Canterlot, halfway up a mountain peak, was high enough to be above the blanket of clouds that shrouded most of Equestria for most of the winter. That didn’t mean that the sky was always clear – snow clouds had to be pushed up over the top of the mountain if it was to acquire its signature snowy peak, and nopony wanted to go the entire winter without getting to play in the snow – but most winter nights you could look up and see the stars glittering overhead, and the moonlight shining down on the snow kept everything quite bright.
It also made the the mountain city very, very cold, particularly at night. The biting chill almost made Twilight regret ditching Spike with Rarity instead of actually getting new clothes made; fortunately, her mother came to the rescue with extra layers of sweaters and blankets and socks and scarves.
Ditto, who’d barely dressed for winter at all, got the worst of it. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “I look like a mummy.”
“It’s your fault for being a unicorn,” Seaside said. Like Rainbow Dash, she was going naked, or at least she would be once Twilight’s mother let them take off the ribbons binding their wings. Pegasi felt the cold, in the sense that they could tell cold weather from warm weather, but there was nothing inherently less comfortable about sub-zero temperatures for them. Twilight’s trip to the moon had proven that their weather immunity went quite a bit farther than that, but for flying around in wintery mountains, the high-altitude adaptation that everypony knew about was sufficient.
It was a little surprising that changelings acquired the same power simply by taking pegasus form, but only a little. A ‘changeling disguise’ was a transformation and not an illusion, after all.
While she was considering the implications – good implications, for once, since Luna’s special project was likely to go back into space at some point, and potentially being able to survive there would be a definite plus to her hiring the changelings – Ditto suddenly burst into green flames, that didn’t set fire to the clothing engulfing him or the books surrounding him. “Right,” he said, in Rainbow Dash’s voice, “I should have thought of it myself. This’ll make rock-climbing easier too.”
“You are not going around as Rainbow Dash’s twin,” Twilight said, as she and the others started unwrapping him. Her. It. Come to think of it, she didn’t actually know whether the two changelings were really male or female, under their disguises – she’d seen them in their base forms, but they just looked like bugs. The green fire flashed again – driving the ponies back a step in surprise, although, again, it didn’t actually burn anything – and now they were looking at Daring Do, mustard coat and greyscale mane. Twilight shook her head. “That’s almost as bad.”
“It’s not like I have an infinite number of pegasus forms,” Ditto whined. “How about this.” With a flash, she turned into Applejack, and then with a look of concentration, spread a pair of orange wings. “Y’all can call me Fruit Fly,” she said. Twilight Velvet removed the last layer of clothing covering her flank, revealing a cutie mark of three apples… with wings. ‘Fruit Fly’ glanced at them, and turned them green instead of red.
“I guess that’ll do,” Twilight Sparkle said. Her face still looked exactly like Applejack’s, but at least to somepony who didn’t know them she’d appear to be a unique pony and not an obvious duplicate or fake.
Her mother stared at the changeling, one eye twitching. “Wasn’t she just a colt a few seconds ago?”
“That’s another reason we’re not dating,” Twilight said.
===
“Are you sure you don’t just want us to carry you?” Rainbow Dash asked, as they left the city and headed towards the mountain trails.
Twilight Sparkle shook her head. “That shouldn’t be necessary.”
After about thirty seconds of walking, Rainbow turned back again, pacing Twilight while flying backwards. “Because it would be a lot faster.”
Twilight sighed. She didn’t like the idea of being hauled around like luggage, but when she’d originally planned to head to Luna’s secret lair on foot, she’d expected to have two ground-based ponies and one pegasus. Three flyers to one walker did change the situation enough to merit reconsideration. After all, she didn’t like being the one slowing down the entire group, either.
“Do you know where her lair is?” she asked Rainbow Dash. “I know vaguely where it is but I was looking out from inside. I know it’s covered by an illusion.”
“Nah, I’ve never been there,” Rainbow replied. “Every time I’ve met the moon ponies since they joined up with Luna, they were in town, guarding.” She looked up at the vast expanses of mountain looming over them. “So we don’t know where we’re going?”
“There’s presumably a trail,” Twilight explained. “My father works there most nights, and complained about the trip a few times when he was visiting me in the castle. From the way he talked about it, it didn’t sound like he was having the Night Guard ferry him back and forth. My plan was to take the public trail up towards the peak, and keep our eyes open. If that doesn’t work, I brought climbing gear to more fully explore the mountain, although at that point you’re right – it’d make more sense for you to carry me.”
