Shadow Grave

by Composer99

Dug Out

“I’ve never seen anything like this in all the years I’ve been here,” Four Foot was saying as Twilight leaned down to examine the churned-up soil and grass that had once been a buried grave. “Never heard of anything like this happening anywhere in Equestria, come to think of it,” he went on.

“Hmmm,” Twilight hummed, her horn lit up with a raspberry aura. She brought her head back up. There were several mounds of upturned soil and grass within the Apple family plot.

"So, after you noticed all this, you dug up one of the graves to confirm that it was a grave robbing?” she asked.

“Yes, Your Highness. I feel awful about it, but I had to be sure.”

Twilight put a hoof to her mouth, “Hmmmm”-ing again.

“What is it, Twilight?” Spike asked. He and Starlight had accompanied Twilight to the cemetery.

“It all just looks – wrong, I guess,” Twilight responded. “They look like they were dug up from underneath, except for the one Four Foot opened up. It doesn’t make sense. And there’s a weird magical aura lingering around each disturbed grave. I don’t recognise it.”

Starlight closed her eyes, and her horn glowed as she concentrated for a moment. “Me neither,” she said.

“What could that mean?” Four Foot asked.

“I’m not sure,” responded Twilight. “Four Foot, can you please keep the cemetery closed to the public until we sort out what’s going on? I’d ask you to keep an eye on things here, but I don’t want to risk you getting hurt by the kind of unicorn who’d do something like this – even if it means more grave robbings. As soon as you’re done here, stay out of the cemetery.”

“Of – of course, Princess,” Four Foot said, bowing. “I’ll go reinforce the gates.” He galloped away.

Twilight looked out over the disturbed graves for a moment longer.

“I’ve read just about every book in the castle, and I’m sure none of them mention anything like this happening before,” she said to Spike and Starlight. “Maybe there’s something in the Canterlot libraries we can look up – or maybe the other princesses might know something. Spike, take a letter!”

“You got it, Twilight!” Spike reached enthusiastically for a scroll of parchment, only to remember he hadn’t brought any with him. “Er, Twilight, could you…?”

“Oh, right!” Twilight concentrated, and with a flash, a few rolls of parchment, an inkpot, and a quill were sitting on the ground in front of Spike. He reached down and got ready.

“Princess Celestia, I’m writing to tell you of an unusual and urgent situation that has developed here quite recently in Ponyville. Four Foot, the keeper of the Ponyville Cemetery, came to me with news of a grave robbing: several graves here have been disturbed. There’s a trace of magic I don’t recognise. Does this sound familiar to you or Princess Luna? I’d like to come back to Canterlot at once to review the libraries. Yours, Princess Twilight Sparkle.”

Spike finished scratching the letter down, rolled up the scroll, breathed deeply, and exhaled green flames. The flames consumed the letter, and a sparkling trail of smoky magic wound off towards Canterlot.

“Now I wish I hadn’t taken the Princess up on her offer to help with the last day of the conference. She might not get the message straight away,” Twilight said, looking up at the departing letter.

“What’s that? Over there!” Starlight said suddenly. She pointed a hoof towards the trees that bordered the cemetery.

Twilight’s head snapped over to look. For a moment, it seemed one of the shadows was… not in the right place? And then, nothing out of the ordinary. They all stared at the trees for a moment.

Starlight squinted. “I’m sure I saw something there…”

“Funny,” Twilight said, “hadn’t Rarity seen something in the shadows near the restaurant at lunch?”

Spike hiccupped, then burped a gout of flame. Rolled-up parchment spouted from the fire, fluttering into Twilight’s waiting hooves.

“That was fast,” Twilight said, surprised, as she unrolled the parchment.

“‘Twilight,’” she read, “‘You needn’t come to Canterlot. Luna and I are on our way. We’ve sent for Cadance and Discord. Please gather your friends at your castle as soon as you can, then meet us, alone, in the cemetery.’ Huh, no signature. She was in a hurry.” Twlight straightened and turned to her friends.

“Okay, we’ve got to get everypony else to the castle. I’ll fetch Applejack and Rainbow Dash. Starlight, you find Fluttershy. Spike? Head into town and get Rarity and Pinkie Pie. If anyone objects, tell them it’s Princesses’ orders. All the Princesses.”

“Right!” Spike said, saluting.

“I’ll take you into town,” Starlight offered. Spike grabbed her hoof, and after a moment’s concentration, they vanished in a flash of pale turquoise.

