//------------------------------//
// Interlude Two: Last and First Mares 
// Story: P-Theory 
// by Balthasar999 
//------------------------------//

       
Interlude Two


Last and First Mares


(Interlude One)



You know when civilization began?  With the invention of the mirror.
-Shimon Peres



+ + +


Canterlot Royal Palace, South Annex
Unfurled Scroll Memorial Library, Crocus Wing, Third Floor Dormitory Reading Room
12:15 PM, 5th day of the Month of the Lyre (June)
31st Year of the Restored Sisters, Full Measure; 7 Cockatrice 93 Fetlock, Adjusted (Conversion N/A)





(full size here)



He'd only brought it on himself, he recalled.
        
        Another sharp burp of deep cracking sounds echoed across the courtyard, as if somepony were being careless with some very beefy firecrackers.  None of the students even flinched; they'd all become used to it by now.  

        No, he had only himself to blame.  Princess Luna had teased him in a letter that if he didn't return to the palace soon, she was going to rent out his dedicated quarters to some craftsponies.  And so she had, if only temporarily.  Though he'd soon have access to his files and equipment again, it would no doubt take months, and all of his rations of public incense, before the room was finally cleansed of whatever acrid chemicals and molds those cheesemakers were constantly using.  Spells were too literal to ever get it all.

        In the ornately tiled courtyard below, a Royal Guard with a face like steel wool had been drilling a small team of yellow-helmeted watchponies in the use of the elaborate, nominally ceremonial cannons that ringed the city.  The unfortunate unicorn trainee who'd acted as the target was struggling to free himself from a heavy, tangled net, his magic and hooves pulling at cross purposes and rendering him ever more immobilized.    

        The ornamented bronzework cannon rang as the guard banged his steel-shod hoof on it for emphasis.  "...Aaaaand as you can see, ol' braggy-pants here is completely incapacitated.  Now, this'll stop your Changeling or your Golem Pony, but for a dragon you're gonna want somethin' to weigh 'im down..."  

The cadet had stopped struggling, though smoke the color of dead grass was still rising from the improbably-stretched mouth of the pony that formed the barrel.  Sitting by what was presumably the loading hatch was a worryingly disorganized pile of what looked a bit like big canvas-wrapped bundt cakes, each displaying its yield and charge type in clumpy red paint.

        The large, whimsically-ornamented cannons had been sitting in their fountain-batteries for centuries, dutifully polished every week and the sundry wishing tokens (and duck shit) cleaned from in and around their pools, until Princess Cadence, recently taking an interest in her husband's duties, pointed out that nopony actually knew how to use them.  Given the rise in the number of creatures to which Canterlot was essentially a prepackaged economy tub of delicious pony, it had begun to seem like something of an oversight.

Taking inspiration from an obscure contraption that blasted out confetti and streamers to hastily decorate a room, the Guards' Sorcery and Clockwork Corps developed an armory of exotic munitions to immobilize or repel invaders.  Princess Cadence began to endure teasing and harsh looks every summer, however, as the gunnery crews drilled with their nets and birdlime seemingly without regard to anypony's desire for quiet or outdoor space around their practice ground, but the Princess would point out that they at least had the decency to train with the stink charges and other irritants off in the mountains.

        Another explosive report knocked him out of his reverie, and he turned from the window back to his desk, folding his quill into an “L” shape with a hoof and placing the bend of it in his mouth to stiffen it for writing.  He idly flicked its sideways barbs with his tongue and adjusted the paperweights on the scroll, trying to remember where he left off.
        
        ...due to the weathering of the statues, which makes identification by their mane and tail styles inconclusive.  However, ceramic fragments found in a layer above, bearing Windigo motifs and containing residue of hays native to the sub-arctic (artifacts diagnostic of the Clover A Culture, see endnotes) indicate the statues date from no later than the Lower Paleohippic.  The pose of the statues, however, indicates


*KABOOM*


        "...No, they ain't like dragons at all, who can't stand to get dirty. The birdlime ain't even gonna stick to a Must-stang under all that garbage!  Tartarus, you try to tackle one, they're liable to take a crap right on ya!  Why I knew this reeeeal pretty pegasus gal once, who..."

        Rubbing a hoof on his temple, he silently cursed whoever had built these windows with mere anti-weather fields instead of thick, closeable shutters—no doubt another combatant in Equestria’s ancient conflict over whether deep silence or invigorating fresh air was better for studying.  Princess Luna knowing his preference for the former, it was no wonder this was the front line to which he’d been shipped.

        It wouldn't do any good to move to another part of the lounge—All the other tables were occupied by students who would no doubt be unable to resist an opportunity to talk to the Doctor Ever-Burning Coals, personal physician to Princess Luna and renowned eccentric Renaissance Pony.

        Though, again, that was no doubt part of her intention in assigning him an unused room in the library dormitory.  His recent archaeological obsessions had left him secluded, sallow-faced, friendless, and frankly weird, and a week of the Ordinary and Alive—Halls filled with laughter about mares, stallions, cider, pranks, and pastry—would return him to a proper place in a proper herd.  Sometimes he got the feeling he was Luna’s patient, instead. 


  

        
        Coals sighed and returned to his manuscript, but before he could even dip his quill in the inkwell, he heard something heavy drop on the other side of the reading room, accompanied by a burst of mild profanity and a familiar alto voice chiming in with a self conscious "Oh... oh, sorry!"  He smiled briefly, then composed himself, grasping the quill between his forehooves and laying it on the table, as a lanky mustard-yellow form made its way around the stacks to his secluded corner.

