The remni had departed. Twilight and her friends had won. They reacted to this course of events with joy, congratulating one another on their shared victory. They were happy and cheerful, and even Twilight, as amazed as she was, allowed herself to be carried away with the mood as they walked together.
“Did you see that?” said Rainbow Dash. “When Applejack hit that tree, and when Fluttershy showed up on that giant worm thing! I mean, even Fluttershy was awesome! FLUTTERSHY!”
“I’m always awesome, Rainbow Dash,” said Fluttershy.
“And Rarity beat one with dresses,” laughed Applejack. “Now, if you had told me that would ever happen I’d have said you were crazier than a chicken upside-down in a bucket of egg noodles. But it did!”
“Darling, fashion is the universal language. There is no need to fight when you and your opponents are both wearing FABULOUS clothing. That just wouldn’t do.”
“And what if you and your opponent aren’t wearing any clothing at all?” asked Rainbow Dash.
“Ooh! Ooh! I know!” giggled Pinkie Pie.
Twilight smiled, and was about to make a comment when the atmosphere detonated with a light brighter than ten thousand suns.
The entire world seemed to explode at once with light and sound. Twilight reacted instinctively, producing a shield around herself and her friends. She did her best to darken the surface to keep the intense light out, but even through it she could see the sky above alight as the force of a tremendous atomic blast forced back the high-atmospheric storms, dragging luminescent fallout with it. The shield did not keep out the sound, either: a deafening crack followed by rumbling caused by the distortions created by two forces greater than any storm feeding off each other as the sky was torn apart.
It was so loud and enormous, but Twilight was barely able to focus on it. Her friends were screaming, and cried out even louder as the sphere of magic was picked up by the force of the blast and thrown along with apples, stones, ice and plant material. Silken did her best to grab the ponies to secure them, but even that only helped a little.
The shield bounced several times and then struck a tree. The force was just too much, and Twilight could not maintain it. The bubble popped with an audible sound, and the ponies dropped into the mossy snow.
Fortunately, the main force of the detonation had cleared by this time. All that remained was the distant rumbling of the explosion propagating across the planet. To the others, it no doubt sounded like an intense barrage of thunder. To Twilight, it sounded like artillery. It was a sound she had heard in her life far more often than thunder.
She looked up and gasped. The storm had been forced away, and the sky was now clear. Up above was the nights sky, as clear and beautiful as it had been in the days long before it had been masked by pollution and later by endless storms of toxic fallout. It was the space where Twilight had spent the majority of her life, and yet from here on Equestria it looked so different. She saw the stars and the constellations sitting above next to the vast white moon, just as they had been when she was still young, or even when she was still mortal.
“What was that?!” cried Rarity as she desperately attempted to fix her hair.
“It’s the attack!” wailed Fluttershy. “It’s happening! We were wrong! We should have gone with them!” She then started crying. Applejack tried to comfort her, but both she and Rainbow Dash were looking at Twilight with expressions of grave concern on their faces. Pinkie Pie, meanwhile, was looking up.
“Ooh!” she said. “So pretty!”
“That wasn’t a dimensional hammer,” said Twilight.
“How do you know?” said Fluttershy. “It could have been!”
“Because the planet is still here.”
“That was a class six B detonation of a coaxial monocrystal reactor core,” said Silken. She looked at Twilight, and Twilight looked up at her concerned. “The same type of reactor that the Prodijila uses. With the same isotope signature.”
“The ship,” said Twilight. “You’re saying that the ship…”
“No. The ship is still intact. I have a visual on it. But they dumped the reactor into the ionosphere.”
“To clear the fallout,” said Twilight. “Those IDIOTS! They could have ignited the planet!”
“Twilight?” said Applejack.
“That idiot! He’s trying to clear the atmosphere for targeting!”
“Then how much time do we have?” asked Rainbow Dash.
“I don’t know, but- -”
“Ooh! Ooh! Pretty!” cried Pinkie Pie, jumping up and pointing.
“Yes, Pinkie, we know, the explosion was- -”
“Not the explosion! THAT!”
Twilight suddenly felt her head grabbed between a set of hooves and wrenched to one side. She looked up, and her eyes focused on something streaking across the sky. It was a pale silver light, one of many. They trailed through the clear sky, descending in wide arcs. The nearest of them sailed straight overhead. It cut through the canopy of trees, causing leaves and branches to fall as it bounced from trunk to trunk. Then, as quickly as it had come, it vanished over a small rocky hill with a distant thud.
“What was that?” said Applejack. “A shooting star?”
“Stars aren’t that low,” said Rainbow Dash. She looked at Twilight, concerned. “That was atmospheric. And it wasn’t any weather I know. And trust me, I know weather.”
“Did you…did you feel it?” asked Rarity, her eyes wide.
“Yeah,” said Twilight.
The others looked confused. “What do you mean?” asked Rainbow Dash. “I didn’t feel anything.”
“Neither did I,” said Applejack.
“I feel a little tingly,” said Pinkie. “And itchy. I blame Rainbow Dash.”
“Don’t blame me, it’s your fault!”
“All I feel is complete, paralyzing feeeeear!” wept Fluttershy.
“It had a magical signal,” said Twilight. “It…”
“It felt like it was in pain,” said Rarity, flatly. This immediately silenced the others. Twilight wished she could have disagreed, but she found herself unable to. The signal had not been in words, but she had known the instant she had felt it that it was a cry for help. A cry that was rapidly growing weaker even as the object crossed the sky.
“We have to find it,” said Rarity.
“Are you kidding?” said Rainbow Dash. “It came from hat big…explody…THING! We shouldn’t get anywhere near it!”
“Core detonation,” said Silken.
“Whatever! It can’t be good!”
“I have to agree with Rainbow on this,” said Applejack. “Whatever that was- -”
“Is,” corrected Rarity. She started toward where it had landed. “And I simply can’t deny help to somepony- -or something- -that asks! That would just not be proper!”
“Agreed,” said Twilight. “Even if we just investigate what it is.”
“Do we have time?” asked Silken.
Twilight gave her a look, and Silken understood. Of course there was time, or rather, a lack of it. There was no time to escape. All they could do was distract themselves while they waited for the hammer to fall.
For a few minutes, it seemed like it never would. The group walked toward where they had seen the strange object fall, clambering over the rough terrain and through the scrub and snow.
