Naborale

by CTVulpin

Chapter 7

Motivaria

I should not have been surprised that a world that contains the structures I wrote into the Motivaria book would be inhabited. There were two black and white ursine creatures on the island when I first arrived, along with the sprawling complex I expected. The creatures were intelligent and once we learned to communicate they informed me that they did not actually live on the island, but were merely caretakers of the complex. They performed their task out of duty to an eccentric and recently deceased uncle who had built the entire complex on what they considered a whim.

After I proved myself capable of maintaining the rails and the core mechanism that powers the island’s different stations, the natives gladly relinquished the responsibility for the upkeep and departed. I have not seen them since, but I assume they are happy pursuing their own lives. It is a shame they did not appreciate the beauty of Motivaria; it is both aesthetically pleasing and a magical-mechanical wonder. Its natural resources are also interesting, particularly the crystals.

---

Twilight and Nyx found themselves on a small hexagonal platform directly underneath a glowing lantern hanging from a red roof supported by red wood columns at each corner. Most of the floor dipped down into a rounded groove. Directly ahead of the pair, the groove met a pair of thick metal rails forming a track leading up to the top of a large hexagonal building with a sloped roof and eaves that swept up at the corners. There were some short, cupped platforms spanning the track, but the gaps between them were too large to jump across. Behind the ponies, the track continued, curving to the right before coming back around far out to sea before stopping in front of a set of three pillars and a covered platform. To the right was a long rope ladder leading down to a wooden walkway just above the water and which meandered through several thick columns of dark, hexagonal stone. To the left was a wood bridge leading to a platform similar to the one they stood on, and from there the path seemed to lead into a cliff formed of more black hexagon columns.

Nyx didn’t want to deal with climbing the ladder, so she crossed the bridge. On the second platform she found a wooden shelf with an I‘strukun book sitting on it. “Oh look, I found the exit,” Nyx said in mock excitement, but when she turned to see Twilight’s reaction she saw the lavender unicorn was still over on the original platform, looking enraptured by the central building. “Oi!” Nyx shouted, “you coming or not?”

Twilight walked over to Nyx quickly, but kept stealing glances at the building. “Sorry Nyx,” she said, “but the architecture of this place is reminding me of something and I can’t quite place it.”

“Well standing around here trying to figure it out’s not going to accomplish anything,” Nyx chided.

“You’re right,” Twilight said, “sorry.”

Another wooden bridge led to a tall opening the cliff, and a lantern was held suspended in the middle of wooden frame by four chains in the upper half of the opening. Just inside was one stone column that had been carved out to hold a glowing crystal. A chain hung guarding a sudden drop-off in the floor to the left of the lantern, while on the right side there was a natural staircase leading down. Because the entire natural landmass of the world seemed to be composed of the regularly-sized stone columns, the passageway at the bottom of the stairs meandered a little bit, lit frequently by more crystal lanterns carved into the walls. Thick patches of moss and the occasional glowing green mushroom grew out from between the stones, but Twilight and Nyx found their footing to be easy and sure.

A few meters down the tunnel there was a gap in the left wall that revealed that Twilight and Nyx were only a short distance above the sea, and little green plants poked out of the water near the stones. “You know,” Twilight said, stopping at the gap and looking out over the water, “I’ve noticed that Star Swirl has a tendency to link to worlds without very strong tides. Do you know why that is, Nyx?”

“Beats me,” Nyx said with a shrug. “I guess it’s for the same reason he tends to get small, isolated islands. Father Writes very detailed Linking Books; he has to note down the precise location of every single tree and important rock.”

“Oh, I know,” Twilight chuckled, as she started walking again, “I read most of Aitran before discovering what the book really was.”

“I think I want to be more like Mom,” Nyx said. “She hasn’t Written nearly as much as Father, and she’s less detailed, but she’s found some truly amazing worlds.”

A little farther down the passageway, the path forked. A wood walkway led outside and around the side of the cliff, and little crystals in paper lanterns floated in the water near the walkway. To the right, the path continued as a tunnel, and there was an elevator set into a small alcove on the left. Nyx decided to go left.

The walkways led to a large shelf of amorphous light brown rock pocked with pools of green water. Up against the far black stone cliff was a large wooden frame supporting a metal half-tube that connected two segments of rail track that wound around and through the cliff. The tube seemed to be balancing on an axel attached to a large gear, a metal basket hung off the right end, and a metal rod came down from the left end and into the top of building tucked away at the far corner of the shelf. The walkway passed through a cross-shaped platform with a podium facing the balance, and then continued on around the edge of the rock shelf to the small building.