        "Hey Doc!"  The tall, ungainly young earth pony bounded forward and pulled a bundle of papers from her saddlebag.  "Here'sh your 'ail for sh’day!" she enunciated around it, then set it down on the table, nearly knocking over a bottle of Coal's painstakingly concocted custom ink.  She raised a hoof to push her glasses up her muzzle and then tugged on her red denim vest, in an endearingly transparent attempt to coquettishly fluff the hair of her chest where the lapels met. "And of course, a little something extra!  Muenster, this time."  She reached into another pocket of her saddlebag, and gingerly pulled out a small burlap package, setting it on top of the mail before releasing the urbanely trimmed gripping-strand of the pink twine that held it together.  She withdrew her head in a subtle rightward arc, “accidentally” brushing her neck against his, with the briefest of pauses as both of them tensed in reaction.
        
"Again, thanks so much for letting us use your quarters in the palace.  Colby and Pepperjack told me to say they’re still real sorry about what happened with the rennet and vinegar."  Her ears slowly sunk to half-mast.

        "Think nothing of it."  Coals smiled weakly.  The muscles of his cheeks and muzzle felt heavy from the fatigue of long concentration.  

        "Princess Luna just really likes her cheese.  I mean, she came back before I was born, but I guess it's true what they say, about her getting really into it on the moon?  Cheese, I mean."

        "Mm."

        "All those poor cows, though, right?  Haha, I mean, they thought it was changelings abducting 'em!  I told you about my great grampa's dairy farm, right?"

        "Mm-hm."

        “Freaky stuff, right?” 

        “Right.”  

        “My mom donated a ton of bits to the bat-ponies’ thing to help the moon ones’ descendants be reunited with their families.  They can give bad milk, you know?  If they’re really down about something?  You wouldn't think it would matter all that much, but it’s like, Wow!  Night and day.”





        “I see.”  Coals sniffed and casually tossed his head to make the magnification armatures of his spectacles fall into position, then blinked in momentary disorientation.

        She blinked herself, seeming to suddenly remember she was, in fact in a library.  She leaned in and stage whispered. “Whatcha working on?”  

        “It’s…” He glanced at the box on the floor containing one of the statues.  His unkempt tail shifted behind him, rasping on the low, upholstered bench.  “Some funny old stuff I found.  Nothing too exciting.”  
        
“Oh but I love old stuff!” The young mare reached back into her saddlebag, and began snuffling around for the scent of whatever she was looking for while her tail swished excitedly.  Each side of her bags was embroidered in bold white letters with half of her name, “SHARP” on one side and “CHEDDAR” on the other, no doubt causing her to spin around to correct anypony meeting her for the first time and usually knocking something over in the process, which no doubt brought endless amusement who whoever had gifted her with them.  It was a very old practical joke, but as tricks were one of ponykind’s oldest vices/trust rituals/predator deterrents, every prank was eventually recycled.  

Sharp Cheddar pulled her head out of her bag, eliding a “ta-da!” around a metal disk, a container lid of some kind, displaying an embossed, painted Wonderbolts member.  Her frumpy mane style and baggy uniform marked it as being at least a century old.  Sharp Cheddar leaned down to drop it on the corner of the oak table, where it gyrated tinnily for a moment before lying to rest with the pegasus image upside down.  “Isn't it cute?  We found it when we were cleaning out my dad’s stuff,” she said, a subtle dreaminess replacing some of the energy in her voice.  Coals felt a pang as he looked at it—It wasn't a close resemblance, but something in the cant of the pose reminded him of a winged mare he’d rather not think about.


*KABOOM*


"Good shot, Wavecrest!  Feels good to be on the firing end this time, huh?”  The Guard’s husky voice carried up from the courtyard as Sharp Cheddar nearly jumped into the air, and Coals wondered when he had begun tuning it out.  The sergeant continued.  “Now answer me: What do you do if you see a mag-mare?"

        "Sir, remove everything flammable and stay out of the proper Guards' way, sir!"

        "That is correct!"

        “Yikes!” Cheddar had recovered, though her mouth was still drawn into a look of dismayed surprise.  “I mean I know this is Canterlot and all?  We’re all crammed together on the side of a mountain, right?  But isn't the Palace supposed to be like the one place that’s quiet?”

        “Nothing is ever fully what it’s supposed to be,” Coals heard himself say, with a tone of unreal remove he hadn't intended.  Something resonant of deep time and symbols that struggled to be understood across unremembered ages.  His eyes refocusing, Doc Coals couldn't bring himself to look at either Sharp Cheddar to his left, or the humble box on the floor to his right, containing the statue that had so preoccupied him, and he continued staring at the baroque wooden bookshelf across the table.   
        
His earth pony’s emotional sensitivity to magic hadn't warned him off the idols before, so this project had been getting inside his head more than he realized, and he felt a pang of stifling discomfort as he wondered if Princess Luna had indeed been right to worry about him.  He quietly drew breath through his teeth.  The scents of the reading room took on a smothering cast, as if harmonizing with the dusty vapors and melancholy resonance emanating from the old tin lid on the table.

        “Haha, that’s true, I guess!” No more than a second or two had gone by before Sharp Cheddar’s rejoinder, but time had telescoped with the intensity of Coal’s momentary dissociation, and his ears’ sudden turn toward her nearly startled him.  She continued, and he deliberately shifted over on his haunches to engage with her fully.  “Are they gonna be doin’ that for a while, d’you think?”

