Friendship is Manic

“So... What exactly is going on?” Fluttershy asked, breaking the latest of more awkward, drawn-out silences than Twilight was willing to count. It was the first time Twilight had heard Fluttershy speak since Pinkie Pie’s monstrous cake-thing, and also the first time Fluttershy had made direct eye-contact with Twilight himself. For such a meek-looking stallion, his eyes were rather intense.

“I didn’t lie to you all,” Twilight said quickly, seeing the suspicious looks in the other stallions’ faces approaching the thin line of up and walking out on his mission. “I just... Gave you each different versions of the truth.”

“Is it or is it not a treasure hunt?” Rainbow Dash asked, his thin arms crossed in front of his plain hoodie and his eyes narrow, presenting the most intimidating look Twilight could have imagined on a pony of so small. “If it is, I still want in, but the big evil-looking moon covering the sun seems more important at the moment. Treasure can wait till after whatever that is.”

“I must admit, Prince Twilight, that though I have ultimate faith in you, I am more than a tad confused myself,” Rarity added. “Did Princess Celestia really send you on a mission to save Equestria, and if so, how does whatever’s in the Everfree Forest avert whatever is going on with the moon? Furthermore, what is going on with the moon, anyway?”

Twilight couldn’t help but glance up at the mention of the creeping dark disc in the sky. In the short time it had taken Twilight to convince his prospective companions to walk from the Ponyville plaza to the edge of the Everfree Forest, the moon had covered nearly half of the sun. Most ponies they’d passed on the way here had remained outside, clearly uneasy as they watched the sun’s slow obscuration, but not really sure what to do about it. Beyond standing around and speaking to each other in hushed, worried whispers, what could they have done?

“Ah’m mighty interested in hearin’ that part, mahself,” Applejack added, his bulky crossed arms against his bulkier chest doing a fair bit more to look intimidating than Rainbow, despite the latter’s best efforts. Applejack had come looking for Twilight shortly after the moon began overtaking the sun, looking far more suspicious than apologetic that he had turned out to be wrong about Twilight’s proposition. Given the circumstances, Twilight hated to admit that he couldn’t really blame him.

“I told you the truth right from the start,” Twilight said, glancing at Applejack. “But you didn’t believe me. That’s why I had to tell everypony else almost-but-not-quite the truth. Do you believe me now?”

“Not exactly,” Applejack huffed. “But somethin’ here is more rotten than a cow patch in August.”

“First of all... Ugh...” Twilight said with a shudder. “I really wish you hadn’t put that image in my head. Second, well, let me just tell you everything as best as I know, because I really don’t know the whole story. I just know that the moon breaking astronomical protocol up there is really, really bad news for Equestria, what’s waiting in the Everfree Forest is the only thing that can stop what’s coming, and we don’t have a lot of time to find it. Come help me find it, and I’ll tell you on the way... Please?”

Twilight flashed his most earnest, heroic smile across the wall of unimpressed faces, earning only a few confused blinks and the occasional awkward cough in response.

“Okay, okay, fine,” Twilight sighed in defeat. “Once upon a time--”

“I always hated that cliche,” chuckled a... Something. Not quite a voice. Not quite present. Felt, but more as a shudder than a sound.

“What the hay was that?!” Applejack gasped, his hand darting to what Twilight saw really was a firearm holster at his hip, even if he only drew a handful of yet more business cards. “Ah’m warnin’ ya, spooky voice, Ah gotta sales pitch longer than a country mile, and Ah ain’t afraid ta use it!”

“...Cards on the table,” Rarity whispered to Twilight. “I had hoped your ‘epic quest’ involved overseeing preparations for the Summer Sun Celebration, not an actual threat. Would it be dishonorable if I were to politely retract my offer of undying knighthood?”

“I never accepted it in the first place,” Twilight hissed back. “But yes.”

Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy said nothing, but stood back-to-back, their wings at the ready as they scanned the unnatural dusk of what should have been midday. Twilight followed their gaze and noted with another shiver that the elongated shadows of the untimely gloom didn’t always quite match the shapes of what cast them.

“Amatuers,” Pinkie chuckled. “What, none of you ever cracked wise with a child of the void?”

“I see the pink one is here,” whispered the eerie susurration of sounds with what Twilight could have sworn was a grumble. “How wonderful.”

“You know her?” Twilight asked.

“Of course not,” Pinkie and the voice both said at once. “But word gets around.”