Then it did. Twilight and Rarity both suddenly screamed, their bodies wracked by sudden pain. To Twilight, it felt as though something had reached into the marrow of her bones and horn and was trying to shake her to pieces. The vibration was simply unbearable, even at such a profound range. What struck fear into her heart, though, was not her own pain. It was Rarity’s cries. What was most horrible to Twilight was the sound of her friend in pain.
“Twilight! Rarity!” cried Applejack. She sounded very distant. On some level, she must have felt it too. Or perhaps not. There was no guarantee that whatever was underneath her pony skin was capable of it, although Twilight thought that even in their present forms the non-magic users among them still had some sense that something horrible was going on.
Twilight was rolled onto her back. Through her blurred vision, she could see the dark sky overhead. As she looked up, she saw it. She saw the dimensional hammer fire.
It was not the kind of thing one could see with her eyes. The actual beam had a tremendously thin aspect ratio; it was less than a ten thousandth of a millimeter wide, surrounded by a quarter millimeter of dimensional plasma. It would have looked golden if seen up close, although such a thing was not possible to see as the feedback field surrounding a firing dimensional hammer would be invariably lethal to any organic life. Instead, it was something Twilight felt inside her body.
Her limbs suddenly convulsed, bending backward as ever muscle in her body uncontrollably tightened in a single, massive spasm. Twilight gritted her teeth and did her best to bear the maddening sensation of the tremendous discharge of magic. Her aetherite jewelry helped shield her to some extent, but not by much.
It was a feeling she remembered well, even if she wished she could have forgotten it. This was not the first time she had seen such a weapon fire. She had been there the very first time, her body clad in heavy metal shielding that no doubt made her look ridiculous. That was long before any pony had decided to turn the hammers into weapons, back when Twilight had created the first of them with the intention of averting an impending asteroid strike. But times had changed, and ponies continued to make improvements to what Twilight had originally conceived as a device to protect Equestria. They had become weapons, at first used as a rhetorical device for political threats until they had finally been deployed in a real war. It had been a war called the Second Lunar Insurrection, although no aspect of Luna’s kingdom bore any fault in it. Twilight still remembered the sound of those guns, and in this instant felt them again.
And, as Twilight watched, the moon was once again struck. As she looked up through the tears in her eyes, Twilight saw it shatter. There was no sound; it was too distant. The only sound she did hear was her friends crying out as they saw the debris expand from what had once been an inherent part of pony life. They were screaming because they saw the debris flying outward, falling toward the planet.
There was no need to fear an impact. The debris suddenly stopped, and then the moon seemed to pull itself back together. The sight was almost perversely hopeful; it was as if the damage were reversing itself. This, of course, was not the case. It was imploding as the target of the hammer was removed from existence.
The force of the implosion was greater than the explosion could ever have been. Twilight felt herself lifted off the ground, along with anything around her that was not already attached to the ground by roots or mass. Small plants, snow, rocks, ice- -they all moved upward slightly. The two lightest ponies- -Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash- -were pulled up substantially, and Rainbow Dash had to beat her wings in a panic to avoid rising to high.
Then, in an instant, it was gone. They all fell back to the floor. There was no more magic from above, and the entire world seemed to have gone silent.
Rarity moaned, rolling over as she grabbed her knees.
“Rarity!” Applejack put her hoof on Rarity’s shoulder. “Are you alright.”
“No, darling, I am most certainly not. That was…awful. Just awful.”
“They blew up the moon!” cried Pinkie Pie. “The MOON! How are we going to have tides? Or moon cheese! I used to LOVE moon cheese! AND tides!”
Twilight sat up. She had suffered no permanent damage, and nor had Rarity. They had just both been very shaken. “There is no way the moon was their target,” she said, rubbing her horn. “Somehow they missed.”
“They missed with a weapon like that,” mused Silken. “Light Gloom has awful aim indeed.”
“You have no idea.”
Silken’s eyes flitted to Twilight. “Really?”
Twilight cleared her throat awkwardly, and then stood up. She realized that she was shaking.
“Are you okay, Twi?” asked Rainbow Dash, steadying her on one side while Fluttershy took the other.
“I’m fine,” said Twilight, even though she felt nauseous. “Ugh. You’re not supposed to be near one of those without some sort of shielding. That was not fun.”
“It most certainly was not,” said Rarity, allowing Applejack to help her to a standing position. “I would say that I have been traumatized, completely! I don’t know if I will ever be the same! A lady’s nerves just aren’t meant for such shocks!”
“Your nerves should be glad they missed,” said Applejack. She looked sharply at Twilight. “If that had actually hit us…”
“I know,” said Twilight.
“And when your ‘old student’ gets around to reloading?”
“It could take days.”
“Or longer,” said Silken. “Considering the Prodijila’s reactor was detonated in the atmosphere, he may have been forced to improvise a power source.”
“We can’t assume that,” said Twilight. “For all we know, he has a whole fleet of cloaked ships up there.”
“Or just the one.”
Twilight first realized that something was wrong when they crested the hill. The area was filled with a type of brush that resembled long, vertical vines of wire-like green material. It made seeing things ahead difficult, but Twilight could still sense something ahead. The already cold air had grown even colder, and a knot seemed to have formed in Twilight’s stomach. She felt bad, and memories from her long life kept surfacing: how badly she had treated her friends, how she had been unable to save Starlight, or the countless others whose names she had never even known who remained during the Exodus, or the wars and weapons- -or the Mortality Virus.
Then, through the weeds, she caught sight of the object that had fallen and she understood. She extended her magic, stopping her friends.
“Twilight!” said Rainbow Dash, bouncing off the pink-violet wall. “Warn us before you do that!”
“Windigo,” said Twilight, her eyes wide. “It’s a windigo.”
“Windigo?” Applejack looked confused. “Twilight, that’s not possible, are you sure?”
“Look for yourself. But CAREFULLY.”
The ponies did. Twilgiht lowered the wall and they poked their heads through the reeds. A clearing sat beyond, and in it there was a small crater. In its center there was indeed a windigo. Its silver body lay amongst the snow and green moss, and it was releasing long, somber calls. Something appeared to be wrong with it: its normally silver body was coated in patches of pale violet that did not seem to be able to maintain a proper outline, and the wendigo was losing form in those locations. It was injured.
