Funeral
The summer sun was shining bright overhead. Sunset wished it wasn’t. It should have been cloudy on a day like today. Maybe even raining.
Today. The day of Princess Twilight Sparkle’s funeral.
She wasn’t sure who had suggested they bury Twilight in the school’s garden. She hadn’t even known the school had a garden. But here they were, in a little glade surrounded by trees behind the school. Her, Twilight, and the three-hundred and thirty-nine residents of Ponyville, plus a few extras. The crowd spilled out well beyond the little clearing.
Sunset stood off to the side, with this world’s Twilight and their human friends. She watched as ex-ponies came forward in little groups of two or three to pay their respects to their princess.
They couldn’t even get her a proper headstone. It would have raised too many questions. So they’d buried her under a rock, surrounded it with a circle of smaller rocks. Someone had carved a crude starburst into the surface of it. Twilight’s cutie mark.
It was the best they could do, but it didn’t feel like enough. Not for a princess. Not for a friend.
A hand laid upon Sunset’s shoulder; she started and looked up.
“Principal Celestia?”
The older woman stood tall amongst the students that surrounded her. She wasn’t the only member of faculty there, of course, but she had an air of power about her. Especially amongst the ponies, who couldn’t help stealing furtive glances.
“Sunset,” Celestia said back, acknowledging her student’s presence. Sunset had, of course, grown used to hearing the voice of her former mentor from this woman’s mouth, but still it unsettled her every time.
Celestia looked towards Twilight’s impromptu grave. “I had hoped I would never have to mourn the death of a student,” she said. “We owed Miss Sparkle a great debt. One we may never be able to repay… especially now.”
Sunset said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“I’d like to talk to you in my office, Sunset. Once you’re ready.”
Sunset swallowed.
“When you asked for my permission to start this project of yours,” Principal Celestia said, folding her hands over her desk, “I allowed it under the assumption that it would be the best—and safest—way forward for everyone involved.”
Celestia leaned forward. “Now, I am left wondering if that is still the case.”
Sunset stood across from the principal. They were in her office. Sunlight streamed in from the windows, which faced towards the east: the direction of the rising sun. Sunset had wondered in the past if that had been intentional. Now, she was too focused on choosing her words carefully to think such things. Her mouth was dry.
“I still think it is,” she said.
Principal Celestia narrowed her eyes. “A person was sent to the hospital in an ambulance, Sunset.”
“T-that was a mistake,” Sunset stammered. “We didn’t know the pony-siders would have problems going back to Equestria.”
“I thought sending them back was the entire point of this.”
“It is,” Sunset said. “We just need to figure out what… what happened, and how we can prevent it from happening again.”
“And if you can’t?”
Sunset blinked.
“Then… then…”
“Then what?”
She didn’t have an answer. “Then we figure something else out.”
Celestia sighed. “Sunset, I want to believe in you. Frankly, I don’t have any other options.”
Sunset nodded.
“But…” Principal Celestia said. “If anything else happens, I am going to have to put a stop to this. For the sake of the school, and my conscience… and for your sake, as well. Do you understand?”
Sunset swallowed. She nodded again.
Celestia smiled. “Don’t worry. I have every faith in you and miss Sparkle. I know you’ll do everything you can to help the ‘pony-siders’. I just need you to promise me that no one else will get hurt. Can you do that, Sunset?”
Sunset sucked in a breath.
“I—”
The mood in the tent was grim. Both Twilight and Starlight were sitting at their own desks. Twilight was fiddling with a microscope. Neither spoke. For Starlight, the silence was almost unbearable.
The flap at the front of the tent opened, and Sunset stepped inside. Her expression was sour.
“How was your meeting with Princess—Principal Celestia?” Starlight asked.
“Well,” Sunset said, “she’s given us permission to keep going. That’s the important thing.”
Starlight breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s great news.”
“But we need to be more careful,” Sunset said. “We can’t afford to make mistakes like we did with Rarity and the others.”
“Of course,” Starlight said.
The silence returned for a few moments.
“So,” Sunset said. “Where do we go from here?”
“I think the first thing we need to figure out is what exactly happened to Rarity and the others,” Starlight said.
Twilight nodded. “I might have something on that.”
The other two girls looked at her. “You do?” Starlight said.
“Well…”
“Go on, Twilight,” Sunset said. “What have you got?”
Twilight rolled her chair to the side, offering up the microscope she’d been looking through earlier.
