Trixie: Eclipse I
Celestia’s pronouncement caused a momentary silence as Trixie looked to Cadence, who was looking at Celestia with a confused expression. “The Tree of Harmony?” She said.
“A magical construct in the form of a tree,” Celestia said. “Unless it’s changed since I and Luna last visited it, there are six shapes in its branches that fit the Elements. We believe it to be the source of the Elements, although we’re not sure where it comes from.”
“So you plucked the six pieces of a magical weapon out of a physical manifestation of your world’s latent aethir,” Sadow said. “I don’t have the Maestro’s brilliant mind for the details of runescription and other means of creating magical objects, but I’m sure that magic like the Elements just appearing, appearing to be manifestations of six esoteric principles that…”
“How would you be familiar with the Elements of Harmony?” Cadence furrowed her brow. “Come to think of it, I don’t think I asked Maestro how he was informed about them. I’d jumped instantly to having read something, which gave him an easy way to not mention how he came to know, but hanging out Tetti gives me the impression that that sort of information would be locked away somewhere and only seen by the trustworthy.”
“We have a book about it over…” Spike hesitated, sweeping his head back and forth before pointing, “...there.”
Cadence looked askance at him and then at Celestia. “I guess it would make sense that it’d be a foal’s story, along with the tale of Nightmare Moon.”
Celestia smiled faintly. “We never thought there could be any harm from our subjects knowing they exist and what they represent.” Her smile faded and she looked up at Sadow. “But that knowledge was laid out for our subjects. How would yourself or this Maestro have it?”
“A being of the Void I’m on good terms with--one of the few it’s possible to be on good terms with--was familiar with this world,” Sadow said. “I asked her, and conveyed what she told me to Maestro Leonid.”
Celestia’s brow furrowed. “How would any being of this Void become so familiar with…” She stopped and her eyes widened. “Are you speaking of… Nightmare?”
“A nightmare, yes,” Sadow said. “I don’t know of one specifically called ‘Nightmare’.”
“The name I knew her as was ‘Nightmare Moon’.”
Sadow thought. “It has the same general flavor as Nachtmiri Mein but attributing the ways of another nightmare to Nachtmiri is… not generally wise.”
“I don’t think it matters who this nightmare is, Auntie,” Cadence said. “The fact is that at least two of our otherworldly allies know about the Elements, at least to some degree.”
Celestia stared for several moments at Sadow before she nodded once and looked at Shining Armor. “Captain Armor, would you go and see what’s keeping the soldiers?”
Shining stood up and bowed to Celestia before clanking over to the door and pushing through it, letting it fall shut behind him. Celestia then looked at Sadow. “When I interrupted yourself and my niece, you were speaking of some deep vines that you could use as a weapon?”
“Yes, the network that runs under your kingdom.”
“Under the kingdom?” Trixie repeated. “Like, the entire land of Equestria?”
“I can only be sure that it stretches as far as the palace,” Sadow said, “and under the ruined castle. But it wouldn’t be unusual to encounter a plant or fungus that has tendrils reaching hundreds of miles in many directions.”
“You… said they could be used as weapons,” Cadence siad. “And you could break armies with them.”
“I am a pureblood kitsune, Princess Cadenza,” Sadow bared her carnivorous teeth in a slightly unnerving grin. “All plants are my weapons.”
“But ya didn’t throw the fields against the atermors and their constructs,” Spike said.
Cadence looked at Spike and then gave the kitsune a raised brow. Sadow’s grin became somewhat sheepish. “You’re… right,” she said, the grin disappearing into a frustrated-sounding sigh. “The plants in Equestria are very… stubborn. I have the very distinct impression that they do not recognize me as their mistress, that their master is another.”
The plants around Ponyville? Have a...“Maybe not a single master,” Trixie said. “Forest, could plants sort of… ignore magic put on them if their master has a lot of control over them?”
“Plants that obey my will have ignored magical fire and ice as if they were made of steel in the past.”
“Could they defy whatever the atermors do?”
“I... suppose they could but what does that have to do with…?”
“I think I see where you’re going with this Trixie,” Celestia said. “We call ponies without horns or wings ‘earth’ ponies, Miss Sadow, because they have a very strong connection to the earth and growing things. Sweet Apple Acres wasn’t afflicted by the plague. The family that owns the property has very deep roots in Ponyville, in their orchards. Perhaps deep enough that their crops refused the disease, like your plant weapons have refused fire and ice?”
“It’s possible.” Sadow sighed. “And it means that at least until we’re quite a distance from Ponyville, I have only my personal weapons to offer the cause.”
“And the gremlins,” Trixie said.
“Yes, and them.” She grinned. “Good soldiers are a more potent weapon than any great spell anyway. I wish we had more of the black ponies to draw on. Where do they come from?”
