No sounds in space

by The Psychopath

Lephantis reborn

The day was just starting to reveal itself once more with the tired, orange colors slowly dissipating from the horizon. Everypony was starting to wake up after a comfortable nap in their warm, cozy beds and were ready to take on the day once more...but this wasn't the case for everyone. A heavily armored fort was sitting in the only pass of the mountain, and the griffons were suffering relentless strikes from infested. The walls of the gigantic mountain pass gradually closing in from the sides and the clear sky above them were the only landscapes the griffons of the fort were used to, but today. Today, there were swarms of bizarre creatures, fleshy growths running along the ground, and bizarre flying orange spore swarms. The fort's stone walls were high enough that the creatures could not jump over them, and they were thick enough that the walls could not be punched down. The ballista imbued with special tribal magic only known to the griffins was capable of rapid firing immense bolts of corrosive power at any invader, so the strange creatures weren't capable of properly attacking the solid fort.

"Sir, we're going to run low on supplies soon. The ballista are holding, but what happens if one of these things starts to fly?" an exhausted griffin asked his commander.

"Then you fly up and claw them to death. We don't have these razor sharp talons for manicure sessions, soldier!" the commander bellowed.

"But everyone who has tried to gut them without gauntlets became infected with something."

"They sacrificed themselves for their empire. Why don't you?!"

The commander simply looked at the soldier shrink and cave in under his menacing glare. It didn't take long for the soldier to speed up towards the walls to take up defensive positions. It had literally started just hours ago after the daily reports from several small towns were never sent. Strange fleshy growths had formed within the forests and had begun to stretch even further. They were apparently growing over the mountains and invading the griffin kingdom. Such ferocity and devastation had not been seen since the war against the crystallions, but an alliance with the minotaurs and a few tribes that had long departed the world had been sufficient to destroy them. With these creatures...it was another tale. Luckily, no flying ones had been seen yet, but the commander had the feeling that something big was coming. Several more explosions from experimental claw-bombs were heard in the background before all the griffin in the fort keeled over and held their heads in pain.

"You refuse us, yet we accept you. If you cannot see your own for what we are, then you will accept us with regret."

After that message, the entirety of the griffin force raised their heads in confusion and looked around in hopes of discovering the source of that message.

"What is that? It looks different from the rest," a soldier said.

The whole field in front of the fort was strewn with bodies and the strange spore swarms flying around. At the horizon, on the edge of the hill stood the halo creature. It wasn't movie, and the other strange abominations weren't moving either. It was as if they had been paralyzed or frozen. The griffin garrison was completely confused.

"Sir, they aren't moving. I think they...shut down, or something."

"Shut down? Why would they--"

The commander was interrupted by violent shaking in the ground. The tremors weren't slowing and stopping as would be expected. These ones just became more and more violent until pieces of stone were sliding out of their positions and falling on those unlucky enough to be below them. Suddenly, a long serpentine shape blasted out of the ground, flipping the ground and tearing away at the rocks around it. As the gravel and dust fell off the body, it revealed a monstrous being with an enormous, triple-segmented maw. This creature was blue grayish in coloration, and its two arms had fused together to form an organic scythe. As the commander looked at it twist and turn its head, there were several moments of painful and frightening silence. Expectedly, the creature roared very violently, opening its maw and revealing what looked like a face with a bright, glowing red mouth. It swung the scythe at the commander who promptly dodged. He shouldn't have, as the scythe smashed into the buildings built within the camp, tearing them apart and throwing debris over the walls.

"What in the abyss is that thing?! Shoot it!" one of the soldiers yelled in a panic.

The ballista was turned around and began to launch their corrosive bolts at the creature who did not notice the threat and found itself pierced by several enormous spears. It howled in pain as the mixture ate through its flesh. It quickly retreated below the surface, filling the tunnel it had just made. Many of the soldiers were gasping in a panic and looking around.

"What is going on here?" the commander thought to himself.

