White Sun

by The Psychopath

Preparations

Nervous, Twilight took in a deep breath and opened the armored doors leading further into the forgotten city she inhabited. Linked to the final basement floor of her home, the heavy doors screeched in protest from being roused from their long, long slumber. The rusted joints flaked bits of rust as they were finally made to work once again after so long. The unicorn normally just took the same chute that her test subjects would use and teleport back, but she really wanted to show Spike what the city looked like. She had used the doors once before, but that was years ago. Her curiosity led her down there after fleeing Canterlot and trying to find a home for herself. In the end, the mare chose the little 'cabin' she lived in now instead of disappearing into the catacombs of a forgotten civilization. It was more convenient that way.

The air coming through was heavy and dry. The amount of dust within absorbed most of the moisture into the surfaces and prevented it from staying in the air. When it hit the back of Twilight's throat, it immediately irritated her passages and caused a sputtering cough. She mitigated it by taking one of the former quilt pieces used as Spike's disguise and covered her muzzle with it. The mare would have to clean this passage up further if she wanted to go back down to the city more often. There were so many steps leading down that Twilight's legs already started hurting. It was a different beast to walk down and up stairs than it was to walk on a mostly flat plane. A final door at the end had collapsed under its own weight. Whoever lived here had only installed a wooden pair of doors at this entrance, and they had dissolved into mulch. Only vague pieces of vaguely solid lumber stuck out from the mushy, rotted pile.

Twilight brushed it all aside with her magic, freeing the way to a caved-in tunnel connected to a large, stone bridge overlooking most of the city. She stood on her hind legs to get her head over the damaged ramp to look around. She wasn't sure who exactly used to live here, but the bridge was wide enough that at least seventeen normal wagons could travel it side-by-side. It was just a prelude of things to come when she first arrived here.

"Spike!" Twilight called out. "Come see!"

The city she lived above dwarfed even Manehatten in size, according to Twilight's knowledge of that place. Most of the stone buildings were intact, but any trace of wood had long since rotted away or was in the process of collapsing under the weight of all they were carrying. The mountain range they sat under had engulfed most of the taller buildings, but even those that hadn't been taken always amazed the unicorn. Fifty stories tall at least. That was the height of highest buildings around, and they were all very large. They weren't simple towers or just tall buildings. The architecture pointed them to being hubs of some kind. Buildings with a complex purpose meant to house dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of ponies all at once on their various floors. Some sported half-cylinder roofs and were decorated with rows of 'pikes' on the edges. Others were angular and more bare. One thing Twilight really liked was a mixture of archways, pikes, floral decorations, and domes. It sported immense windows that were covered in thick layers of algae and other plant life illuminated by the tremendous walls of luminescent moss covering the near totality of the stone walls of the mountain.

Most glowed blue, but there were yellows and white mixed in as well. Zombies wandered the streets down below, unfortunate failures of Twilight's.

"Hi, everyone!" Twilight waved to the creatures.

They didn't acknowledge her existence. Most just wandered around and collapsed on their own or fell into the many massive sinkholes that formed throughout the city. Basements and dug-out zones had bored holes through the zone and, without maintenance, rendered the ground unstable. While the city was enormous, it wasn't hard to spot large swathes of it collapsing inwards. Many of the larger buildings leaned against each other, seemingly trying to keep each other from falling in. If Twilight wasn't the creator of the many wandering dead living in this dead city, she would be in more danger than this place already was. At any moment everything could collapse, taking the mountains with them. Its creators were masters at architecture, it seemed to the unicorn.

She watched as the mobile sources of light floated overhead, falling down towards and traveling through the city streets. Soul wisps. That's what Twilight called them. They only appeared after she started dropping her undead into the city far below. The mare worried that they were souls of the dead that she had accidentally trapped in the city at first, but she could feel no ill will nor harmful intentions nor anything from whatever they were. They simply wandered haphazardly every now and then. Twilight was certain there was a pattern to the wandering and time of appearance, but she paid it no heed.

The unicorn made her way to the end of the bridge and took a crumbling ramp further down, avoiding the holes and broken stone as best she could and traveling the damp streets that reeked of the dead. The zombies continued ignoring Twilight and Spike, allowing her to continue to her favorite spot. When she finally reached the elaborate building, she groaned in annoyance at the amount of steps she still had to travel up. The unicorn almost had to crawl through the only set of doors that still barely stood on their hinges. The others were made of chiseled stone but had fallen and broken apart.

Cold air buffeted Twilight's face as she entered. She could only see traces of what once stood in this immense building. Several doorways and stairs were dotted about, leading to various zones, but what Twilight wanted was just the main atrium.

