I fucking knew it.

Not even a day after leaving through the portal, there was another knock on my door. This time it was Starlight.

That thought alone had the dark fears poking their ugly heads out from the back alleys of my brain, but it wasn’t until she said three unholy words that I let them properly rampage through my mind:

“Sunset… i-it’s Twilight…”

I all but dragged her back through the portal, and we spilled out onto the castle floor. “Twilight!” I shouted before I was even on my hooves.

She lay in the middle of the chalk circle, her head resting on a pillow beside Luna’s. Her eyes were half open and her jaw slack as if she were in a trance.

I shook her by the shoulders. “Twilight, it’s me, Sunset. I’m here. Wake up.”

No response. I shook her harder.

“Sunset,” Starlight said. She put a hoof on my shoulder, but I pushed her away.

“Twilight!”

“Sunset!” Starlight whipped me around in her magic, and we had a moment. The pain in her eyes cut right through me. “She can’t hear you. She’s… she’s not in there.”

“What do you mean she’s not in there?” I half shouted. “She can’t have just up and dream dived. She couldn’t do that alone.”

I then noticed the little green surge crystal propped up in its wrought-iron tripod beside Twilight. Goddamn it. She just had to go and try and put everything on her shoulders. However the hell she managed it, I’d figure out later.

“She… told me she was just going to go over the spell real quick before bed,” Starlight said. Her thousand-yard stare passed through Twilight and beyond whatever dark thoughts held her brain hostage.

“She was afraid of anypony else getting hurt,” Star Swirl said. He stood just inside the double doors, a mournful look on his face. God only knew how long he’d been watching. “Goodness knows we all feel the same way. But here we are…”

I got to my hooves and stormed up to him. “Did you know she was gonna try this?”

“Sunset Shimmer,” he said in a grave voice, his eyes like thin slits. “Had I known her intentions, we would not be in this predicament. I would have volunteered myself before letting her even think of something so foolish.”

My heart tied itself in a knot, and I shook my head. She couldn’t have done something this stupid. Not without a good reason. And while saving others from hurt was a good reason, Twilight had more common sense than that. If only I could…

Actually, hold that thought.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I dove through the portal and hit the ground running. People jumped out of the way as I bolted down the street. I earned my fair share of car horns and angry shouts, but I didn’t care. I needed my necklace.

I shouldered open the front door of my apartment—I had luckily forgotten to lock it on the way out—snatched the necklace off my nightstand, and made it back through the portal before my mind could fully process that I’d made the trip. It wasn’t until I kneeled beside Twilight again that my shoulder started complaining about the whole doorbusting thing.

Necklace on, I pressed the Empathy gem to my heart, and I took Twilight’s hoof in mine. The gem’s magic yanked me through a series of visions: a green flash, darkness, a looming black face with piercing white eyes. For the briefest moment, I was Twilight, and every sensation and emotion coursed through me as if they were my own.

I felt the trail of a cold wind over my back, heard the sound of hoofsteps and pebbles scattering beyond sight. My skin crawled with the sensation of a thousand spider legs, and the air reeked of old meat.

I saw Nocturne. Like the flash of a phosphorus bulb, that crescent-moon smile and swirling void-mane burned into my vision and winked out with the knowledge that I stood alone with my back against a wall. And in that moment, I knew fear like I’d never known it before—the true realization that death came for me and I was powerless to stop it.

A pair of fangs sunk into the back of my neck. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t scream, as my tongue slackened and my legs went numb as if filling with ice water. I heard the dying scream of a mare—in the distance, in my head, I couldn’t tell which.

It was Twilight, twisted and gurgling. A death rattle I knew all too well from my dreams. Somewhere in the back of my mind, she whimpered.

I want to go home…

Something tugged me upward, like the strings of a marionette. It pulled my soul from the body I occupied, and I became weightless, formless. Any semblance of awareness left me, and my brain ground to a halt. Was I dreaming? I couldn’t tell anymore.

A pair of hooves grabbed me around the waist and yanked as if heaving my drowned body from a river. The next thing I knew, Starlight stared me in the face.

“Sunset!” she said. “Oh, thank Celestia you’re okay.”

