“Of Gyres (Widening), Etcetera”
With a quintet of juddering sonic booms, She Who Trots In Dreams turned Mytheme into a velocity-shedding corkscrew, bringing it down over the sparsely-forested lowlands that typified the landscape between Canterlot and Ponyville. Once the massive silver yacht was travelling no faster than a pony in full gallop, at a flight level just above the tops of the trees, she released her hold on the underlying universal energy field. Torrents of unspent thaumic power fled local space, disappearing into whatever zero-space they had come from. Only momentum, and the unquenchable force of Carnifex's ancient bones, kept Mytheme sailing through the air above emerald spinneys, copses and thickets. Residual heat from the tungsten plug reservoirs dissipated slowly out of the diamond tile hull, radiating enough to ignite the summer's crop of dry grass and desiccated foliage.
Princess Luna felt the fundamental properties of reality being altered, in the shape of the Strong Force Bomb's clumsy activation, as a sort of rough prodding sensation against her rump. This had not happened for a very long time indeed and, such was the surprise, she did not react at all. Her first thought was that the little draught-excluder foal from before had somehow sneaked into Mytheme's control suite, but then she glanced down her side and saw that she was alone. Light speared from above somewhere, only visible through her ancillary thaumic senses. Instinctively, she looked upwards, and the light became intolerable. The spear, a single trembling shaft, transformed into an all-encompassing cliff. Luna heard someone scream, then realised it was her own voice.
Her extra sensory capacity did not have an off-switch. It was an indefatigable part of her and how she saw the world. She could not immediately recall the last time it had been overwhelmed in this manner. During certain antediluvian conflicts, when the Strong Force Bomb had last been used, it was never with masses heavier than melons. The explosions thereby produced were mighty, but nothing such as this, creating particles of light that were so energetic they impinged upon the domain of magic. The puckish unicorn who had invented the spell in the first place had hypothesized at length about the possibility of these thauma-skimming particles but, for obvious reasons, had never tried to prove it. Luna gritted her teeth and hoped that the explosion had not been atmospheric.
After a moment, the magical light vanished. Some tiny part of her mind grinned at the fact that the mad scientist of epochs past had been proven right, as his hypothesis had also predicted that only the first pulse of highest energy particles would impinge in such a way. Another part of it began crunching numbers, assessing how long it would be until an overpressure wave produced in the highest part of the atmosphere, where such things were still possible, would reach them. Mytheme was an incredibly durable piece of technology, and had been built to withstand basic yield Strong Force Bomb deployments at distances as close as ten kilometres. Luna doubted that the planet would survive, let alone a fragile little diamond yacht, had the detonation been ground side.
The minutes passed and began to stack up. Curious. The initiation was from the east, suggestive of Canterlot local being ground zero, yet the eruption was from above, likely no further than a light second away. The events were no more than moments apart. What moves so swiftly? I can think of only two such creatures...
*
Even with the prisoner leading the way, the acceleration phase of their trip between Tartarus' colossal basins was, quite possibly, the most terrifying thing Twilight had ever undertaken. This realisation dawned on her when the peculiar glowing orb that had taken to forming in her wake when she forced enough magic into flight guttered out for the last time. The inscrutable depths of darkness all around her held no reference points, and the near-vacuum present at this altitude gave no clues, but the little mathematician in her head knew precisely how fast she was now going, and it was having kittens on her behalf.
Still! Still I think of myself as fleshy and mortal. I wonder, how long will it take before I start conceptualising myself in these new terms? Her wings unmantled, and she saw their purple tips unfurl, nearly touching the edges of the telekinetic comfort barrier. Where does this supposed immortality really end? Is it even a question of physical destruction, and energies required, or am I made of something that does not answer to such pettiness? Could I fall into a star and come out a bit lathered? Twilight huffed, blowing out clouds of puffy white, then made to soothe the mathematician by setting it working out how fast the heat from her earlier atmospheric reentry had flashed her into glass.
Some indeterminate period of time passed. Eventually, Twilight became dimly aware of a light in the distance, like flint sparking in the dead of night, and recalled that this was the signal from Starswirl to begin slowdown and braking. Moving for the first time in what must have been hours, Twilight's hooves had somehow frozen to the psuedomaterial of the conjured telekinetic amalgam that housed Whom. They detached with frosty sprays of ice crystals. The same happened when she opened the aperture down to her precious cargo, which caused all of the local fields to buck and shiver. She furrowed her brow, but could think of no plausible explanation.
