Equestria 485,000

by Unwhole Hole

Chapter 4: The Mission

The weather began to worsen, but not substantially. It had grown colder- -although through her suit Twilight could not technically feel it- -and the sky had grown nearly as dark as night, shading the world with a strange blue light that cast deep shadows into the increasingly deepening woods. It had started to snow, but not strongly. The entire environment was silent, save for the sound of wind and distant thunder.

“So,” said Twilight, her voice sounding almost deafening when all she had to compare it to was the sound of snow falling or the crunch of her own hooves through the icy forest floor. “What have your studies of the planet found so far?”

“I have not conducted any studies.”

Twilight stopped. “You’ve been here for eight months! What do you mean you haven’t conducted any studies? What, did you just sit in that cave?”

“Yes,” said Silken, as though she saw nothing wrong with that.

“Eight months, in that cave, and you never once thought to go outside and survey or get readings of any kind? You didn’t even check our location!”

Silken turned to Twilight, looking slightly less amused than was normal for her. “I’m afraid you have misunderstood my nature. I am not a pony. I am a remnus. My kind does not have the capacity for independent volition.”

“Well where was that lack of volition when you cracked open my skull like an egg?!”

“I do not know what an ‘egg’ is. And there was no cracking, I cut it. Very smoothly. For the most part. And dearth of volition is not the same as lack of initiative. I can interpret actions toward a set mission goal, but only to a limited extent. In this case, it was the captain’s order to protect you. You never gave me specific instructions on what to do on this planet once we got there.”

“Great. So what’s the point? I have to tell you to do every little thing?”

“I am trying my best,” said Silken, somewhat harshly. She regained her cheerful tone almost immediately as she continued. “You have not dealt with my kind, have you?”

“Not much,” said Twilight. “I’ve never had use for you. And would it be offensive to say I find your existence more than a little disturbing?”

“Well, I am a machine, so probably not.”

Twilight stopped at the edge of a slope. The soil was becoming increasingly treacherous and rocky. The palm-like trees were fading, being replaced by thick, gnarled columns and leathery vines that united the various sorts of brush in the area. Due to the wind, almost nothing had branches, though, which made moving beneath the foliage easy.

Rather than waste time picking her way down the slope, Twilight summoned a levitation spell around herself and drifted gently down over the rocks. Silken followed, gracefully leaping from stone to stone with exacting precision and surprising speed. Once at the bottom, the pair began to walk in silence. Twilight half expected Silken to start humming a tune, but she instead made no noise.

It was in fact quite maddening. There was no sound from around them, and Silken’s body moved in absolute silence leaving only a thin trail of dots as hoofprints. While the ponies in orbit around them were hundreds of thousands of years removed from an age where ponies had been hunted through dark forests on this very world, Twilight was not. Even after all that time, she felt her pony instincts rising to the surface. Something was wrong. Everything was too quiet.

“The mission,” she said at last. “The one I am here to complete. Do you know what it is?”

“I am aware of the basics. You are attempting to find a cure for the Mortality Virus. We were dispatched to Equestria because it is believed that if you could recover genetic material from primeval ponies, you would be able to synthesize a cure.”

“That is not entirely true.”

Silken looked surprised. “That is what the captain programmed me with. Did the captain lie to me?”

“No. She told you exactly what she knew.”

Silken processed for a moment. “Are you implying that the captain does not know the extent of the mission?”

“She knows as much as she needs to know. That this planet holds the only hope for the survival of ponykind. The specifics are…more in depth.” Twilight paused, but did not stop walking. She looked straight ahead at the toxic snow and the strange trees. “What I am about to tell you is tier-zero blasphemy.”

“I don’t think it’s blasphemy if you’re talking to a machine.”

“Still. This information does not leave this planet. You will erase it when the mission is complete.”

“You know that is not how remni work.”

Twilight sighed. “I know. But I’m going to tell you anyway. You would find out eventually regardless, and if you are going to be of ANY use to me you need to know.”

“I will do my best to keep it a secret.”

“That does not mean anything at all,” said Twilight, darkly. Still, she continued. “The history of our kind stretches back almost five hundred thousand years. In all that time, there have only been four pure alicorns- -true alicorns. Those who have undergone apotheosis.”

“That is not blasphemy,” said Silken, sounding mildly relieved. “That is common knowledge. The Tribunal and the Holy Mother, Flurry Heart.”

“Flurry Heart is not a pure alicorn. She did not undergo apotheosis. She was born that way, to a pony father…and an alicorn mother.”

Silken looked down at Twilight, no more amused than she was by anything else. In fact, she seemed downright disinterested in this topic at all. “That defies a substantial amount of doctrine,” she noted. “And the Cult of the Holy Mother would not take kindly to such an assertion.”

“That ‘assertion’ is the truth. I saw her as an infant. Her father was my brother.”

This actually did give Silken pause. “Then that means…you are her aunt.”

“It does.”

“And by extension, aunt to her descendants. All of them. The Holy Mother is the progenitor of all living alicorns save for the Tribunal…meaning you are aunt to all living ponies.”

“Essentially,” agreed Twilight, even though it sounded incredibly awkward. “But that doesn’t really matter.”