"The others still aren't moving," a soldier on the walls shouted.

"Did we kill it?" another asked aloud.

"It isn't coming back."

More rumbling started to shake the mountain pass, prompting the garrison to ready itself for the scythe wielding monstrosity to return within. Instead, they heard the ground get upturned from the other side of the walls.

"There it is! Shoot...Wait. Something is wrong," a scout noticed."It's not the same one."

This one bore more of a resemblance to the halo creature from afar. Both had the golden halo construct behind their heads, but this one had an extremely elongated maw reminiscent of a caiman. At the end of this maw sat one red eye that viewed everything in front of it. It swayed gently from left to right, apparently assessing the situation.

"What does it plan on doing from that distance?"

"I don't know. I'll just shoot it with this ballista and...It's vomiting..."

A loud, disgusting and gooey belch came out from the mouth of this creature, but it had its head turned upwards. The griffin were unfortunate enough to notice strange objects flying towards them and started to panic. As soldier slammed into soldier, little black balls glued themselves all over the walls, towers, and inner portion of the fort. The troops readied themselves to get attacked by something, but relaxed when they didn't do anything. One of them even went close to one that had stuck to the wall's pathway and poked it.

"H-hey! They're not doing anything."

"That thing disappeared."

"It's okay, commander. They're harmless."

As the griffins began to mock the projectiles, the commander saw them begin to glow with an orange tint throughout what seemed to be veins and yelled:

"No! Get away from them!"

"But commander, they're harm--"

Several loud and violent explosions followed each other in succession, tossing debris and corpses in all directions. The commander shielded his eyes from the event, only to be given a scene that would cause any inexperienced griffon to heave their breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Those that were standing by in the garrisons carved into the mountain walls came out, spear in claws and ready to fight. They didn't exactly like what they saw.

"Wh-what happened?" one of them asked.

The shaking happened again, this time, revealing yet another of these serpentine creatures.

"JUST HOW MANY OF YOU ARE THERE?!" the commander yelled.

This one had a bluish base which returned to a white-gray after reaching one-third of the body. Whatever this creature was, it had incredible long and wide tentacle arms which covered what appeared to be an enormous, white, rectangular head. This time, there was no hesitation, and the archers behind the group were ordered to shoot at the creature. This had little to no effect, as the arrows either broken once they hit the tentacles, or they simply bounced. Removing said tentacles, the creature spat out several large, glowing green balls at the archers, then dug deep into the ground.

"Get out of there! They explode!" the commander shouted.

The archers panicked and were about to fly off, but the balls erupted into virulent clouds of green smoke. It took mere moments for the griffons to cough in pain and drop dead. The cloud quickly dissipated, but someone had to get to the king and warn the empire of this doom.

"You!" the commander said as he pointed at a rookie."You're young. You're new. Bring your experience and knowledge of these creatures to the king. The empire must know."

"But--"

That's an order!" the commander shouted at the top of his lungs.

The rookie stumbled over and ran away throught the mountain pass. The others just stared at him then looked back at their commanding officer.

"Why did you let him go?"

"He's young, and he was the only kid sent here. Might as well send him back. He still has lots of things to see."

"Yes...but we don't know anything about him. How do we know if he'll do it?"

"It was my order. Do not question me again. Now, let us kill these beasts before they kill u--"

The ground had quite literally rupture like a crater, leaving place to a rising abomination nearly twice the height of the previous serpentine creatures.

"What in the name of the air..."the commander gasped.

The three creatures had joined together, with their 'tails' having become three legs on a conjoined lower body. The scythe weilder looked at them and said:

"We are Lephantis. We are the ancestor. Consume us. Be reborn."

---

[/hr]

Twilight groggily walked towards the garden of the castle, her eyes stinging with fatigue. The dim sunlight didn't help her, and she just wanted to go back to sleep. She had been up all night studying for the actual owners of whatever land it was the griffons and neighponese were fighting over, but she was also studying the way these creatures used magic. They didn't have any horns which suggested they channeled magic from somewhere else. Although it looked like they used their hands to control and channel it, where was it stored?

