Chapters The woman sat in the corner, bound in fabric and smiling. The room was pure white, the walls made of clouds, and she relished the feeling against her back after so much struggling. Freedom tasted sweet on her skin, and the air had a sort of refreshing artificial smell. She'd cast the shackle that was her old home behind and would never see it again, and she felt better for it. It didn't matter that there was blood on her hands, she couldn't see them anyway.
She was supposed to be alone there, and yet she wasn't. She didn't mind though. The little girl kept her company, and she enjoyed the sound of her laughter. Cozy Glow wore a pink tutu and matching stockings, both just a little lighter than her skin, a gold ring on one hand and a silver one on the other, and a red bow through her ice-blue curls. A pair of small vulture wings rested on her back, starting the colour of her skin at the base and darkening to the same red as her eyes at the tips. They fluttered and twitched in time with her movements. She was smiling, and she was laughing, and she was dancing around the room.
The space was somewhat cold, but the woman didn't mind. The air was clear, and thin in that delightful way it is when you're high up. Free from everything and everyone, free to watch the fires burn and the floods cover the land. High up in the heavens. She didn't feel hungry, or sad, or like she needed anything at all. She'd lost everything, and she was the happiest she'd ever been. She was dead to the world, and she'd never felt more alive. And she watched the little girl twirling over the clouds around her, smiling and laughing and dancing.
The doorbell rang again, the sound of a bell toll echoing through the rooms and corridors of the house. Celestia's high heels drew a beat against the drawn out metallic note as they clacked onto the wooden floor. She had just gotten back from a long and tiring meeting, and she did not wish to have anything to do with anyone, but it also meant she was still properly dressed enough to answer the door and politely tell whoever she found there to leave her be or risk wishing they had done as much. She hadn't yet made it back to her room when she'd heard the sound. Had the doorbell rung a minute later, she would have had to send Luna instead.
The light outside assaulted her senses in the way only tired eyes and an even more tired mind can feel. It did not help matters that Luna kept the windows in the house partially shuttered at all times, casting its insides in a perpetual half gloom during the day. The world beyond the walls was much brighter. It was already evening by most stretches of the word, but it was late spring too, and the sky was still lit in the way it only is during those days. If she stared towards it, with its featureless expanse of cloudless blue, she could almost imagine herself falling into it.
She didn't stare towards the sky, though. She stared downwards, at the little girl standing on her porch.
Celestia's first thought was that she looked like she went to Crystal Prep. Celestia didn't know why she'd thought of that when the girl wasn't wearing anything close to Crystal Prep's uniform, save perhaps the fact that she knew she wasn't a student at CHS. Celestia knew all of her students, and remembered them all. Magical horses notwithstanding. The girl didn't look like a horse to her. But perhaps the reason Celestia pinned her as a Crystal Prep student was more simply the feeling she got from her. Celestia was always good at reading people like that.
The girl had salmon skin, ice-blue hair styled in a set of thick curls with a white ribbon keeping part of it in place, a scant few white freckles on her cheeks, and scarlet eyes that all the innocence of her expression and demeanour failed to touch. She wore a short sleeved pink and white blouse that may have been a school uniform, if not one Celestia recognised, a short frilly skirt that matched her top, short white socks and a pair of reddish shoes with a geometric pattern traced over them in a darker shade of red. She was looking up at Celestia while gyrating a little in place, causing her skirt to flare out slightly as it twirled one way and then the opposite one.
Between the dizziness born of the Sun stabbing her eyes and the tiredness from a long day of work, which caused her to see flickers of strange lights at the edges of her vision, it took Celestia a few seconds to realise the little girl was waiting for her to say something. Somewhat embarrassing when she had been doing the same. She frowned, narrowed her eyes, and when she finally spoke she infused her tone with all the artificial politeness she'd bred over decades of working with other people in highly formal contexts. "Is something the matter? Do you need help? Are you lost?" Those were not the questions that first came to her mind, but rather the ones she felt it was more proper to ask. If she'd had no filters, she wouldn't have been asking questions in the first place.
The little girl smiled at her. There was something about her looks Celestia could only describe as predatory, even as the girl stood with one of her legs bent forward to rest the tip of her shoe on the ground, wagging the heel side to side while she gently wrung her hands together behind herself. "My name is Cozy Glow," she said, answering a question Celestia hadn't asked but would have liked to. "I wanted to have a talk with you."
