The Brightest Shine

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The slope of the tunnel was steep enough that even ponies had to be mindful of their footing on the smooth crystal. All around them, the thin mist of nitrogen fog blew steadily by, accelerating around the obstruction caused by their bubble, and giving a low moan as it passed. The only illumination in the dark tunnel came from Pie's horn as she lighted her way, though occasionally, Verdant thought she could see tiny flashes of colored light, just at the edges of her perception. The slope soon ended over a sheer vertical drop to the larger tunnel below, the ventilation tunnel obviously never having been intended for pony traffic. As the two of them teetered on the lip of the drop, Pie closed her eyes and with a 'pop!' their bubble teleported to the floor of the larger tunnel below, coming to rest with a splash in the shallow stream of liquid nitrogen running along the bottom.
Down here in the larger tunnel, the boiled nitrogen fog seemed to be moving faster, and the moaning of turbulent air around their bubble increased in pitch as they continued forward. Before and behind them, the tunnel disappeared into absolute blackness in the distance, as though to hide some secret horror from their eyes, but mercifully, it showed no signs of narrowing, and even when they paused to look and listen, nothing moved in the darkness.

After walking on in silence for several minutes, the ever-present moan of the wind and the slosh of liquid nitrogen around the edges of their bubble in the vast darkness began to grate on both their nerves. Finally Verdant spoke up, if only to hear another voice;
“Don't get me wrong, I'm happy this tunnel is here, but why is there a convenient tunnel right to the heart of this thing?”

“A cooling duct?” Verdant asked, her raised eyebrow invisible in the dim light of Pie's horn.

“Yeah, think about it: Whatever this thing is, it seems to like this extreme cold. If we take that as a given, then maybe this tunnel is the equivalent of a steam output pipe on one of those new steam engines.”

Verdant considered what little she had seen of steam engines,
“Pie, the tubing you're talking about is usually only five centimeters across. If this is serving the same purpose...” She trailed off looking up at the ceiling lost in the blackness high above their heads.

Pie followed her gaze up, then back down into the black distance ahead of them.
“Then we have a long way to go.” She shook out her mane with a grin. “I'm sure Shining will worry if we're gone for too long. Do you feel up for a gallop?”

After months of living inside cramped quarters, Verdant hardly had to be asked twice.

Many minutes later, the two of them were still galloping at full speed, the physical exertion lending strength to Pie's light and giving them a better view of their surroundings. The tunnel had not shrunk, as they feared, but continued to grow larger as more vent tunnels branched off above and to the sides. The darkness had also slowly given way as soft colored lights began to become visible overhead, and the tiny flashes of light Verdant had seen earlier grew in strength as well, showing themselves to be traveling along wires or pipes that twined together through the crystal walls, invisible until illuminated by the pulses of light. Beneath their hooves, the stream of liquid nitrogen had become a powerful torrent, flowing swiftly back downhill into the heart of the thing.

“Pie?” Verdant called as she pounded along, trying to keep from panting, “How are we going to know when we're at the center?”

Pie smiled as she galloped along,
“Don't worry! The other half of the beacon stone I left with Shining tells me how far the jump is. We can guess at how big this mountain thing is, cut that number in half, and that should tell us when to stop.”

Verdant suddenly put a hoof out to slow her, causing Pie to look ahead and gasp.
“Or, we could just wait until we stumble across that.”

Around them, the tunnel had suddenly widened, while a dozen meters ahead, the flow of liquid nitrogen suddenly disappeared over a fall. Sticking to the side of the tunnel, the two of them made their way carefully to the edge and looked down.
Below them, the liquid nitrogen fell ten meters into a huge round basin, the bottom of which was invisible, owing to the rolling boil of the liquid as large bubbles rose up through it, causing the surface to rock with the turbulence. Pie held her breath and stored up her energy before giving off a blinding flash from her horn that briefly illuminated the side of the space they found themselves on.
While the ceiling was high, some six to eight stories overhead, it sloped down towards a low point in the middle of the room, forcing the vaporized nitrogen to flow up and out of the chamber. The walls of blue crystal sparkled for a moment as the light passed through them, giving the impression of some high spike or spire of crystal that towered invisibly into the ceiling over their heads.

