The spell was cast. It would take some time to pick apart the prison woven by the Elements. Celestia had to get back and help her sister.

"Join me when the prison breaks. I should be in Ponyville, or nearby at least."

Discord's voice rang inside her head. "Oh, count on it," he said, in a tone of unmistakable victory. "See you soon, Celestia."

The glow around her horn faded, and she turned and left the vault deep beneath Canterlot Castle. She didn't bother re-locking the magical door.

Twilight Sparkle trotted cheerfully up to the small, sobbing, shivering midnight-blue form that was huddled on the ground. "Well, that went better than I expected! How're you feeling?" Her voice was almost indecently chipper. A sob answered her. "Oh, come on, Luna! We're gonna have some fun, you and I!"

Glowing dark red, Luna was dragged slowly off the ground until she hung, limp hooves dangling, about five feet in the air. She didn't raise her head. She just kept sobbing.

"You've never felt physical pain before?" Twilight asked. "Well, get used to it. The rest of your sorry life is going to be full of it. And you are going to love it," she added, a strange flickering glow appearing around the edges of Luna's eyes as Twilight slowly levitated the Midnight Princess's broken horn.

Twilight sent fine threads of subtle magic through Luna's terrified eyes and into her head, searching her mind, finding her thoughts, her conscience, her desires... Her will. All laid bare before Twilight like so many pages in a book.

She started tearing some pages out. She scribbled a few new ones. She worked quickly and methodically for a few moments.

Twilight released the other alicorn. She fell, catching herself, and stood facing her victor. Her eyes were blank, save for a faint residual glow in the centre that looked just like Twilight's aura. She opened her mouth and spoke in a voice that sounded like it was deep underground, perhaps coming from a grave.

"What do you have in mind first, Mistress?"

Twilight smiled. "Let us wait for your sister first. I am sure that she will be back, and then we shall give her a marvelous surprise." She paused suddenly, cocking her head. "But I am feeling hungry," she added.

The Princess of the Sun flew rapidly down towards her favourite village, fresh pain springing forth in her chest from what she saw. Most of the buildings were still intact, but there was a lot of rubble strewn about, some of it burning faintly. She spied the destroyed bridge, then the bodies, and her heart knew another great pang of grief. But not horror. No more horror. She was starting to accept that this was happening, and she would stop it if she could. There may be time to mourn the dead later, but not now.

Landing in Mane Street, she folded her wings and cast her head about. Not a sound, aside from the scattered crackling of the small fires. She looked with sadness at the body before her, a young pegasus filly, badly burned and broken, obviously separated from her parents, too young to fly away to safety. Now the poor child would never feel the freedom of the skies.

Safety. The word made her snort. Where in the whole world was safe now?

She sat down in the street and bowed her head. Night Mare Flare had clearly left, probably still engaged in battle with her sister, however that would pan out. So, Luna had chosen to fall to her dark emotions. Chosen to, in order to save Equestria. Perhaps she could. A creature that was once borne of The Lunacy might be able to fight it.

Looking about the countryside, she didn't see any particular trail of destruction, neither broken trees nor distant fires, that gave her a clue as to what direction the inevitable battle had moved off in. She wouldn't go looking for them on her own. She would wait here for Discord. She settled down for a grief-filled rest, among her beloved subjects, to remind herself how badly she'd failed them.

A shrieking, piercing scream rang out, shattering the morbid stillness. She was in the air in an instant, fifty feet high, scanning around rapidly for the source of the -

They were over there, by that destroyed fountain. She drifted closer, almost unaware of the movement. She could not believe what her eyes and ears and heart told her was happening.

Celestia stared in horror. She'd thought that nothing else could horrify her after this evening, but she seemed to have found some new reserve of the dark emotion. Some new, massive reserve. What she was looking at was the worst thing she would ever see.

Luna, small and light-blue-maned, was screaming her lungs out in agony as thick dark blood oozed down her forehead from the shattered stump of her horn. The Royal Princess of the Night was hovering about three feet off the ground, spread-eagled, her legs pulled viciously out to the sides. Each of her hooves was caught in a ball of deep red magic, her tail held high by another red glow, while the small alicorn that had once been her beloved student brutally sodomized her with the jagged end of Luna's own shattered horn. The horn, grasped in a telekinetic red glow, was slick with blood. With every savage thrust, Luna screamed anew, a hoarse, choking, anguished cry that seemed to tear Celestia's heart completely from her chest with every gruesome repetition. But it was what she was screaming that made Celestia feel more horror than she had ever thought she could.

