The town of Snow Vale died with a thunder clap. Darkness, oily and tangible erupted into the sky, blotting it from existence. The sound of it shook the earth and cracked open cliffs that Snow Vale had once sheltered between. It had been a small place, ever-white with the arctic snow. As the war effort pressed further northwards it had been abandoned. Harsh elements and soldiers were all that held it now, ravaging it by turns. Not even they could trouble it, not any longer.
Then there was silence. Wherever Snow Vale’s inhabitants had fled; whether deeper into the Empire’s heartland or, if they were sensible and brave, to the newly United Tribelands of Equestria to the south, it could not be known. That they would not return to this embattled land was the only certainty now. There was no home to return to. The snow fell as it always had; now it begun filling in the perfectly circular expanse of nothingness that had been eaten out of the world.
Luna was sprawled in a pile of soft snow. She blinked her eyes open and brushed icy crystals from her face. Standing, shaking snow from body and wings, she left a trail in the drifts as she climbed the scant few paces to the rim of the crater. Few things could truly harm her. This had been meant to kill her outright. It had been capable of succeeding, too, had she been but slightly slower in her evasion or the trap not slightly premature in its firing.
She was impressed.
The oncoming blizzard meant very little to her, so that even as wind and snowflakes pelted her she stood open to the weather and she surveyed the newly deadened, scoured-raw expanse of earth looking for signs of life. She knew not to expect anything alive down there, yet went skidding down the newly exposed earthen banks all the same, more to survey the work of Sombra than to check for survivors.
Her honour guard had been swallowed up in the eruption, death and the means of death had made them exactly the same as the imperial slave-soldiers they had been pursuing across the snowfields. Luna brushed away the thin layer of snow already filling the desolate space. The touch of dark magic was heavy here and she knew she should not stay long. It would take days to safely purge something like this, weeks even. That was time she could not afford, and while this had been the latest and greatest work of dark magic she had seen Sombra employ it was hardly the first. It would not be the last.
The harder the United Tribes pushed northwards, the sooner the war would be ended, but the more vicious its death throes would be for it. It seemed an elegant, evil equation built into the very fabric of nature in these years of late.
Luna climbed the sloped earth and paused to regard her own thin trail. There were no others. Had Sombra’s soldiers known? Had they been witting and willing to sacrifice themselves, or had he tossed them like so much unwitting bait to lure Luna into the hunt?
The alicorn turned her back with disdain. She, at least, did not hide the truth from her own. When she sent them to die, they went in full knowledge of what they were to do, that it was in her service, and the service of the future itself.
Snow Vale lay — had lain — at the very mouth to the mountains, all razor sharp passes and jagged peaks. Mostly it had been the junction of hardy travellers, a respite situated at the base of the pass. Here they stood as the last natural barrier defending the empire’s innermost territory. Had she her trusty guard, Luna would have pressed on, taking and holding, making a garrison of whatever next imperial bastion they came upon. Without her soldiers and threat of greater, deadlier alicorn-killing dark magic traps now a reality, Luna turned south.
It would be a long, lonely and boring march south across the expansive snowfields to their own United Tribes staging grounds. The wind was rising and the snow was falling. Luna sheltered her eyes best she could, turning her head to her shoulder and shielding herself with a wing. Her feathers flicked and twitched wildly as the blizzard grabbed at them, but it would take a stronger wind than that to move an alicorn against her will. Were she to try and fly it would likely be a different story, and she had no desire to be buffeted about by the storm. She was aware of the cold, but only as a passing nuisance. Freezing temperatures were no real threat to ones such as her.
She trudged through hard pack high as her knees, having only its metered crunch crunch and the wailing wind to accompany her. In a fit of frustration she levelled her horn with the ground and blasted clear a path ahead for the next several hundred paces. Steam rose and was swallowed in an instant in the growing blizzard. The exposed ground was quick to turn white again. In time, perhaps as early as tomorrow, the long, thin line of a scar would fill as if it had never been, but for now it would do for Luna’s needs.
The loss of her honour guard was what stung her most. They had been stout and capable warriors, quick to obey and trusted with her missives. It would take time to select their replacements, time to cultivate the full potential for obedience, ability and bravery she saw in them. No doubt Celestia would have words for her about this fracas. No doubt there would be measured looks and insidiously polite words.
Luna put it from her mind, much the same as the clinging snow she brushed from her face. When it came to face that, sometime tomorrow by her estimates, she would do so with measured indifference. This rivalry should be beneath them, always should it have been beneath them, yet even in wartime it was what it was.
An hour of this had passed when something not of earth or ice caught her eye. Though grey and vague in the worsening storm and night fast coming on, she clearly recognized the plumed helm of her warriors. She brought it to her. The wind ripped at it greedily but it was a futile effort. The plume was a frozen crest of stiff, snowbound purple and the crafted steelwork covered in a thick layer of rime ice. The metal had buckled over the eye, leaving an impression deep and wide enough to balance an apple in. Whatever blow had done this would have surely ended an unarmoured pony’s life. Perhaps even then, the armour had not been enough?