“Whom,” she said, voice sounding croaky. “We're going to begin slowing down now, it might feel a bit uncomfortable.”
There was no reply.
“Look, I know you're upset with me, but just let me know you're okay?”
“I'm fine,” Whom said, after a long moment, in which Twilight had begun to panic, and in a tone as cold as the ice fragments now forming a cloud around the amalgam. “Get this over with.”
The magic came easier than before. Where she had been treading new thaumic ground, straining in the upper bounds of even her new-found abilities, she now had an easy time of it. Energy spilled from the void and flowed down the paths she desired with silken eagerness, like an experienced lover returning to his beau after a long spell away. With the locus of the magic pointed in the opposite direction to her initial vector of thrust, harsh white light erupted into a tightly focused beam. She counted the burn duration in her head then, when it was done, cut the power. It vanished instantly, leaving weird after-images in her eyes, which she blinked away in time to see Starswirl's bubble, with his chaise-lounge ensconced inside, emerging from the blackness, ringed with pinpricks of mage fire.
His own accelerations and decelerations were nowhere near as visible as hers were. The prisoner used some sort of highly unorthodox propulsion magic, which had produced bizarre thaumokinetic feedback effects in her horn when first he'd used it. The only way she could think of it were in terms of synesthesia, and this magic smelled like green, felt like the number eleven, and so on. The usual sort of feedback, by which the ways and means of magic could usually be divined by a unicorn so trained, as she was, never strayed into such surreal territory. Starswirl would not be led on it, however, except to say that it was of a school of thaumic thought that likely would never function anywhere outside the unique physical climate of Tartarus.
Their two forcefield menisci met and merged in a frankly obscene fashion. There was a slight whoosh and a rustle of air as the two portable life support systems became a single mutual entity and slight differences in pressure and temperature were equalised.
“I do hope your navigational skills have not let us down,” Twilight said, peering over the back of the chaise-lounge, as soon as the rustling allowed normal speech. “Even very slight deviations, at these sort of scales, could send us hairing very wide of the mark.”
“The beacons that I installed around Tartarus are very functional, my little starling.”
“So you've said.”
“What else did I say, then?”
“That I shouldn't worry about it.”
“Exactly, and nothing has changed.”
“Fine. How soon until we reach this...” Twilight trailed off, trying to recall the proper words. “Gate complex, then?”
“You know, you do remind me of her.” Starswirl's head appeared, and there was a great shuffling, accompanied by a low telekinetic keening, and Twilight realised that he was staring at her with his beady little eyes.
“Who?”
“The Princess whose things you're planning on returning to the world.”
Twilight was taken aback. No possible response had time to nucleate in her mind before Starswirl began speaking again.
“She was always so military, which I suppose is fitting for the supreme commander of the armed forces.” His furred, shaggy head cocked to one side, like a pigeon gauging distance. “It was as though she feared electrons might stop going about atomic nuclei if she didn't orchestrate their spin, as if water would cease to be wet if she failed to splash in it.”
“Am I supposed to take this as a compliment?”
“It is an observation.” He chuckled, which sounded like someone sandpapering wood. “Here is another. You trot her path.”
“I have become a Princess, yes.”
“Not quite what I meant, little starling.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“There you go again, the scalpel interrogatives.” More chuckling. “Cut right to the heart of the matter! No thoughts for innocent bystanders.”
“I make no apologies for my rationality and pragmatism.”
Starswirl said nothing for a moment, then seemed to nod, slowly, just the once.
“Do with my observations what you will, starling.” He cleared his throat, and there was a soft whining noise of magic being expended. “We'll begin to interact with the gate complex's atmosphere in a few minutes. Make sure to give the telekinesis plenty of juice. We're still coming in pretty sharpish, and the gravity sometimes kicks in unexpectedly.”
“What?”
“There is a gravity hard deck, from time to time. That is to say, a zero gradient. We're approaching from the near vertical, so it will be like someone has just thrown a switch. One moment microgravity, floating along all happy, like...” He made a floaty sound that reminded Twilight of waddling ducklings. “Then, blam, gravity. Maybe. This place can be unpredictable.”
“I see.” Twilight furrowed her brow, because she really didn't see. “Wait a minute, I thought you said we were traveling in an arc? If this place is all on one level, as it were, wouldn't we approach from horizontal? Given that our vector has been so linear, once we ascended out of the first basin, that is...”
“Now you're just being silly.”
Twilight's brow could not have become any more furrowed.