“Ugh,” Rainbow said. “How come every time we need to climb a mountain, we end up walking?”
After a few minutes’ walk (or, in Rainbow Dash’s case, very slow hover), they reached the trailhead, where the footpaths leading up and down and all around the mountain all met. The guidepost had two dozen symbols on it, with corresponding arrows pointing every which way. Twilight consulted her map to identify the symbol representing the peak trail; it was fairly obvious which way was ‘up’, but better safe than sorry. The two changelings stood behind her, watching her anxiously.
“Nervous, sugar?” Fruit Fly asked.
“I just want to get this over with,” Seaside snapped.
Rainbow Dash was apparently less nervous, and more bored, and wandered around the area aimlessly, kicking at rocks and watching them bounce down the steep drop-off, just a few feet away.
“Okay,” Twilight said, after triple-checking the map to make sure she had the right trail. “I think –“
“Hey, look at this!” Rainbow Dash interrupted, from just over the edge of a steep section of cliff. Seaside and Fruit Fly flew down to join her, leaving Twilight to carefully slide down a slope next to the cliff, catching herself on a spur of rock to keep from sliding the rest of the way down the mountain. From there, there was a hidden trail leading to a narrow, icy ledge that extended a few feet below the cliff face her friends with wings were already staring at.
Twilight blinked a few times to make sure she was seeing it right – the cliff was currently in shadow, but there was enough ambient light reflecting off the clouds below to make out the runes and pictograms carved semi-randomly into the rock. “That looks just like the decorations we saw on the moon,” Twilight said, excited.
“Which means secret door, right?” Rainbow Dash said.
“Right.” Twilight examined the pattern carefully, and made sure not to touch anything until she’d identified the specific rune that formed the keystone of the entire pattern – the secret doors on the moon had often been trapped, and setting off any sort of trap here, perched on a narrow ledge on the side of a mountain, would be potentially deadly. “Get ready to catch me if I guess wrong,” she said, and the two Changelings flew back a few feet, which was almost the opposite of what she’d just asked.
Still, she was pretty sure that between the three of them her companions wouldn’t let her fall, so she placed her hoof against the crescent moon at the center of the pattern. She thought she felt a faint tingle through the layers of socks and the sole of her boot, but nothing happened.
“Let me try!” Rainbow Dash said, crowding Twilight out of the way. She put her bare hoof against the same rune, and a picture of her cloud-and-lightning cutie mark appeared floating in midair – then turned red, with the sound of a buzzer. Seaside and Fruit Fly tried as well, with similar results.
“If it’s checking our cutie marks, we should use a mark it expects to see,” Twilight said. “My father’s cutie mark is two nested crescent moons, the inner one rotated 135 degrees clockwise.” She scratched a rough sketch in the frost coating the ledge. “Yellow in color, against his blue coat.”
Fruit Fly altered her cutie mark to match Twilight’s sketch. “This doesn’t seem very secure.”
“Getting a magical sensor to recognize individuals is difficult,” Twilight replied, defending Luna even though, really, using a magical sensor to try to recognize individuals was something the description of the magical sensor spell said not to do. “And cutie marks are hard to change with magic. Well, pony magic,” she amended, glancing at Fruit Fly’s flank. “The inner moon needs to be a little smaller, and both of them should be curvier,” Twilight said. “Good… a little more… almost right. There. That’s close, anyway.”
It turned out to be close enough. Fruit Fly placed her hoof on the rune, and an image of the fake cutie mark lit up in green. The rune-covered section of wall swung open inwards, revealing a dark corridor leading into the mountain. “I hope this is the right path,” Twilight said, peering into the darkness. “If we accidentally broke into Luna’s hazardous artifact storage crypt, it’ll be kind of embarrassing.”
“Want me to check for traps?” Rainbow Dash offered, peering into the darkness.
Twilight shrugged, “Sure, why not?”
In a flash, Rainbow Dash was gone, leaving a trail of rainbow-colored fire burning briefly down the center of the secret passage to mark her path. “She’s too fast for them to hit when they trigger,” Twilight explained to the changelings, who looked completely confused. “So unless she flies face-first into an invisible force field or something, she should be perfectly safe.”
In a few seconds, Rainbow Dash was back. “All clear,” she said. “But man, those are a lot of stairs.”
