Madness to the Method
(♫)
Twilight sat beside Spike at the counter in Sugar Cube Corner, her morning bagel and coffee sitting to one side of a special expose in the Times of Canterlot.
“Pinkie?” she asked.
“Hmm?” The baker abandoned the scrubbing she was previously engaged in and sidled over.
“What in Tartarus is a ‘Lunarkin’, and why are they being granted interviews?”
Spike cocked his head like a bird, clearly confused. “Doesn’t the article tell you?”
“I read the whole thing and I still don’t know!” cried Twilight. In fact, the entire article seemed predicated on whoever was reading it already understanding an entire passel of terms like “sidereal dysphoria,” “egg theory,” and “transtemporal gnosis anticipation,” which Twilight had never heard of before and could only guess about the meaning of.
“Well,” Pinkie continued, crossing her forelegs on the counter, “You know about the paragriffish community, right?”
“… no?”
“Adult foals? Fictives? Marekeys and monkeysonas? The ‘on every level except physical, I am a wolf’ colt?”
“Still not ringing any bells, sorry.”
The baker clucked her tongue disapprovingly. “You need to read more of the good newsletters, not just those boring scientific ones.”
“Hey! I subscribe to What the Rut is Wrong With You…”
Spike idly flipped through one of the magazines Pinkie had left out with the morning’s mail, settling on a complicated chart-like illustration that purported to explain which members of the Canterlot Small Business Association had secret diamond-dog ancestry. “I think I’ll stick with comics, thank you. They’re more grounded and believable.”
The baker just shrugged. “Anyway, umm… the paragriffs are the ponies who wear prosthetic beaks and claws and make you call them ‘Girard’ and stuff. Sort of like Lenny Redtail, but dumb.”
“There’s a dragon version of those, too,” Spike cut in, the magazine temporarily forgotten, “Pray you never meet them.”
“Oh! Right!” Twilight did in fact remember the group, although she’d never heard the term ‘paragriffish’ used to describe them before. In Canterlot circles, the more common term was ‘beakfacers’. “But… I sort of thought that was, like, a racist thing?” In fact, one of the reasons why Shining Armor was now Commander of the Royal Guard was that, in 1092, several up-and-coming young officers had gotten themselves caught on camera wearing false beaks at a Summer Sun party in Baltimare. Shiny had been one of the few not to bother attending, and had thus escaped the resulting purge with his rank and credibility intact.
“Well, the Lunarkin are basically like that,” Pinkie continued, “But with, you know, being Lunar Rebels.”
Now Twilight understood. “Oh. So so it’s just a stupid name the paper gave historical re-enactors!” Her mother’s literary career had brought her into contact with them at a fairly young age. Some were a bit ‘out-there’, politically, especially the ones who followed more modern conflicts like the Saddle Arabian Campaigns or the bigger counter-piracy operations around Minos; and as with any hobby, there were some who practiced it far too seriously. Overall, however, they were fairly ordinary ponies, and she experienced a brief twinge of anger at how badly the Times had misrepresented them.
Spike whistled briefly and made an odd gesture, swiping one claw over the spines on his skull without actually touching them. Twilight had seen pegasi do that on occasion. Some day, she’d take the time to look up what it meant.
Pinkie Pie, for her part, just smiled and nodded. “Yeah, you’re pretty close, just without the acting part. They think they’re actual reincarnations of Lunar Rebels. Or survivors of the original Rebellion we’ve somehow never ever heard of before now, who didn’t even know themselves until Luna ‘awakened’ them.”
“Oh.” That, perhaps, explained the whole section of the article on ‘dancestral guidance’. “So, they’re crazy.”
Spike nodded. “Pretty much, yeah.”
Twilight’s eyes narrowed and she jabbed a hoof at the paper. “And, you know, as soon as I even mention Starswirl the Bearded, it’s ‘oh, well, looks like that cuh-raazy Midnight Sparkle’s finally snapped’…”
“Well, in your colleagues’ defense, you never do really just mention Starswirl the Bearded,” Spike admonished, a little more gently.
“They’re harmless, the article says, ‘just like you and me’.” Twilight flipped the paper over, to reveal an entire two-page spread worth of advertisements. Some hawked Cowija boards with the Minotaur lettering replaced by lunar phases and gibberish extracts of Old Ponish. Some offered sit-down appointments or mail-order consultations with ‘seers’ of every description, who could supposedly advise on investments, locate one’s biological parents, or save failing relationships. Some sold replica armor, wingblades, swords, and the like. Roughly half sold books, on any number of topics. One in particular promised to teach anypony how to focus her third eye -unless that pony was a unicorn, of course, since her horn was a deliberate blinding tool jammed into her skull by the All-Mother to punish her sins of arrogance. “I think they’re a scam.”
“And what do you expect me to do about it,” Pinkie Pie asked, “mail everypony who bought something a ‘CONGRATULATIONS. YOU’VE BEEN SCAMMED!’ cake?” She spread her forelegs impossibly wide, teetering behind the counter for a moment before leaning forward and bracing herself again. “Because I do have those.”
