//------------------------------//
// Chapter Two: Far Harbor 
// Story: Fallout Equestria: The Lost Empire 
// by CopperTop 
//------------------------------//

The future should be filled with magic
Dreams and wishes brought to life

“This is...amazing,” Starlight said breathlessly as she stood on one of the upper balconies, staring out across the capital city of the now-defunct Crystal Empire, “I never imagined that there would still be ponies living here.”
Perhaps that was an odd assumption to have made about this place, she realized.  After all, it wasn’t like there hadn’t been ponies living in every other corner of the Wasteland that she’d been to.  Though, her expectations had waned significantly after many months of having her questions about the state of the Crystal Empire being met with a response along the lines of, ‘the Crystal Whose-Ah-What?’  Combined with the ever dwindling size of the settlements that she passed through, and she had just started to assume that nothing this far north had survived the war.
The withered stallion, who turned out to be just the Wasteland’s run-of-the-mill civilized ghoul―and not actually the spectral incarnation of Death―named ‘Archie’ standing next to her followed the mare’s gaze, scanning the buildings with her.  He nodded his head, “they’re tough, these crystal ponies; I’ve always admired that about them.
“When you learn about their history, and everything they’ve endured...suddenly it’s not much of a wonder that something like the end of the world didn’t phase them much.”
“You can say that again,” Starlight agreed, her eyes still focused on how intact the buildings looked, “except for the snow, this place looks great.”
“...yeah,” she caught the somber note in the withered stallion’s voice; more subdued than he tended to sound.  What she had noticed since her arrival here was that the ghoul’s whole mood shifted whenever the subject of the state of the city came up.
She supposed that this was understandable.  Like most ghouls that Starlight had met, Archie was a survivor of the war between the ponies and zebras.  He would have known the city during its prime, just as she had.  However, unlike herself, who had essentially left one day while it looked resplendent and then returned a subjectively short while later to find that everything had ‘suddenly’ gone to pot; Archie had spent his unnaturally long life watching it slowly fall apart before his eyes, and there hadn’t been anything that he could do to stop it from happening.
“It won’t last though,” Archie continued with a remorseful sigh, “eventually everypony here will be dead and gone.”
“What?  Why?”
The withered ghoul gestured at the snow blanketing the much of the city, “it gets closer every year.  Back before the war, the whole Empire was protected by powerful magic―”
“You’re talking about the Crystal Heart, aren’t you?” Starlight asked, receiving an approving nod from the stallion.
“That’s right.  The Heart sustained a veil of magic over all of Equestria that helped to keep the whole nation safe and protected; and kept the Empire perpetually warm and pleasant despite the natural inclinations of this region’s climate.”
The unicorn mare snorted, recalling all of the devastation that she’d seen as a result of the final days of the war that had consumed the entire world, “so much for that…”
Archie nodded, a sad smile on his lips, “well, it worked for a while, even during the war, but it’s failure was inevitable.”
“How’s that?”
“The Heart drew its power from the ponies that lived here,” the ancient stallion explained, “their joy and hope for the future fueled the magic within it.  The more pure those emotions, the more powerful the enchantment that protected Equestria from harm.
“As the war dragged on…” he shrugged, “well, it’s hard to feel very hopeful when every day the radio talks about another zebra attack, and the newspapers publish another list of the dead and missing.  Then you hear about the dragons joining up with the zebras, the griffons hiring on as mercenaries to fight ponies, the Littlehorn Massacre…
“The joy turns into worry, and hope into despair.  Over time, the magic became tainted by those negative feelings, and the Heart grew too weak to protect Equestria the way it had been,” the stallion turned away from the balcony and headed back into the palace chambers that served as his home.  Starlight followed behind him, “as the enchantment started to weaken, the zebra attacks became more successful, which lead to more casualties, and that led to more worry…”
“A magical feedback loop,” the pink mare said, nodding, “a self-perpetuating cycle that kept things deteriorating until…”
“...until the bombs fell,” Archie finished.
Starlight glanced back outside, looking a little confused, “but everything looks so...intact here, compared to the rest of Equestria.  If the Empire was so integral to Equestria’s defense, then why would the zebras leave it alone?”
“The Princess and the Heart saved us,” he said, his tone sounding even more somber than it had been, “the Empire was targeted just like every other part of Equestria.  Dozens of missiles were launched at the city.  Princess Cadance took the Crystal Heart and flew up to stop them,” the stallion winced at the memory, “she...succeeded.  But at the cost of her own life.
“The missiles were deflected into the surrounding countryside, encircling the city in balefire; but all of the crystal ponies within survived.”
“What about Shining Armor?” Starlight asked, recalling that Twilight Sparkle’s brother had married the Empire’s ruler and served as both its Prince Consort and the nominal commanding general of its military forces.
Archie shrugged, “he was devastated by the loss of his wife, and the news that Canterlot, where the rest of his family lived, had been struck by poison gas that killed everypony there, including the Royal Sisters.  His wife, parents, and sister had all died within a period of five minutes.  He...wasn’t the same after that.
“He took his own life a month later.”
“Oh.  I’m sorry to hear that,” she had not known the Prince personally.  Her own husband, Sunburst, had worked in the Imperial Court and interacted with the royal couple on a much more frequent basis though.  He would have been impacted greatly by the loss…
...Assuming that he had even survived that long himself.
Starlight bit her lip, afraid of what the answer to her next question might be.  Though she had already been putting it off for far too long, given that answering it was the whole reason that she had come up here in the first place, “Archie?  Did you work in the castle?”
“I did...I think,” the ghoul said, frowning slightly, “my memories about my life back then are...fragmented.  Ghouls don’t often retain perfect recollections of their lives from the time of the war.  I’m pretty sure I must have, though.  There’s a picture of me on the wall over there,” he pointed a hoof at one wall of the room.
The pink unicorn mare trotted over to get a closer look at the indicated image and found herself looking at some sort of ceremony that featured the Imperial Couple.  They were flanked by a quartet of other ponies: two unicorns and two crystal ponies.  A banner above the group of six ponies identified the ceremony as being the ‘Dedication of the Imperial Academy of Arcana’.
“I...I remember hearing about this,” Starlight gasped as she looked at the image.  Her eyes locked onto a unicorn stallion with a bit of chin scruff that she had only grudgingly permitted him to retain on the grounds that it ‘befitted his station’, as he had put it.  He was grinning like a fool, and there was good reason for that.  This was the day that Sunburst had been bestowed the title of ‘Imperial Archmage’ and appointed to run the Empire’s first magic academy.
A fragile little smile spread across the mare’s lips.  He’d told her that he had been so surprised when his name was selected.  Starlight had been shocked to hear that, since she’d always thought of him as being a prodigy with magic―he had even been invited to Celestia’s school!  In the end, it turned out that he’d just been a medium-sized fish in the really tiny pond that was their backwoods town.  She reached out and gently stroked the likeness of the blaze-faced stallion.  In the end, what he had lacked in actual skill, he had more than made up for in knowledge.  By the time he’d left Canterlot, Sunburst could recite the incantation for every spell there was in the Royal Library from memory.
“Those that can’t do, teach,” went the old adage; and so Sunburst was approached to lead the fledgling academy and educate a new generation in the art of magic.  A position that, in her own admittedly heavily biased opinion, her husband had quite excelled in.
Moreso once she’d arrived to assist him, she thought to herself.  A smile touched the corners of her mouth.  Memories of a hundred different dinners together that Sunburst had spent rambling on about his day at the academy as she listened patiently all blended together in her head.  He’d been very happy there; and she’d been happy that he was happy.
The mare was silent for a moment while she studied the picture.  If this image was proof that Archie had worked in the castle, then did that mean…?  Starlight felt a lump growing in her throat as she turned to look back at the stallion, a burning question on her lips that she was terrified to hear the answer to.
Archie stepped up beside her, looking at the picture.  Wrapped in his magical cyan aura was a jeweled medallion that hung around his neck, previously hidden by the confines of the linen wraps that had once been rather regal looking robes.  Recognition dawned on the mare and she looked back at the image.  The other unicorn stallion in the photo, who was sitting stoically beside the alicorn princess and her consort, was wearing an identical medallion.  A news clipping was nearby, recounting the event:
In a ceremony today, Her Imperial Majesty, Princess Cadance, joined by her husband, Prince Shining Armor, and Prime Minister Archibald Magnate, opened the Empire’s first institution dedicated to the study and development of magic, The Imperial Academy of Arcana.  While, historically, the Empire has not had a strong magical tradition, Her Imperial Majesty seeks to usher in a new era of cooperation and understanding between crystal ponies and the other pony breeds that inhabit the rest of Equestria.
Thus, She has created the position of ‘Archmage’ within the Imperial Court to act as the curator of the academy, and appointed as its first title holder the unicorn stallion, Sunburst…
Starlight looked between the photo and the withered ghoul standing next to her, “you’re the Prime Minister?” another pony that she knew only by reputation and title.  Though she had technically lived in the Empire during the later years of the war, she had worked at various Ministry of Arcane Science facilities throughout Equestria.  Sunburst had lived and worked in the Empire much longer than she had.
He nodded, “ponies around here mostly just call me ‘Archie’ though.  I’m not one for titles anymore.”
“So, you knew this stallion, right?” Starlight poked excitedly at the picture of her husband, “Sunburst?  You worked with him?”
The stallion frowned as he studied the picture more closely, his brows furrowed in thought as he looked at it closely, “I recognize the name…”
“Do you remember what happened to him?  Did he survive the attack?” she was trying not to sound as desperate as she actually felt, but it was very difficult considering how close she was to finally getting the answer to the question that had burned within her since the day she’d woken up in that bunker.
“I...I don’t know,” he admitted reluctantly, “the city didn’t suffer any significant damage from the attack, so I’m sure that he must have; but I don’t recall any specific details about most of the members of the Court.
“If he didn’t commit suicide, I’m sure he lived for a good while,” Archie offered mekely.
Starlight’s blood ran cold when she heard the former option.  Surely Sunburst wouldn’t have…
...Would he?  Shining Armor had not been able to cope with the loss of his entire family in one fell swoop.  Meanwhile, she and Moonbeam had been sealed away in an underground facility with no means of being contacted by anypony on the surface in order to establish who had lived and who had died.  In fact, she wasn’t even supposed to have been in that facility at the time the bombs fell.  Had she kept to her original itinerary, she’d have been in Manehattan...which had been devastated by balefire.
Sunburst might have understandably assumed that she was dead when he received no word from her, and he’d never have been able to find out what happened to their daughter either.
