//------------------------------//
// Friendship is Magic 
// Story: Black Horizons 
// by SFaccountant 
//------------------------------//

Black Horizons
By SFaccountant

Chapter 11
Friendship is Magic





Harvest of Steel
Section 8 mess hall

“… and then, with a mere gesture, Lord Serith lifted the child up in the air, and it was revealed that it had a third arm! None of us really knew what that meant at first except for the pilot, but we soon learned that we had unwittingly ventured into the lair of a Genestealer Cult! A hive of brainwashed humans and aliens hiding underground and breeding an army! An insidious, wicked power that is not NEARLY as sexy as it sounds!”

Trixie stood upon one of the mess hall tables, clad in her armor but without her helmet and pacing back and forth over the top. A crowd of ponies and humans were gathered around her, their eyes wide as they hung onto every word. Suuna sat at the end of the table, eating quietly and looking slightly embarrassed to hear their recent adventure narrated.

The unicorn suddenly reared up. “TREACHERY!! The cult turned on Trixie in an instant, threatening to bury us in rubble unless we surrendered! But in a cunning act of double-treachery, we defeated the brainwashed hobos’ trap and escaped with the Destiny Cube!”


“Destiny Cube… what? What’s a Destiny Cube?” Rainbow Dash asked, using her wing to scratch her head.

The pegasus was sitting with Fluttershy outside the crowd of spectators, eating her usual lunch of nutrient gruel and recycled water. The mares were not wearing their power armor, and Rainbow Dash again boasted several med-patches and bandage wrappings. Her left foreleg was especially well-covered, such that she could barely bend it. Fluttershy, in contrast, had nothing but a small cross patch on her forehead.

“Isn’t she talking about the artifact?” Fluttershy asked, poking sadly at her bowl of steamed greens with a fork. While she was loathe to complain under any circumstances, she missed the quality cuisine of her hometown much more than her squadmates.

“It’s called the ‘destiny cube?’ I don’t remember that,” Rainbow mumbled.

“I think she just made up the name,” the other pegasus admitted, “like she made up the pitched firefight against Sentinel walkers and that duel against Miss Whyd to gain entry to the sanctuary.”

“Oh, okay.” Rainbow shrugged, winced at the throbbing pain in her shoulder, and then scooped up her cup with her wing. “I guess it doesn’t matter. She can’t remember what actually happened after the crash and before we met the cultist lady, right? I’m kind of peeved she forgot I took down a bomber, but the part with the Sentinels was pretty awesome!”

“… I’m still really worried about what happened to her,” Fluttershy mumbled, squirming in place. “Doctor Heartthrob agreed with my diagnosis of her wound and confirmed that she was never infected by the Tyranids, but nobody can get Serith to explain himself.”

Rainbow snorted and put down the tin cup, now drained of water. “I don’t know what to say. She looks fine, sounds fine, and her personality hasn’t changed a bit. Speaking as somepony with experience in brain damage, you don’t get off any easier than that.”

Fluttershy didn’t respond right away, listening to Trixie relate a (greatly embellished) account of the Equinoughts fighting through a Genestealer ambush. Then she slowly turned to look at Rainbow Dash, her forehead creased deeply in concern.

“Yeah, so… that thing the big Genestealer does where it stares at you and you just kind of feel your body shut down? Has some side effects,” Rainbow admitted, her ears pinning back. “I think I’m mostly okay, but AJ had to remind me who that little orange kid is in some of the pict-captures of her and Rarity’s sisters.”

Fluttershy winced and covered her face with her wings.


“Little did we know, even as Lord Serith scoured the mind of Trixie’s prisoner, that the insidious aliens had already laid their trap!” Trixie announced, a dramatic sting playing from the vox node on her gorget. “One of their own had infiltrated our team! A carrier of the cruel alien plague that turns your mind and body against your friends and allies!”

Gasps rolled through the crowd.

“This sabotage was hidden so well that even the victim was not aware, reacting with true shock and horror at the revelation of the cult! A ticking time bomb waiting to be delivered into the very heart of the fleet! And yet the driver accused TRIXIE of being infected! Pfeh!”

“Well it obviously wasn’t you since you’re here now,” said a man in the crowd, “but at the time it does sound pretty reasonable to think it was you.”

“Was it Chrysalis?” a bright yellow pegasus asked. “I haven’t seen her since we left Gessheim. Well… probably haven’t. I suppose we can’t really be sure, huh?”

“Please hold all questions for after Trixie is done,” the magician said, clearly aggravated, “or better yet, hold them even longer, until after Trixie leaves. Moving on…”

Trixie’s horn lit up, and the lumens above suddenly flickered and turned off, briefly casting the mess hall in darkness. The crowd recoiled in surprise and confusion. Then they turned back on, and the crowd shrieked as they found themselves staring up into a giant, snarling Genestealer.

“TERROR stalked those cracked, abandoned halls, creeping after our heroes!” Trixie continued even while her audience scrambled away from the hololith. “Vile aliens were joined by their twisted brothers! Hateful, tormented men and women haunted by the cruel genesis that had been forced upon their parents! Forever doomed to be slaves to the monster at the heart of this labyrinth!”

A couple more hololiths appeared to join the Purestrain Genestealer. These ones were hybrids, wearing dirty laborers’ garments and carrying salvaged weapons. One had sharp, curved teeth and a long tongue that hung out of the side of its mouth, while the other had a third arm that held a pistol while his other, larger hands gripped a pair of knives.

“Trixie fortified herself with magic and joined the fray as the Equinoughts advanced into the darkness of the underhive! Enemies swarmed our positions, desperate to block our progress! We burned a path through their barricades and smashed them aside in a harrowing race against time, knowing that across the ruins, the enemy was regrouping, rearming, and converging! And then, at last, Trixie found it: the Patriarch! The dastardly alien mastermind that had inflicted this cruel fate on the hapless citizens of the Imperium!”

“You weren’t even there for that battle!” Rainbow Dash interjected.

“Trixie will not be accepting editor commentary at this time, thank you,” the magician retorted before immediately slipping back into her narration. “Bigger than a Space Marine, with claws like swords and a mind empowered by an unfathomable intellect, the alien monster was more ferocious than any Ork and more cunning than any daemon! Its will invaded our own, taunting us with visions of misery and carnage!”

The hololiths vanished and a silhouette of shadowy blue appeared, looming over the audience. A pair of gleaming eyes like windows of fire were set in the face, and they shifted left and right as if slowly studying the crowd. The ponies in the audience shuffled backward nervously, and some of them ducked behind the legs of the humans watching with them.

“The beast was mighty, and we fought on its own home turf. But before Trixie’s wit, the Warsmith’s weapons, and – less importantly – the power of friendship, the Patriarch found itself overmatched!”

A series of flashing projectiles bombarded the hololith from nowhere, complete with Pchoo Pchoo noises for effect. The shadowy enemy staggered to its knees, and then a spear of pink magic pierced its back from behind, breaking it into a hundred motes of light.

“VICTORY!! The Patriarch was no more! His many cultist drones scattered throughout the underhive were STUNNED as the psychic shock of its death reverberated through the Warp, pummeling their puny minds with the anguish of its final moments! Despair filled the enemy, and they fled in terror and confusion!”

“Wait, what about the person who was secretly on their side? Didn’t they try to stop you?” a mare asked.

Trixie deflated, extremely annoyed at having her tale interrupted again. “No. As a matter of fact, THAT sub-plot concluded with a harrowing assassination attempt on the Warsmith, which Trixie will GET TO if you nattering pests will pipe down!”

“You weren’t there for that part, either!” Rainbow complained.

Trixie’s eye twitched and her ears pinned back. Then she glanced at Suuna and tilted her head sharply toward the cyan heckler. Suuna stood up and shuffled over to the table nervously, leaning over the pegasi to whisper into Rainbow’s ear.

“Could you leave, please? You’re being very disruptive and Miss Trixie doesn’t seem to appreciate the criticism,” the servant said with an apologetic smile.

“Yeah, yeah, fine.” Rainbow huffed and gulped down the rest of her water, and then launched herself toward the exit. Fluttershy squeaked timidly and followed, and the mares quickly exited into the hall.


“It sure is boring around here for a monster ship full of crazy cyborgs,” Rainbow Dash opined while they trotted past the other feed halls. “I hope we find another planet soon!”

“I… don’t hope that,” Fluttershy said, cringing. “These missions are getting harder and scarier. We barely even made it onto the surface last time!”

“But we DID! And it was awesome!” Rainbow insisted, doing a small somersault in the air. “We just need to make sure Gaela comes with us next time. Having Chrysalis turn into Gaela does NOT cut it.” Then she stopped, touching a hoof to her chin. “In fact, maybe we should get her linked up with Equinought Squadron officially?”

“No,” Fluttershy said immediately.

“But then we wouldn’t have to hope she gets assigned to our team when we get sent on a mission!” Rainbow protested. “Oh! We can get her a neat icon for her shoulder pad, like we have with our cutie marks! That would be cool!”

Fluttershy silently shook her head, her feathers bristling along her wings.

“What do you think her cutie mark would be if she had one? Like a wrench or a drill, maybe? Or an axe splitting an alien’s face open? I think it would be like the Chaos ponies with cutie marks that have the same theme in each cult but are still different, so probably some kind of tool.”

“THE MASTER SPEAKS!!”

Fluttershy shrieked and bolted, immediately crashing into Rainbow Dash. The pegasi tumbled to the ground in a flailing tangle of limbs and flying feathers, and Rainbow tried to get her meeker friend under control.

“Wait! Stop! Relax! It’s just one of those weird crew mummies in the wall!” Rainbow shouted, her voice muffled from Fluttershy repeatedly swatting her in the face with her flapping wings. After a few seconds Fluttershy calmed down enough to freeze up rather than flee, and Rainbow glared up at the withered man locked into an alcove ahead of them.

“Phil, could you not do the spooky howly shout to get our attention? It’s really getting stale,” the speedster complained.

“You were going to walk by me otherwise,” the man said, facing straight ahead and staring at nothing but moderating his volume this time. Numerous tubes and cables were drilled into the back of his head and coiled around his withered limbs, and they writhed like snakes as he spoke.

“You can just say ‘hey guys, I have a message for you.’ It’s okay, we’ll hear you,” Rainbow sighed and fully disentangled herself from Fluttershy. “So what’s up?”

“YOU ARE CALLED TO THE DEEPEST TEMPLE IN THE HEART OF THE HARVEST OF STEEL,” the crewman boomed, his voice returning to its dramatic bellow. “OUR SERVANTS PLUMB THE SECRETS OF THE ARTIFACT, AND YOU WILL STAND VIGIL!!”

Fluttershy flinched badly, but did not run this time. Rainbow Dash sighed again. “Okay, we get it. Volume down, Phil. Where is the deepest temple? Is it like in the underdecks or within the infected quadrants or something like that?”

“It is approximately 200 meters toward the bow, one deck above. When you reach the primary defense pylon hang a left and look for the enormous iron Chaos Stars. You can’t miss it,” the mummy explained in a slightly subdued tone.

“Got it. Thanks.” Rainbow craned her neck around. “Fluttershy, are you good? I want to check and see if they found anything cool with the Destiny Cube.”

Fluttershy timidly looked up at the twisted figure locked in the wall above them, partially hiding behind her wing. “… Phil?”

“Yeah. That’s his name,” Rainbow Dash said with a shrug. “Well, actually it’s some really long weird thing with a ton of vowels but it’s Phil for short.”

“… Destiny Cube?” Phil asked.

“Yeah. It’s called the Destiny Cube now,” Rainbow explained, turning to face the entombed man. “We can’t just keep calling it ‘the artifact!’ What if we steal more weird psychic stuff during the other pirating raids? It would get confusing.”

“These… people… have names? I never heard anyone else address them like that,” Fluttershy said anxiously.

“Yeah, I know! A lot of people just treat them like they’re some kind of horrible cogitator consoles or something but they totally have names! Me and Pinkie asked them! And then she gave new names to the ones who forgot.”

“Don’t cubes have six sides?” Phil asked, lights dancing across the metal visor implant bolted over his eyes. “The Destiny Cube has eight.”

“Okay, NERD,” Rainbow Dash scoffed, fully pulling Fluttershy up off the ground, “you come up with something better, then.”

“THE HARVEST SPEAKS!!” Phil boomed again, once again causing Fluttershy to pin herself to the floor and spread her wings over her face. “VOICES FROM BEYOND THE GATES HAVE WHISPERED BLACK CIPHER! HEAR THE NAME OF THE CURSED HOUND OF ARRTHUL! CAN’NAAN! CAN’NAAN! CAN’NAAAAN!!”

“Nah, I like Destiny Cube better. Now stop yelling; you’re freaking out Fluttershy,” Rainbow huffed, again lifting Fluttershy upright. “Oh! Do you know where Erin is? Erin Whyd. Maybe she wants to see it too.”

