The old hatch creaked and opened slowly, as someone was careful enough not to drop it on the barren soil. A cloud of dust flew through the freezing air, as first a majestic blue alicorn and then a small, huddled up group of ponies slowly and somewhat clumsily got out of it. They looked in front of them: a deserted plain filled with sickly and dried grass and a stormy yet eerily silent sky above them. Clouds and lightning coiled around each other like monstrous snakes of gigantic proportions, a show of unnatural strength that was mesmerizing and painful to see. Through the knee high grass ran a series of wore down train tracks that seemed to stretch on indefinitely. Someone decided to turn around and see one last time what they were leaving behind: some houses, farms in the distance, and fields that once were green but now were just plains full of dullness. They all felt small and insignificant under the uncaring skies above, where turmoil and conflict tore the clouds apart. Even the simple act of hovering in the air was seen as an act of unforgivable hubris. The last one to come out was a relatively small dragon who could see the alicorn of the night eye to eye; he slowly closed the hatch, making sure not to make unnecessary noise.
“My little ponies” said Luna, with care and concern clearly sincere in her voice. “what awaits us is a long and perilous journey. It shan’t be easy, and maybe before the end we’ll have to do things we thought we couldn’t do, not in a million years. We all have suffered many a grave losses already. But if we pull this together, we can win back our Equestria from these monsters, and go forward towards a brighter future. I won’t ask you to give me your loyalty. What I want from you is your trust. Please trust me. That’s all I ask. I’ve seen one too many times what mistrust can do to us, to those we love. I thought your ancestors didn’t care about me, didn’t trust me with the kingdom. That everything was done thanks to Celestia. I committed a mistake. And as long as I live there won’t be a day when I won’t think about all the pain and the suffering I have caused because I didn’t trust the ponies I was sworn to protect. No more. No… more. It’s ending now. I swear that I will bring you back the peaceful world you deserve, even if it means personally dragging each and everyone one of you through pain and sufferings. I won’t allow it, and if you think you can give up halfway through and die on me, you are all gravely mistaken!”
Silence settled once more as the ponies huddled up in a circle around her. They whispered to each other hastily for a moment, then a mare stepped forward, touched her bosom and said with an hesitant but hopeful tone:
“We trust you, Princess Luna”
The alicorn looked down at that mare, and in her eyes she could see real, sincere trust, something she had yearned and asked for such a long time she couldn’t even remember the first time she had wanted to see that beautiful look. Her mouth settled into a soft smile and she answered.
“Thank you.” She almost turned around and saw Ponyville and beyond it Canterlot in the corner of her eye. Her pupil didn’t move from that sight and she didn’t blink, so much it hurt after a while. She forced herself to turn her head completely and watched intensely the train tracks, long snakes of metal that seemed to stretch as far as she could see. A slight breeze came from nowhere, caressing her fur and making her shiver. She breathed slowly one last time before setting one hoof over the other, and another one, and another one. The other ponies watched her for a moment, then quickly scampered and started following their former princess, now leader and guide, through the vast plains of nothingness and dried grass, animating them with whispered and contained chatter. The pure and white snow covered mountains that marked the arrival of every visitor of the Crystal Empire were nowhere to be seen yet.
Just a small dragon stood behind them, watching them reach slowly but surely the train tracks. He found a burned stump of tree and sat on it, making sure not to completely lose sight of them. He gazed at Ponyville, and his eyes rested upon an old oak tree. He breathed a small sliver of green, iridescent flame that danced in the cool air before disappearing completely. He sat there for a while, before reaching up and running to the others, a small speck of purple and green under the darkly streaked and leaden heavens above.
Right after the sun quietly exploded out of the sky, the best definition that could describe the streets of Ponyville was just “panic”. Ponies were just running into the streets, looking to reach their loved ones, a figure of authority or just someone they thought could explain them what happened and why the sun was no longer in the sky. Inside the Golden Oak Public Library, Spike was busy making sure no one got inside as he tried to get a sense out of what he just saw that night. Twilight… her Twilight was alive, of that there was no doubt. Even if it seemed to contradict every possible thing he knew about death, funerals, coffins and bodies, she had been there, in that barn. Her scent, the slightly fidgeting legs when she felt she was the center of attention, all the details he had been able to pick up in the years of asking to sleep with her after he had a really bad dream were there.
