The dark tunnels of the nest were lit only by the glow of phosphorescent tumors growing from the walls, and the occasional brazier burning with anointed kindling. Only deep, dark shadows stretched between those pockets of illumination. There was no Light in this place; not even where the braziers burned their brightest.
No Light, that is, save for a tiny little robotic drone that flitted from shadow to shadow, and pressed itself against the wet, crawling walls whenever the thralls scuttled past.
They were hunting the little Ghost, she was sure of that. Whether they could hear her somehow, or could smell her, or could sense the little spark of Light that she was with senses unknown, the Ghost couldn’t know for sure. But she did know that the thralls couldn’t be allowed to find the Ghost, or else she would be taken. Trapped in their claws, and brought to one of the nest’s wizards or knights as a ritual offering. To have her little spark of Light drained from her, and consumed by the Hive. Consumed by the Darkness.
She couldn’t let that happen. But the longer she stayed here, moving from shadow to shadow, the more likely it became. She could calculate her odds of survival in real-time, and she hated it.
She swooped around a corner, and her sensors spotted the reflection of metal. Dark, pitted and cracked from atmospheric re-entry. This didn’t belong here, inside the nest. It wasn’t of the Hive, but pony-made. Ancient.
It was exactly what she was looking for.
Finding the cockpit took only moments; finding a crack in the hull wide enough to squeeze her shell through took longer. The cabin within was peeled open like an orange on the wrong side, which was both a blessing and curse, since it meant that escape would be easy. But it also meant that there was nothing to keep the thralls from swarming the ship’s interior at the slightest noise.
She tried to put it out of her mind; thinking about her odds made them worse due to distraction. Better that she was focused, as much as she could be, while she searched for any sign of the crew.
She’d expected a full crew; the ship was a combat vessel, designed to carry troops to and from the surface, as well as their equipment, vehicles, and long racks of easily-deployable cover emplacements. But there was only one skeleton within the ship, still strapped into the primary pilot’s seat, and no others within the empty hull.
One skeleton was enough to make this whole journey worth it. And she was vindicated when she unfolded her shell for the most minor scan she could allow herself to perform in such hostile territory. Within the bones, there was Light. So much Light.
She had found her Guardian. Here, in the darkest, most unsafe, most horrible place she could have imagined. If she could have, she would’ve cried with joy and frustration.
Instead, she opened her shell fully, metaphorically cringing at how much of a footprint she was leaving for the Hive to see. The Light flowed through her, as the faintest needle of impossible magical wonder, and kindled the Light within the dead bones. In the deep darkness of the Hive nest, the Ghost turned back time and fate, and resurrected her Guardian for the first time.
* * *
Warmth.
Deep within, she felt a warmth.
She was alive, or something akin to it.
She sucked in her first lungful of air in her life, and it was sickly and acrid. It tasted like rot and mildew and rust. The shock made her cough, as she lurched forward, but she was trapped, there was something pressed against her breast. Numbly, she slapped at her body with limp hooves, trying to find a catch or a clasp or something.
There was a voice, words, but she couldn’t understand them. She sucked in another breath of rancid air as her eyes focused, and she was instantly blinded, because somepony was shining a light directly into her pupils.
“Eeengh, bright…”
“Shush! I’m sorry, but you need to be quiet. Can you stand?”
She traced the straps against her chest with her hooves...her hooves were wrapped in a jumpsuit of some sort? It was hard to tell where her hoof-boots ended and the clothing began. She was a pegasus, she could feel her wings, but they were trapped against her back, inside her jumpsuit. “I—I think so—”
“Shush! They’re coming!”
“Who—?” A horrible screech echoed through the cockpit, and the mare jerked as a spike of fear jolted her awake.
The light in front of her flared much brighter, and heat bloomed on her breast. After a moment, the straps fell free, their latches red-hot and smoking, and the mare shook them off as she rolled out of the seat. Something was floating in front of her, shining a light into her face, and it spoke with the voice of a nervous mare. “Here! This cabinet, hide in here! And don’t talk, they can hear you! Don’t even breathe!”
The tiny spotlight flicked downwards to indicate a low storage locker, one meant for securing survival gear in case of a crash, but the door had long been yanked open and the contents looted. There was just enough room within for the mare to cram herself into the claustrophobic space, but not enough to close the door; she’d have to hold it mostly shut with her hoof.
The little floating light didn’t get in her way—in fact, as she rolled into the locker, it seemed to dissolve into a spiral of dust. Something about the mare’s being...changed, in some way that she couldn’t explain. Nothing was physically different, but her spirit felt...fuller, somehow. Like a tiny fragment of her soul existed outside of her body, and only now did she feel whole.
“Don’t talk—they’ll hear you if you do.” The voice seemed to come from inside her own mind. She heard the words, but not with her ears; it was difficult to explain.
As the mare crushed herself into the space with the locker door, her eyes focused on the small space through which she could still see the cockpit. She couldn’t have cut it more closely; a moment later, something large and bipedal leapt into the ship, grasping the rusted steel bulkheads with bony claws.
It was tall, but thin, emaciated. She could see right through parts of its body, where there was neither muscle nor bone, and no skin to fill the gap. Not that it seemed to have skin; in the dim red emergency lighting, the texture of the creature’s flesh looked more bone, or chitin. The head had no eyes, only a shrieking mouth filled with jagged teeth, and it flicked from side to side like a bird of prey on the hunt.