It took conscious effort to keep his ears from lowering.  “I don’t know.”

        “Oh… Well…” Sharp’s head swiveled awkwardly.  “I guess I should get back to the worksho—I mean, your...room.  Thanks again!”  She leaned in and wrapped her neck over his.  He tentatively returned the hug, and through his withers he could feel the subtle motion of her swallowing, and the strange, rhythmic shaking of her pulse.  “See you tomorrow, Doc!” 

He smiled and nodded back to her.  Ultimately he was glad he got his mail the non-magical way.

She raised her head and backed away before turning around and trotting off to the door, earning a frown from a small, silver-gray, somewhat boyish pegasus who had to flatten herself against one of the shelves to avoid being shoulder-checked.  Coals heard Sharp quietly hum the first few bars of a popular melody before it was muffled by the door knob as she exited.

"...And dismissed!  Good work, ponies! Gimme forty laps and then hit the baths!"  A series of groans rose up from the volunteers in the courtyard, echoed by students throughout the reading room—This Palace wing would have no fresh towels for the rest of the day.


+ + +



        A shared glance was all the Sisters needed to know it was once again time to work.  The three mares with whom they’d been sharing the afternoon drew their lips or nodded solemnly, then retreated to the far wall as a building static charge in the room began to make their coats stand on end.  With a pair of staccato violet flashes and claps of once-displaced air, the Royal Sisters vanished from the suite.  A wax paper biscuit wrapper was drawn upwards by the draft of their passing, its moth-like loops the only sign they had been there at all.  

        The three mares-in-waiting stood motionless for a moment, before returning to their original practiced composure.  “Goodness,” said Tidepool, “You know those looks, ladies; the Princesses shan't be returning today, I’m afraid.”  The three mares began to collect their various effects and place them in their respective saddlebags.  “I’ll call the maids; surely the poor things would appreciate a change from the laundry and a break for tea... Shall we finish our luncheon on the roof garden, then?”

        Her two companions nodded with all the enthusiasm their station allowed.


+ + +


            Coals examined the pile of mail Sharp Cheddar had left for him.  It was the usual: Issues of scientific journals as well as invitations to speak or examine some local curiosity, updates from distant relations about how little so-and-so had finally gotten a cutie mark, fliers for everything from public sing-alongs and season-team volunteer requests to travelling magic shows and motivational seminars, and one small downy, pink, sweet-smelling mailmare feather.  So Sugar Wind was on shift today...

As he neared the bottom of the pile, however, he paused, recognizing the Möbius strip logo of the Telos Foundation, which had finally replied to his request for a hearing of his latest findings in the primeval catacombs beneath the city.  As an organization dedicated to promoting harmony and symbiosis among the three pony tribes, Telos was always interested in any new scholarship on Equestrian prehistory, or pony thaumatobiology, two of many fields in which Coals could claim world-class expertise, should he ever stop reigning himself in so as not to tip his hoof or seem too imperious in public.  

        His liaison to the organization, the fussy pegasus Upper Reaches, had apparently taken time from his busy schedule of… being fussy and important to travel with Coals into the heart of the mountain to examine the object he now believed he understood.  He was free to meet at the specified place at any time in the next two days, all Coals had to do was tear the platinum-leaf sigils at the bottom of the letter and Upper Reaches would be alerted by one of the (unsurprisingly expensive) crystals he carried for the purpose.

Coals examined his unfinished manuscript and decided this would be the perfect time to perhaps make it unnecessary, if Upper Reaches would relay all the relevant information for him.  He held the Telos letter down on the table with a hoof, then tore the bottom of the letter cleanly across the sigils with his teeth.  They flashed for a moment before lifting off the paper, then disintegrating and rising into the air like quickly fading fireflies.  He was unsure of how long it would take Upper Reaches to arrive at the meeting point specified in the letter—The statue of Distant Zephyr in the Moonstone Enclosed Commercial Plaza—but it wouldn't do to be late, and he began organizing his effects to place them in his saddle bags.  

The case at his hooves containing the small statue entirely took up one side, and he slid his mail off the table to slot into an open file in the other, and then began rolling up his half-finished manuscript and capping his ink.  The quill was one of the library’s, so that’s—The cheese, of course!  He almost forgot Sharp’s little present.  Gingerly picking it up by its twine binding, he dropped it into a side pocket on his bags.  A glint caught his attention, and he noticed she’d forgotten the little tin lid she’d placed on the table as well.  Ignoring the musty feeling on his lips, he placed it into the bag alongside his files, trying not to look at the pegasus embossed on the top, for the sense of loss it brought to mind. 

        He slid into his saddle bags and then fastened the hook and eye of his heavy cloak around his neck, its subdued forest green falling all around him to leave only his hooves and the sandy hair of his neck exposed.  He took a deep breath and blew any dust off the table, then set his hooves on the hardwood floor with a resounding metallic clink.  He was shod, yes, and he didn't care who knew.  It only befitted him in his travel-intensive line of work, and its being an earth pony stereotype was merely a coincidence.  Several busybody unicorns had petitioned the library to have carpet installed, claiming that hardwood implicitly discriminated against normally-shod earth pony scholars, but were rebuked by the Royal Agricultural Adjutant herself for being patronizing and ignorant, and the matter was quietly forgotten.  Nevertheless, Coals, with the practiced grace of a stallion accustomed to danger in foreign lands, turned around and glided toward the door.


