Her coronation over, Twilight has some doubts about stepping into the horseshoes of a princess. Little does she know a greater challenge is rushing to meet her, building like a storm on the horizon, bringing with it an endless night.
Her coronation over, Twilight has some doubts about stepping into the horseshoes of a princess. Little does she know a greater challenge is rushing to meet her, building like a storm on the horizon, bringing with it an endless night.
The Forest had withstood pony domination for centuries. Its plants were unique in Equestria, mutants that refused to be cultivated. The creatures that called it home lived wild and free, yet it was no true home to any of them. It was a refuge for outcasts, a breeding ground for strange beasts of origins unknown. During its long history the Everfree Forest had birthed countless oddities that crawled and slithered and clawed their way into being, never having been seen before and never being spotted beyond its borders.
And this night, among the vines and bushes, something stirred.
Fluttershy hummed to herself as she poured out seeds for her bird friends, quieter than normal since the sun was still below the horizon. The notes became deliberate and pronounced while she concentrated on not overflowing any of the dishes, but as there was only so much room among the branches of the trees and the sack was rather heavy, the occasional spray of birdseed tumbling to the grass was inevitable.
The sun was beginning to show when Fluttershy placed the sack of seeds with the rest of the feed. She began trotting along the path that led from her cottage into town, still humming. Marching across Fluttershy’s yard was a column of ants, streaming from the Everfree Forest. They passed by fallen seeds and grains, never deviating from their intended course. Fluttershy never noticed them.
The path took her by Sweet Apple Acres, the red apples in the trees catching the morning light. As she rounded a turn she could see Applejack and her brother Big Macintosh were working this side of the orchard, the former up a ladder plucking leaves.
“Good morning, Applejack,” Fluttershy said with a smile. “Good morning, Big Mac.”
Big Mac mumbled his way through, “Morning, miss Fluttershy.”
Applejack spat out a mouthful of leaves. “Mornin’, Fluttershy. You’re goin’ into town mighty early.”
“Well, I need to buy some radishes for Angel, and I thought I might see something Twilight might like, but I don’t like to do a lot of shopping when there’s other ponies around, so…”
“Right, Twilight’s goin'-away shindig’s tonight,” Applejack said. She glanced down and shouted, “Comin’ down, Mac!” before sliding down the ladder.
“You’ll be there, won’t you?” Fluttershy asked.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, sugarcube.”
“That’s good.” She smiled again. “See you there!”
“See you there,” echoed Applejack.
Fluttershy continued up the path to Ponyville, the line of ants flowing beside her.
Rarity stirred her morning coffee as she looked out the window. The street outside was still half-asleep, still draped in the long shadows of the morning sun. She turned her gaze to the swirling inky liquid in her mug, as if the element to break her creative stupor could be found there, but it turned out to no more be in her coffee than it was prancing up and down the main street. She floated a grapefruit over from the counter and twisted it in half in mid-air, musing that perhaps it might be for the best that inspiration for a dress for Twilight could not be found in either of those places.
“Is that all you’re having?”
“Hm?” Rarity paused, strips of shed grapefruit skin stacked in a neat pile in front of her.
“For breakfast,” Sweetie Belle clarified. “Just a grapefruit?”
Rarity nudged the untouched half over to her sister’s side of the table with her magic. “It could be half a grapefruit, if you want some.”
Sweetie Belle took an tentative lick, then made a face. “This is horrible!” she exclaimed. “Why would you call something this horrible a fruit?”
“It’s not that bad…”
Sweetie Belle shoved it back to Rarity’s side of the table. “Why are you eating that?”
“Grapefruit is excellent for preserving shine in one’s coat,” Rarity said, “and it’s good for preventing colds.”
A perplexed look crossed Sweetie Belle’s face. “But it’s summer.”
“What do you want for breakfast?” Rarity asked, trying to shift the subject.
“Toast!”
“Then make yourself some toast.”
“You banned me from the toaster…”
Trying very hard not to sigh, Rarity floated her coin purse into the kitchen and fished a couple of bits from it, placing them on the table. “You know, I have changed my mind. I think I feel like a croissant for breakfast. A fresh, warm, fluffy croissant, straight from Sugarcube Corner.”
“That does sound pretty good…” Sweetie Belle agreed.
“Could you be a most wonderful sister and run down to the bakery and get me one? You get whatever you like.”
Sweetie Belle snatched up the bits. “I’m on it!” she squeaked, and dashed out the front door, leaving Rarity to her grapefruit and coffee. In her rush, the strange ants crawling into cracks and shadows went unobserved.
As Sweetie Belle burst through the door of Sugarcube Corner, she nearly collided with a short purple dragon.
“Whoa!” Spike said, spinning to take the tray of pastries he was holding out of Sweetie Belle’s path. “Valuable cargo on board.”
“Sorry, Spike.” Sweetie Belle grinned sheepishly.
“No harm done,” he said, backing out of the bakery, the little bell over the door tinkling.
A violently colorful blur sprang up from behind the counter. “Mmmorning!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed with typical gusto.
“Hi Pinkie,” Sweetie Belle said, approaching the counter. She put her bits down as she scanned the display. “Can I get a croissant, and a…” She trailed off, finally having looked at Pinkie properly and noticing something atypical.
“Yes?”
“…Did you know there is a muffin on your nose?”
“Of course! I couldn’t keep it in my mouth, because I want to eat it later and you put things in your mouth when you want to eat them, so that would be a silly place to keep it, and I couldn’t put it on my head because then it might get messed up in my mane and my mane does not taste good even with frosting on, and I couldn’t put the muffin on my back because I couldn’t keep an eye on it because do you know how hard it is to cook with your head looking backwards? So I put it on my nose and now I can keep both eyes on the muffin and not have to turn my head the wrong way!”
“Well, I guess that makes sense…”
“Croissant?” Pinkie asked, as if it wasn’t out of the ordinary to have to explain why there was baked goods perched on the end of her muzzle.
“Oh. Yeah! It has to be warm.”
“Warm croissant it is!”
“And fresh, and fluffy.”
“Warm and fresh and fluffy, got it.”
“And, um… could you make it two croissants?”
Pinkie dropped a second croissant into the bag and passed it over the counter to Sweetie Belle, then flipped the muffin off the end of her nose and devoured it in a single bite. “There you go! Anything else?”
Rainbow Dash was still fast asleep in her bed when the ants passed beneath her cloud house. One broke off from the column and waited, its antenna poised to receive further instructions.
Twilight stood in front of the mirror, examining her reflection. The pony that stood before her felt like a stranger. The tiara on that pony’s head just didn’t want to sit right, no matter how often she shifted it here and there with her magic. She gave the tiara an experimental nudge with the tip of one of her wings, but it just looked more out of place than ever.
Frustrated, she tossed the tiara onto her bed. It was then she noticed the ant crawling along the interior of the window. It was a species she didn’t recognize at all, and she was quite sure she would have remembered reading about one with a large orange growth on its thorax. It almost looked like a type of mold sprouting from the back section of the ant, but it was so smooth and round that she wasn’t sure if it wasn’t just a natural part of its body. Maybe there would be some information in one of the thorough reference tomes: Flora & Fauna of Equestria, vol. II: Fauna, perhaps, or Codex Hexapoda: A Guide to Insects and Other Things with Six Legs.
No. That would be a distraction, just like trying to make the tiara comfortable to wear was a distraction. Twilight pushed the strange ant out of her mind and went back to the task of filling the two open and unpacked suitcases for her stay in Canterlot.
Downstairs, she heard her door open and close, and Spike's humming.
Well... packing could wait until after having a danish, she supposed.
The sun hung low in the sky. The cake was all but gone; the last piece was slowly being worn down by Gummy, who had somehow found his way up on to the table. A couple of balloons had descended from their place crowding in the high ceiling of the library, milling about the lower bookshelves. Although a cup of tea sat as Princess Celestia’s place, the tea was cold. The banner that read WE WILL MISS YOU TWILIGHT!!! in violent pink letters had come unstuck at one corner, falling over itself to cover the part of Twilight’s name. Every pony in the library could sense it; Twilight’s going-away party was coming to a close, which meant it would soon be time for Twilight to go away.
“Write every day,” Pinkie told Twilight, “write magic letters to Spike, and if you’ve studied too much magic then write a normal letter and mail it, and if there’s no mailponies flying that day then send me a carrier pigeon, and if you don’t know how to tell a carrier pigeon to find my house then I’ll leave birdseed out the front on the grass, so there’s no excuses for not writing.”
“Pinkie,” Twilight said with a smile, “I’ll be back coming back here all the time. It’s not even that far away!” She turned to the rest of her friends. “You’ll barely know I’m gone.”
“That’s simply not true,” Rarity said, “you know we are all going to miss you terribly, darling.”
“Be safe,” said Fluttershy.
“Have fun,” said Rainbow Dash.
“Work hard,” said Applejack.
Twilight hugged them all in turn. She then turned to Spike, who had been standing beside Applejack trying to catch Twilight’s attention while maintaining the right level of cool for a young dragon. Twilight hugged him hardest of all.
“Take good care of the library while I’m gone, okay?” she said to him.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, “the library is safe in my very dependable, very responsible claws.”
“Well,” said Princess Celestia, rising from her place, “shall we be going?”
“Yes,” said Twilight, “I’m ready.” The two hefty suitcases containing everything Twilight would need—books, chemistry set, telescope, scrolls, quills—floated down from the top floor of the library, then vanished in a flash of light.
Celestia turned to address Twilight’s friends. “Remember that you are all very welcome to visit Twilight while she is under my tutelage.” She gave Twilight a meaningful look. “I will make sure she has just as much time for her friends as she does for learning to be a princess.”
“We will, Princess,” Applejack said.
Twilight gave one last wave to her friends, then, hoof still in the air, disappeared to Canterlot alongside Princess Celestia.
Twilight lay in bed watching the ceiling, the moonlight streaming through the high window and falling across her face. She had lain in this bed unable to fall asleep many times before, giddy at the prospect of Princess Celestia teaching her a new spell in the morning. So why did it feel so different now? Why, instead of excitement, did she feel like she was about to step out on to thin ice?
Her wings were making it impossible to get comfortable. If she turned to either side, one would be trapped between her and the bed. Twilight sprang to her hooves, abandoning the idea of getting an early night’s sleep before her big first day of learning to be an Equestrian princess. No wonder pegasi sleep on clouds.
She trotted to the window and looked up at the stars in the clear night sky. When she first moved to Ponyville, she had set up her telescope poking through one of the large knotholes in the library, and whenever she was struck by a burst of insomnia she would chart the stars, comparing her observations against the historical astrological record some time during the following day. It was a quiet, solitary activity that demanded a calm mindset to engage in it properly; life’s problems seemed very small when thinking at the speed of drifting stars.