===
The Night Guard was waiting for them when they got to the top of the stairs, and opened another magically triggered door. The entire Night Guard. All four of them. They were in a lounge of sorts, with carpeting and a pair of sofas, lit by a modern magical lamp. It looked significantly more homey than the last time Twilight had visited.
“Took you long enough,” said one of the bat-winged ponies in their evil-looking armor. Hanging off the far wall was a magic mirror, showing an image of the secret door in the cliff face – it was no mystery how Luna’s ponies had anticipated their arrival.
Twilight stared at them, then slowly collapsed onto her belly, breathing heavily. “Too… many… stairs…” she gasped. At least it was warm here, aside from the chill air seeping in from the staircase.
“I guess I’ll do the intros, then,” Rainbow Dash said to the changelings. “Meet Luna’s Night Guard, also known as the moon ponies. The snarky one is Warp, the girl of my dreams.”
“In your – right,” the Night Guard in question replied. “Luna only rarely brings me along when she dream-walks. Your experience was atypical.”
“The silent one behind her is Ram or Hart or something like that.”
“His short name is Wolf,” Warp corrected. To the changelings, she added, “She’s making fun of him because the translator spit out his full name as ‘Wolf-Ram-Air-Hart’, and because she’s a jerk.”
Seaside snorted, trying to hold back a snigger and not entirely succeeding.
“The other guy is Chance. You can recognize him by the stupid grin on his face,” Rainbow Dash said. unfazed.
“Only when I get to see you again, Dashie,” Chance said. “You shouldn’t be such a stranger.”
Rainbow Dash ruffled her wings. “Eh heh. And the one with the horn over there must be Tess, by process of elimination. New armor, Tess?”
Twilight opened her eyes. “Horn?” Sure enough, Tess’s ‘night guard’ transformation, generated by her enchanted armor, lacked the typical batwings that the rest of the moon ponies sported – instead, sprouting from her forehead was a sharp, curved horn, black as her coat. “Oh. My. Stars. Luna made a set of unicorn armor?” Twilight leapt to her feet, her fatigue forgotten. “Yes! Yes yes yes!” she said, bouncing around Tess in a circle, too overcome with excitement to hold it in. “I knew I didn’t need to do anything drastic! I can just borrow a set of armor from Luna, and I’ll have unicorn and earth pony magic!”
“Um…” Tess said.
Twilight put her hooves on Tess’s shoulders and stared her in the eyes. “Take it off! I want to try it!”
Tess’s horn flashed green and Twilight was thrown across the room, slammed into the wall, and pinned there for a few seconds while it pulsed with an overglow. “Stop it!” Tess said, eyes rolling upwards to look at the horn sprouting from her own forehead. Twilight Sparkle felt her vision dim and narrow, while her limbs went numb. She heard Tess yell “Sparkles!” and then there was a flash, and –
The next thing she knew, Twilight was in a much more sparsely decorated room, alone except for Tess, her body aching from a recent transformation. “Sorry about that,” Tess said. “Sparkles is a bit possessive of our horn – it’s her only way of affecting the real world right now.”
Twilight grimaced – Sparkles was another one of her mirror twins. Rather than being turned to stone and put in the statue garden, she’d been converted to data and stored in the machines implanted in Tess’s brain. This left her able to see and hear the world through the moon pony’s senses, if Tess let her, but otherwise she was trapped in an imaginary realm – a rather small and basic one, intended for temporary habitation as part of a game. It was an uncomfortable situation, and she’d never been that stable to start with.
“At least she used a temporary transformation,” Twilight said, smiling weakly. “I’m sorry I was so… enthusiastic. But you have to understand, this is a dream come true! You can’t imagine how much I’ve missed having access to magic… unicorn magic, I mean. Do you think Luna could make me another set? I’d do anything!”
“Anything?” Tess asked. “Would you murder one of your friends?”
“Would I what?” Twilight Sparkle asked, shocked. No, Tess was just teasing her for using imprecise language. “No. No I wouldn’t. If Luna set that as the price, I’d consider her ‘evil’ and work on some way to cheat or trick her into giving me the armor anyway.”
Tess snorted. “Unfortunately, it’s not a price so much as a material component. Rainbow Dash explained about your changeling friends while you were a houseplant.”
Twilight felt a shiver run through her, and her hair stand on end. She took another look at Tess’ horn. Short. Black. Curved. “That’s a changeling horn.”
