(♫)
“Well?”
Twilight Sparkle looked across the card table. Past its many maps sat an older, pale-gray earth stallion with an immaculately combed pale-green mane. A pair of round golden spectacles perched on his muzzle above a neat little handlebar mustache. Slaked Lime, head of cartography for the Central Mountain Dominion, was both a doctor of geomancy and a Colonel in the Equestrian Army, which in the modern military was becoming increasingly common practice. The Royal Guard had been one of the few holdouts in requiring even advanced technical specialists to go through the full routine of basic combat training, at least until Shining Armor had been promoted Commander and established commission policies more similar to those of the mainline Army and Navy. Apparently, there had been quite a bit of protest from veteran Guardsponies who feared the “watering down” of the officer corps. The EUP Special Platoons were still holding out, and likely always would.
Eventually, Lime abandoned the detailed reconstruction of the Lunar encampment spread out before him, and looked out past Twilight to the expanse of Froggy Bottom Bog. The unicorn wasn’t entirely sure what he planned to learn from that investigation, as beyond the tiny mud-hill upon which her team had set up their canvas awnings there wasn’t much to see. As far as Twilight’s admittedly non-geomantically-trained observations could tell her, Froggy Bottom Bog consisted of nothing but greenish-brown water, greenish-brown grass, and greenish-brown trees as far as the eye could see- which wasn’t very far, given the omnipresent greenish-brown haze.
Finally, Lime shook his head. “It’s as accurate a reconstruction as anypony could realistically put together given the quality of the scans- which is, I’d like to add, extremely high.” His voice was a warm, even baritone, its natural roughness smoothed over by a posh Trottingham accent. “But I’m just not certain what your team is expecting to find here.”
“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t… really know.”
Sensing that the older stallion was through with her for the moment, Twilight cantered back to the long table they’d set up under another awning to accumulate the last three days’ collected artifacts. They’d discovered two more skeletons, eight swords, miscellaneous preserved tent-pegs and cloth, three badly corroded iron stewpots, circular stone arrangements suggesting many closely-spaced firepits, a large moon-shaped silver monstrance, and the remains of a sizable field forge. That left little doubt that this was, indeed, the site of a significant concentration of Lunar Rebels. Their conjecture was backed up by the presence of residual thaumosignatures, suggesting numerous regenerative spells had been employed in a very close area over a long period of time, indicating the likely location of a hospital tent.
But as far as “signs and guideposts” went, they had retrieved only two candidates. The first was a round stone about a hoof’s-width wide and a third that thick, carved with something resembling a banner or military standard on one side. They’d found it by digging where Foxglove’s own map claimed there was once a heap of turned-up earth, which had never had anything more obviously useful put inside of it. The second was also a round stone of almost the same size, this one inscribed with a scepter surrounded by radial triangles in a sun-like motif. Berry Punch claimed her grandmother had discovered it somewhere “in the Bog” and had been happy to donate it, although unfortunately for Twilight the location had never been written down with any more precision than that.
It wasn’t a great deal to go on, which wouldn’t have been such a problem if Twilight wasn’t acutely aware of the Ministers sitting up in Canterlot eagerly awaiting results- and soon.
Back behind her, Lime had fallen back into conversation with Pinkie Pie, his designated tour guide and minder for the duration of his trip to Ponyville. “So, is it Doctor Lime? Colonel Lime? Doctor-Colonel Lime?” the baker was asking.
“Well, my dear, when we’re in the field, my official title is Colonel Lime. But, if you were to visit me at the Academy, you’d address me as Professor Lime.”
“Oh. I see. That makes… really no sense at all.”
Twilight twisted her head back around over her shoulder and called out, “Pinkie, is this really necessary?”
“Not really? Just making conversation. You know, that thing ponies do when they aren’t sitting around fractionating gigathaums or whatever?”
“Sorry?” The unicorn turned back to her examination. When they’d first realized that the camp was likely one big map, they’d been hoping that the meaningful components of it -the clues, as it were- would include some sort of enchantment as part of their function. This would, again hopefully, make it possible to pick up traces of them on the thaumoscope.
Instead, the “clues” had turned out to be carved onto ordinary rocks and other detritus. And there were a great many ordinary rocks and other detritus in Froggy Bottom Bog.
“So, when can I just call you Doctor Lime?” Pinkie Pie asked.
“Only if you yourself were another professor.”
“Ugh, I’ll have to have my sister explain all of this one day.”
Pinkie ambled away, and Twilight ambled back over. She waved her hoof in a circle that encompassed the whole of the reconstructed map. “I… suppose I was just hoping your geomancers could tell us something about what features in the original area were natural versus unnatural, what served a tactical purpose and what didn’t, maybe how some of this was built…”
“I’m afraid that’s not really how this works, my dear. I can make guesses about construction techniques, but I can’t really determine intent or significance just from the physical nature of these features. To be perfectly honest, it… doesn’t really look like a map of anything to me- well, aside from a First Century military encampment, of course.”
“I think we are on the right track here with the map-in-a-mundane-collection-of-objects trick,” Twilight muttered, “but what features correspond to what?” She peered at the reconstructed blueprint, then Paper Clip’s map of the pre-flood Hardfrog Valley, then the modern map of Froggy Bottom Bog, as though suddenly some correspondence would become obvious to her on the sixth attempt that hadn’t appeared on the previous five. “The riddles leading to the prophecy and the safehouse under the Golden Oaks were pretty intuitive, once you learned to pay attention to Lunar iconography, but this just doesn’t make any sense. Was there some sort of a paper that had a key on it, or some kind of word-of-mouth component?” None of the Lunar survivors had mentioned any such thing. “I have no idea how anypony was able to solve this thing fairly even when it was new!”
