(♫)
Dear Twilight:
I’m sorry, you told them WHAT??
We don’t even know if this journal of Luna’s ever actually existed, much less whether or not it survived. What are you going to do if we can’t find it? What are you going to do if we can find it and it’s not legible, or it doesn’t say what you think it says?
– Your loyal (if slightly terrified) assistant:
Spike
Spike:
I realize the journal might not exist, or is contents may fall short of seismic, but I’m convinced that anything less than a full account of Nightmare Moon’s takeover of Princess Luna, with all the gory details and straight from the horse’s mouth (as it were), is not going to convince those Cabinet ponies. They’re awful! I don’t know why Celestia ever let them into the city, much less allowed them to take government positions! I’ll see if I can find where the transcript of our meeting went, and send it to you.
As such, consider promising the journal to be a calculated risk.
–Twilight
Dear Twilight:
I don’t think that’s how a calculated risk works. And Celestia wouldn’t have appointed those ponies if they weren’t good at their jobs. In fact, the idea of a pony with zero social graces and a comprehensive knowledge of a very narrow field being given great authority sounds familiar to me for some reason… I’m sure I’ll think of it sooner or later.
– Your loyal assistant
Spike
Spike:
Well if you don’t take this a bit more seriously we’re guaranteed to fail, because Celestia has another meeting in ten minutes and where she goes, my firelink connection goes! Can you please just send me what I asked for?
–Twilight
It was a six-hour train ride from Canterlot to Fillydelphia. Twilight sprung for first class, and spent the whole trip effectively sealed in her cabin, reading voraciously. She’d be speaking with actual witnesses to the Lunar Rebellions soon enough, of course, but she wanted to be able to ask the right questions. She began in more or less chronological order. Spike had helpfully flagged several entries in Paper Clip’s journals with red sticky-notes color coded as “context”:
Throughout the spring and early summer of 98 CE, Clip and his co-conspirators had grown increasingly concerned about the influx of Lunar scouts and untransformed, covert troops into the city of Everfree. He’d feared, correctly as it turned out, that such a buildup of forces might have been prelude to an all-out attempt on the capitol- a decapitation strike after which the outlying Equestrian provinces might very well rally en masse behind Luna’s banner, against the hated Council of Five Hundred.
With a great deal of work, some of the newly-arrived Lunars became the Cabal’s own informants. They told tales of a major encampment of regular troops -or the closest thing the Lunar Rebellion got to regular troops, anyway- some ways outside of the city outskirts. The clerk, however, was skeptical: “I have next to no confidence in the reconnaissance and intelligence capacity of Celestia’s loyalists- after all, I’m still here and fully employed by the Council Staff despite having committed high treason a dozen times over. But the idea of an entire encampment of thousands (or even tens of thousands) of Lunar troops having escaped notice directly outside of the largest city in Equestria would strain even the military’s incompetence!”
A week later, another entry touched on the same topic:
“Escritoire has conveyed my skepticism to her sources, and to a mare they all claim we cannot spot the camp because a spell has made it invisible. Of course, none have actually been to this camp and witnessed its properties firsthoof; these are, by and large, Everfree natives inducted into the Rebellion by more veteran operatives. It’s possible this whole ‘invisible camp’ is just a tale concocted by still more senior Rebel leaders to drive ponies like ourselves off their trail. If so, it doesn’t seem to be working, as my friend on the Council confirmed the Intelligence Committee has no knowledge of any encampment whatsoever. It wouldn’t be the first time the Lunars’ ruses have proven too subtle for their own good, however…
Will contact supporters at the Mages’ College tomorrow and see if they can determine whether such a spell is even thaumatologically possible.”
The next few pages were a mishmash of equations pertaining to various types of illusion spells, in a few different varieties of mouth- and hornwriting. The methods were simple and archaic, but Twilight agreed with the anonymous mages’ conclusions: she wasn’t sure how a pony would go about concealing such a large military encampment for so long now, much less using only the magic available one thousand years ago.
After that, though, as Last Seed ticked into Sun’s Height, Clip became a bit more circumspect: “I find myself returning once again to these suspicions of a Lunar camp outside the city, hidden by some unusual means. Magic is always surprising me… who’s to say what is and isn’t ‘impossible’? Were the Lunars to have such a capability, their sudden appearance in great numbers during the riots in Baltimare and Cloud’s Dale would in fact be a great deal less inexplicable… I think it’s worth reexamining.”
The very next day included the first entry Twilight had seen flagged as referring to Luna’s journal directly:
“Firefly found this mare, oddly enough! A second-hoof story, like the others, although this one includes an unusual amount of detail. The mare says her contact speaks more than he should. I’ve forwarded the meeting-place details to a Watch constable we can trust, but what interests me is the description of Princess Luna. If our source is to be believed, she is indeed in residence just outside the city, but has been spending less and less time among her troops. Rather, she disappears to some yet more remote redoubt for most of the night, bringing along only a few of her closest generals if anypony, and it’s here that she keeps the diaries I remember so well. There is even some sort of ‘challenge’ she has set for her officers to find her at this place, in favor of some reward, although our source’s source said nothing about what exactly this involves.”
Ultimately, however, Clip and his co-conspirators had elected not to take action:
“We have no solid, incontrovertible evidence this camp even exists, and if it does we don’t know where it’s located, and even if we did I’m unsure what we could do about it. Our Dayguard are in no condition to confront ten thousand Lunar veterans in a direct assault. Should we instead arrange for the Loyalists to come across their location, they would no doubt attempt to crush the Lunars immediately under a tide of overly-equipped, poorly-trained bodies. The Lunars would in turn retreat, and continue to prolong this conflict- and if they are anywhere near a populated area, the collateral death toll could be substantial. There simply isn’t a good option here.”
