So we wound up arriving back in Manehattan later than I expected because of the blizzard the day before. As it turns out, getting some shut-eye might've been a bad idea because now I'm back in my hotel room wide awake and writing this entry at about eleven o'clock... in the evening.
Potentially ruined sleeping schedule aside, I do feel much better than I did earlier. Well, I'm not panicking anyway so that's a start. Technically I have almost all day tomorrow to ruminate on recent events, but I'm writing this all down so that I can put that all behind me for the time being.
And before I forget, I also need to make a note to visit Rarity again tomorrow. She said she had something she wanted to discuss with me and from the way she sounded, it doesn't seem like the conversation is going to be a light chat between new friends.
No, this is going to be one of those life-changing talks—the ones that hold way too much gravitas for any one pony to handle. On one hoof, I'm glad that Rarity is finally going to open up, but on the other, I'm kind of terrified of what she's going to say.
But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I need to get this whole Red Crystal business out of my mind and onto these pages. To start with, this was one of the most surreal experiences I've had since joining POUT and something I feel should've been investigated by RIDES instead of me.
For one thing, that wasn't just a dimensional prison on the other side of that crystal. At least, it wasn't when I went in. What I saw when I stepped into the Red Crystal was a world pulled straight out of one of those kirin sumi-e paintings.
I didn't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't open grassy valleys dotted with small patches of woodland. I wasn't kidding about the whole painting thing either. The grass, the trees, the sky, everything I saw had these muted colors and thick black outlines.
Every sound from the noise my hooves made against the ground to my own voice had this ethereal sort of echo to it. It almost felt like I'd walked into a dream and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find the supposed prison beautiful in a surreal, unearthly sort of way.
Or at least I would have if it weren't for the eerie atmosphere and massive grave-like stone structures with countless cells full of horrifying equine wraiths. It was an unnerving juxtaposition, to say the least, and instant regret didn't even begin to cover what I felt almost the moment I stepped into this place.
Despite the picturesque surroundings, the air felt wrong—cold in the same way the cave did as Rarity and I were approaching the red crystal, only a hundred times worse. I would've turned right back around and hightailed it out the way I came, but the way I came—namely, the big red crystal—wasn't there anymore.
No, what I got instead when I turned around was a brief but terrifying eyeful of inky black and white horse wraith. Before I could even take a breath to scream, its white eyes flashed and I was assaulted by a blinding white light, and then... nothing. I don't know if I passed out or what, but my world went black for an unspecified amount of time.
When I finally came to I wasn't in that eerie sumi-e world anymore. Suddenly I was back in my foalhood home watching my parents get slaughtered by psychopaths. Suddenly I was in some kind of black abyss watching some mare I didn't know get dragged kicking and screaming into the darkness.
Suddenly I'm witness to a desperate struggle as countless bipedal equines are torn apart and eaten by giant monstrosities. Suddenly I'm in a world devoid of any light or life, staring into the empty, sightless eyes of the Princess. And on and on it goes with no rhyme or reason or context, one terrible vision after another.
It was like that dream I had all over again, only much, much worse. This felt real, solid, grounded. This didn't feel like a dream or even some kind of morbid vision looking back on it. This felt more like I was living dozens of horrible lives in a single moment. I could smell the dirt and ash, taste the blood, feel the fear and horror, raw and unfiltered by any kind of dream-like haze.
It was too real to be a nightmare and for a while, I thought I was going to go insane. The possibility of some kind of attack of the mind or illusionary spell array being implemented didn't even cross my mind. I didn't have time to shore up my mental defenses or mount any kind of counterattack.
If Tempest had been there, she probably wouldn't have fallen for whatever that ghost horse did to me—or could of at least put up a better fight than I did. In the end, though, I only have myself and my lack of experience to blame for falling into that trap. And it was a trap, one I was totally unprepared for.