“Do you think this is close enough to center?” Verdant asked, her mouth hanging open at the scale of the place.

Pie was fiddling with her beacon stone, but after a moment, she looked up and nodded.
“If I'm right, this chamber is actually slightly off center. We just need to clear a flat spot for them to land, and we can bring the sun in right here.”

Verdant smiled and walked out towards a flat spot along the edge that was just big enough for her, then, planting her hooves firmly, she closed her eyes and reached out to the crystal with her will. Around her, the wall began to recede, and the floor extend as she opened and flattened the place she stood so that it could receive the sun. Pie looked on in concern as Verdant began to sweat, and tons of crystal receded out of the way as she brought her magic to bear, but as the effect faded, and Verdant tottered, Pie put a shoulder under the earth pony to steady her.

Pie gently lowered her to the ground and fished the beacon stone out of her saddlebags, lifting it up in her magic, and giving it a strong jolt. The stone flashed and shown for a moment, and with a loud 'SNAP!', six ponies appeared in their midst, the light of the sun nearly blinding them after working for so long by hornlight. As everyone's eyes adjusted, there was a general intake of breath as they all took in the crystal cavern before them.

The others nodded dumbly, Steady reaching out and taking Shining's hoof as they stared in awe. Even Sand Storm couldn't help but gawk for a moment, but time continued to tick by, and after listening to the deep rumbling boil of the liquid nitrogen below, he looked up with a sad expression.
“This place is incredible. I never thought I'd actually regret burning something to the ground.”

That seemed to snap them out of it. Shining turned and began preparing the sun to rise, while the others each fished out their orange stones.

All eye turned to the green pony by the wall, just at the edge of their bubble. Verdant had one hoof pressed against a thick strand of crystal threads that pulsed with red light and throbbed as they watched. “I think I've found something!”

Shining paused in her work to share a concerned glance with Steady before walking over.
“What is it?”

Verdant looked up, the thrill of discovery written large on her face,
“I think this is some kind of nerve, or mind link! I was able to expose it by moving the crystal out of the way, and I can almost hear it! Listen!”

Shining cocked her head to one side, and to her surprise found that she could hear something. It was faint, like the humming of insects in a distant tree, but she could feel it as a kind of tingling in her skin, and especially in her horn.

“I can't tell what it is, but you have proper magic.” Verdant added as she looked expectantly at Shining. “We've all seen what this thing has done, but we still don't know anything about it. Doesn't it make sense to at least find out what's going on before we kill it?”

The other ponies shared nervous glances, but this time, Sand Storm stepped closer and wrapped a foreleg around her.
“She has a point, Commander. We're already here, and we've got the sun set up to burn. Whatever this thing is, it isn't going anywhere; we've got it right where we want it, so let's do the right thing. If we can find out what it is, we should at least try.”

Memories of everything that had happened over the last two years flashed through their minds; the hardship, the hunger, the ice and cold that never let up, but balanced against that were the unanswered questions, of guilt or innocence, or simple curiosity. Questions about the thing's origins, who built it, what it was, whether more would come. Questions which they would never know the answers to if they burned it now...

With a sigh, Steady asked,
“Is it possible to put the sun on a ten-minute delay?”

Shining studied the moon stone in her hoof and nodded, her magic flowing into the stone and making minor adjustments. “Yes. Spec? Please put a similar delay on your emergency stone: we'll use it to get out of here.”

In a couple of minutes they were ready once more, and Shining turned to the assembled ponies.
“All right, the clock is ticking now: Verdant, Sand Storm? You go with Squall and Pie. Put as much distance between us and yourselves as you can. If things get nasty, we don't want you immediately available to be coerced into turning off the sun. Flare, Spec? You two take a different direction down one of the other tunnels. Steady and I will wait here and try to talk to this thing. Just remember: when you start to feel the sun's heat, you MUST have your bubble up, because that's what the moon stone will lock onto to teleport you south. Is everypony ready?”

“But isn't that really dangerous?” Flare asked with surprising concern, “I mean, what if you're so busy with that thing you don't get your shield up in time?”