“If you say so.”

“But what does is the lost alicorn. Her name was Princess Mi’Amore Cadenza, or Cadence. I loved her like a sister.”

“You are referring to her in the past tense.”

Twilight paused for a long time, wondering if she should even bother telling a remnus. This was something that was common knowledge between Celestia, Luna, and herself, and it had been known to Flurry Heart as well even if her cult refused to admit it. Despite this, Twilight had never been able to speak of it to any of their subjects- -and now here she stood, on a planet she had hoped never to return to, telling it to a synthetic pony.

“It was the distant past,” she said at last. “Just on the verge of the Exodus. We had destroyed our own planet…drained it of resources, poisoned the atmosphere with pollution and contamination. It was already becoming uninhabitable…” She shook her head. “No. By that time, it WAS uninhabitable. We just refused to admit it. And I refused to make the right choice.

“Equestria’s climate began to shift. It started to cool. The Crystal Empire was the first to be affected. It was a city, the one that Cadence ruled, at one time alongside my brother…although he was already gone for twenty millennia by then.

“Even then, the Crystal Empire was protected by the Crystal Heart, an object of unbelievable power. It was powered by the love of the crystal ponies, and it kept the cold at bay. Until it no longer could.”

“Then the Heart is what we are looking for.”

“No. The Crystal Heart no longer exists. It was shattered in the ensuing cataclysm. The only remaining shard of it was worn by Flurry Heart until her death.”

“The Amulet of Eternal Love.”

Twilight nodded. “When the cold came, it came quickly. There was no time to evacuate. The crystal ponies would have been killed, had Cadence…” Twilight paused. This had happened so very long ago, and yet even after all this time it still pained her. “She saved them.”

“How?”

“By merging her soul with that of the Crystal Heart. Her love for her kingdom gave it the strength to endure…for a little while, at least.”

“But you said the Heart shattered.”

“It did. The process…it only went one way. Cadence gave her life to save her people, and her daughter.”

Silken was silent for a moment, as if contemplating- -although Twilight doubted a remnus had that capacity. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked at last. “This story would no doubt be beautiful to a pony, if told better. To me, though, it matters very little. What is it we are actually looking for?”

“Cadence was a pure alicorn,” said Twilight. “Meaning that like myself, Celestia, and Luna, she is immortal.”

“But you just said she gave her life.”

“She did. She lost her spirit, her soul, her mind, whatever you want to call it. But what was left was still quite immortal.”

“You mean the corpse.”

“If it could be called that, yes.”

“You’re trying to recover it,” said Silken, somewhat surprised. “That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? You came to harvest Cadence’s body.”

Twilight reacted angrily, hating how ghoulish Silken had made it sound. She turned and snapped at her loudly. “Cadence was the last pure alicorn ancestor of all living alicorns! All modern ponies! If I had access to her genetics, I could create a countermeasure for the Mortality Virus! I could give them back their immortality, just like she had…”

“But why not use your own?”

“My what? What do you mean my own?”

“Your own genetics. You are a blood relative of all living ponies. The Holy Aunt, so to speak. Wouldn’t your genetics be adequate to form a countermeasure?”

Twilight’s jaw clenched, and she felt her breath catch. She suddenly felt like weeping, but suppressed it. There were some things that no pony was meant to know, even if they were just a machine. “I’m not close enough,” she whispered. “I’m not adequate…”

“Fair enough.” Silken’s eyes suddenly turned toward the forest, as if she had seen something moving through the increasingly thickly falling snow. “But do you think the body will still be intact after all this time?”

“Yes. It has to be. I’m sure of it.”

“And you know where to find it?”

Twilight nodded. “Before they evacuated, the crystal ponies held a funeral. I was there. They set my sister-in-law to rest in a mausoleum carved from the purest crystal that the Crystal Empire had to offer, next to the bones of my brother. That chamber is hard enough to withstand a supernova. There is no way it has broken down. Not yet.”

“I see,” said Silken. “Then the mission is simple.”

“Assuming we can find her.”

“I would think she is exactly where you left her.”

“And how am I supposed to remember where the Crystal Empire even was after four hundred thousand years? Not to mention that half these continents are in the wrong places…drift must have been accelerated by the deep-mantle mining…the planet even has twelve percent less gravity than when I was born…”

“I’m glad.”

“That the planet has twelve percent less gravity? That’s not something to be glad about.”

“No. That our mission is so simple. Comparatively. The question comes down to how, exactly, we are supposed to search for the body of a dead alicorn.”

“Not dead. And I have a system.”

“Really?”

“We start at the most powerful magic signal on the planet, then move to subsequently smaller signals in a hierarchy based on geological comparison of the areas.”

“That could take hundreds of years.”

“Yes. It could. Which would be far more trivial to me than it would be to you.” Twilight looked over her shoulder at Silken. “So, I would strongly suggest you redouble your efforts to get me back in communication with my ship.”

Comments

[FloydienSlip]

I have to say, I love the tone and style of this story already. It's very rare that a story is able to hook you almost immediately, but this has done it beautifully. Really excited to see where this goes.