• Published 9th Sep 2012
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Game of Worlds - DualThrone



Six months after finding the Empty Room, unnoticed among the dust and loss, another shadow stirs to reshape Equestria.

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Twilight: Nor'easter I

“I don’t suppose the dragon lands have anything like an anchorage for the Red Mambo,” Twilight ventured after several minutes spent in silence, standing beside the armored dragoness.

“Nope,” she said.

“So how’re we going to…”

“Don’t care,” she said. “That’s your problem, Sparkle. We didn’t exactly send ya an invitation. You came here on yer own, didn’t send ahead, so I guess you get ta pull some clever ideas out of your plots to land yer fancy flying thing.”

“The Mambo was designed to operate without an anchorage or landing,” the captain said. “Can’t exactly expect a nice landing zone everywhere you go when you’re a military airship.”

“Looks like your buddies figured it out, ain’t that nice.”

“Blue, what’d we do ta you to get you all sour?” Dawn clopped up to stand on the dragoness’ other side. “Or are ya naturally this charming?”

“Don’t make me throw you over the side, Pinkie,” the dragoness growled. “It ain’t ‘Blue’ it’s Ember. And no, I’m normally all kittens and flowers and friendship and all that saccharine-sweet happy-time shit. Just woke up on the bad side of the hoard last year and I never got my girly-girl disposition back.”

“This started a year ago?”

“Do ya know what the word ‘hyperbole’ means, genius?”

Twilight gave her a steady look. “So when?”

Ember growled. “Just… stop talking Sparkle.”

“Twilight.”

Ember twisted and slammed the tip of the sword down hard enough to crumple the deck plate. “I don’t care who you are! I don’t care why you’re here! I’ve got actual problems to worry about and some meddling pony princess and her little tea circle is just one more damned thing. Be happy I’m not pitching your clever plot off the ship and just stop talking.”

Twilight took an involuntary step back from Ember and felt herself nodding, canting her ears before the dragoness’ sudden flare of anger. Ember snorted and turned back to looking towards the bow. “I can’t believe you’re standing behind this, Lady Maredusa,” she said after several seconds. “You’ve been dealing with the Lands for years, you should be the first one to tell the brats to step off.”

“I cannot,” Maredusa said, weaving deftly around Rarity and Applejack to take Twilight’s place on Ember’s right. “If Crysaliss wasn’t keeping a close eye on more immediate dangers, sshe would march an army up here to ssettle the hash of whoever or whatever sspooked her little sister. If you were Thalia’s big sister, wouldn’t you?”

Ember snorted. “Wouldn’t stop with just one army.”

Maredusa turned her head to look at Ember, staring for several seconds. “How much worse is this one?”

Ember seemed to droop slightly. “It ain’t good, ‘Dusa.”

“Sso far, they’ve all been bad,” Maredusa said. “If not for Lepinora’s paranoia, the one Chryssalis is dealing with would have murdered a transport of wounded for pleasure. All of Equestria iss gripped by a monstrous plague made by creaturess called atermors. The one called ‘Master’ has sswallowed nearly all the Provinces, and iss being aided by ssomething far more inssidious and dangerous.”

“So everywhere’s under attack.” Ember turned and looked over the ponies. “This ain’t a social call, and it ain’t only cuz Thalia. Yer coming looking for the one that’s squatting up here, ain’t ya?”

“So there is one of the Evils up here,” Twilight said.

“Yeah,” Ember said. “And all that shit Lady Maredusa said those things have been doing? Mine’s worse.”

Twilight exchanged a look with Dawn. “What can you tell us?”

“Not a fucking thing,” Ember growled.

“How long has it been up here?”

“Can’t tell ya,” Ember said. “Before ya ask a whole list, here’s yer heads-up: I ain’t answerin’ squat about the one up here. I can’t. Can’t say what, can’t say who, can’t say for how long, can’t say any of the rest of it either.”

“Why?”

“Can’t tell ya that either.” She crossed her arms and leaned on the pommel of her sword. “Not here, not yet. Ya gotta see the one up here with yer own eyes.”

“But…”

“Cuz that’s the way it’s gonna be, Sparkle,” Ember said. “My lands, my rules, and if ya can’t deal ya can turn yer plots around and start walkin’.”

“How can this ‘little one’ possibly know if you told us?”

Ember looked squarely at Rarity. “That one I can answer: no idea. Thalia’s got a theory, pretty good one, way the hell out there.”

“Can you tell us the theory?” Twilight asked hopefully.

“Theory is, knowledge is power, right?”

“Well, not…”

“I know, aphorism. Stipulate.”

