//------------------------------// // Material Unaccounted For // Story: Griffon The Brush-Off - Extended Cut // by AdmiralSakai //------------------------------// “I’m wondering…” Spike asked, as he sat beside a newly de-petrified Twilight Sparkle at the Golden Oaks’ big central table, “I don’t think you ever got around to telling me what you were doing out in that part of the Everfree to start with. Daycaller’s still trying to straighten out everything you did to the Lapwing, and there’s this pile of journals you left out that I haven’t been able to make any sense of.” Twilight nodded, and poured herself another cup of strong tea. “I was going to talk about that once we’d unpacked again and you’d had a chance to get a decent night’s sleep, but since you asked… Spike? Get my notes…” One Week Ago “Okay. Let’s… just start at the beginning.” Twilight sat on a blue silk cushion across from Major Forward March, in Princess Luna’s book-filled study at Fillydelphia Harbor. The Princess herself occupied the cushion equidistant to both, and the low table in between them held an elaborate silver tea service and a few scattered manila folders. As per Luna’s preference only one lamp was lit, discreetly, in one corner, leaving most of the study outlined in dim silvery-blue radiance from the full moon outside. The big bay windows making up most of the back wall were open, admitting warm early-autumn air scented with wet grass and the far-away saltiness of the ocean. “We’ve been… having some unexpected trouble in determining how the Oath- sorry, that’s the transformation process the Night Guards went through- actually works,” Forward said, “That was always a major objective of our work here, but… just as it’s gotten a lot more urgent, we’ve completely hit a wall.” Princess Luna continued, “I wish to be able to restore any of my Night Guard who so desire to their original appearance; that they may live more comfortably among the ordinary ponies of thine era. Simply administering the same ceremony that once released our un-transformed fellows from service seems to have soothed the restless spirits at Hardfr- erm, Froggy Bottom Bog, but alas, it seems living bodies are not as easily convinced.” She paused, and took a careful sip from the teacup that floated next to her in a bluish telekinetic aura. “My sister has also made a number of very reasoned arguments that we should seek to induct new recruits into the Oath. She feels that the Night Guard are an important, and gravely unappreciated, part of Equestria’s military history, and that their tradition deserves to carry on.” The corners of Luna’s mouth turned upwards ever-so-slightly, “She also spoke quite eloquently about how useful the Guard’s various skills might be on the modern battlefield- especially if they could be properly deciphered, fused with modern magics, and expanded upon.” Forward March chuckled, somewhat bitterly. “The problem is, right now, we have zero idea how to do any of that.” She fished a few sheets of paper out of one of the folders with her wing, and slid them across the table to Twilight. Each sheet described a spell in standard functional notation. Copious annotations explained the operation of various components, although more than a few sections remained alarmingly blank. “The verbal, material, somatic, and runic components of the Oath ritual are all pretty simple to the point of being unimpressive, but all they accomplish are basic, temporary physiological changes. All of the persistent transformation is performed -somehow- by the potion that’s administered along with the Oath, and we have no idea how that functions. We can’t even begin to speculate about an antidote, and we also can’t manufacture any more.” Twilight nodded. She’d read Forward’s earlier reports. The potion and the Oath now joined an alarmingly long list of Lunar arcana -including the “spylon” pillars dotting Froggy Bottom Bog, the illusions covering Nightmare Moon’s redoubt at Mount Hydra, the hippomorphic constructs that defended both, and the bizarre spell Applejack had been asked to perform to “convert” Sweet Apple Acres to a nocturnal ecology- which simply had no comprehensible method of operation. “How much of the potion do we have on hoof?” she asked aloud. “Fifteen doses. That is all,” answered Luna. She dipped her muzzle downward and shook her head. “Once those are gone… someday, all of the Night Guard yet living will be gone as well, and our traditions will once again be consigned to the pages of history.” Twilight turned to face the Princess more directly, slipping Forward’s notes back onto the table. “Where did this potion come from, originally? It… it couldn’t’ve just materialized out of thin air… could it?” Stranger things had been alleged of Lunar practices, after all- and Twilight had witnessed some firsthoof. “My Guard tell me I was the sole provider of it, but try as I might I cannot recall what I did to produce it, or when.” “You know I have to ask this…” Twilight swallowed hard and continued more gently. “Have you and Forward… tried any additional memory-feedback probes?” “Yeah, ‘we’ have,” the pegasus medic shot a pointed glare at Luna, “But even priming with exposure to the Oath potion, other Lunar spells, and modern magical concepts that should be similar, it’s been a mess. Luna’s able to write down things that look like spells and alchemical formulae, but they’re all ill-formed and never consistent. There’s an explanation going around with some of the psychomancers who’re big on your headspace theory, that the way Nightmare Moon encoded