Cold Light

by Scramblers and Shadows

The Remains of Tanelorn

I could eulogise it. But to what purpose? When faced with such a catastrophe, sometimes the only response is to say nothing. Let the silence of the empty streets speak.

Chapter 25
The Remains of Tanelorn

Spots of light roved through the darkness. They revealed little: A slate-grey wall, smooth, featureless, glittering slightly under the push of illumination. About three hundred metres high, and a little over a kilometre across. Blueberry called up her other sensors and checked other readouts – everything from echolocation to ambient radiation. The results were similarly empty. The ship sniffed the thaumic field and told her that yes, there was some sort of residual magic here, but it was so faint that any further analysis was impossible.

In the ship's systems, she could feel all her sacrifices-to-be. Two to a unit; not ideally efficient, but it would easily be enough.

She disconnected, feeling a little lost and wishing she'd bought Cannons and Sorghum along. Why? So they could bear witness to her setback? No Too her victory? They'd see that soon enough. There was no reason to have her boys here, but she wanted them alongside her anyway.

For a moment the bridge felt horribly alien. Her ship. The Resplendent. Except it wasn't really named that, and it wasn't really called that. Daemons lurked in its superstructure and stroked her ego. She was cocooned in a mass of materials and technology whose modes of operation, for all she'd learned, she knew almost nothing about. A thing that had been built and abandoned long before she or Sombra or the Crystal Empire had been born. Perhaps in that sense it was the apotheosis (ha-ha) of her entire life? Pulled from her family, lurched a millennium into the future by a despot's mad backup plan when she was still a filly. Blueberry, deracinated.

Connecting to the pillar again seemed repulsive, but she did it anyway, and summoned the messenger. Not a messenger any more, of course, but she still thought of him that way.

The put a visual display on the front of the bridge and, when he arrived, stood watching it.

“Yes, Miss Blueberry?'

She looked over her shoulder at him smiled, and summoned him forward. “What do you make of that?”

“I, uh, I don't –” He paused, caught her eye and looked again. “A wall? Is that the Apotheosis Machine?”

“This is where it should be,” she told him.

He looked again. “Maybe it was moved. Or … the map that mare gave us was wrong.”

“I don't think so. Everything else here is … well, my sort of city. This is just a giant wall. There's something here. I can see it. The ship can see it.” She trotted up the image. The spots of light held steady. Connecting with the pillar again, the pulled the Resplendent back. “Every step of my journey, I've had obstacles. Flay, my liege, Sweetie Belle. I've swept past them. This is no different.” Having said this, she wondered whether it was to reassure her messenger or herself.

The faint feeling of being oppressed by the city remained. She took the ship back outside. The desert, at least, was slightly familiar.

---

“Open the Apotheosis Machine?” said the diamond dog councillor.

“Sweetie Belle,” Scootaloo said flatly. “That's crazy.”

Sweetie Belle grinned at her. “I know! But really, it's the only thing she's after.” Her smile faded and she looked slowly round the room. A performance, yes, like any other. The message: This is serious. She continued:

“I'm sick of running from her, running around after her. This time, I make the first move. We make the first move. We take the intiative and put her where we want her.”

“I don't think the Apotheosis Machine is where we want her,” said Tom.

“I know! But there's nowhere else. I can't think of anywhere, can you? And if we wait, she'll probably get through on her own. At least this way, we'll be there waiting for her.” Then she held up a hoof to the others. “Come on, Saffron, back me up here.”

“How?”

“Blueberry gets to the Apotheosis Machine. What does she do to activate it? Can we stop her?”

Saffron sighed. “Maybe. If the ship is her power source, it would be held in place. She'd have to get off it anyway to activate the Machine.”

Sweetie Belle recounted this to the others and added, “There! We lure her off the ship. We stop her … and we save all your citizens. If they're gone, her plan's over anyway.” As an aisde to Saffron, she said. “We can do that right? Save them?”

“Yes,” said Saffron at last. “But it won't be a matter of just opening the doors and herding them all out.”

“Twelve hundred people,” said the griffon councillor.

“With a big enough ship … ” said the minotaur admiral.

“Exactly!” said Sweetie Belle. “And –”

“Quiet, please.” The diamond dog councillor held up a hand to stop her. “Before we go further, does anyone else have a plan? The beginning of a plan?

Nothing.

“Then I'll give you some time to think of one. Meanwhile, let's help Sweetie belle flesh out hers. I want something a lot more detailed than open the barrier before we sign off on it.” To the admirals, “Tell her whatever she needs to know about her capabilities.” To Sweetie Belle, “And you tell us everything you know about this ship Blueberry has. We reconvene in two hours.”

