The Ninety-nine Nectars of Princess Luna; Or How Twilight Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Her Wings

by NoeCarrier

Rating: teen
Tags: Comedy, Adventure, Discord, Princess Celestia, Twilight Sparkle, Main 6, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Alternate Universe, Princess Luna
Length: 228420

Twilight must hunt down the booze of the Goddesses if she is ever to get drunk again, following the discovery that her divine biology is unaffected by the usual stuff.

After an ill-conceived stunt by Princess Celestia goes horribly wrong, and Twilight truly realises the ramifications of her recent apotheosis to Goddess-hood, she goes for the only thing in her life that's ever given her relief – the bottle. But when she finds out that the divine are unaffected by mere mortal liquor, she must track down and brew the booze of the immortals themselves; The Ninety-nine Nectars of Princess Luna.

Pre-reading and editing by Luna-tic Scientist
Cover art shamelessly stolen from wikipedia and crudely edited in Paint
"I don't know what NoeCarrier is on but he needs to stay on it." - herdlesspony, Reddit.
"The whole thing is quite bizzare (sic), really." - Pharohman777, spacebattles.com.

Published 2013-07-27 21:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2016-03-04 23:23:19 UTC

Mythomania

Chapter Two

“Mythomania”

Walks In Dreams was watching Twilight's reptilian assistant engaged in his perpetual endeavor of shelving books. Even with his adoptive mother-sister missing, presumed drunk and incapable, he was duteously adhering to the rota. His bulky yet surprisingly nimble frame scurried up ladders and scaled shelves with equal enthusiasm. Perhaps this one should have been the Element of Loyalty, she mused.

The Queen of Tides sat up from the specially embroidered 'Princess pouffe' Spike had retrieved from the attic for the occasion of her visit and trotted over to one of the library's windows, checking on the sleepy little township for the third time in the hour. Ponies were milling about peacefully. Sparrows and meadowlarks hopped between the branches of nearby trees, singing their melodious tunes to the world at large. Stall holders and their patrons alike were busy making the last trades of the day. Far too quiet. Far too quiet indeed.

Expanding the senses was an easy task for a Goddess, and as Luna did so she felt the numerous minds of the town appear around her like newborn stars attaining nuclear fusion for the first time. Immediately, thoughts of many natures bombarded her own, mostly to do with sex and all things of a rutting mood. She swam through it graciously, the erotic thought-haze still bringing a smile of adoration to her face. Nothing abnormal at this level.

Luna extended her mind further. The resolution dropped; now instead of individual minds, she could only see the general tone or mood of a place. Cloudsdale was a grand zephyr of exhilarated ebullience, the product of twenty thousand pegasus ponies and their rapid, precise thoughts. West Wingshade was a slow and subtle thing in comparison, but it moved with incredible purpose and finality, like a glacier.

Then she came to Canterlot. An icy chill ran down her spine. The city was a cacophony of discordant, shrieking atonality, so loud and shocking she instinctively pulled away from it. All of a sudden she was back in the still environs of the library, with only the sounds of Spike clambering up ladders laden down with heavily bound books filling the air.

The effect of the Nectars was spreading, even though they had not yet actually been brewed. Luna knew that this was the defence mechanism of the Universe, triggered in response to there being a reasonable chance of the drinks it abhorred so much coming back to life. Everypony would become more and more drunk, despite having done nothing to warrant it, until society collapsed. At least, that was what had almost happened before.

Luna shuddered. The memories of those pre-Nightmare incidents were still hard to recall. Every time she accidentally did so, it was as though she had found a shard of glass embedded in her skin. It was a good thing that she retained no memory of the time itself. If thoughts of a few Castle-razing episodes under the influence of too much of the Nectars come unto me like glass, the Princess thought. Then the atrocities of the Nightmare herself are surely to be a more divine torture by far.

“More tea, Princess?” Spike asked, cheerfully.

“Hmm?” Luna said.

“Would you like some more tea?”

“Oh, yes, thank you.”

“Is something the matter, Princess Luna?” he said, bringing the tea service in from the kitchen and placing it on the round table in the middle of the library, beside the pouffe.

“No, faithful reptile, 'tis nothing,” she replied, wandering back from the window and settling onto the big red cushion. She had not been forthcoming with the full details when it came to explaining where Twilight had gone, or why the other Elements of Harmony were now somewhat different to their usual selves. “We were merely thinking.”

Spike frowned, perhaps at the 'reptile' comment, but said no more and retreated back into the kitchen. Luna sighed. If it had been her sister sitting here on her rump doing nothing, it would only have been because the varied aspects of her latest scheme were charging ferociously toward completion. As it was Luna, it was because she genuinely had no idea what to do next.

The Elements were the go-to solution for Equestria's various existential-catastrophe level problems. Ancient Empire reappearing in the north? Send for the purple one, and her brother too. Wrathful snake-god from the deep past returned to wreak his terrible revenge on those who imprisoned him? Brilliant teachable moment, fetch the quills and the Ponyville address book. Who could possibly help when it was the Elements themselves that needed it?

This is no good, Luna concluded. If we want to help Twilight, we have to start thinking like her. But what would Twilight Sparkle do at a time like this?

“She'd probably sing a song, then go and remind her pony friends forever about the magic of friendship, or something.”

It was Discord again. His voice was coming from somewhere beneath her. Luna peered down between her forelegs.

“Oh no, don't get up,” the pouffe said. It had materialized a pair of waxy yellow eyeballs. “I'm quite comfortable like this.”

“It isn’t very nice to intrude on the thoughts of others,” Luna chided, levitating the cup of tea Spike had brought up to her lips and taking a sip. “Is that really what Twilight would do?”

“Absolutely. That totally sounds like her. She did it to me, you know. I had some perfectly wonderful mind altering spells going on and she just waltzed in and trampled all over them. Don't you read the letters she sends your darling sister?”

“The friendship reports? Sky above, not those things. Celestia obsesses over them. We have no idea why. They are the most boring of texts, and it's not as though Celestia even needs events summarised like that. She can just ask the mind of the nation to replay the memory.”

“I imagine she feels they are more for Twilight's benefit than for anyone else.”

“You could be right there,” Luna agreed. The day's twists and turns had soothed her usual dislike for Discord, it seemed. “So you've the experience with her methods, we take it? How would we go about reminding them that the magic of friendship isn't as dead as they think it is?”

“Something sappy, I don't doubt,” Discord sighed, rolling his eyes. “You could probably ask the dragon.”

“That's not a bad idea!” she exclaimed, glancing down again. “Since when were-” she paused. The eyes were gone.

“Who were you just talking to?” Spike asked, nervously. He was standing on the other side of the library, holding a tray of cookies in his claws.

Luna said nothing and drank her tea.

*

Dear Princess Celestia, Soli Deo, Rex Ex Sol, etc,

Just where do you get off thinking you're so high and mighty, anyway? Who made you so exalted? I'll have you know that as a senior member of the Equestrian Hay Board...

Celestia chuckled quietly and folded closed the letter, carefully adding it to the growing pile. Her citizens had been airing their drunken feelings on various matters of state and nation for the better part of the day. Most hadn't been so literate, and not all of their imagined grievances had been aimed towards her. Between episodes of amiable carousing had come some rather unpleasant fights, looting, arson attacks, sharp object centric settling of old scores, and one incident of attempted regicide involving an oversized courgette.

Everything was going according to plan.

There was a polite knock at the doors to her chambers. Celestia frowned. The Helian Court had been suspended due to an 'ongoing national crisis', and in any case, most of the castle staff and councillors hadn't even shown up. “Come,” she said, disarming the anti-espionage seals engraved into the frame and opening the door wide.

“Your Highness,” a soft and collected voice replied. Its owner was a grey bat pony dressed in the black and silver mail of the Night Guard. She came trotting in, confidently. “I am First Lieutenant Zo Nar. Captain Kite sent me to retrieve our orders.”

“Did she?” Celestia asked, puzzled at the appearance of a bat pony in her lofty, sun-loving realm. “Whatever for?”

“Surely you're aware of the situation?” Nar said, looking surprised.

“Of course, I have already sent for the Elements of Harmony,” she lied. “But surely you have your own standing orders?”

“We do, ma'am, but Captain Kite received an urgent request for help from our division from the station chief of the Canterlot Civilian Guard. They're taking a real beating from whatever this affliction is. She wants to know if she's free to render them assistance.”

“Why not ask my Day Guard for help?”

“I believe the station chief already tried that, ma'am,” the bat pony fluttered her leathery wings uncomfortably. “It would appear that most of your guard have joined in with the fighting and looting.”

“I see,” Celestia nodded, trying to look as grim as possible. “And yourselves? How many of your number are incapacitated?”

“None, ma'am. Some of the newer recruits report feeling a bit light-headed and drowsy, but we're in top fighting shape!”

“Hmm,” she nodded. This was unexpected. Nobody was supposed to be resistant to the effects of the imminent completion of the Nectars. Certainly it would take time to spread fully, and not everyone would be affected at once, but Canterlot was at the epicentre of it all. “Well, the nation expects you to do your duty, First Lieutenant. Please inform your Captain that she is to defend the citizenry at all costs until help arrives.”

“Yes ma'am!” Nar shouted, snapping off a smart salute before leaving.

As soon as she was gone, Celestia surveyed the scene from her balcony. A dull roar of cheering and singing hung over the city. Columns of black smoke rose from a dozen places. Pegasus buzzed around in erratic patterns between their high perches, swooping and diving here and there. Those bat ponies will be trouble, she thought. I should have known she would rebuild them to be immune to these effects. Tartarus take her, what else has Luna been hiding from me?

*

Agreeing to go with Whom to one of her infinitely numerous castles had been the only way to get her to stop talking about them for five minutes. In any case, the intense battle was showing no signs of abating soon, and there was one other ingredient to be found on the moon. Twilight's one concession was that they not fly there. Doing so in a microgravity environment was extremely bizarre, and her own experiments had lead to a distinct feeling that an errant twitch of the wings or a mistiming of magic would send her spiralling into the cloying void above.

They'd only been walking for about five minutes when Twilight felt the landscape around her begin to change. The silvery white regolith took on a more subtle, darkened hue, as though it had been spray painted in a hurry. The previously non-existent atmosphere started to present more resistance to her passing, becoming thicker somehow. Her hoofsteps even started to become audible.

Presently, something appeared over the horizon. From a distance it appeared to be a tall platinum wall, but as Twilight and Whom drew closer to it, the construct began to positively loom. Its surface seemed to be in constant motion, a never-ending shock wave that ran the entire length of it. There was no way round, and Whom looked quite content as to the fact that they were going to pass through it. Twilight, however, was not as convinced. She paused as she came within touching distance and set her mind to work on the problem.

Strange images in microscopic detail were present in the wall, a sort of bas relief. Though at first they were monochrome, as she followed them more closely they revealed hints of blacks and blues. Twilight began to recognise some of the scenes. Ponyville, covered in snow. Canterlot on a bright summer’s day, decked out in festive regalia. Ponies, chattering and laughing, playing seasonal games ranging from croquet to snowball fighting.

“Don't mind the Gap, Twilight, it's generally harmless,” Whom said. The pink alicorn was regarding her with a concerned look.

“The Gap?” she asked. “What is this?”

“Something Luna made. It catches dreams so they can be looked after.”

“Catches dreams?” Twilight snorted. “How preposterous. Those are just imaginations. Memories. They're not really tangible. Chemicals and electricity.”

“That's what they are,” Whom shrugged. “The Nightmare used to say she had to remember everypony's dreams, but that sometimes she didn't have room, so they'd have to go in here. Her face would go all funny and she'd stick her horn in the wall like this,” Whom poked her horn into the wall. It entered easily, as though it were completely immaterial. “And then she'd look much happier and less sad. I don't think she liked being reminded of what she'd left behind.”

“I see. Why do we have to go through it?”

“The Gap runs all the way around her private domain. It's where me and my sisters live.”

“Sisters? There are more of you here?”

“Yeah, but they don't talk very much. Come on, the castles are this way,” Whom sighed, and trotted through. Resisting the urge to hold her breath, Twilight followed.

The Gap itself offered no sensory clue that it was even there, and was as thin as a sheet of paper. As she passed it, Twilight suddenly felt warm sunlight on her face, at a contrast to the searing heat that her alicorn nature had been toning down. A familiar sensation presented itself beneath her hooves. It was grass, black as the night but otherwise normal.

They were now standing in a large field surrounded by tall, obsidian trees. They were covered in shimmering silver leaves, and their branches ran at stark, mathematically perfect angles. Each tree seemed to be a carbon copy of the last. Twilight glanced behind her and saw that the wall was gone, replaced by the other end of the field.

“Sweet Celestia,” Twilight whispered. “Where are we?”

“The Nightmare used to call it the Selenite Principality, but only if she was really angry, or drunk, or writing fake letters to her sister or something. I just like to call it home.”

A breeze moved through the trees and over the field. Immediately, a sound like a million wind chimes filled the air. It was strangely soothing, like a sonorous river slowly flowing over a waterfall. Twilight shook her head. Eyes on the prize.

“Right,” she said, using her magic to pull the ingredient list out of her panniers. The third item seemed to make more sense now. Twelve Solanaceae Selenarum flowers. Lunar nightshade. “Lets go find this castle of yours.”

*

Black Ode sprinted down one of Canterlot's wide thoroughfares, hooves clattering over the cobbles, heart pounding in his chest. Some tremendous force coursed through his body and soul. Had he been thinking straight, he might have described it as inexorable in spirit and undeniable in purpose. That was the sort of pony he was; wordy and fanciful.

“Come, my friends, 'tis not too late!” he shouted, to the world at large. “To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle! Where busy thoughts and and blind sensations mingle! For we are the movers and shakers of the world!”

“Shut up, you tosser!” somepony said. “We're trying to have a quiet drink!”

Ode was so taken aback by this that he fell over, crumpling into a heap of flailing limbs. Struggling up, her turned to see the source of the voice. Sandwiched between two tall townhouses was a tiny pub, fronted in black and brown ponyoak panels, windows filled with old fashioned glass panes. The sign hanging from a post above the door read 'The Nag's Hede'. Sat outside it on a series of sturdy looking trestle tables were two old ponies. Ode racked his brains. He was more than familiar with this area of the city; he'd grown up in Canterlot, after all, but for the life of him, he couldn't recall ever having seen the place before, or its curiously misspelled sign.

“Yeah, you great poofy git!” the other chimed in. “Can't you see it's the end of the bloody world?”

“Hey, I will have you know, I am not a poof!” Ode said. “I have been with many mares. They speak most highly of me to their friends. Their marefriends!”

“Sure you have, pal,” the first one grinned. “Why don't you come have a pint with us?”

Ode blinked, and cocked his head, then felt himself wander over to them and sit down.

“I'm Michael, and this is Nick.”

“Michael? Nick? What kind of names are those?”

“Oh yeah? So what's yours then?”

“I am Black Ode, senior member of the Earth Pony Poets and Bards Guild.”

“Hah, see, I told you Nick,” he said, looking over at his friend. “Total poof.”

“So what're you drinking?” Nick asked, before Ode had time to look offended again.

“Um. I'll have whatever it is you're having.”

“Good lad, bitter is then. Sally'll be out in a minute.”

Ode examined the contents of their glass mugs curiously. As an urban poet, he'd drunk more than his fair share of booze down the years, but never before had he seen or even heard of anything like whatever it was they were refreshing themselves with. It was a deep amber colour, almost terracotta, and foamed very slightly when shaken. Apparently some sort of beer, he thought. Though what closeness it has to our own native lager, I don't know.

“So, this end of the world business then,” Michael said. “What'd you make of it, Ode?”

“It's nothing so bad,” Ode said. “Probably just some magical mishap somewhere. This is a unicorn city, after all. I'm sure the Princesses are working on it as we speak.”

“Haven't you seen the way everypony's carrying on?” Nick said. “The guard are barely holding the line around the castle. The Avenue's like a no-pony's land 'cause someone set fire to the Quills and Sofas warehouse. It's bloody anarchy. Got to be the end of the world or something like it.”

“Yer right there, Nick,” Michael nodded, taking a swig of bitter. “Even when that lass whatsherface, you know who I'm talking about, big green wings, black as coal...”

“Queen Chrysalis?” Ode suggested.

“That's her. Even when her lot were here, getting their feelers on everything, it weren't this bad.”

“Those Elements of Harmony ponies will be here soon, no doubt,” Ode said. “They fixed everything last time, and the time before that. They'll sort this mess out, if the Princesses can't.”

The door to the pub opened before anyone could respond, and a shapely yellow earth pony came out, balancing a tray holding three glasses of bitter on it. She carefully placed it on the table, and Ode began to fumble for his wallet.

“Don't worry about that, love,” she smiled. “It's the end of the world, everything's on the house.”

“Oh, right, thank you.”

“Cheers, Sally.” Michael said, finishing off his previous drink and swapping the empty with the new mug. He passed Ode his drink as Nick did the same.

“No worries, lads.” Sally replied, then carried the tray back inside.

“How did she know what I wanted?” Ode asked, as soon as she was gone. He slipped a hoof inside the handle of the glass and sniffed the drink suspiciously.

“Sally's good like that,” Nick said. “Not to mention everyone here drinks bitter.”

Ode took a sip. It certainly was bitter, but as he rolled the flavour around his mouth a great many different flavours emerged. Hops, cherries, a subtle hint of lemon, freshly baled hay on a summer's morning. It seemed to appeal to his earth pony nature at a primordial level somehow.

“Mmm, this is good,” Ode smiled, taking a bigger sip. “Why haven't I had it before?”

“Well, that's because the pub's in Canterlot at the moment,” Michael said, waving around at the city in general. “You guys don't have bitter. What is it that they have here, Nick?”

“Lager,” he replied, as though talking about an unpleasant bodily function. “D'ya remember, we had some the other night, over at that Prince's Arms place.”

“I see,” Ode nodded, drinking more of the bitter. “Well it's certainly something we should have here,” he said, then furrowed his brow in confusion. “What do you mean by 'at the moment'?”

Nick shot his friend a glance of alarm, to which Michael made an exaggerated grimace of apology then took a deep draught of his beer.

“What we mean is 'us', it's us who are here at the moment,” Nick said, hurriedly. “We're here on holiday.”

“And you brought this stuff with you?”

“We're big fans.”

“Where are you on holiday from?”

“You wouldn't have heard of it.” Nick said.

“Other side of the world from here.” Michael added.

“Can't you tell by our accents?”

“Well, try me. I'm a stallion of the world myself, I've been all over,” Ode said. “And, don't take this the wrong way, you both sound like you're from South Canterlot. How else would you have known about Chrysalis?”

“Oh, right, of course we do. And we were here on holiday then too,” he scratched the back of his head. “We haven't had much luck with holidays recently.”

“Mm hmm, yep, that's where I was born, South Canterlot.” Michael agreed.

There was an awkward silence at the table for a brief moment, which allowed Ode to drink more of the surprisingly delicious bitter. Some moments later, the spell was broken by a loud thud from somewhere behind him. Nick's eyes had gone wide, and as soon as Michael saw he turned his head and gasped.

“I thought I'd find you two here.” Princess Celestia's unmistakably regal voice said.

“Oh cripes.” Nick whimpered.

*

“The Great and Drunk Trixie will not be trifled with! Have at you!”

The pillar Zo Nar was hiding behind exploded in a shower of splintered masonry and tiny bunches of roses. Damn unicorns,Nar cursed, reaching for her spear, which she'd dropped when the blue mage with the pointy hat had ambushed her. I guess a dignified attack would be too much to ask for.

“If you come out now, Trixie may yet spare your worthless bat pony life!”

“I am heavily armed!” Nar shouted. “You have one chance to comply before I put you down. Cease your spell casting immediately!”

“Nopony orders the Great and Powerful Trixie around!”

Another of the big pillars holding up the front of the First Equestrian National Bank building blew apart, this time accompanied by various multicoloured fireworks. Luckily, the aim was so bad the resulting fragments barely bothered Nar. I don't have time for this!

Nar raised her spear and dove out from cover, adopting a low-in-the-haunches stance before throwing the weapon. Her aim, unlike the unicorn's, was perfect and true. Just before it struck, the narrow head detected the presence of a magic user and blossomed open, releasing its enchanted payload of four hundred grams of spider silk woven with a simple nullifying cantrip.

The unicorn squealed in dismay, then with mild pain as the shaft whacked her on the nose. Nar had wasted no time, however, and followed up the disabling attack with an angry pounce. The unicorn went flying. Within a few moments, the bat pony had her prey hog tied and helpless. Almost forgetting, she plucked up the now headless shaft of her spear and screwed on a new tip, readying it for use again.

“Now, be a good filly and stay there.” Nar said curtly, before trotting off.

“You can't do this to the Great and Powerful Trixie! She will destroy you! Untie her this instant!”

Her complaints fell on deaf, tufted ears. The situation in the centre of the city had gotten worse in the short time it had taken to meet with Celestia and start on her way back. The streets were a bizarre tableau of violence and debauchery, a mixed platter of vulgarities apparently inspired by the worst revolutions and the best parties in history. One road or side alley would be carried along in good natured drunken cheer, free love and wild singing. The next would seem like a battlefield, littered with injured ponies, or choked with smoke from the fires that had been set.

Nar had been very tempted to just fly out of Celestia's balcony, but the aerial side of things was somehow even more dangerous than the ground side. Swarms of pegasus, their ultra-competitive, hyper-aggressive natures showing true, were having racing competitions and pinionwhip fights between the various roosts of the city. Thankfully nobody had been coordinated enough to pull off a sonic rainboom yet, though not for lack of trying. Nar had personally witnessed several unfortunate young flyers fail to pull up in time and collide with the ground at several hundred miles an hour.

This has to stop, and soon, Nar thought, grimly. Otherwise there won't be a citizenry left to protect.

*

Double Emboss' thoughts were straying more and more back toward that night twenty five years past when he'd helped Princess Celestia deal with a serious problem. She'd come to him, a newly minted clerk of the registry office, with a just-born foal in her hooves and her eyes full of something he'd never seen before in a royal, nor since. Fear. Of course, he had gladly agreed when she'd asked him to conceal its identity. He'd entered a fictional name and lineage in the logs, introduced her to a couple he knew who'd only recently had a child themselves, persuaded them to adopt the purple infant as their own.

If only I'd known. All this, whatever this is, this impending Thiasus, could have been prevented. I should have refused. But how could I have? She was, and still is, my Princess. And she would only have found another.

There had been more favours after that, of course. Altering the genealogies of the long dead House Cupid to show that the dam of the child, a pink unicorn, was a member of it, and thus an alicorn by way of birth, rightful heir to the Crystal Throne. I should have figured it out then. Celestia and Tartarus-damned schemes and magicks. At least I stopped talking to her after the Empire returned and she crowned Twilight Sparkle. Thanks be for small mercies.

The benefits of a life lived constantly in debt to a Goddess had not been inconsiderable. Emboss was currently pacing around the study of his fifteen bedroom manor house, which stood in a hundred and thirty acres of land just outside Canterlot. Its opulence was quite beyond what even a senior clerk like himself could ever have possibly afforded, but he'd always played it off as the family pile, inherited from some great uncle.

Emboss tugged out the stopper from a cut glass decanter with his magic and poured himself a glass of scotch. He'd managed to escape from Canterlot just in time. The northern Abraxis Gate had collapsed after he'd passed through, engulfed by some errant burst of magic, and without it only the Praxis Gate remained as a way out. However, that exit descended down to the opposite slope of Mount Avalon, which would have left Emboss on the wrong side entirely.

It wasn't that Emboss disagreed with most of the outcomes of Celestia's plans. It was the way she went about it. He'd grown up truly believing, like every other pony, that Celestia was the height of pure minded righteousness. He had seen what she really was, a benevolent sociopath, and wished that he never had. Every Summer Sun Celebration was mired with lies to his wife and children about why he didn't want to go, every Hearth's Warming Eve when toasts were made to the Sisters a fog of half-truths.

“Mr Emboss? Are you home? It's not like you to stray and roam.”

Dunya had entered the room, quite unannounced, in her light and airy Zebrican way. Emboss had employed her as a tutor for his foals since before they had been born, but more than that, she was probably the only individual he could really call a friend. He'd even confided in her of his favours for the Princess, though he wasn't sure she believed him as much as he would have liked.

“Something has happened in the city, Dunya,” he said. “Something very magical.”

“From your tone and depressed nature, am I to assume we're all in danger?”

“I believe so. Princess Celestia has triggered some sort of event. Most ponies in Canterlot seem to be affected. It's like they're incredibly drunk. Everything is collapsing. That's not the worst of it though,” Emboss felt his heart start to race, and his words along with it. “This is just a build-up to something she calls the Thiasus, which is apparently like a parade, but run by a God, and sweet sky above, Dunya, I think she wants to have sex with him!”

“Slow down, Mr Emboss, and take a breath,” she cooed, sidling in behind one of the big lounge chairs kept in the study and pushing it closer with her head. “Sit down before you die a death.”

“Good idea, great idea,” Emboss muttered, crawling onto it, feeling utterly miserable and powerless. “Say, you were born in Zebrica! Land of Knowledge! Do you know anything at all about this Thiasus?”

“Many books my mother owned, and many books aside I own,” Dunya said. “But never once in reading them, did I read of what you ken.”

“Worth a shot.” Emboss shrugged.

“But if the knowledge does exist, I know of those who can assist.”

“Who?”

Dunya told him. Emboss didn't believe her. She told him again. After a few minutes of silence, the concept of the Thiasus occurring became the second most outrageous thing he'd heard all day.

Pareidolia and the Search for Meaning

Chapter Three

“Pareidolia and the Search for Meaning”

The 303rd floor of the Cloudsdale Weather Factory was a place few ponies ever ventured. Nestled just above the gargantuan halls of the Thunder Nursery, the sheer volume alone prevented tour guides or nosey employees from finding it. Most of the floor itself was relatively innocuous; some unused storage spaces, conduits for the rainbow outflow, several large rooms filled entirely with chairs, and the usual archaeological strata of broken filing cabinets and used hailstones.

One corner, however, was not. Secreted away behind noise-cancelling enchantments and big, unicorn made locks were the unsuspecting offices of the Dramatic Atmosphere Management Agency, its employees tasked with that most vital of duties; providing appropriately atmospheric weather for seriously dramatic events.

If a lover were to change his mind at the last moment and chase after his beloved as her train pulled from the station, bright sunny skies and gusting, hopeful breezes would be contrived and rushed into place. If two sworn enemies confronted each other in the dead of night in the ruins of an old cathedral, by chance the place where first they met, dread thunder and lightning and driving rain would be scooped up from nearby weather systems and airlifted in by DRAMA's stalwart teams.

Weather Master Strati Form was taking tea in the otherwise secluded seniors lounge when his adjutant burst in, wings fluttering in consternation, face a vision of panic. Form merely peered over the top of his glasses, awaiting an explanation for the interruption. The adjutant was a highly competent officer, a veteran of four successive Hearts and Hooves' Day Campaigns, but he had an alarming tendency to catastrophize things.

“Master Strati Form, sir,” he gasped, quite out of breath, as though he'd been flying for some considerable time. “The hourlies have just come in from Canterlot. I don't know what on Equestria happened, everything is very muddled up, nopony seems to know what's going on, but-”

“Spit it out, Intra Cloud, pull yourself together.”

“We've got a Drama Condition One, sir!”

Form nearly choked on his tea. He felt his heart begin to hammer, and fought against the ancient pegasus urge to seek safety at higher altitudes that started to push against his thoughts. Instead, he cleared his throat and set the porcelain tea cup he had daintily held between the pinion feathers of his left wing back onto the service.

“You're quite sure?” he asked, hoping perhaps that he had misheard the terrified young stallion in front of him.

“Yessir, absolutely. The hourlies from Canterlot, West Wingshade, the High Bank and Mareton-by-Nazeby all say the same thing. We've triangulated a ninety percent accurate reading right over the capital!”

“Very well,” Form said, gravely. “Alert the Weathersmiths and the Meteorological Council. I want a special session of the Tripartite within the next hour.”

“Aye sir!”

As soon as the adjutant had gone, Form took off his glasses and began to polish them absent-mindedly with the downy tips of his new growth feathers. May Celestia have mercy on us all.

*

Ante Diluvian was an old pony. During the span of his life, he'd greeted over thirty thousand dawns, seen the Princesses age with the grace of stars, survived four Changeling invasions and witnessed the return of the Nightmare herself. But even his many years did not compare to the age of the Ginnungagap.

Diluvian's father had always told him that the mighty chasm was older than the whole world, that at its bottom was the seed of magic that held open the rip in reality between this place and the next. He didn't know if that was true, he'd never been as much of a believer in those sorts of things as his father had been, but that point of view was very understandable.

From where Diluvian made his home, the far side was invisible. Impossibly vast streamers of multicoloured magical energies burst up from the depths, roaring into the air with an unrestrained ebullience befitting the sheer potential they embodied. With them came the occasional glob of molten rock, hewn from the walls of the Ginnungagap somewhere in the fathomless pit below, heated by the force of the magic and lofted skywards by the same.

However, where those chunks of mundane lava lost their impetus at a few kilometres in height, the magical plumes continued upwards until they petered out somewhere in the stratosphere, though some of the more powerful impulses could reach the upper bounds of the mesosphere.

Diluvian was busy trotting up the narrow steps toward the edge of the Ginnungagap. The slope was considerable, and the path was cut in zigzags deep into the glittering mafic rock, so it was taking him some time. In his worn leather panniers he carried the same tools he'd been carrying with him since that day some ninety years previously when, as a foal, his father and grandfather had shown him the void for the first time.

The noise it made rose from a dull roar to a more piercing shriek. Although to most the Ginnungagap would have been audible from thirty or forty kilometres away, Diluvian's dutiful decades guarding and watching the gap had made him almost entirely deaf. All he heard these days was the banshee wail of the chasm, and nothing more. As he rounded the last zigzag corner and came out onto the small observation platform built by some distant ancestor of his, he paused to catch his breath, pulling a flask of water from out of his panniers with his mouth. Unicorns and pegasi could not come this close to the Ginnungagap; their inherent magic was too strong and focused. Only the general, homogenised nature of earth ponies could stand it, and even they would begin to suffer after a little while.

Though it was not as if the gap itself received many visitors. Tourists were contained in the town of Brightbeam, a hundred kilometres to the north, where the local gryphons plied a wild trade in obsidian weapons and ornaments, and ex-patriot pony magisters performed strange variants on their art, made possible only by the relative proximity to a magical exhaust such as the Ginnungagap.

Now refreshed, Diluvian set down his panniers and retrieved from them the primary article of his trade. Affixed to a special extending pole, which folded out as he gripped its central point with his mouth, was an array of crystals, inlaid with iron and copper to connect them. Each crystal in the array was tuned to a particular frequency of magic, and would vibrate when it came into contact with it. He had inherited the device from his father, who in turn had inherited it from his father, and so on. For how long, Diluvian didn't know, but the crystals were bright pink, with blue facets and inclusions, and those sorts of rocks were found only in the Crystal Empire.

With a care that had been practised down the ages, Diluvian sidled over to the edge, moving the business end of the device into the stream of pure magic. He had long learned not to look down, and so closed his eyes to wait for the familiar vibration that would tell him all was well with the world. His mind drifted to the coolness of his hut, and the filling meal that his wife would be preparing for him for when he returned.

Instead, as soon as the array touched the mana flow, a sharp judder came down the rod, jarring his teeth. Stinging pain slashed at his cheek. Absolutely stunned, Diluvian opened his eyes and stared. The array was gone, and the remaining part of the rod bent and buckled, burned around the edges.

Oh dear, he thought, blinking, as blood trickled over his eyelids. This is not good.

*

“So this is an apple orchard?” Luna said. “Remarkable. We had always wondered what the state of modern agriculture was. In our time it was not as organised.”

It had taken surprisingly little persuasion to get Spike to agree to helping her return the Elements to their normal states. Apparently this sort of thing went on quite a lot in Ponyville, as he had solemnly retrieved a large binder from underneath Twilight's bed marked 'Contingencies In Case Of Mind Control'. Alongside it was a book called Mental Shenanigans: What To Do If You're Not You, which seemed to have been heavily read, as it was worn around the edges and contained many hoof-written notes and corrections scrawled in the margins. Although Luna could hardly call what had happened to the Elements 'mind control', it was probably the best place to start. The cure for these sorts of problems was the same, anyway. The two of them were now creeping through the south field of Applejack's farm trying to remain unseen, which was quite a task for a green and purple dragon and a midnight blue lunar Goddess.

“Yes, it is, now shut up,” Spike grunted. He was still annoyed at not being filled in on the situation right away, but Luna suspected it was just out of concern for Twilight. The two of them shared a unique bond, quite unlike anything she'd ever seen before.

“Sir, yes, sir,” Luna said, giving him a sarcastic salute.

“You've got no reason to be laughing,” he said. “This is all your fault anyway.”

“Oh come now, Spike, we meant no harm of it.”

“Why did you even tell them all that stuff? You could have just told them about this booze of yours and stopped there!”

“Admittedly, we did go too far. It is not like us at all. We are just very anxious. Twilight must not be allowed to continue the way she has. It will bring ruin to folk of all nations, we are sure of it.”

“She always used to say you were the Goddess most in tune with the thoughts and feelings of actual ponies.”

“We are. Today we have acted more like our sister,” she threw up a sarcastic hoof and frowned. “Oh Ordered Goddess, so high and mighty, not deigning to understand the emotions of others unless to further her own ends!”

“It doesn't sound as though you like her very much.”

“That is not the thing of it,” Luna sighed. “She is a most noble and goodly protector. But she does so only because that is her nature. We do what we do because we love our little ponies. Celestia has no motivations in that sense. She is a force of nature, and can no more love, or hate, or feel emotion than a hurricane can. She simply is.”

“Then why be angry with her, if she can't help it?”

“Because she was not always this way. Once she was a better pony. She gave that up to-”

“Ssh! That's Applejack!”

Spike tugged Luna's flowing mane and pulled her down into the grass. Up ahead of them, between the trees, a dusty coloured mare wearing a Stetson hat was sitting bolt upright on her haunches. She seemed to be in a bit of a daze, as her head bobbed back and forth in time to an inaudible rhythm.

“Okay, you stay here, I'll go talk to her,” he said. “She probably won't react well to seeing you again.”

Spike crossed the remaining distance in a few moments. Luna couldn't hear what he was saying, but it took a moment for him to get Applejack's attention. When he did, she immediately began sobbing, throwing a hug around the put upon reptile. Spike patted her on the back as she started talking. Presently, and apparently after much in the way of promises to return, he ambled back to where Luna was hidden.

“Well? How is she?”

“She says you opened her eyes to the unbearable, undeniable truth of reality, that she's realised her entire life is utterly meaningless, that the apples have been lying to her all along, and that nothing makes sense any more.”

“Applejack said that?”

“More or less.” Spike shrugged. “I don't get it. You told me the exact same thing.”

“In hindsight, it's a very pony reaction to that sort of revelation,” Luna said, pawing at the ground with a hoof. “Herd animals, and all that.”

“Yeah, well, I'm an honorary pony, and it didn't affect me. I mean, so what if the-”

“Don't say it!” Luna snapped, the voce rex fully invoked. Birds fled screaming from the apple trees, and there were a series of sharp cracks as their bark shattered. Thankfully, Applejack didn't seem to notice. “Ahem. Sorry. Your never know who might be listening.”

“No worries. Twilight's been snoring like that ever since you gals alicorned her,” he said, scratching his chin and looking thoughtful. “I wonder when she's going to stop worrying and learn to love those wings.”

“'Tis the question of the hour,” Luna said. “So what did you tell Applejack?”

“What exactly could I say? She was totally cut up about it! Why don't you just mind wipe her?”

“Too much time has passed. Memory alteration is only safe within four minutes of the event itself. After that things get unpleasant. She could end up a cabbage if we tried.”

“What, you mean she could lose her mind?”

“No, we mean she might turn into an actual cabbage.”

“Yikes. You better not do that then.”

“What did that book say we should do?”

“Doesn't have anything on traumatic memories.”

“Hmm. This may be more tricky than we thought. It may require an altogether different approach,” Luna ruminated, sitting up out of the grass and peering into the sky. “Say, dragon, have you ever ridden on the back of an alicorn?”

Spike grinned.

*

Discord watched Spike and Princess Luna take off from behind the illusory guise of a nearby apple. All according to plan. They'll never work it out in time. Oh, but won't this Thiasus be just divine?

Only the worms and the sparrows heard the resulting manic laughter amidst the smell of the blossoms and the rustle of the trees.

*

“It can't be this easy. There's a catch somewhere, there has to be.”

Whom and Twilight were sat together in the courtyard of what the pink alicorn had called Baroque Number 47, which was actually a remarkably accurate reconstruction of Canterlot Castle built entirely from slate grey blocks of granite. Twilight was too busy to take proper notes on it though, because she was staring intently at one of the courtyard's many planters. Contained within it were exactly twelve Lunar Nightshade plants, arranged in a neat, evenly spaced row.

“I eat those for breakfast sometimes,” Whom said, helpfully. With her castle-flying-to lust sated, she'd adopted a strange, doped up expression. “They're spicy.”

“She'll have put a trap on it somewhere,” Twilight muttered. “As soon as I touch them, probably as soon as I even think about touching them, a giant six headed lunar salmon or something will come bursting out of the ground.”

“Our salmon have two heads, and they only burrow during the breeding season.”

“What?” Twilight said, taking her attention off the suspicious flora for a moment. “Oh never mind!”

“Why are you trying to make her drinks, anyway?”

“Because the normal kind don't work on me.”

“Yeah, I know that, you said it like five hundred times, but why do you want to get drunk in the first place?”

“Because it's fun?”

“Nightmare Moon never looked like she was having fun,” Whom said, looking distant. “She just got sad. Real sad. Like all the sadness there could possibly be in the whole Universe was in her head.”

“Look, I'm just trying to come to terms with my incipient immortality, all that stuff.”

“She was trying to deal with something like that too, before she came to the moon.”

“I didn't know that,” Twilight said, trying to decipher Whom's body language. It was strange and awkward one moment, then free flowing and casual the next, as though she'd learnt it all from a book but had forgotten how to read halfway through and had made up the rest. “We were always told at school that she got banished because she felt ponies weren't appreciating her night, and tried to make them appreciate it.”

“Nah, she went nuts after what that big war did to her sister.”

“War? What war?”

“The one against that snake goat thing she had the hots for.”

“Discord?”

“That's the guy!”

“Luna had the, had...” Twilight fumbled the words like they were shards of glass in her mouth. “She had the hots for Discord?”

“Psh, yeah, isn't that obvious?” Whom said, rolling her eyes. “It was because she had to become this big, totally lethal, no quarter given embodiment of war to balance out her sister's natural pacifism, and like, if you spend too long staring into the funny yellow googly eyes, I guess the funny yellow googly eyes stare into you?”

“I see.”

“Yeah, so anyway, after the war Celestia saw what her sister had turned into and tried to take on some of those responsibilities, but to do that she had to fiddle with the, uh, the underlying fundaments of reality, or something, 'cause the whole warmaking thing was totally not in her nature, and that's a big deal for Gods.”

“Something went wrong then?”

“Majorly. Nightmare Moon never really told us what, exactly, but it seriously bummed her out, because she cooked up her brews and well, nopony really remembers what happened after that, not even her.”

“See, that's what I want. I just want to be able to forget, relax, unwind at the end of a day, you know?”

“I'm sure you know what you're doing.” Whom said, completely sincerely.

Twilight nodded, with equal sincerity, and went back to studying the planter for traps.

*

“I think I've figured it out!” Twilight finally shouted sometime after lunch. It was hard to tell the time properly in the Lunar Principality. The light seemed to sneak out from behind things when you weren't looking, like a chastened dog which had just made a mess on the carpet; certainly there was no analogue to the sun or the moon travelling across the silvery sky.

“Figured what out?” Whom replied. She'd taken up a comfortable spot on the lush, black, grassy lawn near the edge of the courtyard and variously snoozed or gambolled about chasing imaginary butterflies. Currently she was lying on her back peering at Twilight.

“The sinister arcane mechanism Nightmare Moon left to ensnare me,” she said, a bead of sweat dripping down her cheek and off the bottom of her chin. “It's a double inverse Gygax-Starswirl pitfall, and if I just do this it'll disarm itself!” Twilight's horn glowed purple as she squinted in concentration.

Nothing happened.

“Damn and blast!” Twilight said, furrowing her brow. “This thing is more devious than I thought. Who knew you could pack so much intricately woven magic into a simple planter? That's clearly the beauty of it though. Totally innocuous, right up to the moment you touch it, and then suddenly you're having your flank chewed on by giant killer moon fish.”

“B-but I've been eating out of that planter for years!” Whom whinnied, looking genuinely scared all of a sudden. “It's been there all this time?”

“I'm afraid so,” Twilight said, sagely. “I'm going to need some scrolls, five hundred metres worth, and about forty litres of number two India Ink. And a small goose, for quills.”

“Nightmare Moon's study has those! I'll fetch them!”

Whom jumped to her hooves and went galloping off as fast as they could carry her.

*

The day wore on into the night, which translated to a slight but noticeable dimming of the ambient light. The courtyard was now covered in great piles of used vellum, every spare inch scribbled over with bizarre diagrams and hastily written notes in several different languages. In the middle of it all was the planter, surrounded by a ring of red duct tape applied to the floor; and some distance back from it was Twilight, standing bolt upright, staring at it.

“My education has failed me,” she mumbled. “My magic has failed me.”

“W-what do we do now?” Whom whispered. She was hiding behind Twilight, which looked very silly, as Whom was at least as tall as Princess Celestia, if not slightly more so.

“There's only one thing for it. I'll grab the flowers, and as soon as I do that, we make a run for it. Whatever monster from the Stygian depths of Tartarus comes at us, we can outrun it. I mean, we're two alicorns! We can take on the world!”

“I'm scared, Twilight!”

“We'll be fine. Just stay with me, no matter what. We'll get through this. Ready?”

“Oh skies above!”

Twilight closed her eyes, and with the solemnity of a priest administering the last rites, she plucked the leftmost flower from its bushy stem with the deftest of telekinetic touches. The sound it made as it came apart was almost audible above the hammering of two divine hearts. Twilight heard Whom gasp as the little blue bloom floated hesitantly into the air.

Nothing continued to occur, as it had been doing quite happily for the previous eight or nine hours.

*

“I think it would be best if we never speak of this incident again.”

Twilight and Whom were wandering somewhat aimlessly through the expansive grounds of Baroque 47, taking a moment to recover from the pointless activities of the afternoon in the warm embrace of the gardens and concourses. Now that she had a moment to consider it, the castle was turning out to be a rather grand sort of place. Nothing in the many flowerbeds or ranks of marble statues spoke of being mass produced; each one was a symphony of careful artistry and thoughtful design. Oddly, there seemed to be nopony else about. Back home, a castle such as this would have had a staff of a hundred, mostly gardeners and hoofmares, but here the halls were deathly quiet and untrodden.

“Speak of what again, Twilight?”

“That's the spirit.”

Presently, they passed into an arched gatehouse through a low but very thick limestone wall. Despite having spaces obviously designed to house a dozen guards, nopony was there to greet them. On the other side, rolling black and silver fields glimmered in shades of the night as the strange unlight washed over them. Thin tracks criss-crossed between those neat squares to link them, and on the distant horizon stands of trees slowly gave way to a forest that appeared to eventually enclose the entire castle and its lands.

“It's really quite beautiful here, isn't it?” Twilight remarked, as the two of them paused to take in the view.

“I guess so,” Whom said, sitting down on her haunches and producing a small rectangular box from inside the recesses of the obnoxiously yellow collar she wore. “But I've lived here all my life. It just goes on forever, no matter how far you fly,” she waved a hoof at the horizon, simultaneously opening the end of the box and pulling a long, tubular thing from it. “There's just more fields and forests, even big mountain ranges sometimes, rivers that go on and on without an end.” she magically placed the tube in her mouth, and then set fire to it with a surge from her horn, causing Twilight to blink in confusion. “You just get so bor-”

“Hey, what on Equestria are you doing?!”

“What?”

“Why did you set fire to that thing in your mouth?”

“This? I'm just having a cigarette.”

“What's a cigarette?”

“You don't have these back where you come from?” Whom asked, puzzled. She took a drag from it and exhaled a long stream of coppery smoke.

“No, we don't.”

“Oh, I see,” Whom said, offering her the pack amiably. “Would you like one?”

Twilight peered at them suspiciously. The smoke washed over her, bringing with it a flood of odd memories. Evenings by the fireside with her parents, lost in study. The sharp but merry chill of a winter's day. Then came more palpable sensations; the joy of knowing, the feeling of acceptance that had come when she'd first made friends in Ponyville. Without thinking, she found herself reaching out with her magic, drawing one from the pack and copying Whom in lightning it.

“Nightmare Moon used to make them as a hobby,” Whom said, replacing the container back behind the collar. “There's not many left, actually. Oh, I've been meaning to ask you, you don't happen to know where she's gone do you?”

Twilight placed the cigarette between her lips and inhaled. Her eyes began to water, and a strange itchy feeling raced down her throat. A few seconds later, this was replaced by something not unlike menthol, one of Twilight's favourite flavourings. “You don't know?” she said, breathing out the copper smoke.

“She just vanished one day. I was surprised you didn't ask who she was, but, uh, I thought you might really have been her, just in disguise.”

“I'm definitely not Luna,” Twilight said, rotating the cigarette around in front of her so she could examine it from all angles. “She tried to attack our world a few years ago. Me and my friends used the Elements of Harmony on her. She's a good pony now, runs the place along with her sister.”

“Oh.” Whom suddenly looked crestfallen. “I thought she hated her sister.”

“Well, she did, but the Elements made her good again. I can't believe she just abandoned you here all alone. Let me tell you, if we'd any idea all this stuff was up here, we'd have come sooner.”

“We're not alone,” Whom sighed. “My other sisters are here too.”

“Yeah, you mentioned them. I haven't seen anypony else. Where are they?”

“They don't go out much.”

“Can I meet them?”

Whom bit her lip and stared off into the middle distance, as if deep in thought about something.

“If you like,” she said, finally.

*

Double Emboss was pouring through a thick tome of ancient and forgotten lore when his wife arrived home with their foals. She worked down in the little unnamed hamlet that had once been a service town for their manor, but which was now a trendy locale for Canterlot's elite to summer in. That never stopped Emboss from feeling as though he were a modern monarch of the glen, however, even when he saw some effete snob pay more for a round of drinks than he made in a year.

“Good evening, dearest husband,” Absolute Truth smiled, prodding him on the shoulder to break his studious transfixion. “You're home early.”

“Oh, sorry darling,” Emboss said, putting down the book held aloft with his magic and giving her a kiss on the cheek. “I didn't hear you come in.”

“So do you know what's going on in the city? It was all anypony could talk about today, but nopony had anything more than rumours and gossip. Mrs Briar-Dell said some drunk blew up the civic centre.”

“Yes, they did. It's been an absolute nightmare today,” Emboss said, cautiously. “We were, uh, sent home as a precaution. Health and safety, and all that.”

“Well, I'm glad you're okay,” Truth said, absent-mindedly tidying the study as she trotted about. “Let me tell you, the number of ponies who came into the shop today who thought the sky was falling...”

For the next twenty minutes, Emboss listened intently to her varied anecdotes of village life. Truth ran a small boutique café, set up to cater entirely to the moneyed whims of the seasonal inhabitants. When it wasn't beset on all sides by the upper classes, it converted to a far more homely and down to earth sort of place, and as it was the only venue of its kind, thus became a one stop shop for gossip and trading in community spirit.

This would usually be the part of the day when he'd have to work hard to pretend to be interested. It was not that he found his wife boring, far from it, it was just that the village barely changed except between the summer and winter. There was really only so much in the way of stories about Mrs Sheen's dodgy left hoof the average stallion could be expected to endure.

Now, however, it reminded him of a kind of normality that seemed so distant. He allowed himself to become lost in it, and so it ended far too quickly. Truth's motherly skill set was soon demanded elsewhere, namely in the cooking of dinner for a pair of ravenous foals, who had clearly not eaten for several weeks if one were to judge by the strength of their protestations alone.

It was a pity that he had to keep the truth from the one he loved in life more than anything, but the guilt now turning over in his head was almost as old as he was. Emboss could probably have tolerated it, had he not been so instrumental in its orchestration. Few understood the power of the Equestrian bureaucracy. Those fateful quill strokes in a ledger made decades ago which had granted the legitimacy of House Cupid to a pony that should not have had it. As far as most were concerned, reality itself had been altered, and made to fall like a line of dominoes in the exact direction Celestia wished it to.

Not this time. I'll haunt Tartarus before I see this come to pass.

*

It was midnight, and the moon arced high over Emboss' manor. For an evening in midsummer, the air was surprisingly cold, probably due to the complete lack of any cloud cover. The not inconsiderable estate provided many nooks and crannies to hide in, and having extricated his young from the more bizarre spots on more than one occasion, Emboss was quite familiar with them.

The plan hadn't taken much time to fall into place once he'd come to terms with what Dunya had told him. It was all relatively simple. Travel to a town on the Dauphin sea, hop on a ferry heading to a Gryphon autonomous region friendly enough to allow access, then head underground into Zebrica. Don't think about the fact you've never even been on a boat before, let alone crossed the Dauphin. Don't think about the fact that there are restaurants in Gryphon countries that actually serve meat, and especially don't think about the fact you hate confined underground spaces. No, if we don't think about any of that we'll be absolutely fine.

“Mr Emboss, are you there? We have very little time to spare.”

Dunya carried on her rhyming scheme, apparently even when whispering out of the shadows. The sinuous and willowy zebra mare blended in well with the darkness, which was surprising, considering one might have thought the inverse to be true. Emboss had never really seen her in the dark before, and had often wondered why her race called the deeps of the earth their home. Now he realised how they survived and prospered in such a place; it was clear Dunya was only visible because she wanted to be seen.

“I'm here. Did you get everything we needed?”

“At such short notice, it was not easy. Luckily, your friend was needy.”

“I, uh, I see,” Emboss said, unsure of what to make of the inflection. “Are we rea-”

The bushes suddenly exploded with a blinding light, cutting its way through the leaves and branches. There was an aura mixed in with it, the tell tale sign of magelight. He immediately recognised its burnt orange pastel hue. Absolute Truth's horn poked into their little cubby a few seconds later.

“Late night liaisons in the shrubbery? With the staff, no less,” her voice intoned, in a guarded and imperious mix of humour and coldness, as though she were a Goddess deciding on the fate of a mortal soul, who's next response would condemn or sanctify him. “What am I to make of this?”

“It's not what you think!” Emboss squeaked.

“Well then, husband, you had best explain.”

“Oh ponyfeathers,” he sighed, rubbing his temple with a muddy hoof. “Yes, I suppose I better had.”

Do Gryphons Purr?

Chapter Four

“Do Gryphons Purr?”

Astrapios the hippogryph strode out into the sharp morning sunlight, the claws at the end of his front legs barely making a sound over the equine clatter of his rear hooves. As the owner of Barely Eagle Magazine, the floating offices of which he now stood on the deck of, it was his duty and pride to greet the day the way he did, in a fashion he considered rather regal and imperious.

In reality, he was something of a laughing stock amongst the stevedores and fishermares of the primarily pony town of Port Dauphine, mainly because of his size. Astrapios was a very small hippogryph indeed. Barely the height of a young filly despite being in his middle age, the bizarre sight of him appearing amidst the dawn rays on the deck of his three masted clipper, standing in the spot usually reserved for some stalwart captain, was quite possibly the only thing that prevented Port Dauphine's residents from going mad with boredom.

It certainly didn't help that he was the sole purveyor of gryphon related adult reading materials for the entire less beaky side of the Dauphine, nor that he was possessed of the most twee and contrived Canterlot accent imaginable, a voice pulled straight from some old fashioned regency parody of the place.

Port Dauphine was an irascible place, much like the crabs and other crustaceans it was most famed for. During the long winter months it weathered ferocious storms, being as it was too far away from a pegasus cloudholme to warrant much in the way of climaculture, but in the summer it thrived, its residents blessed with an aquatic harvest quite unlike that of any other town on the Dauphine coast. It was the largest deep water harbour, too, and so did much in the way of trade with the gryphon autonomous regions. Caravels and hoys sat at anchor, nestled in long ranks of furled sails, fighting for space with imposing galleons and secretive dhows; even Zebrican junks and ur-xebecs had a spot here, fewer in number though they were.

Astrapios, now finished with his dawn routine, began to address the deliveries that had been left beside the ramp that linked his boat, named for the magazine, to the wharf. Large crates bearing the hallmarks of a local printer were the only notable objects, beside the usual supplies of food and fresh water. Finding ponies willing to print blue subject matter was getting harder and harder these days, especially those who had the skill to operate a lithograph. He had been relying more and more on buying up ten-a-bit erotic stories to fill pages, much to the chagrin of his dedicated clientèle. That's connoisseurs for you. They know what they like, and they like what they know.

With a claw, Astrapios opened one of the crates, levering open the wood slats with ease. The smell of new books filled the air briefly, before being overcome by the general odour of a hundred fishing boats and their various catches. The hippogryph paused only to place a tiny pair of reading glasses on the end of his beak, then pulled a copy of Barely Eagle Magazine from its nest of shredded paper padding.

Good binding, nice clear printing, good typesetting, he thought, deftly flicking through it, casting his expert eye on the new offering. Then he came to the first lithograph. Oh, but this won't do at all!

After checking a few more copies to see if the error had been carried over to all the issues, which it had, Astrapios stalked down the gangplank onto the dock, offending article in talon. Had he been a hippogryph of normal size, a wingless alce, or even a gryphon, the sight of him wrapped in fury would have sent the herd animals fleeing for their collective lives, just by dint of their instincts: big angry clawed thing, run!

But as it was, most of the wharf ponies simply ignored him, or cracked a wry smile. One, a bat pony mango salesmare, even fell over laughing, apparently having never seen a creature such as Astrapios before. The hippogryph roundly ignored them, and quickly left the harbour, taking one of the many narrow alleys that fed into the key side warehouses and businesses. On a different day, he might well have given them what for, maybe even snapped his beak at them to show that it all still worked as nature intended, despite the miniaturisation. He had no time for such games today though. All two thousand copies of Barely Eagle contained a dire flaw, and they were only six hours shy of the shipping deadline.

Equus Felix Fine Printing and Haberdashery was located right in the middle of Port Dauphine's Artisans District, which was a fancy way of describing a broad rectangle of workshops and small factories pressed up against the northern city walls, containing everything that wasn't a fishery or some fishery related industry. Many businesses actually shared space, with makers of notions and quills working alongside upholsterers and seamstresses. This was why, when Astrapios crossed the threshold into Equus Felix, he was nearly crushed by a falling tower of assorted buttons and reels of cotton.

“Oh sweet Celestia!” a slate grey pegasus stallion gasped. “I’m so, so sorry!”

“For goodness sakes!” Astrapios snapped. “You could kill someone if you're not careful!”

“I know, I know!” he cried, skittering around on the floor in a pitiful sort of way, trying to pick up the thousands of little accoutrements and clothing essentials he'd spilt. “Please don't tell my boss!”

“As though I have time to inform on you.” he said uncharitably, and carried on deeper inside the workshop.

Past a maze of elegant brass and nickel printing presses was a little office. Astrapios had only been here once before, and somehow it seemed even messier and less organised. Big boxes of inks and papers littered the floor, on top of which were piled trays of typeset lettering and the many types of wax crayons used in lithography. Small limestone blocks accompanied them, stinking of nitrate and tallow, apparently examples, or proofs of concept. Most held images of flora and fauna, or depicted stylised scenes from the recent past. Equus Felix did a lot of work for historians, Astrapios recalled, especially those who recorded the events of the gryphon autonomous regions, which was why he'd chosen them for this production run.

In the middle of all this, a white unicorn was busy tinkering with the mechanism of a lithographic press. Numerous small instruments and tools wavered in telekinetic suspension around her head. The mark on her flank was a black flywheel, barely visible under a slick coating of oil, turpentine, and any number of the foul chemicals used in the innumerable different processes the business carried out on a day to day basis.

“Excuse me,” Astrapios began, tapping his free claw on the varnished wooden flooring. “Can I speak to Mr Felix, please?”

“He's not here,” the unicorn replied, without looking up. “Public decency hearing.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I said he isn't here. Mr Felix was called up in front of the Outrages Against Public Decency Committee yesterday afternoon. He won't be back until next week.”

“Oh,” he said, rather deflated. “Well, can I speak to someone about this order?”

“If you're here about that smutty magazine,” she said, spotting the copy of Barely Eagle he was holding. “You're supposed to take all complaints to the local council offices.”

“I'm the owner!”

“I see, well...” the unicorn said, looking him up and down. “I'm Senn Feld, and I'm in charge until Mr Felix gets back. You're Mr Astrapios, right?”

“Yes, and there's a seriou-”

“You know you've basically gone and put us out of business, right?”

“What?” Astrapios frowned. “How do you mean?”

“Mr Felix did this contract for you under the table, see, because times have been a bit tight recently. But then the OAPDC got wind of it, and all of a sudden, we've lost all our regular customers!”

“I fail to see how this is my problem.”

“Oh Tartarus,” she sighed, laying down all the tools she was levitating. “It's really not, is it? Mr Felix shouldn't have done it. Stupid old bugger. He should have known those uptight bastards would have issues with feathery sorts getting all...getting...” she fumbled for the words, then blushed. “You know what I mean. No offence.”

“None taken,” Astrapios said, genuinely, as he'd heard much worse from drunk dock workers and sailors down the years. “Is Mr Felix going to be okay?”

“I suspect this'll all blow over sooner or later,” Feld sighed, putting a hoof on the printing mechanism and stroking it lovingly, as though for comfort. “But I doubt we'll put anything together for the Foals Guide ponies ever again. The way their editor was talking, it was like she thought our presses were tainted somehow!”

“Hmm,” Astrapios held up the magazine. “So I suppose there would be no chance of getting a lithograph fixed?”

“What's wrong with it?” Feld asked, in the manner of obsessives everywhere. “Mr Felix did the etching for your issue himself.”

Astrapios opened the copy of Barely Eagle to the first lithograph, then held it up for her to see. The young mare winced slightly, but professionalism won out, and she studied the convoluted scene carefully. “I don't see what's wrong with it.”

“The actress playing Hekate in this scene is supposed to be a hippogryph.”

“So? Looks like a hippogryph to me.”

“She's got no hooves! The poor lass looks like a bloody gryphon or something!”

Feld examined the picture again, then glanced at Astrapios. He lifted his back left leg off the ground and waved it about for emphasis. The unicorn pulled the magazine into her aura of magical influence so she could look at it more closely. Finally, comprehension dawned.

“Well I see it now,” she said. “Mr Felix has drawn this, um, mare with paws instead of hooves.”

“Quite so. Although we prefer the term 'hen' instead of 'mare', thank you.”

“And your customers are going to notice that?”

“Madam, Hekate is one of my most popular actresses. If for some reason she were to mysteriously grow paws without even a word of explanation, I would have a riot on my claws. A lecherous, sweaty riot, but a riot nonetheless.”

“Well, alright. I guess I can fix it. Can you pay for another print run?”

“Pay?! But it's your error!”

“I should have told you to get lost five minutes ago too, but I didn't, because I won't have it said that Mr Felix doesn't do right by his customers,” she said, keeping her eyes on the faulty magazine. “Even if they are smut barons.”

“Oh, very well,” Astrapios sighed. “Can you do it in six hours?”

“Three and a half, if you're lucky.”

“Right, excellent,” he said, pulling his wallet out from its hiding place amidst his feathers and retrieving an unsettlingly large amount of paper cash from it. “But remember, she needs hooves.”

“Yes, Mr Astrapios.”

*

Whom led Twilight into the big sonorous forest beyond the fields in complete silence, allowing the eerie sound to wash over them in all its many nuanced forms. The purple mare's brain was in full scientist mode, and she simply allowed herself to observe things. Nightmare Moon had apparently gone to great lengths to create a wholly functional ecosystem, which became more and more dense the further one got from the castle. Tiny glassy black insects began to appear, shaped like trapezoids and cubes, flying on elegant whip-like wings, with abstract planforms that recalled certain Cubist paintings Twilight had once seen.

Chasing these creatures between the jet boughs were things she wanted to call birds, but which propelled themselves along with odd corkscrew impellers, and made noises like a zither or sitar, occasionally being close enough and loud enough to overpower the constant drone of the rustling lunar trees. Beneath her hooves the ground was soft and pliant, almost mud, though it lacked any sort of moisture, and was more like a version of the silicate sea she'd first encountered. This sort, however, didn't cling to her at all, and actually seemed to leech particles off her. Twilight felt that if she were to go rolling around in it, she'd probably stand up cleaner than before.

Presently, the forest broke into a clearing, filled with more colour than she'd seen so far on the moon, though it was all still shades of the night; ellipsoid flowers of blue and dark green, on stems like sine waves, clustered up into neat bunches of three or four plants. They either grew or had been planted in a big spiral pattern, which lead into the middle like a galaxy formed around a supermassive black hole.

Standing in the centre of the glade were five statues.

Twilight noticed that Whom had adopted a reverent posture, usually reserved for ponies visiting the tombs of the great and good. She moved carefully inward toward the statues, making sure not to step over or crush any of the plants. Twilight followed her with equal caution.

When they came to the first statue, she suddenly realised that each of the statues was almost identical to Whom, though clearly not carbon copies, each was subtly different; longer wings, a fatter face, a more wavy manestyle. Each one was sat on a large base of black tinted gypsum, framed in marble, with inscriptions picked out in obsidian or some other volcanic material. The language was Old High Equuish, and Twilight furrowed her brow for a moment to translate it.

Y23 – 66 Whom Nopony. Fell in a Lake.

Beneath it were a set of smaller inscriptions just into the rock, in a dialect of Old High Equuish that was far less formal. Moon Her Sister Raised This.

“They still talk sometimes,” Whom said, sitting down on her haunches in front of the statue. “They're pretty slow now, though. Takes a year to hear us, or more.”

“I didn't know they were de-”

“Don't say that word. She hated that word. I hate that word.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Anyway, they aren't. They're still here. Just very slow,” she said, taking the pack of cigarettes out of the space in her raglia, removing one and placing it carefully against the statue. “Even Nightmare Moon can't cheat him, so she just slowed them down and put them here, where they'll be safe, where we can still love them.”

“Skies above...” Twilight whispered. “She really had issues letting go, didn't she?”

“She just wants us to be safe,” Whom said, wandering over to the nearest group of flowers, where she plucked a few of the fatter specimens. “She loved us all, even if it sometimes looked like she didn't.”

“I'm sure she did,” Twilight said, unconvinced. An abuse victim if ever I saw one. “Look, I didn't know about your the, uh, condition, of your sisters. We don't have to stay here. I still need to grab that squid eyeball,” the purple mare rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Maybe you could come with me? It sounds like you could do with a break, and I’ve got six more ingredients to go.”

“Oh, Twilight,” she sighed, smiling. “I thought you'd never ask,” she added the flowers to join the cigarette in offering. “Let me just finish up here and we can get going. I've always wanted to see Equestria.”

*

“Well, I wish you'd just told me in the first place, husband.”

It had taken until almost three in the morning for Emboss to explain everything to his wife. She was dealing with it all quite well, really, considering for a moment that he had been preparing to vanish in the middle of the night, leaving only a vague letter to the effect that he was going away on business and wouldn't be back for some time. It had been all rather silly, a coltish adventure fantasy tied up in righteous indignation and the need to right an old wrong.

“Mhm, me too,” Emboss said, feeling embarrassed. “I don't know why I didn't.”

“To think that you were going to just leave me here with the foals, too. That was pretty sexist of him, don't you think Dunya?”

“Professional mindset put aside? I would not take that from my bride.”

“That's Emboss for you, I suppose.”

“I just thought she would make a good guide, what with her knowing the territory and all that.”

“I didn't know you were a fillyfooler, Dunya,” Truth said, ignoring him for a moment. “How's that working out?”

“Oh skies, Truth, you can't say that!”

“It's our word, husband. We're allowed to use it if we want.”

“But you're not-”

“Not currently.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then the two mares began laughing like drunk hyenas. Emboss went beet red and took off his glasses.

“Fie on the pair of you,” he muttered. “I'll just go on my own.”

“Oh no you don't,” Truth said. “Dunya will stay here and look after the foals, like we pay her to do. You and I will go together.”

“W-what?” Emboss stuttered. “Really?”

“Yes, husband. I know how important this must be to you, and if it's important to you, it's important to me,” she smiled and put a hoof against his. “Besides which, if Celestia manages to pull off this Thiasus of hers, what kind of a world will it be for our foals? We have to try.”

“Thank you,” he sighed, hugging her in relief. “I was terrified for a moment back there.”

“Don't think I've forgotten about the fact you've been lying to me for the last ten years,” she chastised, shooting him a dire look. “We'll deal with that one later.”

“Yes, dear,” he winced. “Sorry.”

“At least we know why you never wanted to go to any of those Hearthswarming parties,” she laughed. “And there was me thinking you were just being anti-social, or that you didn't like any of my friends.”

“I like all of your friends, dear.”

“Yes, well, perhaps we can actually be seen together at those events from now on, hmm?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Right, well, not if we're flank deep in drunken Gods,” she bit her lip and looked around the study, pulling out one of the maps Emboss had rolled up on a top shelf with her magic. “How are we crossing the ocean?”

“Well, I was thinking we take a pegasus stagecoach to Port Dauphine, then pick up a ferry.”

“To where?”

“One of the gryphon autonomous regions.”

“Which one?”

“Well, whichever is easiest, I imagine. I was just going to ask the locals.”

“You haven't really planned this out very well, have you?”

“It was pretty spur of the moment.”

Absolute Truth unrolled the big map and laid it out flat on the desk, weighing down its corners with a quartet of cut glass cubes she'd bought Emboss for his birthday some years previously. It showed the Equestrian heartland in great detail, with Canterlot as the meridian. Off to the east, beyond the Everfree Forest and on the other side of the Roarke mountains, was Port Dauphine. Every little town and village in between was carefully mapped, each glade and river's course prescribed in beautiful calligraphy.

As those rivers travelled over salt flats they became heavy with mud, and turned to great estuaries as they joined together. Within these mouths onto the sea were dotted dozens of islands, some more than two miles wide, though the majority being far smaller. One or two even had small villages on them, the fact that their names were given in both Equuish and Old Equuish demonstrating their age. Ponies were not thought native to Equestria, and had travelled over the Dauphine while fleeing whatever had once been the homeland. The estuaries had provided safe haven from the antique predators of the mainland, kindling those ancient cultures and allowing them to thrive.

Beyond the coastline, the trend of islands continued, and though these were far larger, they were also far taller, being as they were the tips of oceanic mountain ranges. The cartographer had at this point included some notes on what avian species could be found there, and when, and detailed the existence of old pegasus ruins in amongst their lesser winged cousins. Whoever had put this map together had clearly been a polymath of some sort, as next came tide and current charts, complete with the best spots for fishing, and the locations of smaller islands where one could pick up fresh water, and perhaps some fruit.

On the other side of the Dauphine, however, things were far more vague.

The four gryphon autonomous regions were arranged in a rough quadrangle around their capital, Youdu, which like Canterlot was perched on a tall mountain they called Kunlun. Beyond that scant information, and the borders with the assumed underground limits of Zebrica, little was present. The cartographer did warn, however, that travelling conditions might change at any moment depending on what sort of gryphon or hippogryph wore the August Crown. Why exactly that mattered, Emboss wasn't sure.

“Off the edge of the map, then.” his wife said, rather solemnly.

*

Princess Luna ascended quickly to about a kilometre in height, but then remembered her reptilian charge and levelled off, slowing to a sedate ninety kilometres an hour. Below, Ponyville and its environs bathed in the sun, seeming so small and insignificant against the backdrop of golden fields and emerald forests. The many ponds and small lakes around the little town sparkled as sapphires might, and here and there clusters of ponies, flying and otherwise could be seen.

If the five cannot be convinced by normal means alone to unite with me, they will need to be coerced by altogether more forceful methods. But not yet. We will try once more, with the Rainbow one, and see if she turns out be more prone to sway than her applebucking friend. I do not wish to inflict upon this town more than I have already.

It was at this point the Queen of Tides realised that Spike was clinging to her back for dear life. She turned her head and looked at him. The poor little dragon had a grimace on his face that was somewhere between paralysing fear and incredible excitement. Had she been a normal pegasus or like creature, the claws he had would be tearing great rentsin her skin. Clearly the whelp doesn't know his own strength. That could be useful later on.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” she asked, putting her head back into the wind.

“I have no idea how you do this all the time!”

“Oh, it just comes naturally. You know some pegasus never touch the ground?”

“I didn't know that!”

“Yes, the extremists. You don't see them much these days. Something about a war, horseshoes not fitting, I forget,” she said, resting her wings to glide for a moment. “Speaking of pegasus, where does that pony called Rainbow Dash usually live?”

“Big sky castle, just outside town! You can't miss it, it has her cutie mark above the door and a giant rainbow water feature!”

“They've all bloody got that, pegasai are ostentatious as Tartarus itself.”

“It's the only one in Ponyville!”

“Oh,” Luna swept her eyes about, spotting the unlikely agglomeration of clouds and rainbows floating a hundred metres above the ground some ways out from the edge of the little village. “Yes, I see it.”

The Princess angled downwards and allowed herself to simply glide, taking the power out of her muscles and drawing back on the magical output. Immediately, the low friction thaumic flight shell around her collapsed, and they fell under the normal conditions of air resistance and gravity, prevented from becoming terminal by her voluminous wings. Within a few moments the alicorn alighted on the broad landing ledge of Rainbow Dash's home and began to nose around.

“Stay on my back, youngling,” she warned. “You will fall through these as easily as an earth pony.”

Shod In Silver allowed herself access to the vertically arranged stack of Doric columns and big, open rooms that was Rainbow's inner sanctum, after assuring herself that the pegasus wasn't hiding in the shrubbery.

Domestically speaking, the place was a shambles that even put Luna's quarters to shame. Bizarre and mismatched articles of clothing, including more hats and pairs of flight goggles than any pony should rightfully own, were strewn about like fallen autumn leaves. Hats? That's odd. We never usually wear anything. Oh, but of course. The coronation. They must've had extras, or something.

Pegasus living rooms were usually laid out in pentagonal shapes made up of plush cloud sofas, the largest for the matriarch, and the smallest for her youngest daughters. Though Rainbow Dash lived alone, her house was no different. The theme of disarray and disorder continued, though. Pegasus are usually so clean and organised. She must never bring anypony back here. How sad. We shall have to rectify that when all this is over. It is the right of all to enjoy my night and its pleasures. Perhaps I shall organise a trip to the Hidden Delight for every member of Ponyville, just to say sorry.

“Rainbow Dash? Are you here? It is your Princess of the Night.”

“I don't think she is, Princess. Look.”

Spike was pointing at a note glued to a marble notice board propped up against one of the sofas, so that it could be seen by anyone who happened to just wander in.

Gone to find somewhere underground to live. Like, a nice cave. Totally dark, no clouds, no rainbows. Not coming back. Don't try to find me. Twilight, this means you.

It had been written on unlined paper, and had obviously taken more than one attempt to write, as many words were crossed out, poorly formed, or otherwise illegible. Several blue pinion feathers lay scattered on the floor, covered in ink, along with a mess of hoof prints and other signs of activity, which were slowly seeping away into the cloud material.

“Oh, bollocks,” Princess Luna muttered, in a most unregal fashion. “Okay Spike, you're a dragon, where are the nearest caves?”

“Hey, that's a bit racist, don't you think?”

“No.”

“There's a big salt mine a few hours walk away.”

“Do you think Rainbow Dash would know about it?”

“Probably not. Ponyville is all built on granite, anyway. There's no proper caves round here. If she was looking to get underground, it'd have to be those salt mines. That, or the old mines under Canterlot.”

“We can't allow that,” Luna sighed, rubbing her temple with a hoof. “The Elements have to all be in the same place! They need to get over this thing and work together. Oh, Tartarus take me, I have no idea what I'm doing!”

“No royal 'we', Princess? And your accent, it sounds so...”

“Normal, yes,” the Selenite Princess wandered over to the biggest cloud sofa and installed herself on it. “I've been able to sound like this for almost three years, really. Alicorns are very adaptable.”

“Then why on Equestria have you been putting it on?”

“My sister asked us to. She said we had to keep up appearances, and it was what ponies expected of me, so I did it. You didn't really think I was wandering around with all those 'thees' and 'thous' this whole time, did you?”

“Sort of, yes.”

“Skies above, Celestia was right,” she said, slumping her head down. “You ponies were expecting that from me.”

“It'll be alright, Princess,” Spike said, petting her head. “Why don't we go and find Rarity? She'll know what to do. I'm sure we can convince her to snap out of it.”

“Mhm, yes, well, about that...”

*

Author's Note

Barely Eagle Magazine is now available in all good Gryphon bookshops.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis as it Relates to Equestrian Macroeconomics

Chapter Five

“The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis as it Relates to Equestrian Macroeconomics”

Astrapios returned to the docks by way of the Dry Market, which sat furthest from the sea, and served as the main outlet for Port Dauphine's non-fishy produce and trade goods. After all, it was only alce, gryphons and pegasus who ate fish, or meat at all for that matter, and much in the way of spice and silk from the homeland was needed to keep the higher classes back in Canterlot happy. As soon as Astrapios entered the first of many long, stall lined streets, the stink of bacon overwhelmed him like a wet carpet.

It wasn't that hippogryphs couldn't eat meat. Far from it, in fact, for they like all gryphish creatures were capable omnivores. Already, a little spring inside Astrapios' hindbrain was beginning to uncoil, demanding he take to the wing and hunt down whatever was smelling like so much fried pig. I must be strong, he thought, in a way that if vocalised would have been a desperate whimper. What would mother think?

Hippogryphs had been selective vegetarians for almost four hundred years, since the last big internecine conflict with the alce, who were pure carnivores. It was a battle adaptation designed to counter dwindling food supplies, which later became tribute, and finally rigid morality, to the point where a hippogryph eating meat would be seen even by outsiders as an earth pony waking up one morning and deciding it wanted to fly all the way to the butchers. But the biological equipment, both in digestive plumbing and predatory faculty, remained very much intact. Astrapios had on several occasions almost thrown himself overboard at the sight of a mackerel or cod flitting beneath the waves.

Instead he drifted right past the alce owned café, which was full of the bulky shapes of its beaked clientèle breakfasting on whatever unfortunates graced their grill today, and into the streets beyond, which carried the fruits and nuts far favoured by the hoofed majority population. The pleasant floral tones of apples and oranges filled his keen olfactory, going some way to take his mind off the idea of pork. What about a nice BLT? There has to be a compromise somewhere. No! Just think about melons, and mangos. Lovely, juicy mangos, dripping with juice. Peaches! Definitely don't think about tearing out a jugular vein to still the thrashing of a hard-won prey animal, like a gazelle or something. Oh skies above! Watermelons!

Stressful days like this one had a habit of testing his ability to remain vegetarian. Not that he'd ever really fallen off the chariot, as it were, but gryphish creatures were, by and large, taut feathery balls of coiled muscle and instinct, acting and reacting on pure primeval instinct. It was as though for most of the time sentient, logical thought barely factored into it all. Alce, especially, were like this. Their lack of wings did them no disservice, quite the reverse in fact, for having to move and hunt along the ground had born a subspecies far closer to the mythical lion creatures they were all supposed to have been descended from. They tended to impose themselves like hillocks, whereas the hippogryphs were tall and slender, closer to an idealised equine form, and the gryphons were somewhere in between, a balance of the stately and powerful.

Sweating profusely, Astrapios sat down at one of the tables outside Le Petite Banana, a cosy little Prench owned fruit bar that usually catered to the city's bat pony population. Several of them were haunting the larger inside area, hiding from the sun and chattering away in their strange Equuish dialect, filled with clicks and ultrasonic whistles. Bat ponies, came in one of two types. The majority ate fruit, with a vocal minority being primarily sanguivores. This inevitably had lead to many unpleasant rumours about vampire ponies, who snuck about at night and drank blood from unsuspecting victims. Most simply kept a hutch of rabbits or mice at home, which, if rotated regularly and treated well, would provide a more than ample supply.

Astrapios had felt immediately sympathetic with them, as predators in the bodies of prey. Not that they really treated him any better than most ponies, who thought of him as a kind of comedy object, but they at least ignored him, and so Le Petite Banana was a favoured spot in a big, unkind city.

“Good morning, Mr Astrapios!” the waiter beamed, appearing from out of thin air in the style of good restaurant staff everywhere. “What can I get for you today?”

“A double bourbon, and an extra large Red Special, please.”

“Oh, that bad?”

“That bad.” Astrapios confirmed, gravely.

The waiter returned with his order a few minutes later. Cherries, blackcurrants, hawthorn berries and pomegranate seeds flanked four great hunks of watermelon, complete with a vanguard of less red fruits added as an after thought.

“A bit for your thoughts?” the dusty coloured pony said, sitting down with him.

“Just the usual stress,” Astrapios replied, wiping sweat off his feathers and out of his eyes with a serviette whilst silently cursing whatever God had seen fit to give an avian species the ability to sweat. “You know how easily stuff can set me off, Hybri. The print run was supposed to be finished this morning, but they screwed it up, so I had to pay to get it done again.”

“You had to pay?” Hybri Dyes asked, cocking his head and sitting back into the little recliner he was perched on.

“It's a long story, some outfit called the Outrages Against Public Decency Committee is giving the new printers a hard time.”

“Oh, Celestia damn it,” he winced, ears flattening against his skull. “I thought they might. They've been giving everypony a hard time. You hadn't heard of them?”

“I just got back from the homeland, I've been out of the loop for two weeks. Why?”

“They're a moral hygiene group. They want to clean up publishing and the written word in general.”

“So what? Just another herd of neurotic mares who think government should be looking after their foals for them,” Astrapios shrugged, tucking into his breakfast, sharp beak making short work of his innocent fruity victims. “I get thirty letters a week from ponies like that. They find a copy of my magazine under the bed of their precious, precocious little colt and suddenly I'm Discord incarnate.”

Hybri shook his head and leaned closer.

“These guys are hardcore, Mr Astrapios. They managed to get royal assent.”

“So what, Celestia gave them the old alabaster nod?”

“Bigger. More official. Her royal highness signed a letter of assent granting them powers of inquiry. They've got three months to gather evidence on what harmful, obscene or otherwise disagreeable material might be doing to the moral character of the nation. Can you believe that?”

“That's ludicrous,” Astrapios scoffed, pausing between assaults on the stronghold that was the second slice of watermelon. “Equestria has a proud two hundred and fifty year tradition of press and literary freedoms.”

“That's not even the worst part,” Hybri said. “Rumour has it that-”

Hybri Dyes never got to finish his sentence, because it was at that moment a very large earth pony stallion, who had managed to sneak up on them undetected, tapped Astrapios on the shoulder. Ponies never did this. It was probably something to do with the beak, as if any sudden movements might provoke a vicious attack.

“Astrapios T. Hunderer?” he asked, completely mangling the gryphish name with his gravelly south Canterlot accent.

The hippogryph nodded.

“You've been served,” he said, handing over a packet of neatly folded parchment. “Have a nice day.”

*

Princess Celestia was waiting for the two miscreant extra-dimensional travelers suspended in her telekinesis to stop screaming and flailing around. To be fair, this was because she'd chosen a spot for their meeting approximately fifty kilometers above Canterlot, and most beings of terrestrial bent found this rather uncomfortable. She'd cast a smallish microgravity sphere around them too, which besides protecting from the intense high altitude winds and low temperatures also caused the uninitiated to spiral about like drunken bumblebees.

Luna would probably find this quite amusing the Ordered God thought, her fine magnolia limbs and wings folded against her body. But these sorts have to learn. I can't just have any old riff raff turning up. What would the others think?

Celestia sipped her tea in the usual stoic fashion. Unreadability was a key asset for any statesmare, divine or otherwise, but the Princess had it down to an art. Glaciers had been known to show more intensity; giant molecular gas clouds spanning millions of light years of space had displayed greater passion. Whole generations of the fringe, those lunatic scientists who had seen patterns in her expressions and intentions that had never existed, had been lost trying to get a sense of her holy mind.

To naught, though, as Celestia's plans were the type that were measured in geological eras, in the great procession of stars around a galactic barycenter, in the stratified layers of rocks that made up the world. Except at Bridge, though. I'm terrible at that. Card games in general, actually, other than Poker, though I never seem to be able to find anypony to play with. Funny, that.

*

Astrapios found the Port Dauphine Magistrates Court very easily, by dint of it being the only building in the city that was older than two hundred years. Port Dauphine quite regularly suffered from tsunamis caused by the shifting of offshore tectonic plates, at least in geological terms, and was generally rebuilt from the ground up every fifty years or so. Then there were the far less common but more destructive lahar events, those huge and fast moving rivers of silt and mud occasioned by rapid volcanic melting of glaciers in the nearby Rourke mountains. Not many ponies died as a result of these things, as vulcanological scrying was a skill as old as the Equestrian nation, but they still caused their fair share of upheaval and rebuilding.

The Magistrates Court was put together of sterner stuff than the average Port Dauphine town house or shop front, though. All civil buildings in Equestria were the products of the Bellum Maxima school of architecture, a mindset that was born in an era of history beset by wars with gryphons and terrible beasts of arcana. Thus, it was characterized by walls that could survive nearby use of the Strong Force bomb, and internal layouts that favored defenders and hindered attackers.

Even now, the smutty hippogryph found himself sitting in the wide, open lobby, that was surrounded on all sides by tall, tiered balconies crenelated with crossbow and mage slits, their bottoms lined with murder holes and other historical menaces. Despite their age, all these things were kept ready and waiting for use, a point firmly made to visiting gryphon dignitaries even in the modern age. No diplomatic tour of Canterlot or Port Dauphine would dare be thought complete without a visit to the scenic Arsenal Rex, or a midnight viewing of the Biblio Thauma Terriblis and its many sister tomes, all brimming with dark magic and other spells the mere reading of would be enough to blunt the claws of even the most tooled up gryphon.

All in all, Astrapios felt rather threatened.

“'Scuse me mister, are you a hippogryph?”

Turning, he saw that a burnt umber pegasus colt had alighted beside him on the stone benches, and was now staring at him, eyes level with his.

“Yes, I am, how very observant of you.” Astrapios remarked, dryly.

“I'm a pegasus!” he said, grinning. “My name's Blue Hue, but everypony just calls me Blu. What's your name?”

“Astrapios,” the hippogryph said, remembering his airs and graces and extending a talon, which was warmly shaken without hesitation. “Charmed.”

“Ahs-trappy-ous,” Blu repeated, chewing up the the word. “Ass-trappy-oss?”

“I don't think that was a question.”

“My brother says all gryphons have sex with their cats,” Blu said, sitting down on his haunches. “Is that true?”

“That's a new one on me,” Astrapios said, genuinely surprised at the apparently bottomless creativity of the racist underclasses. “But no, I don't think we do.”

“But how would you know?” Blu asked, looking the hippogryph up and down. “You're a horsey kind of eagle, not a catty kind of eagle.”

“A lot of my friends are gryphons, and I think I'd know if they were doing that sort of thing to their pets,” Astrapios responded, as diplomatically as he could. “Anyway, I wouldn't listen to ponies who say those sorts of things.”

“Are you a filly or a colt?” the little pegasus replied, cocking his head. “I can't tell.”

“That's alright,” Astrapios sighed. “I'm a colt, I guess you'd say.”

“I thought so!” Blu giggled. “You've got bigger beaks, right?”

Before Astrapios could answer, a stocky looking mare appeared out of the background, a vision of motherly fury, and clipped the pegasus around the ear with her wing.

“Blue Hue!” she squealed. “You get over to the other side of the lobby this instant!”

Blu skittered off almost immediately, half galloping, half flying in the manner of those juveniles that were not yet fully fledged.

“And you!” the mare shouted, focusing her ire on Astrapios. “Don't ever talk to my son again!”

With that proclamation issued, she trotted off in a huff, head held high in righteous indignation. As she turned away, pin badges attached to her saddlebags revealed the logo of the Outrages committee, a double striped prohibited symbol over a stylized exclamation and question mark, as well as an orbiting collection of other affiliated groups and organizations. My Colt Is An Honor Student At Dauphine Technical and 51% Celestia, 49% Luna, Don't Push Me!!! were prominent examples.

Astrapios removed the tiny spectacles on the end of his beak and massaged the bridge where it met with the skull bone, contemplating the violent murder of a herd animal followed by an impromptu street barbeque for what was far from the first time that day.

*

“Order! Order! We will have some order!” Black Ode shouted, stamping his fore hoof on the gavel-plate of the lectern at the head of the Earth Pony Poets and Bards Guild meeting hall.

The stallion couldn't quite remember how he'd gotten there, but it seemed like the right thing to be doing. The chain of events as laid out in his head was crystal clear up to the moment Princess Celestia had landed outside the mysterious pub, whereupon it became as muddy and convoluted as Mareabian politics. There seemed to be numerous differing sets of memories stacked up on top of each other, all fighting to share the same space in his neural filing system like Princelings during a succession crisis.

One set held that the Ordered God had started grinning and given a short speech in a language he didn't recognize, but never wanted to hear again, before scooping up the two strange ponies he'd been having a nice drink of this new bitter with and going vertical like a pegasus who had accidentally landed on a cactus.

Another stated that the Queen of Plots had opened her mouth as if to speak, but instead of words, out had come raw feelings, engraved directly into his soul by some means of communication so far removed from the verbal as to exist in another field of science entirely. Great vistas of impossibly lush grassy fields that he wanted to describe as Elysian came next, the sensorium of the street and the background noise of Canterlot segueing directly into whirling abyssals of sights and scents and sounds. They were perfect archetypes, more like the idea of the thing than a recollection of the thing themselves. Untainted, from before the making of the world, when the concepts that would give birth to the cosmos were boiled down into whatever divine dies and presses were used to craft it.

Sweet Celestia, how bizarre. Who even thinks like that? Me, apparently.

But now Black Ode was here, and the day seemed to be getting back on track. The meeting hall came into focus rather sharply as the rabble died down. Ode glanced nervously out of one of the tall glass windows lining one side of the room. Pillars of thick, black smoke rose from glowing amber fire bases in almost every district of the city.

“Does anypony happen to remember how they got here?” a voice from the other end of the big table the other members were sat at said, thick with the drunken slurring of a party pony about to finish their night in Luna's alcoholic embrace. “Because I swear I was somewhere else a moment ago.”

“You probably just had too much to drink again, Vade, you old sot!” another snapped, adjusting the lime green and purple top hat he was apparently wearing unironically.

“I bloody didn't Cory! I was in West bleedin' Wingshade too! How did I get here?”

“Gentlecolts, please!” Ode shouted, stamping his hoof again. “There is clearly some magical crisis going on. I myself was sitting in a bar in a part of Canterlot entirely removed from this one not moments ago.”

“Has anypony noticed these agendas?” Vade Retro interjected, pointing at some neatly arranged squares of paper that had been laid out in front of every member of the Guild.

“Oi, agendas?” Ode said, peering down to see his own copies. “I never signed off on any agendas!”

“Apparently you did, and the Princesses too!”

“Oh Tartarus take me...” Ode started, but trailed off as he began to read, seeing the loops and curls of his own fancy signature sat side by side with the embossed gold and silver Regis Rota, to which had been carefully added in an elegant calligraphy the five pointed star of Princess Twilight Sparkle.

“I bloody hate magic!” Vade complained, making to sit up, but falling over in a tangle of unshorn fetlocks and ending up under the table. “Bugger it!”

“They can't be serious, though,” Cory said, glancing up at Ode and back to the offending agenda with a look of absolute terror on his muzzle. “Tell us you're not bally serious!”

“I don't think we have a choice, Cory,” Ode said, reading and rereading the agenda, which felt more like an edict than anything else. “The question is, can you do it?”

“I, I don't...” Cory Phaeus shook his head exasperatedly. “The Canterlot Philharmonic Orchestra stands ready to serve as always, but this is impossible! Rachmaneinoff's 32nd Symphony was never meant to be performed! By the unkempt beard of Luna's left nipple, do you even know what you're asking us to do?”

“We've all read about it,” Vade mumbled, sitting back up and groggily rubbing his temples. “It's the one with all the cannons shaped like-”

“Yes! That one!” Cory exclaimed, eyes lit with the fear of a stallion who has met his Gods and wishes no more to do with them. “It was written as a joke!”

“The Crown is basically demanding it,” Ode sighed, unable to take his eyes off the text that was commanding his organization of poets and thespians to commit a sort of public suicide. “The only question is, where do we even find seven hundred and fifty nursing mares fit to perform in the chorus?”

“Actually, Rachmaneinoff originally scored seventy thousand,” Vade grinned, chuckling to himself. “And not to forget the six barreled custard launcher.”

“The stallion was a genius, even when it came to overt visual metaphors for one's...one's...” Ode made a face as though he was passing wind. “Crown jewels.”

“Do you think we'll be able to get the seamstresses to sew enough in the way of snake costumes for the brass section to wear?” Vade continued. “If I recall correctly, there are seven pink, seven red, two magenta and a dark purple one?”

“Tartarus, swallow me up!” Cory whinnied, laying his head on the polished oak table.

“Come on, Cory,” Vade smirked. “At least we'll be famous.”

*

“What in the wide, wide world of Equestria do you need forty carronade for?” Iron Filings asked, paused in the doorway of his little complex of forges and smithies. “Is there a war going on I should know about?”

“Oh, well, you see, we're putting on a performance of Rachmaneinoff's 32nd Symphony, and well, it's rather a special order...”

“You came to the right place, Mr, er, Black Ode, was it?”

“Yes, that's right.”

“Well, as I said, right place, and the right pony, too,” he nodded, proudly, taking a moment to clean the soot from his brow. “Now, what's special about these guns, then? Do you need the fancy turns inside the barrel?”

“Erm, no, you see, well, the fact is...” Ode found himself blushing for some reason, struggling to find the right way to express himself. “The carronade need to be shaped like a certain appendage...”

“An appendage?” Filings raised an eyebrow and examined Ode curiously. “What sort of appendage?”

“Well, it's one only a stallion has...”

“Ah, I get your meaning,” the blacksmith smiled, tapping at his nose with a hoof and winking knowingly. “The muzzle.”

“No, not at all,” Ode sighed, fearing that at any moment he might have to resort to crude gesturing. “I mean a more fundamental difference, that key aspect of the-”

“Well, gender is a very fluid concept, with many potential perspectives from which to-”

“No, no,” he whinnied, giving in and resorting to hoof gestures with ever increasing desperation, after a moment saying; “Do you get it?”

“Well I think so, but how would you even make a cannon shaped like a gentlecolt’s unshorn fetlocks?”

“Oh, Luna take me,” Ode cried, trying to match his gestures to his lamentations. “Meat and two veg! One’s crown jewels! The unmentionables! The bed snake!”

“I’m really not following you.”

“Oh come on! One’s Captain of the Royal Guard? One’s morning glory?

“What does a plant have to do with it?”

“Arrgh!”

*

King Hywell Edda adjusted the Autumn Crown that perched atop his feathered head nervously, the weight of the relic still unfamiliar after three long months of rule. It reacted to the touch of his talons by buzzing softly, as if an electric eel had been disturbed, then it continued its normal disquiet purring. Edda had worn many icons of royalty in his short life; the bracers of a Duke, the circlet and raiment of a Vizier, and seen countless more, but never had they felt as motile, as boisterous, as simply alive as the Autumn Crown. The cruel peaks of its twin points sang with all the implied force of a supernova, and where the thing met its mortal carrier, a simple silver coil kept it firmly in place.

In truth, it is more beset of life than I am, now that I am King, the young alce pondered beleagueredly, carrying on in a powerful canter through the depths of the Aoki forest, thankful that nobody had seen his moment of weakness in making contact with the crown. All around him the shouts and echos of his guards and cocks-in-waiting mixed with the trill of the playful ochre res-res birds, which swept gaily about in pursuit of each other along characteristic zigzag flight paths. The smell of the earth and the rotting leaf litter was overpowering; in the heat of the sun of the lowland hills things decayed rapidly, quickly serving to feed the next generation of trees or insects. A King as fast as a beggar, a God as fast as an ant, as mother used to say.

