The Tower of the Fallen Star

Chapters

Prologue - The Princess
Chapter 1 - The Cimmareian
Chapter 2 - The Noble
Chapter 3 - The Tower
Chapter 4 - The Fallen Star
Chapter 5 - The Dream

Prologue - The Princess

When one wears the same crown for sixteen hours every single day for a little over a thousand years one gets very used to it, so much so that when it is time to give it up its absence is very noticeable. Celestia, the newly-retired Princess of Equestria, thought on this as she considered the absence of the weight of gold upon her head. More than a little drunk, she staggered down the ancient, uneven stairs, her way lit by the brilliant yellow light of her horn, but despite her inebriation her hooves settled in steps she had once walked down countless times long before a united Equestria was even a dream. A princess was not supposed to get drunk. One could certainly drink, but being seen as drunk at a public event was strictly Not Allowed. However, though she was no longer a princess as of seven o’clock, masking her drunkenness with regal poise was an old trick she would have to work on un-learning to properly enjoy her retirement.

Princess Twilight Sparkle’s coronation party (technically her second, as Mudbriar had pointed out) had wound down about an hour ago, and it was time that she and Luna retired for the night, ready to begin their new lives as former princesses in Seaward Shoals the next day. There would still be duties, of course, as Parliament had elected to maintain some level of spiritual continuity between the ancien regime and the new one, but nothing quite as taxing as before -- open a new library, visit a new hospital, dispense advice, that sort of thing. After all of this time, more than two thousand years of life, give or take a few as she had lost count after the first three-and-a-half centuries, she had finally earned a break.

Yet something compelled her to come down here, through a secret door in the catacombs beneath Canterlot Castle through which no pony had entered for more than a millennium. With this new milestone in her long life, Celestia had felt the need, almost certainly aided by the veritable gallons of fine wine she had imbibed that night, to visit an old friend she had not seen since she banished Luna to the moon.

Dust that had not been disturbed for a thousand years stirred under her hooves and stained the pristine white coat on her long, slender legs. Walls that had not seen light in that time glistened with moisture. The air was damp down there, and stank of the decay of the ages long past. The stairs stopped at an open doorway, for the wood had rotted away into mush centuries ago. Beyond this dark portal, slowly illuminated as Celestia strode inside, was a simple cave, and at its far end was a stone statue.

The pony it depicted was that of a warrior, clad in furs and cloth, and bearing an iron helmet upon his head. He sat on his haunches, resting a sword on his shoulder held steady by a hoof. Though the artistry was rather simple, especially by the standards of the classical era, being Equestria’s golden age of statue-making in her opinion, the stallion’s sneering expression of grim disdain was captured perfectly. As Celestia approached the statue, she felt its cold judgement weigh her down. She stopped and sat before it.

“Hello, Crom,” she said, her reverent voice echoing in the cave.

The statue was silent.

“It’s been a very long time,” she continued. “But I don’t suppose you cared. You never did. You only cared about strength.

“I gained my crown through your strength. I tore it from the severed head of a tyrant. I have guided the kingdom for more than a thousand years, while you sat silent in your mountain. Tonight, I leave it in the hooves of another, and not one I think you would have approved of.”

Celestia sighed and bowed her head, pausing from her rambling to try and gather the mish-mash of thoughts swirling in her mind into something resembling a coherent point. “Yet what has your strength and your callousness brought you? The Magic of Friendship has brought Equestria peace, prosperity, safety, and friends. You offered only violence and struggle. Ponies have forgotten you, except as a footnote in books on ancient history.”

She lifted her head, staring up at the hollow, sightless eyes of the statue.

“But I remembered,” she said. “Things were different back then. I was very different. Ponies no longer have need of a god like you, but-” Celestia smiled gently and touched her slim chest with a hoof. “But I don’t think you would have minded that. The world changed, I changed, but gods don’t change.”

Her light dimmed and the corners of the cave receded into darkness. The shadows on the statue deepened, lending it a darker, more menacing mien more befitting the cold, distant, and uncaring god that it honoured. The preparations for her journey into a quiet life of retirement would continue without her, Luna and the staff would see to that. And so, a mile into the core of Mount Canter, with alcohol fogging her mind and the hopes and fears of a new life before her, Celestia remembered. Her eyes focused upon those of the statue, her mind travelled backwards in time to more than two thousand years into the past, before even the name of Equestria came into being, to her youth as a barbarian.

Chapter 1 - The Cimmareian

Night descended upon the slavers’ quarter of the city, and with it the filth of the known world, fat off the profits of their equine cargo, emerged from their barges moored in the harbour and sought to spend their ill-gotten wealth in the multitudes of taverns, ale-houses, pubs, gambling dens, and brothels that inevitably sprung up where their kind plied their trade. Theirs was not a respectable profession, yet the city owed its obscene wealth to their trade in flesh, not that those who lived in their palaces and towers on the hill in the distance would admit that the luxury in which they lived was owed to the taxes collected and skimmed on this buying and selling of lives. As such, this quarter of the city was almost entirely given over to them, and no pony who would call themselves ‘honest’ would dare set hoof in the fetlock-deep mire of inequity.

Thence, by the light of guttering torches and brazers, the dim candlelight that slipped through the open windows and doorways of these establishments, ponies from realms as far as Zamarea, Ponphir, Hyponorea, and beyond roamed the refuse-ridden streets in search of such places where they could waste their tainted gold. They drunkenly staggered through the narrow and winding streets, enticed by the light that poured out of these doorways. The sounds that rose up from within, cast out into the darkness, coalesced into a vast cacophony of chatter, of hooves clamouring on tables, of shouts, of the shrill laughter of whores, of obscene songs, and of a myriad other sounds that promised a pony a glorious night of wanton debauchery.

From one such den, nestled deep within this district and known to all for its fine ale and finer mares and stallions, another sound bubbled up in this symphony of sin. Not enough to overpower the other sounds, but enough to be noticeable and certainly unmistakeable; from the top storey of this low, squat building and out of the window with its shutters flung open into the night, the sound of a mare’s cries of passion could be heard by all within a radius of fifty yards. Deep, loud, but feminine, it set the imaginations of stallions who paused and strained their ears to listen afire with thoughts of the mare who made them. It rose to a shrill crescendo with a single cry of climax, and then died away to a moan that was soon lost amidst the general din, and the stallions, disappointed, carried on, some in search of relief.

If one of the pegasi in the streets below had been brave enough to fly up to the window and peek inside, they would see a towering figure, more than twice the size of the stallion beneath her, in the throes of ecstasy. The couple were atop a bed of straw covered with rough cloth, and the stallion was almost eclipsed from view by the mare’s bulk save for his twitching hindlegs that peaked from under her bare flanks. Her mighty chest heaved and her white coat was slick with glistening sweat, which ran in rivulets down the muscular contours of her body. A pair of great wings spread from her back and a long, spiralled horn almost scraped the wooden ceiling above. She smiled down at her partner, who had fallen limp under her.

“By Ishtar,” he gasped between quick, frantic breaths. “You make love like an earth pony.”

Celestia chuckled, deep, warm, and throaty. “I will take that as a compliment, my little stallion.”

“Unrefined,” he said as he pulled himself up on his elbows and gazed up at her, “but relentless.” His horn lit with a pale blue aura, wrapped around a flagon on the tabletop nearby, and brought it to his lips. The glow reflected off the sweaty sheen of the mare’s coat.

“We have little need for such ‘refinements’ where I come from,” she said, stroking a hoof as large as a dinner plate down the front of his chest.

The stallion drank deeply from the flagon, and then offered it up to the big mare. “And where would that be?” he said. “Where the ponies are tall and possess both wings and a horn?”

“Cimmareia.” Celestia took the flagon with her hoof and downed the remaining two thirds, then tossed the empty vessel over her shoulder. It struck the straw-covered floor behind her with a thud, spilling the last dregs to be soaked up by the rushes, and rolled to a stop. She wiped the froth from her lips with the back of her hoof. “And I am the only one with wings and a horn.”

“A northern earth pony barbarian,” said the stallion. “That would explain it. Then you would not know how to use the horn on your head.”

He pointed up at said appendage protruding from Celestia’s forehead, and somewhat self-consciously she reached up and touched it. Her hoof stroked along her peculiar, elegant horn, which always felt alien to her touch, as though it was merely a crown and not truly a part of her. Likewise her wings, which had been spread wide in the throes of ecstasy, awkwardly folded against her sides.

“I might not know how to make things fly as you do,” she said, tossing her pink mane with a hoof, “or myself, for that matter, but foul sorcery and nimble flight are still no match for cold steel in my hooves.”

“There is more to unicorn magic than making things fly.” The stallion pointed his hoof to the open window, from which the sounds of revelry drifted into their quiet room. The mare followed the line to the palaces in the distance, where the lords of the city resided apart from the great, unwashed mass of the town. They were placed upon a hill, such that those in the slavers’ quarter, the grand market, or the slums might look up from their hovels, taverns, and brothels and remember who truly held the power in this city. She could see, even through the small portal of the window, illuminated by sharp, bright lights that could not have come from mere candlelight or brazier, those glittering, extravagant homes. Crafted in marble, gold, silver, and platinum, each seemed to have more wealth plastered on its facade than the mare had ever seen in the hoard of the wealthiest chieftain.

“The most powerful unicorns in the known world reside there,” he continued. “Their magic is such that they can move the sun and moon, granting the world the gift of night and day. They work tirelessly, consorting with the spirits and daemons of the outer realms, binding the forces of chaos to their wills to bring glory to our city and doom to our enemies. With a flash of his horn, one might burn you to dust, or whither you into an elderly, frail mare, or suck your very soul from your flesh. You are mighty indeed, but what is the cold steel in your hooves compared to that power?”

Celestia tossed her head back and laughed, with a single, contemptuous bark of ‘hah!’. Her matted pink mane seemed to float ethereally for a moment, before settling down her back to her wings. “It makes no difference!” she said, showing rows of yellowing teeth with her wide grin. “All of that magic is useless if I have broken their horns or smashed their skulls.”

“I fear you protest too much,” said the stallion. “You would not be so contemptuous of such power if you understood it. A unicorn mage will teach you what your earth pony upbringing could not.”

“For a price?”

The stallion snorted. “There is always a price,” he said. “Speaking of which, I think that should be two bits.”

Celestia had stopped listening, as her attention had been taken by a singular tower that stood out amongst the sprawling palaces and gardens of the upper city. Unlike the elegant, flowing forms of the homes of the city’s nobles, high magi, and merchant lords, this was a tall, dark tower, visible against the night sky only due to the lambent glow of the braziers and magic light around its base. It was round, apparently smooth as far as she could make it out, but devoid of the extravagant ornamentation of the buildings around it.

She was a pony of the wilds who knew only the mud huts of the earth pony peasants she had lived with and the tents of the nomadic yaks who crossed their land on ancient stomping paths. The great cities of the unicorns were baffling and strange to her. Yet she knew that the chieftain’s hut was the largest and his tent was of the finest cloth available, and the shaman’s likewise marked with the bones of beasts arranged into strange symbols. Ponies in positions of power, be they earth pony, unicorn, or pegasus, seemed to feel the need to mark themselves as special, so for the occupier of that tower to separate their home from even the obscene wealth of their fellow lords implied a certain sense of hubris far above that which she had come to expect even for haughty unicorns.

Celestia tilted her eyes up, seeing the blurry outline of her horn in her peripheral vision. It was far bigger than those of the unicorns she had seen here, then again she was simply larger in general. With her greater physical size came strength beyond even that of the fiercest earth pony warrior, and by her logic that meant she should have more powerful magic than these little unicorns. Yet she couldn’t even pick a daisy with it.

“That tower,” she said, pointing towards it. “Who lives there?”

“Ah.” The stallion chewed on his lower lip and his eyes flitted from the mare above him and the tower in the distance. He drew himself up on his elbows and sucked in a deep breath. “That is the Tower of the Vizier.”

“He is powerful?” said Celestia.

“You are a stranger to our lands,” said the stallion, rolling his eyes. “So, I shall tell you. The mage-lords of the city are the most powerful in all the realms, and the Vizier is the greatest among them. It’s said that he caught a star that fell from heaven, and this is the secret of all of his magic. True or not, he counsels the king in matters of war and trade, and weaves doom upon our enemies.”

