//------------------------------//
// Coins to Pay the Ferrymare 
// Story: The Ninety-nine Nectars of Princess Luna; Or How Twilight Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Her Wings 
// by NoeCarrier 
//------------------------------//

                                   
                                   


With her favorite leather panniers strapped against her flanks, Twilight felt ready to conquer the world. It was strange really, how such simple items in the right places could provide an immensity of psychological support, but so it was. She was certain that she had just in her left hoof enough power to level most of Equestria and convert it into a geometrically smooth, silicate glass crater the horrid colour of night, but these few pounds of tanned cow hide and worked iron made her feel far more lethal.

These were the panniers which had carried the Elements, for a time at least. These humble things had carted around bizarre objects of vast and extraordinary power, horrific, hoof-curling poisons, dissertations and thesis, enough ink to drown a moderately sized whale and, at one point, fourteen monitor lizards. If they could speak, they would tell a story of foul demons from deep time, laughing and cackling as they tore apart the world. They would bellow of the friendship and kinship she’d felt, and of the world she’d saved. They would whisper sweetly of the one who had caused them to come into existence, and to whom the aforementioned owed so much.

Twilight settled down on the sand and drew in a slow, measured breath. She closed her eyes and shut out the beating sun or, at least, dimmed it to a tolerable glow. The threads and eddies of thaumaturgic force washed around her, forever there, lurking in the shadows. They seemed thicker and denser than usual, as if she were sensing them for the first time. Odd memories of her thaumarche dribbled back, that first moment of contact with the greater world of magic force. High tea on the vast emerald lawns of the Ostpalace, during a visit to southern Equestria. Her dam had passed her a mint jelly and, quite without thinking, she had reached out and taken it, though all her physical parts remained still, folded up on the soft cotton of a hoof-stitched throw.

The universe had seemed deeper and stranger than she'd ever imagined at that point, its many workings and corners unveiled with the mischievous majesty of a showmare in the full flight of performance. Now, that sensation came again, and deeper still. The huge and complex expenditure of magic that she'd undertaken to rescue Whom had lent consequences to the now.

Almost without thinking, she probed reality with her mind's eye, gathering up the fragments of an easy teleportation spell. Usually, the requisite energy increased with the distance between points in the transition. More of the mysterious substance that made up the wormhole needed to be produced and hammered into shape, made to bend along the paths she desired. Like poking a needle into cloth, terminus had to be drawn up from the nothingness, and some complex mathematics performed. Twilight had never found this processing very hard. She held position data in her head for most of Ponyville, all pre-calculated. Now, it was like breathing, or walking.

“Twilight, we can't just leave them here,” Whom snuffled, blowing her nose into an elaborately embroidered jet black kerchief that she had removed from the secret compartment in her regalia. “They... they need a proper burial.”

“Oh, come on,” Twilight said, opening her eyes and fixing her with an irritated stare. “They're changelings, Whom. They probably don't even have burial rituals!” She paused the whirling spell in mid cast, thaumokinetic feedback vibrating uncomfortably in her horn. “What, are you worried about their spirits coming back to haunt you?”

Whom squealed sharply, ears folding back against her skull. For a moment, Twilight thought that the moon mare was about to bolt.

“Can they do that?” she gasped.

“No,” Twilight said, flatly.

The wormhole unfolded from the quantum foam and enveloped a small chunk of the desert in the blink of an eye, and the two mares departed.


*


Wormholes were simple creatures. The intelligence that emerged in them during their very short lifespans was perhaps on the order of a dog or cat. The structures of ordered energy served well in their roles as neural matrix, having a high density, and thoughts were built from stochastic distortions in the patterns of exotic matter. Though the individual mind of each wormhole existed almost entirely in isolation from the rest of the universe, which happened on time scales it barely comprehended, let alone could conceive of, they could sense certain parts of it, and would react accordingly.

Gravity was a major player in the mindset of a wormhole. It curved paths around the largest concentrations of mass, invisible webs of force in its infinite Empire crafting and impacting the lives of all who dwelled in it. Whilst the patterns of distortions were too simplistic and short-lived to ever develop anything as complicated as religion, if they had they could have been forgiven for thinking of gravity as a sort of God.

