=====&&C&&=====
Blackness surrounds me. No light is present in this place, nor, as my mentor is fond of saying, is there any shadow, as if there is no light there can be no shadow, only emptiness. There is no heat, no sound, no motion, there is not even direction. There is feeling however, vast, swirling whirlpools of emotion and thought, drifting in a void without place. Their beauty and power is evident even in a world without sight and touch, the power of these entities transcends basic physicality.
I bathe in them without being able to feel them; I know their coldness and their warmth without existing in a normal sense of the word. There is one whirling, tumbling entity that I know intimately. Every thought I think and every sense I feel sends cascades and turbulence throughout it. I focus on it, my very existence trained on its formless form.
I see the swirl of invisible colors and isolate one, a thin blue wisp that twirls and wraps around the larger strata of colors that surround it in an infinite, dimensionless expanse. I watch it spin and dance, slip and weave through its brethren.
With my being I direct the strand to grow, and a calmness becomes me. An ocean of serene motion falls into me and transforms me into the dancing rain on a placid lake that shimmers like glass.
I shift focus from the significantly enlarged blue strand and set my designs on a red one. With my thoughts becoming one with the redness I see the lake change. The rain is obliterated in a storm of fire and lightning, the lake surface shatters like glass and tumbles onto its banks, surging outward into a tsunami that destroys the surrounding land under a sky of fire.
With a soundless rage in this deaf expanse I throw my being into the whirlpool that grows ever more red, pushing the other strands back like so many sticks before a tidal wave.
Blackness rushes past me. In a deafening roar I explode into being above the hellish landscape. I smash through clouds that are alive with the fury of lightning and through the endless sheets of ash and brimstone that they rain. The exhilaration of the fall is ended with a crash into the onyx black of the water.
Blackness once again rushes past me, but instead of dissipating it only increases as I sink further down into the seemingly endless depths. The burning anger inside me is drenched in the impossibly cold water as I stare despondently upwards at the quickly receding surface.
Embers fall into the waves and are extinguished.
=====&&C&&=====
I awake feeling like a corpse. For a few moments I lay motionless, convinced I am a corpse. But slowly I register the feeling of the smooth silk sheets on my body, and I see the face of my mentor at the foot of the bed. Her eyes are full of tears.
I open my mouth to ask her why she’s crying, but before I can utter my question I remember the sky of fire and the ocean of death, and I scream in pure animal terror and pain.
=====&&C&&=====
I awake wishing I was a corpse. Every fiber and nerve in my body is begging for rest, and my mind is too numb with the echoes of pure fear to goad them into any motion regardless.
Fleeting sensations like blizzard winds scratching at a frostbitten hoof dance across my body. The tatters of ripped silk sheets and the coarse warmth of smoldering pieces of wood and stone cover my body.
As my brain slowly reasserts its dominance and my body wearily complies, I begin to notice the world beyond the ruined bed I lay in. An electric purple sphere is wrapped around the bed, it hums with soft thaumaturgical discharges.
The sphere is just translucent enough for me to make out the face of my mentor, her mane is a mess and the fur beneath her eyes seems damp. She apparently notices my motion and with a quick blue flash at the tip of her horn the shield dissipates into a mist that is absorbed into the air.
Faster than my sluggish eyes can adequately follow she is at my side, staring down at me with quivering eyes, she seems on the verge of letting a few tears escape, but blinks and takes a quick, deep breath before asking me, “How do you feel?”
I manage to hold her gaze, but my tongue refuses to move in a manner conducive to speech. I take a dry swallow and realize how thirsty I am; I feel like I could stand under a waterfall and just drink the pure crystal water for hours, feeling it cascade down my mane and around my shoulders, tasting the coo-
“Crosswind? Stay with me my l-little star, stay with me, please.” My mentor’s snout is just inches from my face and I can smell her familiar scent, crisp morning dew. Following her comforting scent up to her face I can see she is crying now, small drops slowly sliding down her cheeks and under her snout.
As I manage to focus my eyes on hers once more her crying increases in ferocity until thin streams of tears branch down her cheeks like rivers, “Oh thank the fates!” And with that cry of relief she wraps her hooves around me and then encases me in her wings like a cocoon.
As the familiar softness of her down surrounds me my whole body melts into an immensely appreciated relaxation. My throat reasserts its desire for water with a suffocating convulsion and I manage to move my tongue and mouth in a fashion that is suppose to utter, “Water,” but instead makes a sound more similar to, “ahhhurrr.”
My mentor’s snout nuzzles me behind my ear and a glass of water is presented to my lips, the cool blue of her magic radiating out from the glass and bathing the loose cocoon of her wings. As soon as the glass is tipped toward me I begin sucking at the lip of the glass as hard as I possibly can. Impatient with the slow trickle of water I thrust my wings up to the bottom of the glass and push up with all the force I can muster, the glass doesn’t budge. “Slowly, my precious star, slowly.”