Tess nodded. “And the donor has to be alive while it’s enchanted. They aren’t alive by the time you finish.”
Twilight got to her feet and stared at Tess. “Explain,” she said angrily. She hoped there was a good explanation. She really, really hoped so. Because otherwise, she was going to have to try to punish Luna, and aside from Luna being, essentially, a goddess among ponies, Twilight Sparkle was currently trapped in a room with one of the moon ponies – freakishly fast, freakishly strong, and oh this one also had a copy of Twilight herself living in her head, ready to cast all the spells that Twilight no longer had access to.
“It’s not really a happy story,” Tess warned, watching Twilight warily, as if she could read her mind. Or perhaps as if she had a copy of Twilight inside her head advising her on what the Twilight in front of her was probably thinking. “One of the changelings Pinkie Pie set free went to ground in Canterlot, and managed to stay away from the law for a few weeks. When it was caught, again, it tried to run for it, and was badly hurt trying to escape. Stabbed with a lightning-spear instead of just getting shocked.”
“So the guards were authorized to use lethal force,” Twilight said, scowling, “and as a direct result there was an entirely predictable accident. How does this translate into changeling sacrifice?”
Tess’s expression was blank as she said, “Barring heavy magic that nopony wanted to pay for, it was going to die, so the Professors from the School for Gifted Unicorns claimed it for dissection. Promised to make it comfortable in its last moments, yada yada. Princess Luna heard about this, and decided to intervene. She stabilized it and kept it alive. She didn’t heal it, but she kept it from dying as long as she channeled the spell.”
“And then?” Twilight asked, afraid that she knew the answer.
“Then they went ahead and dissected it. Vivisection is a lot more useful than dissection, apparently, when what you really want to study are a creature’s magical traits.”
Twilight’s skin crawled at the thought, but in the wake of ‘another changeling attack’, she could almost imagine somepony convincing themselves that it was justified. When you were caught up in the throes of curiosity, it was easy to handwave away the obvious flaws in your rationalization with a bit of convoluted logic. Twilight could see herself falling for that trap – she wasn’t proud of it, but there was a part of her that came to the surface when she felt stressed, and it sometimes made her do things that she shouldn’t.
Things like mind-controlling Ponyville. She’d done that twice. But there was a reason Celestia punished her for that. It wasn’t acceptable. “Nopony saw a problem with this?”
Tess rolled her eyes. “They figured since it had Luna’s blessing, it was okay.”
Twilight cringed. “So what was Luna thinking?”
“That if it wasn’t socially acceptable, they wouldn’t have proposed it. She’s been taking her cues on morality from other ponies since returning from exile.”
“And the horn?” Twilight prompted, although the rest was fairly obvious.
Tess smiled a grim smile. “After they’d gotten all they could by cutting the changeling apart, Luna helped ‘dispose of the remains’.”
“I don’t think I want one anymore,” Twilight Sparkle said, feeling sick. “How can you even stand wearing it?”
Tess shrugged. “Waste not, want not. It’s not like it matters to the changeling anymore.”
“That’s a horrible excuse!” Twilight snapped. “You can’t just accept the benefits of an evil action without qualm because the evil that produced it happened in the past! The next evil act will be in the past too, as soon as you’re done doing it!”
“That’s more or less what Celestia said,” Tess admitted. “It doesn’t bother me, though. Maybe I’m just used to it. Before we got stuck in this place, we were scavengers – we picked over wrecks left by pirates all the time.”
“Except that this time, you’re working for the pirate,” Twilight said.
Tess shook her head. “Anyway, don’t bring any of this up with Luna. It’s a sore spot. She and Celestia were going at it off and on for days.”
“The changelings I brought with me are my friends,” Twilight said. “I can’t leave them here if Luna is going to treat them as walking spell components!”
“I’m pretty sure Celestia covered that sometime during the two-day argument,” Tess said. “But if you want to go make the moon princess angry, Sparkles says that she’s willing to back you up.”
Twilight nodded, determined. “So you two will come with me to speak to her?”
“Oh no. Nooooooo,” Tess said, holding up a hoof and backing away slowly. “She’ll be your back up so that in case Luna kills you, there’ll still be a Twilight Sparkle around.”
Twilight stared at her.
Tess smirked. “We’ll be behind you all the way. Way, way behind you.”