Arc 5 – Ponies after all Chapter 3 – Folly

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Flower’s metal hoof kept treacherously sinking into the sand, rendering her gait a laboured hobble. Nevertheless, she forced the dunes, though not as much as out of grim determination. Since the young mare had hastily departed the meeting, a pair of eyes bored into the back of her head… not exactly eyes and not just two; Luna’s slitted irises served as a window—powerless to affect the shadows flickering beyond the turquoise curtains, able only to flutter from the tumult happening within.

Soon enough, the limping pony realised—for once she truly led the way but had no idea where they headed; that, and her limbs, already fed up with braving unstable grounds, threatened to bend on their own volition.

Rising a cloud of dust, she sat on the sand.

“Fuck,” Flower tartly commented on the situation and stared at the stygian blackness of the sky.

The night’s air mercilessly assaulted her, trying to sneak under her long-suffering suit; her travelling companion could be blamed for the frigidity as well. The darkness pressed from every direction and if Flower squinted, the shadows started to dance in a resemblance of some eerie waltz.

The source of all the phantasmagoria as if floated on inky waves of a calm sea—bulbous charcoal vaporous mass undulated from and around the alicorn. Flower shuddered at the sight—the insidious black waters could boil up into a desolating deluge and the vessel bearing the name of Luna would be but an empty shell destined to share that fate with every other creature calling that realm their own. The once promised Night Eternal possessed a modicum of hope—a delusion of deranged demigoddess would have eventually shattered under the weight of its own absurdity; the future portended by Nightmare was absolute—void.

Even the benighted desert infested by the darkness betwixt the stars offered enough to consider it something; maybe not brimming with beauty accessible to everyone, but still a place worth cherishing by those who knew what it might be instead. Flower dared not to imagine a world under Nightmare’s rule—unbearably cold and maddeningly empty, with shivering and shrivelled husks wailing in throes of debilitating horror born by their own mind, but given the chance to tumefy from a nagging whisper to the only thought echoing in the rime-crowned skulls.

Flower shook her head vigorously, whipping her muzzle with her unkempt mane. Proximity to Luna messed up with her head in more ways than just infusing it with the poison of severe paranoia; the aghast mare would have said her imagination ran wilder than she thought it possible, but she had a better answer—those were simply Luna’s nightmares… or Nightmare’s dreams oozing out.

That knowledge still failed to banish desperation from her voice as she whispered to herself as much as to Luna, “How long do we have left?”

Aquiver, Flower filled her lungs with the searing air—with that sweet beautiful air of the realm still with light and warmth in it. She then tried to meet the eyes of the one who had summoned the end of the world, within whom germinated their demise. Two pools of tar dripping shadows on the sand below held her gaze.

The darkness abated, letting just as eternal sadness take its place; drops of regret fell on the desert’s susurrating surface.

“I can’t tell,” Luna answered, defeated; the swirls of black fog gingerly lowered her onto the ground and she sagged under the gravity of her mistake.

“You’re lying,” Flower deadpanned; tired—tired of being angry and despairing, of not knowing if she should fear Luna or herself.

“Nightmare is consuming my mind, so I can’t tell when something I should remember is gone,” the alicorn retorted with a note of irritation in her subdued voice.

Not bothering to acknowledge the sense—a concerning truth—appearing in Luna’s words, Flower carefully noted, “You remembered her.”

The skin taut on Luna’s skull and her sunken eyes nearly bereaved the ancient mare of the ability to express any emotion; the deteriorating state of her body and the sardonic smile endowed her with one visage—of a rabid dog breathing its last. Only the alicorn’s eyes retained the ability to reflect her inner state… whenever Nightmare didn’t blot out the embrasures of that besieged stronghold.

Luna closed her eyes.

“You do remember she is dead, right?” Flower’s question came out as a cloud of vapour.

As long as one sister recalled the other one, Nightmare had yet to truly conquer the last bastion. But, at times, the borders of that memory seemed to be concerningly vague.

“Yes, I…” The alicorn flinched from the cruel reminder only for her features to soften a heartbeat later, if slightly and briefly—her laden with pain voice rustled no louder than the sand, “That moment it didn’t seem so. For a moment I forgot and it was no Nightmare… and Celestia, my Tia, was alive… if only for a moment”

Before she realised what she was doing, Flower reached for a certain memory too, only to find a hole in the shape of two adult ponies—a mare and a stallion; the void she tore in her mind—Flower was her own Nightmare. Though, unlike Luna, she would remain sane as long as she let oblivion reign.

