//------------------------------// // Pleasure Domes Are For Sissies; Or Kubla Khan's Revenge // Story: The Ninety-nine Nectars of Princess Luna; Or How Twilight Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Her Wings // by NoeCarrier //------------------------------// Fluttershy steered the roc, which she had named Mr Beaky, through the night's air toward the East. The moon hid its face, the merest curved sliver of mercury, as if it were ashamed, but there was enough light to see by. The landscape slipped past below in shades of grey and black. The numerous unknown woodlets and tracts of neat-coppiced countryside offered up interesting smells, but Fluttershy had other things on her mind, and the roaring, high-velocity air soon carried them away again. West Wingshade was an inferno, so bright that even a night-blind gryphon could have seen it. The grounded Cloudholme blazed fiercely in a dozen places along its long axis. As she brought Mr Beaky down from his cruising flight level she intersected the smoke, and saw that the whole city had slipped from its supposedly secure embedding, where once it had crashed. The level of the plazas and tall piles of urbanity had shifted twenty degrees, and the numerous subterranean additions, the warrens of zebra tunnels and townholds, were exposed to the air like a nest of ants. Worse, it now teetered on the edge of a great chasm in the land, where once there had been a grassy plain. Brighter flames burned in its base, and threw up fouler smoke than that of the city. It was clear that some considerable mass of Wingshade's material had been shaken loose from its foundations, and gone falling from the deck into the abyss. Like irritated bees around a disturbed hive, many pegasus fliers formed a layer over the hole, and over the city itself. Mr Beaky called out to his friend, a piercingly shrill caw with strange, infrasonic edges to it. The other bird lagged behind, as if reluctant. It kept a good separation, and returned a shorter version of the same caw in response. Fluttershy had been busy trying to penetrate the deeper mysteries of roc language for some time, but it remained beyond her grasp. She made a mental note of this new call format regardless. When Mr Beaky was over Wingshade’s large, central plaza, Fluttershy let go of her feathered seat and dropped backwards, allowing herself to fall for a moment before spreading her wings. Mr Beaky hadn’t been going anywhere near as fast as his cruising velocity, so correcting her path was simple, but it was still more flying than she was used to doing. Muscles and tendons stretched and strained, and sweat prickled beneath her too-long coat. The titled angle of the plaza below confused her briefly as it came up to meet her, but the final landing was reasonably smooth. Chaos surrounded her. Though the plaza’s marbled surface was intact, many buildings had fallen into it, spilling their guts of wood and brick across the street. The fires here had been contained, but evidence abounded; black soot smears and huge puddles of filthy water were everywhere. Much in the way of the enchanted cloud material had been destroyed, losing its magic and evaporating like so much mundane cumulonimbus. Survivors huddled here and there around piles of emergency supplies. Medics flitted between them, pouring salves on burns and changing hung fluids. Nobody paid her any attention. Fluttershy followed the general flow of official looking persons, into what had once been a very fine civic building. The steps were home to dozens of exhausted looking ponies and zebras, who were tucking disinterestedly into rations of hay. They all wore red tabards, some in better states of repair than others. Many appeared to have been badly burned, and painfully squirmed beneath salve-slathered bandages. She wanted to help, but knew that she couldn’t. Her head was low and her ears were back as she filtered through them and entered the atrium, through jammed open doors of black ponyoak. Latticework and open trellises of enameled iron spread across the roof, and heaps of broken glass swept out of the way revealed they’d once born sheets of intricate stained designs. Some parts of it still resolutely hung on, fragments of a larger whole. Hints of stars and moons and pure white oriflammes glinted at her from the pieces. “What did I tell you?” someone shouted. “The Elements hunt in packs!” Fluttershy drew her gaze down from the ceiling and locked onto the source of the voice; a milk- and coffee-coloured unicorn mare, beside whom stood a thick and stocky looking pony that it took her a moment to realize was also a unicorn, such was the expansiveness of