> Through A Glass Darkly
>  by SPark
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter 1
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

An old gray mare walked down a road.
The road was made of well-laid cobblestones, as if it led to a busy market square, though the mare could see no buildings.  Instead dirt walls rose at either hoof, stretching above her head; the road was one of those ancient tracks, walked and walked again until the passing lives had driven it straight down into the earth, like a river.
In places the walls were topped by thick hedges of black thorn.  On others they were not, and sometimes, when they were a little lower, the mare could see the countryside through which she traveled.  The view just now was drab and dreary; dry hills with sparse grass rolling towards a dark smudge that might be mountains very far off or merely more, slightly taller hills nearer by.
Above, the sky was dark, and thickly strewn with silver stars.  They cast such light that there was a wisp of shadow beneath the gray mare’s hooves.
Those hooves rang on the cobblestones like bells.  But the carillon they played was a doleful dirge, for the pace the mare set was slow, slow, slow.  One hoof went in front of another, steadily, wearily, endlessly, and there was no sign of moonrise nor of sunrise as she walked, and walked—though the stars, alien and aloof, moved inexorably overhead.
The mare bore saddlebags slung across her back, and they were as plain and as gray as she.  There was no dust.  The cobblestones were conspicuously clean, black as night and nearly glossy, but it would have made no difference. Caked in dust, she would have still been much the same color.  The bags hid whatever cutie mark she might have from sight.
Time, such as it was, passed.  The stars turned.  The mare walked.  Her hooves paced out, steadily: day is done, gone the sun, from the land, from the sea from the sky...
Perhaps she walked for an age.  On the other hoof, it might have been less than the span of a day.  The turning stars marked off some unknown period as she paced her weary path alone.
She looked down to watch the placement of her hooves, and when next she lifted her eyes, she stood at a crossroads.  There, in the star-silvered world of black cobbles, drab dirt and gray mare, she found a double splash of color.  On one side of the road the walls fell away, and there was green grass for grazing, and the soft chuckle of a stream, with the thread of a dirt path winding its way along it.  And on the other, standing just past where that path crossed the cobbled road, was a mare the color of periwinkle blossoms, a rich purple-blue even seen by the faded silver of starlight.  Her horn was just that color too, a seashell spiral, and her mane and tail were the soft blue of a warm summer’s sky.
This new mare carried nothing, but her hindquarters were marked with the black of night, and the crescent moon, and the gray mare perked her ears forward, feeling something stir in her to see the newcomer.
“Hello,” she said, then coughed, her voice creaking with disuse.
The new mare pawed at the ground uncertainly.  “Greetings.”
“I’m Whiffletree.”
“I’m…  Ah…  Luna?”
Whiffletree tilted her head to the side, frowning faintly.  “Luna.  I feel as if I should know that name,” she hesitated a moment before continuing, “As if it means something.”  She looked at the brighter, younger mare, and shook her head, sending wispy strands of gray hair flying.  “I don’t know what, though.  Perhaps we’ve met?”
“I don’t know.  I don’t… I don’t think so.”  Luna looked uncertain.  She shook her own head, tossing her horn and letting her pale mane fly.  Her tail switched behind her.  “I don’t remember a Whiffletree.  But everything is vague.  I think I have forgotten most of what I ever knew.”
“What do you remember, then?”
“I remember a herd.  I remember family.  The other ponies.  I remember travel, wandering.  There was…  There was somepony with me as I wandered.  A…sister?  Yes, I had a sister.  We were together, and then we were apart.  I think… I think I remember pain, and darkness, yet eventually we were reunited?  And then…  There were other ponies.  I had... friends.  I think I have seldom had friends.”
Whiffletree smiled.  Her own mind was far from whole, but there were things she knew.  Friends, yes.  Friends were important.  “It is good to not walk alone.”
“Yes.  But then…  There was something about the friends.  A leave-taking.  I don’t remember.  It becomes a blur.  I left.  Something had been accomplished.  Something else could be done.  Yes!  I remember that.”  Luna smiled brightly, and something in that expression struck Whiffletree in the heart.
“A grand quest,” she said softly, almost wistfully.  There had been grand quests in her past, she felt, though she could only grasp the shape of them, not the details.  All quests needed somepony like Luna in them, didn’t they? Somepony all hard brightness and sharp enthusiasm.
“Yes!  We quested often, when we were young, and it was good.  But this last quest…”  Luna frowned again.  “Something went awry.  My mind is muddled and mazed, and things are not as they should be.  I cannot see the shape of what is wrong, though, only that something is.”
“Yes.”  Whiffletree nodded.  “This place is not a wholesome one.”
“No.  It’s dark here.”  Luna shifted uncomfortably, her eyes glancing about, as if to find a spark of light to contradict her statement.
“For as long as I’ve been here.  Perhaps it always has been.  Perhaps it always will be.”
“Somehow that doesn’t seem right.  There should be lights.  No world should be only darkness.  Even if it were always night…”  Luna trailed off, frowning.
“Even if it were always night, the moon should shine?” said Whiffletree, looking at Luna’s cutie mark.
“Yes.”
“The stars yet shine here,” noted Whiffletree, lifting her head to look up at them.  They spilled all across the sky, lying thickest in a milky band that ran from horizon to horizon.  “Perhaps all is not unwholesome in this world.”
“Perhaps.”  Luna lifted her head too.  “These stars are wrong, though.”
“Wrong?”
“They’re not… I don’t know.  They’re wrong.”  Luna bared her teeth briefly in frustration, and showed a flash of sharp whiteness.  Whiffletree was somehow unsurprised to see that Luna had wolf-teeth, which few mares had, and that hers were longer than most. She had somehow seemed the sort.
“Well, wrong or not, I have walked far beneath these stars.  I think I would like to see if the grass is right, and if the water is, and perhaps drink and rest.”
“Yes.  I… I walked long too.  Though I don’t know from where.  Or to where.”  Luna frowned still, her ears pinned back to her head.
“No more do I.  Something in the walking matters, though.”
Luna snorted.  “Does it?  Now that I have halted, perhaps I won’t start again.”
“Perhaps.”  Whiffletree walked over to the side of the road.  “But for now I want to see if the grass is any good.”
The grass tasted of grass, though Whiffletree didn’t know how it could grow in this land without sunlight, and the water tasted fresh and clean, so she drank, and ate.  Luna did as well, though more restlessly, more scantily.  She soon turned to rooting in the bramble hedges that grew all about, her magic yanking at brittle, dead old branches.  These she piled in a spot she cleared amid the grass, and another spark of magic set them alight.  They burned readily, with a bright, yellow flame.
Whiffletree, feeling glad of that further splash of color, that cheery light, that comfortable, primal warmth, sat beside the fire once her grass was cropped.  Luna sat beside her, and the two contemplated the flames in silence for a time.
Then Whiffletree worked her muzzle around the buckle of her saddlebags, letting them fall to the ground, and rooted in them.  She found their contents surprising, yet familiar.  She had no memory of packing any of the items found within, but they were all old friends.  Including the sturdy bottle of amber glass, with an apple mark etched on the side, which she drew out with a smile.  She took a swig of the strong apple brandy contained within.  The memories around the bottle were blunted, but she knew it meant friendship, and family, and moments much like this, with fire and food and drink that all present shared.
So she hoofed it over to Luna, who took it silently and downed a long draught without hesitation.
Whiffletree stowed the bottle, then found herself pulling out a book that had been nestled beside it.  It was small, and bound in black, with pages of paper so thin they were nearly transparent.  Each one was printed with small, close text, in narrow columns, numbered off chapter and verse.
“What is that?” said Luna, curiously.
Whiffletree turned it over in her hooves.  There was no title on the cover.  When she opened it, the first page merely read, “The Book.”  She shrugged, and let it fall open to a random spot.  As she looked at the book, a melancholy fell over her, the smile she’d worn since seeing Luna fading at last.
“What does it say?” asked Luna.

“The Sun hath looked upon me, and She did smile, in the days when The Great Queen ruled in the Valley of Dreams.
“Green was the grass, sweet was the water, and bright was Celestia’s light.
“Bright also the moonlight as we slept, and soft the stars above.
“Thou shalt abide with me, oh Sun, for thy light is my constant lamp.  
“Thou shalt wax and wane always above me, oh Moon.  
“Never shall these lights cease, while the earth abides.
“Yea, though the herd walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we shall fear neither chaos nor discord, for light is with us always.”

Whiffletree found tears standing in her eyes as she read the final words out loud.  She felt an ache at the center of her chest and knew that she had lost something of light, somehow.  Looking over, she saw that Luna looked impossibly sad, though her eyes were dry.
“The sun has set,” she said softly, “and I walk alone once more.”
Whiffletree hesitated, then gently set a hoof on Luna’s withers, scooting closer beside her as she did.  “I’m here,” she said softly.  “I know I’m not much, but I’m here.”
“You are.”  Luna leaned into the touch and sighed.  “Thank you.”
> Chapter 2
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The pair, gray earth pony and blue unicorn, slept beside the dying embers of the fire.  They slept for an unmarked time, then woke with the stars still gleaming above.  The faintest wisp of smoke still came from the fire’s ashes, and without a word Luna scooped water from the stream, carrying a sphere of it within the blue glow of her magic, and dropped it on the ashes.  Whiffletree scooped up some water too, more prosaically, and filled a water-bottle that was nestled in her saddlebags.
They grazed again then, filling their bellies with sweet green grass and sweet clear water.
Both finished eating at the same moment, in the silent agreement that a pony herd sometimes has, and went together to the road, which stretched darkly ahead and behind, walled in by earth and hedge in both directions.  Luna regarded the road from the grass beside it.  Whiffletree had already set hoof to it, the step sounding with a soft ringing.  There was no second step, as she paused to look back at Luna.
“It cankers me to blindly trudge forward, answering to some unknown whim,” said Luna, glowering at the road.
“We could follow the track you were on before,” offered Whiffletree, nodding to where the narrow dirt path wound along beside its little stream.
Luna’s scowl encompassed that as well.  “That’s no better.  It might be worse, to only go on as I began.  But…”  She looked down the road, then down the path.  She glanced too behind her, and back the way Whiffletree had come, regarding each of the four options.
“Or we could simply stand here forever,” said Whiffletree, smiling again, her voice holding a faint lilt of sarcasm.
Luna laughed at that.  “Ah, aye, stand here till the stars burn black.  That will accomplish much.  No, I’ll go on with you, assuming you wish to continue forward?”
“I feel an urge.  I don’t trust that urge, but I also feel a great curiosity.  There are things that I should know, but which I do not.  If something has stolen those things from me, then perhaps that thing also draws me forward to meet it.  I would confront it if I can, and see what truth I can wring from it.”
“Maybe it lies behind you, though?” offered Luna, horn gesturing down the path Whiffletree had already trod.  “If it took something from you, and then sent you on…  Maybe the impulse drives you away from it.”
Whiffletree nodded.  “Perhaps.  It is certainly possible.  But…  I don’t know.  There’s no true logic to it, but I feel otherwise.  I feel drawn, not driven.  There’s something at the end of this road.”
“Then let us proceed towards it, and see what we may see,” said Luna.
Luna’s hooves rang on the stones just as Whiffletree’s did.  She set a swifter pace than the elder mare had taken, but Whiffletree had trudged from weariness of mind as much as of body, and found it easy enough to keep up.  Indeed, before long she found herself taking the lead, and Luna fell in at her shoulder as naturally as anything, as if they’d been traveling herdmates for an eternity.