He might have…
No!  The mare shook her head resolutely, she had not come all this way to entertain wild speculation and guesses.  She’d been doing that off and on ever since she woke up!  She had come to the Crystal Empire because, of any other place in the Wasteland, it was here that she would be able to find genuine answers.  Somewhere there was a record of what had happened to her husband.  Maybe it ultimately didn’t matter if he’d taken his own life, or died half a century later, feeble and gray.  Dead was dead, after all.
But she had to know.
“Is there a...graveyard?” she asked hesitantly, looking up at the stallion, “one where the ponies from that far back would have been buried when they died?” if a date was written on the headstone, that might give her an indication of the fate that he’d met.  At least she would be able to say her long overdue ‘goodbye’ somewhere fitting.
“There is,” the withered pony confirmed.  His expression was unsure, “but it’s on the outskirts of the city,” he warned, “out in the storm.”
“I have to go there,” Starlight insisted, “I have to know.  You don’t have to come with me; just point me in the right direction.”
Archie rolled his cloudy blue eyes and frowned at the mare, “do you really think I saved your life just to let you go out and get yourself killed all over again?
“Besides, there’s more than just wendigos out there,” he added in a much grimmer tone.
“Like what?”
He let out a short, dry laugh, “rogue automated defenses, for one thing,” those did seem to be a staple of the Wasteland, Starlight had to admit, “and feral ghouls, of course.  Sort of, anyway,” he elaborated at the questioning look flashed by the pink mare, “the bombs may not have hit the city directly, but the radiation eventually crept in around the outskirts.  It didn’t affect crystal ponies the same way it did Equestrian ponies.  They’re...warped, dark things.
“We call them ‘umbra ponies’.  They’re...resilient to most weapons.”
“I’m not exactly delicate,” the unicorn mare smirked, “I made it all the way up here on my own, after all,” though she had almost died right on the metaphorical doorstep of the Empire.  In her defense though, she had not anticipated facing off against monsters that had only ever existed in some of the oldest legends recorded by ponykind.  It was hard to plan for fighting what she had thought, up until then, were merely fictional creatures.
“I suppose that’s true,” the stallion acknowledged, cocking a smile at her, “but I feel that I had best come with you all the same.  Agate would never forgive me if I let something happen to the first visitor this city’s had in over two centuries,” he stepped over to a wardrobe and retrieved his tattered red cloak.  The same one being worn by his pre-ghoul self in the photo, though much the worse for wear after centuries of use.
Then he took out the sword that Starlight recalled seeing when he’d rescued her.  The brass hilt was dull and the leather grip looked to be as ratty as the ghoul’s own flesh.  The silver scabbard was stained mostly black with tarnish.  The pink mare half expected the blade to be a rusty mess when he drew it for a cursory inspection.  However, that proved to be the furthest thing from true that she could imagine.  The blade turned out not to have been steel, as she had expected.  Indeed, it wasn’t forged from any metal that she knew of at all.
It was crystal.
Archie caught her surprised expression and chuckled in amusement as he withdrew the whole of the weapon with his magic and presented it to her, “unusual, isn’t it?  Diamond-forged.  Not many ponies in Equestria have ever seen a sword like this.
“Funny thing is: these blades, as well as dimoand-forged spears, were once standard issue for Equestrian soldiers.  That was back during the Crystal War, after King Sombra took control.  These blades were the only things that pierced the enchantments protecting his Black Knights.  Now they’re the only thing that puts umbra ponies down for good.  Well,” he added with a shrug, “that and a big enough explosion.  All the grenades got used up a long time ago though.”
He sheathed the weapon and buckled the scabbard around his torso beneath his cloak, “fortunately, Princess Cadance had a few dozen of them brought up here from Canterlot in case Sombra came back...again,” there was one of his coughing laughs, “I guess when you have to kill somepony twice, you make plans to have to do it a third time; because damn if that isn’t one stubborn son of a mule.”
“Does that mean that I get one too?”
“Afraid not,” the stallion said regretfully, “this sword’s one of three that have managed to survive this long.  They’re tough, but not indestructible.  The other two are carried by Marshal Jasper and Lieutenant Peridot.  The umbra don’t often come this close to the castle.  It’s magic tends to keep them away.  But, in the last few years, it has waned considerably.”
“Isn’t there something that can be done to restore the old enchantments that used to protect this place?” Starlight asked as they made their way downstairs towards the castle’s main entrance, “where’s the Crystal Heart?”
“Shattered to dust,” the stallion told her, “destroyed in the effort to protect the city,” the unicorn mare was stunned to silence at the news.  She would never have guessed that anything like that could have happened to such an iconic artifact of the Crystal Empire, “only the echoes of its magic linger, absorbed by the crystal walls of the castle itself over the decades since its return.  But without the Heart to renew it, that magic has finally faded to almost nothing.
“When it finally dies out completely, the wendigos will come for us.  As will the umbra.  Then the snow will bury our corpses.”
“Why not leave then?” she asked, “I can show you the way to Manehattan.  Things are getting better there.  The Lightbringer opened the sky back up.  Hoofington’s finally a decent place for ponies to live.  Even the Neighvada Valley is looking better.  Equestria’s recovering!”
The stallion bowed his head, a sad smile on his lips, “maybe a century ago we could have made a go of it,” he sighed regretfully, “but now...it’s too late.”
The mare frowned, “what are you talking about?  How is it too late?”
“If we leave the city, the wendigos will pounce on us before we make it a mile,” Archie said grimly, “you saw what happened yesterday: just one of them took four burst.  I’d never be able to fight off a whole pack of them.”
“I’m pretty good with magic.  Teach me the spell you were using and maybe we can protect everypony else together,” Starlight insisted, not willing to simply admit that everything was hopeless and give up the same way that the ghoul stallion seemed willing to.  She’d seen ponies overcome seemingly impossible odds with her own eyes, and heard about several other instances during her travels.  This situation couldn’t possibly be even more desperate than any of those!
“It wasn’t a spell” he said, earning a rather perplexed look from her.  Archie shrugged and they passed through the door.  The stallion nodded politely at the guard on duty, receiving a rather deep bow and a reverent ‘Master Archie’ in return, “well, not as such anyway…”
“What do you mean?”
“Wendigos aren’t affected by magic,” he reiterated, sounding slightly annoyed, “remember the stories?  Nothing the unicorns of old did could stop them.  Even the pegasi couldn’t control the storms they brought with them when they came to Equestria.
“What I did back there, it wasn’t magic.  Not really.”
“So then what was it?” Starlight asked, “you clearly did something back there.”
“I…” Archie hesitated, winding his hoof like he was trying to come up with the right word to describe something, but having some difficulty doing it, “...thought at them,” the deep frown on his face suggested that he wasn’t at all satisfied with his own answer.
Neither was the mare standing next to him, regarding him skeptically, “you…thought at them?  What does that mean?”
“That―it’s…” he grunted in frustration, “it’s complicated,” he was silent for several more long seconds, his features distressed.  Starlight waited patiently for him to find his mental purchase once again.  She had learned that some ghouls tended to find thinking about complex subjects difficult.  A form of pervasive dementia or some such.  It was best to let Archie’s mind process his thoughts in its own good time rather than push too forcefully and only end up frustrating him further.
Finally the stallion seemed to find the words that he was searching for, “there’s this one memory I have,” he began again, sounding at first like he had changed subjects away from discussing how he dealt with those winter spirits, but Starlight remained silent as she listened to the tangent, “actually, it’s more of a memory of a memory of a memory―you get the idea,” he rolled his eyes and then continued, “the point is: if I can make myself feel the way I did in that memory, the wendigos go away.
“The problem,” he went on before she could interrupt, “is that after two centuries, I don’t actually know what that memory was about.  I just...try to grasp at the feeling that I had when I did know what it was about.
“...But it gets harder every time,” he sighed, hanging his head, “a hundred year ago, I could have chased away a dozen wendigos with just one burst, and they’d have stayed gone for months―maybe even a year! Now…” he shrugged again, “well, you saw: four bursts, and it didn’t even notice that first one.  Plus it’ll put itself back together in a day or two, if it hasn’t already.”
Starlight thought over his words, but she wasn’t sure that she fully understood, “so you’re saying that they’re chased away by emotions?” then her eyes widened, “you’re right!  The stories!  In the stories, friendship chased away the wendigos!”
The ghoul snorted derisively at her, “you don’t actually think it’s that easy, do you?”
“But, in the stories―”
“In the stories, three ponies talked through the night and suddenly became close enough friends that their affection for one another chased away demons from an unknown plane of existence that nearly destroyed the whole world with a winter so potent that even the entire pegasus race couldn’t affect it in even the slightest,” Archie sneered at her.  Admittedly, when he phrased it like that, it did sound quite absurd.  Granted, monsters that brought eternal winter and froze ponies solid sounded absurd too, but clearly they were real! “not everything in an old fable can be taken as literal fact.”
He waved his hoof around at their surroundings and the collection of crystal shanties huddled tightly around the base of the ancient central castle.  A few of the inhabitants were watching them, in much the same way as anypony might watch something happening that wasn’t part of a typical day, as they went about their lives.  Most were simply conducting their routine little fixes of their dwellings, or preparing food for their meals.  It was a little community, going about their lives, like some many others in the Wasteland, “there’s plenty of ‘friendship’ here,” Archie pointed out, “but the wendigos are still around.
“Clearly there’s more to the old stories than has survived in our traditions,” he muttered, turning away from her and heading further from the castle.
Starlight had to concede that point.  From what little she had seen in this place, the ponies of the Empire got along fantastically.  There weren’t roving bands of gangs and raiders like there had been everywhere else.  The city’s inhabitants hadn’t been devastated by the balefire of the zebras’ attack the same way as the rest of the Wasteland.  It was clear that things had been deteriorating over time as the dying enchantments that had sustained the Empire for so long allowed the winter the consume more of the city, but those who had endured didn’t seem to have lost their sense of community.
From what she knew of the Hearth’s Warming stories she’d been told all her life, this cooperative little town should have been all that was needed to stop the wendigos.  Obviously that wasn’t the case.  What was missing?
She trotted to catch up with the ghoul stallion, “the secret to stopping the wendigos has to be somewhere,” the mare insisted.
“It very well may be,” he acknowledged, “the Canterlot archives is where I’d start, but there’s no way to get there.”  
Starlight frowned, “there’s got to be other possibilities too,” she insisted as she looked around, “the Crystal Heart’s magic works.  That’s obviously not an option any more since it’s gone, but it suggests that there are other things out there that might be able to stop them besides ‘the power of friendship’.” Archie shrugged and nodded his head, conceding her observation, “so maybe we can find another solution!”