Oblivious to moisture gathering in the corners of Flower’s eyes, Luna continued to patter, “She would have known how to help me. She was always smart… smarter…”

Seeking escape from herself, Flower grasped those words, but they only reminded her of a young mare who was smarter than her—Geode Gleam; how her friend warned her again and again, but the mechanic didn’t listen and against all logic sought to fill the voluntary gap in her memory with a fake of metal and gems. Maybe if she acted reasonably, she wouldn’t have ended up in the company of a monster, risking turning into one… nor would have created another trying to cheat herself.

Screwing her eyes shut and hissing, Flower aimed her thoughts at a past much less distant; finally, a distraction appeared.

“Which one did you take for Celestia?” she wondered aloud.

Whilst it was obvious with a young white alicorn who had a Sun for her cutie mark, her companion bearing the bones of an alicorn—Celestia’s most likely—could have appeared differently in Luna’s madness-tinged sight.

Luna tilted her head. “Which… one?”

“Yeah, there were two… ponies?”

Flower ultimately decided to count the equine-like thing as a pony, though it had more in common with the features Luna gained due to her amalgamation with Nightmare. Confusion accompanied the memory of the eerie horse—it emanated an aura of familiarity suffocating Flower, yet nothing suggested she should know Ash’s ‘friend’.

“I only saw my sister,” Luna replied, blinking slowly.

Perhaps, Luna saw beyond appearance, gazing into the arcane essences of Ash and the bone-wearing equine. Flower couldn’t stand in judgement on that matter, so she murmured, “Nevermind.” Then asked more clearly, “Do you think you can hold on for another week or two?”

Sanity glimpsed brighter in Luna’s eyes; the shadows flickering in her pupils grew thicker, too.

“Seeing my sister again let a lot of memories resurface, to become sharp… painful. But that ache is a good sign.”

“I take that as a yes.”

The alicorn abstained from commenting, absorbed in her bittersweet recollections. Although Flower shook her head in dismay, she didn’t dare to press further—too exhausted to delve deeper into Luna’s riven consciousness. Heaving out a sorrowful sigh, she stared at the sky.

The twinkling stars quickly put her into a trance and Flower’s eyelids began to droop.

“Why?” Luna asked abruptly.

“Huh?”

A pair of predatory eyes watched the young mare with unsettling intensity. Their owner clarified, “What do you need two weeks for?”

Flower looked away. “Well, definitely not to follow the Machine Goddess’ idiotic plan. What do you think of it?”

“That golem imagined she knows my Moon,” Luna snorted. “It served me as a prison for a good reason—nothing but a barren orb of regolith and dust; the latter, mind you, is deadly—tiny razor-sharp shards. My… Our palace still stands proud above the desolate planes and seas of lethal powder; I wish the best of luck to whoever foolishly tries to venture inside its majestic halls, for my paranoia and boredom rendered every stone of that place a trap.”

Luna’s voice gradually gained qualities rarely intrinsic to it. Dry and concise, it carried a note of disgust shadowed by remorse and pride fighting both. Clarity, alien to her commonly fogged gaze, appearing in her eyes accompanied that change and it wasn’t just superficial.

“You haven’t answered my question,” the former Princess noted, squinting at Flower.

The mare squirmed under the piercing look—even without Nightmare’s influence, Luna had no trouble getting under one’s skin.

Still not ready to fully explain herself, Flower tried another half-truth. “Is there a way to kill Nightmare?”

The stars seemed to jitter—so boisterously titters of amusement burst from the alicorn’s lungs; tears rolled down Luna’s cheeks whilst her eyes stared ahead, frozen in horror.

Eventually, the ancient equine regained control.

“Is there a way to kill a thought?” she rasped hopelessly.

“Well, you need to stop thinking,” Flower voiced the first thought that came to her mind.

Once more she turned away from Luna—unable to stand the meaningful resigned look and her sad smile.

“That is the way—Night is eternal and I am not,” the alicorn uttered with a heavy sigh. “My only regret is how my death is going to lack any grace—whereas my sister perished fighting for what she loved, I will die struggling with the consequences of my hatred and leave behind something much more terrible than any horror that has ever existed.”