---

Outside, Sweetie Belle found Lucille and her old shipmate, Petallion, in part of a small crown surrounding a list of names posted by the outer gate. The sky was growing darker, and a smattering of Ilmarinen's streetlamps were coming on in the distance.

“Excuse me,” said Tom, moving forward and trying to squeeze through the crowd without pushing anyone.

Lucille and Petallion moved away from the front of the crown and came up to meet her.

Sweetie Belle hugged Petallion; it felt like they hadn't seen each other in ages. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey yourself, little miss adventurer,” said Petallion. “When I said maybe you were meant for greater things than being a stokehold worker, I didn't know you'd go this far.” She smiled faintly as they parted.

Sweetie Belle looked to the list. “What's the news?”

“Miss Sweetie Belle,” called one of the admirals behind her.

“Wait,” Sweetie Belle told him without looking round. Petallion's eyes widened slightly, but she didn't say anything.

“Grit's not here,” said Lucille. The next sentence seemed to stop her for a moment, but she continued, “Not among the dead, though. Probably taken.”

“Left the ship,” Petallion explained. “Not very clever.”

“Well,” said Sweetie Belle, “I'm going to get them all back. She gestured round at the admirals waiting behind her. “We're hashing out a plan now.”

Lucille looked up at the admirals. “I'm in,” she said. “If you need her, the Dulcet's at your disposal.”

“I'll see if anyone from Hinny's Revenge wants to come along,” added Petallion

Sweetie Belle grinned. “Sure. We'll be in here. They should let you in if I tell them.”

---

The meetings began with Sweetie Belle standing in front of a row of three chalkboards. Like the Ponyville schoolhouse with her as the teacher – except her students were an odd collection of Ilmarinen admirals and various friends she'd picked up on her travels, and the lesson plan was being delivered in real time by a long-dead qilin sharing her skull.

“We start with the givens. First, the battleground. When you get through the barrier, it opens onto a sort of cave. Technically speaking, and with the help of some topological magic, it's not actually in Tanelorn; it's in the sky, right next to the Scar. Really? That's so – Right, anyway, it's a holding bay for the biggest qilin vessels – two kilometres long, seven hundred in diameter. At the end, there's a platform leading into the machine itself. This is where Blueberry will have to stop. She'll need to plug her ship into the machine, then go on hoof to the control room.

“Now, the ship itself. She has a Cygnet class light scout.” Sweetie Belle sketched out a side view of the ship.

“Those were light scouts?” said one of the admirals.

“Look,” said Saffron, “By our standards, your lot have barely made it past rafts made of reeds and shit. Just be glad she didn't pull out anything powerful.”

“Qilin tech is pretty advanced,” Sweetie Belle translated. She stared back at Saffron while the other gave her a dark look, then the lecture resumed: “It has its weak spots. Places where we might just be able to get inside.”

“A vent?” came another question.

“No, not a vent. What do you think we are, stupid?”

“Not a vent … but, uh, the hull is thin in three places. Most importantly, right here on the back.” The circled a sot on one of the swooping curves. “There aren't any vital systems there – just corridors. But that suits our purposes. We might be able to break a hole and get in.

“Finally, the life-force units. We need to disconnect each one individually. Once they're all connected to the Apotheosis Machine, there's no way to pull them out without killing the captives.”

Tom raised his paw. “Um, question?” he said. “Why?”

This time, Sweetie Belle gave up an reported Saffron's answer verbatim: “She says they're made to perform executions. Safety of the condemned isn't exactly the highest priority.”

Tom lowered his paw.

After glancing at Saffron, Sweetie Belle looked around. “Now we begin the actual plan. Questions, comments?”

Of course there were:

“Are our guns strong enough he break through the hull?

“Two kilometres away? The moment we get close to that thing, it'll shoot us down.

“She'll be off it, surely?”

“But she might have allies.”

“Okay, okay!” said Sweetie Belle. “One more thing. The cannon we saw used today only faces forward. There are aft weapons, but they're not as powerful. And they have a shadow, here. She sketched out a top view of the ship, then drew a wedge behind it. “About 250 metres long and 100 wide at the base.”

“It can't shoot at something directly behind it?” said Tom. “Well, that's …”

“Soon as we invent a way to teleport ships,” said Cerise, “We'll be fine.”

“Yeah, that.”

