Ice Breakers

Present Day, Sunny Pines

Sven had left for errands at the train station, leaving Twilight and Cycle alone in the Sunny Pines Hearth Motel. When Cycle treated Twilight Sparkle to the motel's small cafeteria, she was somewhat disappointed that the food was merely an ordinary, if slightly bland, affair.

He gave her a flat look. "Its the off season right now, but I do actually have to feed regular ponies here when they visit. Giving them nausea for my own amusement would not go over well."

She squeaked, her cheeks slightly pinking as she dug her face into the stir fried rice.

"However ..." he glanced away from her. "If you're up for it tomorrow, I can give you a sample of a concoction you may find interesting?"

She barely managed to restrain herself from shouting the food in her mouth out, barely chewing to swallow it down as fast as possible. "Yes!" She coughed. "I mean, I would be delighted to try it out."

The rest of the meal passed in comfortable silence. As she was finishing up, Cycle found a befuddled look coming across Twilight’s face.

“You know,” Twilight began, wiping her mouth. “Something that confused me about your, uh, townsponies. You said that Sunny Pines was still pretty small when it ... fell the first time, but right now its pretty big. Where did all those ponies --?”

Her voice died when she glanced at Cycle’s face, twisted in a grimace. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice that, but I guess that was a lost cause.” He sighed. “And since we don’t want you running into this on your own and starting a conflict outside of our influence, we’re going to visit one of the Club’s dirty secrets.”

Twilight shrank back into her seat. “If it’s that bad, I’m ok with not knowing ...”

Cycle shook his head with a weary smile. “Don’t hold yourself back on our accounts, it’ll be something you’ll have to deal with eventually if we’re going to be working together for any length of time. Come on.”

He stood up and began walking away. To Twilight’s surprise, all of the other ponies in the building stopped what they were doing, silently looking at them. They weren’t even breathing. She shot out of her seat and hurried to catch up.

Cycle led the alicorn past more frozen service ponies, something Twilight soon realized was every single pony in the building. In a closet, there was a hidden door to an elevator.

With a click of a button, it started to descend. The brick outside the grated door quickly gave way to steel reinforcement beams, soon interspersed with small windows. Groups of blank eyed ponies glanced at them as they moved down, wisps of cold fog drifting through the grated door.

“This place used to just be a basement, a large freezer,” Cycle began. “I wanted to keep what bodies of Sunny Pines I could get my hooves on intact, as a memento if nothing else.” The elevator slowed to a stop, pneumatics hissing as the door retracted. He still didn’t move, staring into the long hallway, even more ponies standing silently, watching. He gestured at a small glowing Exit sign to the side. “You can even see the old path that this place once used.”

Silence.

“As you can clearly see,” Cycle said, voice now weary, “there are far more ponies here than what a small town should contain. I promised I wouldn’t lie to you. In fact, we are far more terrified of you and yours, so if you leak this secret of mine, we won’t do anything. If you can’t find hope in us, then no one can. But if you can find something of ours worth keeping, please, look for it. In the coming years, we’re going to need allies. We can hide no longer.

“First off, when Sven called me a Wraith, he was not that far off.”

“Wraith?” Twilight asked. “You look-”

Cycle turned his face towards her wordlessly, a frightening familiar wisp of smoke billowing out of his now empty eye-sockets. “Do I look like a hero to you?”

Twilight hopped back in fright. “Those eyes, Sombra--?”

“Long ago, when we were young and overconfident, we made a mistake. We thought we could pretend to be a secret school for those who were really dedicated, but the bastard abused our generosity. Made us close our doors for multiple centuries until we could absolve our sins. Made us realize that we needed to put an active effort in our defenses, as our anonymity will soon fail to protect us.” Cycle gave a weary sigh. “Let me tell you about how we inadvertently caused your sister-in-law so much trouble with Sombra, and yes, how I came to be like him.”

“Wait, the Crystal Empire incident,” Twilight’s eyes widened. “Those ponies were you and your friends?!”

Cycle gave a sharp-toothed laugh, the flattened tongue hanging out of his mouth more befitting that of a carnivore. “Not me personally, but yes. Celestia must have been so conflicted ... “

1099 years ago

Two long years under Discord’s reign. Two long years of being completely helpless, and only being able to stare fearfully as a cruel god danced with his power, before two heroes from across the land discovered (or, according to idle gossip from the undead, possibly rediscovered) ancient magic that managed to defeat him, and for the most part reset the damage Discord had caused.

