half lidded—struck him as multilayered, meant more than a smile could ever intend. She started forward without answer, her gaze lingering on him for two steps before shifting ahead.

He could watch her walk forever. The way she moved, so graceful and light-hooved. He fell in beside her without hesitation.

The bright sky dimmed with every street they passed, time skimming by as fluid as the voices drifting overhead. A distant, steady sound whispered to him beneath the droll of voices. It made no effort to command his attention, content amidst the other hundreds of sounds that had him turning his head at the smiles and shutting doors and clip clop of hooves on stone and packed dirt.

He smelled more flowers like the ones back in the meadow. It came from a house exploding with color—flowers of all shapes and sizes. They bloomed from baskets hung from every windowsill and a garden that ran the house’s length. A wagon sat outside overflowing with even more of them arranged in twined bunches and assorted by color.

Ponies exchanged small, shiny disks for them and went on their way toward the sounds steadily gaining hold of the town. To think they bartered with useless bits of metal in place of goods, that they could even spare their wealth for something as luxurious as a fragrant smell.

That curious noise they’d been following picked up again, and he swivelled his ears to better hear it. It bobbed up and down like that little winged creature in the forest, as if expecting him to wonder at it. The sounds held a distinct pattern to them, clearer with each street that passed beneath his hooves.

He crooked Luna a curious eye. She had yet to look back since asking him to follow, and she led with distinguished authority toward these rhythmic sounds. Still she wore that smile of some underlying meaning. It must have to do with the noises ahead.

Beams of light reached into the starlit sky above, sweeping back and forth as if trying to illuminate every star one by one. A wooden stage of sorts waited for them in the middle of a crowd, and atop it stood black-and-white dressed ponies with Sunlight-colored metal tubes and stringed boxes of curved, shiny wood. The sounds, now slow and rhythmic, came from these contraptions in their hooves. They were the center of attention, the crowd’s collective gaze fixed on them or the various see-through containers of colored water at their tables.

“I particularly liked this one,” Luna said at last. Her eyes never left the ponies on stage. She looked entranced, everything about her slowing to match the rhythm of the noises. Even her mane waved slower in the breeze only it knew. “This song was one of the first I heard when I returned from my exile in the Moon. Very classic in its structure. It reminds me of the composers of old.”

He listened to her words, despite how little sense they made. He had never heard of a “song” before, but if this was one, then he liked songs. Every sound that swung low had a partner there to carry it higher. Fast sounds made way for longer, slower ones. A long moment passed before he realized his body swayed to the rhythm.

Luna smiled at him. “Enjoying yourself?”

He blushed, though unsure why. His heart beat faster when she spoke, something about that half-lidded smile and the softness of her voice.

The song ended, and the ponies on stage bowed. Those watching stamped their hooves, shouted and yelled at the stageponies. But they were happy sounds, it seemed, evident in the smiles they wore. What strange customs they had, to make noise in approval of what they enjoyed.

“Come, Champion, there is more than music to our world.” She closed her eyes, the projection from her forehead glowed, and again the world smeared into a singular mess of color.

He held his balance better this time, and the world blended back into view as he watched what used to be little thatched houses reshape as towering monoliths taller than Canterlot Mountain.

Ponies ran through lined streets made from some type of stone he had never seen before. They dragged large wheeled structures of wood behind them, some with other ponies sitting inside.

To have called Ponyville a colorful place would do the word a disservice. These ponies were colorful—their flowing clothes and the grand and shiny things that dangled from their manes and ears. Their giant houses—for what else could they be?—they splashed with colors and paintings of smiling faces and words for things he could only guess at. The Moon watched from above, but there were far more lights illuminating this city.

Lights of reds and blues and greens and Sunlight flashed and waved across the walls under the power of their own illumination. Some had even been coiled into rope and made to resemble words and the suggestion of ponies or objects. Lamps hung over the streets at even intervals, and every window he could see glowed warm with their own personal Sunlight.

A hoof pushed up against his chin, closing his mouth. Luna chuckled, that same odd smile on her lips. She set her hoof down and swept a wing at all there was to see.

“This is Manehattan, the most metropolitan of our cities.” She walked down the street, her eyes to the tops of the giant houses. “’Tis one of many feats of ponykind’s advances in technology and business. I do not much care for it myself, but I cannot spit in the face of progress, nor can I deny the benefits such advances bring our little ponies.”

They passed a large window, where inside stood statues of ponies fastened to poles by their barrels. Each statue wore on its head a massive hat with feathers and flowers of all sorts of colors.

A mare walked past him. She wore one of the many colorful clothes all the others did, but beneath her hat glowed a protrusion from her head, like Luna’s, and her bags floated—floated—next to her. He had to stop and turn his head as she passed.

“Magic is commonplace in Equestria, Champion.” Her gaze upon the mare looked even and natural. “’Tis nothing special to anypony, but seeing the look on your face humbles me so. The things we take for granted…”

Her words drifted into silence, overtaken by the bustle of the city. He let his gaze wander in the moment, take in everything new and different about this world. His eyes drifted upward to the skies, where pegasi flew between the giant houses. Like the little creature of the forest, they moved gracefully, as if the earth simply didn’t bother pulling them down to where they belonged. What was it like to fly? To be unbound by the dirt beneath his hooves?

“Yet another thing I have taken for granted,” Luna half whispered. She, too, gazed upward, following the little silhouettes darting between houses. Her lips curled into a smile, and she swivelled an eye down toward him. “I haven’t stretched my wings in ages.”

Her smile grew mischievous like it did in Ponyville. “Care to join me?”

What?

Before he could shake his head, the world smeared a third time. The giant houses melted to the ground, and what was once solid stone softened to the point that falling through became a frightening possibility. The wind picked up, and when everything stopped changing, a bright blue sky stretched all around them.

He stood on a… a thing—a giant lumpy white thing far above the earth. It left his hooves and haunches damp where it touched, and that much colder in the wind. Below, fields of green trawled on in silence, their colors muted by the shadows cast from the other white things in the sky.

Luna sat a length away on the lumpy white ground. She wore that odd, layered smile, wings half open, feathers bending slightly beneath the breeze. She giggled.

“Catch me, Champion.” She fell over backwards and disappeared beneath the white earth.

His fur bristled all down his back, and he scrambled to the ledge to see her getting smaller, falling toward her death upon the fields below. He dove, hooves outstretched to catch her.

She twisted in freefall, her wings curling to catch the wind and leave little contrails of the white thing they had fallen from. Her laughter rang high above the wind roaring in his ears.

He caught her around the waist, his chin coming to rest in the valley between her shoulder blades.

She craned her neck back to look sidelong at him, and she wore that little smile of hers. It got his heart racing.

“You caught me,” she whispered. She gave a little giggle that could have stilled the Devourer itself, and in that moment, he forgot his fear of heights and the ground below.

“I may not be able to fly in my outer dream, but in this one I am not bound by such limitations.” She spread her wings, every individual feather catching and bending ever so slightly in the wind. “Here, I can fly.”

Luna arched her back, wings reaching high to either side. She thrust them downward, and her back surged up into his chest. He had to grip tighter to keep from falling off.

She rose another bout of laughter to the sky as she beat her wings, climbing higher toward the white things trawling along above them. She passed one by, grazing it with the tip of her wing to tease out feathery curls of white from its belly.

He stuck out a hoof to touch them, and how light they were! They strung out further at his touch like cotton being pulled free from clothing. How in Equestria had he stood on this moments ago? What kind of magic defied the laws of the world as he knew them?

“Hold on, Champion,” Luna said over her shoulder. She gave one last pump of her wings, and down she dove.

The wind picked up in his ears as they gained speed, and he felt a very uncomfortable sensation of his insides rising up inside him. He held tighter onto her waist, watching as they rushed past chunks of floating white earth.

Luna twisted her wingtips to send them into a spiral that had all the colors of the world blending together. “We are safe, Champion. Here were are unbound by the chains of the earth. Here we are free!”

She climbed again into the sky, through a patch of white earth. It melted around them and left damp streaks on his fur that drew away the Sun’s heat.

They scraped the highest reaches of the sky, where even the floating ground didn’t dare tread. All was silent in the moments between wing beats, and despite the lack of air, a sense of peace washed over him.

All too suddenly, he felt her presence disappear from under him. He seized up at the realization he was in freefall and flailed his hooves in search of something to grab hold of.

“Calm yourself, Champion,” came Luna’s voice. She fell belly-up beside him, without a care in the world. She twisted a wing to roll herself over into a dive, hooves spread wide. “Feel the wind! This is freedom!”

She threw her wings out to break her fall and loop above him, laughing over the roaring wind. In one seamless motion, she wrapped her hooves around him, and her muzzle brushed against his cheek.

“I have you,” she whispered. Her warm breath tickled his ear, her heart beat between his shoulder blades, and her hooves pulled him close. She held him within the span of her wings, and together they fell as one.

He closed his eyes and let himself be carried away by her presence. He could have been falling into the Devourer’s open jaws and wouldn’t have been afraid.

They landed on a patch of floating white earth, and there they lay in the silence of the world. He closed his eyes to better listen to the sound of her breathing, quiet as a whisper beneath the howl of the wind. Her heart continued beating against his back, slow and steady, and he didn’t dare open his eyes lest the moment pass him by. Slowly, he brought a hoof to hers around his chest and held her tight.

He had never experienced a sensation like this, this desire to be near another pony, to hold them close and never let go. But whatever it was, he couldn’t bear the thought of losing it. Something about this mare—the way she walked, talked, laughed, looked at him. She was unlike any other.

She evoked in him this unnamable feeling, a sensation that made his heart beat fast, made him want to get up and move yet lay still for fear of disturbing the moment they shared.

She tightened her wings around him to better hold in their collective body heat. Unlike the waking world, he could feel her wings against him, rather than simply a force that resisted his touch. Her feathers were softer than the fetlocks of a newborn foal, and as warm as a blanket left by the fire.

He knew what was to come once he woke, the darkness and danger awaiting him on the other side of the gate and the distance between. But for now, here in the comfort of Luna’s dream, he could smile and hold close this feeling that meant more than anything in the world.

This feeling, yes. More than the Sun, more than the grass and sky and the bright lights and tall buildings. More than the smells that made his eyes want to flutter shut, the songs that made him want to get up and move. More than himself.

This, he could fight for.

IX - Finding the Brazier

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The feeling of knives in his stomach was the first thing he knew when he woke that cycle. His dream may have been a welcome refuge from his struggles, but hunger was ever ready to remind him of his grim reality.

He squeezed his eyes shut and doubled over, pressing his snout into the floor. The cold stone smelled of dust and disuse, and it only served to remind him of the food he no longer had.

He put out a hoof to raise himself up, but his bones felt cemented together. After these last few cycles, he could barely stand let alone prepare for the jump ahead.

He had to do it, though. He would do it.

Luna’s wings rustled at his sides in greeting. It drew his eyes up toward the Moon above the distant castle towers, ever watching, ever patient.

“We must be off, Champion,” Luna said.

There was no command or annoyance in her voice, yet he felt compelled to follow. Her authority came from the sights of the beforetimes—the sounds and smells that made his hooves feel light as feathers, the quiet cloud-top solitude they had shared. Even now as he stared at the Moon, he could feel her hooves around him and her wings draped over his shoulders. It was the most beautiful feeling in the world, and he found himself already standing at the thought.

Reality abruptly reasserted itself in the aches and pains of a dozen injuries. He gritted his teeth as he stretched out what he could and favored the rest, A quick swig from his canteen, and he set his eyes on the gate a good twenty lengths across the way. Its hole seemed smaller than the last time he looked—smaller still for the massive wolf beast sleeping beneath it. He only had one shot at this, and he knew what would happen if they failed.

“Are you ready?” A moment of silence to center himself, and he nodded. Luna flapped her wings, stirring up the cool night air. “Good.”

He captured the gate’s image in his mind’s eye, the distance between, the angle of descent. He headed for the back wall, and there he tucked his scarf into his bandolier and emptied his saddlebags of all but his canteen and the stone.

Only the essentials. Everything else would only weigh him down.

He breathed in and pictured Luna there beside him. She was with him, and nothing else mattered. Together, they were diamond. He breathed out, and the rest was motion.

He sensed the run-up more than he actually processed it happening—heard the clip-clop of his hooves, felt his injuries flare up, smelled the Moonlit chill in the air as he braced his hind legs on the railing for one final leap of faith.

Luna spread her wings wide, every feather like a sword unsheathed in the Moonlight. For a single, breathtaking moment, he felt weightless, and his mind flashed back to his dream. He felt the wind in his mane and Luna’s wings surrounding him, and all was right with the world.

“Hold steady, Champion," rang Luna’s voice through his thoughts.

His mind snapped back to the present and the gate ahead. They were almost there. They were actually doing it!

He dared a glance at Luna’s wings. They spread wide at the corners of his eyes, each feather pulled taught in the wind. But a sense of worry grew in the pit of his stomach as they narrowly, almost imperceptibly, spread wider, their tips flipping up from their downward angle. That worry flared to life in his chest as Luna strained harder, stretched herself thinner than she could endure, and a realization cut through his senses.

She wouldn’t make it.

Panic sent his heart pounding madly against his ribs. He had no voice to give words of encouragement, and could only stare at the gate in desperation, hooves outstretched for the gap no more than two lengths away. He heard what sounded like a pained gasp in the back of his mind, and her left wing hitched, jerking him leftward.

“Champion!”

He caught hold of the opening just before crashing face first into the gate. Pain exploded in his muzzle, but he held on despite the daze and the taste of iron filling his mouth. He spit out a tooth and watched it fall a good three stories to the causeway below. He didn’t hear it clatter on the stone, but his eyes caught the flick of the wolf beast’s ear, and up reared its misshapen head.

Eyes like the slits of open wounds met his gaze, and out rolled a growl that froze the blood in his veins.

“That is not good,” Luna said. “Climb, Champion, quickly!” She beat her wings, but the upward thrust only served to unsettle whatever footing he could find on the gate’s smooth gold.

The wolf barked, and its bassy volume vibrated through his body. It leapt up the side of the gate, its teeth snapping just shy of his hind legs still scrambling for purchase.

It circled beneath him, those slitted eyes skewering him like a slab of meat. It gave another run-up the side of the gate, its paws heavy enough to jostle the gate and almost send him tumbling down into its open jaws.

He flicked his tail up just before its jaws snapped shut, but he was quick enough to kick it in the snout with a hindleg. He used the push-off to launch himself up into the opening, where he grabbed hold of the far edge. It gave him just enough purchase to pull himself up, but Luna’s frantic wing beats overcompensated, and he tumbled through.

He flailed his hooves for anything to grab hold of, but there was only empty air. He cried out as the ground rushed up to meet him.

“Still yourself!” Luna shouted above the madness.

He went stiff as a board, and Luna spread her wings, righting him into a shaky but controlled fall that saw him tumbling across the flagstones. There he lay a long while, staring up at the stars as they spun nauseating circles in the sky.

Breathe. Just breathe. Defy the darkness. He rolled onto his stomach, and everything hurt. But he was safe.

Something pounded against the gates, and the courtyard resounded with the noise. He jolted to his hooves, backing away from the gates and the wolf beast wanting in.

The gate shuddered beneath another heavy blow, and the gate bent inward ever so slightly to test the ancient crossbar holding it shut. Instinctively, his eyes shot to the open courtyard around him, but it was thankfully empty. Another blow, and another shudder. A short bout of silence left his ears straining for more, before the wolf gave a long, bone-chilling howl. It faded to silence, and there was no more.

His heart still beat a racket in his chest, and he didn’t know what to do with the sudden energy in his legs. He spun around to give the courtyard another scan.

Luna flitted up beside his heart and seemed to wrap a little flicker of flame around him in what he could only describe as a hug.

“Be still, Champion. We have escaped the beast. Collect yourself and let us proceed.” Her little hug tightened, and he swore he felt her wings clench against him at his sides. “I knew you could do it.”

He didn’t do much there besides trust in her. Luna had done all the work in getting them there after he made the jump. But believing was still a contribution, no matter how small, and so he simply gave a nod and thanked her for being deserving of that trust.

The courtyard was as empty as it first seemed. Fields of dry and wilted grass stretched to every corner, framed by the tall white walls that kept out the creatures of the dark. Somehow, despite the untold birthcycles spent in darkness, it almost smelled like the grass in his dream when he put his nose to it. He stole a respectable mouthful at Luna’s behest and moved on, not wanting to waste precious time.

There was an inner courtyard separated by an open gateway. It was smaller than the first, and here the flagstone walkway was flanked by long strips of dirt with no grass.

“These grounds were filled with the most beautiful gardens,” Luna said. “Chrysanthemums of gold and silver. They were Sister’s favorite.” She giggled. “She was always a sucker for more… overt symbolism.”

He crossed the courtyard and stopped before the next gate, a mass of iron that reached into the soft shadows just above Sunlight’s reach. Its bottom dug a series of rectangular holes the size of his hoof into the flagstones. Beyond it, a golden double door stood ajar. Another glance toward its top and the towering iron brought with it wonders of just how much it must weigh.

“If you are thinking of lifting it, Champion, I wish you all the luck in the world.”

He smirked. Though her flame remained steadfast, he had somewhat learned to pick up on her inflection and sense of humor. He wasn’t very good at it still, but he appreciated the banter all the same.

His many cycles spent without food had slimmed him down to the point that he could slip between the bars. His hips gave him some trouble, but with a twist and a pull, he came tumbling out the other side.

Luna smirked in the flicker of cold fire that came to rest on his collar bone. “So much for the vaunted impregnability of Canterlot castle.”

Very much so. Though, whoever built it probably wasn’t expecting such unorthodox methods, nor was he the kind to challenge the might of an entire castle were it at full capacity. Still, all the better for him. He got up and nosed his way through the entrance.

Inside was a grand walkway of stone and a velvet runway carpet, long since beaten to a dingy brown. Pillars ran the length of the hallway, cracks running up their sides like the inedible ivy that carpeted the village walls. Chunks of stone littered the floor, cast down from a tired ceiling.

High up along either wall, large poles of bronze held up the tattered remains of tapestries long since torn to shreds. What remained if their tatters depicted in stylistic curves and points the images of ponies and what he could only guess was day-to-day life.

They shared the walls in even intervals with tall windows that stretched from floor to ceiling. The shattered remains of some hard, clear substance clung to their edges and lay scattered across the floor in sharp pieces that crunched underhoof. From what little he could make of it, it was meant to catch the Sunlight and glow certain colors.

“It has been so long since I have seen this place," Luna whispered in wonder, or perhaps heartache.

He took in as much as he could, on the assumption she saw only through his eyes. He knew homesickness well. What it must be like for her…

“Even in ruins it still holds its splendor.”

He followed the carpet for the winged stairway ahead, and Luna refocused her flames at the forefront of his chest.

“Yes, Champion. Up the foyer stairs and to the left wing. I have not a clue where the brazier may await us, but I suspect a few locations. We shall start with the closest.”

He followed the stairs to the left, and it led him to a hallway about four shoulders wide. Smaller windows punctuated the left wall, opposite what once must have been beautiful doorways into now ramshackle rooms. For what little Sunlight illuminated them as he passed, there were only splinters and crumbling stone looking back.

At the end of the hall stood a set of iron double doors, whose faces still held the rearing forms of two winged ponies. Their horns touched at the seam, and above each head was a circle too rusted for details, but seemed formed from words.

“Through there,” Luna said.

The doors resisted his initial push, and only after a heavy shoulder did he manage forcing them open. Inside, the darkness held dominion, the silence more so. He lifted Sunlight high, but all that greeted him were ancient furnishings of wood and gold, things that behind such heavy doors withstood the countless cycles of wear.

He turned back the way he came, but took a side passage at Luna’s request. It led them to a hallway, where she directed him through a door made to look seamless with the wall. It opened to a set of stairs that took him down, down, down into the bowels of the castle. He got the impression this passage wasn’t meant for common eyes, or even that of royalty.

Here, the grand walls gave way to stone and mortar, once polished smooth by pony hooves but pockmarked by time. The scent of mildew lingered just beneath his nostrils, and the already cool air grew colder still, like the few times he was allowed into the cellar beneath the village chapel.

“’Tis a servant’s passage,” Luna said, at his curious glances. It ended in an intersection, where darkness consumed either narrow corridor. “Right, Champion.”