True to his word, what she assumed was the gate complex approached out of the darkness and, from the dim, sourceless illumination that surrounded it, invisible to the naked eye at longer ranges, it was clear that they were heading directly down onto it. Twilight’s logically ordered mind, so much like the library she cared for, had a herd of stampeding wildebeest driven through it. There was simply no way she could think of that allowed for their current vector. Also true to his word, they were coming in fast. The thaumic spacecraft rumbled and shifted about as it encountered denser layers of the ersatz atmosphere. Speed was further reduced by its drag. The return to rich, visual perception was jarring; everything seemed oversaturated, larded with odd phantasmic hues.
Bent space time, non-Eweclidean geometries, yes, that’s what it must be, she thought, half-deranged, as she struck out toward the rising surface with her telekinesis and applied energy. This close to their target, she dared not use the means of propulsion she had employed before. Whilst it was perfectly suited to transit across vacuum, where huge forces needed to be leveraged in hope of crossing such vast distances on reasonable timescales, when it came to smaller adjustments, relatively speaking, it was just too much, too imprecise. It would have been like trying to put a watch mechanism together with a pickaxe.
Telekinesis filled the gap nicely. Weird resonances came back down the thaumokinetic link, indicative of strong, wild magic in play somewhere below, or ahead. As Starswirl began to do the same, their separation distance began to widen, different masses and varying applied energies conspiring to pull them apart. Looking down onto it, the gate complex resembled a strange, angular assortment of endless cubes, departing from a central mammoth to progressively smaller ones, all conjoined, in the manner of a fractal. It had the colour of candied beetroot which had been painted over with a thick layer of lacquer and optically polished. There was no judging how big it truly was, but permanent entrepôts between demesnes could be of any physical dimension the constructor wished; often enough, practicality trumped the desire to be original, and they just resembled ordinary doorways.
Twilight had a feeling that, going on what she had seen so far of Tartarus, the approaching gate would be no mere doorway.
*
“Like cargo! Like I was just a thing!”
Whom's voice, adopting a new shrill register, seemed wildly incongruous amidst the shiny bones of Tartarus, though congruity was something the alicorn Princess, the shambolic chaise lounge mounted wizard, and the bizarre pink lunar native had in short supply. In the end, they'd opted for a landing site some distance away from the gate complex. There hadn't been any signal from Starswirl on the matter. The group had simply come to the same, unconscious conclusion, unwilling to go near the hulking structure until they'd had a moment to collected themselves. Whom’s recent injury to her ribs appeared to do nothing to quell her appetite for an argument, though she did, from time to time, wince and shiver.
All around it, as far as the sourceless light extended, the plateau was smooth and featureless. Unlike the earlier substance of Tartarus, this stuff was making no attempt to appear to be some naturally occurring material. The closest analogue Twilight could think of was volcanic glass, but even the most pure samples of obsidian would have inclusions, trapped gasses, something to give them texture. The plateau's floor was entirely free of reflection, made muted, unidentifiable noises when their hooves and chaise-lounge feet moved across it and, wherever light was shone too closely, appeared to become more shadowy and black.
“Look, Whom, I've apologised, what more do you want me to do?” Twilight was getting quite frustrated with the mare now, whereas Starswirl just seemed to be enjoying the show.
“You didn't even ask! It was just the right time in your plan for it, so 'back in your box now, Whom!'” She did some impersonation for the last part.
“Should I have left you there?”
“You should have treated me with more respect. Aren't we supposed to be friends? Would you have just stuffed...” She bit her lip and her brow furrowed as she concentrated. “Rainbow Dash in a magic spaceship without so much as a 'by your leave'? ”
“Of course we're friends, Whom.” Twilight stopped and looked at her dead on. “Why is this such a big deal?”
“Nightmare Moon used to behave that way,” she said, after a long moment.
“Hah,” Starswirl said, chaise lounge swerving. “See, what did I tell you, Twilight?”
“I won't be lectured on ethics by the inventor of history's greatest weapon of mass destruction!”
“Which one are you referring to?” He chortled, then his mounds of fur and hair rippled. “You flatterer, you. History's greatest, eh? Cor.”
“Will you be lectured on ethics by a friend then, Twilight?” Whom's voice was very small, and it seemed like she'd lost all the fire of a few moments past, all the righteous indignation.
“Yes, Whom. That happens a lot, just not when we're quite literally trapped in the underworld.” Twilight clamped down on her external displays of emotion, even though she felt as though knives were being driven through her soul at the earnestly of Whom’s speech. “We can talk about it until the cows come home, just as soon as we're back in the land of the living, okay?”