After that, Twilight skimmed through the densely-packed entries leading up to the Battle Of Everfree proper. References to Luna herself were few and far between in that period, and mostly in the abstract, the Cabal growing less and less concerned with the alicorn’s personal location than they were with what her next move was going to be. Only in the aftermath, with Luna banished and Everfree City now the Everfree Forest, did the scale of the Lunars’ attack offer incontrovertible proof that a major encampment had indeed been somewhere nearby. Twilight thought it was to Paper Clip’s immense credit that he never once stopped to blame anypony for his mistake, and instead pushed forward with interviewing the Lunar survivors who had fallen into his care:
“Questioned separately, all ten of the messengers tell the same story. Not only was the encampment hidden from visual detection by magical means, but there was supposedly a sort of mnemonic or ‘psycho-mantic’ spell over the entire area. Anypony who had yet to take Luna’s Oath would forget the exact location of the compound not long after leaving it. Supposedly, a similar but more powerful enchantment was applied to the redoubt where Luna herself is said to have spent most of her time. While (to our witnesses’ knowledge) no explanation for this measure was ever given, I don’t have much difficulty figuring one: a pony who doesn’t know the location of the encampment can never reveal it even under the most severe torture. After all, the Council did indeed hold captive in Everfree, at the time of its collapse, some few hundred suspected Lunar agents- and perhaps five or six were in fact the genuine article!”
This, finally, was where Paper Clip’s interest in Luna’s final writings truly developed; he filled entire pages with speculation of what may have caused the Princess to “turn” in those final, few, fateful weeks before the attack on Everfree commenced. His interviews led him to a region of farmland west of the city’s ruins, known as the Hardfrog Valley- a large area to cover, but small compared to the whole of Equestria, and as precise as the curious amnestic spell over the camp allowed.
Unfortunately, it had been hit hard by the Fall: as space inside Everfree twisted and the ground beneath it buckled, the Snowbourn River that ran from Canterlot down through the City started running right back out again. Pages of maps and hydrological diagrams described with an engineer’s clear, clinical detachment the calamitous flooding that followed. In less than a day the rich farmland of the Valley was all either submerged or washed away. Even more refugees poured into the sprawling camp outside of Everfree, already-strained food stores suddenly had no means of resupply- and any remaining traces of either the camp or Princess Luna’s final redoubt were buried.
Years passed, preserved for Twilight as ledgers and organizational charts. The water receded somewhat, but Paper Clip’s interest in the site never fully went away. He considered sending the government’s engineers to drain it, once he had the authority to order projects on that scale, but the technical challenges were daunting and resources were needed more urgently elsewhere. Twilight was no expert on geomancy, but she doubted the Hardfrog Valley could be reclaimed with modern techniques, much less those of a millennium ago. Paper Clip didn’t give up, though, and he didn’t forget. The very last entries Princess Celestia had on file, written in 126 CE just before the stallion had retired from government business and gone back to teach at the mining school in Frankpferd, contained one more mention of it:
“I realize it’s likely that nothing has survived save, perhaps, for a few forgotten blades that are even now quietly turning to rust. But the Lunars have surprised me before, and questions about who might one day read the last coherent words of Princess Luna continue to trouble me. It galls me to leave any job half-finished, but I’ve told Celestia a thousand times that we can’t spend the rest of our lives (hers of course being effectively boundless) chasing after the ghosts of what was. We need to focus on the ponies alive right now, and on generations to come, and I’d be a fool if I didn’t heed my own advice. In any case, working and studying covertly at the site has become untenable, as the area around it has started to acquire something resembling settlement once again. I hear that now, the locals have abandoned the original name and started calling it ‘Froggy Bottom Bog’…”
It was a start.
(♫)
There wasn’t much to the station at Fillydelphia Harbor, really: just a big open stone platform near the tracks, covered by a wooden roof. Before the Lunars had taken up residence, it had been used mostly to offload cargo and the occasional massed group of sailors, as part of the facility’s original function as a naval yard. The establishment of a dedicated stop along the Canterlot-Fillydelphia circuit, and the special Government trains now running directly from Ponyville every six hours for the exclusive use of project staff, probably constituted more traffic in a week than it had seen in its entire previous existence.
Twilight Sparkle set hoof on it a little after ten in the evening. Forward March was waiting for her, perched on one of the newly-installed wooden benches.
“Twilight! ‘Bout time you bothered to show up…” The medic called out, then laughed and cantered over to Twilight’s section of the platform. “My crew’s been worried you’d forgotten about us.”
Twilight shook her head, and as the train behind her wheezed back into motion she started across the platform to meet Forward halfway. “I really wanted to come up here a week ago, but… things in Ponyville’ve been kind of chaotic, and then all this stuff up in Canterlot started happening, and…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know how it is…” Forward grumbled, then waved with one hoof towards the ramp at the end of the platform. For the first time, Twilight noticed it was flanked on either side by a pair of blue-armored, gray-coated Lunar Guards in beaked helmets, the first on each side holding a halberd topped with a dark blue banner showing a white crescent moon. “After you?”
They started walking.