his black forelock. “Welcome to the city, Madam Element,” the stallion said, in a broad Canterlotian accent. “I’m Mayor Elegy, and this is Doctor Lux, person-in-charge of the medical side of things. Sorry about the state of the place, but we’ve had a little trouble with earthquakes.” “It’s not just you,” Fluttershy said. “This has happened everywhere, as far as we can tell.” “Bugger,” Elegy said, frowning. “No chance of relief from outside, then?” “I have no idea. Canterlot’s burnt to the ground--” Both Lux and Elegy gasped at this, eyes widening. “--and the refugees are around somewhere, some coming here, probably. I think you’ll get more mouths to feed and wounds to treat than any help, Mayor.” “Do you have any idea what caused all this?” Elegy said, after a pause. “Surely that quake wasn’t a natural event? We’re supposed to get forewarning, at least six months worth!” “It’s a magical, very magical,” Fluttershy said. “Alicorn stuff. Twilight is just behind me, and Princess Luna has arrived at Ponyville with her entire nottlygna guard. They’re fighting to find out the cause and stop it.” Fluttershy unmantled her wings and tried to look resolute. “Now, I need to find the other Elements.” “We have Rainbow Dash,” said Lux, distractedly, ears folding back. “She’s in the infirmary.” “Sweet Celestia, Lux, you look like someone just kicked your puppy,” Elegy said, staring at his colleague. “What’s wrong?” “I’ve got family in Canterlot,” she said, breath hitching in her throat. “An aunt, some cousins…” “Skies, I’m sorry, I should have remembered,” Elegy said, shaking his head in disgust. “I’m sure they’re okay.” “Most in Canterlot survived the fires,” Fluttershy said, brow furrowing. “Casualties were fairly light from the events before that, too. Didn’t you suffer any of the madness and rioting?” “Madness and rioting?” Lux said, blinking away tears. “We had none of that here, though there were some rumours.” “You didn’t see the big flash of light either?” Fluttershy said. “Oh no, that was Canterlot?” Lux whinnied. “We had no idea what that was,” Elegy said, sighing. “Some astronomical event, a bloody big rock hitting the atmosphere. I was waiting for a scroll from the capital.” “I need to see Rainbow Dash,” Fluttershy said. “Twilight will be here soon. Only together can we fight this.” She tried to smile, though it ended up as more the angry, pained grimace of a mare about to be hanged for a crime she did not commit. “All of us.” * Emboss awoke in darkness, and to an overwhelming pain. All he could do, for some unknown interval, was lie perfectly still, guttural half-moans escaping from him. Agonies screamed from all quarters of his body, but the worst felt like it was just behind his eyes, an angry knot of fire that yearned for release. He tried calling out to whoever might be listening, but all he could manage was a pitiful whimper. When he moved his head, hot stabbing pain cut into his muzzle along with crunching sounds; the remnants of his spare pair of glasses. His legs were caught in cold vices, and variously tingled or felt like they weren’t there at all. Another interval passed, and he fell into unconsciousness, never expecting to wake up. He did, however. Emboss’ next perception was of flowing water, and blurred shadows on a cave wall. Strange smells like peppery menthol drifted up his nose, stinging the sensitive organ. The pain had dulled away, but he could feel it trying to return. His ears flicked around; more pain came, and one ear felt as if it were moving through treacle. He whinnied, and someone moved in the shadows. “Hush, do not try to move,” iYut said, gently. “You have been injured.” Eventually, Emboss breathed one word: “Truth?” “Safe, my friend,” iYut said, coming into view beside him. “Not yet woken.” There was a scratching sound; Emboss saw iYut moving something ceramic with his forehoof. It was only just visible in the dim illumination cast by a glowing crystal orb on a string, which had been attached to a glossy white stalactite. The sounds of something quite damp burning slowly but surely met his ears. “It is a small miracle only a few of you were badly injured,” iYut said, smiling broadly. “I do not make a habit of keeping much weight of the somniferent mushroom. One alone on his own in the long night of the trotabut could get up to great mischief with it.” Emboss sneezed and immediately regretted it. Pain clenched around his ribs, sending muscles into spasm. He moaned breathlessly, like a hoarse demon was trying to escape his chest. After it had subsided, he said: “What happened?” “My explosion did exactly what we wanted it to do, it was perfect,” he said, sighing contentedly.  “The wave struck the ground above and did not flood the tunnels below, at least, not very much. The weight of the water was vast, however. I think most of the mine has collapsed. It could not take the pressure of the explosives and the wave too. Cavities below opened up and swallowed us.” “Many big caves around here, huh?” Emboss said, somewhat dreamily. “Cavities, and so on.” “A very long time ago, this whole area was a great sea, in which many fish and crabs dwelled,” iYut said, between relighting the sedative mushroom with a square device that produced a jet of flame when he squeezed it between his teeth. “They died, and their bones and shells became rock. We call this rock karratic. The sea is long gone now, but the karra remains. The rain seeps in through cracks and makes the karra slowly melt. The end result is caves.” “I know what limestone is. You’re worse than Astrapios, you know,” Emboss said. iYut laughed, shook his head. “But we have time to speak, now,” he said. “You are not in any state to travel.” Emboss heard scratching and shuffling some distance away, turning his head in time to see someone enter the circle of illumination. He spotted his wife, too, lain prone, with several of the strange patches iYut had earlier used on him along her flanks and belly. He tried to get up, but couldn’t. “Oh, good,” said Astrapios. “You didn’t kill him with your witch doctoring.” “Once, I set your feathers on fire once, and forever I am a witch doctor!” iYut said, grinning. “He had the dreaded feather-flu, and no ladies would go near him.” “Kill or bloody cure,” Astrapios mumbled, limping grandiosely. “Feeling okay?” He sniffed, glanced around. “Ah, I see he’s hooked you up with the good stuff.” “The smallest of fractures to your left cannon bone does not justify the use,” iYut said. “Stop being such a foal about it.” “Cuts and bruises too!” Astrapios complained, haughtily. “Lucky not to lose the leg…” “Where’s the King?” Emboss said, managing to roll over onto his side to face them. “He’s… around,” Astrapios said, frowning. “Woke up half an hour ago, naught but a scratch on him. Lucky git. Anyway, he’s not entirely lucid at the moment. I think it has something to do with whatever the Crown is doing.” “Deep old magic thing,” iYut said, and kissed his teeth. “Eats up the soul until the gryphon is nothing but feathers and bones, then finds another. Some might say evil, but the Crown is less than that. Just an animal of different stripes, surviving as it can. It was not always so, as says my dam and dams before.” “I’m not interested in hearing what the zebras think about the Crown that defends my nation,” Astrapios said, sitting down on his rump. “It’s up there now--” He flicked his head toward the cavern roof. “--fighting the tsunami, a wall of water like a mountain. That’s all that matters.” iYut merely grinned his zebric grin and shook his head. Against pain and the mycological lethargy, Emboss forced himself up and onto his hooves. His muscles shook and trembled, struggling to support him. For a long minute, he just stood there, breathing heavily, but the earlier anger had not subsided. Far from it. He would run on the rage like a hummingbird ran on sugar. Then he noticed that iYut and Astrapios were staring at him silently. “What did you say his injuries were, again?” Astrapios said, squinting in the half-light. “Life altering,” iYut said, flatly. “I feared that here would end our quest, at least for them.” “No,” Emboss said, his voice grating and weak. “They were not. Do you know what has been, though?” He paused to hack up something unidentifiable and red. “This time last week, I was a senior civil servant.” Emboss took a step toward them. “I filed papers, filled out forms and stamped things. That’s where my name comes from. It’s a thing you do to high-grade paperwork. But, then, I had a theophany, that was life altering.” “My lad, you need--” Astrapios started, but Emboss cut him off. “I’m not finished. I’ve been running scared since then, clinging desperately to the notion that I might do something to forestall catastrophe. I’ve been trapped on boats, nearly fed to gryphons, hunted by bandits, blown up and half-drowned. I left behind my young foals and possibly witnessed their end not once, but twice. It will not end here!” “Bloody but unbowed, dear,” said a limp voice. “I think that was the line.” “Truth!” he gasped, staggering over and resting his head over her withers. “That’s the problem with these Equestrians,” said Astrapios, laughing. “Give them half a chance and they’ll start quoting poetry.” He puffed himself up and took on a regal air, unmantling his wings just slightly