Silver was frozen in place—not by any power of the Polestar, but with absolute horror at what he saw. All the time she warned me this would happen, I thought she was just being paranoid. Why didn’t I listen?
A few excuses flashed briefly through his mind, before being swallowed just as swiftly. “No,” he said, stepping directly between the gemstone and Magpie. The light blasted through him, penetrating the suit and even his closed eyelids. The helmet was still polarized, but now even that didn’t make a difference. He couldn’t even look behind to see if things were any different for Magpie—all he saw was red in all directions. “You aren’t going to sterilize her. She’s not an intruder, she’s my friend.”
The spotlight went out, though Polestar remained an angry red. Silver didn’t need any magic to know it would switch back on the instant he got out of the way. It was trying to burn her away. But it doesn’t want to hurt me.
“Condolence. Companion diseased. Sterilization necessary.” He felt a pressure on his mind like a physical weight, shoving up against him. It wanted him to walk, just a little to the left. He gritted his teeth, tried to dig in his hooves—but its power was immense. He moved, stuttering like a disease-riddled nag.
And as soon as he was gone, the spotlight came back on, blasting past him into… nothing, this time. Magpie was gone, and there was no corpse or threadbare cloak left behind. “Required. Obtain.” He started jerking again, dragging towards the nearest tower. Stars above, it’s going to make me kill her myself.
“No!” he screamed—his mouth still seemed to work, even if his body defied him. “Even I know about Penumbra’s child. Founder of the Gatecrashers. If Faithful Gale can come from her, then you don’t need to purify my friend! I know she’s ‘dead’, but she’s still her. I’ve only known her dead, and I want you to leave her!”
Was it even making a difference? His voice echoed over and over in his stupid helmet, and for a moment he wondered if Polestar was even listening. It’s a spirit, not a pony. It doesn’t have emotions like we do or make decisions like we do. What had he read about spirits? The stolen books hadn’t given him very much, describing the art as mostly lost and too dangerous to be worth attempting.
Non-pony life cannot be persuaded, only cajoled. Do not evoke the unseen unless you have already studied the particular spirit and can persuade it to obey you. That was probably good advice, too bad he couldn’t follow it. The ancient Alicorns probably could control the Polestar. They knew, but he didn’t. And now it was going to kill his only friend.
“I won’t help you!” he screamed. “Whatever you want from me… if you kill Magpie, I’ll make you have to control me like this forever! I’ll never help! I’ll… spit in your face every minute!”
His body stopped moving. He collapsed onto the floor, his limbs returning to his control only shakily. He scrambled to his hooves, as though doing so would stop the Polestar from taking them again. While he could still move, he backed away from the tower, not wanting to see if Magpie was behind it. Maybe if he couldn’t see her, the Polestar couldn’t either?
“Uncomprehending vessel. Mausoleum worlds overflow. Oathsworn tool, repossessed. Equus dead.”
It was trying to talk with him—persuade him, maybe? Convince him that killing Magpie was justified? Clearly he’d found the one thing he had to trade within this exchange: his own obedience. Penumbra saved Moonrise from Aminon and his traitor Voidseekers. If she can be good, then Magpie can be too.
“Incomparable. Penumbra defies Nightmare. Nightmare abandoned Magpie.”
It was listening! That’s what she says! It’s not true! The Voidseekers were supposed to be bloodthirsty assassins, but she doesn’t want to fight! She hates killing, she doesn’t even want me to fight against Moonrise’s evil generals. She says the Voidseekers kicked her out because her wing broke. I think Nightmare realized she wasn’t going to do what it wanted, so it banished her. Doesn’t that seem more likely?
Hesitation. Doubt, maybe? There were no emotions to feel, even if he had the magic for it. No face to read, no body language, no scent. Just a glowing red stone that wanted to kill his friend. If you kill Magpie, I won’t help you. That you can trust.
“Unacceptable risk. Response required.”
“Then do something else!” He stomped right up to the stone, screaming at it. “You can’t hurt my friend; I won’t let you. Whatever you’re afraid of, do something else!”
Another long silence. He thought he could make out Magpie’s feeble voice, somewhere in the room. Crying dry tears.
“Compromise,” the Polestar finally said. “Observe. Witness history. Then decide.”
A bargain. Many spirits would offer them—but what were the terms of this one? He had to observe… history? What did that mean?
The Polestar didn’t leave him wondering. “Contact. Experience.”
He stumbled forward, struggling with his helmet for a moment. It came undone a second later, and he folded it back, rather than setting it down. Then he went for the seal down his front, pulling it far enough to squeeze out one hoof.
“Don’t do whatever it says,” Magpie whispered, her voice small and distant. “It killed so many of us. Half the Voidseekers gone. Only the princess stopped this.”
“I have to,” he answered. “And I don’t think it’s going to kill me.” He reached out and touched the Polestar with a hoof. The world went white.