The area immediately surrounding Twilight wasn’t very interesting- mostly empty grass and cobblestone, staging areas that currently had nothing to stage. Beyond that, however, sat a neat little assembly of smart white clapboard buildings intermixed with generous green space, which had up until recently likely been administration centers or officers’ quarters. Now, they housed the two-hundred-and-change survivors of the Lunar Rebellions. Ordinary ponies in Academy sashes and military uniforms mingled in roughly equal numbers with their slit-eyed gray charges- who, after all, were indeed nocturnal and had every reason to be out and about at this hour. Some cleaned armor and weapons; or mock-fought against dummies, Army grunts, and each other. Some were reading, or engaged in games with cards and dice- some conventional, and some that Twilight only recognized from historical texts. Some just sat on the grass and talked. Forward March had seen to it that they were allowed complete liberty to move around the compound, although on more or less the honor system they had agreed not to leave it without some kind of modern-era escort. Everypony, Lunar or otherwise, wanted to avoid soldiers picking a fight with one of Fillydelphia’s trolley cars or similar misadventures.
All of that did, however, make Twilight quite curious about the function of the big heavy chain-link fences, complete with wide upper sections to deter fliers and fully-armored Army guards every few dozen meters.
“So, can I see Princess Luna?” she finally asked Forward March.
“I don’t think you could avoid seeing her much longer. She’s been asking about you every day- or, well, every night, I guess- since she set up shop here.”
Twilight nodded. Princess Celestia had been calling on her sister about every four or five days, which was about as much as the older alicorn’s schedule could possibly allow. Luna had also been offered a suite in the government complex in Canterlot, which was the closest thing Equestria had any more to an actual palace, but insisted on remaining near her followers, and so in Fillydelphia she had stayed. Now that Celestia was on her way out of the country, it made sense that Luna would be making use of the time to catch up with other business.
They were passing one of the main entrance gates, now, and conversation necessarily had to stop on account of the sheer din being generated by the ponies crowded on the other side. Twilight wasn’t entirely sure whether to call them fans, demonstrators, or cultists. Some wore replica Lunar military gear of wildly varying quality; some had dyed their coats gray and their manes black, and some of those had gone to the extra effort of contact lenses or glamer spells to give themselves slitted yellow eyes. Nearly all brandished some sort of moon-related icon or symbol or a copy of this or that ancient portrait. There were also more than a few signs- “LET OUR BROTHERS GO” and “CHILDREN OF THE MOON SHOULD NOT BE UNDER THE YOLK OF THE SUN”[sic] were among the more readable.
Twilight recognized the sentiment, from the letters to the editor the Times of Canterlot for some reason felt compelled to publish over and over again despite their all containing basically the same content. She wondered if any of the ponies agitating for the Lunar survivors to be “granted greater autonomy” and released from the “Fillydelphia Zoo” realized that those survivors had little if any modern money, and some couldn’t read. They were also, it had been discovered, carriers of any number of different diseases -from dourine to feather flu- that had run rampant in the First Century but were all but unheard of in modern times. Forward and the other medics had even speculated that their transformed nature had increased their resistance; like real bats, they developed mild symptoms where other creatures would have died. Intensive treatment had already resolved the worst of it, but there were still enough Lunars sick with enough things that putting them in contact with the general population -especially the sections of the population that didn’t listen when sensible ponies in authority told them to stay away from things-could easily spark some kind of epidemic.
That explained the fences, at least. They weren’t to keep the Lunars in; they were to keep the rest of Equestria out.
As Twilight and Forward passed closest to the gate, one particularly determined pegasus mare in a horrible brown suit tried to shoulder her way to the front, and the more-or-less organized chanting briefly disintegrated into shouts of protest. “Watch where you’re going, dumbass!” the newsmare snapped in a vaguely familiar voice.
“Fie, and double dumbass upon thee!” replied a bat-winged stallion sitting on the curb nearby. In fact, there were a lot of Lunars sitting near the entrance, and watching the proceedings with apparent amusement. Twilight found herself wondering if the Fillydelphia pamphleteers were in fact right about this entire compound being a zoo, and simply mistaken as to which side of the cage they were on.
“Well, at least we aren’t giving the Lunars a falsely idealistic impression of modern society,” she muttered, once they were far enough away from the mob that she could hear the sound of her own voice again.
They finally stopped in front of a somewhat grander building- perhaps an Admiral’s quarters, originally- with the front door flanked by two beak-helmeted Lunars as well as a pair of Royal Guard MPs. Forward March stepped up to the Guardsmare with a Corporal’s stripes, waved something on an official-looking piece of paper under her muzzle, and then nodded. “Yeah. OK. Good.” She flicked a wing at Twilight, then at the door. “Princess Luna’s expecting you. Down the hall, to the right. Umm… have fun?”
One of the beak-helmeted Night Guards opened the door for her, and Twilight stepped inside. She followed the yellow-eyed soldier down a short hallway paneled in fine dark oak and laid with deep blue carpet that smelled brand new, to a spacious study that seemed to be half bookshelves and half grand bay windows. Princess Luna sat at the desk in the center, every spare millimeter of its polished surface covered in books at least two layers thick. Most of them were reference texts on history, thaumatology, geography, and a thousand other subjects, although among them Twilight also spotted more than a few popular novels. For just a moment she sought out her mother’s name on any of the spines, and was briefly disappointed when it proved to be completely absent. Perhaps somepony had decided that alternate-historical fiction would be a bit much to handle for a mare who was still trying to catch up to the real thing.
Even after having read Forward March’s detailed reports on Luna’s recovery, Twilight was nonetheless shocked by how healthy the Princess looked. When they’d first pulled her out of the Castle of the Two Sisters, there had been quite a few doctors wondering if Luna would make it through her first night. Now, to Twilight’s admittedly cursory examination, she just looked like a smaller, rather bony alicorn with a cornflower-blue mane, sitting upright in a chair entirely under her own power.