“Looks to me like we’ve found our first challenge,” Twilight said.

“Looks like,” Nyx agreed, going to the podium and rearing up to take a look at it. There was a large lever next to the podium, and the podium itself had three black horizontal switches on the left and a vertically-moving lever on the right. The switches were labeled with a line with a single dot underneath on the left, the middle, and the right respectively. Nyx pulled the large lever first, and the platform rose several feet off the ground. Twilight, still down on the ground, looked up at Nyx, and then turned to watch the balance as the filly started testing the controls.

Nyx quickly figured out that only one of the three switches could be flipped at a time, because they caused the gear to roll to different positions beneath the half-tube. She put the gear back in the center position before trying the lever on the right. When she pulled it, something that looked like the top of the central building floated up into the air, created a large white ball, and then dropped back down behind the cliffs. The ball dropped as well, and a couple seconds later it came rolling along the track to the right of the balance. When it entered Nyx’s line of sight the first time, it seemed to dislodge a smaller wooden ball which rolled along its own track that ended at the basket, which caused the balance to tilt to the right. When the large crystal ball came back around a split second later, it rolled right off its track and hit the tilted half-tube, shattering into a million pieces. A mechanism leveled the balance, and a hammer kicked the small ball out of its basket and all the way back to its starting place.

Nyx frowned slightly in thought, and then brought the platform back down to earth. “We’ll need equal weight on both sides,” she said, walking toward the little building.

“Perhaps we should try to figure out how much the ball weighs first?” Twilight suggested.

“Right, good idea,” Nyx said, turning around. “Any ideas on how we’re gonna do that?”

“That elevator seems close enough to get us up to the ball,” Twilight answered. She led the way to the elevator, and then took Nyx onto her back when it proved too small for them both to fit normally. After riding it up, the ponies found themselves on a ledge right next to the balance. The wooden ball was sitting at the top of its track several feet away, and Twilight and Nyx had to squint to get a good look at it. The ball appeared to be only three-quarters wood; the remainder was a wedge of translucent white crystal.

“Well that’s great,” Nyx drawled.

“Let’s head back down and look at what’s on the other end before complaining,” Twilight said.

The structure underneath the far end of the balance turned out to be small wood hut with a sliding door made of paper stretched across a wood frame. Inside was a single room. The rod that came down through the ceiling from the balance ended in a half-sphere of wood, flat-side up, and shelves on two of the walls held black metal, wood, and crystal pieces that could obviously be used to complete the sphere. The floor under the hanging ball was littered with fragments of metal and broken crystal. After a moment of looking around, Nyx’s eyes lit up and she went over to the shelves and tried to lift some the ball pieces in her magic. She was able to move the wood chunks with little difficulty, while the crystal required some visible effort on her part and the metal chunk hardly budged. After trying each type, Nyx sat and thought for a bit, and then nodded with a smug smile. “Margent left us a clue to this in the central tower,” she declared.

“What do you mean?” Twilight asked.

“There were two balances in the lower room,” Nyx explained, “that demonstrated how heavy the wood, crystal, and metal are relative to each other: the crystal is four times as heavy as this wood, and the metal is four times heavier than crystal.” Twilight tried to make a common, but Nyx pressed on, having warmed quickly to the puzzle. “The ball that goes onto the other end is one-quarter crystal. It takes four of these pieces to make half a ball, so one ball is eight pieces big. Wood is the lightest material, so one piece weighs one unit. Crystal is four wood per piece, and metal is… sixteen wood. The other ball weighs…”

“Fourteen units,” Twilight answered.

“Yes,” Nyx said slowly, checking the math in her head. “So we just need to match that over here. Half the ball’s made of wood, so that’s four units we can’t change. We’ll have to add ten weight to the top.”

“That comes to two crystal and two wood then,” Twilight said, looking at the shelves, “and it looks like there’s just enough to do that.” Nyx giggled in glee as she and Twilight worked together to put the ball together and they both ran out to the controls. Twilight stayed down on the ground again as Nyx rode the platform up, double-checked the position of the fulcrum, and then pulled the lever. A new crystal boulder was created and sent rolling down the track. Nyx’s excited grin quickly changed to slack-jawed horror when the small ball reached the basket and the balance suddenly tipped to the left presenting the right end of the half-tube for the big crystal to hit and shatter against. By the time the mechanisms reset and allowed Nyx to lower the control platform, all she could manage was to stare at Twilight and point at the balance in frustration.