Phil’s head lurched backward, and a snarl of rage and agony that sounded distinctly inhuman erupted from his throat. Then he slumped forward in the alcove, his limp body suspended entirely by the cabling that imprisoned him. Fluttershy hid behind Rainbow Dash the entire time, shielding herself behind the other mare’s wing.

“… She is in storage hall E-962 on sub-deck 3,” the crewman said, breathing heavily.

“Did… that hurt?” Fluttershy asked cautiously.

“Always,” Phil hissed.

“Thanks, Phil! C’mon Shy, let’s go get her!” Rainbow Dash said, immediately charging into a gallop. Fluttershy yelped and raced after her friend, not wanting to be left alone with the tormented mummy locked in the bulkhead.





Harvest of Steel
storage hall E-962

“Let’s see here… I’m seeing a lot of combat training. Formal, informal, plus running security and survival ops… for who, exactly?”

Erin seemed almost startled at the question, and she sat up straighter in her chair. “It was for the refugee sanctuary. Or… Or rather, a cult of brainwashed humans serving an alien mastermind that was convincingly disguised as a refugee sanctuary.”

The pony at the desk nodded absently while she read a holo-screen projected on the right side of the desk. She was a gray earth pony with a short mane and an unusually fluffy chest and ears, and she wore a respirator mask and vest in addition to the ubiquitous Chaos Star amulet around her neck. A stylus was strapped to her hoof for writing, and judging by the various scrolls and dataslates scattered over her work area, she wrote a lot.

Erin was no longer perplexed by the concept of ponies serving in a war fleet, but it made the experience of being interviewed by one no less surreal. Behind her, guarding the door, was an Iron Warrior: a giant in baroque gunmetal plate mail with one of the shoulder pads carved into an enormous golden skull. His chainsword was a massive double-edged weapon much larger than the usual models she had seen in the Imperial military, and painted in black and yellow warning chevrons on each side. This wasn’t Erin’s first time being questioned by an equine or stared down by a Chaos Space Marine, but now that she wasn’t running for her life she could much better appreciate the absurd contrast between the two pirates in the room with her.

“Hmm… deserter, are you? Well that’s all right.” The mare looked up from the dataslate. “Any particular reason why?”

“Well, Miss Bracer, you see…” Erin began uncomfortably.

“Please, call me Jewel,” Jewel Bracer interrupted. “You’re going to spend the rest of your time here going ‘yes my Lord,’ and ‘as you command, Magos,’ and such. You don’t have to talk to us little ponies with such a stiff back.”

“Okay… Jewel,” the refugee took a deep breath before she continued. “The Imperial military never quite sat well with me, I suppose. Way too much ‘give your life for the Emperor’ and too little ‘protect your planet and your family from marauding aliens.’ And, well, look where it got us. The marauding aliens stormed through the system and a lot of us ‘gave our lives to the Emperor’ for no reason.”

“And that’s why you fled?” Jewel asked, arching an eyebrow.

“… No,” Erin sighed. “That’s why I got stuck with some Junior Officer doing remedial disciplinary training. There… was an incident. He beat me. I ended up hurting him back. Not badly, but bad enough that I would have been sent to the mines or the servitor chirurgeon. I didn’t want that, so I fled. I was going to join a smuggler team, but it turns out they’re more picky about new recruits than I expected and thought I might be an informant.”

Her expression darkened noticeably as she recounted the next part of her story. “The refuge took me in eagerly. Lady Nacellus was nothing but kind, and never seemed to suspect me of anything. It seemed strange, but very fortunate back then. It… It makes more sense now.”

“Why do you think you weren’t infected?” Jewel Bracer asked, scratching at the chin of her mask. “This isn’t an interview question, by the way, I’m just curious after seeing the mission brief. You were in a position of some power, right? At the very least you knew your way around a gun. You were obviously in a better position to stop them than most.”

“Well… I don’t know much about the cult, despite having lived with them for a year, but as I understand it the… corruption or whatever… it’s spread through those four-armed xenos capturing and infecting a victim. That and… and through sex with an infected victim.”

“Ah.” Jewel tapped the tips of her hooves together, speaking delicately. “So you weren’t very popular, I take it?”

Erin chuckled at that and shook her head. “The cultists were a randy bunch and they propositioned me plenty. I always refused. I don’t really like men.”

Jewel quirked an eyebrow.

“Er, can I ask you a question?” Erin said, eager to change topics. “How many of you… ponies live in the fleet with the her-ah, excuse me-Chaos worshipers? Are you Chaos cultists too?”

“There are 718 ponies that are formally under the control the 38th Company as volunteers, conscripts, or allied units under our jurisdiction, 371 of whom are deployed with the fleet,” Jewel Bracer replied. “The majority of the deployment is on this ship, the Harvest of Steel, although there are a few dozen scattered among the other craft. As for being cultists, the vast majority of us are not worshipers of Chaos,” Jewel explained, rattling off the numbers with a brief glance at the holo-screen next to her. “There are some who have joined the cults, but it’s not really advisable. They’re not exactly social clubs.”

“Granting your soul to Chaos is one of the few routes to power available for your kind,” interjected the Iron Warrior on guard. “The dark gods are patrons of incredible might and knowledge, and inevitably the masters of this universe. You would be wise to pay them tribute.”

“I’m a middle manager, I don’t need poison breath or tentacles,” Jewel grumbled.

“There are other gifts! You could get a daemonic familiar,” the Chaos Marine argued.

“ANYWAY,” Jewel Bracer continued to Erin, “it’s kind of a long story, but we Equestrians owe a big debt to the Iron Warriors, so many of us serve them here or back on our planet.”

“Is it… a good life? Working for Chaos?” Erin asked, glancing back at the Chaos Space Marine.

“No,” Jewel said without hesitation.

“You seem to get along fine,” the guard interjected again.

“The other day I was almost torn apart by an alien infiltrator and had to talk down a disgruntled Astartes from murdering my work crew!” Jewel complained. “Look, I’ll take service to Chaos over an Ork slave pit or being a serf of the Tau but you guys have some SEVERE labor hazards around here!”

The mare huffed and quickly returned to the interview. “So! I don’t think you’re a good fit for the Merchant Corp since you didn’t finish your training OR pass muster with smuggling crews, which would be the most valuable references, and the only person who might have vouched for your combat record was murdered before we left the system. You also don’t have any professional skills of obvious use on a void ship. I think you’re looking at a boilerplate mercenary or menial signing, unless you wish to separate at our next destination.”

Erin quirked an eyebrow. “I can… separate? You’ll let me leave when we reach the next system? Really?”

“Of course,” answered the guard. “You’ve committed no offense to us, and we have no use for passengers who do not serve the fleet.” He briefly lifted his chainsword to heft it over his shoulder while he glared down at her. “Whether you depart to a station or out the airlock will be decided upon arrival.”

“Could you NOT?” Jewel Bracer asked the Iron Warrior hotly, her eyes narrowing while Erin cringed.

“Threats are good for discipline,” the Chaos Marine retorted.

A lumen flashed behind the guard, and then a voice came from the hallway beyond the door. “Yo! Is Erin here? I wanna talk to her!”

The Iron Warrior turned around and stepped up to the entrance, readying his weapon. “Whyd has an appointment. Begone.”

“Dude, relax, it’s me,” Rainbow said, banging a hoof on the door. “C’mon, lemme in! We don’t have a lot of time!”

Jewel Bracer sighed and left the desk to open the door. Erin stayed where she was, fascinated by the encounter and anxious about speaking up in the presence of an Astartes. Jewel tapped a lever near the floor – a recent modification for those doors that the ponies used frequently – and the metal barrier lifted.

“What is it, Miss Dash?” Jewel Bracer asked once the way was clear. “We’re in the middle of an initial evaluation.”

Rainbow Dash immediately jumped into the air to hover over the other pony. “Yo, Erin! They’re gonna do something cool with the Destiny Cube! You should come watch!”

“What’s a ‘destiny cube?’” the refugee asked.

“She means the artifact from Ulaisse,” Fluttershy explained, poking her head in briefly. “They’ve been studying it.”

Jewel Bracer tapped the guard on his leg and then pointed a hoof at Rainbow Dash. The Astarte’s hand lashed out like a viper, seizing Rainbow by the back of her neck, just above her shoulders. He pushed her back down the floor, and Rainbow Dash yelped as she found herself once again face-to-face with Jewel Bracer.

“We’re in the middle of an evaluation. This is important! She can go play around with magic cubes after we’ve got her sorted and assigned!” Jewel berated the pegasus.

“It’s actually an octahedron, not a cube,” Fluttershy interjected, still sheltering next to the doorway.

“Whatever!” Jewel snapped, causing the meeker mare to squeak and duck away. “Come back later!”

Rainbow grunted painfully under the grip of the Iron Warrior. “That’ll take too long! Just put her with those guys that get trained with Tau guns! The Fire Lancers!”

“That’s a veteran unit! What qualifications does someone who bounced out of basic training have?” Jewel protested.

“I did run an underground colony’s security team for most of a standard year and have at least thirteen kills in my career, including a Genestealer and an assisted takedown of a Tyranid Cult Patriarch,” Erin said. “I may have dropped out of the Militarum regimen, but I’d place my combat record against any human merc you have here.”

Jewel Bracer hesitated. “Well, that’s… good. But the Fire Lancers are xenotech-equipped soldiers. Do you have any experience with exotic alien weapons? Or any alien technology at all?”

“Pst! Say yes!” Rainbow hissed loudly enough for everyone to hear her.

Erin sighed. “No, I have no experience with foreign tech. Never even got a training mission against Ork thugs in the deep thickets. The closest thing to xeno weapon exposure was seeing her weird Eldar gun in action,” she explained, pointing to Rainbow Dash. “I’ve also killed several aliens recently, if that makes any difference.”

“I’ll take it,” Jewel Bracer said, trotting back to her desk. “You can let go of Miss Dash now, my Lord.”

A dusty snort came from the Iron Warrior, and he finally released Rainbow Dash and stood up straight. Far from looking anxious or relieved, the pegasus simply cracked her neck from side to side and stretched her wings.

“Cool. Can we go now? Destiny’s waiting! As a cube, though,” Rainbow said, smiling widely.

“All right, I may as well see what this thing is that was so important you nearly got killed to seize it,” Erin mumbled, standing up and scrubbing the back of her head with her hand. “I’m all done here, right?”

“No. Come back when you’re done gawking at the not-cube,” Jewel Bracer commanded. “When you do I’ll have your new command report and your service pact ready. Understood?”

“Yes, Miss Bracer!” Erin barked, despite the mare’s request to use her first name. “Thank you for this opportunity!”

“You don’t owe me a thing, Miss. Now go have fun with the mystery relic,” Jewel said waving a hoof toward the door.

Erin exited the room behind Rainbow Dash, and a deep, disturbing chuckle came from the room’s guard before the door slid shut and locked behind her.


“Uh, h-hi,” Fluttershy squeaked, looking up at the refugee with an anxious smile while they headed down the hall. “You’re looking… good? Oh! Not that you looked bad before! It’s just, uhm, you, er…”

“You were going through a lot of stuff when we last saw you in the medicae,” Rainbow Dash continued while Fluttershy trailed off, “it seemed like a real drag to have to abandon most of your friends, get chased by monsters, and then have Gaela kill the last person you thought you really knew right in front of you.”

“It… was. Yes. A real drag,” Erin agreed, chuckling ruefully. “But it could have been worse. It could have been much, much worse… to think that Byron had been infected the entire time. Did he know after all, or at least suspect it? Did Lady Nacellus know? What would he have done if he hadn’t been caught by the Mechanicus machine?” She shook her head sadly, her loose chestnut hair flowing back and forth with the movement. “I wonder about it, but I’m glad I don’t know. The Genestealers are too vile to dwell on.”

Then she smiled at Fluttershy. “But anyway, thank you. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to shower regularly. I’d almost forgotten what it was like. And the nutrient slime is at least much more filling than the fungus swill I’m used to.”

The trio passed by a pair of ponies heading the other way, hauling a metal wagon full of what appeared to be scrap armor and escorted by an Iron Warrior. They stopped in front of a wide receptacle in the bulkhead marked out by hazard chevrons, and then the Astartes grabbed the edge of the wagon. With a grunt he dumped the load of waste metal into the receptacle, and then dropped it back down with a hefty clang.

Erin slowed her walk for a few seconds, watching as the massive, armored soldier of Chaos reached over and scratched one of the mares behind the ears. She giggled adorably, and then the ponies started moving again to fetch the next cartload.

“Hey, what’s the hold-up?” Rainbow called, having already advanced to the next intersection. “You just got here and you don’t even have an amulet thingy! You gotta be careful not to get lost!”

Erin quickly jogged up to her pegasus escorts. “Yeah, good call… I suppose they get up to all sorts of terrible things on this ship, don’t they? Can’t be too careful.”

“Most of the important and dangerous places are locked to us anyway,” Rainbow admitted as she started moving again, “but the consecrated decks aren’t. You don’t want to end up there without a good armor suit.” She stuck out her tongue and made a gagging expression.

