Spritelight

With the wall of flesh defeated, we turned our attention to the demonic eyes set in the fleshy cocoon which encompassed the world.

The eyes continued to cry their blood rain down upon us as they had witnessed the destruction of the other entity, but were obviously a different source of evil to excise.

We aimed our spectral horn upward and charged it with energy, noting the eyes in the sky all turning to look directly at us. They could do naught but watch and cry tears of red as we sent a blast of superheated plasma up toward them.

The ball of plasma evaporated the rain it came into contact with and grew to twice its original size while moving upward, before it impacted with the ceiling above us.

It instantly punctured a hole through this firmament of flesh, much like April's magic had done before, and then started to spread in all directions like a massive shockwave, burning away at the skin and the eyes set in it as it did.

As the hole above us grew and spread outward to all horizons, leaving blue sky in its wake, the fire tugged at the air around the pyramid, pulling it up and out to follow the plasma in order to fuel it.

Yellowstone was subjected to a massive gale wind pulling everything in the pyramid's surroundings toward it; trees, water, animals, and any object not bolted down flew in our direction and up into the sky from the slanted walls of the pyramid.

We changed focus to the borders between worlds as the plasma cleansed the world without us needing to pay further heed to it and found them weak enough that anyone and anything could force their way through with little effort.

Even an unlucky human tripping over a pebble might suddenly find themselves in Equestria if they happened to fall close to one of these borders, we thought. If that person did so under a new moon on Friday the 13th, with a black cat crossing the street in front of them, that is.

This weakness was the reason the horrors had managed to make it onto Earth and these borders needed to be restored as quickly as possible to prevent another such thing manifesting now we had excised the first and were working on removing the other.

We exhumed mana out and into what remained of the existing borders in an effort to repair them, and erected a new one for good measure. Yet we also needed to established one, and only one, very sturdy and stable connection between Equestria and Earth in the process.

There were ponies on Earth who needed to be able to return to Equestria, and there were humans-turned-ponies on Equestria who needed to be able to return to Earth. Neither group would be served by us closing the borders completely.

The mirror inside of the pyramid was easily patched up; the pieces drawn together from where they had lain broken on the ground, fused into a whole again as if it had never been shattered by a chair thrown in desperation.

We tied it into the energies swirling naturally around Earth to power it, and then reconnected it to its twin in Equestria. As we did, we found this mirror stored in a storage room in Canterlot's palace.

It was just a lone mirror of ages past which had been housed in the archives as an obscura nopony knew how to use. Since it was now useful again, we lifted it from its dark tomb by our magic, phasing it through stone walls and wooden doors and placing it in the throne room where Celestia held audience.

We felt the shock of it manifesting in the midst of the crowd present there, the rushed clearing of souls from the space as guards moved in to protect their ruler, but had to move our attention elsewhere as there were more pressing matters to deal with.

With the last of the interdimensional horrors cleansed from the sky, the gust of wind settled and what objects had still made it into the sky rained down around the pyramid.

We waited for the world to calm down in such a fashion before focusing on the remnants of energy of the humans who had found themselves in the path of, and could not escape from, the wall before it had rolled over them and made them a part of its horrendously malformed body.

The immense sadness we felt from the realisation man, woman, and child had been swept up into this thing and were more than likely consciously part of it the entire time it had moved across the landscape made us draw from the collective wellspring of the universe's energy as well as that which was provided from the pyramid we stood upon.

For one brief moment we were a goddess of life, death, time, space, and everything else as we drew upon the primal force of nature and all within it to recall these lost souls from the beyond.

Bodies were restored to how they were before Spritelight's magic started this whole ordeal, spirits imbued within them anew, their memories wiped from all the atrocities they had been unwillingly subjected to.

A thousand and more humans suddenly stood on the ground surrounding the pyramid, left in a daze as their spirits were rejuvenated through a process none should have access to unless in the most dire of circumstances.

They were confused, and rightly so, to have been displaced from their lives from a moment shortly before the horrors had become publicly known.

They came from different parts of the world, spoke different languages, but now all found themselves as one part of a larger group of restored souls given a new chance to live full, complete lives.