Twilight took the failure in far better stride. “We obviously overestimated the weight of the free ball,” she said. “Take a deep breath Nyx; I’ll figure this out.” She teleported up to the ledge, levitated the ball out of its track, looked it over, and then put it back and teleported back to Nyx. “That ball is only one-eighth crystal,” she said, heading back to the hut, “which means it weighs eleven units, not fourteen.”

“Hold on,” Nyx said, running to catch up, “can we even match that? We’d need three wood and one crystal segment, but there are only two of each type in the hut, aren’t there?” The pair entered the hut and Nyx counted the ball sections. “Yeah, only two wood,” she said. “This is impossible!”

“Not if we move the fulcrum,” Twilight said as she took apart the upper half of the weight and put the sections back on the shelves. “If the fulcrum is in the exact middle, the weights on both ends would have to be equal, but when the fulcrum moves to the left or right, one side of the balance becomes twice as long as the other. In that configuration, the short end would need twice as much weight to balance the long end.” She looked at Nyx and asked, “So, which way do you move the fulcrum and how heavy do we make this end?”

“Um,” Nyx said, thinking. Twilight offered her a piece of paper and a pencil, but the filly waved them off and traced on the ground with her hoof as she calculated. “Assuming you’re right about the weight shift,” she said at last, “this end needs to be twenty-two units. Can we do that?” She looked at the shelves, thought some more and said, “One metal segment and the two wood along with the base four would make twenty-two, but that only uses three pieces.”

“I don’t see anything that says this weight needs to be a complete sphere,” Twilight pointed out.

“Ok, let’s try it then,” Nyx said. She levitated the wood pieces back on the ball while Twilight did the heavy lifting with the metal piece. They then went back outside and Nyx turned the control platform on. She moved the fulcrum to the left, pulled the lever, and watched with bated breath as the top of the central building rose into view and dropped another crystal ball. The big crystal rolled down the approach track, sending the little weight into motion. The weight landed in the basket, and the balance tube stayed level as the big crystal rolled through it and around the end of the cliff, out of sight. “Yes!” Nyx exulted.

Something clicked and the control platform came down on its own. When it touched the ground, two reflective panels rose up from either side of the console and met above it. An image appeared in the metal, showing the pillars out in the water near the arrival point from I’strukun. A platform rose up out of the water between the first and second set of pillars, paused for a second, and then dropped back into the sea. The panels then folded back into their supports, which then closed down over the controls. The lid was marked with a pattern of hexagons. Nyx looked at Twilight, and the older unicorn looked back at her expectantly. “Solving this puzzle gives us a clue how to raise part of a bridge to where we’ll find the symbol?” Nyx guessed.

“That sounds reasonable,” Twilight said, levitating notepaper and her pencil out. She copied down the hexagon pattern and said, “I’m sure we’ll see more of these.”

The unicorns left the area and proceeded down the tunnel past the elevator. After a few feet, they reached a stretch where blue crystals growing out of the wall provided illumination. Beyond that stretch there was a ladder carved into the rock on the right leading up into what looked like another tunnel, while directly ahead the passage opened onto a small inlet of water with a walkway built along the right-side wall, beyond which a path of stepping stones curved to the right under broken stone arches. The ladder was too narrow and vertical for Twilight to comfortably climb, but with her help Nyx was able to make it up. Twilight waited as the filly explored, and in surprisingly short order Nyx poked her head into view and levitated some journal pages down. “There’s a little bit of the rail tracks with a walkway built underneath,” Nyx reported, “and it leads to the controls for another puzzle. I’ll work on it while you read these pages.”

“Alright,” Twilight said. As Nyx disappeared from view, Twilight opened Margent’s journal and tried to figure out where the new pages fit in.

Focus, Margent. You must not let the fog come and swallow you. There are long spells, I think. Days. Maybe months at a time when I can't remember what I've done. The fog rolls so thick around me, even if I hold my hoof in front of my eyes I barely see it. I strain and strain and strain but nothing sticks. I think

I think his students came to visit us twice—

On Naborale.

The first time, Star Swirl asked me to meet them. He told me they would come through the book. He says, they will not understand how your words fit together, but they will use them to open the shield. Naborale, he says, is where their lessons come together. Naborale is the last lesson they must learn.