With a whoosh of wings and the snap of branches breaking, a steel-armored gryphon descended through the low canopy and landed neatly beside the King. Edda was not alarmed by this, as even through the whiff of the forest he could tell the scent of his life-long servant and mentor, Idwal Foel. Unlike gryphons, who were possessed of the most keen eyesight to go along with their wings, alce were terrestrial ground hunters, who much in the fashion of certain snakes, found prey by smell and heat alone. Edda could tell the temperature of a cup of coffee from half a kilometer away; but Foel could tell you that the slight trace of white dust on its lip was not sugar, but actually cyanide placed by the claws of an assassin. Together they made an unstoppable team, even if Edda couldn't actually fly like all other gryphons could.

“My King,” he said, taking off his ornate blue and yellow flight helmet and bowing his head slightly. “We've spotted deer in the next valley.”

“Oh, good, I was beginning to think they might not show us some sport.” Edda sighed, internally damning the poor creatures for failing to have the good sense to hide when scouts come flying over. “What have I told you about this 'King' business?”

“Come now, yer Majesty,” the old gryphon smiled, fixing the ruffle of feathers beneath his chin with a neatly manicured talon. “Don't play the 'newly-minted-monarch-just-trying-to-prove-he's-still-normal' card with me. I was there when your predecessor was born, and your father. They all tried that too.”

“I could just command you to call me Edda.” he pouted, pausing to rest against the thickly mossed roots of a tall and sinuous tree, which was half buried into a short but steep incline in the forest floor.

“That you could, yer Majesty,” Foel nodded, sagely, making the most of the break to carry on preening himself, the tone of his voice saying quite clearly that he wouldn't follow such a command if it were given. “That indeed you could.”

“Oh, seventy-seven hells, Foel, why are we hunting these poor deer?” Edda groused, after making sure the rest of the staff were well out of earshot. “They have to deal with enough out here without us ritually murdering them on a daily basis.”

“'Tis hardly murder,” he said, shrugging and folding his wings back neatly against the armor plates. “They're a bunch of savages; they barely think. Why, they've only had fire for the the last thirty years.”

“Yes, well, I think this will probably be the last of our hunts,” he said, sitting up and carefully wiping the leaf mold from his feathers. “I am the living avatar of three races, after all.”

“You'll have a hard time with that, yer Majesty,” Foel observed. “You know how much the Aerie-classes love to hunt.”

“They'll listen to me or face the consequences!” he snapped.

Immediately Edda's vision whited out, as if his stream of consciousness had simply given up. Briefly, the acrid stench of woodsmoke and burning hair filled his nostrils, before a deep and booming force stole away the air, and with it the last sound. The alce felt himself jolt upright, then stagger and fall onto a strange and glassy ground that offered one moment a gluey purchase, and the next became quite solid.

Perception returned after a timeless moment, in which all Edda dared do was lay facing upwards, attempting to control his breathing. Hefting his bulk over, a scene of grim devastation greeted him. As though parked before a blast furnace, the once verdant forest was a cruel specter of its former self, all blasted, blackened stumps, out to about fifty meters, whereupon it stopped abruptly and the greenery simply burned. Thick plumes of smoke and steam crept across the ground and into the air.

Heart hammering, Edda searched around for his friend, and at least found him, entirely unharmed, but a good ten meters away, coiled into a protective ball. The tell-tale flashes of gryphon Sharpe magic glimmered around him, which was obviously what had protected him from the impromptu blast of divine heat. Others were not so lucky. Flaming balls of ruined feathers and hooves marked the last chapters in a dozen lives, dotted across the floor.

“Methinks his Majesty doesn't know his own strength.” Foel remarked, grinning, his voice dulled significantly by the bubble of defensive arcana.

*

“The Slath,” Emboss read, holding a copy of A Foal's Guide to Gryphons aloft in his magic. “Mostly subterranean entity of great size, visible from the surface as dark red outcroppings along the Gryphon coasts, who's drinking mouths in that part of the world account for the remarkably strong west to east currents in the Dauphine sea, and whose excretion vents make for such rich and abundant aquatic life on the coast of our own nation.”

“Fascinating, dear.” Truth muttered, trying not to peer out of the window of the pegasus stagecoach they were traveling in.

“It really is, isn't it?” he said, missing the tone in her voice. “It goes on to say that the Slath is actually one single organism, and that objects thrown into these ocean floor drinking mouths often come popping out of hydrothermal vents thousands of kilometers away.”

“Does it have anything for vertigo?” she asked, closing her eyes and laying down on the narrow wooden bench, gathering the collection of shawls and jumpers around her to defend against the cold.

“Unfortunately no, but if you fancy trying out some Gryphish Rarebit, this guide suggests some excellent restaurants that-”

“Darling, Gryphish Rarebit has actual rabbits in it.”

“Sweet Celestia, really? In with all the cheese and bread?”

“Yes, really!”

“How awful,” Emboss said, looking rather deflated. “I suppose we could ask them to make it without?”

“Then how would it be different from Equestrian Rarebit?”

“Local spices?” Emboss suggested.

Truth sighed and got up, joining her husband on the opposite bench and snuggling gently up to him in a search for greater warmth, her chin ending up against the nape of his neck. She floated the shawls and quilts over, wrapping them both up in the morass of wool and cotton.

“Local spices, indeed,” she laughed, closing her eyes and sighing contentedly. “You know, I don't think we've been away together since the foals were born.”

“This hardly counts as a holiday, does it?”

“Well, I guess not, but still,” Truth said, continuing to nest on him, nickering occasionally as she made herself more comfortable. “I think it would be nice to take a break after all this is over, just the two of us. It shouldn't take an existential crisis to prise us from the day-to-day.”

“Existential crisis,” he muttered, turning the page. “Yes, I guess that's what this is, isn't it?”

“Yes, dear. Exactly.”

Emboss turned the next page of the guide book and carried on reading, and the pegasus stagecoach lurched onwards, just above the dawn-soaked clouds, ambling on its slow but steady way toward Port Dauphine.

*

It was not unusual to see the youngest colts and fillies of Ponyville decked out in garlands of flowers, especially at weddings or during royal visits. Their dams and sires would preen and fuss over them, playing a quiet game with the other parents as to who could look the nicest, or afford fine orchids, or whatever the stakes happened to be at the time.

What was unusual, however, was for those garlands to include poppies. Papaver Somniferum did not grow around the town, nor was it usually found for sale. Roseluck had only seen pictures of them in books, but the two twin colts who had just wandered into The Florist's Cafe were wearing whole garlands of the things, deep red petals framing pale blue faces perfectly. No, that's the wrong word, the earth pony mare thought. Those are wreathes, for a funeral.

Suddenly, Roseluck began to feel very tired. She found that she could barely stand up straight behind the counter. The shop began to swim in and out of focus. It was as though the very act of looking at the colts was an impossible challenge, too monumental to properly conceive of, which would certainly spell an eternity of doom and frustration if even attempted. Like Sisyphos and his boulder. Wait, who?

After a time, Roseluck noticed that the two colts were standing before her, awaiting service. Her mind wandered aimlessly around the idea, unable to find purchase on the logical steps she performed every day to provide delicious flower snacks to Ponyville. Simultaneously, a wave of beautiful tingles rushed up her flanks and forelegs, a bourbon-warmth penetrating muscles and bone. The mare began to laugh, simply for the sake of it.

“Oh, well, really, Hypnos, must you?” one of the colts said, rolling his eyes. “Look what you've gone and done.”

“I can't help it,” the other said, shrugging and smiling wryly. “My natural charms get to all the mares, in the end.”

“I must apologise for my brother,” the first twin said. “He can be such an ass.”

“That's okay!” Roseluck half-shouted, her own voice sounding distant and disconnected. “What can I get for you boys?”

“Do you have any Buddleja?” Hypnos said, looking over the displays of various flowers. “It's our favourite.”

“Of course, Buddleja,” she nodded, following their gaze downwards, her body finally responding to the will of its master and selecting some choice magnolia fronds. “Such nice colts, these are on the house...”

As soon as she hoofed the flowers over to Hypnos and his brother, Roseluck collapsed onto the polished stone floor of the café, a look of serene contentment on her face, quite unconscious.

“At least we got our lunch this time,” Hypnos' brother said, exasperatedly. “Come on, let's not dally. We still need to find our seats.”

When Roseluck finally awoke, some hours later, she had no memory of the two foals wearing wreaths of poppies, except for an odd sense of impending doom she eventually put down to eating too much at lunch.

*

It Doesn't

Chapter Six

“It Doesn’t”

“Did anypony ever get around to naming any of these?” Twilight said, as she crept between the glassy black trunks of the midnight forest.

“Any of what?” Whom said, following along behind her in a far less stealthy fashion, smoking another of her cigarettes.

“These trees, the insects, anything,” Twilight muttered distractedly, a conjured specimen jar floating beside her head, ready to capture the first interesting thing to come by as a souvenir of her expedition. “They must have names, everything has a name.”

“Oh, well,” Whom said, peering about before tapping her hoof on the cloying anti-mud beneath them. “This is called mud, and over there, that's called a flying thing--”

“Where?” Twilight shouted, whizzing around just in time to see a four foot rod of shocking red dive down from the level of the canopy like a lightning bolt then, defying all equine expectations of physics, turn at a ninety degree angle and level off into a sedate glide.

Pausing only to enlarge her magical jar by an order of magnitude, Twilight captured it with the aim of an experienced butterfly hunter. As the jar floated back toward her a noise like hundreds of ball bearings falling down a distant marble staircase emanated from it. Whatever this strange find was, it wasn't happy with having been caught, to say the least. Now stilled, its long feathery wings, which ran along both sides of its considerable length, flapped aimlessly. Twilight saw that they had a delicate network of vein-like structures running through them, much like in the wings of bat ponies, but there the similarities ended. Where in those naturally occurring organs veins spread out willy-nilly, these appeared to have been set out with the ordered care of someone putting up a grand edifice. Yes, the purple alicorn thought, staring at it. Constructed. Somepony made these.

The insect, if it could be called that, was staring back at her. Sixteen silvery triangles presumably the eyes as they were slitted down the middle, peered out from behind the thaumic glass, suspended from a pair of flagellate organs. Below that an opening champed furiously, revealing rows of tiny needle teeth, so numerous and close together as to seem like the baleen of a whale.

“I think he likes you, Twilight,” Whom said, smiling.

“He? Why do you think that it's a boy?”

“Phallocentric cultural bias?” she offered, then blinked. “I mean, I don't, I'm just guessing.”

“Fair enough,” Twilight said, turning the jar over carefully with her magic, trying to get a better look at all the parts of her prize. “Well, a parasprite this ain't.”

“What's a parasprite?”

“Oh, they infested my home town once. They're grapefruit-shaped and multicoloured, and have a propensity for eating everything, then making more of themselves at an exponential rate without let or hindrance.”

“How bizarre.”

“Very much so.” Twilight nodded, sagely. “Speaking of which, do you think those squid will be finished fighting the deer yet? I still need an eyeball.”

“Probably,” Whom said. “I'm very much looking forward to Equestria, you know. I've read all the guidebooks.”

“Guidebooks?”

“Oh yes,” she said, proudly. “A Foal's Guide to Equestria, Ninety-nine Things to Do in Canterlot, Which Idyll? Magazine--”

“But how? This is the moon, it's not like you can get a postal service up here.”

“Not true! Every few months a grey pony-shaped thing drops into orbit above the Pictet crater and tosses out a whole stack of magazines and letters and stuff.”

“Addressed to you?” Twilight said, incredulous.

“Nope, all sorts of ponies. But finders keepers, right?”

“This day continues to get weirder and weirder,” Twilight said, massaging her temple with a hoof. “Come on, let's go get that giant lunar squid eye.”

“Make sure you ask nicely.”

The purple mare groaned at the sarcasm and set off back in the vague direction of Whom's castle and the woodland glade that contained the exit through the Gap.

“And to think,” she muttered, shaking her head. “All I wanted was a nice stiff drink.”

I wonder how the girls are getting on without me?

*

As it turned out, the caves beneath Canterlot had been sealed rather forcefully. Rainbow Dash could not find an entrance that wasn't simply ruined or magically imploded, for safety reasons. Polite notices explained as much, and deterred any would-be sightseers. By the time she had given up, the pegasus had made almost one complete lap of Mount Avalon. Therefore, when she limped into West Wingshade a few hours later, the city of Canterlot itself seeming too high up for her purposes, it was all she could do to drag herself to the nearest zebra bar and collapse into a comfortable booth.

West Wingshade was an unusual sort of town. It had once been a pegasus cloudholme, of the Raconteur type, which meant that it had been designed for grace and mobility above anything else. These sorts of towns would then tour the other cloudholmes, as well as normal cities, acting as an envoy of pegasus culture, amongst other things. Unfortunately, West Wingshade's captain, a mare of considerable infamy, had been a terrible drunkard. Inevitably, the town had crashed into hillock, which up until that point had been politely minding its own business. Never a race to see a cloud without a silver lining, the pegasi who survived promptly founded a new town, utilising the grounded parts of the cloudholme's original material. Out of this disaster this had been born a uniquely Equestrian settlement, one where all races intermeshed with each other in their own special ways.

None had embraced this quite as much as the zebras. Even ignoring their usual penchant for travel, West Wingshade was home to a great many of them. The largest expatriate community in Equestria lived there, in amongst the confused tumult of paved streets and upward juts of ephemeral cloud material. It was said that the underground warrens reminded them of home. That was why Rainbow Dash had come to this place. Zebra bars were underground, as a rule, and the Twenty-Two Skidoo was no exception. The mute lighting and cool, earthy themes salved her confused and aching brain, just as the artificial flow of ventilated air soothed her stinging flight muscles.

Stupid idea, flying all that way. It'll hurt like a holiday to Tartarus tomorrow. Come on, filly. Pull yourself together. It's not all that bad. You were just shocked, that's all. That Princess is all hooves and no social skills. She doesn't know what it's like for us, having to hear that kind of thing--

Rainbow Dash winced as she remembered the conversation in Rarity's boutique. Her train of thought derailed at the intensity of it. Time stopped passing in the usual way. Colours and shapes lost their rounded edges and became more angular. Some indeterminate period later, she found herself again, zoned out, staring at her half-finished drink as though it contained the solution to her problems. Thoughts returned in a piecemeal fashion. The slightly congealed contents of the Old Fashioned glass refused to return the intensity of her gaze. Vodka and carrot juice. I haven't had that since I was a schoolfilly. Easy to drink, see, tastes like something you'd get at Sugarcube Corner, still gets you drunk…

*

Pinkie Pie trotted merrily down the lane, which was just large enough to carry two ponies side by side as it snaked through the landscape outside Ponyville. To an external observer, nothing was amiss. Her muzzle formed a pretty smile, and her eyes were closed as if this mundane task were the epitome of blissful pursuits. Her candyfloss tail and mane bobbed gayly in the night air, which brought with it all the scents of the evening. Internally, however, a vicious debate had broken out.

“You know, I think it might finally all make sense,” Ego said, pontificating. “You know, in light of this new information.”

“What are you talking about?” Id asked, lustfully, though for no particular reason.

“Reality! She means reality!” Super-ego chided, from her lofty position.

“Oh,” Id said, seeming deflated. “I thought you were talking about me.”

“Why would she be talking about you?” Super-ego shouted. “That doesn't even make any sense! Haven't you been paying attention?”

“I really think we should at least try to process this,” Ego implored, standing between the other two facets of Pinkie Pie's mind, as much as was possible for an abstract representation

Process all you like.” Id shrugged. “It makes no difference to me.”

*

Princess Luna hadn't expected Spike to take news of his beloved's unfortunate psychological malady so well. Everything she had read in the letters that crossed her sister's desk suggested the reptilian neophyte to be head-over-heels in love with her. Instead, he'd just stared blankly for a few moments, then apparently moved on. He hadn't said much since then. Sat on her back as they carried on a graceful arc toward Canterlot, he merely gazed into the middle distance. Probably nothing to worry about. I was just misreading those missives. Maybe Twilight simply has an overactive imagination.

Alicorns, like the pegasi they were based on, had an intuitive understanding of flight. They were currently nine kilometres above sea level, travelling at a little under Mach one, following the standard beacons used to navigate between the bigger cities. At this sort of speed they would reach the capital very quickly. The bright lights of Canterlot crowned the cowed shape of Mount Avalon. Too bright. Are those fires? Skies above!

Shod In Silver quickly made ready to accelerate to her theoretical maximum atmospheric velocity, stopping only to shield her mortal cargo. As tough as dragons were, they certainly couldn't withstand the heating effects and g-forces such a passage would create. With her magic, Luna reached out into space-time and cut away a part of it, sequestering it from the rest of existence. Thus constrained, she modified it, altering its ruleset so that matter within it behaved differently. Any physical thing entering the newly forged region of space-time would slow down dramatically, shedding its energy as gamma rays, which were funneled into a small shunt which she created, then linked via wormhole to Equestria's L1 point. This diminishing effect would continue, until whatever matter or energy happened upon the boundary had been entirely diverted. Then, she cloaked the dragon in it, and connected every point within the modified space-time to itself.

Spike gasped, then ceased existing within the universe, at least by any meaningful definition. The little pocket of space-time that he was encased in proceeded along its previous course, a bubble in the bloodstream of reality. Perfect. And sister said I had to stop meddling with the fabric of the universe. Pish!

Closing the rest of the distance to Canterlot took approximately four seconds at Mach 24. Though she did not hear or see it, the sky across Equestria briefly lit up as the equine comet raced across it. The shedding of heat into the atmosphere, as well as the sudden displacement of air, dissipated every cloud within thirty kilometers. Had any of Canterlot's weather team been at their posts, they would have been greatly dismayed as the week's meteorological outlook was thrown into chaos. Luna released the limiters on her perceptual filters in time to see the city fill up her view. Reaching behind her with her magic, she once more spoke to reality with wordless thaumic whispers. The concussion wave generated by her extreme speed entry into downtown Canterlot, aching to fulfill the obligation it had to physics, died out as quickly as it had been generated.

If there had been anypony in the little alleyway where she finally returned to a normal velocity, it would have seemed like Luna had simply stepped out of thin air. Regardless, she maintained a pose of quiet dignity, just in case, and alighted onto the cobbles. Around her, the sounds of violence and anarchy echoed. The bitter tang of burning wood mixed with that of equine fear, but curiously also lust and merriment, filled her nostrils.

If she needed any further confirmation that somepony was brewing her Nectars, this was it. At no other point in history had she ever smelled that unique combination of terror and excitement. Nickering in a disapproving way, the Goddess gripped the parcel of space-time containing Spike and, fussing over it like a newly-minted dam with her foal, anchored it to her corporeal being. It would float there, somewhat like a balloon, though one that reflected no light whatsoever, and appeared to be made from utmost darkness.

Heading toward the loudest sounds of rioting, her quest for the Elements forgotten for the moment, Luna stopped only to readjust her regalia, which had come loose during all the commotion.

*

First Lieutenant Zo Nar crept into the looted storefront, stepping through the gaping holes in the glass that the rioters had left. Once, this place had been a high-class mare's boutique, decked out in black marble and accented with olivine and ruby. Now, everything had been smashed and the wood panels that held the minerals to walls hung off uselessly or were missing entirely. No concern had been given to the value of anything stolen; the tills were still full of bits, and the most expensive items of lingerie or headwear had been left behind, trampled and forgotten. Instead, it seemed like novelty items had been taken. Not a single ponyquin could be found anywhere. If anything, it was as though the mob had been composed entirely of foals, finding humour in panties and thongs, instead of the fully grown mares and stallions they were supposed to be.

Nar winced as she stretched herself over the wreckage, feeling a fresh trickle of blood run out from under her armour and down her legs. The day hadn't been kind to her, and the night, usually a sanctuary for creatures such as herself, was proving even worse. She'd lost most of her armament hours before, either expended or stolen by the baying mob. Reinforcements were non-existent. The city was huge, and her colleagues were stretched incredibly thinly. Every member of the Day Guard had fallen to the inexplicable drunkenness. That was the only way to describe the state of most of the population. Drunk and incapable, and getting worse.

In the back of the boutique was a spacious workshop, circular and formed around an island. It had been trashed, like the rest of the property, but somewhat less thoroughly. The trappings of such a business lay all around. Dresses to be hemmed, hats to be patched and repaired, even those dainty slippers much beloved of the Canterlot elite. Nar found what she was looking for toward the back. Bolts of muslin, cotton and silk lay piled up, waiting to be used. Whimpering, she sat down on a pouffe and began to take off her armour.

Every muscle in her body ached from the exertion. The Night Guard were far from unfit. As a proper military unit, even one with mostly ceremonial functions, they maintained a high level of readiness. This, though, was too much, and for too long. She could feel herself reaching the limit of her endurance, and knew there was likely more to come. There was a clunk as the bracers fell from her limbs, exposing bruises. The cuirass and wither-pauldrons were battered, the matte black finish ground away to reveal the steel beneath. Her greaves and rear-bracers were the last off, and they joined the other pieces of armour in a little row beside the pouffe.

Nar was no medic, but she had been trained in basic battlefield first aid. At some point in the day, somepony had gotten a blade into the joint between the pauldrons and the cuirass. The strike hadn't been forceful, just lucky. She'd been losing blood for hours, from what she now saw was a deep, four inch gash in the muscle. Lucky for the both of us. Could have lost function there. Don't know where I'd be right now if I hadn't been able to run. Probably drinking a pint at the Trough, with all my mates...

Cursing the lack of proper medical supplies, Nar lay down on her side and reached around with her head as best she could. The wound was freely bleeding, but she cleaned it with her tongue. Nar screwed up her muzzle in disgust as the taste overwhelmed her delicate senses. Other members of the Night Guard might have found this task to be less unpleasant. Perhaps they would even have been invigorated. Nar was not one of those ponies. Thoughts of food reminded her of how long it'd been since she'd eaten. What I'd do for a nice mango right about now. Perhaps a melon.

As soon as the wound was clean, or at least less dirty, Nar grabbed a roll of cotton from pile of fabric bolts and wrapped it as tightly as she dared over the wound, underneath her foreleg. Three layers and she stopped. Then, the mare cut the cloth and fastened it by tucking it into itself. Experimentally, she got up and stepped off the pouffe. She barely suppressed an agonised squeal, which would certainly attract attention, but once the pain subsided she was able to move almost normally. The bleeding had been stemmed for now.

*

Princess Luna moved quietly through the city, stepping between the last shadows of Her night. She could feel the disc of the sun behind the limb of the world, aching to birth a new day, but the midwife was nowhere to be found. Celestia, usually a restrained but definite imprint on the magical fields that ran through reality, was absent. Her lofty perch in the Tower of the Day, visible from everywhere in the city even for those without magic, billowed smoke.

As she came out onto the Throughfare of the Virgins, a wide avenue that ran through the Artisanal Quarter, a pandemonium presaged by the roar of chaos and violence greeted her.

Luna had seen many riots in the long years of her rule. They usually had a particular feeling to them. Those incidents of public disorder that were stirred up by religious or nationalist demagogues always felt hateful and rabid, to the point of incoherence. They were always pure violence, unthinking destruction. This was different. It looked as though a scene from a pub half an hour before closing time on a royal Dies Natalis had been transplanted fully into the street and allowed to fester out of control.

Shop fronts were smashed in, looted of what appeared to be their most lewd items. Ponies ran this way and that, singing and whooping at the tops of their lungs. Those that were not running instead staggered, as if blind drunk, grinning wildly at some internal joke. Unlike a Dies Natalis, though, there were few actually passed out. Those that were sprawled on the cobblestones had been the victims of violence, accidental or otherwise. Most of them were guardsponies, something she only realised because she recognised some of them by name. They had been stripped of their armour and left where they'd fallen. The Nectars. Undoubtedly.

Luna willed her form to become three dimensional and stepped out of the shadows. There was a gentle puff of air and a crack like a firework going off as her volume reasserted itself. Immediately, the closest drunkards to her stopped and gazed.

“Look!”, said one, a palomino unicorn who was wearing a pair of frilly mare's unmentionables around his horn. “It's one of those whores that dress up like the Princesses when you rut 'em!”

The Princess couldn't help but crack a bemused smile, as she leant into his body with her magic and carefully altered the function of some his muscular neurones. The unicorn froze on the spot, paralyzed, a rictus grin across his muzzle. He still drew breath, though, and Luna could see the rapid flutter of the skin and fur on his chest. I really should get round to teaching this trick to the Day Guard.

“Hush,” she cooed, sidling up to him, peering into his fitful, darting eyes. “'Tis but a soothing hex. Fret not, and be calm. No pale and lusty imitation am I, but truthfully, your Princess. No harm shall come to you.” She placed a silver shod hoof on his forehead, then ran it up between his ears, through his yellow mane, and down his withers as she wandered further into the crowd.

Now, how does sister do it?

Luna tried to recall the effects Celestia had on local magical fields, whenever she was in the company of those afeared, or those who should be afeared of her, but weren't currently. It was a particular repatterning, forcefully injected into passing streamers of thaumic energy, but still so slight, appearing to be nothing more than the hiss of magical white noise. She played with a few potential shapes, attempting to fit them reality, but came up empty-hooved.

Perhaps I am approaching this the wrong way. Time to round up the Nottlynga.

*

Fluttershy was watching the Rocs, as she normally did when she felt particularly unsettled by something, when it began to get light. The giant birds, easily ten metres long and with a matching wingspan, paid her no particular attention as they rose from their boat-like nests and made ready for their days. Rocs were extremely intelligent creatures, at least as smart as a Phoenix or Hjalseagle, and chattered away in their barely audible click language. They were one of the few types of animals Fluttershy could not inherently understand. Whatever magical grace had given her the ability to speak to fauna clearly did not consider Rocs to be mere animals. That aspect was what made the Roc nesting sites, perched in the middle of a range of low lying, wind-carved rocks jutting out of the salt flat, so peaceful.

A sharp, grinding crack filled the cool, dry air, and Fluttershy moved her gaze to one of the larger nests. It was home to Hyperion, as she had named him, his mate Iapetus, and their offspring. The big male, a truly fearsome creature, all terribly curved claws and striking red feathers, had just retrieved the stored carcass of a buffalo and begun preparing it for his family. Its bones snapped and rendered, clothing carefully removed, the silver-hued female and her far smaller, slate grey nestlings tucked in. The same scene was being repeated across the nest site, with a veritable cornucopia of different species, some sapient and some not, present and accounted for.

There were no ponies, though. The Rocs, as if compelled by some taboo, did not eat pony. Undoubtedly they could, for they ate related species, and Fluttershy knew the biology was almost identical. It was certainly not an issue of sapience, as the buffalo and zebra down below her might well have attested. Whatever the reason, they did not, and the issue was one rarely talked about in books on the subject. Hushed whispers held, as they always do, that Celestia had a bargain with them, that blood sacrifices had been made along the way, a literal pound of flesh, and continued to this day. Those same whispers also hold that Princess Luna has a thing for Twilight. How ridiculous is that?

The Rocs, therefore, barely considered Fluttershy at all. Sometimes they would shoot her sidelong glances, as much as a head the size of a fully grown stallion can be said to glance. The younger Rocs would occasionally come to play, dancing around her, chirping and chittering, but that was it. They left her alone, and she left them alone.

That was the thing with her animal friends. Over the years, she had lavished on them too much care and attention, and they had become completely dependent upon her. She taught their chicks to fly, their cubs to nurse, caught for them their food, and solved their squabbles and disputes. They would never leave her alone, and even if they did, the work she did for them was something they could not do without. As such, Fluttershy rarely had a moment to herself. This must be how proper animals lived, back before there were any ponies. Wild and free.

*

The little plaza was situated in the Luthiers Quarter, one of dozens of such places there. It seemed as though at every possible confluence of a few awkward streets, an artist had seen an excuse to put in a fountain, complete with statue. This one was a particularly fancy example, from a period in time a few hundred years past, when it had been the style to put very large mares with ample, healthy rolls of fat, into everything. The Reclining Mare was cut out of granite, her head thrown back in laughter at some timeless joke and, true to her name, she was lying on her back. From her mouth gushed the waters of the fountain she crowned, and little rivers of serpentine, olivine, beryllium and nickel accented her features around the muzzle.

Rioters were diving in and out of the fountain, laughing, singing and falling over themselves on the slippery edges. Ponies staggered about, bleeding from head wounds, any consideration for themselves thrown to the wayside. Already, the water was beginning to turn a rusty brown, adding to its collection of bizarre detritus. Ping pong balls and rubber ducks bobbed around in the froth. On the bottom sat gramophones and their records, hundreds of gold bits, cutlery stolen from restaurants, and the inevitable pairs of mare's underwear and other scandalous nicknacks.

Zo Nar waited until the exact moment of dawn, then entered the plaza from one of its side streets, mustering up every drop of forceful authority she could manage. Her wounds still ached, and the fuzz of sleep deprivation and fatigue clawed at her mind. Even the quick nibble on the coca plant she'd found in somepony's garden had done little for either her hunger or her tiredness. She had managed to scavenge a Day Guard issue baton, though, and the weight of it curled up in the tip of her right wing gave her no small measure of confidence.

“I hereby inform you that you are in breach of the Pax Rex, and therefore will be subject to strict penalties should you continue!” Nar bellowed, as loudly as she could.

Not a single pony in the crowd paid her the slightest bit of attention. If anything, they became more rowdy. Nar saw one stallion, a bright orange earth pony, jump on an unsuspecting mare reared up on the edge of the fountain, sending her flying to the ground. The sound of her ribs snapping and her muffled squeals of pain, did nothing to prevent the stallion pinning her down and tugging a small pink tutu on over her head to cover her eyes. The mare, blinded, struggled free of her attackers despite the injuries, and promptly began to flee, staggering across the plaza as fast as her shaky legs could carry her. The stallion responsible began laughing, falling over himself as the comedy became too much for him.

Right, that's quite enough of that, I think...

Nar flicked the baton and it sprung into action, the rounded tip of the business end telescoping out. Muscle and mind, harried as they were, began to synchronize. Conscious thought vanished, too ungainly for the twitch-reaction space of the battlefield, replaced by a cool and unthinking mindset that simply did, and questioned it no further. Nar adored these moments: everything became clear, the gray complexities of the world polarized into black and white.

The laughing stallion was first. She came upon him at a terrific pace and swung the baton so that it carried all the force of her run. As it connected with his muzzle she slide sideways, iron shod hooves throwing up hot sparks. There was a ferocious crack, and the stallion's lower mandible was pulverized. The baton came up again, and she delivered a strike to his flank, cracking the sacral vertebrae. The stallion gasped and choked, his ruined mouth unable to form the shapes required to express the intense pain he was feeling. His back legs spasmed, causing the fractured segments of the sacral vertebrae to grind together, and this only added to the debilitating agony.

Nar felt the fur on the back of her neck stand up. The sweet tang of ozone filled the air, replacing all the unpleasant smells of sex, exertion and burning buildings. The gentle dawn light, subtle and understated, suddenly erupted into a glaring, pitiless supernova. Blinded, Nar's other senses came into play. The muddy shapes of moving objects whizzed into the focus of her mind's eye. The normal sounds of the world vanished as she concentrated on the particular frequency that allowed for her sonar. Ponies, tumbling like the seeds of a dandelion in the face of an oncoming hurricane, scattered across the plaza. She clicked her tongue and the fog cleared, the burst of ultrasound returning with a more precise set of shapes.

One in particular, drew her immediate attention. It stood twice the height of a normal pony, and was stood in the ornate archway of Stallion's Farriers. Wings outstretched, and horn fuzzed in the soundscape as magical fields distorted the waveform, it could only be an alicorn.

The other ponies had stopped moving. They all lay in heaps where the divine had placed them. Nar realized she had screwed her eyes shut, some instinctive protection against the intensity of the light show. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she experimentally blinked. The brightness was subsiding now, and her sonar faded away into the background, subservient in the presence of a superior sense.

“Skies above, take me for a concubine!” Princess Luna shouted, trotting into the plaza. “Were you just going to beat them all to death?”

“M-Mother!” Nar gasped and half-collapsed into a reverential kowtow, bloodied baton falling to the floor. “I am at your command!”

“We asked you a question,” Luna said, quieter, though still stern. “Has it been the policy of the Nottlynga, to, in this present crisis, violently assault rioting civilians with impunity?”

“Mother, I have not seen or heard from another Nottlynga since this last evening--”

“So you took it upon yourself to practice this carnage?” Luna said, pausing in front of a wounded mare and bending down her head to sniff at her. “This unrestrained barbarity.”

“Y-Yes, Mother...”

Luna carefully nudged the injured mare into a safer head down position, one in which she wouldn’t choke on her own vomit if she threw up. Then she continued to where Nar was lying, at the edge of the fountain. It was making a strange gurgling noise. All of the water circulating in it had disappeared, along with its unusual additions of ducks and cutlery. Luna shook her head and placed a hoof on Nar's withers.

“You will not do so again,” Luna said, wiping mud from Nar’s pauldrons. “These ones sleep for now. Come, up with you. There is yet hope that my Nottlynga have not fallen to the sword, or put it down in preference for a tankard. ”

Hidden Delights

Chapter Seven

“Hidden Delights”

Many of the streets and avenues that eventually wound their way round the peak of Mount Avalon to the Royal District were blocked, mostly with mounds of fallen rubble. As the morning progressed following its delayed dawn, Luna and Nar had increasingly heard the whip crack sounds of thaumic discharge mix with the raucous symphony. Those few passageways that remained traversable turned into bottlenecks of bloody carnage and mayhem and, in one incident that the Nottlynga and the Princess had witnessed, forced magical transformation into a water buffalo.

For reasons that Nar couldn't quite figure out, the Princess was restraining her magic. Since applying a somniferous cantrip to the ponies around the fountain, she'd left it up to Nar to find a way back to the Castle, merely following with her graceful, clipped gait and lurking in the shadows when danger presented itself. This wasn't particularly often. Something about the sight of a Princess drawn up to her full height dissuaded all but the bravest souls from making themselves known.

They'd made good progress though, only stopping to retrieve an unfortunate and terrified looking stallion. By some malady he had become paralyzed, standing rigid in the middle of the street. In the current climate this had not gone well, and they'd found him modeling many items of scandalous and gender inappropriate underclothes. To add insult to injury, somepony had covered him in paint, and what seemed to be several gallons of strawberry conserve. Luna had then seemed to make him disappear, explaining that she'd deal with him later. She'd mentioned something about 'bolded space-rhymes' that Nar didn't really understand, but she'd long learned not to question the activities of the Princesses, so only nodded politely and suggested they move on.

So now they were carefully picking their way through the maze of abandoned buildings and shop fronts, heading as best they could uphill. Nar longed to take to the wing and get above the mess, but the Princess was having none of it. “I must walk amongst my ponies, so that I may look them in the eyes,” she'd said, mysteriously, then brooked no further line of questioning.

“I trust you did not take that helmet from the cadet's armory, Zo Nar,” the Princess said, as they entered the back room of a toy shop, looking for its rear access to the next street.

“Why would you think that, Mother?” Nar said, trotting over piles of smashed wood and broken clockwork mechanisms.

“Is it not the tradition of the Nottlygna mares to make marks on their helmets equal to the number of times they have foaled?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Then why is it that your helmet is so bare? Is something wrong?”

“No, Mother--”

“Do you prefer other mares?” Luna said, smiling wryly. “Even so, my little pony, you have a responsibility to the herd.”

“It's not that, Mother.”

“Then why is it that a mare of nineteen years is yet to set a hoof inside the foaling stall?”

“I just haven't found the right stallion yet, Mother.”

“Oh!” Luna laughed mightily. “What in the skies above has that got to do with it?”

Nar made a noncommittal noise and self-consciously fiddled with her helmet straps.

“You have partaken of the bounties of my night, haven't you?”

“Not really, Mother.”

“Nay!” Luna grinned, barely able to contain herself. “My contumacious little pony! Prithee tell me that you have at least once felt a lover’s weight?”

“Mother!” Nar blushed and shot Luna a shocked glance.

“A prude! Thou art a prude, I knew it!” Luna pointed a silver-shod hoof “Never would I have thought it of my Nottlygna, to find a maid dwelled therein amongst past estrus' first mighty touch.”

“P-Please, Mother...”

“So you are to tell me, Zo Nar, that you have never made merry at midnight? For most of your time alive I was detained at Selene's pleasure,” Luna said, picking up a wooden foal doll from the counter with her magic and rotating it in the air. “It is the way of your kin to play in the light of the moon when I am gone, to drink the barrel dry, to rut 'til sister mine reveals the dawn. Yet not once, since you were made a mare by dint of May, have you taken a stallion into yourself? Not once drunk 'til vision doubled?”

Nar whinnied desperately and busied herself at the back door, pushing her head into the side of a cabinet which had fallen and blocked their way. The thing was almost a safe, with heavy iron locks, and barely shifted even with her full force behind it.

“If you're asking what I think you're asking, the answer is still no, Mother,” Nar said, sighing deeply and turning to her. “You'd be surprised how easy it is to swap shifts with colts who've a spear too many, or fillies who want to relieve them of that burden. I've never been to one of those parties.”

“Too many spears indeed! You are allowed to talk about it you know, my little Nottlygna.”

“Talk about what, Mother?”

“Procreation!” she said, placing the foal doll on Nar's hind quarters with a gentle clink of wood on metal. “Fornicating. Rutting. The good old fashioned in-and-out game. Sex. Whatever the young ponies call it.” Luna licked her lips and her horn flashed, causing several more of the little foal dolls to float upward whereupon they began to orbit Nar's flanks. “There's no need to couch it in euphemisms. When all this is over, I shall dispatch to you a guard of honor, and they shall take thee to mine pleasure grounds. The Hidden Delight you shall yet haunt, I decree it, thus it is so.”

*

After several more awkward minutes of Luna assaulting her with the most lurid and nigh-on incomprehensible descriptions of exactly what lurked in the Hidden Delight, Nar somehow found the strength to shift the obstacle, and she spilled out onto the back street with no small measure of haste. The Princess followed, a naughty grin on her face, a collection of dolls meant for adolescent ponies floating alongside.

“Technically, Mother, that's looting,” Nar said, glancing both ways down the alley.

“I cannot steal things which I own already,” said Luna, nodding her head at the lintel above the door.

Nar followed her direction. Carved into the wood were a pair of crescent moons, decorated in a subtle way for this part of Canterlot, which meant only the slightest application of silver and gold.

“I don't understand, Mother.”

“Is that not my seal affixed there?”

“I think that's intended as ornamentation only, Mother, not an invitation for the Crown to take as they like.”

“Perhaps I shall assign the big ponies to your guard of honor.” Luna smirked. “Do you know which of your colleagues is descended from Ennis himself? I do.”

“Ennis was a real pony?” Nar blurted, even as she felt herself blushing again.

“That he was, and let me tell you, only part of that song is true.”

“Oh.”

“Ennis was actually very good with the mares, and not one night did he want for bedmates. All that claptrap about him being only useful for his unusually gargantuan endowment is exactly that; claptrap.”

“Ye Gods!”

“Gargantuan,” Luna savored the word as if it were a fine wine. “That's a lovely term, don't you think? Here are some more for you; mammoth, titanic, biologically unlike--”

“Fine! Okay! Take what you wish!”

Luna made a strange gurgling noise, which Nar realized must be what served as the Princesses' dirty laugh.

Suddenly, the street filled with shadows. They were dark and oily, as though they were demons from another realm merely acting out their part in a masquerade. Nar felt an awful chill run down her spine, the embarrassment from moments before fading away in the face of this new, unseen threat. Instinctively, the Nottlynga mare looked upward, trying to find the source of the shade. Floating through the sky, violating the precious morning air with their very presence, were a dozen large shapes. The first was that of an alicorn, belly swollen with an alien pregnancy. The one behind it was less identifiable; a bulbous yellow and black striped body capped with a pair of horrid wings, see-through but with veins, and hideous little green eyes that caught the dawn light and glimmered. It had a vicious protrusion at its rear, a thing that could only be described as a stinger. Following that, a creature with a jointed abdomen and eight spindly legs hanging loosely at its side came hovering into view.

“Oh, what fun!” Luna cried. “The Foal's Day parade floats I requested! But who has loosed them from their housing?”

“Parade floats?” Nar echoed, haunted by the hideousness. “For foals?”

“Yes, aren't they lovely?” She sighed deeply. “But they'll be ruined in all the mess. More casualties of this incident.”

“They fill me with dread,” Nar said, bluntly. “I look at them, and it is as though something unimaginably grim might happen.”

“Really?” Luna looked deflated. “But after the Ponyville Nightmare Night fiasco, sister and I hired a whole team of expert ponies to help design them. Surely they can't be all that offensive to your eyes?”

Nar blinked away some of the sun's brilliant haze, and saw how gaily decorated they were. The second creature's face was a warm smile, and the alicorn beamed just as brightly. All the ghastly thoughts and images vanished from her mind, as fast as they had entered.

“Everything works out in the cold light of day,” Nar mumbled. “I think I'm just tired, Mother.”

“Yes, well, a little more exertion and you can rest, Nottlynga,” Luna said, firmly. “Come, there's much to do, and scarcely time in which to do it.”

*

Infra Base was the last member of the Night Guard within the bounds of Canterlot Castle still on her hooves. Dawn had come and gone, after a long night keeping the mad crowd out of the exquisitely maintained grounds of the fortress within a fortress. Patrols had been sallying out for the past twelve hours, and all had returned with squad members missing, as well as with countless wounds and injuries. The Night Guard were normally a small force, and couldn't stand that rate of attrition for long. Now the new day began to drag onwards, and still the baying horde did not pause for rest. It seemed as though whatever force was impelling them to their acts of wanton vandalism and debauchery was also keeping them awake.

“Show us yer fangs, love!”

Base glanced down through the murder hole into the courtyard outside the gate that served as a turning circle and visitor assembly space. Various attempts throughout the small hours of the morning to bash down the sturdy wooden gates had failed, the crowds being too disorganized and prone to distraction for much serious mischief, but their efforts had left a great deal of splintered and smashed rubbish piled against the gate and strewn out around the courtyard.

Before she quite knew what she was doing, Base hissed at the stallion who'd shouted at her. This elicited a randy cheer from the crowd, and the mare retreated out of sight immediately, a blush coming to her cheeks. Though they had been cut off for hours, the Castle was remarkably well stocked, and none wanted for anything, especially in terms of vittles, wine and armaments. Pausing only to take a long swig from a bottle of Chateau Le Pferde, which was by this point unpleasantly warm, Base grabbed a long black rod from a pile beside the murder hole, hooking her hooves into the o-rings for extra leverage. Then, she poked the tip of the rod out of the hole, aimed it at the assembled masses in general, and tugged on the short blue activation cord with her mouth.

There was a sharp crack, immediately followed by a whooshing noise as the gunpowder charges went off. Dozens of compartmentalized glass ampules were ejected from the end of the rod into the paved courtyard below. Where they struck the stone slabs the thinner internal walls shattered, allowing their chemical payloads to mix. The philosopher's wool, salts of alum and hexachloroethane together began to emit thick white smoke. For four or five seconds the ampules merely bounced around, which was just enough time for the rioters to realize what was going on and begin laughing about it. Then, the pressure inside the glass warheads reached a breaking point, and they exploded.

Panic, terrified whinnying and thick, billowing clouds of grey smoke was Base's reward. She grinned and dropped the spent rod out of the murder hole, and finished off the wine. In the confusion, she heard at least two ponies collide with each other and collapse in whirling heaps of distressed equinity. Those with any sense began to flee back toward the town, their eyes stinging. The effects of the Black Rod's smoke were only temporary, but could be lethal if anypony hung around. Base sighed deeply and went looking for her rope and battle helmet; those poor fools that were now lying comatose in the smoke would need her attention.

Suddenly, Base heard somepony bellowing in the distance, beyond the courtyard. The astute hearing that her biology granted allowed her to hear every single word as though it were being spoken directly. Her mind reeled for a moment. Even though she could not understand the language, it was clear that whoever was using it was swearing in the most unpleasant way possible. Profane utterances and lewd metaphors swept into her mind, a tidal wave of filth. Old High Equuish. That can only mean--

“Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo!” the Selenite Princess screamed, unseen. “Pathici et Cinaedi, and your dams too! Away with you!”

Base squeezed herself through the murder hole in a hurry, dropping out of it and taking to the wing. The air was fouled and acrid-tasting, and she held her breath as much as possible in spite of the increased need for oxygen now that she was flying. Bright magical flashes illuminated the smoke, casting hard shadows even through the screen, and she headed toward them. Everypony knew that unique colour, the silvery-tinged sky blue of the Princess, and with the sheer volume of swearing, Base knew she was quite possibly in need of protection. Or perhaps, the public are in need of protection from her.

Across the courtyard was a grand plaza of fountains and statues, which were the centrepoint to a small garden that overlooked the city from the top of a cliff. Access to the palace by hoof traffic was through this space, and it contained the innumerable marble and granite gifts the Princesses had been given over the years. It was quite possible to chart a diplomatic history of the nation by their quality and appropriateness. Many depicted the Princesses themselves, in all manner of dominant and submissive positions. By far the most infamous of these was The Moon at Rest with a Gryphon, a thirty foot tall polished basalt monolith crowned with a bronze image of the Nightmare herself, drenched in blood and asleep on a dead gryphon.

The statue of The Moon at Rest wasn't just infamous because of the reactions it tended to garner from gryphon visitors to the city. It wasn't just infamous because it was a tribute to ponykind's greatest monster. Nor was it infamous just because rumour held that the artist went mad during its creation and subsequently included his own body parts in the bronze mould prior to casting. It was infamous because the helmet, that refined, restrained example of ancient era metalworking, was removable. Naturally, this had lead to a great many shenanigans down the years, as graduating classes of Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns devised cunning schemes to steal it and place it somewhere amusing. It had also lead to many stories of evil curses, placed on the helmet by Nightmare Moon, or otherwise the acolytes of her dread Lunar cults, which of course still existed...

At the base of the monolith sat a bedraggled looking Nottlygna, who was wearing an expression of fear and awe that mirrored Base's own emotions. Thanks be to the Thirty Stars, it's Zo Nar! Altering her course with a twist of her tail and wings, she vectored in toward one of the pegasi. If the situation wasn't rapidly defused, it was entirely likely that the poor buggers would end up as ash on the wind, or perhaps join the ranks of the garden of statues, petrified by an angry Goddess' magic.

Base rolled her armoured head to the left just before she struck, allowing her withers and chest to take the brunt of the impact. As the target flashed into view, she wrapped her hooves around him, stilling the fluttering of his mauve wings. Flinging back her own to afford her some braking, they quickly descended, slamming into the neatly manicured lawn. The helmet came with them, landing with a dull thud. The mare didn't stop for a moment, and shortly thereafter the pegasus was trussed with a length of cord. He reacted only by laughing wildly, as though it were the greatest game in the world. His friends scattered almost immediately, hooting and hollering just as madly.

Infra Base stood up and wobbled slightly, then turned to see Nar trotting toward her, a bright smile on her beaten features. They embraced wordlessly, necks curling together and holding there.

“It's so good to see you again, Sister,” Base said, sighing. “We thought you dead in all this.”

“And I, the same of you,” Nar said, glancing up toward the Princess. “But we've Mother's business, and mustn't dally.”

“So I saw, it's why I broke cover.”

The bronze helmet jumped off the grass, wrapped in an aura of blue magic, and began to sail toward the top of the monolith.

“Do you know why any of this is happening?” Base sat down on her haunches. “We've fought to the last mare here, which is me.”

“No, but Mother does, and I'm sure she'll explain it when she's ready,” Nar said, her tone assured. “Are you truly the last?”

“Our Sisters are not dead, but cannot fight. We hold the line, but barely; I fear they'll soon return with numbers greater than my hooves alone can quash.”

“Fear not, Mother has a plan for us.”

Princess Luna alighted daintly on the grass, far too daintly for somepony who had, only moments ago, been swearing so viciously. She spread, then folded, her wings, and examined Base with a warm, but critical eye.

“Apologies, 'tis my favourite statue,” she said. “Those jackanapes were trying to place these...” she paused to levitate a catastrophically pink pair of frilly lace panties into view. “On it, and so demean it for their own amusement.”

“Gracious, Mother, do mares really wear those sorts of things?” Base exclaimed.

“Apparently, though p'raps they are a prank, the stuff of foalish jokes,” Luna examined them, then tossed them away. “I have always thought the naked form is best for all occasions, and that wrapping it in such things is but to soil the art, and nothing more.” She sighed and glanced toward the castle. “To each his own, however offensive it may be to me. Forsworn I'd be of truth, if I were to deny I've not far pinker things in my boudoir.” She grinned, ever so slightly. “Tell me, how are my Nottlygna?”

“Few, but we are yet firm,” Base said, proudly. “What are your orders, Mother?”

“Inside, we must gather who we can.”

Flying in formation with the Princess was almost like a dream to Base and, even though it was a mere short hop back through the courtyard and over the wall, she felt privileged indeed. The Princess was a hooves-off manager. Very rarely did she take control, or do more than visit on Feast Days and drop into the foaling stalls of new dams to give a blessing or a word of thanks. Base recalled her last meeting with the Princess well; she, a bloodied, exhausted thing, barely able to stand and inexpertly nursing a foal, and her, a towering, smiling figure that cooed over the newborn and whispered calmness into its ears. Strange then, to see her chasing after vandals. It is as though she is more than one pony, and what we see in any single moment is but a single facet of a greater jewel. Base wrinkled up her muzzle in thought. A cracked jewel, then.

Zo Nar seemed barely able to keep up. Her flapping was irregular and strained and, as they landed in the gravel of the assembly square on the Castle side of the gates, she stumbled, armour clanking and clattering, spraying stones about the place. The Princess neatly helped her to her hooves without saying a word, even though Nar looked bitterly embarrassed by the whole thing.

Beyond the assembly square, which was a large and intimidating space designed to be used when royalty wished to address the public, the Welcome Hall awaited. Its big oak doors were propped open, with a gentle trickle of castle staff trotting through them. To a one they were Nottlygna, though of the auxiliary type; those too old or too young to be part of the fighting classes. The usual ornate furniture of the Welcome Hall, the only truly neutral part of the Castle, through which one had to pass in order to reach either of the Royal Courts, had been pushed to the sides, and wooden camp beds or merely rolls of blankets and pillows now replaced them.

Regardless of how injured they were, Luna's entrance turned, or in most cases, raised, heads. A wave of relieved gasps, oaths and other whispers followed her down the cavernous hall. Everypony stopped what they were doing, be it changing bandages or cleaning blood from the floor, and watched. After a few moments, they would inevitably begin to smile and cheer, and from a single spark of ebullience the entire building lit up. Base watched the regent as she adopted a loving expression, one obviously well practiced. Nottlygna teenagers and foals fluttered and danced through the air, and the adults hugged each other, necks intertwining and hooves wrapped around hooves.

None came too close, though. The joy of the Nottlygna at the return of their Mother in the middle of a terrible crisis was tempered by respect. Even Base kept a reasonable distance, and did so until they'd cleared the hall and were well on their way toward the Selenite Court. The change in artistic style was very clear. Marble and granite gave way to knobbly, organic-looking obsidian, which gradually replaced the neat squareness of the Welcome Hall's annex, until it was as though they were descending through the tunnels of a great worm, who's hot passage through the earth had been so furious as to melt the rock, leaving a tube in its wake.

Base had visited the Selenite Court on only a few previous occasions, though all but for the conception of her first foal had been on guard duty. Despite the crisis, the air in the Court hung as it always did, thick with the smoke of dozens of water pipes and heavy with the enticing smells of strong, exotic liquors and incense. Absent were any ponies, besides a few Nottlygna, who were sleeping spread out on the many pouffes and pillows, taking a moment to attempt to recover their strength. As Luna approached her own embroidered seat at the centre of the comfortable sea something groaned, and there was a low rumbling sound, like tectonic plates moving together.

What appeared at first to be merely another snoozing Nottlygna, perched on a pad far too big for it, began to move. Base realized then that it was made of stone, though stone which had somehow been made motile. Dust jumped into the air, and a glass that had been placed on its flanks fell off. The stone thing's eyes opened, and began to track Luna, who merely cantered gracefully up to it and waited. Base saw that the features of the Nottlygna represented there in rock were over exaggerated, like a caricature, with fangs the size of big carrots and folded wings that would have given it a flying span of twenty foot. Then, what began as a yawn turned into a gaping maw, which the creature held open.

“New messages for you, M'lady,” it said, with a voice that spoke of deep, dark pits full of festering bones, and chains dragged in the night, and howling dogs. “It seems your sister is putting on a play...”

“Thank you, Maurice.”

Luna pulled something out of its mouth with her magic, which turned out to be a long, neatly coiled scroll sealed with gold wax. She hopped into the air, and curled up on the futon that served as her throne to read the missive. Base saw the Regis Rota through the parchment, heavily embossed. The Princess growled in frustration, and several jet black bottles wound their way up from beside the futon. “Oh fie on that meddling, prattling demagogue!” She finished both in a quick succession of deep draughts. “She's up to something!”

“Who is, Mother?” Nar said, sitting patiently beside Base.

“Not a concern for you,” said Luna, furrowing her brow in thought. “What is a concern for you is the safety of this city. We've seen already that their fight cannot be stemmed by normal means. What has happened here, has happened before, and long I've worried might happen here again.” She bit her lip, as if fighting with something internally. “Tell me, what know you of my Nectars, numbered ninety-nine?”

“Some rumours, Mother; idle gossip is a soldier's lot.”

“I've heard a little more than that,” Base said. “I read some law books once, they made mention of these Nectars, but in vague ways. I got the feeling they were not a good thing.”

“Good and bad are merely words, all things are arbitrary,” Luna said, as if she were repeating some oft-spoken mantra. “But for our intents, the Nectars are the worst. This effect you see around you now, the rioting and wantonness, are the results of somepony attempting the brewing of my Nectars. They are the drinks that Gods drink to forget, and are so powerful as to strange the passing of moments, retroactively. The universe itself is loathsome of it, and reacts.”

“Just the attempt alone's enough to produce this?” Nar said, incredulous. “I wouldn't want to think on what would happen if you were to drink it, or what might happen afterwards.”

“I have lost much memory of that time, but know this. The last time the Nectars were brewed, the Nightmare took control, and her attempted coup laid waste to most of the land. Millions died, and it was only by my sister's mercy that she did not end me utterly. So hear me when I say, the brewing must not come to pass.”

“Why isn't it affecting us, Mother?” Base said. “I've not yet seen a Nottlygna downed by anything less than a blow to the head.”

“When I made you, I made you resistant to the worst of it, so you might join me in my drunkenness.”

“Tartarus take us, what are we sitting around here for?” Nar said, stamping a hoof on the obsidian floor. “If there's somepony to be stopped, let us stop them now!”

“If it were so simple, I'd have remedied it myself,” Luna said, looking Nar in the eye. “The brewer cannot be any less than a God, or else the universe would not take notice. The process itself is dangerous, and requires much magic.”

“Is this... is this your sister's doing then?” Base said, her voice suddenly tremulous. “Are we to see a Nightmare of the sun?”

“Ultimately, it is her fault, but her hooves are merely missing, not to blame,” Luna said. “I fear our latest Princess, Twilight Sparkle, is behind the brewing itself.”

“A divine,” Nar grumbled, stressing the word like an obscenity. “She's no more Princess than I.”

“Hush, Zo Nar, lest I feed you your insolence,” Luna said, half-seriously. “She is Princess enough for this purpose.”

“Then what are we to do?” Base said. “We've only a few able to fight. We'll perhaps have ten soldiers by this evening, if they're strong enough and able, and their wounds don't get infected.”

“How fair the others of the city?” Luna said, adjusting herself on her seat, and somehow managing to look regal despite the outwardly casual settings.

“I sent a messenger colt to the zebra ambassador early this morning,” Base said, glancing upwards and away in the vague direction of the foreigner's quarters. “He returned badly beaten, and informed me that the embassy was deserted, except for local staff and a few of the ambassador's retinue.” The mare took off her helmet carefully, allowing stands of her cropped, sweat-slicked copper mane to flop free. “I do not know if the zebras are affected like us, but that is only because I haven't yet run into any. Certainly they do not roam the streets, making riots.”

“They have probably gone underground, they are so fond of their warrens and tunnels,” Luna said, idly stroking her neck with a silver shod hoof. “And the gryphons?”

“Holed up in that ghastly quarter of theirs, as small as it is. They've had no issue barring access,” Base said, massaging her temple. “I've not had thought to spare on thinking of what's happened to any of our race stuck in there with them, but at least they seem, for now, keen to police their own. We've issue enough keeping down hooved foes, let alone mad carnivores.”

“This effect will only spread,” Luna said, seeming to decide on something. “It will roll out across the land from the capital and claim all, in the end. We must evacuate.”

“Evacuate, Mother?” Nar said, dazed. “Just give up the capital?”

“Those not affected must be allowed to flee on hoof, and head away. We'll take our number to the aeroport, our young and old, and retreat to better ground. Our goal now is the protection of the remaining civilians.”

“Aye, seems fair.” Base nodded reluctantly. “If we've more than Canterlot to consider...”

“It's a matter of nation, now,” Luna said, standing up. “Before we can take other actions--”

Luna paused as she noticed more nottlygna start to appear in her court. They stumbled in through the cavernous entrance, limping, with pained expressions on their muzzles that still managed to radiate a certain hopefulness. Even in the low light, Base could see that their fur was caked in blood where it was not covered in bandage, or held straight against muscle and bone with splints. At the front of them was a muscular bull of a pony, recently missing an eyeball, now wearing a pink eyepatch with love hearts on it. He was panting heavily, and it was clear every movement was a desperate trial for him. His armour was bashed in around the haunches, punctured at the withers with a ragged line of spear-holes, yet he wore it proudly still.

“First Lieutenant Hendi Adys, your Majesty, 52nd Adroit Lancers, at your bally service,” he coughed, coming to a halt near where the density of pouffes and pillows reached an impassable level for an injured pony.

“Adroit Lancers?” Luna said, examining him and the twenty or so other nottlygna that were with him. “Isn't that one of my sister's regiments?”

“That it is, we were on temporary secondment to them.”

“What happened to you, then?”

“We were patrolling the underways with a mixed unit, half nottlygna, half not, when something took hold of the pegasi and unicorns with us,” he explained, between deep breaths. “One of them conjured a triskelion, right out of nowhere. He wanted to play fetch with it. The thing ate him in one go, then started on the rest. All but the nottlygna were laughing, laughing like schoolcolts when they went to their graves.”

“You've been through Hades, and worse,” Luna said, standing up from her regnal pouffe and trotting over to them. “Should you not be resting now?”

“We thought the city lost, when neither you nor your sister were here to guide us,” Adys said, looking up at her with his one good eye. “But seeing you again, we had to come. Whatever happens next, we're yours, Mother.” He licked his lips. “Ye Gods, it feels good to say that again. We're ready, aren't we boys?”

An approving cheer and a stomping of hooves went up from the rest of the unit, who were all as injured as the lieutenant, if not more so. Base saw that most of them had wounds that those in the guard would have considered career-ending; severe damage to the webbing of wings, complex fractures of the bones in the hoof. Around half were missing eyes, too. Base shuddered as she recalled lessons on triskelions, and how they would devour the eyes of their enemies as a way of instilling fear and breaking moral. She was glad to see it hadn't worked.

Three Faces, One God

Chapter Eight

“Three Faces, One God”

Cure Ator had never truly felt fear before. His life before taking stewardship of the Royal Gallery had been one of pampered luxury, as he was the son of the former steward and thus a member of a minor aristocratic family. Even the decade or so he'd spent in his sire's old horse shoes had been far from eventful. The closest he'd ever come to fear was when he'd been summoned to the Lunar Princess' chambers, which had only been the once, shortly before the hanging of the painting Ator now found himself standing in front of.

“It's a rank obscenity! Stand out of the way, this instant!”

The unicorn mare was at the head of a whole herd of similar ponies, and stunk of anger and sweat. Her prim, frilly dress and horn-rimmed spectacles framed a face contorted with righteous indignation. Ator's heart hammered in his chest, as he saw that in her magic she had suspended a round, metal container, marked with hazard symbols.

“P-Please, madam, Three Faces, One God is a priceless work of post-Nightmare art--”

“You can see her parts!” the mare shrieked, brandishing the container. “Her dam's parts!”

“Madam, that is rather the point!” Ator said, as fiercely as he could. “Princess Luna is shown as three aspects, a core element of her iconography, and as such--”

“What if a foal saw this? They could trot in off the street, and this would be here, just... waiting for them! Lurking, even!”

“Please, madam, put down the naphtha, before you start a fire!”

“Oh, but sir, isn't that rather the point?” the mare intoned, ominously.

Ator saw her magic pull out the stopper and, before he could do anything about it, the sickly, fatty stench of the naphtha mixture filled the air. The amber liquid sloshed out in a long streamer as she jerked the container about. Ator had never been a combat-minded unicorn, he had refused time and again all the self-defence courses his sire had tried to send him on, but from somewhere deep inside him an anger-filled surge of thaumic energy erupted. There was a flash like a photographer's lamp going off, and Ator was blinded. Somepony shrieked, and he felt himself being piled on by the other mares. Pain radiated out from his withers, and there was a sensation of teeth. Sight resolving in a blur of after-images and tangled hooves, he realized he was being dragged.

“You absolute rotter!” somepony shouted. “You've killed her!”

“I'm okay, Tacit, he only got my mane.”

“Get the rope! Hang him!”

The gallery echoed with the sort of blood lust Ator had only read about in books. Even struggling for his life, he wasn't able to resist the mouths and hooves of the baying mob, let alone the cool, impersonal touch of their combined telekinesis. His heart sunk as he heard flames begin to take hold behind him. Together, the mares moved him out of the Long Gallery and into the East Roundel, a space for displaying the innumerable porcelain fertility statues that had been entrusted to the Gallery over the years. With growing despair he heard and saw some of those delicate creations, mostly votive images of foals, tumble onto the marble and shatter.

Adjoining the East Roundel was the Short Gallery, a curved wing of red and vermillion carpeted floors and great slit windows that let in just the right amount of light to best display the delicate watercolours that were kept there. Fantastical pastoral scenes, imagined mythological pasts, and more rough things too; simple earth pony farmers tending their crops, or gleeful pegasi frolicking in cloudscapes and bathing in pillars of light. These the rioters did not burn, and as he was heaved past them he almost smiled, glad that what were perhaps his last moments alive would be filled with such beautiful things.

Almost, for it was at that moment they reached the end of the Short Gallery, and Ator realised where it was they intended to hang him from. The Purple Room was a relatively small space, fitting perhaps forty ponies comfortably inside at any one moment. It contained only one piece, a statue in bronze, by the infamous third cousin twice removed of Starswirl the Bearded, Starswirl the Unshorn. Perhaps better known for his inappropriate party tricks and spells of mass destruction, the unicorn had once, for a short period, tried his hoof at physical art. The result had been a series of alarming bronzes, at which point he had been censored by the Crown and never allowed near art again.

Celestia Penetro Omnes was a life size version of the venerable ruler, reared up so as to be standing vertical, massive wings spread wide. Even for a polymath from a family of polymaths, it was impressive first attempt. The most intricate of details had been carefully recreated, from individual feathers to bulging veins, to the slightest variations on the gilded faces of her regalia. Every single aspect of the Princess had been captured exactly and perfectly, and besides the colour, one would have been forgiven for thinking it was Celestia herself. All except for one, rather tumescent addition.

“There! Hang him from that... abomination!”

“Ooh-er, I've never seen one like that before!”

“It's a very good abomination, isn't it, Tacit?”

“Shut up, Dream, this is sick filth!”

“Oh, sorry.”

The mares slapped him down in front of the limestone plinth the statue was sat on with some degree of force. He saw the rope snake upwards, to be looped around the bronze phallus. As they began to fasten a noose with the dangling end, he realised the seriousness of the situation. His mouth went dry, and suddenly all he could hear was the sound of his heart straining away inside his chest. He tried again and again to break free of the magic restraining him, desperately struggling for anything that might save his poor life. His own thaumic grip, wild and unfocused by the panic, grasped at the mares around him. Ator suddenly recalled a fragment of something his foalhood wet nurse had been fond of saying, an ancient kenning. Thauma's grasp is merely a stalwart hoof, unclenched.

“Oof! The bastard hit me!”

Ator felt the feedback sing through his stubby horn, as though it had been struck with a tuning fork. He swung his new-found stalwart hoof about, back and forth, throwing every ounce of his will to survive into the melee. He was rewarded with a crumbling sound, like a rockfall, and he felt something that had once been firm give way through the feedback link. The magic keeping him fastened down ebbed away, just in time for him to see the statue's plinth give way, and the great bronze object begin to fall. The mares around him screamed in panic, and their hooves clattered against the floor as they panicked, they themselves now desperate to flee. Then, the masterfully rendered tip of the statue's inappropriate extra slammed into the side of his head, and the world went dark.

*

At Luna's command, Infra Base had cleared everypony out of the Selenite Court, sending them back upstairs to the Welcome Hall to convene themselves more properly. The bravery of the Adroit Lancers, as well as the general aura of inspiration that Luna emitted wherever she went, had initially brought down the rest of the civilian nottlygna, which had naturally occasioned a moment of levity and joy, threatening to explode into an all-out party. The air still stunk of the medicinal leaf satinal, which had been produced from nowhere en masse and burned for perhaps not entirely medical reasons. Base's mind still rang a little with the leaf's effects; whatever strain the nottlygna had brought out was powerful enough to affect even with secondhoof smoke. If we nottlygna have any magic at all, Base had thought, It is the power to immediately home in on whatever narcotic, alcoholic or otherwise enjoyable substances there are to be had, and consume them.

Of course, sensing that a riotous orgy might be about to break out, the Princess had instructed them all to break up, giving them their various tasks and jobs in order to focus their energies on something more productive. Those that had remained she had moved on, and now it was only herself, and the increasingly-ill looking Zo Nar in the subterranean geode-court.

“I rather hope it is still there,” Luna said, to nopony in particular.

“What's that, Mother?” Nar said, somewhat groggily.

“My quarterstaff, of course,” the Princess said, annoyed, as though it were obvious.

“I didn't think you carried weapons, Mother,” Base said.

“Well, not in modern times, of course, but in the past...” Luna's speech trailed off, and her eyes became unfocused.

“In the past? Was it a thing of the Nightmare's gear?” Base said, heartbeat jumping a few notches, muzzle furrowed in disapproval. “All that was scrapped, last I heard. Some say your sister wrapped the Nightmare's helm and armour in rock and buried it in the low places of the world.”

“I do not remember what befell Mythraegg,” Luna said, after a long moment in which she appeared stunned. “He was a sturdy, ardent thing, as good for laying out an opponent as for cracking open skulls.”

“Forgive me, Mother, but you are a creature of vast powers, are you not?”

“Ah, yes, so what use would I find for mortal weapons?” Luna smiled, sardonically. “Sometimes, Infra Base, 'tis better to exercise strength through knowable means, measured strikes and careful ways, than to simply cast a shadow of divinity over my foes and forever take them.”

“So where do you think it might be?”

“One thousand years, and more, have passed since last I saw him. Though his construction would bear him down the ages well, a single, simple thought by my sister, or the careful work of pony hooves, could have undone him. Unlike the Nightmare's helm, he was of mere physical being.” Luna placed a hoof under her chin and her gaze moved upwards. “But, there is one place that we could look.”

*

“...which, of course, means obsidian is a very poor material for a striking weapon, but as it is such a strange, black stuff, makes for a surprisingly effective striking weapon.” Luna paused and smiled devilishly. “Do you get it? It is a jest on words! Because a five meter rod of jet black rock flying toward you at several times the speed of sound is very intimidating, but also--”

“Extremely amusing, Mother, but I think Zo Nar has passed out.”

“Oh, fie on you, it was not that bad!”

“No, Mother, look...”

Base dropped onto her belly beside Nar, who had collapsed in a heap against the sweeping staircase that ran up the centre of the Tower of the Day. She placed the tip of her muzzle under the mare’s jaw, feeling for a little throb of life.

“She barely has a pulse,” Base said, grimly.

Luna frowned and sat down on her haunches, her horn lighting up. With a practiced ease, she began to remove the armour that encased Nar. As soon as the cuirass and shoulder-pauldrons came off, the problem revealed itself. Ugly splotches of blood stained a makeshift muslin bandage that ran around the nottlygna's torso. With the pressure from the armour gone, fresh blood erupted from the edges of it, splashing onto the cut granite slabs that served as stairs.

“I have seen this before. In great battles, my soldiers would take much injury, and seem to stand it fine, but fall as soon as victory songs began,” Luna said, the light of her magic brightening and her eyes closing. “Though the cut was slight, it has damaged more within than externally would show.” The Princess inhaled sharply, as though she were feeling the pain of the wound herself. “She has lost much of her blood volume, and is in shock as a result.”

There was a soft fizzing noise, and Base felt a wave of heat rush over her skin, like the opening of an oven door. Almost immediately, the flow of blood slowed.

“I have mended the broken parts,” Luna said, opening her eyes again. “She will need water, and a dose of selenesi clemens.” The Princess stroked Nar's pale cheek with a hoof. “Please make sure she gets a little more than usual. I think this one has suffered quite enough for now. It will be good that she gets some sleep. Surely, I will see her mind soon, and we will reconcile the horrors she has witnessed, and caused herself.”

“I'll take her down to the Welcome Hall.”

“Please do, and when you are finished, meet me in my sister's study.”

“Yes, Mother.”

*

When Base finally made it up the Court of the Zenith, she was quite out of breath. The tower it sat at the top of was almost half a kilometre in height, though the flat nature of the single stair meant a far greater distance was actually travelled in getting to the top. Her anatomy did her no favours in that department. Nottlygna were built for long, flight-assisted bounds, and sudden bursts of extreme agility in the air. Had she taken to the wing, she'd have likely collapsed from the effort before the halfway point, even without the extra load of armour.

Without Celestia, the Court seemed very small. Base trotted through it slowly, heart hammering in her chest. The sun's rays shone mercilessly in through the domed ceiling, still casting a pure white glow, as it was still before noon and the rainbow effect that time would bring. Conversely to the Selenite Court, which had been mostly untouched by the mayhem, the Court of the Zenith was an absolute shambles. Rolls of neatly bound parchment had been cast about all over the unyielding marble floor, punctuating fields of smashed crystal decanters, lost horseshoes, and great puddles of ink. At some point, anarchy had occasioned what looked to have been a food fight, but with stationary materials. Expensive roc-feather quills, their iridium nibs each worth a month of Base's salary, lay soaking in equally expensive wine, shafts broken.

The mare chuckled as she reached Celestia's throne. It was a far cry from the comfy pouffe Luna used. The reassuringly solid object was a block of granite ten metres tall and five wide, layered over with three centimetres of gold, save for where it met the floor, where the naked rock was finely polished and engraved all around with the same, repeating characters. CEL DEI EX SOL REG ULT.

Base sniffed the air, and her chuckling threatened to explode into full blown laughter. The unmistakable musk of energies expended filtered up through the discordant olfactory clutter. Toward the back of the seat of the throne, lipstick kisses on gold and hoof marks completed the picture.

Behind the throne, in a space the designers of the room clearly intended never to be noticed, let alone looked at, was a simple door. Had it not been left open, Base would have been out of luck. It bore the most complex set of locks she'd ever seen, and undoubtedly more in the way of thaumic defense that she could not. This was as far as the mare had ever been before and, in crossing the unassuming threshold, she suddenly felt nervous. It was as though she was invading the sacred, private domain of some terrible monster. No, not a monster. The mother of monsters, a real Echidna. This doesn't feel right at all.

Base couldn't help but stifle a gasp as she beheld the study. Circular, like the disc of the sun, and with easily enough space for a squadron of ponies to practice flying in, the room imposed itself in her mind. Right in the centre was a monumental black desk as tall as she was, and from beneath it radiated patterns of black marble and red quartz, forming the rays of the iconographic star. At each of the ray points were doorways, and Base's internal map quickly realized they could not possibly extend into more rooms. The tower simply wasn’t that big.

Princess Luna was going through her sister's things. Whilst the study was quite sparse, there was still a mishmash collection of ancient drawers, cabinets, smaller desks, writing slopes, and a number of other strange objects on gold stands that Base didn't recognize. Piles of books completed the arsenal, and though the study was replete with every other item of furniture one might expect from such a place, it had no bookcases. Instead, the leather bound tomes were piled neatly here and there, so great in volume that they spilled onto the grand jet desk itself.

“And to think, they have the gall to call her the Ordered God!” Luna said, as she noticed Base begin to trot toward her. “It is as though she has Discord for a secretary!”

“What are you looking for, Mother? Surely, your weapon is not just in amongst her things?”

“No, Mythraegg is not here.” Luna sighed. “I am looking for one of sister's scrying orbs.”

“You're going to scry for it?”

“Before I realised the dire state of the capital, I was attempting to reunite the bearers of the Elements of Harmony. I may have accidentally revealed a little too much of our nation's past, and this greatly disheartened them,” she said, picking up a cabinet in her magic and giving it a suspicious shake before setting it down. “I believe Loyalty may be in the caves beneath the city.”

“She won't be there, Mother, we sealed those after the incident with the changelings.”

“What, really?” Luna paused her rifling. “Are you certain?”

“Yes, Mother, I oversaw one of the blasting crews myself,” Base said, stopping a respectful distance from the Princess. “With respect, I'm surprised you did not notice. The explosions were quite fierce. We had some unicorns from the Honourable Order of Pyros come down with us. It was very exciting.”

“I am sure it was,” Luna said, deflated. “Our plans evolve by the minute. We shall have to find Loyalty on the way. Honesty remains in Ponyville, as does Laughter. Generosity is, luckily for us, disposed by a worse version of what affects our countrymares. Kindness will not have strayed far, though.”

“Why do we even need them?”

“So that we might sway Twilight from this path my sister has set her down, and avert disaster.”

“Can you not merely ask?” Base wrinkled up her muzzle in confusion. “I have never met the Princess of the Dusk, but nopony ascends to that position without goodness in their hearts, or a will to defend equinity.”

“She dwells in places that I can never go again,” Luna said, suddenly avoiding looking Base in the eyes. “Once an addict, always an addict. All I can do is see to the safety of my little ponies, and assist the Elements in preventing their friend following in my hoofsteps.”

“As you say, Mother.”

The Princess nodded her head in assent, and trotted out along one of the quartz star's rays, heading toward the easterly door. At that moment, Base realized how utterly silent Celestia's study was. Hooves on rock should have made at least a noticeable clatter, but it seemed as though the room was somehow stealing away the sound. Equally, at such a high altitude above the ground, the roar of wind was never far away. Even within the padded, palatial luxury of the Court of the Zenith it had been audible. Now, it was like she had stepped into a bubble of nothingness.

“You have been to the Hidden Delight, have you not?” Luna said, looking back at her.

“Oh, yes indeed, I have.” Base suddenly found herself smiling, and she sighed deeply.

“Do you know that my sister has her own demesne?”

“Is that where we might find your weapon, Mother?”

“Amongst a great many other things, yes,” Luna said, placing a silver-shod hoof very carefully against the eastern door. There was a sound like distant chimes being rung, piercing in its lonesome quality. Luna kissed her teeth. “She is truly unchanging. I would have thought that she would have moved the entry locus in a thousand years.” She pressed down on the ordinary-looking, hoof-shaped wooden handle. The mechanism clicked.

Luna tapped the door with the tip of her hoof, and it swung open. With a soft swish of ethereal mane, she went through. Base followed immediately, with no small measure of trepidation in her heart, but feeling that she might be far safer at the Princesses' side, no matter where she was going next, than alone in the study of the Dei Solis.

With a resounding bang the stagecoach landed and Double Emboss was jolted awake. The pinging of gravel against the iron and ponyoak frame filled the little cabin, along with the sound of dozens of hooves struggling to slow down and the general ruckus of whinnying and relief that the end of their journey bore. Emboss' breath came out clear for the first time since taking off, and through the panes of heavy crystal glass afternoon sunshine came pouring in, warming his bones most pleasantly. Emboss nudged Truth gently with his magic. The mare was firmly asleep, draped over his withers. He smiled and snuggled back into her weight. She hasn't slept like this in years.

Somepony tapped on the glass very enthusiastically, and Truth gasped as she woke. “Come on, ye bastards!” the tapper shouted, heavily accented voice dull but still somehow managing to be alarmingly shrill. “Welcome to Port Dauphine!” With that, he trotted along to the next carriage, away and out of sight.

With the quiet, sleepy activity of freshly-woken travelers everywhere, Emboss and Truth disembarked from the stage. The landing strip was a long, approximately rectangular, blob of gravel in a flat field just outside the port itself, which quickly began to fill with ponies who spilled out of their carriages and other aerial conveyances with no particular fanfare. The air lay hot and turgid over everything, and what had begun as a welcome warmth soon turned into an uncomfortable and oppressive heat. Emboss felt sweat begin to prickle under the straps of his panniers as he put them on, absently rifling through them to make sure nothing had been misplaced on the way.

“Horns up,” Truth mumbled. “Here comes somepony.”

“Quo vadis, laddy?” said an ancient looking pegasus, clad in gray and blue armour, who was missing an ear and what seemed to be most of his left wing. “Objecta declarat, anything at all?”

“Pardon me?” Emboss said, after an awkward pause where his eyes lingered far too long on the denuded stump poking from the stallion's left side.

“First time here then,” he concluded, and grumbled with a sound like tar being poured at the end of a long tunnel. “D'ya 'ave anythin' t'declare, an' what is the purpose of yer' visit?”

“It's the tax inspector, darling,” Truth said.

“Oh, right, gosh, sorry, I wasn't expecting this.”

“Wasn't it in your book?” She smirked, sardonically. “Port Dauphine is a Special Tax Zone.”

“Yer sister’s right there, laddy,” the pegasus said, tapping the front of his armour, where there was a rather worn looking double-fish crest.

“This is my wife, sir.” Emboss frowned. “We've nothing to declare, and our business is our own.”

“No word of a lie?” the inspector cocked an eyebrow in disbelief. “Well, lucky you, eh?” He licked his lips. “I'll just put down 'pleasure' as the purpose of yer' visit, then.” He ambled off without further questions, after giving their scant baggage a quick once over.

“Hmph, 'sister', indeed!” Emboss wrinkled his muzzle.

“Didn't you see his eyes? He was blind as a bat,” Truth said, fussing over his pannier straps, adjusting them so that they were more to her liking. “We've far yet to go, and stranger cultures still than this to see. Why, they still speak our language! You'll need to be more tolerant if you want to avoid being dinner.”

“You wouldn't have thought they were speaking Equuish, the way he was going on. All that 'quo vaddis' stuff, and the accent!”

“Equuish is a slatternly thing, darling, a craven whore that lets herself be taken roughly from behind in alleyways by anyone, be they pony or otherwise, that cocks her a kindly smile. We should think ourselves lucky that they are not hooting and chirping at us, as they might be wont to do, what with all the gryphons hanging about.”

“Is enunciation too much to ask for?” Emboss sighed. “You're right, I suppose.”

“Naturally.” Truth grinned, then looked over toward the distant city gate. “What now, then?”

“Passage, for one thing. I expect that will take time to organize, so first we should find somewhere to stay.”

“Did your guide have anything to say about where might be good for that?”

“Actually, I don't know very much about Port Dauphine at all.”

“Ah, just lots of useless trivia about the sload, then.”

“Slath, and it's not useless. Who knows when stuff like that might come in handy?”

“You know what would be handy right now?” Truth started to trot toward the port. “A travel guide to this city we're in.”

“Did you happen to bring one?”

“I was too busy endorsing your spur of the moment quests to save the world,” she said, shooting him a devilish look. “Not to mention ensuring the fruit of these loins didn't starve in our absence.”

“What loins? These loins?”

Emboss cantered after Truth, catching up to her and nipping her playfully on the rear. She whinnied in gleeful surprise and began to go faster, which sparked a rather foalish game of tag that only stopped when they noticed the extent of the disapproving looks they were getting from the rest of the crowd. By the time they slowed down, they'd reached the end of the landing strip where it transitioned into a wide stone path, with a prominent central furrow which age and the passage of millions of hooves had worn.

Compared to Canterlot, Port Dauphine seemed rather unassuming, as though slapped together at the last moment. It had no sensation of age, no feeling of torpid grandeur, or of moving on timescales and at speeds too slow and complex for mere mortals to really understand. This was a twitching, stinking city, one that sang life in all its many forms. Clustered around the gate, which was reassuringly narrow-looking and set into a forty-foot tall granite wall, were hundreds of stalls and shops, spilling out away from the port and consuming the pathways that lead up to it. Many were little more than a wagon and some gaudy signs propping up a battered tent; others were more impressive things, with vaulted tarpaulin ceilings hiding bubbling cauldrons of oil, in which strange foods were being mercilessly deep-fried.

Emboss coughed reflexively as the wall of smell and noise assaulted him. By now the density of the crowd had doubled, splitting off into two distinct groups; those who were stopping to get something to eat or buy souvenirs of dubious quality, and those who barged or expertly slipped past the distractions, eager to get inside. The queue to get through the gates, as they were narrow and restrictive for the purposes of defense, was already building.

“Perhaps we should wait for a while? Until it calms down,” Truth said, as a mare carrying what appeared to be the entire city's supply of pears on her back collided with her. “Oh, bloody Hades!”

“Good idea, breakfast?”

“Breakfast,” she concurred, somewhat wearily. “Just don't eat anything a gryphon sells you.”

“That's a bit racist.”

“Gryphons are carnivores, darling.”

“I know, but that does that mean they aren’t going to bring our kind of food to mark--” Emboss was interrupted by his own brush with the crowd, being forced to take evasive action at the last moment to get out of the path of an oncoming barrow, which was being drawn by a determined looking colt wearing spectacles. “Look where you're going!”

“Sorry, guv!” the colt shouted, barely pausing to look behind him before carrying on.

“Look, over there,” Truth said, pointing her horn at a cluster of stands that was set off from the main drag into the city. “I see apples.”

Staggering out of the crowd was like stepping into the eye of a hurricane, and Emboss took a moment to dust himself off before joining up with Truth, who'd trotted off ahead as usual. There were indeed apples to be had, piled up high into buckets, alongside pears, little individual pallets of oats and raisins, grapes and mangoes. Beside that was a long all-you-can-eat trough, filled with cabbage, kale of both kinds, and a veritable arsenal of other greens, at which was stood a group of earth ponies, chatting and eating idly. On the other side of the stand cum restaurant were a few bigger shapes, which Emboss didn't immediately recognize.

“I take it all back,” his wife said. “Eat everything those gryphons sell you.”

“Hah!” He shot her a grin, realizing that the creatures working the stand were a pair of full-blood gryphons. “I told you.”

Suddenly, something began to vibrate against Emboss' left side. A shard of fear shot through him, heart racing in his chest. He quickly unclasped his panniers and dug around in them with his magic, feeling for the object. It was a slight sensation, but one which all Canterlot staff had been trained to fear.

“Changelings!” he shouted, loud and unsteady. “Changelings among us!”

One of the earth ponies turned and looked at him disdainfully, as if Emboss had just complained that his gazpacho was cold. Nopony else paid him any attention besides that, other than a collection of annoyed expressions and uncomfortable glances.

“Look, look here,” Emboss said, pulling out a thin, metal disc covered in utilitarian runes. “This is a Changeling alarm, we got them after--”

“Jes' stepped off the stagecoach, eh?” one of the gryphons said, looming up over the counter and peering down at him with hoof-sized gold eyes. “Be eyein' this a moment for me.” He tapped a metal sign nailed to the front of two small barrels that were being used to dispense water. Operated by the KIND PERMISSION of Hive Boundless Joy, in conjunction with Her Majesty Princess Celestia. “We'all Changelings here, friend, hive care deeply f'community outreach, dig?”

Truth grabbed the disc Emboss was holding up and jammed it back into his panniers.

“I do apologize for my husband,” she said, patting his withers, still frozen, his plains-dwelling prey-brain temporarily overloaded by the sudden appearance of angry carnivore shapeshifters. “I think the pressures of a big city have gotten to him.”

“Canterlot plenty big, and y'wouldn't be acting the fool there, Greenie knows,” the gryphon said, sternly. There was an awkward moment of silence, then he smiled broadly and laughed. “Y'ponies, always good to make a changeling laugh.”

*

Cure Ator woke up. Memories from before whirled into his mind, but it was as though he was sat in the eye of a hurricane, and the images of his fate at the hooves of the mad mares didn't really bother him. Even the recollected sensation of the bronze member slamming into the side of his head, the sheer weight of the statue it was attached to bearing down on a single point proved boring. He opened his eyes and saw the outcome lying on the floor in front of him. It was like a jousting lance had speared a grape, though with far more in the way of bloody bone fragments and globs of gray matter. After killing him, Celestia Penetro Omnes had fallen on its side, shattering the marble floor as well. Hm. What a shame.

Ator placed a hoof on what remained of his corporeal form's head. The braincase had been totally pulverized, along with much of one end of the jaw. Did I always look that old? His eyes moved down toward the body's withers and barrel. Was I always so fat? Eugh. And that mane style! What kind of fashion is that supposed to be? Decrepit stallion chic? Ator sighed deeply and stood up. His incorporeal form felt numb, but he was surprised at how many little aches and pains had built up down the years, of which he was now free. Well, I seem to be taking this dying lark fine. Ator's muzzle furrowed. Aren't there supposed to be... Well... Great feathery Valkyries to carry me off? No, that's gryphons. Let's see... Im'Waha'i? No, that's zebras. Greenie? The Dog in the Desert? What comes for ponies when they die? What happens now?

Ator looked around, searching for an answer. The gallery was full of thick black smoke, which glittered and sparkled. Fourteenth century Nightmare Adventists, cor, what a bunch of posers they were, with their bloody sparkly magic paint. Nightmare, yeah, it was a nightmare alright, a nightmare to keep clean! Why did I waste my life in here, looking after all this worthless toss? I never even got married! Celestia take me for a concubine, I never even got drunk!

Though his thoughts were angry, his incorporeal body registered no such change. The steady, ghostly feeling of a heartbeat pulsed in his chest, thudding along as though he were asleep. He trotted back the way he'd been dragged, out of the Purple Room and into the Short Gallery. Bright orange fire, burning ferociously in the presence of so much ready fuel, curved up and around the walls. Where it touched the delicate watercolors it destroyed them immediately, spewing more smoke in a flash of curling paper. It didn't sting his eyes and, when he smelled it, the sense was so fleeting that he realized it must have been a neurological trick, merely a forced memory bubbling up to the surface. The same was true of the feeling of heat; a blast furnace turned down to the feeling of a warm fire in winter.

“Look! There's the atheist!” somepony shouted, from behind him.

Ator spun around toward the sound of the voice. A little herd of ponies, each wearing a different strange hat, came thundering up to him, all looking very eager and excited. They were wearing overstuffed panniers, which were spilling rolled up scrolls and other articles of stationery onto the floor, where they seemed completely unaffected by the ongoing inferno.

“Sir, sir!” said one, who was wearing a helmet with horns on it and talking incredibly fast. “Terribly sorry to hear about your recent demise, but there's light at the end of the tunnel, yes there is! I have for you today a once in a lifetime offer – pardon my pun there sir, just a little psychopomp humor, har har – yes indeed, a once in a lifetime offer! Valhalla! What does that word mean to you, sir? No! Don't answer, I can tell you--”

“Don't listen to this charlatan, sir!” said the pony beside him, who was wrapped in a white sheet that at one end draped over his flank and at the other covered most of his neck. “Not unless you want to spend eternity drinking mead and stabbing things!

“Oh, and that time would be better spent frolicking in fields and spending time with your loved ones? Who wants to do that?” The helmet wearing stallion made a sarcastic face. “Ten billion years with your weird uncle and his pigeon fancying anecdotes, sounds great!”

Ator disappeared. There was no fanfare, no great show of light or sound or color. He was simply there one moment, and not the next.

“Pants. We missed him,” the horn-helmeted one said, sighing.

“Don't worry, chap, plenty more where that came from.” He adjusted his sheet and glanced about. “This Thiasus is only just begun.”

*

Beware of Gryphons Bearing Gifts

Chapter Nine

“Beware of Gryphons Bearing Gifts”

“I'm wildly intrigued,” said Truth, staring up at one of the storefronts of Port Dauphine's Dry Market.

“Cuthbert and Tunt Sons, Yon Perverse Confectionaires To Herr Majeste Princess Celestia,” Emboss read, eyes scanning over the elegant red and gold script. “Since six sixty-seven, apparently.”

“What in the wide, wide world of Equestria could they possibly mean by 'perverse confectioneries'?”

“I really don't think we should go in, darling, who knows what dangers there might be? What if there are more changelings?”

“What, so you can embarrass yourself in front of them again?” She nickered disapprovingly. “He was a perfectly lovely sort of person, and he didn't even charge us for breakfast, I thought that was very kind.”

“We were his breakfast,” Emboss grumbled. “I could practically feel him sipping at your appreciation. It's like fine whiskey to those things.”

“I'm going inside.”

“Darling, look at the sign! It says 'absolutely no minors' in twelve different languages!” Emboss stamped at the ground with a hoof. “Twelve!”

“I think that just goes to show how multicultural this city is,” she said, shooting him a wicked glance.

Before Emboss could complain further, his wife had butted her head against the lock-plate and opened the door. A delicate little bell tingled. Biting his lip nervously, he followed her, if only to save her from the assured depredations lurking within.

Varnished ponyoak counters and glass-fronted display cabinets ran around the edge of the broad space, lit by the fierce blue glow of gas lamps burning even during the day. The smell of burnt sugar, a complex symphony of different notes, hung in the air, filling Emboss' nose. Along with it came a whole host of other floral and fruity smells, many of which he didn't recognize. Anise, cinnamon and mango, along with the tart timpani-strikes of lemon and orange, all worked to produce an odd mixture of cleansing and cloying sensations.

“Good afternoon,” someone said, in a perfect Canterlite accent, from behind the counter furthest from the door. “Welcome to Cuthbert and Tunt Sons, how may I help you today?”

“Ah, yes, hello,” Truth said, coming to a halt. “We just wanted to see what you had, really, we've never been to a sweet shop quite like this...”

A young, lithe zebra was folded up on a tall stool, body resting daintily on a nest of hooves and legs. At first it seemed as though she had on some kind of green and yellow stole, but then it moved, and Emboss saw that it was in fact the largest snake he'd ever laid eyes on. It was draped over her withers, and curled off in both directions to the point where he could not see the head nor tail.

Something primal woke up in the back of Emboss' mind, a fragment of fragments mirrored in the minds of similar creatures across the gulf of time, space, dimension and rationality.

“Snake...” he muttered, trying not to flee.

“Looking to reawaken the djinn in your relationship?” the zebra said, smiling mysteriously. “I am iRen, and I'm sure we can find what you're looking for.”

“iRen?” Emboss said, the instincts of a life-long registrar of births and deaths shining through. “That's a diamond dog name, isn't it? With all the funny grammar and fiddly orthography.”

“Very observant of you, sir, very observant indeed,” iRen said, clicking her teeth and stepping down off the stool, her snake not so much as reacting but simply settling. “My dam was once a member of the retinue of a Lord of the Singing King, and as she took her letters from him, so did I.”

“I'm terribly sorry, my husband rarely knows when to stop,” Truth sighed. “I'm sure he didn't mean to pry.”

“It is a more common question, madam,” iRen nodded, then took a silver tray out from beneath the counter with her mouth. “How about we go over some samples?”

“Is this hard confectionary?” Truth said, picking up one of the many multi-coloured and strangely-beveled sweets on offer and putting it in her mouth. “Ooh! Lemon!”

“Indeed, madam, it is very hard, but that one in particular has a warm liquid centre, just keep sucking and it'll reveal itself,” iRen said, glancing briefly at Emboss. “That one in particular we call the stallione citrone; it's one of our best sellers.”

*

The private realm of Princess Celestia was a monument as much as a demesne. At first, Base had thought it was merely a large white room, of the kind found in dairies or doctor's surgeries, but when her eyes adjusted to the infernal, sourceless glare, she saw that the floor curved not into ceilings, but away into the far distance, vanishing off to her north and south. There was no hint that they had just stepped through a doorway. Instead, they had been deposited as if through teleportation, or other like magic.

Some distant wind howled and, all of a sudden, she and Luna were struck by it. The force was unlike anything Base had felt before. She'd done her mandatory high-altitude training of course, flying to heights of five or six kilometres, all wrapped up in thermals. The winds at that altitude were ferocious enough. What hit them now was a thousand times worse, a long, pummeling torrent of tortured air. Base pulled her leathery wings in close to her body and squeezed her eyes shut, an instinctual reaction. Warmth blossomed, and the wind cut out just as quickly as it had started. When she finally looked around again, Luna was smiling down at her, head framed by the wavering blue tendrils of a magical dome.

“Be not afeared; these winds are products of a fearsome end-djinn of my sister's design,” the Princess cooed, stroking Base's head with the leading edges of her wing. “They will not hurt you now.”

