When an inter-dimensional gate opens between Sweet Apple Acres and rural California, Twilight must act quickly before any creature gets hurt, pony or invader.
When an inter-dimensional gate opens between Sweet Apple Acres and rural California, Twilight must act quickly before any creature gets hurt—pony, alicorn, or invader.
Events in this story take place before season 9 episode 1 and announcement of the royal retirement. [Teen] for weapons and some intense scenes. This story will consist of many smaller chapters published daily or every other day, and is an exercise in cliffhangers. It is a long novella, and is completely written. If it catches on, I plan to open-source or invite writing in the universe I created.
Between thundering breaths, Big Mac got out, "Bloom, Grannie, okay, at vet."
I said, "AppleJack?"
"Captured."
Before that...
Princess Celestia always told me during her lengthy exposition lessons that you really ought to write what you feel. If you don't do that, you'll never learn all about yourself. So... so, I will! Some of this will be what I thought, what I felt. Some I'll relate in time order from other ponies and creatures, though I learned exactly what had happened afterwards.
#
Just a minute ago, in the library, I'd heard the sound of running hooves down the hall, large ones from the sound of it.
No, no, no... I'd thought selfishly, but I dropped my red pencil on my standing desk and sighed. That had ended possibly my longest and nicest uninterrupted time to myself since the end of the term. It had allowed me to mark up all the changes to my lesson plan for the second years and I really hadn't needed to look again at the first year one. Friendship magic really was on the ascendance.
Spike would transcribe my work, I told myself. I didn't need to.
And, no, the visitor who'd pounded on the castle doors wasn't an interruption.
He wasn't. Not much. Part of my being princess was being available.
Spike's voice dopplered towards me, yelling, "Something bad happened at Sweet Apple Acres!"
Spike glided through the open doors seconds before Big Mac galloped in, a red one-stallion stampede who skidded to a stop on the crystal tiles until we were almost muzzle to muzzle, him huffing and puffing. Starlight Glimmer teleported beside me with a loud bang. I shot a hoof to my papers to keep them from being buffeted away by the vacuum pop. She had a frightened look, frost steaming momentarily from her lavender coat.
My subconscious mind deduced ponies were hurt. My heart lurched in my chest. I broke out in a cold sweat.
Applejack!
#
It took four teleports; almost three total seconds in the absolute cold vacuum of in-between. When I popped into the vet's exam room, Granny Smith yelled, "Tarnation!" Apple Bloom squeaked. I shook my coat and scattered flash-frozen bits of perspiration and frost snow across the floor.
Doctor Fauna proved steely-nerved as she wielded a suture needle held in her lips, working on a slowly breathing mountain of pink flesh on her metal examination table. Her muzzle was covered...
Wads of bloody cotton littered the floor, and the vet pressed on the pig's side as she sewed together an outrageously ragged hoof-sized wound with black thread. Apple Bloom had turned a slight shade of green that resembled her grandmother's coat. The foal's jaw trembled as she held her mouth tightly clamped shut.
I realized her squeak probably hadn't been due to the sound of my in-teleport.
"Dagnabit! Had I'd been a might younger, I'd have bucked me some giant flank!"
As the elder went on in that vein, adding new more colorful country cussing, I looked from Granny to Apple Bloom. "Do you know what happened?"
Apple Bloom nodded. "Sure." Her red bow lay flattened and askew across her head.
I walked over and lay on the floor before her so I could look directly into her fire opal eyes. "Try." I also blocked her view of the operation.
"Okay, Twilight. It's just hard. Don't understand what happened or who they was, but suddenly there were these tremendous roars and this big metal box on wheels. Scared everypony, da pigs too and they broke outta their pens. These, don't know what they was, but they run on two legs when they burst outta the rolling box, after havin spun around and kicked dirt all over tha heck. They, the best I can describe is they, they look like tall thin pigs. They've got no fur and look pinkish and got beady eyes like a pig, no offense to Chester here."
I glanced at Chester as Dr. Fauna worked. Pigs did have small eyes, but also a large cylindrical snout.
"No snout. And they wore clothes. All of um."
Wait. That sounded like they resembled the girls from Canterlot High. But the mirror hadn't activated. I asked anyway.
"Nothin colorful bout them. All pinkish- or brownish-skinned, with black or brown manes. Even their clothes. Faded blue farm pants and gray or brown flannel shirts."
"And your sister?"
"AJ, she yelled at them to stop, but they ran after the pigs and me and granny. AJ bucked one, broke his leg. That's when they took out these long black spears with wood fletching at the end. The things started barking and dirt started exploding around us. AJ told us to run, but that's when Chester exploded like the dirt, on his haunch. Big Mac, he gathered us up while AJ kept the pig-things occupied. Last I saw, they threw a big blanket on her and it took six of them to pin her down." Apple Bloom sobbed. "That's how we got away."
I found myself hyperventilating through my nose and found my right rear leg shaking on its own, clattering the horseshoe against the wood floor. I'd fought enough times to not freak at the sight of blood, even my own, but I aways saw AJ as uniquely capable and strong, and the image of the blanket in my mind just negated any thoughts of her being safe. Rising adrenaline would need answers soon, but I turned to Dr. Fauna and willed myself to breathe slowly, though that got me gulping.
With deft moves of her neck, she wove a final knot and bit the suture through with her teeth. In my mind, I tasted the memory of the iron flavor of blood, my own, and the salt. Her dedication impressed me.
I asked, "What caused that? A spiked mace? An arrow?"
Dr. Fauna shuddered. She ran a hoof through her sweaty mane, which didn't help much and smeared it. She grabbed a cologne spray bottle and pumped out little puffs of acrid-smelling antiseptic over the wound. She went to the opposite side of the sprawled unconscious animal and sprayed again. She put down the sprayer and pointed at the animal's lower flank.
"Four wounds. In here." She pointed, then lifted a leg to reveal a big reddened bandage stuck to the other side. "Out here. In there and the fourth one you saw."
"Not an arrow or a spear."
"It hit nothing major, with so much fat and muscle there compared to the width of bone and location of the big blood vessels. But the exit wounds are big and the entry wounds small."
I imagined Chester standing under his own power and visualized the trajectory in three dimensions. The wounds lined up in a perfect, slightly down facing line. Something small and powerful did it. How powerful varied with exactly how small and the mass of said small item. I didn't like what I imagined at all, nor the thought that the barking long arrow weapons had considerably more range than regular arrows, though the laws of ballistics would still apply. Had anypony been stuck in the chest or face...
I looked at Apple Bloom, still looking green as she held on to Granny Smith. She was lucky to be alive. Both of them.
And Big Mac.
Anything that could make Big Mac run... that scared me, too.
I thought, Range...
Spike burst into the room. "Twilight!" he cried, his wings flapping vigorously. "You've got to do something. Big Mac's going back to the farm."
"Celestia, no!" I said. "The pig-things are dangerous. Send a note to Princess Celestia about this. Tell her not to come close. And tell Mayor Mare to order everypony to stay away from Sweet Apple Acres. It's quarantined!"
Starlight Glimmer came skidding in. She, too, had bits of frost on her coat, but while she could easily teleport, she didn't have my range and hadn't been here before, so hadn't been able to target the place. She said between breaths, "You've got to... let me help. You can't... do this alone."
"Yes. Tell everypony to stay away. And no, I can get there fastest."
It took four more teleports. Sweet Apple Acres was on the opposite side of Ponyville from Dr. Fauna's office and Fluttershy's Cottage. Even hyped with adrenaline, I felt every single teleport as a huge load of exhaustion as I punched through the ethereal zephyr and drew heavily on the magic pulse. I still had no idea how I'd teleported from Tartarus to the school in one go, though I had discovered frostbite that required treatment after we'd handled Cozy Glow. I slept two days straight not long after Chancellor Neighsay left and that hinted at a clue. Adrenaline, the gathered magic of the denizens of Tartarus, and alicorn magic—that wasn't so different from dark magic—had probably done the trick, together with a need to protect my friends from the rigors of intra-spacial travel.
I willed myself towards alicorn magic, thinking of a blanket over AJ, but it was no use.
Four regular unicorn teleports.
That landed me amongst the manicured trunks of AJ's precious orchard, near the tree line. I collapsed in a heap, frost steaming from my hide. Some alicorn I was! Panting, I squirmed so I was mostly hidden. I could easily see the barn. The corner of the farmhouse had collapsed down from the roof where something massive had struck it.
I heard a roar and something came growling from the far-side of the barn. That something was the wheeled box Apple Bloom had mentioned.
Canterlot High AJ drove one of these, though hers was red and a totally different design. She called hers a pickup truck.
The cab on this machine seemed to extend toward the rear, so it was a utility truck. Princess Celestia could enter this one and ride with her knees bent. The truck's shell was painted a dark green, not black, judging by the white exposed where the front end had been smashed, undoubtedly having skidded into the house. The thing had two eyes, which I knew were lanterns, set to either side of what looked like the barbecue grill AJ used for her vegetable cook-offs. The wheels were black, very round, and gnarled, which explained the pairs of wagon tracks literally gouged into the loose soil all around the farm. Judging by the damage to the house and guessing that the vehicle was metal rather than wood, I calculated a mass of a couple celestial tons, which meant the energy budget of the magic motor or steam engine that ran the thing had to be enormous.
I'd never had to evaluate the machines as a danger before, but now I recognized it was basically a quarter-sized locomotive that didn't require rails.
Whomever drove the thing seemed intent on making the greatest amount of mess. A cloud of dirt sprayed out as the driver fish-tailed to a halt outside the farmhouse.
One of the creatures jumped out just as another, no two others, stepped onto the veranda, ducking their heads because of the comparatively small door height. They shouted at one another. It wasn't Ponish. It wasn't any language I'd heard before, and I had traveled much of Equestria and beyond during the last ten years. Equestria's influence had pretty much made Ponish the de facto standard language as far as Mount Aris. Even the Stormking and his yeti had spoken it. Surprisingly, the girls on the other side of the mirror had spoken Ponish; that paradox required investigation, but I put it aside.
The invaders did look faintly pig-like and were as pale and colorless as Apple Bloom described. I judged that Celestia's nose would reach neck level on the specimen I focused upon. He probably massed five times as much as AJ, or more than twice Big Mac. And, while his blue workpony pants thoroughly covered him, something about his flannel shirt—muscles visible where he had rolled up his sleeves, and the short messy shag of his hair below a massive black hat that resembled AJ's—made me sure he was a stallion not a mare. All of them. All stallions. They varied, really, only by the shade of their shirts, the shade of their brown or black manes, and their headwear. All wore hats. One wore a billed cap. The driver. That one was anomalous bright red, more like an apple than the red of blood.
As they gesticulated at each other, blood and red made me think of AJ. One of them tackling me would likely subdue me, unless I used magic. She was probably in the house, or the barn. If she was alive.
My body went cold at the thought and nausea tried to push itself up.
The driver walked over with a giant claw-sized pair of black conjoined cylinders. Together, the group walked to the end of the veranda and one of the pig-things put the cylinders to his eyes. Binoculars! Giant-sized for giants, their magnification had to be literally astronomical.
Then I chilled again. He looked towards Ponyville.
The sun began setting in the west as if Celestia had sensed a danger to her little ponies. All the pig-things startled and yelped. One jumped over the railing to the dirt to get a better look around the farmhouse, as some rushed out of the farmhouse and two others thrust open a barn door.
The husky stallion was as big compared to the pig-things as Winona was to AJ.
I needed another name than pig-things. Speechifier's A Nation is Its Ponies put it best: "Non-derogatory nomenclature is essential to eventual understanding and diplomacy." The Canterlot girls called themselves "people." I'd asked. These obviously weren't the same species of people.
They had two feet, like bears, but were manifestly not bears...
Maybe I could call them bi-peds?
In any case, I could easily to deduce what would happen if the bipeds saw Big Mac charging them.
As the sun speedily set and the twilight enveloped Equestria like a fast moving fog, I teleported directly in Big Mac's path. On the road to the entrance to the farm, I galloped at him, wings up to make him stop. He gritted his teeth as he dodged around me.
I lifted him in my magic and trotted with his legs pumping into the woods that surround the farm.
The wild-eye stallion kept saying, "Nope, nope, nope," albeit quietly, as I peered around a trunk down the path to the farm. I craned my neck and squinted until I could make out the bipeds. They pointed toward the western horizon and looked like they hadn't heard the teleport pops.
Without looking behind me, I said, "I really need you to return to Ponyville."
"Nope!"
I glanced back. He was as stubborn as his sister! "Make sure nopony is on the road and nopony comes this way."
"Nope!"
I sighed. "You do realize that you being stubborn is keeping me from going to find AJ?"
"Uh, nope." He stopped struggling and I put him down.
"If you see any pegasus on the way, flag them down. I think the invaders have..." How could I explain this? "I think they have barking arrows that can reach as high as the clouds. You must stop Dash if you see her; especially her. I don't want anypony hurt. This is important."
He nodded. He understood well the allusion Apple Bloom had thought up for their weapons.
"Is there anything you can tell me about finding AJ? Do you think she's in the house or the barn?"
"Barn." He inhaled deeply. "They thought we was animals, Twilight. They tried to round us up!"
"Anything else?"
"We saw a flash in the northeast orchard last night. They came from that direction."
"Let nopony near the farm, Big Mac," I said, looking back toward the house. No creature had looked our way because they now faced the opposite horizon, gesticulating and crying out in astonishment. Bluish light signaled that Luna had raised the moon.
"Mah sister would tell you not to do this alone."
"Yes, she would," I said, crouching low. "She would."
I visualized the Apple barn, in which the six of us had held many parties, and pulled the prank to end all pranks on Rainbow Dash. I wanted none of my friends hurt.
I cast the teleport spell, muttering the mnemonic as I visualized the vectors. As I solved the math slowly and carefully, I paid attention to the effect on my body. I felt the surge of magic to my horn. I saw faint fiery numbers spin across my vision, washing my vision like allegorical yellow-tailed red comets of bad omens...
It had taken my younger self until my thirty-first teleport to realize that if I got the vectors wrong, I'd either throw myself into the ground to bruise my knees, which would always be mysteriously bent, or I'd simply face-plant a wall just short of enough to cause a nosebleed. I could never materialize inside a solid object. If I really messed up the magical math, which for me happened only when tired or startled, the spell simply burnt some of the hairs on my forehead.
Unicorn magic couldn't directly hurt anypony, not even the caster. It was incapable... Or rather, reluctant. Once I'd earned my wings, I'd accidentally materialized in the sky ten-stories high and I fluttered down safely, which proved my thesis; that had never happened before I'd gotten my wings.
I teleported into a hay cradle I suspected would be empty. It was an open slatted stall, and I remained crouched as the stale hay from last season settled around me. I faced the open barn doors. Nothing could disguise the the exit pop from a teleport.
The next events transpired in the stretch of a few heartbeats.
Two bipeds stood in the barn doorway. My eyes had adjusted to the dimming dusk and the moonlight, which conveniently streamed through the open clearstory built into the peak of the barn's roof. I looked to my left, my vision panning across the length of the barn toward excited chattering voices to find another three bipeds, one crouched and fiddling with one of Applejack's kerosene lanterns. As I heard the last echo of the teleport exit pop, I also heard the click of the piezoelectric igniter and a pony-like, "Ha!" The mantel lit dimly, which was plenty to light everything. In that light, I could see the bipeds turning toward the sound of my exit pop.
Forelegs—no, I guess you'd anatomically call them arms—shot out for long items leaning against the wall of a stall. At least one claw—technically, a hand—reached for something more compact in a hip holster. This one biped wore a splint on his leg and started to fall as he overbalanced.
I crouched lower, but kept preparing the vector for a teleport spell.
I'd seen a pony-like shadow before the lantern lit. I realized now it was AJ. Her green eyes sparkled angrily as they locked on me, but she wasn't moving. Her legs had been rope-tied to hobble her. Additionally, four long translucent cables with unmistakable metal braided cores also wrapped around her fetlocks. Her rear legs were lashed to opposite walls of the milking stall. The cable to her forelegs had been staked with shining spikes to the hard-packed barn floor. The other cables were padlocked to convenient tie-ups AJ had installed. AJ couldn't move a hoof length if she tried. The padlocks were small, and one good kick from AJ would shatter any, but she was in no position to kick. Her hat was missing. The top of her golden mane barely made it to the hip height of nearest biped who windmilled his arms as he fell.
AJ cried, "No, Twilight!"
I went from confident and observing, to heart-racing and frightened in the space of three syllables. I knew AJ in serious command mode, and sadly had heard her voice when frightened. This was both, and she followed it with a shout:
"Run!"
Barking arrows leveled at my hiding place, lime-lit, of course, by the ruddy hue of the aura swirling around my horn, something that was increasingLy visible at night.
I broke into a cold sweat with astonishing speed. My vector calculations to teleport beside to AJ and to immediately teleport out went infinite. The numbers flared like a chrysanthemum firework and flashed out of existence. I visualized Chester at Dr. Fauna's. I thought of a ring of archers I'd seen practice offensive maneuvers at Castle Canterlot. I thought about Shiny's shield spell and at the same time knew that I didn't know the mass nor exact velocity of the strange warheads the barking arrows cast.
NotShield, Twilight! Cast teleport!
It's never a good idea to guess the vectors of a teleport spell, unless you're a quick draw expert like Starlight Glimmer was. She could prepare multiple spells and keep them in mind while fighting, which, undoubtedly, was why I rarely won the magic duels we periodically indulged in. You don't guess because of the rule I stated previously. Unicorn magic can't directly inflict harm. You're likely as not to get a fizzle. You could get a backfire, too, which has nothing to do with magic other than manifesting it in your horn when it somehow can't fit. I won't describe that other than to say it requires a surgeon.
I gasped. Pain awakened me. In my confusion, I noticed my knees, my chest, and my jaw ached, like somepony had opened a door in my face. I smelled the cold dry-air smell of frost and shook my mane out and heard wet bits patter beside me. My bed felt like its lumps had turned to rocks. Purple and blue phosphenes flashed behind my eyelids as I opened my eyes, wondering what had happened.