"MORE!" Luna screamed despairingly. "MORE! YES! AHHHHH! FUCK! MEEEEEE! HARDER! MORE! MOOOOORE!"

Celestia nearly fell out of the air. Her now-infinite horror somehow increased as she forced herself to look harder at her sister. There were small divots of flesh missing from Luna's flanks and back, slowly dribbling blood. They looked like they had been carved out with sharp...

They were bites. Twilight had been biting Luna. Twilight had been eating Luna.

Somehow, Twilight had broken Luna's horn. And now she was possessing her, body and mind. And she was injured - bitten! She had wounds that could only be bites.

Luna's horn! It was broken! It was impossible, but clearly true. Luna was mortal!

The Lunacy had possessed the younger alicorn before. Had it somehow used that fact to break her unbreakable horn? To take her immortality?

Celestia could see no other answer.

Twilight Sparkle, royal blood dripping from her razor-toothed mouth, stuck out her tongue at Celestia, winked, and bit down, hard. The foul teeth had no apparent affect on Twilight's indestructible alicorn-flesh. Then she smiled pleasantly at her former teacher. "Welcome back! We started without you, as you can see. Sorry about that!" She hadn't missed a single bloody thrust. She lowered her head to Luna's flank and chewed off another piece of the Royal Princess's flesh with apparent glee. Luna screamed and panted in despair and joy.

Leaving the glowing horn to continue its damnable work, the small lavender alicorn trotted around to look Luna in the eyes. Celestia saw a sick longing in them, as if Luna was smitten with this monster. Twilight opened her mouth, offering the bloody-red scrap of muscle, fat and skin to her eager slave.

Luna extended her panting mouth and accepted the offering from Twilight. Closing her eyes, an expression of utter bliss crossed her tortured face as she chewed on her own freshly-gouged meat.

Celestia, quivering in mid-air, was already at her limit when her sister turned her blood-soaked face towards her and spoke, in a voice filled with agony and lust, ecstasy and torment.

"You're next, Big Sister," Luna panted up at Celestia. "Oh, she's gonna fuck you. She's gonna fuck you bad. And then she'll eat you. I bet you taste like a fucking dream."

It was too much. Far, far too much. She forgot her plan, her pact with Discord. She would kill Twilight Sparkle herself. No. Twilight Sparkle was long dead. She'd been dead from the moment The Lunacy invaded her mind. So she would not kill Twilight Sparkle. She would kill The Lunacy.

For the first time, ever, Celestia lost control of her emotions. Hate, anger, grief, rage, they all blazed inside her. Rage was strongest. Rage took her. A rage that was now hotter than the sun she commanded.

Twilight Sparkle seemed to sense what was happening inside Celestia's heart. The small alicorn leaped into the air, doubling in size, her mane and tail igniting, her flesh burning white-hot, her eyes blazing sudden red, wings and horn expanding and extending, ragged talons bursting from her hooves and wingtips, her jaws surging forwards into a face-splitting maw of teeth, teeth, teeth. She looked at her soon-to-be attacker, and smiled. This was perfect.

Celestia blossomed into a tall sheet of yellow-white sunfire as she allowed her rage to run free. She knew where this might end. She knew that she herself might destroy the world, even willingly, even gleefully, in pursuit of Night Mare Flare.

She didn't care. As long as she killed The Lunacy, she didn't care.

The air shimmered with blistering heat, the wind suddenly fast and powerful, a fierce updraft forming directly over the Princess of the Sun. The scattered and smoldering rubble of the town, all the bodies of the ponies, the trees and grass for hundreds of yards around, even the rocks and dirt, everything suddenly flashed into white-hot flames as the sheet of blazing white fire coalesced into the shape of a huge winged unicorn, more than twice Celestia's size. An alicorn of pure stellar fire, far too bright for mortal eyes to look at, far too hot for mortal matter to be anywhere near. An alicorn that looked to be made out of the very sun itself.