“You served me my coffee and Spike his mineral water,” Twilight explained. In fact the drink in question was a supersaturated mineral solution heated far beyond boiling, which was why Pinkie’s was the only counter in town willing to prepare it, “so that makes you my bartender. That means you’re obligated to sit here and listen to my sob stories.”
“Actually, that makes me your barista. Words matter, Twilight. But I’ll listen, anyway.”
“Thanks, Pinkie,” Suddenly convinced there would be nothing else in the paper worth reading, Twilight shoved it over into the pile with the rest of Pinkie’s junk mail. “I guess I can always count on you to make my day… well, manageable, at least. Thank Harmony Luna’s not going off on anything else.”
Both ponies -and the dragon- looked up suddenly as the chime on the bakery door rattled. Fluttershy froze mid-step, half-in-half-out of the shop.
“Umm… Twilight?” the pegasus finally said.
“Hmm?”
“I’ve… we’ve… I mean, well, I did exactly what you asked me to, and…”
“Fluttershy… is everything alright?” Even on a bad day, the little pegasus wasn’t usually this nervous- there were only the four of them in the shop, after all.
“Oh!” Fluttershy jumped a little in place, then stepped the rest of the way inside and let the door close behind her. “Yes, yes, of course. Everything’s fine. It’s… you know the creatures you asked me to send out? I… think they’ve found something.”
(♫)
As usual, Marigold’s Guardsponies were the first out to the site the next morning. Twilight and her friends followed once the area was secured. The location Fluttershy had suggested- based on a big pile of response templates and quadrat samples and other Druidic gobbledygook Twilight only vaguely understood- was a big, flat, predominately clay-based hill that sat just below the waterline. The digging crews who had been working at the site the day before had laid out a circle of long, thin waterproof canvas sandbags to keep the top of the hill dry, but something appeared to have flattened several on the eastern side. Whatever it was, it was big- reeds had also been bent downwards, some were uprooted, and there was a visible sort of scrape in the mud underneath.
“Whoooeee!” Applejack whistled, “What’d y’all tangle with that did that?”
“Actually, that was there when we got here,” said Marigold as she stepped out of the circle of relative dryness and sloshed her way towards the newcomers.
“It wasn’t here when we stopped digging yesterday, though,” Spike added.
“Do you think we should be posting sentries around here at night?” asked a brownish-gray pegasus stallion in Guard armor. His nametag helpfully informed Twilight that he was a First Sergeant and was named Chamomile.
“That’s gonna be a shit detail for whatever poor rutter draws it…” Marigold warned. Both she and Chamomile looked ahead to Twilight.
“Have we gotten any indication actual ponies are coming out here, or just wild animals?” the scholar asked, thinking once again of the distant specks that were all she’d ever seen of the outside world’s prying reporters.
“No sir. Uhh… no, Doctor,” said Parhelion.
“Then it’s probably not worth the trouble,” Twilight concluded, “Fluttershy, did your little friends tell you anything about what might’ve made this?”
“No…” Fluttershy was walking well behind the rest of the group, and Twilight had to twist her own head around nearly a hundred and eighty degrees to catch the pegasus shaking hers. “Just that there’s something, umm, hurt here.”
“That’s a funny way to put it,” Applejack muttered.
“Creepy is more like it,” replied a blue unicorn with a crossbow slung across his chest and a nametag reading “CPL SUBTLE SPARK”.
Twilight, for her part, made another vow not to let the druid’s strange language and behavior get the better of her, and stepped across the sandbags to dry land. “Well, let’s see it!”
Applejack grabbed one board weighing down the tarpaulin that had been spread across the very top of the hill, and Spike grabbed the other, and together they flipped the entire structure backwards.
Underneath was a square hole about a meter deep, still mostly dry. At the bottom sat two lumps of stone that had clearly once been a single structure- a square pillar maybe twenty centimeters wide and a meter tall, tapering slightly with height. At some point in the past it had fallen over sideways and broken in half- Twilight wondered if the round, natural boulder visible just underneath the break, coupled with the pressure of layers of silt piling on up above, might’ve had something to do with that. A quick magesight spell confirmed it to contain not a trace of residual magic. The stone appeared to be the same type found in the mountains around Ponyville, cleared of patina to bring out a deep midnight-blue coloration. That sort of craftsmareship had been on display in the Lunar Cairns as well, and as a result Twilight was almost certain the artifact in front of her was, in fact, Lunar. Or a very convincing and recent forgery…
The surface appeared quite rough, and as Twilight knelt down and carefully snaked her neck down into the hole, it resolved itself into a series of intricate carvings. Of the three sides she could see, one was divided into three clear segments or panels. The first of those depicted a swarm of blank-eyed equine creatures possessing both curved horns and rounded, insectlike wings, locked in combat with pegasi in traditional Timbucktu armor. Below them was a vague cityscape outlined in flames, into which a larger insectoid figure tossed a pegasus in particularly regal-looking armor. At the very bottom an alicorn with Celestia’s cutie-mark and several other robed ponies -notably all unicorns- sat, some with goblets held in their hooves and mouths open as though conversion, looking in every direction but up. The left side of the pillar was a single image. Earth ponies and pegasi, with manacles around their hooves and collars around their necks, were prostrated beneath another portrait of Celestia and several robed unicorns, standing atop a representation of the Everfree Council Hall. Finally, on the right, Celestia stood before a pile of books with a lit torch held in her telekinesis, while below her a skirmish line of unicorns in mages’ tunics marched out from the distinctive mountain-supported spires of Canterlot. They advanced on a collection of earth ponies and pegasi wearing the traditional First Century garb of physicians, alchemists, geomancers and druids.