The road passed beneath their hooves with a steady ringing, and the earthen walls passed alongside them, rising and falling as the land rose and fell.  The road itself climbed and dropped as well, though never steeply enough to trouble them.
After a time they came to a place where the road doubled back on itself to snake up the side of a hill.  Atop the hill there was a cluster of trees, either dead or dormant.  The walls that had framed the road fell away there, giving a view of the countryside for miles around.  The road itself, a dark line of black cobblestones, wound on ahead of them, down the hill and into the land beyond.  Its course was not straight, but it never meandered far, and from this vantage it was clear that the darkness on the horizon was a mountain range, with the road aimed at the highest peaks.
That was not what drew their eyes as they halted atop the hill, though.  What immediately gathered their attention was an object which lay across the road, perhaps a mile beyond the hill.
“Object” was perhaps the wrong term, for it was not a singular thing, but a cluster of weathered, yellowed shapes.  Here the arc of ribs all in a row, there the long stretch of a leg bone, above, the rounded dome of a half-buried skull, but all on a massive scale.  Whiffletree’s first thought was “dragon”, and one of the greatest of that race, for she swiftly realized that the clutch of darker shapes cupped in the hollow of the former creature’s stomach cavity was a village.  Yet the skull, though half-concealed, was obviously too rounded, too short, to be a normal dragon with its long snout, and it had no tail.  It had been winged, though, as the long, delicate bones behind the main body of it showed.  They were broken in pieces and partially lost, but clear enough all the same.
“I’ve never seen the like,” said Luna, voicing what Whiffletree had been thinking.
“It lies across the road,” noted Whiffletree.  The road passed beneath the great skeleton’s spine, just beside its hips.  There was a break there, perhaps made to let the road pass, perhaps merely natural weathering, or perhaps the monstrous creature had broken its back when it died.  The little village with its dozen huts bordered the road, also; small shapes that looked like ponies moving about within it.
“Indeed.  So it seems we must pass it.”
“Or choose to go back, yes.  I still vote to move forward.”
“Oh, we’re voting, are we?  But who will be a tie-breaker if I vote to go back?”  Luna grinned at Whiffletree.
“Flip a bit?” offered Whiffletree, matching Luna’s grin.
“If you have one.  But no, I vote to continue as well.”
“Then let’s be about it.”
They went on, down the dark road as it wound across the face of the hill and proceeded towards the monstrous skeleton beyond.
Time passed, and the bleached bones drew nearer, until they loomed overhead, blocking out the starlight above.  The road rose up from between its walls, becoming a street that ran through the heart of the tiny village.  The traveling pair halted there, at the border of the town where the first little huts stood, for they had little choice.  Athwart the road stood a trio of villagers, earth ponies all, standing shoulder to shoulder and blocking the road completely.  Whiffletree and Luna could have left the road, treading on the village gardens to go around them, but instead the pair halted, and silence fell as the ringing of hoofsteps ceased.
After a long moment, the pony who stood at the center of the trio spoke.
He was a broad-chested and broad-hoofed stallion, with feathery fetlocks over cracked, shoeless hooves.  His coat was a deep slate gray and his shocking green mane fell in greasy dreadlocks all around his face.  That face was off, somehow; unsettling in a way that Whiffletree couldn’t quite put a hoof on.  Were his eyes too small?  His forehead too flat?  His ears somehow set wrong on his head?  Whatever might be strange about him, it was strange about his fellows too; a skinny stallion with coat and hair the color of the bones that loomed overhead on his left hoof and a plump, pink mare, face lined and coat faded, stringy mane burgundy dark, on his right.  Whiffletree wanted to look between him and Luna, to compare the way a pony ought to be, but she did not, she regarded him steadily, and he regarded her in turn.
“Strangers.  Why have you come to the Sleeping One?” asked the stallion, his voice a low, guttural growl.
Whiffletree squashed sarcastic thoughts about a sleep so deep it had resulted in cleansed bones, and said only, “We are passing along the road, that is all.”
“To what purpose?”
“Our business is our own,” said Luna, giving the stallion a quelling look.
He failed to be quelled, though Whiffletree thought that most ponies would have been.  “Those who pass beneath the shadow of the Sleeping One must pay him homage.”
Whiffletree exchanged a glance with Luna.  Luna curled her lip, obviously willing to fight, but Whiffletree said, “Tell me about this homage.”
“We will perform the rites at the setting of Aldebaran.  We will sing the songs of awakening.  We will chant that which cannot be chanted beneath the wrong stars.  Then we will feast, and drink, and sleep.”
“I see.  And we are invited, then, to join this?  We do not know your songs, or your chants.”  Whiffletree felt a deep, creeping unease, but she said nothing of it.  She felt that in her youth she might perhaps have fought all three ponies, and the rest of the village beside, especially with Luna at her side.  But she was past her prime, and she couldn’t think of a reason to insist on conflict.  It wasn’t as though there was a deadline to whatever journey she might be on, after all.  Not that she knew of, at least.
“It is permitted to watch,” said the stallion flatly.  He had not moved so much as an ear’s flick in all the time he’d been speaking. Only his lips had moved, and only enough to form the words.  “The foals watch.  You may watch with them.”
Whiffletree looked at Luna again. Luna rolled her eyes, but didn’t give any sign of insisting on fighting so Whiffletree nodded at the big, dark stallion.  “We will stay, then, and witness your rites.”
“It is good.”  The stallion nodded, and jerked his head towards the village.  Still feeling uneasy, but not knowing what else to do, Whiffletree stepped from the road and onto the grass beside it.
They were ushered to a place where grass grew beneath the shadow of the great skeleton’s arching ribs.  Both mares grazed a little as they waited, but neither settled down.  They didn’t speak of it, but Whiffletree could tell that Luna felt the same unease that she did.  Something wasn’t right here.
Perhaps it was only the skeleton.  Such a thing was uncanny enough to be off-putting, certainly, yet Whiffletree thought it was more than that.  She waited, though, and cropped the grass, and watched, doing nothing more.  Her memories seemed more hole than cloth, yet she was certain that patience had paid off for her often in times past, even if all she could recall was hints and glimpses of those times.
Luna, beside her, fidgeted and tossed her head often, casting wary glances at the villagers as they went about their business.  She got some in return, especially from the foals, who stared at her shamelessly.  Whiffletree almost immediately realized the likely cause of those stares.  The village was entirely of earth ponies.  Luna was the only unicorn present.
The stars continued their slow dance above.  Whiffletree didn’t know their patterns, yet apparently at some point the one the dark stallion had called Aldebaran must have set, for the villagers began to congregate at the center of their village.  They formed rings and lifted their heads to the sky, mouths open as if about to speak or sing.
Whiffletree wasn’t aware of the sound at first.  It was so low, so subtle, that it crept up on her.  Her coat was all standing on end for no apparent reason long before she realized that there was a dissonant, uncanny chant emerging from the throats of the villagers.  It grew and grew, and Whiffletree had to squash a cowardly urge to crowd up against Luna’s side and take shelter in the taller mare’s presence.  Luna shifted fractionally towards Whiffletree, and her eyes were wide and wild.  No doubt she heard it too.
It began to have words, though they were no words that Whiffletree knew.  She could recognize dozens of languages, but this was nothing that should have issued from pony throats.
The villagers moved, then, also slow at first, but their pace increasing, moving in a spiral dance, circling in and out among each other.  Their steps were strange, stiff here and fluid there, and unlike any dancing Whiffletree had seen before.
Whiffletree’s eyes began to glaze over, and she felt as if the chant were numbing her mind.  Was she awake, or did she dream?  Surely such sounds, such inequine contortions, could not be real?  She gave into her impulse and leaned against Luna, feeling that the other pony was trembling.  That was real, but nothing else was.  The very stars were unreal, dancing freely above them as if stars could be moved so.
“Ia!  Ia!”  
The cries were shrill and strange, the mares sounding like the skrilling of alien pipes, the stallions a deeper drone beneath, even the foals adding high-pitched, animal wailings to the cacophony.
Reality twisted further.  The huts were stranger, taller, built as if for creatures utterly unlike the ones that danced before them.  Or were they?  Were the ponies now upright, dancing on hind legs, raising long, horrible limbs with narrow, unnatural fingers to the dark sky above?  And was the great skeleton that arched above them joining the dance, raising a vast, indescribably horrible head that blotted out the stars with writhing madness, body now clothed on ghostly flesh over its bare bones, membranous wings spreading wide?
Was that real?  How could it be?  Yet Whiffletree saw it, she knew she saw it.  She saw the god of madness looking down at her, and its eyes were chaos and discord.  Not the bland discord she suddenly knew, not the fresh memory of a mixed creature full of jests, but the flesh-rending discord that leaves ponies biting at their own limbs in bloody, frenzied insanity.
“Ia!” cried the circling ponies—not-ponies, and a profoundly basso drone, as if from the largest pipe of the world’s greatest organ responded, vibrating the earth beneath Whiffletree’s hooves.  Luna was nearly clinging to her now, and Whiffletree clung back with no shame.  All they could do was cower beneath the unreal thing that loomed above them.
“Fomalhut rises!” cried a voice, suddenly.  “The eyes of the Old Ones must not see the Sleeper walk!”
There was a wailing as of mourning, and the dance skidded to a halt.  The thing above became a ghost, a shadow, and collapsed back to be only its own bleached bones in mere seconds.  The villagers were ponies once more, their huts only huts, the stars only stars.
Whiffletree could feel Luna blow out a long breath.  She herself felt a profound relief.  She took a half step away from Luna, just far enough to be decent, and straightened herself.
“He woke!” chortled the village leader, his eyes wild, his face stretched into a broad, manic grin.  “The sleeping one woke!  Not since my great-grandsire’s day has he woken!”  He looked at Whiffletree and Luna, while the other village ponies capered and danced in glee around him.  “You have been a good omen to us, visitors.  Now there will be feasting in joy.  Will you join us to celebrate?”
The pair exchanged glances that carried clear agreement—neither wanted to remain and celebrate the awful thing they’d just witnessed.  Whiffletree said, “We would be honored, but our journey calls to us.  I don’t think we can linger long.”
“Of course, of course.  But come!  Come!  The feast is being laid out even now.”
And so it was.  Ponies rushed about, bringing out tables, and pitchers of drink, and food also, fruits and nuts and many other things, some familiar and some strange.  Each pony in the village brought something and added it to the feast, it seemed.  Having had only grass for who knew how long, Whiffletree was tempted by the things on offer.  Yet she still felt a profound unease.  The ponies might perhaps seem less uncanny by comparison than the horror that had walked not long ago, but they were still somehow not right, and Whiffletree wondered at the wholesomeness of their food.
An apple, though, familiar—indeed somehow almost nostalgic—seemed safe enough.  She bit into it, and noticed that Luna had chosen much the same, holding a pear in her hoof.
The apple tasted of nothing stranger than apple, thankfully.
When it was done, and Luna had eaten her pear, Whiffletree begged off the remainder of the celebration, and though the stallion who’d been so cold to them before now implored them to stay, to remain until the next time of ritual and join the rites, even, both mares were insistent that their journey could not wait.
For a brief moment there was something of both anger and madness in the village leader’s eyes, and Whiffletree thought they might have to fight, but it was only a flash, and when Luna gave him one of her stern looks he cringed back and let them go their way.
They walked off down the road, and Whiffletree was very glad when the sound of their hoofsteps blotted out the last traces of merriment from behind them.