I was stuck like that for what felt like ages but I came to my senses eventually. Unfortunately, by the time I realized it was all in my head I was already in one of those cells, weak, tired, and cold right down to my bones. I felt drained and hollow to the point where I couldn't even muster up enough energy to stand on my own.
I was shaking like I'd been the one trapped out in that blizzard outside the cave. Any attempt to use my magic just resulted in a few feeble sparks and painful thaumic backlash. In other words, I was drained, both physically and magically. Whatever that thing had done to me sapped me of just about everything I had.
Normally the fear and panic would've set in at the predicament I was in, but I was too preoccupied with what I'd just seen—no, what I'd just lived through to really think about anything else. It was only the sound of an alien voice just outside my cell that snapped me out of my rumination.
I looked up to see the ghastly, ghostly face of my captor staring down at me with a look I couldn't even begin to comprehend. I didn't hear what she said at first and for a long uncomfortable moment, she chose not to repeat herself.
All she did was watch me with that inscrutable look, the pale white glow of her eyes boring into me. It was only after a hoofful of agonizingly slow seconds that she finally spoke again, just as I was about to say something. By the shrill, demonic timbre of her voice, I was pretty sure this could only be Rabia.
More than her voice though, it was what she said that shocked me. I expected some kind of gloating or villainous monologue or some heinous demand to set her race free with dire consequences if I didn't. I didn't get any of that—at least, not at first.
According to the ghost horse herself, she'd tried to show me some dark secret history involving the Princess and how she'd wronged Rabia and her race. Apparently, at some point during the Dark Era, the Umbrum roamed the now desolate rocky desert of northeast Equestria.
So, basically the area just about where Starlight Glimmer's creepy cult town is located now. Kind of fitting when you think about it, I guess.
The way she tells it, Rabia and her unholy brood kept themselves isolated from the rest of Equestria, living out their lives in relative peace. That all changed when two traveling alicorns, hearing a rumor about horrifying ghostly creatures plaguing the land, came to investigate.
One of those two alicorns was Princess Celestia, naturally, but the other mare's name I didn't recognize. Rabia called her Luna and given I only know of two alicorns (not including the other me) I have a fairly good idea of who this 'Luna' is supposed to be.
Couple that with her reference to the two alicorns as sisters and that lines up a little too nicely with Sunset's suspicions about Celestia's relationship with Nightmare Moon. Some of the pieces were beginning to fit but I still had questions.
Thankfully Rabia was feeling pretty talkative and that gave me a chance to not only get some answers but also recover a bit from her surprise mental attack. She went on to talk about how Celestia wanted to wipe out her entire race and how Luna was against the wholesale slaughter of an entire species, even if was born from dark magic.
Long story short, after subduing Rabia and the rest of the Umbrum, the two sisters settled on a compromise. Instead of killing all the Umbrum outright, they agreed to seal the Umbrum away in a dimensional prison of Luna's own making.
Celestia had evidently tasked Luna with overseeing the whole operation before returning home. It was Luna who used the Red Crystal as a catalyst and hid the prison far from civilization. I can only guess that Luna never told her sister where she actually hid the stupid thing and then it became my problem.
Anyway, as she did with me, Rabia tried to convince Luna to set the Umbrum free. Luna more or less gave her the same answer I did and left, but not before Rabia got her diabolical mental hooks in the mare. If I'm understanding this right, Rabia was the cause of Luna's eventual downfall and transformation into Nightmare Moon.
Rabia herself didn't say as much, but she talked about dark whispers and revenge and how Luna would inevitably come to free them all again. In other words, it was a classic case of long-term psychological corruption by way of magic.
It's much harder to pull off that kind of thing today because such methods are well documented and we have all kinds of protective and counteractive spells. Back then though, I imagine it was pretty effective. It must have been because if what that abomination said was true, then she was essentially responsible for one of the darkest times in Equestria's history.
I still don't know if it's actually true, but given what the Princess wrote in my journal, I'm sure I'll know soon enough. Maybe. In any case, that's what Rabia had meant to show me when she blindsided me with her illusion and drained me of just about all of my strength and magic, but clearly, that wasn't what happened.
