Chapter 2
Twilight Velvet fell asleep somewhere in the afternoon, lulled by the rocking motion and the dryness of her reading material. She dreamed of tesseract storms, which her sleeping mind envisioned as a pelting rain of sharp little hypercubes. She woke up only as they were pulling out of Vanhoover. It was dark outside, the lights of the city illuminating fresh snow on the platform as the train began to move; slowly at first, but picking up speed. A full moon floated in place, distant and serene, as the rooftops of the suburbs whipped past them.
Soon they were out of the city and into the Unicorn Mountains. The train would be passing through them all the way to the Crystal Empire. The mountaintops sparkled above them, pristine white, marbled with ridges of black rock. The peaks fascinated her. What mysteries could they be hiding? She opened her book to the back and jotted down some ideas. Yetis. Ancient temples. Predictable, but it was a start.
Maybe tesseracts, like in the papers.
She looked across the table. Cadence wasn’t sleeping. Velvet had assumed she was because she was so still, but she was just sitting, all four legs under her, head on the bench, staring across the cabin at a sleeping family of fellow travelers.
“What’s a tesseract storm?”
Cadence looked over at her without moving her head. “Do you know what a tesseract is?”
“A four-dimensional hypercube. What you’d get if you folded a cube in on itself eight times. It's just a math thing, isn’t it?”
“You can do it to actual space. That’s what teleporting is. We fold the universe together at one point, then step over to the new location and push the old one away.”
Velvet blinked. She’d always been perplexed when Twilight tried to explain it to her. It wasn’t the kind of thing they taught you in magic high school; it was considered too advanced for most unicorns. “It seems so simple when you put it that way.”
“The problem is, when you fold space like that, it doesn’t always snap right back. It leaves little wrinkles in space. Not harmful on their own, not something a normal pony could even feel. And it's never caused a problem before, but they get tangled together over time and form natural tesseracts. So.”
“So?”
Cadence closed her eyes. “So no more teleporting for a while.”
“I wasn’t gonna try, honey.”
A smile flickered at the corner of Cadence’s mouth and then vanished.
Velvet looked down at her book. She levitated over a pencil and started to jot down an outline about a lost mountain climber. A bisexual mare, of course. Maybe she met somepony in the mountains. A sexy hermitess? A sexy yeti? A sexy tesseract?
Velvet wrote LOVE TESSERACT in large letters next to the outline. She was running out of room. She should have known she couldn’t go six hours without writing. Maybe the porter would bring her some paper.
She didn’t know how much time had passed when she heard a soft rumbling. At first, she thought it was Cadence snoring. And she was snoring. But there was another rumble, too. Distant, and yet louder than the sound of the train’s wheels. Velvet looked out the window. A wave of pure and sparkling snow was rolling down the mountainside towards the train.
“Cadence! Cadence! Wake up!”
“Leame ’lone,” Cadence mumbled.
Twilight Velvet growled, and leaped over the table between them, directly onto the larger pony’s back. She was not going to die today. “Cadence! Emergency!” she said, thumping her on the withers.
“What? What!” cried Cadence, snapping her head up.
Velvet tried to explain, but panic had reduced her to a babbling moron. She couldn’t remember what the thing that was happening was called. “Snow! Snow! Bad!” She shouted, pointing out the window at the onrushing white wall, now barely a hoofball field away from the train.
There was a flash of blue light and the unwelcome sensation of being tossed through space. At first, she thought the avalanche (that was the word; how stupid was she?) had hit them, and that Cadence was shielding her. But no. They were standing on top of the train, the wind of its passage blowing their manes and tails sideways. Cadence was in full alicorn rage mode, wings out, eyes glowing like little suns. All along the train’s length, the avalanche was vanishing into a cyan vortex. Its rumbling sound continued behind them. She turned to see it flowing, unimpeded, down into the uninhabited valley below. Cadence had teleported the avalanche around the train.
Seconds later, the train was running over a bridge, and they were safe.
Cadence slumped to all four knees, shaking, teeth chattering. “Should have just… just moved the train.”