“It’s the grievances that started the Lunar Rebellions…” Twilight muttered to herself. “The Changeling attack on Timbucktu, Celestia’s promotion to Speaker of the Council, the rise of unicorn-supremacists and the forbiddance of necromancy. I bet if we turned it over, the far side would have something to do with the war against the Crystal Empire.”
“Wouldn’t they know all this, though?” Spike’s voice suddenly echoed from behind Twilight. She jumped backwards, narrowly avoiding scraping her horn on the clay side of the pit. “Sorry. Sorry. But think about it. These are supposed to be Lunar officers making this trek. If anypony knew what grievances kicked off the Lunar Rebellions already, it’d be them.”
Twilight nodded. “And out of all the Lunar forces, they’d also be the most literate. One picture or even just a few sentences would probably be enough to get the idea across, and take less time to carve, too. This seems more like…”
“Like a propaganda pamphlet,” Spike finished for her, “Or a kids’ book. ‘Look at big bad Tyrant Celestia, being so cruel to everypony. Here’s as many gory details as we can fit on this rock. Doesn’t that make you feel angry? Don’t you want to be a rebel?’.”
“Yeah…” Twilight trailed off, and then recalled that in every picture Celestia had been holding a ceremonial mace or standard of some kind. She quickly dug into her saddlebags and extracted her booklet of maps, unfolding them all at once in her telekinesis and marking the mace symbol they’d found on one of the stones over the pillar’s location in the Bog. Then she scanned for the corresponding symbol on their smaller map of the Lunar camp itself before remembering that it was the only one they had been unable to locate in situ. “I think the stones and pillars do correspond,” she said aloud, “and that’ll let us compute some kind of homography between the miniature ‘map’ in the camp and the real countryside. But to do that… we’re going to need to find more pillars. Fluttershy? I’m confident you can do this. Take as long as you need, I’m just happy we’re finally making progress without relying on mysterious signs from above.”
She just wished the ponies surrounding her looked a little more convinced.
(♫)
They tramped through more weedy, muddy not-quite water, heading for a particularly dense grove of trees that, according to Fluttershy’s Druidic reconnaissance, contained a second pillar. Supposedly, it was even aboveground this time, if badly overgrown, which was why Twilight was already heading out to the site herself without assembling the usual digging crew first.
It was close to nine in the evening, the sun already hovering near the mountainous horizon, and the Guards walking ahead of Twilight carried folded-up crystal spotlights strapped to their armor. The information leading Fluttershy to the pillar had come late in the day, and Spike had argued for waiting until next morning before surveying it, but Twilight -and, unexpectedly, Fluttershy herself- had both voted to proceed immediately.
“Hey. Twilight?”
The scholar jumped a little when she heard Fluttershy’s voice behind her. Even thinking explicitly about her, she’d forgotten the pegasus was even there. She tended to keep to the rear, after all, and it didn’t help that Froggy Bottom Bog got noisy as the sun went down. It did not, however, get any less humid or any less hot, nor did the insects inhabiting it get any less inquisitive. Twilight wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to comb all of the mosquitoes out of her tail. Perhaps she’d invest in some kind of alchemical repellent before their next outing.
“Umm, Twilight?” Fluttershy called again.
“Yeah?”
“I was wondering, since, you know… this project’s been going so well… if, maybe, you could… help me out a little?” At no point did Fluttershy seem interested in getting any closer to Twilight’s position. The unicorn wasn’t exactly one to insist on eye contact during conversations, but talking to somepony who was always some ways directly behind her was proving to be unreasonably difficult.
“Umm… sure. I mean, whatever you need…?”
“Well, Twilight, you see the thing is…” Fluttershy paused for a while, and Twilight was just about to ask her if she was alright when she continued all in one big long breath. “The big pond in town is getting really overpopulated with frogs, and I was wondering if I could maybe move some of them out here, to the bog, where they’d have more living space?”
Twilight laughed. “Fluttershy, you don’t need my permission to move frogs out here… unless the frogs are also reporters.” Given the recent, impressive demonstrations of Fluttershy’s druidic capabilities, that wasn’t necessarily something Twilight was willing to dismiss out of hoof.
“Oh.” There was another long pause as they made their way into the grove proper. The neat wedge formation of the Guards in front of them lost some of its cohesion, as ponies had to wind their way around gnarled trees and protruding roots. “Still, I appreciate it.”
“Yeah, sure. And if you need any help… corralling them, or transporting them, or anything, I’m sure I can stop by.” Twilight moved to rub the sweat off her muzzle before recalling that her forehooves were currently encased in leather boots and about three centimeters of mud. “Why are they overpopulating the pond, anyway? Is it, like, their breeding season or something?”
