It was a typical day in Cloudsdale, as it didn’t matter if the sky was cloudy when you lived above the clouds and the Sun always graced you with radiant light and comforting heat. The usual chill of the altitude was balanced out and even the stray breeze wouldn’t bother. Weather in the Pegasus cloudcities were always the most pleasant. Of course, pegasi controlled the weather. How could they not make themselves comfortable? Ponies liked comfort and they always looked out after their own. What sort of pegasus wouldn’t?

Additionally, how would you have water if the pegasi stole the clouds? How could you have rain if the pegasi owned the clouds? Obviously, ponies didn’t usually think of asking those questions. You’d often need a griffon for that.

‘If that is not privilege, I don’t know what is.’ Gilda whispered to herself inside her head.

This is unfair. The Pegasus Tribe serve the entirety of our fair world selflessly. There used to be taxes and tariffs involved in the production of clouds, but My Sister had abolished them far before you were born. Even before I was old enough to understand what privilege was. Additionally, griffons are more than capable of dealing with weather in their own cities.

Immediately, something was obviously not right. Something just didn’t fit. But Gilda’s thoughts refused to connect into a coherent train of ideas unless she returned to Cloudsdale. Unless she allowed herself to be the young Gilda in her middle teens, sitting by the cloud’s edge and yawning her boredom into her fist.

It was a slow day at the Junior Speedster Flight Camp. As a primary school for pegasi that had shown promise with their flying skills, morning was usual school time. The first half of the afternoon was spent with all sorts of flight practices. The second half was usually spent resting, studying, doing assignments, playing, or suffering the Pegasus bullies who thought there was no place for some freaky griffon chick in a distinguished pegasus school.

Gilda almost fell off the edge when the cloudball exploded against the back of her head.

“Ha ha!” Seething with a grimace, she didn’t need to turn around to imagine the big popular stallion that had taken a liking to tormenting her for no other reason than that she was a griffon. The shit-brown dumbass with a blonde mane he took way too much care of and sunshades. His two popular mares that followed him everywhere and giggled at every dumb thing he did too. A flag with a star, a cloud, and a songbird for cutie marks. Those were some fitting cutie marks… “What’s wrong with Griffonstone, bird brain?”

Unfortunately for him, that day was the day Gilda had had enough grief from her teachers and decided she was not going to follow the teaching staff’s instructions regarding bullies. Her expression turned blank, and she slowly turned to them. The surprised stare on the stallion was worth all the headache she knew she would get from her teachers. “Dude… You got something against griffons?”

“Uh…” He blinked at her a few times while Gilda prowled towards them. “Yeah! You stink!”

“And you also look like a chicken!” The yellow pegasus mare to his right laughed at her. “Puk puk pukaawk!”

He chuckled and the two females giggled at what Gilda supposed was a joke. She kept going their way though. “Yeah? What else?”

“Well… Nopony likes you! And you should die already!” He raised his voice and his wings flared with an arrogant smile.

“Go back to Griffonstone!” The other mare joined him.

“But they don’t even like her in Griffonstone!” The first mare sang a little mocking song.

That was when Rainbow Dash landed in the cloud next to Gilda with a very unfriendly face and glared at the pegasus trio. Flared wings, angry frown, and tense shoulders; ready to get into their typical routine of hurling childish insults at each other until an authority figure came to make them go their separate ways. “Hey, do we have a problem here?”

Instead of using the typical first insult of calling the trio ‘dweebs’, Gilda looked at her, unworried and relaxed. “Nah. No need for you to get called to the counselor’s office for fighting in the school.”

“Yeah! Go mind your business, Dash.” The male laughed at Rainbow before looking back at the griffoness right in front of him, about half as much heavier than he was and seconds away from giving him a practical lesson in inter-species relationships. “Wait, what?”

Next thing she knew Gilda was next to Rainbow in front of the counselor’s clouddesk. She had a few broken or ruffled feathers and some missing on her while Dashie had a black eye and completely disheveled mane.

“Why am I here?!” The pegasus mare cried and raised her hooves. “It was your dumb flank that attacked Skipper!”

“You hit him too.” Gilda held a bored stare at nothing in particular.

