Canterlot burned as pegasi and changelings rode the rising thermals in a choreographed dance of death. Steel sparked against steel in a sky darkened by hundreds of twisting armored forms. Screams and grunts could be heard among the sounds of battle as both blood and bodies fell from the sky.

A lone figure stood on a crumbling parapet, her eyes stinging with smoke and soot as she desperately sought to understand the madness that surrounded her. Princess Celestia wandered in a dazed shock, eyes wide as she surveyed her surroundings. Nothing but flames and death met her eyes. Her slow hoof falls taking her down into the smoldering city below her. A noise drew her eye as a body struck the ground.

Celestia could see that It was a pegasus in armor, and as she slowly moved toward the figure, she realized with dawning horror that it was one of her loyal defenders. The Pegasus had been a mare in the golden armor of her solar guard. As Celestia checked the body she began to realize that something was off. The Solar demigoddess kneeled closer and waving the soot and embers away from her face, she got a good look at her guard. The sovereign practiced eye roaming the cooling body. What she found wearing her day guards armor was a grotesque abomination of the pony form. Its face was covered in erratic scarring. Somepony had carved complex runes and lines into the skin. Each rune forming magical arrays on the thing that she feared had once been a pony. As Celestia reached for the lifeless face, her hovering hoof could clearly feel the clammy taint of mind magics seeping from the corpse.

The Princess spun and fell into a defensive position as a pulse washed across the ruined city. The movement coming naturally to her through centuries of true combat. She could feel the wave as it passed through her thalmic field. Her face hardened with the certainty that comes from dealing with true evil.

She recognized that pulse. She had felt it before when dealing with the most bleak of unicorn mages. The wave had contained the bound life forces of pure necromancy. Celestia got to her hooves, letting the body she held slide to the dirt and with a low growl, stormed into the smoke.

The Sovereign moved through the ruined and smoldering streets of what was once her city. She stepped over the burning bodies of her ponies as she wandered. The fallen were not just soldiers, but civilians lay strewn around her as well. The Princess’s eyes were drawn to a nearby alley and onto a sad tableau. She moved toward it and looked. It was a scene that had been frozen in time. The bodies, forever locked in position, mummified in a flash by the drying heat of a spell. Celestia's eyes roamed over the silent scene. A Stallion lay dead. He had been trying to shield two small foals with his body. His twisted features frozen forever in a terrified resolve.

Celestia briefly wondered what the stallion had been thinking when he died. She leaned forward and caressed a mummified foal with a deep feeling of remorse. To her dismay, the body crumbled to dust at her touch.

Celestia shook off her unease and flared her wings. With a mighty flap, she rose high into the air. She looked around at the city that had become the embodiment of horror and scanned the chaos around her. She watched as the monsters dressed as royal guards along with a force of some changeling-like creatures struggled to defend the burning capital against an army of… well, everything.

Movement caught her eye and the day sovereign watched as her guard fought the invaders that seemed to pour in from everywhere. What she witnessed surprised and worried her greatly. The invaders were a mixed force made up of strangely armored ponies, and changelings, as well as an odd mix of Minotaur, and Griffin. As the clashing forces fought all around her, Celestias eyes fell on squads of Kirin and Nirik deliberately and systematically burning the city to the ground.

With a powerful flap, the Princess flew upward and as she rose, a powerful flare of magic caught her attention. She spun to face it, and her eyes fell onto the largest tear in reality she had ever seen. It glowed with a dark blue color and had the unmistakable shimmer of magic. Magic that seemed to ebb and flow on its rippling surface. The rifts blue light seemed to cast a pulsing beam that fell near some conflict in the distance.

Curious, she flapped her wings and moved toward that distant motion. As she flew through the smoke, she tried to see through the waves of heat and dancing embers that surrounded her. Her eons as an Alicorn had honed her magic senses and she used them to guide her through the smoke and flames. The sensation of the tainted magic grew as she approached her destination.

What she saw when she arrived brought her to a complete stop. In front of the day Princess, a battle was unfolding. She watched as a much younger version of herself and her sister fought alongside a party of heroes against a rotting Alicorn corpse. Even from that distance, Celestia could feel its twisted dark power. It was tremendously strong and held a necrotic evil that she had seldom encountered in her long life. She could feel the sheer magnitude of it as the figure traded both spell-work and steel while gliding effortlessly through her attackers. The rotting dark Alicorn was elegant and graceful as it moved.

The Sun goddess moved closer to try and make out more features on the corpse. The dark Alicorn had clearly been a mare, and she clearly wasn't alive anymore. Her body was beginning to decay. Her rotting hair and cracked hooves made an odd yet elegant sight as it swept flawlessly into the group of heroes.

A clash of steel drew Celestia's attention to the conflict before her. To her horror she saw her own party now scattered and in complete disarray. Celestia watched as her twisted day guard were fighting against her younger self and the heros with her. She watched as a concussive burst broke the heroic groups tight formation. She watched as her smaller self tried in earnest to regain any kind of upper hand before things could get bleaker.

Celestia eyed the team her copy commanded. It was the oddest group of heroes that Celestia had ever seen. The party consisted of changeling queens, her young self, her young sister, and a Crystal unicorn of frost or diamond.