“Right. Better help Four Foot before I go,” Twilight said to herself, taking to the skies.

---

With a flash of raspberry light, Twilight reappeared in the cemetery. Celestia and Luna were already there, bearing saddlebags and expressions as grave as any she had ever seen.

“You’re here already?” Twilight exclaimed. “I just left here ten minutes ago!”

Celestia smiled briefly. “It’s good to see you again, Twilight. I only wish it were under better circumstances.”

“I’m sorry to say we had to abandon your conference,” Luna added. “The matter you brought to our attention is an emergency. I’m afraid we had to suspend all activity but the banquet – and that is going forward only so that all the food would not go to waste.”

“The open graves are this way,” Twilight said, feeling a gnawing dread. What could possibly be going on, that both Celestia and Luna would drop everything to personally investigate these grave robberies?

They trotted over together. Celestia and Luna examined the dug-out plots, with their eyes and with their magic, and they both swept their gazes - and cones of magic emanating from their horns - around the cemetery.

After a moment, they stopped. Celestia’s expression was grim.

“It is as I feared.”

“Indeed,” Luna said.

“Twilight, your friends – are they at the castle?” asked Celestia.

“They should all be by now,” Twilight replied.

“Excellent. Let us go to meet them. We must call upon the Elements of Harmony once more – for it may well be that the fate of Equestria hangs in the balance.”

---

“Thank you all for coming so soon,” Princess Celestia said. Everypony but Princess Cadance was assembled in the central chamber of the Castle of Friendship, standing or sitting around the Cutie Map, while Luna was walking into the chamber, holding a letter in her magic.

“Shining Armour has sent word, sister,” Luna announced. “Cadance is flying with all speed for Ponyville. She will be here in a matter of hours.”

“Excellent. I’m sorry to have put everyone out like this,” Celestia said, “but I fear that today’s incident heralds the return of grave danger for Equestria.”

“Uh, if you don’t mind my asking, Princesses,” Applejack said, “but what’s this all about? Twilight came to the farm and told me we had to meet here right away, but she didn’t have time to explain.”

“Yes, your summons was unusually curt,” Discord added. “I was just about to work in my garden when it arrived.” To his credit, Twilight thought, he didn’t punctuate the comment with self-snapping shears or other inappropriate humour.

“Perhaps you can explain what has happened here in Ponyville, Twilight?” Celestia asked. “Then Luna and I shall speak of what we know and of what we suspect.”

“Yes, of course,” Twilight said. She cleared her throat. “Well, I’d just got back here to the Castle when Four Foot, the keeper of Ponyville Cemetery, stopped in. He wanted me to come to the cemetery to look at something that was both unprecedented and disturbing: evidence of grave robbery.”

Rarity and Fluttershy gasped in horror.

“How absolutely dreadful!” Rarity exclaimed.

“When we got there, a whole bunch of graves had been disturbed. I – I’m really sorry, Applejack, but they all belonged to the Apple family. Both your parents' graves were among them.”

Applejack gaped. She worked her jaw for a few seconds. “No!” was all she managed to say. Twilight bowed her head for a moment before continuing.

“But it was all very odd. Almost all the graves looked as if they had been dug up from the inside; the only exception was one Four Foot had dug into to verify that anypony was missing. And there was a trace of magic I’ve never seen or felt before. That’s when I wrote to Princess Celestia, and, well, here we are.”

“Thank you, Twilight,” Celestia said. “Luna and I went to the cemetery first, to see for ourselves what Princess Twilight reported. I’m sorry to say that while Twilight did not recognise the magic, we do. We have seen this sort of thing once before.”

Luna scowled before speaking herself. “Shadow Grave,” she said cryptically.

“Sounds frightening,” Fluttershy murmured.

“Shadow Grave? What’s that?” Twilight asked.

“Not what, but who,” Celestia said. From a saddlebag she produced a thick book. It was sealed with a metal clasp and lock. A platinum key soon followed, entering the lock and twisting. The book opened with a click. Celestia’s magic flipped over pages until it came to a portrait of a silvery-grey unicorn mare with an off-white mane. Her flank was adorned with a pattern of stars.

“The unicorn who called – calls – herself ‘Shadow Grave’ was once a magician named Constellation. She was a contemporary of Starswirl the Bearded, and a first-rate wizard herself. But as she grew in age and power, her thoughts and experiments turned to strange and dangerous magic.”