Proper Order leaned forward, brow creased. “It might be doable. If we fly in fast enough. Use decoys to draw their fire. I'm more worried about timing. Once we get there, we have to find a way to break through the hull and rescue all the captives one-by-one. What's to stop her getting in her ship and turning round, and shooting us down so she can continue in peace? Or, if not her, her crew?”

Silence.

“We could hold on,” said Millie.

Sweetie Belle stared at her. “Harpoons?” She frowned, listening to Saffron. “That might actually work. Blueberry's ships actually pretty light.”

“I'm not sure we can cross that gulf quickly,” said Cerise. “No matter how fast we fly, we have to come to a halt. That makes it about acceleration, not just speed. And airships are lousy at acceleration.”

“And that hull. Really, that's thing's tough. What if our guns can;t hurt it.”

Sweetie Belle, trying to keep up with all the problems together, settled for the last one. “Maybe not a gun, but something more powerful?”

“Could crash a gunship into it,” someone joked.

“Could crash all of 'em,” said another.

And then the options were in the air. Suggestions coming up as often as problems. Each one Saffron commented on – yes, no, maybe. And the plan began to take shape.

“Okay,” said Proper Order at one point. “What if she turns on the machine while we're still trying to break through the hull?”

“I'm the bait,” said Sweetie Belle. “I'll be between her and the machine. I can keep her busy – after all, I only have to delay her until you guys are finished.”

“Alone?” said Proper Order.

Though Scootaloo answered him, her eyes were on Sweetie Belle: “No, not alone. Never alone.”

---

A little over an hour later, they put the plan before the Council. Twenty pages of detail in small type, with Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, and Proper Order taking turns presenting the salient points. The diamond dog councillor studied both cautiously.

At one point she looked up. “As much as I admire your audacity … and, shall we say, self-confidence … do you really think she'll buy this?”

“I really do,” said Sweetie Belle. “Every time I've run into her, she's underestimated me. I escaped her several times using qilin magic. She thinks I'm affected by the daemons.”

“Are you?”

No, the answer almost came out without her meaning to.

“Yes,” she admitted. “I …” She looked around her friends. “I can feel them. But I have it under control.”

The councillor was silent for several moments. “Okay,” she said. “So run it by me again.”

“She knows I have qilin magic. She knows by now her other ship has been destroyed. So say she's looking at some of our ansible transmissions, and hears that some white unicorn has swooped in and abducted even more citizens. She hears what I say, because obviously this unicorn rants and brags like she does. What's the conclusion? It's me, stealing her plan. And I've let slip I know a way to open the barrier. She rushes to the site to follow me. And there she is.”

“And in this hypothetical scenario, why would some airships be sending out ansible messages when they don't get any response?”

Sweetie Belle glanced at Proper Order, who stood by the door, listening. “Because someone inevitably will.”

The councillor smiled faintly. “Very well.”

Following that, the Council retreat for a short debate. After fifteen minutes, the vote came out: Three to two in favour of the plan.

---

The following morning, Sweetie Belle woke in Dignity's main cabin, pressed against Scootaloo. Tom was already awake, staring out the window. The hovercraft's hull creaked faintly; the aelewyrms made atonal melismatic sussurations in their sleep; a daemon whispered all such glory all such beauty the performer stands before before lapsing back into nonsense. As she watched, the light in the cabin dimmed slightly, brightened again a few secons later. She shifted so she could see out the window. The clouds were thinning out. Now they passed in ragged ochre ribbons.

Tom's ears swivelled towards her. “Time for the announcement,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Sweetie Belle. She rolled over and stood up. “I never asked … how are your friends? The research team.”

“None dead. All missing.” He scritched at his ear briefly. “Crumbs. I don't know if I can do this.”

“You don't have to come along,” said Sweetie Belle.

Tom stepped away from the window and sat down, leaning against the black-grey undulating body of one of the aelewyrms. “Remember the good old days when the most we had to worry about was being abandoned and captured by pirates?” he said.

Sweetie Belle smiled at that. “We did it, though, didn't we?”

“Will you two quiet down?” muttered Scootaloo into the wall. “We'll do it, alright?”

“Are you sure you don't want to hear more about how we rescued you?” said Sweetie Belle.

Scootaloo groaned.

At last, they got up and returned to Ilmarinen. The night-shift of the navy had already got the work. The Mettlesome, the least damaged of the Navy fleet, hung in its berth, draped in cables. Pegasi and griffons swarmed about it; other workers hung in harnesses, helping to bolt on another layer of makeshift armour to the nose. Two gunships were already affixed to its flank.