“Don’t see me. Don’t hear me. I’m not here.” The mare thought to herself. She didn’t know what the monster was, nor what it would do when it found her, but she knew she didn’t want that to happen.
“Breathe as slowly as you can. Relax. It can’t see you. Thralls are blind.” That nervous mare’s voice spoke again, inside her head. Even then, it spoke as though the monster could hear them, if she spoke loudly enough.
“Blind? Wait, who are you? How are you—?”
“I’m...part of you. Sort of. We’re pairbonded. Think of me as being a telepathic drone hiding in your backpack, if it helps you visualize it.”
“...But I’m not wearing a backpack.”
“I know. It’s a metaphor, I’ll explain later. More important things to know right now.”
The mare tried to breathe slowly, following the voice’s instructions. The monster leapt from one side of the ship’s interior to the other, and then started to rip open random equipment cabinets. Ancient junk scattered across the deck, and slid down the sharp incline. The whole ship was tilted forwards, the mare realized. She’d had some trouble orienting herself before, because of that.
A moment later, another of the monsters appeared, leaping into the ship to join the first. They both prowled across the decks like feral beasts, and clung to the metal for purchase like apes or insects. They must have been twice the mare’s height, standing with their back straight, but the creatures seemed incapable of that; they hunched down to rummage through the debris on the floor, or crouched in the corners of the room to grasp at bulkheads above them.
The two creatures seemed agitated by each other’s presence, and they screeched and snarled at each other as they crawled around the interior of the ship. Every few seconds, one of them would freeze as though listening, only to be disturbed by the other moving around or knocking something over.
A third appeared, and that seemed to be too much. The first and third creatures howled at each other, and started clawing and biting as they fought like rabid dogs. The mare was horrified as the first creature she’d seen was ripped apart by the third. A twitching, disembodied arm slapped against the deck, bleeding green fire, and slid past the cracked-open cabinet in which she hid. Then there was the sound of cracking bone, and the monster went limp, as the victor of their scuffle dragged its prize out of the crashed ship and out of sight. The second monster sniffed at the ship, filled with flickering green embers, one final time, before it followed.
“What...what are they?”
“Hive thralls. They’re...complicated. To make a long story that no one really understands very short, they’re like...ants, in a colony. But vicious. They’re blind, but they always come in swarms, and they’re fast, so they can overwhelm their enemies with sheer numbers and rip them to shreds.”
“To shreds, you say?” The mare considered opening the door of her locker and crawling out, but decided against it, since she could still hear the echoing howls of the thralls. “Okay. Don’t let them catch me. I’ll wait until they leave, and then I’ll move. If they’re blind, I might be able to sneak past them.”
“Maybe, but it’s really dangerous. You need to help me escape.”
“Help you?” The mare wanted to laugh, were it not for how much of a disturbance such a noise would create. “You need to help me! I don’t even know where I am, or what happened, or...I don’t even know who I am!”
“You’re a Guardian. You were dead before. But I brought you back to life, to fight for Equus and the Traveler.”
“...Great. That’s great. Very helpful. I was hoping for a name, maybe.”
“We’ll work out names when we have time. Right now, we need to find you a weapon. These ships had personal defense weapons for the crew and pilots—pistols and submachine guns, compact things that could be safely stowed.”
Gently, the mare eased the locker door open, and scanned the empty ship. “How long have I been dead? Because this ship is halfway made of rust. Even if we can find a weapon, it won’t be usable.”
Dust motes coalesced into the familiar shape of a small robotic drone that floated in front of the mare. “Don’t worry about that,” it whispered. “I’ll be able to fix anything you can find. I just can’t make guns from scratch—at least, not without some more specialized equipment.” The outer shell of the drone rotated and opened, like a tiny mechanical flower with a diamond-shaped eye in the center, and started to shine a light from that eye around the cabin.
The mare gently rolled out of the cabin, and stretched her legs. The old fabric of the jumpsuit she wore felt...weird, and grimy. Like a corpse had been wearing it. She decided to try not to think about that any more, and resolved to find anything else to wear as soon as she could. Her thoughts turned to the drone, and as she started searching through the other lockers, she whispered, “What are you?”
The little drone turned to her, as the shell spun around the core. “I’m a Ghost! Your Ghost, specifically. I’m sort of a…” Rainbow light played across her eye, as she tried to figure out how to phrase the answer. “I’m a mechanical lifeform that does anything you might need out of combat. I can access stored data, manage inventory, communicate with others over radio waves, scan things, open doors...I can even bring you back to life, if you die again!”
The mare pulled open another locker, and disturbed a pile of desiccated MRE packets. “Okay...so what’s my part in this?”
“You have hooves. And can fire a gun. More specifically, you channel the Light to protect the Traveler, Equus, and everypony else on the planet.”
The mare paused, then let out a long sigh. “Right. Okay. No pressure, then.”
“Oh no, there’s a ton of pressure. Especially right now. Focus on right now, we can get into all that after we escape the Hive.”
Right on cue, there was another distant howl.
The Ghost glanced towards the jagged hole torn through the ship’s hull, and the walls of the nest outside, before turning back to her Guardian. “Please hurry.”
