There was a great wide disc in the sky. Black as sin and limned with burning red. Sunburst narrowed his eyes, trying to shut out that sickly stinging glare, but it never quite worked.
The blackened light beat down on him, casting a wavering shadow that faded in and out as he picked his way over the rubble. Clambering up a mammoth bank of fresh-turned earth, he peered down at what lay on the other side and his heart kicked into a pounding rhythm.
Beyond the rise of soil lay a vast chasm, blasted out of the earth by some unimaginably huge force.
It was just as he had suspected, when he saw the gigantic beams of light strobing across the forest from the window of the tower. This was the work of a mage. A great mage, an immensely strong magic user, in the league of the legendary Sunset Shimmer the Sunseeker or even Starswirl the Bearded. A unicorn stronger than anything the barren wastes of the Everfree had seen in eons.
Sunburst took a step forward and tripped on the trailing hem of his cape — coming down hard on his chest, his jaws clacking shut before he rolled head over heels down the other side of the embankment. The only thought that flashed across his mind — apart from the inevitable not again — was the desperate impulse to levitate his precious glasses off his face and hold them safely up as his body tumbled painfully down into the bottom of the gully. His grandfather had found them ninety years ago in one of the ruined towns, and it had been a find so unbelievably fortunate that Sunburst knew he would never replicate it.
With a grimace, he picked himself up. Settling his glasses cautiously back onto his nose, he glanced left along the rift. Nothing but blackened trees and the vast furrow carved in the earth. He turned right — and his breathing stuttered.
The same dull red half-light that had coloured every memory in Sunburst’s life now illumined a mountainous corpse, long as his tower was tall. A wingspan wide enough to blot out the sky. Teeth like swords and claws like scythes. A dragon.
Sunburst had never seen one before. Only read of them. He knew about their honeycomb bones, light enough to fly but reinforced with carbon fibre. He knew about the long bulges running down the serpentine neck that housed the gas-sacs, from whence the famous flames would come. He knew about the long, deadly tail that could lash out with enough force to knock down a building in far better shape than Sunburst’s crumbling tower.
But Sunburst wasn’t looking at any of that. He had eyes only for one thing.
The gaping hole burned through the dragon’s skull.
His heart was thrumming with a desperate, staccato beat now. A mage strong enough to fell a dragon. Even Starswirl the Bearded had never managed that feat. Perhaps the moment he had been waiting for had finally come.
Sunburst broke into a gallop, thundering down the gully towards the dragon’s corpse.
For three generations his family had dwelt in the same crumbling tower, seeking out ancient scrolls and books, storing them and attempting to haphazardly patch them back together. Stellar Flare had succeeded Lightstorm, and Sunburst had replaced her in turn, adding her blue cloak to the glasses he had needed even before his grandfather had passed away.
“Why do we need to know all this, Mama?” he had asked, when he was very small. When he had not understood why they risked their lives to rescue faded old manuscripts from ruined castles, why they bent over desiccated paper and tried to decipher the ancient scrawl there, tried to rescue it and copy it onto fresh parchment they made themselves.
“We are librarians, Sunburst,” Stellar Flare said softly, touching the white blaze on his forehead with one hoof. “We’re keeping Equestria’s knowledge alive, so that one day, when there’s someone strong enough to use it, it’ll still be here."
Sunburst’s hooves thudded against the soil as he ran. It was fresh and loamy — like a wound in the earth. The forest was everywhere, stretching as far as the eye could see around his tower. It had consumed ancient farms and forgotten cities alike, and he half-believed there was nothing else left. This break in the trees was the first he had ever experienced, and it was somehow unsettling. He felt like a mouse scurrying for cover; always conscious of the eagles circling overhead.
The dragon-mouth yawning open ahead of him didn’t exactly help with that feeling, either.
Though the smell of the thing turned his stomach — the three days it had taken him to make the journey had clearly been enough to start the body rotting — he forced himself closer, and finally scrambled up one of its sprawling wings.
From atop its massive back it was clear enough to see the path the mage had taken. Another huge scar in the landscape led away to one side, and in it lay two more dragons.
For the first time, Sunburst’s elation was tinged with fear. The oldest scrolls spoke of the time of the alicorns, back before civil war had ripped them and the world they ruled apart. Back when the sun had risen and set, and the moon had not locked it in permanent eclipse. Sunburst’s family had long harboured the dream of a mage strong enough to undo the great evil the alicorns had wrought, and this one might just be capable. But what kind of mage could take down not one, but three adult dragons? What kind of person would that pony be? And would they be receptive to the pleas of a bespectacled third-generation librarian?
His throat bobbing, Sunburst swallowed. He had no choice but to find out.
He spent hours picking his way through the carnage. Everything was on a monumental scale. Huge blasts had scoured the earth clear of tree and plant and soil, slicing down to the bedrock. Aimed wildly, cast over and over again with reckless abandon. As though the wizard had no fear of ever running out of mana.
