I sat out on the crumbling ruins of the castle's wall, soaked to the bone. Rain fell in a constant, heavy drone around me, the white noise of it washing all other sound away. Distant lightning lit the forest in flashes of electric blue, and announced the waves of thunder that made my bones tremble. I was so numb from shock that I didn't really feel or see any of it.
Part of me wanted to just give up. To pull Machina from my shoulder and disband D and just walk into the forest. I could just keep moving forward in my dazed state and wait for the monsters, or poison joke, or whatever else was out there to just end me. It wasn't the first time in my life I had thought of such things, but either through courage or cowardice I could not proceed.
I had other options too. I could drop the anchor and wander between dimensions, a near suicidal prospect at best. The monsters that lay in uncharted dimensions and the unpredictability of the wandering was dangerous beyond description. Several very sturdy and unnervingly short lived drones had been sacrificed to prove this point.
My final option was to sit in place and wait for a rescue that might never come. While in other circumstances that might not be so bad, but living the rest of my days as a fugitive in a ruined castle did not sound like my idea of a fun retirement.
The rain poured down on me through the night, and everything looked and felt grey.
The next day saw me return to some semblance of sanity, if only in the vaguest sense. I felt washed out, like I was grey and the world around me trended towards monochrome. The rain had stopped, but the clouds still filled the sky threateningly and mirrored my dour mood.
I went exploring, wandering the corridors and halls of the castle, letting Machina map out more and more of the lower levels. While wandering, I came across a curious room.
The place had two long tables, a dozen fire pits, and an entire wall of cabinets and drawers. At first I thought it some large meeting room, but a quick check of the cabinets revealed it was a kitchen.
No, not a kitchen, THE kitchen. A heavy door led to a vegetable cellar, and another to a large pantry. The contents of both had mercifully rotted away centuries ago, leaving only a fine black dirt. Heavy pots, large pans, baking dishes and cookie sheets were stacked in a few cabinets. They were all rusted and brittle with age, and I would need to either replace them from town, or use Machina's limited power to restore them to new if I wanted to use them.
Two of the pots were badly corroded copper, and I picked them up appreciatively. I could turn these into wire, and maybe generate some power for Machina.
If I could find magnets. And something to turn them with. And something to heat the pots up enough to melt them. And tools for making wire.
The futility of the idea caused me to simply be more angry with myself. Here I was still making plans like I would be rescued in a week. Or maybe I was making plans for the long term.
An idea struck me, and I opened many of the drawers and dumped their contents onto the table. Tarnished spatulas, cracked spoons, and aged forks built a small pile before I found what I was searching for. The kitchen's knives, like the blades of the armory, had suffered with age. A millennium of decay had reduced them to machete bluntness. I pressed my thumb hard against the sharpest edge, and got no more than a bruise. I had no way to sharpen them without wasting Machina's precious power.
Sarah?
I sighed and dropped the knife. There was no way that was going to work. Besides, I was sure D would just heal the cut before it had finished it's job.
Dejectedly I went back to wandering.
The next day I wandered into the library. The place was huge! Two stories, and nearly a thousand square feet of shelf space. Much of it was empty, but there were still enough books to be worth consolidating.
By this time both D and Machina were concerned about my mental state. They chatted at me as I walked the shelves, slowly gathering books. It looked like the place had been emptied in a hurry, and in a rush hundreds of books were left behind.
I wish you would at least stop staring at the blades in the armory and sighing.
I know things seem bad but I'm sure if you just sit and think in the long term you will see...
I wasn't really paying attention. My morning had been spent pulling any remaining books into stacks at the end of their aisles. Now I just had to drag them over to a central area, one I had chosen for it's nearness to the main door and it's intact stone tables.
So far I had managed to pull several sections and nearly fill a single tall bookshelf. I had histories, ancient by now, a few works of fiction, gardening, home repair, weather construction, even a self help book The Thoroughly Modern Mare. I set my current load of books down on the stone table for sorting.
The current section I was emptying was the most intact I had found. The whole section was dedicated to science. At least it seemed to be. The book on top of my current stack was obviously a textbook. It had a long title filled with importance: Forces and Their Calculation and Application in Real Space. The cover art, in the trend of text books everywhere, did more to justify somepony's art degree than inform the reader of the books contents. A white silhouette of a unicorn stood in a field of brown. A thin red triangle extended from the tip of it's horn to embrace a stylized green cube.
Out of curiosity I opened it up and thumbed through the pages. There, like I'd expected, were the formulas and graphs and charts and even a few stylized "scenarios" for the reader to work through. What I had not expected were the complex diagrams. Circles, half circles, and thin arcs littered the book, always incomplete. Most had references like "Copy across image 2.1" or "see 3.3.1 b for missing section." A few circles were even pulled apart and printed on opposing sides of the same page.
