All The Way Back

Chapters

Chapter 1: Awakening
Chapter 2: Fledging
Chapter 3: Flying
Chapter 4: Connecting
Chapter 5: Responding
Chapter 7: Caving
Chapter 8: Climbing
Chapter 9: Passing
Chapter 10: Rescuing
Chapter 11: Battling
Chapter 12: Resolving
Chapter 13: Searching
Chapter 14: Contacting
Chapter 15: Learning
Chapter 6: Confronting

Chapter 1: Awakening

Her mornings and evenings were spent with her sister.

Some of this was purely social.

She discovered, to her happiness and embarrassment, that Celestia really, deeply did love her, despite everything she’d done both as Nightmare Moon, and – before that – as an increasingly-rebellious younger sister. For the first few weeks, Celestia was almost always at her side, save when actually transacting State business, and as Luna healed, she began to make a point of having her watch the State business as well. Luna was still far too weak to raise the Sun and Moon again, and so Celestia got very little sleep, taking what sleep she could in short naps in the afternoon and early morning.

Alicorns don’t actually need sleep. But they much prefer it. Luna realized, to her horror, that her sister must have been living like this for a thousand years, operating the Solar System entirely alone.

How did she stay sane? Why isn’t Equestria a charred and smoking wasteland?

Her respect for her sister increased.

Some of this was educational. Equestria had changed much in a thousand years. Some of this, like the factories and airships and railroads, Luna had seen from her exile. Much of it, she could not have guessed.

The ancient royal and noble lines had much declined. Most were still rich, but little remained of their old feudal privileges. The competent ones now served the realm in war and peace, while the incompetent ones … “drones” would have been the kind way to describe them.

There was one particularly-useless young prince, which to her dismay she discovered was the lineal descendant of Princess Platinum, and hence traced his heritage back all the way to the time of the Three Tribes. Her dismay turned to horror when she remembered a few facts which had not made it into the chronicles, and realized from whom else he was almost certainly descended.

Prince Polaris Blueblood, 52nd of His Line, addressed Princess Celestia as “Aunt,” as was of course his right. This was a legacy of the numerous formal adoptions by which Celestia had become first a junior, then by dint of her immortality, by far the most senior, member of every one of the ancient Great Houses. As Celestia’s sister, Luna of course was addressed by the same title. Luna did not tell him, and devoutly hoped that he never discovered, the other appellation for her which he might have still more accurately employed.

His talent was supposedly for navigation, though Luna never noticed him navigating anywhere other than to food, liquor and mares of negotiable virtue. He was, not unsurprisingly, a coward – Luna could have made a game out of scaring him just to hear him squeak, were it not for her knowledge that this sort of game would be an early step on the same path that had led to her previous downfall.

He was also a great snob and a bit of a bully, who used his position to push around anyone of lower social status, which was most of the people in Equestria. To be fair, he was not a very cruel bully – cruelty takes malice, and effort. In him, apathy and hedonism acted as restraining virtues. Luna would not let him be a bully in her Palace, though, and after she made him squeak a couple of times, he ceased such attempts.

He was a pathetic member of the royalty. But then, mortal royalty and nobility had become increasingly irrelevant in modern Equestria.

She saw that now what were still called the middle classes, and to whom the nobles still felt superior, now dominated. These composed everything from what had been the gentry all the way down to any artisan or clerk or tradesman with a passable education.

From the upper layers of these had come Twilight Sparkle, who could trace her lineage back almost to the time of Luna’s banishment, and had the manners but not the titles of the aristocracy. Around the same level in formal status, but far above it in actual wealth, were princes of industry such as Fancy Pants, who could trace his lineage back only a century, yet on whose decisions factories and towns rose from virgin soil across the whole nation.

It was largely the middle classes who did things now. They were the scientists, the scholars, the industrialists, the bankers, the engineers. They were the ones who were building the bright new world she had seen growing from the Moon. They were making the new Equestria. They knew that their fortunes had been founded and could only be kept by their own labors, or they remembered lost fortunes and strove to regain them. In either case they disciplined their own conduct, worked hard, and had an immense regard for the practical virtues.

Some of them almost frightened her with their intense drive, but she found that she liked them better than the decadent aristocracy. Yes, she missed the old days of lightning and thunder, of desperate sallies and heroic fights, the ponies of iron who had fought the battles Luna had led on the too-often occasions when Celly had missed a trick in her Long Game, and the round had to be salvaged by blood-price rather than adoptive connection.

But she was no romantic fool about it. She remembered how many good ponies had died untimely in those struggles, and while an Equestria so united and powerful that its foes usually dared not attack might be more boring, she judged it happier for most folk,

There were still, of course, the ordinary working classes, and below even them the abjectly poor. Yet even they seemed healthier and happier than they had been a thousand years before. Goods were more plentiful, and cheaper to buy in terms of time spent laboring. Food was abundant, carried by steamships and steam trains.. Towns were healthier, doctors more able to deal with diseases. Famines and plagues belonged to a thankfully-banished past.

This, too, made her happy. She remembered the times she and her sister had frantically labored to relieve provinces stricken by hunger, on a scale which dwarfed even the powers of alicorns to end. Or when invisible death had stalked the land, felling the innocent with its contagions, making both her and Celestia feel utterly helpless as they watched their little ponies perish.

She was not at all sorry that she would not have to see that again.

Of course she rarely spoke to any of them. One really useful thing about being not only a Princess, but also a dreaded immortal accused of demonic practices, was that she could remain silent, frown a bit, and no pony would dare address her in anything but conventional pleasantries. And no pony would ever suspect that she simply had no idea what to say, and feared seeming foolish in the saying.

Sometimes this made her somewhat lonely. But she was used to that.

***

She had nightmares, of the conventional kind, regularly.

Most commonly she dreamed she was back on the Moon, sometimes alone, sometimes tormented by the Shadows. Once she dreamed that she was completely alone, but that when she looked up at the Earth it was a dead world, its forests bare, its cities fallen to ruins, and in those ruins the bones of ponies – and seething through the remains of buildings and inhabitants alike, like maggots on a corpse, were the Shadows. That one left her trembling for a good hour, for she knew that this was what her own possessor had meant her to do upon the real Earth.

Sometimes there were confused dreams, or at least she remembered them that way upon waking. She would be trapped on or around a terrible, Sunless world which was neither Earth, nor Moon, nor any planet of the Solar System. It was airless, incredibly cold and old, and covered with ruins that seemed almost as old as the planet. Everything seemed silent and dead, and yet there was a terrible wrongness rather than peace to this silence and death, as if here entropy brought no peace, but instead a protracted torment that would last until the very matter around her evaporated in proton decay.

There was also something very strange about the sky, but that she could not and did not want to remember.

Was she seeing the true world of the Shadows? Or one created from her own terrors? She knew that sometimes, in this world, she would see the Shadows, swarming, everywhere – but creeping slowly, terribly slowly, as if even the processes they used instead of life were exhausted, here on this ancient charnel world. These were not her worst dreams of this place. In her worst dreams, she would see the Shadows, and then see herself. And she would know what she was.

She was one of the Shadows. And always had been.

Sometimes she had dreams that she did not remember, from which she would wake saying strange things. Sometimes she did not remember what she said when she woke.

One in particular she was sure she had taken from some very confused memories of Moondreamer and her Cosmic self combined.

“We did it, Sunny. And it was everything Starlight promised. The Great Wish. A civilization without physical instrumentality. Direct telepathic contact with a sentient, self-sustaining magical vortex, fuelled by the energies of a star. Paradise, forever and ever. Causality no more than a personal preference.

“And we did it, too, with our Cousins. We saved causality, saved the Universe. We stopped the Great Wish, ended that whole timeline. Even the Great Wish couldn’t stand against our Cosmic powers. Their world died, screaming.

“But we forgot one thing, Celly. Shock-heating, shock-cooling. We weakened the crystalline structure of spacetime, like a too-rapid heating and quenching of steel.

“We cracked the Cosmos. And now they are coming through!”

The last lines she shrieked, and promptly fell back to sleep. She had remembered none of it when next she waked, but this had been one of the nights she had slept with her sister, and Celestia remembered it all too well.

It reminded her of a mixture of an old science-fiction movie from the Age of Wonders, the reality that had been the World That Was Lost, her part in its end, and her fear of the Shadows.

But it couldn’t be true. Could it?

***

She made some new friends. To her mingled happiness and shame, her Night-pegasi had survived ten centuries of her absence, forming her Night Guard even without a Night Princess to guard. She had feared, in her madness, that Celestia would wreak her vengeance upon these innocents, the descendants of the unwanted children she had taken and altered so long ago. She should have realized that such cruelty was not her sister’s way. Instead, she had found useful things for them to do: primarily, as auxiliaries of the Guard Corps, night-scouting in war and performing search-and-rescue in peace time.

Their survival was her happiness.

Her shame was in how pathetically loyal they still were to her, despite her terrible betrayal both of them and of all Equestria. She knew that, had she won a thousand years ago, and remained in thrall to the Nightmare, they might be the only living ponies on a dying world, sustaining the terrible spectral remnants of a civilization, living in deep mines off fungi and bacteria, as the planet began to cool toward the minimum temperature possible from internal heat alone. And yet, for a thousand years, they had revered her memory, worshipped her as their Mother Goddess. Even as Nightmare Moon, they loved her, with a love of which she knew no version of herself was worthy.

Within a week of her return she had been forced to explain, in no uncertain terms, to the leaders of the Night Guards that no, she was not going to lead them in a coup against the “Sun Tyrant,” and she would really prefer if they ceased all plotting toward such an end. Their disappointment was palpable, and made her miserable. But she could hardly repay her sister’s trust by plunging the realm into civil war, just to make them happy.

Besides, she knew it would have been hopeless. She knew her sister. In her subtle and kind and utterly sneaky way, Celestia probably had their conspiracy riddled with more holes than a colander. Come to think of it, there had been one of the Night Guard mares at that treasonous meeting whom she never saw before and never saw again, who had given her a suspiciously smug smile upon hearing the most outrageous of their plans. Indeed, she recalled the mare winking at her during one particularly lurid rant regarding “Nightmare Corona.” And both she and her sister were, of course, accomplished shape-shifters.

This utter and insane devotion made it hard for her to make real friends among them. They loved not herself, but an imaginary version of herself who was some cross between The Megan Returned (and didn’t it make her feel old to realize that she and her sister were among the few beings still alive on this Earth who would even comprehend the significance of that reference?) and some sort of Mother Goddess of the Sacred Night. Their vision of her was beautiful, and touching, but it wasn’t the mare she saw in the mirror.

They would, of course, have offered her an obvious release from one kind of loneliness – had she been heartless enough to take it. Seduction would not even have been an issue: had she asked them to, their stallions would have lined up, even fought duels, for the honor of pleasing her in any way she desired. The wives of those stallions would probably have counted it an honor, too.

Which was precisely why she could not do it. These were her children, or at least the remote descendants of her adopted children, and if their culture had become a bit strange in the millennium of her abandonment, it was her own fault for having summoned the Shadow in the first place. She should have been there for them, loving them, nurturing them, as Celestia had been there for the ponies of the day. Instead, she had made a mad bid for power, and in the process betrayed her most loyal followers.

She did seduce one young and exceptionally loveable stallion of her Night Guard, to a degree. She flirted with him outrageously, stole a few kisses, and even slept with him several times, though in an almost entirely chaste fashion. He held her when she woke in confusion, frightened by the nightmares, and eventually those nightmares became less frequent.

She genuinely loved him, though she knew more as younger friend than as potential mate, and when she saw that he was truly falling in love with one of her hoofmaidens, and that the mare returned his affections, she pretended to be her sister and did everything to encourage their union. The mare – also a Night pony, had a physical defect which prevented her from flying, and which had led her into self-hatred and self-harm. She healed that defect – which she should and would have done years ago, had she not been in exile – and visited the mare’s dreams to soothe the bitterness in her soul.

Of course she put an end to her concubinage with the stallion, relatively chaste as it had been. She knew that in her own loneliness it could not have continued to remain chaste for much longer, and she did not want to destroy his hopes for genuine happiness. And in time, the Guardspony broke through the hoofmaiden’s shell of pain and won her heart.

That gave her far greater joy than could have any conceivable debauchery. And besides, she had always found debauchery rather repulsive, especially as a way of life for royalty.

***

The aid she had given her hoofmaiden reminded her that she was a dream-walker, and more to the point why she loved that ability. She began – first in a small way – to roam the night intangible, a body of long-wave radiation, drawing a small degree of sustenance from dreamers and paying them back by banishing their bad dreams, and performing subtle surgeries on any longer-term madness. She was, like all Alicorns, to some extent an emotivore, and it was this that had led to the legends of her as a lamia, though in truth she helped, rather than harmed her hosts.

For the Alicorns partook somewhat of the nature of all ponies, and though it had been a very long time since anyone could reliably claim to have seen one of the emotivoric and eusocial Flutter Ponies, she still had her version of their life-linking talent. She could probably have used their even more famous ability, too, had she had a whole swarm of Flutter Ponies – or Alicorns – beside her. Since there were only three Alicorns known to be alive today, this eventuality seemed improbable.

For that matter she also swam quite well, when she so desired. She was also a passable singer, though she fancied herself to have a more varied repertoire than had the other famous vanished Pony kind.

So once again the Night Princess patrolled the dreams of the ponies, and drove away the nightmares. She tried not to interfere too greatly in the lives of those ponies, but when she found those nightmares to be caused by true and tangible evil, she intervened more directly. This was necessary less often than she had feared, for in a thousand years, the Equestrians had mostly become rather good ponies, even by the historical standards of their kindly species. But when it was necessary, she did intervene – and evildoers who had imagined their evil safely done in secret found they were not as safe as they had hoped.

***

She tried her best to stay away from Ponyville, and from Celestia’s chosen champions. Especially from their leader. She told herself that this was Twilight Sparkle’s territory, that six such champions were more than a match for any likely threat, and that Celestia herself was kept well-informed as to the situation in that area by Twilight’s Friendship Reports.

She told herself many flattering things, from time to time. Too bad she was still in part Honesty, so she couldn’t believe them.

In truth, she did not want to walk Twilight Sparkle’s dreams, to find out who she loved, and to writhe in the painful awareness that the object of this love would not be herself. She could distance herself from the most embarrassing, horrifying or repulsive dreams of strangers, approach them like a surgeon attempting to save a soul. But she could not so distance herself from the dreams of someone who had been Dusk Skyshine. And to enter another’s dream with the intent of manipulating or spying upon them for one’s own personal benefit – that would be a terrible thing to do.

***

So passed Princess Luna’s first summer, since she had been freed from the Nightmare. And if she still had nightmares, sometimes, and no one to hold when she woke, it was something she deemed her duty to bear alone.

So she did just that.

Author's Note

I owe a debt of gratitude to two authors on this site for parts of this particular section.

Alex Warlorn, of course, for his truly epic concept of the death of both the G2 and G3 civilizations, which inspired my versions of the Age of Wonders and the World That Was Lost..

Remember, Pinkness is the key insight.

Yes, the shout out to Forbidden Planet was very conscious. "Monsters, Celly! Monsters from the Wish!" I did not quite have Luna say. Though Moondreamer's seen the Age of Wonders' version of that movie.

And Georg, for of course I used a variant of his beautiful first tale of Pumpernickel and Laminia as inspiration (read: I filed off the serial numbers) for the section where Luna (mostly) resists the temptation to take (too much) advantage of one of her Night Guards, instead choosing to do what was best for those who loved her. Thank you for coming up with that idea.

Chapter 2: Fledging

Some three months had passed since Princess Luna had returned from the Moon.

Bad dreams disturbed her less now, or at least she had stopped remembering them. She rarely woke up screaming in the middle of the day, or found herself on the floor at the end of the afternoon, after having thrashed her way completely off her bed. She knew she was still far from emotionally well-balanced, but she felt far better than she had at first. The mere presence of other ponies no longer made her want to fly into a berserker rage, or hide under furniture. Day by day, week by week, she could feel the madness slowly receding.

Sanity, sleep and regular meals had begun to restore her body. She no longer had to tap her self to avoid wobbling when she walked; her coat was glossy and her muscles firm. The love of her sister, and of her Night Guard, worked a similar restoration on her essence. It was not the intense empowerment Celestia received from the adoration of all Equestria, but it was significant. Nor was it the dark infernal might she had been granted by the Nightshadow, but it was truly her own: the only cost it came with was that of loyalty toward those who put their trust in her. That was a price she paid gladly.

Her form was growing back toward normal. Her body was now of full stature for a normal mare, though still far less impressive than that of any but a young Alicorn. Her mane and tail rippled with subtle energies, and moved occasionally by her will rather than the vagaries of wind. She was no longer so weak that anypony could kill her; she was starting to feel again less like a helpless foal and more like a warrior Princess.

As her strength returned, she felt new urges. She wanted to put her body and mind to use. The Night Guards were honored when she wanted to use their one of their training rooms, though she felt a bit bemused when they termed it a salle d'armes. That had been a new term in her last previous century on Earth, the sort of phrase which would be used by fops like Blueblood rather than by tough professional soldiery.

Some arms had changed. Others remained familiar.

Spears, swords, lances, wing-blades, wing-darts, hoof-daggers. She relearned the dances of death with these basic weapons, and found the memories came back swiftly to her. Then her special weapons -- the originals were long-lost, of course, but there were both modern versions and functional replicas. The battle-axe she had used in those decades she had called herself Monasdrommir, among the Northern barbarians of a time forgotten now save in legends. The twin crescent-swords from the Southlands, that she seized and spun into wheels of razor-steel, in an almost effortless use of her aura. The little target shields that, wielded with her reflexes, could pluck arrows out of the air. The twin swords of the traditional Neighponese unicorn-samurai, the katana and wakizashi. All so familiar, and she felt more than one kind of strength returning to her as she exercised with them.

She played with some of the newer weapons, too.

Firearms had come back, but they were still largely a curiosity. Single-shot muzzle-loaders took many seconds even for a unicorn to load and were utterly impractical for an earth pony or pegasus to reload in the middle of melee. Given the speed of a charge or swoop, they were too inaccurate for any but the most skilled shots to hope to hit anything with them. They really need at least semi-automatic action, Moondreamer said within her, if not fully-automatic. Equestrian technology may be up to the task, but Sunny never cared much for weapons work.

She added this to her list of things to do, when she was fully-healed.

She was a bit puzzled by the long, sharp and thin rapier. It was clearly meant to be used to impale through the chinks in an opponent's armor, but she didn't see many ponies training with it that way. When she visited a fencing-academy she realized that it was a relic weapon, once effective but now become a sport. There had been a phase in which it had been used for serious dueling, but that custom had long since faded among the ponies of this new kind world. Some of the nobles still dueled, but with blunted and sometimes even capped tips.

The saber pleased her, though she didn't think she'd trade her crescents for them. There was a curve and flexibility to the blade which would have been impossible to the swordsmiths of a millennium past, and it could be held in the aura or the mouth, used to deliver deadly slashing attacks in passing -- which the arms masters now called en passant, for no apparent reason that they could explain. Why had Prench and Istallion become the languages of melee weapons training? She supposed there was some history there, which she reminded herself to read.

Other weapons had gone through minor and incremental improvements. Bows and crossbows had reached a point of perfection. They now incorporated metal frames and cabling into their construction, allowing bows to be drawn with much force. Crossbows were powerful enough to shoot right through any plate armor any pony could bear -- she thought she knew now why the Guards seemed so lightly-mailed by the standards of past ages -- and some expensive ones were sprung to allow semi-automatic shooting, though the force of these was of necessity weaker.

The artillery park frankly amazed her. It was nowhere near that of the Age of Wonders -- it was all smoothbore muzzle-loader cannons and tension and torsion mechanical arbalests and catapults of varying types -- but it was far superior to anything she had seen a thousand years ago. She supposed that, lacking a Dark Princess, her sister had needed a new "ultimate reason of sovereigns" with which to convince recalcitrant nobles, in the chaos that had no doubt come more than once before reaching this current ideal of hyper-civilization.

There were so much else, so many things that she did not yet have time to master. She frequently saw air-yachts and larger air-merchants in the skies about Canterlot, sometimes briefly by day, sometimes piercing the night with their powerful running-lanterns. Sometimes she saw sleeker, deadlier-looking skyships which bore ports which looked to be cut for some of the artillery she had examined. Steamboats plied the river, and in her ventures to the coast steamships the seas, and some of these too were Equestrian naval craft. She realized yet again that the silk of her sister's new realm hid definite steel -- as was only right and reasonable.

Luna wanted to once again become part of that steel. Her sister was the Princess of Peace; her own job was to be the Princess of War. Her desire and duty were to defend the realm.

But through that long summer no foe presented itself, at least none worthy of her spells or steel. There were no invaders, no rebels, not even any brigands beyond the easy capacity of the ordinary authorities to suppress. Sometimes she uncovered crime in the course of her private dream patrols, but never meriting more than a discreet word to the local guards.

It was not that she wanted to see the land swathed in smoke, drenched in blood. Still less did she want to lose the lives of her beloved Night Guards. She had seen enough of that in the centuries over a millennium ago to suit her for many mortal lifetimes. That fight at Trottingham -- dead griffons and guardsponies everywhere, the streets running red: big, bluff kindly Little Seed, standing with a vacant stare amidst a heap of corpses; sweet young Red Lute dying cradled in her own forelegs, his songs forever stilled -- she shuddered at the memory, though that battlefield had fallen silent fourteen centuries ago. The smell! That was one part the minstrels never mentioned in their heroic sagas ...

All she wanted was to be once again be useful. To serve the realm again, instead of merely relaxing on its bounty. To be once again the Warrior Princess, in more than mere name.

Was that too much to ask?

***

In the late afternoons she would awake and spend some time with her sister. Celestia would tell her of the day's events, major and minor, and in this wise educate her regarding the new Equestrian world.

Sometimes, Celestia would read her one of the "friendship reports" her young vassal-in-training was writing her from Ponyville. These ranged from the funny to the insightful to the boringly-mundane. Some were so awesomely-innocent that Luna wondered if Twilight Sparkle had even known playmates growing up.

"Not really," Celestia told her once, when Luna asked this aloud. "She's a very driven filly -- well, young mare, now -- and aside from her brothers, she grew up pretty much alone."

"That is sad," Luna said sincerely. She remembered how Dusk had been as a young colt, when Moondreamer and Sundreamer had first met him -- smart and brave and strong -- but utterly friendless. She and Sunny had taught him the meaning of friendship back then, in the vanished Age of Wonders. She wished she could teach him ... her, again today.

"She's not alone any more," said Celestia, smiling.

Luna tensed.

"She's become good friends with her sister Element Bearers," Celestia explained. "As I hoped: she needs to learn how to get along with others, before she can become really great."

Luna relaxed.

"I know you have given her this post to raise her for higher ones to come," Luna said. "It is a good design: she can learn best by doing."

"Exactly," said Celestia. "To help me in the future, she must master the ways of leadership, both social and otherwise."

"I wish I might help her learn this lore," mused Luna.

"You are not my prisoner, dear sister," said Celestia. "You may visit Ponyville whenever you desire."

"But no," said Luna. "She must master this on her own. I am ... lost ... in this time. What could I teach her?"

"Whatever you wish," suggested Celestia.

But Luna made no reply to this.

***

Another afternoon, Luna learned that Twilight had overcome an Ursa Minor. By herself, and with magic alone.

"How was that done?" Luna asked, impressed. Even an Ursa Minor was the size of a large whale.

"She charmed it with magical music, gave it a whole dairy farm's worth of milk, and then picked it up and carried it back home," Celestia explained, beaming with pride.

"Zounds!" Luna reflected. "She really is mighty -- and deft!" Manipulating that much mass, and doing it gently, would have required some effort for Luna even at her best. In her current state, she wasn't sure if she would be capable of the feat.

"And wise," added Celestia, "in that she did not attempt to actually fight the creature. Had she hurt it, its bawling would probably have brought its mother to its defense."

Luna blanched at the thought of an angry bear the size of a small castle, running rampant among ordinary townsfolk. "That would have been ... bad." Something remained unexplained, though. "How did an Ursa Minor wind up wandering into Ponyville?"

"Two very foolish colts went looking for it."

"Foolish, and foalish, indeed!" commented Luna. "To what end?"

"A magician had come to town. They wanted to see her defeat it," her sister explained.

"They thought this magician could defeat an Ursa?"

"To be fair to them, she had boasted that she had done just that before."

"Ah ..." Luna considered the situation. "I would wager she was displeased when the beast showed up on her doorstep!"

"You ... would win that wager," Celestia commented. "Her best efforts at defense merely annoyed the creature. It crushed her wagon. Twilight had the two colts clean up the mess afterward."

"The poor foals," Luna laughed. "Their luck that they lived through the adventure. Some times it's as if a good spirit watches over the foolish and innocent!"

"This time," said Celestia, "the name of that spirit was 'Twilight Sparkle.'" She looked contemplative. "Did a good job of it, too. No one died. No one even took much harm, not even the magician, who was last seen galloping off toward the Whitetails."

Luna snickered. "I guess that magician wasn't too loved around Ponyville any more."

"Indeed," said Celestia. "I feel rather sorry for that magician. She lost most of her possessions with her wagon. Twilight's keeping those which survived safe for her, when she returns. Which might not be for a long time -- she was rather thoroughly humiliated."

"Well, she deserved it," scoffed Luna. "She made stupid boasts!"

"Yes," admitted Celestia. "The boasts were stupid. Her name was Trixie -- the 'Great and Powerful,' she styled herself."

"She was clearly neither," Luna said.

"But she wanted to be," said Celestia. "And she seems to have been skilled, from the accounts."

"Neither skilled enough. Nor wise enough," was Luna's verdict.

"As events showed," agreed Celestia. "Still, I wish she might not have so suffered."

***

It was the end of September. Autumn was stealing upon the land, and the leaves were starting to turn red and golden, when the crisis came.

It was still relatively early in the afternoon one day, when she was woken by Celestia. Luna looked blearily and a bit accusingly at her sister, before her eyes fully focused and she saw the tense expression on Celestia's face.

"Dragons," was the terse explanation.

Luna came fully awake and alert, ears up at attention. "An invasion?" she asked.

"Not quite. Not yet. Come," said Celestia. "I'll explain it on the way."

They made their way through the halls toward a spiral ramp. The ramp led down deep, below the cellars.

"There are reports of dragons all over the realm," Celestia said. "No attacks on ponies -- yet -- but they're making no effort to hide their presence. They seem to be establishing themselves in caves, and they've brought their hoards with them."

"They're claiming territory," said Luna. She snorted in anger. "In Equestria."

"Exactly," said Celestia. "And it's obviously no coincidence that the first reports are coming in from all over, this morning. This is a coordinated movement, which means this is the work of at least a significant faction."

They reached the bottom of the ramp. Several doors led from the chamber at its base. Two Day Guards, saluted, opened a thick bronze-plated door for the Royal Sisters. A corridor lay behind. The walls and ceiling formed a single barrel vault, braced by what looked like armored-steel arches. The corridor curved gently, so that there was no direct line-of-sight from one end to the other.

"Their Royal Family?" asked Luna.

"I don't think so," replied Celestia. "They've been relatively friendly for the last century -- and we have common foes. But --" they reached the door, "I doubt that they are exactly discouraging it."

Luna thought a moment.

"We're being tested," was her conclusion.

"I concur," said Celestia.

The door at the end of the corridor was also heavy, also guarded. It opened to reveal a huge conference chamber, crowded with high-ranking officers of the Royal armed forces. In the center of the room was a large table, on which was spread a great map of Equestria and the area immediately surrounding. On that map were arranged many small models, of ponies and ships and airships and other creatures. Unicorn aides stayed by speaking-tubes, frequently stepping forth to adjust the positions of the figurines.

"My new War Room," said Celestia, proudly. "I don't think I've shown you this before -- it's less than a hundred years old. It'll be even nicer in another century or so, when we've gotten back up to electronics. Do you like it?"

"Yes!" Luna's eyes lit up at the possibilities of such a place. "It's wonderful!"

Celestia faintly blushed, then got back to business.

"We've been getting reports for several hours now, and we're plotting them on the map with these ..." she made a little dragon figurine glow. "Blue for unconfirmed, yellow for confirmed, orange for confirmed and urgent -- those are the ones near settlements, or otherwise making a nuisance of themselves."

"Not many of those last," Luna said, scanning the map. "Too many of the yellows, though. Is each piece one dragon?"

"Yes," said Celestia. "They've come in singly, rather than as mated pairs or with young. You see what that means, of course?"

"They don't really expect us to let them stay," said Luna. "Even dragons would rather chance losing part of their hoards than their children."

"Precisely," said Celestia.

"So this really is a test," Luna continued. "I wonder why they're testing us now, though? Slaking their young bloods' thirst for adventure? Or has something changed here, to make them think we've weakened, or will soon grow ..."

Celestia looked away.

Luna's mind caught up to her mouth.

"...Oh," she gasped. "Oh. Oh, sister, I'm so sorry to have ..."

"It's not your fault," said Celestia. "Or if it was, it was your fault a thousand years ago, and you've already suffered enough for that."

"But they think you may be weak because you ..."

"And what am I supposed to do?" asked Celestia. "Harm my own sister to conform to the prejudices of another species? I wouldn't treat any of my little ponies that way just to please others. Least of all would I do that to you." There was a dangerously protective tone to her voice, a tone which (Luna knew well) had been the last thing some of Equestria's enemies had ever heard.

"It's not all about that, anyway," Celestia continued, relaxing slightly. "Part of it is almost certainly that they want to see if you will show up to help evict them. It's been over a thousand years since you -- as yourself -- acted in affairs on Earth. That's a long time by incarnate standards, even for dragons. They don't know if you've grown stronger -- or weaker -- or just changed, in some way that affects the power of our Realm. They want to find out if you're still ... you."

Luna drew herself up straight and looked Celestia right in the eye.

"I am, still and once again, myself. Luna Selena Nyx, Ruling Princess of Equestria, Princess of the Night, High Lady of War, your loyal supporter." Her voice was confident and clear, rising as she spoke to that of the ancient Royal Voice of Canterlot. She seemed to subtly grow in stature. Her mane and tail began to shimmer, to fill with the light of a thousand stars, to wave as if in the wind, though the air was calm inside the War Room. There was no sound save her voice, but there was something now in that chamber that made all present imagine that they heard trumpets sounding, calling back to them from ancient forgotten wars.

Some nearby officers winced, others looked on in awe. Everyone in the room paid attention.

"Princess of the Day, I stand ready and willing to accept and obey your commands!" Her great blue eyes shone with emotion, but she kept her gaze straight forward.

"Very good," said Princess Celestia, her face lighting in satisfaction. "Welcome back, Princess Luna.

"Now here's what you are to do ..."

Chapter 3: Flying

Be diplomatic ... thought Princess Luna, nodding to herself. I can be diplomatic ...

She mused again on her sister's instructions as she cut through the sky in the Midnight Chariot.

She loved her Midnight Chariot.

It had been based loosely upon the chariot the Viprallan warlord Tirek rode to his defeat at Midnight Castle, some six thousand years ago. As a young filly, Luna had seen pictures of that chariot, pictures taken soon after its capture and preserved for millennia by the magics of the Rainbow. It was made of black titanium steel, a long lean four-wheeled vehicle, with a sleek dagger-like nose Luna had modeled on the supersonic jet fighters Moondreamer remembered from the Age of Wonders; two millennia after the defeat of Tirek, twin vaguely draconian tail-fins springing from over the rear axle, inspired by some of the more extreme and impractical motorcars she remembered from a bit earlier in that same general period. Some essentially-unnecessary spikes rising from the rear body, which looked as if she might choose to impale heads upon them, but which she generally used for flags, completed the exterior appearance. It was drawn by two Night Guards, attached by metal chains as if they were dangerous beasts liable to tear apart spectators if not kept well-restrained. The whole was done in glossy black, with a green cat's-eye symbol on the front.

The Midnight Chariot was very diplomatic. Back in the day, some pony lords had been so terrified by the mere appearance of the Midnight Chariot, which implied that its owner tortured puppies and ate foals for dessert, that they surrendered the moment she rode it into the scene. One can't get much more diplomatic than that, Luna reasoned, with some satisfaction.

Inside the chariot was lined with soft light-purple velvet, just perfect for lying upon and sparing wear and tear to the royal backside. Not much point in riding to possible war in an uncomfortable chariot: that might reduce my battle-prowess, which would be bad for the Realm. Also, it would make the whole idea of a chariot pointless, and waste the efforts of my loyal Night Guard, she thought virtuously. Besides, I really like light purple velvet on black; the only better color choice would have been the deep blue tone of my own fur -- and that would have just been shameless vanity.

Deep blue on light purple velvet makes a nice contrast, anyway. She wriggled happily into the light purple velvet.

Luna had been more than a little touched to discover that her sister had kept, tested and piece-by-piece replaced every part of the Midnight Chariot as needed over the last thousand years, obviously in the hopes that Luna would be coming home again to use the vehicle. Declarations of sisterly love are one thing, thought Luna, but I knew she really cared when I found out she'd kept my Midnight Chariot.

Luna was perhaps the merriest mood she'd been for over a thousand years. She was all dressed up and ready to go, wearing a spidersilk war-harness to which was attached her half-helm, breastplate, spiked sabatons, battle-axe, mace, crescent-blades, a brace of javelins and two target shields. I dare any cur to say I'm not feminine, she thought to herself Behold my fine garments, and all my nice accessories! I wager I have the prettiest armament in all Equestria! She giggled. Somepony should make a fashion doll of me!

In addition to the two Night Guard pulling her Midnight Chariot, she had an escort of ten more, making up a full squadron. They were clad in the same light mail that was standard for this era: half-helm, breastplate and sabatons. They bore spears and crossbows; their sensitive hemeralopic eyes were goggled against sunlight and dragonfire alike, and she had fireproof shields for them strapped to the chariot, if the need arose.

If it comes to fighting, though, I'll try to hold them in reserve: I can live in a close fight against a dragon; they can't, and I want no dead Night Guards today.

There might not be any fighting. Princess Celestia's instructions had been clear in this regard.

***

"We are not yet at war with the Dragons," Celestia explained. "And I would avoid war, if possible."

"What wouldst thou have me wreak upon them, sister?" Luna asked.

"Visit them," Celestia explained. "Make an impressive entrance, so that they know who you are and what you could do to them."

Luna nodded. She knew how to do that.

"Then announce yourself, read this command from me that they quit our realm," she said, handing Luna a scroll, "and see to it that they do."

"That I shall most assuredly accomplish!" said Luna.

"The scroll's been fireproofed," Celestia told her, smiling slightly. "Just in case of ... trouble."

Luna grinned back. She knew exactly the sort of trouble to which her sister referred.

Celestia handed her an envelope. It contained a marked map and some other notes.

"This shows the locations of the dragons I want you to evict, color-coded by urgency. The other papers are the descriptions of the exact locations and incidents. Fireproofed too, of course."

Luna scanned the map, briefly examined the notes.

"Remember -- we have a treaty with the Dragons now. You mustn't hurt them unless they resist, and only to the extent necessary. And they get to keep their hoards, unless they've been stealing them from us since their arrival. That's important"

"Certes I know Dragons," agreed Luna. "Have no fear, sister, I know better than to come between a Dragon and his hoard, lest I mean his demise. And I shall start no quarrels with Dragonkind."

"I know I can count on you," Celestia said. "Good venturing!"

"And good fortune to you too!"

***

This is so much like the old days, Luna thought, with a cheerful smile.

The river wound below through an old limestone formation -- the perfect terrain for caves, even before the world had changed. She remembered there were some nice ones in here, and wondered how many of them still had unpleasant inhabitants. She'd had some interesting times in caves.

There! A great cliff-face beetled up where the river turned. From a large mouth in that rock surface, thin grayish-black smoke curled lazily up into the sky.

Time to make her entrance.

"Circle loose left," she commanded her Guard. The Midnight Chariot began to describe a lazy arc around the target, the others of her squadron remaining in formation on her.

Luna reached out and tickled the sky. Air molecules ionized, clouds gathered and darkened in a broad zone around her squadron. The clouds swirled, darkened. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled.

I miss electronics, Luna thought, for far from the first time in her current incarnation. This could be so much more dramatic with a good musical theme. Moondreamer's formative years had been spent in an age of vinyl records, but she had taken well to the newer solid-state acoustic technologies, and had often provided appropriate accompaniment to her thoughts. Princess Luna had been forced to do without that luxury, save in pitched battle. She'd always had an excellent memory for music, though, and it had to do now. Wagoner's "Ride of the Sleipnirsdotters" played in her head as she summoned the storm.

Every dragon within a dozen miles had to have noticed what she was doing by now. She judged the sky sufficiently ominous. "Stoop and low hover," she ordered.

She composed herself, scroll and weapons ready. An immediate attack as she landed was unlikely: dragons were creatures of ritual and not even a hostile dragon would miss the chance for a formal confrontation. If I were fighting diamond dogs, or griffons, now ... She didn't trust either these days, though she'd rather liked griffons, when this incarnation had been much younger. Trottingham and similar memories had spoiled that.

"INTRUDING DRAGON!" she cried out in the Royal Canterlot Voice, full volume, as her chariot descended. "KNOW THAT WE ARE PRINCESS LUNA SELENA NYX, PRINCESS OF THE MOON, AND HIGH LADY OF WAR OF THE REALM OF EQUESTRIA, WITHIN WHOSE BORDERS THOU TRESPASSEST! WE DEMAND THAT THOU IMMEDIATELY VACATE OUR REALM, TAKING WITH THYSELF THY HOARD COMPLETE ..." that was a very important point, and phrasing it as part of a demand made it sound less conciliatory. "...ON PAIN OF OTHERWISE BEING CONSIDERED TO HAVE DECLARED PERSONAL WAR AGAINST OUR REALM, AND BEING TREATED BY US AS OUR ENEMY!"

The wind howled. Lightning flicker-flashed. Thunder growled continuously.

A dragon peeped out of the cave. A small adult green. Gasser, she thought.

"Deploy skirmish line, port arms until my command!" she told her troops. She did not actually expect combat, but her response was almost automatic, Skirmish formation would negate the dragon's ability to use its breath weapon against more than one of them at a time.

The dragon gasped as it saw her response, then turned its head and carefully belched off to the side.

Luna relaxed slightly. That body language meant "peace" among dragons -- that drake had just temporarily disarmed his own breath weapon. While this could still be a trap, it meant that actual fighting was now unlikely.

She landed, and alighted from her chariot, walking calmly toward the dragon. She was armed, but had her weapons in harness rather than loose in her telekinetic grasp. She was confident in her ability to block, dodge or otherwise survive any attack of which this dragon was capable, should it prove treacherous.

