Chapter 5: Black Sands


The creature that emerges through the smoke is a giant. From its thunderous stride to the sway of its luminous cloak, iridescent scales cover its upright frame from the crest of a copper fin on its head to the blunt tips of its hooves. It stands like a Minotaur but two snarling fire-breathing maws curl to look left and right from its cloaked back. Luna's mind puts the title 'dragon' to it, as few creatures could command such attention short of an Alicorn.

But another equally adept image rears its metaphorical head: a hydra.

It approaches, each footfall deliberate and resonant. It was hard to tell if it was a threat display, it looked and moved like a Minotaur but she could sense little from it. It was surprising, impressive even, but Luna had faced worse. Here, in her realm, she held dominion.

'Yeash, it think it has the tuft to try and intimidate me? Hmm, alright, If it wants to display its prowess like a peacock, let it. Anything he can do, I can do better.'

Her wings rise into a corona, each feathered tip raised up and over her head as she rises on an eldritch updraft of scintillating silver sparks. The same radiant glow spreads from the edges of her figure, an illusion forming the shape of her crescent moon.

The figure stops.

"Lady of the Deep."

It had no mouth but its booming voice still echoes in the empty expanse. It was the same voice that passed through the Strider's mind.

Luna inclines her head as her horn sparks to life, though to its credit the creature didn't even flinch. "We are the Princess of the Night, Mistress of Dreams, We are Luna. Who seeks Us?"

Unperturbed by the formality, the creature inclines its head, "The master of the twentieth legion, the last of the three-fold serpents. If it is to your satisfaction, you may call me Alpharius."

Luna studies the creature for a moment. This was her domain, and between the creature and the dreamer that provided the blank slate, few things could hide from her. "I could, but that's not your name, is it?"

It pauses long enough to reach up to its face. "A formality."

With a blast of air, the hardened scaled exterior peels off to reveal flesh. Its face was hairless, smooth, unblemished, and ageless. She recognized the falsehood of years that betrayed nothing but pure primal strength. It was male, she was confident of that, and that he was a warlord was certain. Luna's white incandescent eyes stare into his, detecting what she could from the usually unguarded minds of her subjects.

This one was different, his dark eyes glitter with iridescent waves of brightest blue that fade to darkest green. No, It wasn't just artistic. Others might have missed it, but it was clear to her. There were intricate wards as clear as the banded rings of magic that layered themselves around her. She could see the bands of tempered gold clearly now where nothing had been present before.

Luna replies as the light from her eyes begins to dim, returning them to their oceanic calm. "You test me?"

"I would expect you would do the same, princess. My name is immaterial, I am Alpharius. Who I am hasn't changed. I apologize for what resembles deceit, but I will not entreat with just any entity." A ghost of a smile crosses his face like a flash of lightning.

"You fear me?"

"If you are what I think you might be, yes." The master of the twentieth nods, then in a single fluid movement, he kneels. "I seek an intercessor for one in a dream not of his own making."

Luna, taken aback, blinks several times. "You seek intercession for another?"

"I do, Lady of the Deep. I have been told that such a feat might be possible."

The Alicorn huffs, "Of course." Her mind searches out what seemed like an unsaid flaw, "But this is done by your servant, and not yourself. Is the one you wish me to aid nearby?"

Alpharius looks up, "No. The one I wish you to aid is dead."

Stone cold silence greets the endless plain.

'Is he bucking serious?!'

When Luna finally speaks, it burbles out as half mirthless chortle and half reluctant scoff, "Pffah! I'm not a necromancer, I can't raise the dead to change a dream!"

"I wouldn't want you to." Alpharius rises and Luna drifts back a pace. "And even if you could, it wouldn't matter. There'd still be enough dead to use planets as pyres, and my father and brothers would still rail against madness or rot in their graves. No, I don't want to raise the dead only to consign a billion more. I want to snuff out the candle before it sets the world ablaze. And I would offer much, here and now."

Luna ponders the request and its implications.

'How in Tartarus am I bucking supposed to do something like that?! Hah! It's a jest. Yes. A bad one.'

She knew next to nothing about time travelling, save for the fact it had been part of a resurgence in foalish fantasy novels since her return.

Celestia might have an inkling, but she could also be a stubborn mule when confronting the unknown. And this was very much 'the unknown'.
Oh, her sister would certainly have some opinions about this, even if she was talking out her flank. But even if the impossible were possible, and this warlord wasn't a capering maniac, Luna knew full well she still needed proof.

'Not to mention he wants me to try to turn back time as if it's as easy as spinning the hand of a dining room clock.'

The look on the warlord's face rouses her from her musing. She must have stayed in silence for longer than he'd expected.

"What do you offer?" She finds herself blathering as she plays for time to sort out the possibilities. She'd need more than a few paltry assurances to entertain such an idiotic request.

"I would offer myself, my soul, my legion. All for you to do with as so pleases you, Princess."

She searches his eyes for deceit, and while the immense willpower is there to block her prying, there's none. He spoke the truth about that, it was the dark shadow of desperation that fed a flicker of hope.

'Oh pony feathers... he's serious. He's actually serious.'

"Alpharius, do you take me for some sort of... some-"

"God." Alpharius offers.

Luna rears back and cringes, yet his gaze still follows her.

She purses her lips and wrinkles her nose in distaste. "I was going to say maniac."

"One in the same, really."

Luna scowls and shrugs, "I'm just a pony."

"As much a pony as I am a man, I suspect."

Alpharius stands, locking the helmet to his belt and taking a long breath. "So, is this an offer that you would accept?"