Large and empty, Twilight could always feel an oddity coming from the wall directly opposite the entryway. There was something that used to hang there, but whatever got rid of it was thorough enough that there was barely even a shadow left behind. Other buildings still had walls hoof-chiseled with patterns and depictions of events long-past using creative figures, but this building held nothing. All Twilight could tell was that the algae-covered windows might be made from stained glass, but the effect caused by the luminescent moss outside and the green algae made figuring that out all but impossible, even with a spell. She could damage the material and would have to wash them all by hoof.

Regardless, she wasn't here to learn about the history of this place. Spike handed her a large bag full of reagents and started placing them on the cold, uneven floor. Plants with a yellow flower and orange stem; some more dried plants from deserts to the east that smelled powerfully of spice and burned Twilight's nose; A jar containing blue kirin fire. While exceptionally difficult to acquire, once you had it you could produce more whenever you needed, but not without specialized tools. Then came two hexagonal slabs. Twilight clenched her teeth as she ripped out a few strands of her mane and put them down onto one of the slabs with a smile and tears coming from her eyes. She took a small shard of Spike's ulna and placed it on the other.

The advantage of this place, moreso than anywhere else, was that it was saturated in magic. For whatever reason it flowed into this building and concentrated into the atrium, precisely where Twilight sat. She pulled out several more reagents, from stones inscribed with old ponish runes to bones to pieces from magical creatures. The spell she was going to perform was going to take her a long time to cast, and it was complex enough to require all these extra reagents. It was one of the more complex spells she had ever cast, and if she wanted it to succeed, Twilight would have to be extremely meticulous in her work and diligence.

"Okay, Twilight," the mare said to herself. She wiped sweat from her brow. "You practiced this for two days. It's just slightly bigger, is all."

She took out some charcoal and started drawing along the floor where to place all the reagents to interact with each other. Every circle, every hexagram, tetragram, septagram, pentagram. Every curve, old ponish, new ponish, minotaur or griffith. Everything she used in her rituals was designed to interact with each other and direct the magic through every item in precise intervals and quantities, just like when she worked on her chemistry. Not too much acid at once, let this part boil for a few seconds then redirect the vapor to drip and boil again in another solution for a minute while this part was mixed up. It all felt natural to Twilight and she couldn't help but let creep a childish smile and a sense of satisfaction when she did the runework. It was the most tedious part of rituals and complex spell crafting, but she loved it the most. Something other ponies never shared.

Even now she could recall an amusing memory as she worked her craft.

She was participating in her fifth class on spell-casting and the harsh teacher at the time was drilling in the idea of spell circle drawing and devising. Everypony was drawing a spell to create a puddle of water, but most of the other colts and fillies were groaning with impatience. As Twilight remembered, they all wanted to get to doing big, flashy spells to immediately become great magicians like Starswirl the Bearded and O'Connor the Thoughtful. While the teacher regularly passed by the others, she forgot to check on Twilight herself, leaving the young unicorn to become engrossed in her drawing and go from the canvas they had all been given to transcribing it on the floor and expanding it further. Then Celestia arrived.

"How are the students doing?" Celestia had asked.

"They are doing great, your highness," Twilight's teacher said with a bow. "Although their grumbling is somewhat of an irritant."

Celestia shared a warm smile and a look of understanding. "Well, they are young and very impatient. They will grow it of it, I am sure."

The teacher sighed and frowned. "I'm sure, but you didn't come here just to look at them, did you?" She looked around and shook her head. "And they're not grumbling anymore. Of course. Twilight!" the teacher called out.

"Yes?" a tiny voice responded.

"Wh-Twilight? Where are you?" The teacher walked around, looking for the tiny pony. "You were so quiet I forgot you were even in my cl--What are you doing?!" she bellowed in horror.

The simple bigram ritual had turned into an elaborate drawing covering the floor where Twilight was sitting and stretched across to most of the lower walls.

Twilight raised the charcoal with her hoof and giggled mischievously. "I made it bigger," she said with a low tone of voice. "But it's also better! Look!"

"Twilight, don't!" Celestia cried out.

Canterlot shook from the explosion that blew out the windows of the classroom, covering everything in soot.

The mare laughed at the memory. She learned that day that just because she made something bigger didn't mean it was better. In fact, it could make it worse. It took days to get the ashes of Twilight's miscast out of the classroom, let alone replace the windows.

"Alright, Spike!" Twilight clapped her hooves. "I'm ready to cast the spell. Stay away from the runes, please and don't worry if anything weird happens, alright? I know you're new to all this but you don't need to worry."