Luna looked up as soon as the door opened, and called out in a firm, clear, and surprisingly musical voice: “Twilight Sparkle! Aye, thou hast… umm… you have at last deigned to visit Us?” She reached up one hoof shod in dark blue metal and tapped the simple, elegant collar that hung at her neck. Both, according to Forward’s reports, were modeled after First Century originals and forged according to Luna’s own exacting specifications by the Guard armory works on this very base. “We praise thee for thine generosity and forbearance in accommodating Our followers and Ourselves,” then she laughed, “We imagine thou hast more than thine share of questions for Us. It is only appropriate that We do Our best to answer.”
“Hello, Your Grace,” before anypony could prompt her, Twilight bent her forelegs into a deep bow, silently thankful for the thick carpeting. “I wanted to come here earlier, but there’s been… complications. Has Major Forward told Your Grace about the situation with the Cabinet?”
Luna laughed again, “Thou needst not hold thine self so formally, Twilight Sparkle. Thine way is simpler, and We shall need to learn it… sooner… or… after?”
Now it was Twilight’s turn to laugh, as she pulled herself back up onto all fours. “Close enough.”
“But… aye. We have heard of Tia’s troubles with her Cabinet. Perhaps some things have not changed overmuch from Our era…”
Twilight shook her head. “I wouldn’t quite go that far… but I do think I could use Your Grace’s help to get them to come around.” That, and maybe a few blasting-crystals.
Luna nodded, and then her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Verily, we understand. Shall We tell these august bodies of Our sleepless weeks in the field, of visions and whispering, of shadow-stuff worming its way down Our throat and pressing against Our eyeballs? Will that be enough to convince them?”
“I… don’t think that’ll be necessary,” the scholar quickly amended. She could already imagine Firelight’s anonymous ‘analyst’ sneering at that sort of testimony as… perhaps, ‘the hallucinations of a deeply mentally unstable mare coached into a marginally more coherent form by Twilight Sparkle’s team of revisionist psychotherapists’. “I’m more looking into First Century textual sources. Things that can be dated and shown to have come before me, or anypony else who’d ever considered restoring Your Grace to power.”
“Aye… such things would be much harder to accuse of bias, We think.” The Princess’s eyes slid half-closed, and she leaned backward in her chair. For a moment Twilight thought Luna had fallen asleep, but then she continued, “’tis fortunate that a senior clerk of Ours, well before the Rebellions, imbued in Us the habit of constantly writing things down.”
Twilight smiled as Luna sat back up again. “His name wouldn’t’ve happened to be ‘Paper Clip’ would it? Because he wrote the journal that told me about your journal.”
The warmth seemed to return to Luna’s expression all at once after that. “Oh, did he now! How is it that one quaint quote went? 'The more things change, the more they stay the same'?"
“I was just wondering… since, you know,” Feeling suddenly awkward, Twilight shifted her weight from one hoof to the other, “Clip was in Everfree for pretty much the entire Rebellion, and didn’t have a lot of information on your movements, if… well, if you knew where you’d put your notes just before the raid on the city? They might not be there now any more, of course, but that’d give us a good place to look, at least…”
“Aye- umm… yes!” Luna paused, and leaned back in her chair again, and after a few seconds began nibbling on her own lower lip. “We… We doth not recall. We remember the struggle to bring Our ponies near to the city unseen, and the nights We spent preparing, alongside them, at Our encampment, but… beyond that…” For the first time, she seemed to show real concern. “Twilight Sparkle… dost thou believe… the Elements may have done this to Us?”
“I… don’t know,” Twilight said, and she really, genuinely didn’t. She thought she and her friends had used the Elements’ power to selectively edit out all the parts of Nightmare Moon that weren’t Luna, but… how could she truly be sure that was all they had removed? Or, perhaps, if the stories about mind-altering magic surrounding the Lunar encampment were true, had Luna simply fallen under the sway of her own spell? “But if you… uhh, if Your Grace would be willing to let me talk to some of your troops about it, I might be able to get you some answers.”
“Then it shall be done.”
“Verily, hidden we were,” said Lancepesade Smoky Mirror. To Twilight’s mild surprise, she had found the unicorn swordstallion back behind one of the dining halls, divested of his armor and covered up to his knees in rich black soil, tending to a small vegetable garden. “’Twas, perhaps, Our Luna’s greatest working, before… errm…” he shifted awkwardly in place, the trowel he was holding in his telekinetic field drifting off slightly to one side, “all that happened in the City.”
“Do you have any idea how it might’ve functioned?” Twilight prompted.
“Nay, not as such. All I know is that from outside, none could see or hear our presence in the field, and that upon leaving one was… confused, for a short while, as though sleep-walking, and upon waking could not recall the way in. It was ended the night we made our push into Everfree, that we could leave as a force without our senses being muddled, and then it was restored. I remember the whole camp fading away again behind me.”
“So, even though the enchantment eliminated both information and whole chunks of experienced time from your memory… you were aware of when it was operating?”
“Aye,” Twilight thought she saw the unicorn shiver slightly, despite the warm summer night, “and ‘twas not an experience I am anxious to repeat.”
That was interesting. Princess Luna had complained of no such symptoms, and should have known more about the spell than anypony, so it was unlikely her memory loss was a result of falling victim to it. Unless it worked differently on the caster, perhaps…
“Don’t worry. I don’t care how powerful it was, that spell has to have faded away by now. If there was any trace of it left… counter-illusion magic’s advanced a lot these last thousand years. We would’ve detected it,” was all she said aloud.