“Oooh, maybe you should… flip it turnways?” Pinkie Pie suggested, “Or try moving the slider!”
“What in Tartarus is that supposed to mean?” Twilight demanded.
“I dunno, but it got you to stop worrying over those stupid symbols, dinnit?”
Twilight was about to remand the baker for sticking her muzzle into things she was completely unqualified to consider, when the absurdity of the whole situation wormed its way into her skull and all she could do was chuckle. She staggered out from under the awning- it provided shade, but not much at this angle, and did nothing against the humidity; maybe the heat was roasting her brain- and sat down further up the flat dome of the island. According to Lime’s reconstruction and the Night Guards’ testimony, this had once been a tall hill near the dead center of the Lunar camp, where Luna’s top generals had held their war councils. Those councils had always been open for viewing by any Lunars who had taken the Oath, and a day ago Twilight had been optimistic that such a key location had to contain some important clue. But there was a lot of ground to cover, to an uncertain depth, and much of it was below the waterline. They had the budget -barely, but they had it- to rip the whole hill apart in an afternoon, but unfortunately the kind of heavy magic that would require ran a high risk of obliterating anything buried underneath.
She sighed, got up, and began walking along the shoreline, then almost jumped out of her skin when Luna’s voice echoed out of her borrowed Royal Guard helmet. She had forgotten the alicorn was still in contact and watching their proceedings. In fact, she’d forgotten she was wearing the helmet at all. “Mayhap thou art thinking too literally, my good Doctor Twilight Sparkle,” Luna chided. “Relax. Think metaphorically, in the language of meaning. Attune thyself to the spirit of the Lunar cause and mayhap clarity shall come to thee.”
“Well, can you give me any hints about what the ‘spirit of the Lunar cause’ might be? Or did you end up forgetting that too?” she snapped.
There was a long, heavy silence on Luna’s end of the connection. “I’m… I’m sorry,” Twilight amended, “That was unfair of me, that was way out of line…”
“Aye,” Luna practically hissed, “Indeed thou werest… ‘way out of the line’.” Then she continued, her voice at least superficially level, “We… I know the severity of my situation- our situation. But thou must understand: the world appears before me in a haze, like the last remnants of a dream, upon waking. Today's ponies, their government, their institutions, they all feel like...”
“… Like what?” Twilight prompted, more gently.
“Cheap knock-offs. Counterfeits of what I first envisioned when I raised the Lunar Army against my sister and her Council. But that is not all!” The remaining hostility left Luna’s voice all at once, replaced by rawness and fear. “I've been told I am responsible for social and military reforms I have no memory of ever enacting. The chronicles speak of grand stratagems I devised, yet I myself cannot understand them. My Guards tell me of brave comrades who fought and fell alongside me, and I cannot remember their deeds. I cannot even remember their names! Pamphleteers in Canterlot scream of monstrous acts committed in my name, and I cannot dispute them because I. Do. Not. Know. It is… terrifying." She paused, and pulled in a long, deep breath. "And now… I too must apologize. Even the words I speak are wrong, it seems.”
“It’s alright,” Twilight continued her path along the muddy shoreline, thankful for Rarity’s donation of a new set of boots. “I hope I can help you figure this out. Do you… not have any memory of the encampment?”
“I remember… some things. I remember what it looked like, from when I flew watch above it, and thine maps are indeed very much like what was once here. I remember visiting my troops, the injured and sick above all. I remember… the memorial for the watch-stallion thou hast seen as a wraith, his name was Greywacke and he hailed from Canterine… but of the design and plans? Naught. ‘Tis a… a horrible, gray space in my mind where I see myself shouting orders and issuing edicts, but the words I speak are gibberish and there is no writing upon the pages.”
“Okay.” Twilight kept walking. She wished she were back in her office in the Golden Oaks, or better yet in Fillydelphia talking to Luna face-to-face, but this would have to do. “Let’s step through it piece by piece. What was the last thing you remember that’s related to… well, here, this hill?”
“Hmm.” Luna went silent again for another few seconds. Then, “I remember… flying above it with General Silver Shade. Very skilled at archery on-the-wing she was, and in all my time in Everfree and in the field I had never mastered that skill. We had… set targets down the hill, before, where everypony in the camp could see…”
“Alright. Silver Shade. Do you remember if she ever completed the challenge?”
“Verily. She hit ten targets to my four, over a half-dozen gliding dives.”
“I meant the challenge to find your hidden redoubt,” Twilight corrected, still trying to keep her tone as gentle as possible. “‘she disappears to some yet more remote redoubt for most of the night … and there is even some sort of a ‘challenge’ she has set for her officers to find her at this place, in favor of some reward’. That’s how Paper Clip described it.”
There was another, even longer pause. Something on Luna’s end of the connection went squeak, and then fell silent again. “Naught. I remember… no such thing.”
“Ok, then let’s try something different,” said Twilight, “Do you remember where this General Silver Shade eventually ended up?” Paper Clip had mentioned a Lunar officer named Silver Shade only occasionally, and had confessed to having no idea of her final fate- a rare failure in his campaign to track down high-ranking Lunars following the Rebellions. Modern researchers hadn’t found the name Silver Shade in any cemetery, or any of the Cairns, either, and she certainly wasn’t among the survivors now living in Fillydelphia Harbor. It was as though she’d simply dropped out of the Known World not long before the Battle of Everfree.
This time there was no pause. “I remember… Or… nay. Perhaps I foresee… woe and strife. I… thou must believe me, Twilight Sparkle, when I warn thee dwelling overmuch on this mare’s fate will bring only tragedy.”