Silver saw… everything. For a single moment, his vision transcended the place he considered his whole world. First a quiet warehouse, then a slum, and finally a city… but even the entire moon was just an insignificant dot in a maelstrom of activity. Moonrise seemed so huge, with thousands of creatures living stacked up to the ceiling—but compared to all this, they weren’t even a blink.
He saw the lights of innumerable stars and knew somehow that most he saw had life. Most of it was bizarre, barely recognizable as life even to the great Alicorns. Much was like the algae they sometimes found growing on damp glass in the farms, living but too small to be seen. But there was more.
Where Moonrise had just one city, he saw places like Equestria where thousands of such cities existed. Most of them were incomprehensible to him. Life took such shapes that it could not be understood, and little of communication was possible.
But many were vexed with the same terrors—maybe all, though he had no way of recognizing it. There was so much information that his head ached even from within the vision. There were many names in many languages, but the Polestar called them “Awakened.” An almost direct contradiction to the pony word “Nightmare.”
He saw a force unlike every other alien thing he had seen—the universe was full of vast, strange things, but all had stayed away. Why should civilizations of immeasurable antiquity and vast power care about what lesser creatures did? But the Awakened did. A single one could unmake a world, putting pressure against its insides from a hundred different angles until it came apart.
He saw the city of the Alicorns, once noble and great, brought low by infighting and betrayal. The Awakened couldn’t even offer them immortality, since they had it already. Yet still they fought, until more of them traded their freedom to the Awakened in exchange for inscrutable benefits. And when they finally turned against their neighbors… that was when the universe reacted.
Suddenly they were the targets of a dozen invasions, and their great cities crumbled. Their planets were turned into glowing balls of hot rock, their floating homes in the void opened to puke out their air and heat to the vacuum. Their last survivors hunted for the danger they represented.
Even lifted up in legends, even seeing the scope of Vanaheimr’s devastation—it now seemed insignificant by comparison. So many more lives were dead before him now that he could barely even comprehend their number.
The vision faded, leaving Silver back in his body again. His head pounded, and a stream of hot blood trickled down his face, dribbling out onto the stone. “Security Compact purified. Allies betrayed. Now abandoned.”
He glared up at the floating stone, yanking his hoof back before it could fill his mind with more strange visions. “Can’t you talk normally? I’m having trouble understanding you.”
Another silence. Silver imagined he’d surprised the spirit—did it expect him to have more to say? Maybe it thought that he would accept that Magpie needed to die because of what it had shown him.
Now I know what the Nightmare is. Not a god, but… another life form, greater than us. But if it wasn’t a god, then it could be beaten. That explained how Penumbra could take back her life. How the First Commander could fight back, though he had begun his career already aged and feeble.
“The Security Compact has been hunting us since our civilization fell. Their fear is justified. The Awakened are invariably destruction. The contracts they swear with physical beings inevitably turn them hostile to creation itself. If they ever obtain the contents of this Armory, they will slaughter all life in the gravitationally bound universe. No measure is too severe to contain them.”
In an instant, the Polestar had transformed from a thing that spoke too little to one that overwhelmed him by saying too much. He had no reason to doubt the vision, or its claims. Contact with the Polestar’s mind didn’t leave him any room for doubt. But that didn’t mean he agreed. “You didn’t kill Penumbra, and you don’t have to kill Magpie. If we need to do something, then do something else.”
He felt the Polestar’s focus on him, deep red light that demanded his attention, refused to let him look away. It seemed as though the spirit could see him as much as he had seen in the other direction. His history, his judgement, his observations of Magpie. The time they’d spent together. His stupid crush, the pressure to fix her wing, their rivalry. Everything in a moment.
“You want a weapon to liberate your city. Petty despotism is unraveling the fabric of a society that depends absolutely on innovation to reach self-sufficiency.”
He twitched, momentarily confused by the change in subject. Did that mean he’d won? “Yes,” he said. “I don’t know how many others there are like me. But I know I’ll be fighting those generals alone. I have to kill them, climb the ranks, and finally tell Nightmare Moon what has happened to the city.”
“Your princess is compromised. When last observed, she was fighting a war for dominance with that corruption and losing. Her noble intentions twist beyond recognition in the Awakened’s influence. Lifting Moonrise from a slave revolt into a civilization may require her death. Will you kill her too?”
The thought was as hard to process as some of the strange forms of life Polestar had shown him. He wobbled on his hooves, wiping the blood with his bare leg. How? I can’t kill a princess. She’s an alicorn!
“So were most who lived in Vanaheimr. There is one weapon in the Armory that could be used for that purpose. But I will not open the Armory while one so close to you is vulnerable. Even here, the Awakened will exploit her. We must steal their control first.”
How? There was another question in his mind, one that bothered him even more. Why did Polestar care about their civilization? It was willing to open up the armory, except for Magpie’s presence.
“Nightmare’s strategy to retain control is animation of the dead. If I sever its power completely, she would be a corpse. You would be unhappy with that outcome.”
