He could see from Nightmare Moon’s face that he’d pushed the boundaries of the boldness she would allow. She seethed with anger, as she always looked whenever someone mentioned her sacred city. She clearly hated being reminded of it.
He waited a few more terrible moments for the blast of magic that might scour him away from the moon’s surface. It would come eventually—it was bound to, if he kept speaking to Nightmare Moon that way.
It didn’t come now. “You make… a certain amount of sense,” she said. “All this time I say to myself that we ought to be giving a certain respect to the grave of the Alicorns. But why? What respect did they give us? They couldn’t protect one moon. If the Sun Tyrant thought we would fail to use what we were left, then she was a fool.” She rose from her throne, straightening. “Shall we go now?”
“I… would like to bring my engineers,” he said, as non-confrontationally as he could. “I am ill-equipped to understand the achievements of Vanaheimr’s great builders. But they might.
Nightmare Moon laughed. “And I would like to be back on the surface. But the Elements of Harmony have deprived both of us of our wishes. Terrible shame.” Her horn flashed, and Quill was swept up through the void.
There were no longer any strange voices in that darkness, no whispers from Nightmare promising great rewards or terrible punishments for his insolence. Soon enough he felt weight settle against his hooves, and the smell of faint dust. He opened his eyes, hoping that Nightmare Moon had given him at least one mercy.
She had not. Penumbra was nowhere to be seen. The two of them stood in another metal hallway. Quill realized with a start that he somehow recognized that metal. He’d seen it on… Cozen’s ring! Sylvan had made this same stuff, somehow.
“We travel with a specific purpose,” Nightmare Moon said. “If we are really to build a city on this desolate place, then we must preserve future salvage for those who are able to understand it. And… when we have the resources… ponies to bury the dead.”
She hesitated by a single corpse, protected as it was in the weird enclosed fabric that so many of these ponies wore. Nightmare Moon lowered her head respectfully towards the creature for just a moment, then continued on. “With me, Quill. We will not wander for your entertainment. We have a destination.”
Entertainment was not the word he would’ve chosen. But even so, there was no denying how much the trip would’ve taught him. He put aside his confusion and his frustration at not being allowed to bring the ones who might understand any of this, watching everything. Every little detail might be a clue.
Even if Nightmare Moon wouldn’t explain much of it, these ponies had understood how to build here. Their city was a model to be imitated.
There were still so many corpses. Nightmare Moon took them on a circuitous route through widening caverns, hesitating occasionally to squint at the alien writing on the walls.
Eventually they reached an expansive dome with a clear ceiling. A wide doorway was open to the elements, and a thin layer of dust had collected on every surface. As they brought their bubble of air, it picked up again, spinning in a caustic cloud.
“We’ll find the largest motors here on a rover,” the princess said, walking all the way to the end of a row of stalls. Most were empty, but some looked like they contained carts. Or… the skeletons of carts? They had huge metal wheels, but even these were mostly empty space, more like a shaped fishing net than a solid wheel. Most of those that remained were in pieces in various ways, with seats ripped out or bits of their glass shattered.
“They were… incredible craftsponies,” Quill whispered. “To get curved glass so perfect every time. Most of it survived.”
“It isn’t glass,” she said absently, shaking one wing. “It’s polycarbonate. Much easier to shape, and much stronger. Most of the domes and exterior surfaces are made from it.”
“Poly… carbonate,” he repeated. “How is it crafted?”
She stopped, spinning around to glare at him. “If I knew that, I would’ve given the instructions to your glassblower! It involves… complex chemistry. I don’t know the details. There are many steps, and it is likely much harder than any living pony will ever accomplish.”
“Oh.” He fell silent, though he did dare to reach over and touch one of the glass bubbles around a cart. It was firm against his hoof, yet also had a little flexibility to it, yielding slightly when he pushed. His hoof didn’t leave a scratch.
“Here, this one looks intact.” The princess hopped down beside a cart, then her horn glowed fiercely. She yanked, and something clicked out from underneath. She held it up in the air, triumphant.
A metal cylinder, with bits of thin metallic string trailing from one end. The other end connected to the strange wheel with a shaft. She settled it on the ground at his hooves. “Here is your model, Quill. You demand I help the ponies who love me—now I have.”
He nodded. “You, uh… your help fills us with gratitude.” He nudged at the wheel with a hoof, finding it was a little like the “polycarbonate.” It gave under pressure, then sprang back into shape. “I’m certain my engineers will be able to… learn from this gift.” Somehow. “Do you think we could… bring the rest of this cart with us while we’re at it? It seems like… there’s much that we could learn from all of this.”
The princess shook her head. “Do not tempt me to obey Nightmare’s instructions, Quill. We have what you asked. Prove you can make use of this gift before we gather others.”