The mare opened another locker, and something rusty and mechanical fell out. She tried to catch it, but fumbled the item—she was too distracted for a moment trying to work out how she was pulling open lockers and picking things up with her bare hooves. It clattered to the deck, and she scrambled to grab it off the metal floor. The howling grew louder as she turned the item over for examination, and found herself holding a gun.
She knew what a gun was, but didn’t remember how she knew. She identified the stock, the magazine, the barrel, the grip, the trigger, and the sights on top. There was a magazine loaded, so she turned it over in her hooves and pressed the stock up against her shoulder to look down the sights. The gun used to have a crystalline sight that used magic to project a dot for aiming, but that had been shattered long ago. The whole gun was a mess, really; the barrel was slightly bent from falling out of the locker, the surface was rusty, and the ammo counter atop the magazine well was dim and broken.
There was a brief moment in which she was internally puzzled by how she instinctively held the weapon, the metallic form clinging to her hooves. She could easily hold it out by the handle in one hoof even though logic would dictate it should simply clatter to the ground. It was almost like magnetism, but that didn’t explain the sensation of some metaphysical aspect of her being that was somehow resting on the trigger, ready to pull. There wasn’t going to be enough time to ponder this, however, with that bone-chilling noise continuing to come closer.
Not that her Ghost seemed to be deterred by this dilemma, or how poor the gun’s condition was. “Ooooh! That’s a Kopis-SMG2; it’s a Minotaur design that fires ballistic ammo.” Beams of light lanced out from the Ghost’s eye as she began to scan the ruined gun. “There’s a round chambered, careful. I’ll start synthesizing more ammo, and see if I can clean it up and get it into working order.”
“How long is that going to take?” The mare asked, as she leaned around a bulkhead to look out into the dim nest once more.
“Um, maybe a couple of minutes, but I’ll prioritize core functions—” As she spoke, there was another howl, much closer this time.
“We don’t have a couple of minutes, work as quickly as you can—”
There was a horrific screech as one of the thralls leapt through the jagged hole, and though it didn’t have eyes, the mare could feel it focusing upon her. She didn’t want to kill, not even a monster like this, but if she didn’t, then it was going to kill her instead. So she didn’t have a choice, even though it made her soul ache in pain at the thought of killing.
She braced the stock against her shoulder, and looked down the broken sights as best she could, as the monster leapt at her. The magic of her hooves acted as a finger to squeeze the trigger, and the gun jerked in her grip as the SMG let out a single popping gunshot, then a click.
The gun had sat in a wet, rusting locker for untold centuries. The round that had been chambered was rusted and malformed, worn by age and water and time. The gunpowder within was ruined, and the casing breached. It never would have been able to fire, under any other circumstances. The striker would have struck the primer and made a dull click as it failed to trigger the small-caliber round. Even if it had fired, the barrel was bent, and the sights were broken—it would have been impossible to fire the weapon accurately.
Instead, the Light of the Guardian infused the gun, as the Ghost reassembled and repaired the firearm on the atomic level. It empowered the bullet, and fate changed to favor the Guardian as, against all odds, the bullet fired straight and true.
The thrall’s head exploded as the single bullet punched through the soft skull, and the now-headless corpse fell at her hooves, bleeding green soulfire from the stump of its neck. It spasmed for only a moment before it laid still on the deck, slain by the mare only minutes after she’d awoken.
“Yes!” The Ghost squeaked happily. “I knew you were my Guardian! I knew it!”
The mare stared at the corpse in shock for only a moment, before another nearby howl brought her to the present. She smacked the magazine of the gun, and a shower of rust scattered as she knocked it loose and pulled it out of the magwell. She clenched the steel case in her teeth as she started to clear the jam, and the Ghost’s light played over the magazine, restoring the rest of the ruined ammo within.
The casing hadn’t ejected properly after the first round had fired, and was stuck in the ejection port. The mare knew all of these terms by heart, and her hooves worked the SMG’s bolt with training that she’d never had, or at least couldn’t remember. In under a second, the ruined brass casing had been flicked away, and the mare grabbed the magazine out of her teeth before slapping it back into the magwell. She worked the action one more time, and there was a satisfying click as the topmost round in the magazine chambered properly.
It was just in time; three more thralls leapt through the hole in the hull, but this time, the mare was ready. She didn’t have time to aim, and hip-fired the SMG into the horde of three. Bullets splintered chitin and tore tendons as the Guardian’s fire ripped them apart, and their corpses joined the first on the angled deck of the ship only moments after they’d entered.
Her Ghost already had a second rusty magazine ready, so she ejected the half-spent mag and slapped in the fresh one. Her Ghost caught it as it fell, and new small-caliber rounds were assembled and slotted into place, before the magazine was slotted into a strap of the Guardian mare’s jumpsuit. The Ghost’s vision scanned the corpses and the hull, and she used Light to leech the molecules she required for repairs and ammunition from the alloys of the hull and the chitin of the dead thralls.
The mare watched as the rust of the submachine gun was stripped away, purified, and relaid into the gun to reinforce it, right before her eyes. The barrel straightened, the crystalline sight un-cracked and lit up with a bright red reticle, and fresh oil bled across the mechanisms of the weapon to prevent any more jams. “Oh, wow.”
“I told you, I just needed a little time! Oh, it feels so good to be able to do this all properly for my own actual Guardian!” Her Ghost let out some giddy laughter as she worked, but paused after only a moment of celebration. “We should really start moving, though!”
