Belshazzar

by MagLocal

Rating: teen
Tags: Tragedy, Violence, Dark, Death, Drama, Original Character, Luster Dawn, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Other
Length: 13592

A nightmare gone wrong is only the latest problem in a divided and waning Equestria. With the odds against her, millennia-reigning Princess Luster Dawn will save her kingdom no matter the price.

When even the dream world becomes dangerous for her, Princess Luster Dawn is at her wits' end. The Night Terror plunges much of Equestria into chaos, and seers (who may or may not be the cause of said Terror) only fuel the mayhem.

Without any other option, Luster Dawn gallops to a last resort that promises a way out—at a high cost.

- This is an edited/revised version of my entry into the Writeoff for the prompt "Ot."

- Thanks goes to Venerable Ro for pre-/proofreading and FanOfMostEverything for collaborative brainstorming.

Published 2020-05-03 13:30:01 UTC
Last updated 2020-05-03 13:30:01 UTC

"Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible."

She wakes up from the bed, scanning the surroundings in this new maddening fantasy.

“Wh-where are you?” she asks no one in particular. “This isn’t how it usually goes in your dreams, right? Wait… I just got out of bed… did I just…?“

Something crashes, and Luster Dawn turns to see it. A branch has fallen from a great and mighty tree.

“Look, get down here!” she yells to the top of the infinite tree, shaking a balled-up hoof at it. “Whoever you are, I demand that you leave Cobalt alone... or I'll make you!”

As if replying on behalf of Cobalt’s dream captors, the grand tree rumbles. Its bark crystallizes, the branches growing outward as the tree’s height diminishes so she could see the top of it: a dome at the top like a fancy new house, and the transparent leaves now shining like gems. Strings of crystals and other precious stones hang from the jewelry leaves as the columns glow like a home in the fabled Elysian Fields. It reminds her of paradise, of heaven in Equestria.

“Is that…? No. No, it can’t possibly be. H-how d-did you see this? Maybe in the history books, yes, but… not to this level of accuracy… the windows, the rooms—I could see them all! H-how did you…?”

She pedals her hooves in mid-air, approaching the tree. The deep wells of her memory tell her what is standing before her: the Treehouse of Harmony. That crystal treehouse, that place she called home during her days as a student in the School of Friendship. There, she hung out with her best friends—a pony, a kirin, a yak, and a griffon. She lived with them, learned things about friendship together from the professors with them. The little games they played, the problems they faced, what fun they had as they laughed and appreciated the many sunsets over Ponyville so long ago.

“H-hello? Is there… anyone there? Any pony out here?”

Her neck cranes this way and that. Her mouth twists into a frown as her head quivers, finding no one inside at least while she stands outside.

And then, appearing before her with great fierce winds are voids: black holes sucking up the tree bit by bit, chunks of crystal bark flying into their gaping maws.

She lights up her horn and whips up a magic dome around herself, keeping her grounded and not flying into the voids even as they morph. Their shapes shift, turning from faceless circles to silhouettes of creatures too familiar, of creatures with feelings and associations with her friends….

“No, no! I… I c-can’t go there! I can’t join you!” she yells at the voids calling for her to come home with their darkened speech. “Not just yet… they n-need me. You… you understand, right?” Her long spiraling horn lights up her gnashing teeth. “I should’ve known. You… you terrors can’t use your illusions on me, you anathemas! You can’t use my friends’ likenesses however you want! Now—“

The voids fly straight into her.

A croak leaves her throat. Her head jerked forward as the voids enter her through the mouth and through her skin like thick black melted molasses.

“Get out of me! Get out!” The voids only strangle her from the inside, tearing her apart from within. “Wh-what are you doing?!… Tw-Twilight?! I-is that… n-no, don’t do that, beast, don’t take the form of my dear teacher!”

Another void creature has appeared before her, resembling ex-Princess Twilight Sparkle, complete with lavender coat, flowing mane, and golden regalia. Her wings expand until they are all Luster could see.

Luster flaps her wings as hard as she could, but they do not lift her. Blood pumps faster; adrenaline shakes her veins, fear rocks her brain, but it is of no use: a cage of Twilight’s wings surround her until she is enclosed in a sphere of darkness.

“I didn’t do this to you! It’s u-using me to strengthen itself! No… don’t die again, Twilight!”

But it is too late. A white beam of light shoots out of her mouth against her will, empowered by the void of her friends to destroy Twilight, and they win. Twilight’s void self shatters into a million pieces, dissipating into many bright but fading stars.

“Did it... take your soul?” The words hang in the air like those dying stars. “Did it take you away from Elysium? No… th-that c-can’t be! That c-can’t be!”

She could not hear the slamming open of her room’s doors. Her dear companion rushes to her side. He feels her hooves but she does not feel him back: her pulse is skyrocketing, he notes. Checks her cheeks: damp, encrusted with sweat and tears.

Luster cries on as a thrashing mess, suspended in mid-air as a pitiful sight. “Please, no! Why… no! That’s not you, Twilight! I wasn’t the one who killed you, it was them! It’s not even my real friends! They… they wouldn’t betray me like that! They would understand. They’d help me, teach me, bring me up….

“No, no, I must maintain my resolve! No! You’re all illusions! Those… those seers sent you to torment me, didn’t they?!“

He checks the screens amid her screams. Vital signs fast ascend, beeping like crazy.

The stallion hurries to the wires and pulls all the plugs.

The apparatus loses its grip on Luster Dawn, letting her fall through the magic dome that keeps her connected to the dreamscape. Wires have been strapped to her hooves through the whole experience; now, they, too, fall apart. The beeping heartbeat accelerates to a flatline, wires now disconnected from her blood and veins.

Frantic yellow eyes take in the alicorn’s own room. Lines of light decorate the floor and walls, illuminating in the colors of purple and blue. Her quarters are a display of laser-powered regality, furnished with the latest and finest appliances in terms of comfort and convenience: a multi-tier fridge with enough food to explode a granary, a retractable bathing machine that completes a spa or a sauna within minutes, and a multitude of screens with electronically-sent updates and reports from every sector of Equestria. Error messages flash red on the medical screens, however, screeching for user input from the missing dreamscaping pony.

“Sorry about that,” her companion says as he pulls her back up on her four hooves.

The young physique of Summer Wheat reflects the room’s atmospheric lights like the subject of a dark oil painting. His gray yellow coat and his white mane can be likened to a mix of milk and honey: his wheat grain cutie mark completes the old-looking work of living art.

“Had to wake you up from that one.” The unicorn sounds out of breath. “And, to be honest: the results don’t look good.”

This world still swims in the princess’s vision, seeing stars and all. The lights in her room burn her eyes and prick her mind as she tries to stand up, her ethereal mane lighting up its own stars like Luna of old—princess emeritus—as it flutters in non-existent winds.

“Wh-what doesn’t look good?” she asks, her shaky voice unbecoming of a venerable princess. “Other than experiencing the worst case of the Night Terror since Luna passed on, that is?”

A harried shrug is the reply to his alicorn princess. He scans the error messages and their opaque explanations, his analytical mind running through them for only a few seconds. “Apparently, what you’ve just experienced is a dream in a dream. However, the catch is that one was somepony else’s dream, and the other was yours that got shafted in by some outside force when the first dream got cut off.”

A gasp of alarm brushes up her throat. The stars in her streaming mane twinkle. Unnoticed, a miniature supernova blooms close to her cheek. “Which means… it tried to delay me from returning here, didn’t it?” Wheat nods. “I should’ve woken up, but the Terror forced me into another dream before I could do that!”

His hoof taps. The beeps continue flatlining in a monotonous background shrill. “I’m afraid so.”

A grimace comes over his face, steeling himself to deliver his news. “Good thing I came in just in time. Thought I was just going to tell you about the troubles and the reporters needing your word on—“

“A statement for the third time within twenty-four hours?” An irritated snort flares out of her nostrils. “They’re just desperate for news now, as if the riots going on everywhere isn’t news enough.”

“They need soothing, Your Highness. With how everything’s falling apart, they need words from you.”

No need to get angry. She lets out a tired sigh. “That is true, but they’ve got to see that I’m not some couch potato! I was just out there doing my best to protect them from those nightmare-breathing monsters!”