He followed her directions, ears alert for any sounds other than the whisper of his own hoofsteps on the stone floor. Something about the silence of the castle both calmed and unnerved him. This deep into the bowels of the Devourers domain, he half expected legions of creatures hounding after him and waiting to pounce from the shadows of the ceiling.

The passage extended on for countless hoofsteps, to the point where it seemed it would lead on forever. Eventually, it turned right and ended in another door meant to blend in with the wall. It opened into an atrium of sorts, lined with unlit torch sconces and stands of rusted armor. The darkness engulfed the ceiling, and, for the creeping silence, he kept his eyes locked with it, for fear of what might reach down with spindly legs and snatch him up. He flicked his ears about, alert for the tiniest sounds.

“This leads to the main research laboratory. It is where our best arcanists synthesized many of our modern spells in the real world.”

He came to a set of heavy double doors, much like the last, but solid and without details. It opened on rusty hinges, and within lay bits of stone and desks decayed by the passage of time. If there ever were magics performed here, no trace of them remained.

“Turn back, Champion,” she said after they searched the many branching rooms in this dark and musty place. “There is yet another place I suspect.”

He followed the corridor back to the servant’s passage, but went straight at the intersection. It snaked a path between what must have been innumerable storage cellars.

“This silence is unnerving. So near the brazier I would have expected to see hide or tail of this Devourer.”

His thoughts exactly. Or at the very least, seen hide or tail of some other creature prowling these halls. He glanced over his shoulder at what felt like an unspoken request. It was as if something was following rather than waiting. He was anxious enough as it was, walking these long corridors in dead silence. The railroad tunnel had seen to his fear of small passageways.

“Stop,” she said, and he froze as if the slightest movement meant death. She extended a wing toward the wall next to him. “Through there.”

He stared at the wall, wondering just what in Equestria Luna was talking about, until he noticed the slightest outline that didn’t line up with the masonry. He blinked and did a double take. A secret passage within a secret passage? With a push of his hoof, it opened wide to a gloomy hallway, and a draft of birthcycle’s-old air breathed across his coat.

“Onward, Champion. We are almost there.”

Hesitantly, he stepped into this new secretive hallway. It followed a shallow incline into what appeared to be a network of interconnecting hallways, eight in all. He approached the intersection with cautious steps, eyes darting between each darkened corridor for anything that glistened or breathed.

Luna said nothing for an uncomfortable length of time, and soon enough he started fishing for the stone, never taking his eyes off the corridors surrounding him.

“Straight,” she said, as if she struggled to remember these passages. “This hallway, if memory serves, will take us to another that runs the length of the throne room. Take the door there, Champion, and we shall see if this Devourer has a penchant for poetic irony.”

As she described, the corridor led to another hallway, where a small, nondescript double door awaited him. He approached, expecting something—anything—to come crawling out of the shadows, but it seemed this place truly was empty.

He gave the door a push, and it swung outward to reveal a massive room of pillars and windows in that same strangely timeless two-toned stone. The foyer’s long strip of dingy brown velvet continued in from a set of giant doors to the far right. The Moon looked down on him from the missing ceiling of this place, and the stars around it twinkled with care. They were like foalish faces peeking in on something they weren’t supposed to. It reminded him of the twins peeking out from behind Luna’s legs back in the meadow.

“Left, Champion,” Luna said, and there he followed her wingtip with his eyes to behold two empty seats atop a throne. His heart sank in his chest. One for Luna, and one for Celestia.

“Now is… not the time to dwell on what was lost, Champion. We must find the brazier. I suspect one last place, if my dream is as fickle as any.” She extended a wing to the door opposite he came through. “Take it left, then left again.”

He gave her throne one last glance before continuing down the hallway. Not long into the walk, she pressed against his ribcage, stirring him onward.

“Yes, Champion, this is the way. I can feel her. Sister calls to me.”

The hallway came to a final bend, and there towered a door of gold far grander than any he had seen before. It opened on creaky hinges, and inside something caught Sunlight much the same way the castle’s glittering tower tops caught the Moonlight. A lot of somethings. The whole room practically radiated with Sunlight’s glow as he stepped inside.

All manner of things gold and silver glittered like tiny Sun cinders. From heaps of little gold disks, to plates and cups, to polished rocks of all colors he could imagine. Curiosity got the better of him, and he withdrew the concrete sliver.

What is?

“The royal treasury. Or, a representation of it, if you will. I had not the opportunity to craft its true likeness, as I only saw it once since my return from the Moon.”

Treasury? he wrote, then poked a pile of golden disks. It chinked and spilled onto the winding pathway leading toward the back wall. What special about these?

A small pause. “My apologies, Champion. I sometimes forget myself. The real world does not struggle with survival, and ponies place value in less sentimental and functional things for it.”

He stared at one of the little golden disks. These were the things he saw those ponies exchanging for flowers in Luna’s dream. There was the image of a smiling pony on it, a crown atop its head. Probably the Celestia that Luna had spoken of.

He continued along the treasury’s serpentine path through the mounds of gold. He gazed long into the millions of little Sunlights reflecting off the shiny trinkets, wondering just how such things could be treasured so. There was no practicality to them, unless one were to use them for reflecting light throughout the village.

All too suddenly, the gold fell away toward the back wall, as if the pieces themselves were afraid to encroach on this space, and when he finally broke his gaze from the piles and looked ahead, he saw why.

Against the back wall of the treasury, there awaited him a dais whose stairs were engraved with the most intricate patterns of prancing ponies, immaculate despite the eternities spent in darkness. At its center was a bowl-shaped indentation a little larger than himself. Deep gouges had been ground along the stone leftward, as if something heavier than the Moon itself had been dragged from here.

“This…” Luna said. There was a hollowness to her voice, a longing. “This is where it was.”

With his eyes, he followed the gouges off the dais and through a large open doorway. Hooves followed suit, and beyond the gleam of gold waited a room as dark and bleak as the world before the Moon.

Like the treasury, the ceiling here rose beyond Sunlight, and the far wall lay in shadow. Only the left wall stood close enough for Sunlight to reach. It chased the shadows into the cracks spidering up its surface, and the light itself seemed to dim the further in he stepped, the darkness eating away at the edges of light. A chilling draft blew in from ahead.

“Careful, Champion. I do not like the look of this.”

He kept his pace slow and measured, eyes up and ears alert, the left wall always within sight. One less direction something could surprise him from. He found the far corner and followed it to the right in search of a doorway, or worse.

His mind wouldn’t stop slipping down the dark corridors of his deepest fears. He remembered keenly the raven’s caw back in the tunnel, and the otherworldly clack of its beak and the hunger in its eyes. The other beasts whispered and played in the shadows at the edge of sight, ever tricking him into thinking they were real. But Luna stirred her wings at his sides whenever he found himself too afraid to continue forward, and that was enough to find his courage.

The further along the wall he walked, the more he began seeing scattered chunks of stone and earth of all sizes. Sunlight threw shadows across the floor behind them that leapt toward the safety of the surrounding dark, and they got larger the further on he went.

Eventually, the wall ended in a jagged hole larger than the dome of Sunlight. Judging by the curve of the opening, it reached at least four stories high.

“The dust is recent,” Luna said. “As is the moisture.” She brushed a layer of dust from one of the boulders beside him. “It must have known that you would come for Sister’s brazier after you lit mine.”

It?

“You know of what I speak.”

He did, but part of him didn’t want to. There still existed the faintest hope that they were wrong in their assumptions and that the brazier awaited them elsewhere in the castle. But he knew in his heart that wasn’t the case. Delving the dark to destroy the Devourer was what they came here for, and that was exactly what must be done.

His legs felt like noodles as he took his first step in, but Luna wrapped the ridge of her wingbone up to his chest. “Nay, Champion. I fear I know where this tunnel leads, and we have searched long this night. ’Twould be best that you sleep before we endure this trial.”

The rational part of his brain screamed that this was the best idea she had ever come up with and that he should turn tail immediately. Another part waffled on the thought that it was now or never. He had the momentum. Turn away now, and next time he might not have the courage to take that first step.

But he couldn’t argue against the weakness in his hooves. He could barely stand without swaying, and the shadows gnawing at the edges of his vision had just as much to do with the need for sleep as it did the evils ahead.

And, if he were honest with himself, he wanted to see Luna again. He nodded before hobbling back to the treasury.

“To the throne room, Champion,” Luna said. “There, at least, if worse comes to worst, we will have our options for flight.” Another nod, and he followed the corridor back.

The Moon had kept vigil over the throne room in his absence. Dustmotes danced in the Moonshafts spotlighting the twin thrones atop the dais, and in the silence that had settled thicker than the dust and disregard of time, a chill worked its way up his hooves.

An emotion stirred in his heart, a reaching out of his self toward this the loneliest of sights: empty thrones before an empty hall. He felt a connection to this place, unexplainable with mere words, but a calling nonetheless.

In this place untold cycles ago, ponies gathered to see their Princesses. They came in droves to bear witness to their deeds and wisdom, to seek shelter from and aid for whatever burdens might have plagued the beforetimes. Here before him stood the greatest testament to a civilization he would never know, but standing here amongst the forgotten stone and reverent silence he could almost see their ghosts gathering beside him.

“I miss this,” Luna said. Her voice was hollow, as if her heart reached out same as his. She had moved to the forefront of his chest sometime during his rumination for a better view. “Not the throne. It is but a hunk of rock. Nay, the view, looking out upon our little ponies and the worries they brought before us. Seeing to their quarrels and woes. Being somepony who could be trusted with the responsibility of leading a nation.”

He stepped up to the base of the dais, looking up the length of the carpet toward the thrones. This here before him was hallowed ground. Like the dais within the village chapel, stepping hoof beyond this point would break innumerable laws enforced diligently by the Elders of his village. And yet his heart told him this was the right thing.

Luna had been stripped of all she knew, cast into the dark and insanity of eternal nightmare. Here, mere lengths from the foot of her throne, he couldn’t imagine the heartache she felt seeing it in this state, much less the world at large. And though some might dare call it punishment for the boundaries she overstepped, she was still Luna. She was still a Princess.

With ears flat back, he took a tentative step, and when Luna made no complaints, he climbed to the top. There he spun about to sit at the foot of the throne and was awarded with a lordly view of the empty Moonlit hall. He made sure to take in as many details as possible, for her sake.

“The view is a bit low,” she said. The stately jaunt of her voice suggested there was a secondary meaning to her words, and the pleasant chill against his heart seemed to imply his intentions weren’t lost on her. “Higher, Champion. Please.”

It felt wrong to sit on her throne, but by her word he did just that. The change in view was imperceptible, yet Luna’s cold flame expanded to encompass his heart in thanks. She brushed her wingtips against the stone armrests, as if trying to remember the feeling.

“Despite the reverence our ponies showed us with bowed heads and doffed caps,” she said in a near whisper. It almost sounded like she was trying not to cry. “This hall was always filled with the sound of chatter, and quite often, even laughter.”

He looked down at his hooves, then at the swirls of the two-toned stone that made up the dais. He pulled the concrete from his saddlebags, but quickly stuffed it back in after realizing what he was about to do. Instead, he settled for tracing his words with a hoof:

You’ll hear them again soon.

To that, she made no reply, though her flame sank further down in his chest and turned away. “’Twould be a lie if I said I did not believe you, or wish it were so. But the closer we come to achieving our goal, the more I find it impossible to place this burden upon your shoulders.”

He lowered his gaze to his hooves. Again, it all came back to his inevitable end. And yes, it was inevitable. Even had he decided against this, there was no making it back to the village, not on his rations. He could count the cycles he had left by the notches in his saddlebag strap.

Soon enough, survival above all wouldn’t even mean nothing, for he would no longer exist. But… It wouldn’t be so bad. It couldn’t be. He remembered all the sights and sounds and wonders of the beforetimes Luna had shown him. His heart got that full-to-bursting feeling, and a whim came to him.

Then show me more, he traced.

Before she could reply, he laid himself down and closed his eyes. Sleep came quickly enough.

X - "Luna"

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When he opened his eyes, he again sat in the meadow amidst the purple flowers and fluttering insects.

The mountains in the distance washed blue beneath a golden Sun that was just warm enough to coax a light sweat from his coat. Birds chirped from their homes in the forest behind them, and a gentle wind brought the sound of rustling leaves to his ears and the dry smell of prairie grass to his nostrils.

“You wished to see more, Champion?” She lay beside him, gazing toward the distant mountains. Her mane danced in a friendly breeze, its thousands of stars undimmed by the Sunlight, and her wingtips poked just above the gentle curve of her back. Even with the difference in posture, she was almost as tall as him. She swivelled an eye toward him, and the smile on her face got a sudden nervousness going in his stomach.

He looked away, at a flower beside him bobbing in the wind, then back at her. Finally, he mustered the courage to point at her mouth, then traced his hoof in the grass:

Speak.

She chuckled, lowering her nose to look more fully at him. “You wish for me to teach you to speak? I thought you were afraid of speaking.”

He blushed. She was right. Before, to speak meant inviting death. But things had changed. He had learned the ways of the world—the truth of the world—and had carved out of it a purpose, even if it went against everything he had ever known. And in that disavowment, he had no reason to maintain silence. He squared his shoulders and looked her in the eye.

The gesture was not lost on her. She smiled and raised herself up as well. “Very well. Where would you like to start?”

He shifted looking between each of her eyes, so bright and limitless, then down at the curved reflection of the Sun on her breastplate. A nervous smile overcame him, and he looked back up before pointing at her.

She raised an eyebrow, putting a hoof to her chest. “Me? You mean my name?”

He nodded. His heart raced for some odd fear she would say no.

But the smile on her face said he had no reason to worry. She closed her eyes and let a soft chuckle drift away with the breeze.

“Very well,” she said, rising from her haunches. Her form towered over him in all its regal posture. Tall and powerful, yet she held the length and grace no pony in the village could have ever hoped to match.

“Luna,” she said.

He furrowed his brow. How did she make those sounds? He understood them easily enough. They had conversed long enough that he should. But to make them? How in Equestria did she do that?

“Luna,” she repeated. She cleared her throat. “Put the tip of your tongue against the back of your top teeth.”

That was easy enough. It felt odd, though. Living his whole life without speech, his tongue was of no more use than to help him chew his food.

“Good. Now, make the sound. ‘Llll.’”

He froze, tongue against teeth, frowning. He looked to her for guidance, unsure how exactly he was supposed to do that.

She smiled all the wider. “When you laugh, when you cry, when you scream in pain or frustration. Surely, sound is as innate to you despite your years of silence.”

His frown got bigger. Memories of such things sprang to mind like embers from the village braziers, but birthcycles of silence under pain of death left him hesitant, even here in his dream. It was one thing to claim disavowment of silence, but a whole other beast to commit to it.

His desperation must have shown on his face, as Luna slanted her mouth. “Perhaps a different approach, then,” Luna said.

She closed her eyes, and the projection from her forehead glowed a blue as dark and radiant as her coat. The world stretched toward its point like a curtain pulled from its rod. When the world relaxed back into place, they stood in shadow.

Walls of what looked like striated red-orange stone rose up on either side of them. Its curves made the sky above look like a distant river.

“Do you know what this is, Champion?” Luna whispered. Before he could shake his head, she shouted, “It is a canyon!”

He flattened his ears to his skull and raised a defensive hoof, but his ears perked at the sound:

“Canyon!” the corridor shouted back. “Canyon. Anyon…” quieter and more distant.

He stared down the canyon, ears pointed toward her not-voice. What magic was this?

She smiled like the Moon itself and raised an upturned hoof at him. “Your turn, Champion.”

He stared at her hoof, then the winding canyon ahead. Still, he was unsure. Would it work for him? Could he even shout like she could? What was this magic?

“Do not be shy, Champion, let me hear you shout!”

“Shout!” went the canyon. “Shout. Out…”

He watched the canyon again for any tricks that might be at play. There was nothing, though. It really seemed to just be Luna’s voice repeating itself, for whatever reason. This phenomenon was beyond him, both strange and frightening. Still, if Luna was certain of it…

He took a deep breath and thought about all the things that made him want to make noise—things that hurt, things that scared him, things that threatened he abide by the laws of silence or else know immeasurable pain—and he let them go. It came out as a loud if warped sound that on first shout-back seemed unsure of its own ferocity.

As the shout-back faded, a shiver worked its way up his legs. He’d done it. He shouted his heart out and… nothing. No Devourer, no once-ponies hungrily seeking their next meal, no Elders come to drag him away. Only him and the blood pounding in his ears.

Presently, Luna let out a tiny giggle. She had a hoof up to her mouth as if trying to hide a smile, but the moment their eyes met she broke down into a fit of laughter that had her on the ground.

“You have a good set of lungs, Champion,” she said, rising to her hooves. She sighed, fluffing her wings and resettling them at her sides.

A fire burned inside him. Something primal, something natural. It wasn’t merely a release of noise, but rather a defiance of the darkness. He had shouted, and the darkness did nothing. The greatest fear he had known all his life held no water.

He squared up with the canyon, and this time, he wasn’t afraid. He imagined the Devourer and the Elders and everything else that had kept him silent all his life, and he let loose a shout worthy of defying the dark.

He shouted as the shout-back resounded up and down the canyon. He shouted as it flattened his ears back and rang inside his skull. And still he shouted, until the sound died from his throat and his lungs felt like they had shrivelled up.

He heaved for air, and within his chest, Luna’s presence blossomed like the flames from her brazier. And as the shout-backs faded away, the her beside him stirred.

“We as ponies are meant to use our voices. It is wonderful to see this calling is not lost to you.” The smile she wore was less a smile than an outpouring of pride. It got his heart going and his knees weak for reasons he couldn’t understand. But it was a good weakness, whatever it was. Because Luna made him feel this way, and that’s all that mattered.

Her smile turned into a grin. “Now, have you had your fill of shouting, or are you ready to proceed?”

He took a final breath to settle his wits, and after a moment gave her a nod.

As if drifting off to sleep, Luna lowered her chin and closed her eyes. Her projection glowed blue, and a faint tinny sound sprinkled the air. The world stretched inward for the briefest of seconds as if toward a singular point in the distance, and they again stood in the meadow. The Sun hung closer to the horizon than before, highlighting the once-white lumpy things in the sky with the colors of Sunlight and crimson.

A breeze swept through the grass and sent it waving. The heads of the purple flowers and spiny grasses tickled his flank while the sweet aroma of the white-flowered bushes along the tree line drifted on the breeze.

Luna resettled her wings, drawing her head up from a bowed posture, and set her large, expectant eyes upon him.

“Luna,” she said.

He recalled her earlier instructions, those of pressing his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Llll…”

He looked down at his hooves, and a strange heat rose to his cheeks. This was beyond weird, and he couldn’t help feeling a little embarrassed.

“Good. Now…” She looked aside, her mouth forming a faint grimace. “Er, flick your tongue down behind your front bottom teeth as you make the sound… Llluuu.” She formed an “o” with her mouth as she spoke.

“Lluuuuh…” he said, scrunching his face as the sound came out wrong. He mimed her “o,” and almost ruined the proper sound by smiling in embarrassment.

Luna laughed with him. “You are doing well, Champion. Do not disparage yourself. But to continue, Luuuu—to the roof of your mouth—nnnn…”

“Nnn,” he parroted.

“…Nnaaa—back down to the bottom—naaa.” She opened her mouth wider to let the final syllable roll out, and her nose dipped slightly. Even in such a silly pose, she was all the more stately for it.

“Naaa… Llu”—he pressed his tongue as hard as he could against the roof of his mouth and furrowed his brow—“nnn-naa.”

“Not quite so hard,” she said. “Speaking is a gentle art. Rather, I should say an intricate art. There is no strict need to be forceful with how you speak. I… Forgive me, Champion. I was never given to teaching ponies in my day, especially not for something so innate. I find myself ill-suited for this.” She looked aside, ears pointed down and away.

He fixed her with an incredulous stare. Was she worried that she was a bad teacher? He’d had bad teachers before, and none of them were nearly as patient. He shook his head and smiled, waving her a “go on” with his hoof, to which she closed her eyes, nose dipped slightly, the most genuine smile he had ever seen on her lips.

“Very well, Champion.” She opened and refolded her wings. “Speak simply. Do not force your tongue, guide it.”

He looked down at the grass and licked his lips, felt the back of his teeth where his tongue should move when speaking. It still felt weird.

“Lllunna,” he said. He stared at her in disbelief, and she smiled back. “Llunna. Lluuna.

“Luuna,” he said. “Luna.” He blinked, and a smile grew on his face. “Luna. Luna. Luna” —his smile kept growing— “Luna! Luna! Lunaaa!!!”

