The Lady in Lavender

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

Celestia’s armor was battered and broken. Her horn stung like hell as the magebane sapped her ability to use active unicorn magic. Her organs twitched and throbbed as they spilled out of the top half of her body, her earthpony magic the only thing keeping her alive, and the throne was covered in her blood.

The gigantic green-eyed wolf towered taller than any non-dragon the two had ever seen. He stood a few precious inches taller than Discord on his hind legs, and the enormous silver broadsword that he had just embedded through Nightmare Moon was the same size as him.

He basked in the silence for a few moments, his eyes moving between the twitching and pulsing body of Celestia as she gurgled weakly on her blood and the shocked and reeling Twilight.

“Hello, Astaroth. Daddy’s home.” Frost grinned wolfishly.

“Frost.” Celestia murmured with a hint of fear in her voice - until her eyes slowly shut. Twilight rushed over to her side.

“C-celestia?” Twilight whispered. She prodded at her chest with a hoof.

Celestia didn’t so much as twitch. Twilight stepped forward again and prodded at her again a little more forcefully. “Wake up,” she pleaded. “Please, mom, wake up.”

“It’s okay, Twilight.” Celestia whispered.

Twilight stared at her for a few seconds. She stared past the thin membrane of fur and flesh, examining Celestia’s beautiful heart that was slowly beginning to slow down. She saw the immortal blood within her veins move sluggishly as it came out of her in a thick, viscous stream - she saw her cells begin to die.

And for one moment - for a single moment, the bedrock of reality began to tremble.

Frost kneeled and put a paw on her head. Her blood turned into a blue sludge that began rapidly reconstructing - first into bone, then into blood, muscle, organs, and flesh. In moments, Celestia quickly was whole.

Twilight stumbled backward as she looked up at Frost.

“You didn’t heal her.” Frost tilted his head to the side. “I mean, if you want to kill her - I don’t give two shits. She’d just make the whole thing more convenient.” He shrugged.

Twilight stared at Frost impassively for a few moments. His soul was - unique. It seemed more like it was an aggregation of souls mixed in one tight package rather than one individual soul - swirling around, pushing at him and slowly leaking from him in a thin, barely perceptible aura.

“Come, Astaroth.” Frost stretched his paw down. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.”

“Astaroth?” Twilight tilted her head to the side. The word came naturally unnaturally to her, resting on her tongue with a strange weight yet rolling off it with ease simultaneously.

Frost stared at her for a long while before he shut his eyes. “You’re broken, aren’t you?” His paws were trembling ever so slightly. “You can’t heal her. You’re not Astaroth. The deer - they failed.”

He tilted his head back and laughed. It started as a deep-bellied laugh with a hint of pain within it - but slowly became more and more manic. Finally, his laughter grew more violent until bits of blue sludge began to ooze from his muzzle, nose, and even past his eyelids.

Then his eyes snapped open, blazing a brilliant blue.

“You’re fucking useless.” He hissed. He stepped forward and slapped Twilight across the face, sending her sprawling down to the ground with a spray of blood as his claws grazed her. He shifted forward and stomped down on one of her front legs, crushing it underneath him as he pinned her down.

“A FUCKING MISTAKE!” He roared. Cryogenesis tore from where it was embedded into the ground into his hand, and he moved to bury it directly into Twilight’s skull.

He’s not a pony, Twilight realized - and her eyes opened.

The blade sunk into her skull. Then it pushed deeper, sliding smoothly into the ground as Twilight’s head shifted - becoming a swirling mass of lavender-colored mana.

It moved and swirled like the shadows, yet shined with the brightness of the sun. Eventually, her mouth opened up, and she flashed all her teeth at him as her eyes opened. Blood and spittle oozed from her dripping maw - and a lavender shaft of energy burst from her horn.

