Friendship Is Magic - Extended Cut

by AdmiralSakai


Before Dawn

()

Little by little, the forest around Twilight Sparkle and her friends began to change. The foreign-looking white stones they’d noticed earlier became both more frequent and more regular in structure, until it was no longer possible to dispute that they had once been worked by pony chisels. Twilight wasn’t willing to call the evocative squareness of the earthworks around her the foundations of buildings just yet, but the suggestion was a nagging one, and while the pattern of stone under her hooves still fell far short of being called a road it wasn’t quite a track any more either. There was no more need for the theodolite, at least right now- as much as the path she’d led them on twisted and turned in its modern incarnation, the scholar no longer had the slightest doubt that it had once been one of the radial roads that led straight from the outskirts of ancient Everfree to the Castle of the Two Sisters at the very center. Now, all they needed to do was follow the cobblestones.

The fact that the trail was also growing appreciably wider did not strike Twilight as particularly unexpected at first, but the signs of more recent destruction very certainly did. The forest wasn’t simply pulling back away from the road- stones had been overturned, foliage trampled and uprooted, and tree trunks in some cases slashed near completely through by something very large and very sharp.

Applejack whistled under her breath. “Somethin’ big came through here…”

“Wait, really?!” Pinkie Pie asked.

Rarity pulled up short, quite suddenly, and cocked her head to the side. “Listen.”

Twilight came to a more gentle stop along with her fellows, pivoted her ears, and held her breath. Up ahead, something crashed through the foliage, slammed into something else that sounded stony and resilient, then let out a teeth-rattlingly loud noise that might have been a roar or might have been a yowl, it was hard to say with any certainty. It wasn’t getting any closer to their position, she thought, but then again it wasn’t getting farther away quickly enough for Twilight’s liking either. “Rainbow. Fly up ahead and see what you can see,” she whispered.

“You got it.” The pegasus quickly flew around a bend in the trail and was from then on lost from sight. For thirty seconds or so, the sounds of horrific violence against nothing in particular continued unabated. Twilight muttered the tracking-spell for the gem Dash had swallowed, and was immeasurably relieved when the generated tug on her horn reversed its bearing and began growing in intensity again. This deep in the Everfree, passing out of sight of somepony for even a moment could easily mean never finding them again; Twilight would never have allowed even this brief diversion without the pegasus having a TC-strong mana resonator literally inside of her.

Moments later, Dash glided quietly back to their position. “Manticore. Big one. Looks pretty out of it, I think we can get closer without it seeing us. Sneak past it or maybe get the drop on it,” she whispered.

Twilight nodded, and motioned forward with her hoof, and the six of them cautiously advanced. Once around the bend in the trail, Rainbow Dash dropped onto her barrel and began creeping forward more slowly; Twilight and the others followed her lead.

Not a great deal was actually known about manticores, due to the generally isolated locations in which they sequestered themselves. They were believed to be highly intelligent apex predators, able to set complicated ambushes and even use simple tools, although they were by nature solitary and had no known language. How long they lived, how they reproduced, exactly where they fit on taxonomic charts, and the upper limits on how large they could get were all open questions, and Twilight didn’t have the naturalistic background necessary to understand the details, but she had her doubts that the actions of the one in front of her were in any way normal. It stumbled around the clearing it had created almost at random, slashing at trees and rocks and overgrowth and other clearly inedible things, slamming itself bodily into larger detritus over and over again whenever its claws and scorpionlike tail proved insufficiently destructive, and yowling all the while. Although still quite formidable at five or six times the size of a very large pony it was actually much smaller than Twilight had been expecting; the stupendous width of the path it had created was in fact mostly a result of its zigzagging drunkard’s-walk. Ignoring the reasons why it was acting that way for the moment, it was actually the fact that the swath of destruction followed the road at all that was surprising.

Another illusion?” Rarity asked.

Pinkie Pie shook her head. “I doubt it, unless Nightmare Moon faked destroying the whole forest… or she just has a really big zombie…”

Twilight turned to Fluttershy, confused. “I don’t get it. What’s it doing?”

“I don’t know,” the pegasus whispered, “If it was interested in hurting us, it already would have-” The manticore let out a particularly loud screech, and twisted around incredibly quickly to look directly at them. “… picked up our scent.”

()

It leaped straight for the center of the party.


“Look out!” Rainbow Dash shouted.

Twilight charged another disjunction spell and fired it at the creature mid-air. Illusions grew less and less stable the larger they got- if the thing had in fact been a knitted-together horror of plants and equine bodies under a manticore image, that blast would have exposed it with power to spare.

Instead, Twilight was reasonably certain she’d just made it even madder.


By unspoken command they backtracked and scattered, forming a wide and ever-expanding arc with the manticore in the center. As soon as the charge was back in her horn Twilight wrapped the beast in a bright magenta shield- she could only hold it for a little under two seconds before it dissipated again, but that was enough time for Rainbow Dash to get into the air above the manticore and begin harrying it with quick, abortive dives. Applejack charged towards it and kept on running, clipping its hind leg with her hammer at full velocity before she began circling around to make another pass. Rarity had by that point summoned her own telekinesis and was in the process of extricating some of the larger pieces of debris the manticore had created for use as projectiles; Fluttershy lurked in the rear, healer’s kit already clutched in one wing; Twilight couldn’t see Pinkie Pie at all anymore and that fact didn’t concern her nearly as much as it probably should have.

Twilight began charging another forcecone spell, then quickly abandoned it and watched with bated breath as a swipe from the manticore’s hooked tail scraped across Rainbow Dash’s flank armor. The thing sprang forward quite suddenly as the pegasus flapped for altitude, and Twilight and Rarity immediately abandoned their previous pursuits to channel their full telekinetic force into arresting it. That didn’t quite work, at least not completely, but they were able to slow it down enough for the others to establish something resembling a fighting retreat. Pinkie Pie leaped vertically into the air from parts unknown and bucked it hard in the head, producing another howl of anger and little other apparent effect, as Rainbow Dash tried to fly underneath the thing, made a swipe for its left rear leg, and barely managed to avoid ditching herself as it kicked back at her. Suddenly finding the leg she had been aiming at was no longer there, Applejack twisted around to abort her charge at the last possible moment, lost her hoofgrip on the turned-up mud, and cursed as she slid off to one side.

“Don’t… think… I can hold it…” Rarity muttered through gritted teeth.

Twilight nodded, and scrambled back another few feet as the manticore pushed particularly hard against the force field slowing it. “This isn’t working!”

“Ah, uhh, Ah think it’s favorin’ that right paw pretty bad!” Applejack called out as she hauled herself back onto her hooves.

“Good point! AJ, go for the front legs,” Twilight shouted back, “I’m gonna try to detonate the soil under it and see if we can give Dash a shot at its neck-”

Suddenly, Fluttershy cut her off. “Wait! Let it go.”


Twilight twisted around to look at her in confusion, the stabbing pain at the base of her horn temporarily forgotten. “What?”

“Let it go.” The little pegasus took another step forward, even as Twilight and Rarity scrambled another few back.

Everypony stopped dead in place. Everypony but Fluttershy, anyway. “You… can’t… possibly… be… serious…” Rarity snarled.

“Let it go.” She was out in front of the others now, staring the restrained beast right in the eye, a look on her face that Twilight had a hard time reading, but was very obviously devoid of any aggression. “You hurting it isn’t making it angry. You’re scaring it out of its mind.” The scholar wondered how she could possibly tell the difference. “And… while I’m not as… familiar with manticore habits as I’d like to be, I… I can tell… he’s fighting like he’s cornered, not like a predator on the hunt…” She seemed to lose any awareness of the other ponies at all after that, speaking directly to the manticore in a low, soft voice. “There. It’s all right. What happened to you?”

Amazingly -whether due to lack of provocation from the others, or direct interaction with Fluttershy, or some combination of both, Twilight didn’t know- the manticore’s frantic scrabbling began to cease. The awful pressure under her horn abated, and beside her she heard Rarity pull in a long, slow breath. The monster itself was still breathing heavily and twitching its head from side to side, growling periodically, but even those movements became less frenetic as Fluttershy drew ever closer.

Twilight eased off on her telekinesis, partially because that was what Fluttershy had told her to do and partially because, if whatever the little pegasus was trying didn’t work, she’d need all of her power all at once in order to be able to yank her back out of claw range as quickly as possible.

Fluttershy gently felt her way down and around the manticore’s right front paw with her hooves, purring and trilling like an overly-chatty housecat. She turned back to the others and whispered one more word- “Look.” Then she fiddled around and, much to Twilight’s shock, slowly and ever-so-carefully began to pull a sliver of astral steel easily six inches long and an inch wide at its base from the flesh directly above the beast’s paw.


There was, oddly enough, little if any blood.


