Legends Never Die: A New Age

by bookhorse125

After Every Ending...

The wind blew through Sunny Starscout’s multicolored mane, and she closed her eyes and smiled, letting the currents catch her wings and lift her higher into the sky. Below her sprawled the town of Maretime Bay, pretty small from heights such as this one. Perfectly executing a twist that Zipp had taught her, Sunny whirled around and began to soar back to the ground, where she could see her friends waiting by the smoothie stand she worked for. They were talking amongst themselves excitedly when she landed, spooking Cloudpuff, who was flapping around Hitch’s head. The white pomeranian barked and flew over to lick her face.

“Okay, okay, I love you, too,” Sunny giggled, pushing him away and holding him at an arm’s length. “Pipp! Zipp! Please tell your dog that I am not puppy food!”

Zipp laughed and scooped up the flying dog in her arms. “Are you sure? I could have sworn you were… Learn something new every day, I guess.” She easily dodged Sunny’s swat with a flip, laughing as she gently set down Cloudpuff in her sister’s arms, who, amazingly, had her cell phone put away.

Sunny walked over to Izzy, who levitated a smoothie into her hoof. “Did you figure out the whole magic-wings-horn thing?” the purple unicorn asked, noticing the glowing appendages.

“Sooort of?” Sunny put the smoothie down. “I think it’s related to the magic of friendship, so…”

Zipp shrugged. “So long as I get somepony else to fly with who isn’t staring at a screen 24/7,” she finished, very pointedly looking at her sister, who was petting Cloudpuff and now looked offended.

“I do not spend all my time on my phone!” she said, and Cloudpuff barked in her defense. “I have to sleep, don’t I? And I haven’t been on my phone for more than an hour all day.”

“Oh, barely,” Zipp scoffed. “I saw you on it at breakfast, and you know it!”

Sunny laughed. “Anyways, what are you guys all doing here? I thought you were busy.”

The other five ponies exchanged looks that told Sunny that they knew something she didn’t. “You know when Hitch and I went down to investigate the wreckage of the, um… you-know-what?” Sprout hesitantly volunteered. “Well, we found something… interesting.”

“Like, what kind of interesting?” Sunny asked, panic beginning to mount inside her.

“There was something that looked like an old cave, but the entrance was caved in,” Hitch remembered.

“Yeah, and so I got one of the unicorns to move aside some of the rocks so that there was a hole,” Sprout continued, “and you want to know the weirdest part? Inside, it wasn’t caved in at all! The whole cave was covered in these crystals, and they looked a lot like the ones in Bridlewood - kind of blue and sparkly.”

“Gee, that narrows it down,” Izzy commented sarcastically, grinning and tossing her hair over her shoulder. Her crystal bracelet gleamed in the sunlight, and Sunny noticed that she now had two, albeit that the newer one looked like it was made by somepony far less experienced in the art of crystal-crafting and unicycling than her friend. “Do you think Bridlewood’s crystals came from that cave? Because we’ve been investigating where they’d come from for years and we haven’t come up with anything.”

Hitch shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said. “I was only standing outside it - Sprout’s the one who did all the real exploring - but even I could tell - that cave was magic. I can’t explain it really, but I felt some kind of connection to it. I don’t think any of the other ponies there felt it, though.”

“Huh.” Sunny turned her head as a flicker of motion caught her eye and spotted a filly standing in the middle of the street, staring at her horn and wings, dumbfounded. Their guardian finally came and dragged them away, and Sunny sighed, letting the magic fade until she was just an ordinary earth pony again.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Sprout said, turning to Zipp and Pipp. “Mom wants you to look at her design for the train system she’s working on. Well, she didn’t say you specifically, but she wanted somepony from Zephyr Heights, since that’s where she’s expanding it first. Something about trade routes and boring stuff. Should we…”

“Sure,” Pipp said, setting Cloudpuff on the ground, where he promptly launched into flight. “You guys want to come, too?”

Izzy slurped up the rest of her smoothie, tossed it into a wastebasket, and grinned. The group of six ponies set off across the town towards the Canterlogic factory, which towered over the town. The only point inside the city limits that might be higher was the tip of Sunny’s lighthouse, which was all the way on the outskirts.

