Luna's Vigil

The grass underneath Luna was still wet with morning dew, which now slicked the alicorn’s dark blue coat and cooled her. The sun above was almost too warm, she could swear it was burning a hole in her back with it’s intense glare. She looked down from the knoll she was perched on down to the forest below, the tapestry of gently swaying green and brown limbs proving as picturesque a visage as one could imagine. Luna knew what was coming, but it was taking longer this time around than usual. Rare that her friend was ever late, considering her distinct lack of patience. A few more minutes passed as she lay in the cool grass with the warm sun on her back before she tipped her horn to the ground, and tore a patch of the earth away, replaced with a patch of the midnight sky, with the moon shining in the distance. She took a moment to look at it. Considering the moon and night were her domain, she could judge the time of night by a glance, and often did so. She had enough time to wait. She touched the patch of black star covered sky with her horn, and it melted back into the green earth around it.

There was a sound like a faint cannon shot, and Luna’s head moved with an acute precision to where it had come from. She saw overneath the canopy of green a black bolt of lightning making straight for the knoll, still maybe half a mile away. Behind the speeding streak of moving energy came a rainbow glimmer, moving perhaps even faster in pursuit. As the rainbow gained, the black lightning began to swerve about from side to side, rising and lowering in altitude and throwing back tree limbs at the rainbow lightning. It dodged them all deftly, and maintained a mostly straight course, continuing to grow ever closer to the black bolt. The sound of their flying was immense and thunderous roaring, and Luna could feel the wind from the force of their flight, along with the sensation of the grass around her being pushed against her chest by the gust produced by the pair. Luna smiled. She did so love the spectacle, it’s why she made time to visit her friend every night. One must find time for merriment, she thought, for their sanity to hold firm.

The dueling energy streaks were no longer separated by more than a few meters, and having crossed the majority of the forest, the chase seemed soon to be at an end. As the rainbow streak moved from its place behind the black bolt, in an attempt to pull to its side, it was it was hit by one of the flung limbs. The light ceased, and a blue figure could be seen falling out of the sky into the trees below. The black bolt ceased as well in a similarly sudden manner, revealing a black alicorn, with patches of sky shining out of its body, strange chitinous wings, and wild long blue hair. It hovered in plain view for a second, lowering slowly to where the blue figure had fallen. There was silence and stillness for a moment, and Luna felt anticipation building in her chest. This was an interesting turn of events, certainly not one she’d seen before yet, and she was nearly an expert on her friend’s recurring escapades. Suddenly the rainbow lightning bolt shot upward, quicker than one could blink, seizing the horrid black thing in its grasp and shooting upward. The light arched at a 90 degree angle, suddenly coming straight for the knoll.

Luna barely had time to jump from where she was as the lightning struck into the knoll, sending dirt all around in an explosive burst of force, and nearly splattering Luna head to hoof in dirt. The princess’s horn lit light blue and she became as transparent and incorporeal as a spector, the chunks of her perch moving through her and into the distance. Below her in the crater stood a familiar cyan pegasi, and the source of the rainbow lightning bolt, her back turned to Luna. She was covered in dirt, and her jagged rainbow mane looked like a symmetrical pile of broken glass flowing off her head and down to her neck, with a waterfall of shards making up her tail. Beneath her lie a strange black insectoid looking equine, covered in terrible holes, with fearful and indignant looking blue green eyes glaring straight at her captor.

It tried to struggle and free itself but the cyan mare kept her front hooves pressed into the hideous things chest, rendering it’s flailing and squirming as useless as a fish flopping about gasping for water in a fisherponies boat. From out of nowhere came Luna’s sister Celestia, appearing behind the cyan mare as if she had been there the whole time. Her soft regal voice rang out over the sound of shifting earth and grunting that came from the horrible bug thing,”You’ve done well Rainbow Dash. Chrysalis won’t be able to threaten Equestria ever again.” The rainbow mare turned beaming to the alicorn,”Ya, I’m pretty awesome.” the alicorn chuckled at the boastful remark,”Truer words have rarely been spoken. Come, I’ve a reward for you.” Rainbow and she walked from the crater to the knoll and to it’s top, and before them were four pegasi of various colors, garbed in the tight fitting blue flight suits of Equestria’s greatest athletes, with the streaking yellow lightning wrapping around their agile forms. A yellow coated mare with spike like hair stepped forth, not speaking, but extending a hoof to the cyan mare, whose excitement could be seen plastered on her face. She took the hoof, and suddenly, the entire world seemed to lose its shape.

Luna sighed. Though Rainbow’s dreams were always very vivid, they weren’t the longest, or most stable, of dreams. She hovered in place for a moment more, watching the various figments of Rainbow’s imagination fade into the growing blackness that was encroaching on the knoll, until only a smiling Rainbow Dash was left. Luna felt something strange in that moment, an odd fluttering in her chest, like her heart was being pressed against the lattice of her rib cage, throbbing arythmically against the hollow bones. She felt a sudden urge to say something, anything, to the pegasi. Yet she found her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth, her jaw clenched and functionless. Her mind a muddled swamp of half formed exclamations rendered pointless when the green grass and the mare that stood on it had been consumed by the swirling abyss all around Luna. The only thing left she perceived was a strange, foreign feeling loneliness, of a sort she couldn’t quite place. It was like a hollow empty hole made apparent only just than. Luna did her best to shake the uncomfortable thoughts and unplaceable emotions from her mind, knowing that her night was still young. She touched her horn to the abyss, and from it sprouted another patch of midnight, somehow ever so slightly less black than the void around her, and she slipped inward.