“Fearsome engine?” Base said, peering out through the blue and azure barrier, looking for some feature in the topography that might act as reference. “Like a steam engine?”

“No, not some new-fangled piston-toy, my little nottlygna, but a bellowing creature of glass and magic, a djinn from the days before my banishment,” she said, licking her lips. “This demesne is unlike mine, which at least makes reference to the world to which it is attached. My sister is a cowed fanatic of the school of queer geometry, and so this space is as a torc, but hollowed out.”

“Like a doughnut, Mother?”

“Precisely so, but large, and larger still than all Equestria, and it had to be, for here are kept those things that even Cerberus refused to contain.”

“I think I prefer the Hidden Delight, Mother,” Base said, suddenly afraid of what would be so awful as to make a three-headed dog larger than most houses balk. “The wet bar is superb.”

“Quite,” the Princess said, nodding, before heading off in a northerly direction, into the wind, the corona of magic following with her. “Come along, and keep up.”

Base began to trot. The sensation of the ground beneath her hooves was deeply disturbing, like walking on warm glass, but a glass that had just been fired and was still molten. She left hoofprints in it, which undulated disquietly before returning to their previous state. Further still, whenever the frog of her hoof happened to touch it, there was a feeling like that produced by the sound of a nail being dragged down a chalkboard. Everything about this place screamed hostility at her, as though the very fabric of reality was rejecting her presence.

Presently, Base became aware of the space around them changing. Where there had previously been featureless, gently curving nothingness, hexagonal pillars of various sizes arose. They were in stark contrast to the glaring white, being made of some flat, black material, shiny like polished metal, completely devoid of any external features, or even scratches. Those closest were only as tall as her knees, but those further away kept on growing, reaching the size of a full grown oak tree in places.

“There has been much conflict in our past,” Luna said, in answer to questions still only half-formed in Base's mind. “Many errant mages, made equus sacer, came back to trouble us later on, not least of which was the Brigand-King of the North, so aptly dealt with by the object of our current troubles in times more recent. Their personal effects and magic talismans are kept here, encased.”

“Why not simply destroy them?”

“Energy, once bound down and forced into shapes it could not otherwise attain, is vengeful to any who seek to unbind it.”

“Surely there are safe places for big explosions to happen, Mother? The southern deserts and flats, or the northern tundra? And wouldn't any risk be worth it, to prevent these magics being used again?”

“Sleeping gryphons are best left undisturbed,” the Princess said, fluttering her wings by way of a shrug. “At least, 'twas how it was explained to me. Much of this collection was made by my sister over the last thousand years, and so I had no hoof in it. There are no records, as some of these devices come to those who merely think or read of them, and certainly sister hasn't time to sit and tell me of each depredation.”

They carried on, following an unmarked path that meandered like the course of an ancient river. Behind them, the black pillars were settling gently into the ground again, hiding themselves away. Base's imagination couldn't help but run wild, recalling all the awful legends of mad magicians and insane inventors that did the rounds in the barracks, thinking on what aspect of them might actually be true, and what fragments of evidence, the smoking cannons of the crimes of deranged pony minds, might be hidden away there.

After what seemed like hours, where on several occasions Luna determined that they double back and take a different unseen route through the expanse, they finally stopped. Base had learned that here looks could be deceiving, so she wasn't surprised at the fact that the space in front of them, which Luna was now examining carefully, looked like everything else, simply the void of the road ahead. Base knew that without the Princess to guide her, she would have quickly gotten completely disoriented and lost within this place, and so waited patiently.

There was a soft thrum of magical energies being applied and immediately patterns erupted in the air that Luna had been studying. Though they were alien to her, she knew they were a script. Characters repeated themselves, and here and there scant traces of familiarity popped out. It was like the language was an antique precursor of Equuish, but one from so long ago that only the smallest hints of relation were present.

Suddenly, there was a thunderclap, like a great door being slammed shut in the depths of the world. Her bones shuddered in sympathy, and Base's teeth rattled around in her skull. She threw herself to the ground, her hindbrain convinced that the world was ending, forelegs desperately covering her head.

“Calm, little one, 'tis but the span of ages reconciling with the now,” Luna said.

Base looked up. Another door had appeared, standing in the free air, but this one was a far different affair compared to the one in Celestia's study. It was a disc, spanning five metres, cut out of a simple, uncomplicated granite completely free of inclusions. A careful hoof had engraved a square series of dots, lines and wedge shaped glyphs into the middle of it, above which was a large stylized image of the sun, about the size of Base's hoof, radiating light. Below the square was a far smaller sphere, the detailing of which bore striking resemblance to the war maps of Equestria Base had trained with. To the right of it was the crescent of the moon, which had no detailing, save for a wedge-glyph.

“She kept the whole room,” Luna said, wistfully. “Sometimes, I like to think there is a fragment of that old, sentimental creature still alive beneath the pitiless sun that is Celestia.” She placed a hoof against the disc and pushed against it. The hinges complained loudly, and little streamers of implausible dust fell from the face of the door. “Though perhaps it is the case that she has merely forgotten it is here.”

*

In the middle of the Dry Market, past the aisles and ranks of the less permanent stalls, was a great fountain. As it was just after lunch, and the sun was still at its daily zenith, casting down a stifling heat, the denizens of Port Dauphine were taking a break to refresh themselves in the water. Adults of many races sat or lay on the lip of the fountain, dipping their heads into, or lapping at, the gently ebbing pool. Their cubs and foals danced and splashed through it, diving through the tumbling blue curtains that fell from the top of the simple, columnar centrepiece with merry abandon, whooping and hollering.

Truth and Emboss had left the sweetshop with quite a bit of loot. At first shocked and taken aback by the brazenness of it, Emboss had really gotten into the swing of it. Little paper bags of melone cunaresand simnel surprixes filled his panniers, saved for later on, whereas Emboss had already gotten through forty bit's worth of stallione citrones, two whole boxes. They'd stopped at the fountain to acclimate themselves, and Emboss took a moment to rearrange his luggage so as to better fit their confectionary haul. Truth had simply thrown her head into the fountain, apparently quite dehydrated.

“Darling,” Emboss said, holding up one of the empty boxes of stallione citrones and examining it carefully. “I may not be the most knowledgeable when it comes to these sorts of things, but is it usual for confectionary to have a maximum permitted dose?”

“What?” sputtered Truth, looking up, her face drenched, auburn mane quite soaked.

“Yes, look here, 'For oral use, one to three lozenges every four hours, no more than six lozenges per day'.”

“Maybe they're concerned about our sugar intake,” Truth said, drinking thirstily.

“I can't help but feel a little concerned. 'If swelling persists for more than four hours, contact a doctor immediately',” he read, squinting slightly. “Swelling? What in Equestria can they mean by that?”

“I don't feel very well.”

“I'm sure it'll pass, probably just a little of the old traveller's tummy.”

“Traveller's tummy? Where do you even get phrases like that?”

“It was in the Foal's Guide, thank you very much.”

“Your mare's lookin' a bit green around the gills there, laddy,” a voice suddenly said. “Mayhap a spell out of the afternoon sun'll be good for her.”

Emboss turned to see a large, muscle-bound figure, sat some way around the fountain, who had edged a little closer to them. His goat-like yellow eyes paid little attention to the object he was holding in his forepaws, which seemed as though it might've been a distant pony ancestor before it was deep fried and served with peanut sauce, instead playing all over Emboss and Truth with the sort of look usually reserved for particularly delicious tufts of grass.

“Oh, yes, as I was just saying, I'm sure she'll be fine.”

“New to the city, are you?” the minotaur said, his strange mix of sharp and flat teeth making easy work of the red-stained meat as he spoke. “Got a place to stay?”

“Not yet, actually,” Emboss said, gulping down his ancient prey instincts for the sake of transcultural relations. “I suppose you know somewhere?”

“All the hotels and inns and whatnot are down in'Cockwobblers.”

“I'm sorry, drowning in what?”

“Down in Cockwobblers, I said, next to the harbour.”

“Oh, I see, it's a district.”

“Yes, what else?”

“Nevermind,” Emboss said, stroking the back of Truth's head. “Any particular place?”

“Aye, but if 'Cockwobblers' gave you pause, you'll not like it...”

*

By now, Base had stopped questioning the peculiar shifts in dimension, perspective and apparently also place. As she had lived in Canterlot her entire life, she'd become used to magical weirdness popping up occasionally and altering the laws of physics, or turning everyone into meerkats, or whatever bizarre thing was on the agenda that day. She was, therefore, quite unsurprised when they stepped through the disc-door into another room entirely.

“Keepsakes, keepsakes,” Luna mumbled, peering into the gloom. “Ah.”

The lights came on, hard and unyielding, casting downwards from the low ceiling. At first, the room reminded Base of the very oldest sort of tombs that could be found beneath Canterlot Castle, those dusty and forgotten mausoleums that held culture heroes from eras in time nobody had bothered to record. Then, as she looked around, she realized it was something more. The walls were chiseled out of flint, knapped markings flowing to the floor, which was tiled with some kind of primitive attempt at paving, each of the flat, glassy plates a different shape, held together with rough grout and a type of highly granulated cement.

At the far end of the room were signs of habitation. Books, socks and quills spilled out across the floor, bridging the divide between a pair of rather voluminous beds. One was pink and made of simple cloths, with gaudy little imprints of the sun and moon on it. The other was a dusty blue, with asterisms embroidered into it.

Base trotted inward, rather intrigued. The iconography and colour scheme were immediately obvious as to what they implied. The room was big enough for three or four ponies, and Luna drifted in behind her. As the door shut, Base became aware of something starting back up again, like the actors in the background of a scene in a theatre production taking their places as the action begins. The feeling nudged the back of her mind, refusing to go away.

“Here is where we, at the founding of this nation, hid ourselves, for we were only foals, of mortal span, not yet come into our divine natures,” Luna said, suddenly very grim, as though attending a funeral. “Later on, we cleft this place apart from Equestria, and hid it away, for it would have great power over us if it were to fall into the wrong hooves. We used it as a keepsake-box. It is here we'll find Mythraegg.”

“I can't imagine you or your sister as foals,” Base said, peering up at the stern-yet-motherly face of the Selenite Princess, with her strange, lonely eyes and wispy indigo mane, flowing in a gentle, phantom breeze. “You seem so eternal.”

“I do not remember it and, in truth, when we came to divinity, that which we once were died, and something new emerged,” Luna said, sidling up the end of the blue bed and peering underneath. “But that is a story for another time entirely.”

“School was never very clear on the topic, Mother. I'd like to hear that story one day.”

“Maybe you will,” Luna said, the tip of her horn glowing blue, followed by the sound of something terribly heavy scraping across the tiles. “Here...”

The long, black trunk that Luna produced from beneath the bed was somewhat anti-climatic. It reminded Base of her own mementos and personal effects box. She'd been expecting some grandiose, ultra-magical container, perhaps drenched in rare, thaumic crystals, studded with diamonds, encased in rubies and sapphires, held shut with complex, zebra puzzle locks. Instead, Luna merely popped open a simple brass catch, one which could have come from any locksmith in Canterlot, and swung up the wooden lid on copper hinges.

The box's innards rather reminded Base of the contents of a doctor's desk. Lots of tiny scrolls in neat bundles sat piled atop stacks of paper, which were all covered in messy hoof writing scrawls, though all in languages she didn't understand and which seemed to be written in two directions simultaneously. Besides that, the only other thing inside was an apple sized model of the moon, highly detailed, with the various seas and craters marked in plain Equuish.

“Beg your pardon, Mother, but aren't we looking for a weapon?” Base said, her muzzle taking on a bemused expression. “This thing is barely big enough.”

“'Tis an abstraction,” Luna said, nodding her head. “Look again.”

In the minute fraction of a second in which she'd taken her eyes off the box, the contents had shifted. Now it was a collection of clinking, dusty bottles, each stoppered with ivory and glued shut with some rubbery material. The glass was too thick to see inside, but the sounds alone, like the intestinal distress of a curry-eating whale, made her uneager to find out. Suddenly, Base sneezed, some bizarre combination of ancient dust and an horrific, aggressive smell rising up off the bottles the culprit. Her eyes snapped shut reflexively, and when they opened again--

“Here we are, penknives, misericords, letter-openers and royal weapons.” Luna giggled, as though she'd made a terribly funny joke. “Weapons! The royal weapons. I wonder if they have, perhaps, scabbards?”

“I dare say they do,” Base said, gulping, glancing at the alarming mishmash of different pointed ends and hoofloops that now jutted out of the chest. “That is the normal way. You wouldn't want anypony getting hurt accidentally.”

“Hah! No, no you wouldn't,” Luna said, the periwinkle glow of her magic filling the space once again. “Mythraegg will be under here somewhere...” the Princess bit her lip and adopted the dazed, middle-distance stare of somepony grappling with thaumokinetic feedback.

There was a sound like the eons-long movements of mountains sped up to mortal hearing, and from beneath the jagged piles of daggers, sharpened staves and iron-tipped stakes came a thing which was quite at odds with the rest of the stabby horde. It was indeed a quarterstaff, but only in that it was shaped roughly like one. Mythraegg had, instead of a cylindrical shaft, two long, wickedly sharp edges, which were so finely honed that Base could barely see them. Ten centuries of sleep seemed not to have dulled it one bit. The air sung as Luna deftly extracted the glassy black fang, turning it over and over.

Base had seen the weapons of mages before. Those who chose to impart magic onto the world though physical means often adopted materials like star-metal or volcanic rock, and they would always be covered in hundreds of complex runes, weaving a phrase of anger and destruction onto the fabric of the mundane with beams of searing horn fire. Luna's weapon was a step up. The shapes of power that ran up and down it had been picked out in silver alloy, with inclusions of a green and blue metal that might well have been beyond mortal knowledge, for though Base's understanding of metallurgy was limited to blades, it was comprehensive in that field, and she did not recognise it.

“Can I be honest, Mother?” Base said, exhaling a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.

“Please.”

“I don't think it sends the right sort of message.”

“What do you mean?”

“It looks very... nightmarey.”

“Nightmarey?!” Luna swung Mythraegg about indignantly, which caused it to make a sound Base couldn't help but place as a chorus of shrieking foals. “Hmph!”

“Mother, I meant no offence.”

“Pah.”

“Perhaps we shall not need it?”

“I sincerely hope not, my little nottlygna,” Luna said, the glow of magic fading as she stowed the fearsome quarterstaff away. “Come, we've dallied long enough.”

*

“That can't be what it's actually called,” Truth groaned, as they rounded the corner of one of Cockwobbler's packed, narrow avenues. “I'm sure you just heard him wrong.”

“You'd have heard it the same as I did if you hadn't been trying to drink that entire fountain.”

“I'm hot! It's practically Hadean in this city, sweet foals above, are they trying to boil us alive?” Truth was rather red-faced, and covered in sweat. “Perhaps it's a preliminary step, before they ram sticks up our backsides and drown us in peanut sauce,” she rambled, struggling to keep up with Emboss. “Yes, that makes sense, slow cook the meat, nice and juicy, practically melts in your mouth--”

“We mustn't lose our heads, dear,” Emboss said. “Once we find our hooves I'm sure you'll feel better.”

“At this obscenely named... tavern? Guesthouse?”

“I think he called it a hotel, actually.”

“Your new minotaur friend certainly had a mouth on him!”

“Come now, he was just a person we met; what happened to being open minded, eh?”

“Great fanged creatures, what next, bat ponies? Cave dwelling lichen that's grown wanderlust and left its subterranean climes, seeking prey?”

“What are you babbling about?” Emboss stopped and turned to her. “Just keep it together!”

“I very much fear there was something in those sweets,” Truth said, gazing at him in an unfocused way, pupils wider than they should have been. “It's like I'm drunk.”

“That's what you get for talking to strangers!”

“The sign! The sign was so enticing! How could I just trot past it?”

At this moment, Emboss and Truth came to the end of the avenue, where it broke out into a plaza, which was really little more than a space between the larger blocks of red brick buildings. In Canterlot, it would undoubtedly have been blessed with a statue of some description, steeped in jewels and with a funny name. Here, however, things were far more functional, and in the centre was merely a water pump, cast out of varnished iron and in busy use by residents and passersby.

Taking up one entire side of the square, behind the pump, was the hotel he and Truth were after. It followed the dominant scheme of orderly red bricks, with three whole floors of them run through with wooden framing, which seemed to be older as the timbers had gone jet black.

Outside the hotel, a number of suspect characters were laid out on a hotchpotch collection of trestle tables, benches and other furniture, all chattering merrily away in a range of dialects and that were almost as varied as the clades, species and possibly even phylae they represented. Minotaurs, more completely dressed than the one who'd directed Truth and Emboss here in the first place, sat drinking tea and reading newspapers. Several diminutive zebras, who seemed so small and ferret-like in the open air, exchanged gossip with silver-and white-furred Diamond Dogs, who were wrapped up in what appeared to be loose bedsheets.

None paid them any mind, except a very muscular looking alce gryphon, who cast a predator's eyes over Truth's flank that, in any equine culture, would have been considered seriously bad manners, but here seemed to simply be a perusal of the lunch menu. Before the sensible part of his brain could conjure up some perfectly good rationalizations for why that couldn't possibly happen here, in Equestria, even on the edge of the nation, his hindbrain had propelled him and his wife through the open front doors of the hotel and into the bar.

“Welcome to the Winking Gusset!” somepony shouted, before Emboss' eyes could adapt to the light.

“Celestia, preserve us,” he said, as Truth winced.

“Y'what, mate?” the same pony said.

Behind the bar, which was in the shape of a horse-shoe and snugly fitted against the interior brick and stone work, a burly, chestnut-maned earth pony with a collection of towels and other accoutrements of his trade laid over his back was giving him a funny glance.

“Terribly sorry, my wife, she's not used to that sort of language--”

“You must be from Canterlot,” the earth pony said, grinning, as though it were the absolute most amusing thing on the planet at that given moment. “It's a bird, lad.”

“Excuse me? What's a bird?”

“The gusset,” he said, pointing a hoof up above the bar, where there was affixed a large lithograph of what appeared to be a caricature of a brown bird, standing on a mudflat, winking cheekily at the viewer. “It's a small wading bird, native to the coast here. It eats small worms, crabs and occasionally other sorts of crustaceans. And it is winking at you.”

“I... see.”

“Don't worry about it, happens to everyone,” he said, still grinning. “Room for two?”

“Yes, please,” Truth interjected. “I'm feeling awfully funny, I think I've been out in the sun for--”

“You've not been at the special confectionary have you?”

“How did you know?”

“You've got a bit on your chin there, love,” he said, tapping his own to point it out. “But where are my manners? I'm Dee Novo, proprietor.”

“It's good to meet you, Novo, I'm Double Emboss, and this is my wife.”

“So, that's Mr and Mrs Emboss, yes?” he said, pulling out a ledger from underneath the bar, along with a little punnet that contained inks, quills and several kinds of pencil.

“Skies, no, why on Equestria would it be that?”

“You're married, aren't you?”

“I'm Absolute Truth,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Darling, some mares take the names of their husbands. I'd have thought you of all ponies would know that.”

“I'm from the Avalon school of births, deaths and marriages!” Emboss protested at her. “We're a very specialist group of civil servants.”

“Will that be a double room, then?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Truth nodded. “Just with the one double bed.”

“Aye aye,” Novo smiled conspiratorially then, after scribbling in the book with a short, stubby pencil, turned the book around for Emboss and Truth to sign. “I'll just fetch your key.”

“Taking the name of your husband, what a load of piffle,” Emboss muttered once Novo had trotted off. “Backwards, that's what it is.”

“Just sign the book,” Truth said, picking up one of the quills in the tangerine aura of her magic and doing exactly that.

“Oh, right away, Mrs Emboss,” he said, sardonically, then did the same.

“Perhaps I'll start calling myself that, just to spite you,” Truth said, then, after a moment of pretending to be offended, began to laugh uncontrollably, which continued until Novo came back, keys folded in a little napkin which he carried in his mouth.

Something Wicked this Way Comes...

Chapter Eleven

"Something Wicked this Way Comes...”

“--and furthermore m'lud, pursuant to the eleventh complaint of gross indecency, I wish to submit the following photographic negative into evidence...”

Astrapios rested his feathered head on the desk in front of him, barely fighting the urge to fall asleep. The courtroom was cool and comfortable, with just enough of a breeze filtering in through into the place from the outside. This earned him a sharp tap on the withers from Mr Ruffley, one third of Ruffley, Buggritte and Runne. The stallion was immaculately dressed, sporting a three-piece blue silk suit, complete with matching horseshoes that were fastened to his hooves with sterling silver clips, and a short tie that bore the trifecta logo of his firm. This was rather expected of his kind, that is to say lawyers, but Mr Ruffley took it to the extreme.

This made him look quite intimidating, or at least, so Astrapios thought. Barely Eagle Magazine was no stranger to various sorts of litigation. If it wasn't the gentle undercurrent of antigryphon troublemakers, then it was a haughty dam of some description, after her pound of hay in a court of law. Nothing much had ever come of it. This feels different, somehow, he thought. More organized, and there's more of them, too. And how did they arrange this so fast?

“Mr Astrapios, you simply must remain awake,” Mr Ruffley whispered, as the bailiffs maneuvered the boxed photographic evidence up to the stand.

“Come on, Ruffley,” Astrapios said, in an equally quiet tone. “This is just the normal nonsense, isn't it?”

“Do you see who that is up there?” Mr Ruffley said, sternly. “That's Judge No Quarter, otherwise known as No 'Legsmasher' Quarter, dearly departed of the Canterlot underground back-boxing scene.”

“Back-boxing?”

“It's like boxing, but played from behind.”

“I see, why is that a problem? We're not in the ring with him.”

“Judge Quarter is Celestia's pet attack dog. She keeps him in a dark hole in the ground, only letting him out when there are poor, virginal barristers to hunt down and defile.”

Astrapios peered at the pony in the dock, a blue-maned old stallion wearing a red smock and an expression that somehow simultaneously displayed contemptuous disinterest and furious, hoof-stamping outrage. There was something grizzled about him, in the way he chewed his lips and moved the trial forward with nothing more than a nod of the head and a swift crack of the gavel. He'd seen this kind of personality before, though usually it had claws and a fondness for eating things that were still mostly alive.

“I like the sound of him already.” Astrapios chuckled. “He reminds me of my grandfather.”

“Sir, that is as well as maybe, but the fact of the matter is that he is not a regular New Corral judge and, therefore, not usually eligible to preside over trials that take place in the city!” Mr Ruffley had become quite animated by this point, though still desperately trying to stay quiet and professional, his voice rising to barely above a loud whisper. “Do you understand? Somepony, somepony big and white, has sent him here on special assignment.” Ruffley loaded the last part of his sentence with what Astrapios presumed was his best attempt at ominous foreboding but, coming from the mouth and voice box of a pony, sounded like a flea auguring doom at first sight of the comb. The hippogryph tried not to laugh, immediately feeling guilty about it on account of his own small stature. “Cogs turn in the background. Something is afoot!”

“Don't you mean 'ahoof'?” Astrapios said, grinning.

“What?”

“You said 'afoot', but the phrase is 'ahoof'.”

“Many species have feet!” Ruffley's eyes went wide. “Don't change the subject!”

“Calm down, Ruffley, we'll be fine,” Astrapios cooed, placing a claw on Ruffley's withers. “Look, I think they're just about done setting up the evidence...”

Up in front of the judge, beneath his lofty perch, the bailiffs had constructed a montage of Barely Eagle centerfolds. The photographic negatives, from which the lithograph blocks were cut and drawn from, had been developed and printed, and were displayed in harsh black and white, the blowing up process having robbed them of a lot of detail and resolution. They sat affixed to cork for all to see, or stuck to card and propped up on blocks, all bearing little black exhibit tags.

Astrapios glanced over at the jury. The twenty-four individuals who would determine guilt were as diverse as the city itself, and representatives of all the major species now stared at the array of flesh and feathers, or talked amongst themselves. The ponies in particular looked the most stunned. He had seen many of those sorts of looks before, all of them on equines. I wonder, what do they teach in schools here? It can't be very good. They're so innocent and naïve, those poor things. It's just as well I don't put out anything that might get the average hot-blooded stallion going. Or, perhaps I do. Maybe I can bribe the jury with signed prints, or a lifetime subscription.

*

Twilight and Whom were on the edge of the forest when it began to rain. Curiously, it did not do so in the way that Twilight was used to. Back home, the weather schedule was published in every paper, and any new burst would begin quite suddenly and rise immediately to peak intensity, with teams of local weather stewards milling around in the cloud base, hard at work to make it so. In the Lunar Principality the clouds moved roguishly, this way and that, as if driven along by the wind and nothing much more. When they chose to deposit their leaden cargo, they did not pause, with light drizzle progressing into short periods of more enthusiastic torrents in a way that was as random as their movement.

None of this seemed to bother Whom in the slightest. In fact, she was thrilled by the shower, giggling playfully as the solid, angular leaves of the metallic trees turned into impromptu gutters. She dove headlong through the curtains of water they created, then took to the wing for short bounds through the air to shake herself off. Twilight merely conjured a small umbrella, which was like her former self before the alicorn business; simple, functional and with an easy role in life.

When they finally climbed back up the low hill that surrounded the castle and walked through the gates, Twilight found her hooves had become quite muddy. The fields around Whom's castle were not, it seemed, made from the same stuff as the ground beneath the metal forest. Whereas that had a cleansing effect, this was quite the inverse, and was by far the most normal thing around. Immediately, the purple mare felt a pang of painful nostalgia. She glanced out between the arches of the portcullis gate and up at the sky, and for the first time began to question her recent actions.

This is the longest time I've spent away from Equestria, she thought, absent-mindedly sitting down on her haunches in the cover of the gate, pulling open her panniers with her magic and drawing out the items she would need for the next part of her quest.

“By the ninety-nine virgin mares of Dionysus, Twilight!” Whom shouted, her voice petrified. “What are you doing with that?!”

“With what?” Twilight said, shooting her a puzzled glance.

“That knife!”

Twilight twirled the object she'd slipped out of her panniers. The thin, flat blade of Joyeuse glinted as its platinum edge reflected the light that her magical field generated. Along the handle, which was cylindrical and made of polished meteoric nickel-iron, Old High Equuish characters inscribed: Discipulus meo carissime, Ego Lætus, composuerunt de eodem ferro et animos Durandal et Curtana. Cum summa amore, Dei Ex Sol.

“This old thing?” Twilight said, frowning. “Princess Celestia gave it to me years ago. I use it as a letter opener.”

“What are you doing with it?” she said, fuzzy pink ears folding back against her skull.

“That squid eye has to come out somehow.”

“Twilight! That's horrible!”

“Oh, come on! It's not like I'm going to do it to a living one.”

“Just put it down!”

Whom was, by this point, becoming quite hysterical, inching away from Twilight to press against the other side of the gate, so the Princess did as she was asked and slid the blade back into its plain brown scabbard before hiding it away within the recesses of her panniers.

“Look, I think it would be best if I go and get this eyeball,” Whom said, as soon as the offending thing was out of view. “You make yourself comfortable upstairs in my private quarters, wipe some of that mud off.”

“There's really no need,” Twilight said, imagining Whom trying to fight a giant squid.

“I think there is! You were going to just cut out their eyes!”

“So? They don't need them any more! They're dead!”

“Only things that are alive can die.”

“I don't understand.”

Whom sighed and trotted into the castle courtyard, pausing only once she was in the middle of it. Twilight noticed that all the tracks on the ground, presumably made by Whom, started and finished in the same place, where she now was standing.

“I really think it will be safer this way,” Whom said finally, then vanished.

Twilight immediately attempted to run after her, but the doorway that Whom had opened through the Gap and back onto the lunar surface had already closed. She prodded space-time rather sharply, trying to will it into accepting, or even recognising, her commands, but nothing happened. She focused her teleport locus, visualising the mathematical coordinates for the same point on the moon that she had arrived at to begin with, but found herself lacking the power required to make the transit, a disappointing fizzle her only reward. Wherever the Lunar Principality was in relation to the moon, it was well beyond her range. Cursing herself for not having read up on the mechanics of pocket universes, she gave up trying and went to look for Whom's private quarters.

*

Twilight eventually found what she was looking for, but not until after a great deal of wandering around and backtracking. Whoever or whatever had designed Baroque Number 87, they must have been quite mad. Tall, sweeping staircases lit by Hearth's Warming decorations flowed upwards, as though introducing some grand suite of chambers, but then ended abruptly in a mess of naked brick and unfinished fixtures. Long sets of gloomy corridors went equally to nowhere, with more than one door revealing what, at first glance, appeared to be an opulent dining hall or drawing room, but which was actually a carefully painted illusion, designed to give the feel of depth and nothing more.

Whom's chambers were located behind a nondescript piece of wooden panelling, which Twilight only found after noticing all the scratches and scuffs on the jet black flooring leading up to it. She pushed it open with a cautious kick of her hoof, peering inside with a sense of growing alarm at what strangeness she might uncover next.

Somewhat anticlimactically, the most normal part of the castle now presented itself. On a polished oak floor sat an unusually large futon, drowned in embroidered black pillows and surrounded by a few solid looking dressers and chests. There was a clear surfeit of possessions, but what little she had was obviously held dear. As she entered and came closer, Twilight saw that on the nightstand was a clock, which had nine hands and didn't seem to be working, and a tiny lithograph picture in a glass frame. It was a scene from outside the front of an old Canterlot building, one that she didn't recognise. A little herd of fillies and colts, all different races and colours, stood in front of a pair of mares, who were wearing bright, cheerful smiles and the most ridiculous hats she'd ever seen. Taken together, it rather reminded Twilight of her great-grandam's rooms. She had been a humble pony of small means, in service to the Crown as a seamstress, and had thus been entitled to one of Canterlot Castle's infinite rooms, secreted away beneath its cellars and kitchens.

The bedroom had a little en-suite bathroom, which continued the traditional, minimalist, themes. Neat slate tiles covered the walls, and a carved wooden sink with a steel bowl sat beside a toilet which looked more like a bizarre instrument of torture than anything else, far removed from the reasonably modern conveniences now common in Equestria. Everything was fastidiously clean and organised; even the glass bottles full of soaps and creams and so on were lined up in regimented rows. Twilight smiled. A mare after my own heart.

There was no shower or bath, not even of the old type that was more a sort of stall with a tap in it, so she washed the mud from her hooves as best she could with just a cloth from the neat pile next to the toilet and her magic. The two outlets above the sink were marked with orange and black enamel dots, but both dispensed only freezing cold water, and were therefore not much help.

Thus cleansed, Twilight replaced everything in the bathroom that she had moved, wiped the last of the mud from the floor, then went back into the other room to wait for Whom to return.

*

Devoid of much to interest it, Twilight's attention span was measurable in minutes. The minimalism, it seemed, was a truly prevalent motif. She'd lain on the futon for a moment, stretching her tired muscles and bones on the pleasantly soft duvet. The pillows, made of a sort of lustrous jet material that she didn't recognize, smelled faintly of persimmon and wild strangle oak, a fiery, peppery, cooling smell that was as though mint, chilli peppers and piper nigrum had somehow crossbred.

Their embroidery, with fastidiously neat onyx cotton lines, showed a series of triangles and squares overlaid on top of each other. In neat coils and lines between the gaps in the shapes were, to her surprise, words in Middle Dales Equuish, a dialect nobody had spoken outside of a string of high mountain valleys eight hundred kilometres south of Canterlot, about four hundred years ago, and which she had only seen in books. Whoever had stitched the pillow seemed to have a strong grasp of it, even replicating the peculiar orthography and numerous fricative stop marks with alacrious expertise.

After the futon had worn out its primary interests, she'd lifted up the pillows and created a comfortable nest, wings fluttering quite of their own accord. The material, still unidentified, clung strangely to her fur, occasionally crackling with static electricity, as she pulled a pinion-feather sized scroll of paper from her panniers, floating it across the room from where she'd lain the big leather things prior to her makeshift bath. Seems so long ago that Punch gave this to me. It's like months and months have passed, and yet, it could only have been half a day ago. I suppose the lack of the day and night cycles to which I've become accustomed has played tricks on me. The Princess unrolled the scroll and held it in the glow of her horn, liking a fixed, known source for reading older works.

Her tail swished idly back and forth as she ruminated on the contents. She folded her legs beneath her, a preferred position, one honed to perfection through a long and obsessive autodidactic career. At once, her thoughts shifted toward the culmination of the quest, and how she might actually achieve the creation of the Nectar she desired. The elegant mouthwritings, for there appeared to have been multiple writers behind the list, stopped short of talking much about what one should do once one had collected all of the items.

Twilight ran her tongue over her lips and felt out the crowns of her flat teeth, tongue twisting this way and that in time with the repeated readings of the same, scant lines of text, as though searching for something hidden in the background. Calling up a little magic, she ran a standard battery of cryptographic probes on it, looking for the minute, tell-tale, spiny shimmers in the thaumokinetic feedback that would reveal if there were obfuscated parts. All matter possessed a magical field, some types more strongly than others. The work of a few moments showed that the fine, cyprus and larch derived material was as natural as could be expected, and perfectly ordinary. The iron in the ink felt smooth, even mixed in with the fuzzy gallnut tannins, sticky gum tree resin, and tiny, crunchy traces of the oil of vitriol that had been used to treat the iron in the first place.

Shifting her hips from side to side and yawning, the Princess allowed her eyes to close, and thusly, her mind to wander. She settled her head down on a particularly plump example of the pillows that cushioned her. From nowhere, a vague memory of something she had read, though at what point in time she could not say, bumped up against the lower boundaries of her awareness. It bobbed there for a spell, like a the petal of a dead flower, curled at the edges and stained brown with decay products. Then, the machinery of her thinking gyred and gimbaled, and in the wave that followed, the petal struck out for higher places. Blast Wells' ninety-eighth precept on the true and just conditions of magic. All other things being equal, sequential revelations are preferred, as the mind of a mage is prone to wander and, if he is in a hurry, may skip vital steps, believing in error that they are not required, or that the function they perform is accomplished elsewhere.

Blast Well was talking about incantations for deriving cubic equations and figuring out the triangular arrays of binomial coefficients, though, she thought, blearily playing a mental demon's advocate. This thing of paper – she waved it around for effect – is less magical, enchanted, hexed, or otherwise different from what I imagine to be several hundred million just like it, apart from, obviously, the text.

Twilight fluttered her wings in annoyance. It was a largely subconscious act but, as the muscles that controlled them were now integrated into her peripheral nervous system, she could not help but sometimes unintentionally move them, to assuage some internal frustration. The tip of her right wing, where the longest purple flight feather spanned out to total length of twice that of her body, grazed the solid, ponyoak headboard.

Immediately, her own magical field trembled, like a tense sheet of tarpaulin having ping pong balls dropped on it. That familiar, eerie sensation reverberated up and down her horn, sympathetic inductions of the keratin and organoceramometallic deposits. She gasped sharply, eyes flicking open, trying to determine the source. Thaumic triangulation was a tricky science, more art than anything else. Indications of distance and vector prickled intuitively, coming from all angles.

A low and tricksy warmth washed over her, and she knew this feeling too. Heat crossed her cheeks too, but it had nothing to do with the rising impetus that swelled in her. Around the base of her spine and through her haunches it rose, layering itself anew and again, becoming more complex. In time with this the levels of magical energy were steadily increasing, the vibrations in her skull becoming more forceful. Twilight flapped her wings and she leapt off the bed and into the air, arcing ungracefully across the room. Mid-flight she rolled her body, the higher output of whatever thaumic thing was in the vicinity allowing easier triangulation, inexorably drawing her attention to the source.

The Princess landed with a thud, the walls of Baroque 82 proving just as sturdy and unyielding as they looked, if not more so. She ended up in a pile, mind jarred and body stinging, but couldn't take her eyes off what had appeared where, moments ago, was nothing. Sitting at the head of the bed, rump against the wood, was a dusky brown stallion, and unmistakably he was a stallion. Long and wild brown mane flowed over his broad and imposing shoulders. Thick bands of musculature covered every inch of him, bulging tightly, like some sort of skinless anatomical model. His immaculately trimmed hooves were shod with a tasteful band of silver and copper, practical, but light on the foot. Striking blue eyes inspected her idly, though interestedly, like a pony anticipating the approach of a waiter.

“You are not Whom,” he said, in an unidentifiable, though faintly modern, accent that sounded like warm butter being spread on fresh baked farmhouse bread.

“That's very observant of you,” Twilight said, throat croaky from several hours of silence. “I'm certainly not that pink. I'm sorry, who are you?”

“I am usually referred to as Olisbos, as that is my function.”

“Your function?” she said, shakily getting to her hooves, the sensation of strong magic, and the feeling of tricksy warmth, making her shiver. “A-are you a slave here?”

“I am not an anything, other than what I am, which I have already explained,” he said, patiently and without much tone to his voice, besides that which was pleasantly helpful and rustic.

“That's a bit cryptic,” she said, approaching closer back toward the bed, sniffing for scent clues and identity but finding none. “I'm not familiar with the term 'Olisbos'.”

“I can demonstrate for you if you wish, as I am not familiar with the term either, beyond an understanding that it is descriptive of my function,” he said.

“Do you dance then, or something?” she said, frowning, trying to find something in the cavernous spaces of her memory that could explain or account for what she was seeing and sensing in the magical field. “I've heard stories of the zebra kings and their lifelike clockwork automata. Are you something like that?”

“On four occasions, I have been told I possess attributes somewhat like a zebra,” he said, cocking his head very slightly. “Does that help? I am not sure on your first point, as I lack sufficient information to answer the question.”

“Could you demonstrate your function?”

“Certainly, though you will need to answer a few questions before we get started, as you are a new user. First, please tell me your name and preferred titles, ensuring that you include any honorifics and pet names.”

“Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Equestria and all Her Domains, Defender of the Realm, by the Grace of Celestia and Luna, Third Pillar of the Triarchy, Guardian of Dusk, She Who Trots the Jagged Line, and so on,” she said, smiling apologetically. “Also, Duchess of Ponyville, though that is more of a formality. Just my first name will do or, if you must, 'madam' is infinitely preferably to 'your Highness', or anything like that.”

“Do you like it rough?”

“I beg your pardon?” Twilight said, stepping back.

“I'm sorry, I said, do you like it rough? As opposed to liking it done softly. What I mean to say is, do you like to be mounted aggressively and with lots of biting and so on,” he said, as though he were explaining the specific operational instructions regarding some bit of mundane equipment. “Or do you like to be treated more gently, with lots of tongue action, both north and south of the equator.”

“What? Oh!” Twilight's eye went wide as the reality of the situation dawned on her and, if she had been red in the face before, it was nothing compared to the colour she now went. “I'm sorry, I think there's been a bit of a mix up here. I didn't realize. How do I... turn you off?”

“I can be toggled to the off setting very easily, either through vocal commands or, if the user prefers, by casting the simple counter-spell, details of which are located in the manual that came with this unit.”

“Please turn yourself off.”

“Is this gender not suitable? I do apologize, Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Equestria and all Her Domains--”

“I’m not gay!”

“Don’t worry, I’m very capable of displaying the outward appearance of all genders and for--”

“Turn yourself off!”

“Would you prefer a different species? I lack the capacity for judgement, whatever your proclivities are, I can accommodate. One moment.”

The stallion, in a sparkling instance of flickering lights and odd contortions of body and form, transmuted into a gryphon. Twilight had never seen a more perfect and prideful looking thing, from is immaculate and razor-sharp claws, to his beak, which simultaneously portrayed incredible lethality and the refined efficiency of Equestria’s only apex predator. He clicked the edges of it together a few times, then let out a staggered, cawing noise, which she recognized as the mating call of a brood-master in full flight. The nose-wrinkling musk of his oily pheromones assaulted her senses, making her wretch.

“Turn it off! Off!”

The gryphon vanished. There was no sound or fanfare to mark this. All that happened was that he ceased to be, the levels of thaumic discharge plummeting down into the low background range, local supplies of the stuff temporarily exhausted. The pleasant sensation of neuromuscular euphoria went too, though it, being mediated by cells and hormones, was not so quick to die away, though the tingling and prickling that had joined it in the last few moments became less intense.

Sweet skies. I hadn't thought about that angle before, but it must get terribly lonely up here for a mare. We all have needs, I guess. The level of enchantment is something else, though. The Thaumic Artificers would probably swap their first born foals for a look inside it. She trotted very carefully up to the back of the bed, magically feeling along the wood. At first, it seemed like an ordinary, if very large and sturdy, block of wood, well varnished, though showing some age in places. Then, as the purple, shimmering tendrils of her magic latched onto the futon’s headboard, she discovered that part of it came away, revealing a narrow cavity. She peered inside, and was greeted by an aureate cube the size of an average house brick, covered in runes, tied with a loop of satin and embedded into a recess within the cavity. Yep, definitely the first borns. Probably their wives and maybe a limb or two as well, if it came to it. Is that a May Hew Inverse Reintegrator? But what have they done to it? It's got nine flanges! That's a direct violation of the Nine-Folded-Swans law. She raised an eyebrow and laughed. Remarkable.

“Twilight? Are you in here?” came a decidedly pink voice, cautious and curious. “I've got your squid eye!”

Oh bugger me!

Twilight hurriedly replaced the small section of headboard she'd removed, trying to strike a balance between moving quickly and not making any suspicious noises. She was just finishing remaking her nest of pillows when Whom nosed open the wood panel that served as the entrance to her quarters, a white sphere about the size of a beachball, which looked like a gigantic pickled silverskin onion, trailing sluggishly through the air behind her, wrapped in a luminous aura.

“S-squid give you any hassle?” Twilight said, making a good attempt at miming having just woken from a nap.

“None at all, they're always very polite to me,” Whom said, placing the eyeball beside the doorway with some difficulty, like she was pushing a heavily laden cart through treacle.

“I was, um, just having a little snooze,” Twilight said, enthusiastically plumping the pillows. “I-I hope you don't mind me using your bed, but this adventuring stuff really wore me out, then our little walk through the woods, and I didn't get a good sleep las--”

“No need to worry, Twilight, what's mine is yours,” she said, smiling exhaustedly, then moving through into the en suite, smelling of sweat and exertion. “I'm just going to towel off, that eye is heavier than it looks.”

“I did offer to help, but you wouldn't let me go,” Twilight said, experimentally lifting the orb with her telekinesis, discovering that it weighed perhaps no more than ten good sized apples before quickly setting it down next to her panniers.

“That's because you were going to take that knife to the poor things,” she said, her merry voice echoing out of the bathroom, amid the sound of taps being turned on and water pooling. “It really is as simple as asking, there's no need to do anything as violent as that, least of all not with your letter opener.”

“You weren't joking about that?” Twilight examined the eye, noting that it didn't have any of the usual signs of traumatic or even surgical removal, as her biological research specimens displayed, or any trace of leaking fluid, be it blood, or ocular in origin.

“Kevin says 'no worries', and to enjoy yourself, but also that you should be safe, and that he's really happy someone's brewing the Nectars again,” she said, emerging from the bathroom, candyfloss mane now somewhat tousled, but free of sweat and smelling faintly of melons. “Lovely guy really, he's just gotten engaged again, but he falls in love too fast and then--”

“I'm sorry, who is Kevin?”

“The giant squid, you met him earlier, I think. Anyway, he's just gotten engaged to this girl, really pretty bit of calamari but--”

“The squid is called Kevin?” Twilight said, unsure about which of the parts of her statement were the most bizarre. “But that's a minotaur name!”

“Is it?” Whom seemed genuinely confused.

“Usually, yes, though I suspect there's little 'usual' about any of this.”

“I think we've gotten off track, that's my fault, I'm sorry.”

“What are you apologizing for?”

“I was trying to make mareish small talk with you, like what always happens in the magazines,” she said, suddenly looking crestfallen. “You know, about stallions and relationships. I was going to ask you how you do your mane, and then we were going to do each other's hooves so we looked good when we turned up in Equestria for the first time.”

“Ah,” Twilight said, nodding. “I see, well, say no more, but you really shouldn't try and engineer social situations like that, especially not whilst reading from a book like it's some kind of official edict. Trust me, I know.”

“Are you still going to take me to Equestria?” Whom said, in a tiny voice.

“Of course, if that's what you want.”

“I'm really glad to hear that!” She giggled infectiously. “There will be so many other ponies there!”

“You'll get on like a castle on fire, I'm sure, just wait until you meet Pinkie Pie.”

“Ooh, I like the sound of her already!”

Something began to rumble. It was only a small sound at first, but there was a certain, ominous overtone to it, a complicated nest of discordant subharmonics, that made Twilight turn and look toward the door. Oddly enough, it seemed like she'd heard this sound somewhere before. A few seconds later, her leather panniers began to rattle. It was the magical jar, which contained her insectoid prize from the metal forest. The creature trapped inside was flinging itself around with alarming and renewed force.

“Whom?”

“Yes, Twilight?”

“Get your things.”

Sand Won't Save You This Time, Twilight Sparkle

Chapter Twelve

“Sand Won't Save You This Time, Twilight Sparkle”

Whom's traveling panniers were, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, the same lurid and deadly shade of pink that she was. They were covered in little good luck charms and wayfarer's icons, which dangled from hessian cords affixed to whatever mounting points were free in the thick-bound hemp construction. They jangled and rattled together as she and Twilight navigated the illogical and counter-intuitive pathway back to the entrance of Baroque 82, as fast as their mounting fear would let them. There now came an awful, buzzing drone, like a hundred million sawmills trapped at the end of a steel tube, cutting down an infinite forest. Twilight had done her best to reinforce the spell that contained the strange creature, but this seemed to have only made it more angry, if such a thing were possible.

The source of the disturbance became terribly apparent when they broke into the odd glow that passed for daylight in the Selenite Principality. Over the gardens and the walled spaces, a howling swarm of glittering scarlet insects was wreaking havoc. They smashed their bodies into crenellations and stonework, shattering clay planters and taking great chunks out of what they did not crush into dust outright. Besides the foot-long red ones, many other sorts were present. Tiny varieties, no bigger than a sparrow, and decked in imperial purple, formed clusters, teaming up to make cannonball-sized holes in things. They seemed to be coated in a thin, slimy layer of something, and they hissed viciously wherever they touched the furniture of the castle, flashing red and blue like fireworks. Huge ones sedately glided around on ripples of filament-like wings, gleaming green and wrapped in heat shimmers, appearing to survey the action instead of taking part in it directly.

“You've never seen them do this before?!” Twilight bellowed, as they stopped in the doorway, struck by the immensity of it.

“No!” Whom said, eyes wide, wings flapping as they half-formed the required thrust for emergency escape, stopping short each time. “They must be really mad at something!”

“Oh, you think?” Twilight said, the sarcasm lost in the noise of it all.

The Princess leapt up into the air, taking flight. She was still somewhat shaky, aerially speaking, but the adrenaline spike helped focus her mind. Whom finally followed her, with a more practised but weaker degree of skill. As they took off, their coat colour schemes contributing in no way whatsoever to the idea of camouflage, the insects noticed them. They were fast, wickedly so, and quickly rallied their numbers into spears, which lanced up from roughly ground level to Twilight and Whom's flight level. Combat magic somewhat inexpertly flaring with misspent energy, she threw invisible beams of heat at them, which sparked and sizzled as they interacted with the leading edge of the first spear. Insects that were killed, or destroyed, were quickly replaced by fresh copies that swelled up through their ranks. Twilight quickly found that she could not concentrate sufficiently on fleeing and fighting at the same time, as well as trying to protect Whom.

She therefore did not notice that the large, green insects were not following with the rest, and were, in fact, drifting gently along above the ground. She did not notice as they moved higher, pores opening on their smooth underbellies to release a thin, clear liquid. She did not even notice when they began to hum and hiss simultaneously. She only noticed what was going on when the landscape beneath them began to explode with a furious, ear-splitting sound, flashing brighter than magnesium flares, sending waves of heat rolling over her. Great clouds of some white gas went forward of the blasts, which was quickly ignited, adding more force to the growing conflagration.

Trees, those seemingly-immutable stalwarts of the Principality, exploded in vivid scarlet and actinic blue. The monolithic colour scheme was bathed in blinding light, the reaction spreading down their boughs and into the ground, tearing at it with the inevitable fangs of chemistry. Spaces beneath them subsided, filling with superheated gas and briefly imploding before vanishing beneath the rolling insanity of it all. The iconoclasm of colour was as though a painter was transitioning between artistic periods, engaged in the ecstatic frenzy of destroying his old work with the immensity of the new, energy and vibrancy replacing, however briefly, that which came before.

Lakes boiled in seconds, steam hammer effects punching into the air from below as heat transferred through underground caverns, flashing the lower levels first. Geysers formed for a moment, then the gas the insects were spitting came over them and they too exploded, burning the very water itself. Those animals of the Principality that were not currently engaged in trying to destroy everything attempted to flee, but could not match the wicked speed of the reactions and the flying monsters. They died in merciful fractions of a second, obliterated entirely and leaving no trace nor worldly impression that they were ever there in the first place.

The tip of the spear reached them. Twilight was pelted in the chest and the flanks with hundreds of the horrid creatures, whose bodies were as sharp and hard as they looked. They tore away her skin in seconds, and she had only a moment to think about screaming in agony before her alicorn body repaired itself. Her fragile bones splintered to tiny fragments before reassembling themselves. She experienced aching moments of deafness and blindness as those structures were ruined and then miraculously restored.

Enough!

Magic surged. The blue and purple glow of radiation filled the sky, painting everything in ultraviolet. Simultaneously concussive blasts took the head and shaft off the spear of insects, blasting it away to a thin skein of rapidly expanding vapour. Twilight glanced behind her, looking for Whom, and had a moment of terror when she could not find her. But then the mock alicorn appeared from behind the displaced band of the spear's rear guard, flapping for dear life. No time! Twilight reached out with her mind and grabbed Whom around the chest, slipping streamers of telekinetic energy around what she hoped were the mare's sturdiest parts, then pulled. Whom shrieked, then the wind was knocked out of her and she went silent.

Although they had been temporarily put off, further spears of red insects, along with crossbow bolts of the smaller purple ones, gathered to attack them again. They appeared to have learned from their error, and began to break away onto numerous vectors, splitting up their avenues of attack to make themselves harder to defend against. Twilight wondered if there was, in fact, a limit to the repair capacities of the alicorn body. Images of being stuck on the moon, alive but in a hopelessly ruined form, for what might be a considerable portion of eternity, did nothing for her morale.

Below, the explosions intensified. Riding the shockwaves of their own detonations, the green insects were being flung further and faster, expelling more of the strange foaming liquid that immediately destroyed all it touched, setting fire to it and causing it to blast itself apart in the most vicious way. The black grass and trees, the weird black and purple multicolour bricks of Baroque 82, all were kindling for it, and all decomposed in a different but equally terrifying way. Some things flashed all the colours of the rainbow as the different compositional elements burned. Others were purer, in single flares of green or orange. At Twilight's height, she saw the destructive insects arcing out in nine different directions, forming a star of red and white blooms. Her ears popped, but it was not from the change in height. Something that Whom had said, at a time which now seemed long ago, turned up unannounced on the threshold of her harried mind. The Selenite Principality was, technically speaking, an enclosed space, one which was now being pressurised; this was now happening at an exponential rate. There were a few, possibly only one, permanent exits through the Gap. Twilight's mind put it together almost casually. Pinkie Pie would love this, she thought.

Acting in the last few seconds that she had available to her, Twilight gathered all her available powers and enclosed both herself and Whom in a dense shell, telekinetic strands holding together sheets of magical pseudo materials, compressing them and making them opaque. She filled the sphere with what she could of the atmosphere, which was mostly for Whom's benefit. The sound of the explosions and of the killer swarm abruptly cut off, and both the mares slammed into the curved interior shell wall. An aching moment of ragged panting and hooves scrabbling against the foamy surface later, and the shock of acceleration took over.

Before she could really think anymore, a dread feeling of tiredness washed over her. All the magic she had been throwing out was too much, especially coupled with the effort of the flight. Her head rolled back, and she passed out, not so much asleep but comatose.

*

Dionysus watched the distant holographic horizon of the universe grow steadily larger in the dream of his divine perception with what could only be described as malevolent interest. Two-dimensional shapes which represented clusters of mass and energy threaded lazily along it, spanning outward to the left and right of his unbounded form. Eventually the holographic horizon met with the mirrored edges of other universes, their points close but never quite touching, instead exchanging bursts of virtual particles like electricity passing between neurons in a synapse.

There was nothing special about this universe. It had very much in common with the ten to the fifty-second power other universes with which it shared space, and was almost exactly identical to the ten to the ninth power universes which incorporated a wholly-penetrating standing magical field. This particular universe, however, was of great interest to Dionysus, and indeed all Gods, Higher Beings and Deities both major and minor, because of a certain agreement.

Something in the horizon clicked and turned over. Streamers of energy, which had previously been flowing along quite happily of their own accord, were now flowing in opposing directions. Space-time began to complain murderously in a profane, wordless language as it was contorted to fit new shapes. Dionysus heard the universe shriek as its torture entered a new phase, one which it was almost powerless to prevent.

Dionysus stilled himself, then began to slow down his thoughts. It was time to prepare for entry, and the whole mind of a thing such as he could not possibly be condensed into a form that would be appropriate for what was to come next. The procedure was never pleasant, as it was much like a lobotomy. Loops of thinking that would have been larger than galaxies, had there been a dimension with which to measure them, wound down into nothingness and were stowed away.

The God felt the thin skein of possibilities grow suddenly thicker and more intense as his divinity diminished. Quantum anomalies, each the seeds of potential universes, swirled around him like the torrents of water through the holes in a burst dam. The unceasing, constantly devouring and creating void of raw existence was now the largest possible thing of which his new mind could conceive. It is a sort of mauve, with a texture to it like foam in espresso. How strange! I am, I am, but can I... ?

“इंद्रजाल – αδνος---!” Dionysus exclaimed, and then began coughing rather loudly, which was unexpected, as moments before he hadn't had any lungs, a mouth, or even neurological structures with which to control them.

Photons vibrating a particular frequencies began to interact with oblate biological structures rather close to the space in which the God's new thoughts were occurring. Form and dimension to which he was entirely unaccustomed to experiencing attacked his mind.

“Please, have the common decency to speak modern Equuish, you're already late; you may as well not be rude, too.”

Strange new instincts moved the muscles in Dionysus' neck toward the source of the noise. Sitting on the pebble beach next to him was a pony, which was bright red and looking back at him with a sort of casual disdain. Dionysus gurgled.

“Yes, yes, it's very disconcerting, isn't it?” the horse said, furrowing his bushy eyebrows. “You'll come back to us in a moment, have no fear, no fear at all.”

A long moment of silence passed. Presently, Dionysus became aware of other sensations. Pebbles pressed into his rear end rather uncomfortably, and the sound of a languid body of water lapping at the shoreline could be heard. Curiously, he only noticed they were there the moment some subconscious impulse thought that they should be, as though the very world around him was being filled in and padded out as they went along.

“I think I'm a male this time round, which should be worth a few laughs. Let's see, what are you?” the red pony said, edging closer with a crash of stones. “Ah, Dio, you're in for some fun, I think you're a female. Or, as I recall the proper term being, a mare.”

Dionysus didn't yet know how to process this properly, but memories and thoughts were unravelling in his mind already. This ontology had been used once before and, now awakened from timeless sleep, was eagerly welcoming its divine master. After another moment or two, in which Dionysus rolled over and experimented with breathing and digestion, he sat up on his haunches, then stood, hooves balancing him perfectly in the upright, sinking into the pebbles.

Above him, occupying the entire sky, was the same holographic horizon he had previously been observing with some interest. It now seemed far, far closer, however, and individual strings of galaxies could be made out. Some of the more ferocious active galactic nuclei were visible too, flickering like candles on an open windowsill.

“Indra,” Dionysus said, turning to look at the startlingly red pony. “So glad that you could make it.”

“Likewise, old chap, likewise,” Indra said, placing a foreleg over Dionysus' shoulder. “How's the wife?”

“Obsessed with knitting, as always. She's mellowed out a bit since back in the day. How's yours?”

As the Gods commenced with their pleasantries, all along the beach, which was very long but definitely not infinite, other equine shapes began to condense, slowly but surely increasing in number.

*

“Darling, is it just me, or does Canterlot appear to be on fire?”

Cadence broke the conversational silence of about an hour, which Shining Armour had mostly spent attempting to deplete the Imperial Train's seemingly infinite stock of mint tea and ruminating on matters of state. She was staring out of the window from the other large bench, having recently woken up from a restful nap.

“What on Equestria do you mean?”

“Just look!” She tapped on the crystal glass, shuffling up so her snout was right against it.

Armour carefully set down his seventy-eighth cup of tea on its exquisite bone china saucer, frowning at the interruption, but quietly alarmed. His wife was level-headed, as would be expected from an Empress, and not one for idle flights of fancy. He climbed down from his bench and went around to her side of the table, folding his body around hers to match her field of view. The train was currently engaged in a long, slow curve through a wide river valley, lined with a thick mat of grass, some stands of ponyoak trees in clusters of five or six, and not very much else. It gave anyone aboard a good look across the thirty or so miles yet to go to the capital of Mount Avalon itself, as well as the environs it was located in. Surely enough, a great pillar of oddly nacreous black smoke, frozen by its size and the distance, hovered over the gleaming capital. The little dots of what must have been very large fires indeed glowed around the base, spread out through the caldera of the ancient, dead volcano that was the Mount, and which housed the city like a fruit bowl housed apples.

“Hmm,” Shining Armour said, placing a hoof on the gold-inlaid mahogany of the table. “So it is.”

*

“I really think it's important that we don't forget what we're celebrating here,” Dionysus said, as he and Indra trotted along the meandering shore. “It's not all about wild debauchery and bodily fluids and wine, as fun as all those things are.”

“I can't think what else it would concern,” Indra said, an expression of immense serenity on his face. “Besides, that's all your lot ever thought you were good for. I, for one, am very much looking forward to some wild debauchery.”

“I'm not saying there aren't a great many virtues to wine and women, or mares, but this is about more than you or I; this is about boundaries coming down, whole planes of existence and being and form that never usually co-exist, all coming together and merging, and...” Dionysus trailed off as he tried to form a gesture with his hooves that seemed as though it would have worked far better with some other arrangement of appendages. “You know what I mean.”

“I certainly do know what you mean, you rascal, you and that, oh fie, what was her name again? That one whose weakness we've to thank for even having this whole cosmic shindig.”

“Celestia, as though your memory isn't perfect!” Dionysus said, shaking his head. “And it is hardly appropriate to speak of weakness in merged things like her. They cannot help being what they are, no matter what we think of the poor decisions of their progenitors.”

“I simply cannot imagine wanting to be anything less than sat at the God-head. It has to be a form of illness, some kind of serious moral failing. They don't even aspire.”

“It is merely a different sort of life, Indra. There are many, many examples indeed of it throughout existence. Whole universes of it, in fact.”

“But it is so singular, so linear,” he said, pointing a hoof upward at the holographic horizon, which was now beginning to take on shades of purple, red and blue. “All four of them are completely mad, they're mad now and they were probably going mad before it all happened in the first place.”

“You don't feel guilty, do you?” Dionysus said, grinning in surprise.

“I just wish sometimes that there was something more we could have done.”

“Honestly, I think this is the best possible outcome, given the starting variables. Celestia got her tools, they managed to restore a measure of sense and order, and we get to meet up and really let loose once in a while,” Dionysus said, adjusting the garland of orange and pink flowers that were now hanging from around his neck. “It really could have gone a lot worse, considering the energies involved. We've all imagined what an aberrant, hyperbolic Divine function within the space-time of a sufficiently compromised universe might end up doing.”

“Best possible outcome?” Indra grunted unhappily. “Their cycles have uncomfortable parallels with visions of Hell. To do so much, to strive as their biologies demand, only to have it all washed away. It could not be worse, could it? Even a hybrid like Celestia must see that she has been shackled, she and all her charges, to guard our rumpus room until the end of time?” The bright red pony shook his head, and the jet black bangs of his thick, silken mane trembled. “That is all their civilization will ever manage. No matter how far they go, how far they advance, how powerful their science, how bright their endeavours, that is their totality. They are an equation, of which the sole output is the Nectar and all that brings.”

“You're seeing it through divine eyes, chap,” Dionysus said. “Except for the generations immediately before and after the Thiasus, which might only be one or two million total life forms, most will never know us. They will be born, live, come to the table of their achievements, eat heartily, then die. Such is the fate of their kind.”

“So, because it is only a small proportion of the total, all that was and all that will ever be, it's right? It's okay?” Indra sighed deeply. “I apologise for the hand-wringing--”

“Hoof-wringing.”

“Right. Well, I apologise.”

“Think nothing of it. It's only natural to feel some empathy with the little lost lambs of our venerable flock.”

“Don't start with the Abrahamic metaphors, you know how He gets.”

“Hah! You know He didn't even reply to my invite this time around?”

“What, not even a Dear Deity, terribly sorry, can't possibly make it?”

“Nothing at all.”

“How incredibly rude.”

“Quite.”

*

Iron Filings had done a remarkable job with the carronade, considering the short notice. They had been cast in steel, inlaid with little flourishes of serpentine and natural manganese. The fact that they had been painted the most lurid shade of pink, and were formed in the shape of male genitalia, detracted from this very little. Ode ran a hoof along the length of one of them, stuck admiring the craftsmanship, only to spot the anatomically correct business end and suddenly feel dirty. The attention to detail has to be admired, though, he thought, trotting between the arrayed weaponry. I don't think I've ever seen one up close like this. I wonder if he used a model? Or a mirror?

The cannons had been delivered that morning, tightly wrapped in two layers of black tarpaulin and hidden inside non-descript boxes. They bore no makers mark, and the shipping manifests had borne only the phrase metalwork – other to identify the load. Ode hadn't had a chance to look at them before now, and suddenly the plan that had seemed so reasonable only a few minutes past seemed less sensible.

These are weapons of war, he thought, coming across a stack of metal boxes bearing the hallmarks of the Crown. A dozen warning symbols fought for space on their tops and sides. Ye anointed foals, black powder too!

Ode unclasped one of the boxes. The smell of the gunpowder hit him, stinging his nose. The urge to sneeze became overwhelming. The earth pony had not been lucky when it came to the genetic lottery. Unlike many of his peers, he had not been gifted with increased strength, stamina, or an affinity for growing plants. Instead, he had inherited a lesser known earth pony trait, an enhanced sense of smell. His mother had always said that it was special, that some of the greatest chefs equinity had ever seen were earth ponies. Ode had tried cooking once. The resulting fire had almost burned down his house, and his mother never spoke of it again.

I was only going to scare them, maybe light a fuse. Act all menacing... Ode trailed the edge of his hoof through the fine granular mixture, leaving a little furrow. No. They have to be stopped.

The stallion examined the rest of the stored material. The 32nd had a rather spectacular finale. At the end of the last cantus, after the orchestral trapeze act had performed the third mandatory encore, the forty carronade would spring up on special hydraulic rams, where they would be touched off by members of the chorus. The cannonballs were made of a thin, brittle metal, just strong enough to survive being fired, and were mostly empty space. They were inscribed with the runes of a basic enchantment that ensured they wouldn't dangerously fragment when they did eventually explode, which they would when they reached the peak of their short ballistic arcs directly above the audience.

In the end, Ode was drawn back to the weapons themselves. He selected one, though it was the only one he could have realistically taken, as it was the only one which had been mounted onto its sturdy wooden base which, in a move of inevitable thematic propriety, was shaped like a very large pair of testicles, which concealed wheels. Someone had even been half-way through painting them, though they had obviously been interrupted by something, as the lines of veins and hair they were carefully picking out with oil paints were only half-done. Ode accidentally knocked over the pots and brushes as he bustled around, figuring out the exact loading procedures for the gun.

The concept was very simple. The powder exploded, ignited by the burning of the fat fuse which was laid out on top of the barrel, ready to be inserted just prior to use. The resulting expansion of hot gas propelled whatever was in the barrel out of the end at high velocity. Ode read this several times in the neatly written note, which he found tucked into the powder case, trying to extract more specific instructions. They were not forthcoming. Whom was about to give up, beginning the ponder a backup plan, which was just starting to involve using the gunpowder directly as some sort of improvised explosive, when a decidedly pink pony popped her head over the top of the carronade and smiled so hard it might have melted ice at fifty paces.

“Hiya!” she said, ears flicking excitedly back and forth. “Whatcha doing? Ooh, can I help?”

“Get away!” Ode said, taken very thoroughly aback by her sudden appearance. “I'm warning you, I'm trained in Rock-Whack! I’m a sixth-granite level master, don’t make me bassault you!”

“Don't worry new friend, I'm not totally crazy like those other ponies!”

“That's exactly what one of them would say!” Ode pulled some strange, rather awkward moves, which he imagined made him look fierce and dangerous, but it actually appeared as though he was having a stroke. “This is your last warning!”

“Are you trying to load this funny cannon?” she said, seeming to notice it for the first time. “Hee hee! It's shaped like a thingy!”

“It's a carronade!”

“It's a thingy!”

“Do you have any idea how to load it?”

“Of course I do, silly, I'm Equestria's number one owner of cannons.”

“Oh, thank the skies,” Ode said, sighing with relief. “I'm Black Ode, and I need to get this loaded, otherwise the nutters upstairs are going to make a bad day much worse.”

“I'm Pinkie Pie, nice to meet you!” She giggled, then snorted. “It's shaped like a thingy!” She rolled around on top of the carronade, hooves kicking at the air.

“We haven't got time to screw around! They could be through the doors at any moment!” Ode’s muzzle wrinkled up in confusion. “The Pinkie Pie? As in, Elements of Harmony?”

The pink pony kept on laughing.

*

“And you are absolutely positive about this?” Luna said, examining the curiously unaffected pegasus stallion that stood before her, wearing a numinous look on his soot-black face, ears folded back against his skull, eyes wide and fixed on her.

“Y-yes, your Majesty, she was galloping like Cerberus himself was behind her, looked wild she did.”

“Which direction was she traveling in?”

“That's the odd thing, your Majesty. She went out over the wall and landed in the courtyard and, when I got there myself, she was headed down Sciamachy Avenue, just vaulting stuff, and see, the only thing left down that way is the Theatre, what with the Avenue of Unmarked Flanks being blocked up with angry sofas and the herd of pink bison in Gastropod Street--”

“What was last reported in the Theatre?” Luna said, materializing a cotton washcloth and a little floating basin of warm, soapy water, maternal instincts kicking in.

“Haven't had much from there, I think it's been reasonably quiet, but one of my lieutenants, Greenie watch over his soul—” the pony said, standing still as the Princess began to clean his face and neck with the cloth, wiping away a day's worth of smoke and grime. “--said that he heard tell of a big protest of some sort heading that way--”

“A protest?” Luna said, cocking her head as she squeezed the cloth dry, before immersing it in the water and carrying on the grooming. “Of what sort? T'would seem to me that it was not a good time.”

“They're putting on some sort of play, the ponies in the Theatre I mean, not the protesters,” he said, closing his eyes and grimacing a little as Luna went over an unseen cut just above his eyebrow. “They're going there to stop them, I think.”

“What was the name of this protest group?”

“Outrages Against Public Decency?” he said. “I don't properly recall, sorry. It was awhile ago, and then the lieutenant fell off a roof and, well, I've been busy with that.”

“I'm very sorry about your friend,” Luna said, apparently satisfied with her work, because she dematerialized the bowl and the cloth. “He gave his life in service to the state, therefore he shall have a state funeral, with all the benefits that affords, once this is all over.”

“Some of the...” he bit his lip as he searched for the right word. “Loonies, did away with his body. Don't know what they did with it. Might just have left it somewhere after they got bored.” He tugged at the gold-hued plate of his armour and dipped his head, sighing. “Bugger this for a game of soldiers, if you'll pardon my gryphic, your Majesty.”

Luna's mind was elsewhere, putting together a plan of action, but she still drew the stallion close, hugging him gently. It might have been thought somewhat unbecoming of a royal, even one who was the spirit of the nation, but this was, after all, an exceptional situation. His body was stiff and unresponsive under her neck, and the armour cold and unyielding.

“Do you know where my court is?” Luna said, breaking the hug.

“Yes, your Majesty.”

“Go there now, and avail yourself of a futon, oats, cold water and satinal,” she said, smiling. “You will be safe below ground. Rest awhile, and come back to the front when you are ready.”

The Day Guard simply nodded his thanks and melted away down the disarrayed Welcome Hall, too exhausted to do much else. Luna knew the look well. He was a pony at the limit of endurance, both physical and psychological, the latter of which being oftentimes the more important. She had seen many times ponies who, despite being brutally injured and having fought for three days without sleep or food and little drink, roar defiance and carry on with some bloody charge. Equally, she had seen hale and hearty, well fed and recently watered, soldiers have their spirits broken and refuse to fight at all, fleeing the battlefield, routed in mind.

Infra Base passed the guardspony as he left, coming the other way. She peered blearily out at the world from behind bloodshot eyes, but seemed in fighting form, and drawn magnetically toward the shape of her Princess. Luna laid a wing over her and drew her close as she joined her at the end of the Welcome Hall, where it rolled out into the courtyard.

“How many nottlygna can we quickly muster?” Luna said, grooming her mane gently, putting it back into place.

“None, Mother, we are combat ineffective as of about a minute ago,” she said, squirming slightly under Luna's insistent tongue and teeth. “We could probably manage a defensive action if pushed, but that's it,

“How long do we need to recover?”

“About six months, preferably at full pay,” she said, gloomily, then shrugged. “Thirty minutes to an hour, possibly more.”

“Not quick enough,” Luna said, distantly.

“I'm sorry, Mother, but that blast--”

Luna took off. The speed and suddenness of the leap into the air staggered Base, who recovered just in time to see a blue and black shape streaking up and over in a fierce arc, clearing the distant palace walls in a few seconds, before letting off a sharp crack as she broke the sound barrier. Then, Luna was gone, vanishing off down toward the Theatre of the Two Sisters.

Concerning the Spiders from Mars

Chapter Thirteen

“Concerning the Spiders from Mars”

The Gap was a gentle soul. She, who had stood guard over bottled thoughts for millennia, who had played with the threads and imaginings of every life form that had ever existed on all versions of the little blue and green world that hung steadfast in the black of night above her, who had witnessed the entire span of life itself, could be nothing less. This too shall pass, a Mareabian philosopher had once thought, and so the Gap thought it also. Words to live by, definitely.

So, when the dimension behind her, although this was only relevant in the strictest, topographically inconsistent sense, began to push against her, ramming itself between her figurative thighs like some drunken and overenthusiastic suitor and, in honesty, she had seen her fair share of those, she only hesitated for the briefest of instances which, for a trans meta thaumic entity whose origin was in the endless wishfulness of the combined thoughtforms of a hundred trillion minds, was not very long at all. Eight milliseconds after the pushing began, she opened a passageway to relieve the pressure, as a great many of the mares and stallions who, having met with the aforementioned drunken and overenthusiastic suitor, had also done.

The exact geometry of the entrance that she opened, being as it was a sort of wormhole, constructed from a great density of carefully organized and highly unusual matter, resembled a bell, at least when represented in the lower three-dimensional space. The spacetime that existed within the Selenite Principality, and the spacetime that existed locally around the Gap, suddenly became the best and closest of friends. All of a sudden, particles had a new vector to travel down, which they did, with great aplomb.

Entirely accidentally, Equinity, or rather, an emergent thaumic facet of it, had invented its first rocket engine. An enormous jet which, very rapidly, became miles long, spouted forth from the forty metre gap in the Gap. Great swathes of the lunar regolith were silently eroded away. Millions of cubic metres of various sorts of gas, under immense pressure, now escaped. The Gap was so surprised by this that she barely noticed a strange mauve and lavender sphere, perhaps big enough for two ponies to fit comfortably in, be ejected in the midst of it all, go scudding over the odd mounts and hills of the moon then, as the curvature of the satellite became more pronounced, gain altitude and attain orbit.

*

Twilight was dreaming deeply. Strange geometric images and weird dimensions beyond the normal four played through her mind like tiny insects dancing in the zenith-strong sun of a summer's day. Her neuroform raced at tremendous speed past monolithic cones a million miles tall, their peaks blazing with fierce white tips of fire that danced back and forth in time to an unseen beat, issuing forth clouds of white smoke that coiled through an obsidian sky, slate-speckled with the washed-out motes of cruel stars. These were the fever dreams of an illness-wracked foal, mind unleashed and boiled in its own fluids, perceiving the rank intensity of the seething universe. Usually, she dreamed of equations and bookshelves, of little dragons tending to them, of white sparrows, horned and sparkling, perched on the crescent of the moon or silhouetted against the sun, tending to the world that lay sprawled beneath, asleep and dreaming too.

There came a sound like thunder, but ten times worse, as though she were nestled in the crotchly bosoms of the thunder Gods themselves, listening to them play dread tunes on their implements of electric carnage. The cones themselves trembled, and great hunks of loose material, whatever dreamstuff they were made of, tumbled off them, heading for her. She tried in vain to escape from beneath them, but they became the sky itself. Fear and terror came over her, and the shadows closed in, imminent signs of her doom. It's the end, she heard herself scream. I don't want to die! Don't let me die, Princess Celestia! I trusted you! I trusted you!

The cones fell away, and the dream ended. An ache, profoundly penetrating, made itself at home. Somepony was coughing near her, and she opened her eyes to find the source. A pink pony with a frizzled, tangled and badly singed mane was staring at her, shivering wretchedly, curled up against a curving purple surface, wings and legs held tight to try and preserve warmth. There was a thaumic lowing, like a distressed cow suffering through colic, and a sputtering light from the pony's horn fighting against the dark.

“T-Twilight!” Whom said, desperate relief in her ditzy tones, the movement and effort of speech dislodging ice crystals, which floated away, sparkling specks in the feeble glow. “Twilight!”

“The Spiders from Mars?” Twilight said, blearily. “Where are the Spiders?”

“What? No! No, Twilight, it's cold, please, help....” Her breath came as a plume of rolling white, and the pitch of her plea triggered some primal part of Twilight's mind, spurring her to action.

“Hang on, hang on,” she said, and focused for a second, trying to make sense of the shapes in her head.

It hurt to cast magic, but Twilight found that her strength was rapidly returning. It felt as though they were moving, and at a fair pace too. The standing thaumic background field was fresh and new, undepleted, and it offered its power to her in silent whispers. Despite the warning whines of the material of her horn, and a headache the likes of which she had never felt before, blessed warmth blossomed into the sphere they now shared. Whom whinnied gratefully, throwing aside all conventions of personal space and boundaries to climb awkwardly over Twilight's withers, curling around her head like a cat in front of a furnace.

Presently, the ice in the air melted and came apart, first a barely visible mist, then nothing. They sat nuzzled up for awhile, trying to find the strength to talk. Whom's shivering equally dissolved, and her breathing slowed down to a deep and meaningful pattern. Twilight could feel the mare's heart beat against her neck, forceful but oh so fragile, like a hummingbird made of the finest bone china, liable to break at the slightest provocation. Her mind began to assemble a plan, imagining what came next.

They were, given the rapid drop in temperature and the microgravity, outside the Selenite Principality. It made sense that they had exited the way that they had come in, but this was a big guess; very little made sense on the moon. They had been shot out somehow, and were likely not on the right vector for Equestrian capture and entry. Twilight had done some back-of-the-parchment workings out on this subject once, a long time ago, when she had still been a bright little filly on the cusp of marehood, with pretty bows in her mane and a glint in her eyes. It hadn't actually been on the subject of the moon as such, only on the study of objects passing between two gravitational sources, but the principles were the same. With the way that physics worked, for a non-magical object to get between two worlds, or any two objects to which they were gravitationally bound, they would need to be on exactly the correct pathway, going the exact right speed, otherwise they would miss; or worse, hit, but at quite the wrong angle for safe entry. Twilight doubted she could prevent catastrophe, at least for Whom, should that happen.

Another thought entered her head. She could teleport. That was how she had gotten to the moon in the first place. The problem was again one of velocity. For moving between two locations with different velocities relative to each other, certain corrections had to be made, otherwise one risked becoming a lot of very fine paste when one arrived, as the location you were going to would be moving so much faster or so much slower than the location you had come from. These modifications to speed formed part of the initial equation that began the teleport. The speed of the surface of the moon and the speed of the surface of Equestria were both known figures. It had only been a case of looking them up in a compendium of astrological and geological data, and she had all that she needed.

Their current velocity was not known, and if she guessed, the margin of error might be as much as one or two kilometres per second. Whilst she would likely survive that, Whom would not. At that moment, Twilight realized the mare was grooming her. Whom's neat little teeth and short, stubby, questing tongue were busy rooting through her mane, and she had been so lost in thought that she hadn't noticed until now.

“Uh, what are you doing?” Twilight said, voice somewhat tinny in the confined space.

“Pfnet?” Whom said, through a mouthful of purple hair, which she quickly disentangled herself from. “Oh, sorry, am I being too rough?”

“Why are you doing that?”

“T-The Nightmare used to sit and think like that for a long time too, and she always liked to be attended to, so I was just trying to be helpful...”

“Please don't, Whom, it's not necessary,” Twilight said, as gently as she could. “Just take deep, slow breaths, and try not to move.”

“Oh, okay, sorry,” she said, returning to her nesting position, shifting her tiny weight a little. “Why?”

“To save the air in here, there's only a finite supply, and you will need it.”

“But I don't need air in space, I have my vacuum spell.”

“I think that might be quite a specific enchantment. The levels of oxygen in here are already starting to be depleted. Life produces a certain waste gas when it respirates, which will accumulate in here. Oxygen depletion is fatal, or rather, asphyxia from the carbon dioxide is what gets you first.”

“Oh!” Whom looked as though she had seen a ghost, then took a deep breath in and held it. After a moment, red crept in across her cheeks, beneath the fuzz of her fur.

Twilight sighed and closed her eyes, gently shaking her head. Whom had a long way to go, physically and psychologically, before she would be ready for Equestria.

*

Twilight was digging through her panniers. She was, for what wasn't the first time, endlessly grateful for their special leather construction. Celestia had given them to her for seventeenth birthday, and for a long time she'd been less than pleased about them. The Princess hadn't said much on where, exactly, they had come from. Leather was a gryphon invention, inevitably imported to Equestria along with much of the rest of their culture. Her panniers weren't imports themselves, as a small but highly prestigious and very secretive guild had sprung up that was charged with their regulation and manufacture, but they were made in the style of the gryphon flightbag, adapted for the pony frame. The official narrative went that the guild had a close relationship with the bovine community, from where they presumably sourced their materials. Those tribals, some of whom maintained mutually beneficial camps near pony settlements where they traded milk for things like rope and wine, were a guarded people themselves, which added only another layer of mystery to the whole deal.

Later on in her life, Twilight had come to love her ethically questionable baggage. It had been roasted by dragons, drowned in more lakes and rivers than she cared to mention, slashed at by changelings and attacked by magical energy, had aqua regia poured on it, and yet it still survived intact. It was often said that the gryphons had a particular secret in the tanning process, which had been carried with them to Equestria, and bestowed unusual properties on the leather it produced. Certainly, Twilight was not in any hurry to dispute that rumor.

“Chemistry, chemistry,” Twilight mumbled, unbuttoning its internal pouches, pockets and other folds. “Ah Hah!” Several long, sturdy ponyoak boxes, varnished to a black sheen and well-used, wavered out wrapped in magic.

“What are they?” Whom said, peering curiously.

“Never leave home without your Ewenmarer flasks, that's what I always say.” She flicked open the catches on the boxes, revealing a series of wide-bottomed, narrow-necked flasks, nested in sponges and hay, stuffed with screwed up balls of paper. “Not to mention some other bits and bobs.”

“Oh, what are you going to do with those?”

“There's no telling how long this trip might be, and you're already suffering the effects of reduced oxygen levels -- just look at your cheeks; I bet you’re feeling pretty tired right now,” Twilight said, continuing her rummaging. “We've got oxygen here, somewhere, I'm sure of it, but we just can't breathe it, so it must be teased out.”

“I thought that was just because I’ve had a long day,” Whom said, shaking herself as if she were trying to dislodge something caught in her mane. “Can't you just magic some up?” She adjusting her lying position so that her head was laid over her crossed forelegs. “The Nightmare used to—”

“Heat, too much heat,” Twilight said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “All magic creates it, even the most carefully guided and expertly cast spells throw off some waste. It can't be helped, no thaumic process is one hundred percent efficient. If I started casting the kind of spells we'd need to conjure enough breathable air, I'd cremate you.”

“Cremate? What does that mean?”

“Incinerate; set fire to and burn,” Twilight said, pulling another flask out of her panniers, this one longer and with a capped nipple on the end. “Heat radiates into space rather poorly, and we couldn't keep this place cool enough for you to survive in.” She uncapped it and latched on, gulping down a sip of water to wet her mouth, then she offered it to Whom. “There's oxygen in this, as part of the molecule. We smash it open, you see. The molecule, that is, not the bottle. Have a bit, but don't drink too much. We'll need all we can get. Did you bring any fluids?”

“No, just some important stuff...”

“Oh, okay. What did you bring, anyway?”

“A nice chemise, in samite, with red satin and a black silk shawl,” she said, proudly going through the rather burned looking but intact cloth bags she was carrying and bringing the smock out. “I've also got the shoes that go with these, they're silver with an onyx band and nacre clips, I know it's a bit fancy, but--”

“You bought clothes?”

“Yes, of course, why wouldn't I have done?” Whom smiled in what she imagined was a mareish way. “One has to be properly dressed, at all times, when one is out in public, that's what Nearer Magazine says.”

“Well, your home was just destroyed, I'd have thought you'd have brought something more...” Twilight chewed her lip for a moment, thinking of the right word. “Meaningful? Sentimental? What about that picture which was on the nightstand?”

“What? Oh, that thing. No, I cut that out of a magazine. I thought it looked really happy, you know? Like a family should. It made me smile.” She broke eye contact and stared off for a moment. “Anyway, these clothes are sentimental, at least to me. I've been making them myself, from pictures. I've always wanted a chance to actually wear them, in Equestria.” She beamed, wriggling excitedly, like a gryphon who had got the meat.

“Where do you get samite, satin and silk from, on the moon?” Twilight frowned, oxygen related endeavours paused for a moment as a puzzle appeared before her. “Wait, don't tell me, Nightmare Moon has her own silk-worm farm lurking in amongst all that.. horror...”

“Yes, she does. Well, sort of. You see, there are these worms that live under the castle, inside the pipes,” she said, playing with the delicate fabric she held in her slight magical aura. “You have to be super careful with them, but if you treat them right and feed them lots of leaves and occasionally a rabbit or two, they make a lot of silk thread. They don't look like the silk worms in the book, and it never said anything about the rabbits or anything, but the result is the same.” The material suddenly vibrated and shuddered, becoming jet black for a moment, taking on the texture and appearance of dried, arterial blood before turning back into samite.“M-mostly...”

“Yikes.”

*

“Whom,” Twilight said, as she decanted water into one of her flasks, preparing to construct the series of tubes required for the process she intended to carry out. “What’s that smell?”

“Oh, are you noticing my feminine musk?” Whom seemed very excited, as if it were Hearthswarming Eve and she was a tiny filly before the fireplace. “I dabbed some on this morning.”

“Uh, it’s more like… mercaptans I could mention…” Twilight’s nose wrinkled at the pungent aroma.

“Produced by the decomposition of vegetable matter?”

“Yes, probably, at least in this case.” She coughed, eyes starting to water a little, just as a series of strangled, awkward sounds that reminded her of air being let out of one of Pinkie’s balloons, very slowly. “Oh, sweet starry foals, what did you have for breakfast today?”

Whom did nothing but keep smiling.

*

“They call 'em the Diamond Dogs,” Truth whispered, leaning close to Emboss' ear as she glanced over at a table on the other side of the bar, which held a host of furry, hooded guests. “They're poachers who hide behind trees.”

“Darling, you've seen them before,” Emboss sighed, taking another bite out of his toasted hay bagel, buttery crumbs tumbling down to litter the plate below. “Don't let the actions of a few social outcasts mar the reputation of a whole population; most of them are good, honest, hardworking persons. You do seem to be in a good mood this morning, though.”

“I feel positively wonderful,” she giggled, nudging her haunches closer to his, nuzzling up close on the big, wooden benches that surrounded one of the Gusset's breakfast tables. “Serene, you know? Just vibrant and wonderful. Very 'in tune' with the world.”

“Probably all the drugs you ate yesterday afternoon,” Emboss said, smirking slightly.

“I had some great dreams last night. Anyway, you make it sound like a bad thing.”

“You might've been a bit sore this morning had I taken you up on any of your many offers.”

“Oh, hark at you, who thinks he's Ennis or something!” She bit him playfully on the neck, laughing in the back of her throat.

“Don't start on me with 'Ennis', you harlot.”

“Queer. Poof, friend of Prancy!” She collapsed into soundless mirth. “Let's go back to bed...” She added, sotto voce.

“We've got to go and see a stallion about a boat actually, or have you forgotten why we're here at all, in your drug fuelled haze?”

“Oh, did you find someone then?”

“I was just going through the petite publicité section in the newspaper, I've got some rather promising leads,” Emboss said, sipping his burdock and camomile tea between further bites of the bagel. “Most of these lines take passengers to pad out their takings, apparently. You have to be a bit careful, but as long as we find someone of repute, I'm sure we'll be okay.

“I wonder if gryphon lands will be as exciting as this place has been so far?”

“I'm sure we'll see, in good time.”

*

It was a matter of pure happenstance that Truth and Emboss were walking through Port Dauphine's sprawling harbour at the exact time they were. A minute or two later or earlier, and they would have missed their chance entirely. They'd spent much of the day crisscrossing the city, going from one haulage firm to another, seeking out ship captains and, in the end, basically anyone who owned a boat. They had so far gotten nowhere with their objective. Actual trade across the dauphine sea, or la dauphinsee as most referred to it, generally with a terrible impression of a Prench accent, was set to a very firm timetable of seasonal schedules, crew availability, the political situation, and a million other factors that simply hadn't occurred to Emboss.

Most of the firms weren't actually able to tell them when exactly they were going to sail, just define a period in the vague and muddy future when the winds would be right. Now that it had been explained to them at length, it seemed blindingly obvious. They had arrived in the middle of a bit of a furlough in the timetable, and most of the boats they'd seen in the port were only local fishing craft or pleasure boats. The larger, ocean-going ships were laid up in drydocks further down the coast, undergoing vital repairs. Many crews had gone off to Canterlot and environs to visit their families, or were drowning their sorrows in the beer and mares of the innumerable pubs and other rough venues that went claw in hoof with the working theme of the city.

Down on the quay, it smelled of dead fish and salt, and satinal smoke, and of the sweaty exertions of street trotters and their clients, occasionally punctuated by a grunt or a pleasured squeal. Wickedly fast tunes spilled out of the doorways of clubs, and the sailors and punters inside were singing the lurid and ferociously complex lyrics with a very palpable gusto. Little herds of them wearing the matching uniforms of their ships or lines, staggered along the wide dockside. The buttons of their waistcoats sparkled in the thick and turgid afternoon air where they had been undone part way as a defense against the heat, and their owners sparkled equally, enjoying what was probably the first time off they'd had in months.

When they passed alleyways, more of the undercurrent of the city revealed itself. There was a whole extra community here, living in the narrow streets, cuts and rat runs, aside but within society.Odd-dressed ponies and minotaurs played dice games, and some played fiddles, or drank dark black liquor from square bottles. Zebra lay in little groups, smoking from long-stemmed pipes and laughing and talking in their strange, chittering language. In some, and it seemed that there were socially designated alleyways for it to happen in, pimps and whores plied their trade, and many a time Emboss turned away in vague disgust as another fine young zebric mare, tired-looking pony who seemed older than they were on first glance, or even androgynous Diamond Dog, was ploughed or themselves ploughed a furrow through an oft-hooded customer. It was surprising, at least to someone like Emboss. Canterlot did not have a problem with street folk, beggars, or very much obvious crime in general. Celestia's machinations, at work again. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that she was mashing them all up and putting them in pies.

On several occasions, some large-set minotaur fellow tried to sell him a deal of satinal, or some other substance of dubious origin and worth. Every time he politely refused, he could see them sizing him up for something, those hungry, carnivorous eyes picking out the muscles he had on display. He suddenly felt very self-conscious, and trotted away somewhat faster than before, hoping that the image of a fleeing animal wouldn't spark some uncontrollable feeding frenzy. I have to wonder, how many of those poor mares go into dark alleyways or pub rooms and never come back out again. In a city like this, I bet you don't even need to do it yourself. Live prey would just be a matter of asking the right person, all delivered to your hotel suite. Freaks and perverts everywhere. “So, would you like the hay and toast with orange juice for breakfast, or maybe we could put the parts of that filly you didn't eat last night in the oven for a few minutes, warm them up for you? Would sir like that?” Sweet foals, watch over us.

As buoyant as she was, Truth kept close to Emboss. Their recent setbacks hadn't phased her at all. She was having the time of her life. Emboss kept stealing little glances of her face as they moved through the crowd, heading for the last destination on the list, and something profound occurred to him. They'd settled down far too early, become dam and sire together, then stallion and mare, well before their time. It wasn't that he didn't love and adore his foals, nor that he regretted them in any way. After all, it was, ultimately, for them that they were on this trip at all, if not the whole of Equestria as an added bonus. It was just that they'd never had a chance to enjoy this sort of thing, to see what else life was before giving that life to something else.

Port Dauphine was a beast to navigate at the best of times, having essentially been built at random over the course of many years, but it wasn't long before they turned up at the particular mooring they had been directed to by the last person who had rejected them, an eight foot tall minotaur who looked like whatever force had made him had decided to eschew the traditional meat and bone approach in favour of cutting him directly out of a block of granite. Emboss couldn't quite work out what kind of boat it was supposed to be. The day's traipsing had quickly inducted him into a lot of basic knowledge of ships and shipping, and he'd not seen anything like it so far.

The prow was clearly a thoroughbred descendent of a clipper ship, fiercely V-shaped and finely varnished. It had nine masts, however, and though he could not see the type of sails, as they were stowed, this was far too many for any clipper. The stern was another matter, looking like some weird, eyeless hybrid of a dhow and a high-backed ancient galleon, with lots of extra parts above the waterline that seemed to function to increase the deck space inside. The figurehead was, promisingly, a rendition of a gryphon in flight.

Emboss trotted closer and squinted at it. There was another figure beneath the gryphon, a pony mare, who seemed to be lying prostrate, tail raised, and impassioned look of deep ecstasy, or possibly satisfaction, on her romanticized features. He realized what was going on, what the artist had captured with his work, a moment after his wife did. She began laughing like a bellows at an insomniac blacksmith's mill, until she fell over on the stone-lined dock, half-pointing at it, half kicking her legs in the air, paralyzed with mirth.

There was a sound of hooves approaching, but the beat was off, like only two hooves were striking the ground at any one time. Emboss turned to look, and saw a creature that, before then, he'd only read about. There were precious few hippogryphs in the country, and very few of that small number ever made their way as far inland as Canterlot. Something about the hippogryph struck him immediately, and that was the size. He was quite sure he had read about them being at least as tall as a gryphon, which towered over the average pony. This one, however, was just about the size of a older foal, perhaps a young stallion.

“Out of the way!” the hippogryph shouted, getting to the edge of the dock, barging through them and then suddenly taking wing, fluttering weakly but enthusiastically through the air, up over the side of his ship.

“Excuse me!” Emboss said, peering up. “Are you Mr Astrapios, captain of this boat, by any chance?”

“No, no sir, not him, he's not here right now!” the hippogryph shouted, the tones of his faux Canterlite accent immediately obvious to Emboss as fake.

“Oh, that's a big shame, we wanted to talk to him about hiring this boat.”

“Hire the boat?” the hippogryph said, his tiny, gold-feathered head poking out and looking down at them, wiping away a stain of blood from what seemed to be a cut across his face. “What for?” He glanced back and forth between them, eyes furrowing which, in lieu of eyebrows, was likely a frown. “I don't do wedding functions, you know, or changeling bondings, or anything like that whatsoever, not even the kinky minotaur stuff--”

“We're going to the home of the gryphons, and we need passage rather urgently,” Emboss said, hopefully. “We can pay four times the standard, and we won't take up much room--”

“You're in luck,” he said, disappearing, at which point there was a long silence, and then a series of clicking and whirring noises, and part of the forward hull began to open, joints and gears working in concert to expose a prow door, from which a long ramp was extended, spat out like a tongue with a loud thud onto the dock. “I've just been called away on some extremely urgent business, and am leaving immediately for Ugurtz, via Stotluz and Longazz, so if you'd like to step onboard--”

“How immediately? Can we have a moment to fetch our luggage?”