“Umm… Alright. You don’t have to talk about her if you don’t want to.” Twilight was just about at the halfway point of the island’s circumference right now- the point of no return, appropriately enough. “How do you think we should proceed?”
“I would rather… thou keepest walking. Consider the trees and the play of the wind. Think of this place when it was alive. Or, better yet, do the same at night, and gaze up at the stars.”
“Okay. Umm, if you think that’ll help…” Twilight began making her way back uphill to the campsite. “We’ve got a bunch of First Century and modern astronomical charts I can show you, and even an illusion projector that’ll create a three-dimensional dome…”
“’Tis not the same.”
Twilight pulled up short. “Hmm?”
“’Tis not the same as being there, Twilight.”
“I’m… just going to go ahead and grab the projector. I’m sure you’ll like it, it’s a really neat device, my brother gave me one as a present for my tenth birthday…”
“Halt!” Luna barked, quite suddenly.
Equally suddenly, Twilight halted. “Umm… yes, what?”
“Here. Dost thou not seest the signs in the swaying of the reeds and the wheeling of the stars? Something is hidden here.”
Twilight looked around her. The reeds were reeds and no stars whatsoever were visible. The sky was also mercifully clear, although that didn’t mean the media wasn’t there; just that they weren’t currently detectable.
“What’s going on,” Pinkie Pie asked as she half-scampered half-slid down the muddy hillside towards Twilight’s location. Twilight had forgotten the baker had also been loaned a helmet and could thus communicate with Luna just as well as the scholar herself.
“Just Luna being Luna,” she muttered, taking care to twist her helmet so that her muzzle was well out of range of the clairaudio rune.
“Super, extra Luna-y today…” Pinkie muttered back.
The Princess was muttering something, too quietly for Twilight to stand much chance of making out words. That concerned her greatly, but if Luna really was undergoing some kind of schizoid episode, the staff at Fillydelphia Harbor would be taking action right now… right?
“Twilight to Lapwing,” she finally called out, “Can you get us some astrological readings? Tell me if there’s… any local deviation from the baseline for this time of year?”
“Uhh… no. All the instruments are showing minimal change,” Doctor Daycaller replied.
“Nay… ‘tis nothing thine crude instruments could sense. Thou must dig down,” Luna admonished.
Twilight backed away slightly. “I don’t really see how you could possibly-”
“Nay, this must be the place,” the Princess snapped with surprising ferocity, “All of the signs are here!”
From behind her, Colonel Lime barked an incantation that set the earth vibrating beneath Twilight’s hooves.
“Colonel, wait!” The scholar shouted, but it was already too late. She hastily backpedaled as the vibration developed into churning, then roiling. Over the course of a few seconds, everything larger than an earthworm was pulled up to the surface, completely destroying any strategraphic record in the process. After a few more seconds the activity ceased, leaving behind a round pile of stones and scrap wood about half a meter in diameter.
Twilight peered at the accumulated detritus, unsure of what she was expecting. Then Pinkie Pie stepped forward and began sorting through the debris. “Twilight?” She asked, unusually subdued, “Look at this!”
The rock in Pinkie Pie’s hoof was the same size and shape as the other “keys” they’d found- and the same size and shape as a million other, utterly unremarkable specimens scattered throughout the surrounding countryside. This one, however, was carved. The marks were shallow, irregular, and filled with mud, but there was no denying that somepony with a chisel had deliberately incised a crescent moon into the bottom surface.
Twilight looked at Pinkie Pie.
Pinkie Pie looked back at Twilight.
“Super, extra Luna-y today, you said…”
(♫)
That evening Twilight sat before an enchanted mirror, propped up on her desk in the Golden Oaks. One thousand kilometers away, in her study in the admiral’s residence at Fillydelphia Harbor, Princess Luna looked back at her. For the first time, Twilight was struck by the fact that Luna had apparently abandoned her nocturnal habits to observe Twilight’s expedition during normal working hours. Right now, she wasn’t certain whether she should feel flattered or concerned.
Luna sat there, blinked, and once leaned forward to peer so intently at the mirror that Twilight was worried her muzzle would collide with it. However, she made no attempt to speak.
“So… I’d… really appreciate it if you could just… shed some light… on how exactly you were able to locate that rock?” the young scholar finally asked.
“’Twas a sign,” said Luna, her blue eyes shining and her expression taking on a strange, euphoric quality. “A genuine sign. We never thought Ourselves to possess the gift, but… were We mistaken, all these years? Or is this something new? It matters not. We have been granted a sight beyond sight, a knowledge beyond what the mortal senses can reveal, and with thee as Our witness We shall relay its blessings completely, humbly, and faithfully…”
“You’re… sure you aren’t actually just remembering things you saw and did a thousand years ago?” Twilight interrupted. She recognized Luna’s speech as a paraphrased version of the Seer’s Oath, a mystical text that had existed in somewhat variable form since at least the Second Century BCE. Some versions of it were quite long indeed, and she wanted to keep Princess Luna focused on the problem at hoof.
Luna fell silent for a few seconds at that, and then shook her head. “Nay. ‘Twas exactly as We explained to thee. Suddenly, as though We stood beneath a cloudy sky and then the stars shone through, We understood the significance of the wheeling of the birds and the rustling of the reeds. ‘Twas a sign, exactly as the seers in Everfree described when We were but young. We can no more explain it to thee than we can explain reading to a blind mare, or music to a deaf mare. It simply… was.”
Twilight leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and ran through the entire conversation on the island again. “Wait a minute, you said the stone was your first ever experience with seer phenomena; that you’d never possessed any abilities like that before. But just before you found the stone, you said you… ‘foresaw’ some kind of bad luck if we kept talking about Silver Shade. Wasn’t that a sign too?”
