As the whispers of war began to grow to open shouts and cries for bloodshed, spies in Fillydelphia at last revealed their findings to the Moon Princess; the great twin cities of Fillydelphia and Manehatten had become safe havens for the New Dawn. Every day, more and more territory was seized by the rebel group, more ground was given, and more ponies began to hope that the sun would one day again rise.

Luna could not allow this to stand.

A regiment of thestrals led by Captain Black Wind was dispatched to Fillydelphia with explicit instructions; purge the city of any suspected members of the New Dawn and reclaim it in the name of the New Lunar Republic.

They were ordered to execute Governor Lyra Heartstrings on sight.

Lyra fled Fillydelphia with as many members of the New Dawn as she was able before the army could arrive. The city was retaken in a single day, the number of executed members of the New Dawn a paltry twenty. The New Dawn members that had escaped raced to Manehatten and prepared for the assault that would inevitably come.

Not even they could imagine what was coming their way.

Perhaps in an attempt to show her strength in the advent of the now seen as inevitable conflict with the Crystal Empire, Princess Luna herself led her elite troopers to Manehatten and surrounded the city, destroying the bridges and trapping the ponies there like rats in a trap.

The difference was that these rats fought back.

As the New Lunar Army attacked from all sides, the New Dawn fought unceasingly while they sought some way to escape to their base in the Crystal Empire. They died by the score, their bodies defiled and left out as an example to all who would defy the New Lunar Republic.

When their numbers were barely above fifty, Lyra and Bon Bon led their rebels into the depths of the Red Hoof district. The New Lunar Army’s officers were jubilant; the rebels had finally chosen their own graves. The battle was all but over.

The New Dawn resisted for five long nights.

Against every conceivable odd, they continued to fight and to survive beyond the point that most thought they would surely surrender. They had no food but mushrooms, no water but sewer runoff that they boiled, and yet they fought back unceasingly. They gave not an inch, not a meter of ground. For every stallion or mare who died with the name of Celestia on their lips, at least fifteen New Lunar soldiers fell.

It is said that even Luna herself was moved by their tenacity.

On the fifth night, she ordered a stop to the assault and personally offered one final mercy; if the remaining rebels surrendered, they would be allowed to live and sent to be in exile over the Macintosh Hills.

One mare stepped out to face the princess; Bon Bon, the city’s Governor, one of Luna’s most trusted allies…

…and an always loyal soldier of Celestia.

Eyewitnesses claim that Bon Bon charged the Princess, dagger in her teeth, and actually managed to cut Luna’s face before the magic of the Night Princess struck her. Her prone body was dragged back to safety by her most dedicated soldier, the mysterious pony known only as the Grey Mare, even as Luna gave the order to burn the district to the ground.

Many of the last Manehatten rebels, the Grey Mare among them, died in a final glorious charge at their attackers… but not Lyra and Bon Bon.

The two rebels who survived the Last Stand at Red Hoof claimed that as they left the safety of the inner district, two ponies remained behind even as the flames began to consume everything around them. Painting an image that was used to rally all the free ponies of Equestria in the long nights to come, they told how Lyra held her love, already dead or dying, and sang to her as the building burned around them.

Even in death, they did not surrender to the darkness of the night.