A star falling from heaven sounded implausible to Celestia; to her and her tribe they were tiny holes in the veil between this world and the otherworld through which the souls of the fallen passed into the next life. Crom, her god, after a fierce battle with the ice daemons of the north had gathered the spirits of the dead and hurled them through the dark veil of night like a hail of arrows, the druids had told her. And some, according to his whim, were the shapes of the beasts and monsters that stalked the gloomy forests of Cimmareia, to remind his ponies of what they should fear. Perhaps something else had fallen from the realm of the gods beyond, through one of these tears in the veil, and was caught by this mage.

“Can this ‘Vizier’ teach me magic?” she asked.

The stallion squinted up at the mare, who still sat upon his lap. These city ponies, she concluded, were a strange bunch; a Cimmareian would have already told her such a thing was impossible, that she was stupid for even considering it, and then she would have punched him, but here, that veneer of civilisation draped over them like a silk cloth over dung meant that they had to mind their ‘manners’. She still wasn’t sure what ‘manners’ were, being things she couldn’t touch or feel, but it apparently meant not calling ponies stupid even if they really were.

“You,” he said at length, his voice hushed. “You would walk to the tower, knock on his door, and ask him to teach you magic as though he were little more than a tutor to the spoilt foals of rich slave merchants?”

Celestia considered this, wondering if she was being mocked. “Yes?” she said hesitantly.

“You are a strange mare,” said the stallion, stroking his hoof over the curve of her flank. It was firm under his touch, and he could feel the tense, heavy musculature beneath her coat. He pulled at it, to bring the empty, blank space where a cutie mark should be into view by the dim glow of the guttering candlelight. “Or a mere filly, if you still do not have your cutie mark.”

“Few ponies have the luxury of finding their special talents where I come from,” said Celestia.

A sly, eager grin stretched the ends of her thin lips, as she edged back away from stallion and stroked her broad hoof delicately over the slim contours of his chest, quite unlike the muscular physiques of the earth ponies she was used to, further down to his trim belly, and kept going. The unicorn squirmed under her touch. She leaned over him, until her huge frame filled his vision, bent her head down and whispered: “Besides, could a ‘mere filly’ do this?”

This time, the stallions and mares who had stayed to linger in the square below the window of this alehouse heard the sudden and exquisite yelp of a stallion, which was shortly drowned out by the headier, louder moan of the mare.

***

Celestia couldn’t sleep. She was tired, for her journey had brought her far from the fog-shrouded hills and dark forests of Cimmareia and she had walked every step of it, but she was no closer to finding the answers to the questions that tormented her ever since she realised nopony else in her tribe had wings and horns. How long she had been on the road she couldn’t tell, having lost track of the number of times the sun had risen and set after nineteen.

The stallion, exhausted by his earlier exertions, had fallen fast asleep. His smaller frame nestled against Celestia’s soft, fluffy chest, held delicately by her strong hooves. She felt the gentle rise and fall of his chest as he breathed softly in his sleep, his warm breath stirring the coat on her breast. The candles had spluttered and died long ago, leaving the room in a deep darkness, save for the cool, silver light of the moon shining through the open window. It cast a white patch onto the floor close to the bed, illuminating a square of the rushes, and in this silver beam of moonlight the airborne dust had become tiny, swirling motes of light. The sounds of the continued revelry of the night bubbled up from beyond the window and from the ground floor of the ale house below, but she only heard those as a pony immersed in water, straining to hear noises from dry land beyond.

Her hoof stroked along the stallion’s side as she considered this. She stared out of the window at that tower off in the distance, her thoughts running wild with the possibilities it held. The stallion stirred, and her attention was abruptly dragged back to him. He was certainly a pretty little stallion, though ‘little’ was a matter of perspective; tall for his kind, and rather leaner than the softer frames that she noticed most unicorns tended to possess here, which she put down to their magic allowing them to pick things up making them lazy and indolent. As she gazed down at him, now with eyes no longer distracted by her wanton lusts, she considered the fact that she truly was different from any other pony she had met thus far even in this strange and diverse city.

Celestia knew that she would never find what she needed in Cimmareia. Here, in this strange city with its inscrutable customs most ponies had horns and some had wings, but never both at the same time. She feared she would have to move on again and keep on searching, but the tower there, standing out from the glow of the city below by the way it blocked the light of the streets and the stars alike, tempted her with its promise of knowledge beyond what these common unicorns could tell her. If anypony could provide her with some insight about what, exactly, she was, it would have to be the sorcerer who harnessed the power of a fallen star.

As fun as it was, Celestia realised she would find no further answers being rutted by nameless stallions above alehouses. She thought to rouse him and ask if he was ready for another round before she headed off, but he was sleeping peacefully. There would be plenty of time for that later. Carefully, she extricated her foreleg from under the sleeping stallion, who stirred a little but remained asleep, and rose from the bed.

Her things were in a bundle in the corner, having been thrown off and discarded when the stallion had brought her into his room and their lusts overwhelmed them. Celestia crept over to them, like a panther stalking its prey, completely silent except for the faint rustle of the rushes on the floor that would be drowned out by the noise of revellers outside. Years spent learning to stalk and kill the monsters that threatened her tribe served her well in sneaking out of strangers’ bedrooms.

Celestia had travelled light on her journey, and having been raised by earth ponies, was not above simple grazing. She lifted her saddlebags and placed them on her back and under her wings, securing them in place with two straps over her barrel. It would help, she thought, to find a pair that didn’t require her to awkwardly guide her wings through the straps to fit, having been made by and for earth ponies, but as she never worked out how to use them it seemed like a needless extravagance. She had tried to imitate birds, but no amount of enthusiastic flapping could get her airborne more than a few feet off the ground for more than five seconds even with a running jump. Perhaps she ought to pay a visit to the pegasi, as soon as she worked out how to get to their cities in the sky.

Her saddlebags secure, Celestia picked up the most prized of her earthly possessions. A truly massive sword in its scabbard, she held it reverently in her hooves and then bound it in place by straps across her back. It was as long as a pony, and its breadth wider than a forehoof. The tribe’s blacksmith was the strongest pony she knew, besides herself, and when he forged it he could barely lift it alone. As she tightened the straps, she remembered what her father had told her when she was still small enough to sit on his lap, and he showed her his sword and explained the most important lesson Crom bestowed upon his earth ponies: only this can she trust in this world, and nothing else.

Celestia tugged on the straps, making sure that her weapon was secure. Happy that it would not move around and chafe against her, she sat down on her haunches and reached behind her head with her forehooves and gathered up her mane. The long, pink hair reached just between her wings when she sat like that. Using a technique taught to her by the war maidens of her tribe, she bound her flowing locks into a tight, firm bun so that it would not become a hindrance in battle. She likewise replicated that with her tail, until it resembled that of a bunny just above her rear. This was the ritual practiced by every Cimmareian warrior before battle, and though she did not think that this night would end in violence she had learned a long time ago that it paid to be prepared.

Last was a cloak that had once been the soft, creamy-white colour of raw wool, but her time on the road had turned the outer part of it a sort of dark, muddy grey-brown with patches of grass stains and pale dust. She opened it up and draped it over her body and clasped it around her neck, making sure that it covered her wings and as much of herself as possible; she had outgrown it a few years ago, and now it only reached just shy of the base of her tail. A new, bigger one was needed, but she felt rather attached to this old thing.

Her meagre things collected, she moved towards the door, her hooves almost silent upon the rushes. She stopped just as she lifted her forehoof to push it open, looked over her shoulder at the stallion left on the bed, and sighed. Crossing the short distance, this time not bothering with being quiet, the stallion stirred, rolled over and groped out with his hooves as if trying to find her. He opened his eyes and lifted his head off the bed, perched up on an elbow, and watched her dark shape approach through the gloom.

“Leaving already?” he said, suppressing a yawn behind his hoof.

“Yes,” she said, her voice hushed. “I must find this mage. If he is as wise and powerful as you say, then he can tell me what sort of pony I truly am.”

The stallion stared up at her, chewing his lower lip. “I can see that you are set upon this path,” he said. “You think like an earth pony, too; when you have put your mind to something, there’s no talking you out of it.”

“You are quite opinionated for a prostitute.”

“I see many different kinds of ponies,” he said with a small, satisfied smile, “and I learn more about them in this bed than any philosopher in a lifetime of thinking.”

“What’s a philosopher?”

“A pony who spends a lot of time thinking about the meaning of life.”

“Sounds like a waste.”

“Oh, it is.” The stallion shrugged. “But if I can’t convince you not to go, then I can at least tell you what to expect there. You seem to think you can just walk up and knock on his door and ask him to teach you magic.”

“Is that not how it works?” said Celestia, tilting her head to one side. “I learned about herbalism by approaching the tribe’s wise mare and asking her to teach it to me.”

“That might work with your primitive earth pony tribes,” said the stallion, “but not here.” His tone was slower and more patient, as though he was trying to explain this to a young foal instead of a pony purporting to be an adult. “The Vizier will accept no visitors and will see nopony except on his own terms. Ponies enter his tower all the time, but only in chains, and they are rarely seen to leave except a few as broken, soulless shadows of their former selves. That is the fate that will await you.”

Celestia snorted defiantly and shook her head. “I am no whimpering slave!” she snarled, stamping her forehoof with a heavy, resonant thud that reverberated through the wooden floor, through the bed, and into the stallion’s heart. He flinched a little. “If he will not teach me then I will… I will” -she paused to look out of the window again at that tower- “I’ll steal that fallen star of his, and take it to another mage who will teach me.”

“That is impossible. If it could be done then the thieves of this city would have done so already.”

“Nothing is impossible,” snapped Celestia. “Crom gives ponies the courage to overcome any obstacle, if they are strong enough.”

The stallion closed his eyes, breathed in a deep sigh, and when he opened them again and spoke his voice was quiet, hushed, and trembling. “The tower is ringed by a high wall. You are big, so you might think that is no problem, but the grounds are patrolled not with pony guards but monsters bred by the Vizier. Even if you pass through the grounds you must enter the tower itself. Now, there are no windows, so you must take the front door, which should be no match for a pony of your strength. Yet once inside you must ascend to the tower’s pinnacle, and there contend with the Vizier himself, who will not part with his fallen star without a fight. You will have to fight with a sorcerer who has dedicated his life to accumulating magical power.”

Celestia digested this for a moment, and then said, “You know a lot about this.”

“As I said, a whore picks up a great many things from a great many ponies,” he said, his confidence returning. “I see now, such talk only encourages an untamed wildling such as you. Go on and ascend that tower, and should you make it out alive with that fallen star I shall be here waiting to hear you tell your story.”

“And ascend your tower?” Celestia’s eager grin flashed in the cold moonlight.

The stallion grinned back. “I’d like that,” he said. “Mitra’s luck be with you.”

Celestia rose and turned towards the door, and then stopped again. She tugged her cloak to one side with her hoof, and rummaged around in her left saddlebag until she pulled out a small purse filled with only a modest amount of coins. A few long strides brought her back to the bed, whereupon she took two gold bit coins from her purse and laid them one on top of the other upon the bedside table.

“The gods can keep their luck, my little pony,” she said, bending down to kiss him delicately on his cheek. “A Cimmareian makes her own.”

Chapter 2 - The Noble

Celestia had been trapped in a minotaur’s labyrinth before, and trying to navigate her way through the winding streets, alleyways, and deadends of the slums to where the towers and mansions on the hill above resided had put her in mind of that. She had spent a good while trying to navigate that labyrinth in the traditional manner, but then she got bored and bucked her way out straight through the solid stone walls to freedom, much to the minotaur’s irritation. The ponies here would be even less enthused should she demolish their homes to reach the tower, she mused.

Celestia carried on, and the sounds of drunken revelry faded with every street she slipped through until they became but a murmur in her ears. Here, as she forged her way through these winding roads, the city had become darker and the night seemed to close in all around. The streets were narrower, and tall, ugly slum buildings constructed of old and rotting wood, patched together by their impoverished inhabitants, loomed either side of her. It was difficult to find where one home ended and the other began, for entire rooms had been built atop the other, with each struggling to rise above its neighbour. Seeing them put her in mind of drunk ponies leaning against one another for support, swaying and buckling as their failing strength failed to hold up their own weight. A few leaned over the road itself, supported only by thin wooden beams, and as she passed under them, Celestia feared that it might collapse and bury her.