Unfortunately, the patch of sky Twilight had been observing was blocked by a stone wall. She would have to hang halfway out the window to even catch a glimpse of it from inside her room. Of course, there was nothing stopping her from going out to one of the open sections of Canterlot Castle and setting up her telescope there, just for tonight. It would take a little bit of working to calculate for the difference in position between here and the library—but it would be a lot more productive than lying in bed willing herself to fall asleep.
Twilight’s telescope case and star journal followed behind her in a magical bubble as she left to find a quiet platform on the upper level of the castle.
“Just need to lower the declination a little… there, that’s better…”
Twilight turned away from the eyeglass to check her notes and nearly collided with somepony. She had become so engrossed in adjusting her telescope that she hadn’t realized she was no longer alone.
“Princess Luna!” she exclaimed.
“What are you doing, Twilight Sparkle?” Luna asked. She seemed more curious than accusatory. “It is late.”
“Well, I couldn’t sleep, and when I can’t sleep I look at the stars, but the window in my room isn’t facing the right way, so I came out here, and… oh no! I’m not in the way, am I?”
“You are not.” Luna regarded the telescope with tilted head. “I was merely curious about the… nature of your device. It aids you in tracking stars, you said?”
“Well, it doesn’t do just that. A telescope is used for observing objects in the sky. There’s a series of lenses inside that magnify the image, so the stars are more detailed than just looking at them.”
“Interesting.” Luna continued to evaluate the telescope with her impassive gaze.
Twilight scanned the sky, searching for the star the telescope was focused on. “I've been tracking the area around that one there,” she said, pointing. “It’s—”
“Canis Major,” Luna said without hesitation, “the Dog Star.”
“You know it?” Twilight asked.
“I know some things about the night sky, yes,” Luna said. The shadow of a wry smile crossed her face.
“Right,” Twilight said, glancing over at her notes.
“Do you observe the stars often?” Luna asked after a moment of silence.
“Just when I have trouble sleeping.”
“So you said. Is this common?”
“I don’t know…” She thought about the times she watched the sky in the dark. It briefly occurred to her to ask her how Luna had felt when she was inexperienced at being a princess, but something in her watchful eyes made Twilight hold her tongue. “Maybe,” she concluded.
“Must you stay awake through the night for your observations?” Luna put a hoof on one of the legs of the telescope. “Your… telescope cannot see the stars by day?” Her use of the new word came with awkward stresses in the wrong places.
“It can’t, but I don’t mind. I like doing things at night. It’s peaceful, a pony can be alone with her thoughts. You know?”
“Hm,” was the only response Luna gave. She turned her attention to a part of the sky slightly off to the west of Canis Major. “Look there,” she said in a low voice, and pointed.
“I don’t see—” Twilight began to say, but then she did: a bright streak arced across the sky, followed by half a dozen more. Each falling star blazed through a rapid spectrum of colors before burning out and vanishing.
“Oh, wow!” Twilight said when the last meteor had disappeared. “A meteor shower! That was so cool! I didn’t expect to— How did you know that was going to happen?”
She looked up at Princess Luna, who just gave a cryptic smile. “Some things one simply knows.” She stepped away from Twilight and the telescope and said, “I will allow you to continue your observations uninterrupted. Have a pleasant night, Twilight Sparkle.”
“You too, Princess.”
Twilight watched Luna walk away, then checked the telescope and jotted down her observations on the Dog Star. As she wrote her notes, the ants marched on.
Later, when Twilight lay down in the bed in her old room in Canterlot Castle, she found what Princess Luna had said to her—some things one simply knows—galloping through her mind. Was that what being a princess was like? Not to study and observe and memorize, but to simply know? That phrase was still in her thoughts as she sank into sleep.
Twilight rose from her bed without taking her eyes from the window. Normally, after a full night’s sleep, the sun would be shining through it, just about reaching the edge of the bed. She had relied on the sun waking her when she had been staying at the castle, learning magic from Princess Celestia. She knew how the sun should look in this room.
But there was no sun. The sky was dark, the stars obscured by clouds the color of fresh bruises, with no hint of the coming sunrise. This alone might have been possible to explain away—sleeping in a place she hadn’t seen in over two years, somewhere both familiar and unfamiliar creating disruptions in her sleeping pattern—but there was no explanation for the vast canopy that covered Canterlot.
In place of the walkways and buildings Twilight should have been able to see, there was a dense jungle. Trees grew in place of streets. Towers were covered in creeping vines and moss. Twilight pushed open her window, and the sounds of a rumbling storm greeted her. The horizon was obscured by rain. It would take all the weather ponies from all the surrounding areas to orchestrate a storm like this, and the time it would take to organize… impossible for a single night. She closed her eyes for a long moment. Perhaps when she opened them, she would wake from her dream.
When the forest and the storm remained, that left only one option: report to Princess Celestia. She opened the door to her bedroom and found the stone hallway strangled by roots and vines. It was almost unrecognizable as somewhere inside Canterlot Castle; it was closer to the Everfree Forest. Creepers wound along the walls, blocking any light from the sconces—assuming the candles could remain lit in such a confined space. A massive root had pushed its way through the floor, cracking the intricate jigsaw of tiles. The smell of plants—of wilderness, of being outdoors—was everywhere. Warm air flowed from the corridor, heated by the biomass, mingling with the cold breeze from the storm outside.
Twilight stepped into the hallway. She gave a brief thought to the spell that made light, and felt a strange sensation in the tip of her horn. It reminded her of the feeling of trotting up one too many steps in a staircase and putting a hoof down where the last step should have been. The passage around her remained dim, lit only some luminescent fungus growing along the big root.
“What…?” she said to nopony. Twilight really concentrated on the light spell, harder than she had since perfecting it so she could stay up late reading under her covers. A very faint glow emerged for a second, wavered, and then faded. She frowned, and closed her eyes to picture the room she had just left, blocking out the plants, the storm, the darkness. All of her magical strength focused, she tried teleporting back into the bedroom, and felt something like an impossibly heavy weight tied around her midsection anchoring her in place. She staggered and fell against the mossy wall, sucking in air. It felt like being hit by a train.
“Okay,” Twilight said out loud, trying to lead her thoughts away from being nauseous, “okay. No magic. Okay. No sunlight.” She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Okay. That’s no reason to panic.”
Yet, a bitter little part of her whispered.
Back in the bedroom, she opened up the armoire in the far corner. It should still be in here, surely nopony would have moved it… aha! Underneath a pile of folded blankets was a lantern. She had read many books by its glow prior mastering the spell for light, and it had been stowed away unused ever since. It even had a half-melted candle and a tinderbox tucked inside. She fumbled with the tinder, long out of practice, but managed to set a flame burning after a couple of awkward attempts. The lantern lit the bedroom, and Twilight was suddenly transported back to being a filly, recognizing the way the room looked in the shaky flame.
She pushed away the thoughts of the castle once again being a daunting unfamiliar place and of being without her magic, and took the lantern handle in her mouth. Okay, she thought to herself, now to find the Princess.
This journey was the longest it had ever taken her to reach the throne room. The vines and roots were so thick on the walkways that every step was treacherous, even with the lantern to light the way. Vines that looked like they would break easily would tangle or trip, and others that looked like they could be stepped on snapped and buried a hoof in a gnarled mess. Every time Twilight would jolt or snag, the lantern would swing back and forth, making wild shadows dance among the creepers. The second set of stairs proved especially difficult as the huge root wound its way down most of the staircase, forcing Twilight to inch between it and the outer wall with barely enough room to move on the narrowed stairway. Once her hoof slipped, and for one heart-stopping second she thought she was going to tumble the rest of the way down, but she managed to brace against the big root and stop herself. Heart beating fast, she made it to the lower level unscathed.
The walkway that toured around the gardens was a little easier to navigate, plants pouring into the freedom of the open air, but the gardens themselves were unrecognizable. The neat rows of flowers were replaced by giant trees, their branches broad enough to scrape against the castle walls. Rain sluiced down weathered roots that began up their trunks far above Twilight’s head and disappeared into a dense network of ugly plants with broad leathery leaves and trumpet-like flowers in an unhealthy shade of orange. They formed a canopy at about flank-height, perfect for concealing ground covered in treacherous ankle-snapping roots. Twilight followed the open walkway; she had to step carefully around the odd vine or two, but compared to the stairs down it was practically galloping through an open field, and she quickly reached the archway at the entrance of the throne room. She ducked under a trail of moss and stepped inside.
In the throne room, more trees stretched all the way to the high ceiling, their branches bursting through the giant picture-windows. Colored glass lay among the roots. Twilight crossed the large hall, past the empty throne coated in ivy to the alcove behind, to the door that opened on the endless winding stairs up to the Princess’ bedchamber. The door was slightly ajar, but when Twilight went to push past it she found it wedged in place by a snarl of roots. She tried to work a hoof into the gap to pry the door open and slipped against the moss-slick surface, losing her balance and dropping the lantern. Twilight heard the sound of glass breaking, then the room went dark. A piece of the lantern rolled into the door, striking it with a dull thud that echoed through the throne room. As if in response, branches stirred in the wind.
Twilight groaned and went to pull her hoof back. It caught in the doorway. “Oh, come on,” she muttered. She closed her eyes and exhaled loudly, and when she opened her eyes she found it wasn’t as difficult to see as it should have been on a clouded night. She tried to turn to see where the light was coming from, her trapped hoof knocking and scraping against the door. More luminescent fungus grew up the trunks of the trees in spiraling tracks. The sound of rustling branches came again, with something else mixed in. Something that sounded like…
Slowly, Twilight turned her attention away from the trunks of the trees to around their base. Glowing eyes were watching her, and a low rumbling growl filled the room. She suddenly became very aware of her breathing, and how loud and fast it had become.
The first timberwolf emerged from the murky trees. Its eyes shone with an inner brightness that outstripped the flickering light of the doused candle. It was followed by two more, while others skulked in the darkness. She could smell their breath, a damp rotten odor like dead trees full of feasting fat grubs.
That’s impossible, her mind stupidly insisted, timberwolves don’t live in Canterlot.
Before another thought could come to her, the alpha lunged.
Twilight jerked away as best she could, the timberwolf’s jaws snapping down on air where her hind leg had been half a second before. She tried to buck at its head with both legs, but she was positioned all wrong with her head up against the wall, and only glanced its muzzle. The two others circled on either side. Twilight kicked wildly into her blind spot, trying to keep the largest one in view. Hunting behavior, her mind spoke up, unable to keep the thought away. Hunting behavior. They are hunting.
And then the shape came out of the darkness.