I reached out to touch her, and yes she was real. I touched my face to check if I was real, and my cheeks were wet with tears.

The memories came rushing back, and an impressive migraine set up shop dead center behind my horn. I put my hoof to my forehead. Goddamn, the Empathy gem never did that.

“What… what happened?” I groaned.

“That’s what I was going to ask you,” Starlight said. “You had a seizure the moment you touched her. Your eyes rolled back and everything. We didn’t know what to do.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried thinking back despite the pain. All my thoughts seemed far away, hidden behind a thick curtain that I couldn’t toss open. Twilight’s scream was the only thing that cut through.

“It… it got her,” I said. There couldn’t be any other explanation. Twilight tried something stupid without telling the others, put everything on herself the way I knew she would.

“Sunset?” Starlight had poured me a glass of water and offered it to me. She said something else, but everything grew far away, and a bout of tinnitus settled in.

I vaguely felt myself accept the glass. My body was on autopilot and my brain in standby. I felt like I was sitting inside a pressure cooker set to high. My heart pounded faster and faster as the ringing morphed into Twilight’s scream clawing at the inside of my skull. I flattened my ears back and squeezed my eyes shut, but it couldn’t keep out the screams.

I was seconds from clawing it out of my ears when something sharp cut me on the cheek. I winced, and that’s when I felt a warm wetness running down the side of my face.

“Sunset!”

I remembered to breathe, and reality snapped back into place. A handful of glass shards floated in my magic, the sad remains of the water glass.

“Are you okay?” Starlight used a napkin from the table to wipe a line of blood from my cheek.

I kept staring at the glass shards in my aura. Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. It didn’t help.

A rage unlike any I’d known before boiled up inside me. It had me shaking, and I could only manage my breaths in little spurts.

I crushed the glass into sand and glared at Starlight. “Put me in.”

“What?”

“I said put me in. Put me in Luna’s goddamn dream.”

Starlight held up a hoof. “Sunset, I get that you’re angry, but it’s not smart to just dive back in and take a whack at the Nightmare out—”

“I’m not going to fight the Nightmare.”

Starlight stalled out midthought, her words piling up on the back of her tongue. There was a look in her eye that teetered between concern and confusion.

“What does this have to do with Luna?”

“Everything.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Yes it is, now put me in—”

“She didn’t have anything to do with this, Sunset.” She jabbed her hoof at Twilight. “Twilight did this to herself.”

“Look, just put me in the damn dream.”

“I… Not without Twilight,” she said.

“If Twilight did it by herself,” I snapped, “then so can you.”

“That, that has nothing to do with it.”

“Then what does it have to do with?”

“Sunset—” She caught herself before saying something she’d probably regret. She took a deep breath. “Sunset, Twilight knew what she was doing with whatever alterations to the spell she made, but I don’t. I have no idea what she’s changed or what using it without figuring that out will do—”

“Then use the old one.”

“Without figuring out what it’ll do to both you and to everything we’ve been working for.” An intensity flared up in her eyes as she talked over my cut-in, and winked out just as quickly. “And if the Nightmare really did get her, I’m afraid of what you’ll be walking into.”

She rubbed a hoof up and down her foreleg. “I… I don’t feel safe doing this without her. I really don’t.”

My chest tightened up, and I looked at everything but Starlight. I swallowed and shot my gaze to my hooves before finding the strength for another breath through my nose.

Fuck me. Everything just had to get worse. Why couldn’t luck just work in our favor for once?

“Sunset, I know you’re hurting and I know you’re upset, but—”

“I know, I…” I shrank in on myself. “I-I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”

Starlight threw on a tiny smile for me, and she put a hoof on my shoulder. “No, I get it. You’re worried. So am I. I have been for a long time.”

I could barely hold myself together. A flurry of emotions ran through me, from anger for what happened, to fear it might be too late, to shame for lashing out at Starlight. She may have shrugged it off, but her readiness to forgive didn’t confer permission to trample her emotions.

I got up and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Starlight asked.

“Bed,” I said. “I’m tired.”

“You’re still going to talk to her,” Starlight said. It wasn’t a question. “In your own dream.”