Inwardly, Celestia did whatever the inward equivalent of raising an eyebrow was. Outwardly, she maintained her poised expression, more out of sheer habit than deliberate effort. The child was starting to get on her nerves, for what could a child possibly want to talk about that might be worth her precious time? Still, nothing good would come from snapping at her. She played along with an even tone, and hoped things would be over soon. "What did you want to talk about?"
Cozy Glow smiled up at her. "I know it's hard. It always is when something like this happens." Celestia frowned, outwardly this time. Cozy continued. "I just wanted to let you know that I'm sorry for your loss."
Celestia flinched, though it was barely visible. Her tone wavered slightly when she next spoke. "I'm not sure what you're talking about. Or if you have the right person."
Cozy's response was candid and innocent. "I'm talking about your sister." Her smile widened as she swayed back and forth on her ankles. "You killed her."
For one moment, Celestia was falling. The blue sky filled her vision and her guts told her she was plummeting. Multicoloured sparks rose and crackled in the corners of her vision. Then the moment was over, and she landed in the ironclad stability of her logic and routines. She was alone on the porch, and the sky above was quickly growing dark. She shivered slightly from the cold. She turned around, and walked back into her house.
The doorbell rang, a bell toll echoing all throughout the empty halls and corridors of the house. Luna ignored it. Celestia would see to it, and whoever it was would be happier to see her sister than her. Celestia was the important one, after all. Luna's role was at best to fill in for her when she wasn't available.
Luna regarded her study. One could appropriately call it spartan, and evoke the right kind of image with the term alone. A grey carpet in the middle of the room. A lonely window with thick white curtains that reached halfway down to the floor. A cheap desk without any blemishes to show for its age. A wooden chair with the barest hint of a curve to its backrest. The few books she needed on hand for whatever she was working on, and an ever present dictionary. No other reading material or shelves to place it on. Books were for the living room, to impress guests when they walked in.
She liked her study. The uniform walls and evenly painted ceiling made it easy for her to get lost in it in the half light she kept it in. When she sat down at her desk to work and looked around, it was like being surrounded by an endless expanse of nothing as far as the eye could see. She found it rather helped her concentrate. It was a way to shunt off the world. Just her and her kingdom of emptiness. And concentrate is what she was doing at that moment, as even with her sister taking care of meetings there was still the matter of all the boring, menial, unimportant and yet indispensable paperwork that poor Celestia was too constantly busy to devote herself to.
So it was that Luna busied herself navigating a sea of paperwork, waiting for the moment her sister would wake her out of it to announce it was time to worry about dinner. But she was awoken a fair bit sooner than she would have thought, and by a voice she did not recognise to boot. A young voice, high and tinny and like a dagger stabbing through the air.
"How does it feel like to be dead?"
Luna stopped what she was doing, her pen hovering in perfect stillness above the paper. She turned towards the door, where the voice had come from. There stood a little girl framed by the unnatural light in the corridor, dressed in red and white and pink. Luna blinked once. She did not recognise the girl, and doubted she was a student at CHS, given she was familiar with most all of them at least superficially. Three questions rose up to her mind that she asked in calm succession. "Who are you? How did you get in here?" And, lastly, "What did you say?"
"I asked what it feels like." The girl stepped forward, and the light flowed with her into the room. "You know, being dead." One more step. "I'm Cozy Glow." As if that carried some greater meaning Luna should have been privy to. "The door was open. Someone must have left it that way."
Luna blinked again. Had something happened to Celestia? "Did you see my sister on the way in?"
Cozy chuckled. It was a sound as clear and cold as an unblemished glacier. "That's no fair, princess. I've answered three of your questions, and you still have not answered mine."
Luna's first instinct was to ask if Cozy was lost, but she figured another question wouldn't be the right move. There was something off about the girl. Maybe she was in shock. Maybe she was running away from something. It was worth being careful with. "I'm not sure I understood what you asked. Could you repeat again?" Luna tried to smile. She was aware the result wasn't good. Smiles were always her sister's thing.
Cozy tilted her head to a side, sending some of her light blue locks to brush against her shoulder. Her thin smile did not go beyond her lips, and her eyes were like embers burrowing into Luna. She sighed. "I asked you what it feels like to be dead."
Luna took in a deep breath. The room felt darker than before, even with the light streaming in behind Cozy. Perhaps the Sun had fallen outside. Little girls should not be talking about death, but perhaps she was too young to understand what she was saying. Though she didn't look that young. "But I'm not dead," Luna replied, choosing logic to try and untangle whatever it was the girl brought with her.
