//------------------------------// // Ch. 11 Into the Night // Story: The Brightest Shine // by Cozy Mark IV //------------------------------// The Brightest Shine Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release Chapter Eleven: Into the Night The day's work had left all of them tired, and though they badly wanted to set out at once, they voted to spend one last night in the igloo fine-tuning the sun and enjoying its' warmth. After months split between the dark freezing igloo and the black steamy hot-springs in the cave, the sun's new shield proved a delightfully bright, warm, dry place to sleep, and after adjusting the bubble to a size so that it wouldn't melt the walls, they all enjoyed some of the best sleep they had had in months. By now, morning and night had completely lost their connection to anything beyond everypony's sleep schedule, the never ending darkness outside giving no clue as to the true time of day. After a restful night's sleep, the delightful smell of Squall's kettle bubbling over the lava pool woke them all to a fresh breakfast of oatmeal and tea. As Steady finished his bowl, he and Shining shared a meaningful glance before he took up the subject. “All right, everypony, today is the day we've been waiting for. Shining has asked me to bring everyone up to speed on the plan, so here it goes: The sun's shield will keep our air in and seal out the cold so we don't freeze our hooves off on the cold ground out there, but that doesn't mean we can just go romping anywhere we please. This thing,” he gestured to the sun behind him, “will even keep us happy and breathing even if we walk the shield bubble onto a lake, but if you push through and out of the shield then you had better have one of your own up already.” Pie and Spec nodded as he continued, “Now, this is going to be a much longer trip, so we're packing our own air. Verdant has grown us some stone vacuum bottles, and we're bringing several days of oxygen in liquid form. If we run low, we'll go looking for a lake or basin to top up from, but we should have enough to make it.” Shining stood up, putting a hoof on his shoulder for a pause, “Thank you, Steady. Now, as to transportation, we have built a number of moon stones for a variety of different purposes, including a power tap for boosting a unicorn's teleportation spell. For those non-unicorns among us, we are normally limited in our distance, and how much we can carry by how much magical energy we have, or how rested we are. Just as four pegasi couldn't fly us all the way home with the sun, even if there were still any air out there, three unicorns cannot jump us more than a short distance without draining ourselves and bringing down the shield in the process. If we use the sun's power tap however, now, jumps of nearly any range and volume are suddenly possible. “We will be jumping from mountain top to mountain top using a clear line of sight to avoid crashing into something, but what we are doing is still very dangerous.” She reached into her saddlebags and produced a moon stone the size of a billiard ball formed from brilliant orange granite. “If things get out of hand for whatever reason, we won't have time to talk things out in an hour long meeting. Pie, Spec and myself each have one of these emergency stones. If our lives are in danger, we will load one of these stones into the sun, and that teleports everyone who's inside of their own shield as far south as possible in one enormous jump. I am warning you of this, because while a jump that long is very possible, aiming it is not. If we are forced to load one of these into the sun, we will each have a short time to throw up our shields and get everyone inside them before we find ourselves thousands of kilometers south, and two or three kilometers above the ground. If that happens, we are counting on the pegasi to give us a soft landing, and any equipment will have to fend for itself.” Sand Storm puffed his chest up as he wrapped a foreleg around Verdant. “You can count on us Ma'am.” Steady couldn't help but rib her, “Wow, this is a lot of planning from the same mare that once forget to warn us about crossing the beams.” Shining turned and fixed the pegasus with a serious look, while just a hint of a smile touched her lips. “And we have all come a long way since that day when our lack of planning nearly killed everypony. I am determined not to make that mistake again: If it is within my power to say so, everypony here is going to make it home alive and in good health.” She turned back to the others as she continued, “And to that end, all of our pegasi need to know one other thing about these emergency moons. Even though it will take a lot longer to jump back the normal way, there is a good reason we don't want to use these unless we have to. An unguided, marginally controlled teleportation of that magnitude is going to gather debris from any launch site and scatter it and us over a huge area: if we used it right now, we would shortly find ourselves falling from the sky far to the south, along with hundreds of metric tons of rock, magma, and who knows what else. The teleportation will grab our three shield bubbles, but also random pieces of the stone and magma beneath us, the walls around us, and anything in the sky above us in a sphere several