The observatory fire moved too slowly to be of any real danger. No, the real danger was the smoke.
Two of the fourteen observatory staff—dedicated scientists, renowned writers of peer-reviewed literature, friends to many—were smothered by smoke in their sleep. By the time the fire alarms finally went off, there was nothing any of the remaining twelve could do but grab their parkas and dash into the freezing night. The fire suppression system served only to make their only escape route slick with an ineffectual layer of foam.
Outside, huddled together against the bite of the wind, they heard the telescope’s mirror pieces crack and pop like so many kernels of popcorn on a searing red plate. A horrible groan signaled the mount listing and finally succumbing to the sea of flames. The main power source exploded. The backup generators whirred to life, sputtered, and died. The lights went out.
Their choices were limited: stay put and freeze to death, or attempt to fly down the mountain through winds strong enough to rip the wings off their backs.
The team looked to Penumbra. A jolt of fear shot down her spine, deeper than any chill. She was the leader. She had to make a call. Panic felt a lot like hypothermia, she realized.
“Well,” she finally said, “I’m scared of freezing to death.” She unfurled her wings, testing the air. “Let’s die in the air. Like bats.”
Penumbra took the lead. The other eleven followed. Without light, there was no way to tell up from down. Ice accumulated on their eyes and froze the leather of their wings stiff. The wind pushed them bodily into the mountain. Blood gushed from open wounds and fell into pitch blackness. Ponies screamed in the night. The night screamed back.
Penumbra dislocated both her wings early on. She also lost her hat somewhere along the way. She’d go on to lose both ears to frostbite. But she got all eleven colleagues down alive.
As she gathered the remnants of her team together at the base of the mountain, she looked up at just the right moment to catch a rare break in the clouds. The observatory glittered atop the mountain like a burning star.
When Penumbra wrote her account of the disaster for the authorities, she listed Cozy Glow’s name along with the other two scientists who had perished. Cozy Glow had been a last-minute addition to the team—an unsanctioned, unfunded, unapproved hitchhiker. She had also been one of the hardest workers on the team, a truly enthusiastic learner with a passion for space equal to any hardened astronomer. With a little string-pulling in the administration department, Penumbra was able to quietly retcon Cozy Glow into the academic roster as a doctoral student. An honorary PhD was the least she deserved.
Penumbra took an extended leave of absence to heal her body and mind. She was several hundred miles away from Canterlot when she felt the tremor. Once again, the night sky gained a burning star.
Canterlot was still burning when she arrived at the doors of her alma mater, Canterlot University, three days later. The campus had been spared the worst of the damage. The astrology department’s prized refraction-mirror had been knocked out of its housing, and most of its reflective mirrors had been shattered. Repairs would take years. But no students, staff, or faculty had died. The same couldn’t be said for the surrounding neighborhood.
Penumbra threw herself into the reconstruction efforts—after submitting notice that she would be cutting her leave short and would need to start getting paid again, effective immediately.
One long and lonesome night, Penumbra was under the hub of a large motor screwing a delicate gear into place. A colleague, an astronomer named Sunrise, was seated on the other side of the motor, working on another component of the motor. The sound of their tools echoed in the cavernous workroom.
Something that had been working its way around Penumbra’s mind finally bubbled to the surface. “Hey, Sunny?”
“Yes, doctor?”
Penumbra rolled her eyes. Doctor. So formal. “Was it really a meteor?”
“What do you mean?”
“The thing that almost knocked Canterlot off the mountain. Was it really a meteor?”
“Of course it was. That’s what the princesses said.”
“Right, right. Buuut, if it was really a meteor, wouldn’t the team have seen it coming?”
“Some things slip through. Meteors can be too dark to see. Or they can move too fast to be tracked accurately.”
“True.”
Sunrise raised an eyebrow. “Do you think it was something else, doctor?”
“No. I don’t know. I overheard some of the grad students discussing alternative theories.”
“Alternative theories? You mean conspiracy theories.”
Penumbra chuckled.
Sunrise set his tools down and walked around the engine to look Penumbra in the eye. “Which grad students, doctor?”
“I don’t know. There were a few of them.”
