24: Rise of Harmony / Intermission Decommission
A month had passed since the skies had been cleared. Old travel routes were being cautiously reopened, towns reconnecting after an entire generation of isolation. Appleton had led the charge, passing out copies of the maps the Honeycomb had studiously hoarded.
Trade and travelers slowly became a more common sight, information and gossip steadily ramping up.
Trestine stopped partway after leaving the post office to sit on a bench and frown at the nagging feeling crawling up the inside of her skull. After her rebirth, there seemed to be a sigh in the currents of magic around Appleton, her Sight gradually clearing. Except, what she saw made no sense.
Past a certain point, every path became an incomprehensible mess. There should be no way such minimal divergences would result in such massive changes in days. Worse, they seemed to change with every blink of an eye.
There was something she was missing, something that tied all this mess together. This uncertainty was getting ridiculous, she was going to get to the bottom of this now before whatever it will be bites them in the ass.
She carefully loosened the mana suppression collar she wore around her neck and the gauntlets on her arms. Instantly, she felt the nigh-invisible flames exhaust out of the side of her eyes, crackling energy shooting down her nerves. She closed her eyes and dove deep into the half-shadows casted from the future, cycling through the hundreds of threads ahead of her, noticeably getting increasingly tangled.
Yet through it all, whispering through ripples in space time, there was a consistent, echoing laugh. A cruel, mocking, delighted laugh.
Trestine toppled out of her seat half an hour later, drenched in sweat. She rolled onto her back, shoving a talon into her side bag and withdrawing her slingshot. Moments later, an orange flare detonated over the skies of Appleton.
Gladas skidded to a stop in front of Trestine just as the elder griffon was pulling herself back onto her feet. "What is it?" Gladas asked, brows furrowed.
"Out of the fire, into the pan," Trestine grumbled under her breath. Turning to Gladas, "We've got two days, three max. Took me days to puzzle through the interference; stupid unsealed spirit wrecking havoc on everything.”
Both turned and started jogging towards Plan P, ignoring the worried murmurs around them. They too, knew the color codes by heart after all. “Defensive measures?” Gladas asked.
Trestine shook her head. “Can’t fight this. We’re going have to do what we do best. Disappear so thoroughly that there would be nothing left interesting enough to look deeper. Back to the base. We need to prepare the town for this.”
“I’ll make an announcement later today,” Gladas agreed.
A vein of yellow crept along Trestine’s violet irises. “It’d be good to practice my hypnosis skills.”
“Ponies of Appleton, I wish to repeat the immense gratitude we hold for your kindness in allowing my family into your fold all those decades ago. We were a lost people, exiled from our homeland, and hunted at every corner. We are in your debt, and we will never forget your generosity. Ask us any problem that comes to mind, and we will do our best to assist if it is within our capabilities.
“However, today I must be the bearer of bad news. A new calamity, one with directed purpose and not a random, creeping malice, will be soon upon us. It is one that adores in mental horrors, for the one silver lining that it prefers its prey alive to play with.
“As you can imagine, I would prefer if we could hide all of us as we did from the Eternal Winter. But we only have days. There isn’t enough time to get far enough to hide our tracks. All we can do is hide in plain sight long enough for the true heroes to confront the Calamity. Despite our efforts, we cannot be those heroes yet.
“What we can do instead, is offer hope for the safety of our children. We can hide their minds from this, Calamity’s cruel magicks until this new storm is over with our blood, but few more. We must ask again for you all to entrust their lives to us, while some must stay behind, blinded, to maintain the illusion.
“I deeply apologize for not being able to do more.”
A taloned paw picks up a dessicated black creature, its wings buzzing weakly.
Its voice snarls in irritation, charging his paw in chaotic magic and flinging it into the heart of the cluster of life fearfully running from him.
Screams of fear echo through the darkness, then warp in screams of horror.
It grins. “No one messes with my toys.”
A few days pass, and the tiny, sparsely populated frontier town of Appleton hunkered down, warily watching the skies.
There were no children, there never were children in Appleton.
They have never heard of rotting corpses in the forest.
They were simple farmers, barely recovered from the life-taking winter, now alone again in the face of a terror they could do nothing about.