“I'll hold you to that,” Whom said, leadenly.
The gate complex was much taller and more three-dimensional than it had appeared coming in. Twilight guessed that it would take her at least a minute to match altitude with the topmost limits of its fractal patterns. The mathematician in her head stirred and opened bleary eyes as she took in the extent of its majesty. She'd only ever seen fractals in the flesh as recursive functions, and in certain thaumic visions. Even then they were half-imagined, hinted at in the nether regions of perception between seeing and thinking. This thing was truly worthy of the word 'edifice', and then some.
“So, do we just touch it, or something?” Twilight said, when the complex was towering over them.
“Give them a moment,” Starswirl said, cryptically. “They don't often get visitors.”
“Them?” Twilight said, looking up to see that they were standing at the base of a monumental cliff, one fractal arm, or spur, of which jutting out above them like the bough of a some weird, geometric tree.
He said nothing in return, but with his eyes he bid her wait and, surely enough, feline shapes began to emerge out of shadow. They came from behind curves and jinks in the pattern of smaller fractal branches, carefully placing paw over paw. It was hard to see their colour for more than a few moments at a time, but Twilight saw ochres, duns, reds, all the hues of a desert at sunset. Then she saw the first hooked beak.
“Gryphons?” she blurted.
“Guess again.”
“If it quacks like a duck...”
“They're absolutely not gryphons.”
Twilight glimpsed another beak; open and backlit against the light, there and gone again. Something in the back of her head began to whisper about all the places from which predatory monsters could spring from.
“Then what are they?” Twilight whispered.
“I,” said a voice, calm and cold as liquid helium, oozing into her ears like mercury, undeniably female, “am a sphinx.”
All of the creatures had stopped their shadowy movements. Almost as one, they were now sat upright like blades of grass in the lull between gusts. Pairs of eyes glinted, dozens and dozens of them, whenever the sourceless light conspired in just the right way.
“They look after this mechanism you said you were having trouble with?” Twilight said, trying to keep as still as possible.
“These creatures are an emergent function of the gate itself. As far as I can tell, they are the mechanism,” Starswirl said, adopting a pontificate tone. “Don't be fooled by how intelligent they seem. It's all just smoke and mirrors.”
“I have long tried to make the wizard understand my true nature, but he still mistakes me for many units, and a trick,” the voice said, from the general direction of the arrayed sphinxes, every mouth speaking at once but somehow sounding singular, as if by an incredible feat of synchronisation.
“Ten centuries of this, can you believe it?” Starswirl grunted, and the many folds of his hair and mane rippled with displeasure. “I should like to meet whoever, or whatever, instituted this mad system. At least Cerberus doesn’t say much.”
“Two sides of the same coin, stupid old horse,” the sphinx said, shapes retreating into the gloom cast by the gate’s fractal outcroppings. “You shall never meet my masters.”
“Shut up,” Starswirl said, then turned to Twilight. “Time to wave your authority about, little starling.”
Twilight’s wings unmantled, as if they had a life of their own. She glanced between the different forms lurking in the darkness, tried to find a locus, something to look at. Eyes like embers scattered over a soot-black fireplace met her on every vector. The sensation of being carefully studied became overwhelming. Liquid fear, like glacial melt water, suddenly invaded the back of her head and crept down her spine. Why am I so afraid? Pull it together!
“I am Princess Twilight Sparkle,” she said, after a long moment, voice sounding pathetically weak. “You said you are a sphinx; I’m not familiar with that species. Do you have a name?”
“I have been called the Mother of Dread.”
Twilight gulped.
“It is no fault of mine that you do not recognize what I am,” the sphinx continued. “Study history more closely. We owned the world for ten thousand years before receding.”
“I apologise for my ignorance, Mother of Dread, I meant no disrespect,” Twilight said, getting into the swing of diplomatic discourse; she was at home here, at least, and the sphinx seemed more amenable to it than the bizarre monster which attacked them earlier. “Would I be correct in thinking that this structure is a gateway to Equestria?”
“Equestria,” the sphinx hissed. “A fleeting name, given by little candles to immensities like planets, moons and stars. These orbs track ceaselessly, speaking nothing, suggesting nothing. What hubris to name them! Folly, folly, folly!”
“Here we bloody go,” Starswirl murmured. “The verbosity increases with time. Goes from simple equuish to Luna’s drunken idiolect quicker than you can say ‘gobbledygook’. I had them speaking a weirdness of firstfall fronsteppe and ald gryphic at one point. I think it was a love poem or somesuch.” He huffed. “Anyway, best be quick about it.”
