The Awakening of an Ancient Child

A pony limped forward, her silhouette alone, pitiful. She stepped into the pale yellow light of a stone, one that she had put there. Her green eyes glinted as she placed her hoof against the source of light, a faint smile appearing on her lips. She blew a tuft of greyish blue mane from her face, and

Behind her, a white alicorn stood in the doorway, watching her sister carefully. The pews and isles stood between them were cast in shadow, and coated in dust. All of their old home had sat still and quiet against the tests of time. The organ room, from which they'd composed great sounds and practical jokes, had never felt so old.

Princess Luna placed her nose to the stone, which was only half her height, and closed her eyes. She lit up her horn, filling the room with blue light. She worked at the spell lock in the stone, placing to it the key she'd taken to heart, and dared never to forget in her long banishment.

The stone shone more brightly, its glow turning green, then blue, the change becoming more and more extreme until it left the visible spectrum. It lifted off the ground ever so slowly, hovering above the alicorn's head. It began to shake and crumble, experiencing its thousand year life all at once, and fell away into dust.

A trembling figure was all that the stone left behind, small, infantile, and curled into a small ball, protective, and shivering violently. Magic coursed through the foal's veins, reigniting all of the natural processes it had once put a stop to. It slowly lowered onto the ground, and set on the stone floor with such care.

The faint light reflected off of its pitch black fur, the silvery velvet on its wings glittering in the light given off by the one who had shattered its prison. Its mane and tail were both dark blue, with a few white hairs woven between them.

Princess Luna looked up, her horn fading, leaving the room in complete darkness, save for what little light entered through the door. She nudged the child's side with her nose, and said softly, "Nightsong." She reached her hoof to the youngling, feeling it's forehead, which was cold.

It remained limp, shivering violently. Its forehead wrinkled as its muscles tensed, and it coughed, wracking its little body, stirring up dust from the floor. It tightened its eyes, and curled itself into a tighter ball. It opened its mouth, and whispered, "M... Momma? C-cold."

Luna lifted the poor thing over her head, and lifted her right wing. She nuzzled the child's head, and said, "I know, I know. 'Tis okay, Nightsong. I'm here." She held the child under her wing, which she folded against her side, letting the foal gather warmth from her feathers, and listen to her heartbeat.

She turned to her sister, and slowly limped towards her. "He is alive," she said and followed her sister to the outside world. She would see the world again, meet new people, and accept flowers, but she never put him down, and she would not rest until he was safely tucked away next to her.

"Nightsong," a voice called.

He shuddered, his mind only just fitting into place. He remembered the cold, the blistering emptiness, the void, the forever stretching expanse of true nothingness. He heard someone whispering, and moved away from them, only for the sounds to intensify. He moved back, but the sounds grew more jumbled, and only grew louder. He covered his mind, and shouted, "Make it stop!"

A warmth, a modicum of sanity, a single note in the silence of nothing, fluttered towards him, and he held it close, trying to reconstruct himself around the only piece of security he had. He managed to make his senses work, then the little firefly of truth slipped away, leaving the void to pull his mind into nothingness again.

He whimpered, and kicked at something, watching and feeling around his chaotic world for something, anything to hold onto. He heard the whispers again, flooding the whole nothingness with unorganized sound, some flaring up and dying back down, others growing more and more numerous, louder and closer, ever present, ever harmful.

He couldn't pick out any sounds he recognized. His name, what was his name?

He heard it, drifting through the hollow Limbo, then forgot it, but held one thought; that he had a name. He had a name, whether he knew it or not. That was something, something to know, something to hold the light of truth, with which he took to running, running as fast as he could, not in any direction, for no direction existed.

He felt warmth, softness, and home. He heard it again, this time louder, louder than the most important sounds could ever be. He snapped his eyes open, and watched the world come into focus.

His mother's eyes: he saw them. He heard her voice, her sweet voice. He blinked his brown eyes at her, and waddled towards her, clumsily lifting his legs and setting them forward. He nuzzled her side, and closed his eyes.