I remember. Staid was carving a Spirit Mask into the Tree the day the colts arrive. He tugs my sleeve to get my attention. Points at a glide ship in the sky. I am shocked by how young the boys appear. They as strange as their teacher. One with wings like a bird. One has no wings at all. Yet they are different from the Star Swirly in more than appearance. They're more impatient. And they are angry not to be treated like stallions.

I take them to our home. I tell them I will teach them how to care for it. I say, together we will encourage the Lattice Tree to grow tall. They ask me why they have to work so hard. They tell me—

No, Margent!!! That was later. That was after Star Swirl took them away. You know this, because when you see them saying these things they are older. Their faces have become angled and hard. They have grown up, into stallions. And something dark is in their eyes. They tell you they've come back to fix Naborale.

Cirrus. And. Archeon.

The walls run red with steam and strangling branches. I see their bloated faces laughing at everything. I remember how they lied. I remember what they did.

They brought me here to die

I followed them

The Lattice Roots are black from too much overgrowth. Puffer spores float up in the hot steam and burst. No one was there to guide the spores to the branches. No one was waiting to perform the ritual Weaves. The fighting had torn my people apart.

They didn't care.

They didn't care.

The Star Swirlies wanted Naborale to die.

“Poor Margent,” Twilight said, wiping tears from her eyes.

“Hey Twilight!” Nyx called down, but then hesitated when Twilight looked up at her with big watery eyes. “What’s wrong?” Nyx asked.

“Nothing,” Twilight said. “Just… Margent wrote something about how Cirrus and Archeon destroyed her home. How’s the puzzle going?”

“I think I need help,” the filly replied. “This one’s supposed to send one of the big balls through a looping section of track and through five big rings, but the ball disintegrates when it reaches the first ring. The controls are just a lever that kicks a ball up into a bunch of odd-shaped gears that move the ball over a set of buttons.”

“Okay,” Twilight said.

“It looks like we could get onto the loops,” Nyx continued, “so I think whatever needs to be changed has to be done out there. You go check it out and I’ll stay here at the controls. Let me know when you figure it out.”

“Shouldn’t you be the one to figure it out?” Twilight asked.

“I think I understand how it’s supposed to…” Nyx paused and glanced behind her. “Wait, I just thought of something. Gimme some paper.” Twilight floated a piece of paper and the pencil up to Nyx and she vanished back into the tunnel. When she returned, she gave the paper back to Twilight and said, “Here’s a sketch of the gears and the direction the ball moves through them. I don’t think their odd shapes are a coincidence.” Twilight looked at the sketch and saw that aside from the gear in the center of the picture, all of them had at least one outward bulge instead of round concave spoke-gaps for moving the ball. An arrow pointed in on the left side of the gears and another pointed down from the bottom, and Nyx had also noted the locations of the buttons with numbers that described a clockwise motion through the gears.

“Thanks Nyx,” Twilight said, putting the sketch away. She then pulled out the sketch of the hexagon pattern from the balance puzzle and floated it up to the filly. “If you get a different pattern after we’ve solved this, copy it down,” she instructed, and then walked out toward the stepping stones. She came to a sudden stop halfway along the little bridge in the walled inlet, because on the opposite wall was a mural depicting Margent standing in front of a withered and burning tree between two groups of violent-looking bat-winged ponies, while giant caricatures of Cirrus and Archeon’s faces with tiny black eyes laughed in the background. The image was a chilling echo of the imagery in the journal entry Twilight had just read, and the unicorn wondered if the pages had been scattered from the journal deliberately.

Walking out of the inlet, Twilight discovered that the stepping stone path brought her quite close to the central building and she was required to climb some rocks to get up onto the rail track that sloped down the side of the building and led to the cloverleaf loops. After passing through the six-way intersection, over which a peaked roof had been built, the track curved through one of the large rings and sloped down to pass through the hub on a lower level before coming back up for another pass. As Twilight approached the first ring, she heard a low buzz pulse in a short rhythmic pattern and quickly realized that the ring itself was making the sound. The sound was making the air inside the ring quiver visibly. There was a small platform just off the track next to the main support for the ring, and on the support was a simple dial made of a dark metal arrow on top of six lighter metal plates. Five of the plates were engraved with shapes that matched the gears in the control box.