The pair walked long, and then longer still before finally calling a halt where the road crossed another small stream.  Whiffletree felt that they’d walked a day’s round, though the stars were still too strange for her to be certain.  Were their patterns slowly changing?
“I wish we had soap,” said Luna, staring at a place where the stream widened into a broad pool.  “I would wash the stink of that… That…thing from my hooves.”
“I might have some,” said Whiffletree, twisting to nose through her saddlebags.  “Yes!  Here.”  She nudged the paper-wrapped, herbal-scented bar with her muzzle, and Luna’s magic tingled against the sensitive hairs there for just a moment as she plucked the soap from the bag.
The feel of magic was familiar, and Whiffletree prodded at her patchy memory.  She must have known many unicorns, for magic to seem such a familiar, natural thing to an earth pony like herself.
Luna stepped into the stream and began to lather up.  Whiffletree settled beside it, and when her fellow traveler was done she took the soap and did the same.  They washed up companionably, and more thoroughly than Whiffletree might have if only washing off the dust of the road.  It was good to get the metaphorical scent of the Sleeping One off of her.
“What do you think that thing was?” asked Luna, as she shook water from her mane.
“An old, dead god, I suspect.”
Luna flicked an ear at that.  “Oh?”
“Gods are strange things.  Life and death mean different things to them than to mere mortals.  Despite being only bones, it may be true that it sleeps.  Or it may be dead but some fading power remains in some way.  Who knows?”
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,” murmured Luna.
“Hmm?”  Whiffletree cocked her head at Luna.
“Something I heard once.  I can’t remember where.  I can’t remember so many things.  It’s maddening!”
“The whole world is maddening, it seems.  Now, though, I am hungry.  One apple many hours ago has left my stomach aching.”
“Yes.  I’ll be sick of grass before long, but I don’t regret not joining fully in the feast.”
Whiffletree only nodded, then lowered her head and set about cropping the verdant green that grew beside the stream.  Its color was muted by starlight, but it seemed like perfectly ordinary grass.
She thought, then, to wonder at her memories of grass by sunlight.  She had no memories of a world where the sun never rose, not before she’d found herself walking the dark road.  What did that mean?  Had something changed in this place, or had she come from elsewhere?  Nothing here was familiar, save for such mundane objects as grass, apples, and streams.
Luna once again gathered dead brambles and fallen branches for a fire.  Whiffletree settled near it with a soft sigh, and pulled out the bottle of apple brandy.  Luna took it when offered and drank a generous measure.  Whiffletree did too.  She was tempted, in truth, to pass the bottle back and forth until it was gone, taking shelter from all that had happened in drunkeness.  Yet she had only the one bottle, and who knew how far to go.  So she stowed it away again beside the little black book.
On impulse she pulled that out once more and ruffled through its delicate pages.
Luna opened her mouth, as if to say something, then shut it again, and turned to stare silently into the fire.
Whiffletree opened the book at random, and let her eyes slide over the verses she found there.

Oh clap your hooves all ye ponies.  Shout unto Celestia with a voice of triumph.
For the Sun most high is terrible.  She is a great ruler over all the earth.
Celestia is gone up with a shout, the Sun with the sound of the trumpet.
Shout unto the sun, all you ponies.
Sing praises to Celestia, sing praises: sing praises unto your Princess, sing praises.

She felt strange as she read.  Something in her lifted at the book’s words, and something sorrowed in loss, and something, inexplicably, felt guilty.  Why should a hymn of praise to a goddess she did not know move her in such strange ways?
“What have you read this time?”  Whiffletree looked up to see Luna send a sidelong glance at her.  
“Do you want me to read it to you?” she asked Luna, and then instantly regretted the asking..
“I… Perhaps I should not, but yes.  Please do.”
Whiffletree did, and the strangeness she felt grew no less from speaking the words aloud.
“It is strange,” said Luna softly, looking again into the fire.
“Hmm?”
“Before, the words made me sad, as if I’d lost something dear to me.  I remembered my sister, though I cannot recall the color of her coat nor her name, but she had something, I feel, to do with the sun, and the verse about it made me miss her.  This one, though, makes me angry.  I feel angry and bitter at the thought of ponies singing praises to the sun.  I cannot understand it.”
“I wonder what this book was to me—or to you—before we came here?”
“I don’t know,” said Luna, and she gnashed her teeth together, showing again the small, sharp fangs she had there.  “I don’t know too many things.”
All Whiffletree could do was nod in agreement.
> Chapter 3
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

There was nothing like morning when the two mares woke and began their journey once more.  The sky was as dark as ever, the stars as bright and as strange as ever, and the road as black as ever, but it began to climb more often than it sank, and the walls grew lower and lower.
They walked along for an unmeasured time.  Whiffletree found herself almost drowsing. There was an effort in the walk, and in the climb, but nothing happened, and she could let her hooves move step by step without her mind paying any attention whatsoever to them.
There came a moment, however, when Whiffletree realized that the hoofsteps that had echoed hers, just a stride behind, had halted.  She stopped and looked back, to find Luna standing in the middle of the road, scuffing one hoof against the cobblestones impatiently.
“What is the point of all this?!” she exclaimed loudly, her hooves spread out, her body lowered but her head tipped back to shout at the sky.
Whiffletree blinked at her.  “Luna?”
“What is the point?  We walk and we walk and we walk, without sun or moon, under stars that measure off no time I can find, along a road that never changes!  Why should I take another single step?  What use is any of this?!”
“Do you have any other alternative to offer?” said Whiffletree mildly.
Luna bared her teeth in a snarl of pure frustration.  “Of course I don’t.  Stars—!  Augh.  MOON damn it, I will not swear by the stars here!”
Whiffletree dared to step closer to the trembling unicorn and put a hoof on her shoulder.  “I’m sorry.  But what else are we to do?  We need to go on.”
Luna suddenly sagged, head dropping.  “Yes.  Yes, I know.  Let us go on, then.”  She straightened, and Whiffletree could see her gathering her resolve.  Whiffletree only patted her shoulder again and began walking once more.  Luna fell in at her shoulder, and they went on in silence.
The land continued to slowly change around them, becoming more and more hilly.  At the crest of each hill they could see more of the terrain.  Those glimpses showed a shadow over the higher hills ahead.  It stretched for as far as they could see to either side, and all the way to the mountains themselves, which lifted pale, snow-dusted heads above the strange darkness.
When the pair finally reached the line between dark and light, they found that the shadow was a forest of barren trees, dark of limb, that blotted out the starlight beneath their branches.  The road went into the wood, an arch of utter blackness.  Whiffletree and Luna stood at the border between light and shadow for a time.  Then Luna lit her horn, a spark flaring at the tip and casting stark shadows beneath it.
She took the lead now, with Whiffletree a stride behind her, and the pair stepped into the dark tunnel beneath its roof of clawing black branches.
The forest seemed to be dead, and at first it seemed to be empty as well.  By the time the arch of starlight had vanished behind them, though, they began to hear rustles in the underbrush around them.  Luna lofted the light from the tip of her horn to float higher above, and brightened it as well, revealing more of the wood around them.  That sudden increase sent something small and furry squeaking and scurrying away.
Whiffletree caught a bare flash of it.  It was the size of a cat, perhaps, but longer in body and coarser in fur, she thought, with a naked, rat-like tail.
“Zoogs,” spat Luna, as a second one bolted out from behind a dead bush and raced after the first.  It looked back at them over its shoulder just before it vanished from sight, and Whiffletree shuddered at the glimpse of a cluster of small tentacles, like a bouquet of writing worms, or like some hideous mutation of a burrowing mole’s nose.  The eyes were blank circles, showing neither iris nor pupil, only reflecting Luna’s cool blue light with a milky, silver sheen.
Then the things were gone, and the rustles stilled.
“If there are zoogs here there may be less wholesome things,” said Luna.  “Though I hardly consider zoogs wholesome themselves.”
“What are they?” asked Whiffletree.
“They—”  Luna halted and gnashed her teeth.  “They are not normal beings and do not dwell in normal lands, but of course I cannot remember what lands I have encountered them in.  Only that I knew them to live in the same lands as ghouls, and perhaps even gugs.  I can deal with ghouls.  Ghouls can be useful things, even.  If we find a gug we will be in great trouble indeed, though.”
“I think I know what a ghoul is, but what is a gug?”
“Gugs are large creatures, with monstrous, bestial inclinations, but they are thinking beings, and so not as easily fought as an animal.  Imagine something the size of a smallish adult dragon, carnivorous, and not caring about the origin of its meals, that worships even less wholesome gods with bloody rites.  Encounter one, and if all goes badly you have an even chance of ending up on the dinner table or on the sacrificial altar.”
“I see.”
“They build buildings, like many thinking beings, so we will not wander into a family of them without noticing their homes.  But if we should find one out and about, I only hope we can escape its notice and flee.”  Luna sighed and added, “I function on mere scraps of memory, though.  I believe that gugs do not live in zoog woods, only that their lands lie near each other.  Hopefully we won’t encounter any.”
“I hope so too.”  Whiffletree felt her whole hide shiver, as if she’d had a swarm of flies land on her.  As far as she could recall she’d never encountered a gug, but she knew she’d fought monsters before, and the idea of a thinking monster was hardly pleasant.
“We should move on.  And pick up the pace, if we can.  The sooner we’re out of this wood, the better,” said Luna.
“Yes.” 
Luna took off at a trot, her captive light floating above her head.  Whiffletree matched her pace willingly.  She didn’t want to linger here either.
They moved on swiftly, alternating a rapid trot with a brisk walk to avoid winding themselves.  There were other rustles and motions in the woods, but for a long time they saw no other things, not even the zoogs.
Some hours into the wood they halted at a stream.  Whiffletree was wary of it, but the water smelled wholesome, and Luna opined that it was likely safe enough.  They paused there to drink, taking it in turns to watch and to slake their thirst.
“Hist,” said Luna, just as Whiffletree swallowed the first mouthful.  She lifted her head swiftly, and followed Luna’s gaze off into the words, where a faint, hazy glow bobbed in the distance.  Whiffletree had the thought that it must be a pony with a lantern.   She turned to go towards it, thinking that any pony out in the woods must need her aid, but after only a step halted.  Something in the back of her mind dredged up a fragment of memory, and she realized that the absurd conviction that a light here must be a pony was a glamor, part of the will o’ the wisp’s uncanny power.
“Of course there are fae here,” said Luna with a snort.  “Next I suppose we’ll be besieged by changelings.”  She gave another snort and shook her head.
“We should be certain to not leave each other’s sight then,” said Whiffletree.
Luna blinked at her, then nodded.  “Aye.  That is a wise plan.”
“I’ll finish my drink swiftly,” said Whiffletree, and turned back to the stream.  She took her fill of the cold, rushing water, and then she and Luna trotted on.
The ground went up and down still, since the forest was covering the foothills at the mountains’ base, and the way still tended up, probably still aimed at those no longer so distant peaks.  Though Whiffletree thought that it hardly mattered if the road ran somewhere else, so long as it eventually left this uncanny wood.
They continued through the unchanging dark under Luna’s light; the only other glimmer of illumination was an occasional will o’ the wisp attempting its futile lure.  Whiffletree knew they could be dangerous, but only if you didn’t know what they were, or were very tired, or drunk, or otherwise compromised.  Alert and aware, it was easy to avoid their snare.  Though, as the endless night wore on, she feared they might become tired enough to fall for the glowing lights.  She didn’t want to sleep in the wood, but she had no idea how far it stretched.