"Well, no," Luna bites back. "I wouldn't know what to do with souls if you gave them to me. It's not something I could put on a mantle. And I don't need more servants... you would be slaves, and... no. I can't. I won't." The Alicorn shakes her head and for the first time, lets the corona flicker until it's little more than a hazy outline.

"Your servant said you needed aid from somepony like me, so here I am." Her eyes catch the slightest movement, his hand had drifted towards the hilt of what appeared to be a concealed blade. But whatever she said had some effect, and he simply brushes the folds of his cloak flat.

"Luna, Princess of the Night, Mistress of Dreams." He speaks her name, savouring each word. The warlord begins to pace, shielding half his body from her sight. "You are most definitely alien to us." He almost spat the phrase, yet smiles.

"And this is a problem?" She scrunches her muzzle in a scowl.

"In this instance, no. You're rather familiar in some regards. You're equine, like an ancient Terran horse."

"What did you just call me?" Luna's narrowed eyes betray the deadpan voice.

"Equine." Alpharius looks back and takes a breath, "You are odd, and I have never seen your kind in this capacity. A beast of burden on a backwater, sure. I've even seen some gene-troopers of the Imperial Army that are very much equinoid, but I would expect if you were a servant of the fell powers, you would be more... fair . More honeyed, not petulant and insulted."

Even before a spluttering Luna can respond, he bobs his head, "I mean no insult, but I have caused it. For that, I suppose I'm both grateful, and apologetic."

Luna's scowl flickers, then deepens as she mutters more to herself,

'I meet the first non Equestrian, non-Lunar, who is both a warlord and a stallion in search of aid, and for feather's sakes, he's as evasive as a common Zebra.'

She coughs to clear her throat, a gesture of irritation more than any need as her temper cools. "You wish for my aid, and yet you insist on speaking in riddles."

"I have been accused of as much, yes. So let me be more clear, can you intercede in the dreams of another being?"

The Alicorn's eyes search him again before she tilts her head and cautiously asks, "If I could, and I make no guarantees, how do I know what you say is true? You offer souls that I have no use for, and servitude which I won't take. But your servant said you would know what happened on Istvaan. So my initial price is simple, I want truth and I want answers. Prove to me why this is worth my time."

Alpharius' face never changes, "Truth commands a price higher than a soul. But I am willing to pay. I would be lying if I said I didn't remember it like it was yesterday."

His visage melts into a waterfall of iridescent colours as the world bubbles and boils in gossamer strands of fiery orange and lustreless black.

Luna's stomach lurches as she transitions from the organic flow of a dreamer's partial memories to something more mechanical. Bits and pieces of a foggy tank and too-close metal plates scratch across her consciousness the way tree branches clatter against a window in a storm. And all of a sudden, everything she thought she was prepared for was tossed aside. It was the first glimpse of an ocean from a rocky cliff top, utterly unfathomable.

The Alicorn's mind reels as her senses sift through the burning haze of sulfurous ash clots and the bitter tang of burning metal on the tip of her tongue. Every breath rakes in hot embers that stings her eyes and sends her into sharp coughing fits. Each unsteady hoofstep forward into the haze sinks into a churning mass of boiling muck and rancid puddles pulled straight from the nightmares of the most pitiful ponies. But muck wouldn't cling to her hooves like this, and it shouldn't stink of copper. The sickly mire sucks at her hocks, trying to drag her down into the skeletal talons of the underworld.

But unlike the fitful trauma dreams of fillies and colts, there was no waking from this. The world's spectral denizens rove to and fro as juddering memory fragments that crackle with the déjà vu of wordless anguish. Bands of those war-like spirits drift across the Tartaran wilderness in anarchistic fits of rage.

No.

Tartarus was real. It was a place of unrelenting cold and despair. Its tall crags and rocky ledges were treacherous and the few minions that lived in the sunlight deprived peaks were misshapen monsters. They lived in tormenting stretches of stygian wasteland. No royal sister sent anybeast to Tartarus lightly. It was a place of grievous punishment.

No word in Ponish could describe Istvaan.

It was a place of incomprehensible insanity utterly alien to any sensibilities. Its blasted abyssal plains lay cloaked in fire and corpse ash; inhabited by relentless nightmares dredged from the darkest pit of her millennium long exile. Pillars of fire stretch to the stars, blistering winds transform coarse sand into flensing hurricanes, and trickling rivulets of molten flesh empty into eddies of caustic chemicals.

Chitinous armoured skeletons shatter to powder underhoof, but there's no way to avoid them. They carpet the ground in numbers beyond counting, heaped in drifts like autumn leaves. For hundreds of paces she couldn't set hoof on the boiling sand, and had to tread over the crumbling husks.

For one grotesque moment, Luna's mind had tried to recognize body parts like pieces of a puzzle rather than accept it as mounds of dead flesh.

She couldn't.

The deranged portraits and demented paintings of the world flicker through her mind as a Canterlot gallery opening viewed through tired eyes. But one image etches itself in her mind.

High atop the bastion walls of ancient veined basalt, towering fifty meters in the air and silhouetted by the pulsating crimson sky, she saw Him.

Cold eyes stare out from a marble patrician face, gazing across the Istvaanian hellscape. The master of any domain he surveyed, hooded eyes drinking in the madness without flinching. The hulking brutes thronging around him all but disappear in his shadow. His standard unfurls, a wrothful golden eye stares out into the whirling maelstrom. He has but to raise a single hand and the world would submit.

He hefts a mace larger than Luna herself, and the unconquerable firestorms are shackled to his will. Istvaan dies in a crippling shudder of agony as Luna cries into the yawning abyss.

"Enough!"

"So," Alpharius's voice whispers in her ringing ears, "Do we have a deal?"