Shining just smiled.
“Don't worry, the sun will kick on a few moments before the teleportation, so we'll have plenty of warning. Besides, just look at this place,” She added with a sweeping gesture, “If anypony is still here when all those millions of tons of cryogenic ice start to melt, they'll be crushed like a bug, shield or no shield. I'm not taking any chances about getting out when the time comes.”

“Well... I guess this is it then...” Spec said as she held out a hoof to shake Shining's own.

“Oh, don't be so melodramatic.” Shining admonished gently. “This will scatter our three groups over several hundred miles, but we all have somepony to take care of us,” She added as she rubbed affectionately against Steady's side, “And it should only take a couple of weeks to find each other again in the south. Remember the plan: we'll leave messages at the top of the tallest mountain visible from the largest pony settlement we can find. That should make it a lot easier, especially if we check in every few days.”

Spec blushed sheepishly as Flare threw a foreleg over her shoulder.
“Well, in that case, let's hope this works, and I'll see you all in the south!”

There were hugs and goodbyes all around, and soon Pie, Squall, Sand Storm and Verdant were shrinking into the distance down the tunnel they had come from, just a faint point of light in the vast darkness. Spec and Flare had teleported to another tube and waved once more before disappearing from view, their own horn light soon lost from view. Shining and Steady remained silent, hoof in hoof for a moment, taking one last look.

Steady chuckled softly.
“Ready to see the back side of the worst winter we've ever known?” He leaned in and kissed her softly, “Yes, I think I'm ready for that.”

Without another word, Shining stepped up to the sun and loaded in the two moon stones, starting the countdown on the sun as they both slid into place and locked with the magic equivalent of a 'Click!”. With the task done, Shining trotted pensively over to the exposed strand of crystal filament emerging from the wall and gently placed her hoof on it, feeling the throb of energy through the specialized crystal.

“As ready as I'll ever be. Stay close and keep an eye out; this might take all my attention, so don't let anything sneak up on us okay?”

Steady nodded and kissed her again before turning around and adopting a rigid, somewhat ridiculous sentry position from the force, his absurdly stern expression making her smile as she brought her horn into contact with the fibers, closed her eyes, and reached out with her magic.

With a jolt, Shining felt herself floating in a crisp black sky studded with stars much like the night sky back home, and her stomach lurched and protested as gravity took it's leave. As she put a hoof to her midsection, the motion sent her into a slow spin, the startled pony now breathing harder as the stars began rotating around her and she tumbled through empty space.

'Wait a second...' She thought, 'Empty space?' Shining took a deep breath, held it, and let it go. 'Okay, so if I'm breathing, then this isn't real.'

Shining had taken only the most basic courses on telepathy, but she knew enough to recognize what had happened; She was inside another mind, and what she was seeing was most likely the thing's home. With a thought, she reached out and grabbed onto nothing, stopping her tumbling action so she could look around. No one and nothing was visible besides the stars, but with a start she realized sky was... different... brighter and more vibrant somehow... It took a moment for her to sort it out, but the broad swaths of dim color around the galaxies, and the insistent static helped it all click into place: She was seeing through the things eyes!

The stars that had appeared superficially similar only appeared as white points if she glanced over them. Focusing her attention on one star, a distant sphere of its solar wind came into focus, the bow shock distorted and compressed by the background radiation pressure of the surrounding stars. As the view enlarged, she could make out the arcs and solar flares blasting off the surface of the star. She could even hear them! As she watched, an enormous arch of plasma fire lifted out of the surface of the star, writhing and twisting in its turbulent magnetic fields before letting go with a thunderous 'CRACK!' that nearly deafened her. She pulled her view back, and found she could see the radiation coming off the star, and its neighbors, floating like a greenish bluish haze around the edge of the galactic plane, and intensifying to a vibrant red and white towards the center of the disk.

'I can... no, this thing can see radiation! It can hear the solar wind! What kind of creature is this?!'

She couldn't help but stare for a time, lost in the beauty of a sky she had know all her life, but was only now able to see. In the distance, a pulsar chattered away, and out beyond the edge of the galaxy, several smaller satellite galaxies orbited like floating city’s. A strange sound found her ears, and turning her attention toward a distant speck of light, she realized she was looking at a galaxy that was incredibly distant, and... falling?

