“Lunch break,” Mary declared, pressing the button of the alarm clock just before it had a chance to ring.
“How do you keep—” I started, but she immediately cut me off.
“Practice,” she said. Which would make a bit more sense if she didn’t do this every time, I don’t even know what this alarm clock sounds like. “Get up and let’s go, before Fluttershy gets angry.”
A daunting prospect. With reluctance, I put away the engineering textbook that I was reading and got off my chair. “Lead on.”
The sun didn’t feel hot on my coat, even with the dress, but in this city of glitter and shiny things, it was so bright, that I was sure I would eventually require sunglasses. As if I needed any extra reasons for my head to be spinning.
Mary’s strange ability to pick up a relevant book seemingly at random turned out to work on average one time out of three. Every book she selected would have been a discovery in its own right, from a popular overview of pre-classical alchemy, which I had to reluctantly put away, to a physics textbook, but most of them had nothing to do with the task at hoof. Only the tenth one she pointed at was a scholarly work on the history of the Crystalling, describing the variation of the ritual they used before the induction of every newborn foal became traditional.
It was horribly poetic and mystical, using a lot of vocabulary specific to their idiosyncratic school of earth pony magic, – contrary to all expectations, their tradition actually turned out to be a proper school, with theories of operation and even something of an elegant paradigm, almost late classical in style – but with Miss Maresbury’s help, we were able to distill it into relatively straightforward instructions. The last group of changelings melded their crystals into the Heart just minutes before the first rays of sunshine lit up the horizon.
And then, the airborne rangers descended on us like bats out of Hades.
I still have no idea how did Twilight stand up to Princess Luna when she was Nightmare Moon. Even the actual Luna terrified me to the core. At least initially. In her antique battle armor, with twin swords at her sides, black like soot against the orange sky, framed by silhouettes of airships, disgorging one squad of paratroopers after another. Even though it has been four days since then, changelings still scatter and transform into random pieces of furniture when she passes by. Especially if Princess Cadance isn’t around.
But the original crystal ponies were very happy to see her, and there were even a few she recognized and greeted by name. Explaining what the hay actually happened and preventing the bloodshed took Cadance many a tense minute, but when she was done, Luna looked awestruck.
That was the first time ever I saw a princess bow.
Even though everypony left me blissfully alone, I barely got any sleep for the entire subsequent day, because every time I did manage to nod off, yet another Heart discharge shockwave phasing through the floor would wake me up. The aurora was so bright, that they didn’t even turn the streetlights on when the night came. And on the next day, Twilight rounded us all up again and started hoofing out assignments.
Damn, she looks so beautiful when she’s crystal…
On top of several fatalities – most of them among the changelings and the Royal Guard – and the numerous wounded on either side, who were actually recovering a lot faster than anypony expected, presumably thanks to the mysterious love energy saturating the streets, the damage to the city was quite substantial. Almost half a sector would have to be rebuilt from the ground up. But ultimately, the legacy of Sombra the Usurper was worse, because all those suspicious pony-shaped pieces of crystal back at the stadium were exactly what I was afraid they would turn out to be.
Executions.
And most of them were exactly the ponies vital for keeping the small kingdom running – Crystal Guard officers, Amore’s retainers and civil servants, community leaders, wizards and engineers who kept the city in working order. The tyrant had a special hatred for unicorns and, for some unfathomable reason, stylists. Lots of crystal ponies received entirely unexpected promotions, and most of them needed every bit of support we could muster.
My assignment was to write a research paper for Cadance, detailing everything built around the Crystal Heart, something that Twilight would have loved to do herself, but reluctantly had to delegate. The energy from the titanic capacitor of the castle was used for everything, from light and heat to melting permafrost for water, so there was a lot of ground to cover, and I asked for Mary’s help, because picking a useful book one time out of three is still substantially better than random chance. Unfortunately, that was the limit of her involvement, because much of what we found was written in old scripts she could not read, or straight up in Old Equish and Old Ponish. She kept quietly reading something else the entire time, for which I was just as quietly grateful.