He yelled it the top of his lungs. His voice shouted back from the forest, and birds took flight over the treetops. The sway of the trees and the frightened bird calls filled the air with noise and his heart with fire. He let out a laugh, full-bodied and dark-defiant, as he watched them shrink into the distance.

Luna laughed alongside him. This time, she didn’t try and hide it behind a hoof. Her eyes followed the flock of birds beyond the treetops.

She sighed and turned her smile toward him. Something about her smile brought a heat to his face, and he had to look away, ears flat back. The purple flowers danced in the breeze, and they smelled so wonderful.

“You are a quick learner, Champion.” Something about the softness of her voice sent his heart racing, and she was still looking at him when he regarded her.

He opened his mouth as if a million words suddenly made themselves known and wanted to express for him the thoughts whirling in his head. But as it was, he didn’t know them by speech, so he sat there staring, unsure how to share his feelings. He clicked his teeth shut to keep from looking like a fool. He smiled at the grass beneath his hooves and gave a small nod.

The Sun neared the horizon, and all things once blue and saturated with the colors of day swam in the oranges and pinks of the phenomenon unfolding before him. The birds had slowed their chirps from the nearby forest, and even the smells of the grasses seemed to be winding down for rest.

“It is beautiful, is it not?”

She sat down beside him, the fold of her wing brushing against his side and drawing another race of his heart. She stared at the Sun, a sense of wonder filling the depths of her eyes. The Sun’s reflection in them highlighted the turquoise that held him captive every time he looked her way.

“Many, if asked, would say the Moon and its wondrous nightscape is my favorite time of day.” Her voice reached a near whisper, and he dared sit down next to her to better listen. If she disliked the closeness, she didn’t show it. “But they would be wrong.”

A faint smile of cycles long passed turned up the corners of her mouth. “It is the Sunset. This, Champion, is when I think the sky is most beautiful.”

He stared long at the Sunset, bright but not blinding, thinking on her words. Again, she seemed preoccupied with the Sun, the symbol of her sister. They protected the ponies of the real world, protected each other as well, it seemed, as any reasonable member of the village would. Yet there remained no overt reason for it other than to see to their health, no intention of prolonging their dynasty, or for self-protection through a herd mentality, as it was with the village. She longed for her sister, simply because she was her sister.

Why?

There was no practicality to it. No end goal. She did so simply for the sake of togetherness, and it was the strangest thing.

Yet he could say the same for himself. Over the course of their journey, he found himself growing accustomed to Luna’s presence. She was his protector and guide. Countless times, she had saved his life, encouraged him onward when the world seemed at its bleakest—and not simply for her own ends.

Despite what this journey meant, every bit of it, every word she spoke, was not in cold disinterest, greed, or selfishness. She felt for him in this impossible way he had yet to understand, in a way that he wanted to feel for her, hoped he already did.

Even when her encouragement wavered and bravery faltered, there were moments when he wanted simply to know she was there.

These feelings were his own. He knew that for certain. But where had they come from? Nopony had ever mentioned feelings like these, to want another pony nearby simply for their presence. Always, cohabitation lent itself toward a practical goal, be it protection or procreation, or simply consolidation of families after a death. There was no desire, no want for it.

Even now as the bottom half of the Sun touched the horizon, that tugging in his heart grew all the more pronounced. It drew his eyes up and to the left, where Luna still stared wistfully into the Sunset.

It meant more than anything to her to succeed in this quest.

His gaze fell to her Moon-embossed breastplate. The Sun’s convex reflection curled around the far side of the crescent, as if to complete the other half of a circle.

She turned his way with steepled brows, and their eyes met for an instant. The deep hues of the Sun saturated her coat to turn her midnight blue into a wash of indigo and the half of her in shadow into the color of the darkest sky between stars.

He shied away, his hoof reflexively moving for his saddlebags. A sudden wave of embarrassment struck him when he realized they didn’t exist in this dream, and he wilted in on himself. He could feel her gaze on the back of his head, and that only made it worse.

A long moment passed in silence before she sent a filament of light spiralling up the projection from her forehead. It sprouted from the tip and snaked down to the grass, where it formed a piece of charcoal and a stone slab.

He paused before taking up the charcoal, not out of hesitation, but rather for his own sense of longing. Now more than ever, he wished he could simply say the words that were on his mind.

Beautiful, he wrote.

She regarded the word with her still-seeking expression, then turned it back to the Sun. She laid herself down and lowered her wing to the grass, beckoning him.

He lay beside her, and she draped her wing over his back. He tensed at the suddenness of the gesture, but her warmth eased his worries away and he all but melted into her side. The heat in her wing was like the warmest blanket on a cold sleep cycle.

These were real feathers, not the cold things of Moonlight that grew from his sides when he was awake. Every feather was as soft as a newborn’s fetlocks. As foalish as it might have been, he snuggled in closer.

They lay there as the Sun slipped halfway beyond the horizon. The wind had died down, but the smell of those white-flowered bushes at the tree line danced beneath his nostrils with another, sweeter scent, one he could only assume was the coat of the mare beside him.

He craned his neck to press his nose against her wingbone draped over his shoulder and yes, there it was. He held that breath in for as long as his lungs allowed him, committing it to memory.

“It is almost time to wake up,” she said. “If my senses still persist, it has been six hours since you closed your eyes.”

He let the breath go, and he turned back to the Sun. Time to wake up…

His thoughts molded themselves into images of that cave, that unnatural cave and its unnatural darkness. Even here, safe beneath Luna’s wing, it seemed to snake in and pervert the happiness of the moment. He suppressed a shudder, if only so she wouldn’t notice.

For the first time in what felt like a cycle, he picked up the charcoal and let a fledgling hope take flight in his heart.

How long is that?

“About a quarter cycle, by your timekeeping.”

Long enough, then. Though the pangs of hunger were absent here, he didn’t want to think how bad they’d be when he woke up. It had been three cycles since he last ate, and it wouldn’t do to stretch his energy any longer by lingering here. Though, he couldn’t help the sense of… longing. Not for something he had lost, but for something he soon would.

“Luna?” he said.

She turned fully toward him, ears alert, apparently surprised by his voice. “Yes, Champion?”

It was all he knew in voice, though he wished so desperately that he could speak the rest. Isn’t time irrelevant in a dream? he wrote.

“Yes it is, Champion.”

He stared at the grass and, in fleeting moments of courage, at her hooves next to his. Then, can you control it?

A moment passed before she chuckled. Where words would have been appropriate, she simply turned her head toward the Sunset and leaned gently into him.

The last traces of gold and pink fled from the sky, and as the Sun dipped fully beyond sight, he leaned further into her side. If he hadn’t closed his eyes to better feel her next to him, he wouldn’t have noticed her wing tighten ever so slightly.

The sound of insects—their nightsong, as Luna had once called it—filled the air with a loud but peaceful hum as the first specks of starlight dared their entrance into the not-quite dark sky. It was a sight that anypony in the village would have marveled at, a sight anypony had the right to call beautiful.

He looked down at the word he wrote. Beautiful. The Sunset surely was, but deep down, part of him knew the truth.

He didn’t mean the Sunset.

XI - The End

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Despite his wishes to remain asleep at Luna’s side forever, his eyes opened to the silent glow of the throne room. The stabbing hunger pains from last cycle had grown worse, and he allowed himself a sigh, as if to fill his stomach with resignation and hope that would satisfy. He stood and shook away the stiffness of sleep.

“Good morning,” Luna said. “At least, as the saying goes.”

A saying from another world. So distant yet so very near. Whatever “morning” meant, the gesture was not lost on him. He nodded, then gave her wings a smile.

She flitted them in acknowledgement. “Let us be off, Champion.”

He stared at her wings a moment longer before heading for the side door.

He travelled down the empty hall and through the treasury with its glinting mountains of gold. The grooves clawed into the floor by the brazier again led him into the back room, and there he found himself standing at the threshold of the enormous hole. Sunlight flickered along the tunnel wall, struggling against the darkness.

“Be on your guard,” Luna said, her flame attentive at the front of his chest.

His heart beat a racket against his ribs, but he took a deep breath. Luna’s wings held firm against his sides, like armor that would never fail him.

He stepped into the opening, keeping the left wall within sight and letting the right fall into shadow. Better to choose one than lose both. A draft swept up the tunnel, cold as death. It whispered in his ear like voices too soft to make out.

Far into the cavernous dark it led him for an immeasurable distance. It grew steeper with every passing step, to the point where he had to shuffle down it sideways. Eventually the slope leveled out, and the walls widened into what must have been a vast cave. Here and there, chunks of purple crystal jutted from the stony walls. They reflected Sunlight in a way that resembled eyes, just beyond the rim of light.

Luna let out a shaky breath between his ears. “It is as I feared. We are in the crystal caverns.”

The crystal caverns. She had mentioned them before, when they stood on the balcony overlooking the castle gates. All manner of monster lurked down here to hide away from the Moon, or so she surmised. The thought sent a shiver down his spine, and he lifted Sunlight higher to better illuminate the cavern.

“Careful.”

She needn’t say the words. Every step was a cautious one, every shift of his eyes and twitch of his ears to catch sight or sound of something ready to pounce. The silence made it all the more unnerving. He had learned long ago to never trust the sile—

He took a step, and his hoof found air. He stumbled forward over a ledge he couldn’t see and panickedly fought to push himself back up.

“Champion!” Luna cried, beating her wings. But her words barely registered as he focused solely on Sunlight as it slipped from his grasp. It plummeted into the darkness, dragging their hopes with it.

Fear had commanded he fight to push himself back up the cliff face, but a greater fear of infinite darkness gripped him by the hackles like the gangly, frozen claws of an unnamable monster. He dove.

The air whipped back his mane and tore at every inch of his coat it could manage like spears of ice. It roared in his ears, louder than whatever words Luna shouted in his head. Below, Sunlight clanged against the wall, spraying a shower of sparks and sending it into a mad tumble, its chain like a whip threatening him to stay away.

He reached out to catch it by the chain, but it cracked against his pastern. The pain jolted up his foreleg, and he cried out. Tears threatened at the corners of his eyes, but the wind tore them free before he could even blink them away.

His first attempt to catch it stopped its wild tumble, and now the chain danced teasingly before him, begging him to reach out and take it. Hoof outstretched, he grasped it and pulled it close, its warmth against his chest a momentary solace that never should have left him.

“Champion!” Reality snapped to, and he reared back against the deafening howl of the wind. Luna spread her wings wide, but there was no saving them. She hadn’t the strength to fly here. “I cannot hold us!”

But any word of warning she could give came too late. Something shimmered below, and they plunged deep into the thick of a viscous liquid.

It burned like fire against his coat, clawed at his eyes when he opened them in terror, boiled his tongue as he opened his mouth to scream. He flailed for the surface, muscle straining against its thickness.

From the back of his mind, images of the village bled into view. The silent gates, the crumbling walls, his sister waiting for him at the front door after a long cycle in the mill. The hundreds of broken, beaten faces who looked on in hope as the gates swung shut behind him, forever awaiting the Sun to break upon the sky so long after the Moon had whet their appetite for hope. Their silent screams rose up in his ears, in unison with Luna as she uselessly flailed her wings.

He broke the surface and heaved for air. Sunlight, illuminated the churning waters and the slick shimmer of rock ahead. He flailed his hooves in a mad scramble for land, every stroke barely keeping him afloat. Luna timed her wing beats with him, and together they made it ashore.

He threw himself upon the stone, heaving for air, every breath as much an unspoken thank you to Luna as it was a defiance of the darkness. Her wings lay spread to his sides, glistening with the water that with every passing second looked more like slime.

“You are a fool,” Luna said, far removed from her normal quietude. It struck a chord in his heart, a cold and shivering thing that shrunk into the corner. “You knew I had not the strength to carry us. You could have killed yourself. Us. And all our little ponies would be left forever in their unending nightmares.”

She fell silent, and with it went the roaring frostfire in his chest. The dark pressed in, far more absolute than ever before.

“But you didn’t,” she said. Strength returned to her voice, and a sense of consolation washed over him. “We are here and in one piece, and Sister’s light is still with us. We have your foolhardiness to thank for that.”

He sighed, letting her words soothe away the burning sensation lingering in his coat. What was left of it, anyway. The individual hairs of his fur curled in on themselves, shrivelled as if beneath a flame. Where he brushed at it, thick clumps pulled away, and his skin lay raw and red beneath it, sensitive to the touch.

“I… Avoid the water, Champion. We best begin our search.” She folded her wings, shining and unaffected by the water. “I did not see the markings of the brazier since leaving the treasury. We can only hope it is down here.”

A troubling but shared hope. He re-hooked Sunlight to his bandolier and gave the water another glance. It had gone placid far faster than water should, and despite its stillness, something seemed to churn beneath the surface.

He followed the water’s edge for what felt like half a cycle. The cavern continued on, unchanging and just as dark. It was as if this place had never known the touch of light, or even the concept of it. For how deep they must have been beneath the castle, it was probably true.

More unnervingly, there was no sign of a ceiling, and even stranger, no walls yet broke the ever expanding darkness. It was simply him and the water that burned like fire.

Its iridescence drew his eye. Indistinct forms seemed to rise up from the depths to skim the surface and sink back out of sight. The faintest sounds seemed to leach from it, and he looked more closely, ears pointed forward.

“Champion…” she said. She half spread her wings, reaching to shield his face.

He gently brushed her wing away so he could hear the sounds better, the whispers growing louder when he looked his reflection in the eye. The firewater smelled of bile, and the indistinct forms still churned below, like rice stirred up from a bowl of broth.

Was that a face?

Their whispers beckoned him closer, and hesitantly, he dipped his ear in for a better listen. Low and warped, a dozen sounds rolled over one another like exhalations of breath. A distinct tingle ran down his spine, and he pulled his head back, wanting nothing to do with it.

“You know where we are, don’t you?” Her voice was slow and quiet, one meant not to startle him.

He reached a shaky hoof back for the concrete, but she beat him to it. “We are no longer in the crystal caverns. We are within the Devourer itself.

“And I need not speak of the water, those whispers… I know them well. I recognized them the instant we plunged into its depths. And I would be a liar if I said I did not fear it consuming me again.

“I can hear them now, Champion. Louder than ever before. And if I but close my eyes... I can feel them.” She pressed herself against his heart, cold as ice. “I knew this to be a trap the moment we saw the brazier was stolen away. The Devourer sought to lure us in, and we allowed ourselves to be its hapless victims. We had no other choice.”

She gave his heart a little squeeze, and courage returned in the form of her blazing flame at the forefront of his chest. Perhaps it was merely a fool’s courage, but it was courage nonetheless. To squander it was to squander what little they had going for them.

“Forward, Champion. I feel the cries and torture of every pony devoured here. But among them I also feel Celestia’s. She calls to me.”

That was at least some good news. It meant her brazier was indeed down here in this forsaken darkness. He set off, and it wasn’t for another half cycle that Luna spoke again.

“Here,” she said.

He stopped, seeing nothing but the darkness ahead and the water beside him. Head lowered, ears back, he took a few tentative steps forward, and from the darkness emerged an enormous brass brazier, round as the village well but larger and taller than his hut, painted with long and curved depictions of prancing ponies beneath a radiant Sun.

He approached, and his hoof moved of its own accord to unhook Sunlight from his bandolier.

“Champion…”

His heart skipped a beat, and he froze in place. Slowly, he lowered his hoof and looked to the ground.

Luna took her place beside his heart, the one where she had often rested during the quieter moments of their journey. When she spoke, it was at a near whisper.

“It is a lot that I have asked of you in these long Moonlit cycles. I have asked everything of you, in fact. More than I had any right to. But you answered with more than I ever thought possible.

“When we became one in the cathedral, you gave me hope that we could light the braziers and free myself, free Sister and our subjects. You were a part of my dream, a tool I could use as a means to an end, and I saw you as nothing more than that.”

Her little flame floated close to his heart, near enough that she brushed against him every time it beat. “But then you started questioning the world, the whats and whys of everything that happened and your place amidst it all. Your determination to see the end of darkness though you knew not the consequences.

“More and more as we journeyed, I saw something grow within you. I do not understand it myself. You think, you exist, you dream. You showed me that you had life, that there was more to you than being some figment of my subconscious, somehow, someway, despite how much has been destroyed by the Devourer.”

She dropped down lower in his chest, facing away. She shrank in on herself to nothing more than the tiniest mote. “You have a soul, Champion. And I nearly asked—nay, commanded—you throw it away, that you take the fall for my hubris. And yet, when you learned the truth, you still sought justice, you forgave me my transgressions.

“You… You cared.” She trembled, both within and at his sides.

He raised a hoof to his chest, pressed it closest to where she rested, and she nestled up against it. Long moments of shaking breath passed by.

“And I care, too…” she whispered, breathless. She sounded on the verge of tears. “I know you do not understand what that means, but… Perhaps it is better that way.”

She drew in a long shaky breath, and a hollow chill seized him from head to hoof. It was a terrifying sensation, one he both understood and one he feared in the deepest nethers of his heart.

This was her distancing herself. This was her preparing for what must come.

“This, here, is the end, Champion. Beyond this lies no light, no dreams of birdsong or Sunsets in the meadow. ’Twill be darkness for you. Nothing else awaits you beyond this threshold.”

She pressed herself against his heart, but couldn’t bear to wrap her flames about it. “If… If you were to change your mind now, I… I-I wouldn’t blame you.”

He stared long at the ground, Sunlight flickering silently off the brazier’s polished brass. He only had to toss the lantern in, and the world would be restored. The village would survive the darkness. The dreaming ponies would go home. Luna would be free.

And he…

He looked to his sides, where Luna held her wings tight against him, one last time. Tentatively, he reached back and touched her wing.

It felt nothing like it did in his dreams, no warmth or fetlock softness. It felt like nothing at all—simply air that wouldn’t allow his hoof to occupy its space. These wings of hers were no more than a dream. They weren’t the real her. The real her waited to open her eyes and see the world that should be and revel with her ponies in the freedom of the open skies and the warm Sun. And he held the power to make it so.

Before he could change his mind, or weakness overcame him, he unhooked Sunlight from his bandolier and tossed it in. He took a deep breath—felt another drawn inside—and waited for the flames to burst toward the sky.

But Sunlight never rose from the brazier to scour away the darkness, nor did the lantern clang against the inside. A faint plop was all he heard, like a hoof in mud. Darkness fell upon them in the absence of Sunlight, and in the tense moments of unease that followed, something bubbled thick as stew.

“Back away, Champion,” Luna commanded, half cloaking him with her wings.

He stumbled backward just as a greenish liquid slipped out from the brazier. It had an eerie luminescence to it, from the glow of Sunlight suspended inside, whose flames seemed as if they were trying to leap out and fend off the pustulent mass but were helplessly trapped.

Shadows twisted within the mass of slime—stretched and deformed faces raising soundless wails into the dark. It poured fully from the brazier, and before he found the wits to run, it lurched forward.

He had only a moment to dive out of the way when it came crashing down. It caught his hindleg, and it burned as if he had stuck it in boiling water. He screamed and turned to force it off him, but it only stuck to and burned his other hooves.

“Do not fight it, Champion!” she cried. Panic sharpened her voice to a knife’s edge. “Flee!”

The mass of faces dragged him closer, climbed further up his leg. The acidic slime peeled fur from skin, skin from muscle, muscle from bone.

He screamed, kicked instinctively with his buck knife, but his leg sank deep into the slime, and even the metal about his leg corroded at the edges. Panic overtook him.

This was no ordinary monster, no creature of the natural or even dream world. The wailing faces churning beneath the surface reared to face him, distinctly equine, reached out to him with long, gangly tendrils that climbed up his stomach to draw him further in.

Luna’s wings were a frenzy of feathers, slick with dripping slime trails that glistened a toxic green in the dying Sunlight. A final beat of her wings caught an advance of slime up his belly, and it trapped her uselessly against him. The slime crept around him, pinning her other wing to the ground.

He clawed, pulled, bit at the ground to drag himself free. The burning reached above his chest and shoulder blades, and he seized up at the pain. Screaming, he turned a fearful eye over his shoulder.

A predominant face swiveled into view on its bubbling surface, silhouetted by Sunlight deep within, and its mouth yawned open to crash down and swallow him up.

The world became fire. He shut his eyes to the burning liquid, clenched his teeth to deny it entrance into his throat. He couldn’t breathe, suspended as he was in this gelatinous mass, and his mind narrowed in on the singular fact that his body was dissolving away to nothing.