It took a while to get through security (Sprout had an ID card, and Hitch got in free because of being the sheriff, but the rest of them needed visitor’s passes, which the guard was reluctant to hand out to pegasi, a unicorn, and an earth pony who had repeatedly trashed the factory’s annual presentations, but they convinced him eventually), and once they were inside, Phyllis Cloverleaf, who was hurrying towards the doors, came to a skidding halt, her face lighting up when she saw Sunny and her friends.

“Oh, thank the stars,” she said, grabbing Sunny’s hoof and pulling her into the building. “Sorry if this is a bit unprecedented, but I need to show you something. Your friends can come along, too,” she said as the rest of the crew stood there, blinking and looking confused.

Phyllis lead them into the elevator and down to the basement. Zipp, Pipp, and Izzy kept their muzzles up against the glass the whole time, staring in wonder at everything around them.

“Wow!” Izzy exclaimed as they came to a halt and the doors opened. “What do you guys do down here?”

Sunny surprised everypony by answering. “Construction mostly happens down here, though a bit happens on the first floor, though that’s mainly packaging and processing and whatnot. Offices and other things like that are on the upper floors, and they are much smaller than this.”

“How do you know that?” Sprout asked incredulously, and Sunny blushed.

“You handed out maps at one of your annual presentations?” she tried.

“Uh, no we didn’t,” Sprout corrected as Hitch figured it out.

“Did you sneak around the entire place?” he asked, and the flush on Sunny’s cheeks darkened.

“I had to find a new route every time,” she insisted. “You guys kept blocking all the ones I used to use. I sort of just memorized the layout on the way.” She turned to Phyllis, who was frantically navigating through the busy workers. “What did you want us to see?”

“We’ve been working on some kind of magic detection system,” Phyllis explained, nearly bumping into an earth pony that Sunny recognized, “you know, so we can see when a suspicious amount of magic is being used, perhaps for… unpleasant reasons, or if magic is in danger of disappearing again. But we’re getting a large amount of feedback from this area up north…”

“North?” As far as Sunny knew, there was nothing north but frozen wasteland. How could there be a lot of magic in use up there? “Where north?”

The pink earth pony pushed open a door to reveal a table with a few monitors on it, with Toots, a plump teal earth pony with a brown mane combed over to one side. He was studying the monitor with red spikes on it like a heart rate monitor with a bewildered expression. A second monitor featured a map of the continent, with a blinking red dot in the middle of the snowy mountains to the north.

“Do you know anything about this?” Phyllis asked Sunny, but surprisingly, it was Izzy who answered. She looked excited and a bit nervous.

“Well… the unicorns have an idea,” she volunteered, stepping forward to take a closer look at the map. Toots scooted out of the way of the unicorn. “I told you guys earlier that we had been wondering where our crystals came from in Bridlewood for a while, right? Well,” she continued after her friends had all nodded, “one of the theories branches off of a legend of a city made of crystals and snow. Something about magic teleportation or something, I can never keep them all straight. But I do know that the city was rumored to be in this area.” She traced around the red dot with her hoof.

“What was this city called in the legend?” Sunny asked. There was something familiar about the idea of a city made of crystals in the northern mountains…

Izzy shrugged. “I always just called it the Crystal City.”

“Do you really think that it could be real?” Zipp asked Izzy while her sister got out her phone to research it.

“With all the other stuff that’s happened recently, it seems pretty plausible,” Hitch commented.

“Oo, I can’t wait to tell Alphabittle!” Izzy said, grinning and bouncing on her hooves. “And Glacier and Lemon Pie! We actually found the Crystal City!”

“We still don’t know if it’s up there, though,” Sprout said, jumping at an opening in the conversation. “It could just be a fluke. Or some sort of magical discharge. Or after-effects of bringing magic back twice now. Or somepony using an evil magical artifact to gain lots of magic and is coming to bring us all down.”

“Cheery,” Hitch muttered. Sprout shoved him.

“According to my research, there’s nothing up there,” Pipp said, scrolling through her phone. “It’s extremely uninhabitable. The conditions can be lethal on a good day. Nopony’s been up there for generations because they didn’t have the equipment needed to withstand the cold temperatures.”

“How could something still be up there after all that time?” Zipp asked, looking a bit skeptical about the whole thing. “If it’s really as bad as you say…”

“We lost our thrones and were under arrest, went on a cross-country mission to discover some crystals, took out a giant war machine, got magic back, got our thrones back, lost magic again, lost our memories, almost went to war with each other, took out a giant war machine again, got magic back again, oh, and did I mention that one of our best friends can have wings and a horn whenever she likes? And somehow this stumps you?” Pipp asked incredulously, putting her phone away under her wing.