Well, the strength and magic draining thing did happen, but she hadn't intended to show me the visions I saw and felt. No, apparently that was all me. Rather than Rabia forcing her (probably modified) memories of what happened in the past onto me, I somehow forced my own 'memories' onto myself through her dark magic.
This, of course, made no sense whatsoever and both Rabia and I were understandably confused by the situation. Well, I was confused anyway. Rabia had no idea what was going on but she just seemed angrier that she couldn't use the past and her dark magic to manipulate me—at least not in the way she'd intended to.
If I could pull away from the story for a second, the biggest reason I'm still awake and why I probably won't be getting any sleep any time soon is because I've been ruminating on those visions. It's not so much what I saw, but the implications of what I saw.
I actually have a few ideas bouncing around my brain on what it could all mean, but nothing concrete. That said, it probably won't do me any good to dwell on it. After all, I can just ask the Princess about it once I get back to Canterlot.
I don't know if she'll have the answers I'm looking for, but if anypony had any clue about what was going on, I'm pretty sure it'd be Princess Celestia. Rabia certainly didn't have any answers to give me, that's for sure. I was kind of out of it at the time so I don't remember exactly what I said or asked when I was finally able to get a word in.
I'm pretty sure whatever it was, was barely coherent and I don't remember Rabia indulging in my questions anyway. What she did do was try and force me to open the way into Equestria for her, but she made a mistake. She wanted to keep me weak and delirious and mentally malleable so she could manipulate me into freeing the Umbrum from their imprisonment.
What the ghost whorse didn't take into account when she tried to sap my intelligence was my personality. Dumb or not, I like to know how things work. I like to ask questions and I'm pretty stubborn about it when I want to be. So if I don't understand something I'll continue to poke at the problem until I get it.
Since I couldn't get it because of what she'd done, her demands never went anywhere. I guess she gave up at some point because she released whatever spell she'd used to suppress my mind enough that I could think clearly. She didn't lift the spell completely, but it was enough that I could come up with a plan.
Rather than try to explain verbally, Rabia had made several attempts to simply force the knowledge of how to release her directly into my brain. I don't know what it was with her and mind magic but she couldn't seem to get enough of it.
I continued to play dumb and put up with it until I got enough of my mental fortitude back to actually fight her influence. I don't really want to go into a lot of detail but suffice it to say that as her frustration grew, she started injecting a lot more than just instructions on how to get out of that pocket dimension into my brain.
I can only assume she found out what was wrong when she first cast her illusion spell because when she next used it, it worked just as intended. Unfortunately for her, she got sloppy and, while I was quickly becoming an emotional wreck, I'd still had some very good training when it came to fighting back against mind magic.
Separate. Locate. Retaliate.
There's a lot more that goes into it, but those are the three basic principles when defending against mind magic. It's basically all about compartmentalizing your thoughts, finding the thaumic 'link' connecting your attacker's mind to yours, and throwing it back into their face. Or mind. You know what I mean.
It's incredibly difficult to do, but I was pretty good at it as it turns out, and Rabia was getting sloppy in her frustration. So much so that even as I was beginning to spiral emotionally, I still managed to turn the tables. Once I found that link all it took was a simple mental twist and shove and suddenly I was in her head and it wasn't a pretty sight.
Her mind was strange and horrifying and twisted in a way that I can't even begin to describe. Just a glimpse of what I saw there was enough to almost make me back out entirely and run screaming for the hills. I did end up forced to back out, but not before witnessing a few important memories.
The first was of Luna casting her dimensional prison spell and sealing the Umbrum away. Seeing the infamous mare behind the legend was a surreal experience. She had a different sort of radiance and regality to her than Celestia and her spellwork was hooves down some of the most beautiful I'd ever seen.
Thinking back on it, I remember learning early in my career that Sunset hadn't actually discovered dimensional travel on her own. I didn't know the full story until I asked Sunset about it later.
