The development had been unexpected. That was irksome.
Its first, instinctive reaction to the incoming conflict had been preparing the shed mass It had sent out to collect resources to consume the threat. That would have been the fast way out, and would have allowed It to access a bounty of new information.
The small creature with which It had passed so much time had stopped It.
No, worse, the idea of the small creature had stopped It. There had been no coercion, no direct intervention. Simply simulating the reaction of the incomplete model it had of the small creature had been enough.
It was evident that something had changed in It. It needed time to understand what was going on—It needed information, It needed answers. Or at least, It needed a plan to get them.
Consuming all the local available matter and starting anew had been considered again. It would have been a problem in the short term, but wouldn't compromise a long-term investigation.
And then the small creature had come to It and had put itself between the threat and Itself. The second small creature had come too.
It could feel the first small creature acting as the conduit for the Flow with both Itself and with the threat.
Momentary destruction and consumption were unacceptable. Which left only one other viable course of action.
If It couldn't change the environment, then It had to change Itself and adapt.
The night had fallen, the moon had been raised, and at the long table illuminated by oil lamps, Copper Horn sat and stared at her hands. Small scars ran on her palms, mementos of an old, less harmonious life. Her past was nothing she was proud of, but for the longest time, she had told herself that at least she would be able to protect the two fillies on whom so much hope laid.
And when it had become necessary, she had failed.
A grumbling pulled her out of her musings. She raised her eyes and looked at her companions, gathered once more to manage a crisis. Fidelis sat in front of her, turning a bucket in his paws. Master Sottile sat with scrolls and a quill, furiously scribbling and mumbling.
The clop of hooves called her attention to the other side of the room.
Meadowsweet walked in and sat down with a sigh. The red earth pony mare laid her head on the table and glanced out from below her green mane and said, "The fillies are sleeping, and Millet is watching over them. Celestia was still crying in her sleep." She blew a strand of mane away. "What are we gonna do?"
"If we are sure it is a danger, then I would collapse the cistern over it." Garvino leaned against the doorframe and passed a claw over his head. "I'm pretty sure blades are useless against it; it feels as hard as iron. I would also hate to butcher something that has yet to do anything wrong."
"I don't know if it can do anything not wrong." Copper Horn turned her head back to Master Sottile. He had laid the quill down and was floating a cup of thyme infusion. "I’ve never seen something like it, and I fear nobody, pony, zebra, minotaur, donkey, or griffon, ever did. I looked into it and it was…" He closed his eyes and brought the cup to his lips.
Garvino walked up to Master Sottile, sat down at his side and put a claw on his shoulder.
Master Sottile took a deep breath, then said, "It was the abyss, the nothingness. I don't think it is evil, but I'm not sure it can be good."
"And yet it never did anything to Celestia or to Luna. You talk like it was some kind of horrible monster, but we have no proof it is." Meadowsweet raised her head from the table. "It has been with the fillies for how long? One week? Two?"
"You didn't see it." Copper Horn clenched her fists. "You didn't feel it, smell it. You didn't see the fangs."
Meadowsweet stood up. "Then I shall. Garvino, do you think it's safe to go down there?"
"I've posted a guard to observe it, but it didn't do anything at all. Still, I would prefer if you stayed here until we decided how to proceed, or how to stay safe. You have to think about little Radish too, and looking at the thing now won't do you any good." Garvino opened one of the scrolls in front of Master Sottile and glanced down at it. "I didn't find anything else like it on the farm, by the way."
Fidelis continued to turn the bucket around, sniffed at it, and mumbled.
"It poured out of the shadows, it could still hide there." Master Sottile put the cup down and stood up. He stretched his neck, a couple of pops hinting at too much time spent on documents and research. "We can't allow it to continue being a threat."
"Are you sure it is a threat?" Meadowsweet stepped near Copper Horn. "From what you told me, aside from being horrible and unknown, it did nothing."
Copper Horn closed her eyes and sighed. "The fillies are too important. We can't afford an unknown, we can't allow something like that to stay near them."