Twilight nodded. “Alright, yes, knowledge is power.”

“Power makes waves,” Ember said. “Tiny ones, but waves. If yer real good, ya can notice the waves.”

“...which means you can know if someone else knows something,” Dawn nodded. “Logic fits together, sis, if you treat ‘knowledge is power’ as bein’ literal.”

“So what you’re saying is…”

“Ain’t sayin’ anything,” Ember said. “Sharin’ a theory. Ain’t proven, no supportin’ evidence… so it’s just a theory.”

“Right.” Twilight glanced at the rest of the girls; every one of them looked right back, clearly understanding at least the immediate implications. Anything she tells us, whoever this ‘little one’ is, she’ll be aware that we’ve been told and can prepare for it. Twilight was sure that if the theory was right, it had to be narrowed down to things that the being didn’t want known, or knowledge she believed endangered her or put others at an advantage. Of course, not knowing what knowledge could possibly be on that list, anyone who guessed that the ‘little one’ could sense certain knowledge had to assume that anything of any value would be on that list. Twilight looked up and her eyes met the ruby irises of the armored dragon princess. “I see your problem, Ember.”

“Glad ya put it together.” Some of the tension in the way Ember held herself faded noticeably. “Still ain’t gonna be any kind of good times when we get there, even if nothing goes on that’d make her suspicious. Changeling ariship with changeling soldiers is gonna make her freak cuz Queenie is a big deal ta her. Not yer two princesses, which is really weird, but she seems awful sure that Chrysalis’ got her number and waitin’ till the worst possible time to stick in the knife.”

“Chrysaliss is certainly a great power of the world, but only one of many,” Maredusa said. “Odd that she should fixate sspecificially on her.”

“If ya can believe it, that’s the least odd thing about this thing.” Ember looked at the captain. “So how do ya lock it down when ya don’t have a dock?”

“The magic that allows it to fly can be manually adjusted,” the captain said. “And so lower us to an altitude where it can sustain itself nearly indefinitely, and also cancel any force that might alter its inertia while it’s anchored.”

Twilight and Dawn both gaped at her. “It cancels all external forces?” Dawn said.

“Or something,” the captain said. “If a thousand metric tonnes of the stone can keep the palace suspended as if it was on solid ground, are you surprised that a quarter metric tonne can exercise complete control over motion related to a modest-sized airship?”

“I guess not.” Twilight pressed her lips together thoughtfully. “Are there very large reserves of…”

“Bow watch!” One of the crew called from the rigging. “Settlement off starboard!”

“No kiddin?” Ember turned and strode to the front of the bow, and then lightly jumped onto the leading mast to walk to the end, balancing without any visible sway as she walked. “No kiddin! This Red Mamba of yers is pretty fast.”

“Where would be the best place to secure her, Lord Ember?” The captain asked.

“Edge of the clearing, and we walk in.” Ember walked off the mast and loomed over the captain. “And it’s just Ember. I ain’t the dragon lord.”

“Very well, Miss Ember.” The captain turned and started towards the stern of the ship, calling out commands to the crew as she went and getting a chorus of affirmative replies.

“Is Lord Scorch awaiting us in the ssettlement?”

“No.” Ember deliberately turned her attention upwards, to the changeling crew scurrying around woking on the masts and ignoring Maredusa’s questioning look.

Maredusa slithered passed Ember and then turned back, blocking her view. “Why do you want uss to walk in?”

“So no one knows what happened to the airship,” the captain said as she took position on the opposite side from Maredusa. “You clearly don’t want to elaborate, Miss Ember, but it’s vital that I know: what do you expect to be waiting for my passengers in that settlement?”

“Have ya not gotten yet that I can’t tell you?” Ember snorted. “Ya think I want to drag you in without telling ya anything? Big fucking hint, Captain: I wanna blab it all to ya, right here, right now. But I can’t, cuz she’s freaking omniscient or something and if she knows that ya know things, she’ll start the music when she’s loaded fer ursa major ‘stead of when she ain’t prepared.”

“Ember, you know there’s one fairly big hole in your reasoning?”

Ember looked at Rarity. “Yeah? And what is that?”

“All those other dragons you sent away,” Rarity said. “If she’s omniscient, she’ll know what they watched you do and if she is at all inteligent, will begin from the assumption that you’ll tell us everything and prepare for that scenario.”

Ember blinked a few times at her. “Oh,” she finally said. “Well… horseapples, as you pony types say.”

“So…?” the captain prompted.