Through some feeling she could not explain, she knew the entire thing was falling away from her, accelerating off into distant blackness, and as she learned to listen for the lower pitched static, to see the red specks, she began to notice the same pattern on all the distant stars and galaxies; The universe was coming apart... She could see it now through this things eyes, and her heart beat faster as her mind tried to wrap itself around the truth; something was devouring the distant stars and galaxies, pulling them away into oblivion. These were not worlds, or lone stars, but entire oceans of stars and planets, falling and falling, faster and faster until, her mind told her, they would disappear from view forever, never to be seen again.

The magnitude of it all left her head spinning, but with supreme effort, she pushed the issue from her mind. The fate of the universe would have to wait for another day; She was here to save her friends and her world, and to do that, she had to find whatever lived here, though on some level, she felt like it was already watching her...

There was no echo, though the idea of sound vibrating around in a vacuum was already strange enough that it threatened to give her a headache. Inside another mind, everything one saw was at the whim, and usually through the perspective of, the host. A visitor like herself could impose her will over some matters, but the class had mentioned it was always a gamble as to how much control a visitor would have.
'All right, let's try something else.' And with a thought, she built up her energy and let out a blinding flash of white light from her horn, hopping that there was someone or something here to see it. A moment later, another voice called out from her left.

Shining spun around to see a brown pegasus pony floating beside her, his wings slowly beating, apparently out of habit, as there was no gravity here and no place to fall to.

He looked back at her in confused delight,
“Well of course I am, but who are you?! How did you get here?”

Shining shook her head, sending her black mane floating out in all direction, the effect looking as though she were at the center of large black nebula.
“What do you mean who am I? Who are you!? And if you're really a pony, then what in Tartarus happened to you?!”

The pegasus scratched the back of his head in embarrassment,
“Uh... I think I died. This isn't exactly what I expected to happen after though...”

Shining had fixed him with a glare that could have set fire to a snow bank.
“Really?! You didn't expect that when you died you would turn into some kind of frozen ice mountain thing?! I'm pretty sure that part was a surprise to everypony!”

“Wait, what are you talking about?” his confusion showed clearly for a moment before understanding dawned; “Oh! No, that's not me. I'm just a private in the third unit of the Flying Phoenixes, or, at least I was...”

Shining's eyes had grown very wide as she remembered the stallion in the crystal they had seen only hours before.

The brown pony tilted his head slightly,
“Hey, are you okay? You don't look so good...”

With an effort, Shining forced her bile down and tried to focus on the task at hoof.
“Sorry. I'm okay...” She swallowed hard and looked at him again. “You said you think you died?”

“Well, yeah. I got lost in that big storm after the windigos broke loose, and in all the turbulence I lost my compass and got separated from the others. I flew for as long as I could, but eventually I was too exhausted to keep going; I know you're not supposed to go to sleep in the cold, but I was just so tired I couldn't help it...” He paused to look at the stars all around therm. “But then, next thing I know, the Darkness woke me up, and I'm in here.”

Shining was struggling to make sense of all this as she held up a hoof for him to slow down.
“Wait a second. The darkness woke you up? You mean it was daylight when you landed?”

The stallion looked at her oddly,
“No, I haven't seen the sun since those first few days of the campaign. I meant Darkness woke me up.” he seemed to think about it a moment, “I think it was curious.”

The hair on the back of her neck was suddenly standing up on its own.
“You mean, all of this,” she gestured at the stars around them, “isn't you?”

“No, of course not. As near as I can figure, we're inside of Darkness. It saved my life, and I'm grateful for that, though” He added wistfully, “it does get pretty lonely in here with no other ponies to talk to.”

The feeling of being watched had become overwhelming, as though she were standing naked in the center of a stadium packed full of silent spectators. Her voice had taken on a worried tremor as she asked,
“Is that what that huge cryogenic mountain thing is called? Darkness?”

“That is the designation/title/identifier this fire-life-self has used to describe self.”

The voice didn't seem to come from anywhere so much as it boomed from every atom in her body, making her jump and setting her spinning. Shining winced at the volume, but between trying not to wet herself or throw up, it was almost a minute before she was able to stop her spin and address the emptiness around her.