I didn’t say anything, not to her, or to Star Swirl as I brushed past him. I didn’t meet his gaze. I couldn’t. They didn’t deserve any more of my bullshit.

But they had nothing to do with this, nor did they have a say in it. This was between me and Luna. They might not agree, but they couldn’t stop me, either.

It didn’t matter how directly a role Luna played in Twilight hurting herself. This was still because of her. It all lead back to her and her master fucking plan to make everything sunshine and rainbows.

I shouldered open the door to Twilight’s guest bedroom. The curtains were drawn, keeping out most of the afternoon sun. I tossed a Dampening Spell over it to fade out what little sunlight bled through and throw myself into complete darkness. A flick of my horn, and the door shut and locked behind me.

I slipped under the covers, but instead of lying on my back to stare at the ceiling, I bunched up the sheets and pillows around me in a sort of makeshift bunker. It might have been stupid, but I didn’t feel comfortable otherwise at the moment. The last time I’d cast the spell I had floating around in my head, things… didn’t go as planned.

I remembered the spell easily enough, the one Nocturne taught me so long ago. Just think of her, she’d said, and how she made me feel, let it reach down into me and draw out the magic.

I thought of happiness and the warmth of a bright future filled with love and endless possibility. But no, that wasn’t right. Those were the feelings I felt then, not now.

Now, I felt anger. I felt helplessness and the desperate need for agency in a situation that afforded none. I felt resentment for the hundreds of lies she told me, and the thousands more I told myself because of her.

I let the last seven years flow through me, one hateful, burning memory at a time. It felt as natural as putting on a sweater, the raw emotions trim and form fitting. And when I opened my eyes to see Luna sitting before me, they roiled in my lungs, ready to billow out like dragonfire.

We were back in Twilight’s guest bedroom dream again—me on the bed, Luna between me and the door. It was dark, save for an invisible light above that cast the room in shades of blue.

Luna stared at me, alarmed. “Sunset, what—”

“I told you this would happen,” I said.

She fanned her wings. “You told me what?”

“I told you that if I left, Twilight would try getting in. Now she did, and she won’t wake up.”

“Twilight would not do something so foolish,” Luna said. She scowled at me, as if I were a monster for even considering that Twilight hadn’t just gone and basically offed herself.

“Yeah? Well guess what, she did. And now she’s a goddamn vegetable like you.”

A tear ran down my cheek, but I wiped it away. After all I had done, after everything I had promised myself, I still went and got Twilight hurt. I knew she’d try. I goddamn knew it, and there I went fucking everything up even more despite it all, thanks to this bitch.

“So rather than set straight to rescuing Twilight, your first thought is to accost me further?”

“Don’t you fucking lecture me,” I said.

She glared daggers at me. “I will lecture you, Sunset Shimmer. Whenever and wherever such lectures are necessary. And that includes this foolish stunt of yours. If Twilight needs saving, then Twilight needs saving. Bickering is not our best course of action, no matter how much you may feel otherwise.”

“Oh, no you don’t. That’s one thing we’re getting straight right the fuck now.”

I stepped off the bed toward her, holding my head high to be as close to her face as possible. I didn’t care that I didn’t even come up to her shoulders. I was ready to spit back whatever bullshit she spewed at me.

“You mean ‘my.’” I thumped myself in the chest. “My course of action. Only bad things have happened since you tried prying back into my life. I put up with it when I was the only one getting hurt, but now Twilight’s hurt or worse because of you, and it stops there. I’m done letting you break everything you touch.”

I jabbed her in the chest. “So listen good, because I’m not repeating myself. Don’t you ever show your face around me again. I’m doing this alone, the way I should have from the start. Whatever it takes, I’ll figure it out. And then when you wake up in the real world, you can crawl back into whatever hole you came from and rot.”

Luna fanned her wings. “Sunset, cease this foolishness. Nothing good will come of rushing headlong at the enemy. You cannot hope to defeat the Nightmare alone. You cannot so brazenly throw your life away.”

“I don’t care what you think I should or shouldn’t do.” I lit my horn with the first spell that came to mind, and I lashed out with a magic whip made of corded fire—a personal favorite of Professor Phoenix Flare, back in the day. It cracked in the gloom brighter than a phosphorus bulb. “You’re done running my life. You’re done making bullshit suggestions like you think you know better. And if you even think of showing up in my dreams again, I’ll show you exactly what I plan on doing to the Nightmare when I find it.”

