Tower of Shadows

by Knight of Cerebus

Chapter II: Merger (Part I)

Every instinct of hers screamed at her not to do it, but Celestia, against all common logic, raised up a hand to knock at the door. Her position was now thoroughly given away, if it hadn’t been before. But Celestia had not gotten where she was in the guard through brutality or subterfuge--rather, her empathy and integrity had done that for her. She called out to the tower’s owner. “Twilight Sparkle? I’ve been sent to exchange words with you.” There was a sarcastic chuckle. A face formed out of one of the stones in the wall.

“The word I heard was arrest.”

Celestia looked taken aback, turning to face the enchanted outcrop. “I beg your pardon?” Her grip on her mace tightened instinctively.

“I’m under the impression you’re here to arrest me.” Twilight smirked. Celestia took the moment to observe the icon, hoping to gain information. Twilight looked to be somewhere between eighteen and twenty. There were stress lines woven into the space below the eyes, but there was a fire in the eyes nonetheless. A fragile genius type, if ever she’d seen one. She lessened the grip on her mace, making sure to droop it lower.

“That is entirely up to you, and your cooperation with myself and the people of Ponyville now and in the future.”

Twilight gave a chuckle. “After all, cooperation with society has worked so exceedingly well for me in the past. No, I think not, in point of fact.” The spell rippled for a minute. “On the other hand, you could always, I don’t know, walk away and leave me alone? Forever? I think that would be fair enough. You’d never hear from me again, I’d never hear from you again, we’d both go on with our lives.” It was hard to tell where the sarcasm ended and the proposal began. Deep in her eyes, Celestia could see it. The betrayal. The hurt. The enforcement of an isolation not of Twilight’s own creation.

“For that to be possible you’d have to stop practicing the dark arts.” Celestia tried to be as patient as possible, despite herself. There were any number of ways Twilight could try to kill her as of this very minute, but her instincts told her that being gentle here would be her safest way forward. “Tempting though they may be, there is a--”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Spare me. I’ve heard it before. ‘There’s a hidden danger to them. They can’t be controlled.’” She looked pensive for a moment, then malicious. “Safe? I never felt safer than the moment I started practicing. Nothing scares off your kind quite like a bit of black magic. Control? The minute I started studying real magic was the moment I started putting life in my control. I’ve never felt more welcomed by anything in my life. And I certainly don’t feel more welcome around you.”

“Then you leave me with no choice. Twilight Sparkle, for resisting arrest, practice of forbidden magic, destruction of public property and civil unrest, I declare you under arrest per the laws of the High Solar Magis--” She leapt out of the way just in time, making sure to roll toward the doorway and not away. A set of blue-red shields--not unlike the emblem of the Royal Guard itself--formed in a ring around the base of the tower, pushing outwards with a bludgeoning force. Celestia hugged the base of the door, her body and armor shrinking against it with a mixture of drilled practice and magical aid. The second wave of the spell began closer to the entrance than she’d anticipated. A web of white-and-blue magical lines surrounded the door, then the entire tower, and then a salmon-coloured bubble began expanding from the edges, reinforced by the leyline scaffolding. The entire bubble began to push outwards. Celestia’s armor bristled against the forcefield, pressing up against her chest and kneecaps and pushing her away in a painful backwards slide.

She ran down a mental list of the spells in her inventory. She’d prepared some dispel magic, but it was likely woefully unprepared for a ward as intricate as Twilight’s. A ward of this nature likely anticipated attackers attempting to break through it with brute force, meaning her mace was likely useless. She wanted to save the few anti-magic spells she’d prepared. Twilight could dispel any magical assaults that weren’t already prepared. But one thing Twilight almost certainly hadn’t counted on was the ward having to do a good job of budging an already-present force. Celestia buckled down, activating the force magic in her mace and slamming it deep into the ground.

She crouched around the mace, digging her armor’s heels and kneecaps into the dirt of the forest. She let a force spell in the armor intended for use as a battering implement weigh herself down even further, and allowed the contorting spell tuned into her armor to condense her weight into an even smaller, heavier mass. The ward pushed around her, ribbons of magic pressing against her and forcing her forward. Metal burrowed into her skin, and she grit her teeth at the scraping, needling pain. Dirt ploughed up over the bastion she’d formed from her equipment, coating her face through her visor. The barrier of magic around her began to distort. Her world was pain. Grinding, heavy objects buffeting and warping and crushing her body. She knew she would break before her armor did. But she also knew…

There was a flash of brilliant, dancing lights all around her, and the sound of glaciers and thunder echoing across her helmet. Celestia rose to her feet, adjusting her bruised and battered body within her completely-unscathed armor. She gave a rough grin. You’re going to have to try harder than that. She attempted to walk forward, only to find that one knee screamed in protest. She kept going, barely stopping to check that she had cast the spell correctly. To a cleric it was second nature, after all. Healing magic surged across her left knee, flooding her skin with a warm and silky feeling--like soapy water running over her. Her hobbling became normal walking, and she picked up the pace.

