//------------------------------// // Clair de Lune // Story: Friendship Is Magic - Extended Cut // by AdmiralSakai //------------------------------// (♫) It took exactly fifteen minutes and twenty-six seconds for Shining Armor’s reply to reach her. Twilight knew it had taken that long because she had been staring at the clock on the wall for the entire duration. Finally a scroll materialized in a flash of green energy directly above where Spike lay curled up in a light doze, and she snatched it up in her telekinesis before it even hit the ground. She squinted through the fatigue headache that had been slowly building up over the entire morning, and forced her wobbly telekinesis to undo the Guard-issue cloth ribbon: Twilight: Canterlot is aware of the situation and a force is currently being mobiliced to retake the town. Please stay out of the way and don’t do anything to try to interfere with the Lunar troops. Just go along with them for the time being. In a little while we will take care of everything and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if you got yourself hurt attempting any kind of heroics before then. Just hold tight and I promise we’ll see each other soon. -Shiny Twilight exhaled audibly, days of stress and sleep deprivation finally beginning to pile onto her with the realization that the whole nightmarish mess she’d found herself in had, at last, been transferred to the hooves of somepony better-equipped to deal with it. She was staggering up the library stairs, aiming for the loft and the chance to take at least a brief rest, when three hard impacts sounded against the front door. Her fatigue vanished in an instant. “Spike- get out of here!” she hissed, able to spare only a moment to watch the young dragon scramble to his feet as she dashed back downstairs. The knocking sounded once again, and this time a stallion’s voice followed: “Open up, in the name of the Moon.” Twilight grasped the doorknob in her telekinesis and fumbled with the lock, finally managing to pull the door open a little less than a barrel’s-width and block the way inside with her body. A scrawny, scruffy-looking bat-pegasus stood outside, dressed in an officer’s tunic with a pair of empty saddlebags slung over his back, and flanked on either side by a unicorn and earth pony revenant. He peered down his long muzzle at her with surprisingly large, watery eyes and gingerly licked his lips. If Twilight didn’t know better, she’d say the mutant pony was nervous. “I am Major Steel Shank. This… is a library, aye?” He asked. He moved as if to step inside, and Twilight realized she had no idea if Spike was still in the foyer. “Hold on, what makes you think you can just barge in here and…” she babbled, more concerned with filling the air with words than what they actually meant. “By order of Her Royal Highness Empress Luna the sovereign protector of Equestria, all citizens of the New Lunar Republic are… are obligated to provide information and assistance in support of the liberation of pony-held lands from the tyranny of Celestia and her regime!” Bit by bit his expression hardened as he rattled off what seemed like a long-ago-memorized sermon. Twilight held her tongue and stood her ground. Then one of the unicorn revenants unslung a crossbow and aimed the business end of it just above her head. Idly, Twilight noticed that its telekinetic field was the exact same electric blue as the revenants that had been tearing down the decorations in the town square. The live Lunars had auras in the expected variety of colors, but every single revenant’s was identical to the others… and identical to Nightmare Moon’s. “Listen,” the scruffy pegasus hissed, “Wouldst thou rather talk to them, or wouldst thou rather talk to me?” Twilight risked a glance behind her and caught sight of the secret panel that led to the Library's bolt-hole sliding closed. She also noticed that the obsidian slates containing the prophecy had vanished from the table where she’d left them. She’d completely forgotten about those, and now fought to suppress a quiver at the thought of what the Lunars might have done if they’d discovered her interest. She relaxed ever so slightly, finally stepping out of the doorway. The Lunars seemed to take that as all the invitation that was required and brushed past her, one after another; Twilight scampered back another few steps rather than make contact with the revenants’ flaky, tattered hide or the… components underneath. They didn’t smell like decay, exactly; the sickly-sweet odor of