Radioactive wind whipped across the wasteland, drawing down ancient dust from the timeless towers above. Clouds were gathering in the sky, causing the light of the sun and moon above to become merged and converted into a heatless and gray cast.

Solar Spectra ignored the cold and forced herself to gallop onward. She was already moving at full speed, and even with a spell to enhance her stamina she was sweating and breathing hard, ignoring the contaminated and foul tasting dust that poured into her mouth and nose.

The slumped figure on her back was rapidly growing colder, and Solar Spectra could feel her sister’s blood dripping down her sides. It had been nearly an hour since her sister had last stirred. Knowing that time was short, Solar Spectra dropped her radiation shield and poured the remaining magic into her speed-enhancing spell.

She had been blind. For her whole life, everypony had been lying to her, trying to manipulate her, even as she manipulated them. She had thought it possible to win that way, but now she realized that she had already lost from the moment she started, from the moment that she let them take Lunar Vision away from her.

Solar Spectra had only returned to civilization to gather more parts for her research. The Generals knew this, but they also knew of her prowess in battle and her unparalleled ability with magic. Even born without a clan, she had risen through the ranks of unicorn society to the point where she was accepted as something reminiscent of an equal, on par even with lesser nobles.

She had initially intended to refuse their offer. Although she was a soldier in many battles, she served the royal family directly in the capacity as a mage-researcher. Her work was considered highly classified, of immense value to the war effort, and she knew that the Generals were not likely to chastise her for refusing to participate in another of a string of endless battles, especially after the string of victories she had already achieved.

Then they had told her that it involved Lunar Vision. Their story had been so carefully crafted, so neat, so believable. Enemy chiropterans had launched a raid in allied Pegasus territory. Their strike had been repelled, but not before they had caused massive destruction to the atmospheric weapons systems and heavy casualties. In the process, they had captured Lunar Vision, the adopted daughter of the Pegasus High Commander herself. They were holding her prisoner in a well-fortified underground base.

Of course Solar Spectra accepted the mission. It had been years since she had seen her sister: Lunar Vision had been accepted into the family of the highest echelons of Pegasus military commanders, and Solar Spectra, although more skilled than any other unicorn in existence, was still bound by her people’s caste system to be little more than a peasant. The two simply could not meet, but not a day had gone by without Solar Spectra thinking about her sister.

Except that when Solar Spectra and the team of unicorn soldires she had been assigned to arrived at the “base”, it was immediately apparent that something was wrong. The “guerillas” she tore asunder with her magic were no more than colts who could barely hold a rifle, or mares with side arms.

Neither the commandos nor Solar Spectra had taken prisoners. She knew it was wrong, but every chiropteran that stood in her way fell by her magic. She told herself it was to protect her sister, that the bats were their enemy, the ones who had hurt her sister.

It had all been a lie. The “well-fortified enemy compound” was nothing more than a field hospital. Solar Spectra was still unsure how they had acquired Lunar Vision, but they were attempting to treat her, as they were the other injured chiropterans that the unicorn forces systematicall slew in their beds.

It was not until Solar Spectra reached Luna’s room that she understood. She arrived just in time to see one of the unicorn soldiers pour a bolt of magic through Lunar’ Vison’s abdomen. The mission had never been a rescue: it was an assassination.

Solar Spectra saw her goal in sight. She slowed and stopped before the massive, half-unburied black sphere. A lifetime of work sat before her, in the one place where no other unicorn was strong enough to reach. So many years spent inside that sphere, deciphering its secrets, rebuilding what was broken, experimenting and failing again and again, ostentatiously in the name of building the Eternal Unicorn Herd a weapon of unimaginable power.

The sudden deceleration caused a jolt in Solar Spectra’s left leg, and she cried out as she suddenly dropped to three knees. The extensive running had overheated the metal of the prosthetic, and its robotic systems were beginning to lock up. Inside it, Solar Spectra could see the internal components glowing with red heat. She used her magic to attempt to cool the synthetic limb, and turned her attention to Lunar Vision.

The chiropteran nurses had done what they could, but the injuries were severe. Lunar Vision had fallen off Solar Spectra’s blood-stained back when she had stopped, and now stared blindly up at the gray sky through her ruined eyes, barely noticing the pain from laying on the stumps of her severed wings.

Celestia’s arm started moving again, and she shifted the hoof, unfolding a manipulator hand. She reached into her bag and fumbled for a syringe. She uncapped it and inserted it into the implanted port in Lunar Vision’s neck.

As Solar Spectra depressed the plunger and the stimulant flowed through Lunar Vison’s body, Lunar Vision suddenly gasped, coughing blood onto her sister. That stimulant was all that was keeping her alive at this point.

“I’m sorry,” said Solar Spectra. “By the gods, I am sorry!”