“What is it?” Rainbow Dash asked. “I’m starting to see your point, Twilight, but I’d really like a little more answer than ‘spooky shadow voice is acting vaguely threatening towards us,’ as super creepy as that is.”

“What is it?” the voice whispered in a mocking imitation of Rainbow’s scratchy cantor. “I assure you, dearest hatchling of the most naive morning, I am not an ‘it.’ I am what swallows the concept of ‘it’ into myself.”

The group tensed as the incongruous shadows all around them lengthened further, darkened, deepened, distorted. Twilight knew, although he did not know how, that the trees of the forest’s edge no longer cast these shadows. Perhaps they never had. They merely borrowed their darkness from something much, much older, greater, colder.

“I am the night,” the voice whispered, the air chill, the group’s tense breath frosting with each worried huff, their own shadows twisting. “I am darkness. I am the all-consuming maw of your deepest, most primeval fears, crawling up from the primordial abyss of the deepness of time. Before your consciousness crawled its way out of the muck of pre-creation, before light dared oppose the dark with its foolhardy falsehoods, I was there. I was waiting. I will still be waiting long after I have snuffed out the spark of your existence, long after I have forgotten such trifles as ‘love’ and ‘friendship’ and ‘life.’ I am infinite, you foolish children of light, child of lies. I am eternal. I am--”

“Nightmare Moon,” Twilight blurted.

“Goddesses dammit!” shouted the voice. “Way to steal my thunder, you eggheaded runt! I had this whole speech building up, and you had to ruin it right at the end! Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to deliver that line to Celly’s rotten champions?!”

“...A thousand years?” Twilight ventured, shoulders hunched.

“That was rhetorical!” the voice, Nightmare Moon, raged. “You’ll pay for this! You’ll pay for everything!”

All at once, the twisting shadows all around faded back to their ordinary shades and resumed their proper silhouettes, the sound of a muted grumble fading into the distance.

“...What just happened?” Fluttershy gasped, sounding on the verge of tears.

“Twilight here just ruined a perfectly good punchline to a millennium-long buildup,” Pinkie Pie said. “Hecklers truly are a disgrace to the standup villain community.”

“Whose side are you on?!” Twilight snapped. “Is she where you get all your creepy baking mumbo-jumbo?”

“From her?” Pinkie snorted. “Are you kidding me? I’d never stoop to such base, lowbrow material. The whole ‘dark lord’ schtick is so old-hat. No, we just have a similar supplier.”

Twilight eyed Pinkie strangely for a moment before shaking his head and throwing up his arms in defeat.

“Wait just a durn tootin’ minute,” Applejack said. “That was Nightmare Moon? The boogie-mare that foals make their parents check under the bed for? The mascot of non-locally grown big-wig candy companies exploiting Nightmare Night for personal profit, when small town businesses are clearly the better--”

“This is not the time for one of your lectures on rural economics, Applejack,” Rarity interrupted. “Prince Twilight, just what is going on? What can you tell us?”

“One of my favorite subjects has always been ancient Equestrian magic,” Twilight explained. “Over the years, I kept finding oddly isolated references to an old tale about one of the defining battles between light and dark magic. The eternal cycle of dark and light is a theme in practically every old myth, even from pre-Equestrian times. There’s the Pony of Shadows, Lord Tirek, Grogar; the list is endless. But the tale of the Mare in the Moon is only ever occasionally mentioned, never told in detail.”

“Maybe we should get the abridged notes version instead of the twenty-page essay, Twilight,” Spike said. “Like you said, we probably don’t have a lot of time.”

“Right, sorry,” Twilight said with a sheepish grin. “I recently discovered the most complete account of the tale of the Mare in the Moon I’d ever seen. Supposedly, she used to be Princess Celestia’s younger sister, in charge of raising and setting the moon while Celestia rose and set the sun. However, eventually the two came into conflict, the younger sister turned into the evil Nightmare Moon, and Celestia had to use a powerful, ancient magic to banish her to the moon to stop her from creating eternal night. However, after a thousand years of banishment, she’ll be able to come back and finish her plan, which is happening right now.”

“But the Princess doesn’t have a sister,” Rainbow Dash pointed out.

“That’s what I always thought, too,” Twilight said with a nod. “When I asked the Princess about it and told her I feared Nightmare Moon’s imminent return, she told me that she hid all information about her sister that she could. Apparently, the magical forces Celestia used to banish Nightmare Moon in the first place are sort of particular. Celestia can’t use them herself anymore, but she couldn’t just give them to the next generation of heroes. The magic wants to be rediscovered, not regifted.