Astrapios glanced away, looking down the line of the dock as if he was waiting for a flood to happen. He clicked his short, yellow beak together a few times, then shook his head, stamping one of his back hooves on the deck.

“It's now or never. This business is absolutely vital, and if I don't leave right now I'll miss the tide.”

Truth and Emboss exchanged looks. A lot was said in those few moments, as is often the case between husband and wife, who have known each other for a great span of years and can read one another's features like open books. There was no need for any sign of agreement, and they climbed through the mouth of the prow door, the ramp bending slightly as it took the weight of two ponies.

There was a lot that went into the casting off of a big ship, but the captain had installed a series of ingenious ropes, pulleys and other gears that meant he could not only operate the ship, which would normally have been a tricky job, given his size, but that it could all be done in a matter of minutes, sped up by the helpful application of a bit of unicorn magic in the manual labor department. Emboss and Truth were keen to show their new, if diminutive, host that they were valuable assets, as well as paying customers.

A few minutes later, the ship was shifting out of the dock, wide, trapezoid sails taking the wind beautifully, even if they were embroidered with a series of images evidently designed by the same artist who had crafted the figurehead. By the time a large, angry mob, mostly earth pony mares, many carrying nooses, swords, barrels of pitch and even several kilos worth of unusually shaped root vegetables, the Barely Eagle was well away, leaving only frustration and a long, feathery wake of foamy sea behind it.

*

Heart of Ponyoak

Chapter Fourteen

“Heart of Ponyoak”

At a fair rate of knots, the Equestrian coastline quickly retreated into the distance. The great, glistening expanse of the dauphine sea stretched out in all directions, spanning the horizon. The broad and plentiful strokes of the Divine Artist’s pallette had been most gracious here, and Emboss did not know that so many shades of blue existed, and he lacked the experience to properly compare them to anything. Shoals of wicked-looking orange fish, long and curved like tiny tusks, followed the Barely Eagle, easily matching its pace. Sometimes, they would leap from the water and, to all but one individual on board’s surprise and wonderment, extend ruffs of frilly membranes, taking to the air for what seemed like an implausibly long period before disappearing beneath the sapphire waves.

Birds that seemed far too small to be ocean-going descended on the deck a few hours into the journey. They were the size of hummingbirds, a shiny, almost pearl-like white, and would sit on any perch they could find for short periods, then dive at speed into the water, returning half a minute later with one of the orange fish, speared through the midsection on the end of its needle-like beak. Emboss had been quite perplexed as to why they, having caught their prey, simply perched, as if waiting for something. Then, another bird, this one far larger and about the size of a small albatross or large gannet, though not as shiny white, would swoop down and, with its one, massive claw, gently scoop up the little bird and its catch, carrying it away at speed.

“The big ones and the little ones work together,” Astrapios had explained, after seeing Emboss’ baffled look. “See, the big ones can’t eat anything except the orange fish, but they can’t go in water, so they have to wait until the fish jump, and be in the right spot to catch them, and that means they don’t get much fish. Now, the little ones can go in water, but the orange fish eat almost all the little one’s favored food. So, for six months of the year, the big bird and the little bird work together to make sure everyone’s better fed.”

“But where do the little ones usually live?” Emboss had asked. “Surely not on the coast, we’d have seen them before… wait a minute, are they gussets?”

“No, those are waders. As for where the little ones live, well… islands, usually,” At that point, he’d looked to windward and frowned uncomfortably, as if he had just spotted a fly in his soup. “You’ll see.”

There was a great deal of activity on the boat, despite the one gryphon crew. About two-thirds of the ship was ‘off limits to passengers’, and Astrapios was constantly in and out of them, like a whirlwind of horse, bird and tightly-wound fury. Besides a few short conversations, Emboss and Truth were mostly left alone to mill about on the deck, or hide from sun beneath it in the upper cargo hold. It wasn’t until well after nightfall, when Astrapios called them to dinner, that they had a chance to talk, and Emboss realized that there were, in fact, more persons aboard.

They were to eat in the captain’s quarters, which were quite sparse and functionally appointed, with a giant black desk, an orbiting collection of high-backed chairs and miniature chaise lounges of various sizes, a neat set of varnished ponyoak and mahogany filing cabinets, a few writing slopes and other official ephemera, and the big, teak dinner table, which was brought in by the first two new people they met, full gryphon twins. Emboss wasn’t fantastically good at telling the genders of gryphons yet - they lacked any of the normal, equine features such as a small muzzle or curly eyebrows - but they radiated an aura of immense sexuality, of femininity, that overrode any mere boundaries of species.

There was something in the way they moved; neat, perfectly-even paws at the back and slender, manicured claws at the front, some indescribable thing that rode on the gentle bob of their wings as they held them, not quite mantled, not quite unfurled, that lurked in the depths of their green eyes and squealed and begged a purity of lusty intent. That thing crept into Emboss’ mind, whispering in mellow, honey-wrapped tones that yes, we can be had, if only--

“Stop staring!” Truth whispered, sharply, snapping him from his reverie.

“Sorry, sorry,” he mumbled, blinking.

The twins had noticed his wandering attentions, and smiled in what might have been called a bemused fashion, had they not so closely resembled raptors. They dragged around two of the little chaise lounges, then another four of the chairs, which they settled themselves into rather unusually once they’d placed them on the opposite side of the table from the chaise lounges, sitting almost upright, feline thighs crossed over each other. Emboss and Truth climbed up onto them. They felt rather curious and lumpy on the fur of his belly, as if they had been used, many times, over the course of many years, for some rough purpose.

“I am Erisne,” the one sitting on the left said, in a heavy gryphic accent. “And this is my sister, Ensire.”

“G-good, strong gryphon names, those,” Emboss said, extremely thankful that he was lying down, for their voices were as beautiful as his mind had imagined. “Firm, rigid, like… ballo--”

“This is my husband, Double Emboss,” Truth said, in the most unamused tone of voice she had ever mustered, at least in his presence, dragging out the emphasis for only a fraction of a moment. “And I am Absolute Truth.”

“The captain will be joining us in a moment,” Erisne said, speaking slowly but very purposefully, and with not a word or bit of grammar out of place, despite the fog-like brogue. “Leaving so rapidly has caused a great deal of troubles.”

“Oh, what kind?” Truth said.

“Most of our stock was still in the printer’s warehouse,” Ensire said, her voice as identical to her sister’s as the rest of her was. “We had also only just returned from the broodland, and so we are short of consumables.”

“We’ve enough to make the trip though, right?” Truth said, briefly quite worried.

“The Barely Eagle has a big belly, you won’t go hungry for hay and oats for some time,” Erisne said, clicking her beak. “But we will need to stop at Noble’s Isle to take on fresh water, and supplies for those of us with different appetites.” She clicked her beak again. “You understand, yes?”

Before anyone could respond, Astrapios came into his quarters, pushing one of the cargo trolleys he had been using throughout the day to move things about. It seemed to be mostly full of glass decanters of many shapes and sizes, stopped with glass plugs, all the colours of the rainbow. They rattled together as he hurried in, shortly followed by the tallest zebra Emboss had ever seen. He walked with a deep grace to his gait, as though he were dancing everywhere, narrow, unshod hooves placed exactly where he meant them. There was muscle to him, but it was in tight and wiry bands, as though it were for purpose, not for show. The stripes along his barrel, neck and flanks were obsessively even, like they had been painted on, and the fur carefully trimmed. He surveyed the room with a quiet yet striking intensity for just a beat, then followed his captain.

“Terribly sorry about the delay,” Astrapios said, parking the trolley and taking a seat, which he scrambled up onto in a way that reminded Emboss of a terrier, or other small dog, trying to clamber onto his master's table. “We have been so preoccupied, haven't we, gang? So busy, that we have neglected our sudden guests.”

The two gryphons nodded gently, but said nothing. The zebra simply rolled his eyes, moved the fourth chair out of the way and sat down on the thickly woven carpet, folding his legs beneath him.

A dinner routine, obviously well rehearsed, began next. Ensire served herself and her sister, fishing a trio of bottles and a something heavy looking wrapped in paper from the trolley, which turned out to be a sort of black, cured meat, and a little tub of fish sauce. Astrapios enthusiastically grabbed a large, very square bottle, which was filled with a thick purple liquid that didn't quite move as though it were, but more like it was syrup, or tar. The zebra latched onto the largest food parcel on the trolley, hefted it onto the table, and very daintily unwrapped the paper that contained it, revealing golden oats and compressed cubes of hay, which had been drenched in some sort of paste and allowed to set, resulting in a very appetising biscuit-like thing. He looked at Emboss and Truth, holding their gaze for a moment, then began to eat.

Emboss exchanged a glance with his wife, who shrugged very slightly, then lit her horn and swiped a share of the herbivore's food over, further divvying it up between themselves. As soon as the eating had begun, Emboss realized how hungry they had become during the day. There had been little time to stop since breakfast at the Gusset, and that had only been the lightest of meals. He tucked into the oats, the pleasurable sensation of satiation rolling over him.

There was a cracking sound as the gryphon sisters tucked into their apparently well-cured meat. They snapped their beaks eagerly, pausing only to drown chunks of the stuff in their fish sauce, which only became more pungent as the surface of it was disturbed. Their bottles turned out to be mostly other sauces, including vinegar, something that smelled of freshly cut grass of all things, and another kind of fish sauce, which was thicker and seemed more rotten than the other one.

Astrapios, in the meantime, had gotten out six shot glasses, three of them designed for beaks – much smaller and designed to be grasped and then cocked upward to work with the avian inability to suck – and three of them designed for ponies – wide rimmed so the tongue could be stuck in and the content licked out. Into them he'd poured the purple drink, an act of supreme coordination for a hippogryph.

“To our guests,” he said, smiling faintly. “May the fairest winds and quietest skies greet them wherever they may be going, and may Princess Celestia smile Her beneficence on their business, whatever that might be.”

Emboss nearly choked on a mouthful of oats, but managed to keep his composure.

“We're going to--” Truth started to say.

“Ah, ah, ah, no,” Astrapios said, shaking his head. “It's bad luck to mention it, and besides, you might make us accessories or something.” He laughed at his own joke, and it elicited the first emotional reaction from the unspeaking zebra, whose black lips curled into a warm smirk.

With that, Astrapios bit one of the glasses, and that was the cue for a great shuffling and fluttering of feathers as the others reached for theirs. Truth again took care of that with her magic, floating theirs over. Emboss carefully grasped it with his own, sniffing it. The drink smelled of peppermint, if peppermint was actually a kind of gigantic, monstrous plant that roamed the countryside, breathing fire on people.

“Shastoi!” Astrapios said, and downed his shot.

The others did too, eliciting much grunting and suppressed coughing, even from the placid zebra. Presently, his eyes began to water.

“Shastoi, indeed,” Truth said, and drank hers, smacking her lips as it went down. “Oh, it's actually quite nice!”

Emboss went last, and all eyes were on him as a result. It burned as it touched his mouth, like being dunked in a vat of chili peppers. His throat trembled, and a prickling went through his cheeks, down the back of his neck and along his spine, where it hung around for a moment before petering out. An unfamiliar warmth came over him, and he too coughed, and the next time he breathed, it was like sucking down a mouthful of freezing mountain air.

“Another?” Astrapios said, nudging the decanter.

“Yes, please,” Emboss said, eagerly grabbing it.

Ah, this might not be too bad after all!

*

“Alright, here goes,” Twilight said, touching her horn to the wire that she'd pulled from one of her note binders and run into the assembly of flasks which, despite the microgravity making things a little easier, had still been tricky. She ran the smallest and most tenuous current she could through it and, after a moment, the liquid in the Ewenmarer flask began to bubble.

The process would throw off another gas too, one they couldn't breathe and would actually be quite dangerous in the enclosed space, but Twilight had contrived a cunning system to deal with that. The pipe sections she'd slotted into the holes of the Ewenmarer's cork stopper split, with the hydrogen going one way, and the oxygen another. Some rubber tubing later, she'd slipped it through the strange thaumic metamaterial surrounding them, changing its composition so it would expand into a cavity under the slight pressure the escaping hydrogen would provide. Then, if it came to it, she could close off one entrance and open the cavity on its other side to space.

Five or six minutes later, and Whom was looking better, if not back in peak condition. Her cheeks were still quite ruddy, and she was breathing strangely, like she was cantering up a hill all the time. Oxygen depletion was invariably fatal, but it was the asphyxia from the building up of carbon dioxide that would get you first. Twilight knew of a number of chemical processes that would remove it from the atmosphere, but none she could think of that would work with the limited array of items at her disposal. She would have to periodically drain as much from the makeshift spacecraft as she dared, and hope it didn't displace too much oxygen along with it.

Having banned Whom from speaking at all, Twilight began to work to address their next problem. Panic and fear, old friends, clawed at her thought processes with their little feelers of catecholamines and cortisol, but she stamped them down each time as if they were biting rodents nipping at her fetlocks. However, she was spurred on by the seemingly limitless amount of energy she had. Maintaining a magical construct, like the bubble, usually took it out of her in no time at all, resulting in its collapse. She figured that it must have been the speed they were travelling at, and the resulting constant refreshing of the local magical battery, that was the cause.

Leaving the oxygen generator for a little while, Twilight changed the composition of the sphere, slipping inside it. As carefully as she could, she ensured that she was well within it, and that there was a solid layer protecting the envelope of life-sustaining gas inside, before pulling herself out into space. The feeling of the odd material in her nose, pressing against her, was suffocating, but she managed to stay calm, even though the old instincts in her brain were telling her to kick, believing that she was drowning.

Space was chilly, but that same autumnal briskness that she had felt on the surface of the moon was complemented by the scorching rays of the sun, which lit up one side of the sphere a brilliant, almost blinding white, leaving the other side in total darkness. All was silent, and only the low and muffled thudding of her Divine heart broke it. As she tugged her back legs out of the shell and climbed up onto the surface of the sphere she almost threw herself off it, so she had to hold herself down with her telekinesis, quickly adjusting the material again to make it solid.

The sun was a sharp gem too fierce to look at it, and she was thankful to have come out on the side not being complemented by the scorching rays of the sun. She glanced around, trying to find a star fix, hoping that years of obsessive astronomy would now pay off. Thirty seconds later and, after finding the now tiny disc of the moon and then the larger blob of the planet they were aiming for, she ducked back inside, taking the same cautious route in as she had going out. Not two minutes had passed by the time she connected her horn to the wire again, restarting the oxygen flow.

Parallax reading equals distance, distance plus time equals velocity. No, margin of error is too big, blast it. Can't account for the time I was out cold. At least we're on roughly the right vector. Will gravity catch us without interference? Lets see... bugger it, I wish I had my charts. No, I think we're going too fast, but can we change that? By how much? Landing in the middle of the sea or the desert might be a death sentence in itself, at least for Whom.

And so the calculations went on, and so the amount of water they had to convert into oxygen got steadily less.

*

The first few drinks had set the stage for more, and more, with each new decanter pulled off the trolley offering a strange new range of delights. Some weren't even very alcoholic, just a kind of intense fruit punch with lots of odd ingredients, and Emboss found he was far more drawn to those. Alcohol had never been of particular interest to him, and probably never would be. Still, he enjoyed the buzz and the slowing of thoughts, the propensity to laugh at everything, even if it wasn't very funny, and to generally slough off much of the anxiety of recent times.

The gang, as Astrapios had called them, mostly talked about themselves, and what they did for a living. Once they'd gotten past the initial awkwardness of Truth and Emboss discovering they had boarded the floating offices of Equestria's only transspecies gentlecolt's publication, which did not last very long at all, given the inebriated state they were in, conversation had flowed like water from a mountain spring. The gryphon twins spoke most, telling of their upbringing in a place they described as a Henhouse, but which sounded more and more like a prison with every mention of how they had been regularly beaten, starved for long periods, and generally mistreated, until they had managed to escape hidden in a laundry wagon.

Later, they had met with what was perhaps a more unfortunate fate. Having gotten themselves into a lot of trouble, financially, they were forced to pay off their debt through sale into bonded labour. They had worked their way through the houses of the Eerie classes as maids and scullery hens, mention of which required twenty minutes of explanation on the caste and rank system present in gryphon society in as of itself, until, at the age of twenty-three, when the Mistress they were serving at the time's fortunes changed and she'd been made destitute, they had been lucky enough to have their debt purchased by Astrapios, who immediately forgave it. They'd joined his then-fledgling business in a heartbeat, figuring that a life overseas and a chance to earn real money was better than another twenty years cleaning and had been key to its running ever since.

The zebra, whose name eventually turned out to be iYut, continued his trend of quietness, and Emboss decided to try and bring him out of his shell, quite innocently asking if the lad was working his passage. This had provoked a brace of shocked expressions from the others, most of whom had then immediately burst out laughing. His pearly white and black striped cheeks went a shade of deep rose, and Emboss was sure he was about to gallop out of the captain’s quarters to go and hide. He didn’t though, and eventually, after much cajoling, explained that he was on trotabut, a fifteen-year exploratory wandering period customary to his people, and was working with the Barely Eagle team in order to fund the next leg of it. He was definitely not in the same role as his colleagues, however, and didn’t appear in any of the issues of the magazine, a point which he made firmly clear, several times. He would not say more, and seemed quite embarrassed about it all.

Finally, Astrapios told them his story. He'd been born out of wedlock; his father a naval captain and his mother a servant. It was a cliched beginning, he said, but it was his, and it was the truth. Origin hidden from the rest of the world, he'd been to work in the gryphic fleet as a cabin cock, a phrase that caused Emboss to break into fits of giggles. The life had been tough and hard, especially as his stunted size became more apparent. Eventually, and he skirted over exactly how with the fluid efficiency of a long-practised storyteller, he'd gotten away from the navy with a large sum of money, enough for his own small boat. Trading and other freelancing had been the name of the game from then on, until he'd hit on the idea of a gentlebeing's magazine whilst in a bar in Port Dauphine, late one night, having gotten into a talk about the sad lack of said product. The rest, he claimed, gesturing at his friends, workers and the ship itself, was history.

Questions nudged at Emboss' mind, like what Astrapios had been running from when they'd met him, and why they'd left in such a great hurry, but the hippogryph had done him the service of not asking the why of it, and so decided not to pry. His wife had made the same deduction, it seemed, for she did not either.

In the end, it was well past midnight by the time Astrapios showed them to their cabin, just off the captain's quarters, along the wide hallway that was also a viewing gallery, with great, tall portholes that looked out onto a moon-lit sea, crested with waves in which flashed the occasional signs of glowing, nocturnal animals dancing through them, though if they were fish or otherwise, he could not tell. The ship seemed to be just fine sailing itself, and kept on a single track, and there was very little chop. Emboss drunkenly hugged the diminutive gryphon as he left them to it, and received one back, before he staggered off down the hall back to his room.

The cabin was, despite being apparently little bigger than a big utility closet, very well appointed, with a comfy looking cotton-sheeted futon and its own porthole, with black wooden slat blinds and too many cushions, each one of which was slightly different, as if they'd been collected over a long period of time. Truth was flopped over the futon, fuzzy, ochre rear end hanging over the edge, back legs collapsed. The sight was wonderful, and Emboss slithered up alongside her, kissing her neck. It wasn't until he got to her head, and realized that she was out like a light, that he stopped, sighing deeply. Ah, the booze got you, my love. Alas, I doubt it would work anyway, as the booze has gotten me too...

Emboss had joined his wife in the silken abyss of a drunkard's fitful sleep by the time the multiple strings of pleasured, gasping cries, high-pitched giggling and rhythmic thudding, slowly rising in intensity, came drifting through the ship's timbers.

*

“Dolphins!” Truth yelled, bounding over to the edge of the ship so quickly she almost fell into the sea, eyes full of joy. “There are dolphins! Look!”

How she could be so eager with what must have been a hangover at least as powerful as his was beyond him. The mare had always been strong-willed, but this was ridiculous. His brain pounded mercilessly, and the bright mid-morning light was painfully lurid. The only small relief was the strong breeze, still a firm easterly, as it had been for the last twelve hours. Emboss gingerly trotted over to his wife, leaning gratefully on the thick, wooden rail.

There were, indeed, dolphins, chasing the boat with an ebullience and eagerness that made him smile. They joined up with the wake, diving in and out of the water, peeling away to play with the rest of their pod or catch orange flying fish, gulping down three or four in a single go before coming back again. They cheered his mood, and the occasional brace of clicks or drawn-out squeaking that came up from the waves that slipped quickly by did not sound too bad, even through the headache.

Eventually, Astrapios joined them on the main deck, making his own clicks and fluttering sounds as he stretched, yawned and warmed his body in the rays, preening his feathers. It was a strange sight to see, a half-horse, half-raptor creature, simultaneously preening, grooming and licking himself. Loose feathers, tugged out and discarded, were caught by the wind and swept up into the four unfurled and billowing sails. The lewd images on them, depicting a number of what must have been samples, in light of the realization about the ship's purpose, gleamed magnificently, and Emboss tittered as he saw them again.

“Good morning!” Astrapios said, as he launched into a series of calisthenic exercises. “Lovely, isn't it?”

“Oh, yes, marvellous!” Emboss said, even though it was mostly a lie. “So, when do we get to where we're going, sorry, I forget the name...”

“About three weeks, give or take the time we spend on Noble Isle, and--”

“Three weeks?” Emboss gasped. “No, no, no, that simply won't do!”

“Well, I do apologize,” the hippogryph said, laughing and putting on faux apologetic tone. “If sir wishes, he may get out and push!”

“You don't understand, we absolutely must get to gryphon lands within the next few days,” Emboss said, trotting closer as the hippogryph began trotting on the spot. “This is of utmost importance, there can be no delay!”

“We're not a ferry, Emboss, there's no chance of it, this thing does fifteen knots on a good day, and it's not a straight line as such, we may spend a lot of time becalmed, and so on, and so forth,” he said, trotting faster as he worked through his little routine. “There's no way to speed it it up. If you were wanting a rapid passage, you should have gotten one of those superclippers, with the unicorn-powered steam drives.”

“We're unicorns!” Emboss said, glancing back at his wife, who was still captivated with the pod of dolphins. “Hook us up!”

“It's not as simple as that, there's all sorts of extra parts, and the engine itself! Unless you can magic those out of thin air, you're out of luck! The unicorn is just the power source,” he said, swapping between very rapid trotting and not so rapid trotting in five second cycles. “You can't magic one up, right? Because if you can, well, those things are expensive, so--”

“No, I can't, my talent is in...” He looked back at the marks on his flank – abstract two-sided blotches, with little orbitals that were like someone had spilled ink on him – and shrugged. “I've never been sure, really. I know I can't do that, though.”

“Refer to my previous statement about being out of luck, then,” Astrapios gasped, stopping for a moment to catch his breath. “Look, what can I say? You're here now. I'm sure whatever you need to do in the broodland can wait, and if it can't, well, you screwed up.”

“No, no.” Emboss shook his head, “We have to find a way. There's no other choice.”

“Listen, I'm an experienced sailor, alright?” He drew himself up to his full height, turning to face Emboss. “I'm open to suggestions, but unless you can somehow make us go faster, there's no way we'll make home in seventy-two hours. There's no way to do.”

“Let... let me talk to my wife,” Emboss said.

“Can she magic a steam engine out of thin air?”

“No, she's a housewife.”

“What does that have to do with it? Maybe she has a hidden gift, you should encourage her to try it out!” Astrapios started giggling, which would have been very unbecoming, had he not been so small. “Go for it, laddy!”

Emboss huffed and trotted back to Truth who, by now, had noticed the conversation and was watching with a worried face.

“What was all that about?” she said. “Was he making fun of you?”

“No, not at all, but I asked him how long it was going to take, and he said three weeks.”

“Oh, okay...” Emboss looked puzzled, then made the connection. “Oh! But that won't work! We need to go faster!”

“We're sail powered, there's nothing to be done.” He sighed, slumping down against the rail edged round the ship. “At least this is a nice place to watch the end of the world. Maybe we'll be safe out here?”

“There will be something we can do,” Truth said, quite simply, after what seemed like a long pause. “We are educated ponies, sweetheart.” She sat down with him on her haunches, resting against him. “We have our learning and our magic. I am positive that there will be a way we can think around this.”

“Do you know any spells that might help?” Emboss bit his lip. “You know, I don't think Celestia mentioned any kind of time limit, now that I think about it...”

“You're right; it might already be too late.” She grinned. “I might, actually. Do you remember that summer I spent with Mrs Spun Glass?”

“Oh, yes, uh,” he said, furrowing his brow. “The big mare, unicorn, weird mane, really irritating voice?”

“That's the one. She used to do this... thing...” Truth waved her hoof around vaguely. “With magic, and she'd feed her forge with it. More oxygen, more heat, better glass, apparently.”

“What does it do?”

“I think it was a modified weather spell that she borrowed from a Cloud Patrol pegasus who she used to have a bit of a thing with,” Truth said, smiling naughtily. “They don't usually let that sort of thaumic power out of the gates, so to speak, but the stallion was really into her. Anyway, it moves and compresses air.”

“Like an artificial gale...” Emboss chewed his lip. “But can you remember how to perform it?”

“No,” she admitted, looking up at the clear, blue sky. “However, I can try.”

Ground Control to Major Twi

“Ground Control to Major Twi”

“Twilight,” Whom murmered, desperately weak and drowsy. “It's okay, if I go, then that's okay...”

“What? No! No, it's not okay,” Twilight said, distracted from her busy calculations and steady work keeping the oxygen generator powered and the gas levels balanced as best she could. “We'll get you safe; this is all my fault, those creatures would never have destroyed your home if I hadn't turned up.”

“Home, yeah...” Whom wheezed, reddened cheeks standing out even against her general pinkness. “Twilight, the time I spent with you was the best...”

“Don't.”

“Best time I ever had... even if I didn't... get to see Equestria...” she sputtered, regardless. “Never had a friend before...”

Whom passed out, then stilled even her slight movements. Out of time. Has to be now. Twilight pulled the wire off her horn and slipped out of the sphere, pushing her way through the material as fast as it would rearrange itself. Using her telekinesis, she grabbed onto the exterior surface and tugged, inadvertently adding to the speed of the spin she had started earlier, to avoid any one part of the makeshift spacecraft being in direct sunlight for too long. The half-dark planetary globe was much closer now, and the blotchy shape of a very familiar place could be seen glowing in the thrall of sparkling rays, which cast long shadows, picking out the higher mountains.

Equestria itself was laid out around the foothills and caldera of Mount Avalon, which for a moment she could not find, but then she tracked lines of geography, the silver strings of rivers that she knew, and found that only a grim pall of thick smoke, like a smudge of ink, hung where rightful knowledge said she should see the capital. She gulped, heart suddenly very close to mind. A horrible sinking feeling came over her, which was nothing to do with the gravity. Something has happened whilst I’ve been away. Oh, ye Gods. She glanced down at the sphere, then back ‘up’ at the planet. It’ll have to wait. One crisis at a time.

The vast deserts that were to the south of Equestria were a ruddy yellow band, getting narrower as they approached the pole, ending in a sudden, faded transition to luminous emerald green, where the forbidding lands beyond those of the Diamond Dogs lurked. This was where changelings and minotaurs and all the other monsters of the world were rumoured to dwell, and from which no pony expedition had ever returned.

The icy strip to the north was covered in dense clouds, but there would have been nothing much to see. Besides wildlife like ice worms and their tatzl cousins, little crouched below the northern wall of the vast glaciers that made accessing the pole impossible. There was a tiny dot of bare, cold light about half-way through it, and that she knew must have been the Crystal Empire. It seemed so alone, set apart from the rest, and it suddenly occurred to Twilight how lonely her sister-in-law must be, even with her own beloved brother at her side.

In the west were darkling shadows, and only the weltsea was there anyway, a fierce and iceberg filled span that bracketed the other route to gryphon lands, a nearly-impassable monstrosity plagued with supertyphoons and currents so rapid they would suck whole boats beneath the waves in an instant. This was also the ancestral home of the hydrae, post-sapient creatures from another epoch in Equestria's long history, content to perch on ice cliffs and hunt whales for food, only occasionally straying inland for one reason or another. To the east, which was hard to see as it was in direct light and almost beyond the curve of the planet, was the narrow limb of the start of the dauphine sea, a lush blue bordered by the marshy, city-strewn coast, like the black specks of water skater nymphs in the muddy brown of a millpond. Gryphon climes were removed from view by the curvature, a fitting testament to their usual distant and mysterious nature.

As awed as she was by the immense and unbelievable sight of her own world from space, Twilight's mind soon came back to Whom, who was rapidly running out of time. All the hydrogen they had been collecting recently, a byproduct of the water cracking, had given her the idea she hoped would save the innocent pink creature. With a little oxygen – and she had stolen some of their precariously small supply – it would combust, explosively so. If this blast was focused, her calculations told her, it would produce thrust, perhaps just enough to have them enter the atmosphere, instead of, as they were currently on course to do, bounce off and go spinning into void. At that moment, Twilight wasn't scared of which outcome of that consequence she was scared of most; being trapped in space forever, immortal and undying, or be trapped in there with someone that she could not save, her undecaying but dessicated corpse mocking her for all eternity.

Stopping the rotation of the sphere with some carefully-calculated dance steps on the exterior shell, she cautiously edged over to the part she knew contained the bubble of hydrogen. It had ballooned out, like some pustule about to burst, and was straining the limits of what this amount of magical material could be expected to do. Lines of blue and purple magical discharge appeared occasionally across it to indicate this, and she knew it would be a moment's work to break it. Nozzle, she thought, after as many seconds worth of thinking as she could risk. Spray out like Applejack’s hoses. Pressure's key. Velocity of the exhaust. Note to self: invent new field of science to deal with this when you get home. She spoke to the material in thaumic words and whispers, shaping it like a potter with his clay. Her brow furrowed, and the sharp heat that was penetrating her head became worse, actual sensations of pain dulling out. Waste can't escape very easily; natural I'd burn. Or, pyrolyse. No matter. The work done, she almost unstoppered the newly formed nozzle as she lost focus, nearly discharging the unreacted gas. Concentrate! Damn you, you stupid mare, concentrate!

The temperature in her horn was starting to become dangerous to the magical output itself, requiring more and more of her attention to compensate for the additional entropy in the system that the lack of adequate cooling produced. The hornstuff was starting to ablate, charring and boiling, gases and vapours crawling quickly over her skin, stinging her eyes - though most of it exploded out into space. In a final moment of clarity, she heavily reinforced the entire structure, timed the spell that would ignite the oxygen and hydrogen mixture in the chamber to go off at the same instant as that which would open the nozzle's business end, and fed the last energy she could muster into that interwoven tapestry of different magical complexes. She latched on to the nozzle like a foal grabbing its mother's neck, knowing it almost certainly wouldn't be enough, and just had time to think I really need to stop drinking, before everything went a blinding and iridescent white, as though she had stepped into the noon sunshine from a darkened room.

*

Twilight could not possibly have noticed him, but lurking nearby was a certain spirit, slithering through the void of space as though it were a merry, green-lined stream and he was lying in a rowboat, enjoying the sunshine. When he saw the purple Princess climb out for the third time and set about making her last adjustments, he raised an eyebrow, but did nothing more, not until the hydrogen and oxygen exploded out of the nozzle, enough fuel present for only the smallest of sputtering burns. Almost, he thought, idly. You almost had it. Good effort, I respect the enthusiasm, honestly, but that simply won't do, just look, you can't go hitting planets at ninety times the speed of sound and at that kind of angle, you'll kill... well, you'll kill someone, anyway.

He sighed, and a cricketing outfit appeared around his oddly proportioned and apportioned body, complete with giant, fuzzy shin pads, a pristine white shirt with a googly-eyed caricature embroidered into the breast , a black helmet bearing the same logo, and a giant cricket bat, which was greatly oversized and seemed to have been hewn from granite and reinforced with gleaming bands of tungsten and iridium. He flitted ahead of the sphere, kicking his legs in an approximation of the back-stroke, until he was well out in front. Then, he spun upright, wriggled his tail, swung the bat a few times, and was in just the right spot to deliver a juddering whack to the makeshift space capsule.

The bat was vapourized by the collison, its heavy build flashing instantly to so much plasma, but this change in velocity and vector it had managed to impart was again just right to place them on a highly precise and razor-sharp new route, along which they would safely enter the atmosphere... somewhere, anyway. But alive, and that, I think, fills my mission's remit rather nicely.

“Deus ex Machina, Twilight Sparkle,” said Discord, then he vanished once more, eyes and smile lingering for a moment longer.

*

Twilight lost track of the sphere a few minutes after it began to interact with the top layers of the planet's atmosphere. To be fair, this was because she herself had begun to interact with it, and had faired off rather more worse. The speed they were traveling at caused a great deal of friction, which lit up the ever-denser air that they encountered with, at first, tenuous traces of wispy fire, green and red, but then which had progressed into a furious and constant lick, like they were being held in the flame of a welding torch. Something had put a bit of a spin in the capsule once again, so there was, at least for her, no escaping it.

The continuous degeneration and regeneration cycles were rather getting to her, as it only afforded a few seconds out each minute of actual physicality, most of which she spent throwing all her thaumic strength into maintaining the structural integrity of the capsule. The rest of the time she was forced to exist as a weird cloud of exhaust gas and carbon plasma. This version of her was blown further and further back away from the capsule with each passing second until, finally, she could not sense it anymore. She would have thought Good luck, Whom. You're on your own now, had she been possessed of the faculties to do so, but alas, she was not.

So now she fell, and the long trail of her smudged across about a thousand horizontal kilometres and fifty or so vertical ones gradually began to recondense. By the time she passed through eighty kilometres of altitude, it had formed a thirty metre by one metre jet-black rod of various glass-like materials, which was a shape it retained right up until a ten kilometre height, whereupon it drastically shortened itself.

Some time later, in the middle of the vast ocean of sand that sat to the south of Equestria, the rod impacted the desert floor at a very respectable fraction of the speed of sound, immediately digging a deep crater and throwing up a towering mushroom cloud. Eventually, the cloud settled down again into a bell-shaped, hovering spectre over the sand. Several kilometres away, a furry, wet-nosed and white muslin-hooded figure, tall and lean and billowing due to his dress and the gently insistent wind, stopped eating his breakfast of dates and dried apples, stood up, and began to wonder what all the fuss was about.

*

“مهلا! من هو هذا؟"

Twilight barely heard the voice, but in the silence of the desert, broken only by the crackling tinkles of her body congealing, and the impact glass which the force of it, as well as the excess heat of her magical recombinations, had produced, but which was now rapidly cooling, it was impossible not to. There was also a certain unusual property about the voice, as if it were being spoken sideways, but Twilight was sure that this was merely an artifact of the situation she found herself in, that is to say, upside down and buried halfway up to her flanks.

Someone began to dig. She heard the quick, scraping sounds of it, then something grabbed at her barrel, and the fight response began, as soon as she felt the tips of claws scrape across her skin. A wicked bang filled the air as she struck out in the vague direction of the threat with the first spell that came to mind, one she normally used to plate metals with aqueous solutions of other metals.

"أنت مخلوق الجهنمية"

There was the stink of singed fur, and the owner of the voice grunted. The force he'd exerted had been enough to pull her free however, and the brightness of the sun above blinded her for a moment, even as she beat her wings and lanced upward, pausing only to stop and look down after five or six seconds, after which the adrenaline began to subside.

Below, a white clad figure was shaking his fist at her, standing in the middle of the crater she'd made, shouting in a language she didn't understand but which, even from height, still sounded as though it were being spoken sideways. Coils of smoke were drifting away from him along the sand, though he didn't seem to still be on fire. After a few minutes of circling him, riding out the rest of her adrenergic spike, she began to descend. Her memories felt strange. Nothing seemed to be in the right order, like she was waking up from a long and dreamless sleep. I was... on the Moon... and then... Oh, by the superfluous hairy third nipple of Starswirl the Unshorn, Whom!

She landed in what was probably the most graceful way she had ever managed, and barely noticed. Whom must have come down by now, but it was impossible to tell how much time had passed. She scanned the horizon, an undulating and confusing landscape of heat shimmers and steep dunes covered in slow ripples, but nothing presented itself. The heat on the sand tingled against the frog of her hooves as she practically fell down the lip of the crater, stumbled but recovered in time to gallop up to the figure, who paused in his litany of odd words.

“Hi, hello, I'm sorry for shocking you but really you deserveditforsurprisingmelikethatanyway--” she babbled with extreme rapidity, stopping only when she realized the figure wasn't a pony, but a diamond dog, and she yelped, for at that moment he had drawn out a long, almost needle-like silver blade, with inscriptions on the blood channel, and a simple wooden guard. The tip trembled, and the reality of everything dawned. His heavily furred features betrayed an expression of immense fear, strikingly blue eyes open as wide as they would go above his long and neatly combed beard, now slightly burned around the edges, which flowed out of his muzzle like the open pages of an impossibly wide book.

“D-don't worry, I'm not going to--” Twilight started to say, but then stopped again, as she realized the diamond dog had rammed the knife as far as it would go into her neck. “Ow, that hurt!”

“!مخلوق لا يمو”

“Would you stop speaking like that, please?” Twilight said, very gently using her magic to withdraw the clawed paw from her personal space, knife sliding out as she did. “It's very difficult to understand what you are saying if you are going to speak it the wrong way around.”

At that point, the diamond dog did what most sensible creatures would do when faced with such a challenge, and ran off. He broke into a respectable sprint, leaving his knife behind him. His feet, on which he was wearing some kind of wide-soled canvas and wood shoe, threw up sprays of loose sand and dust as he headed away into the distance. Twilight rolled her eyes and sighed, before going after him in what she hoped was a non-threatening way. Things were not turning out in the way that she was intending.

*

“All I want to know is the precise speed of the surface of wherever it is that we are right now! Is that really so hard? Look, if you tell me the latitude and longitude I can work it out! ” Twilight bellowed, hovering shakily near the entrance to the diamond dog's tent, from which he was now throwing rocks and chanting some sort of mantra. “Then I will be out of your mane! Uh, fur. Whatever, I'll be gone for good, I swear it!”

*

Princess Celestia drifted through the cloud layer nine kilometres above a tract of countryside somewhere between Canterlot and West Wingshade. The thick and nearly pliable water vapour parted and rolled obediently down her barrel and flanks. She held her golden-shod hooves just so, that it appeared she were in the middle of one, infinite bound. Occasionally, she gave a powerful flap of her wings in supplication to the idea that she was an object bound by the laws of physics, required to provide thrust and lift and all those other pesky mortal things in order to maintain flight, but this was, as many things about her were, a carefully constructed lie.

Dealing with the travelers from elsewhere had been relatively trivial, in the end. They did not have much useful information, nothing that she did not already know, but then again, she was not really expecting them to have. If anything, it had been a useful measure of timing, and an effective way to gauge how far along the schedule things were, especially in the absence of any ability to directly probe events without disturbing them through the very act. Objective sense, she thought, cooly. Now there would be a useful thing.

So, once she had kept them lofted there for long enough, she'd delved into their minds, and they were such interesting places, full of odd locales and sensations and recipes for something called bitter, and carefully removed all traces of their encounter, but not before purloining aforementioned recipe. Then, she'd left them just outside West Wingshade, somewhat dazed but generally unharmed. All wanderers and wayfarers have the right to take part, after all. I have to wonder, though, how many of them like this place so much that they decide to stay? The larger ones could not, the standing fields cannot hold them. But the littler ones, they could. There are so many of them, it would be only a matter of a few adaptations for appearances sake. Take a mate, take up work. Toil in fields, come home and have your pony wife for dinner, yes, I can see that being very attractive.

Something appeared in the expanded field of her consciousness, which was very wide, even without her particular effort. It was a point of mass, too weird to be anything else but an imminent teleportation event. The wormhole terminus began as a speck of this odd stuff a few micrometres across, then quickly ballooned and disgorged a dragon shape, with different arms, legs and two yellow, googly eyes.

“Ave, Satanas,” the wyrm shouted, as the wormhole fell back on itself and collapsed after it had allowed passage of its strange cargo. “I thought you might like a status update.”

“Warm greetings to you, Discord,” Celestia said, refusing to match his high tone of voice, retaining her composure in the knowledge he would hear her regardless of whatever the apparent volume was.

“Her Very Purple Highness returns from the moon,” he bellowed, donning a pair of bizarre, thick rimmed flight goggles as he lept through the air and coiled himself around the Princess, one-fanged mouth rolling up beside her ear, voice dropping to a whisper to say: “She has the uranium, the funny flower and the big squid eye, so I make that about half of the shopping list.”

“Any troubles so far?” Celestia said, still with her expression of immense serenity and love which she wore without fail.

“Nothing that she could not handle, nor I prevent,” Discord said, looking coquettish. “I don't mean to speak up of my fabulous deeds of immense heroism, magical cunning and derring do, but--”

“Continue your observations and intervene as required,” Celestia said, turning to face him, magenta eyes locking with his own whacky organs. “That will be all.”

Discord vanished without saying another word. Nearby, another wormhole terminus opened up, admitting his invisible form. Celestia drew in a deep breath and continued on with her flight, lazily heading back toward the capital which, if the terrific bang that had come her way some time before was anything to go by, was just starting to come along nicely.

*

Astrapios was sitting in his quarters, listening to the ship's evening noises. His hearing was unusually acute, even for a hippogryph, and when he stilled himself, taking low, regular breaths, he could hear things at remarkable distances. There was the cold and slippery whisper of the bow of the Barely Eagle as it cut a path through the ocean, the thuds and clunks of self-adjusting rigging equipment responding to changes in wind conditions in order to keep the boat pointing in the right direction, and the soft orbit of breathing and the beating of hearts; a pair of rapid beats that marked the twins, the strong and protracted squeeze of the zebra, and a higher, nearly choral tone pair, those of his new passengers.

They were the most troubling to his mind, as of late. The fact that he had been run out of Port Dauphine by an angry, baying mob was not of fantastic concern. He'd been chased out of bigger towns by angrier mobs, louder mobs. Most of them didn't even have beaks, and they'd posed little threat to him. By the time they'd made the round trip to the broodlands, during which he could prepare a new edition and perhaps recruit some fresh models, things would have blown over, as inevitably they always did. It was a shame about the lost stock, which would almost certainly have been rapidly 'lost' by the printers, but his readership would understand. The report of the near-lynching at the courthouse would make its way into the press, and all would be well.

He wondered for a moment what had happened to Ruffley. He'd last seen the harried stallion pleading with old Judge Quarter, trying to get him to speak to the crowd which had assembled in the circular courtyard during one of the recesses in the proceedings. That had been moments before said crowd had suddenly turned from a mood of bubbling disapproval to downright murderous violence. That had been rather strange, in retrospect. It was as if some force had reached into their minds and flipped a switch, and just like that they were eager to spill blood.

No, it was the unknown factor of the two unicorns currently milling around on deck, up to some sort of magic, that bothered him the most. He hadn't been able to turn down their offer. So much money was always hard to say no to, especially with the amount of it the Barely Eagle sucked down, both the publication and the boat itself. The coinage was now safely secured in the four metre cube below his desk, hidden behind a zebric puzzle lock, along with the other valuables.

But now he was involved, as much as he had tried to distance himself from their plans, as much as he had spoken jokingly of becoming accomplices in order to provoke some hint in their easily readable pony body language, that was simply the case now. Their obvious concern and consternation at finding out the length of their passage was also deeply worrying. Who were they, that they needed to be so far away so quickly, yet had no idea of the actual logistics involved? What could they possibly be trying to do in the broodlands? And for that matter, how were they going to survive? All sensible herbivores only traveled to carnivore countries in large numbers, on carefully organized expeditions, preferably heavily armed and armoured.

Whilst the eating of sapient creatures was officially outlawed in all nations Equestria had relationships with, even if those were only to do with trade, there were still dangers. Government policy worked a little differently in the broodlands than it did elsewhere. Individuals were far less law abiding, for one thing. It had been a serious culture shock for Astrapios, when he'd first arrived, finding out that he could leave doors unlocked and not need to watch everyone, and that weights and measures were what they were sold as, that the beer wasn't watered down, and so on. But it meant that at home, a lone pony or two, in a dark street, possibly late at night, would likely represent an irresistible target. More so if they left the coastal regions and ventured deeper in, where even alce and hippogryphs were eyed with suspicion, and simultaneously evaluated for their worth as food items.

Astrapios slipped his beak over the neck of the bottle on the desk in front of him and lifted it up, emptying some of its fire-apple red contents down his gullet before setting it back down again. He licked the traces that were left from around the hooked tip and sighed, feeling the strongly alcoholic fluid start to work its magic. Nothing to do about it, he thought. We'll just have to wait and see.

At that moment, quite unexpectedly, the wind began to pick up, sending a low and ghostly sound racing through the timbers of the ship. Chills raced up Astrapios' spine and, for once, they weren't caused by the drink or the kindly and insistent machinations of a pretty set of twins.

*

The gryphon's powerful, slender thighs, all at once a mixture of barely hidden power and soft, feminine need, moved slowly through the shadows of the dingy hotel suite. Outside, the light from the Hilt Once Hotel's bar sent oily beams even through the heavy curtains, occasionally picking out for the eager hen's prey her marble-smooth talons, honed to razor sharp perfection, and that hooked beak, hanging like the tip of a knife. She circled him, eyes fixed not on him, but on his body, brilliant sapphire pupils tracing the lines of his larger muscles. That old familiar feeling, of wrongness, of rough miscegenation in the dead of night, shot up his back and through his loins. At once, blood began to flow to his--

“What are you reading, darling?” Emboss asked, peering over the front of the book Truth held in magic.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, gulping and closing the book a little too quickly, hiding it from view. “Nothing at all, just some old novel I found in our room.”

“Right, right.” Emboss nodded, waving a half-worn stub of chalk around in the air. “I'm almost done with these pentagrams.”

“Mrs Spun Glass used to have four, if I recall correctly.”

“Well, I've done you six. Are we ready to start?”

“I really think we should ask permission before we unleash half-remembered spells on this poor hippogryph's boat, you know.”

“It's fine, really, he even said we were welcome to get out and push if we wanted to, and this absolutely counts as that.”

“He was being facetious, sweetie.”

“This thing isn't a little sailing dinghy, it can probably take a lot more than you can dish out!”

Truth bit her lip and stood up, unfolding her legs from beneath herself. She placed the book behind her back left hoof and gave it a gentle kick, sliding it across to the other side of the main deck, where it came to a halt near the largest central mast.

“Is that a challenge, O dearest husband?” she said, in a sweetly menacing tone of voice.

“Lets see if you've got it in you!” Emboss huffed and stamped his hoof. “Come on, I'm waiting!”

“Right,” Truth growled and nearly galloped over to the point where the points of the six chalk pentagrams met. “Stand well back!”

Truth drew in a deep lungful of air and spread her front and back hooves out, closing her eyes. The soft surrusus of the standing magical background field drifted through her mind, barely audible at the best of times, but which now seemed somehow louder. Thaumic potential energy began to translate itself into the real world, and she heard Emboss whinny as his horn jarred uncomfortably, the building force creating sympathetic vibrations within it. She recalled the particular feeling that she herself had felt when watching Mrs Spun Glass do her work, working backwards to figure out what that mare had been doing.

A lick of telekinesis lashed out, bending the deck planks. She quickly corralled it and, moments later, it became clear what needed to be done. She wasn't sure if this was what Mrs Spun Glass was actually doing, but it seemed right for their purpose. Gas was really just a sort of spread out liquid, and moved in the same way. It could be funnelled, if under pressure. Bands of telekinesis grew thicker and stronger, flowing upwards and outwards toward the clear, blue sky then trailing backwards.

The farmost part of this growing bundle of spellstuff began to resemble a trumpet, widening and expanding. The other end grew needle thin. As soon as she had overseen this, or guided its construction, a deep and cloying feeling of exhaustion suddenly came upon her. With the nature of magic being what it was, she wasn't sure which of these were true; whether it had been a thing of her making or something else, the magic itself begging to be formed into shapes that it wanted.

She struggled on, gritting her teeth. It was like sprinting up a hill, only the incline was becoming more severe with every passing moment. Adrenaline spiked, and her lungs began to work like bellows. Sweat stained her fur and ran into her eyes, which would have stung had she not had them screwed so tightly shut. Heat attacked her scalp, and the smell of singed mane filled her nostrils.

There was one last thing to do, and then it would just be a case of maintaining the design, a far easier thing, if her long-ago education in the magical arts was anything to go by. The air had to be made to flow. She formed a fist of energy, punching and ramming atmosphere into the funnel. Air was squeezed and squashed down the funnel, getting hotter and denser. It exploded out of the tip at the other end, and a few moments later she felt a strong, warm wind roll over the ship.

The sails filled with a sharp snap, all their parts becoming tense. The acceleration was strong and forceful, and the rhythmic sound of the prow slamming into the water became more rapid and intense. Truth felt the need for magic drop away, and the telekinetic structure glowed brightly, a self-reinforcing loop of energy being drawn out of the background now powering it.

“Hooray,” she mumbled, seconds before her head hit the deck.

Money Shot

“Money Shot”

“Wlad fy hynafiaid, tir a bod fy aderyn gwrtw cadw'n rhydd, tir a oedd yn farw I mi, y mae I ti yr wyf yn canu...”

The massed cocks of the Royal Antfwyd Choir were in beautiful voice as they made their way through the national anthem, their deep and bassy tones echoing up through the high and vaulted ceilings of the Pwdfyddych, national seat and long home of Hywell Edda, or as he was now, King Hywell Edda. This familiar place now felt like an alien realm, however. He could not get used to the feeling of his father's throne, no matter how much he rearranged the pillows and cushions. Hywell was beginning to suspect that it was more a matter of rightfulness, that is to say, his lack of it, than anything to do with the construction of the thing itself.

Idwal Foel, always a companion, was watching the choir intently and drinking, of all things, mint tea, a plant which did not grow anywhere within the broodlands and was a specialist import from Equestria. The pleasant and refreshing odour of the stuff drifted over him, a pall of oily refreshment. He clicked his beak very slowly, mulling over the idea of ordering one of the tremulous serving hens who lurked in the shadows around the throne to fetch him a cup too. That thought died shortly thereafter. Ye dratted protocols. Oh, I must, I must be seen when on the throne to have no foibles of a mortal, no needs and appreciations. What a horrid duality of thought! That I am some unflinching creature, a thing that begets nothing but strength, says and speaks for nothing but his own fearsome reputation, but behind closed doors I may devour and vomit and screw, just like all the rest of them. Eyes forward, talons on show, that's the only way to go! Well, rut that, right up the--

“Highness, you're marking the floor again,” Foel whispered, without looking at him.

“What?” Hywell said, glancing down, where surely enough, his right footpaw was scoring five long lines into the marble, adding to a set of others. “Oh, sorry.”

“They've only the Aldwych ayn Fod (OLD-wick aen FHod) to get through, then we can eat dinner and you can take your frustrations out on some deer.”

“Yes, but all this decrepit ceremony, I hate it so,” he said, suddenly aware of his growing hunger as his belly rumbled disquietly. “Take a note for me, dear Foel, to find out who came up with it all and have them fed to hydrae at the next possible opportunity.”

“I fear your father is beyond your reach, Highness,” Foel said, smiling sardonically. “I can see if the fodwycha will bring up his bones from the osscept though, and we can feed those to the hydrae.”

“Wouldn't be much of a meal,” he grumbled, then reached out and suddenly grabbed Foel's cup from where he had left it, on top of the saucer, taking a deep gulp before setting it quickly back, glancing in the other direction.

Foel raised a surprised eyebrow, but said nothing. The choir finished the national anthem, and there was a long round of rapturous applause, hooting and cawing before they launched smoothly into the Aldwych ayn Fod, a hymnal about giving thanks to the ancestors for the bounty of the hunt. It was a four part harmony, with both a male and female section, symbolic of the duality in fertility, and of the two-naturedness of the universe itself. The hens padded in from the invisible entrances between the delineations of the six enclosures of the court's seating, seeming to appear out of nowhere. They were dressed in white linen, with a waxy sheen to them, and red bows around their necks, green and blue smudges on their beaks and claws scribing various benedictions, pleas for intercessions and messages of thanks.

They joined the cocks just as their part kicked in, and they added the essential feminine undertone to proceedings. Hywell vaguely recalled that there was supposed to be a dance involved here somewhere too, but they were stoic and still behind their male colleagues, holding various intimidating, supplicant or reverent poses. Perhaps I am misremembering. There are so many of these blasted things. Fie! Fie on them, and so on.

There was a cheer, and the deer they had hunted were paraded out on carts, or slung over the backs of cocks-in-waiting, depending on how big they were. They had been tied up with green and red bows in the same way as the hens, and painted on with similar symbolism. Eight bucks in total, their necks torn open and bodies long exsanguinated, along with a number of the smaller does and a little collection of fawns, eventually made their way into the centre of the long hall, being laid out for all to see.

Hywell's stomach rumbled again, even as a pang of guilt and disgust came up over him. They fought right up to the end, poor buggers. Fought us, just like we'd do. Wouldn't let go of life. All screaming and scrabbling hooves, kicking and biting. I wonder if they were scared. Bah, of course they were scared! We came down in the middle of them like creatures possessed, claws and beaks moving as a typhoon full with knives, wouldn't you be scared? Hywell placed his talons across each other, tracing the rough scales up his wrists, to where they met with thick feathers, hungry mind imagining what the chefs would soon be doing with those poor buggers. Buck rarebit, haunch of whole buck in sauger sauce, pan seared silverside of doe, whole fawn deep fried and served extra crispy with horsendaise sauce for dipping. Oh, I can't stand it!

He balled his right talon into a fist, and only just resisted slamming it into the onyx arm of the throne. I could do it. I could tell them all to stop. I could... He tensed his neck, the Autumn Crown shifting its centre of mass very slightly, as if tensing itself in response. I could burn them all. Boil out this horrid speck. Cast down these halls, purify everything. There would be so little left over. His heart began to beat faster, and a warmth spread into his skull through his feathers. Something whispered to him, inaudible but somehow intoxicating, promising--

The choir finished the Aldwych, and another round of applause filled the hall, snapping his attention away. The heat subsided, and the lovely whispering ceased, though now Hywell was sure that he had always been able to hear it, and it was only now that he could really tell that it was talking at all. Foel cleared his throat and set down his saucer of tea.

“Well, that's done with,” he said, sighing. “Come then, Highness. Dinner awaits.”

*

“So, what you're saying is, you've made it blow?” Astrapios said, grinning, surveying the empty sky around the Barely Eagle, which was by this point moving along at a fierce pace. “Was this a big job, or only a little one?”

“Oh, well, I think it was quite easy for her actually,” Emboss said, feeling his family pride was on the line. “Yes, very simple, nothing to it all, just a little unicorn magic, solves all ills.” He tapped his horn in emphasis of the point.

“Had a lot of practice then, has she?” Astrapios said, barely stopping himself from collapsing into fits of laughter. “Lucky old you! What a great wife!”

“She is an expert in these sorts of jobs!” Emboss said, haughtily, unable to tell what the hippogryph was finding so amusing. “Why, she only had to watch her mare friend do it once or twice, and she had it down to a tee!”

“Oh, so she likes to watch? That's wicked!” He snorted and stamped his hooves. “Maybe she'd like to work for me!”

“Darling, stop,” Truth mumbled, still groggy, laying her neck over the top of his withers for support.

“I'm defending your honour!”

Astrapios had succumbed to the force of hilarity, and was gasping breathlessly on the deck, having rolled onto his back, kicking his legs in the air.

“I really don't see what's so funny,” Emboss huffed. “All I said is that you were good at--” He blinked twice, then gasped, cheeks going a bright, cherry red. “Oh!”

“Yes, quite,” Truth sighed, smiling and rolling her eyes before slinking off, looking as though she'd just gone ten rounds with a chimera. “I'm going for a lie down. Do try to behave whilst I'm asleep.”

“Y-yes dear, sorry,” Emboss said, removing the tiny pair of spectacles he wore and cleaning them with a pinch of magic.

*

Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis, Luna thought, descending down the slopes and tiers of Canterlot, the force of her passage ripping slate from roofs and shattering the thick, crystal glass against their wooden frames. A few days hence and this would have been madness, augurs of a Nightmare's trot, but now 'tis vital to the cause. Tempora mutantur indeed, but how far will I be willing to go to match?

The brooding, square shape of the Theatre of the Two Sisters, an abomination in architecture which Luna had considered arranging the obliteration of many times in the years she had been back, hid low against the caldera wall of Mount Avalon, on the edge of the city. In the dying light of the sun the gigantic granite blocks from which it had been so carefully hewn were plain to see. It is not so much a building, but an invading army, with troops of gaudy false imperial chic and fawning generals of too much silver and bronze.

Her eyes swept through the wide, cluttered streets up to the theatre, divine mind processing much of the complex scene at once. There was a band of stallions, charivari in full swing, singing sea shanties and smashing up fast food restaurants, and there were a herd of pink bison raiding a zebric mercantile house. Her attentions were quickly drawn to the largest group, however. They were all wearing red sashes, and the blob of their congregation had just begun to spill in through the big, shiny theatre doors. Luna had seen the signs of enthusiastic entry before; a giant barber's pole, long enough that it had required nine or ten of the mares to carry it, had been been pressed into service as a battering ram, and now lay propped against the entrance.

Suddenly, out of the mass, a kicking, biting and squealing blotch came, a highly distinguishable black and grey patch in the sea of primary colours. The mob had a good hold on Zo Nar and, despite her superior strength, training and biology, numbers were always going to win over. Focusing closely, she saw that the mare had already been badly beaten, and her abusers weren't letting up. Vicious spells, of the sort which Luna usually reserved for creatures whose arrival heralded new chronological eras, exploded in her mind. The local magical field drained in an instant, and the Princess almost let go. The intensity with which the shape in her head begged for power, pleaded to be substantiated into the world, was incredible, and it was this which made her pause.

They are yet civilians. Zo Nar would not survive either. The mare in question suddenly lashed out, jumping through the crowd, screaming wickedly and biting anyone in range. It didn't last long, and the magical impulses of all the unicorns present soon dragged her down again, sweeping her along with the rest of them through the doors. Luna smiled proudly. Dum vita est, spes est.

*

“Are you quite sure we should be adding that much black powder, Pinkie?” Ode said, watching as the mare shovelled what seemed to be a good two-thirds of the entire stock into the flared end of the carronade. “This is just for effect, after all...”

“D'ya trust me, Odey?” Pinkie said, dropping the scoop and staring him down.

“Implicitly; you're a champion of the common earth pony,” Ode said, biting his lip.

“Well, would someone you trust do anything to hurt your interests?” She began scooping the powder into the carronade again.

“No, I guess not,” Ode said, nodding, after a few moments of thought. “But is it entirely necessary that we fill the ball with custard?”

“'Ust 'ust 'ee!” she gurgled, through a mouth of handle.

“Right you are, Pinkie.”

*

Truth and Emboss made love for the first time on their trip on their second night aboard. There was no real build up to it, but the idea of some release of frustration, tension and the need to be physically close, had just come together in one, rather rough, moment. Emboss lay along his wife's back in the post-coital daze, feeling her heart beating quickly through his skin and watching droplets of sweat roll down her neck and further dampen the bed.

Through the porthole, the waves slid by at their enhanced pace. They had actually begun to accelerate a lot faster than before, as the magical construct funneling wind at them was further added to by Emboss' own energies, as well as later reinforced and tinkered with at length by his wife. The whole process had been terribly draining for her, though. The mare was already asleep, satisfied and exhausted, depriving him of the usual cuddling and general boisterousness she displayed after they had sex.

They would reach Noble's Isle shortly, or so Astrapios had said, probably before dawn. They'd already passed a series of small, uninhabited islets and islands, which had appeared and disappeared rapidly from view, but in the meantime showed glimpses of emerald trees and long beaches of jet sand. There had been a long discussion as to why they were going, but it still seemed to be for the same reason. The gryphons were getting ornery, and had been promised their reward there. In the end, Emboss had backed down. They would depart the Isle shortly after lunch on the third day, with a tentative estimate on the evening of the fourth or the morning of the fifth as time of arrival in the broodlands.

Emboss rested his nose in Truth's mane and got lost in the smells of her exertions, and the peachy cinnamon perfume she liked to wear, quietly hoping that they would arrive in time to make a difference, and not merely in time to witness.

*

“Where do curves end and straight lines begin?”

The zezura was a large and noble-looking desert bird, with splendidly broad wings which it kept mantled gracefully when not in use, and a head like a guitar plectrum. With its strikingly white plumage to keep off the worst of the sun's rays, and a span between the needle-fine tips of each wing of nearly eight metres, it had very little to worry about in what was one of Equestria's most extreme biomes, at least, of those places not infested by hydrae, or so far above sea-level one saw only blackness up above.

So, when it had deigned to descend from its scarce and lofty climes to find a crunchy salamander or two, and maybe some water to wash them down with, it was not at all concerned with the idea of running into danger, or any kind of trouble at all for that matter. For although many sorts of animals lived in the wadi, none dared hunt the zezura, perhaps out of respect for the mighty avian's plumage. Therefore, when it alighted neatly on the bank, it was very surprised indeed to see an odd, four-legged creature, which had wings, a horn and was immensely pink.

“No, really, where do curves end? How can you tell if a straight line isn't actually just a really big curve, and you can't tell it's a curve because it's so huge?”

The zezura stared at the animal and blinked both of its sets of eyelids in surprise.

“Imagine a straight line, right? Okay, but then imagine a really slight curve. Like infinitely tiny, curved only a little, little bit. Maybe it would be curved as little as it was possible to be before it became a straight line again. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the curve was actually a straight line, wouldn't you?”

The zezura opened and closed its beak a few times, then cocked its head.

“I'm Whom, by the way,” she said. “Well, actually, my name is A Stupid Pink Pony Whom Nopony Will Ever Love, but about half of the ponies I know just call me Whom, so I guess the choice is up to you, which one you use, that is. Don't worry about that question, I was just trying to start conversation.”

Interest in this strange thing quickly faded, and the zezura promptly strode off into the water, the lure of tiny, slithering treats too tempting to ignore any longer. It made sploshing noises as it waded carefully in, eventually disappearing out into the still, shady and very shallow waters of the wadi's central pond system.

Whom sighed and dropped her head rather melodramatically. Her trip to Equestria hadn't gotten off to a very good start so far, especially the part where she'd arrived by means of magical spaceship, only without any of the fancy hovering and safe entries and parachutes, as they did in the stories she'd read in the magazines. Instead, she'd just sort of appeared here. It was all very anticlimactic, to be honest. The last thing she remembered was watching Twilight operate the gas generator, telling her everything would be okay.

Then she had woken up in a rather large furrow in the middle of a dry and dusty salt flat, which turned out to surround most of the wadi. There was no sign of the spaceship, and no traces of Twilight either.After a while, she'd set off at a trot toward the nearest signs of anything, which ended up being the wadi. At least I saved Twilight's bags. She'll want those back, I'm sure. After all, the Nectars seem pretty important to her.

Whom shifted the weight of them over her spine and withers, and the badly shaken contents clanked and thudded around inside. Her own bags were small enough to fit into the leather panniers, so that had been useful. They're really important, actually. What if she wants to make them now? Before she finds me? She drew in a sharp breath. What if she thinks I'm dead? Oh, no, I have to find her! She broke into a half-canter, half-gallop, contemplating gaining some height. I can't let my friend down!

*

“Okay, here's the plan!” Pinkie said, as they prepared to load the carronade into the stage lift. “Are you listening? I'm only going to say this once!”

“I'm all ears, Pinkie,” Ode said, tension and apprehension rising in his chest, alongside the continual aura of merriment the Element of Laughter seemed to radiate.

“You get the cannon up on stage, then wheel it off the platform so the mares and foals can get on it,” Pinkie said, enthusiastically miming the actions for him. “As soon as you do that, they can come down here. These walls are thick! Those meanies outside won't get in. Then, blammo!” She jumped up and spread all four limbs out wide, as though she were a shooting star. “Just touch the firepaper to the fuse I put in.” She giggled and snorted. “Make sure you get it pointed in the right direction! I hate it when thingies make a mess where they're not supposed to!”

“Yes, yes, it's a penis, I'm rather getting sick of the sight of it really,” Ode said, sighing and peering closely at the mechanism that held the fat, white fuse. “What will you be doing?”

There was no reply. Ode turned around and scanned the room. Pinkie Pie had vanished. Even when he trotted curiously up and down, looking into any spaces where she might have secreted herself, there was no trace that she had ever been there in the first place, apart from the fact that he now knew what to do with the gun. The radiated aura of happiness and euphoria was gone too. Ode bit his lip and huffed. When he looked back at the barrel of the carronade, he saw that someone had written 'Good luck, Odey!' on it, with what appeared to be cake icing. Ode smiled, grinned, then burst out laughing.

Pausing only to wipe a tear from his eye, he climbed into the stage lift with the gun, then pulled out the toggle which would loose the counterweight. With a rattle of cogs and wheels, Ode began to ascend to the stage.

*

Princess Luna forgoed the time honoured tradition of using doors and came in directly. Her shadowy self darted through the spaces between the atoms of granite themselves, before she rematerialized below the glass-domed ceiling of the theatre. Below, the rabble had already penetrated another set of doors and begun to infiltrate further inside, toward the main stage. There was no sign of Nar, though Luna could smell nottlygna blood, mixed in with the awful stink of sweat, anger and too many ponies in the same place. She let herself fall vertically, extending her wings only at the last moment to stop her descent.

The ensuing sharp blast of air, helped on and focused by careful manipulations of her flight surfaces and the intense force her muscles could put out, picked up all those who had the misfortune of being in Silver Stream's way and flung them bodily outwards. The shiny, marble flooring, speckled with little black inclusions, had a sense of the dramatic mood strong enough to shatter, with a very satisfying crack.

Luna didn't bother speaking to the hundreds of stunned ponies who now turned to look at her. There was nothing that she could say, at least in any language they'd understand, to change their Nectars-addled minds. Already, shock and awe were turning to violent anger. The Princess scooped up a fraction of her magic and, targeting the first fifty who happened to catch her eye, let it go. The raw and unfocused energy of the blast, having no specific instructions, went off to find its own trouble to get into. Currents were induced in central nervous systems left, right and centre, sending their unfortunate owners into smoking, seizing heaps.

In some of them, specifically the unicorns, things went a little differently. Bunches of roses sprouted under their skin, bursting through superficial but painful rips. Doves and pigeons spontaneously appeared around heads and immediately set to scrabbling and scratching. Rolls of streamers and sprays of confetti, all coloured black and silver with streaks of dark purple, exploded out of nostrils, ears, mouths and less comfortable orifices entirely. Carrots and various other root vegetables, equally chromed, spilled in huge piles, torn from nearby storehouses, flung through wormholes and tipped in great numbers on those who had survived the birds, flowers and miscellaneous party goods and come out still in the mood for a fight.

This is a much better idea than whatever it is my sister does to manipulate their thoughts. Why I didn't think of this before now is unknown to me. Largely unharmed, yet incapable of, or unwilling to, cause trouble. Excellent.

That was when she noticed all the blood on the floor, leading through the large double doors. It was very strongly nottlygna, and stung in the back of her throat, the magical potential of the stuff discharging as it met the simulated interior parts of a divine being. Luna growled and took off, floating over the rest of the crowd mostly via aggressive pushes against the ground with her telekinesis, flinging and tugging herself through. There was the occasional squeak or whinny of pain as she caught something equine with the edge, but she disregarded them.

And I was so harsh on Zo Nar for less! Fie on me! If she lives through this, I'll permanently assign her to the Hidden Delight, by the stars themselves I swear it.

The doors themselves would have splintered to nothing at her passing, had they not already been reduced to that state by the crowd. Through them was the main theatre itself, an imposing and grand space, flush with soft, red cotton benches, arranged in a big circle around the stage, which was like an island in the middle of a sea of chaos. Ponies fell and were pushed over the benches, screaming and shouting. The remnants of a sign, reading Outrages Against Public Decency on one side and Dams Unite Down with the Filth on the other, was being paraded about, though it had been badly abused and was, at this point, barely legible.

Luna noticed that the stage had a giant penis on it a few seconds after she flew in over the heads of the baying mob. It was very lifelike indeed, and even had a pair of testicles shrouding the base, completely smooth and with a black sheen. The tip was flared as if it were in the middle of the culmination of its intended role in life, and indeed, had an appropriate hole. She was briefly rather pleased with it, and only realized that it was actually a cannon when a dusky-brown earth pony, who was quite a bit fatter than the norm, popped up from behind it and slammed his left hoof on the barrel, sending up a shower of sparks and igniting the firepaper he had glued to the bottom.

Whomever had set up the weapon, they had not cut enough fuse for it to be safely and appropriately operated. Just two seconds after the flame that engulfed his hoof touched the fuse, it had burned down entirely in a gratuitous spray of sparks, and the cannon had discharged. There was a tooth-rattling boom, focused to ear splitting volumes by the shape of the theatre and the relatively enclosed space.

Luna's instincts had made the decision before she really consciously thought about it. The cannon was pointed in the direction of the mob, very squarely so. Despite the fact that they were completely out of control and threatened to kill one of her beloved nottlygna, if they hadn't done so already, they had not done anything that was worthy of sanctioning their outright murder. She had seen what unrestrained, close-range cannon fire did to ponies, and had no wish to do so again. There was only one possible choice, a single course of action that could be carried out in the vanishingly small time she had left.

With a thrust of magic as large as she dared, Luna accelerated toward the empty point in space where her divine brain told her the ball would be once she herself arrived. Time seemed to slow down. There was an awful period in which she thought she had not given herself enough of a push, and would not make it. The Princess intersected the cannon ball travelling at almost the speed of sound. She'd prepared for there to be a lot of pain, then a period of somewhat awkward personal reconstruction as bits of her returned from wherever they'd been propelled around the room.

Instead, when the fragile shot impacted her face, the force of it was enough to override the antifragmentation enchantments that had been placed on it. The thin-shelled cannonball immediately splintered into thousands of pieces, dumping its load of warm, sticky custard, only recently drawn from the Royal Kitchens and therefore freshly made, all over her head, muzzle, neck and generally everywhere else, too. Globs of the stuff, still carrying the high velocity that the firing had imparted on them, rapidly turned into an airy foam as they were forcibly mixed with air.

Luna managed to stop herself, then hung in the air just above the pit where the musicians were usually placed. Dozens of terrified looking mares, most with foals hiding behind their legs, or in various stages of pregnancy and therefore somewhat immobile and rotund, gazed up at her. The rest of the mob, who apparently hadn't noticed those souls taking refuge in the pit, had all been shocked into silence. They stared, first at her, then at the cannon, then back to her again. On the stage itself, the earth pony who had lit the fuse looked as though he had just eaten Zeus' prized marigolds, rod-rigid with fright.

A drop of custard rolled down Luna's stunned features and off her muzzle, falling away into darkness. As though they'd been waiting for this cue, the mob erupted into wild laughter, which eventually became louder than the cannon shot had been.

*

Rescuing Zo Nar had been very straightforward after that. There had been nobody who wasn't absolutely paralyzed with mirth to stop her. She'd grabbed the battered mare very carefully with her magic and lifted her away, quickly exfiltrating the theatre before the crowd had a chance to recover. Though her external motions had stilled, Luna could feel a tremulous pulse of life that yet remained inside Nar's chest. Her legs were at funny angles, and dozens upon pained dozens of cuts, abrasions, angry bruises and other injuries crowded her body. She would need a great deal of healing, and probably wouldn't walk straight again, but she would be okay.

Hoping that Nar still had enough of the plant drugin her blood that she could feel no pain, Luna headed for the Palace again. Time for a bath, methinks, and a new plan. There can be no solution to this found in the streets of the city. We must take whom we can and leave. Evacuate the city! What a strange notion. Hm. All the airships were burned with the liftgas. They must have been, for little nearby survived. I wonder, if Mytheme will still be there?

Ground Floor: Ancient Relics, Dirty Secrets and Blood Meals

“Ground Floor: Ancient Relics, Dirty Secrets and Blood Meals”

Princess Luna arrived at the palace thirty seconds after she left the theatre. Every eye followed her as she made her custardy way, her wake an expanding wedge of total silence. She ignored them as she swooped in, taking care to actually fly through the intervening space, and not take the direct route that would be somewhat more hazardous to those around her.

“Physician!” she bellowed, forcing open the door to the Adjutant's office so aggressively that it almost broke it to matchsticks. “Heel!”

Sound Rebound galloped over, his orbital of student doctors struggling to catch up. His hemp, oil-sealed overalls were covered in blood, and his tufted ears drooped as he saw the bizarre dichotomy of confectionary sauce and divine anger.

“I have fetched back this patient you so carelessly lost,” voice as heavy as the punishment rocks used on bound rapists, whilst setting Nar down on a nearby trolley. “She is worsley injured now than before. Do not make me fetch her again.”

The Princess didn't wait for his reply and instead dissolved into her gaseous, ethereal form, taking the quickest route to Infra Base, which lead her down through rocks, lies and corpses, not to mention several hundred thousand tons of volcanic glass, right into the heart of the Selenite Court. She became material again beside Base, who gasped, dropping the frilly, velvet-wrapped mouthpiece of the satinal pipe she was smoking.

“Infra Base,” Luna said, placing a hoof on the mare's withers. “The time has come to leave this city. Muster all those who can walk and load on them those who cannot, as well as anyone else as yet unafflicted. Leave none behind who deserve a rescue. Assemble in the Welcome Hall.”

“Yes, Mother, b-but how will we leave?” Base gasped, coughing, purple smoke trailing out of her nostrils. “Surely we will not trot out? Or fly? Half of us can barely do the first, let alone the second.”

“No. I have a better plan.”

*

The Royal Yacht Mytheme sat suspended in its cradle, buried deep below Mount Avalon. The elongated, teardrop shape of her polished silver hull glinted where the gas fired running lights of the dock caught it, but otherwise hid itself away in the sort of velvet shadows only chthonic climes could provide. Below her, the Spring of Avalon gushed out from between cracks and fissures in the rock, gathering in an immense pool before eventually finding its way out along pitch-black subterranean rivers.

Princess Luna did not care much for grand entrances, or stand on anything like the ceremony her sister preferred, especially when she was covered so thickly in custard. She alighted alone, on the edge of the pool, making only the slightest of sounds. She took off Harsag Zalazalag, placing it carefully beside her, the ancient and broody crown keening lowly as it met the rock. The mantle around her neck came next, then the chrome shoes, and at last Luna was naked, as much as it was possible for her to be. She dropped to her belly and got comfortable, wriggling against the rough cave floor. The sensation of gravel against her fur and skin was delightful, and she sighed deeply, allowing a content smile to play over her muzzle.

Though the centre of the pool was a frothing maelstrom, at the shore only gentle waves lapped against a steep edge. Luna examined the patterns of the waves for a moment, then dunked her head and neck in. It was ice cold, and crystal clear, and she felt her muscles and skin tighten up as her divine heart began to race. The alicorn body, as timeless and unchanging as it was, still took care to simulate such functions.

After a moment, the Princess pulled up out of the water, eyes closed, enjoying the feeling of the pure liquid, filtered through the mountain over thousands of years, trickling off her. Clean again, she thought, picking up a little ball of water from the surface with her magic. Home again. The ball floated over her withers and was released, shortly followed by another that doused her flanks. Last, she washed her hooves, taking care to magically dry them before reapplying her shoes. The custard refused to become stuck in her mane proper, and slid off almost gratefully when she dried those too.

“It is good to see that you keep the old ways, your Majesty,” a voice from behind her said.

“What know you of such things, Katabasis?” Luna asked, turning to look at the old nottlynga mare.

“Enough to know that those were rites of ablution, for a mare about to sully herself.”

“You really must stay out of the libraries, or at least, learn your lessons better; those were rites for a mare who has sullied herself, or in this case, been sullied,” the Princess said, placing a hoof on the scratched and worn, yet proudly polished, breastplate of the boatmare's armour. “How are you?”

“Fine, your Majesty. I trust you will be wanting your yacht?”

“Indeed. I hope the Mytheme remains in good order.”

“That it does, your Majesty. That it does.”

The mare began to chuckle, which progressed to a ragged cough as she turned away, heading for the narrow staircase cut into the rock face leading up to the Mytheme's dock and cradle. Luna followed, slightly puzzled.

“Not quite the flyer I once was,” Katabasis muttered, apologetically unfolding her wings. They were tattered and, where the armour at the roots allowed, Luna could see scars and deep furrows, evidence of muscular damage.

The Princess kept her own wings folded out of respect and followed Katabasis up the staircase. The dock itself was composed of a pair of forty metre granite slabs, suspended from the high ceiling by big brass chains directly over the pool below. The middle of it was cut away to make space for the cradle, in which sat Mytheme. Ropes and mooring lines held the yacht firmly in place, but Luna could see that it bucked gently up and down, as if caught in an ethereal wind.

“I have not seen her for more than a thousand years,” she whispered.

“One thousand, one hundred and seven years, to be precise. Her last actual use was shortly after the Third Intercession, where--”

“She barely looks a day older,” Luna said, trotting reverently across the dock toward the cradle.

“Her last full refit was about twenty years ago,” Katabasis said, following closely. “Though she has had a great many since your absence, as you instructed.”

“You and your ancestors have done a magnificent job,” Luna said, unable to take her eyes off the ancient craft. “Is she fitted and loaded with stores?”

“Some, your Majesty.” Katabasis paused and furrowed her eyebrows. “Do you really mean to take her out?”

“Of course. I have need of her.”

“Why not one of those lighter-than-air dirigibles?”

“They don't have quite the same impression on the soul as Mytheme does. In any case, they have all been destroyed. Did you not hear the explosion? It was loud enough.”

“Y-Your Majesty... isn't...” The old mare suddenly paled, her armour clattering as she stumbled.

“Do not worry. I am yet free of the Nightmare,” Luna said, turning to her.

“I'm sorry...” she mumbled, tears rolling down her wizened cheeks. “We only just got you back...”

“I would never leave you again, my beautiful nottlynga,” the Princess cooed, placing her foreleg over Katabasis' withers. “Once was too much.”

“My Princess,” she whispered, “I did not mean to weep in front of you.”

“That is alright,” Luna said, smiling. “Would you please fetch me the activation rod?”

“O-Of course, your Majesty!”

The mare disappeared off into the cluster of covered buildings that acted as the yacht's workshop, and which were presumably where Katabasis lived. Luna sighed deeply, adjusted her crown, and began to plan her next move.

*

The interior of the Mytheme was, as the exterior promised, unchanged. The silver and copper furnishings gleamed brightly in the eerie glow of the gas lights, the reflections moving in time with Luna's silent hoofsteps over its luscious carpeting. Behind the mortal trappings, however, something far more ancient lurked. The Princess found herself drawn to it, seeking out the exposed ribbing of the underlying structure. To the untrained eye, it appeared to be nothing more than some sort of expensive lacquer, an accent to the near-gaudy opulence of its surroundings. Luna knew better. The moment she touched it--

The Great Worm Carnifex loomed in the sky over the Hill of Tithes, blotting out the glow from the numinous eclipse that was the herald of the Selenite Princess' host. Looping in the shimmering air like a sea serpent in the throes of some ineffable ecstasy, it seemed as though it was a distant kite, a plaything for foals on windy days.

Luna winced, and retracted the hoof she had placed on the bone. “The end of the Third Intercession...” she muttered. “What memory comes to plague me now?”

“Excuse me, your Majesty?” said a voice from behind her.

“It is nothing, Katabasis,” Luna said, turning to face the Nottlynga. “Merely the playful sprites of my old age.”

“Yes, your Majesty,” Katabasis said, unfolding her left wing to reveal an object, her grip resolutely steady despite the damage to the webbing. “I have the activation rod.”

“Why is it in a box?” Luna said, turning her head to study the solidly black container, which appeared to be made of jet, framed with nacre, and held shut with an intricate platinum catch.

“I-I'm not sure, your Majesty, it was given to me like this--”

“Calm, Katabasis,” the Princess smiled, picking up the box with a delicate touch of her telekinesis. “I am sure whomsoever amongst your ancestors decided the rod required a carrier thought it very tasteful.” She unfastened the catch and examined the contents for a moment, before spiriting them away into the recesses of her regalia and closing the lid again. “But please, return it to its place; its job is now done.”

The nottlynga mare took the box under her wing, bowed her head, then left, making for the exit of the yacht without saying another word. As soon as she was gone, Luna took out the rod. It was barely the span of her unshod hoof, precisely hexagonal, and the color of freshly spilled arterial--

“...blood of your stallions! Take from them a thousand gallons of blood for every drop they have spilled of the blood of your foals! Make on them a thousand wounds for every insult they have made to your beloved nation!”

The Midnight Princess threw back her head and howled, and the mismatched lines of her host that had gathered on the Hill of Tithes bayed in return. Down on the cracked alkaline plains beyond the slope of the hill, Carnifex had alighted in a great heap and begun to disgorge wave after wave of unspeakable abominations from his fanged maw. Luna flapped her wings and rose above the crown of the hill. On the other side, thirty thousand of her nottlynga bellowed and writhed, begging for carnage. At their fore, a darker shade in the morass of grays and blues, the legions of the seventh, seeing their Princess make ready to attack, broke ranks and charged. Their lithe, wolfy shapes bounded and hopped over rocks, screeching and hollering. Luna smiled wildly, rolled in the air, and fell after them.

The thirty thousand nottlynga met with their foe some distance from the hill. The enemy outnumbered them nine to one, with untold reinforcements still lurking in the belly of Carnifex, but hadn't had the time to rally into a cohesive formation. Only the minotaurs, glistening and slick with the bile of the worm, presented a defense, kneeling and raising their forearms to cover their necks. It was not enough. The seventh, whirling hurricanes of wicked incisors and blind fury, collided with the first of them and set about their grim undertaking. Luna landed with force, throwing up a cloud of yellow dust that cleared in time for her to see members of the seventh tear away the muscles of their prey, champing jaws crushing arm bones with snapping sounds that rose easily above the noise of battle. From her left another minotaur appeared, flanked by nine-limbed mockeries of life cut out of glass and pulsing, stolen equine organs. Luna reached for Mythraegg, and the quarterstaff, a single shard of obsidian as long as her body, sprung from its nest on her pauldrons and flew through the air wrapped in a sheet of magic, hitting home between the black eyes of the minotaur and shattering his skull like a--

“--melon, and I've also got some rabbit, if that's more your thing?”

Katabasis was performing a balancing act of copper tureens, which were stacked on her head and back and brimmed with durians, mangoes and slices of melon. One, the largest, held a trio of sleepy-looking white rabbits curled up on top of each other.

“Five eat of fruit, the sixth sups blood, and the seventh...” Luna mumbled, blearily looking over the buffet the old nottlynga had brought out.

“Your Majesty?” Katabasis said, peering up at her with an expression of alarm. “Are you sure you're okay?”

“What will the seeds of the seventh eat?”

“I'm sorry your Majesty, I've never been very good at riddles.”

“You have brought fruit and blood, but what will the seventh eat?” Luna shouted, stumbling backwards, as though the food had turned to venomous caterpillars. “The seventh must not be denied!”

The volume of her voice reached a peak, and with a horrid clatter of metal, Katabasis dropped the precariously balanced tureens, throwing herself into a trembling kowtow. Mangoes rolled everywhere across the carpeting. The rabbits, roused from their sleep, squealed in alarm and ran in opposite directions, fearing for their lives far more than usual.

*

“I am truly sorry, Katabasis, I did not mean to shout at you,” Luna said, curled up on one of the extravagant chaise lounges in the yacht's lounge. “This vessel carries an ephemeral cargo for those who are its intended recipients.”

“My dam always used to say that burdens shared are halved, your Majesty,” Katabasis said from the opposite couch, an anemic rabbit passed out on her full belly.

“These are surely not burdens, but false images, for those icons that I saw, and gross depredations of equinity whose atrocities I witnessed--”

“You put it on, don't you?” Katabasis said, stroking the rabbit with the tip of her hoof. “All those airs and graces.”

Luna gulped.

“Yes, you've earned the right to familiarity,” she muttered, after an awkward second. “Sorry, again.”

“The lads up at the Castle are going to be ever so disappointed,” Katabasis said, laughing. “The pool's up to about eight thousand bits, the last I checked.”

“The pool?”

“The betting pool! About whether or not you can speak like a normal pony, or if it's just something you put on because it's expected.”

“Oh, right,” Luna said, chewing her lip. “Is eight thousand bits a lot of money these days?”

“I take home two hundred bits in a month, your Majesty, after tax of course, and I'm paid a little more than a regular on account of having been farmed out due to battle damage,” she said, unfolding her wings slightly. “So yes, I'd say so.”

“I am a little... removed from economic realities,” Luna said, standing up and trotting out into the middle of the lounge. “Perhaps that is an unexpected thing, for one such as me.” She sighed and shook her head. “I require of you another service, Katabasis.” She took a deep breath and reached around behind herself with a tendril of magic, grasping for the immaterial threads of the artificial pocket of space time. “I imagine it has been a wicked while since you were involved in the creches, or foalrearing activities.”

“Y-yes, it has been, your Majesty, but I'm ready and fighting fit!” Katabasis said, snapping upright and tumbling off the chaise lounge, sending the rabbit scampering weakly away. “I could be covered again, if it is required.”

“It is not, but your enthusiasm is admirable,” Luna said, sending magic coursing through the threads holding the pocket together, unpicking the various arcane mechanisms that kept it from interacting very much with the real universe. “I've a charge here, an unusual one. He must be minded.”

“Oh, thank the stars,” Katabasis sighed, relaxing from her rigid alert posture with a clank of armour plate. “Another foal, at my time of life.” She glanced at Luna nervously. “N-not that I'm unwilling, but--”

“Stranger things have happened,” the Princess said. “Though we've plenty of young mares, first seasoners and experienced dams all. No reason to go dipping into the retired stock.” There was a flash of magical potential discharging, and the pocket universe collapsed. Luna shivered as she arranged the complex network of interlinking wormholes required to discharge its energies safely into the space around Equestria’s La Graze points.“This is Spike, Katabasis.”

The baby dragon had appeared straddling Luna's back, just fore of the wing roots, almost exactly where she had taken him from in the first place. He wore a stunned expression, as though someone had just hit him with a giant cricket bat. Trails of white vapour came off his two-tone scales and there was a sudden coldness to the room. Perched behind him was an orange stallion, who immediately slid off and landed on the thankfully well-padded lounge floor with a painful-sounding thud.

“Oh, two charges, then,” Luna said, telekinetically placing Spike beside the stallion. “My little waifs and strays club; the dragon is most beloved of Twilight Sparkle, and must be kept safe in mind, even if his body is tough.” She sniffed the paralyzed pony, squinting curiously at him. “This other one I pulled from a crowd to keep his body safe, though his mind is gone to rut with the fairies. Keep the first out of mischief and shade his eyes of sad things; keep the second watered and comfortable.”

“I was somewhere else,” Spike gurgled, eyes unfocused, mouth moving spastically between words and gulps of air. “All the black, and black in me, came out to find the three in he...”

“Goatsfeld effect,” Luna said, matter-of-factly. “It will wear off in a moment. Just try and stay calm.”

“Who is the fifth who trots beside you?” Spike babbled, staring at an empty space between Katabasis and the Princess. “I count, there are only us four, but when I glance up the white path, there is always another one there, gliding wrapt in black mantle, hooded, not mare or stallion know I it to be, but who is that on the other side of we?”

“He'll be like this for awhile,” Luna sighed. “Though it may sound like augerings, it is just his brain, confused and deprived of input. It has made its own up to compensate, sensed its own background noise, if you like.”

“Your Majesty, this is an infant!” Katabasis said. “How could you inflict such a thing on young one?”

The old boatmare bustled over to Spike, nuzzling his cheek and cooing softly, which stilled his mad wittering and general nervous arousal.

“The lesser of two evils, I assure you. Though he is old beyond his years, and so wiser too than foals of our genetics, the foulness of the unfolding situation above would have changed him, hurt his growing mind. He will barely remember this, and with goodly counsel recover fully.”

Katabasis just sighed and nodded, then picked up the dragon by the scaly scruff of his neck, teeth somehow finding purchase on the scales.

“He will enjoy all sorts of gems, though dragons are panvores, and may consume anything suitably massy with equal nutritional value. They never evolved tastebuds as a result. They weigh food as the sole assessor of its quality. It's what made them a gigantic threat, once upon a time. You don't need to worry about him trying to eat you, though. This one has been raised amongst ponies, and so has our ethics.” Luna chuckled, which turned into a dirty laugh. “A dragon, with ethics. Stranger things, Katabasis!”

*

Mytheme had a control room, of sorts, but it was more a quiet space for the intended pilot to rest in than the usual busy, high-visibility environment of an airship. There were no instruments, and the smooth walls of the spherical chamber were entirely featureless, in equivalence to the contents of the place itself. Apart from a long and immaculately appointed slab of soft materials, no furniture lived here. It was oversized, compared to those used by the average pony for snoozing or as day beds, but that was because its intended occupant was far bigger.

Princess Luna settled herself on it with a refined elegance and sealed the hatch. Mytheme lacked internal controls primarily as a security measure. It had once been a symbol and sign of the Crown itself, but only that, the military power of the state. Though it lacked much in the way of weapons, the mass of the craft, its extreme durability and high cruising speed meant it was a formidable and highly dangerous device in as of itself.

The magical field was different here. The ancient ribbing of the Mytheme, in truth worked fragments of the bones of Carnifex, interacted with the usual flow of potential energy, disturbing and disrupting the vacuum. Had anyone been looking with the right sort of eyes, they would have seen that, instead of the tell-tale impression on the quantum foam that indicated the presence normal matter, the parts which were alien produced the inverse, a negative pull on reality itself. Luna felt it as a general disquiet, so subtle that it had escaped notice and remembrance before now.

Within the chamber, however, the disquiet was obvious and oppressive. It was here that the patterns of disturbed force met, where irresistible magic had bound them a thousand years past. Whatever remained of the soul of Carnifex, this was where it now resided. Luna tugged out the activation rod and held it in front of her. The other half of Mytheme's security system kicked in. Ninety-nine individual fields of enchantment, sparse and unpowered, dormant though ready to respond, suddenly had a locus through which to interconnect. Magical potential flowed out of the void and into the matrices in the rod and, immediately, the many enchantments recognized each other.

Each one was fairly straightforward in its operation. They were split into pairs, forty-nine of them, and challenging one with the other produced a value, expressed in low frequency pulses. The final, ninety-ninth enchantment was more complex, only responding to the correct set of imputed values originating in the others proper, sequenced firing. This order was dictated by the exact method they were interconnected, provided by the activation rod's matrices. Like spider silk hung taught and covered in dust, the enchantments ticked over, power flowing through them. Each in turn reported the value derived from its pair.

Finally, the ninety-ninth received all that it needed, and carried out the fullness of its programmed intent, causing the activation rod to vibrate in a very specific way. As it began to vibrate faster, in a pattern of different intensities programmed by the sum of the decoding enchantments, the molecular structure of the rod changed. The redness faded to emerald green, then deep blue, almost purple. Luna licked her lips, pursed them, then whistled.

The molecular changes had opened up tiny pathways between the arrays of matrices in the rod, through which air now vibrated. In the ceiling and walls, sympathetic resonances began to take place, eventually disturbing piezoelectric crystals that powered shielded channels of copper, carrying the signal to the places deep within the hull where powerful binding magic kept Carnifex's bones largely inert. They unfolded, the binds unshackling the beast's skeletal remains that were now the skeleton of a far prettier thing. Magical energy surged into them,

Mytheme dropped slowly from its cradle. The same copper channels had ignited the gunpowder-filled restraining bolts keeping her secure. For a moment, the yacht seemed hang in the air, limited charge having been built up in the lifting bones, though still enough to slow an otherwise rapid fall. Then it landed with an almighty splash in the middle of the Spring, throwing up a huge spray of water and feathery mist. Luna barely felt a wobble. The yacht was immensely durable, and would shrug off blows that might have uncapped mountains, thanks to the four inches of diamond tiles that lined the exterior hull. Below the diamond shell was a layer of silver alloys, punctured with thin strands of copper. It was the silver that gave Mytheme her colour, but the diamond that would really make her soar.

Luna reached out with her magic, feeling for the two huge tubs of mercury that not only acted as ballast, but also as heat reserves. They were directly connected to the diamond tiles through thermocouples, as well as magically via the copper. She empowered them, forcing energy out of the vacuum and into the mercury. It could withstand over four thousand degrees of heating, enough for her purpose. The temperature began to spike. By the time the reserves reached two thousand five hundred degrees centigrade, the outer diamonds had risen to nearly four hundred.

