(♫)
Once the two of them were alone, Twilight’s first order of business was to make short work of the double-decker hayburgers with cheese, chocolate oat shake, and fries that had been left out on the reading table in the main library room, presumably by Pinkie Pie. After lacing his own portion with one of the pouches of ground glass he’d packed as field rations Spike agreed with her that the meal ranked as one of the best the two of them had ever experienced together. However, Twilight did concede that decorating the entire room complete with a banner reading “ONE-MARE SURPRISE PARTY OF SNOOTINESS” was probably a bit much.
Then, she confirmed that the Golden Oaks was indeed outfitted with reasonably modern living facilities, and treated herself to a long, hot shower to wash every last trace of sweat and grime from her coat. Spike’s scales were to some degree naturally dirt-repellant, but he nonetheless treated himself to a vigorous scrubbing session as well once she was done, muttering about mud and forgetting to bring polish and what-would-that-dressmaker-say loud enough for Twilight to hear through the door. The late hour didn’t bother either of them- there was a reason why half of Twilight’s undergraduate class had taken to calling her Midnight Sparkle before the end of her first semester.
The two of them made their way back downstairs, taking a fresh look at the circular table that sat dead-center in the middle of the room. It was a rather ugly table, as far as such things went, topped as it was with a large, rough-hewn bust of a pony of indeterminate sex with its mane trimmed military-straight.
“Who is that, anyway?” Twilight asked nopony in particular.
“I think it’s Flash Magnus,” Spike suggested. “Look, they used redwood for the crest.”
Twilight took a step closer. “No, I think it’s Commander Hurricane. Look on the sides.” Spike could comprehend Old Ponish perfectly well on his own, but Twilight felt compelled to read out the famous quotation from Equestria’s founders just to prove her point- “They said we must turn back. That we had flown too far from home. I turned myself to the golden sun and flew on. They said our supplies were low. That we had run out of food. I turned myself to the field of golden wheat and marched on. They said our coffers were empty. That we could not afford to continue. I turned myself to the golden mountains and carried on.”
Spike nodded, then cocked his head to one side. “Weird statue to have in a library, though.”
“Who’s saying it always was a library? A tree structure like this could easily predate Ponyville. It could’ve started out as a guardhouse for all we know.”
“I doubt it, these shelves are original, look how they’re curved. The table I don’t think is, though.”
“Storehouse, maybe.”
“Yeah, you might be right. Everything about this is so… weird. Where do we even begin?”
“Well, you take the shelves on the left, and I’ll take the ones on the right.”
...
“Twilight! I got something!”
“What is it?”
“Looks like part of a journal. It was tossed in with a bunch of old almanacs and farm catalogs, but I think it’s a lot older than any of the others.”
“Well? What does it say?”
“Look at this!
Thirtieth of Sun’s Height.
Caught Cornflower hoofing through my ledgers last evening. Didn’t figure him for the Rebel sort, but maybe he thinks I’m a rebel.
First of Blue Skies
Made a formal complaint to General Gold Dust for all the good it will do me, if she’s feeling generous she might cut the order to a mere fifteen hundred pounds. I think I almost preferred those Tartarus-burnt Lunars. They may have filched a bushel of grain every now and then, but it’s this damnable ‘Day Guard’ that shows up with a wagon train a mile long and threatens to put me out of business.”
...
“Ok, Spike, this is a lot more recent, but… well, take a look for yourself!”
“What’s the date on the paper?”
“First Frost 959…”
“Also remarkable was the perfect preservation of the bodies, despite their having been interred in a time when embalming spells were barely conceivable at the fringes of magical theory and in any case lacking the constant and relatively powerful source of mana preserving so many dead would require. The Gazette contacted Dr. Standing Stones, Professor of Ritual and Structural Magics at Trailhead College, who concluded that the followers of Nightmare Moon may have intentionally or unintentionally created a dim, dry, airtight environment which retarded the growth of decomposing bacilli.”
“Hmm. I guess that weird Rainbow pony was right after all.”
“’Bacilli, though?”
“Yeah, a lot of otherwise educated ponies actually held onto the germ theory of disease right up until the turn of the millennium.”
“I know I’ve been asking this a lot lately, but then what did preserve those bodies?”
“I’m… not sure, exactly. Long-running spell, maybe? Powered off of the Everfree itself? There’s mana springs deep inside, after all…”
...
“Something else!
108 15 Sun’s Height-
“That’s only a decade after the Rebellions.”
“- They hanged Star Sapphire last night in the square. Brought out a crowd of about fifty ponies, many of them quite drunk. Wondering if any realized this leaves Poppyseed in line to take over the mill, or if they even remember it was Poppyseed who ‘found’ Star’s moon pendant to begin with. Nopony dares write to Canterlot for fear of being found out and hanged before the soldiers can arrive. Only thing to do now seems to be to wait for all of this to die down, whether because the town at large runs out of interest or because the ringleaders run out of targets. Have been making a show of carefully reading and copying down Single File’s bulletins, so should be able to stay out of suspicion myself for the next few weeks.
That’s the last entry.”
...
Twilight sighed and rubbed the back of her neck with a hoof, surveying the mess of books and miscellaneous papers spread out on the floor around her. Their initial search had yielded such promising results, but now it was pushing eleven at night and their trail seemed to have gone cold. “I don’t understand it,” she said aloud, “We’ve found novel primary sources here, and reference material that discusses the Lunar Rebellions in depth, but no novel primary sources about the Rebellions!”
“It does seem strange,” Spike continued from where he sat halfheartedly reorganizing a box full of Ponyville Gazette clippings, “We’ve found all sorts of little forgotten notes here that aren’t like anything in the Canterlot archives, but they’re all… mundane, I guess you could say. All the important stuff matches the authoritative sources exactly. No early printings, no errors, no ramblings from the local conspiracy nuts added in by mistake. How did that happen?”
Twilight nodded, staring with her eyes unfocused at the lower half of the still-rising Moon framed with almost mathematical precision in an oval window on the open upper loft.
“The Sun and the Moon rise in the same place…” she muttered.
Slowly, she climbed the stairs to the loft and examined the window more closely- in addition to its unusual curved construction, the frame and the wall around it were decorated in surprisingly elaborate carvings.
“Uhhh… Twilight?” Spike asked from the floor below.
“Okay, this is… really weird.” The carvings were, on the whole, highly abstract heavenly motifs- tiny stars and great swirling whorls with no clear pattern- but some of them were much more regular. Perfectly straight lines extended radially outward, crossed by tick-marks that brought to mind nothing more than the axes of some kind of schematic, and near two of them were carved an oddly small Sun and Moon, more icons than proper drawings. “This was carved later than the original library,” Twilight said aloud, “Look at how smooth everything is, in accordance with zebra craftsmareship, except for here where there’s visible tool marks.”
Spike nodded as he began climbing the stairs to join her. “The table’s the same way.”
“Twelve radial lines…” the unicorn muttered, “But they’re not equally spaced around the arc of the window, even accounting for the elliptical shape, and they don’t have the same number of crosshatches."
Spike stopped midway up the stairs. “The shelves! There’s twelve partitions between the shelves in the main room!”
“You’re right!” She turned away from the window and looked out over the floor in question, realizing that the bust of Hurricane was staring directly at her from the table- and, by extension, the window, and beyond. “Hurricane looked to the rising Sun…”
“Then what’s the moon symbol for?” asked Spike.
“I…think I know!” Twilight squeezed past the dragon and dashed back downstairs. She turned so she was facing parallel to the bust of Hurricane, and counted three shelves counterclockwise, then two up from the floor- exactly where the Moon symbol was located in the window’s concentric grid. She lit her horn and removed a dusty out-of-date Encyclopedia Equestria set as a single block, then fired another magelight into the shadowy space left behind. “The Moon was up against the left side so… there!”