With no choice but to oblige I eventually drink my way through what must be an entire pond before I finally feel quenched and refuse a glass.
“How are you feeling?” She parts her wings and studies my face with a small frown.
Using my freshly invigorated tongue I reply, “Better, thank you. What happened?”
“I was a fool.” The venom in her words makes me flinch. She notices the effect her words had on me and her gaze softens, but her frown remains, “I’m sorry, you don’t need to worry about that now, you need to rest. We’ll talk after you’ve recovered, sleep now my precious.” Her horn glows a faint blue, and as it grows in intensity my vision slowly fades to black, “Lun-”
=====&&L&&=====
I can’t help but smile at his sleeping form, so innocent and trusting. His hooves reach out for my wing and weakly pull at it. His pulling increases slightly in intensity as I pull away, and then his face twitches in pain. With a quiet whimper he pulls his hooves back and wraps his wings around himself.
“I’m so sorry.” I whisper to him and feel ashamed.
I lift myself from the bed and survey the room. The four poster bed itself is in shambles, sheets torn and wood frames charred in places and splintered in others, one of the posts of the bed has a clean diagonal slice straight through it and the tester is dotted with holes from grain sized to hoof sized. The heavy drape that covers the eastern balcony entrance has a hole punched through it near the center, edges still simmering with dissipating magic. The stonework and masonry of the walls are cracked in a couple of places where blasts of intense magic energy hit them, passing through the powerful protective wards like glass.
The damage to the room that had come from just a few seconds before I put a shield around crosswind was a very telling thing. Magic very rarely manifests itself due to unconscious activity or thought in unicorn ponies, to speak nothing of him being a pegasus, add to that the fact that Crosswind possesses both a reserved disposition and very thorough discipline training…
The knowledge of the pain I have caused my student is staggering. The pain and fear he experienced must have been truly extraordinary to override his rationality and his basic neurology! The power flowing through him must have been immense to manifest in such destructive forms without a horn to focus it.
I have barely made it a few steps from his bed when I can no longer move due to my crying. As if my tears can ever change what I’ve done! I have not only failed Crosswind, I may have killed him! And he’s only twelve suns old!
Get ahold of yourself Luna! He’s not dead yet, you may yet save him from the worst of your own foalishness.
Evaporating my tears in a burst of thermic magic, I begin striding toward the door to the hallway. Taking one moment to compose my most stoic countenance, I push the door aside and move through it in one swift motion, “The procedure was a failure, move Crosswind to the room I had prepared for him in the castle hospital. I am to be notified of any change in his condition, especially any change in his thaumic signatures; this is my top priority, nothing is more important to me than his condition, nothing. Do you understand?”
The assembled medical ponies and guards before me bow swiftly and surge past me into the room shouting various orders and questions. I almost sigh before I catch myself, a deeply troubling sign of how I have been affected. I take a quick moment to survey the hall before I move on, wanting to see how the world must have changed because of this colossal failure of mine.
A few servants are scurrying around the hall, ducking into and out of the multitude of servant passages along the hall, completely absorbed in their duties. The guards at the end of the hall at the stairwell are perfectly passive, betraying almost no indication they are even alive, as per the norm. A maid is polishing one of the large crystal windows on the outside wall of the hall, the morning sun pouring through and illuminating the whole place in a way that seems almost gloating to me.
Nothing has changed from this point of view. These servants have probably never seen Crosswind before, and if they had it must have only been for a few seconds, to deliver a sandwich perhaps! They didn’t know who he was, only what he was. They didn’t know that he hated daffodils and preferred lilies, that he loved the smell of baking bread, they didn’t know that he always kicked his hind legs when he took off to fly, didn’t know that he would sit out some nights and stare at my night sky, that he would fall asleep in my embrace like a foal in his mother’s hooves. And now they might never have the chance, I almost sound like I’m planning his eulogy. Fates take me what have I done!
I’m such a mess I barely notice I’ve reached Tia’s study, but before I can knock, the door opens in a shimmer of golden magic and my sister is enveloping me in a hug. After a few seconds she pulls back and I can see the tears in her eyes, “Come in Luna.”
Somehow I manage to make it all the way into the room before my legs give out from under me and I fall onto the carpet of Tia’s study. On the walls around me pictures of Sister’s best friends from times past look down on me in pity, “It should have worked.”
One of her wings covers my body and she lays down onto the floor next to me, she nuzzles my head and I fall into her reassuring presence, “I know Lulu.”
“Why didn’t it work? I know it was extreme but it should have worked! He’s so strong, it should have worked, why didn’t it work?”
