Ultimatum

by Starscribe

Digging Deeper

Twilight stared open-mouthed into the empty space, and not just because she didn’t know how they had powered such a large teleport without horns.

Luna’s voice startled her out of her reverie. “I fear the shock may’ve broken her, Dear Sister.”

“It might be easier for her if it had.” Celestia’s voice came suddenly from closer to her, mere feet away. “She is more resilient.”

Twilight shifted on her hooves, practically feeling herself deflate. She didn’t look up. “What... What was any of that, Princess?”

Luna answered first, sitting elegantly down across from her. “Inevitability.”

“What?” Twilight looked up, in time to see Celestia was right in front of her. She looked right back down again, avoiding her teacher’s face, but not before she saw the sadness there. Not anger, not even disappointment. “Princess, why did you let them talk to you like that?”

Again, it was Luna who answered instead. “Cooperation protects you, Twilight Sparkle. You and the rest of Equestria. To protest, argue, or fight would only invite reprisal. At least this way the stroke will fall only on us.”

“Bu—” It had been Luna who answered, but even so Twilight found herself looking into her old mentor’s face. “I’ve never seen those— whatever those things were. There can’t be that many, right? They can’t be that powerful…” Twilight levitated the little square off the ground, close enough that she could inspect it. It was made of metal, though she had never seen one with little black spots speckled throughout. It had no controls, though it did have a single glowing mark in the center, which got brighter and darker like a heartbeat.

“Their threats don’t mean anything, do they? They couldn’t… couldn’t actually be a threat to Equestria?” She tossed the slice of metal back down, where it clanked on the floor between them.

Celestia nodded. “If they desired.” She started walking, towards the door hidden behind the dais, though she didn’t move fast. She didn’t seem to be in a hurry. She did pick up the square Twilight had dropped, hovering it along behind them as she walked.

“Couldn’t…” Twilight struggled for words. She had so many questions boiling in her mind that it took all her willpower not to let them come vomiting out her mouth. Eventually she settled on the most pressing. “Equestria has fought overwhelming odds before, haven’t we? We stopped Tirek, we reformed Discord…” She stopped, flexing her wings. “I’ll just fly back to Ponyville, bring the girls up here, and—"

“No, Twilight.” Celestia rested a hoof gently on her shoulder, meeting her eyes. “Not this time.”

“But we can—"

“No.” Celestia started walking again. Soon she reached the spiral staircase, which led up into the many towers of the castle. Instead of starting up though, she gently unlocked the door covering the stairwell down, pushing it open. “Luna, will you begin our preparations?”

“At once, dear sister.” The other alicorn nodded to Twilight, then vanished.

Celestia started walking again. “Come, Twilight. There is something you should see.”

* * *

Twilight followed Celestia down into the depths. Her teacher seemed to need no light, so Twilight kept her own horn glowing. Their hoofsteps echoed around them as they descended, filling the silence between them. Celestia didn’t seem to want to answer any more of her questions, insisting only that their destination would answer.

So they walked. Twilight’s mind spun as their path took them deeper and deeper into the planet. They left the castle basements after ten minutes or so, then continued on. There were hidden passages to take, concealed behind old tapestries or hidden in confusing twists of the corridor. The smell of dust was soon replaced with a dampness so thick Twilight found herself choking on it, her feathers and fur getting a little bigger as they took it in. The passages soon cut through caves, caverns entirely familiar after her brother’s wedding. Water dripped and her glowing horn was reflected in a thousand sparkling crystals.

Deeper still they traveled. Twilight stopped at the edge of a ridge, as Celestia vanished from in front of her into the darkness. A great gulf opened before her, darkness swallowing her glowing horn and fading into rough rock as far as she could see. The path ended in a chasm, and only the faint glow of Celestia’s mane from below hinted at where she might’ve gone.

