I’strukun
When Twilight Sparkle and Nyx returned to I’strukun they found themselves in the upper room of the central tusk-tower, near the elevator. Twilight went over to the light table by the hole in the floor, pulled out her sketch of the symbol formed by the floating rocks of Wahteg and laid it carefully on the table, saying “I hope this works.” The lamp above the table turned on and the gear-shaped ring on the bottom dropped down and flipped over, somehow forming a thin sheet of metal inside of it and pressing it down on a bunch of small metal rods that had popped out of the floor below the table, creating an impression of the symbol on the paper. The gear-ring and the symbol rotated a little over a quarter turn and something fell into place with a loud click. The ring rose back to its original place, and a moment later the metal lattice cage holding the book Margent had escaped into rose out of the pit. The lights in the room dimmed and the projectors turned on, casting the image of the crazed Pinkie Pie doppelganger onto the ceiling.
“Not so easy is it, star-swirlies?” Margent asked tauntingly. “Feeling like a Squee running through a maze, looking for the answer? Is it over here? Is over there? Is someplace I haven’t looked?” Her expression hardened and her tone became one of accusation. “Cirrus and Archeon didn’t care about Naborale. They came to us with talk about fixing instabilities, rewriting our world so that we would be free to live our own lives, free of the traditions that bound us to the Tree. We believed you, abandoning our traditions while forgetting that they were the very things that kept Naborale alive. When the first branches started to die I realized what had happened and followed them to this place to tell them what they had done, to beg Cirrus and Archeon to save my tribe! And they laughed. They said… you would never fix Naborale; that they had already taken everything it had that was worth saving.” She paused for a moment, visibly overwhelmed by her anger, and then she finished the message through clenched teeth. “Find the remaining two symbols, star swirlies. Don’t. Make. Me wait.” Her glaring eyes faded away with the rest of the image and the lights came back up.
“That was strange,” Twilight said. “Her words were all very coherent, but she’s apparently having trouble remembering who exactly she’s talking to. It’s like most of the time she’s able to tell Star Swirl apart from Cirrus and Archeon, but sometimes her mind conflates them all into one.”
“Do you think that’s why she calls us ‘star-swirlies?’” Nyx asked, “Although, that could just be the name she has for all ponies from outside her home world.”
“It’s hard to say,” Twilight said. “Maybe if we find more journal pages lying around we can get a better grasp of her mental state.” She started to turn away from the pit in the floor, but then paused and glanced back at the Naborale book. “What a striking difference,” she said to herself.
“Huh?” Nyx asked.
“Nothing,” Twilight said, shaking her head. She took Star Swirl’s journal out of her bag and walked over to the exit, but then hesitated after opening the inner door and looked down at Nyx, who was starting to look a little annoyed at the bigger unicorn. “Nyx, have you ever been to the Forestsea?” Twilight asked.
“Not since we escaped from Sohndar,” Nyx answered with a shake of her head. “I don’t think there’s much worth seeing there anymore. Father said that the last time he checked, the natives had left their old village to find someplace new to rebuild.”
“Natives,” Twilight said, both surprised and a little relieved. “I suppose that explains it then. When Rainbow Dash and I went through the Forestsea we encountered one of the native frog people and he helpfully showed us around the level Cirrus and Archeon had claimed. I never gave it much thought, but in the back of my mind I always wondered if he had been the last of his kind or not. If he had been, I’d have said his reaction to Rainbow and I was strikingly different from Margent’s behavior. But, since he apparently wasn’t alone…” She trailed off with a shrug. A dull silence hung for a moment.
“Where to next then?” Nyx asked at last.
“Ah,” Twilight said, opening Star Swirl’s journal and turning to the appropriate section, “The world is called Motivaria, and the book is in the tusk nearest our arrival point. Come on.” She led the way out of the tower and teleported herself and Nyx down to the base of the ladder.
As they walked toward the tusk-tower rising from the seaside edge of the rock area they were headed for, Twilight asked, “Tell me Nyx, what do you plan to do after you’ve learned how to Write links to other worlds?”
“I’m going to Write and explore until I’ve found the perfect world,” Nyx answered.
“A perfect world?” Twilight asked, “Do you not like living in Equestria?”