Fluttershy’s contribution to our task was the alarm clock, because she insisted we are to have at least one proper meal per day. According to her, army rations did not count, no matter how nutritionally balanced they are, so this inevitably meant a cross-city walk.
Even though the streets were full of soldiers, crystal ponies, and changelings, all walking about their business, hardly anypony paid us any mind at all. I was very hesitant when Rarity insisted to make this dress for me, but upon reflection, it is incredibly liberating. I must order an entire wardrobe while I still have a chance.
Soldiers and crystal ponies. Period. Crystal changelings, maybe? Way to confuse everyone.
“The time is out of joint,” Mary mumbled to herself.
“Everything is out of joint here,” I countered. It had been three very frustrating days. “Weather barrier is some strange pegasus trick running off an electrically powered electrostatic generator. Shield spells are pre-classical mumbo-jumbo and leak power like a sieve. Pull the Heart out and half of it shuts down even if the capacitor is full, remove it from the mesh and the city will just freeze over. The vault spell was supposed to reveal the city at hundred moon intervals and retest the conditions, but didn’t, because the ambient light averaging matrix is just gone. Even the power grid is direct current, when the rest of Equestria uses alternating current!”
Mary stopped suddenly and stared at me. “So the fact that they have a power grid at all is not unusual?”
This eye of hers was unnerving before, but when she’s crystal, it’s doubly so. Nothing like that happens to ponies or changelings, but on her, you can actually see a network of thin gold threads spreading through her skull like alfalfa roots behind that eye.
“Look,” I said, “It’s running off the biggest thaumic capacitor ever built, charged by waste magic released through love energy to love energy boost conversion. I know you don’t have the magic education to understand what nonsense I just said, but trust me, modern thaumatology says it is. If you told me that the Crystal Empire was founded by time-traveling refugees from some epic pony war in the far future, I’d believe you, because that’s more plausible than the truth. I’m ready to believe anything at this point.”
“No, I mean…” Mary started, “The forged journal says that the Crystal Empire is one of the original signatories of the Equestria Accords.”
“So does that book of stories for kids that I found,” I replied. “The original scroll was damaged, but it’s well known there were five signatories. There was even that whole rivalry between Baltimare and Rainbow Falls about which of them was the fifth kingdom, never came to anything. Now that the Crystal Empire is back, I suppose that one’s settled. What’s your point?”
Mary crouched before me, sending a shower of glowing sparkles in my direction. As if her dress doesn’t glitter enough at me when she isn’t crystal. “One of the five founding kingdoms has electricity and running water in every home. Others build with mud bricks. This goes on for how long?”
“The length of the pre-classical period is not known precisely,” I replied, pulling back a bit. “Anywhere between one and three thousand moons?”
“So from one to three and a half centuries,” she said. I was about to correct her, but she waved her hand, “Yes, yes, I know the solar cycle was not reliable, not important. A long time, spent gathering kingdoms and dealing with internal and external threats that wouldn’t stay down, taming the land and the folk. The time of fairytales and heroes, as they say. Right?”
“Yes?” I really don’t like what she’s implying. Unfortunately, I’m sure it’s the same conclusion that I’ve arrived at already.
“Then suddenly, the Crystal Empire vanishes. In under two centuries, protected kingdoms become a federation,” Mary said, tilting her head and adopting a wry smile, “but it still takes them six more centuries to start the industrial use of electricity.”
“Just four, if you count weather manufacturing,” I countered. “I know. I noticed. I even have theories. I just don’t like any of them.”
“Oh?” she said, standing up. At least she got out of my face. “Well, let me tell you my theory.”
Twilight described her as an “extreme historian.” I’m still not sure what this actually entails, beyond that time travel nonsense. But Twilight was also impressed with how the human encyclopedias described their history, so maybe there is something to this strange discipline.
