//------------------------------// // Diplomacy's End // Story: My Little Teelo: Masquerade // by Ardwolf //------------------------------// In which diplomacy thwarted, must show its other face. “Leave us,” Celestia said calmly. “Clear the laboratory. Luna and I are the only ones equipped to deal with this.” “Your Highness, I don’t—” Wind Shimmer started to protest. “Now, Wind Shimmer,” Celestia said icily. “Everyone, clear this room at once!” The second-in-command of the Horns shied away as though the alicorn had struck her. The lab techs, stung by the uncharacteristic venom in Celestia’s voice scurried away from their posts. Wind Shimmer didn’t actually leave until Luna spread her razor-edged wings, steel gleaming under the harsh light. She stepped toward the unicorn aggressively. “Obey us!” Luna hissed, lowering her head, her horn surrounded by a harsh aqua glow. The unicorn bolted for the door, a single sob floating behind her as she fled. Celestia winced inside her helm but didn’t protest her sister’s action. Instead she surrounded the massive reinforced door of the chamber with a golden glow and slammed it shut, spinning the circular locking wheel closed. “You are wagering the safety of the world, sister,” Luna commented, folding her wings and letting the spell dissipate from her horn. “Yes I am. Do you disagree?” Celestia asked heavily, studying the document from the chest. “No,” Luna sighed. “A thousand years ago I would have urged you to do this, plunging joyfully into battle beside you, screaming in victory.” “We were younger then, and so very foolish,” Celestia replied softly, lifting the small but incredibly heavy globe from the chest. “Matthew would no doubt be appalled, sister. This weapon is in some ways worse than anything the humans ever devised.” “Indeed,” Luna said heavily. “To twist the very framework of reality and rip it asunder! Have we the right? No matter what our enemies plan to do is there no other way?” “No. This must end,” Celestia said. “We’ve both examined the sphere, and traced the spell matrices within. Our mysterious allies have supplied us the means to save our world, Luna. They did not lie about this weapon’s purpose or effect, we both know that.” “I concur, sister. They did not lie. Yet having said that, knowing we will use this horrid thing—I feel soiled,” Luna said somberly. “Even confirming its purpose leaves my soul drowning in sewage. I truly fear the minds that created this weapon.” “I can do it alone, sister,” Celestia offered. “I love you too much to force this burden on you for all eternity.” Luna paused, but shook her head. “Neigh, sister, if we must blacken our souls let us do this thing together. I am no coward. I cannot let you bear the shame alone. I am wiser than I was, and will not shirk this. As Princess of Equestria I stand with you. If we are to unleash this abomination, I will take equal blame for the decision. Although I would that there were any other way.” “As do I, Luna. But I will do anything to save my little ponies. Even this.” “Together then?” Luna said heavily. Celestia nodded. Their horns lit up and the globe responded by rising in the air, a series of intricate and disturbing runes lighting up on its surface. “I have set the destination, sister. You need merely initiate the activation cascade,” Luna said softly. Celestia took a deep breath, staring at the unimaginable horror she was about to set free. “I am so very sorry,” she murmured to the universe at large. “Forgive us if you can, please spare my ponies if you can’t.” Her horn pulsed once and without any further drama the sphere quietly vanished. ooOoo “Greetings, my brethren, and sistren of old, and greetings to the newest members of our host. Alas, I fear I bring sad tidings,” Hoë Towenaar addressed the assembled Slange, along with the handful of ponies that were either already undead or sought to be, like Sombra, Rimor and several Windigo herd leaders. “Our latest attempt to take the world for ourselves has failed and we have suffered grievous losses this day. But do not despair! As we have done in the past we will withdraw into the secret places and patiently bide our time, rebuilding our strength until we are ready to strike yet again. Only this time there is a new factor that may be turned to our advantage! “The ponies have discovered a new race of creature, one called humans. But these humans are not born of Aarde. Nay, they come from across the Veil! This should not surprise any whom Tišina brought into the Veil itself. That other worlds must exist on the other side of the Veil has always been known to Duisternis. For we, the Holders of Knowledge, understood the mathematical ludicrousness that Aarde could be the only world to nurture sentient life. But now we have proof of a second such world’s existence! More, we know where the gateway to that world lies hidden, and we know the Key that will open that gateway. So let us—” At that moment the sphere appeared in the library several levels below the assembly room. The glowing runes lifted gently away from the surface, floating a scant inch above. Quietly, their glow ceased, like snuffing a candle. And the world twisted. ooOoo In Canterlot the two sisters felt the universe cry out in pain, and shuddered, huddling together like frightened foals. Unicorns throughout Equestria screamed as something blazed in their heads for the