She scowled at the whip, then me. “Threats of violence do not sit well with me, Sunset. I understand your frustrations, but this display of yours benefits nopony. The valuable time you spend here berating me would be better spent—”

I cracked my whip at her, slashing her across the chest. The open wound cauterized before the steam had a chance to dissipate.

“My time would be better spent if you were fucking dead!”

I heaved for breath, and it was then that I realized she hadn’t so much as lifted a hoof to stop me. Even a shitbag like her had ample opportunity to flinch. The whip’s firelight danced in her eyes, and my mind flashed back to Stone Wall and his charred body on the Royal Treasury floor.

I…

I screamed. I leapt on her in a blind rage, and I let loose everything I’d bottled up for the last seven years.

I beat her. In the face, the neck, the chest—any part of that useless bitch I could reach. I poured every ounce of anger into my hooves until the blood gushed from her nose and her teeth littered the floor.

And she took it. She crumpled beneath me, blow after blow, never once flinching or raising a hoof, and never once taking her eyes from mine.

She wanted this, just like last time. The difference now was that it didn’t matter what she wanted.

I didn’t care if this was some secret fetish or part of her martyr complex, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I wanted—I needed—her blood on my hooves and the meaty thump of her body beneath me and the liberation of letting it all go.

And then it was done. I came down from my high, and the exhaustion hit me all at once. Heaving for air, I stumbled backward from my work of art with sticky hooves.

Luna struggled to a sitting position. Her left wing was bent out of shape, and broken feathers littered the pool of blood dribbling from her mouth. Her face looked like hamburger meat.

“Are you finished, Sunset?”

She said it so simply, so… dismissively, with just enough of an edge to that chiding belittlement that I hated so goddamn much.

You know what? No. No I wasn’t. Not in the fucking slightest.

I cracked the whip. “Get up.”

She let that statement hang between us. If it weren’t for all the stupid shit she’s spewed these last few arguments, I would have found the look of confusion on her face unusual.

“Sunset, you cannot—”

“Shut the fuck up. You wanna be a fucking smartass and ask a stupid question like that? Then you get exactly what you ask for.”

I squared my shoulders and cracked the whip again. I was top of my class back in Mrs. Phoenix Flare’s Pyromancy classes, and the disbelief on Luna’s face had me itching to stretch my legs, as it were.

“I said get up.”

Still nothing. It was as if whatever ancient, decrepit hamster had the misfortune of spinning her wheel finally kicked the bucket. Fucking bitch.

I took a step forward, and for the first time since she wedged her sorry ass back into my life she paid me due respect in the form of an alarmed step backward. Her one good eye tracked from me, to the whip, and back to me. Was this really what it took to finally make her listen? Was she really that much of a fucking animal?

Magic loud, fire bad? Fucking pathetic. I took another step forward, and she another back.

Without a word, she lit her horn, and thin slits ran across her swollen brow. They bled freely, and the swelling subsided to the point I could make out the color of her right eye again.

With another flick of her horn, she gathered her teeth. One by one, she reseated them in her mouth with a quiet schlick. She ran her tongue across them behind pursed lips, and with a deep breath, she stood. She was not smiling.

“Sunset, this is not a game.”

“Who said we were playing?” A third step, but this time she didn’t match mine. “You never gave me a choice. Don’t act like you get one now.”

Her face hardened a hair. “I will not say it again, Sunset. This is—”

“Then don’t.” And I leapt.

I lashed out with my whip and comboed it by throwing a gout of fire around like a left hook.

She danced backward just as my fireball swung beneath her jaw and my whip cracked inches from her left ear. She used her wings to skirt around me before I cornered her between the dresser and vanity.

“Fucking fight me,” I yelled, cutting the line between her and the bed. But every time I got near, she flitted this way or that, ducking and dodging whatever I threw at her. Avoid and evade, just like the Nightmare. Just like the word. Just like every little responsibility she claimed to be so profoundly in charge of.