“Well, ya don’t have to worry about her showing up personally,” Ember said. “She seems ta really like hanging around where she is. Wanders the place all the time, but doesn’t ever leave. She’s got more spells than anyone I’ve seen or heard of--that includes you, Sparkle--so she can probably make all kinds of trouble that I don’t know about, but she likes to use her sock puppet hoard.”

“The other dragons?”

“Naw. They are sort of still alive.” Ember shuddered slightly. “The sock puppets are… wrong. Always flickering and stuttering between real an’... something else. Best I can see is they’re sometimes walking drawings on paper and the rest of the time, having all three dimensions.”

“Princess Tettidora’s instruction about golems and other things powered by magic should give us a way to bar them from entering the Mambo,” the captain said. “Anything else?”

“She kinda does a puppet thing…”

“We can deal with your people or if needs be, outrun them,” the captain said.

The assurance seemed to take a little more tension from Ember. “Good. Cuz it’s not like they’re… doing it cuz they want to.”

“I understand.” The captain made a circling gesture to the crew and went back to the stern as the Mambo descended towards the sparse trees near the settlement. Ember turned back towards the bow before Twilight could say anything to her, so she looked at the rest of the girls.

“I guess we’d better pack up.”


“Have you ever seen her create them?”

Ember looked over her shoulder at her as they walked. The dragoness had removed her helmet, which was now secured to her waist, revealing that she was blue-scaled and her features were much more like the idealized depictions in books than those of any other dragon Twilight had seen. Even though she had never met Lord Scorch and had only the vaguest idea of his appearance, Twilight had a feeling that there was a connection between the idealization in the books and Ember’s obvious position of authority.

“Never,” she said. “Pretty sure she pulls them outta her book, but I ain’t seen it.”

Dawn looked back at Twilight and then at Ember. “Out of her book?”

“Just said that.”

Dawn raised a brow. “A variant of the intensified study spell, do ya think?”

Twilight nodded. “Sounds like orientation reversal, although I can only sustain it because…”

“...it’s a personal transformation, coming off yer font.” Dawn nodded back. “If they move around, she must tie them into something but it can’t be stable if they stutter like that.”

“And yet always retains a high enough baseline to keep them coherent.”

“Could be there’s something inherently magic about the Lands she can anchor them to,” Dawn suggested. “I mean, Equestria is like that and Scarabi is like that, so why not where the dragons hang out?”

“Of course it’s like that,” Ember snorted. “C’mon… we eat fancy rocks as a treat. An’ the fancy rocks taste like something. Of course it reeks of magic where we come from.”

Which was something pretty obvious when said aloud, but Twilight couldn’t remember having ever considered. “You know, I’ve had Spike around for all these years and it… never even occurred to me to think about that,” she said. “That he can burn a scroll and it magically gets to Celestia? Hours. That he could eat a ruby like a slice of watermelon? I just… accepted it.”

“Spike?”

“My assistant,” Twilight said. “Baby dragon, about six years younger than me. Hatched him as part of my entrance exam into Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns and he’s been around ever since.”

Ember stared at her. “Your entrance exam was… hatching a dragon.”

Twilight felt her cheeks burning. “I don’t think Princess Celestia meant it to be possible but I, uh…”

“She blew the roof off the room, turned the observers into potted plants, grew Spike big enough that his head protruded from the hole, and went full-blown avatar mode,” Dawn said. “At six. I know Mom had at least one head-to-desk session for not reading the big bucking sign.”

“Ain’t she put some kinda memory thing on herself?” Applejack said.

“Why the heck would she want to forget her kid?”

“Protection,” Rarity said. “If Celestia didn’t know, and no one else knew, no one would take advantage of Twilight. She’d be just one more extremely talented mare. The Princess probably didn’t imagine that magical aptitude could be so directly inherited.”

“Heh.” Ember looked at Dawn. “And you popped outta her head while she was crazy.”

Dawn considered this. “Eh, close enough. I just didn’t get the horn.”

“And yer pink because…?”

“Pink is the color of happy!” Pinkie said from her position at Ember’s right elbow, having not crossed any apparent distance.

“An’ the color of me really, really annoyed,” Ember told her. “How’d you…?”

“It’s Pinkie, don’t question it,” Twilight said. “I mean it. It’ll drive you insane trying to logic it out.”

“Snap your sanity like a twig.” Dawn gave Twilight a grin. “As big sis knows from personal experience.”

Pinkie’s mane drooped slightly, although her cheerful expression remained in place. “Twilight didn’t know the secret, though,” she told Ember sotto voce. “Wanna know?”

Ember eyed her and then shrugged. “Sure, why not. What’s the secret?”

Pinkie leaned closer and held her hoof up to the side of her mouth with an expression of extremely exaggerated seriousness. “The secret is… you ask Pinkie.”

