The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

Kindness Isn't Always Honest

The crystal palace rose from the gloom like a geometric lump, obscured by sediments at the bottom of the sea trench yet undeniably Starlight's goal. It was huge enough to take up the camera's entire field of vision, the layers of dust and silt covering it unable to hide its faceted construction, yet Starlight knew this was just the tip of the overall structure. She had seen Garsheeva's core excavated. She knew how big these truly were.

"Starlight?" Valey called from near the cockpit, where everyone was gathered. "We're getting there! It's your move!"

No pressure, or anything. Starlight ignored the screen, staring downwards at the orange spark. "I'm here," she whispered. "Can you hear me? We want to get inside..."

Welcome, child of...

Starlight's ears shot up, though it wasn't them she heard the voice with. She pressed her cheek against the floor. "Can we get closer? Farther down?"

Come...

Her horn was tingling already, the proximity to the tree's magic starting to connect with it. Would her old ability to use magic freely down here still work with the artifice? She hadn't had another panic attack since she stopped using it...

"How close are you proposing?" Caballeron asked.

"Close." Starlight focused, lighting her horn and trying to touch the palace exterior through the walls of the submarine and the sea. For a moment, her aura sparked to life, fanning her telekinesis out in her special searching spell, and she probed, feeling the layers and layers of silt... and then she touched the crystal. It was like closing a circuit, and immediately a sense of power and completeness flowed into her through her horn. It came with a renewed strength of mind, like a fog of worry became a little easier to see through. Contact was breached.

Starlight pushed more power back into her horn, and orange swirled into her vision as her aura intensified: the tree's magic, mingling with her own like poorly-mixed coloring in water. She hardened her telekinesis, leaning on the palace's energy, and pushed at the silt like a heavy wind, sliding it down the sloped crystal surfaces and clearing it away.

"What's going on down there!?" Sea Star's voice rose in alarm. "The ground is shifting!"

"I'm trying to make an entrance," Starlight said, eyes closed in concentration. This drew attention to herself, and she knew it, but it was like the tree was right behind her, telling her not to worry; that she wasn't alone.

"You're using telekinesis from here to do that?" Anemone sounded flabbergasted.

"Yeah," Valey chirped, "that's pretty much what we do."

Starlight's telekinesis brushed against the crystal facing, now smooth and exposed. "Get us closer," she commanded. "Touching it, if you can."

"I do not see any signs of an entry point," Caballeron warned. "Whatever you are intending to do..."

The ship jostled as it touched against the surface.

"Now stay here," Starlight demanded. "This might work."

"That's quite the confidence level in this plan," Sea Star warned.

Starlight ignored her. She had to get them through the crystal, and had a vague feeling she could sculpt it... after all, in the Ironridge palace, she had noted how similar the crystals felt to her own. But she couldn't control her crystals at range, save for hitting them directly with a beam. And with the wall of the ship in the way...

She reached out to the tree, tightening her focus and her aim. If this didn't work, it might kill her, but she felt a tiny nudge inside her horn, the tree correcting her path. With a powerful burst of magic, Starlight teleported.

Pomf! She reappeared in an equally-strong flash, inside a room that was pitch dark. Lighting her horn somewhat fixed that, exposing a high, faceted, vaulted ceiling held up by pillars. It was impossible to tell what color the place was with her teal light, but it felt dark. And unlike the polished, well-maintained palace of Garsheeva, every wall and surface here was covered by that chalky sediment that had hidden the crystals in Ironridge. She scuffed at some below her with a hoof, and was rewarded by it chipping away, revealing a dim luster beneath.

Starlight turned back to face the wall she had teleported through, charging her horn and firing a bolt of energy. It hit the surface with a crack, shattering some of the buildup, and another bolt and some wiping with her telekinesis later, the wall was clear and exposed. Starlight sent power through her horn once more, hitting the crystals and willing them to expand naturally outwards as if they were her own.

