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// 1 The Ascension 
// Story: Numbers Are Ponies Too 
// by Telofy 
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Amber Rose had no presentiment of her future—not this time—although her life and that of countless others was to depend powerfully on this day.
She walked right through the center of the gate into the Great Hall of the Library of Canterlot, the filly seemingly lost like a red and lightly yellow mote of dust against a firmament lined with thousands of books. She was not lost.
Stained-glass windows that reached all the way to the ceiling bathed the rows of innumerable shelves and cabinets in iridescent light. The colors played on her coat, her blank flank, and her mane, seemingly setting it ablaze when she passed under one of the ruby rays. It was a colorful spectacle that despite its light would strike her years later as a portent of her darkest hours. She turned left and headed straight for the librarian at the reception desk.
The main vessel of the library stretched into a distance at least twice the length of the main square in Ponyville. Even though it was narrower than the square, it yet held rows upon rows of richly ornamented shelves that ran from its central aisle to both sides all the way to the piers that separated the main vessel from the outer aisles. These aisles were each wide enough for two royal chariots to pass them abreast and stretched upward to the height of Ponyville’s town hall until their pointed arches terminated in the triforium. These aisles extended to the far end of the library but were cut short on the near end by the reception area to the left and the cloakroom to the right. Amber reached the reception.
“We need a print of an old-looking map of Equestria as prop for a theater play. It has to be rather large. Do you have something like that here?” Amber asked. She kept her voice low as etiquette demanded.
“Hi there! What’s your name? I’m Fleur.” The librarian smiled at her. She was a tall unicorn, and her physique reminded Amber of Princess Luna, but that was where all semblance ended. Her coat was all white, but she had streaks of the lightest pink in her mane, a mane that looked like it had not seen a brush in days and was carelessly clipped back, probably so it would not bother her when reading. Her cutie mark showed three fleurs-de-lis.
Amber frowned. “I’m Amber. It’s rather urgent.” Can she please cut out the singsong voice? I’m not a toddler.
Then Amber noticed several maps and posters hung on the wall that separated them from the left aisle. “The map over there looks old, the top-left one. It’s just a reproduction, right?”
“Yeah, I can get you that one.” She furrowed her narrow eyebrows. Passion flamed in her eyes. “Actually, no. It virtually breathes impurity! Lots of little mistakes: You see that island there in the south-east, for example? Well, it’s too small to be seen from here, which is all for the better because neither does it exist! Hah! There is no Apple Cider Island! They just made it up! I eclectically hate it when ponies sully maps like that, just to mark them as their own. Like dogs pissing on, uh, maps.” She started to nod repeatedly.
Was it the light or had her coat reddened? How was that even possible? Amber would have been amused by the odd outburst had she not been in such a hurry. Some other guests threw her compassionate glances before they returned to their books.
“I’ll get you a better one.” With that, Fleur vanished downstairs, off limits to mere visitors. Amber envisioned extensive, dusty archives. Minutes passed. Only thirty more to the performance, and she still had to get back to the castle.
She had worked so hard and risked so much to get the lead role. Her understudy might not even know her lines, one of the risks Amber had accepted. All her friends depended on her. No, Amber decided, I’ll just take this map. No one will notice or care about its imperfections.
The poster was high up, even by adult pony standards, and clipped into a rail along with the other prints. Amber tugged at it with her magic, but it wouldn’t come loose. Ripping it off was not an option. She would even insist, she decided, that they only fasten it with magnets for the play, not tape. She had to return it unscathed after their final performance in three days.
When the tugging was of no use, she tried to press down on the hidden mechanism that was holding it in the rail. She wished she had feeling in her magic like she had in her hooves so she might be able to understand how the clip worked. As it was, all her pushing and pulling was to no avail.
All the ladders she could see hung in rails fastened to their shelves. She remembered Juniper Berry’s lessons in carpet flight, and looked around. It was of no use. The only carpets were the ones along the aisles, narrow and much too long to be useful for the purpose. In any case, Juniper had often warned her that indoor flight required considerable skill lest you launch yourself right into the ceiling.
There was, however, a single wooden shelf at that wall, filled with many copies of the same dictionaries and encyclopedias, which must be in high demand. Even though it didn’t have its own ladder and looked much newer than all the other shelves, Amber surmised that she could climb it and use it to reach the map that hung to its right.
She pressed her head against the wall to peek behind it. The wall was not as cold as she had expected but she paid no heed to it. At the top of the shelf, she could see two angle brackets pinning it to the wall. That was all the reassurance she needed. With a few dexterous moves, she hung high up on the face of the shelf. Her hindhooves were securely propped on a lower shelf while several rows up her forehooves were always scrambling to find enough friction.
Then she reached the top. She ignored all the dust and the pieces of trash that had accumulated there and leaned onto it to balance her weight away from the drop. She had lost all fear of heights when she trained with Juniper a mile above Ponyville with only a thin carpet protecting her from the pull of gravity. Now she was up only four or five times her own height and looked down without alarm. With her right hoof she reached over to the rail that held the precious map. From this perspective she could see the mechanism. She had to slide a nob against a spring and the map would come loose.
The moment she touched the clip, a deep throbbing sound filled the library, interspersed with loud cracks. For a moment she could not see where it was coming from, then she felt something akin to vertigo. Gravity seemed to be going out of its way to pull her off her precarious perch. It was a puzzling sensation.
When the angle brackets were sheared out of the wall with a puff of gypsum, she understood what was happening. The wall that filled her vision and that she had assumed to be as solid as the rest of the colossal building was a thin sheet of drywall, visual cover for the reception desk. Some fastings had broken away, and now it was tumbling toward her. The heavier shelf fell even faster.
Time seemed to slow down for Amber because she had enough of it to decide that she would bolt. She would help clean up this mess after the performance. Her friends depended on her! Maybe she would even have time to retrieve the map from the detritus. Books slid out and fell toward the ground far below.
Amber envisioned the trajectory of the shelf and the wall. The shelf with its tons of books would hit the ground first, then the wall would fall on top of it, breaking, probably. If she managed to fall right next to the shelf, it would shield her from the impact of the wall.
But time did not slow down enough. She could no longer kick off. She was already in midair, shelf and wall crashing toward her.