“What needs explaining isn’t the fact that so few of the advances of the Crystal Empire were replicated while it was around,” Mary started. “Unique power source. Unique construction materials. Miles of frozen wasteland to the nearest neighbors, no railroads, no airships, so contact is seasonally limited. And it’s probably the only kingdom out of five that started with all three tribes living together.” She glanced at me over her shoulder. “What needs explaining is why the fundamental discoveries in natural sciences that this city relies on were forgotten with it.”
“I’m almost ready to blame Discord,” I replied. It would make things so much easier. It would also be the most unscientific thing I could possibly do, but now I understand what Twilight meant when she said the world conspires to twist her perception of reality every week. And now I’m just as deep in it as she is.
“Discord law,” Mary said, raising a finger. When did she even learn about that… “Discord has never been here, anyway. He would have wiped the city off the map just for being so symmetrical. No, it’s something else. Everything about the Crystal Empire was classified under the Official Secrets Act. A very long time ago. It follows that all the scientific advances that came out of here also were, at some point, until they were discovered from scratch. Again. Why?”
“There must have been a good reason,” I insisted. Never mind that I can’t think of one. There must have been.
“A good reason for millions of ponies to live without electricity and running water,” Mary replied.
“You might not believe it, but good reasons can exist,” I snapped. “I don’t know how it works in your world, but in Equestria we don’t teach foals to make fireworks until they’re responsible enough not to burn the house down. No matter how much they like launching them.”
“There,” she suddenly pointed a finger in my direction, without even looking at me. “There it is. What sort of knowledge is so dangerous, that keeping it hidden is worth setting science back centuries? You want to answer that question. Because there’s no way to keep a cat in the bag forever, if you forgot what a cat even is.”
“That’s why I don’t like any of my theories!” I exclaimed. It is the same conclusion I have arrived at on the first day. It took her longer, but Mary reached it with a lot fewer clues than I had. In a few months, when researchers from every university in Equestria flood this place, everypony will know. “I open every book thinking that this is it, there’s that secret that could destroy everypony, hidden between the pages, and instead of paying attention to what I’m reading, and writing a simple summary like I’m supposed to, I keep wondering what to do when I find it!”
“In a human world,” Mary commented, “upon discovering that an entire city was deliberately erased from historical record, my first instinct would be to search for evidence of a crime. Something so heinous, that even centuries later it cannot be forgiven.”
I stopped.
It took Mary a few more steps to notice, but then she turned around and looked at me questioningly.
I might not be Celestia’s personal student, but she is still my teacher. The headmare of my school, even if most of the daily business is in the hooves of the vice-headmare. I was the salutatorian of my class, the only student who has seen more of the Princess would be Twilight. The implication in what Mary just said was downright obscene.
“You can’t really mean that,” I finally said, swallowing an impulse to say something a lot more hurtful. “You just can’t.”
“I don’t,” Mary replied. “This is very much not a human world. Here, monsters like that don’t hide evidence, they proudly announce their deeds to the world and gloat. As if to compensate, the power of love raises the dead and stops invading armies. Which makes me all the more curious just what it was that Celestia thought her little ponies couldn’t handle.”
One way or another, it all comes down to the Princess and her judgment.
“I might be blowing this all out of proportion. We did rediscover those things eventually,” I sighed. “The Crystal Empire might have been extremely advanced in its time, but today, they’re almost normal. Except for their construction methods.”
We were passing through one of the destroyed blocks, freshly cleared of the crystal rubble, and already, stumps of future buildings were jutting out of the ground like baby teeth. I don’t have more than a passing acquaintance with rockology, but what I know is enough to appreciate the deep understanding of the magical properties of matter that goes into growing an entire city out of the ground in days.
“Maybe they are…” Mary murmured, “Then again, maybe not.” She suddenly broke into a trot, or whatever her species calls this gait, outpacing me by a good margin, to crouch before a pony sitting on a bench next to a huge slab of crystal.
“Hello, Richard,” I heard her say.