putrefaction she had expected was in fact completely absent, but there was an unpleasant mustiness about them that hung in place well after they were gone. All of the Lunars seemed to ignore her utterly, focused entirely on the bookshelves around them. (♫) The officer scanned each shelf carefully, occasionally fishing a volume out with his surprisingly dextrous hooked wings; the majority were reshelved while others were slipped into his saddlebags. Modern Cryptology, Decline and Fall of the Griffon Empire… The revenants were much less cautious, extricating whole stacks at once and tossing whatever disinterested them to the floor in heaps, but no less thorough. … The Illustrated Book of Airships, Abridged Operating Procedures of the Equestrian Rail Service… The splintered bones of a revenant’s broken-off muzzle swung dangerously close to the spot on the table where Twilight had left Shining’s scroll; working hard to control her breathing she carefully levitated it over, and tucked it as discreetly as she could manage against her barrel, backing out towards the door the whole time. Magical Networks Certification Preparation Vol XLVII, Order of Battle in the Saddle Arabian Campaigns… the list went on and on. As soon as she was outside she broke into a run, staggering aimlessly away from whatever parts of the neighborhood seemed to hold the thickest collections of purple astral steel, and fighting the bile that threatened to creep back up her throat. Cautiously, with unsteady telekinesis, she unrolled Shining’s letter once again. Looking more closely by the light spilling from an open window, she realized that both instances of the letter ‘o’ in “soon” were identical, stroke-for-stroke. Her gaze panned over the rest of it, and her breath caught in her throat- not just two, but three, four… five copies of exactly the same letter, complete with the little spur at the end where Shiny’s quill hadn’t quite completed the circle and dipped inward. Now that she knew what to look for, she saw the duplication everywhere. The more common letters cycled through five or six forms, and the rarer ones were identical every time they appeared… - A flash of reflected moonlight registered in the corner of her eye. She folded up the letter and started moving again, trotting past the greensward across from Sugarcube Corner where the Lunars had amassed a pile of heavy-duty crystal lamps, artillery pieces, air chariot parts, and other miscellaneous enchanted or mechanical equipment. Specialists in mages’ tunics and tool-harnesses swarmed over it like noctilucent ants, pawing at particularly complicated pieces, and Twilight was suddenly reminded of herself when she’d been little more than a foal, taking apart home appliances and learning how the magic inside them worked - … When she’d appeared in the Town Hall, Nightmare Moon had spoken modern Ponish. The alicorn couldn’t have predicted the way the language would evolve all on her lonesome, so she had to have learned of it as it evolved. Somehow, she had to have possessed a means to observe the interactions of individual ponies, in detail, in the Waking World even during her confinement in the Moon. That skill could just as easily be applied to copy the mannerisms of ponies she knew to be close to her hated sister… - Twilight pressed herself against the plaster wall of a building as a double column of Lunars marched past her. In between them, shackled and stripped of their equipment, were ponies she recognized from the Celebration as artisans, healers, weatherworkers, and members of the constabulary- … The use of offerings and sacrifices in summoning spells was one of the oldest and most established magical techniques- the overall mana cost was dramatically decreased if, instead of simply drawing the desired object to the caster’s location, like could be exchanged for like, or a thaumaturgical aspect replaced with its natural antipode. What was a better sacrifice to bring about the return of the Princess of the Moon than her biological sister, the Princess of the Sun, who had maintained an active magical channel to influence the Circle of the Moon, day in and day out, for the last one thousand years? Twilight’s imagination filled her old model of the summoning-spell with dozens of new terms, entire blocks of unresolvable unknowns suddenly canceled away, the familiar false-color lines of a Feymare diagram tying ethereal ground state to physical distance, Nightmare Moon’s corporeal form seeping down from the Lunar Shells even as Princess Celestia was