“Well, yeah!” Rainbow glared at her. “I wasn’t going to just sit there and let you fight them alone!”

After a second of silence the mare chuckled and elbowed at her griffoness friend. “More like kicked the snot out of him, though.”

Just as soon as they started snickering at each other the door behind them opened. A small pegasus mare entered. Not as young as she used to be, her light pink coat was well kept, and so was her mane with white and red, but the latter began to grey already. She walked around them and the cute bow in her head didn’t make her glare less angry.

The two youths silenced and shifted their eyes away while the mare stared at them like her glare could bore a hole in them. “Miss Dash, will you please leave us? I need to talk to Miss Gilda alone.”

Rainbow blinked at her. “Does that mean that I can go?”

“Yes.” The counselor glared harder. “You can go to Detention!”

Rainbow grimaced. “Erm… Later, Gilda.”

She bumped her hoof with Gilda’s fist and left before their teacher changed her mind. Left alone with the mare, Gilda made a bored frown and sighed.

“Why did you do that? I told you countless times to report him and move on with your day” The pegasus glared at her with her soft, cute pegasus face.

“Gee, I don’t know, Miss Vibes.” Gilda shrugged despite her frown. “About as many times as it didn’t work?”

The pegasus sat in front of Gilda, standing some fingers shorter than the griffon, despite being much older. She spoke seriously and clopped her hooves for emphasis. “Every time he does that, and you report him, it goes on his record. But now that you reacted violently, it went on your record. Not to mention Rainbow Dash’s record! And physical violence is that much, much worse than name-calling! All the times I noted you reacted maturely to his provocations are gone with the wind! Violence does not solve problems! Civility does.”

“Well, it shut his mouth…” Gilda mumbled.

“Gilda, your grades are not very good, and you are larger than most stallions here. You are larger than me! It looks bad!” The mare sighed and massaged her temples. “The only reason the E.E.A. hasn’t canceled your scholarship is because of how delicate your situation is and how much you proved the Chancellor wrong regarding his views of griffons. Until you decided to give in to violence! I’ll have to write to Princess Celestia over this.”

“Screw you, the Mare, and the stupid association.” She growled and let her wings flare. “Let me go back to Griffonstone and I’ll stop being your problem!”

The mare’s expression turned sad and mellow, which upset young Gilda even more. “Did you forget why you are here? How much of a struggle it was?”

Why were you there and not in Griffonstone, Gilda?

‘I wasn’t the best student ever, alright?’ Her thoughts shouted at the sweet voice in her head. ‘It wasn’t my fault! My mother made some sort of agreement with the Princess’ help. She mediated my admittance with the Cloudsdale Board of Education.’

Following that, beyond any control Gilda might have, the scene around her shifted. She was just a little griffon fledgling with her mother in the middle of all the pegasi.

Gilda was not as young as some of those pegasus colts and fillies, but she had never seen so many pegasi. The room was filled with moms and dads waiting with their colts and fillies in the small waiting room before the dean’s office. She was just one lone griffon with her mother among some hundred pegasi that gave her weird stares for some reason she didn’t understand.

The cloudwalls and pillars, especially the floor and ceiling, would be a death sentence for anyone that didn’t have the magic of cloudwalking, but griffons, much like pegasi walked effortlessly in the clouds. She never truly understood how they made doors and glass out of clouds or why mundane objects didn’t fall through, but there they were.

It would be curious if not for the angry voices coming from the other side of the double doors in the deep end of the waiting area. But they silenced when the door opened. A cute pegasus mare of pink coat, red and white mane, walked out and looked over the room.

Then she opened a smile. “Miss Gloriana? Can you please bring Gilda?”

“Come on, dear.” Her mother softly encouraged her with a sandy wing and Gilda stood to walk with her.

Her mother looked thin. It bothered Gilda that she could see her ribs and even the bits of bone poking against the skin in her back, but her sandy-yellow coat still had all the shine it always had, and mom was as strong as she had ever been. At least as far as the little Gilda believed. She was too naïve to know, unlike the adult Gilda within her.

‘Fucking unicorns could have saved her! If one of their damn ‘nobles’ had so much as chipped their hoof, they would have moved the entire Mount Canterlot to make sure they would be as comfortable as possible. But they let her die! They let her waste away in our home and I only ever heard of it days after!’