Pairs of the Club were sent out on regular runs to all nearby settlements, most commonly the griffons. One, for their speed. Two, Griffons in this era were still isolationist, and it made their larger size, curved beaks, all the more distinctive. Gladas in her case tended to travel with her pet crow. They all wore partial masks still, no need to advertise their undeath anymore than they already did, and Wally’s body didn’t look good underneath the bandages he now regularly wore.

They stayed for several days in each town, roaming the streets with no particular destination, letting rumors spread like wildfire. If a pony from Appleton was in the area, they soon realized who were visiting and went to reconnect.

Few remembered the tall, silent strangers that passed through their towns. They interacted with no one, visited no buildings, slept nowhere. Sometimes, a pony ran out to meet them, and all disappeared from the town within a few days.

The encounter was so uneventful that stories about them faded in a generation. But traveling families remembered. They ran into too many accounts of those mysterious strangers in multiple towns to not be wary. Record keepers, too, left behind a paper trail for only the most dedicated.

After that, a decade and a half had passed, thankfully, without major incident. What passed for normalcy within the town of Appleton went on as usual, with the population noticeably growing. This also brought in traders, and due to the general secrecy the Honeycomb Club preferred to conduct themselves with, they tended to conceal their near-immortal status.

Gladas went back to managing her shop in town. She also managed the public library, and helped procure textbooks for the local school.

Cycle and Evens dug out a map of old Enlightened and restarted the regular trips to the remains of the abandoned cult bases in search of the rest of the buried scrolls. Bradley resumed his part in helping out digging tunnels that connected to the underground sites. This time around, he was a lot faster because of the much softer ground and tending to only start tunneling out of sight of populated areas, giving the two adventurers plenty of space for mana-boosted sprints before being forced to slow down.

Trestine, now Quartave, increased her efforts in forming an information network, now that there were regular visits from outsiders. In the early days, they were more like gossip networks, but they at least gave her a direction to investigate. When international newspapers and journals started cropping up, she made an effort to subscribe to every single one she could get her claws on. Daily meditation sessions helped her pinpoint the best avenues for investigation. Outside of that, she managed paperwork, resource allocation, and research progress.

Wally didn’t do much nowadays. He spent most of the time inside Plan P. Frankly, he didn’t look all that pleasant to the eye, either. Noticeable portions of his face were sloughing off, and more of his focus was dedicated to keeping his body from falling apart. Inside, he tended to either be reading or doing stretching exercises. Sometimes, he might move into the backyard to practice his fighting skills. Quartave sometimes sparred with him, being one of the very, very few that could keep up, though with a lot of cheating on her part.

Interestingly enough, once Winter Apple finished her schooling, Gladas found her standing in her store, asking if she could learn from her. To become her apprentice. It took a lot of agreements and written contracts between the two to keep quiet about the nature of her training, and promise to hold herself to still be a pony Appleton would be proud to remember.

One sunny day, amidst Gladas and Winter doing an early morning clearing of Plan P, Gladas found herself answering the door due to a series of heavy, pounding knocks. She pulled the door open, leaning against the doorframe and glaring at the gray coated crystal colt huffing on the doormat.

She raised an eyebrow. “And what are you here for...?”

The colt met her with bold, red irises through a shaggy pitch-black mane. “My home, the Crystal Empire, was ravaged by Discord. None of us could do anything. The strongest were instantly struck down. All of my knowledge I worked for was useless in the face of his onslaught. My mother lost her mind to his insanity. I refuse to ever be that helpless again.”

She tapped her chin. “Appropriate response. I must warn you, if you’re going to be that far away, we won’t be able to keep tabs on you. In turn, I am not allowed to give you anymore than the basics.”

“That’s no problem, I can work it out on my own. I’ll be out of your ... mane? Once you’re done with me.”

“If that’s what you wish. Come along then,” Gladas said, waving a wing into the building, “let me introduce you to Winter, my apprentice. Your name is ...?”

The colt snorted, stepping in with heavy hoofsteps.

“Call me Sombra.”

Author's Note:

End of Arc 1, The Gathering of the Dead.

We'll meet again in Arc 2, The Rise of the Dead, whenever the hell I get around to writing it.
Which should be soon, because finally I will be able to write a fight scene again.
Also, The Seer's naming pattern should be obvious now, and where it will lead to.

Edit: Also, this chapter is brought to you by Dorky, who gave me an idea of how to end this arc.

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