The mare took a moment to recenter the gun’s sights, but glanced back at her Ghost. “Okay, which way?”
“Out and up! I didn’t finish mapping the tunnels entirely, but I know enough to get us to the surface! Follow the waypoints!”
The mare slid her rusted SMG into her jumpsuit’s side holster—she paused for only a moment to consider both that she had side holsters and did as such on sheer instinct—and leapt through the jagged hole in the side of the ship, out into the Hive tunnel. The walls had a visible pulse, as they squirmed and flexed, and the glowing cysts in the floor trembled as she stepped over them. The mare didn’t have time to appreciate them, however, as a fresh horde of thrall turned the corner before her.
The SMG was back in her hooves in under a second, and thrall fell like a crashing wave before her, but there were too many in too small a space. The moment her mag ran dry, the Guardian was overwhelmed, and four thrall tackled her against the ground.
The Ghost winced, then swooped out of a thrall’s grasping claw as she dissolved into dust. While they were pairbonded by the Light, they didn’t share sensations, and the Ghost was thankful for that as her Guardian was ripped limb from limb by screeching thrall. Her Guardian screamed as she died her second death, but the Ghost was undeterred, and waited for the right moment.
A few minutes later, the thrall’s bloodlust had abated, and they were fighting over the scraps of pony that littered the tunnel. One near the edge grabbed a large chunk of her corpse by most of a hindleg, and had begun to drag her away from the others.
Now.
The Ghost popped back into reality near the ceiling of the tunnel, and began to fill her Guardian with fresh Light while the thralls were distracted by trying to jump up and grab at her. The thrall that had been dragging her corpse looked back, confused at why his prize had suddenly grown heavy—only to find himself looking into the resurrected mare’s eyes, as fire boiled in her hoof.
Waves of heat rolled down the tunnel as the Guardian turned that thrall to ashes with a fireball, and then rolled back to her hooves as the others howled at her. One other thrall had been chewing on her SMG a few paces away, but it disappeared from his jaws in the blink of an eye as her Ghost flicked it to the Guardian, with a fresh mag already loaded. She caught it, and as the wave of thrall descended on her again, she opened fire with just a bit more precision this time.
After scant seconds of fire and lead, there was only the Guardian, her Ghost, and a pile of cooling Hive corpses.
Her Ghost was the first one to speak. “You channel Light like a Warlock!”
The Guardian blinked at her. “What? Sorry, hold up, I just died, give me a second to come to terms with that.”
“You did! Don’t worry, it happens. I rezzed you! Slang for resurrected. Or respawned. ‘Res’ is the operative part of the term, either way.”
“Right. Yes. Okay. You can do that.” The mare swapped in a fresh magazine as she eyed her Ghost warily. “How can you do that?”
The Ghost spun her shell giddily. “Space magic!”
“What.”
“It’s really complicated and no one’s actually really sure how it works exactly, also it’s kind of a religious thing, depending on who you ask. The short answer is we’re both powered by—or made of—a theoretically-infinite amount of space magic. That’s the ‘Light’ I was talking about before.”
The mare blinked at her Ghost. “Can you do anything about the pain? You probably need a body to appreciate this, but being ripped apart was not fun.”
“Uh...no. There are meditative exercises as part of the training regimen, though. And also medicinal painkillers, but Guardians aren’t supposed to use those because they’ll impair your physical or mental abilities. I can heal anything less than fatal wounds though, using the same method as I used to restore the gun.”
“Okay,” The mare swallowed. “So...not unkillable, just technically immortal. Good to know. Should still avoid dying though, because I really cannot express enough how much that hurt.”
There was another nearby howl, which jerked the both of them out of their conversation. Her Ghost jumped, and then disappeared into hiding amongst the Guardian’s being. “Oh no. We’ve woken the Hive! We need to leave!”
The mare stowed her SMG again, and she started into a gallop, as she continued their conversation in her head. “Okay, if you can bring me back to life, why were you so nervous about those first thrall finding us? The whole hiding in a locker thing?”
“You didn’t have a gun then! I could have kept bringing you back, but you would have had to fight them hoof-to-claw every time. You wouldn’t have been able to stop them from dragging you off to this nest’s wizard!”
“Right. Okay. What’s a wizard?” The mare leapt through a massive spider web, that blocked the tunnel at shoulder-height. A moment later, she realized that something had to have created that web, and she was immediately thankful she had torn right through without becoming entangled.
“A high-ranking Hive leader. Somewhere in between a religious leader and a military commander. They’re usually female, like the princesses. But they’re really dangerous, because they can drain our Light and kill us permanently. It’s alright if you get ripped apart by thralls or acolytes a few times, but if a knight or a wizard gets ahold of you, we’re in serious danger, so try and keep that from happening!”
“Gee, thanks.” The mare’s hooves slid on a slick patch of resin, and she bounced off of a glowing boil in the wall before she regained her balance. “Is that anything like a Warlock?”
“What?” Now it was her Ghost’s turn to be confused.
“You said I was a Warlock before. What does that mean? I’m a pegasus, not a unicorn—I can’t sling sorcery.”
“Completely inaccurate; you already have! You incinerated that thrall, remember?”
The mare paused, and looked down at her hoof, wrapped in both boot and jumpsuit. “...Huh.”