As these thoughts still swept over Twilight's mind, he opened the door to the gardens and got a face full of chilly gust. The alicorn shivered a bit and looked at the two guards stationed at the door. They were wearing coats of fur-grass colored white in order to match their own appearance. The four creatures were sitting in a seiza position and didn't even seem fazed by the elements nor the luminosity. All four were placed in a sort of x position and were facing an empty center with a bizarre shaped was formed with rocks.

"Huh. That must be how they sleep. I thought they were staying in the middle of the maze."

"After the event with the supreme commander...they somehow went outside of the castle grounds," the guard to Twilight's right said.

"What? And you didn't stop them?"

"By the time we noticed, they had disappeared. We didn't move from our spots."

"We simply blinked, and they had disappeared," the other guard said.

"What? Why didn't you call me or the princesses?" Twilight stomped on the ground.

"We didn't...want to worry you..."

Twilight's face puffed up in anger.

"Anyways, after a few hours, they returned," the other guard said.

"Y-yeah. They had plants in their...claws? Talons? I don't know. They just had several plants."

"What kinds?" Twilight wondered as she looked towards the creatures.

"Well...Onions...mormers...fur-grass...some polywraith mushroom.-, some--"

"Polywraith mushroom? Those are extremely difficult to get! They grow near the Ivamora in the Everfree. Even if they managed to travel such a distance so quickly and got them, that mushroom emits a cloud of spores that dissolves anything but the ground!"

"Well, some say the mushrooms also grow within the feces of the pourpros," the left guard added.

"I...I'll want a full report on the occurrence later today. What did they do with those? Did they eat them? Cook them to eat them?"

"They put them into a stone bowl and boiled everything together. The giant one put a weird powder into the mixture then let the rest simmer a bit," the left guard scratched his head as he tried to remember everything.

"The cold one took the bowl, then its sword, poured the substance on it, then let the product slide along its sword onto the ground where the lightning destroyed the maze," the right guard said.

"I remember that..." Twilight groaned.

"Yes, but do you notice anything with the garden?"

The lavender alicorn looked around the garden, then noticed Pinkie Pie sitting with the four bipeds. She had tried her best to sit as they did, but settled with sitting on her flank like ponies usually do...unless you count Lyra.

"Pinkie Pie!" Twilight whisper-screamed."What are you doing there?"

The pony didn't move. Twilight was about to move towards her friend when the right guard stopped her with a wing extension.

"What?" Twilight asked in frustration.

"We weren't talking about your friend," the left guard said.

"Or how...they've been...sitting there...since nightfall..." the right guard twitched.

"They've been..."

Twilight Sparkle stared once more at the four bipeds. Even though she noticed that it seemed to be turning into a habit, she just couldn't fathom what kind of creatures these were. Was this immobility a sign of extreme discipline and training, or was this something inherent for all their species?

"Notice anything with the maze?" the left guard asked.

"Yeah. It's still burnt and destroyed since...yester...day..."

The maze entrance, which had been uprooted and destroyed the day prior was now fully green and seemed even bigger and healthier than before. Twilight couldn't believe her eyes, so she took flight. She was going to see just exactly how much the maze had regrown. To her shock and disbelief, the entire maze had been reborn. No scorch marks remained. No dead bushes and burnt branches were still on the ground or strewn about the garden. The zen garden was still there along with what looked like typical neighponese garden ornaments and a carved statue of an unknown creature who seemed to have a head covered with little balls overlooked by a giant one all the way at the peak of the head, but she couldn't get a proper view of the rest of it from her angle and height. The entire place had been regrown, and it seemed that, around the zen garden there were patches of freshly dug dirt. Perhaps they were also gardeners? Their knowledge of biology was astounding. It had become apparent that they had never been on this world before, but they already had so much knowledge of Equestria's botany...or perhaps, Equestria's plants were very similar to those they knew? She had to report this to the princess.