There was blood on the inside, black and frozen and sticky, yet not enough to decide the matter one way or another. More from curiosity for mystery than hope for a survivor did Luna decide to set aside her weary march and investigate. It would be a pause to the tedium of her trek, and a reprieve from her inevitable run in with Celestia’s reproach.
The blizzard, besides being a deadly thing had she not been an alicorn, made the mundane senses pointless. Luna could see barely further a distance than she could reach with her hoof and her ears were crowded with the maddened screams of wind and ice. She could see in total darkness, yes, such was her birth-given right, but in this matter a hundred thousand snowflakes conspired against her eyes.
Thus Luna turned to the arcane. Moving her awareness into her magic, Luna spread herself through the snow like finely woven threads. From above, had one the capacity to see the magic at work beneath the snow, touching and prodding she would have seemed a spider at the centre of an expanding, ever-branching web.
There.
Something not snow nor winter-sleeping soil, though, it was folded between the two and nearly as cold. Luna hurried through the snow; now high that she had to push her chest through it and work her legs unseen beneath it. Then she dug, tossing aside a tonne with no real expense on the effort.
A pony.
All ponies were small next to Luna, this one was no different in that regard. The vast scales of this land, with the towering threat of the mountains and the remorseless expanse of the snowfields refined the effect, but most of all it was the figure’s own curled, deathly tight foetal posture that emphasized.
Here was the fallen warrior to whom the helm belonged, than. Luna’s ache of annoyance and loss redoubled in her chest. To have not lost every last one to a dark, all-consumptive spell-trap only to lose the last in the same manner that any normal pony might fall. It was frustrating.
She cast a spell and found herself needing to increase its power considerably to push open even a few inches of flurry and gale. Already the snow was greedily reclaiming the guard. A tuft of white hair shared sticky, frozen black blood with the pale green coloured scalp that had bled it.
She knew this face.
Luna twinged with regret. To lose her honour guard was bother enough. To see the the ruined wreckage of a handsome younger recruit added insult to injury. For a moment she considered bringing his body back to camp. There would likely be someone, somewhere, that would want that, though the idea of carrying for many miles and hours a steadily stiffening corpse did not appeal to her whether by back or by levitation.
“Ah, Cotton Grass. Tis a pity that, must you fall, it is away from the others. You were no less brave for a humbler death. We acknowledge your service to Us.” As was customary with what passed as the basic funerary rites, she lowered her horn, her wingtips and her hoof to his eyes and chest. Celestia had devised the gesture and it had since spread to become common practice in the Equestrian lands. Each pony approximated it in accordance with their race. Though it had no words to be spoken, the ritual’s purpose was clear: We are united in life and in death, all three sister-races, in our thoughts and our hearts. Such had been Celestia’s intent all along, of course.
Harmony, the elder sister preached. Harmony in all things was the key to their new world order. As if alicorns themselves embodying the many-made-one were somehow not great enough a symbol already.
She leaned to whisper a small prayer for him. As Luna’s lips brushed the earth pony’s chest her attention snagged into alertness. Cotton Grass was icy cold. She pressed her horn against his throat, her eyes squinted tightly shut for focus. Luna shut out all sensation of the raging blizzard, focusing her everything on the still body beneath her. Then her eyes flashed open.
“Ah! Death has been greedy today, but We might yet turn the black wings aside of this one.” Her words were shredded and tattered by the howling wind. Beyond the circle of her light, all was whirling snow and darkness.
The alicorn widened her stance in the snow. Her face was an unfriendly grimace. She charged herself with magical power. “You are no doubt warm, no doubt at peace,” she hissed as electric-blue energies gathered and crackled along her horn. “But it is time to wake up!”
She jabbed Cotton Grass in the breast, and the gathered energies plunged into him. Legs lurched, he threw his head back. He rasped a desperate, lung-bursting breath and his chest heaved. His eyes tore open with shock and pain. Arcs of blue electricity danced across his eyeballs and vanished. His pupils flitted about, unseeing and wild and the pony panted with maddened hyperventilation.
Luna withdrew her horn. Blood speckled the very tip with a smattering of its wet and quickly freezing shine.
The eyes of Cotton Grass locked onto hers. He gasped and shivered violently. “Pr-pr-pr…”
“Do not speak. You are nearer death than life and We wouldst rather not give Sombra the satisfaction.”
The storm was upon them now and night had truly fallen. Something worse than wind raged and howled out here. Luna paused in her work to consider the obstructed skies.
“Windigo. We expected as much.” The demons would be attracted twice over, by the presence of dark magic and the very storm itself. They would whip a fierce blizzard into a truly brutal one. Such was their nature.
The alicorn smiled grimly and reduced the power of her spell until little more than her faced remained in the light and the flurry returned to claim the empty air. She lowered herself onto the wide-eyed and violently shaking stallion.