hurled bodily upward, out into the deep Firmament… - as she staggered deeper into the center of town, Twilight found herself forced to duck and weave through teams of press-ganged locals as they hammered together barricades and boarded up windows, all under the watchful eye-sockets of the omnipresent revenants. The undead definitely had to be coming from somewhere; before they had been a constant but ignorable presence, but now every street was lousy with the things- … In terms of physical force, Princess Celestia wouldn’t have experienced much more than a sharp jolt, a transposition without motion, but the instantaneous thaumic shear would have been immense. At those energy scales, Twilight knew, the materia-mana coupling broke down completely and embedded enchantments reverted to a host-independent field state. They’d collapse back down a split-second later, of course, but by that time Celestia would already have been gone and Nightmare Moon would be occupying the exact same space she’d left. As far as the contingency spells applied to the Princess by the Day Court were concerned- spells whose operation was based on the assumption that nothing could decouple them and leave anything resembling a suitable host for them to collapse onto- Nightmare Moon was now, and always had been, the rightful ruler of Equestria… - Somepony was shouting, angry and a little afraid, and Twilight watched as a team of Lunars filled wagon after wagon with lanterns, shovels, rope, and other survival equipment pulled from a smashed-open storefront. They ignored utterly the protests of the green pegasus mare whose campfire cutie mark was depicted on the sign hanging overhead, until a big earth pony backhoofed her across the muzzle and sent her sprawling into the dirt. The very same scene was being duplicated with only slight variation at the blacksmith’s shop, and dry goods store, and the druggist’s on the other side of the square - … Her own dragonfire spell was intended for official Equestrian communiques. Not only Celestia’s own terminus, but Twilight’s, Spike’s, and Shining's as well were keyed to Celestia’s wards. It had seemed the safest and most prudent option at the time- after all, what was more secure than the personal protective spells devised by the Day Court? -she caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd, and the unexpected gleam of golden armor. She drew closer and, just for a moment, Colonel Forward March stared at her in bafflement before a revenant unicorn in mage’s robes pressed its horn against March’s forehead and her eyes rolled back in her skull- Twilight uncrumpled the scroll she’d received, one more time, noticing for the first time what she’d thought was Shining’s misspelling of the word ‘mobilized’. She now suspected it wasn’t a misspelling at all: Whatever Shining Armor had actually sent her, he hadn’t included the letter ‘z’, and so when Nightmare Moon had taken the letter apart and put it back together again to serve her own purposes the alicorn hadn’t been able to duplicate it. After a few seconds of silent convulsions, the Lunars undid the shackles binding Forward’s hooves and wings, and she stepped over to join a cluster of unbound Royal Guards and Ponyville Militia who laughed and joked with each other as though this was any other ordinary security detail, oblivious to the fact that nothing around them was in any way ordinary - For a brief moment Twilight felt a perverse sense of relief that she had an explanation for Celestia's dismissive response the previous evening. Then the true implications of what she’d concluded settled down onto her. The Princess was, for all intents and purposes, gone, and had been since well before the failed Raising. Nopony in Canterlot, or anywhere else in Equestria, had the faintest idea that anything was any more amiss than during the Ten-Hour Morning of 1022. The Lunars, it seemed, were gearing up for a full-scale war. And only Twilight Sparkle had the faintest idea of the gravity of any of it. (♫) Before she could lose her nerve, Twilight shouldered her way to the business entrance of the Town Hall. In the lobby harried townsponies scurried this way and that with papers in-hoof, their countless conversations blending into a dull babble, the smell of coffee and strong tea tinged with an undercurrent of sweat. Nopony stopped her as she weaved through the morass deeper into the building, ducking from one packed office block to another, until she found the desk where the Mayor was furiously scribbling entries in