As soon as the mysterious object lost contact with it, the manticore let out a strange warbling whine and collapsed, paws stretched out in front of it as though it were dozing. Fluttershy fished around in her healer’s kit and set about dressing the wound in its paw. Then she took to the air and backed away slightly, and after a few more seconds of… resting? Recovering? Twilight wasn’t sure exactly how to describe it, the beast hauled itself back onto all fours, stumbling about as if drunk. Its bat-like wings flapped experimentally a few times, Fluttershy gave it a tap on the muzzle, and very slowly and cautiously it lifted itself into the air and disappeared into the thick canopy up above.

()

“Wait, what was that all about?” Rainbow Dash asked, eyeing the object in the other pegasus’s teeth suspiciously. “Twilight, can you take a look at that thing?”

The scholar lit her horn and, after Fluttershy nodded, gently took the object in her telekinesis. Almost immediately a sort of buzzing began to manifest at the back of her skull- a whispering, almost- and when she muttered the incantation of a weak magical-detection spell the entire object lit up bright blue with a complex series of overlapping and interacting thaumic fields. Faint silvery energy channels stretched from it to the Moon up above, to Twilight’s own body, to Fluttershy, to a shifting target near the treeline that she reasoned was likely the manticore, and another immobile, seemingly random point far off in the distance that the scholar was willing to guess would overlap nicely with the Castle Of Two Sisters.

“It’s a… something like a spell anchor,” she said aloud, “it’s a way to cast more powerful magic on a specific target at long range. Nightmare Moon probably hit that manticore with it to try and… I don’t really even know what.”

She wasn’t making much headway analyzing the thing from a distance, and Fluttershy had been in physical contact with it for a good long while without experiencing any obvious physical effects, so Twilight cautiously floated it down to eye level and tapped at it with her forehoof, trying to tease apart its tightly-bound thaumic fields by physical shock-

Cast a wide-dispersion stun spell to incapacitate the others and buy me time. The contact wards on Applejack’s armor have expired- get in close, push the incantation of a high-intensity fire spell directly into its meridians, and roast the hidebound brute alive. Pull Rainbow Dash down before she can get altitude, remove her helmet, and smash her empty little skull to pieces with that boulder. Given the shock and her abysmal willpower, the classical formulation for Dominate Equine has a better than average chance of giving me Rarity in one attempt- I’ll have her either kill that giggling pink twit or kill herself in the attempt while I grab her other blade and slice apart Fluttershy’s barrel, laterally, to avoid the ribs and reach every major organ-

Shocked at the sudden intrusion into her thoughts, Twilight immediately yanked her hoof back again. The entire encounter had taken less than a second, but in that time without even realizing it, her lips had pulled back from her teeth and she was already channeling mana into her horn.

The mage looked at Fluttershy with a new mixture of appreciation and horror. “You were carrying that in your mouth?”

Fluttershy, for her part, seemed to be trying to retreat into her own mane. “Well, I don’t think it’s as strong for ponies, obviously. Our minds…” She paused and shifted around awkwardly on her hooves. “aren’t built the same way manticores’ are.”

“We better hang onto that either way,” Rainbow Dash suggested, “I’m sure Miss Egghead here can find something to use it for, and I… really don’t want to leave it sitting around out here for somepony to maybe wander into later.”

“Good point.” Twilight fished a large sheet of chart paper out of her saddlebags, folded it into a crude envelope, and slipped the charm inside. An experimental tap confirmed its mind-altering effects to be nullified. She slipped it back, nodded at the others, and they started back down the trail. Rainbow Dash once again took point, although this time she was careful to remain for the most part in Twilight’s line of sight as the forest closed back in around them.

()

The foundations were becoming more obvious now, some of them even containing enough structure to be considered the remnants of walls. Twilight even thought she was able to make out the remnants of carvings on some of the more columnar and linear pieces of stone, although whatever inlays they may have once possessed had long since been dislodged. The weathermare whistled appreciatively when she saw what Twilight was looking at. “This musta’ been some place when there were ponies around…” she muttered, almost sadly.

“Hey, Fluttershy?” Pinkie Pie asked, “Why didn’t you ask your Manticore buddy to show us the way to the Castle?”

The yellow pegasus shook her head. “Well, I was… a little nervous. I’d never seen one that old before… or that big.”

“Manticores might be reasonably intelligent,” Twilight added, “But they aren’t educated and they aren’t really wired for long conversations about abstract topics like geography. Think one of those ‘feral-foal’ stories times several hundred generations.”

Pinkie nodded. “I… guess that makes sense.”

“When I’m talking with animals like that,” Fluttershy continued, “I’m not really using words. The spell… it turns senses and… emotions, I guess… into words and then back again. A question like ‘what’s the fastest route to the Castle of the Two Sisters’ isn’t really something I’d know how to, uhh, explain.”

“We couldn’t just tell it the name,” Twilight finished, “we’d have to describe what it looks like and smells like, and nopony’s seen its current condition in over a thousand years- the drawings we have from back in the day might not be accurate any more, and even if they did they focus on features like arches and tapestries and things. Those might be relevant to a pony, but wouldn’t be to a manticore.”

“You could explain it, though, right?” Applejack asked, “What’s a castle look like to an animal? Stone trees or summat.”

“So do a lot of other ruins in the Everfree, though.”

“Yes, about that,” said Rarity, “We are seeing ruins, so the castle can’t be too far now… can it? This old city couldn’t have been that large…”

“Well, yes, actually it was,” Twilight corrected, “About the same size as modern Fillydelphia, in fact, and there’s a lot of space in what’s now the Everfree Forest that simply wasn’t there at all in Everfree City. But… you’re right. These streets are broader, and what’s survived is stone- monumental architecture from the government buildings near the city center, not the wood-and-plaster construction that was used nearly everywhere else at the time.”

Pinkie Pie seemed about to reply, but was cut off when Rainbow Dash called out from up ahead- “Holy crap, everypony, you gotta come see this!”

Ignoring the protests of her leg muscles, Twilight bolted forward, then stopped dead in her tracks. The trees and plantlife cut off abruptly in front of her, exposing a great circular plaza of finely-worked stone easily a hundred yards or more across. Though the expertly-laid bricks under her hooves had been faded by time and the moonlight, and turned up in places by thick clots of gnarled roots, she could still pick up here and there brilliant colors they’d once possessed -inlays of gold and lapis lazuli, malachite from the Arimaspe Desert, and Draconic obsidian that until the systematization of alchemy in the eighth century had been more precious than adamantium. Even now vague suggestions of lettering and equine figures remained; Twilight recognized Princess Platinum and Smart Cookie on sight, while only through the letters “L__A_TY” inscribed beneath her moss-covered figure was Commander Hurricane identifiable. Halfway across, though, where the remaining three Founders should have been depicted, the plaza crumbled off into a chasm so deep Twilight couldn’t see the bottom and could only hear the sounds of rushing water.


The Castle of the Two Sisters stood on the other side of that gap- and stood was indeed the correct term, as despite the gaping hole torn through the roof of the main hall and broken-off stubs of some of the narrower towers the entire structure seemed in almost perfect condition. Though the land on the other side of its island was choked with dark, confusing, tangled foliage that moved in ways not entirely attributable to wind or water -and that seemed, at times, not fully explicable in only the usual dimensions at all- not even a single clump of moss seemed able to cross the chasm and impinge on the structure of the Castle itself. The abnormally bright moonlight from the starry sky above pulled the whole of it into a level of ethereal detail that was somehow more-real-than-real, and Twilight’s eye traced the patterns of ornate filigree and flying buttresses that should by all rights have long ago crumbled into unrecognizability.

Cautiously, almost reverently, the six of them advanced.

“That’s… it, right? That’s the Castle of Two Sisters?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Ah guess Ah… never really believed it’d ever been real before…” muttered Applejack.

“Do you think we could just… fly over to it?” said Fluttershy.

“I wouldn’t want to risk that, or a line-of-sight teleport,” Twilight admonished, “It looks like a straight shot, sure, but there’s no telling where we’d actually end up.”

Applejack trod closer to the edge of the chasm, turned her back on a head-sized loose block, and bucked it up and over the gap. Instead of the parabolic trajectory Twilight had estimated it would take, the rock curved into the chasm in a perfectly circular arc before plummeting straight down and out of sight. If it ever did hit the water, nopony heard the splash.

“This is the Founders’ Plaza,” Twilight muttered, working entirely from memory now without any need to consult her maps, “The southernmost of the four surrounding Castle Rock. There should be a bridge to the Castle district proper on either side…”

“You mean that big white arch thing?” Pinkie Pie asked, pointing off into the distance.

Twilight squinted, trying to see what piece of overgrown construction the earth pony was pointing at. Then she stopped, and cautiously turned back around.

There was a cold, blue-white light gradually building in one of the tallest of the Castle towers. Before long, it was bright enough to cast a noticeable amount of illumination on the plaza around them.