A small sliver of wood extended from the side of the shelf, protruding just far enough outward and just close enough forward that a hoof could conceivably reach up, slip between it and the side, and pull down. The back of the shelf was nearly in contact with it, and nearly the same type of wood, and even with the brilliant purple light of Twilight’s spell it was almost invisible, but it was there regardless.
She reached out with her telekinesis and grabbed hold. It was nearly immobile- nearly, but she could feel it shift ever-so-slightly in her grip. She redoubled her efforts, ignoring the ache starting to build back up in the base of her horn, realizing only as she did so that she was in very real danger of breaking the mechanism.
Then the lever shifted, and finally swung downward with a grating squeal of wood on wood. As soon as it did, a section of the hallway to the study indistinguishable from those to either side suddenly sank backward some two or three centimeters.
Twilight dashed forward, horn flaring. She pushed the wooden panel first one way, then the other, feeling it shift slightly further into the wall. Her field glowed and sparked, the pain in the top of her skull redoubling to white-hot intensity, before she registered Spike’s claw on her shoulder and cut off the effort.
“Hey, don’t hurt yourself!” The dragon produced a thick metal rod she’d seen near the fireplace in the study and slid it into the space under the panel. He twisted it around experimentally for a few seconds, before with the aid of Twilight’s hooves managing to lift the door up over whatever it was stuck on and slide it the rest of the way into the wall.
On the other side, a narrow carved staircase twisted down out of sight.
“Twilight… it’s… one of those Lunar shelters, isn’t it?” Spike asked.
“I think so, yeah. They added hints all over the library… even illustrated the quotes on the table, so ponies who weren’t able to read could still recognize the story! There must’ve been other markings around here identifying the tree as a sanctuary, but either they didn’t survive the construction of Ponyville, or we just didn’t have a chance to see them…”
Spike waved one claw in an outsized parody of a courtly bow. “Well, after you?”
It was a tight squeeze at first, and pitch dark once she’d passed out of range of the light seeping in from the hallway outside. Simple iron lanterns hung from the ceiling up above, festooned with cobwebs, but they’d been long ago doused and the fuel left to spoil. Twilight conjured yet another glowing sphere from her horn and set it to bobbing its way down the passage at a gentle pace; after only a few meters the interior wall pulled away to become part of the high ceiling of a round wooden chamber perhaps ten meters in diameter. It seemed, on first glance, to contain a tidy enough living space- an empty table and two chairs, a narrow cot stripped of fabric, and a neat row of three heavy wooden trunks.
“Looks like whoever was down here last had time to clean up after herself,” said Twilight, “I was expecting… I don’t know, more skeletons or something.”
“Yeah,” Spike made a brief scrabbling-and-pounding motion in the air with his claws, “and maybe hoofmarks gouged into the inside of the door…”
Twilight set to work telekinetically sweeping away the thick cobwebs covering all of it, and collecting the worst of the dust into a small force-globe in one corner. “I don’t think anypony’s been down here since the Rebellions, though.”
“If they were, if wasn’t recently, and they must’ve never thought to notify anypony in authority or even write down that this existed.”
“Well if we do end up setting up a larger operation here, this basement might actually make for a good laboratory. Trees are complex enough organisms to maintain internal thaumostasis, so this should be a ready-made magically isotropic environment.”
“Something to think about, at least.” Spike carefully fiddled with the latch on one of the trunks. It proved to be locked, with an enchanted seal no less, but the magic had long ago faded away. With some effort he managed to pry the seal off and push open the lid, then repeated his work for the other two boxes. “Whaddaya make of this?”
Twilight carefully flipped through the stacks of papers and loose-bound folios. “These look like architectural drawings, ledgers, reference books…”
Spike ran a claw across each spine in turn. “Natural History… The Elements of Harmony, A Reference… Pansy’s Tactics… I, Meadowbrook… these are all First Century sources!”
“Still, this is all stuff I’d expect a, a provincial governor or somepony like that to have, not the sort of Lunar advance scouts or sabotours who’d be using a refuge like this.” She located a smaller, thinner volume bound in soft leather. “Hey, look at this one!”
“Paper Clip, Ninety-Eighth Year of the Sisters, Volume II”, the dragon read, “Wasn’t there a Paper Clip who advised Princess Celestia during the Rebellions?”
“Yes… yeah, that’s right!” Twilight eased the volume open with utmost care and began to read aloud, “Twentieth of Sun’s Height. The Council finally managed to get itself into enough order to deliver an official summons to Firefly, Escritoire, and myself on the topic of the Day Guard. I wish I could remember exactly who was responsible, but with nearly five hundred of them all dressed in the same ever-so-tastefully understated finery…”
(♫)
… Paper Clip was honestly unable to tell the difference between individual members. That was, he knew, a critical weakness for a senior records clerk like himself, so he kept a book of sketches and names cross-referenced with factional affiliations alongside his other more routine notes. Today’s summons had come at such a short notice, however, that he had been unable to bring it. As a result he had not the faintest idea who the mare in the black robe and ruffled shirt standing atop a tall oak lectern pronouncing sentence on him and his fellows might possibly have been.
“Escritoire of Sire’s Hollow, Firefly of Cloudsdale, and Paper Clip of Frankpferd,” the mare intoned, eyes never leaving the sheet of parchment in front of her, “By act of the Twelfth Council of Five Hundred approved this day the Twentieth of Sun’s Height in the ninety-eighth year of the Royal Sisterhood, you are hereby denied all title, authority, salary and accommodation once afforded to you on the behalf of Greater Equestria. You are forbidden from receiving or handling secret correspondence; from entering any military encampment, fort, clerical office, or other place of government business unless overseen by a duly authorized bailiff of this Council; and from conducting any negotiation or agreement with a foreign party on behalf of, or giving the appearance of having been on behalf of, the nation of Greater Equestria. Furthermore, you are hereby ordered to immediately disband the unlawful gathering of armed ponies referring to itself as the ‘Day Guard’, to surrender all weapons and materiel accumulated by same to the rightful government of Greater Equestria, and to provide in a timely manner the names, whereabouts, and activities of all participants to the Council Select Subcommittee for Intelligence.”
Paper Clip made his best approximation of a respectful bow. “Honorable Councilmare, I beg you to reconsider. The Lunars could strike Everfree at any time, and the forces currently stationed here are quite frankly in no condition to repulse an assault of any significant magnitude.”
An earth pony stallion- the only earth pony among the ten committee members seated at the raised crescent-shaped oak table extending to either side of the podium, in fact- sat up a little straighter in his chair. This one Paper Clip knew, by position if not by face- as a member of the small but vocal “Concord” faction which advocated good-faith negotiation with the rebel Princess Luna, Councilstallion Palafito’s highly-publicized appointment to the Committee for Public Defense last autumn had produced exactly as much outrage from the more orthodox factions as Paper Clip had anticipated, and none of the civil overtures from the Lunars that those who had arranged his ascension had promised.
“And have you any proof of this incredible claim, Mister Paper Clip?” he asked, in a voice long ago gone rough from shouting. Technically, every member of the Council was to be provided an amplification spell to allow them to be heard in the vast amphitheater that made up the Grand Chamber. The earth pony members’ spells had a tendency to suddenly cut out at the most inopportune times, though. The pegasus wind-mages said they got ‘rowdy’ more often and strained the enchantment by stomping around and yelling. Paper Clip had his own theories. “Everfree is a very diverse city, not as likely to attract Lunar ire as a unicorn stronghold like Canterlot.”
“I don’t have any evidence as such, but, well… Everfree is the capitol of Equestria, it’s centrally located, and there’s a sharp division between the ponies living in the city proper and the nobles here on Castle Rock that could make the population more sympathetic to the Rebel cause,” Paper Clip countered. “If I were a Lunar, it’s where I’d be looking, milord.”
