//------------------------------// // Crystal Pinnacle // Story: No Sun-Queen Shall Rend Asunder // by Plough and Stars Pony //------------------------------// Crystal Pinnacle Breakfast on that weekend was a quiet meal on a mandatorily quiet day. Flash escorting Twilight down to the dining hall crackled with talk and banter. Mare and stallion seated themselves at the table filled by Shining Armour and Cadance. Courses appeared, were eaten and the dishes taken away as talk rolled round the table. “Shining, did you show Flash the whole castle?” Twilight asked suddenly, fork floating beside her head and heavy with dripping pancake. Shining turns away from Cadance to pause, reply. “What makes you want to know that, Twily?” Flash scoops another spoonful of nutmeg-scented and syrupy oats, looking from Captain to Princess and back. He swallows the hot oats, as he, in turn, starts to think. Well, we did tour the barracks, the various halls and galleries, the drawing room, the state room and the throne room…yeah, I’d say Shining did show me the whole castle. “Oh, just wondered if Flash went up the Crystal Tower, the one you get to from under the throne room. Where Spike and I found the Crystal Heart.” The young Princess gulped down the pancake and grinned round at Flash. A sliver of syrup still moistened one edge of her lips. He felt the familiar groaning tremor in his wings and his smile pulled in reply. Twilight spread her hoofs, her wings flaring in response. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see white stars in her pupils. “There are wonderful views of the Empire from the pinnacle up there, you can see every mountain to the north and the tundra to the south,” she said, lightly clopping her hoofs on the table. “I wish I could have spent a time looking properly, but Spike was saving the Empire and I was trapped in a corrall.” Twilight tittered, in a what-can-you-do way. N-No, we never went up there. Trapped in a corrall? Poor Twilight… Shining cleared his throat and faced his yellow-orange comrade. “The stairs appear to be in hidden dimension rolling endlessly up inside the outside wall of the Castle. Twily, …. Yes, Flash?” Shining broke off as Flash looked baffled. “You said it’s an endless stair, sir, then how did Twilight and Spike reach the top of the tower?” The white shining Captain chuckled, “I was just getting to that, Flash,” he mildly admonished. Flash nodded and lapsed to listen. “Twily cast a gravity-reversing spell to lift and attach her and Spike the underside of the stairwell,” he said shaping a blue helix with thaumic energy. Shining indicated with a toe of his hoof one edge of one curve of the helix, lifting the toe almost to the next curve above. Twily broke the hex…he cast on the stairs, and slid up to the top of the tower.” Twilight giggled, clopping her hoofs, stamping them on the table. “It was brilliant, Flash. Just like a helter-skelter at the fairground!” Shining quenched the magic helix, smiling fondly at his little sister’s excitement. Cadance, who had been silent all this time, tittered also. Shining’s smile lasted so long, then lips, jaw and brows drew in sombrely. “But the only way to those stairs, is under the throne-room. And the key is Dark magic, which may not be the best thing to show our beloved subjects." The lavender-coated mare drew her fore-legs under the level of the table, “You aren’t holding Court to-day are you?” “No, you know it’s the week-end.” “Oh well, we aren’t studying at the library to-day, and I’m not leisure reading this morning, Flash and I could go see it. The final dishes were taken away, and the checker-board was revealed, Shining and Cadance settled down to lose and win. The trot through cavernous crystal atrium and hallways palace was quick and quiet. Twilight and Flash hardly met or passed barely any of the serving ponies. They soon reached the equally cavernous throne room. Together they crossed in to the room. The doors slammed shut. Twilight faced the throne, mouth tightening. “Flash, don’t be alarmed.” Should I be? Youuu know what you’re doing She faced the throne again, drew in a deep breath. Horn sparked, glow of magic coating it. Magic brightened in over-glow. Magic dimmed, darkened. Black static charges crackled round her horn, pennants of purple smoke poured from the corners of her eyes and her irises changed from soft purple to hard green and red. Black beams of light shot from her horn to the jewel in the throne’s arch. It