“’Twere… strange,” recalled Sergeant Catseye, “a General might spend hours or half a night seeking Luna’s perch. When she came back, sometimes she was badly hurt, or stumbled about as though drunk. Some seemed… giddy, perhaps, certainly more joyous than our lot warranted… some would stumble back to their tents and sleep for the whole of the next night. But when they recovered, ‘twas as though they were… reborn, almost. They spoke more freely with Our Sovereign, and understood her when we could not. We were forbidden to ever speak to them of their ordeal, but some did, and I heard some say none could remember the path they took, nor what they got up to at its end, nor the path they took home.”
“Thank you, Captain, for agreeing to meet with me.”
Captain Vortex hovered about a meter above the parade ground, forcing Twilight and the pair of Army medics overseeing his progress to look up in order to meet his yellow-goggled eyes. “Tis… no trouble,” he said, in between breaths. He kept awkwardly drifting from side to side or up and down, and the young scholar had to stifle the urge to apologize. The last time they’d met, after all, she’d been the one to break both of his wings in three or four places each. If he was at all bothered to be talking to her now, though, he gave no indication of it. “I hear thou… seekest infor… mation on our hide-away… outside of… Everfree?”
“That’s correct. I guess we’ll start with the basics- do you know where the camp was located?”
Vortex’s leathery wings finally gave out, and he dropped to the ground with a definite thud. One of the medics hoofed him a canteen, and he downed the entire contents before getting back to all-fours. “Three… leagues north… of the oxbow bend… in the Snowborne river.”
That was progress. There was a swamp where the river used to be, now, but there were also ancient maps that charted its course and could be converted into modern coordinate systems. “So I take it you weren’t affected by the mnemonic spell over the place?”
Vortex’s eyes narrowed behind his goggles. “I never heard tell of any… ‘mnemonics’ about in our camps!”
“The spell that made ponies forget the location,” Twilight amended.
“Nay, none of the Shadowbolts were. ‘Twas one of our tasks to lead back those who had strayed from the place, when Our Luna’s signposts and riddles failed.”
“Signposts and riddles?”
“They were meant to show the way to Our Luna, I think, for there were many times towards the end of our stay there when she went to some other location. I know not where.”
“Do you remember what they… you know, looked like?”
“Some were simple. Signs cut into stones and the like. But there were also… pillars. Small, about wing-height” he held one leathery, bat-like wing straight out to the side as a demonstration, “and intricately carved.”
“Do you know where they were?”
“… Nay. In fact, I do not think I was supposed to see as much of their construction as I did. ‘Twas the domain of the illusionists and geomancers, and we were by chance billeted not far from their workshop.”
“Any could undertake the search,” said Rain Chaser, “for the reward of Our Sovereign’s favor. None who had yet to take the Oath could make any headway, though, and few of us who had taken it could make much more. The Generals could find the way, but not commonly. I went out twice and saw nothing. Some… went out and did not come back.”
“I’d like to talk with you about some of your non-combat duties, actually,” Twilight told Mage-Ensign Foxglove. The chubby little earth pony was one of several Lunar mages to have taken up nearly full-time residence in the Yard’s hastily-assembled library, and was currently surrounded by college-level geomancy and botany texts. “If I’m remembering correctly, wasn’t a lot of the basic construction of fortifications and concealment and things left up to geomancers?”
“Yes. All of us were expected to assemble our own portion of the camp, though plans were given to the officers from Our Luna.” Foxglove’s ears had swiveled in Twilight’s direction, but his eyes and muzzle remained pointed squarely at the page in front of him.
A pony after my own heart, I see! “Do you remember making any kind of… guideposts, I think they were supposed to be. Carved stone pillars?”
“Nay, though I saw them made. We were not told much that did not relate to our own duties, and I fear those who were tasked with making them… did not survive.”
Twilight paused, unsure of what to say, and finally settled on, “I’m sorry.”
“’Tis the way of things.”
“Umm… right. I know this is kind of open-ended, but, did you ever get any construction orders that were… strange, or didn’t make sense?”
That got Foxglove’s eyes off the book and refocusing out in the middle distance. “Hmmm… Aye- sorry, yes. Yes, in fact. Much of our earth-moving… many of the officers complained there was no point to our defenses, as no attacker would be able to position herself in such a way as to come up against them. And the instructions to build them were more detailed than any simple fortification ought to be.”
That almost sounded like a map, similar to the Lunar Cairns that had encoded the location of the prophecy describing Nightmare Moon’s return. Twilight reached into her saddlebags and extracted a pad of graph paper. “Can you draw them out for me?”
(♫)
“FLYING ALONGSIDE THIS THING IS AMAZING!” Rainbow Dash yelled over the roar of the Lapwing’s engines as they both soared over Froggy Bottom Bog. “IF THIS IS HOW ARCHAEOLOGY WORKS THEN GO AHEAD AND SIGN ME UP.”
“Rainbow! Rainbow!” Shouted Twilight from her seat on a crate in the airship’s cargo bay, sandwiched between a foldout plotting table and a precision airspeed meter, “You need to hit the rune on your helmet for us to be able to hear you!” She leaned out of the open bay door as far as she dared- which wasn’t very far, really, what with the undefined greenish treetops slipping past at dizzying speed below her- and tapped at the rune on her own borrowed Guard helmet as way of demonstration.
“I SAID, IT’S AMAZING TO FINALLY FLY ALONGSIDE ONE OF THESE THINGS.”
“Yes.” Twilight leaned back inside and telekinetically moved a few leather straps to keep her charts from blowing off the table. “I can tell.”
“I’M SORRY, WHAT WAS THAT? THIS AIRSHIP’S ENGINES ARE EXTREMELY LOUD.”