She could see threads of magic frantically attempting to rewrite themselves in tune with her motion, the barrier dissolving behind her, a second spell forming in time with her steps. Magic was flying through the air around her in a panicked, disorganized mess. Twilight was hurriedly attempting a poor man’s version of the spell she’d just broken. But a spell like that would take time, and effort, and that meant one very important thing. Twilight was distracted. With a flick of her mace, she hurled a dispel at Twilight’s half-finished attempts at a second ward. The strands began to dissolve around the same time she reached the door. She swung her mace, this time applying the force spell for its intended use. The door exploded into splinters, handles and fragments flying inwards at breakneck speed. Celestia decided to call out again.

“There is always time to settle this diplomatically, Twilight.” The chambers remained quiet. Distant sounds of crackling radiated from the top of the tower, while the forest outside echoed with birdsong. But no voices answered her. She scanned the tower with a much keener eye than the rest of the forest. This was no longer familiar ground. The walls were made of the same gem-studded oak as the outside. The room was illuminated by the gems themselves. Celestia was intimidated to notice that the gems weren’t radiating a light spell. They were syphoning off excess magic. It was the equivalent of lighting a house with lamps holding magma in place of lamps holding fireflies. One was naturally luminous. The other had so much raw energy that some had to escape as light. Celestia held her mace tighter. Just what kind of mage was this Twilight?

The further she looked, the less she liked what she saw. While the plush cushions, lecterns and rounded work table would look inviting in most other contexts, this furniture set radiated enough excess magic to levitate. The walls and floors were touched with magic where repair spells had been flung at them time and time again. She looked up. There was furniture that had hit the ceiling. Still, there was material here to suggest a life beyond magic. Busts of famous historians, scientists and philosophers were loving kept in even spaces around the room. Hollows had been carved in the walls to make room for books, on topics as predictable as mind control to as unexpected as books on techniques for jogging. She allowed herself to relax, if only slightly. The slithering sensation of a wave of rogue magic emanating from one of the room’s fixtures broke her feeling of security every now and again. The potted flowers that cheerily dotted the surprisingly well-lit room embodied this feeling beautifully. While each of them was growing merriyl and bountifully, they also were subtly off. Here some knobs of odd growth around the stem. There some oozing spots dotting the petals. Perhaps best that she find a way to end this dispute before she ended up looking like one of them, then. She gave the room around her a quick scan, searching for exits. Three made themselves apparent.

There was a doorway to her right. A vague smell of burnt food wafting from the door suggested a probable kitchen. There was a staircase leading further up the tower. Then, of course, there was a basement. The basement in particular interested her. If Twilight already knew she was here, odds were good that she was planning on teleporting away the moment things began to look too dangerous for her. She’d likely take her necessary equipment with her, too. Which meant that Celestia would be right back where she started. Collapsing the tower would put herself and Twilight in unnecessary danger. Which meant she needed a bargaining chip. Her face hardened. It might make diplomacy harder later, but it would at least force Twilight to stay in range for a while.

Celestia descended the stairs, mace in hand and armor tensed. Her free hand cast the Solar Knights’ famous mass-illumination spell, the reflective charms on her armor turning her body into a beacon. While rarely in the best interest of a paladin, the spell was remarkably useful in dark caverns (or basements) where an ambush was unlikely and in distracting foes briefly. It was also put to good use at parades, of course, though the thought made Celestia roll her eyes. The light from her shining armor touched the base of the stairs, illuminating something Celestia had not counted on seeing pinned to the wall.

Blueprints. Detailed, artistically-rendered blueprints. These had been drawn with an architect’s hand. Learning from books alone couldn’t have been easy-- either Twilight had an assistant or tutor at some point, or she was even more of a perfectionist than Celestia had already gathered. The blueprints were a mixture of spells, machines and foundations for buildings. Celestia supposed the tower couldn’t have come from thin air. The machines, however, were interesting. She hadn’t seen anything in the report or the tower thus far to suggest Twilight was a machinist. She filed the information away for later, investigating a sample blueprint in closer detail. There were writings in the margins of each one, paradoxically made in a haphazard scrawl that reached the very edges of the otherwise-perfect drawings. It looked like gibberish to her, though she was sure it had made perfect sense to Twilight at the time. She moved on to the title and shape of the enchantment. It was, in a word, brilliant. It picked up on fractures in the spell matrix and traced their origin points in order to reverse-engineer the spell in question.