“Equestria’s ok,” Nyx said, “even though Father has us living in the middle of nowhere. It’s just… missing something. I can’t put my hoof on it, but I know if I explore to the limits of where Writing can take me I’ll find what I’m looking for. What would your perfect world be like, Twilight?” Twilight started to answer, but Nyx cut her off to add, “And don’t say Equestria. That’s too easy an answer.”
“Well, I don’t know then,” Twilight said. “All I’d need is a world where I can spend time with my good friends and a place to go home and curl up with a book every evening. Actually, now that I think about it, Aitran could have been perfect if I’d been there before Cirrus and Archeon ravaged it.”
“You would have loved it, I’m sure,” Nyx said with a knowing look. “You’re a lot like Father.”
Twilight blushed faintly at the filly’s opinion, and then noticed that they’d reached the tusk. The little window with the symbol was at eye level, but Twilight’s quick look around didn’t reveal any sort of doorway. “How do we get in?” she asked.
“When I looked around here earlier, I noticed a hole in the rock over there,” Nyx said, pointing to the corner of the rock farthest from the rest of the island. She and Twilight went over and looked down the perfectly round hole. There was a single-shaft ladder leading down onto a brown metal walkway. Twilight climbed down first and saw that the walkway was attached to the wall of a small cove that the sea had carved out of the rock. The walkway started out level, then sloped down before leveling out again in front of what seemed to be the tusk’s entryway. A large metal object resembling a squat barrel resting on its side blocked the walkway at the bottom of the slope.
“We need to get that out of the way somehow,” Twilight said, thinking. She and Nyx looked around and spotted a podium on a rock just outside the little cave. There were several large rocks poking out of the water between them and the podium, so Twilight looked at Nyx and asked, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Nyx nodded and walked down to the metal barrel, where the rocks were closest, and then hopped across them to the podium. Twilight followed her, teleporting from the last rock to get behind Nyx. There was a ladder set into the rock leading up to the top, but the ponies ignored it for the time being.
The podium had two levers on it, and by standing near it Twilight and Nyx could see that the walkway was anchored to tracks in the rock at four points. Nyx slid the lever on the right down and the platform shifted so that the middle third was flat and the ends sloped down, which also moved the ladder at the right end away from the hole. The metal barrel rolled down the newly created slope and bounced off the tower door with a loud clang, coming to rest right on the end of the walkway. Nyx then slid the left lever up and the walkway shifted into a mirror image of its original configuration. The barrel stated put. “This is easy,” Nyx said in a bored tone. She moved the levers with careful consideration, noting that the barrel always rolled back to the base of the current slope, until she had coaxed it over to the far right and then reset the walkway to its original state.
“Good job Nyx,” Twilight praised the filly as they rock-hopped back to the walkway.
“I just hope that Motivaria has some real challenges,” Nyx said, turning the handle of the door and letting it swing in. She started to walk in, but ten stopped when she saw that the floor was missing and the rock underneath was a deep divot that would make it impossible to reach the combination lock for the book. “Is this intentional?” Nyx asked.
“I don’t remember anything about it being mentioned in your father’s journal,” Twilight answered. She looked into the room, at the doorframe, and finally back at the metal barrel. “I think the barrel will fit through the door,” she said, “and it’s probably big enough to fill the hole enough to be a replacement floor.”
Nyx considered the suggestion. “It’s worth a shot,” she said. Twilight teleported the two of them back to the podium and Nyx got to work. In short order, the barrel rolled through the tower door and came to a stop with a satisfying-sounding crash. The ponies teleported back to the door and saw that Twilight’s estimation had been correct.
“If the floor were intact,” Twilight said, “rolling the barrel in here would’ve made the room inaccessible for most ponies. That just goes to show that while Margent’s made changes around here, she still wants everything to be doable.”
Aside from the missing floor, the tower room was identical to the one that held Wahteg. Standing on the barrel was a little strange, but Twilight managed to keep her balance as Nyx climbed up on her back and waited for her to get out her notes and arrange the beads on the lock.
The cage with the book came down, and Twilight opened it to the linking panel. The view flew close to a dark landmass with glimpses of structures and rails before settling on a spinning image of a small platform with a peaked roof supported by red posts and bridges leading off two sides. “Once more,” Twilight said, levitating the book up to Nyx’s waiting hoof.