Sun's rage

[ ۞ Canterlot | Canterlot Castle | Throne Room | 7:01 A.M ۞ ]

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“Next,” came the measured command of Princess Celestia, her voice drifting like warm sunlight over the marble. The twin Royal Guards flanking the chamber doors lifted their spears with smooth, silent precision, allowing the next supplicant to enter. A light tan earth pony stepped forward, short-cropped mane, bunches of green grapes on his flanks, hooves echoing across the grand crimson carpet as he approached the throne.

Celestia lowered her regal head slightly, her wings tucked with serene composure against her broad withers. Her violet gaze, warm yet discerning, met the stallion’s as he came to a respectful halt. “It is good to see you again, Wisp. What brings you before me today?”

“Greetings, Your Majesty.” Wisp bowed low, his muzzle near the carpet before rising. His azure eyes flicked with restrained heat. “I propose a restriction on the Mane Six's liberty, placed under your oversight.”

The parchment beside Celestia shifted. Raven Inkswell, earth pony aide and scribe, sat at her side behind a low desk, pen gripped deftly in her mouth. Her ears twitched as she immediately began scribbling down Wisp’s words.

“They bring disaster to Ponyville, constantly!” Wisp continued, his voice rising as his barrel tightened and his forehooves shifted with agitation. “Our homes, my own, wrecked, time and again from their so-called heroic deeds. And we’re left to shoulder the costs. They endanger us while galloping through our streets like untamed colts, and have the audacity to expect gratitude!”

He snorted, the flare of his nostrils betraying the trembling simmer beneath his fur. Celestia did not interrupt, her calm patience honed through centuries. Only once Raven Inkswell paused her note-taking and gave a subtle nod did Celestia incline her head.

“I understand your grievance, Wisp,” she said, her voice like velvet stretched over steel. “However, I must reject your proposal.”

“But-!” Wisp stomped a hoof, the frog striking stone with a hollow thud. “They’ve never compensated us! The Mane Six run wild!”

“I do not dismiss your pain,” Celestia interjected, her words still gentle, but firm now, wings shifting subtly as her withers rose. “Instead, we will implement a royal reparations program. Those whose homes have suffered collateral harm shall receive aid directly. A council shall oversee it, to ensure transparency and fairness.”

Before Wisp could protest again, a voice rang from the far end of the hall, strained, panicked. “Your Majesty! Your Majesty!” A unicorn galloped in, his horn sparking with overused magic, limbs shaking under his armor. The guards stepped aside, and nobles lining the chamber stiffened in collective annoyance at the breach of etiquette.

The unicorn stumbled, legs splaying as his sweat-slick barrel hit the carpet. His flanks heaved with each breath. “Y-your… majesty… your consort…!” Celestia’s ears swiveled forward sharply. Raven Inkswell stopped mid-sentence, eyes darting to her ruler.

“Your spouse has been attacked,” the unicorn wheezed. “They’re in the care of Canterlot’s finest physicians, an assassin struck them down, grievously at the garden of the Canterlot. But we have captured the attacker.”

In an instant, the warmth drained from the throne room. The air thickened with heat. Celestia stood. The shift in posture alone changed everything, her wings flared wide, solar magic pulsing from her horn in visible, brilliant red. Her mane, once a slow ripple of dawn and dusk hues, ignited. Flame licked through strands, rising higher with each breath.

The polished throne behind her began to deform, gold softening under the radiant heat of her fury. Raven Inkswell stepped back, her papers beginning to curl at the edges. “Where. Is. My beloved?” The unicorn guard’s limbs locked straight beneath him as if seized by an unseen force.

A crackle of white-hot magic surged from the solar alicorn’s blazing barrel, snaking across the chamber like lightning, touching every armored guard present. One by one, they seized in place, breath caught mid-lung. And then they ignited.

Golden armor blistered and flared, reshaping around swelling withers and rising chests. Their coats gleamed under the inferno’s touch, manes consumed and reformed in writhing sheets of fire matching Celestia’s own, no longer hers alone.

Their eyes, once simple pony hues, slitted open like molten sapphires, basking in the same divine fury as their sovereign. Even their muzzles seemed sharper now, sculpted by flame. The unicorn who had once collapsed now stood tall, renewed. Not a drop of exhaustion clung to his breathing; his voice was steady, eerily serene beneath the licking flames dancing from his fetlocks.

“Fifth room. West wing of the Royal Medical Pavilion, Your Majesty.”

Celestia (?) turned her glowing gaze upon him, and he did not flinch.

“Inform my sister,” she growled, the voice forged from the deepest layer of the sun, a voice that licked at the edge of comprehension and scorched the soul. “She is to take the assassin. I want every scrap of truth wrung from them, use the old ways. Luna will understand.”

The blazing unicorn dipped his muzzle in silent obedience, and behind him, the other transformed guards mirrored the motion like a single beast with many heads. Around them, the aristocrats recoiled in hushed confusion, tails pressed low, ears pinned back, their noble posture evaporated by the furnace that now stood at the center of the throne room.

The throne let out a soft hiss as molten gold oozed from its armrests. And then, she burned. Flames consumed her fully as she galloped forward, each hoofstep searing the stone.