fizzed and boiled. The gleaming aura of the throne dulled and a long shadow spread down the front, the leg-rests, the seat, and the steps. The shadow widened, sweeping under mare and stallion. It rose up their legs from hoof and fetlock to upper leg and gaskin. Any other ponies would have skittered. Twilight glanced behind her. Flash copied. And he gaped. A large rectangular hole yawned in the white and sky-blue tiles, as if eaten away by acid. Mare and stallion walked up to the brink. A deep dark well of broad and thin stairs winding down. Featureless walls of dark grey stone sheered down and down. Flash jerked back from the edge, apprehension gathering a tiny lump in his throat. “Ready, Flash?” Twilight asked, wings snapping open, bending her knees of her forelegs and stretching her hind-legs from hock to coronet in pouncing pose. “Ready,” the stallion replied. Ready for adventure. “DIVE!” the alicorn cried, wings lifting and pushing her forwards and downwards in to the pit followed by her stallion. Darkness lined with black races up and past him. A deeper darkness looms up, both ponies bank wings and pull up legs. Keratin strike unknowable stone with rough "clop" . The bottom of the pit was dank and featureless. Except a stainless pitch-black wooden door framed by small grey stones. On the left-side at pony-height, was a large circular iron knocker in an equally blocky iron square. Flash turned to Twilight, expecting her to unhesitatingly trot up to the door, and swing it open with her magic or a tug of her leg. She stood were she landed, wide eyes fixed on the knocker as if it would morph in to a pony’s head or something. The stallion knew something was wrong. “The…door,” Twilight shuddered. “Sombra showed me my worst fear. Celestia declaring I had failed the test and I no longer worthy to be her student. It was so awful.” Flash hesitated, appalled, then stepped up to Twilight’s side, wing against her side, foreleg wrapping round hers above the knee. He whispered, breath to her cheek. “I’m here with you.” His mare relaxed, drawing back her neck to momentarily nuzzle his cheek, “Thank you, Flash.” Flash watches his mare face the door, spark her horn again, aim it at the crown arch. Patches of fur shift as muscles strain and wings unfurl, a brace against expected danger. The lock clicks, the door swings open, stone and iron hinges creak shivering along bones. Brilliant white light spills through the gap. Both ponies wince, and squint. Nothing. “Huh,” Twilight murmurs, nonplussed. “Sombra’s magic is gone.” Flawless snow-white marble stairs joined to perfectly crisp hoary walls curving round and round out of sight. A stair rising and rising in dazzling void. “I wonder if when he was defeated, the hidden spaces reverted back to what they were before,” Flash mused. On the first treads, the lavender mare turned to him. She proffered dextrous primary coverts. Her Guard, in turn, tendered his left wing-tip to her. Lavender feathers closed over light orange ones. A thin magenta rope issued out of Twilight’s horn, snaked round their held feathers, binding them. I now pronounce you… one part of Flash’s mind remarked. “The string is to prevent you falling off,” she explained. Flash opened his other wing, raising an eyebrow. “Why, at all? I could just fly.” Twilight groaned, and facehoofed. “Flash, where is the fun in flying apart, when we could slide down (or, rather, up) together? I want you to have fun with me, your Princess!” The stallion laughed a low giggle. “Well, with logic like that…,” “Hold on tight, Flash.” A magenta sphere enveloped him and her. Flipping them upside down. A weird switching of a force Flash had known all his life, felt in his bones and muscles. Now, what had been down was now up. The underside of the stairs, sleek and smooth, and a long, long ramp heading down. Immediately, wind rushes past him, cracking open his unbound wing. Stomach lurches, as eight hoofs gobble up the crystal ramp. Tears streak from squinting eyes. Yet there was more, and more, ever more hurtling from the right. Flash’s heart swells, lips drawing open, white teeth aching from the wind. Excitement soared up and up, matching hers. Crows of glee burst from two throats. On and on and on. A split-second sight of a large semi-circle of deeper lilac… The view reversed: marble below, sky above. The two ponies, mare and stallion, dropped, hoofs clacking on to grey marble. Bright blue met with deep purple. Before Princess and Guard