Poor child, you could never understand. So young, so alone. There are illnesses not even the most powerful of healing magic can mend. Nothing broken to fix, no magical switches to flip… Only the uncaring consequences of mishitting thaumatology.

‘Shut up!’ Gilda growled at the voice. ‘It’s not like you would understand.’

On the contrary… I do understand.

Despite their exchange echoing in her head, little Gilda walked behind her mother and the brown tuft tip of her tail commanded her attention over the stray looks she directed at the pegasi along the way. Why were they angry? She didn’t even know them.

Gilda didn’t have a lot of time to stare. Her mother ushered her through the door to a richly adorned office. The cloudwalls looked pristine. Though, how they held all those framed papers and plaques defied little Gilda’s understanding. Light came from an imposing window behind a large desk lined with office stuff and a couple of stands flanked the window in the corners, littered with trophies and statues of pegasi in triumphant poses.

‘Not a single griffon statue in that stupid place… I really didn’t belong there!’

At the time the griffons still had not adapted all the school regulations from the Equestrian Education Association. Griffonia would in the later years boast proud primary schools with secondary schools well on their way to raise to the same levels of excellency the older pony institutions showed.

You grew in a period of distrust and turmoil when griffons started to associate the problems of their democracy to a perceived inefficiency of the Federation in dealing with their nation. Ironically, those would be the same griffons that would accuse Celestia of abandoning Griffonia to its fate while also accusing her of not intervening in the situation.

The pink mare that called them in stood to the side and, sitting in front of the impressive clouddesk was an older pegasus mare with grayed out pink mane and a beige coat. Pink eyes that had a lot of kindness in them, unlike the harsh stare Gilda received from the stallion next to her.

She didn’t know how that worked, but it was a unicorn that somehow walked in the clouds. A gray unicorn with a black mane that looked like it had been extensively licked by a cow. He wore a dark red coat, complete with that ‘evil-looking’ high neck that made him look like someone’s idea of a perfect villain.

But she didn’t spend a lot of time devoted to that unicorn guy. There was one in the room whose presence commanded all attention. With her sheer size and even more with the radiant brilliance that seemed to glow from her like she had a light of her own and her mane had gotten permanently caught in some weird magical wind.

There wasn’t a single creature in the world that wouldn’t recognize her instantly.

It was the unicorn that spoke, however, shaking his head after a short glare at Gilda. “I adamantly oppose this, Princess. Much as your own School for Gifted Unicorns is meant to foster interest in the arcane arts within our young unicorn population, the Junior Speedster Flight Camp is an effort from Cloudsdale College of Flight to develop the same fervor in young pegasi.”

Although she said nothing, Gilda’s stare fixated on the towering Princess while the others turned to the older pegasus mare when she spoke with an aggravated and sarcastic tone. “The school is about flying. She has wings. What is the problem, Neighsay? Other than you, that is…”

“I am protecting these timeless institutions, Lyceum.” He spoke as though she had offended him. “They are meant for dedicated pegasi that hone their flying skills and are on the way to becoming the best flyers. Do you want a griffon, a troublemaking one at that, within the ranks of the Wonderbolts? In the Royal Guard? If we are not careful, soon we will have stupid yaks in the Manehattan Ironworks!”

“Careful is what I would be…” The older mare started with an upset frown. “Using words such as ‘timeless’ in the present company. Especially when she was the one that petitioned the school.”

“It is true. But griffons and pegasi are not the same!” He defended his argument again and launched on a long-winded rant Gilda paid little attention to. Her eyes were on the golden clad white alicorn. While the others talked, she listened, but it wasn’t the mindful listening that her mother had taught Gilda when she was supposed to listen to her. It was a thoughtful listening.

Many thoughts behind those big purple eyes. The same eyes that Gilda remembered without ever laying her own eyes on.

The eyes of the Dawnbringer. The one that felled Aen Hader’s walls with a single spell. The mare that commanded the respect of the twelve matriarchs of the Battlehorn Legions, with tens of thousands combat spellcaster unicorns under them and that led the other races in uniting the world under her sun.

You shouldn’t know of such things.

