Within the hour, the Purple Council had been convened.
Faith thought the name was a little silly, particularly since it included her mother, who was black, and the princess, for whom a rank meant nothing. At least she didn’t have to force her way into the meetings. It wasn’t just her father’s name that got her in anymore—now she led the Gatecrashers.
The meeting hadn’t actually waited for her. By the time she slipped inside, Lord Commander Chain Mail was already speaking. “—at least there aren’t any signs of the cavern collapsing. Our Princess sealed us without any collateral damage.”
Nightmare Moon sat at the head of the table, leaned far enough back in her chair that Faith imagined she was wearing her armor. Maybe she wanted to seem more imposing for all the ponies that would be depending on her leadership. “I am no expert in civil engineering or geology, but I did my best. Unfortunately what I cannot prevent are the other consequences.” She nodded to the side. “Penumbra, what did you find in the collapsed cavern? How much further before the glacier continues?”
Her mother didn’t sit at the council with the others. Instead she paced back and forth beside the window, occasionally glancing out at the ponies assembled below. Officially, life in Moonrise was back to normal for everypony who wasn’t an ice miner. But Faith didn’t hear any mechanical noises coming from the workshop, or the usual murmur of voices coming from the marketplace below.
“Good news first,” Penumbra said. “Doesn’t look like the ice cavern is below very much of Moonrise. Emptying it hasn’t made us unstable. Bad news—it’s almost empty. There is no more glacier. I don’t know where the ‘ice cavern’ was supposed to be, but I don’t think it exists.”
“How in the buck can that happen?” Faith asked, loud enough that even the princess turned to stare. “We depend on the ice for… everything, don’t we? Air, water, heat—the ice powers it all. How could we keep harvesting until there was none left?”
“Excellent question,” Nightmare Moon said. “I’m as eager to hear it answered as Quill’s foal.”
Stop calling me that. I’m not a bloody foal. But aside from sitting up a little straighter in her chair, trying to be as big as she could, she couldn’t so much as glare at the princess without being disrespectful.
Attention turned on Swift Wing, city quartermaster. “Well uh…” He hesitated for another moment, shuffling with paper on the desk in front of him. “We don’t actually use much ice anymore. The city’s water comes from the cistern. I’d only ordered the latest shipment in preparation for the latest harvest. It’s only between crops that we have any need to replenish the oxygen supply. Our balance has become that precise.”
“Are you saying this isn’t the threat it seems?” Lord Commander Chain Mail asked, tone skeptical. “That all ponies will be giving up is chilled deserts in their iceboxes?”
“I didn’t say that,” Swift Wing said sharply. He flipped through a few more pages. “Look, I got my hooves on the oldest records of the Airmaker guild. When Moonrise was young, they’d take as much as five carts of stone every lunar day. The Airmaker’s guild of today haven’t filled a cart in months. But balance is… difficult. It took years to establish, and might be ruined in far less. Our system is not perfect. Every harvest, we are forced to convert some water into air.”
“We should’ve solved this by now,” Nightmare Moon said, her voice impatient. “I demand that we transition to a constant circulation of harvests, bringing in only a small amount of our crops on a given day instead of some significant portion. Make the transition at once.”
“That is…” Green Apple began, Moonrise’s Lord of Crops. “Of course, Princess. We’ve considered such a system before. But smarter ponies than I always found that we’d be shrinkin’ the yields that way. Sunstone don’t grow as well as it used to, so we’ve been makin’ do by having most of the growing timed with day.”
“Figure it out,” the princess demanded. “Speak to the Gatecrashers. If they haven’t salvaged hydroponics equipment by now, I’m not sure what they’ve been doing.”
Nopony seemed to know what she was talking about—which was good, because otherwise Faith might’ve felt stupid for not knowing. But she didn’t get a chance to ask.
“It is possible for a colony to be self-sufficient,” Nightmare Moon declared. “Balance is difficult, but it can be found. You aren’t as ignorant as your parents. Use that knowledge and establish that balance.”
She turned towards the quartermaster again. “How long will we last without new ice to harvest?”
“Some time,” he said nervously. “As our honored princess will know, Moonrise uses water to store and move heat. We have… vast reservoirs. We can drain them to replenish the air if it is required. But the more we take, the colder it will get when night comes again. I don’t have measurements on how much water is already stored in Moonrise’s pipes. If I had to guess, I’d say we have months. This is a troubling development, but not the end of the city.”
“See that it isn’t,” Nightmare Moon said. “I assure you, I’ll see the end coming long before it arrives. And I will hold the ones who allowed our future supply to dwindle so far to have an… exquisite death.”
Swift Wing nodded obediently, his scent shifting to near-terror. But the princess was already turning her attention elsewhere. “Mayfly, what of your Dustwalkers? Where will we establish our next mine?”
Mayfly shifted in her seat a moment. “I’ve consulted every map of the surface, Princess. There are… no other glaciers anywhere on it. Now in fairness to the Dustwalkers of the last generation, we haven’t been searching for water. You tell a pony that metal is how they’ll earn their color, and they’ll be looking for buckin’ metal. But factors are against us.”