“Sunset, cease this pointless charade.” She leapt over the bed now, and I chased her around the foot of it.

“Nothing about beating some fucking sense into you is pointless.”

“You cannot allow your anger to let you lose sight of—”

Her shitty little pontification cost her the split second she needed, and a quick flick of my whip caught her just above the brow.

This time, something in her eyes changed, a sense of focus or revelation or whatever the fuck existed inside that skull of hers finally triggered some primal instinct other than run like a coward.

Was that what it took? A knick of the brow? A little blood to know I actually meant business? I ribbon-twirled my whip back to let it coil beside me. The area rug began to smolder outward from where it lay.

“I think I’ve got my sights set pretty straight, actually.” I lowered my chin to my chest. “How about you? You still feel high and mighty enough to keep talking down to me?”

I went in for another crack with the whip, but a flicker of blue magic caught it like wire wrapped around a pole, the firelight highlighting the blues of Luna's mane and casting a shadow up across her face. The crease in her brow said more than words ever could.

Finally. Let’s go, bitch.

Not waiting for an invitation, I yanked my whip free of her magic and redoubled the fire at my horn. I brought it to bear in an executioner's downstroke that I was rather proud of, but she once again backstepped to leave me just shy. The flames splashed across the carpet to set the room aflame.

One, two quick steps, and out went those damned wings of hers in a flurry of feathers. She clapped them together to blast me in the face with a gale-force wind. I could barely keep my footing let alone keep my eyes open.

I knew something was coming. It didn’t take a genius to know a distraction like that. I threw up a shield to block whatever she might have the balls to throw at me, but something caught me in the small of the back, flattening me to the ground.

I twisted over and threw my hooves up to shield myself while I focused on a Fireball Spell. Whatever she had planned for me, she was too slow. I caught her square in the chest, grinning ear to ear.

Easy fucking peasy. Stupid bitch needed to learn some respe—

I stopped smiling when I realized what actually happened.

The fireball never actually hit Luna. The instant it detonated, a tiny glimmer of blue seemed to swallow it whole and absorb it into her horn. When she leapt backward, she spread her wings wide, and every individual feather became wreathed in flame.

Oh, fuck.

She clapped her wings together and blasted my own inferno back at me on the coattails of another gale-force wind, but without my footing, I crashed backward through the bedroom door and smack into the far wall. For a moment, I saw stars.

Luna stepped through the burning doorway. She shouldered aside what splinters remained of the door, which fell from its hinges to join the smoldering debris.

I shook my head. Got lucky at the last second with a quick Shield Spell. That would have probably killed me otherwise—in real life, at least.

I spit the blood out of my mouth and grinned. If she wanted to be like that, good. I could play dirty, too.

I stumbled to my hooves, resummoned my fire whip, and charged. I wound it back, but before she could yank it from my grasp, I let it fade and teleported behind her.

The moment I flickered back onto this plane, she was already facing me, a pony-sized gavel of pure white energy summoned over her head. She knew I’d try and one-up her, and it made the next fraction of a second all the sweeter.

Just as the gavel came crashing down, I teleported again, right beside her and caught her square in the gut with a fireball the size of my head. I felt it sink in, and the grunt that eked out of her was the most gratifying sound I’d ever heard in my life. I savored it a bit too much for my own good, though.

Luna swept her wings upward to keep her hooves planted, and with a quick pivot of her hind legs, she caught my horn with hers and threw me off balance. Like a rhythm stick sliding down another’s length, the spirals of our horns krit-tit-it-it’d until she caught me between the eyes with her skull and my sight went blotchy. Something hit me in the side, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground.

A shadow crawled across my body. Luna towered over me, her silhouette ablaze from the fires consuming the pennants lining the hallway. Her eyes flashed blue in the light of another spell at her horntip, and I had only a second to throw up a shield.

Our magics collided, red against blue, but where I had expected that all-too-familiar resistance, her magic instead enveloped mine. The sound of crackling ice surrounded me as jagged crystals spidered down around my shield, until I lay in a darkness staved off only by the dim red glow of my horn.

A thousand little reflections of myself stared back from the facets in whatever this was, each with a frazzled mane and a wild look in her eye. That bitch encased me in a little crystal dome.

