I sprinted through the trees. It was no chase. I had lost the little purple unicorn in seconds, if it had even given pursuit. My legs were too long, my vision too strong in the dead of night, my body untiring. I just ran. I supposed I needed to get away, needed to clear my head. And so I barreled past trees, hopped over boulders, shredded through nets of vines with my claws and continued moving at a brisk jog. Eventually, a pitter-patter of rain started hitting against leaves around me. I just snorted, it was just what I wanted, to be soaked and smell like wet-dog.

The moon, once my source of direction through the forest, had been reduced to a dim haze through the dark layers of clouds that had swallowed the forest around me. My jog was interrupted when, not far ahead, I heard the roar of a lion, as if from a circus. And in a temperate forest of all places. I slowed to a walk, my spindly legs treading quietly over leafy debris. Seeing the twinkle of light in a clearing ahead, I found the trees opened to a spacious glade. Hard rock and long grasses intermingled over the space. Crouching down in my approach, I was party to an impromptu lightshow as familiar black armoured forms swarmed around a massive bastardization of a lion’s head, a scorpion’s tail, and the wings of what were maybe a bat?

And, looking behind them all, I faltered for a moment. That was an honest-to-gods spaceship, even I was sure of that. The disconnect of the biped creature’s armour from our surroundings, their imperialist approach to what appeared to be the natives around here, it was clicking in. They were as foreign to this place as I was, actual aliens in a flying saucer. And, right now, they were struggling to put down a monster ripped straight out of Greek mythology, a manticore. I was entranced by their fight. They seemed surprised at the fight, showing little of the confidence that the sauntering one I had encountered earlier had displayed. When their weapons fired lasers of bright light at the manticore, they seemed shocked that it was having little effect beyond searing and stunning the beast for long enough for the next alien to blast it. Tapping their weapons like one might an unruly toaster, they had kept themselves out of the lunging manticore’s reach only by a mixture of luck and kiting the beast’s with taunting and blasts from its rear. It wasn’t pretty, but the aliens seemed to be wearing the manticore down, shot by shot. It was whining in pain from the sheer number of seared patches of fur on its body.

I reasoned that I could step in, try to deal with the aliens. I certainly didn’t like them, after all. But, after so many hours on my own, I craved even this enrichment. When so little around me made sense, being able to learn from the actions of the armoured purple things, instead of picking at their bodies, was the closest thing to understanding my surroundings as I could accomplish. Besides, their rifles appeared to be at parity to the magical unicorn’s horn beam and I was not eager to charge into that line of fire for nothing. And so, I watched and waited.

“BEAST!” A thunderous voice boomed from high above. Turning away from the purple aliens, I looked to the skies.

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It was bigger than the ponies I had seen so far. Taller, sleeker, less childish. Held aloft as if in a magical breeze, its mane was a shining sea of stars, flowing out into the night sky. I was surprised to see a horn accompanying its pegasus wings. I supposed that some ponies could combine the two traits? The orange pony I had seen before possessed neither, so maybe it was a genetic luck of the draw sort of affair?

And, over its breast and hooves, sleek armour fitted to its form. Next to the other ponies I had seen, it was positively regal. And, right now, it was descending through the clouds in my direction, wholly ignorant to the far more spectacular battle happening not across the field. Pointed directly at me, a spear hovering in the dim glow of a midnight-blue magical grip, as was similarly reflected in the pony’s horn. A look of irritated resolve on its face, it seemed to be trying to decipher my form as it glided down on its long wings. I wished it luck, making sense of myself was something I had failed at for hours on end at this point.

I stood up to greet the dark pony, my sinewy limbs nearly doubling my height as I unfurled and turned my antler skull to the sky. With a great ‘thum’, the equine landed in the dirt, the ground reverberating as a great weight settled onto it. The pony, all the while, looked unfazed.

“Hark, thou art the beast we have been warned of. The one that hath terrified young Scootaloo, one of our few friends of this era!” The pony accused with a womanly voice (she accused, I supposed), spreading her wings wide and adopting a threatening stance.

“Uuaaiht, wait.” I rasped throatily through the rainstorm, unfurling a claw and holding it up, palm extended, to try and stave off the magical being for long enough to avoid a wholly predictable series of events.

“Desist, foul creature of evil!” She yelled, keeping to the old-timey language she had opened with. And I thought that I was suffering with my speech.

