Meliora

by Starscribe


Chapter 35: Brooksi

For a long time the Alicorn only looked at her. Oracle’s knowing glances were always infuriating, the way he always let on that he knew something she didn’t. And more often than not, he did.

“You’re constructing an Imperial spell,” he eventually said. He didn’t get up—maybe he couldn’t. The chair itself was made of metal instead of cloud, with a few glowing screens whose purpose she couldn’t guess. But the tubes attached directly to Oracle’s underbelly, at a metallic gasket that would’ve been at home on the body of a borg drone.

“Duh. There’s no other way to kill her. Athena has drones all over the solar system, maybe further. Even if we find where she’s doing most of her thinking and nuke it, in ten years she’ll be restored from backup somewhere else and fuckin’ pissed about blowing up. Even if we had some omniscient future-seeing pony who wasn’t a pansy-ass about using his powers, we don’t have the starships to stop her.”

“You don’t need to persuade me,” Oracle said. “Langara is my home now, I will not return to Earth. But Athena’s growth nears a threshold—if we do not stop her now, we never will. She has not yet mastered magic, but soon she will. Once she becomes capable of Imperium, she will secure her rule over civilized space for boundless time.”

Jackie’s ears flattened, and she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Are you saying… are you saying that you already know we’re going to lose? If you’re using future sight to predict the end times and you only fuckin’ now decided to mention that you saw Athena becoming dictator of the universe…”

Oracle raised his wings placatingly. “Peace. I have made no such claim. I am agreeing with you—this action is essential, before we create a being we can neither comprehend nor destroy. But you may want to consider the cost of your proposal. Imperial magic takes a terrible toll on those who wield it. Whatever spell you have in mind will extract its price from someone. From you.”

She nodded, gritting her teeth for a moment. “I know what it might cost. If I don’t have what we need, I know where to find it.”

“Then I’ll be waiting there. I’m no friend of Athena’s… though it will be a terrible shame to see what happens to her. And you.”

“A shame?” Jackie puffed out her wings. “We’re taking Earth back, Oracle. Killing a monster.”

“I know. But you’re only seeing her in three dimensions, Dreamknife. I see her in four—a… a majestic lion. Doesn’t mean I won’t help you put it down for the sake of the village. But it will make the world out there a little less… complete.”

He settled back into his chair, sighing deeply. “But that’s all our actions ever are, really. Creating one future murders an infinity of others. So it goes.”

Jackie turned her back on Oracle and his strange floating world, drawing her knife from nowhere. There was no point going back to the place she’d cut her way in. Now that she knew where in the Dreamlands she was aiming for, the process would be easy.

But she didn’t actually cut yet. “This planet… is it what I think it is?”

Oracle’s grim, knowing attitude vanished, and he sounded almost surprised. “A gas giant, yes. By volume most of our colony is the ring surrounding Langara, but that will change in time.”

She turned back. “Fucking mental. What kind of civilization can you possibly build in a world of clouds?”

“A large one,” he answered. Then he raised a wing. “Yes, your joke is amusing. But I’m serious. We have a hundred Earths’ worth of space here. We could defeat Athena tomorrow and your ponies can colonize a dozen starsystems and my civilization will still be several times larger.”

“Looks like… maybe ten thousand people,” Jackie muttered, a little annoyed. “Hard to call that a civilization.”

He shrugged. “Humans survived worse genetic bottlenecks. They’re also purely organic, and age. My ponies will not, and their drive to reproduce will never need to be curtailed. When we fill this planet, there are many other suitable candidates that you would brush off as mere features of their home systems. The best way to live in peace is to depend on things that others do not want.”

She shook her head. “I dunno if I’m sold, Oracle. Archive is colonizing water worlds, now you’re living out here in the clouds. What will it even mean to be human in a thousand years?”

It was his turn to shrug. “You’ve lived longer than I have, Dreamknife. That’s enough time to know that abstractions aren’t worth dying for. We’re alive—we fill vacuums. In ten thousand years this culture will be so different from our own that you and I would both be strangers here. But what does that matter? They’ll live—thousands and thousands of endless generations. Trillions of lives in the endless sky above Langara.”

The wall-screens all changed, showing images of the city outside—but in daylight. Thousands of overlapping levels, packed with ponies living lives that were almost recognizable to her. Schools, symphonies, monuments…

“You’re in no place to judge us,” Oracle said. “In some ways, you have done the same thing to your people. Building a city in the Dreamlands… I gave my people metal organs, but you turned them from living creatures into ideas. Which one of us has gone further from the root?”

“We’re coming back,” Jackie snapped, spreading her wings again. She was done with this conversation. Her knife sliced through to a near-identical cloud city on the other side. “That’s the difference. When this spell is over my bats get to go home. But whatever you are… you wouldn’t last five minutes on Earth.”

He shrugged. “I told you, I’m not going back.” All the screens went out. “The journey was a long one, Dreamknife. Many of these people lost everything in the Great War. There’s nothing for them to go back to, either. They made their choice, just as you will make yours.”