Wheat raises a hoof to her withers, a full head above his own. “With all due respect, Your Highness, you can’t sleep your troubles away. They need to see you in the real world too.”

Without further ado, she follows him as he walks away. Her magic turns off the dreamwalking equipment for the rest of the night. Detecting her absence, the room turns off all its lights and its machines, plunging it into its final darkness.

Overground passageways join up the castle’s sectors. One-way windows overlook Canterlot in Princess Luster’s seventy thousandth year: angular buildings soaked in metal and neon lights, two or three rising over the ancient mountain hundreds of meters away. Paved streets disappear beneath slow-moving crowds of concerned and panicked citizens, herded down by police to the underground shelters. Broadcasting advertisements in better times, hologram billboards bleed red to the tone and words of emergency public service announcements.

“The Terror has shut down Ponyville’s magic,” he reports as they trot by, their coats shining under the faint moonlight. “Riots are already escalating to anarchy. The most radical elements could be incoming, hence the Royal Military is blockading all possible points of entry.”

Past the cozy prison of a passageway, the moon does not smile upon Luster. Its face is as hard as flint. “I take that that’s not all, is it?”

“Sadly, yes, Your Highness. It’s—“

“A seer in Ponyville?”

He hisses like a viper taken by surprise. “Please don’t do that. You’re being spooky again.”

“I have more experience with this than you’d ever know. Forgive me for using analytics to predict my companion’s bad news.”

He rolls his eyes, but the local architecture calms him a little: it is state of the art indeed, the hallmarks of progress pleasing to the eye. “Anyway, a seer in Ponyville is stirring everypony up there and proclaiming… you know….”

“My mistakes, hm?”

Silence hangs between the two ponies. Wheat’s yes is implied in his unmoving eyes.

“As much as I acknowledge my imperfections,” Luster replies, “I also know that this is the farthest a disaster has come in breaking Equestria apart. Magic is breaking down, and it is much worse than what the cursed Legion of Doom accomplished. In spite of that, we are no closer to finding the culprit.

“And that is without mentioning the strain on my own magic.” Her horn blazes with thaumaturgical energy, but she could see faint flickers in it like a light bulb on insufficient electricity. “It’s not like I’m sitting comfortably above everyone else; I’m a victim too, trying to work with everyone to stop this, Wheaty.”

The clip-clop of hooves is robotic and rhythmic on the polished floor, leaving the stallion with a resigned groan as they keep walking.

Below, terrified ponies stampede over barricades and roadblocks, knocking them down. The police unicorns find their magic auras oscillating. Magic fails them while yet more of their citizens trample them down in a dog-eat-dog dash to the underground shelters.

“… and, on top of that, the Everfree Forest has mostly stabilized because of magic’s vanishing which is not what is supposed to happen!”

To that, the princess on the throne nods slowly, giving weight to each bob of the head.

Upgrades have graced the throne room through the millennia. The floor and the walls have been fortified with unmeltable titanium, impervious to any city-crushing artillery or any long-range missile storms. Screens are littered everywhere, displaying a staggering variety of paintings and hologram heirlooms of royalty, showing the legitimacy of Luster’s rule as if the historical documents showing Twilight Sparkle’s passing of the royal baton to her most faithful student were not enough. Artifacts and trophies of magitechnological achievements are held high on pedestals and within glass boxes, though they have become worthless with magic’s growing disappearance.

Newsponies gather around her throne. They don’t gather too close, however. A short staircase to the throne creates a safe distance between monarch and subject, with a line of guards right in the middle of them.

“Yes, I am aware,” Luster answers calmly as is expected of her royal and official attitude. “Nevertheless, it goes without saying that I also know much of your fears without you telling me.”

“Do you?” says the one with the beehive mane. Quite stubborn for a journalist: isn’t she supposed to have respect for the Crown? “What about the news in Trottingham?”

“Trottingham fell into anarchy just half an hour ago,” she reports nonchalantly. “I have sanctioned a military operation into the island capital and my forces are handling the situation as we speak. Order will be restored in that city within the next seven days.”

The unimpressed journalist does not faze the princess as Luster goes on. “I’ve observed how dire things are. However, do not worry! My top researchers are working around the clock to end this once and for all. Now, I hear that rumors circulate about how them might have skirted the boundaries of ethics, but rest assured—”

A levitating microphone is shoved onto her muzzle. “Are ponies being sacrificed in your labs?” cuts in a unicorn reporter.

Luster’s more powerful magic pushes it away as she puts on a face of disgust. “No. We make sure that our experiments are in compliance with the Equestrian Directorate on Ethics as we have done for the past seven thousand years.”

The assurance does not assure her audience. The journalists and reporters exchange whispers, once in a while glancing at their dear leader with their suspicious eyes.

These still do not faze her for Luster keeps going. “My little ponies, we have known for so long that there are lines we shall never cross even in the darkest hour. And, speaking of darkest hours, let us remember that the dawn rises soon after that.” She could not help but chuckle at the pun on her own name—let the ponies know she has retained some sense of admittedly self-centered humor.

“Equestria has been saved numerous times at the last minute. That is, naturally, not ideal, even back in the old days of my greatest teacher. However, they still saved the world. Thus, my ponies, you do not have to worry, for we will make things right in the end.”

“You keep saying that,” interjects another journalist, memorable for the many notepads brimming out of his hat. “Do you have anything more specific? Something tangible we can rest on, hm?”

With nothing to do but groan, Luster keeps talking: “It has taken months for magic to completely drain from Ponyville. As long as we maintain our current measures, we will be fine for two weeks which is enough time for our breakthroughs to prototype and come out for every pony.”

“Your Highness, what about what the seers are saying about you and—“

“I adjourn the Night Court.”

With that, the guards escort the querulous reporters away, the latter becoming a grumbling and inquiring mass of malcontents firing furtive glances at their sole princess.

A wind rises in into the room despite all the closed windows, rumbling like a whirlwind. Before anypony could react, a vortex manifests out of the ether, scaring the journalists and killing most of the lights. Out of the black hole, that rip in reality’s fabric, trots a stallion robed in sackcloth. His hood hangs back, letting all see his bald head.

“You ponies of the press must know the truth behind this vile supplanter!”. He is loud but there is no echo in this spacious hall, his voice booming from all places. “This princess is not fit to rule anymore! See how she hoards all the power and magic in Canterlot within herself!”

Blood boils in Luster’s royal veins. “Guards, take this seer out!”

The guards charge and the seer fights back. The scuffle is short-lived; a horn suppressor on his head and some nylon rope around his barrel do the trick although he is merely a unicorn, not an alicorn. In Luster’s flustered state of mind, she can never be too sure if they can sprout wings at will; the limits of dark magic prove nebulous even to the sagely Luster. They bind him in chains before turning him out of the throne room. The doors shut on him, barred forever from her presence.

“… and that’s my point,” she hastily continues, hoof stretched out to where the vortex appeared, uncaring about her audience who could have been at the mercy of the seer. “They themselves possess unusual amounts of strange magic. Who’s to say that they aren’t just wizards gone mad and power-hungry, either misleading or not knowing that someone else has misled them?”

She stands up from her throne, tall and sovereign as stability’s symbol. “These seers divide ponykind when they must unite. We cannot let petty matters such as barbaric tribalism and lying ‘prophetic’ pretenders turn us away from a real solution. Together, we must fight and keep our heads above the water, for I, too, am with you in your struggle until the end”

At that, there is no applause from her subjects. They look at her with the minimum amount of respect before, seconds later, passing by watchful soldiers to return to the outside.

Summer Wheat leads the press out of the throne room. Before the doors shut, Luster notices a confused expression on his face.

If the elevator were to have a soul, it would take a morbid pleasure in taking its two passengers down forever in endless freefall. Nothing but shiny walls and screens indicating temperature, wind speed, and other indicators of things on the surface. Each tenth floor rings a chime, reminding the ponies inside that they are yet going down. The number shown on the overhead display shows how many hooves or meters below the earth they are.

“I know you weren’t at your best,” Wheat says. “Nightmare in a nightmare... I truly d-don’t know that feels like—I’m sorry. However, tonight, you sounded... stale. Like you were ready to throw in the towel. Like reading a script or something.”

Luster’s eyes stare straight ahead at the doors, never deviating. “There’s only so many ways to encourage ponies without sounding like a broken record.”