The withered stallion peered over his shoulder at her, cocking his brow, “you’re going to research a whole new kind of magic in order to defeat creatures that hardly anypony knows anything about?  Ambitious,” he looked forward once more and muttered, “let me know how that goes…”
The pink unicorn glared at her escort, “at least I’m willing to try!  Maybe you’ve given up hope, but that doesn’t mean I have to.”
“I’ve been watching this place die, slowly, for two centuries,” he said in a somber tone, “generations of crystal ponies have tried to find a way to stop this, and look at the good it’s done.”
“They can be beaten,” Starlight repeated, “there’s a way to do it, and I’ll find it.”
“I hope you do, but I’m not going to hold my breath,” the ghoul said dryly.  Then he offered a hollow chuckled, “not that I breathe anymore…”
“Master Archie!” both of them turned to see the reddish hued older stallion that had been among those to welcome Starlight when she’d arrived trotting up.  Agate was his name, she recalled.  At his side was the same emerald crystal mare who’d been with the older trio that greeted her initially.  She still bore the harness from which fluttered the purple and silver banner of the Empire, framed in golden braids.  It was rather ostentatious, she thought.
The pair stopped and bowed deeply before the ghoul.  The emerald mare tapped a release on her harness, and the flag she was carrying dipped as well.  When they straightened back up, the banner was raised vertically and locked into place once more.  The pink mare cast a curious glance at the ancient ghoul stallion, but said nothing, “I’m told you’re heading out,” Agate asked, a hint of nervousness in his voice as he spoke.  His eyes darted cautiously between them, “might I know why, and for how long?”
Archie nodded his head towards the pink mare, “she wants to see if her husband is among those buried in The Old Graveyard.  I’m taking her there to look for him.  I doubt it will take more than a few hours.  We’ll be back before noon.”
That seemed to relieve the community’s leader quite a bit, “I see.  Very good,” he turned his attention to Starlight now and inclined his head slightly towards her, “my sympathies.  I hope you find him and return safely.  There’s going to be a celebration tomorrow night,” he smiled uneasily, “well, I say ‘celebration’, but I suppose that it’s really just going to be more of a small feast of sorts.  I’d like to introduce you around, now that you’re no longer fatigued.  There are many who would like to meet you and hear about how the rest of the world is fairing.”
“I’d like that,” Starlight returned the nod and smiled easily at the stallion.  In truth, she really was looking forward to it.  Everypony here seemed to be a decent enough sort.  Besides, until she came up with a way to deal with the wendigos, she was going to be hanging around here for a while; it would be nice to get acquainted with the locals.
Honestly, even after the threat was averted, Starlight was pretty sure that she wasn’t going to be leaving any time soon.  This had technically been her home before the world ended, and she didn’t feel particularly attached to anyplace else.  Well, no place that still existed anyway.  The town that she had founded in order to showcase her “grand experiment” had been razed by the zebras early on in the war.  
Yes, an offer had been extended to her to remain in Seaddle, and even Manehattan, but the Empire was a lot more familiar to her than those places had been.  Even back before the war had ravaged them.
“Good, good,” the crystal stallion said, looking between them again, “well...safe journey then, and we’ll see you both later,” both he and his flag-bearing escort bowed low once more, “Master Archie,” then they retreated back to the castle, the guard’s flag fluttering prominently as they went.
The pair of unicorns resumed their journey out into the snowy outer city.  Starlight glanced to make certain that the crystal ponies were out of sight and then smirked at her companion, “so...they just let the pony in charge go wandering off into the Wasteland all on his own, but that guy has a guard with him everywhere he goes?  What’s he do anyway?”
“I’m not the pony in charge,” the ghoul muttered.  He jerked his head back towards the castle, “Agate is.”
“But how’s that work?  Aren’t you the Prime Minister?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m actually ‘in charge’ of the Empire.  Under Imperial Law, when the throne is vacant, a regent gets appointed.  Right now, that’s Agate.  When he dies, another regent gets appointed.”
“Why don’t they make you the regent?” asked Starlight, “you’re the most experienced and everything.”
“Because I’m not a crystal pony, and the regent has to be a crystal pony,” a smile touched his mottled flesh, “it’s designed to keep the throne from falling under the control of an outsider if no member of the Imperial Family is capable of ruling in their own right.
“Not that I’d want the job anyway.”
“So if you’re not in charge, why all the bowing?”
He grimaced now, “that’s just...habit, I guess.  I’ve basically helped raise or tutor every pony in this place, and I’m the oldest member of the Imperial Court.  I’m also the most senior―other than Agate, of course.
“I’m technically supposed to be the one bowing to him,” Archie chuckled, “but since I occasionally changed his diapers when he was a foal, it makes him profoundly uncomfortable; and he’d been the one bowing to me his whole life until just a few years ago, so he’s having trouble breaking the habit.  It’s been like that with quite a few of the recent regents.”
“Is there even really still an Imperial Court?” the mare asked skeptically.
“Every single title’s been maintained.  A few of us are even doubling up,” there was another rough laugh from the ghoul, “which is why the Prime Minister is pulling double-duty as the Imperial Archmage.  In all, about a third of the town holds Court positions.  Nopony takes most of them seriously.  It’s not like the Imperial Ambassador’s conducting a lot of correspondence with other nations.  And since there isn’t an Imperial Family anymore, the Keeper of the Privy Purse doesn’t have any finances to manage.  An Imperial Marshal’s a bit much to manage the hoofful of guards we have too.”
There was another laugh, “In fact, the lowest ranked soldier in the ‘Imperial Guard’ right now is Ensign Spinel, who you saw with Agate just now; the Army’s standard bearer.  One of her duties is to carry that flag with her everywhere she goes.  
“Every guard is an officer, because there aren’t enough ponies left in it to have enlisted members.”
“I can’t believe that all of you are still bothering with regents and marshals and stuff,” Starlight said, shaking her head with a smirk, “even after none of it matters anymore.”
“It matters to them,” the ghoul replied in a somber tone, “they’d tell you it’s the only thing that matters anymore.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s a part of their heritage―their culture.  Their traditions define them.  They even still hold the Crystal Fair every year, to include bowing to where the Heart used to be.  Sure, it doesn’t actually do anything to renew the magic protecting this place like it was designed to, but it’s important to them that they carry on living their lives like crystal ponies.
“Maybe that’s silly,” the ghoul added, smiling wanly back at the city as falling snow started to obscure it, “but it’s what keeps them going.  They’re not idiots.  They know the enchantments are weakening.  They know the wendigos are coming.  They know their foals probably won’t live long enough to have foals of their own.
“Any lesser ponies would probably despair and just give up.  They haven’t.  Not yet.”
Starlight recalled how fragile Agate’s smile had been.  The timbre in his voice that she had taken for mere nervousness, but now realized could easily have been fear gnawing at his facade as the ghoul whom he had known all his life left the safe(ish) center of the city on a dangerous errand.  As old as Archie was, and as respected as he was, the crystal ponies probably saw him as sort of a symbolic ‘heart’ of their little community .  If he was lost…
Hopefully, once she had her answers, she could do something to help these ponies.  She chuckled to herself at that thought.  Random ponies wandering the Wasteland in an effort to help struggling pony communities seemed to have become a theme of late.  The pink unicorn certainly didn’t fashion herself a Stable Dweller, or a Security Mare, or even a Wonderbolt.  She was just...Starlight: a mare out of her own time, looking for her husband’s grave.
Still, if she happened to find some way to help the ponies here, that wouldn’t be a bad thing…

The storm didn’t seem to be quite as bad as she remembered it being just before she’d run into the wendigo, but Starlight still found herself drawing her leather duster in a little more snugly around her neck as the falling flakes continued to find ways of sneaking down her collar.  The unicorn firmly resolved that, after saving the Crystal Empire from the wendigos, she was traveling to Barnbados and living out the rest of her life on a nice, warm, tropical island.  This cold weather could suck her frozen dock!
Archie didn’t seem to even notice the cold or the snow.  It appeared that being clinically dead had some advantages.  The ghoul kept his pale eyes scanning their surroundings, watching intently for threats as they made their way down the snow-drift choked streets.
Again, Starlight found herself leary of the darkened shops and homes that she could still recall being so full of life in her own relatively recent memory.  They even passed a cafe or two that she remembered dining at on occasion while out running errands.  If, as Archie had told her, this unnatural winter had not set in immediately following the detonations, the pink mare wondered how long these places had remained functional.  Though, she supposed as her eyes drifted to her withered escort, she really didn’t have to wonder, did she?
She had come for answers, after all, “what was it like?” she asked, speaking up to be heard over the stiff wind that was being directed into their faces by the city’s buildings, “after the bombs fell?”
The stallion glanced back at her over his shoulder, contemplating whether he was going to reply or not.  Finally, he returned his attention back to scanning the abandoned buildings and said, “shock, at first.  Then the panic set in.  The city was ringed by balefire.  Their Princess was dead, and the Heart destroyed.  It took less than an hour for word to spread through the city that Canterlot and the Royal Sisters had been lost as well.  Nopony knew what to do.
“A mare by the name of Beryl was the Designated Regent back then.  Nice mare.  Good head on her shoulders, thank Celestia,” the ghoul’s eyes somehow became a little more glazed than usual as he recounted the distant past, “she wasn’t technically in charge yet, what with Shining Armor still alive.  He wasn’t in any state to give commands though, not after what had just happened to Princess Cadence.  Beryl started giving the orders.  She and the Marshal got the Imperial Guard organized.  Martial law was declared, and a curfew was set,” he shrugged, “not for long; only a few weeks.  Just until everypony could process what had happened and get a little more settled.
“A big funeral was held for Princess Cadence, and there was also a memorial for Celestia and Luna as well.  That helped a bit.  Everypony rallied around Shining Armor.  The Court played up his past as the Captain of the Royal Guard, and hoped that the citizens would feel safe with a stallion like him in charge,” he scowled and shook his head, nearly spitting, “then he went and hung himself a week later.  Everypony panicked all over again.”
The ghoul paused and stretched out his shoulders as he suppressed those ancient feelings of resentment towards a pony long since dead.  Then he sighed and continued on, “Beryl took charge for real that time,” he snorted, “she was a genius, that mare.  She kept her old title, even though it didn’t make any sense.  The whole Imperial Family was dead.  The Royal Sisters were dead.  The majority of the Equestrian nobility was gone.  There wasn’t anypony left in the line of succession for her to be holding the throne for.  She could have taken it for herself, and not a single pony in the whole Empire would have batted an eye.  A few in Court encouraged her to do it, in fact.”
“Why didn’t she?” Starlight asked, finding herself quite curious about the reasoning behind the first Regent’s move.  Even to her own thinking, it seemed quite odd to make such a decision.