In the forest, there sat a house, years forgotten. Life had bled out of once sturdy walls, now rotting timber flowed out of doorways and sagging ceilings. Insects roamed the walls, nature steadily reclaiming its territory.
Glass shards littered the scorch-marked floor. A skin-tight corpse, dried from the cool air, lay on its back behind the door, its face mauled beyond all recognition. Ashes coated the kitchen, remnants of an uncontrolled blast of flames. Corpses litter the floor, surrounding a charred skeleton with tiny blades spilling out of her wrists, plated in the black of vaporized blood. Her wings were fused to the cupboards, the outlines of feathers slowly fading into ash. Even in death, she rested in defiance, claws tightly wrapped around daggers, a forever sentinel.
The rest were no better.
A skeleton tied in chains to a pyre.
A spear pinning a small colt to the wall.
An old stallion laying at the feet of the stairs with his neck broken.
A shriveled body locked inside a room full of soot, ash, and shattered wine bottles.
A worn dog half buried beneath an abandoned overgrown field, curled protectively over partially shredded scrolls.
The rainbow light arced throughout the ravaged land, even as the cruel voice bellowed with mocking laughter. Within an hour, the entire land was healed of chaos’s careless scars.
In a dark, dusty forest, that same Harmonic magic clashed against the oily stain coating the derelict wreck of Plan P, grinding out multi-colored sparks as they fought one another. Unlike the chaos slapped haphazardly across the continent, this magic pushed back the comparatively weaker pulse.
The moment passed, and the building creaked in victory, splinters raining from strained timbers.
For now.
The celebration was quick, but fierce. The ponies of Appleton were able to haul out kegs of Heneken beer and string up paper decorations and lanterns in the hours before sunset, rapidly transitioning to heart-pounding dances beneath the stars.
Not everyone came out of Discord’s reign unscathed. Time lost all meaning as the sun and moon danced at random. Discord roamed the land, invading houses and flinging ponies across borders on a whim, played with their perceptions and minds.
But ... it was over now. Some of their numbers were lost, and awkward newcomers were trapped in a land they knew little of, but that was something that could be solved in time. For now, it was a time of unleashed emotion, and the joy in knowing that a bright day would soon follow.
Hours into the night, Harvest Apple looked around for his son. It was getting much too late for the foals ...
He froze in the middle of the street, his wife and a transplanted guardsmare bumping into him. "Crystal Light?" he asked, pitch steadily rising. A mental fog blurred his memories as he struggled to remember. Discord's reign didn't help clear up what he, or anyone was truly doing. "Where did Winter go?"
His wife twitched, her brow furrowed in concentration and growing worry. The bat-winged guardsmare, Wind Cutter, looked on in concern. “Were they taken by Discord?” she asked.
Crystal moved closer to them, head on a swivel. “That can’t be, we hid them with ... “
Harvest and Crystal stared at each other, then ran off. Confused, Wind Cutter trailed behind. Their panic led them to a darkened general store, the door hanging slightly ajar. A thick layer of dust coated everything. A potted plant in the corner was now dry, and shriveled. A few shelves had shifted, leaving shattered ceramic jars on the floor.
Both of the residents’ subconscious memories were screaming about something, someone, that should be there, but the evidence was clear that this spot had been untouched in ages. They pushed through regardless, instinctual memory pulling their hooves to the loft partially hidden above the store.
This too, was empty, yet somehow even worse because of it. There were no personal embellishments one made to make it a home, just a worn bed and a broken desk shoved in a corner. Its bookshelves were bare, no outlines to indicate the presence of something once there.
Despite this, Harvest found himself not entirely surprised.
“Shouldn’t this place look more lived in?” Wind Cutter asked, prodding the walls looking for a secret button.
“Of course not, she spends most of her time at--” Harvest hunched over and coughed, rainbow colored sparks mixed in with his spittel. Crystal mirrored him, a queasy expression on her face as she leaned against the wall with a hoof over her mouth. “... The forest house.”
“The what.”
The trio moved back downstairs, but before Crystal could explain, they were stopped at the door. Turned out, they weren’t the only ones who started to realize that something was wrong.
Wind Cutter looked around at all the near identically worried faces. “Alright, you’re going to have to explain this to me. There are ponies willingly living in the middle of that forest?”
“Nooot exactly.”