“Please, Mother of Dread, I humbly request, as a Princess of Equestria, access to this gate for myself, my friend and this prisoner, whom we are removing from custody.”
“Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi! Ille mi par esse deo videtur! Superare divos!” The sphinx was caterwauling, interspersing the Old Equuish with sudden, shrill caws reminiscent of calling raptors.
“Bugger,” said Starswirl.
*
Since its formation, now nearly five billion years in the past, and subsequent cooling, the moon had not experienced such heat and disturbance. Even ten centuries of occupation by a mad Goddess failed to produce quite the splash Celestia caused when she struck the surface. Obeying physical parameters just slightly out of kilter with the usual behaviour of baryonic matter, the speeding, vaguely equine mass that was the Princess excavated a massive crater, spraying ejecta in every direction. Hypervelocity fragments of lunar regolith, following more normal rules, tracked nearly horizontally across the tortured moonscape, barely outrunning new formed fracture lines.
Shedding her energy into the moon's mass, the Princess finally came to rest several kilometres below the original level of the surface. Above her, an immense cloud of highly energetic plasma, the vapor-flashed remnants of a hundred thousand megatons of assorted silicates, rose quickly, blooming with lambent striations. Where the force had not been quite enough to create an ionised gas of it, the new crater's floor was home to oozing pools and strange coils of molten rock, the deeper stuff of the moon. It shifted and rippled as heat moved around, attempting to find equilibrium.
Note to self, Celestia thought, magically extricating herself from the clinging ribbons of lava and ascending vertically out of the boiling pit, the coolness of her thoughts at immense odds with the heat of her surroundings. Arrange for immediate gelding of Sparkle family line stallions.
*
Canterlot now barely resembled a city, a place where ponies lived, loved, worked and acted out the innumerable small dramas of their existences. Much of the protective caldera wall had collapsed, burying the structures nestled against it or built into it under strata of rock, that of it which had not been obliterated wholesale. Few freestanding building now stood; the hypersonic passage of Sol Dei, and associated blunt force overpressure shock, had pulverized most of them. The stands of pegasus roosts were faint memories, stumps of soot-black steel. Only the larger buildings, or those with deep foundations, had been spared much of this assault.
However, the widespread fires, already established and well rooted, caused by the riots and general collapse of social order, as well as the detonation of the stored hydrogen fuel, now entered a final destructive phase: the firestorm. Feedback loops appeared; greater access to frangible and flammable materials allowed for higher temperatures in the cores of blazes, drawing in extra oxygen, creating even greater temperatures. The scenic, high-sided alleyways and rat runs of the capital turned into smelters, howling maws that consumed in moments all it touched.
Like a lump of iron ore in the centre of a crucible approaching its optimum temperature, the palace was largely unscathed. Despite its height and huge cross-section, the ancient structure had been built with equally aged magics. It towered above the roiling smoke, resisting the touch of soot. Such thaumic considerations had not extended to its attendant buildings; the gardens first smouldered, then burst into flames with rapid pops of water in tree boughs turning to steam. The foliage blazed as heat from the city was carried in the billowing clouds or radiated up the tiers from the now encircling conflagration.
The anachronistic statue of Nightmare Moon, asleep atop a slain gryphon, had begun to glow a cherry red by the time Praetor Quiet Afore located his charge. His eyes stung, and he could barely breath, but the sight of a muddy white rump and a pair of legs shod with the imperial brass, jutting out of the last rank of topiaried hedge left to fall to the flames, was like ice water to a pony lost in the desert for a week.
“Sire!” he shouted, voice straining over the inexorably rising howl of the firestorm, growing closer and more overwhelming with every moment that passed. “Thank the stars!”
Afore briefly considered the proper protocol for this situation, then decided that the exigencies of the baffling catastrophe that had suddenly befallen them called for an immediate solution. He licked his lips, squinted through the rolling, choking smoke to gauge his aim, then leant in and grabbed as much of the Emperor's tail as he could in his mouth. It tasted bitter: soot mixing with sweat and the expensive, prissy shampoo he used. Ignoring this, he pulled as hard as he could.
Shining Armour, it seemed, had become lodged quite firmly in dense, leafy mess of the topiary bushes, and the soil in which they were planted. He wasn't conscious, but through the shroud of muck and leaves, Afore saw his chest heave once, twice, and this was enough. He spat out the tail hair and slid around to the Emperor's side, detaching his withers-halberd in the process. The praetor had long hoped he'd never need to perform this trick outside of a training session, but the secondary function of the weapons armature now came into play and, in one deft motion, Afore hooked himself onto the crumpled emperor via a mount point on his armour.
