//------------------------------// // Screaming // Story: White Sun // by The Psychopath //------------------------------// Twilight was fully kitted in cold-resistant gear. She was wrapped in a thick, pale blue coat with white fur lining the edges. Thick boots of the same blue covered her hooves and most of her lower leg up to her hocks and knees. She was so afraid of the cold that she had even decided to put on a thick wool mask. She didn't regret it all considering nature was punching her in the face with strong and very cold winds since she entered the territory of the Crystal Empire. Visibility was quite poor outside of the light coming from the massive city and spire in the far distance, but even its white light seemed like a blur. The winds also deafened the 'explorer' in her attempts to find the Terrestrial Nebula, and had she not possessed a magic connection to Spike then it wouldn't have been able to follow her through the white wall that impeded movement more and more for every millimeter taken. Even though it had taken only five days of walking due to the need to rest, finding the destination was harder than normal. Usually, the blizzards would have dissipated around the nebula, but Twilight had no luck there. She found a large cliff covered in snow and set up camp there, using the stone as leverage for her equipment. Snow was too fragile to use as a makeshift tunnel, especially since Twilight had no idea how solid or powdery it was. Instead, she pulled out a small map she borrowed from Silvery and started to try and figure out where she was precisely. Somepony had drawn a detailed map of the area near the border for about ten kilometers away from its limits and did this for around seven kilometers in width. Likely a researcher trying to uncover the secrets of the Terrestrial Nebula. She eventually noticed that the winds were finally starting to settle down the further in she went and felt her heart race. After a quick look at the horizon, Twilight sighed in relief. She wasn't approaching the Crystal Empire itself but potentially what she was searching for. After a few more hours of trekking, Twilight finally made it through the blizzard. The mare shook Spike's leg from surprise and slowly took everything in. These weren't crystals or simulacrums of trees that sat here. These were entirely new things. The towering 'things' that comprised the Terrestrial Nebula were spires of night blue, almost impossible to see from afar. They reached high and multiple 'branches' seemed to sprout out from them to catch and fuse with those coming from their neighbors. It created a spiderweb of night blue throughout the air that only seemed to go on forever. Peering closer at the spires, Twilight realized that looking at them was like looking into the night sky. It hurt her eyes and brain to try and comprehend the disjointed mess of night sky and land around her, but it was intriguing all the same. Some branches had stretched out but had not managed to meet with any others, causing them to dangle loosely on the side of the spires and become pale and white, like bones. The area resembled a sizable quarry of a sort, with various-sized holes here and there going from a hoof's depth to being large enough to be classified as a small lake if filled to the brim with water. The strange pillars grew along the walls at various, strange angles, and while most of them would bend themselves to reach the sky, others would grow perfectly horizontal from the walls. The mare could feel a strong magic in this place and an oddly familiar one coming from the dead branches. While she hadn't come for them, she still took several samples, each the size of a full-grown pony's legs, and placed them in Spike's bags. They broke off like icicles. As Twilight searched for any frozen bodies, she realized that the night skies in the webs would converge into each other from their respective spires, collide, and then erupt from the surface of the strange material, creating colorful, star-filled nebulae in the air. It was pretty, but it wasn't getting her any closer to the bodies she was searching for. It took a couple of hours of constant searching before Twilight finally found one. It was likely the body of one of the researchers that stayed behind. They looked like they were in a panic and froze instantly. Whoever they were, their features had become white and icy as all the liquid in their body turned to ice almost instantaneously. Twilight rubbed her hooves eagerly and started to pull out some notes and a clipboard. This was it! The moment she waited for so long: An expedition with nothing but the elements as an obstacle rather than other ponies. Using her magic, the mare heated up the ink in one of her ink pots and mixed it up with a wooden stick as it slowly melted with the heat. She felt very comfortable here for some reason, but her scribbling stopped. The mare looked around, suspicious of her environment. Two bizarre entities she couldn't comprehend popped out of nowhere since she started her expeditions. Why was she to believe that this was any different? "You could harness their power, Twilight," a voice told the mare in her head. "The one in the sands was obnoxious but very helpful. What if there's one here?" The lavender unicorn patted her head with a hoof. "No no. That's a naive notion. The second one was helpful, to an extent. If I didn't have the medallions or that tunnel I would have never been able to get out of there." She paused and put the quill to her lips. "Did the tunnel collapse? It was still sand..." Twilight cleared her throat and went back to scribbling. "I need to focus instead of focusing on 'what-ifs'." "And what about the thing in the city beneath your house?" the voice insisted. "It could help you. It made the medallion." Twilight bared her teeth angrily. "No!" she shouted. She started to chisel away at the ice with her magic, carefully taking in the flow of cracks and the various densities of the block of frozen water surrounding the unfortunate pony. "That thing was ripping my mind apart! I don't want to deal with it again." She coughed from the cold air scratching her throat. "If I go back down there to use that magic focused in the giant building, then I need to prepare many, many wards. Too much work for such a massive, unpredictable unknown." "Your exam was also a massive, unpredictable unknown. Had Celestia not been there then you wouldn't have been able to enter the school or even stop your magic going haywire. Your parents--" Twilight bit her lower lip to break the thought pattern. She didn't want to relive those parts of her life. The mare readjusted her clothing and got back to work. With careful chiseling and melting, she managed to free the mare