“No. No. You might’ve missed the tracks. That was good. That was a good idea.” The wind up here tore straight through her, bones and all. Shock had numbed her to the cold at first, but now she realized hypothermia couldn’t be far off. “We need to get inside, right now!”
They climbed in through the skylight. A cluster of porters and passengers appeared to help them down.
✭☆✭☆✭☆✭
The train slowed to a stop, rapidly enough that Cadence and Twilight Velvet were pressed into the bench they sat huddled together on, covered in multiple scratchy railway blankets. The hot chocolate sloshed in their cups.
“This is one of the worst train rides I’ve ever been on,” hissed Velvet, wiping chocolate off of her snout.
“Do you think?” mumbled Cadence.
Long minutes passed. The engineer appeared, snowflakes dusting his flat hat and the back of his great coat, flanked by porters. They fumbled around, trying to kneel in the tight aisle.
“Rise,” mumbled Cadence.
“Your Highness? Ma’am? There’s a… an object on the tracks.”
“An object?”
“Really more of a lack of an object. I’ve never seen anything like it. We know you’re tired. And cold. But do you think you could…”
Cadence set down her mug with what could only be described as exquisite royal grace. “We’ll have a look,” she said.
They allowed themselves to be bundled up like foals with overprotective mothers going into their first snow and were helped down beside the rails. The railroad ponies seemed reluctant to go any further. Velvet looked down the tracks. Something loomed against the night sky. Something excessively cube-shaped. Three stories high and darker than the night sky, it looked like a cube that had somehow become infested with other cubes.
Cadence dismissed the railroad ponies, and the two mares walked towards the hypercube, legs sinking knee-deep in snow.
“So this is part of that tesseract storm you were talking about?” said Velvet.
“It’s a tear. A tear in space,” said Cadence. “This is what we were worried about. This is the worst thing that could happen.”
They stood beneath it, looking up into it. Velvet felt sure there were things moving in the darkness inside. Huge. Immense. Cyclopean. Mountainous. Whopping. Velvet’s inner thesaurus was humbled trying to describe the scope of the things she could almost see living in there. “Why? Is this because...?”
“Because I teleported the avalanche around the train? Yes, probably,” said Cadence, regarding the abyss with a dispassionate calm Velvet found rather disconcerting.
“Well, why did you do that?” said Velvet, with the exact same tone she remembered using when teenage Shining Armor had left a major school project until the Sunday before it was due.
Cadence’s eyes narrowed dangerously, without turning to look at her. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Sparkle?”
“If you know this could happen, Your Highness, why did you teleport the snow?” said Velvet. She found she was trembling. The void frightened her. There was no up or down in that dark place. She felt as if it was watching her.
Cadence rounded on her. “You didn’t think it was a bad idea at the time. In fact, you said so.”
“Well I didn’t know this could happen!” said Velvet, waving her hooves at the void. “Couldn’t you have… I don’t know? Melted it? Made the train go faster?”
Cadence snarled. “Melting the snow fast enough to make a difference would have created a large amount of high-pressure, superheated steam. Accelerating the train fast enough to get it out of the way would have created gravitational forces not survivable by a non-alicorn. Or by the tracks. Or the train. Do you have any other bright ideas?”
Velvet backed up as Cadence scolded her, swishing through the snow until her hind hoof hit the track. “No. No, but…”
“Do you know whose fault this is?” snarled Cadence. “Do you want to know? I don’t care if you want to know, I’m going to tell you. This is Twilight’s fault!”
“T-Twilight’s?” said Velvet. Her heart roared with rage and fear. She wanted to bop the Princess a good one on the nose for saying such a thing. Twilight could never be responsible for something like this!
“Ten years ago, nopony teleported. Nopony but Celestia and one or two of her most gifted students. But then Twilight comes along. She knows the risks, but she doesn’t care. She’s popping over here, and popping over there. And It’s fine. Celestia lets her. Because she’s careful. Responsible. She learns how to smooth space over when she’s done. If she notices a bad topology while she’s passing, she neatens it out, like she’s straightening a tablecloth. Fine, fine. Everything’s okay. Except for the foals. The Harmony-damned Magic School foals. They all want to be like Twilight. So what, their parents can’t teleport? So what if the school won’t teach them? They work it out on their own. They cut corners to bring it down to energy levels a normal unicorn might be able to use. And they leave space looking like their own unmade beds!”