He could hear them now, the voices Luna spoke of—those of the dreaming, tormented ponies. Their voices filled his ears with the screams of nightmare and flooded his head with visions of the hell he would soon join.

But somewhere in the back of his mind, there was another voice. A quiet voice, one whose weeping sent a shiver down his spine and a tear from his eye.

“It cannot end like this, Champion. We cannot have come this far only to fail. Sister, Equestria, it cannot… I…

“No,” Luna said. Her cold flame ignited in his chest as if to freeze him solid from the inside.

He could see her in his mind’s eye, her nose tilted downward, eyes aglow in the face of the towering monstrosity, with her wings spread and horn wreathed in frostfire.

“I refuse.”

The pain ebbed, and it was hard to tell if the voice became softer or if the sudden distance was simply part of dying.

“This is not the end. Endure, Champion. Find your courage…”

The inferno rushed downward into the core of his being. It sucked away the flames that radiated from her, until every last ember had been stripped away.

She was like the smoke rising from a snuffed candle. A ghost of a smile graced her lips, and she wrapped her wispy strands around his heart.

“Live.”

The world whitewashed away, and somepony screamed.

He jerked up from where he lay on a stone floor. Sunlight pooled around him, pushing back a darkness that should not have been. He double checked the lantern strapped to his bandolier to convince himself that his eyes were not deceiving him. Sunlight indeed hung there as if he had never thrown it into the fire.

Around him, the darkness peered into his little world of stone and bewilderment. His ears rang in the silence. He breathed, and a million pinpricks ran up his legs and back.

He snapped his head around, eyes to every shadow of every corner. Fear forced him to his hooves, and he spun about to catch sight of a staircase just within Sunlight’s reach. His breathing grew harried as he took careful steps forward, eyes tracing a slow path up, up, up the jagged steps. At the rim of Sunlight, shadows danced across the base of the twin thrones.

He spun about to face the darkness, but when no sounds rolled out and no monsters shambled into view, he looked down at himself.

His body seemed rejuvenated, as if he had never left the village, the latent warmth of some unknown fire enkindled within. There were no scars on his legs his legs, and his once-dislocated shoulder felt stronger than ever. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t hungry. But the feelings of newfound health faded when he looked at his sides.

There were no wings.

“Luna?” he said.

A quiet shout-back rang hollow off the high ceiling beyond the edge of light. There was no Moon to peek down at him through the windows.

“Luna!”

“Luna!” the throne room shouted back. “Luna. Luna…”

His breathing quickened, and he spun around. “Luna!”

“Luna! Luna. Luna…” It sounded cold and afraid. His breaths became trembles, and despite the vigor in his legs, he collapsed.

He shut his eyes. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t real. He pressed a hoof to his heart to better feel her hiding away somewhere inside. She was still there. She was still there…

But she never poked her head out from behind his heart, never pressed herself against his hoof to reassure him that all was well. The Moon was gone, all its distant stars with it, and it left only a faint chill as if to mock him for what was missing.

No. There was one last place she could be, one last hope this was all just a cruel joke. One last way he could prove he wasn’t alone.

He set Sunlight aside, curled up at the foot of the throne, and willed himself to sleep.

XII - Into the Dark

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The dream he dreamt that cycle was not a peaceful one.

There was no meadow of bobbing grasses or white-flowered bushes along the tree line, no birdsong alighting from the distant forest or gentle wind against his face. The empty sky loomed over him, black as death, and a distant grinding sound drowned out any memory of the beforetimes.

He stood in the village square, eyes raised to the top of the village walls. He knew without seeing that his sister stood beside him, eyes trained upward like his. The darkness beyond rumbled with the approach of the Devourer.

The huts around them shook, and as the sounds grew louder and the earth rumbled beneath his hooves, the sound of splintering wood and tumbling stone erupted all around him.

He couldn’t turn to look. He didn’t need to. His dream mind knew the world was falling apart as the rapid-fire staccato of nails being driven into stone carried over the wall.

The Devourer roared, and it felt like the air itself was being sucked from his lungs. There was nothing now, nothing but him and the Devourer. All else vanished to the void of dreamspace and the emptiness of the world as it would be.

He stood alone on nothing, stared into nothing, breathed of the suffocating nothingness, and he watched with eyes wide open as the Devourer descended with spiralling, grinding teeth.

“Live.”

He jerked awake. He scanned the darkness around him, hooves light as feathers and ready to run at a moment’s notice. But there was nothing here except the silence of the empty throne room.

It was just a dream.

He took a deep breath to settle himself and gave Sunlight at his chest a glance. The flames within danced with reservation, as if they mourned for the loss of their sister.

Luna…

He cast a heartbroken glance at his sides, still bare. His eyes lingered there as his heart slowly wrung itself out like a wet towel, and when he found the strength to pull his gaze away, he realized he held his hoof against his heart. He squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his teeth until they hurt. The wound in his heart tore open anew, and he lay there trying to hold in the tears.

This was wrong. The darkness, the Moonless sky, the empty space beside his heart. They were this close to defeating the darkness. It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

All his life, the darkness had ruled the world. It filled in the cracks of the village wall, loomed around every corner of every home, gnawed at the edges of brazierlight within the village square. Darkness was eternal and inevitable.

But he had taken Sun and Moonlight beyond the walls, found the Moonlight brazier, and freed Luna from her prison. They defeated every challenge placed before them and by the grace of the Cinders found themselves standing before the Sun brazier, mere moments away from banishing the darkness.

They held salvation within their grasp. The impossible almost came true. But after coming so close, only to have victory snatched away and darkness again retake its dominion…

It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

He realized after a while that he was staring directly into Sunlight. Its afterimage danced in his vision when he blinked to, and its inverted colors reminded him of the Sunset and the color-stained sky.

Beautiful.

No, it wasn’t supposed to end this way. But this was the way it was.

He looked up at the thrones. Sunlight flickered off the stone and highlighted their gold and silver trim. Above them, there was a circular window, whose purpose he ventured was to let in the Sun or Moonlight. But now, with Sunlight washing the stone around it in a warm gold and absolute darkness peering through from beyond, it stared down at him like an inverted Moon.

He turned away. It couldn’t end like this. He had seen the wonders of the beforetimes, of speech and Moonlight, of water and wind and flowers and the laughter of foals running freely through the streets of bustling cities. It was a beautiful world full of beautiful things, and he needed to see it again.

He… He needed to see Luna again.

Why was impossible to say, but he felt it all the same. It pumped through his veins with every beat of his heart that would never again know the apathy of a life lived in darkness.

She had commanded him to live, but to return to the village and eke out his existence would be its own form of death. It would be a life lived in submission of the dark, and that he could not abide.

Survival above all? No. Not anymore.

To hell with the Elders and their tenets. He would rather die on his own terms and rage against the dark until the light left his eyes. The dreaming ponies deserved that much. Luna deserved that much. They deserved Justice.

He stood and headed for the treasury. Past the mounds of gold, past the gouged dais and the Sun-chased shadows cast by the discarded stones of the back wall. There he came to the giant hole bored through by the Devourer itself, and he gave the dark a defiant glare.

Luna was there with him, not in wing or voice, but in spirit. He felt her, inside his heart rather than beside it. She needed a champion, and though he was merely a pony who survived these birthcycles by luck and happenstance, she needed him all the same.

And with that feeling held close and Sunlight raised high, he took his first step forward, into the dark.

The tunnel again led him downward into the heart of the mountain, getting steeper the further in he went. Sunlight threw flickering shadows along the longitudinal ripples in the stone. It seemed wary of their place, here without Luna to guide and guard them, but it sported a bravado previously unknown to him, bright enough to illuminate the entire tunnel. It needed this just as much as he did.

The tunnel opened up to that same cavern of purple crystals and wet stone, and no amount of Sunlight’s courage could broach the upper reaches of this place. Long points of stone poked down into the dome of light like gnarled teeth as he passed them by.

He wasn’t far now. If he remembered right, the hole was just past the—

Pebbles tumbled on stone.

He threw his cape over Sunlight and flattened himself to the ground. His cape glowed a faint yellow, unable to completely hide away the glow. He swivelled his ears in every direction, straining to hear another sound that might alert him to what it was or where it came from.

His heart beat in the stillness, ever clawing at his sanity as the hairs stood up on the nape of his neck. He covered his mouth, for fear of even the tiniest sound that could alert whatever it was prowling these caverns. There was the soft padding of paws, and then the low growl of a hungry animal.

Talon scrabbled on stone, and he had only a moment to react. But Luna’s magic had left him whole and hale, and with a quick pivot he gave a powerful kick that rivalled even the largest hammers made in the village.

His hoof found the heavy push-back of a body, and the blade drove home to the schlick of meat and sinew. Something shrieked, and he was off as fast as his hooves would carry him.

Fractal and geometric flashes of Sunlight skimmed past him as he took flight down the cavern. The crystals jutted from the walls as if trying to get a better view of the chase, and it was like he ran through a series of mouths for all the pointed stone reaching down at him.

The creature was gaining on him. Its heavy footpads shout-backed off the cavernous ceiling, and its breaths crawled up his spine.

A hole appeared to his left, and he ducked in with the hope of shaking it off his tail. He scrambled under a boulder wedged between two walls, over a stone-tooth jutting from the floor, and around a massive pillar of stone, but still it hounded him. His saddlebags caught on a jagged outcropping of crystal, and he ripped it loose with a quick snap of his teeth. He couldn’t afford to slow down.

But his heart leapt into his throat as his lead came to an all too sudden dead end, Sunlight splashing up the walls blocking off every direction except backward. He whirled around to see the creature already leaping at him, its jaws split wide with row after row of jagged teeth. He stumbled sideways and swung Sunlight haphazardly, just missing its belly as its lunge went wide.

The creature grazed him along the neck with its talons, and he felt the sting trail all the way down to his shoulder. Its teeth snapped shut just shy of his ear, the full speed of its tumble giving it enough momentum to roll up the curve of the wall. It scrambled for footing and charged back down in one smooth motion with a raspy snarl, but this time, he was ready.

He’d had his fair share of scraps in the streets of Canterlot, and in a twist of his hips he squared up with it, bringing Sunlight around. A tad early, but it gave the creature pause enough mid-lunge to miss its bite.

It tumbled past him and rolled onto its hooves to gave him another snarl. It paced around him, thick scales marching down its backside and whip tail lashing back and forth behind it. Now with this pause, he could see that it was another fang beast creature like the one he and Luna first fought back in the hilltop cathedral. This one was smaller, though, hardly larger than himself, but that said nothing for the lean muscle rippling up and down its legs with every step.

It clacked its cluster of teeth together and charged him quick as a flash, and he didn’t have the swiftness to dodge. A sharp pain blossomed in his shoulder as its teeth sank in to the bone.

He screamed in pain and cracked it over the head with Sunlight. Fire washed down its back in golden flames that flooded the stone-toothed cavern with light. It threw terrible shadows across the walls that looked like hungry spectators waiting for one of them to fall.

The fang beast yelped and scrambled away from the flames, but not without catching his hind leg with a sweep of its tail, wrapping around his back pastern. Pain erupted in his hoof, and it was then he realized it had little barbs all along the length. Before he could react, it yanked his hoof sideways out from under him.

He went down, landing on Sunlight and knocking the wind out of himself. He sucked air, suddenly blinded as he was by the flare of Sunlight in his eyes, but he heard the high-pitched screech and the pad of meaty paws on stone. He had just enough time to get his hooves up before it bowled him over.

They went tumbling across the cavern floor, where he cracked the back of his head against a rock. The world went fuzzy. It was as if time came to a standstill in that ever-lengthening moment, until a heavy weight forced the air from his lungs. There was the sharp pinch in his stomach as of claws trying to dig through his fur and tear out his innards, and the adrenaline lent him enough clarity to bring Sunlight around.

But this creature wasn’t stupid. Before he brought Sunlight to bear, it leapt backwards, using the momentum to catch him around the neck with its tail, tight as a noose. It gave a merciless yank, and it dragged him forward across the stone.

Hooves clawing at his throat, he felt his eyes bulge and his head pounding in time with his heart. The world was going dark, all the while he kicked frantically at its tail with his buck knife.

This was it. This was how he died—unceremoniously, strangled to death by some hideous creature in the dark.

Consciousness was slipping from him. His hooves became like lead weights. He kept kicking at its tail, but even that was getting hard to focus on.

If he could just…

He felt the tension in his hoof as he connected with its tail, and the buck knife sang its tune to the sound of slicing meat and a shriek of pain.

The fang beast didn’t unravel its tail from his neck, but it loosened just enough that the blotches in his sight went away and clarity returned. Bloodlust sharpened its roar to a knifepoint, saliva flecking from its teeth, and it was already on him.

He threw his hooves up to catch it by the throat and hold its snapping teeth an inch from his face. Its talons dug into his chest, but he couldn’t spare a hoof for fear of being mauled. All he could do was grit his teeth and endure.

He craned his face away from its slavering jaws in an attempt to look for Sunlight fallen just out of reach. That’s when he saw its tail. The buck knife hadn’t severed it, but it had left a nasty gouge in it like frayed rope, and a desperate idea came to him.

Hooves still shielding his face, he wrapped his hindleg around its tail on the near side of the wound and squared his hips to kick the other as hard as he could. The two halves pulled taut, and it ripped clean in half.

The fang beast shrieked in pain and scrambled backwards. Its disembodied tail thrashed around his neck as if it had a mind of its own, speckling his face with little spurts of blood and blinding him in one eye.

He frantically pulled the cords loose from his neck, the little barbs tearing painful bits of skin free with them. Blood ran warm down his front, but the sweet breath of life was worth any price. His head clear and his blinded eye blinking away the blur, he got to his hooves with Sunlight at the ready.

The fang beast snarled at him in a crazed frenzy. It had no eyes, but he could see the fury in the flexion of its leg muscles and the drool pouring from between the cluster of teeth. It dove at him again, and he ducked, swinging Sunlight over himself where his head was an instant ago.

A force caught Sunlight by the lantern, ripping it from his grasp. The crunch and moan of iron split the cavern, and the roar of fire rode the waves of nightmarish shrieking and the flopping of meat on stone.

He turned to see the fang beast with its jaws clamped helplessly around Sunlight, and he watched as the lantern poured a river of fire down its throat. As quickly as it happened, the flames died away, leaving him to stare at the corpse of the fang beast, roasted from the inside. A trail of smoke drifted from its mouth.

That… wasn’t what he had in mind, but it was certainly effective. He picked up the Sunlight lantern, whose chain glowed white hot but was somehow cool to the touch.

Its flames flickered proudly, as if satisfied with its handiwork. Rather gruesome, he had to admit, but he sure couldn’t argue. Out of breath, wobbly from the spent adrenaline, and his brain catching up with all that just happened, he needed a moment.

But that moment was short lived when a cry went up in the distant dark. It was a high, raspy, death rattle-like screech that stripped the warmth from his bones. Others joined it in frightful harmony, and soon the entire cavern resounded with the deafening cries of a dozen fang beasts out for blood.

No time to rest. He took off.

He blew past outcrops of crystal and stone in his mad dash away from the cries. Sunlight bounced wildly against his chest, its light casting terrifying shadows along the walls.

The path twisted and turned like knots in a rope, over and under and around stone-teeth and jagged pillars. He twisted his ankle in a shallow groove worn into the ground by a trickle of water, but he couldn’t stop, not for an instant. Behind him, he heard their footpads on the stone.

He threw a quick glance over his shoulder to gauge the distance between, but he caught sight of a cliff out the corner of his eye. He skidded to a halt just as his hooves pushed a dusting of stone over the ledge of the abyss. Sunlight couldn’t reach the bottom, and the pebbles he cast down never shouted back up at him.

A heavy set of footpads thumped behind him. He turned in time to bear the brunt of a fang beast’s weight with his shoulder, and down he went.

He flailed in hopes of grabbing hold of the ledge or any number of rocky outcrops in reach, the fang beast somersaulting overtop him and off into the darkness, its yelp lost to the vastness of the cave.

Outcrops from the cliff face whizzed past terrifyingly close. One rose up to meet him in a sickening crunch and a flare of pain in his left side. It cartwheeled him sideways further down into the darkness, and the next thing he knew, he lay on his back with a heavy ringing in his ears. Everything hurt.

His lungs felt flattened inside his chest, and heaving for breath stoked the fire that was the wound in his left side. Dazed, he rolled onto his good side and looked around for Sunlight. It was like everything moved in slow motion, and his head pounded with every heartbeat.

Sunlight lay just out of reach, its frame bent inward and missing part of the latch that held the lid in place. Its flame within danced like mad.

He reached out to grab it by the chain lying between them, but the motion brought to life a dozen other pains that had him seizing up and heaving for breath. He gritted his teeth and stared determination at Sunlight before reaching out again and dragging it in. With its flames dancing warm beside his face, he let himself breathe easy.

He was alive. He still drew breath. He still defied the darkness.

The same couldn’t be said for the fang beast that sent him tumbling over the cliff. It lay about two lengths to his right in a motionless heap, its neck bent at an impossible angle. It wasn’t moving.

He put a tender hoof to his side and winced as it came back slick with blood. In a sick twist of irony, it seemed he was only spared the same fate thanks to the outcrop that broke his fall. And maybe a rib or two.

Worse, the wound would fester soon, and without his canteen, which he had shed along with his saddlebags when they snagged on the rocks, he had no way to clean it. Whether by tooth and claw or disease, it was only a matter of time before the darkness claimed him.

He held Sunlight close to his chest, let its warmth fill him with thoughts of the Sun and the cool breeze of the meadow. He thought of Luna standing beside him with her wings spread wide, wearing a smile more radiant than the Sun itself. Even here in the dark and loneliness of the crystal caverns, all he wanted was to hear her voice.

The world had a cruel sense of humor, dangling their victory so close only to yank it away as they reached out to grasp it. He squeezed his eyes shut to hold in a wave of tears. The glow of Sunlight through his eyelids reminded him of the Sunset in the meadow, and with its warmth, he could almost feel Luna lying beside him.

Even in her absence, the mere thought of her warmed him from the inside as Sunlight warmed him from without. She was near, despite the distance between them. No matter what the Devourer did, it could never truly take her from him.

He didn’t know what this sensation was, only that it felt right, that he was one with her, that he needed her more than anything in the world. This wonderful sensation rose up from the depths of his heart to envelop him in its warmth.

There was something different about it, though. It felt fuller, like wings spread wide, as if she really were still with him. But whatever it was, it wasn’t his imagination. There was a sentience alive inside him, just how Luna had occupied the space in his chest. He couldn’t help but perk up his ears, open his eyes to stare into the waiting darkness, and dare to hope:

“Luna?”

The warmth within faltered for the briefest moment, but resurged like a consoling smile.

“Hello, Champion,” a voice said between his ears.

His heart sank, and he flicked an ear in dismay. It was not Luna.

Still, he gazed on in nervous hope of who or what this new voice might be. Feminine like her, but with a more youthful energy—what he imagined a young mare on the verge of her adult cycles to sound like.

It giggled like the little green-eyed filly in Luna’s dream. “It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

He held his breath, as if any sudden movement might scare it away.

“My name is Cadance,” it said. “And you are going to save the world.”

XIII - The Second Voice

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What?

He stared into the darkness, scarcely believing the voice’s words. It knew he was going to save the world?

He scanned his surroundings for a way to communicate. There had to be a rock around here somewhere.

“Just trace your words,” the voice—Cadance—said. A pause, then a giggle, like she just thought of something.

Trace? Like he had with Luna? You mean this? he tried.

“Yeah, that’s perfect.”

He blinked at the ground, and a million questions came to him. Luna wrote about you. Nightmare caught you.

He kept his words brief like with the stone. These voices seemed capable of understanding his intentions, and it wasn’t wise to mince words, especially in a place like this.

Cadance giggled again. It sent a warmth rolling through his ribs where she pressed closest. “I was, but you helped me out there. I’ve actually been awake for a little bit. Well… As awake as I can be in a dream.”

He folded his ears back. What do you mean?

“I mean I’ve been coming to for a while now.” She settled near his heart, where Luna normally rested. He tensed at the trespass, but made no motion to dismiss her. “The first thing I remember is looking down. I was looking down, and you were sleeping on the balcony. You woke up, and you and Aunt Luna jumped over that wolf thing.”

Her voice turned cold toward the end. She sank downward a little, away from his heart. “I’m… sorry,” she said. “About what happened.”