still wearing a brown, false-leather coat filled to the brim with wool. Her boots were also still intact. Whatever the Terrestrial Nebula was made of, it seemed to take the creatures within its confines and keep everything intact during the transitions. Twilight could see a few foxes and birds down into one of the 'quarries' further away. They, too, were frozen solid. The mare wasn't sure where to start with this. If she revived it immediately then the body wouldn't move at all. If she defrosted it instantly then the body risked breaking apart altogether from the sudden temperature change. As her very first test on a frozen body rather than just a limb or organ, Twilight filled it with multiple heat spells and watched it thaw. She still heard audible crackling and popping, but until she revived the body, she wasn't sure if it was just gas in the body finally becoming free or the interior disintegrating. She carefully jotted down the results and readjusted her stance to get a firmer grip in the snowy tundra. Purple and teal light enveloped the body, surprising Twilight. Her magic never produced a teal light, but she was unsure if it was the ambient magic inherent to what she assumed was an earth pony or the magic of the Nebula that infused into her when she became frozen. Twilight watched in awe as the strange zombie's limbs snapped and bent in unnatural angles before righting themselves. Its movements reminded Twilight of the creature trapped in stone under the Pines, but with the ability to move. Even though every contraction and relaxation of the undead's body caused it to move in an instant, angled positions, it was still able to move forward. If anything it reminded Twilight of robots some ponies would draw and 'animate' with flipbooks. Every new position of the limbs was faster than the eye could see. It was further perturbing to see its head dangle upside down and take various other positions every time it moved. The unicorn still took notes of the situation and realized that she might have created a new form of undead. The idea somehow lit up her brain like a Hearth's Warming Eve tree and pushed her imagination into overdrive. Unfortunately, this wasn't the time she would be able to think of a name. The whole area started trembling violently and the pillars started to expel more and more of the 'night sky' into the air, accumulating into a display of space filled with stars, galaxies, and a giant orange 'scar' that reached the entirety of the Terrestrial Nebula's length. Twilight couldn't admire it as she had just realized what was happening. She grabbed for her medallion but the land started bouncing and collapsing violently. "We have to go, Spike! I can't focus on the medallions!" She and the undead started running as fast as they could, hopping over rising blocks of ice and collapsing land beneath revealing dozens of frozen bodies hidden within. A veritable treasure trove for a necromancer or a surgeon. The mare looked behind her to see the new undead casually standing in place as the land broke out from underneath it and engulfed it whole. If only Twilight could have taken it with her. That was a nasty way to end a second time. The blizzard started swirling around the Nebula as its moniker above grew brighter and wider and started lowering itself. It was well on its way to engulf the whole area Twilight was trapped in. "I'm not going to make it!" the mare panicked. She suddenly felt herself being lifted up. Spike had grabbed her and started pulling back as it continued to run. "Spike, no!" Twilight yelled. The next thing she knew, she was soaring through the sky at breakneck speeds and landing in the snow several feet away from the colors as they crashed into the ground and snow was blasted up high. The mare was quick to scamper to her hooves in an attempt to go back for Spike, but it was too late. The Terrestrial Nebula had left. What a moment for it to disappear. "Spike," Twilight sighed. A spark flew off her horn, and the mare, in a panic, tried to focus on said appendage. "Spike?" He had reappeared somewhere nearby with the nebula, but Twilight could feel that he was frozen solid. Overcome with joy, the mare poured as much magic as she could into the undead to give it the strength to free itself. "What's this?" a gruff voice asked. Twilight was broken out of her trance and hesitantly turned around. She was face-to-face with crystal ponies equipped with brass-colored body armor. Several of them were sporting spears while others had retractable swords in their foreleg armor. The mare could see two armored wagons and around fifteen soldiers in total. "N-nothing," Twilight said. "I was just going." The soldier pushed her back down. "You jumped out of the Terrestrial Nebula. The first in a while. Normally we would celebrate such a thing, but we came here because our security teams detected some rather..." The stallion looked up while clicking his tongue. "disgusting forms of magic. You're the only one here, so you're going to be coming with us. If you have nothing to do with that, then you'll be free to go." The mare started hyperventilating as she realized what was going to happen. She might not have been in Equestria, but she was still in the company of ponies no matter how different they looked to her. She called out to Spike in a panic and couldn't help but feel the world spinning around her as the soldiers around started to take threatening stances. "You have to do it, Twilight! You have to do it if you're going to escape and save Celestia!" She still had the medallion. Spike would be taken out of the block of ice, but was he too far? She just knew he was near, and she couldn't concentrate with all the pressure. "Twilight!" "No...No...No!" Twilight's magic went wild and blasted the soldiers around her back. Only the one pushing her down was thrown away, and a large bowl of snow was taken out from under the lavender unicorn. "You can't stop me! I have to do this!" the mare screamed. The guards looked around as purple wisps started appearing in the air and dove into the snow. Massive snow golems started to rise, easily towering over the ponies and being thrice their length in width. Other wisps seemed to expand into odd creatures with immense maws that stretched far beyond the capacity of their bodies, pulling skin and muscle away from their skulls. Rags took form around their bodies, seemingly made from their own flesh and flapped in the wind as they flew around. The soldiers made out griffins, ponies, and reindeer among the spirits. One of them flew next to a guard and screamed at the top of its lungs, sending her careening backward from the force of its voice alone. "She's the necromancer!" one of the soldiers shouted. "Take her down!"