“Clever thinking Nyx,” Twilight said to herself as she pulled out the filly’s sketch. She moved the dial to the section matching the first gear, and the pulse in the ring changed its rhythm. “Now how does that help?” Twilight wondered. “These rings seem designed to shatter the crystal balls with sound, so why does the frequency matter?” Looking around, she noticed that the sonic rings were topped with a glowing crystal each. She thought back to Nyx’s description of the control platform. “Five buttons, each paired to one of the gears… Ah! Those buttons must turn off the sound associated with the corresponding gear. This is just a matter of making the sounds of the rings line up with the order of the gears. In that case…” She proceeded to follow the track, wincing as she ran through the ring and the sound briefly assaulted her ears at full force. She paused in the lower intersection to admire how it was perfectly shaped to always direct the ball on a slight curve onto the next loop. It took only a couple minutes to trot through the entire cloverleaf and change each sonic ring to the proper setting. Feeling accomplished, she ran back to the ladder and called up to Nyx, “Go ahead, everything’s ready.”

“Thanks,” Nyx shouted back. Twilight trotted back out into the open air where she could watch the action. Nyx and the control platform were floating above a short cliff near the building, apparently being held up by magic crystals on the underside of the platform. Nyx pulled a lever, and the top of the building rose up and dropped a ball onto the track. Once it rolled past, Twilight climbed up onto the track and watched the ball go around. With the same precise split-second timing that allowed the counterweight of the balance puzzle to beat the crystal, the sonic rings all switched off just before the crystal ball reached them and stayed off just long enough for the ball to pass through. After the ball passed through all the rings and disappeared through a hatch in the side of the central building, Twilight went back to the ladder to help Nyx down.

“Two out of three done,” Nyx declared as Twilight levitated her down to the ground. She gave the hexagon sketch page back to Twilight with a new pattern drawn on it and labeled with a one. The pattern from the balance puzzle now bore a two next to it.

“Great,” Twilight said, “let’s get going then.”

Twilight led Nyx down the path, stopping just outside the inlet when Nyx noticed the mural. “This is similar to the painting I found in Wahteg,” Nyx said after studying the mural. “Margent’s really trying to play up the horror, isn’t she?”

“She lost her home and way of life to Cirrus and Archeon,” Twilight said. “That kind of loss does bad things to a pony’s mind.”

“You actually feel bad for her, don’t you?” Nyx accused.

Twilight looked over her shoulder at the dark filly. “Don’t you?” she asked.

“Maybe a little,” Nyx grumbled. “But, she kidnapped your dragon and stole Father’s Materan book! Aren’t you upset about that?”

Twilight paused at the bottom of the climb up to the cloverleaf track. She turned around and put a hoof under Nyx’s chin. “Of course I’m upset, Nyx” she said. “I’m scared to my core for Spike’s safety, but I don’t hate Margent because of that. She’s not like Cirrus, Archeon, or Aldro, putting me through this out of spite or greed. Margent’s a victim acting out of grief. When we finally catch up with her, I’m going to try to talk her down and offer her a shoulder to cry on.” Twilight’s face suddenly hardened. “If I find out she’s hurt Spike in any way, though, I’ll slap her around a bit first.” She lowered her hoof, climbed up onto the track, and offered a hoof down to Nyx. “Come on.”

The walkable area of the tracks ended a little beyond the final ring in the cloverleaf, right next to a path of hexagonal stones with bowl-shaped tops that rose above a small field of them that were just above the surface of the sea and filled with water. The path led to a shore that went between a long cliff on the left and the central building on the right. A leaning structure involving arced rails and what looked like large turntables with cups on the edge was just visible beyond the near end of the cliff. “There’s puzzle number three,” Nyx said, “now how do we get to it?”

The answer proved to be very simple: about halfway along the cliff there was a wooden gate held closed with a very simple latch. It opened directly onto a control panel facing the turntable structure. The controls consisted of two dials colored in alternating wedges of blue and white, with a hole in five of the six wedges. Below the dials was a cubby containing three red pins and a sliding lever. One of the holes in the left dial was filled with a pin held in place by a bit of metal. The turntables out on the structure alternated having an open ring and a round metal basket at the end of their six metal spokes. A little bit of track could be seen leading in from below and stopping just under an open ring on the right side, and another track starting under a different ring on the right led off and out of sight. Nyx took it all in and then pulled the platform activation lever. Twilight, finding herself stuck on the back end of the rising platform, sat back and observed.