A second passed in silence. Then two. Then three.

I jumped to my hooves, looking left, then right. Behind? Underneath? What was she doing? Where the hell was she going to attack from?

The hair stood up on the nape of my neck, and a tingling sensation ran down my spine—a chill that drew all the moisture out of the air. It condensed against the crystal dome and ran down the walls in little trickles.

I couldn’t control my breathing. I hadn’t seen magic like this before, and I didn’t like enclosed spaces—even sleeping with my bedsheets over my head made me uncomfortable. But I knew what she wanted.

She wanted me to teleport out, blindly throw myself into whatever trap she had waiting for me. She thought she could outsmart me with some shitty parlor trick like this?

Yeah, no. That wasn’t happening.

I dropped my shield so that I could focus another spell to my horntip. I blasted the wall with a gout of fire, sending a trail of molten crystal oozing to the floor. No dice. I spun around.

I gritted my teeth and blasted it again and again. Globs of white-orange crystal pooled around my hooves, but I’d still hardly made a dent. I fell back on my haunches, panting for air.

I shook my head. She wouldn’t get to me. Whatever the hell mind game this was supposed to be, she would not get to me.

Before I had a chance to bust my way out, a wave of blue light rippled down the length of the dome, and it shattered into a thousand little shards. They fell less than an inch before that same blue light suspended them in midair, snapping their pointed ends inward. Shit.

I teleported out just as the shards made a pincushion of the floor, and before I even got my bearings, something cracked me upside the head. I crumpled to my stomach.

No time for pain! Get up!

Maybe something a little more certain than just getting up. I teleported across the room where I knew I’d have space between us.

Luna stood about twenty feet away, beside a broken hutch and scattered silverware. Where she stepped, she left hoofprints of blue fire that ringed outward, consuming the velvet runway.

If she was all about her trickery and mind games, maybe turning things on its head would trip her up. She was expecting me to pull another ace out of my sleeve. Maybe a good old-fashioned beatdown was just was the doctor ordered, and I was more than happy to obli—

Something hard and heavy caught me in the ribs, and the momentum sent me sliding sideways a good five feet. It took all my focus just to stay on my hooves.

Fuck. When did she teleport beside me?

I squared up with her and deflected a bolt of magic. Out came that magic gavel again, and I leapt backward just before it turned the floor into a pony-sized crater, kicking up a cloud of powdered crystal and dust thick enough to obscure sight.

The moment my hooves hit the ground, I charged up the biggest fireball I could and waited. There was no doubt in my mind that she’d come at me—she surely thought I’d be off balance after that, and I was ready to give her the beating of a lifetime for being that stupid.

Sure enough, she charged through the cloud of dust, and I was ready. I let it fly, and the light burned intensely enough to whitewash the entire hallway.

I had another fireball at my horntip for a follow-up, but it wasn’t necessary. What little gap she had to dodge closed shut, but she seemed unfazed. Instead of fear or surprise, she simply lowered her shoulder and… let it hit?

I stopped short, and the momentary lapse in thought was a mistake. I saw the backhand swing through the curling flames, and she caught me just below the chin. My teeth clacked together, the impact jolting through me like lightning.

I was off my hooves. I didn’t know which way was up. Panic mode kicked in, and I threw fireball after fireball into a sudden, unnatural darkness. I couldn’t see a foot in front of me.

What felt like a sledgehammer caught me from underneath, lifting me off my hooves. My stomach caved in, and breathing became a distant memory. I reeled backward. My magic wouldn’t work right. Everything hurt.

I wheezed for air and swung a hoof to my left. She clocked me in the face from the right. I spit out a tooth.

I stumbled backward and wiped a streak of blood from my lip. Fuck this.

I charged up a Flamethrower Spell and swept it in a wide arc across the room. I couldn’t miss if I hit everything.

The room went up like a grease fire, and the deep red of the dancing flames pierced even this magical darkness.

I caught a glimpse of blue light parting the flames to my left. Gotcha, bitch. I banished the darkness with a Clarity Spell and charged. This ended here.

I went high, she went low. We met in the middle in a clash of fireworks. The explosion launched me backwards, and I rolled into a fighting stance.