Rainbow Dash shifted awkwardly from side to side in the air, and Twilight realized she could now clearly see the pegasus’s shadow. “Girls? I… think we’d better get moving.”

()

Twilight was about to agree when something high up in that very same tower went snap.


A tiny speck of bright white light shot upward, leaving a fading trail behind it very much like a falling star in reverse. Another snap, and another followed it, then another, each on a slightly different trajectory.

“Uhhh… girls?” Applejack asked.

Twilight Sparkle was already moving. “RUN!


They ran. In fact, Twilight couldn’t recall ever having run so hard, or for so long, in her life. At a full gallop they split apart and headed for the treeline, trying to get away from the light as something high above them began whistling.


Twilight, at the very back of the group, had made it perhaps three quarters of the way when the projectile struck the plaza. It made an unimaginably loud crash, like a thunderclap amplified several thousandfold, and her system reeled under the force of a combined kinetic, electrical, and magical shock as the unicorn felt herself lifted bodily off her hooves and launched a good dozen meters forward. She hit the pavement hard on her chest, bounced, struck again on her shoulder and slid another meter or so.

Suddenly and acutely aware that all she could hear was the painful ringing inside her own skull, she tried to haul herself back onto all-fours, but the very stones underneath her were themselves shifting and dropping away. She slid and scrabbled against the building rockslide, any thought of gaining distance rapidly abandoned in favor of the struggle to simply keep herself more or less upright and avoid being crushed. Purely by accident she found herself twisted around to face the treeline and the others- she watched as Rainbow Dash swooped in to grab Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy braced her hooves against Rarity, slowing them both down enough to allow the tailor to get her hooves under her and start to clamber back upward; Applejack grabbed a protruding section of root in her teeth, wrenched herself around, and began to half-dig-half-climb her way up the slope that had formed. The mage felt herself slam hard into something cold and rocky, bounce again, and then slide down onto a flatter section at a much slower rate. She tried digging in her hooves again and was rewarded with the wrenching pain of their nearly being pulled out of joint, but her second attempt was more successful and this time she managed to halt her descent completely.


Nearly all of the plaza was gone now, as far as she could tell, replaced with a morass of earth and fractured stone that was still in many places falling away. Her hearing was back by that point, but all she could detect was the sound of rushing water somewhere below her and, far off in the distance, still more snaps, whistles, and thunderclaps.


Fluttershy’s voice gradually became audible as Twilight pressed her barrel against the cold dirt and tried her best to dig her shaking limbs into it. “… down there, she’s down there! Twilight? What… is that?”

Forcing herself to ignore the instinct that kept her locked in place on her perch, Twilight twisted her head to look up and back. A roughly pony-sized pearl of magical energy was floating more or less at the center of the- of where the plaza used to be, at any rate- rumbling and snapping, sending out tiny feelers of shimmering light in time with the impacts deeper in the forest… and growing. Twilight glanced back up the slope and saw the others slowly advancing on her position, unaware of the danger she knew the artillery spell posed.

“Girls, you have to get out of here!” The mage cried out, “All of you, get to the treeline! It’s going to explode!”

“Hang on,” Rainbow Dash called, “We’re not gonna leave without’cha!”

“No I’m fine just go!” Twilight gasped, then marshaled her unsteady energies and engaged a line-of-sight teleport to the top of the slope. She flashed out of existence-


-into a cold, airless, interstitial darkness shot through with millions of tiny streaking stars. A ghostly image of Nightmare Moon grinned back at her, slitted eyes boring into Twilight’s own through a silvery bubble of space turned back in on itself-


-and rematerialized right back on the cliff face where she’d started. “Dammit. Dammit!” She growled.

Another round of projectiles slammed into the forest behind them, dislodging fresh rockfall and nearly kicking her off the cliffside; she’d worry about those once she wasn’t about to fall to her death or be consumed by the sphere directly behind her.

“I got ya, I got ya,” Rainbow Dash called out and dove towards her position, momentarily heedless of the sphere becoming more and more egg-shaped, its hazy dark core drifting directly towards her.

NO! You CAN’T fly near that thing!” Twilight screamed, just as the pegasus’s trajectory began to curl unnaturally towards the sphere’s surface. Dash cried out, and braked hard, suddenly flapping with all her might just to pull herself downward, barely managing to break free and spiral off to one side. The kinetic, ephemeral nature of pegasus magic might have made her flight more strongly affected, but Twilight knew that unicorn telekinesis would also be disrupted more than a few feet from anypony’s horn, and even Pinkie Pie and Applejack would both find themselves unable to stay grounded if they stuck around long enough.


Warily, the earth ponies and pegasi above her backed away- but Rarity was making her way closer.

Without a word, the tailor ripped open her saddlebags, extracted the rope she’d used to bind the Lunar soldiers, and telekinetically knotted it back into a single line. She wrapped it around her hoof, dropped to the ground, and dangled it towards Twilight, only for the both of them to discover to their mounting horror that it only covered about half the distance.


Static began to prickle over Twilight’s coat.


“Applejack!” Rarity called, “Get me the rest of the rope!”

Immediately, the farmer unslung her own saddlebags and fished out another coil. She balled it up in her hoof, drew back… and then the impact of another sphere in the treeline almost knocked her off her hooves. The wad of rope hit the slope, bounced once, and then disappeared into the chasm below.

“Well, that’s just perfect!” Rarity snapped, “Did nopony else bring more rope? Has nopony else ever gone spelunking?!” Horn still alight she drew her dagger and shredded her own saddlebags with incredible swiftness, twisting the long strips of leather she’d created together into an additional length of cord. Simultaneously she tied it to the rope wrapped around her hoof and played out the additional length, which dangled mockingly just out of the reach of Twilight’s jaws.


The air around her reeked of lightning and woodsmoke and the odd syrupy-sweetness of alchemical aether, torn apart into its component elements by the tremendous magical energies of the sphere’s corona. “It’s gonna go! Girls… you need to move!” Twilight called out.


Rarity shook her head. “Never! I’m not leaving without you!” Her dagger flashed back and forth once again, and suddenly her telekinesis was occupied braiding and knotting her own elaborately-curled mane and tail into the line. Twilight caught it, this time, and with her own rapidly-guttering field tied it securely around her barrel, but even with the aid of a limping Applejack the tailor couldn’t lift her more than a few feet at a time.


“C’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon!” Pinkie Pie muttered.

Twilight could feel the wind picking at her coat as the sphere behind her sucked in more and more air. She didn’t have long to wait now before the upward force became so great that she’d be able to jump to the top of the cliff; the only problem with that plan was the millisecond-long window before she would be unable to stop herself from being sucked the rest of the way in.


“Well, that’s it then.” Rarity pulled in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and flipped her dagger around.


For a moment Twilight wondered if the tailor had for some reason decided to slice her own chest open, before her leather dueling harness broke apart into its component straps. In her deft telekinetic field, the majority of it wrapped around the surviving buckles to form a makeshift carabiner while the rest was tied onto her line; with her free forehoof the tailor motioned for Applejack to stand sideways to the hole and used the farmer’s powerful barrel as an anchor point.


The force on Twilight suddenly multiplied, and she found herself half-rappelling-half-simply-being-lifted back up the rockslide as the fizzing and snapping behind her reached a crescendo. There was a brief, horrifying moment of weightlessness right at the top of the cliff, where Rarity and Applejack suddenly had to pull her back down, and then for the first time in what felt like hours her hooves were set back onto solid stone.


Twilight galloped for the treeline and did not look back.


There was an enormous crash of stone and soil as the orb behind her detonated, and for perhaps half a second or more she and the others were being dragged back the way they’d come by its immense attractive force. Then a more conventional shockwave slammed into them and hurled them forward again.

()

Twilight remained where she’d been thrown in the Everfree mud for a good long while, waiting for the oxygen to come back to her brain and the tremors in her burning limbs to subside. Finally, she turned to look at the pony slumped over next to her. Even covered in mud and scratches, with most of her mane and tail sheared off, the white unicorn somehow managed to hold herself with the sort of poise Twilight was only used to seeing at the more important sort of diplomatic functions. “Rarity?” She finally managed to rasp, “Thanks.”


The unicorn stood, and shook the dirt from what was left of her mane. “Don’t mention it. I just did what I’d hope anypony would’ve done.”

The bombardment finally seemed to have cut out- Twilight could hear the last few spells pop, distant and far away, and no new ones replaced them. She tried to get to her hooves, couldn’t quite manage it, and then gave a little squeak as Rarity easily lifted her back up into a standing position. “But… well, your harness, and…”

Without even looking at Twilight, Rarity responded in a measured, even tone, "Oh, that old thing? Pffffff, I n-needed a new one, anyway. Fleur-de-lis brass rivets are horribly out of style."

