//------------------------------// // Chapter 33 // Story: Friendly Fire // by Starscribe //------------------------------// Danielle always panicked right before casting the Earthbreaker spell. She paced around a patch of bare rock, in the most remote corner of Imperium where the sun rarely shone. Huge sections of Imperium had now been planted and cultivated, and none of those would work. Other ponies knew to stay away, as much because of the constant noise as because of the lumpy craters ripped from the ground and massive piles of rubble everywhere. The broken rock could never be used twice—something about the magic prevented it, but with a little work could be transformed into gravel for cement. Danielle liked the days when they just assigned her to rock-crushing. Such strength with bare hooves might feel strange even after nearly half a year with it, but at least strength made sense. What Earthbreakers did was something else. There were only three of them in Imperium, including her. Something inside always twisted at the prospect of the damage she was about to cause, though that part wasn't enough to stop her practice. Some day she might have to fight for the lives of those she loved. The knights, living contradictions or not, were her best chance of doing good. "That's a good spot," Sheltered Lilly said, nudging her gently with her snout. "You've paced it three times already. I think it's free enough from cracks to start." Lilly was one of the oldest ponies Danni had seen, with a bright pink mane that had faded pale and a few wrinkles in her skin. Unlike Granny Smith, age did not appear to translate to actual weakness—Danni had never won a race or wresting match against her during any of their training sessions. Her Cutie Mark was a delicate pink flower growing from a cracked boulder. Like her Cutie Mark, she was as much sensitivity as strength. "You should go first." Danni pawed at the ground. Lilly was right of course, the stone here was strong and good, perfect for her magic. Lilly retreated twenty feet or so, then sat down to watch from a safe distance. Sure, look as calm as you want. You've been doing this for decades, not weeks. Danielle felt the spell burning in her chest even now, like embers of an old campfire kept alive during a long trek. They waited in her chest where Lilly had placed them, just as she could pass the spell to another earth pony. The process had been agonizing, and strained even her supernatural toughness so badly she had returned to her bedroom bleeding the first night and not left her bed for days. She could use the Earthbreaker spell without fear for her safety now, so long as she made sure not to run out of magic. You want to suffocate in a cave barely as large as your body? Or maybe get crushed to death under several tons of rock? Then run out of magic while you're in an Earthbreaker. The magic wasn't the kind unicorns did, which of course was impossible without a horn. Danielle settled herself securely onto the ground with all four hooves. She closed her eyes, willing the magic in her chest down into her hooves and her connection with Earth. "I swear on rock and soil to do only good," she said. "My hooves will guard what grows and never destroy that which lives well in its own way. Be my strength, my shelter, and my speed. I will be action, flexibility, adaptation." The words weren't English, but Danni had learned them through much repetition. Getting the words exactly right was absolutely essential, for reasons she didn't understand. Just another of magic's unique quirks. She started to sink. What had been firm stone began to yield before her hooves. Solid rock squished and flattened like mud, gurgling and slurping under the pressure. As usual, she started to panic about the time it passed her knees. Ponies were already close enough to the ground that she didn't have very far to go. There was no moisture as she might've expected with quicksand, but also far less give. Though the rock would melt and distort to let her pass, she could not move it any way she wished. She started to struggle as she sank down to her belly, jerking and twisting to try and free herself. "Relax, pony! You cannot stop the tide once it begins to rise," Lilly called from her resting place about fifty feet away, still well out of reach. "Remember what I taught you, and you'll be fine. You've been here half a dozen times before." And it felt like I was going to die each time. Nothing supernatural about the sensation, not the way the magic had felt that burned her insides and caught some of her coat on fire. This was an entirely mundane claustrophobia, as the stone rose up her body, hugging tight to her pony shape. The higher it went, the less freedom she had to move. It wouldn't hurt her, wouldn't crush her or strangle her, but it was very hard to believe that when all she saw was the world getting further and further away. She sank down to her neck, and for a few moments she saw the world as an ant might. Uneven stone, broken with the fallen corpses of previous attempts. No ponies had died in the training on Earth, at least none she had been told about, but Lilly hadn't lied about Equestria's history. There had been a time when this magic was known more widely, and numerous ponies died in the attempt before they could master it. The sound of insects and distant conversation and the