“What about the mages? You said they would be making breakthroughs soon.”

“They haven’t been making progress for a few weeks. It won’t be that way for a few weeks more.” She takes one long breath, drinking it in along with the elevator’s minty scents. “Can’t blame them for being slow, though, ever since most of the labs have lost their protection since last week. The headquarters here in Canterlot is the last bastion standing.”

Wheat blinks. A grunt, then a syllable: one dismayed non-word, before he becomes more sensible. “That’s… wait, how? How come you didn’t tell me this? You said they were just operating under quarantine!”

“That’s one thing you must learn about royalty.” A quick right turn to see Wheat, then back to the doors. “Twilight told me that Celestia wore an iron mask during her tenure That princess kept ponies’ hopes up while she never spilled anything that might scare her faithful subjects.”

“That’s the third time you’ve said that this month.”

The numbers ascend as the elevator descends. The constant whirring is itself an illusion: never resolving, going down but only looping, never going anywhere different. To Wheat, it is uneasiness distilled, poured straight to his heart: when will it stop going down?

“You… you don’t trust me, do you, Highness?”

“Of course, I do!” she says defensively, feeling hurt in the heart but not showing that yet. “You’re still here. You haven’t been dumped. None of your predecessors have been dumped either.”

“Doesn’t seem to be working for you these days with your 538th companion. And, honestly, that’s not a bad number to end it on….”

“I do not plan to abolish the companionship system. Not even if I live long enough to have 538 more companions in the future.”

The stallion’s tilted head begs for a question. “Isn’t that the point? And you call it a system. I’m supposed to be your friend, a mortal friend that you can lean on to when it seems like no one else gets you: listening to your jokes, being there so you can cry on my shoulders when it’s too much. I’m not just another pony you see and utter standard royal-speak to. Don’t you remember? I’m not just your bridge to your mortal subjects! I’m—“

“Here to ground me to reality, to keep me equine. We’ve had this discussion before.”

He stomps the floor, creating a loud thud! against the metal floor. “No, we haven’t! But now we have to talk about this because, apparently, it just isn’t working for you!”

But a loud chime from the elevator stops any talk between them.

The numbers continue rising. The whirring still descends. The doors remain closed. His eyes scan the floor controls: the last one, the bottom one, is the hundredth level.

The numbers shoot past a hundred.

“Aren’t we supposed to stop?”

Luster makes no motion, avoiding eye contact. Anything I say would escalate the situation.

“This is another one of those things you’ve never planned to tell me, isn’t it?” He paces before the princess, examining her not unlike a lion would his prey. “The real last floor to this… thing! In my fourteen years of service to you, in my fourteen years of friendship with you... you lied to me about this too?!”

No answer leaves her lips. The elevator descends beyond Wheat’s darkest nightmares.

After leaving the elevator at absolute rock bottom, they travel ceaseless tunnels. Gates and doors, locked with no life but that of machines and computer systems, constantly scanning the princess for her identity: princess-locked, these doors are. As for Wheat, he chooses to keep his mouth shut as they trudge through tunnel after tunnel, noticing the ever-downward slant they go. Always deeper still.

Past the last gate, past one final checkpoint of robots checking Luster’s identity and inspecting her vitals and her having to tell them that, yes, Summer Wheat has her express permission to be where very few ponies have gone—past all of that lies the end of the path.

The end of the path is a wall of unadulterated rock, reminiscent of some ancient abandoned silver mine. The only sign of civilization is a marked circle on the ground.

They step into the circle and, Luster lighting the lines with her magic, the world spins dizzily around the two ponies. Solid shapes liquefy, diffusing into particles as the pony passengers are transported through a ley line-powered hyperlane, only for their bodies to rearrange back to shape.

Bookcases. Their re-arranged eyes first detect bookcases. Endless rows of bookcases, of infinite bookshelves. Or, rather, their outlines: green mist permeates the place as it reeks of mossy rock, revolting dust, and putrid scents of long-expired scrolls and tomes. All the while, ancient unsmoothed stones make contact with the ponies’ hooves as they land on the ground.

Dread builds up in his heart for yet another unknown, buffeted already by lying floor numbers and hidden tunnels. “Wh-what is this?”

“The Occult Spring,” she says with no eye contact, attention fully given to the bookshelves. “A secret’s secret. It contains writings and artifacts unknown to and withheld from all but a select few.”

“A select few? Why do I have a feeling that ‘select few’ is just you?” It takes all he could to not yank around Luster by the neck, make her spill all the beans in the world. “You didn’t tell me about this! You didn’t tell anyone about this!”

“I had to. Somepony had to install the locks and gates.”

“Before you gave them amnestics, didn’t you?!”

“We’ve got more pertinent matters to deal with, Wheat.” She passively looks down the spaces between the shelves. It is a vast path to exhaust. “Follow me.”

They walk past the cramped aisles between the misty bookshelves. He catches glimpses of unreadable titles written in Old Ponish, runes, or what should have been gibberish. In the background, she drones on about their stashed contents: alternative histories, reality-bending spells, full disclosure of various incidents concealed from the public.

“Ah! Here it is.”

It is ascroll, sandwiched between two pungent tomes, now surrounded in her magic. It floats, showing its size: it is as thick as her head. She unfurls its rolled-up parchment, much of it dropping to the floor in a sea of more of itself. To Wheat’s perceptive eye, not a single mote of dust picks up on nor falls from it. In fact, not a single fragment falls apart: how shiny and preserved this scroll is!

He tries to distinguish the words there as his next step, but they are beyond inscrutable. It is not just a different alphabet: the glyphs form moving pictures, always moving around and never staying in one place, moving in a circle, or otherwise going on a circuitous path and coming to the same starting point.

He shakes his head. What use is there in making sense out of this arcane nonsense?, Wheat wonders.

“Luster, are you sure about this?” He pauses as he inspects the scroll, part of it already glowing in the princess’s magic. “Are we even allowed to use this… or even be here right now?”

In her magic, the scroll rotates his way: mobile glyphs dance for him and her. Faint light reflects from Luster’s pulsating horn, illumining the letters clearer, setting the tone for her explanation: “It is a spell I’ve discovered by spying on the seers… ironically enough. See, it is—”

“You’re dodging the question.”

The interruption is enough to make Luster look up from her scroll analysis and gaze upon him suspiciously, irritably. “Tell me if it’s safe, princess. Tell me that, princess, because having to go down an elevator and dozens of tunnels and one round of teleportation just to get to this spell is raising all the red flags here.”

Luster ignores him as she wordlessly skims through the scroll. It snakes around him on the floor as she reads and unrolls it further.

“I am not completely sure of its full nature myself,” Luster begins absentmindedly, “but, if you want, I can do a quick rescan after this just to be on the safe side.”

Something stops the scroll. It stretches in her attempt to unfurl it further.

A yellow hoof has jammed the scroll to the ground.

Her heart beats fast—could burst at any moment—as she remonstrates with this stubborn stallion tampering with the scroll. “Careful! You’re damaging the spell!”

Wheat huffs at her, stares at her as if she were a harbinger of doom. “I know you mean well—“

“I’ve always meant well.”

“But you know what they say, Luster: The path to Tartarus—“

“Is paved with good intentions, I know,” and Luster completes it with a groan. “However, evil intentions have paved many more ways to Tartarus. I don’t want too much caution to get in the way of fixing the world.”

That is not a good enough answer for him. He paces in a circle despite the narrow path, keeping Luster’s attention on himself. “Don’t you think you should wait it out for a few more days? You know how forbidden and secret spells like this can go terribly wrong.”

Luster places a hoof on her regalia. She lets the crown on her head glow, making him look up there, up to her as his authority. “I have heard of the stories, but I am the Princess of Equestria. My magic is more than sufficient for this.”

“If that’s the case, why haven’t I read of Celestia and Luna dabbling in forbidden magic?”

A tiny wince escapes her. “That was then, this is now. The times have changed, and spells like these are now necessary.”

Wheat does not settle for mere eye contact and attention-getting anymore. He lets his shaking head drop to the floor where he comes face-to-face with the animated scroll of probable Amaregeddon. “I just… I just don’t know if this is….”

