April 12th, year 6 PH (Post-Harmony)

1:32 am

Canterlot Castle, Canterlot, Equestria

Princess Luna sat idly in the throne room, looking out the window to the stars above. Something was bothering her, but she couldn’t say what. The moon hovered in the night sky, reflecting sunlight off its surface onto the darkness that enveloped the hemisphere, slightly illuminating it. Even in the dead of night, well trained eyes could see things as if it were day. Numerous stars twinkled in her ever-flowing mane, and she nuzzled it out of her eyes to see the actual stars that glistened above. The night was her domain, and along with her sister the two Princesses ruled over Equestria for over a thousand years. Albeit it was only six years ago she returned to the throne alongside her sister. She had spent the previous thousand years in anger and depression, banished to the moon by her own blood. The thought of her corrupted form, Nightmare Moon, still lingered in the back of her mind but she learned to seal those memories away long ago. Perhaps Nightmare Moon was trying to return? No, that couldn’t be it. If anything Luna was known for however, it wasn’t self-control. However she is trustworthy, and has never broken a single promise in her long, tiresome existence. She promised Princess Celestia, all of Equestria, and the world that Nightmare Moon would never return, and she intended to do so. So if it wasn’t Nightmare Moon that was bothering her, what could it be? She was lost for answers, and this tended to annoy her. If anything, Luna had a knack for getting answers out of anypony. But she couldn’t get answers out of herself, especially ones she didn’t even know the question to. No, she knew the question. She didn’t have the answer. She was going to find the answer though. She’ll find it tonight.

“Going somewhere, little sister?” Celestia asked innocently from atop her throne. She rarely got any peace of quiet, and as the Princess of the sun she spent most of her time arguing politics during the day. This was partially because most ponies were only awake during the day, and partially because there was always some sort of political conflict going on with any of the neighboring countries. Most notably the Gryphon Kingdom to the north; the two countries were always in a fuss about something, whether it be the bordering badlands, the damming of the Pisa River, or immigration conflicts. Either way, the cases were usually mild and passed on with days if not hours, only to be replaced by another debate. However this week there had been an issue with the northwest neighbor Germaneigh. Some Equestrian ponies had mistakenly built a village on Germaneigh side of the Derbyshire River, and refused to leave even though they were not on Equestrian soil. Hopefully a compromise could be reached soon. The Germanes pushed for the village to be annexed and recognized as a Germaneigh town, or wiped off the map. Celestia had been urging for simple relocation if the Germanes helped build the townsfolk another village on Equestrian soil and they could have the one on theirs. But neither side liked the other’s ideas. The Princess could surely use a must needed nap, but unfortunately the two alicorns were unable to sleep. They never could anyway; one of the many consequences for being nearly immortal.

“Oh ‘Tia. I… I’ve been distracted lately. Something in the last hour has made me feel… wrong. I just don’t know what.” Luna sighed heavily, hanging her head. She brought her gaze back up to Celestia, getting a sympathetic nod from her sister. Celestia hopped from her pedestal and gracefully glided over to Luna and stood next to her as the two looked out the window into the night sky.

“I know what you’re feeling, dear sister.” Celestia nuzzled up to Luna, who after slight hesitation returned to comforting favor. “I have felt the same disturbance. Although my connection to the night has been weakened since you retook control of the moon, I still understand your feeling.”

“I’m… I’m going to the garden. Maybe the rooftop. Yeah, I should get a good vantage point of the night from on top of the castle.” Luna giggled to herself.

“The fresh air should help you, Woona.” Celestia joked, getting an irked glare from Luna.

“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t be calling me that anymore! I’m grown up ‘Tia.”

“I’m just teasing you,” Celestia said with a happy grin, returning her gaze to the night. “I know that whatever it is you’ll figure it out. Your diligence never ceases to amaze me.”

Luna smiled at the thought. Getting a compliment from her sister wasn’t an easy task when she wanted one, but whenever she least expected it Celestia gave one to her right out the blue.

“…and it never ceases to amaze me,” Celestia teased, a hint of sarcasm in her tone. Luna rolled her eyes at the possible insult, and shrugged away from her sister. Her horn glowed with a faded blue, and her favorite pair of saddlebags materialized onto her back. The brown, aged fabric was tough and stood the test of time. The silver thread that copied her cutie mark into the buckle that sealed the canvas shut was hoof-stitched by her herself. Luna had never really been into sewing, but this was her crowning achievement. She opened the satchels to make sure they carried what she intended; a book on astronomical mythology, her sketchbook, several quills and vials of ink, some charcoal, and a couple snacks. With a nod of satisfaction she went out the double doors into the maze that was the castle, eventually to appear on top of the castle itself.

