Twilight rode an air chariot back to Gordon’s tower at the University. He’d come to the party by long-range teleport, but while Goldstone’s manor included its own focus room, it hadn’t been in working order for somewhere on the order of thirty years. Thus, returning by the same method was impossible.

In her weakened state, the acceleration of the tower elevator -the only one in the entire city of Innsbeak, supposedly- nearly brought her to her knees as she rode it to the upper level. Staff were required to take the stairs.

Twilight wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting from the mad mage’s personal quarters, but a spacious, clean, white-tiled laboratory workspace that wouldn’t’ve looked out of place in the Royal Academy was not it. The entire circular floorplan of the tower was essentially one big open room, split up by half-height wooden partitions extending from the central column that held the elevator and staircase. Tall picture windows offered a commanding view of the Innsbeak skyline- which was to say, a commanding view of nothing much, although at least they were above the worst of the omnipresent smog.

The infamous skull collection sat in little individual square cubbies in a wooden shelving unit against one wall; a cabinet next to it was packed with armaments both magical and mundane; and next to that a small alcove held a curious suit of armor on a complicated rack. There was an obvious resemblance to Royal Guard armor, although the gambeson usually worn underneath had been replaced by a full bodysuit that appeared to be made of some kind of treated gray rubber. The armor plates were painted brilliant safety-orange, giving the entire device a marked resemblance to Gordon’s natural robin-like coloration, and the full-face helmet had been outfitted with round glass goggles and a beakguard to accommodate griffon anatomy. Although the suit had obviously been subjected to ongoing modifications both magical and metallurgical, Twilight found the underlying design to be quite reminiscent of the refitted armor used by the Guard in particularly hazardous environments- which, in 1019, would have made it very, very new.

The rest of the tower was taken up by lab worktops, ritual circles, and freestanding blackboards. Most of the work depicted was alchemical, and well beyond Twilight’s expertise, but some appeared to be liminological. Amid the notes and formulae she picked out eerie similarities not just to her research into radion, but also her original models of the spell that brought about Nightmare Moon’s return. A big poster-sized flowchart was decorated with news clippings and names- government and academic agencies, major disasters, and magical developments in Equestria and far beyond. Some of the notes referred to Twilight herself, sharing space with established mages and broadsheet-spewing conspiracy theorists; one of the highest-quality photos of Nightmare Moon taken in the Ponyville Town Hall had been tacked nearby, and then neatly crossed out.

Gordon stood at one of the windows nearby, looking out over the city and its hundreds of wobbly, flickering lights. “Boreas, I still can’t believe it’s night out, it only felt like a couple hours.” He tapped his cane a couple of times on the lab’s tile floor. “Dammit, everything’s like this now. They always say time flies when you’re having fun, but what happens is that time just flies, period, and we all end up older.”

Twilight just nodded, in equal parts impressed and confused. Now that her headache and nausea were starting to fade, it was starting to sink in just how tired she was; she cast around for a place to sit, spotted a wheeled desk chair tucked under a nearby laboratory table, and telekinetically rolled it over.

Gordon picked his way back over to her, pulled another chair out from under the other side of the table, and sat down across from her, drumming his talons on the bakelite resin worktop. “So, I… guess this is it, then. Let’s start with you telling me everything you think happened in 1019, and I’ll tell you all the ways that you’re wrong.”

Twilight scanned over the news clippings on the chart again. Most of them were relatively recent, if one defined 'recent' as having been published within her lifetime. “What makes you so sure I’m looking into anything that happened in 1019?”

“What else would you be looking into? Ponies from Canterlot don’t come around here to learn about the fluxional harmoniodynamic Grangerian,” he shook his head, suddenly looking downcast, “Not anymore, at least.”

“Right.” Twilight pulled in a deep breath, and then continued, “So, I’m pretty sure that the Great Canterlot Fire was deliberately set to cover up some other disaster that took place in or near the northern edge of the Royal Academy campus. This was preceded by, and might’ve been the result of, some kind of major construction or investigation project that had been running for an unknown but sizable amount of time in very close secrecy. It released a plume of unidentified, unique, and mostly undetectable material into the atmosphere, which persists to this day. I’ve been picking up traces of the same, or similar, matter in Lunar artifacts, and I was hoping that if I knew more about it I’d be able to figure out how those artifacts functioned. However, there’s very little information available on its properties, or its origins.”

“I know that you, current Archmage Inkwell, and Princess Celestia were all involved in the initial release event, along with a bunch of other leading figures in variety of fields. Who are now all dead.”

“Well, I tried consulting the Academy archives first, and when that didn’t go anywhere I talked to Inkwell, and when she didn’t cooperate I tried talking to Celestia, and when she couldn’t tell me anything, I came here looking for you.”

Gordon looked at her silently for a second, his gaze, expression, and entire head disconcertingly fixed. Then he threw his head back and laughed, long and loud, and Twilight got the distinct impression that she was being laughed at. Feeling somewhat uncomfortable under the griffon’s wobbly green gaze, she looked down at the table and scanned over a few of the stacks of paper that had been left out in one corner. With a palpable shock she realized they were neatly-collated copies of the documents she’d consulted on radion, along with some of her own most recent reports on Lunar phenomena- and there were corrections written overtop. In fact, the entire collection looked like it had been prepared and set out specifically for her benefit, but when she lit her horn and attempted to lift off one of the cover pages, Gordon’s talon slammed flat against the stack.