Twirling her spear like a majorette with a parade baton, she angled it so that its butt was facing me. Then, with a harpoon-like speed, she shot its end towards my head. Arcing my body to the side just in time, I glimpsed the cold metal, sleek with droplets of rain, pass mere inches from my right ear. Then, just as quickly as it had been shot, the spear shot back to its owner’s side. Enough.

I was tired of the equines attacking me, it was time to set this right. Bony jaw snapping open, I let loose a ferine roar, the pitch wildly oscillating in a ghastly chorus. Darting towards the dark horse, I crossed the field between us in barely over a second. I was surprised at this display, hell, so was the pony. But that moment of hesitation gave me just enough of a lead to strike the winged unicorn with a roundhouse kick to the breastplate. Even without claws, the kick carried enough force to resound through the pony’s metal, throwing it backwards across the clearing.

“You- you dare sully the dignity of Equestrian Royalty, mindless monstrosity!?” The pony bellowed, glancing at a slight dent in its breastplate, where my bony foot had struck. It would buff out. More importantly, the pony confirmed my earlier suspicions that it was in fact a royal something or other. The tailored finery was a bit of a giveaway, when the past two ponies had just worn their furs. The royal pony spread its legs and grounded itself, a dead giveaway that it was charging up for an attack, as the purple unicorn had previously done. I bounced on my toes in turn, the rain’s chill cooling me through my body’s layer of animalistic fur.

That standoff continued for a few seconds, before I made my move. This arrogant pony would see what I was made of. Darting forwards as if I were going for a dumb charge again, I tensed my taunt legs, then leapt squarely into the air. Sailing through the sky like only a superhuman beast could. A snarling laugh escaped me, as I sailed to the pony below.

Gritting her teeth, the pony glared at me and clenched her eyes shut for a second, a bright blue hue encompassing her horn for a brief moment. Then, as my eyes shot wide in alarm, she opened her own. A brilliant, all encompassing blast shot skywards, towards me.

Credit: foxenawolf

Oh, how it burned. From my legs up, I felt my body being unmade. The raw energy burned away the flesh until I was a spiralling torso, and then not even that. I was acutely aware of it all, even if it took barely a second. But, even as my body burned away, I felt something carry on towards my opponent. A mass, something I might have described as a soul, drifted through the air, until a cloud of it remained before the pony. I could still see her, though I wasn’t sure I still had eyes. I couldn’t feel them, at least. I couldn’t feel anything, not even the rain as it passed through me. There was a soft call in the back of my mind, urging me to cease, to dissipate. It was gentle and timid, but it was so out of touch with the violence around me. The dying roar of a manticore, the levelled spear, the pony’s scowl. The fight, tumult, that was something I could focus on.

“What manner of beast art thou?” The royal pony asked me, her voice now a whisper, her head hung low, cautious.

I wasn’t following her. Not her words anyways. Her shape was something I did look at, clung to. Shape, definition, form. I didn’t have a brain, but I had a mind. I didn’t have a body, but I could still have a form. Breath in, breathe out. I reached out to limbs that I instinctively knew weren’t there, and they responded. I closed my eyes, and then I opened them.

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All around me, the choir of rain had been replaced by the silence of snow. But growing from a whisper to a scream, winds around me started to bellow, until a gale of snow and frost began to consume the glade around us. Where puddles had pooled, ice crept and lapped, rain dripping from leaves formed miniature icicles and snow piled in even the barest of amounts. And I, regarding myself, had form once more. Shaped like a great horse, my body was entirely translucent, floating above the ground. I was more the outline of a horse, than one by creation. All the while, the snow clumps sailed through me carelessly. I felt a great burning in my eyes, like torchlight hinting at an unlit bonfire. I did a little prance, then galloped with the wind as if I were an untamed foal roaming the wilderness. Changed once again, I felt a vitality, a restlessness that I had not since I was a bouncing child. I wanted to dance like the winds that howled around me, raging and cavorting about as they did.

Broken from my trance by movement not ten paces in front of me, I became aware of the royal pony transfixed upon me, her spear lowered and her attention fully drawn by myself. I stared back in kind, it was a nice change in pace.

“A windigo? But”–the pony froze for a second, confusion plastered all over her remarkably expressive face–“thy kind hath been gone for millenia.” She paced back and forth, her face a fusion, alternating at once between deep concern and eager interest.

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I tried to respond, to speak. Instead of words, an icy wind blew out of my mouth and I saw miniature snow particles form in the air from frozen humidity. I contorted in on for a moment, standing still in midair while trying to vocalise with a body that was not wholly corporeal.

