Chapter 68: Alicorn Record
Firefly followed Lilac through the doorway into the strange cavern. She kept to the cavern’s edge, staying far from that dark water. There was no telling what would happen to any creature who fell through it, but she knew she didn’t want to find out.
“A low place,” she said, her voice echoing strangely in the cavern. “I remember you mentioned something like that before. We need it for... spells that looked back at—”
Her friend had said the word not long before, to open the secret passage. Try as she might, Firefly couldn’t force it out. She struggled, before dropping to one knee, hoof against her head. “Home,” she finally said, defeated.
“Canterlot wasn’t always the Equestrian capital.” Lilac crossed swiftly to the other side of the cavern, keeping away from the opening in the ground. There was far less fear from her than Firefly felt. But she knew the magic far better, too. “Before Luna’s fall, it was inhabited almost exclusively by unicorns, who created some of the most advanced magic in the world.”
As she got closer to the opening, Firefly felt—cold. Far worse than the weight of the ground overhead, something about that hole crushed the magic from her. Her wings jerked against her sides, and any flicker of lightning died. There would be no calling a storm down here.
“You’re saying this room is a thousand years old?” she asked.
Lilac shrugged. “Probably much older.” She finally reached the bookshelf. It wasn’t wood, but made from stone, reinforced with spurs of crystal in the same shades as the cavern around them. There was no paper anywhere, only the books it held.
Two of them, made of the same silvery metal shining with the light flickering up from realms beneath Equestria. Lilac tapped one with her hoof. “This is platinum. They needed something that wouldn’t rust, tarnish, or fade. Can you lift them down for us?”
Firefly took off. It felt a little like flying through slime. She reached the shelf, then gripped the first of the two books and lifted. It barely budged. “Ugh... this thing is heavier than you are. Stand back!”
Firefly stopped holding back, opening both wings to their full span and flapping with desperate, frantic energy. Feathers scattered from around her, along with a thin layer of ancient dust. She slipped her hooves around the first book, then slid it backward.
She didn’t have to hold it up, only lower it down slow enough that she didn’t break the priceless, ancient record.
It was a near thing. As soon as the weight was released, she dropped like a rock. Between the incredible weight and the pinhole in reality a dozen meters away, she dropped the record with a noticeable thump of many metal sheets.
She collected herself, took a few deep breaths, then lowered the second one, a little more successfully. She landed beside it, chest rising and falling rapidly from the tremendous effort. “Damn Alicorns and their... being so tall.”
it took a long time for her breath to come back to her—so long that by the time she sat up, Lilac already had one of the metal books open. It took an effort of precision with her hooves to turn thin metal pages obviously not meant for somepony without magic.
There was no ink on these pages—instead, somepony had pressed into them by stylus.
“Can you read it?”
Lilac nodded, not looking up. “Check on the others. Make sure they’re okay.”
Right, they weren’t alone! Firefly had barely even thought about their companions until then—Risk and her dad were with them. But where were they now?
She found them waiting in the open stairwell. Risk sat on his haunches, eyes locked on the opening in the floor. Violet lay beside him, facing directly away from the opening.
She considered staying to study the other book, but dismissed that thought quickly. Her best friend wasn’t just smarter, she was also much better-versed in ancient lore. She would do far better prying the truth from this text.
She crossed around the Low Place with just as much care as the time before, but even greater discomfort. There was no denying the subtle gravity it had. When she passed closest to it, Firefly could feel her hooves slipping.
It took far longer to make it back to the doorway than it should have, minutes of intense effort. “Are you two alright?” she asked, still breathing heavily. “Lilac wanted me to check on you.”
Risk shook his head once, but never made eye-contact. “I feel eyes in the dark. There’s a fault in the foundation, an opening in the gate. It calls.”
“Don’t answer.” Firefly stood directly in front of him, braced one hoof on his shoulder, and pushed. He slid backward until he touched against the steps.
Then he blinked, staring at her. “How are you just standing in there? You can’t even cast spells, you should be more vulnerable.”
She shrugged. “It’s awful... worse than the mines. But there’s something familiar about it too, like a weight I had to live with for my whole life. I can do it. Lilac can do it. I think you two should back up, until you’re feeling better.”
She turned, looking at her father. Violet’s mouth hung open, her eyes as wide as saucers. But she wasn’t even looking into the room, instead fixated on a patch of blank ground.
Firefly wrapped one wing around her shoulder, shaking her gently. “Septum? Can you hear me?”
She twitched once, then looked up at her. Her eyes were bleary, like she’d just woken from a dream. “Here was your home, when you had sight.”
It was no pony language she spoke—it was more English, harsh on Firefly’s ears. Meanwhile, the bat’s body was cold and shivering, even though the cavern was a comfortable temperature.