“You always worry, don’t you know?” Her horn glows brighter; the letters glow too, glowing brighter with her—their movements, their circles, their circuits hurrying up. “But, really, Summer Wheat, what is it all for? It could be for nothing, and you know what Twilight once said to me: without a vision, the creatures perish.”

To Wheat, Luster is merely applying a bandage to a missing limb: something useless. He could only shake his head in silent disapproval while she immerses herself in the scroll’s esoteric instructions.

Bang!

Scrolls and artifacts fly away and his mane flaps in a hurricane. Mighty gales strike down the bookshelves, tipping them to fall or otherwise cracking them into many pieces. Wheat holds his own but barely, planting his hooves on antediluvian stone and bracing his body against the wind. Both he and Luster look up as shadows flicker in the corners of their eyes: gushing from the bedrock ceiling like smoke.

The smoke whispers—his ears pick up on that. The figures of smoke coalesce into something discernible, something living: creatures out of smoke, crafted into the shape of ponies.

“The Terror! Luster, it’s them!”

A flash of his horn brings up a magic dome around them, bringing home the many times he saved a fellow pony’s life in the blink of an eye that way. Shadowy creatures dart to the targets and flatten themselves against the shield, but cracks materialize with each savage bump.

He hears a great flap of wings, he looks, turns to the side, to behold the princess flying out of his dome of safety.

“Luster, what are you—?!“

“Defeating the Terror once and for all!”

She rises to the challenge of the smoke creatures, levitating that great illegible scroll. Luster’s horn is bright enough to banish the mist for miles on end. She shoots the concentrated power of violent magic into the scroll, convulsing the moving letters as they loop like speeding clocks.

Summer Wheat calls out for her, but the smoke surrounds her, muffling his voice to her.

“Don’t you worry!” Luster cries out. “It’s all part of the spell! I can handle this… I can fix this world! Just give me time!”

As she says the words, smoke surrounds her, attacks her, confounds her, blinds her. She could hear Wheat screaming her name despite her reassuring words.

She chants the rest of the spell to complete it, both in her mind and with her tongue. Forcing themselves into her mind, the letters compel the words in arcane languages which they teach her in mind-breaking seconds as she tries to fend off the spell’s side effects of feeling like she is falling, falling still—

The smoke solidifies against her chest. It becomes something sharp: a tip like that of a sword. She yelps out the spell’s last words. The moving letters come to a halt and reverse their course.

A great light shines forth, engulfing everything in white mending light.

In her 400,000th year or somewhen there abouts, Princess Luster Dawn sits down on her throne to continue Evening Court after a small break for tea.

The establishment’s small windows give way to cavernous depths and canyon ridges. Weaving around the rocks, moonlight pierces through the plain windows, its elegant touch meeting a ragged red carpet, while the accompanying stars’ lights gleam there on the makeshift castle’s rooftops.

Armored guards stand by as a pony in glasses comes up, levitating a couple blueprints in his possession. “Your Royal Highness, I’m pleased to report that the reconstruction of New Canterlot is still on schedule. The town hall’s almost complete, and so is most of the housing. We’ve also conserved resources like you’ve asked: we have enough leftover materials to make a few more houses with time to spare. On top of that, I have asked my supervisor to alter the plans for the armory….”

A weak smile is the royal response as he rambles on. The trip Princess Luster took in the sunset earlier brought her memories that validate his good testimony: ponies fashioned structures from wood, stone, and even brick if there was enough mortar. It has been this way for decades, a far cry from the times of millennia upon millennia ago. She draws from the cavernous recesses of her mind: they tell her that ancient history had a similar start. In the big picture, it is nothing out of the ordinary.

“And that should be all, right?” she asks with a respectful look down on this esteemed guest, her royal mane flowing ethereal and giving her that august glow befitting nobility.

“Why, yes.” A humble bow accompanies the answer, deep enough to smack his face on the floor, but he does not mind. It is all for the benevolent princess.

Out with the architect, in with the next subject. She comes complete with an escort.

“Ah, yes, Miss.” She knows the name—Smart Alec—but she’s appeared too many times to care about finer formalities. “Any update on the Dreden in Ponyville?”

Her first reply is a cough. The escort guards tighten her leash and shackles, though these stringent measures are not enough to stop dark smoke from seeping through her teeth.

“Much of what remains is falling apart at a breakneck speed,” she reports while her smoke slithers into the air and slowly pervades across the room. “Ponyville... it’s either broken apart or sunken underground… or both. It’s all inconclusive.”

“Any survivors?” she quickly asks.

Her eyes fog with smoke. She shuts them tight, tries to squeeze it away. “It’s the usual: almost every pony comes back wrong. The augurs, though… they’re the ones who made the last stands in Ponyville. I saw it myself: they said a quake would happen, that we should flee immediately. No pony but I fled, and it happened.”

A queenly and skeptical brow lowers to half-close an eye. “Are you saying that they might be good? It was only when the augurs came up that the Dreden came to be! They’re showing off the evil they are capable of and nothing more.”

“More like showing off how the Dreden’s growing and what we can do to stop it!” shouts Alec as desperation lurks in her voice. Smoke, that sign of creeping darkness—the Dreden itself, if only contained—hardens as it splashes out of her mouth. “Please, Your Royal Highness, Your Majesty….“

“The augurs divided what’s left of this fair country, both figuratively and literally,” replies Luster with her head held high. “The pre-Hearth’s Warming windigos fed on the hatred and division of ponies. So do these monsters and their dark magic today. We must not let the augurs cut us any further. We must stay united at all costs.”

Smoke falls like water around Alec’s teeth. “But—“

“Leave this place, miss. We are glad that you have come back from the dead, but the augurs have converted you beyond belief.” Her long foreleg rises, a signal to the guards that the miscreant has outlived her usefulness and must be led out.

“But what if they’re right?!” she screams even as the escort turns her away from the princess. “What if they’re right? Wh-what if they’re right about you and—?!”

They gag Alec’s mouth before she finishes her sentence. Royal magic opens the door, and the dark smoke that went around the throne rushes back into her body: another sign of a once-lively pony-turned-ghoul, her soul having come back wrong from when she herself was rescued from the catastrophe of Ponyville.

“It is sad,” Luster says once the doors close, the guards being her only audience. “It is terribly sad to see our Head of Royal Magic and Research coming apart like this. However, if there is a bright side to it, it is that she is a warning to us: the augurs have never meant well. We must not allow their signs and wonders to trick us.”

At that, the doors swing open, introducing a stallion who strides in with a solemn gait. This unicorn’s yellow coat shines like the sun under the lunar rays. A bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee is his cutie mark: a breakfast pony, his parents half-joked during his colthood.

“Ah, Helios Cereal!” There is no weak smile to tarnish her mutterings; most of her teeth twinkle under the moonlight. She then mutters, “He always has something good to cheer us up just like cold water for a pony stuck in the desert.”

“Dawnie!” The proud declaration stops him at a distance; pause for dramatic effect as is tradition. The blush, too, that used to accompany Luster when she used to hear that nickname all the time—it still appears now and then for how silly it sounds.

“Why, yes, Mister Cereal?” A chipper voice for a chipper pony faced with the relief of something uplifting.

“I’ve got some bad news, Dawnie!”

Her ears perk. This is unusual. Either a proxy would send bad news or some other pony entirely would have done it herself. It would not—should not—be Cereal right here in the flesh. It should not be him spreading negativity just like the others, this good companion of hers, this companion number… she forgets. Must have been four digits at least.

Luster’s stately head leans forward. “What is the bad news? And why do I have a bad feeling about this? I mean… you’ve never been much of a bad-news kind of pony.”

Cereal clears his throat which does not echo or bounce on the wooden walls. “I and my escorts came across a griffon lying sick within Equestria proper. I nursed her with my potions, but when she recovered, she induced me to sleep… and dream with her.”

Luster leans forward some more. Curiosity beckons her with its enticing talons.

“Long story short: there is somepony out there eating Equestrians’ dreams.”

She does not feel that a gasp is necessary to express her surprise: one instant blink would do. “Is that so? That would explain why I cannot dreamwalk so much these days. Still—“ she cocks her head in doubt; never had to do that before to Cereal “—how do you know that’s true? It could just be a fever dream. Maybe a hallucination… or maybe even pure mind control by a griffon trying to steal some of your gold.”