“Because if she crowned herself the new Crystal Princess, that meant that she was admitting that Equestria was completely lost, and that there wasn’t―and would never be―a more legitimate heir that would come along later,” he looked momentarily back at the pink unicorn following him and smiled, “she was giving them hope.  She was telling everypony, ‘someday, we’ll get a real Crystal Princess again; just you wait and see’,” he shrugged and looked ahead once more, “and when she finally died, the pony that took her place did the same thing: pronounced that they would keep the Empire in trust for the day when the ‘rightful’ Princess presented herself.
“Every regent since has taken that same oath.”
Starlight’s mouth hung agape in response to the story.  From every account that she had heard, the rest of Equestria had not been nearly so stable in the aftermath of the culminating zebra attack.  Granted, there had been good enough reason for that.  Unlike the Empire, none of greater Equestria’s upper leadership had been left intact.  The Royal Sisters had died.  The Ministry Mares were all dead or missing.  Every major city center had been obliterated.  The only functioning governmental body left had been among the pegasi, and they’d sealed themselves away from the rest of the world.
All that remained on the surface was chaos.
Archie hadn’t quite finished recounting the Empire’s recent history though, “things weren’t perfect, of course.  Without the surrounding arable land viable anymore, thanks to the balefire, there was a food shortage.  Rationing helped, but not much.  Half the city was torn down to make room for more cropland, which meant everypony had to be stuffed into the remaining half of the city.  Conditions were pretty crowded.”
The ghoul’s head drooped, “there were some plagues due to everypony being crammed in so tightly.  A lot of ponies died.  It helped with the overcrowding and the food situation, but...it was rough for a few years there,” he cocked his head and moved his lips wordlessly as he thought over what he’d just said, “huh.  Actually I guess it was a little over thirty years of plagues.  Funny how the time blurs together when you live forever…”
Starlight’s eyes widened, “wait.  Thirty years of plagues?  That’s horrible!”
The stallion shrugged, “it was a self-perpetuating cycle for a long time.  Ponies would be crowded together, and inevitably the sanitation situation would become so severe that disease would spread.  There weren’t enough working hospitals to house that many patients, so a few blocks of the city would be cordoned off as makeshift wards for the sick.  That meant the healthy ponies were even more crowded than before, and so there’d be another outbreak...it just kept happening.  Plague after plague.”
There was another wan smile from the ghoul, “eventually enough ponies died that there was enough room for the survivors.”
“How many made it?” the mare asked, dreading the answer.
“More than you’d think,” Archie told her, his smirk becoming a little warmer, “crystal ponies are a hardy bunch.  The young were the hardest hit,” that smirk faltered for a moment, “we didn’t feel those effects until about twenty years later.
“Maybe one fifth of the foal population survived the ‘plague era’,” he explained, “that meant that there weren’t all that many mares left who were fit to foal the next generation.  The Empire’s numbers never really recovered after that.  We went from a nation of hundreds of thousands to just...hundreds, in less than a century.  We’ve been struggling ever since.”
“Is the food situation really that bad still?”
Archie shook his head, “food hasn’t been a problem in decades,” he informed the pink mare, “it’s bloodlines.  With so few ponies left...heh, let’s just say there’s a lot of ‘kissing cousins’ in the Empire these days.  Pretty sure even those southern hillponies in Equestria wouldn’t approve of some of the partnerships we’ve had recently.”
He glanced back over his shoulder at Starlight again and winked at her, “just a heads up: Agate’s going to be introducing you to some of our more eligible bachelors at that feast tonight,” then he thought for a brief moment and chuckled, “and probably a few of the less devoted married stallions as well…”
Starlight’s expression soured, “thanks for the warning.  Just so you know, that’s...not going to be happening anytime soon,” while, on an intellectual level, the pink unicorn mare could understand why the small population would be welcoming to new blood, and she could imagine that there would be a lot of subtle―and perhaps even some blatant―suggestions that she pair up with a stallion, the fact was that she was very much still in mourning.  Sunburst might have died nearly two centuries ago, but for her...he’d been gone less than a year.
To say nothing about how she felt about foals, mere months after having lost her daughter...again.
“As far as I’m concerned, you can take as long as you want,” the ghoul shrugged, “like I said before: we’re all going to be dead soon anyway.  It’s honestly probably better if nopony bothered bringing a new generation into the world,” he said as his voice grew more hushed, “fewer ponies would have to suffer that way.”
“I told you: I’m going to fix this,” Starlight stated firmly.  Maybe she didn’t know exactly how, but she knew that there had to be a way.  She was one of the more brilliant wielders of magic that had ever lived―if she was allowed to forgo a little humility.  While they hadn’t exactly been ‘popular’ with her peers, she had developed several new spells and a whole new school of magic that revolved around cutie marks.  There weren’t many ponies in recent history that could claim to have made discoveries like that!  With enough time, and the proper resources, who was to say that she couldn’t do it all over again?
Archie glanced back over his shoulder at the mare, a curious smile creasing his leathery features, “with confidence like that...maybe you just might.”
When the pair finally reached the graveyard, Starlight was struck by the sheer scale of it.  While she was able to conceptualize that several hundred thousand was a lot of ponies, to see all of those simple markers laid out before her...it was almost overwhelming.  It was difficult to even make out all of the graves, as so many were little more than the tips of the small crystal obelisks that just barely managed to peek above the snowdrifts.  Suddenly, the pink mare didn’t even know what to do anymore.
“...Where do I even begin?”
“The oldest graves are this way,” Archie said, nodding his head further out towards the perimeter of the city.
That made sense, she supposed.  Even under ideal circumstances, Sunburst likely wouldn’t have lived more than another fifty or sixty years.  As she approached the far end of the graveyard, Starlight wasn’t exactly sure how to tailor her expectations.  If they found his grave quickly, that likely meant that he’d died early on after the bombs fell, suggesting that either he had indeed taken his own life or been a victim of the plagues that Archie had mentioned.  She didn’t want to think about him having died under either of those circumstances.  On the other hoof, the longer he had lived, the more of these markers she would have to look at until she finally found his.
“What was his name again?” the ghoul asked.
“Sunburst,” she replied absently, her gaze still absorbing the countless dots of headstones laid out before them.
The withered pony blinked, his already wrinkled features creasing further as he seemed absorbed in thought.  Under his breath, he muttered, “...I know I’ve heard that name before, I think...a long time ago…” a moment later he shook his head and, in a more audible tone offered, “We’ll split up.  You can start here.  I’ll take the other side.  We’ll meet in the middle,” before he left her side, he added, “keep an eye out for umbras and wendigos.  If you see one: come running to me immediately.  Don’t try to fight them on your own,” he warned sternly.
“I understand,” Starlight assured the stallion, though in the back of her mind she was a little bit annoyed.  She wasn’t exactly helpless.  On the other hoof, he had insisted that ghoulified crystal ponies were significantly different from typical examples like himself.  At least until she got some experience dealing with them herself, it probably wasn’t the worst idea to defer to her escort’s advice on the matter.
Archie nodded and headed off to begin browsing the names.  Starlight wiped away the snow obscuring the first headstone.  Azure.  Then came Sard.  Feldspar.  Hematite.  The dates all had a common theme: they shared the same year that Starlight had gone into hibernation.  The year that the war had ended.  Some were only days or weeks after the fateful date, suggesting that they were some of the suicides that Archie had mentioned.  Then there was a bit of a time-skip to about six or seven months later where large clumps of the graves shared the same dates.
Plague victims, Starlight quickly realized.  Whole swaths of headstones that had been erected within hours of each other as ponies succumbed to disease.  There was every likelihood that the next name she cleared away would be Sunburst’s.  How could it not be, when so many hundreds―no, thousands―of ponies had died in that manner.  If the conditions had been as crowded as the old ghoul had suggested, then surely entire neighborhoods had been afflicted all at once.
She wasn’t sure how many of the stones she had checked before she looked up and took note of her progress.  The far edge of the graveyard wasn’t even visible through the falling snow.  It just seemed to go on forever in every direction.  A seemingly infinite number of graves yet to be checked.
The obelisk that she was at currently had only been half cleared away when her hoof drew up short.  Three letters had been uncovered: Sun.  Her heart leapt up into her throat as she tried to swallow her trepidation.  With a feeling of dread, she moved to clear the rest of the name.
Sunstone.
Starlight had never before felt such a conflicting combination of emotions welling up inside of her.  First there had been the sweet relief that it hadn’t been the grave of the stallion she loved.  The ridiculous little voice in her head that had rejoiced, it’s not his!  He might still be alive!  This was followed up a heartbeat later with anger and outrage at herself as she reprimanded that treacherous little piece of her mind for daring to get her hopes up.  Of course he’s dead; it’s been two hundred years!
Then came the shame.  How dare she actually want to find Sunburst’s grave out here.  How dare she want him to be dead.  Indignation followed quickly on its coattails though.  It wasn’t that she wanted him to be dead; it pained her to no end to think that she would live out the rest of her life without the stallion she had cared for so deeply ever since they were foals.  He had been her first friend in the whole world, and the knowledge that she would never see him again was a heavy weight on her heart.  She didn’t want to accept that he was really gone but, at the same time, Starlight knew that she had to if she was ever going to find peace for herself.
This wasn’t the way to do it though, she finally realized; not out here in this place.
She turned away from the crystalline headstone and sought out her ghoul companion.  He wasn’t hard to spot, sitting out in the snow as his dingy scarlet cloak flapped about in the stiff wintery wind that whipped around the headstones.  His pale blue eyes stared down at a tightly knit trio of stone markers.  The pink mare kept silent as she stepped around and peered at the names carved into them.  V. Capitalist, A. Magnate, T. Magnate.  His family, the mare quickly realized.  
For a long while, neither of them spoke.  Starlight was the one who eventually broke the silence, “I’m sorry for your loss,” it hadn’t actually occurred to her that Archie would have known what she was going through.  While she knew that nearly every ghoul had lived through the war just as she had, she had not interacted with enough of them to inherently recognize that most of them had lost their own families as well.  It was no wonder that the withered stallion had been so willing to help her find closure.  He must have known exactly how she felt.
“I’d actually forgotten I even had a family,” the ghoul whispered.  The stallion didn’t look particularly mournful as he stared down at the names, considering the stones with his milky gaze, “I can’t even remember what their names were, or what they looked like.  I guess after a while...you just block out the more painful memories until you forget them entirely.”
Starlight smiled weakly as she regarded the stones with him, “I guess I should see about getting myself turned into a ghoul then.  It’d be nice not to remember how much I miss them,” at least she had been able to say her farewells to their daughter, as bittersweet as that experience had been.