Celestia flipped a page, and there was the mare once more, standing over a stone table. Lying on the table was an earth pony. Unlike the ponies in other illustrated historical accounts, this one’s eyes were crossed with exes.

“Constellation pioneered a form of magic she called ‘necromancy’. She broke into cemeteries for the bodies of ponies to use in her research. She animated them into walking forms that could follow her commands.”

“Oh my, how awful!” Rarity gasped.

Another page flip: Constellation, now looking exceptionally gaunt, was standing away from Starswirl the Bearded, who looked away from her with head bowed down.

This time, Luna spoke, saying, “Starswirl attempted to reason with his longtime friend and colleague one last time, but she rejected his counsel. He brought what knowledge he had of her work to our attention. When we approached her demesne to confront her, however, she had vanished.”

“Many years later, shortly after Luna and I defeated Discord,” Celestia went on, “Constellation returned. But she had changed: instead of an elder unicorn mare, she was a skeletal apparition, with glowing yellow eyes and pegasus wing bones grafted to her body: clearly, a twisted mockery of an alicorn. And she did not come alone: she stood at the head of a small army of animated skeletal ponies, which she had collected via a string of grave robberies. She called herself, ‘Shadow Grave’. She had also managed to alter her cutie mark: not only had it changed shape, but it also was visible on her skeletal body.”

She flipped the page, and there was Shadow Grave. A coal black pony skull, backlit by a violet starburst, had replaced the pattern of stars that had once been her cutie mark. A brownish mist in the background barely failed to conceal a host of skeletal shapes behind her.

“Rather the humourless type, no doubt,” Discord muttered.

Celestia flipped another page to show her and Luna standing before the skeletal host before continuing. “Shadow Grave proclaimed that neither Discord nor Luna and I were fit to rule Equestria. Instead of Princesses, she announced, Equestria would have an eternal Queen.”

“We had used the Elements of Harmony just days before against Discord,” Luna said, “and found ourselves forced to turn them on Shadow Grave. She did not seem to realise that we had the Elements at our disposal.”

“We had thought,” Celestia explained further, “that the Elements of Harmony would strip away the magic Shadow Grave had used on herself: restoring her to her true self as Constellation, we hoped, would give us a chance to convince her to abandon the dark magic she had harnessed.”

“It was not to be,” Luna said as Celestia flipped over one last page. There was a picture of Celestia and Luna blasting the skeletal unicorn with a bright flash of rainbow light. “To this day we know not what Shadow Grave had done to herself, but the Magic of Harmony did something we could not foresee: it reduced her body to ashes.”

“With Shadow Grave gone, her army collapsed,” Celestia concluded. “We interred the bones in an ossuary inside the Canterhorn. Afterward, we had every scrap of Constellation’s research into necromancy that we could acquire destroyed. This sealed book may be the only record of her misdeeds in all of Equestria, and it has been in my private chambers where no other pony has seen it, until today.”

“So, Shadow Grave has returned to Equestria?” Twilight pondered.

“But if you blasted her, how could she have?” Spike asked.

“We cannot say,” Celestia replied. “On occasion, I have idly wondered whether Constellation had indeed found some way to bestow a sort of immortality upon herself. She clearly felt she could challenge us openly, so she must have thought she had the means to overcome our considerable magic. But until now I had no reason to suspect she had succeeded.

“I have been diligently ensuring no magic similar to hers has ever again been developed within Equestria’s bounds. It is because of that diligence that I am sure Shadow Grave did survive her body’s destruction, and that she has come back to Equestria to finish what she began so many years ago. It cannot be anypony else.”

“So we need to track her down and get her again!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed, hovering in the air and punching it with her forehooves. “You’ve picked the right team, Princess!”

“It is not so simple as 'getting her again', Rainbow Dash,” Celestia explained. “If Shadow Grave survived the Magic of Harmony once with her dark powers unscathed, she can do so again. Before confronting her, you must first find wherever she has secluded herself for all this time. There, you may find answers, and the means to disable her once and for all.

“That is why I have asked you to come, Discord. You should be able to track down Shadow Grave’s refuge.”

Discord swelled with pride. “I’m on it, Princess!” he said with a snappy salute.

Celestia nodded, then turned to the others. “If our suspicions are confirmed, then Luna, Cadance, and I will remain here in Equestria, searching for signs of Shadow Grave’s presence, and trying to force her into the open. Twilight, you and your friends must go in search of the source of her power with Discord. If you can disable or destroy it, then perhaps we can put an end to the menace she poses, once and for all.”

