The Twilight Enigma

by iisaw

21 Escape

It was the sun-forsaken aurocks skull that did it. It had become a symbol of the town. It was not only a heraldically decorative charge that adorned banners and was carved into roof beams and such. It was also a not-so-subtle message. This thing made the mistake of attacking us, and look what happened to it.

Somepony had chiseled the ragged neck down smooth and permanently mounted it on a tall, decoratively carved pole just in front of the Tower of Harmony,[1] our town's only other significant landmark.
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[1] Yes, it was pretty. Yes it was tall. But it really was only a large-scale thaumic waveguide. Turning it into a tourist attraction seemed nonsensical to me, but once Buzzy got an idea into her head, there was practically no stopping her. She was a mare of few passions, but immense determination.
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Without the roiling internal energy of the aurocks to power them, the horns were inert and harmless… unless they drew mana from some other source. Say, for instance, a huge thaumic waveguide powered by a gigantic charge of dark magic.

I may have been under considerable "influence" at the time, but it didn't turn me into an utter moron. I ran magic through the waveguide to test it at each step of the construction and there was never a glint from the horns, a quarter furlong away.

But the night of the farewell party, things were different. The townsfolk had decorated the meadow below the tower with banners, flags, streamers, and lanterns, all hung from poles put up for the occasion. Between the poles, they'd draped long strings of tinsel to reflect and sparkle in the lantern light, and there were dozens of strands of it looped over the aurocks horns.

Manufactured goods were very rare in the Forgotten Lands. There weren't any party supply stores to buy real tinsel from, so the ponies had made their own from wire mill scrap. Brass shavings, hung from brass wire to bear the weight. Conductive brass wire.

If I hadn't been in such a hurry to get back to normal and return to my friends, I might have noticed. As it was, I only figured it out much later.

The population of Twilight Town seemed to have doubled for the event, and the party started getting raucous as evening came on.

The King of the Forgotten Lands made an appearance, in a costume that would have made Rarity faint,[2] and was very entertaining. The mad old earth pony proposed to me at one point, though I don't remember if that was before or after he condemned me to the Pit of Despair. I informed the king that I was already spoken for, in both cases. He allowed as how I was a lucky mare, and awarded me a medal that looked suspiciously like a chunk of quartz tied up with an old bit of ribbon.
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[2] Whether from joy or horror, I really don't know. I don't have any fashion sense, but I know wildly extravagant when I see it.
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I contented myself with one small glass of Buzzy's metheglyn as the moon rose. I made personal goodbyes with the few people I had become close to: ponies, zebras, griffons, a young kirin, an old burro, and even the weird little diamond dog who was so good at finding veins of copper.

I clasped the Amulet of Night and the Gem of Remembrance around my neck and made my public farewell to the good folk of the Undiscovered West in a short speech. They cheered me, and there were many cries of "Don't go!" I had to clear my throat a few times and my eyes watered a bit, no doubt because of the smoke from the bonfires.

The crowd parted as I approached the finished Tower of Harmony. Ao and Ajo followed slightly behind me, to either side.

I lit my horn and eased my power into the input portal of the waveguide. The Tower glowed and began its job with a low hum as the dark magic flowed out of me and split into two halves. Crystalline sections induced identical harmonics in each stream of mana, matching the crests of one to the troughs of the other, and the final big crystal at the top of the Tower recombined them, canceling out the dark power and leaving behind nothing more than harmless light and sound.

But those waveforms were enough to induce a mana current through the tinsel wires webbing the meadow behind me. That current would have been harmless as well, if those brass wires hadn't been wound around the aurocks's horns. As it was, the current fed into the crystal until it reached critical density and then a twin blast of lightning erupted from the tips of the horns.

The lightning might have crackled into the sky without hurting anypony if there hadn't been a highly charged structure nearby to attract it. Millions of volts danced along the brass rods and struts of the tower, melting the thinner bits and causing the smaller crystals to explode. It was exactly the sort of event that a sane pony does anything to avoid when working with high-energy magic.

The catastrophic feedback caused by the disrupted mana stream blew away most of the eastern side of the tower, and made my magic spin wildly out of control for a few critical seconds before I could stop it. The sudden jolt felt like the aurocks had kicked me in the horn.

The party guests began screaming and running. It was understandable. Only Ao and Ajo stayed by my side.

And then came the whumph of displaced air from behind me followed by a horribly familiar voice.

"Well, well, well. There you are, Sparky! I was wondering where you'd got to. Can't say I like the new look. Goths are soooo gloomy."

Ao gasped. "The Deceiver!"

I turned slowly, still trying to grapple with the sudden destruction of all my hopes, and saw Discord. "You!" I hissed.