The white-and-yellow-speckled Sun Goddess glanced down through the whirling, blistering air to see her sister's body reduced to glowing-white ash which was being quickly whipped away in the sudden firestorm. She didn't care. Luna was out of her torment. She hadn't killed her, really. She had released her, from the rape of the body and the mind. And she would take revenge upon her rapist.

She looked up at Night Mare Flare.

The smaller monster smiled its world-ending smile at the blazing alicorn. "Excellent," it crooned.

As its long, spiky, jagged horn began to glow bright red, The Sun Goddess charged, at a speed fairly near that of light.

The collision felled trees and cracked the earth for fifty miles around.

The spell was complete. The prison had been broken. Now it was up to him.

There were a few tiny splintering noises. Small fragments of stone chipped and flew from the surface of the statue, revealing a faint glow beneath them. More and more chips and fragments, then the larger cracks began to join into longer jagged lines of dull purple light.

With a crash more like glass than stone, the entire statue shattered into powdery fragments.

There was a flash, and then he was gone from the vault in which he had been safely kept.

Screaming with rage, Night Mare Flare smashed into the third floor of the skyscraper with an almighty crash of glass and stone. The twenty-storey building came smashing down around it, thousands and thousands of tons of wood and metal and carved and shaped rock, along with hundreds of screaming ponies, burying the monster in a rubble pile a hundred feet deep. The rubble suddenly flamed and blazed, the metal flowed and boiled, concrete shattered and splintered and stone melted into lava. With sudden white-yellow flames, the entire pile of flaming and molten rubble blazed white-hot as Celestia threw a spell of pure solar fire straight at it, burning the entire pile of scrap and flesh to ash in seconds. The Sun Goddess looked down at what she had done. The superheated windstorm that came with Celestia blasted the grey-white ash in all directions, tearing the windows out of the nearby already-flaming buildings, cracking the foundations of a few of the nearer ones.

Night Mare Flare was sitting patiently in the centre of the shallow red-hot crater, smiling politely up at the force of nature above her.

Celestia blazed brilliant white as she seized the monster in her telekinetic grip. Again she strained at the jagged horn, twisting it this way and that with enough force to crack the world, to no apparent effect. The nearby buildings were shattering and crumbling under her radiant heat, the dust of their collapses being quickly swirled away by the torturous winds, though the crater she'd made was starting to fill up again, rubble tumbling in towards the centre, and her target.

Ripping Night Mare Flare off the ground and high into the sky with enough speed to produce a thick visible compression wave in the air, the Sun Goddess flew straight up after it, passing it closely, grabbing again at the horn with all of her strength. The monster was sent, spinning rapidly, towards the further side of the city, where the buildings had not yet begin to burn.

Night Mare Flare smashed completely through one giant skyscraper, the speed of its passage through the structure dragging the collapsing building along in its wake, then through another, then into the ground at an angle, throwing up vast clouds of dirt and rock. Dozens of nearby towers and buildings shook and tilted in this enormous upheaval, and then they, too, began to fall.

All the flames in the city stopped moving, held suddenly in place as if they were glowing sculptures.

The falling buildings stopped in mid-collapse.

The empty night sky above turned bright red. All the buildings surrounding the huge pile of flaming rubble bent and twisted away from the crater. Quiet, smooth, confident laughter sounded, seeming to come from every direction at once, then, in a burst of light, Discord appeared right next to the Solar Princess.

"Well, it didn't take long to find you." Discord gestured back over the countryside towards the distant fires of Ponyville. "I just followed the mile-wide trail of flames. Now. Things have changed, yes?"

Celestia stared at her ancient foe. "Whoever kills her gets Equestria. Forever. No interference. No questions asked."

Discord nodded. "But I get first go!"

"I've been 'having a go' for the last hour."

"Oooh! My turn now!"

Night Mare Flare saw the long, thin, snakelike draconequus come flying towards it, flashes of magical energy rippling around his front paws. Discord was clearly not going to waste time on trying to cause craziness and madness and so on. He was going for the kill.

Excellent!

Night Mare Flare was caught in a blaze of red-hot magic, stretching and pulling and clawing at it in every direction possible. It flew through the air, spinning and screaming, until it hit a large apartment building. The faint cacophony of screams told the tale - there were clearly still ponies inside.