“You can count on us, Princess!” Twilight exclaimed proudly, fluffing her wings.

Celestia smiled. “Thank you,” she said.

“As we discussed, I shall return briefly to Canterlot, mobilise the Royal Guard, and send word throughout Equestria,” Luna stated.

“Everypony,” Celestia finished, “please gather such supplies as you believe you might need and return here as soon as possible. Twilight. Could I speak with you here for a moment in private?”

There was a clatter of hooves as the others left the Cutie Map chamber, and a flash of light as Discord vanished. Twilight watched Celestia with curiosity.

Once they were alone, Celestia smiled kindly. “Twilight, I know you’ve had a lot on your mind since last night. I don’t want to push you into going on this quest if you still feel disquieted. Luna or I could lead the expedition, if required.”

Twilight smiled back. “Thank you, Princ- I mean, Celestia. That means a lot to me. I wish I could say I’ve reconciled myself to someday outliving my friends for – for centuries, but I haven’t. All the same, if the fate of Equestria is in the balance, I feel like I have to put that aside for everypony’s sake.”

“A feeling I know all too well,” Celestia said sombrely. She paused before continuing. “I hesitate to ask this, but do you think you could write to Sunset Shimmer and ask her to return to Equestria? As my former protégé, she was – is – superbly talented and skilled at magic, and I suspect we will need the kind of magic she can muster before this is all over.”

Twilight took her lower lip between her teeth and shifted her eyes back and forth. “I’m sure she’d come if I asked,” she said. “She’s never really said anything about coming back to Equestria, though – not even for a visit. I’m not sure she feels ready to see you again, or to even risk seeing you again.”

Celestia hung her head sadly. “I understand. I only ask out of necessity.”

“Of course, Princess,” Twilight said, gently. “I’m sure she’ll understand. The mirror and journal are in the library. We can meet everypony else back here when we’re done.”

-

“As sleepovers go, Applejack, I think I like the ones at your farm the best,” Sunset Shimmer remarked, lazily running a finger along the screen of her tablet. They were sitting outside around the Apple family’s big outdoor table, on a patio near the farmhouse.

“Well, that’s a compliment and no mistake,” Applejack said, blushing slightly. She sat up from her own reclined position on the lawn chair. “Thanks kindly, Sunset.”

“I agree,” Twilight Sparkle remarked. “Granny Smith cooks decent fare at Canterlot High, but the food she makes here is amazing.”

“Although it does help that you finally got WiFi here!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed.

“I do miss the amenities in the city, but I must admit, it’s nice to get away from it all every so often,” Rarity managed from where she was lying on a lawn chair, perusing a fashion magazine. A stack of other magazines sat within her reach on each side of the chair.

Rainbow Dash came running over from where she’d been playing soccer with Apple Bloom and her friends. “Hey, c’mon you lazybones, what’re you doing? There’s nothing like getting out there, running around and having fun in the clear country air.”

“Easy for you to say, darling,” Rarity replied, “but it’s just too nice a day to spend it running around, getting all sweaty and sticky. Besides, you’re the one who told me to stick to one suitcase. I hardly had room for any sportswear beyond a few swim suits.”

Rainbow Dash scowled, but before she could retort, there was a buzzing sound from underneath Sunset Shimmer’s lawn chair.

“Wha-?” Sunset managed.

“Ooh, a message from Princess Twilight?” Twilight asked. “What did she write?”

Sunset picked up her journal and thumbed through to the most recent entries. Her eyes scanned the message, and then she froze.

There was an awkward, overlong pause.

“Sunset, are-are you all right?” Fluttershy asked. “You’ve gone pale.”

Sunset did not reply, still staring at the journal.

“Sunset?” Applejack asked, a little more firmly. Sunset started at the sound of her name, shook her head as if to clear it, then looked up at the others.

“It is Princess Twilight,” Sunset replied. “She… she’s asking me to go back to Equestria.”

“She’s never asked something like that before,” Fluttershy said, worry evident in her voice. “She’s never even hinted at it.”

Sunset looked back down at the journal, then sat up and squared her shoulders.

“She says they need my help,” she exclaimed. “Equestria’s under attack.”

Her statement was met with gasps.

“What’re you going to do?” Rainbow Dash asked.

Sunset looked down at the journal, before turning and setting her eyes in the direction of town.

“I have to go back.”