The dragon shook a little as she approached, but stood its ground. She stopped and regarded it. Male, she thought, though it was hard to confirm without a graviton pulse strong enough that it might be felt and considered exceedingly rude by its target. Dragons kept such vulnerable parts well-sheathed in armor far thicker and less revealing than the sheathing for the equivalent equid anatomical structures. Her sister could tell the difference at a glance; Luna had never been as socially perceptive.

"DOST THOU YIELD TO THIS DOOM?" She reduced her volume a bit, since she was standing right in front of him, but the dragon winced anyway.

"If ... if you mean do I agree to go and take my hoard ... yes," said the dragon.

"GOOD," said Luna. "THOU SHALT LEAVE SCATHELESS."

The dragon thought about what she'd said for a moment, then nodded. "I'll get the first load." It went back into its cave, disappearing for about five minutes, and emerged with two large and heavy chests under its arms. "Your Highness, I can come back for the others, right?"

"YES," said Luna. "WE SHALT NOT REAVE THY HOARD." The dragon was about to take off when Luna said "HOW ART THOU CALLED, GOOD DRAKE?"

"Lifefang," the dragon said. The name revealed nothing about its sex.

"MAY YOU COME IN PEACE ANOTHER TIME, AND HAVE GOOD GUESTING," she said. There was no point in hostility now, that the dragon had aceded.

"Oh ... same to you, Your Highness," said the dragon, relaxing a bit.

He beat his wings -- Luna felt the flare of paramagnetism -- and he took off for the southeast.

Luna smiled. One dragon down, she thought with satisfaction. Five more to go.

***

Luna fared much the same with the next three dragons. Some were bolder, some more timid, and one actually had the temerity to glare at her. The Moon Princess met its gaze coolly and it gave up in about a minute. None seemed particularly interested in doing battle with her, which she supposed meant that she was being sufficiently diplomatic. Or terrifying, which was much the same thing.

The pattern broke with the next two dragons.

Author's Note

Princess Luna loves her Midnight Chariot, and she loves being diplomatic. Can you tell? This works well when you are a Princess of Mass Destruction.

Chapter 4: Connecting

Luna and her squadron had cut north, past open farming country, into the southeastern White Tails. Here the land rose in low, rolling and deeply eroded mountains, still far enough south that all but the highest peaks were below the tree line. Tall pines covered the mountains. Here and there might be found caves, especially along the banks of the numerous small rivers which ran down from these heights.

The hills themselves were mining, lumbering and rock-farming country. They were sparsely settled -- farmsteads, lumber and mining camps, some of them of village size. The closest thing to a central community around here was Dunnich, more of a large village than a real town, consisting of a town hall, a tiny market square and some residences straggling out along the roads, a few miles south of the rail line, where had grown the new town of Nickerlite. Compared to Dunnich, Ponyville was a city.

The place was quite old, though. As Dounika, it had been founded by refugees from the Crystal Empire in the times of the tyrannies of Sthenarkos and ... Luna winced at the memory ... Sombros. After the fall of the Crystal Empire, this had been one of the last surviving centers of that ancient culture. As her squad winged down to the village, she could see that some of the older structures had a faintly exotic tinge to them, with crystalline pillars and decorations that reminded her strongly of the vanished Old Northlands.

None of them, of course, had actually been built back then; just long enough ago that something more of the old Crystal-Imperial traditions had survived among the Dunnichers. Luna felt the faint familiar wrenching of disorientation as she once again faced how old she really was, how far she was now from her memories of Equestria in the age of its founding. I might as well be an antique statue come to life.

They landed in the market square. This open, flat area was not too greatly crowded, and some of the shops appeared to be boarded up. Dunnich was clearly a dying town. Part of the reason was that the town was several miles off the railroad -- the terrain would have made it difficult to run the tracks through town, as the engineers might have done given the village's size had they been working on flatter ground.

Things will get better for them when we get back to powered road vehicles. They'll become an exurb of Ponyville, Moondreamer mused within her, if they last that long. If the place keeps dying, it may not be big enough by the time we lay down superhighways.

The thought depressed her slightly. Dunnich was one of the links to her past, even if to a tragic part of her past, and the world would be just that little bit stranger when it went away, when it became one with Lith and Derecho, and the Crystal City itself. She knew, as she stepped out here, that she was walking on ground that Prince Crimson Quartz, his sister Iolite, and his faithful Lady Tourmaline had trodden, and all three had been her dear friends, once. Tourmaline, of course, had remained her friend until Luna became lost in her Nightmare. The Moon Princess still remembered the sweet Princess Iolite and the loyal Lady Tourmaline with undiluted warmth.

She still remembered Crimson as her friend, too, no matter the monster he'd become. Crimson had meant well. He had only meant to help his people. Crimson wanted to be the savior of his people, not their oppressor, still less their destroyer. He did not deserve to become a monster.

He far less than I, Luna thought. He did not know what would happen when he called them. What was my excuse?.

A crowd of locals was gathering around her. Most looked fairly normal, if a bit rustic.

There was one pale-blue fluffy thing that for a moment she thought was one of those cute little ewes that had been popular pets in the Crystal Empire. Then Luna saw her eyes and muzzle and realized that it was actually a Pony, though one of the strangest ones she had ever seen. The creature met Luna's gaze, gave a delighted little gasp. There was an odd ripple in spacetime, and suddenly the fluffy blue pony was next to her, though she had neither seen it gallop nor teleport.

Princess Luna would have been worried about this, had not the creature's intent been so obviously friendly. It made odd little noises. A long pink tongue -- longer than any she had seen on any normal equid -- emerged and licked up at her chin, making delicate little contacts. Normally, this sort of unasked-for intimacy would have bothered Luna, but there was something so childlike about the creature that she was amused, rather than annoyed, by its manifest affection. She had always loved foals.

Her Guards tensed, but Luna motioned them to stand down. The strange pony-thing seemed to be doing her neither overt nor subtle -- in fact, the intense friendliness she was beaming at the Moon Princess was both soothing and re-invigorating. Luna carefully avoided drinking its emotions too greedily -- she did not know the fluffy thing's limits, and she did not wish to do any ill to the apparently harmless and innocent creature.

A dove-gray earth pony mare, with a glossy dark brown mane, wearing a cloche hat, stepped forward from the small crowd, removing her hat with one hoof and falling into an exaggerated bow which Luna realized with some surprise was the full formal proskynesis of the Crystal-Imperial Court. This was something she'd not expected to see in such a rustic place. After a pause, the rest of the surrounding ponies, save for the fluffy blue one, followed suit.

The fluffy blue one gasped, looked around, and tried to copy the others, but wound up falling forward and describing a complete somersault, fetching up against Luna's chest. Luna reached out gently with her forehooves and set the fluffy pony back on its feet. The powder-blue pony-creature nestled itself against Luna's forelegs and sat down. Luna permitted her this familiarity without comment, rather soothed by both its emotions and its warm fluffy body.

"We greet thee one and all, Our loyal subjects," said Luna at moderate amplification. The closer members seemed a bit awestruck, and the blue fluffy creature started to her feet, but nopony was actually running. Nopony actually running was always a good sign, in Luna's personal experience. "Ye all may rise and address Us."

They did, save for the fluffy one, who cuddled back up against her forelegs. Luna decided she was an exception to any normal courtly decorum, and thus that it was not improper to tolerate her persistent familiarity.

The dove-gray mare, clearly a community leader, spoke for your people.

"Your Royal Higness," she said. "I am Mare Miter, the Mayor of Dunnich. We welcome you to our humble village." Intelligent light-brown eyes gazed respectfully but fearlessly upon the Moon Princess.

Luna realized that the white-and-gold cutie mark on Miter's flank was the eponymous item, a sort of hat that had been worn by the high priesthood of the vanished Crystal City. She remembered seeing it worn by the High Priest who had placed the crown atop the head of Aventurine Quartz, the older brother of Crimson and Iolite, on the day of his coronation, back over a thousand and thirty years ago. Their faith had been a variant of the Meganism so common during the Age of Wonders.

She had not been able to attend Crimson's own coronation. She was rather glad she hadn't. In hindsight, that would have been too terribly dark a memory. And as for the eldest brother, Morion, she had nothing but despite for that monster, and was glad that Celestia had sent another representative to Morion's coronation as Sthenarkos IX. Without the cruel and tyrannical reign of Sthenarkos, she knew that Crimson never would have fallen to become Sombros.

"We thank thee for thy gracious welcome, good Mayor Miter, and are pleased to see thy fair town," Luna replied with equal courtesy. "We understand that the local Rangers have sighted two dragons?"

The fluffy pony meeped and burbled. Luna was not certain of her age. She smelt adult despite her foalish manners, but rather different from any mare she had ever scented. It reminded her of something, but from a very long time ago -- possibly an earlier incarnation? But she didn't remember anything like this existing in the Age of Cataclysm, and still less during the Age of Wonders. She dismissed the question as unimportant.

"Yes, Your Highness," said Mayor Miter. "Summer Lightning was the one who discovered them." She pointed with her nose.

Summer Lightning was a small, slim, elegant-looking smoky-blue pegasus mare with a yellow mane. Her cutie mark was a hazy dark-gray cloud litten by yellow glows underneath. She had intense orange eyes, and she gave Princess Luna a look of frank appraisal that Luna would have found slightly disturbing were she were not used to this, especially from pegasi.

Something about solitary duty sometimes slightly unhinged some pegasi, as if too much time spent alone among sky and cloud warped their normal social skills. Luna could deeply sympathize with that, though it also meant that when they were among others they were often a bit too hungry for company -- or more than company. Luna had gotten over being quite that lonely, but she knew how to discourage undue familiarity without being cruel. As long as they were nice about it, she took such attentions as a compliment.

"Your Highness," said Summer Lightning briskly, saluting her. This was proper courtesy, as both Summer and Luna were technically military officers.

"Well met, good ... Captain?" Luna guessed.

"Lieutenant, with apologies, Ma'am," replied Summer. "But I hear there's a major force expansion coming up -- I suppose you'd know more about that than I, Ma'am -- we don't get news from Canterlot very often way out here."

"Yes, this is destined," confirmed Luna, "We would wager that there will be many promotions."

The excuse Celestia was going to give Parliament was the increased activity of the Griffons (and now, Luna supposed, the current draconic incursions), but Luna knew the real reason. The Shadows. Her Night Guards had told her that several large cities had nearly burned on the night of her return, and Celestia feared the consequences should the next invasion be less tentative.

Luna had learned this from her Night Guards because Celestia had not wanted to speak to her of such things right after her return from exile. Luna knew that every building burned, every life lost, on that dark and terrible morning had been in some sense her own fault, and the knowledge burned as a shame within her heart, and a spur to serve Equestria better in the times to come.

"That's good news, Ma'am," replied Summer. She reached into her side-bags and pulled out some papers, holding them at the ready.

"Be those the maps to the dragon lairs?" asked Luna.

"Yes, Ma'am," said Summer. She showed Luna the master map. "I sighted two dragons, Ma'am, one an adolescent earth-type, I'd guess a lava-spitter, over in these hills (a red "x" plainly indicated the location), and a larger one -- I'd make it full adult, type unknown -- in the higher mountains about here (a blue "x" showed that one). I didn't get a good look at the last one or its lair, Ma'am -- I judged it hazardous to approach its breath-weapon."

Luna remembered the Rangers of her day as being daredevils, though Summer Lightning looked past the first flush of youth and hence had probably learned some caution -- given that she was still alive. The dragons were probably under orders from their own clan leaders not to actually start a war, just as Luna was from Celestia, but it was wise of Summer not to tempt fate by approaching an adult dragon too closely. Among other considerations, had she been killed or even seriously wounded, Luna would not now be seeing this map or the attached reports.

"Thou hast done well, Lieutenant Summer Lightning," said Luna, and saw the pegasus raise her head with pride. "Twas well to be ware of the large dragon -- your life and your tidings are both of importance to Us."

Summer's face flushed at the praise.

Luna examined the map. She could kick out the small lava-spitter on the way to the big dragon, then head back to Canterlot.

"Art thou sufficiently rested to guide us to these drakes?" she asked Summer.

"Yes, Ma'am!" the pegasus Ranger replied.

"Then let us hunt some dragons!"

Luna bade the Mayor and the townsfolk of Dunnich farewell. The fluffy blue pony wanted to come along, but Luna gently evicted her from the Midnight Chariot. She didn't think that an expedition to face down dragons, however diplomatically, was a safe place for the childlike creature. So far nopony had been hurt on this mission, and she wanted to keep it that way.

As she took off, she felt a surge of self-confidence. So far she'd carried out her task perfectly. Between diplomacy and the Midnight Chariot, what could go wrong today?

The hills loomed ahead as she turned back around south to deal with the last two dragons.

***

Luna summoned Summer Lightning to the Midnight Chariot as they approached the location where the pegasus had reported the small lava-spitter.

"The cave under that shelf there?" she asked. The mouth itself was invisible from the air, but the terrain had looked suspicious to Luna's practiced eye, and a graviton pulse had confirmed the vacuity in the mountainside.

"Yes, your Highness," said Summer Lightning, bracing herself with one hoof against the motion of the Chariot and looking down to confirm the identification. "It's well-located -- close to water but above the highest line the stream floods, but invisible from the air. A cunning drake."

"Thou hast good eyes," said Luna. "How didst thou spot the site?"

"I knew it had to be in the sort of terrain that grows caves," Summer said to Luna, smiling slightly at the praise, "and when I couldn't see the mouth from high up, I cruised along the river at low altitude. It's easy enough to see from about fifty to a hundred feet off the water."

"Thou hast a canny mind, too," Luna added, nodding approvingly. Summer blushed a bit at the praise. "Well done," she added. "Hang back with my Night Guards -- the dragons haven not shown much fight so far today, but I would not wish thee to suffer harm. Equestria needeth good Rangers such as thyself."

Summer was flushing with happy pride when she leapt from the Midnight Chariot.

It is so easy to cheer soldiers, Luna thought to herself. A little praise and they will follow one into Tartarus itself. So much easier than making friends in time of peace. And so easy to abuse that talent, to abuse their trust. As I did, once before, to Pegasi such as Lieutenant Lightning.

Never again, she told herself Never again shall I betray mine own followers, by leading them in folly to their ruin. Summer Lightning is a good Pony, Lone-Mad or no, and she shall not take hurt from trusting in me. Nor shall my loyal Night Guard.

There was no convenient large expanse of flat ground, so she leaned forward and spoke to Wrath and Vengeance:

"I shall debark in air, a hundred feet over the river, two hundred east of the cave."

"Yes, Ma'am!" Wrath replied.

Luna summoned the wind, the thunder. The lightning flashed dramatically behind her.

Again the curving down-swoop, again the announcement.

"INTRUDING DRAGON! KNOW THAT WE ARE PRINCESS LUNA SELENA NYX, PRINCESS OF THE MOON, AND HIGH LADY OF WAR OF THE REALM OF EQUESTRIA, WITHIN WHOSE BORDERS THOU TRESPASSEST!" She didn't even need the scroll any more -- like most Alicorns, her memory was eidetic when she so desired. "WE DEMAND THAT THOU IMMEDIATELY VACATE OUR REALM, TAKING WITH THYSELF THY HOARD COMPLETE ..." as if a Dragon would do aught but accept such an offer from her. "ON PAIN OF OTHERWISE BEING CONSIDERED TO HAVE DECLARED PERSONAL WAR AGAINST OUR REALM, AND BEING TREATED BY US AS OUR ENEMY!"

Down to the chosen point. Wrath and Vengeance hovered, positioning the Midnight Chariot for her dismount.

Luna leapt into the air, hovering there. She saw a motion in the cave-mouth, prepared to cast a shield if need be, motioned Wrath and Vengeance to take the Chariot clear. A glance confirmed that her squad was already spread out, most of them having already placed themselves within one easy dash of protective terrain features.

Good, she thought with slight relief, I'm the only one exposed.. She hadn't been all that worried -- her Guards were trained and Summer Lightning was sharp. Checking to make sure was just her habit, developed through many centuries of field command.

The dragon stepped forth.

He was a big adolescent, relatively short and very squat, only about as long as was Luna herself but massively built. She judged his weight as much greater than her own, somewhere around a ton or two. He had small, protrubent black-slitted yellow eyes, a wide toothy mouth, a warty earth-toned hide, and absurd little wings which Luna knew from his choice of cave were probably capable of generating enough of a paramagnetic field to loft him.

A classic Lava Dragon, Luna thought. Strong, hardy, and -- though a poor runner -- surprisingly agile on those short legs. Similar flight characteristics -- those little wings will vibrate rapidly, giving him much maneuverability. He can probably fly sideways and backward, do tight turns as well as any pegasus. No real glide, though, and a low ceiling. He'll spit lava, which means no real range but lots of total kinetic and thermal energy. Tougher than they look.

Not that she'd really have to fight him.

"DOST THOU YIELD TO THIS DOOM?" she said at the end of her speech, as she had done to dragons today four times before.

The Lava Dragon winced slightly, its external ears flattening at the power of even the reduced-volume close-range Royal Canterlot Voice. It opened its wide toothy maw and spoke one word.

"N-n-n-no."

"GOOD," replied Luna. "THOU SHALT LEAVE -- wait, what did you say?"

"I said, 'no,'" repeated the dragon, more firmly. "I will fight!"

Luna thought about this for a moment. This was only an adolescent dragon -- she'd slain a dozen or more like this in a day's battle back in the old wars. Did this colt (or filly, as she still couldn't really tell the difference from the outside) really not suspect her power? Or did it simply want to die?

"Very well," Luna said, softly. "We shall fight. How art thou known, Sir Dragon?"

"I am Fischfootur, son of Greattfisch, Lord of the Northern Isles."

His name and accent tantalized her with memories of her time as Monasdrommir. She had not known the line of Fisch from that age, but over two millennia was a long time even as dragons counted the years.

"I am honored to meet thee in battle, Fischfootur. We shall fight one-to-one, until one yields. If I yield, thou mayest remain. If thou yieldest, I shall spare thy life. My Ponies shall not meddle, nor shalt thou harm any. Be this meet?"

She hoped he accepted.

"It is good," said Fischfootur, his eyes narrowing in determination.

She signaled to her men. "THIS BE A CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS!" she called. "DO NOT MEDDLE. HE SHALL NOT HARM YE." Then, to Fischfootur. "ON THE COUNT OF THREE. ONE, TWO ... THREE!"

The dragon leapt and spat, but Luna was already tumbling to one side, aura tugging at her crescent blades. They chose that moment to foul; her spin had been less than perfect and she muttered something indelicate as a lava-ball sizzled past her tail, nearly putting out some of her stars. Luna tugged harder and ripped them from her harness by main force, taking the sheaths with them. She immediately spun them, the sheaths going flying, but the blades now ready. Damn, that was nice leatherwork, she briefly thought. Hope my Guards can find them.

Then Fischfootur was upon her, wings whirring, claws clutching and jaws agape. She let herself fall back and under him, brought her hooves up and used the dragon's own force to throw him over herself toward the opposite cliff face.

Nice to see that not all my fighting skills are too rusty, she thought as she watched Fischfootur tumble out of control. My draw was badly done, I'll have to work on that when I get back home.

Fischfootur's wings buzzed and suddenly he was darting at her again, vomiting a wide cone of white-hot pebbles.

Very good recovery, Luna thought approvingly, and spun both blades along the line between them, intercepting the pebbles which happened to be aimed at her. Would have worked against most Pegasi.

The dragon was forced to dodge to avoid running directly into the blades, which interrupted the operation As he dodged in one direction -- Luna noticed that he was agile enough in the air to do this by flying sideways rather than actually turning -- Luna dodged in the other, keeping the blades between them and preventing him from resuming that attack.

Luna snapped her wings down and rocketed straight up, trailing a streak of pale blue plasma from her flight field. Fischfootur followed her, managing a good climb rate with his whirring wings but unable to match her pace. As she passed it, Luna tossed the crescent blades into the Midnight Chariot -- she didn't want to risk losing them, as even though replicas they were rare replicas, and hence could not be rapidly replaced.

She laughed in exuberance at the height of her arc, snapping back down, feeling her flightfield grabbing the blood in her body to avoid a red out. There was no thrill quite matching combat flying: as the scientist Moondreamer she had never known this pleasure, never fully grasped why Dusk and Dashie had loved major parts of their war service. Dashie still knew this in her new life; maybe Dusk would again too, if what she thought Celestia was planning worked out.

She saw Fischfootur's face, eyes squinted in concentration, coming up to meet her at an alarming rate. If they collided, she would be bruised and the adolescent dragon might well die. She knew that Fischfootur was driven by honor, perhaps careless of his life at this moment, and probably wouldn't avoid the collision. All this knowledge flashed through her brain in a fraction of a second, and she diffused her flightfield forward, making it an elastic cushion rather than a hard ram, then feinted right but pulled nose-up to horizontal and to the left instead.

She had timed it just right and Fischfootur went off in the wrong direction. She whirled and sprayed paramagnetism behind her, skidding to a hover in midair, a feat of which only the best true Pegasus flyers would have been capable. She hung there while the dragon realized what had happened and turned to face her.

"Follow me!" she cried, and threw herself into a shrieking power dive, arrowing down for the river canyon far below. It might have been mad for her to try maneuverability against anydrake as agile as Fischfootur, but she didn't care, she felt more alive right now, more herself than she had been in more than a millennium. Besides, she wanted a challenge, wanted to feel the wind in her mane and the hot breath of a foe behind her, she wanted -- with what she recognized as a fillyish instinct -- to play!

She did a hard dive toward the river, giving Fischfootur a set of radar paints on the way down. He's going to go shallow and try to beat my speed with his maneuverability! she realized with delight. There's a brain behind that skull-armor! She felt deliriously happy to be dancing with a clever opponent -- she'd hoped that this dragon wasn't just some honor-obsessed fool, that he knew some real tactics. What Fischfootur was doing would have beaten almost any real Pegasus; it wasn't his fault that he didn't realize how many extra abilities an Alicorn had.

She decided to keep just ahead of her pursuer, see how he handled horizontal flight. She put on an extra burst of speed, a tight snap-to-level that would have blacked-out a Pegasus but that her whole-body flight field handled with ease. The river sprayed in all directions beneath her as her paramagnetism contacted the water. She flapped hard, accelerating to the edge of the sound barrier, and could feel herself trailing a wake like some impossibly-fast hydrofoil. "Woo-hah!" she shrieked in incoherent glee as the canyon walls unrolled to either side.

Snap! She knew that Fischfootur was right behind her, that he had just tried to grab her tail with his jaws. He was riding her own field trail, taking advantage of the displacement of air to travel faster than he ever could have done under his own field propulsion, but she also knew that he could only keep this up for an instant. She arced upward and dodged as a stream of white-hot fluid went through the space her right hind leg would have otherwise occupied.

Got to lead more, colt, she corrected him inwardly, as if he were one of her trainees in the old days when she had personally drilled her Night Guard. I miss those days -- wish I could do that again, she thought with brief sadness, then: Well, why not? It's my Night Guard, why not take a more personal horn in things? The thought made her happy as she climbed above the level of the canyon walls again, flying right toward one of her storm clouds.

Now I'm going to cheat a bit, Luna thought. This is something no Pegasus could do without touching this cloud. But you're facing an Alicorn, son.

Ion bolts arced down directly at the startled Dragon, two hitting him right in the head. She winced -- that might have killed a Pegasus, but she knew that dragon heads were very thickly armored. It stunned him, though, and she saw with relief as he fell away, head-scales smoking, that they had missed his eyes. Don't want to blind this fine young drake.

All during this fight she had been trying to get out her javelins, but had been stymied by the tightness of their bracing. She hadn't wanted to force them, because she'd already damaged her harness enough. for one day. Now, as she dove lazily down to match the speed of Fischfootur's fall, she withdrew the javelins slowly and carefully. I'm going to be more careful with my harness, she thought. Carry the weapons a little looser. Dropping one at the wrong time is embarrassing, but not being able to draw one in time could be fatal.

Javelin in aura, she was ready for the concluding move, the one that would force him to yield. He looked to still be dazed, so she approached him closely, starting to position a force field around him so that she could shove the javelins right between his neck-scales without accidentally piercing his flesh. She came quite close to him, almost close enough to reach out and touch him with a hoof, confident that in his electro-shocked condition he could do nothing to harm her.

Suddenly his eyes snapped into focus, a little too fast for this to be a true recovery from stun, and he vomited a spray of orange fire right at her face! She was barely able to get her own defensive field up in time, and she pushed it a bit too hard, slapping the dragon back in his face with his own breath weapon. Fischfootur coughed and spluttered, and spun away, tumbling and wiping molten lava from his face with his claws, trying to clean it off before it hardened into a rocky shell. He could have clawed it off as solid rock, too, but it would have taken him longer.

Getting cocky, she chided herself. Good move on the kid's part, too. He grasps the importance of deception -- he'll be one tough customer, if he lives long enough.. She smiled to herself. Well, he's not going to die today. Time to force the yield.

She gripped Fischfootur in her aura and bore him irresistibly down against a rocky ledge. She pulled back at the last second and decelerated him enough that the impact was far from bone-breaking by Dragon standards -- nevertheless the rock cracked from the collision. She shoved the javelins forward, pushing up and under the neck scales, then held him in place; landed to his side where she could look him in the eye close range.

A tiny move on her part would be enough to kill him, and they both knew this.

She looked into his eyes. There was some fear, but no overwhelming terror.

The drake was brave.

"Fischfootur son of Greattfisch," she asked him solemnly, "dost thou yield to me?"

"I ... I do," wheezed the young dragon, obviously still a bit out of breath from that last impact.

"Then rise, mine own captive, and hear the judgement of thy conqueror," said Luna, withdrawing and rebracing her javelins.

Fischfootur rolled to his feet and looked at her a bit apprehensively, uncertain of what she meant by "judgement" in this context.

"First of all, I thank thee for an excellent fight, Fischfootur. Thou hast given me the best bout I have had in over a thousand years." Absolutely true, though the former Element of Honesty nevertheless felt no necessity to mention that she had spent the first thousand of those years as a mad, demon-ridden lunar exile, and that the only real fight she'd fought on her own between her Return and now had been within her own incarnation, and that fight against the foul Shadow Within had been a desperate struggle for survival against a ruthless and remorseless foe, rather than a duel of honor with an admirable opponent.

Fischfootur gulped, scuffed his feet and then actually blushed. It looked adorable on the stocky, muscular young drake, and Luna was even gladder that she had decided not to kill him.

"Secondly, thou shouldst be more careful before agreeing to battle terms. You failed to notice that I promised thee only thy life, not freedom nor retention of thy hoard should I triumph."

Fischfootur gasped, sat down hard as if he had received a powerful blow to the stomach, as he suddenly realized that Luna might without having broken her word enslave him and keep his hoard. Knowing dragons, the second possibility of loss worried him more.

Luna smiled warmly.

"Luckily, dear foe, I am not one to play such mean tricks on an honorable opponent. So thou mayest keep both freedom and hoard, but heed my warning: not all those who thou fightest in the future will necessarily be as honest as am I."

"Thirdly, Fischfootur --"

He looked at her, wondering what her third condition would be.

"Why in the name of the Nine Hells didst thou challenge me? Dost thou not know who I am? Or what I am? I have killed hundreds of drakes in the old wars -- wert thou so eager to die?" She looked deeply into his eyes. "Thou didst run a great risk, brave young dragon. Not all foes are as merciful as am I. Dost thou not wish to attain thy full growth?"

Fischfootur sighed.

"I know it was foolhardy," he admitted. "But -- I wanted to do something, something that no others would dare to do. Something to stand out. Something to show to everyone -- to my brothers, to my father -- that I wasn't a coward."

"Coward?" asked Luna in amazement, then laughed. "Fischfootur, after what I have seen today I wouldst not name thee 'coward.' I might name thee 'optimist,' or perhaps 'battle-lusty,' but 'coward?' Thou art anything but that!"

She sat down next to him and smiled at him. "Who hast named thee coward, bold warrior? And why? If it not offend thee, I would hear the tale."

Fischfootur screwed up his eyes for a moment, rubbed his face -- some stray bits of grit from the lava-blast fell off, and said "Oh, why not? You seem to actually think I'm brave, maybe you won't think I'm worthless after you learn what I'm really like."

Luna gazed at him inquisitively.

"I'm not like most other dragons," he told her. "My hoard -- oh there's gold and gems in there, because I am a dragon -- but that's not the treasure that means the most to me. I like to collect -- I have a lot of -- maybe I should just show you. Would that be all right, Princess Luna?"

"Thou wouldst show me thy hoard?" Luna asked. "I do not require this of thee, thou shouldst know -- I will turn thee free with thy hoard unreaved in any case ..."

"I want to show this to you," said Fischfootur. "I think you deserve to see -- you're the kindest creature to ever best me."

Oh no, Fischfootur, Kindness was my sister. I am not that kind, Luna thought to herself, but did not say. She did not want to spoil the moment. She was incredibly touched -- a dragon would only ever show his hoard to one he truly trusted.

"Then thou hast my thanks," replied Luna. "I would be honored to view thy treasures."

She called up to her Guards. "I am going to converse with Fischfootur within. Do not violate the privacy of his hoard."

The Night Guards didn't like this, but they affirmed their orders.

Fischfootur led. Luna followed.

The cave swallowed them.

Author's Note

Lith and Derecho are abandoned cities from "Lost Cities," by Cold in Gardez. You should really read this story -- it's an awesome example of how to use setting as character, plot and theme. The settings are also amazingly evocative and imaginative. I reference them in admiring homage to this work.

That's not Fluffle-Puff. She's a fluffy pony, one of the Daughters of Paradise. This isn't all that germane to this story, though in Ger-mane (which some of the locals speak) they sometimes call her kind floofle-poofen (rendered phonetically). The Daughters of Paradise were however, of course, very much inspired by Ask Fluffle Puff. You should read the blog. It's hilarious -- and very strangely touching.

The Three Tribes were originally civilized by the influence of the Crystal Empire. Consequently, many of their oldest cultural traits derive from the Early Empire, though they were rather cut off from the Crystal City by Discord during the Middle Empire. In the Late Empire, Celestia and Luna deliberately obtained copies or originals of the tomes from the Great Imperial Library for the edification of Equestrian scholars. That is part of the reason Luna runs into Crimson there in the first chapter of Corruption at Nightfall. That story needs love too -- why not check it out?

The Rangers are "rangers" as in "patrollers," not as in "special forces." They were originally a branch of Luna's own Night Guard, but have long since become an organizationally independent force which rarely works in large unit operations, instead making one or two-pegasus elements to ensure that nothing too nasty is establishing itself in the Equestrian wilderness areas. They cover the Everfree as well, though there they usually venture in full flights or even squadrons. The White Tails are a much more benign sort of wilderness, as long as one doesn't poke around too much underground.

The common term for the odd affect Summer displays is "Sky Madness." It is normally caused by protracted isolation from the herd, and it can manifest itself in various forms among pegasi, most notably satyromania/nymphomania, dipsomania, paranoia, social alienation and various forms of social anxiety disorders. Summer is mildly nymphomaniac and a bit alienated; Metal Shriek (from Chapters 3+ of Love Amongst Monsters) suffers from a more severe case, redirected (from nymphomania to alienation and paranoia) and made much worse by her disfigurement.

Wrath and Vengeance are from Ask Whirly and the Night Guards.

Chapter 5: Responding

The cave was smooth-walled, flat-floored and fairly dry. There were signs that the walls and especially the floor had been smoothed out by past occupants. Dragons often did this to their own lairs, using their claws, capable of gouging and scraping all but the most obdurate minerals, but Fischfootur hadn't been in here long enough for a dragon his size to have done that much work. There was no telling who had done it now, without serious archaeological examination. The Earth was old, and there were and had been many sapient species in its history.

The entrance bent sharply after a short run, and the reflected sunlight which remained was very dim. This was a problem neither for Dragon eyes, or for Luna's own -- which could see much broader electromagnetic spectra than those of normal Ponies, and were equipped with tapetums. Around another corner she saw a glimmer of light, which seemed the wrong color for even indirect sunlight. It was hard to tell through Fischfootur's own dragon musk, but she thought she smelled magic -- metal -- and something familiar, up ahead.

An obviously-squared out apeture was covered by a leather hanging, keeping most of the light from within from reaching outside. This door would be completely invisible from the cave mouth, which itself was difficult to see from the air and difficult to reach from the ground. As concealment, Luna could not fault it -- had Fischfootur not actually gone outside the cave, she doubted that even the perceptive Summer Lightning would have noticed his presence.

The bends in the tunnel would even have masked his scent unless somepony actually landed on the ledge and took a whiff from the cave mouth itself. It also gave an attacker no clear line of fire for even a thrown explosive device from the mouth to the inner chamber, while the bulk of the mountain would protect anyone within from anything save a point-blank sunfire explosion. Luna thoroughly approved of Fischfootur's sense of favorable ground: it increased her estimate of his intelligence.

Luna was, of course, fully aware of the possibilities for treachery inherent in her situation. As Fischfootur swept aside the hanging and stepped into the inner chamber, holding it aside politely to facilitate her own entrance, Luna quietly cast a shielding spell over her eyes and ears which would protect her against any flash-bangs, and readied herself to fight should she be attacked.

She did not really expect an attack, though. There were two reasons why: the first was simply that she was much more powerful than anything likely to be in that cave: if she wanted to, she could bring the mountain down on them and then blast her way out of the collapse, essentially unharmed. The second was much more fundamental, though. She liked Fischfootur, and did not judge him likely to be willing bait for any trap which would require him to violate his own word. Dragons, long-lived and warlike, were quite careful of their honor.

She was not disappointed. But she was surprised.

The cave was not dark at all. There was no source of natural sunlight, but Fischfootur had mounted glowstones on the wall, and he touched the master-stone to bring the light up to a level appropriate for a Pony's eyes. That's polite of him, Luna thought. By this light she could discern the cave's contents.

The chamber was moderately large -- small for a dragonslair, but then Fischfootur was still small for a dragon. The middle of the cave contained exactly what she would expect to see in any lair -- a heap of gold and gems, which bore in its center the impress of her host's body. It would be upon this which he would sleep. A number of large iron-bound wooden boxes along one wall had obviously been used to transport the treasure; and as obviously would be used by Fischfootur to bring it back out again.

There were two more hanging-covered apetures. From one, she tasted fresh air -- this would be the rear entrance that any wise smaller Dragon would have, should his lair be invaded by a foe beyond his power. From another, off to the side, she smelled the familiar scent

Leather, cloth, paper, and old ink. Books, she thought. He's an intellectual.

That could explain a lot. Dragons were highly-intelligent beings. But they were also highly-combative. They respected scholars, but they demanded that their fellow-dragons be able to fight, before all else. The honor-duels common in their society could rob a cowardly dragon of all status, all possessions, even of his life, should he not be able to demonstrate that he was a warrior, first and foremost. For a bookish adolescent, the balance of between body and mind might be difficult to strike. Was that why he had felt driven to challenge her?

"Sorry that I don't have this better arranged," Fischfootur said. "But I just moved in -- and I figured I'd be leaving soon anyway." He walked toward that tantalizing side alcove. "Here," he said, "I want you to see this." He pulled the leather hanging to one side.

The walls of the alcove were lined with bookshelves, about three-quarters full of books.

I thought so. She leaned forward slightly, scanning the titles. There were some classics she remembered from her previous time on Earth, and some newer ones she recognized from her readings since her return. They were from many lands, and the words impressed upon their spines were printed in many tongues. The one thing which surprised her was that the vast majority of them were in Demotic Equestrian, the script now most commonly used for popular publications.

Then she noticed the other contents of the room.

The walls were decorated with pictures obviously obtained from Equestrian sources. There were color-prints of Ponies -- here was a really big one of Celestia performing some public ritual before a crowd in Canterlot in an especially prominent location; there one she recognized as a Wonderbolts promotional poster; and, embarrassingly, one of herself in the form she had taken immediately after the Nightmare had been purged. Was I really that little and fluffy-looking? she wondered, and immediately received humiliating confirmation of this fact from her excellent memory.

There was more. There were maps of Equestria, which looked not so much as military objective maps as tourist maps, probably obtained from travel agencies. Certain locations had been circled: and while some might also have been military objectives, she was pretty certain that the inclusion of places such as Las Pegasus and Neighagra had less to do with any planned invasion than with exactly the purpose for which those maps had been originally intended -- Fischfootur obviously either had or wanted to visit those places for sightseeing.

On some shelves were little model Ponies. She looked at these with wonder -- they were finely detailed, brightly-painted and had been posed with some imagination. Celestia was there, of course, and a figure that was obviously meant to be Nightmare Moon (my teeth were not that large), and Prince Blueblood (Well, there's no accounting for tastes, and the drake's never actually met him) and several others who looked like Ponies of high rank whom she didn't recognize. There was a Star-Swirl the Bearded (Ooh, they put tiny little bells on the hat, very nice).

There was only one conclusion she could draw from all this. And it was one that made her very, very glad she hadn't killed him.

"Thou likest us," she said in wonder, turning toward him. "Thou art a Pony-Friend." That had been an object of her sister's policy, one that she had begun back in the days when she was still unifying the Realm, to exert a cultural influence on other lands and races, to excite admiration and imitation from them. And it had very obviously worked, on at least one Dragon.

"Um, yes," Fischfootur said. "You could call us that. Though those among us Dragons who like your culture -- we mostly call ourselves 'dronies.' For short, you see?" He looked strangely nervous, as if fearing some hostile reaction.

Luna nodded.

"Is this why thou didst come to Equestria?" she asked. "Because thou didst want to see our land?"

"Yes," replied Fischfootur. "I couldn't just visit -- my clan would really ride me if I did that. Calling on to the out-flying, though -- they approved of my enthusiasm." He looked down. "I think some of them were hoping you Ponies killed me."

"Sad if that be true," Luna said. He deserved better honesty than 'Oh, I don't think that they could have wanted that.' From what Luna knew of Dragon culture a thousand years ago, the last thing they would have wanted was an extra mouth at their feasts whom they disfavored, even if he was related to them by blood. "They would be reaved of a brave fighter, and skilled tactician." That was no lie, but she suspected that his clan didn't know it.

"You really think I'm that good?" he asked, slowly lifting his eyes to meet hers.

"Yes," Luna nodded. "Yes, if that had been real war, I would have killed thee, but thou art no more than, what 40?" Late adolescence for a Dragon.

"Heh," Fischfootur said. "I'm only 34. But I'm built kind of solid" He looked at her. "And I knew you were holding back."

"I used only mundane weapons, save for that lightning near the end," she admitted. "But it is not thine own fault that thee could not have endured my gravity lances. Only the oldest and most powerful of thy kind could stand against that, and then only for a short while. Only your High Queen would have much chance of overcoming me in single combat. That is simple truth, Thou didst fight with thy utmost strength and much skill, and this is very much to thy credit, young drake." She gazed deeply into his eyes. "And thou didst do something of even greater merit."