It must have been the horribly out of balance magic that had caught his attention. He hadn't caused the disaster, but at that moment, in my fractured state of mind, I couldn't believe that it was a coincidence. My best chance to get my friends, my lover, and my sanity back had just toppled into ruin, and there was Discord, grinning.

"Save us, Majesty! Please! Kill him! Please! Please!" Ao begged me in a terrified whisper.

"How rude! Some ponies!" Discord rolled his eyes. "Or… whatever."

I shook all over and my muzzle wrinkled up in an almost painful rictus, my jaw opening wide. I think I tried to speak, but the only sound that came out of my mouth was a bestial snarl of rage.

Discord's eyes widened and he lost his grin. "Now, now, Twilight," he began, raising his mismatched arms in a condescending "calm down" gesture. "Everypony's been worried about… ack!"

The counter-rotating helical shields I wrapped the draconequus in would have torn apart a normal, mortal creature. I pounced on him like a manticore on a stray sheep, crushing him and the shields into the soft turf, lining up the forces so that there was only one small channel open in front of his head. I used every ounce of my magical strength to rip his chaos magic out of him and breathed it in with one long, intoxicating breath.

"Twi—Twilight," he gasped in horror. "What… why…."

I dispelled the shields but kept him pinned beneath me. I could feel his heart hammering in his chest. I could see the blood pulsing beneath the skin of his long neck. I could hear the surging hiss of it. I could almost taste it. I wanted to taste it.

My jaws quivered as I forced them shut and lifted my head away from his throat. "You thought this was funny? You think you've won?" I growled. "Well, I can build it again! And this time, I'll feed your magic into it as well as Rushwa's poison. Harmonized to nothing. Dispersed into randomized heat and light. Gone forever! Won't that be fun?"

"Won? I—I don't understand! I…"

"And unless you're very, very good in the meantime, I'll feed you to the Yateveo. You'll love it! A plant that eats ponies! How wacky is that?" I was leaning forward again, having the most incredibly difficult time restraining myself from sinking my fangs into him. "I'm sure Fluttershy will get over it. I'll buy her a canary or something."

It was about then that he got it. He understood that I wasn't kidding and that I might kill him as casually as I might swat a fly.

"She might get over me," Discord said in a suddenly calm and eerily serious voice, "but she'll never get over what you did to her. Applejack and Pinkie Pie, too. They're devastated. When they realize you can't undo it, they'll hate you, Twilight. They'll hate you every second of their immortal lives."

The only reason I didn't tear his throat out in that instant was that I had to know what in Tartarus he was babbling about. "EXPLAIN!"

"What's the one thing Applejack values more than anything else?" he said in a rush. "More than wealth or friends or her own life?"

I didn't reply. I didn't want to be drawn into playing his game. But it was already too late. The first mental domino teetered and fell.

Family. That's what meant more than anything else to AJ.

And, ultimately, family meant foals.

But the crystal engine would always keep her in perfect condition, exactly as she had been when it made the connection to the gem in her head. Exactly.

I knew how Pinkie was with the Cake twins. How could she not want to have her own little ones someday?

And Fluttershy? The most nurturing pony I knew?

Discord probably saw each and every drop of the dominoes in my expression, twisted though it was.

I took a step back. "I—I'll undo it! I'll restructure the crystal engine…"

"Celestia tried that, Twilight! Even she couldn't do it. She won't allow the destruction of the engine, and there's no other way that your friends…"

"Allow? ALLOW? IF SHE TRIES TO STOP ME, I'LL TEAR HER APART!"

He cringed away from me, crossing his arms over his throat and face in an instinctive urge to protect himself. "You can't do that!" he gasped.

He almost overplayed it there. If I had been calmer, I'm sure I would have been instantly suspicious. But all that went through my mind then was a storm of fear and regret that manifested as blind rage.

"He has no power, now," I said to Ao and Ajo. "Tie him up, and don't listen to anything he says. If he refuses to shut up, feed him to the tree."

Ajo was still on his knees, head down and shaking, and Ao was too frightened to reply, but she bowed low to show her acquiescence.

I gathered my power, formed a single, monstrous vortex that would take me all the way to the skull of the great dead dragon… exactly where Discord hoped I would go.

"Twilight?"

I appeared in the spot where Nebula had been downed and found myself in a small camp of Royal Equestrian Guards. They all leaped to their hooves, but it wasn't one of them who had called out. No, I recognized the voice, and it was someone I didn't want to see right then.

More precisely, it was someone who I didn't want to see me.

"Twilight, is that you?"

The unicorn guards wisely didn't light their horns, but one of them said, "Spike, send the message, now!"

"Are you alright, Twilight? Please, look at me!"

Reluctantly, I did. "Yes, Spike. It's me, but I'll be better soon, I promise you."

"Spike!" hissed the guard who had spoken before.

