Pursuit
Twilight's whole body ached. She hadn't pushed herself to that extent for quite a long time. Fleeing from Canterlot was just as grueling a task. As she bounced in Spike's arms while directing him, she recalled that horrible year when she ran away from those who took her teacher from her, stumbling around the land and seeing the crazed gazes of the ponies all around her. Those in Canterlot proper were the worst of the lot. Slavering, blood-hungry brutes and barbarians who jumped at the slightest bit of discomfort, blaming all their problems on others rather than trying to find the source or asking for help. If it wasn't for the griffins visiting the city then it's possible Twilight wouldn't have been able to get out with all the inhabitants and guards wandering around the streets every day.
They, minotaurs, and Saddle Arabians all managed to shuffle Twilight through various parts of the city until she managed to smuggle herself out of Canterlot proper. Not with the help of her own. Traitors. The mare thought she could live in small villages, expecting them to be remote enough, but the inhabitants always ended up recognizing her or some errant guard or soldier was back from a long deployment to the corners of Equestria and recognized Twilight immediately, forcing her to galop further and further. She was going southeast to the sea, hoping to take a boat and go to the continent east of Equestria, but a thought had crossed her mind: No pony ever really talked about the northern regions of Equestria itself. The areas bordering what used to be a frozen wasteland before the Crystal Empire simply 'apparated' back into existence.
It was during these many trips that Twilight eventually learned how to survive on her own, but not without many setbacks. Learning to build your own shelter and checking for dangers at night. Food was determined by imitating other mammals and seeing what they ate, and she already knew how to boil water. Almost a year into her disappearance from Canterlot, Twilight had, essentially, become a savage mare: Extremely dirty with her mane and tail in horrific knots. The only thing that kept her sanity intact was the strand of Celestia's mane that Twilight kept tied and hidden in her own. It was always clean and straight compared to her own, but she was always worried she would lose it.
During her travels north, the mare was fumbling through the forest, looking for some fruits she could eat or herbs to harvest to boil herself some salves. That's when she came upon the cave and decided to take shelter for the night. It was the entrance of her new home. Well-hidden, covered, and a veritable maze inside. It was all she could ever hope for. Even better were the guards and soldiers hunting for her had thinned out when going to the northern mountain ranges until they vanished entirely and only the local patrols that didn't know nor care about Central Equestria's problems were left.
The mare pursed her lips. She was probably going to attract their attention again if those two ponies blabbed about her to the guards.
"Why didn't you kill them all?" a voice asked Twilight. "Now they'll know you're still around and come chasing after you again."
"They won't find me again. Not this time. Not after everything I've worked hard for," Twilight stated.
"All it takes is one misstep and you're through. All those years of research, all those notes. You can't trust the ponies in Flarolina. They're all part of the 'under hive'. They're all out for themselves."
"I know!" Twilight thought. "But they're the only way I'll find Celestia and finish my research."
As the trip went on, the natural disasters seemed to multiply. Mudslides blocked a quicker way to the desert, adding a few hours of travel time, and a terrible storm akin to a typhoon forced Twilight and Spike to dig a shelter at the base of some trees and hide there for a whole day. It was a miracle that the storm hadn't brought in flood waters again, or Twilight would have been forced to use the medallion and flee to her home empty-hoofed. It reminded her so much of the early days of her initial flight, but she had grown accustomed to the strain of hunger and the sponginess that thirst brought to her mouth.
Some strange winged monstrosities also swooped down to 'yoink' Twilight from the ground the closer she got to the desert, but thanks to the presence of Spike, the avian monstrosities found themselves snatched from the air and their spindly necks broken in barely a few seconds of action. Twilight was becoming more and more grateful for bringing Spike to 'life'. Without him, she would have been caught unawares multiple times and captured, or worse.
