The Demon Child

Smoke covered the sky, and what little light made it through was blood red and heatless. Desolation stretched around the crater, and in the middle of it, at the bottom of it, was a rickety stage of old and faded planks, with no curtains to draw and an audience of one.

Upon the stage were two angels, sitting with their backs to each other. One clad in a coal black dress with dove wings white as a cloud, one with raven wings as black as a starless night wearing a dress white as the moonlight. The scene behind them was a childish drawing of a house, somewhat resembling a castle in places, nailed to the back of the stage like someone had taken a kid's drawing and enlarged it to the size of a wall.

There were no seats out in front of the stage, not even a hint of rows where they should have gone, but there was one lonely chair, dragged there from who knew where in the apocalypse all around them. On the chair was a little girl with salmon skin and ice-blue locks, wearing a simple tight fitting suit in shades of pink and red and a white mask over her face that had horns poking out of her brow. She giggled and kicked her feet and waited for the show to begin.

The bell tolled. The clouds of smog parted. The burning red eclipse bled its dripping light onto the stage like honey, and cast the grey world around it into darkness. The angels straightened in their sitting positions, and opened their eyes. One had eyes like the wonder of dawn, and one like the fringes of the ocean. Still they did not look at each other. They spoke in turns.

"Once upon a time, there was harmony."

"Once upon a time, there was a future."

"Once upon a time there was love."

"Once upon a time there was light enough for both of us."

"Turn around."

"Turn around."

The angels spread their wings, and entwined them like two pairs of hands. And the feathers melded and grew and pushed into each other, and like a sculpture of blood and hollow bones a figure emerged from their merged bodies, radiant and magnificent. Then the eclipse poured its fire down towards the earth, and drowned the idol in flames.

The lights went out. The lights came back. Celestia stood on a concrete stage in the middle of the void, clad in glory and gold, her audience a lone girl with a cracked mask. On Celestia's head was a crown, brilliant as the Sun. Yet she lay on the ground and she wept, holding the bleeding corpse of her little sister, murdered as a child.

Luna stood beside her, dressed in black. She looked downcast at the floor, but cared not to turn her gaze towards her sister. "So it was that you killed me for the sake of your own success, and enjoyed a life of triumph at the expense of my own. You got what you wished for. I do only wish you had not carried my corpse along, and instead let me rest."

Celestia merely cried. "I did not mean to," she said, towards the Luna in her hands more than the one standing on the stage. "I did not know."

"Am I to believe you were stupid and blind?" Luna snapped. "You, who were the greatest among us?"

The lights went out. Moonlight blazed from the heavens like a flash of steel. On a backdrop of impossibly tall masonry built of titanic cuts of stone, Luna stood over Celestia's body, covered in cobalt blue battle armour. The flat of her cold metal boot pressed into Celestia's face like a hoof, and her silver blue halberd was stained with blood where it had struck Celestia's heart.

Celestia stood beside the scene, her chest hollowed out. "And so you would rebel against me, and put me to death, to give yourself a life you cannot control. For petty vengeance you would doom us both, and all those who would have needed my light. You accuse me of being selfish, yet place your own gain over the well being of the world. Your sacrifice may have been a tragedy, but my rule was just."

The moonlight blinked away. Sweltering sunlight came to pierce the darkness, a pyre in the sky lit so bright it could not be looked at. Celestia sat enthroned on a chair of bones and metal, covered in flames and gold, and rows of headless mannequins bowed before her in adoration. A great fire burned behind the throne, and Luna burned within it.

"I should do well to cast you aside, and cease worrying about you. Look at the things I could achieve if you stopped holding me back. Look at where I could be without your body weighing around my neck. Even in death, you still find a way to deny me my place."

"And yet you need me. Yet you burn me, and refuse to admit your life would be cold and dark without me. What splendour would there be to marvel at in your palace without me to keep the halls clean and the cogs turning? While you're too busy basking in admiration to make the wheels spin, I'm the one who keeps the blood of your success flowing. Dust would cover your kingdom without me, and you would not know what to do as it all crumbles around you."

The mannequins fell apart like statues struck by a hammer swung wildly and violently. Their dust smothered the fire and covered the stage, and filled the sky to hide the light completely. Then, lightning arched through the clouds of dust, and sparked explosions that blew them away to reveal a sky full of stars shining down onto the stage like a thousand different spotlights.