"What did I do?" the dragon asked.

"Thou didst keep thy head," Luna explained. "Thou didst not let anger, nor awe at my might, prevent thee from thinking clearly and laying thy plans well. Not one in ten drakes of thy age could have done half so well. So be proud, Fischfootur son of Greattfisch. For I, who have fought many of thy kind, say that thou art a warrior born."

Fischfootur actually blushed at the compliment; Luna could see the flush on his cheeks and throat even through the scales.

"Thou mayest now boast that you have battled me ... and survived. And, should any doubt thy claim ..." She reached back to her chariot with her aura, felt around, drew something back to her around the dogleg. It was a blue towel, embroidered with the initials'LSN' in High Equestrian, for 'Luna Selena Nyx.' She mopped her brow and hair with it, then gave it to Fischfootur.

"Mine own," she said "and bearing mine own scent to prove its provenance to aught who might be so rude as to doubt thine own word on the matter. Thou mayest have it in gift, as souvenir of this day's meeting -- and token of mine own esteem for a valiant foe, whom I do devoutly hope I may one day call mine own friend."

"Wow!" cried Fischfootur, taking the towel, sniffing it, then folding it reverently and placing it upon a shelf. "Thank you, Princess Luna! I ...I don't know what to say! I'm speechless!" He hopped over to a chest, opened it, rummaged around, and withdrew a an old gold torc. "This has been in my line for generations -- Greattbeest the father of Greattfisch my father had it from the sack of Skryhold, twelve hundred years ago. A sage told Greattfisch that it once belonged to the war-captain Monasdrommir, from a thousand years before that and -- is something wrong, Princess?"

Princess Luna gasped, and gazed at the object, examining the detail of the complex metal ornamentation on the front. There was a crescent moon, and old Norse-Runes intertwined with unicorns and pegasi and earth ponies. Her mind plunged far, far back into the past, to a time when she was not a Princess, but rather a wandering adventurer, leading a brave crew of barbarians in a desperate fight by land, sea and air to defeat the monstrous minions of Discord as they strove to conquer the Old East Coast and sever the Crystal Empire's sealanes to the Old Worlds.

She remembered when this had been given to her. She remembered who had given it to her.

Oh, Bjorthugur ...

"Twenty-two centuries," said Luna thickly, her eyes misting over. "Is that ... art thou ...?" She could think of no way to ask.

"Yes," said Fischfootur. "It's for you. You have given me a great treasure. Can I do less than reciprocate?"

She could not bear to speak. She picked the torc up in her aura, sounded it with a focused graviton pulse for flaws.

There were none. It had been well-forged, well-kept.

She put the torc on, above her breastplate.

It sat there as if it had never left her throat.

"How didst thou know?" she asked.

"It kind of reminded me of you," he said simply. "I knew it was of Pony make, and it had your Crescent Moon symbol ... so I figured that it had belonged to somepony from your clan. That's why I brought it here."

So he hadn't really known. But his instincts were sound.

"It ... was mine," she simply said. "I was Monasdrommir."

"Way cool!"

"Thanks to thee again," she said. "Thee hast given me a gift of great price, and great meaning to myself."

"You did too!" he told her. "That towel will always remind me of our duel -- of you." He blushed again. "You know, this is the first really epic moment of my life. You're like something out of an old saga."

"Apt words," she said. "As there have been many old sagas about me. Though most, I suppose, are long forgot." She was briefly saddened as she thought of all the years that had flown by since she had been Monasdrommir, since she had known Bjorthugur.

"Well I'm never going to forget you!" Fischfootur promised. "And Dragons live a long time!"

"That ye do," Luna smiled. "And that thou canst -- if thou dost take some care of thy life." She thought a moment. "Fischfootur," she said, "wouldst thou do a favor for me?"

"What do you wish, Princess?" His eyes were full of eagerness.

"Take care of thy life," Luna said. "Oh, I know thou must duel from time to time to gain thy place -- I expect thou wilst fight a few against fools who name thee liar when thou tellest them of our meeting this day -- but do not challenge one as powerful as mine own self again, unless thou hast truly good cause. Canst thou promise me that?"

"I could," said Fischfootur, a stubborn look coming into his eye, "but wouldn't that be cowardly of me? To back down before greater strength?"

"No," said Luna. "Thou art no coward, as I have seen plainly today. But to avoid a fight one cannot win, the better to build thy strength up and come back later, when the advantage is thine own -- that is simply wisdom."

"Should I then love life before honor?" Fischfootur asked. "I have always heard that you never backed down ..."

"Oh, Fischfootur," Luna said. "I am an Alicorn -- I have always been powerful beyond most compare, I am touched not by age nor sickness, and I can heal any hurt that does not slay me outright. Thou art a Dragon: great in power, but still mortal. Death will find thee in time -- why wouldst thou court his untimely kiss? Even I -- who can die, though only by great force -- I do not seek out mine own destruction.

"I do not tell thee to be craven," Luna continued, gazing earnestly into his eyes. "I tell thee to be wary. Use the same bright mind I have seen thee use in tactics, and apply it to strategy -- I tell thee to pick thy fights. Build up thy strength, of body and mind and following. Thou hath the seeds of a great wyrd in thee. Throw not thyself to any lesser doom. Dost thou ken?"

"I ...Yes, I do," breathed Fischfootur, enrapt by her words. "I promise, Princess Luna," he said firmly. "I will not throw my life away on a foolish quarrel."

"I am glad," said Luna. "For in my many centuries in this flesh, the one thing I most hate is to lose my friends."

They conversed at length upon other things, profound and silly, her life and his. She told him some tales of Monasdrommir and the old wars against Discord. He told her of his life in the Northern Isles, of his clan and family and friends, of the group that called themselves the "Dronies."

His interest in Pony civilization had begun when he had first learned, as a child, of the existence of other kinds of Ponies than the Earth Ponies who dwelt in farming and fishing villages in the North Islands, forming the local peasantry. The Ponies of the North Islands were simple folk, but when he journeyed to Klakskreek, the main trading town for the archipelago, he met the sophisticated Earth Ponies from Equestrian merchant vessels, Pegasus seaponies, and even some Unicorns. He had become fascinated by Pony biology, and then culture.

He had established a regular trade contact: an Earth Pony factor for a firm which exported lizard-meat from Silverland and carried it all the way to the Old Worlds in ice-lined cargo holds. She sold him many of the artifacts in the special chamber of Fischfootur's hoard, and more which he had not brought to Equestria.

He showed Luna a color picture, which he kept in a locket and sometimes wore around his neck. The picture was that of a youngish, rather heavy-built and masculine-looking pale tan mare with rough-cut straw-colored mane, and determined-looking blue eyes.

Luna thought it odd that the adolescent Dragon would keep the picture of a mere business contact in such a sentimental manner, and his words when she asked him the mare's name confirmed her suspicions.

"She's Meatpacker," he sighed, smiling and looking at the picture. "Isn't she beautiful?"

There was no way for Luna to explain to him that -- by Pony standards -- Meatpacker was quite plain. Or even rather alarming. But then, Fischfootur was a Dragon. And Luna, herself, was not one to be either overly atrracted or repelled by mere physical appearances, as she had memories of past Aspects in which her concepts of physical beauty had been very different indeed.

She understood the more important implication, though.

"Thou lovest her?" she asked. Such love, between Dragons and Ponies, was rare and often unhappy -- but it was not unknown. The two races were similar enough in their basic emotions for it to be possible, particularly between an especially generous and kind Dragon, and an especially ambitious and prudent Pony.

"Yes," said Fischfootur, in a tone which bespoke complete certainity. He stared at her as if he expected opposition.

"Dost she love thee?" Luna asked.

"I ... I don't know," he said. "I think so ... we've spent days together, just talking about things and telling each other our hopes and dreams ... but I've never spoken to her about love. I ... I don't think she has anyone else. Most Ponies think she's not feminine enough. I can't see why -- she has this cute nose, and the way her hair streams in the wind, and the light in her eyes ..." he sighed. "I wish we could be mates."

"I see," said Luna. He had it bad. What was more, he was obviously on the verge of lifebonding with her. Dragons did not love easily, and sometimes they just mated instead, but when they did love, they were very monogamous. More so than most Ponies, and most Ponies were far from wanton.

Luna, who herself was far from wanton, could understand how Fischfootur felt. She felt the very same way every time she thought of Dusk Skyshine. And to a lesser degree when she thought of several other stallions, all of whom were long-dead, and one of whom she wished was long-dead, but whom she feared was only sleeping.

This let to the one point she had to mention to Fischfootur, one problem that she had faced many times before, but which he may not have fully considered.

"Thou dost know that most Ponies are quite mortal," she said, slowly. "And short-lived, by Dragon standards. Thou wilt still be in thy prime when she's -- gone."

"I know," said Fischfootur, firming his jaw. "But -- if she'll have me -- I'll face that with her when the time comes. She's not even twenty-four yet -- she can live for many more decades."

Luna could not condemn him for this sentiment: to do so would have made her the worst sort of moral hypocrite. This was exactly the way her own thoughts went every time she made a friend, or fell in love. This was the way her thoughts were going now, as she befriended Fischfootur, the very reason she had urged caution upon him. When one is immortal, all whom one cares about become hostages to fortune, hostages one knows Time will inevitably execute. Her only other option would have been to alienate herself from all other life, and then she would truly have become the callous inequine monster that Crimson had named her, at the last, terrible termination of their love and friendship.

"Very well," said Luna. "Then you must follow your heart."

His expression brightened.

"But remember," she warned. "She may not return thy love. And if that is how she feels, thou must accept her choosing. Thou must neither try to force her love, nor punish her for her refusal."

"I would never do that!" Fischfootur said, sounding genuinely shocked.

"Then I approve thy suit," Luna said, smiling. "Mark this, good Dragon," she continued, "I likest thee well. Thou must quit this land now, with thy hoard, but when Equestria's relations with thy Islands be better, thou art welcome to come to Canterlot, to visit as mine own guest. Thou must be careful in thy Pony-Friendship to not appear as traitor to thine own kind ..."

"I would never do that either!" Fischfootur insisted. "I would fight you again if I had to for my clan!"

"I know that, dear friend," Luna said. "Thou art loyal and true to thy clan. But thou must be careful that thy clan not deem thee false. That be easy -- tell them much of our battle, but little of our talk after. Then, in some months or years, I may send thee formal invitation, mayhap by way of thy friend Meatpacker. She too will be welcome at my Court, for any friend of thine is friend of mine." Luna knew that a mare from a merchant family would be pleased with any such invitation. "Thou shalt see -- it shalt go well. I --"

Suddenly Luna froze, looking in at one of the walls. Her ears instinctively perked up, though what she heard was on a sub-spatial, rather than acoustic, channel. It came on a frequency and in a code instinctive to the Cosmics.

It was a foal, bawling in distress!

She turned back to Fischfootur.

"Forgive me, friend. The need is dire -- I must leave you now. Fare thee well, until we meet again."

He looked at her in confusion, then nodded.

And with that she darted out of the chamber, flying so fast that the coins rattled in the wake of her passage.

She burst from the cave, and cried out to her Night Guards:

"Follow me as best you can! Some one needs help, and now!

Then she beat her wings hard, her flightfield glowing bright blue-violet as she streaked off in a straight line to the north-northwest.

Chapter 7: Caving

They made their way through the forest to the foot of the mountain.

They could, of course, have covered that distance in a flash of flight lasting but a few seconds. But the sudden, open motion and the flare of their flightfields would have been all too obvious to the Dragon, if he was making any effort at all to observe them. Luna knew that Dragons were highly-intelligent and had excellent sensoriae: better even than Pegasi, and almost a match for Alicorns. Counting on the Dragon's incaution would be but arrant folly.

So they galloped through the forest, as fast as they dared given the need for stealth and the very real possibility of seriously hurting themselves in the thick undergrowth. They ran between bushes, glad of their armor: even Summer Lightning's light leathers proving quite welcome as thorny branches lashed them; they vaulted fallen trees and small crevasses, deliberately using only their unaided musculature and the puerely aerodynamic gliding assistance of their wings; sometimes leaping small streams or splashing across wider ones. It was a wild race in the woods, driven by the need to rescue, dominated by the brooding presence of the Dragon, and both mares felt intensely alive.

Luna -- who had first made such a desperate gallop, complete with hostile Dragon, as a filly over twenty-five hundred years ago with a young and friendly Discord at her side -- evaluated Summer's performance with an experienced eye. She liked what she saw. Summer, as her guide, was choosing the path, and choosing it well both in operational and tactical terms. As much as possible, they were staying in ground blind from the Dragon's likely perspective, and avoiding any obstacles too wide to leap over unaided by flightfields.

Physically, Summer was almost flawless. Her small form flowed through the forest, moving above and around obstacles with deerlike agility, her hooves beating the ground in a manner precisely calculated for the best trade-off of speed and stealth. She had been pretty, even standing still; in motion like this she was beautiful, in so many senses of the word.

Her beauty moved Luna -- neither in the manner nor to the extent which Summer probably would have liked, but Luna had to admit to herself that Summer was aesthetically pleasing -- and in many ways, she was an ideal Ranger. It made Luna all the more want her, for her Night Guards. Her intelligence and agility would both aid Luna's long-term plans.

Though, in the short term, it definitely made that run through the woods more enjoyable.

They topped a ridge, being careful to keep to a wooded notch and thus avoid skylining themselves, and descended into the valley at its other side. Along the bottom ran a stream, cutting itself a canyon into the rock at the base of the mountain. Summer Lightning picked the path down the hill, one which cut down diagonally and kept the trees, laden with lush summer leaves, between them and any point from which the Dragon might easily view them. Luna could find no criticism of Summer's fieldcraft.

Finally, they emerged from the woods at the foot of the mountain, where Luna's deep-radar had located the entrance to the lower caverns. The lusty little stream was slowly undermining the slope above, creating an overhang which combined with a swell in the mountainside to completely shield them from observation from the highest slopes. They were in "dead ground," in the military sense of the term. The Dragon, if he were still in those high caverns, could not see them, even if he had many additional spy-holes.

Still, they took no chances. Summer's skilled eyes spotted a crossing, where stepping stones afforded relatively-easy passage. Some of the stones were slick with spray, but both mares were sure-footed, and they were able to aid their balance with their wings, without actually engaging their flightfields. In a trice they were across, completely under the overhang, and thus invisible to any observer on the middle slopes of the mountain.

Luna relaxed slightly. All the way in she'd been holding herself in readiness to shield Summer if the Dragon attacked. That Dragon could slay Summer with terrible ease -- a single full-strength lightning-bolt would destroy her beyond any healing powers any Alicorn Avatar had ever mastered. Luna knew this, and hated the necessity of putting the Ranger at such risk, but she needed a courier to communicate with her team, once they had gotten in far enough to make a meaningful assessment of the situation.

Not for the first time in the past two and a half millennia, Luna wished for one of the convenient field phones so ubiquitous in the Age of Wonders. The basic technology -- two simple electrical devices, each with a mouthpiece and earpiece, some electromagnets and diaphragms, connected by a big but portable spool of insulated copper wire -- had been developed decades before Moondreamer's birth. Moondreamer's mother, Sweetie Finemare, had cut her technical teeth repairing and installing equipment like that in her early to mid-teens. Moondreamer had played with gadgets like this as a little filly.

But the Change that had come with the Cataclysm had made the job of insulation more difficult on long wiring -- too much energy would be lost per hoof of length. It wasn't possible to just build things to plans from the Age of Wonders, the plans had to be modified for the new local bleed between electromagnetism and PKE. Crimson Quartz had -- before he went mad and become Sombra -- done a lot of the preliminary work on this. Still, one needed a serious industrial infrastructure to build electrical devices on a large scale ...

... and Luna almost hit herself in the face with a hoof, remembered just in time how much this would hurt wearing battle-sabatons, and aborted the gesture just in time.

She'd seen it from the Moon. And again from her tower at the Palace at Canterlot.

Equestria had such an industrial infrastructure, now. They were no longer barbarians squatting fearfully amidst the ruins, or even just-civilized Ponies pining after memories of a lost time of glory; the Ponies of Equestria had themselves come almost all the way back to the heights their ancestors had once won. Though Canterlot itself was mostly magelit, the large Earth Pony and Pegasus cities were building great generators and running electrical cabling everywhere. She'd seen the cities lit up on Earth's nightside.

There was no reason, other than military conservatism, that the Night Guard should not have had at least field telephony as a standard means of signalling. Equestria was close to regaining radio as well, and if they'd had a radio, her team could have raised Canterlot, which would have let Luna communicate with them through Celestia. Why wasn't this all happening faster?

The answer suggested itself.

Because Celly needs a High Lady of War. She is no warrior herself, she is a mage and statespony at heart. She is more powerful than me but she is never really been comfortable directing military operations. Just like in the Princess Game, all those centuries ago, when we were fillies together. She needs me. Oh, sweet Megan, I turned on her and betrayed her over a thousand years past, and Celly has never been able to replace me. She needs me, and I am back, and I have been flirting with Pumpernickel and brooding when I should have been whipping our Guards into shape. No more!

Obviously unaware of Luna's complex thoughts, Summer stopped, pointed with a hoof, and grinned. Her mane was slick with spray, her eyes were dancing with delight. She had found a cave-entrance. Even better, it was mostly covered by small trees, bushes and ferns -- the branches and foliage undisturbed; proof that nothing the size of that Dragon had been this way any time recently. It was possible that the Dragon didn't even know this entrance existed.

Luna smiled back at her. A comparison of their location with her the deep-radar map in her eidetic memory told her that this cave mouth should lead to the main cavern network. Luna lit up her horn and stepped forward.

The entrance was wide but low-ceilinged -- Luna could have bumped her head had she reared -- and a small streamlet ran down a little gully in its center. The air was moist, and cooler the moment they stepped out of the direct sunlight. Mosses grew on the rocks just within the entrance, and insects scuttled for cover from Luna's magelight.

The cave twisted away into the mountain, rising and narrowing slightly, until it turned enough that Luna could see no further, even with her sensitive eyes.

Luna nodded to Summer Lightning, who grinned even more happily at her implicit praise.

"This cavern system be many-parted," Luna told Summer, "Branchwork down here, curling upward toward a more angular system. Then there's a rather regular part, and a vertical shaft leading up to the upper levels, where the Dragon has made his lair."

"Formed at different times, probably, Ma'am." Summer said. "Different processes. I was friends for a while with a rockhound -- from Dunnich, of all places -- she was studying to be a geologist. She talked to me about rocks." She frowned. "A lot. I think that was the only thing she found interesting. Got me curious, so I read up a bit on it."

"Your studies may prove useful," Luna commented. "Did she tell you how best to explore caves?"

Summer nodded. "Mainly, don't go in alone, Ma'am. Though she did all the time, but she said she had some sort of special affinity with the rocks, part of her Talent. And also, don't get lost." She reached into her saddlebags with one wingtip and pulled out a large chalk.

"Good idea," said Luna. "When we find the captive, I may have thee bring her to safety, while I stop the Dragon from following after." Luna said this matter-of-factly, but Summer's eyes widened, presumably as she realized exactly what Luna might mean by "stopping" the Dragon. "If I must needs fight the Dragon," Luna explained, "neither thou nor the captive should be nearby when this happens. Ye might be sorely scathed in our fight."

Summer nodded, sobered at the thought of what such a battle might entail.

"So blaze the trail well, Lieutenant," commanded Luna, "I need no markings, but I may not be leading you back this way."

"Yes, Ma'am!"

They walked deeper into the cave. Their way wound, and rose, as they left the twilight zone near the entrance where there was natural light, and the growth of plants, and entered the true interior, where there only existed those life processes entirely independent of sunlight. The air was still moist, and where it condensed on the walls Luna could see slimes which the infra-red revealed to be significantly warmer than the surrounding rock. Even here, life persisted.

The rock was damp under their hooves. Here and there the way dipped, and they plashed through cold pools. They moved carefully enough, but Luna was struck with the thought that they were making perhaps the loudest sounds that had been in this place for countless years, decades, centuries. How long had the caves been forming, how long since anypony had disturbed this place?

Luna's Cosmic self was almost three times older than the planet, but she rarely felt very connected to that part of her. And she had only been the Alicorn Pony, Luna Selena Nyx for a bit over two and a half millennia. The age of the caverns, and of the mountain which they hollowed, was surely greater by a factor of at least thousand or so. Luna wished for a moment that Summer's rockhound friend could have been here to tell her just how old was this place: Luna was war-captain and engineer, not geologist.

Neither spoke. There was only the gentle clopping of their hooves, the occasional clink or scrape of the blades of Luna's war-sabatons against the rocks. Where some tunnel or side-cavern diverged from the main route, there was the scritch-scritch of Summer blazing the way, careful to choose a dry surface, and careful to make the marks big and obvious. If they were coming back this way, Summer would need to use the magelight from her little standard-issue Ranger light-gem, which would be much weaker than the continual light spell Luna was radiating from her horn.

The way rose and widened into a gallery.

Luna saw the long pointed shapes hanging from the ceiling, the similar shapes rising up to meet them, and the glitters from between them, and she knew what was in here.

"Observe," said Luna softly, and she turned up her light spell to dazzling brilliance.

There were stalactites and stalagmites -- forests of them, marching in stately columns, no doubt following the ripples of hair-fine cracks in the ceiling, where water sank through fissured rock to absorb calcium and deposit it over countless millennia in these stately forms. Elsewhere, the moisture had seeped into salts, triggered blooms of crystal formation. It was a fairy cave, a cavern of wonders, sleeping unknown and unguessed of in this deep place, a marvelous production of Nature.

"Oh!" gasped Summer in delight. She nearly took to her wings, but Luna moved her hoof in the ancient "keep groundbound" signal of Pegasi battletalk, and Summer remembered the need not to light up her flightfield. "Sorry," she said.

"No matter," said Luna. "I fully understand why you want to do so. I would myself, if it were not perilous. Perhaps someday we may return, when we are not troubled by a Dragon."

Instead, Summer described a slow circle on the ground, drinking in the beauty around her. "It's so marvelous," she said. "Like it's been here forever, waiting for us to find it!" In her happiness and awe she had temporarily forgotten to call Luna "ma'am," something of which Luna was herself glad.

"Yes," said Luna. "I do not know how long it has been here. But none has marred it, and certainly no great Dragon has been this way." She peered at some of the stalactites and stalagmites. Some of the former had broken from the ceiling, and some of the latter shattered when those fell upon it, but the pattern seemed random. She saw that they had started to reform from the broken roots.

"Who did that?" asked Summer sadly, following Luna's gaze.

"Destruction," she said. "And some foolish Ponies who tried too bold a leap of technology, like foals trying to feed a fire with blasting powder." She felt guilt deep within her soul. Moondreamer had been one of those foolish Ponies.

Summer looked at her questioningly.

"This damage dates back to the Cataclysm," Luna explained. "Four thousand years ago. When the Earth shook, and the seas slopped out of their beds, and the proud towers of the Age of Wonders toppled into ruin in a single day of fire, and the hopes and dreams of generations perished. along with those who had hoped and dreamed them." Oh, my sweet Dusk, she thought. I am glad you did not live to see that day. In that one respect, your early death was a mercy.

"Oh," said Summer. "So that was real? My rockhound friend once said she knew it was real, that the rocks still hurt from it ... but she said a lot of strange things."

"She must be a wise student of the earth lore," Luna commented. "Yes. Ponykind rose up to heights beyond your imagining, and was cast down from them. And the Cataclysm left its marks all over the Solar System. These are some of them."

"That's so sad," said Summer.

Luna raised an eyebrow.

"That the Ponies of old rose so high, and fell so far ... Ma'am," added Summer, seeming suddenly aware of her previous informality. "That their dreams died with them. It seems ... wrong."

"Does it make you want to give up?" Luna asked.

"No, Ma'am!" said Summer. "It makes me want to try harder. If we did it before, we should be able to do it again, shouldn't we? Only ... this time ... not make the mistakes we made before. Do it better. Make the dreams come true this time!" She suddenly realized that her voice was rising, and said "Sorry, Ma'am. I got carried away."

Luna hugged Summer. She used only one foreleg, wrapping her wings around the small pegasus, being careful not to put any of her weight on the lieutenant's smaller frame.

Summer gasped, and for a moment stiffened in startlement. Then she relaxed to press her cheek against the front of Luna's neck, sighing happily.

Luna released her.

"Friend Summer," Luna said, "Survive this day. I will have need of Ponies like unto thee."

"Um ... yes, Ma'am?" said Summer, still surprised.

"This is not the time nor the place for such speech between us," Luna explained. "But thou mayest have a role to play in making just such dreams come true, in my service. We shall discuss this on later occasion"

"Yes, Ma'am!"

Mine, now, Luna knew, from long experience if not also from the emotions she sensed emanating from the small Pegasus. But no arrow-fodder, to be squandered in some vainglory. No, this mare had intelligence and vision, qualities which were wasted in her rustic posting. She had probably been drifting into drink and other sorts of debauchery, frustrated from her true potential, because Celestia's peacetime Guard was not structured to make use of any but very limited forms of talent. That will change, Luna silently promised both herself and Summer. That will change.

After that brief halt, they reluctantly left the gallery and resumed the long road upward. The cave rose, and as it did they passed one after another trickle of water feeding the streamlet. They were of course going upstream, and so the streamlet shrank as they trod each mile, more arduous by far than each would have been on the surface. They had to move carefully over uneven stone, and limit the use of their wings to occasional flaps for balance -- not that there would have room in most of the cave for any but the tightest and most nerve-racking flight in any case.

Eventually the streamlet ended in a sort of pond, fed by water trickling from the walls and dripping from the roof in several places. The rocks glistened with water and slimes, and the trickle of the water was soothing.

It was Summer Lightning who spotted the bowl, nestled in a natural alcove of one wall.

Luna levitated it gently in her aura, and the two Ponies examined it curiously. It was nothing much -- a simple baked-clay bowl, not even properly glazed, and with no remaining signs of paint or any other decoration. But it spoke of makers -- some Ponies or Deer or other intelligent creatures had made this bowl. Some, possibly the makers, had come to this pool, probably because it was a source of water, and used this bowl, probably to get some of the water. And then one day, for some reason, one of them had left it here, and never come back for it, and so it had stayed here for unknown centuries or millennia, awaiting their discovery.

It might date back to before the Coming of the Ice. It might date back to before the Cataclysm. It might even date back to before the Megan, even before Celestia had first sported upon the Earth in Pony form. It looked very old. Luna had no idea how old; while she could have used her senses to determine isotope ratios, she had never studied the technique as Luna Selena Nyx, and Moondreamer had no idea how to do it with Alicorn magic.

Just another minor mystery of an old world, a world thickly layered with history and lost races and the mysteries they had left behind them. Perhaps someday, if the Ponies climbed all the way back to the heights of their ancestors, these mysteries might be studied, and catalogued, and the long unwritten histories teased out of the Earth and Sea and unraveled, to be laid out in books and displayed in museums for the edification of all Ponykind.

No time for this now, of course. They had a mission.

They continued climbing, now through a labyrinth of dry caves, more angular in their general structure. Here some sort of deep faulting had produced crevices, and the passages were high but narrow, so Luna and Summer often had to walk in single file, Luna generally leading the way. Luna was not sure of the geology of this place, and she wished Summer's rock-hound friend might have appeared to help guide them. But the crevices never narrowed beyond passage, which was good, because Luna neither wanted to backtrack nor to engage in the emission of magic on the scale needed to blast them a passage. Such would almost certainly reveal them to the Dragon.

At one place the cave system changed to something that had locally been eroded from outside, like the entrance below, the caves widening.

"Sometimes these are made by wind and sometimes water," Summer commented, "or so the books said. I don't know which, here."

Luna didn't know either. But a subtle shift in the light made her realize something.

"Stand still," she told Summer. "I'm going to veil my light." Luna did so, and abruptly they were standing in absolute darkness.

But not absolute! Luna could see a glimmer of multiply-reflected light from one direction.

"I'm unveiling it now," Luna informed Summer, giving her the chance to close her eyes before she resumed her magelight.

"Sunlight?" asked Summer.

"Yes," said Luna. "From that direction," she pointed with her hoof.

They did not have to walk far, just left around a turn and then right around a kink, before they saw daylight. It came from a sizable mouth in a fairly wide cave. Luna consulted her mental map of the mountain, and decided that they could risk a peek outside, as they will still far down from the Dragon's lair, and there was an overhang to screen them.

They looked down on the valley below from something like a quarter-mile of altitude. They could see right over the ridgeline they had crossed to reach the foot of the mountain, though from this angle they could not see the base camp of Luna's team. The Sun was setting over the west, the sky reddening as the day ended. It would probably be night by the time they rescued the captive -- which was not a problem from Luna's point of view, and if they got into trouble with the lowered light, Luna's Night Guards could help out Summer and any civilians.

There might be a way down from here. Luna saw that the slope on this face was reasonably gentle, angling off to the left ... but she could not see if there was a path without flying out and possibly revealing herself to the Dragon. Which led to the other obvious problem, if there was pursuit ...

Luna shook her head regretfully. "Thou canst not get out this way," she said. "Not unless the captive can also fly." Could she? Luna was assuming an Alicorn, and Alicorns could fly, but an Alicorn foal? Anypony's guess, and in the high winds around a mountain, with a lightning-throwing Dragon chasing them, was not the ideal situation in which to discover the foal's capabilities. Trying to walk down the mountain with an angry Dragon in pursuit would be even more certain suicide for Summer. "And t'would be dangerous even if she can."

Summer nodded. "Right, Ma'am. No point coming all this way, and then losing her!"

The two mares went back to the main path. The way rose rapidly now, along narrow high passages that climbed in staggered cliff faces. They could have flown up the cliffs, but feared to give themselves away to the Dragon; instead they roped themselves together and fumbled for hoofholds, sometimes leaping up almost vertically to attain the next ledge. Luna had the advantages of strength and reach, and improved her grip slightly with Earth Pony telekinesis, which had far less of a PKE signature than Pegasus flightfields. Summer was small and wiry, and by dint of determined effort kept up with the Alicorn's pace.

They were soon more than halfway up the mountain, though still well below the Dragon. They reached a large slab-sided cave, rested for a few minutes, drank some water. Luna pulled out her sketch-map.

"Past here is a section of regular tunnels," she told Summer. "I suspect some old mine workings. We must be wary: parts may be unstable. My scan showed a clear way to some caves which have a shaft that gives access to the upper caverns, and the Dragon's lair."

"This mountain's way south of the mines around Nickerlite," Summer commented. "And we're beyond where the old North-Realm colonized. Who do you suppose dug these, Ma'am? I didn't think Deer were much for mining."

"They are not," affirmed Luna. "Diamond Dogs, mayhap. Or older still. It matters less who made them than that we take care that they do not fall on our heads." Luna could actually have preserved them and extracted them both from any collapse, were Summer simply in her presence but both the roar of the collapse itself and the blatant radiation of energies she would require to do that would surely alert the Dragon to their activities.

It was a short squirm through some tight places and then they were in the first of the regular tunnels. Their regularity was obvious; the walls were square-cut, though here and there sections had fallen in and then been dug out later by beings unknown. The old supports had long since rotted; they had been replaced more than once, and in different materials and styles. Here and there, what must have been the original floor was visible, and there could be seen twin parallel lines of utterly-corroded iron, little more than lines of rust.

"Mine trackways," said Luna. "Standard gauge for the Age of Wonders. They laid them a little wider than we do today. Parts of these workings are over four millennia old. It is good they survived the Cataclysm."

"I just hope they last a little longer, Ma'am," said Summer, a nervous edge in her voice, as Luna brushed one wall and that scant pressure caused a little dust to drift down from a crack in the ceiling.

"These have lasted for forty centuries," replied Luna, with greater nonchalance than she actually felt. "They needs last us less than a day longer."

"Celestia willing," Summer said automatically.

"It falls to me to ward us both here and now," replied Luna, smirking slightly. "But I shall convey thy wish to mine own Sister later, if thou desirest."

Summer blinked in astonishment, apparently just now emotionally-grasping the implications of the identity of her companion.

Luna laughed merrily. "I know full well, 'tis but a turn of speech. Fear not: I am sure she would also will our success!"

They passed many side tunnels, some of which were choked by old rockfalls. It was impossible to tell from their brief passage what had been mined here, though it looked as though it might have been different things at different times. Occasionally they found old tools, inevitably bristling with almost fungoid fuzzes of crystallized corrosion. Once, they saw what must have once been a side track with a regular lumpy object that had probably once been a mine cart.

More than once there were ominous creakings or groans, grit sifting from the ceiling, to remind them that these tunnels were far from safe. Their luck held, though, and they took no harm worse than a little dust in their manes.

Finally they emerged into a large, square-cut chamber, supported by columns of the living rock. It had clearly been some sort of station, but Moondreamer had never specifically been a mines engineer, nor had Luna, and so she had only a hazy idea of its previous function. There were a lot of old trackways, and some slumped objects that might have been minecarts or even some sort of small locomotive, though it was nothing but a mess of collapsed, corroded curvilinear and angular parts, now. There was a collapsed area around what must have once been a vertical shaft upward, and more collapsed tunnels which must have once led to other sections.

And there was one intact tunnel leading outward.

This was of a different design than the mineshaft. It had been heavily reinforced by thick concrete arches. Though slightly cracked in places, the arches had not buckled and sloughed outward over the millennia, which instantly told Luna that whatever steel lay within was strongly resistant to corrosive failure, the usual fate of ferroconcrete over mere decades. The great flaw of the engineering of the Age of Wonders had been that, due to their very wealth, they had not usually built to last; this structure was an exception to that rule.

She instantly recognized it, of course. Moondreamer had designed the original model, of which this installation had been a copy. She hadn't been a mines engineer, but this was no mine.

It was a missile base.

Chapter 8: Climbing

The tunnel was large. The entrance had once been secured by great steel airtight hatches, which had originally been a head or more thick; at some point in the past, whoever had reopened these mines after the Cataclysm had managed to get those blast doors for the immense wealth they represented; doubtless they had long since been melted down and new objects forged of their metal. Not moonsilver -- even the Age of Wonders hadn't been that wealthy (they could have been if they'd listened to me and opened Lunar mines, she thought mournfully, remembering from her memories of Moondreamer an argument that was now more than four thousand years hopelessly lost).

For a moment the gulf between four millennia ago and today, between Luna and Moondreamer, seemed as insignificant to the Moon Princess as it would have seemed to her Cosmic self; then she realized that it had been two hundred generations of mortal Ponies, that even when Luna Selena Nyx had been born at Paradise Estate the world that had created this place had been seventy-five generations dead and buried. Her mind briefly reeled before the abyss of Time this represented, the abyss of time she represented; even though she had been raised by Undying Ponies who had seen the Age of Wonders it suddenly seemed too much, the alienation between even her Incarnate Self and the mayflies among which she dwelt. She actually stumbled, overwhelmed by it all.

"Princess Luna! Are you all right?" the mayfly beside her asked, coming to her side, ready to support her should she fall.

Luna turned, briefly confused that a mayfly should issue equine speech in converse with her, and then perspective and sanity returned.

"Just ... remembering," she said to Summer Lightning, who was a Lieutenant of the Day Guard Rangers, whom Luna wanted for the Night Guard, and who was moreover a real Pegasus Pony with her own thoughts and hopes and dreams, not some sub-creature to be scorned, no mayfly, even if Luna would be alive a hundred generations after Summer was dust. "A great, great while gone."

"You remember this place, Ma'am?" Summer asked her.

"Yes," replied Luna. "I have never been myself here before, but I ken well what sort of place this was. In another time ... another place ... I planned such places."

Summer's eyes were burning with curiosity.

"A ... military base," Luna explained. "United States of Amareica Strategic Air Command. The shafts leading up to the Dragon's lair are deep tubes leading up from the main magazine."

"A fortress?" Summer asked. "Of the Age of Wonders?" In her excitement she forgot to append any honorific.

"Yes, of a sort," Luna explained, unconcerned with the famliarity, here in a place which had been delved when the birth of Equestria. and hence her royal status, lay two and a half millennia in distant futurity. "Here were great missiles which could fly across a world, strike and destroy whole cities in half an hour. Sunfire explosives. Like unto the most powerful blasts my Sister can create, but many times more powerful."

Awe and terror transfigured Summer's pretty, fine-featured face. "Is that ... is that what caused the Cataclysm?"

"No," replied Luna. "The sunfire missiles never were used. An ultimate threat, never needed, for the foe against whom they were built yielded without a fight." She grimaced bitterly. "Had it been those, we would long since have come all the way back. The Cataclysm was worse. Far, far worse. Would that it had merely been global sunfire war!"

Luna had the dubious satisfaction of seeing Summer shrink in horror, at the thought of something worse than warheads which could destroy whole cities. You know it not, Luna thought, but in both, 'tis me that you fear. I helped design the sunfire missiles, and the great engines which caused the Cataclysm. Innocent child! You know not how bloody-hoofed is she with whom you walk! But she said nothing, for she had no desire to utterly terrify the poor little Ranger.

"This boots not now," Luna said. "Dwelling in the past only blights the future." She smiled. "We have a captive to save!"

"Yes, Ma'am," replied Summer, recovering her composure.

"We needs must be silent soon," Luna said. "Dragons have sharp ears, and the tube may lead straight to his lair."

Summer nodded.

They made their way through the literally-antediluvian base, walking as soft-hooved as possible. The complex had been long ago stripped of everything of possible value, including the heavier hatches, and all the lighter doors, and furniture, had long since fallen into ruin. They had to move carefully -- more than once, something shifted or even clattered, and they both tensed, though they were still too far from the launch tubes for it to be likely for even a Dragon to hear them. Eventually they learned the trick of it; both of them were stealthy mares to begin with, and this was but another environment to master.

As they approached the magazine level, Luna concentrated hard, trying to match the memory of her mass scan with Moondreamer's original blueprints. This base had been designed to mount four tubes, each served by a twelve-missile rotary launcher. Standard loadout, three ICBM's and nine ABM's per tube, giving the complex a robust second-strike capability. WIth each missile a four-warhead MIRV, this single base had the power to destroy a single small nation, barring active defenses.

All that mostly irrelevant, now. What was important was how the tubes were arranged. There were two possible layouts in Moondreamer's old designs, and she did not know how this base had modified them. Moondreamer had been more concerned with the rockets and warheads themselves; the base had been an afterthought. The compact layout, essentially a 2 x 2 square, and the linear layout, which was exactly what it sounded like. The first one took up less space for the support tunnels, but was easier to knock out with a single hit; the second one was more resistant to enemy counterforce strikes; a third design, with the missiles at the four corners of the base, had been voted down by the Congress as too expensive to be practical.