Night Mare Flare screamed and thrashed in apparent agony. None of its magic seemed to do any good at all against the Master of Chaos.

This is getting the job done marvelously.

Manehattan was a wreck. Hundreds of buildings were now blazing rubble. The Solar Princess seemed content to hang back on the fringes and watch as Discord ripped and tore at the newest alicorn with all of his impressive magical might. She genuinely didn't care what happened to Equestria any more. She didn't care for her little ponies. She didn't even care if the entire world was destroyed in this seemingly-endless battle. She just wanted The Lunacy dead, no matter what it took to achieve this. The Sun Goddess turned her attention back to the raging battle before her.

Night Mare Flare hit the ground at an enormous speed. The cloud of dust and rubble that was thrown up from the impact reached nearly a mile into the sky. It leaped from the huge impact crater and flew at the draconequus, talons outstretched, vicious teeth bared, horn blazing reddish-white.

Floating in mid-air, Discord stepped neatly aside from the oncoming alicorn, extended his arms, and seized the creature's jagged horn as it passed him by. With a tremendous pull, he sent Night Mare Flare spinning off at high speed, almost directly towards Celestia.

"It's still my turn!" he shouted. "No cheating! Just hit that thing back to me, Celestia!"

Celestia obliged. A giant flaming mass appeared in front of the Sun Goddess, moving like a whip towards the screaming form of Night Mare Flare. It smacked the monstrosity so hard that clouds briefly condensed out of the hot air around the impact point. Spitting and shrieking, the monster was catapulted back through the air towards a viciously-grinning Discord.

It was beginning to feel the first onset of boredom.

Oh, fuck it. He's just having a laugh now.

And Celestia's more fun to mess with.

The monster stopped dead in midair, its horn flashing bright red for a moment. It seemed to Discord that the rest of the world was suddenly... switched off. The two magical beings were floating in -

"What?!"

They were floating in absolutely nothing. They were surrounded by an infinite void of total nothingness, stretching off forever in every single direction. The Master of Chaos was definitely caught off-guard by this.

"What's this? This shouldn't have happened!"

Discord flashed away. He reappeared immediately in the same spot.

"What? What?!"

"Oh, be quiet, you little fool. Enough's enough."

Discord seemed to ripple with magical energy. Little sparks started to flash all around Night Mare Flare, the empty nothing of this strange place seeming to warp and ripple, but nothing else happened. The sparks winked out.

"Hmm," said the Element of Disharmony. His eyes glowed brightly, and he suddenly loomed large in front of the alicorn, staring as hard as he could straight into its eyes. He opened his mouth to speak...

Night Mare Flare's jagged horn blazing a violent, pulsing, sickly yellow-green.

Discord shrank in size until he was barely five feet long. Eyes wide, he tried to teleport away again, if not out of this place, then at least a little further away from what he suddenly recognised before him. Preferably, a lot further away. He couldn't teleport. He couldn't teleport at all.

"You're boring me," Night Mare Flare said flatly. "You were fun when it started, but now, you're just boring."

Discord started screaming, twisting madly, struggling to get away, but there was no solid surface to stand on, no air to beat his wings against in this empty realm of pure magic. His own powers had fled him completely, seemingly drained into the ancient terror he could not now bear to look at. His screaming became panicked, hysterical.

"ENOUGH!"

Discord's screams were cut off instantly. The now-small draconequus still flapped his mouth, still twisted and writhed, still darted his wild eyes everywhere but at the alicorn. Suddenly, he glowed faintly magenta-red, and he became rigid, unmoving. He bobbed through the nothingness until he was floating right in front of Night Mare Flare, his wide, terrified eyes locking onto the jagged horn he saw before him. Faint puffs of the same magenta-red glow could be seen underneath the powerful sick-yellow glare surrounding Night Mare Flare's horn.

"You remember it, do you? Took you long enough." A smirk was spreading across the monster's face. "We've been fighting for hours, you even had your claws on it at one point, and you're just now recognising it?" Night Mare Flare snorted in amusement.

"You... you... you..." Discord whispered.

"Me," Night Mare Flare said, the corners of its enormous mouth quirking into a smirk.

