//------------------------------// // Prologue: Starfall // Story: The Wanderers: First Law // by firefeng //------------------------------// Prologue Starfall Princess Celestia’s breath started to rasp as she pushed herself harder, galloping for all she was worth between the jutting crystal fingers that flowered from the walls of the cavern. Hollow echoes of distant hooves reverberated between the solemn, translucent structures, the only reminder left of her Guard after she had powered ahead. She rounded a bend, stumbling briefly over the uneven pathway. She burst into a large room, the crystalline pillars around her extending several hundred meters towards the ceiling and bathing the room with a quiet, pulsing luminescence. Seeing the opening to the next leg of her path on the far side of the gargantuan room, she lowered her head and her horn lit up. Tendrils of magic and multi-colored sparks twirled around the crystal pillars as she blinked out of existence and appeared before the exit, still in a full gallop. She fought off the wave of dizziness that washed over her, refusing to slow her run. Accursed crystals and their interference! She would be there by now, were it not for the unique features of the caverns below Canterlot. She had to be! How could it have come to this? What were they thinking?! She rounded the final bend of her journey and the small, crystal-laden crevasse she was in widened. Gargantuan, gilded doors inscribed with arcane scripts loomed ahead, blocking her path, but she merely pressed herself harder. A few beads of sweat trickled down the sides of her face as her horn’s glow reflected off the walls and its gems, a subterranean starscape that seemed to dance about in its mockery of her inadequacy. The lines in the door began glowing a molten gold, and with a thunderous crack they began to move inward. The light from within almost blinded her, and the rush of heated air sent her normally languid mane into jittering undulations as she pressed forward. She sprinted for the massive doors, her large form little more than a bright mote of dust floating towards the sun-pierced crack between wooden blinds compared to the towering gates. Her harried rush ground to an abrupt halt the second she entered the chamber beyond. She ignored the walls made of pure crystal, ignored the brightly glowing runes coursing their length from the floor to the ceiling, several hundred meters overhead. She ignored the mirror polished floors, refracting and reflecting beams of kaleidoscopic light. She merely stepped through them, her jaw slack and her eyes wide. In the center of the room six mares hovered a good distance off the ground, their eyes glowing white as they channeled their powerful magic through the Elements of Harmony. Wind whipped with aether-tinged luminescence in a large sphere around them. Lightning stabbed violently—and with increasing frequency—from the orb’s surface before arcing inward, back into the thaumaturgy that fed it. The runes on the wall seemed to glow more brightly with each passing second, and hairline cracks began to form in the perfectly even floor beneath them. In the very center of this maelstrom stood Luna, her horn sparking and glowing many times brighter than Celestia’s own sun. “Sister, no!” Celestia cried. The light in Luna’s horn dimmed slightly for an instant, and her glowing white eyes softened as they fell upon her older sister. “I’m so, so sorry, Tia,” she said, her voice breaking, before her horn sparked with greater intensity. “But we will not abandon-” The light in the room flared violently, drowning out every detail in a searing flash as Celestia threw her hoof in front of her eyes to shield them. For one second, two seconds, all sound cut out and silence reigned oppressively, cowing the solar goddess. She barely felt the shockwave as it hit, slamming her into the crystalline wall behind her. The roaring boom was later recorded as being heard as far away as Appleoosa. It barely registered on her consciousness. She was only vaguely aware of the floor and walls around her shattering beneath the thaumaturgic shockwave as the light winked out, only vaguely aware of being crumpled on the ground against the wall. As the world collapsed around her, only one thing scorched her memories in one final, excruciating brand. The look of sorrow in her little sister’s eyes was genuine. When she finally stood on shaky hooves several moments later, she faced the ruined room, alone. The others were long gone. * * * * * Her. Mane. Was. Ruined! The rain never seemed to end in this wretched place, even if she had just been here for a few minutes. And the first individuals she tried speaking to were absolute brutes! Her polite introductions were met with little more than bleating and empty stares from the large group of sheep around her. She pouted