There were fewer ponies, too, and the ones who lingered about the street and just beyond the lights of guttering torches observed her carefully, but when she looked to meet their gaze they averted their eyes and stared elsewhere. Unlike the gaudy wealth displayed by the slavers, which those who did not have the presence of mind to hire bodyguards were soon liberated of in the many bar fights and muggings that took place there, these ponies were dressed plainly, if at all.

The street came to another dead end, blocked by a high wall topped with spikes that made it clear that whoever was on the other side did not want visitors. To her right was an alleyway, where the rows of ramshackle buildings on either side leaned over the gap between them until they merged at the third or fourth floor, forming a sort of tunnel. An unexplained hunch or instinct drew her there, or perhaps a sense of frustration at the prospect of having to go back the way she came and find another path. She sighed, snorted in irritation, and trotted into the alleyway, wondering if cities were designed to confound her on purpose. Truly, they were a more effective way to entrap ponies than that minotaur’s labyrinth; she didn’t have to worry about that ‘manners’ thing in that maze, being hunted by a monster that wanted nothing more than to tear her limb from limb.

The moment Celestia stepped hoof in that alleyway she knew she was being watched; she hardly blended in with the ponies less than half her size at the best of times, but this time it was not the furtive and shy glances from common ponies, the lascivious gazes of drunken stallions and the odd mare, nor the openly shocked stares of foals. It was the same sensation she had when alone in the monster-infested forests of her homeland, of predatory eyes upon her, like ice water poured down the back of her neck. She sniffed the air, but the open city sewers were an effective mask for such predators. Her warrior’s instinct warned her she was in danger, and she grinned eagerly as she walked on into the darkness.

All around the walls were filled with dark, misshapen windows, through which Celestia saw glimpses of pony-shaped shadows before they melded again with darkness. A few tiny candles perched on the windowsills, providing just enough light for her to almost see by. A horn glowed in the distance with a soft, white aura, which was mirrored around a levitating object a few inches from the figure now just barely visible.

“Well, take a look at this,” a voice from the darkness sneered out. “We were going all night with nothing to show for our troubles, and this pretty little thing wanders right into our patch.”

Two ponies approached, one lingering behind the other. They emerged into the light of the nearby candle-lit window, revealing themselves to be two unicorns. The one in front, whom Celestia took to be their leader, was a tall, scarred individual who had dulled down the otherwise white coat and blond mane with grey ash. A hemp belt was tied around his waist, from which hung small coin purses that jingled tunefully with each movement. Hovering by his head was a small, thin dagger, with a gold handle studded with gems that all glittered in the light of his magical aura.

“She ain’t ‘little’, boss,” said the small, rat-like pony at the back, who appeared to be trying to hide behind the other. Unlike his apparent leader, this stallion’s coat was not smothered in ash, but its dark, rusty brown colour blended in well with the murky darkness of the alleyway.

“There’s four of us and only one of her.” The lead thug stepped to the side of the narrow street and tapped the pommel of his dagger on the window. A door swung open behind Celestia, and she turned her head slightly to see over her shoulder. Two other black unicorn-shapes emerged from the house just behind and to her left and blocked her path back.

“This is our street,” he continued. “And if you want to walk through it you have to pay us a toll: one gold each.”

The ways of the city ponies continued to perplex her, and Celestia considered this as she opened up a saddlebag and retrieved her coin purse. Surely a road belonged to everypony and claiming ownership over a scrap of thoroughfare would be as absurd as believing one owned the very ground beneath their hooves. Nevertheless, she had somewhere to be and so she retrieved a single coin from her purse with her mouth and held it out for the stallion, who accepted it in his magic and examined it, turning it over before his eyes.

“How do you do that?” said Celestia as she watched the shiny coin spin in mid-air.

“Do what?” The coin stopped spinning, and the ash-coated stallion stared up at her.

“The glowing horn thing and making things float,” she said, and tapped her own horn. “I want to know how to do it. Mine won't work.”

The stallion squinted up at her, pursed his lips, then shook his head. “You just do it,” he said, which was the same sort of unsatisfying answer she had gotten from every unicorn she had asked along the way, and the odd pegasus she had asked about flying, too.

“I’m afraid that’s insufficient,” he said, putting the coin away in one of his many purses. “When I said one gold bit each, I meant one for each of us. You need to give us three more.”

Celestia looked into her coin purse again, but no amount of rummaging around would turn the one remaining gold bit coin and the assorted other bits and pieces of minor foreign currency she had picked up over the course of her travels into the necessary three extra bits needed to pay this toll. The lead thug tapped his hoof impatiently, while his nervous friend inched a little further into the darkness.

“We got a gold bit out of her,” he said. “Let’s not push our luck here, right, boss?”

“I don’t have three more bits,” said Celestia, shaking her coin purse. The jingle of the scant amount of coins inside sounded despondent. “I just want to go to where the towers are.”

“Such a shame,” said the lead stallion with mock sympathy. “Looks like you’ll have to go the long way around then.”

“Then give me my bit back.” Celestia held out her hoof for her coin, and their apparent leader stared at the large appendage thrust in his direction. It was dirty, grimy, and the primitive iron horseshoe nailed to it was in need of replacement, but what stood out to the stallion was its size. The circumference of this giant pony’s hoof was about on par with his head, he thought. As he stared at it, imagining it stamping on his skull, he considered that his cowardly friend might be right.

“Here, boss!” one of the stallions behind her called out. “I can think of another way she can pay. You should see the view from back here, it’s something, alright.”

Celestia looked over her shoulder to see one of the ponies behind her reach out to touch her flanks. She slammed her hoof down on the ground, cracking the paving into a thin spider’s web, and the stallion retracted his hoof quickly. The ground shuddered beneath the thug’s hooves.

“You’re not real toll collectors,” she said, her voice level and firm. “Are you?”

Her forelegs shifted, spreading in the dirt, and she leaned forward to apply her weight to it. She felt the cold, irregular, lifeless stone beneath her hooves, and the thin patina of dust and grime accumulating in the cracks. Her hindlegs shuffled eagerly in anticipation. Powerful muscles tensed under her fur, like stretched coils and ready to lash out.

The ‘boss’ grinned, flashing peculiarly white teeth for a pony who lived in an alleyway. His pinned-back ears revealed his fear, and it was not lost on the Cimmareian. “She’s clever for a big, slow barbarian,” he said, forcing a chuckle.

His dagger swayed from side to side, like the head of a cobra ready to strike at Celestia’s neck. The light of the magical aura glinted off the wickedly sharp blade and the gems in the gilded handle sparkled. She stared at it, flashed a smile at the little stallion, and then lashed out with her hindlegs. Two massive hooves struck the ponies behind her, each slamming into their chests. Having misjudged the unnatural length of her legs they had accidentally wandered in her strike range. Caught off guard, the two stallions were launched backwards through the alleyway, arcing gracefully through the sky, then landing with a hefty thud in a twitching, groaning heap some twenty yards away.

The ash-coated stallion and the rusty brown-coloured one exchanged a glance, before the latter turned on his hooves and bolted back down the alleyway as though his tail was on fire. He disappeared into the night in a matter of seconds, seemingly consumed by the darkness itself, and was gone with the sound of his galloping hooves fading into silence.

Celestia placed her rear hooves back on the ground. She took a step closer to the lead thug, now alone, and he took one step back, and then another and another. The blade danced between them, flashing in the light as it slashed this way and that to try and ward her off.

“Stay back! I’m warning you!” In his panic, his formerly gruff street accent had become tighter, more refined, and clipped. The stallion stumbled back, tripping a little on the irregularly paved stones beneath his hooves. Sweat beaded down his face, marking little white lines in the coating of ash on his fur.

Celestia, grinning in a way that seemed to unsettle him more, followed with the stallion’s retreat with a slow, almost casual gait, while keeping her eyes on the darting dagger floating aloft between them. With the earth ponies, pegasi, and monsters she had fought before she had learnt to read her opponent’s body language and know what they might do next. Unicorns, however, who wielded their blades without physically holding them and who shunned the weapons that Crom had gifted all ponies from birth - their own hooves - had no such tells. With the little stallion before her, there was nothing in his stance or posture to suggest where that little dagger might strike next. Except, perhaps…

The stallion’s eyes flitted up to her head. Half a second later, his dagger was sent flying through the air. Celestia darted back, but was too slow. She hissed in pain as the blade nicked her horn with a soft, wet squelch of ripping velvet, about two thirds of the way down its length, narrowly missed driving into her forehead. Something warm trickled down her forehead.

“Ow.” Celestia reached up and touched the wound, wincing a little at the jolt of pain where her hoof graced the broken velvet there.

The dagger flew back to the stallion’s side again. He grinned triumphantly and threw out his chest with pride. “I win!” he exclaimed.

Celestia looked at the small smear of blood on her hoof, a streak of crimson on off-white, and then back at the peacocking stallion. She raised that hoof and swung it in a wide arc. It connected with the stallion’s cheek with a dense, satisfying ‘thwack’ sound. The force of the blow shoved him against the wall, where he smacked his horn on the stone and the glowing ceased, and he bounced off to collapse onto his side in the middle of the alleyway. The dagger fell from the air and landed with a clatter on the ground.

“But I-'' The stallion’s words were cut off when he looked up to see the huge mare standing over him like an immense shadow in the darkness. She turned in place to present her rear, allowing him to see twin white flank cheeks eclipsing his vision, before they rushed down as she unceremoniously sat on him. He let out a high-pitched squeak as the heavy mass settled over his body, pushed much of the air out of his lungs, and pinned him to the ground.

“Get off me, you brute!” he gasped, pounding his hooves futilely into the side of the mare’s thigh, which, and as he noticed as he ceased his protest, was almost as broad as his chest.

“No,” said Celestia. She rummaged around in her saddle bag for a spare strip of cloth and began wrapping it around her horn where she was cut. “Not until you explain what all of that was about.”

The stallion gave her flank cheek a weak push with his hoof, and it barely indented the firm muscle there. “But I can’t breathe.”

Celestia tore off the cloth and tied up her makeshift bandage in a tight knot. Looking up and seeing the blurry outline of her bandaged horn, she decided that would have to do for now. She looked down at the whimpering little stallion underneath her, his face visible poking out from under her left flank cheek, and then carefully lifted herself up just enough for him to be a little more comfortable but not enough for him to escape. “Is that better?”

“Yes, thank you.” The stallion gulped. “You were supposed to yield; first to draw blood from the opponent’s horn wins the duel.”

“Why?”

The stallion blinked up at her, and sucked in as deep a breath as the heavy mass of pony flank on his side would allow. “It’s the unicorn code of duelling. It stops duels of honour from becoming lethal. We nearly wiped out our entire ruling class before the king instituted that rule.”

“That’s stupid,” said Celestia. “In a fight you must fight to win at all costs. Had you aimed for my neck you might have killed me.”

The stallion said nothing, but stared up at her with wide, terrified eyes. Further back along the alleyway, the two ponies who had been bucked off their hooves staggered up and beat a stumbling, hasty, but wise retreat.

“I thought this was a street brawl,” she continued, self-consciously touching her throat. “Only losers complain about honour.”

“Ponies usually just give up their money when threatened,” he said. “We only picked on ponies foolish enough to wander the streets at night on their own. Easy prey; we get a few bits out of them and send them on their way. Nopony really gets hurt.”

Celestia flashed a grin and the stallion shuddered beneath her. “Until you met me,” she said. “You’re not like the bandits I’ve fought on the road. They have no concept of ‘honour’ in battle.”

“Is it that obvious?” The stallion sighed and seemed to go rather limp beneath her. He propped his head up on his elbow, as though he was louchely relaxing on a soft bed as he explained: “I am no common street thug; I am Baron Redblood of the House of Blood, or at least for the time being. My title and an empty palace are all that I have left. I owe a debt of honour to a certain pony. Unfortunately, our laws are very simple here: a debtor who cannot pay becomes the slave of the creditor, and-” he paused and swallowed hard “-if even half of what they say about this Vizier is true, then I think I would rather die.”

“I’ve heard a lot about this Vizier,” said Celestia. “Why would you allow yourself to become in his debt?”

“Certain indiscretions,” he said, swallowing hard. “Drinking, gambling, whoring, as every young rake does, the consequences of which I didn’t think I’d have to deal with until much later in life. I was in a lot of debt to the wrong ponies, and he made them… made them ‘go away’. If I’d known what he would do to them and that I’d merely transfer the debt to a far worse pony, I think I’d rather those thugs have broken my hooves instead.”

