//------------------------------// // Chapter 3 // Story: The Collapse // by Lightwavers //------------------------------// A small cloud of frost formed in front of Twilight’s muzzle every time she took a breath. It was now four days since night had refused to leave, and the temperature was slowly dropping. Soon they’d have to resort to warming spells to keep everyone from constantly shivering. As for what the cold would do to Equestria’s crops…well, it was a toss-up as to whether the Everfree or the never-ending night would do more damage in that department. Twilight tried to distract herself by taking in the surroundings. There wasn’t much to look at. To the right towered the Foal Mountains, behind her was Canterlot, and up ahead in the distance a glimpse of green was all that was visible of the Hollow Shades forest, which was fortunately not trying to eat everything like the Everfree. And around her the rest of Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns grazed on the now uncomfortably rigid grass, each one except for Lyra and Rarity with a bright glow emanating from their horns. It was no substitute for more filling foods, but it would sustain them for the few days it would take to reach Manehattan. She bent her head forward as if to take a nibble on the grass, but instead stayed in that position and darted her eyes back and forth. No one seemed to be paying any attention to her. Still, best to do this quick. Twilight concentrated, ripping an undetectable hole in reality with her horn. She felt magic flow through it, lighting it up with rippling purple energy that was too dim to be of any use as a light source, yet just bright enough to stand out if anyone saw it. After a few seconds she stopped maintaining the link and the invisible hole closed as if it had never existed. She quickly shoved her energy into the spell keeping her awake. She didn’t want to use it, but she had no choice. She’d been studying for three days straight before she’d begun creating her thought template, which had taken another two days, and then there were the two days traveling with her school while they walked onward toward safety in Manehattan. When she was done shoving all the magic into the spell, she probed the bundle of energy, looking for any signs that it might unravel. Finding no flaws, she lifted her head and pranced in place for a second to let out her accumulated nervous energy. One of the most useful applications of mental, or dark, magic (the other being the ability to detect and modify thoughts) was its use as a binding agent for more conventional types of spells. With a bit of mental magic, anyone could cast a spell and then bind it to anything; ponies, rocks, trees, or even the middle of the air, and the spell would last until it ran out of magic or unraveled from age or shoddy construction, which was how so many ancient tombs and temples contained functioning magical traps. What this meant for Twilight was that, since her anti-sleep spell only needed a thought pattern to cast, she could sustain it indefinitely without rebuilding her template. “Hey, Twilight!” Startled, she turned toward the sound of the voice. Lyra trotted up to her with an eager look in her eyes, while Rarity followed slightly behind and held a more resigned posture. Twilight considered her options. She could try to get the conversation over with as fast as possible. With the amount of contact she invariably made with other ponies of the course of a day, she had an almost supernatural ability to make any conversation incredibly awkward. Or…she could actually talk to them. Her inability to use levitation made any attempts to read incredibly difficult, and her other past time—magic—was unavailable to her. And some other ponies might be helpful in figuring out what was going on. Normally Twilight was adamant about only relying on her own thought processes, but this situation was clearly not normal, and she could use other ponies as sounding boards to bounce ideas off of. And who knows; one of them might even have a good idea or two of their own. She turned to face Lyra head-on. “Yes?” The other pony’s smile dropped into an expression of utter shock. An unpleasant tingle ran through Twilight at seeing the reaction acting like a normal pony had on her former roommate. She shifted her weight from side to side and lowered her eyes as she waited for Lyra to compose herself. Behind the green unicorn, Rarity drew closer. She seemed unaffected by Twilight’s response. That was expected, as this was Twilight’s first meeting with the unfamiliar unicorn. “Um, if you were expecting any sort of news…” Lyra said. Oh. She thought Twilight was expecting someone to come tell her if her parents were all right. The thought of them traveling to a far away city and not being able to see her again for years, or worse, being overtaken by the Everfree and being…well, whatever it was the Everfree did to ponies that went inside it now filled her with a fix of anger, fear, and confusion, but she wasn’t stupid enough to expect that anyone would find them and then tell her before they’d even reached Manehattan. “I’m not. So what did you want to talk to me about?” Twilight said, pretending to focus on nudging around a patch of grass with a hoof while studying the other unicorns’ reactions out of the corner of her eye. Lyra seemed to have recovered, but Rarity forestalled her. “Well you see dear, we wish to…sort of...backtrack, if you will, and find out what happened to anyone who might have been delayed before they could start journeying to one of the port cities.” Twilight spent a moment parsing the ridiculously circuitous statement. “So you want me to help...what, patrol the area to help find evacuees from your home town? You realize the Wonderbolts are already doing that, right? And they’re professionals.” “Not...exactly,” Rarity began. “Oh my Celestia. By ‘find out what happened,’ you mean you want to actually go inside the Everfree.” “We just need a few protection spells, but neither of us is skilled enough for that sort of thing. I focus exclusively on precision levitation for my boutique, and Lyra...can’t do that sort of thing either.” Lyra looked away at that. She’d dropped out of Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. Ostensibly it was because she’d found a more fulfilling job as a harpist, but everyone knew she’d picked up the instrument because she couldn’t really control her magic. If she tried to summon the sound of a music note from midair, it would emerge as a cannon blast. Even plucking the strings of an instrument with levitation usually resulted in a broken instrument. So she abandoned her attempt to marry magic with music and abandoned one for the other. Two unicorns who didn’t know more than levitation and how to summon explosions wouldn’t survive a second in a place as hostile as the Everfree. Still, even with Twilight with them they probably wouldn’t be able to do much. There were magic researchers in the peak of their career who would be investigating the Everfree, and if they hadn’t found a way to shield themselves from the Everfree already, there wasn’t much she could do, even if she was given a week of uninterrupted time to rebuild her entire repertoire of spells from scratch. Going with the pair would still be suicide, and her presence would make them assume she could actually help them. “Again, there are professionals working on this. If they can’t do it, I can’t either. I’m sorry,” Twilight said. She felt another pang as she looked at the two unicorns’ disappointed expressions. Normally she reveled in the disapproval of her peers, as it meant they wouldn’t be bothering her. But this time she was actually trying to connect with them, and their feelings actually meant something to her. “It’s quite alright dear, I know I wouldn’t travel to such a dreadful place unless I had to. We’ll find someone eventually, even if we have to reach Manehattan and hire someone from there,” Rarity said. The pair walked away. Twilight looked after them for a moment, then sighed and dropped her head to the ground again, trying to give off the appearance of grazing. If only she had a book to distract her. The Essential Book of Spells was just that; the only reason to read it would be to cast something, as she’d memorized it ages ago, and the spells inside it were too basic to even do a few quick experiments with. That on top of the effort it would require to get the book out and flip the pages and it wasn’t worth it to get it out. Without anything else to do, she began to graze. She hoped those two wouldn’t get themselves killed. Rarity at least looked like the type to deal with danger from a distance.