In the end, five ponies gathered up their torches and stood at the almost invisible path into the forest home. Nopony was willing to wait any longer, eager to rejoin their family, and start the search for their other lost ones. Harvest Apple and Crystal Light, the ones who first awoke their memories and best remembered the rarely used path. His new friend, the somewhat confused guardsmare Wind Cutter. River Red, a unicorn magic researcher, he was very intrigued by the rumors that there existed those who evaded Discord’s sight. Cherry Blossom, the town’s nurse who often met with Gladas for lunch.
Torches and lamps lit up the trees and the regrown path, unnaturally still. No birdsong, insect buzzes, rustling bushes. But their foals were waiting, so they moved on, Harvest trusting his instincts to guide his hooves across memory blurred paths.
“So, what happened?” Wind Cutter asked. “You still haven’t told us what this place is.”
Harvest grimaced, while Crystal and Cherry shared an awkward glance. “It’s ... somewhat of an open secret around here, but it’s also something they rather not advertise out loud. Especially as we’re pretty sure a few of them still have bounties in the Griffon empire up north.”
“That ... ‘still’ has a lot of weight attached to it,” Wind Cutter commented.
Harvest hummed as he pushed a branch out of the way. “This house was built several years before the Eternal Winter ... and its builders are still there.”
River Red twitched. “Impossible! No griffon has ever been recorded to live over a century.”
Cherry Blossom shook her head. “They’re no ordinary creatures that’s for sure.”
Harvest held up a hoof as they entered a clearing, his lamp light shining upon a dilapidated house. “Welcome everypony ... to Plan P.”
“That is an awful name,” Wind Cutter commented.
“We know. They wanted a way to make it seem like there’s more, but none of them were really good at the names part. Most of us just call it the Lich House.”
River Red seemed to almost jump out of his skin, eyes boring into the back of Harvest’s head.
The apple pony sighed. “You’ll see soon enough.”
Their first impression upon getting close enough was that it looked old. The type of old a place gets after spending decades abandoned, not the probably year or so of Discord’s reign of chaos. Every window was shattered. Multiple rotting holes pierced the walls, webbing, moss, and small plants digging their way into the crumbling pieces.
The front door was the worst, being completely torn off its hinges and tossed to the side, half buried by mud. On top of that, there was a pony’s corpse laying on its back, its face charred beyond recognition.
“Is that one of them?” River Red asked, cautiously inching forwards.
The natives looked at each other. “We ... don’t recall that one being part of the House,” Cherry Blossom replied. “Strange.”
Harvest pushed forwards, carefully stepping around the body as a muffled instruction rippled through his memories. “Doesn’t matter. Nothing we see here matters. We need to get to the heart of the house.”
Only a few moments after they all pressed the threshold, they heard a creaking noise behind them. Wind Cutter and River Red turned, and gasped as the corpse stood up, a single eyeball rolling out of its crushed skull to stare at them. Cherry Blossom twitched, but didn’t look back, as did Harvest and Crystal. Crystal shook her head. “Leave if you want.”
The five advanced, the newcomers quickly stepping up to stay close to the townsponies’ sides. The corpse wobbled, and slowly started shuffling after them. The charred skeleton in the pyre twitched, the bones easily slipping free of the chains. Its talons dug into the floorboards and started dragging itself forwards.
They soon reached the ruined kitchen, clouds of ash trailing their hoof steps. Harvest and Crystal muttered to themselves as they dug into the caved-in cabinets while the rest stood back, maintaining a wary distance to the body pinned against the icebox.
“Ah ha,” Harvest said, as he pulled out a cutting board. River Red gasped when Harvest flipped it over, revealing a polished surface, and precisely cut grooves beneath the dust. The circle spoke of locations, control, amplification. Two mirrored signatures, one for identifier, and one for user.
Harvest held up a hoof, and Cherry, who already had a small knife in her hoof, quickly made a small cut. The blood dripped onto the identifier, and flashed.
The corpse and the skeleton froze. To their surprise, the charred body in front of them straightened out of her crouch, yanking the knives pinning its wings off. The ash jittered and surged, the grime flaking off and revealing the hidden blood. With a twitch of its claws, blood splashed onto the spell circle. ”Contact: Harvest, accepted.”, the talon slapping the center of the spell circle.