“I think...that I wish I did remember,” Archie said softly, looking a little more regretful, “the ponies in our lives shape us.  They change who we were, and make us better for it.  Not remembering anything about my family...I have to wonder how different I am now from what I used to be.  Am I lesser for forgetting them?”
The mare gently bumped up against him, “you seem nice enough to me,” she offered, flashing a wan little reassuring smile at the stallion, “and I’m not just saying that because you saved my life.”
“Thanks.  Did you find what you were looking for?”
Her ears drooped as she bowed her head, “no...and I don’t think this was a good idea after all.  Every time I find a grave that isn’t his, a tiny part of me keeps thinking Sunburst might still be alive.  It’s stupid and wrong, but I can’t help myself.  My brain still hasn’t fully accepted that two centuries have passed.
“I need something that will finally shock some sense into me,” she frowned.  Then her ears perked up and she looked around, “I need to go home.”
“The castle?”
“No, my home,” Starlight explained, “I need to see the house Sunburst and I lived in.  If I see those two hundred years of neglect then maybe I can finally process how long it’s been and really be able to let go of that false hope I have.  And, I suppose, I can say my ‘goodbye’ there just as well as I could here.
“It won’t tell me how he died,” the mare said with a resigned sigh, “but I suppose that’s something I never really had much chance of learning anyway.  I just really need closure, more than anything.”
“Well, then I guess we just need to hope that your old house wasn’t in the part of the city we leveled to make cropland,” Archie said as he rose back up onto his hooves and started to lead them out of the graveyard.
“It was off of Facet Avenue, near the outer edges of the city,” Starlight offered, trying not to sound too desperately hopeful.
The withered stallion thought for a brief moment and then nodded, “I think that’s still around.  This way.”
The deep snow impeded their progress.  Archie didn’t seem to be as bothered by the biting wind and so the pink mare didn’t feel quite as guilty about walking on his lee side in order to shield herself a little from the worst of it.  She kept her eyes open and scanning their surroundings as much as he was, looking for any sign of the ghostly figures of the wendigos.
Though this meant that she probably wasn’t paying as much attention to where she was going as she could have been, Starlight Glimmer wasn’t convinced that any amount of watching her footing would have kept her from tripping over the buried curb.  The snow was easily two feet deep, and only the barest hints of covered objects remained, and even those looked nearly identical to the otherwise innocuous drifts that had been built up by the constantly blustering wind.
She picked herself up out of the snow and shook away the freezing ivory powder with an aggravated grunt, lashing out at the offending curb with her hind hoof.  A step later, she drew up short, her ears swiveling to her rear as she heard the ‘curb’ begin to growl at her.  Slowly, she turned her head, her eyes growing wide as the remains of the snow drift that she had fallen into rose higher and began to fall away, revealing shimmering patches of deep violet and black crystal beneath.
Starlight’s jaw went slightly slack as she found herself confronted with a dark pony-shaped creature.  Purple nodules of hexagonal prisms dotted the otherwise smooth facets that formed the equine figure.  Smoldering balefire-green eyes blazed out at her, framed by a jagged mane of onyx shards.  The unicorn felt herself taking several unconscious steps back from the creature as it continued to growl at her from deep within its throat.
Archie was instantly at her side, interposing himself between the mare and the umbra pony.  The diamond-forged blade that he had brought with him for just such an occasion floated at his side, poised to strike at the crystalline abomination.  The growl shifted quickly into a heart-stopping scream that Starlight felt deep within her very bones as the umbra launched itself at them.  The ghoul stallion didn’t so much as flinch, his horn flaring bright with magic as a telekinetic wave burst out and slammed into the leaping beast, halting it briefly in the air.
The gleaming sword danced towards the umbra pony, the impossibly sharp blade biting deep into the hardened flesh of the corrupted pony.  It’s horrifying scream became a wail of pain and outrage as Archie’s sword plunged into its chest and drove the beast back down into the snow.  Fissures appeared all throughout its body, centered around the impaled blade.  Those cracks filled with a sickly green glow, growing in intensity until the umbra pony’s body finally shuddered with a pulse of emerald light and dissolved into something that looked very much like coal dust.
Archie stood, looking down at the pile of black powder, which was already starting to get buried beneath the falling snow.  He didn’t make a move to sheath his sword though and, very quickly, Starlight discovered why.  The growling sound from earlier persisted...and seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.  Her blue eyes scanned their surroundings and she realized that all of the snowdrifts around them weren’t snowdrifts at all.  They were buried umbra ponies.  Dozens of them…
They rose up from the snow as one, each turning their glowing eyes towards the pair of ponies and Starlight felt as though this adventure of hers might have been a mistake.  Her eyes darted briefly towards the ghoul standing beside her.  She could tell from his stance and the slight twitch of his hooves that his instinct was to charge at the monsters that had surrounded them, instead of waiting to be swarmed by the abominations.  However, he was loath to part from her side and leave her exposed to the monsters.
A smile creased her lips.  It was very sweet of the withered stallion to want to protect her, but Starlight wasn’t a fresh arrival to the Wasteland anymore.  She’d fought against―and defeated―all manner of beasts and ponies over the last few months since emerging from her centuries-long slumber.  These things were little more than just another variety of feral ghoul when you got right down to it.  As far as she was concerned, ghouls were the sort of Wasteland threat that adventurous ponies practiced on in order to get ready to handle real threats.
“Bet I can kill more of them than you,” The pink unicorn said, smirking up at the surprised expression on Archie’s face, “loser has to kiss the first pony Jasper tries to fix me up with,” and then she charged the nearest umbra before he could respond.
Her lever-action shotgun was out and blasting away at the violet umbra pony in front of her before Starlight had taken more than three steps.  As Archie had warned her, the lead pellets didn’t seem to have nearly the lethal effect that she had hoped they would.  The soft metal smeared itself along the monster’s faceted surfaces, leaving behind silvery streaks as they were deflected away.  However, it seemed that the umbra ponies still retained some measure of pain response, as the impacts made her target reel back.  It was a brief flinch though, and the umbra didn’t take long to recover and lunge at her in retaliation.
Starlight’s horn flared.  A heartbeat later she was on the other side of the umbra, which was splayed out in the snow after having missed its target which had teleported away.  Its jade eyes whipped around in search of its quarry, taking only a few seconds to locate the pink unicorn mare.  In those seconds, Starlight had levered out all of her weapon’s ineffectual ammunition and was loading in her precious supply of orange-hued explosive rounds that she had picked up while traveling through Hoofington.  As the fifth and final round was fed into the weapon, Starlight’s magic ratcheted the lever and pointed the barrel directly at the head of the once more charging umbra pony.
There was a thunderclap and a burst of orange flame.  Amethyst shards erupted from the left side of the umbra’s face.  The crystal monster went sprawling down into the snow and lay still.  Then a roar drew the unicorn’s attention away.  The violet monster bearing down on her was far too close to shoot.  Instead, her telekinesis whipped the shotgun around and drove the reinforced stock into the gaping jaw.  Its head whipped sharply to the side with a resounding ‘crack!’ and Starlight deftly sidestepped in order to avoid the limp body slamming into her as its momentum carried it past her.
Two more snap-fired shots sheared off the right front leg of a third umbra, causing it to slide to a stop only a yard from where she was standing.  A follow-up round placed squarely between its glowing green eyes from point-blank range reduced the head into purple powder.  In only a matter of seconds the pink mare had managed to dispatch three of the corrupted crystal pony ghouls.  It seemed as though these things weren’t nearly the tenacious beasts that Archie had been making them out to be after all.  She looked for the robed stallion to chide him for overselling the threat that the umbra ponies posed.
Her prepared playful retort died on her lips as she saw that the first umbra pony she had ‘put down’ was slowly rising back up to its hooves.  The crater in the side of its face where she had hit it with the explosive round was even now reforming as hundreds of shimmering crystalline prisms grew and merged with one another until the contours of its face had completely repaired themselves, leaving behind no trace that it had been injured at all.  The twisted neck of the second was cracking back into place as well, and the third was regrowing a whole new leg and head even as the rest of the body struggled to rise.
“That’s cheating!” Starlight whined nervously as she backed away from the trio of umbra.  Another four were moving in on her as well.  Her thoughts became more panicked as they drew closer, and she had to fight the impulse to simply teleport herself back to the castle.  If she left now, Archie would be forced to face all of these things by himself.  Even with the diamond-forged sword, there was no way he would stand a chance on his own.
The very least she could do was distract as many of the umbra as she could while the ghoul dispatched them.  She took a deep breath and glared at the encroaching purple monsters, “you want me?  Well I’m going to make you work for it!”
Her fifth explosive round blew off the jaw of one of the umbra facing her and then they all pounced.
A cyan burst of light lit up the snowstorm as Starlight teleported herself elsewhere.  Not far, as she neither wanted to abandon Archie to face all of these creatures on his own, nor deplete her magical reserves too quickly.  Five more explosive rounds floated into the loading port of her weapon even as she withdrew one of her grimoires, “got any suggestions for useful spells that can actually hurt these things?!” she called out to the ghoul stallion, who was surrounded by a half dozen umbra and a couple piles of black powder as the jeweled blade whirled around him.
“Well, they’re crystal,” he yelled back as he lopped off the head of one of the umbra before driving the sword down through the exposed gullet and reducing a third creature to dust, “so something sound-based should be effective!  Do you know Staccato’s Shattering Tone?”
Not for the first time since leaving Neighvada, Starlight vehemently wished that she’d grabbed more than just the three books from the Ministry of Arcane Science hub library before it was disintegrated.  That was, of course, before she’d known that the Canterlot Library was a deathtrap and the Manehattan hub at Tenpony Tower had been taken over by what amounted to a secretive cult who weren’t willing to part with any of their more advanced books and scrolls for all the caps in the Wasteland.  At the time, she had settled for versatility over raw power.  Now she was once more wishing that she had thought to acquire just a little bit of power…
“The best I can do is Requiem’s Raging Voice,” which, the pink mare snarled to herself, would really let her do little more than scold these creatures very loudly.  It certainly wouldn’t come close to actually shattering them.
Another green flash announced the death of a fourth umbra but, in that time, six more had appeared, and there was a rather grisly looking gash that had opened up most of the left side of Archie’s face.  He was also favoring his left hind leg, the mare noticed, “Raging Voice?  What is that, a foal’s primer?!”
“It might as well be,” Starlight grumbled to herself as she ran around and blasted at the legs of the crystalline creatures surrounding the stallion even as just as many clambered through the snow in her wake.