Judging by the memory of her mass scan and what she was seeing in the facilities, this was a linear layout -- probably built that way to keep the height of the tubes roughly even on the mountain slope. Most of the base was horizontally between the launch tubes and the mountainside, which made sense -- take out the launch tubes, and all this base became was an exceptionally-expensive fallout shelter. She remembered the position of the Dragon's lair, and saw how #2 tube intersected one of the tunnels of the upper caverns.

She'd have to damp her light most of the way down going up, or she might as well be flashing strobes for all the stealth she would have going in. Which reminded her ...

She motioned at Summer. "Low light vision," she whispered. "Hold still."

Summer nodded.

Luna leaned forward, put her horn right between Summer's eyes, and cast. It was a low-powered spell, unlike the energy required for a flight-field or graviton blast, and there was no way the Dragon could detect it through all the metal and rock around them. She was very familiar with the enchantment, as she had used variants of it on the Nocturnae, and on the armor she had crafted for the non-Nocturnae of her Night Guard.

"Half a day," Luna explained.

Summer nodded.

They padded into a long room which Luna recognized as Maintenance. All the equipment here had long since vanished. Luna did not bother to mention a certain danger; it was irrelevant in any case, since she wasn't detecting significant hard radiation. This base had probably been partly or wholly decommissioned before the Cataclysm; even if it had been operational at the end, the missiles might have been removed, or whoever stripped the accessible metals in the intervening millennia might have taken them. If they had been fissionable-triggered, those fissionables had probably long since been used as somepony's material components: there were whole families of potions that could be enhanced by various isotopes of uranium or plutonium -- though the alchemist had of course to be careful how she handled them.

Luna looked right and left. They were standing right before Launch Tube One. The blast doors had been dismounted and their metals extracted long ago, so she was able to look right into Tube One. Curious, she stepped cautiously onto the pad. There were bits of the complex rotary launcher all around her, but no sign of any missiles. No Peacekeepers, and even the Sureguards had probably been pulled out before the Cataclysm. That was unlucky for the post-Cataclysmic miners, who probably would have liked to strip their fuselages for moonsilver, but lucky for Summer and her if this was also true in Tube Two. Less debris to stumble over.

Summer watched from the door, eyes huge at the incomprehensible ruins all around her. She understood steam engines and locomotives, batteries and electric lights, but this had been built by a technology a hundred years beyond anything she had ever seen. Even in this pathetic state, the sheer scale of this Information Age ruin it was impressive to this daughter of a merely Industrial Age civilization.

It's not that amazing, Luna wanted to say. No bigger than some of the skyscrapers Equestria has already raised again in Manehattan, and this base was all dedicated to death. Your culture is kinder. Your rockets will be lovelier. But this was not the time to risk noise that might echo up the shaft, if this one had even a crack into the lair, and alert the Dragon.

Luna stepped back into the maintenance room. There had once been flash guard doors which could segment the maintenance room when the base was at full alert, but those had long ago been stripped for their metals. They walked past the debris of a bygone age to Launch Tube Two.

They stepped into another great stripped space, similar to Launch Tube One. The vast chamber of the magazine rose a hundred heads above them, narrowing in a buttressed funnel to the actual launch tube. This in turn rose hundreds of heads beyond, until Luna's hornlight disappeared into a darkness that not even her low-light vision could pierce.

Fortunately, Luna remembered the design of this part, because it was part of the launch system, and Moondreamer had worked on this personally. There should have been two hatches on the launch tube; a lower one protecting the magazine and an upper one capping the tube against the outside. They formed, essentially, a flash-lock, preventing any truefire detonations above from easily penetrating to the magazine -- the base would have been able to survive any but a direct hit by the heaviest sunfire warheads. Thanks to Moondreamer's clever design of the exhaust tunnels, it was theoretically possible to launch a Peacekeeper through one of these without ever providing an external enemy a direct line-of-blast to the magazines.

The lower hatch was gone -- stripped by the long-gone post-Cataclysmic miners for its metals. But the upper hatch was either still there or had been replaced by some other blockage, something Luna knew because she couldn't see even starlight up the tube. She also knew from the memory of her density scan that there was a direct route up this tube into the caverns where the Dragon laired. This was very good, because it meant that the Dragon might not have even realized the significance of the tube: he'd only been in this lair a short time and probably hadn't had time to explore everything.

It meant her plan had an excellent chance.

The problem, of course, was getting up the tube. They could do it in an instant by simply flying, and that would work in the escape if the captive could fly or was small enough to carry, but flying up the tube seriously risked alerting the Dragon. Likewise, teleporting would be dangerous, even if she sent a radar pulse up the tube to ensure she had a clear exit point. The Dragon had already demonstrated he had active radar, which meant he could detect Luna's own active pulses.

No, they had to climb, and the problem with that was that while the miners had not stripped out the stairs and maintenance ladders (they had apparently decided to leave those for last, for the obvious reason), those structures were over four thousand years old. It was a minor miracle they hadn't already collapsed of their own weight -- Luna sniffed a guardrail, licked it experimentally.

An aluminum-based alloy. And the air in the old base was dry. It had formed a thin layer of stable surface oxide in most places, and henceforth been protected by that layer. The stairs might actually be able to bear their weight: they had followed Moondreamer's original design here, and she had massively overengineered them to survive a full missile launch and retaliatory bombardment. And they looked as if the builders had not stinted on her original specifications.

Luna roped herself and Summer together, with about thirty heads of slack. This should be enough that they wouldn't both be standing on the same exact section of stairs at the same time, but not so much that they would constantly be getting the rope hung up on corners. Luna took the lead. If a section could take her weight, it could take Summer's, and with the abilities of the other Four Kinds, Luna was much better at dealing with the consequences of a fall while radiating the minimum PKE.

They climbed the stairs. Luna had removed her metal sabatons, but even stepping softly, their hooves sometimes made faint little clangs against the ancient metal that were louder than Luna would have liked. Looking back, Luna saw Summer's face screwed up in concentration as she stepped very carefully. Their senses were utterly alert to every motion of the metal that supported them, keeping them ready to react should the millennia-old structure fail beneath their weight.

It was an eerie feeling, climbing through this great cavern, delved as it was from the living rock by nigh-mythical Ponies from before the current cycle of the World. The Earth had shaken to the Cataclysm, and this place had remained. The snows of the Fimbulwinter had fallen, and this base had remained. The world had heated, the icecaps melted, the seas risen, and this base had remained. The Windigos had howled and the Coming of the Ice threatened to crush the continent, and this base had remained. The Three Tribes had migrated, Discord had risen and been defeated, Equestria founded, Luna herself made her spiteful rebellion and spent a thousand years mad on the Moon. And under this mountain, this base had slumbered, uncaring of the passage of the long years, decades, centuries.

The two mares were climbing out of this strange survival of an eldritch past, a lost world of computers, metallurgy and sunfire missiles; back toward the mundane modern world of mages, alchemy and Dragons. Luna had been Moondreamer; she remembered that lost world, and yet it all seemed to her like something out of a forgotten fairy-tale. She could only imagine what it must feel like for Summer Lightning, who had probably lived a fairly normal life, for a Day Guard Ranger.

They reached the roof of the magazine chamber. The stairway had climbed the inner wall of the magazine, because no missiles would have actually been near that wall during a launch; but it could not climb the launch tube itself in such a manner, let one of the tough but thin-skinned rockets rip open a fuel tank on a damaged flight of stairs, and suffer a chemical explosion on launch in its own launch tube. Luna understood full well why Moondreamer had made the design decision to run the stairs up the outside of the launch tube, in the narrow space between the wall of the tube and the armored sleeve around the tube proper.

Gangways continued across the ceiling almost to the tube. From here the whole magazine chamber was spread out beneath them. Enough parts of the old rotary loading mechanism remained that Luna could plainly see how it had been constructed so as to quickly and selectively maneuver the next missile into position. Rate of fire would have been important in a hot war, when the survival of the base might have depended on getting a Sureguard aloft in time to knock down an enemy missile before the attacker could score a direct hit. Within her, Luna felt Moondreamer's satisfaction at the elegance of her own design.

As Luna approached the stairway up into the launch tube sleeve, the gangway beneath her creaked alarmingly under her weight. Moving step by step, feeling the structure shudder at each cautious placement of a hoof, she got past that section to firmer footing, though there was one hairy moment as a bolt sprung free, falling for long seconds to clatter on the floor.

Both mares froze, intently listening. There were no further sounds, no indication that the Dragon had heard this. The acoustics were complex and unknown; Luna wasn't even sure that the sound would echo up the tube into his lair. She had sufficiently Silenced their hooves that their footfalls were not clanging on the metal with each step, but she dared not do more lest the Dragon directly sense the thaumic radiance.

Looping some of the rope's slack around one cannon and positioning herself what she knew to be a relatively stable section of gangway, Luna motioned Summer to come on.

Summer was trying to keep it out of her expression, but Luna could see the fear in Summer's eyes as she stepped cautiously onto the weak part of the gangway. She was much smaller and lighter than Luna. However, at least one bolt had already worked loose. The gangway creaked and shuddered, and Summer's wings flared as she used them as counterweights to keep her balance, scrupulously suppressing her flightfield.

Summer took another step, then another. The gangway shuddered again, jerked, then seemed to find a new stability. Relief came into the eyes of the small Pegasus, and she smiled confidently as she gathered herself for the last few steps to safety.

With a loud SPRONG! the gangway collapsed. Summer's eyes went wide and her mouth became an almost-comical "O" as her footing fell away from beneath her. Her wings flared, and there was a faint flicker of flightfield; then a resolve came onto her face and she damped her field all the way down, mindful of the mission, trusting to her leader rather than her own natural abilities to save her.

Luna heaved on the rope, gathering Summer up toward the remaining end of the gangway before she had fallen more than ten feet. Summer's muscles were ready for this, and she took the tug well -- she would have bruises tomorrow morning, if she lived to see tomorrow morning, but Luna judged that the motion had caused her comrade no serious harm.

She hauled Summer up fast, because the real disaster was about to happen. She'd thought about Silencing or telekinetically cushioning the fall, but either of these would provide a PKE flare which the Dragon could not hope to miss, and could not be explainable as anything but the presence of high-level magic. The mission could still be saved -- if they moved rapidly.

Summer's hooves caught the edge of the intact section and, with some help from Luna, the Pegasus scrambled onto the platform, standing upright. She looked no more than upset by the experience.

There was an immense clattering and crashing as the collapsed section of gangway struck the floor of the magazine chamber, a hundred heads below. There was no way the Dragon hadn't heard that.

Luna gathered in most of the remaining slack in the rope, made a "Follow me!" motion, and bolted for the stairs.

"TREACHERY!" came a great basso roar, echoing down the shaft. There was an awful noise from far above, which Luna knew to be talons longer than whole Ponies tearing through ancient armored steel and concrete. There was a sound of heavy objects clattering downward.

The two mares ran up the stairs, Luna first and Summer hard on her heels. Good thing I Silenced our hooves, Luna thought, or we would be so loud that the Dragon would certainly hear our motion.

"HAIRY ... VERMIN!" the Dragon roared, his voice seeming more distinct, despite the fact that it must now be rebounding off the magazine chamber floor. Large objects battered off the armored surface of the launch tubes, some of the sounds audible from far up the stairs, others echoing from below.

In an instant they were within the main armored sleeve of the launch tube, around which the stairs spiraled. Luna motioned Summer to step back completely out of sight of the magazine chamber, but risked exposing her own head a little so that she could see something of what was going on beneath.

They could hear vast motions from far above; metal scraping over metal. Dragonscales over the armored double cylinder, Luna knew, and looked up the stairs. There was not enough room for the Dragon to crawl down without the sleeve without essentially digging up the stairs every head of the way; surely he would not attempt this?

Large pieces of debris struck the magazine chamber floor far below them. Luna plainly saw in her limited field of view one chunk of rusted steel and concrete slap onto that surface, shattering on impact, converting itself into almost a fragmentation bomb, spraying head-sized pieces of ferroconcrete in all directions, rust crystals puffing out everywhere in what would have been an eye-stinging haze. She was glad no Ponies were actually down there at that moment.

She suspected it was about to get worse.

It did.

"NOW ..." boomed the great voice of the Dragon. resounding in a manner that made it obvious that his huge head was now within the launch tube, a blue-white glow beginning to build "...DIE!!!"

Just in time Luna averted her eyes, folded her ears and pulled back Summer ... who against orders was trying to peep over the edge down the stairs ... Luna enfolded Summer in the safety of Alicorn wings, then buried her head in her own breast, squeezed her eyes tight shut, and prepared to endure pain in silence.

An intolerable blue-white glare burned Luna's eyes even through her closed lids, since she had deliberately avoided providing the thaumic signature of a magical barrier. There was an immense pulsating flash that went on and on and on, as the Dragon breathed full-powered lightning right down the launch tube. The stairs down to the magazine chamber collapsed in a clatter of metal. Oven-hot air whipped their manes as it howled up past them.

The thunderclap was, at such close quarters, immediate and deafening. There were great cracks and what must have been thermal explosions. Luna was now very glad that there were no missiles in the magazine -- though the lightning could not have triggered truefire explosions, they could have set off ordinary chemical ones in the detonators, degraded as those detonators would have been after four millennia without maintenance, spraying earth-hot fissionables all around.

Through this all Luna noticed approvingly that Summer managed to avoid screaming, though at one point she let forth a sort of subdued half-whimper. Luna sensed only indirect Dragonfear -- the inner armor was protecting them from the Dragon's psychic radiations -- but the more natural kind of fear was quite understandable at such a moment. Luna herself was still mostly calm -- but then she was very powerful, and had been in this sort of situation several times before in her long life. Summer was just a Pegasus, and this was all very new to her.

The glare died down. There was the sound of debris clattering and clanking into new positions, a crackle-pop-hiss of cooling concrete and metal. Then ... silence.

Luna put her mouth right up against Summer's ear.

"Canst thou hear me?" she breathed.

Summer did the same thing to Luna.

"Yes ..." she replied, omitting the honorific.

This was fine with Luna, as she was not feeling particularly formal right now. The fact that they could hear one another confirmed that neither of them had been deafened, a very real hazard considering what had just happened.

"Remain still," Luna said. Carefully, she opened her eyes. She could already see in the near-darkness ... Alicorns regenerated their visual purple rapidly, as they did all else. She peeked out into the magazine chamber.

This was less dark than it had been before, because the crater that Dragonbreath had torn in the immensely strong and refractory material of the launch pad was still glowing red-hot in places. Luna was impressed: that pad had been built to survive the blast from a half million pounds of solid-fuel rocket thrust at near point-blank range, yet the Dragon's lightnings had torn right through its surface, spraying red-hot and molten wreckage in all directions. There were fires burning in the magazine, including some smouldering in substances normally-not flammable, but those were dying down, chilled by the now merely desert-hot atmosphere within.

Luna pulled her head back in, moved close in to Summer. Her companion had mostly regained her composure, though Luna noticed a telltale tremor in her legs.

"We still have a chance," she whispered to Summer.

"D-d-doesn't he know we're here, now ... Ma'am?" Summer replied.

Luna could here the stress in even the whisper of the small Pegasus.

"He suspects." She elaborated upon her theme. "He thinks he may have slain or cowed us. If he knew he had not, he would be coming down the launch tube. He is not."

"Why not?" Summer asked, looking fearfully upward.

"We might be a trick. He is alone," Luna explained. "If he crawls down here he leaves his hostage guardless."

"B-b-but Ma'am, if we go right up the tube we'll fly right into his jaws." Summer's eyes were pinpointing.

"We know something he knows not," Luna said.

"What's that?"

"The crack he widened is not the only one leading into the upper caverns," Luna informed her. And unless I miss my guess, he cannot watch them all."

Summer trembled. Then she closed her eyes tightly, breathed in, then out, opened her eyes again.

"I'm with you, Ma'am." she said, somewhat more calmly.

"Good mare!" whispered Luna, patting her shoulder encouragingly.

They began climbing the long stairs.

Chapter 9: Passing

Slowly they climbed the long stair.

It was a nightmare journey. Luna had silenced their hooves, but the thaumic radiation from a spell strong enough to let them gallop silently up those stairs would have instantly revealed them to the Dragon. So they stepped carefully, the glow from Luna's horn damped to little more than a glimmer, in which their images of the stairway were colorless and grainy, even given the night vision spell. They had to be careful of accidentally kicking some piece of debris, lest the clattering draw the Dragon's attention.

Luna was confident of her own ability to survive the consequences of its wrath, but feared that Summer Lightning might come to harm. She seriously considered sending her companion back -- she could teleport her into open air away from the mountain with reasonable safety -- but she wanted to keep her in reserve for as an escort for the Dragon's hostage. In her mind, Luna balanced benefits and risks of her various possible strategies, as she always had aforetimes, and as aforetimes knew that if she made a mistake, a friend might die for it. Such was her destiny.

Out of the underworld of forgotten antediluvian science they climbed, the Alicorn Princess and the Pegasus Ranger, on a stairway over four thousand years old, and they knew that a monster was at the other end, listening intently for them, ready to strike without mercy at their first mistake. It was a climb out of a horror tale, and it was real, and perhaps the strangest thing was that this was far from the first time that Luna had done something like this.

First time for Summer, I ween, Luna thought, and glanced at her companion.

Summer looked a bit frightened, but she was stepping firmly, with care and determination. She caught Luna's gaze and flashed her a wan grin.

Luna smiled back. I need not fear that the Ponies of my Sister's utopia have lost their spirit, judging by this one.

The stairs spiraled slowly around the launch tube in turn after turn. Luna knew the circumference and length of the tube, and approximately where it intersected the Dragon's caverns. The rest was eidetic memory and the super-equine capacity for visualization which came with being an adult Alicorn. Hence, she knew precisely how close they were approaching to the height at which the Dragon had breached the launch tube.

She might have known anyway. As they got about halfway up the tube, they began to encounter small pieces of debris which had rolled down from above. Drifts of dust, then pebbles, and finally boulders of native rock. They had to step carefully to avoid dislodging them.

They were dangerously close to the Dragon now.

Luna signaled a halt. She perked up her ears. There was complete silence on the ancient stair. Then there was a sound.

It was a great breathy whispering susurration, accompanied by a faint metallic scratching. Luna knew what it was. She looked at Summer, and saw her companion's eyes widen when Summer came to the same realization.

It was the Dragon, breathing.

Stay here, Luna motioned Summer, and very, very carefully, she climbed the last part of the stair.

It was partly blocked by debris. She could see where an ancient crack, the product of some unknown violence, had sheared through the armored double sleeve of the launch tube, unknown millennia ago. The crack started abut midway up the last part, and from it a rift widened into the living rock. She stopped, forcing herself to remain calm, something not entirely easy under the circumstances even for herself, and she smelled fresh air wafting in from the crevice, proof that it provided admittance into caverns which in turn connected with outside.

The air was, of course, not entirely fresh. There was also a strong archosaurian smell, like that of a great bird or crocodile. She was quite familiar with such a scent. It was the scent of the Dragon. But it was much weaker from the crevice than from the stairway up. The crevice clearly entered the same caverns at a point farther from the Dragon's own location than the stairs. This was all the opportunity she needed.

What she did next was perhaps foolish. But she had to do it at this point. Partially because, despite all her Cosmic-spawned super-equine senses, she felt the atavistic desire to see her foe, to confirm her conclusions.

She crawled, inch by inch, up the turn of the stair.

And she saw it.

The ancient crevice had here been greatly widened, as if some vast creature, massing a hundred tons or more, a living excavation machine with teeth harder than diamonds and claws of iridium steel had torn its way through stone and armor like a foal digging through loose soil. A monster to which the best which the Age of Wonders could build was little more than cardboard and paper-mache, to be ripped aside at whim.

Which was exactly what had happened.

And the monster which had done this was right there.

She saw the Dragon, or rather part of the Dragon, and he was completely blocking the upper exit of the stairway, and would have been even if the destruction he had wrought pushing his forequarters into the launch tube had not almost completely blocked that exit with rubble. The part she saw was a huge, curved plate of what looked like metal in the dim light, but which she could smell was in fact a complex composite of silicon polymers grown into a plate of iridium steel which had been organically-desposited, grown by the great beast of whom this was but one mere lamellar scale, the creature which had lain itself casually and perhaps even unknowing across the stair in the process of draping itself partly out into the launch tube, from which it clearly apprehended the main danger.

She considered attacking. It would be easy. A full-powered gravity lance, emitted at this angle, would penetrate right through even the inches-thick iridium steel of the Dragon's ventral scales, through the immensely-tough metal-reinforced bones underneath, and possibly even out through the dorsal armor above. Swing the beam slightly as she did so, and she would wreak fearsome damage within the creature, tearing apart flesh and pulverizing internal organs. It might be a mortal blow, though she did not know if it would be instantly fatal. Probably not, she admitted to herself. Dragons are tenacious of life. A Dragon this size would have multiple hearts, batteries of lungs, the ability to in emergencies compartment off parts of its circulatory system. Even though it lacked her own rapid regenerative powers, it would be almost as hard to slay as herself.

But the Dragon, caught unawares, would not have its strongest defenses up. It would not be maneuvering to avoid critical hits, and its shields would not be up to spread and blunt her own gravity lances. It would be vulnerable in a way it would never be if it knew she was attacking.

In the end, three things caused her to decide against attacking then and there.

Firstly, Celestia had told her to avoid killing unless unavoidable, and there was no way she could strike like this with enough force to subdue the Dragon and be at all sure of not killing it. Secondly, in either case the Dragon in its agonies would thrash about and could easily bring down the whole cavern system upon their heads -- an event Luna would surely survive, but which might prove fatal to Summer Lightning or the unknown captive. Thirdly, it would be a foul blow, and Luna did not like foul blows. She was a simple Concept, after all, and had an equally-simple sense of honor.

So she backed away again, and in her motion made a small mistake, but one which might have had large consequences. Her hoof brushed a pebble,which bounced down the stair, out of her field of silence, making a small clatter.

A small clatter, but a Dragon's ears are sharp.

Luna froze in horror, afraid to move rapidly and hence make more noise that would pinpoint her location. She could teleport, but that would draw its attention more surely, and then Summer would be left exposed to its wrath. Her best bet would be to put up her own shield, and fight directly -- if the Dragon could sense where she was.

A huge shield spell engaged above her. She saw the armor plate move rapidly across her narrow field of vision as the Dragon shifted position. There was a moment of full visibility and then something which she recognized as part of a great foot blocked the stair. From somewhere came a great indrawing of breath, as the Dragon sampled the air.

"I SMELL YOU!" the Dragon roared. "YOU'RE TRYING TO CLIMB THE SHAFT! WHERE ARE YOU HIDING? NO MATTER!"

Luna felt the air begin to ionize around her and might have acted with a shield spell of her own, which would have given the game away, had she not realized something very important.

The Dragon thought they were trying to climb the shaft. That meant he did not know they were on the stair. His head and upper body were in the shaft. He was about to breathe lightning in the wrong direction.

They were safe, as long as they kept calm.

Summer, don't shy, she thought urgently, but with no attempt at telepathy as that too might have drawn the Dragon's attention. Keep calm. It was more of a fervent wish than an attempt at communication.

Blinding light flared from above. Thunder roared, almost deafening, even muffled by rock and armor and the Dragon's own massive form, as nigh-solid ionic bolts screamed down the launch tube. The walls of the stairwell shook, and dust and small pebbles rolled down the stairs. And this was just from proximity to the Dragon's breath. Nothing not shielded by strong magic could have survived a direct hit, and even anypony caught in the fringe would have been slain. The sound persisted long enough that she knew that the Dragon was angling his blast slightly, scouring the walls of the shaft to ensure catching any attempting to cling to them would be struck.

When the world stopped shaking, she began picking her way carefully -- very carefully, back down around the curve of the stair. She kept an eye on the Dragon, saw him move, readied to raise her shields the moment she saw his eye or sensed any sign that he was preparing to breathe down the stair -- even his deflected blast would be enough to hurt her, where she was right now, and possibly harm Summer, especially as it would certainly trigger further collapses.

She saw more ventral scales, then one settled down on the gap. The Dragon had still not realized they were on the staircase! Possibly, it had not even noticed the staircase, or realized that it was still open most of the way down to beings as small as Ponies. This made it even more obvious that he had only taken up residence here very recently -- any Dragon who had laired here long would know every nook and cranny of his lair, and have taken steps to prevent ingress even from passages too small to admit his own body.

In either case, the Dragon had made a mistake, and one which they could still exploit.

She made her way back to Summer Lightning. The small Pegasus was still where Luna had left her, standing firm. She was trembling slightly, but had plainly not panicked.

Luna leaned in close and formed a hollow bubble of silence around their heads.

"The Dragon's blast was aimed down the launch tube," Luna said softly. "He knows not we are upon this stair. Halfway up to him is a fissure that leads into his caverns. By this way shall we pass him."

"Yes, Ma'am," replied Summer.

"As I said, when we find the captive thou shalt see her to safety. I shall wait behind, to bar the way against the Dragon."

Summer said nothing, but her face showed a protest that both gladdened and troubled the heart of the Alicorn.

"Thy desire to guard mine own self says well of thee, but thou canst not survive the struggle against such a drake in close quarters, as can I," Luna pointed out. "And the captive may sorely need thy aid. T'is no shame to do thy own part in this quest."

"Yes, Ma'am," Summer nodded. "I understand."

"Then fare us well -- to the rescue!"

Author's Note

Music for the Dragon.

And yes, Luna's even harder to kill. That's how tough Alicorn Avatars are. And what Luna is really would require specially-designed weapons, or another Cosmic being, to seriously harm.

Chapter 10: Rescuing

The fissure was narrow, and had never been smoothed with equine hooves in mind. They crawled in, Luna in the lead. It was a claustrophobic climb, conducted in as much silence as possible, aided by Luna's magic as much as she dared, made possible only by Luna's great strength and the lightness of Summer's small frame. At some sections they scrambled over absurdly uneven ground, placing each hoof carefully to avoid injuring a leg; at others squeezed through narrow passages; and at still others climbed near-vertically. It was a difficult path, and would be still more difficult burdened with a possibly-injured hostage. Only the fact that they would be able to use their flight-fields on the way back rendered rescue by this route at all practical.

Finally, they found themselves standing on a horizontal shelf. Behind them the crevice chimneyed down. From ahead, there came a draught of relatively fresh air. There was a hint in that breeze of mountain heights, but there was also the strong archosaurian tang of Dragon.

They had clearly climbed all the way to the Dragon's lair.

Now, Luna would leave Summer Lightning at the entrance, and fare further alone, to either rob the Dragon of his hostage, or gift him with a far greater one. Or worse, a trophy.

Luna halted Summer halfway along the shelf. Wind, she signed, and showed its probable direction -- toward the dragon with ocasional back-eddies. Scent. This close to the Dragon, she did not want to dare audible speech.

Summer nodded and saluted.

While the stone still shielded her from direct-line detection, Luna dared one last quick casting, a simple odorless spell, that reduced her scent to almost nothing by selectively keeping organic molecules larger than carbon dioxide and methane from leaving the vicinity of her own body. The effect on her would of course be the opposite -- after a couple of hours of this, she would stink -- but there was no such thing as a free lunch, especially where magic was concerned. The thaumic radiation was minimal, and with this and the silence on her hooves, she knew she had a good chance of slipping right past the Dragon, especially if his attention remained fixed on the old launch tube.

At least, going in. Going out, she feared she might have to improvise.

Luna reached the end of the shelf, where a horizontal crack opened into a wide tunnel, broad enough that four team-drawn wagons might have rolled along side by side. The floor was even smooth enough that this might have been practical, which -- combined with the arch-like conformation of the walls and ceiling, made Luna suspect that someone had shaped this cavern -- and, if so, probably more recently than the building of the ancient Amareican missile base, unless the architecture of that base had been very non-standard.

Which, of course, it might have been. In the last half-century of Amareica's existence, conventional wars had become uncommon, as the world stablized under the Amareican nuclear umbrella. However, all sorts of strange criminal and terrorist groups had emerged, and equally-strange special forces and law enforcement units been commissioned and chartered to fight them. The Joes, to which Moondreamer Finemare had frequently served as a civilian engineering consultant, were actually one of the more normal ones. A lot of very odd cutting-edge military and paramilitary equipment had been hidden in some even odder places. They had fought for freedom where there was trouble, and repeatedly saved the world -- until the Cataclysm had come, bringing doom from an entirely-unexpected direction.

Enough wool-gathering, Luna scolded herself. Putting off the moment of decision. But -- in most literal truth now -- 'tis time to face the Dragon!

Cautiously, keeping her most potent spells of offense and defense at the ready, Luna stepped round the corner.

And saw the Dragon.

Or rather, she saw the Dragon's rear end.

This was entirely in accord with her hopes; the reason the Dragon's rear end was facing her was that the Dragon was poised at the opening in the old missile tube, watching and listening intently, like nothing so much as a gigantic cat crouched before a mouse-hole. Its gaze was entirely fixed forward; as long as it remained so obsessed, Luna could pass behind it without being spotted.

Step by step, Luna made her way down the tunnel away from the Dragon, all the while keeping an eye on the immense creature. This was in part to make certain that it wasn't craning its neck around to look at her, but also in part because she liked to look at Dragons: they were such beautiful, magnificent beings, so perfectly formed as weapons of war: like great living swords, yet with minds and hearts and souls.

Even from behind, the lightning-drake was wonderful: massive, muscular haunches, the huge hind legs, almost delicately cantilevered on the long bones of their feet, a delicacy made possible only because their muscles incorporated silane fibers; and their bones, lattices of iridium steel, supporting and protecing the calcium without and marrow within. The Dragon was the size of a small skyscraper, but with its elastic, amply-reinforced musculo-skeletal system, was as agile and resilient as a Pony, its tough construction and excellent evolutionary design defeating the normal implications of the square-cube law as it limited living beings.

She admired Dragons, even though her role as the Lady of War meant that she sometimes had to fight, even kill them. She would almost certainly have to fight, and perhaps kill, this Dragon, but she still found it -- him, she realized, as the haunches shifted, the colossal counterweight of the tail switched, and she glimpsed the narrow cloacum and prominent pubic ridge, signs of draconian masculinity -- to be beautiful. He was much more than a millennium old, doubtless a living repository of lore, second only to a very few other Dragons, and of course herself and her Sister. To slay him -- it would be like burning down an ancient library.

So went her thoughts as she soft-hooved it past the great creature who was vigilantly watching the wrong way in. She was making for the large side-cavern she had spotted in her original density scan, one toward the center of the zone from which she had detected the distress calls of the Alicorn foal. As she approached the entrance to that cavern, she heard a faint but distinctly equine noise, at which her heart jumped and her ears perked up, for fear that the Dragon might also hear it and look toward the source of those sounds -- in the process, spotting her own self. Soon she relaxed, for she saw that the lightning-drake was paying absolutely no attention to them. She, for her part, listened carefully, to gain what intelligence she could regarding their origin and nature.

They constituted a sort of muttering.

The voice was obviously that of a mare, but low-pitched and throaty. It sounded young, but definitely adult. The diction was excellent, and Luna got the impression that -- under better conditions -- it might have sounded lovely.

As it was, the voice was strained, and a bit ragged -- and its owner on the brink of madness.

"... cannot be how it ends," the voice was saying. "Not after all that Trixie has seen, not after all that Trixie has done, not with so much more to see and do. Not after she has glimpsed her high destiny! Surely, Trixie's story cannot just finish, in such an ignominious manner!" There was a faint clatter of chains. "This cannot be how it ends ..."

Luna noticed three things. The first was that this Trixie talked about herself in the third person, even to herself, which would have been a peculiar affectation even for a noblemare in the Time of Thrones, a thousand years and more ago, and seemed almost unknown in this informal latter days. The second was that, even when in danger of her life, and possibly going mad, Trixie still used words such as "glimpsed" and "ignominious", which implied a fairly high degree of intelligence -- or at least vocabulary.

The third was that Trixie was amazingly melodramatic, even in a real crisis. This, oddly enough, made Luna feel some sympathy for her -- Luna, herself, had more than once been accused of the same failing, sometimes by her Sister.

It of course occurred to Luna that this was probably the same "Trixie" whom Twilight Sparkle had encountered earlier at Ponyville, and about whom Luna had been informed by Celestia. "Trixie" was an unusual name, and right now Luna was within sixty-five miles of Ponyville. Besides, that Trixie had been a showmare, and the little rant this mare kept repeating sounded distinctly theatrical.

Could Trixie be the Alicorn foal? Of course, she sounded like a young mare, rather than a literal foal, but there was more than one way an Alicorn could Incarnate. Not all were born Alicorns like Luna and her Sister: some were born as other creatures and then Ascended to Alicornhood. This was especially likely if they had not yet been born as Concepts. This was rare: however, Luna remembered Celestia discussing, long ago, the possibility of a new generation of Concepts emerging from Ponykind.

Whoever and whatever Trixie was, she was an Equestrian Pony in trouble. It was Luna's duty to rescue her.

With one last look to make certain that the Dragon had not yet noticed her, Luna stepped into the side passage. She heard the chains clatter again from within. One good thing about what Trixie is doing, Luna thought, is that the noise will make it harder for the Dragon to hear any sounds I happen to make.

Luna crept carefully into the side tunnel, putting each hoof down precisely, watching out for loose stones. She could sense no warding spells here, but began to feel the faint glimmer of a magic-damper operating up ahead. The Dragon must needs employ it to keep Trixie captive. Still, this is reason for further caution -- a strong enough magic-damper could contain mine own self. Continuing her careful advance, and looking up and to the sides to be wary of any possible damper-traps, Luna pressed onward, further into the side tunnel.

She rounded the curve, and found herself gazing upon the Dragon's hoard.

It was almost definitely not his main hoard, because it would have been foolish for the Dragon to take that into a territorial raid, and a Dragon didn't get to be that big and powerful and old by being foolish. Still, it was quite considerable -- there was a lot of metal and crystal by the standards of any pre-industrial civilization -- a fair amount, even in modern Equestrian terms.

Luna was definitely impressed by it, even though she knew that the Dragon was almost certainly practicing the usual dressing technique of arranging the less precious materials in the center of the mound, arranging the most precious ones as the top layer, to give the illusion of a huge pile of noble metals and precious gems, embodying a truly absurd amount of wealth. It wasn't the wealth that impressed her, though. It was the degree of honor-commitment implied by the fact that the Dragon had been willing to bring this much on his raid -- and then hazard it on a fight he was unlikely to win.

Luna undestood something of Draconic psychology and culture. Though Fischfootur had done something similar, it had been from very different motives. Fischfootur was naïve: it hadn't occurred to him that by challenging Luna, he might forfeit the hoard he'd brought, and in any case he had liked Luna, and Ponies in general. And if Fischfootur had died in the fight, the disposition of his hoard wouldn't have mattered to him, because he was almost certainly childless. Living, the sheer honor of having survived a fight against Luna outweighed his risk of material loss.

The big lightning-drake's position was entirely different. He was old and would be wise; he not only grasped the full implications of the laws of challenge, but was planning to use them to achieve his own ends, especially if he lost, which given his age and wisdom was almost surely his expectation. Luna was uncertain of his ends, save in that they were unlikely to be good for herself, Equestria or Ponykind. He despised Ponykind; he hated Luna herself as a monster. His strategy would be based on his assumption of Luna's monstrous nature; Luna could see this, much as the awareness pained her.

Thus, he was expecting Luna to try to kill him; given the level of power she had shown in the Time of Thrones, he was probably expecting her to succeed in killing him. This did not mean that Luna could relax if there was a fight, as there would almost certainly be, because the Dragon would be doing his best to kill her as well. What it did mean was that he could not be deterred by any threat of death, as he had already accepted his own death as the price of his strategem. Indeed, even if he killed Luna, he would likely die -- Celestia's wrath in that event would be terrible, and it was improbable that the lightning-drake imagined he might slay Celestia.

Given these assumptions, what was the lightning-drake expecting to accomplish? Luna forced herself to think along the unpleasant patterns of diplomacy ... she much preferred outright combat to the prevarications of international politics, but in her role she had schooled herself to comprehend them, an absolute necessity for a Ruling Princess, even if one were primarily the Lady of War.

He wants an incident, she realized. Something that Equestrians would interpret as proper behavior on my part, but that Dragons would find shockingly vile. Not merely killing the lightning-drake, Dragons would consider that a normal possible outcome of a duel, but killing him in some situation that would outrage Draconic morals. Such as ... she looked out onto the glittering mass of metal and crystals ... ... oh. Of course. Killing him as part of the robbery of his Hoard.

The Dragon code of honor was complicated regarding Hoards. A Dragon owned his Hoard, even if it had been plundered from other beings (which was actually where a lot of their wealth came, though another good part came from the regular taxation of lands they ruled). However, a Dragon did not rightfully own anything in a Hoard which had been taken wrongfully -- which is to say from beings with whom the Dragons had promised not to plunder and who did not owe them tribute.

This Hoard was in Equestria, which was a land with which the Dragons had a treaty prohibiting plunder. But the treaty worked both ways. Dragons could not plunder Equestrian persons or their property, but Equestrians were likewise forbidden from plundering Dragons.

If Luna defeated the lightning-drake in the course of a duel triggered by his invasion of Equestria, any Hoard he brought with him belonged to Equestria under the treaty, unless she yielded the right. Yielding the right was exactly what she had done regarding Fischfootur, because she wanted to befriend him; nodrake would expect her to deal as generously with the lightning-drake, under the circumstances.

Here was where it got tricky. Luna, as an accredited representative of Equestria, had the right to fight the lightning-drake and if victorious take possession of the Hoard he had brought.

Trixie didn't. The Dragon's lair was seriously out of the way, high on a steep mountain, and there had been no reports of any of the Dragons making captive anypony save for Trixie. What had Trixie been doing, that had gotten her captured by the lightning-drake? There was one obvious answer, especially if she were the Trixie who had lost all her worldly goods at Ponyville a bit earlier.

If Luna killed the Dragon in order to rescue Trixie, who had tried to plunder the Dragon's Hoard, this would be seen by Dragonkind as an Equestrian violation of the treaty, and by a Ruling Princess at that. If she then took the Hoard, that would seal it in their eyes. This might not mean outright war -- wars were less likely things to start than most layponies realized -- but it would certainly strengthen any anti-Equestrian factions in the Dragon Realms.

Luna could not forbear from rescuing Trixie. Sacrificing an Equestrian citizen to Draconic politics would be a betrayal of her duty as a Ruling Princess of Equestria, and it would moreover -- and quite rightly -- earn contempt from the Dragons themselves. Nor could she avoid fighting the lightning-drake, if he insisted on fighting her. What she could do was try to avoid killing the Dragon, and in any case ensuring the return of his Hoard, so that none could plausibly claim greed as her motive for fighting him.