“The Equestrian government and I don’t agree on a lot of things, but the one thing we do agree on is that this is dangerous information,” the mage said. His jovial tone never wavered, but there was something about the way he was looking at her that seemed… steadier, somehow; intent and wary. “What you ponies did up in Canterlot wasn’t some freak accident. It was proven, reproducible science, and you look like the kind of pony who might want to reproduce it, just to see what would happen.”

“No, no, absolutely not,” Twilight stammered, “I’m just… trying to set the record straight, historically speaking, I guess. And thinking about this from a risk-management perspective, giving the information over would actually decrease the likelihood that I’d try to independently re-derive any part of it by running experiments myself. But… more than that, the fact that I’ve found materials originally detected in the aftermath of the disaster, at elevated concentrations in artifacts and living ponies from nearly a thousand years earlier, should tell you that there’s more going on here than even you realize. We’ll have to work together if we want to get to the bottom of it- because, right now, I'm worried whatever happened in Canterlot could happen again. It might’ve already happened, a thousand years ago, or just this year at the Summer Sun Celebration.”

She watched as Gordon’s eyes suddenly grew much wider, the whirring gears in his head almost audible. “It must've been... localized, both those times, then. Contained. I didn't pick up anything on my instruments, when… when Nightmare Moon returned, I guess. That’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it?”

Twilight nodded. “I know the substance has an affinity for living tissue, though. In my notes- which you somehow have a copy of- you can see I've found elevated radion levels in Princess Luna, as well as her surviving troops." She planted her hooves on the table and tried to look him in the eye, which was a more mentally daunting prospect than she’d’ve considered previously. “You can trust me, Gordon. I already have a fairly good idea of what the consequences could be if-”

“No.” The mage said, surprisingly quietly, “Ambushing three Lunars in some forest somewhere is nothing. I had to fight my way through dozens of those things with a prybar, before I even found a real weapon. I beat down colleagues and coworkers and random Canterlot citizens who’d just had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because it was always them or me. So no, I don’t trust you, Twilight Sparkle. I don’t think you know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Twilight resisted the sudden urge to roll her eyes. “Are you always this paranoid, or is it only when you’re with ponies who really need your help?”

Gordon slipped out of his chair and began pacing out an aimless path near the windows, his eyes narrowing with a focus Twilight hadn't seen before, “You know, everypony’s always told me that I’m paranoid, and I need to calm down. But guess what? I’m alive, and everypony who’s said that is dead!” He suddenly swung his cane through the air, hard enough that Twilight could hear the whistling noise from her seat. “That’s the ultimate proof somepony doesn’t know what in Tartarus they’re talking about. 'Follow my advice and you'll die just like me, hu-hyuk!' I’ve got the Equestrian Strategic Services posting my name on a wall somewhere, setting death traps, and firing fucking artillery pieces at me, and ponies have the gall to call me paranoid!” He stopped and once again looked out the window over the city. “Fuck them. Fuck everypony! Anypony who doesn’t listen to me deserves the fate they get! I should kill everycreature just on principle!”

Vaguely alarmed, Twilight slid her chair back a few centimeters, but the griffon wasn’t finished. He waved the claw that wasn’t holding his walking stick in a vague, theatrical gesture. “‘Monsters aren’t invading, Gordon, you’re just being paranoid.’ ‘The mailmare isn’t spying on you, Gordon, you’re just being paranoid.’ ‘There’s no society of hippomorphic bug-ponies living in the mines under Canterlot, Gordon, you’re just being paranoid.’ ‘Owls can’t read your thoughts, Gordon, you’re just being paranoid…’” Very suddenly, he wheeled around once again and looked directly at Twilight; she immediately abandoned any attempts to move away. “Bet’cha wouldn’t call me paranoid if you were still alive! How about expecting Twilight fucking Sparkle to ambush me at an auction party- is that paranoid?!” he practically screamed.

Utterly bewildered, Twilight spent a second pondering what he might’ve expected the correct answer to be. And what was that about owls? Finally, she settled on “Not… any more than expecting Nightmare Moon to return was paranoid, anyway.”

Very abruptly, the frantic energy seemed to disappear from Gordon’s frame. He sat back down and straightened his jacket. Once again, with growing dismay, the unicorn found herself wondering if what she’d just witnessed was some kind of an act. Then she decided that wasn’t the right question. Rather, she was unsure if his current calm was an act on the part of a deeply disturbed recluse; if the entire diatribe had been an act on the part of the clever and calculating wizard seated in front of her now; or if mage and maniac had long ago attained some kind of equilibrium and both were Gordon in roughly equal measure.