The stallion slashed at an umbra pony as he narrowly sidestepped a second, “do you know how to combine spells at least?  If you can mix it with Tectonic Tremors, you might―”
“―get the resonance I need to shatter crystal!” Starlight finished excitedly even as she drew out a second tome, “that’s brilliant!” her telekinesis unfurled a scroll as well, “top it all off with some of Allura’s Aura to give it a wide area of effect and...cover your ears!”
The pink unicorn mare’s horn began to glow brightly as she came to a stop.  Even with such relatively simple incantations, blending all three of their effects together in the proper fashion took a lot of concentration as she was forced to reimagine many of their constituent glyphs so that none of the energies interfered with one another.  She only hoped that she would have enough time to get the spell off before she was piled on by a dozen umbra ponies.
Something large, heavy, and smoothly faceted collided with her chest, driving the air from her lungs and toppling Starlight onto her backside.  It took every ounce of effort that the unicorn mare had to retain the spells in her mind.  Unfortunately, this meant that there was little focus left for her to spare in order to combat the rising fear she was feeling as she felt sickeningly hot and fetid air being blasted over her as the monster that had tackled her roared fiercely.  She stubbornly kept her eyes closed tight, knowing that if she actually saw the gaping maw of the umbra coming in to bite her face off she would lose the spell completely.  All she could do was absently use her telekinesis to fire the shotgun in the vain hope that one of the shots would strike her attacker.
Then there was a loud grunt of effort and the weight of the umbra was suddenly relieved from her chest.  This was followed by the sound of something heavy landing in the snow a few yards away and hoofsteps planting themselves around her.  Archie’s voice sounded from above her, ragged and pained, “any time now, Starlight!”
That moment of respite was all she had needed.  With a final clear thought, the spell that she had been building was allowed to be released.  Her horn flared brightly once more, and then the cyan light imploded into a miniscule little pin prick that was nearly invisible to the naked eye.  For half a heartbeat, nothing at all happened as a dozen and a half umbra ponies circled around the pair.  As though waiting for some shared signal, they all charged in simultaneously and leaped into the air, arcing to come down with their combined power on the ragged ghoul unicorn stallion who was standing protectively over the prostrate mare.
She spoke a singular word, “stop!”
Then the spell went off and a deceptively thin-walled bubble of magic exploded outward from the pink unicorn’s horn.  It brought with it a roar of sound as loud as a balefire bomb detonation.  As the film of light came into contact with the umbra ponies, they instantly dissolved into clouds of amethyst mist, falling lightly upon the snow around them.  Then this covering of purple powder was soon layered by more white snow from the storm, leaving only the trampled drifts as evidence that any disturbance at all had taken place here.
Starlight finally allowed herself to open her eyes once again and confirm that the two of them were safe.  If only for the moment.  Who knew where more of those things were buried beneath the snow.  Archie was very carefully easing himself off of her, kneeling down in the snow.  The diamond-forged sword slipped from his telekinetic grasp and vanished into a drift as he used his magic to extract a healing potion from his saddlebags and chug down the revitalizing fluid.  The severe looking wound on the side of his face began to close up before Starlight’s eyes.
She let out a relieved breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding all that time, “that was really close.”
“What?” the ghoul said a little louder than was probably necessary, given how close by he was.  He was rubbing at his ear as he looked at her.
“I said that was really close!” the mare repeated more loudly.
“You want some wheat toast?” his expression scrunched up in confusion as he looked around for a brief moment before looking back at her, “now?!”
Starlight couldn’t help but chuckle and shake her head.  It seemed that the umbra ponies had not been the only victims of her spell, “never mind,” she said, waving her hoof dismissively.
“With wine?  How can you think of food at a time like this?!” the stallion glared at her in irritation while she fell back over into the snow, laughing.

“Is your hearing back yet?”
“What’s that about baguettes?” the stallion asked, still rubbing at his ear, before shaking his head, “where do you think we are?  Prance?  You have quite the fascination with grain products,” he looked around, “are we there yet?”
Starlight Glimmer rolled her eyes, hiding an amused smile from the ghoul’s sight before pointing a hoof out at the half buried house across the street.  In slow, clear, words she announced, “we’re here.”
The withered old pony seemed a little relieved at the knowledge that they had arrived at their destination and could finally take shelter, if only briefly.  While they had not been unfortunate enough to wander into yet another herd of slumbering umbra ponies, they had spied several small groups that were lumbering through the snow-choked avenues.  Fortunately, it seemed that the corrupted crystal ghouls didn’t have the keenest of senses.  According to Archie, as long as you kept out of direct line of sight of an umbra pony, you could just about stand directly behind them without their noticing.  Starlight had chosen not to test that exact premise, and she noted that even the Empire’s Prime Minister stepped very gingerly whenever an umbra pony was within view.
If Starlight had hoped that merely seeing the building that she had once shared with Sunburst would be enough to firmly set in her mind the notion that her husband was surely dead and gone, she was sorely mistaken.  The sight of her home had quite the opposite effect, in fact.  Looking only at the modest abode with the deep drifts of snow obscuring much of it, did nothing at all to make it appear abandoned and neglected.  From the outside anyway; the interior was a very different matter.
That was when it all finally started to hit home for her.  The last time that she had been here, she had been packing up the last bit of a few belongings that she intended to take with her on her latest rounds to several Ministry of Arcane Science facilities, with an unscheduled diversion to the bunker in the Neighvada Valley where Moonbeam was being treated.  Sunburst hadn’t been awake to say ‘goodbye’ that morning, as he had spent another overly long stint at the Academy working on one of his many research projects; either for the MAS, or something for Princess Cadence, as both made frequent requests of his time.  That wasn’t anything new.  Honestly, the two of them spent so little time together in the same room while they were both conscious and awake it was a miracle that they’d managed to have a foal together!
She had finished packing her bags, given her slumbering husband a peck on the horn, and slipped out the door with every intention of being back in a little less than a month.
“Home again, home again…” the pink unicorn mare sighed as she looked around the interior of the house.  When she had last been here, it had actually been a bit of a mess.  Sunburst had a ‘system’ of something approaching ‘organized chaos’ when it came to arranging his notes and study materials.  Starlight had found it uncanny how the stallion seemed to instinctively know the location of any book that he was looking for from among the many seemingly random stacks of volumes that constantly cluttered every raised surface of their house.  She had often jokingly referred to his study as the Imperial Library’s annex.
If her own duties hadn’t kept her away from the house itself for weeks at a time, with only short breaks between trips, she might have been annoyed by the messy state of their house enough to have insisted that the golden unicorn do something about it.  However, since she was only ever very rarely in the Empire for any length of time, she was willing to overlook the clutter, so long as the bed was kept mostly clear of stacks of tomes.  It usually was.  Sometimes.
The house was tidy now though.  There wasn’t a single book or half-unfurled scroll on the floor anywhere.  There wasn’t anything on any desks or tables―nor even furniture of any kind.  The whole house was devoid of anything at all, save for a single iron-banded chest in the bedroom that was positioned curiously in the middle of the room.  Rather, anyone who had never been in this room before would have thought its placement odd.  Of course, Starlight knew that, when there had once been a bed in this room, that chest had rested snugly at the foot of it.
Archie grunted in mild surprise from behind her in the doorway to the bedroom as he too spied the chest, “that’s strange,” he murmured, “I thought they stripepd these old houses of everything useful…”
Starlight regarded the chest for several long seconds before approaching it slowly.  Once upon a time, the sturdy oak container would have held Sunburst’s more treasured magical volumes that he had acquired from the library in Canterlot―with Celestia’s personal approval, of course!  Or so her husband had vehemently insisted whenever pressed on the matter.  The pink mare considered the implications of what leaving those tomes behind could mean about the possible fate of their owner.  She gently ran her hoof over the top of the chest, noting the tingling sensation she felt as she did so.
She withdrew her hoof and took a step back from the chest, “there’s something in it,” she recognized warding enchantments when she felt them, and nopony magically secured an empty chest.
“That’s even stranger,” the ghoul stallion frowned, stepping closer to the chest to examine it himself, “do you know what it might be?”
“Sunburst kept some old spellbooks in there,” the unicorn mare admitted as she turned away from the chest and started tracing her hoof along the nearby wall.
“Really?  Those could prove useful…”
Starlight mumbled a distracted acknowledgement, her eyes remaining on the wall.  Then the actual substance of Archie’s remark and the implication behind it penetrated through to her distracted brain and she whirled around, “wait, don’t!”
It was too late.  The ghoul’s horn was already glowing with pale blue magic, as was the lock of the old chest.  The ancient stallion had only a moment to glance at the nearby mare with a puzzled expression before there was a brilliant flash of yellow light and he was sent hurtling out of the room.  There was a loud crash audible from the other side of the doorway, and Starlight rushed to see if the unicorn ghoul had survived his folly.
“Are you okay?!” she gasped, staring wide-eyed at the stallion laying in a crumpled heap on the far side of the living room.
Archie groaned softly and stirred as he prepared to get back up onto his hooves, “ow…” he breathed mekely.
“I should have warned you it was magically sealed,” Starlight said as she trotted to Archie’s side and help him back up, “sorry.”
“My own fault,” he groaned, rubbing the back of his neck, which seemed to have been what he had landed on after being tossed from the bedroom, “should have figured the Empire’s old Archmage would locked up his books with more than a simple key.”
“Well, actually,” Starlight started with a wry smirk as she trotted back into the bedroom and returned to the wall she had been studying earlier.  The ghoul stallion followed stiffly behind her and peeked back inside, wary of the chest.  He watched as the pink unicorn mare traced her hoof along the wall until it abruptly stopped and then moved to the floor below.  Out loud, but more to herself than anypony listening, Starlight mumbled, “three laws of thaumaturgy, five pillars of magic, and one rule of scrying,” with the mention of each number, her hoof counted over that many floorboards’ first left, then up, and then left again.
When her leg finally came to a rest, she pushed down on the end of the indicated board, and it popped up with ease, revealing a gleaming golden key beneath.  Starlight picked it up with her magic and smiled.  Her eyes glistened slightly, but she managed to not shed any actual tears as she recalled the reason why that key even existed.  It was a reason that she volunteered to Archie, simply out of a need to share it in order to take advantage of the sympathetic ear that was at hoof.
“Sunburst was a brilliant wizard, in a lot of ways,” she sighed, nominally speaking to the ghoul even if she never actually looked in his direction, “he’d memorized over a thousand different spells by the time he’d graduated from Celestia’s school.  He wasn’t very good at casting spells, but he knew them like nopony else.
