A very, very long time ago, when I was young and unburdened by the yoke of experience and loss, my parents took me on a journey across the Great Lake Saudade, singing to me and telling me stories of spectacular, faraway places and the fantastic creatures that inhabited them as we trekked through the night. I remember little about the experience beyond joy and aching hooves, but one detail sticks with me. My constant companion, by my side longer than my beloved. My one anchor to my youth:
Water stretched out around us in every direction, still but for the occasional ripple of the wind and clumsy hoofstep, glowing faintly from the plankton within. On its surface, a reflection of the Scar lay ephemeral, orangish-but-not-orange, its ragged edges twisting with the motion of the water. At the horizon, reflection and reflected kissed – almost. The smell of salt water tickled my nose. In the cold light of the Scar, my shadow bored deep into the water below. And peering out from my shadow was a pinnacle of rock, its pitted surface slicked with moss and bedecked with a few tiny shells. Crustaceans of some sort, I suppose; even now I couldn't name them. Feathery appendages emerged from beneath each shell, meeting, swaying in the water.
The sight – and the contrast – transfixed me. The creatures were so very small. And the lake around us was so very large. The little animals sat on their rock, holding on to one another, surrounded by immensity, extending their limbs a minute fraction of the way into the lake.
Perhaps I was an easily impressed youngster, bewildered by something prosaic. You can add that to my list of faults if you like. But that wonder is as clear to me now as it was then. And I am still bewildered by the thought – if only because now I feel more than a little empathy with those crustaceans.
But this isn't my story (though I did have a role to play in it). It belongs to someone else. Someone who, unlike me, deserves to have her actions remembered.
This is the tale of how a mare named Sweetie Belle nearly saved the world.
She tried so very hard, she endured so very much, and she came so very close, but one thing tripped her up. Something tiny. Something forgiveable. And now she's lying here with her pastern hanging loose from a shattered joint, a chunk of shrapnel buried in her belly, her mind almost wrecked by gnawing whispers. I'm trying to help her, but there's little I can do, because I'm not really here. There's noone else nearby. And upstairs, our quarry is about to unleash an apocalypse.
We are, in a word, fucked.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. You'll want to see the struggle, not the end. Let's rewind.
… It plunged down through the poisonous cloud cover towards the airship, trailing yellow vapour behind its thagomizer. Ivory mandibles, lacquered with slime and saliva …
No. Too soon. Further back.
… The statue seemed to glow from within, illuminating the ancient cabin and the fragments of bone on the floor …
Nearly there. Just a bit further.
… The airship Hinny's Revenge creaked, trembled …
Ah, here we go.
Chapter 1
Salt
The airship Hinny's Revenge creaked, trembled, and then bucked, sending sand and salt and metal shavings skittering across the sun-bleached wooden deck. Sweetie Belle reached out and hooked a pastern over the railing to steady herself until the juddering stopped. The engines, normally roaring, now merely growled, pathetic and fitful. They choked occasionally, shaking the airship and everypony inside it.
Sweetie Belle sighed. Her joints ached. Her lips and nose stung from the salty air. The airship's daemons whispered incomprehensible words in her ears, sticky, sickly susurrations like congealed grease. The not-quite-orange light in the shadows of the railings made her head ache. She scrunched her eyes up, shook her head to clear the growing list of dissatisfactions, and looked out over the railing.
Above her lay the Scar, a vast strip of white with ragged and twisted edges, reaching from horizon to horizon, dividing the otherwise clear sky in two. The salt desert below was off-white, mottled with patches of brown, stretching on and on until it met the smudged horizon, rippling in the heat haze.
Hinny's Revenge had run out of fuel three days ago. Now two parabolic mirrors had been unfurled from her sides, giant tilted chalices offering libation to the sky. They funneled sunlight – but not scarlight – into the furnaces. It was slow, and it hurt the engines, but it kept the ship moving.
Hinny's Revenge would run out of water in three days. Then, parabolic mirrors or no, she would stop. No winds: she would be becalmed. Nothing to drink: her crew would die shortly after.
Sweetie Belle closed her eyes, breathed deep, and took her leg from the railings. There was work to be done. She trotted away from the railings, across the main deck, past the woven diamond envelope bracing cables, past the occasional grim-faced pony, exchanging nods of acquaintance, and down into the hold. The growling grew as she trotted under the boilers, shrank as she passed them, faded into the back as she reached her destination: the glider bay.