“It is, or was a few weeks ago, but this doesn’t happen every season,” Fluttershy explained, speaking in what Twilight recognized as something approaching her normal tone for the first time since they’d set out, “Ordinarily fish will eat eggs and tadpoles, and then bigger predatory birds’ll keep the adult population balanced. But I haven’t seen many of the bigger birds around town lately…”
“That’s interesting. I’ll do some reading and see if I can-”
“Twilight Sparkle…” echoed an all-too-familiar voice in Twilight’s borrowed helmet.
This time Twilight really did jump a little in place. Ever since she’d failed to locate her first pillar and Fluttershy had started producing more actionable results, Princess Luna had effectively withdrawn from any kind of communication with Ponyville. Twilight had actually considered cutting off her communication link for good, but had decided there was little point. “Lunamania” didn’t need her help to continue dying its quiet, unassuming death.
“- beware. There is… the wind, the birds, the rustling of the reeds… their sounds fill Us with a sense of a great and imminent danger here. Thou and thine fellows must all move with great care.”
Twilight waved at the Guards continuing to advance ahead of them, confident Luna would still be able to see in the low light. “Your grace, we’re always being careful. These ponies are more than capable of responding to any sort of-”
At the very head of the formation, Private Parhelion whinnied in surprise and suddenly dropped out of sight.
(♫)
There was a great deal of crashing and rattling as Captain Marigold called out “Quickmud! Everypony keep back!”
Twilight and Fluttershy both bolted forward, dashing over a low grass-covered berm to find Parhelion sunk up to her neck in muddy brown water. Disturbance on the surface suggested the Guardsmare was paddling furiously, but she didn’t seem to be gaining any buoyancy.
“Aww, shit, I’m sinking, somepony help me outta here!” she shouted, in between quick gasps for air. With that much mud pressing against her throat and chest, it had to be a struggle to breathe even with her head well above the surface.
Twilight pulled up short and stared, wide-eyed. That can’t be right. Mud’s denser than water, even with her packs and armor she should float, there must be some kind of current underneath to generate undertow…
Before she could sink any further, Twilight wrapped the struggling mare in her telekinesis, concentrated on lifting her- and then bit back a curse as the field shifted and slid and failed to find more than a fraction of the purchase it should have. With everything else that had gone on, she’d never had herself keyed into the company’s telekinesis-repelling wards.
Fluttershy glided forward, one forehoof outstretched. “Here, grab on.”
Parhelion grunted, shifted slightly, and then sank still further, eyes going wide under her helmet. “I can’t!”
It was hard to tell with all of the bobbing she was doing as she struggled, but to Twilight it looked like the Guardsmare was sinking down more than she was floating up with each cycle. An earth pony might have been able to form some kind of solid purchase in that muddy soup and pull herself out, but not a unicorn like Parhelion.
“Really missing Colonel Lime right about now…” Muttered Marigold as she pawed furiously through her saddlebags.
Think. What would Rarity do in a situation like this?
Twilight grabbed a thick vine off of a nearby tree in her telekinetic field, twisted it several times, and guided it to Parhelion’s grasping jaws. The Guard grabbed hold and Twilight pulled- and then the whole vine snapped cleanly in two, spraying mud and sap over both Parhelion and Fluttershy.
Mud was up to the back of Parhelion’s head now. A few more centimeters, and it would start trickling into her mouth.
Fighting the panic building up in her chest, Twilight hurriedly scanned the trees around her and caught sight of three more vines. She ripped them away all at once, and twisted them together into a crude rope perhaps half a meter long. She tossed one end at Parhelion, and the other at Fluttershy, and kept the middle in her telekinesis. “C’mon, pull!” she demanded.
They both pulled.
There was a moment of fierce, sucking resistance before Parhelion’s entire upper half rose out of the muck. Fluttershy dove down and grabbed ahold of her barrel a moment later, and the unicorn half-swam and was half-dragged forward to more solid ground. Marigold immediately bit down on one of the front straps on her armor and dragged her the rest of the way across the muddy bank. She lay there for a moment, breathing heavily and coughing up muddy water. Her saddlebags and the spotlights she’d strapped over them were gone, but she herself didn’t appear to have suffered any harm.
“Wow. That was close,” she muttered as she hauled herself back onto all-fours, “Thank the Sun for Princess Luna!”
(♫)
By the time they actually made it to the site, wielding the long poles of their disassembled spotlight tripods as impromptu sounding rods, and carefully cleaned enough vegetation off of the pillar to make the carvings on it halfway intelligible, it was nearly ten in the evening. Turning back, however, was the farthest thing from Twilight’s mind.
In between the spotlights and her own magelight, she had a pretty clear view of the pillar’s inscriptions. This one’s exposed location had subjected it to weathering that its buried, broken counterpart had been spared, leaving fine details like horns and feathers more or less illegible, but it was still obvious that the carvings were entirely different.