abstract knowledge is completely different from the way she encoded events.” “Something I would have liked to explore,” Luna hissed, “If somepony had not shut down the psychomancy labs. Doctor Sparkle would never have-” “Doctor Sparkle left the decision up to me,” Forward March snapped back before Twilight could reply. Then she turned to the unicorn scholar and continued more gently, “and I canceled the tests because Luna was logging close to five times the maximum safe limit for psychoresonance exposure. I was seeing muscle spasms, hearing impairment, tachycardia…the whole nine yards.” Luna seemed about to reply, but Forward kept on going. “Your Grace, you might not be bedridden anymore, but internally you’re still recovering from what Nightmare Moon did to you- whatever it was.” “Major, I can survive a few tremors, or I will be able to, soon enough that-” “No.” The pegasus said, quite calmly, “No, you won’t.” She grabbed another folder from the table and winged it over to Twilight. “Listen. The rate of Princess Luna’s recovery is slowing down, much more quickly than we’d anticipated.” Twilight looked from Forward, to Luna, and then back again. “Wait, what?” All of the tension seemed to drain out of Luna’s posture at once. She closed her eyes, bowed her head, nodded once, and whispered “Aye.” Forward opened the folder and extracted a full-page chart, covered in curved lines of various colors. “We’ve been monitoring Luna’s bone composition, muscle mass, biogenic mana capacity, and other indicators of maturity throughout her recovery and… well…” “I will spare you the complexities, Twilight Sparkle,” Luna spoke up again, “as now that we are speaking freely of it, the truth is quite simple. At the time of my banishment, I was ninety-seven years old. When Nightmare Moon returned, she looked much as my sister does now. Yet by my doctors’ measurements, I will never be much stronger than an alicorn of perhaps seventy.” “The Nightmare Moon data point has an error margin of plus or minus about ninety years,” Forward March added, quietly, “since we never got the chance to run a detailed exam on her or even accurately measure her height aside from a few crappy photos from the town hall. But… basically, yes, Luna’s summed it up pretty well.” Twilight just nodded, mouth half-open, unsure of what to say. Even though much about their initial genesis remained unclear, the development process of alicorns was well understood- Princess Celestia’s stupendous patronage of the sciences frequently extended to volunteering herself and her proteges as test subjects. Alicorns grew rapidly, in physical stature and magical power and a host of other abilities, for about two hundred years. Then, the process began to decelerate. It continued, but at an ever-slower, effectively infinitesimal rate; out presumably to eternity. Celestia had doubled in height between the years 100 and 200 CE, and only gained an additional ten centimeters in the entire period since. According to those models, Princess Luna’s capabilities should either be continuing to grow at a rapid rate, or already be nearly comparable to Celestia- depending, of course, on a very rough estimate of whether her time as a host for Nightmare Moon “counted” or not. But according to the graph in Forward’s wing, she was destined to plateau somewhere far inferior to Princess Cadance. “That’s not why I called you up here, though,” the medic continued, letting the chart slip out of her wing and back onto the table. “As hard as it might be to believe, I actually do have some good news. Or, at least, it started out as good news.” She flicked a wing back towards Luna. “Tia visited us not long ago,” the alicorn said, “And, naturally, wanted to inspect the mages’ progress. When she heard of the troubles they were having with the Oath potion, she recalled a line of study long ago abandoned by other scholars as inconsequential, but which she thought would be of use to us. From those theories, our mages were able to divine the presence of at least one active ingredient. It produces a faint shimmering, akin to starlight, on certain prepared glasses, and so they have named it ‘radion’.” Forward March chuckled. “After finding this stuff in the potions, some of the mages kind of went on a little bit of a scavenger hunt with their detector glasses. Turns out that ‘radion’ exists everywhere in minute quantities, or at least everywhere we can reasonably reach, including inside ponies and other living things; but there’s higher quantities in the Lunars’ bodies and Lunar-manufactured artifacts. The usual background is one or two parts per million, but some of the Shadowbolts are pushing fifty p-p-m. We were even able to pick up a radion signature in the spylon we’ve got in storage, in the daytime, while it was invisible.” That was interesting. Thus far, they’d been completely unable to penetrate the cloaking spells that hid the pillars in daylight- a matter of frustration for many on the project, since said spell should have been over one thousand years old. Twilight took another sip of her tea. “Do you think that means radion is somehow related to the cloaking spell’s operation?” “I dunno, maybe? The radion detection system isn’t that precise, and while there’s different concentrations at different spots on the surface of the pillar we haven’t found anything resembling a rune or a spell circle. It’s possible there’s different kinds of the stuff, some arcanetically significant and some not, and we just can’t discriminate between them yet.” “Do you think the spylons might be