Just as the Sun had to set, so did the Moon; Flower couldn’t deny the reality, but neither did she wish to acknowledge it, especially right now—discussing the inescapable promised as much joy as self-reflection.

Thankfully, she had a legitimate way to avoid both.

“I’m off to sleep,” she brusquely announced and simply let her body fall into the coarse embrace of sand.

Surprisingly, over the last decade, Flower had never suffered a nightmare, but neither her sleep could be ever called fulfilling. She always woke up drained and with a lingering sensation of opening her eyes a mere heartbeat before something utterly wrong had transpired. As if she had slept within a dwelling with its entrances barricaded and her return to the waking world coincided with the barred doors and windows surrendering to the intruder.

However, this time, the blame for her premature awakening belonged not to Luna’s parasite, but to a comparatively mundane reason—a series of ear-splitting screams echoing above the moonlit desert.

The process of elimination combined with intuition suggested those howls of agony belonging to Ash; having marched out from the meeting she and her creepy friend seemed to be stuck in the desert, despite the former having a set of wings—the tiny like a candle fire flickering in the distance betrayed their presence.

Such an accompaniment created a questionable background for resuming rest, even for someone used to sleeping with an otherworldly menace in the cellar, so Flower reluctantly got up, mumbling, “At least, they’re having fun.”

With the horizon gilded by the dawn’s advent, she might as well try her luck at charting her course; though the abating darkness would do nothing to help someone who had almost no idea of her destination’s exact location, to begin with.

Nevertheless, she climbed the nearest tall barchan and peered at the constellations or, rather, one particular star that would guide the insomniac mare to her destiny.

Perhaps, the fate of the entire world would be resolved there. Or maybe not. The last time Flower involved herself in matters of a grand scale, she nearly died and when everything was said and done—only made things worse.

Now she had a chance to fix that, no matter how fat; maybe she would even die this time, but at least she would die trying to make the world a better place.

Imbued with grim resolve, she headed back to the improvised ‘camp’.

The alicorn’s retainers had formed a protective circle around their mistress; though the hierarchy could be debated, depending on who actually controlled the unfading echoes of the Lunar Guard. Regardless, the mare, almost hidden by their spectral forms, twitched in her sleep; the blackness ebbed from her to coalesce into scintillating stallions and Luna lay denuded from the shadows that cloaked her almost all the time.

She looked so fragile and old, Flower realised; not in the sense of being an elder, even though that applied too, to a degree. Fighting back her folly deteriorated her body, wore it out to the point of almost falling apart. Emaciated and sickly, she reminded a long-suffering prisoner or a slave… and she was one.

When Luna’s somnambulant motions had grown more violent—became jerks and whimpers, Flower dared to step closer to the expressionless soldiers. They parted before her, even if reluctantly, and she wasted no time reaching the alicorn to prod her awake; ice crunched under her hooves and the air tore at her throat with rimy death.

Luna woke up with a start and tears in her eyes, her lips forming a single word—a name.

As many times before, relief flooded Flower’s mind—she remembered yet; they had survived the night.

That moment the first ray of the Sun sliced through the retreating dusk; it didn’t reach Luna’s pained visage—Nightmare tightly embraced its host already, but that didn’t matter.

“She is out there,” Luna whispered, gazing into the desert with an unreadable expression.

Flower followed her look, but only the vast expanse of sand met her eyes; she could guess, though.

“Not your sister,” she gently reminded her and waited for Luna’s reaction.

Instead, the alicorn mused aloud, “It is weird to not be the one rising the Sun, but she is doing a great job—natural…”

Sometimes Luna did act like the old mare she was and Flower couldn’t help but roll her eyes.

She didn’t let the moment of peace last long.

“Stop wasting our time. We must go,” Flower firmly stated and bolstered herself for a long trek through the wasteland.

“Where?”

That question would be repeated over and over—the alicorn had a chase instinct of a hound. Nor did Flower have enough patience to stir the conversation into another direction every time Luna demanded to know their destination; she should know, anyway.

“The Crystal Empire.”

“Didn’t you tell me we weren’t going to follow the golem’s plan?”

“And we won’t,” Flower couldn’t help hissing in answer. “The Machine Goddess was right about something—this world has problems, but the Crystal Heart or whatever she seeks there isn’t the thing we need.”