+ + +


As always, the guards did not so much as blink when, with a pair of intense flashes and rivulets of crackling brush discharge, Celestia and Luna appeared in the center of their throne room.  Once again exchanging no more than a glance with her sister, Celestia gracefully strode to her plushly upholstered seat to pose regally on her haunches, while Luna propelled herself through the air with a single deft flap, alighting in front of the throne room doors and opening them inwards with a steady telekinetic tug.

        Two more guards on the far side of the doors nodded in response, and set off in opposite directions at a determined canter, the sound of their hoofsteps quickly vanishing into the deep vermilion carpet.  

        Luna once more raised herself into the air and glided through the kaleidoscopic shafts that beamed down from the stained glass, before landing back at her sister’s side with four delicate clicks on the marble floor and reclining on a luxurious silver and black chaise lounge of her own design, which she effortlessly manifested from her capacious mental repertoire. 
        
Celestia’s horn glowed, and she rematerialized the charred letter fragment from within the palace’s Semantic Volume, where it had been left to be digested and processed into the network of associations that made up the structure’s various enchantments.  If anything like it had been encountered before, by anypony who frequented the palace, something else retained from the building's long history would seek it out and latch on like a thaumatic antibody.  

Wisps of association with their recently broken teapot followed it back into physicality, but like remembering an event coincident with a smell or a song, these kinds of connections were common and inevitable.  Nevertheless, they refused to be shaken off, no doubt because of the importance that old piece of tableware had held for her and her sister, and Luna’s mind tugged at Celestia's to disregard it.

The sisters straightened their posture and concentrated on their breathing.  In, two three four, out two three four...
Their horns began to glow with soft, individually-tuned Cherenkov radiation and wisps of plasma as time and energy exchanged uncertainties to bite into the quantum foam surrounding them and congeal it into a dizzying array of tessellating Planck-scale wave guides.  Already the Sisters could feel a kind of austere, arctic wind blowing upwards from the backs of their minds, up through their hindbrains and calming their eternal cyclone of inchoate thought, and clearing away all other fogs of mortal sluggishness.  It was a state of consciousness inherent in alicorn thaumatobiology, but the concentration required to maintain it frequently left them drained after long sessions of royal activity.

As they reached their peak readiness, the oscillations of their flowing manes intensified, and the apparent depth inside them dropped away to infinity.  The fields of magic abutting them became so intensely charged that any sensitive being would have perceived their coats glowing faintly in the manner of a plasma ball toy, and light began to bend around them to a degree too subtle for any but the most discerning mortal vision.  To the sisters, time itself seemed to dilate, and they felt buoyed by an unassailable calmness, and a confidence that nothing inside them was any longer standing in the way of their expressing their love for their subjects or discharging their duties to them.

 Now feeling fully prepared and at the apex of their capabilities, they were able to cordially greet the first members of their cabinet to shuffle into the throne room.

        Wanting to prime her courtiers with the exceptional nature of the situation, Celestia decided to forgo the traditional circular oaken meeting table and instead called forth five planes of concentrated force to flash through the marble floor, liberating a long rectangular slab which she then raised and bound firmly to the very spacetime of the room, leaving it to hover, ominously inert, at a seated pony’s chest level.

        No fussily dressed maids entered with trays of confectionery or sumptuous, palatial cushions.  Instead, Luna, reading her sister’s intentions, conjured a mat of black, utilitarian padding trimmed in silver, to bridge the pit left by the floating table, and two rows of similarly spartan black and silver drinking bowls, filled with clear water. 

        Two dozen ponies of all descriptions and manner of dress quietly split themselves into two lines and filed down the sides of the hall to assume positions on their haunches at the impromptu table, several of them keeping their forelegs close to their barrels as if they were afraid to touch it.  A pair of Guards closed the massive throne room doors behind them as they exited, and Luna raised her head to blast a formal greeting in her magically-enhanced voice.  A few pairs of ears attempted a retreat, and she continued once they’d returned to standing, her affect stony and unchanging.  “A matter curious and singular weighs upon the Royal poll, its regal jewels transformed to leaden bulk.  Thy sovereigns, holding dear thy council, would have thy wisdom pierce the riddle of a parchment sphinx, whose fiery visitation burned away the last of our repose.”  She closed her eyes and cocked her head with satisfaction.

        “Thank you, Luna, that was fun.”  Celestia smiled warmly at her sister, then turned to address the table.  “What she means is that earlier today the two of us received a damaged piece of a letter of unknown provenance, and as this could signify a problem with the various spells that underlie Equestria’s systems of communication, we decided to cut short our day off—Terribly sorry, by the way, if we've interrupted any of your plans—but this is the kind of thing that’s simply best taken care of before it gets out of hoof.”  There were grumbles around the table, but everypony nodded in acknowledgement.  Celestia continued.  “Here is the letter scrap in question.”  She levitated it off the hoofrest of her throne to hover in the air above the center of the table, then projected around it an image expanded to the proportions of a hanging rug, and the leisurely spin of a prize on a display.  There was a murmur from the assembly.  
        
“...Anypony have any ideas?”  Luna’s earlier bombast was replaced by a whine of puzzlement.

“It looks burned, non-magically.”

“Why does it smell like... rope?  Definitely some kind of hemp derivative.”

“Obviously written by mouth.  Sawtooth, you've dabbled in graphology, right?”

“Do we know what kind of ink that is?”

“It’s core of parchment is quite sound / No vellum or papyrus found.”

“What’s that magic still on it?  It doesn't seem to be connected to anything.”

“Ah, very perceptive, Blueblood.  I’m also getting an emotional coloring of displacement, myself.  Could we get a pegasus to weigh in?”