“Describe them to me.”
“Sunny, don’t do this.”
“This is no laughing matter. Ponies died.”
“Then be mad at me,” Penumbra said. “I’m sorry for laughing. Don’t pick a fight over it.”
“There are no alternative theories to what happened that day. Only baseless conspiracy theories.”
“The princesses have lied before.”
Sunrise’s eye twitched. “You weren’t here. You didn’t see it.”
Penumbra bit her tongue before she could say, Seems like no one did. “You’re right. I’m letting my mind wander. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Entertaining a dangerous conspiracy theory is not something you can just wave away. Do you seriously believe the princesses would lie about something like this?”
“I don’t know—no, I guess not.”
“That’s not good enough. I was here, doctor. Two of my neighbors got killed. My mom had a chandelier fall on her. She was in the hospital for a month.”
“Oh. Sunny, I didn’t know that. I’m—”
“Did you even stop for a second to consider the things the meteor broke besides the telescope? Doctor?”
He almost hissed the last word. Doctor of sticking her hoof in her mouth, she thought. “Sunny—”
“Look, let’s just drop it and get back to work.”
“No. Sunny, I’m sorry, okay? Really. I didn’t know. I don’t really believe that stuff. And I certainly didn’t intend to poke a sore spot.”
Sunrise slowly unwound the tension in his shoulders. “Okay. Apology accepted.” Moving slower than before, Sunrise shuffled back to his spot on the other side of the motor. Penumbra couldn't see him. But she relaxed when she heard the sound of his tools tinkering away again.
After a few minutes of silence, Sunrise spoke up. “What did the grad students say?”
Penumbra pursed her lips together. “It was pretty dark.”
“These are dark times, doctor.”
Penumbra sighed. “Apparently, someone heard from a royal guard friend of theirs that they found a body right at the point of impact.”
“That’s not possible. They would be vaporized.”
“Yes. Apparently, it was completely unscathed, except the heart was cut out. Like a ritual sacrifice. They found bits of it in between her teeth.”
“That’s—that—” Sunrise’s voice became strained. “That’s not—”
“That’s not possible,” Penumbra jumped in. “It’s just a stupid rumor. You know how these kids can get.”
An audible sigh came from the other side of the motor. “I ought to report this to the administration.”
Penumbra risked a joke. “Maybe you should give your students less homework. They’re clearly sleep deprived.”
The scrape of tools stopped. A moment of tense silence passed. Penumbra silently held her breath.
The scrape of tools resumed. Sunrise gave a low chuckle. “Perhaps you’re right.”
The town of L'épine never recovered from the disaster that befell it. Those who survived were scattered, their faith shaken and their lives uprooted. The healing well that had sustained them for centuries had been consumed. They would spend the rest of their lives constructing new myths to explain that fateful day.
Clarity, mother of the late Clearwater, spent the months after her daughter’s death trying to make sense of it all. A piece of her heart went down in that crater, a piece she could never recover. She hadn’t just lost a daughter—she had lost a charge, too. Cozy Glow was listed among the missing, presumed dead. Clarity spent weeks wandering around town dressed in black. Sometimes she fasted. Sometimes she prayed. Mostly she sat at the lip of the crater that had consumed her life.
Prayers are never answered in straightforward ways. Clarity’s prayers were answered in the form of a crier arriving from out of town. He circled the dirt road that had been built around the crater, stopping a stone’s throw from where Clarity sat.
He took a minute to catch his breath as a crowd formed around him. Then he announced his news: Canterlot had been attacked. The princesses were urging every healer and builder who heard this message to head to Canterlot to help the wounded and assist in reconstruction.
Few stepped forward. The town, already put through their own nightmare, was hesitant to help. Clarity was just processing the information when she realized she was on her hooves. She moved with purpose she hadn’t felt in months, walking to where the crier stood and announcing in a loud and clear voice, “I’ll go.”
An hour later, she was off, the remnants of her life packed into a single saddlebag. She left her empty cottage and whatever was left of her old life behind her. Let what hasn’t rotted, rot, she thought.