some kind of accounts book while Cheerilee and Granny Smith looked on. “Excuse me… excuse me!” Twilight demanded, and three pairs of eyes quickly refocused on her before narrowing in suspicion. “You’re… Twilight, the clerk who was managing the Celebration, right?” The Mayor asked, more than a little snappishly. “No, no- well, yes, technically, but my actual position is with the Royal Academy of Magic and I’ve just worked out that-” “Well, you’ll have to come back later, there’s quite a lot of urgent issues I need to see to right now.” “No, you don’t understand,” Twilight snapped, and the dozen other ponies occupying the space looked up from what they were doing at her, “You need to get everypony here to start fighting the Lunars again before they can-” “Miss Twilight, we don’t have much choice, you saw what they did to Citrine and Noteworthy-” “Well, they’re going to do a whole lot more to the rest of the country very, very soon, and nopony outside of town even knows to be looking out for them because Nightmare Moon is executing a type of mare-in-the-middle attack on incoming corresp-” “Twilight, I’m aware that all of these goings-on have been difficult, but you’re just going to have to queue up with everypony else and-” Abruptly the entire room went quiet, and Twilight turned to see a Lunar’s blue-armored head in the doorway. “Is there… a problem?” “Oh. Nothing you need to… worry about, Shade,” the Mayor answered with unsettling familiarity. “What are you doing, why are you working with them?” Twilight snapped, the words tumbling out of her faster than her brain could consciously process them. “Miss, you’re frightening ponies-” Cheerilee began. “Well they should be frightened! They’re-” Twilight suddenly registered the presence of two large militiaponies standing uncomfortably close on either side of her. “Miss, you really ought to leave,” the earth mare on the right warned. “Fine. Fine! Ok! I’m leaving!” Twilight stammered, common sense finally catching up with her racing, panicked thoughts. “Clearly nopony here is in any position to help me.” She stumbled back through the lobby and out into the market square, which somehow during her brief time indoors had grown just as crowded as the hall itself. She darted and probed between the shuffling townsponies, heading for anywhere that wasn’t here, when her hoof bumped into something warm and furry. She turned to apologize and found herself staring at a little orange pegasus with a short purple mane. “Hey, aren’t you that mare from Canterlot?” the filly asked before her eyes widened and she darted back out of sight. “Hey, yeah, that’s right!” Another voice called, “I saw ‘er badgerin’ poor Miss Rarity about somethin’ back behind the Town Hall yesterday!” Twilight, initially, was thankful that she had ended up with a little bit more room to stand in, before she realized that the crowd wasn’t thinning out, it was pulling away. Very quickly she found herself standing in a rough circle of townsponies, searching unsuccessfully for a way through the wall of tightly-pressed bodies, the tension in her chest threatening to metamorphose into a full-blown panic attack. “Badgering?” she stammered, “N-no, I was just asking if she’d ever en-encountered any Lunar-” “Wait, that’s right,” a red-maned earth mare cut in, “She was talking about the Old Cairn out on Sweet Apple Acres!” “Hey, wait, I saw her slinking around out there when I was busting clouds!” added a charcoal pegasus. Twilight wondered why the Lunars dotting the square hadn’t taken an interest in any of this, when she realized that they had all been replaced at some point by revenants- and civilians harassing civilians apparently didn’t count as provocation. “Wow, Thunder, I think I saw that mare carrying something back from the old Nightmare Statue last morning, too!” a yellow-and-orange earth pony cut in. “Do you think… she woke those soldier things up?” her tan stallion friend added. “Does seem like a pretty big coincidence, doesn’t it?” the charcoal pegasus answered, “Those things showing up just a day after some Canterlot egghead starts poking around all the places ponies aren’t supposed to poke?” “Now, I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation why-” began a cream-colored earth mare with a curious pink-and-navy mane. Twilight, for a moment, was struck by an uncanny sense of familiarity. The others, however, didn’t even seem to hear her. “Yeah, c’mon, what’d you do?” the pegasus demanded of Twilight. “What’d you do?” the rose-maned earth pony stepped forward