Her horn glowed again, giving him only seconds to prepare. He gritted his teeth, and soon enough the teleport had swept them up and out.
He didn’t press the princess any further, retreating with his newly acquired “motor” up the stairs to the top of Moonrise and the Lunar Company. Everywhere he walked, ponies stopped to stare. Even more in his own section than in the other camps, these ponies knew what he had saved them from.
It took only a few hours to get everypony together, even if it was near the time their hourglass-keepers read as “dawn,” and the end of the workday. There could be no delay, not with something so important to show.
“You actually did it,” Cozen said, once the door was shut and the guards had settled outside. She levitated the motor down in front of herself, fiddling with it for a moment. The wheel came off, and she set it down on the desk. “I’d begun to wonder if she was… tormenting us. Watching us solve everything without her help to see if we would survive.”
“Too harsh, sweetheart,” Sylvan said. “Say instead that she was testing us. Could we rise to the challenges set out before us with only an occasional hint from her? The answer has been yes so far.”
Cozen hefted her tools onto the desk between them, unrolling them. “That’s what it will be if we somehow get lightning out of this. Explain how we’re supposed to do that, again?”
He’d already done his best to repeat everything the princess had told him. But looking at the thin metal string trailing from two points along the back, he could think of only one way to interpret this. “I think the wheel… spins? And doing that makes electricity from the other end. I do not understand why.”
Cozen turned it over in her magic. “It does seem to follow the same principle. Sun wire, moon wire.” She spun around, retrieving a thin coil inside a little glass jar and settling it on the table beside the motor. She attached each length of metal, so the ends touched, then aimed her horn at the shaft. It started to spin, and the engine hummed.
The coil began to glow faint orange, radiating an even warmth.
Cozen settled back into her seat, panting from the effort. “Well then. It does appear that… there may be promise here.”
Sylvan prodded the device. “I believe something like this could work with the energy-storage device we’ve been constructing, Lord Commander. Motion becomes lightning, it’s perfect.”
“I missed those meetings.” Penumbra pulled over a seat, leaning back and propping her hindlegs up on the table. She wasn’t wearing her wraps anymore. Ponies gasped and stared, but none fled. They’d seen her enough to know she had abandoned all the Voidseekers’ old rules. “How are we going to ‘store’ lightning without using lightning bottles?”
“The sketches are… somewhere…” Sylvan started digging around in the papers scattered across the conference table.
“I think…” Appleseed said, voice cautious. “I believe the plan was to do what the spring in a pocket watch relies upon, or… the pendulum of a grand mare’s clock. But for some reason a pendulum wouldn’t serve. I don’t recall the reason why…”
“Because everything is lighter here,” Cozen said, having recovered her breath enough to sit up. “A pendulum holds more energy the higher it swings, but we would need something massive to store enough energy for our purposes. Instead we’re going to use one of the newer discoveries in artifice. A flywheel. Despite his track-record as an engineer, I believe my husband is correct. If we could make something like this… only much larger, perhaps we could use it to change the spin of our flywheel into electricity.”
“We still have to get it spinning in the first place,” Sylvan said, his head slumping to the table in front of him. “Our loving princess didn’t give you anything on that score? Nothing to produce the motion in the first place?”
He shook his head. “Nothing we don’t already know, I’m afraid. She said that almost all power production revolves around heating water until it boils—the steam rises, spins something, and then condenses. I’m not sure that’s terribly useful to us.”
“It all comes down to heat, doesn’t it,” Appleseed said. “Heat for our next harvest, so the potatoes don’t freeze. Opening our doorways to the cavern when we get too hot. Heating the core warm enough to survive the night, without cooking us alive during the day.”
“I suppose…” Cozen’s eyes were unfocused as she spoke, as though she could see right through the stone ceiling to the moon’s surface far above. “We could use the same method already keeping us warm. Mirrors and sunlight into metal—lots of mirrors this time, enough to boil water. Boil water, capture the steam, spin something massive…”
“We’re out of metal,” Silver Needle said. “I’ve already given you every silver coin in our stores to melt for your mirrors. I have nothing more to give. And steel… we would need pipes as well, wouldn’t we? Even if we melt every sword in Moonrise, that wouldn’t give us enough. Even if what you describe is possible, we cannot build it.”
“We have metal here…” Quill began, pointing with his wing towards Cozen’s horn ring. “Sylvan, you made that from local ore, didn’t you?”
Sylvan nodded. “Aye, Lord Commander. The procedure is one of my own devising—but I don’t know that it could be achieved in the amounts we require.”
“Why not?” Quill asked. “Sylvan, if we don’t get more electricity, we all die. If there’s any way to achieve it…”
Sylvan met his eyes. “It uses lightning, just like the glassblowers. Or… electricity, I suppose is the term we’re using now. I used a trivial amount preparing enough metal for two rings. But to make mirrors, and a heat-capturing apparatus, and a finely-crafted flywheel… we might use most of the lightning remaining to us.”