There was no response. After a moment, the brown pegasus answered her instead.
“That's the first thing I asked too. I don't think it understands what we're asking, because it doesn't really have any body, at least none it's ever shown me.”

Shining shook her head, sending ripples out through her main as it floated around her.
“How can you not have a body?! What are you?!”

“Self is intelligence/thought/consciousness. All else is stars, dust and gas. Self moves through space/vacuum/emptiness; consumes/absorbs/metabolizes dust and gas to grow.”

Shining winced again, but looked to the pegasus for an answer,
“This thing is from outer space?!”

The pegasus thought about it, and his face suddenly brightened as realization hit.
“Hey, I bet you're right! It must be an alien!”

Shining stared at the stallion in disbelief.
“I thought you said you had been here for a while! How did you not realize that?!” The pegasus looked confused again, as Shining began to remember how many ways his frozen body had been cleaved; some mental damage would be inevitable after that many slices.

The silence that followed gave her some time to collect her thoughts.
'Okay, so the thing is a bucking alien! Great, just bucking great! Think!'

The brown stallion seemed to have forgotten the last question as he commented,
“That's the nice thing about talking to Darkness. It always gives you plenty of time. I don't think it's very used to talking to anyone else.”

“Most recent prior communication with not-self occurred 1.2 galaxy rotations in the past.”

If Shining had been sitting in a chair, she would have fallen out of it.
“That's two hundred and seventy five million years ago! How old are you!?”

“Self separated form former-self and became autonomous twenty two revolutions in the past.”

Shining felt like her eyes were bulging out of her head.
'This thing is five billion years old?!'
“How is that even possible?! Our entire planet isn't that old! How can anything survive for that long!?”

The stars around them began to shift, taking up a new pattern as a strange shape coalesced in front of the two ponies. The shape was hard to define, as various protrusions, spines and dish-shaped craters were scattered across its surface. The thing floating before them had no color, a side effect, Shining realized, of their extreme distance from the nearest star. A quick look around confirmed her suspicions.

A piece of the thing about the size of a house broke off from the larger form and floated away as they watched, their view point shifting to follow this new object. The 'parent' thing drifted off and was soon lost from sight as the stars around them swirled and the new form ducked and dodged between them. The effect was not unlike riding in the back seat of a cab through the most bustling part of a city during rush hour. Stars from dim red dwarfs all the way up to titanic blue giants swirled and orbited about them. As she cringed from the speed of it all, she watched a yellow sun swing into view to her right, suddenly expand to hundreds of times its size, burn briefly as a red giant, then collapse back into a brown dwarf as it disappeared into the distance. Throughout this mad dash, the house-sized thing had gradually grown until it was almost ten times its original size, and that shocked her for a moment before the truth of their time scale hit her.

'I just watched a sun burn out in seconds! This thing's perspective on time is ridiculous! Millions of years to it are like minutes to us because in the emptiness of space, it takes eons for anything to happen...' Another thought came right behind, 'But if this thing has lived it's whole life in space, it's never known a sun or air or gravity or anything! How the hell do I talk to something for which 'up and 'down' are new concepts?'

The mad dash continued for a while longer until suddenly a large portion of the thing disappeared in a flash of blinding white light sending their view tumbling wildly.

“High energy meteor impact caused catastrophic/severe/life threatening damage. Continued normal operations would result in termination/irreversible shut down/death through raw material starvation. Extreme/unorthodox/unprecedented action required for survival.”

The uncontrolled spinning quickly subsided, and one of the nearby yellow stars began growing brighter and brighter, the injured creature limping towards it. As the sun grew ahead of them and soon took up station far off to their right, they could feel the temperature rising to unbearable levels. Both Shining and the pegasus had begun to sweat profusely, and she would have sworn it was at least eighty two degrees C (+180 F), yet the temperature at this distance from the sun couldn't be higher than two hundred twenty degrees below zero C, a temperature at which liquid nitrogen would freeze solid!

“Gas/dust/food density greatly increased. Continued exposure to high temperatures near the light impossible. New defenses developed for survival.”

