The sky was dark, but not like the usual night. What was supposed to be lit by the stars and moon was just a blank canvas of slate grey – an utter bastardization of Luna’s sky. A pure nothing with no hope of dawn in sight.
That dreary grey matched the unchanging corridors that shot off from the brightly lit room Raven was inside of. The laundry room, to be more precise. It was the only defensible position within the castle Raven could reach in time before the castle had become overwhelmed.
Her and several others.
With her was a collection of castle staff and hooffull of guards. They were haggard, worn down by the kind of weariness that comes from constantly being filled with equal measures of fear and dread.
She didn’t know how long they had been stuck there, since the sky never changed. They used to be able to measure time by the spin cycle of the washing machines on the back wall, which were each magically attuned to run exactly thirty-five minutes. However, the constant thrumming had caused the guard Steady Hoof to go mad and smash the machines to pieces.
Raven had opted not to lecture him, as they were already being punished enough by the situation, so instead she’d made the call to not run the machines anymore. That had been what felt like an age ago.
“We’ll never last,” Last Stand muttered like clockwork. For a pony with a name such as his, he was an awful doomsayer. “They’re due to arrive again.” He clutched his spear tightly between his wings, the shaft shaking from his frayed nerves. “They’ll break through this time.”
“We will persist again, just as we have done before,” Raven Inkwell lightly reprimanded.
“... But what if it really is the last?” Clean Sweep, one of the butlers, asked. “What if this time we can’t hold them back?”
“That attitude will not serve us well in this situation,” Raven replied.
“But what if?!” Last Stand retorted. He turned away from the corridor, his expression rapidly breaking down into panic. “You can’t know! The sun hasn’t appeared in Celestia knows how long and we—”
Raven raced forward, grabbing the spear out of Last Stand’s grip, before thrusting the tip forward into the abomination that had tried to attack Last while he had his back turned.
Her aim struck true, piercing straight through the monster’s eye and into its brain. The pale octopus-like monstrosity dropped to the ground, spewing white liquid onto the marble tiles. She gingerly raised the creature onto her borrowed weapon and tossed it onto the pile out in the hall that acted as a makeshift barricade between them and the monsters.
“—will persist,” Raven finished. “Until we cannot.” She gave the spear back to Last Stand. “Watch the corridor. Believe in the Princess. Dawn will come.”
Though still shaky, Last Stand returned to his watch. The others, who had watched the attack unfold, returned to their various duties or mindless acts to keep their mind off of their desperation.
Raven, for her part, kept vigilance over her small herd, waiting for the sun.
It had happened suddenly. One moment, Raven had been organizing important documents on behalf of the Princess. The next, the sky had gone grey and horrific screeches had echoed through the halls of the castle.
Everything afterward had been a rush of adrenaline. A gallop to find a safe place away from those monsters — the Pale as one of the guards noted — as they flooded in. She’d helped several stragglers on her way, those who had been in unfortunate positions during the initial attack, then hunkered down in the nearest safe place available to them. That that place was the laundry room was an unfortunate happenstance caused by the despicable monstrosities.
No one had stepped up when they had settled into their base of operations, so Raven took it upon herself. She setup a rotation of ponies to watch the two corridors leading out of the room and armed them with weapons and anything they could salvage from their surroundings.
The Pale came in waves. Sometimes there would only be one or two, sometimes nearly a dozen. They attacked us from both sides, seeking to do… something. They’d been lucky enough thus far to not know what exactly the Pale did to their victims, and Raven had every intention of ensuring they never did.
Barricades didn’t work. Wood and metal did nothing but act as shrapnel as they tore through it easily. The corpses of the Pale ended up proving more useful by sheer volume, comparatively. Violently graphic, but highly effective.
Raven looked over her group of survivors. She felt responsible for them. An inherent need to ensure their safety. Whether this was for her Princess or for herself, she intended to follow through on her promise and make sure they all lived through this ordeal.