"Oh." Cozy looked surprised, for just a moment, but then she chuckled. "You don't even know it. You don't even see it. I'm sorry about that. But I can help you. I can show you." She turned around, making the hem of her skirt trail behind the rest of its length in her twirl. "Follow me!" she said, louder and more energetic than anything she'd said up to that point. Then she dashed out of the room, red shoes patting against the wooden floor in a quick rhythm that slowly drew away from the study.
Luna stood there, confused, for a few seconds. But then her sense won out and she gave chase after the girl down the corridors of her house. Her little legs wouldn't carry her too far, and it wouldn't be a challenge for Luna to catch up with her. It was best to look after Cozy and figure out what was going on with her, before she hurt someone or herself.
Celestia stumbled inside and closed the door behind herself, shivering from the cold and bringing her manicured hands to her mouth to breathe on them and warm them up. As the walls of her home cut her off from the darkness outside and the warmth of the corridor began to seep into her flesh, she became aware of how the lights were already on before she'd entered. Not just the one closest to her either, but all the way down the corridor as well. That was unusual. She was not so forgetful as to have left them on as she'd gone outside. A touch confused, she turned off the one near the front door and walked towards the next.
Then she heard a sound. It was like boxes tumbling, that indistinct noise of soft things falling somewhere in the house. Nothing had broken that she could hear, but she needed to go check on what it was regardless. She turned down the side of the house the sound had seemed to come from, and was surprised to find more lights already turned on leading the way. She took each step deliberately, eyes and ears alert for anything around her.
There was another sound, still muffled. Something running, and maybe hitting something else. Had a cat sneaked into the house? Some other animal seeking shelter, drawn in by the warmth of her home? She wouldn't toss it outside to the cold if it was a stray, but she couldn't have it running unsupervised around the place. The sounds had come from downstairs, the cellar, where she kept food and old things and all manners of occasionally useful school supplies.
The door was unsurprisingly and unsettlingly open, and she could already see the light behind it as she walked down the steps towards it. She rested her hand carefully on the handle, and as if trying to catch someone in the act she waited a second, then flung the door open all the way. The room before her was illuminated, but all was still, and nothing was amiss. There was no intruder, animal or human, and not even a sign something had fallen somewhere.
But it was not exactly a tidy room, and there were blind spots where a cat could be hiding, or behind which there may be a pile of fallen books or clothes she couldn't see yet. She walked down the final step into the cellar and closed the door behind herself. She breathed slowly, regretted not wearing something more to contend with the coldness of the room, and set about looking around to make sure it really was as empty as it seemed.
She checked behind every pile of forgotten stuff from long gone moments in her life, and looked over every shelf to make sure no animal was hiding among those things she wished to preserve out of instinct, but cared not to display and be reminded of in her daily life. Once or twice she even stopped for a second, to look at this or that fragment of her past and reminisce briefly about the moment she'd shed it. It was never more than a passing thought, though.
She found nothing that shouldn't have been there. She wondered if she hadn't misheard, if the sounds hadn't come from somewhere else in the house or maybe from outside. That still wouldn't explain the lights. And there was a feeling, like static in the air surging over her body, telling her something was there. Unsatisfied with a lack of answers, she gave one more sweeping look to the mausoleum of her memories, and finally noticed something. There was a puddle on the floor. Water, though not exactly clear. A growing puddle.
She tracked it with her eyes, then moved towards it when she found its farthest edge hidden behind a shelf. She followed it, careful not to step foot in it and ruin her red shoes or wet her stockings. She found a crack in the wall, and hints of something metallic inside the wall once she leaned in to get a better look. Water was flowing out, like from a broken pipe on the other side. The flow grew stronger as she stared at it, no longer a trickle but a pour.
Celestia stood stunned as the puddle widened and spread beneath her shoes, then leaned forward into action. She first tried to halt the flow with her hands, but found it impossible. The water simply slipped through her fingers, and a moment later it was coming in strong enough to push her hands away. She took a step back, whipping her hands to clean them and thinking of what to do. In the time it took her, the puddle had hit the edges of the room, and the water level began to rise.
Celestia stumbled back, as if at that point it still mattered where she was compared to the water, and frantically began to look around. There had to be something she could plug the leak with, anything. But nothing she saw would work. No souvenir from one of her many vacations, no toy from her youth nor folder of old useless paperwork could properly stop the flow of water from the wound in the wall. There were a few wooden things, half broken and half carved by woodworms, but even if she'd had a proper panel or plank she couldn't hope to nail it into solid concrete.
The water was up to her ankles, and seeping higher along her stockings. Her shoes were probably ruined, but that was the least of her worries at that point. She didn't even much care for the stuff there, it was there for a reason even if it would still hurt once she saw it all ruined. Some of the food would need to be tossed too, but that was no big issue either, and what was inside the old, boxy freezer may come out okay. Although... She was just in time to dash towards the wall and pull the plug before the water level reached the socket. She breathed a sigh of relief.