Then finally, after nine days of travel, the humid air started to dry out and heat up intensely. Plants became sparser as the climate became arid, dotting the landscape with blackened bushes breaking under the lightest of breezes and sand fighting against stubborn grass to claim as much land as they could. Twilight gulped when she saw the desert stretching out far before her. She had Spike show her the water rations and wiped her forehead. She had enough to last a few days in the desert if she hurried up and rationed herself. Her fur insulated her skin somewhat, protecting her from the sunlight and mostly keeping her safe from the chance of overheating and dying there. Even Spike wouldn't be able to save her then, and he would disappear with her.
It was a terrifying thought, but Twilight had more and more terrifying thoughts lately and they did nothing but increase in volume, so, once more, she steeled herself and got ready to step into the boundaries of something she didn't know and didn't want to. Because of Spike's escapades, the two had found themselves off-track by a few hours of travel per the unicorn's assumption. She looked around, trying to find some potentially recognizable landmarks and be able to direct herself to the Golden Pins. The mare facehoofed. The pins were an hour of walking from where she stood on the left, and they were far bigger than she had anticipated. Gigantic crystalline spikes jutted out from the ground and the desert sands, reflecting golden sunlight in every direction and making their 'branches' sparkle from the various angles their surfaces sported.
It was a bizarrety of nature that Twilight couldn't even understand. Some kind of oddity unique to Equestria and which acted as its own sort of biome. The temperature remained consistently high, and the unicorn almost felt like she was cooking, but just seeing these 'trees' growing high in the air tickled her researcher's soul fiercely. The surface of the crystal trees was lukewarm at best, contrasting the environment they sat in and the sunlight above. The mare took a swig of water from her supplies when she spotted several tiny, insect-like creatures wearing shells seemingly made of the same crystalline substance as the rest of the trees. Six legs, disc-like bodies, and very long mandibles that would likely hurt if they pinched you, but these creatures fled on Twilight's approach. A tripodal creature, as big as a fox, peered around a corner to look at Twilight with its singular eye possessing three golden yellow pupils that seemed to rotate and lock in place at regular intervals the longer Twilight looked at it. It was carrying something in its mouth that dripped with a yellow liquid that ran down its chin. Its legs were thin spikes that it used to quickly break apart the ground and dive into the free sand with its catch, showing Twilight that its crystal body vibrated rapidly, allowing the strange creature to swim through the sand and redirect itself.
It was like Twilight was visiting a zoo for the first time in her life again, and everything in the 'woods' was so fascinating to her. Well, it was fascinating until she bumped into and tripped over something. Spike, increasingly on alert the longer they stayed here, put Twilight back onto her hooves and continued to scan the area. The mare uncovered a desiccated pony corpse that had been sitting there for who knew how many years. The fur had disappeared, leaving behind a prune-like body with not even the eyes left. It was like the pony's own skin had strangled them to death with how tight it had become.
The mare immediately got to work working on the corpse and taking as many notes as she could, but she found herself having to spit into the ink to get it humid again. The subsequent notes quickly dried in the hot sun intensified by the trees, but the mare was already garnering a ton of new information she absolutely needed. Twilight had already amassed a large stack of forty-nine pages in small font. All of a sudden, all her concerns had gone away and only the mare's research mattered.
Focusing on the true reason for the experimentation, Twilight poured her magic into the body to see how it would react to being brought back to life. At first, the corpse didn't move, but something similar occurred with the unicorn's first zombie a few years ago. Her ears perked up when she heard a nasty cracking sound, endemic to something like a thin film of melted sugar or grease being moved from a surface. Twilight watched as the corpse started to shift and move around, revealing the dried, slightly reddish muscle underneath. Its movements were stiff, like it was fighting against its own body to get its articulations to animate, but with every success came a nasty shredding noise and bone popping from the years of gas build-up finally being released.
