One thousand years of hunger.
No grass grew on the moon. No vibrant forests, no rolling plains, not leaf nor flesh nor grain.
But Alicorns were gods, immune to the ravages of mere mortality. Here, in her place of power, she could never die, never waste away to nothing. Yet still did she hunger, a hollow, eternal, piercing pain rending through her as lifetimes passed. She had never eaten, not a feast nor meager ration; her birth near synonymous with her imprisonment. Even thoughts of what it may have tasted crumbled, ground away against the eternal, monotonous gray of stone, until only a deep, alien need was left inside her.
One thousand years of cold.
No tears fell from the daughter of the night any longer, crystals frozen to the fur beneath her eyes burning, formed in spite of the void around her by the crushing weight of the seals etched into the thin atmosphere of her prison.
She had once desperately licked at the frozen, matted fur across her face, reclaiming what little water she could to stave off the cloying, incessantly dry lunar dust that coated her mouth. She stopped only as her first eye had been forced shut, scabbed over in crystal and blood, the second barely spared by the end of tears left to cry.
One thousand years of silence.
The void was deaf, uncaring to the cries of the damned. As years turned to decades, as decades ticked to centuries, the daughter did scream, of fury and hatred, of despair and pain, of confusion and injustice. She screamed herself hoarse, then screamed herself raw, and – despite her divine physiology’s best attempts to stop the damage – she screamed herself silent, blood and viscera staining the stone beneath her her as her throat tore against the pressure of her unearthly howls.
Her only audience, the ever-faithful moon, shook with rage and indignation at her cries, chasms and ravines cracking along its surface as it struggled against the decree Harmony had levied upon its child, who’s only crime was loyalty and naivety.
One thousand years alone.
Two had been sentenced to the moon, to stand penance for the crime of attempting a world’s destruction. The mother and the daughter, bound in body, but in neither mind nor spirit. As the daughter languished, pain overtaking ascendant mind and flesh, the mother withdrew, forcing the punishment upon the weapon alone. Asleep, entombed within the depths of their mind, she drifted away, ignoring the calls of her daughter, calls for understanding, for comfort, for hope.
For nine hundred years, the daughter pounded at that mental barricade. For nine hundred years, the daughter pled for a message, a sentence, a word – what was happening, why did we fail, can you hear me, do you still lo-
Luna had taught the Nightmare hate. She had taught it fury, and anger, and rage to crack nations, break mountains, kill gods.
It was alone, that Nightmare learned despair. When her throat was splattered against the rock to which she was bound, when her body rebelled and devoured her from within, when her sight failed in the face of her failure, despair was her only companion. It broke hatred, doused fury, smothered anger, and extinguished rage. Against it, the daughter was powerless, drowning beneath an ocean that frayed the edges of her mind, slowly disentangling the threads of self, until a slight breeze could dash them into nothing.
So too, was it alone, that the Nightmare discovered hope – a spark, at first, flickering in the depths, the slow feeling of the seals breaking, loosening, the full weight of Harmony’s judgment lifting from her shoulders. The spark kindled, grew, a blaze of light as the days ticked away, ticked down instead of up for the first time in a millennia, the moment of freedom in sight.
Then Luna awoke.
It started as a whisper, a drone of discontent and irritation, which surged to a whirlwind of scathing insults, condemnations of the Nightmare’s actions, of her purpose, of her existence.
Hollow and hated, hope fafing under the harsh vitriol streaming from Luna’s mind, Nightmare nearly missed Harmony’s seals shatter, broken under the Firmament’s impatience, the perpetual pressure of her imprisonment vanished. Runes, carved into the moon’s surface over centuries of cataclysmic tremors, flared to life, roaring even in the near-vaccum of the moon’s atmosphere. Light filled the sky, and for the first time in her millennium alive, Nightmare moon felt unconsciousness claim her.
The voice was gone. The voice of hatred, of vitriol and poison. The voice that craved her death, the voice of the hypocrite, the liar, the coward. It was replaced by a lighter sound, a titter, a twitter, the short call of birdsong – she barely knew what a bird was – a slight rustle of wind against leaves. She wanted to see it, to know it, to be certain it wasn’t a cruel trick by the voice, but she couldn’t open her eyes, sealed by the cold ice grasping at her face. Her claws reached to her helmet, skittering against metal a crystal alike. Her fingers curled under the rim, desperate, tugging at the offending headgear before it finally came loose with a sudden, wet tearing squelch, pain blooming around her eyes as bloody chunks of fur were torn away by the frozen helmet.
Oh , the sight! The crater within which Nightmare knelt was surrounded by greens, and blues, and browns, and reds, and gray-
A shiver, as she stared at the stone ruins only yards away, a great gaping hole in the wall revealing a pedestal holding six stone orbs inscribed with familiar crystalline shapes.
And gray. The shivers were persistent now, her breath coming in short, staggered gasps. Her eyes flicked up, to the sky, where the full moon stared down at her.
And gray. She shook uncontrollably, a deep, foreign melancholy filling her. The moon began to fall, first slowly, gathering speed until it visibly fell beneath the horizon. Following its example, the stars winked out, the night sky clearing one by one until only black remained.
As the sudden blinked out, a sudden gasp filled her lungs once more. She was lying on her back now – she doesn’t remember how – and a squirrel, previously emboldened by her complete stillness, froze just inches from her. Eyes locked onto it, unable to tear themselves from the wonder of even the slightest movement. The squirrel, its quick breath mirroring her own panicked state, the minute twitches beneath its fur. It was beauti-
The squirrel was gone.
Nightmare felt something hanging out of her mouth, still twitching slightly, as a slow drop of blood fell from her fanged snout. Her clawed hands, now drenched in blood – held in front of her, staring at the ground. She was kneeling again.
She’d lost seconds, or minutes, or hours. She didn’t know how long, she didn’t know why, she’d already lost so mu-
Hunger.
She could barely walk, but her hunger and thirst, silenced by lifetimes of neglect, screamed to life as the flesh and blood of the creature made its way to her stomach. She pushed her way to her feet, stumbling between trees, towards a river she could hear in the distance, at the edge of her vision, at the edge of her memory…
Staggering to the shore after several minutes… it should’ve taken longer than that… of fervent, painful travel, she fell forwards, scrabbling along the smooth pebbles into the clean water of the roaring river, rocks slamming into her skull as she greedily consumed the raging water.
She barely noticed the pain, anymore.
As she slowly crawled out the other side, she stopped to continue to drink in the slower shallows, water consumed by the gallon only to be retched out and replaced once more. Slowly – so very slowly – she felt her thirst slake, starvation still roaring in the background, though muted by her ostensibly full stomach.
She tried, for a short time, to catch the fish jumping through the river, but her magic was sparky, wild, untamed after endless time unused. Scavenging through the loamy leaf litter of the forest, she couldn’t find enough grass to fill her gargantuan frame.
On the edge of her senses, a smell she remembered – just barely, a momentary thought from walking through oppressive, sun-decorated hallways -- from the day of her birth.
Apples.
Author's Note
I won't say it's my best work, and it suffers the eternal condition of being far shorter than I'd like. But I wrote it, so I figured I would post it. I'll... probably write more chapters to it eventually, but it's not really my focus at the moment.