fell over, foreleg over the other’s shoulder, mouths yawing, chests in stitches, heaving from blind merriment. “Sooooo amazing!” Mare and stallion, Princess and Guard shared a look, a knowing look. A look of the affection they shared, the affection of friends and the affection of mutual adoration. A wide silver-grey floor, and twelve elliptical floor-to-ceiling windows, between tall columns braced by stalagmite and stalactite, itself the longest of a troika of quartz spikes. In the centre of the chamber, a circus-top circle of cyan-blue and sky-blue sections, and split by a white six-pointed star. “The hiding place for the Heart,” he heard her whisper. “See what I mean by the view?” she said, sweeping her hoof round the panorama. Flash could only nod, dumb-struck. While the view was not as spectacular as it would be hundreds of feet above the coruscating Empire, it was still magnificent. Flash saw the regular snowflake shape, the avenues shooting out to the points of the star, and other boulevards meeting and passing the line of the star itself. And the minute islands of house, tree or arbour or lawn and parkland floated as if they were stationary plates of ice. Every domicile and edifice that was a cell in the Empire’s being, looked tiny, almost as if they were spiky quartz beads of rock candy. Even if the buildings towered over you at ground level, extravagant examples of abstractionist sculpture. That was not thinking of the other shapes; the blue crown of the spa, the heptagonal theatre of the creative arts, the cross-shaped Library, the drum-like figure of the sports hub, conical Nightmare Night hats, cubes and cuboids with sweeping sheer buttresses, domes, diamonds, and countless spare. Beyond, the pleasant rolling yellow and green fields nipped by squares of lazybeds, were ringed by bigger steeper hills, and higher hills, to the statuesque mountains to the North, the barrier between Equestria and the Frozen North proper, (not that said mountains were a barrier between Equestria and Yakyakistan). Farther to the south, the green fields and pasture ceded, faded and died under the gelid arctic tundra. But not before he could espy the pinpricks of the border posts and the scratch of the train-station. “Oh, wow, I don’t know how to describe all this! So much to see!” “I knew you would love it, Flash,” his mare replied, hugging him with a leg. Much later, stallion and mare wander down from the tower's pinnacle, down the staircase, and back up the second staircase. Near the top, Twilight sparks her horn, and the rectangular slab of floor above lights up, becomes clear as water. Sets of hoofs crossing the floor stop, heads jolt downwards. Cries of surprise and fear float faintly to their ears. "Whoops!" Twilight mutters, before bolting up the last few stairs through the hole in the crystal floor in to the throne room, Flash following. The ponies who had cried out now cower shaking where they had stood, fore-legs over their heads and eyes. Flash looked down, and whistled, wings snapping out, instinctively to catch him for the fall. The floor was still solid, but now it was as clear as ice. What he sees is darkness stretching down and down, nothing to suggest a solid surface between him and the bottom far, far below. Twilight canters over to one of the cowering ponies, reaches out to rub the withers reassuringly. The mare snuffs her horn, and the transparency spell ends. The floor is again dazzling white and lilac pink. "Sorry, sorry, sorry!" Twilight murmurs frantically, like a rosary. Flash walks over to the other cowering pony, a servant. A leg round the other's shoulders, he says "Hey, you're safe, Twilight's cancelled the spell." As he says it, a heavy gallop of hoofs and clattering armour blows in to the room. "What's going on here?" a deep voice bellows. Twilight looks up from the pony she is calming to see the big Crystal Guardspony and his comrades. A bashful smile hitches to her muzzle. "Heh heh heh, really should have checked if there were ponies in the room before making the floor see-through." "Everypony's alright?" the Guardspony asked. "Yes," Twilight said, as the pony next to her raised hoofs from his head, saw the crystal squares, tapped them with a toe, before sighing a long sigh. Later, Flash heard a knocking on Twilight's bedroom door. He heard Shining Armour's voice. "Twily, are you in?" The door opens, conversation just heard, Shining Armour laughing, "Oh, Twily, still causing trouble."