briefest moment before sending them into blessed oblivion. Twilight Sparkle and Cadence both stumbled at the unexpected agony, but their alicorn minds were made of tougher stuff and they felt the agony quickly flare and die, leaving behind a ghostly ache, like the memory of the world’s most epic hangover. In Ponyville Pinkie Pie was the only earth pony to feel the mind-searing pain, sending her into blackness like the many unicorns collapsing around her. Professor Nimbus cried out and died, crashing against his lectern as around him doctorate students screamed and fell unconscious, some bleeding from their noses. Pegasi and earth ponies rushed to aid the fallen, having no clue what had happened. Discord felt the blast not as agony but rather a massive influx of chaos, unmatched since his sister had escaped the Veil and come to Equis an eon ago. Rather than rejoicing his eyes widened in fear, recognizing that the uncontrolled catastrophic force of nature was as lethal to him as a tsunami would be to a pony. He cowered in his pocket dimension, doing everything he could to stabilize and deflect the horrific after effects that threatened to rip him and his home apart. Grimly he fought tooth and nail simply to survive. Deep in Hejm every Alene felt the hammer blow, but like the alicorns, withstood the onslaught. Their innate toughness allowed them to shrug off the lingering pain and nausea. Chrysalis fell to her knees as the unimaginable agony slammed through her, worse than Discord’s enchanted migraines had ever been, her agony ripping through her kaleidoscope—each already experiencing their own hellish agonies. For the flutter ponies it was infinitely worse as the pain ricocheted through their mental link, bouncing back and forth between each herd member and their queen, one in five receiving multiple incoming waves at once, amplifying the torture a hundredfold. Those unfortunates did not suffer long, exploding in a fifty-foot circle of red and white. Shards of bone, flesh, and blood coated the entire kaleidoscope, wounding the unconscious survivors in a grotesque coloratura of death. All over Equis those sentients who were sensitive to magic felt the agony explode in their heads. Fire and crushing pressure and feeling themselves ripped to shreds was the common theme. Tougher species like dragons were able to shrug off the blinding pain, eyes narrowing in anger as they contemplated revenge against whoever had inflicted the indignity. Some of the more fragile magic using species fared worse. The antelope and the zebra were particularly hard hit, many falling into a coma and others dying from cerebral hemorrhaging. Ironically, their less magic-sensitive members fared better, some not even noticing the magic disruption that had felled their more gifted kin. ooOoo At the epicenter of the catastrophe, a mile wide sphere of utter annihilation, the victims felt nothing, having been torn apart far too quickly for the pain to register. The blast nullified the bonds between atoms, between electrons and protons, even the bonds between quarks. On the magical side the unimaginable forces tore apart thaums and destroyed the very fabric of space and time, ravaging everything until not even primordial chaos survived. The ravaging energies formed an event horizon inside of which nothing existed, not energy, not space, not even time. Even the souls of the victims disassociated, as though they had never been. Pony or slange or windigo, it mattered not. Their souls simply evaporated along with their flesh. Celestia and Luna felt the death of those pony’s souls as a diminishment of ponykind, and they wept bitter tears, knowing those failed lights were forever lost to the Fields of Elysium and would never rejoin their loved ones. Nothing material survived in that unholy sphere of nil space, neither dimension nor time nor space. The million year-old knowledge of the Slange disappeared from existence, as though it had never been, along with the Slange themselves and their allies and slaves. The sphere quickly imploded from the pressure of the multi-dimensional reality surrounding it. The Veil and the other dimensions conspired to make it retreat from the universe, its nullity allowing it to disappear without trace, the event horizon nothing more than a soap bubble of non-existence, which shrank far below the diameter of a quark, until it disappeared in the unbridgeable gap between something and nothing. ooOoo Of course the effects on Equis were far more severe. The actual area of the blast was now a polished demi-sphere a mile across. The mountain that had housed the Slange lair was gone—gravity sent the top of the mountain crashing into the crater, leaving only a pile of rubble, the majority of its support vaporized in a heartbeat. But that was only the physical aftermath. Around the planet millions of magically sensitive creatures had fallen unconscious, tens of thousands more who were physically weak due to age or their species physiological peculiarities had died outright from their brains being ripped apart by magical backlash. Naturally, some who would otherwise have survived the direct affects died by misadventure, falling from high places or being found by predators while helpless. Nature is cruelly inventive, offering an endless variety of ways to die. It was the worst disaster that had befallen Equis since the Sibling War six