Blood tendrils shot out, jumping through cracks and seals, diving beneath the floorboards around them. Dust fell from the ceiling as the building shook, its foundation creaking as the soil below churned. Crystalline shards burst out of the ground, pulling tiny skeletons behind them, as flesh regrew.
The body looked up, yellow flames igniting in its, her, sockets. “Welcome back.”
Gladas pulled her blood out of the cool body of Trestine resting in the middle of the Regeneration spell circle, moments before the six charged crystals fired. Trestine’s body spazzed as donated and preserved blood was pulled through the holes in her limbs and torso before they started shrinking, sealing. She gasped, jerking up into a sitting position before leaning on an elbow and dry heaving. Bile barely made it past her tongue, being pulled back in reverse as the spell continued to dig into her cells. There was a brief burst of magical flames around her eyes, before they began being sucked back beneath her skin, a burst of feathers covering the broken mana coils.
She wiped the side of her mouth with the back of a talon glancing up at Gladas. “Update?” she ground out through clenched, twitching teeth.
“Time passed is uncertain,” Gladas reported. “The changing days and rampant magic radiation made time keeping all but impossible. Perceptions were heavily distorted too, at best guess it was roughly two years before the Calamity was made no more.”
The sparks of energy around Trestine’s body began dying down, tying down tightly down into her rear half.
“While any permanent damage has been mostly avoided,” Gladas continued, moving to pick up the drained crystals, “there are still complications. Ponies across the continent have been displaced, including ours.”
Trestine clutched her chest as she slowly moved onto her feet, wobbling at the feeling of her strange new limbs. “We’ll need to send out search parties soon. This ... intermission has been an annoyance, but solving it is simple, if time consuming.”
Gladas nodded, holding out an arm to Trestine’s shoulder to steady her. “Cherry Blossom is currently checking the foals, it will be well within her capabilities.” She raised an eyebrow. “How are you feeling?”
Trestine patted her face, her beak. “Well, I still have this, that’s good.” The feathers on her front half had turned completely pale outside of a few black specks, so bright it almost glowed in the dim light. Her rear half was completely different, a pony's rear with a light grey coat and the mark of a bare-branched tree. She tapped the mark with a claw. “This is new.”
Gladas moved the crystals to the side of the room, to be recharged later. “Do you feel any different?”
Trestine squinted. “Not sure. I will require experimentation later.” She waved a claw. "Enough about me. I assume the rest of the Club are reconstituted?"
A nod. “Though, what are we going to do with the outsiders? We never really had rules or a plan on what to do if we get revealed.”
The Seer hissed. “Nothing to it now, we never told the Apples to keep them out. All we can do is impart the importance of keeping us out of their breaths. We absolutely cannot harm them, or imply harm, or we’ll lose all progress.” She shook her head. "Assist in clearing out the foals as soon as possible. Call a meeting afterwards; get a census of the town, a count of who's here, who's new, who's missing, figure out a safe introduction to the outsiders. But before all that ..." The Seer plucked the dusty cloak she was wrapped, buried, in and flicked off the dirt. "Let's introduce them to Quartave."
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7061887
Now's the Discord chapter I mentioned weeks ago.
First mention of Sombra is coming next chapter
Typo? I thought his name was Harvest Apple, not Blue Harvest.
Glad to see this story updating!
7232444
Whoops, it was a mid edit change. Seems I didn't get everything. Was going to make a reference, but it didn't really work out, so I changed it. Should be all fixed now.
Regarding Agatha, I envisioned her as liking a good performance, even after she mellows a bit. A big bit. Seeing a events and following it to the exact detail. Pre-cog for non precogs.
I just pulled that out of my ass. Time to add that note to self.
You are really one for confusing chapters.
They used the lich equivalent of cryo-storage to outlast Discord?
8801472
haha, oh man there's someone actually reading this frozen zombie. I'll get back to it soon, pls.
Anyways, actually answering your question, pretty much. Came from a quote somewhere (probably used many times) that Discord hates death most of all because it can't change anymore. So they turned themselves into corpses so Discord wouldn't give a shit, and set some geases or whatever equivalent I wrote (wait, how do they cast geases? flips through notes) to activate once Discord is gone, or for a 100 year timer to expire. Probably be better explained once I stop being lazy.