“Have fun!” Celestia called after her with a nervous smile.

\x\x\x\x\

Twilight Sparkle was awoken from her midnight slumber. Something brought the unicorn out of her sleep. Groggy, she peered out of her bedroom window, moonlight casting itself through the blinds and onto her bed. With a sigh, she used her magic to close the blinds, returning her loft and the rest of the Ponyville Library into darkness.

Fifteen minutes later she still couldn’t fall back to sleep. An urge to look into the night sky haunted her but she didn’t know why. Twilight cast a simple illumination spell to read the clock on the wall, and it was about quarter to two in the morning. She didn’t have insomnia, so why couldn’t she fall back to sleep? Silence echoed through the library, and even the rest of Ponyville. Shifting around in bed, she peered through the blinds of the window up to the moon. Something caught her eye, a small black glimmer offset by the dull whitish-gray of the moon. Her gaze fixated on it in curious fascination until it dawned on her exactly what this was.

A meteor shower! She squeaked at the thought of catching one before it began. The novice astronomer had never been able to see another body in space other than the few that have already been documented by the Canterlot Astronomy Department. And she would be the first to see this! Twilight’s Comet, maybe? Or was it even a comet? It had no ice tail, so that was a bit of disappointment. But still, the first pony to document a full meteor shower before it began!

A surge of adrenaline shot through the young mare’s system. She eagerly jumped out of her bed and grabbed a quill and empty book of one of the many shelves. She hurriedly ran up to the roof to her telescope. Twilight fully expected to track the asteroid’s trajectory and present it to Princess Celestia. Oh, how her mentor would be so proud!

Twilight tried her best to aim to telescope at the shooting star, but to no avail. It was hard enough to point it to a neighboring galaxy, but that still took several minutes at best. And she was trying to fixate it onto a moving target. After a few seconds she gave up, not wanting to waste any time at all. She lay down on the balcony and opened the book to a blank page, and readied the quill. Twilight immediately regretted not bringing a blanket, but it was too late for that. The undefined blur of the asteroid began to take enter the atmosphere, a steady streak of fire engulfing it and creating a trail of red that followed the meteor’s descent.

It’s not a shooting star anymore… Twilight thought to herself, her heart beating faster as she came to the abrupt conclusion. It’s a meteorite! The thought of an actual space rock falling to the planet below made her squeal with joy. She’d never seen any space rocks before, and the few that existed were treasured artifacts in museums. To actually be able watch the rock fall was a dream come true! She just had to make it to the crater at some point. Tonight? No, it’d have to wait. She’s not ready to go out in the dead of night, and she knew for sure that some of her friends would want to go with her.

Twilight jotted down the information she was gathering as the meteor fell. By what she could tell, it was considerably large; probably the three times the size of the Ponyville library. It was also traveling slower and slower thanks to the atmosphere, so she should easily be able to find where it crashed. Another thing is that its trajectory hinted it would crash in the Everfree Forest, so aside from the possibility of a few animals, there’d be no casualties. Also, the rock didn’t seem to be tumbling, rather it shot like a spear thrown the air, straight and true. And it was breaking apart! Multiple craters to examine! The thought made Twilight’s heart beat faster and she continued to scribble down quick calculations and other data she was gathering. The meteorite broke into four chunks, three the size Sugarcube Corner and another slightly less than half that size of the others. As it got closer to the planet’s surface, the fiery streak of the tails disappeared, two of them oddly to be replaced by smoke.

Makes sense, Twilight thought, After all, the high speeds would probably put out the fires, but then why only two of them? Why did the others have smoke? She knew nothing about the topic. There were a few books about space in the library, and she’d have to reread them later tonight. It’s not like she’d be sleeping anymore anyway.

The purple unicorn look up in bewilderment as two of the rocks changed trajectory. The smaller one and one of the larger rocks, the two that both trailed smoke, tumbled through the sky heading straight for the Everfree Forest. But the other two did an impossible midair turn, heading for the area near Canterlot. She watched as one of the rocks made another sharp turn, slowly descending into the Whitetail Woods. The other rock was higher than the other, somehow gaining altitude. It headed for Canterlot, disappearing into a cloud bank.