From the look of surprise he saw on Luna, the Princess and the others’ faces, he understood that they weren’t prepared to find her under those enchantments, so they didn’t try to keep this from him. As for those things about the Society, Foundation, whatever, he didn’t care much. There was just this one question booming inside his head…
His ears were pierced by the most awful sound he had ever listened to, and he stumbled from his chair. He quickly got up and ran to the window, to see what happened. It had felt like a really close explosion and a death scream all mixed up together and blasted through a train engine. He reached the window just in time to see the sun slowly making its way to the bottom of the sky, before exploding like a glass ball, without making any kind of sound. The shards fell down over the horizon, like sparks of a firework, and the whole world went dark. He closed the curtains and dashed out of the door, looking for some kind of clue of what had just happened and-
The dream-like vision faded from her eyes as quickly as it had formed. Tactile mnemonic spells were tricky to land and even harder to maintain. Ponies impressed their lives all around them, like rain slowly eroding a pebble, and for certain mages it was possible to tap into objects and read them like a record, to show what happened around them. Impressions, thoughts, desires were like indentations on malleable vinyl, yet they could only show what had happened close to them. The small piece of wood Twilight had gotten from the library was not enough to see the rest. She rested her back against the cool wall, and shivered a bit; above was raging a sand storm of titanic proportions. Winds blew and screamed and pillars of dust raged across the desert, carried by the streams. The furious weather above was muffled by the closed hatch, but the grains scratching and mauling at the metal like a wounded beast could still be audible. She bent her neck a bit to look at the room down the corridor: Bright Light was enchanting the knowledge of that thing into Kalos’ mind. His face was scrunched in concentration as his horn glowed and pulsed rapidly. A wyvern mind work in different ways, so adapting a mnemonic spell to Kalos was difficult. And even if it was difficult to imagine the bookish, if somewhat slick stallion kicking flanks left and right, he had been an agent too, even if Twilight hadn’t actually asked anything about those times. So the three of them were more used to make people forget about stuff rather than helping them remember. Nonetheless, this thing she wanted to remember.
055.
A Keter she had never heard of before. After Bright Light had explained it to them, she was kind of grateful for it. Now that she had the knowledge, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. On one hand, it seemed pretty innocuous, even if it had a somewhat annoying anti-memetic property. But as the reality of it all suddenly pressed on her, like an epiphany, she realized they could as well be walking with a humorless, homicidal Discord, for all it mattered.
An object you’d forget about it as soon as you looked away. Who knew what was it capable of? Maybe the moment you saw it you would be completely and utterly horrified, overwhelmed by an unspeakable eldritch horror that seemed to stretch through time and space, or maybe it was just a simple teapot. The unnerving thing was not knowing it. Not knowing what thing could do, or even what it was. And of course, there was the matter of who just wrote the dossier, and or just who found the SCP in the first place. Bright Light told them that he couldn’t be sure that the time he remembered he read the dossier for the first time was actually the first. Maybe he had been reading it all mornings for the past ten years. He just thought that he couldn’t let the knowledge of this slip away, and even if he couldn’t actually remember anything about the thing, even the dossier, there was still a chance to get around it. He engraved the dossier with a spell in his subconscious, making sure it refreshed the knowledge, like showing a photograph, thousands of time per seconds, much faster than the actual electrical impulse running through his brain. So, any thought he could formulate about 055 would always start and finish with him knowing about it. And that thing he had just done to Twilight and was proceeding to adapt for Kalos. According to him, the only ones who knew about it were him, the 05 council, few other researchers, and now the lavender unicorn and the wyvern.
It did bug her one thing. The 05 was understandable. They were the head honchos of the Foundation, so they had to know. The most important researchers could also be relatable, as a decision. But the discoverer, Bright Light. Why they left him with such vital information? According to himself, her Watcher and everyone she had managed to know in the Foundation, Bright Light was just a lore expert, even if a damn good one at that, who helped out agents during missions and retrievals. The strangeness of it all dawned on Twilight, and made feel her uneasy. She felt like she had shared herself with somepony she actually didn’t know at all. And for that matter, how did Bright Light even got in the Foundation? He was the only pony other than herself, and when she asked him the day she came out of Training just how he got into the Foundation, he said he had been “scouted”. But, according to the voices Kalos had heard (he signed up a couple of weeks before her and was also puzzled by the fact that there was a pony working for the Foundation) around, he was always kind of… there. And you could to the list of suspicious coincidences that the they had conveniently a briefing up to date with modern pony history even though there had never been another pony for over a thousand years!
