Fluttershy bounced harmlessly off the giant like a piece of thrown bread and grumbled when the golden giant seemed to laugh at her while going around. She stood up on wobbly legs and looked in disbelief as the faceless titan was stopped, nodded once, then returned to the craft. Grabbed Celestia with both of its oversized hands and got her back onto her hooves, weak as they may be from the magic blowback. It nodded and followed it compatriot, much to the confusion of everypony watching.

As Fluttershy slowly approached the princess, her eyes unable to remove themselves from the new invaders, she sat down next to the stunned alicorn.

"I...I don't understand..." Celestia muttered. She removed her helmet showing her face and dropped it onto the cracked ground. "They were trying to kill me. You all."

Fluttershy looked up at Celestia, somehow seeing her as paler than usual. "But...these ones are different, somehow." She looked behind them to see the blue things fleeing back toward some large smoke sources in the distance that she couldn't make out the details of. "The golden one ripped off the metal door to our bunker, moved in while ignoring our weapons, and, when they saw our radio operator, just left."

The alicorn grimaced, like she was recovering from too much alcohol. "So they don't actively attack us? Have they attacked Sombra's forces?"

Even though Celestia spoke calmly and with tact, Fluttershy could still hear some faint hint of hope in the mare's voice. Hope that would have lived a very short amount of time.

The pegasus shook her head. "I'm afraid not, your highness." She watched the life fade from Celestia's eyes. "But, they have been focusing on the blue monsters and ignoring us, at least here."

Celestia's ears twitched while she looked at the creatures talk with each other. "I was told they appeared everywhere the blue monsters are located as well." She looked at Fluttershy from the corner of her eyes. "A potential shared enemy, I suppose?"

"We'll, both did come from the stars."

The princess nodded, looked at the battlefield eating away the land and the trees, then looked at Fluttershy carrying a stern expression. For but a moment she hallucinated the meek, sensitive pegasus that was a friend to all animals and stifled her sorrow.

"What has become of us that the Elements of Harmony have become so ripped apart?" Celestia lamented.

"Princess?" Fluttershy wondered.

"You were the kindest of the six. In fact, that encompassed your element." The princess kicked a small pebble on the ground and let her ponies tend to her wounded guards. "I could have prevented this if my sister and I had found Sombra's form hidden in the Blind Chasms north-east of Griffonia, but I was certain the elements had taken care of him..."

"I know, princess," Fluttershy said as she pat the mare's leg gently. "I miss my animal friends greatly, but any that I meet now..." She saw a bit of her head reflected in a piece of glass in the ground created by Celestia's prior spells and scowled. "Now they all just run away. It's...heartbreaking."

"War has a way of changing ponies, Fluttershy..." The empathetic alicorn quickly turned red with rage when she saw one of the blue things far away dragging several destroyed cannons with a rope and considerable effort. "But now these things come in from nowhere and destroy Equestria even further. My only solace is that more of them are focused on Sombra's front and his artificial creations." She yiped when one of the bipedal machines shot at the puwandese, calculating the trajector and distance with near-perfect precision, leaving a creater where the creature was and blowing apoart the cannon husks. "They're very thorough with how they...kill..." the princess trailed off.

"The blue things are worse," Fluttershy said while furrowing her brow. "They destroy everything, rip apart the remains, then put it back together again for their own use. Several stole our two-hundred millimeter mortars and plopped them onto one of their vehicles and fired shells that were far more powerful then what we had for those wapons. They kept cheering after every explosion!" the mare grumbled.

They watched as the creatures seemed to be arguing each other and the giants. This went on for several minutes until there were a moment of silence and some of the smaller bipeds hopped over their defenses and corraled the ponies to their immense craft.

"What are they doing?" Celestia groaned and she struggled to walk.

"I think they're escorting us," Fluttershy explained.

She gestured to those keeping their weapons up and looking around for any threats.

"But why? They have no reason to care about us." Celestia limped forward, glaring at the faceless giant that did not reciprocate any acknowledgment of her existence. "Unless...They know that I'm an important figure of sorts, perhaps?"

Fluttershy scanned Celestia and failed to act surprised. "Yes, your highness. You do stick out."

The alicorn grumbled. "Well, I suppose a giant pony wearing golden armor will stick out in a field of normal Equestrians." Getting help from the soldiers in the bunkers and Celestia's escorts, the mare was sat near one of the vessel's feet. Horror quickly replaced the moment of relief she was about to feel. "Where are the carriages?!" Her escorts shook their heads. The alicorn dropped her head in her hooves and took a deep breath, shivering while her lungs filled with the tainted air. "We were supposed to beat those creatures back and reinforce the frontline..."

Using her experience, and the kindness she still held within her battered body, Fluttershy patted Celestia on the back. "It'll be alright, princess. You can't blame yourself for every loss in a war, no matter what you think." The alicorn poked a swollen eye out to look at Fluttershy. "Sombra started it, and these creatures came in without warning. There's no way we would have been able to predict any of this." The lieutenant pased a hoof across her scars and clenched her teeth. "We just live as we can and try to survive while expecting the future to get better with our efforts."

Many of the ailing ponies turned to see one of the bipeds scratching a pony behind the ear and making her squeal with delight. The scritching slowly halted as it noticed all eyes on it. With a sheepish smile it retracted its hand and slowly backed away, only to get smacked on the back of the head by another and yelled at. It quickly hurried back to the front, tripping over its own feet. Every word seemed to have strong 'R' sounds and 'th' noises that roled with every other word they seemed to make.