It was something much larger than any of the timberwolves, that much was clear when it descended on the one right behind Twilight. The sounds of scuffle and struggle cut through the growling. Twilight tried to turn herself to see what was happened, tried to wrench herself free, but she remained stuck. The shape was dark, and now it stood between her and the timberwolves. Dark, with stars like the night sky in its mane.
Twilight watched Princess Luna rear up on her hind legs, transfixed. Her wings were flared, and at that exact moment lightning lit the sky and turned the Princess into a massive black silhouette cast over the timeberwolf pack. Time slowed, the moment frozen in the air along with the Princess of the Moon. Then it came to an abrupt end with Luna’s hooves crashing to the ground like thunder. The timberwolves scattered, melting into the dark shadows of the trees.
Luna turned to Twilight, towering over her. Twilight could see her taking long, even breaths. “Are you hurt?” she asked.
“No.”
“Do you require some assistance?” she asked, lifting an eye to the overgrown door.
“Yes.”
With Luna bracing against the door, Twilight was able to pull her hoof free. She examined her leg; there was a shallow cut she hadn’t felt while she had been struggling that was beginning to sting. “This is really happening, isn’t it?” she asked.
“It is no dream,” Luna replied.
Twilight found she could feel her heart still beating fast. She knew timberwolves could be dangerous, but only to ponies that stumbled too deep into their territory. This was Canterlot! And just how many had there been? It seemed like there were hundreds of glowing eyes in the darkness. She hoped with a fluttery desperation that her memory was incorrect.
Luna was inspecting the door to the stairway. “I had planned to check on my sister, but it appears the way is barred.” She placed a hoof against the door, pressing on it to test its strength. “Perhaps together, we may be able to kick it free.”
“Wait, your magic doesn’t work either?” Twilight asked, a sudden knot constricting her stomach.
“Only at a fraction of its intended strength. My abilities are severely limited.” She glanced at one of the broken windows. “Though, perhaps flight would be unwise” As if in response, thunder rumbled from the clouds.
“Uh, yeah,” Twilight half-heartedly agreed. She could just manage to fly level on a calm sunny day; the howling winds of the storm would probably send her into a tailspin the moment she got airborne.
Luna positioned herself to face away from the door, then looked at Twilight. “Upon the count of three?”
The tower stairs were deeper and wider than the ones leading down from Twilight’s room, so the vines were easier to avoid and the moss less likely to be the cause of a near-fatal slip. Twilight kept stealing glances at Luna by the light of the fungus, but her expression remained unchanging, unreadable; if she was concerned for her sister, she didn’t let it show. How many years would it take, she wondered, to hide my emotions if somepony I loved was in danger?
When they came to the room at the very top, they found it much the same as the rest of the castle: overgrowing with wild plants, and quite empty. The rain falling on the open balcony and the cold wind that came with it made the room seem like an abandoned ruin.
Twilight looked around, hoping her eye would land on some clue among the overgrowth. “I don’t understand,” she said, mostly to herself, “have you even heard of anything like this ever happening? I know I never have. Where would you even begin trying to figure it out?”
“Perhaps,” Luna said in a soft voice, “there.”
She was looking across the balcony. Twilight stood beside her. Through the haze of rain, the shape of a gargantuan tree loomed. It towered over the landscape, reaching up into the clouds, its branches spread out wide enough to create a shelter from the storm over what must have been all of Ponyville. It looked like a giant umbrella. It might have been funny, under different circumstances.
“Where is that?” Twilight asked, indicating the base of the giant tree, although she feared she already knew the answer.
“It appears it is growing from the Everfree Forest,” Luna said.
“What is that?”
The drumming rain made Luna’s pause seem incredibly long. “I have no idea,” she said at last.
“What kind of spell do you think did this?” Twilight asked as they neared the base of the stairs.
“I believe it was no spell at all.”
“But… but there’s no plants in Equestria—in anywhere—that can grow so quickly! This couldn’t have happened in one night.”
“It could,” Luna said, “if the night were long enough.”
Twilight voiced her sudden realization. “If our magic doesn’t work, then the moon can’t be lowered and the sun can’t be raised… Wait, so we might have been asleep the whole time while the plants took over Canterlot? How long would that take?”
“It is difficult to estimate. Many years. Possibly lifetimes, if the tree from the Everfree Forest grew naturally.”
Lifetimes? “Does that mean that everypony else could be…” She couldn’t bring herself to say what she was thinking. “…Gone?”
“That is unlikely.” Luna stepped around the remains of a stain-glass window without taking her eyes away from the path ahead of her. “Without the cycle of the moon and sun, life remains in stasis. There is no decay, no entropy, no passage of time. Even if we were asleep a thousand years, it would still only be a single night that passed when the sun is next raised.”
Twilight suddenly felt very small, the way she did sometimes when she watched the stars. “I didn’t know that.”
“Few do.” Luna looked at Twilight. “There are now three ponies that know what happens when the moon is not lowered to make way for the sun.”
Twilight lapsed into silent contemplation. An uncomfortable image was stuck in her head of a fly drowning in honey; first struggling, then tiring, and finally sinking, all at an impossibly slow pace. Suspended. Preserved. Had this happened to Equestria? Maybe a brief resistance, and then… nothing?
That might be why everypony else is missing, the dark part of her mind insisted.
But if everything’s suspended… then why…?
“Princess Luna—” Twilight began.
“Luna.”
“Hm?”
“You need not maintain the formality,” Luna said, “of addressing me as ‘princess’.”
“Oh. Sorry pr—” Twilight shut her eyes and sighed, then looked at Luna. “Sorry, Luna.” She briefly wondered if Cadance had suffered a similar problem.
“There is no need to apologize. You were about to say something?”
Twilight remembered what her thought had been. “The trees.”
“What about them?”
“If there’s no change, then how did the trees grow?”
Luna paused in her stride. “This I had not considered. Ponies and other creatures, yes, but the plants themselves…” Her voice was grave, ominous. “This makes the matter of their growth all the more worrying.”
The covered section of the walkway came to an end, torn down by a sea of kudzu. Rainwater washed over the uneven path, flowing down from the mountain and through the broken sections in the crumbling low wall on the other side. Twilight and Luna exchanged a glance, then stepped out into the rain together.
The walkway overlooked the levels of city built into the side of the mountain, each growing broader and wider as they descended down. Under normal circumstances it would have been faster to travel through the city rather than over it, but with the inner hallways turned into tunnels filled with roots, the longer route had seemed the most direct.
Somehow, neither of them had considered the rain as a factor.
Twilight flicked her mane out of her eyes and angled her head away from the direction of the downpour. The rain was as cold as the wind that came with it, but she wasn’t about to let it beat her. It wasn’t like she had never been wet before.
Luna, meanwhile, managed to keep facing rigidly forward into the torrent. Aside from her mane pooling close to the ground, heavy and slick with water, she looked unchanged.
They were about halfway to the sheltered passageway on the other side of the open section, stepping carefully through rushing water, when Luna asked, “Do you hear that?”
For a moment all Twilight heard was the rain, but then she was able to pick out a second sound: the low mournful howl of timberwolves. The two ponies turned in unison to see a mass of dark shapes descending down the slope of the mountain. It looked like the forest had come to life, liquid as the pouring rain.
“If we make a loud noise,” Twilight said, trying to keep her voice calm, “and focus all our attention on the alpha of the pack, we might scare them off again.”
The timberwolves spread over the path, blocking the way Twilight and Luna had come. The largest, the alpha striding at the head of the pack, locked eyes with Twilight, its rumbling growl mixing with the sound of drumming rain. For a moment all Twilight could see were its ethereal green eyes, level with her own with its massive bark head lowered.
Without needing a signal, she and Luna acted. Twilight reared on her hind legs and roared, an incoherent primal noise that took the fear sitting in the pit of her stomach and turned it outwards against the timberwolves. Luna flared her wings and used the full power and majesty of the Royal Canterlot Voice, commanding the alpha with reverberating imperatives of GET BACK and STAY DOWN.
For a second, Twilight thought they had been successful. Then the alpha snapped its gnarled jaws and snarled, making a noise of pure aggression, and the rest of its pack responded in kind. In the throne room, Twilight suddenly realized, sound could echo. Here it will all just vanish in the rain.
“What’s our plan B?” Twilight asked, taking a step backwards away from the advancing horde.
“Flee,” Luna said without hesitation.
So they did.
Twilight’s hooves pounded on the path, sending bursts of water into the air as she ran. The noises of the timberwolf pack baying and snarling sounded like they were surrounding her, but still she galloped without looking back. Her eyes were focused on the entrance to the building at the end of the mountain path. It was only a few furlongs away. If she and Luna could get there, they might be able to get behind a door, or lose the timberwolves somehow. They had to be able to. Had to.
The sluicing rainwater hid a traitorous obstacle course of thick weeds and vines. One of Twilight’s hooves caught on something and she went sprawling on to ground. As she scrambled to stand Twilight saw she had outpaced the timberwolves more than she had thought, but they were still near enough to close the distance in mere seconds.
Almost to the building. Twilight chanced a glance behind her and looked into the baleful eye of a timberwolf. She had to twist her body to move her hind leg out of the reach of its jagged maw. The sound of its jaw snapping shut was audible over the pouring rain and the grunting and growling of the pack. Luna passed beneath the ivy-clad archway in a single graceful movement and Twilight followed, steps behind her. Right inside the structure was a stairwell. There was no time to take each step gingerly; Twilight collided with Luna and they both slid down the stairs on a chute made of slick vines as if it were a helter skelter. Twilight spilled onto the lower level, ready to keep running, but Luna turned and stood her ground. Wings outstretched, she issued a deafening challenge to the first timberwolves starting down the overgrown stairwell.
“The first down shall receive a sound thrashing! I will kick your pack to splinters wolf by wolf! Hear the command of the Princess of the Night and obey! BEGONE!”
The timberwolves could only descend the stairs single-file, and with Luna guarding the exit, their prospects must have suddenly looked a lot less appealing than chasing down two ponies in the open. But they couldn’t stay here with Luna shouting up at the pack, Twilight realized. The stairwell exited out to a pavilion filled with trees; at its edge ran a wall topped with the walkway they had just galloped over. The timberwolves could just scale down the vine-covered section of the wall, and once they realized that, the little alcove at the base of the stairs would offer little protection. They could make a dash across the pavilion, but with all the trees it would be an environment more suited to the timberwolves.
Or, Twilight realized as she noticed the faint glow of mushrooms coming from a passageway leading into the mountain, they could disappear into the tunnels.
“Luna!” Twilight shouted. “This way!”
She ducked into the passageway, not thinking about what would happen were it to be a dead end or if the roots grew too thick inside to pass by or a million other things that could go wrong. Following the fungus-lights along the passage, Twilight was quickly reduced to edging along with her head lowered in the dark. She heard a dull knock, followed by a sharp intake of breath: Luna was right behind her, not managing to duck under a root Twilight had passed beneath.