“That is completely uncalled for!" Velvet stomped, though the effect was lost when the sound was muffled by the soft white powder. "Even if that’s true, you can’t blame my Twilight for that!”
“And yet you blame me for saving your life.”
Velvet remained silent. That had been unfair, but after what Cadence had said about Twilight she wasn’t ready to concede the point.
“But I know why,” continued Cadence. “It’s because I’m not good enough for your son, isn’t it? I’ve never been good enough! If he’d married the incarnation of Harmony herself, it wouldn’t be good enough for your perfect little boy!”
“Well, how could you be?" snapped back Velvet. "Who are you? You’re the Princess of Love. What does that even mean? Who are you? And what’s going to happen when he gets old? You’re going to live so much longer than him! It's not fair to either of you!”
Cadence bit her lower lip. In seconds, she’d gone from fury to looking like she was going to cry. “I know.”
Velvet turned her head to one side. “You… know?”
“I know he’s going to die while I’m still young. And I don’t know what to do about that. Celestia says you never forget them. But what was I supposed to do? Shining Armor is the strongest, bravest, gentlest pony I’ve ever met. I couldn’t live without him. I’m sorry. I should have chosen another immortal. I was selfish.” She hung her head. “But I will never forget him.”
“She remembers her husbands?” said Velvet.
Cadence gave a half-hearted little giggle. "Celestia isn't the marrying kind. But yes. Phalanx. Clean Sweep. Peaceful Pumpkin. To name just a few. You can find them in the history books if you dig enough. She remembers the colors of their eyes.”
Velvet put a hoof to her mouth. “Cadence, I’m so sorry. I judged you really quickly. I thought you were… you know… a little…”
“Shallow,” said Cadence with a wry half-smile.
Velvet gulped. “No! No! Not at all.”
“I’m really good at reading people, Mrs. Sparkle.”
It was Velvet’s turn to hang her head. “I’m so sorry.”
Cadence rested her hoof on Velvet’s shoulder. “It’s all right.”
“No. It’s not. You’ve been really forthright with me, and I’ve been living a lie.”
Cadence gave Velvet a sidelong look. “I’m sorry?”
Velvet looked up at her. “I have a deep, dark secret I’ve been keeping from everypony except my husband. And it’s time you knew.”
Cadence looked panicked. “Velvet, it’s okay. Not everypony has to know everything about you.”
She grabbed Cadence by the front of her parka. “I’m Ardent Roan.”
Cadence stared at her, gears turning visibly behind her eyes. “You’re what? Who? Hold on… Do you mean?”
“The novel. In your bag. I wrote that. Every word, except for the introduction by Jade Singer. The book I’m reading? I’m doing research so I can write a novel about gay warrior pegasi from classical times.”
Cadence gasped. She began to cry in earnest. Oh no. Was it really that much of a shock? Velvet knew she should have cut the part about the diamond dogs. She knew she shouldn't have confessed to Cadence!
Then Cadence was hugging her. So tight she couldn’t breathe.
“Air! Air!” gasped Velvet.
“This is amazing. Are you for real? I love those books!” said Cadence.
“They’re trash,” said Velvet.
“They’re wonderful trash,” said Cadence.
“Even the part with the diamond dogs?”
“Especially the part with the diamond dogs. That was hot.”
An echoing, metallic groan rent the night’s icy silence. Both mares looked up at the tesseract. Deep inside of it, a vast, baleful, square-pupiled eye regarded them with idle malice.
“So it’s been great connecting with you,” said Cadence, “but we really need to do something about this.”
“What can we do?” said Velvet.
“I don’t know! As far as I know, nothing like this had ever happened before! And I’m still worn out from my snow removal trick a little while ago. If Twilight were here, she’d know a spell, or she’d make a new one on the spot. But I can’t do that!” Cadence shifted from hoof to hoof anxiously.