The golden giant stepped in front of the two ponies and knelt down, its armor being dirtied by mud.

"What do you want?" Fluttershy spat.

Even kneeling it still stood above Fluttershy but was at Celestia's eye-level when sitting. However, the two followed when it slowly rotated and pointed a giant finger into the distance past the wreckage of ramshackle vehicles and torn carriages, causing the two to pale. The other ponies gasped and mumbled in horror and terror at the sight.

Far on the other side of the battlefield were two blue creatures. One was significantly smaller than those they had seen up until now and stood up straight. Its body was surrounded in clean, smooth, masterfully crafted armor with no single color to it, but it covered and protected its body efficiently. In contrast was a mountain among behemoths, and Fluttershy could have sworn it was as big a house and just as wide. It was encased in many, many layers of metal scraps that had been punched into shape, judging by the dents on it, and melted into place. In its right hand was an array of at least a dozen barrels of varying size all connected by just as many belts of some sort leading to a backpack as big as the regular blue monsters she had seen so far. It was laughing at the sight and dragging away a pile of the destroyed vehicless stacked on top of each other with one arm.

"How strong do you have to be to do something like that with just one arm?!" Fluttershy gasped.

"That thing puts minotaurs to shame..." one of the soldiers stated in shock.

The blue creature put a finger in its nose and stuck out its tongue at the group, not that anyone but the pegasi could see it. It patted its shiny fellow with another finger, almost making them fly forward and laughed as it grabbed its loot, disappearing into the dregs of the forest.

"What was that all about?" Celestia wondered.

The giant with a gaping maw stepped to the golden one and the two seemed to have another discussion which Fluttershy still couldn't hear. The smaller creatures seemed capable of hearing them, however, and Fluttershy didn't understand how.

The ponies gathered together around Celestia, with many of the higher ranking ponies organizing everyone into small platoons with what they could find. Despite the morbidness of the task, some groups went out to search the battlefield for dead ponies and equipment that could be recovered.

"Never thought regular soldiers would be assigned to work as death harvesters," Fluttershy lamented.

Celestia slowly blinked. "I'm sorry, assigned as what?"

"Death harvesters? They go on the battlefield after a fight to grab dogtags and equipment," Fluttershy explained. She looked onto the muddy landscape, her eyes seemingly glassing over. "It's...better to recover what we can and reuse it, if not for its practical applications then for its material to be sent back, then to fight with our hooves and no protection."

"But...I've seen the amount of equipment being manufactured." Celestia paled. "It's not enough? Even at that level?! All the industrialization Equestria went through just for this war..." She shook her head. "Well, Twilight and Luna warned me. I suppose this is the consequence."

"I don't think it matters anymore," Fluttershy said. "Look."

The pegasus pointed up to the sky where a few dozen of the orb-like craft and much larger, wider one came in, landing on the battlefield and letting hundreds, if not thousands of the bipeds onto the field. They were accompanied by multiple wheeled vehicles carrying immense, metal containers; and mopre vehicles with the odd, interlocking mechanisms their many wheels used. Unlike the blue monsters', these ones were elegantly and minutely crafted and carried only a single cannon, although the chassis had an odd design, acting like an angled trap meant to bounce every shell into the driver's viewport. Fluttershy and Celestia could not understand such a thing for my reasons. The rotating object housing the cannon even had a rounded by to keep anything from getting trapped beneath.

Before they could take in the rest of the equipment the creatures were bringing off their ships and setting up, one of these stepped in front of Celestia. Its body was covered in sealed, loose cloth of dull wine red. Before and after its joints were black rings keeping the cloth in place, and black gloves to protect its hands. Fluttershy, concerned and stressed out, looked at a head also draped in cloth and tightened around the neck, with two large, black lenses reflecting her glare back at her. Around its mouth was a series of vents and tubes, creating an obvious wheeze as they expelled whatever this creature breathed in. Sitting on its chest were an assortment of rectangles and blocks that reflected those Fluttershy could see peering over its back.

Perplexed, Celestia remained silent as the entity seemed fixated on her and bounced in surprise when all the equipment on the creature's chest and back started to unfurl, creating multiple glowing screens, antennae, and what she could only surmise as receptacles whatever substance or substances this creature picked up. It started typing very quickly on a keyboard, watching lines slide across one of the screens then pushed it to the side and pulled down a black, flat board covered in interlocking, blue dots. With its left hand it started tracing things in the air, producing odd, twisting symbols Celestia had never seen before.

The alicorn watched in amazement as the symbols started growing in number and fusing together until the entity slammed the object into the sound of its keyboard, started typing more as its equipment flowed blue, and a projection of a plain chariot formed in the air.

It fiddle with its breathing apparatus and stared straight at Celestia.

"Crætwæn."

Author's Note

You'll find the link to Lux Locus: The First Awakening here.

It's a sci-fi/fantasy hybrid spanning 82k words, set in a universe where eldritch aliens can come in from other dimensions with weapons that have odd effects within our reality and gods that can enter our plane with the right rituals, but that's for later books.

Here's the description:

Killigan Ghor, a blacksmith of the Calaghi System, explores the swamps beyond his village and discovers immense gauntlets that put him on the path to becoming a super soldier of the Terran Expanse: A Pillar Scieldan. As he grows in experience over the years, he returns to his home system with the promise of defending it from threats. However, due to his reckless actions, he awakens a rotting threat that casts its eyes over his home system. Its ever-changing tendrils grow closer to his home, and Killigan must find a way to stay its decaying flesh lest it destroys all of his work.