“Guardians are all unique in how their Light manifests, but usually they can be categorized into three different general categories; Titans, Hunters, and Warlocks! You’re a Warlock, which means you’re especially inclined towards the elements and the fundamentals of reality, and you can channel them as needed. In your case, solar, which is basically just fire, but it’s a lot more complicated than that...anyway, I probably should have guessed, it totally fits your look.”
The mare looked down at herself. While her Ghost had remade her jumpsuit almost perfectly after the thralls had ripped both her and it apart, there were still a couple of tears, through which she could see her own bright yellow fur. She also looked up at her short-cropped mane—a military cut—which seemed to be a two-toned bright orange, as far as she could tell in the light of the nest. “...Huh.”
She heard her Ghost giggle. “I know, this is a lot to take in, and we’re reaching critical mass in terms of education for one day. Focus! Up, out, and away to safety!”
The tunnel ended in a junction, with the tunnel to the right marked by a floating diamond that seemed to exist only within her vision. That was a waypoint, then. Progress through the nest was hard to determine, since it all looked the same, but the mare could faintly tell that they were moving upward, albeit slowly.
There was something else here...the mare couldn’t put her hoof on it exactly, but the air within the nest was oppressive, and cloying. It wasn’t just the smell of death, or the smoke from the burning braziers. There was something in the air here, a sort of dread that couldn’t be shaken. It was almost the sense that something was coming, or that she was being watched...but whatever that was, had already arrived. And it was squatting within this place, watching her, waiting for her to slip up, so it could consume her.
“This place...it’s...there’s something wrong here. How far are we from the surface?” A thrall crawled from a nearby hole in the resinous walls, and the mare barely blinked as she incinerated it with an instinctual blast of fire from her hoof.
“Not far, I think! Turn left here!”
“You think—?” The mare felt the words die in her throat as she turned the corner, and found herself looking into a chapel made of bones and chitin. She stood in the doorway of a second-floor balcony which ran around the room. Another identical door on the other side was marked with a waypoint, but what was immediately more pressing were the dozens of Hive that filled the hall.
Throngs of thrall kneeled in supplication behind a massive, armored Hive creature, which itself kneeled before a grand altar covered in woven bone and flesh. In one claw, it gripped the handle of a chitinous sword, which was stabbed tip-down into the floor. Even from here, the mare could see the wicked edge of that blade, and the sense of dread that she had been feeling coalesced into a sharp spike of fear. “...What is that?”
Her Ghost was afraid too; she could hear it in her voice, and on that same instinctual level. “That is a Hive Knight, bred for battle and tempered by war. It will kill you, so we need to not be here.”
If only they were so lucky. Already, the thralls had begun to sniff at the air, and other Hive around the chamber on the same balcony as the mare—neither thralls nor knights, but somewhere in between, and armed with their own guns made of chitin that leaked crackling blue fire—had taken notice of her. One let out a dull roar of alarm, and all eyes were upon them.
Eyes. These ones had eyes. Three of them, two placed horizontally, and then a third on the forehead, to form a triangle. That they had eyes, as opposed to the round, featureless skulls of the thralls below, that was particularly unsettling.
There was intelligence in those eyes. They had weapons, and worshipped their dark gods here. They were sapient, not just insane, feral beasts like the thralls. They were dangerous. And the mare would have to kill them, if she wanted to escape.
The SMG leapt into the mare’s hoof, and she unleashed two bursts of lead into the chest of the nearest Hive creature—”More acolytes, watch their fire!” her Ghost shouted, which gave her a name for them—and she leapt over the green-burning corpse before her as the doorway in which she had stood only a moment before exploded with hot blue plasma. There was cover here, and the mare ducked behind it as more bolts slammed against the blood-iron railing.
Her cover began to melt under sustained fire, and heat rolled over her as the metal boiled. She spared the dead acolyte a glance to see if she could recover his weapon, but he still held onto it, even in death. Then the creature’s chest writhed as she looked at it, and the neck bulged as something within the dead monster started trying to escape. A third burst from her SMG put an end to that; whatever it was, it popped and died for good this time, as the monster went still.
The sound of claws beating against metal caught her attention, as the thrall from below thundered across the balcony towards her. The knight was below, the thralls were coming, and the air was filled with blue plasma.
The first thrall was upon her even as she brought her sights to bear, and warm air rushed across her back as it dragged its claws through her suit, and the flesh beneath. Hot pain filled the mare, and she let it out as a pained screech as she squeezed the trigger, and hot lead tore through more of the thrall before her.
“Jump! They’re going to swarm you here, just run!”
The mare did that; she leapt over the slagged lump of boiling bloodsteel that had been her cover, and her wings unfolded, now freed from her jumpsuit. She braced for an impact, a slug of plasma that brought her crashing down...but it never came, and somehow, she seemed to be disobeying gravity.
She hung in the air, as though caught in an updraft without any wind, as she spread her wings on instinct. The acolytes seemed confused by this as well, as they tried to predict her path, only for their shots to go wide or low. The thrall howled in frustration, now that their prey was out of reach, and the mare lazily spun in the air as she brought her SMG to bear.
One acolyte stood beside her point of egress; once he fell, she would be unmolested as she passed through the door, until the thralls caught up with her. But it was a plan, better than nothing, and she focused her weapon’s sights right between his three eyes.