Frost’s corpse slumped over as it struck the ground. He was utterly vaporized by the bolt of energy from his head to his waist and his blood - a deep red shade, much darker than pony blood painted her chest and face. Twilight dragged her tongue over her lips to lick it up - then grimaced as she found that it tasted like ash. She crawled over onto her front and hacked up the blood, wiping her draconic lips against her hoof even as her head morphed back to its default state.

Frost let out a soft, “huh.” Twilight flinched as she pulled away from him - his skeleton already regenerated, bits of blue sludge oozing off of him as it reknit flesh and muscle. The wolf pushed himself up into a standing position and wiped a trail of black ichor from his nose that had started leaking after his regeneration.

“What the fuck are you?” He squinted. “Jesus. Maybe you really can take the bitch down once and for all.” He wiped more of the black ichor from his nose.

Twilight didn’t respond to him as she shifted over towards Celestia, keeping one cautious eye on the wolf as she ran a hoof through her mother’s mane.

“Did you - fucking imprint on her or something? Why are you so obsessed with her? Ugh. Fine. Maybe she’ll make this a little easier.” Frost held a paw out. His hand was enveloped with a soft blue glow - and a gallon of ice water promptly dumped down onto Celestia. The deity of the sun unceremoniously flared her wings and flailed her hoofs as she sat up, gulping air down into her lungs as the fur on her legs back rapidly regrew.

Celestia beat her wings once, a great gust of air throwing her backward, grabbing onto Twilight as she sailed through the air. The Glaive of the Sun shot over to her side - but Frost lazily reached a paw out and gripped onto its shaft.

“Chill out, Celestia.” He paused for a moment. “Get it - cause -”

Celestia’s horn lit with a violent triple corona, the force of the sun entering the world through her horn. The air started to bubble, twist, and warp. Frost was strong, but magically - he was inferior to any of the Aspects. And Celestia was the greatest of the deities.

Yet still, his left arm began to glow - and power filled the air, a power that would certainly destroy the Canterhorn itself if it was allowed release- so the three found themselves in Asgard.

Long-range teleportation was tricky. It required a unique spell that sent you through the primordial plane of magic itself, rather than the usual bending of space used for conventional teleportation. The reason you couldn’t use the traditional spell of teleportation was that - at a certain distance, you ran into the problem of Merlin’s Measure.

Every meter that teleportation or telekinesis travels, the power that the spell demanded goes up exponentially. While it means that theoretically, there’s nothing stopping someone from teleporting between two of the Worlds themselves using the default method of teleportation - the power demands of such a spell would scale so dramatically that it would take more mana than any creature save the Children could manage.

And while Twilight did, in theory, have the power to teleport from anywhere to anywhere with how much raw power she had - since she was still young, her body couldn’t handle the stress of using her full magic. Her soul was only partially inside of her body, and so she could only access a fragment of her mana at a time.

However, the visage that Twilight had taken on when she had banished the Iampex didn’t quite have that restriction - although the state of mind she had to be in to access that form wasn’t something she could do at will.

The short of it was that Twilight used much more magic than her body could handle - and so her horn promptly exploded, causing her to pass out.

Celestia gasped and let the power around her horn dissipate with a soft hiss of burning air. She lunged forward and wrapped her hooves around Twilight, cradling her head and wrapping a wing around her.

Frost slowly let the energy building in his arm dissipate. Then, he flicked his wrist and made a small chair made out of ice by Celestia that he promptly sat down on. “She’ll be fine. And you’ll be fine too, assuming you don’t fucking attack me again.”

Celestia glanced up at him. “...Apologies. I wasn’t, quite exactly in the best state of mind. Considering…” She glanced at Twilight.

“Everything about the little slice of hell. Yeah.” Frost shrugged.

“Little slice of hell,” Celestia repeated, a rather unamused expression painting her face. “I will ask that you refrain from insulting my daughter again.”

“Your - daughter? For one, she’s my fucking daughter. And two - I was being literal. Fucking hell, Luna was right. You really know jack shit about everything you’ve stumbled into. I pity you.”

“I am growing tired of creatures informing me of my foolishness, yet doing nothing to educate me on it.”