“THE RUNE ON THE LEFT CHIN GUARD ON YOUR HELMET. IT’S COLORED RED. YOU NEED TO TOUCH IT,” screamed Pinkie Pie. Twilight had offered the entire Town Council and all six of her friends spots on the Lapwing’s first reconnaissance fight. Rainbow Dash and the baker were the only ones who had accepted.
“OH. YEAH. OKAY, I CAN DO THAT.” There was a momentary pop in Twilight’s ears as the enchantment adjusted, and then she nearly jumped off her crate when she heard Dash scream at full volume right next to her head, “OKAY, IS THAT BETTER?”
“Yes. And… you really can just talk normally,” Pinkie admonished. “Please?”
“Hmm. Mayhap this infernal contraption hath its charms,” interjected Princess Luna, “but We do not overmuch trust it yet.” They had needed to launch a dedicated relay balloon midway between Ponyville and Fillydelphia in order to make her communication possible, but Twilight thought it was worth the effort. That sort of setup was ordinarily used for important, long-distance diplomatic summits, and likely would have been what Celestia was using now if she hadn’t felt the need to bring herself, her flagship, and several elite divisions to the Parrot Isles in a show of concrete force. However, Twilight thought that if Luna could both see and hear everything they were doing in the swamp, and be able to speak to the expedition team in turn, then it might just be possible something would jog her memory of the events that had happened there a millennium ago. The fact that Ponyville was now entering the record books as the site of either the fifth or sixth longest-distance clairauditory link in Equestrian history was just a bonus.
“I don’t really see what the problem is,” Twilight answered her, then shifted on her crate as the Lapwing pulled into a sharp turn, “I mean, it’s working, isn’t it?”
“Aye, but thou sayest this strip of electrum and crystal can do what We can do?” Luna continued, “‘Tis absurd. There must be some trickery to it, some pony beyond Our sight performing only the Moon itself knows what crafty science, and We should like dearly to speak with her. We suppose ‘tis natural that, Our having been absent for so many years, others would arise who promised to do what We have. Nonetheless, they are but pale imitations and must be recognized as such.”
Twilight shook her head, aware that Luna could pick up on the motion through her visual feed. “No, Your Grace, I’m completely serious, it’s really just a collection of ordinary spells.” She racked her brain for an appropriate First-Century analogy, and then remembered that Luna and some members of her messenger corps had recently toured the Fillydelphia regional headquarters of the Equestrian Post Office. “It’s just like the firespell used to send letters, only with images and sound.” In fact the system wasn’t much like that at all, and more similar to a focused divination spell, but Twilight decided she had best keep things simple to start out with.
Over the audio link, Luna harrumphed. “A likely story. We promise thee, Twilight Sparkle, some evening We shall show thee the true majesty of the Realm of Dreams, and thou willst be able to see these trifles as the falsehoods they are.”
“Uhhh… sure. Twilight, let’s just go with that, OK?” Pinkie Pie suggested.
Twilight was about to reply when the Lapwing made a particularly sharp turn, leaving Rainbow Dash completely out of sight, Pinkie Pie standing calmly on the deck at a forty-five-degree angle, and herself madly scrabbling with her telekinesis to corral assorted papers.
“Hey,” called out Rainbow Dash once she drifted back into position outside the port cargo door, “Why do we -haff- gotta go so -haff- fast anyway?”
“We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time to do it in,” Twilight answered, gesturing out the bay doors to the late afternoon sun and then to the brass-and-crystal contraptions that filled up most of the cargo bay, “But it turns out that if you speed up the aperture wheel, and add a second amplification circle to increase the sensitivity on one of these ground-penetrating thaumochromatic spectrographs, they work just fine at over a hundred kilometers per hour. I even had Leafspring connect the drive shaft on the main engines to the primary timing gear, so the aperture period automatically adjusts to match changes in our velocity!”
“That’s great -haff- Twilight, but what’s -haff- a ground-paralyzing thaumospotter?”
“Oh!” Twilight abandoned her calculations for a moment. Finding the Lapwing on another relatively level run across the Bog, she stood up from her crate. “It’s actually a couple of different devices all synchronized. This,” she waved at a hexagram of fine gold wire affixed to a rune-inscribed ceramic disk floating in a vibration-dampening pool of mercury, “is a multivariate, multidirectional thaumograph that records mana impulses. It’s basically a collection of six thaumoscopes all pointing in different directions and sharing a common reference pole. If there was any kind of large-scale enchantment on any part of this swamp a thousand years ago, this machine will tell us right where it was and also a little bit about what it was originally supposed to do. And this,” she tapped a vertical column of crystal wafers, “is the chromospectrographic component. It’s able to detect different types of materials in a geologic environment down to a depth of about fifty meters. We’ll be using it to try to identify metal and bone buried underground, and any other signs of a major military encampment out here.”
“Uhh… cool!” Rainbow Dash began to slow down in spite of herself, and drifted back towards the engine section.
“And what sort of signature could a spell or a sword have, that can be seen and felt from the air at such great speed?” Luna demanded.
“Actually,” Twilight continued as she returned to her crate, “Any thaumic field is going to have some effect on living tissue simply because we’re all made out of matter, although it’s certainly not going to be perceptible or… make anypony sick, or whatever the tabloids are saying these days.”
“But…” some of the regal bearing disappeared from Luna’s voice, and Twilight thought she actually sounded genuinely confused, “then how dost thou knowest they are there?”
