The disappearance of the illusion--projection is more like it, she thought--of Penumbra left Luna lounging comfortably in front of the recreation of her table, with an empty cup of her favorite fine porcelain design, in her antechamber with the gentle scent of alstroemerias subtly urging her to indulge in some nostalgia instead of thinking on the current situation, and frowning pensively.
“I intend to shatter the wheel of destiny to which all ponykind is yoked.” Everything that Penumbra had said was very rational, reasonable, even understandable. Now free to think on it, Luna realized that what she had taken for anger in the zebricorn’s voice had been closer to bitterness--and sadness. The only beings that Luna had met who were anything like as old as Penumbra were Order, Discord, the alicorns of the four seasons, and Nacht, and the very personal way that Penumbra spoke of past events removed all doubt in her mind that what appeared to be a young mare was fully as ancient as she claimed.
Which of course presented the problem that as unicorns--and alicorns--accumulated centuries, they accumulated power which meant that Penumbra could well be her peer in terms of pure magical prowess. Far more worrying was that someone who she should have been at least dimly aware of had kept herself essentially invisible for millennia. What Penumbra had said about her desires being extremely ordinary probably contributed to that--those who wanted for very little were very difficult to notice in the first place--but she was also so extremely exotic that no crowd, no matter how heedless, could fail to notice her.
“Some form of concealment,” she said, still looking down at her empty cup. “Something that makes her difficult or even impossible to notice.”
“Penumbra, I presume?” Luna hadn’t heard Nacht come in, but when she looked up, the other alicorn was easing herself into the chair opposite her.
“Yes,” Luna said. “Her ‘message’ was her projecting herself in the form of the young adult mare she probably normally appears to be.”
“Claiming to be ancient wasn’t just talk.”
“No,” Luna said. “She spoke of the past in a very personal way, the way one talks about things they’d witnessed themselves. I can’t confirm her claims--except the ones that pertain directly to Tia and myself--but what she said about the history of the zebras, griffons, dragons, yeti, and Equestria all fit into the pieces I know.”
“So, what’s our little villain like?” Nacht leaned back a little and grinned. “Megalomaniacal? Any villainous monologues or overblown threats, or nifty catchphrases?”
“I take it the changeling libraries contain comical graphic novels.”
“Comic books, Selune.”
‘That is what I just said.”
“No it…” Nacht shook her head. “Never mind, later. So any cliches?”
“Just the adage that even villains are the heroes of their own story.” Luna said. “She claims to want nothing more than a quiet little home by the sea, and the bare essentials of a comfortable life. She says she has no desire to conquer, plunder, or rule. She imagines that after all this is over, she’ll build a cottage on the eastern sea and watch the sun rise on a world she made better.”
“And?”
“And every instinct I have, everything I know about reading people, says she’s entirely sincere.” Luna sighed. “But she’s also intensely bitter about what she sees as patiently waiting for over ten thousand years, leaving people alone to live their lives and govern themselves as they chose, and having nothing to show for it. No better world, no peace and security, and no cottage by the sea.”
“So we’re dealing with an ancient magi whose patience with trusting mortals to sort themselves out snapped, and she’s set to do something major to make it work this time.” Nacht folded her forelegs. “So how does Daddy Dearest fit in?”
“She only mentioned him in the context of the two of them giving an ‘interloper’ a swift kick to the plot and a ballistic arc,” Luna said. “Whoever was playing the game for the purposes of winning control of our world. She seemed certain that with Canceros dead, their strategy was entirely wrecked and they could not recover.”
“The Games rarely if ever involve participation of the world they’re being played for,” Nacht said. ‘Of course, few worlds have demigods, or ancient beings with an even more ancient being riding on their shoulder. So what’s our ancient little dead-not-dead filly-not-filly’s intention?”
“To shatter the wheel of destiny to which all ponykind is yoked,” Luna said, “to quote her word-for-word.”
Nacht furrowed her brow. “That’s… strangely pointless. Did she elaborate?”
“No, but you seem to know what she meant.”
“I don’t know her exact meaning but her phrasing sounds like she’s under a bizarrely out-of-date impression of destiny,” Nacht said. “In the wider universe, fate--destiny if you prefer--is managed by The Weaver. Used to be--as in, over a hundred thousand years ago--The Weaver was evil. Not purposefully, but he was an object lesson in the principle that anything taken to an extreme goes really bad, which in his case was neutrality. He was, in essence, neutral to the point of torturing everyone by treating all outcomes as equally appropriate. He was a tyrant, obsessed with keeping everyone and everything in their neat, orderly little fate box and remained restrained by their established thread of destiny. The only being who knows why this was so has never explained it, but the old one eventually just sort of disappeared and the new one was a mirror image. Zealously idealistic, uses her threads to make things bend to what she believes ‘good’ to be, but thinks mortals should be just left alone to figure things out. The way Penumbra talks about ponies being yoked to a wheel of destiny makes it sound like she thinks that destiny is still being controlled by the tyrant Weaver.”