“Be still,” she commanded softly, “This is neither time nor place to do battle. In these northern storms they are at their strongest. We would likely be victorious, but your life is forfeit should We be gone more than a moment.” Low to the ground and nearly lying atop him, she wrought a new spell. This spell of discretion she cast with minimal strength. Snow tumbled and bunched up around them. First it was as low walls, then tumbling overhead. The dome sealed itself and the wind became muted and ceased its maddened tugging. No flakes slapped at them and a semblance of real quiet was reclaimed. “There. We will remain hidden and safe ‘til this passes. Now We might work on saving you without distraction.”
Their shelter under the snow was far too low for a pony to stand or even sit up straight, least of all an alicorn. It was wide enough to lay down side by side though, to this effect Luna manoeuvred herself.
Luna shook herself free of errant snowflakes. She propped her chin against the pony’s head. “Is war not exhilarating? Twice today, in a matter of hours, Our life has been in genuine danger. Which do you think the greater example be?”
“Pr-pr-pr…Th-th-th…”
“Ah, yes.” she chided. “Worry not.”
She cast a soft, steady light that filled their little space with some light and their own tangled shadows. A second spell of flickering blue energies made Cotton Grass glow faintly.
It pushed into him, lighting up his flesh with a tracery of blue luminescence. The pony thrashed, he screamed, he kicked and convulsed and Luna took a flailing strike to the jaw. She forcibly drowned his screams with a strong and steady hoof over his mouth. The spell spread further and deeper in him, rushing along the pathways of his blood.
In a moment it was over, the spell faded and Cotton Grass fell limp in Luna’s grasp. She held his mouth a little longer, waiting until she was certain there would be no more howls from him.
Then, when she believed he was past the pain, or at least past having the energy to express it, she released his mouth. She pulled the guard to her, again cradling his head in the warm space of her throat. “You were dying of cold. Now you are not. We have put some heat back into you.”
His breathing was ragged and raw. Luna gave her attention to sounds of it. “Take a moment and collect thyself. There is no rush tonight.”
Something roared quite near them, only some thicknesses of snow away before disappearing once more into the constant raging of the blizzard outside. Her spell had been dangerously near detection, it irked her to know that another would surely see them found.
Eventually the worst calmed. Cotton Grass shook, not the lashing frenzy of his death throes, but the shivers of the manageably hypothermic. Once upon a time before the war, Luna had dove into the sightless waters beneath the ocean ice, pushing herself deep past the lungs of mortal ponies and there she had gleaned something of what cold was. Of what it could mean to her subjects.
The guard’s voice was thin as air. Luna could feel the vibrations where she cradled him to her throat. “Pr-princess. Princess Luna.”
She murmured in the affirmative.
Cotton Grass struggled weakly in her grip, twitching his head in a feeble attempt at a bow. She held him gently, yet strong enough that even in his full strength he would not have hoped to move her. “Us?” he asked, his eyes adding words to the question that his voice yet could not.
Had her guard known they were dying? Had the trap allowed time enough for that or did they cease altogether in an instant? Unfit deaths for her honourable ones. It was a sad outcome for the day, and left poor prospects for the night.
“No. None remain but we two. The others did as was bid of them and they did not falter in the service.”
Cotton Grass fell silent. She sensed he needed something more. “You did not fail Us.”
He remained quiet. She sensed he was awake, concussed yet conscious. She could not let him sleep, not yet. The blow to his head had been mighty and Luna knew from such a sleep as would follow he might not wake. There would need to be time, time enough for the healing to begin, and safeguards established. The cold, too, conspired to lull Cotton Grass home to his comrades. Luna had forced heat into his body, squeezed it against its own enthalpy, tighter and warmer within him, spooling it back into the blood and bones and organs it had been leached from. He was no alicorn though; he could not hold the warmth as Luna did. Without her, Cotton Grass would be thieved of it again.
Luna’s sole remaining guard was no longer in immediate danger, but damage had been done. Cotton Grass needed aid that Luna could not give and protection that the Windigo would sooner destroy. The demons raged unrelenting in these lands. In a blizzard risen such as this, she must assume that one was but short strides distant from her at all times, well near enough to sniff out even minor spells. The war was inconsequential to the icy demons, only that it riled hate and violence and dark magic. When Sombra fell, their turn would come and they too would be routed and burned from the world.
Luna would see to that.
But not tonight. Tonight she must remain hidden, for her own sake and for that of one she would want to live. And so princess and guard were hidden in a shelter of snow, snug as a bed and grim as a coffin.
Luna was no stranger to long nights. She settled her mind to face this one. She wondered what her guard saw in the limited, shadowy vision granted by the magic incumbent in her hair, but did not ask after it.
The pony’s voice was emotionless when next he spoke. “I struck you.”
Luna let the last tickle of sensation fade from her chest before she responded to his words. “Such was not your intent, Cotton Grass. You are forgiven.”
“Thank you,” he whispered.