It took a bit of digging and prodding Sunset for details, but I eventually got her to admit she'd found some old documents while exploring one of the forbidden sections of the castle one night. It was those documents that had given her the answer.
No, she hadn't been the first to discover interdimensional travel, just the first in over a thousand years to make heads or tails of the overly-complex formulae involved. She was sour about me finding out for a while but I still think that was an impressive feat. I've told her as much multiple times, but Sunset Shimmer will be Sunset Shimmer I guess.
Getting back on track, the second memory I saw was of how Rabia and her infernal brood of wraiths came to live in the desert. So apparently that hadn't actually been a desert before the Umbrum came. Apparently, that area had once been a verdant green woodland inhabited by the deerfolk, a sapient race I hadn't even known existed until that moment.
Then Rabia and her ilk had come along, systematically slaughtered their entire race, turned their home into a scorching wasteland, and moved right in, claiming the now burning rocky desert as their own. That was why the Princesses had come to confront them.
The real reason Luna had chosen to imprison the Umbrum instead of wiping them out was that she couldn't. She and Celestia had tried but as physical manifestations of magic, they can never truly be killed. Maybe dispersed for a time at best, but never killed permanently.
Ergo, the interdimensional prison solution.
I think the idea was not only to stop the Umbrum from laying waste to the rest of Equestria but to cut them off from Equestia's ambient mana. Being creatures made of the stuff, you'd think they would need it to maintain their form, but I guess that's not the case. I mean here Rabia is, trying to get me to release her from her prison and all.
But I digress, again. The most important memory I saw, at least to me, was the unexpected arrival of my alicorn self. Rabia must not have known how she'd gotten here because there was no memory of that. Instead, she'd seemingly found the mare wandering around in a maddened daze, babbling about some kind of map.
By her ratty appearance, twitchy movements, and the twisted expressions she was making, she certainly had lost it. She looked just as she had when I'd first seen her and the sight of her brought back some unpleasant memories of my own. Rabia, on the other hoof, had taken an interest in the mare and went to investigate.
As soon as the other Twilight noticed Rabia though, she panicked and used some kind of spell to teleport away, though I hesitate to use the word. It wasn't a teleport exactly—not a normal one anyway. Once the spell was cast she just seemed to sort of ripple and fade away like some kind of illusion.
I hardly had time to make sense of what I'd seen before I was finally shoved out and thrown back into my own mind. I was so caught up with the memories I'd witnessed that I'd forgotten to make a mental attack of my own, but thankfully my sudden intrusion into her mind had tripped her up.
Whatever she'd done to me had been undone by the time I regained my senses. Both my magic and my strength were back and the moment I realized that I didn't hesitate to put as much distance between myself and Rabia as I could.
With my magic back in my control, it was easy enough to get out of that prison, and wouldn't you know it, there, a ways behind where Rabia was still reeling, was the large red crystal I'd used to get in. Without another word or look back, I teleported to the crystal and threw myself out of that picturesque nightmare world.
After all the trouble I'd gone through, getting back out had been surprisingly painless. Unfortunately, things didn't end there because when I turned to blast that Red Crystal apart down to its last atom, I was stopped by Rarity of all ponies.
I thought she'd left me behind to deal with the Crystal on my own, but no. Out of nowhere, the crazy mare comes slamming into me just as my horn was lighting up to finish the job. When I not-so-politely asked if she was out of her mind, she just gives me this uncertain look and tells me that she came back because she was worried about me.
She goes on to tell me how she heard everything Rabia and I had been talking about from outside. I tell her that's all the more reason for me to destroy the Crystal, and then she comes back with the notion that destroying the Crystal might release the Umbrum. And then it hits me that she's right.
From what I'd learned of the spell, the Red Crystal was the linchpin holding the prison together. Destroy the Crystal and you destabilize not the dimensional rift itself, but the lock holding it closed. Without the Crystal, the rift would be thrown open and there'd be no way to close it back up again. The thought of what would happen after that still makes me shudder.