He tested the fixture for a moment, grunting as he shouldered a dead weight. Something exploded deafeningly in the near distance. Afore turned instinctively and saw that the Nightmare statue, with its copper-wrapped stone core, had ceased existing. The topiaried hedge that he had just extricated the emperor from now took its turn to burn; sprayed with molten copper, it had little choice in the matter.
Afore wrenched himself around, dragging the emperor with him, adrenaline spiking in his veins. This sort of stallion-carrying maneuver was best practised with two praetors, one at each side, but in emergencies, could be done with only one. Doggedly, heart hammering in his chest, he began to head for the gaping void where once there had been a gate and much of a complex of stone walls, but where there was now only a strange smear of bubbling, glassy material that looked as though it had just come out of a volcano.
Beyond, the palace beckoned. If there was any safe place now, if succor could be found, it was there.
*
“It is a signal-to-noise ratio trap,” Starswirl said, once their little group had retreated from the towering wall of shrieking not-gryphons. “Someone’s idea of a funny little joke. When the mechanism detects you, the initial transactions are high in signal, the parts that make sense, and low in noise, the parts that don’t have any meaning. However, as the seconds tick by, the noise ratio increases until, well…”
The old unicorn trailed off as he glanced over toward the sphinxes, who had just launched into their sixth repetition of The Wizard’s Horn, complete with anatomically improbable thrusting.
“You could have mentioned it before we went galumphing in,” Twilight said. “How long before this trap resets?”
“Well, how long are protons stable for?”
“What’s a proton?”
Just before the caterwauling sphinxes reached the last chorus of the Horn, whose ribald tones echoed in peculiar and unlikely ways across the glassy no-space of Tartarus, they suddenly stopped. They scattered across their fractal roosts like copperfish scared by thrown stones, secreting themselves away behind shadows and the outcrops of mathematical tricks made real.
“Hm, that was quick,” Starswirl said, then sneezed abruptly, which had an effect much like a grand old pair of bellows being mated with by an overenthusiastic bull. “‘Scuse me, gamma rays.”
Whom squealed like she had been stung and nearly ran Twilight over in an attempt to jump onto her withers, apparently in defiance of her fractured rib. “Oh no!” she whinnied. “Where?”
“The mechanism uses Tartarus’ own mass as a power source, and the process by which it converts said mass to energy is somewhat lossy; showers you with gamma rays and suchlike particulate thingies,” Starswirl said, blowing his nose with a delicate little ‘kerchief that appeared emblazoned with his mark. “None of you were planning on any foals, were you?”
“No longer on my agenda,” Twilight said, flatly, as she untangled herself from a timorous mass of pink-furred limbs. “You know what is, though? Escaping this forsaken pit.”
“Look, I’m going to be very honest with you, and that really always has been one of my redeeming qualities, my blunt honesty, yes, right, very honest -- that back there was my last, best hope,” Starswirl said. “The mechanism isn’t smart, you see. It cannot be reasoned with. It is a clockwork of better parts than metal, but a clockwork yet. If it could be opened from within, then the regnal authority of a Princess would have been the thing to do it. You see?”
The milky-blue eyes that peered out at her from beneath a fringe of muchly matted hair held an unreadable expression.
“I won’t accept that we’re just stuck here,” Twilight said. “There has to be--”
“We’re definitely stuck here, it’s a prison, built out of pure fundament to fill the purposes of beings who could probably simulate perfectly every mind in modern Equestria with their equivalent of a passing day dream.” Starswirl sneezed again, his dander up. “What fools we are, what hubris fills us, to think we could--”
Gravity shifted. Twilight felt it as the most unpleasant of sensations, as if she had suddenly been dangled over a cliff in the direction of the huge fractal Gate complex. The suddenness of it interrupted Starswirl’s proclamations, and he turned even as he began sneezing rapidly. Then, they began to fall. Some old birdy instinct, programmed into Twilight’s brain at the moment of her apotheosis, had her up and flapping her wings against the tug without her ever really deciding to do it. Starswirl’s motile chaise-lounge scraped along the glass with a hideous keening for a moment, then arrested in mid-air with a flash of blue magic.