Luna sat on a throne of silver and onyx, wearing a black dress dotted with diamonds slung over one of her shoulders. Heatless blue flames danced around her, while behind her Celestia's body hung from a cross, her throat slit. "You were only lucky," she said. "You should not consider yourself greater because of it. I could have been the one who lived, and you could have been the dead one. I could have built a kingdom as beautiful as your own, or even more. But a life isn't built out of ifs and maybes."

From the audience a voice rose up, mocking and sharp and dripping with satisfaction. "You were never one not to indulge a dream."

Luna nodded her head. The flames around her slowly went out, and one by one so did the stars. Darkness fell upon the scene once more. Then, a lone light shone down onto the stage, a circular spotlight in the middle of the void.

Celestia and Luna stood side by side. One dressed in white and gold, the other in silver and black. Together they greeted an audience that wasn't there, smiling for a crowd only imagined. But what else is there to do on a stage if not pretend? Their smiles were genuine, at least, and they held hands and slowly walked together towards nowhere.

Two more lights shone onto the stage, one on each side of the duo. On one side Luna, her pale skin like that of a corpse, her wings tattered and hanging loose behind her. On the other Celestia, covered in ash and scorch marks, white wings ruffled and losing feathers onto the stage. Luna spoke, looking at her other self. "This is what we could have been. This is what we could have had."

"Happier than what we ended up with," Celestia said. "And yet it was never what you wanted. Neither did I wish for it." The central light went out and then on again. In the middle of the stage sat two children playing with dolls. "We didn't know better, perhaps. We can't undo what we have done. We can't change the past, only our memories of it." She looked at Luna, deep into her eyes. "Is this what you choose?"

The lights all went out. Then a lightbulb lit, alone near the ceiling of a dusty, unpainted attic. Cozy Glow knelt in front of an old, fancy doll house, opened to reveal the scene inside. Celestia and Luna sat on dainty miniature chairs, with their rigid joints and plastic smiles and dresses made of candy wrappers and gift wrap scraps. Cozy giggled at them. "You're dolls. Forever fated to play out childish mockeries of the lives of those you were made effigies of. You were silly to ever think you had a choice, or to think it ever mattered. You were only ever pathetic toys in the image of something much greater. I know how angry that makes you." She lit a match, and set the house on fire.

The flames quickly wrapped around the house, and rose to consume its inhabitants while spreading around it too. Celestia and Luna could not move or scream as their clothes caught fire and fluttered away, as their artificial manes went up in acrid smoke, as their bodies melted and blackened and were warped and consumed. And the fire spread through the attic, filling it with heat and with smoke. And the lightbulb popped and showered down a rain of glass that glimmered in the light like snow lit by the moonlight and dew lit by the Sun.

The middle of the crater was almost empty, save for two figures sitting facing one another, and a smaller one a short distance away. Celestia and Luna, always in that order, clothes torn and sullied and faces streaked by tears, looked at each other, hands gently wrapped around each other's throat.

Celestia said, "We don't have to do this. We can take what we have, and live with it. We can give you a pretty tomb and preserve the memory. The world needs me, and I can cherish every second you will burn for me."

Luna said, "But you're not sorry for what you did. You never were. You're only sorry you didn't get what you wanted, even though you never could. It's easy to say we need to take what we get when you're the one in the limelight. You don't deserve my forgiveness."

"But the world deserves my light."

"You don't care about the world past what it cares about you. Why should I?"

"That's not true."

"I don't care!" Luna heaved, shaking all over. "You are not a good person, no matter how you paint yourself as one. Why should I be the one who has to play by the rules? Why do I need to do the right thing when you get nothing but rewarded for stabbing me in the back?"

Celestia sighed. "Luna... I love you. I always have, and I always will."

Luna stopped shaking. "Then let me have this for myself."

Nails dug through skin and flesh. Tar came to smother the flames and caught fire. Gold and silver clashed against each other, ice hissing as it was thrust into molten metal. Teeth gnashed and bodies tore, feathers scattered and columns fell. Bones splintered and dust rose, and ash and snow and shards of a shattered mirror. Two bodies entwined, piercing each other, clawing at each other's life. Light and heat touching and twisting without mixing, and minds driven only by hatred and anger for a world without justice or freedom.

Blood poured in rivers down from the altar, a crimson waterfall to fill out the crater, and Cozy Glow stood unmasked at the bottom of it and showered her naked body in it, and the blood ran over her skin and through her peachy feathers and it drenched her loose and unbound hair. And she drank of it between her fangs, and felt her heart and arteries freeze and burn up at once. And she smiled, and she writhed, and she laughed, and her laughter was like hail over a thousand glass bells, cold and pure and heartless and full of beautiful notes without a melody.