What is this? I thought, diagrams for alchemy?
-then you could go fishing or work in your garden and I can help grow the plants. I'm sure with me and Machina working on it we should be able to get a decent interdimensional tracking and relay station set up in only a short year. We can celebrate Christmas as the half way point! By then I'm sure the ponies will have forgiven you for whatever they think you did and-
"D, shut up."
This really was doing nothing good to my mood. I did not want to discuss this now, and by pressing the issue and giving me "hopeful" estimates of a year in this place he was only pissing me off.
But Sarah, if you would just-
"Fishing? Gardening? What use is that when Machina might be out of power soon? What good is it to plan Christmas decorations when our food won't last to the end of the month?! Don't feed me pie-in-the-sky hope of going home in a year. Give me plans that mean I can survive to see next Tuesday!"
If you had been listening, you would know that-
D's agrivation was evident in his voice, but it was just gratting at me and making me more upset.
"Shut up before I shut you up."
That was the last straw for my spirit companion apparently.
You and what army you prissy, bitchy, morbid, emo, self-centered -
"Команда демон мовчання" The "spell" was something ARCO had taught dimensional jumpers with my specific breed of spirit. The enchantment would shut them up for twenty-four hours.
Sarah
I could hear the warning tone in Machina's voice, but I had no patience for her after D.
"Don't make me use your command codes too."
It took me a moment to realize that the inside of my head was silent, as quiet as the ancient library around me. Lost and alone, I had just driven away my only friends by my own actions. I tried not to think about it. Picking up another book titled Applied Thaumatic Energy I walked back to the stack of "magic" books and kept consolidating as I read.
Four days had passed, and D still wasn't talking to me. He had regrown all my missing fingers and toes, healed every scratch and even grown my hair down to my shoulders. I couldn't tell if he was trying to silently apologize or if he was just letting me know that any suicide attempt would be little more than a painful failure on my part.
I had taken to scavenging the nearby forest for berries and nuts, but had to compare them against Supernaturals to make sure I wasn't eating a poisoned potion component. After my morning gathering I would wander near the edge of town and watch ponies through the shield, dodging guards and timber wolves. Something about the shield agitated the wolves, and the guards were out for them as much as me.
In the afternoon I settled down into the library with a little bit of food and read magic texts until I fell asleep. I had done my best to understand magic, given the smattering of books I had, but the process still eluded me.
Why did one book detail a circle and say that it should have worked, then tell me it didn't and show the next, more complicated one that did? Why did that one work? Why did another book insist that I be facing south when doing an exercise and another that I be facing west? Why, in the name of all that was holy, did none of the forty seven books on magic have one single completed diagram? They all had sections that were blank or dotted saying see panel such and such on page so and so. One even referenced another book entirely, a book my collection was sadly lacking.
I was trudging back through the woods towards the castle, munching on my bounty of berries and thinking. The book on my mind was Magic Through the Ages and how it defined a form of magic as tied to the Elements of Harmony, providing the elements their true power. The author had gone on to define formulas showing that all of the power the element's had were derived from the element of magic. The formulas were wildly wrong, a fact visible to anyone who had more than a single semester of calculus. Still, his argument that nothing was greater than the elements was a fun one. They had no idea that Nightmare Moon was coming, or that she would escape after only a thousand years.
Still, somewhere was a god of pure chaos, trapped permanently in stone because of the elements. Their ability to whisk poor Princess Luna away to her namesake. I mean, how would I have gotten home if that had happened to me? If I was separated from my home by an impenetrable and deadly gulf, how would I-
The nuts and berries dropped from my hands, and the thought played over and over in my mind. I began to walk, then run, back towards the castle. Overhead, rain began to pour down.
Nightmare stirred from her slumber as the door opened. Sarah, odd creature that she was, stood in the doorway, soaked to the bone. The last time she had seen Sarah she had hung her head and walked with the air of someone utterly defeated.
"Sarah, thou hast the appearance of a drowned rat." Ever tactful, she realized the comment might not be appreciated. Nightmare could sympathize, she had felt much the same when had been imprisoned. "When we realized how impossible our escape from the moon was, we too despaired. But this will not get better if all you do is pick berries and sulk. "
Sarah turned, and Nightmare noticed something. Her hair was longer, down to her shoulders now. The spirit bound to her arm must have regrown it, no longer worrying about conserving power. The rain had pulled it flat and straight, and it hung around her down turned face like a thick curtain.
"But you escaped." Sarah said slowly, an odd inflection in her voice as she approached me.
"Yes, with the help of the stars."
Sarah walked over and picked me up. Nightmare could now see Sarah's face in the low light of the fire. Her eyes were wide, and her smile stretched across her face in a way that did not suggest mental stability. Nightmare heard the edge of psychosis in her voice, and wanted nothing more than to hide.