He looked aside. Yeah, he was, too. He should have stepped back like Luna said, run while he had the chance. She’d still be alive if he had.

“Don’t worry yourself about it, Champion. She’s still out there.” She giggled again, and something about it made his heart flutter, like she truly believed her own words. “You’re already on the right track.”

He couldn’t help but lean forward, ears at attention. What do you mean?

“I mean that you’re already down here in the dark, risking your life to save her. I don’t know many ponies who would do something like that, but I do know there is a very certain kind of pony who always would, no matter what.”

Who are they?

“Oh, I can’t tell you that. You have to understand it.” Cadance flitted up to a higher place in his chest, just below the collarbone.

“But I can tell you one thing…” she half whispered. He looked up again, hopeful. “It’s why I’m here now. And it’s why I know you have it in you.”

His eyes fell to his non-existent words on the stone. Nopony could be so sure of that, but he had to try. He had to believe.

“She thinks highly of you, Champion.” She giggled again. “And much more than that.”

What do you mean? He was asking that question a lot. He wasn’t sure how it made him feel.

She reached down with a fraction of her warmth to touch his heart, as if with a hoof. The gesture felt odd, but the warmth it sent to the farthest reaches of his body eased away any concern.

“Well, for starters, she does call you Champion.”

His heart sank at the thought. Luna might have called him Champion, but that still didn’t make him one. His worries must have shown on his face or something, for how Cadance cuddled up against his collarbone.

“Whether you’re a champion or not, you’re her Champion.”

He searched the talon scars and pebbles carved into the stone for an answer he couldn’t find. I don’t understand, he wrote.

Cadance laughed, and there was what seemed a deeper warmth resting in the upper reaches of his chest—another reassuring hoof. “You will eventually.”

The not-hoof gave a gentle squeeze. “Now come on,” she said with a pulse that amounted to a glint in her eye. “Let’s go win her back.”

As close to a plan as he would ever get. He took a step forward, but paused, realizing what a fool he was for so blindly jumping to action.

How? I don’t know where we are.

Cadance fluttered down and came to a rest just above his heart. He imagined her sitting atop it, smiling up at him, like a pony would a stone wall, their hind legs dangling out over the edge. He had no basis for what she looked like, and so substituted his sister, but with wings and a horn, since that’s what Luna had. It was oddly befitting, those blue eyes and braided brown mane, though he doubted this Cadance looked anything like her.

“Do you feel it?”

He blinked to. A moment’s silence, and he nodded—a soft sensation within his heart, like a hoof catching the tail of his scarf.

“That gentle tugging, pulling-onward feeling, right here.” Her warmth gave a gentle squeeze about his heart. “Listen to it, Champion. It will never steer you wrong.”

He put a hoof to his chest. It was there, the feeling she spoke of, but nothing more than a faint pulling, yearning thing. It had no direction, only desire. The more he lingered on it, the more he thought of Luna, and the stronger it grew. That was reason enough to take his first stumbling steps, wherever they might lead.

The blood on his side had long since crusted over, but the stabbing pain in his ribs stole away any hope of a full breath. And now that the adrenaline of the moment had passed, his front-left ankle took on a dull throb, heavier when he put weight on it.

Wherever he had fallen, it must have been closer to the center of the mountain, judging by the crystals. Rather than the sparse eye-like gems jutting from stone, these deeper tunnels were practically made of crystal. They reflected his face back at him in all shapes and sizes, each a distinct shade of blue or purple.

The warmth flitting about his chest flickered like lantern fire in what passed as her form of a shudder. “I hated this place the time I was trapped down here. I never thought it could get any worse.”

Truth be told, it easily could. Sunlight barely reached four lengths out, a far cry from the more favorable six or so in the Moonlight. It was as if the unknown pressed in on it, that the light itself was afraid of this terrible darkness and wanted to hide within the safety of its iron cage. The thought raised the hair on his neck and sent goosebumps down his legs.

Wait. She had been down here before? He quickly traced the question.

“It was a while ago. I-I’d rather not think about it.”

But you’ve been here before, he pressed. You know this place.

Her warmth tilted of a sort, what must have been her equivalent of cocking her head in thought. “Well, sort of. I know parts of the real crystal caverns. But I also know that dreams don’t always make things the same way they are in reality. You should see some of the dreams I have," she added flippantly.

While her offer might have been a nice break from the cave’s oppressive atmosphere, it wouldn’t help them any. He tapped his hoof to get her back on track.

“Err, yeah sorry, that was weird of me. But yeah, it would be best if we didn’t assume too much about this place. If I do see something familiar, though, I’ll let you know. After all, this is Aunt Luna’s dream we’re talking about, and she did help the Guard map out the higher sections.” What equated to a smirk simmered somewhere between his lungs. “She said it was the least she could do for sleeping through the entire changeling invasion. If anything’s true to form, I’d bet the crystal heart it’d be those parts.”

Her certainty was a small comfort, at least. As long as there was a chance she could guide him, then their journey would be that much less perilous.

“Champion?” she asked. “What’s it like where you’re from?”

To that, he actually stopped walking. Isn’t that the sort of thing I should be asking you?

“What, I’m not allowed to ask you what it’s like where you’re from? I don’t know much about this dream. Besides…” Her warmth curled in what was probably a shrug. “It’ll help pass the time.”

He continued on, beneath a low-hanging jut of crystal and around a corner. The silence was worse here. Down here, the darkness had eyes.

Yet part of him felt for the new voice in his chest. He couldn’t imagine the horrors of waking up from one nightmare into another. The least he could do was share a few comforting words between steps and bring it up to speed.

It’s… It’s what Luna would have wanted.

It’s dark, were the first words he wrote between steps.

“You don’t say?” she replied in a tone that seemed less a question than her words suggested.

I just did. Did she want him to talk or not?

“Uh… Oh, right. You grew up writing everything. Yeah, I guess sar chasm won’t be the best way to chat.”

What’s sar chasm?

A pause. “Wow, did Pinkie Pie get swallowed too or something?”

He stopped again. Who?

“Um, I mean, sorry. Force of habit. I guess being trapped in a nightmare for almost forever really does a number on your ability to talk like a normal pony.” She shied away, hovering into the space between his rib and lung. Silence lingered while he walked another dozen or so paces. “So it’s always been dark like this?”

For as long as anypony can remember.

She was rather talkative. It didn’t make much sense. They might be questions that would help shape a general sense of this dream world but were pointless to a practical extent. It was like she wanted to talk simply for its own sake.

“What do you guys do for fun?”

They came to a ledge overlooking an impossible darkness. He stared into it longer than was healthy, then turned to follow along it before it spiralled downward with the wall.

We don’t, really, he traced before continuing on.

“You don’t have fun?”

We don’t really have ti—

Something click-clacked around the bend. He tossed his cape around Sunlight and huddled low to the ground. Its light still glowed through the tatters in his cape, and he hurried to cover it with Mother’s scarf. Proper darkness rushed in, and between the heavy beating of his heart the click-clack of claw on stone came closer.

A wet nose considered the air, searched for whatever might have been passing this way. Something that might have been fur shifted just beyond hoofreach, and it lumbered by for the passage behind him.

He waited until long after even the memory of those claws on stone faded before unwrapping Sunlight and continuing onward.

We don’t really have time for fun, he traced, picking up where they left off.

“There’s gotta be something you do when you’re not not having fun.”

He considered her words. There was one thing.

“Oh? Do tell.” Her warmth shifted to the forefront of his chest, little nonexistent hooves attentively perched on one of his ribs. He imagined her resting her head on them, large eyes looking up at him.

My sister has a bell. Little silver thing. Don’t know how she got it, but sometimes, when nopony else was around, we would ring it.

Cadance giggled. “That’s adorable. So you and your sister are close?”

Close? What do you mean? He was answering with a lot of questions lately. It made him feel small, not knowing what seemed to be such innate things to these princesses.

“I mean close. You know, like, best friends?”

He folded his ears back. Smaller and smaller still.

Silence passed, and the hooves perched on his ribs pulled back. She seemed to be searching for something to say.

“Oh… O-okay. So, no fun and no friends, huh? Wow, Pinkie Pie really must have been swallowed.”

Who is Pinkie Pie? And why all the questions? So specific.

Her smile warmed the space between his heart and lungs. “Even for a pony who’s never talked before, you’re pretty perceptive.

“If you really wanna know, somepony has to be the optimist here, and you’re definitely not filling that role.” She ended her statement with a warm flicker that could only equate to a wink.

What does that have to do with all these questions?

“Well, if we’re going where we’re going, we’ll need Twilight.”

The fourth princess? But what does that have to do with talking to you? Not that I don’t mind, he added.

“Because,” she said, “she’s my sister-in-law. And, more practically, we’ll need her help getting out of here once we save your damsel in distress.”

Sister-in-law. Was that another one of those “love” things? It didn’t sound like any sort of practical relationship. And what was a damsel?

He shook his head. But how will we “release” her? She doesn’t have a brazier. There are only Sun and Moon braziers.

Cadance flitted from one rib to another, leaving a trail of warmth to radiate outward and match the one against his chest. “Just tell me more about yourself. You and Luna released me, and knowing that, I have a hunch.”

That didn’t make much sense. Me and Luna released you? How?

Cadance laughed. “Like I said, Champion, I can’t spoil that. You have to understand it. As for Twilight, just trust me on this one.”

He drooped an ear and frowned in dismay, but kept his thoughts to himself. Maybe it was better not to question her, if she was going to be cryptic like that. The last time he forced anypony to be that open he almost let the world die away.

Hunches were hunches, and without one himself he had no reason to argue. It’d help pass the time and make navigating this place a little less terrifying. Things finally seemed to be coming together.

He told her about his village, the Elders, and their call for silence. He traced his description of the Devourer between cycles spent in silent darkness as other creatures stumbled by. She seemed aware of his movements even without light, as if she were one with him, especially when tracing memories of Luna and the dreams they shared.

She perched her little hooves on his ribs now and again, and the gentle weight of her head pressed their warmth into his bones. There was something about her, in the same way Luna stirred up unknown feelings, something that pulled at his emotions and made him genuinely wonder what life was like on the other side.

Luna instilled in him a thirst for the sights and sounds of the real world, but this Cadance, this young, chatty princess, fashioned curiosities of the ponies that inhabited it.

Of course, he flirted with the fantasies of their daily lives—the houses, the laughter through the streets, the bright smiles sent his way—but only that. The ponies, what they felt, what they thought—their desires, aspirations, worries, fears, joys, dreams. This mare, this Cadance, drew up unknown but thirsted-after waters from a well he had only drunk from after meeting Luna.

It all came back to her. Somehow, someway.

“Tell me what you think of her,” Cadance said on their second cycle down in the dark. He almost bumped his head on a low-hanging spear of crystal for how suddenly she had asked.

He looked down at his chest where she waited for an answer, felt a heat rise to his cheeks that didn’t seem to come from her.

“Come ooon, you can tell me.” She buried a particularly roguish grin between her perched hooves, eyes gazing up to meet his.

What about? he quickly traced.

“You know what about,” she half said, half giggled. “Luna. You’ve told me what you two have gone through. I want to hear what you think of her.”

He looked around as if the darkness held the answer. He shrugged, his eyes falling back to his hooves. The heat reached higher in his cheeks, and it definitely wasn’t Cadance sneaking up to take a peek at his thoughts, thankfully.

“What about her do you like, then, if you’re so shy all of a sudden?”

Well, that was easy enough. Brave, smart, courageous, conscious of her responsibilities. He traced each word for her, but as each came to mind… How she stood in the meadow at their first meeting, her starlit mane drifting on the slightest breeze, her tall, stately poise that bespoke her authority, and yet those eyes. Those shining blue eyes that he could stare into for cycles on end.

That smile. By the light of life, that smile. There were no words for the feelings it brought, feelings that never existed until she came to be part of him.

“Champion?”

He shook his head, and she laughed.

“I thought I lost you there. You stopped walking and started staring off into space.” A big, warm grin stretched from one side of his heart to the other. “And you got this silly smile on your face.”

He blushed and couldn’t help pawing at the ground in embarrassment. Even Sunlight seemed to flicker in its own form of laughter.

“Don’t worry, Champion. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the most natural thing, in fact.”

It?

Cadance giggled as she drifted lazily between lung and ribcage. “That feeling in your chest—uh, the one that’s not me floating around all over the place because I don’t know what to do with myself right now. Seriously, you have no idea how weird it is being a disembodied voice inside another pony.”

Again with the cryptic messages and weird tangents. And why are you so certain of that? Of this feeling, that is.

“Because I sometimes like to think it’s my special talent.” Her warmth flickered in that shrugging manner of hers, but a hotter radiance belied a clear grin.

He rolled his eyes. This was that “sar chasm” thing again, wasn’t it? What was the point of it? Luna didn’t use this sar chasm.

Cadance was quite a different princess than the formal and stately quality Luna gave the title. This Cadance spoke with a more playful attitude, seemed to make light of their bad situation. Not that she didn’t understand its gravity. She simply chose to look at the brighter side of things despite it. The contrast in personalities was immense, yet both seemed to possess the tendency to ask questions beyond the practical, especially Cadance.

She questioned to the point of exhaustion, but she truly seemed to care about the things she asked. It wasn’t caring in the same sense as he understood it all his life. There was no practicality to it, just a simple, courteous curiosity.

“Wait,” Cadance said, urgent. “Champion, I know this spot.”

He perked up his ears before raising Sunlight from its bandolier. The better lighting revealed himself surrounded by monolithic crystals. They reflected his face back at him, massive, curious. How they reached up, up, up into the darkness that even here couldn’t fend off the reflection of lantern light, like a grand brazier all its own. And still farther they reached.

“Turn around, Champion, that way.” She pressed against his left rib, directing him.

His careful walk turned to hurried canter. A miniature iron railroad appeared from the dark, like that of the tunnel so long ago.

“Follow the mine shaft. It’ll take us deeper into the caverns where your Devourer is waiting. I’m sure of it.”

It led to a downward, slope, far into the heart of the mountain. The jagged crystals consuming the walls grew darker, more chaotic in pattern until all semblance of shape became little more than his harried face mirrored back at him a million times over. Half of them looked more like eyes than they had any right to, and he put swift distance between them.

The railway spiraled down a shaft to a long, narrow tunnel unnervingly devoid of crystal. The bare rock shimmered with a wetness better left unquestioned, and the air turned cold. His breath plumed from his nostrils.

The tunnel opened up to a room too wide and tall to see its walls, and only sparingly was there the glint of crystal beyond sight. He stepped carefully into the cavern.

“Is this the place?” She hid deep in his breast, poking her head out from behind his heart.

It looked enough like it. Maybe, he traced, never taking his eyes off the darkness ahead.

It almost seemed alive, as if the darkness itself breathed across his skin and held its ground against Sunlight. Down here, the lantern light hardly reached two lengths ahead of him. He bunched his scarf up around his neck, eyes alert for movement.

Was it the Devourer? Stronger now that it had taken Luna? Angry, perhaps, that Cadance escaped. Maybe both. He kept his chin down to cover the sensitive skin of his throat, the teeth of innumerable once-ponies playing shadowed tricks in the corners of his mind.

The tugging in his heart pulled him silently onward, and it took what seemed a quarter cycle to realize it was not Cadance. Somewhere beyond the darkness, Luna called out to him.

He passed into what seemed to be another chamber, and the chill in the air crystallized on his fur. Sunlight barely reached a length away, and for all that Luna pulled him onward, there was an ever present feeling that something trailed closely behind.

The feeling stuck with him until he reached another chamber. Crystals spired from the bare rock almost like flower heads to stare at him as he passed. One particular rosette grew beside one of the many stone-teeth, and he knew this was it.

He took another step forward, and the ledge came into view, its transition from black rock to empty air nearly seamless. The darkness seemed to reach out to him like the curls of little tendrils beckoning him closer, tugging him downward into its open, waiting mouth. It would swallow him again, and this time it was either victory or death.

“It’s… Are you ready?”

After a short pause, he nodded. The fall would be brief without Luna’s wings to slow him, and the impact would no doubt be painful. But it was the burning, not the plunge, he feared most.

Cadance flitted about his chest, her little warm hooves touching here and there against his ribs, as if seeking a better view, or perhaps a way out of this herself. But the weight of her voice shattered any such notion when she spoke.

“Let’s get going. I don’t like this place.”

Neither did he, but he had the unfortunate knowledge of what lay ahead. He placed his hooves on the ledge, and a small pebble chipped off to tumble into the darkness.

Part of him wanted nothing to do with this, to simply return to the village and save himself the pain and suffering, much less the risk of failure. But that was a fool’s wish, a coward’s wish. Luna needed him, and nothing in this world or the other would keep him from laying it all on the line.

He nodded despite the racket of his heart and took a deep breath. He let it plume slow and steady from his nostrils, and he let his body tip forward.

The wind whipped through his mane, its roar like that of the Devourer crashing down on his dreams. It was only fitting that he now returned the favor—he the one crashing downward to destroy what awaited him below.

All too quickly, he plunged headlong into the firewater, and it felt like his body had been set ablaze. He seized up at the pain, the individual hairs of his coat curling at their tips.

“Focus, Champion!” Cadance shouted. “Swim!” She pressed against his sternum, directing him onward.

Her voice brought a surge of vivid clarity, and he found the wits to put one hoof in front of the other for the surface. He breached the water, gasping for breath. The air stank of burning hair and his mane lay matted against his face, but he pressed forward. There he dragged himself into the shore, and when the worst of the burning subsided, he put a tender hoof to his side. The firewater had eaten through the scabbing, and the wound was slick and seeping pus.

“It’s okay, Champion. We made it.”

Made it, indeed. But the worst of it was yet to come. That… that thing still waited for them at the brazier. He felt Luna calling to him, pulling him onward, and so he got up and marched on.

Over the course of that cycle, he felt her calls grow stronger. She felt his presence as he did hers, and the tugging at his heart gave lightness to his steps.

Her smile played across the darkness, clearer than in his dreams, and the warmth in his chest blossomed like the millions of flowers in the meadow. She wasn’t far.

Quickly enough, he came to a stop. She was there, just beyond the rim of light. But that meant—

A tendril of slime shot out from the darkness. He leapt aside, the slightest bit catching his shoulder before it slopped to the ground and slithered back into the darkness.

He heard a low bassy gurgle like the rumbling of a hungry stomach, and that thing—that mass of hollow, wailing faces—rolled into the rim of Sunlight. His heart thundered in his chest at the sight of it.

“Focus, Champion,” Cadance said. She tried to sound bold, but as it advanced on him, even she struggled to hold fast. “I don’t have the magic Luna did when she spared you from this thing. We won’t get a second chance here.”

The thing rose above him, its predominant face yawning wide like a cresting wave. It took him in with hollow eyes, and those moments of utter silence sucked at his soul, whispering in his ear that he should simply lie down and die. But he couldn’t. Luna was down here somewhere. She was counting on him.

He rolled sideways in time to avoid the full brunt of its attack, but its amorphous body splashed across the ground and up his right side. It burned through his coat and deep into his skin as he scrambled backward. When he brushed it off, it peeled away his coat and the top layer of skin.

The creature was slow to reform, and he used those precious moments to blink away the tears and focus his thoughts. He needed to get past this thing, find Luna, and get away.

He sidestepped a slime trail creeping for his hooves and made to dash around the far side of the creature, but something within its roiling mass caught his eye, and he stumbled.

Amidst the crowd of wailing faces, there was a longer one, more graceful, with ghostly eyes that seemed to recognize him. It mouthed as if in a trance,

“Champion…”

A massive air bubble burst from its side in a gurgle of slime, and out spewed a noxious plume of gas that rose into the air like some miasma seeking to choke out the sky. The creature swelled up overtop him again, but this time he tripped over his own hooves when he tried to dodge.

He scrambled away on his belly, but not quickly enough to avoid the splash as it got him along the back of his legs. He grit his teeth to the liquid fire seeping into his already blistering skin. It smelled like a mixture of burning hair and vomit. He scrambled to get his hooves under him before it could drag him in, and he collapsed a dozen meters away. He bit back a scream for how the ground felt like daggers tearing at his exposed and bleeding skin.

“Champion! Are you alright?” Cadance, for all her previous hesitation, pressed herself against his right rib cage where the pain was greatest. But her warmth, however welcome, did little to ease the pain. She rose up to the space between his collarbone and shoulder blade, a gentle urge that he stand. “Was… was that her in there?”

