Magic's Birth: The Sisters' Memories

by The Psychopath


Wilderness of the Black

The forests of the black were a thick molasses of gray snow and strange colored plants. Much like the trees, they were all mostly shades of whites, blacks, and grays. There weren't very many creatures that were easy to spot, even to the two machines. Tiny little gray things slithered through the black and white foliage, throwing about the leaves and snow everywhere. Long, spindly vines curled onto themselves when the sisters poked them, trying their best to escape the perceived attackers.

Luna happened upon a group of very small plants with cone tops. She noticed that a lot of them had been nibbled by local fauna, with many missing tiny pieces of themselves in random places and various amounts. Scattered all about them were white lumps sticking out of the ground. Lumps that didn't look like vegetation. The machine lowered herself and tugged on one, plucking it out with relative ease. They were bones. She witnessed her sister poke one and get doused in an explosion of yellow and pink sparkles. Much like the snow, the sparkles slid off her body, leaving behind a deflated plant with nothing to show for its display.

"They eat bones?" Luna wondered aloud.

"Where would they get them?" Celestia added.

Luna checked her data storage, looked at her sister, then shrugged. Celestia imitated the action.

"Should we continue exploring?" Luna asked.

"There's nothing for us to aid with at the farm. the makers were explicit on that, I think," Celestia answered.

"But Galah was left behind," Luna added with a tinge of worry.

"I think he can manage. Rahllup couldn't hurt him, remember?" Celestia said.

Luna nodded. "Then let's continue gathering information of this place for those of the blue." She looked around and tilted her head. "I have found no traces of the giant creatures we witnessed yesterday."

Celestia kicked another mushroom that exploded angrily at her. "The snow covers the tracks. Too much snow," she grumbled.

They resumed their traveling, coming upon six-legged, skittish creatures with four jet-black eyes shaped like horizontal rectangles. They were covered in blackish-gray fur and had tiny antler-esque growths along the back of their necks culminating into two giant growths on their heads. They bolted away when they witnessed the two machines approaching, leaving behind a rather wide stream of water. It had gray particles flowing down its body, with black plant life beneath the water and a prickly residue growing on its banks. Luna reached into the water, but her arm started emitting blue sparks that caused the river to bubble angrily in response. The blue machine was quick to remove her arm and check for damages. Nothing.

"The river is filled with black energy," she noted. "It doesn't like me."

Celestia dropped a rock she was ready to drop on a creature in the river and looked at her sister. "There are no damages, but I have no information regarding such interactions." She tapped one of her chassis plates. "Perhaps it's a more natural form of black? Maybe the energies don't work together?"

"But Dissonance has both, and other such interactions have yet to occur," Luna argued.

Celestia remained silent. They decided to resume their escapade, but in the corner of Luna's eyes, perhaps unaware, the area where the now sparkling water had hit started to melt away the snow and reach the black, near-lifeless soil beneath. A thick patch of green grass grew from the patch, and while they pushed upright in a flash, they quickly turned to black ash, coating the ground with a shorter patch of snow.


"What was that?" Twilight blurted out. She was pointing at the images.

"What was what?" Luna asked in surprise.

"You didn't see? In the corner of your eye?" Twilight added frantically. She pointed using a magically created arrow. "Right there!"

The two sisters leaned in, focusing their optics as best as they could, and Luna replayed the image multiple times. The lights of their body glowed brighter and brighter as the realization hit them.

"Could it be...?!" Celestia said in a hushed tone.

Luna's lights flickered then dimmed. "No. If it were just those we still wouldn't be here, and yet...The grass died immediately."

The white machine hummed pensively.

"I guess we need more information," Twilight supposed. "There's clearly a catalyst," she pondered.

"There's more than one, most likely," Luna added.

"I hadn't even thought of those," Celestia said with astonishment. "Do you believe it could be elements that came to be while we were asleep?"

Luna crossed her arms. "The prevalence of scientific elements now that didn't exist back then make me wonder a lot of things. The black and blue energies alone couldn't have caused that."


The deeper into the wooded areas the two got, the thicker it became. For Celestia, this area was a very remote location or didn't have many resources, which is why it was occupied like in the Blue. That said, the two often came across ruins of old buildings of stone, concrete, or wood. One such wooden cabin was still freshly being eaten away by nature. Its glass windows had been punctured by enthusiastic vines while others had fallen and been buried. The roof was bending inwards but had yet to cave in.

Curious, the two went inside, expecting a similar layout to home of the farmers. Instead they found a rather empty-but-large area overgrown with weeds, moss, and a few tree sprouts.

"You think the maker who lived here left?" Luna asked aloud.

"The house is in bad condition. I would imagine so." Celestia poked a closet sitting against a wall and caused the rusty hinges clinging only by force of will after all this time snap off. "Cloths are still here. Sleep and dryness would have been difficult without them."

Several beds were placed around the single room cabin, but they had all collapsed from rot, and their mattresses were black with mold. In fact, to the sisters, it seemed that whomever lived here left behind all their things, and likely in a hurry since tables and chairs had been thrown and overturned. Tableware had equally been shattered and tossed about randomly.

"I don't like this place," Luna complained. "There isn't much to explore."

"Then let's continue our wandering in the forest," Celestia suggested.

More plants and animals wandering around. Luna managed to catch a tiny furry creature no bigger than her ring hands with four legs, seemingly no ears, and a long and pokey tail. "Look at this tiny thing, sister," she called out.

Celestia floated in and leaned in to see the angry creature desperately trying to poke out Luna's eyes; eyes which she didn't have. The white machine's systems whirred.

"It seems aggressive," she noted.

