Alicornae: The Legend of Starlit Sky
Part IV - Chapter 1: Ice And Stones
* * *
Starlit was poring over a tome, one of two dozen, that Twilight had given to her that morning before setting off. On one side of the dining room table sat the ones she'd already been over, and on the other sat the ones yet to be completed. The latter was unfortunately still larger than the former.
Her eyes grew weary from the strain despite having ideal lighting conditions, and she got up to stretch her back and get something to drink. Even in what meager schooling she had had before her grandmother's passing Starlit had never been particularly good with studying, and having to study something she barely understood and half of which was in terms she didn't know wasn't helping matters much.
For days it had been like this, with Twilight teleporting across Equestria to scavenge old books and scrolls in between bouts of feverish reading on magic and the northern realms on the parts of Starlit and Sun and the occasional break for food provided by Spike.
Every time Twilight summoned Spike it set a pit of worry into Starlit's stomach. The necklace that held him was still inside Starlit's bags, but if Spike or Twilight knew that she'd taken it they weren't saying. For his part Sun seemed oblivious to Starlit's skullduggery, and she'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible. She would eventually tell him about Spike's hiccup, but not when there was so much work to still be done.
"Starlit, do you have that copy of Northern Climes And The Dangers Thereof?" Sun asked from across the room. "I have something here that I need to cross-reference."
"It's in my 'done' pile, hold on," Starlit answered. With barely an effort Starlit pulled it out of her pile with her magic and floated the book over to him, which he took eagerly. Sun's demeanor had brightened considerably ever since getting the opportunity to do what he loves, which is reading and taking considerable notes.
Starlit returned to her books with a mug of hot, strong coffee. She'd grown used to its bitter taste and needed less sugar and cream to sweeten it, and the pleasant sensation of alertness it gave her was a godsend during her hours of reading.
Ever onwards the hours wore, the sun growing low on the horizon and casting long shadows through the windows. Starlit was just starting up her eighth book and seventh cup of coffee when a magical pop from just behind her caused her to gag.
"I've got it!" Twilight exclaimed as she teleported into the library. Sun and Starlit both leapt up from their respective work stations, with Starlit nearly pulling her back after hours spent hunched over a desk.
"What'd you find?" Sun asked as Twilight laid out a scroll and a relatively new book, at least by the standards of the positively ancient ones she'd been sending in.
"A way to keep your bearing when getting to the Empire, that's what. Get something to hold this scroll open, this is going to need some explaining."
Quickly Starlit levitated over a few of her books and positioned them at the four corners of the now unfurled scroll. Starlit couldn't read the script but did recognize it as the alicorn language that Twilight had slipped into a few times. The book that she was leafing through furiously was written in the common script, with swooping calligraphy and and gold illustrating the pages.
Finally Twilight got to the pages she was looking to find and set it next to the scroll.
"Now, like I said, the Crystal Empire is a nightmare to locate," Twilight began, "but it isn't just because of the treacherous area. According to this scroll from my personal libraries the Empire has a defensive enchantment that was placed on it by the ancient alicorns that can obfuscate its location."
"Aren't you an ancient alicorn?" Starlit asked.
"Oh, this spellwork far predates me, or any of the Princesses for that matter," Twilight replied with a sly grin. "These enchantments were set millennia ago, and only activated during times of crisis."
"What does the book say about all of this?" Sun asked eagerly.
"Now, here's the interesting part; this book is a genealogy tome detailing the lineages of the ruling families of the Empire going back to just before Cadance ascended the throne, and in this section it describes how one family was wiped out just after the war."
"And these enchantments would have something to do with this family's demise?" Starlit asked, unsettled at the thought of an entire family dying at once.
"Precisely," Twilight answered. "According to this record they were wiped out by attempting to draw on the power of these enchantments to bolster their fading magic after the war, but it also left a critical weakness in the defenses that we can exploit. There's a magical deadzone all along the southern border, which I suspect is why I had such trouble navigating; magic is tied to my perception of the world more closely than anypony else alive, and any lack of it is befuddling to me."
"Will this have any adverse affects on us?" Starlit asked. "I'm just getting used to the level of magic your training has been giving me, I don't want to lose it so quickly."
"The two of you should be fine as far as wayfaring is concerned, but within the deadzone you won't be able to use any magic whatsoever, so pack accordingly."
Starlit had already done so during Twilight's absence, gathering up yet another small-sword and swearing to herself that she wouldn't lose this one as well. Sun had managed to keep a hold of the dagger that Starlit had given him and had taken up a hoof axe as well.
"Is there any civilization that we should know about that far north, or will we be on our own?" Sun asked.
"There are a few small villages built up around the border of Equestria proper and the Empire, but none venture out into the deadzone itself for reasons I do not know. You'll have to do some reconnaissance tomorrow, but for tonight you need to rest. I have preparations to make."