Erin blinked a few times. “… Consecrated? Consecrated for… what, exactly?”

“Nurgle, mostly,” Rainbow replied. “I guess there’s probably a Khorne and Tzeentch shrine down there too, but mostly Nurgle.”

“I’m not really familiar with the Chaos faith,” Erin said blithely. “On Imperial worlds the Imperial Cult and the Machine Cult of the Adeptus Mechanicus are the only religions that are not suppressed. Knowledge of Chaos is heresy, never mind practice.”

“Okay, well, it can get a little complicated, but the basic rundown is this.” Rainbow lifted a wing with three primary feathers curled, and then unfolded one. “Nurgle is the main dark god around here. His thing is bugs, disease, and uh… well there’s kind of a plant thing there too maybe but I’m not really sure how it fits. Super gross all around.” She unfolded another feather. “Khorne is the Blood God. You won’t need me to tell you that, because the cultists will tell you, over and over and OVER. Really into violence and skulls.” She unfolded the third feather. “Tzeentch-“

“I take offense to what you’re about to say,” interrupted a unicorn in a robe and blindfold, stepping out of a room ahead of them.

Rainbow scowled. Erin stumbled to a halt, staring at the strange mare trotting across their path. Fluttershy immediately ducked behind the human’s legs, her wings quivering.

“This is Shifty Sights,” Rainbow Dash grumbled. “She’s with Tzeentch, the creepy magic god who seems kind of cool at first but just gets more annoying the longer you have to deal with him.”

“Why do you say things that you know will hurt me?” Shifty asked, pouting as she kept walking. Her path looked like it was going to lead straight into a bulkhead, but right when her nose was about to touch the wall a wave of smoke exploded around her robe, completely obscuring her. The multi-colored cloud twisted and churned and then it spread apart, revealing that the pony was gone.

“So you’re the new human?” Shifty asked, stepping up from behind Erin.

The refugee took the surprise with admirable calm, but Fluttershy yelped and scrambled around Erin’s legs to try to keep the woman between her and the Dark Sorceress.

“Yes, I’m the new human,” Erin said, the corner of her lips twitching. “My name is-“

“Erin Whyd,” Shifty interrupted, walking ahead of her. When Erin looked puzzled, she continued. “No, I didn’t look it up.” Erin opened her mouth, only for Shifty to pre-empt her again. “Oh my, no. Mind reading isn’t for me. I can see the future.”

Then the unicorn’s expression suddenly soured and her ears pinned back. “Shut up, Rainbow Dash!”

“She can’t use her power to do anything useful, so she mostly just annoys everyone with them,” Rainbow Dash said.

“What did I just say?” Shifty huffed, an arc of electricity flashing around her horn. “Clairvoyance is EXTREMELY useful! But I’m a combat sorceress, not a fortune-teller!”

“Then stop using it to answer people’s questions before they ask them and give vague, spooky advice,” Rainbow grumbled. “You said something weird to Twilight just ONCE and then she had us drop into the middle of an alien cult surrounded by the biggest army in the system.”

“That wasn’t my fault! Besides, what are you even complaining about? Everyone made it back fine!” Shifty retorted. “Miss Whyd is certainly better off for it!”

“Did you want something from us, Shifty?” Erin asked politely.

Shifty Sights quickly composed herself, reigning in her expression to an easy smirk and tilting her head such that it seemed to face no one in particular. “I didn’t want to miss this experiment! I’ve been helping the cabal unicorns study the…” she paused, tilting her head away and furrowing her brow under her horn. “Destiny Cube? Huh. Not a bad name.”

“Except it’s not a cube. But yes, it is kind of catchy,” Erin admitted.

“She doesn’t know that though. She’s blind,” Rainbow Dash interjected.

“I have magic spatial detection which, may I remind you, can define shapes MORE easily than mundane sight can!” Shifty retorted hotly. “I know it’s not a cube, but who cares? It’s better than calling it ‘artifact register 811.’ Which is still better than calling it the ‘Geo-Sparkle.’”

“Twilight’s name for it?” Rainbow asked, her ears flipping back.

“Yes, which is how everyone working on it came to learn its catalogue ID number,” the unicorn grumbled.

“What’s going to happen when we get there?” Erin asked.

“The Cabal Hierophant has decided to try a deep probe. Basically it means communing with the artifact through brute magical force and prying out its secrets directly,” Shifty explained.

“Okay, and what’s going to happen when they try to do that?” Erin pressed. “You can see the result in the future, right? So you can see if it’s productive, or a waste of time, or even harmful.”

“Unfortunately, the threads of fate wrapped around the Destiny Cube are too numerous and volatile to see anything around it. My clairvoyance is blinded,” Shifty admitted.

“Told you it can’t do anything useful,” Rainbow mumbled. Shifty clenched her teeth in aggravation, but said nothing in response.

“How does it work? Seeing into the future?” Erin asked. “The Imperium uses psykers for many things, but they’re always sequestered away from the rest of us. I’ve never spoken to one before I met Twilight Sparkle and Lord Serith.”

“I knew you would ask that!” Shifty said, her mood brightening substantially. “What you need to understand is the future is not a single, immovable thing, but a spectrum of possibilities spreading out before you! I can latch onto one of these possibilities and follow it pretty far if I devote some time meditating on it, but the further forward you go the less likely the events are and the less clear the picture is. Eventually the vision fragments into nonsense; brief snippets of conversations and images stripped of all context phasing in and out randomly. Interesting, but pointless.”

“So the future you see might not actually be the future?” Erin asked.

“Correct. For my particular form of clairvoyance to be accurate, it requires immediacy. A single decision or two into the future yields limited possibilities, and the overwhelming majority of them coalesce into a clear decision that can be easily acted upon. The further along you go, the more decisions, interventions, and inexplicable twists of circumstance spoil the vision until it’s no longer likely enough to be useful. That’s why it’s best suited to tactical combat – where you must know where your enemy will be and what they’ll be aiming at you in the next few seconds – and worst suited to fortune telling.”

“So when we start doing the thing with the Destiny Cube does that mean you can see what’ll happen then?” Rainbow asked, her tone suggesting she anticipated the answer was “no.”

“No,” Shifty replied. “Certain individuals and objects tend to peel away probability around them, making psychic prediction more confusing than helpful. Queen Chrysalis is one such individual.”

“And the Destiny Cube is an example of such an artifact,” Erin mumbled.

“Precisely.” Shifty paused. “Also Warp engines. I took a tour of the ship’s stern and it was like tripping into a circus funhouse. Didn’t just screw up the future sight, but my spatial detection too. Not a good time.”

“You should really consider just getting your eyes replaced,” Rainbow Dash mumbled.

“YOU should consider getting your own patron before doling out advice to those of us who have one!” the Dark Sorceress snapped. “Tzeentch isn’t like the Warsmith! I can’t just browbeat him into giving me things I want!”

“Sounds awful. Solon is way cooler than your lame nerd god,” Rainbow retorted smugly. Fluttershy remained quiet but nodded vigorously in agreement.

“What’s your planet like?” Erin asked, switching topics and hopefully heading off further argument. “The Imperium spans countless star systems, but I’ve never left Gessheim before now.”

“Our world is an idyllic little globe at the frontier of Imperium space,” Shifty answered, taking a calming breath. “It’s overrun with all sorts of strange beasts and magic, which I suppose you would consider monstrous xenos and cursed artifacts. We were part of a nation of ponies called Equestria, living without any knowledge of extraterrestrial life. Then… the Iron Warriors came.”

Erin felt a slight chill at the last sentence. “Did they… conquer your planet?”

“It’s a long story. The short answer is yes, but we ponies were allies in that effort, not opponents,” Shifty explained, her lips curling into a smile. “In the process numerous other races were brought to heel, including contingents of Tau and Ork warriors that have been abandoned on our world by their war fleets.”

“Some of those races were brought to heel a bit more than others,” Rainbow interjected. “The Tau work for the Iron Warriors now, and the Orks are being slowly wiped out.”

“A tall order,” Erin murmured. “It took nearly two hundred years to cleanse Gessheim of Ork remnants after the last invasion. We still have packs of greenskin raiders suddenly appearing from the forests on Ulaisse regularly enough to make training missions out of hunting them.”

“It wouldn’t be possible at all without the Iron Warriors and the Dark Mechanicus,” Shifty said, “so the 38th makes its home on our planet while those of us with the stomach for it lend them our strength directly. Meager as our power is when not bolstered by gifts from the Warsmith and the Dark Gods...”

“Is it… worth it?” Erin asked hesitantly.

“Yeah!” Rainbow Dash chirped.

“No,” Fluttershy squeaked.

“… It’s complicated,” Shifty Sights sighed. Then she stopped. “On your right.”


A door ahead of them opened, and a tremor ran through the decks as Applejack stomped into the hallway. The farmer was in her armor, although her helmet was disengaged. Behind her was Rarity and Pinkie Pie, neither of whom were in their usual wargear.

“Howdy, Erin! Looks like they haven’t chucked ya in the reactor yet!” Applejack said brightly. Her tail swayed back and forth in imitation of a wave.

“No, they have not. For good or ill, the Iron Warriors seem to have lost interest in me the moment it was confirmed I was not infected.” She smiled. “Mostly that’s good, as far as I can tell.”

“We’re gonna see Twilight do magic with the artifact!” Pinkie said excitedly.

“What exactly that means must be left to the imagination for now,” Rarity admitted. “Twilight confessed she doesn’t know what to expect, but she seemed convinced she was on the verge of a breakthrough.”

“And a few more grains of sand slip the hourglass into the abyss of the Empyrean,” Shifty Sights said to no one, her voice reverberating unnaturally. “Blind, ignorant souls orbit the light while claws of steel and shadow draw closer with every breath. The masters of this galaxy are watching, but alas… the angels may prove faster.”

The others stopped and stared at the cultist.

“… What?” Rainbow Dash ask.

“Hm? Just felt inspired to poetry all of a sudden,” Shifty giggled, an extra spring in her step while she trotted ahead. “I’m so excited! Hurry! Hurry!”

“Why was your voice different? That didn’t sound like you,” Rarity said, sounding concerned.

“Something something God of change!” Shifty chirped before rounding the corner.

“She is so weird,” Rainbow mumbled as the bladed whipcord tail of the Sorceress vanished behind the bulkhead.

“I thought she was starting a song,” Pinkie Pie said, sounding disappointed. “Remember when we did that? Just started singing and dancing out of nowhere? That was fun! We should do that more!”

“Darling, you know the Astartes don’t like extended expressions of joy,” Rarity chided, moving ahead to follow Shifty Sights. “Come on; let’s go see what the spooky alien artifact does!”

“It’s called the Destiny Cube now,” Rainbow Dash corrected.

“Really? Ah kinda like that name,” Applejack mused while they turned the corner. “Although Ah was gonna call it the Seed o’Doom!”

“Pff! Farmers,” Rarity giggled.


The entrance to the psykant labs was a massive vault door shaped like a Chaos Star and secured with massive hydraulic servo arms that locked it in place with clamps. A trio of iron braziers were positioned in front, with human and Ork skulls placed among the coals under the blaze. Wards decorated the vault door; scraps of parchment scrawled over in blood and icons of bone that dangled from the clamps.

Such displays of crude arcana embellishing the heavy industrial nature of the ship wasn’t exactly uncommon among the Harvest of Steel. Shrines to Chaos, the Machine God, and the consecrated decks given over to Nurgle were other examples, each different sort of dwelling possessing its own grim and generally repulsive style. As a rule, most ponies tried to avoid such places. Few of the Equestrians wanted to see the twisted corruption that fueled the flagship up close; the sterile bulkheads and alcoves of trapped, tormented crewmembers was quite enough.

Case in point, Shifty Sights was the only one out of the group to have previously entered this particular lab. While the others were gawking at the vault entrance she trotted up to the guards, a smile stretched across her muzzle.

“Greetings, my lord! We have been invited here by the Cabal Hierophant and Princess Twilight Sparkle!” the Dark Sorceress said, facing straight toward the door even as she addressed the Iron Warriors.

One of the Chaos Space Marines turned toward an access panel and started keying in a code. The other stepped forward, his boltgun gripped loosely in one hand.

“Sparkle has been toying with that thing since we entered Warp space,” the guard informed them, his voice a deep growl within his helmet. “Lord Serith joined her some four hours ago.”

“My condolences,” Rarity mumbled, her ears pinning back.

“They haven’t gotten into any fights yet, but the shouting does escalate from time to time,” the guard explained further. The servo clamps began to move, huge gears and pistons churning to lift the massive blocks. “The vault will be sealed behind you. You may proceed once the quarantine protocols are active.”

Erin’s eyebrow slowly lifted higher as the vault door started to slide out of the bulkhead. The door was nearly a meter thick, which wasn’t exceptional for ship bulkheads but was typically situated on the outside of the vessel where it would be expected to hold back the firepower of enemy vessels.

“This room is very well-protected. Would you expect an incursion here if the ship is compromised?”