Gordon of Innsbeak worked underground, in the Blue Mountain Research Facility tunneled five kilometers into the side of Mt. Maranduin. Here, the Royal Academy of Magic conducted experiments too delicate to risk being disturbed by the everyday activities of the city of Canterlot- or which, for any number of reasons and any number of different meanings of the word, might ‘disturb’ the city or its inhabitants in turn. There was a dedicated rail line running to it from the closed-off little residential district where they’d assigned him living quarters, retrofitted into the old crystal mines to keep it from showing up on public construction budgets, although today -of all days- his train was running late.

Ordinarily, he wouldn’t’ve been overly bothered. However, he considered himself lucky to have secured a position on such an important project at all, and was willing to put in at least a bit of effort to keep it. Prestigious Equestrian research institutions didn’t recruit from the University of Innsbeak every day, after all, especially not to hire new doctoral graduates of his relative inexperience; and especially not for projects that required ‘Special Security Clearance’. Indeed, his entire hiring process had been unusual- secretive was the best way he could describe it, all one-on-one meetings in cramped little rooms, with more concern given to a small mountain of nondisclosure agreements than to the usual visa and residency papers.

Finally his train car slid to a halt, a little more than ten minutes behind schedule.

The primary rail access to Blue Mountain was little more than a platform of bare rock chiseled into the tunnel wall. It was by no means a public station, so there was very little here in the way of creature comforts- just big crystal floodlights high above, crates full of equipment and raw materials, and a very large and very well-guarded metal door. “Couldn’t they bother to set up at least a bench?” Gordon muttered.

“Mornin’, Gordon!,” called one of the Royal Guard MPs who provided security for the complex, as her companion fiddled with the door’s complicated lock. “Looks like you’re runnin’ late!”

“Oh, by all means, please continue stating the perfectly obvious,” the griffon continued, pacing in a tight circle as the doors slid ponderously across their tracks. “Nothing could make me more confident that you have my back during a crisis.”

He slipped through the doors as soon as there was a body’s-width of space between them, into a scene of supremely organized bedlam. The open forum that made up the central hub of Blue Mountain was swarmed by ponies -and other creatures besides- in lab coats, coveralls, and uniforms alike; on their way to adjust this or deliver that. Another squad of Guards sitting behind a ring of desks in the center were at least nominally overseeing all of it. If they found Gordon’s lateness at all remarkable, they were far too busy fielding the constant stream of tactical jargon spat from the clairaudio spells in their earpieces to say so. Supposedly, the same spells would be made standard-issue for combat troops before the end of the year.

Gordon caught a few odd segments of conversation -“… new weather report for Doctor Stone…”, “Mountaintop post reports all clear…”, “… no-fly zone expanded to five kilometers, prepare to land…”- but he didn’t wait around to try to decipher them. Seeing this many troops in one place always made Gordon nervous. There’d been rumors about some traditionalist factions in the military taking a ‘harder line’ against griffons working in government positions.

“Yeah, the Guards aren’t on our side, here, they’re on their side… Is somepony following me?” He ducked past a unicorn technician hauling a pullcart full of amplifier crystals, and headed down the bustling hallway towards the theoretical alchemy section. Built into Maranduin’s natural caverns, the facility’s staffed areas were spacious, tiled, and well-lit- it was easy to forget one was underground at all, and not just working in an unusually windowless building elsewhere on the Academy campus.

The alchemy labs themselves were mostly empty by now. The specialized reagents his team had spent the last two years developing were finally to be put to use; so most of his colleagues were already down in the center of the complex- either to make last-minute adjustments or simply to observe what was promised to be a historic experiment.

“Do you know who ate all the donuts?” asked one of the few remaining researchers as she lurked near Gordon’s desk.

“No! Do you know if æther is really a stellated polyhedron? Fucking donuts…” He strode past the bewildered mare to the workshop at the end of the hallway. A trio of pony technicians stood, shuffling their hooves impatiently, near the complicated metal armature that held his protective suit.

“Oh, there he is,” said the seniormost mare. Gordon had never bothered to memorize their names. “We were just about to try and cram P-F-C Shift in this thing and go on without you.”

Gordon shrugged and stepped onto the raised platform in the center of the room, backing up until the technicians could lower the complicated saddle-piece that contained the bulk of his suit’s systems into place. After that came the gloves, leggings, wing-wraps, neckpiece, and all-important helmet.

“Seals check out… atmospheric pressure nominal… filters cycling…” another technician read off. Gordon pressed the helmet’s front section forward, listening to the characteristic buzz of powerful protective enchantments engaging. The dim and blurry world visible through his mask’s thick round goggles brightened again as the photoreactive crystals adjusted, and a series of symbols projected onto their inner surfaces one-after-the-other: clairaudio spell, onboard camera, impact wards, trauma module, thermoregulatory spells. “He’s good.” The technician clapped Gordon on the shoulder. “But, suit or no suit, I hope you weren’t plannin’ to have cubs after this.”

Gordon considered responding, but thought better of it. Unlike most of the other components of the Project, most of which he considered unclear at best and pointless at worst, he had a vested interest in his suit doing what it was supposed to. He was, after all, going to be inside the experiment chamber when it was in operation- that enchanted rubber would be all that stood between him and a cold, highly ætherized environment capable of killing him in minutes.