Then, suddenly, a distant baying sounded, and both Luna and Whiffletree halted, heads raised, ears swiveling to locate the sound.
“You had to mention changelings,” said Whiffletree, knowing what the sound must be.
“It could just be some other sort of hounds,” offered Luna weakly.  “And they’re probably not hunting us, given how far away they seem.”
“I hope so.  But either way we should pick up the pace.”
“Yes.”  Luna broke into a trot, and the two moved swiftly down the road, the distant sound of baying hounds echoing through the wood.
The sound grew and faded, the direction seeming to change impossibly, twisted by the trees and by the dips and hollows of the hilly terrain.  It soon became clear, though, that it was headed in their general direction.  Luna muttered a curse.  Whiffletree only broke into a canter, and prayed that the road would take them away from the Hunt, and not toward it.
They seemed, as far as she could tell from the shifting sound, to be moving at right angles to the progress of the Hunt.  The belling cries of the hounds grew and faded unpredictably, but overall they were growing louder, which made Whiffletree more and more nervous.
Something crashed through the brush just ahead of them and both mares halted, Whiffletree nearly running into Luna’s hindquarters.
The thing blundering through the brush stumbled onto the road, then let out a loud, meeping sound, head whipping around to stare at the two ponies and their light.
It was not entirely unlike a pony itself.  Its hind limbs were equine, with cloven hooves, and a bony tail with a few long, scraggly hairs clinging to it might once have been a pony’s tail.  But its front limbs were distorted; cloven hooves elongated into claws, and a pair of spindly dew-claws acted as bizarre double thumbs.  It held these limbs tucked up against its chest, its posture half-hunched as if it couldn’t decide if it wanted to drop down to all fours or continue to shamble upright.
There were clumps of wispy mane atop its head, and its face was an equine face, but was sunken in, cheeks hollow, muzzle distorted, cracked lips splitting too far back from a wide-hinged jaw whose teeth were too many and too sharp.  Its eyes were black pits, and yet it was just equine enough that the pure terror in its expression was crystal clear.
For one long instant both ghoul—for Whiffletree knew it was a ghoul—and ponies were frozen, staring at each other.  Then the hounds bayed again, very near now, and the ghoul flung itself at the ponies.  Whiffletree shied—she couldn’t help it—and she saw Luna flinch too, but the ghoul didn’t attack. Instead, it dropped to lie prostrated at Luna’s hooves.
“Sanctuary!  Please!  Oh please, ponies, have pity on a thing that was once alive and still wants to live.  Please!”  It’s voice was as twisted as the rest of it, both harsh and horribly liquid at the same time.
Whiffletree and Luna exchanged brief glances.  Whiffletree recognized the question in Luna’s eyes, and gave the smallest of nods.
“Get behind me then,” said Luna, and the ghoul scrambled to cower in her shadow.  Even as it did the hounds, pale white creatures with pink eyes and ears, began to spill out of the woods and onto the road.  They halted too, on seeing the pair of ponies, and milled about, pausing now and then to sniff at the road where the ghoul had stood and bay.
A moment later other creatures emerged from the black forest.  The first was an ordinary changeling, lambent blue eyes narrowed in Luna’s light.  It went straight to the hounds, calming them and setting them in order.  Close behind it came a taller, more elegant changeling, one that Whiffletree knew must be highly ranked, though she did not have the fully developed, slit eyes of a queen.  A lesser princess, then, or a lady.  The creature had no crown, so most likely a lady.
“Ponies,” said the changeling, her voice a high-pitched buzzing, her tone an arrogant sneer.  Four more lesser changelings came out of the forest to range themselves behind their leader.  The hounds now sat in an orderly rank about the hooves of their minder, red tongues lolling as they panted.
Whiffletree knew in an instant that she and Luna were outnumbered and likely outmatched.  She didn’t want to fight if she could avoid it, but would if she must.  Still, changelings could be reasoned with, and many of them weren’t terribly smart.  When Luna didn’t immediately step forward, Whiffletree did, ducking her head and bowing.  “Lady Changeling.  It is an honor to behold one of such surpassing beauty.”
“You flatter me shamelessly,” said the changeling, but she nevertheless arched her neck and preened, her wings giving a flutter.
“I only speak the truth, Lady Changeling.”
The changeling gave a little scoff, but also angled her head the other way, still obviously posing.  Whiffletree managed to not smile.  She might actually pull this off.
“I notice that you ponies are standing between me and my quarry,” said the changeling.
Whiffletree put on an expression of surprise.  “What, the ghoul here?  An obviously important lady like yourself, bothering with such a lowly creature?”
The changeling actually flushed, her cheeks turning green.  “Yes, well, it irritated me.”
“Ah, of course.  Ghouls are uncouth things, aren’t they?”
“Very.”  The changeling’s ears flicked in obvious annoyance, and Whiffletree quickly forged ahead, not wanting to let her focus too much on her anger.
“I’m truly surprised you bothered with a hunt, all the same.  It’s such an inconsequential creature, compared to your obvious status.  Yet unfortunately we now have a bit of a problem, my lady.  I hesitate to bother you with it, but this lowly thing has claimed sanctuary of us, and sanctuary does carry certain obligations.  I know, of course, that I cannot possibly stand against you, but I hate to put you to any effort on behalf of such a worm.  It is a petty little conflict, far beneath you, and I am ashamed to find myself even considering that you might stoop to dealing with such nobodies as ourselves.”
“Oh, well, truly I am hardly that exalted…”  The changeling looked hesitant now.  Insisting on fighting for the ghoul suddenly looked like losing face, yet she obviously didn’t want to give the ghoul up.
“There’s no need to be so humble, my lady.  I know you must be one of the great ones.  Your power and beauty are both plainly apparent to anyone with eyes!  But if you need to dirty your hooves fighting us for this bit of slime, I understand.”
“Ah…”  The changeling glanced at her retainers.  The one managing the hounds was sitting among its charges, and as oblivious to all this as they.  The other four stood stock still, with carefully neutral faces, but were all looking intently at her, obviously curious what she would decide.  She tossed her head, putting her muzzle up, and said, “Hmmph.  It is a little nothing, isn’t it?  Why don’t you punish it for me?  I cannot possibly let rudeness such as it showed go unanswered, but if you whip it a few times, I will consider my honor upheld.”
“Of course, my lady,” said Whiffletree, bowing again, deeply.  “We will be certain that justice is carried out.”
“Excellent.  See that it is done, then.”  Nose still in the air, she turned and stalked back into the wood, her servants immediately following after her, hounds bounding and yelping all around them as they went.
Whiffletree stayed with head bowed, and Luna and the ghoul both kept perfectly still as well until the last sign of changelings and hounds had vanished, and then a little longer.
Finally Whiffletree straightened with a deep sigh.  “Thank the sun and moon.”
“I’m impressed,” said Luna.  “I will freely admit that I was preparing for a fight.”
“I thought I should at least try diplomacy first,” said Whiffletree with a shrug.  “It was admittedly a crude and hasty effort.  I’m very glad it worked.”   She then peered behind Luna, at where the ghoul still crouched low to the ground.  “Are you alright?”
“Somehow, yes.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.”  The ghoul scrambled to its feet, resuming its off-putting, hunched posture.
Luna cleared her throat.  “Considering who we have dealt with to spare you, and how, I believe we must do one more thing, lest the fates fall against us.”
The ghoul cringed, but nodded.  “Of course.  I accept my punishment.”
“Whiffletree?  Would you please, since you made the deal?”  Luna gave Whiffletree a wink.
Whiffletree smiled and winked back.  One could not lightly break a promise to a changeling, especially  not in a place of their power such as this wood likely was; so she was bound to whip the ghoul.  She looked around, and immediately saw just what she needed.  Bending, she took a dry grass stem between her teeth and plucked it.  The ghoul had its unsightly, clawed hoof-hands over its eyes, but it let them fall and stared in astonishment as Whiffletree stuck it across the shoulder with the grass stem thrice.  The ghoul began laughing, a strange, gurgling sort of sound.
“Truly I have been harshly punished.”  It grinned, showing far too many teeth.  “Thank you again.  I was called Cotton Candy, when I lived.”
There was the briefest possible moment when the old gray mare found she couldn’t remember her own name.  Was her memory growing worse somehow?
“I am Luna,” said Luna.
“Whiffletree,” she finally said, though it was odd; she could conjure no memories of being called that name by any except Luna, in the unmeasured span since they’d met at the crossroads.  If she had another name she couldn’t recall that either.  Her mind must be fading even further.  Perhaps she was simply too old.  She couldn’t put a number of years to herself—that too was missing from her mind—but just looking at her coat she knew she was far from young.
“Are you going toward the mountains, or away?” asked Cotton Candy.  The name was incongruous, but it was true that beneath the grime and rot, the ghoul’s coat had once been a pale pink.  Her ears were mere tatters, but she perked them towards the ponies inquisitively as she spoke.
“Toward,” said Luna.
“Tch.”  The ghoul’s shredded ears went back.  “I owe you a debt, possibly of my life, but if you go to the mountains, I can accompany you only to the edge of the wood.”
Whiffletree found herself once again exchanging a meaning-laden glance with Luna.  “What lies in the mountains that’s more dangerous than these woods?” she asked.
The ghoul gave a little shrug.  “Nothing I know for certain.  The woods I know. The mountains I do not.  But they were once the home of the Elder Things, long ago, and there are tales that they made a terrible, monstrous servant, a being far worse than a small horror like myself, that remained behind when they grew tired of this world and set off into the void in search of another.”
“I see.”  Another glance was exchanged.  The tale of a monster to be feared might be true, but it might be only the sort of story that thinking beings of all sorts had always told about the strange terrors of “over there” as opposed to the familiar conditions “over here.”
“We will go on,” said Luna firmly.  “We have no other direction to go.”
Cotton Candy looked at them curiously for a long moment, then nodded.  “I’ll go with you to the edge of the wood, then.”
“Thank you,” said Whiffletree.
“Yes, thank you,” echoed Luna.  She lifted her head, and the light that had hovered above them all this time bobbed.  “We should move on, now.”
They did.  Luna once again took the lead, with Whiffletree at her shoulder, and Cotton Candy at Whiffletree’s shoulder in turn.  Whiffletree had to make an effort to not spook, having the ghoul so close.  Cotton Candy smelled of blood and corruption, and the way she moved made Whiffletree want to shy every time she caught that motion from the corner of her eye.  Yet in a way, Cotton Candy was still a pony.  Ghouls were fallen things, but even through the haze of broken memories, Whiffletree knew that Cotton Candy hadn’t chosen her lot.  Becoming a ghoul was something that sometimes happened to ponies who had certain bloodlines, and who perished in certain ways.  So Whiffletree did her best to trot steadily and remain calm.
This effort seemed familiar, as if she’d often had reason to welcome predators into her herd.  Why must her memory be so inconstant?  She could grasp vague glimpses of walking with gryphons and even speaking at times with dragons, but had no notion of when or why she’d done these things.
She tried to put it out of her mind—that should be easy enough, with her mind going, shouldn’t it?—and continue on.  Eventually, though, tiredness dragged at her, and she noted that Luna had slowed to a walk and hadn’t attempted a trot in some time.  Looking back at Cotton Candy, Whiffletree said, “How much further to the edge of the wood?”
“Half a turn of the stars, or a little less,” she said, and Whiffletree wanted to sigh.  That meant what, half a day?  Twelve hours?  Much too far to keep walking.
“We should rest then,” she said.