and jabbed a hoof at Twilight’s chest. Moments later, the rest of the circle stepped forward a little. “C’mon, what’d you do?” She searched again for an exit and again came up empty, charging her magic for a teleport spell before a forehoof lashed out and grazed the tip of her horn. “What’d you do?!” called somepony else in the crowd who might have been its owner. Another hoof slammed into Twilight’s flank and sent her staggering. “What’d you do?!” "What'd you do?!" "What'd you do?!" “Alright, that’s enough!” Both Twilight and her accusers looked up in surprise to find Rainbow Dash hovering overhead, clad in her gleaming metal armor with a pair of luminous green flight goggles hung around her neck. The crowd pulled back, just a little, and Twilight realized that Applejack, Pinkie Pie, and Rarity had all scaled the rim of the fountain in the center of town. “Now, Ah was watchin’ when Twilight here went pokin’ round that Cairn in the field,” the farmer continued, drawing more than a few eyes off of Twilight much to the unicorn’s relief, “an’ she didn’t do nothin’ some a’ yer own fool selves didn’t do when y’all were younger. So I dun’ wanna hear nothin’ more ‘bout her wakin’ up them spooks, understand?” “Indeed!” the tailor stepped forward and gazed out over them all with the same sort of utterly unpretentious contempt it must have taken Celestia a hundred years or more to master, “Nightmare Moon wasn’t hiding under that statue… all we found there was a prophecy of her return- something Twilight was trying to prevent!” A few ponies backed up. A few more left the circle entirely, but Twilight was too transfixed to even consider attempting to flee. “So… really,” the baker’s apprentice finished, “You’re all just about the most self-defeating angry mob in history, and if anything you should all be beating up on Twilight for not coming here sooner and messing around in things more. Don’t actually do that, though,” she amended almost as an afterthought, “Otherwise you’ll just get us all into even bigger trouble.” Twilight had to laugh at that, and she didn’t seem to be the only one in the crowd to do so. Feeling warm feathers tap lightly against her withers, the unicorn looked over to see that Fluttershy had somehow made her way up alongside. “C’mon…” the smaller pegasus whispered, “I know a couple places where they won’t be able to find you.” She slunk off just shy of a distance where Twilight would have lost sight of her completely, and with a final look back at the dispersing crowd, the scholar hurried to catch up. (♫) “… all of which, in laymare’s terms, means we can’t count on a response from Canterlot anytime remotely soon,” Twilight finished, gazing across the small, homey sitting area of Fluttershy’s cottage at the five ponies and one dragon who had offered her sanctuary. “So you… think Nightmare Moon might… actually take over Equestria?” Fluttershy asked. “Going up against the Wonderbolts? And the whole Royal Navy?” Rainbow Dash countered as she circled aimlessly near the ceiling, “I doubt it.” “Ah dun’ think the Navy’s comin’, is the problem, Rainbow,” Applejack corrected her. “I mean, sooner or later somepony’s gonna wonder what’s taking Celestia so long…” Spike began. “… but an incremental response might be even worse than none at all,” Twilight continued, “Every account of the Rebellions agrees on the Lunars’ ability to fight very effectively against larger, better-equipped forces, and Princess Luna herself was always known to be very skilled in necromancy, illusions, abjuration and mind control. You all saw those Guards and militiaponies her mages’d gotten to…” “Oh, dear, I think she’s right!” Rarity spoke up, “If they send just a few ponies here to take a look around, all they’re doing is giving that horrible Nightmare Moon more… raw materials.” The normally composed tailor was shaking, badly, and Twilight thought she could see tears in the other mare’s eyes. “We’re… we’re all…” Spike loped over and gently patted her shoulder, still looking back to Twilight and the others. “Yeah, and her goons are all mixed in with a whole village full of innocent ponies.” Even Rainbow Dash went a little paler at that, and Rarity broke down into audible whimpers. “Spike, please stop helping,” Pinkie Pie admonished as she wrapped a foreleg around the thinner mare. They all stayed silent for a little while after that, consciously avoiding paying too much attention to the white unicorn until she’d regained her composure. Then, Applejack spoke up once more: “So… what do we