All four sides were roughly similar in composition. The upper thirds depicted, respectively, an earth pony standing in front of an empty field, watching a cart laden with some sort of unrecognizable plants depart off to one side; a pegasus in armor hovering alone against a line of griffons with claws outstretched; a pony that was likely a unicorn standing beneath another image of Canterlot with a pick and shovel floating nearby; and Princess Luna herself -identifiable by her cutie mark, eroded though it was- standing in an empty Night Court in Everfree City. The middle sections depicted each of the three mortal ponies imbibing some variety of potion beneath a starry night sky as Luna stood against Princess Celestia with a banner held in her mouth. Then the lowest section of each side included the representative ponies as full-scale portraits in Lunar armor with slitted eyes, batlike wings, and a curved horn,with the fourth panel depicting all three marching behind an armored Luna.
Twilight nodded, extracted her much-abused map, and marked out the banner symbol over her current location. Two down. One to go. Hopefully.
It was odd, though. This pillar was hard to find but it wasn’t completely unreachable or invisible. Even overgrown, it was clearly recognizable as an artificial structure from some distance away. Given the number of treasure hunters who had apparently searched Froggy Bottom Bog, and Paper Clip’s own more organized search efforts right after the valley had flooded, it was in fact somewhat unusual that the artifact in front of her hadn’t been discovered before now.
“Twilight?” Fluttershy stood at the very edge of the spotlights’ glow. Despite the grove being covered in thick vegetation, she hadn’t heard the pegasus approach.
“Fluttershy?” She folded up her map again and slipped it back into her saddlebags.
“Can I… talk to you about something?”
“Sure! I’m just about done here, actually, and I’m thinking about maybe calling it a night.” She muttered the cantrip of her standard mage-sight spell, concentrating on teasing out any traces of magic from the pillar despite the heat headache that immediately started to worm its way into her skull. The pillar remained utterly inactive, which rendered poor Foxglove’s original assertion that mages had been involved in the thing’s construction more and more dubious. Even using geomancy to shape the stone would’ve left traces Twilight’s fine-tuned spell would be able to detect.
“Actually, it’s… umm. It’s about the locations I gave you. This one and the other one,” Fluttershy continued as she stepped up beside Twilight.
“What about them?” Twilight asked, her headache receding somewhat. She unlatched her saddlebag again, ready to extract the map if necessary. Another major breakthrough by Fluttershy was, in fact, exactly the sort of thing that could tie up this whole mess of a project.
“Well, you see, the thing is, Twilight,” Fluttershy stammered, seemingly trying to fold herself up behind her own long, pink mane, “I wanted to tell you sooner but Luna didn’t think it was a good idea while you and she weren’t getting along so well, and…”
“You talked to Princess Luna?” Twilight interjected, genuinely shocked, then when Fluttershy backed away a few steps amended, “I mean, you have every right to, you’re an important part of this project and you’ve made huge contributions and it’s not like you can’t talk to or write to Luna for your own personal reasons regardless of the work we’re doing… I just didn’t think she’d be willing to talk back.” You know, since you basically replaced her.
“Well, you see, that’s the thing…” Fluttershy stepped closer again, almost invading Twilight’s personal space. “I was searching over the bog for so long and I wasn’t getting any results, and I know this whole project is so terribly important for everypony. So I… decided to let Princess Luna commune with the animals too.”
Twilight stood, mouth half-open, a dozen questions burning through her mind in rapid succession- Why did you ever think that was a good idea? Were you ever going to tell anypony? How long did Luna know about the mud? When did she tell you about the mud, if ever? Why did you even think of this to begin with?-and were quickly stifled. Finally, more or less of their own accord, her vocal cords produced something appropriately inoffensive: “Does Luna know that kind of spell?”
“Umm… yes?”
Idiot. Of course Luna knew that kind of spell. There were a thousand well-documented instances of her communing with bats, owls, and similar creatures to reconnoiter for her forces, fueling superstitions that were still getting innocent wildlife killed well into the Third Century.
“And then they found the pillars,” Twilight continued, still feeling half-numbed by shock and confusion.
“Mmm-hmm..” Fluttershy now seemed to be trying to hide herself behind the pillar Twilight was looking at now.
“Did… did she at least write down what she did?”
“Not… really? I didn’t think she could do any harm…”
Twilight turned away, and scuffed at the muddy, root-riddled ground with one booted forehoof. Her shock and confusion were slowly but surely hardening into something that burned hotter than frustration but held denser and sturdier than any of the usual sorts of anger. “Yeah. Nopony ever does.”
“Twilight, I really wanted to tell you-” Fluttershy continued on behind her.
She turned around and stepped back over to the pegasus. She dipped her head down, the curious feeling still present but pushed aside for a moment by concern. “I know. I’m… I guess I understand why you didn’t, too. Nopony talks about it, but… with all those followers around her, and so many ponies who want to do what she says and nopony really knowing what she’s going to do next, and now all of this stuff about her supposedly having powers, Luna…”
“She’s… kind of… intimidating?” Fluttershy mumbled.