The safety team hadn’t been informed exactly why the environment would be cold or ætherized -in addition to being generally reclusive, the Project’s mysterious sponsors enforced compartmentalization to a ridiculous extreme- but the desire to talk about their chosen fields of study was the curse of technical sorts the world over. Word got out. Supposedly, the overarching purpose of their work was to more closely observe the surface of the moon: such observation would be greatly enhanced if the atmosphere in the chamber closely matched what was conjectured about conditions on the lunar surface. Gordon’s task would be to monitor their analytic equipment -thaumographs, photographic plates, and the like- and make sure everything was working even if the observational properties of their target patch of lunar landscape changed unpredictably.

Not for the first time, the griffon mage wondered just what it was about the project that merited such intense secrecy. The properties of the Lunar Plane -and, more recently, the nature of the ‘Mare-In-The-Moon’ phenomenon that covered much of its visible surface- had been the subject of open and vigorous scientific debate since the dawn of recorded history.

Beyond that general statement of purpose, though, the rumor mill got very confused, very quickly. Exactly how the moon was to be observed was a particular point of divergence. There was talk of predictions and prophecies dating back a thousand years; consultations with flaky neo-Lunar mystics; recreations of dubious energy experiments from the depths of the Centaur Union’s secret archives; and military expeditions launched to the distant corners of the Known World, to retrieve the writings of Sombran occultists from the dying days of the Crystal Empire. All of it added up to not much, and none of it pointed to anything resembling any specific motive aside from the most abstract scientific curiosity- which certainly wasn’t worth keeping so secret.

“Somepony lost their keys, huh? Yeah, I’d look up there too, when all else fails.” Gordon muttered to himself, striding back through the alchemy wing and into the main section of the complex once again. It was already beginning to empty out, somewhat: anypony who didn’t have a specific station to attend to no longer had any business being here. He weaved around carts and pallets of equipment, and down the big corridor that led deeper into the complex, where wallboard and drop tile ceilings were quickly replaced by piping and bare rock. The metal cylinder of the experiment chamber dominated the largest cavern dead ahead, easily three stories high and nearly as wide. It was surrounded by catwalks and scaffolding and a few small, stand-alone instrumentation shacks, and bathed in the omnipresent crystal floodlights.

“What, is Princess Celestia looking for her sister up there or something?” Finding the elevator down to the cavern floor occupied by a collection of senior astrologers, he ducked along another walkway, aiming to cut through the observation area- the cavern was filled with enough cables and struts to make flight a distinctly dangerous concept. “Shoulda’ thought of that before she vaporized her nine hundred years ago, and- GAH!”

He skidded to a halt at the door to the observation room- Celestia herself was standing inside, along with the head of the Project, a somewhat heavyset white pegasus stallion named Stormseeker. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen the Princess somewhere in the facility, since she had a sizable role in funding and directing it, but it was certainly the first time she had been this close.

She looked directly at him, called out “Doctor Gordon,” smiled a press-conference-perfect smile, and then turned back to Stormseeker.

“Ah, there he is,” the pegasus said, adjusting his wire-framed glasses with the tip of one wing. “We had a few delays earlier for some… last-minute recalibrations, but that’s all been dealt with. You should probably head down to the chamber as soon as you can. We’ll handle everything up here.”

That was more than the senior mage had said to Gordon over the whole of the last month.

He squeezed past the banks of instruments without another word, and then paused on the open stairway beyond- he could just about hear Princess Celestia speaking through the thin sheet-metal wall, over the constant background hum of ponies reading off checklists and calling out measurements. “… as I was saying, if you have any concerns at all about the sites, you’re more than encouraged to make them known.”

“Not…concerns, exactly, I suppose,” he heard Stormseeker reply, “I’m just a little curious as to why you’re so adamant on choosing them. At such an early stage, I’d figure that one part of the Lunar Plane would be as scientifically informative as any other…”

“Consider it a… symbolic gesture on my part, on behalf of a few very close and dear friends from well before your time,” said Celestia.

“Obviously, that’s… reasonable, and we never would’ve gotten anywhere near this far, this quickly without Your Grace’s contributions, but… if I could just see some sort of derivation for the corrections you supplied, I’d be a lot more comfortable with-”

Whatever else the project lead might have said was cut off as somepony called out from the bottom of the stairwell, “Gordon? Gordon? Is that you up there?”

Gordon nearly jumped out of his suit, looked down, and recognized Inkwell- one of the junior members of the liminology team. He hauled his armored form over the safety railing and glided down to the bottom of the stairwell.

“We’ve been looking for you all over! No time to dawdle, Gordon!” Inkwell chided, as he made his way down another broad, floodlit tunnel bored through the wall at the bottom of the cavern.