He nodded, struggling to his hooves. He clenched Sunlight tight against his chest to feel the heat in his bones. It was all he could do to forget the pain.

All those faces inside the creature. Those weren’t the monster. Those were dreambound ponies, and now Luna was one of them.

The realization sent a terrifying certainty resounding in the pits of his heart: there was no avoiding this monster. If he were to save Luna, he had to defeat it.

But this thing was immune to his buck knife and had swallowed Sunlight the last time as if it was nothing. He couldn’t leave her here, but it seemed there was no way to get to her.

“It’s smaller, Champion,” Cadance said, quietly, likely recollecting her wits, searching for some way to help. “After it attacked you. It got a little smaller.”

He glanced at the glob stuck to his side. Though his entire right side was painfully raw and seeping, the slime itself hardly burned anymore. He brushed it away, and it fell lifelessly to the stone. It seemed whatever magic gave it the touch of fire vanished if it stayed separated long enough.

Maybe that was it. Just bait it out, destroy it bit by bit. He could do this.

The distant sound of wailing ponies emanated from the monster in harrowing chorus. He could hear them now, as if that intimate pain had attuned him to their cries and their many faces churning beneath its surface. Only one face seemed to watch in silence.

The creature shot out a tendril of slime while he was still processing his thoughts. He almost didn’t see it.

He sidestepped it just in time to feel the swish of wind against his cheek. His heart racketed in his chest, and his brain stalled out at the realization. That would have killed him had he not moved.

The slime trail slopped to the ground and slithered back toward its mass, but he brought Sunlight down on top of it. This time, unstuck within the creature’s pustulent mass, Sunlight exacted a vengeance worthy of the Sun. The inferno unleashed from its simple frame could have incinerated half the village.

The sight brought a momentary worry to the forefront of his mind, one of how Sunlight dimmed with every burst of flame it let loose. But Sunlight knew their triumph lay on the other side of this monster, and it held nothing back. The tendril writhed to the squeal of steam before curling in on itself, and Sunlight blazed all the brighter in the rush of battle.

He grinned for the small victory, but nearly missed the mass of ponies mindlessly hurling its entire weight at him.

It caught him by his hindleg, and he fell in a halfhearted attempt to dive out of the way. The fire burned deep into his ankle bones like little white-hot teeth clamping down and refusing to let go.

He screamed as it dragged him in, his hooves scraping an unholy sound on the stone, the fear in his heart already thrumming with the terrors of what happened the last time.

It lifted him up by the ankle as if to dangle him over its open mouth, but he tucked inward and swung Sunlight, its flames severing the tendril clean like the sharpest of blades. He landed hard on his back and for a moment saw stars, but he willed himself to roll onto his hooves.

The creature oozed forward. Where it left a path of slime, the stone looked brighter, eaten away by the acid bubbling from its pustulent surface. The stench of his burning hair grew pungent and drew his thoughts to the blistering skin along his sides. He took a weak step backward.

“Don’t give up, Champion,” Cadance said. She had found her courage at the forefront of his chest, and it spoke true in the calmness of her voice. “She needs you.”

He looked Luna’s shapeless face in the eye, saw in it her hopes and dreams—a quiet moment among the meadow flowers with him at her side, and nothing more.

Cadance put a hoof against his heart, and a warm radiance spread through him. “You can do it. Do you trust me?”

Luna seemed to reach out with a formless hoof as the monstrosity split in two to encircle him. Something sparked within his chest, a certainty that believed every word Cadance said, and he held tight to that spark. He could do this.

He gritted his teeth and charged left, swinging Sunlight like a sword to tear through its enveloping arm. The severed end splattered to the ground, speckling him with droplets like boiling oil that left a dappled pattern on his legs and chest.

He spun about, eyes locked with the predominant wailing face. It slid out a tendril to reunite with its lost limb, but he blasted that into steam with another downward stroke.

The creature shuddered, and the half that had tried encircling him from the right melded back with its body. Noxious bubbles burst from its backside as if in anger, but it seemed to finally consider him a threat and waited on his next move.

“I don’t think it liked that, Champion,” Cadance said.

No, it sure didn’t. He could see the faces within condense at its center, as if it meant to hide them away, protect its food from this newfound danger. The lifeless slime beside his hoof still held one of these wailing faces, and he stomped on it for good measure, destroying the face.

Up sprayed a noxious plume of burning gas that belied its seeming inertness. It smelled of sulfur and bile, and it burned all the way into the back of his sinuses to leave him sputtering and gagging. Not his brightest idea in hindsight, but he knew it worked the instant the creature let out a gurgling, pained roar.

Meanwhile, a sizeable warmth travelled up his foreleg. It worked up from his knee and into his chest, where it bounced around in a frenzy. A new voice screamed incoherently between his ears, loud enough that he winced and instinctively flattened his ears.

“Calm down!” Cadance shouted at the new voice. Her warmth melded with it in a hug of sorts. “Shh… It’s okay. You’re safe now.”

The new voice receded to heavy panting. It jerked about like it was trying to see everything for the first time. When it spoke, its voice sounded deeper, distinctly non-feminine. Was it a stallion?

“What’s going on?” it shouted. “Where am I? What is that thing?”

He was able to look up through the snot and tears as the creature drew back on itself, the remaining faces swirling and concentrating toward the right side of its body. They bubbled outward from the surface as a singular, gelatinous arm that curled back to strike.

It swung wide, and he barely had the chance to duck. Stray splatters of slime hissed all along his back and made steam of the hairs between his shoulder blades.

He scrambled away, still half blind, tears and snot pouring down his face. Jamming his buck knife up his nose would have been less painful than breathing in those fumes.

The thing slid forward angrily, and despite being half blind, he could hear every gurgling, bursting, slithering sound it made, and used that to keep his distance while clearing his head.

It was noticeably smaller now, he could tell after the tears relented long enough to see. Where it had once towered over him at least three times his size, it now loomed a little less than two. It was working. He was winning this fight. He would win this fight.

He locked eyes with Luna still at the center of it all and stepped forward.

“What are you doing!?” the new voice yelled. “Get us out of here!”

He closed the distance, sidestepped a slow cascade of slime, and charged in to carve out another face from the crowd. Sunlight struck home as a cloud of toxic gas blasted him in the face, but he heard the gurgle in its belly too late to dodge.

It caught him in the chest with a burst of slime to throw him backwards off his hooves, and he slammed hard into the ground. Dazed and heaving for breath, he rolled over to stare up at the cresting tide.

This was how it ended last time: dragged in, kicking and screaming until every last trace of him dissolved away. Through the snot and tears, he watched its massive, moaning face tower above, building itself up for a final crash.

The newfound heat in his chest crashed about, crying and whimpering incoherently. This… this was a pony. This was another pony inside him, one of the innumerable souls Luna sought to set free from the nightmares. Not just Cadance, not even Luna. He was saving somepony.

He was saving everypony.

With Sunlight clenched in hoof, he gritted his teeth and let courage stand tall.

This time, he didn't kick and scream, he didn’t thrash like an animal trying to escape. He let the little tendrils snake along his body and lick away his fur in little spurts and hisses of smoke. He waited as its massive face reared up over him, and just as it came crashing down, swung Sunlight to catch it in the jaw.

For the briefest instant, he saw the flames curl out the sides of the lantern, and everything went gold in a deafening boom that rocked the very stone beneath him. It blasted the creature apart, ablating even the fumes that squealed their release from its mass.

He rolled to his hooves, Sunlight ready to smite it again, but the creature had fallen backward and melted into a puddle that seemed as if struggling to reform. All around him, little clumps of wailing faces lay in other puddles trying to coalesce and retreat back to the main body. He stomped on them one by one, and their warmth seeped into his bones.

Each face brought with it a frightened cry to join the chorus in his head, and Cadance danced between their wild flares, drawing them down from fear and into a semblance of order. The dozen warmths collected in his chest lent him courage as he had never known it. But there was one still missing from its special place beside his heart, and it drew his eyes toward the monster.

The slime creature cowered beneath his gaze and burbled out a pathetic haze of acid. Pressed against its bulging belly was Luna’s distorted face, eyes wide and reaching out to him, her voice ever-present in his ears. At his advance, the creature slunk toward the firewater in an attempt to escape. If it got away, he would never see her again.

He stumbled forward, his hooves weak and head still foggy, but he locked his eyes with Luna, and he would not be denied. He dove on top of the monster with Sunlight already coming down to carve away its pustulent mass. Fire blanketed every inch of the monstrosity’s body and doused the cave in unwavering Sunlight. Every strike brought her face closer to the surface, her eyes clearer and filled with disbelief.

Just as it slumped into the firewater, he plunged headlong into its mass, the hair on his face and hooves dissolving away. The pain was unbearable, but he felt the cold chill of her face against his, and nothing else mattered. All he saw was her smile, the smell of her wing draped over his back, the gentle rise and fall of her chest as they gazed into the Sunset. He held that sensation close, and with all his strength, he wrapped his hooves around her and pulled.

Like a hoof yanked free from the sucking mud, he tore her from the monster’s belly and tumbled over backward. Through the pain, he held her amoebic form against his chest, never to let go, as the squelching and slithering sounds receded into the lapping of water and only his ragged breathing filled the silence.

She couldn’t see, her shapeless head resting in the crook of his neck, but he traced the words into the stone all the same:

Ive got you

He wrote them over and over, all the while her ghostly form pulling itself tighter against him, a tendril of a hoof wrapping around his neck to hold him close.

Ive got you Ive got you Ive got you

The sounds she made could be nothing other than crying—not of fear or sadness, but a mixture of joy and disbelief. A warmth spread through him. It radiated in his chest, a growing sense of… of something. Something needed, that he was needed and that he in turn needed to feel.

Cadance fluttered close to his heart, placed a gentle hoof upon it.

“There,” she said. “That feeling right there. That’s not you, that’s not me or the others in here. That’s not even her.” She giggled, softly. “Well… It is her. But it’s not her her.”

He stared at the imaginary words he had traced, processing what she said. What do you mean?

She gave his heart a gentle squeeze. “That, Champion, is love.”

As she said the word, he felt the sensation expand to encompass his chest as if feeling it for the first time. If this was love, then it was all he ever wanted.

Luna’s amoebic form absorbed into him, and her wings sprouted from his sides anew. They held tight against him, tight enough that it hurt where the slime had left his sides raw and seeping, but he couldn’t have cared less.

Her flame found its special place beside his heart and made no hesitation of pressing against it. The other ponies inside watched on in reverent silence.

“I did not want you to,” Luna whispered, “but I knew you would return. And I am glad you did, for our subjects within your breast would not know freedom as they do now. I cannot thank you enough for your bravery, or foolhardiness as some might see it.”

Bravery or foolhardiness, it didn’t matter. He needed this as much as they did. He needed to see and feel her within and at his sides as before. Life would have been little more than existence without her. He curled his forehooves in toward his chest. It was the closest he could get to holding her.

She pressed herself against his ribs to return the gesture, let silence beget silence. A moment passed before she turned to the others.

“You have all suffered long for my mistakes,” she said. “Words cannot convey how sorry I am for what I have done. I only ask that in time you might find it in your hearts to forgive me.

“But as much as I wish to hear such words, there is much yet to do, and I must ask a favor of you all. Spread the word: dawn is coming. The nightmare is at an end.

“Go, my little ponies. Be at peace. Awake.”

What little magic she possessed coalesced as a windswept chill in his veins. It gathered up the ponies’ warmths in its current, and bellowed into his lungs.

On his exhale, they drifted up his chest, and out his mouth trailed little wisps of smoke that danced upward, out of sight. From somewhere above, yet also inside, whispered words met his ears:

“Thank you, Champion.”

His gaze lingered on the darkness above. The ponies thanked him. They thanked him! His was not a thankless task. Somepony other than the princesses would remember him.

He lowered his head, eyes closed. There, beside his heart, Luna’s cold flame gently pulsed, right where it belonged.

He had Cadance to thank for that. She was his guiding spirit when the world seemed at its bleakest, instilled in him the courage to fight for the one that needed him most—the one he needed most. She gave him this feeling, this love he felt in his heart.

But not quite that, even. It was already there, that feeling. That ever-reaching yearning need to be with Luna, to see no harm come to her and to right the wrongs befallen her.

Still, she brought it to the forefront of his mind, made it possible through steadfast encouragement, for no other reason than to help. She cared for him, just like Luna, in a way wholly different but no less valuable.

Cadance, he traced. Thank you. His heart raced as she sidled up to his ribs.

“Anything for a friend,” she said, rather knowingly.

There was another presence, the spark from before—the one that had ignited in his chest when Cadance gave him that gentle encouragement and he believed. It floated close beside Cadance, a bit to the side as if peeking out from behind her legs.

“Go on…” Cadance said, her smirk clear in the warmth tickling his ribs.

What? he wrote.

She laughed a high and happy laugh that warmed even the tips of his hooves. “Not you, Champion.”

A moment of silence followed, then, “What, me?” It was a new voice, somewhat frightened. Feminine and young like Cadance, but much less certain of itself. “I-I don’t know what to say. There was that thing he was fighting and then he won right before saving Princess Luna and then they were having a moment and I didn’t want to interrupt and I’m so sorry.”

Cadance’s warmth melded with the spark in a gentle hug. “Twilight, it’s fine. Why don’t you introduce yourself?”

The spark pulled away from Cadance. “Oh, right!” she said before somehow clearing her throat. “Hello, my name is Twilight Sparkle. It’s nice to finally meet you, Champion.”

He smiled at the ground and traced, You too.

“That was… That was terrifying.” Twilight fizzled out, becoming little more than the faintest thrum of energy in his chest. “You finally pulled me free, and then you had that… thing. How did you even get me out, anyway?”

“He believed me,” Cadance said. She tapped his rib in some passing form of an elbow nudge. “I told him Luna needed him and that he could do it. All he needed was to believe it himself.”

“But how did him believing you get me out of there?”

“You should know more than anypony, Twilight. He made a friend. As for you…” She nuzzled into Twilight’s spark and made some weird windy-sounding noise.

Twilight giggled, her spark flickering as she struggled to unmeld from Cadance. “No, Cadance, stop!”

“Twilight, just because you don’t have a pony belly to raspberry doesn’t mean I can’t give my best sister-in-law a best sister-in-law belly raspberry she’s long overdue for.”

“No, Cadance! Wait!” Twilight shouted as she whizzed circles around his chest, keeping away from Cadance.

He lay on his stomach, smiling at the ground between his forehooves. Twilight and Cadance shared an odd relationship, one full of the laughter that Luna had talked about in cycles past. They shared something on a deeper level he had yet to understand, this love. Though, they didn’t seem to have the same love as he did for Luna. Theirs was love in the truest sense as he understood it. Their banter and racing about inside his chest couldn’t be anything but, yet there remained a distinction he had yet to figure out.

He looked a little further down, closer toward his chest, feeling for Luna’s flame still pressing against his heart. Since releasing the other ponies from the nightmare, she hadn’t said a word.

“Luna?” Cadance said.

“Hmm?” Luna said, pulled away from deeper thoughts. Apparently he wasn’t the only one that noticed.

“What’re you thinking about?” Cadance asked.

“Nothing.” She paused. “We… We must be off.”

He nodded. They were close to the brazier. Their quest was almost complete. He struggled to raise himself on limbs that could barely support him.

“Maybe you should rest before we go any farther,” Cadance said. “We might not be far from Aunt Celestia’s brazier, but we have no idea what will happen when we light it.”

That was true. His legs quivered beneath him just standing there. If there was another monster lying in wait, or if the Devourer reacted to the brazier, there was no way he would be ready.

And he wanted to see Luna again. She hovered close to his heart, closer than the other two, pressed ever so gently against it.

He more collapsed than laid down, and before the sensation of sleep overcame him, he already lay in the meadow.

A gentle fog covered the distant night-shrouded valley. It swept in around him, yet for all its thickness didn’t conceal the faraway lights of Ponyville or the cloudless night sky. The stars reflected off the lake beneath Canterlot Mountain, and the air smelled sweet with the wetness that collected on the grass beneath his hooves.

Here he had no injuries, knew no aches or pains of the outside world. His coat, though its usual dull grey, was whole, and Luna pressed herself against his side, wing draped over his back to pull him close.

Twilight and Cadance were somewhere in his dream, too, but they were elsewhere, enjoying their own rests from the nightmares.

Within the fog, the sounds of the outside world fell silent, his and Luna’s breaths all that filled the still night air. Luna placed a hoof on his.

He looked at her, she looked at him, and all was as it should be.

XIV - Raising the Sun, Waking the World

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He woke the next cycle to the tinny hum of magic.

Slowly, the quiet fog and solitude of hooves intertwined lifted from his mind, and he opened his eyes.

A faint purple aura wafted from his body in wispy curls, like steam off a pot of hot water. Everything felt unusually warm. He lifted his head, ears perked, and raised a hoof to better inspect the glow. The humming grew louder when he brought it before his eyes.

“Good morning, Champion,” Cadance said. She fluttered up from the lower regions of his abdomen and took a seat on his ribs. Even without her extra warmth, it was obvious she wore a knowing smirk. “Have a good dream?”

He glanced at the ground and smiled. He blinked, and the purple mist curled about as if dancing for his attention. He craned his head back to get a better look at his chest. The magic steam rising from it smelled like the dew-laden grass and waterfall mist of Luna’s dreams.

Cadance giggled. “That’s Twilight. She’s been working all night to help get you back on your hooves. You can kinda see it already.” She swept up behind his collarbone, just beneath a patch of newly grown fuzz where the slime monster had boiled away his skin down to the bone.

He touched a hoof to it, but it couldn’t be real. He had felt the firewater, watched the skin slough away to blistering sores and pus. But as his hoof brushed across his skin, the grey fuzz whisked with it like new grass, soft and springy.

The ghost of a long-forgotten pain still remained, along with its soreness and aches, but he could move and twist with little discomfort.

The purple mist abated, and a raspy voice gasped for air. He bristled at the spark between his shoulder blades, but after it settled down to a more accustomed place in his chest, he shivered away the feeling.

Good morning, he traced. It was a greeting of sorts, it seemed, one he was eager to share regardless of what it might mean.

“Good morning,” Twilight said, groggily. “Feeling better?”

He nodded, smiling, then shook himself from head to hoof as proof.

She laughed. “Glad to hear it. Whew! That took a lot out of me. But now at least you should be able to deal with anything this place can throw at you. And don’t worry about how bright that might have been. I was keeping an eye out just in case.”

He stood on stiff legs, wincing at the cracks and pops and general aches of overworked muscles. She might have healed his skin, but her magic hadn’t done as much for the beating he took as he would have liked. He stretched out his legs, rolled his shoulders and neck. Perhaps it was a good thing they were a ways off from the brazier. It would give him a chance to work out the kinks on the way there.

Luna’s wings flitted at his sides. They seemed perky, their wingtips curved to reach just above his flanks. He had never bothered checking, but was pretty certain they had never done that before.

“Good morning, Champion,” Luna said, jaunty yet authoritative. “I trust you slept well last night?”

He stretched out like a cat one final time, gave her wings a smile, then started along the shoreline.

In time, the stiffness in his muscles subsided, and he found a near lightness in his step. Twilight was dozing somewhere in his abdomen, and Cadance and Luna chatted about things from the real world. It wasn’t his business, so he kept his attention forward on the darkness.

Though, it was apparent that with every step he took and every word from Cadance’s lips that Luna’s wings clenched tighter at his sides. Her voice maintained the stoicism he always admired about her, yet no matter how well she kept the feeling from Cadance, she couldn’t hide her worries from him. He couldn’t help but feel the same.

They were close. No matter how much Luna loathed the moment as much as he, it was clear she longed for her sister and, whether she meant to or not, pulled him onward the longer they went.

He paused at the sight of the brazier. Its massive brass gleamed in the lantern light, seemed to soak in and return its rays.

He stepped up to it, gazed at the whorled embossing of the Sun and happy ponies prancing beneath it. He touched a hoof to it, and its warmth spread through him like hearthstones beneath a fire.

“Champion,” Luna said.

He looked down at his hooves in his customary equivalent of looking at her. She hovered in her special place near his heart. The others had taken up residence lower down near his stomach, giving them space to talk.

“It is… It is time.” A pause, and a whisper: “when you are ready, Champion.”

Another moment’s gazing at the ground, then a nod. He unhitched Sunlight from his bandolier and tossed it in. A distinct metal clang sounded into the darkness, and he stared in uncertain wonder at the growing light licking over the rim. The princesses gathered in his chest, silently gazing with him.