“You’re an alicorn. If a bunch of CSGU undergrads can write their own teleport spells, you can close a cosmic rift,” said Velvet. “Come on! You’re all we’ve got!”
In the darkness, the eye was moving. There was a sense of some vast, unseen thing uncoiling. A realization that though the eye seemed huge, it was still very far away. But it was closing fast.
“I’m not all we've got,” said Cadence. “You're a writer. Do you happen to know any editing spells? And do you have any paper?”
Velvet had brought her saddlebags, and her pencil. The endpapers of her history book were full, but the blank page opposite the copyright information would do. Cadence began to scribble.
“Do you remember the principle of grammatical equivalence?” said Cadence.
Velvet nodded. “Magic is enforcing change in conformity to the will. Language is the most common and most powerful form of magic. Any spell can be expressed in linguistic form.”
Cadence had filled the whole page with what looked like a nonsense poem. “This is Starswirl’s original teleportation spell. We need to reverse the whole thing. Can you do that?”
Velvet glanced at the tesseract. It was impossible to tell how far away that thing was. It would seem to be moving away, then suddenly would jump forward all at once. “Yes. Just give me a second.” Her horn glowed. She pulled the words from the page. With the deftness of a mare who’d met countless impossible deadlines, she shuffled them into reverse order and set them back on the page. Cadence’s eyes flickered over them, one word at a time glowing as she read through the spell.
“A good start, but it's not enough. Quick. Cut these words, and this stanza and…”
Velvet obeyed as quickly as she could. Cadence erased a word or two herself and scribbled in several new lines. She ran through the spell a second time, then shut the book. “That’s going to have to do. I need one more thing. Open your mind to me. I’m tired. I need your power.”
“Me, but I’m just…”
“The mother of two of the most powerful living mages in the world. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Or it better not have, or we’re in deep trouble.”
Velvet laid her head against her daughter-in-law’s shoulder. She felt Cadence’s magic enter her mind. She saw things like tendrils made of millions of black flies begin to coil out of the tesseract. Then Cadence’s magic blazed, and Velvet’s perceptions were pulled along with it. She’d co-cast before, but nothing like this. Cadence’s power was like a torrent of blazing light, sweeping her along. She fed what power she had into the stream and was pulled along with it. Like a needle darning torn cloth, she darted back and forth, tearing through resistance, dodging tendrils of darkness, and coming back for another pass.
There was that metallic call, a scream this time, not a moan. The sound of a door slamming. Velvet was in her body again, shaking and faint. She opened her eyes. The sky was just the sky. The aurora flickered near the horizon, green and blue. Cadence made glowing lines of force where the tesseract had cut the rails. She was smiling, humming as she worked.
“We did it, Your Highness,” said Velvet, her voice trembling.
“We did. And ‘Cadence’. Please, Mrs. Sparkle.”
Velvet levitated her book out of the snow and brushed the cover clear. “You can me Velvet, Cadence.”
“How about ‘Mom’?”
“Mom works, too.”
They turned and walked back towards the train, side by side. Cadence spread her wing over Velvet’s back, sheltering her from the cold.
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Or to sum up Cadance's real problem with Twilight, and Celestia and Luna for that matter even if she doesn't say it:
She's jealous. Jealous of the fact that they actually contribute something to the world while she, doesn't add a damn thing.
Not that I hate her character. But that's what I got from that rant.
I'm going to guess that Straight Whiskey is Hemingway. Four Legs Good has presumably written at least one story whose protagonist was named Boxer.
In any case, wonderful character piece for both leading ladies. I especially love the editing spell. It's basically just magical cut-and-paste, but it's presented in an awesome and suitably arcane way. It's like Sunset Shimmer's journal; yes, it's effectively magical SMS, but it's really cool magical SMS. Plus, I'm a sucker for anything involving higher dimensions.
Thank you for this.
8839835
Yes, they do contribute something to the world: countless mistakes and screw-ups they keep dumping on someone else to take care of because they're too incompetent to do it themselves.
And she's totally added something! Her baby, the Destroyer of Worlds.
When you know shit's getting serious.
This is a terrific story! I loved the interaction between these two and it was a different take on how I thought their relationship would be, which made it even more interesting and enjoyable.
