Twilight’s entire world was darkness as she pulled herself along the rope, hoof over hoof. There was no sound, no light, no sensation at all beyond the roughness of the rope on her hooves, and the tug of the harness around her barrel as the carabiner dragged along unseen behind her, and an unfamiliar, nigh-unbearable burning sensation at the base of her horn.
According to her senses, the world simply ended in front of her eyes. Her first instinct upon dropping bodily through the rift below Harmony’s Shard had been to trigger a simple lighting spell, but that had done nothing at all, despite the cast completing successfully. It had taken every ounce of self-control she had at her disposal to fight the overwhelming wrongness of her perceptions and push on.
Even her rational mind was insisting that the world really did end right in front of her. Given that her expectation was that her breath was going to be ripped from her lungs the moment she crossed through the rift, as one would expect upon moving into an area of pure vacuum, and the fact that her breath was quite happy to remain in her lungs for the time being, she had come to the conclusion that, for all intents and purposes, she was occupying a roughly Twilight-shaped bubble of existence, beyond which was absolutely nothing.
She kept pulling, relying on the lack of gravity to aid her efforts. With the lack of exterior stimuli, her internal senses were heightened to the point of painfulness. Increasingly-stale air burned in her lungs as what little oxygen she had dragged with her was steadily depleted. Her head spun from the combination of no gravity to orient her, and the progressively worsening pain at the base of her horn. Her skin itched as her body heat, normally dissipated into the environment, was trapped with nowhere to go under her fur. Her heartbeat echoed deafeningly in her ears. Illusions danced in front of her eyes, optic nerve conveying nonsensical information as her retina attempted to adapt to the absolute zero light level and fired off erroneous signals in the process.
By the time her hoof touched metal, she felt as though she were on the verge of unconsciousness. Pulling herself through, the normally-tepid air of the Exterior felt like a blast of arctic wind against her badly overheated fur.
“Never... again...” she gasped, gulping down fresh air as though she had almost died, which, to be fair, she almost had.
“Oh, don’t be such a foal,” Rainboom chastised, pulling her the rest of the way into the hallway through the rift. “It’s not that bad.”
“Oh, you can talk!” Lyra cried, similarly breathless. “You... just had to… fly here… Gravity… did all the… work…”
“Horseapples. Pinkie’s an Earth Pony, and she’s fine!”
“Yeperoonies!” Pinkie confirmed. “It was a bit lonely in there, but not all that bad, really. Just like hiding in a really, really dark box and pulling the box along by a rope outside the box and-”
“You can’t use... Pinkie as evidence... for your point,” Lyra groaned. “She’s Pinkie Pie!”
“Yes I am!”
“What’s Pinkie now?” Walleye asked as she came to a rapid halt after barreling into the hallway.
“I’m me!” she replied enthusiastically, bouncing in place.
“Of course you are.”
“Buck… you both…” Lyra gasped, the flush in her face slowly subsiding. “You can carry me… next time…”
“Like Tartarus that’s happening,” Walleye smirked, hovering cautiously. “Any contacts?”
“Not as of yet,” Rainboom replied, moving up the hall. “We’re alone.”
“Good, good. Everyone up. R.D., you’re on point. Twilight, you got any spells for early warning?”
“Not if we’re going to be moving,” Twilight replied after a quick mental skim. “The Exterior’s geometry would play havoc with any of the area-cast spells I have for that.”
“Sense Danger?” Lyra prompted. “Even I know that one.”
“Firstly, that doesn’t endure, so I’d need to cast it repeatedly,” Twilight lectured. “Secondly, a spell that senses danger is too general here. The walls themselves are dangerous considering this bit of the Exterior is barely hanging on and has holes open to the Void all over the place.”
“Point taken.”
“Both of you, quiet,” Walleye ordered. “I’ll take the rear. R.D., stay airborne, I’ll do the same. Twilight, you’re behind her. Lyra, Pinkie, stay behind Twilight so she can protect the three of you if something goes wrong.”
“Wait, protect them?” Twilight asked, concerned.
“Yes, rookie. Protect them. I assume you know some force field spells or some other defensive trickery?”
“Well, yes, but…”
“Good. Keep them ready. Rainboom, we’re looking for a control room or a briefing room, office… anything that’ll give us some information on who used to live here, if anypony.”
“But…” Twilight began.
“And stay quiet,” Walleye finished. “We don’t need to give any hostiles here extra options to ambush us.”