Her attention quickly changed to the other two, just in time to watch them crash into the forest. The smaller one continued to tumble like a baseball and fell to earth. The larger of the two impossibly nosed over and smashed into the ground at a near vertical angle, exploding into an enormous fireball. Twilight’s jaw unhinged and her mouth fell agape at the spectacle. A small light indicating a fire appeared over the crash site, but it was quickly snuffed out in a cloud of smoke, that too disappearing after a few seconds. However there was no indication of fire or smoke from the other meteorite, and Twilight got a rough estimate of where it landed before it disappeared into the trees. The two fell about a kilometer apart from each other. Shortly after the impact, the brief sound of a muffled explosion rocked the town of Ponyville followed by the shockwave, and it did little more than rustle the leaves of the Library.

Twilight looked back to the other two, and saw only one of the rocks as it defied physics and glided into the Whitetail Woods before crashing. She lost sight of the other one long ago, it still being hidden by the cloudbank. All she could assume now is that it too crashed, hopefully into the mountains behind Canterlot and not in the city itself. Twilight looked down at the book and realized she hadn’t documented anything since the meteorite broke apart, and her eyes widened in fright. She hastily wrote down everything she could before it escaped her memory.

\x\x\x\x\

Princess Luna sat on the highest point in Canterlot; the watchtower that overlooked the Dream Valley that ran its way between two mountain ranges. Inside the valley lay a basin or fertile soil, occupied by many farms and small villages. To the right stood the Everfree Forest, taking up the entire western side -a good third- of the valley. Out near the end was Fillydelphia, one of the newest and modernized cities in the kingdom. Luna looked down over the valley and to the tiny spec that was the farming village of Ponyville. The small town always brought a smile to her face; something about it just made her feel good inside. Luna brought her gaze back to the night sky, looking for whatever it was that caused her to feel doubt. Doubt about something she didn’t know anything of. She looked to the moon and smiled at the handiwork she was charged with. It was something. It was her pride and joy, and Ponykind couldn’t live without it. No pony, no creature could live without it. The world needed the moon. Whether or not it was appreciated, it was something. And she loved the moon. She knew every square meter of its surface; part of it doing with her thousand-year banishment and another part being that she simply loved the moon.

Luna’s keen sense of the moon made any disfiguration about it obvious to her, so she was shocked to see two oddly shaped objects fall through the moonlight, casting dark outlines that were as clear as… well, day. Luna smiled with glee.

It’s not something bad! She silently cheered to herself in a low hum of relief, This is great! A meteor shower! I haven’t seen one in so long! Luna opened her saddlebags and put away the book on mythology she had been reading and took out the sketchbook along with the bits of charcoal. She was going to try her luck at drawing it. The only documented shooting stars were drawn, but only by astronomers after they either saw it themselves or after the fact when they took eyewitness testimonies and those were almost always unreliable. Luna drew what she saw with her own eyes, getting the two rocks written down in fine detail. She needed to hurry though; after they passed out of the moonlight their silhouettes would disappear, and with them the hope of an accurate drawing. Luna finished what she had with satisfaction and looked up to see the rocks become engulfed with the all too familiar flame or atmospheric reentry.

“Oooooo…. It’s coming down! I can’t remember the last time a meteor hit!” Luna spoke to herself, the sound of her own words calming down the surge of adrenaline. It was all she could do to not go up and join the space rocks in its descent.

No time to switch to a quill. Luna frowned, letting out a moan and started writing down what the two rocks were doing with the piece of charcoal. She never looked down from the meteors, her gaze fixated upon them and her magic wrote with impeccable speed. Subconsciously, she was able to somehow avoid the sketch she drew with her writing, write straight on invisible lines, and even turn the page to keep writing. She documented everything, overenthusiastic with this find.

Oh I hope ‘Tia sees this. She’d love to tell her sister to join in to watch, but her mind was elsewhere, focused on more important things. Then she smiled as she watched the two rocks gently tap each other in their fiery descent, breaking off into four individual chunks. Luna happily squealed as she watched the rocks fall. She thought for a moment in worry about where the now four meteors would fall, but that feeling quickly left as she realized they’d fall in the Everfree Forest; safe from hurting anypony. Then something strange happened; the rocks fell out of the stratosphere, and as expected the fires were put out and replaced with cones of air as they split through the night.

But now Luna realized why she felt disturbed inside. Two of the rocks were trailing smoke. That’s impossible. Even if they were charred from the friction of the atmosphere, the least they’d do is break off the burnt chunks. And that rarely happened. Maybe the rocks had gases contained inside? And they were burning off? That was a logical conclusion, but what happened next defied everything she knew about meteorites. And Luna knew everything about meteorites.

The two smoking rocks continued their path into the Everfree Forest, but the other two made an impossible aerial maneuver, banking hard to the left and wrapping back around towards Whitetail Woods. Luna kept writing, already on her second new page. While one stabilized itself and slowed down, the other kept accelerating and turning, gaining altitude and into the cover of the clouds. Luna’s attention was immediately diverted to the other two rocks with a flash of light.