creating it, like they create those constructs?” “Doubtful. The scintillation effect shows up in some photography, especially thaumophotographs, so we were able go back over some of our older data and see if any radion existed in the recent past. When we did, we found that everything that’d been present at the Castle of Two Sisters when Nightmare Moon was… killed? Dispelled? Whatever… was absolutely covered in the stuff. That included you and your pals from Ponyville.” Twilight was about to ask why she hadn’t been told of this earlier, when the Major held up one hoof. “Now, before you ask, we don’t think radion has any harmful effects- we’re not quite at the point yet where we can separate it out and inject it into mice, but the Lunars seem okay with it and there’s a little bit in everypony already anyway. More to the point, based on what we could dig out of photos, your levels all decreased back to normal over the course of a few days.” Forward extracted another chart, this one featuring a set of wobbly primary-colored lines that quickly swept downward to approach -but not quite touch- the zero axis. Twilight, however, was more interested in one much higher, dark blue line.It flattened out at almost exactly twenty-seven percent of its original value, eerily similar to the factor by which Luna’s recovery was expected to come up short. “What’s that?” she asked. The Major closed her eyes for a moment and pulled in a deep breath. “I’m afraid that’s the level of radion in Princess Luna’s system. She experienced the highest exposure we’ve ever seen, but what’s more alarming is that, while it’s been decreasing just like yours, that decrease is also slowing down. There’s probably going to be a sizable percentage of her original radion exposure that will, as best we can predict, never go away.” Twilight took another long, slow sip of her tea. “Do we know what that means?” “Not really.” “Do we know why it’s happening?” “I’m afraid not.” “Do we know where this radion content is coming from?” “We think it’s the same radion, that’s been trapped in her tissues this whole time. How it got there in the first place? That’s anypony’s guess.” “Do we know if it’s affecting her recovery?” “I don’t know, maybe? Probably, actually. But I also don’t know if taking the radion out -if we even knew how to take it out- will help.” Twilight squeezed her eyes shut, and leaned back against her cushion. “Who else knows about all this?” she finally asked. “Celestia, Luna, me, the three alchemists and an MD who ran the actual tests, and now you,” Forward answered. “Good. Let’s keep it that way. With all of this other nonsense that’s been circulating about Princess Luna, the papers really do not need to know that she’s experiencing difficulties with her recovery and is contaminated with an unknown substance.” There was a long, heavy pause. Then the Princess nodded, ever-so-slowly. “Agreed.” “Wow.” Spike took another sip of his tea, quietly glad that his claws had stopped trembling a good long while ago. “That’s all… well, it’s a lot to think about, I guess. Mostly to be concerned about. So, all those weird scans you were doing with the Lapwing were to look for… radion? Radions? What is the plural of that, anyway? In the Everfree Forest.” “Correct! And Forward was using it like a mass noun, so there really isn’t a plural.” “And then you went out on-hoof and decided to check out a weird noise in the bushes because… radion might’ve made it?” “Actually, it was Chamomile who insisted on checking that out; I just wanted to keep moving, but, you know,” Twilight tilted her head back and stuck out her lower jaw in a passable impression of some of the less competent Supermare cover art, “‘A Royal Guard Never Backs Down From A Fight – Hoo-RAH’. And I certainly wasn’t about to let him charge off and leave me alone out there.” She shook her head. “Actually, if Luna’s any indication, that cockatrice very well could have been the source of my radion readings… but I’m pretty sure it was the bits of potion bottle Fluttershy discovered- the Oath potions are positively… uh, radiant with the stuff. After that,I was going to scan the sites where the pillars had been, the day after, but I never got the chance to.” “That makes sense, yeah. And those old papers you were piling up… I’m guessing those were the methods Celestia pointed out?” “Right again!” Twilight raised her teacup in a little mock-toast. “But there’s actually a little more to them than that. Major Forward thought radion has always existed, but based on the digging I did that’s actually not the case. The original studies Celestia referenced were started because, back in 1019, weather stations and a few precision alchemy experiments all over the world started picking up a plume of unknown matter spreading out from central Equestria. They were able to identify what we’re now calling radion in about a third of the samples, and the composition of the rest was never conclusively determined.” Spike held up a claw. “Wait, wait, wait. If they could detect this stuff sight unseen back in the 1020s, how come we never could with all the tests we were running on Luna and the pillars? Was their approach really that much better than yours, eighty years earlier?” “I was asking myself the same thing, at first. What clued the early alchemists in was the presence of essentially pure radion in particulates, the kind of thing you could just see under a microscope. The material in Luna’s tissues, and the pillars, though, is… compounded, somehow. I think we were the first to ever detect it in that