“If you were a Lunar?” muttered a fat tan unicorn mare wearing a red silk officer’s uniform festooned with medals. General Lockjaw was another known quantity, one of several military hardliners to find their way into Council seats following the latest round of Lunar assassinations. For whatever reason, those sort of unicorns- and they were almost always unicorns, in fact- never seemed to have any trouble with their amplification spells, ‘rowdy’ and prone to stomping and yelling though they may have been. Paper Clip wasn’t surprised to hear Lockjaw speculating about his loyalty- he had it on good authority, Escritoire’s in fact, that the General also kept a certain book of names close at hoof, although most of hers were civil servants and private citizens.
“We’ve thoroughly broken the Lunars’ momentum,” continued a third unicorn, a blue stallion with a sleekly-combed white mane and understated dark tunic that might at some point have been eye-catching had five other ponies at the table not been wearing the exact same thing. “There’s absolutely no need to subject our brave fighting-mares and stallions to the… very unusual conditions under which you’ve been operating your vigilante band.”
“Yes, of course,” said Princess Celestia, before she went back to what she’d been doing before, which appeared to simply be staring off into space on her elevated platform at the center of the Council Chamber, higher even than the Committee chairs’. Indeed, some three centuries ago, that platform had been the Council Chamber, back when there had been only a Council of Six that met informally around a roaring fire to drink and debate and pore over maps. Only once Equestria had simultaneously grown and fractured into dozens of federated territories, had the original walls been torn down to accommodate the ever-growing number of representatives.
Paper Clip had never understood how Celestia could be as popular as she was with the noble classes and the common pony alike when all she ever seemed to do was stand on that ancient hearthstone and look imposing. Those three words were the most vocal she’d been all week, although according to Firefly she was much more intimidating when she left the capitol to assist in military campaigns and whatnot. Paper Clip considered himself lucky to have never seen that side of her.
...
“Spike wait, that’s really weird. He doesn’t just not mention Celestia’s involvement with the Dayguard, he makes it sound like she wasn’t involved.”
“Maybe this guy just wasn’t important enough to know about what she was doing? Maybe he’s just not being clear here?”
...
The stallion with the pomaded mane -or possibly a different one, they all looked and sounded the same in any case- nodded sagely. “Well said, Your Grace. With the tragedy of Luna’s betrayal behind us, now is the time for Equestria to come together in solidarity, to bring our people into harmony and restore respect for the institutions that make up the living heart of this great nation, not to try to undermine them.”
Another mare in an officer’s uniform- a pegasus this time, surprisingly enough- continued. “Our spies have received no word that anything is amiss. Everfree is the best-garrisoned city in all of Equestria, to attack it would be suicidal!”
“There’s more to this war than… garrisons. Sir.” Firefly admonished, but nopony seemed to hear him.
On Paper Clip’s right, Escritoire continued more forcefully. “Then your ‘spies’ are incompetent. Or aren’t there at all! Just how many did you send away to hunt down ponies trading with the lesser dragons and other such trifles? Or to help suppress the slave revolt in Minos?” It was not the first time that Paper Clip considered that the small mint-green unicorn, despite being a bookkeeper by training and an assistant to the Keeper of the Treasury by position, showed a disturbing knowledge of espionage. He’d have to ask her why, when all of this was over.
“That’s classified information!” snapped the military pegasus.
“We need to stand by our Minotaur allies against Griffonia, even if their culture differs from ours.” stammered the mare at the tall podium.
“Only a few of those slaves were even ponies-” muttered Princess Celestia.
“And if we come to depend on the dragons for our gem supplies the security of Equestria would be placed at serious risk!” shouted Palafito.
Paper Clip looked first to Escritoire on his left, then Firefly on his right. He wasn’t sure if his comrades looked amused or appalled or some combination of the two. He wasn’t sure how he should have been feeling himself, either.
Then Escritoire continued. “After all, we all know how effective your… spies are in predicting major assaults of this nature. I still remember listening to the dire warnings of a dragon attack on Baltimare the night before Timbucktu fell to the changelings.”
“That tragedy has nothing to do with the situation in which we now find ourselves,” admonished the unicorn on the dais, her tone somewhere just north of absolutely predatory.
“It has everything to do with our current situation. Or do you still think so many pegasi volunteered to become Equestria’s warrior class, out of patriotic sentiment completely unrelated to the destruction of the last great cloudborne trading hub? You took clerks and artisans and made them into soldiers- bitter and battle-scarred when Princess Luna came to them offering to turn their lives back to the way they’d been before.”
“You will not devalue the title of Princess by applying it to that upstart in this chamber.” snapped the podium mare.
Paper Clip knew weakness when he saw it, and stepped back to stand closer to Escritoire. “Over the last three months we’ve seen nearly four-score convoys raided and stripped bare. A dozen priests of the Sun hanged in the middle of Baltimare in broad daylight. Four Lords of the Admiralty poisoned on the same day. A fleet of ten privateer cruisers spotted flying Luna’s banner on the Eastern Sea. The Lunars aren’t on the retreat; they’re growing bolder and better-equipped because every time you raze a farmstead or pull ponies off the street for ‘questioning’, more join their ranks. But in spite of all of this, it’s been two weeks since the assassination of Duke Artfeather, and thus far we’ve seen nothing. The Rebels didn’t just grow the feathers back onto their wings and walk back into town… and I think they’ve given up on suing for peace. So where are they and what are they doing?”
“Do you really think we’d share that information with a known griffon sympathizer?” demanded a well-coiffed mare in a dark blue tabard.
“We will have peace when we’re finally free to bring the full might of our army down on these Lunar traitors!” Lockjaw suddenly snapped.
Escritoire just nodded. “Yes, once the Lunars are gone and you’re in power. Then we’ll have peace. So I suppose that map of Griffonia I’ve seen on your wall these last few days was merely an… artistic touch?”
Lockjaw glared at the podium mare, seeming to demand that she change the subject. As if on cue, another Councilstallion with a gold military star on his tunic spoke up. “Your… ‘Day Guard’ is a disgrace to the Equestrian soldiery. You invite the officers of our foreign adversaries into the capitol and call them ‘trainers’, you hand out weapons and armor to the common soldier for nary a bit…” The ruling Equestrian Unity faction staunchly opposed any changes to the military’s age-old traditions, and were quick to bring that fact up to set themselves apart from the upstart Militarists they vehemently despised.
Not to be outdone, General Lockjaw continued, “You toss officer’s commissions to the common pony without consideration of land or title… you let earth ponies and pegasi share barracks with the unicorns, dress in officer’s capes and order us about like common infantry!” The upstart Militarist faction staunchly opposed any changes to the military’s age-old traditions… and were quick to bring that fact up to set themselves apart from the ruling Equestria Unity faction they vehemently despised.
Major Firefly bowed his head, his voice silky-smooth. “I’ve always believed that promotions should be awarded based on merit, not because of any fondness or antagonism towards the tribe of the officer in question. But I can see how this might be a difficult concept for you to grasp… milord.”
The pegasus General looked aghast. “Are you accusing a member of this Council- the voice of all Equestria- of tribalism?!”
Firefly just grinned. “I think milord is more qualified to answer than I.”
Lockjaw nodded sagely. “No, nopony has said anything about tribalism, for the Sun’s sake! Indeed, I find the concept abhorrent. We simply wish to guide our lesser brethren by the light of our sun and stars! We must focus the brutish energy of the pegasi, and goad the sluggish earth pony into filling his own belly, as well as ours!” That was a lot more poetic than the General was capable of, and Paper Clip wondered which Canterlot pamphleteer had written it.