"I don't understand why," Luna lamented. She stared at the tiny creature. "Perhaps I should soothe it as I did the infants of my owners?"

Celestia shrugged and nodded at the same time.

The blue machine held the tiny, hissing 'beast' in her arms and gently leaned from side to side, moving her whole body like a pendulum. The creature wasn't having it and, with an exhausted and limp slip of her arm, jumped off and skittered away, leaving the two confused.

"I don't understand why it ran away," Celestia said. She looked to her sister. "You were not harming it in any way."

"Maybe it was just skittish?" Luna pondered as she watched it scamper away.

Perplexed, the two left the creature alone and continue to move about, choosing to climb the increasingly hilly area. Several cliff faces had made themselves known among the landscape and the trees, leaving behind tiny fissures that only small animals could really enter, much to the sisters' dissatisfaction. They noticed discoloration in several parts of the exposed stone layers at various different sites. One had been blackened in a circle, and the stone carved through. Another had this in its topmost corner, creating a scooped out zone. A few of this circles had borne several very long black vines covered in tiny thorns and sporting very sharp leaves that chopped away at the stone they were growing off of as the wind blew.

Curious as to such a thing, the two started scrounging about in the tall grass and bushes. They would lift up rocks to see if any of the weird vines or signs of discoloration were present. Celestia had found a tiny bug that sprayed her 'eyes' with a steaming green sludge. She just dropped the stone on it and moved on.

"I don't see anymore," Celestia said as she looked around.

"I'll survey from above," Luna said. "Maybe I'll get a better view."

She felt the energy in her body coursing faster and faster as she rose higher and higher and was unsure of where the sudden draw of power was coming from. It felt like she wanted to keep exploring and discovering more. It was a similar sensation to when she explored the city of the Blue. The city was far, far away, and only its tallest buildings were still visible. Luna hadn't realized just how far from everyone the two had gotten. Various raised cliffs broke the landscape of trees, seemingly pushing them up against their will. There wasn't much else besides some plants and movement in the trees implying various large creatures might be traveling through them.

Luna would have frowned if she had a face. She wasn't interested in going any higher than she already was, preferring to stay as inconspicuous as she could despite the way she stuck out. "Tree, tree, tree, segmented metallic pillar collapsed onto a caved-in cliff side, tree, rocks...I can't see anything. The angling of the hills makes it too hard to see without going any higher," she told her sister after lowering back down.

Celestia was enveloped in the need to analyze a shiny rock she had found. "Really?" The white machine dropped the rock. "Well, let's keep looking around for more of the fauna and flora. "Perhaps I will have more information to facilitate recompiling of my data."

Luna was confused. "Why would you say that?"

"I've been doing it since we came here. References make it easier," Celestia answered with a happier tone. She bounced up and down. "And I've been registering and labeling everything we've been finding and seeing here! Most of the information I managed to recover was either wrong or outdated." She picked up some snow and let it drop. "Data mentioned the lands of the black being greener and the forests as very small and weak compared to those of the blue."

The blue machine looked up and up and up the nearest tree. "But most of these are at least three times the size of the makers' farmhouse."

Celestia giggled and her systems glitched, causing a few spastic movements. "I wonder what else there is to find here? I'm looking for plant life specifically right now."

Celestia sped off with an enthusiasm that Luna hadn't seen since she first met her sister. Some time later, the two broke through the canopy to a steep, bumpy hillside overtaken by the white fungi they had seen earlier. In fact, they seemed to have devoured acres of land by themselves and were steadily growing bigger and bigger. Some had turned brown as they decomposed, however, letting their inner spores and slime coagulate into rivulets leading from their host to the ground. There were also various strangely shaped mounds covered in snow and the grayish, leafy ferns of the area. They were hiding something.

"Oooooh, so this is where the bones came from," Celestia nodded to herself.

Luna felt her arms shaking again. The sea of mushrooms covered bones emerged at varying levels from the black dirt. The biggest mushrooms had covered the most amount of them, and larger, fractured bones were tangled in their roots. They littered the area, and there were no signs of any animal save insects and some fiber-like plants slowly inching their way through the landscape somehow.

"That's a lot of mushrooms and bones," Luna said. "Maybe they grow from the bones?"

Celestia nodded. "They probably do." She poked a mushroom and giggled at the spray of spores, prompting an annoyed groan from Luna who checked herself after that unexpected glitch.

"Odd," she thought aloud. "So many diagnostics to run," she lamented with a fake sigh and drooping of her arms.

The sisters looked to the giant metallic object and hummed. Curious, they finally approached it. Celestia placed her arms on it, creating a loud vibration that traveled through it and scared off some animals that had made their home on it.

"It's made of metal," she noted.

"Yes, but it's not a plant or animal," Luna said.

The white machine scrutinized the rusted metal layers and looked down at the base. Slowly she started to rise upwards, analyzing every minute detail and wiping off any dead plant matter and snow that had accumulated atop its frame. Luna looked on past the horizon and noticed various other parts of the forest had been left bare with no trees. Rarer were strange chimneys spewing an acrid black screen into the air. To her it seemed the makers of the Black worked in this forest, but she wasn't sure for what.

The blue robot slowly rose up to rejoin her sister who was floating at a joint of the metal part. Celestia was currently antagonizing a small, feathered quadruped with a beak hiding in holes of the collapsed cliff rubble. It was trying to claw at her with the two fingers jutting from its wings.

"This is very high up," Luna said.

"You can see a lot from here," Celestia said without taking her eyes away from her new discovery. "Would be a nice place to build a home for the makers here. My database shows that some like homes in high places so they can see many things all around and have a large amount of sunlight."

Luna rubbed her chin pensively and leaned in to better look at the tiny creature that her sister became enamored with.