“Septum!” she yelled, much louder now. “Septum, wake up!”
The bat opened her mouth again, but no words came out. That was all the sign she needed. “I think changelings are worse at resisting this than ponies are.” She slid her neck under Velvet’s foreleg, then lifted her onto her back, walking back up the steps.
Risk followed, dragging his hooves a little on the steps. But at least he was moving on his own.
“Dad, do you need me to take you all the way up?” she asked, as soon as they were around the corner. Some part of her still thought the whole concept was strange, speaking to somepony she’d thought was one of her friends a week ago.
Shouldn’t it be harder to adapt to her father’s true identity as a formless creature, constantly shifting between bodies?
It wasn’t. The bat blinked, and her eyes finally seemed to focus. “Firefly? Where are we going?”
“Up here.” She continued for a few more steps, until she no longer felt the strange pull of gravity. The stairs were still dank and confining, carved directly from the old stone, and barely lit by Risk’s little red glow. But none of that should hurt a changeling.
“Don’t go any lower,” she said, depositing her on the steps. “There’s something down there that’s hard for you. Risk, can you keep an eye on her?”
The distance helped him to recover, too. “Sure. Don’t leave Lilac Empathy alone, okay? She’s brilliant—the smartest pony I’ve ever met. But she has a hard time with consequences. Help her get what we came for, then get out.”
She touched his shoulder with a hoof. “Thanks, Risk. We’ll go as fast as we can.”
She took off, galloping back the way she’d come. When she emerged at the bottom of the steps, Lilac was exactly where she’d left her, hunched over a strange metal book. She was much further than the last time. She didn’t seem to notice Firefly’s return, not until she tapped her on the shoulder.
“What does it say?”
She looked down herself, eyes settling on the book. It was incomprehensible to her, symbols she’d never seen in Equestria before. It didn’t even resemble the written language they had taken such a painful time to learn.
“They were real,” Lilac answered. She sat upright, lifting her hoof away from the metal pages. “They’re not called the Old Gods in here. The first hooves to press against the grass, travelers from impossible stars. They searched forever for a world until they found one. It was perfectly ordered, a landlocked wasteland without an atmosphere—and they brought chaos.”
Firefly slid to the side, until she was between her friend and the Low Place. She opened her wings, shielding her. “It’s a creation myth?”
Lilac shook her head. “No. This isn’t just a record, it’s instructions. The spells they used are here—spells to alter a planet’s orbit, spells to pull in comets, to pull minerals from the rock, to force volcanism... it’s a spellbook, Firefly. A spellbook so advanced I can barely make sense of it.”
She flipped through the pages rapidly, and Firefly forced herself to stare. As she did, she saw some glimpses of familiar things. There were a few of the runes Lilac used in her spells. Most of them weren’t runes at all, but complex numbers, creating equations that Firefly herself could never fully grasp.
“You’re saying the Lightless Star was right after all? There were... ancient Alicorns, who made the world instead of Celestia and her sister. It’s real.”
“It’s real,” Lilac agreed. “I would need months to pull apart most of these spells. Even the commentary is strange. The way it talks about Equus—none of it sounds right. Like the sun.”
She stopped on one page, this one showing a distinct diagram of a solar system. Except that the distances were all wrong. Even an elementary-school student from Earth would’ve known that. “They knew they needed a source of light and heat for the planet. But they didn’t have enough hydrogen for a star, so they...”
She tapped it, mouth hanging open. It took a little prodding from Firefly to get her talking again. “It’s like a giant... magical spotlight. It orbits the planet, and doesn’t waste any of its energy on the rest of the system. Because there’s... barely any system at all. Just the moon there.”
She flipped the page, showing a much closer view of Equus and its single moon, together. Only from this angle, the moon didn’t look like a moon should, but another disk, a simple mirror poised to catch the magical sun’s light.
“I think ponies... understand this stuff, on some level,” Firefly whispered. “Everypony talked about how Celestia raises the sun, and now Luna handles the moon and stars. Even with as powerful as Alicorns were, the idea that they could move a star just seemed... silly.”
“There aren’t any stars here, Firefly.” Lilac’s eyes were wide now, almost as bad as Septum’s had been. “The travelers liked stars, and they liked a moon, so they made them here—chaos they understood, imposed on this place. There was barely even enough for one planet. They made the rest with magic, copying where they came from.”
Firefly never would’ve believed a story like that, except that her friend sounded so absolutely certain. If she could trust anything from Lilac, it was her ability to understand magic.
“I think we’re... reading the wrong book, then,” she said, pushing on Lilac, pointing her towards the other book. “All that magic about how Equus was made is beyond us. We need to know what happened to the Alicorns, remember? We’re trying to stop the Lightless Star.”