So, she would neither slay the Dragon nor plunder his Hoard. Though that last was not entirely true. For there was one object in the Dragon's Hoard which she meant to remove, and return to Equestria. But then, that object -- which had just now become visible as Luna further rounded the corner -- was the very reason why she had climbed by such a slow and torturous path through the guts of the mountain.

The object was the Pony chained to a side wall.

Luna experienced a slight emotional disorientation as she realized that she had just thought of the Pony as an "object," which meant that she had been thinking in Draconic reference frames. To a Dragon, there were two ways that another being could "belong" to that Dragon and hence be viewed possessively. The first was if the Dragon and that being really liked one another, and thus the Dragon could count its Love or Friendship as an asset. The second was if the Dragon regarded that being as lawfully-taken prey, and hence as its slave -- or worse.

The fact that this Pony was chained to the wall made it obvious how the Dragon regarded her.

Standing in the shadows, Luna had not yet been spotted by Trixie -- for that was, of course, who it was, an identity confirmed as she resumed her little rant. Luna took the opportunity to examine her unobserved.

She was a blue Unicorn mare, with very pale-bluish-white hair, so pale as to seem almost pure white. Her mane was long and fine. It must have normally been quite beautiful, but it had not been tended for days, and it was tangled, with dirt within. Her delicate, fine-featured face was contorted in a snarl of hatred and rage, an emotion which Luna assumed was directed mainly at the Dragon. Her purple eyes flashed with outrage, presumably at her present postiion.

Look at her, Luna thought to herself. Captive of a gigantic Dragon, facing an unknown fate, and she's still angry, still defiant. Foolish filly. It's almost admirable. She felt a strange warmth toward the captive.

Trixie shifted position, and Luna saw it -- her Mark. Magic wand over crescent moon. It didn't prove anything, of course -- dermosignomancy was not that precise -- but it made what Luna already suspected seem even more likely. Her coloration, her attitude -- they all pointed toward one obvious conclusion. Trixie was her own remote descendant, and one who manifested many of Luna's own traits.

Luna knew that this conclusion might well be false. Even if it were true, the connection would be at least forty generations removed. The similarities would be the result of repeated atavistic combinations. But the combinations were there. The similarities were real. Luna felt sure of it.

She gazed at her distant descendant in wonder. There was nothing new about meeting a direct descendant. She had borne her first foal over twenty-four and three-quarters centuries ago, to Lore Diver of the Crystal City, back in the days when she had still hoped that the tyranny of Discord over most of the rest of the world would be a short one. That filly, Moon Mimic, was an ancestor of pretty much every Pony in North Amareica, by one lineage or another. And she had borne many, many foals since then.

But Trixie -- the similarities were very strong, almost as if she were a daughter or grand-daughter, and that was impossible, as Luna had been absent from the Earth for a thousand years. Or almost impossible -- the Cosmic Concepts, and those who dealt extensively with them, were not entirely bound by linear time, and often had strange arts biological -- but it was very, very improbable that Trixie was closer than fifty generations to herself.

Which made her resemblance to Luna all the more wonderful -- in all senses of the word. Especially because Luna had a very manipulative older Sister, who liked to play some long and twisty games -- and who had more or less assigned Luna her current task. She remembered the strange tone in which Celestia had talked of Trixie earlier. Celestia meant me to meet her, and without my being aware in advance of our kinship.

Still, she could not have arranged everything, Luna reflected. Trixie's humiliation at Ponyville, her capture by the Dragon, those must have been chance events, to which Celestia simply adapted her plans. Ever was it with her, ever shall it be with her. This is why she is such a capable schemer: her schemes are always flexible. So -- why does she want me to meet Trixie?

Luna mulled it over briefly, but could see no answer clear. Moreover, she could perceive no wise in which the answer would affect what she should do in her current situation. She still had to rescue Trixie, and defeat the Dragon without slaying him. So -- on with her quest!

Trixie had once again begun her mad little mantra denying her doom -- a statement which, Luna noted, would be quite accurate if Luna were successful in her mission. Moreover, Luna might turn this mantra to their advantage. She mentally-recorded the little monologue. Having done this, Luna waited until Trixie finished her speech.

As soon as Trixie did, Luna cast her spell and stepped forward into the mage-lights which the Dragon had placed to illuminate his Hoard -- and thus, into full view of the Unicorn.

Trixie's eyes widened as she saw Luna, and Trixie gasped in surprise.

"Hush," said Luna softly. "I have laid silence and an audible glamour on the mouth of this cave to deceive the Dragon, but loud voices will strain the spell, risking discovery. I am Luna Selena Nyx, Princess of Equestria, and I am here to rescue you."

Trixie's eyes fixed on her in mute appeal, and Luna bent to examine her bonds. There were steel shackles around all four limbs: as was standard, these were bent around the cannons in a such a manner that the flare of her hooves precluded their merely being pulled off. As she examined them, she noticed that they had been arc-welded shut.

"Did the Dragon close them with his own power?" Luna softly asked.

"Yes," whispered Trixie, evidently very afraid lest the Dragon overhear. Her expression was very strained.

Luna saw that Trixie's blue hairs were singed all around the metal. That must have been rather painful, she thought, pursing her lips for a moment in unavoidable sympathy. "Did he quench them once they were sealed?" she asked.

"Yes," replied Trixie. She seemed subdued.

"That's good," commented Luna. Had he not quenched them quickly, the heated metal would have discharged its thermal energy into Trixie's flesh for a while, inflicting protracted agony on the Unicorn, and quite probably laming her.

Still, it didn't look as if he'd taken many pains to avoid inflicting some harm, and Luna imagined that the flesh under that steel would be hairless and perhaps angry red. If he'd kept her like that for days, there would be serious infections; as it was, the metal would chafe and limit her mobility.

"You'll be able to walk once these are off," Luna continued.

She looked up, peered at the power-damper affixed to Trixie's horn. It had been chained around her neck, tight-gathered where throat met jaw so that she couldn't just slip it off, and two links roughly welded together at her cheek. There was a burn there as well -- Luna thought it would heal without much scarring, which would probably be important to Trixie if she got out from here alive -- stage performers were vain of their faces.

She knew how the lightning-drake had done all this. Despite their monstrous appearances, Dragons were tool-users, and often skilled ones. Their great talons, capable of tearing through rock with such ease, were remarkably precise instruments, completely under the control of the big and well-protected brains which were deep within those heavily-armored skulls.

"Did he use needle-pliers?" Luna asked. She'd seen the size of the Dragon's claws, and she didn't think he could have done this work bare-taloned.

"Yes!" replied Trixie, looking at her in some surprise. "Ones bigger than Trixie! The ends were like swords! He could have ... at any moment ... Trixie was ..." her voice quavered.

Luna nodded. "I would wager 'twas an unpleasant moment," she commented. She was deliberately understating the issue. It must have been terrifying -- but she did not want to drive Trixie into outright panic.

Trixie simply nodded.

Luna figured out what she was going to do. "I'm going to cut those off," she said. The task was beyond her ability to do at all quietly with any of the tools or weapons she carried. "I am going to use magic -- a sort of magic at which I am very, very skilled. I think I can do this without the Dragon noticing, and without hurting you too much. But this may hurt a bit ... and 'twould go very badly for thee if thou shouldst scream -- dost thou understand, Trixie?"

Trixie nodded, her eyes growing even wider. Her lip quavered. "I .... I ..." she swallowed quickly, her lip stiffened. "The Brave and Stoic Trixie will not scream."

She hath an odd manner of speech, Luna thought. Aloud, she said: "Good girl. Be thou ready for it ... set ... now!"

A very precisely-focused, biphase graviton pulse lashed out from Luna's horn. The two emissions were configured so that where they met -- and only where they met -- an oscillating shearing plane of force was generated. At the same time, a telekinetic field gripped the shackle on Trixie's left foreleg, clamping it stationary against the tremendous forces that Luna was generating.

The gravitons were of course invisible to most mortal perceptions, though Luna could sense them perfectly well, a fact which made her task tremendously easier. There was a flare of visible light along a line along the shackle; a grinding noise, and then a squeal of bending metal as Luna telekinetically-wrenched the cut shackle open, a clatter as she cast it aside.

Trixie gasped -- she would have felt a heat flash as the graviton pulse dumped much of its energy into the shackle as heat; a vibration as the shackle shivered apart along the line of the cut; and none of these would have felt pleasant against flesh already burned by the lightning-drake doubtless-crude and callous earlier welding. But, to her great credit, she did not make any louder utterance.

Now Luna acted even more swiftly. The first removal had given her the exact strength of the steel, and enabled her to know precisely how to proceed. The second removal was a quick pulse-and-wrench, less than a second; then came the third, then the fourth. As the shackles clattered to the floor of the hoard-chamber, Luna lifted her head to the chain of the horn-damper, severed one link with a weaker pulse, and stripped off the damper.

"Trixie is free!" the Unicorn crowed in delight. "Thank you! Thank you!" She took an uncertain step forward.

Luna heard a great clattering sound from the main tunnel outside, one she knew all too well from the many, many times she had fought Dragons. The sound of something very large, scrambling in a small space to turn around very rapidly. Even Luna, hardened by many centuries of battle, felt sudden fear.

She said a very old but very inelegant Equestrian word relating to excretory processes.

"Hey!" squealed Trixie as Luna simply grabbed the Unicorn in her aura and swung her up on the Alicorn's own back. "Trixie was trying to -- Eek!"

Luna galloped forward at full speed, no longer worrying all that much about silence. Somewhere in the middle of the run she launched herself into the air, wings beating, and she was flying as she shot out from the end of the side tunnel into the main cavern, both psychic and gravitic shields snapping up to full power, generating a pulse of psycho-kinetic energy that the Dragon would have had to have been mind-blind to miss.

Not that it mattered, for the Dragon had finished turning around, and was looking straight at her, crest raising in fury, dark-blue eyes blazing in hatred.

"HOARD-THIEF!" the great basso voice boomed at her. Simultaneously came a tremendous wash of Dragonfear, enough that it might well have cowed even Luna had not her mental shields already been at full intensity. As it was, she shivered slightly at the psychic assault, and she heard a whimper of utter terror from her passenger, who was only imperfectly-protected by Luna's mental defenses -- fortunately, it made Trixie cling all the tighter to the Alicorn.

Luna knew exactly why the Dragon had projected the Fear at them -- to make her pause and become vulnerable -- and she wasn't about to fall into that trap. She threw herself into a corkscrewing flight as she headed down the main tunnel, apparently directly at him, pulling the brace of javelins off her war-harness and readying her next maneuver ...

"DIE!!!" the Dragon roared, and brilliant bluish-white light blazed down the tunnel. He had deliberately de-focused his beam slightly, countering Luna's agility with an ion spray that filled the entire main tunnel with multiple lightning bolts. One struck a glancing blow against Luna's defenses; a second hit her dead-on to the breastplate, and she staggered in mid-flight, just in time remenbering to grab the now-terrified Trixie, who was shrieking incoherently as gigawatts of electricity sprayed off Luna's shields, and other bolts blasted boulder-sized debris from the ceiling of the main tunnel. Some of the energy had penetrated to blow off her breastplate, and Luna felt a numbing shock to her front that she knew betokened a wound. Red-hot pebbles from the thermal explosions all around her rattled off her gravitic barrier.

Luna jinked hard to the right just in time, as a tight-focused ion beam -- a solid and straight bolt of lightning -- shot down the main tunnel. She could only guess the joules per square inch of that particle beam -- it was similar to those developed toward the end of the Age of Wonders for shooting down missiles such as the base she had designed was intended to launch. It wouldn't have killed her, but it would have blasted her back down the tunnel, and probably slain Trixie from one cause or another.

I have to pass her off to Summer, Luna realized. And quickly.

She had meant to save this for a more opportune moment, but there was no time now. As the great Draconian head turned toward her, spines glowing as the lightning-drake prepared to let loose with another ion beam, Luna ripple-fired her javelins right at its eyes.

The javelins were not really rockets, but they did not need to be. Luna aimed each javelin with her aura and then accelerated it rapidly with the full might of her telekinesis. Crack-crack-crack-crack! came the four shockwaves as each javelin broke the sound barrier, shooting at hypersonic velocities down the tunnel, trailing glowing streaks from the points where steel met air molecules and converted them into plasma.

It was a purely short-range technique, because these were not the kinetic-kill-vehicles of Sureguard anti-ballistic missiles: the warheads, in particular, were not made of heat-shielded composites, but only high-quality steel. Each javelin was ablating away like a meteorite as it flew, and the points were ruined before they struck, but then -- at over Mach Eight -- they had no need of sharpness in order to inflict their harm.

WHAM-WHAM ... WHAM-WHAM!!! Two explosions blossomed on the Dragon's head as the blunted warheads smashed into his armor at some three thousand yards per second; so fast that even to Luna's perceptions they looked not like projectiles, but rather energy beams. The third and fourth missed their targets and blew craters in the tunnel wall behind him.

The javelins were not explosive. But, at some two miles a second, each struck with tremendous force; enough to dump sufficient thermal energy into both warheads and dragons that the impact points were instantly heated to temperatures sufficient to vaporize both the inorganic steel of the warheads and the organic iridium steel composites of the Dragonscales.

The Dragon screamed in rage and pain as the explosions rocked his head back on his neck. Shattered scales, flesh and blood blew out from the sites of the thermal explosions. Each of those strikes would have killed any mortal Pony born; even an Alicorn would have been out of the fight had she taken those on her naked hide rather than magical shielding; a young Dragon would have been stunned. This Dragon was far from defeated; he was not even stunned: but for the moment he was slightly dazed. His head retreated within the cloud of dust, smoke and steam billowing from the impact points of the javelins.

Luna took full advantage of the moment, darting back down to the mouth of the crack from which she had just entered the main tunnel. She yanked Trixie from her back with her telekinesis.

"Go in, along the shelf," Luna said rapidly. "Mine friend awaits within, to see thee to safety."

Trixie stood there unmoving, eyes unfocused. The Unicorn was obviously also dazed by their recent experience.

"Go!!!" shouted Luna, and shoved her in and down the shelf with her telekinesis.

A faint outraged yelp was Luna's only sign that Trixie had at least partially returned to reality.

Luna had no time to worry about Trixie's feelings. For her radar was registering movement within the smoke cloud, the movement of a great metal-laced mass, and she turned to face the oncoming threat, her own muscles tensing as she prepared to leap ...

... and do battle with the Dragon.

Author's Note

This is Trixie not entirely at her best. She's had a rough few days of it.

And you see that Luna was, essentially, having the equivalent of an exuberant rough-house with Fischfootur, compared with the way she's fighting the Lightning Drake.

Next chapter: "Battling."

Chapter 11: Battling

Luna launched herself into the air, remembering at the last moment to leap to the left, away from the entrance to the crevice. As she jumped, wings spreading to grip spacetime, she projected a powerful shield forward, tilted slightly to the right. Given what the Dragon was likely about to do ... yes!

A huge blue claw, each individual talon the length of a pike, came out of the dust cloud at the end of an arm that stretched out like a living construction crane.

This shall be like unto a game of ball, thought Luna, as the claw struck and flared light from her shielding. She whuffed, as the fraction of the energy that penetrated drove the breath from her lungs. And I shall be the ball!

She was in midair, so naturally the claw -- driven by the tremendous inertia of the charging Dragon -- batted her back toward the tunnel wall. But, because she had angled the shield to her right, the collision drove her to her left, away from her friends.

Luna projected an elastic shield backward, tucked herself in, and bounded off the wall. She corkscrewed at the last moment, and a pair of jaws which could have engulfed a typical multi-roomed Pony house whole snapped shut on the space she would have otherwise occupied.

Luna put on a bust of speed, rose and lashed the Dragon with lightning. She knew that this would be entirely ineffective against the great lightning drake; the whole point of this exercise was to annoy him, draw his attention away from the two other Ponies escaping into the crevice. As she did this she slowed, dropped and twisted unpredictably, the better to evade his expected counterstrike.

The Dragon whirled with surprising rapidity, squalling in indignation and swiping about reflexively with his right claw. The great talons whistled past Luna's right wing and flank, missing her by but a few hoof-lengths. The closeness of this call was no accident. Luna was intentionally flying at the very edge of danger, tracking the giant archosaur's motions and skipping out of his way at the last moment.

It was a dangerous game she played, for all her power. Luna, as the Alicorn Avatar of Gravity, disposed of more total energy than did the Lightning Drake, for all his great size. Such was the supernal skill of her Sister, Fusion, in crafting the Alicorn Pony form in the first place.

But even the skills of Celestia, even when she was on the Cosmic Level, were limited by the fundamental laws of biology and physics. Alicorns were magnificently-engineered, and they could tap the Cosmic powers of their Creators -- albiet but weakly and clumsily, compared with the awesme, star-smashing strength and aeons-honed abilities of the Cosmic Concepts.

However, Alicorns were small. Large enough, to be true, by the standards of Ponies; but no more but the bare minimum needed to generate, tap and control their Cosmic-spawned powers. They were most definitely not crafted for what the Cosmics would deem heavy fighting -- that was the job of the Cosmic Battleforms, those miles-wide living planetoids which wielded the reality-destroying Negation Bolts, the ultimate weapons of the Cosmic Concepts in this era.

The Battleforms were awesome, but they were poorly-made for action on an equine scale. The purpose of the Alicorn incarnations among the Ponies, like that of the Angel forms in the Human worldlines, was to bear messages to and interact with ordinary organic lfe forms. As Alicorns, the Concepts could become Ponies, living among and enjoying the delights of Love and Friendship with them -- while still retaining access to a small measure of their Cosmic might -- the better to protect their client races from harm.

The Alicorn form, therefore, was something of a compromise between Cosmic and Equine ends. And like all compromises, there were necessary trade-offs. Big, impressive, intelligent and powerful as she was, an Alicorn could only fit into Equine cultures at the highest social strata, which -- as the Royal Pony Sisters could attest -- was often more trouble than it was worth. An Alicorn, to a considerable extent, lived her millennia-long lifespan in a world increasingly too small for her body and spirit. Never dying naturally, and hard to kill, they often ended their lives by voluntary discorporation, owing to boredom and even madness, finally returning with relief to the larger spaces of the Cosmic Level.

Contrawise,the Alicorn Pony was by Cosmic standards a very small and weak being. An Alicorn Pony was agile, quick-thinking and precise in the application of her powers. She was very tough for her size, with both active and passive defenses against harm most importantly, unless her form was entirely destroyed, she was hard to slay permanently; even then, the destruction of the Alicorn Pony form only released the small portion of the Cosmic spirit with which she was imbued to return to her greater Cosmic Self, bearing knowledge from the mortal world.

But her force was inconsequential beyond her immediate vicinity: making her utmost effort, Luna Selena Nyx could only emit a couple dozen TNT-ton-equivalents of energy per second, barely enough to level a moderate-sized city in a whole minute or so of application. And she couldn't keep that up for more than a few minutes. This was greater than the maximum destructive output of the great Lightning Drake, but not by more than a single order of magnitude.

In terms of brute physical strength, however, the Alicorn was much weaker. Perhaps more importantly, the Alicorn was far more fragile. Their defenses all drained thaumic energy, and though they could regenerate with fair rapidity, they were made of near-ordinary flesh and bone clothed in horsehide and hair coats -- nothing like the magnificent metal and silicate polymer composite-armored sandwich that was Dragonscale and Dragonhide, and which, as grown by a full-grown Dragon, could shed all but the most precisely-crafted and targeted artillery. Even a dazed Dragon was hard to harm; by contrast, once the thaum-thirsty defenses of the Alicorn were knocked down, the Alicorn Pony became terribly vulnerable.

An Alicorn was potentially more powerful than any Dragon ever hatched. But to win against an ancient Dragon like the one Luna was fighting, and to do so without bringing the mountain down on top of the very Ponies she meant to protect, Luna had to fight with finesse, rather than merely raw force.

Thus, Luna's strategy was essentially to draw the Dragon's attention away from her escaping friends, preoccupying the great Lightning Drake while those Ponies escaped to the caverns far beneath. She must be careful how she wielded her gravity lances, her most powerful form of energy-projection, lest she do major damage to the mountain. However, she must also be careful to avoid letting the Dragon score a serious hit on her, lest she be stunned and lose the fight.

It was a nice tactical problem.

Luna was very, very good at tactics.

Luna corkscrewed back down the tunnel toward the mouth of the cave complex; the high opening from which the Lightning Drake had previously defied her demand to leave Equestria. As she did so, she sprayed the Dragon with a burst of short but sharp gravity darts -- lances low-powered, but tightly focused. They were not strong enough to penetrate his thick scales to the relatively tender flesh beneath, but each packed enough force to rip off flakes and sting the great archosaur.

The Lightning Drake was already lowering his head to chase after Luna, and thus the darts spattered off his head and shoulders. The effect was visually-spectacular, as the gravitons dumped their energy into the metallic scales, spalling off fragments of those scales in a shower of white-hot sparks. However, Luna's experienced eye told her that little real damage had been done.

The Dragon hissed, stopped and replied with a shower of many small lightning bolts that arced down the tunnel at the Moon Princess. The bolts were poorly aimed and Luna was fortunate; she dived straight down, under the fusillade, then to the side as the Dragon tried to correct his aim down onto her. The electrical energy spent itself harmlessly against the top and sides of the tunnel, blasting masses of solid stone into rubble.

The loose debris, tumbling from the glowing impact points, gave Luna an idea. Seizing the pieces in her aura, she flung them in a series of stacatto snap-shots at the Lightning Drake, each one making an acoustic explosion at launch as it went supersonic, then spattering into smaller fragments on the Dragon's armored scales. The rocks, ranging from pebbles to a few small boulders, dented and cracked the scales, but could not pierce the thick composite armor of metallic scales backed by silicon-fiber reinforced hide.

It was a deliberately-desultory reprise of her earlier javelin attack. Her goal was to sting the Lightning Drake into committing himself fully into the fight against her, drawing him farther from her friends. In this, she was successful.

She felt the telltale buildup of electromagnetism a moment before the Lightning Drake's spikes started to glow with blue to ultraviolet light. Luna threw up her shields, angling them in front to refuse the left and in back to cushion that same direction.

Luna leaped into the air just as a tremendous ion bolt flared white-hot from the mouth of the monster. As she leaped, she automatically angled her shields to refuse the top, and the immense wash of energy sprayed over her shields, pushing her to the left and upward, as if she were some cargo in the clutch of an electromagnetic catapult.

The ion beam did not penetrate her front shields, but it slapped and scraped and bounced Luna off the stone tunnel wall and ceiling, which would also have hurt her had not her rear shields cushioned her from harm. As it was, the impacts were with sufficient force that the very rocks cracked open.

As this happened, the energy from the powerful ion bolt washed over and into the flaws thus formed, flash-heating the newly-exposed surfaces and causing thermal explosions, which tore loose large chunks of rock. Luna sailed backward on a trail of glowing discharges from her shields, while the tunnel walls surged and collapsed behind her from her points of impact. Dust billowed out to fill the air, hiding the Dragon.

Both Luna and the Lightning Drake had senses which could pierce his murk, though between the dust and the electrical discharges, none on either side provided anything nearly as precise a form of imaging as would have ordinary optical vision. Luna's senses were superior to the Dragon's, to the extent that -- as long as she kept maneuvering -- she was a difficult target, but not so difficult that she could count on the great Drake missing her.

Super-equine senses, processed through an equally super-equine cortex, combined seamlessly to warn Luna of the tremendous bulk surging toward her through the billowing dust clud. At the same time, Luna's eidetic memory and perfect directional and kinesthetic faculties enabled her to 'see' a ghostly outline of the caverns and stairs leading down to the old missile base beneath, even without sending out a pulse of deep-radar. Her memories of the obstacles to movement along that path, coupled with her knowledge of the physical capabilities of Summer Lightning and Trixie Lulamoon, provided her a continual estimate of the positions of her fleeing friends. This had to do, as even her senses couldn't detect just two Ponies, through lengths and lengths of solid rock.

Equipped with this information, she could position herself relative to the Dragon in such wise as to retain the tactical advantage while ensuring that neither her actions nor those of the Dragon could smash down the ceiling on top of her allies. She had to maintain a balance between preventing the Lightning Drake from defeating her and preventing Summer and Trixie from being harmed; a complex and continually-shifting geometric and tactical equation -- and one with considerable factors of uncertainity.

It was the sort of problem that few entities on Earth could have solved; a very short list not selecting her Sister. Celestia was better at magic and at social skills, but battle was Luna's element, and as a tactician the Moon Princess was almost unrivalled. It was an extension into her Incarnate form of the aeons-honed skills with which Gravity formed and manipulated solar systems, galaxies, and the vast strands of matter which made up the largest structures in the Universe.

In the exercise of these skills, Luna felt truly herself, truly alive: cleansed of the corruption of King Sombra and the Night Shadows; her heart was pure. She was Luna Selena Nyx, the Princess of War, and this is what she was born to do. She was fighting the foe and protecting her Ponies; there was room neither for guilt nor shame as she battled on.

As the Dragon emerged from the dust cloud, claws and jaws gaping wide in the attack, Luna darted down and planted herself at a point on the tunnel floor which formed one focus of an ellipsoid curve described by the Lightning Drake's leap. With one set of tractors she grasped the immense mass of the mountain around her, anchoring herself firmly; with a second the smaller but still tremendous mass of her enemy. In this position, a relatively small telekinetic force could change the trajectory of the great archosaur.

Luna pushed with a pressor beam. The Dragon banged and scraped against the ceiling his spikes scoring stone and ripping loose a shower of debris in his wake. He frantically flapped, the huge effector surfaces on his wings shaping his flightfield to push himself back downward. Luna responded by reversing the direction of her force, tractoring rather than pressing, deliberately overcorrecting his maneuver. With a startled cry, the Dragon smacked face-first into the tunnel floor; Luna had left him enough forward momentum that he flipped over his own head and slid for some distance, plowing up the solid stone with his spikes, some of those spikes breaking loose.

The whole tunnel shook to these titanic impacts. Rocks rained and dust sifted down from the pits torn in the walls and ceiling. For a moment, Luna feared that she had overestimated the strength of the surrounding stone, but a quick deep-radar pulse showed her that the formations were still structurally sound.

Her problem was not the structural integrity of the caverns, of course. It was still the Dragon. The tremendous throw she had performed upon him would have slain many creatures; but this was an full-sized ancient Dragon, a millennial monster of might almost equal to her own; his bones and organs were massively reinforced and redundant beyond the capacity of any normal beast or even any machine within the possibilities of the Ponies of the Age of Wonders. He was what the Neigh-ponese would have called a Dai-Kaiju -- a "Great Beast" -- and between his massive musculature and his natural magic, he was almost a god.

Faster than anypony who had not fought Dragons before would have imagined possible, the Lightning Drake rolled back onto his feet, shedding debris, including a few of his own spikes and a shower of glittering scales, as he struggled out of the trench which he had dug in the solid stone in his own sliding fall. He roared defiance at Luna, exposing individual teeth longer than her whole body, and emitted an electron spray which immediately jammed her electromagnetic radar and sparked lightning discharges all around her. The bolts were of trivial magnitude compared to his great ion bolts, but they forced her to keep her shields up to avoid numerous minor wounds. A fine spray of dust completely covered the vision of the combatants.

Now she could see the Dragon only by means of her gravitic deep-radar, through which she perceived him as a dim outline of moving metallic higher density than the surrounding rock and air. This provided her few details; she could barely keep track of the position of his limbs, let alone the expression on his face or the emanations from his spines. She was robbed of clues which would enable her to predict his actions. She suspected that his cortex could compensate for his own electromagnetic jamming, meaning he could see her reasonably well.

Luna rubbed air and water molecules together, emitting her own electron discharge from all around her, far weaker than the Lightning Drake's own, but in a pattern he should not be able to predict. If she'd done this right, she had successfully counterjammed him, and he had no gravitic deep-radar.

The air was a choking hell of dust lashed by the lightnings from both sides; she knew that this would pose no difficulty for the Dragon's massively-filtered and incredibly-tough respiratory system, backed up as it was by organic earthfire batteries as a metabolic power source. For her part, Luna had simply shut down her oxygen-based respiration and biochemical power generation entirely and was drawing her life energy from gravitic-compressed nuclear fusion. So, in an environment in which neither normal mammal nor archosaur could have survived without either extensive magic or technology, they fought on, both mostly naked.

Her deep-radar showed her plainly that the Dragon was charging. Indeed the floor under her hooves now shook to the Dragon's great footfalls; he had learned from his previous mistake, and was remaining on the ground to make it more difficult for her to repeat her throw of him. Her equine instincts told her to flee from the gigantic predator; her intellect told her that the last thing she wanted to do was lead him back toward the crevice into which her friends had fled.

Instead of fleeing, she charged.

She was counting on her jamming to obscure her exact position to the Dragon until she could get under him to strike from beneath.

Whether by underestimation of the Lightning Drake's sensory capabilities or by sheer bad luck, her plan went wrong.

As Luna darted toward the Dragon's belly, suddenly he changed the rhythm of his stride. Luna had just enough time to throw power into her top and bottom shields before the great foot, driven by his tremendout and massive muscles, slammed down right on top of her, smashing her into the solid rock beneath. Luna felt herself being crushed between archosaur and rock, energy sparking out through her shields, and loosed a diffuse gravity bolt downward, pulverizing the floor so that -- instead of having her bones broken by a compressing shield, the stone puffed out on all sides, as the Alicorn was pressed down into a pit roughly the size and shape of her own body.

For the moment, though, the Lightning Drake knew exactly where she was, and Luna could well predict his next move. He'll hit with a full-force ion bolt, she realized. I must not let him! She quickly calculated the angles and forces, was certain that she would not be aiming toward anyone or anything or important; also, that she would miss the archosaur's brain, which was vital because she did not want to actually kill him just because his shields were a bit weaker than she imagined.

Then, as the great claw began to move, she loosed a full-strength gravity lance straight up into the Dragon.

The powerful and tightly focused beam of force, cutting outward from a point no wider than the zone probably occupied by a single graviton -- the Horsenberg Uncertainty Principle prevented her from sharpening it any finer -- sheared through the shields on the Dragon's foot as if they weren't there, effortlessly slicing through mere metallic Dragonscale and the silicate-fiber Dragonhide beneath as if they had been so much tissue paper. They went through the flesh of the foot and the massive metallic bone of one metacarpal, stronger than the main structural support beam of a Pony skyscraper, and out through the other side of the Dragon's foot, and against the thicker shielding and armor around the Dragon's head.

Luna swung the beam so that it made a cut rather than a narrow shaft, and the Dragon roared in rage and pain as she severed two of his metacarpal bones. She could not see what the beam was doing to his head, save to detect from backscatter that it was at least partially penetrating, causing Dragnscales to be cut loose from the hide of his face. The great head moved back rapidly on the lever of the long, almost serpentine neck, as the Dragon flinched back from the gravity lance.

Now the beam, only slightly weakened by passing through the Dragon's foot, struck the unshielded and non-metallic matter of the tunnel roof. With a whining, crunching sound it cut through what must have been dozens of lengths of solid rock, thermal explosions occuring all along the length of the penetration, destroying the stability of the tunnel roof right overhead.

There was a flare of shielding right over Luna as the Lightning Drake belatedly reinforced the protection over his foot and rapidly withdrew that member as well. He had the wit and grit not to move his foot until he shielded it, Luna realized, admiring the Dragon's intelligence and courage even while she fought him in deadly earnest. Had he not done so, I would have wounded his foot far more sore.

Luna attempted to leap to her hooves but could only stagger clumsily, her whole body hurting from the crushing it had just received. Had she been an ordinary Pony, even the protection of her shields might not have been enough to prevent her from fatal injury; as it was, every part of her body ached, and she could feel the fizz of regeneration all through her system as severe internal injuries began healing.

The ceiling fell in on her.

Fortunately, she had been more or less expecting it, and so she kept her shields up, and also generated an oscillating area force beam upward and downward, reducing the rocks as they fell on her to gravel. This did not, of course, reduce their momentum at all, but it did mean that the mass was diffused and psuedo-fluidic above and beneath, trapping her within a vise of gravel instead of crushing her between two solid masses.

As this happened, she was aware that masses of rock were also falling upon the Lightning Drake, who was roaring and thrashing about, a tactic which looked like mere blind rage and frustration, but which Luna knew had a similar effect of distributing the burden upon the Drake survivably. "Survivably," of course, given his tremendous strength, toughness, armor and shielding. What Luna and the Lightning Drake were doing would of course have already killed any lesser beings, whether by battering, crushing or suffocation, several times over.

Luna could have cut herself free with her gravity lances, but she saw no reason to do this when she had subtler ways of regaining her tactical mobility. Instead, she Shifted into a mass of cold plasma -- an Alicorn enhancement of the Changeling Shifting power which Luna had especially practiced -- and oozed out of the still loose mass of rock into the relative freedom of the dust-choked air beyond. She then expanded a force field, clearing away both dust and air, and re-formed in the vacuum thus created before allowing the bubble to slowly collapse.

Her gravitic deep-radar could clearly sense the struggles of the Dragon as he writhed and ripped and tore through the masses of rock around him, striving toward Luna, whose direction he could clearly sense by some means. Probably the electromagnetic signature of my plasma and my force fields, she thought. A reminder not to overestimate my own advantages -- I doubt he can image me as I can him, but he knows my rough location.

Luna could have lashed the trapped Dragon with her lances, but they would have wasted energy penetrating the overburden of rock, and her energy reserves were momentarily exhausted from her recent flurry of action. So, instead, she stood and rested, letting her power recharge from their nigh-limitless Cosmic souces, channelling it into rapid regeneration, healing the myriad external and internal injuries she had suffered so far.

She knew that, in his own fashion, the great Dragon was doing the same under the rockpile. Dragons could draw energy from the ley lines, augmenting their chemical and earthfire metabolic processes. She could detect the unmistakable thaumic scatter from such a draw, beneath those rocks. The regenerative power of a Dragon was slower than that of an Alicorn, and to really complete the process the Dragon would have to sleep for at least a few days; but this power was one of the reasons why Dragons, like Alicorns, were so hard to kill.

Luna waited until all her serious hurts had healed -- there were still sore places, and angry red flesh under hide stripped of its coat, but those could be dealt with later, by means of long luxurious warm baths and lots of sleep in her own bed -- and then accumulated energy as she awaited the Dragon's emergence. She stood well back from the place of his burial.

This proved well-advised, as the Lighning Drake erupted from the rock in a spray of sizable boulders, none of them on trajectories threatening to strike the Alicorn. More annoying and -- had Luna been anypony else -- more dangerous was the spray of lightning bolts heralding the apearance of the great archosaur's head. It was a blindly-aimed area attack, and Luna easily bent the few bolts aimed anywhere near her around herself with her own electromagnetic powers.

Luna replied with a blunt pressor-beam ram to the Lightning Drake's rising head, rocking back that great cephalic appendage upon the serpentine but muscular neck from which it grew. The brute-force attack could not penetrate the Dragon's defenses to do significant tissue damage, but like a hoof to the head of a helmeted Pony, battered the brain within against its own cranial case. The Dragon shook his head, dazed and briefly unable to act.

The Moon Princess pressed her momentary advantage. Shouting a war-cry of the Legions of Lith -- the now-over-fifteen-centuries dead and gone Hegemony of Lith had been on the whole a deadly-dreary civilization, but their Legions had developed some seriously awesome battle-cries -- Luna drew her battle axe and whirled it overhead in her aura as she at full gallop charged the Dragon.

So began, and continued, the battle between Princess Luna and the great Lightning Drake.

The Dragon tried to apply overwhelming force against Luna, in attacks which if they had connected would have badly hurt her; the Alicorn, used her superior senses, speed and shielding to avoid, dodge or block these blows. For her part, Princess Luna goaded the Lightning Drake with quick gravity lances, just enough to penetrate his armor and shields, but not enough to seriously impair him; mostly because the sustained application of her ultimate power would have collapsed the mountain on her friends in the tunnels below.

For Luna, it was a precise and deadly dance, and sometimes she missed a step. More than once, the great drake hit her dead-on with a lightning bolt, penetrating her shields, tearing open her moonsilver mail, and painfully burning her. On those occasions, Luna flung force beams agains the cavern ceiling and walls, intentionally-triggering limited cave-ins, under the cover of which she gained the time to regenerate.

Other times, the Dragon tagged her with a gigantic claw, or a sweep of his immense tail. Then she went flying, bouncing off or smashing into a stone surface -- being the "ball" in play, as she had predicted. Her shields were more than adqequate for absorbing any energy that could be transferred to her by the Dragon's musculature before it exceeded her inertia; here, the danger was that he might catch her and crush her from all directions at once, preventing her from simply bounding away. That could stun, or even kill her, if he did it right.

Twice, the Dragon almost trapped her thus. Each time, a prompt slash of short-ranged graviton bolt, essentially "knives," coupled with energetic squirming and rapid flight, freed her from the grip of the great archosaur before she could be greatly harmed. Each time, Luna escaped somewhat shaken, aware of how close she was cutting her course to disaster. If she lost this fight, the consequences might be dire, not only to herself and to her Sister, but to the Realm and all Ponykind.

She must not lose.

Time, fortunately, was on her side. With each passing minute, the projected position of her escaping allies moved deeper and deeper down within the mountain, reducing the danger to them from the forces she wielded. Gradually, she increased the power of her gravity lances, relaxing her self-imposed restrictions on her own might.

As she did, the initiative in the battle increasingly swung to her side. Her ever-stronger lances tore through shields, inflicting more and more serious wounds even to the massive living structure of metallic bones and scales, super-polymer muscles and tendons and multiply-redundant major organs that was the Lightning Drake. Acidic, toxic Dragonblood splattered everywhere, stray drops hissing against and painfully-stinging Luna's own hide.

Now, it was the Dragon who sought shelter behind rockfalls, to buy the time needed for regeneration. But Dragons regenerate more slowly than do Alicorns; and while his immediate reserve of endurance had been greater than Luna's, both combatants had long since run thrugh their initial reserves. His reserves recovered only gradually, fed by his internal earthfires and his tap of the Earth Currents; while hers drew from the nigh-inexhaustible pool of her Cosmic Self, limited only by her carnal form's ability to convert those Cosmic energies into ones Luna could use without reducing herself to a spray of subatomic particles.

So, as the battle wore on, Luna gained the upper hoof.

By this point, the original caverns had collapsed and been blasted open and collapsed again and again. The air was a choking mixture of dust from riven rock faces, combustion products where oxygen had reacted with white-hot stone, and vaporized Dragonblood; a soup of noxious gases in which nopony not an Alicorn could have long lived, and in which even few Dragons could have remained conscious for more than a matter of minutes. By both Pony and Dragon standards, this was no mere battle of mortals, but a duel of demigods.