In a feat of acrobacy that even Rainbow Dash would be jealous of, Twilight immediately flew into the throne room, not realizing that Luna, Celestia, and all her friends were already.

"Princess Celestia! It's incredible! You won't believe what the bipeds did! They...Pinkie Pie?! But you were--"

"We do believe that you were instructed to be here early in the morning to hear our story and the explanation of what the supreme commander is," Luna frowned t the newest alicorn.

"But, the creatures! They--"

"That is enough! Sit with the elements. You may be an alicorn, but you must learn restraint. You may speak to us of whatever mundane feats these creatures have performed at the end of this story. In the meantime, the gardeners shall be here soon to see how they might fix the maze," Luna said as she rubbed her chin.

The alicorn sat next to Pinkie with an angry scowl on her face. Pinkie's muffled chuckling didn't seem to help the situation.

"Right. Thank you, Luna. We told you, at least, we told four of you that the Supreme Commander was a puppet, correct?"

"Yes," Fluttershy nervously said.

She nearly shrunk away when Luna looked at her.

"Well, a long time ago, the council had perceived a threat coming from the lands up north. A large army had been conquering lands far and wide and were coming towards Equestria. To prepare for them, we had been developing our technology and magic, but it wasn't enough. We needed what Luna calls 'super soldiers'."

"Some time ago, when my sister and I were still foals, a strange object had landed somewhere near the castle. We don't exactly know where. Unlike my sister, who was sleeping at the time, I was awake. It was night, after all. A group of the council's militia and arcans had secured the object and were taking it to a place we do not know. What we do know about the object itself is that it was glowing with an incredible brightness and it took ten arcans to transport the object."

"Um, excuse me for my interruption, princess, but what exactly is an 'arcan'?" Rarity asked.

"Ah, yes. I forgot that ponies of today use different terms. Arcans are arch-wizards. These are some of the most powerful magicians of the world. They possess power second only to my sister and I."

"AND IT TOOK TEN TO HOLD THAT THING?! That's like...a bajillion gazillion alicorns!" Pinkie exaggerated.

Applejack simply facehoofed.

"Yes. Well, the council at the time of the threat tried to use that object to empower ponies. Experiments were...dire, to say the least."

"As my sister was imprisoned at the time, I had to supervise the plans. They were horrid and awful and, in the end, I was about to cancel the project. The ones who lost their lives didn't deserve it. The lines north of Equestria were fortified and our alliance with the griffons had just formed to aid us in the upcoming conflict thanks to our trade agreements. Mountains are rich in ore, and Equestria was rich in forests and farmlands, so the trades were perfect for this alliance to last. Strangely, the same day I was going to cancel the project, news came to us at the castle. It had seemed that some sort of...thing had appeared out of thin air and was blocking an enormous amount of land. It was the easiest point that allowed four different nations, ours included, to travel to each other."

"The Nyum-Bunet," Twilight whispered.

"Exactly. Whatever it was, my scouts had told me that the army had created over two-thousand ski-boats to cross the sandy landscape and into our lands. These had been made after several failed attempts with others sinking into the ground."

"One of the scouts still remembers the stories and still laughs to this day," Luna rubbed her face in irritation.

"Each of these boats was big enough to house over two-hundred troops."

"How many got through?" Rainbow Dash asked in excitement.

The pegasus was eager to hear the stories of defense of Equestria against the surviving invaders. Her face was ripe with excitement.

"None. No boats got through. Of the four hundred thousand soldiers, zero made it here."

Rainbow Dash immediately went pale at the thought of whatever could have destroyed them all. If Twilight was right, this 'nyum-bunet' was something to fear.

"Still, this has protected our borders from the invaders and any potential ones, and the project was shut down with zero successful attempts."

"Recently, one of the council members came by with a young stallion. He was rather...absent, but seemed to obey every order we gave him," Luna said.