The massive doors on the far end were currently open, bracketed by two more Royal Guards in full armor. Both of them nodded at Gordon, and he stepped inside the experiment chamber, then took flight and headed for the balcony that ringed the orange-painted walls, protected on its inner side by big panels of reinforced crystal. His instruments were set up on reinforced tables behind them: thaumographs, materiographs, his precious new color photo cameras, and much more besides. On the floor below, no fewer than seven concentric spell circles had been etched into free-spinning metal rings, which were currently being sprayed down with a fresh coating of magically inert lubricant by another squad of technicians. In the very center sat a pool of extremely pure mercury, also rigged to spin at high velocity; in clear view of both the glassed-in, magically shielded observation deck and the instruments on Gordon’s balcony.

“Convergence minus five minutes. Close surface vents. Pressurize æther tanks. Coolant exchange pumps on standby,” a mare’s voice echoed through the complex, magically amplified.

Gordon had been inside the chamber three or four times already during test runs, and always found it somewhat incongruous with its intended function. “We’re studying the surface of the moon from inside a mountain” he muttered, not for the first time, “that makes about as much sense as deep-sea astronomy, or grounded aviation. There’s telescopes and cameras, but they’re all pointed down, and I’m pretty sure the mercury pool is supposed to be stable, not spinning. This looks more like a summoning circle. I’m not an expert on divination or anything, but this is elementary stuff… I don’t get the feeling we’re in very good hooves here…”

“Dynamancy section to begin active stabilization. Æther tanks to capacity.”

Down below, the technicians seemed to have finished what they were doing, and began wheeling their equipment out of the room.

“Begin cycling coolant. Prep team, clear the central chamber. Engage pressure seals, and open æther valves one, two, and four.”

With ponderous slowness, the chamber doors ground closed, and there was a loud whine as the secondary amplification spell on the observation deck activated.

“All right,” said Doctor Stormseeker. “We’ll begin with the rotors at thirty-three percent of-”

Then, to the griffon’s surprise, Princess Celestia spoke as well: “Before… we proceed, I wanted to… to thank, each and every one of you for your contributions to this venture. Without the dedication, courage, and ingenuity of everycreature involved in this project, from all across Equestria and from the realms beyond as well, none of this would have been possible.” She paused, and through the reinforced glass of the observation deck Gordon thought he saw her swallow hard and blink away tears. “This work means more to me than anycreature alive today could possibly understand. Whatever may happen, all of you have my eternal, personal gratitude.”

“Your grace? The… umm… the stars won’t remain aligned indefinitely…” Stormseeker interrupted.

“Initiating startup sequence.” Stormseeker picked up a clipboard in one wing, and spent a few seconds looking from it to the instrument panel in front of him and then back again. Slowly at first, gradually growing faster, the metal rings set into the floor began to turn. The whole chamber was suffused with an eerie hum, and the mirror-smooth surface of the revolving mercury pool started to curl upward at the edges and press down in the center.

Another mage in the observation deck began reading off a series of figures that Gordon couldn’t rightly comprehend- or, rather, he understood them perfectly well from his introductory astrology courses, and simply couldn’t comprehend how they could possibly be changing: “Apparent spatial manifold thickness: six hundred thousand kilometers… five hundred and fifty K… five hundred K…”

As the rings continued to spin faster and faster, the symbols on them starting to glow with a faint blue light, and the surface of the mercury pool began to darken until it was pitch-black. In the very center, something like a tiny white star winked into being.

“ASMT, four hundred fifty thousand… overhead flux crystals holding at one-oh-five percent charge… ASMT, four hundred thousand-three-eighty-five! We have passed the epicyclic mean orbit!”

The hum of the spell circles deepened to a low drone that Gordon could feel through the soles of his boots, and the image in the mercury pool began to wobble and shift. The white star in the center expanded into a pale silver circle, somewhat darkened on one side by thick swathes of blackened terrain that somewhat resembled the head of a unicorn- maria, in astrological parlance.

In defiance of all the basic laws of divination, the spinning mercury mirror had indeed produced an image of the moon.

According to the meter readout superimposed on the right lens of Gordon’s goggles, the radiant flux was already immense, far higher than his briefings had suggested. As the image grew larger and larger, he found himself dashing from one instrument to another up on the catwalk, adjusting shutters and shifting lenses by several orders of magnitude before any permanent damage could be done to the sensitive internal components.

“Three hundred thousand K-ASMT… gimbal system locked in…” The mage read off. The luminous markings on the circles blurred into unidentifiable rings of light. Any trace of a parabola in the mercury mirror was gone now, or perhaps the image had simply become so clear that its actual shape was no longer visible.

“That’s odd,” Stormseeker murmured, barely audible over the noise of the machine. “The overhead charge load just increased by about eight kilothaums.”

The unearthly hum built to a whine, then a howl of metal on metal. It was hard to tell at this point, but Gordon thought the discs were now spinning even faster than they had been before. “I’m… not sure how long the bearings will hold up at this temperature and this r-p-m…” stammered another mage whose voice he didn’t recognize.

“Well, they’re spinning as fast as they’ll ever go, and holding for now. Increase coolant pressure to compensate.” Stormseeker said.

“The charges are holding steady now too,” replied the first mage, “Do you think we might’ve miscalculated the local membrane permeability?”

