Chapters "In the defense of my little ponies, to keep them safe...I would pay any price."
-- HRH, Princess Celestia
Luna awoke to a horrible cacophony. A thousand myriad voices screeching telepathically into her mind in unfamiliar languages. Bolting to her hooves, she found herself shrouded in darkness in the midst of a dusty, colorless wasteland.
"..."
Her mouth moved, but no sound came out for there was no air to speak. And yet the relentless screeching continued unabated. Countless conversations and songs, dry commentary and angry debates, all together at once being broadcast into her mind.
Her horn lit up.
"BE SILENT!" She mentally screamed into the magical aether. And yet if any of the mysterious speakers heard her, there was no response besides their continued screechings.
She'd heard voices in her head before, of course. But not like this. The Nightmare had always spoken to her, or occasionally with her. This was more like a thousand unicorns telepathically talking and singing at each other, somehow oblivious to the other conversations.
Conjuring an anti-magic barrier around herself at last brought silence. But still she could not breath. The sensation in her lungs was...unpleasant, but dealing with such a trivial discomfort could wait. Taking in her surroundings, she seemed to be in a vast desert composed of unfamiliar gray soil. A niggling thought began to take root in her mind, telling her that this was not Equestria. After being blasted by the Elements, she had expected to wake up an instant later after having been released from a thousand years as a statue. Perhaps this was Equestria, but after a thousand years without her guardianship, some sort of tragedy had befallen her home. Had her sister failed to raise the moon? Had tidal forces stripped their entire world of breathable air, rendering it a lifeless void while she lay helplessly trapped in stone? For that matter, where was the moon?
Reaching out with her magic, she could not find it.
Luna's face contorted into a snarl at the implication, yet a silent one, for still there was no air to carry the sound of her fury.
It was then that she looked upward to see the silhouette of a planet blocking out the star that lay behind it. And as she watched, it continued its casual journey through space, revealing the blue sheen of water on its surface as the light of the star behind it grew.
It was not her world. And this, that she was standing on, was that world's moon, not her own.
But it was at least some world, and behind it lay at least some star, though not her sister's. And from that planet came the cacophony of voices calling out into the magical aether in their unintelligible languages. There, at least, was life.
Lightly pushing off the ground with her hooves and majestically spreading her wings, she telekinetically grabbed onto the pale blue dot above her and pulled herself into the space between them, towards it.
"Since time immemorial, humanity has been fascinated with the beauty of space. And nowhere is that beauty more evident than during a lunar eclipse. Unlike its cousin, the solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse occurs when the earth passes between the sun and moon, with the earth casting a shadow to create the beautiful spectacle you're seeing now."
Twenty feet away, the cameraman snickered.
"But any moment now, the first light of the sun will peek out from behind the earth. Any moment, and...there it is. The first glimpse of a crescent moon, soon to be an entire moon once again returned to us by virtue of light from the sun having passed through a fantastic eight minute voyage through space. I don't know about you viewers at home, but this moment gets me every time."
"Reporting live from Los Angeles, this is Mark Durnham."
"And that's a wrap," the cameraman sighed. "Gotta say Mark, I don't know how you do it but somehow you manage to make these things sound not completely boring. How many times have you given this same exact 'oh yay an eclipse' report?"
"I don't know," the reporter shrugged, adjusting his earpiece. "Maybe twenty or thirty, over the years? They all kind of run together. It's just one of those things we have to do when it happens."
"I guess. Anyway, we're done here, right? Shall I pack it up?"
"Yeah, I think we're -" Frowning mid-sentence, Mark suddenly put his hand to his earpiece and listened for a moment, then frantically waved an index finger at the camera, which promptly resumed filming.
"Thanks for the tip. We'll take a look."
Mark turned to the sky, and the camera followed, settling on a glowing ball of white in the sky growing slowly larger. Shocked, but ever the professional, he resumed his reporting.
"As you know, a 'shooting star' is the informal name for a meteor, a ball of rock or ice, that's lit up by friction with the earth's atmosphere, generally leaving a bright trail across the sky until it burns up."
There was a moment of silence while Mark waited for the silent response from the studio.
