The Forgotten Prince

Chapter V: Duel of the Immortals

The main plaza in the centre of Canterlot city was utterly dead silent, with the six elements, the young dragon and the Cutie Mark Crusaders standing completely frozen in panic between by castle doors, following attentively the dialogue between the princess of the sun, who had her wings dauntingly spread wide, and the stranger who claimed to be the last alicorn.

On the opposite side of the vast paved area was the enormous, fearsome dragon of six wings and no face, made of thick, dark smoke, standing idle behind its master, the mysterious alicorn in the black armour, also spreading his wings, though with much more calm and less pride. He faced Celestia through his metallic mask, which hid the entirety of his face, making the latter feel not comfortable at all with his sudden coming. She could not recall ever meeting or seeing such pony in all her millenary life, and nothing about his appearance would give her any reason to trust him, let alone the fact that his vague and untruthful presentation irritated her.

“What are you talking about?” she vociferated to him in response to his last statement “I do not know you. You dare violate the memory of our ancestors through vague lies? Me and my sister are the ONLY surviving descendants of the ancient race of the alicorns!”

His strong, deep and loud voice was heard again. It seemed to be coming not from within him, but from everywhere around them, echoing and reverberating on the walls and in the air, as he spoke slowly and clearly, articulating each and every word carefully.

“An error I will make sure to mend tonight. My previous defeat managed but to delay me, but now I have awoken from my prison of slumber and returned to the land of mortals to finally fulfil my destiny, starting by spilling your blood on this very soil, princess.”

“You intend to overthrow me? To dominate Equestria through fear, and threaten those who oppose you with horrible deaths, is that why you’ve come here, fiend?”

The giant dark dragon behind him growled menacingly and flipped his massive ethereal-looking wings once. As he responded in the same disturbing voice, his pose remained perfectly unshaken, facing the princess with his face hidden, while she looked at him with distrustful eyes.

“You mistake my intentions. It is not sovereignty over this land that I yearn, have it by whatever name you desire. I am the prince of fear, harbinger of death; I am to bring about the fall of my own kin, so it is prophesised. It is but your blood I seek, daughter of Nebula and Galaxia, for only I must remain, of all alicorns already slain, to overlook her mighty craft, as she will prepare this world for the next to come.”

That last proclamation really unsettled Celestia. She felt every single part of her body shudder unconsciously, her breath fastened nervously and her pupils dilated as she kept gazing at the strange pony, now with pure horror and dread present from those words, which she refused to believe to be true, even with such assertiveness wherewith he uttered each of them.

“You mean, all these years, you were the responsible behind all of this?”

She seemed to be gradually losing the hold on her own emotions, eventually exploding in a frenzy wrath like none of them had ever seen.

“You’re the source of this evil that has come to torment my subjects? Was it you who made the exact same thing happen before, more than a thousand years ago?! WHO KILLED MY MOTHER AND MY FATHER?! ANSWER ME!”

While anypony else would have flinched in fright at the princess’ clamorous cries, the very pony to whom she was directing all of her ire did not move a single muscle, always keeping his majestic posture.

“Yes. But believe I had no choice. She was always right about me...” for a brief moment, his tone seemed to bore a slight bit of resentment, one detail Celestia ignored completely, focused only in channelling all her hatred towards him.

The princess was panting heavily from the shouting, with her eyes widened and still piercing the alicorn right before her like burning daggers. When she finally calmed down, she closed them tightly and gritted her teeth, as one limpid tear rolled down her cold cheek. Lowering her wings and trembling from her tall, slim legs, she dropped her head, having her beautiful, stirring four-coloured mane covering her face, as constant, heartbreaking sobs became audible.

Then, in a swift motion, the princess of the day lifted her head back up, and with a painful and sad tone still present she spoke again, all of her heart burning in rage.

“I had promised myself I would avenge mother and father’s deaths. You have come to threaten my subjects and destroy everything that we love, but you will fail!”

She lit her horn with an incandescent golden magic aura, while leaning her head slightly forward, pointing it at the dark alicorn.

“You have made the mistake of coming back after so many years. Now, the only thing you will find is going to be your own demise!”

She charged up a massive beam with all of her might and immediately struck him with it in, not giving him any chance to divert the attack. As it hit him, it created a thunderous explosion, so luminescent it was almost like a second sun. There was no possible way anypony could have survived such a powerful destructive blast.