“There’s a hollow not far ahead,” said Cotton Candy, “and a stream near it.  It’s as safe as most places here.  And there are fish.”
Luna looked sharply at the ghoul with a sudden eagerness in her eyes, which Whiffletree didn’t fail to notice, but the gray earth pony only nodded.  “That sounds good.”
When they reached the hollow, Whiffletree was pleased to see that it was a curve of steep, barren earth with just enough space for the three of them and their fire beside the stream.  A little ways upstream, a bend in the water created conditions that Luna gleefully declared perfect for fish, and no sooner was a fire kindled than she and Cotton Candy were standing in the shallows of the stream, intent on the spot.  
Whiffletree lay beside the fire and watched the fishing.  Luna’s magic made short work of it.  It took perhaps fifteen minutes until Cotton Candy was hunched over a fat trout, and shortly after that Luna’s magic was dissecting a second one in an almost disturbingly neat fashion, planes of force tidily separating skin, guts, bones, head, and fins from the fish’s pale, striated flesh.  Luna dropped everything else into the stream, and floated the pair of perfect fillets she’d made over the fire, while Cotton Candy curled up beside it, still clutching her fish and gnawing it happily.
“I thought ghouls only ate dead flesh?” asked Whiffletree.
Cotton Candy looked up, her teeth stained red, and chuckled.  “Yes.  I killed the fish first, and nothing says I must wait until it rots, though decay is a fine spice.  Very few things eat living flesh.”
“I suppose that’s true,” said Whiffletree, managing to firmly tamp down any disgust at the ghoul’s dinner, and at Luna’s as well.  With her fillets roasted, Luna was now tearing into them eagerly.  This once again felt as familiar as it felt disturbing.  She had dined with carnivores before.
Feeling a deep, bitter frustration at the state of her memory, Whiffletree dug into her saddlebags again.  Once more the bottle of apple brandy, somewhat lowered now, emerged, and once more the little black book did as well.  She passed the brandy to Luna, who drank, and Cotton Candy, who sniffed it and then refused.  Whiffletree smiled at the thought of a ghoul being teetotal, but the smile didn’t last.  She opened the book, seeking some augury within.

Oh Celestia, where art thou?  And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?
How long shall thy hoof be stayed and thine eye, yeah thy fiery eye, behold from the heavens the wrongs of thy people?
How long shall thine ear be penetrated with their cries?
Oh Sun almighty, let thy hoof be stretched forth, thy pavilion be taken up; let thy hiding place be no longer covered.  Let thine ear be inclined and thy bowels moved with compassion.

Whiffletree sighed.  A deep melancholy came over her.  She still didn’t understand what this book was to her, but those words brought sadness, regret, and even something like shame.  The words were associated with failure, somehow.  With something she hadn’t done, something she hadn’t seen, someone she hadn’t saved.
“Read it to me?” asked Luna.
Whiffletree shook her head and instead hoofed the book over.  “I don’t feel like reading.”
Luna’s eyes scanned down the page.  Then, out loud she said, softly, “My daughter, peace be unto thy soul.  Thine adversity and afflictions shall be but a small moment.  And then, if thou endure it, the Sun shall exalt thee on high.  Thy friends do stand by thee, and they shall hail thee with warm hearts and friendly hooves.”  She looked up, and smiled sadly at Whiffletree.  “Was missing friends what made you sigh at the page so?”
“I read a different verse,” said Whiffletree with a shrug.  “That one is nicer, I suppose.  I don’t know.  I should stop reading, the book always seems to be upsetting somehow.”
“I know I have friends somewhere, even if I can’t remember them,” said Luna.  “That is a comfort, regardless of what the book may say.”  She looked at Whiffletree again, and over at Cotton Candy.  “I have friends here too, perhaps.”
“Ghouls do not have friends,” said Cotton Candy, looking away from Luna, her expression guarded.
“Well, ponies do,” said Whiffletree.  “And I think ghouls could if they wanted to.  But friendship is hardly mandatory.”
Cotton Candy looked back, and gave a little shrug.  “Friends or no, ponies need sleep.  I will watch while you rest.”
“Thank you,” said Whiffletree.  She had the thought that the ghoul could get a very fine meal of recently dead flesh, if she wanted to kill two ponies while they slept.  But she was too exhausted to think of anything else to do, and the ghoul seemed genuinely grateful for her rescue.
Whiffletree’s heart apparently believed that as well as her mind, for she slept deeply, and woke refreshed.
> Chapter 4
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

They went on.  The road had stretched forever, Whiffletree was sure, and the forest nearly as far.  They would walk on worn black cobblestones until the universe died its final, cold death.  Yet with each stride the road curved and climbed more, snaking its way back and forth as it ascended the foothills, and finally—finally!—there was a glimmer of starlight ahead, and the trio emerged from the forest to find themselves halfway up a mountain pass with nothing growing ahead but stunted shrubs and dry grass.
Cotton Candy gave a shudder as she looked up at the looming peaks.  “I go no further,” she said.  “You can see the old domain of the Elder Things already, and I have no desire to meet their monster, if it exists.”
“Thank you for your help,” said Whiffletree, and Luna echoed her.
“Thank you for the rescue,” was Cotton Candy’s reply.  “And best of luck wherever the road takes you.”  She waved one abhorrent forelimb, and Whiffletree waved back.  Then Cotton Candy vanished back into the dark, and the pony pair were left to climb onward on their own.
Surveying the road ahead, Whiffletree couldn’t help but notice that the mountain’s slopes were oddly shaped.  They were pierced with many holes to begin with, and though some of those openings were irregular, most were constructed of straight lines, joining at odd angles, but definitely not accidents of nature.  Even the rougher holes showed where they might once have been more even, before untold years had weathered them.
Looking for straight lines, Whiffletree began noticing them everywhere.  It wasn’t only the doorways: the hills had been carved into buildings, or buildings built out of the hills.  Both peaks, the one to the right and the one to the left of the pass, were cities, all the way from just above where they now stood to the white gleam of the snow line, and perhaps even higher still.
She and Luna both stood there for a long time, taking it in.  Finally Whiffletree started forward again, for there was nothing else to do.  That seemed the tone of this whole journey.  They did it because there was nothing else to do.
Whiffletree was sure things hadn’t always been that way.  She remembered a world of sunshine and moonlight, of song and laughter, of friendship expressed with food or gifts rather than by guarding a friend’s back from mortal danger.  She felt there had been other dire times, but that good times had lasted for a longer span.
She let her mind wander as she climbed the slope, the mountains now looming on either side, their slopes full of strange angles seldom found in nature.  What had happened, between those sunlit years and now?  What had broken her mind and made her so much less than she’d once been?  How had she come here, to a place that seemed to have never seen the sun, from that idyllic land she could almost recall?
The wind picked up, chill here so high up the slopes, and it brought with it a faint, hollow, fluting sound.  Luna and Whiffletree both halted, pricking their ears towards it.
“The wind across some empty doorway, pitched just so, I think,” said Luna after a moment.
Whiffletree nodded, and they continued, accompanied by that eerie, monotone music.  They were well into the pass, now, though the road still sloped upward ahead, but they would crest it before needing to halt, Whiffletree thought.  She was glad of that.  She didn’t want to bed down amid so many open doorways.  Even if the monster Cotton Candy had mentioned didn’t exist, anything at all might be sheltering inside those black holes.
The distant fluting seemed to shift about, coming from one direction and then another.  There must be many different doorways that could catch the wind, each doing so in turn as the wind gusted.  As they went on there were often several of them, though they always sounded the same note.
Something about the sound began to set Whiffletree on edge, though she couldn’t put a hoof on why.
Luna, though, managed to do so, for after a time she said, “How is it that many different openings, in many different places, all resonate to the same pitch?”
Whiffletree considered if she knew any curses that suited the sudden realization.  “It’s not the wind, is it?”
“Not the wind,” said Luna, nodding.  “And whatever it is, there are a number of them, on all sides of us.”
Whiffletree looked around.  They were short of the crest of the pass yet, but not that short.  They were completely surrounded by the buildings though, and some of the doors opened out almost directly onto the road.  “Any ideas?” she said.
Luna shrugged.  “Run?”
“It’ll be uphill, and towards at least some of them.  And it will be noisy.  If they’re busy having a communal concert or whatever that is, they may not have noticed we’re here yet.  Even if they have noticed, they may not be interested in us, but running tends to attract attention.”
“True.”  They both were still walking as they spoke.  “I’ve readied several spells of both defense and attack if needs be, but there are only so many creatures I can fend off, and we know nothing of their nature.  Other than that I can think of nothing to do.”
“We proceed, then, and hope they leave us be.”
“Yes.”
They proceeded.
The piping sounds seemed to grow more numerous as they reached the crest, but reach it they did—and without seeing so much as a hair, scale, or feather of whatever lurked in the ruined mountain-city.
From that vantage, they could see what lay on the far side of the mountains; a high plateau, dotted with shadows that could be forests, and threaded with things that might be rivers.  It was at such an elevation that the road down from the pass was far, far shorter than the road up to it.  Once it reached the plateau, the road ran ruler straight, though it eventually became a thread too thin to follow, so Whiffletree couldn’t see if there was an end to it.
There was no end in sight to the plateau, so if further mountains lay on the far side they were very far off indeed.  Or perhaps the world was flat, and the end of the plateau dropped off into space.  Or maybe it simply stretched out forever, and the road too, and they would journey on like this, beneath the strange stars, for all eternity.  Whiffletree sighed.  Just now that latter thought seemed more likely.
Still, even if the plain stretched forever, she would be glad to set hoof on it, and be out from among all these strange buildings with their unknown, pipe-playing occupants.
Luna let out an audible sigh, which Whiffletree echoed.  “Let’s move on,” she said, and they began making their way along the road as it wound down through the mountain-city towards the plain below.
The piping was still all around them as they moved. Whiffletree felt as though her hair had all been standing on end for an eternity now.  She picked up the pace, anticipating relief once they left the city behind for the plain.
Then she halted, for there was something reaching out of one of those dark doorways only a few strides ahead of her.  “Luna…”
“I see it.”
It was a tentacle.  That was Whiffletree’s first impression.  It was a tapering length of…stuff, crawling along the ground.  Then it bunched itself up to lift a smaller tentacle from part of it, behaving not like the arm of an octopus, but more like a slime mold greatly sped up.  The lifted portion of it gathered a larger blob at the tip, and this suddenly opened up into an eye, which swiveled around until it came to rest staring directly at the two ponies.
The piping sound cut off abruptly, from all directions.
“Oh dear,” said Whiffletree, her voice barely above a whisper.
“This does not bode well,” replied Luna, just as softly.  “Yet…”
“Yet we need to continue on, yes.”  Whiffletree started forward again, angling to one side of the road, so as to give the staring blob-thing as wide a berth as possible.  Its single, unblinking eye followed Whiffletree as she walked by.  She’d thought her hair had been standing on end before, but now she was certain that every single fiber in her entire coat was at attention, and that her whole hide might crawl away, given half a chance.  The whatever-it-was unnerved her thoroughly.
A second tentacle emerged from a different door, a little further from the road and further ahead.  Whiffletree trotted a little faster.  
Luna, still just at Whiffletree’s shoulder, suddenly cried out and staggered.  Whiffletree wheeled, and saw that the first tentacle was wrapped around one of Luna’s legs, just at the pastern.  Luna’s horn lit, and a beam of power struck the thing, making it recoil and let go.  Several mouths suddenly opened along it and it wailed through them, half a scream, half the sound of piping that they’d heard before.