She had seen his face enough times before to know him. For the first time Luna truly studied him. Though an earth pony, in Cotton Grass she recognized the bold, flight-favouring features more typical of a pegasus. Already the Tribes had begun to blend around her, she surmised. The old stigmata, the old divisions had been banished with the Sisters’ coming; a pony such as Cotton Grass would be among the last to have been born and raised in a world where mixed lineage as she suspected lay in him was a bugbear of shame to be carried.
In time, Her suspects would see the folly of their meaningless derisions of one another. All lay equally under the alicorns; all tread the same path to serve them, that they in turn might better all. Celestia might say it differently and muddle the truth of in modesty, but that is what it was: truth.
What did such truths matter to the broken guard, she wondered.
Cotton Grass was young, handsome and more than handsome. Service had not thickened his body with muscle like it did most earth ponies; instead he had grown lean and become best shaped not for brute force, but agile movement.
White hair lay clumped and tangled in dried blood. Old smatters of it painted his cheek. His left eye was dark and murky. Luna expected that live or die, the sight was gone from it now. She shifted the guard more closely against herself and with one hoof she braced him gently. Her wing she worked around his shoulders, drawing him to lean more upon herself than the wall of their snowy shelter. With the other she gathered a small amount of snow.
She breathed on it until it softened and was wet to her touch. Despite being present for all this Cotton gasped in quiet surprise when she touched it to him, as if all he had seen had but been a dream, a mysterious and not unkind one, a dream that physical sensation — let alone the sharp kiss of cold and wet snow — was not expected to play part in.
He winced at first, then relaxed into Luna’s touch. It was a poor means to bath him of his deadened and sticky blood, but there was time and Luna applied herself patiently to the work. He held his head still as he could despite the shivers, tilted it back against the crest of her wing and submitted more fully to her. Water melted; dripped; ran in faintly red trails down his cheek to fall and be lost silently in her feathers. A trickle stained the snow.
Eventually Cotton Grass shifted slightly. Pressing himself more tightly into the contours of her body, Luna understood. The shivers she felt from him lessened a little and she welcomed the novelty of intimate sensation, for all else had been but ice and snow before. The guard’s breathing steadied and quieted again and, when Luna had done what she could to clear the worst of the blood; he pressed his unsullied cheek into her coat.
“Do not sleep,” she warned him, sensing he fought his own seductive fatigue. “It may yet be the death of you.”
“You,” he murmured, his breath puffing faintly on her skin in visible, fleeting clouds. “I can’t defend you. My body is heavy. My head is painful and half-dreaming.” Almost as an afterthought, he added with a pleased sigh, “You’re warm.”
Luna had received many compliments in life, but none quite like this. The simple, unabashed sincerity of it was humbling. Her body was warm, and he appreciated that. A time where she had received such gratitude for so slight a thing as she possessed as the warmth of her body, Luna could not recall. She hoped it was not entirely his head wound speaking. The humility and the sincerity were welcome to her.
Luna thought of keeping the guard awake. Short of tormenting his body — a measure she had no desire to act upon — she sought to engage Cotton Grass’ mind. Stimulation of the brain, she hoped, would dissuade it from too easily ceasing its activities.
Even unwitting to Luna’s plan, Cotton Grass still served his Princess’ will. He met Luna’s eye and spoke. “This is not a dream,” he said in the tone of one resolving an intriguing puzzle. He cracked a weak smile. “Too much pain,” he explained.
At least his faculty for rational thought was unharmed, Luna reasoned.
“Do you hate Us?” She had not thought to ask that, but she had done so and could not take back the words. She feared he did, and that he would have the right to. For what she was — and was not. Hate Luna for the way that it was her most faithful and fervent that were used hardest and bled most. Hate? Yes, he had the right, and the culmination of the rights for all those who no longer had voices. Celestia had the way of smiles and beguiling words and gentleness, not Luna. Luna’s way was to hunt truth to its lair, to meet it in the eye and not turn away.
Luna’s second thinking turned darker still. Here, hate was prey. Ambrosia of Windigos. A hovel in the snow would no more stop the scent of it reaching them than gauze or well-wishes.
Should Cotton Grass hate her… she would not hate him. But she would end him, and so end his hate.
The image came unbidden: her hooves, his throat. No, simpler still: Luna would stand, break open their hovel with the spreading of her wings and soar. Cotton Grass would see her go and then he would die.
One might do great things, to save something small, but one did not sacrifice something great for something small, not ever.
“Do you hate me?” She did not mean her voice to catch nor for it to weaken yet both these things happened.
Cotton Grass was a long time answering. Luna felt her heartbeat wrack more fervently against her chest. She was afraid. Moreso, she was focused. The one, shackled to the service of the other.
She did not know what she looked for in him, only that she looked for a sign.
What had she expected of him?
Not tears. Never that. But Cotton Grass held her eyes fixed still with his own and they came. They welled up, wobbled atop the wide sincerity of his eyes and overflowed. They flowed like twin streams separated at birth, destined to take opposing, identical courses , never meeting and yet coming to the same eventual end. He cried until two wet trails painted his cheeks, one clean, one bloodied still, despite Luna’s efforts to bath his wound.