as her eyes wandered, scanning across the emerald hills as the weeping, dull grey sky continued devastating her mane. "You have got to be the ugliest sheep I have ever seen," a child's voice stated from behind her. The mare's eyes widened and with a huff, she whipped around. * * * * * She didn’t scream! It was more of a battlecry. Yeah, that! A battlecry as she felt a lurch and began losing altitude. Her wings hammered at the air but she still kept dropping like a stone, at least until she slammed into the large tarp cloth in front of her. No, wait, until she attacked the large cloth in front of her! With a battlecry! She quickly became entangled with more than a few ropes as she slid down the rough material, before crashing into a hard, wooden surface. She groaned, trying to pull herself to her feet as the wood beneath her seemed to roll gently, rhythmically. * * * * * Well, ain’t no way around it. The mare clenched her jaw and pressed open the cupboards she had ducked into to catch her breath. She stumbled out into the sterile room she had first appeared in. She reckoned not much had changed since then. Still had the same cool, stale air. The same stark white lighting. The coffee machine was burbling a mite less, and the refrigerator was still making that weird humming noise. Huh, awful weird, that. Refrigerators in Equestria sure didn’t make such a racket. The plastic table in the center of the room certainly hadn’t gone anywhere. Right, she was stalling. She could do this. She cantered towards the door with the thin window on the upper righthoof side, but paused when she heard a pair of approaching voices. “-and like I keep telling you, Doc, the reaction times on the EXOs are still too slow. I don’t care how strong they are, if they don’t have speed they’re still gonna get ripped open like a tin can.” The mare bolted back towards the supply cabinets. “It doesn’t matter, Xander,” a second voice said, opening the door. “The neurological implants you have are-” The mare let out an awkward cough, one hoof on the open cabinet as she stared wide-eyed at the two bipeds at the door, who stared right back at her. One was in a grey lab coat, the other was in some sort of uniform. “Uh, howdy?” The one in the uniform shouldered past the doctor, pulling something metallic from a sheath on his hip with one hand while he pressed on the side of a band that wrapped around his throat. The mare’s pupils narrowed as she stared into the black hole at the end of the tool the human had drawn. She’d seen what one of those things could do. “Operative Chessmaster to Command, we have a code zero in the L4 lounge. Repeat, code zero in L4 lounge. Requesting immediate lockdown and a response team.” “Now look just a minute, here!” she blurted out. The human put both hands on his weapon’s grip, still leveling it at her. His eyes narrowed. “Shut up and don’t move until the response team gets here, understand?” She gulped and nodded. * * * * * Firecrackers. She hated firecrackers. Okay, maybe she just mostly disliked them even if she could respect that others found them enjoyable. Even still, she wished she had her earplugs. And earmuffs. And that she was in her cottage with the shutters closed and all her friends around and a pillow over her head so- Kra-BOOOM! She screeched as the buildings on either side of the alleyway shuddered. She was pelted with a small storm of concrete and dust as she shook her head, willing the ringing in her ears to subside. She looked up fearfully when she heard a small group shouting nearby. She was confused by a section of building above her that seemed to have gone missing, but as the cracking and booming and shouting seemed to grow louder and louder, her ears seemed to melt closer and closer to her head. She slouched deeper into the dark recesses of the alley and hid, as best she could, behind a small pile of concrete and twisted iron. She began to tear up, the wet trails upsetting the smudges on her cheeks. “T-Twilight? Princess?” she whispered. * * * * * Her head whipped around quickly. She was a lot of feet in the air. Or meters. Or whatever. There were lots of weird houses, boxy houses that all looked the same and booooring and lots of nice patches of grass even though Princess Luna said that they didn’t control the plants here like they did there and then there was the wood fence surrounding more grass which surrounded concrete which surrounded a lot of water which- She inhaled sharply and her eyes exploded open, almost escaping their sockets. Her downward descent halted immediately. ‘A pool!’ “Cannonball!