Great plumes of steam bubbled and raced away from the hull as it floated in the Spring, collecting inside the cave, forcing the hanging granite slabs upwards. Pressure built and built, and the diamond continued to grow hotter. At one thousand degrees, the flow of new water into the spring was insufficient to prevent the boil off from drastically reducing its total capacity. All the steam, without anywhere to escape except down the courses of the underground rivers, now pushed against Mytheme's massive bulk. The yacht began to move, quickly picking up speed and rising above the level of the water.

As the high vaults of the cave vanished in favour of narrow tunnels, so did the water. The superheated nature of the exterior of the Mytheme had created a bubble around her. She rode the pressure like a cork in the neck of an impossibly long bottle of champagne, accelerating to tremendous speeds. Occasionally, the Mytheme would strike and completely vaporize a chunk of the tunnel wall. This was rare, however, as the huge but even pressure of the steam kept Mytheme suspended neatly in the middle, even as the course of the river meandered through the underbelly of Mount Avalon.

Eventually, the Spring of Avalon fed out of four main exits, which went on to trickle down into the hoof hills and water tables of most of the nation. The northern exit, near the Abraxisgate, consisted of a mossy aperture in a short cliff of granite, surrounded by a thick smudge of deciduous trees and grasses. The flow, usually very feisty, had increased to a hydraulic spray then, moments before Mytheme was ejected, erupted like a horizontal geyser. The silver bullet shook the water as it broke the sound barrier, vanishing toward the sky.

Luna concentrated, adding her own power to the frame as that imparted by the steam cannon faded away. Mytheme's worm-bones would keep her aloft, but without extra impetus they would drift like a rudderless boat in time with the whims of magic. It was a huge temptation to open the throttle as far as her divine nature would allow, and keep racing toward the heavens. She closed her eyes, feeling the world drift away below her. Mount Avalon was distant bowl, gleaming with magic, when she reigned Mytheme into a wide curve back, only having to telekinetically shift the nose around before aerodynamics took over and turned her.

Assisted by gravity, Mytheme's fall was even quicker than her ascent. Luna devoted most of her available power to slowing it in time, though they came in wickedly steep, the sounds of straining inertia damping enchantments filling the air with a harsh whine. She oriented herself on the Palace, imagining the walls and courtyards. After a moment's pause as she circled, to allow for anyone who might be in the way to clear space, she set Mytheme's long, smooth hull down in the gravel. Luna threw back her head and took a sharp, starting breath, gulped, then started laughing. Exhilaration, how I have missed thee! What speed, what form, what style, what grace!

Luna hopped up and unsealed the cockpit, nearly galloping down the corridor which lead to the lounge deck. Katabasis had wrapped Spike up in blankets, and they were cowering on one of the big chaise lounges. The orange stallion had received the blanket treatment too, but he remained where Luna had left him, in the middle of the floor and completely immobile.

“Ye starry foals!” Katabasis exclaimed, looking as though she had dropped about thirty years in age. “That was incredible!”

“Prepare for guests,” Luna said, as she swept past toward the access ports through the outer hull, preemptively flinging the big, heavy things open. “I didn't tell you earlier; we're evacuating the city.”

“Yes, your Majesty!”

Outside, a gaggle of nottlygna and other stunned onlookers gazed up at the Mytheme in wonderment. Little explosions and pings of shrapnel from rocks beneath the hull being overheated by contact with the still hot diamond tiles met Luna's hearing, and big wafts of steam and smoke gave her the impression that she was leaning out of a furnace. As soon as the nottlygna saw her a great cheer went up from everyone, and the batty things began to hop around and flap their wings with excitement.

“Greetings from Tartarus!” Luna shouted, and further cheering came in response, which had to die down before she could speak again. “Fetch ladders, ropes and climbing gear! Fetch satinal and wine!” Another cheer. “Fetch you some mares! A smaller cheer. “Fetch stallions!” A massive cheer, complete with wolf-whistles and laughter. “Fetch what you need, dearest ones, fetch up your wounded and your dead! They died gloriously, in the service of what is just and true! May we all have that honour!” More cheering. “We may be leaving and in retreat, but our tails are not between our legs! We have been hurt, yes, but not defeated! We have been bloodied, but we are not unbowed! Invictus! Get aboard, nottlygna! We shall return!”

Bugger Your Decorum!

“Bugger Your Decorum!”

Ponyville's long, humid summer day had come, quite without fuss, to its gentle end. The trailing rays of the last of the light had done their merry dances across the lawns and commons of the little town, and now a post-sunset lambency settled on the steeples and thatches, as if the day was entirely comfortable where it was, and wished to stay around for a bit longer. The cloak of night hurried the sprite away soon enough, however, and darkness fell.

All of the town's meticulously orchestrated weather schedules detailed a slow and turgid environment, with no wind to balm the brows of sleepers, progressing into more of the same until morning, at which point it would become insufferably hot again. Ponyville's denizens were just preparing for their fitful, broken sleeps, contemplating the risks of snoozing in ice boxes, and generally entreating the sandmare to bestow her loving touch, when a great and sphincter-clenching bang rolled through their very souls.

The tell-tale flash of lightning shortly followed the thunder, and all who saw it were too stunned and confused to question why it had not been the other way around. In that moment, a dozen angry letters were mentally quilled, ranting in explicit and outraged language as to the disruption in the schedule, of which the unannounced storm was surely a sign of. Some particularly eager complainants to the Crown had even begun to write them when the freezing rain started to fall, rising to a fever pitch in moments, lashing their windows and mudding up the roads and paths.

Weather Master Strati Form rode his captive cumulonimbus up through four kilometres of altitude, curving the feathery steed around with sharp twists of his wings. He stood resplendent on the crest, rain streaming over his shaven skin and taut muscles, surveying the work of his covert dramatists. DRAMA, he thought, sternly. No event is beyond our reach.

An ominous and doom-laden thunderhead slotted into place below him, shepherded by the expert ministrations of winged agents. It rippled with cloud-to-cloud lightning and gave off low rumbles, and was a fine specimen of the fateful species. When it entered the pathway set out for it, which howled with eye-stinging wind that caught the harmonics of buildings just so, producing a ghostly whisper, it sped up, flickering and throwing off the odd thunderbolt.

Strati Form grinned as it collided with the complex array of holding winds in the middle of the town, ensuring it would hold position in the centre and provide the maximum dousing of climatic and thematically appropriate weather. He unhooked his goggles, wanting to see with his own eyes. Getting down on his belly, he peered in the abyss.

A swirling and chaotic vortex of angry clouds, too disconnected and bizarre to be given names to or hope to put in any cloud atlas, tore at the rooftops, their rain discharges already creating the perfect muddy ground through which chases, desperate struggles and other grim events could easily take place with the grandest of aplomb. Lightning went off like cannon fire, replete with the thunder of those weapons. Any tumultuous speeches, sinister announcements or final conversations prior to titanic conflicts would be punctuated by it, and with a high chance of it happening at all the right moments.

Strati Form bit his lip and, though it was whipped away by the high-altitude gusts as soon as it fell, a tear rolled down his cheek. When they write the history of this day, they will say 'This was their finest hour'. If only we knew what all this was in aid of.

*

Berry Punch was staggering out of the Sneaky Stepladder, Ponyville's lone watering hole and a total dive bar of the kind she loved the most, when the rain commenced. The torrent was kept off her face and neck by the wide, rafetta brim of one of Punch Drunk's premier apparel products, the Goode Tymes Rolle On Forever Funbrero. Drinking straws dangled from it, swaying around near her mouth and dribbling Old Peculiar into the developing mud, and the slosh of the bottle that was slotted in under the crown was drowned out by peals of thunder.

She'd been drinking for most of the afternoon, and was in the full sails of a nicely drunken stupor. In all the excitement and rude songs being sung, she'd quite forgotten about the incident some time past where she'd presented a certain alicorn Princess with the formula to Nectar number one. Those memories came drifting back in a murky haze, followed by a sharp sting of lucid adrenaline when she realized. Berry Punch glanced up too quickly, sending the funbrero crashing into the mud.

Luna's tits! It's the end times! I've got to get moving! So much to do!

She broke into a zig-zagging gallop across the small park the Stepladder let out onto, putting on a real streak of speed and managing to fall over only the once.

*

“I'm genuinely concerned that there exists a...” Truth rolled her head, pausing for a moment as she searched for the right word. “Species, a certain type of pony, extant in Equestria, who enjoys engaging in this sort of bizarre proclivity.”

“Oh, come on, it's just a story, isn't it? Fantasy fiction, of a particularly grimy nature,” Emboss said, flicking through the pages of the book which his wife had found in their room. “On a Wing and a Neigh-er, even the title is a stupid joke.”

“I'm not convinced. What would you even call such self-destructive behaviour? Some extreme extension of the power play paradigm?” Truth sighed and continued to relax on the foredeck, the continuous magical exertions tiring her. “Mrs Spun Glass used to like that kind of romantic adventure, but it was all, you know, chains and whips.”

“I'm not sure that I do know, dear,” Emboss said, frowning disquietly. “Why would anyone want to be tied up and whipped? That just sounds scary and painful.”

“I'd hazard a guess on that being the point.”

“Well then, how is that any different to someone having a fantasy about...” He stopped rifling the pages halfway through the book, reading from it. “Right, here we are, a fantasy about having four gryphons, after they do their... well, you know, anyway, after they do that, eating you? It's just words on a page!”

“Darling, the thing here is that activities like what Mrs Spun Glass got up to are all safe, in the end, and they go to great lengths to make it so. You would never be happy just looking, just thinking about it, would you? No, you'd want to actually do it. There's no coming back from a locked room with a randy gryphon for we herbivores.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about chains and whips.”

“Don't I just?” Truth yawned and flicked her tail, rearranging her mane for the umpteenth time as the winds were constantly putting it out. “Agh, that bloody hippogryph knows nothing about navigation; the horizon is emptier than a nest in winter and it's got to be almost lunchtime.”

“I'll go see what the situation is,” Emboss said, eager for any excuse to end the conversation. “Back in a moment, sweetling.”

The hippogryph in question was sat further back on the deck of the Barely Eagle, emplaced on a big chaise lounge which the ship's zebra had brought up earlier, amidst much grunting and sweating. He was writing in a journal with some obvious aplomb, narrating the contents of his words with flicks of his head and clicks of his beak. His fountain pen had a band of gold and onyx around its copper construction, and several of the tungsten nibs that fitted into the bottom each, of course, with their own equally lavish embellishments, lay here and there on the rests and pillows of the sofa.

“I know what you're going to say,” he muttered, not looking up from the journal. “Oh, Astrapios, me old chum, why aren't we at Noble's Isle yet, when are we getting there?” He pulled off a pretty decent impersonation of Emboss' accent, itself strongly Cantish, which begged the question as to why he didn't put on a better one for regular use. “I'll tell you what my old cocksmaster used to say--”

“What?” Emboss said, furrowing his brow. “Cocksmaster?”

“Mid-level manager, bridges the gap between officers and the rank-and-file,” Astrapios said, tapping his pen on the paper. “Anyway, he used to say 'ye seas are a fykle beest, no hen norr cock norr mare norr stallion maye hope to tayme it.' ”

“I see, did he put on all the stresses on the archaic words too?”

“Seacock's flare!” Astrapios snapped, shaking his head. “Our culture is rich and storied.”

“So what you're saying is that you have no idea when we're going to arrive?”

“Soon,” he grunted, peering quickly up at the horizon. “Probably.”

“Probably!” Emboss huffed. “I'm not a mathematician, nowhere near it as a matter of fact, but I know how to work out time and velocity! Come on, all you need to know is where you are, how far away the place you're trying to get to is, and the speed at which you are traveling!”

“Well, if you hadn't set us going like a pony with an eel up his backside, I would know all of those things, but the fact of the matter is that I don't.” Astrapios set down his journal and stood up, puffing himself out to his full height, which wasn't very much at all. “So we'll get there when we get there, and you silly horses are going to have to like it, or you can bloody well lump it!”

“An eel?! Ye Gods!”

Astrapios grumbled and squinted at Emboss, then got back on his chaise lounge, making a show of rustling and resetting his feathers, as if to show how annoyed he was.

“First, my wife is on about gryphons rutting ponies, then eating them--”

“Oh, she read my book?” Astrapios suddenly beamed eagerly.

“--now you're on about eels in places where there should not be eels, not ever!”

“Did she like it? What did she think?”

“Ask her yourself! I've had enough of all you perverts!”

Emboss promptly stormed off, passing by the large central mast, which he had not yet, up to this point, noticed was shaped like a gigantic penis, originating species unknown, possibly fantastical, but very spiny indeed.

*

Twilight had given up on the uncooperative diamond dog, and now sailed aimlessly through the dry desert skies, unsure of where to go or what to do. So much of her fall and all the intervening parts were a blurred mess of half memories and sensations. She could not place them within the scope of her previous life experiences. They were alarmingly alien, and faded in and out of cognizance like a dream, remembered and forgotten. There was no way she could tell where Whom had come down and, for all she knew, the hapless pink thing was on another continent.

Worse still, her panniers were missing. This was intentional for, as sturdy as they were, they would not have survived the heat of their return. Only Twilight's magical nature had allowed her to remain intact, for a given definition of the word, and she silently beseeched any and all deities who might be listening that she had put in enough of the magical good stuff for Whom's protection to have gone the distance. What hadn't been intentional was the part where she'd fallen off. Poor mare, she will have learned to fly on the moon, not to mention walk. I wonder, if she was born in the normal manner, or rather hewn from some thaumic stuff. Both ideas raise more questions than they really answer. Perhaps she sprung fully formed from the void, bidden by a divine's will. That, perhaps, is more palatable than the idea she sprung from another void entirely.

Twilight had not been planning on doing much more with Whom, after dropping her off at home to be looked after and, if possible, kept far away from Luna, at least before she had a chance to stage manage that particular reunion. There was no telling how either would react, but Twilight knew that it would be a negative one for her pink friend. Whom had said and inferred a great many horrid and mysterious things in their short time together, and she had seen so much more in the way of grim madness, just in one part of the Nightmare's demesne. She had not visited the other fortress, which had towered so menacingly in the horizon when first she'd turned up on the moon. There would need to be a long process of decommissioning after all this was over, possibly spearheaded by a large number of geldings, or those with chronic empathy disorders.

Can one really 'decommission' an entire ecosystem? Maybe we'll have to abandon it all in place, end what suffering we can. We'll need to determine what is suffering first, though, and what is merely an illusion of it, and what amongst those awful things is quite happy doing what it is doing. I will write a book, I think. And I could fill three volumes just with what was in and about the Imbrium! Winking deer and giant squid. Ye star-drenched foals!

Now, however, Whom had her panniers or, at least, she was last seen with them. Twilight would surely find them in, near or possibly smeared over a large area around, the crash site, wherever that might be. Her idle scanning of the horizon suddenly picked up a brown blemish in the otherwise pristine and unchanging undulations of the massive and empty desert. Wadi. An area around the termination of a water course or natural spring. Bigger than an oasis, something like a tiny valley, and more common. Essential habitat for many specifically adapted species. Whom will want and need water. Even a silly filly like her will follow the urges of her biology.

The Princess winced as she put on speed, the alicorn nature simulating the pain such an action would have on an unaccustomed and untrained flier, even if no actual damage or strain to the muscle was occurring. It's as good a place as any to start looking.

*

Across the desert floor, a strange and improbable caravan of equinoid figures traced a determined and unwavering path. At the front of them was a mare with white fur so pure it seemed unreal, as though the Divine Artist had forgotten to add a colourscheme on this particular individual. Though her frame was slight, and was perhaps more familiar to an environment of luxury and little work, she carried nearly two hundred kilograms of weight in mismatched and well-worn panniers.

Behind her was a stallion, whose sire's sire had clearly been a zebra, as his stature was of those creatures; majestic and noble, every part of him an equation with purpose and meaning, even if it was too grand to see. Though he was a pony, little stipples of stripes in black and white betrayed his far ancestry up his barrel. Muscles slid and slipped over each other with each strident motion, and the chestnut of his coat had turned a warm cappuccino with two weeks of unshorn growth and the oppressive sun. He wore nothing, and was as naked as the day he was born, despite the heat mandating something at least to cover the head.

Last in their convoy was a minotaur. These supposed monsters came in many shapes and sizes; some were towering copies of their ancient selves, vast and brick-like. Others were tiny and lithe. They were not meant for the world, and were a late addition. Their genetics were confused and messy, giving rise to so many apparent species, clades and other categories that little serious academic work had yet been undertaken to place them in Equestria's kingdoms of life. Science still awaited some gifted genius, of a kind found once in ten generations, to tackle that bastard of a binomimachy.

He walked upright, muscular head and shoulders swaying gently with his gait. Unusually for his kind he wore a collection of clothes, none of which were from the same fashionista or design house. Leathers and hemp of no fewer than eight different colours fought for space around his tubular midsection, along with cotton bandoliers, map tubes, pots and pans, water gourds, and so on. His big cloven hooves were not as stable a platform as the wider pony hooves of his compatriots, and so he had on a pair of wide-soled shoes, allowing him to keep pace.

“This is a bastard thing, Lus!” the minotaur bellowed, suddenly, in a language very few would have recognized or even have heard before, spoken in deep and mellow tones with harsh notes, like honey being mixed with nails. “We should have found Boundless Joy by now!”

The mare walking at the front turned and shot him a gaze that might have turned the sand into black glass had its vitriol not been poured into the minotaur's frame.

“I know that! Don't you think I know that, Lap?” Lus said, her voice tense and strung out, every word an effort of immense will. “Shut your stupid mouth and keep moving!”

“We've had nothing to eat in two weeks! I can barely move my mouth, let alone my legs!” Lap said, too plaintively than what might have been expected for something of his size.

“Lads...” the stallion in the middle said, distractedly.

“Oh, and you think I don't feel hungry too?” Lus said, growling. “I wish I could eat you!”

“Lads!”

“What?” Lus spat, through clenched teeth. “What is it Auks?”

“There's a pink horse over there.”

Everyone turned to look in the direction that Auks indicated with his nose. About half a kilometre away on the top of a sand dune there was indeed a pink equine. It was heading straight for them, leaping and bounding up into the air for a few seconds of flight before crashing back down again in a big puff of sand. The extreme pinkness cast a bizarre reflective glow over the desert, like a miniature sun was setting. It was obvious that she was very enthusiastic about wherever it was she was going, just judging by how often she simply dragged herself back up on her hooves and carried on.

All three of them immediately stopped and sighed with tremendous relief. They stood panting, waiting for her to come to them.

“Greenie moves in mysterious bloody ways!” Lus shouted, laughing. “Food, glorious food!”

“I want its lingering adoration for the same gender!” Lap said, eagerly racing off away from his peers, the patience of moments ago vanishing rapidly. “Calling it now, closeted homosexual feelings!”

“Hey, wait for me!” Auks whinnied, breaking into a pained canter. “You can't have that bit, that's my favorite bit!”

“The Aleph always gets the first taste!” Lus snarled, chasing the stallion and the minotaur. “Just because we've been in a survival situation doesn't mean we can piss all over decorum!”

“Bugger your decorum, right up the bum!” Lap laughed. “I'm hungry!”

*

Noble's Isle appeared on the horizon just after the sun had begun to climb down from its zenith. Smoke and other signs of life had come first, shortly after which the smudged, hoof-shaped brown of the central volcano appeared. Crouched around it were traces of green, but the strikingly black caldera dominated. It was a kernel of life and dryness in a massive pond. Dotted along their approach were the white sails of caravals and the ochre of dhows, which they rapidly overhauled.

The sea life was denser here, and many pods of dolphins jumped in and out of the waves, bullying shoals of fish and lone squids, as well as the ubiquitous orange flyers. Birds of the littoral waters followed the dolphins, eager to snap up the extra prey. Occasionally, there was a glimpse of a giant reef deep below the waves, a whole pastel array of pinks and oranges. There was no apparent risk of striking them, though. The draft of the Barely Eagle was already small, and with the extra speed they'd lifted out of the water somewhat.

Emboss hadn't devoted much time to moping about being trapped on a ship of perverts. They had, after all, thrown in with them in a great hurry, and beggars could not be choosers, even if they were paying for the ride. He'd come back on deck, vaguely sullen and hoping not to be noticed, just as Astrapios was launching into a little speech on the history of the island. He held himself all proud and officious on the prow of the Barely Eagle, tail wagging its fuzzy fly whisk ball around.

“--which of course, is as good a reason as any, I think, to found an island out here,” he said, laughing at his own, unheard joke.

“But what did Celestia want with all that salt?” Truth said, looking eager to take a proper break from magically impelling them. “Equestria has so many salt mines. They won't run dry for decades, and even if they do we can just dig new ones. There are whole stretches north of the capital that haven't ever been prospected, let alone exploited. I know that we don't use so much, and the gryphons don't need it for storage, they eat all their food fresh.”

“Maybe she just buries it again somewhere else. Maybe its a tax dodge. Maybe she sells it to the zebras in exchange for illegal and exotic life sustaining elixirs. Tartarus, maybe she's stashing it all in the basement.” He grinned. “Nobody really knows for certain where the salt goes,” Astrapios said, letting the intended mysterious tone hang in the air. “Or rather, went, because about two hundred years ago, the Crown sold this whole island chain to the Independent Guild of Hircine Interests, for the nominal sum of one bit. Gretsch Nobeard himself delivered it to Celestia's own hooves, and that, as they said, was that.”

“I've never heard of the Independent Guild of Hircine Interests,” Truth said, furrowing her brow.

“Goats, my dear, but also the sheep and other close relatives,” Astrapios said, as though it were a bit of a dirty word. “They'll take anyone these days, though. They used to be an ethnically pure trading house, with some extracurricular activities in the areas of freebooting, piracy and smuggling, which is basically just a sort of trading anyway. Minotaurs are especially fond of this place. The common perception is that Celestia didn't want them to integrate any more closely with pony society, which they'd been merrily doing for about five centuries, though in a very slow and gradual way.”

“What changed? To think of it, I can't recall ever seeing a goat or a sheep. Are they... you know, like us?”

“Somewhere between us and your bovines, I'd say.” Astrapios clicked his beak a few times, a gesture Emboss didn't recognize. “Though they might just be different. As for what changed, their birth rates skyrocketed. Celestia exported them, though they were and are still convinced it was their own decision to diaspora. It's a considerable matter of local pride, actually. Don't mention any of this when we're on the island. Implying that Celestia had any serious influence on their nation building is the quickest route to a black eye around here.”

“A little history lesson, eh?” Emboss said, slipping in between his wife and the hippogryph and nuzzling her by way of greeting.

“Hello, love,” Truth said, touching him back.

“So the Guild runs the island as a fiefdom, the chief of which runs all the way back to Nobeard down the male line, but they also have the port of Pronto, which is where we're going. That's a Special Economic Zone which the fiefdom taxes as a whole, operated by all their family members.” Astrapios squinted at the approaching island. “It's pretty complicated, but they do have the only bit of useful territory between Equestria and the broodlands. Considering how rapidly trade has been picking up this last decade, I think they're in a fantastic position.”

“Special Economic Zone sounds like a euphemism for something,” Emboss said, flicking his head warily. “Something gross and fetid, possibly performed in a dark alleyway in exchange for bits or bottles of grog.”

“It's just a freeport, lad, but it does mean the port isn't subject to any of the island's regular laws, nor is there a jurisdiction held by the chief's thief takers over it. That allows them to freely shrug their shoulders and do nothing, claiming their hooves are tied, if they get extradition requests or anything of the sort. That's why it's so popular with outcasts.” The hippogryph smiled suddenly, which was still quite unsettling for the equines. “And golden retrievers, of course.”

“Golden retrievers?” Emboss said. “As in, the breed of dog?”

“Yes indeed, there's a whole wild colony of them on the island. Nobody's really sure how they got there or why they like it so much, but they are a sight to see.”

“Aww!” Truth cooed, eyes widening with excitement. “Really?”

“Thousands of the buggers. Don't get me wrong, I like a good dog, but when you're as little as I am, a really big one can pose a bit of a problem.”

“Oh, gosh, I suppose so,” Truth said. “Are they friendly, then?”

“Absolutely, the goats wouldn't tolerate them otherwise. Pronto is a peaceful enough place, and the port police have a no nonsense attitude to the enforcement of the pax pronto. In other places, Equestria for example, if you offend society's ideals...” He paused, laughing under his breath. “Either the mob gets you or, if you're lucky, the local guard gives you a swift kicking then fines you for good measure. For worse stuff, it's the regional Assizes and a date with a judge.”

“Don't they have a legal system in Pronto then?”

“If you come to the attention of the police there, they throw you in the harbour.”

“What?” Truth frowned in confusion. “No more complex judicial system? What if I murder someone, or rape, crimes like that?”

“That is the punishment for any and all offenses. A big team of burly goats, minotaurs and ponies will grab you by the scruff of the neck and chuck you in the harbour. They'll continue doing this until you get the hint and bugger off. Or drown. Or are eaten by sharks.”

“What about the people who live there? Surely they don't expect them to swim a thousand miles to serve exile?”

“Nobody lives in Pronto,” Astrapios said, shaking his head. “Locals are guild locals, they go back home at the end of the day, or rather, to sleep, regardless of the actual time. People stay there, sure, but never permanently. It's so the fiefdom can keep the outside world at hoof's length, whilst still scraping every bit we have out of us.”

“We should get a dog, honey,” Truth said. “Maybe a beagle, or a golden retriever. Oh, what about a labrador? Those are really great, one of my manedresser's friend's sisters breeds them as a hobby. We could probably get a deal on a pup or two.”

“Whatever for? Are you feeling broody again already?” Emboss looked faintly concerned and quite uncomfortable, as if he'd just sensed some swollen spider crawling up his spine. “I think I'm more of a cat person myself.”

“Because they're adorable, that's why. A mare's best friend, or so they say.”

Astrapios snorted mirthfully and shook his head, drifting away from them in order to stifle himself.

“I'm going to rig the sails for entry to the port,” he said. “Please cut the power to your spell whenever you are ready, or we shall be dashed on the rocks and eaten by stray golden retrievers.” He turned and winked. “They have right of first salvage around these parts.”

Truth nodded and dug her back hooves into the deck, closing her eyes. Emboss stood back, allowing her some room. Magical discharges loved commingled unicorn pairs to jump between in order to even out the unnatural buildup, which was why romantic magic was often so risky, or at least one of the reasons. She gasped and began to writhe in place, as if someone was rubbing a silk swatch over her teeth, or scraping their hooves down a blackboard.

Emboss felt harmonic interference fill the thaumic band, the roots of his own horn twisting and producing that same silk on teeth feeling. He winced, but then it was over. His wife sighed pleasurably, as if in deep relief. She began to pant, recovering from the sustained effort. At the same time, the Barely Eagle very noticeably slowed down, a great spray of warm, salty water shooting up over the stern and drenching them.

He let off a very unstallionly squeak of surprise, but Truth just shook herself off and laughed at him, then folded herself around his neck in a gentle hug. Above them, the complex mechanisms of the automated rigging system kicked into life, taut hemp ropes and copper pulleys rattling and straining. They began to haul over left, pointing the prow toward the island. The big sail with the crouching gryphon hen on it rolled neatly up with a series of zipping noises, the action of which released the catches on the smaller, tighter sails that would catch the littoral winds better.

Emboss peered up at the whirling, twirling devices and machines that ran everything. He suddenly caught sight of the spiny protrusions that ran up the oddly conical main mast. As soon as he noticed what it was, he groaned and buried his head in his giggling wife's mane in dismay.

Wadi, Weni, Wedi

Port Pronto was an awful cauldron of mixed up life. Emboss had first smelled the place on the wind, and all at once a sensation of horrific dread came over him. Some deep-dwelling part of his psyche, inherited from his tarsier-like ancestors, squealed mute warnings of danger and death. It was the stink of abandoned mortuaries in the depths of tartarus, marinaded in excrement and used underwear. It stung the eyes and settled on his tongue and up his nose, coating them with a fine layer. There was no way that a city of living beings could smell this bad. An awful accident must have happened. Emboss had just been imagining some kind of disaster in a fishery, which was located next to a sewage farm and an abattoir, when the island had enveloped them.

Now, they sailed into Noble Isle's single wide bay, which looked like a great, slightly bent foreleg in white and green, with a massive cancerous tumor at the knee where the port itself beckoned. Eight rocky wharfs jutted some way out across the mouth of an artificial channel, which ate up the beach for about half a mile on either side. Dense jungle crowded up every available space, leaving only a narrow strip of sand. Flights of odd blue birds and more of the harmonious symbiote aviforms filled the sky, cawing and trilling. Gentle breezes assailed them from the fore, bringing physical washes of the stench onto them, but yet they kept moving forward, despite having no obvious motive power.

“We're in the harbour current now,” Astrapios said, sitting down on the foredeck and watching, apparently entirely unconcerned by the horrendous odour, whilst Emboss was busy considering how many ways he could remove his entire olfactory gland without killing himself. “There's a sort of big waterfall under the port, which draws from the bay. That's why they put the harbour here. Grates on the far side stop you going all the way, but there's a bottomless pit below the waterfall they use for waste disposal.”

“A bottomless pit?” Truth exclaimed, incredulously.

“Yeah, that's why it smells so sanitary!” Astrapios said, laughing.

There were, as promised, packs of golden retrievers. They milled around on the wharf sides, slipping gracefully between the goats and sheep who filled the inevitable roles of a dock. Emboss found himself staring at the lithe little creatures, who occasionally flashed him startling stares with their bizarre horizontal eyes that seemed lifeless and devoid of soul. They babbled in a mellifluous language full of grating, three part harmonies that turned speaker into speakee in a matter of moments. Emboss had always been a fond student of languages, at least as far as they applied to given names, but this one evaded him. Even from the ship he could hear it.

There seemed to be no reasonable structure of vowels, or many phrases repeated. He saw identical actions performed with accompanying completely different sounds, saw those narrow, fuzzy muzzles, always complete with neatly-plaited beards, speak at one second barking, guttural tones and beautiful, slithering golden words that felt as though they might have been spoken by angels. Unlike in Equestria, where basically every person who wanted to get by spoke Equuish, or a variant on the theme, and where the lingo of the state was basically just Equuish with lots of -iums, here it was a madhouse.

Emboss caught strains of the more recognizable Ald Gryphic, something he thought was a dead language, but a properly, well and truly dead language, not like Old Equuish or Old High Equuish, which were the shambling, shuffling corpses of languages, and which certain entities tended to forget was no longer the done thing. There was the zebric tongue too, curiously being spoken by the sheep, who were another fascinating sight in themselves.

There were far fewer of the fat, muscular creatures trotting about on the wharfs, usually hauling improbably large loads or sitting around twelve-hosed hookah pipes at the bottoms of gangplanks, sucking down great lungfuls of lavender smoke and grinning like a gryphon with a mouse. Most, like the goats, were shaven mercilessly close, though some boasted fuzzy coats. Equestrians were far less restricted, and it wasn't uncommon to see a few inches of fur on the rougher, less urban sorts back home.

As the Barely Eagle nosed up the channel and between the wharfs, more of the port proper came into view. Where the deep and fast moving furrow ended in a mammoth aggregation of half-moon grates, the city began, perched on top of a very solid looking embankment of smoothly worn stone bricks, dotted with mooring posts. The fronts of businesses that looked very much like those they'd seen on the wharfs in Port Dauphine, that is to say very seedy and vice-oriented, loomed up. For a moment it seemed like they would crash into the end, but just in time to quell Emboss' growing urge to stampede, another of the boat's automated systems kicked in and sent up a juddering rattle of iron, which was punctuated by a single weight sploosh.

The anchor caught the boat and arrested it a few metres from the end of the dock. There were straining and pinging noises as the current continued to pull at them, but whatever the anchor had stuck fast on was very sturdy. Immediately, goats who had, unawares to Emboss, been following their progress along the dock now leapt up onto the deck from standing positions. There were thunks and bangs as they landed, merrily and industriously going about the task of mooring. They seemed to have an arrangement with the hippogryph, as Astrapios paid them only the mind of a boss surveying the work of employees.

The noise of the port was perhaps worse than the smell, in retrospect. Emboss had never heard such a din, not even in the shadier parts of Canterlot. Equestria's primary emigres were gryphons, who made a lot of odd cawing noises sometimes, especially if they got into fights, but were otherwise very quiet, or the zebras and minotaurs, who between them must have been having some ethnic whom-can-be-silent-and-mysterious-the-longest competition, as they rarely even spoke. If there was any truth to what Astrapios had said about Celestia organizing the diaspora of these goats and sheep, and Emboss had no trouble at all in believing it, for once he agreed with her decision.

There was an added bonus of pheromones in the air on the dock, which hadn't been detectable from further away over the high malice of rotting fish, decaying linen and who knew what else. Most of them were alien, passingly related to the many equine smells with which Emboss was familiar, but there were certainly ponies here. Many of them were in heat, or had been recently. He bit his lips to still the reflexive sensory gesture, mostly out of manners, but also out of pure fear. There was no telling what a mare from these parts would do to him if he showed even the slightest interest, but what he did know was what his wife would do, and it involved nearby sharp objects and his most treasured physical possessions.

“Pronto is a bit dangerous for equines,” Astrapios said, climbing up on the edge of the boat and perching himself there. “Especially the uninitiated. I would stay aboard if I were you.”

Without waiting for a reply, he jumped onto the dock. Behind Emboss, the twin shapes of the gryphon hens loomed, and they said very little as they followed their half-breed compatriot, every step and twist of their lithe frames in weirdly perfect synchrony. Their whole demeanor had changed. They weren't the sexually charged, totally in control figures of massive power they had been before. Now, a far more primal shadow stalked with them, mirroring their movements twice again. It took Emboss a beat to realize what was going on.

They were hungry.

*

“Something has just occurred to me,” Truth said, between mouthfuls of Emboss' fur, busy with grooming him as he did the same for her. “We left all of our maps and such in Port Dauphine.”

“Foal's knees!” he spat, shuffling for a little extra space in the cramped communal wash room, which was so crammed with endless bizarre accoutrements apparently related to the personal hygiene of gryphons, as well as a very stately gold-heaving bathtub, that it barely fitted two adult ponies inside. “At least we had what was in the day panniers. Lucky we were carrying the money, if nothing much else.”

“How much of the route can you recall?” Truth picked up a thankfully equine coat brush in her magic and started following the line of her nibbling along his withers. “I wonder if they take Equestrian coin?”

“Astrapios didn’t seem to mind it. Though I suppose he is partially Equestrian. First, we track inland via Gruntz and Wulfa, then to the capital, oh... what was it called...”

“Half-way up the slopes of that big mountain?”

“That's the one. Then, we go down. Gryphons dig deep themselves, but we have to find the heartland zebrics.”

“Dunya's grandsire, right?”

“Great-grandsire, actually. We find him, tell him the story.”

“What if we can't?”

“Then this whole thing will have been for nothing,” Emboss said, softly sighing as he enjoyed the mutual grooming session, which they'd needed to take after the grimy feel of the city had somehow invaded their very bones.

Truth nudged him and smiled coyly, setting down the brush.

“We are alone aboard now, you know...”

“Again? Is there something in the water on this ship?”

Emboss' question was lost in the feeling of what she did with her mouth next.

*

Mytheme was full of nottlygna. They crowded every available space, sitting on top of each other’s withers and curled up around one another, filling it with their smells, their laughter and their general merry spirit. The constant feeling that it might, at any moment, explode into an orgy, was very palpable. This was exactly how Luna liked it. This was what she privately referred to as terminalia, the feeling of being on the edge, an about-to-be state of mind. When stallions reared up and mounted, this was what they felt. It was transition, but not only transition, but the beautiful, wonderful, euphoric period of becoming something truly magical.

There were many slang phrases for this, but they only captured a certain aspect of it. The concept had a multifaceted surface, but all boiled down to a kernel that embodied the passage state. The Hidden Delight was that figurative, though perhaps also literal, kernel. Luna liked to imagine that minds engaged in terminalia were, in some sense or other, touching and becoming one with her demesne. There was another demesne once. On the moon. Twilight will see it. Has seen it. She will see what you did and hate you.

Luna paused as she trotted down one of the port corridors, jarring to a halt as she tried to process the errant thought. It was as though a suitor had whispered it in her ear, just out of her peripheral vision. She closed her eyes and shook her head. It was just another errant burbling of the distant past. Her memories of the fight with Carnifex had been embellished in the recollection, some parts distorted as though for dramatic effect. She was sure of that at least, as when the memories had settled in they’d lost their mythic hue, becoming more staid and placid.

Spike had ceased his babbling and calmed down, returning toward that usual chatty, intelligent mood which Twilight Sparkle often wrote about. As Luna had predicted, he was busy forgetting about his time within the null-area. He was chewing on a chunk of basalt and being made a fuss of by the nottlygna foals, as well as his new nursemaid. The young ones were absolutely fascinated by the appearance of the dragon, let alone one that could talk, and Spike in return was very pleased at the attentions of a rapt audience. He was telling them the story of how he and Twilight Sparkle, though it was mostly him, had defeated the Sombre King and allowed the foundation of the Crystal Empire. Stubby black tails and little wings flipped and flapped idly as they listened.

“Did the Sombre King really keep them all in chains?” said one, a rather stocky specimen with bigger than normal ears and a burgundy scarf wrapped firmly around his neck.

“Yes, he did, the entire nation was under bondage,” Spike pontificated, placing his wrists together to illustrate the point. “But the Princesses put an end to that when they launched the Campaign of Northern Terrors, which disrupted the Sombre King, who was also called the Brigand-King of the North. Eventually, they managed to penetrate the High Weave Wall and gained access to the capital of the Empire itself, and then it was all over very quickly.”

“But how did they make new foals if they were in chains all the time?” the stocky nottlygna said, a look of puzzlement on his face.

“Uh.. well…” Spike said, gulping suddenly. “That’s probably a question for your dam or sire!”

“What’s a dam or sire?” said another one, who was lithe like a draught excluder made of black velvet, and of that young age when nottlyngas became quite androgynous.

Luna smiled pleasantly as she passed by, heading for the entry ramp. She elected to float for this portion, drawing her legs up tightly and mantling her wings, as though she was a leaf drifting on an ethereal current. This wasn’t usually the done thing, because it tended to remind everyone who saw it that they were dealing with an entity that was, all in all, very alien when compared to those whom they oversaw. The nottlygna didn't seem to mind on this occasion.

The lading procedures were going with a rapid, chaotic fury. The self-organizing nature of nottlygnas at work was evident; though no dockmasters or anything of the sort were present, chains of individuals had coalesced into long bands stretching out of the Welcome Hall, tossing along kit bags, crates, bottles of wine and an infinitude of needed things with little bumps of the withers, curls of the wings or wholesale mouth action. Others flew over their heads in long arcs, loaded up with panniers, who fought with yet others for space to access the yacht itself.

Yacht was probably something of an understatement. Mytheme had been designed for a purpose much like this one, though with a larger number of equines in mind, and in greater style. Between the four massive state lounges, forty grand bedrooms and ninety-nine assorted ballrooms, drawing rooms and dining halls, they would not lack for space. Nottlygna did not sleep alone in any case. Their insular nature and certain atavistic traits in their psychology, brought out in them in their creation, meant they favored the herd in all aspects of life.

Just as Luna settled by the access way that was seeing the most use, she felt a tug at the base of her spine. It was slight, only a gentle thing indeed, but very insistent. She set her hooves down on the immaculate rug floor, which was quickly being mashed into a muddy, gravel-pocked mess by the troupes passing over it, then turned her head.

It was the velvet draught excluder foal, who now had the appearance of a little ferret which had just succeeded in extricating a delicious insect from a tree stump, resolute determination on soft features, sable eyes narrowed around a dappled black-on-slate muzzle. It spat out the tip of her tail, which made an disquiet throbbing sound as it folded back beneath spacetime where it belonged, having been rudely drawn out of its nest there and forced to behave like an actual tail, made of real hair. Luna smiled warmly, to settle any divine fears the scrap might have.

“Princess Luna,” he said, the lower notes in his lilting and slightly breathless voice betraying gender. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes,” she stated, simply, adopting a tone she hoped would imitate that of her sister, the one she used when teaching the multitude of her intellectual progeny.

“Spike the Dragon just said something that made me wonder.”

“What was that?”

“Where do we come from?”

“Why, small one, surely you know?” Luna said, laughing with confusion. “The act of lust--”

“Not that, I know all about that!” He shook his head and frowned. “Where do nottlygna come from, you know, at the beginning, in the first--”

--of your kind, but you will soon be joined by others,” the Selenite Princess spoke, in a voice of lilting, honeyed power, its gentle and persuasive motes dancing in the sapphire-pocked beams of near-blinding ultraviolet that penetrated the Court. “You seven will be the scions of a new race, another beginning for this nation.”

“Our foals are already ponies, your Majesty, even if they are not yet out of us and in the world, they were made of pony and pony, and will also be,” said one of the quiet shapes that lay nearly prostrate on the luxuriously padded flooring. “I think I speak for all of us when I say that I do not understand...”

“They are, but can also be more, if you will offer your ascent,” Selene Imperatrix said, lifting her head to look down on the speaker.

“You have it, for we are yours now and always--”

--telling me that I shouldn't mind about things like that!” the lithe foal whinnied. “So, where do we come from?”

Luna didn't have time to answer, as the lounge burst into a roaring rendition of Dark Skies Are Headed Here Tomorrow. She stared at the child, lost in the intensity of the memory that had just returned to her. Her gaze seemed to put him off, because he made a noise like a mouse being trodden on and half-fell, half-galloped, back to the safety of the herd. Luna's divine heart began to race. Assumptions and things which she had held as fact began to interfere with each other. Her internal train of thought collided with a mountain top, but the mountain was black as night and hewn from a single block of jet, full of dirty little secrets.

I made them, she managed to think. But not from the vacuum. They did not spring, fully formed and squeaking, from the void. I bent them! Made new shapes. Took ponies and made new ones. Why didn't I remember before now? There are holes! I see absence, irrational loops with missing parts where rationality should be. Are these my memories, or some false thing? What can I trust, what must be set aside? Who has meddled with my thoughts and made me so? What faith, then, am I to hold of all that is inside my head, and not merely these memories? Whose hoof is on the tiller? What creature, what force, what inglorious beast would dare to trick a God?

*

Twenty-five thousand tons of Imperial train, a lurid and bloody pink sausage of aerodynamically smooth crystal, slunk around the Helicon that brought it slithering up the inclines of Mount Avalon. All around the carriage was devastation. Fires raged through fields and gutted houses, taverns and the other aspects of the conurbation that was outside the city proper. That which was not on fire was flattened, ground into pieces like the refuse at the bottom of the Divine Artist's pestle. The track was littered with ruin, but the train had been designed to plow through drifts of snow a hundred metres deep, and cared little for even whole remnant granite and marble chunks, throwing them aside with ease.

Shining Armour and his wife stared in mute horror, jaws agape, unable to say a word to each other, right up until the train slipped into the grandly-mantled tunnel that carried the twin track around the mountain through the caldera wall, and all fell away into darkness. All at once, the spell was broken, and the praetorian guard began a wild cacophony of activity as they bustled into the imperial carriage, taking up their defensive and offensive positions in delayed form, all clanking armor and low grunts and the cocking-on-the-ground of withers crossbows.

Blue and white gas lights on the interior of the tunnel wall slipped by, occasionally throwing bright strobe flashes in through the windows to complement the cool orange glow of the luminite embedded in the carriage walls, neat brocades of the stuff in swirling patterns.

“There must have been an accident,” Cadence said, limply. “In the liftgas stores, or of some magical nature.”

“We would have felt a magical incident,” Shining Armor said, sitting back in his seat, body aching somewhat from the stress position he'd been holding as he stared, transfixed on the vista of destruction. “We set down one nasty for another!”

“We shall help. There will not be a mouth in the city unfed, a flank uncovered in the rain, nor foal abandoned for want of a dam,” Cadence said, chill determination mixing with the shock.

“Let us see what we can do, and what will be politik to do, for all we know now is that we know nothing, and Celestia may – will – have her own plans.”

“The train is not an unobvious sight, especially on the last approach. It concerns me that she has sent no greeting party, or else come out to meet us herself, especially with this, whatever it is, going on.”

“We have come unannounced, and with not even an inkling of our visit. Likely, she is in her tower, plotting the rescue of her people.”

“Maybe she will have devolved the task to your sister,” Cadence said, hopefully. “Or otherwise employed her in it. Sky knows, she has not had a chance to flourish.” She unmantled her wings carefully and fluttered the tips. “It would be so nice to see her work again. She changed somewhere along the way. Not the little filly for whom I cared. Sad, you know? Depressed in mood and distant too.”

“Let us see, Cadence,” Shining Armour muttered. “Let us see.”

*

Twilight glided over the wadi, straining the air through her nose. Lush vegetation and big, flat stretches of shallow water provided many scent clues, but none of them were equine, let alone that belonging to Whom. Having spent hours with her in the sphere, it would be an obvious track. Giant white birds, which she vaguely recognized from her biological studies, fled in disarray as she passed overhead. Looming Bezoar palms, pregnant with their heavy purple dates, flashed past as she went lower, searching for visual clues as well.

On a bank, she found what she was looking for at last. Little dances of hoof prints impressed into the mud, a familiar scent pocked with floral overtones that was undoubtedly Whom and, if that was somehow not enough, a single outrageously pink feather, drifting on the gently lapping surface of the wadi's water. There was a gaggle of flies and other small creatures around it, as though this bizarre interloper to their normal world was a real sight. Pink swan incident, she thought, gurgling with laughter at her own joke as she looped around the traces of Whom a few times, looking for leads.

It was clearly not within Whom's abilities to fly for very long, as might befit a creature raised in one third of Equestria's gravity. Twilight soon found evidence of great lolloping strides up and nearby falls out of the sky. They pointed out of the wadi in a counterintuitive direction, which she surmised was North based on the position of the sun. Depressions in the sand followed by spaces and lots of scrabbling hoofprints showed her the way.

After about half a kilometre, the wadi faded away. The green blush of fecundity only spread as far as the water would go. The firmer earth with patches of mud turned into the wickedly hot sand that typified the desert. It was here that Whom seemed to have given up on the idea of flying at all, for the last, oversized crash had a lot of belly marks, flowing into a single meandering track of hoofprints.

Twilight flapped her wings and ascended, clearing ground level in moments. Whom could not have gotten very far by hoof, and in such an open and unbroken landscape it would only be a matter of a little altitude. Anxiety rushed up in her as her height increased, a sort of cloying fear that is found in little foals who have heard a strange noise and are unable to do anything else but open the door or tread down the stairs to see what is there, knowing that it must be awful but incapable of other actions.

She had read many stories that took place in the desert, and some knowledge had distilled by that avenue, but she had also devoured tomes on surviving there. They all placed great importance on the idea of keeping a slow pace and sheltering one's head and body from the sun's merciless rays. Whom might have had the appearance of an immortal alicorn Princess, Deus Equine, but was as feeble and capable of harm as a babe, or any other living being. Galloping through the desert would be fatal for her in short order, if it had not been so already.

Not only would Twilight likely never find her, not even her corpse for passage into whatever rituals might be applied to a creature like Whom, and she had many ideas on what those might entail, but Twilight would never get back her beloved panniers, nor the materials they contained. With the Selenite Principality destroyed, or at least rendered inaccessible for the time being, the source of the fragile floral ingredient she had secured there was gone. Without Whom she would also need to fight a Giant Squid and, though she might just be able to ask, would prefer not to have to get to the moon again.

Against the yellow, buttery dun colouration of the forever-flowing desert, the errant moon mare's coat worked in her favour yet again. Almost exactly twelve kilometres from the edge of the wadi, Twilight laid eyes on a little conglomeration of black and white around a ferociously pink blob. She impelled herself closer and closer, pulling into her mind spells that would condense water from the air, what little moisture there was, as well as those which would attend to hyperthermia, sunburn and a number of other maladies that she imagined might have befallen Whom. Without the limitations of the vacuum, and an atmosphere to dispense with the excess thaumic heat, there would be little restriction on what she could cast.

The unknown qualities of the black and white parts of the vision she beheld focused more properly as she approached. They were distorted and bent about by the rising heat, shimmering and shifting. The moment that she caught glimpses of a stocky figure, tall and bipedal, she immediately added to her collection of passive and beneficial spells with those of a more fighty nature. There would be no electroplating magic this time. Collapsing walls of telekinetic pressure would compress organics, crushing ribcages and puncturing organs with bone splinters. If they had so much as displaced one hair of that pink coat or put one ridiculous eyelash out of place, they would cease to exist.

When Twilight was a kilometre away, she realized that the three were not diamond dogs, but a minotaur and two ponies, a mare and a stallion. They were lying immotile in the sand, legs at strange angles. Whom was sat in the middle of them in the shade of one of Twilight's emergency umbrellas, sides weighed down with panniers, facing away.

“Whom!” she bellowed, as soon as she was within earshot.

“Twilight!” the moon mare squeaked, dropping the gourd of water she was drinking from and spinning around.

“Are you okay?” Twilight said, landing on the sand with a little more ferocity that was really required and immediately breaking into a run without missing a step. “What happened here?”

“I don't know!” Whom whinnied, suddenly curling up and receding into herself as she seemed to notice the situation again. “We were just talking and then suddenly they... they...”

“Heatstroke?” Twilight pulled into a quick loop of Whom, glancing back and forth at the bodies, none of whom showed any signs of life. “Maybe we can help them, hang on.”

Twilight stopped beside the pale white mare, whose eyes were rolled up in her head. Her jaw bit into the sand, filling her mouth with it, as though she had fallen with it open and not made any efforts since then. She grasped her by the withers, shaking her roughly and sensing through the thaumokinetic feedback for a pulse. There was none. Her body was very hot, too hot in fact, but that was to be expected. Her chest was still, and she did not breathe. Twilight suddenly sniffed something odd around her. It was like lamp oil that had been poured all over a compost heap, mixed with the acrid notes of bile. Her instincts pricked up and her ears flared back.

“Changelings!” she gasped, recoiling. “Recently fed, but a little too much.”

“Oh, those bug things that attacked Canterlot?” Whom said, drawing the umbrella closer with twinges of her magic, gripping so tightly the wooden stem crunched. “I read about them in a magazine...”

“Whom, what were you talking about with them when they died?”

“I was just so excited to meet them,” she choked out, through sudden keening sobs. “I told them everything, how we got here, how much I was looking forward to seeing Equestria, how they were the first normal ponies I'd ever met, then the big one started coughing and making this most horrid sound and they all fell down!”

“Love overdose!” Twilight said, laughing and shaking her head. “We hypothesized about it after the whole changeling coup attempt fiasco, but I never thought I'd see it actually happen!”

“You mean... I did this?” Whom looked mortified, as if she had just told her about her kitten strangling hobby.

“You totally nailed these guys!”

Whom started to cry in the most dramatic way she had ever seen, and she had witnessed innumerable high-order Rarity meltdowns. Her throat suddenly felt quite tight, and she winced.

“Gosh, I'm really sorry, Whom,” Twilight said, trying not to make eye contact, instead pretending like she was surveying the dead changelings. “There was nothing you could have done about it, honestly, if they're hungry they won't stop eating, even if it kills them. Bit of a design flaw, really.”

The moon mare just kept sobbing, falling down into the sand. Eventually, Twilight had to curl up alongside her to maintain the protective shade, making cooing noises and stroking the back of her mane with her nose. It was all that she could do.

Coins to Pay the Ferrymare

With her favorite leather panniers strapped against her flanks, Twilight felt ready to conquer the world. It was strange really, how such simple items in the right places could provide an immensity of psychological support, but so it was. She was certain that she had just in her left hoof enough power to level most of Equestria and convert it into a geometrically smooth, silicate glass crater the horrid colour of night, but these few pounds of tanned cow hide and worked iron made her feel far more lethal.

These were the panniers which had carried the Elements, for a time at least. These humble things had carted around bizarre objects of vast and extraordinary power, horrific, hoof-curling poisons, dissertations and thesis, enough ink to drown a moderately sized whale and, at one point, fourteen monitor lizards. If they could speak, they would tell a story of foul demons from deep time, laughing and cackling as they tore apart the world. They would bellow of the friendship and kinship she’d felt, and of the world she’d saved. They would whisper sweetly of the one who had caused them to come into existence, and to whom the aforementioned owed so much.

Twilight settled down on the sand and drew in a slow, measured breath. She closed her eyes and shut out the beating sun or, at least, dimmed it to a tolerable glow. The threads and eddies of thaumaturgic force washed around her, forever there, lurking in the shadows. They seemed thicker and denser than usual, as if she were sensing them for the first time. Odd memories of her thaumarche dribbled back, that first moment of contact with the greater world of magic force. High tea on the vast emerald lawns of the Ostpalace, during a visit to southern Equestria. Her dam had passed her a mint jelly and, quite without thinking, she had reached out and taken it, though all her physical parts remained still, folded up on the soft cotton of a hoof-stitched throw.

The universe had seemed deeper and stranger than she'd ever imagined at that point, its many workings and corners unveiled with the mischievous majesty of a showmare in the full flight of performance. Now, that sensation came again, and deeper still. The huge and complex expenditure of magic that she'd undertaken to rescue Whom had lent consequences to the now.

Almost without thinking, she probed reality with her mind's eye, gathering up the fragments of an easy teleportation spell. Usually, the requisite energy increased with the distance between points in the transition. More of the mysterious substance that made up the wormhole needed to be produced and hammered into shape, made to bend along the paths she desired. Like poking a needle into cloth, terminus had to be drawn up from the nothingness, and some complex mathematics performed. Twilight had never found this processing very hard. She held position data in her head for most of Ponyville, all pre-calculated. Now, it was like breathing, or walking.

“Twilight, we can't just leave them here,” Whom snuffled, blowing her nose into an elaborately embroidered jet black kerchief that she had removed from the secret compartment in her regalia. “They... they need a proper burial.”

“Oh, come on,” Twilight said, opening her eyes and fixing her with an irritated stare. “They're changelings, Whom. They probably don't even have burial rituals!” She paused the whirling spell in mid cast, thaumokinetic feedback vibrating uncomfortably in her horn. “What, are you worried about their spirits coming back to haunt you?”

Whom squealed sharply, ears folding back against her skull. For a moment, Twilight thought that the moon mare was about to bolt.

“Can they do that?” she gasped.

“No,” Twilight said, flatly.

The wormhole unfolded from the quantum foam and enveloped a small chunk of the desert in the blink of an eye, and the two mares departed.

*

Wormholes were simple creatures. The intelligence that emerged in them during their very short lifespans was perhaps on the order of a dog or cat. The structures of ordered energy served well in their roles as neural matrix, having a high density, and thoughts were built from stochastic distortions in the patterns of exotic matter. Though the individual mind of each wormhole existed almost entirely in isolation from the rest of the universe, which happened on time scales it barely comprehended, let alone could conceive of, they could sense certain parts of it, and would react accordingly.

Gravity was a major player in the mindset of a wormhole. It curved paths around the largest concentrations of mass, invisible webs of force in its infinite Empire crafting and impacting the lives of all who dwelled in it. Whilst the patterns of distortions were too simplistic and short-lived to ever develop anything as complicated as religion, if they had they could have been forgiven for thinking of gravity as a sort of God.

How any individual wormhole would actually react to any given source of gravity was determined by the exact starting conditions of the thin skein of exotic matter that went into its make up, which was in turn decided by the mind of the magic user creating it. As a rule of hoof, however, the closer to any massy object a wormhole was generated or guided to, the more energy it needed to cajole it to functionality. Pony mages, unaware of the limited mindfulness of their wormholes, tended to describe this behaviour as being the result of universal randomness, unpredictability and other dull ideas.

The wormhole that Twilight generated, intended to take them a few thousand kilometres north into the heart of Equestria, took flight and sailed through the four dimensional arena it called home, bidden forth on wings of zero point energy torn from the universal standing thaumic field. An aurora of bizarre virtual particles ground against the expanding tunnel of space time that was spinning out behind the motile exit terminus. They fought against the nothing and the something, tiny grains of meta-real stuff carrying massive and impossible energies. They eroded the fabric of the wormhole like sandpaper, and would eventually lead to its end, placing a hard limit on the life span, in time, distance and length.

Something was terribly wrong. The wormhole was idly looking for the place that was calling it, and instead found a dizzying array of different gnarls and pitfalls in the topology of the universe. Gravitational singularities, the seeds of new realities, appeared around it, tearing and pulling at it. Like a tiny boat trapped in the swell of a perfect storm it was dragged this way and that. Its short life was ended moments later, though not before it had disgorged the contents of itself to somewhere else entirely.

*

The Imperial Train rolled into Sol’s Cross station just after lunchtime, complicated steam engine ticking over at a low ebb to draw the massive weight of the train in at a pace just shy of trotting. The busy black shapes of praetorians moved against the backdrop of long crystal windows, all attempting to get a look at the station’s massive platforms.

Built at some indeterminate point in Equestria’s history when there had been plans to expand the national rail network from a few trains operating on a single line, Sol’s Cross had nine marble-topped platforms, supported on sturdy iron and copper stanchions. These were clad and concealed in such a way that, from the right angle, the station appeared to float within the high-walled nest of baroque and multiply-styled buildings and warehouses that made up the core of the Artisan’s District. In some places, the unusual overhangs and other architectural refinements, designed to allow flying occupants to easily alight or take off, actually overhung the emerald green and duck egg blue painted platform roofs, throwing grotesqueries of shadowplay at regular, solar, intervals.

The station seemed deserted. The merry pastel coloured signals, usually busy and flicking back and forth like the ears of an excitable filly, lay dormant and dead, folded away in their hutch at the far end. Rubbish, papers, the contents of a fruit seller's cart twice over, and a wild array of a thousand other things apparently liberated from marital aid shops were strewn liberally across the marble.

The train halted when it had drawn its engine carriage parallel with the conductor’s office at the midpoint of the station’s centremost platform. A fire had consumed it at some point fairly recently, as whispers of slate smoke still drifted out from the ruined, skeletal frame of blackened wood, mostly turned to ash or charcoal. The conflagration hadn’t gotten particularly far. The platform itself was laced with fireproofing magic and other crafty cantrips that prevented decay and infestation with pigeons. These magics too were relics from another age, and their like was rarely seen. The conductor’s office, however, was a more modern addition, one which hadn’t been afforded the same sort of luxury.

There was a long pause before anything further happened but, several minutes after the engine had dumped its remaining steam in a long, hooting whistle that broke the quiet of the station in the same fashion as a overeager lover breaks a maidenhead, six praetorians scrambled out onto the platform and spread themselves about. There was no sound but the clatter of their armoured hooves on the marble and the metallic schwing of their withers-mounted halberds and spears.

Empress Cadence stepped assuredly from the carriage, svelte and delicate frame slipping out of the portal cut in the single-crystal train. She glanced about, ears in motion as they scanned for any signs of disturbances. The sheer stillness and calm of the place, despite evidence of such recent ferocity and disorder, was incredibly unsettling. Even the air itself, interwoven with the standing background field of magic, was flat and immotile.

“Quiet Afore, L’Tempete; you two were sired here, correct?” Cadence said, breaking the spell of cloying nothingness.

“Aye, your Majesty,” a squat, thickly-muscled stallion in full plate said, not breaking his alert, sentry’s gaze. “We were.”

“I will teleport you up to the Palace. Find out what the situation there is, please,” she said, trotting slowly and deliberately into the middle of the semi-circle perimeter they were creating as they fanned out. “You will have to make your own ways back, but--”

Cadence had been attempting to cast the spell required to relocate the two praetorians, but seemed to have reached an impasse in the process. Dazzling pink light illuminated the platform, briefly causing hard shadows to jump from anything bigger than a millimetre. Stopped in mid-sentence, she inhaled sharply, face slack and drooping, like she was having a stroke. There were a series of staccato cracks, as if of calving icebergs, and all of a sudden the light dropped away.

“Is everything alright, your Majesty?” L’Tempete said, no hint of real concern in his voice. “It’s just that I can’t help but notice we haven’t moved.”

“There's something wrong,” she mumbled, eyes half-lidded. “My magic is in disorder. Clearly, a dreadful thing has occurred here. Perhaps a Tartaran prisoner...”

“We must find the Princesses at once,” Shining Armour said, landing on the platform with far less in the way of grace and dignity than Cadence had employed. “No doubt my sister will be at the heart of matters, else captured and held by same. If we can locate her, we will locate the trauma.”

Cadence smiled softly and turned around, apparently still dazed from her brush with thaumic refusal, looking all the part a drunken sot. Her ears had ceased their dance, and lay back, not in fear or anger but lax, unstrained, the erector muscles failing in their task. She seemed to be having trouble focusing.

“I have a better idea, oh, darling, my sweetling,” she said, voice lilting through strange octaves.

All around them, the root vegetables, fruit and other like-shaped objects began to roll and move in the same direction, under the impetus of pink magic.

*

Twilight felt the wormhole abjure itself of her control as a grating series of shocks, right through the core of her, so rapid that they blurred into one awful whack. There was no time to react to them, or effect any sort of correction. Even with her highly attuned magical reflexes, she barely perceived two or three seconds of subjective time. The wormhole collapsed around her, discharging its energies back into the seething, invisible paravoid of the vacuum.

There was no verdant field, as she had intended. The spot she had picked for the exit locale was a grassy acre of communal forage-land a mile or so down the road to Canterlot from Ponyville. It was one of many such places, owned by the state for the free use of local communities and travellers. Since it was so close to town, few ponies actually did, preferring to push on a little further to more comfortable amenities, or otherwise find their forage in the lusher lands that bordered the Everfree. It was, therefore, quite likely to be unoccupied and out of the way. It was the lesson of much teleportation that ponies hated being appeared on and rudely interrupted.

There had also been the point that she was travelling with an individual who had spent their entire life living either with the Nightmare in her final days, or alone, surviving within an ecosystem so terrifying and baroque that it apparently regularly destroyed itself in fits of rage, presumably recombining and rebuilding afterwards, by some unknown but likely just as bizarre process. That sort of individual would, even with preparations drawn from the magazines and periodicals that occasionally appeared on the moon, require gentle introductions and gradual exposure to anything that could be called 'normal Equestrian life'.

Twilight glanced about, the prickling of fear finding its way across her skin. They had appeared in what seemed to be an underground cavern. Darkness rolled back in toward them as the waste heat in her horn faded away, bright optical gleam turning to the soft fuzz of infrared. She quickly fed a little more energy into it and put the black to abeyance. The cave floor was smooth for some distance around them, but quickly became more convoluted, the random undulations in the granite and basalt like the marbling in one of Canterlot's huge palaces. The air was hot, oppressively so, and stank of organic things. Twilight had never kept a compost heap, but this was what she imagined one must smell like. It was deathly silent, that silence of ancient and forgotten tombs or airless moons on the very edges of their parent systems. Not even the sounds of their own breathing rebounded against anything solid, betraying the fact that this cave must be very large indeed.

“Oh, wow!” Whom said, beaming widely. “This isn’t like the magazines at all!”

“I don’t think we’re in Equestria; something’s gone wrong. The only meaningful cave system in the country is under the Palace. I’ve been there, and it’s not like this,” Twilight said, trotting forward with careful, measured steps. “In any case, this is not at all where I was aiming for. Let me try that one again. It... happens sometimes.” She flicked her ears by way of a shrug. “Cosmic fluctuations or some such thing.”

The deep purple glow of her horn began to oscillate as she tinkered with the spell which she had only moments before finished casting. It required only a few modifications to work given their new location. Equations danced their goose step through her mind, adjusting for time, distance and so on. She came to the point in the process where the energy had to be applied, and she did so in her normal way; without really thinking about it. Immediately, a sound like a trio of carronade going off destroyed the solemn stillness of the cave. Appearing at the tip of her horn in flickers, the thaumic force, intended to be fed into the complexities of the mechanisms of spatial manipulation and exotic matter production, suddenly found it had nowhere to go. It shocked the air, or discharged down into the horn root. Actinic flashes of blue and silver strobed, leaving tracers in her eyes, which she had already screwed shut in self defense, despite how unnecessary that was. The flares poked through regardless, incredibly bright and extremely close to her face.

Completely stunned, Twilight gasped. It wasn’t painful, but her muscles spasmed involuntarily, as though she were on the edge of a sneeze. Little worms of wild blue electric force were burrowing into them, feeding them spurious commands. The acrid stink of burned mane hair stang her nose.

“Oh! Hee hee!” Whom said, stamping her front hooves on the ground gleefully, rear end wiggling with excitement like she was being tickled. “Do it again!”

“That wasn’t--”

The floor moved. Twilight had experienced a number of earthquakes before, mostly during her brief obsession with geology when she had visited the Brassback Fault and lived awhile with the zebra enclave there. Those convulsions of the earth would begin this way; a palpable sensation of motion in something that was resolutely firm and stable. Along with it came the first notes of a wild chorus, infrasonic grumbling and groaning that would occasionally crescendo in the low sonic before falling back to a diminuendo of creaks and chirps that were more felt than heard.

Simultaneously, the current of the air began to shift about from their former, crypt-like stature. It was slow at first, a breeze as gentle as a brush by a lover’s muzzle, but soon built up, adopting a sandpaper quality as it picked up in intensity, as well as dirt and debris, bits of tephra and other assorted geological junk. Moments after a loose flint slapped Whom across the cheek and left a fine gash of red against her outlandishly pink fur and skin, Twilight conjured the first proper spell that she had mastered after that long-ago thaumarche, one which was, for all intents and purposes, a sort of family heirloom. If Whom made any pained sounds, she could not hear them over the gale.

Lines of purple telekinetic force instantiated and bent around her, becoming a weird parody of a material object. They quickly formed one half of a geodesic dome, which gradually became smoother as seconds past. The howling died off like someone had rammed cotton wool in her ears. Whom was staring at her, eyes wide and terrified, looking all the world a foal cornered in a woodland glade by the nottlynga of legend. Blood was smeared over her face in the direction of the flow of wind, as if a yearling had gone mad with a straw and watercolours.

Moments after the field was fully formed, a rock bigger than an apple cart appeared out of the darkness at immense speed, slamming into them. The gut-jarring crack of the immense boulder shattering filled the protective space. Though it had to weigh as much as twenty or thirty ponies, at least, it had been picked up by the tempest and tossed around like it were a marble. Twilight gulped, though it was mostly out of sympathy for the moon mare. She herself would, faithfully enough, have survived such an event.

“Are you okay, Whom?” Twilight said, over the now-constant drumming of smaller rocks, getting closer and examining the gouge in her cheek. “Doesn’t look too bad.”

“What was that?!” the moon mare said, teasing her kerchief from its hidey hole once more and pressing it into service as a makeshift bandage, which made Twilight frown.

“I can just heal this,” she said, rearranging the threads of magic that spiraled out of her, glad that they had not failed as the teleport had. “Back before I was a Princess, my friends and I used to get into some really crazy scrapes. Things tried to kill us all the time. I had to learn so much first aid just to keep up with the sheer rate of attrition.”

“It’s fine, Twilight. There’s no need,” Whom said, taking a step backwards.

“Really, it’ll only take--”

“No!” Whom’s tail coiled up around her as her rump slammed into the magical force field, not even coming close to penetrating. “No healing magic!”

Twilight blinked and stepped back. Whom was scared of many things, it seemed, but this felt different and more primal. It suddenly occurred to her how much like the Nightmare she must seem sometimes, especially in the full flight of magic. Horrific half-imaginings came into her head, the product of a keen investigative mind coloured by too much reading of history and lurid fiction. The poor mare was nearly crying by this point. Twilight decided to just nod and give her the space she needed. There was clearly something wrong here, something dreadfully wrong -- memories of an old and unhealed horror lurked and were being brought up to the surface, dredged like the spiny corpses of sea monsters from a mere of memories -- but this was neither the time nor place to address them.

Beyond the magic curtain, the darkness was being lit up by countless flashes and flickers, orange sparks from the bashing about of rock on rock. Twilight occasionally caught stolen glimpses of the just how massive this space was, and of its topology. There was a subterranean plain all around them, rolling up and down as the natural contours of land would. The lights of kinetic interaction reminded her of long processions with candles, or of wassailers and the ancient custom of the Grey Mare, still practiced in some of the more remote and isolated parts of Equestria. At the very far range of vision, she saw that all the undulations gradually trended upwards, hinting at a limit, or some kind of far wall.

There would be a reckoning for Luna, of course. Twilight had secretly known it for quite some time now, and was only just beginning to come to terms with the idea of it in a conscious manner. Whatever creature is responsible, ultimately, for all those grim things on the moon, and for the scars that have been left on this unfortunate, they must be brought to justice. But what if that creature is Luna? Her and I will need to sit down and talk about all this. Anger, a new feeling on this subject, broke out of its internal confines and joined the morass of thought. Her ears flicked slightly, the anger bubbling into the real world. If she knew of any of this, retained even a scrap of memory… how could she have done nothing? Not tried to help, to atone for these offenses?

Whom was daintily dabbing away the blood with the pointed, wetted tip of her kerchief, refusing to make eye contact.

“I don’t know where we are, Whom,” Twilight said, after half a minute of unpleasant, cloying silence, punctuated only by the tattoo of rocks and the low, white noise gale. “I don’t know what’s going on here. My teleportation spell isn’t working properly. We’re stuck here until it fixes itself, or this…” She trailed off, peering out beyond the shield, unable to find the words to describe it properly. “Whatever this all is, stops being quite so lethal.”

“Can we see a grassy field?” Whom said, smiling broadly again, as if the last moments hadn't happened. “A real, green one?” She drew in breath sharply and wriggled. “Can we prance and frolic in it?”

“I don't really get up to much prancing myself, but I know some ponies who do,” Twilight said, laughing. “How are you finding the gravity, by the way?”

“I'm fine, actually, totally fine. I thought it would be worse, but it really feels the same.”

“Really?” Twilight said, skeptically. “But the moon has only a tiny fraction of the mass that Equestria has. The gravity there was certainly much less than here.”

“I fell over a bit, it's true. I wasn't very good at flying through the desert, when I was looking for you.”

“I know, I saw the marks in the sand. You were like a chicken, or something.”

“What's a chicken?” Whom cocked her head, squinting a little bit. “Ooh, are they like a starling? I love starlings! And larks, meadowlarks.”

“Something like that.”

Abruptly, the wind ceased pelting the magic shield with rocks. Unlike its start, the force of it cut away very quickly. The dust rained out of the surrounding environment, settling on the thaumic surface around them and fogging it slightly.

“I'm going to drop the magic,” Twilight said, after a few long minutes of tense waiting.

Whom whinnied quietly as the purple screen evaporated. Sound, or rather, the abject lack of it, came back. The air now stank of ozone, and Twilight's nose wrinkled of its own accord in disapproval. An aspect of the pony psyche somewhat liked or at least tolerated moldering vegetation. The heat had died away, at least for now, but it already felt like it was coming back, the air returning to its former turgid state, like breathing lacquer. It really was the air of tombs.

An awful, terrifying reality struck her. It formed in her mind like a crystal knife, ramming itself between two perfectly innocent thoughts with no regard for her sanity. Twilight went rigid, eyes widening on a sharp intake of breath.

“It's Tartarus, Whom,” she squeaked, words feeling like treacle. “Sweet, silvery stars above, it's Tartarus!”

“Who's Tartarus?” The moon mare's voice was tiny now, as though it were being eaten by the sheer vastness of the place.

“Tartarus isn't a person, it's a place,” Twilight said, all too quickly. “A very bad place, a place out of time and proper dimension.” She glanced around, as if trying to pierce the darkness by sheer force of will. “Starswirl the Unshorn referred to it as a glass bottle universe, but that was all he ever wrote about it.” She started trotting in little circles, the distraction activity of lecturing someone on a complex, scholarly subject doing much for her state of mind. “Later commentary and analysis said that this was the one place in the whole thick-thin skein of multiple existences that he was really scared of, which never really made sense to me because that stallion once made a giant bronze statue of Celestia which was not at all anatomically correct, and that takes a special sort of fearless stupidity, don't you think?” Twilight shot Whom a look of sheer hypermanaical terror. “He put a willy on Celestia and he was scared of this place! Do you understand?”

Twilight didn't bother waiting for a reply. She cantered away with blatant disregard for what might be around her. The sound of each hoof fall was clearly and solely audible.

“Light, that's what we need right now, light! Can't form a plan if we can't see what we're doing now, can we?” She lit her horn, feeding it power, and it responded by making a subtle keening noise and getting brighter and more brilliant. “No! That's not enough. More persistant!” She came to a stop some distance from Whom and peered upwards, biting her lip. Then, she bowed her head and braced herself with a back hoof.

There were a series of dull pops, and long streamers of glittering white light, too painful to look at directly, leapt away from the tip of her horn like scalded cats. The climbed on long, graceful arcs, gradually drifting further away from each other as they gained height. Six individual points emerged, casting rays of absolutely pure and dazzling light over the hidden landscape.

Tartarus, for there could now be no doubt as to their location, was more beautiful that she had been expecting. Those snatched glimpses had not done the place justice. It was as though some mad and demonic confectioner had layered endless whorls of jet black fudge over the top of each other, swirling them together then allowing them to cool into delineated bands of ochre and jet. These were granites, obsidians and so on, or at least they seemed to be. In places they appeared more like chitinous hide, whole hillocks and dales of insectoid plate, glittering with rainbow diffraction patterns as the beams swept over them and illuminated their character.

They had appeared on a sort of low plateau, like a desert mesa which had been sanded down until only a stumpy husk of its former glory remained. This afforded a commanding view, as much as was possible. Twilight's mind, always eager to form theories and explain things properly, began forming a hypothesis. If that kind of wind is anything like a regular occurrence, not much would stay standing upright or remaining tall. These patterns must be the result of erosion effects.

Something caught her eye more so than anything else, a long, silver thread cutting through the gently rolling pattern of low valleys. It glinted and sparkled fiercely in the light, as if whatever it was that she was seeing was built out of many tiny strands of fast moving satin. Sweetest foals, it's a river! A river in Tartarus! But how does it survive the winds?

Twilight dragged her attentions away from the river as the analytical engine of her mind unboxed memories and hauled things from deep storage. Despite it's strong presence in pony culture, there were few hard facts or much in the way of detail on where Tartarus actually was, in relation to the rest of the world. She knew that an entrance to it existed a day's gallop from Ponyville, as she had visited the place once before. Four grey pillars stood there, lone sentinels on an ancient salt flat, arranged in a perfect square and untouched by the ages they had surely seen. The Black Dog Cerberus was chained between them, the gazes of his three heads fixed on the east, south and west simultaneously.

She stared upwards, trying to find evidence of the roof, or the curvature of great walls that she had seen before. Her flares were now far, far above, beginning to dwindle, and there was no sign of them stopping.

An Eternal Golden Braid

An Eternal Golden Braid, Or ‘What Marefriends Do’

Whom and Twilight walked for what seemed like hours, though in the Great Pit of Tartarus there was no easy way to keep track of time. With a magical flare tethered above them like a guardian bird, spreading kindly wings of light, they made in the rough direction of the immense wall that Twilight had glimpsed when they were first sheltering from the rocky hurricane. There had been an attempt at flying, for what better way to escape the stronghold of all ills and evils below the deepest bonds of material earth than to ascend, but this had ended almost as soon as it had begun. Whom could not maintain flight for more than a few minutes. Whilst Twilight doubted she would ever actually tire, the idea of leaving the benighted lunar pony on her own in the vault of damned things was unthinkable. She would not wish to leave any creature here, even her greatest enemies. In any case, there had been no sign of a roof.

Certain questions ran through her mind. This place was, if the scant few sideways comments from the Princesses were to be believed, a final dungeon, a prison of ancient foes. Despite her occasional interest during the scholarly years of her foalhood, she really knew very little about the internal topology or characteristics of Tartarus. The occasional legend, story or other floating mytheme did not help matters, especially when they conflicted with one another, or with the accurate, verified and peer-reviewed historical accounts. Her brain dragged each memory up from the archival space of her mind, and each in turn she dismissed. They could not be trusted to guide them. She would need to interpret the situation as best she could with her own senses, and only refer back to the haze of misinformation and old dam's tails if absolutely everything failed.

When the wind returned, and it did with a random, sudden and entirely unannounced nature, they weathered it in the same fashion as before. Curiously, it always came from the same direction. Ever scientific, Twilight realized that, with constant force and time, all of the bits of loose tephra that came at them would end up on the other side of whatever topology this place actually had. They were using this to navigate, by heading into the wind. This was where she had glimpsed the far wall and, for now, a destination.

Presently, they came upon the river. As Twilight trotted up and over the top of a smooth, granite ridge, she caught sight of its silvery path in the middle of the wide valley the rolling nature of the landscape provided for. It glinted and shone in the light of the flare, which waited obediently like a faithful hound, some way ahead and up. In the dread silence of the pit, she could hear its flow, even from some considerable distance – though only, it seemed, from within the valley that it actually inhabited.

“Oh, it's that river,” Whom said, between laboured breaths. “Can we stop for a bit? I'm tired, and thirsty.”

“Sure, I'll conjure some hay,” Twilight said, then glanced at her. “You eat that kind of stuff, don't you?”

“Yeah!” she said, nodding eagerly. “What else would I eat?”

“Just checking.”

It took them another few minutes to reach the banks of the river proper. Distance was as hard to estimate as the passage of hours – except for the odd unusual miniature peak to a ridge or valley top, or particularly noticeable rock, still for a moment between storms, there were few features or landmarks. The bank itself was high-walled and abrupt, giving it a distinctly artificial feel. Whom galloped the last stretch, collapsing into a panting heap of fuzzy pink legs that were too long. Twilight drew to a halt and peered at whatever it was that made up the river. It looked like molten chrome, broiling and irritated as it was poured into a mold. There was no way to see the bottom, nor gauge how deep it really was. That's certainly not water. Quicksilver, maybe. Maybe a kind of quicksand. Something with quick in the name, anyway. Was there something about rivers in any of those old legends? I think there might have been. The rivers are important, anyway. That much is clear.

“Hey, Twilight, I've got a question for you,” said Whom, head between her forelegs as she splayed out, seeming to have recovered her breath.

“Oh, really?” Twilight said, beaming excitedly at her, all other concerns temporarily forgotten. “What about?”

“If all unicorns can just magic up food whenever they like, how come you still have farms and stuff like that?”

“Ah, well, that's just the thing, isn't it?” Twilight said, mentally putting on her lecturing cap. “Not all unicorns can. In fact, even if their magic happens to relate in some way to culinary or agricultural arts, they can't materialize it out of thaumic energy.” She wiggled her ears and smiled proudly. “It's just not possible. Now, you know who Princess Celestia is, yes?”

“Of course!”

“Well, she found a way to do it. It's a ground-up approach to the whole thing, starting with the very smallest blocks of whatever it is you're trying to make and putting them together.”

“Oh! Direct thaumomaterial synthesis?” she said, ears perking up. “That must drain the local Marekowski space of all potential for miles around!”

“Uh... yes?” Twilight frowned in confusion. “Yes, yes it does, that's exactly right. That means it just isn't practical, except in emergency situations. Celestia showed me the spell; she thought that it would be useful to me, considering how often my situation becomes an emergency.” She laughed mirthlessly and looked around. “That all seems like such a long time ago.”

“What does synthesis mean, anyway?” Whom said, cocking her head.

“Right, so you knew what the Marekowski space was, but you don't know what synthesis means?” Twilight sat down on her haunches and shook her head. “You, Whom, are a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, hidden in deep shadow at the bottom of a lunar crater.”

There was a long pause, in which Twilight studied the strange patterns on the surface of the river, which reminded her, at least in some respects, of the fractals that she had seen in the Imbrium's 'surf'. At least it didn't seem big or wide enough to hide anything like a squid. Twilight thought that she could probably jump it, at a gallop.

“Can I have toasted oats instead of hay?” Whom said. “I don't want to taste real Equestrian hay until I'm really in Equestria.”

“Of course,” Twilight said, then smiled and laid down beside her. “Tell you what. I know an amazing hayterie in Canterlot. It's called L'Tresse D'or Eternelle. When we get home, we can go there, just me and you.”

“We can?” Whom said, as though she could barely believe it, head coming up from between her forelegs, ears swiveled forward attentively. “Like marefriends would?”

“Like mares who are friends would, yes!” Twilight corrected, lips curling into a wry smile.

“What's the difference?”

Twilight laughed and closed her eyes, reaching for her magic. Not for the first time these last hours, she was grateful that the thaumic force seemed to be as all-penetrating as gravity, if far stronger. She had often wondered if it were the case that gravity and magic were simply two different ends of the same carrot, and not, as the received wisdom suggested, wholly distinct entities. For was it not true that, as far as could be currently told, they were both universal? Neither the time nor the place, Sparkle, for ruminations on unified forces.

The air temporarily lost some of its cloying heat. Twilight felt local space contract and expand, dispensing energy into the astonishingly complex shapes she formed in her mind. The tip of her horn began to glow, a cherry red spreading down its length. After a long moment, what had first seemed to be little particles of free floating dust coalesced into a gradual stream of grey and umber. There was a sound of crackling then, and the warm, homely smell of toasted oats. They brought back memories of foalhood, of her dam at work in the kitchens of their home in the city; busy clattering and the dance of hooves on stone, humming tunes she could now only recall a few notes of, burnt sugar and the low outgassing of airborne flour, drifting from the culinary spaces into the rest of the house.

Presently, she had a collection of carefully toasted oats. They weren't quite identical to the real thing, but served largely the same purpose. The little golden things contained no genetic information, but much in the way of simple sugars and carbohydrates. There were no patterns of growth in them, but lots of the important trace elements; potassium, iron, zinc and calcium, all drawn down from the void. Temporarily stymied for a dish, she rummaged around in her panniers for something that might do, eventually settling on one of the empty flasks, which she slit in half before dropping in the oats. The space around them was filling with waste heat, becoming nearly intolerable, by the time she started on the water. She had to drain the slowly condensing fluid that was produced away from her to prevent it boiling off. Whom, her pale pink magic wrapping itself around the makeshift dish of oats, retreated to a safe distance without prompting.

“Nothing for you?” she said, between mouthfuls, once Twilight finished up with her magic and presented her with the other flask, which was replete with lukewarm water.

“Maybe later on,” she said, glancing around. “This process has real limits. Did you feel those waves of heat?”

“Like an open oven door.”

“That's just one side of it. Magic can only provide so much in any given period of time.” She unmantled her wings, spreading them wide. “Hard physical laws apply to everyone, even if they're an alicorn Princess, and it takes a lot of energy to produce matter.”

“These oats taste funny. A bit like lead.”

“If the spell falls apart or runs out of energy, the matter collapses, half-formed,” Twilight lectured, wondering why Whom knew what lead tasted like, of all things.

“Producing a shower of gamma rays and high-energy particles.”

“What?” Twilight raised an eyebrow. “What in Tartarus is a gamma ray?”

“I don't know,” Whom said, swallowing and licking her lips. “I think it might be a kind of invisible manta ray, with lots of little tentacles, so it can walk on land.” She raised a hoof and waggled it along in the air, as if she were miming the motion of a spider. “Nightmare Moon used to say that you couldn't see them and they were very dangerous, and that sounds very dangerous, doesn't it?”

“Invisible land-dwelling manta rays?” said Twilight, nodding, as if she actually understood. “Yes, they do sound like they'd be a big threat. Lets hope there are none down here, eh?” She paused, thinking for a moment. “Say, Whom...”

“Yes?”

“What else did Nightmare Moon say about high-energy physics?”

“Oh, is that where you shake up a fizzy drink really hard?” She beamed, like it was the best thing in the world, and something she knew everything there was to know about. “No, she never said anything about that...”

There weren't many oats, but it still took Whom quite some time to work her way through them. She had the most dainty manner, which Twilight wasn't expecting. It reminded her of the sort of table etiquette Rarity insisted on, whenever she was feeling particularly formal. She had her napkin, spotted with dried blood, tucked into her regalia. With each pulse of her magic, individual grains hovered up, accreting into balls about the size of a marble, which she then popped into her mouth.

Twilight hadn't wanted to explain to Whom that, since her apotheosis, food had held no interest for her whatsoever. She had not grown more or less hungry, even with considerable exertions. The fact that she could still eat, and take part in all the associated processes, did not mean that she did, except on the odd occasion that she had needed to maintain appearances. This had been another nail in the coffin, another push toward the warm friend of alcohol.

The memory of booze triggered a familiar domino effect in her mind, leading into thoughts of her quest. The collimation of her mental processes became more intense, that half-unconscious focusing of all its computational abilities. It's certainly curious, isn't it, how we ended up here? It seems that, for all of these last hours, my objectives have, for want of a better word, fulfilled themselves. It is almost as if it has been set up this way, a pathway for me to follow, through which I have been nothing more than a mute observer, a passenger. She sat and thought a beat. No, not a passenger. A tool, a useful idiot. The realization hit her like an out of control freight dirigible, and a cold, awful fear prickled the back of her neck. Could someone, or something, be railroading me? Travel between dimensions, especially those as protected as Tartarus, is not something one does simply by accident. It's so unlikely...

The engine of her brain reached into its archival space and tore up some long forgotten piece of arcane lore. Sweet foals! It's not just unlikely, it's downright impossible! The energy isn't there for it; I know, I cast the rutting spell. It would be like trying to drive a tunnel through Mount Avalon with a toothpick. Twilight shook her head and frowned ruefully. You're getting slow, Sparkle. Too rutting slow.

“Wait, did you hear that?” Whom said, glancing away from the stream and toward the pall of darkness that stalked them at the limits of the magical flare's illumination.

She found that she had begun to trot little, excitable circles while thinking, as if the energy her brain was expending in its compulsive tasks was just too much to cope with all in one place, and had begun to spill out through the rest of her nervous system. Who gains? Who profits? Luna seems an obvious answer. These are, after all, her drinks. As much as she wishes to remain lawful, she might give anything, do anything, to be reunited with them. Scheming could run in families. Her sister loves to pull at our Mareionette strings, doesn't she? Why not Luna, too? Bah, then why not simply tell me, and spare my course of its circuitousness?

“Twilight? Hey, can you hear me? I think there's something out there...” Whom said, an octave higher than usual.

Twilight began to trot up and down the bank of the river, brow furrowed. She did not initiate any of this. Where Celestia is concerned, it is easy to see her wishes and intents. She can always be found in the middle of the web. They are never secret. If she wants to lend her aid, it is openly and, when she cannot, it is plainly stated. Certain recent 'surprise' parties aside, she has never been anything less than benevolent. And, it is her stated aim that the Nectars not be made.

“Oh, oh no, I don't like this!” Whom whinnied, staggering to her hooves, tipping over the dish and scattering the oats. “

She nearly fell in, train of thought breaking as she compensated, catching herself and staggering away from its silvery main. Twilight barely registered Whom's voice, let alone the ominous, strangely musical sounds that were drifting closer. Discord. Can it be you? If tales of the Nectar's potency can be believed, and I certainly believe them, they would most definitely create a great deal of chaos and mayhem, if abused. Could he make them himself? Berry Punch was... decidedly mystical on that topic. 'Hooves of a Goddess' can be interpreted in many ways, after all. Levels of power are hard to quantify, but he was always the elder be--

At this point, Twilight was very rudely interrupted by a near-infrasonic growl of gut-punching volume, and her mind immediately did two things in quick succession. The first was to conjure up an image of a massive, vicious wolf. The second was to flood her synapses with adrenaline and cortisol.

Thecreature gazed down on them from the top of the ridge, right on the limit of the darkness. Much of its heaving bulk was still hidden, but the front part had enough teeth and and exposed bone to know that this thing meant business. The body plan was vaguely equine, though it was as if whatever had designed this particular pony had liked legs so much that it had included as many of them as it could possibly fit. It resembled what might be the product of a unison between a demonic swan and an outrageously large millipede. Though it had stopped moving, the twenty or so sets of legs were still wriggling and flexing disquietly, a nest of thickly muscled snakes terminating in glittering, obsidian hooves.

It had a longer than average muzzle for a pony, though there the similarities in the head pretty much ended. The lower jaw distended hideously, accommodating row upon row of tiny, needle-sharp teeth, rammed into every available space. Razor-like ears were fixed, unmoving, and two, fiercely intelligent and surprisingly equine eyes joined them.

“Whom, don't move an inch,” Twilight said, instincts of a thousand encounters versus similar, if not quite so grotesque, monsters, kicking in. “Don't make another sound.”

There had been a lot of encounters, but she had never been without all of her friends beside her. She felt naked now, vulnerable as a still-wet foal. She wished, for the first time since embarking on this trip, that she had brought them into the endeavour.

“Why do you disturb this place?” the thing intoned, to Twilight's considerable surprise.

“We did not mean to!” she shouted, as the creature was quite far from them.

“Explain,” it commanded, swampy, super baritone voice jarring in from all directions at once, as though passing through the intervening space by the mere vibration of the atmosphere was far too normal to stand on its own, and that more was needed to really drive home the idea that its owner was monstrous.

“I am Princess Twilight Sparkle, and this is...” she said, glancing at the apparently petrified pink figure beside her, who looked all the part to be of the same stature as she; an alicorn. “Empress Cadenza, of the Crystal Empire, and my sister-in-law,” she finished, hoping that the bluff would pass, and that, whatever this monstrous being was, it did not know too much about the politics of other dimensions.

There was an obscene grinding, gurgling noise, like that of a machine infested with mud, silt and burrowing parasites giving up a last gasp of intended activity and, with a sickening flash, she realized the thing was laughing.

“Pony Princesses, in the Pit?” it said, after a moment, the plosive words like someone throwing rocks into a weed-choked pond as they emerged from a bulging, furless throat. “You are far from home, aren't you?”

“We came here by mistake; a malfunction with our transport spell. We seek only the exit. Do you know where that is?”

“Nothing leaves the Pit!” it screamed, voice adding and layering over extra, higher octaves, producing an ear-splitting, monstrous character that seemed to simultaneously assault her eardrums and her brain. “Nothing, nothing!”

“Please, kindly creature, I did not mean to offend,” she said, mantling her wings to reduce her size and, hopefully, telegraph quiescence and submission. “If you would come closer, so that we may--”

The darkness behind the monster lit up, dozens and dozens of bright orange flashes. Twilight realized that they were the striking of its many, many hooves on the hard granite floor of the pit. It unhinged its jaw, some wicked mechanism in the front unlatching as well, allowing it to drop wide and apart, separating into two slavering, saliva-drenched mandibles. From that maw a black tongue rolled, covered in a carpet of chitinous silver barbs, which quested, this way and that, like a sea anemone which had evolved to flense the meat of fish directly from them.

The infrasonic growl came again, louder and more honeyed than before. It had strange notes, as if two or three of the creatures were responsible, instead of just the one. It was joined by the mellifluous sound again, many hooves gearing up to gallop. Twilight was allowed a brief moment to contemplate her incoming doom, and then the monster began its terminal charge.

*

The marrow glistened as it sailed around in the cool air, magic impelling it on weird trajectories, left and right, as if being toyed with. It was battered in places, covered in scuffs, scrapes, and craters, like it had been used to hammer in nails. Finely shod hooves patterned a beat on the cobbles of the Artisanal Quarter's major thoroughfare, slithering smoothly from quick to slow and back again.

The true Empress of the Crystal Empire was abroad, something horrid on her mind. Even the poor, Nectars-addled fools that called this street their playground and felt that none were their masters now, were in abeyance, cowed into the shadows by the overwhelming aspect of the whole scene. Giant carrots, courgettes, a number of squashes in orange, yellow and purple, and half a dozen heads of cauliflower, all followed along behind her as if they were the members of a Wild Hunt, a Dionysiac parade.

Shining Armour pulled back from around the corner and gulped audibly. Only two members of his praetorian guard remained uninjured by whatever cruel affliction had come over his wife. He had realised that it was the same thing which had impacted the city and plunged it into so much mad chaos. When they'd broken out of the station in panic, pursued by a pink spectre intent on a rearward mischief, they had come up against a lurking swarm of wicked others, hooting and laughing. Fighting their way through, by spell and blade, had been no small feat. Slight mares had the strength of full grown stallions, and paid no heed to disabling pain or fear. But they had passed through, losing several praetorians in the process, and then Shining had heard a squall of squeals and squeaks from the gathering crowd as they encountered the pink spectre. They had been fighting a retreat toward the Palace ever since, with varying degrees of success. Though they had gotten away each time, the Empress showed no signs of slowing down.

“We've nowhere to go, sire,” L'Tempete said, joining them against the wall of the ransacked ice cream parlour that served as temporary cover. “Rib Street is full of very angry bison, and Contumely Court's buildings have collapsed in fire and blocked the way.”

“Between a marrow and a hard place, then,” Afore muttered, fiddling with the straps that held and aligned the halberd at his withers.

“Star-drenched foals,” Shining cursed, nestling his rump as close to the protection of the wall as he could, despite the pain and discomfort it caused. “Why is she doing this? What has come over her?”