"What sort, if I may ask?" Starlit asked as Twilight rolled up the scroll.
"Just a little geomancy, something to help you keep your bearings. The north is a very stormy place and if you've seen one snow-covered hill you've seen them all. Even with magic it is a very easy place to get lost in."
Satisfied and ready for a much deserved bit of rest, Starlit gathered up the books that Twilight had given her and added them to one of the shelves in the library. It took a few minutes to get everything situated downstairs, but as soon as Sun took to the guest room and Twilight to her basement laboratory Starlit settled into her pile of pillows and fell into a restful, if a bit fitful from all the coffee, sleep.
* * *
The next morning was hurried, as had been the moments leading up to Starlit's other two teleportations. Twilight was being her neurotic self, worrying over every minor detail and double-checking the runework on the teleportation pad. She had also given a pair of stone talismans wrapped with leather cord at one side and carved with runes to herself and Sun.
"These sigils… these are compass runes, if I'm not mistaken," Sun stated as he tied his stone to one of the straps on his fur-lined longcoat.
"Precisely," Twilight replied. "Once you get into the deadzone you won't be able to magically orient yourselves—"
"Not that either of us knows how," Starlit cut in.
"Fair point," Twilight said, "but these stones are like compasses that are oriented to always have the leather cord pointing towards the Empire. As long as you have these you'll have a sense of direction."
The teleportation pad started to wind up in its familiar activation sequence; the runes glowed a fierce purple and crackling magical energy arced between its spires. The sight of it reminded Starlit of something she had meant to tell Twilight about her trip to New Selene.
"If you have anything to say, say it now or forever hold your peace," Twilight said, as if on cue.
"I actually do," Starlit replied. "I just wanted to say that I was the one that got Sun and I home from New Selene."
"Were you now?" Twilight asked. "How'd you manage that?"
"I made a kit-bashed teleportation by recalling the sigils as best I could and digging the lines into the dirt with my hoof. Sun did a little proofing on them and I added a warding circle to the outer edge in case something went wrong, but with both of our magics combined it got us back home in one piece."
"Wonderful, simply wonderful!" Twilight said as she led the two of them up to the pad. "You'll have to show me how you did it when you come back, warding magic wasn't a discipline I particularly cared for."
"Certainly," Starlit replied, maintaining a cheerful facade despite the three different worries vying for control of her thoughts; worry for Sun and his waning magic, worry for her family behind their dome of fog, and worry for what Twilight would do if she found out that Starlit had stolen Spike.
For once, it felt good to not be worried about being sent to the edge of the world to track down a long-forgotten Princess.
* * *
The wave of nausea passed sooner than Sun had expected, even if it still felt like a kick to the head. Now he only had to worry about being in the worst cold he'd ever felt and the ever increasing likelihood of his hooves flat out freezing off, instead of those two concerns and how fast he could pull his face mask off so he could vomit into the snow.
A biting wind whipped past his face, causing his coat to flutter haphazardly and his eyes to instinctively water up, and he could barely see two yards in front of him. Everything was white, and he found the effect not too dissimilar to living on the edge of the desert.
"Starlit?!" Sun called, his voice muffled by his face mask and deadened by the wind. "Starlit, where are you!?"
"Over here!" Starlit called from a few feet away. A small glimmer of blue pierced through the grey and white, and Sun trudged through the snow towards her. His furred leathers and snow boots could only do so much to keep the cold out, and his teeth were chattering by the time he got to Starlit.
"Cold enough for you?" Starlit asked playfully.
"How can you possibly be joking at a time like this?!" Sun asked incredulously.
"I'll say one thing for it, this is colder than anything I've felt before. Do you want the extra cloak, or do you think you'll manage?"
"Right now I would do just about anything for the extra coat," Sun ruefully answered. Starlit quickly pulled the extra wool coat that Sun had insisted on bringing out of her extra bags and affixed it underneath his leather overcoat.
"Better?" Starlit asked as she checked her compass stone.
"Much. Now I don't feel like all the heat is draining into my hooves and out of my body. How do you stand this type of weather, this is a nightmare."
"I acclimate fairly well to cold, but even I'll admit that this is extreme," Starlit answered. "I could very well ask you the same about living on the edge of a desert for all of your life."
"I'll tell you how I did it; I didn't go outside unless it was dark or I had to and I had a fairly sophisticated heat-ventilating system in my home that made it about ten degrees cooler than any other building in Appleoosa."
"So, you cheated?" Starlit pointedly asked.
"I prefer to think that I overcame my environment."
"Then you'd better prepare to overcome this," Starlit continued, gesturing for Sun to follow. "We need keep moving if we want to keep our blood flowing and body heat up. Hopefully the compass is pointing us in the same direction as one of those villages Twilight talked about, or else we're going to be roughing it tonight."