“I want to see this Vizier.”

Baron Redblood laughed, but when he saw the stern face of the mare sitting on him glaring down he abruptly ceased. “By Mitra,” he said, swallowing hard. “You’re serious, aren’t you? It’s not enough that my life is collapsing around me. Now I have been beaten by a madmare who could bench press my palace!”

Celestia spread her wings wide, until they blocked out all of Redblood’s view of the alleyway and beyond. He looked up, and in spite of the weight pinning him down, he saw a creature that was no longer a monster, but at once majestic and beautiful. Her strangeness lent her an exotic allure far in excess of that of the most prized foreign courtesans of the best royal brothels he visited, or used to visit when he had the wealth to do so. He bit his tongue to hold back a compliment, just so he could maintain his outward appearance of fury and frustration at a world that should have been made to suit his desires but had just disappointed him.

“He will be able to tell me what I am,” she said. The longing and hint of sadness in her voice was not lost on him. “And if he will not, then I shall make him. I will take his fallen star.”

“What terrifies me more than the fact you could crush my skull beneath your hoof like an egg shell,” he said, “is that you are really going to do this and that you might actually succeed.”

“I must do it.”

Baron Redblood sighed and rested his head on the cold, filthy, slimy stones of the alleyway. His mouth was set in a thin line as he contemplated the dwindling set of options set before him, but as he considered the two remaining possibilities most likely to result in his continued survival - either help this strange, powerful mare and pray to Mitra that she eliminates his problems with the Vizier, or run away and charter a ship to Hyponorea to live as a hermit in the frozen wastes - he found that some other part of him had posited a third option.

He noticed a small frown form on Celestia’s face. She shifted her flanks on his battered little body, and glanced over her shoulder to the lower part of his body.

“Ah,” she said. Her smile reminded him of that of the tigers in the royal menagerie. “So that wasn’t your hoof poking me in the rear.”

***

There was a Cimmareian custom, long-outdated and maintained only by those clans truly dedicated to preserving the old ways, for the survivors of a battle to rut one another, either to celebrate a glorious victory or commiserate an embarrassing defeat. No distinction was made between friend or foe, though the latter were sometimes reluctant to take part in the festivities. It was said by the tribe’s wise mare that Crom blesses foals conceived in such a manner with great strength and fighting spirit. Celestia, however, had been informed that not only had her parents laid with one another after a brutal fight, she was also born on a battlefield eleven months later, making her doubly blessed. She was not brave enough to ask her mother if charging into battle while very heavily pregnant was not a little bit irresponsible.

Despite being a soft, civilised pony who would never have dreamed of stepping hoof in Cimmareia, Baron Redblood proved to be a most enthusiastic supporter of this tradition. The alleyway was not the soft bed that used to be in his chambers nor the luxurious pillows and silks in the many high-class brothels he once frequented regularly in happier times, and certainly much less private, but the dirt and the filth, coupled with the idea that common ponies could be observing them at play, added a certain frisson to the proceedings that he heartily enjoyed. Celestia had no idea what any of that meant, but took it to be a compliment, and with her lusts slaked for the second time that night the two ventured out.

She did, however, request the return of her gold coin.

The Baron led her through the narrow alleyways and streets, between the cramped, crumbling slums packed with numerous families of unicorns in single apartments. He picked his way through these maze-like warrens with the sort of practiced ease that came with numerous excursions beyond the comfort of the inner city and into the less salubrious, more carnally-enticing districts.

Despite her longer stride, Celestia found herself struggling to keep up with the little unicorn, who nimbly dipped in and out of those alleyways and streets with very little warning or prior indication. Her longer gait and greater size made it rather tricky to navigate down the narrower of the alleyways, including one where she had to squeeze through a tight gap between two walls. That had necessitated Redblood to crawl between her legs to get behind her, and then push at her flanks with all of his remaining might to free her when her hips got stuck. Her fears that the walls were closing in and would trap her felt a little more justified after that.

The claustrophobic mess of back alleys opened up into the main thoroughfare. It was a wide, open street normally reserved for markets and slave auctions, but at this dark hour it had been emptied save for a few beggars sleeping in doorways and the odd guard trying to stay awake. It led straight from the docks, through the slavers’ quarter, and straight into the royal districts of the city. Celestia followed Baron Redblood into this wide open area, and sucked in a deep lungful of the foetid, rank city air as though she was standing in the cool, crisp environs of plains she had walked through to get here. It was a relief to be able stand tall without having to hunch to pass through those cramped alleyways her guide could easily slip through.

Here was where the two sides of the city, those who ruled it and those who gave it wealth, met. A vast metal gate, stretching across the entire length of this broad street, provided a physical separation between these two realms of social class. Celestia could not help but stare at the iron bars to catch glimpses of the opulence glittering through the gaps between them. During her journey through this urban labyrinth she had become quite disorientated, but she guessed that this formed part of that high wall she had run into earlier. Quite why the rulers of this city felt the need to exclude themselves from those who lived in what to her seemed like the more fun areas, with their lively entertainment and pretty little stallions, baffled her, but she had long resigned to the fact she would never quite understand why civilised ponies invented all of these rules for themselves.

Redblood trotted on ahead and spoke a few words to one of the guards at the gate. They all stared at the strange giant standing to the side, bobbing her head from side to side to try and get a better view of the palaces and temples beyond. Celestia couldn’t hear their whisperings, but had gathered that the Baron was trying to pass her off as some sort of harlot that he wanted to take home for the night. He should be so lucky, she thought, though the view of the pretty, pampered little unicorn and the lingering warmth in her loins made her briefly consider postponing her plans for the night. Briefly.

They were taking a rather long time, so Celestia approached just as Redblood raised his voice:

“You’ve got to let me through!” he snarled, pointing at the palaces beyond the gate. “I still live there!”

The guard sergeant he was speaking with shrugged and said, “We have an agreement. We let you pass and look the other way and you give us our cut. So do your civic duty and donate to the night watchponies’ guild.”

“I don’t have enough for tonight.”

“Then why don’t you go and ask your whore for your money back?”

This money nonsense seemed to cause more trouble than what it was worth, thought Celestia; bartering goods and exchanging services had worked perfectly fine for her clan and she didn’t see why these civilised ponies had to complicate matters with shiny circles of gold. As she crept closer, moving into the soft light cast by the guards’ torches, one took notice of her and playfully jabbed his sergeant in the ribs.

“You could pay by letting us have a go on your- oh, Mitra!” The guard almost dropped his spear when Celestia emerged fully from the darkness. He first saw a broad, muscular chest at the same level a cute mare’s face should be, then his gaze travelled up, following the line of her neck, to tilt his head far back to see her face masked in shadow just beyond the glow of his torch.

The sergeant looked to Celestia, arched an eyebrow, and then back at Redblood. “How in Set’s name does that work?”

“Wonderfully,” said Redblood, winking up at Celestia. “You can ‘have a go’ with her if you want, but she doubles as a bodyguard, you see. It’s very dangerous far from the watchful eyes of our dedicated watchponies. Why, tonight, I’d just seen her buck two thugs right into a wall without breaking a sweat. Bloody red smears, like popping berries.”

The sergeant chewed on his lower lip, while his comrade shook in his sabatons. Celestia, however, simply stood there, staring down at the terrified watchpony, who returned her gaze with a fearful, wide-eyed one of his own. She tilted her head to one side and stretched the ends of her lips in a broad grin, which glinted like a crescent moon in the flickering light of the torches. The watchpony yelped.

“Ugh, fine,” snarled the sergeant, sneering at his friend as he unlocked the gate. “You pay us double next time.”

As she slipped through the open gate, the transformation between the greater city and this self-segregated district was abrupt and stark. Celestia felt as though she had stepped through a portal, the likes of which she had only heard about from drunken sailors in the taverns along her travels, whereby one can step through a mirror in one place and emerge somewhere completely different. Past the demarcation formed by the gate, which was shut and locked behind them, the lurid sounds of the drunken revelry of the slavers’ quarter appeared to have ceased, leaving only a silence that seemed louder for its absence.

Chapter 3 - The Tower

Celestia and Baron Redblood strode down the wide boulevards lit by glowing orbs suspended by tall poles, which banished much of the night. On all sides, the towers, temples, and palaces Celestia had only glimpsed from the lower city glittered in the wan moonlight - golden domes, ivory spires, marble pillars, and silver arches. She saw gardens with exotic flowers imported from all across the known world, shrines tended to by grim-faced priests in crimson robes, and intricately-carved marble statues of unicorns she had no hope of recognising. Even the air smelt sweeter here, as though perfumed.

Celestia did her utmost not to look impressed by the gaudy wealth, but the knowing grin on Baron Redblood’s face told her she had failed.

The Tower of the Vizier stood out amidst the elegant ivory forms as a dark monolith that towered over its neighbours, as if trying to establish some sort of dominance over them. The two made their way towards it, across the wide, empty streets, and all the while Redblood’s visible unease about his proximity to that tower became more and more apparent.

“It’s a lovely evening,” he said. Celestia and Cimmareians in general were not ones for idle small talk and most of their journey had been undertaken in silence. “The unicorns have outdone themselves tonight.”

She looked up, away from the opulent surroundings, to the same sky shared by rich and poor pony alike, civilised and barbarian. The full moon shone down brightly upon them, as did the myriad stars that speckled the oppressive black, such that it almost obliviated the need for streetlights. A barbarian like her would have learnt to allow her eyes to adjust to the darkness, and where necessary her other senses - hearing, smell, touch, taste - would compensate, while civilised ponies flocked to their torches and magic lights.

“It was almost on time too.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” asked Celestia.

“Raising the sun and moon each day uses a lot of magic,” said Redblood, “and finding enough volunteers to give up their magic is a very unreliable system, if you ask me. Ah, we’re here!”

The tower rose before them; a tall, slim, black pillar that, from their vantage point near its base, seemed to stretch up to touch the night sky itself. Now closer, and illuminated somewhat by the dim lights of the street below, Celestia could see rippling veins of gold and silver cross-crossing its surface. A stone wall, three times as high as a unicorn, surrounded its base. Where they stood at the street just outside, they were confronted by a plain iron door, and the simplicity of which, contrasted with the delicately filigreed gates of the neighbouring palaces, seemed to make clear its occupant’s desire not to have visitors.

“Well,” said Redblood. He shuffled awkwardly on his hooves. “I hope you won’t be too offended if I just leave you to it, then. If you make it out alive, my palace is open to you, what’s left of it.”

With that he nodded his head, turned on his hooves, and galloped into the night without looking back, leaving Celestia alone there in front of the tower. Standing there she looked over the tower, its walls, and the streets around her. There appeared to be no guards as the whore had said, at least, not pony ones that could be seen. Indeed, where before she had passed watchponies on patrol, around this tower there were none that she could see.

Celestia had come this far already, but here was the point of no return. She approached the iron door and, ignoring what that stallion had said about the Vizier not welcoming visitors, knocked on it. The sound cut through the still of the night, but there was no answer. She had hoped, despite what everypony else had told her that night, that this could be done in a manner she thought that civilised ponies would approve of, but as she waited, the ringing sound fading from her ears, she realised that the more direct method was needed after all.

There were bushes and shrubs along the wall, and in contrast to the well-manicured lawns she had seen thus far, these were overgrown. She crept cat-like over to them, her hooves curiously silent even on the stones, and, reaching the base of the high wall, looked up at them. A unicorn might have been dwarfed by it, but she, a giant amongst ponies, found that she could quite easily rear up on her hindlegs and place her forehooves on the very top. She glanced around, and, seeing that there were still no guards visible, or indeed ponies at all, pulled herself up and over the wall.

She dropped down amidst the bushes on the other side. Immediately before her, a pony reared up with a sword in his mouth to bring down upon her head. On reflex, Celestia darted to the side, drew her immense metal slab of a sword from its scabbard to swing and-

The pony hadn’t moved. Celestia stopped. She placed her sword on her right shoulder, holding the mouth guard with her hoof to keep it steady, and cautiously approached the stone statue. It was stunningly life-like, and not at all like the idealised forms of the marble statues she had seen before. A brazier burned nearby and illuminated the figure, and she could see carved into the solid stone every wrinkle in the pony’s clothes, every strand of his coat, and even the raw terror in his eyes. Sniffing it, she could even detect a very faint scent of pony.