        “Of course… Oh, how peculiar: magically it seems to be... pulled upwards, indefinitely.  A bit like an astronomical body.”

Celestia and Luna listened as the ponies began to break off into little neighboring groups, brainstorming and comparing ideas.  So far they’d said nothing the sisters hadn't figured out on their own, but it still surprised them how regularly their immense perspective could blind them to something right on the ends of their muzzles, things the fresh eyes of a mortal pony would uncover with ease.

Still, the thought began to creep into the Sisters’ heads that it might simply be some kind of statistical fluke and a false alarm.  Part of Luna’s mind began devising a snack she would later realize is actually just cheese fondue.  

There was a momentary consensus it might have been the result of a dragon’s sneeze in a library, quickly abandoned when it was pointed out one of the edges had been deliberately cut, after the letter had been addressed.  Otherwise it was perfectly ordinary—Regular dragon's fire-grade paper, regular ink... Contributions began to dwindle, and two giggling, blue-uniformed mares excused themselves to return to their duties reviewing weather petitions.   

“You know...” One of the ponies broke the silence that had descended over the hall.  “If it’s being pulled heavenward in a—what did you say, astronomical?  Astronomical fashion, perhaps we should follow it.”

“Follow it where, Upper Reaches?  There’s no provision for something like this in the sky.  What are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting we let it tell us where it belongs.  Even Princess Luna will tell you the night sky isn’t perfectly predictable and contains many mysteries.  We should let the sky itself do the deciding as to what belongs in it or not."

“But it’s obviously of terrestrial origin.  Look at the writing.”

“Perhaps.  All I’m suggest—Oh my.” Upper Reaches blinked and glanced down at the breast pocket of his coat.  “I’m dreadfully sorry, I’m needed on Telos Foundation business.  Your Highness, I don’t suppose I could get a facsimile of that scrap, could I?”  Celestia nodded and a copy flashed into existence on the table before him, unfortunately lacking the magical tug of the original, but duplicating such an idiosyncratic part of its semantics was beyond the scope of this meeting.  He took it in his mouth and placed it in another pocket.  “Fillies and gentlecolts,” he said with a bow, then turned towards the door.
        

+ + +


Coals was making good time, and decided to stop for a moment to pull the little block of cheese out of his bag, so he stepped onto a grassy verge to get out of the pedestrian traffic.  Eating on the street could get you fined in sparkling-clean Canterlot, but a tiny morsel like this could be taken in one bite, leaving nopony the wiser.  Practiced teeth and tongue quickly undid the twine and freed their contents from the burlap, placing the cube between his back molars before spitting them into a nearby public garbage can.  Coals quickly re-moistened his lips, and resumed his rhythm among the cosmopolitan throngs of the gleaming capitol, energized by finally being back in the literal and figurative center of the world.
 
As always, it was excellent cheese.  He was actually disappointed on one level to be kicking the world-class artisans out of his private quarters in a week.  As Luna had intended for him to realize, they were getting better use out of it than he had been, with his constant travel.  He made a mental note to maintain contact with them, though it immediately occurred to him Sharp Cheddar was probably on top of that already.  Maybe her presence was something else Princess Luna had—No…

Not that a part of him wasn't flattered by the girl's awkward little advances, and not that she wasn't cute—He did like the way little dimples formed behind her nostrils when she smiled—but he felt it would be somehow inappropriate, and had attributed her seeming interest in him to her simply feeling gawky and unfeminine, and wanting a bit of validation from a well-known, and now unmarried, stallion.    

Apparently Sharp had developed a distrust of spells after her father’s accident, and Coals wondered if his being a fellow earth pony wasn't part of why she’d latched onto him, or why she’d been so excited about her apartment joining the current yuppie fad of getting electric service as opposed to every object having its own magical motive power.  All those gaudy blue fliers touting electricity’s “safety & reliability” apparently had the desired effect.

        It was true: too much magic in too small a space carried a risk of unpredictable accidents.  Coals himself, as a foal, narrowly avoided being scalded in the bath when their downstairs neighbors tried to use magic to dry off their pet ferret.  There would be a high-profile magic incident in the news, and ponies would begin clamoring for electricity, until over the decades it became its own thicket of disquietingly intricate wires and fields, and the pendulum would swing back, in a textbook illustration of pony alarmism and herd behavior.

        Coals rounded a corner and descended the marbled ramp into Canterlot’s brightly-lit lower tiers.  A youngish peach-colored pegasus mare standing halfway down the ramp made to pass him a flier in her mouth, saying something about a street performance art show, and without thinking he took it between his own teeth, feeling a sudden chill at the way the mare's eyes momentarily transfixed him with their odd, probing severity.  Switching to a momentary three-legged gait, he folded the paper and placed it into his bag, before emerging into a wide, rococo atrium, with furnishings and ornamentation of ebony and marble inlaid into the floor and walls, marking pedestrian lanes with flowing script about which parts of the city they lead to.  The magic powering the lights registered in his mind as a feeling of calm welcoming, as if he'd been expected.

In the center of the atrium stood a monumental statue of a robed unicorn rearing onto her hind legs and planting one forehoof on the ceiling, the other supporting an open golden book against her chest, from which a sheet of water trickled down the pages and along the bottom.  Strips of material inlaid into the ceiling in baroque, filigreed patterns glowed with a soft yellow light, giving the plaza an atmosphere a human might associate with an upscale department store lobby sometime around Christmas.