kilometers across. Squall's eyes had grown larger as he muttered respectfully, “So, we must be ready to dodge. Thank you for that warning.” “And let's hope there is no one below us if that happens.” Pie agreed, before a quirky idea crossed her mind, “Though the confusion it would cause geologists...” She smiled at the thought, “Random pieces of stone from the far north, inexplicably scattered across the south? I'll bet they would never figure out how it got there.” The rest of them shared a confused look before Steady coughed and continued. “At any rate, our first goal must be to investigate the strange light beams coming from the north. As nearly as we can tell, they're the source of the cold and the wind, and while Spec's temperature probes back home don't show anything like the kind of cold we're dealing with here, it's only a matter of time until it gets there. If we do nothing, we'll get to watch as the entire world freezes and dies just like the lands around us have.” Flare spoke up, stamping her hoof into the ground as she asked, “Do we know who we're fighting? Some kind of unicorn sorcerer?” Steady and Shining shared a worried look, “We don't know. If we can survive this cold, then it is possible others could if they set out to cause it, but Shining has told me it would be a massive undertaking to pull off something like this. It is possible that some kind of 'darkness' or 'night' cult could be causing this, but it's hard to imagine why several hundred powerful unicorns would want to drive the sun from the sky and bring on eternal night... Personally, I hope that isn't the case,” Steady continued with a shake of his head, “because I've fought in wars against the truly crazy, and I have no desire to do so again.” He added with a shudder. Sand Storm looked back and forth between their blurry faces, trying to read their expressions as he asked, “Well, we're going in prepared, right? Full armor and weapons?” Shining shook his head to clear it of haunting memories and replied, “Of course, but our best weapon in all this may be the sun itself. Whoever's doing this probably won't have any knowledge of it, and we've all seen what it can do at full power.” There were respectful nods around the circle of ponies as Shining picked up, “No one here wants to see the sun burn down and explode as it nearly did last time, but that doesn't mean we can't put it to good use. Right now we have it in the lowest power mode, giving off only a tiny amount of its full light and heat, with most of that contained inside the shield. This,” she held out an oval stone with a bright red dot in the center, “is a keyed moon stone that will lock the sun in place and into its full output and bubble size until shut off by all three unicorns now present. Unless all three of us work together, the sun will be immovably stuck in place and at full output. I don't know what kind of cold magic would be necessary to freeze half a continent, but it's a safe bet that it's not compatible with balmy twenty degree weather. Unless something changes, our plan is to find whatever is causing this, and light the sun up right on top of it.” Verdant still looked worried as she asked, “And if that doesn't work?” Shining's expression hardened, and she tapped the red circle on the oval stone meaningfully. “Then we press this symbol, and that gives us a very short window to get out before the sun explodes and excavates a crater five kilometers across and one deep. That's a last resort though, because if we do that, and we're wrong, we've got nothing left to work with. There's also no guarantee that the emergency moon stones will work with the sun burning into overload, so lets all hope it doesn't come to that.” The group exchanged nervous glances and several of the couples snuggled closer together as Steady continued, “Very well then. We all know the stakes and what has to be done. Everypony meet back here in ten minutes with whatever you're taking with you and we'll be off. … The group flashed into existence on top of the igloo, most wearing full armor with various weapons tucked into their saddlebags, and Shining began fiddling with the shield settings, soon adjusting it to allow them to see out without being blinded by the reflected light of the sun. As their eyes adjusted once more, Shining brought the light output of the sun up gradually until they could see the mountainsides and valleys around them, and the sight gave all of them pause. The last of the atmosphere had rained out by now, leaving an unnatural crisp clarity to the landscape that not even the driest, clearest day could match. Those with good eyesight could make out the smallest features on even distant hillsides, every rock and frozen stone standing out in stark, unearthly relief. In the valleys below they could see tributaries and streams of liquid air trickling and flowing through the frozen landscape, while immediately beneath them, the lake of liquid air they had built on the hilltop remained absolutely still, and reflective like a mirror. It was that stillness that was most unnerving. The sun's new tuning meant that it made very little noise, just the occasional soft hiss or crackle, like an abandoned campfire in the hours before the dawn. From the vacuum outside came... silence. Absolutely nothing could be