“This was an omen, not a sign,” Luna explained, as though the distinction were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Luna…” Twilight continued, as gently as she could, “towards the end of the fourth century, an Abyssinian psychomancer named Coover performed what we’d call a statistical analysis on the signs reported by seers. He found them to correspond to the actual predictions made no more than they would by chance, and that seers were ignoring the same stimuli when there wasn’t a result. The whole seer movement pretty much died out by the year 450. Ponies don’t interpret signs any more, Luna. They never really did.”
Luna’s eyes narrowed, the brightness in them turning sharp and deadly. “Aye, verily, there may yet be no seers in this cold and prideful age… but they were all too real. We have with Our own eyes seen practitioners find springs of pure water and veins full of ore. Dost thine Abyssinian sage believe this to be mere chance?”
“No, no, no, what you don’t understand is that by… by the time Coover conducted his research, physicians had already developed the nervous theory of material perception…” Twilight realized she was speaking far too fast, her heart hammering in her chest. She stopped to remind herself that Luna was in fact many kilometers away, and couldn’t actually reach through the mirror to strike her. Then she wondered why in Tartarus she was even thinking about that at all. There was just something about the alicorn that seemed… off-kilter, now. Her speech had slipped back into a more antiquated pattern, and she seemed to bounce between intense emotions almost at random.
“All Coover needed to show was that the signs weren’t important; there was already a… a material explanation of how the seers functioned. A thousand years ago, Rarity might’ve been… propped up as some kind of… of gem-seer or something, but now we understand she just as a sensory ability other ponies don’t, like perfect pitch or verifiable thaumosensitivity. So she gets to live a normal life, as a well-understood, perfectly normal mare with a well-understood, perfectly normal condition that lets her detect certain types of buried matter. She doesn’t consult- or invent- any kind of ‘signs’ because she knows she doesn’t need them.”
“Aye,” Luna snapped, “she struggles as a seamstress in a tiny hamlet in the shadow of Canterlot, unaware of the gift she hath been graced with because none remain to speak of it!” The venom drained somewhat from the alicorn’s voice after that, replaced once again by that strange euphoria Twilight had first observed. “Mayhap… this is the reason for Our long exile, and Our mysterious blessing… to bring back the ways of the seers to a world that has forgotten them…”
“What, would you rather ponies treat Rarity like some kind of… like something supernatural?” Twilight snapped. “Cut off from ordinary ponies her whole life? Under pressure to blind herself to enhance her abilities when that was… was totally unnecessary to the actual process? I know for a fact she could be making ten times what she does now as a surveyor with one of the big mining concerns down South; she works as a tailor because she. Likes. Tailoring. Do you want her to not be able to do that?”
Luna reeled back from the shared surface of their mirror, but Twilight kept right on speaking.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because what you did wasn’t something that Rarity could’ve ever done. The ponies they used to call seers only ever detected specific materials and physical characteristics, as much as they liked to pretend otherwise. What you did was completely different; you picked a rock out from among a dozen other rocks. Don’t you want to know how that happened?”
“We knoweth perfectly well… ‘how that happened’,” hissed the alicorn, “thou dost not believe because thou dost not understand. Instead, thou placeth thine faith in soulless assemblies of gold and crystal, forgetteth the equine spirit of the arts, and gapeth when thine contrivances fail thee.”
If Twilight had been less dead-set on regaining control of the conversation, she might’ve pointed out that Luna now seemed to be butchering even her own Old Ponish. “No, that’s not true at all, Luna, just because you don’t understand the principles of modern thaumaturgy doesn’t invalidate them, ask a dozen educated ponies and they’ll all agree that there’s no such thing as signs and our sensors should’ve worked. If you would just give me one straight answer about why-”
“ENOUGH!” Luna’s voice fizzed and crackled, overloading the clairaudient spell by sheer volume as her lips pulled back into a thin snarl.
Now it was Twilight’s turn to flinch backwards in her chair- she wouldn’t have believed it was physically possible for a pony to be so loud on her own. “We hath given thee all the answers thou needest, and it is thou who cannot understand them. Run thine ‘tests’, and consult thine ‘instruments’, Twilight Sparkle. We shall seek thine treasures in Our own way. And all of Equestria shall learn who seeth more clearly.” There was a sharp, hollow snap, like a Hearth’s Warming ornament being struck with a hammer, and Luna’s image dissolved into incomprehensible blobs of color.
Twilight tapped the plain wooden frame of the mirror a few times. “Luna? Princess Luna?!” Nothing materialized, and the unicorn leaned partially around the door to her office. “Spike, is she receiving us?”
From his seat against the far wall, her assistant peered at the assembly of luminescent gems set into an improvised spell circle. “CA stream’s good, there’s just nothing in it! That sounded nasty… I think she might’ve actually broken something, on her end. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Forward or one of the others can fix it… if she even lets them go near…”
(♫)
The next morning, Twilight Sparkle awoke to black coffee, toast, and a photo of herself holding the carved banner stone on the front page of the Times of Canterlot. She had no idea how that could possibly have been acquired without her knowledge… unless somepony on the excavation crew had been responsible.
The headline read “PRINCESS LUNA REVEALS BURIED TREASURE”. Twilight herself was only mentioned in the photo caption: “Royal Academy archaeological researcher Twilight Sparkle presents artifact for inspection.”