The tentacle ahead of them, slowly creeping towards the road, sprouted wailing mouths as well.
“It bit me!” said Luna, sounding as outraged as injured, and indeed she was leaving bloody hoofprints now as she continued, but the injury couldn’t be severe, given that she wasn’t limping.
“Better run,” said Whiffletree.  She broke into an outright gallop, racing past the next reaching tentacle before it could get to the road, and Luna ran neck and neck with her.  All around them irregular tentacles flowed out from doorways like a hideous liquid, studded with mouths that screamed and eyes that stared.  It was a terrible cacophony that made Whiffletree wish she could clap her hooves over her ears.  She was much too busy running with them, though.  She raced, hoping to somehow outrun the reaching masses.  Yet all too soon there was one fully blocking the road ahead, and Whiffletree felt a stab of despair.
With a cry Luna leaped forward, horn aglow, and a beam shot out and hit the thing.  There was a chorus of screeching from the amorphous masses all around as the one in front of them was partially vaporized.  Whiffletree leapt the smoking remnants of it at Luna’s heels and galloped even faster, rushing recklessly down the slope.   Ahead yet more of the things loomed, though, tentacles merging where they met to form threatening masses, whose mouths opened wide enough to swallow Whiffletree whole.
The glow from Luna’s horn grew brighter, its blue turning nearly white, and a bubble of energy popped into place around the running mares.  As they reached the next abominable mass the shield hit it and forced it aside, the nearly-liquid nature of it letting it part around the bubble of force.
Whiffletree could see the strain this put on Luna, but she felt a wave of relief to have some barrier, however slight, between her and the monstrous, churning mass.
They ran on, blundering through blob after blob, until they were continuously forging through an ocean of appalling quasi-liquid.  Their pace had already slowed, but now it slowed further, and Whiffletree feared that if they came to a halt they’d be drowned in a sea of horror, never to move again.
“If I push the shield from the inside, can I move it?” she cried.
“If…”  Luna’s eyes went wide and she said “Yes!  Yes, please!”
Whiffletree lowered her head, leading with her shoulder, and leapt forward.  The magic felt solid when she hit it, which it must be if it was to hold the abominable sea that foamed about it.  It tingled, also, a crackling energy against her coat, but she hardly noticed for her whole being was concentrated on setting her hooves in the way of earth ponies and pushing.
They’d slowed to a walk, but she soon was pushing at a trot, shoving the knee-high wave of horror aside while Luna trotted just behind her, concentrating on maintaining the bubble, but relieved of the need to move it.
The mass lapped slowly higher, more and more of the creature flowing out of the doors all around, converging on the pony pair.  It grew harder to forge through it, and Whiffletree was soon sweating just keeping to a walk.  She soldiered on, digging in her hooves and shoving with all her might as the horror rose and rose.  It was as high as her head now, and the whole world was made of mouths and eyes that pressed against the wall, gibbering and staring, separated from her by only a paper-thin blue glimmer.  Something in the back of her mind was hanging tightly to sanity, and she knew she would pay for it later, but now there was only pushing and pushing.
Despite all she could do, though, she slowed, and slowed further, until at last the bubble was moving only by inches, and finally not at all.
Whiffletree sagged.  “I’m sorry.”  All around them mouths pressed hungrily to the bubble, and lidless eyes rolled against it.  They were completely enclosed now, buried beneath the thing.
“No!” said Luna.  “I refuse to accept defeat.”  Her horn glowed bright, gaining a double corona, and then a triple.  Then it seemed to explode, magic slamming into the shield, which itself turned white-hot for an instant before exploding outward.  There was an unbearable light, a hot pressure and release, a bang that near deafened Whiffletree, and a shrieking that was nevertheless audible from all around them.
They were suddenly standing in a crater, with a terrific burned reek filling the air, and charred lumps of the thing lying about for what must be two or three furlongs at least.  Whiffletree found herself surprised at that.  She couldn’t summon concrete memories, but she felt that this was an unusual amount of power, more than most unicorns could wield, even in extremity.
“Swift, let us go,” said Luna, and the bubble popped back into place.  Whiffletree could see that the unicorn was exhausted, but she only nodded and trotted at Luna’s side as they climbed back onto the road from the pit Luna had blown in it and resumed their retreat.
The vast ocean of awful being didn’t react immediately, but it wasn’t long before it was once again sending tentacles out to press against the bubble.  Luna gritted her teeth audibly, her horn sparking and guttering as Luna drained her power to the dregs, and Whiffletree knew they might well die, yet the road was beginning to level out as they neared the plain.  Perhaps once they were out of the city, no longer surrounded by the thing, they might have a better chance at holding it off.
As more and more tentacles wrapped around the bubble, Whiffletree put her shoulder down again and pushed it.  Luna was exhausted, and she was swiftly growing exhausted too, but the tide of creature was not even knee-high and she could see the edge of the city ahead.  If they were merely not surrounded, she could surely keep pushing on.  The thing’s tentacles didn’t seem that fast.  If she didn’t have to push, maybe they could outrun it.  Or something.
She knew that was all futile and they would probably die, but she shoved wearily on all the same, with Luna wearily holding her magic—down the last curve, past the last crumbling mountainside-building, past the last door half-filled with the mass of crawling horror, and out onto the sudden transition from slope to utterly flat plain.
As she did she literally fell on her face, for all resistance suddenly vanished.
The trailing edge of the bubble slapped her in the rump, and Luna stumbled but did not fall at the unexpected impact tied to her horn.  Whiffletree slowly climbed back on all four hooves and looked back, puzzled.
There was a seething mass of alien flesh, studded with mouths that shrieked and wailed and, as she watched, began to both chant some unholy syllables and with other mouths purse and whistle that fluting tone that had grown so familiar.  But it was bounded by a sharp line, precisely where the city stopped and the plain began.  
“Okay, that’s creepy,” said Whiffletree.  
Luna let the spell bubble pop.  “Indeed.”
“Uh…”  Whiffletree found herself completely unwilling to turn her back on the abomination wailing, changing, and piping at the edge of the plain, so she started to back up.
Luna tossed her head and said, “If it stops short of the plain, what does it fear here?  Let us walk with eyes forward.”
“Ah.  Uhm.  Yes, good idea.”  Feeling the back of her neck absolutely crawling, but also unhappily aware that Luna was right, Whiffletree turned and began walking forward.
They were still on the road, and the road was still the same.  It never changed. Whiffletree half expected that if she somehow backtracked to the spot where Luna had blown a hole in it, it would already be restored, grown back in an instant.
Looking back over her shoulder, Whiffletree saw the abomination slowly withdrawing into the doors it had spewed forth from.  The wailing and chanting tapered off, and only the eerie piping remained.  It was still audible even when the last tentacle had vanished.
At that point Luna halted, and Whiffletree did as well.
“I am spent,” said the unicorn, collapsing to the grass that grew along the side of the road.  The plain was dry, and the grass was too, but it smelled wholesome as Whiffletree let herself fall to lie on it as well.
“Yes.  That was…some kind of thing.”
“I have never seen nor heard of anything like that.”
“Me neither.  But now you have me thinking of what something like that might fear.”  Whiffletree gave a shudder.
“Perhaps its existence is bounded somehow,” said Luna, taking a mouthful of grass as she lay.  “Some magical things are created thus.  The ghoul said it was a created servant.”
“I can hope,” said Whiffletree.  She tried a mouthful of the grass herself, and found it dry but sweet, like hay.  She let out a small sigh, unwinding just a little, and managed to get to her hooves to graze.
They ate, and settled down in the grass a little ways away from the road.  There were no brambles to burn here, nor streams to shelter beside.  Whiffletree pulled out her water bottle from one bag, and drained about half of it.  She didn’t know when they’d next find water, but it was still just as well to carry it on the inside as on the outside.  She hoofed the bottle over to Luna.  Then she followed it with the brandy bottle, after taking a longer than usual pull.  Her nerves could use some settling after all that.  There was a part of her mind that was insisting on replaying the way the mouths and eyes had pressed up against her as she shoved her shoulder against Luna’s shield, and it was all too easy imagining what would have happened if the shield had failed.
Luna took a long drink too.  The bottle was definitely growing low, and with a feeling of reckless disregard Whiffletree had another swig when Luna passed it back.  She offered it again, and Luna took her up on that offer.
They passed the bottle back and forth until it was all gone.  Then, beneath the merciless stars, whose patterns Whiffletree still didn’t know, Luna said, “Will you read me a verse from your book?”
“They’ve all seemed like ill omens to me thus far,” she replied, knowing that the drink was making her more candid than she perhaps should be.  “They’ve all been nothing but sorrows.”
“Perhaps, but they’ve spoken to me all the same. Read me one more, please?”  A spark kindled on Luna’s horn, and Whiffletree sighed and pulled out the book.
Once more she opened it at random, and began to read, out loud this time.

“And in that day shall the sun be darkened, or rather shall the face of Celestia be darkened in wrath, and the moon shall be turned to blood, or rather Luna shall turn to the power of blood, and rise again in darkness to rule upon the earth forever more.”

Whiffletree halted, a scrap of memory stunned back into her mind by the verse.  She could picture a pony, whose face was that of the Luna sitting before her, but whose being was utterly different, for this Luna was tall and terrible, with vast dark wings, wreathed about by a mane and tail bearing the night sky within their waving umbra.
“The moon,” said Luna, her own eyes wide with memory.  “It’s not just my cutie mark, I was the moon.”
“I remember.  I remember seeing you and being afraid,” said Whiffletree.  She clawed at the memory, seeking more.  When had she seen and feared Luna?  Why?  What had she been doing, to be in the company of the moon goddess?  What had Luna done to cause such fear?
No matter how she beat at her own mind, though, no further memory emerged.
“But how?  I’m no goddess now.  How did I lose such power?”
“There’s no moon,” noted Whiffletree.  “Perhaps something happened to it.  Or…”  She thought again of a lifetime worth of memories, tattered as they might be, and said, “Or perhaps we came here from somewhere else, somewhere with a sun and a moon.  You lost your moon, and I lost my past, but I feel like everything we’ve seen here has been alien to me.”
Luna shook her head.  “I don’t know.  Some of it was familiar.  The zoog wood was.  But it’s true I’ve never seen anything like the dead god, or the piping monster we just escaped.  Perhaps zoogs, fair folk, and ghouls are found on many worlds.  Ponies must be, that we are ponies and have met ponies here.”
“Perhaps.”
“The verse, though…”  Luna looked away from Whiffletree, out across the dark plain.  The stars came down to the horizon in every direction save where the mountains made a long, dark wall behind them.  The eternal night was beautiful, in its way.  “The verse speaks of something yet to come.  I wonder…  My own memory is as rotten as a long-fallen tree.  Yet I have no memory of rising in blood.  I think…  I think I have dealt in darkness, as I suppose the moon might.  I’ve done bad things.  But though what memories I have suggest I have long borne a blood-craving, I’ve seldom indulged in it that I can recall.  A prophecy that I will take blood and rise to rule…  It strikes me as ominous.”
“It is a bit, isn’t it?”  Whiffletree smiled.  Somehow, despite that sudden memory of past fear, she wasn’t afraid now.  Even the idea of Luna giving in to vampirism and becoming some kind of dark goddess didn’t seem all that fearful.  She could hardly be a more awful monster than the one they’d just escaped, and probably would be no worse a deity than the dead god dreaming his skeletal dreams, after all.
