"This is what I know," Violet said, stepping down from her perch on the balcony railing. She sat down on the floor, leaning back against the railing. "Some time ago, your city was attacked by the changelings, and you defended your ponies. I am unsure of the words for more details. This attack was violent, and killed ponies. Is this correct?"

Celestia nodded. "Yes, that's how it went."

"That is your side of the story." Violet turned to look at Celestia, her glowing eyes piercing her own. "The changelings are starving. They have been starving for a long time. I think the word was... 'generations'...? The only option was to attack for food. By doing so, they made themselves seen, and now, gathering food is harder. If they didn't attack, they would starve. The Queen saw no choice but to attack."

"Violet, understand that changelings lie—"

"I would have done the same," Violet interrupted the Solar Princess. "If you care for your ponies, you would have done the same."

At first, she stared at Violet, surprised by her tone. But as she thought about it, she knew Violet was right. She would have done the same. Her eyes fell to the floor of the balcony, conceding Violet's point.

"Starving is a horrible way to die," Violet murmured softly. "I've done it once. I would not want even my greatest enemy to starve."

The Royal Sisters were confused by Violet's words until the memory of her dying in front of them and returning to life resurfaced. Both of them shuddered uncomfortably.

"The changelings want peace. They are starving. I understand that love is their food, and that this is a problem that cannot be solved easily," Violet said quietly. "But they are not monsters. If you can help them, I think you should."

Luna spoke up, "Why are you speaking on behalf of the changelings? How did you find them? Or did they find you?"

"A changeling disguised as a pony asked questions that it should not have known to ask," Violet answered. "Later, I rescued the changeling from timberwolves, and asked where I could seek answers to my own questions."

"What questions did you ask?" Luna asked.

(Recommended Listening)

"Changelings feed on love. {Ahamkara} feed on desire," Violet said, struggling against her limited vocabulary. "They are similar. I want to ask how they feed on love and how they came to do that."

"Why?" Celestia asked. "Why do you need to know?"

Violet's expression became grave as she turned to answer. "I am hungry, and I do not know how to eat."

The impact of her words was immediate. Celestia and Luna turned to each other with wide eyes. A chill ran down Celestia's spine, making her feathers puff out. Her wings itched fiercely. Her heart accelerated, quickening its pace and intensifying the force behind each beat. Flashbacks of the sheer magnitude of power one of Violet's curses held surfaced in her mind.

Luna, too, felt primal fear gripping her very soul. She had seen Violet eat, she was certain she could. Twilight had kept her updated on Violet's dietary habits and capabilities.

{Ahamkara} feed on desire... Luna's mind raced as it realized what was being said. So she has to feed both sides of herself...

"I cannot feed the {Ahamkara}," Violet said, breaking the silence. "I fear I may lose control if I cannot learn to feed it."

"And that's why you need the changelings to teach you," Luna concluded.

Violet nodded. "I do not mean to make fear, but I must ask that help be given to the changelings quickly. I do not know if I am only hungry, or already starving."

Luna stood and approached, offering a comforting nuzzle to the alien. "We will do what we can," she said.

Violet smiled softly, offering a soft stroke of her hand down Luna's neck to return the nuzzle. She stood up and turned her gaze between the two princesses. "I must sleep. Good night, Luna, Celestia. Light be with you."

And in a flash of light, Violet was gone.

——————————

There was no horizon. The void she stood in was colorless; no expanse of black or white. The taste of metal danced on her tongue, and the scent of rot filled her nose. But the void was silent, and she was hungry.

She stood against the backdrop of a mirror lake, the setting sun painting the sky equally above and below her. The stained clouds above lazily drifted in a breeze that wasn't present on the surface. She looked around, seeing only the sky in all directions. There was nothing around her.

She took a step and immediately fell into the ocean, yelping in surprise as she was dragged beneath the violent waves. The world became dark and cold, thrashing her around and twisting her body in painful ways as she struggled to right herself. She quickly became dizzy as she continued to sink. The armor on her body shattered under the stress, and the scraps that remained were shredded off her body as though the water was clawing it off with unseen talons.

She felt the pressure building on her from all sides, gripping her naked body in a vice of cold water. She tried to struggle, but no matter how she willed herself to move, she found herself immobilized.

Her feet touched the desert sand, scorching her skin as the freezing sea was replaced with blistering, dry air. Howling winds seared her dry, wicking away the water and leaving only a fine crust of salt on her skin. She looked around for any landmarks at all, but found nothing. Only endless dunes further than the horizon.