Its lips, long since turned to dust, snapped off to reveal retracted gums just barely holding onto sharpened teeth eroded by sand and wind. A lot of them were missing, but it was still an unnerving sight for Twilight to handle. Still, she quickly jotted down everything she could about how this undead was rising from its long slumber. All the data she was getting was pure gold! It reminded her of old tales of mummies, but what the unicorn considered to be more 'realistic'. It was somehow able to navigate despite lacking any form of eyes and slowly shuffled towards Twilight, its entire skeleton snapping and cracking the whole time. Once it was a few hoof steps from its new master, it looked to its right and shuffled away. It was easily more mobile and capable than regular zombies, but its flesh was very badly damaged.
Twilight dry-heaved when she thought of her precious mentor in the same state as this poor pony, but this only served to improve her resolve, and so she continued to wander the 'woods' with Spike, leaving the mummy to wander around and eventually be destroyed by whatever large creatures lived here. Unfortunately, with the amount of sand that kept blowing in and what already existed, Twilight was only able to find three more bodies. The sun was also starting to set, and the air was getting unusually chilly as a result. There was no way to pitch a tent, the crystals weren't trees, so the mare wasn't certain that she could place a tree house without them collapsing under all the weight, and there were no stone outcrops sticking out from anywhere.
The unicorn dragged a hoof across her face. She was going to have to dig again. If anything went wrong, she could always use her medallion, but she would hate to have to make the trip back again. Twilight surrounded herself and Spike with several barriers of protection that would grant her a bubble of air and protect her eyes and ears from sudden pressure changes or sand getting in them and went to work. The sand was surprisingly compact thanks to the 'roots' of the trees that seemed to go down deeper and deeper than Twilight initially thought. Inspired, the mare kept going until she found herself in a sand cavern created by the fake trees above. Sand ran down everywhere in rivers and streams along the 'walls' and pockets surrounding the single piece of solid, albeit pockmarked, ground. The unicorn and Spike had managed to dig through one of the few bits of wall that weren't covered by a seemingly infinite flow of sand, and to Twilight's morbid delight, she could see many mummified remains sticking out of the walls and flowing down with the sands, be they pony or other. What she hadn't noticed was an enormous, sapphire-blue eye looking at her from the walls.
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Wow....I knew Twilight had a bad time, but not that bad. The best comparison I can think of is that Celestia was Marie Antoinette and the inhabitants of Canterlot were the French, the rest is left to the imagination.
Poor Twilight, if it weren't for the unexpected allies (griffons, minotaurs, and Saddle Arabians) she would already be dead, which suggests that it was not a simple revolt, it was a total uprising from simple citizens to members of the royal guard. When the "mafia" rises there are only two options: you are with them or against them, and if you are against them it does not matter if you are an innocent civilian, your destiny is death.
Obviously at the time it happened, all of Cadence and Shining Armor were outside of Canterlot because at no point is it mentioned that anyone has interacted with Twilight since that moment, and I don't know if that voice in her head is simple imagination, bipolarity, paranoid psychosis, effects secondary to necromancy or some nightmare parasite but I'm sure that "it" will use Twilight's fury as fuel for her to break her ideals.....she saw her teacher die decapitated and how she was persecuted to have the same end, she definitely has depressed anger and at some point she will explode.
I tried looking up MLP characters with sapphire eyes but I couldn't find any, or atleast any that would live underground.
11832365
I'm gonna guess either imagination (insanity), a Nightmare Parasite, or because she uses necromancy which I believe is dark magic which isn't that what made Sombra the way that he was? I do wonder what being the element of magic means for Twilight though because "magic" isn't exactly specific, it could be any type of magic, maybe it's impossible for Twilight to go power hungry but who knows.
11832809
Oh, there you are. You scared me. Thought you vanished.
11832940
Sorry, when I got notified a new chapter appeared I was tired so I was already starting to go to sleep so I decided to wait till I woke up, I was already awake for about 18 hours at the time.
And plus even if I did read the chapter I would be to tired to even type down my theories!
11833017
Sleeping is like sanity: Better in teeny doses every forty-eight hours
11833131
I did that once, in fact one time I stayed up over 100 hours, probably, the longer you stay awake the harder it is to tell time and remember the last time you checked the time along with remembering what the time was when the last time you checked the time.