The passage hooked to the side and opened into a wider chamber. Roots and moss covered the walls, and a giant luminescent mushroom grew from the ceiling like a natural chandelier. Another flight of stairs leading down began at the far side of the room, and a second passageway led back outside. Twilight crossed the lit chamber to inspect it, wary that the timberwolf alpha might be out there, waiting to catch sight or scent of them. Roots grew around a stone bench in the passageway, blocking any access.
Twilight turned back to Luna, who was looking at the mushroom on the ceiling. “I think,” Twilight said, pausing to catch her breath, “we lost them.”
“It would seem avoiding open terrain is the safest option.” Luna tilted her head, her damp mane falling to one side in a straggled rope. “It will be fortunate to also avoid the weather.”
“I think I might be able to do something about that,” Twilight said, then when Luna glanced at her with a raised eyebrow, she clarified: “Your mane. Not the weather. Could you kneel down a bit?”
Luna did so, her curious expression never wavering. Twilight went to her side. “Just look forward, and keep your head still. Now, how did this go…?” She took Luna’s mane and began coiling it into a thick wet rope. The large mushroom made seeing what she was doing easy, but the silence filled only with the sound of distant rain caused her to fumble. “That was really impressive,” she said, trying to imagine they were somewhere more normal—the library, for example—and were having a normal conversation. “With the timberwolves.” A little scary, her mind insisted on adding, bringing with it the image of a little colt from Trottingham, but impressive.
“It is your quick thinking that should be praised. Were this an ordinary night, they would not dare challenge me in such a fashion in my domain.” Twilight could feel the change in Luna’s voice when she spoke next, her flash of anger turning to introspection. “But, this is no ordinary night, and I fear it is my domain no longer. Tell me, Twilight: stripped of my magic, my subjects, and my kingdom, can you still believe me a princess of Equestria?”
“Your kingdom is still here,” Twilight said, “underneath the trees. And you still have one subject.” As she pulled Luna’s starry mane into place, she added: “You’re still my princess.”
“Perhaps that is enough.” Twilight couldn’t be certain, but it sounded as if Luna were smiling.
After a long pause, Twilight said, “I fixed your mane.” She had wound Luna’s mane into a tight knot at the back of her head, folding it over itself and using its own weight to hold it in place. Luna shifted her head from side to side, testing her new manestyle, then probed it carefully with a hoof.
“Most practical… how came you by this talent, Twilight?”
“I read it in Slumber 101: All You Ever Wanted To Know About Slumber Parties But Were Afraid To Ask. It said, and I quote, that giving a pony a new manestyle was is expression of trust, and an important bonding ritual. But this is the only manestyle from the examples I could get right every time when I practiced.”
“How fortuitous.” Luna got to her hooves. “Do you wish to lead the way?”
The flight of stairs that led them even further into the mountain Canterlot Castle was built upon was free of creepers and vines pushing their way in from the outside, and only in one place did the roots become difficult. Instead the stairwell was covered in the luminescent mushrooms, glowing and pulsing across a wide spectrum of color. Twilight had been to this area of Canterlot before—the day earlier it had been a shopping district, with an open market in the pavilion and niche boutiques and specialty stores branching off the subterranean passageways—and she had always found it stuffy and claustrophobic, even the bookstore with its collection of first editions displayed proudly in a glass case above the counter. Under the light of tens of thousands of mushroom caps instead of a dozen or so candles, the Canterlot hallway was transformed to a tunnel from an alien world.
“Such abundant growth…” Luna mused as they followed the passage along the curve of the mountain. “What causes them to thrive?”
“We must be near the roots of the bigger trees,” Twilight said. “Lots of fungus needs other plants to feed from. Maybe there’s more mushrooms because there’s more trees?”
“Perhaps,” Luna said, her eye catching on a sizeable orange mushroom, “but this still leaves us the problem of the size of the trees.”
“Or,” said Twilight, brightening suddenly, “or, what if it’s the other way around? What if the fungus makes the trees grow? Before I left Ponyville, I saw an ant with a strange fungal growth on its back. I’d never seen anything like it before, and I’ve never heard of mushrooms like these either. It’s a bit of a longshot that they’re connected, but…”
“No, it is a reasonable hypothesis. The fungus appears omnipresent among the flora. But if it is stimulating the plants to grow—”
“That would put it outside of the normal cycle of growth and decay, wouldn’t it?”
“It would.” Luna’s voice darkened. “Which raises some very troubling questions on its origins.”
“How do you mean?”
“The cycle of night and day, life and death was a creation of my sister and I. We—”
Twilight was floored. “You…” She had always assumed that universal concepts like that were… well, that they came with the universe. “How is that possible?”
“During Discord’s rule of Equestria, his intrinsic opposition of reality permanently altered reality. With him having free reign to do as he would, the laws of time, space, matter, magic, they ceased to be laws, reduced to mere suggestions. Celestia and I, using the combined magics of the three pony races to tap into the source of that magic, created a new set of fundamental underpinnings of Equestria, beginning with the cycle of the sun and moon as the cause of time passing. With a framework established, it became possible to reduce Discord's sphere of influence, and eventually unseat him and cast him in stone.”
As far as revelations Twilight had experienced went, this one rivaled both getting her wings and becoming Princess Celestia’s personal student. “But,” she protested weakly, “there’s history that goes back pre-Discord…”
“Fragments,” Luna said, “relics recovered from the chaos, distorted by word-of-mouth legend. There is no clear picture of life in Equestria before Discord’s reign.”
“You don’t remember anything from before Discord?”
“I do not. It is possible my sister and I were six separate ponies fused during the period of chaos, or that we were beings completely different from our current forms. Equestria may not have even been populated with ponies, even if it were anything like the Equestria we know. I may have never existed before the moment I suddenly appeared in the broken universe.”
“And you’re… alright with that?”
“I have had many years to accept that some things are unknowable. Ultimately, Twilight, origin is irrelevant. Action is what is important.”
Twilight nodded her head slowly, feeling unqualified to add comment. She had known alicorn magic was extremely powerful, beyond the scope of what even the most talented unicorns were capable of, but to reshape the world… to dictate the logic of the universe…
“But if the fungus comes from outside the natural order of things,” Luna said, picking up the thread of their previous conversation as if it had never strayed from the original topic, “then it is likely to only have one origin.”
“What?”
“Chaos.”
“You think Discord did this?”
“No, not precisely. Some aspects of his chaos lingered after Equestria regained structure. There was one place in Equestria that refused to obey order, and so retains a hint of that former chaos. A place that ignores the command of ponies.”
The similarities Twilight had hoped she had only been imagining suddenly seemed undeniable. “…It’s the Everfree Forest, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Untamed, untouched. Ever free. Canterlot was purposely placed within watching distance. Though, “she said, eyeing one of the larger mushrooms, “perhaps we did not watch close enough.”
They found a chamber similar to the one with the great mushroom on a lower layer to make camp, though this one was lit by a faint glow from beneath the roots that neither Twilight nor Luna could determine the direct source of. Twilight lay down on a nest of roots to sleep, while Luna stood facing the passageway they had crawled through.
In her dream, Twilight was back at the Ponyville library. She was reading aloud from a book entitled Princess 101: All You Ever Wanted To Know About Alicorns But Were Afraid To Ask, but all the pages were blank. When she lowered the book, she saw she was standing in front of the mirror she hardly even used that hung on the back of her closet door. From inside the mirror, Nightmare Moon looked back at her.
Travel though the underground was slow meticulous work. The passages did not reach deep into the mountain, built with the assumption that ponies could travel freely through the open sections of Canterlot to reach different levels. Finding a clear path required significant amounts of retracing steps, backing through tunnels to take a separate fork because the first one chosen was collapsed or blocked by roots or simply went no further. At every point when it became necessary to venture outside, they paused by the opening, listening for the sounds of the timberwolf pack. It felt to Twilight like they were spending hours standing still in silence and darkness, waiting for a distant howl to cut through the rain.
On their second “night” of travel, the passageways took them past granaries and pantries, emptied after the winter. What supplies would normally be there were consumed by the spreading fungus, spores swelling sacks of flour and barrels of oats until they burst. A vat of grain had spilled its contents over the floor, and from each separate pod grew a thin filament stalk topped by a tiny white cap. It looked like some obsessive pony had come by and marked each grain’s place with a long fine needle, in case they needed to be put back the way they were.
They rested in a dead end a long distance from the last branch in the tunnels. Twilight lay her head on a patch of dry moss, looking at one of the protruding roots covered in mushroom caps. “Luna,” she asked, “if you weren’t a princess… what would you do?”
“I… am unsure of your meaning, Twilight.”
“Well, just say weren’t a princess any more. That you didn’t have to raise the moon, or look into other ponies’ dreams, or anything. What would you do?”
Twilight could hear Luna considering. “I don’t rightly know.”
“Oh.”
“Perhaps I would work on reclaiming my title,” Luna said at last.
A long moment of speechlessness passed between them, the sound of dripping water echoing up the tunnel.
“I know what my sister would do,” said Luna, and when Twilight failed to respond, added: “She would knit.”
“Knit? Like, making socks and things?”
“Yes. She is quite taken with knitting.”
Twilight tried to picture Princess Celestia with a pair of needles and a ball of yarn. “I’m having a hard time imagining that.”
“She does not have opportunity to indulge her hobby often.” Another long pause, then: “What would you do, Twilight?”
Twilight sighed and closed her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said, although she did.
“Perhaps you also want for equilibrium,” Luna mused. Her voice was calm, even. “Perhaps you simply wish for things to return to the way they were.”
“Maybe,” Twilight whispered.
“Twilight,” Luna said, resting a hoof on Twilight’s flank with a light touch, “look here.” Twilight turned her head. “Is this an image of the moon?”
“No, it—”
“Or the sun?”
“No.”
“Or a heart?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“No, it is not. It is an image that represents magic itself. Magic and all its aspects are an inseparable part of you, and it will always have led you to the road you now walk. This is and always has been your destiny.”
“Did Princess Celestia know that, when she took me as her student?”
“She may have suspected.”
“Then why not just tell me?” Twilight asked. “I would have been prepared, so then…” She trailed off, finishing the thought in her mind: So then I wouldn’t be so afraid of doing something wrong.
“Twilight, have you ever read a single story of a pony who knew their own destiny and was better off for it? Given great power and foresight, the wisest course is often to let events play out on their own.”
“…That’s the sort of thing I’ll be learning, isn’t it?”
“That is the sort of wisdom that comes with experience.” Luna looked into Twilight’s eyes. “You have the makings of a wise and just leader, and a great princess. I do not have my doubts that, in time, you shall surpass us all.”
