• Published 5th Jun 2018
  • 1,942 Views, 280 Comments

Meliora - Starscribe



Earth is only just recovering from a war that almost wiped out the pony descendants of humankind. But when the Alicorns fail them, the survivors turn to an unlikely source for aid: Jackie the bat pony.

  • ...
16
 280
 1,942

Chapter 19: Evotis

Jackie had preserved Meliora from being completely overwhelmed with refugees… at least until somepony found out they were living in a dream. But she could do nothing to prevent that, nothing besides making sure that the vast population of Meliora received good instruction into the mechanics of their bat pony powers. They would learn the truth, eventually. The circumstances of that revelation would decide whether her attempt to give them somewhere safe to live ended in terrible failure or audacious success.

The city council met the next day. Jackie arrived at the meeting a few minutes late, the same way she always did. Instead of quietly taking a seat in the back with a fresh bagel and several shots of espresso, the whole room fell completely silent. Melanie stopped with some boring presentation about the watershed along the coast to join the others staring at her.

Jackie glanced between them, settling down her mug on the worn wooden table. “What’s wrong?”

There was a long silence. Jackie shifted uneasily as her mind wandered, imaging various terrible possibilities. Everyone in the dream is dead. Athena is going to use the rods of god on us. Charybdis is back. What the hell happened?

“I’m glad you’re on our side,” Lavender said, settling in beside her. “We picked the right princess for Thestralia.”

Words of agreement echoed from around her, and Jackie suddenly recognized their expressions. The ponies on her city council were looking away from her, speaking almost reverently as they agreed with Lavender. Except for Liz, who looked as confused about all this as Jackie had been.

“I’m not a princess,” Jackie said, and she could see that their faces didn’t change in the least.

“Of course not,” said Fry. “Obviously. We know that.”

“But if you were,” Lavender continued. “You might be able to do some pretty incredible things. Like building a city in two days.”

“We knew you were the Dreamknife,” said Firelight, the religious representative on the council. “We knew knives could be used to destroy. Not to build. We should’ve. Maybe if we’d given you the respect you deserve, we could’ve gotten out of the jungle sooner.”

“No.” Jackie rose, knocking over her mug with a frustrated wing. “Fuck this. No. You all can finish this meeting without me. Liz, my office.” She didn’t walk out so much as fade briefly through the Dreamlands, which was becoming far less private than it used to be. The copy of City Hall on that side now might have bats in it, who would be even more willing to look at her like she was some goddamn princess than her own city council had.

She cut her way back into the physical world pretty quickly though, and paced restlessly back and forth in her office. There were a few minor notes her dream team had left her, describing the ways the dream they had created was adapting to the enormous strain that almost a million minds was placing on it. She skimmed them, but didn’t find any of the warning signs she would’ve been expecting from an upcoming catastrophic failure. What they wrote was more like the settling of a great weight into a mold. Nothing to worry about.

Liz emerged a few seconds later, clicking the door shut behind her. “That was… a little unnecessary, don’t you think?”

“You mean the goddamn religion? Yeah, I’d say so.” Jackie smacked one hoof into the table, denting it a little with the force. “Half the ponies in that room helped me design the city, or helped me build it.”

Liz shrugged. “Ever read what the engineers on the Manhattan project wrote after seeing the first few tests?”

Jackie’s wings tensed. “Now you sound like your sister. I didn’t pull you in here for trivia.” She turned away, striding over to the little window into the heartwood and the magic resonating from within. In a way, their whole civilization relied on what went on in this room. A bomb in here could destabilize the dream-city, and undo the supports that kept the real one supplied with magical energy as well.

It’s a good thing Athena doesn’t think of any world but this one as real, or we’d be fucked.

“Why then?” Liz asked, annoyed. “Trying to make them see me as your priestess? I won’t worship you, I’m Catholic. I already have a God to pray to. You can ask Him, I’d be a shit priest anyway.”

Jackie growled in response. “I wanted to know if you wanted to come play diplomat with me.”

“Really?” Liz’s eyebrows went up. “That sounds like fun. But I’m not sure we can win over Athena after stealing so many citizens from her. My sister explained how she worked to me once. The only thing she cares about is the number of people she’s ruling over. She’s gonna be pissed about the robbery you just did.”

“Not Athena,” Jackie agreed. “Right now Meliora is becoming unbalanced, unstable. We’ve got way too much investment in the Dreamlands side, and not enough on our side. We need more ponies keeping things real over here. And helping us bring over the dream-city with some nature magic.”

“Which means… who?”

“The deer,” Jackie answered. “And maybe some fairies too. I’ve been seeing things in some of their dreams—a huge airship filled with tiny ponies. It’s gonna be the most adorable mission we’ve ever been on.” She spun back around, holding out her wings. “They’re called breezies. Like little ponies this big. Thing is, they’re powerful nature spirits. Might be tiny, but their magic makes earth ponies look like amateurs. I think I could find where they’re hanging out. I know for a fact they still dream.”

“Are you going to… get permission from the city council for any of this?”

Jackie didn’t even bother answering. Liz was a smart enough fish to figure that out.

“Who is it, the deer or the… breezies?”

“Both, but fairies first. Deer don’t have as much magic. In the long term the deer are probably the better investment, since they can coexist easier without overwhelming everything. But all the deer I ever met were religious. Let’s treat with the fae.”