“The equipment’s complicated, but the concept is really quite simple. Anything that… well, exists, whether it’s a thaumic field, or a physical object, or whatever, has to interact with other real objects. It might not be something you can perceive with the naked eye, or feel on your skin, but it’s there. Once you know what it is, you can figure out how it behaves and how to magnify it…” in her telekinetic field, a roll of tickertape displaying natural background magical signatures floated in front of her helmet where Luna could see it, “and make it as plain as a line on a piece of paper. In this case, we amplify magical fields using resonance in a crystal or a wire, like the blasting crystals you remember, but contained. A thousand years ago, a lucky pony might be born with the ability to ‘sense’ a certain type of material- hopefully a valuable one- through an interaction with her natural magic…”
“Aye,” the alicorn said, “the seers. Our host employed several, but none took the Oath for fear that their blessing would desert them. But… a seer experiences and interprets signs. How can a pile of crystals possess that knowledge?”
“Well, the signs were mostly association- individual superstitions,” explained Twilight “Nowadays, we know those ponies were born with a keratic -or, more rarely, cranialis or palmar- nerve that’s unusually close to a sensory nerve. The two thaumically couple and the resonance is perceived as visual artifacts or sensation. We’ve just taken the pony out of the equation and created the same process in a box full of crystalline lenses.”
“Twilight Sparkle. We understand that many of the taboos of Our day have faded away in thine. Mayhap, even, thine ponies are better off without them. Yet…” The Princess’s voice became as clear, sharp, and deadly as broken glass, “Thou meanest to tell Us… this pillar of crystal is what remains of a pony?”
Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash both laughed, uproariously. So did their pilot, and Sergeant Leafspring back in the engine compartment. It took all of Twilight’s willpower not to join them. “No, no, nothing like that!” she finally stammered. And I need to remind Forward to brief Luna very carefully on the regulations surrounding the medical use of cadavers. “It’s just magic. A precisely structured equation of energy and materials set up to achieve a desired effect. It’s not… I don’t know, some kind of power that some ponies have and some don’t.”
Luna was silent for a moment. Then, “We… are not certain of the difference.”
There was a long pause after that where the only sound was the continuous muffled roar of the engines and rattling of equipment. “So, Twilight?” Pinkie Pie finally asked, “If a tree falls in the Everfree forest, and nopony’s around, can this stuff tell us if it makes a sound?”
“Pinkie,” Twilight smiled, “this stuff’ll be able to count the rings.”
The tension seemed to loosen at least a little bit.
“Hey, we’ve got a tail. Six o’clock, 200 meters.” Rainbow Dash finally cut in.
Twilight fished for the relevant section of sensor readout and briefly scanned across the printed tickertape, analyzing by eye the marks that other ponies needed a reference table and a pad of note paper to fully comprehend. Whatever was behind them was mostly organic material, and a small amount of metal and glass with stronger-than-usual thaumoabsorbtive properties: likely a pegasus with a camera. A joint edict by the Ponyville Town Council and the Royal Academy forbade the press from getting within five hundred meters of any Project operations or harassing the townsponies, but that didn’t stop them from trying.
“Whaddaya think I should do, fire a warning shot past her muzzle?” asked their pilot, a stallion Lieutenant named Palisade, “Oh, wait, that’s right, I can’t!” They had needed to take out all six of the Lapwing’s guns in order to make room for the instrument package.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her…. umm… him? Can’t really tell,” Rainbow Dash declared as she peeled off aft. “And with all these scopes, rangefinders, and whatever, you'll be able to set up an instant firing solution!”
“Yeah, for the exact angle we can chuck one of these adding machines,” Palisade snapped.
An audible pop indicated Rainbow Dash had passed out of range of their limited clairaudient network, and Twilight scribbled a few notes on her graph paper. After a second pop, she mused, “You know, it’s not going to see combat on its own, but a dedicated sensor ship like this could provide a lot of targeting information to more heavily armed craft, and those in turn could defend it… there might be something to this idea! I should run it past Shiny.”
Twilight’s quill described lazy loop-de-loops in her telekinetic field as they made yet another long bank, and Rainbow Dash drifted back into view, “That reporter landed as soon as I got close, and I still didn’t get a good look at him…” said the pegasus, “So, how’d your target-ship get those orders to the gunships, though? Clairaudio’s too unstable, and signal flags’ll take too long!”
“Lean out the window and yell?” Pinkie Pie suggested.
“… thanks, Pinkie,” said Twilight, and then returned to her analysis. There was something irregular about the patch of bog they had just flown over, its coordinates already stamped on the paper readout. There was bone buried underground, which wasn’t uncommon in a swamp filled with creatures great and small; and pure metal with a faint spell signature, which also wasn’t uncommon in a swamp at least occasionally traveled by ponies. However, this was the first time Twilight had seen the two together in the same place. “Hold on a second. Palisade, can you turn this thing around and hover over the spot… say, a hundred meters aft? I think we’ve got something!”
(♫)
“Whoa up there, a cragadile’s got good meat and good hide on it! Y’all really gonna just push it back into the water like that?” Applejack demanded of the Royal Guards currently shoving the corpse of a five-meter-long animate rock feature back into deeper water with the blunt ends of their polearms. Although ponies were, for the most part, herbivorous, they made frequent use of animal byproducts from leather down to gut and kept up a lively trade with other, carnivorous species.
“Sorry, ma’am, the Guard doesn’t get hunting permits,” explained Captain Marigold, “It’s gotta be put back in its environment.”
Applejack nodded. “Well, Ah’m still glad y’all’re on our side either way.”
Corporal Subtle Spark looked up from what he was doing and blinked a few times, confused. “What… other side would we be on?”
“Y’all know what? Never mind.”
Under Academy direction, Applejack and others from the town had been digging on this little grassy excuse for an island -one of several protruding from the seemingly endless expanse of brown water and reeds that made up Froggy Bottom Bog- for the last two days. Arriving on site on the morning of the third to find a cragadile having taken up residence had caused some consternation, but Marigold and the Guards had taken care of that problem with a minimum of fuss. At least the skies had remained mercifully clear of any more vultures with cameras.