She still remembered the day they had taken her away. They had been living in the street, hiding in alleys under boxes so that passersby would not beat them. At some point, there had been a battle, or a negation, and the territory changed hands.

That day, Commander FireStorm had come to view her newly acquired territory. She had seen Luna, but instead of striking her or shoving her away, she seemed to see something in the filly. Later, she returned, and asked to adopt her as her own daughter. Solar Spectra could not refuse such an opportunity, even if it meant them being separated. She herself had only shortly after been conscripted into the unicorn army forlorn hope, and had not seen her sister since.

Now she understood what had happened. FireStorm had not looked down at Lunar Vision with love in her eyes, but with a view of an opportunity. They had never intended to give her a better life; they had seen her capacity, her gift. FireStorm had not wanted a daughter; she had wanted a weapon.

All the marks on Lunar Vision’s body confirmed it. They had cut out her eyes to enhance her mental sight, and taken her wings so that she could never escape. The stimulant was a powerful psychotropic drug; it was designed to enhance Lunar Vison’s psychic ability, but had long since rendered her insane. There were even indications from the numerous scars under her mane and on other parts of her body that they had been doing far worse to her.

They had been attempting to use her vision as a weapon. To read the minds of enemy troops, perhaps, or even to control them, or, if they truly were as depraved as Solar Spectra thought, to predict the future. She did not know for sure. What she now realized, though, was that every moment she had spent pursing her own goals, the endless long nights decades spent working deep inside the Black Sphere, Lunar Vision had been tortured. Never once had she went to help her sister, even as she must have screamed out to her. It was because of her selfishness that this had been allowed to happen.

“I will make this right,” said Solar Spectra, lifting the dying Lunar Vision onto her back. “Just hold on.”

Solar Spectra pulled her sister down the radiation-infested slopes that led to the sphere. She could feel her body beginning to weaken, but she knew that it would not matter soon. Any pain she felt, from either her burning lungs, her scalding prosthetic leg, or the growing radiation sickness was just a fraction of what Lunar Vision had had to endure because of her failure.

She directed her magic as the sphere, and its surface shifted, creating an opening. Solar Vision entered and sealed it behind. She knew that they would be safe in there. When she had realized the truth, she had flown into a rage and promptly murdered the unicorn soldiers who had attempted to kill her sister. She was now labeled as a betrayer, and they would come for her. She alone was strong enough to cross the wasteland, though, without a radiation suit, and she alone could control the sphere. It had chosen her, and nopony else.

As she raced through the halls, they reconfigured, forming new paths that she directed with her mind, opening ways past the machines within. When she had first found the sphere as a child, it had been running, but later research had shown that it was actually in terrible shape. All around her were the repairs she had made from whatever parts she could find or build or convince the royal family to pay for. Some she had even stolen, both from her own nation and from the numerous enemy nations that she spent the other part of her life fighting.

Finally, she reached the main center room. She carefully set Lunar Vision down on the floor.

“Finality Core!” she screamed. “Help me! Please!”

“At your command,” said the voice of the only assistant she had that had managed to survive the Sphere with their sanity intact. From the darkness emerged a figure, larger than a pony. Part of it was metal, and the rest bone, linked together with a fleshy pink substance. Its wide-mouthed skull bore three long horns, and one only one of its eye sockets was empty. The other bore a flat pink eye with an immensely complex symbol of geometric shapes imprinted on it.

“Finality Core,” said Solar Spectra. “Prepare for the activation of the sphere!”

“The internal storage cells have not yet accumulated enough magical energy to accomplish a successful orbital strike,” said the artificial intelligence matter-of-factly, without a hint of real emotion.

“We’re not going to direct it into an orbital strike,” said Solar Spectra, approaching the alter in the center of the room. With her magic, she manipulated the structure of the controls around her, retracting the models of the sun and moon and producing an abstract model of the sphere before her. She adjusted the shape as Finality Core watched, changing the fundamental components and performing the necessary modifications and calculations for the process.

“You are attempting to reconfigure the link to the Sphere,” noted Finality Core. “I see that you are directing it inward. What, exactly, is your target?”

“Her,” said Solar Spectra, bringing the model of the moon into alignment beneath the swarm of needles above. “And me,” as the sun lowered itself into position, finishing the new format for the Black Sphere.

“This pattern is not within known functional parameters of this unit,” said Finality Core, sounding a bit annoyed. “The outcome is not known.”

“Then predict.”

Finality Core turned to her, his pink eye staring into her own violet ones. “Your mortal form would be linked to the energy of the celestial Spheres. I cannot predict the exact physiological changes you may experience. However…”

“What?”

“You would become gods.”

“I don’t care about that!” screamed Solar Spectra. “Can it heal her?”

“You mean, can it reverse death?”