Those eyes were cast upon the ranting unicorn. Little Gilda wouldn’t know, of course, but she understood that the generally beloved mare of mellow eyes didn’t typically stare at others like that. It would probably be a good idea for the unicorn to… Maybe… Not make her angry?

How do you know of the Battlehorn Legions and of Aen Hader?

Something was wrong. Gilda was not supposed to talk about that. She ignored the question, focused with all her might in the scene before the eyes of her younger self.

The unicorn continued his rant. “She is a griffon. She is a citizen of Griffonstone. Griffonstone ought to care for her education with her mother and father.”

“Gilda’s mother is single, Chancellor.” Celestia finally spoke with her soft voice, as though she could flip a switch and turn her mood around. Or hide it really well. “It is common for griffon mothers to partner with a prospective father and then raise their chicks alone. They relish the independence it allows and it is a cultural trait rather than an issue.”

He turned to Gilda’s mother. “And that is precisely part of the problem, isn’t it? I mean no offense, Miss Gloriana. But pegasi schools were created with young pegasi in mind, not young griffons. Of course, she is not exactly a model griffon either, is she?”

He gave Gilda an angry glare. “Gilda has been expelled from Griffonstone Youth, from Stonewalk Primary, Feathergrin and every single school you tried to get her enrolled has rejected her on account of her deplorable behavior.”

‘Because you stupid grassbreaths kept trying to make me behave like I was one of you!’ Gilda’s thoughts cried at the scene evolving in front of her. ‘Why didn’t your stupid face choke on a rock while you were grazing, you fucking pokehead?’

Little Gilda pouted and wanted to give him a piece of her mind, but unlike the adult Gilda in the backseat of her mind, she followed her mother’s example, who simply sat there. Stoically staring at him.

Your anger is as misdirected today as it was in that day. Griffons meant well, but they were never supposed to misrepresent the E.E.A. directives and norms so. Please understand that as the years passed this changed, but such changes missed you and that allowing Neighsay to remain for so long in his position might have been a mistake. However, do tell me what caused you so much grief in school.

‘I don’t know!’ Gilda groaned, frustrated at the voice in her head. ‘I didn’t like it. They kept telling me I couldn't do this, couldn’t do that… I don’t know. I never fit in with any school. Nobody ever understood me.’

I wasn’t present. I couldn’t help!

‘Celestia should have done something!’ Gilda complained. ‘Not about me… About Griffonia! It’s her fault griffons are so messed up today!’

She did. She respected your race’s proclivities and the autonomy of your country. And she tried to give you another chance at a quality education. She certainly knew that you were vulnerable and that you would be alone soon. That in Griffonstone something bad was bound to happen to you.

‘I should have stayed with my mother! I wasn’t there when she died!’

There was nothing you could have done. She wanted to spare you the pain of watching her wasting away to a disease that couldn’t be healed.

Regardless of the weird conversation Gilda seemed to be having, as though someone watched a theater piece with her, the unicorn went on. “Do we really want her in the same school as our young pegasi colts and fillies? When not even griffon schools will take her?”

“How dare you, Neighsay?” The older mare stomped her hoof on the cloudfloor. “Gilda is a child. She deserves care and education. Princess Celestia is correct that maybe another environment will be beneficial to her, but not with such discriminatory judging!”

“This little barbarian will be taking the place of a proper and dedicated young Pegasus.” He raised his voice.

“Neighsay.” Celestia finally spoke calmly, and they all turned to her. “If you cannot contain yourself, I will have you removed from the conversation entirely.”

When the princess spoke, all the others silenced. “Gilda is not a barbarian. I will not accept you speak in such a manner of any child. I am aware you are not happy about this, but Gilda, and all the griffons of Griffonia are as much my subjects as you are.”

“Princess, I understand that you-” He started, but she interrupted him by raising a hoof.

“I didn’t give you permission to speak now, Neighsay.” Celestia spoke calmly. “I am talking.”

He didn’t like it and his petulant huff showed it, but he did shut his clumsy equine mouth as Celestia walked over to tower over Gilda with a docile smile and compassion in her eyes.

‘Don’t pity me, you… You filthy… Abomination!’ Gilda cried. ‘It was your fault Grover betrayed the Empire! It was your fault everything that followed!’