“The other side of this continent,” Cadence said. “They’d sent a division ahead in General Market’s airship in case we needed them. It’s otherwise a very, very long journey to get to Equestria from the Barrens. My younger sister Tettidora devised a magical means but it’s only suitable for a single pony at the moment.”
“Then it appears that what we have is all we have,” Sadow said. “Not that what we have is very lacking: a demigoddess, her niece, an army, some rough field fortifications, and artillery.”
“And the Quarantine Flag.” All of them turned to look as Krysa and Anori walked through the door. Or, rather, ponies that Trixie recognized as the pair of bodyguards despite the fact that it was readily apparent that both were changelings. Their shapeshifted disguises abandoned, both were even more lean than they had been before, and the stalking cat cadence of their movements were no longer hidden behind an imitation of Royal Guard training.
Anori had the tattered flag draped over his back and lit his horn to raise it up to show them. “It didn’t seem to be doing anything without being activated, so we took it down,” he said. “And if I may say, Princess Celestia, it’s good to see you awake and about.”
“Thank you, sir…?”
“Anori du Closs, Your Highness,” he said, bowing lowly to her. “My mate, Krysa du Ard.”
“Ard and Closs families?” Celestia smiled a little more brightly. “Both still exist?”
“Officially absorbed into the royal house of Amaryss, Your Highness,” Krysa siad. “Unofficially, still considered distinct noble houses. The estates of Tempesthaven and Messana are still our home, although somewhat… displaced.”
“Um, yes,” Celestia agreed, looking suddenly awkward. “There were a… great many oversights, I’m afraid.”
“Including letting an entire manor and outbuildings be carried away?” Anori grinned widely.
Celestia blinked. “It wasn’t burned…?”
Somehow, the grin seemed to get wide and toothier. “To this day, we’re still teased about that. But I’m told my many-greats-grandmother was a determined mare.”
“Determined is… such a mild term for Sarissa du Closs…” Celestia smiled. “So is stubborn, come to think of it.”
“The Looming That Walks?”
“One of her very appropriate titles.” Celestia sighed. “I wish I could enjoy a long trip into nostalgia, Sir du Closs, but our enemies draw near.”
“I’m not sure you need to fear them as much as you think you do, Your Highness,” Krysa said. “Although… the reason will sound irrational.”
“After a strange dragon showing up with a letter of introduction from an otherworldly monarch, the Element of Loyalty being attacked by a beast of darkness, and this plague being laid on my kingdom only to be revealed as some bizarre magical trick, I’m not sure anything can be irrational anymore.”
Krysa smirked very slightly. “The Flag wants to help.”
Celestia blinked and looked askance at her. “The Flag… wants to help.”
“Yes.”
“What do you… what does that mean? Is it not some manner of extremely magical object, like the Elements?”
“Well, based on what Starswirl wrote down, the Elements definitely can have intentions, Your Majesty,” Spike said. “I mean, when your sister ended up on the moon for a thousand years with some stars acting like a sort of alarm clock, that doesn’t sound like something you thought up at the moment and told the Elements to do, right?”
Celestia opened her mouth, and then closed it, furrowing her brow. “That has… not been pointed out to me before,” she said. “I just remember taking them and directing their power at her but…”
“...the Elements came up with the thousand years and four stars?”
Celestia nodded to him and then looked back at Krysa. “I beg your pardon, please go on.”
“It’s hard to really explain,” she said. “When I or Anori pick the Flag up with our horn magic, we get distinct emotion out of it. Mingled lust, love, fear, and hope mainly. Interpreting the mix as something coherent isn’t an exact science but… it feels like a desire to help, and the feeling that help will be accomplished.”
“I don’t remember getting that when I poked at it with my horn magic,” Trixie said.
“Well, positive emotional radiance isn’t part a healthy diet for you, Trixie,” Cadence said. “Nothing is for free with magic. For changelings, that price is a need to… well, basically, ‘breathe in’ a certain amount the positive energy from positive emotions every day. It’s like a nutrient for them--for us, rather. We need all the rest of the good things: balanced plant diet, air, water, all the things normal ponies need. We just add in a healthy cup of hugs to stay well-nourished and feeling good.”
“You… eat emotion.”
“No more than you ‘eat’ sunlight,” Anori siad. “‘Eat’ implies that there’s less of it afterwards. Positive emotional radiance is why the horn magic and wings and respectable strength, plus the
shapeshifting.”
“It’s a lot of benefit for a simple addition to the diet, but then again Equestria is practically saturated in it, so it’s sensible,” Krysa added.
“The dietary needs of changelings aside,” Celestia said, “Are you certain of this, Sir du Closs, Lady du Ard?”
Both nodded. “As certain as we can be, Your Majesty.”
Celestia compressed her lips a moment and looked at the fox being standing quietly at her shoulder. “Explain.”