        Beyond a row of planters bearing small red blossoms was one of the city’s interior canals, and his specified meeting point with Upper Reaches.  Coals trotted over to the row of benches around the giant statue, and lay on his stomach, stretching his forelegs out in front of him, underneath his cloak.  He thought about eating a flower or two off the planters (half of what they were for, after all) but a kind of fatigue overcame him and he decided to rest.


+ + +


        The energy of the meeting had fully dissipated.  Celestia and Luna, no longer sensing productive input from the fresh eyes of their mortal compatriots, dismissed the crowd, and while Celestia rubbed her temples with her pasterns, Luna reattached the floating marble slab to the floor, the original cut so clean that its natural grain structure rolled seamlessly back into place with just the daintiest touch of a razor-thin flash of blue-white heat, and a whiff of vaporized limestone.  

        Mares and stallions, chatting idly amongst themselves, shuffled out of the throne room.  As the doors closed, only a teal hoofkerchief and smattering of pegasus down were left behind.  While her sister meditated, Luna discorporated them and added their essences to the palace’s eternal memory.  Like the sisters, the palace forgot nothing, but actually recalling something could be a level of challenge far above mere retention.  Things became lost among orders of magnitude.
        
        Celestia, still sharing the transcendent alicorn sense of clarity, did not have to voice her next idea to her sister; the mere inclination of her head and narrowing of her eyes conveyed her meaning as plainly as the most laborious explanation.  Luna responded with the most delicate raising of her brow, invisible to any but her sister.

So certain art thou, that such a trifle shall drive thee to the claws of chaos?

Celestia nickered, and momentarily closed her eyes.   He’s shown no evidence of harmful behavior since Project Fluttershy.  And we both know how invaluable he was in repelling Typhon.

Luna stepped close to her sister and nuzzled her neck with a concerned whinny.  Thou say’st such, yet with such a fiend such concord to appeal; ere today thy battered soul mine wings and fetlocks hath much succored.  Pray, let thy sister of the night be thy lantern in such realms where Chaos doth the light of Harmony make pale as the awful calm of mine own faintest star.

Celestia snorted and flexed her wings, then ran her teeth across Luna’s poll, the magic in them pulling her mane against its ethereal breeze with what Luna felt as a pleasant, grooming tug.  You're lapsing again, sister.  But no: It was my idea to involve Fluttershy, and it was my idea that Discord could be reformed at all.  I took that risk in trusting him, and until we know he’s truly on our side, that’s a risk I, and only I, have to continue to take.  

Luna nuzzled her sister back and began to neigh.  Tia, I—

Celestia withdrew, then kissed her sister on the cheek.  Trust me.  

It was Luna who finally spoke aloud.  “Very well, dear sister.  We shall withdraw to our Tower of the Darkening Sky.  Prithee call on us, when thy duty is discharged.”  Returning her kiss, Luna took a deep breath and teleported away.  Celestia felt her feathers and the hairs of her coat momentarily rise as the electric charges in the room regained equilibrium.  Letting her eyes remain closed, Celestia began her mental preparations for Contact.

        As likely as not, Discord would be completely unhelpful.  When the entity could even be reached at all, making any sense of “his” (the pronoun he seemed to prefer a bit more often than any of the others) free associating, elliptical word salad was usually more trouble than just solving the problem on your own.  When he’d appear, looking like a hurricane that had blown through a zoo, it was usually best all the guards were dismissed from the chamber, otherwise rather unsavory rumors tended to spread around the capitol.  There was still too much suspicion after his re-emergence, as much as ponies were grateful he’d limited his unusual manifestations to mostly foodstuffs this time, in contrast to the rather lurid and graphic legends passed down from his original appearance.  

        Now, supposedly, he was “safe.”  Many advisers had wracked their brains trying to understand the creature, but it was only Celestia, consummate master of Harmony, who was able to devise a solution, even knowing she’d have to let it out of her own hooves:  It was only the actions of one very brave pegasus spending enough time in contact with the entity that seemed to convince him ponies were, in fact, alive.  Celestia and Luna, in their own contact with him, had come to the conclusion he was a being of Configuration Space itself, existing “orthogonal” to their own conception of existence, like the axis of Imaginary numbers perpendicular to the Reals.  Something about Equestria had lured him from… elsewhere, and until they were finally able to “impale” him on an abstruse spike of petrified, congealed unfreedom, he was regurgitating regions of those... other places, dredged up through his abstract body that stretched like an ancient dragon through numberless possible worlds.

But Equestria still had some mysterious property the entity called Discord claimed to need for his life cycle or growth or whatever his equivalent of those things were, something he called “appreciation,” thought it was unclear if it was in the sense of the aesthetics of his constant tricks, or accumulation, or both.         

In either case, whenever the strange or the unearthly needed probing, or whenever something seemed connected to nothing whatever in Equestria, Discord was the one who might hold the answer.


+ + +


With the sudden realization of his unconsciousness, Coals was jolted awake on his bench.  The clock on the corner told him no more than ten minutes had passed, and he was about to relax once more, when a cry caught his attention.

“Doctor Coals!  I say!  Over here!  Yoo hoo!” The voice of the always-ruffled Upper Reaches was unmistakable.  Coals stepped his left pair of legs off the bench, then shifted his weight and caught himself with his other pair, before trotting off to meet his contact.  He saw the pegasus by the canal, half out of a covered, deep maroon gondola, one foreleg on the bank while the other waggled in the air for attention.

“Upper Reaches!  Well, what a quick arrival—I’m impressed,” Coals returned, still trying to shake the grogginess from his brain.