She skimmed over the beginning of the article, which was mostly just a rehash of the general purpose of the expedition and its difficulties in identifying the location of Luna’s hide-away. However, a few sections gave her pause. For one thing, the paper claimed that “the Royal Academy’s most sensitive instruments were unable to detect this splendid carving”, when Twilight thought “splendid” was a bit of a stretch of imagination. More importantly, the Lapwing’s instruments had been able to detect the rock just fine; they were only confused by the presence of a hundred thousand other, superficially identical rocks. Finally, while the article did not explicitly say that the stone had been discovered apropos of nothing during a search of the whole of Froggy Bottom Bog; it certainly seemed to give that impression by not once mentioning the detailed reconstructions performed by Doctor Lime’s unit and the identification of a key area to narrow the search. To hear the paper tell it, the rock was simply sitting out in the middle of an otherwise completely un-excavated field somewhere, and Luna had led them to it all the way from Fillydelphia.
After that, there was a statement from Princess Luna herself:
“There may yet be no seers in this cold and prideful age… but they were all too real. We have with Our own eyes seen practitioners find springs of pure water and veins full of ore. A thousand years ago, a mare of my acquaintance named Rarity would have been recognized as a gem-seer, but today her blessing is reduced to a mere ‘condition’. She struggles as a seamstress in a tiny hamlet in the shadow of Canterlot, unaware of the gift she hath been graced with because none remain to speak of it…” The paraphrasing went for the entire rest of the column, before degenerating completely into an exploration of emanations and hesychasm and other ideas that hadn’t been seriously considered since the end of the Rebellions.
Twilight squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again.
The words remained on the page more or less as she had originally read them.
Luna, apparently, did not quite understand the modern concept of what a “statement” was supposed to be. That had to be the explanation. The alternative- that after failing to shout down Twilight in private, the Princess had known damn well what would happen were she to retry the same argument in the press- was best not even seriously proposed without Celestia to back her up.
Once her breakfast was consumed, the paperwork for the day signed off on, and Spike sent off to Froggy Bottom Bog with the necessary instructions, Twilight trotted over to Rarity’s shop. Finding it closed for the day, she then set out on the winding road to Fluttershy’s cottage on the edge of town.
The last time she had been up here, she’d been fleeing for her life both from Nightmare Moon’s revenants and a mob of angry townsponies, and hadn’t had much time to take in the scenery. Now that she had the time and light to appreciate it properly, the whole place proved to look like something out of a storybook, all sun-dappled grass and low, lush trees. She couldn’t see Fluttershy right away, but she could hear the pegasus well enough, singing some kind of lullaby from inside an open window.
“Hush little baby, don’t say a word,
And never mind that noise you heard.
It’s just the beasts under your bed,
In your closet, in your heaaaad…”
Well, okay then!
Twilight stepped up to the cottage and rapped gently on the window frame.
There was a quiet yelp, and Fluttershy’s head jerked up into view for just a split-second before dropping back out of sight. Then she reappeared once again, and this time stayed in place, resting her forehooves on the windowsill. “Oh! It’s… it’s just you, Twilight.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. Can I come in? I think I might need your help.”
“Oh my, yes, certainly!” Fluttershy flicked a wing at the door. “It’s not locked, just let yourself in…”
This Twilight did, and finding Fluttershy already perched on one of the cottage’s old-fashioned velvet couches, she immediately took up position on the opposite one. “So… Fluttershy… have you been reading the papers?”
The yellow pegasus nodded, and flicked a wing at the issue of the Cloudsdale Plain Dealer sitting on her coffee table. “Mmmhmm. Horrible, really.”
“Hmm?” Horrible, Twilight thought, was a bit of a stretch. Conceited and melodramatic, yes. Borderline plagiarism, possibly; she wasn’t sure how the law applied to misquoting another pony’s unpublished spoken words. But horrible? It wasn’t as though Luna had brought down an airship, after all. “You wouldn’t happen to know how Rarity’s taking this, do you? I went by to check on her, but the Boutique’s closed up.”
“Oh. I saw her earlier this morning,” Fluttershy volunteered, “She said she was going to spend some time ‘working on her designs’, and she didn’t want anypony to bother her.”
Twilight nodded. “I don’t blame her.”
“She also said something about not struggling, owning her own store, being a member of the Ponyville Small Business Board, and still finding time to save Luna’s own bony ungrateful derriere… but I mostly just remember it because of the last part.”
Twilight nodded again. “I… don’t really blame her for that either.”
“Do you think we should… do something?” The pegasus asked after a long pause.
“I’m getting to that, yeah,” said Twilight. “I just wanted to make it clear what I think the root of the problem is. I’m positive that even if she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, Princess Luna’s contaminating the site we’re working in right now with remembered information. I can understand why she’s doing it, I think Nightmare Moon did her a pretty bad turn and she was under immense strain even before that. Add to that the really alien future she’s been hurled into, and… it makes sense that she’d do and say things that don’t make a lot of sense. But it’s still a problem for two reasons:”
“The first is that she’s not doing it in a vacuum,” the unicorn continued, “there’s a whole… cottage industry of ponies who’re going to jump on every weird thing she says about signs and auspicious places and make it sound as stupid as possible for their own reasons. That’s not helping Luna adapt, or her case as an Exarch. Also, when some crazy mare decides she saw a sign she’d recover from a festering hoof wound on her own and doesn’t seek medical attention, or stabs herself through the eyeball to bring her seer powers out, I don’t want Luna getting blamed when that mare ends up dead.”
She straightened in her seat. “The other big problem is that, if Luna keeps doing things like this, or getting ponies to mess around at dig sites for her, she might damage something important. And then we’re all in the kind of trouble that committing some additional mare-hours to the excavation can’t fix.”
“Have you tried… well, talking to Luna about this?” Fluttershy asked.