The mare was a surprisingly poor actor. As soon as she could stand properly again, Twilight turned to face her. “I mean, it must’ve meant a lot to you. I thought you sai-"

"Never mind what I said," Rarity snapped. Then in an instant, her features softened, "I'm sorry, darling. You’re right, of course. I… it really can’t be replaced." Rarity's eyes locked onto Twilight, filling with a grim confidence, "but neither can you. Let’s… let’s go ahead and give that usurper princess a good what-for, hmm?"

Twilight laughed for the first time in a long while. “All right.”

It was at about that time that Pinkie Pie gave a surprisingly restrained cough. “So, uhh, Fluttershy and I found that bridge you were looking for…” the baker said, “but… there’s kind of a bit of a problem.”


Rainbow Dash gazed out over the cracked, crumbling stub of what had once been an incredibly fancy marble bridge. She had no idea if the thing would’ve been sound to cross after Boreas-only-knew how long out exposed to the Everfree, but Nightmare Moon’s shelling had very effectively made the question -as well as most of the structure itself- strictly hypothetical.

“Dammit, dammit, dammit we do not have time for this!” Twilight Sparkle cursed.

“Sugarcube, if you could stop gripin’ long enough to help me ‘n Rarity with these ropes, we’d be over there an awful lot quicker…” Applejack muttered as she and the tailor knotted together what was shaping up to be a more or less serviceable rope bridge. “Dash, Fluttershy, think the two a’ ya can run the other end a’ this over when it’s done?”

From her position almost directly under Rainbow’s hooves, Pinkie Pie eyed the fog collecting on the other end of the chasm with uncertainty. “I don’t know… there’s something funny about that mist. I don’t think it’s natural.”

“Hmm… Pinkie’s right.” Tying off another line, Twilight trotted back over to the edge. Her horn flashed, she muttered something under her breath, and a weird bluish film slid over her half-closed eyes. Rainbow Dash had seen magesight spells before, owned a pair of goggles enchanted with exactly the same ability, and was even technically certified to be able to create thaumoluminescent clouds and mist herself, but the effect was still more than a little bit unnerving. Then again, so were a lot of other things about the weird little Canterlot egghead. “Hmm… I’m not getting much mana scatter,” Twilight muttered, more to herself than to anypony else, “so I don’t think it’d be able to physically harm anypony or for that matter create the sort of seamless illusions Nightmare Moon’s produced previously… It might still be confusing or disorienting to come into contact with, or alert Nightmare Moon to cast a more powerful spell indirectly, so whoever goes inside it is going to have to keep on her hooves and be ready to clear out at a moment’s notice. There’s less obvious ways of performing both of those functions, though, so… I’m not really sure what its purpose might be.”

Rainbow flew down to the scholar’s level -or at least as close as she could get to the shorter pony without bending down- and was secretly relieved when the bluish film over her eyeballs dissipated. “Well, if it’s dangerous, or… well, might be dangerous, I guess… then I’ll handle running the bridge over.”

Fluttershy shook her head, "Um, actually, I'm fine with traveling with Rainb-"

"Twilight, we can't lose all our air support in one push!" Applejack cut her off.

"Well I'm not going send Rainbow Dash over there without support!" Rarity shot back.

Girls!” The weathermare climbed back up to her usual more comfortable altitude and re-situated her helmet. “Look at me! I'm amazing! I'll have the bridge up in 30 seconds, just watch me!"

“Well, when you put it that way…” Pinkie Pie muttered, as she took a thick wooden peg from Applejack’s saddlebag and drove it by hoof into the solid stone near the collapsed section of the bridge.

Without another word, Rainbow slipped two other pegs and a mallet into her armor’s webbing, grabbed one end of their improvised bridge in her teeth, and set off across the chasm.

She half-expected the fog to manifest jaws or claws or tentacles to grab her as she approached, but it remained exactly where it was, roiling in a little area perhaps ten yards across centered some ways back from where the original bridge ended. Cautiously she glided closer, and prodded at it with one hoof- it seemed to have no temperature or texture of its own, and neither did her action seem in any way to disturb it. It slowly dawned on her that trying to simply clear it away it like any mundane weather would be a futile exercise.

Altius volantis… I-huh. Wow, I thought there was more to it than that,” she muttered, and dove inside.

Only when nothing remotely threatening occurred as a result did she realize that she had no idea what part of the crumbling marble hoofway would serve as the best anchor point. She descended, picked a spot more or less at random, slotted the peg in between two thick stones, gripped the mallet in her teeth, and gave it two sharp whacks before looping one of the rope ties around it. It seemed to hold well enough.

Then she reared back upright and scanned the area. Very faintly, she thought she’d heard somepony -or something- whisper her name.

()

She was about to dismiss it as a confusing echo -fog generally didn’t echo, she knew that much at least, but maybe this kind did- when she heard it again, much more clearly: “Rainbow Dash?”

The voice sounded familiar, but she couldn’t immediately place it. Her memories were cloudy and jumbled and it was getting difficult for her to concentrate, even though her physical senses somehow seemed to have been rendered hyperacute. Dash could smell the forest around her and even the fog itself had become lighter and easier to see through; she felt lighter on her hooves than she ever had before and not even remotely tired, giddy almost, and if her injuries were even still present they weren’t causing her the slightest bit of pain, despite her every other sensation feeling as though it had been multiplied severalfold.

She thought she picked up movement, back towards the base of the bridge, and charged off after it. It would take just a minute, after all, and Twilight said the mist couldn’t hurt her, and Twilight had a doctorate so Twilight would know things like that.

There was nothing at the base of the bridge, so she took wing and began flying the very start of an outward-spiral search pattern. There was nothing but fog around the bridge, either, but when she circled back to where she started at the end of her first arc, a stallion clad in dark purple leather was sitting next to the peg she’d installed. “Thou werest about to fly off and leave this,” he said, extending a leathery, bat-like wing to offer her the second anchor-peg. “I would not have expected an Imperial to be so sloppy.”

“Vortex?!” Rainbow demanded, landing and immediately brandishing her wingblades.

“Ah, so now I’ve a name that is not ‘Freak’.” His mouth pulled back into the faintest hint of a smile. “I am flattered!”

“H-how did you get out here?”

“Oh, I did no such thing. Unless somepony was thoughtful enough to move me, I still lie stricken on the trail where thine fellows left me. But... through the power of Our Glorious Sovereign Luna, my dreams of thee may appear to thee in the Waking World.”

“Actually,” she snapped, “yeah, we did move you. You didn’t think we’d just leave you and your pals out there to be manticore food, did you?”

He gave a short little bow. “How kind of thee.”

“But… you really came all this way just to tell me you’re dreaming about me?” Rainbow snickered, then broke down into full-fledged laughter. “Wow, you’re even more pathetic than Zephyr Breeze. I didn’t even think that was possible!”

“Oh, and how many victories has this… Zephyr?”

“No, uhh… he’s not… he’s just this one weird colt from Fliers’ Camp…” Dash muttered, suddenly feeling uncomfortable before Vortex’s yellow-goggled stare.

“Aye. I suspected it was not many. Yet… I fear the same could be said for thyself, aye?”

“Wait, wait, I know what this is,” Dash rolled her eyes, “You freaks are still trying to get me to turn traitor for you! That is pathetic!”

Vortex stood in one quick, fluid motion and began circling Dash in turn. “Really, now? And what is so… pathetic… in recognizing potential unjustly squandered and left to fade in obscurity?”

Rainbow’s ears flattened back against her skull.

The Shadowbolt just smiled. “Ah, thou knowest of what I speak, I see! Thou gainst nothing by disguising thine feelings… I truly do wish only the best for thee.”

“You got a funny way a’ showin’ it,” the weathermare growled.

“Orders are orders. My comrades feared thee, and I say they were right to do so.”

“Your ‘comrades’ were going to torture me!”

“Desperate times make brutes of us all, Imperial. But before Our Sovereign revealed me to thee, we spoke in some depth. ‘Twere not easy, but I believe I… convinced Her to forgive thine past transgressions as the acts of… a desperate mare. There shall be no more chains waiting for thee in the Lunar Republic, Rainbow Dash. We would much rather thou would come to us of thine own free will.” His circles drew in closer and closer almost to the point of physical contact, and Rainbow knew she should probably have been concerned about that, but she had a hard time mustering the will. He smelled of lightning and fresh spring rain.

“Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it.,” she finally said.