form; the papers I found just theorize about possible compounds. So we’ve actually come at least a little ways farther.” “But not far enough to figure out how any of it works. In fact, while we know it exists, we currently actually know basically nothing about radion.” “Pretty much. Further experiments could take decades with dedicated teams of alchemists, and all the existing studies are dead ends. There just weren’t any foreign mages’ groups with the resources necessary to conduct studies like that at the time, and nopony in Equestria seemed to think it was worth pursuing.” “I’m not sure.” Spike stood up, and loped over to Twilight’s desk. Operating more off of a gut feeling than any specific memory, he began leafing through the stacks of documents again. Finally he extracted a systematic review by a group of hippogriff druids, modeling the early days of the material’s spread. “Doesn’t this ‘plume’ thing start out awfully close to the Great Canterlot Fire?” he asked, “Within, like, a few days, even?” He wasn’t surprised that Twilight hadn’t made the connection herself- if there were any facts she tended to miss, they were usually the most obvious ones. It likely didn’t help that, despite being a disaster that had ended up killing nearly five hundred ponies, leveling sections of Canterlot Castle, and forcing the Equestrian government to relocate its operations to the lower commercial district for nearly a year, the Fire had received extremely little press coverage. As far as Spike knew, there hadn’t even been any sort of official Ministerial inquiry, or a published report- and Twilight usually consulted those sources first. Twilight gently pulled the page in question from Spike’s claws in her telekinesis, and scanned over it herself. “Spike, you’re right. I wonder…” “Once everything’s settled out here, do you think we should head up to the archives in Canterlot?” Spike asked. “Yeah, I think that might be a really good idea.” “Here’s that editorial from the Times I remember hearing about:” “The divergence of views between the Defense and Interior Ministries, and the unsatisfying conjectures advanced by the Army to explain the affair, have touched off a vigorous public discussion. The considerable public excitement and confusion caused by this disaster, as well as its spectacular official accompaniments, demand a careful explanation. We at the Editorial Board concede that military authorities had been correct in calling a precautionary alert, but deplore the lack of agreement between the Army and Navy. Indeed, the more the incident is studied, the more incredible it becomes. There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair, and it appears that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion on the matter…” “Check this out:” “… The suit alleges that plaintiffs, all survivors of the Great Canterlot Fire, were subjected to medically unnecessary memory removal therapy by the Equestrian Hospital Service. Patients initially consented to the procedures, which wereadvised to treat post-traumatic stress, and were never made aware that less risky and time-intensive therapies were standard for their cases. Damages total between three and four million bits, intended to address neurological side-effects, lost productivity due to overextended medical leave, and various emotional damages. ‘There’s a three-day blank space in my life, where other ponies had to tell me that four of my mares died, and now I feel like I wasn’t there for them,’ said plaintiff Silverkey, a former sergeant in the Canterlot Watch, ‘If I’d seen them go down, I think I could’ve eventually made peace with it and moved on, but now there’s just nothing. What can I tell their buddies? What can I tell their families?’ Memory specialists consulted by the Times stated there was ‘a slight chance that experimental techniques could restore some limited recollection’. The Ministry of Health has thus far declined to comment, citing standard policies on ongoing litigation…’” “This is interesting. The head of the Canterlot Fire Brigade went on record saying the source of the explosion was actually beneath the Royal Academy, a significant distance underground. Then she walked that back in a press conference a week later and said the origin couldn’t be determined, but… didn’t present any of the evidence like what she’d shown to back up the original statement.” "… it is the conclusion of the Equestrian Union of Firemares and Fire Safety Officials that large portions of Canterlot Castle were in fact deliberately demolished or set aflame by emergency personnel or the military. While the establishment of backfires and fire-breaks is entirely normal procedure in firefighting, we find the degree of destruction inflicted by Canterlot’s authorities unusually severe, bordering on indiscriminate. In addition, the continued insistence of the Interior Ministry that all damage to the city was accomplished by accidental fire, and that deliberate destruction played no role whatsoever, is troubling…" “And then there’s a footnote mentioning that back-burning is generally only used to combat wildfires, not city fires… and describing how this means the whole Canterlot Fire was a false-flag operation perpetrated by a group of donkeys operating inside the Government…” “Wow, Spike, there’s a lot of different letters from different ponies in here who are all claiming that the collapse of Dockyard Terrace Three was due to some kind of spell, not fire damage at all.” “Do they… have any kind of proof of this?” “Not really, but they all come back to the