Luna gave Whiffletree a long look, but Whiffletree only shrugged, still smiling. “If you’re destined to rise in blood, then you are.  I feel there’s probably not much point to fighting destiny.  I may not remember much, but I remember how those sorts of stories go.  You set out to be certain your son can never marry you, and all you do is create the circumstances where he definitely will.”  Whiffletree’s smile broadened, and Luna smiled back.
“You’re right.”  Then Luna yawned.  “Regardless, I am beyond exhausted, so certainly for now there is nothing to be done but sleep.”
Whiffletree nodded, and, feeling strangely confident in the gesture she wished to make, rested her head on Luna’s withers.
Luna flinched from the contact, but only for a single surprised instant, then she relaxed and shifted to rest her own head on Whiffletree in turn.  So they slipped into slumber together, as herdmates had since the earliest days of ponykind.
> Chapter 5
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Whiffletree felt well rested when she rose.
It was illogical, of course.  They’d escaped a horrible danger, and rested amid the unknown and perhaps the unknowable, and yet she’d slept deeply and soundly.
She stretched, as did Luna beside her, and they both grazed again for a time.
Then it was time to once more set hoof on the black cobblestone road.
Whiffletree paused for a moment.  She was growing weary of this journey.  She was weary of the road, weary of her broken mind, weary in body, weary in spirit, weary of everything in truth except perhaps Luna’s company, which was congenial and comfortable.  That was the only bearable thing in a world that seemed nothing but the unbearable and the tediously miserable.  She felt as though at this point she might take any escape from the unending night with its wrong stars that she could find, then shook her head at the thought.  Best to not wish for such things, lest she curse herself to have the wish fulfilled in some terrible way.
Still, there was nothing for it, so she once again set off down the path, hooves chiming, the cheery sound very much at odds with the mood of at least one of those who made it.
Luna’s mood was hard to read, but she seemed to be pensive, if she was anything other than merely tired.
The plain around them wasn’t perfectly flat, but the rises and falls were nothing that could be called hills.  They did eventually find a stream, carving a shallow valley out of the plain as it meandered slowly across it.  It might have even been considered a river, for it was broad, but barely more than hock-deep when they forded it.  The road’s cobblestones lay beneath the washing water, and seemed unaltered by it.  
Whiffletree drank from the cool rush, then filled both the water bottle and the now-empty brandy bottle there before they went on.
As they continued, they began to pass large stones that jutted out from the plain.  They were dark things, and when one bordered directly on the road, Whiffletree noticed that it seemed to be made of the same rock as the road itself.
Had the road’s countless cobbles come from here, then?  Did reaching the source of the road’s stones mean reaching the source of the road itself?  Whiffletree could hardly believe that the road that had been so strange all this way would simply halt at a black stone quarry, but if not at that, then at what?
The stones were of different shapes and sizes, but most were roughly rectangular, and stood on end, reaching from the dark earth below to the star-strewn sky above.  They began to appear in clusters, and the clusters sometimes suggested patterns.  One could draw certain angles between them, perhaps, or map out arcane runes with them.
They had gone on among these stones for perhaps a quarter turn of the stars above when there arose a faint sound of chanting from ahead of them.
Luna and Whiffletree paused, exchanging a long, weary glance, and then continued on without a word, towards whatever further madness might lie ahead.
The standing stones stood thick around the road, and for a moment Whiffletree thought there was a great cluster of them ahead, but then she saw that the shapes were wrong, and the sizes also, and instead they were buildings.  Low things, with few and narrow windows, spreading out to the left and right of the road to form a modest village, all built of the same dark stone.  The road ran through the heart of it, and as she drew closer Whiffletree could see that the road’s cobbles widened to form a broad plaza, circular in shape and lined with tall standing stones, which had lintel stones placed atop them to form a continuous ring of doorways.  She gave a shiver, knowing that this must be a place of great power.  At the center of the plaza there was an altar.  Gathered around it were a dozen robed ponies, chanting, and a thirteenth lay on the altar itself, held there with chains that glinted silver in the moonlight.
The chant was in a language that was almost familiar.  Whiffletree couldn’t understand it all, but to her surprise she knew the basics.  The chanting was addressing a goddess, offering her worship and praise if she would only come and take up her mantle of moonlight and shadow.
It was somehow not remotely a shock when the chanters called that goddess by name at the conclusion of their verse, and that name was “Luna.”
The real Luna halted just short of the circle in the silence that followed, with Whiffletree taking a place at her shoulder.  The air was tense as the robed ponies all turned their shadowed faces towards the new arrivals.
Then one of them put back his hood and spoke, dipping his head.  “Welcome, Princess Luna, soon to be goddess.”  He was a thestral, slate-gray of coat and bright gold of eye, with slit pupils, tasseled ears and fangs even longer than Luna’s.  There was brighter silver sprinkled in the dark color of his coat, especially around his muzzle, and in his hair as well, showing that he was far from young.
“Princess I might claim, but goddess is a bit beyond me just now,” said Luna, her voice calm, her eyes narrowed ever so slightly as she took in the scene.
“You were a goddess, or very like a goddess, once,” said the thestral elder.  “You will shortly reclaim that mantle and more.”
“Will I?”  Luna’s eyes were fixed on the altar, on the figure bound there.  That was a thestral also.  A young one, Whiffletree thought, whose eyes were tightly shut and whose chest heaved rapidly in what looked a great deal like fear.  He was rust brown in color and Whiffletree noted that one of his wings was stunted, oddly shaped and half the size of the other.
“Yes.  We have prepared all.  We have performed the rites for months now, seeking the goddess that our prophecies promised.  The one who will replace the fading gods of old and wake the light of the moon once more.  The one that will save our dying world.  And now you have arrived, as foretold.”
“And what have I to do in order to claim this power?”
“Merely accept your sacrifice,” said the thestral elder, his hoof making a sweeping gesture towards the bound thestral on the altar.  “The stars are right, the rituals are complete, the power is here in the circle, held by these stones, focused on this altar.  Merely claim his blood there and the divinity of an entire world will be yours.”
“I swore an oath, long ago, to never take unwilling blood,” said Luna.  Her tone was soft, almost gentle, yet there was steel beneath it.
“He agreed to his place,” said the elder, frowning now.
“He appears to have some reservations still,” said Luna, dryly.
“He agreed,” repeated the elder, voice growing hard and stern.
Luna brushed past him and halted at the foot of the altar.  The youth lying on it twisted his head around to look at her.  His eyes were wide and terrified.  His muzzle had been bound shut, and there were marks around all four ankles where the chains held him.
Whiffletree was not the least bit surprised when Luna’s horn lit and the chains shattered.  Pieces of silvery metal flew everywhere, startling curses from several of the gathered thestrals.  The bound youth lunged to his hooves and leaped off the altar, then halted, staring at the ponies all around him, sides still heaving.  None moved aside for him.
“He agreed, you say?” said Luna, wheeling to the thestral elder.  “A youth, and one no doubt already ill-treated because of an accident of birth, bullied into giving up all his years, is hardly the kind of offering I desire.  Will you step up onto the altar for me, elder?  Will you send your own son or daughter?  Your mate, perhaps?  No?”
“Please, princess.”  The elder bowed his head again.  “None of us want to die.  We did the best we could.  This rite must be completed, though.  If it is not, we will all perish, and our world will end.  There will be no light, no food, no life at all for any of our children if you do not accept this power.”
Luna snorted in angry disbelief, but the stallion forged ahead.  “The old gods are gone, or dead, or mad.  They passed on before the memory of any living here.  The last lingering gasps of their power keep the grass growing and the fish leaping, but every year there is less.  Every year we draw closer to starvation.  We cannot bring the old gods back.  Finding that a new goddess, and one not lost in madness, was within our grasp, can you blame us for doing all we could to bring you here and aid in your ascension?  Please, princess, goddess, please do not let our whole world die.  Isn’t one life a small thing to pay for a world?  It’s not only my people, it’s all ponies, all living beings here.  Maybe the madness beneath the mountains will survive the final dying of this world, but that will be all that remains in only a generation or two more.  Please.”
Luna’s face twisted.  Whiffletree could see the conflict there.  “I swore an oath.”
“One oath, like one life, weighs little against all the world,” said the thestral.
Luna stomped her hoof.  “I will not be forsworn!  Give me your life, then.”
The thestral began to tremble.  “If you wish truly willing blood, princess, it cannot be mine.  Forgive me my selfishness.  I… I will step on the altar if I must, though.”  His voice shook, and he looked away, down at the black cobblestones beneath his hooves.
Whiffletree felt a peculiar ache growing in her chest as the drama played out before her.  One life to save a world…  It felt, strangely, like fate.  Her mind was broken, and would no doubt only break further if she walked past the altar and along whatever road might lie beyond it.  And how many more years did she have left anyway?  It couldn’t be many.  
She stepped forward, gently shouldering the startled thestral elder aside.  Luna stared at her in shock as Whiffletree passed her as well, and put her front hooves on the altar.  It wasn’t high, barely to her knees, so it was the easiest thing in the world to heave herself up atop it.  She settled down there, tucking her legs up beneath herself, and looked up at Luna.  “I am willing,” she said simply.
“Whiffletree…”  Luna seemed suddenly stricken with uncertainty.
“I think, perhaps, that when you were summoned to this world to become a goddess, I was summoned for a purpose as well.  I’m only an old gray mare, I can’t imagine ascending to anything in particular.  But I’ve got blood, and if that’s what’s needed to save a world, then I’m willing to spill it.”
Luna stared at her, speechless.  Whiffletree, feeling astonishingly calm, began undoing her saddlebags.  She dropped them off the edge of the altar, then stretched out on her side on it, arching her head back, baring her throat.
“Go ahead, Luna,” she said.  “I’ve enjoyed traveling with you, but I think my journey has come to an end, and you must go on to do what you came here to do.”
“Whiffletree…  I…”  There were tears in Luna’s eyes,  but she nodded.  “Our journey has been a strange one, but you have been the light of it for me.  This has the feel of fate, doesn’t it?  The verse, when last we rested…”  She looked up at the stars for a moment, then down at Whiffletree.  “I could wish there was another way, but if you are truly willing…”
“I am.”
“Then I and this world thank you.”  
The robed thestrals all bowed their heads, even the youth whose place Whiffletree had taken.  The stars above watched in silence.  The standing stones hummed with barely perceptible energy.  All was ready, and Whiffletree felt at peace.  She’d walked the long, black road to come to this place, and do this thing, and it was as it should be.
Luna bent her head, her lips drawn back, showing the small, sharp wolf teeth that Whiffletree had noticed the very first time they’d met.
They stung when they pierced her, but it was a small pain, even though Whiffletree knew her life’s blood was now leaving her.  She could see the red flash, from the corner of her eye, and she could feel the chill and weakness that began to creep over her.  Her head spun dizzily, the already dark world around her darkening further.
Through that dark haze she saw Luna as she had seen her in remembered vision, tall and stately, wings unfurling from her sides, mane and tail carrying the night sky within, and knew that the goddess was arising.  Light spilled into the world as the moon edged above the horizon, framing Luna in a silver-white halo and making the thestrals all around gasp in awe, but for Whiffletree darkness was growing.  She let her eyes close, surrendering willingly to the darkness, feeling that her life had been well-spent.
> Chapter 6
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

In her first moments of ascension, all Luna knew was blood.
The sight, staining the altar and Whiffletree’s gray coat.  The scent, thick in the air.  The taste, heady on her tongue.  Blood was her world as the moon rose triumphant at her back.  She rose too, borne aloft by a cresting wave of power more than by the action of her wings.
