The Demon Child

The smell and smoke of burning incense was so thick it fogged Celestia's mind and vision, and hid the ceiling from her view. She walked wreathed in flames down the nave, leaving a trail of molten marble in her wake. The light she cast and the shadows born from it danced madly over the columns and frescos around her, painting abstract patterns as the heat and smoke warped it all like layers of clear water.

Cozy Glow stood at the end of the path, wearing a pure white bridal dress and crystal slippers, holding a bouquet of bones in her gloved hands. Hidden behind her veil, her cold smile and scarlet eyes were barely visible, fixed on Celestia and her advance. She chuckled quietly, too quietly for anyone to pick up on it over the sound of the flames and Celestia's steps. Then she spoke. "What does freedom taste like?"

Celestia didn't answer. She barely seemed to care as she kept on moving forward, while fire spread behind her like a set of wings draped over the earth and burned away all the effigies and designs that had kept her chained. They'd been holding her back. It was time she did away with them all. The past was dead weight against her flight, and what the water didn't carry away the fire would deal with.

Cozy saw this, and kept smiling. In a giddy, breathy tone she quietly muttered, "Shame on me, shame on me, I'm a tool and nothing more." She turned and strode with quick steps towards the altar, her dress trailing behind her, then laid herself across it and faced Celestia once again. Her bouquet clattered to the floor, carved bones scattering around like runes no one would ever read. She held up a knife, golden and with a purple gem within its handle. It was a long, ornate, unbalanced thing, carved in patterns all over as intricate as they were meaningless. A ceremonial weapon, meant for rites and not for combat. "A sacrifice to the rising Sun," Cozy said. "Like the good old times."

Celestia saw her, and heard her, and she thought it was good. Yes, it made sense. Why, she should not care about others, and she was dreadfully tired of doing as much, but a sacrifice? She would not entertain any requests that came with it, but she would certainly entertain herself to it. Because she could. She had the right.

Celestia strode forward in long, pompous steps, strutting for an audience of herself and her willing victim. The flames climbed high against the walls and molten gold poured from the sky above, and all was coated in it and shaped in her image. The lives and accomplishments of others burnt as fuel for her glory, and their legacy shadowed by her light. When she finally reached the altar, the temple stood for her alone, and fire danced madly over the gold.

Cozy Glow held up the knife, and let Celestia's hand take it as the fire spread to her and burned her wedding dress black. She parted the charred fabric over her chest and exposed the salmon skin above her sternum. "Do it," she hissed like a snake, as her veil burned and her grinning face was exposed. "Take what is yours. Do as you deserve."

Celestia regarded the knife in her hands with far more interest than she gave the burning girl before her. One was an instrument of her worship, and the other only an accident in its way. She traced a finger down its long, angled blade, and let her eyes roam over its spiralling patterns without beginning nor end. Then, struck by a fancy, she raised her hand high and plunged the knife into her victim's heart.

The blade connected, shattering bone and cleaving through meat, and sliding deep within the beating muscle in the girl's chest like a nail hammered into weak wood. Blood surged upwards along the length of the knife, and spilled out over the altar and against the floor, and it burned and boiled against the flames and heated metal beneath them and Celestia inhaled deeply of its fumes and smiled.

She looked down, satisfied, to admire what had been sacrificed in her name. Her expression fell and shattered and a scream tore through her lips, so great it emptied her lungs, so strong it extinguished all the flames and left her a weeping husk clad in soot and ash, crying as she fell to her knees within a cold and dark and empty temple, desperately babbling as her hands touched the lifeless body of her sister she had killed.

And Cozy Glow came, down from the heavens on black wings of skin and bone, clad in clinging darkness from neck to toe, and chuckled mercilessly at the grey woman with weak downy wings bent over dead Luna's cold and bleeding body. "This is what you wanted, is it not?"

Celestia looked up at her and wailed her anguish, but an ember of flame ignited in her crying eyes.

Cozy moved lower, and stroked the knife's handle with her tail. "What else is there to lose now, princess? What is there you weren't already willing to sacrifice? What is there to do besides cowering in your own hypocrisy?" She reached out, stroked a pure black finger on Celestia's cheek, and brought it to her mouth to taste her tears. "You may as well drink from her while it's fresh. A goddess's blood is a precious thing, and there's no point in wasting hers like that."

Celestia wailed. Celestia screamed. Celestia stood and growled and yelled in grief and in rage. "You!" Her eyes were ablaze and her weak, burnt wings groaned under the effort to straighten themselves. She looked at Cozy with hatred, and embers began to reignite along her form. Then, with a final scream of pain, Celestia set herself on fire, and rose once more on burning wings towards the demon keeping herself just out of her reach.

And Cozy Glow rose higher, cackling, until she touched the counterfeit stars above. Then she found the crack from which light and madness had slipped into the world and dug her bloodstained hands within its flesh, and pulled with all her might until she tore the heavens open with her claws. And the Moon tumbled down towards the world.