“It’s hard to imagine she’s so out-of-date that she doesn’t know about the god of destiny being replaced.” Luna thought back a moment to a comment Ember had made. “No, I’m confident she’s aware of it. Ember said that Penumbra is like someone who was supposed to die, but was saved and now sits just shy of dying. I can’t imagine the obsessive god you describe letting that pass.”
“No, you’re right.’ Nacht hummed thoughtfully. “Maybe she means to do something with cutie marks?”
“Cutie marks.” Luna frowned. “Well, I suppose it fits. All ponies have them, and you can’t remove it, so from a certain point of view you’re yoked to that destiny. And… there are ways to… trifle with them.”
Nacht blinked. “Really?”
Luna sighed. “Yes, it was an incident at Ponyville.”
“No big surprises. The Trio?”
“Who else?” Luna smirked. “Cute fillies, too driven for their own good.”
“Oh, I don’t know, their changeling counterparts turned out well enough.”
“...their what now?”
“Changeling counterparts. Belladonna du Luc, Pear Bloom du Sylvi, and Sugar Bell du Closs. The resemblance is eerie as all buck, although the changeling Trio are about six years older than the Ponyville Trio.”
“I think I need to see this. Later. At any rate, Apple Bloom got her hooves on an alchemical tincture a zebra shamaness named Flavius Zecora was developing and decided to down it because she thought it would give her a cutie mark.”
“Gave her a ton and piled them on thick and fast, compelling her to do the things being depicted, until she mended her ways?”
Luna gaped at her. “How could you possibly…?”
“The du Dunes keep several variants of the end product on hoof,” Nacht said. “It’s meant to temporarily induce an altered mental state so a pony can achieve a better insight into their cutie mark if it’s especially obscure. Unfinished, before being mixed with the other component tinctures it… well, it does what happened to Apple Bloom.”
“I suppose it’s good that the unfinished potion isn’t poisonous, then. At any rate, that’s what I mean about it being possible to trifle with them.”
“And what can be altered can be destroyed, or at least altered in a way that there’s no real difference.” Nacht grimaced. “I can’t imagine how she plans to do what she says--how do you smash something metaphysical that has no known driver?--but if we assume that her intentions are in that direction, she means to smash a symbol that confirms what a pony already knows about themselves. The result seems weirdly pointless for the amount of planning she seems to have taken on.”
“Cutie marks aren’t just pictures on your flank.” Both Luna and Nacht turned to see that Thalia had appeared in the door, leaning against the frame. “I don’t know more about what they are--I’ve got a sister and a niece who do, but they’re elsewhere--but I do know that Starswirl the Bearded conducted a whole plotload of practical tests to confirm it. Pretty sure he was doing it as part of constructing some kind of spell, and I know that it’s all under serious lock-and-key in Canterlot’s archives.”
“How?”
“You know my sister as Precise Index,” Thalia said, a grin pulling at the edges of her muzzle. “I know her as Chiti.”
Luna gaped at her. “The sister who holed up in the Royal Archives is the head librarian?”
“Kyra mentioned her, I see.”
“In passing but she never mentioned that she had become the head librarian.” Luna settled back in her seat. “The only one with unfettered access to the Forbidden Section besides myself and Tia. How?”
Thalia shrugged. “She’s a genius. I’m sure she got help with inventing her identity and making it airtight and bulletproof but leading your big sis to trust her with the most dangerous repository of knowledge in the world--except perhaps this crazy place--was completely her.”
“Your sister must be an extraordinary mare.”
“She is.” Thalia smiled broadly. “It’s fortunate that she didn’t get ahold of your niece, or Twilight would have become a magitechnician to rival Starswirl instead of being a highly technical battlemagi.”
“At this moment, with Twilight compelled to be in the company of Penumbra, I’m not sure I’d be unhappy with her hiding in a library and doing research.” Luna got up. “Did you figure out a way to get at what we’re after?”
“Yeah, and it was suspiciously easy,” Thalia said. “Penumbra wants to exploit the central position of the lei node that the Crystal Heart is anchored above to saturate everywhere that the bodies and tributaries of the network reaches with some spell.”
“Her thinking skips directly to approaching the Heart?” Luna said. “Nothing about how she plans to return the Empire to reality?”
“I didn’t want to risk asking,” Thalia said. “Truncated, narrowly-construed questions are the only safe way to get information out of the Archive.”