However, as the dust settled down, it revealed that the dark alicorn was still standing on the exact same spot without even a single scratch on his armour, much to their great astound.

His horn held a very bright, scintillating sphere of golden magic aura, which Celestia recognised as being the compressed power of her own blast just in time before he used it to strike her back with her own shot. She conjured up a magical shield that deflected the potent beam from her, and quickly retaliated by casting several rapid shots of magic, all directed at him. Yet, before they even touched him, they were repelled to all directions, before acquiring a curve trajectory and homing back to her, who had to deflect them with another magical shield.

Celestia was more exasperated than ever, as she realised this was not going to be an easy fight. Still, she was determined to have her revenge and do whatever it took to protect Equestria and its inhabitants, so she summoned more strength in order to put a definite end to it.

“I am the princess of the sun!” She closed her eyes. Her horn and cutie mark began emitting an intense light, as a broad, translucent and spherical golden aura surrounded her form utterly, and the paved floor beneath her hooves shook and cracked “I summon the ancient power of the solar sphere to aid me!”

She shot her eyes open, which were irradiating an ardent, blinding light.

In the meantime, Twilight and her friends had just reached an elongated and ruined corridor, where the dim light provided by the sky irradiated in its fullness through a massive hole in the wall, which prolonged itself farther upwards to other floors above them.

Upon reaching the corner, they all nearly bumped with two royal guards coming from the other side, both in a miserable state, bruised and with some burns on their fur, with one of them barely conscious while the other aided him to walk. They could not help but to mutually on their unexpected encounter, but the immediate relief was obvious from the soldier who could still speak.

“Thank goodness, we were starting to think we’d never see anypony alive in here! Our entire unit died when the tower fell down, we were searching for a way out here before more of the castle crumbled.”

“I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through...” responded the librarian pony with some hurry “we were sent up here by princess Celestia to look for princess Luna, have you seen her?”

“I’m afraid not, but her highness was there with us when the whole damn thing came down, so she must still be there...” he pointed to the segment of the hallway behind him with his hoof “if she’s still alive...”

“Come on, girls! There no time t- AH!”

She was interrupted by a sudden, single bolt of lightning which struck directly the two guards, piercing through both their bodies, as they dropped heavily and unmoving on the floor with a dull sound.

The ten friends froze agape with their hearts pumping nearly out of their chests from the indescribable shock after witnessing such a violent and rapid death of somepony they had just talked to. But then, just as the luminescent burn mark on their bodies cooled down, they got back up leisurely, and stood backwards in silence, without even breathing.

Before long, the two guards turned their heads to face them, both revealing their eyeballs completely black, with narrow bright red pupils staring menacingly at them, as they also turned their bodies and prepared an hostile stance.

“Run!” cried Rarity, rapidly grabbing her little sister and leading the other youngsters in the front, commanding them to follow her through the hallway from where the soldiers had come.

Back in the main plaza, the next move was the armoured alicorn’s, who simply lit up his horn with a mystical white magic aura for a brief moment, followed immediately by a reaction from the colossal black dragon, which exhaled a massive column of fire out of where its mouth should be, through the dense smoke of his head. As it hit the ground, between the dark pony and the dragon itself, the column bifurcated, and, as if by magic, it spread quickly and formed a perfect circumference of tall, lively flames all around the plaza, closing just behind Celestia.

Some downed royal guards still managed to gather some strength and felt the urge to rush inside the vast arena to help the princess, but were all instantaneously thrown away through the air by a hot burst spit by the magical flames, landing painfully with small portions of their fur scorched.

It seemed that the strange pony intended to fight Celestia alone, without any unwanted interference.

The princess, now at the peak of her power and with her aura shining like the very sun she controlled, rushed at her opponent so swiftly that anypony could have believed she was moving even faster than Rainbow Dash. Yet, it seemed that he, too, had mastered some light speed moves, as he dodged by jumping high up in the air so rapidly no eyes could follow.

In the castle, the friends were still trying to elope their two possessed chasers, who were alarmingly faster than any other enemy they had encountered, when they were all forced to skid to a stop before falling through a great hole in the ground, which followed the greater gap in the wall in a confusion of piles of dust and scorched debris.

With the two guards nearing them, they saw no other choice than to jump over the deep hole, extending downwards a few floors. After throwing the three crusaders and the young dragon first, they all followed as quickly as possible, with Fluttershy carrying Rainbow Dash through the air. Twilight remained the last, leaping just before one of the soldiers grabbed her.