As she passed the town limits, she swore to herself she’d never come back. She cursed the town and all the destruction and pain it had wrought her. The town of L'épine receded into her past, never to return.
Canterlot, by comparison, was not faring much better. The city’s gorgeous architecture, the proud spiraling Saddle Arabian-inspired spires capped with shimmering gold, were reduced in number by half. A haze of stone dust clung to the city. Rockslides were a daily occurrence. Most of the town’s earth ponies, along with a fair number of unicorns, streamed out of the city. Others persevered. The fear of falling impacted the flightless in many different ways. The two most common were pragmatism and dogged denial.
Precious days had passed since the initial disaster, yet the need for doctors and healers was just as high as ever. Clarity was immediately sent to a temporary hospital erected against the western exterior wall of the castle. She was setting broken bones and running medical supplies within five minutes of arriving. There were dozens of patients for every healer. She didn’t have time to think. It felt good.
Rumors flowed from room to room. Some thought the disaster had been brought on by the arrival of a new alicorn. Others were convinced one of the princesses went rogue, a la Nightmare Moon. One older mare sporting a gnarly concussion even claimed it was a beast from the stars.
Clarity paid them little mind. She wasn’t here to spread rumors. She was here to help. And that’s exactly what she did.
To say professor Pixkin was happy with the outcome of his expedition was like saying non-foliated metamorphic rock was the same as foliated metamorphic rock. It wasn’t.
Pixkin made it off the volcano. Most of his equipment, including all of his remaining samples, did not. It would have been impossible for the aging professor to carry back his many samples and crystals and measuring devices all the way down the side of the mountain. An entire year’s worth of extensive private funding went up in smoke somewhere on the south face of the volcano, left in a neat pile like a sacrifice to the monsters that lurked below.
He left Cozy Glow—and her bizarre apparent suicide—out of his final report. A death in the log books meant official investigations and governmental investigations. He wasn’t afraid of investigations. What really kept him up at night was the thought of word getting out. A death, even a suicide like Cozy Glow’s, would be forever linked to his enchantments. His dreams would be shattered like so many bones against the magma river—turned to dust, unworthy of even being eaten by the pyroclastic flow.
But it took more than watching a crazy mare throw herself into a volcano to keep professor Pixkin down. He was back at New Yorky-Terrier University the very next semester, picking favorites and doling out busy work to grad students. He was there the day Canterlot was destroyed.
He was in class at the time, lecturing about pyrite with his usual boundless zeal, when two royal guards in full armor walked in the room. They approached the desk and whispered in his ear, “The princesses request your presence. Lives are at stake. Do not appear alarmed or you’ll scare your students.”
The professor’s wig nearly shot off his head. “The princesses?”
In just a few short hours’ time he was touching down on the south lawn of Canterlot palace, courtesy of a private royal guard chariot ride. Not that he could see where he was—the entire city was completely shrouded in smoke.
The briefing was short and to the point: the city had been hit by a meteor, which exploded in the north gardens. Many of the foundation pillars that connected the city to the mountain had sustained damage. Some had broken entirely. He was being brought on to help survey the damage, as well as assess the integrity of the mountain in preparation for drilling new supports.
The scale was monumental. A full half of the stone and concrete supports had shattered. The process of reconstruction would take decades.
Still—with new challenges came new opportunities. And what better testimonial for the efficacy of his enchantments? This was a project truly befitting his talents. Shoes were small potatoes in comparison.
On his first day on the job, a cadre of royal guards led him through the ruins of the north gardens. Almost none of the grand architecture in the immediate vicinity had survived. The famous topiary had all been vaporized. The stone tiles marking the old walking paths were all reduced to jagged rubble. Pieces of so many statues littered the ground. A low cloud of dust lingered in the air. The ground felt sticky and had a faint red tint to it.
“This doesn’t make sense,” professor Pixkin said to the guards escorting him. “A meteor would have punched through the city like it was paper mache. The odds of it exploding just above the ground are astronomically low.” He blinked away rock dust. “No pun intended.”
The guards exchanged a look, but said nothing.
One of professor Pixkin’s white eyebrows rose. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“That,” replied one of the guards, “is none of your concern.”