They tried to make sense of it and the strange pyramid in their midst with the ornamental pony statues on its surface staring them down. A pyramid like none other on Earth, with a radiant alicorn made of energy suspended above it, towering over them like a creature from mythology.

Some fell to their knees as if they had found a new religion, others stared dumbfounded as their brains could not comprehend, some turned away or tried to wake themselves as if they could not accept what was right before them.

The sheer overload of energy we had drawn upon to restore these humans was too much for the ages-old crystal, which had obviously not been designed to hold the unbridled power of the universe.

It shattered into eight fragments of roughly equal size, each still shining with the remnants of energy they had been charged with as they fell to the floor like a multicoloured array of magic lamps.

The Alicorn goddess' psyche similarily cracked and broke into eight separate selves, and I felt my facet of its consciousness flung backwards into the body of the princess named Josey.

The energy which had suspended me in the air pulled away while I was trying to come to terms with being myself again, and gravity took hold of me once more.

With all of my energy spent, I hardly put up a struggle to remain airborne and collapsed down onto something soft and fluffy which itself also fell down as her tired legs couldn't bear the weight of another suddenly resting atop her.

Pinkie Pie's pink mane tickled my nose as I lay sprawled across her back, and I sneezed involuntarily.

"Gesundheit," the pink Earthpony underneath me spoke in a tired, yet surprisingly cheery fashion.

She reached up with her left forehoof as well it could to offer me a paper tissue she had pulled from nowhere in particular, and my brain finally caught up to what just happened.

I quickly scrambled to pick myself up onto my own four hooves and noticed a similar situation was happening all around me; the ones in our group who had been in the air when the iris opened had all fallen down upon the ponies stood on the ground underneath them and were now scrambling to stand up on their own again.

Turkey was having a tough time getting off April's back, the younger unicorn looking especially bothered by the errant flapping of Turkey's wings.

Cadance was already standing beside Patty Cannon, her head bent down to check up on how my Earthpony girlfriend was doing.

Rainbow Dash had had no problem getting off Spritelight, the both of them side-eyeing one another with a look which clearly stated "we're never talking about this with anyone else".

I wasn't sure I could describe what had just happened with all of us if I had to explain it to someone else either, but as I checked up on Pinkie Pie beside me the Earthpony in question just forced her usual smile on her lips in an effort to make me feel better about it all.

"Did we... win?" Turkey finally dared ask after managing to get off April's back, her voice barely above a whisper.

"God help me, I think my back's broken after that," April breathed out, tested getting up on her own hooves, and then shook her head. "Oh good, it's not broken. It does hurt."

"I didn't mean to fall on top of you, sorry," Turkey apologized, daring a gentle pat of her wing across April's back.

Patty Cannon suddenly braved striding across the room in a straight line, past the glowing crystal shards and the still-opened iris, to bury her muzzle in against my fur coat.

"You are plenty enough for me, and so much more than I could have ever dared hope for," she spoke in earnest, and I could feel the warm wetness of her tears starting to flow as she poured her all into me.

I bent my head down to nuzzle into her as well, knowing now how much we both needed one another. "So are you, my darling. Rho and Jo forever, remember? I'll always be there for you."

"Turkey, I had... no idea," Spritelight voiced from our right.

"I didn't really talk about it, now did I?" Turkey huffed in exasperation. "It's not like I wanted to talk about it. It's no use lingering on."

"I do believe we could all use a moment to collect our thoughts," Cadance spoke calmly, offering up a motherly smile to all present as if to try and prevent a sudden panic taking hold of our group.

"I can't believe this happened," April exhumed.

She sat down on her rear end and turned her head up to look at the ceiling.

"Just a week ago I was debating with myself whether God existed and why He was so determined to punish me, and now I..." she caught herself and shook her head. "No, we... We pretty much became a goddess? Is that right? Was that what happened just now?"

Spritelight walked past me and Rhonda, avoiding the shards in the middle of the room as she made her way toward where April and Turkey were.

"I don't think we can tell anypony about this," Rainbow sighed. "That must have been the biggest accomplishment of my life, of OUR lives, and we can't even tell anypony about it! They wouldn't believe us if we did."

"You'll always have your Sonic Rainboom, Dashie," Pinkie Pie offered as solace.