faint breeze all faded away as Danielle was wrapped entirely in a cocoon of stone. She kept sinking, now utterly frozen. For these few seconds she would be unable to breathe, unable to do anything at all. No sensation other than the blackness, and the cool touch of rock on her coat. She stopped struggling. Movement would take precious air, air she couldn't afford to waste. Instead she held perfectly still, not even breathing. It felt a little like she was floating through space, weightless in the sense that she was equally supported from all sides. The spell surged within her, its magic reaching out to claim more and more of the rock. It always felt like something was watching, though she lacked the air for speech and couldn't ask. Danielle might be the one floating, but it was someone else's sea. The next part was the hardest. Lilly had never described it, nor did she have an explanation for why it troubled Danni while other ponies didn't struggle with it. She had to force the magic around her into its finished shape, breaking free of ordinary rock to use the power she had channeled. She fought and strained and grunted, trying to understand how to will the stone into the shape she had been told. Earthbreaker ponies had to look like ponies, that was the way it worked. Danielle didn't imagine a pony when she thought about herself—when she woke up in the morning, she still expected hands. When she remembered her dreams, she was always on two legs and standing where she had stood her whole life. Eventually though, she managed to hold the image in her mind long enough to feel sensation returning to her body. Well, the thing that would be her body for a little while. Suddenly she wasn't stuck motionless inside a stone prison, but was instead wrapped up inside something with the consistency of dry soil, gripping her tight but without much strength. She stretched along her body as Lilly had taught, and the sound of cracking stone like gunfire echoed around her. She moved lengthwise, extending each of her legs in turn. Each one brought another avalanche of cracks and shattering stone, shaking free of her body with rock's characteristic brittleness. Enormously strong in compression, but terribly weak when twisted. The more she shook free, the more her sensations seemed to return. Her vision came in as a blur, then solidified into a rocky sky and stone all around her. The smell of dirt. Strangest of all was the pressure against her skin, no longer seeming to be trapped inside rock. She felt solid stone clinging to her like soft clods of dirt, and shook herself free as she might've as an ordinary pony. Except she was not an ordinary pony anymore. Danielle rose to her hooves a full twenty feet above the ground, each step shaking the ground beneath her stone form. Her Cutie Mark was chiseled into the proper place, but the rest of her fur was only roughly detailed stone taking the pony shape she had within. Somewhere, like a frighteningly realistic case of double vision, she could still feel herself trapped in rock that swallowed her like a perfect cocoon. But those sensations seemed strange and distant, right along with the desire to breathe. "Good, good!" Lilly was so small on the ground beneath her Danni had to squint a moment to find her among the shards of broken rock. "Wait a moment, I’ll join you." She didn't take half as long to complete the process as Danni had, picking a spot of smooth stone and splashing down inside like it was water. It seemed like mere seconds later the frail pony broke free as something far larger, rising to her hooves as a mature, healthy-looking pony at massive scale beside Danni. Having someone else to look at always brought home just how insane the process was. To look up into the face of a massive carving of stone come to life, shaped vaguely like a pony she knew but with a skin of marbled mineral veins and eyes like sparkling gemstones. The stone didn't behave the way she expected it to—there were no seams, yet it seemed to bend without breaking. Rock was not meant to be so plastic, and yet she watched it in the way the pony turned to look at her. "What is it today?" Her voice was strangely downshifted by the magic, utterly unrecognizable as anything but monstrous and strange. "More running drills? Swimming? Climbing?" Aside from how gray and featureless she looked, it was almost possible to look up at Lilly and pretend they were still small. It was easier to move if she treated it that way, and didn't imagine herself trapped in a magical mechsuit. That illusion would last about as long as it took to go anywhere ponies were living and working, when the terrifying reality of the spell would come crashing down again. "You haven't shattered in three days." Lilly walked past, shaking the ground with every step. Bare stone would not crack or crumble under their steps, thanks to the same magic that made these bodies work in the first place. "I think it is time to make you useful. We are needed to help install roofs on some of the first housing blocks. A few hundred pegasus ponies could do it, or just the two of us." They didn't run—even skirting around the edge of the cave, they were far too large within the protection of their spells to move quickly and not risk serious injury to anypony they met. "I'm still not good about being delicate. What happens if I crush the roof? Or