Once they were all one the other side and sighing in relief, believing they were safe, another terrible surprise struck them as the pursuers boldly proceeded to jump over as well. Yet, like an unexpected stroke of luck, the cracked and frail stone where they landed soon succumbed beneath their hooves, and they both fell to their death.

“Phew, that was close!” Applejack let out, wiping up the cold sweat from her forehead.

Before continuing, Twilight approached the edge of the declining ground, where the wall had collapsed entirely, and caught a glimpse of the fierce duel occurring further down outside. The only thing she could discern inside the wide circle of fire were two large blurs, one white and the other black, moving around and crisscrossing on the ground and in the air at an astonishing haste, and constantly conjuring rapid magic shots at each other, the white blur golden shots, and the black one pale shots.

Terrified, the purple unicorn could only wish for her teacher to survive this deadly encounter, but her hopes would become lower and lower every time she heard her cry in pain after being struck by the enemy’s matching magic. Shrugging away all her concerned thoughts, she focused on their objective the princess had designated them, and followed the rest of the group.

After a few minutes of battling, the two combatants finally landed on the ground simultaneously, facing each other. Celestia still had her powers in full berserk, and her anger and resolution were exploding, but she was starting to feel her body exhausted from both the effort she had been putting herself into, and the wounds from white shots that hit her.

His magic spheres were not made of pure energy, like hers or the ones a unicorn would normally shoot, for those would burn like hot plasma. Instead, these felt like incandescent sharp blades, leaving several open cuts where they had touched her body, even cutting through her armour plate.

As Celestia got back to her battle stance, suggesting she was still far from surrendering, he enlightened his horn again, surprising her by creating not one, not two, but three perfect replicas of himself, absolutely indistinguishable from one another and from the original one. The four armoured ponies surrounded her completely, all standing still and facing her in a threatening way.

Without thinking twice, the princess directed her next strike to the one immediately in front of her, who, in just a split second, phased out like smoke into thin air and reappeared slightly closer to her, and delivered another painful, slicing strike out of his horn on her. At that point, she realised the only way out of this would require her figuring out which one was the original and surprise him with a powerful attack at the right moment.

The other replicas did not wait for her to recompose and strike back, as they, too, started shooting at her from all directions, and Celestia had found herself forced to cast a magical barrier around her temporarily in order not to die from all the wounds she had received by then. However, his magic was too powerful and her strengths were fading quickly, as the blood streamed continuously from her cuts. She did not even have much power left to maintain the barrier that was shielding her.

Suddenly, moved by a desperate thought, but nevertheless possibly her last chance of surviving, she lifted her head up, pointing her horn directly to the sky, and created an explosion of incandescent light and strong, multidirectional winds, which did seem to have confounded the four armoured ponies a little, at least for a brief moment.

A white blur then landed heavily on the ground from far up above, and then proceeding to move extraordinarily hastily between the four opponents surrounding it, clashing with each of them multiple times and leaving a long trail behind of a bright golden light.

None of the armoured ponies was able to parry this relentless, frenetic attack. Each time they got hit, they would actually react and back off slightly, and, though they would not emit any sound of pain, they were perceptibly stunned.

When the blur finally halted back in the middle of the four enemies, it reshaped in Celestia’s form, still in her battle stance and facing one of them specifically. The replicas vanished like thick, dark smoke, leaving only the already recomposed original one, who was right before the princess’ sight.

In a more calmer ambient that was the final corridor Twilight and her friends had yet to comb looking for the princess of the night, all they would come across were more piles of wreckage and clouds of dust, in a dangerously bent and unstable storey.

They had searched restlessly all rooms, often having to use force to knock down a stuck door, bucking their way in. Unfortunately, all they had found would be either nothing or more death.

That was the last hallway they had left to search for the younger princess, and they had reached a dead end made of an impenetrable wall of fallen stones ahead, blocking further access inside the castle. There was nothing they could do to continue.

“Oh no, what’re we gonna do now?” Twilight looked desperate at the impenetrable obstruction before them, tormented by the thought of failing the task her mentor had designated them.

Another lonely bolt of lightning tore the skies completely out of the blue, missing the purple unicorn by only a few centimetres, making her jolt and yelp in alarm.

“Woah, that was close!” Rainbow Dash let out, her heart fastened from the scare, like all the others.