“Surely you expected nothing less from the Telos Foundation…!”  There was a subtle wink in his voice.  He knew his position was enviable and granted him special privileges, and it would be beneath his dignity to pass an opportunity to acknowledge such.  “I've taken the liberty of hiring us some convenient transportation.  Please, hop in!  Don’t worry, I've already paid the fellow!”

Coals leaped from the bank into the wide front deck of the gondola, between Upper Reaches and the distracted gondolier, a dark green unicorn with prodigious, corded neck muscles and a rather vacant, bored expression.  He was chewing on something, the action of his mouth making small, wet popping noises whenever his lips parted.  Upper Reaches momentarily stretched his wings, but quickly withdrew them as Coals slid onto a plush gold cushion underneath the little boat’s awning.  

Upper Reaches’ dark purple-gray top hat and overcoat were suitably elegant and timeless, and matched as a darker shade of his natural coat, while a neat green pocket square coordinated with his immaculate white mane and tail, though the white cotton “chaps” he wore on the upper surfaces of his wings spoke to his fastidiousness, almost to the point of affectation, or a statement that he should not be expected to exert himself in flight.  He was what, in the more uncouth parts of cloud cities, was known as a “penguin”—A diving bird who might as well not have wings at all. 
        
        He settled down next to Coals, then nodded to the gondolier.  “Awrigh’,” the unicorn mumbled back, still chewing on whatever was in his mouth.  “You all tucked in back there?”  

        “Oh yes, thank you!” Upper Reaches nodded enthusiastically, and the unicorn levitated his long, bite-marked paddle up from its cradle on the gunnel, then spat the contents of his mouth into the canal and locked his teeth around it.  Several ducks noticed the change and began lazily paddling out of the way, preening and quacking softly among themselves.

        Upper Reaches tried to draw information out of Coals about what he’d discovered in the catacombs, but all he was willing to volunteer was that the artifacts he had with him were deeply connected with it, and it would be better if the two were seen side by side.

        They mostly passed the trip in silence, the gondola occasionally tipping down ramps into lower tiers of the city.  The boats were more for tourists, and the majority of them were easily convinced the magical barriers would indeed keep them from completely pitching over a waterfall, but the lurches were still somewhat disorienting.

        They emerged into another, slightly less opulent pedestrian mall.  Down a brightly lit side street, a crowd had gathered to listen to a public performance on an instrument a human could be forgiven for calling a harpsichord.  Down another street, two fat, officious-looking griffins were watching a unicorn levitate several marionettes in some kind of slapstick comedy.

They soon disembarked in the soft orange lamplight of the Taproot district, an ancient zone of workshops, cider houses, and budget inns, carved primarily out of the mountain itself, near the very bottom of the city.  The extraordinary amounts of public incense were able to cover up the acrid odors of smithies and centuries of pony sweat, but only just, and the dense aroma made Upper Reaches' eyes water for several seconds once he stepped onto the embankment.

He followed Coals down a wide alley, past several squat stone buildings emitting an indecipherable combination of metallic clangs and raucous laughter.  They exchanged a polite nod with a circle of ponies and one diamond dog sharing a hookah made from an old municipal censer, then turned another corner to arrive at the surprisingly plain and unadorned entrance to the most ancient part of the tunnels.  Upper Reaches had expected a sign, or a curtain, or at least some kind of frame around the threshold, but it was simply a rough circular shaft sunk into the face of the rock between two shops, sloping gently downward and swallowing the light as if it were stuffed with ink-stained cotton.  

        “After you, Doctor.”  Upper Reaches retrieved a pair of lanterns from his saddlebag, and set one on the floor for Coals.  The specially bred moths inside stirred to life, their tireless activity summoning a flame for them to dance around by conservation of symbolism.  Coals took the handle in his mouth, fitting the pads against the gums of his bar, and noting the residual flavor of expensive Shetland Highlands hay that Reaches had been indulging in earlier.  

        Coals was only vaguely familiar with this part of the tunnel network, and assumed Reaches had chosen this location as an indirect method of gauging how thorough his research had been, but Coals had a schematic of the mountain in his head, and was confident he’d be able to lead them to his discovery.  “Yes.  Well…  Let’s go.”  He rolled his shoulders to give his cape a dramatic flap, then trotted confidently into the darkness.

        “Oh!  Oh, um!  Yes!  Let’s!”  Reaches’ high tenor was clear around his lantern, something they both subconsciously felt as a shred of camaraderie—It was a rare unicorn who was practiced enough to speak clearly while holding something in his or her bar.  

There was simply nothing to say.  For more than two hundred meters, the pair just appreciated the silence and warm glow of the torches continually maintained in the sconces built into the walls.  This was one of the older parts of the crystal mines below the city.  For millennia, long before the founding of Equestria proper, ponies had been mining this mountain for the unusual minerals and crystals it contained.  It was fiercely contested, but as what they considered Equestria's only "true" civilization, and with the reflexes, observational skills, and teamwork born of being raised from the cradle as a prey species, no other creature could keep them away for long.

Not to mention that Celestia and Luna had promised them this mountain, after their long interregnum in the Windigo-besotted latitudes.  A wave of marching hooves pushed back all other scattered tribes with what the ponies themselves saw as token resistance.  Only extremely rarely did things escalate to any kind of lethality, mainly through accident, but ponies were not ones to refuse to match their opponent measure for measure.

  Some sections of these tunnels dated back to the original construction of Canterlot itself, atop the wind-swept crystal mining encampments, and if the ancient graffiti left behind in them was any indication, the interests and obsessions of bored workponies had changed very little in the intervening millennia.