“Nonsense,” Stormseeker snapped, “it’d have to be several orders of magnitude lower…”

The mercury mirror seemed to flex again, and the image of the moon slowly began to grow larger. It was a faint wobble on the indicator, at first; and between the vibration of the catwalk under him and the unholy noise, Gordon initially thought that he’d been imagining it; but another glance at his instruments confirmed that the radiant flux was still increasing.

“I… think we should stop, or at least slow down again.” If he didn’t know better, Gordon would’ve thought Celestia sounded worried- or, rather, she sounded downright afraid.

Through the glare of the luminous spell-circles on the observation deck glass, Gordon could just about make out the Princess close her eyes for a long few seconds, and then open them again. “Very well. Continue.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, two hundred- one hundred and fifty thousand…” the technician read off. The image of the moon grew larger still, easily filling the confines of the mirror. The individual scorch marks of the Mare pattern were easily visible now, the ‘eye’ in its center revealed to be a large patch of lighter surface, rough and indistinct towards the edges. The whole chamber was vibrating, the metal spell-rings howling in their tracks, and as Gordon policed his instruments he realized they were beginning to pick up the emanations of physical matter.

“Capacitance just… just jumped up to one megathaum!” The nervous mage on the observation deck called out, and the mercury mirror shifted again. The eye of the Mare pattern completely filled it now, revealing mountains and gullies and what looked to be patches of cloud cover with almost unreal clarity.

A quick check of the crystal-point polarostat confirmed that the ground in the image had a sidereal moment fluctuating between two and six- all terrestrial matter was confined to a range between positive and negative one, but more positive values were hypothesized to exist on the moon.

Gordon’s fascination turned to confusion as he found the same readings on the reference polarostat aimed at the chamber wall. It was as though the material was airborne, not simply scanned through the image in the floor- or, perhaps, the griffon realized with a strange, uneasy feeling in his gut, what was taking shape in the floor wasn’t an image.

“ASMT’s fallen to... to ten thousand kilometers?” Shouted the perplexed technician.

“That’s not- that’s not possible-” shouted Stormseeker, before Princess Celestia cut him off.

The mirror shifted once more, and before Gordon’s incredulous gaze its surface began to dome upward into the chamber, even as the terrain visible inside it took on depth and shadows.

Somewhere, he could hear sirens beginning to ring, barely audible over the tremendous din of the mechanism itself.

“Five hundred kilo- wait, no, five hundred meters?” The technician called out.

“I’m trying, it’s not- the feed lines are closed but the charge isn’t falling, it’s- it’s not shutting down-” Stormseeker was cut off again as the dome of mercury shuddered and spilled over the lip of its container, hissing and sizzling, releasing wisps of oily black smoke- which didn’t make sense, since Gordon knew mercury vapor to be colorless. “Somepony, get Gordon out of there-”

Celestia’s horn glowed bright yellow, nearly swamped by the glare of the observation deck’s shields. “I can’t!”

“That can’t be right, there’s less than a meter of-” Whatever the technician had been meaning to report, he never got the chance to finish. With a horrific, beak-rattling screech of tearing metal, the outermost spell-circle jumped free of its track. It skipped once edgewise off the chamber floor, kicking up a titanic plume of blue-white sparks, and slammed into the wall just beneath Gordon’s catwalk. The grating bucked underneath him, scattering instruments and shards of broken crystal paneling into the air. He leapt and stretched out his wings, suddenly feeling dizzy and light-headed, struggling to maneuver in the bulky suit- and then realized he simply felt lighter; indeed the ceiling was rushing towards him and he had to flap upward just to avoid slamming into it.

He heard Stormseeker shout something that sounded vaguely like “-from the other side?”

Then the entire chamber seemed to lurch and tilt, and without any input from his wings the trajectory of Gordon’s far-too-slow fall began to bend inward towards the mirror. He felt hot slag and what seemed to be pebbles slam into the plating of his suit, and raised both talons to protect his vulnerable goggles. There was a tremendous burst of yellow light, and suddenly the speed of his fall redoubled. He slammed into the floor -or perhaps the plates making up the floor slammed into him- and even through his armored boots he could feel the searing heat of the metal, but he didn’t dare let go. For just a moment he twisted his head to look back at the mercury pool, now wreathed in black vapor and spitting arcs of blue-white lightning at the walls of the chamber. Then, seemingly in slow motion, another spell circle tore free and sailed overhead. It slammed into the wall just under the observation deck, rupturing a feed line in an enormous yellow-white fireball. Despite his best efforts to hold onto the floor, Gordon was hurled backwards-

- into a cold, airless, interstitial darkness shot through with millions of tiny streaking stars-

He hauled himself back onto all-fours, wiped off the strange material clinging to his goggles, and gaped in shock.

The experiment chamber under Maranduin was gone. In its place, barren dunes of dusty gray soil stretched around him in all directions, lit by a wan, colorless sort of light with no clearly identifiable source. Far off to his left -concepts like cardinal directions hardly seemed applicable here- the dunes hardened into hills, and then vast gray mountains. Atop the tallest peak, something crystalline shone brilliant purple- something almost artificial-looking in its regularity, a tower perhaps. Above, titanic black thunderheads traded bolts of lightning, beneath a smooth, sable sky utterly empty of stars.