“It brings to mind the arts of necromancy, sire,” L'Tempete said, grimly. “This sort of mental control and manipulation is a hallmark of that thaumic trade. But they are never so... fanciful, sire, I think is the right word, whimsy is not a thing that necromancers have!”

“To turn an alicorn Princess, though?” Shining said, unable to arrest the shivering and sense of violation. “We must be dealing with an evil mage of immense power and potency!”

“I shall drive this blade into his foul heart and break the spell,” Afore said, rolling his shoulders and causing the halberd to whip left and right in the air. “On my honour, sire.”

“There have been no living dead, though,” Shining said, frowning. “I must admit that I have little knowledge of necromantic pursuits, but is that not an equal sign as mind control is?”

“Aye, sire, very true. We have seen no corpses, but that does not mean there are none,” L'Tempete said, glancing around, just in case a shambling abomination were sneaking up on them in that very moment. “Likely the necromancer has his strongest, deadest minions in close thrall.”

“Would a necromancer not wish to kill the living and so swell his ranks?” Shining said, shaking his head. “Everyone here is distinctly alive.”

There was a high-pitched squeak from around the corner, and much laughter, emerging from a throat that they all knew very well. Clattering and scuffling came next, as if of a lot of ponies getting out of the way of a rolling boulder. Shining Armour and his praetorians simultaneously shuddered, with a perceptible rattle of armour plate and iron-shod hooves.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” came a sing-song note, laden with honey, slurred as a drunkard would. “Oh, sweetlings, I won't hurt you, I promise that I won't, I'm an Empress, I mean no malice, how could I?” There were more squeals and squeaks, low whinnies and the sounds of shattering glass and wood splintering into thousands of matchsticks.

“We have to keep going!” Shining Armour whispered. “Could we go through the buildings?”

“Yes, sire, but--”

“We've no alternative, L'Tempete!”

“Yes, sire.”

The praetorian broke cover and cantered over toward the other side of the street, shortly followed by the Emperor and the other praetorian. Cobbles flashed under their hooves as they picked their way through fallen masonry and strewn rubbish, much of it on fire or in embers. A pall of thin, silvery smoke hung over everything, the product of thousands of small fires and several that were not so small. On the other side, a cafe, roughly trodden by the wild thoroughfare of the last day, its windows completely blown out or melted away in places, took up most of the available commercial space.

As it was located in the Artisanal Quarter, inevitably the cafe was not merely a place that served coffee and pastries, but also a communal studio and general artistic hub. Beyond the trashed and fire-black bar, and the ruined carpet of wooden fragments that had once been a collection of chairs and tables, a suite of wide, airy rooms held oil paint and spare canvas. Much of this was in various stages of on fire. Smoke stung Shining's eyes and attacked his sense of smell as they entered, and he was glad of the silver shoes he wore. Had he not been, some shard of wood or remnant of a structural nail would undoubtedly have lodged in his frog, and they could not afford to slow down, even for a moment.

They'd cleared the cafe and were just beginning to bully their way through into the studios when the root vegetables started to throw themselves in through the spaces where the windows had been. Some fragment of the Empresses magic had given them a life of their own beyond the mere telekinetic. Shining could not help but turn to look as he heard them snort and snuffle, like pigs after truffles, and he saw that many of them had sprouted long, tumorous noses, and scampered across the ground on tiny legs or obscene tufts of writhing feelers. Mouths, cartoonish v-shapes replete with awkward and hurried looking flat teeth or misshapen tusks, completed their horrid mein.

“Sire!” L'Tempete shouted. “There's no time! Quickly!”

With the vegetable garden of many terrors snapping at their fetlocks, the trio blindly stumbled through the fiery pit of the studio, searching for a back entrance, or some window, anything to escape. For a single, awful moment, Shining thought that they would be trapped, unable to see anything in the smoke, locked in with the monstrous beasts. His thin, ceremonial armour breastplate clanged several times as he ran through piles of clutter, metal cans and other things he could not see. Then, a beam of light cut through the choking fog and they spilled out at once into a narrow alleyway, which was lined with iron planters dangling from copper stanchions. Pink and purple flowers danced in the tug of the conflagration's sucking current of air, as gaily as they would have done on any other day.

The alleyway was thankfully deserted, and it seemed like it would take time for the animated vegetables to pick their way through the blaze. He dared not turn to look again, however, and broke into a violent gallop toward the end of the alley, the stampede instinct taking hold in all three of them and overcoming any need to organize or plan. The objective was clear, and the adrenaline did not release its fearful grip until they had passed out into the Street of Crafty Hooves, a long, wide avenue that curved away to the left and right like a mathematical parabola. Tall, narrow buildings leered over them, many of their windows blown out even at the highest levels. The heavily barred doors and apartments of jewellers and goldsmiths, paranoid sorts at the best of times, appeared to have fared far better than the rest of the city in weathering the storm of chaos.

“I know this road,” Afore said, barely even winded. “We are nearer our goal. The rest of the way is up, however...”

“Oh, good!” Shining gasped, far more exhausted than his praetorians, sucking down great lungfuls of air and squinting through sweat-drenched eyes. “That's great!”

With a decidedly bow-legged gait, all three set off moving, once, of course, the Emperor had been allowed the scantest of moments to recover his composure.

Filthy Lucre

“But whence come these monstrosities? You ask; from what fountain do they flow? In days of old, the dams of Canterlot were kept chaste by their humble fortunes. It was toil and brief slumbers that kept vice from polluting their modest homes; hooves scratched and hardened by the naked rock, Carnifex nearing the city, and stallions galloping to arms at the Abraxine Gate. We are now suffering the calamities of long peace. Luxury, more deadly than any foe, has laid her wings and hooves upon us, and avenges a conquered world. Since the day when Equestrian poverty perished, no deed of crime or lust has been wanting to us; from that moment gryphons, zebras and minotaurs have poured in upon our hills, with the beggar landed amidst drunken and unabashed shame. Filthy lucre first brought in amongst us foreign ways; wealth enervated and corrupted the ages with foul indulgences. What decency does Luna observe when she is drunken? When she knows not one member from another, eats huge carrots at midnight, pours foaming poisons into her unmixed Nectars, and drinks out of perfume-bowls, while the roof spins dizzily round, the table dances, and every light shows double!” - Juvenile, History, Satire and Politik, c.210 BN

The creature was far longer than even Twilight's febrile imagination had feared. There seemed to be no end to it. The muscles that were driving its terrifyingly fast advance across the plain toward the river were all knitted into a single, undifferentiated mass along its spine which, when the creature finally exposed its entire body to the light, burst from between its last pair of thundering legs and formed a wickedly sharp tail. It held the whip-like appendage nearly rigid, the bony serrations that jutted out of the skin flashing with a honed edge.

Despite its size, it moved with unreal speed. Like some tremendous steam train undergoing emergency braking, showers of sparks followed it in a long wake. The sound of it hammered at Twilight's ears. This was not the merry, shimmering tone it had produced before. It sounded as though a dresser full of bone china and loose cutlery was perpetually tumbling down a funhouse spiral slide, though thousands of times larger. In a stomach-clenching moment of heightened awareness, she saw that all of its hundred hooves had broken apart from single, flat surfaces to many extra claws, forged of the same metal but obscenely sharp-looking, as if it were galloping on knives.

This was, she thought, an all too common occurrence in her life. For when was it the case that some adventure did not, ultimately, conclude with a beastly freak or hideous mockery of life charging at her? Or, if it did not conclude that way, it would be true that the aforementioned nasty would be holding the secret to the conclusion; a special key, an ingredient, a sacred artefact, whatever it happened to be.

Instinctively, Twilight reached for her magic but, as though she were descending a staircase only to find a step missing halfway down, the threads of its power were absent. And I used it all on oats! She held the spell she intended to cast in her mind, a particularly vicious heat beam, but without the fuel to make it work, there it remained, in thought only. The creature loomed, its two fanged mandibles stretching extra wide. Time appeared to slow. She turned to Whom and said: “Fly!”

The collision happened. Twilight's image of Whom flashed into a pink blur. She was very aware of the sensation of her hooves leaving the ground. The weight of the impact was too much and too fast for her magic-deprived force to fight back against. Her desperate telekinetic flails were as effective as a feathery touch on the flank. The syrupy air flowed around her ears for a moment, then the pain and the river swallowed her more or less simultaneously. She felt a clamping, muscular tightness in her neck and chest, but found she could not move to see what it was, blithely knowing what it had to be. Then the river rolled up around her, and it would have been in vain in any case. The substance of it, whatever it was, let no light below its surface.

*

Two equine figures, one distinctly taller than the other, trotted down one of the Everfree's innumerable tracks. The low background rustling and chirping of animals and insects seemed to have gone into abeyance. Squirrels and jackalopes, popping their heads from the undergrowth for a moment, would turn tail and flee as if burned at the sight of the party coming through the dense greenery and graceful, ivy-laboured arcs of ancient trees. Even the occasional miraj or other fearsome beast turned away.

“And you're definitely sure we're invited?”

“Positive, old friend. When have I ever let you down? Anyway, relax, this is an open house. How are they going to stop us?”

“It's not very polite to turn up without a specific invite.”

There was a loud bang, like someone striking a giant timpani once. Lines of hard shadows briefly played across the forest floor, blinding light illuminating the hiding places of terrified woodland creatures. Suddenly, Satan was waving around a glimmering golden slip in a sheath of magic. “I borrowed the Big Man's!”

“Aw, shucks, Satan! That's stealing!”

“So it is, Death, so it is. I have a feeling he won't mind, though.” The timpani sound came again, though curiously the light seemed to peel back out of the distance where it had fled off to in a great hurry, photons arresting their courses and jumping toward their point of origin with all the same alacrity. “Hey, have you had a chance to look between your legs? Your back ones, I mean.”

“No...”

“I gotta say, I am hung like a horse!”

“Satan, that's lewd!”

“Good, strong set of testes right there, all firm and tense against the body, you know? Just waiting, nay, aching, to fill their purpose in life.”

Death dipped his head and, rather awkwardly, examined his undercarriage. He almost tripped, but managed to only stumble. “I don’t think mine came with those... I might be a mare.”

“You don’t smell like a mare.”

“I don’t know much about horses, Satan, I just walked into a farmyard and chose one at random to base the model on…”

“So, you wouldn’t know what a gelding was, then?”

“No.”

Satan laughed like a drain being unclogged, a smug grin on his taut features. “Hey, Death, when you find out...”

“Yeah, Satan?”

“Don't kill the party.”

“Ugh!”

*

“She's a whore, yes a whore,
A mare of myth and lore.
A Carnifex of oral sex.
You can ride her you till you're sore.
Yes, she's a whore, yes a whore.
She is dear to Crown and corps.
Her tail's arrayed, we'll all get laid
By the whore that we adore!”

The nottlygna had barely finished their latest bawdy tune by the time Luna coaxed Mytheme into the sky. Even laden down with all the supplies they could find, and a whole herd of batty ponies, the ancient yacht was a dream to handle. It was still a severe test of her willpower to avoid opening up the thaumic throttle and really seeing what it could do, but she kept the long, slender craft at just below the speed of sound. In her mind's eye the tortured rooftops and open plazas of the quarters surrounding the Palace turned into a blur of slate and granite. Moments later, Avalon's caldera rim passed below, revealing long slopes and wide plains that rolled off in all directions.

Wobbling threads of quick, slate smoke trailed up from the industrial districts and small conurbations that nested around the city proper. The blast zone caused by the liftgas facility's untimely demise was clearly visible. Obliterated stands of trees and the muddy, track-scored remains of parks, as well as the smashed rubble of unidentifiable buildings and collections of other structures, demarcated an area of destruction that was almost as big as the footprint of the city. Luna doubted that anyone not protected somewhat by the caldera wall would have been severely injured, deafened or blinded. Yet, even in all the madness below, there were signs of a properly organized evacuation. She could see winding, trailing lines of ponies trotting in single file or in small groups, heading in a rough easterly direction. Most were aiming for the coast, it seemed, or some parts in between.

Luna guided Mytheme on a single, surveying orbit of Avalon, taking in all that there was to see, then pointed the blunt nose of the yacht toward the south-west, following the same line of pegasus guide beacons that she had used to enter the city.

*

Whom scanned the surface of the rippling river with wide, fixed eyes, flapping her wings as hard as she could. Already the muscles along her belly that powered them were beginning to burn with fatigue, threatening to painfully seize up at any moment. Her heart hammered like a demonic drum solo in her chest. Sweat lathered up on her barrel and neck, and her breath came short and gasping. The monster-thing had collided with Twilight and kept on going as if she had been nothing but a dragonfly in the path of an avalanche. Then both had gone into the river, the metallic, goopy stuff that ran through it swallowing them up with ease. It was silent now, aggressively so. The quietness ate at her, eroding her mind. All Whom could hear were the sounds of her own struggle and fear, desperately small in all the cloying, invasive nothingness.

After what felt like simultaneously an eternity and a precious few moments, awful pain put paid to her flight, and she dropped like a pink, feathery stone onto the cold, unyielding floor. In her fear, she had failed to reserve any strength to break her descent, and something went pop in her stomach, exploding in hot needles of tension and pain. She bounced once, wings folding as they were painfully jarred this way and that, then landed again and came to a stop on her back, staring upwards into the darkness. Little red motes blotched her vision, and what small effort she had left she spent on whinnying. The broken parts of her ribs moved freely against one another, producing a gut-wrenching grating sensation as well as more lances of pain, so she tried to keep herself as still as possible.

“I've seen better landings!”

The voice was nearby, and its mere presence made Whom jerk her head toward it instinctively, an action she immediately regretted. Dozens of little wounds all along her stomach and back, all over her body in fact, suddenly made themselves known. Grazes, sprains and innumerable bruises fought for space in her attentions with the cuts and gashes. They stung atrociously, making her feel as though she'd just gone ten rounds with a back boxer made entirely of sandpaper.

“What happened to your friend?” the voice said, deep and mellow, a tutor's patient tones, yet it was only passingly interested, as if it belonged to a spectator at a boring sporting event. “Looks like the ekatopleton got her good.”

Some distance away, there had appeared a kind of long sofa, with four legs, extravagant purple upholstery, and a large number of baroque ornamentations and engravings. The legs ended in four different kinds of animal foot; a gryphon paw, a big flat hoof and a smaller, thinner one, curved beyond all realism, and some sort of tentacle arrangement like a ratty knot of feelers. With a strange rocking motion, they were gradually shuffling the whole piece of furniture forward. It moved with a slow, yet stately and perverse inevitability, like a glacier made of phalluses.

Draped over it was what at first looked like a pony shaped pile of dirty grey rags. Up where the face should have been was a wide, drunkard's smile, underlining a short and fuzzy nose and the merest hint of eyes, above which were a pair of heavily furred ears that bracketed a long, thin horn. The most tremendous beard that Whom had ever seen flowed seamlessly into his mane, a single roiling morass of hair that encompassed his entire body. To make matters even more confused, the beard itself was wrapped several times around the pony's barrel and flanks, eventually merging into the bundled weave of his tail.

As soon as Whom noticed that the creeping, slithering chaise lounge was actually making its way toward her, she decided that it was wise to try and get to her hooves. It hurt a lot worse than she was expecting. The broken rib chastised her grievously as she first rolled onto her belly then, as she shakily stood, it initiated a new phase of awful, burning misery, grinding and atrocious.

“Who are you?” she said, her voice a pathetic mockery of what it had been, like a dog which had been barking too much.

“Why, my dear little starling! Does all the hair not give the game away?” He threw his head and seemed to be posing for her. “I'm Starswirl the Unshorn.”

*

“I think I should handle this one, Satan,” Death said, as the pair of them drew to a halt outside the Cosy Tie-Up, a long, squat building of considerable age that now served as Ponyville's only real hostel. “We'll catch more breezies with honey than with vinegar.”

Satan only chuckled in a way that recalled the falling over of moss-choked tombstones. The beams of the Cosy Tie-Up's first story sagged under the weight of the second and third, as if they had been added at some unknown point in the building's evidently long history, against the advice of architects. A sign bearing the name, flapping and clanking on its chains in the breeze, dangled from a yardarm that extended from the side of the structure. Windows, portholes and other assorted apertures that filled the same purpose decorated the frontage in madcap fashion. An equal assemblage of blinds, drapes and curtains completed them, mostly preventing the warm, buttery golden light that spilled from the unblocked ones from assaulting the incessant rain. There was only a single door, a huge black thing made of ponyoak that had been honed to a fine sheen, especially around the plate at head-height that served to open it.

There was a tremendous thunderclap and associated flash of lightning as Death nosed through the entryway. The promised warmth of the light delivered on its end of the deal, radiating from a huge fireplace in the middle. It had apparently been a giant communal living space at some point, as it was arranged in a loosely circular drum shape set about the hearth. Soot-blackened iron griddles and other mechanisms of the fire nestled over a quintet of huge logs, which were well ablaze ensconced in the ashen remains of kindling and charcoal, and all buried in a sort of large pit. There was a brass kettle, decorated with enamel figures engaged in spring rituals, boiling on a hook hung just below the smooth hole where the chimney drew in smoke.

The peal of thunder had only just finished its rolling, echoing refrain when the screaming started in earnest.

*

It had been another quiet evening at the Cosy Tie-Up for Long Stay, owner and proprietor, though she liked to think of herself as more of a steward. Her dam had passed the place on to her, after all, and her dam before that, and so on, into the deep recesses of history that nobody talked about very much. There had been the usual traffic of guests, eager to get off the road and into the comfort of a warm bed, especially with the unseasonably heavy rain that had appeared in the early evening, without so much as a pegasus to explain why in the wide, wide world of Equestria it needed to be quite so boisterous. She had served the evening meal of vegetable stew to a merry, if somewhat travel-weary, herd of ponies, then everyone had drifted off to their separate rooms.

The Tie-Up never closed, technically speaking, as the idea of having some poor soul, fur soaked and hooves aching, turn up at the only real public house in town in the dead of night, cruel gales biting at his flanks, only to find himself faced with a bolted door, sent dread shivers down Long Stay's spine. However, there was a protracted period, beginning shortly before midnight, when the place settled down and went into a sedate slumber. She would take up a watchful position near the aforementioned door and keep the kettle hot, just in case. In her opinion, there was no better way to recover from bad weather than with a nice cup of mint tea. There was even the possibility of hot chocolate.

She had just been on her way back to her spot at the door from putting away the chickens for the day when the entrance had swung hesitantly open, faltering a little. Pride, glee and an attentiveness verging on motherly had first swelled in her chest, and she'd quickened her pace to help attend to the prospective guest's potential needs. She'd been so engrossed in her expectations, in fact, that she barely noticed the square and slender muzzle of the statuesque hooded figure that had entered her hostel. Except then she did, and all those positive emotions vanished.

Beady eyes, half the size of those on a normal pony, peered at her. They were set in either side of the creature's face, looking out to the left and right instead of directly forward. Two great nostrils flared and breathed hot air all over her. Its fur and mane were completely overgrown, and he would have looked like a tramp had it not all been immaculately groomed. It was huge, at least twice as high as she was, and Long Stay was no squat mare. She strutted with the best of them. It seemed to be regarding her with a predatory intent. That single thought was enough to set off an ancient string of fear responses in her brain. She began to scream.

*

Twilight struggled as hard as she could, but the creature had a fierce hold on her. She felt its many misshapen teeth cut into the skin and muscle along her back and flanks. They scythed into her belly. Her organs offered little better resistance to the mangling, and popped as they were ruined. She barely felt much of this. It hurt, certainly, but it was as though a kitten were nibbling her playfully. This mute, disconnected perception of the progressive destruction of her corporeal form was, in a way, more disconcerting that she imagined the true pain of it would be.

There was no apparent end to the depth of the river. Twilight expected to feel the thud of a bed of some kind at any moment, but it never came. They only sunk deeper and deeper. The weird liquid was more of a gel, and it slithered around her like wet sand, tasting of burnt toast, copper and almonds whenever it invaded her mouth. Half a minute passed before she realized the creature wasn't trying to eat her whole. If anything, it was only holding her in place, preventing her from coming loose. By now, even the minor chewing sensations had gone, structures of nerves simply absent or trashed beyond functioning. It was impossible to see anything in the mire, but she had the distinct impression that the creature had started to paddle, the faintest, half-imagined outlines of dozens of pairs of legs flailing rhythmically in the near distance.

Presently, some errant fang slipped and penetrated her skull. She felt it slide from its former position, bent off-angle against her neck, and up into the gap where her spine met the skull. As it had done in orbit, her stream of consciousness ended abruptly. The next thing that she became aware of was light and shape all around her, segued into being with a jarring suddenness. She was lying at a strange angle, inside what immediately reminded her of the grain halls in Canterlot. They were long, cavernous structures, underground to keep them cool and away from light, with domed ceilings, packed with supporting columns and numerous arches, passageways and alcoves. They were cursed with the scantiest of illumination for, besides grain, they also stored flour, gunpowder, paraffin and other combustibles, and so sources of ignition were heavily restricted.

Where this place deviated was the sheer dirt of it. Storage for comestible, potable and otherwise spoilable goods had to be reasonably clean. They could tolerate ingressing water or rotting food about as well as they could tolerate sparks and candles. The walls and ceilings around her dripped with a patina the colour of oxidized copper, green but with the faintest hint of sky blue. Fungus, dun and ochre fans, marked the lines of flow for what appeared to be some sort of sewer. The moment that she began to move to look around, crunching noises filled her ears. It was a grating, horrid sound, like dozens of twigs snapping all at once. Every one of her somewhat shaky motions to get back on her hooves resulted in a chain of them, setting off secondary and tertiary cascades.

She looked down, and saw only bones. Skulls of all races, many of which she didn't immediately recognize, blended with a profusion of ribs, tibia, fibula, femurs and a melange of the fiddly bones of the gryphon paw. Her scientific mind had carefully analyzed some of them before the emotional hit even arrived. But, then it did, and awful revulsion, a sick and desperate thing, began to crawl around in her belly. The entire floor of the hall was covered in them. It was the floor, for she saw nothing beneath it. They occupied the same sort of volume as grain might have done. The moment Twilight made it to a vertical posture again, she flapped her wings and jumped up above it, eyes scanning the expansive space for some safe perch.

Out across the plain of the hall, larger islands of bones, complete ribcages and spines of enormous creatures that might have been ancient snakes, dotted the greater sea of fragile and horrid remains. The air was still and cold as she flew through it, reminding her of midnight in winter. It stank of damp rot and dust, whole epochs of it. She alighted, barely suppressing the urge to panic and flee, upon a large, central section of the nearest gargantuan ribcage. It looked somewhat like a sternum, but was far wider and seemed to have been where many muscles had once been anchored. It was perhaps as broad as the viewing platform on top of Golden Oaks Library, and felt sturdy enough to take her weight. Despite this, there were little creaks and pops as she folded in her wings, echoing up from down below.

Twilight sat down carefully on her rump, assuming the position she so favored for complex tasks. The one before her now was particularly daunting. The vast hall didn't seem to have an end. Where she had assumed its bounds to be, she now saw further avenues of the same form and shape as the one she found herself in. They stretched off in all directions, following no scheme or pattern she could discern. If any process of construction familiar to mortals had been used to build this place, then it could be said that it had been thrown together at many different points in time, added to as more storage was required. Beyond this appearance of haphazard build quality, no architectural marks or flourishes were visible.

She had not read many books on architecture as such. Equestria was a place where changes to the schools of thought and artistic expression came very slowly indeed. It was also the case that new buildings weren't often needed and, if they were, were merely knocked down and rebuilt in exactly the same fashion. To confound things further, there were a number of structures that never needed repair or maintenance, as they were heavily magical, originating either in the mind of a Princess or in the distant past, the thaumic skills that put them together in the first place lost to the ages. Canterlot's central station was a good example of this, as was the Palace.

Twilight laid down flat and felt the cool, slightly clammy bone against her belly. With a thought, she unbuckled the panniers and slithered out from under them, then turned to examine their condition. Aside from a few new nicks, scratches and scuffs, they had survived the encounter with the monster intact. In the absolute quiet of the hall, her telekinesis made a low keening sound as she employed it to open the big leather things and rifle through them, checking that their precious cargo had not been damaged.

The nightshade flower was somewhat bruised and ruffled, and the squid eye had taken on a deflated, deformed appearance, but were otherwise intact. The disc of metal that was the first Nectar ingredient had a dent in it, apparently more ductile than she'd given it credit for. They were all taken out and inspected carefully, before being returned to whatever little cubby or safe spot. Then, Twilight came across the pinion feather sized scroll that bore the list of ingredients. She frowned and turned the thing over in her magic, wondering.

Sequential revelations. What were the triggers? Spatial location shifts were always a favorite. But, it really could be anything. Words, thoughts, specific spells, times and dates. I have come such a long way from the Moon, though...

Twilight unrolled it in one quick motion. The list's loose script hadn't changed or shifted. She applied the same thaumic exam to it that she had used in Whom's bedroom. There was nothing immediately obvious, just like before, but there had definitely been some kind of change. The impression of it was different now. Twilight furrowed her brow, then closed her eyes in concentration. These sorts of scrying techniques could often be quite vague, exactly as much as they could be highly specific. As far as she knew, it was a problem with equine minds. The spell knew what the score was, and the detailed properties of magic. However, translating those concepts and ideas into perception was another thing entirely. Twilight had experienced episodes of synesthesia. Enchantments would taste blue or sound like the number seven.

Alternatively, as it was in this case, they would just feel different, in an ineffable and peculiar way. Whether this was her mind's way of expressing a series of barely perceived micro shifts in particular properties about the material in question, or if it were merely hallucinatory, a mental fiction brought on by her desire to bring the Nectar into being, was up for debate. Happy to once again be back within a thaumically undepleted area of space at least, she fed a little more energy into the spell. This was a double-edged sword. More energy could result in a better resolution, but it always ran the risk of some spilling out and destroying the sample.

A minute passed, then two. Twilight could glean no further information from the scroll. It was the same ink and processed tree fibres as it had ever been. It was bound together by the same molecular bonds as before. Not one thing had changed. Yet, the sensation that something had mutated in it persisted. The feeling of difference remained. She pushed the energy envelope as far as she dared then, sighing and shaking her head, she dropped the spell. Her horn sizzled as it momentarily became hot enough to fry the strands of her tricolour mane that were draped too close around it. The stink of burned hair joined the unpleasant melange of mouldering miasma.

Her mind wandered on to thoughts of Whom as she carefully rolled the scroll back up. Little pangs of worry joined the mental chorus of continuing revulsion and frustration. Twilight's last words to her had been a command to fly, but she could not keep that up forever. Her original plan, built in the fractions of seconds that had been available to her, had been to keep the monster occupied with her immortal, regenerating form until the magic rolled back in, then blast it into submission. Whom might have witnessed some particularly unpleasant things in the process, limbs being torn asunder and guts spilled all over the place, but she could likely be consoled. After all, she had lived with Nightmare Moon, and who knew what mischiefs the fallen Princess had gotten herself into, only to reconstitute herself?

Then, the creature had run a coach and ponies through that plan, and there had been no time to come up with another. She had her magic back now, but the monster was nowhere to be seen. Had it gone back to finish the job? Twilight gulped at that idea. Whom was fragile, a normal pony. It seemed that the purpose of the many-legged monster was to kill and neatly deposit unwanted intruders in the vault of bones. The moon mare would not survive for a second if those threshing, serrated teeth got at her.

Twilight glanced around, trying to get her bearings. The worry pangs quickly inflated into full-blown knives of terror. It could already be too late. The monster might be, at this very moment, on its way back with a mouth full of warm, pink ichor. Her overworked imagination conjured up images of a squealing pony, torn to shreds and dragged beneath the surface of the silvery river. All that would be left on the bank was a pile of bloodied feathers the colour of sun-bleached roses.

She almost took off again without putting the panniers back on, her leap aborted halfway through in a flick of flailing limbs and awkwardly postured wings. The stumbling clatter of her hooves on the bone platform was very loud and obvious in the crypt-like atmosphere. She groaned in irritation at herself, then flung the panniers on with great and fumbling haste. For the umpteenth time, she wished that she’d had more time to get acquainted with flying. It seemed to take her an eternity to get the straps and latches done up around her belly but, at last, she had them on and securely fastened. She hopped up and beat her wings furiously, sending her arcing up into the sky. The air rushed around her, flattening her mane out behind her. Picking a direction at random, desperate to do something, she began to accelerate.

The One in Which There Are Reindeer

“I have previously discussed the nature of the archaeological evidence that exists to question my esteemed colleague's assertions that, contrary to the established timeline of the emergence of life in the many domains of this world, hydrae once possessed a level of technological sophistication and intellectual development far in advance of our own. I would ask my esteemed colleague this: where are their wonders? Their palaces, their great magics, their edifices carved into the faces of mountains? He has failed to answer this question to even the satisfaction of himself. Is it not true that all the hydra in existence today possess no more intelligence than an ape? Is it not also true that we have found not one shred of physical proof to suggest that they ever had otherwise? Now, the discovery of the Kynder object is certainly one of great importance. But can we infer so much from some faint lines in eroded rock? I would direct my learned colleagues to the last page of the document, where I outline my own views on the origin of the object...” - Professor G.D Jyup, Symposium Simplex keynote speech, AN 992.

By the time that Hywell realized he needed to get out of the palace, it was well past midnight. As per usual these days, the wicked crown on his head was not allowing him much sleep. It had been like this for the entire week since the unfortunate incident in the forest. Deploying its powers, even accidentally, seemed to carry a real physiological cost. Even if he dared to take it off, which had its own risks of rapid regicide from some aspiring duke, the effect remained with him, and he would begin to feel a crushing malaise, as if he had come down with the worst flu of his life. It was as though the crown was punishing him for his outburst.

Hywell padded silently down the baroquely ornamented corridors that were woven into a maze around his private chambers, marrying them neatly into a comprehensive array of attendant rooms, annexes and spaces. His usually poor hearing, a consequence of his race, was compensated somewhat by the deafening stillness of everything. He could even pick out the low, rhythmic sounds of servants and maids dozing somewhere nearby, though always on the cusp of sleep, ready to respond should he call or ring a bell. After a moment, Hywell came out into the grand, carpet-drowned foyer that marked the boundary between his suites of private chambers and the Harem of the High Place. To his left and right were little understated arches that hid the long staircases down to the Court, Throne Room and the palace proper, but the Harem had a truly ostentatious door.

It often reminded Hywell of something from a fabulous novel or ancient epic poem. The exposed guts of a prized zebric puzzle lock played out across its surface, simultaneously describing curling trellises of roses and sturdy oak trees in thick silver lines. The aesthetic and the functional blended seamlessly together, and the wholeness of it gave the impression that some mad artist had done it all at once, in a single stroke of dizzying genius. Dragons and many-headed hydra guarded the boughs of the trees and the ranks of chromed flowers, breathing fire into the sky or frozen in mid-roar, gigantic teeth on clear display. The message here was obvious; beyond this door, no mortal cock may enter.

“Not thinking of dipping your talons in, are you, sire?”

Despite the voice's immediate familiarity, its suddenness still shocked him. His instincts had him wheeling around, ready to strike out, before he really knew what was going on. Foel's stout face was regarding him with curious amusement from within the lap of a nest of chairs, secreted away in one of the foyer's nooks. The gryphon must have been there the whole time, and Hywell simply hadn't noticed him.

“Gadarn's beak!” Hywell swore. “What have I said about sneaking up on me?”

“That I wasn't to do it, sire.”

“That you weren't to do it, exactly,” Hywell said, compulsively rearranging the feathers around his neck.

“So, were you intending to visit the Harem?”

“No, Foel.” Hywell glanced away, peering at the arched exit down to the lower levels of the palace. “As the facts would have it, I'm going abroad for an evening constitutional.”

“Sire, it's the middle of the night,” Foel said, the smile on his beak expanding to something that might have been the beginnings of a smirk. “It's quite alright, you know. You have the right and, some would say, the obligation, to--”

“I'm not going into the Harem!” Hywell insisted.

“Sire, forgive me, but I know that you are not as well versed in the ways of the world as perhaps is desirable. If you were to have any questions on the matter, know that this old cock,” he said, tapping his chest with a talon. “has been around the block, and knows a thing or two.”

“Foel, if I want your advice, I will ask for it.” Hywell frowned and clicked his beak desultorily. “Besides which, I am barely of age. I doubt there would be much reason.”

“Not even curious yet, sire?”

“I'm just going out for a walk,” Hywell said, shrugging his broad shoulders. “You may accompany me if you wish.”

“I believe I shall then.” Foel grinned and nodded his head in a supplicant gesture. “Lead the way, sire.”

*

Port Pronto vanished into the late afternoon sun like a scolded dog, slinking away behind the horizon. The ocean had taken on a slightly oily complexion, thick with mats of algae and shifting miniature islands of purple bladderwrack and the tanned hides of dead kelp fronds. The Barely Eagle cut a swath through them at a goodly rate of knots, leaving behind a roiling, frothy wake. A different collection of birds kept them company, dipping into the water around them and coming back with strange, wriggling prey items that looked a bit like squid. These flyers were dart shaped and black, apparently from a different clade of water birds entirely.

For all the apprehension and the vague sense of unease that the approach to the Port had made Emboss feel, things hadn't really been so bad. Something had certainly gone on for, when the gryphons and Astrapios returned some hours after they'd left, it looked as though they'd been in a pretty unpleasant fight of some kind. One of the sisters had a gash along her belly, which completed a litany of smaller abrasions and missing patches of fur and feathers. The other was holding her left wing at a strange angle, and winced every time it was jostled or she accidentally flexed it. The hippogryph himself had seemed uninjured at first, but then it became clear that he too had taken a beating. Fresh bruises, big and vaguely hoof shaped, could be seen developing wherever the trim of his fur allowed.

Emboss and Truth had silently decided to not question any of this. The diminutive captain had done them the courtesy of not asking why they were travelling with such haste, or what their mission was, and would doubtlessly appreciate the same respect in return. They had even helped the crew and the local stevedores load the new cargo aboard. The flashes of telekinetic magic had been met with discontent and bitter gazes, but nobody had complained openly. Twenty-four well-sealed ponyoak crates, heavy with whatever their contents were, and bearing no distinguishing marks except for a little twin-peaked seal neither of them recognized, now sat stowed in one of the Eagle's holds.

Now, they were once more making excellent time. The two sisters had returned to their usual positions of skulking about or napping in high places. Often, Emboss saw a long, black-furred paw dangling idly from a spot up in the rigging mechanisms. Just after they'd left, the zebra had come up on the foredeck and silently gone about the machinations of some ritual or other, involving many highly polished ochre stones and a large cloth, hoof-stitched with criss-crossing lines and geometric shapes picked out in fine red thread. He would mutter something under his breath in a language Emboss presumed to be zebric, raise a hoof or hold a stress position for a few moments, then whisper again, move a stone to some other location on the cloth, and repeat the process.

Truth was parked firmly on the prow of the ship, just above the figurehead. The wind spell was now far less taxing for her to cast. Emboss had never been fantastically magical, no more so than the next unicorn stallion approaching his middle-age, but he knew that experience with any magics made later castings easier. Something to do with the pruning of inefficiencies, and the mental handing off of complex tasks to subconscious areas of the brain. Even so, she sat on her haunches as rigid as a statue, the muscles in her neck tense and quivering. Sweat glistened there, and on her barrel, frothing up and dripping off onto the deck. Emboss had taken to mopping it up from time to time, as well as bringing her pouches of water and bundles of hay from below.

After an hour or two of sailing, Astrapios, always somewhat unreliable, informed them that, contrary to his earlier statements, they would be within sight of the gryphic mainland within the next day. With that news in his head, the feelings of apprehension, dread and unease, only so recently put to bed, came back with a vengeance.

*

Bittersweet Threnody for Last Winter’s Cubs hung above Hywell and Foel as an unlit, looming shape in the darkness. Its true size was masked by the lack of illumination, but Hywell knew its exaggerated ovoid shape well. The airship was a relic, dating back a few centuries to when gryphic endeavours had demanded its construction. Originally intended as a sort of aerial command hub for the then prolonged wars against Equestrians, it had never made it into that kind of service. The thing was an atrocious extravagance. Even four or five centennial refits had not quite managed to remove all the whalebone interiors, exotic lacquers and dense shag carpeting of the highest thread count.

These days, it was almost permanently moored in the grounds of the High Palace, nested in a protective well of wind baffles to protect it from the oftentimes sudden gusts found on the Upmount and its many attendant slopes. Piloting it out and down into the valleys was a herculean task, usually involving many weeks of waiting for exactly the right weather conditions, as well as the dispatching of legions of scouts and observers to mark the way. Organization on those sorts of scales was troublesome for gryphons. Supplication to the Eyrie classes and to the Divinity of the Crown came more as a grudging, bitter acceptance of a more powerful foe. The one exception to this was wars, though there had been few of those in recent years.

“Sire--”

“Yes, Foel?” Hywell said, trying to laden his voice with a certain irritation.

“I have known you for a long time, have I not?”

“You have.”

“Might I be forgiven, then, for assuming that I know a thing or two about you?”

“I have no doubt of that, Foel.”

“Then, as the Equestrians say, a bit for your thoughts?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

The two of them rounded the hidden shape of one of Threnody's gargantuan stone mooring posts, a square, boxy thing that was twice as tall as Hywell was. Gas lights, hidden inside amethyst safety cases, cast silently shimmering purple pools onto the slate grey stone cobbles of the path that would, eventually, lead into the Wystpark. It was a pitiful glow, but neither of the two required much in the way of light to find their way around.

“What I mean, sire, is that it would appear to me that you have something on your mind.”

“Oh, rut the martyrs,” Hywell sighed, pausing in the middle of the path and glancing at Foel. “It's all this, you know?” He gestured back in the vague direction of the palace. “It's suffocating me. I can feel it, clawing its way down my gullet. The ceremony, the rote of it, every day without fail.” Hywell made a soft clicking noise and closed his eyes, and there was a pause before he spoke again, this time in sotto voce. “And this thing on my head. It'll be the death of me. I know it.”

“Heavy sits the crest that bears the Crown, sire,” Foel said, with a tone of voice as if he were applying some soothing balm to a grazed rump. “You still need time to become accustomed to these things.”

Hywell said nothing, but gave a lethargic shrug that turned into a continuing trot down the path. Foel dutifully followed, his eyes and beak far more attentive to the hidden line of trees that marked the outskirts of the Wystpark. The faint shapes of the mammoth welderboughs, jagged branches languidly swaying in the breeze, poked up out of the sucking blackness. The two of them soon passed through an archway that provided passage through the wall that acted as gust protection for the Threnody. Though the arch had huge, cast iron gates, this far inside the palace grounds they were rarely kept locked.

Neat lawns, aggressively manicured to perfection, buffered the park from the walls. Now they were outside them, the breeze became apparent as a constant, urging pressure out of the night. It brought with it fragrant, subtle smells, of the last traces of the evening's flowers, of the snackrabbits that bred so prodigiously in the park's warrens, and of the welderbough's symbiotic vines, which blossomed at this time of year with gay abandon.

“I'm getting out of here,” Hywell said, as they reached the first, towering welderbough tree. “Tonight, Foel.”

“Out, sire?”

“Out of the palace, out of the eye of the court, away, away,” Hywell said, stamping his front left talon as hard as he could against the stone.

“Where, sire?” Foel said, maintaining a constant calm demeanor.

“The coast.”

*

So out it was. Hywell had refused to listen to any of Foel’s attempts to dissuade him from his plans, even as they became more insistent. In fact, it only made him more eager to leave as soon as it was physically possible. Taking the shortest route through the Wystpark to the complex of low, understated stone buildings that squatted unobtrusively in the space between the park and the courts, nests and other functionary aspects of the Crown. Despite the late hour, staff wrapped in thick woollen jackets and wearing scarves wound many times around their necks milled around on urgent duties.

If he had not had the thing on his head, few would have readily recognized him. As he did, however, they scattered as soon as they saw him coming near, pulling off well-practised escapes that simultaneously appeared respectful. Those few that were caught with nowhere sensible to flee to kowtowed dramatically, beaks almost against the flat stone floors or hovering just above the dirt, back legs splayed out and wings unfurled and held low, if they had them.

A larger percentage of them than might have been encountered during his father’s reign did not. Hywell had taken up the cause of alce everywhere, and made sure to employ more of them whenever the chance presented itself. The strength and power of his race made them excellent as laborers and gardeners, as well as some areas of soldiering. What they lost through the lack of flight capabilities, they more than made up for in speed on the ground and stamina. The level of disquiet grumbling this had caused among the gryphons and even hippogryphs, had been hard to deal with, but it was worth it.

Foel had quit his efforts to change the course of things by the time he and Hywell reached the South Kitchen. The vaulted, underground space was filled with bright copper-coloured ranges and huge, industrial-strength ovens that devoured coal as eagerly as the many hungry beaks they were built to serve. Cauldrons and vats, their bases glowing cherry red in the heat of the range and the general conditions of low lighting, bubbled with all tomorrow’s stews. Endless ranks of curing game and fowl -- eviscerated dun and ochre deer that hung open with their guts removed in obscene display, plucked and unplucked pheasants in their rich emerald and red plumage, decapitated pasty white chickens and geese -- stretched off through an arch at one end.

Another arch held a similar pageantry of cheeses, dusty jars of preserves such as apricots and peaches, geological strata of jams and chutneys, glass tombs of pickled onions and eggs that sat motionless in their vinegar like so many gouged, pupiless eyes, and the dangling, intestinal, links of salami and other kinds of sausage. Silently, Foel helped Hywell load up several satchels with fare for the road, but not before emptying their original contents onto the scuffed marble. Papers, notes and training schedules, as well as menu plans and other paper ephemera, went everywhere.

By this point, Hywell was starting to feel like a giddy schoolcub raiding the tuck shop. As annoying as the emotion was, it did about as much as Foel’s pleading had done to calm his passionate mood for escape. After they had packed what they could into the satchels, they slipped through the higgledy piggledy mess of ancillary larders and cook’s offices, scuttled through the coal annex that loomed large with black shapes of stored fuel, then came out into the big, square yard that was formed by the coming together of thirty or so enclosed stalls.

The comforting and familiar scent of reindeer was thick in the air. The gentle huffing and lowing added an aural quality to the scene that Hywell had always found pleasant. Reindeer and deer shared a distant ancestry, he knew, but it was in the same way that he and a ferret were cousins. They had both descended from an ancient ancestor, but ended up quite different. Unlike the deer, who were undeniably of the same mental character as a gryphon or a pony, they were mere animals. That was not to say they were not smart, but merely that they were not gryphon smart.

This all contributed to make them excellent, and ethically comfortable, mounts and beasts of burden. They rounded off their portfolio of value by producing an agreeable milk, which could be made into an even more agreeable kind of cheese. Hywell rather wished that there was time to wake up the stable master and have him harness the state coach to a herd of them, but that was simply not on the agenda. Foel, understanding his charge’s intent at this point, dutifully prepared the reindeer for a trek. They seemed ornery and of an ill mood when the big gryphon carefully brought them out into the yard. Even Hywell’s own, a creature he had not had much time to get to know, but which he understood had a sweet and mellow temperament, grunted disapprovingly at the unexpected turning out from the warmth of her stabling.

A few minutes later, they exited the yard at a fair pace, Hywell leading, down a long, cobbled road large enough to carry twenty rows of fully armoured gryphons marching side-by-side. It would shortly lead to the large garrison town that served to protect the palace, as well as provide for the many workers and tradescocks that lived beyond the walls. As he crouched low in the lounge-saddle, laying out down the length of the reindeer, excitement and joy appeared in him for the first time in months.

*

Parlous. That was the word that, against rationality, came into Emboss' head when first he sighted the gryphic coastline. He could have used a whole raft of possible terms in his broad vocabulary, but it was that one in particular that drifted up through the swirling gas-like eddies of his tense and anxious mind. Parlous peril. Is that a tautology? I think it is. Doom, doom and thrice bloody doom. Why does it have to all look so threatening? Too much to ask for something a little more inviting? Bastard gryphons.

It was like someone had drawn a knife across the horizon, neatly slicing open the very fabric of the universe itself, exposing the sinister black nothingness of the realm beyond. Dotted along the top of this was the occasional hint of slate cloud and little crenellations of what he presumed were fortresses or lighthouses. It wasn't possible to tell at this distance. As if to underline the quickening gloom and environmental glowering, a silent lash of lightning struck out from a fat thunderhead.

Presently, a persistent, lukewarm drizzle began to fall upon the Barely Eagle. The wind spell served to collect and accelerate it. It was as though they were being constantly sneezed on by a sickly dragon. It stung flanks and blurred vision, and generally made the deck an uncomfortable place to be in. Emboss stoically bore it, throwing up a thin telekinetic barrier to shelter his wife. She nodded her head gently by way of thanks, and Emboss shuffled up next to her, touching flank to flank and wither to wither. Her body was damp and her fur matted, her usually pristine mane a mess of sweat and seawater. She still smelled like wet dog. Emboss minded not one bit.

*

Foel had been quietly betting on Hywell's ambitions of flight evaporating like dew drops in the face of the morning sun as soon as they'd gotten a few hours from the palace. They would dive together into some awful tavern or cathouse, drink enough vydlych to euthanize a dragon, start a pointless fight of bravado with local toughs and be back at court the next day. He had seen this sort of reckless wanderlust in young gryphons before. It was as much a rite of passage for a cock as the removal of the dewclaws, if far less formal. As civilized as the average gryphon thought himself to be, the need for violence and rough mating was simply a part of their souls.

But that scenario was growing more and more unlikely, now that they'd passed through Buttez, the town that serviced the palace, and were eating up the flint-strewn paths winding down through the Supplicant Altress range like creatures possessed. The chill breezes of the night were turning into the insistent gusts of the early morning, and pale, milky talons of light were creeping up over the horizon as dawn began to occur.

The Altress range was a brooding figure of snaking, sheer cliff faces and equally formed valleys. Though gryphons kept to the heights of them as much as possible, the glacially fed rivers that plunged down from the greater mountain that the range was supplicant to only ran along the bottom. Fed thereof, emerald sprays dotted with the darker greens and jet blacks of vegetation followed the watercourse. Foel peered down into one such valley, his view gently bobbing as the reindeer trotted neatly along behind Hywell's as they navigated the four-gryphons-wide path cut into the cliff.

Of course, they couldn't keep up this kind of pace forever. His own animal, which was a male called Satin, already panted and strained, his breath coming with an ever-increasing degree of unease. They had been going for perhaps six hours, if the dawn was anything to go by. Another two or three, five at the outside, and the reindeer's endurance would be spent. As Foel was quickly beginning to realize, this was just enough time to bring them to the pawhill two-town of Bregth, a busy and bustling river port. From there, they were only a half a week by paddler to the coast.

*

Emboss had thought, for a few terrified minutes, that Astrapios was intent on sailing them right into the imposing jet cliffs. The tops of them were not at all uniform, as first they'd appeared. Prominences and low shallows, like the break patterns in randomly fractured obsidian, loomed large. But then, when the little fellow had appeared in his sudden and alarming way, tugging on cords and throwing switches, they'd begun to pull around. Shortly thereafter, he'd come fore and broken the thaumic, adrenergic reverie Truth and Emboss were sharing, asking them to power off the arcana.

“We can do fine under our own power from here,” he'd said, grinning merrily. “The rocks are a nightmare, and we'll need to go slow anyway.”

So now, Emboss was busy toweling his wife down with one of the enveloping linen towels from the ship's state bathroom. He'd helped her into their tiny quarters, and she had collapsed on the bed, barely cogent. It seemed as though even the effort of falling asleep was too much to cope with. The only part of her that was dry was her horn, which was still hot enough that it raised the temperature of the room as if it were a fireplace. She had not so much lain down as collapsed.

After half an hour, and much in the way of drying off, she finally managed to summon sufficient willpower to say: “Where are we?”

“Gryphic lands,” Emboss said, tugging a quilt embroidered with bright orange fractal octopi over her withers. “Didn't you see the cliffs?”

“Got a bit weird at the end there, memories and whatnot, you know...” she rambled, voice a thin croak. “My dam warned me about keeping the magic on too long.”

“Did she? What did she say would happen?” Emboss said, nestling up behind her so that he was between her and the porthole, allowing her to lay out flat as best as could be managed in the tight confines.

“If you keep pulling that face, the wind will change and it'll stay like that,” she burbled, only marginally coherent, and passed out in what would become a deep sleep.

Emboss sighed and put his head down, rearranging the covers so that they shared the warmth, and that their bodies touched in as many places as possible. Even with her horn spilling so much waste into the air, the unforgiving and unrelenting chill of the ocean was a constant presence. Later, he experimented by balling up little droplets of water and telekinetically massaging them into the tip and stump of his wife's horn. They continued to hiss, bubble and flash into vapour for much of the afternoon.

*

“It must be noted, if purely for reasons of completeness, that hippogryphs exist. However, they are not the progeny of a coming together between ponies and gryphons, regardless of what conventional rumor may hold to be true. Regular readers of this magazine will be fully aware of this fancier's investigations in that area! The precise origins of the hippogryph are not understood by academics. It would defy conventional evolutionary logic for them to have been the products of nature. But again, for reasons of completeness, the so-called 'nottlygna', the much-feted Night Guard, are also a species which exists. We take it as read that they are not the results of a mare and a bat! However, we understand where nottlygna origins lie, in the mind of Princess Luna. So, it is no illogic to come to the conclusion that hippogryphs and nottlygna are both apples of the same type of tree. This raises further questions, of an evolutionary and theological nature, but they are outside my remit. Suffice it to say, there can be no 'fruit' in any fancier's endeavors.

Those of you out there, and I know there are many, who are upset that they may not at some point be the proud dam or sire of their very own hippogryph, can take solace in the fact that, should this sort of union even be possible, it would be very likely that the creature therein made would eat you from the inside out before gravidity was done. Equally, those of you who were concerned that some gryphon parent might appear before you and demand you make an honest hen of his daughter, need no longer worry.” - 'Meadow Spring', Pigeon Fancier's Association of Ponyville Magazine, 1003 AN.

The Osscept, as she had begun to refer to it, taking from certain items in gryphon almanacs that talked of a deep and vaulted crypt for bones, was an immense place. Even on first sight it had seemed large, but after twenty minutes flying at her optimal cruise velocity, this domain was now redefining her ideas about largeness. The long, reasonably narrow areas that looked like grain silos had given way to a complex of arenas like bowls, stepped and tiered. She'd been coughed out into them through an eye-shaped orifice in one wall of a gigantic underground cavity. She looked down onto a plain of those depressions, stretching away into the darkness wherever she cast a glance and a flicker of light. Between the dish shapes were open stretches of fractured marble, slabs of black and white that appeared to have been trampled repeatedly by herds of elephants. She cast optical flares behind and ahead of her, and they traced away on perfect ballistic arcs.

In the place of seats or couches for spectators were skewed piles of femurs and tibias, arranged as though observing the things in the middle. Those were far more disconcerting. Twilight had been to a lot of museums in her time, and seen the fossilized remains of the ancient soft-shelled crustaceans that had once called the Equestrian continent home. All that was left of them had been the interior structures of bone-like chitin, subsequently preserved and inferring the rest of their organs. The things sitting motionless in the centres of the arenas reminded her of those, though far more massive. Each tableaux was slightly different, as though every one of the arenas was a snapshot of the same display or performance.

The ceiling above the plain had curved away into shadow some time earlier, and Twilight had been reluctant to follow it for the time being. If this place remained on the same rough topological grid as the rest of Tartarus, then she might well ascend out of it without Whom. After forty-five minutes or so, with great stress on the or so, as time was nearly impossible to track in these climes, Twilight pulled a left turn at three hundred kilometres an hour and curved downwards. G-force tugged at her as she dove sharply, but it was with the gentleness of a foal entreating something from its dam.

Lower now, she began to adjust the angle of her beating wings, bleeding off some of her momentum, simultaneously searching for somewhere to put down. The landscape between each of the arenas was more broken and irregular than she'd first thought from altitude. The larger marble slabs, looking as though it had been beaten on with hammers for a great span of time, were complemented with whorls and swirls of black volcanic glass, sometimes cresting like frozen waves into wickedly sharp protrusions.

Finally, though, she reached a butte that jutted above the fragmentary environs and alighted there, the sound of her hooves making a terrific clatter. The surface was some sort of mineral, which had the light, copper-green hue of aventurine, and offered a cloying, grabbing purchase. It was still deathly quiet, and all the little burbling sounds of Twilight's body, faithfully recreated by the alicorn form, became the loudest noises once again.

Frustrated, Twilight looked up and about, trying to get a sense of scale or perspective. All around, from horizon to horizon, the vista of equally-spaced arenas extended off into infinity. The flares she had been casting behind her were gradually meeting the ground, to join a line of them back in the direction she had come from. That was her thread, her trail of breadcrumbs. If all else failed, she could at least find her way back to where she started and try another route.

Come on, think. That thing could run fast, but not as fast as I can fly. It couldn't have moved me this far, could it? Not in the time I was out. But then, how long was I really down for? It could have kept a fang in my brainpan for as long as it wanted. Twilight shuddered involuntarily at the idea of those wickedly sharp incisors inside her, crushing and penetrating. Mustn't dwell on that. If it's been so long, then Whom is dead already. I won't believe it until I see it. Rutting moon mare. She bit her lip and closed her eyes.

Come at the problem from a different angle. What if I can't travel back there in a straight line? An idea, so obvious now that it had arrived, began to unfold. Of course. Why didn't I think of it before? Star's pity! Slow, getting too rutting slow. Tartarus is a demesne, or so like one that it doesn't matter. Layered on top of each other, each slice having arbitrary dimensions in relation to itself but fixed, local dimensions in relation to other aspects of the same whole. I could fly on like this for cosmological distances, but Whom might only be a millimetre away...

Twilight sat down on the butte. Coldness spread up her haunches, baffled only a little by her fur. She ignored it and lit up her horn. It whined and vibrated with unspent power, glowing in the infrared. I couldn't find my way out of the Lunar Principality this way, but then again, those boundary conditions were set by a madmare. She gathered more thaumic potential, cramming it into the tip. She knew the energy density would be growing, and clamped down around it with telekinesis. As she did this, the infrared became a harsh optical glare, like a camera flash that refused to subside. Just a little more. She grabbed at the same reserves of local power that she'd used to synthesize food.

Something gave way. The energy density plunged, a great exhalation of thauma. The chill coming from the butte vanished, replaced by the tugging pull of gravity, of falling. She gasped and opened her eyes, wings flicking out instinctively. Another, completely different, ground came up at her. She braced for a collision, but nothing happened. As though she were stepping daintily out of a carriage, she came to rest on a deep green field. The lushest, thickest grass she had ever seen cushioned her hooves.

In a way, it was a little like the landscape around Ponyville, though apparently untouched by any of the trappings of civilization or the workings of industry. She was in a paddock, bounded, not by fences, but by bands of thick, withers-tall flowers of every shade and hue. Species from a dozen biomes shared space, attended to by flights of orange and purple bees. It was still quiet, but not vacuously so; it was the stillness of a distant glade, punctured only by the humming of insects and the occasional trill and cheep of birds. In one direction, a neat line of trees that marked the beginning of a forest replaced the band of flowers. The boughs were like none she had ever seen in any of her botanical texts, mottled black and silver with long, slender leaves of alternating cerulean and viridian. They wafted back and forth in a breeze that was theirs alone, almost as if motile.

Well, that worked, then. A different part of Tartarus? Or somewhere else entirely? She trotted hesitantly across the grass, taking a bearing. Interesting. I wonder how many subset layers the demesne has? Think. Limits on layering? Arbitrary, I'd guess. Three that I've seen so far. Demesne responds to brute force approach, what does that say? Didn't seem like that creature was very smart, so perhaps simple locks for simple minds. Can it be tuned? Further experimentation is required. Isn't that always the case? Don't lose focus. Whom. Nectars.

Twilight realigned the spell. As before, she piled energy into the tip of her horn, compressing space around it with a torsion of telekinetic fields. She smelled burning almost immediately. Slate grey curls wafted up around her as the waste heat began to set the grass on fire. Oops. Reality gave way again. She kept her eyes open this time. The switch, the passage between layers, happened too quickly to perceive. Blackness. Falling. A familiar chill and pressure returned.

She was standing in a boulder-strewn wasteland. The undulating ripples of Tartarus' main floor rolled away in all directions. Hah! Yes! She jumped up and took to the wing, scattering dust and little pebbles. Flares sprayed out of her horn as quickly as she could cast them. She scanned, searching for some familiar landmark or sign. Half a minute passed, and she went higher and higher. Then, she saw it. A familiar twinkle on the horizon. The strange river from before, a part of it at least, reflecting back the light from her flares. Twilight swore she saw a pinkness there. As if to underline this point, she scented Whom; a light, peppery trace that, after the trip through space in confined quarters, she could not mistake.

Twilight dove and put on speed, accelerating to her cruise velocity as quickly as she could, heading toward the silvery thread of the mysterious river.

*

“Noble Nibble here, with another exciting update on nomenclature! Regular readers will be sad to hear that my faithful assistant, Champion Chomp, passed away this last month, owing to a bad case of the consumption. Take heart, though you may be sad, as the quest lives on in me, and in you. What more noble an ambition (pun very much intended!) than to chart this branch of linguistics? Now, to business. This edition, I'd like to redress some confusion that was reported to me this past tenday, specifically by Fast Bridle of West Wingshade, and by Merry Champs of Canterlot. Many thanks to them for their kind letters.

Having done the research, and spoken to some sources on the ground, I can say with authority that the following is the case. Whilst it may seem logical for a male or female junior gryphon to be called a chick, considering that their adults are called cocks and hens, this is not so! Imagine the looks I got when I entreated this suggestion to one beaky fellow who wishes to remain anonymous. 'Chick' does not translate so well from Equuish to Gryphic! They thought I was attempting to purchase their offspring! Later, I was informed of the homophonic similarity between the Gryphic word for 'saleable', with the upward lilting tone, and of the Equuish for 'chick'. The appropriate term, for both genders, is 'cub', and absolutely no derivation of 'chick', including 'chickadee', 'chicken' or 'little clucker'. Thanks again to Mr Bridle for those suggestions.

I hope this draws the matter to an end. Anyone wishing to send flowers for the late Mr Chomp should know that he is survived by his faithful wife, and her favorites are petunias. Noble Nibble, signing off.” - Noble Nibble's Nifty Notes on Native Nomenclature, 866AN

*

Fluttershy was just about to finish up her ad hoc roc watch when she felt the unusual twitch at the back of her neck that could mean only one thing. She wasn't sure if it was an actual muscular contraction, or just a magical tampering with her peripheral nervous system, but it never happened under any other circumstance. It was Discord.

The slithery chimera stepped out from behind a low outcropping of razor-sharp rock, some distance from her. This wasn't in character for him. You could even imagine that he had walked or flown here like a normal person. He took great delight and amusement in becoming objects in use by those he wished to speak to, manifesting aberrant googly yellow eyes or misplaced fangs and waiting for them to be noticed. She thought for a moment that this might be a sign of respect, given recent friendship events, but when he began to stride across the fractured ground, stepping neatly and quickly over the larger boulders, the worried look on his faintly goatish, not-quite-dragon features dispelled that notion.

“Fluttershy!” he called out, in a silken baritone, which attracted the first concerned glances from the large gathering of roc parents and hatchlings. “Thank all the stars in turn that I found you.”

“Be quiet!” she said, nodding her head at the immense avians.

“Huh?” He glanced toward the nest complex, then stopped and feigned surprise, almost as if he was genuinely seeing them for the first time. “Oh, what pretty birds you have.”

“Did Princess Luna send you?” Fluttershy said.

“No, though there is a Princess involved here. Listen, there's no time to explain a lot of this, but Twilight really needs your help.”

“I sort of understood that from the last time we met!”

“Fluttershy, she's trapped in Tartarus.”

“What?” She felt her muzzle develop a fearful aspect, ears folding back against her skull. “Oh no! How?”

“As I said, there's no time. I need you to talk to an old friend of yours.”

“What? I don't understand...”

“Cerberus, Fluttershy. He's old magic, Divine stuff, hard to unpick by force without consequence.” Discord paced back and forth in the dust and dirt, kicking up a cloud. “Not that I couldn't, or anything. But if you could have a word with him...”

“Absolutely!” she said, nodding quickly. “Lead the way, just tele--”

“Wonderful, brilliant! See you at the Gate! Oh yeah, and bring a roc.”

Discord imploded out of existence with a flash like sheet lightning before she could say anything else.

“Bring a roc?” Fluttershy squeaked, half in terror and half in frustration. She looked over at them with wide eyes. “Bring a roc?! How am I going to do that?” She began turning in a little worried circle. “Discord! Come back! Come back right now!”

But a pair of them had already begun to slowly sway toward her. Had anyone been paying them close mind, they would have seen the larger of the two gently shaking its head, whilst the smaller one rolled its eyes.

*

The Barely Eagle spent another half a day sauntering up the gryphic coastline at what seemed to be a painfully slow speed. Astrapios was at the prow the whole time, scanning the waves and consulting a series of charts and maps, many of which appeared to be written on vellum. They made Emboss' skin crawl, which felt like an apt response, but they certainly saved the hull from being dashed open. Several times during this period, Astrapios would start swearing violently in a surprisingly fluid mashup of equuish and gryphic, scrambling back and tugging on control ropes and jerking rudder lines, steering them safely out of the way of danger. Emboss even caught a glimpse of those black fangs of rock, barely visible in the rucked up ocean but lurking nonetheless.

The looming cliffs they kept on their right eventually turned into flats and marshlands, which immediately reminded Emboss of the Equestria around Port Dauphine. Little deltas flowed from gaps in the occasional dunes, issuing dirty silt blooms into the sea. When Emboss stuck his nose over the side and sniffed the air, it smelled of salt and decay, with wood fires in the distance. The dart birds fought for space in the air around the deltas as a wide assortment of small brown avians plied their trade in worms and mud. Much ado of squeaking and squawking came back to him and, on several scary occasions, snakes half the size of the Barely Eagle sprung suddenly from the water and grabbed a dart bird before splashing back down. He silently swore off ever going swimming again.

By the time a far-off conurbation, a black and grey smudge on the horizon that was first presaged by slate smoke drifting into the sky from numerous points, came into view, the sun was quickly receding into the east. The amber glow was dazzling, and plunged the deck into deep shadows. Astrapios had calmed down considerably, the threat from the submarine outcroppings apparently passed. For all the excitement and pressure of the voyage so far, it felt quite anticlimactic. Emboss sat below the billowing mainsail, attached to its unusual penile mast, a spare wheel in the general operation of the ship.

Certain hard realities were arriving in his skull again. They nagged and worried at him. We're going to be on our own in this damn country. Plenty of cash, but not much else. Alright, no need to panic. Break it down into discrete steps. Can't fret on things in the future; concentrate on immediacies. Where are we going to sleep tonight? How are we going to move about, eat, stay warm? Foal's above, I really hope they take Equestrian coin. If they don't, we'll really be up a certain creek without a certain implement.

Emboss caught sight of another watercourse dribbling out of the marshes, wondering idly for a moment if it might be that certain creek.

Language, that's another point. What do they speak here? Gryphic's the state tongue, but it's such a mess of weird dialects. We should do fine on Equuish. That's what the guide said. Wait a minute, bugger, that was only 'in metropolitan areas'. Why didn't I take that gryphic course like I was going to? We could really use an insider, a local fixer...

Astrapios trotted past him, and spared him a gryphony unreadable look for a moment before padding off.

Plenty of cash... and not much else...

Emboss turned and went after the hippogryph, hope building in his chest.

*

“I am not a bloody tour guide, you mad horse!” Astrapios snapped, his voice sinking into the spongy, felt-lined walls of his office slash dining room. “I'm running a business here, and I can't take time out of it to show you around.”

“It wouldn't be like that at all,” Emboss said, sat down on his haunches, trying to minimize his profile in comparison to the tiny hippogryph. “All we need is someone to show us the lay of the land, get us sorted out, a fixer, that's all. We're going into the mountains.”

“You're going to end up in a sausage, old chap,” he said, slinking around behind his desk. “Possibly some kind of ham? They do like to keep the prime cuts in storage.”

“That's exactly what I want to avoid.”

“Look, I can't help you,” he said, shaking his head. “I've got business obligations.”

“Those crates we picked up at Port Pronto?”

“Quite, pal.”

“Is there no way I can change your mind?”

“These obligations are strictly time limited, Emboss.”

“Could we do both? Perhaps there's some way we can satisfy our mutual needs.”

“I really don't think--”

“That fee we paid for passage?” Emboss stamped his hoof. “Double that for the services I outlined. Plus a ten percent per day retainer fee.”

“My reputation cannot be bought, if I fail to deliver on this deal--”

“Triple!”

Astrapios closed his eyes and sighed deeply, rubbing the side of his beaky head with a hoof.

“I see you aren't easily dissuaded,” he said, rummaging around for his bottle of mysterious purple booze. “Though, considering your exploits over these last days, I shouldn't be surprised at that.” He found the drink and unstopped it, pouring out a measure and swallowing it eagerly. “I'll help you, Emboss.”

“Thank you!” Emboss' relief was palpable, and he made a noise as if a great weight had been lifted from his withers. “You're a good person, Astrapios.”

The hippogryph shrugged noncommittally as if he only partially agreed with this sentiment, then knocked back another drink. Suddenly, Emboss became aware of the rapid fall of paws and talons on wood paneling, then on soft carpet. He turned to see one of the pure gryphon twins hurry in, head held high. He couldn't tell which one it was.

“Astrapios,” she said. “Trouble.”

“Trouble?” The hippogryph jumped over his desk and landed somewhat awkwardly.

“Customs,” the gryphon hen replied.

*

Whom struggled to her hooves in painful stages, wincing and clenching her teeth at the grating, stabbing pain in her barrel. By the time she'd gotten all the way there, she was shivering and breathing heavily through her nose. Each inhalation brought more agony.

“I take it from your less-than-impressed reaction that you've never heard of me,” the great shaggy pile of horse and beard on the sinister motile chaise lounge said. “Usually people do something.”

“I-I think I've hurt myself quite badly,” Whom choked, wincing at the sharp stabs she felt as she did so.

“Broken ribs, I'd say. Easily fixed with magic, let me just--”

“Don't!” she shouted, almost collapsing. “No healing magic!”

“It won't hurt, my little dove,” Starswirl admonished, like she was a naughty foal resisting a much-needed bath.

“No healing magic,” she repeated, closing her eyes and weighing up options for escape.

“Can I at least x-ray your side, see where it is you're hurt?”

“No! No eggs-rays!” Whom whinnied, then her body finally did what it had been threatening to do and she collapsed, landing hard on her gut, back legs skewing out in different directions. The sensation was like someone was rubbing ground glass. She heaved, trying to suck down a restoring breath. “No gamma rays either! They bite and... s-sting...”

“Gamma rays? What would they be for?” The furry mound on his face shifted slightly, as though he were raising an eyebrow in askance. “Don't worry, no radiation. Please let me help,” he cooed, light blue auras of magic catching her muzzle and chin with the most delicate of touches so it wouldn't be dashed on the floor. “Could I do something for the pain, then?”

Whom could muster nothing more in defense. It was too overwhelming to resist. She nodded assent, then Starswirl rested her head carefully on the floor. She watched him carefully, looking up at the moving hillock of hair and pony. There was a clinking out of sight, and a gentle, humming business. She saw a vial removed from a smaller case, which had been produced from some deeper fold. It was made of glass or crystal, and contained a clear liquid like water, stoppered with a thin layer of neatly cut cork. Then, there was a whine of magic, and a surge of fear in Whom. Warmth washed over a spot on her flanks, along with an ultraviolet glow.

“Don't worry, dear,” Starswirl said, with that chiding tone again. “I'm just sterilizing this needle, and you.”

The tip of the hypodermic went into the vial, through the cork, and then telekinesis worked its plunger back and drew up a measure.

“Sharp scratch, coming up...” Starswirl said, then chuckled. “You may feel a small prick!”

The next thing Whom knew, the needle was in. She could feel it as it tugged at her skin around the injection site and wormed its way in. The paradoxical feeling of chilled warmth spread like paint in water through the big muscle covering her left flank. Half a minute later, and the grating, grinding, gnawing pain was starting to diminish to a barely tolerable ache. Whom simply lay there, unwilling to move, feeling utterly miserable.

“Thank you,” she whispered, coughing. “I'm sorry I shouted.”

“Darling, no need to apologize, I know what it's like to be in pain.”

“I'm just afraid...” she mumbled, dreamily. “Brings back bad memories.”

“It's okay, really. I take it, then, that the thaumic drain I sensed didn't come from you.”

“No, that was Twilight.” Whom experimented with standing again, finding it much easier this time round, if still quite painful, especially when any pressure was put on her ribcage.

“Well, two Princesses in one day. When I was but a young colt, you didn't get two Princesses at the same time without asking very nicely.” He chuckled with the sound someone might make falling into a septic tank.

“What do you mean, 'two'?” Whom said, peering down at her side and immediately wishing she hadn't.

“Well, darling, the wings, the horn, both on the same chassis, has to be a Princess, right?”

“I'm not a Princess. Twilight is, but not me.”

“You look like one.”

“You look like a pile of hair,” Whom said. “Does that make you a rug?”

“Ah, the cat has claws,” Starswirl laughed. “Sorry I asked!”

There was an awkward silence. Whom shivered, even as a delectable inner warmth was taking hold in greater fashion and form.

“Anyway...” he continued. “I haven't felt a drain on spacetime that fierce for years. Damnable luck I didn't get here in time to meet the individual responsible. I was already coming in this direction; felt you wormhole your way in here and thought you might be worth chatting to, but teleportation is a trick done with rabbits and top hats compared to... what was that, anyway?”

“She'll be back. She's immortal, just like Nightmare Moon. It'll take more than a big fangy thing to kill her. I don't think she thinks I know she can't die, but I do.” Whom sighed and shook her head, fighting off the urge to sleep. “Direct thaumomaterial synthesis, Twilight's good with magic.”

“She might be able to find her way back, then.”

“Back? From where?” Whom looked over at the river, now some distance away. “Isn't she in the river?”

“The ekatopletons are a sort of filing system. They file away things that turn up here, and stop the nastier residents from getting out. Once they realize they can't eat her, they'll dump her in the Vault of Many Bones. Pretty small minded folk, really.”

“Oh.”

“Really, don't worry about it. If she's anything like the kind of mage I'm suspecting she is, she'll figure out the layer cake arrangement of this awful realm,” Starswirl said, as his chaise lounge shifted and carried him away a few paces. “What were you doing down here, anyway?” There was a protracted shuffling and scraping noise, and the columnar trunk of hair and fur that was Starswirl's neck moved his head to look at her more closely. “You mentioned a certain Nightmare; you're not here on a certain periodical errand, are you?”

“Nightmare Moon had her memories dug out by the Elements like they were a melonballer; she's just called Luna again now,” Whom said.

“Has it really been a thousand years on the surface? Starry foals, I have been here awhile.”

“Me and Twilight came here by accident, I think,” Whom said, eyes still fixed on the slithy mercury surface of the river. “We're getting the ingredients together for the Nectars though.”

“Ah hah! I knew it! Well, then it's no accident that you ended up here, that's for sure.”

“Twilight was trying to take me into Equestria, not down here.”

“She would have had to come at some point, even if she did not know it yet.” His columnar neck relaxed back into its former position, and he sighed. “You can't very well make any of the Nectars without a bit of the river. Everyone knows that.”

*

Twilight gathered her magic and dumped it into the act of flying. This was raw stuff, undirected and primal. Wings alone failed to function above a certain velocity. She'd been doing something like this to attain the speeds she'd put on to clear through the other levels of Tartarus, but now it was happening at an order of magnitude more intense. She spread telekinesis ahead of her, tense thaumic surfaces deflecting the airflow. The fields extended first as a skirt, then a tear-shaped bubble with its interior surface as close to her as she possibly dared whilst still maintaining that perfect aerodynamic model. Glad that she didn't really require oxygen, as providing a gas exchange mechanism would make the magic more complicated, she shouldered through the sound barrier.

Wings were an irrelevance now, almost distracting. She was a pure missile of force. Thauma gladly provided everything she asked for, and then some. Suddenly, heat washed across her flanks, like an oven door had swung open. Daring to glance over her shoulder, she saw, for the briefest of moments before the blink reflex kicked in, a sun-bright speck of brilliant illumination stabbing out, leaving a long trail of lambent gas filled with the flickering dazzle of ionization effects. What? I didn't set that up...

The speck immediately evaporated, as if her observation alone had spoiled some wondrous cosmic moment. Passing in a blur of fast moving hard shadows and smudges of shapes, the river shot past somewhere below her. Her control of the bubble slipped and the energy sheath collapsed, dropped, and the naked airflow smashed into her like a cliff. She was barely cogent of it before the black unawareness she'd come to associate with temporary physical destruction descended.

All of a sudden, she was staring down at the river again. She was upside down and coming in fast, ballistically. The little physicist in her head blithely commented that her present vector seemed unlikely, but Twilight ignored it, fighting her way through the disconnection and confusion that always came when she was smashed about in such a manner. Obviously traveling far more slowly now, she beat her wings to shed speed, then pulled a hard right turn almost directly over the sinewy watercourse, searching around for Whom.

Sweet starry foals, what in Tartarus is that?

It seemed as though some further monster of the Pit had taken this opportunity to slither out from underneath whichever bleak rock it called home. This one was particularly foul; a great mound of fibres like hair, mounted on a grotesque motile bed of some kind. Whom, immediately noticeable through her pinkness that assaulted the darkness even now, was standing beside it. Frozen with fear, no doubt. Thank gracious I got here in time. Putting on speed, Twilight summoned up the nastiest, most aggressive killing spell she could think of. This time, the creature would not have a chance to throw her into the river. Even if it did, she knew that she could get back with only a moment's thought, now she had divined the secrets of this place.

This spell was a real classic. She had peeled it from a wicked tome dragged out of Canterlot's Low Archive, a special lead-lined crypt cut into Avalon's own bedrock. The original writer of the book had not invented the spell, merely copied it from another, darker source, but the meaning was there. She pulled together the magic for it and felt local space diminish and cool. Next, she dropped into a ground approach and scanned around for a suitable rock.

The hard deck rushed up at her, and she almost missed her chance to grab the right stone. Just a pebble, Whom's right there, can't be too fierce. The little scrap of flint that she placed a telekinetic hold on arced out ahead, just as the final parts of Starswirl the Unshorn's Strong Force Bomb unfolded and exerted their dire effects on a tiny grid of space. The flint intersected it. She imagined the fundamental force beginning to come apart, unleashing energy. Instinctively, she closed her eyes and waited for the flash.

Nothing happened. Aching seconds passed. The window for firing came and went, and Twilight shot over the top of the hideous furry mound. Vaguely, she became aware of Whom shouting and dancing about, flapping her wings as she gesticulated wildly. Before she could find some solution to this predicament, a vice-like grip clamped down around her ribs, slowing her like she had thrown down an anchor.

“Really, darling, I invented that spell! Did you honestly think it would work? Apologies for the faux pas, interfering with another's magic, but I think we can all agree that gamma ray fluxes are unhealthy.”

The voice was just shy of being described as falsetto, and the tone it bore reminded Twilight of an arrogant peacock. It assaulted the silence as if it were an invading barbarian horde. She immediately found it aggravating, without even processing the content of those words.

“Plus points on effort, though. The mare in the arena and all that! Strive, strive, strive.”

Twilight was rotated around toward the source of the voice just as its owner started chuckling at something. The mobile hillock of fur and hair was laughing. The softly keening sounds of magic being employed drifted with the laughter, along with faint, egg-shell blue flickers that concentrated in the air around the highest point of the mound. 'I invented that spell'? What?

“Hey! Twilight!” Whom shouted, in her usual merry way, though it seemed to have been dulled a little, almost pained. “We were just talking about you.”

“Are you okay, Whom?” Twilight said.

“Mostly,” she said, and did a little slow motion dance that involved raising each hoof in turn. “I fell and hurt my ribs.”

Twilight nodded and frowned, then turned her attentions to the mound, fixing it with the most evil and disapproving stare she could muster.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn't turn you into glass,” she said, pouring magic into the second most aggressive killing spell she knew, which was a thermal inductor usually utilized in the creation of artificial rubies.

“Your little pal here tells me you're making Old Moon Rump's super secret special sauce,” he said, voice carrying all the evil of a naughty sprite detailing plans to inconvenience mortals. “You'll need me for that.”

The mound's magic then settled her upside down on the smooth rock floor of Tartarus, whereupon Twilight quickly righted herself, standing up and turning to face it. All the while, the immense chaise lounge on which it was emplaced shuffled and writhed, its hideously motile, enchanted and mismatched feet working overtime. A beady pair of vibrant sapphire eyes regarded her from inside a cavernous nest of silver hair and fur, above which a bone-white horn jutted, fizzling and shimmering with power.

That scared her more than anything. The magical organ keened and hummed on frequencies she was usually barely aware of, simultaneously feeding her own horn with thaumokinetic feedback the likes of which she had never seen before. The magic of alicorns was immense, that was in no doubt, but it was always restrained, available only in the background, visible only to those who knew precisely where to look, or else when the Divine in question wished it so. This was unicorn magic, a far more obvious subspecies, but it sung in this creature. She knew it now to be a unicorn, knew that it could be nothing but. It was beautiful and frightening in vast and equal measure, like a matriarch gryphon, talons outstretched, poised to strike.

“Yes, I have that effect on most mares,” the unicorn-mound said, when he noticed how Twilight's previous angry staring had segued into reverent study.

“What are you?” she managed, after a long pause.

“He's called Starswirl the Unshorn!” Whom said, nodding forthrightly.

“That's not possible,” Twilight said, automatically, even as the sound of her voice suggested that she was growing radically unsure of this theory. “Starswirl the Unshorn was eaten by a tatzlwurm almost a thousand years ago.”

“Did I really? Is that what she said happened?” Starswirl said, laughing incredulously. “How funny! No, I was not eaten by a tatzlwurm.” There was a beat. “I did once write a treatise on interspecies coupling, though. That was fun, you see; it's how they reproduce. The field research alone--”

“That's how you unpicked my spell,” Twilight interjected. “Because you wrote it.”

“Because I wrote it, exactly,” Starswirl nodded. “I intended it to be an amusing little party trick, but apparently it had military applications, who knew? Personally, I thought the one with the pink bison was more amusing, but hey ho, they can't all be winners.”

“What are you doing down here, then?”

“Oh, well, I tried my hoof at some statutory, there was a lot of copper involved, I seem to recall, or was it brass? Perhaps it was gold.” Starswirl's scraggly folds shifted like sand dunes in fast motion. “Anyway, I made a little satire, and this was just one offence too far, and Celestia threw me down here.”

“Celestia put you down here?” Twilight took an involuntary step backwards.

“Yes, all rather unpleasant, and just because of a statue some folks found displeasing!”

“There are dozens of unpleasant statues in Canterlot; stomachs torn open, dams foaling, gryphons frozen in the act of dying,” Twilight said. “What could be worse than that?”

“I called it Celestia Penetro Omnes, I believe.”

“Celestia Penetro Omnes?” Twilight echoed. “Which one is.... Oh!” The realization clicked into place and she gestured with her front right hoof in a generally downwards direction. “The one with the... additional parts?”

“Yes, that's the one, usually a bit of a faux pas with statues of those we ostensibly think of as mares, but it was satire for goodness' sake!” Starswirl had gotten pretty animated by this point, which occasioned unsettlingly tumultuous ripples in his massive flowing locks and weaves. “I mean it's not like she couldn't grow one! She can make herself look like whatever she pleases, including inanimate objects and bloody metaphysical concepts!” He huffed and snorted, and tufts, bangs and sprouts of beard hair flopped once. “A big dangly willy would be the least of her abilities.”

“So she put you down here.”

“Only after I presented the statue to her on the occasion of her birthday.”

Whom began giggling wildly whilst trying to look like she wasn't, which made her wince and tense up in obvious pain.

“You're not what I expected,” Twilight said, after a moment, feeling rather disarmed. “You know, I've read all of your books. I'm actually a big fan...”

“I doubt you've really read any of my texts, at least not in the fashion I intended them to be read.”

“What do you mean?”

“Knowing Celestia, she almost certainly rewrote them to conform better to the approved version of history.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“How many books do you think I've written?” Starswirl said, head coming up, those fierce eyes fixed on her with an even greater intensity.

“Your main body of work comprises nineteen complete treatises,” Twilight said, sitting up straight and reciting as if giving an answer in front of a packed lecture hall to an expectant professor. “Eleven cover the major schools of thaumic thought, with the remaining eight comprising commentary and analysis of those schools. However, modern science agrees that your diaries are far more--”

“I never wrote any diaries,” Starswirl said. “Too much of a security risk. It's all up here.” He wobbled his head back and forth in lieu of tapping it. “And, as a matter of fact, I wrote ninety-nine treatises, of which eighty-seven were complete at the time of my incarceration.”

“Oh, my...” Twilight said, visions of previously unknown Starswirl the Unshorn manuscripts writhing about in her mind, lighting up the parts of her brain usually only invoked during certain periods in the spring when the light was right.

“Starswirl says he can help us with the Nectars,” Whom said, having found a comfortable position that didn't compress or interfere with her ribs too much. “You know, there are nine ingredients, and we've only got...” The moon mare peered up and to the right, thinking deeply. “Three. Three ingredients.”

Twilight's reverie of dancing formulae and arcane secrets was broken only when she heard the familiar sound of her panniers being unlatched and rooted through. She glanced back in time to see the pinion-feather sized scroll zipping out, wrapped in Starswirl's magic. She almost instinctively grabbed at it with her own telekinesis, pulling back just in time, aware that a tug of war between two powerful magic users would involve a breakage at the weakest point – that all too mundane scrap on which the ingredients list was written.

“Hey! Give that back!”

Starswirl ignored her and unrolled it, closing one eye to peer at the writing, drawing it closer and moving it further away, in what was almost a parody of someone actually reading something. Twilight moved closer, then Starswirl huffed and looked away in pique, as if the scroll had suddenly grown a disgusting smell and become repulsive.

“Yuck, what amateurish hooves wrote this?” he said, shaking his furred head. “What a bunch of little foals! Playing with magic you're not supposed to wot of, and all that. Do you have an uncontrollable army of brooms fetching water for you, too? Tsk, tsk, tsk. I'm very disappointed. Lucky you have good old Uncle Starswirl here to sort it all out.”

He continued speaking before Twilight could reply.

“I can imagine what you've been through to get even three parts of nine. Without a proper recipe, too. I'm surprised, maybe even a little impressed. How about I give you a hoof and fill out the rest of this, though? Locations of said parts, what you need, how you're supposed to make it, where you're supposed to make it. Sound good?”

Twilight could only nod mutely.

“But there's something I want from you.”

“What's that? What could I possibly do?”

Even as Twilight's febrile imagination began to suggest exactly what a twenty-something year old good looking mare and her equally comely pink friend could do for an elderly stallion who'd spent a long time alone, Starswirl leaned down and forward. His chaise lounge shuffled a little bit, lending to the conspiratorial air.

“Jailbreak,” he whispered.

Roughly a Light Minute

“As discussed in previous chapters, species of Tatzledia, whilst superficially resembling leeches or worms, are related neither to the Hirudinean or Oligochaete annelids and, in fact, occupy an entirely different phylum, of which they are the only extant members. Nine species have so far been identified, two of which appear to have become recently extinct, as they are only attested to and not found in the wild. There are three subspecies. Ranging in length from three to eleven metres, depending on age and diet, tatzledia spp can weigh up to two thousand kilograms, though the average is between five hundred and eight hundred. Of course, it is their highly unusual and perhaps unique method of reproduction that is of most interest to modern science, but I will cover this later on.” - 'Glaucus' (almost certainly a pseudonym), Modernis Mundus Bestialis, BN 42, from a translation by Funny Money et.al.

Fluttershy's hysterical screaming soon became a slightly different, but excited, shriek, as she realised that the roc did not mean to eat her. Certainly, it still maintained a firm but blunt grip on her with its rowing-boat sized talons as they ascended at a frightening pace into the engulfing blue sky, but had it been intending a quick snack, it would already all be over. She'd seen these terror birds handle their prey, and they took no joy or time in dispatching them. Fluttershy liked to think that this was because they were an order above the average ravenous fanged predator with a spark of smarts, but knew deep down that it was because the longer a prey animal, especially one with horns or similar means of self-defense, was allowed to stay alive, the more time it had to cause damage in aid of its escape. With the sheer weight of prey needed to sustain such a phenomenal aviform, rocs could afford little downtime.

The alkali flats were studded with roc hideaways like angular flattened tulips, and generally strewn with boulders. To the east, the desert occupied the horizon and, since that was the direction the roc was headed, it was the only way she could see. Yellows and ochres flashed past below, almost sulphurous in the sunlight. Flickers of mica and sparkling salts in the regolith gave it all a shimmering mein. As the roc beat its tremendous wings and they accelerated, gaining height all the while, there would occasionally be a bright flash as the light reflected off a particularly shiny rock or sparse, transient pool.

After about twenty minutes, though Fluttershy was pretty unsure on that measure considering the levels of adrenaline coursing about her system, the roc began to sink downwards. Then, four great pillars emerged out of the heat haze. Arranged in a loose square, they failed to draw her attention as much as the Black Dog did. With each of his heads pointed in a compass direction and great shaggy black back facing the north, he seemed some sentinel statue, a gargoyle to ward off foes. His collar, an immense circlet of dull slate metal studded with square diamonds, girdled his tripodial neck. Eyes like the shallows of a stormy ocean filled with bioluminescent plankton gazed and gazed, ever vigilant.

The roc made one loose orbit of the four pillars that marked out the gate to Tartarus, shedding altitude all the while, then curved back on its course to overfly a surprisingly flat strip of yellow dirt which, by dint of its square shape, had to be artificial. They were moving slowly now, low enough that Fluttershy could see the emerald shoots of hardy desert plants nosing up out of the sand. Just for a moment, she swore that the roc glanced down at her, then its talons sprang open, depositing her onto the makeshift runway.

She landed with a sound like a tree trunk being felled onto dense leaf litter, impacting rump first. The roc, it seemed, had imparted a slight spin to her. The world was a swirling maelstrom of confusing views, and the sky she could see was fogged with clouds of dust. She soon came to a halt, and lay on her back, staring into the blue. As a pegasus, she knew that uncontrolled landings could easily result in fractured leg bones, so it was best to roll into one that was too fast and couldn't be corrected. Had it been an accident, a twist of fate, or had the roc known that as well?

Clambering to her hooves, she looked around for the bird which had brought her here. Its low pass to the ground had left a trail of drifting dust along its course, so was easy to track up to where it was now curving up and away, needing only the occasional flap of its gigantic wings to propel it. That scimitar beak was now obvious, and easily twice as long as her own body. The big sapphire eyes were studying her, waiting. Now, she saw the second bird. It had obviously been following along some distance behind. It must have been very high up, for it seemed like a single, vaguely avian shape drifting slowly along, up in the hazy blueness of the deep sky. Shrill calls came next, along with their basso subvocalizations, just one part of the complex and impenetrable roc language. They boomed across the landscape, resonating inside her skull and in the pit of her stomach.

That's certain, then, Fluttershy thought. They're as intelligent as I am.

She glanced around, expecting to see the chimera somewhere, but frowned as things came together in her head. Animals are animals; they can be excused. But these rocs can understand our language, they're smart, thinking beings. How can they allow it? Where are their ethics?

That muscle tensed in her neck again, just before Discord whispered; ethics are for ponies!

Whilst this might have made anyone else jump, Fluttershy merely trotted forward toward the Gate and refused to give him the satisfaction. She'd spent a long few weeks in fear of this ability, the fact that he could read minds. However, she'd soon realised that he could only easily read surface thoughts, her internal monologue. Even then, it would not always be fantastically accurate; his precision scaled with the force of the emotion that she was feeling at that moment. Whilst this had lead to some rather embarrassing incidents, when Discord had intruded on her more personal moments deep in the forest, she'd developed better mental finesse since then. Whether or not these apparent limitations to his power were genuine, or merely a disguise, a sort of feint, she didn't know. That estimation tended to change depending on how much of a bastard he was being.

Fear came over her then, because the towering pillars of the Gate were looming large. The ground underhoof was changing from its rough, random sprawl of windblown dunes to the flatness that predominated the area immediately around the pillars. She had been here a few times before, mostly to check in on Cerberus. Despite the Black Dog being three or four times the size of her cottage, and nominally charged with the defense of the realm above from the realm below, his personality was really rather doggy. He enjoyed small, squeaky objects being thrown for him, scratches behind the ear, and the occasional bit of something meaty purchased from gryphon butchers.

How this reflected his ability to detect and guard against threats that were possibly powerful enough to rival even the Princesses was beyond her, but she supposed that his attitude would change as soon as he actually spotted something worthy of his fierceness. It would be like it was with any other guard dog. Fluffy, snuggly and, in the right light, downright adorable, with those he liked, and a ravening monster who would dive in for the kill without a moment's thought against those he didn't.

“What are the rocs for, Discord?” she said, quickening her pace toward the imposing figure of the Dog between the pillars.

“Fun,” he said, using his words this time, appearing to her left in one of his favored mythic forms; a box-kite parody of a dragon picked out in red, green and orange ribbons, drifting as if tethered in a gentle breeze. “Though, mayhap, for more pragmatic reasons.”

“If this is a wind up, I'll set him on you,” she said, peering up at Cerberus' heads. “I wonder if you'd come out of it smiling so widely.”

“Mr Woofy over there would barely leave a scratch on me.”

All of a sudden, there was a low rumbling roar, as if of mountains collapsing in the distance. One of Cerberus' heads shifted. Flights of small brown desert finches bloomed out of the various hiding spots in his fur, alarm calls going up and a great mellifluous tweeting echoing between the pillars. Green threads of dry aloe creepers fell in a rain below them, along with dust and sand, dislodged as a pair of those oceanic eyes panned round to inspect them, pupils contracting sharply down to fierce points as if someone had shot up a flare over that sea. His squat, canine features were rounded and rough, as if he had seen an unceasing span of ages come and go. A single snaggletooth, alone the size of a pony, jutted out from his lower jaw and pressed against his big black lips.

She was about to jump up and greet him with a full body snuggle, but then in the shadows cast by his own body there was a tremendous movement, far too fast for such a large entity. His immense right paw shot out and slammed down on Discord with a whip crack sound. She was sure she heard crunching and a sound like someone unclogging a particularly blocked up toilet. From beneath the claws and pad of the chthonic limb, four mismatched appendages jutted out at strange angles. The draconic tail spasmed. Cerberus licked his lips, quite slowly, exposing a further array of enamel that was positively selachian.

“Good boy!” Fluttershy cooed, stroking Cerberus' huge and wrinkled nose, which elicited a softening of those wicked eyes.

“Why?”

Cerberus' voice didn't emerge from his mouth, but seemed to spill out of thin air, spawned of the naked vacuum itself. The tone of it was deep, as expected, but with a merry, idle tone behind it, like a grandsire might put on when dealing with a precocious foal whom he must educate about the birds and the bees. It was always concise, too. There was rarely a word wasted or out of place. His features followed the expressions and emotions of his speech. Currently, one massive furry eyebrow like a shag carpet remnant was ever so slightly raised, and he seemed to indicate the trapped and wriggling form of Discord with a tilt of the head.

“He says that Princess Twilight is trapped in Tartarus,” Fluttershy said, granting him the same courtesy of verbal efficiency. “If that's true, we need you to let her out, or let us in.”

“Hmm...” the Dog said, dragging that sound out into a long rumble like echoing thunder.

“He could probably explain it himself if you let him up,” Fluttershy said. “He didn't really tell me very much.”

Cerberus nodded his agreement and raised his paw, swiftly returning it to its normal position. Discord had been rammed deeply into the dirt, slap bang in the centre of a paw-shaped impression. The chimera was laying it on thick. That, or Cerberus really had some power over him. It seemed as though Discord had been flattened along his trunk, goatish head squished and squashed into an odd shape that, as soon as the pressure was off, popped back to the way it had been.

“Ow,” he said, sitting up straight, rubbing his temple, at which point his eyes fell out with an obscene plopping noise and rolled in opposite directions. “Was that really necessary?”

“You are not allowed here,” Cerberus said, fixing him with a gaze that spoke of the litany of casual violence its owner could perform.

“I'm on a mission of mercy!” Discord protested, holding up his paw and talon. “Tell him, Fluttershy.”

“I did, but I think he needs a little more information.”

“We've not got the time!”

There was a brief silence, in which Fluttershy said nothing, and the Black Dog merely continued to gaze, as if daring the chimera to do something brash. The moment passed, then Discord sighed and telescoped his arms out left and right, fetched up his eyes and reinserted them as if they were made of glass. They wobbled around in their sockets like gyroscopes, then he blinked a few times and they went back to their old selves, mismatched, googly and lurid, liver failure yellow.