Whom fell the furthest, and her pathetic wing beats had to be assisted by Twilight’s telekinesis. She felt the mare’s heart hammering away beneath her ribcage via the thaumokinetic feedback, felt how slick and damp her coat was with the sweat of exertions and fear. Moments after she applied the pressure, one of Whom’s ribs slipped and, cursing herself, Twilight remembered her earlier injury. Whom just wailed and tensed up reflexively at the pain.
Below, for that is where it now appeared to be, the Gate complex’s black fractals were glowing with the cherry incandescence of worked metal in a forge. Whole arms and whorls of the stuff had already turned white hot, and were spraying out in gouts of globular liquid, escaping for a short distance under their own momentum before returning and falling into a slow orbit around the centre of gravity. Twilight tried to catch a glimpse of the sphinxes but, for a moment, could not see them anywhere. Then she saw one of the bird-cat-not-gryphon things plunge into a growing spherule of gate-stuff, flail its limbs in an attempt to avoid immolation, shriek wordlessly then, finally, succumb to flames and vanish out of view.
“What’s going on?” Twilight shouted, as the sounds of gyring metals became a roar as the sea enraged, dashing again and again against itself with ever-greater speed and weight like a grand mal seizure at a whale orgy. “Is this another trap?”
If Starswirl answered, Twilight did not hear it. Beams, like rays of light through some ungodly thunderhead, speared from out of the gestating, slippery molten mess. They had the blemishless purity of high altitude sunlight, but only for a moment. Then they rapidly turned ultraviolet, and faded from view. With near-comic swiftness, the ball of swirling stuff collapsed in on itself, as though it were a blob of water being sucked through a straw.
The Gate complex was gone. With the floor now feeling like a wall, it felt as if they were suspended half-way off the edge of a cliff, arrested mid leap. Something rounded was hovering above the 'wall'. It was blue, and getting bluer. Twilight recognized the shade immediately, and felt a horrible pang of homesickness.
Starswirl tossed a dried apple he removed from the folds of his robes away from the chaise lounge, watched it fall, then caught it again. He repeated the process. “Ten metres per second, that seems about right,” he said, his voice now the loudest thing around. “Well, whatever you did--”
From the rounded object, which Twilight did not recognize but felt that she should, came something she most certainly knew. The familiar flanks of Fluttershy, perched astride the great back of a phenomenal example of Aviforma terribilis, the Roc, hurtled into the abyssal depths of Tartarus, the bird’s wings unfolding as it transitioned from dart-like to an awesome gliding profile. The riding pony fell away from them, skimmed the floor-wall, then pulled up and arced around again, flying in parallel and ascending.
“By Luna’s hairy left tit, it’s Fluttershy!” Twilight shouted, breathless.
And after her, unseen, followed something snake-like and asymmetric.
*
Mytheme landed, as Luna felt was appropriate, outside Ponyville’s quaint little town hall. The square, formed roughly from a simple absence of houses and the inevitable prancing pony statue -- which was crushed to a thin layer of dust by Mytheme’s unyielding hull --, was devoid of any bystanders, who had fled in panic long before any vast diamond sky yachts disturbed the serenity of their bucolia. Apart from a few holdouts in the larger buildings, whose presence she could tell from long range disturbances to the magical standing field, much of Ponyville’s resident herd was now camping out in the Everfree. Mass cataclysms have their advantages, Luna thought, as she released the tension that held Mytheme and allowed it to sink into the soft mud of the square.
The nottlygna decamped apace, their organic organizational structure causing the deployment of a few dozen trotlites, nottlygna simply armed with light mail and a withers-spear, to perform a recce and to secure the town, without any individual officer or chief actually ordering it. As this wave of cantering, thinly-armoured and more than a little drunken batty-horses expanded like ripples from the lobbed stone of Mytheme, filtering carefully through the patchwork of houses, cottages and small business premises that formed the heart of the sleepy little town, secondary and tertiary waves of what the nottlygna ostensibly referred to as civilians emerged from the yacht, those older mares, the newly foaled, the crippled, whose military contributions were at an end or unbegun, but who otherwise could carry a lot of stuff.
Cargo lines formed and foals danced up and down them, carrying smaller items, as the adults hefted the apparently many essential supplies that had been crammed into the yacht between themselves, as buckets of water might be in a fire chain. Inevitably, somepony began singing, and this was all it took for laughing, squealing, chittering pulses of ribaldry to fill the air. Though Ponyville had been subject to many songs throughout its long and muddy history, few had ever referenced so many appendages, of so many species, in such unusual situations. Fewer still had featured harmonic parts beyond the range of hearing of a cat.