Show me why you harbor such hatred for one trying to help you.

In a moment of clarity Gilda realized she was not living those moments. Princess Luna was poking around in her head! No! No! Dumb! That was dumb! Luna was messing around with her head, and she couldn’t allow herself such revealing thoughts! How in the heck would she keep herself from thinking something?!

Things changed in the blink of an eye. The room was on fire and smelled of burning flesh and wood. But not like the roasting caribou. It reeked of fur and bodily fluids in the flames. A smell that brought memories of death to her. Inside her own mind, without a true body to react, she recoiled and choked at the foul smell as much as she did on the acid in her metaphorical mouth.

Thunder cracked and the clear light washed from the room, replaced by infernal heat and flickering light. Gilda found herself in the middle of a blazing inferno. A forest burned and she was in the middle of it.

She had started getting used to these abrupt changes of mental state that came with the strange recollections of her ‘Loremaster powers’ though. She had jumped into the memories of one of her ancestors and she was again an animalistic creature. Time must have passed since her death at the riverbed, if she was born again and an adult. But heck if Gilda understood how that worked.

The important thing was that she was a griffoness, but with the mind of an animal. And she ran around the burning trees, no name, only memories of a happy life along a mate with cubs living in the Stormy Eyrie. And a desperate desire to find him.

She dodged under fallen trees and around flaming trunks. Skipped at the stream prey often drank from. Her nares burned and she coughed in the black smoke, but she didn’t stop until she found a body.

She skidded to a halt in the hot soil, sending blazing embers into the air. The simple act of breathing burned her throat, or was it the sight? A fallen griffon, broken over a stone amid the small flames in the forest floor. His radiant orange body barely retained its color, scorched black with barely any unburned skin left.

It both repulsed and horrified her. His body was much hotter than it should have been and the bones under his chest didn’t feel right (she would know, she had touched them countless times). He didn’t breathe and laid lifeless, bent over the gray, moss-stained stone.

She pushed him, and she cried. But he didn’t move on his own, much less respond.

Her eyes stinged, but that time it wasn’t from the smoke or from the dry heat. She cried again, and he didn’t respond again. Her cyan paws were stained with blood and flakes of burnt flesh. She cried a third time, low and sorrowful.

Gilda tried to remind herself she wasn’t living that, but it didn’t work. It hurt too much. It hurt like losing her mother. It hurt like falling away from Dashie. It hurt like losing Grunhilda, but she was not living that. It was a memory, turned to a nightmare. It wasn’t the first time. Did she just fall asleep with Grunhilda and fall into that nightmare? She didn’t remember.

What a horrible dream. What a horrible, crushing loss.

But the griffoness she accompanied in that nightmare didn’t allow herself the time to mourn. Anger filled her as her paws grabbed the hot burnt soil, and she jumped to the burning canopy. She flapped her wings across the blaze, dragging embers with her to see the valley aflame below. It cast an eerie light over the mountains while angry and panicked cries came from the caves. Griffons and pegasi flew everywhere. They were too many to count.

Taken by urgency, she flapped her wings again and hurled herself to the closest step in the mountains. Ponies and their colorful coats were everywhere, and she looked for a target, focusing her sight on it.

Gilda knew what that was. When the ponies finally rebelled. Another life, another reason to hate that abomination.

The fire had burned through the mountainside vegetation, leaving only small fires and dead plants. Ponies climbed the incline and she landed with her talons and all her weight on the side of a unicorn. Their bones were thin, and they gave upon impact, but she wasn’t satisfied. It was a blue male, and he didn’t even know what hit him. The nameless griffon Gilda was clawed his neck open in a feast of gore, blood, and shocked, gurgling neighing.

Once she let go, he stumbled and tripped down the mountainside just as another unicorn shot a bolt of purple magic at her. It exploded in her chest and hit like a kick from a caribou. Enough force to throw the large griffon that she was in the air and to fall on her back.

Furious neighing soon followed, and a large yellow earth pony loomed over her. Her chest hurt and the griffoness’ frantic thoughts didn’t allow Gilda much clarity to think either.