“I have no personal knowledge of the Flag’s making, Princess Celestia, but I’m familiar with its legend and a generally-understood principle of making magical artifacts,” Sadow said. “The principle is that your material either must be able to bear the magical ‘weight’ for lack of a better term, or be reinforced until it can. The way that this happens to ordinary objects--such as the tattered remains of a flag--is that a soul is partly or completely infused into it. Not,” she added at the suddenly horrified look Celestia gave her, “that it can be done forcibly, and it borders on impossible to do it with deliberate intent. Such infusion is unintentional, which is why such objects are so valuable--and powerful.”
“And the Flag?” Cadence asked.
“The legend is that the infusion is that of a physician, a plague doctor as a point of fact. It is said that they spent the last of their strength to raise a quarantine flag over a plagued village where the atermors had gathered, and lived long enough to see the atermors trapped in the village and an inferno destroying them.” Sadow smiled a little. “And that is the legend. What is fact is that around the time this was meant to have happened, the atermors were trapped on some mortal plane and massacred, even the first Canceros, self-named Emperor of All Maladies. What is also fact is that the Flag consumes them in fire and ashes if properly used, which lends credence to the legend.”
“So it could have intent? Desires of its own?”
“It is a possibility. Without the creator of the Flag, certainly is impossible.”
“Alright,” Trixie said, “So how does any of this change anything?”
“The same way that the Elements having some kind of will changed things,” Celestia said. “It seems that Nightmare Moon was somehow distinct from Luna. My will would have simply been to drive her out or destroy her; the Elements did something different and so, she was both able and willing to help when the time came.” She smiled a little sheepishly. “Although I don’t think we can know what the exact benefits are, or even could be. This is another of those instances where I would rely on my sister.”
“Hopefully, this Flag feeling generous will do something useful like that.” Trixie looked at the two guards. “Did you see Shining Armor on your way here?”
“I’m here, Trixie,” Shining said as he shouldered passed the two guards. “Colonel Kipper has pulled his forces off fortifying the town and is on his way to retrieve their artillery. The… whatever they are took the long way around and attacked them on the road from Canterlot. The courier said that they beat back the first assault but Kipper was concerned enough to abandon the town to march to their relief.”
“...and General Market?”
“I’m here!” Market said leaning around Krysa and giving them all a little wave.
“Where’s First Tantalus?” Cadence asked.
“Setting up headquarters in the town hall,” he said. “One of our engineers said it was solid and defensible, so there we are.” The excessively cheerful, slightly bashful and nervous demeanor visibly faded. “Princess, I think I can fit about a third of the town into the Black Mambo and start evacuating them towards the Barrens. Princess Tetti gave me a way to tell her what’s up so they’ll probably be safe there.”
“I can’t believe the only way is to tell my little ponies that they must flee from their homes and take nearly nothing with them,” Celestia said.
“If there’s a better way to keep them safe, Auntie, I don’t see it,” Cadence said. “We have no way to know what form the helpfulness of the Flag would take, and no army to put itself between them and the atermors.”
“Well, there’s a lot of them and their fakes, but they’re not real strong,” Market said. “Could probably beat ‘em up really good if they tried to get into Ponyville again.”
“But they outnumber you at least ten to one,” Sadow pointed out. “Those kinds of odds are beyond even the race from which Ersari and Elena spring, and even the most ill-trained jei and jeikitsu have decades of combat experience.”
“We don’t need to kill all of their fakes,” he said. “We just need to kill them until we get close to the boss. How’d the people who started the fire in that legend keep ‘em from running away?”
“By dragging them into mortality and forcing them to remain manifested by some manner of binding or seal,” Sadow said. “Otherwise you’re just destroying a puppet made of Void material. But you don’t have a way to do that.”
“Well, I sort of… uh… kinda do,” Market gave her a bashful smile. “Little trinket thing Queen Chrysalis gave me. I think she got it from her friend, that Empress pony.”
“Empress?” Celestia furrowed her brow. “What an… unusual name.”
“It’s what Queen Chrysalis calls her, to tease her because being called ‘empress’ seemed to annoy her.” He tapped his chin in a pondering manner. “I think it’s because she kept reflexively calling her ‘Queen Chrysalis’ after she told her…”
“What does she look like?”
“Um… black coat, long blue mane with stars in it, turquoise eyes with dragon pupils, wings, horn…” He brightened. “Just imagine the pictures of Nightmare Moon. She looks like that.”
“A pony who looks like Nightmare Moon?” Celestia squinted at him. “How much like Nightmare Moon?”
“Uhh… like someone lifted her directly from the pages of a storybook?”