“Yup,” said Applejack, pulling her head back through. “I was wrong. That is a windigo. We need to go. Now.”
“Agreed,” said Twilight.
“We can’t!” cried Rarity.
“Quiet!” hissed Twilight. “It will hear you!”
“I don’t care! Look at it, Twilight, it’s hurt!” Rarity turned to Fluttershy, expecting support. Fluttershy just averted her gaze, rubbing one of her front legs against the other nervously.
“Fluttershy?”
“Well…it’s not an animal…so…”
“So you don’t even care? Fluttershy!”
“No, no, that’s not what I mean, it’s just…”
“It’s a creature that feeds on negative energy and disharmony,” said Applejack. “Rarity, I’d bet apples to eggplants you can feel it, just like the rest of us.”
“But why’s it on the ground?” asked Rainbow Dash, peeking through the plants again. “Aren’t windigoes supposed to be up in the sky or something?”
“Yeah,” said Pinkie Pie. There was a pause as she searched for a joke, but effects of the windigo were affecting her far more deeply than the others. She grasped for a moment, but then just fell silent.
“They are,” said Twilight. She too looked out at the creature. Logically, she knew that she was supposed to leave now, to escape from the vicious creature before more came. Somehow, though, she could not bear to leave it.
“Winigoes are ectoplasmic beings,” said Silken. “And while I am not familiar with their biology, they are indeed alive. And based on my extrapolation of their physiology, I can say with certainty that this one’s vital signs are dropping.”
“Dropping?” said Twilight, her breath catching in her throat.
Silken nodded. “As I said, they are ectoplasmic beings. Their bodies are made of condensed magic, and they dwell in storms.”
“The explosion,” said Twilight. “It was meant to neutralize magic, to clear the way for the sensors.” She turned toward the clearing. “This one must not have been able to outrun the blast…”
“It is injured,” said Silken. “Badly.”
“You heard it,” said Rarity. “Twilight, I know you heard it to. How much pain it was in. Please. We have to help it.”
Applejack looked to Rarity with a grave look on her face. “Sugarcube…I don’t think there’s anything we can do.”
“Yes there is,” said Twilight, steeling herself. Then, before the others could try to stop her, she stepped out from the reeds and into the clearing.
“Twilight!”
Twilight did not stop. She approached the windigo. It looked up at her with its luminescent white eyes, and Twilight saw fear in them. The creature whinnied in fear and tried to crawl forward to escape. It collapsed, though, unable to move.
“Easy!” said Twilight, wishing that she had paid more attention to Fluttershy’s endless yammering about how to treat frightened or sick animals. “I’m not going to hurt you! I’m trying to help!”
The windigo looked up at her, and in its eyes, Twilight saw that it was indeed not an animal. Although it could not speak, it had understood her perfectly. It lay down, shaking.
Twilight continued to approach, but she felt herself slowing. The air had been cold before, but now it was icy. The pain of her past was growing deeper and stronger. Every step Twilight took drove her deeper into her sorrow and regrets. The list of them was long, and so was their weight.
“Twilight,” said a voice behind her. She looked over her shoulder to see Rarity approaching as well. Behind her were the others. Not one of them hid- -not even Fluttershy- -and all of them had emerged from the brush to help.
Silken moved forward the most quickly, because she could move freely. The windigo had no effect on her; she was both a machine, and had already died long ago with no regrets. The windigo, likewise, did not seem to register her presence. It was either blind to her presence or far weaker than Twilight had thought.
“Silken,” said Twilight. “Can you do anything?”
Silken reached down and touched the windigo. Her hoof went through it, trailing ectoplasm as it did. “No,” she said, looking up. “This creature has no physical body. It is a living spell. It can only be healed with magic.”
“Of course it can,” muttered Twilight. She turned to Rarity. “Are you up for it?”
“This was my idea,” said Rarity, clearly showing some level of regret. “And I’m going to stand by it! I don’t know what I can do, but I promise I will give my all!”
Twilight nodded and the pair of them got close enough to touch the windigo. It was smaller than either of them had expected; whereas Twilight had always perceived windigoes to be much larger than ponies, this one was slightly smaller. That either meant that Twilight had misinterpreted their proportions or, more likely- -and more distressingly- -this was a foal.
The patches of contamination on its body seemed to be growing. The creature’s shimmering silver surface was fading in luster, and its sorrowful cries were getting weaker.
“Oh my,” whispered Rarity. Her blue eyes turned to Twilight. “It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Not for much longer,” said Twilight. “Unless this works.” She lit her horn, and started the basics of a spell. There was no reference for what she was doing; this was purely uncharted territory. No pony in the history of ponies had attempted to help a windigo, and all those who had tried to exterminate them had inevitably failed. There was nothing to go on, meaning that Twilight was forced to improvise in real time using her knowledge and skills to determine the nature of every spell required and to execute them exactly. In any other circumstance, this would have been profoundly exciting and alluring to her. Here and now, though, it only made her afraid.
“Alright,” she said. “Rarity, feed your magic into mine. Follow my lead”
Rarity nodded and ignited her horn. It glowed with bright blue magic that slowly swirled downward into Twilight’s magic.
Twilight began to focus, so much so that she barely registered the deep, mechanical bellowing coming from the trees around them. It was at the edge of her consciousness, but she still recognized it. She swore unspeakable curses concerning various parts of Celestia’s anatomy under her breath.
“You all heard that,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Applejack, looking somewhat pale. “They’re still a ways off, though, I don’t think- -”
“They can sense the injured windigo. And they’re coming. They’re on their way, fast.”
“I will do what I can,” said Silken, standing up. “But so far, I have proven inefficient at fighting them.”
“I haven’t,” said Rainbow Dash.
“Do you have a wooden handle?” asked Pinkie Pie.
“What?” asked Rainbow Dash. “Pinkie, why would I have a handle?”
“Because they mopped the floor with you last time,” she said, darkly.
“Well, yeah, but that was a fluke! They got the drop on me!” Rainbow Dash punched one of her hooves against the other. It was meant to be a threating gesture, but it came off as looking like she was clapping. “So now I’ve got a score to settle.”
“Fluttershy,” said Applejack. “You wouldn’t happen to have any animals that can help us?”