Sun shuddered at the thought of having to hole up in a cave or make use of their threadbare tent in the middle of a snowstorm, but he trudged on after Starlit before she got too far away to see. The pair of them illuminated their horns to serve as signals, and Sun could feel Silence giving him a boost as the time wore on.
"Thanks for the help," Sun said to his brain-guest.
"You still haven't used that crystal yet," Silence replied. "Any particular reason for that, or is it just pride?"
"And we're back to the passive-aggressive wit. No, I haven't used the crystal yet, and it isn't just because of pride."
"But it is slightly because of pride," Silence replied teasingly.
"I'd be lying if I said it wasn't," Sun answered. "Imagine that one day the one thing you're good at, the thing that you use as the locus of your identity, starts to slowly and agonizingly get ripped away from you. You can see it happening every step of the way and you're powerless to do anything about it save for rely on something you barely understand to keep it from slipping away any faster than it is. Wouldn't your pride be a little wounded from that?"
"Were I in that particular position, I'd take any opportunity available to me until a more permanent solution was available," Silence answered.
You just have an answer for everything, don't you?" Sun replied ruefully.
Sun trudged in silence save for the howling wind, but the pressure on his brain didn't dissipate to indicate that Silence had left. If anything it was starting to get a bit more intense, focusing to the back of his head.
"Sun, I won't pretend to know what you're going through," Silence stated, calmly but with force, "but I know for truth that hedging on this is only going to imperil you in the long run. The crystal has vast stores of magic in it, enough to see you through the end of this journey. You can either rely on me, or you can rely on it, but you have a choice to make."
Silence's presence faded away before Sun could reply, leaving him with only the wind and Starlit's glowing horn ahead of him for company. His eyes wandered upward to his own horn to find that its pine green glow had been nearly completely replaced with the dull grey glow of Silence's magic. His thoughts ran sour, mostly because he was aware of how right she was.
* * *
As fate would decide, in its unending line of blows that it had been delivering to Starlit as of late, her and Sun's first night would be spent in a lovely cave. The wind had mercifully died down earlier in the day, but it still didn't make the freezing temperatures any more bearable outside of their small fire.
"I didn't think it would be possible, but I think I've found a place I hate more than the desert," Sun groused as he stared at the rapidly heating pot of water over the fire. "At least deserts are flat for the most part. All this mountainous trekking had me working up a sweat in sub-zero temperatures."
"Just be glad that the wind died down when it did, or we'd have gone over that dead-drop cliff for sure," Starlit replied. "You'd think our compasses would be able to lead us in directions that wouldn't lead to certain death."
"Why would you assume that?" Sun asked. "Compasses always point north, these ones are just tuned to point to the Crystal Empire. They don't decide a route."
"They don't?" Starlit asked, looking at her compass. "I thought that's how they worked."
"Starlit, do you mean to tell me that you don't know how a compass works?" Sun asked incredulously.
"Don't blame me, I've never needed to use one before now," Starlit replied defensively.
"Then, while we wait for dinner, why don't I give you a crash course? Let you benefit from some of my wisdom for once."
"I've benefited from your wisdom on more than a few occasions," Starlit replied, "but I'll indulge you. How does a compass work, exactly?"
"A compass, a regular one," Sun clarified, "is simply a product of applied magnetism. Any piece of metal with a sufficient magnetic charge will tend to point to the north. So, if you magnetize a piece of metal with a lodestone and set it into a device that lets it spin freely, it will always rotate to point north. From there, you can orient yourself by determining which direction you're facing compared to the direction the metal is."
"Then how do these stones work, if they're like a compass?" Starlit asked, not wanting to let on that most of the jargon had gone over her head.
"That's a bit trickier to describe. In theory it works like a regular magnetic compass, but instead of using magnetism to find north, it uses a tracking spell to find the direction a location is in. In our case it's the Crystal Empire, but theoretically you could use this type of magic to track anyplace, anything, or anypony."
"It sounds useful, if a bit sinister when you put it like that," Starlit replied as she tugged the stone with her hoof. "I don't much care for the idea that somepony could track me wherever I go."
"I highly doubt that there are any unicorns talented enough to figure out this level of geomancy, and certainly none with the power to do it. You and I are a special case, remember?"
"Special case indeed," Starlit mused. "Keep watch on the pot, I'm going out for some air."
"Suit yourself, just try to stay within eyesight."
Starlit nodded as she walked out of the cave. The blast of cold hit her like a slap in the face, but once she got in it the weather turned gentle. She could feel the slight prickling of the chill on her fur, smell the cold as it burned gently in her nose, but most of all she savored the type of silence that only a snowy night can bring.