He stepped forward. He’d been hoping for an opportunity like this. “That’s an interesting way to look at it, certainly, milord. Although I’m surprised this… plan of yours doesn’t make the slightest mention of the Royal Sisters’ contribution!” The entire Committee was looking at him now in confusion. The full Council seated further up were too far away for Paper Clip to get much of a look at their expressions, but he imagined they weren’t much different. He grinned, and continued. “You don’t seriously think it’s a coincidence that the ‘naturally gifted’ unicorns began to outstrip the other two tribes in magical and economic achievement only after the Sisters took on the burden of moving the Heavens, do you? After an utterly unexceptional century of more-or-less cooperative endeavor, and some seven before that filled with sporadic inter-tribal conflicts that never once produced a clear victor? In fact, I suspect that if Princess Celestia had found herself with a Mark to, say, bring the rain and wind to Equestria each season, or to cause our crops to grow; and if Canterlot Keep and its great crystal mines had not been settled predominantly by unicorns; well, then I think this debate between an esteemed Councilor and a humble records clerk would be going very differently.”
Paper Clip reached out a hoof, encompassing the entire Council. “I don’t believe the current situation to be the fault of all, most, or even many unicorns. Nor,” his hoof paused, just momentarily, on the pegasus in the General’s unform, “do I think that a belief in unicorn supremacy, or ‘equine diversity’ or whatever the fashionable term for it might be today, is confined wholly or even largely to unicorns. Indeed, with the ever-widening tolerance of this Council -even praise- for single-tribe schools, single-tribe towns, and single-tribe delegations to Everfree, it is almost inevitable that we'd end up where we are through no real fault of the public's.”
“But we are where we are. When a few of you found yourselves in a position of unusual good fortune, did you respond with the humility and insight expected of those chosen to speak for all of Equestria? No. You listened only to the nonsense spat out in the broadsheets by the smallest-minded, shortest-sighted residents of your home districts. The wealth under Canterlot could have paved roads over the whole of Equestria, but instead it went to the wages of private armies. The adepts released from the ranks of the Sun- and Moon-Raisers could have led their earth pony and pegasus fellows into a new era of magical study, but the academies you’ve established admit only unicorns. If this is what you call ‘greatness’, then you are positioning not only yourselves, but also all of the common ponies who trust you to make decisions on their behalf, for a terrible fall.”
“I established the Day Guard alongside Escritoire and Major Firefly because radical action is necessary to confront the Lunar threat, and because I have, quite frankly, no faith in our current crop of soldiers to accomplish it. The boons of tradition, and unicorn ‘exceptionalism’, will desert you as soon as the winds change. And then Luna and her followers... ponies so desperate for real leadership that they chose a madmare over you and were entirely justified in doing so... they'll be waiting. I formed the Dayguard not to admire the Lunars but to understand what for all their flaws they did right, why they're winning and you're losing, and you can either march alongside us, or be tread underhoof.”
Quite unexpectedly, old Palafito stamped his hoof emphatically against the surface of his desk. “Well said, my friend! Well said! And we wonder why so many among the ‘lesser’ tribes flocked under Luna’s banner? If the pegasi and earth pony communities would only be permitted full political and economic independence from our unicorn overlords-”
Paper Clip rounded on the older stallion immediately. “For a pony who claims to want to be ‘fair’ to Princess Luna, you seem to understand precious little of what she once advocated. If we split off the downtrodden into their own nations, all we’ll be doing is cutting them off from easy access to the resources now held in the unicorn-majority territories. And what of the remaining multitribal centers? The Luna I knew would never have stood alongside separatist-”
“Enough.” Princess Celestia’s voice rang through the chamber. “Palafito may hold different views than… well, most of us, but he is still a member of this honorable Council and is entitled to a place to be heard.” Her magenta eyes narrowed. “One more outburst like this and We will have you and your friends removed from this chamber.”
Paper Clip was beyond caring. “Oh, yes, Harmony forbid a pony with differing views be denied the chance to address them before the ruling Council."
“That’s enough!” Shouted General Lockjaw. “Guards!”
Two beefy pegasi in red-and-gold regalia immediately stepped forward, uncomfortably close to Paper Clip. The clerk just turned, shrugged off their wings, and strode out through the marble foyer into the bright sunlight of late-afternoon Everfree.
...
“No, no, that’s not right, none of this is right. Celestia gave that speech!”
“Twilight… the Council’s records were spotty even before it was destroyed. How… how do we really know she did?”
“Spike.”
“I’m reading. I’m reading!”
...
(♫)
Paper Clip stared out over the mountain of splintered wood and cracked marble that had, until about an hour ago, been the Great Equestrian Council-Hall. He’d been apprenticed to an engineer in the Miners’ Guild back before his desperate financial situation had forced him to seek out a clerkship in Everfree, and had some idea of what must’ve happened. The Hall’s expansion over the years had been haphazard, and attempts at a comprehensive renovation or even permanently moving the Council to a new location had suffered the predictable death that awaited so much legislation these days. All the Lunars had needed to do was secret a few unstable charge-crystals under the original central dais- there was space underneath it very few ponies knew about- and the whole thing had come crashing down.
The metaphor, he supposed, was painfully obvious.
They must have been so proud of themselves right about now, drinking stolen champagne in their bolthole over the success of, what, Project Peacock? Operation Fairway? Something pithy and stupid, he was sure. His hoof met something warm and squishy- grey matter, from the looks of it. He sighed. Their supply of that particular resource was limited enough as it was.
An attack like this wasn’t what he’d expected. The Council Hall didn’t just hold the Council of Five Hundred. There were pages and bailiffs and ponies whose only connection to the institution was to keep the floors clean, and another thing very few ponies knew was that the building held a few prison cells in its lower levels that more often than not were occupied by common folk who’d happened to make themselves suspicious in some way to the likes of General Lockjaw. Paper Clip had no idea if the Lunars had opened those cells before they’d finished their work, but he had his doubts. And, he supposed, not every member of the original Council had been corrupt- the vote to censure him and his comrades had, after all, had some thirty members in opposition. To jeopardize so many innocent lives was utterly unlike the Princess Luna he’d worked under at the start of his career. Paper Clip had heard all the bloody stories of Lunar ‘atrocities’ before, of course, but hadn’t put much stock in them. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Soldiers and fire-brigadiers dashed this way and that, sometimes nearly colliding with him. Off to the left a few of the surviving Councilors stood side-by-side with their backs to the rubble, each trying to speak over the others and capture the attention of a small crowd of curious townsponies.
“… important now more than ever that we reach out to tribal communities all across Equestria and acknowledge their unique and inviolable sovereign…”
“… come together to reaffirm the overarching Equestrian spirit and our faith in the traditions of our forefathers, extending a hoof in unity to…”
“… rest assured, we will hunt the cowards responsible for this dastardly attack to the very gates of Tartarus…”
Whatever else they might have said was cut off by a frightful amount of crashing and rattling from further off to one side of the Hall’s remains. With nothing better to do, Paper Clip trotted closer to the source of the sound, and found it to be coming from Princess Celestia. The white alicorn hovered a few meters above ground, coat smeared with ash and dust, wrenching great wads of debris into the air with her telekinesis and briefly diving to render still larger pieces more manageable with thunderous strikes from her hooves.
There was a good argument to be made that Celestia had been the actual intended target of the blast. If she hadn’t elected to hold the morning Committee session in her own Day Court- there was a disturbingly plausible rumor circulating that she’d done this because she thought the Council chamber was too hot- she would have been right overtop of the bomb when it went off. Paper Clip had had no idea she’d come back, however.
“You probably shouldn’t be doing that, Your Grace,” the clerk said out loud. “If you’re not careful, those piles could shift sideways… crush anypony still alive inside. It’ll take trained digging crews days to get through all this… Your Grace did order everypony working the mines in Canterlot to be brought here as quickly as possible, did you not?”
Celestia didn’t so much as look at him, but after a moment her frenetic digging ceased. Her eyes glowed the dull yellow of some sort of divination spell, and with the muffled fzzt of teleportation equine figures began to flash into existence on the flagstones further away. Some were in various states of mobility; more than a few were incomplete corpses. For his own sanity, Paper Clip chose to assume the latter group had also been that way before the Princess had teleported them.