“I’m aware,” Nightmare Moon said, her voice turning back towards annoyance. “The surface is too hot for any water to exist in direct sunlight. If there is water elsewhere, it will be found in perpetual shadow at the bottom of craters. My Voidseeker will assist in the search, won’t you Penumbra?”
“As the princess commands,” she said. “I haven’t seen ice anywhere else either, but I can start looking.”
“I know where we can find water, if all else fails,” the princess went on. “The Sacred City has an enormous reserve tank, vaster than all of Moonrise. It was established on a supply of groundwater sufficient for a million ponies. But the reserve is deep underground, and the equipment to extract it is likely destroyed. Whatever water was stored in the city itself is long gone by now. It will be an option for future generations, who are less ignorant than any of you. But… we will have to find a balance. What will you do, Lord Commander?”
“We can… improve collection,” he said. His voice went rigid as he said it, like he was reading from notes. “I’ve spoken to craftsmare Cozen. We can collect water in areas we know it will be present. A drain in the greenhouse and in… latrines… could funnel into our supply.”
The princess made an unhappy sound. “As though the water didn’t already taste foul enough. If you begin collecting blackwater, we will need more than mechanical filters. The simplest mechanism for creatures as primitive as yourselves is distillation—boil the wastewater, collect the vapor, and cool it. But great energy is required.”
She rose, spreading her wings. “We’ve lived this last generation squandering our wealth. The moon gave us a boon, and we’ve been too foolish to husband it wisely. Now we face the consequences. In Vanaheimr, the water of every creature was known, sharded, and purified. We will need to become like them soon.”
She pointed at Faith, causing several ponies to turn and stare in her direction. “The Gatecrashers can abandon whatever occupies their attention and find the water treatment plant. Maybe Quill’s miracles can be inherited, and she can provide one to the colony. The rest of you, the time has come for steps forward in understanding. We must know our consumption of oxygen, and establish a balance with carbon sequestration that does not require inputs. We have vast caves piled high with stored carbon we may wish to reclaim one day. But for now… survival.”
She turned to go. “Lord Commander, you have a day and night to find a solution to this before I grow unhappy. I’m sure the Purple Council is more than equal to the task.” She didn’t walk very far—just a few steps, before she vanished in another teleport.
Penumbra lasted a few seconds longer, making her way up to the table and looking between them. The ponies here seemed to fear her almost as much as the princess, because not even the lord commander interrupted her. “Good luck,” she said. “You’ll need it.” She looked briefly in Faith’s direction, then vanished too.
The weight of what they’d all just been ordered settled on the room for a few more moments of terrible silence. Faith shuffled awkwardly in her seat—everypony else here had notes and scrolls with them, but she didn’t. She couldn’t read, so everything was either in her head or nowhere at all.
“Moonrise has faced greater threats than this,” Chain Mail said. “I’m confident in each of you. But the princess is right, we’ve grown complacent. We expect because we survived this long that nothing serious can challenge us. We need to remember what the First Commander always said about life here. The moon is a land of hatred, fighting to expel us from her surface at every opportunity. If we ignore that fact, then we make ourselves ripe for destruction.”
Faith didn’t have to listen too closely to what he had to say about each of the other departments. The Lord Commander had instructions for each of them. They would each have their own assignments to help ensure that Moonrise had enough water. The Arcanium would be working on new ways to capture what they didn’t use, while the quartermaster’s office would be given the monumental task of converting their agriculture system and finding ways to negate the need for new water to be broken down into air.
Eventually Chain Mail came around to her. He sounded suddenly tense as he did so, probably expecting an argument. “I approve of your fertilizer project, Faithful… but it’s going to have to wait. Moonrise needs its unicorns for more important things until the water situation is resolved.”
“There’s nothing more important than food security,” she argued, though without much venom. She’d been expecting this, and she couldn’t really be upset about it. “Don’t leave us on the backburner forever. Green, you did the numbers for how long we would have before our harvests weren’t keeping up with the population anymore. Isn’t it soon?”
“About a year,” he said. “Assuming nothing dramatic. The soil weakens gradually. We could stretch the time by investing more earth ponies in the farms, but magic only goes so far.”
“You aren’t forgotten,” the lord commander said. Though there was something of relief in the way he did it. “It isn’t often the princess names some specific lost magic of the ancients for us to find. We’re not going to ignore her advice. Devote everything you have to discovering a ‘water treatment plant.’ Whatever resources we need to imitate the spells involved, you will have. I may travel to the Sacred City myself, if the magic is dramatic enough. Make it your top priority.”
“Water… treatment,” she said. Like so much of what the ancients did, the vocabulary made perfect sense. “I’ll see what I can figure out. Arclight is close to a working phonetic translation of the Alicorn language… and we have some maps. I’ll keep you updated.”
“See that you do,” Chain Mail said. “You know your assignments. We’ll return a week from today and report. I expect significant progress from everypony here.”