in the preferred manner of the Princesses. In an accent even more refined and haughty than his usual attempt at High Canterlotian, he said: “If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs and blaming it on you--” “Oh, enough, you ridiculous cretin,” Emboss said, coughing, laughing, leaning on his wife. “How about this: you stay out of my culture, and I’ll stay out of your…” Emboss said, frowning. “Gryphic throat singing?” “You haven’t got the beak for it, matey,” Astrapios said, adjusting his plumage. There was a rumble and a roar, as if of the howling gale atop a mountain heard from a great distance away. Everyone looked upwards, even iYut. Ears swiveled about desperately. The cavern had filled suddenly with a haze of fines, motes dancing this way and that in the unstable back-and-forth flow of air. “The earth moves,” iYut said. “The water above is a great weight, some shifting about is to be expected. We must go deeper.” “I’ve heard that one before,” Astrapios said, chuckling. “‘Spose you haven’t, though, Ser Zebra.” “This cavern is a long tube,” iYut said, frowning at the hippogryph, but addressing his comment to the equines. “Erisne and Ensire are ahead, minding Hywell. They will have located further egresses.” “Long tubes? Egresses?” Astrapios said. “Come on now lad, you’re making this too easy!” “Oo-er, matron?” Truth said, quietly, as she picked through what remained of her panniers. “Do not encourage him!” iYut said, rolling his eyes. With little further fuss, the party struck camp, such as it was, and headed into the deeps. For the first few minutes, iYut lead them through the stands of stalagmites, glowing crystal orb in his mouth, but then the unicorns remembered their magic, though Truth beat her husband to the punch, calling up eerie blue spectres of magelight. There was no real path through the limestone towers that they moved through, and iYut demonstrated the strange litheness of his race well by slinking through the narrowest of gaps and kicking holes for the wider members. Emboss regretted the vandalism, but their need was great. Water, cold and cloudy, carrying miniscule bits of debris, began to flow from behind, passing their feet. It was momentarily stalled in places as pooled up, but soon was sluicing past their hooves again. The roaring became louder, creeping up on them. Everyone unconsciously began to scramble, duck and dive faster. Emboss lagged somewhat behind, grunting as each step or attempt to force more from his tortured body elicited new aches. They heard him before they saw him. Hywell was saying, in clear and concise Equuish with no hint of accent: “The nondegenerate symmetric bilinear form, of which this metric is one, accepts two arguments; tau over upsilon and tau over delta, bearing constraints laterally, and only on the inverse, which appear twice in fourteen segments; tau over tau, tau over gamma, gamma over tau, tau squared…” The big alce was wandering back and forth in perfect darkness, beside a narrow, diagonal fracture through the rock that seemed to terminate the cave. Erisne and Ensire were lying on their forepaws beside him, looking thoroughly bored. As light intruded, they shifted and squinted. “What’s biting him?” said Emboss, winded. “Sounds like a thaumic trance,” Truth said, sagely. “The top mages get them sometimes, when they’re working on the big stuff. The excess heat makes them a little delirious. There was a book of poetry about it, actually, The Cunnyng Cennyngs of Clover the Clever, where they--” “Take up the White Mare’s burden!” Astrapios pronounced, melodramatically. “Send forth the best ye breed!” “Alright, alright, no poetry!” Truth whinnied. “Stay close to me,” iYut said, briefly examining the fracture before climbing in like a ferret. “Remember to breathe, and to remain as calm as possible. You will not get stuck here.” His striped rump neatly shuffled forward, vanguarded by Truth’s magelight. “And keep the mad one in check!” If any were afraid of tight spaces, they kept it hidden. One by one, they slid into the fracture, just ahead of the water. * Fliegende Freundschaft Uber Alles, envelope plump with magically heated air, drifted purposefully through the sky away from Ponyville. Whom was leaning over the edge of the basket, peering down at the ground. Her tail lashed excitedly. Twilight internally frowned at the joyfulness, between reads of the synthesis for Nectar #1. That scale of unabashed merriness was just not normal. Even the run-in with Luna, and their own difficult chat, had only put a dampener on it for a few minutes. “This thing is all Old High Equuish to me, Whom,” she said, somewhat dejectedly. “I’m