"Isn't that what our misguided siblings would say?" The tiredness in Garvino's voice she expected, the hint of bitterness, less so.
Copper Horn blinked and looked over to him. He was smiling, and yet she could see the worry sculpt new creasings in his face.
For a while, the only sound in the room was the crackle of the lamp and Fidelis' mumbling.
Magic surrounded the scrolls, rolling them up. Master Sottile corked the flask of ink and said, "It is a good point, and I will have to meditate on it. Sometimes I wished Harmony was easier." Scrolls and flask arranged themselves in ordered rows. A glow surrounded a bottle on the highest shelf of the kitchen and brought it down. "Regardless of how we decide to act, we still have to find a way to keep the fillies safe if things don't work out. From what I've seen, collapsing the cistern will at most slow it down. It flowed like water, and water will find a way through. It always does."
Copper Horn traced the carvings in her left horn with her fingers. Well-known glyphs and sayings passed under the fingertips, habit and familiarity soothing a bit her frayed nerves. "Plans to move the farm? I know it would be unexpected, but we could prepare another one and then leave the thing behind."
Master Sottile floated a couple of smaller cups on the table. "That may be difficult. Master Illustro already had to do that half a year ago, and our order won't have something else ready so soon. I will have difficulties getting another farm from one of the Families without indebting us even more to them. We can't allow that."
Master Sottile opened the bottle and filled the smaller cups.
"Maybe we can prepare an amphora to trap the thing. You can't trap water with loose rocks, but you can with the right container." Meadowsweet reached out for a cup. "You know, as an emergency solution if it turns out to be truly a danger."
"It was a good bucket." Everyone in the room looked at Fidelis as he held out the bucket. "A very good one. Very expensive."
Blinking. Copper Horn looked to Garvino, while the griffon shrugged. Silence followed.
Master Sottile finally asked, "Fidelis, my dear friend, what is the problem?"
The Diamond Dog held the bucket and pointed at it. "I used this bucket in the forge, it was a very good and very expensive bucket."
"Fidelis, what…" Copper Horn caught herself just in time. While she was tired and her nerves felt like the chords of a harp, it rarely paid to snap at the mutt. No, that was unjust of her, and another clue that she wasn't thinking straight. Fidelis, aside from being way smarter than he let on, had often shown far more common-sense and practical thought than the rest of them.
After a deep breath, she asked, "I fear we don't get what the problem is. What is your issue with that thrice-damned bucket?"
Fidelis looked at each of them, sniffed, then huffed. "It was a good bucket. They put that thing into it. I looked for it for weeks. It was my ironwood bucket."
Garvino gasped. "You used ironwood to make a bucket? What possessed you to do something like that? Did you have to carry dragonfire with it?"
"No, I had to carry embers from the forge, fireslugs and sometimes salamander slime. And a good bucket is worth its weight in sugar. I could clean it by throwing it in the furnace." Fidelis held it up. "And they carried the thing with it."
"And?" Copper Horn felt her head pound. The day couldn't end soon enough.
Fidelis raised a paw, put it in the bucket, and then there was a sickening crack.
A single finger wiggled through an impossible hole in the container, the remnants of wood falling down in a shower of dust. "It was ironwood."
The silence hung heavy on the room, four pairs of eyes staring at the little heap of splinters and sawdust on the table.
The day truly couldn't end soon enough. Copper Horn reached out to the cups, grabbed one, and drank it, throwing her head back. Aqua vitae burned as it flowed down her throat, a welcome anchor to the present in the whirlwind of insanity.
Garvino raised his own cup, glanced at it, and said, "Well, I guess we need another plan."
It needed a new physical form to move among the beings that lived here.
After having examined Its memories to build a model of the beings It interacted with, this new requirement had come as a surprising revelation. One of many.
It also posed a novel problem. How did one assume a shape without having consumed it first?
It pondered the issue, then decided to go through what It had absorbed. There was the chance that It could find an adequate template.