How any individual wormhole would actually react to any given source of gravity was determined by the exact starting conditions of the thin skein of exotic matter that went into its make up, which was in turn decided by the mind of the magic user creating it. As a rule of hoof, however, the closer to any massy object a wormhole was generated or guided to, the more energy it needed to cajole it to functionality. Pony mages, unaware of the limited mindfulness of their wormholes, tended to describe this behaviour as being the result of universal randomness, unpredictability and other dull ideas.

The wormhole that Twilight generated, intended to take them a few thousand kilometres north into the heart of Equestria, took flight and sailed through the four dimensional arena it called home, bidden forth on wings of zero point energy torn from the universal standing thaumic field. An aurora of bizarre virtual particles ground against the expanding tunnel of space time that was spinning out behind the motile exit terminus. They fought against the nothing and the something, tiny grains of meta-real stuff carrying massive and impossible energies. They eroded the fabric of the wormhole like sandpaper, and would eventually lead to its end, placing a hard limit on the life span, in time, distance and length.

Something was terribly wrong. The wormhole was idly looking for the place that was calling it, and instead found a dizzying array of different gnarls and pitfalls in the topology of the universe. Gravitational singularities, the seeds of new realities, appeared around it, tearing and pulling at it. Like a tiny boat trapped in the swell of a perfect storm it was dragged this way and that. Its short life was ended moments later, though not before it had disgorged the contents of itself to somewhere else entirely.


*


The Imperial Train rolled into Sol’s Cross station just after lunchtime, complicated steam engine ticking over at a low ebb to draw the massive weight of the train in at a pace just shy of trotting. The busy black shapes of praetorians moved against the backdrop of long crystal windows, all attempting to get a look at the station’s massive platforms.

Built at some indeterminate point in Equestria’s history when there had been plans to expand the national rail network from a few trains operating on a single line, Sol’s Cross had nine marble-topped platforms, supported on sturdy iron and copper stanchions. These were clad and concealed in such a way that, from the right angle, the station appeared to float within the high-walled nest of baroque and multiply-styled buildings and warehouses that made up the core of the Artisan’s District. In some places, the unusual overhangs and other architectural refinements, designed to allow flying occupants to easily alight or take off, actually overhung the emerald green and duck egg blue painted platform roofs, throwing grotesqueries of shadowplay at regular, solar, intervals.

The station seemed deserted. The merry pastel coloured signals, usually busy and flicking back and forth like the ears of an excitable filly, lay dormant and dead, folded away in their hutch at the far end. Rubbish, papers, the contents of a fruit seller's cart twice over, and a wild array of a thousand other things apparently liberated from marital aid shops were strewn liberally across the marble.

The train halted when it had drawn its engine carriage parallel with the conductor’s office at the midpoint of the station’s centremost platform. A fire had consumed it at some point fairly recently, as whispers of slate smoke still drifted out from the ruined, skeletal frame of blackened wood, mostly turned to ash or charcoal. The conflagration hadn’t gotten particularly far. The platform itself was laced with fireproofing magic and other crafty cantrips that prevented decay and infestation with pigeons. These magics too were relics from another age, and their like was rarely seen. The conductor’s office, however, was a more modern addition, one which hadn’t been afforded the same sort of luxury.

There was a long pause before anything further happened but, several minutes after the engine had dumped its remaining steam in a long, hooting whistle that broke the quiet of the station in the same fashion as a overeager lover breaks a maidenhead, six praetorians scrambled out onto the platform and spread themselves about. There was no sound but the clatter of their armoured hooves on the marble and the metallic schwing of their withers-mounted halberds and spears.

Empress Cadence stepped assuredly from the carriage, svelte and delicate frame slipping out of the portal cut in the single-crystal train. She glanced about, ears in motion as they scanned for any signs of disturbances. The sheer stillness and calm of the place, despite evidence of such recent ferocity and disorder, was incredibly unsettling. Even the air itself, interwoven with the standing background field of magic, was flat and immotile.