Twilight’s spark sputtered forward. “Is... Is that it? Where’s Princess Celestia?”

He felt the answer before he heard it. A ball of golden light shot downward from the darkness, like how Luna had come to him in the hilltop cathedral all those cycles ago.

It touched his forehead and ran down his face and withers like warm water poured over his head. It shrouded him in an armor of warmth that the chill of the Devourer’s gut couldn’t penetrate. Though nopony stood before him, the vision of a smiling face filled his thoughts.

“I am here.” A gentle voice, one that he imagined would have belonged to Mother, had she a voice to share.

“Princess Celestia!” Twilight said. The warmth coalesced beside the others, and the spark leapt to its side.

“Do not fear, Twilight,” Celestia said. “We are all together now. We will fight back the darkness.” The spark and warmth unwound from their embrace, and he turned his attention to the void around them. All was still.

“Huh,” Cadance said. “I would have expected something a little more dramatic, now that we’re all free.”

“Then let us entice it.” Luna spread her wings wide. Her cold flame hovered beside Celestia’s radiant warmth, made it her other half, and a golden glow lit atop his forehead.

He crossed his eyes to stare at the silvery translucent thing protruding from his skull before Luna’s voice resounded like the waves of a waterfall.

“With me, Sister! Twilight, lend us your aid and let us be rid of this place once and for all!” Luna and Celestia’s flames became one, but Twilight fizzled out lower down in his stomach.

“M-me? What can I do? I don’t know how to help.”

“You are magic incarnate, Twilight,” Luna said. “All of us are merely shadows of ourselves, but with your aid we can attain something comparable to our full strength. Without you, we cannot hope to defeat the Devourer.”

Twilight halfheartedly floated up toward them. “W-what about Cadance?”

The tiniest hint of Luna’s flame nuzzled Twilight. “She is not our aid, Twilight—” she turned a smile inward, toward him “—She is our Champion’s. She has and will play her part in the battle to come.”

“Oh, Aunt Luna,” Cadance said, sidling up beside her. “You give me too much credit. You’re the smitten one. I’m just the liaison.”

“Save your raillery for the waking world, niece,” Luna fired back, to which Cadance giggled.

Celestia’s warmth redoubled in the tips of his hooves, perhaps also a smile. “Smitten, Luna?”

“’T-tis nothing, Sister.” Her chill faltered before redoubling in intensity. “L-let us be on with it.”

A moment passed, then came a reserved chuckle from Celestia. Laced with the static of Twilight’s spark, their power intertwined, and the glow at his forehead blossomed until all turned gold.

A twisting, turning sensation yanked him through an impossibly small hole. He couldn’t breathe in the half-moment span, but there was no distinct need to, only a need to come to grips with this sensation and the weightlessness of being thrust into a darkened room.

He staggered sideways, hooves spread for balance. The tang of burnt hair wafted beneath his nostrils, and his ears rang in the silence.

He shook his head, and the slabs of stone before him took shape as the thrones of Sun and Moon, visible in the glow of the projection from his forehead.

What was this thing? He touched it, and it was warm with the heat of Sunlight.

“Have you never seen a horn, Champion?” Celestia asked.

He shook his head, but Luna supplemented his answer. “There are many things lacking in this dream of mine, Sister. But as to our quest, it would seem there is your problem, Cadance.”

She drifted high toward his collarbone to note the darkened sky. “I feel the Moon is close. Just over the horizon.”

“And the Sun,” Celestia said. The ebb and flow of her warmth was an enigma. She wanted to raise the Sun and banish the darkness—that much was clear—but something about the flatness of her voice considered an alternative.

Luna picked up on it, too. “What is it, Sister?”

“It hasn’t stirred. There’s no doubt that it realized we’ve escaped, but it must be waiting for something.”

Why not just raise the Sun and Moon? he traced. A moment passed, as it seemed Celestia needed it to process this new form of communication.

“It could possibly be waiting for that very moment, when we are at our most vulnerable,” she said. Her warmth centered toward his right rib. “I think it would be best to raise them from my balcony… That, and I couldn’t deny a small desire for a sense of normality after so long.”

“From your balcony?” Luna asked. “Your idea would be to climb to the upper reaches of the castle and trap ourselves there when it comes? And what of its foundations should this thing decide to burst up from beneath us?”

“Last I checked, Luna, we have the advantage of flight and an entire castle to pit between us.”

He unconsciously looked back at her wings, and she spread them halfheartedly, nervous.

“I-I cannot fly, Sister. That has… That has caused us enough hardship already.”

“But you didn’t have Twilight then, did you?”

“I…”

“However I can help, Princess Luna.” Twilight hovered to her side encouragingly. “I’m right here.”

Her chilling flame shrank in on itself, but she rebounded and took her place beside his heart. It was as true a smile as she had ever given.

“Then let us be off,” she said.

He stared at the thrones a moment longer. These princesses worked together, just as everypony in the village did. But still theirs was a different kind of helping, less a desire to seek an end and more for the sake of the others.

Luna had shown this… this… compassion? Was that the word? She had shown it time and again on their journey, and now they shared the feeling as one, sought after it, more than the Sun and Moon itself. Was this the friendship Cadance mentioned? Or was it more?

“Champion?” Luna said.

He took a deep breath and set off for the side door Celestia leaned toward.

He and Luna had explored the lower levels of the castle, and those were an enormous twisting maze in their own right. The upper floors, however, were twice that.

Hallways sat gilded in dust and threadbare rugs of faded velvet. Tapestries hung in tatters along the walls, chests of drawers and tables topped with silver cups and bowls and silverware stood like sentries that had never left their post.

Above, the ceiling webbed with cracks and the decay of time. A stale hint of something he had never smelled before—possibly the old stones themselves—tinged the many winding corridors with a heady sense of emptiness.

“Your attention to detail is impressive, Luna,” Celestia said. “I was expecting a more… amorphous dream, especially with how quickly you secluded yourself that night.”

“I will admit I was angry with you after our conversation, Sister, but I find comfort in the intricacies of dreamweaving, especially my own.” Luna moved about his chest, as if perusing the details of the hall. “It seems luck was on our side that I had detailed this one so, or ours might have been a more difficult task.”

Celestia had no rebuttal, but her warm radiance turned to mute roiling beneath his skin. “Indeed. We will have much to talk about when we return, Luna.”

A pause, before, “That we will, Sister.”

Silence returned for the length of the corridor, until Twilight spoke up. “Is... Is this what the real world looks like now? This can’t be what’s happened out there.”

“I daresay it is not,” Luna said. “Not everypony fell victim to the Devourer. I am sure they have kept order in the time being.”

“And… how long do you think that’s been?”

Luna didn’t answer immediately. “I am not sure. Were I to chance a guess, perhaps a year.”

“It seemed like much longer than a year, Luna,” Celestia said. “I’m not the expert on dreams, but are you so optimistic about that timeframe? Left, Champion.”

He turned left, and there he climbed a switchback staircase of heavy wood railings. It was smooth to the touch and shimmered like wet rock in Celestia’s horn light.

“It was two months I spent seeking out the whispers, Sister, centuries within my dream. Time is irrelevant, but is at the very least stable once it is set.”

“I hope you are right about that, Luna. Right, Champion, and follow the hall.”

Here the ambiance changed. What was once gaudy and overbearing in decoration took a turn for the elegant, if spartan. Faded paintings and simple brass light fixtures lined the walls, and the velvet carpets had changed to a fine weave he had never seen within the walls of the village.

“Here,” Celestia said.

He stopped, turning to face a tall set of doors whose golden Sun shone proud even in the darkened hall. He placed a delicate hoof against it, and it swung open as if on fresh hinges.

Within lay a room of gold and silver trinkets, shelves of books and reams of parchment, portraits of important-looking ponies, all spared the touch of time.

“Wow,” Cadance said. “This really does look like your room, Aunt Celestia. Like, exactly.”

Celestia’s warmth rose up to his sternum. She had a stillness about her for a long moment that nopony dared break. “You… You did all this, Luna?”

“I was angry, Sister, but that will never stop me from caring.”

Celestia shifted left, then right, then low down in the center of his chest. “No. No, it wouldn’t. To… To the balcony, Champion.”

He stepped through the quiet room, careful not to disturb its odds and ends, and emerged on a small balcony where, had the Moon still shone above, would have surely been an awe-inspiring view of the city below. His heart beat in those silent moments as Luna and Celestia’s flames merged.

“Are you ready, Luna?” Celestia said.

“I-I… Are you, Champion?”

He stared at the railing in thought. There was no other option. He had made his choice. For her.

He nodded.

“Then we begin,” Luna said. “Hold fast, everypony, for I do not know what will happen. And if the worst befalls us, know that I love you all, and that I am sorry.”

She clenched her wings at his sides in a hug, then spread them full, their feathers trimmed in Moonlight as her flame spread to every inch of his body.

“I’ve little magic to call my own in this form, but even so, the Moon and I are one. With me, Sister! Raise high the Sun and let us end this demon’s reign!”

As if charged with her words, Celestia’s warmth expanded to match Luna’s flame. Together with the lightning storm of Twilight’s spark, their magic erupted in a flash of white light that blinded him from the inside.

His body seized up, and his eyes filled with fire. The inferno collected in his skull like water defying gravity, and when the flames built to an unimaginable pressure, they surged up Celestia’s horn. A non-existent wind cooled the sweat from his brow, and in the unfathomable moments he spent with forehooves lifted from the floor, it became clear exactly what was happening.

Far beyond the distant towers and high walls of Canterlot, beyond the valley, beyond the furthest reaches of the world, rose a faint glow that silhouetted the distant saw-toothed mountains. It was the barest fraction of the Sunlight in Luna’s dreams, but glorious all the same in this world of darkness.

In the city below, the night creatures rose their wails to the sky in strident chorus. They fled to the shelter of whatever shadows and darkened holes they could find among the rubble and ruin. But something about their terror seemed off, not directed at the Sun.

A tremor shook the castle beneath his hooves, and the princesses gathered together.

“It is here,” Luna spat.

An explosion rocked the foundations of the castle. Crunching rubble, yawning steel, and collapsing buildings drowned out the world fallen back into darkness, the Sisters’ grasp on the Sun and Moon lost.

Above the chaos rose a terrible roar that blew him back on his haunches. He clenched his teeth, put his hooves to his ears to soften the stabbing pain.

“Well, I think we woke it up,” Cadance said.

“To your hooves, Champion!” Luna shouted. She spread her wings and beat them, kicking up a torrent of dust as Celestia lit her horn.

He rose, head low and at the ready, but without sight beyond a dozen meters, all he could do was stare anxiously into oblivion.

“Do you hear that?” Twilight asked. He couldn’t. The Devourer’s roar had blasted all sense of hearing from him. It was only by whatever magics that bound the princesses to him that their voices still rang true inside his head.

Cadance pressed herself up against his ribs. “It sounds like… wind.”

“It’s coming,” Celestia said. She thrust herself against his sternum in command. “Jump, Champion!”

The power in her voice jolted him to action. He leapt over the railing, and the balcony’s white stone vanished into the darkness over his shoulder. He felt more than heard the balcony explode in a shower of rubble less than a moment later.

The shockwaves sent him tumbling forward, but Luna was quick to twist her wings and bring him upright before he had even a chance to shout. Still, they fell in a chaotic glide through the abyss.

“Twilight! Lend me your aid!” Luna’s voice rang of desperation. Her primaries bent upward at their tips, and he seized up at the sensation of his bowels rising into his stomach, far too reminiscent of their flight over the wolf.

Lightning coursed through his veins as Twilight poured her energy into her. The sensation was like having a hot iron pressed against his insides. His vision blurred, but a quick shake of his head brought him back to reality.

“I’m sorry, Champion,” Twilight said. “I’m pulling some of my magic from your lifeforce. After trying to raise the Sun and Moon, I don’t have much left. I can’t do this by myself. Just let me know if it’s too much.”

It hurt, whatever it was, but knowing how high up they must have been, the alternative was far worse. He nodded, then gritted his teeth. The lightning surged into his back and up Luna’s wings, where it sent filaments of static twisting along her individual feathers.

Luna gave a triumphant grin in a blaze of frostfire, and she heaved a powerful thrust of her wings that snapped his chin to his chest. They slowed to a moment of weightlessness where his bowels again reached up in that unsettling manner.

“Maybe a little less gusto next time, you two,” Cadance said, rising up from his lower abdomen, like she had been flattened against the floor along with his innards.

Twilight settled into the niche between his lungs. “Sorry,” Twilight said. “This is weird. I’m not used to this.”

She sounded ragged, and he imagined this little filly sweating as if she had run a dozen laps around the village wall. She drew more from him than before, just to keep them afloat. Beads of sweat ran down his face as if he were running full sprint, and that hot iron pressed squarely into the inside of his spine. At this rate, neither of them would last long.

Celestia’s horn redoubled its light—or maybe regained what it had lost in the transfer of energy. All was dark, and his ears still rang, deaf from the Devourer’s roar.

A deep bass rumbled in his heart and across his back. He instinctively looked over his shoulder, but saw nothing.

“Dive, Champion!” Luna shouted.

His heart leapt to his throat at the suddenness of her command, and he snapped his body straight down. The wind cut against his face, but he felt behind him the whoosh of air displaced by a monstrously huge body.

Luna pulled back on the crest of her wings, tearing him out of the dive, his head dragging downward against his chest. They levelled out, and the powers inside him shifted from cold to warm.

An ember built at the base of his skull, and the light spiraling up Celestia’s horn grew that much brighter. “Toss your head over your shoulder,” she said.

He whipped his head around with the wind, and as if physically thrown from his forehead, a dazzling flare streaked into the darkness.

In the moments he spent staring, a network of scales, each twice his size, glimmered for a brief moment as the flare skimmed by.

“Eyes forward, Champion.” Luna regained a foothold on her courage, and it resounded from her special place beside his heart. “We do not know how low we are, and some buildings of Canterlot enjoy themselves a commanding view of the rest.”

Twilight shivered, held her spark close to Cadance atop his collarbone. She affected strength in her voice, but the way she fizzled said more than anything about how the fight had drained her.

“What was it?” she asked. “I can’t tell what it is.”

“It doesn’t matter what it is or what it looks like,” Cadance said, wrapping Twilight in a hug. “We have to fight it anyway.

“All of us, together,” Cadance whispered. Hers was a soft voice, softer than she had ever sounded. He knew without question she spoke only to him. Maybe she could also tell that Twilight was hurting more than it appeared.

Though, despite the truth in her words, he couldn’t stave off an overwhelming sense of helplessness. He had no control in this fight. All his movements were reaction to the princesses’ commands. He hadn’t even the means to communicate between the moments of sudden death, only the ability to follow orders—flee like a roach from stamping hooves as he heaved for breath.

A massive wall of stone slipped past him at the edge of Sunlight, there and gone in an instant, before the rumbling crack of stone tore through the darkness. That much even he could hear.

“Take us up,” Celestia said, and Luna complied with a swift beat of her wings.

He craned back his head to help her climb into the darkness, shrugging his shoulders in time with her wing beats. It wasn’t clear if it helped, but it felt better than doing nothing.

“Give me another shot, Champion,” Celestia shouted over the muffled silence. He felt the fire collect at the base of her horn, and he snapped his head over his shoulder.

She sent another flare crackling into the darkness. This time, it lit up the Devourer’s face as it passed by: four sets of jaws split radially from the center. Teeth the size of ponies spiralled inward toward its throat, grinding and scraping together like some terrible machine. It had no eyes, but when did a monster like the Devourer ever need them?

Celestia drew up a massive inferno to the forefront of his skull, so much so that his sight went white with its power. She sent it screaming on the tail of the first, where it exploded against the Devourer’s upper jaw and forcibly wrenched its head backward.

The Devourer unleashed an ear-splitting cry as the light dispersed and darkness swallowed the world. He clutched at his ears, screamed his own silent scream beneath it all. Blood ran warm on his hooves.

Luna tilted her wings to catch the air and pull them higher into the dark, hopefully out of its reach. “We cannot keep fighting like this. ’Tis to our disadvantage, this precarious dance but a single mistake away from death. And we are not winning the war of attrition.”

He didn’t need prompting to know she meant Twilight. Her little spark rested low down in his abdomen. Every one of her labored breaths rippled like static through his stomach.

“I’m… I’m okay,” she said.

“Nay, Twilight, we must find a place for you to rest. We cannot hope to maintain this fight without you.”

“I don’t think it’s going to give us the chance,” Cadance said from somewhere behind his shoulder blade, as if trying to look behind him.

Celestia took command of his chest, redoubled the light at her horn tip. “We’ll figure something out. If we had the Sun and Moon above, I’m sure it would weaken the Devourer’s hold on the dream. And anything that loosens its grasp on the dream is an advantage we’ll need.”

“But that would mean stopping,” Luna said. “’Twould mean landing, exposing ourselves. You would ask we put all or nothing into raising the Sun and Moon with that beast on our tail?”

“You said it yourself,” Celestia said. “We’re losing this battle.”

“Yeah,” Cadance said. “As hard as Aunt Celestia hit it just now, I think she only made it angry.

“This isn’t good,” she whispered to him only. “We’ll need to figure something out. We need your help, Champion.”

Luna carried them higher still. Every beat of her wings pressed the iron harder into his spine. He gritted his teeth, the only way he could fend off the pain without impeding Luna’s flight.

Cadance was right. Things weren’t looking good. Twilight hardly put off any of her own strength anymore. Almost all of her magic she leeched from him.

Still, she seemed hesitant to draw too much. He could hear it in the strain of Luna’s voice. They wouldn’t be able to fly much longer, and Celestia couldn’t fend off the Devourer as it was.

There might be one way, though, if they were thinking all-or-nothing. If Twilight had been drawing only so much power from him, what would stop her from drawing more? What about all of it? Would that be enough?

Something about him must have changed, because Cadance came up beside his heart in a manner different than ever before. She whispered solemnly, “Be careful what you wish for, Champion. It just might come true.”

He lingered on her words a moment, let their weight drag him down from the thoughts in his head. She was right. It was a dangerous thought to entertain. But more importantly, she could read his thoughts?

Though it was a sober conversation they shared, she spared a moment to laugh. “We all have our talents to contribute, Champion. Twilight has magic. Luna has her wings and the power to raise the Moon. Celestia has her horn and the Sun.

“And I’m the Princess of Love. I can feel every whim your heart desires. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that before. I just wanted a chance to get to know you the way I would have in the real world. As a friend.

“I know my place in this dream isn’t to tell you what to do or how you should feel. I’m only here to remind you of what it is you truly want, and what lengths you’re willing to go to for it.

“What… sacrifices you’re willing to make.

“I don’t want to say it, but I… I really don’t think there’s any other way.” She put a gentle but firm hoof on his heart. “You know what that’ll do, though.”

He did. The pain was already more than he could bear. It was like Twilight had taken a second hot iron to his stomach at the same time. She couldn’t have known, though. She didn’t seem the type to do that willingly. Luna surely wouldn’t have let her, had she known.

“She will hate you, Champion.” Her words lingered in his heart, a tone whose weight knew only crushing truth. “She will hate you for a long time.”

Those words cut deeper than even Twilight’s magic. They knew this moment would come. They knew for a long time. But that still didn’t make it any easier.

He had felt her flame grow colder as they neared their goal. Luna hoped, perhaps even more than he did, that they would find a way to defeat the Devourer without sacrificing himself.

Yes, she would hate him for making this choice. But for her, that would be okay.

He closed his eyes—he didn’t need them anyway—and centered himself, on the point where Twilight’s magic hurt most. There was a presence there, almost impossible to describe—like himself but more, as if it was his very being opened up for the first time. Whatever he did, he must have gotten it right, because Twilight jerked away.

“Wait,” she said. “Champion, no, you can’t do that…”

Luna’s flame snapped toward Twilight, her wings stiffening mid stroke. “Can’t do what?”

Twilight shuffled farther away. “That’ll… That’ll kill you.”

It would do more than just kill him. But that wasn’t what mattered.

The wind pulled Luna’s wings limply upward. “What is it? Champion, no! Whatever it is you are doing, stop!”

Twilight hovered near him, near this whatever-it-was that he held, sensed his gentle insistence. Though only a spark, he pictured her looking up at him with large eyes and her ears folded back. She held up a hesitant hoof.

“I… Are you sure?”

He nodded without hesitation.