Their mutual revelations at different parts in this tale made them more relatable and real, as well. Coming together during the battle with the space tear was awesome!
8840120
Nailed it.
Oh, me too! That and trips to the pony realm of the dead.
I like it weird, and I like it morbid.
Thank you for liking it!
Honored by your presence in my comments section!
8840691
Thank you so much! And thank you for your help on it!
8841816
It was very much an honor and my pleasure!
I warned you I was going to do this.
You know what that is? That's a bolt-on.
So, teleporting without cleaning up behind yourself rips holes in space-time and summons the Great Old Ones. There's just one problem: either Equestria should have been eaten by Cthulhu long before now, or sompony already knows how to prevent this and they've been sleeping on the job.
It sounds like Starswirl invented teleportation. Unless he got it perfectly right the first time, he made a few wrinkles along his high-traffic routes, and had to figure out how to clean it up. Even if he didn't, I can't believe no enterprising young foals have ever figured out how to make a cut-rate version, and left a mess everywhere. So somepony, sometime, had to take notice that things need untangling every so often. Either that, or somepony was making damned sure the foals never tried that shit again.
Case A: there's a bunch of unicorns somewhere, probably in the Principality Transit Authority, who are supposed to be straightening out spacetime every so often. They didn't do it. If things are bad enough that the Crystal Empire - Canterlot hyperspace corridor is fucked, things have well and truly gotten out of control. They need to be sacked, and probably brought up on charges.
Case B: there's a bunch of ponies somewhere, probably in some Guard formation which Doesn't Exist, who are supposed to be keeping ponies from doing shoddy spellwork that puts Equestria in danger. First they try talking to ponies, telling them that they're messing with things they don't understand, and if they don't forget all about that spell, something bad is likely to happen. If that doesn't work, they're exceedingly likely to slip in the shower and break their neck. Tragic, really. If the Guard doesn't catch them in time, well, that crater where a town used to be was probably caused by some beast breaking out of Tartarus again. No such thing as Great Old Ones. Don't ask questions. Nothing to see here. Anyway, whoever was in charge of cracking down on unlicensed teleports is probably in a shallow grave in the Everfree right now. Hopefully her successor will do a better job.
[Yes, that's the ponified Monster Control Bureau from the Monster Hunter International books. Shoot me. They're fun.]
8843716
Curses I didn't believe you.
But the reason this hasn't happened before...
Wait, it happens so often in my stories it occurs in porn. For slightly different reasons, but still. As bolt-ons go this is like the Lego space ship wing; I use it on everything. It just happens rarely enough that local authorities are able to deal with it. Because the hyperspace monsters aren't Great Old Ones; they're more like scavengers. Very big scary scavengers. I world built them a lot in Life After the Blitz.
Anyway, the 'home brew teleport spells' thing didn't happen until now for the same reason we didn't have steam engines in 1 AD: because it didn't occur to anyone to use the technology for something besides toys. It just didn't occur to ponies to start playing with super powerful spells until Twilight Sparkle's 'I don't give a shit let's take this apart and see how it works' attitude became fashionable. A paradigm shift is what I'm talking about here.
Anyway this is all a 7 AM ass pull and I should have actually read that essay you linked to. Am I getting to the point in my fanfic where I need some detailed world building docs? IDK; that shit's boring. But maybe.
8844154
Because this is neither the time nor the place, I'll refrain from continuing a debate on this and arguing why this isn't remotely the same thing, and I'll instead go with "because the author said so, that's why". But that's totally an ass-pull.
8844185
I freely admit I have no idea what I'm doing.
Whelp, another Outer God taking an interest in the planet now. How fun.
What a wonderful story! I loved the characterization work here, as well as how Velvet and Cadence bounced off each other. The little bits of magic world building were also really inspired.
8956723
Thank you so much!!
Mother of whores! XD
9001192
Thanks for the review! It has helpful feedback.
10717257
oof, sorry 👉👈
ty for the response tho
10717471
NP! Sorry if I was too rude, I get like that sometimes.
10717523
no its fine ❤