“However,” she went on, rolling her eyes as she approached the chest with the key, “it often felt like the reason why he was so good at remembering spells was because he didn’t bother remembering anything else.  Like where he left the key for his chest.  After the fourth time we had to go out and buy a replacement ward lock―which isn’t cheap, I’ll have you know―I went ahead and made myself a bypass.”
“And you kept it hidden under the floor?” the ghoul rasped skeptically.
“I didn’t want Sunburst to know I had it,” she admitted, “not because I didn’t think he’d trust me or anything.  It was just...well, it was really starting to upset him, how often he was losing keys.  So, I decided to make my own so that whenever he lost his, I had the template to make another copy and place it somewhere he was sure to find it.  He stopped ‘losing’ keys, and started feeling a lot better about himself,” the mare flashed a wry smirk, “unfortunately, I couldn’t do the same thing to replace the glasses he kept losing.  That stallion would just put them down anywhere and not pick them up again.  I used to joke that if anypony ever needed to find him, they only needed to follow the trail of glasses left in his wake.”
She slipped the key into the lock and gave it a turn.  The lock clicked and the chest seemed to grow slightly duller in appearance as the magical wards encasing it were dispelled.  Starlight flipped open the lid…
...and gaped in astonishment at the contents.
She had anticipated finding a collection of ancient magical grimoires and old vellum scrolls.  Those were the articles that Sunburst had traditionally kept inside the chest, after all.  It seemed that a change had been made at some point after Starlight had left on her most recent trip through Equestria, because the contents were drastically different since the last time she had peeked inside.  Contained within the chest now was what must have been every personal effect that the two of them had acquired since getting married.  It was a veritable treasure trove of knick knacks and mementos.
Prominently displayed on top was their wedding photo and the quartet of Moonbeams first horseshoes.  Beneath those was a host of other photos of their life together.  There was also just about every birthday and anniversary gift that they’d ever exchanged.  Nestled on one side was also a trio of small glass globes that were glowing with clouded swirls of golden light.  Memory orbs.  Old World repositories of a pony’s experiences.
Starlight felt her rump landing hard on the floor as her hind legs gave out, her mind working hard to process the implications of what the contents of the chest signified.  There was no question that all of these objects amounted to the sum total of her and Sunburst’s life together.  The one question that she had in her head now was: why?  Certainly there were any number of reasons that her husband might have had for wanting to discard anything that might remind him of the wife he had believed was lost to him, but which one had it been?
Had the thought of losing his family simply been too painful, and so he had opted to seal away all thoughts of that traumatic loss in order to cope?  Had this all been in an effort to move on and settle down with somepony else?  Was there some other reason that she couldn’t conceive of that would have made sense to Sunburst?
She had come to this place to seek answers, but instead she felt like she had found only further questions.
Tentatively, she reached out with her magic and retrieved the nearest memory orb.  She glanced at Archie, silently asking his permission to peer inside of it, knowing that doing so would render her unaware of the world around her and leave him with the duty of watching over her unconscious body.  The ghoul gave her a somber nod and parked himself just outside the room.  A sweet, but largely unnecessary, granting of privacy.
Starlight did the best that she could to mentally prepare herself for what she might find within the memory orb.  What precisely had Sunburst wanted to effectively forget about her?  She swallowed and touched her horn to the glowing orb.


	oooOOOooo


The world blurred, and then slowly reformed around her.  Except she wasn’t a ‘her’ anymore; she was a ‘him’.  A him that was having a poor go at settling into the new office that went along with his new position as the Imperial Archmage.  At first he had been so overwhelmed by the prospect of being recognized for his magical talent―something which hadn’t happened since he was a foal―that he hadn’t really given much in the way of thought to what his new position would actually entail.  He had just figured that he was going to be a glorified librarian of sorts, placed in charge of the Empire’s moderately impressive collection of magical grimoires.
In less than a month he had soon discovered that this was far from the case.  His specialty up to this point had been rooted firmly in the pursuit and retention of magical knowledge.  However, it was not old magic that Equestria and the Crystal Empire were interested in to aid them in their war with the Zebras; it was new magic.  Unfortunately, there was a not insignificant gulf between the principles of memorizing the contents of a book and those espoused in divining completely untested spell matrixes.
He glanced down at the message on his terminal, his eyes lingering on the name of the author, one ‘Ministry Mare Twilight Sparkle’.  The message had been very politely worded, but the subtext was plain to see: the Ministry of Arcane Science was not happy at all about how little progress he and the Empire’s ‘Academy’ had been making.  So, in an effort to help him ‘get things moving along’, the Ministry Mare was sending him somepony whose job it would be to ‘advise’ him.
“Take over is more like it,” he mumbled to himself as he finished reading the message for the umpteenth time that week.  Granted, the Ministry Mare hadn’t come right out and said as much.  That would have meant stepping on more than a few political hooves where the nominal autonomy of the Crystal Empire was concerned.  He knew about the history that the Crystal Princess and the MAS’s founder shared though, and doubted that it would take more than a simple word to Cadence to have him removed and replaced by anypony that Twilight wanted.  However, things in the Empire among the general public were becoming...tense, these days.
The crystal ponies, as a rule, loved Princess Cadence dearly, and would follow her lead most anywhere.  Even so, there was a slowly growing sentiment among them that their Empire was being dragged deeper and deeper into this war against the actual desires of their princess.  After all, there was no way that a leader who was very nearly the next best thing to the physical manifestation of love itself could want a genuine war with anyone, right?  The common crystal pony was certainly not very happy about their involvement in a war that was largely viewed as none of their business.  This had all started over a trade dispute between the Zebras and Equestria, and none of it had concerned the Empire at the time.
Indeed, there had been relatively little direct involvement of the Crystal Empire in the war, at first.  In the early years, only medical aid and disaster relief teams had been dispatched to help Equestrian ponies affected by the fighting.  The Empire’s citizens had wholeheartedly supported those efforts.
Then soldiers had finally been committed to the fighting.  That was when the worry had begun to set in among the populace.  Only a little at first, as those expeditionary forces had been volunteers that Princess Cadence offered to help her former mentor who ruled their close ally.  Assurances had been made at the time that those volunteers would only participate in defensive battles on Equestrian soil, and never actually attack into the enemy’s sovereign territories.  This helped somewhat to mollify the concern at the time was that seeing crystal pony soldiers would draw the ire of the zebras directly to the Empire.
Public opinion didn’t begin to sour noticeably until Princess Luna assumed the throne, and sent Cadence a ‘formal request’ for more soldiers to reinforce Equestria’s frontline regiments.  The official letter of state had been ever so graciously worded, but nopony in the Empire had seen it as anything less than Equestria telling them to commit their own forces to a nominally ‘foreign’ war.
Since that moment, the public had been watching very carefully for any further sign that Equestria was trying to assert dominance over a nation that was―again, nominally―an independent sovereign state.  On paper, the Crystal Empire was not a vassal of Equestria and Cadence was their ruler, not Luna, or her Ministries.
So, while Twilight could almost certainly have held a private conversation with the Imperial Princess and gotten him replaced with anypony that the Ministry Mare wanted, the public would have balked rather abrasively at the sign of the Equestrian government ‘meddling’ in the Empire’s domestic affairs.  Sunburst wasn’t sure exactly how much further the crystal ponies could be pushed before their love for Cadance was outweighed by their contempt for Equestria’s interference, but he doubted that they’d stand for much more at this point.  Either Twilight Sparkle knew enough about the local political climate to realize that, or somepony who did had cautioned her about taking more direct action; and she had settled for sending an ‘adviser’.
He had a pretty good idea of what would happen if his lack of progress continued though.  Hurt feelings among the crystal ponies or no, he would be replaced.  Keeping his job meant doing what he was told by whoever Twilight was sending, and essentially letting them run the show until things started going the way that the MAS wanted.
The moment Twilight’s envoy stepped through the door to his office, he was essentially no longer in charge of his own Academy.
A hoof tapped rather sternly upon the polished stone portal, making the golden stallion wince.  His new ‘boss’ had arrived.  He took a deep, resigned, breath and sat up straighter in the seat.  The least he could do was endure this with some semblance of dignity.  He was still Princess Cadance’s Imperial Archmage, after all.  Maybe he wasn’t a genuine crystal pony, but he still held a place in the Court, and that meant that his demeanor reflected on Cadance herself; and he respected the pink alicorn and the trust that she had placed in him too much to let her down if he could help it, “enter.”
The door swung inward, revealing a pink mare with a purple mane and tail.  A teal streak shot through both, very nearly matching her pale blue eyes.  Eyes which regarded the stallion sitting behind the desk with cool detachment.  She strode through the open door and approached him, “Sunburst, I presume?”
There was something...familiar about the mare, but he wasn’t able to place it.  He pushed the thought aside, resolving not to let himself become distracted, “Archmage Sunburst, yes,” he nodded curtly to the visitor, “you are the, um...advisor that Ministry Mare Twilight Sparkle has sent to observe our operations here in the Crystal Empire?” he very pointedly used the wording that had been contained in the official missives that he had received, letting this mare know that, whatever else she might think her job here was, this was his domain.
The pink unicorn mare didn’t seem to have been phased by his language in the least, however.  In fact, his choice of words served only to amuse her, “no, I’m the mare that Twilight sent to tell you what you’ve been doing wrong and finally get this place working like it’s supposed to,” despite himself, Sunburst balked at her blunt statement, losing his carefully crafted composure.  The mare’s teal eyes sparkled with amusement upon seeing his surprised expression, “my name is Starlight Glimmer, and I’m your new boss.”
“Now see here―” the stallion blurted when he finally managed to recover from his shock.
“No, you see here,” she rose up and planted her hooves on the surface of his desk, glaring down at him.  Much to his own chagrin, the stallion felt himself flinching away from the rather aggressive unicorn mare, “this jumped up library of yours is a disgrace!  I know crystal ponies aren’t exactly renowned for their magical talents,” she admitted with a nod of her head before jabbing a hoof at the Archmage’s chest, “but you attended Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns!  The way I see it, a pony like you has no excuse for not being able to follow through on something as simple as a little magical research.
“Your staff has yet to produce a single new spell; and that’s just unacceptable,” she frowned at the stallion, “I don’t suppose you have any shitty excuses ready so that I can explain to you how pathetic they are?”
“Well―I―um…”
The mare snorted in disgust and rolled her eyes at the stallion, “of course not.  No new magic, no bad excuses, exactly what have you and your staff been coming up with here?”