It was a failure. Nothing had an acceptable shape, size or complexity.
It was bothered. This whole cycle wasn't developing as it should. It knew that one was bound to find local variation, rule-sets, and unusual situations, but there was a loop of total-consumption, growth, relocation that was universal. Or should have been.
It would have to adapt even more. And that required… it required creativity. It required the creation of new things. It went against Its very nature.
Once again it entertained the idea of simply following Its fundamental impulses. It would have been easier.
No, there was potential in this world, and it required effort.
Maybe It could start from the basic forms it had and build on them. It visualized the small being which was the cause of all this doubt and confusion.
It couldn't be too difficult to imitate.
The afternoon light streamed through the door of the cistern, projecting Luna's shadow on the floor of the cistern. The filly stepped inside, nodded to the guard at the base of the stairs, and hopped down the steps.
The blue griffon, Ginevra if Luna remembered correctly, smiled at her and stood aside. "Here to visit the mushroom?"
"She's not a mushroom." Luna scrunched her muzzle. "I'm pretty sure of it."
"Oh, well, she seems to like dark and damp places, so I guessed." The griffon patted Luna on her head. "But I suppose that you know more about her than me. So, what are you doing down here?"
"I wanted to stay a bit with Slimey, and Master Sottile said I could."
Ginevra sighed. "He did, didn't he? Just be careful, and don't stay too close to her, alright? And don't get behind her, I'll have to always see you."
Luna walked over to the black column and sat down a couple of steps away. She turned and pulled a scroll out from her saddlebags, then looked up at the bulging growth at the center of the thing. "I'm sorry it took me so long, but Master Sottile and Donna Copper Horn wouldn't allow me or Tia to see you. I don't know what changed, but they talked about it for forever before letting me come down here. They took, like, four whole days, before giving me the permission." She sighed. "And I have to stay here. I…"
An unlit lantern caught her attention, and she stared at it for a while. "I'm sorry, it's all my fault. I couldn't keep you a secret and now Celestia is angry and sad, and Master Sottile is all worried and Donna Copper Horn is looking at us and I can see she doesn't smile like before." She drew a small circle in the dust with her hoof. "And Meadowsweet and Millet are trying to cheer us up and Garvino is always working and preparing stuff and Fidelis is still longing for his bucket. And nothing would have happened if I could just shut up."
A whimper escaped Luna. She took a deep breath, then turned back to the column. "Please, come back soon. I promise I will be a better friend too, even if you are icky. Celestia needs you, and I think even Master Sottile and Donna Copper Horn will see you are not dangerous. And then we can have again fun together. And Tia won't be mad at me anymore."
She raised a leg and wiped away small tears blossoming at the corner of her eyes. "I'll have to be braver, you know? I can't show it every time I'm sad. Mom always said it was unbecoming and that if I ever wanted to make it out of the ditch I never should show tears." Luna glanced over her shoulder, then leaned forward and whispered. "Don't tell anyone, but I don't remember much of Mom. And the thing with the tears, Donna Copper Horn says I should never be afraid to show who I am to those who love me, but —"Her voice dropped even more, skipping on the border of the audible. "—maybe she's wrong on that."
The column stood in silence, unmoving, unchanging.
"Remember, you promised to tell no one." Luna took the scroll and rolled it out. "I guess I finally understand what you are. Ginevra said a mushroom, but those don't have teeth. No, I think you are a butterfly." She looked up from the scroll. "You will be a butterfly. I read about it from this Zebra, right here. Look, it was Armba–Armahab–he was a pretty important philosopher. He wrote a lot of stuff about nature and the sky and all that, and Master Sottile has all the scrolls. He says that every learned pony should read and write High Sahali, and he makes us always translate these things. And I saw there that there was this scroll here"–she tapped on it with her hoof–"and it says all this stuff about change and the river of time and so on. I don't understand everything, but he wrote about how butterflies aren't born as butterflies and how they pass some time in a cocoon before transforming."