The moment her beam struck, she nearly tripped. A sensation of weightlessness and immeasurable, cosmic size came over her, like she was as big as spacetime itself... and then a presence grabbed and steadied her, dulling her senses until she could only feel that singular room. It was still bigger than anything she had ever been, but as Starlight focused their power, working on instinct alone, the crystals reacted and flowed outward as she willed it. She felt them touch the submarine. She felt the force of the submarine change... They were ignoring her instructions and trying to pull back. She hardened her grip, the crystals spreading all over its submerged body, encasing her friends and their vessel in a gemstone tomb that no amount of engineering or power could free their ship from. And finally, she willed the original wall to melt away, leaving a tunnel into the cavity where the ship was sealed, a route for her friends to get inside.

You wield it with ease.

Starlight's ears folded. "I'm going to get my friends. I'll be just a minute more..."

The tree's presence beckoned to her from below. And yet, unlike the other two, something about it felt hesitant. Not unwelcoming, but uncertain. It had reservations about this.

That almost gave Starlight pause, but she shook herself out of it, the tree still feeling certainly on her side. She charged her horn again and teleported back into the ship.

"What happened out there!?" She was immediately accosted by the academics... or more accurately, appeared in the midst of a panicked squabble between them and her friends.

"Look, we roll how we... Oh hey, Starlight!" Valey turned to her in relief. "What did you do?"

Starlight shook her head. "We're inside. Go out the normal way."

Everyone looked at each other, and Valey shrugged. "Hey, if she says it..."

The porthole ground and squealed as its industrial pressure seal was undone, slowly maneuvering to let them into the world. Starlight climbed out first, testing the tunnel she had left... It was almost good, but they were too high up. With a flash of her horn, she added a staircase, one that appeared out of orange crystal and took no concentration or focus to maintain.

"What is...?" Caballeron breathed, following behind and staring around at the upper chamber. "We truly are inside...!"

Anemone followed behind, hovering and staring around. "What is this place?" She turned in circles while flapping, bumping gently into a pillar and brushing it with a hoof. "And what's this stuff it's made out of?"

"It's just dirt," Starlight explained, demonstrating by gouging some away with her hoof again. "See?" She pointed at the crystals below.

Sea Star emerged with her horn lit as well, and Caballeron switched on his headlamp, revealing that the coating was definitely orange. "Fascinating," he breathed. "This substance is..." He touched the patch of crystal Starlight had left exposed, and his cutie mark briefly twinkled. "Also without value. How did you get us inside this place?"

Starlight shrugged. "I asked it for help."

Meanwhile, Anemone had broken off a flake of the residue and gave it a careful sniff, then a tiny lick. "Hmm." She tossed it aside. "I think this is a form of dried ether. It must concentrate in this place and build up over time."

"You love licking things way too much," Valey pointed out, trotting after Starlight.

Anemone did a midair backflip and followed along. "Guilty as charged!"

Starlight was already moving toward the edge of the room, searching for a way down. She glanced over her shoulder at her party... three academics, Valey, Maple and Nyala. The professors were all distracting themselves. Nyala looked... unreadable.

FLASH!

Starlight tripped over an unevenness in the floor, and for a split second, her vision crackled with gray. But it wasn't a true gray like moon glass. More a subdued gray, like someone had forgotten what colors were and left the light to fade. And for a tiny instant, while that flash was active, she wasn't in a crystal palace at the bottom of the sea, but in a spacious building of metal and glass and materials she didn't recognize, where dozens and dozens of ponies in sharp suits sat in rows, intensely concentrating. Then the world was back to normal as quickly as it had changed.

"Woah, you alright?" Valey caught up to her first.

"I-I'm fine." Starlight pushed away Valey's attempt to help, laying on the ground where she had fallen and squinting. "Just a minute..."

The lighting was completely different, and it was hopefully her imagination. But the room's ceiling... the distance to the walls, the faceted, shallow roof vaults, the positioning of the pillars... it all looked eerily similar to whatever she had just seen.