do?” Twilight chewed on her lower lip. “Nightmare Moon herself is the biggest threat- she’s what’s keeping the rest of Equestria from coming to help us, and she’s what overpowered all the serious resistance here. If we can eliminate her, and let the Army know what’s happened here, the others will be just a woefully outnumbered force with severely outdated weapons, no supply chain, and very little knowledge of the modern world. If they follow the tactics they used a thousand years ago, they’ll try to hide out in the countryside after a defeat like that and leave the town of their own accord, and even if they don’t the Army will still be able to-” “Be able to what? Kill them all?” Both Twilight and Rainbow Dash turned in surprise to see Fluttershy standing up and looking both of them right in the eyes. “Those are still ponies under that armor!” “Brutes though they might be…” Rarity sniffed. “I think Twilight was going to say take them into custody as nonviolently as possible,” Spike countered, “But that’s assuming they don’t all go back into that weird stasis again like they did when Nightmare was gone the first time.” “So they just… sleep forever?” Rainbow asked, “That sounds worse than just looking ‘em in the eye and killing ‘em.” “Well, from what Twilight’s told us, it’s soundin’ more and more like before too long it’s gonna either be them, or us,” the farmer countered. “And most of ‘them’ are already just walking skeletons that hunt you endlessly and have no understanding of mercy, remember,” Pinkie continued, “So, really, there’s nothing to be afraid of!” Twilight made a few more orbits of the rug. “Look, I’ve gone my whole life up until now without killing another pony – or any intelligent creature – and I really don’t want to start now. I can’t say I know what’ll happen when the Lunars are cut off from Nightmare Moon, but… well, we’ve got a thousand years of arcanobiological research behind us that Firefly and Paper Clip had never even heard of. Once everypony in town is out of immediate danger, we’ll… try and do everything we can.” “Hey, hey, hey, aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves here?” Spike spread his claws in a quick warding-off gesture, “How would the seven of us even do this? You all saw what Nightmare Moon did to those soldiers in the Hall- and those were Celestia’s personal bodyguards, with airship-grade shielding on their armor!” Twilight’s ears folded back against her skull and her frenetic hoofsteps slowed. “Spike’s right. Even Princess Celestia needed the Elements of Harmony to-” “You mean these Elements?” The scholar turned to see Pinkie Pie offering her a thick book bound in ancient red leather that she was entirely certain the baker had not been holding just a few seconds ago. Carefully, Twilight pulled the thing towards her in her telekinesis and read off the deeply-stamped letters that still retained a fragment of gold leaf here and there: “The Elements of Harmony: A Reference.” “It was under ‘E’,” the baker explained. With a free hoof, Twilight rubbed the base of her horn. “Pinkie, there is no ‘E’ section…” “It was in with Paper Clip’s other references,” Spike said, “Pinkie, AJ and I went back to the library after the Lunars trashed it to try to find you, and when that didn’t work we just looked for anything they’d dug through.” “Nothin’ in that box had anythin’ ‘bout the Lunars,” Applejack finished, “so Ah reckon you musta’ put it aside when you were rootin’ ‘round down there last night.” Twilight sighed. “Yes, because I already know there’s not going to be anything helpful in it. The Reference is a well-known text with copies in every major library in Equestria. I wrote a comparative analysis of different commentaries on it for a two-hundred-level history class, for Starswirl’s sake!” “Twilight.” Spike admonished. “This one’s… different.” Carefully she fanned through the faded pages, skimming over long philosophical discourses on the virtues of equinity, and paying significantly more attention to a number of truly spectacular maps depicting lost Everfree and the Castle of the Two Sisters. More than a few locations were annotated in a plain, workmarelike script- “Completely caved in”, “Blew out this wall”, and so on- and after a moment Twilight recognized the writing as General Firefly’s. She turned the page to a detailed schematic of the courtyard, and the Great Solarium that held the Elements of Harmony. Here, in shakier mouthwriting, were a few cramped lines: “Long way up to the Solarium. Things in the way. Would not throw