“They’re not weapons!” said Fluttershy indignantly. “And no. They can’t get near the windigo, except for the cockroaches. And they’re just too adorable to put in any danger.”
“We’re all to adorable to be put in danger,” said Pinkie Pie. “Frankly, this is getting ridiculous.”
Almost as soon as she had pointed out the obvious, the tall reeds around them began to rustle. The ponies looked around in panic, forming a circle around Twilight and Rarity.
“Twilight,” said Applejack. “Um…I don’t mean to be demanding or anything, but we sure could use some of that alicorn magic right now…”
“I can’t stop now,” said Twilight. “I need more time. Hold them off.”
Eyes became visible through the grass. They were blue, the same color as Pinkie’s- -and there were a lot of them. There was definitely more than one of the machine-creatures. Twilight heard a low, heavily distorted sound that rose rapidly in pitch. She shivered, realizing that it was a version of pre-recorded giggling.
“And how are we supposed to ‘hold them off’?” asked Applejack, annoyed. “We’re just ponies.”
“And they’re giant monsters,” said Fluttershy, clearly not wanting to even think about fighting them.
“They’re not monsters,” said Twilight. “They’re failed versions of you, of all of us.”
“Of us?! What are you talking about- -”
“Starlight spend her life trying to create you. But not all of them worked. She couldn’t bear to end the failures, so she created these.”
“Ah,” said Pinkie Pie. “You know, I never took her for the ‘mad scientist’ type. I figured you would end up doing that whole ‘insane doctor’ thing.”
“That was a phase,” protested Twilight. An idea suddenly occurred to her. “Pinkie!”
“Yes. I am.”
“So are they! Pinkie, these are different versions of you! Try talking to them!”
“Talk to them,” said Pinkie, calmly, as a tentacle reached out for her legs and as at least twelve of the creatures stepped silently through the reeds, their numerous eyes scanning both the sky and locking on the various ponies. They were moving slow and carefully, but they had finally ascertained that there was no present threat to their goal. “Twilight, I’ve heard a lot of stupid ideas in my time. Half of them came out of my mouth. The other half came out of Rainbow Dash.”
“Hey!”
“But that has to be the WORST ever.”
“I don’t know, just do something! Try telling them jokes!”
“Jokes,” sighed Pinkie Pie. “Really? It’s not a switch. I’m not just a sack of joke meat you can just put on a humor rotisserie. And you had better use the rotisserie, if you don’t all the juices seep out and my humor gets really dry.”
The creatures stopped, and turned their blue eyes to Pinkie Pie. The compressors in their bodies hissed as their robotic limbs slowed. They watched, interested in something other than the windigo.
More tentacles reached out toward Pinkie Pie.
“Oop,” said Pinkie Pie, stepping away. “Yeah, I know where that is going. You know this story is supposed to have a teen rating, right? We can’t do that kind of thing here.”
The creatures did not laugh. Instead, two of them turned their attention toward Twilight and Rarity. They approached, but slowly. No doubt they were mindless and without the capacity for any semblance of thought, but that did not mean they could not feel. The effect of the windigo, Twilight realized, might have been an involuntary defensive mechanism.
It did not stop the creatures for long, though. Heavy hydraulic systems pressed forward, and thin pale gray tentacles reached outward. Twilight felt one touch her shoulder and slide up her neck as it petted her hair. It was cold, and did not feel like flesh at all.
The same was happening to Rarity, and she seemed to be frozen and on the verge of weeping as it touched her mane. She was gasping and letting out a horrid high moan.
“Focus!” said Twilight. “Rarity, please! I can’t do this without you!”
“But…m…mm…my mane! It’s tt…t…touching me!”
“Pinkie!” shouted Twilight, not taking her eyes off the windigo. “Do something!”
“What am I supposed to do?!” By this time, Pinkie had been lifted entirly off the ground by the creature, and it was examining her with an array of glaring eyes interspaced over a system built from scavenged and strangely manufactured optics.
“Make them laugh!”
“That doesn’t answer the question!” Pinkie Pie turned to the eyes, and then watched as the whole assembly split open into a vast mechanical mouth overgrown with vicious bone teeth and metal spikes.
Pinkie Pie stared into the gaping maw, and then calmly looked over her shoulder at Twilight. “Welp, I’m toast. I hope this thing likes chocolate. Because I just made a LOT of fudge.”
“I can’t help you right now!” cried Twilight, exasperated. “I am literally reconstructing a living ectoplasmic spell from a subunit level upward while trying to dissipate a geometrically propagating asymmetrical decay. This isn’t easy!”
“Come on, Pinkie!” called Rainbow Dash. “You can do it!”
“Hopefully,” said Fluttershy, who was covering her eyes. “Please don’t get eaten.”
“And don’t make any more fudge,” added Applejack, looking a bit disgusted.
The creature suddenly stopped. Its eyes turned to Applejack. The fact that she was being upstaged for the attention she so deperatly and constantly craved snapped Pinkie out of her stupor. “Okay,” she said, taking a big breath. “Okay…hey! Big shoggoth thing!” It looked at her. “I just flew in from Cloudsdale, and boy are my arms tired!”
This was met with loud and exasperated groans from all the ponies present. Only Silken laughed. One of the creatures on the far side of Twilight and Rarity let out a long, low sound.
“Did you just boo me?” cried Pinkie Pie, turning around sharply on the tentacles that held her. “You haven’t even evolved to sentience yet! You can’t boo me!”
The creatures growled. Their features suddenly sharpened, and Twilight felt the tentacles wrapping around her, hard. Her friends retreated to the relative safety around the windigo, but even that did not protect them. The creatures closed in, looking like a wall of rusted machinery and silently laughing eyes.
“Pinkie!”
“Okay, okay! How about- -um- -oh! I know! Do you know why Rainbow Dash’s house doesn’t have any carpet?”
Rainbow Dash turned as red as a beet. “PINKIE!” she cried, her voice going several octaves higher than any of those around her thought was even possible. “You swore you would NEVER tell that joke again!”
“Well I don’t have a lot of material, and I’m kind of freaking out right now! I feel like Fluttershy does when she sees a potato!”
“Oh,” mumbled Fluttershy. “So many eyes…”
“Try physical comedy!” said Applejack. “That always gets me hootin’ and hollerin’!”
“How am I supposed to do that from up here?!”