Jackie muttered something crude, stepping through to the other side and shutting the portal behind her. Her oversized pegasus body blew away like a snowman she’d been hiding inside. “Liz? Misty?”

She raised her voice, but there was no need. They hadn’t gone far.

They had gone to the fountain in the center of the marketplace. Liz’s armor now stood empty beside it, the metal superstructure open and ready to accept her body.

It didn’t really matter that the fountain hadn’t been big enough for her before—this was the Dreamlands, and it was plenty deep enough now. And when she swam to the surface, she rested her forelegs on the edge as though she’d been normal-sized all along.

I really have been transforming them into ideas. This was the danger of visiting the Dreamlands, even for bat ponies. The rules here were so fluid that staying for too long eroded at the soul. The denizens of the Dreamlands, figments and greater creatures, existed only because the minds of dreamers in real space gave the featureless aether some solidity.

“Oracle isn’t with you,” she said, struggling forward towards her armor. But she flopped onto the cloud, and started to fall through it.

Jackie caught her with one leg, though she very nearly let her slip through her grip. But then Jackie squeezed, before her tail could slip past and she could slide away.  “Careful, fish. Wouldn’t really be fair for you to be perfectly safe over here until you fell off.”

Right to your death. Thus was the danger of physical travel in the Dreamlands—you couldn’t wake up when you died like a normal dreamwalker if your real body was here.

“Y-yeah,” Liz squeaked, her song muffled. But she was out of the water, and didn’t really have much of a voice without her suit. Jackie helped get her situated, conscious all the while of Misty circling around them. “S-sorry about that. Got bored waiting for you.”

“I would’ve,” she admitted. “But maybe don’t take your armor off next time. What if someone showed up and poked a hole in that fountain? They could’ve pushed your suit off the edge and you couldn’t do a thing to stop them.”

The seapony grunted in annoyance, looking away. But Jackie could tell she had no argument to make. So she said nothing.

“Oracle agreed, but he won’t be coming with me. He’ll be… waiting at the end.”

“Oh.” Liz looked down, pawing at the cloud with her suit. The little engines under its wings made no sound, but then she’d kept them folded until now anyway. “Guess that means we’re going to… recruit my sister. The other two Alicorns have already agreed.”

“Either her or Mystic Rune,” Jackie answered. “But from how weird things are already getting out here, I don’t really like our odds on whatever planet he’s found. And… he doesn’t dream. We’d have to hope he had friends with him who did, and… last I checked his only friend was an AI. It would take a master unicorn to track him down, and I’m not that. So Lonely Day is our target.” She stomped into the clouds with one hoof, dissolving a hole big enough for them to see down. These alien places weren’t so far apart—far, far below them, she could make out the ocean. The same ocean where they would find the musical dreams of sea ponies, and with care, the Alpheus colony.

“You don’t have to come,” Jackie said again. “I know you weren’t happy living there, and you… still have some anger with your sister. Could just wait on the other side like you did here.”

“Nah.” Liz’s finned tail swung back and forth behind her, energetic. “I think I’d… like to go back. Sing some of the old songs for a while.”

Jackie nodded towards the opening, then dived off. Not like a falcon going for a distant fish, though… their descent was leisurely. Liz’s wings didn’t flap, and consequently she couldn’t drop straight down like Jackie. She had to fly in gentle circles, with the hum of motors following her along. Jackie flew beside her, and found it a surprisingly challenging task. Organic wings just weren’t built to move the same way as those rigid ones.

“Living with grounders was that bad?” Jackie asked. “Gonna… actually, it might be a good idea if you stayed there for a bit. Meliora is in for a rough patch if this spell doesn’t go right. I don’t know what happens when an immortal gets hit with an orbital laser.”

“I wake up on Alpheus anyway,” she answered. “There’s this whole revitrification building—creepy as fuck. Blank bodies just floating in tubes.”

You didn’t say no, Jackie realized, a little sadly. Leaving Liz behind probably was the right thing. Meliora didn’t need a shopkeeper during the apocalypse. But that wouldn’t make it easy.

“Are you going to be a seapony again? When we go through?”

Jackie found herself blushing. “I, uh… I guess? Why?”

“So I can hear you sing again,” Liz answered, right as she turned away for another circle. In the opposite direction as she’d been moving, so that by the time Jackie caught up she had several seconds to hide whatever she’d been feeling.

If she was only a seapony now, Jackie would’ve been able to sense exactly what emotion that was. But she was old enough that she probably didn’t need the magic. Oh lord.

“You should know…” Jackie began, her voice tentative. “When I, uh… when I first met her, I had a crush on your sister.” Maybe that would… gross her out or something? But no, she watched Liz carefully this time, and the fish didn’t even seem to react. Her song came out exactly the same, too.

“I can see that being hard. Alex can be… hard to get along with sometimes. Great to have around, since she’s so good about getting shit done… but when there’s nothing to get done, she’s fucking insufferable. Like a racehorse stuck in its pen for hours before the starting gun.”


They landed with a splash.