“Pft. Yeah, you’re right, it’s annoying as hell isn’t it,” Frost rolled his eyes. “Then I’ll stop jerking off around the bush and get to the point. Give you the whole slice of pizza, so to speak.”

“I am certain that neither of those are the expression you’re looking for.”

“Close enough.” Frost shrugged. He then leaned in right next to Celestia. “So what do you want to know?”

“...I think, that it is best to start from the beginning. What - is, Twilight? Why are so many of the Children coming to Aezilan? How did my sister get freed earlier? Why are you here? What are the Elements of Harmony?”

Frost thought for a long, long time. Then, finally, he found the words to speak.

“Tell me, Celestia. What do you know about the Fall of the Deer?”

The Outer Beyond has always been filled with war.

From the second the Queen had found herself aware of these creatures through Fate’s loom, the war had begun - and it would never end.

They made their assault at the fringes of actuality - creeping tendrils and gnashing whispers that slowly entered the Beyond and the Worlds within. They possessed thousands of names and an equal number of horrible titles - they were the Terrors, the Horrors, the Things, the Stains -

Yet the truest of all their agnomen was the Empty Lords, for they were empty spots in the canvas stitching that the Queen had woven. They were ugly spots of missing dread, too big, too small, too thin, too wide, too many, too numerous, too few. They were the bleeding gaps of reality that sought to consume and feed and would see to it that everything joined them in their ever-present emptiness.

They were Primordia incarnate. An agglomerate of foes to even the Queen herself - fragile, individually, but together they were unstoppable. They were beyond contest - stalled, delayed, slowed - but ultimately, inevitable.

At the brink of the Beyond and the Vast Void beyond, there was an infinite amount of white nothing. There was no light; there was no absence, no magic - no time, no space.

Few heard the noise - even fewer from the native time of the Primordia. It came as a faint whistle, growing louder and louder - until it sounded with the crack of a whip, and a brilliant golden chariot came forth from the edge of space and time.

The deer towered above all his kin - his splendid silver antlers ornate and beautiful, his white fur clad in gold, his eyes a brilliant blue. The First Blade swirled within his telekinetic grasp, a colossal silver broadsword nearly his size. He leaped from the chariot into the swirling Nothing, and with a fearsome battle cry - he began to destroy. Each swipe of the First Blade brought away vast swaths of nothing, and the Empty Lords began to screech.

His brother soon followed after him - his antlers made of bone and wrapped in flaming green, his fur black and his eyes a gangrenous green. But, where his brother was a whirlwind of sword and steel, it was he who called forth the First Flame. An infernal green flame tore from his antlers and bit into the nothing, ensuring that the First Blade’s damage would stay lasting.

Their purpose, however, was not to win this impossible battle. They were simply the distractions. They were ill-equipped to deal with even the smallest of the Lords, and slowly the creeping void inched ever closer.

“Fraezen!” The green deer cried.

“Steadfast, Nazareth!” Fraezen threw himself backward and curled a hoof around his brother - before a glow came from his heart, as the First Shield - the Aegis itself formed around them. It was not a thing of physical strength or even mystical strength - that would prove itself ineffective against the Lords. Rather, the Lady of the Heavens had bound a piece of the First Crown to his very heart - so that his will may serve as the strength the Aegis drew from.

It was strong. So strong that it delayed even the attacks of the Empty Lords - their smashing tentacles, stabbing tendrils, and fractures in reality itself rebounding off the Aegis.

But even Fraezen’s will was not unbreakable. And the Aegis began to crack -

The Archons rode forth. The great black stallion of Void grabbed his sons within his grasp as he charged through the dark emptiness of the Lords, exiting out with mystic steam curling off his bodies.

The flame-hearted War and the metal-plated Conquest stallions summoned forth a wave of the Undying and a veritable storm of spears and blades that sunk deeper into the absence, shining with a victorious light. It was the greatest of them, the first among equals who rose last from the crack in the reality wall itself.