Starlit found a relatively clean rock to rest on as she took in the sights around her; the tundra rolled away into the distance, a glittering ocean of frost that shone bright in the pale, smooth moving moonlight. The moon overhead had ceased its jittering lurch across the sky ever since Starlit and Sun had returned from New Selene, and for the first time in her life she could truly appreciate its majesty.
The stars shone beautifully alongside the moon's brilliance, and as Starlit stared she found her mind wandering back to New Selene, and to everything that had occurred in the palace the night she had set Luna free. They were hard memories, but they were the ones that she had let sit in the bottom of her mind for a little too long.
Taking a calming breath, Starlit concentrated and began to focus on her magic and her horn. The blue glow quickly grew to a bright shine, and as it did she thought hard about how she had felt during the fight with Chirox. The pain, the desperation, and especially the betrayal, all melting together as she tried to call back that spark of magic.
A quiet hum was Starlit's reward as a pale blue dome of pure magic enveloped her. It was approximately seven feet or so in diameter and rose a few feet above her head. The night sky danced and shimmered from outside of it, filtering some of the moon's light and giving it an ethereal quality unlike anything she'd ever seen before.
"Just like my warding lines," Starlit muttered in amazement, her eyes wide with delight at her own display.
Quickly Starlit got up and started pacing, taking note of how the field followed her every movement with perfect precision. She experimented with moving it independently of her, changing its size, and even altering the shape, and by the time she finished she was exhausted. Satisfied with her display she trudged back through the snow to the cave, ready for some food and some sleep.
* * *
The morning came early for Starlit and Sun as pale sunlight filtered in through the mouth of the cave, made all the brighter by its reflection off of the fresh snow. They took care to mask their progress and scatter the spent firewood on the off chance that they were being followed, before setting off with their compasses to guide them into the calm and crisp snowfields.
Starlit in particular had a certain spring in her step, but not without a twinge of guilt every now and again. Sun was right, her magical power was getting stronger as she got more used to performing magic, and as much as she wanted to share her experience with the shield she felt like it would come off as gloating.
"You were out in the snow for a while last night," Sun said, striking up conversation. "Can't understand why."
"You obviously haven't seen a clear, snowy night," Starlit replied. "The moon and stars were beautiful, and the way they light up the endless fields of white is simply breathtaking. You ought to get a look tomorrow night, I think you'd really enjoy it."
"I did bring a few star charts in case we ever lost our compasses," Sun said thoughtfully. "I could point out some of the constellations to you if you'd like."
"Anything to make the trip more interesting," Starlit replied.
This sort of banter played back and forth between them for a while as they walked, discussing the weather and the stars and taking care to point out potential hazards and pitfalls as they went. Starlit found the experience to be rather pleasant, and with the sun shining even the cold wasn't too much of an issue.
Hey, do you see that?" Sun said on one of their stops to rest and have a bite of food. He pointed off to a rocky hill in the distance and Starlit swiveled her head to get a good look.
There appeared to be a pony of some description on the hill, or at least something roughly pony shaped and sized. Starlit couldn't make out what they were wearing or looked like, but they had some sort of tool on a long pole in their hoof.
"You think they're friendly?" Sun asked.
"I think we need to get moving again," Starlit as we're, packing away her things. "The compass is pointing us off to the right of where they are, so we can avoid them easily enough."
As Starlit stood up to get a better look the pony with the pole waved it into the air, causing a large bolt of red to shoot up from the tip. There was a scuffling from behind the hill to their left, followed by a sight Starlit never thought she'd see; a group of pegasi, numbering maybe a dozen or so, all flying down on herself and Sun.
Starlit and Sun tried to run for it but the pegasi proved to fast for them, easily boxing the two unicorns in. They all wore white hooded cloaks and thick leathers to protect from the cold, all of which were very similar in make. They each also bore one of those pole devices which, upon closer inspection, had a small red crystal affixed to the top of them.
"Do you think we could take them?" Sun asked nervously.
"Oh, you could try," one of the pegasi replied, "but I don't think you're gonna get very far without your magic."
"I'm sorry?" Starlit asked. "We don't have magic, no unicorn has functional magic!"
With no reply the pegasi waved their poles in a circuitous motion, the gems atop them gleaming from within. A wave of red erupted from each of them and Starlit felt a stinging pain erupt from her horn and go down her forehead. She saw Sun's horn erupt into a fierce red glow, the same color as the gems.
"Don't play dumb with me," the same pegasus replied. "Now come with us, the Commander will want to see you two."
"Who are you?" Sun pleaded. "What do you want with us? We were just passing through!"
"Nopony is 'just passing through' here, I personally don't want anything with you since I'm just doing my job, and as for who I am…"
The pegasus pulled down her hood and face mask, revealing a sky blue coat, light burgundy eyes, and a shock of rainbow patterned hair atop her head that Starlit could barely believe was real, much less natural.
"Name's Rainbow Dash, and I'll be your captor today."