Moonrise seemed overwhelmed by a constant low panic as Faith made her way back, with ponies on all sides whispering to one another of the exhaustion of the ice-mine. As she walked, she overheard voices whispering all manner of strange things—that they’d be dead within a week, once the little fountains on each floor ran dry.
Or worse, that certain members of the city would lose their water privileges, so that the more valuable members might live a little longer. No doubt those stories would come with resentment as ponies stared at her blue necklace, but for once being blind was an advantage there. She wouldn’t have to see how upset they were with her.
She passed a large line at the central fountain, with dozens of ponies each carrying their own water pots. There was no sign of the fountain being emptied, though there were half a dozen peacekeepers standing guard.
Eventually she made her way back to the Gatecrasher building, which was overflowing with far more ponies than her usual two-dozen. “There are no unannounced missions,” she said, repeating the order over and over. “I know you all want to get some distance with Moonrise. Let me be clear: we aren’t running.”
She glowered at them all, daring anypony to question her. But nopony did. Fine Detail met her as the crowd of temporary workers dispersed, many of them turning back up towards Moonrise with disappointment or anger in their scents. “It can’t be good news,” she said, her usual clipboard levitating beside her. “What’s changed?”
“Everything,” she said, exasperated. “We don’t get our unicorn teams after all. They’re going to be working on some… enchantment or other. I don’t know what. I’ll ask Arclight to ask Cozen about it and tell you then.”
Fine Detail tapped her quill impatiently on the clipboard. “So an entire cycle of the staffing was… pointless. Lord Commander just took them all away. He can’t expect us to haul the greenhouse without all the extra charging for the wayrunes, can he?”
“No, he doesn’t.” She hurried down the wide ramp in the center of the building, leading towards what had once been a secret lab tucked away in a severed cavern. It was easier to build something new connected to the old wayrunes than to establish new ones. “We’re looking for something else now. It’s… about water efficiency, I think. The princess told us about a ‘water treatment plant’ and we have to find it. I guess they’re going to try to build one in Moonrise.”
“They don’t know what it is?” Fine Detail asked, exasperated. “They didn’t bother to ask the princess why we should be looking for it?”
You mean why didn’t I ask? “Nightmare Moon isn’t usually that expressive. Getting anything about Vanaheimr from her is unusual. Nopony felt like pushing their luck after she was already furious. If you’d like to go to the crown and ask, you go right ahead. I’ll trust Arclight’s translation to figure it out myself.”
“I… find myself agreeing with you suddenly. Translation it is.”
Preparation for their now-defunct mission to Vanaheimr’s greenhouses was still underway in the central passage, with many rugged carts parked and waiting for the ponies who would use them. A number of ponies moved back and forth between them, checking the shovels and Dustwalker tools. They stopped to salute her as she passed, and she nodded politely to each of them. She didn’t have the heart to tell them it was all pointless.
The ceiling opened overhead into the massive Gateroom, with its walls carved to look like stylized pillars surrounding the wayrunes. Each one looked like one of the four pony tribes, doing their part to hold up the ceiling. The walls were packed with supplies, largely charged thaumic crystals that she had learned never to touch.
As she expected, Arclight was already here, pouring over his notes and scrolls on a table. She approached, nodding to Fine Detail this time so she would know not to leave. What they discussed would likely make for more restructuring she would have to figure out.
“Faith!” Arclight hurried over to her as she approached. He might act like he was half deaf and half blind, but he’d apparently been watching. “How’d the meeting go?”
“The princess didn’t freeze anypony,” she answered. “I call that a good meeting."
He let go a few seconds later. “So what happens with the ice?”
“Gone,” she said. “My mom checked it—there’s not enough to be worth harvesting. Now everypony has to scramble—we have to get better about how much we use, how we recycle it, and find some new ice.”
“And the greenhouse expedition is scrapped,” Fine Detail supplied. “So much for rejuvenating our agriculture.”
“Postponed,” Faith corrected. “We’ll get it. But we’ve been reassigned. We’re supposed to find something called a ‘water treatment plant.’ Anything like that on the map, Arclight?”
He headed back to the table, shuffling through several layers of parchment before finding one. “I assume it isn’t like other plants, or wouldn’t it be dead like the others?”
“Yeah,” Faith agreed. “Nightmare Moon would probably banish the pony who annoyed her enough to ask right now. Let’s just… assume it isn’t and go from there. What can your translation tell us?”
“Not a lot,” he answered nervously. “But I don’t think we need it this time. The Alicorns had to use pipes just like ours, and that means we can follow where the water goes. They’re on their maps too, like this… I think it’s a maintenance drawing.” He held it up, then his scent shifted towards embarrassment, and he tilted it slightly towards Fine Detail. “Water gets concentrated twice, an input and an output. I bet one of them will be a ‘treatment plant’.”
“Good.” Faith turned away, over to one of the nearby shelves of gear. She unslung a set of saddlebags from a hook, tossing them on her back. “Pack the map. We’re going now.”