same idea eventually- that airship fuel can’t melt adamantium beams.” “… at least three witnesses, including a Lieutenant in the Canterlot Weather Patrol, observed a Royal Navy cruiser hover over the Castle district between the hours of four and six AM, and fire between ten and twelve cannon rounds straight down…” “Does it say why?” “No, the quote just cuts off and then the newsletter says this is proof that Princess Celestia called in an airstrike to assassinate her political opponents. Under orders from, of course, the international confederation of donkeys.” “Oh, no, not this again…” “Whatcha’ got?” “Copies of coroner’s reports.” “How in Tartarus did some accountant in Vanhoover get ahold of those?” “I’m not sure, maybe they’re fake, but they look genuine and they’re really actually kind of weird. This table here was supposed to be part of an internal investigation run by the Ministry of Health, which of course nopony’s ever heard of because ‘it never saw the light of day’. Take a look.” “Twilight, this can’t be real!” “Of four hundred and ninety-six (496) sets of equine remains in possession of the Canterlot division of EHS, twenty-two (22) have not been turned over to next of kin despite no stated legal or practical justification being provided to withhold them. An additional one-hundred-and-four (104) sets of remains were stated in initial release documents to have been incinerated during the course of structure fires, but instead show alchemical indications of artificial cremation. Of these, sixty-six (66) sets of remains were described as containing complete skeletons in initial logs, but are in fact incomplete. A further sixteen (16) sets of remains are accompanied by coroner’s reports identifying ‘anomalies’ in the skeletal system and blood serum, although no further investigation appears to have been initiated. Additionally, the EHS currently retains a collection of fifty-one (51) sets of remains which ‘could not be conclusively identified as equine, or belonging to any known species’ and which are not included in the official death toll." “… are they donkeys?” “Nope! They’re part… let me see here… of an ancient race of reptile ponies that live deep underground, impersonate political figures, and eat equine flesh!” “Oh. Well, that’s so much better.” “I found some astrologer who’s pointing out how many magically-significant astrological combinations occurred on the night of the explosion. More than any other night for two years in the past and three in the future, even.” “Hmm. The actual calculations look pretty solid, but… give me a minute to read the rest… there we go, here’s a section on how the whole thing was predicted by Princess Luna. I was worried I might have to take some of this seriously.” “Here’s an interesting paper. It says ponies all over Canterlot spotted a ‘large, shadowy, owl-like figure, possibly metallic in composition,’ which matches depictions in an obscure illustrated text called the Thievius Abyssinius dating back easily two thousand years. There’s even pictures!” “Let me see that.” Twilight peered at the badly-copied pages. As far as she was concerned, the artist’s depiction looked less like a mechanical owl and more like an obese, balding stallion with a handlebar mustache covered head-to-tail in black garbage bags. “Just stick it on the pile with the Mothmare sightings, and the Headless Horse sightings, and the Nightmare Moon sightings, and the Slendermare sightings, and-” “Wait, was that the one where the supposed ex-Army captain… sergeant… whatever… kept asking if the mare in the suit was actually wearing a suit?” “No, you’re thinking of the pale mare in the blue-gray suit, with a briefcase,who was spotted more than a dozen times, all over the city, within an hour. This one’s the faceless mare in the black suit, who was supposed to mess with photographs.” “Oh. Right. There’s so many of these, it’s getting hard to keep them all straight…” “This mare’s convinced that changelings started the fire.” “Not ‘The Donkeys’?” “Nope! Changelings. She says she saw ‘four black, silent, equinoid figures climb vertically up a wall in the Fountain District’.” “Well, that’s dumb.” “I don’t know, she’s the only one who mentions changelings but there’s all sorts of reports of creatures crawling and flying around in lower parts of the city. And the Army was sending troops out to deal with them! I think there might be something to this.” “Something more than just mass hysteria, you mean?” “If these sightings were just caused by mass hysteria, then I’m not sure how it spread so quickly. The reports show up within minutes of each other, halfway across the city- that’s way too fast for just word-of-mouth suggestions to travel, and all the firelinks and messenger services had been commandeered for official use…” “It does seem kind of strange… so many elite military units just happened to be in the area to render firefighting assistance so quickly…” “Yeah, the kind of ‘firefighting assistance’ that needed a lot of front-line combat troops and consumed a lot of crossbow quarrels and blasting crystals…” “These reports are such an absolute mess it’s hard to make sense of anything, though… look at this, the Army Engineers Sixth Corps is assigned to three different districts of the city within minutes of each other! There’s no way the military could get away with recordkeeping this sloppy. Something’s wrong here.” “What’cha got, Twilight?” “Weather reports. The 1015-1020 Central Mountain Dominion Almanac, specifically. Look at this; for a period of ten days before the fire the