"AJ!" I shouted before it all came back.
Not in bed. I saw a tree.
An old apple tree.
I'd teleported.
I lay astride gnarled roots that had grown out of the soil to become a tripping hazard, my legs folded and my muzzle ploughed deep enough into moist ground such that the impact must have knocked me out. Today just had to be the day I had to test the limits of unicorn magic, didn't it?
And now I'd shouted my location to the bipeds from somewhere in Sweet Apple Acres. As the phosphenes retreated and I levered myself up, I recognized the old grove I lay in.
Obviously, when Big Mac had said "northeast orchard" that had stuck in my head. It was the location of a special pair of trees that had grown intertwined. As I stood swaying and a bit dizzy, I recognized the wedding grove, and the pear and apple tree that had grown together such that the upper trucks roughly formed a large heart. The original wood pots—abandoned at the altar where AJ's parents had married in secret long ago—had long ago returned to the soil. The memory had similarly been mislaid, and the grove had lain forgotten until Grand Pear and Granny Smith could reconcile, yet something essential in the long ago union had created a strong palpable magic.
I sensed the harmony in it. Maybe it was a reason AJ grew up to become the element of honesty. TheTree of Harmony had roots throughout this part of Equestria, after all.
But that wasn't everything I felt.
I didn't forget my shout and backed into the surrounding trees. I felt my ears swivel, listening for any non-arboreal sounds. I sniffed the air as I waved my horn, trying to sense any disturbance in the magic pulse.
What I sensed smelled faintly of ozone, that weird scent after an electrical storm. After half a minute, I heard a faint zap and a crackle... I shivered.
Its source lay beyond the intertwined tree. My horn didn't sense magic like from a developing or continuously reciprocating spell, but there was a flow, more of a stream than a brook.
I remembered visiting a gem mine once. A mine was rarely just a single hole, but many. Since warm air rose, air naturally ventilated such arrangements, being sucked from the lower entrances to rise like chimney smoke out the upper entrances.
This was that, but with magic.
I heard a roar, one I readily recognized as an engine. It approached rapidly, and I pushed myself further into some concealing shrubbery. I heard laughter then glimpsed a pair of bipeds on a motorbike, one much more rugged than the one that Sunset Shimmer drove. It came bumping up a path that I would have very soon noticed on my own. Truck tires had mercilessly shred the soil that lead just east and parallel to the length of the grove.
I heard the laughter again and watched the light seesawing between the trees before the noisy machine jumped into the grove, having hopped a root, then buzzed on by.
Nopony was seeing me.
I jumped from hiding into the air, flapping hard to see above the intertwined tree. I followed the sound with my eyes just in time to see the phenomena I'd just sensed a minute ago.
The motorbike shot into it—and was silenced immediately. In the moonlight, I might have missed the apparition until within pony-lengths. A wan bluish light, not unlike moonlight, lit it. Something the other Twilight had called a fluorescent light. The clue was the motorbike. A red running light glowed on its tail end, and the red light diffracted jaggedly, passing through what had to be some sort of magic mirror, then slowed into what looked like a small cavern, except it couldn't be. I saw apple trees beyond the inter-dimensional membrane, but the location of the bike appeared to be the same place when looking through the membrane.
A sudden crackle of electricity solved the issue of me seeing this thing I had no good context to understand. The discharge outlined a depressed sphere—it resembled a water droplet on oil, about the size of a small house, embedded slightly in the ground.
The motorbike riders opened a door—to a barn I immediately presumed—and bright sunlight streamed into the space on the other side. Daylight. The pair immediately passed through on foot and the barn door closed behind them.
I heard a shout from behind. An inquiry, surely, because another biped farther away made a querulous sound.
I found myself smashed against a corrugated metal wall, my belly, chest, and jaw against a hot surface—sun-drenched outside, considering the rays of light shinning through tiny punctures—my rear quarters in the dirt. The smell of oil mingled with frost steam in the air. I hadn't quite knocked myself out again, but my ears rang and again I hurt from, well, slamming into an immovable object.
I suppressed a groan as I slid to the ground only to have my chin strike pieces of crushed cement. And the metal smelled of rust and oil. Lovely.
I looked right, left. Had any creature been near, they'd have had a momentary advantage, but I skittered behind a couple of steel barrels and felt hidden from...
The sphere was an inter-dimensional gate, fundamentally different than Starswirl's and Celestia's magic mirror. It didn't require magical input, but it certainly circulated a celestial-ton of magic like an arcane house fan.
That meant this world hadmagic.
I rubbed my bruised jaw with the frog of a hoof, looking at the gate, wishing that my intuition was better at spell equation math.
Blood. I felt a drip at the tip of my nose. That was the rust smell. Well, I guess I really didn't know everything, after all.
From my vantage point, I could see back into Applejack's parents' grove. I waited. A few minutes later, one of the bipeds with a hat like AJ's walked into the clearing, carrying a barking arrow. He shook his head at the parent tree, kicked it hard enough to rattle the branches, then took out a canteen. He pointed to some creature unseen and headed along the improvised road back toward the farm house.
I began breathing easier and examined my surroundings. It was no barn, in the sense AJ used it. From inside, I could see how slipshod it was. Seams here and there did not match and, along with the puncture holes, let in wan little beams of sunlight in which dust swirled and gnats flit. On the opposite side, I could make out dappled flickering of breeze tussled leaves—probably trees that shaded the ill-fitting sheets of tacked-together metal and kept the light from the various gaps and holes from overwhelming the flickering bluish bulb hanging near the barn door. The motorbike rested on a kickstand.
That made me think it was a temporary garage, cobbled together from trash siding. Oil stained the dirt in places. Compared to the scale of pony construction, a small house could easily fit in here. Compared to the bipeds and their trucks, it was little more than a shed and really wasn't that big.
I theorized that the gate had recently appeared. The bipeds had hastily hidden it from prying eyes by building around it. With junk. As slipshod as it was.
Why?
The startling report of dozens of barking arrows gave a clue. I cringed behind the barrels, hiding my head under my forelegs. I should have thrown a shield spell around me, even if I didn't know what velocity ranges I needed to tune for to protect myself. A right guess, even if it weren't the most likely guess, might have saved my life...
Were it I who were being shot at.
But, it wasn't me. I lay there quaking in fear for more long seconds than I'm willing to admit before my twitching ears sensed the direction of the sounds and a doppler effect in action.
No. The bipeds weren't shooting at me. Or the garage that housed the gate.
I heard an amplified shout and the barking stopped, except for a couple defiant barks. Another shout, then quiet.
Was there an army out there, preparing to invade Equestria?
I crouched in a pocket woods after a perfect teleport. I shivered as the breeze blew into my short coat. It was nippy outside.
The barking arrows went off intermittently beyond the other side of the garage and I judged no creature would think anything of the rather innocuous sound of a teleport in comparison. I didn't want to open the garage door to alert any creature in the woods. While botany wasn't my forte, I recognized a species of scrub oak and a sedge which was at a perfect height to conceal me. And it smelled tasty, reminding me of Fluttershy's Arboreal Spring salad.
This semi-arid land definitely wasn't Equestria, but I took a chomp and chewed, thinking. A mild pepper flavor burned on my tongue.
Like a sedge.
The sky was blue, and the breeze did feel nice and fresh, despite bits of blown dust and the shade I stood in. The world looked washed out, though, like the color had been drained. I'd been to the badlands out near Appleloosa and Dodge Junction many times, and this felt even more washed out, which was kind of sad. Paint on the corrugated steel siding might have cheered up the view. A color other than the dirty stained-brown one on the giant house a few hundred pony-lengths behind me certainly would have helped.
Was this why the gate had suddenly appeared? Had harmony been planning on extending the cutie map into another territory?
I crept around the garage to the front. From there, I saw at least two dozen trucks parked on hard-packed light tan dirt. There were a few cars. All were painted black, gray, or dark green. All were filthy, but that might be because of the ubiquitous dirt.
Cognizant of the bipeds that had gone before me, I snuck to the opposite side of the garage from the house to find something quite interesting. Dozens of bipeds stood in front of wood stalls, facing away from the garage and house and truck park completely. Pretty much as a whole, they wore the blue pants and farm shirts I'd seen on the invaders. Billed caps predominated, though I saw only one that was red. Each appeared to be armed with one sort or another of barking arrow. A couple bipeds—and these wore flannel shirts that greatly resembled those of the invaders—seemed to be assisting the rest of the gaggle of creatures. Not long after I started watching, I heard the slam of truck doors. One of the flannel-dressed bipeds greeted the new arrivals. A newcomer passed over some pieces of paper. I could recognize bits when I saw them. The flannel biped pointed at a sign with unintelligible lettering. When the other nodded, I realized it was a set of rules.
It was a business!
And this business was a place where the bipeds could practice with their barking arrows.
I quickly realized the device had nothing to do with arrows. Each casting, or shot, resulted in an immediate impact of a distant target. For those interested in precision, there was a clothesline arrangement for setting up a target. Others weren't so interested, and just judged by eyesight alone. Likely it was cheaper that way. I heard lots of joking and shouting and unmistakable fun going on, though it felt sinister to me.
Call me prejudiced. Having lived in Canterlot, living in one of Celestia's ivory towers, visiting the castle grounds daily, I'd seen the royal guard practicing often. Spears. Javelins. Bows and arrows. I'd never seen that as sinister.
Maybe I needed to think it through, better. Be more relativistic and tolerant.
I rapidly came to a conclusion. The bipeds, neither the customers nor the flannel proprietors, were military. Some small good news in that, though a mad pony could still hurt other ponies, Invaders, like parasprites and bear-bugs, while not in Lord Tirek's class, could still mete out a great deal of damage. The bipeds, I suspected, more so.
I really needed more information to judge the mass and throw of the barking arrows. I felt I could guess it from what I saw at a range nearly five-hundred pony-length away, but I didn't want anypony's life to depend on me guessing, wrong. I need something to test.
With increasing confidence, I turned toward the house.
A corral stood near the house. It was hard to see inside the two-story building's windows because of the glare on the glass. While most of the interior was well lit by light passing through, I didn't take a chance and kept to the cover of shrubs and trees.
An inarticulate nicker made my heart lurch and I changed my course toward the corral.
The sight of actual living breathing giant horses caused my jaw to drop in awe. Popular literature called them cave-ponies, though archeologists were adamant that at most prehistoric horses sheltered in caves during bad weather, drawing on the walls only then, and never else. These specimens would dwarf the bipeds themselves, probably by 25%, and would out-mass them by thrice or more. They weren't Equestrian, though. They had the biped's small eyes, though they were more colored in with less white showing. And, like the bipeds, they looked drab. Sure, there are some non-pastel Equestrian ponies, but these two giants could blend into the dirt and scrub background in this very environment. One was dirty brown with black points and had a muzzle and hooves to match. The other was dappled gray and brown. Neither displayed a cutie mark. One noticed me and looked. Briefly. It nickered, blinked unintelligently, and set about reaching for some sedge branches waving enticingly almost within neck's reach. I saw droppings scattered all around the corral.
Pretty disgusting.
And the shifting breeze carried the scent.
Further study showed a very elongated muzzle and a relatively restricted skull. Sometimes foals were born with a similar looking congenital defect and it was always sad. These specimens made a real pony look practically flat-faced and dome-headed, though not as flat-faced as the bipeds. The bipeds shared a skull size nearly as big as that of ponies, but, heart-wrenchingly, these horses weren't even cave-ponies. They were just animals. Dumb animals.
I heard a shout and sudden laughter from the house.
My caution was warranted and I crouched down in my cover. In this environment, my purple fur and feathers really stood out, but I was in deep shade compared to the approaching bipeds. I so wished I could master Starlight Glimmer's Don't See, Don't Look, Don't Hear spell. She had used it to fool the Changelings in their last attack, and during her entrance exam to Celestia's School when she'd spent half a year there. It wasn't that I couldn't cast it, I just couldn't maintain it. It was self-reciprocating, but the caster had to also be hyperaware of her surroundings because the spell cast her perceptions to show what normal sight would block, as well as to convince ponies not to look. It required being able to concentrate while clearing your mind. Starlight often laughed that I had too many thoughts in my head. Maybe true. She could multitask spells better than I could, even if she didn't know as many as I did or why the arcane ones worked.
I remained hidden in the shade, probably aided by the dry breeze that moved the leaves, obscuring any movement I might have made.
I watched as one of the bipeds hauled out a saddle and thunked it on the corral fence, then, as his companion waited, he fetched a second one he thunked down with weird dangling tack ending in metal parts. When she giggled at something he said, I realized a number of things at once.
I'd seen my first biped mare.
She was a bit more slight in stature than he was, but her hair was as short as his, and they both wore the same clothing.
It wasn't flannel.
A mishmash of gray, green, olive, and tan splotches splattered their shirts and trousers. They wore brimless hats in the same pattern. I could imagine Rarity gagging at the poor fashion choice. Both wore makeup, though it was more smears of dark gray than anything enhancing. The mare filled out her shirt, or rather her blouse, pretty much like Canterlot High's Pinkie Pie. Rather enormously. And very mammalian, the way its contents moved when she laughed.
The bipeds saddled the horse, despite them being taller than either, in short order. My stomach turned, and not because I realized immediately that the saddles were to allow the bipeds to ride the horses not unlike how I let Spike ride me. No. That wasn't it. After the bipeds cinched the straps under the barrels of their mounts, they put a bridle over their heads... and inserted the metal thing in their mouths.
I cringed, despite my caution, expecting broken teeth, but apparently the teeth in the rear of their mouths at the cheek-line were missing. The horses chomped on the devices, not crunching thankfully, and white spittle appeared.
They were clearly not pleased, but tolerated it. The bipeds mounted with the help of handy foot loops dangling from the saddle body, took the leads attached to the metal bits, turned their mounts heads, and tapped their flanks with the end of the leads.
The brown horse jumped into motion, obviously annoyed, then they both trotted through the opened corral gate. At the garage, the biped stallion opened the door, led his horse who started shying back, and his mare's, inside, closing it behind them.
As my revulsion settled, thoughts occurred to me about what I had observed. AJ and Fluttershy both raised farm animals, all of which had their pony uses. Secondly, this pair were younger than the other flannel-dressed bipeds I'd seen. If I was eventually to befriend the creatures, the younger ones were probably better to start with. Last, maybe now the house was abandoned?
With better, more protected but open, vistas, I was able to reconnoiter the location most efficiently by flying and leapt into the sky.
The bipeds, these bipeds anyway, lived in a very wide, immensely long valley. In the far distance, I saw a blue and gray mountain range to the the east. Closer hills and mountains lay to the west beyond the garage. A few peaks rose high enough to gather snow. Exposed rocks and browned grass swathed what in the lower reaches of the closer slopes probably amounted to pleasing pastures. In the near distance, none of the sort of sedge trees I had hidden in grew. Instead I saw tumble weeds, scraggly skeletal plants, and strange thin-trunked trees that ended in a whorl of gray-green pointy blades easily each the length of a sword. Very few clouds decorated the sky or cast shadows on what I deduced was some sort of high desert region. From the height of a second story window, I saw no settlements at all up to a distant road. It appeared paved, and was wide enough for fast two-way intermittent traffic. I saw but couldn't hear cars and trucks, both big and small. A currently vacant dirt road wound out east from the truck park.
I took advantage of the practice range and garage being hidden from my vantage to listen for occupants in the house, then hover and peer through as many windows as I could.
After a minute, I teleported inside.
I smelled a faint scent of perspiration and cedar planking and it was warmer inside. Every chair, every table, every bed, and every lamp was giant-sized. Most were fashioned from wood, some fixtures out of badly tarnished brass, and though some chairs were made of fabric, at least one sofa I suspected was made out of animal hide. I really tried not to think about that. I couldn't judge, yet. I didn't know enough, and unlike AJ, I really worked hard not to let my gut lead me.
Thought of AJ, who I'd last seen probably about 15 minutes ago, returned my sense of urgency. I found myself dancing nervously on hoof tips—luckily upon a muffling dense woven woolen rug, considering I might not be alone.
If ponies disobeyed my orders to quarantine Sweet Apple Acres, ponies would be hurt. I really disliked not being in better control, but I needed to understand the bipeds better. If I could just find a forgotten barking arrow and some of the "arrows" they cast, I'd know exactly how to tune a shield spell. I wasn't deluding myself that I might find a map with invasion plans marked all over it.
This really didn't feel like more than a well-used farm house, one that could have been better maintained.
Upstairs was all vacant bedrooms, except for a sewing room filled with corrugated brown boxes. All had pale manilla-colored sheets and dirty-brown crochet-style blankets. Even the wall paper was pale white with drab olive stripes. Again, Rarity would have been mortified.
The stairway down creaked. That stopped me repeatedly, ears swiveling, really straining to keep my tail from swishing nervously. Downstairs I found an almost industrial-sized kitchen and a huge long dining table. That got me to thinking about the large number of upstairs bedrooms and somewhat institutional decor. Could this be some sort of wilderness hotel? One with a practice range? If that was true, I guess I was lucky there wasn't a concierge and a cook...
Both of who might be one of the flannel bipeds now invading Equestria!
Right... Not military.
Plenty of enticing books and magazines lay around over-stuffed chairs and sofas, which boosted my hotel theory. I tore my eyes away and took my time to gaze through the open windows at the garage and the practice range. I could hear the barking arrows off and on, somewhat muffled.
I continued exploring.
Until I found a single locked door, with a brass plate. I looked up at the engraving. I huffed. Not a clue. Probably read, Authorized Ponies Only.
I teleported to the other side.
When I slightly opened a heavy fabric drapery, I found a large oaken desk with unmistakable ledgers atop it. Business notebooks lined the shelves behind it, with hardbound books beside them. On one high shelf lay a stack of small, cardboard boxes with curlicue writing and what I felt confident I identified as digits. Under that shelf and extending down to the floor, I saw something that, despite the lack of any smell of magic, could only be a safe.