He found nine more dead dragons.
By the time he reached the eleventh, he was no longer surprised. He was losing the energy even to be frightened, but he didn’t want to stop and rest. Not here, in this graveyard of giants, watching him with their staring, congealed eyes.
There were traces of pony blood, here and there, dotted onto plants, and once, on the teeth of one of the dragons. That was the sixth dragon, and Sunburst lingered a long time beside it. His mage was indeed mortal, and that ought to have been reassuring, but all he felt was dread. If he had come all this way for nothing…no. Anyone capable of this slaughter had to have survived. There was no other option.
But who could escape the maw of a dragon?
His fears were all but realised when he reached the head of the eleventh dragon. The upper jaw was entirely missing, blasted away from within, leaving the creature to bleed out from the huge wounds to its skull and brain. But wedged between two humungous fangs, was a leg.
Pale pink and tapering to a delicate hoof. Leading, when he hesitantly ventured into the mouth itself, to a pink thigh and a shred of baby-blue cutie mark edged with gold.
Hope fled, and Sunburst sat down with a thud on the raspy surface of the dragon’s tongue. Was that it, then? The last dragon had caught the wizard, and they were dead. Nopony could live after a wound like that. No healing magic could be strong enough.
But…there was the dragon’s mouth, open to the sky above him. The upper jaw and half the cranium utterly disintegrated by raw magical power.
Slowly, he clambered to his hooves again. He had come this far. He would finish his quest before he returned to the solitude of his library.
In a clearing less than quarter of a league from the dragon, Sunburst finally found his quarry. The trees were snapped and blackened, felled by the force of a violent teleport. There was a small crater, the stones and soil smoothed out by some fiery heat that had long since faded.
And crumpled in its very centre was a small pink shape.
With a heavy heart, Sunburst crept closer. “Mage?” he whispered, hoping against hope that somehow they were still alive, that their wounds would be treatable.
But when he brushed back the tangled mane, striped like candy in the old illuminated manuscripts, he saw only the glassy stare of a mare long dead. Her eyes had been blue, her fur the colour of roses. Her horn was a delicate filigree spiral.
She had been beautiful.
Lost in the weight of his own despair and pity for this mare he had never known, it took Sunburst a long time to notice her wings.
And when he finally did, he shot upright, trembling in every limb. Wings?
He lifted one and let it fall, his flanks rising and falling in shallow gasps. A horn, a beautiful classical horn, like in the paintings of ladies from long-ago Canterlot — and wings.
She was an alicorn.
The first alicorn to walk the planet in over a thousand years, and she was dead.
It was like some sort of sick cosmic joke. Sunburst’s head bowed under this last, most crushing blow. She would have had the power to raise the sun again. She could have restored the world to balance. To harmony.
And she was dead.
A sob escaped his lips, or maybe it was a laugh. He was weeping, and he was howling, tears and mirth somehow mixing together in one horrible cocktail. He abandoned himself to it, letting himself scream into the empty forest full of fallen behemoths and his empty tower, the two unmarked graves outside it.
And then he heard a little snuffle.
His mouth snapped closed so hard that it hurt. With feverish desperation, he pressed his ear against the alicorn’s muzzle, straining to hear any sign of life. But she was as cold as bone, and stiff with the inflexibility of death.
But there it was again! A wet little gasp. Sunburst leapt up and shoved at the alicorn, willing her to move. Maybe alicorns could come back from the dead, after all. Her wings and three legs stayed rigid, but she lolled to one side, and Sunburst finally saw what she had died concealing. What she had died defending.
There, in the ruins of the alicorn’s one hind leg and the stump, was a small ball of half-congealed viscera. It was wet and red — and it was moving.
His hope giving way to concern, Sunburst nudged at the little bundle, trying to get it free of the gunk. At last, something gave, and the mess of placenta and amniotic sac slipped away to reveal a face.
Blue eyes peered up at him, the same blue as the alicorn’s. A nubby little horn peeked between blood-wet hair, and he thought that under all that red, her fur might be closer to white than pink.
“Hello,” he said, his voice still thick with tears, and she blinked those big blue eyes.
“I guess I won’t need to go out and find a new librarian after all,” whispered Sunburst softly, cradling her close. “You’ve come to me.”
And after all, the daughter of an alicorn was bound to be a powerful wizard in her own right. Maybe, if he trained her, she might be able to do something with all the ancient lore he had spent his life protecting.
She yawned, and then, almost carelessly, she extended one barely-feathered little limb. Her eyes slipped closed, but Sunburst couldn’t stop staring.
An alicorn. A baby alicorn.
The red light of the noondark sun shone weakly down, as it always had, and Sunburst was grinning as he wove his cape into a sling and tied it securely against his chest. For the first time in a long time, there was hope.