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, her inertia returning as she curled into a ball and slammed into the surface of the water. She imagined huge tidal waves exploding from her point of entry. As she surfaced, she frowned as the small pony saw that barely any of the pool water had escaped the pool...maybe if she jumped from on top of that huge mansion next to her? “Um, moooooom?” a voice called out from behind her. She flashed around in the water, focusing on the voice and cracking a wide grin. “Hi!” * * * * * She swallowed, and almost gagged as her prickly throat stuck to itself. She sighed and flopped to her haunches, staring up into the stark blue sky as the heat battered down on her. She had most certainly not thought this through with enough thoroughness. Her eyes fell to the small depression in the sand next to her. She closed her eyes and summoned her magic, trying to focus it through her horn. It sputtered weakly a few times before dying out, her magic failing again. She sighed, and began shoveling more dirt out of the depression by hoof. When it was deep enough, she tossed what little remnants of vegetation she could forage into the bottom around a small wooden bowl. Grasping her saddlebag flap with her teeth, she flung it open and hoofed around inside before producing a small tarp. She placed it over the small pit, weighing it down with rocks on all corners. After a few failed tries, she was able to toss a small rock into the center to create a slight depression, right over where the wooden bowl should be inside. Hopefully, this would be enough. She didn’t recognize any of the cacti around her from her books, and even if she did feel confident enough that they were safe, she wasn’t going to brave their needles without her magic unless things… No. Things wouldn’t get that bad. She had promised Luna, and her friends. Her head swiveled and she leveled a determined glare towards the city on the horizon, little more than occasional glints of sunlight and large buildings that upset the dusty sands and squat, lean vegetation in the harsh landscape around her. She curled up into the shade and tried not to dry swallow; the small pebble she held in her mouth wasn’t triggering her salival reflex as much as it should. The needles in her throat felt almost as harsh as those on the surrounding cacti after several days. * * * * * Darkness. Complete darkness, with a smattering of pinpricks piercing the night sky above her. She felt a momentary revulsion at the stars’ ailing light in this place, at their utter lack of majesty and wonder. She tried to control her gag reflex when she realized there was no moon, here, either. He had said there was a moon. She believed him. But the soulless stars above her merely winked humorlessly in their own banal patterns, devoid of life. And of a moon. She frowned and sighed to herself as she fell through the air at terminal velocity, the cold wind biting and whistling around her ears. She had no idea how close or far the ground was below her falling form. She spread her wings. Was she really doing the right thing? It was hardly honorable to go behind her sister’s back the way she did, but she owed a debt! By Tartarus, all Equestria owed a debt! A debt that must be paid! She could not just- Her wings flapped and caught nothing. She frowned, the wind shrieking around her as she rolled her head back to them, willing them to work. She flapped again. Nothing. Again and again and again, faster and faster, yet her wings refused to catch to air. Her breathing began to pick up in intensity. He hadn’t mentioned this. Maybe he hadn’t known? Her head rolled wildly in a panicked search before discovering where the stars seemed to end and a black void began. The end of the night sky, and the start of the earth below. The speed with which that abyssal event horizon leveled out with her sight horrified her, and for an instant, she felt a stab of fear. If her flight didn’t work, if her horn kept sputtering uselessly like it was now, maybe she might even… She clamped her eyes shut and flapped her useless wings for all they were worth, flapped until the muscles in her shoulders were burning with exertion not felt in centuries. Right when she expected to slam into the ground, her wings bit into something tangible. She noticed herself slowing and flapped all the more. She opened her eyes, and felt the pegasi magic returning to her. She sailed horizontally through the air, now, no longer descending. A small smile played across her lips, and her horn lit up to test her magic. Her concentration was broken by a deep rumbling sound, and her eyes widened as she saw two brightly glowing eyes glowering at her from the carapace of an odd creature coming straight for her. She tried to dodge but the large creature slammed into her back half, sending her cartwheeling across the ground before her head hit something hard. Luna faded into a blackness deeper than the dark world to which she had just teleported. ‘Let the rest of them be in good health. Let them be safe,’ she prayed before unconsciousness consumed her.