“I only know a little more than I've already told you,” he said, standing up and brushing invisible sand from his feathers, scales and fur. “Twilight, for reasons unknown and by methods arcane has gotten herself trapped in Tartarus. We have to open the way for her. The Gate doesn't open from the inside.”

“What if it is a trick?” Cerberus said, though whom he was addressing was unclear.

“I wouldn't joke about something like this.”

“He's been better recently, less of a pain in the rump,” Fluttershy admitted. “Reformed, and on our payroll.”

“So I have heard,” he said, nodding. “Many evil things live beyond the Gate. Many woes, from many places.”

“We'll be careful,” Discord said, conjuring a ball of sputtering, oily fire above his paw. “Don't forget, I am no pushover.”

The Black Dog grinned, his lips pulling back ghoulishly to expose a seemingly endless parade of flat, sharp and serrated teeth that were strikingly white, their sharpest edges shimmering and distorting the air. Fluttershy couldn't quite see where exactly those edges were. He flexed his big shoulder muscles and lifted the same paw he'd used to pin Discord experimentally.

“W-With exceptions,” the chimera clarified, looking away and dispelling the flame.

“The Gate can be opened from the inside,” Cerberus said, lending another of his grating, shuddering growls to the emphasis. “I am both here and there.”

*

“'Tatzledia procreator terribilis’. Yeah, they have the name pretty much right. Sarge told me it means ‘terrible breeder’. We were out on patrol, half way along the Tepp trail, on the northern edge of the desert, when we found it. Nice Wings was on point above, and he just started screaming and hollering like it was the end of the world. ‘Course, me and Lemon Laugh all gallop over to where he ended up landing just as fast as we can. I ain’t never seen anything like it. There was a family caravan, maybe thirty or forty diamond dogs plus carts. Something happened to ‘em in the night. Bandits maybe. Tatzlwurms don’t usually have the stones or the inclination to attack thinkin’ folk unless they’re injured and can’t resist. Anyway, there were five or six of the big ones… they were just eating. I think I could have stomached that. You see plenty out on the trails and, well, we’re all animals. Some folks reckon there’s a difference, but we all look the same when something’s got its teeth in us. Nah, what did it for me was the two that weren’t having dinner. They had those special feelers out, the ones with the little things that look like brushes. Almost careful, like, they’d taken off all the clothes the two diamond dog matriarchs were wearing, and… well, they were doing that other thing the wurms are known for.

Then Nice Wings gets real mad. Starts going at ‘em with his crossbow and his dropstones. Laugh and me open up with just the magic. Halfway through Wings runs out of dropstones and he can’t get his wits together to reload the bow, so he lands and starts going at them with the stronghooves on his back legs. Wurms don’t move that fast, but they sure are wily bastards. We killed the two breeders right quick, but by the time we were done with that, the others had escaped into their burrows. Nice Wings was gonna dig them out, but we managed to calm him down before he got himself into trouble.

It was at that point we realised that most of the diamond dogs were still alive…” - excerpt from the debriefing of Lance-Corporal Sand Dancer, 602nd Royal Guards Brigade, AN 944

*

Twilight grumbled and marked time whilst Starswirl filled in his end of the deal. The big lump of fur that was his body wriggled and writhed in its unsettling way, and he hummed and hawed as a quill, liberated from her own panniers, danced across the Nectars scroll. Occasionally it swung away and dipped into a pot of ink. Whatever he was writing, it was long winded and complicated, and his horn occasionally produced the odd sound of satin sheets rubbing together that she recognised as an ink erasing spell.

In the interim, she was fussing about Whom. The mare had taken to trembling and generally looking completely pathetic. Twilight wished that she'd had the presence of mind to bring medical supplies with her, but acquiring a mortal sidekick who might actually require such things at some point had never been on the agenda. Her ribs seemed badly broken. They were visibly deformed beneath that pink fur, marred with the blotches of growing bruises. The substance that Starswirl had administered, once Whom had explained to her that episode, was yet still working its magic on her, but they both knew it wouldn't last. She needed to get Whom to a non-magical doctor, the sooner, the better.

“What you have to understand,” Starswirl suddenly said, as his chaise lounge shuffled around to focus on her. “Is that Tartarus is a very big place. I assume you're aware of the arbitrary nature of demesne dimensions, yes?”

“Have you finished writing there? Can I see?”

“Are you aware of--”

“Yes!”

“Well, good.” Starswirl rolled up the scroll and secreted it on his mighty person. “Then you will recall that part in my seminal work, Demesne Arcana Modernis, where I mentioned cosmological distances?”

“Get to the point.”

“Tartarus is immense. Even in all my subjective time here, I have never really managed to discover where it ends, or if it actually has such a thing.”

“I'm pretty sure I saw a wall around here somewhere. That implies boundaries.”

“It's a step.”

“Excuse me?”

“I've taken to calling it Basin nine hundred and forty, but that is an arbitrary designation. The wall you saw is one edge of that basin. It is eleven hundred kilometres from the base to the top of the basin, which is itself fourteen thousand kilometres on its long sides, and eight thousand on the short ones.” Starswirl seemed to puff himself up, rising slightly. He evidently enjoyed this sort of didactic tone in a way that put Twilight to shame. “I have so far charted over two thousand such basins. That's why it took me so long to turn up here after I detected your ingress. Light may travel at a pretty speed, but I do not.”

Twilight's head reeled as she glanced around into the sucking darkness beyond the pall of soft light, trying to factor such a gigantic scale into the general scheme of things. She felt her throat turn into a tiny desert, and it was as though someone had tipped a bathtub full of ice down her spine.

“Where's the ceiling, then?” she said.

“Oh, I gave up trying to find that a few centuries ago. Magic soundings taken in a vertical direction always return the same results as I got when I used to try them on the night's sky. I don't think it really has one.”

“What about the Osscept?”

“Where's that?”

“The big place full of bones.”

“Oh, the Vault of Bones. It's a similar sort of endless space. I identified bones from over ninety-five percent of Equestrian species that actually have them, but those samples make up only about thirty percent of the total mass.”

“No, I mean, how is it connected into this place?”

“It's another cell in the greater structure of this demesne, ditto Elysium, and that place with all the fire.”

“I don't think I've seen that one.”

“They're not linked by linear space. I think they are quite strongly acausal and atemporal too, in relation to the other cells.”

“I called them layers.”

“You say tomato...” Starswirl shrugged. “In any case, be glad you didn't stay too long in any one spot. You say a thousand years have passed in Equestria, but it has been rather a lot longer for me. Subjective time has meant a span eight times that.”

“You've been down here for eight thousand years?” Twilight raised an incredulous eyebrow.

“Approximately.”

“I think we've meandered away from the point you were trying to make,” she said, filing that factoid away for later investigation.

“You may have wormholed your way in here like a particularly randy specimen of tatzledia--”

Twilight winced at the reference, instinctual parts of her brain rebelling and telling her to flee.

“--but that is certainly not a route you can take out, as I'm sure you have already tried.”

“My teleportation doesn't seem to work here, yes.”

“A device somewhere hereabouts disrupts the generation of stable wormholes. It's ten kilometres tall and, so far, I have not managed to destroy it, by means mundane or magical. I suppose at one point it would also have prevented you turning up here at all, but time has not been kind to it. ”

“So how do you get around?”

“The atmosphere only settles down into the basins.” He glanced upwards, as if looking at something huge in the black. “Even then, it's in a thick layer about a hundred kilometres deep. Once you're above that, you can slip around in the vacuum at alarmingly high velocities, unimpeded by the atmosphere. Doesn't take long to get where you want.”

“Oh!” Whom suddenly piped up. “I've read about that. I love science fiction. The magazines I used to get had stories in them every month.”

“It is no fiction, my dear!”

“You were making a point...” Twilight grumbled. “Does it lead to you giving me back my scroll?”

“Long ago, I discovered the intended exit from Tartarus. It is within a dome shaped structure on the high ground between the basins. But I cannot get through the Gate. I am an intended captive of this demesne and, whilst parts of it may have decayed, those wards hold true.”

“So you need me to have a look? Break you out of here?” Twilight sat down on her haunches and licked her lips, anticipating a challenge.

“Yes. Then I will fill my end of the deal and give you back your list, when once again I taste Equestrian air and feel the sun upon my skin.”

“What makes you think I'll be any better than you? You've had eight thousand years, so you say, to pick that lock.”

“You are a Princess! You're of the same authority as she that put me here. More importantly, you aren't intended captives. The demesne keeps good track of its prisoners.”

“Right. Well, alright. I suppose that we've no choice. We need to get out of here in any case.”

Twilight briefly considered just taking the list, now that Starswirl had apparently already amended those missing parts to it. The ancient mage represented a major imponderable, however, and she dismissed the idea almost as soon as it appeared.

“You shan't without me, unless you wish your scroll to stay entombed as well.”

“Oh, don't worry. We've a lot to talk about. A great many things.” Twilight couldn't help but smile as she imagined all of the wonderful, exciting topics the two of them could rap about, what light he could shed on the past, present and future, and of the physical properties of the world and this weird place. “I don't intend to leave any part of you behind. Where is this exit then? Lets get to it. We've no time to waste.”

“That direction,” Starswirl said, indicating with his head to Twilight's rear. “Up, out of the basin of course, for about...” He trailed off, humming to himself, then said, quite simply: “A light-minute.”

*

Equestria, named such by its equine inhabitants and named other, secret things by the other races with whom they shared space, hung in the star-speckled firmament like a gaudy bauble, hiding one half of its face in shadow. It kept a steady corkscrew path around the harsh white point of a star that cared little for the fragments of gas and metal that loyally followed it, beating out an unceasing pattern through epochs of geological time, quenchable only by the most dramatic of cosmological events.

They had become now, instantiated into mere six and seven dimensional fractals spraying and sliding about in the quantum foam like energetic pinballs. One, final, barrier yet prevented them decaying and degenerating further, to sketch three dimensional objects into being on the surface of that little blue and green marble, and so begin the Party. This happening was scheduled to be something truly grand, and so warranted the capitalisation. If the fractals that were the Greater Gods, Dionysus and Indra and all their high-order fellows, were to rampage in the style they had been promised, a certain drink had to be made, a final key in the lock.

They could feel themselves getting stupider as they spiralled down toward Equestria. The secrets of the cosmos, and the Cosmos Beyond, elude them as if those memes of deep understanding were wily newborn rats, and they the decrepit cats at the ends of their lives. Ideas of their bodies, suitably horsed up by dint of the universal context, swirled and eddied, desperately waiting to become odd red equiforms and other syncretisms. Each of the fractal-gods were, truthfully, only a tiny part of the fullness of the Gods they represented, but it was more than enough. They would return and become one again, and memories, such as they were, merged with the immensities that spawned them.

Thoughts like pair-production and annihilation in the foam flashed and flared soundlessly, and the fractals began coalescing in the background in coordinates that corresponded to the three dimensional location of the Moon's permanent night side. Photons encountered them then, a constant wash that described a solar system, an uncaring star and a planet full of mad horses, cattish birds and birdish cats, insectile equines that couldn't decide on a look, and upright dogs that wandered the desert and worshiped rocks, all watched over by mares of loving grace. These last creatures the fractals were most familiar with, for they came from the same stock.

The rest of them they remembered faintly from the last time they were here, but they were all products of random evolution, hotch-potch combinations of atoms, molecules and electricity. Some of them were the products of the products of evolution, more than the currently extant fraction that were untampered with in fact, but this distinction was of little importance to the fractals. No, it was the hybrids they were interested in, those mares of loving grace. Once, a very long time ago, they'd been flesh things digging about in dust. Then, the Universe, which cared far more than the stars that made up the majority of its visible mass, had decided to get itself involved, and that, as far as the Gods were concerned, was were everything had gone pear-shaped.

The first hybrid, made from a fragment of the divine which the Universe had let inside, then bound into a cattish bird on the top of a mountain when his suffering became too great, turned out to embody all the things that its syncretic race cared about. It used its immense powers, at least locally, to forge a new three-species race, turning many cattish birds into birdish cats, and even making some horsish, cattish birds, which irritated everyone no end. Then, it turned the tables in a long-standing war of attrition and completed its subjugation of the equines, for use as food, amongst other things.

With the Universe predicting catastrophic biosphere collapse within a mega annum, and unable to go back on its choice, it let in something else to balance out the equation. This was an unbounded thing, not mixed with any sapient biology. Responding to the desperate cries of those mad horses, fearing their extinction, the second fragment of the divine rose and instantiated as their defender.

Disaster was only averted because the two fragments were basically evenly matched. As it was, part of the gryphic megacontinent fell into the sea, millions on both sides perished, and several vital oceanic and littoral biospheres were utterly obliterated. The Universe was more than a little bit miffed about this, and decided to wait and see what happened next. The pony survivors, and there really weren't many, escaped across the sea that they would later on call the Dauphine, and the gryphons retreated into the mountains, talons clasped around a certain crown which held the last scraps of their pet God.

The first defender of the equine faith was cursed roundly by those he'd thought he served, and subsequently descended into a century-spanning hissy fit. Meanwhile, the cut-throat processes of regnal ascension in the gryphic realms ensured that someone new, someone at least as sociopathic as the last guy, was soon wearing the crown. Though the Divine intelligence was burned out, it still retained a lot of its power, and whoever wore the crown was a conduit for this. Despite being on the receiving end of enough gamma radiation to boil off part of an ocean and raise global temperatures by several degrees, gryphic affairs rose quickly under the unified leadership a semi-divine ruler at the top of things offered.

This set the stage for a local biological catastrophe within five hundred years, a blink of the eye in the Universe's timescale, so once more it strove to act to rebalance things. These Divines it had let inside itself were embedded in its foam like ticks, and it would have caused more damage to remove them than it ended up causing to control and balance them. Having island-hopped, flown and slogged their way across the ocean, the dregs of the pony species had set up shop on the uninhabited second megacontinent, and begun to strive inland. To protect them, the universe allowed in divine fragments again and, selecting certain mares who became important later on, bound those fragments into the meat. To protect itself, these fragments were arranged in balance with each other, complementing and requiring the other to succeed.

Naturally, within five years these individuals were in charge of the entire pony show. The Universe, content that it was good, sat back once more to monitor events.

Indra, represented as his fractal, gazed at the moon and at the little planet. Within the fractal, the shape of his scarlet pony form danced cartwheels around the imagined shape of Dionysus, who drifted simultaneously inside his own fractal and inside that of his fellow's. Their current topology allowed them this kind of thing.

“You know, when we're down there you won't be able to occupy more than one location at the same time,” Dionysius said. “It's very much frowned upon for massy three dimensional objects, as we will soon become. You're welcome to try, but you may cease existing.”

“Stop being a spoilsport,” Indra said. “How soon until the Party starts?”

“You'll be pleased to know that we'll be down there in the blink of an—”

*

“--I don't think this is a good idea, Twilight!” Whom whinnied, trotting a slow, wincing dance of panic and worry on the stone. “What if you sneeze and the magic stops working?”

“That rarely ever happens,” Twilight said, sizing the mare up through squinted eyes as she measured the required force field diameter. “Besides, you seemed perfectly content the last time we were in vacuum together.”

“But back there I didn't have any choice, it just happened,” Whom said.

“You think you have much in the way of alternative options?” Twilight said, adjusting the straps of her panniers. “We need to get out of Tartarus, and so we need to get to the Gate. You might have read some science-fiction, but do you have any idea how immense a distance a light-minute really is, especially on a pony scale?

“No...”

“To use the normal system of measurement, it's nearly eighteen million kilometres. Light travels so fast that, in one second, it could do eight or nine laps all the way around the globe. We are talking about a distance sixty times that.”

“Fine, alright, I get it!”

“I'm sorry Whom, but this is the only way.”

Without waiting for a reply, Twilight gathered and applied her magic, generating fine layers of force and placing them carefully over the top of one another. She wove them like expensive muslin around the pink moon mare, creating a series of membranes like a sort of dress or suit. They came right up to her neck, mating with another nesting doll of interlocking fields that went over her head. She looked as though she had been preserved in clear amber. For now, Twilight was exchanging atmospheric gas through diffuse sections in the head piece, but that was about to change.

Ever since the brief flight through space, ideas had been dribbling around in Twilight's mind like marbles. The life support system she'd thrown together from the contents of her panniers had been a stroke of genius, but she had been looking for ways to improve on it. Now able to use magic with impunity, unconstrained by heat concerns, she got stuck in. Warm flares rolled over her skin and her horn began to glow cherry red as she increased power to the whole procedure. She was only barely aware of Starswirl watching her intently from behind a shroud of hair.

First, she boiled down the functions she wanted to perform to their most simple, basic operations. Then, building from the ground up, she translated those functions into reality, forcefields providing the meat and bones of machines Whom would require on the trip. She could make these force fields any shape she liked, as long as they conformed to basic geometric rules, and she could alter the properties of those psuedomaterial surfaces in various ways. They could contain gases and liquids, apply various pressure levels to them, become diffuse and porous, and more besides.

So, spherical chambers could be slowly filled with atmospheric gas via vacuum pumps, processes along the insides of those containers removing heat until it became liquid, allowing more to be stored. Water could be condensed, dispensed, collected again and purified by heat and condensation. Twilight held in her mind an image of ground level Ponyville the whole time she was working, striving to emulate every condition found there inside the heart of this strange device she was building, all to keep Whom alive on their long trip.

Tartarus' stone floor was beginning to turn molten with waste heat by the time she was done. The amber entombment has grown many opaque, copper-coloured protrusions of force fields like cancerous lumps. It was also now far bigger, almost the size of a small house, flat and wide and shaped a bit like a saucer, and levitated ten metres off the ground as Twilight drifted around it under gentle, half-physical and half-magical impulses, making final adjustments. Power gradients, heat gradients, thaumic batteries tied to the underlying structure of space and other things besides all had to be balanced, so that it would maintain itself with only the occasional top up from her own magical sources.

“It's a bit like a triskelion, then,” Starswirl said, from the ground, interrupting her reverie.

“What?” she said, after a moment trying to process the words; long applications of magic tended to leave her a bit disconnected from reality.

“This thing. Lots of self-reinforcing force fields and tricksy magic,” he said, sending his chaise lounge on an orbital inspection tour. “Looks good, but I wouldn't want to be inside it if you hit a magic dead zone. The thing would just come apart.”

“Yes, it would,” Twilight said, flatly, then moved on, fluttering down to rest on top of the giant thaumic device she had constructed. “I assume you have something like this in order to get around?”

“Nowhere near as complex. It's just a standard one inch frictionless shell.”

“Ah, of course.”

“Tartarus wouldn't want its prisoners to be able to commit suicide, so here I cannot die,” Starswirl explained anyway. “It's really just for the atmospheric bits. The shell, I mean. I don't like to get my mane messy.”

Twilight nodded and dug her front hooves down into the weird pseudo surface of the device. Below, she could just about see Whom's immotile form through warped layers like panes of hard boiled sweets and frosted glass, in which dribbled and oozed fluids in various states like fabulous crystal slugs. The surface reacted to the pressure, admitting her up to the fetlocks and then solidifying like tar. She did the same with her back legs, though these she submerged up to her flanks. There was a strange coolness around her most sensitive parts, and she realised in an instant that she was sitting on the cavity containing several thousand litres of liquid oxygen.

With a purple flash and a keening like catgut thread on piano wire, Twilight fired up her telekinesis and pushed gently up on the bottom of the big device, which wobbled and lifted further from the ground. She caught sight of Starswirl on her right, ascending with her, matching her course.

“Lead the way,” said Twilight.

Minimum Safe Distance; Or Party Fireworks

“I'd like to take a moment to speak about zebras, who are, without a doubt, our strangest relatives. Of the deep past, and the eras in time which drove those ancestors whom we both share to great troubles in order to survive, we know very little. But, it seems there was disagreement between some elements, though it surely was of a far more drawn out kind, practised down generations and in unspoken ways, and for which the term 'disagreement' is a wild oversimplification. It is more probable to think that it was just the best way for those particular groups to survive the increasing pressures of predation that a growing gryphon population exacted.

What we can be certain of is this; whereas our more direct ancestors evolved flight, magic, strength and speed to defeat gryphon attack, the more direct ancestors of zebras fled underground. Where we contrived linguistic systems so as to pass on information between disparate herds to better find resources and survive, they settled down, first into caves, then into the honeycomb of tunnels, passageways and subterranean crevasses that run the length and breadth of the gryphic continent, and so changed away from us, as we changed away from them.

The more obvious adaptations, I will skip. It should be no mystery to learned scholars such as yourselves as to why a biological organism living primarily underground would evolve to be smaller and more flexible. What is, and yet remains, a mystery, is their vision. From our studies of cave dwelling lizards and other fauna, we know that vision adapted to daylight is often the first thing to go. But, as far as can be told, zebra retain eyesight as keen as our own. Furthermore, why have they retained their stripes? And, is there any truth to the rumour, much peddled by the chattering classes, that zebras have a form of magic too, possibly as effective as pony magic?” - excerpt from a lecture given by Professor Fosters Rool, Canterlot Equupological Society, AN 997.

Finding the sensation of vacuum around her rather disconcerting, and with the unceasing thudding of her heart the only sound, Twilight had cast a small, clear dome around herself and filled it with a portion of the atmospheric gases from the device. It was probably more appropriate to call it a ship at this point. Twilight had long been a fan of proper nomenclature. As a filly she had been a regular reader of Noble Nibble's Notes. She wondered what that old stallion would have made of all this, and what he might have ended up calling the contraption of interlocking telekinetic fields that now keened and vibrated beneath her, sustaining Whom's life through modulation of pressure, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, heat and water levels.

She could feel the mare's own heartbeat and regular breathing as feedback through the meshes and layers of telekinesis, jarring her horn in its rootbed. It had been very rapid and fearful at first, but she had calmed down as they rose up quickly up into the blackness. Starswirl was half a mile above them, bright light all around him. How it was possible that he was navigating was unfathomable. He must have contrived some system, however, for he never wavered as they described an arc ever upwards. Twilight's magic flowed easily as they built up speed and passed ever more quickly into thaumically fresh areas. Though she had taken on a substantial amount in the way of stores of gas and water, the structure of the ship weighed essentially nothing, and was, therefore, easy enough to move.

Wondering briefly why she hadn't done this earlier, Twilight fiddled with the orientation of certain internal ship structures, opening a passageway down to Whom's body-hugging enclosure. Her horn's keening took on a different note as the patterns of magic flowing through it shifted. There was a hiss and a ruffling of feathers and fur that brought with it the moon mare's smells, but this was only very slight as the pressure difference was tiny.

“Doing alright down there?” Twilight said.

“Harumph!” Whom said.

“What's the matter?”

“You packaged me up like cargo!”

“I'm just being efficient,” Twilight said, fighting down a fit of irritation. “Don't worry, all this will be over soon, and we'll be in Equestria. Won't that be good?”

Whom said nothing in return.

*

“Recently, I have received numerous letters, all unsigned and anonymous, of course, describing, with fastidious and stomach-churning detail, the writer's escapades with minotaurs. Now, you know that this magazine is dedicated to the idea of maintaining a forum for the free exchange of ideas on love, and the safe practice of such activities. You will all have read our articles and coverage on pony-gryphon coupling. But what, for the sake of all that is good, possesses you people to seek out adventures with minotaurs, of all creatures? I juggle fascination and revulsion in equal measure. I have only one request of you – please, stop sending me these letters. I cannot bear to read another word expounding such bizarre practices.

In the past, you have relied on this magazine to inform and educate on the practicalities of love across boundaries of species, between all the thinking races, and on the material safety of such things; illness, conception advice, and so on. You have trusted us to guide you whilst you indulge your urges or follow the course of true love. So as you have trusted us before, trust us now. We have only one thing to say about having sex with minotaurs: don't.” - 'Meadow Spring', Pigeon Fancier's Association of Ponyville Magazine, 1003 AN.

*

The gryphic customs and excise ship was a sleek, minimalistic example of the art. Its three mainsails were taut in the breeze as it drew closer, presenting an aggressive and precise profile. Before long, it had swung around to present a broadside, then stopped in the water, as much as a moving ship really could simply cease motion. Emboss saw uniformed sailors tending to the rigging, hauling up the sails. From the decidedly utilitarian foscastle, a misfortune of gryphons took off, their broad, dun-coloured wings wide and flapping hard against the inshore breeze.

As Emboss observed the scene unfolding at the very edge of his vision, for the customs ship had not drawn in particularly close, the deck behind him was a hive of frantic activity. Astrapios was deep in conversation with his crew, though they'd switched into a heavily accented dialect that he only passingly recognized as gryphic, full of multipart tones and high, trilling noises that reminded him, in a rather unpolitic way, of irritated turkeys or startled chickens.

Visions of gryphons in flight, paws and claws tucked against their feathered, streamlined bodies, inspired primal fear in even the heartiest of ponies. Emboss had to keep reminding himself that they probably meant him and his wife no personal harm and, in any case, aboard a boat there was scant enough room to merely live, let alone have a decent gallop. Nevertheless, the dumb, babbling mesohippus in the back of his mind, barely more than a tapir with delusions of grandeur, refused to calm down.

The gryphons kept a close formation as their shadows, leonine and winged now they were gliding, swept over the deck like spectres at a wake. There were five of them, he saw, and they now split up, taking different paths in close orbits of the boat, some skimming the waves and others peering down from on high into the unusual rigging. Their smells came now, little by little, and the mesohippus hindbrain screamed foul murder. Emboss could stand no more, and pulled his gaze away from the circling predators to find Truth. The mare had obviously had the same idea, as she was staggering up from below decks as he ran toward that entrance, mane decidedly tussled and looking as though she'd been run down by a cart. She must have seen the gryphons through one of the portholes, or else a more primordial sixth sense had alerted her and drawn her from her sleep.

“What's going on?” she blurted, suddenly transfixed on the gryphons.

“They're from the local customs, I think,” Emboss said, his voice sounding not his own; he hadn't realised how scared he was. “At least, that's what our captain said.”

“Oh, bugger,” Truth mumbled, pulling in close and placing her head over his withers, a gesture he reciprocated.

There were a series of thuds on the main deck, and the sounds of wings flapping and beating the air. Emboss turned and saw five of the burliest looking gryphons he had ever seen standing in a neat V-shape, their precision and maintained order of battle betraying a military air, even if the light brass armor they were wearing over thin chainmail, as well as the sharp iron tips they wore on their claws, weren't hints enough. Four of them wore aerodynamic, seed-shaped helmets of the same material as their cuirass and greaves pieces, but the individual at the head of the V did not. His electric emerald eyes, fiercely attentive, surveyed the deck with extreme distaste, as if he had just found a pustulant wound on his flank.

The leader barked something guttural and simplistic in the general direction of Emboss and Truth. It was in a different dialect of gryphic, but even had Emboss been able to understand any part of the language, the terror he was feeling in that moment would have rendered him mute regardless. His heart hammered like the wings of a hummingbird, and every muscle in his body was stiff and rigid as he stared directly at the gryphon. He was barely aware of his ears folding back against his skull.

Astrapios bustled past him – they were both standing in the door to the accessway below decks, and doing a fine job of blocking it – and broke this terrified spell. He clicked his beak and rattled off something in gryphic, then went to stand directly between them and the customs officers. He was soon joined by the two pureblood gryphon sisters, who watched with the same sort of passionate intensity. The terror soon subsided, and Emboss managed to regain some control over himself, as the two parties began to have a furious debate of some kind. Although, it might well have been a completely polite, business-as-usual exchange of general pleasantries and the discharging of official duties; Emboss couldn't really tell, but knew that trying to apply pony norms to gryphic discourse was like trying to teach phenomenology to a fish.

“I think we should get below,” he whispered in Truth's ear, to which she nodded glad acquiescence and lead the way.

Their exit earned them a few stares from the customs officials, somehow more aggressive than they had been before, but nobody registered open complaint. They descended into the amidships corridors, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the farrago on deck, and soon ran into the zebra. Converse to their own emotional states, he seemed entirely unconcerned, and examined them with a puzzled expression, until he seemed to catch on.

“You are worried about what is happening up there?” he said, in a calming velvet voice, like buttercups swaying gently in the breeze of a summer's day.

“Well, aren't you?” Truth said, glancing upwards. “I doubt apex predators care much whether their prey is striped or pastel pink!”

The zebra laughed and shook his head.

“These gryphons will not eat you, or me, for that matter. They wouldn't want to negatively impact their bargaining position, would they?”

“What do you mean?” Emboss said, feeling calmer by the minute in the presence of more equines, even if they weren't ponies.

“Running into customs clippers is a pretty standard thing for us. There is no big problem. Oh, it might have looked that way, but it is all just posturing. They have come to extract their bribe, that is all.” He grinned and licked his lips, flicking his ears dismissively. “The Captain will put on a big show about how he, an upstanding subject of the gryphic Crown, shouldn't be subject to such rampant misuse of power. They, in turn, will make a show of demonstrating how reasonable their suspicion is that he is carrying contraband. Then, eventually, they will back down, and the Captain will very graciously offer them some remuneration to compensate them for their time.”

“Oh, I see,” Emboss said, suddenly feeling very silly.

“Someone should have warned you, really. I guess our Captain sometimes just forgets himself.”

“And are we carrying any contraband?” Truth said, making Emboss wince.

The zebra's smile diminished by the smallest degree, and he studied them both for a long moment. Then he rolled his shoulders by way of a shrug and nodded.

“It should be no surprise to know that all of our material is forbidden in gryphic lands, but since we had to leave Equestria so quickly, we have none of that on board. What we do have, and you saw it being loaded aboard I think, is dogs.”

“Dogs?”

“Illegal dogs, yes. Labradors, mostly, but also some colter spaniels and some neighounds, on special order.”

“Those are illegal here?” She furrowed her brow in consternation. “Whatever for? Why?”

He shrugged again.

“Don't ask me why the gryphons made all dogs illegal. That is just the way it is. But it means there is a big black market for them. Pets, you know?”

“I thought you were a... you know, a gentlecolt's magazine, not smugglers,” Emboss said, still somewhat embarrassed by the whole idea.

“We have to make ends meet, take opportunities where they present themselves,” the zebra said. “We had to stop at Pronto anyway, and it only made sense to seek out alternative business ventures while we were there, considering the fertility of such a landscape when it comes to these things.”

Truth took a deep breath and shuddered, huddling up against Emboss so that their withers, flanks and barrels were touching. He took the hint and began nibbling at her neck and behind her ears, at once noticing how enticing she smelled; how intriguing.

“Don't worry so much, little ponies!” the zebra said, the big grin returning to his stripy features. “You'll do yourselves a mischief!”

*

There was a spider in the shape of a cantaloupe melon attempting to bash its way inside the guard's cabin where L'Tempete, Afore and Emperor Shining Armor had taken refuge. Whilst its body looked no different to fruit, eight spindly legs covered in fine black hairs sprouted from the unusual carapace, along with a flat, circular mouth full of razor sharp fangs that seemed to have come directly from nightmare imagery. Bristling turrets of beady black eyes darted this way and that as it slammed itself against the windows in different places, probing for weaknesses.

All across the palace courtyard, a large gravel turning circle before the walls, similar perversions scuttled around. Tubers represented the majority of the vegetables on show, but also melon tarantulas in lime green with snowy dapples, and several dozen of the cantaloupes. There were even a few scattered bunches of grapes, for all the world looking like daddy long legs spiders, with far too many slender limbs dragging their stems from interest to interest.

Thankfully, physically destroying them worked, and both of the emperor's praetors had made short work of half a green grocer's between them, with sharp jabs and swipes of their withers-halberds. They were now sticky with the fruity ichor of their foes, dripping with seeds and juice. However, as many as they smashed, sliced in half or bucked into oblivion, more, more and still more would emerge from the warrens of streets, clambering out of sewer grates, swarming from around corners and clambering in the most unsettling fashion over the tops of buildings and over the mounded up corpses of their comrades. As strong and willful as the praetorian guard were, they could not fight forever.

To make matters worse, the great gates of the palace were firmly shut and barred, barricades of strange components blocking much of the black ponyoak structure from view. They bore all the hallmarks of previous struggles, blood stains, piles of feathers and fur, though Shining Armor was glad to see that there were no corpses. Here, at least, there had only been injury, and though it pained him to imagine any pony in distress, hurts of the physical kind could usually be mended, whereas death held far more finality.

“Now we've a moment, sire,” L'Tempete said, between panting breaths, as he slipped his lips around the halberd's quick release catch and allowed it to fall against the interior of the little guard cabin. “Any idea what that...” He trailed off as he searched for the right words. “...object, that cleared the palace thirty minutes hence, might have been?”

Armour's ears were still ringing from the sound it made as it passed. It hadn't broken the sound barrier, but whatever it was, whatever dark magiks and foul enchantments powered it, the weight on his senses had nonetheless been nearly overwhelming. When the gleaming silver teardrop, easily twice the size of any airship he had ever seen, had hurtled above, even the seemingly unstoppable thaumic spider-fruit freaks had paused for a moment. His horn had vibrated so strongly he'd feared it was going to come out of its bed, hewing away a chunk of his brain with it. Seconds later, it had instead set fire to his mane with the thrumming of waste heat. The smell of burning hair still clung to the inside of his nose.

“None at all,” the emperor admitted. “I have never witnessed its like.”

“When it passed over my head, I felt very strange, sire, like I was about to... well, I have no words for it,” said Afore. “In any case, it could be some device of this necromancer.”

“We are not dealing with some hedge mage who has stumbled on a powerful relic and hoofnailed it up to existential threat level menace,” Armour said, gravely shaking his head and sitting down on his haunches, in a breach of formal etiquette quite unbecoming of a pony of his stature. “The last time my horn did that was at my wedding. Deus Sol was in full ascension, striking at the very soul of a misguided changeling.” He winced slightly. “One of my clearer memories of the afternoon.”

“Then it is clear,” L'Tempete said, licking at a semicircular bite wound on his barrel. “The Princesses have the situation under control.”

“We can only hope,” Armour nodded. “Now, does anyone have any idea how we're going to get past this gate?”

“Fly over it, sire,” L'Tempete said, immediately.

Shining Armour humoured him for a moment, saying nothing and smiling pleasantly during the time it took him to understand.

“Ah, forgive me sire, I sometimes am taken to thinking that all ponies have wings,” he mumbled, fluttering his own alabaster set.

“Think nothing of it.” The emperor licked his lips and glanced upwards. “I think we shall take a magic solution to the problem of this gate. There's a spell I've been meaning to try, you see. One suited to this occasion, designed in distant times to break the backs of fortifications. My sister mentioned it to me, in passing, and I looked it up. Took some doing, but such are the perks of the job.” He threw up his head and grinned. “They call it the Strong Force Bomb.”

Several minutes later, L'Tempete bucked open the door of the guard hut, allowing Afore to spring out. The nearest magical horror, a nightmare mash up of a huntsmare spider and a marrow, hissed aggressively and began to scuttle toward him, joined by three peers of equal form. The stallion didn't miss a trick, however, and dashed forward, ramming the tip of his withers-halberd squarely through the first spider's central mass and into the ground. He then rolled his shoulders, corkscrewing the trefoil blade in the shape of three hooves joined in the middle, firmly tearing the body apart with a sharp pop and a shower of seedy pulp, but also driving the tip of the blade into the dirt, where it lodged fast.

Before the second and third spiders could pounce, he stabbed at the quick release, ducking left and rounding on them, lips curling into a snarl. There was a clunk and a whistling sound, then a bolt from L'Tempete's crossbow, a copper finished wooden tube with vertical arms mounted on his withers in the same configuration as Afore's halberd, obliterated the second spider. This gave him time enough to kick down the weighted, spiked sections built into his back shoes, the so-called 'strong hooves', turn his rear to face the third spider, and jab out with the firmest strike he could muster. The dust kicked up stung his eyes just as he felt his rump spatter with gore and quivering legs, a stiff shock jarring cannon bones.

Blinking through the dust, Afore trotted around to examine the corpses of his foes for any further signs of resistance. Excorporeated eyeballs twitched and bounced, peering at him with impotent rage, and legs with hooked tips lay everywhere, but the immediate number of them seemed depleted. However, more were slinking across the courtyard, so he repositioned quickly. L'Tempete cantered past him, chasing the arrow he had let fly, as he himself slotted in behind his dropped withers-halberd and reattached it, pulling back to remove it from the ground. As well as serving as a spear, it could also be employed for slashing and gouging, and this was how it found service next.

Loud cracks like the snapping of whips rebounded off the looming palace walls as the Emperor joined the fray, lobbing nails, screws, bolts and fragments of masonry liberated from the guard post and from the stone edifice itself, telekinetically propelling them up to the same sorts of speeds found in good cannons. These makeshift projectiles were far from ideal, though, and only a direct hit was sufficient to wipe out a spider. When he missed, which was often, the effect was merely to erode chunks from the vegetables, or smash off legs. These monsters could survive even complete removal of all major limbs, whereupon they would roll themselves forward, perhaps by sheer malevolent will, so total destruction was vital.

Having learned to co-ordinate their efforts on the fight up the hill, Afore was quick to gallop forward, jerking left or right at the last moment to effect a powerful swipe on the creatures the Emperor managed to stagger or halt in their advance. They retook the courtyard gradually, the two praetors moving ahead of their charge, radiating outwards, fighting with all the weapons at their disposal, right down to tooth and naked hoof. Nobody had tried eating the spiders yet, but when the situation called for biting and tearing the opponent to bits, it was hardly the worst thing any of them had had in their mouths.

At last, L'Tempete speared the final spider of their immediate number through the midsection with a well-aimed bolt, whereupon it took the creature a few moments to realize that it was dead. Then the Emperor boiled it with a few seconds of directed magical heat, carbonising the exterior of its pumpkin shell and flashing some of the dirt on which it was lying into black beads of glass. Then, everything was quiet for a moment, except for a lot of panting and gasping for air, and the background noise of the city burning, of screams and merry cheers, and of distant, bellowed songs.

There was a loud clank as the Emperor laid down on his side, barrel heaving. He removed his helmet, foisted on him by L'Tempete, as his own set of largely ceremonial armor did not usually have one. Though L'Tempete was a pegasus, the armor was panspecies specification, and a small aperture that usually held a ceremonial crest could be tugged open and the horn slotted through. The stallion was no longer in fantastic shape, having tilled the rudder of an empire for several years. His horn glowed a lambent pink even in the daylight, and little tendrils of smoke drifted up from it.

“Are you okay, sire?” L'Tempete said, trotting neatly to his side, surveying the horseshoe of the courtyard.

“Secure the area!” the Emperor said, voice strained, between gulping breaths.

L'Tempete nodded and he and the other praetor did just that, positioning themselves nearby, until he had regained his composure sufficiently to proceed.

“Right!” he said, drinking from a water skin, helmet now back in place. “The idea with this spell is that you take an object, doesn't matter what it is, cast the magic on it, then leave it next to whatever you want to blow up. The bigger the object, the bigger the bang.”

“Light blue touch paper, retreat to safe distance?” said L'Tempete. “Sounds a bit like a gunpowder blasting charge, sire.”

“Quite, quite,” the Emperor said, nodding. “Now, the grimoire I learned this spell from was quite specific on the size equals power front, absolutely equivalent I think was the phrase, so we'll need to be on the ball with this.” He licked his lips thoughtfully. “How much gunpowder, in terms of weight, do you think it'd take to blow those doors open?”

They all simultaneously looked over toward the towering black gates, heaped up with debris and firmly shut.

“A fairly large amount, sire,” L'Tempete said, a long moment later. “The explosion would mostly be wasted. I don't think there's enough material for you to convert.”

“Couldn't you just cast the magic on the door itself, sire?” Afore said.

“Hmm!” The Emperor's eyes brightened at the idea. “I don't think the grimoire said anything to suggest I couldn't.” He nodded. “Right, I shall do the deed. The spell is what my sister would describe as a toughie, so it may take a moment, but when I start running, you'll know it's done.”

“Imagining that the door here is entirely gunpowder, that'll create a huge explosion,” L'Tempete opined. “My demolitions instructor always used to say that if you can see the bang, you can still be hit by shrapnel. You'll need to have fleet hooves, sire.”

Afore and L'Tempete simultaneously glanced nervously at each other.

“I'll take this blasted armor off, then,” he said, fiddling with the catches and straps that held it all together. “You two get down the hill there, but don't leave line of sight until I'm done. If more of these things turn up whilst I'm barrel deep in thaumic manipulations...”

“Don't worry, sire. We'll keep you safe.”

The two praetors trotted over to the far edge of the courtyard, where it joined up with the big statue garden. The sinister figure of the big statue of Nightmare Moon mounted on a column, her sleeping body terrible even in repose atop the butchered corpse of a gryphon, was clearly visible above the neatly trimmed hedges, a maze of emerald and evergreen. They took up position on the edge of a small lawn, bracketed on three sides with topiaried bushes in the shapes of half-important dukes and duchesses of the previous century.

By now, the Emperor was sat on his haunches, head bowed, horn flickering and flashing like a guttering streetlamp. Before the great gate of the palace, he looked like some lost firefly.

“All this foliage should provide a little extra cover, it's pretty thick in places,” L'Tempete said.

“You know, I bet the both of us could have carried him over,” Afore said, brow furrowing. “Or we could just have knocked? Maybe one of us could have--”

A new sun dawned in the centre of the city.

*

Princess Celestia was sat on fluffy bed of cirrocumulus cloud, like a pearly white swan on a vast lake in the process of unfreezing. Items more commonly found in high-bred mare's boudoirs were arranged around her in a neat circle, each apparently from a different period in Equestrian history. The mirror, a full length model made of highly polished bronze that would never have supported its own weight in the wispy clouds had it not been for the intervention of magic, was straight from the era its materials suggested, but the fine ponyoak dresser was ten centuries older, the night-black wood laden down with lacquer and spilling frilly clothes.

Scattered about the top of a slab of marble were dandy brushes, combs of various types with teeth as numerous as those found in the average wolfpack, glass jars of hoof varnish in shades usually seen through a helioscope, and dozens of lengths of red and pink ribbon. Celestia was currently very carefully brushing her mane with one species of delicate comb, which was made of china and extremely fine, looking like it might crumble to dust should it encounter even one tangle. Every so often, she would pick up one of the ribbons, turning it over in her magic, examining it thoroughly, before setting it down again. She would spend extra time studying the pink ones, as if she were unsure of them.

Something trembled, very faintly. To all and sundry magical beings, even highly trained unicorns, the subtle fluttering of space/time would have been barely detectable. However, to a thing such as Celestia, it was like someone kicking a great bell with both hooves, or a particularly large pony jumping into a swimming pool. At any other time, it might have taken her a fair while to remember exactly what the fluttering, trembling sensation was, but she had felt it only recently. When it happened again, awkwardly this time, hesitation marks in the fabric of reality, she was in motion with speeds that only matter infalling toward a black hole could muster.

A spear of fire, purple-lashed, wreathed in annular lightning that rippled away from the central pillar of atmospheric heating, stabbed toward Canterlot. Clouds all around the path were obliterated like dreams upon waking, bubbles of shocked air expanding outward, flensing the sky of detail in a wake of fire. A neatly coppiced forest, replete with plant-swamped clearings hiding the slate grey crags of ancient ruins, unfortunately lying in Her Solar Majesty's path, ceased to exist. Even from five kilometres up, the waste heat and immense pressure fronts conspiring together vaporised everything from the topsoil up, replacing it with a neatly compacted layer of black slag and a rapidly expanding cloud of highly differentiated plasmas.

Mount Avalon's woes, heaped on over the course of the last days, were compounded when Celestia arrived over the city in its caldera only moments later. Parts of the rim wall, those closest to the earlier hydrogen explosion, were smashed to flying ruin, gutting the parts of Canterlot that leant on them, or even incorporated them into their design. In the nucleus of the comet, Celestia's mind processed at its maximum possible rate, aligning and empowering the magic that allowed this immensely rapid transit. There was no time to slow down now – equally, no time, had the thaumic background even been permissive, to generate a wormhole and neatly step through from her perch on the clouds to the place of a new terror. The trembling in space/time had become a penetrating, painful ingress, and was only seconds from reaching its dread climax. That bastard unicorn, Celestia thought as, in the slowed perceptual frame her greatest mental efforts allowed, she approached the central peak in the caldera on which the palace stood. Why did I ever let that spell leave the pages of his journals?

She saw the gate, piled on with a makeshift barricade, a white stallion with a blue mane hunched over it. She felt the magic he was employing, felt its tendrils creeping over the mass conversion radius he had established. Fool, tinkering in the darkness with things he does not understand. Unexpected variable. Shining Armour predicted to remain at minimum safe distance to Thiasus initial events. Further unexpected; use of Strong Force Bomb as breaching tool. Am I losing my touch?

The spell had progressed too far now and, unlike the inebriate who had levelled the civic centre with a half-formed, inept use of this selfsame thing, it was functioning perfectly. She could see the way its insidious, wildly crafty space/time functions interacted with the mechanisms of reality, breaking them just so. All of the mass, roughly seven thousand kilograms of rubble, gate frame, locks and other materials enclosed within a large sphere, was beginning to come apart. Things sparkled with the blue and green of gamma rays, as perceived by Celestia's divine vision, at the edges of it. Shining Armour's face was locked in a rictus of deep concentration that obviously ran in the family, along with the same genes that allowed the application of this type of thaumic force.

Celestia's original plan, to interfere with the magic or silence its caster, would now not work. There would be no Thiasus if the host city and, most likely, the host continent, were little more than flash glass and radioactive embers before the guests even fully arrived. She calmly slipped to enacting the backup plan, even as the many parts that comprised the magic it involved were slamming into place and imprinting themselves upon reality.

Time and velocity now meant she hung above the epicentre of the imminent explosion. She could feel the output of radiation growing as a false sensation of heat on her barrel, like a hot water bottle minus its case. Telekinetic scoops bit down below, grabbing up the entire kernel of epochal destruction plus several metres of surrounding material. With the immense speed she had put on, the feeling of it coming away and being dragged along behind her was as if it were a ripe apple, plucked from its tree, saying nothing of its huge weight and firmness of anchorage into the ground.

Tiny pushes against the standing magical field were all that was required to change course, and she did so with alacrity, and as intensely as she dared, achieving a nearly ninety degree turn upwards. It was only through sheer force of will and the power she called on, tearing it hungrily from the thaumic background as fast as it would come, that she maintained physical corporeality, and managed to accelerate even faster as she dragged the offending things high into the air. Terrible gravitational forces tore at her frame, and would long ago have turned a flesh and blood pony to thin paste or ionised gas. Thaumic potential drained from an area many times the hoofprint of the city. Any pegasus on the wing at that moment would have found themselves trotting home, had they not already been smashed by the overpressure wave.

In her cocoon of magic and speed, Celestia felt nothing of the growing cold or dropping air pressure outside, but everything of the unfurling, majestic Strong Force Bomb behind her, taut on its line of forcefields. Sensations she had not felt in ten centuries crept across her flanks, her barrel, up her neck. Even under such acceleration, she managed a wild grin. Her mane and tail, earlier grooming and preening now totally ruined, glowed with the actinic sharpness of a magnesium flare.

A short distance beyond her outstretched back hooves, exactly two thousand, four hundred and twenty six kilograms of various sorts of matter suddenly became energy again.

*

All over Ponyville, those who were out and about all simultaneously turned to look toward the eastern horizon where, for the briefest of moments, they witnessed an unfurling glare of purest, solar white expanding out from a high point to engulf half the sky in all directions. Then, their blink reflexes kicked in and shielded them from the worst of the radiance, with but a few suffering flash blindness. It was completely silent, and only the panicked hoofbeats and odd cries of pain and fear as ponies ran into things or fell over one another provided a soundtrack to the explosion.

The brightness seemed to last forever, casting impenetrably hard shadows across anything it didn't white out as if covered with snow. Then, at last, it began to fade, achingly, away, leaving weird after-images in many eyes that blended in with the fast moving purple and green strands, like celestial bruises, that now crept across the sky in fast motion, expanding outwards from the former central point of the blast. There was a glowing orb still hovering there, seeming still due to the distance and its immense size. It was the colour of melted Emmaretal cheese, or a blob of hard wax floating in oil.

Moonstruck; Or Lunar Fantasies

“The gryphic two-town is, as its name suggests, two towns, sat one over the top of the other. Now, you may ask: if they require more space, why not expand horizontally? Why go to all the trouble of digging caverns, tunnels and whatever other warrens you require to mirror the surface polity, when you can just expand the hoofprint of the city? The answer is, as it is with many perceived oddities concerning gryphic society, to do with the fine balancing act the King and his people play.

Under threat of death, the local chiefs, barons and other assorted members of the landed gentry on whom responsibility for inhabited regions rests, must furnish the King with a certain number of new recruits for the national army per year, as well as a tithe in gold or silver. This number is worked out by means of the Five Claws Tariff, which is, in turn, mostly derived from the total acreage of the town or city in question. Why this is, even our most brilliant scholars have yet to deduce. However, since the establishment of the modern language of the Five Claws Tariff, circa 1400AN, no gryphic city has grown, on the surface at least, by more than the space of a few houses. The underground aspects, on the other hoof, have never failed to expand, ever further downwards and in more complex fashions.

An unusual case of excessive taxation quite literally driving the populace underground.” - The Yearling's Guide to the Gryphic Polities, Their Practices, Traditions, Culture and Politics, Associated Canterlotian Press Society, 1992AN.

*

By dint of her initial velocity, much of the spray of plasma that was now Celestia ended up going in the same direction. She had angled flight toward the horizon in the last few moments and, knowing the inevitable results of physics and wishing to avoid any attempts at interplanetary flight, aimed at the moon. Even as repulsive forces and the heat of that plasma threatened to scatter the incandescent ionised gas, the thaumic recombinations produced by her divinity were tugging her back to full corporeality. She experienced a confused moment of awakening, and of a monochrome lunar limb approaching very rapidly, then another where the mares and hard shadowed walls of craters blurred into a far too close swirl of impossibly quick motion. This is going to leave a mark, she thought, then the void of discorporeation swallowed her once more.

*

Something flickered and flashed in Hywell's peripheral vision, and he looked up from his supper of preserved sausage and roadbread toward the western horizon. The sky was all aglow, as though someone had poured luminous ink across it, which was now slowly spreading. There seemed to be an epicentre, but placing it in his mental map of the world was impossible. Over the course of about a minute, it got brighter and encompassed more of the firmament, adding to the light of the moon until it took on the appearance of the coming of dawn. Then, the pure white faded to an orange, finally ochre, lambency, before fading again. In its stead, trailers of aurorae, which Hywell recognized well from his childhood trips into the northern parts of his father's then-domain, began to drift across the zenith.

How curious, he thought, hewing off chunks of the sausage, then he gave a gryphic smile likely recognizable only to those of equally beaky stature. Surely, an auspicious portent for my trip.

*

“It's not possible, is it, darling? Please, tell me it isn't...”

Emboss sat on his haunches in their little cabin, tapping his right hoof nervously on the thickly carpeted floor. An entirely new species of fear now stalked around in his head, one mostly unrelated to fears of predation.

“I'm sure you're just imagining things,” Truth said, though she sounded unconvinced.

“Not this!” he whispered through clenched teeth, glancing over his shoulder at the locked door.

“It can't be,” she said, shaking her head. “It's the wrong time of year.”

“You know I can always... tell before you can,” Emboss whispered, unable to meet her gaze.

“It's impossible,” she stated, in the tone of voice that she used to say that the discussion was over.

There was a short, awkward silence, in which all they heard was the gentle creaking of the boat and the trampling of paws and hooves above, as well as the shared, cross-species expression of cheerful laughter that could only mean the 'business' between Astrapios and the customs officers had gone swimmingly.

“Because if you are, what we did--”

“I know what we did! We've had two foals, did you think I didn't know where they came from?” she snapped, then glanced at him, bit her lip and sighed, looking away. “Sorry, I didn't mean to raise my voice. I'm just tired. Like I could sleep for a thousand years.”

Emboss climbed up onto the bed and curled up beside her, withers to withers. They touched horns gently.

“Not like it'd matter anyway, I suppose,” he said, calming himself with rationality. “It wouldn't even be until next year. By then, this will have sorted itself out, or else, we'll all be dead.”

“What a cheery thought!” She snorted and threw her head in mock disgust. “And don't count your chickens!”

“Sorry.”

*

The port whose smoke they had seen earlier was called Bad Gutz, and it was far smaller than he had imagined. Emboss supposed that he had been spoiled by the largeness of Port Dauphine and the rambunctious, predatory air of Pronto. There were a few iron-black fishing boats moored in the T-shaped harbour, which was about a quarter of its maximum capacity, as well as a scattering of small, flat-bottomed littoral and river-delta craft, so the Barely Eagle had no trouble securing a berth.

The stallion watched from the deck as Astrapios jump-glided down onto the wharf, landing beside a bedraggled looking gryphon wearing oilskins, whom he supposed was the harbor master, or some junior of the same. Despite the fact that some difficulties with tides had meant they'd drawn in at a weird hour of the night, lights burned everywhere, casting pools of warm orange beneath and around them. All the paraphernalia of the fishing industry – pots for crustaceans, interminable lengths of rope, crates of many different sizes, various hooks on poles, spears with backward-facing barbs – were therefore shown in odd illumination, with shadows taking on vague forms where it failed. The arcane nature of much of this equipment, at least in Emboss' eyes, lead to it taking on an air of fearful mysticism, like he was seeing the forbidden tools of some taboo mage.

“Here we are then,” Truth whispered, slinking up beside him. “Gryphic lands.”

“Indeed,” Emboss said, gravely. “I shall be glad to get off this boat. It feels as though we've been cooped up in here for a thousand years.”

“It's only been a few days.”

“Ponies just aren't meant for this sort of thing. It's not natural.”

“Natural? Then we should all go live outdoors, never clip our coats, and mount each other in full view whenever it takes our fancy.”

“You know what I mean, you troublesome mare.”

Truth laughed impishly then, with a keening of magic, placed a set of panniers over her husband’s back.

“I have fetched our luggage,” she said.

“So I see,” Emboss said, chewing his lips thoughtfully as he secured the panniers' woven hemp straps, never taking his gaze off the view over the side.

“I also discovered where they keep their herbivore rations.”

“Is that what the smell of oats is?” He sniffed the air purposefully, which captured all the stinks of a working fishery, and wished he hadn't.

“Yes. We've enough to keep us going for half a week, perhaps longer.”

“There are vegetarian gryphons, you know. Astrapios is one of them. It won't be hard to find our kind of food.”

“You never know, dear,” Truth said, in a tone close to admonishment. “So, what's our plan of action?”

“I don't know yet, not exactly. I'm waiting on our newfound guide.” Emboss peered down at Astrapios, who was gesticulating wildly as he negotiated some deal with the harbour master, who was equally animated.

“Ah, yes. I hope that turns out to be a good idea.” Truth rested her head on the guardrail, still fighting the lingering effects of her exhaustion.

“He seems an alright sort of person, doesn't he?”

“Well, would you trust him to foalsit?”

“Skies above, no!” Emboss actually managed to look away for a moment to shoot her a look of horror.

“Quite.”

“That's besides the point,” Emboss said, shaking his head. “He knows this place, and he probably isn't going to try and eat us. Poor bugger likely has to deal with enough discrimination as it is, what with him being half pony, so he must know how to skirt the bigger dangers. Plus, he has a zebra on his crew.”

“What does that have to do with it?” Truth’s brow furrowed.

“Gryphons and zebras aren't exactly the best of pals. Weren't you listening to Dunya?” He sighed and waited a beat for signs of an answer before continuing “They don't regularly try to wipe each other out anymore, but that's entirely to do with logistical problems, not because the gryphons have decided they don't want to eat sapient food. Astrapios must have a fair grip on how to keep his crew safe from that sort of thing.”

“I suppose,” Truth admitted.

Presently, a muted and disgruntled looking gaggle of stevedores appeared in spits and spots on the wharf. They had obviously been roused unexpectedly from sleep, as they were all in various states of bedragglement, and engaged themselves in preening and grumbling in gryphic as they waited for their full number. Then, they set about tying up the Barely Eagle, at which point the debate Astrapios and the harbour master were having came to its conclusion. Coinage was exchanged for paperwork, which the hippogryph promptly began filling out as the gryphon counted the money.

All of a sudden, illumination filled the western sky. At first, Emboss thought that he'd somehow lost track of time, and that dawn was now upon them. It was too bright, though, and the wrong colour. Where the usual sunrises held their orange and gold wonderment, rising up from the black horizon in an inevitable progression, this was an unyielding white. Everyone on the deck and on the wharf watched in unknowing, mute silence. The glare unfolded, eating up the horizon.

“It's too late,” he whispered, half a minute later, when rippling streamers of aurora appeared and began to march across the heavens. “She's begun it. The Thiasus is underway...”

“It's more beautiful than I thought,” his wife mumbled. “Do you... think that happened over Equestria?”

“Where else would it be?”

“Then the foals...”

“No.”

Emboss turned to look directly at her, which succeeded in breaking her fixed gaze at the conflagration. Her face was a study in terror and fear; eyes wide, lips trembling.

“You mustn't start thinking like that,” he said. “Dunya will keep them safe. She would not let harm come to them.”

Truth gulped and stilled herself, tail low between her back legs, everything about her posture wrong and painful to behold. He couldn't stand it. The stallion embraced her, laying his neck over the back of hers. Her muscles, previously tense like violin strings, stayed that way for a moment before relaxing.

“We don't even know if that...” She nodded toward the west. “...really was the Thiasus, do we?” she said, after a moment. “Celestia didn't mention anything about giant flashes in the sky, did she?”

“She didn't say much about the actual schedule of events, no.” Emboss nibbled gently behind her right ear. “But we should hurry. Accelerate our own schedule.”

“Agreed.”

*

Bad Gutz was just going through the motions of waking up by the time Emboss, Truth, their hippogryph guide, his twin gryphon employees and the zebra finally finished decamping from the Barely Eagle. Of course, since Bad Gutz was primarily a fishing port, it was still a few hours before dawn. There was a chill verging on the bitter in the air as the party drifted away from the harbourside. Emboss' breath left him in long plumes, made orange in the glow of oil lamps. Nobody was saying very much, even the usually talkative Astrapios, whom in another life might have been a tour guide. Though the illumination they cast that actually reached the ground had long since ebbed below the visible, traceries of aurorae still hung high overhead.

By the power of mutual, unspoken consensus, they ended up in a pub again. Bad Gutz had, apparently, only a single place for such premises, because it was currently in the process of serving breakfast. The narrow, four story building was invitingly lit, with many merry signs, all in the weird chickenscratch of gryphic, plastering chalkboards on the outside. Apparently, the pub's customers hadn't seen the huge explosion in the western sky not a few hours before, or else, it bothered them not a bit.

Inside, it was wonderfully warm. Emboss hadn't realised how cold he had gotten, and he let out an involuntary whinny of relief. The thick, hazy air smelled strongly of smoke, coffee, hot bread and something that reminded him of floor cleaner, or the solvent his wife used to remove lacquer and polish from her hooves. There were about thirty gryphons in the pub, clustered in fours and fives around low, altar-like tables, which appeared to be little more than flat, smooth slabs of rock. Most were sat upright on their haunches, though some were more comfortably arranged, laying on their bellies or curled up before the grand, roaring range.

There was a lull in conversation when the other customers noticed the smell of ponies, as well as a few curious looks but, even with his fairly limited understanding of gryphon body language and expressions, he knew that they were curious, surprised and non-aggressive. There was little of the suspicion he'd been expecting. After twenty seconds had passed, the chittering, melodic chatter of conversing patrons kicked in again.

Whilst Emboss had been keeping a watchful eye on the customers for signs of predation, Astrapios had, apparently, ordered drinks and found them that most magical of items: an unoccupied pub table. Emboss sat down on his haunches, but was already feeling itchy. There was no time for this, really. Events had clearly taken on a new urgency back home, and it might now be the case that every second would count, in the end. Glancing at his wife, he could see she felt the same. The mare seemed barely able to sit still.

A tray of the little shot glasses that gryphons drank basically everything out of, as well as a veritable bucket of coffee with a handle and crooked spout, was dropped off at the table a few, silent minutes later. Astrapios merely studied them and drank shots of the coffee, which the twins and the zebra shortly began to tuck into as well. This little ritual performed, Astrapios spoke.

“I am not a paranoid sort of person,” he began, swallowing another slug of coffee. “I left all that horsepiss, racist atavism back here, in the homeland.” He gestured at his crew very slightly with a roll of his shoulders. “But what I am, is an avid observer of the equid form. In fact, I have become so proficient that some of my clients have developed the notion that I can read their thoughts. However, even a blind gryphon could have spotted how bloody terrified you were just then.” His accent had dropped away from the faux high-bred Canterlotian, exposing a more forthright mix of south Canterlotian and west coast gryphic that was probably his native 'lect.

“We--” Emboss began, but Astrapios raised a hoof.

“I haven't finished.” He poured coffee, drank it, clicked his beak a few times as if savoring the taste. “Notice that I said 'terrified'. Not shocked, not surprised. Awestruck would also have been an appropriate response. But you were terrified, as though you knew pretty much what was going to happen, and had just had your worst fears confirmed.”

“I thought you said you weren't going to ask us our business,” Truth said, flatly.

“Usually, madam, when someone is in such a hurry to get away from a place, and eager to pay so much gold, it is because they are involved in some sort of criminality.” He toyed with the coffee bucket, tracing a hooftip delicately over its inlaid designs. “Murder is usually a good one. Tax, that's a given. But you two are the least criminal people I have ever met. So, what are you running from? Why do you need to get to this place in the mountains so urgently?”

“Princess Celestia,” Emboss blurted. “She's trying to end the world, so she can invite all the evil spirits that lurk beyond the threshold into our universe, allowing her to so honor an ancient compact and get roughly covered into the bargain.”

Astrapios choked on the coffee he'd just swallowed, spraying a fine mist of vapour out of the tiny holes in the top of his beak that served as nostrils.

“I've been a senior civil servant for the last three decades, but when I was only a junior I helped cover up a gigantic scandal for Celestia,” Emboss continued, getting faster and louder. “Ever since then, I've felt so guilty.” He couldn't hold the hippogryph's gaze, looking away and closing his eyes. “When she told me what was coming, I had to do something.”

“We're on our way to meet a contact in the zebric kingdoms,” Truth said, easing over gently to touch withers with her husband in hopes of calming him down a bit. “They need to be told what's going on. They... know people who might be able to do something about it.”

“Then what was that light in the sky?” Astrapios said, not missing a beat. “Have these evil spirits gotten in?”

“We don't know,” Truth said, shaking her head slightly. “Celestia called that event the Thiasus, but we've no idea if what we saw was a portent, a herald of its happening, or merely a side effect of the chaos spreading through Equestria at this very moment.”

“Seemed peaceful enough to me,” Astrapios said. “I assume that's not quite the case in Canterlot?”

“It's all gone to Tartarus. There was no sign of it getting better. I wouldn't be surprised if half the city is in ruins by now,” Emboss said, dipping his head. “I can't imagine how many people have died.”

“What's causing this chaos?” Astrapios had pulled out a satin 'kerchief from somewhere on his person, and was busy using it to clean himself up. “Are the other Princesses in on this too? What are they doing? You know, what's-her-smell, Luna and Twilight, the pink one...”

“Drunkeness, without end and without having drunk anything in the first place,” Emboss said, trying not to flee with the intensity of the recollections. “The inebriation only gets worse and worse, spreading to more and more ponies like a plague. The guard were overwhelmed. At first, it just felt like a bad riot, but they didn't stop. Fires, looting, violence and more violence...” Emboss whinnied softly and shivered. “Stallions, suffocated under the weight of mare's unmentionables, still grinning, even as they got cold.”

“We saw nothing of the other Princesses, or Celestia. We got out of Equestria as fast as we could, on this mission,” Truth said, sighing. “We had to leave our foals behind.”

Ensire, or Erisne, Emboss couldn't really tell which of the gryphon sisters it was, bowed her head at this and said, in that slow, word-perfect gryphic accent: “Our sympathies. I hope you get back to them soon.”

“Why would Celestia tell you all this, anyway?” Astrapios said, throwing a glance at his crewmember before fixing his gaze on them again. “She of the Alabaster Buttocks isn't a fool. If she thought there was any conceivable way you could be the breezie in her ointment, so to speak, wouldn't she have kept quiet?” The hippogryph's strange, beaky smile widened a notch. “Or arrange it so that you speed off on a mad quest halfway around the world, availing yourselves of nothing?”

“We were concerned about that too,” Truth said, before Emboss could answer. “In the end, if we are paralyzed into inaction with second guessing, worrying about whether or not we have free will or if Celestia is just that devious or, worse, falling into nihilism, then we've already lost.”

“You've been practising that, haven't you?” Astrapios chugged down a further measure of the coffee, just as a comely-looking alce, wearing a combination bib and cape that seemed to be for food hygiene purposes, slunk over and delivered a tray of oily, silvery things on toast drowned in butter. “Who is it that you're meeting, anyway?”

Ensire and Erisne began to attack the whatever-it-was on toast without any of the decorum they'd shown with the coffee. Emboss watched their beaks snap and slice, grabbing up chunks of the butter-drenched bread before their owner's swallowed them whole. It reminded him immediately of pelicans, or some other wading bird.

“There's a zebra in--” Truth began.

“No, what I mean is, who is it that you want the zebras to help you contact? The ones who can help?”

“I think I know,” iYut said, in a small voice, his first contribution to the discussion. “But it will be no use to try. They have been in repose for the last twenty years. Nobody has even made it past the Night Gate in fifteen.”

“Dunya wouldn't have sent us if she thought there was no hope,” Truth said, shaking her head.

“Who's that?” Astrapios said.

“Our housekeeper, and the one whom we left to look after our foals,” Truth said.

“I hope she's alright,” Emboss said, biting his lip. “What will they have thought of that blast?”

“She is a zebra, your housekeeper, yes?” iYut said, smiling softly. “Your young are in safe care, no doubt about it. We zebra are canny folk, we have to be! It's in our blood. We would never have survived so long here, and out there in the world, if we were not.”

The zebra grinned around at the gryphons, as if to emphasise his point. Considering the enmity between the two races, he wasn't attracting much attention at all. Emboss could understand why the ponies in the room weren't of particular interest. No fewer than four protracted, extraordinarily costly, conflicts, underpinned equestrian-gryphic diplomatic relations. The magical triskelion constructs allowed the ponies an immense strategic advantage. Who really wanted to risk provoking the enemy that held a blade against your throat at all times? The zebras were another matter entirely.

Officialdom in gryphic lands, for what it was worth, didn't even recognize the zebric kingdoms, those below dominions, as states. As far as Emboss knew, they were considered a particularly tasty sort of vermin, to be obtained for the larder if possible, but otherwise eradicated or kept out.

“Our stripey friend here has a few sly tricks up his mane,” Astrapios said, casually, but with a hint of pride. “Those rocks of his aren't just for show; he's casting a mild charm spell as we speak. As long as he stays fairly innocuous, folk won't notice him.”

“Never wondered why we two nations haven't wiped each other out?” iYut licked his lips and seemed to be giving the toast genuine consideration. “We are too slippery, and they are too large to fit in the cracks between rocks. Big, fat birds get stuck in holes.”

“I did know that,” Emboss said, nodding. “About the conflict between your peoples, that is. Not how the detente is maintained.”

“So, who is it that we’re talking about here?” Astrapios said, seeming irritated at the diversion.

“It’s the centaurs, boss,” iYut said, almost in a whisper.

There. It had been said. Until now, it hadn’t quite seemed real to Emboss. The word, and all that it really meant, hung heavy in the air, despite the softness of its saying. Astrapios opened one of his eyes wide, which Emboss took to be analogous to the Equestrian raised eyebrow. There was a lull in the conversation, which lasted for an awkward thirty seconds until the hippogryph spoke again.

“The centaurs,” he repeated. “I see.” He unmantled his wings and rolled his shoulders in an approximation of a shrug. “Are we going to need to run this past the fairies, too?” He maintained the deadpan for a moment, then laughed. “Ooh, and maybe the merfolk and the kelpies should be brought into the loop! And we wouldn’t want to leave out the wihwhinny.”

“We are very bloody serious!” Emboss whispered. “Look, I thought it was a windup at first too, and I really don’t have any hard evidence to the contrary--”

“They are entirely real,” iYut said. “When I was a little foal, I was taken to see them in repose. I have seen them with my very own eyes, smelled them with my own nose.”

“Let me get something straight; you two, so-called responsible adults,” Astrapios said, peering at them with a smirk on his beak, “abandoned your duties, and your offspring, and your jobs, and ran off in order to deliver a message concerning the most benevolent entity in the world’s imminent plans to bring about a global existential crisis to a species confirmed as mythological and entirely fictional by no less than six successive academic generations?”

“That… that’s about the long and the short of it, yes,” Emboss said, after a moment. “If you don’t want to be our native guide anymore, I understand.”

“My dear colt,” the hippogryph said, taking a glance at each of his crewmembers. “I don’t think you could stop us if you tried.”

*

They left Bad Gutz on hoof and paw just after dawn, having first swung by the Barely Eagle to pick up some personal items. All the time, Astrapios had been getting more and more excited, and it struck Emboss, not for the first time, what a strange and contrary creature he was. But contrariness was, perhaps, to be expected, in the chimera of two opposing races whose biologies and cultural outlooks were so radically different.

It was the fate of the ponies, and the zebra, to end up carrying the largest shares of the load. Astrapios was about the same size as a pony foal, and the gryphon sisters seemed not to want to ruffle their prim feathers with such things as pannier straps, nor mar their brows with such things as sweat, or whatever passed for the gryphon equivalent of the product of hard work.

The road out of town was, against expectations, cobbled to a good standard as it wound its way east, following a path of least resistance between the seemingly endless expanses of bullreed-choked marshes. Their high and noble crowned stems swayed in the early morning breeze, and the temperature began to climb. After a few minutes trotting on the harder ground, the hooved members of the group called a brief halt to put on shoes. Truth slipped into the set he had given her for her last birthday; fuchsia enamel and brass with a steel substrate. She looked gorgeous, he thought, even in a bedraggled, fear-worn state, not yet recovered fully from the exertions of the trip. Emboss stood into his own birthday set, bought around the same time; burnished steel, unvarnished or enameled.

Astrapios, as per his style, produced the smallest shoes Emboss had ever seen. They would not have sufficed even for the most diminutive of foal’s first shoes. They were gold, of course, with a steel substrate so clean and free of scuffs that Emboss could not imagine them to have seen much use. At first it had seemed that the zebra wasn’t going to put something on his feet to protect them from the road but, at the last, he extricated a quad of simple, iron shoes from his hemp panniers, which attached via snappy metal prongs.

By lunchtime or, at least, when the sun had reached its approximate zenith in the sky overhead, the swamp teemed with diaphanously winged insects, and the little brown birds that feasted on them. The two ancient and timeless enemies wheeled and circled each other, chirping and buzzing with merry abandon. Emboss wondered how different the species of his home and native land, and those of this place, really were. Most, he did not recognize, but he doubted that he would have been able to tell the difference.

They had been walking along at a steady pace for perhaps six hours when the mountain began coming into view. They could just about make out, on the distant horizon beyond the flat marshes, strange, rippling purple-tinged shelves, smooth and sometimes pocked with snow.

“That’s the Supplicant Altress range,” Astrapios said. “It’s all funny like that because it’s being reflected through the atmosphere. They’re just really tall, and they’re supplicant to an even taller mountain. The mountain. That’s why you can see them, though. They’re still hundreds of miles away in reality.”

“That’s where we’re headed?” Emboss said.

“In that direction, yes,” Truth said, throwing her head a little.

“More than that,” iYut said. “The Night Gate is directly below the peak of that mountain. Good place. Strong magic. Ginnungagap is on the other side of the world, on the same line. You can really feel the billowing of reality’s skirts. I’m sure you unicorns will appreciate it.”

“Reality wears a skirt?” Emboss wondered, aloud.

“It is a metaphor, because it seems as though reality is about to show you what you really want to see,” iYut said, smiling and shooting a mysterious glance at Emboss. “You understand? Her skirts are billowing!”

“Ah, I see,” Emboss said, though really he had no idea what the zebra was talking about.

As the sun climbed away from noon and into the long hours toward dusk, the marshes receded, gradually transitioning to a neatly coppiced forest of spindly trees, sticking up out of the bronze floor of the leaf litter like brooms. There was no single point where Emboss remembered leaving the marshes. He just looked up one moment and found himself in the midst of the forest, trotting down the road. There was only the gentle background rustle of insects, the stabs and whoops of birds in the far distance, and the sound of horseshoes on cobble, keeping a gentle, insistent pace.

Ahead, the Supplicant Altress range was growing more visible by the hour.

*

“--and then, your Princess Luna, though she was in her most fearsome metamorphosis and unrecognizable as a result, descended on the Great Slithering Ones from out of the sudden cover of the eclipse, and smote them righteously all over the Line Tuple, at last destroying the remnant of their number. The first Intercession was ended, and much rejoicing broke out through the ranks, despite their wounds and having fought four days without a break.”

iYut was telling stories, which seemed to be a major pastime of his peoples, or perhaps just of the zebra in question, going by the skill and acumen with which he spun a yarn. He even did voices for some of the more detailed parts and, for a moment, Emboss was able to forget the concerns of the greater world. Of course, as far as iYut was concerned, he was merely relating the past, and not recalling a story.

“I don't remember this from history at school,” Truth said, busying herself with a water gourd. “I definitely would have noticed if my teacher had told us about any plagues of eternally multiplying, all-devouring worms invading from other realities.”

“It is all true, I swear it,” iYut said, looking slightly hurt. “These records were sung down from dam to foal for nearly three thousand years.”

“Celestia lies, darling, we must be careful not to forget that now,” Emboss said, the aforementioned realities crashing down. “If you can simply outlive anyone who might say otherwise, history is yours to write and rewrite. Oh, I imagine there are large tracts of non-fiction; the best lies are mostly true. But the important stuff? All lies.”

“These things are just part of our shared history where I come from, I heard the song and knew its rhythm before I was off my dam's teat,” iYut said, rolling his shoulders in a shrug. “By the time I left on trotabut, I could speak and sing it well, as well as any zebra.”

“We need to get our act together on that kind of thing,” Emboss said, frowning. “Equestrians, I mean. We relied too much on books and authoritative records, guaranteed by the benevolence of the crown. We have to keep our own histories.”

“There it is!” Astrapios called, from his position a little ahead of the group.

They had just reached a nearly-hidden turn in the road, where it crested a small hill on the edge of the forest. The overlook commanded a fair view of the more steeply sloping countryside beyond. As Emboss quickened his pace and caught up with Astrapios, he saw that the slope rolled down to the centre of a low valley, with its opposite side visible, crowned in the purple fuzz of heather and pocked here and there with stands and spinnies of tall, black-boughed trees hemmed in by the far smaller rings of fences.

In the lee of the valley, long, brick buildings, of every shape and size, marked out a town. It was nothing like the Equestrian standard -- neatly planned baroque fantasies and follies, or thatch and wood. Instead, the place seemed like it had grown organically, with people allowed to build wherever they wanted, over a period of many years. There was no swirling decorative marble fascias or glissandos of extensive ornamentation in view. Emboss could see that, even from here. Not a single folly-turret, so common back home, jutted out of any of the low roofs.

In what he took to be the very middle, a two-horned shape marked the only signs of anything but spartan ornamentation. Here, it was far more bladed than the few examples he'd seen on ambassadorial residences or official outposts of this stateless state that refused easy classification within the Equestrian schema. The prongs of it were all that was visible, and they glinted occasionally with the lustre of some metal as they caught the coppery wane of evening sunlight.

“Unless, mares, hens and gentlecolts, I very much miss my mark, that...” He indicated with his head, in the obvious direction of the middle of the valley. “Is the two-town of Lo Squitz.”

*

They were just about to leave the cover of the woods, where the treeline broke abruptly on the edges of the valley, when it happened. With his eyes busy trying to catch glimpses of the two-town ahead, Emboss hadn't been paying attention to his immediate surroundings. There was a sudden rustle and crackling of foliage moving and, all of a sudden, half a dozen feathery shapes dashed from behind blackish boughs, bounded over the narrow drainage dykes on either side of the road, and landed with a clack and clatter of metal, paws and claws. All the commotion and movement sent Emboss' heart hammering into a frenzy, and he had to resist bolting.

“Oh, bugger!” Astrapios exclaimed, as the foremost shape levelled a boxy, brass-finished crossbow at him, the Equestrian-made weapon seeming almost like a foal’s toy, brandished in one foreclaw.

“'Bugger', indeed,” the shape said, in surprisingly sure-accented Equuish. “Right, you know how this works; stand and bleedin' deliver!”

The gryphon, of an uncertain clade, wore a black felt cloak pulled up tightly around his neck, complete with a three-cornered hat, equally black, and what appeared to be a polka-dot 'kerchief draped over his beak and tied at the back. His friends were equally attired, right down to the 'kerchief. Glancing back the way they had come, Emboss saw that another half dozen had appeared, blocking their escape. Emboss felt Truth instinctively draw up to his side.

“Bandits,” iYut muttered, then winced as he realised what he’d done.

“Who said that?” the lead gryphon said, glancing around.

“Look boss, they've got a zebra with 'em!” said the gryphon standing behind his left shoulder, the tone of barely-contained eagerness apparent in his voice.

“Ooh! Ooh! Dibs! Dibs on the zebra!” said another.

“Nobody is eating my crew!” Astrapios said, drawing himself up to his full height, which wasn't very much at all. “Now, look, I don't know what kind of game you're playing here--”

“We are not bandits,” the lead gryphon said, flatly ignoring the hippogryph, now staring furiously at iYut. “How bloody dare you, a stripy fellow like you, calling us bandits!”

“The cheek of it, the bare faced cheek...” the one standing at his shoulder added.

“Have you ever even met a bandit?” the lead gryphon said, gesticulating with his crossbow at iYut. “Why, a bandit'll rape you soon as look at you! Doesn't matter what species you are, doesn't matter to a bandit!” He clicked his beak and shook his head. “Then he'll eat you, and your whole family too!”

“Please don't eat us!” Truth whinnied, suddenly.

“That's what I'm saying!” the lead gryphon shouted. “We're not going to eat you, because we're not bandits!”

“You just called dibs on my zebra,” Astrapios said.

“Yeah, for the reward,” the lead gryphon said, finally focusing on Astrapios. “We're highwaycocks, not bandits. We're just after a financial reward, gained through the threat or application of certain kinds of violence, see?”

“Also, kidnapping and rendering to the authorities,” the one behind him said. “But again, for financial gain.”

“I am nobody's zebra,” iYut said, firmly.

“If you try anything funny with me or my wife,” Emboss said, voice sounding far more threatening than he really felt. “I'll--”

The crossbow bolt struck the cobbles inches to the left of his hooves, sending up a spray of sparks and stinging his barrel with splinters of wood as the projectile destroyed itself. Emboss immediately forgot any thoughts of resistance as the threat he had been making died in his throat. Truth made a sound like a mouse being strangled and pressed herself against him even harder. There was a clunk and a rustle of clockwork ratcheting as the crossbow reloaded.

“Right, I'm going to be charitable and kind, considering you're visitors to these lands, and forget about all the unpleasantness vis a vie the bandit comments,” the lead gryphon said, pointing the crossbow squarely at Emboss and Truth. “All your valuables, in a pile, on the ground, or the pretty mare gets it, understood?”

Emboss was half-way through formulating some response from the depths of his fear-hobbled mind, when the world around him exploded into strobes of fierce, lightning-bright illumination. The sound was of a God beating on Tipanic war drums that heralded the end of the world; six sharp thuds in quick succession, each assaulting his ears more terribly than the last. The stink of saltpeter and something sulphurous stung his nose. Someone screamed, some pony. It took him a moment to realise it was his own voice, heard from a distance.

Sight left him, robbed as he screwed his eyes closed to protect them from the flashing. Old instincts kicked in and he made to bolt, feeling Truth’s muscles tense up against him in preparation to do the same. It didn’t matter the direction, or any consideration of the greater tactical situation. Time for such cogent, sapient thoughts had departed. He heard shrieking; gryphic cawing that sounded more strangled and distressed than any sort he’d encountered before.

He slammed into something, hard. It was feathered but unyielding, and he bounced away at a tangent, still carrying forward a lot of momentum from that panicked burst of speed. An orchestra of squealing came next, of tension being released. Something passed by his right ear very close. Emboss had broken into a full gallop now. He couldn’t remember running this fast at any point since his foalhood. A presence tugged at his right flank for a moment, stinging and digging quite deep, but it hurt not a bit and then was gone.

Weird, kaleidoscopic patterns lurked under his eyelids. He found himself returning toward a calmer state some unknown period of time later, and this was the first thing he was really aware of. The quality of the ground beneath his hooves had gone from the unforgiving stone of the cobble to something far more comfortable and familiar; springy grass. As though he had been staring at the sun for too long, his vision began to return in odd purple blotches, revealing more and more of the actual world. He saw a rolling moor, replete with grasses and heathers and, in the floor of the valley beyond, a town crouched.

Sweat, foamed up into a lather where his clip was stricter, felt like it covered every inch of him. All he could hear was his heart, hammering in his chest as though it was about to explode. Breath came strangled and strained. Still cantering, he pulled left, trying to turn. Then, something gave on his back right side. He crumpled like a felled tree and landed on his chest in the heather. Smells of exertion and rooted-up earth, the blood of grass and deciduous plants, filled his nose. For a long moment, he merely lay there, pain now a constant. It was clustered around his right flank, near his mark, but extended to every muscle. Hot fire trickled out. Something warm dampened the grass, as though he had lain in a mire.

There were more explosions in the distance. They had a different quality to them, sharper and snappier, each accompanied afterwards by a ripping noise. There was more shouting and screaming, swearing in both Equuish and Gryphic. He struggled to lift his head to look, to try and find his wife, but the tree line somewhere far behind him was just a black and green blur, hazed with smoke or vapour. Emboss had lost his glasses at some point. He lit up his magic, subconsciously rooting through his thankfully undamaged panniers for the little ponyoak box that held the spare set, whilst trying to make sense of the distant scene. That was when he noticed the ugly, three-furrowed rent along his right hand flank. It was bleeding freely. Emboss whinnied and almost crushed the ponyoak box with his telekinesis, such was his alarm. Truth? Where are you, Truth? Oh, skies above, please be alive…

Glasses perched on his muzzle and vision corrected, he surveyed the scene. What he saw made him struggle to his hooves, despite the agony this caused. He hissed through clenched teeth and swore himself. Gryphic figures were fleeing through the trees in disarray, far fewer than the dozen or so total than had waylaid them in the first place. Smoke lay over the gap in the forest where the road exited, and he saw little sparks where damp fires had started in the leaf litter, their smouldering kicking up further billowing clouds. The stink of burning gunpowder hadn’t left him, and it was only getting stronger. He could see no sign of his wife, or any of his travel companions. Despite the fear and terror that now crawled up his spine, somehow worse than the physical pain, he forced himself forward.

The scents on the breeze were more complex now, as he approached back toward the obscuring smoke. There were feather- and blood-marred shoe prints in the ground around the edge of the road, with downy fluff gathered in the adjacent drainage dyke. Even moving at a trot was blindingly painful; regardless,he managed a short hop, landing on the cobble and almost collapsing again. He must have taken it at a bound without noticing during the bolt.

Something growled at him from the smoke, and he froze. Black stripes emerged, like some optical illusion. The zebra, iYut, stood there, rigid and sweat-drenched, half of his short-cropped mane missing, neck and withers decorated with ruddy pink patches of burns. Soot had nearly turned his flanks black and, where it hadn’t, marred his white fur to a dirty grey. His muzzle had obviously suffered the worst of whatever had happened; burns, cuts and abrasions rendered it into a broken mask. One eye was screwed shut with swelling, and the imprint of a hoof was rendered in the orbit. In his mouth, he was holding a strap of woven hemp cords, onto which was attached a series of iron spheres, each painted a different primary colour.

His expression turned from one of utter hatred and the intent to do great violence, to a warm smile. He dropped the hemp cord and licked his lips, ears folding forward from their prior back position.

“Like I said,” he grunted, as he spat out a boxy, fractured tooth, covered in spit. “Canny folk!”

“That was you?” Emboss said, inanely, his voice sounding pained. “What did you do?”

“Flashbangs and frangible bursters, a fundament of my people. Works better underground,” he said, between heavy breaths, sitting down on his haunches. “Light adapted eyes, walls all around to focus the sounds, sometimes even kills through shock.” He laughed and grinned wider. “Or because of hot, flying metal.”

“Smells like fireworks…” Emboss mumbled, glancing around. “Where is everyone?”

“Hiding, hopefully,” the zebra said, slipping off his panniers and rummaging through them. “I only put down one fat bird, maybe two. The rest will be back, and they will be angry. Very, very angry.”

“Truth!” Emboss shouted, trying to peer through the remarkably persistent smoke. “Where are you, Truth?”

He trotted past the zebra, and almost had a heart attack upon seeing a lumpy shape lying some distance further back up the road. It was soon obvious that it wasn’t a pony, however. Emboss’ breath caught in his mouth; the gryphon was very clearly dead. Parts of him were missing that a living being couldn’t do without. Blackish blood was pooled all around him, highlighting paw and hoofprints, and feathers were strewn through it, being carried away by the gentle camber of the road toward the drainage dyke. The crossbow sat beside him, scuffed and soot-black but apparently still functional. Emboss wrapped magic around it and hefted it up, surprised at the feedback he received through the thaumokinetic link; it was far heavier than it looked. He called for Truth again, feeling bolder with the weapon in tow, but got no reply.

“Don’t worry, I think she was the one who kicked me,” iYut said, laughing. “I do not hold it against her; she is in heat, after all, and was under a lot of stress at the time anyway.”

“Hey!” Emboss turned around and tried to feel some chagrin at this very impolite statement, but couldn’t; all he felt was pain and a growing weakness, an inertia that came from the core of him. “You can tell that?”

“Anyone with a nose and even a little bit of pony in them can tell; it is a primal thing,” iYut said. “Being as it is, you should follow yours. Who else will smell like that around here?”

“That…” Emboss said, frowning. “Isn’t a bad idea, actually…”

iYut focused his one good eye on him, studying for a moment at the sway and confusion in Emboss’ voice. He bit his lip, shook his head.“Did one of those bastards get you?” he said, peering. “I am not surprised. Even in small fights, these gryphons can cut you to ribbons. They walk around with knives on the ends of their limbs at all times; it is to be expected.”

“Yes, but I’m fine. I need to find my wife,” Emboss said, inhaling deeply through his nose and trying to ignore the overwhelming stink of smoke, blood, a slew of odd chemical smells undoubtedly from the devices iYut had used, and the lingering tartness of broken grass rubbed into his muzzle.

“You are not fine, I can see from here,” iYut said, then drifted around to his right hand side. “Oh, yes, one of them cut you, I can fix this.”

Emboss tried to object, but he could only agree with the zebra, so kept still. iYut began to remove things from his hemp panniers, muttering to himself. Emboss’ entire back right leg was covered in blood, as though it had been varnished with the stuff, and it was still bleeding. Working with a surprising degree of finesse, iYut removed string-wrapped paper packages from their hiding places and bit off their tapered ends then, in a single motion, dumped the powdered contents of a package into four, evenly spaced gashes on Emboss’ flank. It was so sudden; all he could do was yelp. The powder clung, stinging and settling, and he whimpered, but it began to subside, along with the worst of the pain.

“We have been fighting these stupid fat birds for centuries. We have become good at treating equinoids for claw and beak injuries,” iYut said, spitting out the tapered end retained in his mouth. “This mix will clean the wound and stop the bleeding, and also deaden nerves.”

The zebra finished by applying a patch the size of a kerchief over the centre of the injuries. It began to react in some way with the powder, fizzing and sizzling until the material, which had the appearance of stretched out seaweed or some sort of damp rubber, bonded firmly to his skin. Though it hurt a little when he moved, where the patch had caught hairs, all the pain of the injury had stopped. He probed around the edges of it with a gentle lick of telekinesis, and found that much of his back end had become numb to the touch.

“Good?” iYut asked, putting his panniers back on.

“Good,” Emboss nodded, taking a shaky breath.

There was rustling then, of paws or hooves moving through the undergrowth and trees somewhere off the path. Emboss aimed the business end of the crossbow at the source, fumbling magically for wherever the trigger might be. From the smoke, which had begun to clear, a tiny hippogryph appeared, shortly followed by two identical gryphons. Besides mud and ruffled feathers, which they were already busy preening back into place, they didn’t seem to have been injured at all.

“Woah there, killer,” Astrapios said, holding short when he noticed the crossbow. “Just us. Everyone okay here?”

“Yes, boss,” iYut said, rolling his shoulders and wincing. “Still trying to find the wifey.”

“Oh, the one in heat?” Astrapios said, casually.

“Luna’s tits, does everyone know?” Emboss groaned.

“I am part pony,” Astrapios said, snickering. “It’ll only make her easier to track down; I’m sure she’s around here somewhere.”

“That’s what I was just saying,” iYut said, nodding.

“Right, well, we need to get off the road,” Astrapios said, making to head back into the woods. “We’ll head north across country and arc around to Lo Squitz, maybe meet up with the Charnel road.”

All of the equines present, even those with bird and cat in their heritage, became aware of the smell at pretty much the same time. With the smoke clearing out, and Emboss becoming better at mentally parsing the stench of the fight, it had only been a matter of time. He bit his lip and just about managed to stop it from curling up in a most uncouth fashion, but iYut had no qualms in pulling the full flemens gesture, which he seemed to enjoy, like a respectable pony who had happened upon a particularly nice flower. Emboss decided to be embarrassed on the zebra’s behalf and frowned.

“This way,” he said, for the benefit of the gryphons and, crossbow hovering beside him, the group headed into the woods.

The forest immediately around the road was obviously disturbed, and run through with tracks from various species, mostly gryphon. When the flashing devices had gone off, the twelve bandits, or highwaycocks, had fled in disarray, smashing smaller branches and generally making a mess of the flora. Emboss spotted several sites where some struggle had taken place, and surmised that they had tried to take flight in panic, only to collide with trees and come tumbling back down again. Singed feathers and a few, longer, pinions, whose loss must have been rather painful, added weight to this idea. He even found a gauntlet, evidently for gryphons to wear on over talons or paws, which ended in razor sharp tines. He wondered if this was intended as a terror weapon, as he nudged at it with his nose to get a better look at it. That certainly seemed to be the purpose. Gryphon claws were sharp and fierce enough, as well he knew.

Further away, however, the forest was pristine and uninjured, and became progressively thicker. The light making it down to the forest floor dimmed, due to an increasing prevalence of green and ochre vines, which wrapped the boughs of the jet species of tree in parasitosis, or symbiosis; Emboss couldn’t tell which it was. The large, diamond-shaped leaves that the vines sprouted at their tops were to blame for the shade.

The specimens of tree here were older and, as a result, much bigger. Where trailing vines did not obscure them, moss and fungus, mostly in shades of dun and copper, spread across them. There were even squirrels, which seemed far too Equestrian to be present in gryphic lands. They were slender and wore coats of black, but were identifiably squirrels. Bushy tails disappeared up trunks or scurried across the leaf litter as they came near. Little birdsong reached his ears, and he saw no flying forms. All the time, he followed his nose, maintaining decorum by not giving in to the urge to roll his top lip.

Just before the sun vanished for the night, they found her. For half an hour, the scent had been very strong, and mixed in with her usual, personal smell. Despite his tiredness from the day’s walking and the fight on the road, he managed to gallop up the low incline in the forest and bounded over a fallen tree, which had been cored and was now rife with various mycelial infestations. He halted as he landed, sniffing deeply, then glanced around, trying to get a track on her.

The leaf litter was disturbed and mud rooted up, and some very identifiable shoe prints were impressed in the dirt. He followed them around to the end of the fallen bough, where they terminated, and there she was, hidden within the hollow, eyes wide, posture rigid and terrified. A pure and unashamed happiness filled him as she sprung out. They necked, tightly embracing one another. There was no need for words, and Emboss had none anyway. He couldn’t stop himself from crying as they kissed. Even though she tasted like a fungal nursery, and her mane looked like she had been dragged through a hedge backwards, he still thought she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

Eventually, he managed: “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“I just kept running,” Truth said, even the crushed timbre of her voice, so terrified, making him hurt inside. “Then I didn’t know where I was, and I couldn’t smell you--”

“It’s alright, it’s okay,” he cooed, kissing her neck again. “We found you.”

“How did you find me?”