Luna pulled the scroll up and turned it towards the column. "See? Here there are the drawings about how it happens." She rolled it up again. "So, when you come out from there, can you be a pretty butterfly? I think Master Sottile and Donna Copper Horn will like you better if you are a butterfly."
The body itself was satisfying, if underperforming. It had managed to build in enough defenses as to not be worried about physical threats once it matured completely.
The mind was a different, far trickier affair. The initial plan of simply anchoring Itself to the vessel wouldn't work, and the incomplete form it had wouldn't be capable of sustaining it completely.
It would have to put in a reduced version of itself, at least until it evolved to a more complex stage. It would take time, but that was something it had in abundance.
It was time to decide what to seal away and what to keep.
It pondered the problem for a while. It was a difficult choice to make, there were too many possible scenarios requiring different parts of Itself.
No, It had to think about it differently.
And then the solution came to It.
A different perspective may be what it needed to understand the Flow.
The hammering of raindrops on stone and earth was a rustled in the distance. The air was warm and humid, the dust on the floor moist.
In front of the column sat a white filly under a brown coat. The parts of coat that could be seen were unblemished, a slight lavender smell coming from her.
Celestia looked up at the thing that once had been her friend. "We missed you a lot today."
"We tried to conquer the creek today." She raised her hoof and moved the hood back. Soft, pink curls flowed out. "Clay and his minions were there, as we expected. I went out first, Luna remained hidden among the trees. We went with my plan, the one I told you about. So, Clay was all Bla, Bla, I'm big and stupid and I stink and you can't stay here because I'm a jerk and I can't even read. And then I said, Leave me alone, or I shall summon the mare in the rye!"
She sighed. "His minions were shaking, I tell you, but he was kinda stubborn. So I mumbled some Minoian poetry, summoned a couple of lights, and then Luna came out with a costume we made. It was all black with soot, and we made the eyes with some white stones. It was pretty good, looked a lot like you, but then Luna stumbled on some stupid root and fell down, and then it was over."
"I think we will need a new plan. This one won't really work again, even when you return. But I already have a new idea and… and…" Celestia stepped forward and hugged the column. It was soft and warm. "And I don't know what to do and… and…" She sniffled. "When we walked back Luna was almost crying. She is trying to be strong because she thinks it's her fault that this happened to you and so even if I messed up and she didn't want to say anything. Even under all the mud, I could see it."
"I'm so stupid and selfish and I don't know why they all put up with me. They told me I could come to visit you with somepony else, and what did I do?" She grabbed the border of her coat and flapped it. "I put on my sneaking-coat and came here in secret because I don't want them to see what a mess I am. I like it here, I love Luna, and Donna Copper Horn, and Master Sottile, and Garvino, and Meadowsweet, and all the others. I don't want to leave, I don't want them to send me away."
Celestia whimpered. "I… You were like me. You were weird and strange and I miss you. Please, come back."
The pattering of raindrops on stone and dirt was just a far-away drumming. And it lulled Celestia to sleep.
Something was tickling Celestia's nose. She scrunched, but it continued. A sneeze escaped her, there was a chirping, and then she felt something moving on her coat.
She yawned, opened her eyes and blinked. It was dark, silent, and there was a weird, sweet smell in the air.
WIth a flicker, an aura flamed up on Celestia's horn, and a small ball of light appeared, bathing the cistern in warm, golden light. Her eyes wandered to the column.
Celestia gasped and jumped up. The bulbous growth in the middle of it had deflated. An irregular cut, three hooves high, ran diagonally on it, and some thick fluid coated the edges of the wound. A track of slime started there and crawled down the trunk, on the floor, to her and then up…her…leg.
Slowly Celestia turned her head to her back, where she now felt something gripping on her coat.
On the white fur sat a thing. It had a bloated, yellow-white body, with dark things moving just under the semi-transparent skin. The head was made of something smooth, black, solid, like armor. Two enormous green eyes stared at her. A muzzle filled with fangs opened, there was a chittering, and then it said, "Tia."