“It’s a gamble,” Penumbra supplied. “That’s what you’re saying. And if it doesn’t work, everybody dies two months earlier than they had to.”
Exactly the sort of decision that a Lord Commander would have to make. I’ve already exhausted every other option. I’ve begged Nightmare Moon, I’ve got to Vanaheimr. I’ve done everything short of begging Nightmare itself for dispensation.
Quill rested his working foreleg on the table between them. “I need your honest assessment. Tell me if you can make this work, and I’ll order it.” He looked between the members of his table in turn, particularly on Sylvan and Cozen. “The two of you might soon have more to lose than anypony else here. Consider before you answer that we don’t just have death waiting for us if we fail. Our princess will exercise her displeasure with those who fail her. Only our success maintains her sanity.”
Cozen and Sylvan shared a long look. Quill could sense the communication pass between them, however silent it might’ve been.
Eventually, Sylvan nodded. “We can make it work. We already have a template for how to build a large workshop. The glassblower’s, and the mason’s… it would be like that, only to work lunarite. Shame your ring won’t be as special when we’re finished, love.”
“It’s still special,” Cozen said. “It will still be the first.”
“Then consider it ordered,” he said. “Sylvan, get the layout of this workshop to Silver Needle as soon as you can. She will delegate to the construction crews. Find a place for it beside the other workshops, Colonel Needle.”
“I’ve been saving several openings, Lord Commander.” She glanced towards the conference room’s shut balcony. “I’m sure we’ll need several more before Moonrise is finished.”
Iron Quill forced a smile. “Silver, we’re not building a camp anymore. Moonrise will never be finished.”
Quill left that meeting behind, feeling the grim resolve pushing him forward with every struggling step.
A pony settled in beside him, though her voice was muffled by cloth again. She’d chosen to show her face in private, even to ponies who weren’t bats. But she still didn’t go removing it out in front of everypony. Some of the ancient customs still motivated her, it seemed. “Your assassination made you braver. I don’t think the Lord Commander who landed here six moons ago would’ve approved that plan.”
He didn’t have to slow down for her—he could barely even maintain a competent walking pace. The prosthetic might keep him from being a cripple in some ways, but his body was still barely functional. Even an incredible machine could only do so much for him. Penumbra had never mocked him for it. She matched his pace as though that was just the speed she wanted to be walking all along.
“Six moons ago, I was the moon’s biggest fool. I had no imagination of what we were facing. Even now, I feel like I can… barely grasp it. Cozen mocks the princess’s reticence, but I think the truth is far in the other direction. I think she shares as much as we can understand. I think she’s measuring information, so we don’t go insane from despair.”
She rested one wing over his shoulder, guiding him into the Lord Commander’s quarters. It was far more open a display of affection than she would’ve dared while the Voidseekers still lived in camp. But now she was the only one of her kind, and nopony dared question her about anything. “We have no reason to despair, Quill. Everyday life goes on is more than the Tyrant wanted for us. Even if we lose the war—we won so many battles together.” She rested her head against his shoulder. There was no warmth between them, but he didn’t need it.
He took a deep breath, fighting the shame clawing at his chest. She was so beautiful, and what was he? Not just old, but forever broken now too. Aminon hadn’t even been strong enough to finish killing him. “A battle isn’t good enough for me,” he said. “I’m amazed by what we accomplished—but none of it will be good enough if everypony dies. If all our suffering and toil only amounts to a later grave, maybe we should’ve just walked out onto the surface to let the moon take us.”
“You don’t think that,” she snapped, pulling away from him. “Look at you, Quill. You’re still fighting. You’re just like the army. You showed me not to give up, you can’t expect me to believe that you would.”
“I…” He sighed. “You’re right. I haven’t given up. I wish we had a better option. This source of electricity is… desperate. A gamble, just like you said. But it’s all we have left. Maybe we’ll come out the other end. Cozen and Sylvan have done some amazing things, and they’ve got some talented ponies working in their workshops now. The cleverest mares and stallions from every camp. You’re right to think that I never would’ve tried this in the early days—but I don’t think we could’ve done it even if I had. We’ve collected all the skill together. Now we see if it’s enough.”
She reached over him with a hoof, covering the glowstone with the waiting cloth and plunging them both into total darkness. Not that it mattered—they were both bats, both comfortable in the dark. “I know you like it better this way,” she said. “You don’t feel so… tense. I don’t know why.” She rested up against him again in the dark.
There wasn’t much point in keeping secrets, not when they might only have another week or two to live. If Nightmare Moon was going to execute him for failing the army, he wouldn’t die with regrets. “Because you’re beautiful, and I’m a rotting, limping hunk of meat.”