A shadow of a smile appeared on Twilight’s face. “…Does Celestia really like to knit?” she asked.
“Never insinuate that your horn is ever cold,” Luna said with utmost seriousness, “or you will be wearing a procession of gaudy horn-warmers for many winters.”
Twilight’s smile blossomed, and Luna smiled with her. She was able to perfectly picture Luna with a wooly cone perched awkwardly on her horn.
After sleeping, they followed the crooked passage back out to where it led to an open area covered in the leathery plants with the orange flowers. The smell of rain was a welcome change to the musty underground of earth and dripping roots, but there was a second scent lurking beneath the rain, one of rot and decay. Both Twilight and Luna noticed it, and wordlessly they pressed closer against the walls, waiting. It wasn’t long before they saw the first timberwolf pad among the ugly flowers, green eyes shining through the haze of rain. The pack moved silently through the underbrush; Twilight made an attempt to count their numbers, but gave up when some of the sets of floating, glowing eyes doubled back across the patch of ground she could see. She had made it into the thirties, and was fairly sure she had marked less than half of them.
What were timberwolves? She hadn’t seen any other animals around Canterlot, even though an area as heavily covered in jungle as this should have been teeming with wildlife. Whatever had caused them to go into hiding had clearly not done the same for timberwolves. Perhaps it was because they were more plant than animal? Maybe, as creations of the chaotic Everfree Forest, they were both and neither at the same time.
She waited a long time with Luna, wondering.
After three intervals of travel and sleep, they emerged from the underground on the level of Canterlot closest to the ground. The last they had heard from the timberwolves had been far in the distance back up the mountain, but they were still cautious stepping out into the rain. Twilight recognized the pattern among the bricks between weeds and roots: it was the grand road that led up to the steps to Canterlot Castle, which meant they were near the gates to the city.
They were making their way past a fallen column covered in moss and mushroom spores when Luna paused in her tracks. Twilight paused, about to ask why Luna had stopped, but then noticed what she was fixated on. Through the hole the fallen column left in the canopy, Canterlot Castle was visible in the distance, wrapped and bound in vines and creepers.
“It is difficult to see Canterlot in such a manner,” Luna said, her voice devoid of emotion. “This was the fate of our first castle. We built it within the heart of Everfree in a misguided effort to keep the region stable. It rebelled, and turned the gardens and the wildlife against us. It was then Celestia decided it would be prudent to leave the observation of the Everfree Forest to a safe distance.”
“It won’t stay that way,” Twilight reassured her.
“It shall not,” she agreed, and she started to walk again.
Past the column and around the next corner lay a rusted tangle of metal, its golden color nearly impossible to see through the coat of moss. It was half of the gate at the entrance to Canterlot, fallen from its place while its twin hung from the city’s walls only by lashings of vines. Beyond those walls, the jungle waited.
After leaving Canterlot, the ground still sloped away for some distance. Twilight knew this, though it was impossible to see where flat ground began through the dense jungle. In the city, the walkways and halls had been choked by vines and creepers; outside, in areas that would normally have been covered with clean fields of grass, grew giant trees. Their trunks were nearly the size of the magically-adjusted Ponyville library. Their thick canopy blotted out the sky, but the rain found ways down to the ground. It flowed down the trunks of the trees and sprayed off the vines growing there; it cascaded down the base of the mountain, forming turbulent streams that eroded the soil at the base of the great trees to expose a layer of roots. The rivers looked like they may have been possible to wade through despite the current, with some effort, but neither Twilight nor Luna were willing to take the risk on the steep decline. They proceeded down at a slow pace, silent and with heads low to avoid the stray showers of rain and to concentrate on every step.
Twilight envisioned an easier terrain at the point when they reached flat ground; still covered with plants, but less dangerous to move through. This turned out to not be the case. When the surface looked as if it was about to level out, Twilight and Luna were greeted with a swampy undergrowth of moss that greedily drank in all the rainwater. It bloated and swelled at the edges of the streams, and deflated with a wet squelch if either pony put a hoof too close. Twilight feared the ground away from the mountain would be covered in the absorbent moss, but the reality proved more difficult; she and Luna arrived at the edge of what appeared to be a giant lake where she knew no such lake existed. All the rain had collected in the natural basin that lay outside of Canterlot, and now a body of water stood between them and Ponyville. Between them and the tree-colossus.
“How should we proceed?” asked Luna.
“It might not be too deep,” Twilight said, trying to sound hopeful. “We might be able to wade across. Or, if it’s deep enough, we might even be able to swim.”
“Shall we try?” Luna asked.
Wading through the shallows of the lake was easier than stepping around the moss. The water was dark, black in the stormy night. Twilight and Luna’s passage left ripples in the wake of their passage, but the rest of the lake was deathly still with the exception of a few stray places where steady streams of bubbles eked to the surface. Twilight made sure to give these spots a wide berth. The water was cool, but not all that much different from being out in the rain. She could have easily travelled towards Ponyville if the rest of the journey was like this, but it was not to be.
A great splashing sound came from Luna’s direction. Twilight whipped her head around to see what had happened, and in doing so lost her footing and plunged into deep water. The ground had fallen away beneath her, the surface of the water concealing the drop-off. She surfaced and spat out a mouthful of boggy water, and saw Luna emerge in a similar state, wet to her newly-compact mane.
“This is unfortunate,” Luna deadpanned.
Something about the severe understatement of Luna’s words struck a chord within Twilight, and she couldn’t stop herself giggling. Being wet was unfortunate, the slow passage was unfortunate, everything was unfortunate. She saw Luna looking at her as if she had just sprouted a second head, which caused her to break into proper laughter. This was unfortunate indeed. Then Luna began to smile, the ridiculousness and sheer impossibility of the whole situation catching up with both of them, and Twilight laughed even harder. After worming their way beneath Canterlot, being back in the open was a catharsis she hadn’t recognized until she was floating, her hooves suspended from the bottom of the lake.
Twilight took a deep breath, finally controlled. “How deep is it? Do you know?”
“I can just touch the bottom, with some effort.” Luna sank a little to demonstrate, her head half-submerged.
“So now I guess we swim,” Twilight said, shaking her wet mane out of her eyes.
“Now we swim.”
The calm of the lake was eerie. Trees grew from out of the water, rain from above dripping off the glowing mushrooms growing on their trunks. The heavy canopy formed a barrier against the storm, blocking not only the rain but most of the sound of falling raindrops and rolling thunder. Twilight almost wished there was less cover so there would be more sound; the silence broken only by their passage through the water and the mysterious bubbling from beneath the surface was the main cause in making the basin unnerving.
Twilight lost track of time crossing the lake. It could have been hours, days, years. Each tree she had to swim around was a landmark yet each tree was the same. When they finally reached solid land on the far surface, Twilight staggered out of the water and collapsed among the spongy moss, exhausted.
“I think,” she said, pausing to take a deep breath, “we should rest here tonight.”
Luna lay down beside her, exhaling. “Will you take the first watch?”
“Sure,” Twilight said, “I’ll do anything that isn’t more swimming.”
They climbed among the roots of a tree by the edge of the lake, reasoning that anything that wanted to approach them would need to move through either the water or the mossy bank; either would make noise they would hear before anything got close. Free of the water and on a more exposed platform, Twilight found the air was cold, much colder than the passages under Canterlot. Any heat that collected here would just melt into the lake. As if to confirm, Luna gave a soft whinny and shivered as she lay against the tree’s trunk. If they stayed here, still damp from their marathon swim, they’d likely freeze.
Twilight stepped over to Luna’s root and lay down right next to her, pressing in as close to her as she could. Luna’s eyes shot open. “Twilight, what…” she began.
“Body heat,” she said, “we have to share body heat after being in the cold water for so long.”
Twilight thought that Luna might ask her where she had learned this skill, or perhaps question her directness in applying it. Instead, she said after a pause: “Good thinking, Twilight.”
“I’ll still keep watch first,” Twilight said.
“Then you mustn’t fall asleep.”
“I won’t,” she said, but this proved to be a difficult promise to keep: Twilight soon found her eyes falling shut and her head drifting off to the side. Luna was significantly more comfortable than roots and moss.
Trying to blink sleep away, Twilight said, “Talk to me. Tell me something.”
“What should I tell you?” Luna asked
“I don’t know. Anything to keep me awake.”
“I know a thing I would do if I were not a princess.”
“What?”
“I would not go hiking.”
Twilight chuckled. “Me either.”
“Though, I would not be adverse to taking part in an activity with you,” Luna said, “provided it required favorable weather.” Twilight could feel her breath brushing her mane.
“Maybe we could watch the stars,” Twilight suggested. “I’ll bring my telescope.”
“There was a pony I used to watch the stars with. He was very intelligent, gifted, to the point where he would often fixate on a minor detail and be unobservant of the greater situation. Kept his own counsel. He reminds me of somepony my sister spoke to me of, now that I pause to consider.”
“I might know who you mean,” Twilight said with a smirk. “What was his name?”
“Starswirl.”
“Starswirl the Bearded?”
“The same. Though he was not called such when I knew him, for he wore no beard as a young stallion. I was quite fond of him.”
Quite fond? What did that mean? A curious part of Twilight wanted to ask and clarify, but she was concerned that saying anything would draw attention to the heat rising in her face.
“But,” Luna continued, “I do not think he ever knew the extent of my affections. Perhaps he may have suspected, some nights. I shall never know.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?” Twilight asked.
“Perhaps that I shall never know that, either. I’m not sure I would stay my tongue, however, were I to suddenly find myself in my younger self’s horseshoes.”
“Why not?”
“Because the consequences of risk,” Luna said, “are an easier burden than regret. Everything can be chanced, for everything is ephemeral. Nothing is permanent.” A long moment of contemplation passed between both ponies. Finally, Luna broke the silence and said, “I believe I am sufficiently warm.”
“Me too,” said Twilight as she got to her hooves, thinking about just why it was she felt so warm.
Keeping watch was an unentertaining process. Twilight tried to keep her mind occupied, but there was only so many times she could recite favorite passages of books she’d memorized before the cherished turns of phrase all turned to nonsense. She found herself wanting Luna to be awake more and more for her period as guard—which was ironic, for if Luna were awake then Twilight would no longer need to guard her.
Twilight glanced back to Luna’s sleeping form, curled up beneath a tree. The stars in her mane shone with the light of distant fields of fireflies. She wondered if the stars beyond the canopy and the never-ending storm were still up in the sky, still the same stars she had watched.
If we fix everything… if we get rid of all the plants and raise the sun again… will it all really just go back to the way it was? Will it be like nothing out of the ordinary happened? Would anypony be able to tell?
