We landed at our temple smirking to ourself, things had turned out just as we had expected, they were too distracted to notice the dragon attack and now Celestia's dear student was emotionally distraught. That would make her act irrationally , not accounting for every possibility as she would usually have done, Celestia was angry, the elements would be ready to destroy us at a moments notice, and with the orders of monarch guiding them the guards would be another few hundred souls for us to take for our own.

Now all we had to do was wait.

After two long tiring days the five hundred and seven equines had reached our temple and another two for them to prepare and rest for the coming battle. We watched as they pitched tents and light their fires signing and drinking and telling tales of their previous battles. The poor fools we thought with a small twinge of pity they know not what awaits them.

The sun hung high above the horizon, its rays muffled by the ever-present gloom of the of the clouds overhead, the only other light coming from the rift floating above our temple waiting to be opened. The guards were stretched out in lines of one hundred forming four rows spears and bows leveled above them hovered a hundred pegasi lead by a mare in what appeared to be armour based on the ancient centurions.

Standing a mile from the temple was our army, legions of undead supported by our cultists and golems.

"What are your orders my lord?" one of my cultists asked us as they bowed.

"Keep enemy casualties to a minimum, but keep the Princesses and the elements alive. We have...Use for them,".

Our army leveled their weapons and charged towards the guards murderous cries emanating from their form and bright flames glowing in their chests. Flames that were outshone by something descending towards them burning with lavender light and releasing an unending piercing scream as it impacted with the ground and bounced back into the sky wiping out more and more with each strike, then we realised that it was heading towards us. We have two options here we thought to ourself not run and keep the plan going but have an enraged minor deity beat our skull in every time we make a vessel, or run away and wait a few more millenia for something else to kill everything. We reluctantly chose the option that would free us sooner. We closed our eyes and waited for the impending strike of the Element of Magic, after a short passage of time we opened our eyes and saw that our vessel was still intact, we flew to one of the temple walls to see where Twilight had gotten to. Just in time to watch her destroy our cultists in one swift strike before landing in front of our temple.

We took a brief moment to slam a hoof against our face, those had been the last living equine descendants of our cult. We heard hoof steps from outside the walls heading towards us, we recomposed ourself and greeted our visitor with a smile. "Why hello Twilight, welcome to my temple, how may we help you?" Twilight replied with a blast of energy that just barely missed and scorched an outcrop of rock nearby. "We see that your aim hasn't exactly improved,"

"For once, could you please, have a serious discussion," she hissed through clenched teeth and weighted breaths.

"We are trying to and failing to do so, and in all honesty we're not sorry about that," we replied as we took a small sip of tea from a cup we had conjoured "Now as we said before how can we help you?"

"You can 'help' by turning yourself in and paying for your crimes before I beat your head into a smoothie," her horn glowed as she charged another blast this time aiming for our head.

"Crimes?" we asked with what appeared to be feigned ignorance "What crimes?"

"Almost too many to bother listing," she growled at us "Murdering Luna, killing guards as if they were an annoyance and worst of all, she charged into us and pinned us to the ground "What you did to Rarity." We tried our best not to crack under pressure but we couldn't help but make the most non-intimidating snort ever heard in Equestrian history.

"We honestly can't that we made you fall for that," we chuckled much to Twilight's annoyance "Did you really think we would just waste a soul, the soul of an element bearer no less, just to make you angry? No," our horn began to light up, similar to the one Twilight had cast all those months ago "Your worth more to us...Alive."

The runes lining the walls of the temple lit up like flames in succession, each circle and the circles within them glowed an eerie shade as more and more magic was drawn into the spell pressing against the veil until it could take no more as the rift opened.

And shattered the sky.

The skies were saturated with numerous shades as light red-shifted, dust was cast higher into the air than any pegasus could hope to reach and the rocks and corpses below shattered and decayed as the little life left in the surrounding earth was drawn in to maintain the rift from which our eldritch mirrors of the constellations that wandered their world crawled into being. All this occurred in the shade of a great ancient blackness that seemed to flow and ebb out of the breach in the sky before charging down to the ground below shaking the bones of the equines below as it lead out one infrasonic roar.

And at the centre of it all was Twilight Sparkle, her irises barely visible as she looked up at the display above her, and the thing that fell down upon her.

Twilight Sparkle's eyes fluttered as if in response to an outside light, but as she looked outwards all she saw was blackness. Complete and unfeeling blackness.

"Hello, is anypony here? Where am I?"