thousand years before. But this was scant comfort to the survivors since only Discord and Chrysalis still remembered it. ooOoo Naturally, the populace wanted answers as did the nobles. It took the combined political savvy and experience of a thousand years to keep a lid on the situation. Both Royal Sisters personally extracted magical oaths from those willing and cast memory-alteration spells on those who weren’t to keep the secret of what really happened from escaping. The official explanation Celestia and Luna gave was that an unknown group of crazed cultists had somehow gotten their hands on an ancient artifact. Mere hours from capture by Equestrian forces, they had meddled with things best left alone and somehow triggered the artifact, causing the disaster. The resulting catastrophe had destroyed both them and the artifact, leaving no trace of exactly what happened. Used to trusting Celestia, the ponies accepted the explanation. ooOoo Unlike Equestria, Hejm came through the disaster completely intact, Clan Hest having been dealt the worst of it. However, being comprised mostly of earth ponies and pegasi, with only a relative handful of unicorns living there (all stronger and more physically fit than most in Canterlot), there were no deaths or debilitating aftereffects, the majority of the unicorns who fell unconscious doing so within the pony compound. The handful of unicorns that had been outside the compound had been rushed back to Clan Hest by trolls, and swiftly treated. It took Hejm only a single day to fully recover. ooOoo Canterlot, naturally, was among the hardest hit, given the majority of the population were unicorns. But between the Royal Guard and the non-unicorn population, even Canterlot managed to return to normality within a month. During that month Celestia was moving largely on autopilot when she wasn’t concentrating on the recovery effort. Seeing the effects of what she and Luna had done was a sharp stick poking her conscious, constantly reminding her of the atrocity they had committed. Even with Luna’s constant attention to her dreams, more often than not they turned into nightmares, disturbing her sleep and slowly shredding the iron self-control she’d built up over centuries of rule. Luna, a thousand years closer to their violent and tumultuous past and far more militant than her gentler sister, was dealing with the realities of the attack better than Celestia. True, she was careful not to become too introspective, but was more pragmatic about the realities of war. There was no doubt the cost of victory was high, but the cost of defeat made the price of victory pale in comparison. But she still tried not to dwell on it. ooOoo It was now a month after the disaster. Equis had largely recovered, and Equestria had begun sending aid to other species harder hit than the ponies. In Hejm the Council was in session, debating what more, if anything, Hejm should do to help other species. “Clan Hest is handling the matter,” Sannheten repeated his point, “there is no reason for the rest of the clans to become involved beyond what they have already done.” He spoke Equestrian, out of respect for the queen. Vismeg spoke up in Trolsk while nodding, apparently agreeing with Sannheten. Although Teagan had been immersed in Trolsk for a solid month she still couldn’t follow the troll’s rapid speech. “He said the medicine Clan Langtpunkt sent Canterlot is enough, they need to consider the other clans before strangers,” Emma said quietly. Her skills at language far outstripped Teagan’s own, she was far from fluent, but could easily converse with any troll she met, whether in Trolsk or Equestrian. “What say you Droning?” Varig asked. His deep rumble was still powerful despite his age and gnarled body. “Clan Hest eyes and ears against Duisternis. Princess Celestia shield against creatures beyond Veil,” Teagan said slowly in Trolsk, picking her words carefully, straining to remember the correct word order, fighting a lifetime of knowing only English. She was excruciatingly aware she wasn’t up to even Emma’s modest skill, wincing at how idiotic she must sound. “Clan Hest help troll, pony, griffin, cow, no favor one over other,” the young queen stubbornly keeping to her pitiful grasp of Trolsk. The other council members did not try to correct her pronunciation or grammar, respecting her efforts to speak the foreign language and forgiving her current lack of skill. “We help others now maybe others help us after?” she finished hopefully. “Trust—a little? Maybe others deserve? Earn more trust later?” “Trust is not a Makilak, Min Droning,” Vismeg objected. “It cannot grow from a little sprout! It is or it is not. Trolls cannot trust others. They foreswear themselves far too easily.” “I cannot say in Trolsk, must speak Hest to say this thing,” Teagan said, giving up and switching to English. “Vismeg, humans are not entirely trustworthy. Some can be trusted and some can’t. And when it’s a stranger you can’t know if you can trust them or not. So we learned how to divide trusting others into small pieces, to protect ourselves from betrayal. We discovered a long time ago you can trust a person to do one thing without necessarily trusting them to do another.” Søyle translated patiently as Vismeg listened, brow creased in concentration. “How is this possible, min Dronning?” Vismeg asked, shaking his head. “How can you