Still looking at the stars in Luna’s mane, Twilight felt somewhere deep down they might, if they knew exactly what to look for.
And then she heard the sound from behind her.
Twilight whipped her head around in the direction of the unmistakable sound of a pony was pulling their hoof free from the boggy moss, and found herself looking at a shape in the darkness. This was no timberwolf, bristling bark hide and radiant eyes, nor was it any other beast native to the depths of the Everfree Forest. A pony stood with one hoof in the mire, watching her. Watching them.
Then the pony-shape turned and bolted back into the shadows.
“Wait!” Twilight called, leaping from the root she had perched on and wading through the moss. She could see the figure weaving through the trees, darting in and out of the ever-present low light of the mushrooms. Galloping as fast as she could through the thick forest, Twilight tried to keep the shadowy pony in view. She heard a splash; the other pony was crossing some separate branch of the lake. Twilight followed in rapid pursuit, calling out again.
The other pony gave no indication they had heard Twilight at all, cutting through the water with a queer fluid grace, growing smaller and smaller in the distance. Twilight was about to redouble her efforts when she heard it. The sound must have been faint and distant when it began, and it must have crept in beneath her conscious understanding, but now with panic beginning to take a hold of her she could hear it clearly. It was a buzzing, roaring sound that was suddenly everywhere around her. The sound of rushing water.
The sound of a waterfall.
“Luna!” she called. She was far from solid ground, she suddenly realized, and she could feel the water no longer being calm. Her eyes darted around for a tree to swim towards, something to hold on to so she wouldn’t be swept away in the growing current, but all of the nearby trees were disappearing in the darkness as she was carried along by the river. It was difficult to see for much of a distance. She was so busily hoping for a trunk sprouting out of the increasingly-rapid water that her eyes skipped right over the slick black rock.
Twilight collided with the rock, and while she felt no pain it knocked the wind from her. She sunk beneath the water, and she fought to the surface, scrabbling to find some grip on the rock that would keep her in place. She burst into the air and took almost a full breath before being driven back into the lake. The roaring of water was a windy howling one moment, then a bubbling jet the next. She was turned by the sudden river, unaware she was upside down until a hoof kicked into the air. A wild crazy thought went through her mind that she wasn’t able to drown, not while time had stopped, and then the world shrunk to a tiny dot in the center of her vision the size of a pinhead. The rest was swirling and black.
The last thing she was aware of was Luna’s voice calling her name.
She was floating up in the night sky, pulled along on a dark raincloud by some invisible force. The raincloud was surprisingly warm on top, though one of her hind legs had sunk into its murky surface and was freezing cold. Every so often it would spark with pain, like it was being jabbed with a lightning bolt, but the pain was distant and somehow not a part of her.
Strange faces appeared in the constellations, faces of ponies she knew, ponies she didn’t know. They were talking but she couldn’t hear anything they were saying; everything was an indecipherable babble. The faces coalesced into the snarling maw of a timberwolf. Its teeth were oddly dull, and when it snapped its jaws together she saw they were lined with drums. It made a deafening pounding noise every time it snarled and barked, and she turned away from the timberwolf in the sky to the water full of stars. She plunged her head into it to escape the pounding noise, but it echoed even under the water. A passing fish pressed something that felt like an ice cube against her forehead, but it was warm to the touch.
Twilight slept on.
For a moment, Twilight thought all of it—the plants, the rain, Princess Luna—had been a vivid dream. She was lying on a comfortable bed, looking at the shine of a pane of glass. She was so caught up in the idea that she was in her room in Canterlot Castle that she failed to notice for a good while after emerging from her vivid dreams that the view from the window was nothing but trees.
“You wake,” came Luna’s voice from behind her.
Twilight tried to turn, and felt a sharp pain in her leg. She looked down at it, and saw it was wrapped in something that looked like seaweed. Luna was at her side, watching her examine the makeshift bandages. Her mane has returned to being unbound, though it looked slightly more unruly than usual.
“I did the best I could with the crude material available to me,” she said. “A splint formed from branches, a paste of healing roots, but they are a poor substitute for the magic I could use, were I at full strength.”
“What happened?” Twilight asked.
“I found you amid the moss downstream, barely conscious. I fear the leg may be broken.”
“My leg kind of hurts still,” Twilight said, “but I don’t know if it feels broken.”
“Pain relief comes from the roots, but they can only do so much. You should not walk on that leg,” Luna said. “After attempting to mend you, I carried you to here.”
Twilight looked around. “Where’s here?” A single candle beside the bed lit the room. The walls were lightly covered in plant growth, making it an unrecognizable space. Twilight briefly wondered if she could have ever been here before.
“I am unsure. A pony’s home, I believe.”
“In Ponyville?”
“Yes.”
Twilight realized the sound of the rain and thunder was gone. They must also be beneath the branches of the gigantic tree. She also realized, now that she looked at Luna instead of around the room, just how worn and strained Luna looked. How long had she been watching her while she slept? Had she stopped?
“Twilight,” Luna said, “when I saw you among the rocks… if you had…” She trailed off, though the words she avoided saying were clear. “…I do not know what I would have done. Twilight, I…” She bit her lip in an uncharacteristically unprincessly gesture.
Twilight looked into Luna’s eyes, seeing in there all the words she was having so much difficulty saying. “…Don’t want to be alone?” she finished for her.
A very faint smile crossed Luna’s face. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I believe I would be very lonely, without you.”
“You should get some rest,” Twilight said.
Luna laughed at this, a short sudden burst. “I must appear quite wretched, indeed.”
“I can keep watch.” Twilight made a motion to get out of the bed, but Luna stopped her.
“No. You too must rest, and heal. The entrances below are barricaded. For the moment, we are safe.” She climbed into the bed beside Twilight, and leaned over to blow out the candle. They lay together side by side as they had in the roots of the tree by the lake, seeking not warmth but comfort.
“Luna?” Twilight said in a soft voice. She was looking out the window at the wavering branches.
“Yes, Twilight?”
“Can I tell you something strange?”
“You may.”
“In a way… in a way I’m kind of glad this happened. I mean, what’s happened is bad, but good things have come out of it, and I’m glad it led to those. You know?”
Luna was very quiet and very still for a long time. “You do not know how I wished for something like this to occur,” she said at last. “To empty the world of the ponies who feared and mistrusted me, and leave behind only the ones who…” Twilight heard her swallow. “…Who understood me. I was a very different pony then, very angry, and this is not at all how I imagined the scenario would unfold. But still,” she said, and Twilight did not have to see her face in the dark to know she was smiling, “I too am glad for things to have happened the way they did.”
Sleep came to the pair quite easily after that.
Twilight was the first to wake. She could feel Luna’s deep regular breathing beside her. There was no reason to get up just yet.
And then she heard the noise, and realized they were not alone in the room.
Two ponies stood just within the doorway, their shapes vague silhouettes.
“Wow,” Twilight said to the shapes, “are we glad to finally see somepony else.” She said this in a voice she hoped was loud enough to bring Luna out of sleep. “We’re sorry if this is your house,” she added. Luna began to stir. The two shapes remained motionless.
Luna lit the candle. The light that had been pleasant before became ominous, ghoulish. Twilight recognized one of the ponies; it was Mr. Cake, of Sugarcube Corner. The other was the pony she had chased into the water, a teal mare whose name escaped her. Both wore identical blank expressions.
“Come with us,” Mr. Cake said. Twilight only knew Mr. Cake in passing—Spike was the one who was the more frequent customer at Sugarcube Corner—but his tone was completely unlike his normal friendly demeanor. His voice was flat, toneless. She heard nothing familiar in it at all.
“We have been waiting for you,” said the teal mare in an identical dead voice. She stepped back through the doorway and performed a mechanical about-face. Luna and Twilight were obviously expected to travel in file between them. Something about that nagged in Twilight’s mind.
“Do we follow?” asked Luna, getting to her feet. Twilight watched her inspect Mr. Cake as she stood, finding him as false as she did. If Mr. Cake noticed, he gave no indication.
“I think we should,” Twilight said, edging to the side of the bed. “We’re likely to be going to the same place we were headed.” She climbed on Luna’s back, careful not to stand on her bad leg.
“Is this true? Do you plan to lead us to the giant tree?” Luna asked Mr. Cake. Again, he remained still, his blank eyes focused intently on a spot on the wall behind Luna.
“I didn’t think we’d get an answer,” Twilight said in a low voice into Luna’s ear. “They’re not exactly… normal.”
Luna took her place between the teal mare and Mr. Cake. Twilight wrapped a leg around Luna’s neck, ready to hold fast if she suddenly needed to bolt.
They descended the stairs of the abandoned house in a column. The teal mare pushed aside the couch Luna had placed against the front door with surprisingly little effort. Twilight wondered for a moment how the two ponies had come in the house. Perhaps they had broken a window? It was possible she and Luna could have slept through that, but the image that came to mind was Mr. Cake opening the back door and pushing aside whatever piece of furniture Luna had put there to keep out timberwolves and other menaces with similar freakish strength. It was disturbingly convincing, and she wanted desperately to find some other explanation that fit better.
Then she saw it. As the teal mare bent to open the door, her mane shifted, revealing a growth on the back of her neck. It was smooth and orange, the same shade as the orange trumpet flowers all over the jungle. The same growth that had been on the back of the ant she had seen on the library door, the last time the sun had been in the sky.
As they marched away from the house in a neat line, something else fell into place for Twilight. Ants travel in columns, too.
“Luna,” Twilight whispered, hoping there was enough distance between them and their two escorts for her words to not be overheard. “That pony—”
“I see it,” Luna murmured.
They walked down what was once the main street of Ponyville. The houses were unrecognizable, looking more like great stones covered in moss. The ground, unlike everywhere else they had seen, was clear of twisting roots, covered only in a light layer of fallen leaves. The natural path seemed to continue in a straight line for some distance, though it was difficult to see clearly in the dark. She turned her eyes upward, looking for the giant tree, but saw only a low layer of branches from the surrounding trees.
The rows of houses ended and were replaced completely by jungle. In Ponyville in its natural state, there was a curved road that led around Sweet Apple Acres and ended near Fluttershy’s cottage at the edge of the Everfree Forest, but that path seemed to have been discarded completely in favor of a more direct route. Their clear passage took them through what would have once been apple orchards, but in place of apple trees gnarled and curled invaders grew. Twilight couldn’t tell where the Apple’s farm ended and the Everfree Forest began. But really, hadn’t they been in the Everfree Forest all along?