A bell tolled somewhere overhead. Losing the stuff there wasn't her main worry. It wasn't even the cost that troubled her, though that would be annoying. It was the time. The time it would take to sort through it all and fix everything once the situation was resolved. She could feel the water eating away at her future as it rose, halfway to her knees by then. And if it kept rising and got to the ground floor, and ruined everything there too? Celestia almost felt herself passing out at the thought.
The water was reaching past the bottom of the door. In a bout of worry she waded through it, and after a brief moment of deliberation threw open the door. She did not like the way the water poured itself onto the first step, wetting the much better kept and properly painted walls outside the cellar, but the door opened inwards and she did not want to risk getting stuck if the water rose too high.
She stood there, sweating from nervousness, looking up at the staircase and wondering what to do. There was probably a switch somewhere, or a valve, something she could shut off to make the water stop. There had to be. But she didn't even know where to look for that, much less what to look for. With how long it would take her, it would be easier to just call someone. Maybe a plumber. But by the time anyone got there, her house could be in ruin. But what else could she do?
A bell tolled again. She turned back towards the rising tide. A few things had taken to floating above the water. Old clothes she hadn't worn in decades slowly getting drenched. Old papers now illegible as the ink spread through them. Wooden trinkets and wintertime baubles and other knick-knacks that had once meant something to her. And the stray sealed bag of chips or crackers, which she kept down there because it was cold and, usually, dry.
And something else came carried by the current, as the water reached past her knees. It was a boat, or at least something like a boat, tiny and thin and like something a child would fold out of paper. With its curved shape and tall mast it looked like an upside-down scythe, and within it there was space for only one person, and a small one at that. There was a girl inside the boat, a little girl with red eyes and blue hair that Celestia recognised, but couldn't recall ever seeing before.
Cozy Glow wore all black, and a thin red headband over her hair. A top that ended just slightly above her waist and clung to her body, with long sleeves that hooked onto her middle fingers. Pants that matched the colour and texture and did the same on her naked feet. Her nails were sharp and painted black, and she ran them against the side of her boat. She lounged on it like a cat, looking at Celestia like she was a bird stripped of her feathers while drifting lazily towards her. "Life's tough for a murderer, is it not?"
Celestia stared at her, understanding the words but not their meaning. The water was still rising, but it seemed to have slowed down somewhat as its height approached that of the crack in the wall. "What do you want?" she asked. It was not the only question on her mind, and not even the most important. It was just the first to have made it out.
Cozy burst into laughter, and it was immediately clear she was laughing at Celestia more than at the question itself. "Wouldn't you like to know?" she finally said when she calmed down from her giggling fit, and her smile was as cruel as it was genuine. "Aren't you cold? Cold and wet down here in this damp little cellar, full of nothing but waste?"
The bell tolled again. The water was halfway to Celestia's thighs, up a few steps on the stairs leading down into the room, but it had stopped rising altogether. It seemed reaching the crack it was pouring out of had done it. Celestia was cold. She shivered, and hugged herself for warmth. It still wasn't enough. "What are you doing here?"
"Just helping along." Cozy rolled onto her back, with her head dangling out of the boat, curls just barely not touching the filthy water, arms resting along the upper edge of the hull. "You should start a fire."
Celestia looked at her, and blinked. She mouthed something. Not anything clear, but the intent of the question was apparent.
"To warm yourself," Cozy replied. "To burn the water away. Start a fire. You deserve it."
Celestia nodded at that. The bell above tolled again. Start a fire. She turned and walked back up the steps, and fire walked with her. And in the darkness of the cellar, Cozy Glow smiled.
Luna chased after Cozy Glow. The girl moved surprisingly quickly despite her short legs, and Luna was left following sounds and glimpses over anything concrete. A flash of colour disappearing behind a corner, a tinkling peal of laughter, the sound of steps against the floor always somehow muffled and quiet no matter where it came from.
The whole house was awash in light. It was like someone had taken the Sun and placed within the walls themselves. Luna followed Cozy around, down every corridor of the upper floor, until they reached a set of wobbly foldable stairs leading up to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Stairs that should have been closed, hidden away. Luna barely caught a hint of Cozy's pink legs disappearing into the attic, and slowed her chase as she reached the bottom of the stairs.