one of Equestria’s foremost living academics, bearded persons notwithstanding, and I just can’t understand it. What are we, in the face of the ancients? Sad little foals, nuzzling around in the dirt and chasing worms. I mean really, listen to this.” She ruffled the scroll in her magic and cleared her throat. “‘The prepared LSE--’ - that’s lunar squid eye, by the way - ‘--the prepared LSE was added to 522ml of well-agitated and refluxing aqua regia in an inert environment and furthermore agitated with 1.124 Foe until the Upsilon-phi-three catastrophic collapse mode occurred, resulting in, after prolonged cooling, 1.2kg of dark amber solids.’” “What’s so difficult to understand?” said Whom, looking at her with one eyebrow raised. “Well, these units, for one thing,” Twilight said. “What’s a Foe? It’s obviously not the dictionary definition, an enemy or opponent.” She glanced away in thought. “Although, given the general high-order weirdness we’re dealing with here…” “Oh, it’s an acronym, isn’t it?” Whom said, smiling widely. “Fifty one ergs, ten to the power of fifty one ergs.” “Eh?” Twilight said, almost dropping the scroll. “Ergs? What’s an erg?” “Equal to ten to the seventh minus power joules,” she said, closing her eyes and nodding. “So, 12.1 Foes is--” “Lots,” said Twilight, her inner mathematician doing a spit take and dropping her chalk. “Lots and lots. Much energy. Many energies.” “Nightmare Moon used to say it was called that because it was the only thing her enemies were going to get from her, so it might as well have their names on.” “We couldn’t do it on the planet,” said Twilight, shaking her head. “We couldn’t do it anywhere near the planet. Where would I even get that much energy?” Whom’s attention span expired, and she was back over the edge of the basket, absorbing the view. “We’re still missing most of the ingredients anyway,” Twilight said, shaking her head. “We’ve got the squid eye, the lunar nightshade and the uranium, but that’s only three of nine.” “What else is there?” “One bushel of Phallocentri nottlingi, never heard of that one, I imagine it’s a plant of some kind. A single troy ounce of Cummingtonite, I think we can just ask a geologist, doesn’t seem too hard. One firkin of stallion’s tears--” She stopped, frowned externally. “Stallion’s tears? Do we have to round up the bachelor herd and read them sad poetry?” “Oh, I hope not,” Whom said, glancing round, face a mask of genuine terror. “A firkin’s two whole kilderkins, or just over forty litres! That’s an awful lot of crying.” “Then we need three pods from a mature Soma hyperphoria, another plant I’ve never heard of, a pint of water from the spring of Avalon, I assume that’s under the mountain somewhere, might be tricky, considering recent events, and--” Twilight cocked her head, licked her lips. “A dolphin?” “A dolphin?” Whom said. “Like, the fish?” “It’s a mammal.” “Oh,” said Whom, resting on the edge of the basket. “What do you use the dolphin for?” “It’s so you can reduce the ‘alarmingly’ red liquid produced at step nineteen to a ‘calmingly’ mauve solid required for step twenty, apparently,” said Twilight. “This whole synthesis sounds like it was written by someone who was, at some point, trained in proper, honest chemistry, but then got into an unpleasant cart accident and never quite recovered. How on Equestria does a dolphin help?” “Dolphins are cute,” Whom said, after a moment of silence. “Cute animals always make everything better.” “You know, Whom,” said Twilight, adjusting the balloon’s power output for higher flight. “I couldn’t agree more.” * “I know it sounds drastic--” began Fluttershy. “Drastic?” snapped Lux, putting herself between the half-conscious Element and the yellow one. “You want to fill her full of untested dental anaesthetic!” “Canterlites chew the leaves to stay awake,” said Fluttershy, calmly. “It makes sense that a concentration of whatever’s in the leaf might produce a more powerful effect, especially injected.” “That’s conjecture, and testing it in this circumstance would be wholly unethical,” Lux said, ears back. “I’ll have no part of it. For all you know, it’s a vicious poison at high doses. Her liver might start boiling out her ears before I’ve even got the plunger down half-way.” “Doctor Lux, you said it yourself, Dash won’t wake up properly for hours,” Fluttershy said. “Days, even. We need her up and on her hooves, now.” The sounds of screaming and panic filled the makeshift infirmary, and a firepony came galloping in, eyes wide and nostrils flaring. “Mayor, there’s a giant bloody bird on the roof, it’s making these unholy noises like I’ve never heard…” he panted, breathlessly. Fluttershy