This time, she seemed inclined to wait long enough for Sunburst to give some sort of coherent answer.  It took the stallion far longer than he cared to admit to recompose himself and finally articulate one beneath her bored stare, “Miss Glimmer, I don’t think you quite appreciate how unique our facility is: the Crystal Empire’s library―like everything and everypony else in the Empire―was removed from time for over a thousand years!  It is far older than the Canterlot Library―perhaps even older than the library in the Castle of the Two Sisters!  There are volumes here that were long thought completely lost by Equestrian scholars.  Some of the titles on these shelves date back to before there even was an Equestria!  If you think that such invaluable works, some written in languages that predate even Old Ponish, can be interpreted with just a casual―”
“Language barrier.  Perfect!” Starlight interrupted him, withdrawing a scroll and a quill as she started to scratch out some notes, “that should buy us a few months,” she glanced back at the stallion, whose face had once more blanched, “anything else?”
“I―what?”
“Can you think of any other reasons that I can feed Twilight about why nothing’s been done up here?”
Sunburst narrowed his eyes at the pink mare, “...I thought you weren’t interested in excuses?”
“I’m not interested in bad excuses,” Starlight stressed with a smile, tapping the scroll levitating in front of her with her quill, “but you’re right that the books here are likely older than anything else any Equestrian scholar has ever encountered.  The research going on in Equestria is chugging along quite nicely because there are ponies who have spent their entire lives studying the books on magic that are there.  Twilight has, literally, thousands of experts at her disposal to help her come up with new spells based on those sources.
“How many ponies have read all of the books in the Imperial Library?”
“All of them?  Um, nopony.  Nopony left alive, anyway,” Sunburst amended soberly, “it seems that King Sombra was keen to eliminate anypony in the Crystal Empire who knew enough about magic to pose a threat to him.”
Starlight’s quill was dancing over the vellum once more, “lack...of experts...on site.  That’s a good one too.  I can probably get her to send us a few dozen interns or something.  No experienced ponies, we’ll want fresh minds for this in case there’s material in those books that flies in the face of Equestrian unicon sensibilities,” she added, rolling her eyes, “you would not believe the sort of entrenched thinking that goes on in Canterlot,” her features contorted into a grimace, “if it’s not magic that they think has merit, they don’t want to even hear about it…
“But, having a team of ponies with no experience is one more reason I can give Twilight that could buy us a year or two on top of the language barrier thing,” the mare grinned broadly once more as she jotted down another quick note.
“I’m sorry; I’m confused,” the amber stallion was finally forced to admit, pushing his glasses back into place from where they had been subtly slipping down his muzzle, “why are you helping me buy more time?”
“I’m not.  I’m helping me buy more time,” Starlight corrected the stallion, and took a fair amount of delight in seeing his confusion compound significantly.  She chuckled, “the longer I can convince Twilight Sparkle that I’ll need to get this place producing the results she wants, the longer I can stay here as her ministry liaison, and away from Canterlot.
“You have no idea what it’s like working for that mare,” the pink unicorn sneered acidly, prompting Sunburst’s eyes to widen in surprise.  He had not expected to hear somepony who worked so closely with the Ministry Mare of the MAS be so critical of her boss, “she acts like she’s some sort of expert on everything arcana, but she’s a dabbler, at best.  Maybe she graduated from Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, but it’s not like she’s the next incarnation of Clover the Clever.  She’s never even created a new spell before, whereas I broke ground on a whole new school of magic before she’d ever attained her ministry title!
“Not that she or any of her cronies wanted to hear about it…” she added with a mumbled growl under her breath.  She took a deep, cleansing, breath and continued more amicably, “suffice it to say I am completely on your side in this.”
Sunburst felt himself letting out a tense breath he hadn’t realized that he’d been holding.  He had not anticipated finding any sort of ally in whatever liaison Twilight had thought to send his way, and the knowledge that this mare was firmly in his corner from the outset was a very welcome surprise indeed.  Why, with enough time, the two of them might very well be able to start churning out the results that the MAS was looking for.
“I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear you say that Miss...Glimmer, was it?” something nagged at the back of his mind, but it was a fleeting sensation, “it certainly wasn’t anything that I expected after the introduction that you made.  You’re quite...assertive.”
The unicorn mare’s blue eyes gleamed brightly above a mischievous smile, “scared you a little, didn’t I?” the Archmage begrudged her a slight nod, “that’s because I needed to make sure I got some honest answers out of you.  Sparkle may be new to the field of genuine magical research, but even I have to admit she’s not a complete moron.  She’d know a shit excuse if she heard one, and I needed real reasons to justify any further delays.  Throwing you off of whatever prepared script you had was the best way I knew of to get at them.”
“So you’re not going to be taking over?” the golden stallion felt himself relaxing even further.
“Oh, yeah, I’m absolutely taking the lead on all the projects here” Sunburst immediately tensed up again, “as I said: I have experience in arcane matrix development,” as though she sensed his increased trepidation, she added, “but that doesn’t mean I’m going to cut you out of the loop or anything.  I’m not going to pretend that I know the first thing about what’s contained in the books here.  You do though.  Your knowledge of the tomes here will be integral to our success, so you will stay exactly where you are, and keep doing your research.
“However, I’ll be the one ‘managing’ you and your team to make sure you’re pursuing useful paths.  I’ll also be the pony in charge of matrix development for any promising new magicks, since that’s my area of expertise.
“You and I are going to be working very closely together for the foreseeable future, Sunburst,” She smiled at the stallion and held out her hoof, “and I’m looking forward to it.”
Sunburst wasn’t going to pretend that he was completely thrilled by everything that he’d heard in his office today.  What little relief he felt had been tempered by the mare’s laid out plans for how things were going to be organized.  He was the highest magical authority in the Crystal Empire.  He was supposed to take his direction directly from Princess Cadence.  The idea that he’d have to defer to this mare nibbled at his pride more than a little bit.
Still, if she was willing to largely keep out of his mane where the actual research was concerned, he supposed that he could live with that.  He had to admit that he knew next to nothing about creating spells.  Truth be told, he knew embarrassingly little about casting spells.  His strengths lied in his ability to retain and recall magical knowledge with awesome accuracy.  Every test at Princess Celestia’s magical academy which had involved drawing upon the study material he had passed with flying colors.  Which had been just enough to keep him from failing out of the school entirely when those scores were factored in with the paltry marks he earned when tested on his actual magical proficiency.
“Very well, Miss Glimmer,” he sighed, extending his hoof, “so where do you suggest we start?”
“Starlight, please,” their hooves clacked briefly before she withdrew hers, “and let’s start with coffee.  It was a long trip here from Canterlot,” she turned and headed for the door, pausing to look over her shoulder and motion for him to follow after her, “I saw a nice little cafe on my way here that’s not too far…”


	oooOOOooo


The past eased out of focus and the present asserted itself once more as the memory ended.  Starlight Glimmer shook off the last remaining vestiges of disorientation and looked around her surroundings, taking in the nearly empty room that she had once shared with her husband.  Archie’s ghoulish form was standing in the doorway, looking down at her with an expression of mixed relief and curiosity.
“You were out for a while,” he rasped at the prone mare, “are you alright?”
The pink mare blinked as she sorted out the scenes that she had just beheld.  It wasn’t as easy this time as it had been with other memory orbs that she had seen in her life.  Generally, when she reviewed the orbs from other ponies, it was a simple matter to make sense of things and compartmentalize what she had seen; separating it out as ‘some other ponies memories’.  It was like watching a movie, in a way.  This time though, things were different.
She remembered that day quite clearly.  Only, she remembered it from her own perspective.  There had also been some...discrepancies, between what she remembered and what she had just seen in the orb.  That was one minor flaw with memory orbs: they were memories.  With a few exceptions, nopony could ever commit events perfectly to memory exactly as they had happened.  Usually, this wasn’t all that much of a problem, since ‘close’ was often good enough for most of what the orbs were intended for.
However, Starlight was undergoing a bit of an internal crisis at the moment as her brain tried to reconcile those minor differences between what she recalled personally, and what she had just witnessed in the orb.  She hadn’t remembered being quite so...hostile towards Sunburst; but that was clearly how the stallion had seen her arrival.  Had she really been that abrasive with him during their first meeting at the Academy?  Had she really seemed so self-absorbed and vapid during their conversation later at the cafe?
That memory had encompassed most of the afternoon, starting from that meeting and ending when she had finally left for the suite at the hotel where the MAS had paid to put her up at while she worked.  Once her initial report had been sent back to Twilight, along with a revised estimate for the project timelines and the reasoning for those estimates, she had been moved into an apartment near the library.
Starlight looked down at the little glowing orb, “I’m fine,” if she didn’t sound absolutely convinced of that, there was good reason for it.  While she had been fairly sure of what sort of memories she would find in the orb, given the nature of the other contents and how they related to the life she had shared with Sunburst, she hadn’t been prepared for the sheer totality of it.  Every moment of her contact that day with Sunburst had been included in that memory.  Hours of discourse.
This hadn’t even been the point where their romance had begun to kindle.  Sunburst hadn’t even yet realized who she was yet!  The idea that her husband had wanted to be so thoroughly rid of any memory of her existence that he would even remove something like that, well...it hurt.  It hurt a lot.  If he had been as extensive with all their other interactions...it would have been for him like the two of them had never met at all.
The mare spent several more long moments staring into the chest at the remaining orbs.  Who knew how many more hours, or days, or perhaps even years worth of memories they contained?  There certainly wasn’t time enough for her to review them all here, and Starlight wasn’t sure that she wanted to put herself through that; to see exactly how much Sunburst wanted to be rid of her memory.  She collected them though, and placed them soberly into her bags.
She removed one more article from the chest as well: a blue cape with gold trim.  It was very tattered, and a little threadbare in places, but it had been Sunburst’s favorite cloak.  This she did not place in her bag, but instead threw up over her back and fastened into place around her neck.  The garment now snugly in place, draped over her leather duster, the pink unicorn mare closed the lid on the remainder of the precious articles which effectively summed up her life before waking up in the post-Equestrian Wasteland.  Her hoof rested lightly upon it.
“I’m so sorry,” she said in a near silent whisper that even Archie might not have been able to hear from his position in the doorway, “I should have stuck to my itinerary and come right back.  I just...I heard they were doing things with our little Moonbeam in Neighvada, and even though they were just rumors…” she sniffed and wiped at her muzzle, “I just...I never thought the zebras would really do it, you know?  They had balefire, we had megaspells; only an idiot would have actually used any of it!
“...I wish I’d been here.  I should have been here.  I’m sorry.
“Goodbye, Sunny,” Starlight took in a deep, ragged breath as she fought to maintain her composure.  She removed her hoof from the chest, “may Celestia protect you, Luna defend you, and may we see each other again, in the Everafter.
“I love you.”
Starlight turned away, and left.