In Sphere Seven, a stage had been set up. The survivors, a crowd of two and half thousand, gathered on the sloping land. Someone had put up an Ilmarinen flag, which hung limply in the stagnant air. As Sweetie Belle approached, one of the guards summoned her to stand on the stage. She brought Scootaloo with her, but Tom and Millie held back.

When everything was settled, Proper Order took to the front of the stage. “You've seen the list of the missing,” he said loudly. “The ponies who have them are a threat to the world. Both worlds. We have a plan to stop them and get our people back. We leave this afternoon. I'm telling you this because we want volunteers. He paused here, looked over the crowd. “If can fight, if you can't. Either way, you can help. Now, I won't mince words. The mission is dangerous. We are expecting fatalities. It's quite possible none of us will come back. Don't be under any illusions about what signing up entails. But if you want to volunteer, come to Sphere Two in the next hour. There, we'll do a head-count and assign you to your teams. That is all.”

---

The volunteers were counted, sorted into combat-capable and not, then passed onto Sweetie Belle. Acting as a proxy for Saffron again, she introduced them to the design of the execution units, demonstrated how to deactivate them. Proper Order came in again briefly talk about how to handle the abductees as they became conscious again, then Sweetie Belle moved onto the ship design, putting up a deck plan of the ship – “We don't know where the units will be,” she explained though Saffron, “but given the number, they're almost certainly in the corridors. This is the order we proceed in … ” The volunteers copied their deck plans, then moved on to other training.

Millie was among them. When Sweetie Belle asked her about it, she shrugged and said, “What else am I gonna do? Have a pint and wait for all this to blow over? Suppose I could, but it's too late now.”

Tom was there too. In the non-combatant group. Lucille had convinced some of her crew to come with her. Others, apparently, would be looking after the Dulcet in her absence; if she didn't come back, her first officer was to take Gregor back to Aquileona in her stead.

When she had a free moment, Scootaloo came up to Sweetie Belle. “Look at this!” she said. The thips of her wings made a whispering sound and flexed slightly. “They're starting to work again!”

Elsewhere, others worked. Messengers checked all the ships with ansibles, found which ones had terminals which might have been stolen, and recruited their help. The Council put together what seemed like plausible messages of panic that would attract Blueberry's attention, and the captains of the ships copied them out in their own writing.

Millie supervised a team of workers in detaching the harpoon guns from Dignity and affixing them to the Mettlesome.

When Sweetie Belle saw the ship brooding in its berth, it had shed whatever elegance had been in its design to begin with. The nose, already spiked, bristled with harpoons and another layer of armour. Cables looped round its waist tethered gunships – sixteen in total, arranged into two circles.

Finally, they took her to see her decoy, an Aquileonan-style scout named the Shrike. An ugly, sharp-nosed thing in grey and dirty-white, with a swollen belly and oversized engines. Big enough to hold her imaginary hostages, but fast enough to keep up with the battleship and get to Tanelorn in a day.

The afternoon had come. It was time to leave.

---

Just before they left, Sweetie Belle and Tom went back to Dignity. One of Lucille's crew had agreed to look after the thing while Ilmarinen was evacuated.

They sat with the aelewyrms a while, scratching their mandibles and necks, played a little, fed them some more diesel, then opened the main cabin doors. They looked up at the sky, back at Sweetie and Tom Belle, spread their wings, closed them, scampered back and forth across the cabin.

Eventually Sweetie Belle shooed them away. Bounce took flight first and circled in the sky above Dignity. At last, its siblings joined it, with Chardonnay going last. They swung about Ilmarinen once more, then turned Northeast.

Best to keep them out of danger; if she got back, she could summon them back. She hoped they understood.

---

The sky clear again. The bulbous sun hanging over the horizon. The ground still strewn with the remains of half the navy, their burnt-out husks striping the desert with orange-stained shadows. The Scar opening above and the gorge below, the latter still trailing smoke.

Ilmarinen receding into the distance. It would be evacuated for the next couple of days – the four remaining battleships looking after a quarter of the fleet each, in case Blueberry came back.

Sweetie Belle rode on the Mettlesome. The austere, angular symmetry of the interior corridors held firm against the near-chaos inside: Triage facilities, training areas, awkward groups of volunteers under the direction of a frontier Navy, itself no ideal of discipline. With the others, she was shown what she needed to know of the ships systems. Hollow pipes ran through the bulkheads for shouted orders; they came with mirrored insides and strong lamps at either end in case things got too loud. Sweetie Belle wished she'd learned the light code.