Celestia tore her gaze from this peculiar statue, and looked around to see that the garden in which she stood was full of these statues. Each was unique in appearance and pose - a unicorn mare poised to cast a spell, a pegasus spreading his wings to take flight, an earth pony halfway through drawing a sword from its scabbard, and so on - but one thing they all had in common was an expression of fear so vividly rendered in the medium of stone. The icy, primal fear of a threat out there that she did not understand gripped her heart.

She crept between these statues, at once fascinated and disturbed by their intricate detailing, though she could not put a hoof on why she found them to be so unnerving. Across this small garden was the base of the tower itself, and when she reached the wall she followed it, sticking to the shadows where she could. As she tried to remain hidden, she mentally kicked herself for not asking Baron Redblood for some ash with which to dull down her white coat and pink mane and tail. This had all been a spur-of-the-moment thing, entirely unplanned, and though her stubborn nature would not allow her to consider the idea she might have been wrong, it did occur to her, as the branches snagged at her coat and scratched her skin, that perhaps she might have benefitted from an hour of planning. Still, it was too late, and she could only press on.

The tower itself was wide and seemed to narrow towards the pinnacle, though that might have been the distortion of perspective. Eventually, following its rounded surface led to a door in the smooth, marbled wall. It was tall, wide, and made of a dull, patina’d gold. A short paved path in the grass led from the iron door in the outer wall to this entrance. Still seeing no guards, Celestia stepped out in front of the door, and considered it. A testing push with her nose found that it was locked.

It was the pure, savage instinct of a barbarian that saved her. Celestia sensed something behind her, though it made no sound. She turned, and there, hidden in the bushes was the black shape of a creature the likes of which she had never seen before even in the deepest of Cimmareia’s forests. At first she thought it was some sort of horrid serpent, yet its head was the wrong shape, appearing to be rounded, blunt, and possessing a beak and a crest. There were wings too, like a dragon’s, spreading from its back.

Tiny, hate-filled eyes glared at her. Celestia’s hooves felt heavy, as though they were turning to lead. She swung her sword in a wide arc, and the blade ripped through the bush, bisecting it and decapitating the creature. Hot, stinking blood splashed onto her face. The twitching corpse dropped to the ground in a pile of leaves and chopped branches, followed by its head, which she saw now resembled that of a chicken if poultry were capable of expressing such hate.

The leaden, stiff feeling in her legs melted away. Celestia moved her foreleg testingly, finding it still a little slow to respond, and on closer inspection there was a peculiar coating of stone dust on her coat. From further away in this garden, she heard yet more hissing. In the darkness, scores of red eyes stared.

Celestia turned on her hooves and charged for the door at a full gallop. A Cimmareian never runs from a fight, but a fight as she understood it was a fair contest between ponies where the winner won through strength or cunning. This was sorcery, and there was no shame in a warrior fleeing from the soul-sucking horror conjured by the most depraved of unicorns.

Using the full momentum of her charge, she turned her head out of the way and slammed her shoulder into it. The lock broke and the door swung open wide, revealing a grand entrance hall filled with light. Celestia stumbled in, all but tripping on her own hooves to arrest her momentum. She dropped her sword to the floor, seized the door with her hooves, and slammed it shut behind her with a ‘bang’ that echoed through this cavernous room. Heart pounding, sweat streaking over corded muscles, she held that door shut until the feeble banging of those abominations on the other side faded and stopped.

There was silence, save for the pounding of blood in her ears and her own ragged breathing. Celestia turned and slumped to her haunches, resting her back against the door, and looked around at the chamber.

The circular hall was a riot of bright colour, such that Celestia thought perhaps her vision had been cursed by those strange creatures. The floor at her hooves was a colourful mosaic of tiny stones, with a yellow path winding this way and that over a field of greens and blues, and which terminated at another golden door at the other end of the room. Here and there, standing apart from this snaking path, were pedestals, and upon each were huge jewels, marble carvings, and other curios. The walls were resplendently painted, depicting unicorns of all colours in a city engaging in various activities - bartering, working, sleeping, playing, and so on. The ceiling was a high dome, and painted so that one half depicted the sky during the day, with a stylised sun and clouds, and the other at night, with a full moon and a field of stars. She gathered that this was a reception room of sorts designed to impress visitors, and on that account, at least, she thought it worked.

Closer to where she sat against the door were a number of sofas, the sort decadent unicorn fops like Baron Redblood liked to drape themselves across, or so she’d heard. Celestia rose up to her hooves, and while keeping a wary eye on the door, dragged one of the sofas over to block the door. The scraping noise of its golden feet on the polished stone mosaic filled the entire chamber with its echo. Celestia was not satisfied that it would hold the creatures indefinitely, but it would keep them for as long as required. It would have to do.

There was nopony to greet her. From what she had picked up of grand unicorn palaces there should be servants, ponies employed to do the menial work of others too important and lazy to do themselves, rushing to take her cloak, give her drinks, and run for their master. But here there were no ponies, but she could not shake that primal sensation, bubbling up from her warrior’s instinct, that she was still being observed somehow.

Celestia picked up her sword and returned it to its scabbard for now. Anxiety knotted in the pit of her stomach as she picked her way along the yellow path, the sound of crude horseshoes on the delicate stone ringing through the hall, that unnamable, superstitious instinct of hers telling not to stray from it. The gems and jewels on the pedestals scintillated in the light as she passed them -- a golden chimera seemed to burn with inner fire, a diamond as large as her hoof refracted her reflection a thousand times over, and a jade dragon was so skillfully crafted she thought it might come alive and attack her.

Each of these items would have bought her one of those big fancy houses, she thought, and it was certainly tempting to just wander from the path and take one. She carried on, but the urge scratched at the back of her mind. Her funds were rather low, and while she could always get a few coins by doing odd heavy lifting jobs for ponies at the docks, among other profitable and often less-legal ventures where her strength and size were assets, she was certainly tempted by the promise of never having to worry about paying for ale again.

One item, however, caught her eye as she almost walked past it. An exquisite carving of two ponies engaging in a certain activity she had indulged in twice that night. She stopped and stared at it, entranced by the sheer, wondrous skill of the carver to have created such a perfect, artistic depiction of her favourite thing to do in the world. Even from such a distance, she could make out the pure ecstasy of two loving ponies captured at their moment of culmination. Celestia wanted it, and so much so that she wandered off the path that had hitherto guided her safely halfway to the door.

Celestia approached to within hoof’s-reach of the carving, seeing it revealed in greater and greater detail as she came closer to it - the musculature of the stallion, the soft curves of the mare, the way their manes were carved to appear matted with sweat, the detail on his…

The floor beneath her hooves gave way, as though it just ceased to exist, and Celestia’s hindlegs dropped through the trapdoor. Her stomach lurched violently. Her forelegs scrambled for purchase on the smooth mosaic tiles, only slowing her descent through the pit until it simply stopped. She looked down to see that her rear end had blocked a hole that a normal-sized pony would have just about slipped down. The sides pinched rather painfully around her muscular flanks.

A dart flew from an unseen gap in the wall and struck her in the hoof. It stung, but no more than her embarrassment at being saved from death by her large backside. Examining it, she saw that it was a tiny thing, no bigger than a wasp, but she could see a vial emptying some foul green liquid into her body. She ripped it off, but the damage was done; the pinprick was tiny but the skin under her coat had started to take on a sickly green hue, and her hoof began to feel numb and lifeless.

Stupid.

She had let her guard down, and for what? Mere base lust over a pretty little trinket. If her mother could see this she would be ashamed; she was raised to be a better warrior than this. A warrior this stupid was useless. No, worse than useless: a danger to her tribe. No wonder she had to leave. A big, stupid, useless, horny, drunk giant, who was going to die with her arse stuck in a hole because she was too inattentive to see the obvious and too fat to escape before the poison took her.

No.

Heat rose from her breast and seemed to suffuse her entire body. She whipped her head to the left to see the golden door that led to the rest of the tower, beyond which lay the answers to a question she had momentarily forgotten. All she knew now was that she wanted it more than anything. Snarling with the effort, her thick, corded muscles strained as she dragged herself, inch by inch, out of that tiny pit. The edges scraped painfully against her flanks, leaving ragged, bleeding cuts, but she felt the pain only in a distant, abstract manner.

Freed, Celestia stormed defiantly to the door, never taking her eyes off it. A quick buck tore it from its hinges and sent it flying down the corridor beyond. Not slowing for a moment, she passed the unconscious form of a manticore -- knocked out by the metal door striking it directly on the forehead.

Celestia found a flight of stairs leading up. The Vizier lived at the top of the tower, she reasoned, so up she went. She tore through the corridors and rooms. A hail of arrows from one end of the hallway passed harmlessly between her legs, being aimed to strike an average pony in the chest. She leapt through a room of flames and paused only to discard her burning cloak. Her coat was singed and her skin smarted with the heat, but she pushed on. A jolt of lightning cast from a spire in the next room only tingled, sloughing off her skin and re-directed through her wings to the ground. She didn’t stop to question it.

Only when she reached a small ritual room, many levels up from where she started, did Celestia stop. The tiredness that adrenaline and simmering rage had held back came flooding in, like the banks of a river during one of the very many rainstorms of her native land. She staggered in, sucking in deep breaths of the stale air in this tower, and finally allowed herself the opportunity to rest a moment.

Compared with the rest of the tower she had seen, this room was thoroughly modest. The walls were bare grey stone, though the flickering candles in sconces on the walls seemed to deepen the cracks and fissures between them. At its centre was a font, with a shallow indentation about the size of a soup bowl. There was a plain wooden door at the far end, made of a thick and sturdy oak that was reinforced with iron bars. It lacked a handle, lock, or any obvious way of opening it save for pushing. Across its surface floated symbols that Celestia failed to recognise.

It was quiet here, so Celestia retreated into a corner to take stock of her situation. Her saddlebags had been knocked about in her trek through the tower, but her canteen of water and oatcakes were still perfectly usable. She drank and ate as much as she dared, withholding some for later should she need it, and tucked the rest away.

Celestia examined her hoof where the dart had struck her, holding the appendage up to a candle and turning it over in the light;.the tiny pinprick had scabbed over and her skin under her coat had returned to its soft pink. There were many things that perplexed her about her own body: that she was stronger than most ponies was a given, it was obvious just looking at her tree-trunk limbs and barrel chest, and the wings and horn were still a mystery, but she had just survived things that would have slain even the mightiest warriors of her clan. She wondered if she would truly find the answer to the question that had plagued her when she first noticed she was different from the other fillies and colts -- what am I?

There would be no answers gained from sitting around. Celestia could have benefited from a little longer to rest, but, despite her growing exhaustion, a sense of nervous eagerness put her limbs into motion. She approached this door and rested her hoof upon its surface. A gentle push revealed that it was shut solid, though she could feel the cold, lifeless surface almost imperceptibly begin to buckle when she pushed harder.

The symbols shone brightly before her. ‘Writing’, she had heard it being called; the civilised ponies liked to record thoughts, feelings, and stories with symbols drawn on parchment or carved into stone. Nopony had thought to teach Celestia how to read, for there were very few ponies in the clan who could and she didn’t think that it was important that she learn anyway. Knowledge was passed down by the simple telling of it and that seemed to work just fine for them. So she stared at the words, recognising a few letters like ‘f’ and ‘d’ but unable to see how one could possibly convert these shapes into speech.

Celestia inspected the empty font. On closer inspection she saw a dark, rust-coloured residue at the very bottom and some soot caking the sides. If she had to guess, some sort of ritual was required to open the door, but as she couldn’t read what she assumed were the instructions she was rather at a loss. The memory of a few bratty unicorns laughing at her when they discovered she couldn’t read the sign to the privies in a roadside tavern bubbled up into her mind, and she felt a twinge of embarrassment.

Embarrassment, which she harnessed into anger.

Celestia backed up against the door. She steadied herself, spreading her forehooves for support, head down low, and then lashed out with her hindlegs. The great oak door shuddered under the impact with the sound of snapping wood, and two large cracks appeared in its surface. The glowing letters flickered briefly.

Most doors would have shattered under that, as the others she had left broken in her wake would testify. She sucked in a deep breath, steadied herself once more, and bucked again. The impact shuddered along her powerful hindlegs, seemingly reverberating into her bones. The door lurched and the wood splintered, shattering two large planks to leave a rather modest hole.