Eight streams of sunlight lanced into the gloom from the glider ports. Eight gliders sat on tracks facing aft, wingtip to wingtip, ready for launch. A group of ponies stood at the far end of the bay, looking down and pawing at the ground or muttering in hushed tones: Sweetie Belle's fellow pilots. All Earth ponies or unicorns; pegasi would fly without gliders, covering shorter distances at greater detail. Some she knew as fellow stokehold workers, useless in the airship's current state.
A senior engineer stood beside them. His face was gaunt, his wings ruffled, his mane short but ragged. He looked up when Sweetie Belle entered the bay.
“Name?” His voice was sharp, but she thought she heard an undertone of compassion, a feeling of mutuality in the face of crisis, even though they barely knew each other.
“Sweetie Belle.”
He nodded, and gestured to one of the gliders. “Number four. Your heading is south-south-east.”
Seated in her glider, Sweetie Belle almost had a breakdown. She had just checked the controls – joystick, rudder, brakes, ballast port, balloon switch – and brought the canopy down over the cockpit. The outside of the canopy was dusted with fine grains of sand, clinging with static, not worth the effort of dusting effectively. A filigree of cracks radiated from a point to her left. A couple of holes had been inexpertly filled with translucent resin – ponies had no basis for making something like this; nearly all gliders were constructed from salvaged parts. The glider couch, smooth and cool, pressed against her belly. A lone daemon mumbled nonsense in her left ear. Looking out through the cracks and the plastic and the sand to the glider port and, beyond it, the salt desert, Sweetie Belle felt her insides somersault.
What in Celestia's name was she doing here? She should be back in Equestria, singing, touring, laughing with her friends, holding a lover. But she wasn't. She was here in a glider, on a rusted old airship, in an unmapped desert, on Amaranth, a different world, where the sky was weird and the land was weird and time was weird. For the past two months, every step had taken her further from Equestria. She was terrified, and she was homesick.
But she had to be here.
A muffled clang, whoosh. The first glider hurtled away.
Sweetie Belle blinked the tears from her eyes. “I'll find you,” she whispered.
Clang, whoosh.
“I'll find you, and we'll go home together.”
Clang, whoosh.
The next one would be hers. Sweetie Belle steadied herself.
Mechanisms clicked. Something electrical hummed.
Clang. Whoosh. The glider port raced up to meet her – and the she was in the air. A few moments to get clear of the airship, then she glanced at the Scar to orient herself, took the controls, and turned south-south-east.
Thirty miles. That was the limit. Go thirty miles out, and then, if she found nothing, turn back with a shallow curve so as not to go over the same land twice. She glanced back at Hinny's Revenge. It didn't look like anything ponies could have built: Dull paint, often scoured away, often replaced by patches of rust or patches of additional metal. Spectacularly hodgepodge – cobbled together from salvaged technology on top of Equestrian engineering. It would have suited Discord, Sweetie Belle thought, if he could make the trip through the Funnel.
She had never been in a situation like this, where the ship had to send out gliders. But she had heard stories. Not all gliders came back. Some were found months later by another salvor, cockpit cracked open and pilot eaten by something. Some were found thousands of miles away, with no evidence as to how they got there. And – most clichéd of all – some were never found.
Whatever. Sweetie Belle shrugged, scanned the landscape, flew onwards. And onwards. And onwards. Somewhere out there was salvage and salvation. And when she found it, she could continue her search.
Time passed. She wasn't sure how much. Piloting and searching became automatic. The desert still stretched ahead, remained featureless as if she had not moved at all. Memories of softness and companionship and home tugged at her awareness.
Sweetie Belle manoeuvred her way through the crowds of The Spread Eagle, doing her best to hold six full pewter tankards in her aura without spilling anything. The smell of mingled smoke and beer filled the air, brought close by the low ceiling. The hubbub of the pub's patrons was loud enough that she felt the old floorboards creaking beneath her without hearing them, but even so she could pick out Scootaloo's cheerful voice cutting through the noise:
“And that is why Rainbow Dash is the best flyer Equestria has had for the past century!”
Sweetie Belle couldn't help but smile. Their teenage years, complete with colts and euphoria and tears and fillies and awkwardness and arguments, had had come and gone, but some things still hadn't changed.
There had been a Wonderbolts show earlier in the day. Scootaloo made a point of visiting all of their tour destinations, even as far away as the Crystal Empire or Susa, the capital of Aquileona. But, since this show was in Canterlot, Sweetie Belle was all too happy to accompany her – she would need to be in Canterlot two days later in any case, she told herself, so she may as well make the trip.