She scowled, moving into position a dozen hooflengths behind Rainboom as they began to walk down the hallway. Pinkie, despite the glares from Walleye, opted to bounce behind Twilight, the slight sproing sound as she bounced only slightly more audible than the ruffling of the two pegasi’s wingbeats.
Very unlike the Exterior she had come to know, the hallways they were walking through were worn and ruinous. Ragged holes open to the Void were common, marring walls and floors and making navigation difficult. More than once, Twilight had been pulled back by Lyra, about to step into a rift that she hadn’t spotted.
While a far cry from the oxygen-depleted air she had been forced to breathe during her transit through the Void, the air here tasted stale and old, markedly warmer than she remembered from the Exterior. A sheen of dust and debris coated most everything in sight, kicked up by their movements to produce a cloud that irritated their eyes and noses.
It took them almost six hours to find anything indicative of habitation. Every room until then, either intact or no, had been completely devoid of any signs of life. Door mechanisms and lights were barely functional at best, dangerously malfunctioning at worst, and the mood among the team had been steadily deteriorating from the combination of enforced silence and unpleasant environmental conditions.
It didn’t matter that all they found were empty crates and stale food in a chamber that was half-missing and near-unlit. By that point, anything was enough to make them jump for joy.
“R.D., check those,” Walleye hissed, pointing at the crates. “Twilight, check for traps.”
Twilight edged forward, her horn igniting as she readied and cast a spell which would highlight traps or hidden objects within her line of sight.
“Gah,” She yelped, turning her head away from the room and blinking.
“What?”
“Weird spell interaction. The rift in there is lit up like the surface of the sun!”
“Really?” Lyra asked, incredulous. She ignited her horn, casting the same spell and looking into the room. “Looks normal to me…”
Twilight peeked back in, immediately recoiling as the spell-vision seared her retinas.
“Alright. Yet more weird Outsider magic stuff,” She mumbled, dismissing the spell and rubbing her eyes.
“Too much talk,” Walleye interrupted. “Lyra, is it clear?”
“Yeah, looks that way,” Lyra replied, dismissing the spell.
“Rainboom, anything dangerous?” Walleye asked into her radio.
“Not that I can see,” Rainboom replied as she hovered to each of the crates in turn, using the various pillars of ruined metal in the room as cover. “Some torn cloth, a few food rations, nothing really substantial, but it looks like our stuff.”
“Food?” Pinkie perked up, poking her head into the room. “What sort of food? I’m starving!”
“Pinkie!” Walleye shouted, pulling the pink mare back behind the doorway.
Not an instant later, a beam of solid purple light tore through the air where Pinkie’s head had previously been, slamming into the wall behind them with a phenomenal crack.
“Bloody Nora!” Lyra cried, scrambling away from the doorway.
“What in Tartarus were you thinking?” Walleye yelled at Pinkie, pinning her to the wall.
“I… I was hungry…” Pinkie replied, quietly. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I-”
“We have rations, you foal! Why didn’t you mention that you were hungry before now?”
“You said to keep quiet…”
“I… argh!” Walleye grunted, pulling her rifle from its sling. “Stay here, and stay down!”
“Okay…” Pinkie whispered, shame and confusion etched onto her face.
“Twilight, you-”
Twilight didn’t hear the rest of what Walleye said, a crack of displaced air echoing from the room as someone, or something, teleported.
“No.” Twilight breathed, pulling her hammer from its pouch and coupling its magic reserves to her own. A script of spells, burned into her memory from constant recitation since their departure from Slateform, executed, encasing her body in a form-fitting force field and preparing a set of instant-response defensive spells for use.
A second crack echoed through the room as she teleported beside Rainboom, ducking in beside her.
“Where did the shot come from?” she hissed
“I don’t know,” Rainboom replied. “I just heard the shot and dropped!”
“Hoof!” Twilight said, reaching out and grabbing Rainboom’s hoof, pulling a ready teleport spell from her collection and casting it.
A sense of unnatural wrongness accompanied the spell discharging, as though the spell’s parameters had been perverted mid-cast. Reacting on instinct, she released another readied spell, forming a momentary bubble of invulnerability around herself and Rainboom.
Microseconds later, the world went purple as their attacker fired a beam of energy at them, point-blank into the shield. Twilight responded, funneling the hammer’s power reserve into a crude formatting spell, directing a beam of her own from the hammer’s head back towards their attacker as the barrier collapsed, a sickening metallic shriek echoing throughout the room as the two beams collided and struggled against each other.
“Rainbow!” she yelled, pulling the beam’s focus tighter and pushing forward. “Move!”