“We do not see you with a pick and a shovel,” Celestia finally said.
Paper Clip rolled his shoulders. “Can’t, I’m afraid.” He waved a hoof at a few of the nearby soldiers in full field plate, who were looking at him every few seconds as bystanders rushed to attend to the civilians Celestia was extracting. “They were worried I might try to sift through the rubble to find secret documents for my ‘dragon compatriots’.” He laughed, bitterly. “Yesterday, I was working for the griffons.”
“That’s a shame.” Celestia drifted deeper into the wreckage, her horn flickering with energy all the while.
Paper Clip tried to follow her, but the soldiers gave him another warning look as they turned their heads toward the handles of their sheathed blades. He’d have a difficult time wading through the debris anyway, so he settled for shouting. “You confuse me, do you know that, Princess? I think you do care about the lives of your subjects, at least in some rudimentary way. If you didn’t, you’d be off making speeches with the others instead of dirtying your coat over here. But then you go and you shore up policies that have cost us thousands of innocent lives- a number which has increased a great deal today. I just don’t understand how an intelligent being can function like this.”
“If you’re trying to convince Us to reverse the Council’s verdict, We fear your pleas are in vain,” Celestia called back, “Equestria needs to come together in this time of rebellion, not throw in our lot with the latest strongmare… stallion?” she added, almost as an afterthought.
“Your Grace thinks me strong? I’m flattered!” said Paper Clip as Celestia circled back around closer to his location. The Council members seemed to have stopped speaking for a little while, and he could just barely make out some sort of noise building in the far distance, near the outskirts of the City- shouting and tramping, which could have been a spontaneous parade in the memory of the fallen Councilors or yet another riot, it was hard to tell and probably didn't matter. Everfree was a noisy place these days, and one got used to it. “But there’s something else that’s been puzzling me.” He pointed upward. “The Sun is out.”
“It’s mid-morning.”
“Yes, but Your Grace doesn’t seem to be having much trouble keeping it there.”
Celestia took on a strange, wistful expression as the yellow glow in her eyes faded. “Our… sister doesn’t fight us as much for control of it any more.”
Paper Clip nodded. “She saves her strength for when it’s needed, these days. She lets Your Grace work the daily cycle, then pulls down the Sun when her soldiers truly need the advantage of fighting in the dark.”
Somewhere near the city outskirts, something large and heavy went thud, and released a small cloud of white stone dust. The soldiers looked to their officers. The officers looked to the Councilponies. The Councilponies looked at each other. Only Paper Clip looked at Celestia, and quirked an eyebrow, and the Princess hovered a little lower. “Save when she wants to celebrate the murder of loyal Equestrian subjects in one of her… raids…” Celestia continued, then trailed off.
Paper Clip nodded. “Yes, she always brings the Moon out then, or at least tries to. And I’d definitely call the destruction of the Council Hall something the Lunar Rebellion would find worthy of celebration, wouldn’t Your Grace? And yet, indeed, it is still mid-morning.”
Celestia muttered something he couldn’t catch, lit her horn, and took to the air. Up in the sky, Paper Clip watched the Sun start to wobble and sink as the first shapes began to resolve themselves over the crowded lower-city skyline- shapes with leathery, bat-like wings.
Paper Clip lurked near the outer wall of what had until recently been a wine cellar under the Castle of the Two Sisters- before that, it had been a vault for the storage of dangerous magical artifacts. He didn’t know quite where those artifacts had gone when it’d been converted to its new purpose, but given the progression of the war effort so far he had a number of very strong suspicions. Now it had become, for lack of a better term, the bolt-hole of what remained of the “legitimate government of Equestria”.
He wasn’t even supposed to be in here, breathing in air and taking up space meant for ponies far above his meager station. He’d just been caught up with the rest of the group that had been standing around with the Princess and the Councilors near the ruined Council Hall and shuffled off by a gaggle of terrified soldiers, and in the intervening three-and-a-half hours nopony had developed the presence of mind -or absence of heart- to eject him. He figured it was almost certainly mostly the former. When he tried to talk, or inventory supplies, or really do anything at all, one or another of the guards would cuff him on the muzzle and tell him not to interfere in an emergency situation. So he sat on a borrowed cushion in a poorly-lit corner and watched the surviving Councilponies bicker and fuss, as Princess Celestia looked more and more lost and angry and… if he didn’t know better, he might even say scared.
“Lunars are pushing across the East Bridge to Castle Rock,” a messenger stammered, “and we don’t have the crystals available to destroy it!”
“Where’s the Everfree Heavy Brigade?” demanded Celestia, “Where’s General Fletching?”
“Your Grace, A month ago…” a general muttered, barely audible, “the entire brigade marched to Griffonia and swore themselves to the service of Lord Grover.”
“Why were We not told of this?!”
“The commanders feared… the impact on morale, Your Grace.”
“Your Grace, the riots in the Pegasus Quarter are beginning to spread into Founders’ Court-”
“I don’t understand it…” said a High Magistrate, “we had more troops there than anywhere else in the City, we made nightly raids and interrogated anypony remotely radical…”
“What about reinforcements from Canterlot?” Asked Celestia.
“Still a day’s march away, Your Grace.”
“Your Grace, Dayguard militias have seized the outer gates!” shouted a lieutenant, “I no longer doubt that they’re attempting to take the armories there for themselves!”
“Well, fight them!” General Lockjaw practically screamed.
“They’re moving around the city faster than our messengers can reach Castle Rock,” said the Chair of the Committee on Intelligence, “They and the Lunars must be working together, it’s the only explanation.”
“Milord, they’ve been fighting the Lunars. They’ve… cleared out entire blocks!” said a different lieutenant- or possibly the same one; they all looked alike and Paper Clip had a poor memory for faces.
General Lockjaw’s eyes narrowed, and she slammed her hoof against the map table. “How does a collection of authoritarian thugs manage to evade our finest warriors right here in-”
Paper Clip had heard the sounds of some kind of struggle beyond the door next to Lockjaw, and backed further into his shadowy corner. The General evidently had not, and when the door was blown open with a thud of earth-pony magic she was shoved over to one side as soldiers in golden armor immediately poured through. In a flurry of motion he could barely follow, the Council guards were forced back and placed in various states of disarmament- Clip’s knowledge of bladesmareship began and ended with his brother accidentally slicing him across the flank with a sickle when he was eight years old, but he got the distinct impression that the Loyalists hadn’t put up all that much of a fight.
“Lunars!” Lockjaw shouted.
The newcomers were about a dozen strong. A curious and heterogeneous mix of commoners’ work gear, City Watch tabards, and even a few Equestrian Army uniforms were visible under their armor, but they moved as a single unit and all wore the same golden barding. He recognized Firefly and Escritoire centermost among them, and Paper Clip couldn’t resist grinning as he stepped out from the shadows. “Oh, no, we’re not Lunars at all.”
Celestia spread her wings and lit her horn bright yellow, but Firefly was already halfway across the room with a bladed wing pressed against General Lockjaw’s thick neck. “Wouldn’t do that if I were you, Princess.”
“How dare you storm into this chamber…” Celestia began, but then she quieted and the light in her horn began to fade away.
“You shouldn’t’ve come all this way just to rescue me,” Paper Clip admonished.
“We didn’t,” said Escritoire, “Lunar Troops are moving into position to launch a final assault on the Castle, and we can’t move to counter them with the Loyalists still on the streets. We need Celestia to order them to assist, or at least to leave us alone until we can get to the castle and-”
“No. Absolutely not, that would be treason against Equestria,” the alicorn snapped.