“Death?” said Solar Spectra. She turned suddenly to her sister, and ran across the room. She took Lunar Vision in her forelegs and her cold metal arm, and the gaunt blue mare fell limply across her.

“Her life force terminated twenty nine point three seconds after entry into the Sphere,” said Finality Core.

“Lunar Vision,” sobbed Solar Spectra. “Don’t leave me! Not like this!” She bowed her head over her sister’s body, and soaked her sister’s coat. Then, as she pulled back her face, she suddenly saw a pair of turquoise eyes staring back at her where her sister’s empty sockets had been before. Those were eyes that seemed to stare into her, eyes that could never have belonged to her sister.

“Choose this path, and you shall betray your sister a second time,” said Lunar Vision in a voice that was not hers. “This path is pain, because this path is life eternal. When the Black Queen walks, you shall know this pain!”

Solar Spectra jumped back, and her sister’s corpse fell from her hooves and thudded to the floor, her empty, sightless sockets staring blankly at the room surrounding her.

“What was that?” she said, turning to Finality Core.

“No anomalies detected,” said Finality Core. “She is still quite dead. And the answer is yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Flooding her with the energy of the moon will result in resurrection, if successfully deployed.”

“Then do it.”

Finality Core’s head tilted slightly. “Are you not concerned with what will happen if the Sphere fails in this endeavor?”

“No. Begin the sequence.”

Finality Core responded, linking his innate computational capacity to the Sphere he was bound to. The needles on the ceiling twisted, and then shifted, revealing the containers at their base- -each one containing a spiral horn.

Solar Spectra shifted the room with her magic, adjusting the nearly infinite mechanical portions in the Sphere, bending them to her will. The floor turned and separated, and the room around her began to disassemble itself, falling away, leaving only two circular pads of stone-like metal below: one on Which Lunar Vision lay, and one where Solar Spectra stood.

The two circles linked to the machinery of the Sphere and lowered. Solar Spectra watched as Finality Core, who remained standing near the control altar, watched them leave.

They moved rapidly through the depths of the machine, past the endless machines that surrounded them- -some that Solar Spectra had built herself, replacing those that had been long-since lost, and others that had existed since the beginning of time, running eternally on the weak streams of magic from the sun and the moon. This device ran on theories that only she could comprehend, and even then, she was not entirely sure how it worked- -she did not know who had built it, or why, but she knew what she could make it do.

Years of excavation had only unearthed the top-most portion of the sphere, and Solar Spectra knew that she was moving miles beneath the surface of the land to where the sphere had somehow been buried in the ancient ruins of a long-destroyed city. As she moved, she summoned visual interfaces with her magic, hurriedly checking that the systems were properly configured and correcting the ones that she believed were inadequate.

Finally, her and her sister arrived in the massive hollow center. The core itself sat before her, suspended in the center of the tremendous spherical room, an enormous cylinder imbedded within a sphere that linked it by vast conduits and numerous smaller pipes and wires to the remainder of the machine. It was the one greatest mystery that had driven Solar Spectra’s desire and greed- -and she cursed the one element of the Sphere that she could not control, and herself, for having unknowingly conspired against Lunar Vision.

External scans indicated that airships were already visible on the horizon. The unicorns were coming. They were too late, though. Solar Spectra set the final system into order, and felt the Sphere itself harden and shift, preparing to be activated.

She floated her pad over to where her sister’s was. She reached down and ran her hoof through Lunar Vision’s mane. The small, thin Pegasus’s body was so cold and so still.

“Don’t worry, sister,” said Solar Spectra, smiling through her tears. “I can bring you back. We can be together again. This time…this time I promise. I will never leave you. I will protect you. I promise, Lunar Vision.”

A nearly seismic shift and sudden surge of electrifying magic indicated that Finality Core had finished aligning the receptors. All that remained was to activate it.

“Sleep well for now, Sister,” said Solar Spectra, pulling away her own sphere and locking it into the machine that began to emerge from the wall, and doing the same for Lunar Vision’s. “Because soon it will be time to wake up again.”

Solar Spectra stared at the emitter before her, a device that was linked to the core itself. She took a deep breath, and then ignited the magic in her horn.

Outside, at the edge of a distant horizon, a force of radiation-hardened unicorns shuddered as the air suddenly became saturated with impossibly intense magic. To their awe, and to their horror, they watched as a pure red beam of light suddenly descended from the sun, and a beam of white from the moon fell opposite it, focused on the same point.

Where the two met, they merged into an electric violet storm- -each spark of which chilled the unicorn soldiers to their very souls. They cowered as an explosion started, but then thanked their gods and leaders as the explosion retreated, as if it were being absorbed into something at the sun and moon’s focal point.