“So an elaborate illusion…”
“...which I believe Mother would be able to see through…”
...or…” Celestia stared off into space for several moments. “It wasn’t insanity. It wasn’t a delusion, or some predator seizing upon her in a moment of weakness. She...” Celestia slumped back hard on her flanks, her stunned appearance almost comical if not for the utterly lost expression on her face. “...actually tried to… it was… real, the entire time...”
Trixie looked to Cadence, who was watching her aunt with a concerned expression. “Auntie Tia, what’s wrong?”
“Luna,” Celestia said faintly. “She… she wasn’t a victim. She… it was… she agreed to Nightmare’s plan… or was it her own plan all along?”
“I don’t know, Auntie, but didn’t that happen over a thousand years ago?”
Celestia stared at her for several moments before her features smoothed over and the haunted, lost expression melted back into a calm and attentive mask. “You’re right, Cadence. Right now isn’t the right time for this. It can… keep until I see my sister again.”
Cadence glanced at Trixie now, her brow furrowed, before she looked at Celestia. “Auntie, are you…?”
“Yes.” She looked at Market. “This trinket allows you to actually kill the atermors?”
“I think so,” he said. “The Empress said it’d take out anything not of this world. But… um… only once.” He looked sheepish. “I guess it’s real hard to do so… uh… wanna make sure we kill the right one with it.”
“Or any of them, really,” Sadow said. “It might deter them, seeing one of their kind actually killed, since they’d think it impossible here. Not even the Bloodwynds can actually kill them with the weapons they carry, which they’d be aware of by now.”
“I don’t think so,” Shining said.
“Why not?”
“The messenger that came loping up on one of those beasts they use mentioned that they drove off the attack by killing the atermor leading it. I don’t think they just meant that they destroyed--what did you call it? A puppet?”
“It wouldn’t be unheard of for a mixed unit to be carrying a contingency,” Sadow said. “Probably a satchel of munitions with their preference for machines.”
“So nothing we can use,” Trixie said. “I mean, I’ve used cannons in my act before but I always pay a professional to prepare it.--the trick is worth a hundred times the bits--so all I know how to do is pull a cord.”
“And I think our own cannons are more rust than metal,” Shining said. “We--uhh--haven’t had to fight anything big enough to need one that the Princess doesn’t simply… smite. Until the Guardian.”
Celestia gave him a wan smile and then sighed. “Another area where I’d defer to my sister.”
“How did you…?”
“By twisting every problem I needed her for into a problem I could handle.” She looked to Cadence’s bodyguards. “Clearly not the best solution. I can’t imagine this Chrysalis has shirked her international relations.”
“Embassy with every nation, Princess.”
“Not a single one of which has spoken a word about foreign pony emissaries since I expelled the changelings.” She sighed and looked at Sadow. “I concur with Trixie, we likely can’t use the gremlins’ method. It seems like this ‘Empress’ is our only hope--and she only gave you one, General.”
General Market nodded. “We’ll make it count, Princess,” he said earnestly. “And if you need to go somewhere else to stop the bad guys, we’ll take care of Ponyville.”
“I am honored by that General Market, after exiling those you lead.” Celestia smiled briefly before she looked at Sadow. “You have some way to teleport, the way Spite did?”
“It’s far more natural to her, but it’s a skill I have.”
“Can you take others with you?”
“I... suppose I can but…”
“How many?”
“I’d feel safe with no more than six.”
Celestia nodded to her. “Would you be willing to spirit my little ponies away from Ponyville while General Market and his forces shield you?”
“I would be, Princess, but did you not just say that you didn’t want them evacuated?”
“I did,” she said. “But I don’t think the atermors will continue to wait and if the Tree is broken or taken…” She looked at Market. “...I fear that only a changeling queen is strong enough to shield them.”
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I have wondered this for awhile now, what does Nachtmiri Mein's name mean and what language is it in?
8815574
The only part of her name that actually means anything is the first part: Nacht, which is the German word for 'night'. The rest of the name isn't in any kind of real language but it meant to be voydspak, the spoken language of creatures from the Void. That's the more story-orientated explanation, however. I reality, I just came up with something that had a similar spoken cadence to 'Nightmare Moon' so it would make sense that she'd adopt the more familiar name for ease of use. Anyone who's close to her, however (Luna) or is a peer tend to call her by a diminutive of her given name such a 'Nacht' or 'Miri'.
8816080 Hm. I tried using the crappy Google translate on it and one time I had gotten 'my nightmare' as an answer.
Well at least I was never wrong with that try to say the least, cuz I like it.
8817145
Yeah, because "mein" means "my" in German (forgot that). When I say it out loud to myself, though, I say it "me-in" instead of "mine" (the second one is the proper German pronunciation).
Personally I like to aim for 2-5 thousand words. Anywhere in 1-10 is good though. Longer than that and it's hard to make time to read a chapter all the way through.
Extra line.
Certainty?
11725257
Yes, and yes, thank you. :)