"But... Celestia said... The Lunacy... you're... The Lunacy... not... You can't- can't be..."

"Sharaheng Zus," Night Mare Flare said with a murderous grin. "Pleased to re-make your acquaintance."

Discord started screaming and twisting again, but was immediately stilled with a fast pulse of light from the horn.

"It's been a long time, Ankoshung Zast. A very long time since I made you and set you loose on Equestria. I've visited your statue from time to time, of course. Even after Celestia locked it away in that crypt..."

Discord was barely able to comprehend the words he heard, so enormous was his terror. His eyes were locked onto the horn once again. The ancient glowing pattern of jagged twists and spikes was like a childhood horror in his mind, forgotten for thousands and thousands of years. He'd seen that horn before. He'd seen it, glowing like this, as his spirit was formed out of the air and the ground, as he was instructed by his until-now-unknown maker, as his soul was poured into the results of the sacrifice of thirteen different living creatures... All of this for the sole purpose of bringing disharmony to Equestria. He'd seen the pattern in the horn before him when he was told that his failure would mean his destruction...

"You played your part perfectly, child. You drew Celestia and Luna to Equestria. Job well done. I wasn't at all surprised that they imprisoned you. They couldn't kill you, of course."

Night Mare Flare lowered its horn. The tip pushed easily through the otherwise-indestructible fur and skin right over Discord's heart. The blood that flowed was the same colour as the arcane glow of the horn.

"I have no such problem."

The ruined city of Manehattan reappeared around them as Night Mare Flare released the magical hold on Discord's voice, letting him scream, both in fear as well as in agony now. It wanted to remember its creation's final 'words.'

Celestia flew slow circles high above the ruined city, whipping the smoke and dust into huge flurries. She was looking for Night Mare Flare and Discord. She had no idea where they had gone, and she was worried.

A scream. A loud, high-pitched, wailing scream of agony... She whirled to face the direction it had come from. She couldn't see anything in that direction, just destroyed buildings and rubble-filled streets...

A random jumble of bodyparts, covered with a strange greenish-yellow substance, suddenly appeared in the air in front of the Sun Goddess. Just before they were incinerated away to glowing ash, she recognised a goat leg, an eagle's claw, a large spiky bat's wing, what seemed to be a deer's antler... A misshapen pony's head, eyes blank, tongue lolling out...

As she was coming to the impossible realisation that Discord was dead, something collided with her at a tremendous speed. She felt teeth around her neck, she felt many claws scrabbling over her hide of solar plasma. She felt a magical power unlike anything she'd ever felt before...

Her roaring fire flickered for a moment as some enormous blackness clouded her mind. Night Mare Flare didn't just have her in a physical hold, it had her in a magical grasp that was suddenly far stronger than she'd expected. Gathering herself, she released a huge burst of energy, which both threw the monster off, and blasted the entire enormous, ruined city into glowing ash.

Celestia paused for a moment. She looked at what she'd just done. She saw the magical shockwave she'd made, still visible, moving away from her at a tremendous speed in every direction. She saw buildings and rubble and terrified, screaming, fleeing ponies ignite into yellow-white flames as the magical wavefront passed.

She'd just killed at least a million of her beloved subjects.

She didn't care. The monster wasn't one of them. It wasn't dead. The monster that had caused so much death and destruction wasn't dead. The monster that had even somehow managed to kill an indestructible magical spirit was still alive. It would die. Celestia would kill it, then she could mourn her sister and all the other, insignificant dead, and rebuild her world.

Night Mare Flare was heading back towards her, its sharp and spiky horn aimed right at at her face, moving faster than she could believe. Celestia tensed, flexed her magic, prepared herself.

She released another enormous burst of magical energy, far larger than the last. This one blew the burned ground underneath her into whirling fragments, for miles and miles in every direction. She caught sight of her enemy, far away now, mane and tail still blazing fire, spinning out of control and heading right towards the lights of the distant city of New Martindale.

Seething with fury, the Solar Princess channeled all the magical power that was available to her. She exploded into an enormous mass of alicorn-shaped flame, hundreds of feet long, sharp spikes of white-hot sunfire extending all over her magical body. The ground beneath her, already blasted and burning, began to glow a bright yellow-white from her radiant heat. The air itself seemed to ignite, and massive walls of fire raced away from her in every direction, turning the trees and ground and occasional buildings they passed into dull-white ash.