At least the girl had nowhere else to go. She'd be able to talk to her up there, hopefully. She was still upset. People weren't supposed to look inside the attic. She did not keep it clean. It was old and dusty and full of abandoned things, and painful things. Things not meant to be seen. But she couldn't let a child run around in there and risk hurting herself. Luna swallowed, took a deep breath, and climbed up the groaning metal steps.
The space at the end of the stairs was deserted and cold. She looked around. The ground was grey, almost white, covered in dust, and it stretched as far as her eyes could see. All around her was darkness, pure blackness hanging like fog over the grey in every direction. Above her there was a light in the sky, yet she could not see its source. It was just there, shining down on her yet bearing no warmth.
Luna was cold. No. It wasn't even cold. There was nothing around her. Not even air to feel cold against her skin, just a hollow vacuum devoid of heat and life and joy. Frigid, yet unable to sap any of her temperature as it couldn't touch her. There was no air to breathe. Luna felt her lungs grow empty and her diaphragm stop. She wasn't breathing any more. It felt natural. She realised she hadn't been breathing for a long time.
Cozy came towards her with steps that made no sound, leaving dainty little prints on the ashen sands around them. Her wide pink gown hovered just barely above the ground, and her frilly shoulder puffs were completely immobile in the emptiness she moved through. But she spoke, and Luna heard her words despite everything else. "Welcome home."
Luna understood the meaning, though she knew it was more a prison than a home. It made no difference at that point. Cozy Glow began to walk away, and she followed behind her. They moved through a gallery of forgotten dreams and might have beens, old memories and fantasies rising up around them like living paintings she could have lost herself in if she'd stopped to admire them. But she was pulled forward and they all shattered behind her, barely giving her the time to recognise them as something she'd once known before they were lost again. It didn't matter. They were there because they were dead, just like she was. They were there because she'd put them there.
The cold light that came from nowhere in the sky cast a shadow on the barren surface of her palace of exile. Luna admired it as she walked, a darker spot on the grey that formed a shape too vast for her to comprehend. To her it just looked like a stain, marring the surface of her home. Perhaps someone might appreciate it when looking from afar. Perhaps someone might find beauty in it, but to her it was only a source of pain.
Cozy led her to a tree, and an open grave beneath it. Luna stared into the grave, but did not recognise the woman inside. Her body was immaculate, unblemished, and unreal. It seemed almost transparent, more like a vision than anything physical. Her open eyes were calm lakes reflecting the light of a full Moon, and her hair was dark like the emptiness of space. Her dress was coated in starlight, and raven wings lay folded at her sides. Luna knew she had known the woman once, seen her somewhere a long time ago. But the more she looked, the more the corpse would fade. Luna looked up.
Her face was a mask, and she felt it slip and shatter soundlessly at her feet, exposing her polished skull beneath. The tree was built out of scythes, the snaths embedded in the ground and the blades jutting out to form a canopy of branches. From one of the branches hung a rope, and at the end of the rope was a little body of a girl Luna had been, a long time ago. Luna fell to her knees and screamed a soundless scream, as tears fell upwards from her hollow eyes and floated like weightless diamonds in the cold light.
Cozy Glow floated up on her delicate hummingbird wings, and cut the golden rope around the child's neck with a pair of scissors. She held the body gently as it began to fall, and carried it to Luna so the dead woman could embrace it.
Luna held herself with quivering arms, and looked at the pristine face of the girl she'd been, preserved in the cold hollowness of the oblivion she'd cast it to. It looked just like the woman in the grave. Luna held herself tighter and gave a breathless heave. Cozy stood beside her, looking towards the horizon they had come from.
Time passed, though time had little meaning there. It was all past and a future that hadn't been, wasn't, and couldn't be. Luna cried until she had no tears left to cry, and screamed until her sadness turned to rage. Rage at what she'd lost and what she could have had, and what should have been hers and the world had taken from her. Anger at the world for the life she'd never lived.
Then Cozy spoke again. "I cannot give you back what you lost. There is no justice for what happened to you. But you can have your revenge." She raised a finger capped by a golden nail, and pointed down the path they had trodden to get to the tree.
Luna raised her head and turned. Fire was rising from the hole she had emerged from, and smoke and ashes with it carried aloft by the air it warmed. She looked once more to her young dead self, then rose and let her little body gently fall within the grave of her fantasies and dreams. She turned towards the fire, black hawk wings spread in rage, and the dark mask she wore was one of anger and hate as she stormed onwards, kicking up the dust of her memories and scattering it to the cold light that shone over her prison.
Cozy Glow looked on, and laughed without restraint and without a sound.
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.
Total Eclipse of the Mind
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.