“I want you to take a look at this. It’s the wood sample you brought back for me the trip before last.”
They both got up and headed over to Twilight’s desk. Sunset got there first; she bent down and peered down the microscope’s length.
“The pattern of decay isn’t consistent with any known form of earthly fungus—er, as far as I could tell, anyway,” Twilight said, looking a little bit sheepish, but she recovered quickly. “I thought it might be some kind of Equestrian variant of white rot, but… well, here, take a look.”
“You look too, Starlight,” Twilight said, turning towards her. “Tell me if it looks familiar.”
Sunset stepped to the side, allowing Starlight her turn at the microscope. Brushing her hair back, she knelt down and looked through the eyepiece. Through it, she could see row upon row of rounded chambers, formed by walls of thin filament. Plant cells; she’d seen similar structures in her biology classes.
Less recognizable was the way they seemed to be falling apart. Many of the cells on the right side had split open, their walls fraying outwards.
“There are no signs of colonization,” Twilight said. “Normally you would be able to see little pits in the cell walls where the fungus spread through, but they just aren’t there. There’s no sign of an actual fungus, either, and as far as I can tell, the sample hasn’t decayed any further since yesterday.”
Starlight took a step back. The image had burned into her retina; she blinked it away.
“So what does that mean?” Sunset asked.
“I don’t know,” Twilight replied. “I do have a theory, but I’d need to test it first before I could be sure.”
“Alright,” Sunset said. “So how do we test it?”
"Well..."
“We’ll need four samples,” Twilight said. “Two from Equestria, two from here. Something simple, and easy to get, like a—”
Snip.
The twig fell neatly away from the dead tree it had resided upon and into Sunset’s gloved hand. Nodding, she reached up again with her scissors and found another such suitable item.
Snip.
“I’ll take pictures and thaumic readings of all four samples,” Twilight continued. “So we have a baseline.”
The thaumameter hummed. A graph appeared on the screen of Twilight’s laptop. She didn’t see it, however; she was too busy looking at a sample of one of the Equestrian twigs under the microscope.
“Then, we’ll leave two of them here,” she said. “One of the samples from our side, one of the samples from Equestria. We’ll keep the other two samples in Twilight’s castle. We’ll leave them there over the weekend. Finally, we’ll compare the ones in Equestria to our control group here, and based on the results, we should have a much better idea of what’s going on.”
The weekend passed slowly—or, at least, it had for Sunset. Now, however, it was Monday, and that meant the end of Twilight’s experiment.
“Ready to go?” Starlight asked her, as she put on her respirator mask. Sunset nodded.
“All good.”
“Alright,” Twilight said. “Firing capacitors—now!”
With a crackle of electricity and a flash of light, the portal to Equestria was once again ripped open.
“All green,” Starlight announced. “Go on, Sunset—let’s see what’s happened to our samples.”
Sunset nodded. With a deep breath—this moment never seemed to get any less dramatic—she stepped forward. Once. Twice. Again—and she was in Equestria. The crystal felt firm and solid beneath her boots.
First order of business: connecting the cable back up to the radio relay. That done, she turned her attention to one of the tables, upon which she’d placed their samples, two days before.
“Alright,” she said aloud. “Time to see what’s up.”
The two twigs lay in separate petri dishes, their ends jutting out over the edges. One was labeled “Earth”, the other “Equestria”.
Not that Sunset would have needed the labels to tell the two apart. The one from earth looked essentially the same as when she’d last seen it. The other…
The other was bent. It looked… soft. Like it had sagged under its own weight, little as that weight was.
“Any obvious changes?” came Twilight’s voice over the earpiece.
“Yeah,” Sunset said. “One’s… well, you’ll see when I bring them back.”
She went to pick up the samples, and—
She froze. She’d heard something. A clicking, faint, but definitely there. It was coming from the hallway outside the library.
Sunset swallowed. The sound was getting louder.
“I think something’s here,” she whispered.
“What? What do you mean?”
Sunset made her way to the doorway. “I can hear something. Sounds like footsteps.”
Holding her breath, she poked her head out of the doorway. Looked right; nothing. Looked left—there, movement. Something ducking into one of the rooms down the hall. She couldn’t see what it was.
“Hello?” she called out, timidly, then again, with more force: “Hello? Is someone there?”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea!?” Twilight hissed through the radio. Sunset ignored her.