Celestia’s hindlegs ached. It would have to do, so she kicked out a few of the loose planks and snapped off jagged edges to make a hole that she could just about squeeze through.

Once on the other side with only a few more scrapes for her troubles, she found herself in yet another empty hallway with a door on the other end. Celestia groaned in frustration, and stamped a hoof into the paved stone, leaving a modest crater of shattered marble. This tower seemed endless, and without windows through which to glimpse the passage of the moon and sun she had no idea how long she had been trapped here. Minutes, hours, days -- it had all become meaningless. But with the stubbornness so characteristic of her clan she carried on, having gone too far to give up now.

Where are the ponies?

The thought was sudden and unbidden, but the realisation stopped her in her tracks. From the moment she mounted the wall she had not seen a single living, breathing pony in this tower. She at least expected to see slaves or servants whom she could interrogate. Yet, despite this tower clearly having been inhabited by somepony to clean its chambers, dust its nick-nacks, and maintain its many deadly traps, she encountered absolutely no ponies here, and she could hardly imagine a very important pony like the Vizier doing all of those menial tasks himself. Perhaps, she considered, they were all hiding from her, and judging from the minor trail of destruction behind her she could hardly blame them. This tower was certainly expansive enough for it, and she wagered that, from what she had seen, the entirety of her clan would only occupy a quarter of the total space of this tower with more than enough space to accommodate each family.

If anything, what she had travelled through in this tower felt like far more space than what she had seen from the outside would allow. In her rampage through the lower levels she was hardly taking stock of her position, as a hunter of monsters stalking the gloomy forests should, but it occurred to her, as she crept on through this maze of corridors, that she had been travelling rather more horizontally than she expected.

She came to a set of ivory doors inlaid with ice-blue diamonds. Cautiously she pressed her hoof against the door, and to her quiet surprise it silently swung open. Celestia stood at the threshold, poised to unsheathe her sword and fight or flee, as the room beyond was revealed inch by inch. She saw a large and homely bedchamber; the walls were packed with shelves heaving with books and parchment scrolls, the floor was marble as white as the full moon and partly covered with rugs of deep blue and purple. The air here no longer tasted cold and stale, but was fresh, sweet, and smelt faintly of lavender.

Celestia’s gaze settled on a bed at the far end of this long, rectangular room, draped with purple bedsheets, but atop it rested a unicorn with her legs folded under her body, reading an open book propped up on a pillow. Her coat was grey-blue and her mane and tail a light azure. She wore a shimmering black silk robe that draped elegantly over her slight, slender frame.

The mare looked up from her book and saw the towering Cimmareian standing at her door. An expression of alarm flashed momentarily over her aquiline features, before they settled into a polite smile. The book was shut with a soft thud. She rose from her bed and approached, while Celestia stared in quiet amazement, and said in a clipped, refined voice:

“Hello, my name is Luna. What’s yours?”

Chapter 4 - The Fallen Star

Celestia’s first instinct was to reach for her sword, but the little unicorn, ‘Luna’ she had called herself, merely stood there before her and smiled in eager anticipation of her polite greeting being reciprocated. She would not have put it past the Vizier to have used the form of an innocent foal to trick her, but, looking down into her dark eyes sparkling in the candlelight, she could not bring herself to entertain even for a second the possibility that she might strike down a filly.

“Celestia,” she said, “of Cimmareia.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Luna held out her hoof in apparent greeting, and Celestia hesitantly imitated that gesture. The smaller mare giggled, stepped closer, and tapped her polished hoof against the Cimmareian’s. “You’re supposed to bump hooves when you meet somepony new.”

“I see,” said Celestia, gingerly placing her hoof back down on the ground.

She stared around at the room, being so incongruous with the oppressive menace of the rest of the tower she had ascended. Compared with a series of chambers that seemed to have no obvious purpose other than to kill anypony foolish enough to break in, this room was very clearly a home. Everywhere she looked she saw signs of those little personal touches a pony makes when they find a place suitable to live in: the books and scrolls on the shelves, though she could not read their titles, looked as though they had been selected and arranged with care; in the corner of the room were a set of dolls that the filly had clearly outgrown but had kept for sentimental reasons; and further along the walls were decorated with hoof-drawn pictures of constellations.

“I’ve been reading books on etiquette,” said Luna. “Father says ponies aren’t allowed to see me because I’m too special, but I’m almost a grown mare now and I can’t stay here forever. Did Father send you here to see me? Please, come in!”

The words came quickly, though her refined accent never wavered. It was almost a veritable outpouring of pent-up emotion, as though the filly was trying her very best to hold back her excitement at meeting somepony new. She was as tall as an average unicorn, but her features and proportions were like that of a pony no more than fifteen, by Celestia’s guess, though her manner seemed to be that of a much younger filly. Then again, by the barbarian’s reckoning, civilised ponies who did not have to grow up with the hardship that comes with living in a cold, wet, monster-infested region like her homeland seemed immature by comparison.

This felt wrong. Not the mare, Celestia believed she was as perfectly innocent as she presented, but her mere presence in this tower and with the Vizier whose name she had heard so many ponies whisper in dread sent her primal instinct screaming. Warily, she did as she told and stepped inside the room, leaving grimy hoofprints on the rug.

“Who is your father?” asked Celestia.

“He owns this tower. Lots of ponies come and visit, but they’re not allowed to see me.” Luna shut the door behind her with a burst of magic, then turned to trot into her room and start showing off her things to her new friend, when she stopped, mouth agape in shock, when she drew up alongside the big mare.

“What is it?” said Celestia.

“You have wings.”

Celestia self-consciously fluttered her wings against her body. The filly stepped forward, reaching a hoof out to touch one, but Celestia stepped away.

“Please,” said Luna, her voice trembling. “I want to see them.”

Slowly, Celestia turned to face her, knocking over a pile of books with her rump as she did so but the filly didn’t seem to notice. She spread her wings wide; two vast, feathery white appendages on either side of her tall, domineering frame. Luna stared up in apparent awe at the sight, and, apparently having forgotten that ‘etiquette’ thing she had talked about before, reached out with her hoof and touched the thick, downy feathers.

“Father said I was the only one,” said Luna.

“What?” Celestia blurted out.

A flicker of magic from Luna’s horn unclasped her robe and it fell to her hooves in a heap. A pair of wings from the filly’s back, much like Celestia’s own, stretched wide, mirroring her own stance. “Father said I was the only one,” she repeated. “That’s why I have to hide in the tower, because I’m the only special pony with wings and a horn.”

Luna let out a sudden, shrill, foal-like squeal of delight that pierced Celestia’s ears. She pranced on the spot, her silver-shod hooves hopping on the plush rug and her wings fluttering. Her expression of utmost joy was infectious, and even Celestia found herself smiling.

“Are there more of us? Tell me everything! Is there a tribe of ponies with wings and horns out there, waiting for me? Where do they live? Are they all in the clouds like the pegasi or in big cities like the unicorns or out in the fields like the earth ponies? I’ve read all about them in my books, but I want” -Luna paused to take a breath- “I want to see them.”

Celestia waited for five seconds after the questions had stopped before speaking, just in case Luna thought of more to ask her. “I don’t know,” she said at length, and the filly’s ears drooped a little. “I thought I was the only one too. That’s why I came here, to look for your father. I thought he might be able to tell me and show me how to use magic.”

That seemed to perk the filly’s ears back up. “I can show you magic!” she said. “And we can run away together and see the world. I’m nearly an adult now, and I can make my own decisions. We’ll go and look for the ponies with wings and horns together and have adventures.”

“What about your father?” asked Celestia. Breaking and entering and potentially stealing a valuable item was one thing, potentially kidnapping a foal, or being mistaken for such, was another entirely, and one that judges were rather harsher on. Celestia rather liked her intestines inside her body.

“I said I’m nearly an adult,” snapped Luna. “And it’s not like I’m going away forever. I’ll come and visit and tell Father all about the ponies we’ve met and the places we’ve seen. And you’ll look after me like you’re my big sister.”

In the absence of the Vizier, his daughter would have to do, Celestia thought, and, in theory, she would be more valuable to him than the fallen star that she had still yet to find. Besides, as she looked down into the eager eyes of the filly, filled with so much excitement at just having met another pony like her, it would be a crime not to release her from this gilded cage and show her the world. It was a comfortable existence, but a cage is still a cage nonetheless; Luna would not have felt earth under her hooves, seen the glittering palaces and minarets of the city for herself, or known the pleasures of a stallion. The world could be harsh, as Celestia well knew, but there was joy in it, and she too felt it now that she could utter the answer to her eternal question:

I am not the only one.

The door opened.

“Father!” Luna shouted. “Look who I found! Another pony with wings and a horn!”

Standing at the door was a grey unicorn clad in hooded red robe embroidered with gold designs that resembled those letter things that Celestia had seen before, at least on a superficial level in the same way that moths and griffons both had wings. The hood was pulled low over his eyes, but a small hole had been cut for his long, thin horn. She could see a small, well-kept goatee, expertly trimmed to form a frame around his sharp chin. Though his eyes were shrouded in darkness, she could sense them staring at her, peeling away the layers of her flesh until he found her soul within.

“Look away, Luna, my dear” said the Vizier. His voice seemed to bubble up from the abyss itself.

Ears and wings drooping, she protested as only a foal could. “Please! She’s my friend.”

Celestia stepped forwards between them, saying nothing but drawing her sword with a steely rasp and resting it on her shoulder in the ready position. Her heart raced in chest, and the lingering tiredness was purged by a surge of blood. She stood there, tall, muscles tensed under her coat, staring down at the sorcerer and wondering if this little unicorn in a silly dress was truly the one the whore had said spoke with daemons and weaved doom upon his enemies. His neck would snap with a single slap from her hoof, she thought.

The Vizier smiled. “Look away.”

Luna turned her head away and clenched her eyes shut. “I’m sorry, Celestia,” she whispered.

The Vizier’s horn spluttered into a blood-red glow, like the burning heart of a ruby, or the eyes of those monsters in the garden. With a roar of defiance in the spirit of her ancestors who routed the would-be conquerors on the rain-drenched hills of their homeland, she seized the handle of her sword in her teeth and charged. They were close. Within moments the sorcerer would be reduced to a bloodied smear in the doorway, chopped in half by a brutal blade of steel and trampled by hooves that have crushed stone. Then she and Luna would both be free.

The glow intensified, suffusing the room in the hellish red glow of the pit. It throbbed like the beat of a heart, throwing everything within in sudden, stark, crimson relief before receding again. Celestia felt something in her horn, an unnamable sensation that she could not hope to describe in words, as some as of yet silent instinct within her now screamed in the mortal terror of a pony who knows they are doomed but not why. That the Vizier was casting a spell was obvious, and there was only one single hope for her -- kill him before he completes it. Closer and closer, she had but to leap forward and swing her sword and it would be done. Yet her hooves slowed, stiffened, and seemed to stick to the rug. She tripped and stumbled on, despite that cold, creeping feeling crawling up her long, muscular limbs, driven by a single-minded desire to kill the enemy, whose lips were twisted into a sadistic grin.

Her legs would no longer obey her, now stuck mid-trot. Only then, her calcifying heart straining against its fate, did she dare to look down and see stone creeping up her body. Shrieking, shouting, crying out; what muscles that were not solid rock burned with exertion to make herself move. The sword dropped from her mouth as she screamed. In the corner of the room, Luna sobbed.

The Vizier glided closer, his robe barely disturbed by the movement of his hooves. At the last moment, before the creeping petrification enveloped her face and all turned black and silent, as one final act of defiance she spat in his face.

***

Celestia awoke to a dull, droning sound. Her first sensation, before she could exert the super-equine effort required to open her heavy eyelids, was of a pounding, rhythmic pain in her head, as though Crom himself was beating an anvil inside her skull. Her mouth was dry, and there was a strange, dusty roughness when she ran her tongue along her teeth and gums. A foul smell in the air stung her nostrils -- a noxious mixture of blood and death and exotic incense that had a stultifying effect on her thoughts.

Her eyes blinked open, wiping away some sort of greasy film that seemed to have accumulated, and almost immediately she wished she hadn’t. Celestia was manacled to some sort of great stone slab, tilted back slightly, with all four of her aching limbs spread wide. The room was choked in a coagulating darkness, but before her, illuminated by the feeble light cast by a smouldering censer hanging from the ceiling, wreathed by the ghostly tendrils of smoke that clung to every surface like the early morning mists of the Cimmareian hills, was a table straining under the weight of weird eldritch devices that she could scarcely guess the purposes of. Her gaze seemed to melt off the table, incapable of appreciating the things atop it as a whole, and instead could only seem to focus on individual items: knives, daggers, saws, needles, jars of fluid in which sins against nature floated, vials, test tubes, bones, arcane sigils and Crom knew what else.