Silken looked down at Fluttershy, and then pointed. “Would it help if I slapped her?”
Fluttershy suddenly jumped up with a squeak, her eyes wide. “Wh- -what? Why would you say that?”
“Is that not comedy? I have heard that it stems from suffering.” Her wide eyes narrowed into tiny dots, and she lifted one of her hard, plated hooves. “I promise it will only hurt enough to be funny.”
“Please, no,” begged Fluttershy.
“She’s right,” said Pinkie. “I mean, that’s how slapstick works. And you’re the stick.”
“Huuhuuu…I don’t want to be a tree anymore!”
“Well,” said Pinkie Pie, considering, “I suppose we could just stroke her gently. I mean, Rainbow Dash already does that.”
Rainbow Dash became beetlike again. “I did not do that!”
“Rainbow,” said Fluttershy, looking dejected.
“Well…yes, one time, but she was afraid! I couldn’t just leave her like that!”
“She’s always afraid,” said Applejack.
“I’m not always afraid!” protested Fluttershy. “Not when I have something cute and soft to hug and squeeze…”
“Like Rainbow Dash,” said Pinkie.
The monstrosities that had now completely encircled the group had begun to make sounds. It was not laughter, but rather seemed to be discussion. They were releasing low-frequency warbles with occasional trilling that was filled with significant static distortion. Whatever organic part of them remained silent.
“What are they saying?” asked Applejack, turning to Twilight.
“How should I know?” said Twilight, annoyed. Sweat was running down her face, but the spell was starting to work. She had found the correct combination of spells to remove the heavy contamination, and to begin ectoplasmic regeneration. It took a vast amount of power, though, and Twilight was not sure how long she could maintain the concentration necessary to perform the incredibly complex ad-hoc spell. “It’s probably just mindless screaming.”
“Well, I’m about to be screaming mindlessly!” cried Pinkie Pie. “They’re gonna take my brain!”
“I don’t think they will,” said Fluttershy, softly. “Because that would give them diabetes.”
All of the ponies and even the pseudo-Pinkie Pie abominations turned to Fluttershy. She shrank. “I was just…trying to…nevermind…”
“Fluttershy! Stop trying to do my job! Besides, you’re the only one here who gives ponies diabetes! Quick, hug Rainbow Dash or something! If we’re lucky their high blood-sugar will give them ketoacidosis! That’s a real pain, you know, I’ve had it, like, eighteen times!” She paused, and then produced a large and thoroughly frosted cupcake.
“Pinkie,” said Applejack, looking somewhat repulsed, “where did you just get that?”
“I made it, silly!” laughed Pinkie, nervously. She turned to the creature holding her. “Do you want it? It’s fudge flavor! Extra fresh!”
All of the creature’s eyes focused on the confection. In fact, all the eyes of all the creatures focused on the cupcake. Thin projections slipped out from between the rusty joints of their armor and expanded into feathery organs that began to wave rhythmically. They could smell it.
Pinkie Pie extended the cupcake with a shaking hoof toward the vast mouth. As it approached, all of the creature’s eyes suddenly closed and receded into its body, revealing the heavy metal beneath. The mouth suddenly snapped open like a mechanical trap. Instead of attempting to bite the cupcake, though, tendrils of flesh emerged and began to reach for one another, winding and twisting. As they merged, they began to form a shape.
Within seconds, they had assembled something that looked like a badly sculpted parody of a pony head. Not just any head, though: it was Pinkie Pie’s. The face was longer, and crooked; the jaw was slack. What hair the creature had tried to make was pale and sparse. There were no eyes.
The face looked up at Pinkie Pie, and then giggled. It did not sound like a pony giggle at all. Then it leaned forward, its jaw extending suddenly to a size far larger than any pony would have. It quickly snapped up the cupcake, pulling it gently back into the creature’s body held in a set of long, transparent fangs.
Pinkie Pie stared at this in silence. “Huh,” she said as the artificial head looked back at her. “It’s like looking in a mirror, isn’t it? Except an ugly mirror. Like that one I gave Rarity for a prank.”
“Wait!” cried Rarity, turning so sharply that the change in her magic nearly caused Twilight to pass out. “That was you?!”
“No,” said Pinkie Pie, her face scrunching. “It was Rainbow Dash.”
“Huh?” said Rainbow Dash. “I just heard my name. I wasn’t listening to the rest. I was looking at that thing. It’s just…you know, I can’t look away. It’s just so…I don’t even know. Like Granny Smith in a stiff wind.” Applejack shuddered. Rainbow Dash turned to Fluttershy. “Hey, Flutters, it’s neat to see you’re still standing, though.”
“I’m too scared…to faint,” gasped Fluttershy.
Silken reached out and poked Fluttershy’s side. Fluttershy was so stiff from terror that she just fell over. One of the creatures made a sound that was something like a laugh.
“What do you know,” said Silken. “It IS funny!”
Pinkie Pie stared at the face looking back at her, and then looked over her shoulder at Twilight. “Hey, Twilight.”
“Hay is for horses, Pinkie.”
“Yeah, I know. Hey, Twilight. Are you almost done?”
“Don’t rush me. You have no idea how hard this is.”
“Oh,” said Pinkie Pie. She paused for a long time. “Well, if you say so, but if you don’t mind me making a teensie, tiny, itty-bitty request, could you pretty please HURRY THE BUCK UP OH CELESTIA’S GOLDEN RUMP IT’S LOOKING AT ME TWILIGHT TWILIGHT TWILIGHT I’M FREAKING OUT DON’T LET IT EAT ME I’M TOO YOUONG TO BE EATEN EVEN THOUGH I BET I TASTE SUPER-GOOD OH LUNA’S DYSPLASTIC GERMAN-SHEPARD HIPS HURRY UP IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS CINNAMON!”
In her screaming, Pinkie Pie expended too much air and promptly passed out. The creature shook her for a moment, and then dropped her.
This group of creatures was patient. They were not driven by insane, mindless rage like the others. They had waited, calculating, observing. Now, having seen enough, they advanced forward.
“No!” cried Twilight. “Not yet! I’m so close!”
“Twilight,” whispered Rarity, her horn flickering. “I don’t know if…I can…Sweetie Belle…”
She suddenly collapsed, and Twilight shuddered as she took on the full burden of the spell. Rarity had given everything she could, and although it had been more than Twilight had asked she had still fainted at the worst possible time.