In between their training sessions, some of the volunteers wanted to talk to her. Did she really summon the aelewyrm to kill the other ship? Sort of. Was she really the sworn nemesis of Blueberry Pancake? Not intentionally. Was she available? After this, would she consider … ? Let's get through this first.

“I wish they'd leave me alone,” she lied to Millie.

Saffron appeared infrequently. “Tanelorn,” she said once. “I'm going back to Tanelorn.” Later: “I don't know if I can do it. No, that's bullshit. I can. I'm just loath to have all those memories brought up again.” She smiled weakly. “Emotional repression suits me down to the ground.”

In the morning, the desert had turned white. A scratchy, dull white that stretched on to the fat, red arc of the sun peering over the horizon.

“You recognise this?” she asked Saffron.

“Where you found me. Well, within a few hundred kilometres, anyway.” Saffron laughed. “I know it well. You know this used to be a great lake? I walked across it a lot.”

“Walked across it?”

“Qilin can – could – walk on water. Yeah. After the end, I came back here. It was shallow then, but not empty. After my ship was attacked, I knew it was going to crash, so as a last resort I uploaded myself into the repository. I hoped that if he used the Apotheosis Machine, he'd be able to get me out and fix everything. Instead, he spent the next few millennia messing about in your world, so, y'know, that worked out well.” Saffron stepped back from the windows, closed her eyes for a moment and sighed. “Anyway, it turns out someone thought the Great Lake Saudade was the best place to hide Tanelorn. Tell me when we get there.” She vanished again.

A little over two hours later, and the sun crawled up towards the Scar, they reached the co-ordinates.

At first, given her conversation with Saffron, Sweetie Belle thought it was a lake: A circular hole in the salt half a kilometre across, an immense staring eye reflecting the sky and the Scar. But its surface was too smooth, too calm. Almost featureless. It was slightly concave, giving Sweetie Belle the impression that it was a tiny part of a sphere buried beneath the desert.

“That's exactly what it is,” Saffron commented. “A shield around the city. If I'm right about its size, we'll need to prepare for turbulence”

With the two ships positioned a few metres above the shield in the centre of the circle, Sweetie Belle headed down to the belly of the Mettlesome. A guard opened a door for her so she could look out and down.

They were close enough that she could see her own reflection, her set expression, looked out from the bulk of an upside-down battleship.

Not the face of a filly, she thought.

Saffron gave her the spell, and she used it. The shield quivered the moment she hit it with her aura. The reflections fragmented. Patches of colour skated away across it surface. Then it vanished. A downdraft roared. The ship lurched, dragged down into the darkness below. Bulkheads whined, squealed. For a few seconds, Sweetie Belle thought it was going to tear apart.

The rattling faded, then stopped. The trickle of light from outside vanished, and everything became quiet.

---

For a moment, Sweetie Belle stood staring out the open door into an infinite blackness. Daemons whispered at her; the battleship creaked around her.

“Remind me what that was?” she asked Saffron.

“Pressure normalisation. This space is a few kilometres deep, at least. Don't worry about the downdraft when we want to get out – I just have to change the spell a bit.”

Sweetie Belle made her way back to the bridge, By then, the Mettlesome's giant lamps had come out, picking out a web of glinting edges floating in the shadows. It took a few moments for her eyes to become accustomed.

Tanelorn. The capital city of the qilin.

Close by, the tallest thing in the city. A spindle shaped tower that reached the ceiling, and went down do deep into the shadows that she couldn't see the base. It was hard to say how tall it was. Kilometres, at least. Flat, triangular plates, like horizontal blades of grass, extended from it in a sort of helical spiral. As the battleship moved forward, they passed over one: Quaint little houses with overhanging eaves. Winding pathways between them. Coated in shadow, a sculpture, or maybe a fountain. A village, like Ponyville – standing on a platform kilometres off the ground, stricking out from the side of a giant tower.

“Port forty degrees,” said Saffron, voice drained of affect. “Then keep going for twenty kilometres or so.” Sweetie Belle relayed the orders to Proper Order.

The ships turned from the tower and proceeded forward above the cityscape. In their light – powerful, but still swamped by the dark – the city looked incorporeal, on the verge of physical reality and ready to tumble away into nothing.