Yet Cotton Grass did not shudder, or shake, blink nor blubber. He simply cried in silence and in stillness. “All of us?” His voice was thin, gouged hollow of emotion.
All of them? She was hated by all? They had all hated her. Their spirits would trail her shadow.
Her heart flashed darkly of an instant before understanding found her.
Not a statement, she realized. A question. Pleading. Despairing. Hoping.
Her honour guards. His comrades. They had died that she might live, and so had fulfilled the utmost meaning of their service to her. She could not honestly regret that her honour guard had done as they were meant to do. But she could understand sympathy, and she craved to show something of it now.
“Yes,” she stated flatly. She felt an urge to brush Cotton Grass, but that, she felt, was an intrusion she had not the to right make just now. “All are lost. They went without fear. They went without pain.” She hoped that much was true.
His tears slowed and stopped flowing as unannounced as they first come. Pausing, blinking, Cotton Grass at least seemed to remember himself. He wiggled as his weakened body allowed. When he could not move his hooves to clear his face Luna simply did for him what he could not.
He murmured wearily, incomprehensibly through feathers of royalty, marred as they were tonight by blood and tears and flecks of fallen frost. He squeezed his eyelids tightly now, his head came down and he hid himself more deeply in the crooks of her wings. Again the wriggling. Luna found herself intrigued and needing to slightly reposition herself around the smaller pony. “Help me. Help me, please.”
It took her a moment to make sense of what his weak struggles sought to do. A hoof groped weakly at the catchments of his armour. Ah. She moved as if to kiss him, but she did not. In this confinement it was easier to pry open the catchment with her mouth than make awkward room for the hooves of her long and slender legs.
She flicked the breastplate away from Cotton Grass where it made its own place in the snow. His next breath came steady and strong, as of great relief removing itself his shoulders.
Was it such a weight to serve? She did not ask.
“I do not hate you. Princess,” he restated.
“Because I am your Princess.”
Cotton Grass twinged. “I cannot move my head…” he explained, flashing her a grimace of embarrassment and pain. It took a few rushed breaths to steady himself, but he rallied his wits again. “Because it is not me,” he stressed the word, as if with his unwavering stare he might give the weight of it to her. In a slow moment the fixed intensity of his eyes left him. His speech loosened. “Oh, I…I should not have tried to move my head…”
Luna cradled the guard tightly to her, squeezing firm enough that new warmth grew between them. “Be still,” she urged him. “Be still.”
Cotton Grass gave the faintest suggestion of a nod, like a sleepy child might give half-woken too early from a dream. He could manage little more, she feared. What little she knew of medicine flurried uselessly through her thoughts.
Sleep. One must not let them sleep, ones who had wounds such as this. Something that would be broken in the brain would not wake them. They would simply descend deeper into sleep, deeper, deeper, out the bottom and beyond this life. What had she, without her magic?
Disregard the Windigo and she could enter his dreams, readily as another might enter a door. But the damage was in the flesh, not the mind, though the two be not wholly distinct. There was no resolution in his dreams, anymore so than there was hope for salvation in patching the boat when the ocean that suspended it was draining out from a hole in the bottom of the world.
Dare she risk magic? No, she decided severely. She could not. Must not. What else, what else was there?
Snow. Ice.
Luna’s hope was hoisted higher, suspended to new heights on a sharp and growing pike of frustration.
She gathered more snow, then decided to drop much of it. Luna filled herself with long, slow breath. She exhaled in the same manner, warm air to cold snow. “Drink,” she quietly urged him, manoeuvring her hoof until the trickling melt water fell onto Cotton Grass’ lips. “You must drink. Drink for Our sake,” she demanded.
The pony smacked his thin, colour-drained lips. Drip by drip he gained something. Not much. Something. His eyes were unfocused and turned somewhere above them.
His voice was too low to make out now.
Luna jostled him, gently — firmly — as she could.
“Answer me now, Guard Cotton Grass. What are you saying?”
She caught one word from the mumbling before the pony choked and spluttered weakly. She hurried the dripping snow away from him until his breathing steadied. The word had been stars and it had been full of wonderment.
Luna almost forgot herself when she figured it out. Almost forgot how cooped in she was, not just how intimately close this pony was to her that she held. (and how rare, how non-existent such intimacy was!) Almost of an instant and for an instant she forgot the dozen or so ways her present situation was absurd for an alicorn such as herself.
Cotton Grass was stargazing in her mane. His addled wits had surely taken another turn. She wondered if he was aware the difference between what he saw and what he thought he saw. Carefully, with slow movement and silence she returned the dripping, melting snow to its place where she might get some meagre ration of its water into him.
After a time, she replaced what had been that powdery, paltry hooful with another. In time, she replaced that also.
And still Cotton Grass stared. Perhaps his eyes tracked individual stars, divining of them. Or perhaps he simply could do no more than allow the vision to pour down into him, like an empty vessel left to gather the rain. All ponies saw stars, after all.