She clawed at the pony with hind and forelimbs, drawing deep gashes on his legs and his stomach. In a moment of panic, he seemed to remember that he was a prey, and she was a predator. She sprung at him with a deep, sorrowful cry as the image of her smiling mate forced itself into her thoughts. She let all the sorrow guide her fury and she shredded his face into a spring of blood and a macabre show of ripped flesh hanging from it.

Her frenzied mind didn’t let her stop! She immediately launched herself at the nearest pony she could find before she even identified what kind it belonged to, or what color its coat was. It didn’t matter, whatever kind or color they were, they were responsible.

This is not your memory. This is not your dream. You are losing yourself to a pain that is not yours! Find your center, Gilda. These are irrational animals from a time that no longer exists.

Jarring. Disruptive as a train crash. Luna’s voice echoed inside her head and woke her from the frenzy, yet she was still there. Watching from inside that furious mourning griffoness. The pain, the sorrow was still there, but it all seemed detached.

She found herself again at the background of that mind as another griffon joined her to attack the closest pony they could find. Lightning flashed in the clouds above and its clap echoed in the valley.

This is impossible. This is from a version of this world that no longer exists. It was erased from time.

It was probably the anger she shared with that griffoness from the past, but Gilda’s allegorical head throbbed with that infuriating voice in her head. It was not The Harpy, and she knew very well who that was.

‘Get your clumsy snout out of my head! You’re like a siren trying to enchant me and then drown me away!’ Gilda cried inside her thoughts, but she received no answer.

In the madness that unfolded around her, the griffoness she shared her mind with fought another pegasus. She was too heavy for the winged female equine and her rage bled into Gilda’s own anger at what she had seen. Gilda found herself mimicking her movements with surprising ease as their minds merged again.

Talons cut into the skin as her cyan paws held the mare’s neck against the ground. She shared in that griffoness’ grieving wrath watching the life steal away from the pony’s eyes. Luna’s voice sounded distant; Gilda didn’t pay attention to her.

More magical explosions echoed in the mountains, and the thunder roared in the clouds. Griffons and pegasi still took the cloudy sky with their colors and every now and then one would fall into the trees below.

Angry cries were constant, but one stole her attention. A mournful cry from the nearby cave. Helpless and sorrowful, it drew the griffoness and the other griffon that had joined her in fighting the equines.

The cave was no more than a nook in the rocky face under a curtain of ivy that burned and bunched in the ground, black and lifeless. A pair of griffons had made their home there and one laid dead next to the entrance. Deep gashes were burned on his brown side, from where blood seeped out of the cauterized, lifeless flesh.

Deeper inside was a bed made of leaves and yellow leather where a bruised griffoness, very young and covered in deep cerulean laid on her side, holding broken little griffon bodies. Bloodied and disfigured little colorful bodies. She looked at Gilda, blood in her face among the darkened feathers wet with tears, making a low mournful cry for help.

Enough…

Luna’s sad voice distracted Gilda before she could react.

Enough of this hellish nightmare. They were animals acting on instinct. On fear. And this memory is not yours. It belonged to your soul, but it should have been undone as everything else was when Creation started anew. It’s not present within your soul. This is not Gilda you are witnessing, and this is not your dream. I will deliver you into a peaceful and pleasant dream. There is no point in this.

‘Don’t you fucking dare!’ Gilda’s thoughts screamed at the voice. ‘This is all your fault too!’

Without notice, the clouds were lit in bright yellow flames, roaring louder than the fire that consumed the woods under the Stormy Eyrie. Thunder, louder than anything in existence, scared the fight out of griffons and ponies alike.

I see…

There was an eerie silence for a couple of seconds. Then a body fell through the dense clouds. Time seemed to stop. It was a bizarre feeling. The wind ceased. The fire literally silenced and all of existence focused into that moment.

It was a large, black and white body that crashed against the rocks on the mountainside above. The cracking of bone sounded like a breaking tree, and it resonated inside Gilda and the griffoness she shared her mind with. They witnessed something impossible.

A marvelous white and black griffoness rolled limply on top of the rocks and fell again to the stony terrace of the series of caves. She rolled on her back and coughed blood. It stained her obsidian beak and her snowy plumage. During the fall one of her wings broke and bent on itself. One of her hindlegs was also limp, turned in an unsettling position. Her size still seemed impressive despite all the damage her body had endured.