“Yeah.” Twilight nodded, thankful she'd removed her hot, surprisingly heavy borrowed Guard helmet a little less than an hour ago. “And I don’t like her intimidating my friends. Tomorrow I’m going to write up a recommendation to Major Forward and see if we can curtail Luna’s activity a little to teach her a-”
Something in the foliage rustled.
Twilight wheeled around, horn already illuminated and the first words of a heavy stun spell on her lips, half expecting to encounter a bat-pegasus -or possibly even an actual bat- with bladed wings aimed directly for her throat. Instead she found only Sergeant Chamomile, panting and covered in sweat but otherwise nonthreatening. “Doctor Twilight! Doctor Twilight!” He gasped, “We’ve been tryin’ to reach you, something’s happened! The gravesite… there’s another pillar back there!”
(♫)
Twilight stepped out of the Lapwing’s troop bay onto more or less solid ground. She continued forward and stared. There was now a pillar sitting in the bottom of the trench in front of her, perhaps a meter away from the flag marking where the treasure hunter’s skeleton had been removed. “When did this happen?”
“I don’t know!” Spike answered, “I was out at… uhh, the broken one, E-5, with Applejack, trying to figure out how we could get it moved back to the Station. It was starting to get too dark to see, so we decided to head back to the base camp and grab more lights. When we came past here…” he waved his claws in a vague sort of ‘surprise’ gesture, “… there it was!”
Beside him, Applejack spoke up. “Ya know, there’s been all kinds-a stories circulatin’ bout this place ever since mah granny’s day. Treasures a pony can find that ain’t there the next mornin’, weird lights ‘n sounds… ‘moon ponies’ meetin’ out here for all sorts a’ rituals that’re supposed to let ‘em talk to Nightmare Moon…”
“Wait, I thought you said there was nothing worth talking about out here?” Demanded Twilight as she passed the farmer.
She shook her head. “Ah meant right in this spot. Ah even asked’cha if that was whatcha wanted to hear ‘bout. Whole swamp’s s’posed to be haunted, though… Listen, Ah’ll write down everything Ah can remember for ya when Ah get back into town.”
“Thanks, Applejack. That’d… actually be really helpful.”
Carefully, Twilight stepped down into the trench and examined the ‘new’ pillar. One side was mostly occupied by a vaguely serpentine creature seemingly assembled from a variety of different limbs -Discord, most likely. The figure’s lopsided hands grabbed hold of a cresting wave, which towered over a collection of unicorns with outsized Sun- and Moon-Raisers’ pendants around their necks. The next side -the pillars always seemed to be arranged in a clockwise fashion- depicted a unicorn with a voluminous beard and traditional mage’s hat, with his forehooves raised up and outward. Below him, a representative of each of the three pony tribes knelt in apparent reverence, and above him floated the two Royal Sisters, depicted with shorter manes and foal-like proportions. On the third, both sisters were depicted as adults again, surrounded by six hexagonal objects that were likely the Elements of Harmony, and below them the Discord-figure was depicted curled in on itself and surrounded by exquisitely-carved chains. Finally, the fourth side was broken up into two distinct segments. In the upper, Princess Celestia stood before the bowed ranks of the Sun-Raisers, a pile of pendants at her hooves; in the lower, the same scene was repeated with Princess Luna and the Moon-Raisers, only they faced the opposite direction and there was a large crescent moon included overhead.
Perhaps more confusingly, there were still traces of soil clinging to the carvings, and no signs of weathering. The pillar had obviously been underground for some time… or at least most of it had been. Roughly the top three centimeters had clearly been worn down substantially- and it was exactly those three centimeters that protruded up above the lip of the trench. “So, what?” she asked, mostly to herself, “We dug this up ourselves and didn’t realize it?” Gritting her teeth against the headache now coiling up behind her eyes -wearing her helmet again seemed for whatever reason to make it immeasurably worse-she once again muttered the cantrip of her reliable magesight spell. Once again, it revealed precisely nothing- no illusion or cloaking spells, no teleportation, and nothing that could’ve conferred motion. “I don’t get it. I don’t get it!”
“Twilight Sparkle.”
Twilight wheeled around by pure reflex, momentarily expecting Princess Luna to have physically arrived behind her. Of course, there was nopony there save for a bewildered Applejack, Spike, and Captain Marigold standing next to the lip of the trench. “Oh, rut me, what is it this time?!”
“Twilight, thou must leave this place, and not return ere the Sun rises again. Thine probing and meddling hath awakened something of great danger.”
“Danger. Dangerous how?” With some difficulty Twilight managed to haul herself up over the side of the meter-deep trench.
“We do not know, but if thou dalliest thou willst soon find out!” Luna practically snapped.
“There’s nothing here, Luna, just a big carved rock.” Twilight muttered the chant of a moderately powerful disjunction spell, directing pulse of silver energy directly into the pillar. The stone remained stone. “See?”
Behind her, Applejack and Marigold both gasped, and took a few steps backwards.
“Twilight?” said Applejack, suddenly sounding very concerned, “Don’t make any sudden movements or anythin’, but one a’ them ghost Lunars is standin’ right behindja and she dun’ look too happy.”