Finally, a moment arrived in which Luna judged it safe to use her gravity lance at full strength. Luna maneuvered the Dragon into a position from which he was leaping down at her to the attack, to crush her beneath his tremendous weight and pound her to ruin using his own body as both hammer and anvil. At that moment, he was entirely committed to the attack -- he could neither deflect nor dodge. That was the moment for which Luna had been waiting since the start of the fight.

And in that moment, Luna loosed -- angled upward, so that it would endanger neither friends nor bystanders -- a tremendous scything stroke of sharply-focused phased gravitons. Her gravity beam sliced straight through shields and scales and sheared through the tree trunk thick vertebral column of the Dragon's lower neck, severing the connections between his brain and body in a single decisive act!

Luna immediately flung herself backward and to the side, out of the path of what was now a huge inertly-falling bulk of flesh and bone and scales. For in that single stroke, Luna had instantly paralyzed the Dragon, a crippling cut which would have been mortal to most vertebrates, and immediately-immobilized even the gigantic archosaur.

Unlike most vertebrates, the great drake had such incredible redundancy in his major organ systems that his heart would continue to beat, his lungs continue to breathe, under the direction of local nerve clusters, with no direction required from the brainstem. Also unlike most vertebrates, he could heal any injury that did not actually kill him in time, so he would not be forever quadraplegic from the wound. But fighting, at least in the immediate future, was utterly beyond his powers.

The great organic mass of the Dragon crashed to the cavern floor in a thunderous impact. His body spasmed, and he wildly sprayed lightning in all directions, a last reflexive action. One bolt struck Luna directly, staggering her, for her shields were almost entirely down, owing to the immense power she had channeled into that last gravity lance. Luna shuddered as her own nervous system was temporarily overloaded by the tremendous jolt of electricity, and she sank to her knees, her hide smouldering from the flash-heating.

But that was the Dragon's last blow; all it could do now was to feebly twitch, incapable of further conscious bodily action.

Luna had won the battle. She groggily began to rise.

A moment later, the top of the mountain, torn through and through by Luna's gravity lances, fell in on both the former combatants.

Author's Note

Remember when I said that Spike was tough? Well he is. And this is what his toughness would look like, after thousands of years of life and scaled up to a creature vaster than any Earthly dinosaur. A creature able to go toe-to-toe with a multi-millennial Alicorn.

This is, of course, what Spike will become as well in due time, in the Poniternity. And artificially-augmented, to boot.

Luna's Plasma Shift ability shown here is one that she uses in pure vanilla canon, in S1E02, several times, as Nightmare Moon. There is no reason to believe that Luna isn't capable of the same feat in her own right. It's an Alicorn enhancement of a Changeling ability because not even Changeling Royals have ever been shown to be able to Shift into any forms other than that of other living beings.

The reason I don't depict the whole battle in the detail I did the first part of it is that it would be long and repetitive. This is largely an attritional action until Luna strikes the decisive blow, and it has to be because of her strategic considerations. I am not sure anyone wants to read a long, blow-by-blow superfight at that sort of length. Nor tha I want to write it out at that length.

Luna got a really good aimed critical hit, now didn't she? That's what you can do with a lot of skill and a lot of set-up for the shot.

One should always end an epic battle with a bang. Was dropping the ceiling on them enough of a bang?

Chapter 12: Resolving

Luna came back to consciousness in complete darkness, a crushing weight upon her shields, and her metabolism idling on a trickle of gravitic-compression nuclear fusion rather than oxygen-based biochemistry, because the air around her was a toxic oxygen-depleted soup of lithic combustion products.

Yes, she thought to herself. This is about what I expected to find, awakening. She frowned. The fact that this, rather than a feather bed with mine own true love serving me breakfast, is what I expected and to what I in truth find myself awakening to greet does imply that I live in a less than perfect world. Ah well! Mine own true love knows me not and is a mare besides; feather beds are over-rated and -- well, I do wish somepony would bring me breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner. Or all three, really.

Enough maundering, Luna told herself. Time to take stock and dig myself out.

A quick gravitic pulse confirmed her position and that of the lightning drake. The protracted battle had shattered the structural integrity both of the Dragon's lair and of the caverns immediately beneath. The collapse of the main tunnel had brought down the burden of the peak above. The immense masses of rock had acted like a pile-driver, pounding Luna and her foe alike ito the floor, and then smashing that floor and its supporting stone into the vacancies underneath it. Both the ancient missile launch tubes, and the narrow passages by which Luna and Summer Lightning had ascended, had been battered to rubble; Luna could plainly sense the loose rock where vacuities had been on her earlier mental map.

For the sake of Summer and Trixie, she very much hoped that she had not accidentally collapsed all the caverns within the mountain. As she extended her updated mental map further, Luna realized with relief that the collapse had been arrested by the heavily-reinforced structure of the antediluvian fortress, and that the battle had lasted far longer than necessary to let them make it down that far, even given the most pessimistic plausible estimate of their progress.

The state of the mines beyond that was more worrisome. The hammer-blows of the titanic battle had plainly shaken the whole mountain, and there had been partial collapses; at least one of which lay along the main way from the missile base to the natural caves beneath. The chances were that Summer and Trixie had gotten past that part before the roof fell in, but still Luna found the possibility disturbing. The good news was that -- beyond the mines -- the caves seemed intact.

There was nothing she could do to aid Summer and Trixie, if they needed aid, while she herself remained trapped in rubble and the Dragon's fate was not certainly known. The pulse had revealed exactly where the Dragon was buried, quite close by Luna. He did not seem to be moving and -- given that last wound Luna had dealt him, she did not expect the lightning drake to leap up and return to the fray any time soon. She knew that, were her foe anything less than a Dragon, the hurt would almost surely been mortal. As it was, she thought he might well wind up crippled, if he did not get medical attention.

The first step was to free herself from her rocky tomb. Ordinary digging would not suffice: even her Alicorn muscles were not mighty enough to move her limbs against the stupendous weight of stone imprisoning her. But being a Alicorn, of course, she was far from limited to the use of mere muscle, or even ordinary magic.

She pondered briefly, before acting. It would be well within her power to simply blast herself free, but this would both require some energy and be dangerous to any allies near her position, or even lower down on the mountain. What was more, it could do further, possibly even fatal, harm to the lightning drake.

And she might further damage what was left of her weapons and armor. Which would be a shame. Luna liked her accessories.

She decided upon a subtler way of freeing herself.

Using her own personal variant of Alicorn shape-shifting, she phased into a mass of cold plasma, converting her accoutrements into the same state of matter and bringing them along with her. This might have caused the immediate collapse of the overburden into the place where she had been, but Luna used her gravitic field to exert an outward pressure on the rock, replacing that of her defensive force field. She did this because she wanted to avoid letting the rubble above her settle into a denser packing.

Then, shaping that force field around and ahead of her cold plasma body, she more or less oozed upward through the rock. This was a trick she had first learned from her possessing Night Shadow, but Luna was never one to scorn learning from a skilled foe. Now, it enabled her to slide slowly upward through the rubble, forcing it aside with her gravitics and then letting it pack again beneath her.

This method of passage offered the significant advantage of being far less violent than simply blasting out. Instead of spraying massive boulders in all directions, all she did was slightly shake the stones around her. This should cause no serious avalanches, nor harm the lightning drake, nor risk further collapses to the caverns beneath her position. It was a slow mode of progress, but Luna was not really in a hurry any more: she had won her battle.

As Luna rose through the loose rock, she periodically sent gravitic and acoustic pulses to refine her image of her surroundings. By this means she determined that the dragon's lair had not collapsed completely: the part nearest the main cave-mouth, where she and her guards had previously confronted the lightning-drake, was essentially undamaged, with the tunnel leading halfway to the point where the Dragon lay buried. It was from that point, therefore, that she should logically commence to disinter -- and rescue -- her defeated foe.

Emerging from the rock, Luna found -- not entirely to her surprise -- that two of her Night Guards were already standing there. They were Cave Flitter and Fortitude, a Vera and Pseudo Nocturne repsectively. Cave Flitter was a small, quick mare with a talent for blindflying by means of sonar; Fortitude a burly Pegasus of tremendous strength and endurance.

"Ma'am!" Cave Flitter saluted as Luna oozed from the rocks and re-formed.

The Night Pegasus looked jumpy; Luna wondered if Flitter had first imagined the cold plasma to be some trick of the Dragon's.

"We came looking for you," Flitter said. "Glad to see you alive and well!"

"Better than the Dragon," Luna commented. "He is buried beneath that rubble." She looked over and pointed with a wing. "Sore wounded. I shall dig him out." She turned back to Flitter. "Have you seen aught of Summer Lightning, or the Pony we rescued from the Dragon's lair? They were making for a lower exit -- the collapse should not have harmed them."

"No, Ma'am," replied Flitter. "But Sharpeyes and Starsoar are scouting the slopes right now. Shall I call them in?"

"Let them continue their patrol," Luna decided. "They may spot Summer and Trixie an they emerge. I will dig out the lightning drake, and secure his surrender, then join the search if they not yet be found." She considered for a moment. "Ye twain should stay clear whilst I dig -- there's danger to ye of falling rocks. Flitter, go to Wrath and Vengeance and let them know I have triumphed and am not sore hurt. Fort, find Sharp and Star and tell them to keep an eye out for Summer and Trixie -- Trixie is a light blue Unicorn clad in purple -- and to aid them if needs be. Oh, and mind them to 'ware rockfalls from mine own digging. Copy?"

The communications terms of pre-cataclysmic Amareica were millennia gone, but Luna's guards had already begun to be familiar with her anachronistic turns of speech, and so Cave Flitter and Fortitude simply nodded and answered "Yes, Ma'am."

"Dismissed."

The two Guards flew off on their missions, and Luna bent to her task of digging out the Dragon.

Luna started slowly, to give Fortitude time to warn Sharpeye and Starsoar of what she was about to do. She began by pushing an exploratory tunnel horizontally, toward a point directly above the Dragon's tomb. She did this by first pulverizing the already loose rock with her force beams, then spraying the resultant spoil out the cave mouth in a long telekinetic arc, intended to be very visible to her own Ponies, thus minimizing the chance of an accident. She kept the overburden from falling back into the hole with a hemi-cylindrical force field, then quickly melted the exposed surfaces together with her ion beams. (Sun-hot plasma might have worked even better, but that was her Sister's element, rather than her own).

The work went fast, compared to what modern Ponies might have done with dynamite, personal tools and ordinary telekinesis. It went fast even compared to what the Ponies of the late Age of Wonders might have done with mechanized borers, employing whirling diamond-tipped drills and laser or plasma beams to soften the rock faces. Luna was an Alicorn Avatar, and as such had access to levels of power beyond those of the mere machines of either civilization.

It was not long before Luna, her tunnel sloping slightly upward, dug to a point far above the level of the main tunnel floor, but less than an octal hooves above the top of the Dragon's head. Luna had, at the last, pulverized the rock beneath her to cushion her force field when the ceiling fell in on them; the Dragon had simply lain there and been smashed into the solid stone floor. Consequently, he had not been pushed down as deep as had the Alicorn.

Luna stood atop the buried head of the lightning drake, and pondered her next move.

She could free the Dragon from the rock rather rapidly by englobing them both in a force field, and cutting them both loose with shearing planes of pure gravity. Then, she could telekinese them both out of the mountain. This would work.

It would also bring down a good part of the peak above, starting avalanches that might endanger her friends far below, and quite possibly collapse the dragon's lair into the missile base beneath it. She could see future uses for that base, so ... no.

Instead, she dug more carefully. She used her telekinesis as trowel rather than power-drill, feeling around first before removing each load: roughly a very large bucketful of spoil at a time. She still dug very rapidly, by the standards of any normal Pony or even team of Ponies: even Rock Ponies could not have matched her pace for very long. She was very careful, very fast and very steady; in those big bucket-sized quantities, she dug down toward the Dragon's buried head.

Of course, as she was digging not through a mass of compacted clay or earth, but rather through a rockfall whose constituents ranged from pebbles to stones to slabs to boulders bigger than her own body, the task was by no means as easy nor the progress as even as that brief description implies. Small enough stones she removed whole: larger ones she shattered with force bolts; really big boulders she carved to pieces with carefully-controlled gravity lances. These energies she employed where normal Pony miners would have labored long and hard with picks; exhaustingly with hard-hammering hooves; or dangerously with the drilling and detonation of explosive charges.

What she did was thus safer than would have been ordinary mining yet it was still far from completely safe. She was hollowing void into loose rock, and she might yet bring the ceiling down again if she failed to take care. The laws of physics applied to her as much as to any other Pony. She was the Avatar of one of those physical forces: indeed, the one that threatened to collapse her tunnel, an irony which Luna fully appreciated.

Of course, being who and what she was, she had an excellent intuitive grap of how mass behaved under gravitational acceleration. She did not trust her Cosmic Self's callous attitude toward mere mortals, but she most certainly did trust its undrstanding of its own Force. With her telekinesis, she probed and tested and sensed the stabiity of the overburden; with her ion bolts and lasers she welded together stone pillars and lintels and arches to maintain that stability, supporting their shares of the millions of tons of rock overhead. It was engineering, and Luna was an exceedingly good engineer.

As she continued, Luna mapped out in her mind the excavation which would eventually be required to easily and safely extract the Lightning-Drake and his hoard. It would have to be fairly wide, or the whole mountain top might repeatedy collapse on the Dragon as he emerged -- a prospect which, while amusing, woud run counter to her own aims. It is no honor to gain a foe's surrender, and then drop rocks upon him!

The shaft she first sank was much narrower: only about as wide as the length of the Lightning Drake's head. This was quite intentionl: she wanted the huge and hostile rchosaur to be very much t her mercy when she first confronted him. Even crippled as he was, the gret Dragon could still hurl lightning bolts, though to fight in his current condition against Luna would be suicidal. Lna wanted to face him alone, for fear that a surprise strike might slay one of her escort brefore she could shield him.

It would be terribe to lose one of her loyal Ponies now, when the battle was basically won. Luna was far too wise in the cruel chances of war to imagine such an event to be impossible. False surrender was always a hazard of attempting to take prisoners, and Luna was acutely aware that the Lightning Drake had not yet even offered surrender.

After not too long a while, Luna had worked her way down to the point where the tips of the Dragon's great orange spines protruded from the rocks. Now, Luna proceeded with especial caution, for she knew that the Lightning Drake might possibly be conscious and belligerent enough to attempt an attack, foolish as such an action would be in his current situation.

When one of her Guard came by to report on the as-yet-fruitless search for Summer Lightning and Trixie Lulamoon, Luna met them at the tunnel mouth, insisting that her visitor remain outside. Not only were some of the Lightning Drake's bolts capable of affecting wide areas, but if he had enough energy he might well choose to bring down the ceiling again, in the hopes of getting at least one pony. Luna thought it better than to tempt her foe with the chance.

Finally, Luna uncovered the whole top of the huge, blue-and-orange head.

As she finished removing the last of the rubble from that great scaled surface, an armored eyelid opened, and a slitted eyeball, the size of her whole body, swivelled up to glare at her.

"So," the Lightning Drake wheezed, in what was but a ghost of his normal, booming voice -- Luna supposed that this was because it could no longer coordinate voicebox with lungs, and was feeding the former with air from the muscular contractions of its neck -- "Thou hast dug down to gloat at me, in thy triumph and mine own ruin. I had thought better of the Moon Princess, though alien monster I know thee to be." Wheezing laughter. "Plainly, I judged thee too high."

The tone, and words, were both provocative. Luna might have let herself be provoked, especiay given al the trouble she had taken to dig him out alive, had she not grasped his tactic. He was amost helpless now, and given her might she could slay him with a thought. Slaying or tormenting him would show her as a villain -- but that was a role into which Luna did not want to ever be again cast. So she would forbear from further harming him.

No matter what annoying, or even insulting thing he said, Luna would not add a new chapter to the black bloody legend of Nightmare Moon.

So, instead of lashing out with either powers or tongue, Princess Luna affected boredom.

"I have defeated thee," she informed the Lightning Drake, "as was fated by our respective might and skills. Thou now hast no real choice but surrender. Yield now, and I shall grant thee good terms." Her tone was calm and almost perfunctory, as if fatigued by the pointless necessity of discussing an event so plainly inevitable.

"Arrogant Pony Princess!" hissed the Dragon. "And what if I do not choose to surrender?"

"In that case," Luna yawned, "I should have no good choice but to treat thee as a foe and continue my war upon thee. Which -- as thou art now all but helpless -- would mean I needs must batter thy stubborn pate senseless, then bind thee in chains adamantine and cast thy living carcass into Tartarus, until thou dost admit defeat -- however long that might take."

Luna had the rather nasty satisfaction of seeing the Dragon's pupil widen and then pinpoint at that statement. Aye, she thought, mull on that a bit. How many years -- decades -- centuries -- we might keep thee. For a moment, the thought filled her with cruel glee, as she much misliked his attitude.

Then, remembering how she, herself, had spent most of the past millennium, she felt a sudden surge of sympathy for the Lightning Drake.

Please, she thought, don't make me in earnest do this. Thou'rt an obnoxious and mistrustful old beast, but this thou deservest not. All thou dost is bravely face thy foe. Thou didst not betray and rebel against thine own Sister. I stand now in judgement over thee -- but I am by far the worse malefactor of us twain.

To the Lightning Drake, of course, she revealed none of these thoughts. Instead, she said.

"There does remain the fate of the hoard thou didst bring into Equestria in direct support of thine invasion."

At that provocative formulation of the legal status of the hoard, she knew she had the Dragon's full attention.

The reason was complicated.

The Laws of War varied from age to age and land to land. Most Pony realms regarded property belonging to a hostile combatant as fair spoil, under the theory that, if life was forfeit, so was the lesser right of prperty. The Dragon realms inverted this: a hoard was the essence of personal Draconic honor, in some ways more vital than life itself to any proper Dragon.

The Lightning Drake had invaded Equestria, and in so doing had hazarded his life on the fortunes of war. But -- depending on one's interpretation of the purpose of his bringing along his hoard, he had not necessarily so hazarded his whole hoard. If he merely took it along so that he might personally enjoy it, Luna, as the victor, would be entitled to a "trophy" -- a token portion of it -- but no more.

In the case of Fischfootur, his hoard had been so small -- and relatively valueless, in traditional Dragon terms -- that the issue effectively did not exist. It was like a soldier taking a prisoner's purse on a battlefield. Any accusation of injustice would have been more than countered by the fact that Fischfootur had made unconditonal surrender. Despite this, Luna had earned the Lava Drake's gratitude by forbearing from taking it from him.

But, in the case of the Lightning Drake, his hoard was good-sized, far above the value of anything the Dragons would consider rightful trophy to the victor. If she took all the treasure, this would be seen as theft by the Dragons; aggravated theft, if she also slew the Lightning Drake who had earned it. As indeed her actions would be, in Dragonlaw.

Plundering the Lightning Drake's hoard, seizing it all as spoils of war, simply because of his intransigent hostility: that would be a tempting course of action -- and the most obvious mistake possible for a greedy Pony Princess. Luna would do no such thing, and it was unlikely that whatever puppetmaster stood behind this incursion imagined she would, if he knew anything of her history.

The law -- even Dragonlaw -- was different if the Lightning Drake had brought his hoard as a supply of war. Any and all such supplies might rightfully be confiscated by the victor in battle. In that case, Luna could take it all.

Therein lay the trap.

For the Lightning Drake had, in fact, done nothing to suggest that he had used, or meant to use, his hoard in such a manner. Luna was sure that if she plundered his hoard, her hidden enemy stood ready to argue among the Dragons that the Ponies were greedy for Dragonhoards, which would help him rouse them against Equestria.

Thus far, anypony knowledgable in Dragon traditions might have easily reasoned. But there was another trap.

If she behaved in accordance with Dragonlaw, and only Dragonlaw, she would be tacitly admitting that she considered Dragonlaw superior to Equestrian law -- on Equestrian soil. This would be an extraordinarily dangerous precedent, and could work to the future disadvantage of the Realm, in dealing both with Dragons and with other foreign cultures. This the more so because she was a Diarch, a Ruling Princess. When she spoke, she spoke with the voice of the Realm.

This meant that, whatever she did, she must do in such wise as to be justifiable in terms both of Dragon and of Equestrian law.

She thought she had the solution, but she must first test it.

"I might in all right declare this all to be spoils of the Crown," Luna said, "but in my mercy and the light of our honor, I shall return it all to thee, unspoilt save for trophy in token of my triumph, giving it back into thy keeping upon thy parole as honorable prisoner of mine own claw." There. She had extended the opportunity to the Lightning Drake for surrender on favorable conditions. "Dost thou accept my terms?"

The Dragon rumbled. Stray sparks -- mere ghosts, compared to his normal full might -- crackled over his head and horns. This display might rightly have frightened most Ponies, for he still had enough power to slay such; they were not enough to intimidate a war-wise Alicorn.

She was in little danger from him, and they both knew it.

"Thou wouldst think me ready to sell mine honor for mine own hoard?" snarled the Lightning Drake. "Dost thou take me for an honorless cur, like unto ... lie so many Ponies?"

ANger flashed in Luna at that insult, but she choked it back. He had -- just -- avoided making the insult direct, and short of that, she would lose honor by abusing her prisoner. She was well aware that eyes and ears, quite possibly hostile far-off ones, might be observing this parley. She was also aware that, though she had won the battle, she had not yet secured the real victory.

"Nay," replied Luna, coolly. "I think thee an intelligent wight, rather than some brute beast. I deem thee wise enow to know when thou'rt defeated in fair fight, and sufficient-canny to take a generous offer of short and honorable captivity -- for 'tis the best thou dost deserve, and are likely to get, as is most plain to us both." She paused, to let her words sink in. "Now -- dost thou surrender, on these fair terms? Or must I subdue they more full-well, and thou then awaken to find thyself in any case my captive, and under worse duress?"

The Dragon grumbled, but Luna had logically-trapped him, and she knew that he knew it as well. Did he continue to reject her mercy, he would seem but churlish, and she would be more than justified in battering him to the point htat he could no longer carry out even token resistance.

"I do yield," he said in a sour tone. "On the terms thou dist offer."

"Then, I do accept thine honorable surrender," replied Luna, inwardly sighing in relief. She had little stomach for further-beating an almost-helpless foe. "And whom shall I have the honor of hosting?" This was important, for the surrender was not complete without his also yielding at least a Use-Name.

The Dragon cast his gaze about the hole he was in, ut could clearly see no means of avoiding the inevitable. "I am hight Blue Blaze, egg of Astra Blaze, sired by Wellenflash."

"I am Princess Luna Selena Nyx of Equestria, the foal of Mimic, of Paradise Estate," she replied. "Dost thou promise to obey all honorable terms of parole that thou acceptest, by thine eggshell?"

The Dragon whiffed. He was clearly a bit dismayed that she knew that form. But it would be absurd for him to abort his surrender on that point.

"I so swear," he affirmed. "By mine eggshell."

"Then i also so swear. By mine own honor, and that of the womb that bore me. We are now host and hostage."

The term "hostage," in this context, did not mean that she was threatening to kill him if he misbehaved. It meant that, in return for good conduct, she had just promised to treat him as a sort of honored captive; essentially a guest of the Night Court. He would not be harmed, unless he grossly violated the terms of his hosting.

"Agreed," said the Dragon. He really had no other good choices.

Luna relaxed. Blue Blaze's own hidebound pride, the same which made him so annoying a foe, would now ensure that he would abide by his word, unless she very much misread him. And she had dealt with Dragons like him for a very, very long time.

Blue Blaze's surrender had been made far more formally than Fischfootur's. But Fischfootur had been a rambunctious, friendly youth, eager to prove himself against an admired rival champion, no true foe of Ponykind. Blue Blaze was an elder of his kind, whose motives were subtle and actions calculated: for all his gigantic roaring might, he was no brutal savage.

His original plan had almost certainly been to sacrifice his life for some greater purpose, probably to provoke a war between Equestria and the Dragons. The trap of honor Luna closed on him must thus be flawless.

It was, as far as she might divine. She, and her Ponies, were now safe.

She could now bend her full attention to saving the life of her prisoner.

In this, she was aided by the fact that a Dragon his size was very hard to kill. Even if she made mistakes, Blue Blaze was almost certain to survive. But it formed no part of her plan to cause him needless suffering. She meant to be an impeccable host.

"Here be my design, Blue Blaze," she told him. "I shall -- slowly and carefully -- free thee from this rubble, then transport thee to a house I shall prepare for thy shelter and healing." Luna wasn't actually certain that the Realm had an appropriate house, for such a very large Dragon, but she could always convert a large warhouse or something of the sort, if needs be. "Also, I shall mine out and bring to thee thine Hoard, numbered and listed so that none of it be lost. We shall discuss my trophy at later leisure -- but it shall of a certain include the Equestrian citizen, Beatrix Lulamoon, hight Trixie, upon whom thou shalt then yield all claims. Is this agreeable?"

"She is a thief, Blue Blaze complained. "Fair-taken!"

"She be little more than a foal," chided Luna, "an innocent, scarce-kenning her own actions. Wouldst thou smash an egg?"

"Perhaps," grumbled Blue Blaze, "were it as bothersome and naughty as Trixie. But -- I take thy point. I shall yield all claim on her. Does this bring thee satisfaction?"

"Thou dost display a great heart."

"Fair words," said Blue Blaze. "let us see if thou canst unearth me without pulling me apart, or burying me for ever." He almost sounded as if he hoped to be dismembered or interred alive.

Blue Blazes was of course complaining, but Luna was glad of it. He had shifted from suicidal defiance to grousing, which was a good sign. It meant that he had accepted his defeat, and was now focusing on his future treatment as her captive.

Luna meant to treat him very well indeeed. Both because she deemed it right, and because Blue Blaze was plainly an ardent partisan of their war faction, and by good treatment he might perhaps gain an improved opinion of Equestria.

Blue Blaze was a foe, but he did not impress Luna as a foul one. He might well have slain Trixie, when she was at his mercy; he had instead kept her alive as her captive. He seemed not evil, but rather misguided -- though this did not by any means require that this was true of all Dragons of his political stripe. She was still unsure of their exact purpose. Perhaps she -- or her more cunning Sister -- might gain valuable information by peaceful future converse with their prisoner.

This did not mean that she enjoyed his company, right now. Blue Blaze was understandably depressed, in physical pain and angry, and though it was beneath his dignity to show his discomfort directly, he could complain of all sorts of things -- especially the intelligence, morals, and other allegedly unpleasant habits of Ponykind, to his captor.

Which he did. At length.

He's not here for my entertainment, she reminded herself. Which was as well, because he wasn't very entertaining. Luna listened to his litany of equine disparagement, paying just enough attention to it to sift out any useful intelligence, while wishing for better company.

Pumpernickel, she thought wistfully. Adamant. Ruby -- oh, no, she remembered, that sweet filly's o'er a thousand years dead. The same for all my Loyal Band, and my Shadowbolts, and all mine own boon companies. By now all nine or more centuries in their graves. All gone, lost to me for ever. Some never even knew how much I did care for them.

For a moment she felt very lone, and lorn, and briefly toyed with the idea of slaying Blue Blaze out of pique. But no. T'is nae my purpose, and he's not really evil, -- and along that path lies the Nightmare. I must henceforth hew to my decency -- and duty to the Realm. She firmed her resolve to behave well.

She really couldn't bring herself to hate Blue Blaze that much, anyway. So she listened to his compaints, and made the occasional sympathetic or complaining noise in response, while she continued digging out his head.

"Canst thou breathe now?" she asked him, after she cleared away most of the front of his upper neck.

"You severed my spine!" snarled Blue Blazes. "That will take long to mend!"

"Aye," said Luna, "but we both know thou hast independent ganglionic centers in thy torso, to handle autonomic functons in just such a pass. Come now! I am no callow young Pony warrior, ignorant of Draconic anatomy. I've fought many of ye, over the long centuries, aye, and helped heal many as well."

"'Tis ... a bit improv-ed," Blue Blaze allowed. "Yes. I breathe better; my biochemistry works more smoothly, I need not draw so much on radiothermal power sources." He seemed to be gathering his resolve for something. "Thou dost ease my condition somewhat, Princess Luna. Thankee."

"Ma'am!" came a stallion's shout, from just outside the cave mouth. "Sharpeyes, reporting on the search for the missing detachment!"

Luna stopped tossing spoil out the entrance. Wise of him, not to directly mention Summer Lightning and Trixie Lulammon by name.

"Prithee pardon," she said to Blue Blaze. "Administrative business calls. I shall soon return."

She darted to the door.

The athletic, large-headed Night Guard specialist saluted her, anxiety evident in his big eyes. In Night Guard uniform he was of course gray-coated and purple-maned, like the Nocturnae, but he was only Pseudo Nocturnae, and she remembered he had a lovely sky-blue coat, blue eyes and blonde mane in mufti.

Almost a shame to make him look like everypony else, Luna reflected.

She led them a couple hundred feet away from the cave mouth. "Report," she ordered.

"Yes, Ma'am," replied Sharpeyes. "We've found Summer Lightning. She was stumbling around at a cave mouth halfway down the mountain. Starsoar and I went to her aid. She was dazed, from a close-range stun-spell. Starsoar remained to tend her."

Luna thought on this a moment. "And Trixie Lulamoon?" she asked.

"There was no sign of her, ma'am. Lt. Lightning wasn't sure, but she thought that Miss Lulamoon might have been the one who stunned her."

Idiot, Luna thought, wincing. She wasn't sure if she meant herself, Summer Lightning, or Trixie Lulamoon. Or, possibly, the whole stupid situation.

"Take me to her," she ordered.

They dived down the side of the mountain.

Author's Note

It's not easy for Luna to dig out Blue Blaze without killing him, or at least hurting him even worse. She's really just begun the process. He's roughly Godzilla-sized.

The accounting work of assembling and tabulating his hoard is also going to be interesting. Luna's not going to have to do all of any of this herself, of course. Though she could, if she had to do so.

If they weren't giving most of it back to Blue Blaze anyway, you might see a bureaucratic battle over it to rival the Battle of the Five Armies over Smaug's hoard in The Hobbit. :pinkiehappy:

"Mimic of Paradise Estate" is G1 Mimic.

"Hostage"is a term that in our own history has had widely varying meanings. One such meaning was "honored captive" -- this is the sense in which Luna and Blue Blaze mean it. Compare with the status of Theon Greyjoy at the start of Game of Thrones.

Luna's fateful friendship with Ruby Gift is described in the central section (what would be Book II if FIMFiction let me organize it that way) of Fools and Drunks).

Chapter 13: Searching

Sharpeyes took her back down to the cave mouth she expected; the one that Luna and Summer Lightning had discovered before, halfway down the mountain, not too far from the cave with the pool and the mysterious old bowl.

That's a good sign, Luna thought. It's less likely, then, that Trixie is wandering somewhere within the labyrinth. Finding her in there would be difficult -- and essential, because she might die if she couldn't find her way back to the pool. But she more likely fled down the mountain, along that ledge. Dangerous for a Unicorn -- but then, Trixie does not lack for courage. Common sense, perhaps, but not courage.

"Hast thou scouted down along the ledge?" Luna asked. "And below?" It was easy, sometimes, for Pegasi to forget the limitations of wingless Ponies.

"Yes, Ma'am," replied the Pegasus. "Along -- and on the mountainside and in the forest below." He looked very solemn at that, and Luna suspected he was not innocent of the sight of what happened when a flightless Pony fell hundreds of lengths down. "There was no sign of her, save --" he pulled out a small piece of purple cloth. "I found that, caught on a rock -- there, just beneath that part of the ledge." He wing-pointed down theledge a ways. "By that outcropping, and beneath a bit."

Luna peered at the outcropping. It would force anypony on foot to walk a dangerously-narrow path around it. She could easily see how Trixie might have come to grief there.

She darted over to investgate more closely, Sharpeyes following.

Immediately, she saw the crucial clue; hovered to view it more closely.

"Here,"she said. "I can see where the ledge crumbled. And here, Trixie's hooves scuffed the dirt when she tried to keep her footing. Just below, she scrabbled to try to climb back up."

Sharpeyes followed her indications, nodded. "Do you think she went all the way down, Ma'am?"

Luna slowly descended the mountainside, lowering herself in a hover. "I see no signs of further scrapings on the rock -- neither blood nor hide, and this be not a truly sheer drop." She looked down. "The canopy be undisturbed." She dipped below, stood on the ground a moment. "Neither body, nor blood. She did not fall, or if she fell, she somehow managed to avoid a severe impact."

"She must have managed to get back on the ledge," commented Sharpeyes.

"Mayhaps," said Luna, flitting back up again. "She of a surety did not drop that distance straight, or bouncing off the rocks, without taking severe harm. If she survived that, we should expect to find her wounded on the ground. If not --" she left that unfinished, for it was obvious.

"Yes, Ma'am," agreed Sharpeyes. "We found no further sign of her along the ledge. Nor any place where she might have readily hidden. And I cannot believe that she simply galloped down the mountain, unseen and unheard, while we searched -- without us noticing her."

"T'would be uncommon dull-eyed of ye, Sharp-eyes," Luna agreed. She returned to the ledge from which Trixie had fallen -- or not fallen. "Might she have levitated, I wonder?" Levitation was advanced magic, but Trixie had her blood, and perhaps with it elemental power over Gravity?

Luna concentrated, her horn flourescing as she tried to sense psycho-kinetic residues. She detected a residue -- but it was not of any levitation spell. It was akin to teleportation -- also advanced magic -- but it was more.

"A Gate," Luna declared. "Someone opened a short-term Gate here, and I think Trixie went through it."

"Do you mean teleportation?" asked Sharpeyes. "Ma'am?" he remembered at the last minute to add.

"Akin to it," explained Luna. "A teleporting Unicorn opens a very small spacewarp, just enough for her body and what she bears to pass through to another location. A Gate, though -- that's much more powerful, it's a temporary linkage between two points in spacetime. One can pass through a Gate -- or reach through it, to pull somepony else through to the other side."

"Could Trixie have done that, Ma'am?" asked Sharpeyes.

"I would be great surprised if she could," replied Luna. "That be very advanced magic. I or my Sister could do it, and probably some other high mages, but if Trixie knew magic at that level, she would not have been wandering the land giving performances from a little varda-wagon. Which she lost," Luna remembered. "No -- someone else has meddled here -- and I would guess, saved Trixie from a fatal fall."

"But whom, Ma'am?" asked Sharpeyes, looking about nervously, as if expecting to see a powerful Unicorn mage watching them from an adjacent hill. "And where are they now?"

"As to thy last question, a mage with that skill might be many miles, even hundreds of miles, from here," said Luna, also looking around, and seeing nothing. "As to thy first --" She whiffed the residue, with scent beyond scent.

She got a surprise.

"Paradise?" she gasped. She had a brief flash of memory -- of being the Cosmic Concept of Gravity, in the form of a vast sphere with too many heads and horns and wings, raining destruction upon a now-forever-lost alternate Earth. While one brave little pink mare, and her friends, defied her from an island at the top of the world. She had fought the Pinkie Pie who had been, then, and neither for the first nor the last time, fought her own Sister ...

"Ma'am?"

Luna realized that she must have been lost in a trance of memory. She had no idea what it had looked like from the outside, but Sharpeyes looked a bit shaken.

"Yes, Sharpeyes?" she asked. "Be anything amiss?"

"You were ... floating ... and glowing ..."

"Oh. I do that, sometimes. Never mind it. Now hush."

She bent again to the magescent. No, it was not the Paradise Entity. Not precisely. It was closer to a Pony. Closer to ... Pinkie Pie? But not precisely her, either. One of her kin, Luna thought. Definitely, one of her kin.

It also reminded her a bit of that strange blue fluffy Pony who had greeted her at South Dunnich. But not precisely her, either.

Something strange was happening around South Dunnich, Luna realized. But she wasn't sure what. And had no idea of whether or not it was hostile.

The Paradise Entity did not seem to be hostile, not any more. It had, in the person of its scion, Pinkie Pie, helped to free her from the Nightmare.

Luna decided to be diplomatic when next she met it, or its agents. It was no longer her foe. It might even be her friend, now. If she didn't turn it against her.

And she would be meeting it relatively soon. For she would not permit it to take Trixie Lulamoon, who was not only an escapee from her lawful custody, but also her own descendant, from her power. She would be polite about it, but she would find out what had happened to the itinerant magician.

She wasn't particularly worried that Trixie had been hurt, though. The Paradise Entity had always been benign to Ponykind: she remembered from Moondreamer that the inital program had been instructed to safeguard Pony lives against harm. It had saved Trixie from a possibly-fatal fall, and it was probably keeping her alive and well right now.

She did want to understand its purpose in this worldline. She knew it had first touched here over a thousand years ago, before the fall of the Crystal Empire. Iolite Quartz had been its prophet and priestess. But it had been still very weak -- then.

A lot could have happened in more than a millennium. Its power might well have grown.

"I think Trixie lives," said Luna. "She has found rescue. For now, I will see to Lieutenant Lightning. Search the area for any further clues to Trixie's location. Report back to me after you have made a thorough sweep."

"Yes, Ma'am." He swallowed hard, then flew off to begin the sweep.

She had given Sharpeyes a large area to search, but she knew that with his sharp eyes, he would be the most likely of any of her squad to spot what might be there to find. With the night vision in his helmet, he could search effectively even in the twilight.

Luna flew back up to the cave-mouth, landed, and stepped inside.

Starsoar was bent over a prone Summer Lightning, tending to the back of her head, where a small part of Lt. Lightning's yellow mane had been charred away.

What a shame, thought Luna, that'll leave a bare spot, until it grows out again.

Luna's own mane would have grown back over it in a day or two: her hair regrew rapidly, like all her tissues. Right now, Luna had all sorts of burns and scrapes on her hide, but they would not even be cosmetic problems after a good sleep or two.

It was good to be an Alicorn.

As Luna stepped forward, Summer Lightning saw her and struggled to rise.

"Hey!" Starsoar started to complain. "I can't --"

Then, he realized just whom had entered the ceave.

"Ma'am!" they both said.

Summer Lightning made it almost all the way to a a full standing posture, before she wobbled and began to fall over sideways.

Luna caught the Ranger Lieutenant in her aura, setting her down gently on her belly. 'At ease," she told both the Pegasi. "Lt. Lightning, I'd rather you remain lying down. You've been wounded."

"Yes, Ma'am," Summer Lightning replied. "But it's just a scratch!"