“Quiet Afore, L’Tempete; you two were sired here, correct?” Cadence said, breaking the spell of cloying nothingness.

“Aye, your Majesty,” a squat, thickly-muscled stallion in full plate said, not breaking his alert, sentry’s gaze. “We were.”

“I will teleport you up to the Palace. Find out what the situation there is, please,” she said, trotting slowly and deliberately into the middle of the semi-circle perimeter they were creating as they fanned out. “You will have to make your own ways back, but--”

Cadence had been attempting to cast the spell required to relocate the two praetorians, but seemed to have reached an impasse in the process. Dazzling pink light illuminated the platform, briefly causing hard shadows to jump from anything bigger than a millimetre. Stopped in mid-sentence, she inhaled sharply, face slack and drooping, like she was having a stroke. There were a series of staccato cracks, as if of calving icebergs, and all of a sudden the light dropped away.

“Is everything alright, your Majesty?” L’Tempete said, no hint of real concern in his voice. “It’s just that I can’t help but notice we haven’t moved.”

“There's something wrong,” she mumbled, eyes half-lidded. “My magic is in disorder. Clearly, a dreadful thing has occurred here. Perhaps a Tartaran prisoner...”

“We must find the Princesses at once,” Shining Armour said, landing on the platform with far less in the way of grace and dignity than Cadence had employed. “No doubt my sister will be at the heart of matters, else captured and held by same. If we can locate her, we will locate the trauma.”

Cadence smiled softly and turned around, apparently still dazed from her brush with thaumic refusal, looking all the part a drunken sot. Her ears had ceased their dance, and lay back, not in fear or anger but lax, unstrained, the erector muscles failing in their task. She seemed to be having trouble focusing.

“I have a better idea, oh, darling, my sweetling,” she said, voice lilting through strange octaves.

All around them, the root vegetables, fruit and other like-shaped objects began to roll and move in the same direction, under the impetus of pink magic.



*


Twilight felt the wormhole abjure itself of her control as a grating series of shocks, right through the core of her, so rapid that they blurred into one awful whack. There was no time to react to them, or effect any sort of correction. Even with her highly attuned magical reflexes, she barely perceived two or three seconds of subjective time. The wormhole collapsed around her, discharging its energies back into the seething, invisible paravoid of the vacuum.

There was no verdant field, as she had intended. The spot she had picked for the exit locale was a grassy acre of communal forage-land a mile or so down the road to Canterlot from Ponyville. It was one of many such places, owned by the state for the free use of local communities and travellers. Since it was so close to town, few ponies actually did, preferring to push on a little further to more comfortable amenities, or otherwise find their forage in the lusher lands that bordered the Everfree. It was, therefore, quite likely to be unoccupied and out of the way. It was the lesson of much teleportation that ponies hated being appeared on and rudely interrupted.

There had also been the point that she was travelling with an individual who had spent their entire life living either with the Nightmare in her final days, or alone, surviving within an ecosystem so terrifying and baroque that it apparently regularly destroyed itself in fits of rage, presumably recombining and rebuilding afterwards, by some unknown but likely just as bizarre process. That sort of individual would, even with preparations drawn from the magazines and periodicals that occasionally appeared on the moon, require gentle introductions and gradual exposure to anything that could be called 'normal Equestrian life'.

Twilight glanced about, the prickling of fear finding its way across her skin. They had appeared in what seemed to be an underground cavern. Darkness rolled back in toward them as the waste heat in her horn faded away, bright optical gleam turning to the soft fuzz of infrared. She quickly fed a little more energy into it and put the black to abeyance. The cave floor was smooth for some distance around them, but quickly became more convoluted, the random undulations in the granite and basalt like the marbling in one of Canterlot's huge palaces. The air was hot, oppressively so, and stank of organic things. Twilight had never kept a compost heap, but this was what she imagined one must smell like. It was deathly silent, that silence of ancient and forgotten tombs or airless moons on the very edges of their parent systems. Not even the sounds of their own breathing rebounded against anything solid, betraying the fact that this cave must be very large indeed.

“Oh, wow!” Whom said, beaming widely. “This isn’t like the magazines at all!”