Firefly turned to look at her, eyes narrowed, even though the blade on his wing never moved an inch from Lockjaw’s neck. “Look around you, Princess! There is no Equestria any more, just… cowering politicians and powerless generals! You’re not gaining anything by prolonging this… this three-way clusterrut, so call off your troops until the Lunars are dealt with and we can discuss the rest like civilizedponies!”
Celestia froze. Completely. Even the motion of her barrel and the patterns in her prismatic mane seemed to still. Her eyes swiveled from Paper Clip to the prone General Lockjaw to the Chair of the Intelligence Committee to the open doorway. Finally she spoke, barely audible. “We… I… I can’t. I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
Paper Clip turned and consciously avoided looking at Celestia as he made his way back out of the room. “Anypony who’s willing to fight alongside us may step forward now. Otherwise, you can stay here and do nothing while you wait for the actual rebels to arrive. Just like your worthless excuse for a Princess.”
...
“Spike this is all backwards, this can’t be right…”
...
“Are you sure this is a good idea, sir?” asked one of the pages who’d joined up with them in the wine cellar- a smart little pegasus stallion by the name of Violet Dart or Purple Shot or something along those lines.
“Absolutely not,” Paper Clip answered. “but I’m going to do it anyway. If there’s any possibility of coming to a settlement with Luna… a way to stop any more bloodshed today… we need to risk it.” Celestia’s troops may have been in disarray and defecting with encouraging frequency, but the Lunar Rebels held onto their positions with a demented tenacity and attacked with little regard for their own survival. The Dayguard had been fighting them block-by-block, often over the same area multiple times- the Castle, for instance, had changed hooves thrice already since Paper Clip had left it. Escritoire didn’t think the Lunars could sustain that kind of attrition forever, and he agreed, but the end of the Battle of Everfree was obviously still a long ways off. The fact that the Sun was currently down, and had been down for a good long time, at five in the afternoon proved that better than any reconnaissance.
“Palafito tried to negotiate with the Lunars…” Escritoire waved a hoof out across the fat, slow river that surrounded Castle Rock, to one of the few public parks in the lower districts of the city. It was, as far as anypony knew, still under Lunar control. In the center, where a kitchen garden had once been, there was a roughly circular patch of the sort of mud made from quite a few hooves moving around for quite a while, and in the center of that a chest-high wooden block with a bloody wicker basket still sitting in front. “Look where it got him.”
“Well, Palafito was a bad negotiator. He would’ve been condescending, severely overestimated his own position -which was weaker than ours is now, by the way- would’ve aggravated the Lunars by demanding symbolic concessions they could never accept, and never even mentioned concrete reforms they would’ve been indifferent to or supported themselves. I… know I haven’t had much luck with the Loyalists, but as a known outsider I might just have a better chance with the Rebels.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Well, I’ve… never asked anypony who’s accompanied me on this venture to risk any more than I’d be willing to risk myself.”
“But what if Luna doesn’t come?” asked Firefly.
Paper Clip peered out through a gap in the barricade surrounding their hastily-constructed forward camp a few blocks from the Castle of Two Sisters. “Princess Celestia’s still holed up inside the Great Solarium, and Luna knows that. She’ll come.”
Some of the lower-ranking troops worked to disassemble just enough of the barricade to let Paper Clip through, and he stepped out into the street. He wore a soldier's light mail, but instead of a weapon one of the loops on the side had been modified to carry a flag made from somepony’s white tablecloth. It would have to do.
He’d walked this route to the Castle many times before, although now with so much rubble in the streets his progress was significantly slower. The entire district was eerily quiet- Clip's own troops had pulled back to their barricade once the civilians were evacuated and he had decided there was nothing left here worth fighting for, the Loyalists were all dead or deserted, and the Lunars had yet to arrive. A plume of smoke still rose from the site of the old Council Hall, but otherwise nothing moved. He perched himself atop a low stone wall in one of the gardens outside the Solarium, jammed the flag securely into a crack between two large cobbles, and waited.
It only took about ten minutes for Luna to arrive. She strode around the corner of a side street in near-complete silence, despite her ornate silver-blue armor. She was taller than Paper Clip had ever remembered her being, thinner and wirier, and she surveyed the area with the flinty gaze of a seasoned hunter.
He hopped off the wall and dropped into a deep bow. “Princess Luna! I’ve come to you on behalf of the people of Everfree to discuss terms for a cease-fire, pursuant to a diplomatic settlement between the Lunar Republic and the provisional government I represent.”
Luna peered down at him with eyes as dull and lifeless as old snakeskin. He searched her features for any sign of recognition, any trace of the awkward and spirited mare he’d worked under before the Rebellion. He might as well have been interrogating the wall behind him.
“Luna… don’t you remember me? Paper Clip, the head clerk.”
The last thing he remembered for a good long while was her forehoof slamming into his chest and the cobblestone wall giving way against his back.
(♫)
He awoke to warmth and birdsong and bright sunlight against his eyelids, none of which were particularly welcome given his pounding headache and general nausea. As those sensations abated somewhat, he realized he was thirsty and insanely hungry. Everything hurt in one way or another, his back and neck most of all, and when he finally opened his eyes he found himself lying on a cot in a sort of large treehouse with a white unicorn stallion in healer’s robes fiddling with some linens across the room. After a few false starts he managed an audible croak, and the unicorn spun around and gave a little yelp of surprise. He dashed over to the bedside and lifted a large earthenware bowl in his telekinesis, revealing it to be full of water. Paper Clip sipped at it as much as he felt able, then before the unicorn could take it away again jammed his entire head inside and just held it there for a good few seconds.
“Sir, don’t strain yourself,” the healer said, placing a hoof on Clip’s chest. “You’re fine, you’re going to be fine, I’ll just get the Deputy Secretary and General Firefly.” He disappeared below eye level- apparently the clerk was on an upper floor of wherever this was- and a few seconds later Paper Clip heard a door open and shut.
General Firefly?
With some effort and much cursing, he managed to roll himself out of bed. With more effort he managed to right himself, and then to stand, and finally begin a few tentative circles around what proved to be a small loft in a storehouse of Zebrican construction. Wherever Firefly had been must have been reasonably far away, as by the time the door on the ground floor opened again he had managed to successfully negotiate the stairs.
There were quite a lot of ponies on the other side, in various forms of official garb. He recognized many of them, Firefly and Escritoire in particular. They both looked different- thinner and scruffier, and not only tired but as though they’d been tired for a very long time, but despite all of it neither looked in any distress. There was a confidence and determination in how they carried themselves that had been absent before, and the healer and other functionaries seemed to look to them for guidance on what to do next.
“Clip, what are you doing down here?” Firefly demanded. “I didn’t think you’d be able to stand!”
Paper Clip tried to answer, but for a little while his tongue seemed unable to follow through. “Haaagh… uhhh… How lon’ve I been sweepi… aswee… asleep?” He finally managed.
“About nine days,” Escritoire said. “It’s the morning of the tenth. Nightm… uhh, Luna did you a pretty bad turn… if that wall hadn’t collapsed behind you you’d probably be paste. We were worried you might never wake up.”
The healer stepped forward. “Your excell- I mean, Minister, sir, you really need to rest-”
Paper Clip shoved past him -perhaps afraid of harming the older stallion, he put up precious little resistance- and stepped the rest of the way outside into what he could only describe as a sea of tents on a scale he was fairly certain nopony had ever assembled before. There was some resemblance to the road that ran north of Everfree, but with so many temporary structures covering the terrain it was difficult to say for certain- and, in any case, if this was north of Everfree then there wouldn’t be that horrible-looking jungle directly to the south.
“What? Why did you bring me out here?” he demanded. “Where is ‘here’, in fact? We… the Lunars haven’t taken Everfree, have they?”
Firefly’s expression became downcast. “No, the Lunars didn’t take Everfree. Clip, that forest… that is Everfree.”