Come, the flame beckoned from below. All its reservations were intact.

Starlight forced herself to stand up, very shaken and not sure why.

"You don't look okay." Valey frowned at her. "You look like you just saw a ghost. You sure you're alright?"

"I..." Starlight took a few steps forward, her curiosity for answers almost enough to overwhelm her trepidation. "I think maybe I did..."

A staircase soon presented itself, and Starlight and her friends started their journey downwards. As they went, Starlight's mind refused to let the vision go. What had she seen? Was that another vision of the future? It didn't feel like it at all. To be fair, it looked futuristic, going by Ironridge's idea of the future... but it hadn't activated when she touched the flame, and wasn't nearly long or apocalyptic enough. It had been... ponies working at a very serious job.

At ease, child. You are here to learn, are you not...?

About a dozen floors down, the vision hadn't repeated. It was Caballeron who stopped them instead.

"Halt." He pointed down a long room which they were crossing side to side, to a platform with two curved, chalky staircases on either side, leaving a large wall section exposed descending from the platform and facing the rest of the room. "If I know anything about ancient ruins... that is a prime location for an equally-ancient mural."

"You want to stop and search for murals?" Valey blinked.

Starlight shrugged, turning and wandering down the long hall toward the platform.

The area in front of the wall was protected by a subtle, raised ridge, low enough that Starlight could step over it with ease but high enough it couldn't be a natural part of the floor. She stared at it, thoughts of the other room she had seen in the vision filling her head. If this place were made out of something else... no one would have reason to approach this wall anyway. Maybe it was decorative? It looked almost like the curved lip of a fountain...

Caballeron climbed straight over and started scraping at the wall.

"Um..." Starlight cleared her throat and intensified her aura. "I can do that faster."

Shaping her telekinesis cloud like a giant rag, she pressed it into the sediment, scrubbing and wiping as it all crumbled away into flaky dust. The air took a second to clear, during which she backed up... and was rendered speechless at what she saw.

It was, indeed, a mural, half of it a blasted, broken landscape and the other a lush, verdant field. Streams upon streams of ponies were pouring from the ruined land to the healthy one, carrying their belongings all upon their backs. In the background of the ruined land were crumbling cities and castles, meteors and debris falling from above, silhouetted by an emblem she had never seen before. The healthy land was filled with mountains and whimsical villages, and behind it was a much more recognizable mark: the Emblem of the Nine Virtues.

But it was the line between them that drew her true attention. Two figures were doing battle, both terrible in their own right. One was a featureless pony with a ring of runic light around their barrel, attached to ethereal, runic butterfly wings, surrounded by circles and sigils. The light pattern was a decoration Starlight remembered all too well: she had seen herself with that ring and those wings, shown in a reflection in an altar in the dream cave where she received the Nightmare Modules, a reflection that showed her herself as the goddess of her friends. And hovering unmistakably at the figure's side was a sword with a triangle in the hilt, just like how she had a sword that gave her the beginning of those runes.

The other figure was Aegis.

A titanic ray of power flew from the metal dragon's chest, barely missing the winged pony, appearing small when there was no context, yet hitting the ruined landscape and leaving a crater the size of a town. The pony was in the midst of a dodge, retaliating with the sword... It had to be bigger than the one in her saddlebags. But if she could shrink it to a dagger, she could probably make it grow...

"Bananas." Valey hovered in front of the mural. "Isn't that Aegis?"

"So this is what she meant," Nyala whispered. "Princess Celestia must have been to a place like this and seen this mural. I wonder if this is why she was so scared of it?"

Valey glanced at her. "Buh?"

"This is why she went back instead of dealing with us when she first arrived," Nyala answered. "It was before you were... back. She found Aegis and wanted to take it back to Canterlot." She squinted at the mural. "I don't get it, though. Where's the third one...?"

"Third one?" Valey stared harder at her, tilting her head.

Nyala shook her head. "Something from the Icereach chapel. Don't mind me."

"Pardon," Caballeron said, "but are you saying you're familiar with some of the things in this mural?"