“If thou willst, thou canst still fly away. I cannot hold thee, this time.” There was a long, tense pause, then he cocked his head to one side. “Ah, but thou seest reason… Yes, I see how life under the Sun-Tyrant bores thee… I think life in the Shadowbolts would suit thee better… no more weather reports, no more catering to the whims of grounders or fearing that thou mayst offend the child of the wrong noblemare… thou willst find that we do much… differently. Fly with me up to the new castle of Our Luna. I shall show thee the way, and join thee upon waking. Accept Her honors.” The very end of his tail flicked lightly across her muzzle as he continued to circle. “Tell me the names of the ponies who wronged thee, and with Her blessing I shall fight them side by side with thee…”

Rainbow struggled to focus- she’d been doing something terribly important, but she couldn’t quite remember what it was. “If… I… say yes… what’s gonna happen to the others?”

“Nothing much, I hope,” Vortex laughed again, smooth and deep. “They cannot even reach Our Sovereign without thine aid… why dost thou think thou werest sent ahead? Indeed, without thee, they would never have gotten so near… if thou wishest, we can go and bring them to safety, although it is their own decision how they will react to thee now… unlike mine own comrades, I make no promises how they may see thine choice…”

Rainbow shifted awkwardly from hoof-to-hoof, grateful for the lightness and flexibility of her purple leather flight suit compared to her old plate-armor. “And… after that?”

“Then, I shall train alongside thee, and fight alongside thee, and thou willst be remembered as the finest warrior of the Lunar Republic…” Vortex murmured.

“That’s… umm… a lot to… think about…” As she considered the opportunity she’d been given Rainbow unfurled her wings, giving them the first good stretch they’d had in quite a long time, relishing the sensation of leathery skin pulling tight over the long, thin fingerbones; free of suffocating feathers…

“Indeed, ‘tis a great thing I am asking of thee, so, by all means, take thine time to decide.” He stepped up beside her, and it took all of Dash’s willpower to pull her wing inward and keep it from ending up against his smooth, sleek back. His muzzle hovered an inch from her ear, her own head about level with his powerful chest and wing muscles, which was strange, because she hadn’t remembered him being that tall. “I am not… going anywhere in mine sleep, after all,” he more hummed than whispered, “Though when I wake I shall again seek thee… in the flesh.”


She had to wait a moment before her mouth stopped being too dry to speak.

Then, “Sorry, Freak, answer’s. Still. No.”


“Then you will die, along with everypony else who still clings to the memory of my fat despot of a sister,” Nightmare Moon hissed.

Her armored, jet-black frame towered over the weathermare, sharp white fangs a hair's-breadth away from tearing into the skin of Dash’s ear, luminous blue eyes locked with the pegasus’s own. Rainbow yelped and scrambled away under combined wing-and-hoofpower, ending up halfway over the edge of the bridge and flapping hard to tip herself back onto solid ground.

The alicorn threw back her head and laughed. “Well, it looks like we won’t be working together. No regrets, Rainbow Dash. I will see you up ahead.”

She reared back on her haunches and coiled her wings, sending Rainbow cowering and bracing for the immense downdraft, but instead on the Nightmare’s down-stroke Dash registered herself -and the entire world around her- beginning to drop sickeningly downward while the creature in front of her remained exactly where she was. On pure reflex Rainbow closed her eyes, bracing for… something, she wasn’t entirely sure what, but it never came.

When she opened them again, there was no dark alicorn and no beguiling mist, just a half-finished rope bridge, a loose support peg, and a mallet lying at her hooves where it had slipped out of her slackening jaws.


She positioned the peg, gave it a few sharp whacks, and then looped the rope around.

Fluttershy was the first to cross, gliding gently with her hooves barely touching the bridge. “Are you all right? Is it safe?”

“Yeah,” Twilight muttered as she made her own traversal, surprisingly adroitly for a pony who evidently didn’t spend much time with her hooves out of contact with carpet, “I thought I heard… voices. Or, well, your voice, at least. Not too sure about any others…”

“We were just debatin’ whether or not to send Fluttershy over after ya’”, Applejack explained, “when we saw ya yelp, slide off the bridge, fly back up, and then… I guess do somethin’ to fan off that weird fog. Darndest thing.”

“I knew we should’ve gone with the catapult idea,” Pinkie Pie cut in.

“Well you do look a bit… flustered, but I suppose that’s more than understandable,” said Rarity. “Just as long as you think you’re all right.”

Rainbow nodded. “I got a little turned around in that cloud but… I think we’re fine now. We should get back under cover, I… don’t like being out in the open like this.”


()

The ruins were so densely-packed now that Twilight almost missed the turnoff towards what Firefly’s notes identified as the primary Day Guard camp. If it wasn’t for the markings his scouts had left on the crumbling walls nearby, she almost certainly would have- chalk markings, no less, which should have sloughed off long ago but nonetheless persisted. Curious.

No buildings still stood, which she’d been expecting, but while civil engineering wasn’t a field Twilight Sparkle had a great deal of expertise in, she was beginning to develop the strangest sense that the damage surrounding her wasn’t the work of time at all, but solely of fires and spells and catapult strikes.

Curious indeed.

Nopony seemed willing to dare conversation as the path they were on wound between collapsed pillars and piles of undefinable crushed marble, then finally opened out again into a circular plaza perhaps half the size of the Founders’ Court outside, paved entirely in black marble and inlaid with thousands of gemstone ‘stars’- the original Court of the Night.

It no longer even seemed worth remarking on to Twilight that they had ended up here, on what should have been the westernmost end of Castle Rock, by passing from the north through another courtyard south of their current location and then turning left.

There were paintings of this place in museums in Canterlot- not as many as of the original Day Court from which Celestia’s seat of government took its name on the opposite side of the Castle, but paintings nonetheless- and architectural drawings in its archives. Some had even tried to reconstruct, from imagination and fragmentary accounts, how it might have looked at the end of the Lunar Rebellions. None of them had managed to capture the scale of the camp laid out in front of Twilight now. It seemed, impossibly, as though everypony who had staffed the densely-packed collection of canvas tents spread out in front of her had simply stood up and left, leaving behind everything from bedrolls to entire siege engines to dead bodies- rows upon rows of them, little more than skeletons now even though their armor remained as bright as the day they had fallen, Solar and Lunar and Loyalist and many others besides, laid out in preparation for a decent burial that had never come.


Twilight Sparkle found them incredibly fascinating.


Some of the corpses showed obvious signs of death by extreme heat- most were Lunar, but a few were Solar, in every case their half-melted armor fused with one or more rebel soldiers’; some with the remains of weapons still lodged in between them.

The scholar muttered another mage-sight spell, and at once the entire courtyard was awash in color. Outside, the ambient magic of the Everfree swirled in brilliant, nauseatingly psychedelic patterns that at times brought out impressions of gaping mouths and grasping claws and other, worse and less-definable things, but not a single feeler of it managed to cross the bridge to Castle Rock. Instead, on the other side, the mana field was one of the most uniform she had ever seen outside of a laboratory; though the scorch marks and craters surrounding the camp were still effervescent with power, as though the spells that had made them had been cast only hours ago.

Twilight whispered another incantation, and dimmed out everything she could currently see. As she’d expected, all of the burned bodies still glowed pale yellow, but what surprised her were the greater number she now saw covered in a cold blue-white aura that was nearly as familiar to her: Nightmare Moon’s victims, by a rough estimate, outnumbered Celestia’s nearly two to one, and only perhaps seven out of every ten were Solars. Many were her own ponies. Others wore no armor and carried no weapons at all.

She hurried to catch up with the others, muttering to herself all the while. “She killed her own mares to get at the Solars… I always thought that was something the Golden Dawn made up later because there was zero archaeological evidence of Luna ever having actually done it, but… she did it here.”

Fluttershy must’ve heard her, because the little yellow pegasus turned around and looked at Twilight for a long moment. “But… are you sure… that was Luna?”

Twilight looked at her in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“I’d believe that sort of behavior from Nightmare Moon, obviously, but...” Rarity continued before Applejack cut her off.

“Well, she went mad, didn’t she? That’s what you said, right, Twilight? Makin’ all them revenants drove her crazy?”

“Actually… I’m not sure it did.” The more she thought about that theory, the less plausible it seemed. “Neurological degradation due to the overuse of telepathic links causes memory loss, mood swings, and delusional psychosis. But when she appeared in town -and when she tried to stop us out here- Nightmare Moon was acting in a very lucid, rational way, just out of step with the goals and methods all my sources ascribe to Princess Luna.” Off to the left, Twilight could just about make out a dark, ragged-looking hill that was all that remained of the Equestrian Council Hall. Paper Clip had been surprised by the loss of civilian life there, but the attack itself had been subtle and sophisticated in its execution. Unless… “There’s… something that’s been bothering me about that, actually, but I’m not sure if I’m imagining it or not. Maybe you can help me put my hoof on it, but at the same time I don’t want to lead you on by telling you what it is, okay?”

Rainbow Dash nodded. “Fine by me.”

“You were all pretty close to Nightmare Moon when she appeared. Well, closer than I was, certainly. You got a good look at her, right? You remember the little details?”