The pair rounded another bend.  Now there were no more sconces, and the tunnels were defined only by the strokes of long rusted-away pick axes.  The pair’s lanterns were the only thing between them and absolute darkness.  Upper Reaches was almost glued to Coals’ side, and even he had trouble fighting his instincts to flee whatever predator might be lurking in the blackness beyond the flickering bubble of his lamp.  Even the walls were only visible as an occasional glimmer of quartz or the sides of a timeworn ax stroke, while the floor was worn smooth through periodic rivulets of overflowing rainwater—Something that had never happened in either of their lifetimes.  It was as if the two of them were walking on a stone treadmill suspended in a thin tunnel of stars.  They walked onward in fitfully broken silence for nearly another hour, following what approximated a wide, downward spiral.

Coals stopped momentarily and closed his eyes.  Upper Reaches bumped into his flank, and worked his mouth as if he were about to ask a question, but then realized he shouldn't distract the stallion while he was mentally confirming their route.  The tunnels were vast, but laid out logically.

The pair descended an eroded flight of stairs, barely managing to maintain their footing, broken only by several landings, before arriving at in a chamber so vast that their lanterns were utterly unable to reach the walls.  They were stranded on a platform of stone in an infinity of echoing blackness.

“We’re here.”  Coals doffed his saddlebags and opened one side with his teeth, then withdrew a hefty wooden case, unclasping it with his front hooves, and removing a small artifact wrapped in tissue paper, then setting it on the floor.

"Are you familiar with the full story of the Queen of Equestria?  Not the metaphorical, 'even the Princesses serve Equestria herself' one from civics class, but the actual legend?"  Coals nudged the statue toward Upper Reaches.  

"I think so... Wasn't it something like... 'Once she ate all the wild grass in the heavens, she got sleepy, so she lay down until her hooves became the earth, her feathers became the sky, her horn holds it up, her eyes became the sun and moon, her voice became magic, and her cutie marks became the first two ponies?'  Something along those lines."

"Very good.  Now who do you suppose… planted all that grass She ate?"

“Well, it… Um… it was just there, of course.  It was the grass of heaven.  What else would you expect to be there in heaven?"

“Hm.  I wonder.”  Coals gave the object at their hooves a tap with his nose.  “Here, unwrap this.  It was found in the North, before there's any record of the Three Tribes living there.”

        Upper Reaches gently took a flap of the tissue paper in his teeth and pulled away, sitting on his haunches and keeping the object steady with his forelegs.  Slowly, it was revealed.

It was a statue of an earth pony, rearing on its hind legs, but its front hooves were... split, with an extra toe on either side, bent down to form stubby tripods at the ends of its outstretched forelimbs.  Upper Reaches had heard of such a rare deformity, but it usually affected all four of a pony's hooves, and was never capable of that range of movement.  Nowadays, foals born with extra toes usually had them removed right away, or magic was used to prompt the body to reabsorb them during growth.  Like a dragon with feathers instead of scales, he'd only seen the deformity in medical texts.

One of the statue's "toes" had broken off, as well as its tail, apparently, giving it an even more half-formed, distorted appearance. 
More remarkably, however, the statue's eyes were closed, and a stylized symbol of single open eye had been carved into its forehead, where a unicorn's horn would be, its mane slicked back to expose it.  

"What is this?"

Coals didn't respond.  Instead, he bounded forward and held his lantern up as high as he could.  A muzzle, and then a pair of split forelimbs loomed out of the darkness.  Larger than life, another rearing stone stallion, ancient as the hills, stood before them in the bowels of Caterlot, the single abstract eye carved into its forehead still able to fix them with an interstellar detachment made all the more remote by time.   

"They..." Coals set the lantern down on the raised dais that supported the frozen apparition, "... were the First Ponies."


+ + +


        Configuration Space
        Equestria/Terra-spectrum Ontological Paradox Nest
        Timelike Iteration 99999999999999999999999999999999999999[ERROR: OVERRUN]

The preponderance of Discord was still pleased, even here, that the innumerable rocky needles that had so infuriatingly fixed him in place (and still did, back there) had long ago reached the limit of their spread.  Before long, this advancing front of his consciousness would be too far away in the “change” direction to even sense them. 

 He had been foolish to ever consider himself alone (and friendless), he realized—The intricate point patterns that varied dazzlingly quickly over even short distances had in fact been a form of life—some kind of sessile, multicolored crystalline entities that fed on the entropy gradients across their extent.  And they were not pleased with his attempts to develop the area into something a little more hospitable, piercing him all over with stone thorns like some omnidimensional cactus. 

He should have been ready, given the unusual nature of the area, so different from the homogeneous wastes of unchanging dust and light that tiled Configuration Space like dunes, or the singularities that regularly blocked his way with their leeward shoals of non-being, and perhaps he had been a little… very well, more than a little cavalier in his probing of its inhabitants, but Discord’s life had been a solitary one, without so much as another soul he could confidently see within the horizons of his memory.  He never dreamed there was anyone home inside these formations, let alone that one of them would try to communicate, the patterns of her intelligence, her wings, and her kindness spelled out along her every axis.  The universe was a vastly richer and more welcoming place than he had believed, and it gave him pause.  

Having oozed this far in the direction that these strange, baryonic creatures called “tiem,” several... somethings were wont to shift.  There were flashes of the native phenomenology of “white” all around him.  The entity that called itself Celestia had once again risen to communicate.





(full size here)