Her weapon jerked as she emptied the mag, and the creature was dead before it hit the floor. The mare landed beside it a moment later, and folded her wings as she jammed her gun back in her holster. Already, the thrall were running back around the balcony and catching up to her, but the mare glanced one last time towards the center of the chapel.
The Hive knight had not given chase, like the thralls had. It stood, proud and ominous, in the center of the hall. It watched, to see if she would dare to attack it, and the mare wondered what would happen if she did. The chitin that formed the beast’s armor was so thick, she wasn’t sure it would even feel her pathetic small-caliber gunfire. No, she was sure it would slay her with barely a thought, perhaps in a single swing of that cleaver-like blade in its claw.
The mare turned and ran, but the last she saw of the knight, she could have sworn it was laughing at her, or at least smirking. It knew how much more powerful it was than her, and it was proud of that fact. It hungered for their fight, so that it could slay her and win. So it could take her Light, and grow stronger from that conquest.
It was utterly alien to the little pony, and her tiny mote of Light. It was the opposite of everything they knew, and there was not a philosophy that could have opposed them more thoroughly.
And so they fled.
* * *
Hive tunnels blurred past them as the mare galloped frantically upwards. Her lungs burned, but she couldn't stop running, or else the thrall would catch up to them. Her Ghost was shouting something inside her head, but over the pounding of her pulse, it was hard to hear her.
Suddenly, the Hive resin receded, and the mare found herself in a pony-made stairwell. It led upwards, and she took the stairs two at a time to get as much height as she could. But she couldn’t be sure that she was escaping the Hive’s lair, because even this stairwell was painted with their symbols and incantations in foreign glyphs across the walls, daubed in glowing paint.
Her Ghost spoke again, and she strained to listen. “We’re almost out! I still don’t know where you’re going, but you’ve got the right idea! This must be one of the buildings adjacent to the crash site, if we can get to the roof or even a high window then we can take to the sky—”
The stairwell ended in a blockade formed of Hive resin, and a door to her right that seemed to lead to an ancient office. A long time ago, ponies had busied themselves with shuffling pieces of paper from typewriter to typewriter here, processing papers and mail and forms while their boss watched them work.
Now, it had been transformed into a mockery of such. The ceiling had long collapsed and the debris shoved aside, which had created a new room three stories tall. More thralls, always more thralls, scuttled around the ruined cubicles and burning braziers, as they drew glyphs across the floor and wound bloody tendons around glowing crystals. Moths fluttered around the glowing crystal lamps, and more thrall leapt for the tiny insects, to try and catch and consume them.
At the back of the ruined office, another new Hive creature hovered in the air, watching all of the thrall, and this new intruder. It looked as though it was some sort of high priest, wearing long robes of moth-eaten cloth, from which two long grasping claws emerged. It screeched as it saw the mare, and began forming symbols using arcane hand gestures. Fire appeared at its fingertips, and that fire was swept towards the mare as the thrall swarmed towards her.
“That’s a Hive wizard! That’s this nest’s wizard! This is bad, this is really really bad!” The Ghost shrieked in fear, and the mare drew her SMG in an instant...only to recall that she had never gotten the chance to reload. As the thrall approached, she dropped her weapon to bring her own hoof full of fire to bear.
In that moment, as she felt Light flash in her hoof, and watched the first thrall fall back, the mare felt something. Some well of untapped power within herself, that she had only used in short bursts until now. Just like those flashes of fire, but deeper, and larger. But she didn’t have the time to contemplate it; the second thrall had already tackled her, before she could focus on that power.
“No no no no no...” The Ghost shimmered into existence above the pile of bodies, as the writhing mass of thrall descended on her Guardian and tore her apart for the second time. Only now, the wizard was present as well, and she could feel the alien monster’s hungry gaze upon her. She was little more than a morsel of Light, but the wizard wanted that morsel, all for itself.
The wizard swooped in close, the ragged cloth of its cloak billowing as it paused just above the pile of writhing Hive, and reached for the Ghost. Tendrils of Darkness extended from its claw, and wrapped themselves around the Ghost, even as she shook with panic, and drew in Light to bring her Guardian back to life. “Come on come on come on—!”
She could feel it. Not just touching, caressing, crushing her shell. She could feel the dark invading her, trying to rip her apart. The Hive wizard was a hungry predator, trying to crack open a bone to suck out the marrow within. It would have her Light.
And then the room exploded, with waves of heat and fire.
The writhing thralls dogpiled atop her Guardian were reduced to ashes in an instant, and the fire of the sun scorched the wizard as it screeched and recoiled from the explosion. The invasive Darkness receded, and the Ghost braced herself for the shockwave and the heat...but it passed right through her, as though she wasn’t even there. All she felt was Light, restorative and warm and loving, as it swept across her tiny being and filled in all the cracks the Darkness had been trying to pull open.
Her Guardian was a being made of energy, and that energy was fire, burning hot and bright and angry. Waves of fire rolled across the room, upending braziers and scattering the ashes within. The grimy windows of the office shattered, and the walls groaned as the structure sagged.
The Hive did not acknowledge fear. Fear was weakness, and weakness led to failure. Failure was death, and thus, those that felt fear were superseded by those who did not.
But for a scant few burning, painful seconds, this Hive wizard felt fear. For it was trapped in a room with a pony made of living fire. It was alone. And there were no shadows in which it could hide, nor draw power from.