Death herself brought the power of the Queen’s flesh. Her demonic horns bubbled with corruptive energy as she loosed forth a blast with a Terrible Word, the first Cruel Magic that the universe would ever know. The Empty Lords could not feel pain, but even they seemed to whimper momentarily.

The Archons were merely an omen of the greatest of them. Where the Horsemen came, she followed - and while the Empty Lords did not have intelligence, it was always she who they attacked first.

The Great Dragon of Renewal tore from the world-wall. Her scales were a glistening violet as she breathed death, bringing her aspect with her in her entirety. She tore through the center of the cloud of Absence, everything in her path obliterated. Yet, she was only somewhat physical, seeming more ephemeral than natural. She created and warped Space that destroyed the Empty Lords where it touched - until her rival sister came following moments later.

The Great Wyrm of Justice followed through the crack in reality. She shined with a brilliant light that counteracted the nipping darkness of the Empty Lords. She could not take away their absence, for only one of them had that ability - but they fell to dust in her path.

The Wyrm and the Dragon were the strongest of the gathered children - but even they could not oppose the Lords for long. Maybe if they were to work together, they could destroy a few thousand - but a hundred thousand more would take their place. And slowly, slowly but surely, they were being beaten.

“The battle is beyond us now,” Void gazed upon the raging dragons as they fought the swarm of the Lords. “A retreat would be wise.”

“A retreat?” War snarled. “They have never been this emboldened before! I will not abandon our Sisters!”

“Think of it this way, brother,” Conquest grunted. “We shall live to fight another day. They will die an honorable death.”

“No,” Death spoke in her chilling tone. “They will not die. They will be Unmade, Conquest. Are you truly so traitorous in your greed that you would deem Renewal’s life before our own?”

“Mother goes not by that name.” Fraezen shook his head. “She claims the title Arlanarlia now, in honor of the Qui that tore their world apart.”

“An arbitrary correction,” Death tilted her head to the side. “She is greater than all of us put together.”

“We still have a role to play.” Void turned to his sister. “Our task is not over yet. Let them-”

It was their youngest sibling who entered as a herald.

Fate’s voice rang out through the battlefield -

And then a scream of horror rang out from the Empty Lords collectively. Multi-layered screaming, like a million beasts and a million species all crying out at the same time. The battlefield was still.

The truth of the Lords was that they were not intelligent. They were not coherent - their sole goal was to consume, and everything would be destroyed before them eventually. They could not feel desire; they only had their purpose and nothing else.

They did, however, feel fear for one thing and one thing only.

Their youngest sibling entered as a herald to their fear.

”The Queen is here.”

A pillar of red light tore the absence apart, shining with such a searing brightness that even the Empty Lords were pushed back. The magic barrier itself was shattered as three glowing red fragments of her crown were torn from her head, each erupting into bubbling supernovae of mystic energies that had done more damage than the rest of the Children had done combined.

She spoke her words and brought reality itself into existence - calling upon the fires of the stars that burned within her and the cast-away fires of hell. Her advance was continuous, destroying more of the sickly Absence with each step as she shaped the nothing into something, weapons of delirium and desolation as she continued her extirpation of the Empty Lords.

Within moments of her arrival, more than half of the lords’ sickly absence brought with their mere presence had been destroyed. The white void was beginning to heal within their departure - the rainbow fractures in reality and the blots of star-colored mass that served as the blood underlaid the Vast Void.

The Queen formed wordlessly in-front of her Children. She stood taller than any of them - a fearsome crown of Pure Iron decorating her skull, her antlers reaching up towards infinity. The edges of her wings melted into fire, entropy, ice, and ether. She had no flesh, fur, or skin - there was a faint outline of red energy that served as a “casing” to the nothing that she was made up of, a swirling ephemeral soup of stars and the cosmos themselves.

The stars within her form were not a representation of the cosmos. They were the cosmos.

She tilted her head to the side as she examined her gathered children. Then, she spoke in a voice more horrible than anything that the Lords could dream up.

”I am not amused.”

-