Nyx levitated the pins out of their cubby and placed them in the dials at random, two on the left and one on the right. “Let’s see what happens first,” she said, sliding the lever to the right. The lever sprang back and from behind the ponies came the sound of the building’s top rising up and making a crystal ball. The ball rolled down the side of the building, through a hole in the cliff, and then launched off the end of the track, through the empty ring, and onto the closest arc which dropped it into a basket ring of the left turntable. The turntable and the left dial of the controls turned clockwise until one of the holes with a pin reached the bottom. The pin fell through a hole under the dial and rolled back out into the cubby, and out on the turntable the ball had stopped under another of the arcs. Some force launched the ball up into the arc, landing it in a basket on the right turntable. That turntable and its dial rotated counterclockwise until the pin dropped, leaving the ball stranded without a track to take back to the other side. The crystal subsequently shattered and the mechanism returned to the starting position, depositing the last pin back in the cubby along the way.

“Is that all?” Nyx said, disappointed.

“Already figured it out?” Twilight asked.

Nyx rolled her eyes. “The idea’s simple: stop the turntables at the right time so the ball eventually lands on the exit track. I just need to figure out when to stop them.” She stared intently at the dials, imagining the results of stopping them at different points. “Ah,” she said after a moment, “I get why this one spot on the left is plugged up. If the ball stops there, the puzzle’s solved in one step.” Twilight looked over Nyx’s head and saw that she was right. The blocked hole was two positions from the starting point, which would launch the ball into the third track out and right onto the exit track, which started out with an open ring above it.

Nyx plotted for a bit more, and then picked up the pins and placed them with confidence into the dials. She pulled the lever and leaned over the control panel to watch the show. The ball jumped into play, rode the turntable to the farthest arc, was launched over and rode the right turntable all the way back around to the second arc, crossed over, and then the left turntable rotated one position and launched the ball up and through the empty ring positioned over the exit track. Nyx leaned back as the metal panels rose up over the controls, showed the final section of track near the arrival point rise up from the sea, and then folded down to reveal another hex pattern. “Just our luck we did the hardest puzzle first,” Nyx said as the platform came down, “and that one wasn’t even that bad once we figured out how much the counterweight weighed.”

Twilight chuckled as she copied the hex pattern into her notes. “You’re a smart filly,” she said, “and I think this lesson world was designed expressly for analytical thinking we’re both good at.” She turned to leave the area, and noticed some journal pages sitting a rock next to the gate. “Well hello there,” she said, picking them up, “what horror story do you have to tell?”

The memories fly over me too fast. They race around inside my head, filling my heart with despair. And the more I think about how nothing can be done, how no one can be alive outside his shield, the faster the fog rushes in.

I could lose myself in the fog.

When it's thick enough, I can let go and be safe.

I can start to forget

But I mustn’t forget. I must remember every lie they told my people. How they manipulated us all to get what they wanted! They told they had come to fix my world. The books they carried in with them showed other worlds—beautiful places where ponies didn't have to work so hard to survive. They told my people that Star Swirl had written these books. That he had written Naborale, but that he'd made our world unstable. On purpose. They said he wanted to make us slaves to the Tree. Our master wrote this world to teach us, they said. To show his apprentices what a world shouldn't be.

I don't know what to say. I don't know how it could be true. But why would they lie? Why would Star Swirl have lied? The worlds they showed us in those Books

The Elders refuse to believe them. They say we cannot abandon the Tree. For thousands of years we have tended the Lattice roots. Without our traditions, we will die.

I don't want us to die. I don't! But Cirrus and Archeon said

They said they would come back, Margent. Just like Star Swirl once said to you, as well. He said he would come back, but then he didn't. He broke his promise. They killed our home.

But there is nothing you can do about it.

Nyx’s eyes narrowed in anger. “Father has never linked to an unstable world in his life!” she exclaimed. “And he doesn’t make them either.”

“I know Nyx,” Twilight said calmly, “but I don’t know if Cirrus and Archeon ever understood that. Archeon in particular seemed to have trouble believing all these worlds were real; he kept referring to worlds as illusions.”

“Oh yeah,” Nyx said, “he was always like that. It drove Cirrus and me crazy. I was never sure if he did it bug us or not, since it was obvious he felt that Aitran was as real as Equestria.” She sighed. “And it would be fitting that they’d make up whatever lies they could to ruin Margent’s world.” She brushed past Twilight, opened the gate, and walked out onto the path with determination in her steps. Twilight followed as Nyx continued down the path, which followed the cliff to its end and then dropped slightly onto wooden walkways that weaved between tall stone pillars that balanced on narrow crystal points on or slightly above the surface of the water. The walkway ended at the rope ladder on the side of the arrival platform.