“Much as Ah’d like to forget, yeah,” said Applejack. “Reckon Ah’m gonna be seein’ that face in my dreams.”

“Was there anything… strange about her?” Twilight prompted.

“You mean other than the fact that she’s pitch black, seven feet tall, and has nasty sharp pointy teeth?” Pinkie Pie asked.

“Yeah, besides… well, all the obvious things.” She had led them through the camp to the outer wall of the Castle almost unconsciously. The tunnel dug by Firefly’s sappers was hard to miss; just as his annotations described, he’d taken out a ten-foot section of the wall. The six of them didn’t hesitate as they stepped into the rough-hewn tunnel beyond. However much it twisted and turned, Twilight was confident there would only be one exit.

After a minute or so more of walking, Rainbow Dash finally spoke up. “Her eyes were creepy. Nightmare Moon’s, I mean.”

Rarity and Fluttershy both nodded in agreement.

“Creepy… how?” Twilight prompted.

Dash frowned, concentrating. “I dunno… empty, I guess.”

“Exactly, like… like a doll’s, almost,” Rarity continued.

Applejack seemed to focus on something far off into the indeterminate distance. “Wait… yeah… wow, that ismighty strange.”

“What is?” asked Twilight.

“Well, they don’t have any depth!” Pinkie Pie answered instead.

The unicorn had to bite her lip to keep her expression outwardly neutral. She didn’t want to suggest anything, but if the five of them were thinking of what she guessed they were… “Go on?”

“Well,” Rarity began, “If you look very closely at another pony’s eyes, they aren’t just orbs. There’s a lens, and then the iris is a little below that, and then the pupil is an opening to a dark space inside.”

Ranbow Dash nodded. “Yeah, but Nightmare Moon’s eyes aren’t like that. They’re flat! They’re just flat, perfect balls!”

“Like they were… painted on, or something…” Fluttershy continued.

“What kind of pony has eyes like that?” Pinkie Pie asked, then when it became clear to her that none of the others were willing to respond, “Something that isn’t a pony, that’s what!”

Twilight grinned. “Exactly. I thought I might’ve been imagining it myself, but… I think we all saw the exact same thing.”

Surprisingly, Applejack grinned. “So… you really did mean what’cha told those Lunars. About trying to bring the real Luna back.”

“No. I thought we’d have to heal her, before, but now… I think you’re all right. Nightmare Moon and Princess Luna aren’t even the same creature!” The others nodded, but Twilight scuffed her hoof nervously. “Everything I’m seeing here is just… so far beyond the boundaries of accepted magical and historical theory; we’ve only come as far as we have on lucky guesses and snap deductions… and I don’t really know if there’s anything of Luna left to save. She might not be alive, and after a thousand years of isolation she might not be sane. Maybe Nightmare Moon is… I don’t know, something that exists alongside Luna, or maybe it ate Luna, or Luna was a mask for it all along, or it just watched Luna’s soul escape her dead body after the Battle of Everfree and decided that, yeah, now it had a good handle on what this whole ‘being a warm-blooded equinoid with audible language and an internal skeleton’ thing was all about.”

Rainbow Dash cocked her head to one side, muzzle twitching as she mouthed almost-words for a few seconds. “But how do we fight something like that?”

“Ideally, we don’t. We sneak in, grab the Elements, and then… use them, I guess. Before they stopped being able to use those artifacts themselves, Celestia and Luna were supposedly able to cure physical and mental diseases with the Elements, including conditions like possession and lycequiny. But the texts don’t really offer a good description of how the things’ powers ever worked, or why they ever stopped working, just that they could be activated by physical contact. The clearest description I’ve ever encountered of the process is ‘when the five are present, a spark will cause the sixth element to be revealed’, and even that’s not much.”

“So… what do they look like?” Pinkie Pie asked. “How will we even know if we found them or not? I mean, we might’ve been the Elements the whole time!”

Twilight had to chuckle at that. “Well, they’re supposed to be indestructible at least to the might and magic available a thousand years ago, that’s one of the few things the most recent- or, I guess, least ancient- accounts agree on. Other than that, though… all the drawings and written descriptions of them are copies of copies; they might be stone spheres, or gems, or fruits, or equinoid creatures themselves. It’s hard to say what’s meant to be allegorical and what’s meant to be a literal description, when we’re reading texts from a time when even the most educated ponies hadn’t given up on the Sun and Moon being physical objects floating around in the Firmament, that a pegasus could reach if she could just fly far enough.”

“And… if we do run into Nightmare Moon?” Fluttershy asked.

Twilight extracted the shard of astral steel from her saddlebags, turning it over and over again in her telekinesis, quietly considering how it might react to different enchantments before concluding that an explosive heat spell would be most effective. “Defensive spells that implemented surface-normal discrimination weren’t developed until the five-fifties. Before that, the only way to allow the user to cast magic back out was to permit anything that matched the caster’s thaumic signature. That’s a weakness, because it meant that even the most powerful wards were useless against the user’s own magic. Unless Nightmare Moon has knowledge of magical techniques post-dating her imprisonment -which I doubt, because I saw her revenants digging through the Golden Oaks for a bunch of technical topics- then this artifact should be able to deliver spells through her defenses. So that gives us… a shot. I don’t think we’ll get more than that.”

It took Twilight a little while to notice as the change was extremely slight, but the tunnel around them was definitely growing lighter.

“Quiet, we’re almost there.” Rarity whispered.

True to her word, the tunnel sloped sharply upward not long after, and the dry soil roof soon opened out to deep, blue-black sky. Twilight cautiously scaled the last few yards, Rarity wordlessly lifting her over a particularly steep patch where her hooves couldn’t find purchase.

They had surfaced in what might once have been a courtyard or garden before nature had largely reclaimed it; a strange idea took form in Twilight’s brain that the thick, wickedly-thorny brambles nearly covering their entrance had been what finally deterred General Firefly and his recovery expedition a thousand years ago. Now, however, they were dry and easy enough to shoulder through, and from the outside the tunnel entrance was effectively invisible- a fortunate thing, the mage supposed, given that Nightmare Moon had almost certainly had time to search the castle grounds by now.

There was no sign of any movement, and the surviving towers were far away, but the six of them still kept a low profile as they tread silently across the overgrown paths to a low, long, ovoid shell of a building located more or less in the center. She recognized the Grand Solarium from its position more than anything else- with most of its walls and all of its windows and roof fallen in, there was precious little else to go on.

For some reason, Twilight found that fact unimaginably sad.

Then she approached a little closer, and realized she couldn’t see any rubble to speak of inside the structure, certainly not enough to have composed the entire ceiling; instead, stone lay piled at random in the garden around her, and tiny beads of glass crunched under her hooves. The Solarium hadn’t collapsed, it had been ripped open from the inside.


Rainbow Dash was the first to make it to the entrance, of course, but as she approached the half-open bronze doors her flight slowed, little by little, and she finally stopped. Then she waved a hoof and beckoned.

Applejack gave the scholar a brief nudge to her shoulder. “C’mon, Twilight, isn’t this what’cha’ve been lookin’ for?”


No artist a millennium ago had ever dared to depict the inside of this building. There had never been any laws against it, at least none mentioned in the records that had survived; it simply wasn’t the sort of thing ponies of the time would have dared.

Twilight Sparkle swallowed hard and stepped inside.


The walls and floor here were bare- polished gray andesite devoid of the opulent inlays that characterized so much of Everfree and scored with simple, geometrical markings; almost untouched save for a great divot of unknown origin back near the door. Six pillars might once have supported the roof of the place, perhaps, but little trace of them remained now; from the leglike shape of what remained near ground level, Twilight supposed they might once have been carved into equine forms, but who or why she couldn’t begin to say. The only structure to hold any ornamentation at all was the vaguely pyramidal stone platform in the center, perhaps half-again Twilight’s height. The sphere at its apex produced, at seemingly random angles, five surprisingly graceful stone beams, each topped with a smaller sphere of about head size. The spheres themselves were perfectly smooth save for a pattern carved in high relief, depicting one of the five regular polyhedra on each.

That sequence was familiar enough to Twilight- it recurred in the writings of Starswirl the Bearded, and studies of the spontaneous visual artifacts that appeared in undirected divinations, and etchings a hundred meters across on a mountain in the center of the Dragonlands, and correlated clusters of the outer fixed stars, and the ruined abbatoir-temples of the Diamond Dogs, and the fundamental mathematics of spell interaction, and a thousand other places besides. There was no academic consensus on where they originated, save that they were far older than pony civilization- perhaps older than any written language, or even older than intelligent life itself.


“The Elements of Harmony…” she whispered, “We’ve found them.”


Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy were already in the air, flying forward to remove the spheres from their mountings. “Careful… careful…” Twilight warned, anticipating the cracking of stone as the delicate, priceless structure was disassembled, but there seemed to be nothing physically connecting the spheres to their mounts. In short order, they lay collected at her hooves.