A small sob escapes me, and Tia’s other wing moves under my snout and forces me to look into her eyes, “I love him too sister, and I will do everything in my power to help him recover, but he needs you to be strong Luna, now more than ever.”
I feel like such a coward, cowering here in my big sister’s embrace while the victim of my idiocy is tended to by other ponies. I know I need to be strong for him, to be the immovable Princess Luna, Mistress of the Night, but to see him lying there, to remember what he saw, to see how I’ve changed him…
“I know, I-I will go to see him when my dreamless sleep spell wears off on him. He should be in the chamber I had prepared in case of such an, incident, like this.”
Celestia nods her understanding, “I was attuned to Crosswind while the ritual was going on, and I felt immense rage and terror. I don’t think such intensity of hate and rage are normal for him.” She stands and moves to the tea table at the other end of the room and I follow her, determined to put weakness behind me, for my little star.
“You are correct Sister, it is unfathomable that he has engendered such emotions, let alone hid them from me. It troubles me to say this, but I fear some element of the Nightmare might be responsible. Perhaps through teaching him dreamwalking and empathy I inadvertently exposed him to some form of it that still lingers around me.” As Tia sits upon one of the two cushions at the table and begins pouring the tea a thought strikes me, “Yes, yes, I think I have it. I need to go right away Sister, I don’t know how much time I’ll need. Cover for me and take good care of Crosswind, Clear Bright knows everything that needs to be done for him.” For some reason I’m smiling, I think this might actually work! As Tia opens her muzzle I disappear in a flash of blue light and shadow.
=====&&C&&=====
I groan. Somewhere nearby I hear the steady beeping of an electrocardiograph. I feel thin linen sheets over my body and a stiff mattress underneath me. I hear a pony breathing close by me, on the opposite side of my bed from the EKG. Listening for a few moments I determine that the unknown pony sleeping.
Having determined my surroundings, I try to piece together what I know. My mind is languid, however, and after several minutes all I can decide is that I’m in a hospital room and that I feel like a million invisible leeches are sucking me dry of energy.
Armed with approximately no information I decide to attempt the gargantuan task of lifting the lead curtains I have for eyelids and facing the world. Using all my concentration and willpower I manage to slowly open my eyes a hair’s width at a time. With every second the task becomes easier until I have fully opened my eyes. I then promptly shut my eyes and neigh in pain as I’m staring directly into the Sun through a crystal window on the opposite side of the room.
My cry of pain apparently wakes my guest as I hear the pony gasp as I’m desperately rubbing my eyes with my wings. “You okay Cross?”
My eyes are still burning as I respond to the familiar voice, “Never better Sunny.”
“Well if this is how you always feel I guess I know why I’m always beating you.” The fire in my eyes is finally abated enough for me to look at her. Sunpoint is sitting in a plush chair that’s much too large for her, large enough for her to lay down in with some room left over. She seems to have been doing just that as she’s just starting to sit up.
A few strands of her fiery red and yellow mane fall onto her face before being casually magicked back into place as she looks at me, “Why am I here anyway Sunpoint?”
The small smile on her face slides smoothly into a frown, “You don’t remember?”
I shake my head no, “Well,” she responds, looking at her hooves, “there was some kind of problem with an exercise Luna and you were doing, Celestia said it had something to do with dreamwalking but she wouldn’t tell me anything else. That was two days ago.” Anticipating my reaction she quickly looks up from her hooves and stares me right in the eyes, making the power of the burning Sun I had just been victim to seem pale, “You’re going to be okay though, alright? The doctors said you’re perfectly healthy, they’re just going to keep you here for observation. And when they release you, we’ll celebrate by me kicking your flank at any game of your choosing.”
Some of the anxiety that had been building since she said I had been unconscious for two days faded with her reassurance, but not all of it, “But, if I’m fine, why have I been asleep for two days? And where’s Princess Luna?” A horrible thought bursts into my mind, “Is she okay? She’s okay right? Nothing happened to her?”
Sunpoint shakes her head rapidly a few times, “No, no, no, Luna is fine, she cast a sleeping spell on you so it would be easier for you to be moved here, and so that it would be safer.” She stops talking for a second and coughs, looking away from me she continues, “I don’t know exactly what happened; Celestia just told me that you were emanating a lot of magic. But from what I heard you nearly destroyed your entire room, and your magic broke right through the protective wards on the walls like glass!” She glances to me quickly, too fast for me to really see her face, “I, uh, I saw you, when they first brought you in, you were, um, never mind. You’re fine now, so I’m just going to go get the doctor and tell her you’re awake, okay?” She still isn’t looking at me, but she apparently takes my silence as a yes and jumps down from the chair to start walking towards the door out of the room. “I’ll be right back.” She says quietly as she slips out.
I close my eyes to rest a moment but find myself drifting slowly but unstoppably back to sleep as I wonder where Luna is.