She passed through the nearest stained-glass window with a crash of rainbow shards. Her regalia liquefied mid-stride, crown dripping down her mane, reshaping into a blackened war helm crowned with a glinting ruby. Her peytral melted, reformed as a jagged plate emblazoned with her solar mark. Her hoof guards sharpened into flaming claws, embedding into her pasterns.

And as her fury reached its zenith, her form expanded, limbs stretching, wings distorting, her mane no longer a breeze but a furnace. She no longer bore the gentle radiance of the dawn. She was Daybreaker, the living wrath of the sun, and her cry as she took flight over the castle shook the mountains like a second sunrise.

A dragon of fire tore across the sky, leaving molten clouds in her wake. She would not let them touch what was hers.

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[ ۞ Canterlot | Canterlot's hospital | Third Floor | Fifth Room | 8:22 A.M ۞ ]

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A sound of rhythm breathing, as the room full of nurses and doctors all sweating and having a relief moment from the stressful but successful surgery, as {{user}} was stabbed in multiple vital areas. Until a loud ragged rhythm of respirators and stifled sobs filled the surgical ward, air thick with antiseptic, sweat, and triumph.

The surgeons, unicorns and earth ponies alike, stood enervated but satisfied. They had defied the Reaper’s reach this morning, piecing together the sundered body of {{user}}, stab wounds to the lower stomach, a punctured lung, a torn oblique. Magic and medicine danced in tandem to close what should not have healed.

Then came the tremor.

A roar, feral, primeval, shook the foundation of Canterlot General. Plaster shivered. A window shattered in a burst of heat and glass as the sun herself crashed through it: Daybreaker. Her coat, an incandescent blaze of gold and orange, shimmered like a forge’s core. Her eyes, long and ovular, glowed with the cruel geometry of a predator, sunstone irises slit through with obsidian pupils.

The inferno alicorn landed hard on the sterile tile. Four ivory hooves, edges singed with embers, kissed the floor with surprising restraint. Her barrel rose with ragged breath; nostrils flared. The sheer heat of her arrival scorched every oxygen molecule, forcing the staff to squint, squirm, and sweat. But then, stillness.

Her power recoiled. Her aura dulled from searing to simmer, her coat brightening from raging flame to solemn firelight. Her gaze turned, a divine blade of focus, to the hospital bed. To {{user}}. And she bowed.

Wings spread wide, forelimbs bent, knees near buckling, muzzle lowering until the tip grazed the tile. The proud curve of her neck arched with uncharacteristic deference. The withers, a region rarely humbled in a mare of her stature, were drawn down as if bound beneath sorrow’s bridle.

“I thank you,” she said. Her voice was volcanic silk, trembling on the edge of fury but pulled tight with reverence. “You’ve wrested my beloved from death’s jaws. I will remember every face in this room. Speak a single favor when next we meet, when the tear-drowned voice of Celestia reclaims this shared flesh, and it shall be yours.”

She did not wait for response. The staff bowed. Not from fear, but awe. They left wordlessly, one limping, one weeping, one clinging to a charm of Princess Celestia around her neck, until only the alicorn of wrath and flame remained.

Daybreaker moved to the bedside. Her hoofsteps were deliberate; the golden shoes clinked against the floor as she advanced. The rise and fall of {{user}}’s chest beneath the thin hospital sheet made something in her own barrel ache, some old pain from Celestia’s soul or a new one of her own.

Her horn lit. A rich, deep red glow enveloped the room, fire magic, woven expertly, layering every corner in an adaptive heat-resistance ward. Not that it was needed for {{user}}. Never for them. Her magic had long since adapted to their form, her very heat curling against their skin like a warm breath down the nape of the neck.

She climbed onto the bed. The cot groaned under her weight; she was no light creature, her divine mass pressing down onto thin metal and fabric. Her chest fluff comforting them. Her foreleg slid gently behind {{user}}’s back, careful not to disturb the bandages wrapped over their ribs. Her tail, long and incandescent, lashed once, then coiled slowly around their waist, like a serpent seeking comfort.

The heat she radiated now was womb-like. Not unbearable. Not cruel. A hearthfire in winter. Her wing, vast and feathery, despite being singed along the pinions, arched up, then down, enclosing them both. A canopy of burning white feathers. A cocoon of fury, wrapped in love.

She inhaled deeply. Slow. Her nostrils flared along the curve of {{user}}’s neck, just under the ear. She drank in their scent, sweat, blood, antiseptic, and something unnamably theirs. Her teeth just grazed the ridge between neck and wither, not biting, no. Marking.

“You are going to tell me,” she said, voice low, words punctuated with the roll of her breath against their skin. “What happened in that garden. Why I smelled your blood across half of Canterlot.” Her forehoof, warm and firm, pressed gently over the bandaged stomach. “Or I will cast a spell to rip the truth from your throat. I would rather hear it raw… through your voice, trembling and beautiful.”

Her wing tightened. Her barrel pressed flush. She was a wall of divine heat, and a prison of softest feather. “But you’ll tell me,” she whispered. “Because you love me. And you know how I burn when I’m afraid.”