It was enough to bring me down from my fear-induced mania but the panic was still there. I couldn't destroy the Crystal from outside, but something still needed to be done. I could hear Rabia from inside her prison, ranting and raving and cursing and promising me all kinds of horrific harm.
None of it helped my nerves as I remembered what she'd shown me while trying to make me do her bidding. The nightmarish images made it hard to think and for a brief moment, I almost gave up. I was ready to take Rarity and flee the cavern altogether. Hay, I was ready to leave Rarity behind if that's what it took to get away from that place.
Am I proud of the fact? Of course not, but I'd just endured what basically amounted to literal psychological torture and I wasn't exactly in my right mind. It was Rarity who ultimately managed to calm me down enough to find a solution. I'd mentioned before that she had a way with words and by Celestia, I'd never been more glad in that moment that she hadn't abandoned me.
With her encouragement and the lessons I learned from Sunset about dimensional manipulation—thank you, Sunset, seriously—I was able to come up with a way to destroy the Crystal without releasing the Umbrum in the process.
It was actually pretty simple when you knew the science behind it. Well, no, it wasn't simple per se—not the process, I mean. Coming up with a solution was simple if I thought about it clearly. Essentially I needed to tap into the ancient spell matrix binding the dimensional rift and kind of... reverse it. Flip it around.
Make it so that if I destroyed the Crystal, the dimensional rift would collapse in on itself rather than tear itself open. It would sort of be like turning a white hole into a black hole, and would probably be just as dangerous as it sounds if you didn't know what you were doing.
The accidental creation of an actual self-sustaining black hole wasn't the only risk involved either. Reversing the dimensional spell matrix would take time, and for a very small window during the process, Rabia would be free to escape her prison.
Luckily the wraith didn't know a thing about interdimensional travel and had no way of knowing what I was doing from outside. I also had a really good teacher, and while the process wasn't easy—Luna's spellwork was really something for the time—I was able to pull it off.
Everything clicked into place and I blasted the Tartarus out of that stupid Crystal. After the rather spectacular light show that occurred as the rift collapsed, Rarity and I left. It took some time, but I guess Rarity had memorized the path because we made it out of those tunnels without any more issues.
The blizzard had even wrapped up by the time we came stumbling out into the morning sun. It was still freezing but I didn't even care. I was literally sobbing with relief at having gotten out of that mess alive and relatively unharmed. Since we never found Mister Yeti, I was afraid we were going to have to hike back down the mountain ourselves, but nope.
Apparently, the pony piloting our airship had gotten a bad feeling when he noticed none of us had come back to the lodge yet. That stallion, bless his soul, had brought the airship around and spotted me and Rarity as we were trying to struggle down the mountainside.
He dropped a rope ladder from the airship and with a brief explanation and a piping mug of hot cocoa in hoof, we were on our way back to Manehattan. When I asked about the Mountaineer, the pilot assured us he'd send a search party. That was fine with me. That meant the issue wasn't my problem anymore.
I know how that sounds, but I kind of had my own problems to deal with. My own issues to work out. I had a lot to think about. I have a lot I'm still thinking about even now. I left that mess behind with even more questions than before and the answers I did get just raise more questions.
I have to deal with the fact that if I had destroyed that Crystal without thinking about it first, I might've doomed Equestria. Or if I had missed even one step when I was reversing that matrix, I would've doomed not only Equestria but the whole freaking planet. I couldn't stop myself from shaking for like an hour after I realized that.
There was so much that could've gone wrong, but now it's over and I just want to go back to Canterlot. I want to see Spike again and tell him all about it. I want to see Sunset again and thank her in person for all she's done for me. I also need to thank Rarity for being there when I needed her the most.
Right now though, I think I need to find a way to get some sleep. I still have that conversation with Celestia to consider. Maybe I should make a list of questions to ask her when I finally see her.
Yeah, I think I'll do that tomorrow after I talk with Rarity.