astrological and meteorological records go out to five significant digits instead of the usual three. Measurements that precise usually have to be ordered by some authority, for some reason, but there’s no footnotes. And all rainfall is rescheduled to the weeks afterward- then they went ahead and dumped it all at once to put the fire out, of course, but why would they make changes ahead of time?” “Does it say who ordered these changes?” “Nope. The weather schedule itself is a public record and has to be published, but there’s no obligation to disclose why a specific change was made…” “Twilight, I asked Jade Singer for some of the invoices from 1019, and a lot of them are missing, but the ones she could find show very large shipments into the Academy from different instrumentation and reagent suppliers right up to the day of the Fire. Who was buying this stuff, what they were buying, and where it was ultimately going are all blacked out, but I recalculated the total cost and it’s something like twelve and a half million bits.” “Okay, so, where did it all end up?” “I’m not sure, but there’s no records of any of it being disposed of or released to any ordinary department.” “So, I’ve been doing a little more research into the theoretical alchemy and liminology literature that might be related to radion, and I found something weird. Some of the sources I’ve been consulting have checkout cards going all the way back to the turn of the millennium, and all of the ones where records exist were also loaned or copied to the Royal Academy in 1019. That got me thinking, and I sent some letters out to other academic libraries with key works in the field, and some of them were also loaned and some of those just went missing- some got checked out by the Academy just before the fire, and never returned, and some got checked out afterwards, by ponies from the Ministry of Defense!” “What’s in the envelope?” “So, Spike, you know how Shiny has tea every week with Fleet Admiral Gyrfalcon and his wife?” “Yeah?” “Well, I asked him, to ask Gyrfalcon, to ask the head of records for the Navy to send me the deployment reports for the first half of 1019. And not only were twice the usual number of combat airships stationed in Canterlot the day of the Fire, but there were a dozen of what were described as VIP passenger runs in the week leading up to it. Nine were within Equestria, and three outside.” “Do you know who ordered them, or who the passengers were?” “Nope, that’s all redacted. Shiny says it was all Gyrfalcon could do to get a hold of the airfields the ships went to.” “Actually, let me see those…” “Twilight?” “Yeah, Spike?” “I took a look at those airfields, and… well, they didn’t go to airfields. This was land-on-your-lawn official service. So I started going through some of the old address books, and it turns out every one of those flights touched down within a kilometer of the mailing address of a leading astrologer, liminologist, or magical theorist.” “That’s… that’s a little concerning, actually.” “There’s more. Four of those mages had obituaries written within two weeks of the Fire, even though according to the official records, they’d died of natural causes and hadn’t been anywhere near Canterlot at the time.” “Spike?” “Yeah?” “Can you get me everything those mages published?” “Bingo.” “Twilight?” “Look at this. Astrological Cross-Correlation In Multiversal Object Substitutions from 1018 cites ‘Bittersweet and Leadwing, 8th Issue, Hearth Fire 1013.’ But there is no 8th issue of Bittersweet and Leadwing’s reports, in that month or any other!” “Isn’t this the report series that got Doctor Ball to quit her job? The one with her name misspelled on the cover, and those really weird figures?” “Yeah, but at least that’s actually in official records, complete failures to accurately depict basic skeletal anatomy and all. There’s an Issue 7, and an Issue 9, but 8 just… disappeared.” “I’ll add that into your report for Celestia.” “Good thinking. And I’ll fill out a request to the Academy’s high-security archives, and see if they might have any information.” “Dr. Twilight Sparkle: Your disclosure request number 1098/15422 to the Royal Academy High Security Archives has been forwarded to the authorization committee under Section 14 of the Destructive Arcana & Techniques Act 972,” Twilight read the very next day. The Destructive Arcana & Techniques Act was brought into force whenever a magical discovery’s potential to cause widespread destruction -and make doing so easy- was deemed to outweigh the benefits of further study. It would not serve the public good, the argument went, if any madmare with an elementary magician’s circle was able to conjure up virulent diseases, permanently sterilize great tracts of farmland, or simply make a very large explosion. Instead, such developments were forbidden by law from being disclosed. Knowledge of their inner workings was only made available to select researchers that a committee of public-safety officials and magical experts deemed sufficiently trustworthy. The fact that the Act had been invoked at all already told Twilight a few very important things. First, there was indeed something responsible for the horrible events of late 1019. Second, information about that something was sufficiently detailed that there was a very real danger of those events being reenacted. Third, that something had to be of immense magical power: the Destructive Arcana & Techniques Act was not invoked whenever somepony invented a sharper sword or a more efficient formulation of blasting-powder. She