heard, the streams and rivers below moving as though in a dream. Sand Storm, who had by now learned to rely more on his hearing picked up a loose stone and threw it out of the bubble, watching as it bounced off the steep slope of the igloo wall below and hit the lake with a splash, all in total silence. The view was both serenely beautiful in its clarity and threateningly alien, as all of them knew very well what would happen to them should their shield fail. After another minute of fiddling with the controls to tap into the teleportation moon, Shining took the offered telescope from Steady, sighted in the next mountaintop and jumped. The landscape shifted abruptly, tilting slightly as the purple afterglow faded and their bubble settled onto the uneven ground of the mountaintop. Their jump had taken them a dozen kilometers at a stride, but while the details were different, the landscape remained depressingly familiar. “Say what you will about vacuum,” Shining muttered as she sighted in the next jump, “at least it makes this easier.” The group jumped again and reappeared on a lower hill, the mountains beginning to fade into the distance behind them. Over the next few hours, the mountains disappeared completely, and their jumps shortened as they hopped along the flat terrain. Periodically, Shining would pause long enough to dim the bubble so they could see the strange straight lines of rainbow light growing brighter and nearer overhead, and as they got closer, a dim column became visible in the distance, linking the lights in the sky to something on the ground. Soon the flat prairie gave way to low rolling hills, and the column linking the lights in the sky to the ground began to resolve itself. There was now no question that the lights flowed through something, as the column appeared to be composed of some strange smoke that absorbed all light that touched it, and could be seen only when it billowed out, over the lines of light, obscuring them from sight. The same lightning visible in the sky overhead flashed back and forth through the column, appearing and disappearing as it arced between the different colors and flowed through the smoke. By now, the light of it all had grown strong and near enough to cast an eery, flickering glow over the frozen landscape, and they could tell they had nearly arrived. Shining sighted in a distant hilltop and closed her eyes in concentration as she called out, “We should be coming into view in the next jump or two. I've dimmed out the shield and set the sun as low as it can go, but we'll still be visible to anyone looking for us. Be ready.” The landscape shifted again as the purple afterglow of her magic faded, and the assembled ponies looked around to find themselves in the shadow of a low hilltop. The rainbow light and lightning was now bright enough to provide a dim illumination of the surrounding landscape on all sides, but for the modest pool of darkness provided by the hill. Steady whistled the command for a march, and the other pegasi fell in behind him as the rest caught on and followed, their bubble traveling with them as they walked toward the oddly flat plane that sparkled in the dim light. The sound of a deep and threatening “CRACK!” followed by splintering and snapping made them all jump after traveling so long in silence, but before anyone could ask, the bubble abruptly fell about a ponies height before bobbing to a new equilibrium as jagged shards of nitrogen ice scraped against the outside of their shield a little above knee height. “It's okay...” Shining managed in a shaky voice, “We just broke through the surface of a nitrogen lake. The shield was built for this, we just have to keep walking and row ourselves out into the light so we can make the next jump.” With a few nervous nods, the others began trotting forward, the bubble's surface transferring their motion into a forward paddle that rolled them onward, snapping and breaking a path through the layer of nitrogen ice that had formed on the liquid nitrogen lake. As they rolled out of the hill's shadow into the dim rainbow light, each of them turned to see and was transfixed by the sight before them, their bubble gradually drifting to a stop as it bobbed slightly on the surface of the lake. It was huge. Their first impression couldn't help but be of the sheer scale of the thing before them. The shape was vaguely reminiscent of a mountain or a pyramid, but beyond that any analogies failed them. It seemed to build up in fits and starts to the column of rainbow lines that enclosed and confined the smoke emerging from several huge craters or stacks spread across the top. As each line of light pulsed and brightened in sequence, pieces of the thing the size of towns would light up in unearthly colors, sometimes before and sometimes after the lines themselves pulsed, briefly illuminating the surface of the thing and sometimes seeming to shine from deep within, as though hinting at some massive glowing power source deep within the structure. The surface and shape of it was actually difficult to make out, as light didn't seem to illuminate it as it should. Here and there, spires or bulges jutted out at odd angles; in some places, flat planes seemingly covered in ten meter tall grass transitioned into sheer vertical cliffs, while their