As they watched, a layer of reflective crystal began to grow on the sun facing side of the thing, and soon the temperature the two ponies endured began to fall, leveling out at a scorching but tolerable forty degrees C (+105F). Around them, the creature had begun to grow at a much faster rate, and it's metabolism seemed to have increased as a result, their mad spinning around the sun slowing (at least in the thing's perception) as it made use of the denser food source to spend more time awake.

“Abundance of food tempted/interested/intrigued self. Increasing intelligence/awareness/wakefulness possible as direct result. Energy expended to modify self for high heat conditions/situations/environments near the light.”

Shining found she could actually feel the changes the thing was making to itself. More and better crystal heat shields began to form across the thing, and it's internal structure began to change as well, veins of liquid helium diverting into cryogenic heat exchangers that used other higher temperature liquids to dump heat opposite the sun facing side. As the three of them spun on and on about the sun, making perhaps ten revelations a minute, the ponies began to cool again, falling back to a pleasant twenty degrees C (+70 F) as the changes began to work. Throughout all this, the creature continued to grow, until it was now the size of twelve houses, larger even than its pre-injury state.

“Self moved closer to light in search of greater/increased/enlarged supply of gas/dust/food.”

A distinct feeling of the thing's hunger flowed through them both as the creature began to drift closer to the sun. As their orbit became smaller, and the temperature warmer, the creature's shielding continued to develop. Several times it had to back off as it worked out new ways to cool itself, but each time it reacted faster, seeming to grow smarter and quicker after each new problem. By now it had more than doubled in size and grown more in the last ten thousand years than it had in the previous hundred million, but it wasn't to last. As the ponies watched, a green/blue dot appeared in the distance, and suddenly, the entire creature lurched violently, several long protrusions snapping and breaking away.

“Extreme/violent/chaotic gravity distortion emanating from light! Unable to break away!”

They were spinning again now as the world grew rapidly from a dot to a bright green planet, and both ponies could feel the strain as the creature fought the tidal forces that were tearing pieces off it. It's panic and desperation flowed through them as it tried to draw itself together and extend its protective shielding to cover all of it's sides. Then, to their amazement, it managed to stabilize itself: What had looked like certain destruction became an erratic, but survivable orbit, and though the distortions continued to pummel the creature, it adapted once more, becoming much more compact and enclosing itself completely in the reflective crystal heat shielding.

For several minutes of their time, and hundreds of years of real time, the creature managed to ride out the gravity distortions, struggling to build up it's orbit and escape, but stopped again and again by small changes in the timings of sunrise and sunset. The crystal around it hardened into a shield that was both insinuative, reflective, and ablative as it gambled that it would escape, but worried of what would happen if it didn't. It had almost made it out again when its' doom came.

The planet below them rotated sharply and held position, then oscillated violently back and forth, and Shining gasped as she realized what she was seeing;
“This is the ancient war between the Unicorns and the Pegasi tribes! The unicorns tried to deny sunlight to their enemies several times before the conflict was over!”

The creature narrating all this didn't seem to care about the intricacies of equine politics and ignored Shining as the world around them began to spin again, the planet growing larger and larger as they barreled towards it at break neck speed. The creature knew it could no longer escape, and did it's best to aim for the pole as it went in, but soon the ragged edges of the atmosphere began to touch the outside of the shielding, and all vision and external perception burned out in the fire of reentry.

Blind now, it burned a trail across the sky, coming in to crash at a shallow angle in a frozen ice field far north of the equator. The heat shielding had protected it from the short inferno in the atmosphere, but now it's real fear was realized; It was drowning at the bottom of a deep ocean of boiling fire! The place was so hot that nitrogen, used now as a super high temperature heat transfer fluid, was vaporized into a burning gas!

With its' eyes ripped away, the world around the ponies was absolutely black, and as the heat rapidly increased, the creatures fear coursed through them as it desperately tried to stay alive. Shining screamed with the creature as her skin began to burn and her coat caught fire in patches in the hellish heat of the frozen ice field. They writhed in pain as the heat began to destroy memory and burn away pieces of the thing's mind, and Shining could feel it beginning to shrink, its thoughts becoming sluggish as it fought to survive.