“Silken!”
“I will do what I can,” said Silken, stepping forward to the nearest creature. The creature stopped to meet her. It’s surface shifted, opening various plates to reveal stained ceramic eyes with tiny blue pupils. A set of limbs then reached forward. Although they had been crudely constructed, it was clear that the robotics they contained were not hydraulic or pneumatic like the limbs that the creatures so often used. They were robotic, but a kind that Silken found both highly surprising and highly familiar.
“Goddess,” she said. “When the violet one passed over me in the castle, do you think it might have scanned me?”
“Even if it did,” grunted Twilight. “There’s nothing it could do with the information. There’s no way they could replicate it.”
“Oh,” said Silken. “Well, that’s good to know.”
With one swift motion, the creature struck at her. Silken took a step back, but barely managed to avoid the robotic appendage. With the force of it, she calculated that even at full mass she would sustain substantial damage if it struck her optics or a limb. Her body, though effective at the most crude and basic fighting, was not designed for combat.
“You’re not going to get me again,” said Rainbow Dash. She backed up as well until her rump was nearly against Twilight’s back, dragging Fluttershy by her tail the whole time. “Round two, eh? You’re not going to be so lucky!”
“Twilight,” said Applejack, who was also backing up but eying Pinkie, who was lying unperturbed by the creatures. “Dash is right- -sort of- -but to be honest here, we’ve got about as much chance of an inchworm eating a yard-long bean.”
“I’m almost done, I’m almost done! Don’t rush me!”
“It is too late anyway,” said Silken, shrugging. “We are already surrounded. Even if Twilight finished before you all end up, well…like me, you would not be able to get away.”
“Not helping,” said Applejack. “Not helping at all.”
“Rainbow,” said Twilight, “you can fly.”
“Don’t even say it!” snapped Rainbow Dash. “There’s no way I’m leaving! Even if that means getting ground into a paste!”
“I don’t want to be a paste!” wept Fluttershy.
“Twilight, can’t you teleport us?” asked Applejack.
“No. Even if I had enough power left, what it does to things with an organic brain…well…”
The creatures suddenly stopped. They stood in silence, as if waiting for some unheard signal. Then they leapt forward.
Twilight took a deep breath and summoned what magical energy she had. As her friends cried out in surprise, a violet bubble formed around them. The creatures struck it, but were immediately repelled. They did not depart, though, and began to attack the spell.
Silken had already known what Twilight would attempt to do, and she reacted accordingly. She was quick enough to jump forward, rolling across the ground as the shield fell around the others, leaving her on the outside.
She did not hesitate. Instead, she moved forward quickly, dodging past the creature’s various legs and exhaust ports. They did not seem to know how to react; despite Silken’s ungainly appearance, she was as fast as any remnus.
She reached her target in seconds. Pinkie Pie had been lying exactly where the creature had left her, and still remained completely unperturbed. In one swift movement, Silken picked her up and tossed her backward. Twilight’s shield spell, as she had expected, was permeable to her friends. Pinkie Pie passed through easily, landing on Fluttershy with a loud thump.
This immediately sent the creatures into a frenzy. They reacted strongly to the removal of the bringer of fudge cupcakes, and in their panic began tearing at Twilight’s dome, trying to reach the ponies beneath.
“Silken, get under the dome!” cried Applejack.
Silken just smiled, as was customary for her. That was not her intention, although she wondered if she truly would be allowed to get through at all.
Instead, she turned her attention toward the largest of the creatures. It would be impossible for Silken to fight them all, but she had resigned herself to doing as much as she could.
She charged the creature. Their bodies struck, but the impact was not like when Silken and Corona Fade had fought. Instead of an explosion of force, Silken seemed to just sink. The armor was hard and impenetrable, but whatever was beneath it gave way as though it were rotted.
Then she saw a flash of robotics. The appendages that she had seen before on the creature’s body were like hers, but they were crude parodies, built from scavenged materials and improperly conceived schematics. They were strong, but inefficient. Yet, still, Silken felt a shock to her body. She looked down to see the golden structum tips of the limbs emerging from her body where the creature had repeatedly impaled her.
“Silken!” cried Fluttershy.
Silken looked over her shoulder. “It is fine,” she said, calmly. “I have neither the capacity to feel pain nor vital organs.” Save for one, she thought. “I will hold this one as long as I can.”
That was not of much consequence, and Silken knew that. Despite this, she grabbed onto the creature. She had been impaled three times, and with her body shifted in such a way as to lock the creature in place. The arms were linked to the creature’s core, and no doubt to the skeleton that bore it, whether that was of perverse and distorted bone or a framework of iron. Silken could not fight the creature, exactly, but she could slow it down. So, she reversed her mass centrifuge. Her body quickly gained wait, rising to her default sixteen tons- -and continuing to rise.
Not fifteen feet away, the shield spell was beginning to crack. The creatures were tearing at it, and although they could not use magic they were still incredibly strong. A few even had components made of structum, and every hit with a substance of such metaphysical weight was like a punch to Twilight’s spleen.
Sweat was running down her forehead. The strain on her horn was now almost too much to bear, and she could see no way out.
“Silken!” she cried, her voice wavering and causing her vision to darken. She immediately stopped yelling; if she tried to talk again, she would lose concentration and likely pass out.
“My mass is currently seventy six tons!” said Silken, who had partially sunk into the rocky ground below her, and who was struggling against the largest of the creatures, keeping it out of tentacle-reach of the dome. “I cannot move!”
Twilight’s breath hitched. The world grew blurry, but she focused. Her friends were around her. Rarity was lying at her side, breathing but unconscious. She looked small, with her mane disheveled in a way that she would never allow if she were awake. Pinkie, likewise, was asleep, but she was smiling, apparently having pleasant dreams. Fluttershy was cowering behind Applejack, who looked about ready to fight even if she could not manage to hide the expression of hopelessness on her face. At the top of the dome, Rainbow Dash was circling anxiously like a panicked bird, eyeing the creatures as though she wanted to attack them but could not find a way to do so.
The spell that Twilight was using to heal the windigo was also failing. She had been keeping it unconscious, but now it stirred. This only caused the creeping depression that surrounded it to worsen, and it began to struggle. Its body had been repaired, and it was no longer dying, but it was still injured.