“So,” Twilight Sparkle cantered over to one of the trenches they’d dug, marked with little red canvas flags. There were several at various locations across the island, but Spike had led her specifically to this one. Twilight had considered overseeing the entire dig herself, but after the first day the heat, humidity, and overpowering sameness of the bog had proven more than she could comfortably tolerate. Spike didn’t mind at least the first two of those, although he’d made her promise to take over for him again once winter rolled around. “What are we looking at, here?”
“Bones. Equine, we think,” Spike answered, and waved a clawed hand at the far end of the trench. Despite the early-morning shadows, the dirty-white shapes of ribs, vertebrae, and what appeared to be a jawbone stood out clearly against the surrounding dark soil. “We haven’t found any of the metal you picked up just yet, so this might be… I don’t know, just somepony who wandered in here and got lost? In fact, this might even be a deer jaw, we’ll need to find more of the skull to be sure.”
“Hmm.” The trench was a good eight feet deep, and the bones Twilight could see were clearly assembled in a roughly anatomical pattern; not scattered. That indicated an intentional, if hasty burial. Due to the tendency of the Lunar Army to reuse equipment, it wasn’t unexpected that a dead Lunar would be buried without her gear, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be traces of enchantments. Twilight muttered the incantation for a magesight spell.
For a few seconds, nothing much was visible aside from the general background magic of the swamp, the ponies -and dragon- around her, and the Royal Guards’ various gear. The pit itself seemed utterly amagical. Then, the bones themselves began exuding a faint corona of magic that her spell colored a pale blue. That signified the sort of energies ponies themselves naturally produced, although this was only perhaps half as bright as the glow that surrounded Applejack or Twilight herself. She began to back away as the false-color mist grew denser, first pooling around the remains in a region roughly one meter wide and then piling upward to form a sort of thick column. It continued to build until it was level with the sides of the trench, and then the top of it started to bulge. The bulge began to take on color and definition over the course of a few seconds, growing a neck and haunches and solidifying into an equine form in the act of getting to its hooves.
She muttered another cantrip and banished the magesight. Without the false-color highlights obscuring her vision, the hazy figure of a bat-winged Lunar stallion in dark blue armor stood on thin air where the soil over the trench had once been. He looked downright ill, thin and sweaty with a whole section of coat -and more than a little skin- along his lower belly missing outright. Twilight recognized the symptoms of dourine, and recalled that disease to be particularly common within long-term Lunar encampments.
“Hmuhh… what, nay…” The ghostly stallion rasped in a faint, tinny voice that seemed to come from a long distance away. He shook his head as though waking up from a brief nap, leaning on the ethereal halberd that had materialized with him as his sole means of support, his slitted yellow eyes fixed straight ahead. “I will keep my watch… I must keep my watch…”
Spike rapped Twilight on the shoulder as they both backpedaled, eyes fixed on the ghostly stallion. “Twilight?”
“I see him.”
“Twilight, it’s a… it’s a…”
Twilight’s eyes narrowed, “I’m not going to do the stutter, Spike.”
The shorter dragon frowned. “Spoilsport.”
Quite suddenly, the specter seemed to become aware of them, staggering forward on trembling legs and using his polearm as an impromptu crutch. “Halt! Who goes there?” he rasped, the hollowness of his voice not quite hiding the fact that he was slurring his speech as though drunk, “I say, halt or in the name of the M-Moon I sh-sh-shall r-run thee through…”
Applejack looked to Twilight and, briefly, stopped backing up. “Wait wait wait. He can’t actually hit anythin’ with that pointy stick a’ his, can he? I mean, he ain’t solid, right?”
Twilight kept on going, now putting herself roughly at the same distance as the Royal Guard squad, who were brandishing weapons but doing the smart thing and not approaching. “No,” she said, “But physical con- uhh, I guess passing through him or having him pass through you could cause frostbite or even expose you to disease, so it’s a good idea to keep our distance.”
For whatever reason, talking about the ghost seemed to get his full attention. He snapped his hazy ears forward and shifted his halberd into a striking position. “Intruders!”, he rasped, “Sound the alarm!”
With surprising agility given his disease-ravaged frame, the ghostly watch-stallion leaped straight at Applejack, halberd pointed forward with killing intent.
Twilight caught him square in the emaciated barrel with a psychodisruptive exorcism blast.
He didn’t even have time to react as he disintegrated in midair, winking out of existence and leaving behind nothing more than a glob of clear ectoplasm that splattered to the ground a meter from Applejack’s front hooves.
By the time anypony had the wherewithal to react, even that had already sublimated in the building midsummer heat.
“He’ll be back,” Spike warned. “Until we can find what’s picked up his psychic impression, that halberd, maybe, we can only really disrupt him temporarily. We should be careful, where there’s one ghost there’s usually more.”
Applejack gave a low whistle, reached up, and carefully re-settled her brown leather hat. “Y’all… do this all the time?”
Twilight shook her head. “Not commonly, no, but it’s not unheard of to run into ghosts at archaeological sites like this, either. I’ve never seen one myself before, but one of my professors at the Academy did, and I’ve read a lot of after-action reports. This poor rutter probably keeled over on watch one night and was in too poor shape for Nightmare Moon to bother raising him.”
Applejack shot her a sideways glance, “Ah… guess that makes sense? Golly. Right now Ah probably look… well, Ah probably look like Ah’ve seen a ghost!”
Leaving the farmer to recover in peace, Twilight turned back to her assistant. “Still think we might not’ve found the right place?”