She breathed laboriously and touched her face, closing her eyes before opening them again. Bright, icy grey. She smiled and grimaced at the same time before she coughed more blood and laughed. A shrill, disturbing, choking laugher.

“If I knew it hurt like this, I would have dulled the pain down a little.” She laughed again. More clearly and louder along with the thunder in the clouds. “Maybe that is why the ungulates are so angry.”

She squirmed and her paws hugged her chest, smearing her feathers in more blood. She winced in pain and her laughter came out breathless in a squeal before it exploded in hysterical guffawing.

The yellow glow in the clouds subsided and became a single star of bright flames that descended from the slowly dissipating clouds. The blue sky showed through the holes that increased steadily and sunrays pierced through.

It wasn’t alone though. They were four stars that descended from the clearing sky, shrouded in bright silver, pink and white. Four magnificent beasts. Winged equines, as tall as no pony should ever be, made taller still by the fearsome horns in their heads. Beings made of pure, unrestrained magic; they were like forces of nature made real by the very magic of Creation. Staring at them for long was impossible and it threatened to burn the eyes of the griffoness Gilda accompanied.

One was made of sunfire and she carried the day in her wake as though she could hold it under her wings and the other was made of the darkness among the stars, and undefinable deep blue sprinkled with the twinkle of a million distant suns. The third was pink and her chest shone red with the sign of a heart. Her eyes were as bright as the passion of unbridled lovers. And the fourth was white, and her neck was encrusted with a collar of six stones that shone in colorful lights blending together in a rainbow.

They flapped their wings with the might of a cyclone and their hooves never touched the stone. They floated in the sky, with their open wings and staring down. Eerily synchronized as though all four were one.

They remained silent and watched. The griffoness touched her stomach and chuckled before she hacked again.

“You stupid animal…” The griffoness spoke with a coarse and weak voice, almost chuckling.

The griffoness turned and chuckled coarsely as she stood. Her chest moved in an uneven way and all several cuts stained her plumage in even more red. Her hindleg didn’t support her weight, but she stood on the good one.

No reaction from the four supernatural entities in the sky.

The griffoness gathered all the strength she had left and stood on her hindlegs as best as she could. She clenched her black, blood-stained paws and then she cried. Furious as a storm and her howl echoed in the mountains. “Do you understand what you have done?!”

She lost her balance and crashed to the stone again. With a painful wince, but then she laughed quietly. “Of course, you do not.”

She shakily raised her head and her eyes struggled to remain open. Blood dripped out her nostrils and out the corner of her beak. “I am the Allmother. I am Order. I bring law upon Chaos! From the first breath of Creation to the last whisper of Annihilation, I am Aya Harpyia and my will brought you into existence. Everything is mine and you exist to serve!”

Her trembling chest filled with air and blood pooled in the stone. She pulled herself, dragging over the stone with a shaky laugh. But then she frowned and grimaced, still trying to pull herself up and spoke softly. “I will not forget… In another billion years if I must.”

Finally, she stopped moving and laid still on the stone. The last clouds washed from the sky and the sun shone supreme against the blue. The fiery magical creatures startled, however. They neighed in panic and reared in the air just before the sky turned dark.

The sun vanished into itself, replaced by a terrifying point of nothing, blacker than the black of the skyless above. Beyond the boundaries of existence and shrouded in a crimson glow. A low growl echoed in the mountains and the trees died. Their leaves turned brown and fell. The fire ended as though it had never existed and the four alicorns undid themselves in a final neigh of terror, evanescing as though the wind had taken them away.

Gilda was included in the terror that washed over the griffoness she inhabited. Griffons and pegasi flapped their wings frantically, but they fell from the black nothing that was the sky, mercilessly dragged to crash against the dead trees and the ground.

Gilda panicked with the griffoness she shared her mind with as the stone began undoing itself and the resulting sand lifted into the air and the mountain shook. Panicked cries and neighs filled the air until they became distant and muffled. Her own cyan paw undid itself in a bloody mess of flesh and bone evanescing into nothing and the lack of pain somehow made it all the more terrifying.

Enough! Luna cried in the black nothingness, and nothingness was all that remained.

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