“It almost seemed it was... aiming directly at you, Twilight” stated Fluttershy, which would unbridle a wave of unsettling thoughts on everypony’s minds, already frightened without considering that a force of nature might have been attempting to hunt them down.

They were forced to put their worries aside when a muffled sound coming from the other side of the massive wall of debris drew their attention.

“Did you hear that?” asked Rarity in a low tone, while putting her ear against the wreckage, followed by a brief moment of deadening silence, aggravating the suspense.

The entire wall burst suddenly, propelling all of them backwards and to the ground, making them feel a bit disorientated. Before they realised, another four possessed guards, their eyes just like the other two from before, had launched themselves through the hole and landed right on top of Twilight, Pinkie, Applejack and Fluttershy, immobilizing them.

Just as their frightening heads, with their mouths open, were about to bite the skin off their faces, a torrent of frenetic shots of light blue magic came out of the hole from where they had emerged, hitting every single one of the undead soldiers and liberating the ponies within their hold.

As the guards got up rapidly, prepared to attack again, a familiar form leaped through the dusty breach, bustled and focused, in a silver armour of identical design as that of Celestia’s golden one.

“Princess Luna!” the ten friends exclaimed, blissful to see the younger princess still alive.

Without thinking twice, the six elements got up as well and aided the monarch in fighting off their enemies, delivering hard bucks or shooting magic at them. Rainbow Dash, who had regained some sensitivity in her legs, attempted several stunning kicks on any that would get too close to her and Applejack, supporting her.

But the guards’ determination to kill their prey was not easily breakable, so that the fiery struggle would only end after they were either violently thrown off the castle through the gaps in the walls, falling from a great altitude, or crushed beneath the heavy stones of a crumbling ceiling. At last, the friends could all truly sigh in relief.

“Are you okay, princess?” Applejack inquired, still breathless from combating with the weight of the cyan pegasus on her shoulders.

“I’m fine, but what are you all doing here?” she answered promptly, but clearly agitated with their presence there “I thought my sister and I had sent garrisons to Ponyville as well, with orders to evacuate everypony to the district bunker!”

“It’s a long story, princess.” Twilight intervened, trying to hasten the conversation “We were delegated by your sister to come up here look for you right after the large tower collapsed. Just before we entered the castle, a giant dragon came out of nowhere and landed in the central plaza, ridden by a strange alicorn in black armour...”

“An alicorn, you say?” Luna repeated, astounded and a little sceptical.

“It’s truth, they’re both fighting down there right now!” Spike assured, standing near the edge of the cracked and unstable floor, pointing far downward to the feverish battle of powerful bolts and explosions of golden and pale magic.

“We have to go back down, the princess needs our help!” pleaded the crusaders.

Celestia was terribly drained and starting to find difficulty in catching her breath, as well as the fact that the large amount of blood she had already lost from her wounds had weakened her severely, and her pain was so excruciating she could barely stand up on her legs much longer.

Taking in one last agonizing inhale, she rapidly propelled at him, having both their horns clashed with each other. They were now battling literally face to face and without any magic, only relying on their own strength, using the horns as sabres. Yet, she could not hold her position for very long, since, apart from her weakened state, the dark alicorn was larger and much stronger than her, as she felt his immense force pushing her backwards with the biggest ease.

Out of desperation, she attempted to astound him with a magical strike delivered directly from her horn to his masked face, but right before she could finish casting it, he was the one to take her aback with a potent repulse spell, so powerful that the multidirectional gusts of magical wind it generated even extinguished the flames delimitating the round arena, and the princess of the day was thrown a scarce meters in the air, but still managed to land on her hooves.

However, as she looked back up and prepared to retaliate at her enemy, he was already gone and nowhere to be found, though it did not take very long for him to reappear, in the form of a dark blur descending vertically from a great altitude and landing so rapidly and fiercely, like a thunderous lightning, that the pavement of the whole plaza trembled, and many big cracks opened on the hard stone. Both the still fading black trail he left behind and his tall armoured legs were emanating highly energetic electricity.

All the shaking in the ground formed another wall bounding the battling area, this one made of protuberances of stone, rock and dirt.

The vibration on the floor had disorientated Celestia a little. Without wasting any time, the dark alicorn lit up his horn once again, involving himself entirely with electricity, and then trespassed her whole body brutally, like an horizontal lightening strike, halting right behind an electrified Celestia, screaming shatteringly in excruciating pain.