Scootaloo's post-show euphoria – and, Sweetie Belle suspected, her association with Rainbow Dash – had attracted a gaggle of Wonderbolts obsessives, most of whom accompanied them to the pub.
Sweetie Belle arrived at their table just in time to hear a rejoinder, delivered in a nasal voice by a young unicorn with a lank mane and a wispy beard that barely covered his jowls:
“Yeah, right. Who cares about raw wingpower? Azure Cometwings had far better manoeuvrability! His turning radius was recorded by the Fillydelphia Retrix Association as less than two metres unaided at 30 metres per second. And that's what counts.” He was called Brambleknees, Sweetie Belle recalled. She wasn't sure where they had managed to pick him up.
Ears pinned, Scootaloo looked like she was about to yell, then she caught sight of Sweetie Belle and she broke into a smile. She dismissed the conversation with a wave of her hoof. “There you are!” she said. “Six beers at once! You're a lifesaver, filly.”
“I could do six normally. I'm just feeling a bit off today,” mumbled Brambleknees.
“Here,” said Scootaloo, ignoring him. “Sit down. Move over, ponies!” She scooched over on the already crowded wooden seat to make room.
Having set the tankards down on the table, Sweetie Belle sat and listened to the conversation, nursing her pear cider and rarely speaking, an outsider to the conversation. She didn't know much about the Wonderbolts that hadn't already been said. The warmth and pressure of Scootaloo beside her was conspicuous. A couple of pinion feathers tickled her side every time Scootaloo shifted her position or gesticulated to illustrate a point about athletics. Sweetie Belle wondered what it would be like to preen them.
She was running her tongue over her incisors, feeling all the ridges and imperfections in the enamel, and considering taking another sip of cider – perhaps she would find it easier to talk if she were drunker – when Scootaloo's foreleg appeared on her shoulder.
“And here,” announced Scootaloo, “is another pony who's awesome. Sweetie Belle has a gig in the Barbican coming up!”
Sweetie Belle found six ponies all looking at her, which brought her back to reality rather quickly. Her heart jumped into her throat, and she suppressed a nervous laugh. “Oh, yeah. It's nothing much. I'm supporting The Draconequi Rebels.”
“Bullshit,” said Scootaloo. “It's brilliant, and you know it.”
Sweetie Belle shrugged and looked down. “I suppose so, yeah,” she said. “I'm really happy about it, anyway. I hope the crowds like me.”
“I'm sure they will,” said a smiling stallion with high cheekbones, a quiff, and an engineered untidiness to his wings – Bluesky, he was called – sitting next to Scootaloo. He nodded wisely. “You'll do fine.”
Sweetie Belle considered reminding him that he'd never heard her sing and had no basis to judge her singing ability, but she just gave a polite smile and said, “Thank you.”
Brambleknees rolled his eyes and muttered something inaudible.
“And what about you, Scootaloo?” said Bluesky.
“Huh?” said Scootaloo.
“What spectacular thing have you got planned this week?”
A frown flickered across Scootaloo's face. It was covered almost immediately by a grin; Sweetie Belle wouldn't have noticed it it she hadn't been looking so intently at Scootaloo.
“Oh, uh, nothing that stands out. My life is just, kinda, always awesome,” she said. “I don't need to plan spectacular things.”
Bluesky smiled – he did a lot of that, Sweetie Belle thought – and said, “Fair enough. I'm sure it is.”
Scootaloo smiled back at him, but didn't say anything. The conversational slack was taken up by another pony – this one's name, Sweetie Belle didn't know – who started talking about the Fillydelphia Retrix Association. Scootaloo, occasionally contributing when prompted, emptied her tankard and excused herself not long afterwards:
“I'm off out for a smoke. When you all get the next round – that's your turn, Brambleknees, ain't it? – get me another Coronet, will ya?”
“Yeah, alright,” said Brambleknees.
Scootaloo left the table, her tail brushing against Sweetie Belle as she squeezed past, and trotted out into the garden. Sweetie Belle watched her go.
“Hey,” said Bluesky. When Sweetie Belle turned to him, he gestured at the door to the garden with his head. “Is your friend okay?”
“I don't know,” said Sweetie Belle. She made a move to leave.
“Want me to come with?” asked Bluesky.
Sweetie Belle looked at him, and he shrank back, raising his forehooves.
“Okay, okay. Never mind,” he said.
Sweetie Belle left her seat and followed Scootaloo. Going into the garden felt like going into another world: The bustle and warmth and flickering of candles fell away, replaced by calm and chill in the cold moonlight. Wood gave way to cobbles underhoof. The smell of beer and sweating ponies fell away; out here there was just a faint hint of cedar in the air.