The Sun Goddess screamed a curse at her fleeing prey, and launched herself after Night Mare Flare.

She would finish this. She would finish this now. Whatever the cost.

The roaring walls of fire before her had overtaken the cowardly monster, with no apparent effect on it, blasting right to the horizons in all directions, destroying everything they touched. She closed in on her quarry, enormous white-hot hooves extended to catch it, trap it, crush it, incinerate it into ash.

Her prey stopped dead-still in the air before her. Celestia smiled. It was making this easy for -

A vast, boiling, rippling, screaming wave of utter blackness exploded out of Night Mare Flare, spreading across everything that Celestia could see. She couldn't escape it, she couldn't outrun it -

Celestia screamed as it hit her. With a ripping, tearing crack, she shrank into a small pink-and-green-maned winged unicorn and fell out of the sky, momentarily stunned. She managed to catch herself, and rapidly flapped down to land near the charred and smoldering top of a small hill that was underneath her. She turned around and looked up into the sky, her eyes going wide at what she saw.

Night Mare Flare had transformed into a huge ball of rippling fire, hanging still in the air. There were no features visible, but Celestia had no doubt that the Thing was staring straight at her, an expression of pure triumph on its face.

The ball of fire flashed white-hot, then cooled to a sphere of utter blackness.

Celestia reached for her magic. She couldn't find it.

It wasn't there.

There was no magic at all for her to use. No magic. None at all. Not anywhere.

"Well! Thank you for FINALLY being so accommodating!" The ball of blackness in the sky sounded half-overjoyed, half-annoyed. "Ten thousand years I've been waiting for that, and you finally oblige with a blast of solar plasma that burned the entire world into ash!"

Celestia stood, stunned, gazing at this monster of monsters in the sky before her.

"Oh, before I forget." The Lunacy made a horrible, gurgling, choking noise, then it spat a small wet lavender ball right at Celestia.

The Princess moved to the side, watching the incoming mass, confident that it wouldn't hit her... She recognised the projectile...

Sending a spray of glowing stone fragments in all directions, Twilight Sparkle smashed into the hot rock where Celestia had been standing. With a groan, the small winged unicorn started to get to shaky hooves. Celestia darted over to her and helped her stand.

"Twilight? Twilight?! Are you hurt? Are you alright?"

The small alicorn shook her head to clear the dust out of her eyes. She raised her gaze to Celestia's.

If Celestia could be killed, the look on Twilight's face would have done it.

Horror, sorrow, anguish, pain, remorse, fear, terror... The face of the small purple alicorn was straight out of Celestia's most horrific nightmares. Twilight had been raped far more thoroughly than Luna.

The Princess turned to look at the monstrous ball of death in the sky. Somehow, she found her voice. "You just... You used Twilight Sparkle to..."

"To empower me." The Lunacy flared white for a moment, before returning to its twisting, swirling black. "To empower me to force the Third Eternal Sister to follow through with her destiny."

"You used Twilight to destroy the world! You... You..." Words totally failed the ancient alicorn.

The Lunacy laughed, a loud, cracking, cackling laugh. If it still had a head, Celestia could imagine it thrown back in mirth. She glared at the monster while feeling around for her magic. She would rip it into fragments if she could only find some magic! Where had all her magic gone?!

"Twilight Sparkle?" the monster choked. "Twilight Sparkle didn't destroy the world! You did!"

Celestia's eyes went wide.

"But..." she started. "But... but my mother's prophecy..."

"Twilight Sparkle's not the third Eternal Sister! She's the fifth! You are the third Eternal Sister!"

Celestia's mouth dropped open in shock.

"And poor precious Luna was the fourth!" Night Mare Flare laughed, a horrifying grating cackle that sounded like a million windows smashing at once. "Starshine and Moonrise were the first and second! Your parents were ALICORNS!"

Celestia didn't want to believe this. It wasn't possible. Her mother and father were unicorns. They didn't have wings. It just was not possible...