“I don’t think we’re in Equestria; something’s gone wrong. The only meaningful cave system in the country is under the Palace. I’ve been there, and it’s not like this,” Twilight said, trotting forward with careful, measured steps. “In any case, this is not at all where I was aiming for. Let me try that one again. It... happens sometimes.” She flicked her ears by way of a shrug. “Cosmic fluctuations or some such thing.”

The deep purple glow of her horn began to oscillate as she tinkered with the spell which she had only moments before finished casting. It required only a few modifications to work given their new location. Equations danced their goose step through her mind, adjusting for time, distance and so on. She came to the point in the process where the energy had to be applied, and she did so in her normal way; without really thinking about it. Immediately, a sound like a trio of carronade going off destroyed the solemn stillness of the cave. Appearing at the tip of her horn in flickers, the thaumic force, intended to be fed into the complexities of the mechanisms of spatial manipulation and exotic matter production, suddenly found it had nowhere to go. It shocked the air, or discharged down into the horn root. Actinic flashes of blue and silver strobed, leaving tracers in her eyes, which she had already screwed shut in self defense, despite how unnecessary that was. The flares poked through regardless, incredibly bright and extremely close to her face.

Completely stunned, Twilight gasped. It wasn’t painful, but her muscles spasmed involuntarily, as though she were on the edge of a sneeze. Little worms of wild blue electric force were burrowing into them, feeding them spurious commands. The acrid stink of burned mane hair stang her nose.

“Oh! Hee hee!” Whom said, stamping her front hooves on the ground gleefully, rear end wiggling with excitement like she was being tickled. “Do it again!”

“That wasn’t--”

The floor moved. Twilight had experienced a number of earthquakes before, mostly during her brief obsession with geology when she had visited the Brassback Fault and lived awhile with the zebra enclave there. Those convulsions of the earth would begin this way; a palpable sensation of motion in something that was resolutely firm and stable. Along with it came the first notes of a wild chorus, infrasonic grumbling and groaning that would occasionally crescendo in the low sonic before falling back to a diminuendo of creaks and chirps that were more felt than heard.

Simultaneously, the current of the air began to shift about from their former, crypt-like stature. It was slow at first, a breeze as gentle as a brush by a lover’s muzzle, but soon built up, adopting a sandpaper quality as it picked up in intensity, as well as dirt and debris, bits of tephra and other assorted geological junk. Moments after a loose flint slapped Whom across the cheek and left a fine gash of red against her outlandishly pink fur and skin, Twilight conjured the first proper spell that she had mastered after that long-ago thaumarche, one which was, for all intents and purposes, a sort of family heirloom. If Whom made any pained sounds, she could not hear them over the gale.

Lines of purple telekinetic force instantiated and bent around her, becoming a weird parody of a material object. They quickly formed one half of a geodesic dome, which gradually became smoother as seconds past. The howling died off like someone had rammed cotton wool in her ears. Whom was staring at her, eyes wide and terrified, looking all the world a foal cornered in a woodland glade by the nottlynga of legend. Blood was smeared over her face in the direction of the flow of wind, as if a yearling had gone mad with a straw and watercolours.

Moments after the field was fully formed, a rock bigger than an apple cart appeared out of the darkness at immense speed, slamming into them. The gut-jarring crack of the immense boulder shattering filled the protective space. Though it had to weigh as much as twenty or thirty ponies, at least, it had been picked up by the tempest and tossed around like it were a marble. Twilight gulped, though it was mostly out of sympathy for the moon mare. She herself would, faithfully enough, have survived such an event.

“Are you okay, Whom?” Twilight said, over the now-constant drumming of smaller rocks, getting closer and examining the gouge in her cheek. “Doesn’t look too bad.”

“What was that?!” the moon mare said, teasing her kerchief from its hidey hole once more and pressing it into service as a makeshift bandage, which made Twilight frown.

“I can just heal this,” she said, rearranging the threads of magic that spiraled out of her, glad that they had not failed as the teleport had. “Back before I was a Princess, my friends and I used to get into some really crazy scrapes. Things tried to kill us all the time. I had to learn so much first aid just to keep up with the sheer rate of attrition.”