“Yes. There are objects within that many of our enemies would seek to pillage if they got this far,” the Astartes explained. “But the seal is hardened to this extent more to keep the occupants in than for keeping thieves out.”

The door finished opening, and Rarity grimaced. On the interior siding there were numerous deep claw marks that had been carved deep into the metal. None of the damage looked recent, at least, and once the sound of moving gearwork stopped the ponies could hear Twilight’s voice from within another room beyond.

“Let’s not keep them waiting!” Shifty chirped, trotting in immediately with a smile on her face.





Harvest of Steel
Section 9 - restricted
Psykant laboratorium sanctum delta

“-and if it is some kind of logic processor, it would seem to only accept input in very specific ways. I haven’t been able to communicate with it at all as far as I can tell, but it is clearly aware of its surroundings to some degree.”

Twilight was walking a circuit around the artifact, her eye fixed on the octahedron. She was in her armor, helmet removed, and the gorget lumen indicated she was speaking through the vox. The artifact stood on a raised platform ringed by telescoping metal rails, with a series of servo arms hanging from above. Particle shield projectors were placed in a triangular position around the platform, inactive; as of yet, the artifact had not displayed any capabilities that warranted safety precautions greater than being stored behind the defenses of the psykant labs.

Outside the pony’s orbit, Serith stood with his halberd, flipping through the book that was constantly chained to his hip. A ring of cultists, both human and pony, stood near the walls. They wore dark red cloaks and carried heavy incense burners in great brass spheres attached to chains, like flails leaking intoxicating smoke. The ponies – unicorns exclusively, of course – also had candles settled on their horn, the tiny flames providing almost as much light across the room as the tiny lumens dotting the ceiling.

“It didn’t act passively, either… The artifact is intelligent. It knew what was happening to those people. It… didn’t tell me about it, of course. Just that they were under threat. Maybe it didn’t know how to explain it.”

“Or maybe it deceived you,” Serith interjected.

Twilight didn’t pause in her anxious circuit around the dais platform, but she did cast an annoyed glance at the Sorcerer. “Can logic engines lie?”

“A logic engine can be made to lie, yesh,” came Solon’s voice from the vox link, “but what you’re deshcribing ish no mere engram. It undershtood your emotional compulshionsh, and knew enough about your fearsh not to warn you of the danger.”

“Allegedly,” Twilight retorted. Serith laughed, and she scowled at him.

“I have built true artificial intelligence, and to divulge falshe data or manipulate emotionsh cutsh againsht their nature. They are poor liarsh. Thish ish, however, a very different short of machine.”

“The Elements approach!” hissed one of the cultists standing along the wall. “The hour draws near.”

Twilight had heard the sound of Applejack’s hoofsteps despite the door that closed off this sanctum from the rest of the lab. She nodded absently to the unicorn that had spoken, and then turned around as the door shifted open.

“Hi everyone! Hello, Erin! I hope you’re feeling better after a good night’s sleep and a hot meal?” the Princess greeted them brightly.

“I mostly had nightmares and the gruel was served at room temperature,” the refugee replied, “but yes, I am feeling much better relatively speaking, thank you.”

Twilight’s smile cracked, and she quickly turned her attention to Shifty Sights. “And Miss Shifty Sights! I wasn’t expecting you here! Hello!”

“Salutations, Princess Sparkle. I’m pleased that Equinought Squadron was able to complete its mission.” The Dark Sorceress’s tone seemed teasing, as if she was giving the punch line to a joke no one else understood. “The fleet, the Imperium, the refugees, the darker powers… your efforts on Ulaisse aided many noble souls. As well as a few less noble ones.”

“Didn’t aid the Tyranids,” Rainbow Dash snickered. “Pirate ponies, two! Freaky bug aliens, nada!”

“We’re ALL quite surprised that you took it upon yourself to slay the Patriarch,” Serith admitted, planting a fist against the chin of his helmet as if he was thinking. “Your adventures under the 38th Company seem to have given you a bit of… bloodlust, Princess.”

Twilight’s eye narrowed. “… I have a greater appreciation now for the threats and evils humanity faced as it spread across the galaxy, that’s all,” she said calmly. “Anyway, we’re here to talk about the artifact, so let’s get to it.”


With a glance upward, several servo projectors unfolded and activated, generating a few holo-screens that hovered around the mysterious object. None of them contained any information that was immediately intelligible or useful to the mares in the room, although Pinkie thought the molecular auragraphic print looked very neat.

“Do you have any idea what it is or where it’s from?” Rarity asked.

“Yes! We’ve made so much progress!” Twilight gushed, returning to her anxious circuit around the dais. “Every insight we make just raises more questions, though! The projections, the observational capabilities, the data extraction, the psykant polar defraction, the processor-“

“Twi!” Rainbow Dash interrupted, already feeling a throbbing in her forehead. “Can you dial it back a little? We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Right. Okay. Sorry.” Twilight composed herself, and then cleared her throat. “Warsmith, why don’t you go ahead? I think you can explain it better.”

“Of courshe.” The floating holo-screens flickered, and one of them suddenly changed to a vid-feed of Solon’s helmet as the vox link on Twilight’s gorget disconnected. A few others shifted to change the information displayed, although none if it was really any more intelligible to the other mares.

“Object 811 ish, ash far ash we can tell, a pshychic cogitator. A highly advanced one that may have attained true intelligence and shelf-awarenessh.” One of the holo-screens changed to display a hex grid of bright blue stones that seemed to be interlinked to each other. “It proved unexpectedly agreeable to our materialsh analyshish. Although few of the materialsh are fully understood, it wash shimple to determine their purposhe. The inner core ish a processhor. The shurrounding cryshtal lattice ish a data shtorage hive. The blackshtone shell actsh as an interface, either amplifying the shyshtem output when needed and protecting the internalsh from pshychic contamination and Warp breach when it’s not.”

“Hee hee! Shyshtem output,” giggled Pinkie Pie.

“That explains the layers up to the blackstone, I suppose. What about the alabaster exterior? Serith said there was something on top of the blackstone,” Rarity asked. “Is it some kind of special transmitter? Anti-gravity plating? Sensory frame?”

“Oh, no, all thoshe functionsh are performed by the other partsh of the device,” Solon replied, sounding quite pleased to get an intelligent question from the fashionista. “The outer layer ish a composhite shubshtrate collected over hundredsh of yearsh of being buried conshishting of calcium reshidue, shediment runoff, and fosshilized excrement.”

“Ewwww!” shouted several of the mares, recoiling.

“Don’t worry, we washed it,” Twilight assured them, rolling her eye.

“So… wait a tick. Ya said this’s a cogitator? Don’t we have a million cogitators already?” Applejack asked. “Even our fancy space hats have cogitators!”

“Well, sure, but they’re nothing like this!” Twilight insisted, sounding giddy again. “The logic engines in our helmets can do some impressive things, but this device figured out that it was being held by a malicious cult and reached out to me from across space to intervene!”

“Did it know you were ALSO part of a malicious cult?” Erin asked, quickly adding, “No offense.”

“Er, no. It probably didn’t. Also I’m not actually part of the cult, I just work with it! Technically,” Twilight explained awkwardly.

“The nature of the artifact may be of ushe to ush if I can figure out how to interface with it. I can think of more than one posshibility for a pshychic logic engine,” Solon said. “But the mosht valuable ashpect ish mosht likely the data being shtored within. Unfortunately, the nature of the technology meansh I cannot shimply plug in an appropriate conduit and exload whatever ish there. That ish where Sherith’sh cabal comesh in.”

“We do not yet know how this device was normally activated, and unfortunately the only other individual to study it was murdered before he could divulge any secrets,” Serith said regretfully. “However, as it is a psychic device, and as it communicated on its own with Lady Sparkle, we are gifted with other options.”

“Where did it come from? It’s not of human construction, is it?” Erin asked. When Serith turned his gaze toward her she straightened and quickly added. “If I may ask, Lord Serith.”

“We’re not sure,” Twilight replied.

“The deshign and function reshemblesh that of Old One artifactsh, but the conshtruction ish far more rudimentary and hash sheveral uncharacterishtic featuresh. It alsho doeshn’t sheem old enough itshelf, although it wash reshishtant to our dating techniquesh.” The helmet facing on the holo-screen shifted away, apparently focusing on something else. “If I were to make a guessh, I’d shay thish wash an attempt to copy a device from the Old Onesh by shome other, lessher shpeciesh.”

Erin twitched while she stood as still as possible, visibly trying to stifle a laugh. Pinkie Pie was giggling into her hooves, while Rainbow Dash snickered loudly, unconcerned. Rarity cleared her throat to silence them, although her mouth was also curling into a smile.

“So we don’t quite know where it’s from or what it’s for, but at least we know what the Destiny Cube is. What now?” Rarity asked.

“Now we have to…” Twilight began, slowly trailing off. “… Destiny Cube? What?”

“We have been planning an effort to probe it more forcefully,” Serith answered instead. “I believe that we now have everything we need. The final preparations may now begin. Lord Mantis!” He lifted his halberd and slammed the butt onto the floor as he called out the name, sending a ringing clang throughout the lab. The cultists surrounding the participants started whispering amongst themselves, and then turned to file out of the room.

“Does anypony know why we were called in for this?” Fluttershy asked, nervously scratching one foreleg with another. “They didn’t invite us to any of the other tests.”

“Hey, yeah. That’s a good point. Why did they want us here now?” Rainbow asked. “Maybe they want us to see whatever’s inside? I guess that could be cool.”

“Can we step back a little? Back to the part about the Destiny Cube?” Twilight asked. “What is that?”

“It’s the psychic space artifact that apparently works as a cogitator,” Erin explained, pointing to the object in question.

“But… It… No!” Twilight shouted, rapidly growing more agitated. “First off, it is NOT a cube! Secondly, it’s an octahedron!”

“That’s really just one point, if you think about it,” Pinkie mused.

“It’s true though,” Fluttershy said, still rubbing one front leg against the other anxiously.

“Look, if you don’t like it, take it up with Trixie. It was her idea,” Rainbow said, waving a wing in the general direction of the exit.

“Why would Trixie get to name the artifact?! She only came along out of curiosity and hubris!” Twilight protested, increasingly agitated.

“Well she did carry it out fer us,” Applejack reasoned.

“All the more important now that we know what the outer shell is,” Rarity mumbled, gagging.

“Rock! The outer shell is rock! That’s what fossilization means!” Twilight fumed. “And Trixie didn’t carry it, Suuna did!”

“Yeah, and Trixie is Suuna’s boss,” Applejack reasoned, “she wouldn’t have come along if’n Trixie didn’t.”

“And her and Serith DID save us, so I think it’s very reasonable to give her naming rights,” Rarity pointed out.

“Thank you, Lady Rarity,” Serith said with great amusement in his voice.

“No! It’s not a cube! I’m not calling it a cube!” Twilight barked, stomping her boot on the deck.

“Dark Gods, WHAT is all the racket in here? You’ll unsettle the Warp itself with your yapping!”


Three new ponies marched into the room, walking past the train of cultists leaving for some other lab chamber. Each of them wore a Chaos Star amulet or clasp and had a cloak draped over their backs. There was a stallion at the head, with two mares following him.

One of the mares they recognized immediately: Vinyl Scratch, sometimes known as Dj Pon-3, was in the rear of the trio, wearing a bright red cloak and hood. She wore her trademark magenta shades as well; along with her shock-blue mane and snow-white coat, she made for a bright and colorful contrast compared to the other two. She gave an awkward smile once she was recognized, and then waved a hoof at Pinkie Pie.

A unicorn mare with a gray coat and curly dark blue mane was second in line. She wore a blue cape with an iron clasp fashioned into a Chaos Star, and her cutie mark was a white snowflake over a blue starburst. She looked quite cheerful, smiling brightly at the sight of the Equinoughts waiting for them.

The stallion was different. His coat was light gray with a patch of ash white over his face; Rarity couldn’t tell whether the color was natural or  makeup. A purple octagram was spread on his hip, his cutie mark abstractly mimicking the form of his amulet. Messy, platinum blond hair that hung to his shoulders framed his face, twisted as it was into an annoyed sneer. His hooves were cleft sharply in front, and the dock of his tail was much longer than other ponies, leading to a thick, tangled length of hair that was just barely held high enough not to drag along the ground.

What stood out the most about the stallion, however, was his horns. For one thing, he had two of them rather than the traditional single, striated spike possessed of unicorns and alicorns. They both curled backward over his ears and had a smooth ivory texture to them, and Rarity could see no indication of augments or bodily reconstruction that she’d noticed in other ponies who had been modified by the 38th Company (including, somewhat regretfully, herself).

“I see everypony is here. Good. We can begin at once,” the stallion said, striding past Serith and stopping next to Twilight.

“I have other work to do, and I doubt I would have any usheful contribution to thish exercishe,” Solon announced. “Good luck! I’ll review your reshultsh later.” With that announcement, the holo-screen with Solon’s face vanished.