“One, two, three, four…” Pinkie Pie muttered, “There’s only five! Where’s the sixth?!”

“When the five are present, a spark will cause the sixth to be revealed…” repeated Twilight.

“What in the hay is that supposed to mean?” asked Applejack.

“I’m not sure, but I have an idea. Stand back, I don’t know what will happen…” As the others formed a ring around Twilight, weapons readied and heads swiveling, the scholar began a close-range intensive scan of the nearest Element. There was definitely something other than rock in its core, but she wasn’t immediately certain what that something was. It was more of an absence than a presence, really, and at first she wondered if the stones were either magically shielded or simply hollow, but a shield would reflect her scan and vacuum permitted things to pass through it; this did neither. It was as though the core was made of the most inert, immutable matter possible. She began charging energy, muttering cantrips to shape it into a tiny, penetrating thread.

“C’mon, now, y’all,” said Applejack as she backed slowly away, “She needs to concentrate.”

“Indeed she does.”

()

If she hadn’t focused it so intently on the Element and only the Element, Twilight’s scanning-spell might have registered the teleportation magic before Nightmare Moon stepped out of the open air in front of the six of them; instead of immediately after when Twilight involuntarily jerked her head upward and took the spell with it. But it probably wouldn’t have made any difference either way.

Stop her!” Rarity called, and the five mares from Ponyville braced themselves to charge.

Nightmare Moon stared at them, fangs bared in a hungry smile, astral steel armor gleaming in the moonlight. Twilight knew she could have killed them all easily enough right then and there, but she didn’t move. The scholar wasn’t entirely sure why that was- she wanted to isolate and turn each of them, perhaps- but she knew that if they kept drawing attention to themselves sooner or later Nightmare Moon’s patience would run out.

She intended to act before it did.

“Wait!” Twilight called out, and began to walk forward. Her walk became a trot, then a charge as she channeled more and more power to her horn. She felt the enchanted shard of astral steel bouncing in her saddlebag, and carefully tore apart a seam with her telekinesis.

The alicorn’s smile grew, and she slowly shook her head. “You’re kidding. You’re kidding, right?” Casually, almost dismissively, Nightmare Moon flicked out her left wing-


- and Twilight activated the teleportation spell she’d been charging, instantly repositioning herself back in front of the Elements. Her saddlebags, and the enchanted bomb inside, had been deliberately excluded and continued forward under their own momentum. She heard the deafening thud as the spell went off, felt the intense heat wash over her, and saw the entire chamber illuminated briefly in a strange mixture of orange and bright white-blue. She heard Nightmare Moon screaming -no, howling, louder than anything remotely equine ever should have been able to, more in surprise and anger than in any real pain- but she dared not look up. She knew she only had seconds to extricate the Elements, if that. Teleportation wouldn’t work, but if she could remove even a tiny column of the natural stone in which they’d been encased and inject mana down the channel…

No.”

There was a flash of cold white light, brighter than anything Twilight had ever seen before, and the unicorn’s world briefly disintegrated into vibrating, stinging, squirming pain that made her want to tear off her own skin a strip at a time just to get rid of it. Then it was gone as quickly as it had arrived -was this what happened to those Guardsponies at the town hall?- and she realized she was lying among the others, scattered a good meter or two from the Elements. She struggled to pull herself to her hooves, forcing herself to ignore her friends’ own attempts to do so -they were farther away, and all in better physical shape to begin with, they had to be all right- but Nightmare Moon was standing right in among the stone spheres now and Twilight wasn’t immediately sure what to do about that.

The alicorn still loomed as tall and proud as ever, glaring down disdainfully at the Ponyville mares, despite the blast of Twilight’s spell having torn away the flesh from her cutie mark all the way to midway up her barrel on her left side.

The scholar gasped. Whatever she had been expecting to see exposed underneath- ribs and musculature, concentrated starlight, eyes and mouths and tentacles, perhaps- the flank of another, smaller, thinner pony with a dark blue coat hadn’t even been considered.

The alicorn seemed to realize where Twilight was looking and twisted to shift her injured side out of view. She tapped the floor with one steel-shod hoof; it made a single, clear, crystalline sound as it hit, and the stone spheres of the Elements of Harmony silently broke apart into shards each no larger than a feather’s width.

Nightmare Moon smiled again. “Well?”


Knowing she wouldn’t get another chance the scholar bolted forward again, this time charging the blasting-spell directly in her horn and hoping to slip the incipient magic under Nightmare Moon’s outdated wards before they could recognize and block it. It was a long shot, but at the moment she didn’t really have many options left. Even if she couldn’t beat the alicorn, which was very likely the case, she had to make herself interesting enough to give the others a chance at the Elements.

She realized a little too late that Nightmare Moon could easily have swatted her away with a hoof or a wing, or simply stepped aside and let her crash to the floor, but Nightmare Moon didn’t do either of those things. Instead, her form began to grow hazy and insubstantial, softening at the edges, and when Twilight slammed into the alicorn head-first she kept on going. There was a brief impression of being surrounded by oily, iridescent, cloyingly warm fog; then she was being hurled under the force of her own accumulated momentum through an airless, weightless, dark interstitial space filled with hundreds of tiny, streaking stars; then gravity took hold of her again and she landed in a heap on another stone floor.


Biting back a curse, Twilight scrambled to get her hooves back under her again, but before she could even begin to find purchase she found herself wrapped in a cyan telekinetic field and lifted bodily upwards. She tried to wrench free and shout a jamming spell both at the same time, but found herself utterly immobilized from hooves to jaw by the field’s incredible force.


“Enough of that,” said Nightmare Moon, and lifted Twilight up to face her eye-to-slitted-eye. The alicorn’s warm breath blew across Twilight’s muzzle, smelling of dew and fresh rain and something electrical. “I’m going to put you down, now, so that we can talk about this like civilized ponies. If you try to escape, or harm me, or signal anypony outside or otherwise do anything else… dramatic, you will not only fail but the attempt will also leave you very badly hurt.” She pressed the cold astral steel of her sabaton down against the tip of Twilight’s horn, as if she were crushing an unusually large bug. The sensation of pressure was immense- it wasn’t any more directly painful than a mild headache, but Twilight swore she could feel and even hear the bones in her skull creaking under the strain. If Nightmare Moon applied the slightest bit more force, she knew they would give way completely.

“Do you understand?” asked the alicorn, and removed her hoof. Her telekinetic field loosened just enough for Twilight to move her head, and she nodded. What else could she do?


Nightmare Moon smiled again, and gently lowered her to the floor. Her telekinesis faded away completely, replaced by the telltale buzz of a powerful anti-magic field. Twilight realized they had been transported high into one of the Castle’s surviving towers, to a room that still contained the remnants of fine furniture and midnight-blue drapery. Of the many vaulted windows that filled three of its walls, the largest and most central faced directly towards the perpetually-rising Moon; every so often bat-winged shapes fluttered past outside, but the interior remained quiet and still.

“You’re lucky I’m more forgiving of attempted regicide than my dearly departed sister,” said Nightmare Moon. The dark alicorn slid gracefully down onto her haunches, one forehoof crossed over the other. The moonlight seemed to flow over her, that odd hyper-detailed blackness of her coat displaying every muscle in her powerful chest and long, sleek neck, posing just as Luna had always posed in the old portraits she’d spent so long poring over for hidden symbols and Lunar codes-

-and keeping, Twilight noticed, her uninjured side facing towards the scholar all the while.

()

“I knew you were looking for me ever since you started your work, you know. Or, rather, I knew there was a pony looking for me; a pony who dreamed about stars, and tombs, and rebellion against Celestia. Until you came all this way, I didn’t know that the pony having those dreams was you, but now here you are. Impressive.” The corners of Nightmare Moon’s mouth pulled back into another predatory, knowing smile, exposing brilliant white fangs. “Now I know why my sister chose you to seek out the time and place of my return.”

Excuse me?” Twilight snapped, “No, Celestia-” she quickly cut herself off before she could say anything damning.

Nightmare Moon just laughed, light and clear. “The Tyrant barely tolerated your work and refused to believe the truth until it was far too late? It’s futile to try to hide your fears and resentment from me, you know. I’ve seen your dreams…. And my sister’s. But you’re mistaken. Celestia never cared if you proved that I would return, because she already knew that.” She bent forward and brought her head inches away from Twilight’s own. Her features were every bit as refined and elegant as Princess Celestia’s, but leaner and crossed by delicate little scars. Twilight recognized the pattern, and remembered the nights she’d spent speculating what trials brave Luna had endured to get them-

-and also noticed there was a sort of a seam in between her cheek and the surface of Nightmare Moon’s eye, as though the surface wasn’t quite flush with the inside of the eyelid.