She stepped forwards, flinching as the sole of her foot was burned on contact with the sand. Blazing grains of sand flew as she tumbled down the dune, adding even more burns across her body. She bit her lip to keep herself from opening her mouth to scream in pain, and drew blood that tasted of sand.

Solid ground caught her at the bottom of the dune, somehow hotter than the sand. She forced her eyes open, seeing that she was now at least in familiar territory: Rose's Fields of Glass - Arcadia Planitia, Mars.

A shadow passed overhead, drawing her eye upwards. Immediately, the humanoid shadow became a second sun, burning her eyes and flesh. The sand and glass around her caught fire, coughing out plumes of choking black smoke, tainted with gaseous iron.

Lightning crashed around her, and warm summer rain fell in a turbulent monsoon. Thunder roared from the dark clouds above. All around her were swords stabbed into the ground like lightning rods. As another bolt of lightning came down, she could swear she saw a fist guiding its path. The current leapt from sword to sword in a web of electric death, catching her—

Luna screamed, shooting upright in her bed in a frigid sweat. As she tried to catch her breath, her Ghost woke up, looking at her with concern in its eye.

A gentle knock sounded from her door. Luna didn't respond. She felt like her stomach was growling, even though she'd eaten before bed. She knew what was happening, but that only made her more afraid.

A hoof was placed on her thigh, prompting her to look up at the pony to whom it belonged: ~Twilight~. The pony was watching her with a worried gaze. Purple eyes flitted across her facial features, trying to get a read on what was happening. But she didn't speak. She remained silent, waiting.

Luna shook her head. "~Just bad sleep...~"

Twilight didn't respond. Not with words, anyway. She simply placed her chin on Luna's leg, staring up at her with the same concerned look as before.

"~What happened in the forest...?~" the pony asked softly.

Luna sighed. So much for 'They won't worry.'

"~We...~" ~Twilight~ murmured, "~we know you're more than capable of defending yourself... But you went past the forest... didn't you?~"

Luna could only nod.

"~Where did you go? Why did you go?~"

Luna raised an open hand. "~I will explain to you and your friends in the morning. All of you need to know.~"

This only raised more questions in the pony's mind.

(Recommended Listening)

[Sol System: The Vault of Glass - Ishtar Sink, Venus]

Once a stronghold for Vex ontological weapons testing, the Vault of Glass had long since been cracked. Rose, Mae, and Luna had been through the Vault, learning its secrets. After Atheon, the Vex Mind in charge of the Vault, had been slain by the first team, led by Yu, more teams got together to explore in their wake. At least, that was the goal.

No one can open the Vault alone. I opened the Vault. There was no one with me, but I was not alone.

The Vault was outside of time, a fixed point beyond the grasp of reality: a simulation. Inside the Vault, the Vex could freely decide how everything worked. Gravity could pull up, time could flow backwards or sideways. But the Vex could also decide what was real. The first Guardians to enter the Vault learned this lesson the hard way, eventually succumbing to the endless Vex and dying their final deaths.

The stars will dance around you and mark you and sing to you. They will decide if you are real.

Kabr. Pahanin. Praedyth. Among the first team to breach the Vault. Kabr is remembered: the armor he forged from the corpses of slaughtered Vex keeps his memory alive. Pahanin is remembered. His journals made it out of the Vault after the first team cleared it. But Praedyth was lost. There are no records of Praedyth anywhere, except for a couple of weapons that bear his name. He was deemed unreal, and the universe forgot.

That was the kind of danger of this plan.

"Alright, run me through this again," Mae said. Her armor sparkled with the erratic light of electricity arcing around her. Patterns of foxes and roses and crescent moons were etched into the thick plating with dexterity and care that could only have been done by a Hunter. The cloth hanging from her hip bore a familiar pattern, marking her with the emblem of her team: the black fox. It, too, coursed with electricity.

"How many teams have cleared the Vault?" Rose asked. As usual, she was unarmored, instead wearing only the thinnest, most breathable fabric she could obtain. Between her breasts was the tattoo of a black rose, and on her shoulder, the black fox. A simple golden circlet was worn around her left arm, and flames emanated from it, though she was not burned.

"Piss if I know," the Titan huffed. "A lot?"

"Yeah, a fuckton," Rose confirmed. "And every single one of them killed Atheon."

"What does the Vault have to do with the Forest though?" Mae sighed.

"The Vault is hidden in the Forest. It's essentially a backdoor," Rose said, smirking wickedly. "Ikora's weird device on the moon was designed to tear a particular target from all of its possible timelines. Kill it enough times, and suddenly, no timeline where it existed can calculate properly."

"Alright, now why aren't we on the moon then?" the Titan asked impatiently.