Light filled the room, and there was no escape.
* * *
“That was amazing!”
“Ugggh...You keep saying that.”
“Because it was!”
“I’m not even sure what I did!”
“You channeled the Light!” The Ghost’s shell spun in excitement, over her Guardian’s shoulder. “You were barely even alive yet, but you channeled the Light so quickly! I’ve never heard of a Guardian getting back up like that! You were like a phoenix, rising from the ashes!”
The Guardian sighed, as she flopped onto the bench of an old cable car station. “Yeah, well...I think I burned myself out a little bit there. Or maybe doing that just kicks the snot out of you.”
“That’s another thing the meditative exercises help with, apparently.” The Ghost swooped into the mare’s face, and clicked her shell in excitement. “Come on! We’re almost away from the nest, it’s still really dangerous here.”
The mare gently pushed her Ghost away with a hoof. “Whyyyy...we killed their boss, doesn’t that mean anything?”
“Oh no, not in the slightest. That was that nest’s oldest wizard, but others will replace it. One probably already has, and they’re probably rallying thrall and acolytes to sweep the area as we speak. We need to put some distance between ourselves and this Hive.”
The mare sighed, and sagged on the bench. “Gimme a marker.”
The Ghost flew up into the sky a few body-lengths, then placed a gray diamond over a distant ridge. She remembered a scout camp in that direction; a couple of guns, a bed, and a hoof held radio. It wasn’t much, but that was a good start. “There, that ridge. We should be far enough away to evade any wandering Hive, once we reach that point. I can help with the exhaustion, too!”
The mare looked up at the waypoint, and sagged again, but nodded. “Please. My wings feel like they’re gonna fall off.”
* * *
It took them maybe a slow fifteen minutes to reach the top of the ridge, and the mare spent more than half that time just looking around the desolate cityscape she was emerging from. They seemed to be on the edge of a city, but the nearest six blocks had nearly been flattened. A huge shockwave had smashed the nearest buildings down to the support structure, and the windows facing the blast had all been turned to dust and glittering grit long ago. The street had been torn up as pipes underneath had burst, and yet, Hive resin seemed to bleed through the cracks in the sidewalk. The nest ran deep and wide; no wonder they’d been so lost within the tunnels.
But the most striking feature of it all was right in the center of the crater. There, the aft end of a huge military transport spaceship stuck out of the ground at a nearly forty-five-degree angle, and the engines still faced up into the sky, though they were long cold. The hive nest had grown out of the ground around it, and had nearly covered the aft end of the ship entirely in alien resin—but the shape of the craft was unmistakable. Her Ghost must have seen that, and tried for quite some time to find a way inside...to find her.
“I was in that ship,” the mare mused.
“You were!” Her Ghost responded, as she swept the horizon with a scan. “In your past life, you were the pilot, but you were the only creature aboard.”
“That’s a big ship...it should have been more than just me. There should have been others. And it’s buried inside the Hive like that—do you think they took the bodies?”
“No point,” the Ghost said, with a shrug of her shell. “The Hive has no use for corpses. You know what I think?”
The mare rested her forehooves on the highway railing. “What’s that?”
“I took a lot of scans, before I entered the nest to try and find the fore of the ship. The engines were already heavily damaged, even before the crash. I think you had everypony else evacuate, so you could crash the crippled ship into the Hive nest from orbit. You died a hero, trying to burn out the infestation as a desperate last action.”
The mare was silent for a long few seconds, as she contemplated the ship—and turned her eyes to the sky. “It didn’t work.”
“Hm?”
The mare looked back down at the lumpy resinous mounds that encased the ship, and the other nearby buildings, like they had been overtaken by massive wasps. “The nest is still there. So whatever I tried to do, it failed.”
“Maybe. But it did a lot of damage, in a decently clever way for what you had available. I figured a pony who could do that sort of thing would make a good Guardian, and I was right.”
The mare nodded again, slowly, and the ridge was silent for a minute. Eventually, she looked down at her breast. “Damn it.”
The Ghost swooped around to her front. “Did I miss a spot? Are you still bleeding from that fall?”
“No, I’m fine. It’s—I was wearing a jumpsuit, before that big fight. It was old and tattered, but I bet it had a nametag on it. But it’s ashes now. So if it had my name on it...damn it.”
The Ghost very quietly rotated her shell in thought. “That’s okay, though. Guardians aren’t really supposed to know all that much about their past life. Keeping your old name is kind of a taboo.”
The mare blinked at her in confusion. “What, really? Why?”
“Well, I mean…” The Ghost rotated her shell again. “There’s no official rules against it, as such. But a lot of Guardians have gotten really distracted with trying to find out their past. Enough that it distracts them, or gets them killed. Or they get really hung up on who they were before—and can’t reconcile that with who they are now. So us Ghosts, we’re supposed to discourage it, unless it’s really important.”
After a moment, the Ghost spoke again. “You were a hero—I’m pretty sure of that. And you knew how to fire a weapon already. That’s more than enough for me.”
“...I guess,” the Guardian said, as she looked back at the ship. “I still would have liked to know my name, though. What’s yours? Sorry I never asked before.”
The Ghost chirped happily. “I don’t really have a name, yet! Usually a Ghost’s Guardian names them, and vice versa.”
“Oh?” The mare smirked. “Then what’s my name, since it’s up to you?”