The creature didn't go down without a fight though. After eons of gathering traces of dust and gas in the interstellar vacuum, it now found itself immersed in a treasure trove of raw materials, and it used them to expand its crystal heat shield at a speed that would have been impossible before. Within weeks of its crash landing, a thick crystal block had formed and begun to sink into the ground as it struggled to pump away the intense heat of this hellish world. In a month, the first multi-stage heat pump was functioning, and as the pain receded, Shining gradually found it possible to think once more.

Darkness seemed to be forcing its' perspective on her own avatar, and Shining looked down, horrified at the terrible burns covering her body. The temperature was still unbearable, but no longer lethal, and gradually, it expanded and grew, learning more about the black burning hell at the bottom of this deep ocean.

It wasn't long before it discovered magic. The crystal shields surrounding it began to absorb bits of magic from the air and soil, and Darkness recognized a new tool it could use to survive. The first crude transmitters didn't work well, but in time it learned to construct curved, horn-like crystal spikes to better control the magic around it, and soon it had formed a series of reflective domes over itself, and devised a magical 'breeze' to keep out the heat.

As the temperature fell, Darkness grew at a phenomenal rate in this wealth of raw materials, and as it grew, the reflective domes grew with it. Before long, for the first time since their crash landing, Shining felt the temperature fall to eighty two degrees C (+180 F), and she gritted her teeth as her sweat stung the raw burns all over her body.

“The ocean must be drained/frozen/cooled for survival. Self developed reflective magic to extend above the ocean, make habitable.”

A growing spire of the now magically infused crystal took shape on four long legs, rising high above it and beginning to launch clouds of reflective particles into the air. One by one the multicolored magical beams began to take shape, propelling the reflective smoke upwards and suspending it above the atmosphere where it began to reflect the sunlight back. Several years passed in the next few minutes as Shining panted for breath and the sweat dripped freely from her scorched coat, but gradually, what started as glitter in the sky began to work. The unbearable heat began to wane, and slowly, the form she had seen with her own eyes began to take shape.

As the atmosphere finally rained out leaving behind a vacuum, Darkness was at last able to grow properly, and her vision returned at last as the boiling sea was no longer around to vaporize its eyes. The large hill grew rapidly now into the mountain she had seen. As her burns healed up, the thing's hunger coursed through Shining once more, and looking out over the immense wealth of materials available to it she couldn't help but mutter;
“Yeess... Materials...”

As Darkness continued to expand greedily, one of the superconducting cooling fins grew around something that still had lingering traces of complex magic. Unsure of what it was looking at, the creature spliced open the oddly shaped blob, trying to figure out what it was, and in doing so, it discovered a strange network of systems, some of which resembled it's own mind. The conclusion was as inevitable as it was shocking.

“Other life/not-self/minds exist at the bottom of the fire ocean! Repair and reassembly commenced.”

The not-self now embedded in the heat sink was the strangest thing it had ever seen! The thing was made of liquified stone, and as far as Darkness could tell, it was built, not just to tolerate the hellish heat of this world, but to actually pump the fire ocean in and out of itself! The main component of its body was a hard rock, dihydrogen monoxide, sometimes used for bearings due to its durability, extremely high melting point, and friction-reducing properties under pressure. With careful tinkering, Darkness managed to emulate enough parts of the blob to restore its' mind, and, eventually, to converse with it.

With that, the playback ended, and Shining found herself once more floating in the blackness of space, staring at the brown pegasus across from her. She looked down at her body, but saw no sign of the burns that had been there a moment ago, and with a supreme effort of will, she forced herself to focus on the subject at hoof.

“You have to stop expanding! We cannot survive at the temperatures you need to live!”

“This not-self survives/adapts/thrives. As other fire-life is found, Self will restore function/operation/life.”

Images of the pegasus's body frozen into the block of crystal and split into shards jumped unbidden to her mind, and Shining tried not to throw up.
“We can't live like this!”

“Negative/false/wrong; self has improved integration process, and your integration/freezing/suspended animation is proceeding without incident.”

The Brightest Shine

by Cozy Mark IV

Ch. 12 A Light in the Dark