“I thought so too. That is, until I woke up.”

Leaning anymore would have made her fall over. She scoots forward, never leaving the throne but still having more of her body hang over the seat.

“I found myself awake, back in the real world, but the griffon didn’t wake up. Instead, I saw… a figure… a smoky figure just like what the pony ghouls usually turn into, but worse. They’re like... solid steam and smoke. It came out of the griffon just like that like it was burning!”

“I knew it!” and she turns to the side as if an adviser were there, but there is nothing but the wall across. “Perhaps this is the Dreden’s true form! Or maybe even its controller, the root of it all. Didn’t the augurs say something to us ‘evildoers’ that we’d fall into a perpetual sleep we’ll never wake up from? Maybe this is it!”

The full weight of her back rests on the tall cushion of her throne. “The augurs are desperate but effective. To summon or even form such abominations on their own—”

“She also spoke, Your Royal Highness.”

Her smug confidence takes its leave. Luster blinks again. “It speaks? Did it… say anything? Anything of importance?”

A cough comes to him. He looks up to her but not without a wheeze. “See… that’s the funny thing about it. What do you think it said?”

The gears in her brain, always on all cylinders, go into overdrive, searching for a sensible explanation that would be easy to convey to simpletons like her ever-loyal Cereal. After a few seconds of thoughtful but productive humming, she looks back down at her special servant. “I assume it is not too smart and that it just explained its modus operandi: It would go out and put ponies to sleep and suck their life force while they’re unconscious, either rendering them catatonic when they wake up or trapping them in the dream world until they die of natural causes.”

“Exactly. And you know what her name—“

She stands up for the first time this Evening Court, nettling the interrupted Cereal. “I propose that we should fortify the dreamscape. I have enough dream spell-machines to have oneiric sentries work in shifts. Of course, they’ll have to follow the guidelines I’ll put up over the next week or so. I will teach them how to enter and exit dreams discreetly as well as—“

“Luster, you’re doing it again.”

Such an improper attitude! During Evening Court, even! But serene is she, at least on the outside, as the princess looks down with one word coming out of her mouth: “What?”

“You’re ignoring me again, Luster.”

Those eyes bore into her. Cereal is right.

Luster brings her head up, her muzzle set like flint. “I must apologize, Cereal, but I have to let every pony know what the standards shall be when I let them into the dream world. Nothing like this has been done before, and I want to be sure that absolutely nothing goes wrong.”

Cereal shakes his head like a teacher disappointed in his student saying the wrong answers for too long. “You’re missing the point here, Luster.”

She raises her ears, spotting none of the royal addresses in his speech. Even the affectionate nickname is gone. “And what point would that be?”

His eye contact is sustained, looking at her closer and closer, staring at her for too long so she gets agitated. “The point would be that she has a name.”

Luster leans back on her throne again to rest from the stress, in wonder at Cereal’s weird behavior: first the news, now his eyes and bad attitude. And the smoke too.

She continues as normal: “We’ve had so many monsters naming themselves in order to terrify us more. Even then, it’s all self-descriptive in some old language: the Dreden, the Ofnau, the Katakot. What is so special about this one?”

“She… and it’s not just she.”

He digs his bushy eyebrows deeper into his head. They are like firearms from when Equestria was still powerful enough to produce them en masse against the constant terrors from the underworld—yet, now, they do not protect the princess. They have her in their sights.

“She keeps saying your name, Luster Dawn.”

The princess merely blinks again, though this time with less haste, resembling vexed boredom rather than surprise. “So?”

Cereal takes another step forward, past wary guards with weapons close at hoof. The sky whistles quietly like something is falling, but the princess’s soldiers pay too much attention to the royal’s well-being.

“It told me your true nature, Luster. Ah, it’s not just that: it told me my true nature as well.”

A string of smoke bleeds through his teeth in the shape of spirals, and that is enough for Luster to sit up on her throne and light up her horn with an explosive spark. “Look! If that is the augur’s creation coming out of your mouth… you are falling right into their hooves! They’ve altered your mind! They’re… using you!”

His mad grin portrays no true joy at his own words nor any true care for the soldiers creeping up on him. “I don’t think so. It showed me who I used to be.”

“Past lives, I presume.” It is said in an attempt to throw him off, to project her power against this unknown factor. “You know that I don’t believe in reincarnation, Mister Cereal.”

“Does Summer Wheat ring a bell?”

The name.

Summer Wheat.

That name.

Everything else escapes her. The smoke coming out of him, the guards slowly surrounding him, the fact that she is in serious danger: these escape her mind, as her brain falls back to… to….

“Back when we had to deal with the Terror, Luster, when we faced the seers and I was there in the Occult Spring—“

It is the straw that breaks the princess’s back.

She springs forward from her throne and lands on her hooves, still raised high over her subject. “The Occult Spring?! Y-you aren’t supposed to know that!... but the Terror? I don’t… I don’t remember… no, you must be crazy….“

“Or what about when I was Solar Field and we had to deal with the land dissolving into lava while fire rained from the skies, all while the prophets tell us to turn or burn?”

The name, that name, this name everything else took refuge in. Multiple names now. Tip of the tongue—she just knows she’s met him before in some other time, some other place.

“What about Lumen Kernel? Or Daylight Spring? Or Light Seed? Atom Speck? Or even—”

“I apologize, but your sanity must be leaving you,” blathers the princess with renewed clarity of mind, focused on neutralizing the threat before her. “The events you speak of have never happened. In addition, I have encountered similar names but never the ones you’ve mentioned.“

He grins a toothy smile. Smoke comes out in such volume that there may as well be a fire burning in him. “You’re dodging the question. Maybe you’re having a hard time getting this… so let me make this easier to understand.”

His teleport spell brings him to the foot of the princess. Guards fly at him, stopping inches short of poking him with their spears. Now, he is surrounded by lethal spear tips. One wrong move from Cereal and he would be skewered to death.

“I know your true nature, Luster. The constant déjà vu, me being too familiar with you, how you seem to dive into dreamwalking too much to test things out, these monsters always converging on some version of Canterlot, always saving you for last….”

His eyes narrow, confident and smug, searching Luster as if the guards mean nothing: a vulnerable, cowering Luster Dawn whose eyes shiver at the threads about to be unraveled.

“The Occult Spring has a reset spell, right?”

Luster could not stop herself: “That is completely classified information!”

His replying chuckle reveals flames coming out of his mouth. “Makes sense for you. You never trusted your companions anyway. What a shame for the so-called Princess of Friendship….

“The one before all of us in this line of companions—my spiritual forefather, if you will—came to you, to help you cope with the death of your once royal mentor. This… all of this companionship meant a pony who trusted in you, who could be with you, who could just hang out with you and have fun as simple ponies under the sun. But now, you yourself do not trust even me.”

“You’re certainly not helping your case right now!” Luster is right: the darkening smoke oozing out of him proves the princess’s case as the cackles of dark-magic fire rage inside him. Maybe the augurs finally caught him, this poor companion, in a moment of weakness, no matter how careful he tried to be.

But he keeps smirking madly. “You’ve failed… you’ve failed your companions. You did not tell us, did not trust us….”

He gestures at the stained glass windows on the walls, the windows depicting Princess Luster Dawn standing in the way of monsters and defeating each and every evil force that has come with it. The hallway stretches endlessly with them.

They were not there seconds before.

“How much of this history is real, anyway?” he asks as a flourish to his gesture.

Luster stops herself from retreating back to her throne in bewilderment. “How are you doing that?! You’re not supposed to do that! That’s dark magic! You’re… you’re using dark magic on me?!”

“A mistake, hm?” he goes without acknowledging her words. “Or a glitch, ah?” He does not notice the moonlight flickering on and off for a second. “Maybe I wasn’t supposed to remember. Maybe I’ve become an echo of other ponies in past resets… or maybe I was literally just born five minutes ago with false memories, and that is just too short a time to fit thousands of years in.

“So, here’s what I want to know, Miss Luster Dawn: why don’t you tell us any of this? Why don’t you trust us?”

Her jaw locks. Thoughts build up into a frothing mass, never forming into good words behind her grit teeth. They would spill into a mess, a bile of insults or excuses: that much she knows. The emergency plan is discovered and ruined. What else would they do to her when the ponies start siding with Wheat here?… no, it’s Helios Cereal… right? If that is the case, then there is only hope for a quick and painless death for everyone else.