“Well, uh, I mean, it isn’t really, but, uh—this is a lot of responsibility, because names are really important, and—”
The mare gently booped the eye of her Ghost. “Hey, relax, I’m not putting you on the spot like that. It’ll come when it comes, alright?”
The Ghost’s shell relaxed, just a little, and she let out a digital sigh of relief. After a moment, though, she spoke up again. “I, uh, did have something though. After that incredible display—”
“The one you still can’t stop gushing about, huh?” The mare looked back out at the city, and the burning, half-collapsed ruins of the building. Turns out, tossing that much fire in such an old building tended to weaken the structural integrity a bit. They’d gotten lucky and escaped before it fell on them, but her Ghost had spent a long while filtering debris from the mare’s lungs.
“Yeah! And I said something earlier. Um...how do you feel about ‘Phoenix?’”
The mare chewed her lip. “It’s a little on-the-nose, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. But it fits you, it really does. I’ve never seen anyone recover so quickly, and burn so brightly with the Light like that!”
The mare—Phoenix—let out a long sigh. “Okay. I can live with that, or maybe we’ll work out something better.” Her eyes focused on the Ghost hovering in front of her. “Well...you woke me up to begin with. How about…”Sparkplug’?”
“Sparkplug?” The Ghost repeated, as she rolled the word around, and cross-checked definitions. “Referring to the ignition coil of a vehicle. Appropriate, and decently quick to say. I like that!”
The mare nodded. “Phoenix and Sparkplug. Alright, then.”
Sparkplug wiggled and spun her shell happily in the air, but their celebrations were cut short by a burst of static that made them both jump. The Ghost had led Phoenix to the old scout camp, and they’d yet to search it properly, but the old hoof-held radio sitting under the lean-to was easy enough to find.
From the speaker, a gruff mare’s voice spoke. “Mayday! Guardian, requesting backup. This is Tempest Shadow, is anyone out there?”
“Another Guardian!” The Ghost chirped, and her eye lit up as she accessed the radio channel directly. “We read you! I’m that Ghost from a couple of nights ago, remember me? I found my Guardian!”
“That—that’s great—” There was the distorted sound of a shotgun blast, then the mare spoke again. “—but I don’t really have time to foalsit a New Light. I need fire support ASAP, I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. Fallen have us pinned down in a tunnel, some kind of shield.”
“We can handle it!” Sparkplug stated confidently, as Phoenix began rummaging through the camp for a replacement weapon—her SMG hadn’t survived the blaze, either, and whatever was left had been lost in the rubble. “We had to fight, uh, a lot of Hive about an hour ago. My Guardian’s awesome!”
“Uh huh, I’m sure they are—” The radio cut out for a moment, before the voice on the other end swore suddenly. “Damn it, alright, I can’t be picky. Jet, upload our coordinates. Basic encryption; the Fallen already know we’re here, but let’s not invite any more unexpected guests.”
On the other side of the camp, Phoenix pulled the long barrel of a sniper rifle out from under a tarp, where it had been hastily hidden. She turned to the hoof held radio, and pressed down on the “send” button. “We’re on our way, be there soon.”
Author's Note
Okay, so...this is technically my April Fool's story. Technically.
Originally, like last year, I wanted to do a parody chapter for Hollow Pony. Last year was a Giant Dad invasion, and this year was going to be a porn parody. (I might still do that one next year, on my alt.) But I kept rewriting the premise and outline until I was satisfied with the quality of the concept...at which point it had lost all of the things that made it a Dark Souls/Hollow Pony story. So, I shoved that back, and switched to my plan B.
My plan B was based off of my general musings about some deep Destiny lore, and the idle thought of "Huh, the actual core of both these settings are the direct conflict between light and dark, and juxtaposing the lore of the two would be really interesting, even if the games have almost nothing alike themselves." But I have to do everything with ponies too, so my thoughts turned to "Destiny Pony Crossover story," which then became "What if I rewrote the first chapter of Hollow Pony, except Holly is a Guardian instead?"
But then I kept rewriting and iterating on that outline, and things changed. I didn't want to use Fallen for the enemies in the chapter, Fallen are overused and Hive are less morally ambiguous. The environment changed from the ruined bookstore to a crashed ship, deep within a Hive nest. Holly became an entirely new character—I wanted the Guardian to have a clear identity from the start, so I used Spitfire as my base.
So it got away from me again, just like the porn parody. I did a lot of planning and brainstorming for this story, in background lore and various little connections and potential character arcs. Because really, this was written as the first chapter of a full-length Destiny crossover, which I don't actually have time to write. And might not ever write; I have about five other stories planned that I'll be writing and posting before I even get to this one, and that's all after I finish Hollow Pony. This chapter may be the only proof of that story's potential existence for years.
In a way, it became the most insidious and maybe even cruel April Fool's joke I could have ever done; "Here's a thing that I could create, but didn't. It takes up space in my brain. Now it does so in yours as well."
So, uh...Sorry about that. I do hope you enjoyed the story, and have a...pleasant? April Fool's day. I'll try and do that porn parody next year, the one I originally planned that's actually based directly off of Hollow Pony.
Big thanks, as always, to my pre-readers Non Uberis , Prince-Nightfire93 and Citizen for all their hard work! I also had help from a few of my Destiny raid friends, who will remain anonymous.