Twilight shivered, opened her wings, and let herself fall. She watched both sides of the chasm warily, making frequent adjustments to keep herself from getting too personal with the edge. Celestia’s glowing mane and tail were her only guide, leading her deeper into the void.

Time passed, more time than Twilight would’ve thought possible. The air warmed noticeably, and all the moisture from the caverns above started drying again. She kept falling, until at last she could see ground again. Well, something like it. Far below, Celestia settled onto a hill of strange white stones. Twilight flared her wings, shivering as she fought her momentum.

Her eyes widened as she neared the ground, wings beating furiously. Even so she managed to land, scattering stray feathers as she touched onto the stones. They settled beneath her a little, but the ground wasn’t sloped much so they didn’t have far to go. The ground felt quite warm, though not uncomfortably. Was she imagining things, or was she not breathing as easily?

“This place shouldn’t exist,” she said. “We must be miles down, right? Shouldn’t a natural cave have collapsed under its own pressure? I don’t see any supports…”

Celestia shrugged. “Nothing about this place is natural, my faithful student.” Celestia started walking again, moving carefully over the rough stones. It wasn’t ideal conditions for a pony, but Twilight could see the ceiling sloping sharply down in the direction they walked. They wouldn’t have been able to fly very much further. “We’re almost there. I expect your questions will be answered.”

Twilight followed, speeding up a little so that she could walk right beside the tall alicorn. In such a strange place, the unchanging aura of her mentor’s magic reminded Twilight of simpler times. When she had been Celestia’s personal student, it had seemed like the whole world was open to her. Anything was possible to a pony who worked hard enough. It wasn’t a world of secrets, only unlearned facts.

Soon the ground evened out, and Twilight’s hooves found unnaturally smooth stone. Celestia kept on for only a little distance more, then stopped. “We have arrived.”

Twilight stopped beside her, taking in the object in front of them. Celestia had led them to a door. Well… something like a door. It was set into a solid wall of glittering metal, caked over with dust but not a trace of rust. The markings painted there had faded beyond legibility. There were other marks, stamped with machine regularity, which remained visible to her. It didn’t help, though. She couldn’t read the language.

“This is… ancient.” Twilight stepped forward, examining the edge where it looked as though rock had been creeping along the metal, distorting it slightly over geologic time. In time perhaps it would be bisected, like any other strata. “What civilization on Equis had the skill to work this much metal?” The wall was massive, towering at least a hundred feet above and curving flawlessly through the rock. It was more metal than she had ever seen in one place.

“None. The Creators built it, long ago. These caverns are part of it, not just what you see. This is just the part that survived. It was built to resist even Discord, so all these years have done little.” She advanced, passing Twilight and approaching the door. Celestia raised a hoof, towards a little indentation in the metal Twilight hadn’t noticed at first glance.

Light flashed briefly towards Celestia. A voice spoke, rumbling from nowhere in an alien language. A familiar language. Twilight had heard it just a few hours before, in Celestia’s throne room. Unfortunately, there were no minds for her to use to translate this time. Well, besides Celestia. She didn’t cast it, though. Somehow, she figured that if Celestia wanted her to know anything about what they saw, she would explain it herself.

“It will be a moment,” Celestia said, lowering her hoof again. “The shelter took steps to preserve itself. We must wait for those steps to be undone before it becomes safe to enter.”

Twilight nodded, sitting back on her haunches. From just beyond the wall, she could faintly hear a sound like a violent wind, along with unplaceable mechanical grinding. She focused on the familiar and watched her mentor, but Celestia would not meet her gaze. She spoke anyway. “Princess Luna mentioned Creators earlier — are they the ones who visited?”

Celestia nodded. “That’s the name my sister and I gave them. I’m sure they call themselves something else, but they never told us what.”

Twilight looked down at her hooves, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. She didn’t really want to ask what she was thinking. She asked anyway. “Are they… gods? Did they create Equestria?”

To her surprise, Celestia chuckled, the first light-hearted thing she had seen from her all evening. “Neither, thankfully. Though they did help save it.” She gestured behind them, towards the strange stones they had walked across to get here. “Look behind you. What’s back there?”