“It’s fine, Twilight. There’s no need,” Whom said, taking a step backwards.

“Really, it’ll only take--”

“No!” Whom’s tail coiled up around her as her rump slammed into the magical force field, not even coming close to penetrating. “No healing magic!”

Twilight blinked and stepped back. Whom was scared of many things, it seemed, but this felt different and more primal. It suddenly occurred to her how much like the Nightmare she must seem sometimes, especially in the full flight of magic. Horrific half-imaginings came into her head, the product of a keen investigative mind coloured by too much reading of history and lurid fiction. The poor mare was nearly crying by this point. Twilight decided to just nod and give her the space she needed. There was clearly something wrong here, something dreadfully wrong -- memories of an old and unhealed horror lurked and were being brought up to the surface, dredged like the spiny corpses of sea monsters from a mere of memories -- but this was neither the time nor place to address them.

Beyond the magic curtain, the darkness was being lit up by countless flashes and flickers, orange sparks from the bashing about of rock on rock. Twilight occasionally caught stolen glimpses of the just how massive this space was, and of its topology. There was a subterranean plain all around them, rolling up and down as the natural contours of land would. The lights of kinetic interaction reminded her of long processions with candles, or of wassailers and the ancient custom of the Grey Mare, still practiced in some of the more remote and isolated parts of Equestria. At the very far range of vision, she saw that all the undulations gradually trended upwards, hinting at a limit, or some kind of far wall.

There would be a reckoning for Luna, of course. Twilight had secretly known it for quite some time now, and was only just beginning to come to terms with the idea of it in a conscious manner. Whatever creature is responsible, ultimately, for all those grim things on the moon, and for the scars that have been left on this unfortunate, they must be brought to justice. But what if that creature is Luna? Her and I will need to sit down and talk about all this. Anger, a new feeling on this subject, broke out of its internal confines and joined the morass of thought. Her ears flicked slightly, the anger bubbling into the real world. If she knew of any of this, retained even a scrap of memory… how could she have done nothing? Not tried to help, to atone for these offenses?

Whom was daintily dabbing away the blood with the pointed, wetted tip of her kerchief, refusing to make eye contact.

“I don’t know where we are, Whom,” Twilight said, after half a minute of unpleasant, cloying silence, punctuated only by the tattoo of rocks and the low, white noise gale. “I don’t know what’s going on here. My teleportation spell isn’t working properly. We’re stuck here until it fixes itself, or this…” She trailed off, peering out beyond the shield, unable to find the words to describe it properly. “Whatever this all is, stops being quite so lethal.”

“Can we see a grassy field?” Whom said, smiling broadly again, as if the last moments hadn't happened. “A real, green one?” She drew in breath sharply and wriggled. “Can we prance and frolic in it?”

“I don't really get up to much prancing myself, but I know some ponies who do,” Twilight said, laughing. “How are you finding the gravity, by the way?”

“I'm fine, actually, totally fine. I thought it would be worse, but it really feels the same.”

“Really?” Twilight said, skeptically. “But the moon has only a tiny fraction of the mass that Equestria has. The gravity there was certainly much less than here.”

“I fell over a bit, it's true. I wasn't very good at flying through the desert, when I was looking for you.”

“I know, I saw the marks in the sand. You were like a chicken, or something.”

“What's a chicken?” Whom cocked her head, squinting a little bit. “Ooh, are they like a starling? I love starlings! And larks, meadowlarks.”

“Something like that.”

Abruptly, the wind ceased pelting the magic shield with rocks. Unlike its start, the force of it cut away very quickly. The dust rained out of the surrounding environment, settling on the thaumic surface around them and fogging it slightly.

“I'm going to drop the magic,” Twilight said, after a few long minutes of tense waiting.

Whom whinnied quietly as the purple screen evaporated. Sound, or rather, the abject lack of it, came back. The air now stank of ozone, and Twilight's nose wrinkled of its own accord in disapproval. An aspect of the pony psyche somewhat liked or at least tolerated moldering vegetation. The heat had died away, at least for now, but it already felt like it was coming back, the air returning to its former turgid state, like breathing lacquer. It really was the air of tombs.