She draped her wing over his left side, pulling him closer to her on the soft bed. "'Tis okay," she told him.

He leaned his head into her side, reminding himself of her soft heartbeat, and that it was real. She was real. He was safe. He was home.

Luna watched her son's behavior for a moment, trying to diagnose the effects that suspended animation had wrought upon him.

He began building himself up again, trying to figure out where various pieces of his mind had once gone, which was akin to solving a jigsaw puzzle without a table or floor to do it on. He had a checkerboard table though, with several pieces of the table simply not existing, so he had something.

He found a piece of parchment placed before him, and a hexagonal prism, covered in yellow paint, with a cone at the top. He blinked at the two objects for a moment, taking note of the fine font the paper was printed it.

"'Tis a puzzle," she told him. She pointed to the yellow object. "This is like a quill, but not quite, as its words can be removed."

He blinked at her, and nodded, closing his teeth over the side of the pencil, and reading over the instructions at the top of the paper. He examined the puzzle itself, a large black box, made of nine smaller boxes, each made of nine smaller boxes with thinner borders than the outer ones.

Numbers were printed in thick sans in some of the boxes, clues.

He began thinking. If each number could only appear in each row, column, or box once, then any set of three rows, columns or boxes held exactly three of each number. "Hmm," he said, placing a two in one of the empty boxes, then a three above and a six below it.

She smiled at him as he became engrossed with the puzzle. She'd taken pride in his intellect before, but now his resilience left her wondering why she'd been so worried. Suspended animation wasn't an enhancement to sanity, especially to children, but he seemed perfectly fine.

She hadn't wanted to suspend him, but the nightmares had given her no time for a better plan, and even in hindsight, she'd found no better plan. Her only other options had been to turn him over to the nightmares, forcing him to join Nightmare Moon's failed conquest, or to leave him with no parents for however long she'd be gone.

He paused for a moment, the tip of his pencil still held to the paper. He turned to his mother, a sort of displacement, confusion, maybe even fear in his eyes. He asked, "What was my name again?"

She said, "Nightsong." That was troubling, very much so. If he couldn't even remember his own name, had he not fallen completely asleep during his suspension? Had some part of his being remained active? Had he nearly been swallowed by the void, and her return happened to let her snap him from its jaws?

He thought for a moment, then returned to his puzzle. He added a few more numbers to the paper, then frowned, as though trying to remember something. He asked, "Where are we?"

Luna said, "Home. We are home. It's not quite the same home, but 'Tia is here. She made sure everything was ready for us when we woke up."

He blinked slowly and said, "We... It didn't feel like sleep." He put the pencil down in front of him, and leaned closer to his mother's fur. "I... I think I'll finish this later. It's... I'm just tired, mom."

Now she knew something was wrong. He would have never, in all of his life, set a puzzle aside. Neither hunger nor illness had ever kept him from a challenge of the mind before, and now he was letting himself believe that sleep demanded him more than a puzzle. This simply wasn't like him, not at all.

She sighed, and said, "Alright, Nightsong. You may rest, but I must know, what is the last thing you remember?" She waited, rolling onto her back and hugging him close to her chest with her wings. She looked him in the eye, his beautiful, brown, double slitted eyes.

He didn't feel well, putting things lightly. His vision seemed to twist and contort on small scales, and waver inconsistently on larger ones. He opened his mouth and stretched his back in a long yawn, his two fangs showing. He smacked his lips a few times and spread his wings as wide as he could, trying to break off what thin layers of aches were left.

He said, "I... I remember a lot of whispers. I tried to run, but they only got louder, and... I think I heard you speak, but it took a long time. I remember a lot of weird sounds and... nothing. I remember a lot of nothing." He closed his eyes and snuggled closely to her warm fur.

"I'm just glad to see you, mom," he added, and curled up into a small ball.

She said, "I love you."

He murmured something into her fur.