Luna felt that in all her life she had not studied what was fundamentally herself so engrossingly as did this one, here and now and bedding down with death. He drank, she reassured herself, but did not dying ponies often take water? Silence did not often worry Luna, truly this was so. Silence didn’t often bother her, but often is not always. The thought that her last remaining guard’s mind, which had rallied so wholly, so briefly, was dimming again upset her.
She hated the notion of working for nought.
She found her own voice coming forward to challenge the quiet, though she did not govern her thoughts or steer them to any sort of end.
That she whispered here, whispered with deathly, respectful quiet made her realize how loud a thing she truly was. Luna: a noisy princess. Like the blizzard: howling.
She knew her thoughts took an odd and worrying shape tonight, chased uncommon threads and moved to unrehearsed dances, but acknowledgement of the change did not cure her of it.
Then, another twist of thought she remembered that Cotton Grass had not answered her. Had not answered his Princess. Twice.
She pressed her forehead to his, aware of but not caring for how flecks of once dried, newly wet with washing flecks of blood stuck to her, willing him to have living, cogent thought.
“We asked you a question before. Do you remember?”
Cotton Grass gave no response. “Do you hate Us?” Luna asked. She wanted to know. Not for the sake of chances, the sake of Windigo and strategy and chances. For herself. Words to her satisfaction. For the sake of being a person and knowing another and asking the only other one in the only time and only place she might have the cowardice — or the courage — to see if she would justify her own scabbed-over, blood-matted feelings.
The blizzard howled. The Windigo howled.
“Do you hate your Princess?” She smiled and wondered why she did so and knew. “Do you hate me?”
Slowly, with much effort for little gain, Cotton Grass’ eyes resolved themselves clear again and came to her. “No. I do not.”
“You should. Who in all the world has more right this night to despise me?”
“I do not hate you.”
Luna gently worked little clumps of matted blood and gore from Cotton Grass’ hair. She spoke softly. “The honour guard are all dead. By my choices and in my service, they are dead. You were the first struck down, far from the others and when you fell, it passed beneath Our notice. Will you not resent me, despise me, hate me for what I have done and what I have failed to do?”
“Princess,” he murmured, “hush.”
A soft touch may strike deeper than a vicious blow, and such was the case here.
The guard’s eyes were closed, yet he breathed wilfully, like one who does not intend to stop. His chest rose and fell steadily. His breathing was not weak, yet it took several breaths to strengthen even a few words. “We did not hate you. I do not hate you. They do not hate you. Please believe this.”
Unable to truly dry the guard, Luna brushed the snowmelt from him with her feather tips. The young guard was bare and vulnerable beneath her. Exposed and helpless and so completely unabashed with his circumstance. She did as she will and Cotton Grass had only acceptance. Luna felt oddly buoyant, bubbling between an urge to smile and cry. “You cannot speak for the others, Guard Cotton Grass.”
Cotton Grass wobbled, raising his chin an inch and his hoof a little farther. His jaw worked for a time, then the words formed. “Yes. I can.”
“On what grounds?”
For a moment the guard stilled, as of succumbing to gentle sleep. He rallied. “Silliness.” Each pause was apparent. Luna hiked his body up, a little closer against her own. Cotton Grass groaned in painful, groggy compliant. “I can speak for them.”
There came a silence. Luna did not want it, but she felt it was not hers to break. Having done what she could to clean Cotton Grass with water and her wings, she arched them. Between them, her mane shone like a river made of the night sky.
After a time, her guard asked, “Do they have names?” He did not leave his princess uncertain for long. “The stars,” he said. “Bright star… Candle star... Stag star… Rain star. The sky is in your hair.” Cotton Grass tried to lift his hoof, but he was unable to reach far. “The sky is your hair.”
Luna said nothing, she only listened. The little guard’s quiet breathing held such terrible fascination for her.
Cotton Grass gestured for water and Luna gave it. Icy dribbles spilled between thin lips. A mournful howl, softened by distance and gale pierced their shelter. “I think this battle is lost, Princess. I’m going to die.”
“You will do no such thing. Not by Our night. Not by Celestia’s day. You are not permitted. You will not die.”
Cotton Grass huffed weakly, a ghost of laughter. “Your will, Princess.”
“Promise it,” she insisted.
Cotton Grass rested against Luna’s warmth. He was in no rush, for he had nowhere to be. He stared into the tranquillity of stars.
“Promise Us. Hey.” Luna nudged the guard with her nose. “Hey!”
Cotton Grass stirred. He grudgingly cracked his eyes open. “I was listening.”
Luna raised her ears, then flicked them this way and that. The storm was unabated and the Windigo forlorn. Neither had changed, far as she could discern. “Listening to what?”
“Everything.” Cotton Grass took a deep breath, held it and loosed it again with a protracted sigh. “It’s nice. I can feel your heartbeat. Princess,” he added, somewhat abashed with himself. “You’re still so warm.”
Luna blinked, slowly as if to check that when her eyes opened things would be just as they were. They were. “I won’t let you die,” she said matter-of-factly.