away the lives of good mares and stallions for a few baubles.” Twilight’s eyes widened, and her heart hammered in her chest. “In the Solarium they remain.” “Ohhh, OK!” Pinkie Pie nodded, “So we can fight Nightmare Moon if we can just make it to the center of the creepy forest that’s famous for nopony ever being able to make it to the center of. Works for me!” The problem with archeological investigation of the Castle of the Two Sisters and other sites in the Everfree wasn’t that their locations were unknown- after all, there were dozens of incredibly detailed maps of Equestria’s first capital in libraries across the known world, and indeed on a clear day with a moderately powerful spyglass the Castle’s crumbling spires were just about visible from the forest’s edge. It was that reaching them was far more complicated than just travelling the right direction in the right distance. Even the most skeptical of mages now generally agreed that in the chaotic depths of the Everfree, spacetime itself was… twisted in complicated ways and ceased to function quite as it should. The geometry of the place was labyrinthine, and some wondered whether it was really accurate to call it ‘spacetime’ at all. The greater the distance one traveled through it, the less reliably time flowed, and the more time spent within it, the less reliably space behaved. There were well-attested accounts of an expedition from Trailhead College that projected magical beams to guide them in a perfectly straight march towards the Castle for two-and-a-half days; they reemerged along the same road by which they’d entered six years later, after the outside world had written them all off as dead. Another group, from the Rangers' Guild, had made camp together one night and then awoken to find themselves in different locations scattered over nearly a mile. Airships and pegasi who braved the unpredictable weather to fly above the castle and then dove straight down would eventually land somewhere else entirely, more often than not under dense and unbroken canopy. “Wait,” Rarity cut in, “aren’t the Lunars coming from inside the Forest?” “That… is where they were buried,” said Fluttershy. “Yeah…” Spike scratched at his muzzle, thinking, “Yeah, the Cairns were all set up around the Castle!” “You’re right! And we have a map!” Twilight dashed over to the room’s sole un-shuttered window and peered outside. The faint purple sparks of Lunar signal flares were just barely visible over the treetops… and on a table nearby, amongst a pile of other notes and documents salvaged from the Golden Oaks, she spotted the topographical chart containing Rainbow Dash’s survey of the Cairns. Quickly she grabbed the parchment in her telekinesis and held it next to the page in Harmony where General Firefly had scribbled the location of the true and decoy Cairns on a map of the fields surrounding Everfree. The scale was different and no two features exactly matched, but that didn’t prevent her from determining that the pattern was, for all intents and purposes, identical. That wouldn’t mean much once they got into the interior of the Forest, but with a constant stream of Lunars marching out from the deeper Cairns right next to the Castle, it might just be possible to use them as additional points of reference, and develop at least a temporary mapping to relate the space as it existed in Firefly’s day and the space that existed currently. “Yes… yes, I think that could work!” (♫) “So… we’re… we’re really going into the Forest?” Fluttershy asked. “What if we do find the Elements, and we can’t figure out how to use them?” Rarity added. Looking over the gear the locals had managed to stockpile, Twilight grabbed a pair of saddlebags and gently slid both Dash’s chart and the annotated Reference inside along with some quills, scrap parchment, geometer’s tools, and a slim black volume of magical and mathematical tables. “The Elements are described as being ‘intuitive’, whatever that means… obviously, this whole plan is a huge gamble, but… do we really have any other option?” The room stayed silent for a good long while. Sizing up the rest of their supplies, Twilight began to slip on a set of steel-shod leather boots and a light cotton mage’s tunic. Rarity had somehow managed to get a hold of proper armor ranging from chainmail to field plate- some of it Lunar, some of it the more modern design of the Ponyville Militia. Shiny had once shown her, though, much to her embarrassment, that taking a direct hit even when clad in full plate still hurt like