“I’m sorry, maybe that blow did something to my ears, you’re not making any sense…” Paper Clip looked again at the camp surrounding him. The tents were haphazardly constructed in many cases from quite a wide variety of cloth, and clustered together in disorderly groups; many of the ponies hurrying from one to another were either foals or elderly. It was large enough, he estimated, to hold most of Everfree easily, but it wasn’t a military camp like he’d originally thought. “Oh, Harmony help us, you’re serious.”
“Three days after the battle those trees just… erupted, out from under Castle Rock,” said Escritoire. “Trees and... worse things. We tried to contain it but… when Firefly led a squad in to recover the Elements of Harmony, they barely made it back out again. We’ve evacuated what we could, and forbidden any further expeditions.”
...
“He doesn’t say where they went.”
“Twilight?”
“He says Firefly took the Elements out of the Solarium. He doesn’t say where they ended up! He could’ve sent them anywhere in Equestria!”
...
“But what about the Lunars, Escritoire? If they aren’t in Everfree, then where are they?”
“Princess Luna’s… gone. Dead or just sent… away somewhere, we’re still not sure. Something’s happened to the Moon, you’ll be able to see it tonight; the mages we’ve questioned can’t make much sense of it but we don’t think it’s dangerous. Celestia’s… disconsolate. Whatever happened in the chamber with the Elements… whether that had anything to do with Luna disappearing or the city becoming, well, that… I think she was the one who did it. Now she just sits outside and stares at nothing all day… for the first three days, the unicorns in camp had to help her raise the Sun. She just signs whatever we put in front of her now, though, so we’ve been able to set up something resembling a provisional government. I just wish it’d come under better circumstances.”
“And her troops?”
Firefly shifted awkwardly on his hooves. “A lot of the changed ones fell after Luna… disappeared, and it seemed like the fight went out of the living as well. They didn’t offer any resistance. I thought it was a trick at first, and had them disarmed and bound, but there really wasn’t any need. They asked, very politely, to be let go, and be provided with stone and stone-working supplies, and when we let them they started building… structures, we assumed for their dead. I’ve never seen ponies build so quickly… they didn’t sleep, they barely ate… Some of them asked for chilled cider, basic comforts like that. We had a few clerks make rounds and collect messages, since not even all of their elite were literate. I suppose I could’ve stopped them, but it would’ve been bloody, so… I didn’t, and... they sealed themselves in, Clip every last one of them,living and dead." The pegasus sighed, and turned away. "Maybe that’s for the best.”
“Most of the structures ended up deep in the… what used to be the city, but there’s a few outside I can take you to if you want a look at them,” said Escritoire, “the Lunars who hadn’t taken the Oath helped with the assembly, and then slunk off into the camp. I’ve set ponies I trust to tailing them, but they haven’t taken any aggressive actions. A lot of ponies in camp blame them for what happened to the City, so I’ve tried to keep their locations quiet. The ones who stayed," she waved a hoof back at the morass of chaotic vegetation that had until three days ago been a thriving city. "Do you… think they knew?”
“If so, there are easier ways to commit suicide,” said Paper Clip, “Right now, we have enough to do for the ponies who are still alive right now.”
...
“Look, Twilight, there’s more volumes. Year 99, Year 100…”
...
There was, indeed, a great deal for Paper Clip and his fellows to do. Their first concern was to get as much food, water, and medicine as possible into the camp surrounding Everfree, and to get as many ponies as were able and willing to leave back out of it to less chaotic environs. There was a long, long list of missing individuals to track down, and families to reunite, and families that needed to be gently convinced they were probably better off if they gave up looking.
The genteel citizens of the higher districts had suddenly found themselves without their lands and treasuries, and the ‘mere’ tradesponies who had struggled to earn enough to survive in the lower -the carpenters, nurses, weatherworkers, messengers, night-watchmares, and honest-to-Gaia farmers- suddenly found their services in desperate demand. It was thus a nearly Rockhoofian task to make certain that they neither fought to underbid each other nor charged more than they were due. The old guilds were dissolved, and new ones instituted in the Lunar style, with honors- and responsibilities- appropriate to their positions as vital public services. When all was said and done perhaps one out of every ten inhabitants of Everfree City were found to have perished in either Luna’s attack or the subsequent Fall, but they made sure the survivors would on the whole be better off than when they’d began.
Alongside that there was the wider picture to consider. Originally Paper Clip had feared that the outer provinces -which had become more and more autonomous in the waning days of the Council, some out of necessity and some out of greed- might break away completely, or that all of the neighbors Equestria had alienated over that same period might seize the opportunity to invade en masse, or that both might happen simultaneously; but with the right words in the right ears neither proved to come to pass. Denouncing the reviled city-states of Minos earned the grudging respect of Dragonlord Scales. Capitalizing on that respect, Scales was convinced to recognize the upstart Grover as King-of-all-Griffons and end the calls for him to ‘unite’ ponies into his nascent Empire. Then, an offer of free passage for the Griffon Army through Equestria to better prosecute their skirmishes with Minos turned the outrage of the minotaurs elsewhere. Paper Clip reached out to like-minded ponies in the outlying provinces and appointed them to governorships, and made sure they had the resources necessary to check those with greater ambitions. Trade resumed, within and beyond Equestria’s borders, and with it came tax revenue and exotic goods and foreigners who were skilled in things ponies were not. It would be decades if not centuries before Equestria would ever again be considered a serious power in the known world, but for the first time in a long while they were no longer its laughingstock.
Slowly but surely the refugee camp dissolved, but Paper Clip elected to stay in the hermitage outside of what was now being called Everfree Forest. There was a bolt-hole of the sort once used by Lunar scouts underneath it, and he enjoyed the peace and timelessness that came from working underground. Ponies didn’t bother him quite so much down there, and if he was being entirely honest it still disturbed him deeply to look at the sky and encounter a frequently unsteady Sun or that strange, blackened Moon.
Then the surviving members of the old Council government needed to be tried, as the idea of either letting them walk free or summarily executing the lot of them were equally distasteful, and that meant a long and winding reform of the entire judicial system. Corrupt judges and tribe-obsessed jurists needed to be ousted and a new civil service trained up to replace them, and from Luna's earliest manifestos Paper Clip and his clerks distilled the first ever code of Equestrian common law. Eventually, though, the trials were held, and many were exonerated and many others were avenged. The Lunars, and those with Lunar leanings, were a more complex matter, but eventually it was decided that an amnesty would be extended to those who still remained. They were sent to towns where they wouldn’t be recognized and put to work assisting with the reconstruction effort; Cairns were added to the official records to account for them and it became the position of the new government that they had always been interred there alongside their fellows ever since the Longest Day. Many of Paper Clip’s newer colleagues took a very dim view indeed of lying to the public, but the time he’d spent under the watchful eyes of General Lockjaw had convinced him of the value of secrets. In any case, the Lunars themselves had insisted. He even participated in a small, secretive little ceremony with many of them outside of one of the few Cairns not consumed by the Fall, and honored his memories of Princess Luna even as he lamented what she’d become.
The reforms came quickly after that. The Day Guard became the Royal Guard, and alongside the special airborne, heavy, and telekinetic units devised by Firefly served as the elite spearpoint around which the rest of a new-model military was organized. Roads were paved and public schools were built, and when the unicorn residents of Sire’s Hollow refused to allow neighboring earth pony and pegasus children to attend, it was the Guard that marched with those children through the mob outside and stood watch over them as they sat at their lessons. Escritoire began to make plans for a specialized School for Gifted Ponies open to exceptional foals of every tribe, and an Academy of Magic to pursue advanced studies with the full support of the Equestrian government.