One of them blew up? No… not unless it was filled with something like methane. Why didn’t the other blow up? Luna watched the fireball that was one of the rocks get replaced with smoke, and the smoke quickly getting snuffed out. She had no idea where the other meteorite hit, but it couldn’t be that far off from the first one. Whatever fire that was made was brief and fortunately got put out on its own. Luna looked back to other two and saw the falling one continue falling, gliding into the Whitetail Woods before it too crashed. Luna frantically scanned the skies for signs of the other space rock, just in time for it to emerge out of the clouds. It arched over her, over Canterlot, and into the mountains behind. A few seconds passed, and the sound of an explosion hit her ears. The silence of the night amplified what would have otherwise been unnoticed. Luna looked back into the Everfree Forest, and saw nothing; there was no indication anything had fallen from the sky and hit there. She turned to the Whitetail Woods, and saw a single column of smoke rise above a small crater.

“I hope that’s not on fire,” Luna mumbled and got up, returning everything she had out into her saddlebags. The Princess of the Moon jumped down off the watchtower into the courtyard, and ran into the castle. She needed to organize her guards and head to the Whitetail Woods’ impact site before the fire spread. This had been an interesting night for sure.

\x\x\x\x\

High above the planet in the upper troposphere, four metallic objects drifted helplessly in space. Three of them were still intact, but only the front half of the fourth existed. Bodies, weapons, equipment, and assorted debris drifted out of its cargo bay creating a cloud of wreckage the hovered near the destroyed craft. Over the course of the next hour, these debris and the rest of the ships slowly succumbed to the planet’s gravity, increasing speed as they hurdled to the surface below. As the group cleared the mesosphere, two of the ships came to life in a roar that was outshined by the sound of atmospheric reentry. Fortunately, the ships had been specially designed to handle such a challenge, but one of them was crippled beyond repair; its protective coating doing nothing about the enormous hole in the back of the craft. As they left the stratosphere, the fiery contrail that accompanied them this far ceased, but two of them still bled smoke; the unresponsive craft and the destroyed one. The other two gained sentient control and, reluctantly, left their friends behind.

The two craft turned sharply to the left to avoid crashing into the swamp that would be their friends’ fate. They continued to steer in order to avoid crashing in a town below, and ahead a clearing appeared, distinguishing itself from the rest of the heavily forested area. One of the craft leveled out and slowed down, preparing itself for an emergency landing. The other ship had a malfunction in its system though, and continued to accelerate and turn, coming down and back up into the sky.

The fate of the two smoking ships was grim. The half-ship tumbled haphazardly out of the sky, falling end over end. The ship came into contact with a tree, splitting it like a toothpick, completely unaffected by the impact. The same happened to the next few trees until the craft hit the ground. A ball of twisted metal, it bounced off hard earth like it was made of rubber and rolled across the Everfree Forest's floor, ricocheting from tree to tree until it eventually came to a rest.

The other ship finally came to life, much to the relief of the beings that flew it. They tried to pull up, but unfortunately for them their ship was falling upside down, and nosed into the swampy lake below. Realizing the immediate danger, the craft spun around and pulled up again; jettisoning its missile-pods and the vehicles it carried in order to heighten its chances of survival. However, leveling out at only ten feet above the water did nothing. Its spilt contents hit the water with great speed, detonating the unused rockets. The ship shook from the sudden shockwave of twelve high explosive warheads going off at once, and nosedived into the water. The craft skipped along the surface like a stone, and then cartwheeled across the swamp. The craft almost broke in half from the tremendous g-forces it was straining, and when the ship came into contact with the shoreline it kicked back up into the air, spinning wildly as it came back down entangling itself within the forest canopy.

The controlled ship came in slowly and tried to perform an emergency landing. The underside of the ship made contact with the ground below before bouncing it back into the air. This happened two more times, and while the craft was losing speed the trees were still getting closer. Out of desperation to halt the craft, the pilot drove the ship into the ground, flipping it onto its back. It skidded across the flat land before smashing into the trees and coming to a stop.

The remaining ship pierced through a cloudbank and emerged high above the ground below, still unresponsive to controls inside. Upside down and still accelerating, the engines gave out and the ship fell out of the sky. However the craft was unstable, and it spun like a top in free fall. As the the craft came closer to the ground, it scrapped alongside the face of one of the many mountains. The ship buckled, bouncing off an enormous boulder and into the side of a cliff, consuming the craft in a ball of fire.