Understanding flashed in Luna’s eyes, eclipsing the shadows usually ruling her gaze.

“Flower, I told you, there is no way to kill Nightmare—it’s not a god-like entity, it’s… something far worse.”

“So you have overheard.”

Despite appearing half-conscious, the former Princess had absorbed every conversation that had taken place around her in the past few hours; she had a rearing as sharp as that of a dog as well, though the problem lay in the leash.

Luna bristled. “I’m neither deaf nor stupid.”

Flower wasn’t meant to be privy to the conversation Red Wire had with Delight and the Kirin either. Though the eavesdropping let her learn an invaluable fact, she still knew very little to fully understand what she planned to do exactly—only comprehended what she tried to accomplish.

So she asked, “Then do you know what that secret is?”

“No,” the alicorn shook her head. “But it is likely to be something Sombra created and the last time I came in contact with the result of his research, I turned into this.”

Flower ignored the warning, frowning at Luna instead. “He wasn’t wrong.”

“It’s too late to keep reminding me what I did. You are missing a point.”

“Nor I am stupid, Luna. And the Kirin made some sense, too—it all looks like a huge setup for something… something very bad. But if The Machine Goddess didn’t lie, the world is ending anyway. And if she did lie, it’s a matter of time before Nightmare gets out of control.”

Shaking her head again, Luna noted dryly, “It doesn’t mean you are now free to make things worse.”

“Do you know how it gets worse?” Flower snapped. “The Machine Goddess gets what she wants.”

“Your path leads to where I stand.”

The young mare refused to relent, “Ending the abomination’s reign is the right thing!”

“Once, the exact thought ruled my mind.”

A wave of panic sent shivers down Flower’s spine—did what desire belong to her? If things went wrong, it might be beneficial to certain entities… like the malevolence observing her that very moment through the alicorn’s eyes.

Then a certain memory resurfaced, playing before Flower’s eyes—of a filly pleading with her not to create a custom equinoid; it took place long before Luna came into the mechanic’s life.

“I’m going to the Crystal Empire and I don’t care what you think,” she barked. “And shut up—you sound like a broken record.”

Stomping away into the endless sands, Flower feared Luna wouldn’t follow—for a heartbeat. She didn’t need her and it might be wise not to be in the alicorn’s vicinity in case her memories faded completely before they reached the frozen north.

“The Crystal Empire is the other way.”

Flower turned to look at the once triarch with her eyebrows raised.

“Why are you helping me?”

“Nightmare can’t be killed, but there might be a way to somehow deal with it—temporarily containing it as I did.” Luna thoughtfully answered. “A lot of forces are going to converge on that place, many great minds, no matter how twisted. I should be there.”

The thousands-year-old equine exhibited many habits of note; Luna rumbled a lot, amongst other things letting Flower become familiar with the way she spoke.

Those words didn’t belong to her.

Yet relief washed over Flower—Nightmare sought another host, it had found her unworthy. The familiar dread settled back almost instantly—the peerless puppeteer would want her to think that, lull her into a sense of false security.

Either way, Flower had no means to stop Luna—or herself—not when Nightmare held the reins. So, clenching her jaws and trying not to think about the mind game she was involved in, the mare turned in the direction opposite of the one she chose initially.

Only to be stopped by Luna’s voice again.

“The Crystal Empire is further away than you think and it’s not an easy journey either.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I offer my magic.”

Even recovering from the arcane wound, Flower couldn’t miss the worrying nature of the jumps that had carried their travelling party back to Canterlot. And though she hated to remember that fact, the Machine Goddess did notice it too and called Luna out, leaving no room for other interpretations.

Luna’s ability to teleport had nothing to do with this world.

“No.”

“Then you are not going to make it in time,” the alicorn levelly informed her.

Flower’s mind caught up with Luna’s choice of words and a question stuck in her throat, “The time for what?”

Banishing the worry about the inevitable from her head with a vigorous shake, the scowling mare gave Luna a long look.

Finally, she spoke, her voice laden with doubt and reluctance.

“Do you remember how to fly?”

Author's Note

English isn't my native language; though I try my best and use various tools to aid myself, I'm aware that a result is far from perfect. That said, if you notice anything that you think should be fixed—please let me know.

I hope you've enjoyed reading this story so far.
Stay awesome.