"No, right," he continued. "And the fact that we don't see the trail probably mean that it's, uhh, headed directly towards us. We don't see it from our vantage point because the trail is on the far side where we can't see it."
Again, Mark waited for a response from his companion in the studio. But this time, instead of silence, there was the dull roar of a swiftly passing body burning through the air in the distance. On the camera, the ball of white fire had grown visibly larger.
"I would if we could, studio," Mark swallowed. "But I don't think we have time. Reporting live from Los Angeles, this has been Mark Durnham, signing off."
In the next second, the object smashed into the ground. Whether directly on top of the reporter, or half a mile away, no one could say. The ensuing blast converted slightly less than a gram of the ground into energy, disintegrating everything and everyone at ground zero, and converting the smooth pavement and dirt beneath it into a crater of glass. Further away, buildings collapsed while cars and trucks alike were thrown hundreds of feet through the air, leaving their drivers dead or dying when they came back to the ground.
At its height, the mushroom cloud could be seen for hundreds of miles.
A few seconds later, after air had rushed back in to fill the vacuum created by the initial shockwave, Luna inhaled a comforting breath of fresh air at last.
This world was strange.
Fortunately, on the surface, the cacophony of magical talking voices were somewhat more blocked by the curvature of the planet. There were still at least hundreds apparent, and so far as Luna could determine there was some sort of system in place to propagate their calls beyond the range most casters would find convenient. But the natives of this planet themselves appeared to be completely magically inept. Instead, they used artifice.
Having tracked down the loudest and closest collection of voices to their source, she'd found a large tower of metal, as if a giant unicorn horn or novice caster's wand were projecting itself out from the ground. It was an intriguing power crutch for a species that apparently lacked the biology to channel magic directly. But while that inability allowed the creatures to completely bask their bodies in countless broadcasts while only tuning in to one at a time via artifice, it was a terrible nuisance for one such as her who could naturally hear all of them at once.
She'd destroyed the tower, of course.
But many more remained, and they seemed entirely too useful to simply destroy them all. Walking through the debris around her, she prodded one of the creatures who'd been stationed at the tower, now laying motionless on the ground. Unfortunately there wasn't enough left of his mind to extract anything useful.
She would need to search elsewhere.
"Look mommy! Look! Look!"
"What is it dear?"
"That woman has a puppy! Can I pet the puppy? Huh? Huh? Can I?"
Clara looked at the woman her daughter, Belle, was pointing at, and stifled a laugh at the fully grown chihuahua hesitantly peeking out of her purse. Her husband, Steve, spoke first.
"That's not a puppy, bestest daughter of mine," he smiled.
"It's not?" the little girl quirked her head in confusion. "But he's so tiny! How can he not be a puppy?"
"Some dogs are just naturally small like that," Clara explained. "Do you remember how small Rover was when we first got him?"
"Uh huh!" Belle grinned enthusiastically. "But then he grew up and got all big! When are we going home? I want to play with him!"
Clara and Steve both smiled inwardly. Their daughter was a sweetheart, but easily distracted. They'd agreed to let her rescue one dog from the shelter, and sometimes reminding her of the dog they already had was the only way to keep her from wanting to take home every dog in the whole world.
"Look mommy! Look! Look!"
"What is it dear?"
"It's a pony! Can I pet the pony? Can I? Can I? Huh? Huh?"
Clara turned to see a black horse wearing what looked like some sort of purple metal halter walking directly towards them. Strangely, the horse seemed unaccompanied, and someone had dressed it up to look like a unicorn with wings. Before she could warn Belle not to startle the poor thing, she was lifted from the ground in a glowing field of purple light.
"What...what's happening!?!" she cried, reaching out for her husband, who was frantically holding his arms out as if to try to catch her, despite the fact that she didn't seem to be falling for some strange reason. Equally strange, he seemed completely unable to push through the glow to reach her.
"Mommy?" Belle sniffled hesitantly, not understanding what was happening. "Are you ok?"
The dark horse let loose with her entirely functional wings, and in a single bound covered the remaining distance, bringing herself nose-to-nose with the stricken woman while her husband balled up his fists and punched at the side of her head to try to protect the woman he loved.