“Ah, you’re awake.” The voice seemed to materialise out of the languorous darkness, and moments later the Vizier, smirking confidently, emerged.

Celestia pulled at her restraints, but though her mighty thews strained against them, the cold metal would not yield.

“Don’t bother,” he said, circling around the table. “Those manacles are cast from metals found in a meteorite. Not even you, Cimmareian, can escape those.”

She gave one last, defiant tug with her forelegs. Celestia snarled at the Vizier, who she thought was doing well to keep his distance; any closer and she would have bitten his muzzle off.

“That’s better,” said the Vizier, returning her animal grin with a broader, self-satisfied smile of his own. “I have been looking for you, you know. Not personally, of course, but for another pony out there with wings and a horn. And after all of these years of searching, ever since little Luna fell into my lap, you just walked into my home, killed my cockatrice, and smashed my doors.”

He chuckled to himself. “That was a puzzle, by the way, the room with the bowl and the door with writing. ‘Blood and fire will open the way’, it said, but I didn’t count on my guests being illiterate.”

“Luna.” Celestia gasped, finding her voice dry and cracked. Her throat stung as she spoke. “Is she not your daughter?”

“My ‘fallen star’.” The Vizier peered over at the mess on the table, picking up instruments and examining them as he spoke. “I’m aware of that little story commoners share in their seedy alehouses. No, she is not really my daughter.”

“I thought it unlikely such a sweet filly could come from a wretch like you.”

The Vizier laughed again, and it was a mocking, hideous laugh devoid of any emotion akin to joy. “Her parents, her real parents, were minor nobles of the city, a unicorn and a pegasus, and naturally the birth of a foal with the characteristics of both caused a bit of upset, especially when the priests found earth pony blood inside her too. So they brought her to me, hoping that I could explain it. Alas, I could not. I failed. But I needed her for more research and I simply couldn’t leave her in the hooves of two ignorant ponies.”

The sickly feeling in Celestia’s stomach rose up, and the bile stung the back of her throat. She swallowed to keep it down. All around, amidst the darkness beyond the spot of meagre light cast by the censer, she imagined ghastly shapes forming, melting, and re-forming into something even more horrific.

“What happened to them?”

The Vizier sighed. “I don’t see why anypony should care,” he said. He ducked under the table and retrieved two large jars sloshing with a viscous pale-green liquid, which were placed on the table, shoving aside a pile of animal bones and a fetish taken from a Zebra shaman. Celestia leaned forwards, squinting to try and see the contents of those jars, and when she finally worked out what she was looking at, the bile returned.

In the left jar was a pair of wings, curled up to fit inside, and in the right was a unicorn’s horn complete with the small part of the brain its innards attached to.

“Bastard,” Celestia hissed.

“I wanted to know how to replicate Luna,” said the Vizier, leaving the two items on the table. “But they were desperately normal. Nothing about them even hinted at what they had unwittingly created. Luna has the potential to wield so much magical power, but she’s just a foal, still playing with dolls and dreaming of adventures. I’ve been waiting fifteen years for her to grow up, so I can unlock her true potential.”

Celestia spat dust on the floor. “For your own power.”

“All power demands sacrifice, Celestia. Preferably somepony else’s. But here you are now, a full-grown mare.” He ran his eyes hungrily over the barbarian’s strong frame, lingering between her hindlegs. “Clearly.”

The Vizier darted around the table, but remained just out of biting distance for Celestia. As he spoke, his voice grew animated; higher, more frantic, as though the words struggled to keep up with the machinations inside his diseased mind.

“Do you know how much magic is required to move the sun and moon? To give the world the gift of night and day? How many unicorns, brilliant sorcerors all, must burn themselves from the inside out and scour their bodies clean of magic every day to make it all work? You and I and one day Luna will change that when I unlock the power within you. I will sink my hooves into your flesh and drag out your magic as a surgeon tears out a foal from a dying womb. I will make more of you. I will become like you. I will ascend.”

‘Do not fear magic, but fear what a pony must sacrifice to take it.’ The words of the wise mare imparted to her before she left for the unicorn lands made little sense to her then, but now she understood them clearly.

“Release me, you coward,” Celestia snarled. “I’ll snap your horn off your head and make you eat it.”

The Vizier sighed, tutting and shaking his head in mock-disappointment. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Of course you wouldn’t. You can’t even read. But I will make you, and in time, when the pain is over, you will thank me.”

A scalpel lifted into the air from the table, encased in that dark red glow that was echoed in the horn of the Vizier. It floated closer, slowly, as if dragging out the moment of anticipation. Celestia squirmed against her restraints -- this was no fate for a warrior, no glorious death in battle, and nothing that would grant her soul a seat at Crom’s side. The sharp blade glinted brightly in the glow, and unlike the pretty dagger Redblood had wielded, this was a thin, clean, precise tool for inflicting pain, not a weapon to grant an honourable end. It rose up and up to the level of her forehead, and as it began to slice into her horn the world became nothing but white and pain.

Chapter 5 - The Dream

The night sky stretched on forever in all directions, including down. A trillion stars sparkled -- a trillion gaps in the firmament for a lost soul to fly to the afterlife. As Celestia stood in this void, somehow on firm ground, her first thought was that she had died there under the Vizier’s knife. She wondered about when she would stand before Crom upon his mountain throne and submit herself to his judgement: would he point to the path on his right and allow her to sit by his side and await the final battle, or would he point to the left where she will descend as a shade into the otherworld for the rest of eternity? Then she saw Luna.

“It worked!” She galloped on over to Celestia, somehow through a void with no visible ground, then reared up and threw her forelegs out to wrap around the big mare’s neck in an embrace. Rather stunned, Celestia could only think to pat her on the head. “I hope Father isn’t being too rough with you.”

“Where are we?” said Celestia.

Luna broke her embrace around the Cimmareian’s broad neck and stood back on her own four hooves. She looked around, grinning happily, and swept a glittering silver-shod forehoof around at the great expanse of stars all around them.

“Do you like it?” said Luna. “You’re asleep and this is your dream. Father doesn’t know about this yet, but if I concentrate I can see into ponies’ dreams.” She leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “It’ll be our little secret.”

Celestia stepped back warily, having earned a rather healthy respect for magic she couldn’t explain. Looking over her own body, she saw that the cuts, scrapes, and bruises she had earned to find Luna, her ‘fallen star’, in the first place had vanished. Even the thin coating of soot and grime had vanished, as though she had suffered one of those bath things that everypony else kept telling her she needed.

“How?”

“I don’t know. It just happens.” Luna shrugged and, apparently sensing Celestia’s discomfort, stepped forwards and placed her hoof on the taller mare’s foreleg. “You’re safe here. This is your dream, after all.”

It was a dream, but the hoof on her foreleg felt very real, as did that hug earlier. Even the unseen ground was as solid as stone. If she pricked herself, would she also feel pain?

“Luna,” said Celestia falteringly, as she struggled to think of how to word her thoughts carefully to avoid upsetting her new friend. It was silly, she thought, she had fought monsters and beasts and ponies who were little better, but this filled her with more dread. “Do you know what it is your ‘father’ does?”

“Oh.” Luna stepped back and rubbed her left foreleg with a hoof, ears drooping. “He helps the king rule and he thinks about magic things.”

“Do you know what he’s doing to me?” Something slimy and wet seemed to crawl up Celestia’s back, and she shuddered. “To my body?”

Luna turned and looked away, and said in a small, hushed voice. “My father is a good pony.”

Celestia felt a twinge on her horn, just where her ‘father’ had made the first incision with the scalpel. It was not that Luna truly believed that, but that she wanted to believe that the stallion she had called father for as long as she could remember is a good pony.

She sighed, crouching down and inclining her long neck down to the level of the smaller filly, and said, “Do you remember your mother?”

A moment passed, but it dragged like an age of the world itself. Here in this dream realm there was no wind, no heat or cold, and no sensation save the firm something beneath their hooves that kept them from plummeting into the endless void. Celestia watched patiently as Luna screwed up her face, her brow furrowing as she seemed to be right on the cusp of remembering a memory long-repressed, buried so deep within her but she could almost see the faint outlines of a mare and a stallion, the former with wings and the latter with a horn. Yet though the faces were blank voids and the ponies merely shadows, she remembered the feeling of love that flowed like a fountain from them.

“I’ll tell you about my mother,” said Celestia. “She is the strongest mare in our clan, except for me, of course, but that never stopped her bending me over her knee and giving my arse a slap if I misbehaved.”

Luna seemed to perk up instantly at that, that infectious curiosity returning to her eyes. “Can you show me? You said you’re from Cimmareia. I’ve only read about it in books.”

“I don’t know how.” Celestia looked around the void, seeing only stars.

“It’s your dream,” said Luna. “You just think about it and we’re there.”

“I will try.” Her mind cast back to her youth, before she left her homeland. Celestia pictured her village and the fields and hills around it, which had always seemed so big but now seemed tiny by comparison to what she had seen. She remembered the craggy hills, the stones, the sea by which her village was built, and the dark, forbidding forests she was warned not to go near for fear of the timberwolves that infested it. She remembered the wind.

A chill gust plucked at her mane. They were now atop a hill that overlooked a tiny village of crude hovels, shacks, and huts placed sparsely between vegetable plots and grazing ground. There was the chieftain’s hut, being the largest and, by their standards, the most extravagantly decorated, with a single red banner fluttering from a pole. Smoke rose from chimneys, carried away by the breeze. Ponies, all clad in rags and cloaks to provide some protection from the wind, worked on their plots, chatted, drank, and bartered at the local market for the scant amount of foreign trade that came in. ‘Foreign’, of course, meaning the next village over a mere two miles away. Further along, the ground sloped away to a pebble beach and a grey, churning sea that crashed in white waves upon it. In the distance endless hills filled the horizon, all drenched in fog.

“It’s just missing something,” said Celestia. Thin but consistent drizzle then descended from the skies, smothering the scene in even more grey. “There it is.”

It looked and felt so very real, as though she was truly there upon that slope overlooking the village where she once played games with the other colts and fillies. She was always the monster to be slain, of course. The long, overgrown grass beneath her hooves, the rain on her coat, the smell of the sea -- she was home.

Luna shivered in the rain and the wind, so Celestia rose to her hooves and extended her wing over the filly to grant her at least some comfort from the hardships she had long-since grown used to. Nevertheless, Luna was utterly entranced by this very ordinary scene unfolding before that she almost forgot the cold wind chilling her to the bone. Dozens of quite ordinary ponies, albeit shades of a dream acting according to the memories of the dreamer, going about their daily business. It was a scene she had certainly read about, but to see it with her own eyes, through the lens of a dream, was quite something else.

A little bit down the slope from where they stood Celestia saw herself, albeit a little younger, standing there with a stallion, her wing too outstretched to protect the smaller pony from the constant rain. To see her own body as another pony would was a little jarring to her, though seeing for herself the effects of all of that physical training her mother had put her through to build her into a warrior did fill her with some small level of pride.

Speaking of her mother, now that she had thought of her, a figure of a small, squat mare who wasn’t there before sat nearby and brooded over the scene of her village. Her coat was tan-coloured, almost blending in with the cloak on her back, and at her hip was battleaxe almost as big as she was. She was short, but about as wide as she was tall, and it was all densely-packed muscle. A lattice-work of scars criss-crossed her body.

“Is that your mother?” asked Luna. “She looks so serious.”

Celestia chuckled. “To lead the chieftain’s chosen warriors to battle you have to be,” she said.

“Who’s the stallion?”

“Tinpot, my big brother.” He was a small, rather scrawny pony who resembled his ‘little’ sister only in that they had four legs, two eyes, a nose, and all of the other necessary prerequisites to be labelled a pony. His coat was as grey as the stones around them, but his mane and tail were shocks of white. On his flank was a picture of a tin pot.

“He’s a bit of a strange one,” continued Celestia, smiling softly to herself. “He had no interest in being a warrior like the other stallions. Growing up, I had to protect him from the other colts. He had an idea about the metal in the hills near the village. It’s no good for making weapons, but he said the unicorns in the south want it and will pay us for it, and that will make us rich. Then we won’t need to keep kidnapping sheep from the next village, he says.”