"Anypony? Some would that kind of presumptuous behaviour offensive." Twilight flinched at the omnidirectional sound of our voice entering her mind "As for your question, you are currently in that lovely and short span of time between when a resident of your world dies and when their souls are devoured by starspawn. Isn't nature just beautiful like that?" Twilight didn't respond, she simply sat down and looked at the floor with a blank stare, not moving and even refusing to speak for a few minutes.

"I failed...I failed everpony...Everyone. Celestia, Luna, my friends. All of them," we appeared before her bearing Luna's form. She looked at us her eyes showing pure contempt "Why? Why all of this?"

"There are three things that define a being. What you think you are, what the world sees, and what you truly are," a collection of projections representing each point appeared, each shaped like Twilight. "You see yourself as a scholar, but your subjects see you as a saviour and a ruler, but at the end of the day you are an equine just like all the others" the projections shifted to resemble us "We see ourself as the bastion of order, the world sees us as an unimaginable malevolence that will only be satisfied with the death of all things, but what we are...Is entropy and void, the eventual winding down of all systems and the purest form of order. It is our nature to destroy and we will not deny it. The one thing that differs us from Discord is that we are not tied down by commitment to anyone. Where he sees friends we see only potential pawns and momentary distractions"

"And what if what if the world says is true? You are nothing but a monster,"

We raised a quizzical eyebrow in response "And why is that, because we have killed? Is that why?" Twilight nodded in response "Then what does that make Celestia?" Twilight was taken aback by our question and stepped away from us.

"C-Celestia?"

"Don't you remember what she said to us a few months ago? 'You were supposed to be dead'? Celestia considered us so great a threat that she tried to kill us. Does that make Celestia a monster? What of your brother and the guards he leads, surely they will have some blood on their hooves from stopping would-be assassins" We brought our head down to her height so that our eyes were level "And what does that make you? Princess Sparkle slayer of hundreds of innocent ponies bound into the servitude of an eldritch god. What really makes you believe you are no worse than we are?" Twilight fell back to the floor stupefied.

"No...No..." slowly we lifted her in our magic "What are you doing?"

"To be a monster you must first think like one," In a pulse of magic the world went from a great silent void to a plane of whiteness and screams.

As we had told Twilight the time span between death and cessation of existence is very short, so while what felt like twenty minutes had passed only one minute had actually gone in the world of the living. In that time Celestia and the elements had run into the temple through the black haze that had fallen upon it to find the darkened spasming form of Twilight Sparkle lying on the stony ground.

Despite being on the brink of death she was still able to say one thing "C-Celestia...Help us"

"Twilight, hold on. Please." Celestia cradled Twilight in her hooves like a newborn foal. Twilight looked at her and then to her friends with a look of guilt crossing her face.

"E-every...Pony. We're sorry," Her eyes became a blinding white as she rose into the air and let out one continuous scream as her being was flooded with souls, fragments of our being plucked from the sky above. The kind of scream that only someone who's mind had been flooded with more knowledge than they could ever have wished for, the machinations of her world, the history of Equss, the final fate of the dead and so much more. As she screamed her body shifted, proportions were changed, features where gained and lost as we altered and shaped her body into one better suited for our plans. Her friends backed out of the temple shielding their eyes as Twilight continued to grow in size. When the light faded they opened their eyes and what they saw was unlike anything to have ever wander their world.

She looked like a two legged minotaur, her legs ending with pointed feet, her forelegs had been replaced with two slender arms each ending with a five fingered hand, her head lacked a snout instead it bore a small nose with two nostrils who's bridge lead upwards to the glowing spaces where her eyes were supposed to be. All of this being visible only because her body was devoid of body hair except for the shoulder length mane on top of which was the same crown she had worn over the months bearing five amethysts.

Deep purple robes reached to her ankles and golden armour surrounded her torso, and encased her arms shimmering in the light of a non-existent flame with enough space for her wings, now shaped more like those of a hawk than of a pegasus or alicorn and stretched down to her knees, each flap generated a small pulse of air that was felt by the equines below. To put it simply, Twilight was human, a winged human that stood a hundred feet tall but a human none the less. To the rest of Equss however she would be remembered as a monster unlike anything they had seen before. For on that day the first of the Descendant Queens were born.

And for the first time in history the Doomsday Clock struck midnight.

Author's Note

I'm dreaming of dark christmas
Where Sator Ni'Mad claims our souls
Where the stars above glisten
And foals listen
To hear the call of the Ancient Lords

Five little ponies that marched off to war
One became what she fought and then there were four