"Because we need two things. First," Rose replied, "we need a piece of Atheon's corpse. Then we rebuild a copy of it on Mercury and chill in the Forest while every other Guardian flocks to it for loot."

Mae smiled in understanding. She cracked her knuckles, lightning arcing around her fists as she did so. "Alright. Let's go kill Atheon then."

"Let's keep it quick with a Curse, yeah?" Rose smirked as the flame on her circlet flared up. "We'll have you kill Atheon, and I'll keep everything off you. Entropy Cannon is probably your best bet."

Mae smirked, the lightning around her increasing in vivacity. As the pair of them walked down the final hallway, the universe around them began to shudder. Each clunk of boot on stone echoed with magnified volume. The walls and floor seemed to pixelate as they passed. A terrifying mark was carved by their very presence: one of two dragons circling each other, casting an all-encompassing cyclone of flaming, storming death.

The triangular door opened for them.

They stepped inside the final room and took in the majesty of the Vex's geometry one more time. The room was wide and triangular, with the base against the wall of a cliff and each side stretching about one-hundred meters. The center of the triangle was hollow, save for a floating stone cube, and down was an endless void from which there was no return. Directly forward, at the far point of the triangle was a triangular gate, framed in glass, guarded by a Vex Hydra. On the side-corners of the triangle were raised platforms with hollow circles of metal sticking up from the stone. Nearby each of those portal frames was a disc embedded in the ground.

The Guardians smirked as the Hydra screamed a mechanical battle cry, a pair of Minotaur units teleporting into existence and firing their heavy weaponry. Volatile void rounds arced through the air towards the Guardians, but they were far too slow to be effective at such a long range. Both Rose and Mae easily moved out of the way, each making a dive for the plates embedded in the ground.

Mae went left, hopping up onto a stone cube and plucking an incredibly complicated-looking weapon from her back, steadying her aim as she pulled the trigger. The diamond panels of carbon-fiber began to leak a brilliant red light as the weapon hummed ominously, ticking like a stopwatch to the death of the Hydra lined up in its sights. The moment the weapon reached full charge, it loosed a massive, ultra-dense red laser that pierced the Hydra's tough alloy chassis, causing it to disintegrate into nothing.

Rose went right, tapping her Light and tossing a pair of bright orange spheres at the Minotaurs. Each one landed directly under its intended target, exploding into miniature suns that melted each of the murderous alien robot monsters into puddles of liquid metal.

When both of the Guardians had eliminated their targets, they hopped back onto the discs in the ground.

The discs hummed with ancient, timeless energy, tiles of light rising from the edges of the plates in a cylinder, reaching up a meter before suddenly dissipating. The portal frames snapped open.

Dark clouds formed over the far point of the triangle, and square lightning coursed through the vapor, arcing at perfect right-angles. Piece by piece, the machine formed before them. Its chassis gleamed with light glaring off its hybrid metallic-glass exterior. Clawed robotic feet in triangular spread hovered just above the stone as its leg was reconstructed in the air above the foot. Abdomen, complete with a pod of milky white fluid said to contain its mind. Arms, shoulders, hands, weapon, and head. The pieces joined and linked together, and the completed Atheon fell to the ground with a resounding thud and a resonant mechanical roar.

The Vault glitched, and Atheon noticed.

Mae rose into the air, her Lift pushing her up before her Light flared, holding her in place. She called out with a wicked, fanged smile, "O foolish machine! You call yourself 'Time's Conflux'! You are nothing more than an example of the madness of a creature that abandoned the anchor of flesh! Become tribute for our wish! Entropy Cannon!"

Arc Light engulfed Mae's body, concentrating in her palm, then blasting forth in a massive sphere of explosive lightning. The first shot destroyed Atheon's leg, causing the machine to wail in fury, but not pain. The second shot hit Atheon's arm, blowing it to bits and sending the broken remains of its weapon spiraling into the infinite. The third shot smashed through Atheon's abdomen, shattering the pod of fluid and instantly making Atheon fall to the ground.

Mae returned to the ground, panting, but still smirking beneath her helm. A familiar notification on her HUD popped up:

[Light Overtaxed. Grenade unavailable. 06d, 23h, 59m, 45s.]

She walked over to the corpse of the massive Vex unit. Rose met her there, knife in hand, Atheon's eye in the other.

"Got what we need?" Mae asked.

"Yup!" Rose smiled in return. "Thanks for not blowing up its head."

"Welcome," Mae replied. "Now, let's get the fuck outta here. I'm hungry."

Author's Note

This is Atheon, for visual reference.