"He possessed tremendous strength and this frightened even us. He was similar to the arcans of old. I studied the subliminal messages of the project and still remembered them, but I never used them. I wanted to forget. What I saw yesterday confirmed that somepony continued the project and succeeded."

"How do ya know it ain't the council guy?" Applejack asked.

"Because he is too afraid of offending us to do anything. He has a kind heart, but his backbone is poorly developed," Luna chuckled.

"After a unanimous vote, he had become supreme commander of the guards and has worked hard for that task ever since," Celestia frowned.

"We have succeeded in getting the object transported to the castle in order to let you observe it. You might recognize it from something. We are not sure. You can bring it in n--" Luna was interrupted in her order by one of the gardeners who had just arrived.

"Princesses, I am sorry if I seem impertinent, but is this a joke?"

"What do you mean?" Celestia asked.

"There's nothing wrong with your garden. In fact, it looks more like it needs to be trimmed."

"Let's see what you're talking about," Celestia said.

Everypony but Twilight left the throne room with curiosity. Twilight waited, then followed with a frown and a face that said "I told you so". Much to her lack of surprise, her friends and the princesses had their mouths wide open. The four bipeds didn't seem to have moved, though. Luna slowly turned her head around and stared at Twilight with the same face of stupor.

"Perhaps you guys could tell Princess Luna the whole story."

Comments

[Angius]

Of course, my crappy phone didn't even saved my elaborate comment

Lephantis, huh? Well, he'll definitely make a good main villain (at least I hope he'll be one), the Grineer or the Corpus are main villains in most of the crossover fics (except Endure for an Eternity - which firstly has no villain, but then also features Lephantis - maybe).
Well, we'll see how things will go

The exposition takes pretty long, but that's understandable, since Tenno are not the only main plotline in here, there's the whole Gryphons - Ponies conflict, both nations being on the verge of war pretty much. Still, I feel that the Tenno should get more focus. But that's probably coming, since the Infested appeared and Tenno are the only ones able to fight them. I long for seeing the ponies' reactions to Nekros slicing his enemies - living creatures, still, and inhabitants of Equestria ar rather pacifistic - or Frost leaving holes in them using his weapons... Yeah, more action!

As for ponies themselves - sometimes they seem almost not interested in the Tenno whatsoever. See Luna jumping on Twilight for not being here on time and completely oblivious to the fact, that four humanoidal extremely powerful beings from other space are sitting in her garden and did something that shocked even Twilight the alicorn, bah, the GODDES of very magic! If Twi is shocked by something then hell, it's probably worth checking out. She should be like "What? What have they done? Report immediately!" not "Pfff, whatever, it's not like they can raise the dead or something, sit on your flank and listen to my story".
Also Luna acted like a bitch. I mean, come on, since Twilight is an alicorn, that means we have Nightmare Night behind us, which means that Luna is rather friendly now. Hell, she's most probably grateful to Twilight for what she did. And what do we got? "You were late! You are an alicorn but I am a better alicorn! You do not deseve the title! I won't ever acknowledge you! No, your discoveries don't interest me in the slightest!"

Yeah, she was kind of out of character.

But other than that - no issues so far. Well, maybe sometimes it's hard to tell who you are referring to, but it's not something big.

Keep up the good work, mate! I'm waiting for nest chapters!

[The Psychopath]

4744435 Actually, it's because I'm portraying Luna as somene being very serious and who follows the rules since she's kind of culturally out of place. She needs something to hang onto. Also, the tenno will get their light. The ponies are simply mostly ignoring them not because they're not super curious, but because of the possible war between griffons and neighponese. The 'creatures' are keeping to themselves and are barely doing anything, so they sometimes get forgotten.

[Angius]

4744448 Well... Ok, yeah, I can understand that. The war is probably more important than some creatures that meditate in the garden and do nothing. Yes, that works.

[The Psychopath]

4744449 I predict everything without even planning it or actually predicting it.