Despite Twilight’s best efforts, the windigo sat up. It did not attack her, but it turned its head upward and let out a high, intermittent cry. The sound was bonechilling and strange.
The attacking creatures did not seem to notice. They had become fixated on the growing cracks in the shield spell. One had even started reaching its tentacles inside. Rainbow Dash was in the process of fighting them, although as a pony the best she could do was bite them.
Then, suddenly, they all stopped. The hair-like appendages on one of them seemed to go wild, shifting and twitching in every direction. Almost instantly, the creature tore itself apart from within, spontaneously dividing itself just in time to avoid a blast of blue magic.
The magic struck the ground, and immediately it burst open into a plume of vicious-looking ice spikes that propagated exponentially. The two halves of the creature, rather than come together, went their separate ways and became two smaller versions of their single parent.
Twilight felt the cold before she saw heard the sound from high above. It came out through the trees as if from everywhere at once, driving the world into silence. It was a single long wail. The injured windigo’s ears pricked and its luminescent eyes stared upward. It began to call more frantically.
Then they descended as a sudden swarm. Amidst the atmospheric phenomena, Twilight saw the outlines of windigoes. Some of them were the taller ones whose bodies bore complicated makes, and they attacked with ice and force that Twilight could not possibly mistake for anything except magic.
They fell form overhead, striking at the creatures. The failed clones reacted with confusion. Despite having an uncanny ability to guess where the windigoes were going to attack, they were being driven back. Spells of frost, lightning, and wind struck out at them, pushing their rusted and heterogeneous armor to- -and past- -its limit.
The creatures retreated, but they did not go far. They initially scrambled rapidly across the rough terrain- -they could not fly- -but then suddenly stopped and regrouped instantly. Twilight for a moment just assumed that they were naturally capricious, just like the pony they were derived from. That was until she felt the ground rumble.
Part of it nearby collapsed, causing one of the nearby trees to tilt suddenly. Material crumbled into the pit below, and mechanical limbs forced their way through. They were massive; just one leg of the emerging creatures was the same size as the ones that had retreated to provide them support. When the reinforcements finally did emerge, they were vast and tank-like, coated entirely in armor save for a number of tiny green eyes arranged in a small circle near their apex.
Their bodies bristled with what to Twilight tangentially resembled turrets. She could not be sure on that conclusion, as there was no way to identify what the combination of electronics, mechanical parts, and gray flesh truly were.
At this sight, the windigoes descended. They did not attack, but rather positioned themselves across from the advancing force of shoggoths, their hooves touching the snowy ground but leaving no tracks. They stood ready for attack, and one of those among them who bore the complex marks of a wizard stepped forward. She raised her hoof, and a circle of frosty air appeared before her, displaying a shifting combination of symbols. Symbols that, Twilight realized, were derivatives of those she had found scrawled on the extra page of the friendship journal in Starlight’s facility.
“Well bread me and call me a fritter,” swore Applejack under her breath. “Those are real windigoes. Real, live, windigoes.”
“Yeah,” said Rainbow Dash, her voice wavering almost imperceptibly. “This just got interesting, didn’t it?
“It’s a good thing we have this shield,” said Fluttershy. “At least we’re safe as long as- -”
Twilight dropped the shield.
“Twilight!” cried Applejack as the purple dome collapsed to her feet and dissipated. “What did you- -”
The injured windigo filly peeped loudly and struggled to stand. Twilight helped it up, and it moved through the air, its legs shaky but swift, as it returned to its family. The other windigoes saw it, and they saw the scars that the contamination had left on it. They looked at Twilight, and their symbols changed, questioning.
“I did what I could,” said Twilight, addressing them.
They stared at her for a long moment with luminescent eyes. They were not the only ones, though; from the other side, blue and green eyes watched with anticipation. Those eyes were different, and Twilight saw that now. The eyes of the windigoes were alive with thought and understanding. The eyes of the shoggoths were empty and blank, their species having evolved past the need for conscious thought millennia ago. Yet, despite this difference, both types of eyes watched her, waiting.
The windigoes slowly turned their attention to the creatures standing across from them. As they did, the air around them distorted. Something like a blowing wind materialized from the silence around them, a mass of swirling blue light that stepped forward on abstract legs. It stood far taller than the rest of them, but they moved aside from it, as if they understood its will. Perhaps they did.
There was a sudden crack from the other side. Four teleportation spells had ignited, spraying forth burning plasma from an improperly formed spell. None of the creatures had left, though. Rather, four had arrived: creatures far smaller than the others, that walked like ponies but bore faces carved from metal. They were four of the eighteen queens that Starlight had created. Twilight looked at them and shivered, knowing that she was the reason they were what they were. Starlight had attempted to resurrect her, not realizing that Twilight was still alive. Unlike the others, the queens had no hope of succeeding. Since their inception, they had been doomed to this fate.
One of them had a familiar mask, and Twilight saw its many knowing violet eyes turn to her. They were her eyes, perverted and changed by uncontrolled evolution. Behind this creature and its comrades, more arrived silently: ones that bore perfect white paint instead of rust, and others that arrived from the sky, clinging to high trees and watching with blue or violet eyes.
Both sides stared at each other, and Twilight could feel the tension rise when she realized that neither group was going to back down. They were waiting, but only because she was between them- -and even then, they were both preparing for attack.
The blue windigo looked up at them, and started to take a step forward. The queens saw this, and growled low. Twilight saw their bodies preparing to open for a magical attack.
“Wait!” cried Twilight. “Stop!”
Miraculously, they all did. Once again all eyes- -including those of Twilight’s friends- -turned to her.
Silently, Twilight stepped toward the blue windigo. It shifted, as if she were about to attack it, but Twilight raised no spells against it, not even to protect herself. She knew that she did not have to.
“When I first saw you,” she said, “I guess I already knew it. On some level, even if I didn’t remember. If I didn’t want to remember.” She looked up into it, and its one eye , constantly forming and re-forming, looked down at her. “There wasn’t enough left of you. You lived too long, tried to do too much. You don’t remember what you were. And for the longest time, I tried to forget too.” She paused, not taking her eyes off of the swirling mass of disembodied magic. “But I do remember. I remember who you used to be.”