Cotton Grass jutted his chin forwards an inch and he gestured wanly. His voice had a pronounced slur. “I won’t try to,” he said, managing gentle indignation before slumping again.
Having been made ware to the fact, Luna concentrated on feeling her guard’s heart beat. She eased her hoof under his and settled it over his chest. She gave the effort due attention; his heart seemed fast and quite faint to her, but she had no experience to compare it with. She searched her memory in vain, and wondered if this really was the first time she’d had such shared physical closeness with anyone.
In the end, she chose not to worry, not about this. If Cotton Grass were to live or die, the state of his heart would not be a deciding factor in it. She had had already fired it back into life, violently at that. For the moment, Luna simply let herself experience the gentle rhythmic sensation of what her actions had bought.
Time passed with an almost meditative awareness in Luna. Breathe and heartbeat, and no thought at all. The guard didn’t sleep. None in the world could half so well tell the difference between a pony awake and asleep as Luna. The skill was part of her very essence. When she did blink her eyes open and shift herself ever so slightly, she looked down. Cotton Grass hadn’t moved at all. He was stargazing in her mane again.
She thought him in a daze or a trance, so it surprised Luna somewhat when he spoke in reply to her little movements. “This wouldn’t be a bad way to die,” he said. “Warm. Quiet. In your care. In your hooves. It doesn’t hurt too bad. Better than before.”
“You are not to be so resigned, Cotton Grass. Did you stick out your neck and bow your head and just let the enemy try their best with you? Do not do so now.”
The guard sounded pleased despite the jibe. “I can feel your voice when you talk. I’m so tired, Princess. Let me sleep.”
Luna grumbled in the negative. It was hours yet to dawn, not that the distinction of light or dark mattered greatly to her, but the storm was relevant, the storm and its Windigo. Dawn would see the end of that, she knew.
She had his attention, what there was of it to have, at any rate. The silence irked her as it rarely did and she found herself speaking. Cotton Grass was in no fit mind for dialogue, rather; she told him a story. Luna whispered to her humble shelter, hidden from the demons in the snow, the true and exact story of how she and her sister had come to be. A hundred or a thousand variations on the story vied to survive in the memories of their subjects; many wild, creative, impressive and wholly untrue fabrications thrived. Some were like heaps of sand with but a few grains being true. A very few stories glanced off its very edges, but none struck truth itself.
While Luna and Celestia often did not agree exactly and unwaveringly on things, that their true story be allowed to remain hidden in the myriad had always had consensus between them. That she felt compelled to tell it now…she questioned not the motive.
She went so far as to leave crumbs in her telling. Curios that invited thought and intrigue. The hint of questions so that he might guess or poise another. Cotton Grass took no cues, nor gave voice to any thought, but he closed his eyes and turned away from water and Luna knew that he listened with the same attentive absorption he had previously held to her starry mane. If he understood much, he did not show it.
Then her telling of it veered sideways. Celestia. Sombra. Starswirl. Childhood. Celestia again. Celestia would not do this, would not lose her dignity like this. Nor would she have needed to prove that she would — and could — maintain her aloof, image-of-perfection poise as a solitary pony flickered and faltered. No, she would have found means to mend him. But no, Celestia would not need to do that, she would have steered his life away from falling, would have reined in the wild hunt of the guards’ joyous, baying charge forward.
Luna was not without logic. Were all this conjecture a reality, then that reality equally allowed for Celestia to take Snow Vale with direction and control and lose no one. Then, with a dark magic trap erupting under-hoof, for no guards had rushed ahead (their Princess shouting for glory and joy to see them take the field so earnestly) to trigger it and lose everyone and herself.
Celestia’s vaunted perfection, today, would have killed her. Luna took a grim satisfaction in the thought.
But it would do her little comfort when tomorrow arrived and the sun came up to scrutinize her choices. Luna imagined briefly what it would be, to have remained at the outpost instead, to receive the news or come upon it herself that her sister, an alicorn, one of those whom should not die had gone and done just that.
As all who love another do, she could not help but momentarily explore the concept more fully.
A princess unchecked could accomplish much.
When Luna’s voice was spent of stories and squabbles, Luna let herself be lulled into the passage of time. She was not free of her thoughts and they troubled her to no end, making hours of minutes.
The blizzard was at its height, a howling so constant and ferocious that even in its terrible volume, it had become almost a forgotten constant. Luna held the little body of Cotton Grass, trying to shun away her own thoughts and experience only the fickle warmth she felt from him.
But she could not. Her senses prickled. Something unseen in the world had shifted on its axis. Luna opened her eyes.
She laid the guard down and, readying herself, stared at the wall. “We are discovered.”
A sneering face of ice pushed through the shelter exactly where Luna had turned her eye moments before, nosing aside snow with an almost gentle curiosity. She met the windigo with the full might of her magic, shearing the demon’s head from its shoulders and wings from its back. It collapsed on thrashing limbs, melted and steaming along the remains.
A Windigo did not die so easy as that, more was the pity.