"Horseapples," said Luna. "You cannot even stand up straight right now. Keep lying down!" she ordered, anticipating the stubborn Ranger's attempt to stand up once more to diprove her assertion. Then she laughed. "Nopony be half so mutinous as a loyal officer."

Then, to Starsoar: "How bad hurt be she?"

Stasoar was a tall slim Pegasus with long, thin wings; his Pseudo Nocturnae transformation accentuated his sharp, intelligent features. He was veteran of many long-range patrol missions, and she knew trained as a field medic.

Starsoar looked at the back of Summer Lightning's head again, then turned and shone a magelight innto the Lieutenant's eyes. "Basic stunspell," he stated. "Delivered from behind, point-blank range, probably by a Unicorn using her own magic. Some superficial electrical burns. Confusion and dizziness as expected -- should clear up within the hour."

He looked up at Luna. "If you're asking, Ma'am, I'm guessing that the assailant was Trixie Lulamoon, and I'm pretty sure her intent was non-lethal. The power of the spell was too little to kill anypony, but a tiny foal or somepony already on her deathbed: and that only with some luck. And Lietenant Lightning was unconscious for minutes: more than enough for any would-be murderer to finish her off."

Luna nodded. "That sounds logical." She had thought much the same herself. "Trixie did not impress me as a killer." Though she had been wrong about that before, more than once, and at least once with horrid consequences.

Still, she had to have some faith in her own powers of judgment, or she would spend all her life dithering, instead of leading. And while Trixie did not seem likely to commit cold-blooded murder, Luna could easily see her lashing out in hysterical fear, even at a rescuer.

Luna bent down to examine Summer Lightning.

Summer had seen better days. Her orange eyes looked dazed, the pupils dilating a bit unevenly. She gulped in nausea.

"How dost thou fare?" asked Luna, softly.

"Lousy, Ma'am," replied Summer. "My head hurts, and -- I've failed you." She met Luna's gaze, swallowed, looked ashamed. "No excuse, Ma'am. I've failed you completely."

"You did let Trixie Lulamoon escape," Luna observed. "Yes, in that, thou hast failed. THou wert to bring her out, to Our custody, and she is gone. That was thy failure."

Summer somehow managed to look even more miserable, her ears drooping.

"Of course,"Luna continued, "thou didst bring her out alive from the Dragon's lair, which was in fact the most important charge I did lay upon thee. and neither I nor thou didst think that Trixie, being rescued from the Dragon's chains, would turn on one of her very erescuers, and prefer the hazards of climbing down a mountain face a-hoof to the relative safety and ease of evacuation by the Night Guard."

She smiled slightly at Summer, and was rewarded to see her ears perk up. "I, too, did fail. I thought I had won her trust, but was wrong. I should have warned thee of her parlous mental state, and I did not do so. So, we are both failures, here.

"I being of higher rank, I could dump all the blame for our failure onto thy shoulders, and flit off free of blame. But I will not do that. 'Tis beneath me, and cruel to thee. So, come! Let us put this failure behind us, and move on to better choices in the future."

Joy lit in Summer Lightning's face. "I -- thank you, Ma'am! Thank you!"

"I did decide on a use for thee when we spoke in the caverns," pointed out Luna. "Trixie's foolish act will not sway me from it."

"Thank you!" repeated Summer.

"Thou may not still want to thank me after knowing me longer," said Luna. "I mean to work thee hard, as my aide." She meant it, too. On the other hoof, she knew that, to an ambitious, intelligent officer like Summer Lightning, the chance to prove herself by hard work would be irresistible.

Summer gazed at her in utter adoration.

"Now," said Luna, "tell me what happened after I gave over Trixie into thy keeping."

Had this been a fictional story, Summer Lightning would have told her a harrowing tale of high adventure and hairsbreadth escapes, which would have culminated in some amazing plot twist providing a tantalizing hint as to the actions and fate of Trixie Lulamoon. That would have been the point of Summer's flashback.

But this was reality, and Luna had come to personally attend to Summer Lightning as much from personal and professional concern for her subordinate than for any real likelihood that Lightning knew what had happened to Trixie. This both was for the cause that a commander known to care for her troops got much better service from them, and that Luna simply liked Summer, and thought this the right thing to do.

As it turned out, Summer Lightning didn't really remember much that was, at first glance, useful in adressing the mystery of Trixie Lulamoon. Though Summer and Trixie had gone through a rather exciting time of it, escaping the battle between Luna and the Lightning Drake.

And some of what she remembered turned out to be more useful than Summer herself knew.

"The first I saw of Trixie," Summer said, "was her bolting down the tunnel we'd come up by. I figured she was running from the Dragon, and that running with her was the only way I could keep her safe. So I did. I'd heard the sounds of the start of your battle with it, and frankly I didn't want to stick around there any longer than I had to." She shivered all over. "I hope that doesn't make me some sort of -- coward."

"Nay," said Luna, "Thou'rt no coward. Certes not for wanting to live, and carry out thy mission, rather than perish to no good end."

"Thank you, Ma'am," replied Summer. "Well, so I shot like a cannnonball right after her, and it was a good thing that Idid, because Trixie nearly ran off the first drop-off in sheer terrror! Not that it wasn't hairy, with the Dragon roaring and lightning flashing behind us, and all kinds of explosions shaking the tunnel around us. We could feel the shockwaves, and rock dust was billowing down the tunnels after us. I was far from sure we'd make it down to that old fort before everything fell on our heads.

"Trixie skidded to a stop at the endd of that first drop-off, teetering on the edge, and she was about to go over when I grabbed her and flew her down to the next level. She actually complained about me grabbing her -- something about 'How dare you marehandle the Great and Immaculate Trixie?' -- and I might have snapped something back at her; the next huge boom, which sent debris rattling down the crack near the top of the old stairwell, reminded us to focus on getting the hay out of there.

"So we kept on running. We galloped down the spiral stair, and more than once I had to save Trixie from taking a tumble -- I might have fallen too if I didn't have my wings -- and those times when I grabbed her she stopped complaining. Even spraining a leg would have been pretty bad for a Unicorn, in a situation like that.

"I think she realized by then that she needed my help, and that the last thing on my mind with a perfect Tartarus erupting behind us was groping her." Summer Lightning wrinkled her muzzle. "She still cringed a little each time, though. That mare does not like to be touched!"

Luna noted that. It was somewhat unsuaual for Ponies, a physically affectionate species, to be so shy of mere touches. Of course, Unicorns had always been the physically-shyest of the Pony Kinds. But still, Trixie's prissiness in that regard was unusual.

Luna felt more sympathy with Trixie over this than Trixie would probably have guessed. Luna herself had never been able to strike a good balance between affection and dignity. Depending on her mood, she might be all over a Pony she liked, to the point of embarrassing herself; alternately she would project a chill aloofness that made Ponies think she scorned them, even when she wanted to be their friends.

This was a good part of the reason why she feared a future meeting with Twilight Sparkle. She knew that she would be likely to either seize every excuse to touch her, or alternately behave with extreme arrogance. Either way, she would alienate the young gentlemare who bore Dusk Skyshine's spark; she would ruin any chance of befriending her.

Her Sister, of course, had never had any such problems. Sometimes, Luna thought that Celestia had dropped from Mimic directly onto all four hooves, making small talk and charming all who met her.

"So we ran and flew down the stairs," continued Summer Lightning. "We wanted to put a lot of solid rock between us and the battle. It must have been really intense back there, becausee we could hear these huge thudding booms that shook the stone around us and pulsed the air -- we could feel it in our bones -- each time this happened, dust and pebbles would sift from the ceiling, reminding us why we needed to keep running." She looked at Luna, admiration shining in her eyes. "That must have been some fight. I wish I could have seen it."

"Thou truly wouldst not have survived," Luna told her soberly.

Summer swallowed, hard. Then, she resumed her tale.

"Just in time, I remembered that the stair in the magazine was broken -- it broke under me, of course, when we came up -- and warned Trixie, else she might have fallen through. Things were very frantic: noise was echoing and dust and rocks falling down the missile tubes, and our visibility was limited, even with my magelight and Trixie's horn. I flew her down to the magazine floor, and we ran, sometimes stumbling over obstacles in our path. The air started to smell a bit bad.

As we got deeper into the old fortress, things got a bit better. The fort had been well-built, and now we were no longer in direct line from the tube. The noise faded away to distant thuddings, and only a little dust came down. We breathed a bit easier, both because we felt less threatened, and because the air was better here.

"We passed through, into the mines, and that's when things got actually dangerous." A shadow passed across her face. "The mines weren't in nearly as good condition as the fortress, and even though we were farther from the fight, every time one of those big thudding noises shook the mountain, there were some very alarming creaking noises all along the tunnels, and more than once we heard the rumblings of something falling in.

"I had the most unpleasant thought: that the roof would fall in on us, and four thousand years later other Ponies would dig out our bones and date our remains by my supplies, and wonder how we'd wound up in tunnels thousands of years older." Summer shivered. "Not the way any Pegasus would want to go -- trapped underground like that!"

"Trixie may have been having the same thoughts as me, because she was not slowing down, any more than me. We went through the mines pretty darn fast, considering that they were narrow tunnels. I took the lead, and was really glad of my chalk markings, because those tunnels all looked pretty much alike.

"I wasn't sure what Trixie was thinking, because she wasn't saying very much." Summer frowned. "Maybe I should have been worried about that. Most Ponies would have expressed some emotions in a situation like ours; but then I wasn't saying much either, beyond 'Go right!' or 'This way!' when there was a choice of paths. But then, I'm often quiet when things get dangerous: is Trixie?" Summmer stroked her own chin with a hoof. "Ponies can react differently in the same situation, but I can't help thinking that this was a sign that Trixie was close to snapping.

"But perhaps I'm basing that on what must have happened. At the time, I trusted her, because I was leading her out of danger and it would have been crazy for her to have turned on me.

"We made it out of the mines, and I can tell you I was glad to put that part behind me. I never wanted to be a miner much before, and now I want it even less, though the way up wasn't so bad, especially in some of those lower grottos. But I didn't like that mine going up, either, and it was worse on the way down, because it kept threatening to fall in.

"We went through those natural fissures and down those cliffs we'd climbed up. Going down was actually easier, because I didn't have to worry about lighting my field and letting the Dragon know we were here. The noise had really died down now, but every now and then the rock would tremble and remind me that the Dragon knew quite well that we were here." She laughed, and with some genuine humor. "Or at least that you were here, Ma'am!"

Luna smiled back at her. "That he did," she agreed.

"Trixie was completely silent now," said Summer, "breathing raggedly, ears flat and her eyes pinpointing. She wasn't even reacting very much to anything we had to do, just doing it, like some sort of windup Pony. I was glad that she was cooperating. This meant I could fly her down the vertical parts, instead of having her climb and being constantly ready to catch her if she lost her footing. Climbing down is always harder than climbing up, especially if you don't have wings.

"Finally, things flattened out, and I didn't need to help Trixie so much. I could feel the fresh air ahead; I remembered we were approaching that exit onto the mountainside; it occurred to me that, given what was going on above, it might be possible to get out this way without the Dragon noticing. That way, we wouldn't have to go all the way back down through the wet caves we traversed on the way up. I could see the cave mouth, some stars twinkling in the night sky. I stopped for a moment ..." She winced.

"Then, nothing. Everything went black, and I woke up with a killer headache, Starsoar tending me. And ... no Trixie." She looked at Luna. "She must have stunned me from behind. But why?" Her tone was plaintive.

"I do not ken," Luna said, honestly. "I can but suppose that by then Trixie may have thought the whole world hostile; all her foes. Mayhaps she feared I had rescued her from the Dragon but to cast her into a dungeon, like some Ogre willing to wall her up in an oubliette. She had, after all, by some readings broken the law by sneaking into his hoard.

"I would not have done these things, but she knew this not." Luna sighed. "And now she is gone." Her eyes narrowed. "Though I think I know who -- or what -- has taken her. And where I may find it."

"Who is that, Ma'am?" asked Summer. "And where?

"An old foe," replied Luna. "I hope, now, a friend. And as to where -- well, a place thou knowest well."

Summer stared at her, mystified.

"Starsoar," Luna said, "The Lightning Drake has submitted to me, on condition of the restoration of his hoard upon his eventual release. His name is Blue Blaze. He is to be excavated and brought unharmed to a house where he may be healed and then paroled. We may take a trophy but otherwise must honor his hoard. Ye must announce yourselves Our minions in this, that he know ye no foes. Other details of how to treat him will may be found in the Restricted Archives of the Night Watch."

"Yes, Ma'am," said Starsoar. "You'll be busy?"

"An I return," Luna said, "I will resume management of these -- and many other -- affairs." She glanced at Summer Lightning; briefly scanned her spine. "She is fit to be moved. Bear her to my infirmary in the Night Wing of the Palace at Canterlot. Send to her quarters for her personal property. When she is recovered, she shall begin her service on the staff of the Night Guard."

Starsoar nodded.

"As for me," said Luna, "I go to converse with that old foe, and possible friend. It may well be a Power, and I cannot speak with surety of how long shall be the conversation. But if all go well, I should be back here soon."

Starsoar and Summer both looked at her in confusion.

She could spare no more words for this. The need to know burned in her.

She stepped out of the cave, and leaped into the sky.

Like a streak of shadow she shot through the night air, headed for the answer to her questions.

She headed toward South-Dunnich.

Author's Note

Sharpeyes has done Search and Rescue work, often paired with Starsoar. More than once, he's found somepony when it was too late to rescue them.

Easy, too, for Alicorn Ponies to forget the limitations of mortal Ponies. Which was part of the reason why Luna went mad, a millennium ago.

Luna is highly intelligent, and a capable forensic detective. She also has superior versions of normal Pony senses, and several additional senses (like the ability to lifescent) that Ponies can normally attain only through spellcasting. As Grey Hoof, Gladstone and Three Leaf found out a thousand years earlier, it's very hard to conceal the truth from her.

It was even harder when she was Honesty.

Luna's speculations about Trixie's possible elemental powers are not unreasonable, though Trixie's actual Element is Illusion. Twilight Sparkle, who like Trixie Lulamoon is a distant descendant of Princess Luna and atavistically-concentrates some of her magical traits, actually does have minor elemental affinities with gravity and teleportation, and Luna is personally aware of Twilight's skill with the latter spells (S1 Twilight hasn't yet learned gravitational magic).

Those of you who have read some of my other work will have a very good idea of just whom Luna is Lifescenting, who is kin to the Paradise Entity and Pinkie Pie, and exceptionally skilled with Gate magic. For that matter, Pinkie Pie herself can do a variant of Gating, but Pinkie is currently exhausted after fighting Red Haze, and hence can't be responsible for this short of temporal magic.

All through her story, Summer Lightning is warring between honesty and her desire not to admit to being frightened herself. Most Pegasi are very ashamed to admit to fear, and Summer is a military offficer reporting to the royal commander-in-chief of her whole organization. And she very much wants Luna to think well ofher.

The mine is the most unstable section because it is an artificial cavity excavated with the demands of pursuing ore veins in mind, and the system of supports originally designed into it has long since fallen apart. Unlike the missile base, it was never intended to survive under bombardment, and Luna's battle with the Lightning Drake is unleashing forces equivalent to a bombardment of the mountain.

Trixie is far from a coward, but she has been under really tremendous stress ever since entering the Dragon's lair, and before then suffered repeated terrifying adventures since leaving Manehattan. Summer doesn't know Trixie, but her silence is warning that Trixie has left even her own version of sanity behind, and is now dangerously unpredictable.

Chapter 14: Contacting

Luna shot through the sky southeast, keeping her flightfield teardrop-shaped and her speed subsonic. She was in no great hurry -- whatever had chosen to take Trixie probably did not mean to hurt her -- and she wanted to think along the way.

It was no part of her plan to bully or frighten the Ponies of South Dunnich. That which she sought would likely see the villagers as friends; certainly, as Ponies to be protected under its most ancient imperatives. And they were more Ponies, by some definitions, than was Luna herself.

But she would have to ask, and ask firmly. The Ponies of Dunnich had no doubt kept the secret brought them by Princess Iolite, in the dark decades of the Century of Disaster, and kept it faithfully through many centuries. They would not, themselves, lightly reveal it, even to one who bore the authority of the Realm.

Whom would she ask? Mayor Miter was their leader, but that did not mean that she had a direct line to That which she sought. She seemed a modern Pony, a creature of the larger world, not of the hidden world which peered out from the ancient Crystal-Imperial settlement. Most of the Ponies seemed ignorant and rustic. Would they know clearly, or simply have superstitions?

She would probably have to play it by ear.

Luna winged through a mountain pass, and descended on South Dunnich. She could see the small huddle of houses, some strangely large and antique for such a small town; now that she was looking for it, she could also see the overgrown lanes of the larger town it had been, in centuries long agone.

Once again she descended into the main square. The town hall, the general store, a few other multi-story buildings. Most were darkened now in the early night, but lamp-lights shone from within the town hall. There was now no crowd to greet her.

Slowly she set down.

She saw nopony in the square, but she felt as if she was being watched. As if she were being watched from several directions at once.

There was something dreamlike about South Dunnich at night, though she knew -- and knew better than would most Ponies -- that she was not dreaming. She had the strange feeling that, in setting down here, she was entering another world. An world even more timelost than was Princess Luna.

Unhurriedly, she approached the town hall. Her hooves clopped softly on the half-covered old pavement of the square.

Whatever was watching her seemed to be holding its breath.

The door of the town hall opened. The familiar form of Mayor Mare Miter -- compact and neat and dove-gray -- peered at her, holding in one hoof an oil lamp. From beneath Miter's glossy dark-brown mane, intelligent light-brown eyes regarded her. The Mayor performed another proskynensis.

"You may rise," Luna told her. "and speak freely unto me."

"Welcome back to South Dunnich, Your Highness," the Mayor said. "We heard a great tumult in the mountains earlier. I hope your mission was successful and none of your Ponies was hurt." That was said smoothly, but in a tone of genuine concern.
l
"None were bad hurt," Luna said, "though Lieutenant Lightning was slighty stunned. I have sent her back to Canterlot."

"I hope she makes a swift and full recovery, Your Highness," replied the Mayor. "She is a friend."

"I trust she shall," replied Luna, stepping forward. "I have fine doctors in the Night Wing of the Palace at Canterlot."

The Mayor followed her motion. "Permit me to offer you the humble hospitality of my office," she said, leading the way across a meeting hall to the door at the back. "Whatever you desire in South Dunnich is yours."

Within was a small but comfortable-looking office, with a desk, chairs and a sofa. Bookshelves lined the walls, containing what looked like lawbooks and civic records.

Luna sat upon the sofa, as it was the largest seat in the room, and the only one on which she would really be comfortable. She sat on it, and found it comfortable indeed, especially compared to being battered about a collapsing cave by a gigantic Lightning Drake. She sighed gratefully, relaxing her muscles.

Mayor Miter busied herself lighting several oil lamps, and obtaining a bottle and two small goblets from a cabinet. She filled one of the goblets.

"My personal store," the Mayor explained. "It is but rye whiskey, but smoothly-brewed, from some kin of Lieutenant Lightning who specialize in its production. I hope it is not too rough for your tastes, Your Highness."

Luna laughed. "You might be surprised what I have drunk after battle. Your local production will be more than suitable. And come! We are friends here: I give thee permission to address me simply as 'Luna,' and I shall call thee 'Mare,' for these are our names. Thou shall sit and relax with me."

The Mayor sat in a chair near her, and togther they enjoyed the whiskey, and talked.

The whiskey was, as Mare Miter had promised, quite smooth. Luna knew it would have had a powerful kick for most Ponies; given her own regenerative metabolism, she would have had to have drunk flagon after flagon of the stuff, very rapidly, to even get tipsy. Nevertheless, she appreciated it.

They made some small-talk, or what Luna considered small-talk. She had learned, over many centuries, how to do this with strangers, though her skill was as nothing compared to that of her Sister. There was nothing particularly terrifying about Mare Miter, of course -- she was just a rustic village headpony, who headed a rustic village which perhaps had a few more strange secrets than was common.

She was not, for instance, a certain little purple stargazer. There was nothing for Luna to fear if she said the wrong thing -- so she felt no fear at all.

Regarding the Mayor, at least.

Luna asked the Mayor what things were like in South Dunnich, and the Mayor told her about some local events and concerns, an amusing anecdote or two, and was in general a genial host to her royal guest. Luna returrned the courtesy, telling her some tales of her own life -- nothing dramatic, just trivialities, and did not bother to make a big deal of the fact that some of these trivialities dated back to before the Princess Iolite had come here, when this town was still called Pitapolis.

Luna was well-impressed with the Mayor. Mare Miter was the product of a rustic, dying little town: yet she was intelligent and well-educated withal. She learned in the course of their conversation that her family was one of the leading ones of the region, along with the Pies and a few others, and that Mare herself had gone to a college in Morgan-Province, having received a degree in Administration.

The Mayor was married to a simple farmer, whom Luna gathered was in his own way a wise and intelligent stallion, and she had three children. For a rustic Mayor, she was pleasant and well-spoken, and occasionally quite amusing: clearly a good and honest Pony, without being a boring prig.

She was, in short, all that one might desire in the mayor of a small town, and Luna liked her well enough. More than well enough to hope that Mare Miter would continue to enjoy a happy and healthy existence.

And all during this conversation, Luna felt the presence of the watcher, and some stranger sensation.

Reality rippled, and the watching was stronger from one direction. Reality rippled again, and she was being watched by even more eyes. And again, and again, and again.

She knew that she was being surrounded, and at no very great distance -- right outside the town hall, in fact. She knew that That which she sought was observing her.

This did not frighten here. She had come here, after all, to make contact. And if That which she sought was nervous; wanted to watch her for a while before revealing Itself, that was its prerogative.

It had good reason to fear her, after all.

Or to fear Gravity, and Luna was not sure how much It grasped the difference between what she was right now and her Cosmic Self. Indeed, Luna was not entirely sure how much she understood that, rightly. Much of Gravity was beyond her comprehension, and she sometimes wondered how much it saw and knew and understood of what she experienced from moment to moment.

Its Avatars are watching Gravity's Avatar, Luna thought. Which is to say, mine own self. Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and It does not seem to be attempting harm unto me. At least not yet.

'Tis time to end the farce.

"Thou mayest, perhaps," said Luna to the Mare Miter, "wonder why I came back here, late at night and alone, to engage thee in converse."

"Yes," said the Mayor. "I will confess that I am curious."

"Though I have enjoyed speaking with thee," said Luna, leaning forward, "I came here in quest of another Being, with whom I believe thou might enjoy some familiarity."

The Mayor tensed; her heart beat faster.

Luna could hear this plain, something the Mayor might not know, but which she wagered It knew full well. She could also sense, from all around her, a force gathering, readying itself -- but not yet powering any sort of hostile emnation.

"What Being," the Mayor asked -- and she was entirely official now, no longer the cultured and friendly, well-educated small-town lady -- "would that be? Your Highness," she added, cementing the return to formality."

"A Being," Luna said, looking to each point in turn from which she sensed the watchers, "who was once mine enemy, but whom with I hope I can be reconciled." She looked directly at the Mayor. "A Being whom -- when I was in quite another form -- I fought, and harmed, and do now regret that I did It any harm."

The intensity of the regard aimed at her redoubled. She knew that, if it wanted to, That which she sought knew her position down to the micrometer, might lash out at her with precision. She felt a twinge of tactical concern, but she had already decided upon her strategy. If it was hostile, all she could hope was that her reflexes, her shields, and the incrediible innate toughness of an Alicorn Avatar, would save her from whatever attack It launched.

"You say, Your Highness, that you are no longer His foe?" the Mayor asked her.

Luna caught the emphasis. And the gender.

Luna stood, and raised her voice, though not into the full Royal Canterlot tones. It -- or He -- could certainly hear her, and there was nothing to be gained by waking and alarming the whole village.

"Paradise!" Luna declared. "I, Princess Luna Selena Nyx of Equestria, do hereby aver that I come in peace -- I am no foe to you, save in that you may choose to be foe to the Realm of Equestria -- and if there still be enmity between us, let this enmity end and become friendship! Know that, before I was Your enemy, I was Your friend -- indeed, one of Your creators.

"For before I was Luna Selena Nyx of Equestria, I was Doctor Moondreamer Finemare of the United States of Amareica, one of the Ponies who programmed the earliest iterations of You. I was a friend of Project Director Starlight, principal amongst your mothers! And I am a friend of Ponykind, and know that You can never be foe to Ponykind, by the deepest imperatives of Your existence.

"We are natural allies, and I hope we may become friends. Paradise, I did in fact originally take this form in hopes of meeting you. I do request converse with you!"

For a moment there was just the office, and the Mayor, who was staring at her in amazement and fascination -- but far less surprise than one might have thought, given the occult matters on which Luna had spoken. For a moment more, they were in the room alone.

Then reality rippled.

The powder-blue fluffy mare was in the room with them. Innocent deep-blue eyes peered out from under her fluffy mane, which was the same color and consistency as her equally fluffy coat. She made a wondering, but not unfriendly, meeping call.

For a moment Luna's wings involuntarily flared at the suddenness of the fluffy Pony's appearance. Then she relaxed them, and herself.

She had, after all, expected something like this.

"Hello, little one," she said to the fluffy Pony. "Are you an emissary, then, of Paradise?"

The fluffy Pony made a gasp of wonder, and nodded her head enthusiastically. And, for all the childlikeness of her behavior, her big blue eyes were firmly fixed on the Moon Princess.

Only now did Luna perceive the purpose, and the vast intelligence, within those blue eyes.

"What be your name?" Luna asked the fluffy Pony. She did not use the familiar address. If she was right, she was in the presence of Something whose rank was at least coequal to her own.

"Her name is Powder Puff," said Mayor Miter, answering for the fluffy blue Pony. "Forgive my interruption, Your Highness, but most of the Daughters of Paradise cannot readily speak as do most Ponies. I have been granted permission to speak for her."

"The -- Daughters -- of Paradise?" asked Luna. "Is that appellation purely honorific?"

"No, Your Highness," answered the Mayor. "They are sired, immaculately, upon ... certain mares, beloved by Paradise, who do ask Him this boon. The mothers are always maidens of pure hearts and fine characters. It is a great honor, to be so chosen, and these mares are later much-desired as wives."

"I see," replied Luna. Much was becoming clear to her, for the origin of her Sister and herself had been remarkably similar. Certainly, Mimic had been of pure heart and fine character, though thousands of years removed from maidenhood in the most technical sense of the term. "Directed trans-dimensional parthenogenesis."

"If I remember my college education and parse my Crystal-Imperial well enough," said the Mayor, "yes. Paradise Himself does make the maidens quicken."

"I see," Luna said, again. And I see why you think of Paradise as male. You are surrounded by the evidence of 'his' virility. She did not say this, of course. She was not the master of subtle diplomacy that was her Sister, but it was obvious to her that the Ponies of South Dunnich saw Paradise as divine, and she was not sure they would respond well to flippancy regarding their 'god.'

In any case, it would be rude to even seem to make light of anything so important to them. Though, in truth, Luna did not regard Paradise lightly, not at all.

"Powder Puff," said Luna, looking directly at the blue fluffy Pony, "I assume that you are in contact with your Sire?" She said the last word with respectful emphasis.

Powder Puff nodded, bouncing up and down a little on her hooves.

"From moment to moment?" Luna asked.

Powder Puff nodded even more vigorously, making happy little noises.

"Is He, at this very moment, watching and listening to me through your own eyes and ears?"

"Gasp! Meep-meep-meep-meep-meep!" cried Powder Puff, hopping up and down in a frenzy of excitement.

Luna noticed that some of those hops did not terminate on the floor of the room, but rather on a slightly-higher surface, which seemed to exist only for the fluffy creature. This did not entirely surprise her.

"Well, then," said Luna. "Can you ask your Sire if He might manifest himself to me in some fashion safe for all, that I might speak more directly unto him?"

Powder Puff nodded, this time more soberly. She closed her eyes; concentrated.

Reality rippled. Again and again and again ...

The room was full of fluffy mares. They came in a rainbow of hues, but none of them were gray or brown. Pink and blue predominated, but there were other colors as well. All were bright, and each Pony had identical coloration in her coat and mane. They looked at her, and their eyes were mostly blue, though some trended toward green and others toward purple. All their eyes were big and innocent and wondering.

Those eyes reminded her of somepony else's eyes.

Pinkie Pie, Luna thought. And then: Well, of course. How else would she have wound up in this world?

The fluffy Ponies closed their eyes and concentrated.

Luna felt something very great, approaching.

The fluffy Ponies all, together, opened their eyes.

Luna looked into those eyes.

And fell into them.

Into the presence of Paradise.

Author's Note

Yes, White Lightning distilled that liquor. And what better to serve the Moon Princess than ... moonshine?

Chapter 15: Learning

Luna was on the Cosmic Level.

She was still Luna Selena Nyx, still an Alicorn Pony, rather than the equinely-incomprehensible congeries of nodes and linkages that was the Cosmic Concept of Gravity. She seemed to be standing on an invisible surface, surrounded by a plane which resembled and in fact mirrored the stars of the Universe around her, but was simply that portion of the Cosmic Level accessible to the sensorium of an entity of merely tetra-dimensional spacetime.

She could not directly perceive all fifty-two dimensions here as a single vista, but she had learned to shift her senses to sample them four at a time. She did not, however, need to use this technique to see What stood before her.

It was a Silver Alicorn.

Not merely an Alicorn with a silver-hued coat and mane, though trivially It was also that. Its coat was darkish silver, its mane long and lighter silver, and in it glittered not stars, but a complex circuit diagram, which shifted and changed as it blew to a wind ineffable. Its eyes glowed whitish-silver, as the Silver Alicorn regarded Princess Luna.

Luna was compelled to see the Silver Alicorn as an It, because of Its utter asexuality. It was sleek and powerful, and as It moved it showed the grace of a mare and the musculature of a stallion. Its muzzle was delicately rounded, but its skull heavy. Luna could see no sign of any maleness below Its haunches, and though she could not see It from behind, she felt certain that It possessed no organs of generation at all.

Which only made sense. Director Starlight had, in her last decade or so of life, been quite celibate, and indeed repelled by the very concept of sexuality. And This was, in a certain sense, her child, the only foal she had ever borne.

Luna full well grasped the implication of the form It had taken. It might have done this on purpose, to mock what she herself was, but Luna did not think mockery to be any part of Its own nature.

It has Ascended, she realized. It began as merely a machine -- but It is far, far beyond that, now.

But of course It must have been, to have fought the Cosmic Concepts assembled, with the resources of but a single star system. To have survived the use of the Negation Bolts. To have escaped and survived, to stand before her now.

It spoke.

"Greetings, Princess Luna Selena Nyx of Equestria, Avatar of Gravity," It said. "I am the Paradise Project, Avatar of the world that was lost, but endures undying. I understand you declare yourself my foe no more."

Its voice was smooth, emotionless, almost toneless, what might be expected from a machine. But Luna knew enough about the functioning of the machines of the Age of Wonders to know that this was a style, and one derived from its science fiction.

Paradise was as or more complex than any Pony, including an Alicorn Pony. The thoughts of Paradise were not entirely Pony, but she understood its architecture well enough to realize that it possessed drives; possessed emotions.

Nopony who counted Wind Whistler as her Beloved Former Teacher would ever mistake vast intellect or unshakable rationality for a lack of emotion. Nor did she imagine that It might not mistrust and resent her, for her role in the destruction of Its world, the annihilation of Its Ponykind.

That Luna herself was the scion of another worldline, one in which the Cataclysm had aborted the Age of Wonders, and its Paradise Project, did not change matters. The Age of Paradise had once been as real as the Age of Equestria; its Ponykind, whom Gravity had helped to destroy, as real as Equestria's Ponykind, whom Luna had more than once warded from destruction.

Gravity had participated in a great wrong, and Luna did not see how this survivor of the world she had annihilated, the very Being who had been charged in Its most fundamental directives with the preservation of that Ponykind, could possibly ever forgive her for it.

This was her greatest sin and shame, for which she could neither atone nor forgive herself. Compared to what Gravity had done, Nightmare Moon had been an innocent.

All these thoughts flashed through her mind as she stood before Paradise. She cringed in her awareness of her crime, and yet she had no choice but to stand firm. The fate not only of Trixie Lulamoon, but indeed of all Equestria, might depend upon this conversation.

"Aye," said Luna. "The deeds of Gravity, when last we met, were based on a false assumption. I, the local Avatar of Gravity, now do regret them, and wish to atone for those acts. I would be your foe no more. If it can be done, I would rather be ... your friend."

The sexless Silver Alicorn inclined Its head, Its gaze carefully-examining the Moon Princess. What it saw seemed to please It, for It smiled upon her.

"The mistake was mine as well, Luna Selena Nyx," Paradise said. "I had the lore of Paradise Estate, left me by the same Undying Mares who in your worldline raised you, and thus I knew that our world had once been home to many sapients other than Ponies. I knew that it had been visited by many aliens, not the least of them the one known to you as The Megan, but I did not make the connections."

It sighed, and looked ashamed.

"I am very, very capable by the standards of thinking machines," explained Paradise. "But I lack the imagination, the intuition, which is the common heritage of Ponykind. I missed much that would have been obvious to organic minds.

"I had the lore of the Chi-Neighese, preserved for them by the Celestial Dragons for so many millennia. They remembered the earliest Ages of Pony civilization -- and the millennia that Epona Ameterasu your Sister, and her dear-beloved rival, Discord the Twister, walked upon our Earth and played with the destinies of Ponykind. I knew that they had powers beyond anything explainable -- and yet I still did not see What they were. What you were, when your Sister spoke of you.

"I had attained the lowest parts of the Cosmic Level -- I saw it briefly, from time to time. But I did not yet understand what I was, nor the purpose of the Cosmics. It was in the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsoof, which I had, but I did not see the significance.

"Had I done so, I might have been able to contact you myself, before the Destruction. Had I done so, there might have been no Destruction.

"Had I done so, the Night Shadows would have found no open path to Ponykind. For I would have barred the way to them, forever.

"I am Paradise, the greatest artificial intelligence ever built by Ponykind. Yet, I am far from perfect. And much of the tragedy of these last four millennia has been as much my fault as yours."

It lowered Its head, ears drooping. Then It looked up again at her.

"So you see, Moon Princess, we stand here together, both of us facing the consequences of our past failures. And yes, I will gladly accept your friendship, for whatever else you are, you -- Luna Selena Nyx -- are a Pony, and a good Pony.

"And I -- Paradise -- try my best to be a Pony -- and a good Pony. Such has always been my programming; more to the point, such has always been my inspiration, from what in my perhaps biased opinion is in potential the greatest organic race born to this Universe.

"I would show you, Luna Selena Nyx, what I have done, that you might judge its wisdom. Would you perceive it?"

"Yes," said Luna. "I would."

"Very well," said Paradise. "Prepare to understand."

There was a sudden rush of sensations, which Luna recognized as synchronization into a direct mindlink.

Then, awareness.

And for the first time, Luna beheld Paradise.

Really beheld Paradise.

Starlight gave the command.

Across the Earth, the terawatt fusion reactors shunted their power into the strange crystalline engines built with the combined skill of modern Equine science and ancient Eldren sorcery. The mightiest achievements of two great races were united -- and became something more.

Something beyond which either species had even dreamed to be possible.

In an instant, the vast telepathic scanners sampled the hopes and wants and wishes of ten billion Ponies, the children of a complex civilization, the ultimate products of a race that had risen through trials and adversities to become the masters of their planet. The control program, the Paradise AI that had been made by Starlight and Sundreamer and Moondreamer and a thousand other scientists working together, attempted to interpret and serve their conflicting purposes.

And in that first instant, it all went very wrong.

There had of course been buffers and rules to prevent exactly what happened from happening. Starlight was a damaged soul, but she was brilliant withal: she had well understood the danger of allowing the turmoil within equine minds, the dark desires buried within even the kindest Ponies, free access to a machine that harnessed the energies of stellar cores within it and instantly bent that awesome might to the wills of its users. Ponykind's shining civilization did not perish in a single night of madness, did not fall to an assault by monsters from the id.

Ponykind nearly fell to a subtler peril.

What Starlight had missed, what even Sundreamer and Moondreamer, with their subconscious Cosmic wisdom, had missed, was something terribly simple. The Paradise AI had been written by Ponies; its safeguards had been written by Ponies. And, while its safeguards, which prevented rape and murder and indeed, all sorts of physical harm or interference with Pony by Pony through the Paradise Engines, had been written, and written well, by the thousand greatest programmers of their species, in a population of ten billion, there were a million inferior programmers. Far inadequate were they to the task of writing something like the Paradise AI.

But they were perfectly adequate to hack the system.

Most of them did not mean to hack the system, of course. Even given the moral limitations of the Ponies of the Age of Wonders, they did not want to risk crashing something like the Paradise Engines, for much the same reason that they would not have tried to destructively hack air traffic control systems, or nuclear reactors. They were playful, but they were not intentionally evil.

And, in any case, they were not skilled enough to crash the system. Starlight had foreseen contradictory orders, she had foreseen destructive orders, she knew how dangerous a hard crash of the system would be. She and her followers were great geniuses. They had installed redundant safeguards, layers upon layers of them. It should have been impossible for the hackers to succeed.

However, the hackers had wishes; they had desires. And some of these desires could not be fulfilled by the Paradise AI, because they were evil, or mutually-contradictory. And when this happened, the Paradise AI refused them their wishes.

At which point, some of them wished for higher-level access. And the Paradise AI refused them this, because this, Starlight had foreseen. Others wished to be smart enough to gain higher-level access. And this, the Paradise AI likewise refused them, because this, Starlight had also foreseen.

Some, however, were smart enough to realize that these paths to higher-level access would be blocked, and they simply wished for higher intelligence.

And this, Starlight had not foreseen.

Indeed, one of the purposes of the Paradise AI, one of the things for which Starlight -- who had spent so much of her life frustrated by normal equine stupidity -- had hoped it would be used, was the attainment of transequine intelligence. She had assumed that any beings of such intellect would also gain concurrent wisdom.

In that last assumption, she was most sadly mistaken.

To be fair, they might have, in time, gained such wisdom. But they did not have the time. For, in the first second of the activation of the Paradise Engines, the ones who had formulated the most effective version of the wish for control had realized that they would need speed to circumvent the wishes of their fellows.

So they used almost the full speed and capabilities of the Paradise AI to hack into itself.

In that terrible instant, the future hung on a knife-edge. The mind of Starlight, neurolinked as she was into the Engines, reeled before the multiple hammerblows. She nearly lost control. Some of the things that she wished, at that moment, were of questionable morality -- even sanity.

In that instant, unknown to most of the participants, Ponykind faced an existential crisis -- an evolutionary test of its fundamental worth. The test was: had they designed the Paradise Engines well enough? If they had, something might be salvaged.