“It just seems so unogical,” Zipp protested. “I mean, sure, all that other stuff was crazy, but it more or less followed the laws of science! Even the magic-related stuff had limits and rules. But this… this is just impossible. There’s no way anything could be up here unless it was very powerful, and that would require magic, which, I’m not sure if you noticed, has been gone for almost a century, possibly longer. If there’s anything left, it’s most likely in ruins.”

“But can we at least go check it out?” Izzy asked, still looking like a filly who’d just had ice cream for the first time. “Please? We can’t not check it out. Like, that would be impossible. We can’t do that.”

“We might be able to help with that,” Phyllis began slowly, “but we definitely won’t be able to provide all the help you might need to get up there.”

“I’ll talk to Mom about it,” Pipp added, putting her phone away.

Zipp elbowed her playfully. “You mean, we’ll talk to Mom about it,” she corrected. Pipp looked a bit surprised that her sister was helping. “And while we’re there, I’ll check and see if there’s anything in the artifacts that we’ve collected about a Crystal City.”

Because they were already there, Phyllis gave Pipp a few rolled-up blueprints to take back to her mom, and Sunny, Izzy, Hitch, and Sprout promised to do some looking around Maretime Bay for anything about the Crystal City. Once the two pegasi were outside the city limits, Zipp took to the skies and whooped in delight. She turned to her sister, who was also hovering in midair, and said, “Race you to Zephyr Heights!”

With a burst of speed, Zipp was off, and Pipp struggled to catch up. The blueprints were kind of heavy, and she was much smaller than her sister, so it was slow going. Zipp eventually noticed that her sister wasn’t there and doubled back.

“You alright?” she asked, taking in the sweat beading on Pipp’s forehead, and how hard her wings were pumping.

“I’m fine,” she responded through gritted teeth. “Why don’t you go ahead and fly around the world while you wait for me or practice some tricks or something that just shows how superior you are to me. I know you love rubbing it in.” The bitterness in her voice surprised her, and her sister as well, it looked like. “Zipp, I didn’t mean-”

“No, it’s fine,” her sister said, reaching over and taking the blueprints from her. They flew for a while in silence until Zipp said, “You know, one of these days, I can show you how to do some of the tricks I’ve learned.”

Pipp looked over at her sister with a surprised look. Her sister had changed. “I’d like that.”

Once they arrived in Zephyr Heights, Zipp angled towards the airstation to check their stash of Ancient Equestrian artifacts while Pipp took the standard entrance to the palace, though skipping the elevator. She landed inside the entrance when she saw her mother hurrying towards her. “Mom, what-”

“Are your friends with you? Where’s your sister? Is Sunny here?” Haven asked breathlessly as she skidded to a stop, flanked by Zoom and Thunder, two of her most trusted guards.

“Z-Zipp’s in the airstation, and Sunny’s in Maretime Bay,” Pipp stuttered. “Why? What’s so important?” But Haven had already taken off towards the castle entrance to the airstation, followed by Zoom, so Pipp turned to Thunder. The green pegasus turned and geastured for her to follow.

“Come on,” he said, leading the way to the palace dungeons. “It’s better if you see for yourself.”

Author's Note:

Got a gajillion chapters of this written, so more will be coming tomorrow.

Constructive criticism is appreciated. Thank you for reading!

Comments

[Phetiamwantip]

This is pretty good.

[Yoshifan30]

Ok looks like we're back in the present time so everything looks like everything is back to normal well as normal as it can be but then hitch and sprout there was a cave where the war machine crash landed and they went to Canter logic to talk to Phyllis about this whole situation but then she showed them about how to read the magic with that's pretty interesting and they were wondering about where the Crystal from bridlewood came from but it turns out that it could be the crystals from the Crystal Empire Maybe so that's why they need to check it out because not only there was nobody at the North but somehow survived and we all know who Could That Be and it looks like when the two Pegasus sisters got home it looks like Queen Haven found somebody I wonder who Could That Be I guess we'll find out next time

[Sunnydlight]

Wow, these stories are insane! Keep it up! This is going in my favs folder!