I pulled my head away from nuzzling into Rhonda / Patty Cannon and noticed Spritelight had not just made her way to April and Turkey, but had pulled both of them into an embrace; her forelegs wrapped around the others' withers.

She didn't say anything, but it was clear she had to show them she cared about the pair.

Cadance, Rainbow Dash, and Pinkie Pie each stood by themselves, or at least a little distance away from each other, with Pinkie looking like she was recovering quicker than the rest of us from our tiresome ordeal.

The princess across the room was looking at me directly and I gave her a slow, respectful nod. She returned it in silence and turned her eyes to the empty ring still dangling in the middle of the room from its metal chains.

We would forever carry the knowledge of one another's past and reason for being, longer perhaps than the others present in the room with us since there was no way to tell how long our lives would be given Celestia and Luna's advanced ages.

I watched her look down, now to the multicoloured gemstones on the ground. There was one for each colour of the rainbow; pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

I was reminded of the Elements of Harmony from the show, but they had each been a different shape as well as colouration. These shards had split almost evenly.

Pinkie Pie bounced past between Cadance and myself, breaking my concentration as she made her way over to Rainbow Dash and promptly pulled the Pegasus into a hug, the pair of them sharing a moment between themselves as well.

I knew now that we had shared a combined consciousness, that Rainbow desperately sought that closeness from her friends, but also needed to maintain the air of being untouchable to others she had less of a bond with.

She was similar to me in that respect; we both wanted to be the strong ones, the ones others could look up to and pull themselves up to the same level as. We both had a strong sense of justice and the drive to help others.

Patty Cannon calmed down and brushed her tears from her cheeks. "Now what do we do? Discord locked us in when he left."

"I'm sure we can open the doors from in here as well," I offered down to her, then looked in Spritelight's direction.

"Do you think you can find the way to open the doors after you're done consoling your wards, Spritelight?" I spoke.

"Hm, wards," Spritelight mused. "That could allow Turkey to have a second chance at this family thing."

"Sorry, what?" Turkey spoke in confusion.

"You could help me help April here get a life away from the parents who want her to change who she is?" Spritelight offered. "I'm not sure how your world deals with this sort of stuff, but maybe you could adopt her?"

"Adoption when her own parents are still alive? I'm not sure that's an option. Perhaps she should move to Equestria with us? I don't intend to go back to life as a human if I can help it," Turkey considered.

"Wait a moment, wait a moment, do I have a say in this?" April asked with growing worry in her voice.

"Not really," Spritelight decided. "We'll have to figure out some way to keep you out of that school we found you at. We'll work on the details later, let me see if I can find us a way out of this room first."

Spritelight detached herself from the pair and turned for the double doors. "It's most likely a pressure plate on the wall here on the inside. The doors don't have the logo on them which they did have on the outside, so it's not the same mechanism which opened them earlier."

"So, which part of the wall is the pressure plate?" I asked. "Back in the other rooms there were dimples for a hoof to fit in, but this is just smoothed brickwork."

Patty Cannon took a few steps forward past me to end up on Spritelight's left side and bumped her left hoof against one of the stones which made up the wall.

"This stone is loose. If you push it in a little it will trigger the doors," she just stated as if reading it from a manual. "Knowing more innately now how Pinkie and I do things, this is ridiculously simple."

Patty Cannon looked back at the broken crystal with a pensive frown as if she was seeing something the rest of us were not.

"I think we're all going to benefit from getting out of this room sooner rather than later," she considered. "There are no jokes to make here to soothe our nerves with."

"Amen, sister," Pinkie Pie agreed. "What we did here was waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too serious to make jokes about."

"Yeah, let's get out of here before something else weird happens," Rainbow agreed.

Spritelight put her own hoof against the part of the wall Patty Cannon had indicated and gave it a good push.

There was an audible click from within the brickwork and the double doors swung open inward again and locked themselves in place against the wall as they had done before.

I glanced into the hallway beyond for any sign of the draconequus, but he was nowhere to be found.

"Let's figure out where Discord has gone off to, shall we?" I suggested. "Considering what we've done to the mirrors, he might be in the mirror room to explain things to Celestia or something."

"Explain things? Discord?" Spritelight scoffed. "He'll be making half a mockery out of it to string Celestia along until we show up to set the record straight. Let's save her from him."