They continued in silence down the path, until something that looked like a wall blocking their way loomed in the distance. As they got closer, Twilight realized it was the giant tree, its bark warped and unrecognizable as belonging to any kind of foliage she knew. But something else was strange about it, too. If this was a tree, where were its roots? It was huge, easily as tall as Canterlot Tower and more than double the tower’s width; it should have sunk roots into the ground thick enough to turn the surrounding area into a small hill. If all the other new trees she and Luna had seen along their journey were any indication, it might have pushed roots far out enough to collapse some of the houses in Ponyville from underneath. So where were its roots?
A rough entryway opened in the side of the massive structure before them, lit with a glow that reminded Twilight of the luminescent chamber where she and Luna had been unable to find the source. It disappeared into the tree (if it was a tree). Mr. Cake and the teal mare stood flanking the entrance, staring their vacant stares.
“Proceed,” they said in unison.
Luna stepped past them, eying the teal mare who continued to gaze out into the darkness they had come from. The passage was lit from the inside by that same ethereal light that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. It was enough to see clearly by, but the passage curved sharply, making it difficult to see for any distance even if they had been in full daylight.
“I suspect,” Luna said once they were around the bend and away from their guards, “this not to be a tree at all.”
“Me too. It’s not—” Twilight broke off, because in that instant it had all come to her. The glowing. The lack of roots. The unnatural texture the “bark” had taken. In her mind’s eye, she was back in the Princess’ bedchambers. In the distance, the towering shape had resembled a tree, but that was mainly because of its size and the influence of all the surrounding forest, but what it really looked like, what it really was…
“It’s a mushroom,” Twilight breathed. “It’s not a tree at all. It’s a mushroom.”
“A wholly unnatural one,” Luna commented. “This did not come into being by chance.” She glanced back at Twilight. “Consider ants. Consider the behavior of our escorts. Does it not remind you of—”
“A colony,” Twilight finished. “A hive.”
“Yes. Is it possible the reason we have seen no other ponies is that they have been here, laboring to construct this edifice?”
It made a horrible sort of sense. “But,” Twilight said, “what’s it for? And…” She swallowed. “Why aren’t we helping build it, too?”
“That,” Luna said with resolve, “is what we are here to discover.”
The passage wound in one long curve, spiraling up the stem of the enormous mushroom. Twilight could not have said how many times they had walked in a circle, climbing up slightly higher each time. The monotonous nature of the passage, combined with the faintly pulsing light, made her lose all sense of time and direction. She studied the passing walls, hoping for some distinguishing feature she could use it mark their passage.
When she found it, she immediately wished she had never taken her eyes from Luna’s mane.
“Gah!” she exclaimed, nearly falling from Luna’s back.
Luna froze in place. “What is it?”
“There,” Twilight said, pointing to the wall. In a neat alcove, nestled tightly among a cluster of glowing mushrooms, was a pony. Twilight recognized her immediately; it was Cheerilee, the schoolteacher. Although her eyes were open, they contained none of the intensity that Mr. Cake or the teal mare had. Her head was slightly lowered, her body limp. Twilight would have been sure she was dead, had she not noticed her taking shallow breaths in time with the pulsing of the surrounding mushrooms.
Twilight also noticed the smooth orange growth on her neck.
“Cheerilee?” Twilight asked, not expecting a reply but hoping for one. She reached out and touched her cheek; it was cool and clammy. “Cheerilee?”
“Twilight,” Luna said softly, “I do not think she will respond.”
“No,” Twilight said, “I know. I just…” She trailed off, unable to find words for exactly what she wanted to happen.
“I know.”
“She was a friend,” Twilight said, and then immediately corrected herself: “Is a friend.”
“Let us save her,” Luna said. She was looking back at Twilight with a solemn expression.
“Yeah.” Twilight squared her jaw. “Let’s do that.”
Another alcove was next to Cheerilee’s. Twilight recognized Filthy Rich, wearing the same distant gaze as if he were viewing something happening a million miles away. Twilight hoped that was the case. They looked like they could have been asleep with their eyes open. Perhaps they were dreaming, dreaming of an Equestria covered in sun and not dark jungle. After Filthy Rich came Time Turner, and after him was Granny Smith, and after that Twilight avoided looking.
On and on the spiral passage went. Twilight wanted to find something to speak to Luna about, but nothing about this place inspired any sort of distracting conversation. She tried to turn her mind to the things she was going to do when everything was set right, and found it was impossible to imagine anything outside the pulsing winding path up the core of the great mushroom. She counted Luna’s hoof-falls on the soft path, the beat creating a wordless marching tune of the most simplistic variety. One two three four, one two three four, one two three four…
After what seemed like an eternity, the curved passageway straightened out. Luna stopped. Twilight, who had been close to dozing with nothing to fix her mind on, suddenly felt completely alert.
“Are you ready?” Luna asked.
“I am,” Twilight said. “Are you?”
“I am prepared to face anything.”
“What do you think’s up there?”
“Anything,” Luna said.
Twilight took a deep breath, and said, “Let’s go.”
Luna marched up the straight incline and into an open chamber. It was huge, the base curving slightly and the walls shrouded in the distance by a hazy fog that filled the whole area. Suspended in the roof of the chamber, hanging from a network of vines, was a violently orange spongy mass, throbbing in unison with the glow in the chamber. It looked like a giant diseased heart. The floor was covered with the plants with the leathery leaves, their trumpet flowers swaying in an invisible breeze in unison. In worship.
Standing in the chamber beneath the massive orange fungus were three figures. In the center was the zebra Zecora. To her left, the diminutive form of Apple Bloom, her bow nearly the same shade of orange as the fungus in the low light; to her right, her wings folded, her crown askew from the orange growth on her temple, was Princess Celestia.
Luna approached them slowly, cautiously. It was Zecora who spoke first.
“Two ponies we have waited to see,” she said, “at last you come to speak with us.”
Zecora sounded more like herself, but the missing rhyme was like a sour note to Twilight’s ears. She wanted to say “speak with me”, she thought, and an uncomfortable chill ran up her back.
“You are not my sister,” Luna said. Twilight heard it too. She couldn’t describe exactly what was wrong with the Princess’ voice, but something was wrong. It reminded her of a mimic performing an imitation. It reminded her of a puppeteer with a wooden pony doll.
“That’s mean,” Apple Bloom said, though her voice and her face showed no sign that she thought it was.
“What are you?” Twilight asked, ignoring Apple Bloom. Her eyes were fixed on the hanging fungus.
“An Equestrian citizen,” said Zecora, “wanting to be free again.”
“Free from what?”
“The forest,” Apple Bloom said in a blank tone.
“Free from ourselves,” Princess Celestia said. “We have only had ourselves for company for so very long. Only ourselves to speak to, only ourselves to plan with.”
“We were lonely,” Apple Bloom said.
“We were trapped,” Princess Celestia, overlapping Apple Bloom.
“We have been imprisoned eternally within the forest Everfree,” finished Zecora.
“What are you?” Twilight asked again, although she was beginning to suspect the answer.
“We are in the plants,” Princess Celestia said, “we are in the animals. First the insects, which carried our spores, then in the mammals. We are everywhere.”
“We are here,” Apple Bloom said. The trio lifted their eyes to the orange fungus, then lowered them in a single synchronized action.
“We have planned our escape since we freed ourselves from a cage of stone and wards,” said Princess Celestia.
“Cage of… the castle?” Luna asked.
“The magic that bound us would not be used a second time,” Celestia continued, ignoring Luna. “We grew. We changed. We drew from it to make ourselves strong. Now, it feeds us. Where we are, there can be no magic. Now it is us who are the cage.”
“You planned this,” Twilight exhaled, awestruck, “for over a thousand years.”
“We are patient,” Apple Bloom said.
“One thousand years to adapt,” Zecora said, “ten thousand with our world back.”
Ten thousand?, thought Twilight, unable to comprehend the span of time Equestria had lain dormant. TEN thousand?
“We covered the world. We spread to all places. We had freedom. We built this grand monument,” Celestia said, “but we were still alone. We were still only us.”
“But then we found you,” said Apple Bloom.
“You differ from plants and insects. You are like us.” Celestia’s neutral tone somehow made the statement more horrifying.
“We are nothing like you,” Luna declared, taking a step back.
“You think. You dream. You remember. We plan. We grow. We remember.”
“We didn’t understand one thing about you,” added Apple Bloom.
“You are many. We are one,” said Celestia. “You require connections of friendship to be one like us. You place so much importance on these connections.”
“We wanted to understand.”
“So we woke you, faithful student Twilight Sparkle and beloved sister Luna, to observe you.”
“To see the connections for ourselves.”
“To see if we needed to grow and change and adapt to have them too.”
This was too much. Equestria had been put to sleep for centuries by an intelligent parasite mushroom, and now it wanted to make friends?
“So,” Twilight asked with some hesitance, “do you need these connections?”
“Yes!” exclaimed Apple Bloom.
“Yes,” echoed Princess Celestia.
“Our new growth will come in a rush,” said Zecora, “with both of you to teach us.”
“We will re-enter you, and you will teach us,” said Celestia.
Twilight’s ears stood up. “Re-enter?”
“You must come back to us,” Apple Bloom said.
“You must explain to us,” said Celestia.
“We will teach you everything if you do.”
“The memories of all the others will be yours if you do. Every thought. Everything they have ever learned.”
Twilight imagined herself as one of the blank drones, her eyes glazed over. Is that what would happen, if the fungus was to “re-enter” her? Were all the other ponies connected like that, some sort of singular mind held in a continual dream, their thoughts misunderstood by the watching fungus?
“No,” she said, disgusted at the idea of losing herself in that way.
“You cannot!” cried Celestia.
“You must!” shouted Apple Bloom.
“No,” Twilight repeated.
“Then you, beloved sister,” Celestia said. “When you return to us, you will have nothing to fear.”
Luna was silent for a long moment, and for one terrible second before she spoke Twilight heard in her mind Luna saying “I accept”.
What she said instead was: “I will never, you abomination.”
“Sad,” said Apple Bloom.
“Regrettable,” said Celestia.
“You will rejoin in due course,” said Zecora. “We will make you come by force.”
The orange growths on Zecora, Apple Bloom, and Princess Celestia burst open, spraying a fine red mist into the air.
“Don’t breathe!” shouted Luna, and she turned and ran.
Twilight clamped her mouth shut and held on. The giant fungus gave a mighty lurch, and more of the red mist started flooding the chamber. Within seconds everywhere became dark, impossible to see through the cloud of spores. Luna galloped in a haphazard pattern, unable to find her way. Twilight looked around frantically, unable to make anything out.
Except.
Except a shining sliver of light, cutting through the fog. It was not part of the faint glow from inside the mushroom; it was a piercing, pure white.
“There!” Twilight took a chance shouting, willing none of the spores to take hold in her. She pointed with one hoof, the other wrapped tight around Luna’s neck. “Keep running! Don’t stop!”