In the time it took for the scene before her to register in her mind, she realized in shock that their numbers had already been halved. Completely outclassed and unable to regain the offensive, the party was losing. Celestia watched grimly as the crystal unicorn, having gained some much-needed distance, began to glow. She cast spell after spell all around her, raising jagged crystals from the battleground in unbelievable numbers. The Jagged spikes began to strike the dark Alicorn like crashing waves. But even as the crystal blades broke against the demon's barrier, the dark Alicorn continued her assault.

As she moved forward through the smoke, the Sun Goddess began seeing more details of the crystal unicorn, and what she saw shocked her. The unicorn was not a mare at all, but a stallion. A young one. He had the look of a colt just coming into his stallionhood. While he was taller than most ponies, he wasn't at all what she would have thought a crystal soldier should look like. He wasn't large or stocky but was tall and slim. It was the sort of build she often saw in runway models. His blue eyes flashed as he bobbed and weaved through the mayhem of battle. She watched as he fought with skill and focus that she had never seen in a modern stallion.

While Celestia allowed stallions to join the royal guard, she had no intention of sending them into any situation even remotely harmful. While the solar guardsmares were given intensive military and occult training, the stallions of the guard got basic self-defense and simple stun spells. They were too valuable for combat and were used for their beauty and to soften foreign opinions of Equestria.

A cry pulled her out of her thoughts and grabbed her attention. She stood by and watched in disbelief as first her sister, then herself were impaled and flung through the ruins that were once her city. Celestia watched in growing horror as first the changeling queens, then the unicorn was launched viciously into the ground.

The sun Princess stepped backward in dread, her eyes locked firmly onto the aftermath of the fight. She watched as the withered Alicorn corpse, robed in royal regalia, stalked toward the fallen. Then as if things couldn't get any grimmer she heard the long deep thrum of thalmic magic. Craning her head toward the sound she realized that it had come from the massive tear. As she watched in astonishment, a serpentine stream of power snapped down onto the battle below with a crack of thunder.

THOOM!

Celestia sat bolt upright in her bed and looked around in terror. Her heart was beating furiously in her chest and she was covered in foaming sweat. She stood on shaky legs and grabbed the ornate pitcher that sat by her bedside. She looked at herself in her mirror and ran the cool damp towel across her sweating features as she thought about the dream. She thought about her and her sister's appearance. How they looked younger and smaller. She thought about her sister and how she was back from her long exile and no longer the nightmare. She considered the changeling queens. Changelings had been gone and forgotten for centuries. She had honestly thought that they had all died. She looked deeply into her tired eyes and wondered if she was wrong. If not one, but multiple queens had somehow survived. How they not only survived but had helped her fight a monster. Celestia looked down and sighed. Not just one dead race from the past, but two of them. A crystal pony was alive. Not only was alive, but alive and fighting at her side. Fighting alongside her sister as well.

Celestia considered the dream, or was it a vision? A vision of the future, the past? A future where the Alicorn sisters fought with monsters against monsters. She shook her head vigorously to clear her mind. No, that was foolishness. Her sister was banished. Locked in the moon by the elements. The Princess was so distracted by her raging thoughts that she didn't notice that the details of the vision were ever so slowly fading from her memory.

No. The Crystal Empire was lost to history, and the changelings were extinct. She giggled at the thought of a prissy stallion warrior. What would he do, nag at her until she surrendered? She giggled at the thought of banishing him to the kitchen for a thousand years. She pushed down the grin with a self-incriminating rebuke. She really shouldn't do that in this day and age. It was a wrong thing to think and very sexist. A over reaction to the extreme scarcity of stallions and their long time roll as housecolts. Celestia grinned again, who was she kidding, it was kind of funny. She turned around and with a regal air perfected through the centuries, she pointed her hoof and declared in her best courtroom voice.

“I sentence you to the kitchens to make me a sandwich!”

A sound broke her from her daydream and she looked down and into the shocked face of her door guard. The stallion was standing rigid, his ears folded back, lower lip trembling. She looked down at her hoof and realized it was pointing right at him. Before she could say a word, the sniffling colt bolted out the door. The other guard, a mare looked at her with a slight frown and an arched eyebrow.

“I apologize for disturbing you. We were only looking in on you because we thought we heard a noise.” The mare pursed her lips and tilted her head a little. “Am I banished to the kitchens as well, your majesty?”

Celestia sighed. “Could you please go get him, and apologize for me?”

As the guardsmare stiffly bowed and left, a thought struck the Princess. I just sent a hysterically crying colt…to the kitchens. Kitchens teeming with sympathetic colts that gossip like a bunch of old stallions. She grumbled, ’This is going to be all over the castle by tomorrow, and if they are really mad at me, it's nothing but low-fat diet cake for a week.’ She sighed. ‘Again.’

Resigned to her fate, Celestia wandered over to the window and slid open the curtains. She looked up to her sister's moon and froze in shock, her pupils shrinking in terror. High in the sky was her sister's moon. The moon was shining brightly among the dotted stars of space. Luna's silent silhouette lay quietly upon its silver surface. But that wasn't what Celestia was staring at. Celestia's gaze was locked someplace else. Next to Luna's moon, but much closer to the horizon stood a blue rift. A tear in reality the Sun Princess had seen earlier in the night.

It was the azure rift from her nightmare.

Author's Note

I figured that I would give this idea a shot.

A different spin on RGRE

The Monk