The garden wasn't large. Pitted stone buildings encroached on all sides, just beyond the fence. A few patrons stood around, talking in subdued voices or, in a couple of instances, nuzzling one another.
Scootaloo stood alone by the fence, looking at the moon, the orange glow from the tip of her cigarette illuminating her nose. She didn't seem to notice Sweetie Belle trotting up behind her.
Sweetie Belle was about to speak up when she was seized by a sudden feeling of awkwardness. She fell back, her throat tight. She tried to speak again, just to announce her presence, even, and found she couldn't.
Why? Why this sudden barrier? This was ridiculous. She'd known Scootaloo for over ten years. They'd played together for Sweetie Belle's disastrous first gig. They'd performed an opening act for the Equestria games together. Sweetie Belle had held Scootaloo's mane while she threw up after a night of carousing, and Scootaloo had listened to Sweetie Belle's tearful moping after a fall-out with Rarity.
But now, looking at Scootaloo, serene and melancholic and beautiful for all her rough edges and boisterousness, Sweetie Belle felt a gulf between them.
She grimaced, stepped forward, beside Scootaloo, where she'd be noticed.
“Hey,” said Scootaloo, not taking her eyes off the moon. Smoke from her cigarette tickled Sweetie Belle's nose.
“Hi …” Sweetie Belle was silent after that, trying to find something to say, until Scootaloo looked at her.
“You're finding them a bit much too, huh?”
“I guess,” said Sweetie Belle. She bit her lip, silently berating herself for being so cowardly. “What's wrong?”
Scootaloo frowned. “Just the hangers-on. Y'know, being the centre of attention is fun and all, but it gets tiring quick.”
“No, not that. Bluesky said something and it hit you pretty hard.”
Scootaloo looked back at the moon and chewed on her cigarette. Her forehooves kneaded the cobbles underneath.
“Come on,” said Sweetie Belle. She felt much more confident now. “I've known you for ages. And you've got the worst poker face out of all of us. It's not hard to see something's wrong.”
Scootaloo spat out the remainder of her cigarette and crushed it underhoof. “Okay, fine,” she snapped. And then, after a sigh, she continued more quietly: “Rainbow Dash is set to make captain of the Wonderbolts. Apple Bloom's got a list of design contracts as long as Discord's tail. You're well on your way to becoming, like, the idol of musical ponies everywhere. And me … I'm a junior cloud disperser who makes friends by riding in Dash's wake.” She snorted. “She's amazing, the best sister a pony could ask for, and I love her. I totally do. But I don't wanna live my whole life in her shadow.”
“You're not. Not at all. And you don't need a prestigious job to be awesome. Remember how long Rainbow Dash spent in Ponyville weather team before she managed to get into the Wonderbolts?”
“Yeah, but she knew she could.” Scootaloo flicked her wings. “With these things, I'm never gonna get in. I'm a weak flier no matter how hard I try.”
Sweetie Belle reached out with a hoof, and then froze. Should she? Go on, she told herself. Don't be such a coward. She swallowed, hesitated momentarily, and then put her hoof over Scootaloo's “You … you are awesome, Scootaloo. I promise you. Even if you don't feel like it right now.”
Scootaloo looked at her silently, and Sweetie Belle felt her cheeks warming. And then Scootaloo smiled.
“Thanks,” she said. “You're a great friend. You really are.” She closed her eyes and stretched her wings. “Oh Princesses, moping really doesn't fit my style. Gimme a kick up the rump if I do it again, all right?”
“I .. okay.”
“Gotta concentrate on the good stuff, right? Speaking of which, I think I'm in with Bluesky. So don't wait up for me tonight.” Scootaloo gave Sweetie Belle an exaggerated wink. “I think I'm in the mood for another beer. You coming?”
Sweetie Belle felt a chill go through her, but she tried not to show it. “Yeah, I guess so.”
The two ponies trotted back inside together.
Twenty-three miles out, the desert became host to a giant's board game: Outcrops of rock broke through the salt, lay strewn about the landscape. Some ancient, scoured by the winds to surreal sculptures; others young, bearing the layered birthmark strata of sedimentation.
Nothing the ponies found in Amaranth had aged in a consistent way. There were things out here, an eager palaeontologist griffon back in Omphalos City had told Sweetie, that seemed to have millions of years behind them, that were older than Equestria itself. And then, some things had barely decayed at all when by all rights they should have crumbled to dust long ago. There was only one pattern: Technology, always inhabited by daemons, had aged very little – usually little enough to still be useful. Which made salvor ships like Hinny's Revenge profitable.