“That’s what we’re looking for,” Twilight finished, turning to peer into the Everfree Forest, which already looked darker than it should, even with the encroaching gloom. “That magical treasure that defeated Nightmare Moon the first time is hidden in the heart of the Everfree Forest, at Princess Celestia’s old castle. Once I discovered what was going on, Celestia charged me with gathering the best heroes I could find and retrieving the treasure to defeat Nightmare Moon again. If we don’t, Equestria will be shrouded in darkness forever.”

“Still not exactly the abridged notes version,” Spike pointed out. “More like a mini-essay, but close enough.”

“Ah’m sorry Ah didn’t believe ya the first time,” Applejack said.

“It’s okay,” Twilight replied with a reassuring smile. “In hindsight, it must have sounded pretty silly without any proof. But do you all believe me now?”

One by one, the group gave a worried yet determined smile and nodded.

“Excellent, thank you all,” Twilight said, feeling better about this whole venture than he had since its outset. “I won’t pretend it’s going to be easy, but the fate of Equestria depends on us. If we succeed, we’ll be heroes. If we fail... Well, let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that. Now, let’s be off! We have a kingdom to save.”

“Right!” the rest of the group all shouted in unison.

Twilight about-faced and charged head-first into the darkness of the Everfree Forest, his new companions hot on his heels... Or rather, he would have, had he not instead ran headfirst into something else.

What that something was, Twilight couldn’t be sure. One moment, he was rushing into the shadowy pathways of the Everfree, a song in his heart, a fire in his blood, and new friends at his back. The next, his head had run right between two warm, pillowy masses of congealing darkness materializing right where he had been heading.

Twilight felt himself tripping, and someone new tripping with him. There was a tumble, a tangle of limbs, a slew of curses in an eerily familiar voice, and the oddly pleasant yet still utterly terrifying sensation of that same soft warmth pressed against Twilight as he and whoever else had suddenly appeared ended up on the leafy carpet of the forest floor.

“Get off me, you mortal sleazebag!” demanded a voice that matched the whispers from earlier exactly, save for the fact that now it thundered. “How am I supposed to destroy you if you’re on top of me?!”

Twilight tried to say something, but found his voice instead muffled between the twin soft something-or-others. In fact, his whole body was pressed against this new person, who could only be one person, really, based on her unmistakable snarl of an imperious voice.

“Stop that!” Nightmare Moon demanded, somehow sounding on the verge of laughter despite her furious tone. “That tickles!”

“Sorry!” Twilight gasped, at last regaining his sense of balance long enough to raise his head, gasp for air, and push up from the ground. “I haven’t trimmed my beard in a few days, and it must have... Oh, uh... Wow...”

What Twilight saw beneath him was a towering, if currently horizontal, alicorn mare. Her fine coat was darker than the sky on a moonless night. Her features looked, and in fact were, positively divine. She wore a surprisingly tight and revealing imperial silken dress of a sort Twilight had only ever seen in illustrations of ancient Equestrian royalty, albeit pale and faintly glowing like the thinnest sliver of a lunar crescent.

“You’re much more... Pleasant to behold than I had expected,” Nightmare Moon said, drawing Twilight’s eyes to her own, instantly banishing his blush and sending a cold chill to overwrite his confused, terrified, slightly aroused sensations with the most frigid of blizzards.

Her eyes were not the eyes of a pony.

Princess Celestia’s eyes were kind, calm, understanding, even motherly. They glowed faintly with the warm light of a comforting sun on a beautiful summer day, and spoke of wisdom gained over generations of peacefully ruling her subjects with patience and love. They were the eyes of a teacher, a friend.

Nightmare Moon’s eyes, however, if they were even eyes at all... Her sclera was darker than the night sky on a starless night Twilight had never seen, but could imagine all too well. Her irises were deepest verdian, or perhaps azure, or perhaps cobalt, or perhaps even darker still, simply backer than the sclera. Her pupils were an infinite descent, down, down, down through the darkest of darkness to a depth described only in screams, only in fears, only as nightmares.

“Nevertheless, if you’re going to ram your filthy, unwashed mortal face into the sacred bosom,” Nightmare Moon continued with a tone returning from near-giggle to the most sinister of snarls. “At least buy your dark goddess dinner first.”