Slowly and carefully, Twilight twisted her head around and peered back into the trench. It remained completely and utterly empty, both in mundane vision and through her magesight. “I don’t see… there’s nothing there,” she said aloud.
“Yeah, I don’t see anything either,” Spike added.
“Thou dost not see because thou dost not believe…” Luna’s voice admonished her.
Twilight shook her head as though she could physically dislodge Luna from her helmet. “You keep saying that and then you never explain anything, dammit! If a ghost is visible to one pony she’s visible to everypony, I’ve never ever read about one having any kind of… of… selective invisibility…”
“What’cha talkin’ ‘bout, she’s right there in the trench, she’s goin’ on ‘bout Princess Luna and evil unicorns…” Applejack shouted.
“Wait, wait, yeah, I… I heard something,” Spike continued, shifting around in place and then stepping back closer to the Guards, “It’s Old Ponish but it sounds, distant somehow, I don’t know, like a bad recording…:
Beside him, Captain Marigold stepped forward, shortsword clenched in her jaws in a parrying position.
“Fine. Look. OK.” Twilight muttered another spell and projected a quick amniomorphic shield between herself and the trench. “This thing can stop a Shadowbolt’s lightning spells, so I don’t think a ghost has any chance of-”
“Twilight Sparkle, thou must flee. Thine fellows may follow, but it is thee the spirits doth seek!”
“I still don’t see anything,” Spike cut in, now sounding more than a little confused- in fact, confused was hardly the right word; he sounded about ready to panic. “There’s just that voice, I can’t even tell where it’s coming from…”
“Lapwing, this is Twilight. Are you seeing any of this?”
“Nothing on any of the instruments,” confirmed Sergeant Leafspring a moment later.
“What are you talking about? I can see it out the window, plain as day!” interjected Palisade.
“Doc, you’d better back away, that thing’s armed…” muttered Marigold around the sword clenched in her teeth.
“I don’t see it, I can’t see it, there’s nothing there… is there?” Spike stammered, backing away with his claws raised up in front of him.
Twilight looked from one confused face to another, then back again, consciously avoiding turning to face the pillar, the ache in her skull building all the time. It didn’t help that she was being absolutely buffeted by old-fashioned dialects, with Luna on one side and Applejack on the other. “I don’t get it. It’s like something’s dampening our instruments, but the magic to do that didn’t exist a thousand years ago. Ponies wouldn’t even know where to start… could a natural phenomenon be possible? Something they stumbled on and worked into the pillars… but why haven’t we ever recorded anything like that before, and how would First Century ponies even know they’d-”
“Twilight, I sense that thine very life is in peril for as long as you stay in this place,” Luna’s voice was icy cold, “Please. For thine own sake, leave. Now.”
“Luna, I’m trying to think!” she snapped.
“Twi, this really ain’t the time,” said Applejack, “Ah can see that mare plain as day and she just stuck a hoof through yer shield like it wasn’t even there…”
Twilight looked back at the shield. It remained intact and utterly unperturbed.
“Still not picking up anything on the scope…” confirmed Leafspring.
“Ah’m tellin’ y’all, she dun look happy, she’s got a mace in ‘er mouth now…” warned Applejack.
“Unless…” Twilight paused, summoning all of her experience in ignoring other ponies to focus solely on the evidence at hoof. Something was bothering her about this whole affair, something very obvious and very wrong, but she still felt she couldn’t quite grasp what it was.“ It’s doing things a ghost can’t ordinarily do because it’s not a ghost at all, it’s some other kind of mag-”
“DammitDoclookOUT!”
Captain Marigold charged forward and caught Twilight in a rough tackle from the right, just as intense, searing pain blossomed in the unicorn’s left rear leg. Twilight dimly registered being hurled sideways into the muddy soil, landing hard and sliding with the weight of Marigold’s armored form bearing down on her, as back where she’d been standing the site erupted into shouts of alarm.
Marigold rolled off of her a moment later and she tried to stand, but every tiny movement sent a fresh jolt of pain through her limb and she couldn’t do much more than thrash uselessly in place.
“Capt- wha- did you just break my leg?” she demanded, between breaths.
It was only as the fireworks behind her eyeballs gradually died away that Twilight realized she was being dragged. Dragged in the opposite direction that everypony else seemed to be running.
Very faintly, she thought she heard Applejack’s voice, now a long way away. “Can somepony double back an’ get Fluttershy? Ah think Twi’s hurt awful bad…”
(♫)
The examination light beat down on Twilight like the noonday sun, doing nothing to assist with her continuing headache. She’d only taken a few sips of the analgesic potion the doctors had offered her, and was already feeling sleepier than she’d’ve liked, but it seemed to be having no effect on her various scrapes and bruises.
“Well, that looks like a mace wound if I’ve ever seen one,” declared the most recent physician to take up residence in her little whitewashed room- a greyish pegasus with the name “Coldheart” embroidered over the front pocket of his coat. “Deep hematoma, one hairline fracture to the left tibia, and one displaced fracture along the fibula.” He favored Twilight with a particular look: as near as the scholar had ever been able to determine, doctors throughout the Known World were led into some hidden chamber on their final day of medical school and taught in great secrecy how to execute it to exacting specifications.