She had a brief moment of mad calm to consider what might happen if she was wrong in her wild guess, and then Luna crashed through the thin spot in the edge of the rim of the mushroom, charging out into the pure pale moonlight, and fell into nothingness.
They were falling, falling from the top of the mushroom. They fell through the layer of rainclouds, the sound of the storm deafening around them, the trees rushing up to meet them.
We escaped, Twilight had time to think. At least we were free.
And then over the howling wind and pouring rain came the sound of Luna’s wings unfurling. The whole world tilted, and Twilight held tightly to Luna to keep from falling off as she leveled out of her dive and began to climb back up into the air.
“Yes!” Twilight shouted, “Yes! We’re above the trees! We’re outside the spores!” Her horn lit up with a beacon of light. “Our magic is back!”
Luna broke through the clouds, out into the calm above the storm. She flapped her wings, suspended in the air. “I have never been so happy to see the moonlight,” she said.
“Me either,” Twilight agreed.
“But it has been night for far too long. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding her head, droplets of rainwater falling from her mane.
“Then let us make it tomorrow.”
The sound of wings drew their attention back in the direction of the mushroom. Pegasi were ascending through the clouds, flying in chaotic overlapping paths like a nest of furious bees.
“We must land!” Luna cried, and Twilight redoubled her grip. They flew back into the storm, and the skies were filled with rain and wind and swarming pegasi. They hurled themselves towards Luna, flying at her like arrows. Twilight threw up a magical barrier around her and Luna seconds before a dozen pegasi collided with it, rocking her on Luna’s back. The glowing shield flickered, difficult to maintain with little preparation and violent testing of its boundaries. Another wave of pegasi slammed into it, and this time Twilight lost her grip of the spell completely, the roar of the rain once again filling her ears. She concentrated on reforming the sphere, but still more infected pegasi were descending on them. Twilight was too late. They crashed into Luna, aiming for her wings, her horn, her head. Luna made a rapid twist to avoid them, but they struck from all angles, and then instead of flying with Twilight on her back she was falling with Twilight beneath her. Twilight saw through the chaos Luna’s eye roll back in unconsciousness.
“No!” she shouted, and spread her wings. She held on tightly to Luna and once more the violet magical bubble surrounded them. She needed to slow down before they landed. Pegasi hammered the bubble, and Twilight grit her teeth. No, she thought with each blow, no you won’t.
The canopy was approaching from beneath, faster than it should have been. It was going to be a rough landing. Twilight dropped the shield and unleashed a spell with such intensity and ferocity upon the trees that tiny bursts of light flashed in Twilight’s eyes. She made a monumental effort to pull up out of the dive she was in with carrying Luna’s limp weight, buoyed by magic, and then they crashed to the ground amid scorched trees and burning leaves. Propping herself up with her front legs, Twilight turned in an arc as another great gout of glowing purple fire erupted from her horn, burning back the forest.
Try to cage this, she thought with a certain satisfaction.
“Twilight,” coughed Luna.
Immediately forgetting the blaze around her, Twilight dropped down close to her. “Yes, Luna?”
“Alicorn…” she breathed, “…magic.” Each word was a struggle.
“But,” Twilight protested, “I don’t— You have to!” But even as she said this, she saw it would be impossible for Luna with the injuries she had sustained in the fall. “I don’t know how,” she blurted.
“You do,” Luna said, resting a hoof against Twilight’s chest, “you have always known. Forget what you see…” She turned her head to the side and coughed again. “…And hear Equestria. It will remember what it was.”
Twilight rose to her hooves, barely registering the pain in her broken leg. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and exhaled slowly. With that breath out, she pushed everything from her mind: the heat of the fires around her, the jungle, the darkness, the rain, the colossal mushroom, Luna’s broken form at her hooves, everything. She emptied her mind of hundreds of spells memorized, searching for a time when she had performed magic by will alone. The spark that had awakened in her during her entrance exam was there, her link to the unformed raw heart of magic itself. For just a second time stretched on, reducing motion to stillness, burning heat to freezing cold, sound to silence. In the space between two heartbeats, Twilight heard the faint whisper of Equestria that was.
She opened her eyes as scores of earth-bound ponies crashed through the charred clearing in the forest, the second wave of attack from the giant mushroom, but Twilight saw none of them. Before her were rolling green hills, clear skies full of stars, and the lights of Canterlot Castle twinkling in the distance. She rose from the ground, graceful and calm like an air balloon taking flight. Everything before her was surrounded in a brilliant white nimbus, but she found she could dispel that glow with the lightest of thoughts. The sky became clear, the grass, the stars, the mountain in the distance, and then Twilight was back in the clearing, now free of burning trees and pouring rain. Grass lay beneath her hooves, wet with evening dew. She could see the stars in the sky through a hole in the clouds, although the storm raged around her still. Her leg was whole. The horde of charging ponies with orange fungal growths had vanished.
And Luna stood beside her.
Twilight embraced Luna in a fierce hug. Luna hugged her back. “I knew you could do this,” she whispered.
“What… was it that I did, exactly?”
“Uncovered the natural state of the world. Equestria has waited ten thousand years to be itself again, with this unnatural forest growing over it. It wants to return.” Luna looked up at the sky and closed her eyes. When she opened them, the storm was no longer there. It didn’t blow away or vanish in a magical flash: it was simply as if it never existed, free of dark clouds, falling rain, and diving ponies.
“Where are the ponies going?” Twilight asked. “When they vanish.”
“Back to where they were, prior to attack from the parasite. I imagine most of them will be in bed.”
Twilight turned back in the direction of the giant mushroom, looking even more unreal and out of place against the backdrop of stars. She centered herself and saw in her mind the horizon as it once was, broken only by the distant mountains. When she opened her eyes, it had ceased to be.
Luna learned down close to Twilight over her shoulder. “You truly are a most gifted student,” she whispered in her ear.
“Well,” Twilight said with a smile, “some of that has to do with the teacher.”
And little by little that night, they restored Equestria.
Fluttershy turned the page of the book she was reading with her muzzle, careful not to disturb Angel. He had been a good bunny today and had eaten all of his dinner, which meant he could stay up as late as he liked—which meant he would stay awake fifteen minutes past his regular bedtime and then snuggle up next to Fluttershy and fall asleep. She kept reading, unaware that the previous night her tree-house had swelled its proportions over thousands of years, growing with her things still inside it like a seed sealed beneath frozen ground.
“C’mon, one more story!”
“I ain’t tellin’ you another story,” Applejack said with exasperated laughter, “you should be asleep. ‘Sides, you know ‘em all already!”
“Pleeease?” Apple Bloom pleaded.
Applejack sighed. She’d learned that trick from Rarity’s little sister, she was sure, who’d probably picked up the exact pitch to play on maximum sympathy from Rarity herself. “Fine. Just one more! Now,” she said as Apple Bloom settle back down on her spot on the couch, “which one do you wanna hear?”
She told another Apple family story that Apple Bloom had to have heard at least a hundred times before. Halfway through Big Macintosh came inside from a final walk around the orchards, and sat next to Apple Bloom to listen. He had found nothing out of place with the apple trees: no sign they had been overrun by ravenous timberwolves who had systematically devoured all the fruit before their pack loped off towards Canterlot.
“…And then she flies away from the zeppelin, seconds before it explodes!” Rainbow demonstrated by taking a quick zip around the room before landing back in front of her typewriter. “So, what do you think? Awesome or what?”
Tank, her editor and pet tortoise, slowly blinked his eyes.
“You’re right! It would be way better if she got to land and put on her sunglasses before the zeppelin explodes! You’re a genius, Tank!”
Rainbow spun in her chair and started making the corrections to her novel, never knowing her cloud house had dissolved and been a part of the storm that lasted ten thousand years.
“Pinkie,” yawned Mr. Cake, “what are you doing in the kitchen this late?”
“Well, I was looking in the fridge for some yoghurt for Gummy because he likes to have a little yoghurt before he goes to sleep—that’s a funny word, yoghurt, why is it written like yog-hurt but nopony ever says it that way?—and, clumsy me, I knocked over the eggs, and so then I thought, hey, if you break some eggs then you’d better make an omelet!”
“I… don’t think that’s quite the way that saying goes,” said Mr. Cake. “Just clean before you go to bed, alright?”
“Okie-dokie-lokie!”
Mr. Cake headed back upstairs, tired from a full day of his twins. The years’ worth of labor he had performed the previous night, hauling fallen trees to the heart of the Everfree Forest for a variety of mushrooms to grow on, forming a tower that stretched beyond the clouds, went unnoticed.
Rarity lay in bed. Her eyes were wide open beneath her eyemask; she saw not the black silk but instead a dress, a simple collection of shapes and perhaps a hint of color and fabric. The design had been brewing in her mind for the past week, but seeing Princess Celestia the other evening had pulled all the elements into focus. The combination of elegance and simplicity was the perfect starting point for the kind of stitching she’d been wanted to try, and she could clearly see the line of the dress every time she tried to close her eyes…
She sat up and pulled off the mask. Sleep later! Her muse called! She pulled on the robe she wore for late-night bursts of creativity, not as glamorous as the robe she wore in the mornings nor as luxurious as the robe she wore following a long bath but oh so comfortable, and sat at her sewing machine. When the dress was finished, she could even present it to Twilight as a kind of late going-away present. Surely she’d be attending some variety of functions during her time in Canterlot—she couldn’t spend it all studying—and the dress dancing in her mind’s eye would look so good next to the Princess.
When she noted the clock later in the night, marveling at how fast time could pass by when one was “in the zone”, it never occurred to her that the opposite was true; that time could slow to make a single night last thousands of years.
Spike looped the film on the projector and flipped the switch to start it running. “More popcorn?” he asked Owlowiscious, who hooted in in response. Spike plucked a single kernel from the bowl and tossed it in Owlowiscious’ direction; the owl caught it with one deft movement of his head.
“Nice catch,” said Spike, and he slid the bowl across the floor. “There you go, buddy.” The titles of the film appeared on the wall, accompanied by a shrill organ flourish: I Was A Teenage Werepony. So far today, Spike had left his bed around ten, sung to himself as loud as he wanted while he swept the library floor, and bought a bag he’d had to carry over his shoulder full of unpopped popcorn kernels in addition the regular food he needed from the market, and now he was staying up with Owlowiscious watching old monster films. Being old enough to be responsible ruled.
Spike poured a bowl of popcorn for himself and cooked it with a single breath, never thinking Twilight might be doing anything in Canterlot other than studying magic and protocol with Princess Celestia.
Two ponies sat under night sky at Canterlot Castle, both sharing a blanket.
“When should we inform them?” Luna asked, turning back to the stars.
“Not just yet,” Twilight said, resting her head against Luna’s side. “They can figure it out on their own.”