Twilight leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Yeah. It… didn’t go well. In fact, it didn’t just not go well, it pretty much directly precipitated that stupid press release. I’ve thought about trying again a couple of times, and I can never even think of what to say. ‘Hey, Princess Luna, sorry about lecturing you before, now can you maybe try not be so weird all the time?’”
She pulled in a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “I have to keep reminding myself that back in Luna’s day, the kind of… high mysticism that came out in her statement was a lot more common in what we’d think of as hard academic fields. Everypony had their pet theory and philosophy and circle of students, and the idea that any of it had to be objectively evaluated was kind of an afterthought. It wasn’t until a century after Starswirl the Bearded disappeared that his experimentalist concepts started to be considered by the scholarly community. Luna never saw that; a month ago -for her- she was still living in a world where admirals and merchants routinely called off naval voyages because of ‘ill omens’. It’s going to take time for her to realize something that was such a huge part of ponies’ lives has been discarded, and we don’t really have that kind of time right now.”
Now it was time for Fluttershy to lean back and shift in her chair. Twilight’s gaze roamed around the cottage’s rough-hewn wooden bookshelves, and she realized there were quite a few records stashed in between the field guides on Equestrian birds- Talk Down The Timberwolves, Metallicorn, and Luna’s Priest among others. Fitting, really.
“Well… what do you want me to do?” Fluttershy finally asked.
“We need to get this project back onto four steady hooves, and to do that we have to find out what real signals Luna’s been picking up on. A few weeks ago, I read an article in an archaeology journal about sending in druids to communicate with local animal populations, to get topographical information on a cave system in the Griffish Isles. Those druids deliberately released rats, but Froggy Bottom Bog is already crawling with all sorts of birds and insects and… I don’t even know what else on its own. I was wondering if it might be possible for you to get them to… scout the bog for us? And write down the instructions you gave them?”
“Oh, wow, that… does sound like a lot of work. But… I’ll see what I can do.”
(♫)
Once again, Twilight gazed out across the expanse of Froggy Bottom Bog. It remained, as always, brownish-green and sweltering. Her helmet didn't help- she wasn't entirely sure why she was still wearing it. Routine, perhaps. She’d expected to have scores of trenches dug by now, and train cars’ worth of artifacts sent back to the Station for reassembly. Instead, after four more days of searching, she had the same three carved rocks and a ‘positive diet specialist’ -whatever that was- in the Hoofington Post crowing about her inability to explain the supposed prophetic abilities of the Lunar Host. Most gallingly, at the moment, that columnist was entirely correct.
“So is something supposed to be… happening?” Twilight asked Fluttershy, then turned around to find the pegasus sitting in the middle of a half-circle of assorted birds. Her eyes were closed and she periodically made odd little tittering noises that a pony had no business whatsoever making. “Wow. I can’t decide if that’s adorable, or horrifying.”
“What’s so bad about birds?” Pinkie Pie asked, emerging from the shadows of one of the smaller tents. “Are birds not allowed up in the ivory spires of Canterlot? Or did a woodpecker-wielding mugger kill your parents in a back alley or something?”
“What?! No! It’s just that those birds aren’t… doing anything! They’re just sitting there. Watching. It’s weird.”
“Pigeons do that all the time, you know. Sit and watch, I mean.”
“Oh. Yeah. We do have pigeons in Canterlot. I guess I just never really paid attention to them.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
It was only then that Fluttershy stirred, and her eyes slid open. “They’re doing something. You can’t see them, but they’re all over the swamp. Still, I thought they would’ve found something by now.”
“Okay. Now that was creepy,” Pinkie Pie muttered.
“I just don’t get it.” Twilight began walking a path that would take her in a circle around the perimeter of the camp, consciously avoiding the patch of disrupted soil where Luna had discovered the third symbol stone. “Magical cloaking could confuse animals easy enough, but then we’d be able to pick it up with the Lapwing’s sensors. And all three of the stones we’ve identified so far have been completely amagical! It just makes no sense!”
Then she rounded the corner of one of their big crate-piles and stopped short. On another island about fifty meters to the South, connected to hers by whatever a sandbar was called when it was made out of reeds and barely-submerged mud instead of sand, was a small copse of gnarled trees. Gathered around them were what had to be most of Captain Marigold’s infantry platoon, as well as a distinctively dark blue pegasus who could only be Dr. Proper Verse.
Twilight set out through the shallow water. As she drew closer, she realized that each pony was sitting in front of a specific tree, with their eyes closed, humming. Periodically, one would get up and move to another location, but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to how they positioned themselves. Some trees would be “observed” for only a few seconds, and some had remained under closed-eyed surveillance for the entire time it took Twilight to cross over to them. Sometimes the Guards -and Verse- visited new trees; sometimes they moved back to ones their fellows -or themselves- had just been in front of previously. The overall effect was of the sort of precision parade maneuvers the Guard sometimes put on for show at Hurricane’s Green, as choreographed by a somnambulant eight-year-old.
“Excuse me?” Twilight said as she approached Captain Marigold. The Guardsmare didn’t respond. “Excuse me? What in Tartarus are all of you doing?” And why didn’t anypony tell me you were out here doing it?
“Active Focusing, si- uhh, Doctor,” Marigold answered, without opening her eyes, “For Princess Luna. It’s an old seer’s technique to enhance Distant Awareness.” Twilight fancied she could, in fact, hear the capital letters in the Captain’s voice.
“Distant what?” Twilight shook her head. “Listen, she found one rock. One rock!”
“Um, so, actually…” Twilight jumped a little as Doctor Verse stepped up beside her. She’d thought the pegasus was a lot further along the beach. Distant Awareness indeed! “It’s-it’s really interesting. This research group in Baltimare’s documenting all kinds of incidents where Princess Luna predicted important future events before her banishment!” Verse rooted around in her saddlebags for a few seconds and produced a thin booklet with a bright, abstract cover. “Take a look!”