You had to go out on an Adventure, didn’t you? That look said, more eloquently than any speech, And on that Adventure, you discovered that you were, in fact, a pony made of flesh and bone just like everypony else and not an immortal titan. So now you’re here, taking up my time and making use of my stocks so that I can repair the wages of your hubris. Don’t you feel foolish about the whole thing now? “If that Guard buddy of yours hadn’t pushed you out of the way, this could easily have crushed your entire leg.”
“Can you tell us anything about the weapon itself from the injury?” Spike asked from his spot lurking in the corner.
Coldheart pulled a long strip of thaumosensitive photographic paper from its spot under Twilight’s bed, held it between both wings, and peered at it for a while. “Not in any real detail, no. It’s not like there’s an arrowhead embedded in the wound that we can take out and examine.” He tossed the paper dismissively onto a nearby counter, and waved his wing over the wad of bandages he’d just wrapped around her leg. “However, these specks of necrotic tissue have appeared so quickly that I’d wager the weapon was enchanted with something similar to a vitalistic draining or disruptive mechanism.”
“That’s consistent with the weapons given to elite Lunar troops,” Spike confirmed, entirely unhelpfully. “And completely dissimilar to the types of damage usually inflicted by contact with ghosts.”
Seemingly satisfied with his bandaging work, Coldheart grabbed a pen in his mouth and began sketching a few basic runes onto the surface, peering every so often at a thin reference book he’d fished from some unknown location. “That’s a pretty serious enchantment. These glyphs’ll prevent it from necrotizing your entire leg or anything drastic like that, but… I’m afraid the usual thaumo-osteotic regimen is going to have to be heavily curtailed to compensate.”
Twilight let her ears flip back against her skull. “Curtailed… how, exactly?”
“You’re going to need to keep that cast on, and walk with a support brace, for the next… I’d say about a week? In fact, I’d prefer if you spent the rest of the night here for observation, to make sure there are no lingering effects from the enchantment.” He turned, swept all of his equipment and supplies back into a thick black leather medical bag, and headed for the exit, calling out over his shoulder “That means no more gallivanting around out in the swamps, either.”
“Gallivanting, he says.” With some effort, Twilight managed to extricate her hind legs from the complicated rest the nurses had placed her in. She levered her way back up into a sitting position, moved to slip off the hospital bed- and then yelped in pain as something akin to a white-hot knife suddenly found its way into the very center of her leg. Somewhat reluctantly, she lay back down, albeit on her side in a more natural posture. That hurt, too, but to a more manageable degree.
Spike relinquished his chair in the corner and stepped closer. “So… umm… do you… want me to get you something to read or whatever?”
“Don’t worry.” It was well past one in the morning, and Twilight was tired- which was about the only way a pony could get any sleep in a working hospital anyway. She reached out with her telekinesis -that was still working, at least- and dimmed each of the lights in the room in turn. Then she paused, considered, and brought a few of them back up again. There was something she’d figured out, or thought she’d been about to figure out, back in the swamp, but she couldn’t remember what it was.“ Actually, if you could grab some paper and quills, there’s a few letters I still need to write.”
“Umm, yeah, okay. I’ll see if I can get any from the nurse’s station down the hall.” After that, Spike left as well, easing the door closed behind him.
Twilight stared at the ceiling, tried her best to ignore the bustle in the neighboring rooms, and planned her next move.
Thank the Sun for Princess Luna indeed!
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Again, a really good job on this latest chapter. Definitely enjoyed the work that went into the exchanges, characterizations, action and future chapter set-up, naturally. Definitely got some laughs out of Twilight's confusion concerning the weird-sounding names for all those things in that article before Pinkie and Spike helped her figure things out. Also definitely respected the effort that went into the quick-mud rescue. And the confusion about the "selectively invisible" beings certainly makes sense for somebody with a hard science (or as close to hard science as a high fantasy realm can allow) background, even if Twilight was being stubborn enough to not listen to Luna as much as she should be. Also appreciated the scene at the hospital with the doctor (mostly the frustratingly snooty but not completely without good reason attitude, even if the fact that Twilight had all that back-up was a pretty good indication that she, at least, DIDN'T think she was invincible even before the injuries) and the reminder to take it a lot easier for a while (even if Twilight probably isn't going to give up until she has hard evidence one way or the other).
VERY certainly going to be looking forward to more of this.
I must say, I've really come to look forward to the updates to this story. FIM:EC was great, and this is shaping up to be just as good or better. They remind me of Forthwith's longer works.
About the only small issue causing hiccups to my enjoyment is the sporadic missing space between words. Copy-paste issues, perhaps? If you'd like, I could point them out for you.
Dang it, Luna, stop messing with the event flags.
11011692
You say that like the entire reason she was banished these last thousand years wasn't messing with the day-night cycle (okay, fine, and also blowing up the seat of Equestrian government, but they kind of had it coming)...
Took a ghostly mace to the body for Twilight to realise she's ignoring reality when trying to work things out.