A spell like this could eliminate secrecy in the Academy forever. She set it aside. Another spell that had been drawn up was one for isolating time-flow and then forming a resisting magical force in front of it, causing a localized time-stoppage. There were notes in the margin about redirecting temporal flow--forcing localized time to travel forwards and backwards. Celestia grimaced. The words “untested” were written in the top-left corner. It was a small consolidation. Another one appeared to be a way to harvest magical energy from a fellow magic-user. Nosferatu’s Gale, it was titled. She didn’t bother to figure out its workings or look at the others. She was certain the rest were as ill-boding.

She pressed on with increased wariness, wondering what projects she might find in the lab proper. Her armour continued to shine upon the edges of the basement. A workbench with scattered pieces of metal and components for spells. Here a set of tangled wiring wound around a metal rod, there a metal sphere with some gaps missing. Pearls and gems were embedded near their ends for each and every one of them. There were even some kind of wand-shaped structures jutting from an ovular base. She pushed aside the metal sphere to get a better look at the more complex source components. Something in Celestia’s mind flickered with recognition.

Generators and conductors, all mixed in with magic syncs and dissipators. The machines. They transported magic. She came to the largest, most complete one. It seemed like it was for...storage? But it had a diffusal mechanism at the base, sending the magic into the ground. Celestia marveled. Why would anybody build a machine to waste magical energy? Whatever the case, it was seared and scorched, and the word “failure” had been written in angry red letters on a blueprint resting above the machine. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about whatever trap that machine would inevitably be setting up for her.

The hairs along her body shivered in response to a faint hiss she picked up on the edge of her hearing. A whirring noise started up behind her, the sound of mechanical parts powering up in the midst of the ground around her. Celestia braced herself, spinning on her heel to face it. The build was remarkably simplistic, perhaps a necessity for the contraption in question. Four wiry legs held up the body--the sphere from earlier, she recognized--on a basic collection of pivots allowing the object to move in any set of compass rose directions. The bottom of the sphere, now that she looked at it, appeared to contain two compartments: One held a gem that was focusing a small red light on the center of her chest. The other appeared to be gearing up to open. Another hissing noise started, the hatch on the sphere flying open. Celestia’s legs tensed. A large red gem extended from a mechanical arm, crackling with electricity. She threw herself out of the way only just in time.

Shots of pure energy wrang out through the basement, exploding violently with the wall behind her. Celestia attempted to pull herself up, only to be caught by stray fire. Her armor glowed a dim yellow, several of her wards fizzling and dying in order to stop the round of bullets. She didn’t like the odds of surviving a few more rounds of whatever was in those shots. The paladin covered her next attempt to stand up with a blast of anti-magic directed at the last spot that she’d seen the android. To her surprise, the spell dissipated not a few feet away from her face. A faint glow she hadn’t know was there faded, and a collection of dust that had been invisible not moments before suddenly lost its cloaking function. The rounds of contact magic hit her in the chest once more, pushing her back towards the stairs. The wards again absorbed the brunt of the blow, her armor losing some of its shine in the token attempt it made to absorb the impact.

She was running out of options, and she knew it. She ducked behind the cover provided by the wall between the stairwell and the basement proper, hoping that it would prove thick enough to absorb the brunt of the force of the roving weapon platform. Brutally effective, if nothing else. The academy would be very grateful to look at it. But how to disable it? Celestia readied her weapon. The machine remained silent. Perhaps it wasn’t programed to move beyond a certain boundary? Or perhaps it was so simple as to remain stationary whenever a target was outside the view of its targeting reticle. Either way, the fire appeared to have stopped. Celestia decided to take a moment to regain her bearings. To her surprise, the wall that had taken the brunt of the machine’s onslaught appeared to be unscathed. Likewise the parts and blueprints. Irrelevant at the moment. She returned to the task at hand. A plan began to form in her head. Risky, but better than anything else she had at the moment. The delicate nature of the machine itself, combined with the rudimentary nature of the programing, suggested a simple course of action to her. She only prayed it worked. She only had enough wards left to survive two more onslaughts, and she was still a full tower away from Twilight herself.

She needed a non-essential piece of her gear. Something that was situational at best. For some paladins, this would be a kneepad or a satchel. Celestia, however, immediately chose her mace. A glorified baton in the arms of a paladin capable of doing their job, to her way of thinking. She held it out in front of the wall, waving it in such a way as to (hopefully) attract the sensors of the sentry. Sure enough, a hail of bullets fired into the other side of the wall, again leaving the surface spotless. She let the mace slowly pull back towards the wall. A whir of mechanical movements followed. Celestia closed her eyes and took in a breath. She would get exactly one chance to do this correctly. The robotic horror’s shadow grew larger. Celestia narrowed her eyes. The clank of gyros and gears grew louder. Celestia opened her palm. A robotic leg cleared the corner. Celestia’s legs clenched. At last, the robot rounded the corner. Celestia lept.