He scanned the dunes, searching for anything resembling a familiar structure, and then pulled up short. Hanging just above the horizon, almost directly behind him and opposite the tower, was a globe of brilliant ocean-blue light, stained brown and green and white. Little by little, his horrified brain assembled the patches of color into recognizable shapes- the Frozen North in white, Equestria and Griffonia in green and brown, the Dragonlands in reddish-ochre…

-into a cold, airless, interstitial darkness shot through with millions of tiny streaking stars. A slit-eyed, horrible, vaguely equine shape peered at him in bemusement from a long way away-

-and he slammed hard into the buckled metal floor of the experiment chamber, from nearly three meters up. He could still hear alarms, and the sound of wrenching metal, and feel a titanic vibration below him, but aside from a few brilliant flashes his vision was completely obscured by what appeared to be thick, dark smoke.

Then something hard and heavy caught him on the side of the head, a fallen support beam perhaps, and after that his vision failed him completely.

Consciousness returned to Gordon of Innsbeak in drops and fragments, revealing a blurry world of flickering lights and grayish fog. He groaned aloud, rolled over onto his belly, and staggered back onto all-fours slowly and unsteadily. The left-side lens in his goggles had a nasty crack running through it and his head still felt like somegriff had sawed it in half lengthwise, but otherwise he seemed to have escaped major harm.

The experiment chamber around him, however, was in complete disarray- what he could see of it through the smoke and darkness, at least. Entire sections of metal shielding had been ripped from the walls and ceiling, or up from the floor; the spell circles had warped, shifted, and broken apart; and there was nothing but a pile of collapsed stone where the windows of the observation deck had been. It was difficult to tell underneath the rubble, but the mercury pool in the center of the chamber seemed to have evaporated completely. Good thing he was wearing a filtered helmet, then.

Ever-so-carefully, he picked and stumbled his way through the debris- some of which he feared might give way beneath him, and some of which was still red-hot, jarringly cold, spewing magical arcs, or actively on fire. The chamber’s great metal doors hung wide open, dented and half-melted by some tremendous energy, and Gordon doubted they would ever close properly again. In fact, if he didn’t know better, Gordon would guess they’d been pried open from the inside, although that of course was impossible- he himself had been the only living thing inside the chamber.

He hauled himself through, clinging to the bent metal frame for support, and half-staggered-half-slid down a pile of collapsed stone on the other side. The corridor beyond was in no better condition than the chamber- red emergency lighting barely penetrated the mixture of smoke and rock dust that filled it, intermittently supplanted by the orange glow of small fires and flickering magical sparks. Dizzy and nearly blind, Gordon stumbled over fallen racks of equipment and great heaved-up sections of flooring as best he could manage, scanning the wreckage for any signs of life. There were none, although bodies- and pieces of bodies- became increasingly common the further he advanced. Curiously, the presence of Guard-issue excavation tools suggested that somepony had been here before him, but why they had abandoned their work was unclear.

Finally, as the smoke and dust began to clear out up ahead, he spotted something moving at the tunnel entrance. “Hello?” he called out, as loudly as he dared.

“Gordon? Gordon! Is that you?” The voice that replied was Stormseeker’s, but he sounded off somehow- unsteady and stilted, injured perhaps.

Squirming his way past a broken coolant pipe still spewing corrosive, freezing vapor, Gordon cautiously worked his way closer.

“Big day today, Gordon!” Stormseeker called out, his tone oddly cheerful, and stepped out from behind a section of caved-in wall.

Even in the poor lighting, Gordon could tell immediately that something was terribly wrong with the pegasus. The latter half of his barrel was simply missing, his hind legs held in place by a thin length of exposed spinal column protruding past his ribcage, the bone covered in an opaque grayish film that merged seamlessly with his coat.

“Very good. We’ll take it from here,” said Stormseeker, ambling closer still. His head twisted at a nearly ninety-degree angle, and he grinned a lopsided grin around where the frames of his glasses had melted into his face. The eyes underneath, originally blue, were now bright yellow, with slitted cat-like pupils. “Yes, all of this looks nominalllll…”

Cautiously, Gordon backed away, and reached for a prybar somepony had left lying next to the pipe.

“Shut down the equipment and somepony get him out!” Stormseeker yelled at no one, and then staggered forward another few steps.

Stormseeker’s rictus grin grew a little wider. “We’re waiting for you, Gorrrrdon, in the test chamberrrr…” He chuckled, slightly, exhaling wisps of black vapor; the griffon was reminded, just a little, of the material he'd seen trickling from the edges of the mirror pool.

The pegasus sprang forward mid-sentence, mouth wide open and fangs -fangs?- bared, heading straight for Gordon’s neck. Gordon was faster- his pry-bar slammed into Stormseeker just as his arc bent downward. There was a wet snap, and what little material was still connecting the pegasus’s head to his neck came apart with the force of the impact; both split off on separate arcs and landed back down the hallway, trickling oily black smoke that moved in ways Gordon couldn’t completely attribute to the shifting air currents.