Ember waited for several moments. “That it?”

“Yuppers!”

Ember then looked over her shoulder at Twilight. “You seriously never asked her?”

Twilight gave the dragon her best offended look. “Of course I…”

“You asked if my Pinkie Sense told me that you had a frog on your face,” Pinkamena informed her with a grin. “And that’s pretty much the only question you asked. The rest… you remember.”

“I remember the same thing,” Dawn interjected before Twilight could say anything. “Or, I guess it’s better to say Mom remembered the same thing cuz of the friendship report you wrote. So if ya forgot to tell her about plying Pinkster with questions, I can’t back ya up.”

Twilight conceded the point with a sigh and a hoof gesture. “So, yes, I didn’t ever ask.”

“Though it sorta begs the question,” Applejack said. “Why ya ain’t had all them twitches in a while anyway?”

“A friend getting punished by coincidence because she isn’t equipped for blind faith isn’t funny,” Pinkamena said with a shrug. “Popping out of nowhere without any explanation still is.”

“Element of Laughter,” Dawn said to Ember.

“Gotcha. Don’t suppose you could pop out of Lia’s stuff and tell her we’re on the way in?”

“Tried,” she said. “I can’t.”

“Not funny?”

“No,” Pinkamena siad. “I think Thalia has a great sense of humor, so it should work. But it’s like having a straw,” she pulled a normal straight straw out of her saddlebags, “suddenly get switched for UltraTwisty Mark Two Nine-Thousand,” and then came the most twisted and convoluted straw Twilight had ever laid eyes on. “Hard to go from one end to the other.”

“Ain’t that, yanno, impossible?”

Pinkie shrugged as she put the straws away. “I do ten impossible things before breakfast. Maybe she does twenty.”

“So what yer all saying is… little bint can shut down magic that works on the basis of ‘just because’?”

“Seems so,” Twilight said. “Still, I should probably check if it’s only for Pinkie, or anyone using teleport magic.”

“What, by blind-teleporting somewhere?”

“No, that would be foolish,” Twilight told her, unfolding her wings. “Too much risk of being deflected off of something. Midair blinking should do for demonstration.”

Twilight picked a spot far above the ground, set her wings for a glide, and reached for her preferred blink spell when Dawn put a hoof on her should. “Sis, I don’t think that’s such a hot idea.”

Twilight let the building spell go and looked at her near-twin. “Why?”

“It’s… sorta hard to put a hoof on,” Dawn said. “But I’m getting this sorta… I dunno, thickness ahead. Like hitting a wall of humidity when ya walk outta a nice cool place into a muggy afternoon.”

“Like around the Tree o’ Harmony,” Applejack added. “‘Cept thicker-feelin’ and not nearly so light an’ inviting.”

Twilight nodded to them both. “Alright, I’ll look.” She glanced at Ember. “If you don’t mind?”

Ember snorted. “Look all ya like. I ain’t in a hurry to scurry on home with that thing waiting.”

Twilight nodded again and then reached for her mage sight spell. Much like how it had appeared when she used it on the flying transport, it seemed to have more… breadth than it had before Nightmare’s bestowal had altered it. At least, until she had taken her eyes off the ground at her hooves and looked forward.

Directly ahead was almost a solid wall of pulsating magic. Twilight held up a hoof without consciously thinking about it. “I… I think the way ahead has been booby-trapped,” she said.

She saw a vaguely Ember-shaped figure in her peripheral vision as the dragon took a few steps forward. “Don’t see anything.”

“I didn’t either, until I used this viewing spell.” Twilight found herself taking a few steps forward, staring at the construct to try to make heads or tails of what she was seeing.

“I believe what I’m seeing is several constructs layered on top of one another so tightly that they appear to be a solid wall,” she said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” she agreed. “But how are there so many?”

“Lei line theory would fit the situation well,” she said thoughtfully. “I know it’s not yet been scientifically established, but it would adequately explain…”

“...the constructs that the invader is using as her tools.” Twilight nodded several times. “An overwhelmingly powerful torrent of magic would be the…” At about that moment, her brain caught up to the fact that she was talking to herself and was getting coherent replies. What’s more, the replies seemed to be coming from beside her, and she turned to look.

She was standing there, looking curiously at the constructs, her hoof tapping her chin. “...would be the perfect explanation for long-term maintenance, but perhaps also why the mobile constructs stutter,” she said. “What do I think?”

Author's Note:

A great many apologies for this taking time. Life comes at you hard. Anyway, I hope those few of you who read enjoy, and I'd love to hear what you have to say. Please?

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