Twilight cleared her throat and then gestured to the stallion. “We should introduce everyone before we start, actually. Girls, this is Mantis, the Lord Hierophant who has been working with me on the artifact. You already know Vinyl Scratch of course, and her name is Snow Fallie.” Twilight gestured to the unicorn next to Vinyl, and then turned around as if she was going to introduce her squadron.

“I know who you all are,” Mantis said wryly, walking up to the artifact. “The Elements of Harmony, the refugee Erin Whyd, and Shifty Sights of the Dark Sorcerers of Tzeentch.” His voice was deep, rich, and quite pleasing to the ear, even as his words seem airy and dismissive. “Now then-“

Pinkie Pie reared up and started waving a hoof in the air.

“… Miss Pie, do you have a question about the ritual?” Mantis asked after an awkward pause.

“Yes!” she said brightly.

“Go ahead, then.”

“Why do your horns look like that? Why are there two of them? Are you a daemon pony?!”

“None of those questions have anything to do with the ritual,” Mantis replied sourly.

“They are a tiresome lot, aren’t they?” Serith asked with a sigh. “Are you certain their presence is required?”

“Having the Elements present will increase our odds of success substantially and reduce the risk of any serious mishaps,” Mantis explained. “Scratch, prepare the circle.”

“Gotcha, Chief!” A piece of chalk lifted out from beneath her robe on a cloud of bright purple magic. She trotted over to the other side of the artifact platform.

The stallion was about to say something else, but he started in surprise when he felt something touch his horn. He jerked away and whirled around to find that Rainbow Dash was hovering overhead.

“Oh, wow! I think they’re REAL!” Rainbow said, clearly impressed.

“Of course they’re real!” Mantis snapped. “How do you think a pony without a real horn would become a Cabal magister?”

“Well Ah was under the impression that y’all needed a proper unicorn horn to do that, so Ah’m not quite straight on the rules here,” Applejack said. “But it don’t matter to us if yer a Chaos pony! Not the first one we’ve met!”

“I am NOT a ‘Chaos pony,’” Mantis drawled.

The Equinoughts all shifted their eyes to look at the eight-pointed mark on his hip. Erin did as well. Shifty couldn’t see the mark, but she had to stifle a laugh into her hoof. Vinyl stopped drawing the ritual circle and looked back at the Hierophant with an arched eyebrow.

“… All right, I should rephrase that,” the stallion grumbled. “I was not mutated after entering the service of Chaos, nor did my cutie mark change, unlike our friends who have sworn themselves to Nurgle or Tzeentch. My horns have been like this since I was born.”

“Whoa! That’s so cool!” Rainbow said, hovering closer and reaching out toward his horns again. “Was your dad a goat or something?”

“No, he was not, and also STOP that,” Mantis snapped, recoiling 

“Dash! Do try to show a little propriety, would you?” Rarity admonished, wagging a hoof. “Besides, what if they’re cursed or something? You don’t know where they’ve been!”

“They’re not cursed!” Mantis protested, looking increasingly incensed.

“It was just an example! Relax, darling. I don’t like strange ponies fondling my horn either. I understand.”

“Do you, now?” Mantis sneered. His eyes were a dark, dull gold that seemed to pulse with energy whenever his gaze met another pony’s. They narrowed angrily, and a dark purple arc lashed between the ends of his horns. “Do you have colts and fillies groping for your head every time you walk through town? How often do you have to explain to suspicious guards that you’re not a changeling who got their shapeshift wrong and didn’t realize it? Have you ever been ambushed with balloons filled with holy water?!”

“That last one actually sounds kind of fun,” Pinkie interjected with a broad smile.

“It’s NOT! That stuff burns!” Mantis retorted angrily.

“… Wait, wha-“ Rarity started, only for Applejack to interrupt.

“All right, we get it. Ya don’t wanna talk about it,” the farmer drawled. “So let’s talk about yer magic thing instead. Ya said havin’ us around will help, right? What’s that about?”

“Right. Thank you,” Mantis coughed into a hoof to clear his throat. “The reason you’re here is because the main subject of the ritual isn’t the Destiny Cube. It’s Princess Twilight.”

Twilight nodded. “That’s right. You see, while studying the-“ then she suddenly recoiled. “Why are you calling it the Destiny Cube too?! It’s NOT a cube!”

“True, but so what? You can’t call it a ‘Destiny Octahedron,’ that sounds terrible,” Mantis explained.

“At least it would be CORRECT!” Twilight barked, slamming a hoof into the floor.

“Anyway,” the stallion said with a roll of his eyes, “the blackstone shielding renders the Destiny Cube impervious to magical effects. This is why nopony can levitate it; it unmakes and repulses mana to protect the core from contamination.”

“Isn’t it a psychic cogitator, though?” Erin asked, scratching the back of her head. “How would you use it if you can’t use… uh… ‘magic’ on it?”

“Presumably there’s a specific kind of input necessary for ordinary use. A certain spell, a key, or a password. Hay, maybe there’s a button hidden somewhere on this thing that you’re supposed to press first. We don’t know,” Mantis lifted a hoof toward Twilight. “What we do know is that the Destiny Cube sends information to Princess Sparkle and is monitoring her somehow, so it must be receiving information back. Therefore, she will be our conduit; our window into the Destiny Cube’s memory. The reason you’re all here, by extension, is to protect her through your own connections to the Princess. With your deep bond of… uh…”

Snow nudged him with a giggle. “Friendship!”

“Right, friendship, yes. With that you’ll be able to shield her projected spirit from any possible threats.”

“Why? Is this dangerous? We expectin’ the Destiny Cube to try to put her down or somethin’?” Applejack asked.

“We don’t really know what to expect at all,” admitted Snow Fallie. “We could have a complete failure, where the conduit to Princess Sparkle is closed off to prevent access, or a complete success, where we’re able to link consciousness with the Destiny Cube and issue commands it will accept. Anything between those two outcomes is obviously possible. Or maybe something else will happen! Isn’t it exciting?”

“Not really,” Rainbow mumbled.

“Other known possibilities – as with any use of substantial psychic power to toy with things beyond our understanding – include a sudden incursion by daemonic hunters or the random disintegration of somepony involved,” Mantis added.

“Okay I take it back, this is a little exciting,” Rainbow said, standing up straight. “Let’s crack this cube!”

“What if I dig around a little bit to find the artifact’s real name?” Twilight asked, sounding somewhat desperate. “It has to have one, right?”

“Most likely. But if the creators treated their logic engines similarly to the way we do, it likely possesses little more than a model type and serial designation,” Serith mused.

“Finished!” Vinyl suddenly announced, flicking away the remains of her chalk with a hoof.

The others looked down at the floor she had been drawing on. A series of large concentric circles had been marked out in chalk such that they resembled a music record. Within the circle were many lines of carefully drawn glyphs, all of which resembled curiously jagged and exaggerated musical notes.

“Is… Is this a magic circle?” Rainbow mumbled, hovering low above the mark. “It doesn’t look like the ones usually Serith draws.”

“Magister Scratch has an unusually… stylized style of glyph markings,” Serith said, walking over to the space and stopping at the edge to look them over. “The runiform focii are accurate, nonetheless. Lady Sparkle, you may take your place in the center.”

“Okay, but I still want to talk about the name after this is over!” the young Princess griped, slowly lifting off the ground and gently moving to the middle of the glyph circle.

Serith gestured to the rest of the mares waiting next to Erin. “Lady Rarity, if you and the equine rabble that dirties your presence could take position on the outer conduit, just inside the glyph periphery.”

“Of course,” Rarity replied frostily as she and the other mares approached the circle and started spacing out around it.

Pinkie reached her spot, but then hesitated, her hoof hovering over the chalk drawing in front of her. “Is this one of those circles that release a daemon if the chalk gets scuffed up?”

“Ha! No way! No possibility of Warp rifts with these things!” Vinyl Scratch assured her. “The worst you’d have to deal with is agonizing psychic feedback. Probably not even fatal.”

Pinkie Pie cringed and then very carefully placed her hoof down on the glyphs, delicately moving into place one leg at a time. The other ponies did likewise, although there was only so much Applejack could do to keep the massive greaves of her armor from disturbing the chalk drawing.

“It is ready. Vinyl, Snow. To me,” Mantis commanded. “We will activate the psykant warding, and then establish the link. Once we have established a presence that the Destiny Cube does not reject, we shall proceed to breach its matrix. Lord Serith?”

The Iron Warrior started to walk a wide circuit around the ponies, his eyes locked on his book. “I am ready. Proceed, hierophant.”

“Good luck! We’re rooting for you!” Shifty said brightly, waving a foreleg. Erin stood next to her, looking toward the exit as if she already regretted coming.


Snow Fallie and Vinyl Scratch sat down next to Mantis. He leaned back on his haunches, lifting his forelegs with the hooves turned upward. The mares each placed a hoof against his, a slight shudder running up their spines at the contact. Their horns started to glow in sympathy, the magical shine swimming between them and mixing erratically.





Twilight closed her eyes. Serith began to speak, his voice emerging in whispers that seemed to run together into nonsense. The warding circle under her started to glow as well, and each of the mares felt a deep chill up their spines.

“And so it begins,” Mantis intoned, his eyes pulsing with eldritch light. “Open the path. Let us see what secrets this rock holds for us.”

Twilight felt her stomach flip as her senses went haywire, and then she suddenly felt like she was falling.





???

Twilight opened her eyes with a gasp.

“Where… Where am I? Is this…”

Twilight was laying on a long stretch of deck plating. The magic circle was still underneath her, quivering with energy, although her friends were nowhere to be seen. Nor were any of the others around who had been in the lab while the ritual had taken place.

There were no bulkhead walls, ceilings, cogitators, or ominous markings in this space other than the warding circle below her. In every direction the floor stretched into the distance with no end in sight. Which isn’t to say the space around her was empty.

Big floating pieces of stonework the size of a refrigerator hovered in the air all around and above her. The stones were cut into large block shapes, as if they were prepared as part of a greater construction. Each one also seemed damaged, with a corner ripped out or a deep crack sundering the block. The blocks all floated in place, slowly turning in a personal rotation separate from all the others, many with debris locked in place floating around the cracks. There were hundreds of them in view, and Twilight presumed there were many thousand more out of view.

“I wish I had brought some paper,” she muttered to herself, looking back and forth. Of course, she assumed she was currently a psychic projection, and therefore any paper she had would also be a psychic projection, and any such hypothetical object wouldn’t retain her writing when she emerged back on the ship. Still, Twilight felt the surroundings would be a lot less unnerving if she could take notes right now.

With nothing better to do, Twilight trotted up to the nearest block to observe it more closely. It looked to be made of white marble, with veins of gold running through it in crooked narrow streaks. The breach in this block had ripped off a corner and the detached piece was frozen some fifteen inches away, with many pebbles scattered between the pieces also frozen in the air. The bottom-most part was just within reach from the ground, and Twilight reached up a hoof to shove it and check if it was being held in place by some invisible force.

The moment she touched it, an electric jolt ran through her body and her senses went haywire. Images poured in front of her eyes, one after another. A void ship exploding. A solar flare. Comets streaking through colorful dust. Breaches in space. A massive dockyard. Crab-like aliens scuttling over the surface of an asteroid. They came with incomprehensible speed, yet each image seemed to burn itself in her memory the way few other images ever had. Sounds bombarded her as well: Screams and lectures, conversation and narration. All seemed to pour into her as a senseless mess of noise strung together, yet each separate sentence or sound registered just as clearly in her mind as the words in a book.

Twilight recoiled, breaking contact with the block. Her eye was wide, and sweat was forming on her brow and neck. Her hoof tingled with energy, despite still being clad in her power armor (whatever that mattered in this psychic dream world, anyway). The memories – shoved into her brain through an artifice she didn’t understand or consent to – remained, clearer and easier to recall than anything she had read in the past few days.

“These… are… data recordings?” she mumbled to herself. It made sense. The artifact was some kind of cogitator which was storing information. She had been linked to it. She had just viewed a considerable amount of information and appeared to retain it, not unlike how Techpriests inloaded knowledge from dataports.

This prospect was strangely unsatisfying. She had touched the block and absorbed its knowledge, but it was all useless. She had no context for any of the images. She didn’t know who any of the speakers were supposed to be and usually couldn’t tell how they were associated with the images they were linked with. Some of them were simple enough for her to figure out: a calm, regal-sounding voice had explained that the asteroid crabs were a species called metamites and that they were nesting. But what did the exploding ship have to do with the 9th Gale Armistice? Was The Haunt the name of the dockyard or some other place related in a non-obvious way? Was the solar flare really that important to the Eldar? Why?

“The data is badly fragmented,” announced a voice behind her.

Twilight jumped, and then turned around. She was expecting to see nothing at all, or be confronted by some avatar of the artifact that had spoken to her on Ulaisse. Instead, she saw Mantis.

The stallion’s cloven hoof was pressed against one of the blocks behind Twilight, and his expression was held in intense concentration, as if he was struggling to power through a difficult spell. After a few seconds, he backed away and released an exasperated sigh.