Undeterred, the horse simply stared into the woman's eyes, ignoring the rapidly weakening screams for several seconds before releasing what remained of her mindless husk so that it could fall roughly to the ground.
At Luna's side, the creature she now understood to be a human by the name of 'Steve' screamed in fury, while the creature she now knew by the name of Belle bawled at her hooves in terror.
"No child," Luna spoke soothingly. "Your mother is not alright. But worry not. Soon, you'll both be with her again."
Luna casually strolled through the remains of the city, the sounds of machine gun fire all around her. Catching one of the many bullets before it struck, she brought it up to one eye and compared it to one of its sisters on the ground. The bullet she had kept from reaching her was long and cylindrical up to a tapered point. A tiny little bit of lead wrapped in copper, while the one that had struck her was...a bit mangled, really, resembling more of a little mushroom with the lead interior having been squished out of its copper coating by impact with her side.
"Target sighted. R.O.E four twenty five. Final attack heading south to north, front-runner's callsign Bulldog S-26."
The humans were calling in another airstrike. They still hadn't figured out that they didn't work, and they still hadn't figured out that she could hear what they called 'radio' transmissions as easily as she could hear their heartbeats. Not that it mattered.
"Roger, Bulldog. Wilco. Inbound ETA two minutes. Recommend you get out of there."
Luna nodded appreciatively at how very convenient the omni-directional nature of human communications were. Though not very suitable on the battlefield. No unicorn battle mage would be so foolish as to broadcast their intentions and location to every unicorn who might be listening.
Teleporting across several miles to the inside of a medium-sized green tent that had been hastily sent up in a field, she picked up a few hoof-fulls worth of dirt from the ground and dispersed it into a cloud of dust travelling at supersonic speeds in a sphere all around her. What remained of the radio operator before he hit the ground somewhat resembled a cross between a cloud of red mist and a seriously starved changeling.
The sound of screams and machine gun fire erupted from the soldiers who'd been fortunate enough to be standing far enough away from the broadcast station to avoid its operator's fate.
She ignored them in favor of picking up one of two nearby tanks with a telekinetic field and crushing both it and its occupants down into a conveniently shaped ball, then flinging it into the other tank with enough force to crush it beyond operability.
"Base, this is Eagle-3 awaiting strike clearance. Our boys in the clear yet?"
Luna glanced around at the remaining soldiers, half of them fleeing while the other half continued uselessly unloading their weapons at her. Inspired by the fact that they'd completely destroyed their own radio equipment with their gunfire, she lit up her horn to broadcast her own reply into the aether.
"Eagle-3, this is base. You're all clear. Strike is go. Repeat, strike is go."
Several miles away, a dozen soldiers were briefly surprised to hear the sound of a missile homing in on their location.
Briefly.
Princess Celestia wrapped up the amber unicorn in her wings and held her tightly.
"I'm so sorry!" Sunset bawled. "It was wrong what I said. I'll never to try leave again, I swear!"
"Shhh," the princess whispered. "Everything's alright. You're safe now."
"No I'm not! Neither are you! Nopony is safe! We have to do something!"
Celestia looked gently into her favorite student's eyes. "Sunset, we're always doing something. Even if that something is nothing. Silence can speak volumes, and sometimes the best choice is to choose to do nothing at all. Sometimes action, even with the best of intentions, can come with horrible and unexpected consequences."
Painful crunching noises erupted from Sunset Shimmer's neck as she struggled to lift her head far enough to gaze with her one remaining eye into her teacher's face. At least the healing magic had stopped most of the bleeding.
"And so you seriously want to do nothing ?" Sunset cried. "An entire world, destroyed ! An entire people, subjugated and reduced to nothing but mindless thralls for her whims! And it all our fault! It's your...your..."
"My fault?" Celestia smiled sadly. "Perhaps. But right now, you should rest."
Lighting up her horn, the princess redoubled the healing spell on her student, and delivered her unto a dreamless sleep.
"Guards, please take Sunset to her room in the east tower. See that she is not disturbed."
"At once, your majesty."
After the guards carried Sunset away, Celestia paused to take one last look at the mirror in front of her. "Please forgive me, dearest sister," she whispered.
Then she lifted a heavy hoof, and shattered it, forever.