No reply came. As she chanced a glance over to see why her teammate had failed to respond, an almighty bellow issued from off to her side, and a prismatic blur streaked out of the shadows towards the unknown assailant.
“RAINBOW!” Twilight cried, cutting her beam off and dodging sideways so as not to hit Rainboom. “NO!”
There was a flash of purple and a crack of a shockwave.
As she watched, Twilight saw their assailant twist to the side, grabbing Rainboom in their magic and effortlessly swing her around, propelling the helpless pegasus straight past Twilight.
Twilight caught only the briefest glimpse of confusion and fear on her face before Rainboom vanished through the rift that occupied half the room.
And in that instant, something within Twilight Sparkle cracked.
“No,” she growled, standing up. “No more.”
She rounded on her assailant, swinging her hammer around to almost effortlessly deflect a spell thrown at her. Small motes of blackness popped in and out of existence around the base of her horn, amplifying the already-intense burning sensation she had had since traversing the rift from Harmony’s Shard earlier.
“No more killing,” she declared.
She walked forward, miniscule black scars forming and vanishing in the air around her as she solidified her grip on the magic under her control. With barely a thought, she directed it towards her opponent, engulfing them in a malevolent violet field. Motes of light sputtered and died around the mystery pony’s horn as the field sapped their available magic.
“There has been too much death,” Twilight continued, spinning the pony upside-down in mid-air. “That ends now.”
Twilight tore the black helmet and mask away, only to recoil in shock as her own face stared back at her.
“Not what you were expecting?” the duplicate sneered.
Twilight glared at her alternate, her magic darkening ominously.
“You killed Rainboom.” Twilight growled.
“Oh, she’s not dead yet,” came the reply, belligerent and condescending. “I give it a minute, maybe two before she suffocates in her own little bubble of existence. Good luck getting to her, though.”
“Why? Why did you kill her?”
“...Because you’re the enemy?”
“I am not the enemy here! You attacked us!”
“I engaged you to give the rest of my team a chance to get clear. They’re long gone by now, on their way to your Exterior.”
“What do you want with the Exterior?” Walleye asked, slowly walking up behind them with her rifle trained on the duplicate Twilight’s head, Lyra and Pinkie following gingerly behind her. “Who are you working for?”
“Is that a Hooves I hear? Figures the derpy question would come from the derpy pony.”
Walleye pushed the rifle into the back of the duplicate’s head.
“Call me derpy. One more time. I dare you, dam-bucker.”
“Such language.”
“Enough,” Twilight commanded. “Answer the question. I assume you’re working with the group that attacked the Exterior?”
“Why are you expecting her to answer?” Lyra chipped in. “If she considers us to be the enemy, why would she tell us anything?”
“Well, it’s not like you can do anything at this point,” the duplicate replied. “We’ve got a Derpy with anger issues, a Pinkie, a Lyra, a Twilight, and a Rainb— oh sorry, former Rainbow. Five Outsiders, now four, against everyone on my side, and we’ve already taken your Exterior.”
“Your count is off,” Twilight corrected. “I’m an Insider.”
“Really?” The duplicate asked, surprised. “I didn’t think they usually let Insiders in on the secret, much less work for Outsiders.”
“We don’t,” Walleye replied. “But this one’s special.”
Twilight looked at Walleye for a moment, genuinely surprised.
“What? You are!” Walleye said. “I’m pony enough to admit that. Diving in there, risking your own skin to save Rainboom? That takes guts. Guts that, until now, I didn’t think you had. Didn’t think any Insider had. You proved me wrong, kid.”
“That doesn’t change what you made me do.”
“No. And to be honest, if I had the chance to do things over, I wouldn’t change what happened on EF. Not my proudest moment, sure, but we’d still be on the Exterior if I hadn’t done it, probably dead, definitely captured.”
“Doesn’t make it any less wrong.”
“Look. When we have the time, I’d love to sit down with you and discuss the relative moral balance of wiping out a single city filled with rioting, regicidal ponies who almost executed my closest friend and bashed Pinkie’s head in, but right now we have more pressing issues.”
“So much for that apology. Thought you were actually starting to like me.”
“I didn’t say I liked you. I respect you. There’s a difference.”
“If you’re going to continue with the sappy heartfelt crap,” Twilight’s duplicate cut in. “Please shoot me before you do. It’s honestly painful.”
“Shut up,” Twilight growled. “Why are you attacking the Exterior?”
The duplicate didn’t reply, mouth prominently pursed.
“What?” Twilight asked.
“You told me to shut up.”
“Can I shoot her?” Walleye asked, ears twitching.