“Complete success. A perfect entry into the Destiny Cube. A simple method of absorbing the encoded information. No obvious hazards. And yet…” Mantis twisted his face into a grimace. “It’s incomplete. All of them are. We can learn the shreds of information that remain, but it could take ages. How many data blocks are there?”

Twilight hadn’t been completely sure how this ritual was going to turn out, but she decided that Mantis appearing here with her was one of the more likely and reasonable outcomes. She turned around, looking over the various rocks with a deepening frown.

“Why is it like this? Everything is so… disorganized. There’s no directory labels or meme tags or even an anchor codex. I’ve studied a lot a cogitators and none of them were like this!” Twilight complained.

“It may be that this is just how your mind perceives the datastacks. Or perhaps this is the best that our ritual could do in projecting something we could easily interact with,” Mantis mused, trotting between the blocks.

He reared up and touched another one, and then after a few seconds he broke away with shudder. “My primary theory, however, is that the Destiny Cube is damaged.”

“Damaged?”

“Yes. Perhaps the device is simply not immune to the relentless march of time and has corroded over the millennia. Perhaps there was something done to it that damaged its internal memory. If this representation of the memory cells – as manufactured blocks that have been cracked and split open – is true to their functional state , then that would explain why touching them provides a handful of disconnected, vaguely related thoughts and images.”

Mantis started to approach another block, and then hesitated. He looked back at Twilight with a grimace. “If wandering this shambolic library absorbing information at random is all we can do now, we should withdraw and report our findings to the Sorcerer instead. We may delve into the artifact again, but this represents sufficient progress for now.”

Twilight twisted her head around, and then narrowed her eye. “No. Not yet.”

Mantis quirked an eyebrow.

“There should be something else here. Something capable of processing information. The entity that contacted me. The artifact isn’t an inert repository of data. It can think and make decisions.” Twilight lifted off from the floor and then started flying away. The ward circle under her kept pace, locked onto the ground underneath her but moving at the same exact speed. “Follow me.”

The goat-horned pony galloped after her without protest. They curved and ducked through the various floating stone blocks, this time without touching any of them. The sprint didn’t tire them, but at the same time it didn’t look like they were making any apparent progress. One stretch of the Destiny Cube looked like every other one, with the only obvious variation being the exact orientation and degree of damage to the countless floating stones.

“Are Snow and Vinyl here too?” Twilight asked suddenly.

“No. They are acting as support. The psychic bridge, so to speak,” Mantis explained. “Although if this process proves to be safe, they may accompany us in future incursions to speed up the harvesting of these data scraps.”

“You put a lot of time into making this project less dangerous, and even if that turns out to be unnecessary I just want to say that I appreciate it,” Twilight said. “The Chaos rituals I’ve observed and read about don’t seem to place much importance on the safety of the psyker.”

“Yes. In part this is because, well, it’s Chaos and they mostly view living creatures as resources to be expended. But also a necessary component of these precautions is usually more psykers. The Iron Warriors simply didn’t have enough or understand magic sufficiently until they met us,” Mantis explained. “The amount of research on their rituals and sorceries we’ve been able to conduct with a proper unicorn corps is far beyond what the Warsmith had ever expected when he agreed to be… custodian of our planet.”

“That’s… good. Probably,” Twilight said, thinking back to the various examples of Chaos magic she had witnessed since meeting the Iron Warriors. “So… if you’ve been studying Chaos sorcery and daemonic artifice, do you… happen to know what Solon is?”

“No,” the stallion replied curtly. “Scared to ask.”


Twilight probably would have pried further into his studies, but then something caught her eye. Up ahead was something new, standing on a wide, round platform separate from the blocks of psychic information.

It was a monolith of carved marble, not dissimilar to the blocks, but of a clearly different design. It stretched some twenty feet into the air, tapering not to a point but with a small, flat surface on top. The base was a square about five feet wide on each side and built directly into the ground in stark contrast to the many data blocks floating in seemingly random orientations around it. Rather that veins of rough gold giving the monolith a crude, natural look, it had stripes of black running through it in distinct, obviously artificial patterns.

“Is this it? The processor core?” Mantis asked, leaning in to study the markings without touching it.

“I think so, yes.” Twilight looked over the monolith, mildly frustrated that her bionic was unable to return any useful information as a psychic projection. She approached and lifted a foreleg toward the structure.

Stop…

The Princess froze, the toe of her greaves just inches from the monolith’s surface.

“What was that?” Mantis was on alert, his head twitching back and forth and his tail whipping in agitation. The voice had seemed to come from all directions at once.

“The artifact! It’s speaking to us!” Twilight could barely contain her excitement. She had so many questions! How did it end up on Ulaisse? How did it contact her? How much of the Genestealer Cult had it observed? What happened to it? Where did it come from?

She decided to resolve a more immediate concern. “What are you called? I need to settle something.”

“Princess, be serious,” Mantis scoffed.

“I AM serious! I’m not calling it the Destiny Cube!” she snapped.

Harm…… cannot…… break……

The voice spoke haltingly, frequently spilling into stretches of unintelligible nonsense, almost like static plaguing a vox transmission. It was difficult to ascribe emotion to the words, but they sounded almost pained.

“What’s going on? Are you okay?” Twilight asked, her brow creasing. “Are you running low on power? Is there anything we can do?”

“Hmm?” Mantis narrowed his eyes at the monolith. He could swear that the black strips had just shifted slightly.

Twilight lifted off over the ground, moving closer to a dark ring several feet above her head. “Tell us how we can help. We found our way to you and defeated the Patriarch. What do you need us to do?” The magic circle beneath her quivered.

A crack suddenly appeared and ran from one side of the monolith to the other in an instant, splitting through the construct all the way around. Twilight gasped, her eye bulging in shock. Mantis recoiled, and then looked back at the black strips. They were actively slithering now, and pulling free of the monolith.

Trap…

“Sparkle, RUN!” Mantis screamed at the same time that a spear of inky darkness erupted from the breach in the stone.





“GYAAAH!!”

Rainbow Dash was sent reeling through the air, wings and hooves flailing in a panic. She struck the ground and rolled, leaving a streak of fresh blood across the deck.

“Wh… Wh…” Fluttershy paled, and the other Elements of Harmony gaped in shock. Snow and Vinyl were equally stunned, although they kept their magic flowing regardless.

Erin was by Rainbow’s side in an instant, crouching next to the trembling pegasus.

“She’s under attack,” Serith hissed. “Stay where you are, ponies. Her survival depends on it.”

“Okay! Yes!” Pinkie Pie said breathlessly, standing tall while magic continued swirling around her. “Quick question though: what about our survival?”

Serith didn’t answer, instead flipping the page in his book.





Twilight blinked in surprise as a tendril of shadow recoiled away from her, shocked away by a barrier of powerful magic. She quickly turned and veered away, and another tentacle swiped at her and missed.

“What’s going on?! What happened to it?!” Twilight cried.

“It’s possessed! Corrupted!” Mantis snarled. “This… This is a daemon!”

More shadow-stuff started to ooze out of the breach in the monolith, and then some of it hardened into a long, jointed limb.

“Is the core still there? Can we save it?” Twilight asked in a panic.

“Forget about the core! We have to get out of here! Now!” Mantis shouted, turning and galloping away.

A long, scythe-like talon burst from the tip of the limb, and then it sliced through the air at the armored alicorn.





“Hrk!”

Fluttershy jolted, and the blood drained from her face while streaks of crimson started running down her leg. Her eyes rolled up into her head, and then the pegasus collapsed.

“FLUTTERSHY!” Rarity screamed, recoiling in horror.

“Medicae! Someone get a medicae in here!” Erin bolted away from Rainbow Dash and then scooped up Fluttershy, lifting her out of the magic circle.

“Uh, yeah, see… that’s not really how this works,” Shifty Sights said awkwardly. “We’re in Omega-level quarantine so long as the ritual is in effect. Nobody’s allowed in or out.”

“I will place an alert for support, but Lady Sights is correct. They will be unable to assist until they are certain this sanctum is safe,” Serith explained, touching his fingers to the side of his helmet.

Erin placed Fluttershy on her side, and then pressed a hand against her wound to stem the bleeding. “All right, fine! Shifty, come here!”

“Uh, okay, sure,” the Sorceress trotted up behind her, feeling somewhat at a loss among the panic swallowing the rest of the room. “You know I don’t do healing magic, right?”

Erin reached over to Shifty’s leg, grabbed onto the bandage wrappings around it, and then pulled hard. Shifty yelped and almost fell over before the wrappings came off, leaving Erin with a strip of old, tattered cloth.

“She needs this more than you do,” the refugee said, pressing it down on the deep gash under Fluttershy’s chest.

“Hey, can we put the kibosh on this ritual thing already?!” Applejack yelled anxiously. “Yer gonna get somepony killed!”

“We’re trying to get them out!” Vinyl assured her. “There’s something fighting us! Maybe the Destiny Cube itself!”

Mantis grunted, and beads of sweat started crawling down his brow and neck.





Twilight reeled back as her barrier flashed, once again knocking aside the daemon’s attack. She moved further away and started circling around the monolith, staying well out of reach of the monster. The black ooze continued to seep from the breach in the stone, and as the shadowy mass swelled it formed more discrete shapes.

A second talon erupted from the mass, shuddering as the body behind it emerged and hardened. A seam split on the mound of pitch, and then opened to form an eye with a bright purple iris. More eyes opened up underneath the first, many of them glowing with silvery light.

“What are you?! WHO are you?!” Twilight demanded, her shock and anger rapidly giving way to anger. “Did you destroy the core? Did you break all the memory blocks?!”

“Princess, stop bellowing at that thing and get over here!” Mantis shouted. “We have to leave at once!”

The Hierophant bowed his head and closed his eyes, and dark purple flames engulfed the tips of his horns. His concentration intensified, building a pattern in the Warp while also expanding his sixth sense. He opened his eyes again, and they shined with golden light.

Twilight looked over at the stallion, then back to the daemon. It was still growing, with numerous shadowy tendrils wrapped around the monolith like an octopus clinging to a branch of coral. She clenched her teeth angrily, but resigned herself to escape; the daemon didn’t seem to be answering her questions anyway, and it was unclear what, if anything, they would gain from stopping it.

“Well, if we can’t get anything useful out of the artifact after all, maybe Solon can use you instead,” she spat, turning away and flying toward Mantis. “Hopefully he can turn you into a daemon-empowered space belt or something.”

“Princess, PLEASE stop conversing with the Warpspawn and make haste!” Mantis shouted while the magic energy around his horns intensified.

Latching onto the psychic energy being fed to him by the other unicorns, Mantis ripped open a new exit. It was difficult; much more difficult than expected, in fact. He suspected that the daemon had somehow reinforced the boundary of this quasi-dimensional space to keep them from disengaging, but his ritual precautions had pre-empted such a ploy. A glowing seam slowly tore open behind the goat-horned pony, spilling bright purple light from the breach.

The daemon leapt from the monolith, landing on the cluster of tentacles that made up its lower body. It slid across the ground toward Twilight, eyes fixed on its prey. One of the tendrils lifted from the ground and slid around a data block, yanking it free of its bizarre hovering stasis.

Twilight grimaced and built her altitude higher, preparing to evade. The daemon lifted up the block and spun around once, building up momentum before releasing the stone projectile. When it did, however, it wasn’t aimed at Twilight.

“Oh,” was about all Mantis managed before the construct plowed into him, smashing him off his hooves and into the portal.





Mantis was launched backward into the air, wailing in pain and flailing his legs in a panic. The goat-horned pony slammed hard into a brazier, and a loud crack came from his left foreleg after he bounced off and landed in a heap. Glowing embers and dusty ash jumped from the brazier at the impact, slowly floating down to mix with the blood splashed over the base.

“LORD MANTIS NO!!” Snow Fallie jumped up and raced to his side, and Vinyl Scratch was right behind her.

Serith stopped pacing around the room. “Hmmm... It seems the Hierophant has escaped. Or was ejected.” Twilight still stood in the middle of her ritual circle, unmoving. “This has gotten more complicated.”

Mantis hissed in pain and rolled himself over so he wasn’t lying on his broken leg. “E… Ejected…” he said while blood dribbled from between clenched teeth. “It… It was a trap. A daemon… it was waiting for her.”

Serith stopped short, but said nothing. On the other side of the ritual circle, Erin had finished dressing Fluttershy’s wound and had moved onto Rainbow Dash, still tearing bandages free from Shifty as needed. The Dark Sorceress pouted as her second leg was exposed, but offered no complaint.

“Daemon? Just one? Twi can handle that,” Rainbow grunted.

“It’s not that simple,” Shifty Sights warned.

“Twi has cooked LOTS of daemons! We cleared an entire cruiser once!” the pegasus retorted.

“Yeah, with Luna’s help,” Applejack reminded her. “She’s all alone in there now!”

“She’s not alone. We’re with her,” Rarity said sharply.