“Uh…”

Jackie opened a door into the Dreamlands, and this time she left it open. “Come on, Liz, you’ll love it. They’re the cutest little monsters you ever saw.” The fish followed her through the opening in the air, and the darkness closed in behind her a moment later. Jackie hadn’t taken them directly to the other side this time, but into one of her own private corners of the Dreamlands. This one was a massive, topographical map of the planet and everywhere else that ponies lived. So there were a few starships, a few space stations, and a few covered domes. But they weren’t visiting any of those today.

Jackie concentrated on the map of Earth, searching for the largest concentration of fae creatures. They did sleep, and their dreams were particularly strange. She had a feeling that Archive would’ve had a hard time connecting them with the memory of humanity—they didn’t have much in common.

“Now that’s interesting.” The map fuzzed, and a massive airship appeared over the skies in central Australia. It had the look of something ancient, repaired so many times that nothing of the original remained. There were thousands and thousands of little fairies inside, and some of those were asleep. Their dreams tasted strange, flashing with images that made no sense to Jackie. I can’t believe there are refugees who changed into you guys. You’re not even close to human.

“Another advanced civilization?” Liz leaned over the edge of the map, her hooves blurring the ruined ports on the edge of Australia. “Or… wait, you called them fae. What does that mean?”

“It means watch your words,” Jackie answered. “Don’t be rude. Don’t eat the food, and remember magic always has its price.”

“Uh…” Liz glanced over her shoulder, but the doorway they’d come through was already gone. “The city council acting weird didn’t make you lose your mind, did it? Because you’re the one acting weird right now.”

“Yes, no, whatever I don’t care.” Jackie waved a bat wing through the map, and it melted away into foam. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. But when I found you on that seapony colony, it seemed like you were losing your mind with boredom. Running the general store in Meliora seemed like it would get pretty boring after a while too. Living with seaponies gave you a lot of different biases, I figure being another kind of life might help you work through them.”

Liz mouthed the word “being,” looking increasingly nervous. “Are you sure you didn’t lose your shit? Mundi is still coming for us. I dunno how soon, but this doesn’t seem like it will help.”

“You think I forgot?” Jackie tensed, drifting back to her memories inside Axis Mundi. Athena had been programmed to protect civilization and help them recover from Charybdis, and she’d accomplished her purpose by gunning down a room full of refugees. A thousand ponies, and who knew how many more. “I’m not like them.”

Jackie flicked her wings, and the dream around them dissolved into something else. “You think you had it hard, Liz? You came back after the worst enemies were all beaten, the battlefields were cold. I’ve been here. You didn’t understand when Mystic Rune gave you your immortality?”

The word was black around her. Jackie appeared beside her, leering into Liz’s face. “I watched your sister murdered in front of me. Then I had to stay alive as the world we’d balanced for three centuries crumbled around us. I watched civilizations rot, I watched demons turn us against ourselves.”

Reality appeared around them, though even the Dreamlands could represent these images only poorly. The hill in an ancient city, where every stone represented some fundamental truth. That shore where she’d said goodbye to the only person she really loved. “I saw past the iridescent veil. I stood beside a supernal well and refused the will of gods. I’ve seen the fathomless darkness of the abyss.”

She dismissed the dream completely, and the two of them dropped into the Dreamlands where they happened to be standing. The enchanted forest, with its strange animals chirruping in the distance. The sound of crickets mixed with the strange language of the zoogs, tempting away any cats who wandered too far.

“I know Athena is coming. I’ve fought the gods before. I’ve fought sargons and emperors. I’ve fought queens and priests. Quismali, nightmares, and broken oaths. I’ve survived them all. Meliora will make it through these.”

Liz’s eyes were wide, and she kept glancing around them. As though looking for somewhere to run, but ultimately thinking better of it. When she finally spoke, her voice was very small. “My sister told me there weren’t gods or goddesses. But if you’re trying to convince me that isn’t what you are, you aren’t doing a great job. You just saved a million people.”

“We have to save them again,” Jackie snapped. “Maybe a god could just pretend everything was fine after saying what they wanted. But that’s what separates us. We have to get our hooves down into the dirt, square our shoulders, and lift.”

Liz relaxed. “Alright, Jackie. What’s the plan? How do we stop Athena?”

Jackie cantered past her, grabbing Liz by a wing and dragging her along. “Athena is smarter than me, she’s smarter than you, she’s smarter than Alicorns. She has tons of information—but she doesn’t have it all. Our best chance of winning a war against her is introducing factors she can’t predict.

“Breezie magic is exactly that—it’s not well understood, so she doesn’t have a lot of history she can look at. But the vision Voeskender showed me included breezies living with us, and I think they made the city stronger. Think of it like… we’re recruiting for the coming invasion. The deer and breezies both live here, might as well see if they join up. We can start with the ones who used to be human, and see if maybe they will work together. Athena might want them dragged back to Mundi too, if she knew about them. Our interests should line up.”

Jackie found them a path that led through the enchanted wood—deeper than she’d ever been, into those ancient parts where old legends from before the birth of man still grew strange and the song of the firstborn was still sung. Jackie rarely traveled to such dangerous realms of slumber, but today she had good reason.

“So we’re gathering allies,” Liz said. “That’s it?”

“That’s where we start,” Jackie said. “Stay close to me, and maybe stay quiet. It’s a dangerous trip.”