After climbing up, Nyx looked out to sea and saw that the track still stopped short of the covered platform. She then turned to the central building and walked as far up the track as she could. Next to the track was a short podium covered in hexagonal buttons, and Nyx could see two more like it farther up the track. “We need those patterns, Twilight,” she said, looking to the lavender unicorn. Twilight pulled out the page with the sketches and held it up for Nyx to consult. Nyx pressed the buttons that matched the first pattern on the page, and two metal plates swung up from under the tracks to bridge the walkway gap. The ponies moved up, repeating the procedure with the other two patterns, and were able to walk right up to a large round door in the side of the building. Twilight braced herself for some heavy lifting as she searched for the door latch and opened it, but once she got the door started swinging up it continued the motion on its own. Twilight and Nyx stepped through the door to find that the building was full of rail tracks winding over and under each other to connect large hatches like the one they’d just come through. High above the tracks, a tiny platform hung from the ceiling. Before anypony could wonder how to get up to the platform, a suspended metal staircase swung over and unfolded in front of them invitingly. Twilight let Nyx climb up first, and at the top they found a metal frame holding four firm cushions in an arrangement that could only charitably be called a chair in front of a viewing device like the one they’d found inside the hydroelectric dam vault in Wahteg. Nyx hopped onto the chair, nearly lost her balance as it spun around in circles, and steadied it with a flare of magic and a glare. Once she was stabilized, she pressed the button on the viewer and Margent’s face appeared in the dark glass. She looked angry.

“Twenty years, Star Swirl. Twenty. Years! Alone. They tied me to a post. They burned their linking books in front of me, and they laughed! And when I finally made it back to Naborale, I saw… I…” She fell silent for a long time, too overwhelmed by anger or grief to form the words she wanted to spit out. Finally, the fire in her eyes turned to ice and she said, “It would have been better if I had died.” The image faded away.

“Ok,” Nyx said slowly, turning in the chair to face Twilight, “I guess I can’t blame her for… Twilight?” The lavender unicorn’s face was screwed up in confusion and she didn’t seem to be paying attention. “Twilight, are you ok?”

Twilight blinked and her face cleared. “Sorry Nyx,’ she said, shaking her head, “I got distracted trying to figure out Margent’s timeline measures up with Equestria’s. Everything your father’s touched in these other worlds seems to move so much slower than back home it gives me a headache.” She looked at the chair Nyx was sitting on and frowned. “There’s hardly enough room for two of us on this platform,” she said.

“Then wait here then,” Nyx said, “this is my lesson after all.”

Twilight shook her head and eased her way onto the platform. “I get the feeling we’re almost at the end of this,” she said, “and I don’t want to get left behind if you end up going for a ride.” Nyx grumbled but accepted the uncomfortable position of having Twilight’s side pressing into her.

Above the viewer was a pull chain. Nyx gave it a tug and the platform shot up, coming to a stop inside the open peak of the building. Clamps connected the platform to the building, and then the peak rose up into the air, giving the ponies a bird’s eye view of the whole island, particularly the three puzzles and the starting area. As they took in the sights, a box resembling the puzzle control panels approached the platform and opened, revealing a panel with nine circles marked with lines. Around the edge of the panel were four colored lines that started from the middle of each side and stretched over to point at one of the corners. Four colored buttons hung down from the roof, one above each puzzle and one over the starting area. As Nyx turned her chair to look around, Twilight was forced to walk along the edge of the platform. Nyx reached up with her magic and pressed the blue button, which hung above the cloverleaf track. A mechanical arm with a hooked end swung into view and spun around, forming a crystal ball out of thin air and dropping it. The ball rolled through the cloverleaf, the sonic rings turning off in turn as they were supposed to, and after the ball passed through the last ring Nyx heard the sound of something rising out of the water and dropping back down behind her.

“Ok, so we can run the puzzles from up here,” Nyx said, turning back to the box, “so what?”

“Well,” Twilight said, nodding out at the gap between the track and the covered platform, “each puzzle causes part of a bridge to come up. And this,” she pointed at the box, “looks to me like it could be a map of the tracks inside the building if the circles are turned right. I’d say try to design a course that goes through each of the puzzles in the order they raise the bridge pieces and ends at the red dot,” she tapped the start of the red line.