I chuckled, trotting closer. I sniffed and waved my horn. Indeed, no magic. It looked tough enough. I tapped it. By the plinks, I deduced it was iron or steel, probably the latter, under black paint with chrome details and an orange logo in florid cursive. With a dial and a lever. Entirely and mundanely standard, except that no ward glowed under my query spell, not even a simple cantrip! And the the handsome metal box stood much taller than wide.
I puzzled at that as I reached my magic to grab one of the small boxes that was maybe the size of two hooves side by side. And heavy. Unexpectedly. Heavy. It made a crunchy, jangly sound, not unlike bits but not coin-shaped or -sized, either.
I ripped apart the packaging and cylinders, each the size of the end of a stubby overused pencil, spilled out. All were tipped with a dull brown modern arrow head clad in a trailing sheath of brass.
"Not arrows at all," I breathed. I bet if Pinkie Pie had heard Apple Bloom's description, or seen the barking arrows herself, she would have recognized a cannon. Portable, powerful cannons that would be wielded by hoof or wing, or hand in this case, but certainly soon by hoof and wing. I bounced the miniature warheads, or shells, I wasn't sure of the correct terminology.
The tips were... By the weight... Yes. Lead.
Dozens of physics equations solved simultaneously in my head with the aid of my horn. (Watching Princess Celestia raise the sun that first time, I'd discovered a horn, my horn, could solve any math, not just spell equations—when I pushed it.) The brass part undoubtedly held phosphor fireworks powder of some sort, which explained the ferric disk at the center of the bottom. Ignition in a right-sized hoof-canon would explosively expel the warhead at supersonic velocity, with devastating results. The recoil would be substantial, but I could think of engineering and magical solutions for that when ponies designed their own.
I couldn't absolutely determine the terminal velocity until I actually analyzed the propellant, but I had a really good guess. Looking, I found a purse or pouch, which, with some deft tying of knots, I turned into a messenger style saddlebag. I ripped open all the boxes and selected samples of each size of ammunition. I then looked out the window.
Still no creatures near the house. Good. Because I had figured out what was inside the safe.
It turned out to be bolted to the floorboards. Made sense. Timed against a large burst of practice barks, my force spell splintered the wood. Whilst it proved a heavy load, I struggled the safe out the back door of the house and used Measure Mostly to analyze the thing's weak points. I glanced once around the side of the building and during a loud cacophony, I gathered my strength and threw the safe 14.62 pony-lengths straight up. When it reached its maximum height, I oriented it slightly skewed making allowances for drag and cross-winds, grabbed it again in my magic, and shoved down while dodging around the edge of the house.
The bang may have been louder than I expected.
Bits of heavy metal thundered into the wood-siding of the house and though the walls, while the rest rolled away like chunks of an accidentally dropped watermelon as the safe spilled its contents.
Amongst a mess of scattered gray-green leaflets fluttering in the breeze, I found the half-dozen weapons formerly within. One long barking arrow survived mostly intact but for cracked wood fletching. I strapped on one hefty compact model in a handy holster that had cushioned it, alongside my messenger bag. I didn't even give a second thought to the animal skin leather I'd laid against my skin. I found an exquisite wide-bladed knife with an array of notches along one side to act as tools for prying and tying, also in a belted holster. I tied it on and quickly wedged the barking arrow between all the straps I now wore. I used force spells to break apart anything left faintly intact, then scattered the blackened metal and wood into the brush.
My heart raced. Had I miscalculated, I didn't have much time.
With nary a glance, I glided so low to the ground that I scuffed the tips of my horseshoes as I shot toward the garage below the level of the sedges. AJ would have said the cowpony in me had come out, but not entirely. I took the moments the flight afforded me to reorient my understanding of my position in space, to imagine the location of the spherical gate relative the garage I approached at a dangerous velocity, and to properly cast a spell with well calculated vectors.
I teleported a pony-length from the corrugated metal wall. I hit the gossamer membrane of the gate at full speed on the other side, and a half-heartbeat later flew back into Equestrian airspace. I banked instantly right, away from the makeshift road and into the forest. Had any creature been waiting, they'd have seen a flying purple pony armed with two barking arrows flash by. From their context of horses being earthbound and unintelligent, they likely wouldn't be able to fathom what they'd seen.
I told myself that my flight instructor, Rainbow Dash, would be proud.
"What were you thinking!?" Rainbow Dash yelled. She did that more now that she'd been working as a Wonderbolt, and as a teacher, for over a year. "I thought we went over this? We fight together."
"I was scouting, I wasn't fighting."
Starlight Glimmer just growled, while her friend Trixie glared—because, under the circumstances, she could get away with it.
Rarity said, "I tend to concur with Rainbow Dash, dear. What if we lost you?"
We were always strongest together, but, "I saw I could gather facts about the bipeds before they learned enough about us that they could gain more of an advantage. Their actions lead me to think they may think we're all earth ponies, like Applejack—" I stopped as my throat closed up with emotion, then launched back into a brief executive summary of my adventure, levitating the long hoof-cannon, unholstering the compact hoof-cannon and knife, and arranging the ammunition in an orbiting constellation over my head for everypony to see.
We had gathered outside town hall because it seemed like half of Ponyville was already there. I really wanted everypony home with their doors barred and said so, finding my town folk unwontedly stubborn, or curious. I finished, looking up into a pair of violet eyes I'd known well since the year I'd become a teenager.
I told Princess Celestia, "This is why we need to contain this invasion and secure the gate while we have the advantage of their ignorance—and their naïveté. I strongly suspect these criminals, a label deserved from our point of view, are civilians and not military, the latter of which I suspect would be much better equipped and more powerful. My data set of two samples convinces me provisionally that they are creatures of applied force. It's the only language I can perceive from them at this point, but if we can overpower them without casualties, I think we'll be able to make friends with them later. Doing that means acting directly and immediately, and with you, Princesses—" I bowed deeply. "—safely far away. In case I fail."
Celestia and Luna looked at each other. A dozen pegasus guard, armed with javelins, stood protectively around them in their light bronze-appointed armor. The alicorns nodded and Celestia said, "We trust you to do whatever is necessary."
Wait, what? This was where Celestia needed to say that I was evidencing tunnel-vision again, that I should try diplomacy first, that they would send in the royal guard instead. My heart lurched and punched me in the stomach. I tasted bile. Not what I was expecting.
"Really?" Rainbow Dash said. From her tone, I couldn't judge if she was happy to expect action or surprised that I was allowed to direct a campaign so easily.
My gut told me to get about it before I over-analyzed all the mistakes I was about to make.
Too late.
I mean, really? Were the Princesses really deferring to me? I had helped save Equestria many times, but then I'd tried to steal the pearl from the seaponies when Queen Novo refused to let us use it. I'd let Rainbow Dash give away our location to Tempest Shadow. Both Sunset Shimmer and Dame Songbird Serenade had pointed out that if I'd just levitated Lord Tirek over the Canterlot Cascade, I might have ended multiple problems with the centaur, like eventually having Cozy Glow find a mentor to finish corrupting her. In fact, this reminded me suddenly of when I cast Need It Want It on Smarty Pants.
I was going to have to talk to Big Mac about that again...
I felt a hoof touch my withers on both sides. Celestia and Starlight Glimmer. The former said, "Concentrate. You've earned our trust," while the latter nodded and added, "What she said."
I couldn't see how, but the praise filled my heart with warmth.
Rainbow Dash swooped in to whisper in my ear, "So don't blow it." In a normal voice, she added, "So what's the flank-kicking plan?"
I blinked away tears I hadn't realized had begun to sting.
I took three deep breaths and stretched out my right hoof, eyes shut, exhaling slowly, exhaling the weariness from the teleports at the same time. I turned 360° and met everypony's eyes. Fluttershy and Spike joined Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and Starlight around me. Even more ponies had arrived. Big Mac looked forlorn. I was kind of glad Pinkie Pie, Maud, and Briar were visiting in Vanhoover.
I said, "Nopony, no creature, gets hurt... And we rescue Applejack."
Big Mac sighed.
"The bipeds don't know about pegasi; it gives us the high ground. Let's keep it that way. Rainbow."
"Aye, aye, ma'am!"
"Can we build-up a complete low-ceiling cloud cover over the farm?"
"Yes, ma'am!" She crouched, ready to launch skyward.
I interrupted. "I need it in no less than an hour, and make sure nopony is visible from the ground. Take as many pegasi as you need, except the royal guard."
"Obviously!" she scoffed, gesturing to the sky and the feathered crowd gathering around her, "Let's do this!" and streaked off at thankfully subsonic speed. Ponyville's pegasus ponies followed into the midnight-blue brightly moonlit sky, taking off like a flock of geese rising off a pond in waves of rolling thunder. With so many taking flight to move clouds toward the farm, it gave the phrase "a gathering storm" a new meaning.
I stood blinking away the moisture in my eyes. Coordination. Cooperation. Harmony. I'd caused that. I stopped breathing at the awesome sight. But I had to... Breathe. And I took a gusting breath, blew it out slowly, and turned to the princesses.
"I need your royal guard and their quivers of javelins to convince the bipeds not to escape out the gate but to instead surrender, which is why I want you away from the danger zone. And, yes I know. You can protect yourselves, but consider this demonstration."
I'd re-holstered the weapons, so I now took out the compact hoof-cannon and floated the blackened steel object before me. I waved ponies out of the way as I trotted to a small tree. I spun the thing in my magic, keeping the cannon barrel pointed away. I quickly figured out the cartridge release, then pushed and pulled until I understood the firing mechanism and ensured the evil device hadn't been damaged in the safe-cracking. I cast Measure Mostly and found everything straight within a hair-width. I floated a spinning constellation of brass-clad lead stars, repurposed Measure Mostly, loaded the right-sized caliber, and dropped the rest back into the messenger bag with a heavy thunk of beads.
"Because Levitate, Force, and Shield are essentially derivatives of the same spell arcana with different mnemonics but congruent parameters, I can cast a simultaneous shield, which I must since I may have damaged the hoof-cannon. It could fail explosively." A cocoon of magenta sheathed the compact and I tuned it to leave the muzzle open.
With experience observing Spike using his claws, I understood the concept of finger-actuated triggers. Cringing, I pulled it. And kept pulling up to the tensile strength of the train of metal parts I thought I understood.
Nothing.
I frowned. I saw a nubbin where Spike's thumb could touch the device and chuckled. I toggled the interlock and pulled.
The sharp report echoed off the buildings.
Wow.
I felt the jolt of the impressive recoil through the feedback-loop in my reciprocating magic.
Powerful.
Oddly, I liked the feeling.
A dozen ponies reared and the royal guard reflexively closed ranks around the princesses. A hole appeared in the tree. It wasn't a big tree and it shook as if struck with a sledgehammer. As a leaf see-sawed down, I realized I heard something else that didn't fit into what I expected.
Puzzling that, I took two steps toward the sundered tree; the top part had begun leaning back. The compact had required the most massive of the ammunition, so the destructive energy transfer made sense. I smelled the burnt powder and could better guess it was largely potassium-nitrate, roughly a tenth sulfur, and the rest charcoal. It informed how I had to tune Shield. The velocity vector of the equation would be a minimum of 1.6 times the speed of sound.
The last seconds replayed in my head and puzzle pieces assembled.
I cried, "Sweet Celestia!"
I had heard a distant frightened whinny, an inarticulate one, followed by nickered syllables, none carrying any meaning. Giant horses! I now also heard obvious curses in Lingua Bipedus—inside Ponyville.
Fluttershy, of course, hadn't flown off with the other pegasi. "I need you with me," I told her.
"Oh, okay," she said, quietly.
"Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, I need your guards, and I really need you to take shelter... against what I just demonstrated. Rarity? Could you entertain them?"
"I surely could."
"Everypony else, I need you go that way," I pointed behind me as I began flying in the direction of the bipeds.
Notably, the Princesses didn't balk, though I wished they had. Had they, they would have known better what to do, and they had the experience to know better. That they let me proceed...
It frightened me, almost more than that they had already teleported away, leaving their guard behind.
The ponies of Ponyville were in danger. I swallowed hard as I directed the armored ponies to spread out at about 45º and to call out, not attack, when they spotted the intruders, and to stay back. My hoof-cannon demonstration had made that point easy.
Starlight galloped below us. "What about me?"
"And me?" Fluttershy asked, somehow flying fast and making doing so appear languid.
"We need to catch the bipeds—" I started.
Starlight galloped and jumped, suddenly glowing green as she took flight in her magic beside me. "And flying would be faster. Naturally."
I coughed. As the hue and cry split up going down various streets, I said to Fluttershy, "The bipeds are riding horses, giant ones, that for them are simple animals. I want you to speak to them."
"Riding them? The horses will have a lot to say about that!"
"And your plan?" Starlight asked. "You always have a plan."
Again, I swallowed hard. Thinking of AJ and her honesty, I said, "Make sure no creature gets hurt or gets away to tell the others there are other ponies besides ponies that look like their non-magical horses."
"You're trusting your instincts again, and admitting it?" Starlight said and smiled. She made a knocking gesture toward my head. "Are you a changeling?"
"No."
"Good. I like this new confident Twilight."
Fluttershy said, "Uh huh!"
I felt my face warm. With the sudden fall of night, and that the lamplighters had not made the rounds, the moon was dim enough to protect me from total embarrassment. Block after block of shadow shrouded houses and storefronts breezed by. Everypony left here had taken my earlier advice to remain indoors. The horses had long legs and probably ran like the wind.
Fluttershy added, "You know, we're headed away from Sweet Apple Acres."
"Right! That's actually better. They can't just run back to their fellows."
"And towards the Everfree Forest."
"Then, for their safety, we must stop them."
I heard shouts, then a pegasus guard swooped between brick chimneys and flew along side us. "Your Highness, follow me."
We banked up and over thatched roofs far to the left, passing over Sugar Cube Corner. The guards, most of them furred white or light blue, their brass armor gleaming in the light of the moon, were hard to miss, but they had managed to corral the intruders on three sides where the houses ended and a park area led up to the forest. The giant horses were undoubtedly as fast as the wind, but one of the two, the irascible one of the pair, was demonstratively unhappy, and kept looking up and around, and balking. He clearly sensed the pegasi. Few ponies would deny feeling a shock seeing the shadow of wings cross the path they trotted along. Large eagles and rocs did that to anypony. It was an instinctual horse-brain fear of predators.
"What'll we do?" Starlight asked.
"Keep your distance, everypony. I'm going to cast a shield."
"I can do that, too."
"We aren't deflecting force spells or arrows, Starlight. It's a bead of lead flying faster than the speed of sound. You heard the sonic boom."
"I did. Mine has a time component—"
"Why doesn't that surprise me?"
"It allows me to dodge. What else?"
I rattled off an effective mass-vector range necessary for a EDD-standard spellbook Shield spell. Starlight whistled as I added, "Fluttershy will convince the animals to stop and we’ll convince the bipeds to dismount; the guards need to fly around trying to convince them not to run while staying far enough away that they cannot be accurately shot at."
The stallion biped helped. He kneed his horse and yelled, but now the animal's own muddled thoughts consumed him. The giant horse didn't want to go straight, shying left or right depending on what he saw, and the companion mare stayed alongside despite them being within a hundred pony lengths from the forest line.
I landed and cast Shield. It was barely large enough for me and Fluttershy to stay behind. The tuning necessary to stop supersonic beads of lead heavily restricted the size of the spherical arc segment I could magically manifest.
Starlight disappeared. The guard made like distant flitting ghosts.
The horse stallion danced about as I approached and the red aura of the shield reflected in his eyes. The biped mare reached repeatedly to catch his bridle, but couldn't. He shied away when a green aura surrounded the stallion biped, but Starlight couldn't unhorse him because of the tack he had his feet in, and his grip on the animal's barrel. The bipeds shouted until the biped mare slapped the stallion's flank.
His horse jumped into motion and a few heartbeats later, she dashed afterward.
I saw Starlight flying amongst the trees of the forest, then land on a high branch.
Her levitation spells hadn't served to unhorse the bipeds. Instead, she suddenly bent down a branch as the horses rode in.
The biped stallion flipped backward out of the saddle. His horse reared as Starlight nevertheless caught the injured fellow before a high fall compounded his injuries, laying him on the grass.
The biped mare turned to face me and Fluttershy as we approached, yelling angrily. Her horse danced in place, clearly now becoming worried, bobbing her head and fighting her reins, having seen the other biped fall, and having noticed us, if not the guard, and found us unfamiliar and scary. The biped mare moved her giant horse protectively between her and him. Those hooves would hurt if one struck, and the way my shield was tuned, it offered no protection for something that slow.
But the semi-transparent arc of the red glowing apparition looked imposing. I did not doubt the biped guessed its purpose if not its nature.
Fluttershy began speaking.
The horse immediately quieted. A few moments later, the other horse appeared in the trees, peering cautiously around a trunk before nickering querulously. In the relative quiet that brought, the biped stallion groaned.
The biped mare fought her mount, but the mount out-massed her and it asserted its will as Fluttershy reassured it that we weren't scary and that she needed to be calm. When Fluttershy asked it to walk aside, the biped mare became agitated and jumped off her horse to crouch over her fallen mate.
She unholstered a knife that resembled mine. It was good that it was only a knife. I surmised she would have taken out a hoof-cannon had she had one. The gray and brown weirdly splotched clothing made sense, as did the blackening makeup; it did help her blend into the shadows.
I dropped the shield and cast Illuminate. She shielded her eyes with a fleshy claw, watching us nervously as Fluttershy walked away with the horses, deep in conversation. Fluttershy's voice tinkled as she laughed at whinnies that still sounded inarticulate to me. The biped mare's emerald green eyes reflected my light, as did her shiny hair. She waved the knife in warning when I came within ten pony lengths.
Or maybe it was when Starlight landed beside me encased in a green glow. As she canceled Pegasus Simulation, I reiterated,"I said, no creature gets hurt."
"Sorry about that. It worked, though."