nodded politely. “Please excuse me for a moment,” Fluttershy said. “He’s one of mine.” Mr Beaky was perched above the atrium when she entered at a trot, cocking his head back and forth and cawing, irritably moving between different holds on the roof. It looked for all the world like he was one of the rodent-eating ground birds that populated some parts of Equestria, lurking near a mousehole, about to drive his beak inside to pluck out a furry morsel. Ponies were hiding on the thresholds, whinnying and squealing in fright. “Awk,” said Mr Beaky, focusing one eye on her. “Awk!” “She is?” Fluttershy replied, automatically. “Wait a minute, you can talk?” “Awk.” The giant bird nodded, slowly. “Awk.” “I see, that’s actually a very good reason, you’ve got me there,” Fluttershy said, blushing slightly. “I’d have done the same thing, in your position.” “Awk, awk.” “You shame me.” “Awk, awk.” “Do you think you could guide her balloon down?” Fluttershy said. “Those things can be hard to land with any accuracy.” Mr Beaky nodded, then leapt into the sky and was gone. Several very large black feathers tumbled slowly into the atrium.   * The fracture between the rocks only got narrower and more constricting. It was only anger and blind fear that kept Emboss sane and moving. He briefly wondered if it was the same for the others. Whatever the motivation, nobody slowed down, even when it became necessary to strip off panniers and drag them along behind them. Emboss thought they were going gradually down, though the fracture eventually terminated abruptly and spat them out into a curiously regular tube of smooth black rock, which curved roughly northwards, ever trending gradually downwards. The inundation of water was lessening, but they could hear it constantly behind them, squeezing its way in. The heat was rising too. Stuffy, clammy air laden with moisture seemed to be rising up out of the depths. It smelled of decay, of nitrates, uncleaned middens and the scent of fired guns. His ears kept popping as pressures shifted about and changed. The tube branched after about half an hour of crawling, offering a wider nodule of empty space speckled with various mouths, out of which iYut picked their route with only a moment’s hesitation. He had some strange sense down here. Emboss strongly suspected a sort of low-level, species-wide magic; some brain structure that was sensitive to the lines of thaumic force that ran through the world. More tunnels, more passageways. Most of it looked natural, the result of water wearing rocks away through thousands of years attrition; some had a decidedly manufactured appearance. Others bore traces of having been shorn up, their unstable parts hewn away and more durable elements added. It didn’t take a subterrene to spot the bricks. Others still were disturbing in the way that they looked like they’d been drilled through blocks of granite with sheer force of magical will. Glasses and other bits of the spoor of too-powerful mages gave the game away. Several hours had passed before Emboss spared a thought for what was happening on the surface. His body ached sympathetically as his adrenaline spiked, realising that, whatever the Crown had done to defend the nation had long since happened. There would only be the fallout now. That was how Divine magic worked. It wasn’t something that needed long preparation, careful study, devout meditation in remote places and the carting around of at least one very heavy book. It just happened, and the lesser species that were subject to it were left to wonder the why or how of it. Emboss had never been a hugely studied mage. The usual intuitive telekinesis and a few handy self-defense spells, that was it. His wife was the real unicorn. But he knew that the magic of unicorns and the magic of the Divine had very little in common, and barely seemed to be describable in mortal terms. Probably something hugely bright and showy; no real witnesses, everyone who saw the flash is dead, blind or half-mad he thought, as he incurred further banged hocks and scratches from the cold and unrelenting stone. His bones and skin and muscles ached wretchedly. There has to be a breaking point. The equine form isn’t designed to be punished so much, and for so long. Something will give. I’ll fall and not get up again. They’ll have to lay me by the side of the road, or in the nook of the tunnel, as it were, and Truth would never leave me, and that would be that… iYut froze suddenly. His ears folded back as his lithe frame became rigid, but then they swept forward, searching. He scented the air. In the black depths ahead and below, something howled. It sounded hungry.