“Your Royal Highness!” screeches a guard, scared eyes upward. “The sky!”

All eyes turn to witness, and Luster gasps as she too is a witness to the sight above. Darkness takes over the horizon against the tranquil night’s blue and purple to blot out the stars. It hangs over the moon so that it becomes red, its glimmer becoming crimson.

Bells, clarions, and gongs ring in cacophony. Lightning zaps in the sky even though there are no clouds. The black shadows of ponies outside, cast by the red light of the moon, gallop and flee and scream in panic. From the top, like a ringing bell, are rumbles: rocks fall off the ridges which themselves are breaking up and collapsing.

Her horn bright one more time, Luster removes all the windows, thrusting everyone into the dark for the lanterns have been snuffed of their light. “Stay here! I will take care of this once and for all!”

“No, Luster!” bellows a dark voice.

Luster notices then the growing form of the pony calling her: the deteriorated form of Cereal, dark-magic smoke becoming the sole energy propping him up. The smoke ghoul glows with power, sparkling with electricity zooming around him. “You usurper! You are the Dreden! You are its servant, you are—“

She zaps him and he falls to the ground, his horn broken into pieces as he shrieks in pain. Blood-curdling enough is his cry for everyone’s ears to flatten.

Luster Dawn zaps herself and disappears in a teleport.

In her place, the throne has been lit on fire by the spell, leaving the guards to fend for themselves in the collapsing castle. The ceiling breaks and the boulders crush them and her throne.

It is all blurry, but her vision begins to focus.

Green. That is the first thing Luster can tell with her eyes: a filter of gray green all around her, not unlike visiting a graveyard by a forest at night or one of the abandoned swamps in the South-East.

Her eyes recovering into more focus, she could make out outlines in the mist: bookshelves, bookcases galore—infinite, stretching on forever. Her mind reminds her that a spell might have been cast here recently. Her ears rise up and swivel—there are things, many things, hitting the ground.

The blur falls from her eyes so that she can see the contents of the shelves. They burst out of them, some already glowing, streetlights in the dark, pushing out of their spots and falling onto the floor.

Luster navigates the shelves drunkenly: her hooves are clumsy as her energy drains away but, bit by bit, returning. The books and scrolls tumble in her gravel slow gait, the pages and even the covers quickly turning into dust under her hooves.

Shining down yonder is a beam of light against a silhouette. Something shines there, raised on a pedestal, with a long shadow caused by a solitary ray of light stretching to the ceiling… wherever that is, for she could discern only eternal mist above her. She refocuses on the pedestal and the mysterious item on it. It must be important, or else a great light would not have graced it in this… in this here…

Occult Spring.

Weary legs stumble toward the light and its silhouette. An earthquake tosses her to the floor and launches books and scrolls and artifacts flying to the ground, flying straight at her, attacking her while the earth cracks. Artifacts of glass shatter against her coat, scarring her skin in cuts, but the pain merely wakes her up in an agonizing cry. It takes her all to not trip on some errant scroll or magic item. They all glow, pulsating like a dulled heartbeat: they all light her path forward.

For each step, the tiles welcome the returning princess. Her mind, muddled. The mist obscures ever further but for the straight path. To Luster’s relief, the light and its shadow still come nearer as expected.

The mist parts like a holy sea, and there she is. The light and its silhouetted mystery revealed: a scroll on a pedestal. It is a can of long, glittering paper. No letters on it; she can see such from this far off: nothing but lines and curves shooting everywhere. It is like television static but frozen and possessing the entire color spectrum.

A summon of her magic brings her closer via teleport. No need for trotting on so intoxicated and drunk with a banging headache. She then catches the scroll in her failing magic grip.

The earth shakes, throwing her balance off and making her legs buckle. The scroll leaves in her unfocus, plummeting to the ground. Iron determination instilled in her mind, she leans down, eye on the scroll: it is still there, now in her grip again, trying to levitate it back to the light. She hopes, begs to understand the babble, the indecipherable alphabet if it could even be called that. In her panting, she takes a whiff of it: it smells like honey, but her stomach churns. She could feel vomit coming on.

Another poof. Her eyes and ears direct themselves to the source of the mysterious sound she did not make: notebooks, having just fallen from thin air, lying scattered on the pedestal.

A notebook gets caught in her magic, floating into a better angle. Under the light and on the cover is her cutie mark. A glance at them: her cutie mark on all of the notebooks, that familiar glimmering sunburst over a great ocean. With a teleported notebook brought to her hooves, she pries the old volume open.

It begins with a greeting from Luster Dawn, though Luster does not remember these words. Something about being taught how to dreamwalk thanks to Princess Twilight not long after the ascension and coronation of her most faithful student. Not long after is a record of personal and private writings: some dreams, some nightmares, some secrets from her best friends, some experiments in the dreamscape where nobody can get harmed.

On the last page is pegged a danger. Something wicked has befallen Equestria again. Never says what it is: just the disaster. Hegemonic conquest, civil war, mass starvation, plain death with a dash of pestilence, magic failing, fires burning: all hypothetical scenarios in her head as to what the disaster might be, yet they all speak to her, all ring that sense ofdéjà vu to her.

Written on the last page is this: I will sleep on it. Will dream of a solution somehow. Inspiration strikes at a moment’s notice, after all, even when one is not awake. Hopefully.

The notebook slips from her magic.

The rest of the notebooks are mostly the same. Longer or smaller, pages taken out or forced in: they are all the same length, all devolving from ordinary dream journals into warnings and safety plans for Equestria eternal, with so many plans and standard operating procedures….

Did you know of these things? Did I know of these things? Why do you tell me things I don’t know? Or maybe half know? Is this some kind of illusion?

Luster rattles at the various words she does not recall writing, but they ring too many bells in her mind. Then, the final page of the final notebook comes up: a disaster has befallen Equestria, and it is called the Dreden, but no memory of writing these words come to mind.

I knew it! I shouldn’t be able to remember this… funny that remembering is bad… but this is not good. All the signs are here… and all the memories. Is that what Cereal meant by my constant déjà vu?

It must be the reset spell! It’s failing!

“It’s not.”

The heart pounds at the new but hoarse, old voice. Slowly, she turns around.

Standing in the mist, only his long, narrow, lanky silhouette could be seen. The silhouette is disjointed in this or that part of his body, never making sense to Luster’s logical fancy.

Though it is her first time meeting him in so many millennia, she’s heard the stories and read the tales to know who this stranger is. Alicorn memory can be quite durable.

“I thought you’d never leave Fluttershy’s side.” Luster’s accent falters as she tries to sound authoritative. “If she were alive, she would be mad that you left her stony self to be alive again.”

The figure rubs his appendages vigorously. “Maybe this world’s Discord is like that, but I’m not of this world.”

He takes a few steps closer, but the silhouette never fades into color. It remains a darkened filled outline of the draconequus.

“You must be from a previous reset, then, Discord.”

His head tilts, the mist obscuring a grin or a frown. “Yes and no. I am from a previous... thing… and, let’s say that it is so previous, there is nothing else that precedes it.”

It sends her head into a frenzy, trying to process the statement but never getting anything sensible. “What are you saying? Did I reset, then? I did reset, right?So… what is the nature of this reset? The… they must be failing, right? Did I make a mistake? I… I shouldn’t be able to remember the previous resets. I-it should cause a pile-up and the world would be destroyed before it even began! I—”

Words and questions fail her, so she points an accusing hoof at the spirit of chaos. “If you can get in, then what about the disasters of previous worlds? Argh!”

Luster stomps a hoof and pain stabs her leg. It does not just buckle: there is complete decay, joint pain beyond medication, with a broken bone tossed in. No scream; at least she is strong enough to hold it in. Yet, in the searing misery, she whimpers, “I’m not even supposed to remember….”

“Oh, but you are remembering.” Another curious tilt of his head, and the lavender smell—that smell she has not noticed in this room for so long—disappears. “As an immortal, I find the halls of memory and the act of remembering very beneficial in the long run. Helps bring about reflection and change, and you know how much I like change.”