“I… Th-thank you.” She reached out a filament of static and flared at the touch.

The sensation was unlike anything he had ever felt. There was pain, but not in any describable sense—like an eggshell broken open and its contents sucked through the cracks.

Her spark erupted in a thunderstorm that consumed him from head to hoof. Rampant arcs of energy ripped through bone and organ, uncontained by this little wide-eyed filly in his chest.

As if with a trembling hoof, Twilight focused what few forks of lightning she could toward the other princesses. Celestia’s horn flared brighter than the Sun to leave a trail of fire in their wake, but Luna refused.

“You can’t do this, Champion,” Luna said with quivering voice. Her flame all but vanished. “Not this close to the end.”

“Luna, it’s too late!” Celestia shouted above the roar of wild magic. “He’s already done it!”

Her omnipresent warmth coalesced beside Luna, held her in an embrace both empathetic and stern. She spoke softer than any of the princesses ever had before. “Don’t waste this gift.”

In the silence, Cadance whispered, “She will hate it. But in time, she will understand.”

Despite the pain, he managed a tiny smile. Even if she didn’t, it was still worth it.

He chose this.

Luna huddled up against his heart. “Please… Don’t make me do this.”

He held his hoof up to his heart, lowered his chin to meet her, and closed his eyes. In a final ease of release, he let the last dregs of his soul slip into Twilight’s grasp.

The world washed white beyond his eyelids, so great was the Sunlight at Celestia’s horn. All he could tell in the moments that followed was that his jaw fell slack, and everything to come was beyond his control. With the final slivers of sanity left to him as the magic flooding out from that little spark dissolved away bone, then flesh, then fur, he thought of Luna, smiling at him in the meadow, one last time.

XV - The Break of Dawn

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Luna bolted upright.

A cold sweat ran down her face, and her lungs could not breathe deep enough to ward off the suffocating heat of her bedsheets.

“Princess!” Nighteye, one of her private Guards, stood beside her bed in full Night Guard regalia. He placed a hoof on the sheets, concern and relief warring over the deep circles beneath his eyes.

“Nighteye, you’re awake!” The bluntness of her outburst brought her ears flat to her head, and a silent thanks to the stars for a dark coat that could so easily hide a blush.

“Yes, your majesty,” he said. “It’s been… A long time since I’ve slept.”

He wavered on his hooves, struggling to stand at attention. A relieved smile still held attention on his face, however.

“At ease,” she said, and he promptly collapsed to his haunches. His coat, once sleek and shiny, lay nappy and dull.

She closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids, no matter how hard she focused on the now, she could only think of her Champion in his final moments—the fire blazing out his eyes, the pure, unfettered power that tore him apart from the inside.

“How long were we gone?” she asked, before the tears could come.

“Yourself, about ten months, your Majesty.” He looked askance in thought. “Princess Celestia, about seven. And Princess Twilight and Cadance around six.”

She eyed him curiously. Part of her hesitated to voice the question on her lips. “The Devourer captured anypony who fell asleep since I brought it to this world. How have you stayed awake this whole time?”

“We, uh… we haven’t. Slept, that is. Not really, anyway.” He pushed himself back up from a slouch he seemed to have just noticed. “Before going in after you, Princess Twilight organized Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns and other schools around Equestria. Stasis spells, door to door every day. Well, cycle, technically.”

She shot him a glance. Hers must have been a wild look for the wide eyes he gave her.

“Your Highness?” he said.

She pressed her hooves into her eyes and sighed. “My apologies. ’Tis nothing.”

Taurus stared up at her from the weave of her bedsheets. Orion pointed his great club down the length of her bed, and her worn and ragged form stared back from the mirror across the room.

A stasis spell, to give the mind rest without dreaming. Little research had been conducted on its long-term effects—or its efficacy, if Nighteye was as tired as he looked—but there was no arguing its use. ’Twas a silver lining if anything that Twilight had at least found a way to spare most of their subjects the horrors of her failure.

“Who has been in charge since Twilight’s slumber?”

“We cobbled together a semblance of government in your absence, us and the Day Guard.” A glint of pride found its way to his eyes and the corners of his mouth, but that too passed to weariness. “It’s been… Rough. But Equestria is still standing.”

There came a knock from the door. “Enter,” Luna said.

The door opened on soundless hinges, and in poked the weary face of a greying, old maid. Though she had the look of one ready to walk side by side with Death, her uniform remained as spotless as before this whole ordeal.

Was that what she was calling it now? An ordeal? Just this week’s trifle? Oh, Aquila, spurn such arrogance!

“Your Highness?” The old maid wore a tiny smile. “Princess Celestia would like to speak with you when you can. In her chambers.”

No doubt to discuss how this all came to be. ’Twould be a fun conversation.

“Thank you,” Luna said. “I will be there shortly.”

The maid bowed and hobbled out, leaving her alone with Nighteye. Alone with Nighteye?

Luna turned to him, studied the bags under his eyes. She glanced about the room for her other personal guard, Leatherwing, nowhere to be found. Fear worked a knot into the pit of her stomach. The two were nigh inseparable, on or off shift.

“Nighteye,” she said. “Where is Leatherwing?”

There was a pregnant pause as he looked away. “He was… Sleeping. Sleeping off a bet that first day of the Longest Night. He’s in the barracks with the others.”

The Longest Night, they called it. She closed her eyes and breathed a deep sigh. ’Twill be a long road ahead, this recovery.

“And what of your family?”

“Same, your Majesty. Err, sleeping, that is.” He spoke subdued. Nighteye had never been one for words, ever the strong, silent type. But even for a stallion such as him, some pains could never be masked.

She wore the very same face when she said, “Go to them.”

“My service to the crown is—”

“Is to do as I say.” The sharpness of her voice wilted him, by the way he flicked an ear, but he otherwise stared back in trained soldier fashion. She wilted in turn, looking back to her bedsheets. “Please, look after your family. There has been enough suffering on my account.”

Silence took hold for an uncomfortably long minute. Before the feelings could return, she got out of bed and clasped her breastplate in place. Tiara settled behind her horn and shoes on her hooves, she made for the door.

“Princess,” Nighteye said. In his eyes drifted a compassion he rarely expressed. Not one of sympathy, or even pity, but of concern. “There’s no way you could have expected this. Don’t blame yourself.”

She stopped at the door, looking down. A reserved sigh was all she could give in reply before stepping out.

Once a quiet stroll at any given time of day, the path to Celestia’s chambers was a bustle of ponies awash with tears and jubilant hearts for the now-awake and weary alike. Some met her gaze, and emotions abounded in their eyes—longing, fear, confusion.

Strangely enough, anger held no place among them. Surely these ponies knew of her role in this nightmare, that it was she who unleashed the Devourer upon them. And yet they sent only smiles and silent thank you’s her way. Really, truly, only smiles.

Yes, the castle was alive with the sound of happy ponies. ’Twas a splendid sight, if not for the churning in her heart—that it should have been this way uninterrupted for the last eight months.

She turned a corner, and there a feeling emerged, one of familiarity for the hallway’s emptiness, if only for a heartbeat. These were the very halls he walked in their final hours, when he carried her and the others to face the Devourer.

Now she walked them alone, with her own four hooves and with her own feelings in her chest. They barely felt like hers, like she drifted on a cloud, far above the world.

Celestia’s door appeared before her, and she stopped. Some indistinct sensation drew her gaze over her shoulder at what was a mix of four lefts, three rights, and two staircases, and how suddenly they drifted by.

Celestia’s door glinted in the sunlight filtering through the stained glass at the end of the hall. Its embossed sunrise stared back at her. It, too, seemed to smile at the sight of a new day. Or, evening, it seemed, given the sun’s place in the sky beyond the window. Daylight, nonetheless.

Stone Wall, the door guard, placated two palace staff members seeking audience with Celestia. He gave Luna a well-meaning smile before turning back to the others.

She raised a hoof to knock, but paused. Instead, she gently pushed the door open and stepped in.

Philomena was the first to greet her, an excited purr rolling out from the large gold cage beside the leftmost bookshelf.

Celestia sat at her writing desk in the far center, twirling a crimson inked-tipped feather above a sheaf of paper. She swiveled an eye toward her, and the faintest smile found the corners of her lips. She gestured to the cushion across the desk from her, which Luna took.

“It’s eight in the evening, Luna. I’m surprised to see you awake.”

Luna shifted on her hooves and cast her gaze to the hutch in the back corner. After all these months, the ponies still kept the time. They kept hope.

“Please, Sister, I appreciate your attempts at lighthearted banter, but I cannot simply set aside what I have done.”

“We’ve all made our mistakes, Luna. I can hardly fault you for trying to find peace.” She set the quill in its well and bowed her head. “But you are right that we cannot set it aside. We rule together, Luna. We make these sorts of decisions together.”

“You said I was being foolish.”

“I said you were being foolish for worrying over the whispers when we already had our hooves full with the Griffinstone Summit. I said we should hold off discovering their origins until the ambassador went home.”

Celestia looked to her balcony’s sheer curtains in a way that would have implied annoyance had she not flattened back her ears. Of course. Not even she was angry.

“I know you didn’t care for the ambassador and his… grievances,” Celestia continued. “But that was no reason to belittle him.”

Luna scowled at the stack of papers on Celestia’s desk. “’Twas he who first belittled my thoughts on the whispers. ’Twas only fair I belittled his on that farce of a trade proposal.”

Celestia stared at her. Even after growing up together over thousands of years, this particular face—the tiniest of smiles and peering eyes—was an enigma not even she could crack. Celestia’s mind sought its way through a maze of conversation, and until she made her move that was all anypony could hope to glean.

“They got by well enough,” she said.

Luna flitted her wings before meeting her gaze. This was the part where she was supposed to question the oblique change in subject. A revelation of some sort, or at least a placation, was soon to follow. With no other principle to go by, she fell in line.

“What do you mean?” Luna said.

“Equestria, our little ponies. Stone Wall filled me in when I woke up. Twilight couldn’t lower the moon or raise the sun without our powers, but she was able to organize the placement of magelights to keep nature healthy and the cities and towns safe. The Guard maintained a sense of government and were quick to mandate stasis centers in every town and village so nopony else would fall asleep and enter the nightmare.”

Luna looked away. Whatever comfort Celestia sought to impart with her words, it came up far short of any such feeling.

“Though the ponies still awake might have seen the moon as a sign of who caused this—” she pushed aside the ink well and sheaf of paper to pull another sheet from a stack, well-worn and crossed with lines and dots “—You aren’t without your sympathizers. Or those who now have a greater appreciation for the night.”

She floated the paper to Luna, who took it in her aura, but almost dropped it at the sight. “Canis Major? The Little Dipper? Even Sagittarius and Pisces…”

Below the crayon constellations was a stick figure of herself lying on a bed, and beneath that, a note:

“You are sleeping because the nightmare caught you,” she read slowly over a child’s misspellings. “I hope you are okay and… we all love you?” She stared at Celestia, lips parted and brows peaked.

“There’s more of them like that.” Celestia lifted a stack of paper from her desk. It was a mixture of loose-leaf paper, cardstock, and envelopes, all addressed to her.

Luna tucked her ears back, taking the stack hesitantly in her magic. Every piece was of the night sky, with impressively accurate constellations that would have made a versed astronomer blush, each as happy and hopeful as the last. Some had notes scribbled in crayon and marker like the first, and the tears threatened before she leafed through half of them. She set the stack aside, looking away.

By all rights, they should hate her. They should be pounding at the gates, demanding recompense for her actions. That every pony between hers and Celestia’s chambers and the many more abroad gave only smiles and well-wishing brought her head low and her shoulders lower.

“Why?” Luna said.

“Why?” Celestia raised an eyebrow. “Because those that stayed awake know the real you. You aren’t Nightmare Moon and you never will be again. They know this. And I as ruler of Equestria had to give a statement on why the moon was late to set and ponies weren’t waking up when this all began.”

Luna stared at a Newton’s cradle on Celestia’s desk. Its polished weights shone like miniature suns in the evening light.

“What did you tell them?” Luna asked.

“The truth. You were lost, you were taken by some magic or creature we didn’t understand yet.” Celestia regarded the cradle with a gentle smile. She lifted the right ball and let go. Its gentle click-clack-click filled the silence.

“So they knew I had doomed their slumbering loved ones to a fate worse than death, and themselves to one of uncertainty.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Luna didn’t meet Celestia’s gaze, but she knew the look on her face—one of admonishment but unsurpassed empathy. “Tell that to those who were asleep.”

“I don’t need to.” Celestia’s was a smile that could have soothed a raging manticore. She leaned forward in her seat, and there was no doubting that the sun shone imperceptibly brighter when she spoke. “They saw us, Luna. They saw you, through the Devourer’s eyes.”

She came around the desk, a wing outstretched to bring her into a hug. The warmth of her body staved off a sudden wave of shivers.

“They saw what you went through to save them,” Celestia said, “what you were willing to risk to set things right.”

Luna looked away. The only thing she risked was—

“Ponies make mistakes,” Celestia said. “Even us. More so us.”

Philomena cooed from her cage, and both turned to her. Celestia was quick to shift her smile back to Luna.

“You might hate what you’ve done, but they don’t. There will be fallout from this, but that’s the least of our worries for now.”

Celestia gave her a squeeze, then turned for Philomena’s cage.

The absence of Celestia’s warmth close by left a shiver to run through her. In some fraction of her words, Celestia was right. Yet for all her instincts as a princess, Luna couldn’t find the strength to rise from her seat.

Celestia unlatched the gate of Philomena’s cage, and the phoenix leapt out to circle Luna.

Luna looked up at Philomena, and after a pause crooked a halfhearted smile and raised a hoof. Philomena perched, and the warmth radiating from her nuzzle and gentle coo were yet more reminders that yes she was awake.

“Luna,” Celestia said. She wore her concerned expression, the one she always wore whenever she caught Luna ruminating. There was no point hiding it.

Luna let Philomena take flight, then set her hoof down, looking for anything to distract her from the now. Celestia’s silver tea set on the center table was as beautiful as ever. The maids must have tended to everything par the course. Luna drew in a long breath, longer than she should have needed.

“I know he meant a lot to you,” Celestia said.

“Sister,” Luna said, reserved. “At the very least, save me your pity.”

That earned a small sigh. Only Celestia’s mane was visible in the corner of sight, but the look she wore would be unmistakable—that little pout she never quite grew out of from their younger days, the one she only felt comfortable using in her presence and hers alone.

“He hasn’t left you, Luna.” Celestia stepped before her again. Hers was a calm voice, and she placed a gentle hoof on Luna’s chest. “He’s right here.”

Luna’s eyes fluttered shut, and she sucked in a little breath through her teeth. Her heart beat faster—at the thought of him in the cathedral far below, beside her in the meadow beneath the wash of the sunset, in the dark by the lake of fire after their triumph with his hooves wrapped about her. I’ve got you.

Yes, he was right there. And yet he was not.

She was alone, adrift. She was home, and yet wasn’t. Only in the cycles of her nightmare, when she languished in the ever aching severance of her soul, a fragment of herself made whole inside her Champion, had a sense of home truly existed.

Yes, he was right there. And she let him go. As the edges of her dream frayed around them, she did nothing more than stare.

The ponies should not be happy. They should not have smiles upon their faces and forgiveness in their hearts. She wanted—needed—that catharsis, some modicum of external rage to burn away the feelings in her heart.

But as it was, the ponies forgave and forgot, left only her to hate her transgressions. This loathing was a burden too great for one pony, but it needed bearing.

Self forgiveness was a lesson she learned from the Tantabus, but all wounds deserved their share of salt before closing, lest their lessons go unheeded. Some more than others.

Celestia said something about the throne room, and the words “Take all the time you need” filtered through the cotton in her ears.

Quickly enough, she was alone. The room lay quiet, save the distant chirping of birds in the gardens below and the summer breeze fluttering the curtains.

Luna sat in Celestia’s room, and that was all she could do. She hadn’t even the comfort of her own bed chambers, where she could scream her frustration to the heavens, lash out at the trinkets and worthless sentimentalities before collapsing in a pile of tear-stained fur and feathers, nothing but the empty shell of a pony that couldn’t save the one who gave her everything.

So she sat, trembling, staring at the sun’s sparkle off the tea set, until the tremors became too much, and she collapsed.

She lay there, head hung to the polished floor, tears rolling hot and wet down her muzzle, body shaking from the sobs. She hid her face behind her hooves, pressed them into her eyes until they blotched, gritted her teeth until they hurt.

He was not a piece of her mind lost to the nothingness of dreamspace. He was a pony unstuck from the mortal world. A figment of her imagination, true or not, he was a pony all the same. One that lived, breathed, hated, loved. Dreamed.

Since when did a dream dream? Not in all her immortal life had a dream taken on its own sentience, coalesced within its imagined mind the ability to itself imagine, think. Be.

At first, he was merely an anomaly, a byproduct of the Devourer and the nature of her nightmare. But as the cycles continued and he broke free of its grasp, it became clear that what he saw behind closed eyelids could not be anything but the will of independent thought.

Whatever the circumstance, whatever power her shattered mind skimmed from the surface of her magics and instilled in him, he was real. He deserved every bit the freedom he sacrificed everything to realize, and she needed him close, now more than ever.

But she was no fool. Places she could recreate on a whim, in her dreams. They were things and nothing more. A pony, too, could be created, but not a true pony. In a dream, a created pony was little more than a memory. It lacked the pony’s essence, their soul. No, a true pony could not be created. They must be found.

Somewhere, within the deepest recesses of the dreamscape, at the spindling edges of her mind, he drifted. Perhaps only a whisper on an invisible wind, another thread waiting to be pulled free from the dark infinity beyond. But he was a pony, and it remained her duty to see him home.

But as much as that fire burned in her heart, there remained the matter of the real world. ’Twould be a long road to come, setting right the wrongs of her mistakes, and no room could be spared for her own desires, not until all was right.

Give of her wants so that others could receive of their needs. Hold it in. Be strong. She had a country to save. He gave her that.

He gave her this world around her, this air she breathed, the sounds of summer outside, the very ability to sit and ache for what should have been. More than anything, he wanted to return to her what she lost. And no matter how bitter the dregs of her heart tasted, to do any less than fulfill his wishes would be to spit on his grave.

No, not grave. He was out there, waiting for her.

Out the balcony doors, the sun neared the horizon, and the pinks and golds of evening’s close lay themselves bare to the world. She made for the balcony with delicate hoofsteps, to better see the sunset in all its splendor. For all the turmoil in her heart, the sight still brought her solace.

Beautiful.

The word twisted her heart into a knot as grand as the skyskape shrouding the world in growing shadows. There truly never existed a more beautiful time of day.

He thought so, too—he, a stallion who had never seen the sun until her dream. With unfiltered sight he saw the beauty of its colors filling the sky, of silence’s slow creep into the world and the dim twinkle of stars not yet brave enough to dip their toes into that ocean. How he looked at her throughout that hallowed twilight, how he… How he looked at her.

She cracked a smile, and a chuckle followed. A tear rolled down her cheek while she raised a hoof to hold in a little bout of laughter.

“Oh, Champion…” she whispered. “You never meant the sunset, did you?” Tears flowing soft and free, she stared long into the sunset as its oranges and pinks drained from the sky.

The stars peeked out from their hiding places far above, little foalish eyes gazing at her to ask if it was safe to come out and play. Eyes closed, she dipped her head in approval, and with a gentle smile lit her horn to raise the moon. With the moon in its rightful place, she let it slip from her grasp and reclined her head to better hear the glorious silence ushered in by the night.

Beautiful.

This, here, he gave her—this wondrous moment of solitary solidarity his gift. Not the sunset or the stars in the sky, but the feeling in her heart, the soft pitter patter for another pony only she could feel.

He was far away, yet the yearning that dawned anew with the setting sun brought him close; and surrounded by the sweet silence of the night, as she breathed in and let go the moonlit chill, she could almost feel his warmth resting against her side.

Into the Dark

by Corejo

I - Beyond the Village Gates

II - Shield of Feathers, Voice of Hope

III - The Looming Shadow

IV - The Tunnel

V - The Pony That Was the Moon

VI - Canterlot

VII - Justice

VIII - The Goddess Beheld

IX - Finding the Brazier

X - "Luna"

XI - The End

XII - Into the Dark

XIII - The Second Voice

XIV - Raising the Sun, Waking the World

XV - The Break of Dawn

Epilogue - Beyond the Ever-reaching Realm of Dreams