“And she will need your protection,” Serith added. “This is no heady incursion into the Warp or brutal mission here in the Materium. The daemon has chosen this time and place for a reason.”





“You… You…” Twilight saw red as the exit portal vanished, taking Mantis with it. Her horn started to pulse with energy in tune with her heartbeat, and her bionic eye generated a targeting reticule. “You insipid, meddling, puerile ball of psychic filth!”

The daemon’s gaze had never left its main target while it was dispatching the other pony, and the eyes narrowed.

“You want to fight?! Okay! LET’S FIGHT!!” The young Princess was beyond infuriated now, and had been cut off from any obvious method of retreat. There was probably a way to get out on her own, but she was increasingly disinterested in leaving before she had sent this intruder and saboteur back where it came from.

Twilight felt magic power flow through her, and then focused the energy on the tip of her horn. She switched her flight mode to hover and tilted down, pointing her entire body at the daemon like a living gun with her horn as the barrel. With a scream of anger and sorrow for that which had been lost, she unleashed her power.

A dart of bright purple energy burst out of Twilight’s horn, striking the daemon. It popped on impact, doing no appreciable damage. The daemon started advancing again, its arms raised to cut down the flying mare.

Twilight lifted her head up, frowning, and the magic charge around her horn faded. “There’s probably a perfectly rational explanation for this,” she said to herself. “I need a chalkboard so I can diagram this out.”

The daemon lunged, and Twilight flew straight up. The talons missed, slicing through the air, and it reached its tentacles toward another of the memory blocks.

“Okay well for SOME REASON most physics are working as expected in this psychic projection of a quasi-planar subspace but my magic power isn’t. As long as the daemon can’t fly I think I’ll be fine. I need to find a way to retaliate,” Twilight said to herself.

The daemon slithered across the ground on its tentacles, and then jumped onto one of the floating data blocks. The tendrils wrapped around the construct fully, as if the Warpspawn was trying to constrict the block, with the main body of the daemon hugging the side.

“What are you doing NOW?” Twilight demanded. “If you’re threatening to destroy the information stored here to make me mad, it… well… it’s definitely working, but it doesn’t change my options!”

The daemon quivered. White light seemed to seep from the data block into its tentacles, and the stone of the construct rapidly turned to a bleak, dusty gray. The daemon’s eyes glowed, starting with its main central eye and then filling each of the smaller ones below it.

“It’s… draining the memory block? Wait! I understand now! This is-“

A beam fired from the daemon’s central eye, slamming into the airborne pony mid-sentence.





“GWARGARGHBLE!!” Pinkie Pie was suddenly consumed by light before rocketing backward into the air. She landed on her side and rolled across the floor, eventually hitting the wall with a yelp of pain. Her coat and mane were scorched, and her eyes spun in her sockets for a few seconds before she passed out entirely.

“Pinkie! No! Erin, can you make sure she’s okay?” Rarity asked.

“I was going to see to Mantis next; is she bleeding?” Erin asked, grabbing hold of another of Shifty’s legs.

“Hey, c’mon, I’m running out of coverings!” the Tzeentch cultist complained.

“And we’re runnin’ outta friends!” Applejack snapped. “One o’ you daggum space wizards get yer act together and DO SOMETHIN’!!”

Rarity shrieked in pain. A long gash opened up over her flank, splashing blood across Applejack’s shoulder pad.





Twilight flinched as the daemon was repelled by a sudden burst of magical light, its claw bouncing off of a shimmering barrier. She turned and fled, the magic circle underneath her sweeping across the gray, featureless floor. The daemon gave chase, frustrated as it was by the mysterious shield.

Twilight herself didn’t quite understand why every attack that should have struck her was deflected, but she didn’t want to test the limits of the arcane defense. Besides, she felt strangely queasy every time it happened, an ache settling in her heart that she couldn’t explain. She banished such thoughts and kept running, returning her concentration to the matter of energy inflows and psychic power.

“This space is a blackstone construct. It’s cut off from the Warp on purpose, which is why I can’t use magic normally here! There no mana source!” She launched into the air again, and started to build altitude while veering back and forth between the floating marble blocks.

“But there IS magic energy here! It’s in the artifact’s system constructs! The monolith! The data blocks! Presumably also a network substructure underpinning this space to move energy from one part of the artifact to the other! Maybe if I-“

Twilight caught a gleaming light out of the corner of her eye, and then dropped back behind a construct just as another energy beam lanced by her.





Applejack bristled as she felt a tingly wave of heat run down her neck and back, and she squeezed her eyes shut while she waited for a more substantial impact.

“Twi, Ah know ya probably can’t hear this, but ya really gotta work on yer evasion,” Applejack grumbled, bracing herself as best she could.

Mantis grimaced, and then looked up at the Cabal unicorns standing over him protectively. “Help me up.”

Snow Fallie helped lift him upright, but Vinyl Scratch hesitated.

“What are you going to do? Do you have a plan?” the DJ asked.

“No. But I have a functional magic defense and a mostly intact skeleton. Help me over to the warding circle.”

Snow hesitated, her ears flipping down. “W-Wait… you mean you’re going to join the warding?”

“Yes. And you two are joining me,” Mantis grunted, giving Snow a push. “Hurry!”





Twilight jumped up into a hover again, this time moving up to the data block she was sheltering behind.

“This feels so wrong… Like I’m… eating a book or something,” she made a disgusted expression before she reached out and touched the flat, cracked surface of the construct.

A massive portal spinning in open space. Needle-shaped void ships like black daggers crossing in front of a star. Maps. More maps. Planets, suns, moons, nebulae. So many maps. A city of black spires, or maybe a planet? Keys. Symbols. Runes. Blood. Voices babbled and lectured above it all, some panicked and angry, others calm and clinical, speaking words she didn’t understand but would probably never forget.

Twilight clenched her teeth as the surge of information flooded into her, but didn’t recoil. Then she went deeper, feeling the current of power underneath the images. A humming wellspring of psychic power holding together the scraps of data that remained.

She felt bile in her throat. Not at what she was witnessing or had beheld but at what she had to do. A desecration she would not have forgiven under less dire circumstances.

She drank in the energy, draining it utterly. Her horn lit ablaze with power, her remaining eye became a window of gleaming light, and her body – or rather the psychic avatar she inhabited in this space – was filled with renewed might. Her armor – useless in this space as it was – simply peeled away into nothing, and her body was surrounded by a shining purple halo.

The marble block was drained of color, and the massive crack that had impacted its face began to spread. It seemed to go gray and then slowly dissolve, coming apart in large chunks that floated away and evaporated.

A black tentacle darted through the drifting rubble, speeding toward Twilight like a spear.





“GWAH!” Applejack pitched to one side, a long bruise appearing on her face.

The Cabal ponies flinched back, and then Mantis limped forward toward the magic circle ahead of Snow Fallie.

“W-Wait! Hierophant, you’re-“

“Be silent, Magister,” Mantis snapped, taking position within the ring of glimmering runes. “I haven’t lost a psyker yet under my supervision and I’m not going to start with TWILIGHT bucking SPARKLE!”

Applejack was breathing heavily and tasted blood in her mouth, but she didn’t step away. The wound she had taken wasn’t nearly as bad as the others had suffered so far. The farmer lifted her head to look the Hierophant in the eyes, and then she arched an eyebrow.

“Not that Ah don’t appreciate it, but didn’t ya say we needed to have some kinda connection with Twi fer this thing to work? That ya brought us here ‘cuz we were her closest friends?”

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Mantis said through the pain still rolling through his body, “and desperation is the essence of camaraderie. Scratch! Fallie! Get over here!”

The mares were obviously very nervous about their new role, but they stepped up on either side of Mantis nonetheless.

“It’s going to be okay,” Snow Fallie said, her voice shaking only slightly. “Princess Twilight can handle-“

Then her eyes bulged and she was launched violently from the circle.





Twilight flinched as another tentacle tried to swipe at her, only to again hit a barrier and bounce off.

The daemon surged toward her, its body carried high in the air and one claw scything down toward her head.

“Got you!” A beam erupted from Twilight’s horn like a cannon shot, and the daemon’s claw vanished within a stream of purple light.

Its eyes widened as the beam ripped through the side of its body, and the twisted black mass was thrown back. A tentacle whipped back around to try to strike from the side, but Twilight jumped into the air to evade it.





“Yeek!” Vinyl yelped as she felt a tremor run through her body, but after a tense moment no actual harm befell her.

“Is Fallie all right?” Mantis demanded through clenched teeth.

“She landed badly, but nothing’s broken!” Erin announced, kneeling next to the unicorn lying limply next to the wall. “Shifty, get over here!”

“Why? You already took all the wrappings!” Shifty Sights complained while she trotted over. Her body was mostly exposed now, revealing that there were numerous scars carved into the shape of spell runes in her coat. She still had her cape, however, as well as her blindfold.

Erin turned and reached for the blindfold. Shifty gasped and then bit her hand. The refugee recoiled, snatching her arm away.

“Why did you do that, you useless witch?!” Erin screamed, her hand twitching toward her waist for her sidearm.

“The blindfold STAYS ON. ALWAYS.” Shifty said hotly, her blade-tipped tail standing straight up in the air like that of an agitated cat. “Take the cloak if you’re really that hard up for cloth, but you do NOT touch the blindfold!”

“EEYAAAAAGH!!” Vinyl’s glasses shattered as she was suddenly hurled across the room screaming.





“Hrrrgh!” Twilight shook as another tentacle slammed against her barrier, and her senses briefly went haywire. The shield seemed to be weakening with successive attacks, and it was a distinct trans-dimensional magic entanglement that she couldn’t feed with the energy in the artifact. She was running out of time, and fast.

That left only one thing to do with the energy, as far as she was concerned.

“Die! Die!! DIE!!!” Purple energy bolts launched from Twilight’s horn with every word, hammering the daemon back. Tendrils were ripped away by streams of power and eyes were crushed to a pulp before the barrage.

Every energy bolt was weaker than the last, however, and Twilight felt her magic power drain away with shocking speed. The young Princess stopped firing, and then turned to gallop away.

The daemon surged forward immediately, its eyes gleaming. Warpstuff oozed from its wounds like crude oil, splashing onto the ground in grotesque puddles, but the predator paid it no mind. Twilight raced under one data block, but rather than trying to follow, the daemon jumped on top, and its tentacles wrapped around it to drain its energy.

Twilight glanced behind her, furrowed her brow, and then jumped. She twisted in the air to land hooves-first on the face of a different construct, and her wings spread as the knowledge and magic flowed into her.

Dozens of stars passed before her eyes. Stars the size of asteroids, stars the size of some entire systems. Neutron stars. Healthy trinary clusters. Cataclysmic novas. Factoids followed each image; a neat little line of crucial statistics that stuck to each separate vision. It was the first genuinely and entirely beautiful collection of images she’d encountered so far in this space, and fresh anger welled in her heart at the thought that she was going to erase it so she could bludgeon the wretched monster chasing her.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!” With a furious scream, Twilight fired a lance of pure energy at the daemon.

The daemon’s eyes flashed with light, and a similar magic lance erupted from it.

The beams crashed into each other, and the nearby data blocks quivered from the shock waves rolling through the space. Bright red pounded against glimmering purple, throwing blasts of coruscating sparks in all directions. A constant roar echoed around Twilight’s ears, and she clenched her teeth.

“You want me?! Was that the point of all this?! Just another stupid assassination attempt?!  FINE. COME GET ME!!” Twilight screamed, her beam doubling in strength.

The daemon quivered, feeling its strength flagging even as the construct below it started to crumble away to nothing. Its eyes widened, and its tentacles started slithering outward from its perch. The energy beam streaming from its central eye was pushed back, gradually thinning while Twilight’s magic plowed through it.

Then the daemon’s stray tentacles lashed around two nearby blocks, rapidly drawing their power into its core.

“Well… drat,” Twilight mumbled right before the screaming river of power overtook her.





Mantis screamed in pain, his coat seeming to burn around him as he was shoved off of the warding circle. His eyes fluttered closed as he slumped to the deck, smoke rising from his body.

“Yeah, Ah felt that one too!” Applejack complained, squeezing her eyes shut while wisps of smoke started rising from the gorget of her armor.

Erin threw Shifty’s cloak over Mantis, and then leaned down next to him to check his vitals. Shifty Sights stood behind her, completely naked aside from her blindfold and horseshoes.

“He passed out! His heartbeat is fading too!” Erin proclaimed after checking the Hierophant’s pulse. “If we don’t get a medicae in here soon some of them aren’t going to make it out of this!”

Rainbow Dash growled from where she was sitting on the floor, bloodied bandages wrapped clumsily around her leg and wing. “This is so stupid! She’s right there!” Rainbow pointed to Twilight’s body standing stock-still in the middle of the warding circle. “You’re telling me there’s no way to just… unplug her or something?”

“You may rage against the reality of our circumstances all you wish,” Serith advised her, still staring at the pages of his book. “If we remove Lady Sparkle’s body from its link to the Destiny Cube, which has her soul, what do you imagine would happen?”