the whole building?" Lilly shrugged. "Then they'll have to build a new roof, I suppose. And you will have a large crowd of very angry ponies." "Maybe you should just do it. I'm not ready for this. Or we could get someone from off duty to help. Bedrock, or Golden Grain?" Her own steps came a little ponderously. While the body was the proper shape and proportions, the density and balance was all wrong. The first time Danielle had tried to run, she had fallen on her face and shattered into a million pieces. It wasn't the fall itself that broke the spell, anything that broke her concentration could do it. Otherwise, an Earthbreaker was nearly indestructible. "I think having more serious consequences for failure will teach more restraint than using rocks and empty fields. If you make a mistake, the ponies will forgive you. You're Freedom, The Broken Chain, you fought a thousand monsters before freely giving your humanity away for them. You could squish a pony and they probably wouldn't notice." There was more than a little sarcasm in Lilly's voice. While it was true that many of the ponies they had saved did look up to her like that, Lilly and the other Earthbreakers had never once fawned over her. She had never asked, but Danni was quite sure their achievements back in Equestria were even more impressive. "The sooner they forget about all that, the better. Anypony would've done what I did. I just happened to be the one close enough.” Lilly laughed. It sounded a little like the rumbling of a distant volcano. "Think that if it helps you, young pony. We both know it isn't true." More and more ponies passed them as they made their way around the camp. The trip didn't take long—even at a walk, Danielle's armor of stone was so large and strong that it took strides thirty feet long. They got less stares the more they practiced, as the ground-shaking rumble they produced became more common. About halfway across camp, she heard distant screams. Not ponies screaming about them, for that was a sound far closer and more immediate. This noise was much further and far worse than the simple fear ponies displayed around the Earthbreaker armor. "Something's wrong." Lilly tensed, then broke into a gallop. The gesture boomed and shook with terrible violence, and with each step it seemed like her body was going to shatter. Danielle did her best to follow, though it took the whole of her concentration to stop from breaking into a pile of rubble each time she came down with three of her hooves. She didn't break, though she was soon gritting her teeth and whimpering with the strain of it at each step. The alarm sounded a second later, exactly like the air-raid siren that had echoed through Unity on the night it fell. Danielle picked up the pace, closing some of the distance between herself and Lilly. There was a different alarm for drills, so no mistaking this for anything but a genuine attack. As they crossed around the perimeter, running sometimes only a pace away from the rock edge of the cave, or from the shore of the black-water lake that surrounded Imperium, ponies began scattering before them. They didn't have to work very hard to avoid them, since ponies seemed possessed of their own initiative, and their own destination. They passed through fields, doing their best not to step on as much of the crop as possible. They passed through construction yards, where material was stacked and equipment resting for its next use. Eventually they reached the gradual spiral of young buildings that was to become a neighborhood, the one they had intended to come to in the first place. There were hundreds of ponies here, though most of them were running away in fear. They had to slow to a stop anyway—even with the ponies doing their best to avoid the gigantic statuesque Earthbreaker ponies, they were still so small that they often didn't realize just how much room Danielle and Lilly needed to maneuver. As they got closer, cries of fear became shouts of relief. "The knights are here," someone called, and cheers echoed from around them. Danielle ignored both. "Stay behind me." Lilly's voice was curt as she made her way towards the half-finished buildings. Something snapped and gurgled and slurped from just behind them, something Danielle could only see in vague outline. Then she got a little closer, and her towering stature rose above the pony-designed housing structures, giving her a clear view of the monster. It was easily twice as tall as she was, or it might've been if it stood on hind legs alone. It was vaguely draconic, though not like any she had ever seen before. It looked shriveled and half-dead, with scales coming off in clumps and others gone white and discolored. It wore nothing except a faintly ceremonial necklace around its neck, with a rusting iron pendant like a moon glittering there in the artificial light. There were dead ponies at its claws. It was hard to tell how many, there was so much blood. There was also an opening in the wall behind it, where the stone had evidently crumbled away to let the monster pass. "The pretender sends more capable servants than the guards." It had six limbs, not counting the rotten wings clinging gangrenous to its back. With one of its pairs of legs, it flicked something towards them— broken guard armor. There were still bloody bits inside. "Please, come. There is much to discuss."