He lowers himself, honing in on her from behind. Unseen and hidden from her sight, he grabs her ear, and whispers close in guttural growl:

“But you’re not... immortal.”

“Of course, Discord.” She keeps a straight face despite the scorching pain. “I just… live long.”

“So says the mare who’s lived longer than the old princesses combined. You are… what, 401,365 years old?” He takes out a calculator to calculate, but then he crushes it in his claw. “That’s more than enough to burn your birthday cake. Surely more than enough to make Celestia and Luna jealous… if they cared for that sort of thing when they were alive.”

He hovers back into the mist’s obscurity. His claw and talon knead each other as his head finally comes into view, those uneven eyes taking a gander at her broken and pained form. Lying in pain, Luster remembers all the protocols to activate if Discord would turn his back on Equestria for good: watch out for any snap of that talon, for any odd thing going on in the world.

But there is nothing, save for the calculator—he might have even brought it down here like any teleporting unicorn would. The only odd thing is Discord himself silently watching her in this sick staring game.

Something clicks in her head. Something is wrong.

“Discord, you’re… different today.”

His dark laugh says the yes. “Expecting some flair from your old pal, weren’t you? Sorry to disappoint, Miss Luster, but extravagance all the time would make me predictable and boring. More importantly, though, it would make me funny, and this is no time to be funny, considering the circumstances topside.”

“… topside?”

Discord taps on his wrist. A wrist watch counts down. The milliseconds fall fast.

“You should be back in a jiffy thanks to somepony slapping your face. Normally, with this sort of thing, a second should take a mere few minutes, but with how deep you’ve gone, though… heh. You’ve lived here long enough to make the five-second rule a historical era all on its own, complete with world wars and trading disagreements. There’ll be a lot for you to deal with when you come home, to say the least… and, of course, I’ll spare you the details, as usual.”

“You’re not making sense!” She runs over the tired bags under her eyes, not noticing that they have not been there before. “A full second’s already past and nothing’s happened!”

A single laugh shoots through Discord’s irregularly toothed mouth. “Oh, Luster Dawn, you are so dense and in more ways than one. If the death of your friends didn’t crack your thick skull, not to mention Celestia and Luna passing on, then the death of your dear Twilight would have done the trick and knocked some sense into you, especially since she chose the nobler path of letting life run its natural course. Considering that your life has gone beyond what’s natural anyway, I guess you’ve got no sense left.”

The talons on his claw curl. For the first time in too long, the mare’s ears flatten. A snap is to come.

“Well… you do remind me of somepony. Your mother, actually….”

“What does my mother have to do with this?!” Luster yells, but even that weakens her throat which already writhes in pain.

His chuckle drips like viscous fluid. “Before I met your mother, she had an obsession for control, enough to have a cult of her own in the hinterlands. Even went to controlling time too, if for a short while… so, I guess the Lack-Luster Dawn doesn’t fall far from the tree of a certain Starlight Glimmer, hm?”

Another rumble comes to the floor and she falls. Her vision blurs; the Discord in her eyes is doubling—multiplying in her sight. Could not roar against Discord for disparaging her mother, for her throat is tightened in aching.

“You can’t run away forever, Miss Dawn.” The talons uncurl without a snap. “They’ll be happy to see you when it’s all over. That’s the last favor I shall ask of you, if you can: say hi to them for me… especially Fluttershy, of course.”

The draconequus disappears. No fade, no suddenly existing door to leave through. He is, simply, not anymore.

There is silence for a while, leaving Luster Dawn by the notebooks and the useless forgotten scroll.

The world then enters its death throes.

Dust and pebbles slip from the dying bedrock ceiling. Boulders from above smash the bookshelves like dominoes: they fall on each other, their ancient contents dwindling into dust. Their dust fills the air. The mist turns to dust too, rising to clear the whole place.

She tries to stand up in the tremor, but her limp legs make her stagger and fall back down. She tries to flap or hover: the wings do not respond for they are flint hard, never unfolding. She forces all the force in her head to come to her horn, to commit to one last spell, but it only dies in sparkles. It numbs, losing sensation.

Bookshelves die away in the distance, fading from existence as the pitch black darkness approaches from all sides. Cracks on the floor increase, chunks of ground floating away from her as if from a leper, in disgust. Each chunk reveals nothing: just the blackness of non-existence. This nothingness draws near, consuming everything, until it is all that surrounds Luster.

All that is left for her is her atoll of pedestal, books, herself, and scroll. She and her numb, inanimate self.

A cold, scathing wind clutches the scroll in its hands and takes it away from her. The freeze flings itself upon her shivering state as the atoll gives away.

The princess finally falls into the black void of oblivion.

Blink.

She blinks too many times; she does not see much. What she does catch are split-second images of fire, red, orange, death, screams, excruciating pain—as if they are phasing through her, waking up multiple times without rest, always feeling like she is falling.

Then, there is nothing, the blackness given by closed eyes.

She feels herself: the cold of her hooves. She cannot move. The rest of her body is the same way. Tries to move her wings, but she could not: they are all under some pressure. Her horn...

Half of it is not there.

She tries to scream, but pathetic muffles come out. Gagged and taped. Rough itchy fibers hug her in death grips.

More blinking comes through before she finally gets the strength to keep those eyes open.

“She’s awake. Good.” That is a low, angry whisper.

The scent of mint behind her, something rough scraping her back. Gravity does not feel right, feels upside-down. The rest of her bodily senses wake up with her, now detecting the ropes around her barrel, her wings, and her legs. Could not move them an inch without the rope greeting her with their iron control.

Something at stake: a stake. She realizes that the thing she is lying on is a stake. She is tied to a stake; she is condemned to the stake. The stake faces up, and so does she.

The night sky. Its stars twinkle; they blink back at her while they die down in the cool breeze of the coming morning. A brightening pink conquers the expanse, although the yellow of sunrise threatens an overthrow from below. Where the sun would emerge, there over the ocean she is approaching, the stars dim as if they are ashamed.

The flicking of her ears register the noises: lots of mumbling, lots of hushed chatter, and many hoofsteps too. It is an exodus of many hooves. To color her soundscape, there are whimpers, insults, crying, and admonitions to the whole party to keep quiet.

“Hey, the bedlam’s awake!”

The ruckus grows from there. Thrown objects or bone-breaking indignities are not its weapons. It is the rise of murmurs, of questions for her, accusations against her. Her ears register nothing sensible: they mesh into something incoherent, like the smoke of a sinking ship in the horizon.

“We’re here, everypony! Set it down!”

Everything jerks to a halt, and she jerks to a halt with it: her vision interrupted, shaking her head until it is dizzy. She turns her head just in time to vomit onto the dusty ground as the stake re-orients. Somepony shouts at her to clean up after herself, to “be like the princess you used to be, you dimwit!”

The stake falls into place. So do the traveling audience staring at her dumb-founded as she jerks again with the stake’s sudden stop, vomiting again and feeling dizzier by the moment. Her onlookers’ mouths are politely open in shock. Beyond, behind her, lies nothing but unending ocean. There is nowhere to run to at the end of this road.

Ponies in plain robes trot forward from the spectators’ small semi-circle of a crowd. Their leaders, most likely, according to what is left of Luster’s logic. The scribe writes furiously on a scroll for posterity, to record this execution.

The robed figure in the center takes out his own scroll from his clothes, levitating it before his eyes. There is no quill for this prosecutor to write on, and he brings on his glasses to read from it. His scraggly beard screams age, wisdom, and moral authority.

“Before we go through the charges, Luster Dawn, do you remember what brought you here?”

On a stake by you guys, Luster Dawn stupidly thought.

Her chambers of memory fill with gross fog. Just woke up, anyway. The brain must wash itself of sleep’s grime, the cobwebs that mire in the mechanism after long disuse: in the cabinet to collect dust until the universe dies—and here she is, trying to scrub it away with a mere sponge, with nothing but being on a stake and the premonition of dying.

“When Equestria needed you the most, you have been found in deep sleep within a hoard of dreamwalking magic and technology. The notes found in your possession say that it was to buy yourself enough time to solve the crisis, yet you never woke up even when we had to storm the castle to get to you. Not even on the way here either until just minutes ago.”

Please disbelieve him! The gag allows her no word. Angry and blank faces stare at her, ask her more questions without words as they attempt to decipher what madness this madmare on the stake has pulled of.