textures and colors continued on, long after the mind said they should have stopped. There was a long silence as they all stood staring at the thing that pulsed and glowed in this flat spot between the low hills. “What in Tartarus is that thing?” Flare finally asked, worry warring with awe in her voice. Shining didn't turn from the sight before her as she answered, “I have no idea.” Not burdened with a scientist's mindset, Steady fell back on his military training, simply calling out what he could see. “It's definitely a made thing... It might even be alive somehow, but it doesn't look like anything a pony would build...” Spec pointed to a cloudy patch about half way down the right slope, “Is that... Steam?” As they all watched, another revolution of the light pulses came around, this time making the area glow a bright green from deep below and showing what appeared to be streams of liquid air running down the side and into the thing, only to emerge back through a series of holes as a fine mist of vapor that flowed down the slope, gradually condensing back into a liquid and collecting in a wide pool near ground level. “It almost looks like some kind of weird factory...” Pie wondered aloud. “Perhaps, but I do not see anything that looks like a door or window... It looks closer to a coral reef than a building...” Squall muttered. Sand Storm had been gazing at the dull multicolored blob as patiently as he could with his poor eyesight, but at length he could bear it no more. “Yes, I'm sure it's all very pretty and such, but why are we still standing here gawking? We came here to save the world, so let's get on with it!” Steady turned to Shining, “Can we break that thing? I was counting on some kind of magical trinket or stone, not an entire bucking mountain!” Shining shook her head to clear it and brought the telescope up to her eye, “I don't know. Let me get a little closer before I start making promises I can't keep.” Their surroundings shifted again as the group looked around to find themselves down on level ground looking up at the thing towering into the sky before them. The usual stony ground around them was punctuated here and there with strange house-sized projections of ice or crystallized material that jutted out of the rock beneath their hooves as though it had grown up from deep below. The shards tended to be sharp, with jagged edges, and often cool blues or greens in color. Shining, one of the few ponies who had forgone armor in favor of tools, pulled a thermometer from her saddlebags and pressed it through the wall of the bubble and up against one of the crystals. “Well, if the entire thing is made of this stuff, we might have a problem... I don't know what this is, but its almost eighty degrees below zero C. In this landscape, it might as well be white hot steel straight out of the forge!” “Wait, those things are hot?” Pie asked as she surveyed the field of jagged crystals around them, thinking hard. “Shining... it it possible those things are superconductors?” Spec and Shining both turned to look at her, their own brows furrowed in thought as they worked it all through. “Maybe... We've never seen a superconductor that would still work at so high a temperature, but...” Shining looked up at Verdant, “Could you pass me a cup of oxygen? I think I know how to test this...” Verdant's face lit up as she caught on, and she dispensed a small stone cup of the steaming air which Shining took in her magic and poured out on the crystal, some distance from the thermometer. “It worked!” Spec shouted from where she was watching the temperature, “Look how fast that dropped; this thing is a superconductor!” Flare put a hoof on Spec's shoulder, “Hold on there, what's a superconductor?” Spec turned on her with a giddy light in her smile as she explained, “A superconductor is a material that transmits electricity and heat without any losses, and at incredible speed! They're really neat materials that have all kinds of potential uses, but they only work in extreme cold. You look at this field full of crystal spines and see a bunch of rocks: I see a field of cooling fins!” “Cooling fins?” “Of course!” Verdant answered as she caught on, “This must be a heat dump for some huge machine... Maybe even the one that's running that.” She gestured up to the column of smoke overhead as her brow furrowed once more. “Speaking of which... Shining, could you teleport a sample of that stuff down here?” Shining thought about it and nodded, a hoof sized sphere of the stuff flashing into existence just outside the bubble as the pegasi glanced warily around. Shining shown the light of her horn on the smoke, and blinked at the bright reflection as the stuff turned into a perfect mirror, reflecting the light back into her eyes. “Ow... Well that answers that. Whatever this stuff is, it's designed to reflect sunlight back out into space, and apparently, it's pretty damn good at it. That's why we haven't seen the sun or moon in months now: they're still up there, but this... smoke, is blotting them out!” “How are we supposed to deal with that?!” “Let's not throw our hooves up yet. When it comes to breaking things, never underestimate what a team of determined pegasi- er, ponies can do. Let's get a little closer and see if we can find a way in.” Shouldering their