I sighed, then put a hoof up to stop the guard who hovered, coming closer, each with a javelin out. "Please stay back."
The guard did, mostly.
A sudden crackling hiss broke the gathered silence. I heard a bleep, then a distorted biped voice asking a question.
She looked at her hip. I spotted a black amulet with a stick coming out of its top. Starlight grabbed the knife and I grabbed the obvious communication device.
The biped mare shrieked. Had she the strength, I think she would have grabbed her mate and run into the forest, but he out-massed her and considering how he only groaned, I gathered the bipeds were neither as strong nor resilient as ponies.
Which meant I had to do something because we had hurt her mate.
I moved closer. That Starlight took the opportunity to check their pockets and belts for weapons or devices with her magic didn't make it any easier. A tensed biped mare glared at me.
I said, "I know you can't understand me, but we really don't want to hurt you."
For a creature with such beady eyes, she held them quite widely. I could see their whites clearly. Fear, mostly. Maybe it occurred to her that I was talking to her, also, which likely frightened her even more. Despite weapons and clothing that seemed purpose-built to deceive, I doubted even more that I was dealing with military. I couldn't help but think they had thought this a game. Had been on some CMC-style quest. Had thought they were dealing with animals. I hoped one day that we would be able to laugh together and discuss what they had thought over some tea.
Part of me wanted to think they weren't as smart as a pony, but I quashed the idea. There was danger in underestimating any potential enemy.
"I'm sorry." I lowered my head in a small bow and spoke slowly. "We did not want to hurt anypony, but that is what happened. May I see if he is hurt?" I pointed a hoof.
She couldn't understand my words, but she let me close enough that I could hear his breathing. He wheezed. Blood smeared his chest where the impact had split the skin and wet his camouflage shirt. The biped seemed particularly fragile, and I wondered if maybe he had a broken rib or internal bleeding.
Starlight lit her horn, staying out of reach. I used Levitate to gently palpate the stallion's chest. He tensed and moaned, but I felt some bones move differently in the magical feedback than the rest, evidently incorrectly. He made a gurgling noise. The mare tensed, but didn't spring.
I said to Starlight, "He's badly hurt. I'm taking him to the hospital. The both of them are too heavy for me. Can you bring her?"
"I think I can."
A few seconds later I teleported the two of us out.
Ponyville General isn't a big hospital like in Canterlot or Manehatten, but considering the fifteen thousand ponies that lived in town and on the surrounding farms, it had plenty of business. Since my arrival, and certainly since the castle and the school were built, the royal purse had vastly modernized it with the latest equipment that bleeped and blatted, and refreshed it with a new green and yellow decor that boasted plenty of daisies and cherry-wood accents. Between being a bit of a klutz, and injuries I'd suffered protecting ponies, I knew the hospital way too well.
I teleported into the reception area, startling waiting ponies from the sofa and chairs. I spotted Rumble, too tired to flutter his wings with his red nose standing out against his gray fur. Thunderlane put up a wing over his brother, as others scrambled away.
The perfect in-teleport left me standing as the biped settled on the floor—which was flatter than the grass he'd lain upon, so he moaned.
The pink maned charge nurse, Nurse Tenderheart, rushed up. "Don't you think you need Dr. Fauna instead?"
"I think he's bleeding internally. Let's get him looked at and we can call Dr. Fauna while that's done."
The wiry creature took two gurneys, being almost one and half times longer than a pony. With no further delay, attendants wheeled him into the ER but insisted that I remain to restrain him. They gave me a face mask and sprayed antiseptic as they turned bright lights on him and began cutting away his stained shirt. Everything gleamed with white tile or shiny steel that could be completely sanitized. Three unicorns worked on the paired gurneys, using magic and machinery. Thread and utensils flew through the air.
He had left drops of blood on the reception floor.
Starlight's exit teleport made me jump and I turned to the doorway. I saw the lavender unicorn—frost steaming from her hide—and another. True to the spell, the magic had shoved the biped to the floor as there was no chance that she could stand in the doorway except crouched over. She grunted as she looked up, her muscles tensed as if ready to spring.
Starlight immediately cast Levitate around her, but didn't restrain her as she looked around. The biped looked astonished. I supposed that hospitals looked similar in every world, so maybe she recognized it—or had never seen its like. I could only speculate if one without magic could function affectively, but her gaze focused on her mate. Her eyes alighted on the heart monitor, which now beat regularly, sounding very much like the heart of a pony. She shuddered as she watched as the doctors cast repeated spells into his chest. The tension in her body caved suddenly and she collapsed with a heartfelt sigh.
Whatever she'd been thinking had changed.
Keeping an eye on the stallion lest he suddenly move, I approached the mare, motioning her inside to let a wary lime-green nurse trot in around her.
She understood, levered herself up though bent over, and approached a few pony-lengths closer.
I sat and spread my wings widely, motioning around me. "Hospital."
She blinked at me, then said a word too strange sounding to repeat.
I pointed at my own chest and said, "Twilight Sparkle."
She glanced at her mate, then at me, and said something that imitated my name, but her lips just couldn't buzz right as she said it. Then something miraculous happened. I saw something that resembled a smile as she pointed a claw at herself and said something guttural that sounded like, "Oh Neigh," followed by, "Broader," pointing at the stallion on the gurneys. She had tears in her tiny wary eyes, but I took it as a good sign.
Princess Celestia teleported in. She'd bowed her head, knowing she faced a low ceiling. A yellow pegasus, Dr. Fauna, frost on her hide, trotted past to assist the doctors.
"My guards informed me what happened. And this is one of the mysterious bipeds?"
The biped just stood dumbfounded, blinking in surprise. The whole teleport thing was probably beyond her comprehension, but then again Princess Celestia could not help but generate awe. She might be significantly shorter than one of their horses, but she gleamed. As did her regalia. And her particolor mane flowed in the zephyr of the magical pulse. Maybe the bipeds had their own royalty, for the biped made an obvious dip of her head. (She could scarcely do much else as her brown hair brushed the ceiling. I did notice a momentary strengthening of Starlight's spell around the mare.)
"Princess Celestia, this is Oh Neigh."
The alicorn ducked her head slightly in acknowledgement, then looked at the operation. "He will survive?" she asked.
A doctor said, "Broken ribs and a collapsed lung, but we're on it, Your Majesty."
The biped communicator took that moment to bleep and hiss in my saddle bag. I realized suddenly that I still wore the barking arrow, and the two other weapons strapped to me. Levitating the noisy black amulet to the princess, I said, "The others may know more about us than I hoped."
The princess brought the rounded device to her eye, as if looking for a hidden door for a breezie to hide inside, then shook it. "Then you had better put your plan into action, now," she replied. "I'm certain I can charm this young creature in your absence, and the clouds are gathered."
"I will need to return Oh Neigh and Broader to their brethren, shortly."
"An exchange of hostages?"
"Nooo. Okay, maybe. I did say creatures of applied force, didn't I? By that time, I hope it will be a simple good-faith return."
Princess Celestia simply sent me on my way. She didn't ask what my plan was, or why.
She didn't even tell me to be careful!
Her confidence confused the horse apples out of me.
As I trotted toward the reception area, I knew I did have a plan. I did feel focused. One could never do enough analysis, but having seen AJ tied up in the barn changed everything. When Lord Tirek had attacked Equestria, the princesses had guided me. They had given me their alicorn magic to hide and then use as necessary, but they had guided me. It wasn't until I'd encountered Lord Tirek hunting me that I'd become focused. When he had destroyed my home, and almost killed Owlicious, I'd stopped second guessing myself and became the embodiment of action.
We might have fought for days to a draw, destroying most of the farms of the northeastern Ponyville plain, but then Lord Tirek had conjured my friends and proven my choices hollow.
Now.
Yes, I'd had a few battles and many trials since that day, but it was a lesson learned that I didn't necessarily do the best thing when I followed my instincts. Even if in the end it taught me an essential lesson about friendship that led to the monster's ultimate defeat, Cozy Glow aside.
Through the glass doors, I found the pegasus guard at parade rest outside. I said, "Two of you, stay with her highness. The rest follow me," I said, jumping into the sky.
Starlight followed me, encased in her magic aura. "What are we doing?"
"Freeing Applejack. I need two unicorns that can teleport."
"And by that, you mean Trixie. I figured you'd learned about the cutie map."
I nodded. "Yes, I mean Trixie. It's unexpected that she's a high level unicorn, but I'll take it. How good is she?"
She smiled that quirky way we she did when she talked about a counseled student who'd done well. "Her aim isn't good, and she's better able to send things than to move herself, but she's progressing. Something tells me that you don't care where she teleports afterward, so long as it's away."
"Correct. But first we need to stop at Fix All's mechanic shop."
"I don't know about this," Trixie said, pacing beside her wagon, her breathing not yet exactly hyperventilating, but coming close. The powder blue stars on the roof and the crescent moons, stars, and wands on the shutters glowed faintly in the light of Luna's full moon, as did the paint on the wheels. The yellow trim on the windows looked pale in comparison, but drew attention and made sure everypony could see somepony unique lived here even when most homes looked faded at night. The purple wagon reflected Trixie's strengths as well as her showmanship, especially when you realized that she was only a unicorn and that she had pulled the heavy vehicle across Equestria. Alone.
Hidden strengths.
She continued. "You're talking about me, here, Starlight. Trixie is a Performer, a Great and Powerful one. Hero? Not so great and powerful." She was whispering when she finished with, "We got lucky."
I rolled my eyes, though everything she said was uncharacteristically true. "Heroes learn to make their luck," I added.
Unlike in Chrysalis' changeling hive, I had my magic. And we didn't have Discord, whom Twilight was worried wouldn't understand the seriousness of the situation, of keeping the monsters on this side of the gate, and might find it difficult not to make it more chaotic. I, on the other hoof, understood fighting. I'd run away as a foal, after Sunburst had earned his cutie mark. In Baltimare, I'd learned how to protect myself, and soon protected some shady individuals who maybe I shouldn't have until I had to run away again when I learned I couldn't save ponies from their own stupidity. I'd had plenty of practice fighting by the time I fought Twilight and her friends... the time all my Our Town plans crumbled. Since becoming friends, I'd continued fighting, only for better reasons.
I said, "I wasn't keen on the plan, either. Your teleportation leaves a lot to be desired."
"It's not that bad! My first try, the Cutie Map landed half a town away, and it didn't hurt anypony."
"Because the magic would have failed if it would have hurt anypony. Remember my lecture on limits?"
"There is that, but it was still definitely pretty good!"
"It was actually pretty fabulous, if you consider it weighs ten tons."
"Trixie is fabulous. Hey! You're trying to flatter me. Usually a good strategy—"
I stepped in front of her and we bumped muzzles. Despite the moonlight, Trixie colored and stepped back speechless. I added, "Remember, I fought Twilight to a draw, but she won me over by offering me friendship. She almost never wins when we have magic duels. I can protect you—and we need Twilight doing other things."
Trixie rubbed her nose and her light blue eyes caught mine. "Doesn't mean I like the idea."
"Yeah, I'm scared, too."
Trixie shuddered, but tentatively smiled. "Maybe a few smoke bombs would be in order?"
I breathed a sigh of relief when the last scout returned. We waited just around the bend on the road to Sweet Apple Acres. Clouds lightly jostled above, but clumped loosely such that some moonlight filtered down. The farm was situated amongst rolling hills and it was apparent that the clouds gathered only around the farm, which probably disconcerted the bipeds, assuming they noticed. Probably couldn't have noticed, but I've been told I was way too observant by too many ponies, but it was just a guess.
The bipeds seemed to have retreated to the farm, according to the scouts. Rainbow Dash had visited briefly to say she'd seen some return from the orchards and seen none leave. Together with the pegasus guard, after a discussion of what I might call for, she'd returned to shuffle clouds about to conceal any shadows from the ground.
I looked from Starlight to Trixie. The blue mare had her fight face on, but I knew her determined glare was a performance. I handed her Fix All's tool to hold in her magic; it resembled a large tree pruner. I said, "The stakes pounded into the dirt floor are 'grounding' AJ like a lightning rod. A teleport will fail because the spell thinks it has to move the entire world. Cut the cables holding AJ down first."
"O-kay."
I lit my horn and told them both, "Rainbow Dash said they've illuminated the interior of the barn, so let your eyes adjust, first, by looking at my light... Okay. Starlight, when you're ready..."
I wasn't ready. I'd gotten to like the quiet life of a school counselor!
Though, really, getting stuck in the magic Cozy Glow cast using magical artifacts did annoy me—needing a bathroom being only the half of it. "Oh, my! The Crown of Glover just floated out of its box. I followed it to this door into a sub-basement! I really do think you ought to take a look, Counselor Starlight, since you understand magic." She'd tricked me. I'd thought I'd been devious and calculating at her age, but she left me feeling I could easier predict Discord's actions.
The bipeds were worse. They weren't even ponies. They weren't even native to this world.
So, yes, I wasn't really ready, but I knew what I had to do. I'd been in Applejack's barn enough times so that when when everything went dark except for Twilight's blinding horn light, I imagined the center of the barn and triggered one of the half-dozen spells I'd prepped in my horn. I teleported.
After a few instants of completely dark in-between, I landed me and Trixie by the light of a dozen lanterns. AJ shouted, "Whoah!"
Trixie screamed and dropped her tool as I quickly looked around.
I counted seven who'd been sitting, talking. Three were at the barn doors. Four were at the opposite end of the barn, with us ponies between the two groups who scrambled around.
Just as Twilight had expected, they realistically couldn't shoot lest they endanger one another, but she had counseled that they didn't seem well trained either so not to count on it. "Trixie, throw the smoke bombs!"
She had already started as my last word came out. The bipeds scrambled this way and that as I cast my shield spell and crouched down. As I'd told Twilight, the shield spell I routinely used relied on a time component and it triggered even before I spoke the mnemonic, and since it progressed on its own, I had time to grab a hammer off a workbench, a hoe, and a few boards. I tossed them towards either end of the building to add to the confusion. What I didn't know was if my re-tuned spell would stop supersonic lead.
The thin glassy flasks Trixie had thrown—blown-sugar Hearthswarming Eve tree ornaments filled with separated ingredients—were light enough that they had air-resistance. The stuff I threw first landed as the bipeds dodged before the smoke bombs detonated with rapid cracks and puffs.
Coughing and hacking ensued as Trixie whirled around the bolt cutters. It had handles the length of her entire body and easily snipped the first wire grounding AJ with a loud ka-chunk. I heard yells as I heard a grunt as I heard the snap of the second cable. As AJ pulled the third cable taunt for Trixie, I heard one of the creatures screaming one long determined yell. The thump of his long legs made it easy to tell he ran through the smoke at me.
Snap! The third cable separated.
I hoped the shield spell would hold if he used a hoof-cannon, though I suspected I'd use my queued force spell if he got too close.
The biped, wearing a gray flannel shirt, his brownish mane in his face, hand-cannon drawn, had judged my position pretty well passing through the curtain of smoke.
And Trixie had judged well, too. The bolt cutters spun at him. Just in-time, he dodged, but tripped, and went diving.
I grabbed his hoof-cannon from his claws as he slid toward me, then pushed into my shield as if it were taffy.
The bolt cutters whizzed past in a blue aura. I heard a final ka-chunk.
Trixie's muzzle scrunched up as her horn lit with her magic. Two seconds later, AJ disappeared in a pop.
It was too much for the bipeds at the door. Maybe they thought the teleport pop was a shot, so they began firing.
Hard to miss the biped yells, even at a distance. I cast my updated shield spell as I flew forward, two of the royal guard and Spike flying behind me. Behind us came Winks, Shiny Hoof, and Sweet Tooth, all unicorns, and Big Mac who proved very stubborn. We were in no way an imposing force, but somepony had to be a focus of the bipeds when they started to worry and possibly started thinking whether to attack or flee. I needed to see and control the creatures to the greatest extent possible.
I heard shots.
I landed at the entrance to Sweet Apple Acres, propping my shield before us, getting the rest to crowd behind the puny thing. Tuned, it was barely three pony lengths wide, two high, and thick enough to make seeing the buildings ahead of us like seeing an oasis through a heat mirage. The luminous apparition wasn't close to a sphere. As a partial arc, it didn't even protect our sides, let alone our flanks. Starlight teleported in just behind me, with Trixie, who immediately collapsed, shaking.
"Are you hit?" asked Starlight.
Trixie said, "No. My legs are too shaky to stand!" The mare whined, trying to hug the ground.
I asked, "AJ?"
"Trixie imagined her bed. She wants to be under it right now!"
Starlight clarified, "I saw AJ teleported away."
Big Mac nickered. I heard him say, "yep" as his form retreated down the road. I cringed, looking quickly back toward the farm, expecting shots, but none came.
"Good enough," I said. "Spike, inform the princess. Everypony else, light up the farm."
The unicorns cast Illuminate on the farmhouse and the barn, just as the bipeds threw open the barn door. Oddly, the diffuse green, gold, and sky-blue lights popping on didn't seem to phase the bipeds as they streamed out from the house, also into the night, which was good because I wanted them outside and not shooting using the house like crenellations on a castle or as arrow slits as protection.
They yelled at one another and scrambled for the vehicles.
As I saw a reflection of Spike's green flames, I shouted, "Volley!"
The guards behind me wound up, whirled, and each launched a javelin. Their offensive attack worked more efficiently, I understood, if they tossed while flying, but their launch had to be unmistakable even as the bipeds shielded their eyes from the bright light.
The two thunked into the ground to either side of the truck parked in front of the farmhouse as if teleported.
Three others appeared out of nowhere to either side of the barn doors. A half-dozen bipeds dove into the dirt facing us, apparently not suspecting where the extra javelins had dropped from.
"There were seven in the barn," Starlight said, "And I count seven."
I pointed at the barn and yelled, "Volley!"
Three more pointed sticks bloomed from the ground. The bipeds, some now with hand-cannons unholstered, dodged toward the house.