“He sounds clever.”

“He’s very clever,” said Celestia, smiling proudly. “He knows his letters. But my parents wanted a warrior, and they told me that when my mother was pregnant with me they prayed to Crom, who clearly made up for Tinpot when I was born.”

Luna stared silently at the scene before her, utterly entranced by this modest spectacle of earth pony village tedium. Though the need to push her about her so-called ‘father’ burned fiercely in Celestia’s breast, threatening to force its way out of her mouth and demand that this sheltered little filly confront the horrid truth about the lie that had been her life, as she looked to the quietly shivering filly huddling under her wing, enraptured by something so simple to Celestia but so alien and exotic to Luna, she found that she simply could not. No matter the memories of the pain she had been through, to ruin what was otherwise a lovely moment felt like a sin.

“Where’s your father?” asked Luna.

“Probably out chopping wood,” said Celestia. “Oh, this is a dream. I can summon him whenever I want.”

A grizzled older stallion emerged into existence. Standing atop a rock, he was telling a story to his family, and despite his apparent age, he supplemented the telling by enthusiastically demonstrating slashes with an imaginary sword and dodging imaginary attacks. Over the sound of the wind they couldn’t quite hear him, but if Celestia didn’t know any better it was the story of how he met her mother again. It was a favourite tale of his to tell, and only when she visited the civilised lands did she find out that it was not considered normal for two ponies to fall in love after duelling for a night and a day on a corpse-strewn battlefield.

Luna leaned forwards, almost tipping over on her hooves, with her ears pricked as she tried to listen to the story, which contained rather more violence and bad language than the romantic epics in her book collection. Celestia looked down at the filly and smiled at the simple joy she was taking in this banal, everyday scene. Though she didn’t want to spoil her pleasure, she knew that she must wake up and the horror would continue.

It had to be done, and there was nothing else for it. Like the administering of a healing balm to a wound it would sting momentarily, but in time it would heal and hopefully leave an impressive scar behind. Celestia sucked in a deep breath and held it. She was not good with words, she thought, not like Tinpot, but perhaps here some Cimmareian bluntness was what was truly needed. “The pony you call your father is using you.”

“What?” Luna blinked up at her.

“Have you ever asked him about your mother?” asked Celestia.

“Well, yes, but he said he’d tell me when I was old enough.”

“And you are ‘nearly an adult’.” Her wing dropped to drape over the smaller mare’s body. “He is not your real father.”

Luna screwed up her face in an expression of rage, and pushed herself out from under Celestia’s wing, snarling up at her. “No!” She petulantly stamped a hoof into the grass. “You’re lying.”

“Then find me,” said Celestia calmly. “There you will see the truth for yourself.”

Luna shivered in the rain and the cold. “I’m not allowed in his workshop.”

“Luna, you will not see and experience the world for yourself unless you push the boundaries other ponies have set upon you.” Celestia held out her hoof to her. “I swear by Crom that I am speaking the truth.”

Another ageless moment passed as Luna stared at the huge, dinner plate-sized hoof before her. Then, as the moment passed and the rain of this dream-Cimmareia soaked into their manes and coats, Luna reached out and touched the hoof.

The dream world turned white.

***

Celestia awoke to a throbbing pain in her horn and forehead. The smell of blood had grown stronger. Added to the noxious mixture that suffused the room was that of urine, and judging by the warm, wet sensation on her hindlegs it was most likely her’s. She opened her eyes again, her vision swaying as though she had drunk an entire alehouse’s stock of strong ale again, and the stars of the dream realm still sparkled before her vision.

The Vizier was there, sitting on his haunches and staring at her.

“What did you do to me?” said Celestia, her voice cracking.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I only took a look inside your horn. I haven’t changed anything. Yet.”

“I can still…” Her head lolled drunkenly on her neck. Vomit rose up Celestia’s throat, but she swallowed that foul-tasting mess. “Take your head. Tear out your eyes. Slit your overbed throat.”

The Vizier’s grin glinted in the eerie light like a knife in the darkness. “You have no comprehension of the power you have. The poison should have killed you in seconds, but it did not. That lightning would have turned a unicorn to ash, but it only tickled you. So much magic potential, and you waste it all on mere flesh.”

A rectangle of bright light appeared in the room, briefly blinding Celestia with its brilliance. Blinking through the glare, she saw an expression of alarm on the Vizier’s face before he turned to look. Forcing herself to look despite the pain in her head, she saw a black figure silhouetted against the white. As her vision slowly adjusted, she saw Luna, her horn bright with the light of the moon on a clear winter’s night, stride into the room.

“Luna?” the Vizier said, rising to his hooves. “I told you not to come here!”

She didn’t seem to hear him, and instead looked around at the horrors of the ‘workshop’. Now that there was light, Celestia could see upon the walls blasphemy of almost every sort she could imagine and some that were far beyond her ken. Grotesqueries upon grotesqueries were nailed to the walls: things that were supposed to have been ponies, with too many wings and horns in all the wrong places. If that, she saw things that could only be described as ponies by applying a very loose definition of the term. A few, she noted, were very small -- foals. All of the Vizier’s failures to create more like her, among other atrocities that he had created and then discarded according to his vague whims.

Celestia started to feel a chill, and she wasn’t sure it was only to do with the abominations she saw on the walls.

“What happened to my mother?” asked Luna, her voice frightfully formal.

“She-” The Vizier’s mouth gaped, like a fish dragged out of water, and only a feeble croaking sound emerged. His eyes wide with terror, turning red at the edges, and his breath frosted in the air before him.

“The jars on the table,” said Celestia, indicating towards them with her muzzle. “I’m so sorry.”

Luna’s silver-shod horseshoes tapping against the cold marble was the only sound audible, aside from the Vizier’s ragged breathing and the rapid beating of Celestia’s heart. Her wide, terrified eyes drank in the gallery of sin before her -- the wretches that were once ponies on display like sadistic art. Her gaze moved quickly from one poor creature to the other to see the last moments of pain and torment etched forever on their faces, where there were still faces. She approached the table and saw the mutilated mortal remains of her parents. Her shaking hoof reached out to touch first the jar with the horn and then the one with wings.

“Mother, Father,” whispered Luna. She flinched from the jars as though her hoof had been pricked. “I… I remember them now.”

A single, strangled cry of despair rose from Luna’s throat. Her whole body trembled like an autumn leaf in a gale, and Celestia saw that it was not fear but raw, unadulterated rage. Luna’s sharp, delicate features twisted into a hideous rictus of misery now transmuted into anger, as she narrowed her piercing blue eyes - now bloodshot, teary, and filled with hate - on the pony responsible.

The light from Luna’s horn intensified, shining brighter and brighter until the room was flooded in it and all of the Vizier’s sins on display were fully illuminated. The temperature dropped, chilling Celestia to the bone far sharper than any wind and rain she had known before. Yet the Vizier seemed to be suffering the most for it -- his flesh under his coat turned a sort of red, cracked with black and blue bruises that appeared starting at his hooves, his breathing now rapid and shallow, and his eyes widened with the fear of a pony who knew precisely what was happening to him.

His jaw continued to flap uselessly, but, with one last monumental effort, he willed his blueing lips to form faltering words: “I-I did what I had to.”

“You took everything from me!” roared Luna.

The Vizier’s horn flickered with red light. Once. Twice. Then the appendage snapped off like an icicle and shattered on the ground, leaving a bloody, jagged stump. He tried to take a step forward, but when his forehoof touched the tiled floor it crumpled beneath him, breaking and tearing as though it was made of parchment. The second step brought his body to the ground, whereupon he shattered like glass into frozen shards.

The muggy heat of the room returned as the light from Luna’s horn dimmed. The manacles restraining Celestia crumbled in the cold and she slid down the metal slab onto her hooves, and was aghast when they splashed into the melting, gorey chunks of the Vizier. Dizzy and nauseated, she stumbled away from the visceral mess as quickly as she could manage without stumbling or falling.

Luna stood there, gaping in mute shock at what she had done. Terror, and not for the first time that night, had gripped Celestia’s heart like the talons of a beast. She had just seen Luna turn the very air inside a pony’s lungs to ice, and the implication that she herself might be capable of such magic too, sickened her.

Yet Luna was still a filly. Celestia stumbled on, almost tripping once or twice, and snatched her up in her thick forelegs in a fierce and tight hug to her barrel chest. It seemed to snap her out of her shock, as she squirmed a little against the veritable wall of the barbarian’s coat, before slowing and then sobbing into the soft fur.

“Don’t look at it,” said Celestia. “Just look at me.”

“I want to go,” said Luna, her voice muffled. “I don’t care where, just not here.”

Celestia looked behind her to see the grisly remains of Luna’s parents on the table, still there amidst the multitudes of abhorrent things. “What about your mother and father?”

Luna choked back a sob. “They’re gone,” she said. “Please, just take me away from here.”

They deserved a proper burial, cremation, or whatever it was that these unicorns do with their fallen, but looking at the mutilated organs it simply too ghoulish for either of them to even consider picking up and carrying. However, this awful place would become the Vizier’s tomb, ensconced with the horrors he had created in his quest for power -- Celestia found the irony grimly appropriate.

“I will.”

“You’ll look after me?” Luna looked up at Celestia, tears streaking down her cheeks.

The image of the Vizier turning to ice flashed into Celestia’s mind, putting to question that very idea. She looked down at the weeping filly, and found that, despite this, there was no part of her that would consider saying no.

“I swear an oath,” she said, raising her right hoof. “By Crom, I will not abandon you. May he strike me dead where I stand if I break this oath.”

***

Luna had brought Celestia her sword and saddlebags, and into the latter she had packed a few of her possessions: three books, some parchment and ink, and a few gems and trinkets of hers. She had brought no rations for the road, but as Celestia wanted out of the tower as quickly as possible and was suspicious of what the Vizier might have thought passed for food, she was content. Teaching Luna how to survive out there in the world would have to come later, she thought, for there would be plenty of time for that.

It was time. Luna led Celestia through hallways and rooms and down stairs she had not seen when she stormed the tower earlier. They moved as though in a dream, and indeed the nameless, empty environs of the tower seemed incomplete and lacking, as though unfinished on a level of reality itself. It was an uncanny sensation that could not have been put down solely to the pain and tiredness that sapped even her mighty strength and will, and it unnerved her greatly.

“Part of this tower exists within the dream realm,” Luna explained when Celestia asked if she knew where she was going. “That’s why it’s so big. It exists because of my- the Vizier used my magic to create it.”

They came down a long spiral staircase, lit from the high ceiling by a glow that seemed to have no obvious source, and which terminated into the grand entrance hall. The trapdoor Celestia had gotten herself stuck in was closed, the trap reset, and the sofa she had dragged to block the door was back in its original place. The many gems and curios on the pedestals seemed somehow vague and indistinct as she passed them by; she would see one, drink in the detail of the carving and the glimmering fire of the gems, but upon looking away almost forget what it was she had seen.

The doors opened into the garden, where about a dozen ponies, some of whom Celestia had recognised as bearing a stark resemblance to the statues she had encountered there, staggered about in dazed, fugue-like states. The morning sun crept over the palaces and spires of the upper city, dazzling the streets below in the light reflecting off their marble and jewelled surfaces, and as Celestia stepped into the light she was invigorated by it, as though awakening from a deep sleep. Life itself seemed to flood back into her very being.

Luna, however, stood at the threshold of the door, looking out at the garden, the ponies in it, and the city beyond. Knowing that as she crossed that threshold her life would truly begin, she hesitated; there was no going back, but she had already crossed that mental line the moment she had seen Celestia. When she emerged into the glow of the early morning, feeling the warmth of the sun for the first time upon her, she was as a newborn foal, with a life of experience and wonder stretching before her.

The dark tower, looming oppressively above them, seemed to flicker, sparkle, shudder in the light, and then was gone, as though it had never existed. All that hinted at its previous existence was this garden, and where its base once was the ground was black and scorched, as though the earth itself had been scarred by its presence.

“By Crom,” said Celestia, staring up at the space where the tower once was. “To Tartarus with these sorcerers and their plots. I need a mug of ale in my hooves and a pretty stallion on my lap.” She grinned at Luna, who marveled at the sights of the city. “And I know just the place and the stallion.”