Luna cursed wildly as she fanned her armored wings out. Moonlight and starlight caught under the massive span, glittering off the arcane metals of her wargear. Her hands clenched around Midwife, her mighty lucerne hammer. She hadn't had cause to bring Midwife to the field of battle since before her banishment, and Midwife had scorned Nightmare Moon's hands.

Today, the same metal belonging to the asteroid that had birthed her beloved Moon from Epona's crust glowed furiously in her hands as Luna shattered through the dimensional walls. She gave Luna the strength and ferocity of that long dead cosmic traveller; indeed, Midwife had come to Luna's hands in the very moment that her fool stallion had collapsed the mountain on himself and the Marrowrot Gate.

Youth had shed from Shadow Hopper as he'd begged her to leave, to let him hold the narrow gap while she went to marshal their voices. "This is what you trained me for. This is my reason."

Words! she raged in the place between places, the nonbeing of the interdimensional gulf. Only Rainbow Dash could catch up with her now, and the Princess of Storms was assembling their fastest, mightiest special forces. Luna had barely gotten past the exclusion zone and sent her preliminary warnings when Midwife had come to her. Come to her screaming warnings just as a mountain formed from the dead hulk of an Inconnu Juggernaut shattered and crumbled.

The Juggernauts had been among the mightiest weapons that had turned upon the very strata of reality, leaving Epona's star system broken and wild, a lonely traveller shorn from its galaxy in the void. Luna didn't know what could slay one; this one's hulk had survived the final cataclysm and the coming of the Herd Eternal. And the wretched colt just called it down on his head the moment I was out of range! her mind screamed.

In the cold calculus of capability, his logic had been ruthlessly accurate. "You're the important one. Not me. You're the Warmistress. I'm the thug. There will be other stallions for the herd some day. There's only one warmare like you. Our foals grow beneath your heart." They'd been ambushed. Poisoned by the Juggernaut's dying core. She'd needed Fluttershy to survive, herself. The foals had been safe enough.

Anger flared again as she "neared" the Entropic Defile. Even as her heart and Midwife hunted for her fiancee, her mind ranted at him, You need her aid as well! But whatever strange spheres blessed him, he'd been granted a strength and fortitude that might now rival or surpass Celly's. He could stand longer. There had been Greater Dholes, replete with their infectious slime and world-killing fate, beyond the gate, which yawned further still open with the moment. Greater Dholes, and worse things of the Defile.

She punched through. If there was one blessing in all this mess, it had been that her foalish stallion had knocked himself through into a parasite dimension inhabited by only the maddest, least comprehensible metanatural beings. Even Discord, before his chrysalis, wouldn't have had truck with them, and they were quite unprotected by the treaties between the divinities that knelt before the Light and the spurned vileness of the Twisted Dark.

A fierce warrior's snarl erupted from her throat as she thought, Not that such would keep me from any of my herd, and blast the consequences! Blast you too, foolish stallion, only let you not be damned or doomed. Luna might have a low opinion of most males… but this one was hers.

It didn't take long. She was proud of Hopper; unbound by the need to protect his world, he had removed much of the constraints on his might and was tearing through the world-devouring worms and foul, nameless qlippothic lords as though they were little more than pressed fibers. The Defile was home to the Greater Dholes; its "earth" was of the fabric of metareality and had lasted longer than the life-age of the current cosmos.

He was leaving vast rents and craters in it, shattering the landscape with the battered and broken corpses of unimaginably vast foulnesses that had crept through the cracks of armageddon after apocalypse after unmaking of eternities.

If Luna hadn't been so worried, she honestly would have found it to be one of the most fervently arousing sights she'd seen since the last time her sister sat on her face.

Her wings flared again, and she raised Midwife high, her divinely titanic muscles rippling with unrelenting power. She did have cause to worry. He was leaving a trail of destruction, it was true. One that was getting smaller as he moved, and not because the number of swarming parasite ur-divinities and demiurges was thinning. Even the 'sky' was growing thick with unreal horrors best thought of as the nightmares of locust demons; he couldn't head up, and didn't have time to open a gate, even if his inexperienced magic would let him shift out-plane at all.

But hers would. And while she might not be forged from the unimaginable might of the Void King and the Triune Queen, she was Luna Selene Solutae. The Unbound Moon; Warmistress of Equestria, and the deadliest combatant on Epona still. Strength, she had in sinews more than mighty enough, and speed and skill as well. She had them all, the divine, arcane, and occult magic of a millennia-old alicorn, and Midwife had returned to her.

She charged the field, and the cleansing silver glow of her rage and Midwife's were as one. Had her stallion left crumbling craters and gulfs? Selene Solutae took the field at the height of her powers for the first time in over a thousand years, and with it, she obliterated them all with one unblinking goal; to retrieve and save her foalish dear one.

There were foul things coming that might have stood against the Warmistress, but they slept deep and encysted by the corruption of their own dreams, waking but slowly. Fueled by her rage and protective love, there was nothing that the mere world-killers could do against her but disintegrate, their spiritual natures rent to the undying cores and stripped of all divinity, mad or otherwise, to re-enter the cycle of being. A fitting fate for those who had threatened Luna's herd, her people, and her fiancé.

Luna's triumph was marred by her prize. Were it not for the discipline sunk into her very bones, she might have turned that rage upon the entire plane and thus been consumed. Her stallion, youthful, not even through his adulthood second puberty, mere months past eighteen, was rent and torn. Poisons to corrode stars foamed in open, gaping wounds; otherwise unbreakable bones were fractured, sticking through the skin. She howled, and swept him up into the argent reality of the only sanctuary she could think of: her soul.

Midwife comforted her as she risked the corruption again. This time, Midwife could shield her, and did, venting its cosmic energies against the foulness which tried to follow him into her metanatural embrace. With Hopper safely locked in her own dreams, she once more took wing to shatter her way out of the hellish chaos of the Entropic Defile.

Author's Note

So... a few months ago, I timeskipped a bit to write the first of these to deal with some internal angst over pain. Right now, editing on my current stuff is going slow, so I'm publishing these with only self-editing. My apologies if this gets a bit rough as a result.

In terms of timing on Twilight's list in her letter to Hopper, Hopper has met with Fluttershy, Dash, Rarity, and Luna's approval and met their challenges. Unlike his current 9' and maybe a few inches, he's actually 10'6" and growing.

About the only spoilers for Hunting Season will be that Hopper doesn't fuck up and the ladies will continue shaping him to be the stallion they want him to be, and if those are spoilers, I'm sorry. Updates are going to be extremely intermittent; I only have three other chapters complete, one mostly complete, and one with thematic fragments. I'm still focusing on the main storylines; this is just here to deal with fibro's ongoing attempts to smack the shit out of my life.