“Oh!” Nyx said, smiling. “Ok, so if the first piece is raised by the sound puzzle, and that’s the blue button… we start from this corner.” She spun the lower-left circle until one of the lines touched the end of the blue line. “The balance beam was the middle piece, and that’s… yellow…” She spun circles for several minutes, occasionally needing to back up and think when she created a dead-end, and at last she had mapped out a course that went through each color and ended at the red. She sat back with a satisfied smile, but nothing happened. “Did I mess something up?” she asked.

Twilight looked over the map for a bit, tracing the path, and said, “It looks good to me. Maybe we need to do something else to get it going.” She looked behind her and pressed the blue button with her magic. The whole floating structure moved at once. The puzzle box closed and moved away, the clamps released from the platform, and the hooked arm came down and moved around the chair, encasing the two ponies in a mostly transparent ball of crystal. The floating structure moved out over the track leading down to the cloverleaf, and Twilight felt her stomach start to ride in her throat. “Oh dear,” she said, and then gravity took control.

Twilight had seen roller coasters before, but she’d never been on one. As the crystal ball rolled off the last of the track segments that had sprung out of the ocean a mere seconds ahead of the orb and slowed to a gentle stop near the end of the covered platform, she was determined that nothing would ever convince her to get on one so long as she lived. As the ball stopped in a divot prepared to receive it and disintegrated around the ponies, Twilight look over at Nyx, who was still leaning back against the chair with an enormous grin plastered on her face.

“Oh my gosh that was awesome!” Nyx exclaimed, leaping off the seat without warning and bouncing in place on the platform floor.

“At least one of us enjoyed it,” Twilight muttered dryly.

“Are you kidding me?” Nyx said, “That was better than the underwater cart on Sohndar. There was speed, hills, the rush of coming within inches of danger, and the turntables! We were practically flying!” She threw her hooves in the air to emphasize her point, and then her adrenaline ran out and she flopped onto her back. “Once this is all over,” she declared breathlessly, “I am coming back and riding that again.”

“Uh huh,” Twilight said, tuning the filly out as she spotted the symbol painted on the floating columns, which from the platform appeared to be lined up right next to each other. The symbol looked like a wide curvy M with a smaller half-circle under the right hump and a fruit with two leaves sitting in the left-most curve. Twilight drew the symbol on a clean sheet of paper, and then turned to look at Nyx and pulled out Star Swirl’s journal. “I’m glad you had fun,” she said, “but what did you learn from this world.”

Nyx sat up and frowned deeply in thought. “I am… not sure,” she announced. “I mean, we solved a bunch of puzzles, but in the end, what did we actually do besides make the best motion experience… Wait.” She smiled. “Everything we did involved changing some kind of force, like weight or sound. By adjusting those forces, we changed four separate devices into one complete system. You can create changes in a world just by altering some of its foundational forces.” She looked at Twilight expectantly.

“That’s it,” Twilight said, “but I should point out your father’s notes on the lesson emphasize dynamic forces. Now, where’s that I’strukun book?”

Comments

[Kinrah]

Sweet Celestia, it lives!

Nitpicker that I am...

...that demonstrated hoe heavy the wood, crystal, and metal are...

Amateria is still my favourite M3 age, not only because of the rollercoaster, but also the rhythmic music made by the sonic rings when you listen to them from the control platform. But I wouldn't blame Twilight if she took a breather before doing anything else.

[CTVulpin]

5981141
Typo fixed. Thank you.

[Reese]

Ah, it returns. :)

[Leo Archon]

Well, it's finally here. And it's well-done, given the content of the Age.

I'm looking forward to the analogue to Edanna, and I bet Twilight and Nyx will appreciate the nature of the place.

[Nebula1701]

sooo happy to see this updated! :D *begins to read*

[AShadowOfCygnus]

Good to see this is back on. Quality writing, as ever.

[ConsciousHaze196]

That would be quite useful if someone wanted to create a properly chaotic world

[Starcat5]

“I know Nyx,” Twilight said calmly, “but I don’t know if Cirrus and Archeon ever understood that. Archean in particular seemed to have trouble believing all these worlds were real; he kept referring to worlds as illusions.”

That little tidbit will come to bite Archeon in the flank once Book 4 rolls out. Those who have played the forth game will know exactly what I mean.