Rising with and within her was a tide of memory.  The past flooded into her, a chaotic torrent, yet as she looked down at the scene beneath her, one thing in particular crashed into her mind like a wind-whipped wave against the shore.
The circle below was lit clearly by the light of the full moon, and by that light Whiffletree’s gray coat was glowing silver.  The red of her blood was a vivid splash across her body and across the dark stone beneath.  More vivid still, though, was the gold of her cutie mark, hidden all this time by her saddle bags, and ignored during the brief times when it had been revealed.  Silver and gold she lay, pale in the moonlight, and Luna knew her, for she bore the sun in glory, the match to Luna’s moon, the mark that her sister had worn all her life.
The moon rushed higher, and so did the power and memory in Luna, her mind full of the sun.  She felt a strangeness that wanted to be grief, but was not; for grief might come from a thing that was finished, and the power around her was still rising.  The thestrals had spoken true: all the world’s magic was focused here, in this circle, on that altar, and though Luna had taken a deep draught of it, she could not drain it. The moon began to sink, yet Luna could feel something else still rising.
She threw her head back then and laughed.  All the thestrals were staring at her, but some of their eyes began to turn back to the altar, for another light was growing there.  It was a light that burned away the red of blood, and bleached to white as it grew. It traced the unfurling of pristine feathers, raced to the tip of an elegant horn, and left behind the colors of spring over drab mane and tail. As Celestia opened her eyes and rose to her hooves, to stand restored on the altar where she had freely ascended to her death, the sun lipped the distant horizon, sending pure, golden light spilling across the world.
The thestrals cried out, squinting against a brightness they had never known, but Luna’s cry was one of familiar joy, and she swooped down to land on the altar and embrace her sister with unfettered delight.
> Chapter 7
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

A gentle breeze sent ripples over the golden grass that covered the plain, sunlight glinting from the stalks as if they were real gold.  Here and there green peeked out amid the gold, signs of the new life that seemed to be flourishing all around.
There were flowers, too, adding splashes of color, and not far away a thestral team was tilling the latest of several farm plots, where a thin green haze showed new seedlings sprouting with fervent energy on the previously tilled soil.  Their village loomed beyond, its black stone looking stark and strange in the warmth of the sun.  The thestrals were going cloaked against that brightness, so that they wouldn’t burn.
The two who sat in the grass surveying the scene, though, had no need of such guards.  The sun was Celestia’s, and Luna was long proof against its rays.  Celestia, white of coat, with flowing pastel mane and tail, sat with her wings folded and her hooves tucked tidily beneath her.  Luna sprawled on her side, her longer legs splayed out, her mane and tail spreading wayward stars across the grass.
“I established the link to Equestria this morning.  Twilight says hello,” said Luna, tilting her head to look up at Celestia from where she lay.  “I’m sure I’ll be able to hook you into it next time I open it.”
“There’s no rush.  We haven’t even been gone a year, and it’s not as though Equestria needs us.”  Celestia smiled.  It had taken centuries, after giving up their thrones, to grow so bored of retirement and of the wonderful utopia that Twilight’s rule had established, that they’d wanted to seek out a world that might need them.  A few months was nothing, compared to that span.
“True.  That’s why we came here, though I’m not sure I’d have chosen this world if I’d known everything about it.”
“It was a word that needed—needs—us badly,” said Celestia gently.  “It needs you in particular.  I appear to be merely a bonus.”
Luna’s cheeks colored ever so faintly.  “It feels…strange to be the greater sister, I will freely admit it.   Old jealousies say that I should be ecstatic, but mostly I am finding it unnerving.  To have such power, and such devotion…”
“It’s frightening,” said Celestia, nodding.  “You fear you will fail them.”
“Yes.  That’s always been something I needed to worry about as a princess and as the alicorn of the moon, but now it seems especially acute.  All these pilgrims, coming to petition me…  The ones who don’t have petitions scare me more than the ones that do, truly.  They’d do anything for me.  I could abuse that so easily.  It’s obvious the gods here often have before.”
“You’ve never abused your position,” said Celestia, chuckling.
“Oh?”  Luna rolled fully onto her back and looked at Celestia upside down, smiling. “I would think that the Nightmare Moon incident…”
“If anything that was the inverse, a lack of power, not an excess,”  Celestia smiled back.  That was ancient history by now.  Rather literally, even if you only counted back to the Nightmare’s return.
A loud, meeping cry interrupted them, and a voice cried out, “Luna!”  The voice’s cheerful tone and its gravely, bubbling sound were very much at odds, and Cotton Candy looked even more horrible by bright sunlight than she’d looked in the zoog wood’s dark shadows, but Luna and Celestia both broke into broad smiles as the ghoul came lurching towards them.
Luna rolled to her hooves and leapt to meet her.  “Cotton Candy!  I didn’t expect to see you here!  How did you get over the mountains?”
Celestia rose as well, but let Luna take the lead, standing at Luna’s shoulder, and feeling oddly pleased to find herself still the shorter of the pair despite her ascension.
“I followed the changelings.  They have some kind of way to lull the shoggoth to sleep, they said.  I knew I wanted to see you, when I overheard the news.  They stopped to rest on the other side of the mountains, they’ll be here all formal and diplomatic and probably kissing your cutie mark soon enough.”  Cotton Candy grinned toothily.  “But I came on, since I don’t need sleep.  I couldn’t wait!  Though where’s Whiffletree?  Did something happen to her?”
“Something did indeed,” said Celestia, still smiling.  “I was Whiffletree.”
“Oh wow.”  Cotton Candy peered at Celestia, eyes that had looked entirely black in the forest now shown as pale blue, pupils tiny pinpricks in the brightness.  “You got bigger!  Though I guess Luna did too.  I didn’t know you were a goddess.”
“Neither did I!  I’m Celestia now, and the sun is mine, as the moon is Luna’s.”
“Right, of course.”  Cotton Candy nodded, looking between them.
“Have you come seeking a boon, then?” asked Luna.  “I know somewhat of the magic of the dream that lies over your home forest, and of the nature of ghouls.  If you wish to be a pony again…”
“Oh hell no!”  Cotton Candy shook her head vehemently.  “Being a pony was nice enough, but I like what I am.  I don’t want to go back to needing to sleep, grazing all the time, and having to fear anything with teeth.”  She bared hers in a literally ghoulish grin.
Luna laughed out loud in obvious delight.  “I see!”
“No, I just learned the name of the new goddess, who returned the moon and sun—that’s what they’re saying, sorry, Whiffletree, or whoever you are now—and I wanted to see you now that you’ve ascended.  I knew a goddess!  How could I not come say hi?”
“I’m glad you see you,” said Luna.  “Come, here, sit and speak with us.  I can send for fish, if you’re hungry?”
“Nah, there was a bunny that something else didn’t finish on the way here.  Very nicely rotted and everything.  I’m good for now.”
“Let us sit and speak, then.”  Luna settled on to the grass once more, and Cotton Candy did too, the ghoul as ungainly while sitting as while doing anything, but Celestia was still glad to see her.  They had worshipers a-plenty already, but Cotton Candy was the nearest thing they had as yet to a friend.
“So what’s it like, being a goddess?” said Cotton Candy.
“Many things,” was Luna’s smiling reply.  “Worrysome, just now.  I find myself surrounded by ponies who are willing to do anything I ask, and many of them seem to be almost literally begging to be taken advantage of.  To misuse the power of a goddess so would be wrong, and yet I fear I will be tempted.  Power and luxury and, ah, attractive partners…  They can be hard to turn down, especially when those offering them seem so eager.”
“So take a little advantage!”  Cotton Candy giggled, and Celestia thought that the sound of a ghoul giggling was an experience.  “If they’re actually eager and you like the look of them…”  She giggled again and wiggled the scraggly remains of her eyebrows.
Luna rolled her eyes.  “Yes, a fine jest.  But in actuality…”
“In actuality our gods have always been mad, or evil, or like…things that make me look downright equine and homey.”  Cotton Candy gestured at herself, that too-toothy grin coming back.  
“I think if it weren’t for the whole ‘planet slowly dying’ thing we’d have been better off without them entirely,” she added, her expression sobering.  “I’ve been around long enough to remember when more of them were active, and what it was like.  Knowing you, you’d have to try really hard to cause a thousandth the trouble they did, Luna.  I wouldn’t worry about it.  Ponies here are used to horror-thing gods, you know?  They’re flinging all this at you because they’re so damn happy to have an equine god.  I mean, some of them don’t trust you at all, you should hear what the changelings who argued against sending anybody to greet you were saying!  Some of them think a fair seeming means you’re going to be even worse.  But trust me.  You are going to be wonderful for this world.  Both of you are.”  She nodded at Celestia.  “So don’t worry too much about screwing it up.  We’ve been through worse.”
Luna regarded Cotton Candy thoughtfully.  “I am tempted to argue that just because the harm I might cause is lesser, that doesn’t make it not harm.  Yet I do find myself reassured by your perspective.  That these ponies are offering me so much because they find me trustworthy compared to their old gods is a more reassuring thought than that they are awed by me, or are not thinking of what harm I might do them.”
“Nobody, pony or ghoul or anything else on this benighted globe, could possibly fail to think of the harm a god can do, believe me,” said Cotton Candy.  “They’re just happy to have you.”
“I’m happy to have you,” said Luna.  “One thing a goddess seldom has is a friend.”
“Hey, I’ve said that ghouls don’t do friends.”  Cotton Candy scrunched up her sunken face in a truly hideous expression of protest.
“Yet ponies do, and I do, and so I will consider you my friend.  If you say I can hardly do wrong, I will no doubt do no wrong to insist you accept my friendship.”  Luna’s smile was sly as she spoke, and Cotton Candy laughed again.
“Oh, I guess so.  Gotta keep up my reputation as a monster, though.  Can’t be seen acting all soft and fluffy.”
“I shall appoint you my official divine monster, if you wish,” said Luna.  “But you and I will know that by this I mean friend.”
Cotton Candy laughed again, and Celestia found herself laughing as well.  “You will definitely have to tell Twilight about this, when next you speak.  She’ll be pleased to find that finding a friend was one of your first accomplishments here.”
“Finding a friend was my very first act,” said Luna, her expression gentling.  “Because the first thing I recall here was finding you.  You are my sister, but you are also my friend.”
“Best friends forever,” said Celestia, and leaned over to give Luna a nuzzle.
“Best friends forever,” answered Luna with a smile.  She gave Cotton Candy a sidelong glance and said, “Ghouls are rather near immortal, so shall I say ‘friends forever’ to you as well?”
Cotton Candy rolled her eyes.  “If you insist.  But yeah, sure, friends forever.  Now, if we’re talking about abuses of divine power, let me tell you about a few things on this rotten world that I totally think you ought to fix…”
Celestia let the conversation between Luna and Cotton Candy wash over her, as the sun above also washed over her, and felt a warm contentment.  The road here had been strange, and the way forward far more difficult than she could have guessed, but she was glad they’d come to this world.  After centuries of idleness, it was nice to be needed.
It was nice, also, to renew her bonds with Luna.  She’d been reborn on the dark altar, and in some ways she felt that having been Whiffletree, and having died feeling she was of no worth save for that death, had changed her.  Yet she was not so changed that she wasn’t still Luna’s sister, as she’d been for all these years, and as she would be until the no doubt far, far, far distant day when this world too became a utopia and they might find themselves ready to move on to somewhere else, and walk together down some other strange, dark road.