What remained of her light had vanished completely, and her beautiful golden aura and shine in her eyes dimmed.

The armoured alicorn approached the fallen adversary unhurriedly. She was still breathing, though barely alive, but still managed to move her head slightly and through much effort in order to look up at him. He glared down on her through his faceless metal mask, with his wings spread wide.

His dark horn irradiated his pale magic aura once more, and Celestia realised this was the end. She was exhausted and close to dying; he was too much powerful, even for her.

She regretted not being able to protect her subjects, like she had committed herself to. Her mind drifted to her mother and father, then to her race and family. She recalled their faces with an unmatchable grief; shattered by the failure to avenge them all, in the end. A tear fell from one of her saddened, closed eyes, and rolled down her cheek, while she let a small sob and silently muttered to herself “I’m so sorry. Mother. Father. I’ll be with you soon...”

She expected a final, merciful strike to come down and put a definite end to her suffering, which never actually came. Instead, she felt like her body was being lifted up from the ground. Her bewilderment only aggravated, as the next thing she felt was a rather warm liquid touching her body, spreading up her limbs and involving her utterly.

She made an effort to open her eyes again, immediately realising that she was, indeed, hovering in the air, right in front of the dark alicorn, inside of some a strange magical bubble he was conjuring up, which he was also filling up slowly with magically generated water. He wanted to drown her.

It would not be too long until the water level reached the top of the bubble and Celestia was completely submersed. She closed her eyes, as she felt the life escaping from her with her last exhalations. The image of her favourite student and her friends came to her head. She would miss them very much, without a doubt, but there was another one who she would miss above all: her dearest sister Luna.

“Goodbye, Luna. Please, don’t forget about me...” she thought with great melancholy.

All of a sudden, a cry was heard from high up in the sky, amongst the black clouds. A rapid cobalt blue sphere of magic struck the armoured pony directly from above, having no other effect on him but breaking his concentration on the bubble spell, making it burst. Celestia fell back on the ground, coughing all the water out of her lungs and gasping desperately for air.

A dark blue blur then landed on the ruined paving of the plaza, right between the dark alicorn and the fallen princess. Far behind her followed the friends from Ponyville, leaping from a lower window onto a sloped stone roof, and sliding down back to the top of the staircase.

“Luna...” Celestia mumbled quietly, finding it difficult to even talk. She felt peaceful to see her sister before losing her senses from her weakened state.

“Worry not, my dear sister, I’m here.”

The princess of the moon eyed the pony in the black armour with no fear, only ardent anger in her face, like she was about to murder him.

“You! Who do you think you are to come here, disrupt our peace and try to murder my sister?!”

To everypony’s surprise, instead of simply standing in silence like he used to, the dark alicorn appeared to have shuddered slightly, even taking one quick step back, just from seeing Luna.

“Why have you come here? What do you want from us?!” the younger princess kept shouting at him vigorously “ANSWER ME!”

“Luna...” he uttered in his strong, grave and reverberated voice.

That was when everypony got absolutely confused, but not as much as Luna.

“How... do you know my name?” she inquired, now in a completely different tone, more of a surprised rather than an enraged one.

He did not respond. Instead, he backed off a few more steps, before lighting up his horn, commanding the gigantic dragon that was right behind him to approach his massive head, having the dense black smoke engulfed him entirely, until he disappeared from sight, within the beast’s body.

After that, the dragon quickly took off, creating a gust of wind with each beat of its six wide wings, almost knocking down everypony below, and headed back up to the clouds, whence it had come. Once it was no longer visible, all the darkness faded away again, leaving the thick, grey fog taking over everywhere, for the third time.

Now that the calm had returned, Twilight managed to concentrate on her teleporting spell, sending herself and her friends inside the ring of rock protuberances where the battle took place, and they rushed as fast as they could to the injured princess

“She is still alive, but has just lost her consciousness...” Luna informed them, with one of her front hooves holding Celestia’s head, and the other placed over her golden chest plate, all destroyed and torn open, showing clearly the damage made to her body “We have to get her to the castle hospital wing quickly, before she loses more blood!”

“We’ll help you, princess!” Twilight said promptly, using her magic to lift up Celestia’s insensitive body.

“Thank you so much...” Luna approached to whisper at her sister’s hear “You’ll be alright, my sister. Just hang on.”