The griffon collapsed on his haunches, breathing heavily for a few moments, then summoned his dwindling magical reserves and cast a simple lightning spell at what remained of Stormseeker’s head. It slid across the tile floor perhaps a few centimeters, grinning the whole time, and otherwise remained inanimate.

Cautiously and slowly, Gordon climbed over the collapsed supports in the tunnel entrance and onto the cave floor. Little by little, the air cleared, and before too long he fancied he could hear more voices.

He pressed himself up against a mostly-intact dividing wall, and peered around it to discover a small storage area. In the flickering glow of the single spotlight that was still attached to its tripod, he watched a trio of gray-coated, yellow-eyed ponies in tattered lab coats as they babbled to each other, overturned crates, and pawed through scattered papers.

“And now we return to Ethical Dilemma Theater. Do I kill them... or not?” Gordon muttered, as quietly as he dared. “I mean, Stormseeker was making it pretty clear he did not like me, which is a capital offense, I guess…”

Twilight nodded, mutely, and watched the old griffon mage drum his talons on the laboratory table.

“Am I a hero?” he asked, and then continued without waiting for her reply. “I don’t know, I don’t think it’s heroic if the only person you’re saving is yourself.”

Twilight nodded again. “I… don’t really know what to make of all this, either.”

“I guess… mostly, the thing I want to correct is that what you’ve been calling Lunars, probably aren’t the same creatures as the Lunars I’m working with in Fillydelphia. It sounds more like you encountered what I’ve been calling revenants, or some variant of them. Although how they got that way without exposure to the Lunar Oath, I really have no idea.”

Twilight wondered if he meant the Lunars at Fillydelphia, or the revenants he'd fought under Maranduin. “I can’t believe Celestia never told me about any of this,” was all she said out loud. “In between this and all that nonsense I went through with my model of Nightmare Moon’s spell, I’m…”

“I was going to say ‘not sure what to think of her any more’, but… I guess you’re right about the trust thing, too.” She waved a hoof out the window of the tower, back in what she hoped was an Equestria-ward direction. “I mean, it’s great that we were able to bring back Luna and her followers safely, and I think this whole project contributed to that, but… a lot of good ponies died when it went wrong. I know that wasn’t something Celestia expected to happen, but maybe if she’d been just a little more up-front about what she was actually doing…”

“It’d’ve been a great achievement if it’d worked, yeah,” the older mage said. “But family entanglements make creatures do dumb things sometimes. That’s why I don’t have any.” He paused, and then continued, his flippant tone just a tiny bit softer. “I don’t think Celestia had much choice about not telling you, though. I didn’t get to hear a lot of the details, but I know that after the whole thing was cleaned up she just kind of… shut down. There were probably a lot of ponies in the government who were able to take advantage of that… get her to agree to things she wouldn’t’ve otherwise…”

“It was around when they started with the memory modification stuff and some of the other survivors were getting called back to Canterlot, that I decided to catch the next airship back to Innsbeak. I had about ten thousands bits worth of gold buried in the woods outside the city, that I’d put there for exactly that sort of situation. They did get to confiscate all my weapons; most of them were government property anyway, but Celestia let me keep the suit. She said I’d just about earned it.” He shrugged again. “I’ve been hiding out here ever since- or, well, not really hiding, but, you get the picture.”

He waved a talon at the stack of papers sitting on the table between them. Twilight reached for them again with her telekinesis, and this time the old griffon didn’t snatch them away.

She fanned through the documents, some typewritten and some in Gordon’s neat, minuscule talon-writing, interspersed with carefully-drawn figures; all of them referencing what the griffon called “selenite”. Its properties were described with an accuracy orders of magnitude finer than the figures derived at the Harbor; alongside more reliable and sensitive methods of detecting it; and property tables and detection spells for types of selenitic matter that the Harbor didn’t even know existed. There were detailed instructions for safe handling and protective equipment; processes to cleanse the material from a living being; and processes to introduce it again that eerily echoed certain Lunar spells. Twilight’s limited alchemical knowledge identified compounds and transmutations, purification and synthesis procedures, and evocational vulnerabilities by which anything Lunar might be most easily destroyed. Selenitic energies were described, and speculations made about the runes and enchantments that might make use of such a novel power source, and Twilight was unsurprised to find that some of them reduplicated from her analyses of the ‘spylons’ in Froggy Bottom Bog.

“I… this is amazing. I don’t know what to say.” the unicorn swallowed, hard. “I can talk to Celestia about your case, if you’d like. Try to get everything put right with you in Equestria, legally speaking.”

“Why, so I can go back to the Academy that almost got me killed? Or worse?”

“I guess you have a point.” Twilight lifted the stack of documents in her telekinesis again, and this time the griffon made no move to stop her. “Thanks… for talking to me.”

“I’m normally not the sentimental type, but…” He paused, and got up from the table. “No, I’m not. I just figured that if I didn’t get to you first, somepony else would…”

Griffon The Brush-Off - Extended Cut

by AdmiralSakai

Doctor Sparkle, I Presume?