“Which means we can’t stop her from returning the Empire.” Luna frowned. “Not that the Empire finally being free, and the crystal ponies returning to the embrace of Equestria is a bad thing necessarily, but she clearly means to exploit it.”
“Did she say how?”
“Only that if her plans had gone the way she wished, Cadance and Shining Armor’s grandchild would be on the throne of the Empire by the time she executed her plan, and that few if any ponies would be harmed.”
“So messing with cutie marks in the same way but with different timing would endanger ponies less.” Nacht frowned. “That’s curious. Why would a more stable world change the result of blasting every pony with a spell that does something to their cutie marks?”
“Yet another question on a stack that we have no way to solve.” Luna shook her head and trotted over to where Thalia was standing in the door. “I don’t suppose you thought to ask the Archive where the Empire can be found?”
“That was worth the risk, although I don’t think it was significant enough of a question to encourage the manipulation: dead center of the Glass Waste. Looks like an ice sheet as far as the eye can see, supernaturally smooth, no snow on top.”
“I have a clear picture of it in my mind.” Luna looked at Nacht. “In case you need it so you can get us there.”
“I know it as well,” Nahct said. “So, where’s Rainbow?”
“Back near the entrance, complaining about how the books are all stupid and unreadable, and how she really wants to kick Zambet’s plot.” Thalia smirked. “I think she was under the impression that she could pick up a book and start reading, and didn’t need to learn the language.”
Nightmare looked oddly at her. “Why would she have to do that?”
“They’re all written in some kinda weird pictographic language,” Thalia said. “As I hear it, it was lucky that the du Dune archeologists that breached the Archive initially had just finished surveying a tomb that used it.”
“And this has remained consistent ever since?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Just… that seems somewhat counterintuitive, doesn’t it?” Nacht looked at Luna. “It’s supposed to entrap ponies who read its books, but it requires them to learn an obscure ancient language before it can?”
Luna swallowed. “Thalia, where’s the nearest repository of the books?”
“Uh… up the stairs, though the..”
“My library,” Luna said. “I’ll meet you both there.” Before either of them could say anything, a quick spark of magic brought her into the comfortably familiar space, complete with the illusion of an eternally-shifting night sky above, that she had no time to enjoy. Picking the nearest shelf, she pulled out a book and opened it.
Pre-union Equestrian. She gritted her teeth, shoved the book back in place before choosing one on a different shelf, placed up high, and opened it up. It was the same language, in flowing and decidedly not pictographic script, and Luna flung it at a corner before turning and heading towards the door, nearly crashing face-first into a panting and slightly lathered Thalia.
“They’re written in pre-union Equestrian!” she snarled. “Which is not a bucking pictographic language!”
“I didn’t know!”
“Well you should have put two and two together.” Luna gritted her teeth. “I’ll chew you out later, where’s Nacht?”
“I don’t know,” Thalia said. “I looked away for a moment and she was gone.”
“Probably didn’t want to wait until I confirmed what she suspected.” Luna picked up Thalia with her magic and then blinked to the entrance, carrying the surprised royal. What she fully expected to find was Nacht restraining an entranced Rainbow trying to make her way deeper into the castle; what greeted her eyes on the other side of the teleport was Nacht and Rainbow practically nose-to-nose with Nacht holding a book out of Rainbow’s reach.
“I was getting to the best part!” Rainbow growled. “The plucky heroine was totally gonna save the day in, like, two more pages!”
“Thalia warned you about these books, Rainbow,” Nightmare growled back. “The last thing we need right now is one of the Elements being enslaved to a damn library.”
“It ain’t gonna enslave me,” Rainbow scoffed, pulling back just enough that Nacht could see her superior smirk. “I’m too smart for it.”
“Really now.” Nightmare raised the book still further and looked over her shoulder at Luna. “The idiot was trying to see if Thalia’s claim about the books being able to tell your entire life story was true. But there’s a providence that protects children, morons, and ponies because she skipped the ‘boring’ parts so relatively little reading was done.”
“Yeah, and that’s why I want you to give it back,“ Rainbow said. “I’m about to totally save the day and I wanna read about it.”
“I’m not going to let you read the book,” Nacht said firmly as she slid it back into the only gap in the rows of books. “We’re leaving anyway, so we don’t have time for you to finish.”
“Then let me take it with me.”
“The Archive doesn’t work like that,” Thalia said. “Unlike the stuff I supposed, that’s one thing the du Dunes were pretty direct about: any book that leaves only has writing on the pages it was open to at the time it got taken. If it was closed, it’s blank.”
“Ponypiles,” Rainbow said, looking frustrated. “OK, fine, I can come back later or something. So where’re we going?”
“To pick a fight,” Luna said, “and find out what the mastermind of this entire mess has in mind.”