"Your parents were thousands of years old when they sacrificed their immortality to see the future. I should know. I was there." The Lunacy sounded smug beyond imagining. "I saw them transform from enormous alicorns into small wingless unicorns. I saw them realise what was going to happen, I saw them take measures to prevent the end of the world."

"The book," Celestia breathed. "My mother's book. She never told me. She never mentioned -"

"Oh, that book took nearly a hundred years to write. Some of the things in it had happened before it was finished, I should think."

"You know about the book?!" Celestia's disbelief at the situation actually increased.

"I was watching over your precious mother's shoulder as she wrote it!" The Lunacy laughed. "I saw her speak to you on her deathbed, give you that small box containing the work of decades. I had never been happier. I waited for such a long time to make the first prediction bear fruit."

Despite the fact that she somehow knew this to be true, Celestia just couldn't believe it. It was too... It was too crazy.

"You knew that I was the third Eternal Sister? You never tried to attack me, control me?"

The ball of darkness contracted slightly. "Repeatedly. I never could. I tried. For six thousand years I have tried. But you're just too noble. So I attacked your bitch of a sister."

"DON'T YOU DARE SPEAK ABOUT LUNA LIKE THAT!"

The Lunacy chuckled. "I'll speak about my little whore however I like. QUIET!" it warned, seeing Celestia about to shout again. "She was easy. I thought I'd succeeded the first time, but you somehow managed to bend all of the Elements of Harmony to your will. Fine. You banished us both to the moon. I waited. And today, I finally win."

Celestia didn't respond. The Lunacy couldn't resist taking another jab at her.

"Taking your weak, insignificant younger sister and transforming her into a creature of madness and dark powers... Even that didn't make you turn to your own inner demons. It took a thousand years, but I finally found something to make you snap. Breaking her, far more completely than I could when I made her turn into The Night Mare. Your precious student there is so incredibly powerful. Far more powerful than you and your late sister combined. My powers grew to match hers. And I found how to break you."

The spinning ball of blackness twisted into a silhouette of Luna, floating spread-eagled, writhing in ecstasy as a smaller winged silhouette repeatedly rammed something jagged into the area beneath her tail. The Lunacy started to laugh as Celestia and Twilight began to weep.

"And then," the monster said, huge quantities of sick mirth invading its horrid voice, "you finally snapped. Finally. Oh, I could have destroyed the world on my own, with the powers of the fifth Eternal Sister at my command. I could fling this ball of rock and dirt straight into your sun. But it was so much more fun to watch you do it for me!" Ringing peals of laughter shook the superheated air.

Celestia still couldn't say anything. The tears streaming from her eyes were boiling away into two small trails of steam in the blistering heat. Next to her, wrapped in her wing, her former student shook violently, sobbing at what she had helped to bring about.

"And you have, very neatly indeed, fulfilled a prophecy that was written almost a hundred years before your birth." The spinning ball of blackness seemed to actually bow politely. "Thank you for that. I would have had no trouble doing the same, but it was so entertaining watching you break, and watching you eat the world while trying to kill me. Besides," the monster chuckled, "it wasn't my place to do so, whereas it was, if you'll pardon the expression, your destiny."

Celestia stayed stock-still, stunned beyond comprehension.

"And now, the end. My work is done. Oh, don't worry," The Lunacy said. "Life will return to this filthy ball of dirt. I hope the next five hundred million years aren't too boring for you."

The ball of darkness flared briefly. The sun roared high into the sky. Celestia and Twilight could see that the familiar blue sky was now dull red, choked with the smoke from an entire world burning.

The Lunacy blazed sudden reddish-gold. The ball of light and heat in the sky shrank, its illumination fading, its warmth dying, until it was no larger and no brighter than one of Luna's beautiful stars. The stars the world would never see again.

The Lunacy spoke for the last time. "Good bye. I'll see you in two or three billion years to repeat the pleasure."

The dark sphere evaporated into steamy mist that was whipped away by the torturous winds of fire that swept the world.

Celestia and Twilight, both sobbing, embraced each other. Each had only the other for comfort on this dying ball of flame and ash. They stayed like that for hours, days. After what seemed years, they broke apart.

"So," said Twilight Sparkle.

"So," sniffed Celestia. "So, we wait, Little Sister."

Sobbing, they embraced each other once again.