There were just so many things wrong with the whole picture, and to think that they became apparent to her just now was unnerving and frustrating. Her eyes drooped a bit and she massaged her throbbing, sore head. Peeking in the room again, she saw what was really wrong with everything: she had been fraternizing, in other words, making friends. She wasn’t so blind to deny what friendship could do to the world, she had seen with her own eyes and tasted for herself the literal magic that spawned from bonds of love and understanding. But those bonds didn’t help her when it really mattered. Those bonds couldn’t bring Pinkie back. Those bonds didn’t stop her, and her friends from forgetting everything about her. She could now clearly see that point the finger at them, at her former friends, was not the answer. It wasn’t their fault, really, even if it was easy to convince herself otherwise. But when Bright Light unlocked her memory, showed her the ugly, horrible truth about the world, how it could have been possible to turn her back on it? How could she let somepony else die because of her weaknesses? No one else would have taken that deal, no one else could carry the burden of actually doing what had to be done, not even her friends. Some of them were cocky, stalwart or assertive. But none of them could actually kill, or deceive, or lie, or do whatever it takes to survive. She could carry all of Equestria on her shoulders, at least for a little while. She could resist a bit longer. But sooner or later, Twilight Sparkle will come back from the dead, an herald of bad news to come. A messenger with tales of blood, darkness and fire. When everyone, not everypony, everyone, will know about the Foundation and what they have kept secret for such a long time, there won’t be any more Pinkie Pie. She understood that her goals were traitorous to both her former mentor and friends and her current ones, a natural born betrayer. That’s why she couldn’t allow herself to get involved.
Her weakness, her need to have someone she could call “friend” had been her mistake. It wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about friendship, or love, or trust, or anything. There was a goal, an objective to reach, and she couldn’t stop at anything to achieve it.
“Twilight? You there? We’re done here” The familiar voice of the grey stallion suddenly made its into in her mind and interrupted her train of thoughts. She quickly got up, scrolled the dust out of her fur and trotted forward into the room, a small smile on her lips.
Inside stood Bright Light, visibly strained, and Kalos, who was still a bit dazed after the spell. The stallion quickly shook his head to fight the dizziness and picked up 055 with his magic. It levitated in front of them, slowly rotating in the dry air of the bunker.
“So, quick test. What is this thing again?” Bright Light asked with a hint of worry in his voice.
“A SCP, 055” They both answered at the same time. He smiled and placed 055 in a small saddlebag he had found in the city before.
“Good, good, the mnemonic spell works!” He nodded to himself.
The three looked at each other for a bunch before Kalos broke the silence:
“What’s the plan now? We got this SCP, what do we do with it?” He asked curiously.
“Oh, right , right. It’s simple, actually. None of us has the magical brawns to force the Crystal Heart to do what we want and forcibly reveal the pony who will be able to move the Sun. So, we drive this little SCP into it, and hopefully the confusion generated in Akasha by having this thing inside of it will make it more malleable and prone to manipulation. Within limits, of course.”
Her jaw fell to the floor.
“Y-y-you want to throw a SCP into the Root of the World? Have you lost your mind? You’re completely irresponsible! This is not scientifically possible!” She blurted out in complete disbelief while pointing an accusatory hoof at him.
“Well it’s not like we have much of a choice, don’t we? We either do this or just live this out. It could decades or centuries before another pony with the right talent resurfaces, and we have what, two weeks, a month before we all freeze to death?” He asked her harshly. There was reason in his words, yet just the thought of ramming such a dangerous object in something so pure and crystalline as Akasha was just… wrong.
“But surely there must some kind of other way….” She said, her eyes falling to the floor.
“Twilight, he’s right. We have to try this.” Kalos placed a tentacle on her shoulder.
“It’s just… I hope we won’t come to regret it later.” Twilight sighed and leaned against the wall.
Bright Light walked past her and into the corridor. She realized that the howling of the storm was over, and there was that deadly, still silence yet again. The fake boulder blocking the entrance moved on the rusty rails, scratching and creaking, and stopped with a dull thud. He looked, through the hole, the oppressive sky above, and said:
“You shouldn’t be afraid of regret. Sometimes it’s a great incentive.”