read on. "We regret to inform you that your request has been rejected on the advice of the Archmage of the Royal Academy. Please be aware that the DATA Authorization Committee receives a very large number of disclosure requests each day, and must carefully weigh the potential risks of further study into dangerous areas against the possible insights and applications gained.” That was all. Twilight released the letter from her telekinesis and let it fall back to her desk. She had, over the course of her career, submitted three previous Authorization Committee requests. Two had been accepted, and one denied. All of them had spent a little more than a week in deliberation; a decision in under twenty-four hours was, as far as Twilight knew, completely unheard of. It was also unheard of for the Archmage of the Academy to take the slightest interest in the proceedings, to the degree that Twilight hadn’t previously had the faintest idea it was even allowed, or why the Archmage would even care. Finally, every single rejected request she’d heard of included a brief summary of why it had been rejected, including some basic information on what made the sought-after documents so dangerous. Here, there was nothing of the sort. She stood up from her chair, scribbled a quick note to Spike, and set off for the Academy grounds. Twilight had visited Archmage Inkwell’s office some dozen times over the course of her academic career, and it never ceased to impress her. The room was half-circular, occupying the east side of one of the Academy’s larger towers; leaving a curved outer wall to alternate between imposing bookcases and tall, arched windows. Inkwell’s surprisingly small, unadorned desk sat in the center, facing the door. On the interior wall hung an impressive number of framed awards, and a floor-to-ceiling tapestry depicting the seal and motto of the Royal Academy: ‘Nihil Est, Quod Non Sciendium Equii’. The Archmage herself was not in attendance when Twilight arrived, despite the younger mare having gone through all the proper channels to make an appointment. Inkwell also kept a smaller office down among the other faculty -the same one she’d been assigned when she was first hired, seventy-eight years ago- and only used the Archmage’s tower for official meetings. Only after Twilight spent a few minutes in one of the stiff, high-backed chairs Inkwell had provided for the dubious comfort of visitors did she appear; staggering with a not insignificant effort across the plum-colored carpet from the staircase and reception area that occupied the other half of the tower. At one hundred and four years old, Archmage Inkwell looked less like a live unicorn mare than some sort of necromantic construct- a patchy gray coat stretched taut over an unsteady skeleton and not much else. In fact, with her dark mane pulled back in a decidedly old-fashioned flat bun and her scarred-shut left eye, she could probably have passed for a Lunar revenant; but for whatever reason she always wore a pair of gaudy, black-and-purple striped leggings over her forelegs. Rival scholars underestimated her at their peril, however. In addition to carrying out the sizable administrative duties of the Archmage, Inkwell still taught Introductory Dynamancy each and every semester, as well as a number of advanced seminar courses on subjects as diverse as golemancy and theoretical astrodynamics. “Hmph, blasted stairs…” she muttered more to herself than to Twilight, in a voice that seemed to be generated entirely by vigorously rubbing small rocks against each other somewhere inside her barrel. She hauled herself into the chair behind her desk and continued, as if by way of explanation, “Hospital switched out my arthritis medication, for some newfangled formula that’s supposed to be easier to process, but it just doesn’t work as well.” Twilight opened her mouth to reply, but the Archmage continued talking without giving her a chance: “You may dispense with the usual pleasantries, Doctor Sparkle. I know why you’re here.” The younger mage let her jaw shut again with an audible click. Then she nodded. “I’m afraid my decision is final. I have good reasons for the instructions I sent to the Approval Committee, and they won’t be altered. However, I also won’t hold this… transgression against you if you need anything from the Academy in the future.” Inkwell leaned forward, with some apparent difficulty, and braced her forehooves against the desk. “You have an unusually bright future in front of you, Doctor. Please don’t fritter it away on Princess Celestia’s behalf, chasing down all of her old mistakes.” Twilight swallowed hard, and then asked “Can you at least tell me why you vetoed my application?” Inkwell shook her head, producing a very faint series of clicks and pops in the process. “I wish I could, Twilight, but you’ll have to trust me that doing so would be just as… catastrophic as releasing the files themselves.” She paused, looked over Twilight’s shoulder at the banner hanging against the far wall, and then gazed back at the scholar with a renewed, almost fearful intensity in her sole functioning eye. “Believe what you will, Doctor Sparkle, it doesn’t matter to me. But listen well. There are indeed things in this universe that ponykind was not meant to know. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I’m afraid I’m going to be late for my next lecture. Good day.” She carefully dismounted her desk chair and trotted back out the door, this time -Twilight thought, at least- with a noticeably surer step than when she’d arrived. The next train back to Ponyville didn’t depart for an hour and a half after her meeting with Inkwell. Twilight hadn’t expected the meeting in question to be anywhere near as short as it was, and now she was left with nothing better to do than wander around the Academy campus and speculate. She was making her way down the skywalk between Pasture Memorial Lecture Hall and the Fair-A-Day College of Theoretical Evocation, when she heard Princess Celestia’s voice behind her. “I’m sorry, Twilight, but I’m afraid this falls under the category of secrets that aren’t mine to tell.” Twilight came to an abrupt halt, then spun around to find the Princess standing some ways back along the corridor, looking out through one of its many windows in the rough direction of the Archmage’s tower. She didn’t even bother to ponder how Celestia had already learned the outcome of her meeting with Inkwell, or for that matter found her over the expanse of the entire campus. After working for the alicorn for as long as Twilight had, one simply got used to such things. Instead, she trotted back over and rested her hooves on the railing. “So, you know about… whatever happened in 1019, then.” Celestia nodded, and squeezed her eyes shut for just a moment longer than a blink. “Of course I know, Twilight. I was there.” “Then tell me what happened!” Twilight snapped, “Or, better yet, just order Inkwell and those Committee ponies to cooperate. Ultimately, they work for you, don’t they? Inkwell’s granddaughter is your Chief of Staff, for Starswirl’s sake!” If Celestia was at all bothered by Twilight’s outburst, she gave no immediately visible sign, although when she spoke again her voice was just a fraction of a degree colder. “Twilight, you know I can’t do that. The position of Exarch exists to serve and uphold the laws of the Imperial Republic, not the other way around. That’s true whether the law in question is a murder statute, or an information approval process. To even consider stepping outside of it would be to betray everything I’ve spent a thousand years building.” She paused, and then knelt down to look her younger student in the eye. “I’m sorry, Twilight. But simply by speaking to you about… these events, I’ve already pushed up against the absolute limits of what Equestrian law allows.” She stood up again, and set off down the corridor, rapidly vanishing from sight when she turned a corner just inside Pasture Hall. By the time Twilight found the sense to follow, the alicorn was already gone. “I don’t get it,” Twilight told Spike over dinner at the Golden Oaks that evening, “I’m sure Celestia was trying to tell me something important, but I don’t have any idea what it might’ve been.” The dragon continued absentmindedly subdividing his ruby-dust-and-daisy casserole into smaller and smaller squares with a butter knife, until some of them began to grow top-heavy and collapse. “Honestly? I’d just leave it alone for the time being.That mare from the candy shop across the street was asking what you were up to… I think she was worried you’d disappeared on us again. Maybe it’d be better to focus on the leads we’ve already got here, in Ponyville, at least for a while. Maybe Celestia was counting on your already having discovered some other clue that we’ve actually missed so far.” “Okay,” Twilight nodded. “Any luck tracking down the survivors?” “Oh, I’ve been tracking them down just fine, the only problem is, they’re all dead.” Twilight froze with her water glass hovering just in front of her muzzle. “What?” Spike waved his claws in front of himself in a quick negatory gesture. “No, no, no, not like that. I did find a Ministry of Health report that said the survivors of the Canterlot Fire showed an elevated incidence of some otherwise extremely rare lung and bone diseases, but nothing particularly drastic or lethal. What I meant was, the Fire was almost eighty years ago. If a pony was old enough to remember anything substantial in 1019, they’d be pushing a hundred, now. Or past it, in most cases, unless they were super-young.” “Yeah,” Twilight nodded again. Like Inkwell… “Inkwell?” Spike asked. “Yeah, you know, the Archmage?” Twilight hadn’t realized she’d said the last part out loud. “Wait a minute.” Spike turned away from the kitchen table, casserole seemingly forgotten for the moment, and disappeared back into the main room. He returned a moment later with a newspaper clipping held in one hand, which he slid across the table to Twilight. Underneath the headline “CANTERLOT FIRE HEROES HONORED”, the entire page was taken up by a photograph of Princess Celestia, standing in front of the office building that had served as the provisional headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior. On her left stood a young, tired-looking unicorn mare. Her dark mane was pulled into what would have, at the time, been considered a perfectly fashionable flat bun; she wore a somewhat torn and abused Royal Academy graduate assistant’s sash; and her forelegs and left eye were covered in thick bandages. On the Princess’s right, what appeared to be a male griffon wearing a pair of thick, black-framed glasses was half-visible and half-out-of-frame, one talon outstretched as though warding off the camera. I’ve already pushed up against the absolute limits of what Equestrian law allows… “Wait… who’s that?” Twilight asked aloud. Spike peered at the tiny caption underneath the image, slit pupils wide in the dim light. “‘From left to right: Junior Researcher Inkwell, H.G. The Exarch Princess Celestia, and Junior Researcher Gordon… of… Innsbeak…”