She was already on me, blow after reeling blow, cycling through more spells than I could count—fire, ice, crystal, lightning. I could barely keep up, let alone stay on my hooves.

She magicked a glowing speartip just under my chin, but I somehow caught it before she had a chance to run me through.

I couldn’t breathe. I could barely see. The dust had gotten in my eyes, and my heart was ready to rocket out of my chest, but I was not going down.

Every day for the last seven years, I promised myself I’d never let someone put me in a corner again. I’d be damned if I let her do it a second time.

I wrenched the spear from her grasp and turned it on her, but she cut off the spell before I could drive it home. It dispersed into a thousand little motes of silver light that filtered through my magic like wet sand through my fingers. A few melted against my coat, cold as snow.

I went for another flamethrower to catch her off guard, but I was too slow. She met me halfway with what looked like condensed moonlight, and we stood there, gridlocked.

I pushed with all my might, the flare at my horntip bright as the sun. The rubble at our hooves jittered in the latent energy, and I gritted my teeth to double down on my spell.

She pushed me backward without even breaking a sweat.

I felt the center mass of her magic shift low and force upward on mine, deflecting our magics into the far wall to blast a hole into it the size of Canterlot’s front gate.

Before I could catch my balance, she twisted her hip and kicked out with her hind leg, catching me in the shin. I felt the snap of bone, and I caught the scream in my throat before it could escape.

She beat her wings to blind me with a kick-up of dust, and when I shielded my eyes, something heavy crushed my nose in like a pop can.

I had never felt pain like that before—that blinding, tear-wrenching fire and the gripping fear that came with it. I stumbled backward into the corner, shielding my face from a second blow. I heard the wet schlick of meat as a searing pain tore across the length of my shoulder, and I crumpled to my haunches.

Luna towered over me, head held high, blood swirling through the air from the tip of her horn like a dancer’s ribbon. The intensity in her eyes was something I’d never forget.

But just before she dealt the final blow, that baleful intensity sparked with… recognition?

She caught a gasp in her throat, and that split second was all I needed to grab a rock from the nearby rubble and club her across the face. The weight of the blow staggered her sideways, and I followed through with another square to the jaw that sent her tumbling backward into an ungraceful heap.

I let the rock fall from my magic and collapsed forward onto my face, coughing and hacking up a disgusting mixture of dust and phlegm and blood. My eyes burned from the dust and the heat of the flames around us, but I could just make out the blurry image of Luna maybe five feet ahead of me. She wasn’t moving, save the barest rise and fall of her chest.

I struggled to my hooves. My shoulder burned like a motherfucker, along a deep gash that bled freely—and my broken foreleg wouldn't accept any weight—but nothing in this world or the next could stop me from hobbling over to see that self-righteous bitch where she belonged.

Even as the hallways still burned down around us, I paused to lord over her, the way she had done to me so many times before. The flames threw frantic shadows across her body, gleamed in the blood dribbling from her muzzle, dampened the lazy twinkle of her mane.

Still heaving for air, I summoned up my own magic gavel. That’d be fitting enough. Put her down with the very symbol of justice she wielded so willy-nilly, so… flagrantly. I drew it back for an executioner’s stroke.

Bring it down. Just pancake her fucking skull into the floor. Paint the room with the justice she wanted so badly and make it all go away. I raised the gavel higher, but my shoulders started shaking, and I felt the tears well up in my eyes.

“Fuck,” I said and dismissed the gavel. Gritting my teeth, I snagged her by the neck with my magic, and held her up to me.

Her head lolled to the side. Every shred of anger I carried with me for the last seven years burned hotter at the sight of the peaceful emptiness on her face.

Just wring her fucking neck. A simple twist and all was right with the world. Like a baby bird in the palm of my hand, all I had to do was squeeze. So I did.

I wound my magic tighter and watched as her skin indented and cartilage bent. Soft, vulnerable. Just like I was.

And I… I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Fuck!”

Shameful tears rolled down my cheeks, but I dragged her away from the flames, grabbed the splintered remains of a nearby hutch, and got a fire going.

Author's Note

That's gonna leave a mark. Onward and Upward, Sunset. You'll get there eventually.