She stepped through the doorway, headed down the hall to the room. “Can you hear me? Hello?”
She looked into the room.
Empty.
It was just a bedroom, a guest bedroom, by the looks of things, given how bare it was. Just a bed, a table, some shelves…
Bewildered, Sunset stepped inside. She looked around. There was no one there.
“Sunset?” came Twilight’s voice through the radio.
“I’m alright,” Sunset replied. “I thought I saw something, but there’s no one—”
Then came a sound. Behind her. Something dropping down on the floor. Sunset’s eyes widened. She went to turn around—
Something grabbed her by the back of her suit, lifted her into the air and threw her to the ground. Sunset let out a grunt as her body hit hard crystal. Her hands protected her face, but just barely. She felt something sharp—no, somethings—press into the back of her head, push her face harder into the floor.
“What are you,” a voice growled in her ear, “and what did you do?”
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Interesting story. Will be keeping an eye on it
My guess is that the voice is Spike. Regarding as to what happened, I think the magic got drained away somehow
OK, so based on all of the clues so far:
The Malady (provisional name) is explicitly magic-based. Considering all of the things we have seen, it acts on the subject's connection to and capacity of raw magic.
Even if we dismiss the vaguely tribalist implication that Unicorns have more magic than Pegasi, etc, we can instead view it as 'Unicorn magic is more generalized and therefore more susceptible, followed by the other tribes.'
Everything in Equestria contains magic. Especially all life, and by extension, all organic matter. The Malady accelerates entropy as it drains magic. Normally, we would have vectors by which entropy is afflicted on matter (weathering, scavengers, fungi, and microbes promoting breakdown and decay) but in the absence of those operators we have material breakdown ex-nihilo.
The symptoms described in the living victims seem like hypothermia. Numbness in the extremities followed by loss of energy and motor function. The wood examples seemed like whatever ambient magic in the cells crystallize and then was ripped from them, leaving cell walls breached and structural integrity compromised. If that sort of thing had happened with the visiting native equestrians there would have been blood, screaming, and worse . . . a horrific combination of microscopic buckshot fired from within and radiation poisoning. Let's assume that a living thing has more of a grip on whatever magic is still inside of it than a dead thing. Living magic can still be energy, 'dead' magic can crystallize.
So, I propose that thaumodynamics is working like thermodynamics. Equestria, for some reason, has gone 'arctic' with regard to magic. It has all been drained, either away or to some concentrated point, al la Cozy Glow's scheme. Different mediums retained magic for longer than others, just as different mediums would retain heat. The traumatically rapid removal of magic causes active symptoms. Equestria in its current state is drawing the magic out of anything that sets foot there because the entire world at this point is 'cold' with regards to magic. It is not unfathomable that some sort of magic insulating material could be created. Perhaps dragon scales? Assuming our assailant this chapter is an angry Spike.
Earth, in this sense, is a 'cold' world but allowed for Sunset to 'cool down' slowly, and then once she was more or less fully drained of magic, no further meaningful difference existed between her and other humans. All magical 'incidents' in EG were just splashes of water into the winter that was Earth; they all quickly froze or evaporated, with a very slow drip of magic from the portal.
Earth life forms can enter Ruined Equestria without issue because they have no intrinsic magic to be traumatically stripped of. Equestria natives will need to spend an arbitrary amount of time on Earth before they slowly drip-dry of their own magic to the point that exposure to the Malady will not harm them.
So humans could visit 'safely,' any native earth life could likely survive without issue, which just leaves us with the final questions of what happened, who's managed to not die yet, where the fuck is all of the magic, and if the magic has been actively collected . . . where is it, and is it about to explode?
Cliffhanger!
https://youtu.be/cphNpqKpKc4
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If not him an incredibly peeved Discord.
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If it is Discord then only a holy blessing from Celestia’s fat ass can save her. (Yes i believe in those rumors that she Adores cake.)
Well, this went from quiet horror to louder really quickly. Looking forward to further developments.
(And I do wonder what Wallflower thinks of an alien horse skeleton getting buried in her garden.)
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Who d'you think suggested they use the garden? Must've been someone pretty unmemorable.
i wonder how many not-so-magic talented races are still kicking on that world?
desperate things, carnivore or gem eaters have some time maybe sunset, and the girls can help anyone living if twilight improves that portal and location opening so it not always at the castle also I bet twilight could do that while hurtful to her a magic draining could help the pony side from being drained by their world it worked for sunset!