weapons, the group set off through the field of crystal blocks, pausing now and then to examine something of interest and continually looking over their shoulders. So far there was no suggestion that anypony knew or cared about their presence here, and they all felt anxious to keep it that way. The most direct route forward soon took them up the side of a low ridge, and it was Pie, leading the way who saw it first. And screamed. The rest of the ponies reacted in a moment, forming a protective ring around their position, their weapons bristling outward as they scanned the sky and the horizon for anything moving. Nothing came. After several tense moments, the eery silence broken only by the sound of their breathing, Squall whispered something to Pie, and followed her pointed hoof up to the crystal spire overhead, his face going ashen as he saw it. Encased in the light blue crystal was a brown pony, or at least what had once been a pony. While the armor and wings made it clear he had very recently been a member of the pegasi force, those details now seemed much less important than his present condition. The frozen body in the crystal had been sheared into pieces, like a real life version of a biology textbook's cut away illustration. While the head was more or less intact, its' one whole eye fixed in a frozen stare up into the sky at the mountainous thing high above them, the other eye had been bisected as well, as had two of the legs, one wing and the entire trunk after the shoulder. The shifted sections were further split and segmented, with individual organs isolated and sometimes cut neatly apart as well, a myriad of thin green threads flowing through the crystal and connecting everything together. “Was... was he one of yours?” Shining finally managed as she tried to get her racing heart under control again. Stead nodded dumbly, his eyes wide as well as he stated simply, “Flying Phoenixes, third unit... He must have gotten separated during the fight with the windigos and wound up freezing to death out here...” Squall's eyes were still very large indeed as he held Pie close to calm her shivering, “I have never seen ice do that before!” Without any speech, the deafening silence of this desert moonscape fell once more. After some time, Sand Storm prodded them again. “Not that I don't feel for the poor bastard, but we can't do anything to help him now, and we still have a job to do.” Steady shook his head to clear it, “Yes, you're right. Come on, we're getting close to the outer... layer, so let's keep going.” As the rest of them turned away down the slope of the hill, Spec couldn't help but linger a moment, holding Flare's hoof. “What could have done that to him?” she asked softly, staring up at the frozen body, its' one good eye looking down at the ground where they stood as though watching them. “I don't know, but... wait... wasn't he looking up at the sky a second ago...?" The hairs on the back of their necks were beginning to stand up on their own as the two scrutinized the frozen corpse staring down at them. Spec took a tentive step backwards as she asked, "I... I thought it was... but... I must have been wrong..." "Yeah..." Flare shakily agreed as she backed away wide eyed, "We must have... imagined it." A quick glance down showed the bubble's edge coming at them as the others and their sun walked down the hill behind them. “Come on, let's get going.” ... Their path soon led them outer edge of the thing, and as they came to a stop beside it, it still wasn't clear what they were looking at. Overhead, it towered into the sky, but at ground level, a kind of crystal barrier separated the surface from the rocky soil. Where they stood, the surface looked smooth with long thin spikes emerging and curving upward in clumps like some kind of plant growth. The material making up each texture appeared to be the same though. Cautiously, Shining reached out with a geologist's hammer in her magic and delivered a gentle tap to one of the long spines which broke off and fell to the ground where it shattered like glass, those pieces that landed on the bare ground slowly beginning to melt. “That's more like it.” Shining said with simple satisfaction. “Whatever this thing is, it sure can't take heat, so our sun should make short work of it. Verdant, could you pass me a cup of water?” Shining took the offered cup and flung the contents out through the shield where they fell in a rain on the clumps of spines before them. The result was like throwing liquid steel onto an ice sculpture. An explosion of boiling vapors filled the air as frozen chunks of the hill fell all around them, sizzling where they touched the ground. Almost immediately, a soft orange light shown from under the surface, and as they watched, the spines and surface features began to gradually re-grow like a plant viewed through time lapse film until, several minutes after the last vapor cleared, the area had grown back as though nothing had happened. As they all watched in fascination, Steady said simply, “Right. So we won't have to destroy the sun; just turning it on should be more than enough to kill this thing.” “That's true,” Shining amended, “But look at the size of it! If we light up the sun right here at the edge, it won't be big enough to get the entire thing!” “What if we