“Rocks.” Twilight walked a few steps closer to where the uneven white lumps began. “Wait.” Her steps slowed as she got closer though, blood turning to ice in her veins. She shivered, retreating a pace. “Bones.”

What Twilight had taken for a pile of stones was actually an ocean of bones. Well, bones with metal shells. She wondered if the mass had been submerged, because it seemed that stone had caked over much of it, which was what had confused her when she had landed. The volume was enormous. If the space was as big as it looked, there were enough bones to bury Ponyville deeper than city hall and leave enough extra for every field in Sweet Apple Acres. “Thousands of—"

“Millions, actually. I think they called it a…” She struggled for a moment. “Planetary legion. If this ship hadn’t been buried by the soil, well… Equestria might look different.”

Twilight stared out at the vast field of the dead, trying to take in the sheer volume of the word. On paper, Twilight could understand a million well enough. Fifty of them made Equestria’s population, for example. Yet the thought of millions of dead soldiers… what kind of nation could suffer losses like that and survive? The wind whispering through the chasm no longer sounded natural to Twilight; it was transformed to the eerie whispers of the dead. Millions of dead.

She lowered her voice, though it was more out of respect than embarrassment now. “What killed them?”

“The same one who almost destroyed Equestria — and the rest of the planet with it.” Behind her, something hissed, and strangely bitter air rushed suddenly past her. Even white light burst into brilliant life behind her, as vibrant as noon sunlight. “Come inside, my faithful student. See my birthplace.” She turned, vanishing into the sudden glare of the open doorway.

Strange as the door might be, it was somewhere besides a mass grave, so she didn’t hesitate to follow. Anything but outside…

She followed in a trance through glistening hallways of smooth plastic and metal. Strange machines hummed and buzzed all about, and flat surfaces filled with flashing text and shifting pictures. She had no words for what she saw, no context for the wonders or theories at what they might do. What she didn’t see was signs of decay; there was no rot, no dust, no mildew. This ‘shelter’ had been here long enough that the rock had started to swallow it, yet it looked as pristine as Canterlot Castle.

The hallways were all unnaturally tall, though she suspected they would’ve been just tall enough to be comfortable to the creatures that had stood in the throne room to negotiate only hours before. They passed through an elevator, which zipped them with dizzying speed down and back into the bowels of the craft. She didn’t protest; Celestia seemed to know where she was going.

Eventually they found their way to a relatively small room. Celestia slowed as they neared it, though Twilight couldn’t see why. The room was some kind of lab, that much she could tell even without being able to recognize any of the machines. There were a pair of egg-like vessels built into one of the walls, filled with a fluid that glowed from within their transparent surfaces. There was no paper, no books, but plenty of little metal pads, similar to the one she had seen in the hands of the female back in the castle.

Were those images? Twilight hurried up to the closer of the two eggs, having to strain a little to get a clear view of the flat panel mounted above it. Like many within the shell, this one filled with text and images, then emptied and filled again. The possibilities were astonishing, yet the images displayed on it were even more so.

“That’s what you meant.” Twilight gestured with one hoof, staring. Beside what she guessed to be detailed medical reports was an image, apparently taken from a camera just within the egg. “They were your creators.” The image was of Celestia, or… a pony that would become her. As the images changed they cycled through the stages of unborn pony development. Instead of blood and placenta, the growing Celestia had a dozen bits of metal on her body, each one connected to a transparent tube with a different color fluid within.

A glance at the neighboring pod proved what she had already suspected: the pony there had blue fur instead of pale pink, but otherwise the setup was much the same. “You were created here.” She reached out, touching the edge of the pod. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Celestia stared at a door on the far side of the room, one that hung partly open. “When you were young, you wouldn’t have understood. When you became a princess… I planned on it. If we saw signs of their return, or… or decided to carry out their mission, I would have brought you here. Now, well… this was the way I hoped you would never learn.”