While I prodded at the approximate location of where I thought pony lungs might be with a forehoof, a bright light snapped me out of my experimentation. A new beam of light, from outside our little bubble of astoundment and experimentation cast itself forwards and struck the dark pony square in its little muzzle. She let out a little yell, then shielded her face with an armoured hoof. I glanced away from the pony. Approaching, their manticore now subdued, the armoured aliens plodded towards us with a newfound confidence in their step. There were about ten in all, perhaps an even dozen.

“More indigenous”–a familiarly guttural voice bellowed–“don’t rough ‘em up too bad. The governess will want some alive for the surrender ceremony, once the techies work out how to get a line open to Shil.” Did all of the marauding aliens sound like orcs, albeit feminine ones?

I turned my full attention to the attackers. I may not like the brash pony with an aggressive streak, but I wasn’t about to let these savages burn her to a crisp, like they had with that manticore. The pony, now wholly caught off guard by the incoming group, shone her horn brighter still and formed a navy blue bubble around herself, cautiously observing the new attackers. I would step in then. This form seemed to move more by instinct, than direction. So, when I did a little shake and started prancing on air, while I’d intended to rise, I just ran with it. Charging towards the armoured aliens with soft, almost ghostly ‘clip-clops’ of phantom hoof strikes against cobblestone, I carried the full wrath of the snowstorm with me. The invaders were still primarily focused on the winged unicorn in a magical bubble when I first glided overhead. But, after I’d doubled back and they were already under a foot of snow, they started paying me more attention.

The bright lights of alien laser fire passed right through me as I danced around the group in a meandering circle. All the while, I exhaled a steady breath towards the black suits of armour. Like magic, a core of ice began building up around the aliens standing in the heart of the storm. While they screamed and concentrated fire on me, raging and frothing as they fought, the ice built and solidified until the last hand, desperately reaching to the sky, had frozen over into a block.

Moving as if in a trance, I trotted down to the ground from my track in the sky, facing towards the solid ice cube of aliens. Bringing two forehooves skywards, I saw a flash of glowing light in my eyes and I pounded down the hooves to the ground. Incorporeal though I may have been, the cube shattered into a thousand crushed cubes of ice with a resounding screech, like a skyscraper’s worth of glass all shattering at once.

With the sudden surge of power, I felt a great pang in my chest, like a beating heart. An incorporeal hoof taking a step back, as if wounded, I stepped away from the purple and black sea of ice. Winds raging around me all the while. In the centre of the navy bubble of magic, the dark pony stood, wholly unaffected by the raging blizzard.I took a step closer to her, nearing to her abused shield. Feeling another pang in my chest, I fell into a ball, curling up into the pony approximation of the foetal position as a numbness settled over my mind. I barely was aware of a layer of snow settling over my ghost, pouring matter upon the bodiless. That numbness of the mind dulled any comprehension I might have had of what happened to me in that frozen crucible, but I was acutely aware of the sensation of a clawed hand bursting through the snow, grasping at the world once more. Piece by piece, a twisted mound of antler, flesh, and bone wrestled its way once more from the snow and ice.

I had condensed into solid mass before a shell-shocked dark pony, who for a moment seemed incapable of more than staring at me. To my own amazement, I appeared as untarnished as I had been the moment I had fallen through the tree canopy. Even the tingling skin from where the purple pony had blasted me was fully healed. Readjusting to a solid form, I staggered briefly, falling to four limbs and sagging towards the ground. An intense weariness, not so different from sleepiness consumed me. Rejoining the living had not come without its fee, I realised. Looking up, I saw that raw shock was not holding back the dark horse pony thing any more. Nursing a struck muzzle, and seemingly immensely cautious of the fates that had befallen the group of ten armed warriors, the pony was beginning to build up a massive amount of power in its horn.

“He-loh” I managed with my newly restored lungs, close enough to let the words carry. Standing up again, I waved at the pony, before stumbling and falling to a knee, the kneecap crunching softly into an inch of snow.

Spreading her long wings wide, the dark pony’s eyes grew bright like the pearl white of the moon. I could swear that the moon itself, hidden behind the dense clouds of the blizzard, shone brighter with the pony’s might. Consciousness was escaping me rapidly, so it might have been a hallucination. But what stuck with me for certain was the raw power that slid off the pegasus unicorn’s body like waves from the sea, her eyes growing brighter and brighter until she spoke in a voice that brokered no compromise.

“THOU SHALT SURRENDER THYSELF TO US!”

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Unfortunately for her, I wasn’t in much shape to do anything. My body spent after the longest of nights, finally, I collapsed.

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