teleport to the top and set it off there?” “Still not big enough. At full power the sun is going to cover a huge area, but this thing is widest at the base, and just look at all these projections coming up from underground! Do you want to take the chance that we wouldn't get it all?” Steady fervently shook his head, “No way. There's no telling what will happen after we light up the sun, but I very much doubt the locals will come running out with flowers and champagne. That means we have to find a way inside and set it off in the center, just a little below ground level.” “Exactly. That way, if we don't get high enough, it won't matter. Anything up above will fall down into the bubble after it's supports boil away.” She turned to address the other ponies behind her, “We need to start looking for a way in. If we're lucky, there may be caves or tunnels around here. If not, we'll have to teleport out a sphere of rock from underneath and try to get the sun in there without bringing the whole thing down on top of us.” As she turned away, Verdant spoke up with a question that had been nagging at the back of her mind, “Shining? We haven't seen any sign of anypony else around here, so whatever this is wasn't built by us...” Shining waited patiently for her to continue, “And it can re-grow itself. Steady, I think this thing is alive.” To her surprise, Steady simply nodded, “It certainly looks that way, yes.” “Well...” Verdant rubbed the back of her head uncomfortably, “shouldn't we at least try to talk to it before we decide to kill it?” There was a long silence as the ponies looked back and forth between the alien mountain and Verdant, but no one spoke. “I mean, we wouldn't just kill somepony before you know why they did something, right?” The silence had become distinctly uncomfortable as all of them could remember times when members of their tribes had done exactly that to the earth ponies. Steady cringed as he remembered a superior officer's words from years ago; 'Who cares if this is the one that stole it, just let her drop! She doesn't even have wings, so she's hardly entitled to pegasus justice.' At last Shining spoke up again, looking Verdant directly in the eye; “I don't know if we even can talk to it, but if the opportunity presents itself, I promise you I will try.” Verdant smiled back at her, and without further issue, the group set off around the base of the thing, looking for some kind of imperfection in the ground that might indicate a tunnel. It only took a few jumps and one quarter of the thing's diameter before they spotted the cloud fog billowing from an underground pipe that emerged from the ground at a forty five degree angle. A quick check with the thermometer confirmed Pie's suspicions. “This is mostly nitrogen. It's only a bit above the boiling point, but its just warm enough to flow out like a fog.” The rocks and stones around them were sweating visibly in the fog as the air condensed back into liquid nitrogen and ran in trickles down to the ground. Pie formed her own bubble and walked out around to the far side of the opening, staring down into the blackness below. “Okay, this might lead in the right direction, but how do we get down there with the shield up?” Unexpectedly, the ground beneath their hooves began to vibrate, and as they watched in astonishment, the narrow opening began to grow wider, revealing a larger tunnel below from which other passages branched off. It took a moment for them to realize that Verdant had closed her eyes and was smiling broadly; “Wow, I've never seen stone like this before!” The others stared at the green earth pony in astonishment as she opened her eyes. “I don't know what this crystal is made out of, but it's amazingly responsive! It's almost as though it was designed to respond to my magic...” Shining and Pie shared a look of concern. “This is the same stuff we saw used as cooling fins a few kilometers ago, isn't it?” “It seems to be.” “Verdant, have you ever seen this stuff before?” The earth pony put a hoof against the side of the light blue crystal surface and concentrated, the others watching in amazement as a crystal star slowly grew from the stone in front of her. “Sorry, but no. I've read up on almost every kind of stone and glass there is, but I've never seen or heard of anything like this stuff...” Her eyes followed their own as they looked up at the mountain that dominated the sky, “I guess it must have come from that thing...” There was a long silence as the implications of that sunk home. Once more, it was Sand Storm who broke the silence. “So when we're done, we'll turn this place into a quarry and charge admission. Lucky us. Can we please get on with it?” Spec agreed with a shiver, “Yeah, this place gives me the creeps.” Pie walked back around the hole that Verdant had widened, and gestured for the earth pony to join her, “All right then, I'll keep my shield as small as I can, and I think I can make it fit, but the rest of you will have to wait here for me to send back a beacon. With a little luck, we can make a space under there big enough for the sun, and then you can lock onto my beacon and teleport in.” She turned with a flick of her tail and looked down into the black abyss that threatened to swallow up the light of her horn. “Come on, Verdant; lets get moving!”