"HOW?"
The library was a huge mess. Tomes, scrolls, and stacks of paper were everywhere. I had found a storage cabinet hidden in the library, a jar inside still holding dehydrated ink. A bit of practice and I had been able to write, with the help of a pen from Machina. I sat at the table, looking over the dozen tomes scattered across it's surface and trying to wrap my head around what Nightmare and Machina were telling me.
"So, you cast a spell in the stars?"
"With the stars" Nightmare clarified. "We used stars and constellations as a spell form, a map that the mystical energy could course through."
The stars defined nodes and intersections in a massive three dimensional arcane map? That is impressive.
Yeah, but it still took her a thousand years to put everything in place.
"HA! It took us less than an instant to set up the array."
"Then, why-?"
"You don't overcome the power of the elements of harmony overnight! We stole a little of our Dear Sister's power every time she moved our precious moon."
How long is your year?
"Three hundred and ninety days and nights"
D whistled.
That's nearly four million little snippets of energy you stole.
"When you are moving the sun and the moon, the power is anything but little"
"So, with the right kind of magical array, we could go home?"
The moon is a little closer to us then our home dimension Sarah. We do not have a thousand years to collect power.
Yeah, but we ain't fighting against the elements.
"Do you think, between you three, we can generate the proper array and the kind of power we need to get us home?"
"The array will not be a problem, it will simply be a more complex version of the one we used for our escape. Power, however, is another issue."
Judging by what you have said, and estimating the power requirements, I do not feel that Nightmare, D and I can generate the level of mystical energy you would require.
We might need Twilight's help, or maybe even Celestia and Luna.
They will not like our dealing with Nightmare.
"Unless you want to wait here gathering power for a while, you will need to find some power you can actually access."
"I can think of something that might do the trick." Reaching out, I picked up the history book from Ponyville Library. I flopped the book open in front of the helm. "What about these?”
The page showed two earth ponies, two pegasi, and two unicorns floating in the air, wreathed in white light. They were wearing the Elements of Harmony.
I have calculated that the timber wolves are now a much more immediate and real threat then we ever were. If Sarah can defeat a few and save some guard ponies, we might be able to talk to the element bearers and work something out.
“You do know one of the bearers is Twilight Sparkle.”
“I thought that picture looked familiar. I was hoping to bribe her a little.”
Sarah, you live in an abandoned and crumbling castle in the middle of a wild forest. What could you possibly offer someone who, according to the history book, is the personal student of Celestia?
"Oh, I don't know," I waved my left arm offhand at the library's collection. "How about a few old books?"
The sun was low on the horizon when I started my hunt. Normally I would have liked to hunt using bullets or at least arrows, but Machina's power had dropped below 20% with the hologram and the few times I needed her percision work etching the spell form in the sun court.
“D, your up. We need to be seen attacking the wolves, so don't bother with illusion.”
Got it, claws and teeth.
“Lets not go too far, these ponies don't seem keen on killing.”
No, just pummeling helpless mares.
I tried to push the battered image of Ditzy from my mind. “Once we prove our good intentions we can work on that. Focus on speed and strength boosts, and maybe give my punches a little more oomph.”
Sarah, I recommend testing your combat skills against a lone opponent before you try showing off in front of the guards.
I glanced around the woods. “You have a likely target?”
Movement ten yards to your left indicates a timber wolf.
D's enhancements had me leaping from branch to branch almost like a monkey. It took only seconds to silently traverse the distance and spot the wolf prowling through the undergrowth. I waited until it was nearly right beneath me before swinging down to land a powerful kick.
My plan had been to hit it on the side near the center of mass and knock it sideways. Then I could pummel it into submission. But I must have made too much noise dropping from my branch, because the wolf turned to look at me. I hit it in the side, but only a glancing blow to the leg.
Instead of stunning or spinning the creature, the blow tore the leg clean off, pieces of wood and vine scattering on the forest floor.
“What the?”
The wolf either didn't know or didn't care about its missing leg and lunged for me. A swift right hook drove it down, and D's claw seemed to shatter the beast, reducing it to a pile of rotting wood.
“What- what just happened?” I stood stunned in the aftermath, the adrenaline draining from my system.
It appears the creatures are far less structurally sound than previously estimated.
Should I reduce my augmentation?
“No, this one was about the size of a German shepherd, we have see some out here bigger than mountain lions. Keep this level of boosts and we will let the pieces fall where they may.”
.
Sarah was gone from the clearing a moment later, and the clearing was still. All that remained of the wolf was the stench of it's breath and the scattered pieces of its body. A soft breeze blew through, causing a single loose branch to fall to the ground.
Slowly, looking like it was carried by ants, the pieces of the wolf began to move together, and it's eye glowed a pale white.