The sound of fire echoed through Celestia’s ears, several of the stairs exploding into splinters under the force of the barrage the machine had let loose. Celestia slid past the creature, her hand running along its side until she hit the joint she needed. The cannon’s opening joint. The dispel gave a spark, then a fizzle, and then began to do its work. While anti-magic itself may have been impossible in the magic-heavy air, the chaos magic inherent in the dispel began to do its work almost immediately. The door slammed down again and again against the turret, pounding the fine crystal and brass of the framework against the solid metal chassis again and again. The spidery automaton began to whirl, gun attempting to target Celestia wildly all throughout the frantic assault. The sound of metal on metal filled the basement, echoing up the tower in a church bells’ chorus. Every time the turret appeared to get a bead on Celestia, the flying metal of the hatch would beat it out of position and into the robot’s unflinching shell.

It was a moot point, at any rate. The crystal itself was beginning to fragment. Celestia backed away, raising a hand against the inevitable result of the critical failure of the container for the magic. Light and heat began to vent all over the floor of the chamber like the last moments of a dying firecracker. Magic spilled out the cracks in the crystal in the form of changes in air pressure, temperature, gravity and light. The result was a mess of violations of physics that oscillated between dangerous and barely noticeable. It was only once the crystal had given out, and the warped and damaged lower half of the spidery construct had stopped glowing with the heat, that Celestia allowed herself to breathe. With a heavy sigh, she turned to the rest of the room, careful this time to check for movement out of the corner of her eye with every step she took.

There was a large machine further to the back that appeared to be medical in nature. Lines displaying pulse, temperature, bloodflow, neurological output and a dozen other life functions were displayed on a screen, while a strange-looking hat with a series of flashing lights lay bound to the machine by a set of wires. There were charts on human anatomy here and there, as well as that of owls, to her great surprise. She stored the information for later, placing it in her mental catalogue alongside her thoughts on the fragility of Twilight, the excess magic machine, the hobbies and hidden talents that had made this place a home, and her understanding of Twilight’s ability to think under pressure. It was all starting to come together--how this woman had come to be what she was, what she wanted to do with her life, how Celestia could stop her. And, more important than any other, what she could do to smooth down the dangerous situation here.

The rear wall housed an array of potions with labelled under various ailments, which stood near-adjacent to the machine itself. Celestia looked down at the assemblage with a grimace. A runaway and criminal could hardly stop at a hospital or a pharmacy. Those were not the only potions, though. A second table to the left of its medically-inclined cousin held up several chemistry sets--she lacked a background in the subject, so the most she could manage was “vials containing liquids of various uses”. One of them was labelled “morning stimulant”, with notes from Twilight declaring she’d made a better coffee. Celestia chuckled. The people back at the lab would get a kick out of it, if nothing else. She decided to take some of the notes for analysis, slipping them into a satchel at her hip. It was only then that she noticed something that made her freeze. There were notes in handwriting she recognized from somewhere. Somebody she’d discussed a similar subject with earlier. It was then that Celestia almost dropped the notes. Zecora. Stolen, perhaps. She checked again. Many of them were indeed on potions, yes, but there were letters between them. She was reading the other half of discussions on spells, on herbology, on the local wildlife, on the townsfolk. There was a warning, even. A note that there had been...had been a paladin nearby.

She scanned the note, heart sinking. Zecora’s writings were far more aware of her failings than she’d ever let on. She was “ignorant to the dangers of her colleagues”. “Dangerous in her sincerity”. “A link in their iron fist”. “A fore-runner to prisons”. “To be treated with great caution”. Celestia let the notes drop, then hastily gathered them and shoved them into her bag for later. She’d let the analysis team learn the rest. For the moment, she had other concerns. She removed the wiring from the helmet Twilight used for medical scans. She’d got what she’d came here for. It was only a shame she couldn’t ransom the entire machine itself. Though, truth be told, in hindsight it was nice to not be fully vindicating Zecora’s warnings, and it was still entirely possible Twilight would call her bluff either way. Losing that piece of equipment was an inconvenience to her. Celestia hadn’t yet found something Twilight could be said to love. Part of her wondered if she could even bluff destroying it when she did.

She turned her mind to brighter places. The books seemed to be ever-present in this house. Books on engineering, books on stargazing, books on...slumber parties? Celestia bit back judgement, unable to stop a nervous laugh from escaping her lips. Perhaps she’d have to take some lessons herself, if she was ever to make an honest friend. Celestia made her way up the stairs at long last.

Comments

[Night_Song]

Celestia’s back legs clenched. At last, the robot rounded the corner. Celestia lept.

Missed the pony slipping through again, here? Excellent work, of course, as always! And now to read on~

[Knight of Cerebus]

6767881 Good catch!