“I can’t do this anymore,” one of the guards, Blue Shield, said. He shook in place, silent tears rolling down his face. “I-I can’t—”
She gently took Blue’s weapon away from him. “Go rest. I’ll take your watch.”
“But you already took the last watch, I—”
“Have reached your limit and need a moment to yourself. Rest,” Raven stressed.
The guard seemed to want to protest, but instead wandered over to the back of the room, where linens had been piled into a nest for sleeping.
“You didn’t need to take his place,” Serving Platter remarked. He stood at attention, with a metal pipe firmly held within his magic and stained with the white blood of the abominations. “There are others who could have taken his place.”
Raven glanced back at her herd. They huddled together in fear, expressions of dread on their faces.
“The others need rest and time to recover,” Raven said.
“They’re a mess,” Serving stated bluntly. “They won’t last.”
“They will.”
“They won’t.”
“They will.” Raven closed the gap between them, her voice going down to a near whisper. “I know they’re reaching their limits, but we have to keep going. The Princess will save us. We just need to last until that moment.”
“... How can you be so sure that moment will come?” Serving whispered back.
“Because it’s the only thing that’s keeping me going.” Raven replied.
Raven was startled awake by the sound of horrific screeching. She grabbed her makeshift weapon by her side and leapt onto her hooves. Others who had been resting were quickly scrambling and readying for the worst.
“What’s going on?!” Raven shouted toward the ponies guarding the corridors.
“H-hordes!” Last Stand replied. “T-there’s dozens of them, all coming this way from both directions!”
A murmur of fear raced through the herd.
“W-we can’t last against that!”
“We’re doomed!”
“It’s too much!”
The murmur became a roar as ponies screamed and cried, their resolve shaken by the new wave of monsters. Soon, they would be broken.
Raven wouldn’t allow it.
“Enough!” She shouted. The crowd quieted, turning toward her. “We will survive!”
“Dawn will never come, it’s been too long!” Last Stand retorted. “We won’t—!”
“We. Will. Survive,” Raven insisted. “Even in death, we will survive.” A murmur of confusion. “This ordeal is not just about being alive. It’s about showing these abominations that we will not bend. That in our final moments, we fought them down to the last.”
She raised her weapon overhead, casting a quick spell to increase the volume of her voice. “We will push them back! If we fail, so be it! But I will never let it be known that I gave up! Anyone that looks back on this moment, anyone that might judge me for my current self will never, ever be able to say that I did not do everything I could!
“We are alive!” she roared. “We will persist because that is our right as living creatures! It is not about cowardice! It is not about bravery! It is about screaming to these monsters that we are alive and that we will continue to be so in spite of them!
“I will not demand any of you to fight. But I will ask that, if you do not, you stay in the back so that you may persist in your own way.”
Her speech finished, Raven took up position at one of the corridors, looking out into the darkness as a mass of pale moving shapes surged toward them. The sound of hooves against tile echoed behind her, as she heard her herd pick up their weapons and ready for the upcoming onslaught.
“You’re awful,” Last Stand remarked. “And I’m going to live through this just to tell you how awful you are every day after this.”
She smiled. “I look forward to it.”
It was horrible. A mass of pale bodies and gnashing teeth throwing themselves upon her herd. They skewered themselves against their weapons, then used the discarded corpses as stepping stones to get closer to them.
Pure adrenaline and the last vestiges of hope were all that kept them going. This neverending fight against the horde. A horde that was replenished as quickly as it thinned. The bodies piled higher as more were thrown on top, an eternal font of horror.
In spite of this, they persisted.
When they were barely conscious, when they were far past the point of exhaustion, when their very beings screamed for it all to stop, the abominations obliged.
They dropped lifeless to the floor like gnats. Raven and her herd stared in disbelief at the monsters.
Before anyone could interject with a remark, rays of sunlight pierced through the nearby window flooding the room in light.
Dawn had come.
Raven, along with her herd, collapsed and cheered as tears of relief rolled down their cheeks.
For they had lived.