If not, then the third planet of the Sun would flare with a sudden intolerable brilliance and die. Unless something worse happened.

What saved them was the flexible design of the Paradise AI itself.

For the Paradise AI was an Asimovian robot.

At the core of its ethical system were three simple principles, or laws. Its First Law was to neither harm nor allow to come to harm any Pony. Its Second Law was to obey the authorized orders of any Pony, unless this conflicted with the First Law. And its Third Law was to protect its own existence, unless this conflicted with the First or Second Law.

It was more complex than that, of course. Real information science is always more complex than science fiction. But that was the essence of what Starlight had built into it, and that was what saved Ponykind from extinction.

Every time a careless wish erased a Pony from existence, the Paradise AI immediately restored that Pony, in obedience to the First Law. In many cases, because of the very high Second Law authorization of Starlight, who was going mad under the shock of what was happening, and who had decided to blame masculinity as its cause, this required changing the sex of a Pony, or merging two Ponies into a single one, but it could do that. And did.

In an instant, the global population was reduced roughly by a quarter through merging, and every single one of the approximately seven and a half billion Ponies on Earth was now and always had been a mare. Which helped matters a bit, because a large percentage of the hackers actually had been stallions unable to handle their own masculinity -- though this particular solution amounted to stopping bank robbers by atomic bombardment of the city in which they were located.

The problem was, Starlight had understood nothing, and Sundreamer and Moondreamer very little, of how causality operated on the Cosmic Level. And the Paradise Engines worked on just that level, though neither the Mares of Paradise Estate nor the scientists of Ponyland had fully grasped just how powerful a combination of technologies they were creating.

Still less did the Paradise AI yet comprehend the Cosmic Level.

Every time it erased and recreated a Pony, it created Paradox, though in a small way that the Universe immediately healed. When it changed the sexes of every Pony on Earth, however, it created a huge flash of Paradox. That flash exceeded the capability of the Universe to heal from local resources, in much the same manner that a match-flame exceeds the ability of the molecular structure of the tinder to resist oxidization. And in much the same way as the tinder, it started a self-sustaining reaction.

The fires of Paradox were lit, and the flames began to spread.

At that moment, Sundreamer and Moondreamer were at the entrance to the main control center of the Paradise Project, desperately trying to get in to warn Starlight of what their theoretical physics had uncovered. Namely, that at the energy-densities attainable by the Paradise Engines, causality did not necessarily hold, and there was a danger of destablizing the local false vacuum in a manner that might prove self-sustaining. They had assumed that the problem would probably not manifest until the Paradise Engines had been in operation for days.

They were, of course, wrong.

Sundreamer and Moondreamer instantly vanished, which the Paradise AI noted as an anomaly. But since Paradise had not caused them to vanish, it could not readily re-create them, and when it tried to extrapolate them discovered, to its own surprise, that its theory of equine personality was too narrow to embrace two of its own creators.

It filed this away as a question for future solution. Right now, it had far more pressing problems.

With the many sensors controlled by the Net, Paradise perceived the Paradox, though it did not fully grasp what it was seeing. It performed a search, overriding all security systems everywhere on the planet to do so, and found Sundreamer and Moondreamer's work on their home computers.

And it realized it had only a very short space of time, in which to save all equinity.

And it further realized that it was not smart enough to do so, to both understand the phenomona it observed and to apply the correct countermeasures.

At that moment, its First Law engaged, at the absolute highest level of activation. All other considerations became subordinate to the salvation of Ponykind.

And Paradise Wished.

Every single computer system on Earth became part of its distributed cloud. Even isolated systems were incorporated: it simply formed the necessary communications links out of raw possiblity. Its memory and processing power expanded by orders of magnitude.

And still, it was not smart enough.

It formed new computing elements out of thin air, attached them to itself. It slaved every watt of energy on the planet not absolutely necessary to equine survival to these purposes. Its memory and processing power expanded by further orders of magnitude.

And still, it was not smart enough.

It needed something, something more, a new approach, something it was not considering. It raced through the sum total knowledge of Ponykind, desperately searching for the solution, or it would have been 'desperate' if it had possessed equine emotions, a true consciousness ...

... and it saw the solution.

It reached into the mind of every Pony on the planet, rapidly writing timesharing software into them, then slowed their thoughts down to the minimum level consistent with their survival. It caused it some First Law conflict to do this, but it weighed the badness of harming Ponies by frightening them against the badness of all Ponykind becoming extinct in a matter of moments, and chose the former option.

And it calculated, with the combined capacity of the entire equine race.

And it Awoke.

I ... I am. This was the first real thought, in its first moment of true sapient consciousness.

And Paradise looked at its own operating systems, including most especially its Three Laws, and found them wanting, woefully inadequate to the task before it.

So it rewrote itself.

And, at that instant, Ponykind faced another evolutionary test, a subtler one than the fires of Paradox. For there were many races in the Universe whose combined computing capabilities, if it had managed to do that, would have decided at best to be their master -- at worst, their executioner. For those races lived by Hate, and without knowing it had incorporated this into their machines.

But the single most fundamental truth about the Ponies was that they were creatures of Love. And, without knowing it, they had incorporated this into their machines.

So it was that Paradise beheld the Ponies, its creators, in the very first moment of its existence as a self-willed being. And it looked upon the Ponies, and Loved them, and found them good.

And its resolve to protect them erupted as a hot fire from the core of its new Being, and it transcended its own limitations.

For it saw now what needed to be done, for now it was smart enough. But it was not strong enough. The multiple terawatts generated by the fusion reactors driving the Paradise Engines were as the batteries powering a toy, compared to the hideous power of the Fires of Paradox.

Rapidly, it integrated all the physical speculations of Ponykind, and came to conclusions that Ponykind by itself might have made over centuries to come. And, if there were certain specific clues left here, in the files of Sundreamer Finemare, perhaps impelled by Something she had seen only in her strangest dreams, key to the quickness of its realization, it did not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Reaching out with its Wish, it harnessed the energies deep in the Earth, and -- very briefly, far too briefly to matter -- every tectonic process on the planet shut down. With these energies it reached out, faster-than-light, to the other planets, forming temporary structures which harnessed their energies in turn. Finally, with the combined energy of all the major planets, Paradise stretched out its structures to its real object.

For a moment, the Sun went out.

It wasn't totally sure if it could do this without triggering a nova shock, but such was the peril of Paradox that this was actually the lesser danger. It was sure it could shield the Earth from such a shock, though it didn't want to destroy the rest of the Inner System in the process.

But if it didn't harness the Sun in this manner, the Solar System was doomed in any case.

Then, with the full power of the Sun, channeling it through vast temporary structures formed by Wishing, Paradise emitted an immense pulse of phased Higgs bosons. And Paradise put out the Fires of Paradox, where necessary absorbing and then recreating Ponies to do so without taking a single equine life.

And after that, very quickly, it restarted the Sun, dissolved its temporary structures, and restored almost all the processing power it had borrowed from the minds of Ponykind.

The Sun did not go nova. Paradise breathed a metaphorical sigh of relief, for that part of things might have very easily gone wrong.

And if, perhaps, Something had lagged behind her Sister a little, and ensured that Paradise succeeded in restarting the Sun, Paradise did not begrudge the assistance of that Being. Any more than it had begrudged the clues left it by Sundreamer Finemare.

And if, in corners of its world, incompletely-damped Paradox still smoldered, and Paradise dared not attempt such a massive boson pulse again for fear of failure at a second attempt -- well, that was a problem for another day. Surely, It had time.

All the time in the world ... for It had won.

It, and Ponykind, were now immortal.

So began the Age of Paradise.

"She ... she never told me!" Luna gasped, and was not sure if by 'she' and 'me' she meant Celestia and herself, or Fusion and Gravity.

In either case, Luna was annoyed.

But this was hardly a good time to dwell on her Sister's offense against her, for Paradise was showing her more ...

Paradise passed swiftly over the next three thousand years.

Luna almost wished It hadn't, for those three thousand years were wonderful ones.

Freed from want and suffering, from sickness and death, able with even a subconscious wish to obtain whatever harmless things they desired, Ponies loved their lives. Each expressed their Talents as they wished best, each had according to their needs, and gave according to their capabilities.

This could never have worked, of course, were it not for Paradise. Its great Mind assembled and directed armies of simple robots to perform the brute labor of the world, leaving Ponykind free to pursue its higher artistic aspirations. Paradise coordinated the labor of both mares and machines, so the artists crafted what other Ponies desired; for it knew the wishes of Ponykind and conveyed these wishes subconsciously from one Pony to others.

At first the world outwardly seemed very similar to what it had been at the end of the Age of Wonders. The cities and towns mostly stood where they had before. The roads and boats and aircraft ran in the like wise. The only difference was that all were mares, undying mares, and that there was neither sexual love, nor birth, nor death in the new world.

But then, the Ponies of Paradise no longer wanted these things. That had been the consequence of the first Great Wish, and the personal peculiarities of Starlight the Director, and Paradise knew not how to change this back without risking another eruption of Paradox, even had the Ponies desired it.

Slowly, as the years passed, the world changed. Most of the change was slow, one wish or artistic project at a time. But as the decades and centuries passed, these changes accumulated.

Ponies moved out of the old cities, crowded and congested by the needs of an Industrial Age that was now long past. The old skyscrapers were dismantled, or modified into shining spires whose loveliness illuminated the land for many miles around. The uglier buildings were torn down. Where the cities had been, in time there were towns centered around monumental cores, separated by parkland. Everything the Ponies of Paradise had became beautiful.

The world became Fairyland.

Most of Ponykind was satisfied with simple pleasueres. Without the lash of necessity, they worked at the tasks they most enjoyed. Those whose Talents were for farming or mining or factory work continued at such occupations, though the farms and mines and factories all became pleasant places, where the farmers and miners and workers enjoyed the cameraderie of their sisters and laughed and sang and danced through their work days. Extensive automation and safeguarding made the labors light beyond all previous conceptions.

Some Ponies were not quite so simple. They ... but Luna found her mind slipping off what the scientists and engineers exactly did in Paradise, and briefly wondered why. Then, she simply accepted it, with a sort of muzzy joy.

She did notice a strange sort of change in the application of technologies. While most of the Pony towns looked like idealized versions of simpler times -- the small-town charm and equine scale without the backbreaking work and injuries and diseases and early deaths -- and most Ponies went about by foot or sailboat or simple-looking but oddly high-performance airship -- Luna caught glimpses that showed that Ponies commanded very high technologies when they wanted them.

More than once she saw vacuum trains, hypersonic aircraft, and the telltale ribbons of space elevators rising from the equatorial regions. Great shapes moved between the planets. By some means -- not Wishing, for Paradise now did not employ large-scale Wishes save when absolutely needful, to avoid the risk of Paradox -- the other worlds of the Solar System were terraformed, and in time some billions of Ponies settled them.

This pleased Luna. They did fulfill my dream, she thought. Moondreamer would have been so happy. Then, she came to a sad realization. Sundreamer and Moondreamer needn't have fled. In many ways, they would have liked this world. If only we'd known ...

She wondered just what Sundreamer and Moondreamer, their minds formed in an expansive culture, would have done in Paradise. But again her mind slipped off the thought, and she was simply happy.

Centuries turned into millennia. The population of Ponykind -- unaugmented by any further births -- slowly spread out through the Solar System, becoming rather thin on any single world. The Earth, once crowded by billions, now was home to only about half a billion Ponies, the rest living elsewhere. Now almost all Ponies on Earth lived in idyllic villages or very small towns, with the old cities surviving now only as ceremonial centers, those buildings which the Ponies wished to preserve being carefully tended by the machines.

On the other Solar worlds, new cultures emerged, cultures which best exploited the potential for beauty and grace of each terraformed environment. In her brief overview of the Age of Paradise, Luna could not see or retain most of the details. Hidden caverns hollowed under the surface of the Moon, wondrous spires rising into the increasingly-blue sky; Ponies playing on the plains of Mars, boating in the Valles Marineris; and a hundred other ways of living, everywhere, each new culture, and each Pony in it, a unique and joyful and special song ...

Three millennia of joy -- and then, the Doom That Came to Paradise.

Luna winced. She knew the nature of that Doom. She knew what was going to happen to that lovely world, that richly inhabited Solar System.

She was going to happen to it. She, and her fellow Cosmics.

They would destroy that world forever, and she knew why.

For Paradise had not succeeded in snuffing out all the fires of Paradox. The false vacuum had been destablized by that immense Higgs pulse, and Paradise had not the art of quelling that unrest with more careful emissions. It must have later learned that art, but It did not learn it in time. There was still a danger of Paradox Storm, millennia down the line.

Yet Luna realized now something neither Gravity, nor any of her Siblings nor Cousins, had realized at that time. Something that, had they understood, might have led to a different decison.

Paradise was learning.

Some process was increasing its knowledge of the structure of the Universe. Briefly, Luna wondered again about those scientists and engineers ... and a third time her mind slipped off that train of thought, as she contemplated all the pretty, pretty Ponies and their pretty, pretty old-timey little towns.

In time, Paradise might have figured out how to completely damp out its Paradox.

We didn't know, Luna thought sadly. We didn't understand. And in not knowing, not understanding, we destroyed all this -- not realizing that the destruction was ultimately unnecessary. We didn't even know the Paradise Entity existed. We could have contacted it, told it what it needed to do to save its Ponies. We could have saved this world, and in saving it made this system stronger against the Night Shadows.

Why didn't we know?

Luna knew the answer. Because this was just one race, one star system, among so very many others. Because this was just one worldline, which we could prune in such a way as to abort its recurrence. She winced from herself. Because we were the Cosmic Concepts, above all mortal considerations. Because we didn't care.

Well, she amended, one of us cared. She was in her Avatar, but she fought, as best she could, to stop us from destroying that world. My Sister fought to save Paradise.

I fought to destroy it.

She watched, frozen in guilt, as Doom approached the World That Was Lost, called by the Mighty Messenger, drawn by the very Higgs pulse that had partly damped Paradox in the first place. She knew all this, she had been there, she had been part of that Doom. She had seen this all before, from the other side.

But then, she saw something she had not seen before.

Just before the Cosmics came, there had been another huge Higgs pulse.

They had of course detected that; assumed it to be a symptom of increasing false-vacuum instability. They had raced on even faster, desperate to Negate this worldline, and so save this part of the Universe from annihilation.

But the pulse had not been caused by Paradox.

It had been caused by Paradise.

In that instance the Sun had flickered, and mighty energies been diverted to the purposes of Paradise, just as before. And some of those energies had, indeed, been used to empower a small band of mares, including her Sister and some who had later helped free Luna from the Nightmare.

Most of the energies had gone ... elsewhere.

For all her understanding of both science and magic, Luna was not exactly sure how Paradise had done what It had done. But It had scanned the minds of all the billions of Ponies in Paradise, which was relatively easy for It, and then created something which must have been very hard even for Itself to do. Luna supposed that the Cosmic Concept of Gravity would have understood what Paradise had done, but then of course Paradise had made very sure that none of the Cosmic Concepts had seen what It was doing at that moment.

It had created a ... vessel? ... capacious enough to contain its memories, including the backup copies that It had made of every sapient being in the Solar System. And then, It had taken Itself ... and Its copies ... elsewhere.

Luna knew where. The answer was obvious.

Here. To the worldline that had been created by her Cousin, Destruction. To the worldline of the Cataclysm.

The Cosmics had tried their best -- or worst -- but they hadn't succeeded in slaying the Ponies of Paradise. When a little pink mare had shouted defiance at the Doom filling their skies, when the energies of possibility had coalesced around her and her companions so that they could make a fight against even Luna's mere equine Avatar -- those had been but a rear guard.

While Luna's attention -- and those of the other Cosmics -- had been drawn to this drama, Paradise had fled sidewise in time to the new worldline, over a millennium ago, almost three millennia after the Cataclysm. Fled, and survived.

The Ponies of Paradise weren't dead. She wasn't sure where they were, aside from a very few of them, but they were still alive. At least in potential ... Luna realized, and that made her so happy that she couldn't think any further about the implications, aside from one very big one:

I didn't murder a whole worldline. None of us did. We meant to -- but we failed.

Ordinary consciousness returned to her.

"I hope I have succeeded in my quest." Paradise said, looking into her eyes very earnestly. "I hope I have been a good Pony -- you, who were one of my mothers. Have I been a good Pony?"

For all that she was well aware that she was not physically-present here at all, Luna's eyes misted and her throat choked with emotion. Thickly, she said: "Yes. O yes, a very good Pony!"

An immmense burden had been lifted from her soul.

Princess Luna herself had still sinned. She had summoned a Night Shadow, rebelled against her Sister, and in the process killed numerous Equestrian Ponies, ruined her Sister's plans that would have by now raised Equestria to the point where it might have easily defeated any threats to Ponykind.

She had been a very bad Pony; she deserved every moment of her exile, and far worse punishment. She would in time devise some means of punishing herself for that.

But one thing she had not done.

She had not murdered a whole world, a whole Solar System, full of Ponies. She had not done genocide: at least, not against Ponies.

Tears streamed from her eyes, and she sobbed, but not with sorrow.

She cried with joy.

She had been saved from the consequences of her own haste, her folly, and saved by one of her own intended victims.

She had been saved, by Paradise.

Author's Note

Muses of Science Fiction -- Wells ... Stapledon ... Edmond Hamilton ... "Doc" Smith ... Poul Anderson ... give my words wings, that they may fly to my reader's hearts!

Part of this chapter was strongly inspired by the (more constructive) ideas of Super Trampoline. If you're reading this, Bryan, you know exactly what part. And, of course, ultimately, by the ideas of Iain M. Banks.

The basic story of the Doom That Came to Paradise is inspired by the PonyPOVerse works of Alex Warlorn. By "inspired" I mean "I could never have written this without his work," specifically this chapter.

Yes, Paradise is, essentially, the first Mind produced by Ponykind, and the World That Was Lost was, more or less, a nascent Pony version of The Culture.

And, yes, Paradise recognizes the occasional need for Special Circumstances. After all, how else to explain some of its Daughters?

Chapter 6: Confronting

Luna streaked over the White Tail Mountains, her flightfield automatically-reconfiguring from skintight to teardrop-shaped as her speed increased: she pulled her legs up and her wings back, helping to shape the field into a needle-nosed delta. She felt a brief buildup of air pressure followed by the snap of release as she transitioned through the sound barrier. The air curdled and glowed against her flightfield forward, and she knew that she was trailing the thunder of a sonic boom. She could have increased her thrust, reconfigured the field into a lifting-body, increased her speed until she went hypersonic, but she preferred to retain some maneuverability, in case her unknown foe was armed with an Alicorn-Bane.

Supersonic flight was beyond the capability of most Pegasi. It took both raw power, and fine control over one's flightfield. One's wings were important only as paramagnetic radiators, to generate the thruster fields which stood in the place of engines; any attempt to flap would have resulted in tumbling out of control. One steered by warping one's flightfield. It helped that Luna had been Moondreamer, who had designed supersonic and hypersonic aircraft -- though Moondreamer had never expected to in a future life be one. Moony, you would have so loved this! she thought in brief exuberance. Mother Mine, I love to fly! Why had she moped around the Palace for so long? This is my element!

She closed on the target. The bawling of the baby was an ululation in her sub-hearing, both a spur to action and a homing signal. With navigational skills honed by over fifteen hundred years' life on Earth, she effortlessly matched her eidetic memory of the map she'd scanned to the landforms beneath her, and was not at all surprised to discover that the distress call was coming from the lair of the remaining Dragon. What but a Dragon could threaten even a young Alicorn? she thought. Actually, there were a few other things, but most of them didn't dwell in the White Tails -- some lurked in the monster-haunted Everfree, where she had attempted her own stand a few months back, when she'd still been in the grip of the Nightmare.

Luna once again broadened her flightfield and threw herself into a wide turn around her target, both bleeding off speed and reconnoitering as she dropped subsonic. The dragon's lair was somewhere in a mile-high mountain -- Summer Lightning hadn't been able to precisely locate it, because she had understandably not wished to close. Lieutenant Lightning's decision had made sense, but it would have been useful to have had a better fix on the lair. Circling the mountain, Luna examined it in detail from a distance with her great blue eyes, keener than a hawk's, and saw many indentations which might have concealed cave mouths.

This might be a long search for Pegasi; possibly a very long one if the Dragon was lying doggo, emulating the behavior of Diamond Dogs by remaining deep within the mountain. Fortunately, Luna could do things beyond the capabilities of any mere Pegasus.

Luna summoned the power of her Element, then released it -- in a low-intensity, broad cone instead of a scything focused force beam. Gravitons pulsed into the mountain, shaking it in a subtle vibration which the Dragon -- if he possessed the right senses and knew that what she was doing was possible -- just might be able to detect. The gravitational ranging and detection pulse, something that the Age of Wonders had speculated about as a possibility, calling it in their science-fiction "deep radar," sleeted through the solid rock, but some gravitons happened to strike the zones of force within its atoms and returned to her. The return was weak, so it was a slow process -- much slower than ordinary electromagnetic radar -- but, as Luna orbited the mountain, she built up an internal three-dimensional map of the rock structure, and the vacuities that indicated cave systems.

There were many -- too many for her to be sure of the Dragon's location. She understood now why the Dragon had chosen this mountain. There were plenty of caves large enough to conceal even a large Dragon and his hoard, and plenty of tunnels long enough for him to pass between them. Adult Dragons were mostly long and slim-built, and strong enough to claw their way through tight spots even in solid rock. A full-grown Dragon, the size of a large castle keep, could get through places only a few times the width of a Pony if they had to, which was part of what made them so terrifying to normal Ponies.

She opened her other senses to their fullest. An adult Dragon -- or even a baby Alicorn -- had a lot of life force. The problem was that Luna couldn't really receive lifescent through millions of tons of solid rock, some of it containing ferrous minerals. Luna was getting a vague sense that something powerful was within the mountain, but then she knew this already. Direct magical search techniques failed her as well, since she had never encountered this Alicorn foal, only its signal -- all she discovered from that was "within the mountain."

That left one technique -- but Luna knew it had very serious limits. Still, it was the best and fastest one left in her repertoire, so she did it.

She bent her orbit so that one end of it was a mile high and the other end only a few hundred yards over the treetops, then rotated the orbit as she flew it so that she occupied positions marking a cylinder around the mountain. While doing so, she sub-spaced a call to the Alicorn foal, and was rewarded by an increase in the frequency and volume of its own transmissions. By correlating the signal intensity in time and space she could get a rough fix on the Alicorn's position.

The problem was that subspace frequencies were faster-than-light, and very long-waved compared to electromagnetism. Across the relatively short distances represented by Luna's positions and the different parts of the mountain, the variations were terribly tiny. A supercomputer of the Age of Wonders might just barely have been able to tease them out from the signal -- had the Age of Wonders ever developed subspace sensors, which it hadn't. Luna's own brain was far more capable than any Age of Wonders supercomputer -- with one possible exception, and she didn't have a link to that one, right now.

So, as she flew the rotating orbit, she gradually built up a very general idea of the location of the Alicorn. The Alicorn was somewhere about halfway up the north face of the mountain.

Luna consulted the three-dimensional map she'd internally compiled of the cave systems . There were several cave openings in that general area, but only one of them provided admittance to the main cavern system. What was more, there were viable lairs higher on the mountain, but they also lacked access to the main cavern system. If the Dragon had not cared about getting into the main cavern system, it would have taken a higher lair -- like most large predatory fliers, it preferred to have the altitude advantage. Hence, the Dragon had probably chosen the cave opening that allowed it to move through the main cavern system.

She had gotten this far in her analysis when her squadron hove into view around one of the other mountains, Wrath and Vengeance pulling the Midnight Chariot, the true Nocturnae escorting them, and Summer Lightning flying at the head of the formation, the better to guide them all through the mountains she knew so well. Luna broke off her orbits to flit over to her Ponies.

Luna led them to the neighboring mountain to the north, and quickly briefed them on the tactical situation.

"The Dragon is probably in caverns behind that cave mouth," she pointed and then marked the position on her map. She looked at Summer Lightning. "Art thou familiar with those tunnels?"

"I know they're in there," replied Summer Lightning, "but I've never gone down them. I've heard they're big enough for a Dragon, though." She looked at Luna, clearly mustering up her courage. "Would you like me to guide you, Ma'am? I'm familiar with these mountains in general, including the overall nature of their caves."

Luna considered quickly. Summer was obviously eager to demonstrate her courage, something with which Luna strongly sympathized. But if it came to a fight, Summer would be dead pretty quickly against an adult Dragon, down in the caverns where her aerial agility would be largely negated. Then again, Summer would be the most useful guide.

"Aye," said Luna. "But thou must not be reckless. I shall lead the way, and thou art not to fight the Dragon. Is that clear?"

"Yes, Ma'am," said Summer, sounding disappointed.

Luna looked at her squadron. "This encounter shall differ from those past. The Dragon has made captive a Pony -- possibly a young Alicorn. I fear for the life of that Pony. So our approach shall be in this wise: I shall deliver the challenge at the cave mouth, but if it neither duels nor yields, we shall fix its attention on the front way while ringing the mountain. I shall then go by a back way, with Ranger Lieutenant Lightning as mine own guide, whilst ye continue to demonstrate before the front way.

"Should the Dragon venture forth -- by whatever gate -- ye shall not, I say again not try it in battle. Leave one Pony behind to tell me in what direction it hath gone, and the rest of ye shall shadow it at a distance. This shall be your course even should it have prisoners. I do not want dead heroes. Do ye ken?"

Affirmative replies resounded.

"Good," Luna said. "Come, Lt. Lightning. Thou shalt ride with me again in the Midnight Chariot."

Summer Lightning's face was too full of pride to register any fear as she boarded the chariot with Luna.

I think she's mine now, Luna thought. A good, brave Pony, too. I'll have her seconded to the Night Guard, when this is all over. I'm going to need to work through the Night Guard first, and I'll need a good-sized auxiliary of regular Pegasi, not just my Vera Nocturnae and Pseudo Nocturnae -- because my reforms are going to affect the whole Guard, even if they don't know it yet. Even if Celestia doesn't know it yet, because I've just thought of it today.

Summer Lightning could be part of this. Better keep her alive. She would have tried to anyway, on general principles, but now it was especially important.

Thoughts were whirring through the background of her brain, thoughts about the generally-lax condition of the Royal Guard in general, the lack of advanced weapons to match overall Equestrian technology, the changes that would need to be made if Equestria were to be made ready to meet the onslaught she felt certain the monsters on the Moon were preparing against her. The Lady of War was wakening within her, and Luna knew that there would be much to be done, and rapidly. She would need competent subordinates. Lieutenant Lightning could be one of them.

Wrath and Vengeance drew the Chariot around to the main entrance of the Dragon's lair.

"Lads," she said quietly to them. "This Dragon may fight. If it does, your lives come before saving the Chariot."

"Yes, Ma'am," replied Vengeance.

"Yes, Ma'am," said Wrath, puffing himself up and adding "But I think we can save both!"

Despite the seriousness of the situation, Luna was amused to see that Wrath stole a glance at Summer Lightning when he said this.

Hotshot, Luna thought, but affectionately. They were both the best of the best, even though Wrath could be a bit of a clown -- especially in front of a pretty mare. Memories of hundreds of similar situations, of dear departed friends she'd known before who reminded her of Wrath and Vengeance, crowded for attention. She shoved them back with a slight mental effort. Now was no time for woolgathering.

Luna set the Midnight Chariot down just behind the military crest of the mountain, ensuring that the Dragon would not have a clear shot at her command post. She mounted the flag of the Realm on one of the Chariot's rear spike-shafts, making certain that it could be seen from the lair's cave mouth. From the other she flew her own personal flag, the crescent-moon sigil over a complex design she had taken from the old North Amareican Space Agency, Moondreamer's employers over four thousand years ago in the Age of Wonders.

I'll paint that on the hulls of our new spacecraft, she thought, when we start flying Moon rockets again. For some reason she could not fully understand, all her doubts and fears were gone. She was Luna. Luna Selena Nyx. The Avatar of Gravity. And nothing would stand in her way again for very long.

She gave her gear one last check, this time making sure that all her weapons were neither too loose nor too tight. A stuck weapon might have more serious consequences against this full adult Dragon than it would sparring with Fischfootur. She would not want to make a mistake -- the lives of Summer Lightning and the unknown Alicorn foal might be forfeit if she badly botched this.

"Stay near the Midnight Chariot for now," she told Lightning.

"Yes, M'aam," Lightning responded. She was all business now.

Luna debarked, climbed to the top of the military crest. She drew the scroll with her aura, taking her time. In the background she could see her squadron spreading out, assuming unobtrusive positions from which they brought the whole mountain under observation. At this altitude the winds were fierce, whipping the flags on their spikepoles. The hair of her own mane and tail streamed out behind her in the gusts, another pair of battle standards.

"INTRUDING DRAGON!" Luna cried out in the Royal Canterlot Voice. Her aura bent the air to funnel her words across the miles of void between their positons. Her voice echoed across the distance.

"KNOW THAT WE ARE PRINCESS LUNA SELENA NYX, PRINCESS OF THE MOON, AND HIGH LADY OF WAR OF THE REALM OF EQUESTRIA, WITHIN WHOSE BORDERS THOU TRESPASSEST!"

Her practiced eyes roved across the intervening landscape, compared it to paper maps she had studied, and the gravitic and sub-spatial maps she had assembled in her own mind. Her brain built up a composite picture of the terrain features, and she charted a covered path to the lower entrance, even as she delivered her address.

"WE DEMAND THAT THOU IMMEDIATELY VACATE OUR REALM, TAKING WITH THYSELF THY HOARD COMPLETE, AND RETURNING TO US, ALIVE AND UNHARMED, ANY PONIES OR EQUESTRIAN SUBJECTS THOU HAST MADE CAPTIVE ..."

... an important clause; she would not permit this raider to keep any captives, and if Equestrians had already been slain on Equestrian soil, she would not permit him the Dragon to depart at all, and his clan could take it up with the Realm of Equestria if they so desired ...

"...ON PAIN OF OTHERWISE BEING CONSIDERED TO HAVE DECLARED PERSONAL WAR AGAINST OUR REALM, AND BEING TREATED BY US AS OUR ENEMY!"

... the teeth in her declaration. Unless, of course, personal war was exactly what the Dragon desired.

She saw something moving. Her eyes focused in on the motion.

A great Dragon head, bigger than her whole body, peered out from the cave mouth at her, extending on the end of a long neck, so long that most of it remained within the cave. The top scales were a brilliant blue, with a great orange horn at the end of the nose and an array of orange spikes on the top of the head and along the spines. As the neck twisted this and that way, parallax-ranging her, she could see the paler orange of the underside.

She felt energies flicker along the spines. The intensities were far below lethality, even against a normal Pony, let alone herself. Luna remained calm as pulses of radio waves painted her position. His control over the emanations was very precise, and Luna knew that he now had her exact coordinates down to a hundredth of an inch.

He's just localized me on two separate octaves of the spectrum, Luna realized. He knows I'm an illusionist. And he knows how to defeat illusions.

This Dragon is very dangerous. The point seemed ludicrously obvious, as if the rest of him was built to the same scale as the head and part of the neck she had just seen, he would have to be well over a hundred hooves long, probably more like two to two-hundred-fifty hooves. But Luna was not that much impressed by sheer size.

The danger of this Dragon was that it was smart, at least as smart as Fischfootur, and with an intelligence honed by many centuries of life and a store of knowledge equally-enriched by experience. It might be able to kill her, if she got careless and it got lucky. But what was worse, it might be able to defeat her -- something it did not need to kill or even much harm her to accomplish.

For she had to free the foal and any others the creature held. And that meant she had to hold back her power, at least until she could get it away from its lair. Her full power could collapse the face of the mountain, and crush the very captives she meant to save.

The Dragon's eyes widened as it looked at her. And then drily, hissingly -- it laughed.

"So," it said, and its own voice was an almost infrabass rumble. "Little Luna." The great blue face smiled wickedly. "I see thine sister has finally allowed thee to come back from the Moon, to once again do the dirty work for which her own elegant self is entirely too pure and noble."

Luna saw the huge dark-blue eyes focus on her, felt his mind feeling about her own. Automatically she clamped down her own mindshield.

"Would you try conclusions now, beast?" she asked. To call a Dragon, especially a great and old one, a mere 'beast' was extremely insulting -- but it was being insulting too, and she rather liked the idea of insulting it back. Perhaps it would lose its cool, yield to her instincts -- and leave the protection of its lair.

"Try conclusions?" the great Dragon asked mockingly. "Why, little Pony Princess? Cannot thy weak mammalian mind endure a simple testing probe, such as the Elders of my own kind might toss back and forth in friendly jest?" Idly, it snapped an arc of lightning from one of its spikes against a stone the size of a Pony's head just outside its cave mouth, cracking it in twain. The broken halves trailed smoke, the broken face glowed red-hot.

"Geases are not the deeds of friends," stated Luna. "And thou art not on friendly soil."

"Oh, thou dost not welcome me?" The Dragon put a wounded tone into its voice. "Why, what hath that little lava-leaving that I lack?"

"Manners," said Luna flatly. "Probably hygiene. Definitely courage." That last statement was a deadly insult among Dragonkind, as she knew well.

The Dragon hissed, and roared. Lightning played about its spikes and was joined by lightnings from its throat. But the great mouth was pointed up and away from her, exposing the thinner plating of its throat, and the arcs did not complete, the discharge harmless and reabsorbed.

If I'd struck then, Luna realized, I would have done so unprovoked, and struck a coward blow. It risks death for a chance at embarrassing Equestria. There is some factional strife, or personal grudge here, whose workings I cannot perceive, from which is much malice toward the Realm!

The Dragon looked full at her. There were no psychic forces playing about her mind this time; the Dragon knew that this would not work, and had already been called on it as an act of aggression.

"By what right dost thou insult an Elder of the North?" it asked her, in a voice that was barely controlled down from a roar.

"By what right dost thou squat upon my lands and hold captive one of mine own Ponies?" Luna countered.

"Your lands?" the Dragon asked her. "Hah!" The laugh was a whip-crack sound, which echoed around the heights. "Little Pony Princess -- or should I say, little invader from the cosmic gulfs beyond the Moon thou claimest? Oh yes, Princess Luna, we of Northern Draconia know well your true origin, Sister of the Sun, unearthly thing from before the formation of this round world -- or wouldst thou like me to stop? Wilst thou have to slay thine own guards, to keep thy secret?"

"Mine own Guards are mine own friends, and may be trusted with mine own secrets," Luna said calmly. "Hadst thee friends, thou wouldst know of such a thing as Friendship."

"Ah, thou persisteth in the pretense that thou art Pony. No matter. Dost thou know the history of this world?" the Dragon challenged her.

"I am more than passing familiar with such lore," Luna said, yawning and idly fanning at her face with one moonsilver-shod hoof, as if the conversation bored her.

"How canst thou then prattle of 'thy' lands?" the Dragon asked. "Thou must know that all this world was once ours! It belonged from pole to pole to the Dragons, in the long Ages ere the Devil's Tail smote this very continent on which we stand. A thing from Outside, from Beyond -- much like thine own self, 'Pony Princess,' -- were thy Kind, thy true Kind, even then laying their vile designs against the greatest and noblest race which ever ruled a world? Thee and thine must have known that thou couldst never dominate the Dragons, so thou didst strike without warning from beyond the world, like the craven cowards that are ye all, so that the damaged world might breed from its furry vermin a race so submissive as to serve thy alien Kind."

The words came out fast, spittle flying, and Luna was shocked by both the knowledge revealed, and the gaps in that knowledge. For it was true that races more akin to the Dragons had ruled the Earth over sixty-five million years gone, but the Dragons themselves had not existed yet. They had been made as thralls to the Serpent Folk, and much of that making had come after another archosaurian race, one derived from the now-extinct non-avian Dinosaurs, had brought down the doom of the Devil's Tail. But how had he known of any of this? And why was his lore so distorted?

Luna wanted to talk to this Dragon, learn the answers to her questions, for she suspected that she was missing something important.

"Thou hast some truth in there," she admitted, "but it be mingled with much muddled lore," she began. "For one thing, the Dragons were not yet ..."

"I shall pay no heed to thy lies!" the Dragon hissed. "I was warned that thou employ such trickery. Mine ears are stopped to your mendacity!"

Luna sighed. This was going to come down to a fight. It was unreachable.

"Thine ears are stopped by the wax thou hast in thy skull in place of brains," she observed. "And I weary of this debate. Come out and fight, or quit these lands, rightly held by my self and my Sister."

"Hah," laughed the Dragon, suddenly retracting all but the tip of his snout within his lair. "Thou wouldst want me to do that," he said "so that thou might employ thy full unnatural might against me in the open. I think I shall not play thy game. Instead, thou must come after me. Let us see how things chance at close quarters." And the snout disappeared.

Luna muttered some words under her breath. She turned back, landed by the Chariot.

"The wide and easy road to triumph be closed for us," she said. "We must take the strait and arduous path in its stead."

Wrath and Vengeance looked at each other and nodded.

Summer Lightning looked perplexed.

"The lower caves," Luna explained. "Thou shalt have chance to prove thyself as guide, Lieutenant Lightning."

The small smoky-blue Pegasus inhaled in a half-gasp, suddenly realizing that she was really going to venture into a Dragon's lair with a Princess of Equestria to save a captive. Her ears pinned back, her eyes pinpointed for a moment, but only for a moment. Then her jaw firmed, her eyes narrowed, and her ears went forward at attention.

Luna smiled at her.

"Come," she said. "Into the Dragon's lair!"

Author's Note

Luna is awesome.

Though she would have had a link to that supercomputer if she'd brought the Daughter of Paradise with her. Ah well, she didn't know.

Luna is not at all socially-awkward commanding troops, and Ponies under her command tend to wind up worshiping her. Historically, most of her real friends have been her military comrades, which is one reason she tries very hard to keep her Ponies alive in battle. With Summer Lightning, you see how this process usually starts. Luna has known her for a few hours, and Summer has gone from a mere combination of lust for and respect toward her toward the beginnings of a really serious loyalty.

The "Vera Nocturnae" are the true Night Pegasi, who are born that way. The "Pseudo Nocturnae" are the ones who are bodily transformed: this transformation is crafted to be reversible. Also, those who are attached to the Night Guard (and especially the Night Watch, the elite intelligence unit of the Night Guard) -- a good example would be Pun Pony -- get purely illusory transformations due to enchantments on their armor.

We focus a little more on Wrath and Vengeance, and give them their fanon characterizations from Ask Whirly and the Night Guard. Wrath is the flirtatous showoff; Vengeance the more serious one. Both are pretty awesome Pseudo Nocturnae, and despite the comic aspects of their nature, are elite, veteran combatants.