A beam of light emerged from the core, and struck Solar Spectra. The pain was unimaginable- -she felt herself burning, her body being consumed by magic that no mortal frame was meant to contain. It was as though she had been spread thin across all eternity, and every memory of her past and future had been replaced with oceans of flame.

The magic penetrated her flesh, and then disintegrated it, burning her body away, forcing her to suffer wounds that should not have been survivable. Even her metal prosthetic melted and then turned to ash. Even as magically charged particles, the pain persisted, and Solar Spectra felt like a child standing before an unstoppable tidal wave, a tempest of fluid energy crashing down upon her.

Even in abstract terms, she could feel the agony. She felt as her cutie mark was stripped away, as her destiny was fundamentally rewritten by solar light. The energy continued to pour into her, but her dispersion suddenly began to reverse, reforming herself around the new energy and new soul, every cell of her body swelling and reconstructing with the power she had projected on herself. It was the pain of a birth in pure flame, creation from a force of destruction.

The only thought that kept her sane was that Lunar Vision was already dead, and could not experience this pain- -and that her own body would be repaired when she was reborn.

As she felt herself reforming, Solar Spectra- -who could now hardly be called Solar Spectra at all- -momentarily stared downward at the core before her, and realized that it had opened. Even with her mind painfully intact, she could not fully comprehend what she saw within, aside from a strange mental assertion of an oversized skeleton made of crystal. What she felt, though, terrified her- -that whatever was in that core was the component that was actually directing the force of the sun and moon, and that it did so without even noticing.

In the midst of battle, the soldiers suddenly stopped and looked to the sky. Above them, the sun, which had for all time been a swirling mass of dim orange flame, suddenly ignited into a brilliant orb of white. There was no time to cry out as the surge of heat fell upon them. In a single instant, the majority of the armies of all seven pony races- -twenty five million ponies total- -were reduced to ash.

Deep in the forests, the last bastion of chiropteran pony defenses sallied forth from their final caves, and were slaughtered by the heavy weapons of the armor-plated earth ponies that surrounded them, or pulled to their deaths by the beetle-like burrowing Pegasi that attacked from below. As the last of the chiropteran forces ran toward their death, though, the moon above them seemed to distort. Pure white threads drifted from above, reaching into the minds of the earth ponies and into the ground where the flightless race of Pegasi tunneled.

Suddenly the enemy forces cried out as their minds shattered. Most fell, breathing but no longer alive. Those that were fortunate enough to retain fragments of their own minds turned their weapons on themselves. The chiropterans looked up to the moon, and dropped to their knees.

In the distant swamps, the only neutral race, the oldest of them all, looked to the sky, and were afraid. Not one among them could remember why.

The solar light retracted, as did the threads of madness from the moon. Those that remained looked to the sky at the newly white sun that cast light even as its twin, the cold moon, cast darkness. Those in the bottom of one particular valley, the survivors of three particular races, watched as two figures descended from above.

One was a pure white mare, her form distorted and elongated, her mane blazing white and her body clad in golden flames. The mark on her flank was of a blazing sun. The other was no more than a child, a deep blue pony who cast a paradoxical, frigid glow that was both light and dark in nature. Her mark was a crescent moon, surrounded by a strange dark stain.

Both of them were unlike any pony that had ever been witnessed. They bore both wings and horns, and the ponies below knew that they were in the presence of gods.

“Behold us,” said the white mare, her voice booming out over the ponies below, forcing them to tremble. “We are the Sun, and we are the Moon!” The white mare turned to her child-like sister, and smiled. Her sister looked back, and returned the smile. The flaming white mare returned her harsh gaze to the people below her. “No army can stand against us,” she boomed, “and no pony is our equal. We hereby declare ourselves, for now and for all eternity, as the rulers of all Equestria!”

She descended to the ground, and where her hoofs set, the grass burst into flames. Her sister landed beside her, and the land below her darkened.

“Now bow before your gods!” ordered Celestia. “Swear your allegiance to us, and to only us, and we will create a new Equestria! A land of peace, and happiness.”

The ponies looked at each other, each waiting for the other to bow first, not knowing what to do.

“No!” cried an earth pony, stepping forward. “I shall never serve one who bears a horn!”

“Then die,” said Celestia, calmly. A beam of light arced from her horn and struck the pony, burning him away to nothing. “Nor can we allow the bloodline of such a heratic to survive in our Equestria .” She focused her mind, and miles away, the pony’s wife and children were instantly incinerated as well.

“All who dissent from our will shall meet the same fate,” said the white mare, glaring at her new subjects. She smiled to them. “We only seek your happiness, and your prosperity. Now bow.”

The ponies did. Shaking, they dropped to their knees and prostrated themselves before the white goddess of the sun, and the blue goddess of the moon, the new Eternal Overlords of Equestria.