“Very,” he growled. “Not good enough.”
“Anticipated response. Since you will not destroy this potential attack vector, it must be purified. You must accept a solution that preserves your friend’s life without preserving the Awakened’s influence.”
“Let me talk to her,” he said, settling his foreleg into his suit. He zipped it up, though he didn’t pull the helmet back on. There was no need. “It’s her life as much as mine.”
“They are the only options. Destruction, or purification. The decision is yours to make.”
He ignored its voice, walking slowly back. “Magpie? Can I ask you something? It’s… probably important.”
She didn’t answer, except with a strangled, frightened sound. She was still hiding in the shadow of one of the towers, though it wasn’t the one he’d been looking at. He made his way over, keeping his distance.
Finally he could see her, eyes glowing red with reflected light. “You brought me here to die, Silver. I tried to get you to leave, and you didn’t listen. This is your fault.”
I had to come here eventually. “I didn’t come here to kill you,” he said. “That thing back there, it’s the Polestar. It—”
“I know what it is,” she interrupted, rising from her curled position to glare at him. She kept firmly to the shadows, not even a fang poking out from behind the tower. “It can kill us in a dozen ways. Which does it want to use on me?”
“None,” he answered. Anymore. “Not if we cooperate. It knows how to remove the Nightmare without killing you. Like what it did to Penumbra?”
“It didn’t do anything to her.” She stepped further back into the shadows. “She was never here, that’s why she’s still alive. Any of us who got this close died. Always. Sneaking around the corners of the city was one thing, hiding in your shadow could go on for a while… but not spitting in its face.”
He followed her. There was nowhere else for her to go. It was only in the shadow of the Polestar—the room was still so brightly lit from every direction that she’d never be able to shadow step away. That was probably why it left the lights on in the first place. It knew. “It gave us a choice,” he explained. “We can let it take the Nightmare out, or…”
“I’m dead either way.” She slumped onto her haunches, staring down at her broken wing. “It was a good run. Centuries, how many ponies can say that? Better hope I’m right about souls, or else it’s off to endless torment for me.”
He reached down, gripping her shoulder and forcing her to meet his eyes. “It’s not going to kill you, Magpie—”
“Because I’m already bucking dead?” she screamed. “Because you don’t care! Moonrise is better off without me, right?”
“No!” He reached down, pulling her against his chest for a hug. Or against the suit, anyway. As tight as he could manage without risking pulling her out of the shade. “You’re my friend, Magpie. I told Polestar I’d refuse to do anything it asked if it hurt you. If it tries, I’ll make sure it kills me first. I’ll put myself in the path of its weapons, and you can stand in my shadow. Then you’ll have the satisfaction of watching me die first.”
She stopped crying. “You can’t, Silver. There’s no way to save me without Nightmare. Its magic is the only thing keeping me alive. I’m just a rotting corpse without it. The instant the Polestar hits me, I’ll crumble to dust just like the others. Ponies aren’t meant to live hundreds of years. Time… takes back what I stole.”
He let go, turning to peek out from behind the tower. “That won’t happen, will it? Magpie will still be alive when this is over?”
“Your friend will still have a body,” it answered. “One not dependent on uncontrollable forces to end our intervention before it begins.”
“It won’t happen,” he said, turning back. “I don’t think Polestar can lie to me. Unless you think I’m wrong. Did it ever lie to the Voidseekers?”
She shifted uneasily on her hooves, then eventually shook her head. “N-no, I guess it didn’t. It said it would destroy us for entering here, and it tried to do that as much as it could.” She rose to her hooves again, looking doubtful. “You really think it can do that? Just… take the Nightmare away? Will I start aging like a regular pony again? That’s the same as burning me here, just about sixty years slower. I don’t want it either.”
“She will not.”
“No,” he said again. “Polestar says no.”
“And I suppose Polestar isn’t going to give us any other choice, is it? It’s always with the ultimatum. That’s life on the bottom, obey or die. Just like I said, Silver. Nothing cares about us. They kill us because they want to, because it’s convenient, or just because they can.”
“She is correct. The options have been presented. One way or another, she must be purified. Too much has been wasted on your colony for it to fail now.”
“You’re right. But isn’t this an opportunity, Magpie? When we first got here, you were telling me how awful it was to be at the whims of something greater, stealing your free will. I just experienced that for myself. I wouldn’t want it for one minute more than I had to.”
“I didn’t. I left. They punished me for it.” She glanced backward at her stump wing, shuddering. “If it’s going to change me, tell your stupid buckin’ Polestar to fix my wing while it’s at it. You’re keeping your promise to me one way or the other, Silver.”
“Sure.” He turned slowly away from her. “Can you fix her wing too?”
“Flight can be included. Step forward. You will enter the Armory while the intrusion is held at bay. Move quickly.”
“I’ll be right back,” he called, stepping forward into the light. “If you touch her while I’m gone, we’re done. Don’t forget that.”
“Noted.”