“The prophecy that foretold my return? A thousand years ago, Celestia commissioned it. You were only meant to perform the studies of deep magical theory that would help her calculate where and how I would arrive.”

Twilight nodded. “The statue where the prophecy was hidden. It was protected by a modern stealth spell. Celestia’s. She never needed me to complete the model, because she already had the missing piece.”

Nightmare Moon’s smile widened. “She thought she did, at least. Celestia was confident she knew the place of my arrival outside of Ponyville, and that I would be so drained after a long flight through the Outer Shells that she could dispatch me alone. Quietly. Without anypony needing to know. The disgrace of one Dr. Twilight Sparkle when my predicted return went unobserved… never entered into her calculation. But she withheld too much, and your research traveled paths other than what she intended, and when you learned the secret of how my spell worked on your own, it was too late to make any difference.” She leaned in very, very close, her muzzle almost-but-not-quite touching Twilight’s. “Celestia took only what she wanted from you, and didn’t give you what you needed. The fact that you weren’t able to predict the nature of my return in time is her fault and hers alone.”

Twilight stood, and began pacing small circles in the center of the room. “I… want to argue with you but I’m not sure that I can…” The sky outside was now thick with revenants, hovering silently on their bat-like wings. They all watched her as she moved, tracking her perfectly just like Nightmare Moon herself-

-because what was looking out through their empty, blue-lit eye sockets was Nightmare Moon herself, watching Twilight and not watching anything else-

The creature across from her stood again in a single fluid motion, all silky darkness and shimmering ether. “Fight alongside me, Twilight Sparkle. Turn your back on Celestia and reclaim the recognition you deserve.”

“And what do you get from me?” Twilight abandoned her circling and began tracing a wider arc pattern-

-and as she walked, Nightmare Moon turned to keep her damaged flank always out of Twilight’s view. That meant that as long as Twilight stood about where she was standing… now, the alicorn would be facing away from the stairwell that served as the tower’s only entrance-

“You have a great deal to offer me,” said Nightmare Moon, “My sight of the changes undertaken in the Waking World these last thousand years has been limited, after all. You understand that better than anypony. A knowledgeable adviser such as yourself could be a great boon to the cause of the Lunar Republic. And, what’s more…” she stepped another body-length closer to Twilight, again nearly touching the smaller unicorn. “I know you find me… fascinating. I’ve seen your dreams, remember?” Twilight knew she was shaking-

She hoped Nightmare Moon would take it for exhaustion, or nerves. She’d be right about the last one, in fact, even if she was ignorant of the cause-

“All I’m proposing is that if you answer some of my questions, I’ll gladly do whatever I can to answer some of yours. I will show you all that is hidden by the light of day, Twilight, and you may learn everything about me that was lost in the night.”

-there was movement further back down the stairwell. Nothing audible -Twilight knew the mares from Ponyville were better than that- but movement nonetheless. She forced herself not to look, conscious of those flat, fake eyes boring into her own-

Twilight knelt before Nightmare Moon in a deep, old-fashioned bow-

-a bow that put her curled-back hoof within grabbing distance of the dagger she’d slipped into her tunic back in Fluttershy’s cottage-

“What do I need to do… My Sovereign?”

Nightmare Moon smiled again. “Those five ponies in the Solarium. The locals who came with you. I’d like for you to go back down to the chamber and kill each of them. You’ll be in no danger from them, as I’ll be right behind you, but I’d like to see that you’re sufficiently… committed to preserving the freedom of the Republic from those who might still cling to the old ways.”

“I’d love to,” said Twilight. She stood again-

-careful to keep the hilt of the dagger grasped in the frog of her left hoof-

“But it’s a little more complicated than that.”

-The Elements were indestructible. She’d made sure all of the others knew that, and for the first time in her life Twilight was willing to trust another pony to figure out what that meant- that what Nightmare Moon had destroyed hadn’t been the Elements at all-

“You see, I don’t think those ponies are in the Solarium any more.”

They hadn’t had time to arrange any kind of signal beforehand. They hadn’t needed to. As soon as Twilight finished speaking, Applejack and Rainbow Dash charged around the corner of the staircase, followed by Pinkie Pie, Rarity, and finally Fluttershy.

Nightmare Moon twisted around, impossibly fast, wings snapping out and hooves raised to strike… and as soon as she did Twilight brought her own hoof up and let go of the dagger. It had no mana charge for the anti-magic field to sap; no complicated alchemical reactions to muddle; indeed it had no moving parts at all. It was just a very fast, very sharp piece of metal, and with her own wards and abilities suppressed by the disjunctions she’d cast there wasn’t a great deal Nightmare Moon could do about it.


It was a better throw than Twilight had thought herself capable of executing.

The dagger, tumbling from having been lobbed underhoof, slashed blade-first across Nightmare Moon’s right eye socket from her eyebrow to midway down her muzzle. The alicorn whirled back towards Twilight and snarled viciously- or at least that’s what Twilight figured the sound was supposed to be, since when a pony snarled she didn’t usually crackle and hiss- but she wasn’t blinded or bleeding like the mage had expected. Instead, the inky black coat and most of her eye itself seemed to have split and peeled away like a drumskin under too much tension; underneath a blue, equine eye rolled undirected beneath a half-closed lid, the pupil unnaturally dilated.

If the alicorn was in any way bothered she gave no sign. Instead the buzzing of the antimagic field cut out a split-second before she spread her wings out, a dense sheet of lightning crackling between them, but Twilight had been waiting for that. The unicorn shouted the final syllable of her teleportation spell and was gone in an instant, reappearing directly in front of the odd, hexagonal purple gem Pinkie Pie had just thrown.

Nightmare Moon struggled to turn around, her greater size suddenly a liability in the now-cramped space of the chamber, as Twilight leaped, slid, and scrabbled to reach the gem, hauling herself forward with desperate, wiry strength.

The alicorn managed to turn just as Twilight’s hoof made contact.


That one blue eye was swiveling under its own power now, even as a slitted teal shell was taking form overtop of it, the wound knitting itself closed one shadowy, iridescent strand at a time. It focused on Twilight, then on the Element.

“No… no!” Nightmare Moon shouted, and there was no mistaking the absolute terror in her voice, and Twilight suddenly wondered if the creature speaking those words was Nightmare Moon at all any more.


The Element -if that was really what it was- lifted off the floor, rippling and shifting into a six-pointed magenta star as fine gold wire seemed to materialize from thin air around it, forming a structure not unlike a tiara.

Twilight didn’t remember how, or what Nightmare Moon or the others could possibly have been doing in the interim, but somehow she managed to put it on.


Nightmare Moon stood rampant before her, horn glowing and wings flared, front hooves raised to strike out at her and her friends, sharp-toothed mouth wide open in a horrified scream, utterly immobile. Everything was immobile- from the rubble kicked up by the alicorn’s last, horribly misaimed spell, to the revenants falling to pieces just outside, to the trees of the Everfree, to the twinkling of the stars in the sky above, to Twilight’s own heartbeat. There was a time when that might have concerned her, but that was long ago. What she was now didn’t need a heart to beat, or muscles to move or eyes to see. There was a sense of being watched, of expectation without any clear source, but it wasn’t threatening. Nothing could threaten Twilight now, with reality itself holding its breath and waiting for her to give it its next instruction. A brilliant light suffused the entire chamber, and Twilight realized it was coming from the six of them. Everything else seemed to fade in that light; colors desaturating and shadows stretching away from her before vanishing completely, but paradoxically she could still see perfectly well. In fact, she could see more clearly than she ever had before, the infinite universe laid out in front of her like an architectural blueprint, all the inaccuracies and distractions of her equine visual system removed and only the superstructure left.

Twilight realized she could easily banish Nightmare Moon permanently in this state, or with the same minuscule expenditure of effort kill her outright, or reduce her to something that maggots in the deepest pits of Tartarus would turn away from in contempt. But she could also see what her friends were doing, how they focused their attention- to call it a color would be inaccurate, but no language had words for what it should have been called- not on Nightmare Moon herself but on the smaller, skeletal mare just underneath her skin.

Twilight didn’t want to keep the others waiting, so she went ahead and made her decision.

If there’s anything at all left of Luna inside of Nightmare Moon, I want that Luna back.

The light got a lot brighter very quickly, and then went away again, and the universe continued on along the path where it had originally been set, only now a certain volume of flesh and a certain volume of something that was not flesh of any kind were again separated where they had once been commingled.


Twilight Sparkle gasped, suddenly remembering -why had she forgotten? Had she forgotten the reason too?- what it was like to have hooves and skin and eyes and lungs. She had come a long way -they all had, together- and she was very, very tired.

The last thing she remembered was a midnight-blue alicorn curled up on the stone plinth in front of her whispering “Sister, we are… so, so sorry…” before the exhaustion overtook her completely and she lost consciousness.