She giggled. “You realize that before you, I spent time with the Voidseekers. Undead monsters who never naturally heal from their wounds, only get stitched together over and over again. Compared to them, you’re like…” She kissed him. “Well, that.”
Quill wasn’t sure he cared for the comparison to literal monsters, but considering she was one of those too, he’d take what he could get. And if she wasn’t going to send him away, he’d enjoy their time while he could.
Quill watched as his trusted ponies played their part in Moonrise’s ultimate gamble.
For the first week or so of work, it was still not too late to turn back. New buildings required bricks, and they fired most of those in the heat-core using an insulated box and mirrors during the hottest part of the day. Earth ponies dug and hammered and chiseled out more foundation, and still it wasn’t too late to turn back.
While Iron Quill rested barely alive on his sickbed, Silver Needle had established a system of labor shifts, giving every pony in the city a color according to their skill and physical ability, and rotating ponies from each through the various jobs. Those who worked got extra rations, and a chance for “luxuries” like mushroom stew and fresh water.
By the second week, the walls were up, and the new workshop’s complex interior was being built. Quill visited the construction site several times a day to inspect the work, though in reality he had little concept of what was being built or why. There were heavy rock crushers, a massive ceramic crucible, a polished flat shaft, and thaumaturgical devices of coiled wire. Lightning’s electrical manifestation would be used at two stages of production in the factory, instead of just one.
Sometimes he could understand the explanations they gave him. “This is a casting mold,” Cozen told him, when he inquired about the strange reverse-pipe she’d covered over in scribbled runes. “Once we pour the lunarite around it, the spell will help slide out a finished section of pipe.”
There were dozens of such molds, worked by the “silver” class, the most skilled and valuable crafts ponies in all of Moonrise. He visited their workshop only once, long enough to realize that his presence frightened and distracted them from the delicate work they did.
Before the second week was up, Quill was there to cut the imaginary ribbon and open the workshop. He had to do it without his bodyguard, since he hadn’t seen Penumbra at all during that time. But nopony threatened him with assasination anymore, not when he was the hero of Moonrise.
Carts of dark rock rolled in, were crushed by hardworking earth ponies, and loaded into the crucible for the first of two stages. The workshop’s glowstones suddenly felt pale to his eyes, as a heat like lightning striking filled the workshop. Molten rock boiled, workers scraped away the dross, then moved it forward into a second oven for more heat around a black core.
After an hour, Sylvan presented Quill with what would’ve been an ordinary length of pipe, wide and long enough that he might not have been able to lift it. He did anyway. “The mythical lunarite,” Sylvan said, wearing a heavy apron and a pair of slightly charred goggles over his eyes. “What alchemists from Saddle Arabia to Canterlot have only dreamed of, we will have in abundance. The lunar metal, nearly weightless but far stronger than bronze or iron.”
“But not steel,” Quill noted, hefting the length of pipe back down into the troth.
“Well… no,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. I believe an alloy will probably be found to improve its strength. But our supply of other metals is… somewhat limited. We once had many ponies who could walk the surface with ease, but… they tried to murder everyone and now they’re in hiding, so… we have your—” At Quill’s glare, he cleared his throat. “B-bodyguard. And the unicorn crews. But they’re so busy enchanting that they don’t have much time to visit the surface to gather metal.”
Quill shrugged one shoulder. “Don’t waste resources on strength we don’t need, Sylvan. Will these pipes and mirrors be strong enough to endure their purpose?”
He nodded. “Absolutely, Lord Commander! Lunarium’s melting point is much higher than plumbum or stannum. It is ductile like steel, without being tempered first. It may be the miracle we have been waiting for.”
“That will depend on your wife’s achievements,” he said, clasping the alchemist on the shoulder. “You have done great work. Produce only what she requires, and not one pound more.”
“Oh, certainly…” Sylvan gestured back at the workshop, where workers were shoveling the next load of finely-crushed ore into the crucible. “But Lord Commander, you must see the potential I do. If we can produce and store electricity, we can finally crawl out of the dust. We will have metal, brick, and glass in an endless supply. We might actually be able to build a home here.”
Quill nodded. The optimism was refreshing to hear, considering the nightmare of stress that had become his constant companion as he watched the city’s resources drain.
“It’s a start,” he said. “We need a new source of light, we have to vary everypony’s diets, we have to find a better way to shut our door than fighting a slowly-melting plug of ice with unicorn magic… but it’s a start.”
“Every day we solve one impossible dilemma,” Sylvan said. “Eventually, we will have overcome them all, and we’ll be masters of this place.”
Quill almost laughed. He’d seen what the city of a master looked like, and Moonrise certainly wasn’t that. It wouldn’t be in any of their lifetimes. With luck, they’d return to Equestria long before they learned how to build it.