know they can be trusted at all, even to do a single thing?” “Because it is to their advantage,” Teagan said patiently. “Humans talk to each other, Vismeg—all the time. We listen to those we trust who have done business with the stranger. We trust them because they’ve proven we can. If a lot of people I trust say the stranger can be trusted to do something, I am more confident I can trust them to do that thing. The more people who vouch for him the more trustworthy I know he is. “On the other hand just because I know he will sell me something that is what he says it is, at a fair price that does not mean I can trust him in all things. So while I may do business with him I wouldn’t trust him to come to my home and watch my children while I’m not there. That is a different thing, and needs a different trust. You see?” “I do not understand, Dronning,” Vismeg said after a long silence. “How can trust be chopped into small pieces? Even if it can be as you say, how could one possibly keep track of all the many trusts and not mistake one for another?” “We do make mistakes, sometimes dangerous mistakes,” Teagan replied with a shrug. “So we have many people in government that do nothing else but watch different kinds of trust, to make sure someone can be trusted to do that one thing. That’s one reason our laws are so complicated.” “Trolls cannot live so,” Vismeg said, sitting back. “We could not survive. Any trust we give only lasts until the first betrayal, and then we could never trust them again.” Several of the council members nodded in agreement. “Do you think all ponies act the same way? Or all minotaurs? Or even all trolls? I know this is not so, Vismeg. Consider Einar and Meisel. You would trust both of them, would you not?” “I would,” Vismeg said firmly. “Neither has ever foresworn themselves.” “And yet when Winter Gust broke his word Meisel would have killed him but Einar stopped her. They are both trustworthy trolls, Vismeg. But they acted very differently in the same situation.” “That is not a matter of trust,” Vismeg protested. “Isn’t it?” Teagan countered. “Winter Gust trusted trolls not to kill him or he would never have gone to Meisel’s shop. That trust was kept by Einar but not Meisel. Yet it is clear Meisel did not foreswear herself.” Vismeg’s expression turned thoughtful as he considered her words. “I know of a troll that foreswore himself. An outcast named Jern. Did you know him?” Vismeg nodded. “I was on the council the day we banished Jern. He foreswore himself, forcing himself on a troll child who was not yet old enough to wed and did not desire him. But Jern was the first troll to foreswear himself in five hundred years.” Teagan shrugged, switching to Trolsk for the moment. “He boasted he eat me alive, then eat pony filly alive. He stole her from her place to do that thing. I kill him, Vismeg. Yet trolls trust him before, yes?” “Many did, including the child he forced,” Vismeg agreed reluctantly. “How does this explain chopping trust into small pieces, Dronning? Jern foreswore himself. Till then he was trusted. But not afterward, for anything. Trust is yes or no, that is all.” “Trust is yes-or-no,” Teagan agreed, switching back to Equestrian. “But humans know trust can be allowed for one thing but not another thing, while still being yes-or-no.” Vismeg shook his head. “This is a new thing, min Dronning. I must think on this thing.” “Fair enough,” Teagan said, nodding. She hadn’t expected to get even that much out of the stubborn troll so she took the small victory while she could. ooOoo Life progressed as it always does, and by the time Teagan and Emma were leaving to return to Earth Duisternis had been largely forgotten in the rush of life’s daily unremitting demands. Teagan’s grasp of Trolsk and the deceptively simplistic troll mindset increased to the point where while not entirely fluent she wasn’t regularly embarrassing herself either. She had also gotten a handle on the Alene and Snøskred as well, to the point she was much more comfortable around them than she’d been when she arrived. Emma had actually mastered Trolsk, being nearly as fluent in it as she was English. Both girls had also managed to learn reading and writing Trolsk, which was actually easier than conversing in it, at least for Teagan. Vismeg was still not completely ready to agree with Teagan’s human perspective on most matters when it came to Council business, but while remaining staunchly conservative he had unbent enough to at least listen to her opinions. Teagan had finally adjusted to the loin cloth and halter Søyle insisted she wear after Truth Speaker had given her a necklace that kept her from freezing in Hejm’s cool clime. He assured her the spell would last at least six months before needing a recharge. Emma surprised her on the last day by appearing in her own halter and loin cloth, an identical warmth charm around her neck. “Hey, you went native the day you got here,” Emma defended herself good naturedly when Teagan gaped at her outfit. “Besides, the necklace keeps me comfy, so why not? I’m Adventure Girl, after all! Why shouldn’t I look the part?” She confidently slipped her staff over her shoulder, in imitation of how Teagan carried Crush and grinned at her friend. Teagan laughed as the two of them, along with her bodyguards and Søyle headed for the surface and the chariots waiting to fly them to Canterlot.