“Further investigation of your testing facilities reveal literal skeletons in the closet. Autopsies showed that they have been exhausted via necromancy magic. Needless to say, the evidence points to you as the perpetrator of this, all for the reason of immorally extending your life, which we have gathered from your journals in your private study yesterday.”

Within reason! I needed more time! Ponies would need me! They need somepony to guide them! They are like sheep with no one to herd them!

“You’ve stated in your private journals that it is all to ensure Equestria’s safety… at the expense of preventing somepony new, somepony more in line with the times and their citizens, to look after it. That we have not found a single succession plan authored by you says a lot.

“Not to mention that you constantly ignored us, even your very own counselors and advisors, most recently telling us that not a single one of us knows anything, that only you hold wisdom to lead ponykind, claiming that since you were the Princess of Friendship after all, you, and here I quote, ‘totally got this because I know everything about friendship,’ also claiming that you were Equestria’s final princess since it is implied that you believe no one can be fit enough to succeed you. In addition, let us not talk about the ‘unfortunate accidents’ on your advisors and council members, accidents on whom have increased within the last few years of your reign….”

It’s the only way! How else can I solve a failing world? There are too many variables when I let someone else take the throne, and—

“In short: you trust no one.”

Luster’s thoughts fall dead in this silent twilight before the sun must rise.

The stony gaze of the accuser, the judge, the jury—the executioner too, given the stake—that gaze cuts her across, stops her heart for a morsel of time. Her heart burns, its blood boiling, its blood rising—the thought of death crashing onto her life.

“You trust no one to lead for you. You have isolated yourself. You have put yourself on a pedestal where no one can touch you, where you cannot be reasoned with for you have brought yourself so high that nopony understands you… and you understand nopony. The consequences of these I have already laid out, and they are abhorrent for any decent pony, much less a princess.

“Thus, you are sentenced to stake fire.”

Remembrances of best friends: search long and hard for them, for they are long dead, long turned into corpses that would have been reduced to dust were it not for the balms, the spices, the spells. There was nopony like them before, nopony like them after, not even after she upgraded the School of Friendship to a full-blown university city. Luster tried searching for such like-minded souls, but nothing came up.

When the guilty sentence is pronounced, she does not notice or she has stopped caring. Surrounded by many to die alone. They talk about forming an assembly of unicorns to raise and lower the celestial bodies like in pre-Equestria times.

“… until we find Harmony’s next chosen: preferably an alicorn just like Twilight Sparkle, somepony who can trust and can be trusted… unlike that cursed Luster Dawn who has faltered at the end.”

Inferior to Twilight.

Her spirit would be chastising this least faithful ex-princess by now.

Firewood is hauled over to the base of the stake. They would’ve enjoyed the fire: at the fireplace, warming up over the winter, when they were still alive, when she was undoubtedly there with them, chilling over s’mores and other sorts of sugary delights. Best friends and all that.

The logs pile up, each thunk resounding into ripples. Why blame them? They’re decent ponies. Just desperate, just angry at her, and rightly so. Luster’s friends learned a lesson together with her, that same lesson to please live in the moment, stop Twilighting or whatever the term was for worrying too much from her dear teacher, for being anxious too much.

The audience merely watches the prologue to the greatest show of death: the live demise of a princess. This is no entertaining horror show; it is only the sickly fascination and the consoling solace of watching justice meted out upon a tyrant.

There are no insults hurled out by the audience. There are only questions whirling in their mind: Why? Why did you do this to us? Why did you leave us like this? Were we not your faithful citizens, your little ponies? Were we not worthy of your trust and your love?

During one of her studying trips in the Canterlot Archives, she learned of the more merciful practice of burning someone at the stake. The subject would have plenty of dry leaves stuck onto them. Thus, when the fire is set at the foot of the stake, the whole body would burn almost at the same time, quickly causing death by suffocation since the leaves would be everywhere including their nose and mouth.

This knowledge tortures her, for she wishes such a quick death, for the shame to end in a minute. Instead, she is raised up as an object of evil, to be purged from this world.

The torch lights up, illuminating everything in dim orange. The flame catches her in its allure like fire against moths. Caught in the magic of somepony, it is bestowed upon the firewood at the base of the stake.

The crackle starts, its killing heat crawling up to her hind hooves. Seconds twist into agonizing minutes and, already, she would scream at the flames turning her over to death. Her voice, drained and then gone after several minutes of screaming, is enough to cause a wince from a spectator once in a while.

A sea of fiery needles slowly floods her body, scaling her, scorching her from hindlegs to flank where the sun of her cutie mark burned, and then onto the rest of the body as her organs—all her bodily systems—shut down in the torment.

Hades: the place below, the eternal darkness, the screaming, the lack of rest. Immortal worms torture the dead in their second death from which there is no rest.

To think that she was an angel, that she would bring about a golden age in her eternal royalty, that friendship would be perfected under her almighty gaze and control.

Fire catches her heart, her eyes, her brain. The many minutes unravel into agonizing seconds at the threshold of life.

And then, her spirit is released.

When they could tell their friend was coming, Twilight told Luster’s closest companions to stay behind and at least let her welcome the newcomer herself. It would be a personal, heartwarming reunion between mentor and student.

In the Elysian Fields, the now deceased Twilight Sparkle flies over vast golden fields of endless wheat, fruit, and vegetables. Rivers of milk and honey flow by abundant towns everywhere, where friendship is the rule forevermore, where creatures could be with each other—could enjoy each other—for eternity.

She stops.

Over there, at the edge of the landmass, is the rest of the sky. Despite her tremendously long stay here, she still has not figured out whether the landmass is truly floating in the sky or if this is simply a really big sky hole. Such is the endless mystery of Elysium, something the studious pony welcomed with open forelegs.

But this she knows and is no mystery to her: creatures enter the Elysian Fields through here.

Her ears perk up: Luster Dawn is coming!

Twilight looks down the sky hole, ready to see her most cherished student rise to paradise and finally rejoin her motherly teacher, to be with her forever.

What surprises her is that she could not be found down there. She bends her head as low as possible but that does nothing. Only endless blue skies below.

What surprises her more is the screaming, not from the bottom but from the top. She looks up to see the source of the cry.

A pink dot. A flailing pink dot. No, that is definitely a pony up there.

Yet, falling from the sky, on the way to the depths down below? She winces whenever she hears a report of that: a cruel punishment that Destiny and Harmony would give to the worst offenders: to those who knew the truth so intimately and yet rejected it willingly, spat at its face, and walked away from it in open defiance—to let them know that they could have had paradise, that they were so close, and yet….

When Twilight recognizes the falling dot, she opens her wings and shoots up. Her heart pounds like a storm of anvils. Eyes begin to swell with tears too early.

The winds of the sky push her away, an invisible hurricane as she tries to get level with the forever condemned sinner before her. There, she could hear her screaming, see her flailing her legs about, begging for dear life to stop falling. The sinner looks out at the fields: tears could do nothing but snowball into a screaming howl at what she is missing, what she thought she deserved—

And then, their eyes met.

In the roar of the winds trying to shove her away, Twilight hovers with her, level with her as her student falls. The princess’s muzzle, downward in sorrow; her eyes already filled with hot burning tears of their own.

“… L-Luster?”

Luster could only stare at her. A waterfall of tears stains her cheeks at the sight of the princess, her beloved teacher—of Twilight Sparkle—in trauma.

I failed you….

And the winds hurtle Twilight back as Luster’s last three words in coherent thought die out. She lands on the ground without any grace, landing on her muzzle. Quickly recovering after massaging the pain on her face, she gallops over to the landmass’s edge.

Up there, no pony to be found. She looks down.

Her student falls evermore, the dot resembling her shrinking on, her scream diminishing with every second that passes.

A mid-air lick of flame turns into a fiery portal. It opens up to swallow her.

Luster Dawn would be seen no more.

Upon not hearing from the former princess for half an hour, Luster’s friends join up with Twilight’s companions to travel to the edge and find out what happened there.

What they find is a weeping Twilight Sparkle, her head looking down in a mix of terror and lamentation. Her tears fall off the edge, into the hole, and away from the fields of golds.

No portal shall give Luster in Hades those tears.

Author's Note

Afterthoughts.