Eventually, though, it was no longer possible to continue managing Equestria from the basement of a hermitage, and Paper Clip reluctantly came to admit that his government required a capitol. There was a great deal of debate as these plans coalesced about exactly where to establish it, as the mountainous terrain immediately surrounding Everfree was deemed unfit to support much more than a small town at best and in any case very few ponies were willing to return to the site of such dreadful happenings quite so soon. Canterlot was finally chosen, despite its association with the now generally late and very much unlamented unicorn-supremacist movement, for the simple reasons that it was both the closest major city and the largest in Equestria. Another reason, less publically spoken of, was that Canterlot was where Princess Celestia had taken up residence, and for better or for worse a great deal of the new government’s legitimacy hinged on the surviving alicorn’s continued support… or at least her general apathy and willingness to be told what to do.
According to Escritoire, who worked with the Princess most closely, she remained sullen and withdrawn, spending most of her days in a room deep in Canterlot Keep used for the storage of nonfunctional magical artifacts. Whatever it was she did in there, it was very quiet. That suited Paper Clip just fine. He probably would have to meet with her when he arrived in Canterlot, and he certainly wasn’t looking forward to that meeting, but he wasn’t anxious about it either. He’d faced down Nightmare Moon not too long ago; he was certainly not afraid of Princess Celestia- she simply didn’t have that much relevance to him.
He likely would have to send somepony back to the Hermitage in a few days, though- somepony he trusted more than the pegasus coachmare who shuttled him back-and-forth to official functions, to pick up the documents he’d accumulated. There were copies of nearly everything but the journals in Canterlot already, but the idea of leaving so much of his personal correspondence behind simply made him uneasy. Perhaps he should make that an entire team of ponies. There were quite a lot of materials, after all…
“… and I fear my back is still not remotely up to the task.”
(♫)
Twilight closed the last journal and gently set it aside, and began climbing the stairs back up to the main level. “Spike, we’re bringing these back to Canterlot with us, so we can analyze the mouthwriting and the paper and date them properly. They have to be forgeries. Have to be!”
Spike hurried to catch up with her. “Twilight… he describes the Sun and Moon moving around in detail, which was forgotten by the 120s. He talks about the Lunar Amnesty, which wasn’t public knowledge until the 130s. He was there.”
“That doesn’t mean everything he wrote was true. He could’ve just been trying to… to undermine Celestia, devalue her work, even claim credit for it!”
“By leaving his notes in a cellar nopony knew about so it could be discovered a millennium after he died? Twilight… we gotta start considering that this might be true.”
She paced an endless circle in the loft. If it had been any other night she would probably have remarked on the blunt metaphor for the current state of her thoughts, but tonight she was simply too caught up in those very same thoughts to care. Her loyalty to the very concept of Equestria rested in no small part on the great admiration she’d always felt for Celestia; for the strength and vision her mentor had shown in taking the helm of her fractured nation and personally steering it into a new age. The idea that so many of the building-blocks of what would become the great, thousand-year Pax Equestria- the weather service, the Equestrian Legal Code, the EUP Platoons and all the rest- hadn’t been developed by Celestia at all but rather the work of the reviled Lunar Rebels, hastily repackaged by a cabal of panicking ministers, was corrosive to the young scholar’s conception of reality. The records still tucked away just under her hooves might just as easily have offered incontrovertible proof that two and two summed to five, or that the world was round and orbited a gigantic gaseous Sun.
A cold, electrical sensation washed over her coat as she realized that she’d never once thought to simply ask Celestia about her own memories of that particular era. She wasn’t sure if anypony ever had, when there were authoritative texts to consult- but in those texts, she recalled with another phantom shock, names like Firefly, Escritoire, and Paper Clip had never been hard to locate in references and bylines. If the aftermath of the Lunar Rebellions had been so effectively hidden from public view, then what else might have been buried along with it?
“Twilight?” Spike’s voice startled her out of her ruminations, “You’re gonna wear a hole through that rug if you keep it up, and I’m pretty sure the Mayor’s gonna make you pay for it.” He finished stuffing a large basket he’d extracted from Starswirl knew where with a variety of miscellaneous linens, circling around inside it like a cat for a few seconds before finally curling up with his tail tucked against his snout, “You should probably get some rest.”
Twilight ignored him.
In her second year of undergraduate she had encountered Heart-Of-Progress’s controversial text The Structure of Magical Revolutions, which explained at great length the concept of a ‘paradigm shift’. According to the author, much of history was spent in the pursuit of what he called ‘normal science’- an era of steady progress where wizards tweaked and refined a respected collection of established theories in light of experimental evidence. Every so often an experiment would present evidence that outright contradicted those theories, but explanations were invented for why and how and the anomaly was typically passed over. Eventually, though, the anomalies piled up, and the scholarly consensus couldn’t bend itself flexibly enough to fit around them all. Instead, it shattered, and wizards had to invent a new overarching theory that explained all the evidence in their possession at once. That was a paradigm shift, and from the far side of it a wizard could no more understand how the new theories had been anything less than perfectly obvious all along than she could unlearn how to read.
"Uh, Twilight? You're still tracking dust everywhere."
"Hm? Oh! Oops. It can wait!"
Twilight supposed she had her share of anomalies. The revelation of a secret Lunar influence on early Equestria -Tartarus, she was reasonably certain she’d once found a pamphlet stuck under a napkin dispenser in the Academy dining hall with that exact title- was ruinous enough. But in retrospect the correlations between the grievances that had led to the formation of the Lunar Republic and the reforms of the early United Equestria were indeed blindingly obvious. From there, however, everything simply… disintegrated into contradictions. Who was Princess Luna? Nightmare Moon’s cruelty was an objective, verifiable fact. She’d studied bones exhumed from the Old Dayguard Cemetery herself, matched the tooth-marks to a pony’s jaw and sampled the magic inside them, still potent enough to seize up lab rats after a thousand years’ inactivity but disturbingly slow to finally kill them. That didn’t sound like the pony those journals had described… at least not initially.
And just what had become of the core army of the Lunars, then, if not execution or escape? If there was one point on which she unquestionably agreed with the late Paper Clip, it was that there were far simpler ways for them to have committed mass suicide. What was the "change" the old minister had mentioned, and what, if anything, had preserved the Lunars' bodies? Twilight knew there had to be a logical answer somewhere at the core of all of it, something that in retrospect would appear unimaginably obvious. That was how the universe worked. She recognized from long experience solving exactly these sort of problems that her current discombobulated state was due to missing that final piece of the puzzle… but she had no idea what it was. Every muscle and joint in her ached, on top of the eyestrain and simple tiredness she was already much more familiar with, and her mind just kept revisiting the same points over and over again- stars, Cairns, Elements, ministers, Luna, prophecy; stars, Cairns, ministers, Elements, Luna, prophecy… ooh, ministers, prophecy, stars, Luna, Elements, Cairns!- without making anything from them.
“Twilight!” Spike punctuated his remark with a tiny lick of unnatural green fire. “It’s three in the morning, and the Summer Sun Celebration’s tomorrow. Get some rest.”
She blew nearly all of the air out of her lungs at once, and suddenly realized she was indeed immensely tired. Exhausted, even. She took one last look at the moon visible from the loft’s window, trying to coerce Nightmare Moon into revealing her secrets through sheer, frustrated willpower. Surprisingly, this interrogation tactic proved ineffective.
“Legend has it that on the longest day of the thousandth year, the stars will aid in her escape and she will bring about everlasting night,” she murmured, as though either of them hadn’t studied the prophecy back-to-front a thousand times already. “I hope the Princess was right… I hope it all really is just an old mare’s tale.”
With incredible effort Twilight managed to drag herself across the room and clamber into bed, far beyond caring about the rougher, homespun texture of the linens compared to her quarters in the Observatory.
As consciousness rapidly left her, one memory in particular seemed to return with surprising clarity. The pile of rocks that had been set up to booby-trap the Lunar Cairn at Sweet Apple Acres was symmetric. For whatever reason, the ponies who had made it had gone out of their way to make sure it would collapse if somepony tried to take it apart from the inside.