Scootaloo had gone home with with Bluesky that night. Sweetie Belle had tried not to cry, and when Scootaloo had finally arrived in the hotel room early the next morning, with ruffled feathers and touseled mane and smelling of sweat, Sweetie Belle had curled up under the covers and pretended to still be asleep. Scootaloo had grown, become an adult, while Sweetie Belle had remained a filly, still timorous and awkward and weak.
Twenty-seven miles out, Sweetie Belle found salvage. A downed ship – it lacked an envelope, so she was reluctant to think of it as an airship – lay on its side among the outcroppings, its belly torn open and its limbs – wings? – twisted or sheared off, its hull covered in the brown scar tissue of corrosion. The normally flat layer of salt had been overturned in a trail behind the ship, where it must have crashed.
When Sweetie Belle saw the wreck, her heart leapt and her worries fell. Right now it was the most welcoming thing in the world: There was a slim chance it held water. She circled it a couple of times, examining the shredded hull, looking for a way in. There: Below the stump of a wing was a rent large enough climb through, just above the ground.
She steadied herself and landed the glider as close to the opening as she could manage. Not too far – maybe a dozen metres. Already feeling the heat in the cockpit, she cast a protective bubble around herself – a skill nearly all unicorns had learned in this place, but one she had learned long before from Twilight Sparkle – and opened the canopy.
She jumped to the ground and galloped over the desert. Even with the bubble, her hooves stung, and she could feel heat against her skin; it felt like standing ever so slightly too close to a bonfire. She leapt.
Going into the ship felt … felt like going into another world. The heat and the glare of sunlight fell away, replaced by calm and chill and dim light flowing in from the desert outside. After the echoes of her hooves entering the airship had died away, there was silence – for a moment. And then, rustling: Daemons. The inhabitants of the wreck for Celestia knew how many years, invisible and insubstantial, but audible. A cacophony of slimy whispers, what sounded like cajoling, orders, taunts in a language she didn't know.
The whispers lasted half a minute. Then most of them died away. Only a couple of daemons stayed with her, and their efforts grew more lacklustre. They had figured out she couldn't understand them, Sweetie Belle supposed.
She was in a large room, a cargo hold probably. But empty. The ceiling, supported by rusted columns shaped like melted wax, was marred by several jagged holes, but it was too dark to see what was on the other side. A few crumpled or shattered domes pockmarked the walls without pattern; if that was a lighting system, it was long defunct.
Sweetie Belle trotted across the the slanted floor, upwards, the clang of each hoofstep reverberating, to a lone door on the far side of the hold and through it to the corridor beyond. The frayed remains of a carpet lay over creaking metal. She traipsed through the airship, searching. Corridors, more corridors, more damaged dome lights, crumpled walls, the occasional wrecked bulkhead blocking her path, the occasional fragment of text so damaged that it would be illegible even to those who could read the script, the occasional beam of sunlight streaming in through a hole. And then, in a small cabin near the front of the ship, she found the statue.
Whatever creature it represented – with antlers, cloven hooves, a blood red mane, a lapis lazuli hide – Sweetie Belle didn't recognise. It had, she though, inspecting its face, an insouciant, world-weary sort of expression.
Something had died here. There wasn't much left – a bit of skull, just eyesocket and cheekbone; the knobby end of a legbone; what looked like it might be a rib. Assorted off-white shards and powder, as if somepony had dropped a stack of porcelain plates. There was a faint but sharp metallic smell in the air, whether from the airship or the statue, she didn't know.
The statue seemed to glow from within, illuminating the ancient cabin and the fragments of bone on the floor. Not as if it had a light source in its core; rather, diffuse light bled out from the whole thing. It looked like it was made of gemstones or stained glass or both – emerald and amethyst and aquamarine and ruby and topaz, joined seamlessly. No sharp edges like one might see on something from the Crystal Empire – every surface smooth and rounded.
Sweetie Belle found herself entranced, looking into the statue, into the opalescent complexity of the substance beneath its surface. A prickle ran down her spine, and she swallowed. A pony could get lost forever in all those minute variations of of colour. She was momentarily reminded of Scootaloo's eyes.
The statue's glow surged. A tendril of light leapt from its antlers to Sweetie Belle's horn.
It felt like somepony had driven a white-hot needle through her forehead – but only momentarily. A fraction of a second later it was gone as quickly as it had arrived.
Sweetie Belle tried to step back, found her legs crumpling under her. Her vision blurred, then dimmed.