Celestia made her way through the center of the lab, walking along a marked aisle near the pods and never crossing beyond it. Twilight imitated her, though she could see no obvious reason for the behavior. Hidden traps, maybe? Ruins were supposed to have hidden traps.

“You already heard the reasons they made us. I suppose you might not have been listening closely, judging by your reaction. It’s a good thing we weren’t meeting dragons. They don’t take shouting as well as Creators do.” Celestia’s smile was a little strained, though she seemed to be trying.

Twilight tried to remember on top of everything else she had learned in the last hour. “To… fight Discord? That doesn’t match any of the history books I’ve read. I thought… weren’t you raised by Starswirl the Bearded? It had to be Equestria by then, right? Err…” Twilight realized then just how frustratingly vague all those old stories were. Nothing about where the princesses had been raised. Nothing about them in the founding of Equestria story either, though Clover was in that one, and she had been Starswirl’s apprentice, which meant she had to be younger than he was. It felt like the insides of her head were melting.

“Fighting Discord? Yes, I suppose that was part of it. The other part, well…” She gestured around them. “Does all this look strange to you?”

Of course Twilight nodded. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“The Creators sent us with their legion to stop Discord, knowing that they would all die.” She shivered, staring down at the floor. “They did. I suspect that was why they planned objectives for us when we were successful. Objectives Luna and I defied.” Celestia sat down without any of her usual regal grace, her flowing mane seeming a tad limp to Twilight’s eyes. “They wanted Equestria to be another of their provinces — that was the price of saving it. The technology you see all around you — we were supposed to teach all of it to Equestria’s ponies.”

Celestia set the little slice of metal from before on the counter beside Twilight, where she could see the little light still glowing there.

Twilight retreated, no longer having any trouble meeting Celestia’s eyes. “Why would you keep it from us? Forget provinces — if ponies could build things like this, we could stop them! They wouldn’t be able to push you around, push all Equestria around! Why wouldn’t you want us to have all this?” Thousands of unidentifiable machines hummed around them, defiant of the years.

The creators had come from another world; they could travel into space. Celestia and her sister had kept that ability from Equestrians, even though the Creators had wanted to give ponies their powers. That didn’t make their threats any less outrageous.

Celestia shook her head. After a long moment, she pushed the little square closer to Twilight. “You heard; they’re visiting you tomorrow. While you’re showing them around Equestria make sure you take the time to ask them what the rest of the galaxy is like.” Celestia stared up at the metal ceiling, shivering against a wind Twilight Sparkle couldn’t feel. “Ask them what’s waiting for Equestria when we get up there. I think then you’ll understand.”

Comments

[Yami Vizzini]

If we saw signs of their return, or… or decided to carry out their mission, I would have brought you here.

I'll... just take it that they showed back up without any signs, then?

[aLazyPanda]

Boom. We're here for an audit.

[the bored writer]

the fecal matter has hit the mechanical bladed air distributor, my good sirs and siretts

[QCosmic Derp]

The unholy offspring of a high tech auditor and a tax collector.

[arancaytar]

To… fight Discord?

Hm... so they couldn't defeat Discord on their own?

I think I have an idea for how to get rid them...

[Alondro]

Uhmmmmm.... if this Discord had no problem killing by the millions... how in the hell did the Mane 6 stop him in this universe? He'd have killed them. It would have been easy. Heck, even if he wanted them for fun, he would have at least killed Celestia and Luna since they didn't have the Elements and were thus no challenge, nor were they interesting.

Plus... if this Discord is reformed... where is he now? Wouldn't he show up at once to flaunt his release to these arrogant, stuck-up, COMMUNIST FILTH!!! DIE YOU FUGGIN COMMIES!!! DIEDIEDIEDIEDIE!!!! *Alondro nukes North Korea... which is really a waste since it's such a mess already no one can really tell the difference...*