Spike fumbled something out of the pouch he had slung over one shoulder. It was a scroll. He held it up in front of his mouth and took a deep breath. I watched him, silent and unmoving.

Spike hesitated, and then breathed out. It was a slow exhale and brought no fire with it. He held out the scroll to me. "It just says, 'Twilight is here.' I was supposed to send it if we saw you, but…"

"Spike!" shouted the guard.

I slapped him with the back of my wing and he went tumbling into the sand, his chamfron flying off and half burying itself in a drift.

"The next pony to interrupt, dies," I said quietly.

Spike's eyes were huge and his pupils had shrunk to pinpoints. "Please don't hurt anypony, Twilight!"

I nodded slightly, indicating that I understood what he said to me. If he took it for agreement, that was convenient.

Spike turned the scroll over and over in his claws, nearly dropping it once. "What do I do, Twilight? Celestia won't banish you to the moon or anything, will she?"

"I'm here to fix the problem, Spike. I'm here to make my friends happy again. Send the scroll if you want to. Celestia won't get it for at least a day, and by then it will be all over." I would have hugged him then, but I assumed that being wrapped in my huge black wings wouldn't have been much comfort to him.

"But…" He bit at his lower lip. "Do you still… are you still…"

"Do what you think is right, Spike. You may be wrong… disastrously wrong…" I broke off as a harsh laugh bubbled up from my throat, but managed to cut it off before it went on too long. "Do what you think is best."

"It'll be over by tomorrow? And everything will be back to normal?"

"It will be over very soon, yes," I said.

He stood for a while, his gaze on the sand, and then nodded. He looked up at the waiting guards with a sheepish expression, and tore the scroll to shreds. "It was specially enchanted to travel instantly," he said over the outraged gasps of the guards. "But I'm your number one assistant, and I trust you, Twilight."

I smiled, remembered to keep my lips covering my teeth. "Wait for me here. I will be back soon."

The Stairs were foal's play. I scanned and manipulated each group of sigils almost as fast as I could walk down the flights, slowly blinking to let the translocation magic take effect at each landing.

It was the engine that presented the real problem. I hadn't planned on destroying it. I could simply remove the crystal sun that acted as the power conduit and, as the stored mana was consumed, it would fall below the critical threshold necessary to maintain the links to the raptor crystals. I wondered why Celestia hadn't seen such an obvious solution until I caught sight of the engine.

The sun was enclosed in a cage of crystal branches. It looked as if a tree had grown up around the twin points of the conduit's contacts. They channeled not only power, but complex and ever-changing spell matrices. Breaking through them to remove the sun would cause a catastrophic failure in the system rather than a smooth discharge of power.

It would only last a moment, but in that time a thousand exchanges of corrupted template information could travel the links to the raptor crystals. I shuddered at the horrific possibilities that went through my mind.

Had Celestia done it, or had it sprung from the judgmental Tree of Harmony? It didn't matter. All that mattered was that I needed to find an answer. Soon.

An object-specific teleport would have been the solution if the spell could transport magically charged artifacts. There were dozens of times it would have saved untold trouble… if it weren't an impossible fantasy. I began groping for another solution.

I needed to cut the power. Stop the input and the output would take care of itself. But what fed the energy into the engine's input conduit was the Wheel of the World. And that was...

I snorted in anger and stamped the floor. Beyond me? Was that really true? I was powerful! I was brilliant! The Wheel was a mere magical construct for all its size and energy.

I opened my magical sight and stared down at the mechanism of the planet. Cycles within cycles, the simplicity of the circle multiplied and interwoven until each trace of energy became a complex, meandering dance of arcane power.

If I had weeks to study and plan, I might have been able to isolate the stream that fed the crystal engine and stopped its flow. But the Royal Guards surely had other ways of alerting Celestia, and my time was limited.

So I stopped the world.

It was my Fail-Safe spell that did it. The Wheel of the World had been modified long ago. Cycles had been stopped, redirected, and added by the Royal Sisters. The mechanism wasn't pristine. It wasn't pure. All those changes were flaws that gave my spell something to latch onto.

I used the Wheel itself to feed power into the spell, and so, just as it began to function, it stopped its own power source. Nothing changed. I hadn't intended that it should. The spell died before it could have any effect, but for the barest fraction of an instant, the Wheel stopped turning.

The pause before it began to turn again was just long enough for me to shatter the crystal cage of branches surrounding the sun, and snatch it out of the power conduit.

Unfortunately, it was also more than long enough to disrupt the prison buried at the heart of the world.

The cavern of the crystal engine faded away, and I was standing in a soft void that I had only seen once before.

"Twilight Sparkle."

The voice was not loud. It was not quiet, it was not harsh, it was not kindly; it was inevitable. It was terrifying.

I turned to face the Red Queen.