Anemone and Sea Star were glancing between the winged pony and Starlight. They had been in the underground lab when she used the sword to clean up the windigo heart mess...

Starlight swallowed hard. Aegis and this pony fighting... A world ruined, and ponies moving to a new one... Was this a preservation of the past? Could this old world have been Indus? But if she had the sword and Glimmer had Aegis, and she didn't particularly like her counterpart... hopefully it wasn't a prophecy as well.

No, that was ridiculous. Starlight shook her head and tried to get a grip, the tree's magic stepping back to let her come to terms with this on her own. "We need..." she ground out. "We need to go deeper. We have to reach the bottom."

Eventually, the party proceeded, thoughts swirling in Starlight's head about what all this meant. Above all: had all this been in the Ironridge palace as well, or had she just missed it because there was too much sediment and Valey already knew the way? Garsheeva's palace had held murals of Empire history. Maybe it reacted to its master, or maybe that meant this old world was physically closer here.

Kindness isn't always Honest. Some of us have purposes we must put above the Truth. I am Honesty. Here, Truth is that purpose. It must be wrestled with, and the other Elements exist to help with this.

Starlight frowned and pressed on.

No Element can exist absent from the others. Harmony is not a solo. But I am the advocate of Truth, because all Elements must be represented for there to be a balance.

Another flight of stairs fell away, and another, and another. Starlight was moving quickly; Caballeron and Sea Star were falling behind. Valey and Anemone were the only ones who were still caught up when she finally entered the table room above the tree stem.

The table sat waiting for her, the Emblem of the Nine Virtues glowing on its surface as a collection of points, just like the last two palaces. Starlight nodded at it, spotting the staircase on the far wall that would take her to the flame. Just a little-

FLASH!

Another wave of gray struck her, and she barely kept her balance. This one felt more like moon glass, though she couldn't place why. And it lasted for nearly a second... long enough for her to see that the crystal room around her hadn't changed. But the map table, in the corner of her eye, was different: instead of a geometrically perfect hexagon inscribed in a triangle, the sigil was smashed, as if someone had drawn it on paper, put down two hooves and then scrunched the two sides together, ruining the perfection. Then the gray passed, and it was back to normal.

Starlight felt a fearful confusion rising in her throat. What was happening? What was...?

Her friends had been on her tail, but now she was alone. And a bit of gray, artifact static was occasionally flickering at the corner of her vision.

"Maple? Valey!?" She cried out, looking around desperately... but her hooves moved of their own accord, carrying her without her say-so toward the staircase to the bottom.

Comments

[Phoenix Kitten]

Someone hitched a ride in you, Starlight. Or Honesty has something to show you.

[Oberth Effect]

Oh boy, a mysteries-to-be-addressed-later dump! My favorite

Looks like Starlight might be in for some uncomfortable conversations/revelations. Curious to hear what Nyala knows, too. Interesting that something similar to this mural showed up there, too, considering the apparent age of the palace. Either it means that event was in the past, and one potential future for Starlight is to go through another iteration of a past conflict, there's some shared way of telling the future, or there's some shared prophecy. Or something I'm not creative enough to come up with.

These new visions are interesting. And worrying. Hopefully it's just Honesty, rather than something more sinister. Chrysalis or Chauncey finding this place would probably not turn out great.

[ZanyZapper]

I keep wondering if these scenes of devastation Starlight keeps seeing are glimpses of the same desolate future we saw in the S5 finale. Like without Twilight and friends protecting Equestria, Starlight attempts to fight the enemies, to the point of using Aegis to do so, and in the process losing control of him and bringing about the very destruction she was trying to prevent.

[BurningSkies]

Meanwhile, Anemone had broken off a flake of the residue and gave it a careful sniff, then a tiny lick. "Hmm." She tossed it aside. "I think this is a form of dried ether. It must concentrate in this place and build up over time."

Licking rocks is a tried and true method of identification used by geologists around the world!