They passed more buildings. Not as large as the tower, but still immense. They seemed to be arranged into districts by style, but there were more styles here than Sweetie Belle had seen in Equestria and Aquileona put together. Here, a sort of gothic shading into organic, with sweeping arches that looked almost skeletal. There, something almost classical – domes and pillars, long structures that looked liked canals, all perfectly symmetric. Then the buildings were all straight lines and irregular angles, asymmetric and chaotic like shards of quartz and knives. After that, a single distributed thing a soft, smooth curves, like a river viewed in a frozen instant, or a mass of flowstone among speleothems. Then the bucolic again: Dainty structures sprinkled across rolling hills and rivers – except the water and grass had long since gone.

They passed something resembling a forest – giant trees, stripped of foliage and apparently petrified – then followed an avenue as wide as the battleship itself, lined with three aqueducts supported by gracile arches.

And finally, near the edge of the city, where the shield offered a distorted reflection of the way they'd come, they found the entrance to the Apotheosis Machine: A pale white wall cliff face, smooth as a wall. Behind it, just flat ground abutting the shield.

Saffron manifested again. “Move to the window, would you?” she asked Sweetie Belle. Then, pointing at a large, open building in the shape of a prism, a bit like a hangar: “You can hide your battleship in there. Blueberry's ship won't be able to see you through that.”

Sweetie Belle relayed this to Proper Order.

“Very well,” he said. He put a hoof on her shoulder. “Good luck.” And, turning to Scootaloo, “Both of you.”

Scootaloo grinned at him. “Same to you.”

They made their way down to the bay while the Shrike and Mettlesome docked with a shudder and a distant clang.

“How are you wings?” Sweetie Belle asked.

“Can't fly, but I can open them properly now!”

Where the corridor opened up into the docking tube, their friends waited for them. Petallion, Whicker, Muttershanks, Tom, Millie, Lucille. Even Cerise.

Seeing them all that made something catch in Sweetie Belle's throat. She bounded into a hug with Tom, who stood nearest. He recoiled at first, then at last accepted. “Alright,” he said at last. “Calm down. It only might be our last every meeting.”

She hugged him harder, until it began to get a bit embarassing, then moved on.

“Woah, lass,” said Mille. “You're not doin' that to me. Don't you even think you are.” She looked Sweetie Belle in the eyes, patted her shoulder, and sighed. “I'm no good at this emotional crap. Just … try not to die, alright.”

Sweetie Belle smiled at her and shook her hoof.

“And if you fail at that,” said Lucille. “It's been nice knowing you.” She did hug Sweetie Belle – briefly and firmly.”

At last, the pilots of the Shrike had all disembarked. The Shrike was ready. When they'd finished their goodbyes, Sweetie Belle feeling on the verge of crying, she and Scootaloo headed aboard and retracted the gangplank.

They traipsed through the empty corridors, trailed by the metallic echoes of their hoofsteps. All of it for all the others and yourself with a daemon whispered in her ear. The bridge was a poky little room with windows on three sides and two ansible terminals placed either side. Both connected to the bridge of the Mettlesome.

She settled behind one set of controls, and looked over at Scootaloo with a faint smile. “Ready?”

“As I'll ever be,” said Scootaloo.

They pulled the Shrike away. While the Mettlesome retreated towards the hanger, they swung round and nosed up against the blank white wall ahead.

“Okay,” said Saffron. “Here you go.”

A spell jumped fully-formed into her Sweetie Belle's brain. The opening key to the Apotheosis Machine. Looking straight out through the front window, she used it.

The wall seemed to fade, smear. It became overlaid with something else, like a doubly-exposed photograph. A few seconds later, there was no wall; just a cavern opening straight ahead.

The path into the Apotheosis Machine

Author's Note:

We're nearing the end here, guys. I'm pretty excited.

Comments

[Lord Max]

Goodness, it's hard to believe that this story is approaching the end. It feels like it just started! But all the same, it's been a fantastic ride. I'm curious as to how many of the mysteries of this world are truly going to have an answer, by the end of it. What are the daemons? Does Discord still have a stake in all this? What exactly is the nature of the tunnel that leads from Equestria to Amaranth, or the Scar? You've made such an intricately designed world that I can't imagine there'll be explanations for all of them. I imagine that I'll be satisfied just to see the conclusion nigh at hand - should be quite the show!

[sharkker]

To te the admirals

[Scramblers and Shadows]

8411315
Took me a while to get to this, but it's all fixed now. Thanks!

[Scramblers and Shadows]

8400089
Thank you! I've really appreciated (and still do) your support throughout this story.

[Lord Max]

8426492
The honor (and pleasure) of reading your story is all mine -- can't wait to see how it ends!