The guard knew their orders. Individual javelins struck dirt and the steps of the veranda before the startled creatures, quivering and upright. It quickly deterred returning into the house, but it didn't stop three from dashing for the truck, each throwing open a door, diving in, and slamming the door behind them.
The engine roared to life.
I shouted, "Volley!" as the truck lurched forward.
While the pegasi behind me whirled and launched two more javelins with enchanted diamond tips in an upward arc, a dozen javelins fell from the sky this time. Two hit in the vehicle's path, two splintered, and two bounced off. Six pierced the metal armor of the engine cover in a line just up to the glass enclosure. The engine made a sudden destructive Clank! The truck stopped so abruptly, the rear wheels lifted and the vehicle skidded onward, toward the entrance to Sweet Apple Acres, finally sliding sideways. The last two sent from behind me, landed to the right and left of the truck.
I didn't like the implication of the biped's intent. Had they wanted to hit us or scatter us? Vapor arose from the front of the vehicle as a couple bipeds dived for the cover of the disabled vehicle.
Cover from us.
Five stood in the middle of the yard, carrying barking arrows. None made to use them. None looked at the sky. It hadn't occurred to them yet. Maybe the horse riders hadn't reported their findings? It felt inescapable that no creature had missed seeing my wings or that of the guard. Had they completely missed our charge? If they had no winged-horses, and there was no way I could have been certain they did not, perhaps the implications just hadn't come to their minds.
Yet.
In any case, I had their attention now. "Starlight, please take my hoof-cannons and knife and lay them beside the shield."
I could tell by the tilt of the biped's heads that they had noticed that the hand-cannons and the knife had floated aside. I gave them a minute and had Starlight holster the weapons again, then put them aside. Starlight was careful never to point the muzzle at any creature, but nevertheless, I'd seen a few shudder when they saw my weapons re-holster.
Having witnessed the giant stallion lose its composure earlier, which directly made it easier for us to find and capture his masters, I mused about what went on in their biped heads. They saw what their experience and world view led them to believe were dumb animals. Not only that, we were substantially smaller than themselves or their giant-sized horses
And I carried a hoof-cannon. And a barking arrow. And a knife.
It made more of an impression than all the magic before them.
Because they could understand that.
I waited a minute and repeated the act.
Starlight muttered, "I'm not impressed with biped intelligence. They are tenacious, though. I'll give them that."
"See that black-haired stallion with the red shirt whose arm is drooping? Can you pull his hoof-cannon to the ground?"
She imitated Big Mac. "E-yup."
When a green aura blossomed around his fleshy claw and tugged hard, he overbalanced. He stumbled, arm down. Possibly due to the unaccustomed tingle of magic, he also tossed the weapon from his grasp with a yelp. Starlight planted it on the ground as he backed away, pushing down with her magic.
The bipeds suddenly clumped together, speaking loudly, pointing at the hoof-cannon that thus far hadn't pointed at them but seemed to radiate a greenish glow.
I wasn't sure if it made them feel more or less threatened or more or less likely to disarm. Language was a barrier.
One of the guards muttered, "Don't they know they're making themselves better targets?"
The other said, "Herd instinct. First thing you gotta train out of the recruits."
I repeated my pantomime of laying aside the weapons five more times until the frustration bubbled up. "Ugh! What am I missing? Are there other bipeds that escaped us and they're waiting for them to attack? Are they waiting for reinforcements?"
Starlight squinted into the well manicured apple orchards on the farm side of the fence and the woods, methodically cleared of undergrowth, on this side of the fence. "Pegasi have pretty good night vision."
"Winks, can you move your light to the trees on the right?" The yellow ball of illumination glided away like a breezie with a lantern lofted in the wind, leaving the red floating near the barn and the blue near the house. The pegasus guard were to drop javelins if they saw any creature in the orchard or forest, to herd them and bring attention to the stragglers.
Nothing. The yellow globe of light meandered back and over to the other side. Nothing on the left, either.
As Winks moved the light back and in place, making the farm look like an oddly lit Hearths Warming Eve display, I said, "Reinforcements, based on what looks like an amateur operation, don't seem likely, and they'd be spotted."
Trixie, still prone, her hooves over her head and mashing down her mane, said, "Trixie thinks they could just be scared. Not everypony saves Equestria for a living, you know."
Starlight and I huffed at the same time. When I looked into her violet eyes, we both smiled. "I can see that. Or, they could be worried about the horse-rider bipeds."
"Or hoping the pair will rescue them?" Starlight asked.
I thought about the stallion, who had trouble controlling his mount, then about the mare's reactions. I wasn't entirely sure they were even supposed to be in Equestria, but like the CMC, perhaps they were allowed to stay once they arrived? I shook my head. "No. I don't think they're counting on a sweeping rescue." As I repeated the disarming pantomime one more time, I said, "Spike, ask the princess when the horse riders will be ready for that good-faith return."
Her response came about ten minutes later in the form of the sound of marching hooves up the road from the direction of Ponyville.
A special express train from Canterlot could have made it down the mountain if the princess had summoned them before she flew to Ponyville. Pegasus-pulled carriages might have been faster. I heard the sound of a platoon before I could see them, and so, too, it seemed, could the bipeds who were pointing with their outstretched claws.
My heart raced as my first thought was that my shield spell was too puny.
Second: Hadn't I ordered everypony to stay away?
As the first royal guard, all unicorns, marched into view, I first saw the sparkle and shimmer of fifty highly-tuned shield spells. The troops had formed a shield-wall and dome of overlapping auras in red, blue, yellow, and green—and one purple. All but about five looked like thick, semi-translucent, small-arc anti-hoof-cannon shields; the rest were more typical unicorn shields against spears and force spells. Needing less magic, they added a second ethereal layer of intersecting spheres. The view reminded me of visualizations I'd seen of electron shells around a simple molecule.
In the center of the defensive group trotted a large white alicorn, wings flared, with her regalia and crown gleaming in the moonlight, head and withers above all the other ponies. Beside her, a head taller, walked the brown-haired biped mare pushing the biped stallion in an improvised giant wheelchair formed from a big-wheeled black and red-lacquered pony cart, probably a Meadowbrook. His chest was wound with white bandages and he wore a neck brace.
I was not happy, and craning my neck behind me then quickly looking forward was beginning to give me whiplash—besides, it distracted me.
"Starlight. Tell me if any creature moves." I turned to face the rapidly approaching alicorn.
"Well, that's something," Starlight said.
I now craned my neck back toward the farm to see that many of the bipeds had lowered their weapons, mostly so they were dangling. While magical auras and moonlight did provide some illumination, I was willing to accede that the bipeds had at least some night vision.
"Princess Celestia," I said. "I asked you to stay away."
"And you did, for my safety. But Captain Shining Armor did train my royal guard in his special talent, Twilight, and you are not the only pony who can calculate shield equations from observed empirical data."
"Still." I scuffed a hoof in the dirt. As the royal guard gathered around my vanguard, their shields slid aside and brought us within the defensive perimeter. I sighed, letting my shield dispel. Continuously casting it had begun to become exhausting. I couldn't fathom how Shiny had done it for days at a time, even while asleep. I'd probably have had nightmares worrying I'd fail...
"Besides," the princess said, using her magic to lift my chin. "You said that you thought shows of force would impress the bipeds. I think this should do nicely."
I grumbled, barely audibly, "And let them know what we can do, too!"
Feathers chucked under my chin lifted my eyes to her purple ones. She smiled and tapped her ear with the other wing before folding them both. "Teacher ears, Twilight. And you are right. But we've listened to what you said and to what you meant, too. These misguided bipeds aren't going anywhere. As we speak, Luna is constructing a—for lack of a better word—mausoleum to entomb the portal. Composed of ton granite blocks from the deposits you thrust to the surface fighting Tirek. And she knows well how to cast Shield. She invented her own version her first day as an alicorn."
I took a deep breath.
Beware of what you wish for. It might have been might greatest desire to have Princess Celestia's confidence in my actions. Now, it threatened to make me insane.
"Okay," I said, glancing above at the slowly circulating clouds above the farm. I calculated that Luna had probably commandeered half the pegasus guard. I trusted that she had. To protect her flank as she raised up stone from the ground or conjured it. I had dropped the top of a hill on Lord Tirek. Considering how he had completed Cozy Glow's corruption, I so wished that had finished him, though that I had wanted to, and would have had to deal with the psychological consequences had I succeeded, troubled me. Nevertheless, turning to look at the bipeds, I thought about conjuring and dropping stone blocks, something only an alicorn could do quantitatively. Unicorn magic might be, as some scholars quipped, composed of giggles and rainbows and unable to directly do harm, but you could heat and project a cylinder of air with Force and throw rocks into the sky with Levitate. The magic didn't understand intent beyond the extent of the magical apparition.
I really hated that I'd become good at fighting, and thinking of fighting.
Princess Celestia said, "But you're also the Princess of Friendship."
It took all my control not to startle or tense up. Sunset Shimmer had written from the other side of the mirror. Harmony magic there had provided her an elemental jewel that allowed her to see images from another pony's mind. While it felt like Celestia had done that, this wasn't that.
That was Celestia stating the obvious, to remind me to focus.
I narrowed my eyes. The bipeds stubbornly kept hold of their weapons. Behind me stood the unicorn power necessary to rip them from their grasp, but better that they surrender willingly. Oh Neigh's behavior, and Celestia's acceptance of her beside her, convinced me that the bipeds had the capacity for friendship.
I had holstered the hoof-cannon, knife, and barking arrow unconsciously. I sighed after I repeated the pantomime. After a minute, I thought of demonstrations of power.
"Princess Celestia?"
"Yes, Twilight."
"Could you please raise the sun?"
After about three seconds, the princess began to laugh. She sounded a bit like Nightmare Moon.
It wasn't as if I hadn't heard my mentor laugh gleefully before, and I'd never forget Luna, possessed by her mania, do the same. It was just that Celestia usually evinced a calm motherly demeanor. Except when it had to do with a very special dessert, usually the one with Chantilly cream and brandy strawberries, or if I hit on one of her most arcane areas of interest. Butterflies, homeless ponies, and ponies with learning disabilities being the most memorable. It was at these times that she could act like Rainbow Dash with a Daring Do book—and suddenly I wouldn't feel like the only über-nerd in the room.
A kindred spirit.
Celestia levitated the ponies and bipeds aside to give herself a wing-length of room. She positively glowed.
No, I mean she glowed.
Actually glowed.
I'd seen her raise the sun a dozen times, and Luna the moon. In this, Luna was the more exuberant. She often reared and pedaled her hooves, like nothing else in life gave her more joy than to see her old friend. Neither alicorn needed more than a lit horn to cast her spell.
I'd raised the sun, once. It had levitated me over my bed and caused my mane and tail to course in the swirling magic. It had felt... I hadn't really been able to think about it at the time because of my fears. In retrospect, it hadn't exhausted me at all. It was as if my spell—which had not been Levitate but had fallen into a groove that required Motivate, like in the turning of a wheel—was more like opening a valve on a pipe than my magic filling the pipe with water.
It was like... being struck by lightning but the lighting flowed around me from the Earth to the heavens. Not exhausting at all. Being the conduit... it felt more like I had been thanked.
I'd probably intuited the spell thanks to the delightful mountain of arcana Celestia had given me to study prior to and following my becoming an alicorn, as well as having watched her cast so many times.
She explained, "The first time I cast it, I'd cast it to save my father from terminal melancholy. He fully expected to die before the sun rose, and in those days the sun rose and set every two or three days, so without a clock who knew when it would rise and we were poor so didn't have one. I told him to hold on, that it would rise in moments. It had to. And it did. I was so focused I don't remember much else and Father never said what he saw that day."
The air around the princess shimmered and her mane and tail began to flutter toward her muzzle as if a steadily increasing wind blew upward from the earth. Sparkles scintillated upward around her in a fountain of glimmers as the magical flow lifted her from her hooves, even as she spread her wings to balance herself. The heat radiating from her became like from a fireplace, causing everypony to step further away.
And a good thing. The golden glow around her, her aura, became brighter. In an instant her mane and tail ignited. Though the hair wasn't consumed, it became as if flames, dancing and crackling.
Celestia's laughter grew louder over the roar of her magic. She continued, "I did not know why I'd gotten a solar cutie mark saving my father. Years later, in a place and time where being a mare didn't count for much, I tried hard to help my autistic brother get into a wizard school. The final test was going to be for the finalists to help the other wizards raise the sun. As I watched the fumbling convocation from a distance, their spell chanting triggered my magic. I did not understand that I did not have to be the conduit for the spell, which resulted in much burnt clothing.
"This is my original spell."
At that, she reached the apex of her demonstration. The fiery winged pony, levitated a pony-length above the ground, rearing, faced the eastern horizon, opposite Sweet Apple Acres. With a flick of her neck, the sun slid from the edge of the world into the sky, dispelling the night and instantly turning the sky blue. I'd seen the Stormking use a staff to effortlessly spin the sun repeatedly through the sky, but Princess Celestia had always been measured and gentle in how she moved the orb.
This was no ordinary sunrise, though.
This was theater.
In a matter of seconds, it went from dawn to noon, with the sun hidden behind the gathered clouds. It drew gasps from the bipeds and the gathered ponies.
I spun around to face the farmhouse. To my horror, I saw an array of deformed lead missiles embedded in the shields. While the impacts spread over a target circle almost a pony-length in radius, most were above my head. I heard a buzz and a ricochet before I saw a burnt tunnel where one had actually drilled through but flown astray. It took me an instant to remember that an untested spell was by definition a bad spell—and to remember why I'd wanted Celestia no where near this confrontation.
In the precious seconds it took me to comprehend the situation, more lead appeared. The trajectory of each left a further embedded black trail. Each impact flashed blue, regardless of shield color, followed by a blooming of opaque yellow with red radiating out with the forward mass vector dissipated as heat. The size of some of the strikes was different. They may have been higher or much lower velocities than I'd deduced, coming from a different hoof-cannon. Each strike over time dug deeper. Like a glass laminate struck by multiple stones, the massed shield spell apparition was turning to snow and failing.
I heard the grunts of the unicorns feeling the feedback.
I flashed back to me on the telescope balcony of the Golden Oak Library. I'd trained the instrument at the centaur a mile outside of Ponyville. I saw his fisted claws and body tense as a ball of fiery magic bloomed between his up-curved horns. The bloom increased in size and brightened. The realization struck that Tirek had combined the magic he'd stolen into the equivalent of a force spell. The resultant plasma propagated toward me.
I'd jerked back in surprise, but hadn't frozen. I'd remembered Owlowiscious on his perch atop my desk that morning, his head tucked under his wing.
Had he not been still sleeping...
In those few instants, at least two bipeds had discharged their barking arrow at Princess Celestia. Suddenly seething, worse than I'd seethed when I'd been Lord Tirek's only target, I did not freeze this time either.
I teleported.
I found myself in Applejack's living room. The sofa had been shoved aside from the window and the table knocked over to form a wooden shield across the wide-open door. Shattered earthenware littered the floor.
I confronted two biped stallions, one hunched over because he was too tall for the room. If one could judge by pony standards, the smaller was also the elder. He had salt and pepper hair that was both short and mostly salt. His gray beard hung down like Starswirl's. Both bipeds wore tough blue pants and similar short-sleeved red flannel shirts. The graybeard had brown eyes and the other had blue.
I knew this because they looked at me in shock after hearing the exit pop of my teleport.
Though I wasn't an expert at barking arrow technique or technology, it looked like I'd caught the graybeard exchanging a discharged weapon for a reloaded similar one. These barking arrows were the heaviest duty devices I'd yet seen, and there were three different kinds with different muzzle sizes. Split cardboard boxes lay scattered on the floor beside three piles of brass-clad cannon reloads, positioned for quick teamwork.
Earth ponies, pegasi, dragons, and bipeds have a disadvantage compared to a unicorn when it comes to manipulation. The ability to quickly move one's hooves, lips, wings, claws, or hands into position to manipulate an object always proves proportional to an equation of mass and change in vector, subject to muscular control, strength, and inertia. All species can react similarly quickly, based on age and wakefulness, but a unicorn only has to cast a spell that is never subject to inertia or, to a reasonable extent, distance.
In the "hand"-over of the weapon, the graybeard had a grip on the barrel of the barking arrow and on the fletching at the rear. The stallion had to grab for the trigger, getting a claw into the loop first, at a distance of about three hoof-lengths.
And to aim, at me, at the same time.
To the extent that Starlight had taught me anything about her quick-draw magic casting techniques—like I've said, she almost always won our magic duels—it was to immediately have in-horn a spell when the last one completed. I hadn't had one in my first battle with Lord Tirek in my angered mind when I teleported.
But I'd learned much in the subsequent years. How my go-to use of Force ultimately failed to subdue Lord Tirek, and how I, multi-alicorn-enhanced, had devastated the lands and orchards around Ponyville, incidentally resulting the quarry Luna now mined for her portal mausoleum. My impulse to use Force had failed me miserably when Fizzlepop Berrytwist had conquered Canterlot. The apparitional reflection off their Chrysalis-throne-rock shields had destroyed a bridge and dumped us in the East Canterlot Cascade. We had been incredibly lucky statistically as well as kinetically that the seven of us missed the various extrusive crags and granite erosional structures going over the edge and during our descent!
And that didn't include the boulders deposited in the lake...!
What I had queued in Applejack's house turned out to be Levitate. And as burning numbers and vector math swirled into my horn and dashed across my vision, I realized it was because my subconscious had been working overtime. Nevertheless, as Graybeard's hand wrapped around the trigger mechanism, I shoved upwards.
Hard.
The sudden acceleration didn't rip the weapon free, but drew his forelegs, no, arms, with the barking arrow into the ceiling. He yelped as his hands struck. At which point he let go.
A good thing, too. It occurred to me that had he succeeded in discharging the barking arrow, it would have pierced the roof and might have endangered the pegasi in the clouds.