Presently, something very much like a military camp sprung up in the middle of Ponyville, only it was a military camp that had been lifted up on many thousands of night-black hooves and catapulted at great speed into the side of Equestria’s largest brothel, by way way of two vineyards and a brewery.
It was only after they had settled in, and the remaining residents -- and visitors, of course -- of Ponyville dared put their heads above the parapets to see what all the screaming and lusty singing was about, did the trouble really begin.
*
Twilight circled the spherical object that Fluttershy and her roc had emerged from. She was trying to process the sight of it, but her brain, still wired to function along more-or-less squishy organic lines, couldn’t quite make sense of it. Whilst it appeared to be a physical thing, like a great polished ball, when she tried to focus on it, all she could see was a warped representation of a sky, and a flat yellow plain beyond. As she moved around it, the view shifted to show four black columns, and she knew that what she was seeing beyond was the Tartaran Gate.
The roc, with Fluttershy in tow, seemed very confused as to the orientation of gravity in the new location it found itself in. It was flying around in long, disoriented loops, almost crashing into the wall-floor on several occasions. After about five minutes of this, Fluttershy apparently remembered that she had wings, and left her seat on the roc’s back, appearing like a dash of butter on bread too well toasted against the black void of Tartarus.
“Discord was telling the truth!” she whinnied, as she arced past, colliding with the wall-floor and rebounding, wings flapping and hooves kicking.
“He was?” Twilight said, at a loss for a more intelligent response. “Wait, Discord opened the gate?”
“No, he can’t do that,” Fluttershy said, bobbing upright relative to Twilight, then she misjudged her orientation and collided with the wall again. “Oh, bother.”
“Just imagine a point source of gravity,” Twilight said, still transfixed by the light-bending effects of the gateway. “Easy enough.”
Fluttershy righted herself, fell toward the gateway to try and come level with Twilight, then failed to arrest herself in time. With a squeak, she began to fall away from it again. Twilight sighed, reached out and added Fluttershy to her menagerie of thaumically tethered ponies.
“Hi!” Whom said, beaming the most unabashedly joyful smile at Fluttershy.
“Princess Celestia?!” Fluttershy exclaimed, aghast.
“No, I’m Whom, and I’m so--”
“Whom are you?” Fluttershy said.
“Whom I am, absolutely.” Whom nodded. “I am so happy to meet you at last!”
“Her name is Whom, Fluttershy,” Twilight said, distractedly.
“Oh,” said Fluttershy. “Oh.”
“I found her in a castle on the moon, well, near there, anyway, and she just followed me home.”
“I’m an experiment!” Whom said. “Or a toy, I ‘spose.”
“The Nightmare made her, I think, but don’t worry, she’s the exact opposite of evil.”
“Unless you’re a changeling,” Whom said, suddenly dejected. “They met a Princess of Darkness in that desert.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure I’m not a changeling, so we’ll get on just fine, no doubts,” Fluttershy said, gulping. “Oh, Twilight, where have you been? We were all so worried. When you brought Rarity back, then disappeared...”
“Here, there and everywhere. I’m sorry if I troubled you. I visited the moon, a demesne, drifted through near-Equestrian orbit, then we re-entered the atmosphere in a spaceship I built out of magic,” Twilight said, tilting her head this way and that to see if it changed the orientation of image projected through the gate. “We landed in the Southern Deserts somewhere, a diamond dog stabbed me to no avail, some changelings tried to eat Whom and discovered that there definitely can be too much of a good thing--” Twilight grinned conspiratorially at Whom, whose dejection shifted to sheepishness. “Then my teleportation spell went awry and we ended up here, and you wouldn’t believe who we met.”
Twilight glanced around, looking for Starswirl. The obvious shape of his chaise-lounge was nowhere to be seen. Only a few clouds of fur and feathers, knocked loose in all the recent commotion by many a furred and feathered thing, still drifted in wide, unlikely orbits around the gateway.
“Bugger!” Twilight shouted. “He’s gone! But how? I was watching the gateway the entire time.”
“Twilight,” Whom said. “What’s that behind your ear?”
She felt around with her magic and grasped the thing immediately, knew it well through its feedback. It was the pinion-feather sized scroll, the one Starswirl had completed. As she unrolled it, she saw that it bore so much extra script, in tiny, excruciatingly neat letters that she recognized at once from her academic studies, that it noticeably weighed more. A powerful sensation of wondrous excitement crept up her spine and emplaced itself over her withers.
The complete synthesis for Nectars #1 was finally hers.