Shoving the body away with another blast before it could reform, Luna jumped. She broke through the roof of snow without effort and rose well past it. Snapping open her wings she let the storm winds take her in whatever direction they may.
Diving, spinning, Luna retook her footing, hoping the distance she had taken would safeguard the vulnerable Cotton Grass from the demons. She could lure them away and she could fight them. The sooner her victory, the better his chances.
“Come and die, Windigo!” Luna shouted in challenge. A second Windigo was shot down with a screaming bolt of magic, while a third was sheared clean of its hind legs. “You face Luna now! Your hearts will be torn out, melted and boiled! This you are promised! Come! Come and die!”
A body of ice tackled Luna. Together they tumbled, one over the other in a roll through the snow until Luna took the top. The Windigo snapped at her and scored her legs. Pinning its own to the sides, the alicorn lowered her horn and loosed a concentrated and sustained magical assault upon it.
Reaching into the hot and steaming ruin of its chest cavity; there were no lungs or organs there, but one; cold, blue and never beating, Luna tore it free and, with fixity of purpose she made good on her promise.
Her blood was pumping. Some of it leaked.
Vision enhanced beyond sight, Luna could see many. Many were close, too many, but it was an ice demon further away that most alarmed her.
“Away!” Luna shouted, blasting at range the Windigo with a volley of bright flashes that pocked and cracked its body, slowing but not stopping it. Too many!
She would have to act fast and she would have to act decisively. This Luna knew. There were Windigo gathered here in greater number than she had ever seen before. More than perhaps even she could combat willingly. Not at disadvantage, not without the support of sister, strategy and legion. Her plan was a doomed one.
“I will kill you all!” she roared. An especially bloodthirsty or stupid Windigo surged ahead of its kin, this Luna met with her horn, blazing with moonlight, and stabbed it in its frozen blue heart. Expanding the spell further, the demon was impaled through and through on her magic and died explosively.
More were rushing her, undeterred. Too many. Too many. Luna moved swiftly, killing sorry few, repelling many, refusing to allow Windigo to close ranks on her. Wind whipped her and hail pelted her.
Teeth in her leg and the weight of a body tore Luna from the sky. She fought the fall and, swinging her tormenter forward at the last used its body as a target for the force of impact. The Windigo’s shattered limbs twitched in their haste to reform and teeth like diamond razors froze alicorn blood into permanent painted trophies.
Luna pummelled her abuser ruthlessly, gracelessly into momentary remission before prying herself free. “Cotton Grass!” she shouted angrily. “If ye have any strength yet remaining, I call on it now! We are leaving!”
With a swipe of her hoof Luna opened her shelter to the storm. A lunging Windigo was knocked aside by a blast of Luna’s scorn, another was bodily lifted and tossed back screaming to tempest gale.
Enfolding her last living guard in a shell of magic and tethering him to her back, Luna sprang from a running leap into full-hearted, hard-flapping flight. Now the storm was as much a foe as the icy demons, for the fight was not her goal today, though the Windigo be a detested foe, but instead her and her guard’s assured and certain survival.
Twice she had courted death today. A third was a flirt too far. Though it shamed her to retreat in such a manner, Luna gave her all to this end regardless. She strafed with seething streams of moonlight and nightmares as she could and drove the pursuers back. More would come. Always more.
Now she turned her fervor upwards. Luna would not fly free of the blizzard by any of the compass’ four options. No, she would rise above. The open sky of night, under the unobstructed light of the stars was her domain. She could feel the air grow thinner, colder and ever more furious as she rose, flapping her wings violently, righting herself on every other beat.
Breaking at last through the highest reaches of the blizzard, Luna whipped about and unleashed all the remaining fury left to her in a single, great outpouring of energies. The snow on the ground far below, all above and all below, it flashed to steam and stillness as a veritable hole was punched clean out of the blizzard by Luna’s might, but even this was not enough to truly stop the attack, Luna knew.
Steaming and partially melted bodies fell from the sky in droves, but they would reform soon enough. Already the storm collapsed back in on the open wound, filling it with white obstruction. Luna had bought her escape this night, nothing more.
Did Cotton Grass yet live? Luna damned well hoped so. She could not check, not here, where the atmosphere was too thin and too cold for the likes of regular ponykind. Her shell of magic would be sustained to the end of this night journey, and there she would discover Cotton Grass’ fate.
Their discovery by the Windigo had not been chance, Luna knew. Neither had it been the guard’s fault, such as he were beneath their notice.
No. They had been rooted out, and Luna had served as the Windigos’ guiding star. It was her. Hatred had found its way into her heart at long last, unstoppered and unchecked within her. This she beheld with grim understanding in the cold light of the stars and the rarified air.
Damn the excesses of this war. Damn the insane Sombra. Damn her cautious and calculating sister. Damn the death that took so many and gave so few back. Damn them all. The guard had better not die! Action in vain angered Luna like few things did.
The alicorn veered southwards, and keeping a grueling pace, aimed for the tiny specks of distant lights.