Thinking of pegasi condensed my subconscious into my conscious mind. I had instructed the pegasi royal guard what to do if the bipeds attacked. Levitate and Shield were mathematical transforms of the same spell arcana, with the former being the application of force as a vector at one or multiple points and the latter being a weaving of magic to form a fabric that could absorb force vectors.
My reddish aura had formed a roiling cloud of sparkles at the muzzle and the rear of the barking arrow's fletching. As I pushed to make my horn calculate the needed transform, and Graybeard's salt-and-pepper mane contacted a wood rafter, I saw the aura bubble and spread. It thinned and became syrupy, and, as such, the magical liquid—or more aptly, liquid spiderweb—rushed into a dome shape as gravity and proximity to its magical source, myself, caused it to curve. Gravity took over from the acceleration I'd applied with Levitate and the biped began to fall.
A good thing, that. From the roof, the stuttered Cracks! were deafening.
Twelve diamond-pointed javelins blasted through the ceiling like the tines of a fork through softened butter. The guard had probably cast down just before I teleported. Attuned to any attack on the princess—princesses if they included me—why would they not have?
The air above the shield transformed instantly into a maelstrom of splinters and diamond dust. Sharp debris ricocheted and banged against walls. The glass in the windows shattered. A vase with sunflowers near the entrance to the kitchen burst, splashing water. Not all the javelins splintered, however. These struck with their remaining mass vectors down on my shield. Adding the magical feedback from shattered javelins to the total heat dissipation of the entire attack, it translated into a downward shove.
Never discount the incredible strength after a wind-up throw of a trained pegasus with a javelin. Or twelve of them.
It flattened me to the floor. Like a fly hit by a fly swatter. Mediated by unicorn magic, I found my legs folded, but that didn't stop me from smacking my chin on the floor. Blue and purple phosphenes bloomed across my vision and I saw four bipeds. Two sets of twins.
The bipeds, not magically connected to the shield, faired better. The magical apparition only swatted them on the head as it jerked downward. The younger of the pair, shoved back by the curve of the dome toward the shield's anchor point, my horn, collided with Graybeard and landed into a pile of legs and arms to my right. Graybeard moaned even as he flailed his arms to reach his dropped weapon.
I had lost Shield. The three of us lay on the floor, together, within hoof-reach. Unprotected.
I groaned as I levered myself up. Biped eyes locked on my own as we all recovered from the stunning blow. One of the javelins slid with the sound of wood on wood to fall to the wood floor. It bounced and toppled over, clattering between me and them. A second one dropped, and stuck into the dark varnished wood planking. The bipeds' eyes locked on that one as it momentarily vibrated.
I shouted, "Halt!"
I didn't think that the guard would launch a second volley, but had they not figured out that I'd teleported inside, they might. The sound of my voice sent shocks of pain between my eyes.
Before I could fully stand, Graybeard again grabbed for the weapon—instead of me, which would have been arguably more effective. As he did so, I cast Levitate.
I ripped the weapon from his hand. He had tried to grab it by the trigger, but hadn't calculated the weight of the weapon and had barely gotten it sliding.
He yelped, pulling his hand to his stomach, as I spun the barking arrow out the broken window, hitting the remaining knife blade shards of the panes. The glass and the metal device landed with the sound of a cascade of glass... and a single discharge that rang loud in the momentary silence. As I finished standing, I glided the other weapons after the first, hoping for a safer result.
Graybeard leapt at me. Now he did, though further away than before.
More liked tried to leap. The younger, on top of him, wrestled with him to keep him from his feet. They shouted and fell over each other, throwing punches, while I warped Shield to center around them. That left an apparition resembling a transparent red stepped-upon balloon, the bulge toward me, but I didn't need pretty. I collapsed it so it gave them little more than a biped-length and trotted to the rear of the room, then pushed them toward the door.
Not wanting to be swept prone along the debris strewn floor, the two stumbled to their feet, teetering at first, but kept upright, bouncing against the spell field with repeated zats and zaps as I collapsed the circumference of the spell to a pony-length.
I marched them through the door, across the veranda, and down the steps. I trotted behind, tail high, ears forward, beginning to smile.
Probably, I should have looked first.
If the bipeds hadn't yet intuited the purpose of the apparitions we'd held between us and them, they certainly did now. Ahead, the invaders waited. Some had sat or knelt, minimizing their targeting surface. The rest stood there... I had to characterize their wide eyes as shock. None had dropped their hoof-cannons. I could hear the wind... and the crunch of shoes and horseshoes in the fan of glass and wood splinters we traversed.
Eerie.
When I glanced right, I saw the distant entrance to the farm and the multicolored shields. Behind, I saw Princess Celestia towering over the rest. Oh Neigh had dropped to the ground beside her mate who had shrunk to the side of the Meadowbrook, looking at the princess.
What I'd mistaken for the sound of the wind had been the ongoing whoosh of the firestorm that raged above the Princess to a height of twenty pony-lengths. Everypony had spread away from her as the smokeless flames licked and swirled above her, forming a dust devil of orange and red.
I remembered Starlight's retelling of her nightmare the night after she had inadvisedly switched the princess' cutie marks. I could clearly see the whites of Celestia's eyes. They weren't black. I saw no pointed dragon teeth. This wasn't the nightmare mania taken over. Not the Daybreaker described to me, which could have just been Starlight's deductive mind generating a nightmare persona for Celestia.
I judged there was some princessly history I was not yet privy to...
Starlight popped into existence beside me, frost steaming from her withers.
"Time to g-go!" she chimed-in in that falsely bright and cheerful nervous way she did when she got very worried.
"No!" I said before she could teleport me away.
"Shield?" she asked.
"No.
"No?"
"Tell Celestia to release Oh Neigh and Broader."
She pursed her lips, but vanished with a pop and a spray of sparkles.
When I looked back at the bipeds, one let his hoof-canon drop from his hands. It was a start, anyway. As I came as close as I would to the group, I shoved the shield spell forward and dispelled it. The two stallions staggered forward, arms windmilling, only to knock over three of their fellows who jumped to try to catch them.
Two further hoof-cannons and a barking arrow rattled as they hit the ground.
I was close enough to the giants that I had to look up into their faces as they dealt with the returned two, though the younger still positioned himself to pin the struggling patriarch to the ground. They yammered amongst themselves, with the younger pointing toward the house and probably describing the javelins, two of which stuck out of the roof.
The volume of their talk increased when a shout from Oh Neigh made them look. She was pushing the Meadowbrook, running toward them. Her mate winced at every rock that rattled the pony cart.
Graybeard took advantage of the distraction. I saw in my peripheral vision that he'd grabbed a knife from a boot. He lunged at me.
He didn't get far.
The younger tackled him. He went down, belly first, with a loud woof.
I cast Force as Starlight once again popped in beside me. In a second, the blade glowed bright red.
"Yow!" he cried, flinging it away.
As Starlight stood there, her eyes keen on the bipeds before her, her hide steaming from her third teleport in a row, I cast Levitate on the incapacitated truck nearby since it offered the bipeds cover and obscured my complete view of them. The thing weighed celestial-tons, but I had no need to be careful with it or to worry if I might damage or drop it.
I did grunt as I lifted up one side of it. The thing bounced on its springy suspension. As I bounced it, gaining momentum, one door swung open, then slammed. It slid about three pony-lengths, then rolled over. I capitalized on that and let it roll over five times before it stopped beside a fence.
Starlight, more practical than I was, swept away the seven dropped weapons, including the knife and what I'd thrown out the windows, into the orchard.
I guess I should acknowledge that she didn't just fling the bipeds into another dimension the way she had with Discord.
She matured every day.
It took Oh Neigh a few minutes to calm every creature. At one point, she fiercely hugged Graybeard, perhaps her grandpa, as she spoke urgently to him. He kept stealing glares at me, and at some point I understood that I would have to discover what hate filled his eyes.
Nevertheless, what Oh Neigh said, and some that Broader added, worked the final bit of magic. Very cautiously, keeping their weapons and hands in view, the remaining bipeds placed their hoof-cannons and barking arrows on the ground.
Keen-eyed Rainbow Dash shouted above, "Clear it!"
In moments, the pegasi started kicking the clouds out of the sky. While I hadn't ordered it, the pegasi royal guard, brass armor gleaming in the noontime sun, and the rest of the pegasi of Ponyville beside them swooped down and settled in a circle surrounding our guests.
Many biped mouths dropped open.
"No," I told Starlight when she made to gather up the surrendered weapons, probably to teleport them away. "These are their belongings."
Methodically, and slowly, I took each weapon, spun revolving parts, pulled magazines, ejected the contents of slide clips, emptying the ammunition on the ground. Then, with Starlight's help, we checked each pocket, holster, belt, boot, and hat to assure nothing sharp or dangerous or which we had no clue to what it did remained in their possession. I did let Starlight sequester the ammunition, of course.
And so the hard part began: Showing our "guests" that we meant no harm, and learning whether their biped nation posed a threat to Equestria. All that had to start with learning the language.
I pointed to myself and said, "Pony," then at Starlight and said, "Pony."
I got blanks stares. After our fierce struggles, there were obviously cultural issues to deal with.
I woke up, my face smushed into a strange pillow of gooey (but dry) elasticity. It didn't smell of pony, but something I could only think of as a melange of pollen, farm-animal, and machine oil. My hooves made a zzzzt sounds as I glided my legs under the silky sheets. Woven of an almost magical type of linen, they stretched and breathed like no fabric I knew, keeping me cool despite what had been a warm desert night.
I heard repeating chirps and trills, but I could not identify the bird species despite Fluttershy's thorough instruction. The sound of my movement echoed back not from a large open crystalline space, but from a more compact volume, possibly wooden. I couldn't remember when I'd fallen exhausted into bed.
I remembered a dream, about how the world had changed but everything really was the same, populated with ponies and monsters, responsibilities and discoveries—but it was fading despite my clinging to it, trying to make it real.
Disoriented, I blinked and lifted my head in the near dawn light.
I looked toward a window, but saw naught but sky. A bright orange and yellow one, clearly the result of atmospheric dust and layers of disorderly cirrus reflecting light. On impulse, I popped out of bed and trotted to the window, hooking my hooves on the window frame.
As you well know, you normally must be vigilant to experience the dawn. Depending on Princess Celestia's prior evening schedule, and her need for sleep, the twilight could last for minutes or almost an hour, and could start suddenly early or late. Sometimes, Luna would put the moon away and there would be neither orb in the sky for long periods of time. But when the dawn began, the sky would transform from a sea of deep blues and stars, with dabs and smears of red on the eastern horizon, to a wash of spilt orange watercolors flooding the sky, to a burst of yellow before the luminous orb of fire inched upward to become a blinding light in a endless blue sky. The liminal time might last as much as a minute, or it could be over in seconds.
I often mused that sometimes Princess Celestia stretched on her balcony while she performed her morning duty, delaying the coming of day. Or maybe she just yawned a lot.
It had taken me less than fifteen seconds to raise the sun that one time. With the magic of four alicorns, it wasn't that it was hard. It wasn't that I didn't understand the feedback, or that it was more of an ask than a spell. I didn't understand that the sun actually wanted to rise but needed guidance. As of last night, I knew that she—yes, she!—needed magic channelled to her from the heart of the earth itself, and getting that right was Celestia's cutie mark talent. In my case, the sun had kept jumping the tracks in the crystal sphere and that had confused her directional sense. The way I'd done it, had I understood, it would have been instant like the way the Stormking had.
I had had many questions for my mentor. Last night I'd learned much to fill in what I hadn't known, as well as my misunderstandings the day I had raised the sun into the sky.
Our world is a complicated place and, despite books compiled over the length of a millennium by scientists and historians, there are still discoveries to be made.
And this—this alien world—was another.
I looked out across an immense valley. Between listening to the bipeds, watching images on a babble-machine called a "smarteeveee", and perusing all the books in the house, I was able to decipher a map in the office and locate our position at the base of the eastern Sea-air-a mountains. The Inn-yo range formed a blue and gray wavy-ribbon streak at the bottom of the western sky. We were in "Cauliflowernia" somewhere between a town of giant lakes and "Beeshop," part of a continent-spanning federation many times the size of the pony nation. Slowly, and I mean slowly, over minutes, the sky brightened. I detected a pattern in the clouds, but pegasi never arranged them this way. Cirrus were clouds of glassy ice; they were decorative and high in the sky, so pegasus ponies rarely bothered bringing them out. These acted like a frivolous gauzy veil, taunting me as if they were put up just for my benefit. I squinted as a bead of orange and yellow blossomed over a peak... before it methodically rose and brightened until I had to raise my hoof.
It was like Celestia had slammed her hooves down on the springs and wound the celestial clockwork below the horizon, letting the sun trudge upward on her own.
But the ballet I witnessed outside was not that. No magic was involved, just beautiful, neigh I say it, awesome science.
In this land, physics, gravity, and momentum reigned supreme. The sun wasn't a city-sized disk of magical fire. Nor was the moon a self-luminous rock, though it did at least orbit the earth at a tremendous speed, falling and always falling around the earth and never hitting it. It was huge. The earth was huge. The law of gravitation and simple geometry elucidated everything. The bipeds' sky wasn't a crystal sphere. Their sun was something gargantuan, and by my calculation, incredibly distant and mind-bogglingly large and energetic. Neither magic nor combustion lit the inferno; it just burned outrageously and wastefully, expending its entire output to no purpose but for an inconsequential but necessary fraction that beamed this world's way.
I would learn why, one day, but not today. The bipeds living in this house had scant love of science, at least as evidenced by their library.
None of the last day had been a dream.
There was a portal.
There was a group of bipeds.
Those bipeds had used the portal to invade Equestria.
From the gray hairs I'd found tangled in a brush, little scissors, and a tiny tube of mustache wax in an attached bathroom, I knew I had just slept in Graybeard's bed. That had been the scent of his perspiration in my nostrils.
I was comfortable with the deduction that he was the patriarch of the clan. It was his desk I'd found, and his cache of ammunition and weapons. It had been his safe I had sundered. I wondered how many gold bits it would require to replace it. While we'd discovered bipeds used coins, they were worthless base metals compared to paper bills and plastic they apparently traded with. Despite tiny rings of gold some bipeds wore, bits even of gold likely had no worth.
On the other hoof, an Equestrian safe with proper strengthening spells, wards, and cantrips might be acceptable. I hoped.
What had worth was the least of the problems that faced us.
I remembered how Applejack had trotted over with a bushel basket of her finest red apples, kicked from a tree. She had called the bipeds "varmints", but seemed pleased that the bipeds liked what was offered them.
They'd turned down hay.
Applejack is no linguist, don't get me wrong. But it became obvious that she and they (maybe not so much Graybeard) had a lot of "country" in common and that it would be her, her little sister, and her family that ultimately made friends with the group. She'd said she'd try, and keeping Sweetie Belle away might prove impossible. Which would be important, soon, as we worked to learn their language.
The princesses were taking great interest the situation, especially Luna. As if the royal sisters didn't already have enough on their plate with ruling Equestria! But Luna had less responsibility than pleased her, as she had repeatedly groused over the years. Both sisters had talked wistfully of hobbies last night in the middle of what felt like catastrophic events to me. It embarrassed me to even remember their praise for how I'd handled things after I'd complained about their discussing their perceived need for hobbies. They just didn't understand.
Nevertheless, it was individuals who made a difference. A cascade effect. I thought back about last afternoon...
I was going to do something important with my life, to help people and make a difference—I just didn't know what. I would attend CCC this fall; I was thinking paralegal or web design. I didn't want to join the sheriffs like my dad, though he really had done just about everything he could to convince me. He'd taught me to shoot and how to hunt. I'd shot a hare once, which convinced me hunting wasn't it for me, though I hiked and fished with Dad any chance I got. His stories of citing off-roaders, giving speeding tickets, dealing with families of idiots screaming at one another, and transporting occasional prisoners didn't fit my idea of making a difference. It wasn't it, in a sense, either, though I really respected the man a lot for doing the job.
In any case, I needed a job for myself, which was why I was working at the shooting range run by Daniel's family. It wasn't like there was a lot of choice, and Daniel Shoal was all right, even if his grandpa Silver was an over-the-top right-wing loon. All I had to say was "Yessir!" and "Nosir!" when the grey-bearded geezer showed up squinting at me—packing his long barreled Colt revolver in a black holster like a cartoon sheriff—and spitting as he made sure none of us were "slacking."
It's how I found myself bending over that day, plucking discarded ammo boxes, shell casings, and candy wrappers from the brown grass. The bucket I dropped the stuff into was full and heavy. The last customer had left a half-hour ago and the loudest sound this far from the 395 and Bishop was the wind and an occasional bird. I heard a creaky hasp then the snap of what I was sure was the last padlock on the range gear cabinets.
Sure enough, Daniel called out. "That's enough, Dude."
It was a joke between us that we called each other that. Most of my friends called me Jude, except him. As I approached, he tossed me a water bottle. As I put the bucket beside the trash, I asked, "Are they really letting us close up ourselves?"
"Pretty much," he said. He had short black hair and hadn't shaved in a day or so. He looked scruffy, like the rest of his family. We clunked our water bottles together, drank, then hustled the trash to the wildlife-proof bin and locked that up, too.
As the sun sank into the clouds hovering over the peaks, I glanced at the house. I saw a few familiar trucks and my dirty brown Tercel beater, that was all. And no open windows. "No lodgers. What gives? I don't remember ever seeing that, like, in forever. Is business bad?" Inyo County was all about tourists.
"It happens." He shrugged as we headed for the house.
I noticed that the twin's horses were gone. Antoinette and her brother—I couldn't remember his name because she always called him Brother and so did everyone else—were cool. Why Brother rode that janky Nightingale, I couldn't guess. The stallion had trotted over and tried to bite me once, and I'm good around horses. They lived somewhere near LA with their divorced mother. It was hard to forget Antoinette because of her sweet smile and freckles, but I suspected I was nowhere sophisticated enough to be her friend. She went to Cal State Domingues Hills. I shrugged. "I'll just use the john and go."
