Apocalypse, Swarm of the
There was the buzzing. It never ceased, now. The echo of it reached into even the deepest levels of the archive, forming the eerie undertone through which the mare slept and read. Six days ago, she hadn’t known what they were. Now, she was possibly the foremost expert on them, owing to the circumstances.
Parasprites.
They weren’t natural creatures; that the literature was clear on. Spawned of some unknown magical source, their only drive was to eat. And eat. And Eat. When they had first showed up, ponies thought they were cute, which… admittedly, they still were. But that just meant few ponies even tried to stop them until they’d already infested much of the city. And then the reports started coming in; towns to the south, like Ponyville on the edge of the Everfree, were calling for help on account of an unstoppable swarm that was eating every crop, every scrap. But no help could be sent, because every able hoof was needed to defend Canterlot’s food stores.
But that was just stage one. A particularly delicate scroll from the Double-Stripe Dynasty period described three. The creatures would first start eating all of the food in the area, multiplying in the space of hours or even minutes by their peculiar manner of asexual-regurgitation, which the mare would have been utterly fascinated by if not for other overriding concerns.
There was a faint crackling noise, and the researcher rushed over to the central control, an array of crystals and gauges that sat at the bottom of the archive and monitored the various defenses set in place around the underground structure. Princess Celestia had always understood the value of knowledge, and generations of royal mages and archivists had agreed, adding layer upon layer of defenses to the Royal Archive Deep. The mare used to boast that she worked at the most secure structure in Equestria. Now she scrambled around, checking each indicator desperately, afraid that it wouldn’t be enough.
Nothing had changed from the last time she’d checked. One of the mana shields had gone down a few days ago, and the outermost metal hull had registered as breached around the same time, but the other seven barriers were still operational. She walked slowly back over to the pile of books she’d been sorting through, for now resisting the urge to simply stare at the indicators, willing them to hold steady.
Stage two would begin when the parasprites could no longer easily locate conventional food. They wouldn’t stop eating; no, that wasn’t in their nature. Most ponies were out in the streets, trying to beat back the swarm, when stage two swept through Canterlot. The screams had followed her as she ran. A dozen ponies had followed her as she called to head for the archives. By the time they’d reached the entrance, there were only two left. She didn’t want to remember what had happened to the rest of them, but she wasn’t able to forget, either. She unlocked the doors with her access gem and rushed the remaining ponies inside, locking it behind them and activating the extra shielding. None of the other archivists were present; they’d likely prioritized their own stocks of food, not believing the books to be in any danger.
The screams and sounds of battle haunted them for hours… and then stopped. At first they thought the creatures had been beaten back, but before they could open the doors to check, other sounds started reaching them. Horrific creaking and crashing, as though the city was coming down around them. This went on for some time, before everything went relatively quiet again, except for the occasional buzz of the swarm, telling them that the threat was still moving around somewhere just outside.
The junior archivist learned later that the cacophonous noise had been stage three: Having exhausted the available organic matter of plants, animals, and untreated wood, the parasprites had turned to the other available material: Everything else. The crashing sound was the buildings of the capital falling as their walls and supports were munched through. Anything that stuck out of the ground was leveled by tiny furry balls of teeth. And then, according to the scroll and all other reports she could find, they would leave; not move to another city or town, but just go away, as though vanishing into thin air. For this reason, it was speculated that parasprites were summoned by a mage through some secret ritual, to target only the place that the mage wished destroyed.
A few scholars took a much darker view: All reports of parasprite swarms were in the Zebrican deserts. Remote towns, surrounded by miles of sand. Perhaps, they put forth, the swarm had simply starved to death, unable to keep up their rapid reproductive cycle once the town had been leveled. This left open the idea that if parasprites were to strike in another biome, they would be able to spread unchecked rather than remain confined to one place. One scholar had even postulated that some modern deserts had been caused by such massive swarm events in the distant past. She speculated that this was where the swarms in Zebrica came from; single parasprites from this past event laying dormant under the sands, occasionally uncovered by the wind or a shovel.
She got to know a little about the ponies sheltered with her. They were sisters, Rose and Lilly. They’d come up from Ponyville to relay the message about the parasprites down there, only to find the miniature beasts had arrived ahead of them. Their sister, Daisy, had traveled with them, but they were separated in the crowd. After nearly a day in the archive, the sisters were beside themselves. Rose suggested they go look for Daisy, and it wasn’t long before Lilly was brought around to the same notion. Pleas for them to stay inside went unheeded, and during a lull in the buzzing, they unlocked the door and crept out. Several minutes later, the archivist had heard a single scream, cut off with a gurgle.
Now, days later, she sorted through a number of tomes on music theory. After coming across an old legend about taming the parasprites with some sort of tribal rhythm, she’d started cramming as though she were going back to finish learning the oboe. She knew she was grasping at straws, of course. Even if the legend was accurate, there was no telling what sort of rhythm would work, and then there was the matter that she couldn’t hold a beat for the life of her anyway. But it was something, and she needed that something to keep her mind occupied.
Another ominous, indeterminate noise. Another rush to check the control panels. She watched as one of the dials indicating field strength fell to zero. A noise like shifting rock echoed from above, and two more indicators emitted magical sparks and died. As another failed, the archivist realized that her assumption that each ward and barrier would add more time was flawed. It had really just been the one holding the swarm back. The whole console began to hum, emitting pulses of magical feedback. Taking a few steps away from the machine, she whipped her head around, following the increasingly frequent noises of stress along the walls. A crash sounded from the upper levels, and the buzzing was suddenly much, much louder.
28 minutes later, Twilight Sparkle, Third Junior Archivist of the Royal Canterlot Archives, was no more. The empty cavern that once held Equestria’s most valuable knowledge slowly fell silent as the swarm moved on.