“I should’ve stopped reading before you got here. But the magic in there—it’s beyond anything I’ve ever seen. It makes Starswirl’s first thesis look like it was written by a little filly. With a copy of this book, I could do—anything. Change my body to give myself a horn, change a pony’s age, their sex, repair broken memories, rewrite their true name... anything. This is the recipe book for Equestria’s reality.”
Even Firefly felt the temptation nagging at her. There was so much power here, but also so many questions waiting to be answered. What were the Alicorns, and where had they come from that felt so familiar? They’d taken a world of forms, and given it a sun, a moon, stars, and a planet very much like her home.
“Maybe one day, Lilac. But my dad says the Lightless Star has magic that can attack us from far away. Unless you can learn enough while we’re down here to stop that from working, we have to put that aside. We need to know what happened to the Alicorns. I don’t like how much the cult was right about so far.”
Lilac finally looked away from the book. In a way it seemed to draw her attention more than the Low Place behind them. “I could be fast, but not... that fast.”
She rose, then walked along with Firefly over to the second of the two ancient records. She turned the first page, then the next, with Firefly watching along. But just because she had a good view of the page didn’t mean she could actually read what it said.
Lilac accelerated, flipping page after page in rapid succession. She stood up, squinting down with growing panic. “It can’t... it has to be here.”
In moments, she reached the final page, and tried to turn it. There was nothing beyond.
“I don’t...” She looked up, eyes wide.
Firefly held her with a wing, the same way she’d done several times before. “It won’t be less true if you don’t tell me. I need to know too.”
“No!” Lilac flipped back through the pages, this time in reverse order. There was no way she could possibly be reading them all that fast—but maybe she hadn’t the first time. “It’s not what you think! Firefly, this doesn’t say anything about the Alicorns!”
Firefly’s wings snapped open in surprise. The movement came slowly, but then everything did when she was in here. Keeping important magical books in the secret magical library was one thing, but how could anyone study them next to that awful hole?
“It has to be something!” Firefly squeaked. “It’s a secret book made of platinum hidden underground! You said that first one was all about how to make a world! What’s in this one?
Finally Lilac reached the first page. She sat back, looking away from the book. “Ponies who know call it Abaddon—the Void, Abyss, Outer Darkness. This is a map through it.”
She pointed at the first page, and Firefly leaned forward to look. Most of it was meaningless magical information. But there was a solar system there, pressed into the metal. A star, eight planets, each one familiar. “Recognize this?”
She nodded. “Why is that the first page?”
Lilac looked away. “It doesn’t say. There aren’t explanations for any of these places, Firefly. Directions for how to get there, displacement in time and space. No wonder that scry was so hard the first time. But I don’t understand—this was supposed to have their history! It should tell us what happened to the other Alicorns, why Celestia supposedly betrayed them, who they were—”
Noise came from the stairs. It might not be the first, but this was loud enough that Firefly turned. How much longer had it been? Was Dusty okay?
Light exploded into her vision, blinding against the perpetual flickering gloom of the Low Place. She recoiled, shielding her eyes with a wing.
It made little difference. This wasn’t just bright, it was an overwhelming wave of magical strength, standing under the sun and noonday. This was far more powerful than any unicorn—and more dangerous.
When it finally faded, she saw an Alicorn standing over them, her horn glowing with powerful magic. “There’s no record because I remember it,” Princess Celestia said.
Stats
Page generated in 0.031 seconds
Total duration
946 users online
1,884,549 hits today, 2,244,100 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Who could've seen this one coming!
Well, that is slightly ominous!
You done messed up now.
Whoof. Well, this is going to be an interesting conversation…
I'm really curious about how Celestia knew they were down there. I don't think she just habitually visits this place.
Guess we'll find out next week if Celestia really would kill them without hesitation.
Finally, time for some answers! Celestia should be able to tell immediately that these aren't just a couple of lost fillies. One, they are seemingly unaffected by the low place that incapacitated Risk and Septum, and two, Lilac is capable of reading the platinum book. Hopefully, they can both get answers, escape the Lightless Star, and make their choice of in which world they will live.
Great story!
It'sh a trap!
Uh-oh, they've been caught red-hoofed. Was this Saffron's plan all along? Is Lilac going to have a heart attack? Find out next time on SoW!
In all seriousness, interesting lore. So my current mental image: Equus itself is an unnatural world created by the ancient Alicorn civilization - they fled from Abaddon, and more specifically, Earth - explaining why it's the first page. At some point, they were possessed by what i'll call 'nightmares', forcing Celestia to banish them.
That leaves the question of why we have never heard of this, as humans. It could be an ancient civilization on earth, but you'd think we'd see it. Unless this is in our future, and the sisters were not only ripped from one dimension to another, but instead forwards in time.