An awful, terrifying reality struck her. It formed in her mind like a crystal knife, ramming itself between two perfectly innocent thoughts with no regard for her sanity. Twilight went rigid, eyes widening on a sharp intake of breath.

“It's Tartarus, Whom,” she squeaked, words feeling like treacle. “Sweet, silvery stars above, it's Tartarus!”

“Who's Tartarus?” The moon mare's voice was tiny now, as though it were being eaten by the sheer vastness of the place.

“Tartarus isn't a person, it's a place,” Twilight said, all too quickly. “A very bad place, a place out of time and proper dimension.” She glanced around, as if trying to pierce the darkness by sheer force of will. “Starswirl the Unshorn referred to it as a glass bottle universe, but that was all he ever wrote about it.” She started trotting in little circles, the distraction activity of lecturing someone on a complex, scholarly subject doing much for her state of mind. “Later commentary and analysis said that this was the one place in the whole thick-thin skein of multiple existences that he was really scared of, which never really made sense to me because that stallion once made a giant bronze statue of Celestia which was not at all anatomically correct, and that takes a special sort of fearless stupidity, don't you think?” Twilight shot Whom a look of sheer hypermanaical terror. “He put a willy on Celestia and he was scared of this place! Do you understand?”

Twilight didn't bother waiting for a reply. She cantered away with blatant disregard for what might be around her. The sound of each hoof fall was clearly and solely audible.

“Light, that's what we need right now, light! Can't form a plan if we can't see what we're doing now, can we?” She lit her horn, feeding it power, and it responded by making a subtle keening noise and getting brighter and more brilliant. “No! That's not enough. More persistant!” She came to a stop some distance from Whom and peered upwards, biting her lip. Then, she bowed her head and braced herself with a back hoof.

There were a series of dull pops, and long streamers of glittering white light, too painful to look at directly, leapt away from the tip of her horn like scalded cats. The climbed on long, graceful arcs, gradually drifting further away from each other as they gained height. Six individual points emerged, casting rays of absolutely pure and dazzling light over the hidden landscape.

Tartarus, for there could now be no doubt as to their location, was more beautiful that she had been expecting. Those snatched glimpses had not done the place justice. It was as though some mad and demonic confectioner had layered endless whorls of jet black fudge over the top of each other, swirling them together then allowing them to cool into delineated bands of ochre and jet. These were granites, obsidians and so on, or at least they seemed to be. In places they appeared more like chitinous hide, whole hillocks and dales of insectoid plate, glittering with rainbow diffraction patterns as the beams swept over them and illuminated their character.

They had appeared on a sort of low plateau, like a desert mesa which had been sanded down until only a stumpy husk of its former glory remained. This afforded a commanding view, as much as was possible. Twilight's mind, always eager to form theories and explain things properly, began forming a hypothesis. If that kind of wind is anything like a regular occurrence, not much would stay standing upright or remaining tall. These patterns must be the result of erosion effects.

Something caught her eye more so than anything else, a long, silver thread cutting through the gently rolling pattern of low valleys. It glinted and sparkled fiercely in the light, as if whatever it was that she was seeing was built out of many tiny strands of fast moving satin. Sweetest foals, it's a river! A river in Tartarus! But how does it survive the winds?

Twilight dragged her attentions away from the river as the analytical engine of her mind unboxed memories and hauled things from deep storage. Despite it's strong presence in pony culture, there were few hard facts or much in the way of detail on where Tartarus actually was, in relation to the rest of the world. She knew that an entrance to it existed a day's gallop from Ponyville, as she had visited the place once before. Four grey pillars stood there, lone sentinels on an ancient salt flat, arranged in a perfect square and untouched by the ages they had surely seen. The Black Dog Cerberus was chained between them, the gazes of his three heads fixed on the east, south and west simultaneously.

She stared upwards, trying to find evidence of the roof, or the curvature of great walls that she had seen before. Her flares were now far, far above, beginning to dwindle, and there was no sign of them stopping.