“Well it’s obviously not ‘her soul returns safely to her body and everypony’s fine’ or you wouldn’t have asked,” Rarity grumbled.

“Isn’t there ANYTHING you can do?!” Rainbow raged, standing up and bristling in the manner of an angry cat.

“I suppose I could give the warding circle a try myself, if we wish to truly test the prerequisite of having a substantial bond with the subject,” Serith mused.

“Seething resentment is a KIND of emotional attachment,” Shifty offered.

Applejack screamed in pain, and a loud creak came from her armor.





Twilight grimaced as the tendrils wrapped around the flickering barrier, squeezing tighter as if the shield were a metal ring that was slowly giving way. She glared up at the daemon and her horn flashed, drawing on her last scraps of magic power as the monstrosity reared back its remaining claw.





“Hrrrgh!” Applejack started choking as she felt her body being squeezed on all sides. A rattle came from her armor, but as her vision started to swim it sure seemed to her that the wargear was helpless to protect against the damage.

“NO MORE!! I’M SICK OF THIS, DO YOU HEAR ME?!”

Rainbow Dash suddenly bolted for the  Destiny Cube, much to the shock of the others.

“GIVE ME MY FRIEND BACK YOU STUPID CUBE!!” Rainbow spun around in mid-air, landing on her forelegs with her rear legs bunched up next to the floating artifact.

“W-Wait! No!” Shifty stuttered, right before Rainbow bucked the Destiny Cube across the room.





Twilight felt a slight lurching sensation.

In an instant, all of the floating data blocks shifted sharply to one side by several meters. Twilight felt one of them brush her wingtips, but otherwise she was blessedly untouched by the unexpected motion.

The daemon, being much larger, was not so fortunate.

A strangle warbling noise filled the air as one of the marble constructs slammed into its side. The tentacle trying its best to crush Twilight was flung loose, and her eye widened at the inexplicable turn in fortune.

Twilight bolted away toward another data block on the opposite side of the daemon from the one that had hit it. She leapt onto the face, her mind filling with imagery of a far-off war and horrific imagery of death. Her mind reached into the construct, configuring the energies there to her will. Behind her, the daemon peeled itself off of the unexpected obstacle, its eyes swimming across its core to spot its prey.

“Eat THIS!” Twilight cried, zipping straight up into the air.

The data block she had touched suddenly exploded on one side, the marble bursting open and launching the stone straight towards the Warpspawn. The daemon’s eyes widened in the split second before impact, crushing it between the memory constructs.


Twilight twisted about and flew away, not bothering to check her handiwork. Daemons were immortal creatures that could not truly be killed; only temporarily banished. She wasn’t at all sure which rules applied to this quasi-physical transdimensional projected space, but the monster had gotten the drop on her too many times already. The magic circle, once a glittering and elaborate golden wreathe under her hooves, was a flickering shambles now. It spun in fits and starts, large sections of the runic script were missing, and the glow dimmed constantly, like a lumen on the verge of dying. She didn’t think she could rely on it to turn away another blade, and she didn’t intend to put it to the test.

The young Princess soared over the vast library of arcane monoliths. They seemed distinctly disturbed now, even more than before. Several were floating unusually high or low off the ground, and the limited sense of uniformity that had arranged the constructs had been severely disordered by whatever had happened.

There was one construct that had not been obviously affected, though.

Twilight landed in front of the monolith at the center of the artifact. The core. The daemon’s hiding place. It still bore an enormous gouge from the Warpspawn’s emergence, and it was a dusty gray just like the data blocks that had been drained of energy.

When Twilight touched the monolith’s surface, however, it was not inert. There was power there. And, surprisingly, emotion. Sadness and fear welled up at her touch, and the young alicorn felt the surface start to give way. Her hoof sunk into the stone facing and started drawing in the rest of her body. Twilight did not resist. There was still something here, some remnant, and she had to find it.

Her senses went fuzzy, and the surroundings faded away into a colorless haze. The sky, or the sterile, well-lit space that passed for the sky here, was replaced by a void filled with stars. The space around her was a flat, empty floor, featureless and stretching off into infinity.

But Twilight Sparkle was focused on the body in front of her. It was an indistinct, blurry thing, like mist trying to squeeze itself into a consistent shape. It was much larger than a human, but beyond that it seemed to defy any distinct appearance.

“Are you… the voice? The one that called to me?” Twilight whispered.

Yes… I am… sorry.

“But you did it! You succeeded! We rescued you!” the Princess argued.

So many… lost. Too many… could not… be saved. Destroyed in mind or body. Failure…

The entity seemed to shudder, a ripple pulsing through the fog.

And then… IT… reached me. Warpspawn. Daemon. Hunter. It… hid here… feasting… gnawing and seeding my… transmissions…

Twilight shook her head. “I can stop it! We can defeat it if we work together!”

I cannot… there is… nothing… I do not have enough… power to resist… immense drain… to… communicate. Links to… memory… failed. Processing… failed. It allowed me… this much… only to maintain… illusion… deception…

Twilight felt a tear crawl down her cheek as the words from the artifact started to break down. “There’s so much I want to ask! So much we could still learn from you! There has to be a way!”

There is… no… way. Survival… you… leave. Last… reserves… will not… endure… core purge.

“What? What does that mean?” Twilight demanded. “You’re not going to survive if I leave?! You can’t!”

A cracking sound came from behind her. A night-black talon, like a farmer’s scythe of pure ebony, emerged from the ground and scraped across the floor. It was nearly ten feet away from Twilight, but it appeared to be dragging something behind it and opening the way.

“There has to be something we can do!” the lavender mare shouted, her bionic eye lighting up. “Don’t give up! We worked so hard to get this far!”

The crack widened, and an eye emerged at the head of a lumpy dark mass.

No more… time.

The mist suddenly washed over Twilight, seeping all around her. She felt a new surge of magical energy around her, but this time it wasn’t her horn draining what reserves it could find. Something was happening. A last, desperate spark of power flared around her, and then it was rapidly consumed.

The daemon drew itself up out of the breach in the ground. Its body was regenerated. Its talons reared back for the kill. The bulbous mass that was its central body opened up, revealing a mouth full of needle-like teeth.

“NO! GET BACK HERE! DIE!!” the Warpspawn snarled, speaking for the first time while leaping toward the pony.

Twilight closed her eye, and then darkness consumed her.

I am sorry…





Twilight gasped and then stumbled, falling onto her belly. Tears streamed from her remaining eye, and her heart thundered in her chest. As she slowly regained her senses, she stared down at the deck below her. It was a music note drawn into a spiral, with a jagged tail. Blood was splattered over it.

“T… Twi?” gasped a voice behind her.

Twilight raised her head and looked around. Applejack was still standing in the circle, looking ragged and heaving for breath like the air had been choked out of her. Fluttershy and Mantis were unconscious and laid out on a bloodied cloth that she recognized as a magic cloak. Rainbow Dash was pinned to the deck under the butt of Serith’s halberd, squirming angrily. Shifty Sights was naked except for her blindfold, and seemed to pause mid-argument with Vinyl Scratch, who had a bloody nose and appeared to be without her glasses. Rarity and Pinkie Pie, both visibly injured, gaped in surprise, their expressions brightening tremendously at the sight of the young Princess.

“What… happened?” Twilight mumbled weakly, light-headed and exhausted. She would have surely slumped to the deck were she not wearing her power armor.

Before she could say anything else Rarity raced toward her and seized her tightly in a hug. Twilight felt new tears emerging when she saw the dirty bandaging tied awkwardly around Rarity’s barrel. She groped for the right words, but she felt utterly overwhelmed.

“Rarity, you… how did…” she started mumbling, but the white unicorn just hugged her tighter, running a hoof through her mane.

“Sssssh…,” Rarity whispered, her mascara leaving dark streaks down her cheeks. “It’s okay. You’re back. You made it, Twilight. Everything is going to be okay.”

Serith watched the display with rapidly waning interest, and then finally took his weapon off of Rainbow Dash’s back. The Sorcerer held the Destiny Cube in his free hand, and although the artifact had clearly survived Rainbow’s attack it now sported a web of black, oil-like veins running over one side. It was not obvious if the damage was from being kicked or something else.


A bright red lumen on the sanctum door turned green, indicating an end to the quarantine lockdown. A loud creak rolled through the room, and the metal barrier yawned open. The still-conscious ponies whirled about, quite eager to leave the confines of the psykant laboratories.

Gaela stood outside the doorway, staring silently at the brutalized equines. Next to her was Spike and Doctor Claret Heartthrob, whose jaw dropped open at the sight. The two Iron Warrior guards were behind her, apparently interested to see what had come of the ritual that someone had called for medicae support.

“What in Starswirl’s name happened here?!” Claret shouted, an arc buzzing around the chain hanging from her horn.

“Daemon attack,” Pinkie said before coughing painfully.

“Told you,” Spike quipped. “It happens.”

“Did you kill it?” Gaela asked.

Twilight heaved a miserable sigh. “No.”

“Unfortunate,” Gaela said, turning around. “Medicae, begin emergency treatment. I will procure a mag-lev cart to carry the wounded to the apothecarion.”

“At this rate they might as well bunk there,” Claret grumbled.





Harvest of Steel
Deck C-13 – Twilight Sparkle’s quarters

“… but I couldn’t save it. I couldn’t stop the daemon, and the core ejected me from the artifact. I don’t know precisely what happened, but my best guess is that it used the last of its energy to expel my psychic presence and save me from the daemon. It’s highly likely that there’s nothing in there but the corrupted data stacks now. Just that and the monster slowly feeding on them.”

Twilight laid on her bunk while she gave her report, her ears pinned back and her expression utterly defeated. Her armor was discarded at the front of the room, and an empty ration tin lay atop a haphazard pile of dataslates next to the metal slat that she slept on. A holo-screen hovered on the wall displaying Solon’s face positioned in front of a dim background of shuddering machinery.

“I’m sorry, Warsmith. I failed,” Twilight sighed. “I dropped my whole team and a handful of others into a war zone, but the whole thing was an elaborate trap after all. It’s only thanks to the Hierophant’s prudence that it only ended with all my friends beaten up rather than me dead or possessed.”

Solon was obviously working on something else while she spoke, but after she finished he looked up to address her. The trio of red lights on the left side of his helmet pulsed, briefly covering the screen image in crimson.

“Failed? Do you think you failed me?”

Twilight arched an eyebrow, then thought about it. “I… suppose the only mission you gave me directly was to recover the artifact and I did that. But… I don’t know. This really feels like a massive letdown for everyone.”

“I can only guessh at the rewardsh within the Deshtiny Cube that are now out of our grashp,” Solon admitted, not noticing when Twilight’s eye twitched, “but in the end it wash a trap. Enemy action that aimed to deshtroy you, shpecifically. Your duty in thoshe circumshtancesh wash to shurvive, and sho you have.”

Twilight grimaced, her eye glancing away.

“… Do you regret it?” Solon asked after a long pause. “Would you have preferred Sherith talk me out of the deployment if you could do it all again?”

“Well, I… I mean… there’s a lot of LITTLE regrets, but, uh…” she looked away again, toward a small bronze amulet sitting on the counter next to her cogitator. A crude metal emblem of a wyrm curled into a circle. The only thing they took from Ulaisse other than the artifact and Erin Whyd.

“I… don’t,” Twilight admitted, feeling slightly relieved to speak the words. “Strategically speaking, we risked way too much to save a single refugee and an arcane death trap. But…” her brow furrowed under her horn. “I’m still glad we saved Erin. And I’m very glad we destroyed the Patriarch. I don’t know if it was the artifact or the daemon whispering to me back then, asking me to tear the heart out of the cult, but… I’m glad we did it. Something like that should not be allowed to survive if we can help it.”

A deep, throaty chuckle can from the holo-screen. “You’ve come shuch a long way, Princessh.”

“… Thank you,” Twilight replied evenly, unsure of what, precisely to make of the comment.

“Are we certain that none of the information you recovered ish usheful after all? No intereshting tidbitsh that you wouldn’t expect to find in our archivesh?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” the mare grunted sourly. “That’s the worst part about it all! All the data in each block I touched was all just dumped into my brain with a bunch of holes and zero context! What’s the Hadresparr? Why does it matter when it crossed Saytorian? Why was someone mapping all the trinary star systems in the Hyruso sector? I know that metamites are some kind of space crabs, but everything else that might have made that knowledge useful is missing! And what the hay is a ‘webway?’”

“A webway is a network of shtabilized Warp pathwaysh connected by fixed gatewaysh,” Solon explained. “It ish primarily accesshed by Eldar to enable shafe, shpeedy travel over vasht dishtancesh.”

“Oh. Well… okay then,” Twilight mumbled. “So I guess I did get some coordinates relating to that. I think. They all had the same word associated with them though, so I’d guess they all go to the same place. I don’t know if that’s very helpful.”

“What word wash that?”

“Commorragh.”