“No more killing,” Twilight repeated, gently pushing the muzzle of Walleye’s rifle away from her duplicate’s head. “Answer the question.”
“You need to ask?” The duplicate asked, incredulous. “We want your Exterior because it’s functional. We’ve always wanted your Exterior. I hate living here, in this ruined shadow of the Exterior, where nothing works, rooms falling away into the Void on an almost daily basis. I’ve lost friends, lovers, colleagues… Hundreds of ponies, lost because this place is falling apart around our ears. I have been forced to live in the belly of this horrid place, and it’s bleeding to death. And you wonder why I want out?”
“Okay, point taken, but why not just ask?” Twilight challenged, voice weary. “You’re all Outsiders, you have all the same technology, why not just organise everypony and head over to the other Exterior?”
The duplicate’s confused silence was more telling than anything she could have said in response, but far more surprising was the identical expressions of confusion on the faces of Lyra and Walleye.
“Celestia above, I feel like the only sane mare here,” Twilight muttered. “Did none of you ever consider the peaceful option? Just jumped straight to the killing, did we? Are all the ponies from the Ruins like this? Murder first and ask questions later?”
“Would certainly explain a few things,” Pinkie said, voice tinged with pain.
“Yes,” Twilight continued. “We’re up against a force of Outsiders, only with the violent impulses dialled up to eleven and then some, who want to take the Prime Exterior by force because they want a new house and buck everypony else in the way. And we can’t reason with them because, again, Ruins logic means near-insane.”
“Hey!” Walleye protested. “I’m from the Ruins and I’m not insane.”
“By my standards you’re pretty equicidal,” Twilight countered. “And Lyra is strange by anypony’s standards.”
Lyra nodded sagely.
“This also quite handily explains why Theta is working with them,” Twilight continued, turning back to her duplicate. “The Exterior as it is isn’t all that friendly towards her, but an Exterior controlled by ponies like you would probably let her run free.”
“Who?”
“Theta. The mad alicorn-Pinkie Pie.”
“Oh. Yeah, probably.”
“That’s not an answer,” Twilight growled, adding a spike of mental pressure to the plethora of spells that were containing her duplicate. “Is that why Theta is working with you?”
“I don’t know,” the duplicate replied, wincing at the effort of trying to resist the intrusion. “I’ve never met a ‘Theta.’ That’s not who I was told was helping us.”
“Wait, what?” Walleye blurted. “There’s somepony helping you? And it’s not Theta?”
The duplicate remained pointedly silent.
“Who is helping you?” Twilight repeated, voice dropping an octave as she directed all of her available energy towards penetrating her duplicate’s mental defenses. The sound of cracking glass echoed throughout the room as the aura around her horn and her prisoner completely desaturated, turning pitch black.
“I don’t know!” The duplicate shouted back, voice cracking.
“LIAR!” Twilight bellowed, forcing ever more pressure onto the prisoner’s mind. “WHO. IS. HELPING. YOU?”
“A Sparkle!” The duplicate cried. “It’s a Sparkle. One of yours. She’s helping us get inside!”
“Twilight…” Lyra said, voice filled with fear.
“WHICH SPARKLE?”
“I don’t know! I swear! I never met her!”
“TWILIGHT!” Lyra shouted.
“WHAT?” Twilight demanded, glaring at Lyra.
Twilight turned, following Lyra’s outstretched, shaky hoof, pointing at where Rainboom had disappeared through the Rift. What was only moments before simply a hole into nothing had changed dramatically, thousands of razor-fine spiderweb cracks radiating out from every edge she could make out.
As she watched, horrified, ever more cracks appeared, slowly forming together into larger, more coherent rifts of their own, swallowing piece after piece of the room from right around them. A horrid cracking noise, sounding like a cross between bone shattering and glass breaking, echoed through the room as each new rift tore open.
She stepped backwards in horror, only to stop and stare up at her horn as a flurry of identical black spiderweb cracks formed in its wake, slowly undulating and vanishing before her eyes. Experimentally, she wobbled her head, watching the cracks again appear in her horn’s wake, writhing in place before slowly disappearing.
“What the…”
Her words were cut off as the steady cracking of opening rifts grew instantaneously to a crescendo. Before her eyes, the entire room shattered into fragments, each piece visible for a fraction of a second before they vanished completely into the Void. The bottom dropped out of her stomach as local gravity abruptly ended, giving her no time to react as the floor below her lurched around an axis that her mind insisted wasn’t part of the three-dimensional universe she knew, and straight up into her face.