The unicorn started her casting, causing the traces of charcoal to immediately start glowing blue. Various colors flowed through the traces of coal and would change rapidly and quickly with every new set of instructions the magic had to follow.

The young mare almost instantly found herself being pinched by two, sharp objects in her chest and back. That wasn't something that was supposed to happen. Daring to open her eyes, she found herself face-to-face with thousands of vertical rectangles of orange, red, and yellow stretching, squeezing, then disappearing, only for more to reappear in the opposite way. Several black rectangles that followed the same pattern ran from the colored shape to Twilight's body, somehow holding her in place despite disappearing and reappearing. As her eyes adjust, Twilight realized that this was a singular entity. The mare had somehow found herself in some bizarre place of darkness where purple and black clouds roiled around in a spiral far above. The entity took up too much of her sight to allow the unicorn to make anything else out.

Twilight kept as calm as she could manage and tried her best to understand whatever this creature was. With her mind relatively appeased, she could somehow vaguely understand the intentions of this strange thing.

"I'm trying to bring back my teacher!" Twilight shouted. Her voice was almost drowned out by nothing, like she was yelling in a dream. "I'm only using this place to make teleporters for Spike and I! I mean no disrespect or enmity towards you," she assured it. The rectangles shifted to Twilight's left and somehow 'lowered'. Twilight could see a broken reflection of Celestia in the colored shapes. "Y-yes! That's..." She could hear the yelling of angry ponies filling her ears. The cries of despair of Celestia as she tried to appease the mob. "They...They took her from me..." Twilight scowled and held back her tears. "I'm working to bring her back." She felt the intention of the entity. It could bring Celestia back. Somehow. Twilight could see Celestia alive and well, but the reflection she was given... "N-no! That's...she doesn't look right!"

The image of the living Celestia became more intense, forcing itself into the mare's mind. She kept trying to focus on the medallion as her rite was still going, but this entity seemed to be tearing Twilight's mind open and peering at the exposed fruit inside. Another group of black rectangles moved in front of Twilight, covering her view, then she 'woke up', so to speak.

She was drenched in sweat and the building seemed to have some form of ethereal glow around it, like it was overlapping with another from a different plane. A glowing echo of itself wobbling around. Twilight realized that none of the reagents had been consumed in the ritual, but the teleportation medallions had completed all the same. Metal hexagons with pieces of Twilight's magic and Spike's presence burnt into the surface.

Panting from exhaustion, Twilight picked the medallions up and then looked at the wall where she always felt a strange presence. Three rectangles had come into view, but badly faded. What had happened?

Comments

[DarkSnowGaming]

Wait, there's a giant city bigger than most cities on the entire planet inside a mountain? From what seems to be hundreds of not thousands of years ago?

First off, how is that even possible?
Second off, how is something that big and massive easily forgotten about?
And third off, how in the world did nobody even find it until Twilight found it.

This is weird.

Panting from exhaustion, Twilight picked the medallions up then looked at the wall where she always felt a strange presence. Three rectangles had come into view, but badly faded. What had happened?

I'm trying to to figure that out myself, I'm a little confused.

So far what I'm understanding (or think I'm understanding) is Twilight asked some kind of entity to locate and find or bring back Celestia using an amulet? Or medallion? And I'm guessing something went wrong and she failed?

[Lost_Data]

So, I'm guessing that presence is either Celestia, or a very malevolent presence which is why the city is forgotten/left-alone. Either way, Twilight's in for a bad time, just as whomever the next poor sod that finds this city next.

[The Psychopath]

11830520
No. Just bigger than Manehatten, and she didn't ask the entity anything. That was just an accident that she got its attention.

[DarkSnowGaming]

11830866
Oh...well.

I don't know how to reply to this.

[The Psychopath]

11830868
Big world. Bigger breaches in reality :>

[Dormi_san]

11830520
Wow....without realizing it Twilight is gathering a small army in that ancient city, it is obvious that at some point in history those "failures" could be useful for her.

First of all, the cave systems can be huge and she takes into account that in this AU there are magical species with abilities that we don't know about.
Secondly, it is very possible since we as humans are a living example of that, even today we discover remains of civilizations that we did not even know existed (the best example that comes to mind right now is the Moais).
And last but not least, keep in mind that in this AU we do not know how technologically advanced the ponies are, I doubt that they have explored "all" the territory of the continent or at least have mapped it.

Applause to the author of this story for all the background he is giving to the magic since it is very well developed.

[The Psychopath]

11830897
Moai?