"Um." Daniel opened the door and grabbed a sign from the table beside the door. He flipped it so I could read, Silver Shoal's is Closed Today. "We're not open tomorrow."
"Wait, huh?" I followed him as he trudged to the gate, leaving a wake of dust. He had to push hard to slide the sign into the corroded holder. "Is something wrong, dude?"
The shadows became deeper. The sun had slid into a blue-grey bank of clouds that meant rain on the western slopes of the Sierras. I followed him back to the house as he seemed to contemplate what he wanted to share.
"You want me to update the web site?"
"You know it... It—It's the opposite of something wrong, Judith."
I stopped, my mouth opening in surprise. He hadn't used my name, even on the phone asking my father if I was home, in, well, forever.
"My dad said I could decide whether to invite you in. He calls it an adventure. He says it's going to be some few weeks of a lot of work and thinking on your feet. And it'll pay well. I know you're saving up so you don't need a full-time job when you're at CCC, so... It'd be great for you. You game?"
Maybe it was the sudden gloom and the oddity of everyone being gone that gave me a bad feeling about it all. But, oh man, it did make me curious. He knew my father was a sheriff, so I doubted that he'd let me know of something shady, but on the other hand, Daniel's uncle was a loon, like I said, so he might not have been told everything.
I wanted to make a difference, so maybe this could be it. "An adventure, huh?"
"Yeah. But it's proprietary, need to know, hush hush—"
"Now you're messing with me."
"It really needs to be kept secret, for now."
I narrowed my eyes at him. "After that build up, it had better be good."
"You in?"
I sighed and raised my fist up, knuckles toward him. "The only thing that would convince me more was if it involved horses." I loved horses. They and I saw eye-to-eye, and, with one notable exception named Nightingale, they all seemed to love me as much as I loved them. I'd been riding since I was five. Family couldn't afford to own one, though. Couldn't afford to pay to ride, anymore, recently, saving up for college and all that.
Daniel bumped his knuckles against mine.
He chuckled. "It sort of does, I'm told. One of the reasons I decided to ask, in addition to us being best buds."
"Really?" About buds: Strictly non-romantic, and he understood why.
He held open the door to the house. "Use the john."
I fake batted my eyes at him. "You remembered!"
"Dude. Meet me by the new shed." He closed the door at me and I laughed...
...and couldn't help but be worried as much as I was intrigued.
It wasn't like the Shoal family was poor, and in a few days you could get trucked-in new siding or even a pre-fab from Amazon! This had been hammered together from garbage discards from an old building on the property that dated back to the last millennium. It was rusted and displayed the yellow and green stains of paint sand-blasted by decades of dust. Every idiot and his father had shot at the crap, but, somehow in the last week—overnight I'd bet—they'd put it up over a perfectly serviceable ATV shed. I'd been blown off when I'd asked why yesterday.
So, now I was going to find out what it was for?
Daniel scuffed the ground with a shoe, lost in thought, raising a little dust cloud. I snorted as I arrived. He held his .22 rifle pointing down as if he were going to take a hike and worried about snakes.
"You haven't changed since we were ten when you broke that window with the baseball."
"Huh?"
"How you show your nerves." I pointed at his feet and he straightened right up.
"Dad tanned my hide."
"And it would have been worse if you hadn't immediately told, or had lied instead. Though I guess it must have hurt if you still remember."
"It did."
"Look. Maybe I should go if you're having second—"
"No. No! You were right. And I know I'm right, now. You gotta see this." He grabbed the door to the shed. The pulls were U-shaped bent pipe, handy for padlocking a chain around. Both a hefty padlock and imposing chain lay on the ground. The door creaked as it opened—surprise!—on rusty hinges.
The dusky high-ceilinged interior looked empty, except for some barrels and a small motorcycle. The ATVs and the much smaller, squatter shed that housed it, were gone but for hard packed dirt and an edge of wilted weeds.
It looked empty... because it was dark. Outside, the sun hid behind the clouds and was dipping below the mountains, but the sky was still bright. Bluish light seeped through seams and buckshot holes. As Daniel closed the door and the fluorescent light began to dominate, what I saw made less and less sense.
"Give your eyes a moment."
"For what? Seriously, you could have put in something brighter like LED lights—"
"Grandpa's a cheapskate," he deadpanned.
I snorted and stepped forward. "A flashlight would—"
He caught my wrist. With the rifle balanced at its midsection, he sketched an arch.
I blinked twice, then I saw a curve floating midair.
The hair on the back of my neck rose and I gasped as my heart began beating faster. My mind interpreted it as a heat mirage, despite the dark. As my perception added details, I got a sense of mass. While my mind insisted it was a slightly flattened black water balloon, my eyes saw something translucent, like I was looking at a bubble.
As if to prove it was a bubble of something, a static discharge crackled, sending mini-fingers of lightening across the ovoid surface.
Creepy shadows flitted about. The shed made a few clanking noises as it cooled from the midday heat, which further set me on edge.
"What the heck?"
Daniel said, "Uncle Rick found it Thursday—" It was Sunday. "—up in the hills a few miles west. Said it was basketball-sized, and when he used the butt of his rifle to poke it, it rolled away from him. It was at the low spot in a gully. It's like oil and water where water is everything not it, even— even the ground. That's how he shepherded it here—and grew bigger as he did. Grandpa thought—"
"Doesn't surprise me. Valuable, right?"
"Ohhh, yeah."
"So you built the shed around the trophy?"
Daniel moved so he was more in my field of view since my eyes were locked on the almost gel-like thing. "It's more than a trophy."
I said, "I'm thinking of that creature movie we watched last month— The Abyss."
He laughed and looked at it, waving his rifle butt at it. It shrank slightly away. Nevertheless, he said, "Not alive. But—but there is somewhere-else on the other side. 'To the right and a mile down the path...'" His voice trailed off.
The building took that moment to creak again, almost behind us. I stiffened, unwilling to take my eyes off of the apparition. I said, "If there is a somewhere else over there—a cave, another shed, maybe?—it's very dark."
"Yeah. And it is..." His eyebrow crunched together. "Darker than usual."
I spared a few moments to look at him. Briefly our gazes met, then returned to the nothingness beyond.
"You don't mean a Narnia The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe-somewhere else, do you?" My body went cold with my last word and I chuckled, yes, nervously.
If it was a prank, and it had to be a prank, not that he ever did pranks... F-me if it wasn't a really convincing prank... I wasn't ready to have my conception of reality shattered, but, I had to admit, part of me was thrilled thinking about it.
"I'm not sure I believe that," I lied.
Mostly. I hoped it wasn't true.
Mostly.
He said, "I wouldn't in your place. It's odd, though— Last time I looked, there was some sort of orchard. Even in the moonlight, you could see that..."
I heard a hint of something wooden sliding and a reverberation that sounded like a pool cue. There was a pool table in the great room of the now vacant lodge that the two of us used midweek when there were fewer guests.
I looked back at the shed doors. I saw the same bent-pipe U-shaped handles. It almost didn't register—because it ought not have been there—but then I saw a thin dark rod inserted through both handles.
I inhaled sharply, reflexively. A glance confirmed Daniel hadn't moved. Now my hair definitely stood on end.
Loath to put the whatever the sphere was behind me, I nevertheless turned completely around, but saw nobody.
Where had the rod come from?
I realized amongst all the other weirdness, there was a slight breeze. When my gaze floated upward, I found a pair of eyes looking down at me.
My throat closed up and I couldn't squeak for trying. I backed away from the eyes that looked down on me from a height of no less than seven feet up. I bumped into Daniel and reached back.
My brain constructed what I saw in pieces, probably because I'd never seen its like before, and what I did recognize was in a completely wrong context of it being in midair. The amber eyes, bright despite the dimness, were set in an equine head, but the head was to the head of a horse like a Persian cat or pit bull face was to a typical cat's or dog's. Flattened muzzle; high forehead. And... Wearing a blue steel Trojan helmet that sported a black, likely horse-hair, crest. I saw wings gently flapping before I realized it held a blackened steel cutlass in its teeth.
Oh, did I mention it? Her wings were leathery. And she stuck to the roofing by her rear hooves.
We blinked at each other maybe five seconds, then she neatly—and silently—hid the sword in a lengthwise-slit sheath strapped across her withers. The forty-five degree-angled hilt sported a flared crossguard that could protect its welder's face and neck. It was an astonishingly functional design for an equine that fought with its face instead of a hand, which made it hard to think I was hallucinating it all. There was no way I could have ever dreamt this up!
"Uh," finally escaped my mouth.
A sweeping sound against the siding and a clank to Daniel's right caught both my attention and his. Another bat-winged horse-creature hovered near the ceiling, not holding on to anything. Its wings moved so slowly, my mind insisted it stood on an invisible pedestal despite its suspended, slightly folded legs. It balanced a spear with a bullet-shaped tip on the upper surface of its right wing with practiced ease. Like a ball on the ocean, the spear barely moved except up and down, and it was pointed roughly at us. The small horse could not be more than three-feet tall. The... This one was female, also. The mare had purposely struck the side of the shed with the spear butt to get our attention.
"What is that?" I asked.
"I—I've never seen that."
"You...? What!?"
Another sound designed to distract us came from the direction of the bubble. It was the sound of metal striking stone. A bluish light grew like a half-seen flame reflected through a glass of water, to the left. Reflections and shadows moved from the right, again like seeing a candle through a glass of liquid. It condensed into the center of the sphere. The pulsating nebulous glow brightened around what I originally guessed was a stick held at chin level, then, as it came closer and brightened, I realized I was very wrong.
Another smallhorse approached, this one almost my height. Almost my height if you included the long pointy glowing horn that appeared screwed into its forehead. This mare was significantly more slender than the other two, perhaps even elegantly shaped. Her fur was midnight blue, and she wore black plate armor and a black helmet. Unmistakably feminine iridescent blue eyeshadow highlighted blue eyes.
With my shoulder jammed into Daniel's, I felt him move before I saw it. Then I saw him bringing up his rifle.
I did what my father did when he found me sticking a tablespoon into a tub of Rocky Road snuck out of the freezer, holding a game controller bleary-eyed past midnight, or when I was about to press the button on the remote when I thought he was asleep in the Lay-Z-Boy recliner.
"Put down the weapon!" I shouted.
I also shoved him hard. It wasn't from some perceived sense of innocence from the horse-creatures. No. I knew overwhelming force when I saw it, and I knew that Daniel, like the rest of the Shoal family, reacted with his gut. His pop-gun could only do real damage if he hit something critical, which was unlikely considering the armor I saw and most people's inability to aim a rifle like a pistol.
He wasn't thinking.
As he stumbled, I swatted his right arm; he dropped the rifle to rattle on the floor. Luckily, it didn't discharge. I followed through by stepping on the barrel of the weapon.
Both of the winged-horses were standing on the ground when I looked. Each were the size of a husky German shepherd, but with a human-sized head, a stocky midsection, and relatively short legs. I might have considered them miniature ponies, but no ponies on Earth could point a cutlass or a spear at us as these did.
I looked toward the bubble. Horses don't speak. Not earth horses. Well, not like humans, anyway. That said, I recognized that the sound from the elegant horse's throat was a chuckle and could be nothing else—followed by a snide comment.
The unicorn stopped this side of the bubble. A luminous fog pulsed around her horn, bright enough to illuminate the shed well. My ear twitched as I caught the faint sound of wind chimes. In a series of whinnies, neighs, chuffs, whickers, and palate pops, she issued terse orders.
I heard hooves scuffing dirt as her guards backed off.
We locked eyes, but hers were steely and hard. I eventually had to glance away. She gave me the once over and gave a horsey nod before the foggy glow pulsing around her horn bifurcated.
The safety on Daniel's .22 clicked into place as an identical blue fog gathered there. Then, one by one, actuating the lever, each of the bullets in the rifle ejected and drifted into the air toward the unicorn until they disappeared into her right saddlebag. I counted, and she knew how the firearm worked and how to determine the full load of the rifle.
Suddenly, my Swiss Army knife and Daniel's jack knife spirited away into her possession. That glowing blue fog made like a mouse and ransacked all our pockets. After splaying in the air all Daniel's cash and IDs like an exploded instruction diagram, Daniel's weathered brown wallet shot back together in one unified movement and deep into his rear pocket, causing him to gasp and squirm.
She said something to us. When we didn't quickly move, the cutlass guard, sword sheathed, pushed us out of the way with a wing. She used the leathery thing like an oversized hand. It had a single finger that looked like a dog's dew claw. I shuddered at the touch of the claw and wing, and when I looked down, I noticed the mare shuddered having touched my arm.
As the unicorn passed, I noticed she had a brand on her flank. On second look, I decided it was a tattoo. Her outrageous dark blue color aside, she was a painted pony with an ink blot onto which was tattooed a white crescent moon. I could smell horse perspiration, but something else. A faint flowery perfume.
The spear slid out of the door handles and the glow pulled open the door enough to look out. She glanced about, then opened the door a little more. Suddenly, wings flared out. They were dark blue like the rest of her, and feathered like a bird's.
"Not a unicorn," I muttered.
"Unicorns don't exist," Daniel stated flatly, denying what his eyes and mine saw. "I don't think this one shits rainbows, either."
The honest to goodness real as all heck unicorn mare glanced back at me. It was almost as if she understood Daniel's shits rainbows remark and was giving us the stink eye. She momentarily blinked, then looked out toward the house.
...she probably didn't understand. I let out my breath.
In this moment, I realized that her long tail flowed like a waving flag, as did what bit of her mane escaped her helmet, despite the lack of wind. The black-streaked blue hair seemed to contain sparks that had the effect of twinkling stars. When she swished to shoo a fly, I realized it was indeed hair, and a phenomenon far beyond my experience.
The nebulous glow around her horn increased and a branch of the sedge beside the shed flew up to her mouth. She stripped some leaves with her teeth, chewed introspectively, then nodded. She stripped the rest and tossed the branch into the yard beyond. Without a pause, a box flitted out of her left saddle bag.
Daniel said, "A camera?"
The thing had a stubby lens in front and a glass back, so it likely was. She floated it around, snapping photos of the house, the shooting range, the corral, and the yard. Each time, the glowing fog twisted a crank to cock it. The shutter sound couldn't be mistaken.
The camera flew skyward.
Daniel pulled on my sleeve and whispered, "What should we do?"
The guards were between the winged-unicorn and us. "I don't think going through the bubble would be a good idea. No flashlight, for starters."
He laughed weakly. He looked at the guards and they regarded us back with large eyes that showed attention and a bit of nerves.
I added, "I don't think they're going to hurt us."
I thought that I understood horse body language well enough, and what I sensed studying them agreed with that thought, but how could I know that they and earth horses were the same? In any case, it was all too easy to have something unexpected spook a horse, and then all bets were off.
In the brighter light from outside, I noticed that the guards' eyes were slit like a cat's.
I said, "Probably not going to hurt us if we remain calm. They're not letting us go, either."
As if to confirm that, the leader tucked her camera into a saddle bag and noisily dragged the chain and padlock inside before closing the door. Once again, the unicorn brightened her horn enough to see.
Daniel's jangling keys flew from his pocket. Each key probed the padlock until one turned the cylinder. She removed it from the loop, walked over to a metal barrel and shifted it to find it filled with something gritty. The barrel loudly clanged as her glow gouged out a couple pieces of metal. She muttered something and with a click-ka-chunk, the metal pieces transformed into keys, the edges glowing faintly red. She waved them around to cool them, then tried each in the padlock. Though blackened steel, each turned the cylinder. She returned Daniel's key and key ring with a few horse syllables. Probably a thank you.
"Wanna bet the people on the other side of the bubble are more sophisticated than your grandpa counted on?"
"I just hope everybody's okay."
"I hope so, too," I said as the chain rattled and tied itself tautly around handles before the padlock clicked into place.
The leader looked around, noting the imperfect seams and the bullet holes. Her horn brightened and the metal of the shed began to complain and creak. In moments, the seams crimped closed with a metal shriek. For good measure, the bullet holes closed in sequence as if they were holes poked into clay and pinched. With them all sealed, I noted the repairs glowed faintly red in the much more complete darkness. I smelled heated metal as well as burnt paint and dirt.
I muttered, "I get that you're powerful. You don't need to fix things to prove it."
The mare looked at us and blinked.
Daniel shushed me.
"Don't worry. They can't understand us... yet."
"Even a dog could understand that tone."
"Yeah, maybe." Which made me wonder what she was thinking if she did recognize my tone. Moreover, what was I thinking? I had thought about horses being spooky, but it was my skin that alternately cooled and flushed, and my heart that caused my blood to pound loudly in my ears. My emotions jumped quickly between anger, fear, awe, and confusion. What were their equine thoughts about... about monkey-creatures?
Unstable? Aggressive?
The mare had looked from me to him as we spoke. Now that she noticed me watch her watching me, her lips drew back into what had to be a smile. She displayed horse teeth, but, with a short muzzle, they also resembled ours, with obvious canines not much different than our own.
Not horses.
Don't even think they're horses.
I did my best not to begin shaking. I put my fingers in my belt loops to steady my hands.
The spear-carrier caught a tossed key in her lips and the leader put away the other. She pointed with her right fore hoof, indicating the bubble, waving us forward. To wave, her hoof and lower leg rotated and flexed, articulating in an anatomically impossible way.
Impossible for an earth horse.
I swallowed. Daniel seemed unwilling to move, and I had to pull to get him to back up. I went forward, putting the not-earth horses behind me, reaching to touch the bubble.
The "surface" shrank away, but the bubble yielded.
I felt nothing. It was totally an optical distortion very reminiscent of a heat mirage, and further away like looking through curved glass. I was glad the static discharge didn't repeat while we were inside, and, in a dozen steps, we were in the darkness on the opposite side. Our shadows played across what looked like a curved dome. As I looked around in the space of a small house, I saw it was constructed of large blocks of rough hewn rock, some sort of black-speckled white granite that extended to the ground and swept beneath us and under the margins of the bubble.
I saw perfectly fitting seams. Attention to details had to be a thing with her.