Twilight gingerly picked up the booklet in her telekinesis. It certainly looked like an academic publication, and even had the emblem of the University of Mareland Press stamped in one corner, but the authors were actually listed as belonging to something called the Center For Lunar-Equestrian Studies. Twilight had never heard of such an organization, although she found the name disturbingly -and suspiciously- similar to that of the Center For Lunar Studies, a respected astronomical society spun off from the Royal Academy a century ago. However, that group did not perform archaeological or historical research of any kind. Also, very much unlike academic publications, which were usually distributed on a mail order basis, this had a price tag on the back cover- stating it had cost Dr. Verse forty-five bits!
She quickly fanned through the pages, noting the cheap, pulpy material and monochrome printing. The text did appear to cite sources, although a quick scan through its bibliography revealed nearly all of them to be either high school history textbooks or other CLES publications. None of those were dated before the thirty-first of Sun’s Height, 1097, presumably because before that point the Center For Lunar-Equestrian Studies had not existed. In fact, given that Luna had only acquired a reputation for predictive abilities six days ago, this particular “report” had to have been assembled extremely quickly. Or the Center’s operators, whoever they were, had been pursuing the Luna-as-prophet angle well beforehand and waiting for just the right opportunity to go public. Twilight wasn’t sure which option made the whole exercise seem more dubious.
She paused on one of several sticky-noted pages. It contained a sort of table. On one side, excerpts of a speech given by Princess Luna in 96 CE were presented. On the other, basic facts about the changeling attack on the independent city-state of Trot in 453 CE were arranged to “correspond.” For instance, when Luna spoke of a “city of great wealth despoiled by the Changeling swarms”, a bullet point mentioned that Trot was the wealthiest of the post-Rebellion independent pony states.
“Doctor,” Twilight said, as calmly as she could, “Don’t you think it’s the least bit possible that Princess Luna wasn’t predicting the Changeling attack on Trot, just memorializing the Changeling attack on Timbucktu? Timbucktu was also a wealthy, conspicuously monotribal trade city infiltrated and destroyed by changelings; and that was only a few decades before Luna gave this speech. Before, I want to remind you. Not after. This is like saying the newspaper coverage of the Chicoltgo Fire predicted the Great Canterlot Fire. It turns out that in the grand scheme of things, one big fire’s a lot like another, and once and a while big fires happen.”
“Okay, okay, maybe, but check out Page Seventy-Four!”
Dutifully, Twilight leafed forward to another sticky-note. “Luna says ‘I fear one day my sister’s adoration for the Sun will lead to her being consumed by it, before ten-score years have passed.’ They say this predicts the assassination attempt that delayed the Summer Sun Celebration in 358?”
She let the booklet flip down and close itself in her telekinesis. “Okay, so, first of all, getting firebombed isn’t the same thing as being ‘consumed by the sun’. This says Ambassador Godfrey later described the explosion as having ‘sun-like intensity’, and I think that’s an accurate quote, but Luna didn’t say her sister’d be consumed by something like the sun, she said it’d be the sun. Second, can you guess how many times Celestia interacts with the sun or sun-like things in a two-hundred-year period? A lot more than once a day, obviously, at least, so that’s hundreds of thousands of chances for something weird to happen. It’d be surprising if in those whole two hundred years, there wasn’t some kind of an incident where… where a flag fell on her or something… you know what, never mind. I shouldn’t even have asked about it.”
Twilight was about to just let the book fall out of her telekinesis and onto the muddy grass below, before she remembered it was still Dr. Verse’s property and floated it back over to the pegasus. “Just… please tell me nopony here is supposed to be on duty right now?”
Back behind Verse, a shockingly white unicorn in Guard armor- “Private Parhelion”, if Twilight remembered correctly- shifted in her seated position and went “Uhhm.”
“Actually, I enlisted their aid,” Princess Luna’s voice explained over Twilight’s helmet.
It was not lost on the scholar that Luna had not bothered to speak up when she was being falsely credited with predicting the Battle of Trot, or the Disturbance of 358. Nor had she made any attempt to explain her statement to the papers. Fine. If she wants to just go on like it never happened, Twilight decided, then I can certainly move on to bigger problems too.
“Well, that’s not really something you can do, Your Grace,” the unicorn snapped, then turned back to the assembled Guardsponies to make sure Luna had a good view of them. “As long as they don’t break any laws or interfere with the operation of the dig, anypony here can get up to whatever sort of weird, silly, nonsensical business they want. That’s fine. But their duty hours are paid for by the government, which ultimately means they’re paid for by Equestria’s taxes -you remember how that works, right- and I don’t want that money going to something that isn’t productive.”
“Not productive, aye? Then mayhap thou shouldst examine the tree Doctor Verse is standing before?” the alicorn replied.
“Luna. It’s a tree. There’s a million like it all over this swamp.” She stepped closer to the assembly, and stamped the ground a few times to get their attention. That tactic proved approximately fifty percent effective. “Has everypony taken complete leave of her senses out here?”
Back in Dr. Daycaller’s small laboratory in the Station, out of the heat and humidity, with Twilight’s hooves planted firmly on newly-installed gray carpet and the shelves around her stuffed with brass-and-glass analytical equipment, the whole thing did indeed seem rather silly. Unfortunately, that didn’t make the slit-eye emblem outlined on Daycaller’s photographic plate any less real.