Tartarus, and she quite frankly lacked the practice needed to deflect or blunt impacts properly. Fortunately, as Shiny had also been fond of telling her, a mage was never defenseless. “Rainbow Dash.” She looked to where the cyan pegasus was fiddling with her own rather more material armament. “This could get really complicated, really quickly, and I need to know you’ll do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it, without any explanation. If the Lunars end up chasing us, I won’t have a chance to outline the eighteen months of research I did to figure out whether we can cut through a cave somewhere or are better off taking our chances overland. Can I count on you to do that?” Dash screwed up her face for a few seconds, seeming to parse Twilight’s words, then her eyes widened in surprise. “Wait, you’re going with me?!” Twilight gave her saddlebags an experimental heft and then settled them across her back. “I mean, if you know how to compute optimal three-dimensional homographies, I don’t suppose I need to…” “Well, in that case, darling, you’d best bring me along as well.” Twilight turned to see that Rarity had slipped on her duellist’s harness, and was currently weighing a Lunar-made saber and dagger in her hornglow. It looked to be a perfect fit, and Twilight wondered why she’d ever expected anything else. “I assure you, I’m more than capable of defending myself, and I’ve worked with the Lunars more than anypony in… well, this century at least.” Seemingly unable to decide between the blades, she slipped both into the loops on the right side of her harness and did a quick twirl for seemingly no other reason than to show off. “Then… umm… I think I should go with you, too.” Fluttershy murmured. “There’s creatures in the forest you’ll need to know to look out for, and I have a healer’s kit in my kitchen in case the Lunars… in case somepony gets hurt.” “Well Ah suppose Ah won’t be doin’ much good sittin’ round here…” Applejack said, casting another long, appraising look at the golden barding and warhammer she’d brought up from the family farm, “Ah know the forest ‘round here like the back a’ my hoof… well, the outer parts, at least, and Ah reckon y’all ain’t gonna resent havin’ another strong leg or four ‘afore this is over. Count me in!” “Ooh, me too!” Pinkie Pie added. “Pinkie,” Twilight admonished, “Are you sure a baker really needs to…?” “Who said anything about baking?” The pink mare suddenly hefted a round stone about four inches in diameter in one hoof -Starswirl only knew where she’d gotten it- wound up, and hurled it at one of the spare sets of Lunar barding in the corner at blinding speed. There was an audible pang as it punched a neat hole clean through the astral steel and lodged in a hoof-sized dent in the helmet behind it. “I also have a license to pack explosives, and most importantly you still need a bard to fill out the party!” “I’ll help in any way I can,” Spike added, “Rarity, do you think you could put some of this armor together to fit a dragon?” Twilight knelt down on her haunches and looked him in the eye. “Spike, I… need you to not go with us.” His slitted eyes widened. “What… why?” The scholar ruffled through her saddlebags and extracted a quill and a piece of parchment, beginning to copy out another report to Shining Armor. She detailed everything that had happened since her arrival in Ponyville as concisely as she could manage, followed by what she intended to do next. “I’m putting a plan together for Rainbow make a route for us out of town and into the Everfree proper, but when that happens I need you to sneak out along the road to Canterlot and head straight for the nearest train station. Don’t use the Post, or your fire spell, and don’t stop anywhere along the way even if everypony there seems completely normal. Just deliver this, in person, to Shining Armor as quickly as you can. If we can’t make it to the castle and back again-” “We’ll make it…” Rainbow Dash interjected. “Whether or not we make it, the outside world needs to know what’s happening here so they can do something about it. You’re… the only way they can.” She studied her assistant carefully, noticing how his breathing hitched and he shifted his weight back and forth. But then he nodded. “Yeah. OK. Yeah, OK. I can do that. I… good luck.” The young scholar stood up again, fished a sheathed dagger off the table, and slipped it into the bandoleer of her tunic. A mage was never defenseless, but a mage could also never be too careful. “Ok, everypony, here’s what we need to do…”