I still think there was some foreshadowing of reincarnation here. I would say that maybe this implies that the exodus from Earth to Equestria would have been within our generation on earth, but it feels so sudden. I guess if we completely abandon the reincarnation/future ideas, it could have been a cult on earth (the same which gave Lilac knowledge of magic in the first place), which slipped off ages ago to do this... Which may imply that they're still around on earth. I smell sequel bait, but I feel that wasn't the intent.
If that isn't the case, and the hinting at reincarnation was genuine, my only thought is that Lilac and Firefly would have become immortal alicorns in the initial timeline, and went along with the rest of humanity to Equestria... But the Lightless Star dragged them forwards in time before that could happen.
Now, can Lilac and Firefly tell Celestia what's going on in Willowbrook? We'll find out!
Tune in next week! Same spook-time, same spook-channel!
as the announcer gets caught by a large stage hook Enough of that, Desmond!
11366309
I think if Celestia was who Willowbrook said she was, she wouldn't have wasted her breath saying even just the one thing she did. She would have knocked them out at the end of the chapter, and the next would be imprisonment, interrogation, with the promise of execution afterward that gets thwarted by some harebrained rescue from an unlikely source. Celestia seems to be, if nothing else, more reasonable than Willowbrook said. She sees the two as a threat, but the fact that she's addressing them at all when she could have taken them by surprise while they were blinded by her entrance says a lot.
11366309
I imagine she has some form of silent alarm for when someone opens up the secret door or takes the books off of the shelves.
This is a surprise but I had considered that Celestia might know when those books are being read. I do wonder what they'll tell her to explain themselves though.
So much to unravel already. No doubt next chapter will explain all.
No doubt they would have mastered the little piece of Abaddon they came from. They could have mastered our universe if they didn't come from there. The question is why did they came to Equus?
Perhaps they weren't banished at all and instead ultimately found this plane lacking and abandoned it to move on to greener pastures. Celestia would have reasons and all the bitterness in the world to censor these deadbeat gods if this is true.
If Celestia didn't appear and the guards wouldn't mind the sisters checking out this book... would it really be wise to take it? Beyond the cult taking it, I probably wouldn't even trust myself with it.
Not much imagination to tell we're level 1 of this multiverse. Can't say the alicorns are or aren't humans but whoever they were they found a way to ascend and apparently loved it. Given the fall myths, they likely became too big for their britches.
We're looking at the last creator or the last creation that can set the record straight.
Terraforming and the way home. And the Old Gods seemed to come from the same place as our intrepid heroines. The thing is, they meant to, with intent and tools at the ready. These two were dragged here unwittingly. The question is whether Celestia cares to make the distinction. We'll see soon enough.
Don't like where this is going. Not one bit.
Aoh shit! Celly is large and in charge!
Next week on Dragonball Z, two little fillies get vaporized for messing with things beyond their comprehension.
Here we go. Let's see what Celestia does with our favorite fillies.
11366309
Magic
If she's the only one to know of the place course it has trip wire magic alarms that are alicorn tier
Time to call another demon, Lilac.
Calling it now. Alicorns... Ponies in general, are descended from humans so far into the future and advanced, they not only had the technology to realize that there were different planes of reality, but the technology to get there, as well. Lilac said it herself, there was a time displacement between the two realms. Maybe they were fleeing a dying earth to a reality they knew they could terraform with the magic native to the realm.
Think about it. How would the world react if we found out there was a planet we could go to and every one of us be Superman?
11367007
Lilac and Firefly are Celestia and Luna from the past
Well, they're screwed
11367180
That is a huge leap. Be really cool and definitely Starscribe's MO, but I haven't noticed any hints of this. ~~unless this is a joke and I'm being a dumb dumb~~
11367007
It may very well be possible that the entirety of Abaddon (or at least the parts suitable for life) was created by Alicorn/Human civilization. The chaotic multiverse with its different rules all blossoming from our relatively humble world. If the Alicorns disappeared because they've decided to ascend further then that could mean every entity, demon, or elemental are in actuality the humans or creations they've left behind. The lifeforms of the next world would easily see ponies in the same darkness as the ponies see their demons now.
To say the cult fished something important is an understatement. The sisters are members of the first civilization, the mother of all. And if their potential can match those of the creator Alicorns, losing that to the cult won't just give them power over Equestria or even just Equus. They'll have power over all of creation. To shape it as they please. It's easier to imagine killing the sisters being at least one of Celestia's contingency plans. A desperate last resort.
11368744
Half joke half prediction because that's definitely a twist Starscrine would pull
Esto se puso es pero con ansias el nuevo episodio
😁👍🇱🇻
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Then they finally figured out that credits warp to skip the final boss and quickly return home.
There she is! 🎉
Platinum you say!?
How interesting.