“It’s… not unusual for this type of tree to live well over a thousand years,” the earth pony scientist explained as he fiddled with the equipment on his desk, “and it’s grown a lot since the First Century. I would… guess that this was carved into the outer layers, just below the bark, between nine hundred and one thousand one hundred and fifty years ago? The tree has since grown outward and there’s nothing externally visible. All I’ve done here is to highlight the change in grain using N-ray diffraction, and then refocused the pattern into a viewable image.”
“I think we can date it a lot more precisely than plus-or-minus a hundred and fifty years,” Twilight muttered. “Are you sure you’re not getting any kind of mana potential in the wood… in any of the other tree cuttings? Any of the samples we got back at all?”
“Umm… ahh… no. It’s… an ordinary piece of wood. I’d say the symbol was cut into it with an iron-tipped blade with sharpness typical of First Century craftsmareship.”
“I mean, obviously we know it exists,” said Twilight, “what I want to know is how Luna managed to find it.”
“’Tis… not something thou wouldst understand,” said that same damned infuriatingly serene voice, this time from a little gold amulet sitting on the edge of Daycaller’s desk. According to Forward March, Luna had in fact smashed the visual scrying focus on her side of the connection. They had since decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble of physically shipping another to Ponyville to pair with Twilight’s mirror, and then all the way back again. Thus for the foreseeable future, Luna would be able to see Twilight and anypony else with a paired helmet, but nopony in town would be able to see her. That suited the scholar just fine.
“I hath seen in the shape and placement of the trees,” Luna continued, “and in the way thine troops moved about them, and in the wheeling of the birds above, signs that something of true meaning lay under the Circle of the Moon. There is no more, and no less, to it than that.”
“That’s not how astrology works,” Twilight snapped, already heading for the door. Luna could pester Daycaller all she wanted if he was willing to put up with her, but Twilight herself had more important things to do. “Meaning isn’t something that the stars ‘understand’, they don’t recognize symbols, they operate on physical forces like weight and energy. Astrological forces might influence how trees grow, or even how birds behave, but that’s not something you can see just by looking at them- there’s precise and really non-intuitive calculations involved. And astrological forces certainly wouldn’t be influenced by a pony having carved something in a tree a thousand years ago versus the tree just being cut. It’s ridiculous.”
“Twilight Sparkle.”
More or less against her will, the unicorn stopped halfway out the door. “What?”
“If Our astrology is so without worth, how do We know there is something of great importance a third of a league due north of where thine maps place the upper right corner of Grid B-7?”
Once again, Twilight knelt down on her front legs and peered into the trench. Once again there was a skeleton curled up at the bottom, but this one was more a disordered tangle of bones than a body that had been properly laid out for burial. Intermixed among the bones were a few broken glass bottles, heavily degraded metal loops of the type generally used to construct chainmail, and a large rusty lump that was still more or less sword-shaped. Judging by the depth of soil they’d removed, and the deposition chart Colonel Lime had been kind enough to fill out before departing back to Canterlot, the body probably dated back to about the middle of the Fifth Century. By then the Equestrian Army had largely phased out chainmail as light armor, and in any case their mystery pony did not appear to possess any of the gold rank clips that had been used in that era. Thus, they were likely some sort of treasure-hunter or adventurer. Possibly they had even been looking for something Lunar out here.
Without more analysis which only the lab back at the Station could provide, it was hard to say exactly how they’d ended up where they were. Had they been attacked by wild animals? Jumped by some rival or turned on by comrades who didn’t want to split their find? Trod on the wrong patch of muddy grass and slipped and fallen and broken their neck? Analysis would also be needed to determine if the mystery pony had picked up anything genuinely Lunar in the course of their explorations, but Twilight doubted it. Her scans had picked up a faint magical residue on the bottles and the sword, but no other enchantments- and no astral steel or paper products.
It was, in summary, an utterly unremarkable find.
Twilight turned back away from the pit, to where Applejack was sitting on the grass beside an open icebox filled with bottles, provided by Pinkie Pie and the Cake family for the benefit of the digging crews. “So, AJ. You ever hear about anypony having… you know, found or taken anything from this site?”
“From the swamp? Or from here, specific’ly?”
“From here, specifically.”
The farmer shook her head. “No-siree. Not even any a’ them spook-stories ‘bout these parts, either. Really, this whole part of the Bog’s ‘bout as far from anythin’ ‘miss-teer-ee-us’” She waggled the forehoof that wasn’t currently holding a bottle of Clydesdale in a vague approximation of quotation marks, “as a pony can reasonably get.”
That meant the entire hot, sweaty, bug-infested, unreasonably early morning trek out here had been wasted… and Twilight Sparkle couldn’t be happier. Princess Luna’s unaccountable streak of revelations had finally been broken, and one way or another the entire project would soon be getting back on track.
“An item of great significance, you said,” Twilight asked aloud, addressing both the assembled digging crews and the alicorn she knew was listening through the spell on her borrowed helmet.
“Well, I mean, that body’s probably significant to somepony,” Pinkie Pie suggested around the shovel in her mouth, one hoof raised, “Like, I don’t know, her family?”
“Don’t you start, too,” Twilight admonished.
“What, worried I’ll start writing those booklets?”
In fact, she wasn’t entirely certain how Luna had found the skeleton. It might not’ve been Lunar, but it wasn’t a rock or something like that. One couldn’t just dig anywhere in Froggy Bottom Bog and come up with a dead Fifth Century treasure hunter. In fact, it was equally puzzling that they hadn’t found the skeleton when they’d been scanning with the Lapwing- they’d even been paying particular attention to any traces of bone. But those were problems that could be solved later. For the time being, it was up to Twilight Sparkle -and nopony else- to manage the hunt for Luna’s redoubt the way it should always have been conducted- sensibly, methodically, and logically.