Twilight raised her horn. The blue windigo did not step back, but rather just closed its eye. Pink-violet magic surrounded it as Twilight performed a spell not terribly unlike that of the one she had just used on the windigo, although modified in that she knit it with her own memory. The magic that she felt against hers was familiar, and Twilight smiled. It was a magic she had never expected to feel again, and she was glad that after half a million years she was still able to recall who it had belonged to.
The blue windigo began to collapse. The various pieces of its spell ceased to swirl and pulse as they were brought together, the shattered elements being reassembled and the extraneous pieces that had been created across the centuries being discarded.
All eyes watched as the blue windigo was reduced in size and consolidated in shape until, finally, the spell was complete. Before Twilight stood the ghostly image of a pony. Her body was translucent, like that of a wingigo, and her eyes glowed with internal light. Her eyes were different from those of the others, though. They were conscious, but they were not alive.
“Twilight,” said Applejack. “Is that…”
“Starlight,” said Twilight. She smiled, and so did what remained of Starlight Glimmer.
“Crea…TOR,” groaned one of the queen shoggoths in surprise. The others looked to it, and then back at Starlight. They had no minds of their own, and yet they remembered the one who had stood outside the tanks of their ancestors, looking upon them with hope even after so many failures. The queens no doubt did.
“You shouldn’t have used this spell,” said Twilight, unable to suppress her tears. “You could have rested. After all that time, you deserved it. To sleep.”
“Twilight,” said Applejack. “How can she be here?”
“She can’t be,” said Fluttershy. “It’s been too long…”
“It is her,” said Twilight. “Or part of her. What was left. Sombra’s Bane. The greatest curse known to ponykind.”
Starlight looked at Twilight, and her smile faded slightly. Most likely, she could not speak. She could think, though. Despite her ghostly form, Twilight saw that she still had a pale cutie mark on her flank. The same one the Map had called before, when Twilight and her friends had been in danger.
“You didn’t stop, though,” said Twilight. “That’s why you did it. Because you couldn’t leave the world like that. The windigoes. They’re sentient, aren’t they?”
Starlight nodded, and smiled. She turned her head toward the windigoes, and they nodded back to her.
“You taught them what you could, helped them evolve. Your body is pure magic now, but so are theirs. Building a civilization in the clouds out of spells and clouds instead of flesh and steel.” Twilight turned over her shoulder, and then reversed course, walking toward the army of silent and still creatures that stood across from the windigoes.
“Twilight!” gasped Applejack. “Don’t!”
“They won’t hurt us,” said Twilight, looking into the many eyes of the failed copies of herself. The more she looked, the more she began to realize that they were not quite the failures that she or Starlight had initially thought.
“My own road apples!” cried Applejack. “Twilight, ever since we got here, they’ve been trying to mash us into apple butter!”
“I’ve got to agree with AJ on that one,” said Rainbow Dash.
“Then I suppose I am the dissenter,” said Silken. She had regenerated enough to stand up, although her body was still marred by a set of vast holes that revealed the machinery beneath her surface. Her wide blue eyes turned toward Twilight. They looked so oddly similar to the way Starlight’s did. “They knew my schematic. They could have struck my central processor and rendered me permanently inert. But they did not. Look.” She pointed to herself. “They struck at my body, the part of me that I can heal.”
“Well tell that to my body!” cried Rainbow Dash. Her voice sounded as angry as it sounded afraid, and she was no longer able to control the fact that this situation was getting to her. “They messed me up! I thought I was going to…you know…”
“You would not have,” said Silken. “You would have progressed.”
“Progressed? What is that supposed to mean?”
Silken pointed up a tree, where one of several large winged shoggoths was clinging to the trunk by a combination of mechanical and organic legs. “You would have become like that.”
“They are you,” said Twilight. “The same kind of creature.” She looked up to the copies. “And they are violent. Dangerous, deadly, vicious. But I don’t know if they intend to be.”
“Twilight,” said Applejack, exasperated, “that doesn’t make any sense!”
“Like a foal trying to reach out and grab a fragile butterfly,” muttered Fluttershy quietly.
Twilight understood, or understood as well as she could. She addressed the masked creature before her directly. “You were built to protect Starlight’s facility. From creatures, monsters, windigoes. But you don’t need to anymore. There isn’t a reason to fight! The windigoes only live in the sky, and you live underground. You can coexist. You’re both Starlight’s children, after all.”
The creature looked down, and then spoke. Its voice was badly distorted. “Twil…IGHT…S…park..LE…not re…EAL not…real…”
Starlight drifted forward, a windigo mage at her side. They paused beside Twilight and looked at the shoggoth. It looked back, and Starlight smiled. The windigo traced out a pattern in the air. Twilight read it and smiled.
“What does it say?” asked Silken.
“She says it doesn’t matter anymore.”
Almost in an instant, the tension between the sides seemed to vanish. The windigoes still stood, but they were silent and watching impassively instead of preparing for attack. Their opponents, likewise, had not moved in the slightest, but somehow had made it clear that they had no intention of fighting. There was no longer a reason to. In fact, there never had been, but now they both understood that.
Twilight smiled, but something still weighed heavily on her mind.
“Starlight,” she said, “I was alive. This whole time. I’m sorry I left. You were here, the whole time, while I was away, if I had just…”
Starlight shook her head, and put a hoof around Twilight. Despite her ghostly appearance, she still had mass. There was no sensation of touching a familiar hoof, but there one was of touching familiar magic. Even after all this time, it still felt like a sincere gesture from an old friend. It took everything Twilight had to stop herself from bursting out into tears- -and even then she only managed to resist it for a few seconds
“Thank you for giving me my friends back,” she said through her tears. “I’d forgotten…and tried to forget…”
Starlight said nothing, but Twilight understood. They embraced for a few moments longer, and Twilight only then realized that she had wished for this moment for well over four hundred thousand years.
Twilight hesitantly pulled herself away and wiped her eyes. “I can take them back with me,” she said. “We…we thought this planet was dead. That it would never support life again. We were wrong- -no. I was wrong. We left it. But I have to go back. I can’t stay here.”
Starlight stared at her for a long moment, and then nodded solemnly. Of course she understood.
“But I have to finish something. I have to get to Princess Cadence’s tomb. I know where it is, from the Map, but it is too far. Can you help me?”
Starlight smiled. Then she nodded. �z?