I also saw no windows or doors.
The cutlass guard pushed us aside as the leader passed, horn glowing. She approached the wall, examining it and likely admiring the work. She muttered something and a splash of glowing nebulosity caused all the bricks to glow a faint blue-white, as if bathed in moonlight. I reached out to touch the stone—
A sudden flash-bang made me yelp.
The winged unicorn had disappeared.
I jumped back, thinking that she'd somehow exploded, though she had left no flying bits behind, so that couldn't be true.
Then I heard the faint tinkling of wind chimes and saw sparkles like soda bubbles popping all around me in a blue fog. The next instant, the world went completely black.
A cold more bitterly cold than any walk-in Costco refrigerator I'd ever experienced surrounded me. Or any freezer I could imagine. Or laying naked in snow, maybe? Or in the arctic, having been chased off an iceberg into the sea by a polar bear.
And I couldn't breathe.
I reflexively screamed... but failed. The air whooshed out of my lungs because nothingness surrounding me.
A loud pop echoed off a stone dome, suddenly, amazingly, thankfully to my right. I found myself in an orchard in warm bright sunlight, just steps from the shade of an orchard. Once again compressed and warmed by air, I momentarily no longer cared to scream. Instead I gasped and inhaled frantically. It felt like I'd had an epiphany; maybe my brain would catch up sometime soon and explain it all to me.
My sudden perspiration steamed off my arms, flash frozen. I shuddered and rubbed my arms together, trying to find my lost heat. I blinked furiously, my eyes feeling slightly burnt.
Daniel popped into existence a couple seconds later. He shouted, "Yah!" He waved his hands beside himself until he saw me standing near. Frost steamed off of him, as it did also off the midnight blue winged-unicorn.
I spotted two wingless unicorn stallions, both ash-grey both with ears pointed alertly toward me, each with normal eyes. Normal... but huge, and mostly white with relatively small irises that pulsed and grew. Manifestly not horse eyes. His were an amber color, and his companion's pale blue. That they were male was obvious. They were only slightly bigger than the bat-winged guards. They wore brass armor and Trojan helmets, though one had a reddish crest and the other a light blue black-streaked one. I realized the crest had to be their manes poking through the metal because their nervously swishing tails matched their crest. The quirky opening did make the helmet less protective, though.
One had a nutcracker tattoo on his flank, the other a chisel. I could tell this because the brass armor curved aside to make it visible.
Daniel fast-walked toward me.
High in the air, I spotted a couple more small armored horses, this time with feathered wings, each with a quiver of spears strapped to their side, each with a spear weirdly balanced on a flapping wing. The closest was white, the other blue. The blue one was a mare and much more petite. Neither had horns.
What had just happened, hit me. I thought about it, about the sparkles, about the stone dome that we'd obviously just been inside.
I said, "Star Trek," as Daniel took a place beside me, though I suspected he wanted to stand behind me despite my being a head shorter. "Star Trek, Star Trek... Star Trek!"
"No. Not possible," he said.
"Yes, possible. We've been transported." I think I said whoa like Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Then... No. But it was... "Magic. They're using magic!" I said.
"Unicorns, right. You think?"
"Do I? Any sufficiently advanced technology..." I'd read that somewhere. I shouldered him, then looked at our, what, host? Captor?
"What now?" I asked of her.
She replied in horse-speech, unfurled her wings, and jumped into the air. The downdraft pushed my hair from my face. Despite her wingspan being way too little to provide lift, she flew upward. An instant later, encapsulated in a blue nebulous glow full of sparkles, I was jerked into the air following her.
Daniel shot into the air, too. In moments, we soared horizontally through the air above an orchard that looked ripe with apples. It felt like I was laying on my stomach. Reflex, and my trying the minimize the air tugging at my body, made me put my arms out like I was a superhero or something. The horse stretched out her fore and rear legs similarly. It struck me as bizarre and I found myself giggling.
I was flying.
Daniel, on the opposite side of her, looked white as a sheet, something that the sunlight and harsh shadows accentuated. He hugged himself, not quite in a fetal position.
Some people didn't know how to have fun.
I looked at our host's face. Her blue eyes glittered as she looked at me faintly, unmistakably, smiling. I could see the silver filigree in her armor, composed of multipointed stars, and that the black enamel on her breastplate matched her painted-pony color, etched with a crescent moon that matched her tattoo. I'd noticed it was identical on both sides of her rump. Inset into her helmet was a black crystal tiara that also glittered outrageously in the sun.
I knew what I thought it meant, but I wasn't ready to think fairytale stuff. It was enough that I forcibly accompanied an animal as smart as a human that wasn't human.
Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if she had a similar thought about me.
I asked, "Where are we going?"
She began speaking in intricate horse-speak, gesturing expansively with armored fore hooves, probably stating something of the order, "I really haven't the faintest idea what you're saying, but feel free to ask more."
When she finished, she actually answered my question by pointing her weirdly articulated foreleg. I realized we were flying up toward a hill upon which rested a red barn in the middle of two or three hectares of dense orchard.
In the outside chance that she understood me, I added, "I'm willing to bet stupid happened, and by that I mean something really bad, knowing the head of the family that owns that shed. For what it's worth, I'm sorry."
My father sometimes brought work home with him, more often recently as he tried to influence my career choices. Talking people down from being angry or violent was a skill I'd at least found interesting. You had to find common beliefs and empathy, and you had to never make the other person wrong.
Her eyebrow raised as she regarded me. I realized that her eyelashes were mascaraed and lengthened to look feathery. Between her eyeshadow and perfume—and her obvious vanity—it made her more human and more alien at the same time, and made her power more frightening.
"Since I work for them, I'm partly to blame for— I hope they didn't hurt any one. I am going to feel really stupid if I'm guessing wrong." Now my nerves were making me blather. "But... I'm guessing under different circumstances we could have made friends."
Another glance and a few horse words followed as we circled the barn. I could see the work yard, animal pens, and a house down hill.
I added, "I'd like to make it better if I can..."
Then I saw gathered small horses—I decided to call them ponies—and a single much taller white Arabian mare. It looked like someone had painted the ponies in all the colors of the rainbow, making me shiver thinking of Daniel's now ironic rainbow unicorn quip. The equines surrounded what looked like Daniel's extended clan and some men I knew worked in the hotel. I saw the Chief Cherokee rolled down hill against a fence, a door and the hood ripped off, spears deeply embedded. I saw that more spears, looking like ham radio antennas,had pierced the roof of the farmhouse. I saw guns and rifles piled away from the people.
No bodies, human or otherwise. Thank goodness for small favors!
And now I was rushing into the ground from a height of ten stories. The leader braked, feathers splayed, beating back with what felt like inadequate wing area, but we quickly slowed and Daniel and I were brought down on our feet in what I decided was a professional recognition of human anatomy.
I went immediately to steady my friend who folded to his knee and looked ready to puke. I recognized that dozens of the ponies wore gleaming body armor, though only a few winged ones evidenced any drawn weapons. The horned ones had none, though thinking about the leader gouging out keys from a metal barrel, melting and warping the metal siding of the shed, and picking up heavy objects with ease, like us two humans, with magic... Maybe unicorns didn't need weapons.
I recognized the demeanor. The armored ones weren't police. They were military.
I thought Shit! I didn't say it, though. I instead patted Daniel's back. Eyes on the leader, her wings folding up as she trotted away, her crescent-moon tattoo molding with her flesh on every step, I said, "Dude? Are you okay?"
"If I ever fly again, it'll be too soon."
"I think you meant never fly, but..." I patted his back as I stood and added, "Deep breaths, Dude. Deep breaths."
I watched the leader rub necks with the taller white Arabian, then lift a foreleg to half embrace her in an eerily human gesture. This one, unarmored, nevertheless wore a golden breastplate with a faceted amethyst the side of a fist centered in it. She also wore a solid gold crown. The former had to weigh forty pounds, the latter two or three alone. It was real gold, judging from the way it moved, and from its unmistakable luster. I'd had a friend obsessed with jewelry who explained gold carets and alloys like a metallurgy nerd, and had shown me examples. The Arabian mare's mane and tail, while obviously hair, behaved like stage smoke, roiling and clumping, never still and almost alive. I knew which equine was the queen and which was the princess.
There.
I'd thought it.
Fairytales. Oh, Christ, I wasn't in Kansas anymore. Or California.
I stepped forward toward the painted pony with the black crown. A hand caught my shoulder as I attracted the attention of a dozen pair of unicorn guard eyes.
I put my hand on Antonette's to remove it, growling before I said. "I'm going to try to fix this cluster f—"
"—They're a lot more capable than they look, especially for their size."
I turned my head. When my eyes found her face, I saw black makeup smeared from ear to ear. She wore hunting camou? What the— I took a deep breath. "What were you playing at?"
"Scouting— More like being grandpa's fool— Look, they ran us down with air calvary and Brother got himself knocked off his horse by a branch and hurt bad. Broken ribs and a pierced lung. They took him to a modern hospital, Judith. Modern. They saved his life! They even completely healed the pierced lung."
"That's good to know." I released her hand a finger at a time.
"These... pony-oids are twitchy and spooky just like horses back home. Marty said all it took was the truck sliding on the loose dirt around the barn when he drove in."
"Don't you mean, trespassed?"
"Your dad speaking?"
Uh. Maybe?
"Ok. Yes. It scared some animals. When Pauli jumped out to corral them so they didn't run away from their owners, this golden one rushed up and kicked him!"
"And?"
"Broke his leg." I was looking at the Shoal clan and had noticed Pauli had a makeshift split.
"I could see that. What I meant was—"
"Who made you an inquisitor?"
"Who made a mess of things that I'm now stuck in the middle of?" We locked into a stare. Her eyes were green. My skin felt hot and I felt my lips compress. I wondered if this was what my father felt on the job.
Maybe.
She looked away.
"L-Let me guess—" I continued.
"They thought they were animals, Judith! Attacking—"
"And... they... shot at them? Right. Or am I wrong?"
I turned around completely. No way to know if they killed any of the pony people, unless she admitted it. I saw no conspicuously missing humans, either. Everyone I'd ever seen working Silver Shoal's.
Antonette said, sheepishly, "Didn't know they were people—
"Didn't think, either."
"—until much later. The houses aren't that much smaller than people— humans—would build..."
I sighed loudly and looked toward the queen and princess. Were they really twitchy and spooky like our horses? Didn't matter since they had the upper hand— or hoof. They now likely had a very bad opinion of monkey-creatures.
"We had no reason to think it was a completely different world, Judith. I know Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings aren't real. Grandpa thought it was some secret government project to encroach on landowners in the valley. Or maybe it was another trick by DWP or SoCal Edison to screw people out of more water rights." The two companies basically owned Inyo, and had turned the Owens Lake into a salt flat. "Not sure what conspiracy he thinks it is now, but he wanted to check it out; refused to let it be covered up. Think about it. Feds or CIA or DARPA is a lot less crazy than an alien world! Credit him that he wanted to find out. Grandpa even brought Brother's DSLR, too, to document it all, not just his cellphone!"
I touched my jeans pocket. I'd left mine in my parked car because, well, working.
I nodded. DARPA did make more sense than to straight up think Narnia. His theories were all kinds of self-validating, I suppose, if you thought about it because none of it wanted to make sense in my head, anyway. It added a new dimension, beyond the less credible equine dimension we found ourselves in.
Which led to the question: Why was the... gateway... between dimensions there in the first place?
Again, it all felt crazy. What the Shoals thought. What I'd thought.
But it was definitely still a mess, hashtag CF, no matter how you diced it.
As I stepped away from the Antoinette, she added, "The big white one bursts into flames and moves the sun through the sky anywhere she wants. And the horned ones can travel instantly between places."
"They're unicorns, Anne."
A third winged unicorn popped into existence to prove Antoinette's point, excitedly greeting the painted pony and speaking rapidly as she magically drew out the camera from the princess' saddle bag in a ruby cloud of sparkles.
Then they all noticed me approaching.
First, the white Arabian mare set purple eyes on me.
Next, the armored midnight blue mare's turquoise eyes hardened into a stare my direction.
Last, even the purple new-comer looked with curious, also purple, eyes. She, unlike the other two, was heavily armed.
I nevertheless continued approaching the winged unicorns. Ten feet from the three, I knelt, pushing one jeans knee into the soft dirt with a faint crunch, audible in the new silence. This put me at about eye-level for the ponies, and below the three. The newcomer was the shortest of the winged unicorns and very purple, almost as if her coat had been stained with grape juice. Her mane was even more purple, with a reddish stripe.
As I said, different from the others, this unicorn carried weapons—and I recognized Daniel's grandfather's prize hunting rifle strapped to her side, minus the scope, despite it being nearly her length. I saw a holstered .357, probably also Grandpa Silver Shoal's, and a sheathed hunting knife, too. It looked Vietnam vintage. His without a doubt.
All that was missing was his ridiculous long-barreled Colt .45.
Antoinette gasped. "The purple one. She's the one, the mare that took Brother to the hospital..."
I heard a shout, "And the monster's a thief, too!", followed by a chorus of shushing. I didn't need to look back to know which old baby boomer had said that.
I stared at the little winged unicorn. Time had dilated and it seemed we'd been watching one another for a minute or more. In that time, she seemed oblivious to the "heat" she packed, but I understood full well that not only could she use all of it, and all of it simultaneously like the princess levitated the keys, but that she didn't need any of if she chose to be fierce. Nor did she seem to want to be. Her obliviousness telegraphed that much. Slowly, the word ingénue came to mind. I wasn't positive the word ingénue entirely applied, but intuition insisted it did.
The exuberant newcomer stared hard-eyed for a few moments at the source of the last outburst, then looked back into my eyes as she trotted, smiling, the short distance up to me. With horse-like body language, ears forward, she sniffed, her nostrils in what appeared to be a soft small muzzle pulsing, before she spoke.
"..."
I shrugged.
She shrugged and smiled even more widely in a totally un-horse-like manner, pointing at her gesture and mine, glancing back. She then tilted her head inquiringly, looking me in the eye.
I said, "What has happened looks bad. My father is a sheriff, kind of like those armored guys over there but with a smaller brass shield pinned to his chest—" I pointed. "—and I'm sure this shouldn't have been allowed, and I feel sorry it happened. Can you even understand anything I'm saying?"
The pony blinked her big purple eyes, then shrugged. I'd noticed that she had a stars tattoo and the Arabian had a sun tattoo, which fit oddly with what Antoinette had sad about that one controlling the sun. To keep things straight in my head, since I'd never be able to speak horse, I decided to call the purple pony Duchess Stars, the blue one Princess Moon, and the white one Queen Sun. In my mind, a duke, or in her case a duchess, seemed like someone who'd be formidable or militant. I thought of Downton Abbey.
I coughed.
I decided the shrug was coincidental. I added, "I would like to help to fix whatever happened and to help humans and equines live together peacefully."
My words stunned me because they came out in a rush without much thought. Then I realized that I had been looking for some way to make a difference with my life. Had my subconscious picked a role for me? I blinked away a tear.
I could make a difference.
I briefly bowed, then pointed at my chest and said, "Judith Brown." I pointed at the duchess.
Her mouth dropped and she chuffed two words and pointed at herself, then made horse sounds that faintly imitated my name. While I named her companions, then Antoinette and Daniel who had come to sit behind me, a golden brown pony trotted up with a basket of very red apples on her back.
Apples! How very stereotypically horsey.
"That's the one!" Antoinette said just short of shouting behind me. "She kicked Pauli."
I glanced back to see her pointing, then forward. Of all the ponies, this one looked the most earth-like. Though she greatly resembled a Shetland pony, she wore a work-stained cowboy hat and had wrangled together the voluminous blonde hair in her mane and tail with red yarn ties. In a feat of hard to follow motions, she brought the basket over her head and hat, caught its fall, and landed it with a faint bang before us.
She picked out a very red apple from the basket and offered it on an upturned hoof with a word I'm sure meant apple. I flashed on a scene in the animated Snow White where the witch gives Snow White the apple.
Kicked Pauli, huh? While wearing a cowboy hat?
When I paused like a deer in the headlights, the pony bit into the apple and offered it again.
Not poisoned.
But also, well, horse spit.
I took it nevertheless and bit off a mouthful from the other side. It wasn't overly sweet, but the taste of apple was so intense my mouth hurt as my salvia flowed freely. I nodded and smiled, realizing this was obviously her orchard and all it implied.
I hoped what she said next was If she likes apples, she can't be half rotten.
I bent and used a finger to scrawl Apple in the dirt. Suddenly the equines and I were pointing between the fruit and the word.
A small yellow pony had been hiding behind the apple purveyor's legs. This one was the size of a border collie but with legs that were more the length of a corgi's. She was jumping and speaking, until the older one shushed her and possibly scolded her. The little one turned stern in an obviously kid way, pointed at the other humans accusingly, at her apparent elder, then at her own purple and red flank tattoo as if it made a point. She then rushed off into the farmhouse faster than any earth quadruped her size had a physical right to.
I decided to call her Bows because she had a big red ribbon bow tied into her mane.
When she shot back from the house, she skidded to a stop between the duchess, Apple, and me. Bows dumped her saddlebags, which, besides a few hardbound books, included pencils (painted yellow with a pink eraser), a protractor, a triangle, a notebook, and index cards on a ring.
She opened the notebook and with a stubby pencil in her mouth, wrote letters, a single line glyph of an apple, and copied a-p-p-l-e.
I reached for another pencil, then presented an open hand as if to a regular horse. Bows nodded. I took the index cards and printed APPLE.
Bows started bouncing again, then remembered herself as the gathering herd of equines, including the princess and queen nodded and chuffed happily. She wrote on the back of the card, and hoofed it back to me. As I took it, I noticed an oddly clean (for a quadruped) frog that was fuzzy pink and looked like it formed to flattened thumbs.
It explained much.
I flashed the horse writing side at my audience and pointed at the apples. Every equine nodded.
Taking an empty card, I pointed to myself and printed in block letters, JUDITH BROWN.