Emboss didn’t want to voice the words, and chose the lesser of two evils, pulling the gesture he had so long been suppressing.

“Oh!” She whinnied, understanding dawning. “I’d forgotten…”

“Ah, wonderful!” interrupted Astrapios, who’d come sauntering up the slope. “No harm?”

“Are you okay, love?” Emboss said, stepping back and looking her over.

“Cuts and bruises,” she said, sighing. “I’ll be fine.” Then she noticed the blood on Emboss, all down his back right leg, which had mostly air dried and was now swampy in his fur. “Oh, sweet foals, what happened to you?”

“Gryphon got him,” Astrapios said. “Just a scratch; probably instinctive.” He glanced back toward iYut, whose own injuries, whilst salved in various ways, mostly through self-administered first aid during the search in the forest, were still evident, including the hoof-print in the orbit of his left eye.

“Friend zebra patched me up,” Emboss said, rolling his shoulders in a shrug. “I think you got him in the face during all the commotion back there.”

“Oh, sorry,” Truth said, glancing between her back hooves and the bashed up zebra. “I was just so afraid. I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

“Think nothing of it, no problem at all; a mare in your condition is prone to such things,” he said, sagely.

“Right!” Astrapios said, before Truth could reply or express displeasure at iYut’s comment. “I don’t think we’ll make it to Lo Squitz before nightfall, which is any minute now, given this diversion.”

“We can’t travel at night?” Emboss said, glancing upward at the sky’s nearly vanished light.

“Far too easy to get lost or injured, and there are blaggards abroad,” Astrapios opined, and that seemed to be the end of the discussion, because next he said: “Who knows how to start a fire?”

“If we start a fire, said blaggards will see us, won’t they?” Emboss said, idly grooming the mess and leaves from his wife’s fur with the tip of his nose. “There has to be someone among us who can see in the dark, too. Our nightvision isn’t that bad, and we’re only ponies.” He shot a look at the silent sisters. “Aren’t you mainline gryphons nocturnal hunters anyway?”

“What we are and what we aren’t,” said one of them.

“Cannot be so easily categorized,” finished the other.

“I don’t think that really answers my question,” Emboss said, in their vague direction, unsure of to whom he should direct his replies, and whether it really mattered. “I think I speak for both of us when I say that we're done sitting around on our haunches waiting for things to happen.”

He glanced at his wife for confirmation, finding it in spades, then she said: “I don't want to spend another minute in this forest longer than we have to.”

“Well, alright,” conceded Astrapios, whose expressions were becoming harder to read by the minute in the fading light. “But if you fall in a hole and break your legs, I'll just have to put you out of your misery.” He laughed and scratched at the ground. “I think that's vaguely south-south east, over there,” he said, indicating a gap between boughs that were now discernible only from other aspects of the forest by shadowy smudges.

*

They left sylvan clutches in a quiet troupe about an hour later, Truth and Emboss leading a neat line of softly moving figures. The rolling moor that lead down to Lo Squitz was thicker and wilder here, the bristly heads of unfamiliar, yet delicious looking, grasses, brushing against Emboss' barrel as they moved and, here and there, the swaying washed out shapes of flowers, frilly hexagons of too-flimsy membrane, danced to the tune of the insistent and nagging wind.

The Equestrian moon, ever a comfort to lost and lonely travelers, cast its luster over even gryphon lands, sparing and forgetting none in its nightly peregrinations. Emboss wondered, as he shivered and began to regret the civil attire of close-clipped fur, if the Princess of the Night had, in some Divine fashion, arranged a light to guide their way. Lo Squitz was a whorled knot of gleaming silver, islands of mercury dribbled into an ice cold stream, under a sky unmarred by clouds. The moon was not full, appearing in phase to be the waxing gibbous, but that was enough to drown out whatever petty fires and sources of illumination the gryphons in the town had placed.

He had worried at first, when they had set off from the little spot in the woods where Truth had hidden herself, because Astrapios seemed to navigate on intuition, and with a laissez-faire fit to put a nottlygna into an existential crisis, but it was for naught. The diminutive hippogryph had brought them out perfectly, precisely where they needed to be: on the edge of the forest adjoining the conspecific Lo Squitz moorland. He had never indicated an uncanny sense of direction before and, when navigating the sea off the coast, had needed many maps just to avoid being dashed on submarine boulders. That was something Emboss was keen to forget the image of; tanned hides as writing materials.

After two hours crossing the moor, during which their pace had to slow right down to avoid potential detection following Emboss' detection, admittedly at long aural range, of gryphish muttering and snk-snk-snk's of claws on stone, they joined up with the road again, though only followed its course from a distance, on safety grounds. The steady breeze now brought with it the proper smells of the city, an osmic fantasia on the themes of gryphon. Sulphur, burned and burning wood, and a dozen different types of pine-like smells, all volatiles and thick oils, as well as a certain skein of coal smoke, mixed with the bodily scents of gryphons and their feeding, ablutions and leavings.

Smells were controlled far less here, it seemed. Whereas Bad Gutz had the rape of ocean's bounty to cover and control it, and the constant blast of cold sea air to clear it, further inland, they had no such luck. Even the breeze was not enough to clear it from settling in the low point of the valley, just over the town. Emboss wondered if gryphons even had a particularly refined sense of smell. Judging by the stink of their diets, and the lack of much olfactory signaling, at least of which he knew, suggested that they didn't.

Gradually, the main road broadened and the materials used in its construction took on a more solid tone. Huge blocks of granite, faced with fine cubic patterns like crenelations or squares of chocolate, had been set ten abreast with brick separations that also held fine iron-worked drainage gutters. Either side of the road, the grassy dykes and ditches with stagnant, oil-filmed water, had been replaced by steeply angled v-shapes, in which the drained water flowed fast and along courses bedded with a coarser granite. Occasionally, his shod hooves would throw up a flickering spark, which fled across the night and died out as soon as it appeared.

Emboss was busy admiring the engineering work, which was almost on a par with Equestrian standard models, when his wife let out a gasped “Finally!” and he looked up from the road, and beheld Lo Squitz's Western Gate. Compared to Port Dauphine, these looked far older and more decrepit, and not at all what he had been expecting, given the fine condition of the road leading up to it. The walls it lead through were moss-drowned and made of mortared flint blocks, roughly quarried in some distant age, and the gate itself was a squashed ovoid, fashioned in newer-looking oak, barred with iron and locked tight. There was a smaller wicket gate inset, open, and with an oil or gas light ensconced in glass that cast a pool over its entrance from above.

What Emboss had, at first, mistaken for a pile of rags and rubbish, shook and juddered violently as they approached, then unfolded to reveal the shape of a gryphon wearing heavy oilskins and an assortment of different pieces of armor. He, and Emboss was only half sure of the gender, was parked on his haunches, and hissed softly in challenge as he hefted a crossbow, of primitive single-shot make, in their general direction. The weapon seemed to double as a general purpose devise, for its long body was gnarled and knotted up at the mouth, as in a good cudgel, and had a sliver of stout iron, sharpened and with a little hooked curve in the tip, emerging from its stock.

Fierce eyes flicked between Emboss and Truth, then took in the gryphons and Astrapios, obviously missing iYut. The thaumic mechanism by which his rocks effected their disguise of him had evidently reestablished themselves. There was an awkward moment of uncomprehending silence as two cultures sized each other up. Emboss saw a talon curl around from its place on the trigger guard to the tong of metal that was the trigger itself. He wondered how much tension it would stand before loosing the evil shaft that lurked inside its wooden embrace. Backward-facing barbs lined the tip. If the gryphon decided to stick it in him, he knew the round would not be coming out.

Astrapios ambled out between them and the nightwatchcock, and clicked his beak for attention. To Emboss he said: “Let me handle this, friend gryphon here doesn't want a fight.” Then he turned to the nightwatchcock, and said something in gryphic that sounded quite convivial, as much as a language composed of harsh guttural noises and staccato squeaks, chirps and clicks could to equine ears.

The conversation turned into a negotiation quite rapidly. Emboss recognized the gesticulating, and even some of the words or phrases. Astrapios had said the gryphon didn't want a fight, and this was largely true, at least a fight involving lots of unpleasant stabbing and impolite gouging. He was, however, more than willing to set about a mercantile conflict. Eventually, after the moon had slipped a little further through the tapestry of night, detente was reached, and peace treaties signed by way of some grubby coinage pressed into the talons of the nightwatchcock, who subsequently shambled off, suddenly discovering that he had an incredibly fascinating thing to inspect a short distance away.

Astrapios beckoned them through the wicket gate and, one by one, for the portal was only meant to admit a singleton, they entered Lo Squitz a little before midnight.

Any self-respecting Equestrian town or village would long ago have put itself firmly to bed. The pubs and licensed venues bucked out at eight in the evening, and even wild parties, thrown once a year by the most daring Libertines, would only tread the dancefloor until eleven. Canterlot was different, a real twenty-five hour, ten days a week type of city, but comparatively few actually lived there. Lo Squitz was just an ordinary town, typical of many such places, as far as Emboss knew, and it was as bustling and busy as if they had trotted in at noon.

Gryphons and alce muscled past one another as throngs of feathery beings strutted and slithered across a wide plaza, which Emboss found himself glancing around, looking for something, until he realized that he had never seen such a space without at least one large fountain or outrageous statue. At the centre was nothing, merely a point at which all the edges were equally distant. It made him feel immediately ill at ease.

Much of the traffic seemed to be heading away from, or toward, large structures that erupted out of the ground at irregular intervals, shaped faintly like a gryphon's head and beak. Only as they wandered further in, trying to gain a sense of the place, did they notice that these were underground entrances and exits, each decked in chickenscratch signage. Gas lights lit the tops of the 'beaks', dangling from them on deliberately crooked stanchions like the angling lures of certain deep sea fish.

Along five lines of sight, equally spaced around the other side of the plaza, streets raced off on odd vectors. The business premises here, shops and restaurants, all appeared to be rather at the top end of the market, and were dressed in lots of marble and rich oak. Through beveled windows, hints of soft, plush things and sheer quality came, right at the edges of perception.

“When you're done sightseeing, we'll need to go downstairs to pick up a boat,” said Astrapios, adopting a hushed Equuish tone.

“Boat?” Emboss said, dimly.

“Well, we're going into the east, aren't we?” Astrapios said. “There are canals all over the place, linking industrial and production centres with markets and so on. Really big barges and other watercraft, mostly run on steam or pulled by alce. There are systems of locks and lifts that will take you all the way from where we are now, at more or less sea level, right up to the pawhills of the Mountain. Rather swank technology, even if I do say so myself. We've been building them for centuries, one of our few indigenous ideas.”

“Not much call for it in Equestria,” Emboss said, sighing, suddenly realizing just how tired he was and how far he had traveled, as his body issued a litany of aches and pains, including a creeping fire on his flank, beneath the zebric patch.

“I know, you just use airships, good roads and sheer brute force,” Astrapios said, shaking his head. “Combine that with a generally lower level of what is usually termed heavy industry, lighter bulk fuel and food needs, and a smaller national range, and it all becomes economically unfeasible. And, how could I forget, your steam train is making a big splash--”

“Are you sure a town somewhere isn't missing its tour guide?” Truth mumbled, nudging Emboss.

“Er, is there a ticket office somewhere?” Emboss said, rolling his shoulders and trying to loosen the kinks and knots that had built up from carrying the panniers so far.

“Ticket office?” Astrapios said, as if the words were unfamiliar.

“For the... barge, or whatever it is...” Emboss said.

“Skies above, old horse, absolutely not,” Astrapios said, feigning shock. “The locks and canals, and most of the barges that run regularly on them, are owned and operated by the Crown, for the free use of all citizens and modes of business. Of course, you can hire a private vehicle, some opulent yacht or something, there's usually space for everyone to use the waterway, but they are few and far between. Not much is done in a hurry in this country, you'll soon learn that.”

“So you just get on?” Emboss said, quizzical. “Without paying?”

“Without paying,” Astrapios said, nodding.

*

The equinoids among them whinnied or nickered with relief as they entered the underground warmth of Lo Squitz, following Astrapios through the warren of granite-walled tunnels and hollows. If the city above had been busy, then the domain below was positively fit to bursting. Emboss found it strange that a species with large wings and generally bulky bodyplans would choose a life in such close quarters, especially when something as apparently trifling as tithes of persons and gold was in question, but nobody around seemed oppressed or otherwise unhappy.

Building materials varied widely, though the most common type Emboss saw was unfinished granite, cut into a number of different, largely square, shapes. It lined the walls, made up the buildings and ran underhoof. In some instances, entire brick houses had been moved brick by brick and rebuilt in situ, slotted in as though they were only bricks themselves.

Young gryphons, cubs, of different ages and types, slipped gaily chirping and hooting to each other along the thoroughfares and, where their passage allowed, Emboss saw brief glimpses into private warrens that looked a little like Equestrian neighborhoods, townships in miniature, were houses of different sizes were crammed into and around the ceilings of hollows as though they were the nests of weaver-birds. This was where the normal folks lived, the lower and middle classes, by rough approximation. As they passed further down, they ran into bulging expansions in the general threading of tunnels and passageways, that held freestanding shops and small warehouses, where traders blatantly hawked their wares. Some even broke into tortured Equuish the moment they saw ponies, though the party did not stop for very long.

Though Emboss had given up trying to keep an idea of where they were in relation to their entry point after the first layer of the town, he had been subconsciously counting his steps, and knew that they had gone at least three miles of distance before they finally entered the Bargeway. Astrapios had launched into full expository mien, so Emboss knew the name of their location long before they actually reached it. The roughly oblong hall, which was natural in its origins and so roughly faced all round, was loud with the clanging and cawing of gryphon industry in full flight.

Cutting through the centre of the hall, and forming its 'floor', was a smooth gray waterway, in which sat many long, narrow barges of similar design. Docks and wharves spread outwards in fractal patterns to reach them, but there were also catwalks and bridges that spanned the two sides of the Bargeway, from which ladders and ropes allowed access to top decks. There were at least a hundred of the large craft, decked in Royal purple and black, scattered at various points across water.

At each end of the Bargeway, lifts of evidently gargantuan strength and proportion were hauling up their loads of either barge, dry and settled on its hull, or water, which Astrapios explained was for flow balancing purposes. Much of the lifting work was done by displacing water or using it as a counterweight, with steam engines to compensate for mistakes or unexpected loads. Once they reached the surface, they could be fed back into the canal system.

There didn't actually seem to be very much stuff being delivered to Lo Squitz. Emboss saw far more in the way of things merely being shuttled, by of teams of alce stevedores and the occasional crane, from one barge to another. Exactly what, he couldn't really determine. Only when something obvious came into view, like gigantic bundles of lumber, or the evident tubular shapes of steam boilers, was the identity clear. The rest of the time, everything was crated up in wood, and so hidden from view.

It was far too loud and bustling to allow normal discussion at this point, so they continued to follow Astrapios as they navigated through the crowds. The side of the Bargeway they were on was, rather unimaginatively, just called Leftside, though it was a massive flat bank, and formed a little town all by itself. The inevitable dockside pubs and bawdy houses, replete in brick armor and with lewd, visual signs that needed no interpreter to understand, even across a biological and cognitive horizon, crouched below inversely stacked shelves of small apartments and flats, for gryphons only, perhaps, as they had no visible means of entrance from below.

How Astrapios selected the barge they eventually boarded Emboss didn't know. None of them were marked in any meaningful way, even in gryphic. All of them, perhaps, carried passengers, and it was only necessary to pick one that was headed in the right direction. Emboss kept expecting someone to turn up and demand to see their tickets, or at least count them in as they entered a foyer on the barge, but there seemed to be little in the way of crew.

The place was tatty and clearly well used, with a panoply of scuffs and talon marks on the floors, but far from decrepit. The gryphon sisters, Erisne and Ensire, boarded last and, seconds later, someone slammed closed the pentagonal hatch from the outside, which muted the industrial roar. The deck beneath Emboss' hooves clanged and rumbled, various subsonic noises rising and falling in quickening crescendo, like the heaving of a giant sprinting uphill. There was a surprisingly delicate quiver which, for a thing of this size, was no small feat at all, then the barge began to move.

“Oh, good,” said Astrapios, glancing around. “Just in time. Clever, aren't I?”

“Where does the barge go from here?” Truth said, peering around the foyer suspiciously, as if still searching for someone to buy tickets from.

“Everywhere, eventually,” Astrapios said, looking down the corridors that led in three cardinal compass directions away from the foyer. “It's a sort of big loop at both ends, with a long straight bit in the middle.”

“No, I mean, what's the next stop on the line?” Truth said.

“Bregth, if memory serves,” Astrapios said, trotting off in a direction he had apparently selected at random. “Lovely little town, had some wonderful tush there, if you know what I mean, looks a lot like Lo Squitz actually...”

With the hippogryph narrating the entire way, they eventually found themselves somewhere to rest their hooves and other ambulatory appendages, in the shape of a long, spacious lounge located toward the rear of the barge, inside which were crammed hundreds of mismatched chairs, a herd of benches of remarkable vintage, and surprisingly few gryphons. Emboss had been anticipating a positive riot of beaks, wings and claws, but only about a dozen or so inhabited the big public space, snoozing in the higher spots or staring out of the lozenge-shaped windows at the slithering-past of docks, quays and other assorted industrial paraphernalia.

With a lot of muffled shouting from outside, and the by-now expected clanging and banging, the barge was loaded onto its lift and begun on the climb to the surface, taking with it a draught of water. Astrapios remained the only one among them talking now, as they all settled onto benches designed for gryphons, too tired and aching to offer much in the way of conversation. Emboss was a city pony, and simply not designed for cross country trotting. There had even been some galloping back there, somewhere at any rate, and Emboss was quite sure that speeding about in such a fashion was not something anypony should be getting up to, much less him.

Emboss was fast asleep in a disgraceful little pile before the barge even reached the summit of its mechanistic climb, and only woke again when the earthquakes began.

*

King Hywell crouched on his belly in the gaily-pendented aftcastle of the Didn't Want To Stop For Tea Anyway, the steam yacht which he had stolen, and peered over the imported ponyoak rail out across the expanding V of froth-frilled grey water, looking for signs that the military were still pursuing them.

In the distance was Bregth, still very visible despite the span of miles now separating them, due to the flat nature of the surrounding countryside. The two-town lay beneath a pillar of black smoke like the body of a sooty jellyfish embedded in the loamy chalk of the central lowlands. With the steam motor chugging away below deck, it was retreating at a fair pace. Soon, even the low and desolated landscape around the canal, long since cleared of trees and pocked here and there with the moundings-up of iron works and mines, as well as the countless other medium-heavy specialist industries that provided the umpteen million chemicals and processes all the other work required, would not prevent the two-town from falling out of sight.

His adventure had become quite dramatic in the last day. It must have had something to do with the tremendous light that had appeared in the sky before dawn, whose tendrils of aurora had not dissipated until the sun had gone as far as the zenith. First, on arriving in Bregth, he had been dismayed to learn that, despite his sudden and entirely unannounced departure for parts unknown, word of his movements had reached the nominal civilian authorities. They, in their disgustingly servile manner, had put on the most ridiculous welcoming ceremony for him, which had all begun with a full surprise rendition of Stoop Not Thou Weary Souls, complete with cannon, trapeze and performing snakes.

To make matters worse, Hywell had been so stunned at this turn of events that he had only been able to muster blithe compliance with their intended, and hastily put together, schedule. His addled brain had rolled out all the platitudes and regalness his cubhood instructors and life of public service had drilled into him. There had been a crash tour of a smeltery, which made iron nails and smelled of cleaning fluid and fresh paint, followed by a tasting session and another tour of a distillery, the primary product of which was a deeply objectionable, if extremely intoxicating, liquor, made from turnips.

Then, someone had tried to assassinate him. It had taken the civilian authorities almost no time to organise this visit and, equally, it had taken them very little time to scare up an assassin or two. Foel had been distracted by the turnip stuff, tasting it repeatedly and very carefully in order to ascertain its various characteristics, and was just in the middle of a speech about the stuff's cinnamon notes and heady bouquet, when a pair of masked alce, each armed with crossbows, emerged from the crowd of dignitaries, officiants, aide-de-camps and other hangers on, and opened fire.

Hywell's only cogent thought had been a prideful one, because the crossbows were gryphic ones and clearly sourced from an armourer in the that very town, not Equestrian ones, which were obvious because they always had far too much complex clockwork and extra fiddly bits. He was about to grab someone and congratulate them on their patriotism, when one of the alce got around to pulling his trigger, sending a bolt spiralling across the alarmingly narrow space that now separated them.

There had been a warm sensation in his head, and a strange feeling of tenseness, and that was all Hywell really remembered. He'd guessed what had happened, though. The Crown, sensing danger, had reacted on his behalf. The only pity was that they had been standing next to several hundred copper-lined barrels of high-proof alcohol. The next thing he'd known was Foel bellowing instructions at people and dragging him from a pile of splintered timbers and crushed rock.

Stealing the yacht had simply seemed like the next logical step. They'd had just enough time to do it, as the remaining elements of the military, their leadership now scattered finely and at high altitudes above the town, or carefully mixed with and beneath the remains of much of the Artisian's District, decided how best to exact revenge. That was the problem with last-minute assassinations; far too easy to end up standing beside tons of flammable material and an enraged, Divine source of ignition, when it all actually went down.

“Looks like they were planning on a buffet lunch!” Foel called, from somewhere on amidecks.

“The bastards,” Hywell said, tearing his gaze away from the water now he was sure of their clean escape. “I bet they even had those little hats for the snackrabbits.”

Foel nodded grimly as Hywell climbed down from the aftcastle and joined him on deck, sidling up to the folded-down mainsail and mast and using it as protection from the onrush of wind. The gryphon was engaging in some post-prandial preening, but stopped and produced the damning evidence; three paper hats, crushed in his talons, flecked with blood.

“Damn decent of them to bring it all to a close, really,” Foel said, clicking his beak. “We'd have been there days otherwise.”

“Do you think they're all dead?” Hywell said. “The... duke, I think it was?”

“Not much left of the district, sire, let alone the occupants, present company excepted.”

“Shame.”

“Take heart, sire, there are always new rats to replace the old. I suspect they are already popping up out of whatever gutter they call home. In any case, the punishment for attempted regicide is summary execution. Nice and clean, was that back there.”

“Right as usual, Foel,” Hywell said, sighing.

“Remarkable technology, this,” Foel said, indicating the boat in general.

“Seems fairly unremarkable to me.”

“Well, what about that automatic tiller?”

“Automatic tiller, Foel?”

“The one doing the steering, sire.”

“I saw no such thing.”

“It's not up on the aftcastle?”

“There's nothing up there at all.”

“Oh, balls.”

*

The Didn't Want To Stop For Tea Anyway possessed a steel-plated prow. When the yacht had first been built, some decades past, the alloy had been in considerable vogue, representing as it did the modernity, toughness and general spirit of the nation. For a boat intended as a floating tribute to aforementioned virtues held in trust by the state, the fact that some of its construction was not made of steel, perhaps demonstrated considerable restraint on the part of whatever committee was responsible.

However, in order to showcase the swiftness and surety of the state, an equally vital pursuit, the yacht also needed to cut quickly through the water, producing in the final design a dart-shaped nose, and an overall thinness. Power was provided by no fewer than six high pressure boilers, driving a pair of tremendously expensive and effective triple expansion engines and two, inevitably steel-plated, screws. No cost had been too great in this department. Unfortunately, the one thing that had been neglected was an automated tilling system, that role intended to be filled by sinecured former naval officers, grown fat on state pensions and wearing finely-tailored dress uniforms.

For some minutes following their discovery of this fact, Hywell and Foel struggled to make sense of the overly-ornate control scheme. It had made so much sense in the panic of the boat's initial theft and, had they possessed a few more minutes, they might have discovered the decidedly non-automated tiller. The Didn't Want To Stop For Tea Anyway struck the West-East 22, a prosaic barge of vast tonnage and inevitable momentum, at the apex of a very broad curve in the expansive canal, more or less head on.

The spear-like metal nose of the yacht sliced into the far softer wood of the barge with a clipped thwack, belying the hundred or so knots of combined impact velocity in its innocuousness. At the same moment, the substructure beneath the steel-plate began to buckle, transferring energy in rippling waves through the comparatively fragile decking and general timbers. In the rear of the decomposing folly-craft, the boilers ripped themselves free of their mountings and kept on going, being as they were, humble servants of the one true cosmic Lord and Master, physics.

Crushed between the immovable bulk of several thousand tons of barge and the onrushing of loosed steam boilers, complete with attached steel screws, gearboxes and other large, metal objects, the rest of the yacht immediately performed its best impression of a pancake.

*

“Ow,” said Foel, somewhere out of sight.

Hywell opened his eyes, talons already reaching for the Crown. It was its usual body-temperature warm, slightly slippery, and firmly on his head. He looked up, and saw he was within a shimmering, oily bubble, with Foel beneath the centre, standing on his back legs over him. His wings were unmantled, spread, arms wide. Tell-tale vibrations in the air and a haze of stinging black smoke around Foel’s thaumically-manicured claws told him all he needed to know.

“Still breathing, sire?” Foel said, words strangled. “It's just that this trick is a bit... draining...”

Beyond the skein of the Sharpe bubble, all Hywell could see was a tangle of metal, cogs and bits of unidentifiable machines. Yellow flashes of freshly smashed timber gave some hint as to what had happened.

“I'm okay,” Hywell breathed, slithering up onto his haunches. “Take it down.”

“I'm holding up fifteen tons of boiler and screw, sire,” Foel half-grunted. “Be ready to move, on my mark.”

Hywell scouted an exit; a gap in the general destruction that hinted at the remains of an open hold or cabin space. He tapped Foel on the hindquarters.

“Right, mark.”

There was a hideous, groaning heave of metal, drowning out the crackling snap of the Sharpe bubble vanishing into whatever hidden dimension it usually resided in. Hywell tensed and darted for safety. Immediately, something struck him a body blow that almost had him off his paws, but the surge of adrenaline fear and panic drove him forward. Dust, and the instinctive screwing shut of his eyelids, blinded him for a moment. Someone grabbed him, dragged him.

The avalanche of sound that came next continued for almost a minute, ending in distant and muted splashing noises. They were in a storage bay of some description, though so much damage had been done to it that what, if anything, had been stored here was no longer obvious. The wooden floors and ceilings were a crushed mess of crazed and fractured varnish, with a clear half of the space missing, smashed away by the impact.

Peering into the void beyond, Hywell could see beams and spars, and other rooms and spaces just like this one, cleaved in twain or with chunks missing from them. Not much was left of the yacht, except crumpled metal, and the boilers themselves, which all seemed to have survived intact. They were spilling steam and smoke now, and the scent of mild acridity had developed into a pungent aroma of a thousand wood burning fires. The boiler that Foel had been preventing from killing them both now balanced precariously above silky gray water, which was flooding into the lower spaces.

“That bastard Crown,” Foel remarked, holding up his talons, which were smoking and burned where the quick met the nail, the arcane runes carved there barely visible. “Picks its bloody moments...”

“You know it watches,” Hywell said, edging away from the cavity. “I'd take its inaction this time as sound approval of your bodyguarding skills, Foel.”

Foel growled noncommittally, then noticed the boiler and its current position. His eyes went wide, and he tried to move to place himself between Hywell and the teetering mechanism.

“Foel! Whatever is the matter?” Hywell said.

“Steam explosion, sire. Surprised it hasn't happened already. Those boilers have been running all day, and they've just been at full tilt for a good half an hour. Get it? They're bloody hot, and the moment they hit the water...”

“They'll cool down?”

“In a manner of speaking, sire, that's exactly what they'll do.” Foel rolled his wrists around several times, performing little gestures Hywell knew meant he was trying to activate his Sharpe abilities. “Buggerit...”

“Foel?”

“Too much power through the casting substrate causes pronounced ablation relative to excess,” he said, as if recalling a line from a textbook. “Never thought I’d actually do it.”

Hywell’s uncomprehending stare was answered when Foel raised his talons. They were still glowing cherry red at the tips and, where the precisely cut magical symbols had once been, were now melted ruins. The half-cooled dribbles of keratin ran to the quick like the frozen tears of a marble statue.

“Gadarn’s beak!” Hywell squeaked. “No magic?”

“No magic,” Foel nodded, slinking away and toward the other side of the half-room, where the soot-stained remnants of a door leaned against its frame. “We need to clear out of here. ”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” Hywell said, following him.

Foel had just shouldered the door out of the way when the barge shook bodily. Hywell felt as though the whole thing had dipped below the water and then popped back up. The explosive sound that came next seemed to hammer his ears from every angle, shaking things about in his guts. Foel fell with the force of it, vanishing into the corridor beyond. At the same moment as the explosion tiny objects slashed through the cabin, narrowly missing Hywell. He felt one pass across the back of his neck, zinging through the air.

Foel screamed. Hywell had never heard the old cock make a noise like that, and suddenly felt as if he’d had his rear end dipped in ice water. He rushed through and found him, back legs collapsed, clinging to the corridor’s seaward railing. Along his left flank were a pair of ugly tears, like furrows in soil, bleeding sluggishly. The nails of his paws skittered as he tried to stand up, but it didn’t seem as though his legs were working properly. Though light was coming in from the many random punctures in the superstructure of the barge, it was hard to see where else he might have been injured.

“Bloody shrapnel!” Foel gasped, releasing his grip on the railing and falling to the varnished wooden deck, which was rucked up in places and smashed in others, from where it had buckled with the impacts and subsequent detonations. “One of the boilers must’ve gone up.”

Hywell ran his talons up the plates and folds of Foel’s armour, searching for the pont grabbage. This inset claw-hold sat underneath an overhang of metal, just above where the wingroots met. He had been shown how and when to use it, but that had been a long time ago. Foel was much lighter than he seemed. All the flyers of the world were. So much feather and taut muscle, but little of the heavier stuff of which alces were made. Even he, who had spent much time of late luxuriating in the ease of his office, lifted him up with ease.

“Where do we go?” Hywell said, once he’d stabilised himself on three legs.

“Up, up on the top,” Foel grunted.

Moving him seemed to have exacerbated something, because the blood flowed far more freely now. They left a trail of it behind them as they struggled along the buckled corridor, away from the ruined prow of the barge, like the slime of some macabre fleshy slug. Eventually, as Hywell dragged Foel up a wide companionway onto the top deck, he realised that the gryphon had passed out. Things were more obvious in the blinding light of day, even as smoke curled and flurried away on the gentle breeze. He saw half a dozen inward punctures on Foel’s armour, all having come from the same direction. There were none on the other side.

The situation was becoming more desperate. The top deck was crowded with wreckage and stored material, the two intermixing so thoroughly that it was hard to tell what had been originally part of the barge, and what had been kinetically introduced. When the smoke briefly cleared, he could see all the way from the prow to the stern, and it was all like that, except for a smoking, bubbling crater amidships. That was where one of the boilers must have ended up. From every open porthole came smoke, and it was evident that much of the barge was in the process of burning.

Someone shouted. It was the soft, melodic tone of somepony. Hywell recognized the speaker’s race straight away. Equestria made a point of sending lots of diplomats, officials and other meaningless functionaries to all of the public official events. Celestia herself had even come to his coronation. Now there was a creature he hoped never to meet again. The undisputed and total ruler of all ponies had an overwhelming friendly politeness to her, but there was no soul behind those magenta eyes, no spark of personhood. He’d often wondered if anyone else had noticed this, or if it was he alone who had seen through her finely-crafted pony suit.

The pony shouted again, and there was a flash of light. Immediately, the wind picked up and blew away smoke. From the direction of the stern, about a hundred yards away, a little procession of ponies came. There was not only the one, but two, and it seemed as though they had their foal with them. Then he realised that the foal had a beak and a set of wings, and saw that it was the tiniest hippogryph he had ever seen. He had not known they came so small. Following behind them was a pair of black-feathered hens, pure gryphons. There was also the suggestion of something stripey and barely there at all, but Hywell dismissed it as the effects of smoke stinging his eyes.

Hywell clicked his beak and looked down at Foel. His breathing had become shallow and barely there at all. Where Hywell had lain him was now a pool of blood so black it seemed like tar.

“I’m so sorry, Foel,” Hywell mumbled, feeling like someone had slipped a needle of cocaine in behind his ears. “This is all my fault.”

His friend did not answer.

Hywell simply sat there on his haunches, staring at the life leave Foel’s body. The next thing he was aware of was a soft sensation at his side, where the transition from feathered front to furred behind was. It was tickly and full of whiskers, but it drew his focus away from Foel. There was a dun little pony nuzzling him. It had an auburn mane, the cut of which suggested it was a female. Behind her sat a male, who was wearing a pair of spectacles and looked confused and terrified.

“Help me,” Hywell gasped, speaking gryphic.

The two ponies just glanced at each other, then simultaneously looked beyond him. Following their gaze he saw the little hippogryph, who was dressed in absurd equestrian finery like some kind of ceremonial soldier missing his plate. It had little tassels on the shortened epaulettes, which fluttered gaily in the strong breeze.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” the hippogryph said, matching his gryphic. “King Hywell Edda.” He looked up at a spot just above Hywell’s head, which he had long grown used to people doing. “And that is the Autumn Crown.”

“If you’re here to try and take it,” said Hywell, voice strangled by a strange tensing up of his throat. “Please, just wait. If you go for me now, the Crown will kill my bodyguard, and everyone else on this barge, defending itself.”

“We’re not here to do you any harm, sir,” the hippogryph said, curtly using the wrong title. “But we have to get off this boat. My gryphon friends here have been moving survivors who can’t leave by their own steam to the banks.” He gestured to the pair of identical black-feathered pure gryphons, whose plumages were ruffled and fluffed up beyond repair.

“Take my bodyguard first,” Hywell said, laying a talon on Foel’s armoured chest. “He is in need of--”

“Survivors, sir,” the hippogryph said, not meeting his gaze. “We’ve only time for survivors.”

Eventually, when Hywell said and did nothing in response but allow his talons to slide off the battered armour, the two gryphons took to the wing and carefully scooped him up, one to each of his forearms.

Of Gyres (Widening), Etcetera

“Of Gyres (Widening), Etcetera”

With a quintet of juddering sonic booms, She Who Trots In Dreams turned Mytheme into a velocity-shedding corkscrew, bringing it down over the sparsely-forested lowlands that typified the landscape between Canterlot and Ponyville. Once the massive silver yacht was travelling no faster than a pony in full gallop, at a flight level just above the tops of the trees, she released her hold on the underlying universal energy field. Torrents of unspent thaumic power fled local space, disappearing into whatever zero-space they had come from. Only momentum, and the unquenchable force of Carnifex's ancient bones, kept Mytheme sailing through the air above emerald spinneys, copses and thickets. Residual heat from the tungsten plug reservoirs dissipated slowly out of the diamond tile hull, radiating enough to ignite the summer's crop of dry grass and desiccated foliage.

Princess Luna felt the fundamental properties of reality being altered, in the shape of the Strong Force Bomb's clumsy activation, as a sort of rough prodding sensation against her rump. This had not happened for a very long time indeed and, such was the surprise, she did not react at all. Her first thought was that the little draught-excluder foal from before had somehow sneaked into Mytheme's control suite, but then she glanced down her side and saw that she was alone. Light speared from above somewhere, only visible through her ancillary thaumic senses. Instinctively, she looked upwards, and the light became intolerable. The spear, a single trembling shaft, transformed into an all-encompassing cliff. Luna heard someone scream, then realised it was her own voice.

Her extra sensory capacity did not have an off-switch. It was an indefatigable part of her and how she saw the world. She could not immediately recall the last time it had been overwhelmed in this manner. During certain antediluvian conflicts, when the Strong Force Bomb had last been used, it was never with masses heavier than melons. The explosions thereby produced were mighty, but nothing such as this, creating particles of light that were so energetic they impinged upon the domain of magic. The puckish unicorn who had invented the spell in the first place had hypothesized at length about the possibility of these thauma-skimming particles but, for obvious reasons, had never tried to prove it. Luna gritted her teeth and hoped that the explosion had not been atmospheric.

After a moment, the magical light vanished. Some tiny part of her mind grinned at the fact that the mad scientist of epochs past had been proven right, as his hypothesis had also predicted that only the first pulse of highest energy particles would impinge in such a way. Another part of it began crunching numbers, assessing how long it would be until an overpressure wave produced in the highest part of the atmosphere, where such things were still possible, would reach them. Mytheme was an incredibly durable piece of technology, and had been built to withstand basic yield Strong Force Bomb deployments at distances as close as ten kilometres. Luna doubted that the planet would survive, let alone a fragile little diamond yacht, had the detonation been ground side.

The minutes passed and began to stack up. Curious. The initiation was from the east, suggestive of Canterlot local being ground zero, yet the eruption was from above, likely no further than a light second away. The events were no more than moments apart. What moves so swiftly? I can think of only two such creatures...

*

Even with the prisoner leading the way, the acceleration phase of their trip between Tartarus' colossal basins was, quite possibly, the most terrifying thing Twilight had ever undertaken. This realisation dawned on her when the peculiar glowing orb that had taken to forming in her wake when she forced enough magic into flight guttered out for the last time. The inscrutable depths of darkness all around her held no reference points, and the near-vacuum present at this altitude gave no clues, but the little mathematician in her head knew precisely how fast she was now going, and it was having kittens on her behalf.

Still! Still I think of myself as fleshy and mortal. I wonder, how long will it take before I start conceptualising myself in these new terms? Her wings unmantled, and she saw their purple tips unfurl, nearly touching the edges of the telekinetic comfort barrier. Where does this supposed immortality really end? Is it even a question of physical destruction, and energies required, or am I made of something that does not answer to such pettiness? Could I fall into a star and come out a bit lathered? Twilight huffed, blowing out clouds of puffy white, then made to soothe the mathematician by setting it working out how fast the heat from her earlier atmospheric reentry had flashed her into glass.

Some indeterminate period of time passed. Eventually, Twilight became dimly aware of a light in the distance, like flint sparking in the dead of night, and recalled that this was the signal from Starswirl to begin slowdown and braking. Moving for the first time in what must have been hours, Twilight's hooves had somehow frozen to the psuedomaterial of the conjured telekinetic amalgam that housed Whom. They detached with frosty sprays of ice crystals. The same happened when she opened the aperture down to her precious cargo, which caused all of the local fields to buck and shiver. She furrowed her brow, but could think of no plausible explanation.

“Whom,” she said, voice sounding croaky. “We're going to begin slowing down now, it might feel a bit uncomfortable.”

There was no reply.

“Look, I know you're upset with me, but just let me know you're okay?”

“I'm fine,” Whom said, after a long moment, in which Twilight had begun to panic, and in a tone as cold as the ice fragments now forming a cloud around the amalgam. “Get this over with.”

The magic came easier than before. Where she had been treading new thaumic ground, straining in the upper bounds of even her new-found abilities, she now had an easy time of it. Energy spilled from the void and flowed down the paths she desired with silken eagerness, like an experienced lover returning to his beau after a long spell away. With the locus of the magic pointed in the opposite direction to her initial vector of thrust, harsh white light erupted into a tightly focused beam. She counted the burn duration in her head then, when it was done, cut the power. It vanished instantly, leaving weird after-images in her eyes, which she blinked away in time to see Starswirl's bubble, with his chaise-lounge ensconced inside, emerging from the blackness, ringed with pinpricks of mage fire.

His own accelerations and decelerations were nowhere near as visible as hers were. The prisoner used some sort of highly unorthodox propulsion magic, which had produced bizarre thaumokinetic feedback effects in her horn when first he'd used it. The only way she could think of it were in terms of synesthesia, and this magic smelled like green, felt like the number eleven, and so on. The usual sort of feedback, by which the ways and means of magic could usually be divined by a unicorn so trained, as she was, never strayed into such surreal territory. Starswirl would not be led on it, however, except to say that it was of a school of thaumic thought that likely would never function anywhere outside the unique physical climate of Tartarus.

Their two forcefield menisci met and merged in a frankly obscene fashion. There was a slight whoosh and a rustle of air as the two portable life support systems became a single mutual entity and slight differences in pressure and temperature were equalised.

“I do hope your navigational skills have not let us down,” Twilight said, peering over the back of the chaise-lounge, as soon as the rustling allowed normal speech. “Even very slight deviations, at these sort of scales, could send us hairing very wide of the mark.”

“The beacons that I installed around Tartarus are very functional, my little starling.”

“So you've said.”

“What else did I say, then?”

“That I shouldn't worry about it.”

“Exactly, and nothing has changed.”

“Fine. How soon until we reach this...” Twilight trailed off, trying to recall the proper words. “Gate complex, then?”

“You know, you do remind me of her.” Starswirl's head appeared, and there was a great shuffling, accompanied by a low telekinetic keening, and Twilight realised that he was staring at her with his beady little eyes.

“Who?”

“The Princess whose things you're planning on returning to the world.”

Twilight was taken aback. No possible response had time to nucleate in her mind before Starswirl began speaking again.

“She was always so military, which I suppose is fitting for the supreme commander of the armed forces.” His furred, shaggy head cocked to one side, like a pigeon gauging distance. “It was as though she feared electrons might stop going about atomic nuclei if she didn't orchestrate their spin, as if water would cease to be wet if she failed to splash in it.”

“Am I supposed to take this as a compliment?”

“It is an observation.” He chuckled, which sounded like someone sandpapering wood. “Here is another. You trot her path.”

“I have become a Princess, yes.”

“Not quite what I meant, little starling.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“There you go again, the scalpel interrogatives.” More chuckling. “Cut right to the heart of the matter! No thoughts for innocent bystanders.”

“I make no apologies for my rationality and pragmatism.”

Starswirl said nothing for a moment, then seemed to nod, slowly, just the once.

“Do with my observations what you will, starling.” He cleared his throat, and there was a soft whining noise of magic being expended. “We'll begin to interact with the gate complex's atmosphere in a few minutes. Make sure to give the telekinesis plenty of juice. We're still coming in pretty sharpish, and the gravity sometimes kicks in unexpectedly.”

“What?”

“There is a gravity hard deck, from time to time. That is to say, a zero gradient. We're approaching from the near vertical, so it will be like someone has just thrown a switch. One moment microgravity, floating along all happy, like...” He made a floaty sound that reminded Twilight of waddling ducklings. “Then, blam, gravity. Maybe. This place can be unpredictable.”

“I see.” Twilight furrowed her brow, because she really didn't see. “Wait a minute, I thought you said we were traveling in an arc? If this place is all on one level, as it were, wouldn't we approach from horizontal? Given that our vector has been so linear, once we ascended out of the first basin, that is...”

“Now you're just being silly.”

Twilight's brow could not have become any more furrowed.

True to his word, what she assumed was the gate complex approached out of the darkness and, from the dim, sourceless illumination that surrounded it, invisible to the naked eye at longer ranges, it was clear that they were heading directly down onto it. Twilight’s logically ordered mind, so much like the library she cared for, had a herd of stampeding wildebeest driven through it. There was simply no way she could think of that allowed for their current vector. Also true to his word, they were coming in fast. The thaumic spacecraft rumbled and shifted about as it encountered denser layers of the ersatz atmosphere. Speed was further reduced by its drag. The return to rich, visual perception was jarring; everything seemed oversaturated, larded with odd phantasmic hues.

Bent space time, non-Eweclidean geometries, yes, that’s what it must be, she thought, half-deranged, as she struck out toward the rising surface with her telekinesis and applied energy. This close to their target, she dared not use the means of propulsion she had employed before. Whilst it was perfectly suited to transit across vacuum, where huge forces needed to be leveraged in hope of crossing such vast distances on reasonable timescales, when it came to smaller adjustments, relatively speaking, it was just too much, too imprecise. It would have been like trying to put a watch mechanism together with a pickaxe.

Telekinesis filled the gap nicely. Weird resonances came back down the thaumokinetic link, indicative of strong, wild magic in play somewhere below, or ahead. As Starswirl began to do the same, their separation distance began to widen, different masses and varying applied energies conspiring to pull them apart. Looking down onto it, the gate complex resembled a strange, angular assortment of endless cubes, departing from a central mammoth to progressively smaller ones, all conjoined, in the manner of a fractal. It had the colour of candied beetroot which had been painted over with a thick layer of lacquer and optically polished. There was no judging how big it truly was, but permanent entrepôts between demesnes could be of any physical dimension the constructor wished; often enough, practicality trumped the desire to be original, and they just resembled ordinary doorways.

Twilight had a feeling that, going on what she had seen so far of Tartarus, the approaching gate would be no mere doorway.

*

“Like cargo! Like I was just a thing!”

Whom's voice, adopting a new shrill register, seemed wildly incongruous amidst the shiny bones of Tartarus, though congruity was something the alicorn Princess, the shambolic chaise lounge mounted wizard, and the bizarre pink lunar native had in short supply. In the end, they'd opted for a landing site some distance away from the gate complex. There hadn't been any signal from Starswirl on the matter. The group had simply come to the same, unconscious conclusion, unwilling to go near the hulking structure until they'd had a moment to collected themselves. Whom’s recent injury to her ribs appeared to do nothing to quell her appetite for an argument, though she did, from time to time, wince and shiver.

All around it, as far as the sourceless light extended, the plateau was smooth and featureless. Unlike the earlier substance of Tartarus, this stuff was making no attempt to appear to be some naturally occurring material. The closest analogue Twilight could think of was volcanic glass, but even the most pure samples of obsidian would have inclusions, trapped gasses, something to give them texture. The plateau's floor was entirely free of reflection, made muted, unidentifiable noises when their hooves and chaise-lounge feet moved across it and, wherever light was shone too closely, appeared to become more shadowy and black.

“Look, Whom, I've apologised, what more do you want me to do?” Twilight was getting quite frustrated with the mare now, whereas Starswirl just seemed to be enjoying the show.

“You didn't even ask! It was just the right time in your plan for it, so 'back in your box now, Whom!'” She did some impersonation for the last part.

“Should I have left you there?”

“You should have treated me with more respect. Aren't we supposed to be friends? Would you have just stuffed...” She bit her lip and her brow furrowed as she concentrated. “Rainbow Dash in a magic spaceship without so much as a 'by your leave'? ”

“Of course we're friends, Whom.” Twilight stopped and looked at her dead on. “Why is this such a big deal?”

“Nightmare Moon used to behave that way,” she said, after a long moment.

“Hah,” Starswirl said, chaise lounge swerving. “See, what did I tell you, Twilight?”

“I won't be lectured on ethics by the inventor of history's greatest weapon of mass destruction!”

“Which one are you referring to?” He chortled, then his mounds of fur and hair rippled. “You flatterer, you. History's greatest, eh? Cor.”

“Will you be lectured on ethics by a friend then, Twilight?” Whom's voice was very small, and it seemed like she'd lost all the fire of a few moments past, all the righteous indignation.

“Yes, Whom. That happens a lot, just not when we're quite literally trapped in the underworld.” Twilight clamped down on her external displays of emotion, even though she felt as though knives were being driven through her soul at the earnestly of Whom’s speech. “We can talk about it until the cows come home, just as soon as we're back in the land of the living, okay?”

“I'll hold you to that,” Whom said, leadenly.

The gate complex was much taller and more three-dimensional than it had appeared coming in. Twilight guessed that it would take her at least a minute to match altitude with the topmost limits of its fractal patterns. The mathematician in her head stirred and opened bleary eyes as she took in the extent of its majesty. She'd only ever seen fractals in the flesh as recursive functions, and in certain thaumic visions. Even then they were half-imagined, hinted at in the nether regions of perception between seeing and thinking. This thing was truly worthy of the word 'edifice', and then some.

“So, do we just touch it, or something?” Twilight said, when the complex was towering over them.

“Give them a moment,” Starswirl said, cryptically. “They don't often get visitors.”

“Them?” Twilight said, looking up to see that they were standing at the base of a monumental cliff, one fractal arm, or spur, of which jutting out above them like the bough of a some weird, geometric tree.

He said nothing in return, but with his eyes he bid her wait and, surely enough, feline shapes began to emerge out of shadow. They came from behind curves and jinks in the pattern of smaller fractal branches, carefully placing paw over paw. It was hard to see their colour for more than a few moments at a time, but Twilight saw ochres, duns, reds, all the hues of a desert at sunset. Then she saw the first hooked beak.

“Gryphons?” she blurted.

“Guess again.”

“If it quacks like a duck...”

“They're absolutely not gryphons.”

Twilight glimpsed another beak; open and backlit against the light, there and gone again. Something in the back of her head began to whisper about all the places from which predatory monsters could spring from.

“Thenwhat are they?” Twilight whispered.

“I,” said a voice, calm and cold as liquid helium, oozing into her ears like mercury, undeniably female, “am a sphinx.”

All of the creatures had stopped their shadowy movements. Almost as one, they were now sat upright like blades of grass in the lull between gusts. Pairs of eyes glinted, dozens and dozens of them, whenever the sourceless light conspired in just the right way.

“They look after this mechanism you said you were having trouble with?” Twilight said, trying to keep as still as possible.

“These creatures are an emergent function of the gate itself. As far as I can tell, they are the mechanism,” Starswirl said, adopting a pontificate tone. “Don't be fooled by how intelligent they seem. It's all just smoke and mirrors.”

“I have long tried to make the wizard understand my true nature, but he still mistakes me for many units, and a trick,” the voice said, from the general direction of the arrayed sphinxes, every mouth speaking at once but somehow sounding singular, as if by an incredible feat of synchronisation.

“Ten centuries of this, can you believe it?” Starswirl grunted, and the many folds of his hair and mane rippled with displeasure. “I should like to meet whoever, or whatever, instituted this mad system. At least Cerberus doesn’t say much.”

“Two sides of the same coin, stupid old horse,” the sphinx said, shapes retreating into the gloom cast by the gate’s fractal outcroppings. “You shall never meet my masters.”

“Shut up,” Starswirl said, then turned to Twilight. “Time to wave your authority about, little starling.”

Twilight’s wings unmantled, as if they had a life of their own. She glanced between the different forms lurking in the darkness, tried to find a locus, something to look at. Eyes like embers scattered over a soot-black fireplace met her on every vector. The sensation of being carefully studied became overwhelming.Liquid fear, like glacial melt water, suddenly invaded the back of her head and crept down her spine. Why am I so afraid? Pull it together!

“I am Princess Twilight Sparkle,” she said, after a long moment, voice sounding pathetically weak. “You said you are a sphinx; I’m not familiar with that species. Do you have a name?”

“I have been called the Mother of Dread.”

Twilight gulped.

“It is no fault of mine that you do not recognize what I am,” the sphinx continued. “Study history more closely. We owned the world for ten thousand years before receding.”

“I apologise for my ignorance, Mother of Dread, I meant no disrespect,” Twilight said, getting into the swing of diplomatic discourse; she was at home here, at least, and the sphinx seemed more amenable to it than the bizarre monster which attacked them earlier. “Would I be correct in thinking that this structure is a gateway to Equestria?”

“Equestria,” the sphinx hissed. “A fleeting name, given by little candles to immensities like planets, moons and stars. These orbs track ceaselessly, speaking nothing, suggesting nothing. What hubris to name them! Folly, folly, folly!”

“Here we bloody go,” Starswirl murmured. “The verbosity increases with time. Goes from simple equuish to Luna’s drunken idiolect quicker than you can say ‘gobbledygook’. I had them speaking a weirdness of firstfall fronsteppe and ald gryphic at one point. I think it was a love poem or somesuch.” He huffed. “Anyway, best be quick about it.”

“Please, Mother of Dread, I humbly request, as a Princess of Equestria, access to this gate for myself, my friend and this prisoner, whom we are removing from custody.”

“Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi! Ille mi par esse deo videtur! Superare divos!” The sphinx was caterwauling, interspersing the Old Equuish with sudden, shrill caws reminiscent of calling raptors.

“Bugger,” said Starswirl.

*

Since its formation, now nearly five billion years in the past, and subsequent cooling, the moon had not experienced such heat and disturbance. Even ten centuries of occupation by a mad Goddess failed to produce quite the splash Celestia caused when she struck the surface. Obeying physical parameters just slightly out of kilter with the usual behaviour of baryonic matter, the speeding, vaguely equine mass that was the Princess excavated a massive crater, spraying ejecta in every direction. Hypervelocity fragments of lunar regolith, following more normal rules, tracked nearly horizontally across the tortured moonscape, barely outrunning new formed fracture lines.

Shedding her energy into the moon's mass, the Princess finally came to rest several kilometres below the original level of the surface. Above her, an immense cloud of highly energetic plasma, the vapor-flashed remnants of a hundred thousand megatons of assorted silicates, rose quickly, blooming with lambent striations. Where the force had not been quite enough to create an ionised gas of it, the new crater's floor was home to oozing pools and strange coils of molten rock, the deeper stuff of the moon. It shifted and rippled as heat moved around, attempting to find equilibrium.

Note to self, Celestia thought, magically extricating herself from the clinging ribbons of lava and ascending vertically out of the boiling pit, the coolness of her thoughts at immense odds with the heat of her surroundings. Arrange for immediate gelding of Sparkle family line stallions.

*

Canterlot now barely resembled a city, a place where ponies lived, loved, worked and acted out the innumerable small dramas of their existences. Much of the protective caldera wall had collapsed, burying the structures nestled against it or built into it under strata of rock, that of it which had not been obliterated wholesale. Few freestanding building now stood; the hypersonic passage of Sol Dei, and associated blunt force overpressure shock, had pulverized most of them. The stands of pegasus roosts were faint memories, stumps of soot-black steel. Only the larger buildings, or those with deep foundations, had been spared much of this assault.

However, the widespread fires, already established and well rooted, caused by the riots and general collapse of social order, as well as the detonation of the stored hydrogen fuel, now entered a final destructive phase: the firestorm. Feedback loops appeared; greater access to frangible and flammable materials allowed for higher temperatures in the cores of blazes, drawing in extra oxygen, creating even greater temperatures. The scenic, high-sided alleyways and rat runs of the capital turned into smelters, howling maws that consumed in moments all it touched.

Like a lump of iron ore in the centre of a crucible approaching its optimum temperature, the palace was largely unscathed. Despite its height and huge cross-section, the ancient structure had been built with equally aged magics. It towered above the roiling smoke, resisting the touch of soot. Such thaumic considerations had not extended to its attendant buildings; the gardens first smouldered, then burst into flames with rapid pops of water in tree boughs turning to steam. The foliage blazed as heat from the city was carried in the billowing clouds or radiated up the tiers from the now encircling conflagration.

The anachronistic statue of Nightmare Moon, asleep atop a slain gryphon, had begun to glow a cherry red by the time Praetor Quiet Afore located his charge. His eyes stung, and he could barely breath, but the sight of a muddy white rump and a pair of legs shod with the imperial brass, jutting out of the last rank of topiaried hedge left to fall to the flames, was like ice water to a pony lost in the desert for a week.

“Sire!” he shouted, voice straining over the inexorably rising howl of the firestorm, growing closer and more overwhelming with every moment that passed. “Thank the stars!”

Afore briefly considered the proper protocol for this situation, then decided that the exigencies of the baffling catastrophe that had suddenly befallen them called for an immediate solution. He licked his lips, squinted through the rolling, choking smoke to gauge his aim, then leant in and grabbed as much of the Emperor's tail as he could in his mouth. It tasted bitter: soot mixing with sweat and the expensive, prissy shampoo he used. Ignoring this, he pulled as hard as he could.

Shining Armour, it seemed, had become lodged quite firmly in dense, leafy mess of the topiary bushes, and the soil in which they were planted. He wasn't conscious, but through the shroud of muck and leaves, Afore saw his chest heave once, twice, and this was enough. He spat out the tail hair and slid around to the Emperor's side, detaching his withers-halberd in the process. The praetor had long hoped he'd never need to perform this trick outside of a training session, but the secondary function of the weapons armature now came into play and, in one deft motion, Afore hooked himself onto the crumpled emperor via a mount point on his armour.

He tested the fixture for a moment, grunting as he shouldered a dead weight. Something exploded deafeningly in the near distance. Afore turned instinctively and saw that the Nightmare statue, with its copper-wrapped stone core, had ceased existing. The topiaried hedge that he had just extricated the emperor from now took its turn to burn; sprayed with molten copper, it had little choice in the matter.

Afore wrenched himself around, dragging the emperor with him, adrenaline spiking in his veins. This sort of stallion-carrying maneuver was best practised with two praetors, one at each side, but in emergencies, could be done with only one. Doggedly, heart hammering in his chest, he began to head for the gaping void where once there had been a gate and much of a complex of stone walls, but where there was now only a strange smear of bubbling, glassy material that looked as though it had just come out of a volcano.

Beyond, the palace beckoned. If there was any safe place now, if succor could be found, it was there.

*

“It is a signal-to-noise ratio trap,” Starswirl said, once their little group had retreated from the towering wall of shrieking not-gryphons. “Someone’s idea of a funny little joke. When the mechanism detects you, the initial transactions are high in signal, the parts that make sense, and low in noise, the parts that don’t have any meaning. However, as the seconds tick by, the noise ratio increases until, well…”

The old unicorn trailed off as he glanced over toward the sphinxes, who had just launched into their sixth repetition of The Wizard’s Horn, complete with anatomically improbable thrusting.

“You could have mentioned it before we went galumphing in,” Twilight said. “How long before this trap resets?”

“Well, how long are protons stable for?”

“What’s a proton?”

Just before the caterwauling sphinxes reached the last chorus of the Horn, whose ribald tones echoed in peculiar and unlikely ways across the glassy no-space of Tartarus, they suddenly stopped. They scattered across their fractal roosts like copperfish scared by thrown stones, secreting themselves away behind shadows and the outcrops of mathematical tricks made real.

“Hm, that was quick,” Starswirl said, then sneezed abruptly, which had an effect much like a grand old pair of bellows being mated with by an overenthusiastic bull. “‘Scuse me, gamma rays.”

Whom squealed like she had been stung and nearly ran Twilight over in an attempt to jump onto her withers, apparently in defiance of her fractured rib. “Oh no!” she whinnied. “Where?”

“The mechanism uses Tartarus’ own mass as a power source, and the process by which it converts said mass to energy is somewhat lossy; showers you with gamma rays and suchlike particulate thingies,” Starswirl said, blowing his nose with a delicate little ‘kerchief that appeared emblazoned with his mark. “None of you were planning on any foals, were you?”

“No longer on my agenda,” Twilight said, flatly, as she untangled herself from a timorous mass of pink-furred limbs. “You know what is, though? Escaping this forsaken pit.”

“Look, I’m going to be very honest with you, and that really always has been one of my redeeming qualities, my blunt honesty, yes, right, very honest -- that back there was my last, best hope,” Starswirl said. “The mechanism isn’t smart, you see. It cannot be reasoned with. It is a clockwork of better parts than metal, but a clockwork yet. If it could be opened from within, then the regnal authority of a Princess would have been the thing to do it. You see?”

The milky-blue eyes that peered out at her from beneath a fringe of muchly matted hair held an unreadable expression.

“I won’t accept that we’re just stuck here,” Twilight said. “There has to be--”

“We’re definitely stuck here, it’s a prison, built out of pure fundament to fill the purposes of beings who could probably simulate perfectly every mind in modern Equestria with their equivalent of a passing day dream.” Starswirl sneezed again, his dander up. “What fools we are, what hubris fills us, to think we could--”

Gravity shifted. Twilight felt it as the most unpleasant of sensations, as if she had suddenly been dangled over a cliff in the direction of the huge fractal Gate complex. The suddenness of it interrupted Starswirl’s proclamations, and he turned even as he began sneezing rapidly. Then, they began to fall. Some old birdy instinct, programmed into Twilight’s brain at the moment of her apotheosis, had her up and flapping her wings against the tug without her ever really deciding to do it. Starswirl’s motile chaise-lounge scraped along the glass with a hideous keening for a moment, then arrested in mid-air with a flash of blue magic.

Whom fell the furthest, and her pathetic wing beats had to be assisted by Twilight’s telekinesis. She felt the mare’s heart hammering away beneath her ribcage via the thaumokinetic feedback, felt how slick and damp her coat was with the sweat of exertions and fear. Moments after she applied the pressure, one of Whom’s ribs slipped and, cursing herself, Twilight remembered her earlier injury. Whom just wailed and tensed up reflexively at the pain.

Below, for that is where it now appeared to be, the Gate complex’s black fractals were glowing with the cherry incandescence of worked metal in a forge. Whole arms and whorls of the stuff had already turned white hot, and were spraying out in gouts of globular liquid, escaping for a short distance under their own momentum before returning and falling into a slow orbit around the centre of gravity. Twilight tried to catch a glimpse of the sphinxes but, for a moment, could not see them anywhere. Then she saw one of the bird-cat-not-gryphon things plunge into a growing spherule of gate-stuff, flail its limbs in an attempt to avoid immolation, shriek wordlessly then, finally, succumb to flames and vanish out of view.

“What’s going on?” Twilight shouted, as the sounds of gyring metals became a roar as the sea enraged, dashing again and again against itself with ever-greater speed and weight like a grand mal seizure at a whale orgy. “Is this another trap?”

If Starswirl answered, Twilight did not hear it. Beams, like rays of light through some ungodly thunderhead, speared from out of the gestating, slippery molten mess. They had the blemishless purity of high altitude sunlight, but only for a moment. Then they rapidly turned ultraviolet, and faded from view. With near-comic swiftness, the ball of swirling stuff collapsed in on itself, as though it were a blob of water being sucked through a straw.

The Gate complex was gone. With the floor now feeling like a wall, it felt as if they were suspended half-way off the edge of a cliff, arrested mid leap. Something rounded was hovering above the 'wall'. It was blue, and getting bluer. Twilight recognized the shade immediately, and felt a horrible pang of homesickness.

Starswirl tossed a dried apple he removed from the folds of his robes away from the chaise lounge, watched it fall, then caught it again. He repeated the process. “Ten metres per second, that seems about right,” he said, his voice now the loudest thing around. “Well, whatever you did--”

From the rounded object, which Twilight did not recognize but felt that she should, came something she most certainly knew. The familiar flanks of Fluttershy, perched astride the great back of a phenomenal example of Aviforma terribilis, the Roc, hurtled into the abyssal depths of Tartarus, the bird’s wings unfolding as it transitioned from dart-like to an awesome gliding profile. The riding pony fell away from them, skimmed the floor-wall, then pulled up and arced around again, flying in parallel and ascending.

“By Luna’s hairy left tit, it’s Fluttershy!” Twilight shouted, breathless.

And after her, unseen, followed something snake-like and asymmetric.

*

Mytheme landed, as Luna felt was appropriate, outside Ponyville’s quaint little town hall. The square, formed roughly from a simple absence of houses and the inevitable prancing pony statue -- which was crushed to a thin layer of dust by Mytheme’s unyielding hull --, was devoid of any bystanders, who had fled in panic long before any vast diamond sky yachts disturbed the serenity of their bucolia. Apart from a few holdouts in the larger buildings, whose presence she could tell from long range disturbances to the magical standing field, much of Ponyville’s resident herd was now camping out in the Everfree. Mass cataclysms have their advantages, Luna thought, as she released the tension that held Mytheme and allowed it to sink into the soft mud of the square.

The nottlygna decamped apace, their organic organizational structure causing the deployment of a few dozen trotlites, nottlygna simply armed with light mail and a withers-spear, to perform a recce and to secure the town, without any individual officer or chief actually ordering it. As this wave of cantering, thinly-armoured and more than a little drunken batty-horses expanded like ripples from the lobbed stone of Mytheme, filtering carefully through the patchwork of houses, cottages and small business premises that formed the heart of the sleepy little town, secondary and tertiary waves of what the nottlygna ostensibly referred to as civilians emerged from the yacht, those older mares, the newly foaled, the crippled, whose military contributions were at an end or unbegun, but who otherwise could carry a lot of stuff.

Cargo lines formed and foals danced up and down them, carrying smaller items, as the adults hefted the apparently many essential supplies that had been crammed into the yacht between themselves, as buckets of water might be in a fire chain. Inevitably, somepony began singing, and this was all it took for laughing, squealing, chittering pulses of ribaldry to fill the air. Though Ponyville had been subject to many songs throughout its long and muddy history, few had ever referenced so many appendages, of so many species, in such unusual situations. Fewer still had featured harmonic parts beyond the range of hearing of a cat.

Presently, something very much like a military camp sprung up in the middle of Ponyville, only it was a military camp that had been lifted up on many thousands of night-black hooves and catapulted at great speed into the side of Equestria’s largest brothel, by way way of two vineyards and a brewery.

It was only after they had settled in, and the remaining residents -- and visitors, of course -- of Ponyville dared put their heads above the parapets to see what all the screaming and lusty singing was about, did the trouble really begin.

*

Twilight circled the spherical object that Fluttershy and her roc had emerged from. She was trying to process the sight of it, but her brain, still wired to function along more-or-less squishy organic lines, couldn’t quite make sense of it. Whilst it appeared to be a physical thing, like a great polished ball, when she tried to focus on it, all she could see was a warped representation of a sky, and a flat yellow plain beyond. As she moved around it, the view shifted to show four black columns, and she knew that what she was seeing beyond was the Tartaran Gate.

The roc, with Fluttershy in tow, seemed very confused as to the orientation of gravity in the new location it found itself in. It was flying around in long, disoriented loops, almost crashing into the wall-floor on several occasions. After about five minutes of this, Fluttershy apparently remembered that she had wings, and left her seat on the roc’s back, appearing like a dash of butter on bread too well toasted against the black void of Tartarus.

“Discord was telling the truth!” she whinnied, as she arced past, colliding with the wall-floor and rebounding, wings flapping and hooves kicking.

“He was?” Twilight said, at a loss for a more intelligent response. “Wait, Discord opened the gate?”

“No, he can’t do that,” Fluttershy said, bobbing upright relative to Twilight, then she misjudged her orientation and collided with the wall again. “Oh, bother.”

“Just imagine a point source of gravity,” Twilight said, still transfixed by the light-bending effects of the gateway. “Easy enough.”

Fluttershy righted herself, fell toward the gateway to try and come level with Twilight, then failed to arrest herself in time. With a squeak, she began to fall away from it again. Twilight sighed, reached out and added Fluttershy to her menagerie of thaumically tethered ponies.

“Hi!” Whom said, beaming the most unabashedly joyful smile at Fluttershy.

“Princess Celestia?!” Fluttershy exclaimed, aghast.

“No, I’m Whom, and I’m so--”

“Whom are you?” Fluttershy said.

“Whom I am, absolutely.” Whom nodded. “I am so happy to meet you at last!”

“Her name is Whom, Fluttershy,” Twilight said, distractedly.

“Oh,” said Fluttershy. “Oh.”

“I found her in a castle on the moon, well, near there, anyway, and she just followed me home.”

“I’m an experiment!” Whom said. “Or a toy, I ‘spose.”

“The Nightmare made her, I think, but don’t worry, she’s the exact opposite of evil.”

“Unless you’re a changeling,” Whom said, suddenly dejected. “They met a Princess of Darkness in that desert.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I’m not a changeling, so we’ll get on just fine, no doubts,” Fluttershy said, gulping. “Oh, Twilight, where have you been? We were all so worried. When you brought Rarity back, then disappeared...”

“Here, there and everywhere. I’m sorry if I troubled you. I visited the moon, a demesne, drifted through near-Equestrian orbit, then we re-entered the atmosphere in a spaceship I built out of magic,” Twilight said, tilting her head this way and that to see if it changed the orientation of image projected through the gate. “We landed in the Southern Deserts somewhere, a diamond dog stabbed me to no avail, some changelings tried to eat Whom and discovered that there definitely can be too much of a good thing--” Twilight grinned conspiratorially at Whom, whose dejection shifted to sheepishness. “Then my teleportation spell went awry and we ended up here, and you wouldn’t believe who we met.”

Twilight glanced around, looking for Starswirl. The obvious shape of his chaise-lounge was nowhere to be seen. Only a few clouds of fur and feathers, knocked loose in all the recent commotion by many a furred and feathered thing, still drifted in wide, unlikely orbits around the gateway.

“Bugger!” Twilight shouted. “He’s gone! But how? I was watching the gateway the entire time.”

“Twilight,” Whom said. “What’s that behind your ear?”

She felt around with her magic and grasped the thing immediately, knew it well through its feedback. It was the pinion-feather sized scroll, the one Starswirl had completed. As she unrolled it, she saw that it bore so much extra script, in tiny, excruciatingly neat letters that she recognized at once from her academic studies, that it noticeably weighed more. A powerful sensation of wondrous excitement crept up her spine and emplaced itself over her withers.

The complete synthesis for Nectars #1 was finally hers.

Bones of Contention

“Bones of Contention”

Starswirl the Bearded tasted Equestrian air only briefly on his tongue before his thaumic accelerations tore him away from that thin skein of warm gas. Thirty seconds after his transition through the new-formed Tartaran gate, he was passing the outermost fringes of the atmosphere. Long-prepared complexes of spells, thaumic instructions and intentions running in the autonomous portions of the ancient mage's expanded mentality, clawed at space/time in clever and unusual ways. From the atmosphere, many tons of nitrogen and oxygen were gathered, as well as a thousand litres of water, stolen from a thunderhead which, to the casual observer, appeared to simply cease existing.

Like a comet in reverse, leaving and not coming, this mess of elements and not-quite-pony came to stop a hundred and fifty kilometres above the alkaline flat and the emerald blotch of the greater Equestrian nation. The chaise lounge nucleus at the heart of it all revolved, and two milky-blue eyes peered down from behind strands of captured materials, to regard a thousand-years changes. The mentality considered; one lifetime, a long and aching loneliness ago, it had lived here, and it had been a unicorn called Starswirl the Bearded.

Starswirl had known the smell of a lover's neck, and the new blossoming trees of spring, and he had known of good food and merriment in abundance. There had been risk, and there had been heartache, and there had been the inimitable thrill of discovery, of hiking up the skirts of reality to see what lay below. Yes, there had been triumphs and disaster in equal measure. As these memories flooded through what passed for his mind, he traced out the invisible roads between the faint greys and browns of towns and cities he remembered, joined now by many he did not. Starswirl felt a longing to return too deep and painful to give voice. For a long moment, the nebulous bulb of elements drifted idly in their telekinetic containment, some boiling, others quickly freezing solid.

“Nah, bugger it,” he said.

Within half a sidereal day, Starswirl was beyond the orbit of the outer gas giant Cronos, having raided its hydrogen seas for supplies and, by the time a full day had passed, the mage was snuggling light, his telescope pointed firmly ahead.

*

Twilight fell through the Gate with her eyes closed and wings folded flat against her back. There was little fanfare, but the sudden sensation of merciless sunlight on her neck and flanks, and the dry air of the alkaline flat, were shocking in comparison to the unceasing and relentless chill of Tartarus, which surrounded the soul and set about draining it of energy with all the patient inevitability of glaciers.

Her avian instincts, so recently patterned into her brain via apotheosis, demanded she spread her wings. Without conscious impulse, she found herself coasting on the last of the velocity, the tug of gravity now reconciling itself to a more standard location. Up really was now up, and down was down. The subtle smells of the salt desert, normally so much dull background olfactory noise, were like water to a parched mare. She spent a moment drinking it all in, the unabashed joy of return.

Cerberus lay some distance from the set of four black pillars that surrounded the sphere of bent light and clever tricks with space/time. His houndish features, usually as stoic and foreboding as a mountain range, appeared razor sharp and focused on the wormhole. His eyes were almost shut, their pupils contracted to points. Whom came through the object of his staring a moment later, shortly pursued by Fluttershy and the roc, the latter of which seemed happiest to leave by far. It immediately made for the sky, pounding its wings and sending up plumes of dust, momentarily shading everything brown in a haze of fines.

Whom landed in the salty sand as soon as she had, jerkily, arrested her velocity. She whimpered in agony and promptly collapsed, wings splayed uselessly. Fluttershy was first on scene, joined by Twilight seconds later.

“My ribs,” Whom squeaked, then coughed blood onto the sand.

“Don’t move,” Fluttershy said, eyes dancing up and down Whom’s prostrate form, assessing and analyzing. “Breathe slow and steady.”

“Can’t get my… breath…” Whom wheezed.

“It must be the return to standard gravity, something slipped and gave way, punctured a lung--” Twilight began.

“Twilight, shush!” Fluttershy scolded, sparing her a harsh glance. “You’ll make it worse.” She tutted and felt gently with her nose until she found the rib in question, which she skirted around, producing only the smallest of whimpers from Whom. “Could you try to stand please, Whom?” she finally said, after she had satisfied herself.

Whom complied, shakily and with snorts of pain, but managed to hoist herself off the caustic sand and into some semblance of trembling uprightness. Fluttershy frowned, apparently noticing the little reddened puncture wound on Whom’s inside left leg.

“What’s that?” Fluttershy said, peering closer. “Did you inject her with something?”

“Some sort of painkiller, I-I think,” Twilight said, still reeling from having been shut up moments before.

“Twilight, you aren’t a doctor! You can’t shoot ponies up with whatever you feel like just because you read a book!”

“It wasn’t me, it was Starswirl the Bearded!” Twilight stamped to reinforce her point. “He’s more qualified than some hedge-vet like you!”

“Hedge-vet? Hedge-vet?! I went to a veterinary college!”

Five rolling booms echoed in the distance, spaced evenly apart. In the silence of the desert, the far-off sounds were clearly audible. All ears and eyes were inexorably drawn to the direction of the disturbance, retorts and counter retorts aborted in throats as instinctive parts of their equine brains scanned for threats. On the horizon, much smeared by heat shimmer, the faint smudgy green of the furthest extent of the Everfree wavered hazily, in and out of reality, as its image was projected around the curve of the planet by planes of warm air.

“I’m sorry I called you a hedge-vet,” Twilight said, half a minute later. “I’ve just been a bit wound up recently. What should we do?”

“Apology accepted,” Fluttershy said, softly. “We need to get Whom back to Ponyville. Nurse Redheart will be able to help. One of her unicorn medics can set the rib into place and deal with any internal bleeding. ”

“Agreed,” Twilight said. “Has anything major happened whilst I’ve been indisposed?”

“There was a really bright light in the sky a day ago, brighter than anything I’ve ever seen before,” Fluttershy said, looking up at the roc, which had joined its partner and was now circling again. “No sound or anything, just fire, so much fire. It crept across the vault of the heavens and was gone in an hour. Then, it was aurorae that carried on until dawn.”

“Ominous,” Whom spluttered. “Very ominous.”

“Closing gateway,” Cerberus intoned, voice a thundering report like cannonfire, which drove Twilight’s ears back in self-protection.

Nothing happened. Twilight was watching with the intense and furious interest only an academic could muster up, but the scene did not change. She noticed that little eddies of white vapour were starting to seep from the black pillars, rolling down the sides and pooling around their bases. The sphere still projected the bent image of the gateway’s other side, a horizontal plane surrounded by perpetual darkness.

One minute passed, then another. Fluttershy was making urgent, but silent, motions that it was time to go. Twilight had just been about to say something to Cerberus about how important it was that the gateway to the universe in which the ancient imponderables stored their dangerous imponderables remain open only as long as was required, when one of the pillars cracked.

The noise set Twilight’s teeth on edge. It was like someone had nailed her brain to a calving iceberg, penetrating deep into her mind. Quicker than thought, a fissure ran the entire length of the pillar, from which erupted clouds of roiling steam and smoke, tinged purple with an intense light that emanated from somewhere inside the pillar. Despite the new heat prickling Twilight’s skin, cold tendrils ran up her spine. Hissing noises thereafter issued forth, growing louder, as if something under unimaginable pressure had sprung a leak.

“Sabotage. Mechanism exposed,” Cerberus announced. “All life must leave immediately.”

The rocs had sensed something was amiss, because one was already coming in for a low pass. Apparently intending to grab Fluttershy and Whom, it waved off at the last minute following shouted commands that Twilight couldn’t hear over the shrieking noise. It wobbled and wavered, then pulled up and around before landing smartly some distance away. Fluttershy was already hurrying Whom toward the landing site. The roc splayed its crane-scoop talons and lowered itself to permit their easy boarding.

“I’ll be faster on my own!” Twilight shouted, as loud as she could, but Fluttershy and her roc had worked this out already, as they took off without further attempts at comment.

She followed suit moments later, the fear of whatever was happening to the gate mechanism on the Equestrian side propelling her to achieve new speed records. The warped sphere of the gate remained steadfastly open, even as it was limned by ever-brightening purple light and a wreath of boiling vapour.

*

“Satan, there’s a horse outside,” Death said, peering sideways through one of the thickly-bevelled windows of the Cosy Tie-Up.

“Ponies, Death, they’re ponies, and not entirely unexpected, given this is Ponyville, planet Equestria, Universe--”

“No, what I mean is, it’s a big pony. A horse.”

“So what?”

“It has the moon on its backside.”

“Oh, man!” Satan was suddenly animated, nosing around his person excitedly before pulling out a little black book, which bore no cover illustration. He started flicking through it, then stopped on a page with dramatic aplomb. “Sights to See in Temporal Equestria, here we go, Death. That horse is no horse, of course…”

Satan joined Death in peering out of the window, the view from which was mostly taken up by the monstrous, towering form of Mytheme.

“Princess Luna, She Who Trots in Dreams, Mistress of Tides, Gravitrix, blah-de-blah, all that extraneous names mumbo-jumbo, she’s got ‘em,” Death said, rolling his eyes. “That right there, my friend, is a bona-fide, grade-A demi-hemi-semi whatever God, or Godling, whatever you like.”

“One of them?”

“Yeah, the Fallen Two.”

“She’s pretty,” Death said, vertebrae grinding together like millstones as he nodded. “Do we go and say ‘hello’?”

“What, you want to bone her or something?” Satan said, grinning at his own unforgivable pun.

“Oh, vade retro!”

“That’s what they all say.”

*

Twilight and the roc bearing Fluttershy and Whom, flying in close formation after all, managed to reach the edge of the Everfree, beyond the transition between desert scrubland and proper trees, when the eastern horizon blossomed with light. The double flash of actinic intensity briefly outshone the glaring sun, then faded quickly to nothing. Almost at the same moment, an awful falling sensation, as if once more they were poised above the wormhole, overcame them.

Below, the boughs of saplings and some of the smaller adult trees bent precipitously back. Twilight spotted stones and other things moving below the canopy, rolling as though the whole world had been tipped. Making any headway toward Ponyville became harder and harder. Glancing back, she saw the roc increase its effort, it’s unsettlingly sapient eyes staring resolutely ahead. Just when the effect had intensified to such a level that Twilight had begun to panic, it faded to nothing.

The forest below rippled and sent up cracking, moaning noises as megatons of wood returned to former positions. Obviously, some of the older trees hadn’t survived. Chunks of splintery ruin crashed into their more steadfast peers. Birds and other large, canopy-dwelling creatures Twilight didn’t recognize, began to rearrange themselves, hooting, hollering and roaring in alarm and disquiet. The roc zoomed ahead, overshooting before adjusting again.

“Do you think it’s over?” Fluttershy shouted, over the relatively gentle noise of the hundred mile an hour airstream.

“I have no idea,” Twilight replied.

“Discord, did you see him escape?”

“Forget about it, he can look after himself.”

They continued on over the Everfree, that massive emerald cladding which simultaneously sheltered Equestria from the desert winds and held its least pleasant wild threats, defying centuries of pony attempts to tame it. All Equestrians had ever managed to do was keep it more or less in check, though whether the forest’s lack of expansion to the north was the result of pony intervention, or simply the wrong kind of climate, remained an open question in botany.

The crag-like edifice of the derelict Castle of the Two Sisters, an unimaginably ancient construct which predated the nation itself, passed below and to the far left, indicating that they were on the right track. Twin spires had once crowned its cruciform heart, according to certain oral histories, but it had no place on official maps or in authoritative written histories. Twilight knew, for she had read them all. Those of a few century’s vintage drew purple circles around that area, indicating a general thaumic hazard. Venturing too close to the Castle derelict tended to result in magical burns and, with sufficient exposure to the environment there, the worst kind of slow, lingering death.

Twilight swore she could see a faint corona of blue or purple light around the crumbling pile, though it soon passed away behind them, out of range of easy inspection. Despite its proximity to Ponyville, the hazardous ruin had never been a target of interest. Equestria had many such sites, where old magic inflicted death. It was always the usual story; epochal battle between powerful foes.

Something bulbous, like a huge silvery tick, crouched over Ponyville. Twilight struggled to resolve the shape, smack in the heart of the village. Clouds, black and thick with the threat of rain, circled the outskirts of the town, occasionally squirting out bursts of hail. Lightning flashed between them in sheets, or in forks to the ground, incinerating small trees. The clouds seemed to be giving the town proper a fairly wide berth.

“Was that there before you left?” Twilight said, getting closer to Fluttershy.

“No!”

“I know that shape,” Whom said, wincing with the pain it took to be audible above the slipstream. “That’s Mytheme!”

*

“Dear Sir,

I write to you today in order to express my deepest disgust at your recent pro-Gryphon sentiments, particularly those contained in the article ‘Why We All Need a Feathery Friend’. Not only are these viewpoints highly perverse, they are unpatriotic, and very disruptive at this time of heightened national security. Additionally, your suggestion that we all take a gryphon for a ‘bedfellow’, that we good, honest ponies lie with these filthy, beaked monsters from beyond the sea, drove my wife to frank hysteria, for which she has been admitted to hospital for urgent treatment. I mean really, where would you even get a gryphon from? Think of the sheer mechanics!

I demand, in the strongest possible terms, that you cease this blatant attempt to harm the equine race. Furthermore, I have registered a complaint with Her Majesty’s Equerry, regarding your crass behaviour.

Yours sincerely,

General Brass Polish (ret).” - excerpt from ‘Letters to the Editor: A Life Behind the Quill’, Nose Knows, Pigeon Fancier’s Association of Ponyville Independent Press, AN 970.

*

The roc landed in the stretch of open fields behind Ponyville’s well-appointed hospital. The space was typically used for therapeutic purposes, or to cope with incoming medical fliers from surrounding villages, which the hospital also served. Twilight had only been here on a few, largely-forgotten occasions. As far as she recalled, the interior was a mess of aseptic corridors and brightly-lit rooms, stinking of caustic soda and the sweet tang of anaesthetic gas.

By the time Twilight landed beside the roc, which showed no outward signs of fatigue, Whom was off the bird and being urged toward the hospital back entrance. She had obviously deteriorated in the short few minutes it’d taken them to actually reach Ponyville. Her skin, where not covered by fur, was colourless, and her breathing, previously fast and laboured, was almost non-existent.

Twilight could not have seen a more glorious sight then, than a quartet of ponies, wearing medical capes and curious-yet-terrified expressions. For a moment, Twilight thought she might have to cure them of their fear of gigantic birds with curved beaks the size of driven carriages, but then their professionalism took over. They came trotting up and immediately set to work on Whom. The roc mantled its wings in a whoosh of avian smells and loose dirt, which made the medics cringe.

“What happened?” said one of them, a sexless individual beneath the cloak, voice light enough to sit somewhere on the stallionish side of mare, scent betraying nothing.

“She crashed,” said Twilight, feeling impotent as they unrolled some sort of large fishing net.

“Into?”

“The ground, bare rocks.”

“Flying accident?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“How long has she been like this?”

“Twelve hours, maybe?”

“What?! Why didn’t you bring her here sooner?”

“We got here as fast as we could.”

The medic stared at the bird, which loomed over the party, and was doing the ponies the same favour, though with a hungry, wantful eye that only a starving predator could possibly muster.

“I’m sure you did, Princess, very sure,” the medic said, after a moment.

The fishing net turned out to be a pony-carrier, into which Whom was ensconced, with the weight taken under her legs. Parts of the net could be added to or removed, so it left her ribs and belly untouched, free of pressures. With a medic at each corner, they hurried into the hospital, making it respectfully clear that any non-medical ponies would surely get in the way of the speedy treatment of a case in dire need of said.

Twilight just stared at the hospital, thoughts wheeling through her mind. Whom had barely been breathing, barely shown any signs of life at all, since they’d entered Ponyville airspace. Modern medico-thaumic science was good, but they could not work miracles. They could not bring a pony back from the dead, except within a few minutes of the heart stopping. After that, the brain itself began to die.

“She’s in the best place now, Twilight,” Fluttershy said, nuzzling her gently on the withers. “There’s nothing more we can do.”

“Mytheme,” Twilight said, looking over at the omnipresent looming shape, much like a pinecone but incredibly smooth. “That’s what she said. I know that word, I’m sure I do.”

“Is it something to do with…” Fluttershy cringed at the recollection. “That thing Princess Luna talked about?”

“Princess Luna? Oh, starry foals, of course! Mytheme!” Twilight danced across the grass toward the centre of town, suddenly excited. “It’s her yacht! I thought it was just a legend!”

“That doesn’t look like a yacht, Twilight.”

“They say it was made from a single huge diamond, hollowed out and filled with star metals and ancient dragon bones,” said Twilight, ignoring her. “When Luna was banished, the yacht was buried under Avalon to await her foretold return. I didn’t think it was real!”

“Yachts have sails.”

Twilight leapt into the air and took to wing with a smart and snappy trio of downbeats, shortly followed by Fluttershy.

*

“Come,” whispered Discord, to the universe. “Come and play.”

Vast mechanisms within the layered depths of Tartarus began to move. They were stupid, though large as solar systems, and responded to magical commands without questioning the identity of the commander. The builders had never thought anything bent on mischief would make it past the gate, and the guardians they had installed there. Into the guardians they had poured all their eons of cleverness, and it had survived the test of two billion years of unrelenting time. Until now.

Though in its beginnings, Tartarus had been much like any other nascent universe, the singularity responsible had been cultivated, curated, edited in subtle ways by the builders, who intended it for their own purposes. Unlike those universes which eventually grew aware of themselves, the deep structures required for such slow, yet purposeful, thoughts, had never been allowed to form. Instead, the immense budget of energy had been stolen and reshaped, and the universe forced down a different evolutionary route, that of the demesne.

Emplaced within the everything-nothing space of the Bulk, it was cut off from all other universes. Fate decided before the spark was even lit, this place would not undergo the slow and graceful death of entropy. It would not be allowed that dignity. Instead, it would persevere for an eternity of eternities, mutely watching and outlasting even the living universe to which it was attached like a cosmic lamprey.

After some span of time, things began to move across the voids, from the cores of mechanisms which would long ago have collapsed under their own mass, were they extant within a universe whose physical laws demanded it. They were echoes of a memory, stored for only the blink of an eye, by the reckoning of Tartarus. Remade now, they crawled, crept, flew and accelerated on plumes of reacting matter and antimatter, all grasping for the light that shone from the jarred open door to the universe beyond.

Above it all hung Discord, and all he could do was laugh.

*

Twilight's recollection of the legend surrounding Mytheme had just reached the part about the fabled yacht requiring Luna herself to operate, when space/time ahead of her sharply folded inwards, and her ballistic arc over the town toward the diamond hull was jarringly arrested. The scene around her melted and warped, air was compressed and heated. Like being caught in the jaws of a huge wolf, complete with warm breath, she was trapped. Twilight didn't bother trying to fight against it. She could feel the magnitude of the force arrayed against her, and knew it would be a pebble's vote against the avalanche.

The space/time warp intensified, and the warped vision of Mytheme and the town became more distant, losing brightness. The ring of jet clouds was the last thing she made out clearly, then the abyssal gloom covered everything. All Twilight could sense was the quickening sound of her breathing and her own familiar smell.

“I am not angry,” said Princess Luna, whispering from a point just behind her ears. “I am just disappointed, if I may use a cliché.”

“Luna! Let me go!” Twilight shouted.

“Selfish nag,” Luna spat. “Can you not see, all of this is your fault?”

“All of what?” Twilight said, stung. “What did I do?”

“Canterlot burns, the nation tears itself apart in drunk reverie, my sisters plot dread things in the shadows, and you sit here proclaiming ignorance?” Luna's tone was one of utter contempt. “Black Gods lurk upon on the threshold, Twilight. I feel them coming closer. They hunger for the terms of Celestia's old compact.”

“Canterlot's burning?” Twilight felt like she had fallen into an ice floe backwards. “I saw smoke from orbit... I thought it would be in hoof.”

“Yes, while you kicked over stones that should have remained buried!” Luna growled, and impressions formed on the interior surface of the warp, leaving faint ideas of claws or fangs, ripping and biting. “We are granted a mercy, though, that you have not yet finished manufacturing my Nectar.”

“Why is that such a bad thing, Luna?” Twilight flailed her limbs, trying to orient herself better, but all such power had been stripped away by Luna's magic. “I deserve it!” she barked, through gritted teeth. “You and Celestia, you demanded that I join you, that I become, to take on the mantle you wear, but would not allow me a little relief? To enjoy the things I enjoy? Tell me, whom do I harm?”

“You 'deserve' it?” Luna echoed, and a liquid nitrogen chill entered the warp, to match the deep freeze of her tone. “Whom do you harm? Could it truly be that you know not what you do?”

“Tell me then, you of all this righteous fury, tell me!”

“Thiasus, Twilight, does this word mean anything to you?” Luna said, though the cold still remained, now causing ice crystals to form, clinging to her fur and drifting through the tortured air.

“No,” said Twilight. “Should it?”

“My memories have only recently returned,” Luna admitted. “Much of the truth was obscured to me. But I know this: our existence here, by which I mean Equus, on this world, has always been tenuous. It has balanced on the vagaries of fathomless Divine beings for the past five thousand years.”

“Divine beings? Like you, and Celestia?” Twilight gulped. “And me.”

“The being in the Autumn Crown was the first, called by gryphons on the edge of extinction,” Luna said. “Equine ancestors had become too wily food, and the big birds couldn't catch them. The gryphons were one species then. Their last mortal king beseeched an uncaring universe to care, and it worked. So began an era of misery.” The disgusted tone came back for a moment. “The gryphons were cleft in three, made better conquerors. Equines were pushed to the edge of extinction. Can you guess what happened next?”

“We called our own God?”

“We called Discord.” Luna's head suddenly emerged from the interior surface of the warp, a fierce expression on her slight features, eyes pinpoints. “We made a mistake, however. Without a body to inhabit, without a mentality like the last mortal king of gryphons, the Divine was unbound. It did not understand, could not understand. Oh, it tried. Some might even have said that it succeeded, for in the aftermath of the great fires it unleashed, equines fled across the sea and, by ways and means, came to Equestria.”

“But the gryphons don't have a Divine leader, just the--”

“Just the Crown, into which the First retreated, after the destruction of Gadarn. Discord made it into a sad, aborted thing, clinging to existence.” Luna smiled slightly then. “There it remains.”

“Then how--”

“The universe could not suddenly stop caring, now it had meddled,” Luna said, expanding the warp to admit her lithe, midnight-blue form, wings unfurled and spread wide, surrounded by a skin of warped space. “It needed balance, it knew that it needed to array forces against one another to achieve stability. So, selecting two ponies of the Diaspora, it made two Sister-Gods, to watch over the Race.”

“Great cosmogony, Luna.” Twilight frowned. “But where are you going with this?”

“I am answering your questions!” Luna darted forward, some impulsive wave sending Twilight flying, nearly interacting with the far edge of the warp. “Discord survived his conflict with the First, in better shape. He drifted aimlessly through the world, first lost, then bitter and furious that others had been given his rightful inheritance, that none lived who loved him.” She folded in her wings. “He himself, born of meddling, began to meddle. Thus, the Intercessions began.”

“I've read that word somewhere,” Twilight said, furrowing her brow. “I can't remember--”

“I would be surprised, Celestia sanitized the record expertly, wrote her own narrative, where it is I who triggered the Intercessions!” Luna bared her teeth, the unspeakable contempt like a physical blow to Twilight. “Nothing could have been less true, for it was I who fought them with all the blood of my foals, all the rage of my nightmares.”

“Foals, Luna? We're sterile.” Twilight felt for a moment she could stare down the other Princess, but she was quickly disabused of this notion when she saw the glaring force beaming back at her, bright as a lighthouse.

“We are dams to the nation, and so I birthed races, not individuals,” Luna said, as if it were the most obvious thing. “My beautiful nottlygna. More of their blood than any else was spilled on the Hill of Tithes.” Rage and contempt transformed to a bitter, bottomless agony, but only for a moment. “But we changed, I changed, for who could stay so pure and virginal after three centuries of unceasing war and formless terrors, heaped onto us from places we did not understand? To forestall a Fourth Intercession, my sister begged the universe for aid, and was answered, instead, by those from whom we were budded.”

“The 'black Gods'?”

“The Divine source that dwells outside all universes,” Luna said, nodding. “They've many guises, but all are terrible. They offered my sister a solution, the Elements of Harmony, though that is a mortal name for a set of tools that do not truly exist here. They were forged with perfect understanding of the physical and magical rules that underpin our reality. With these, she could trap Discord, remake the world in her image.”

“So that's where the Elements came from.” Twilight couldn't resist a grin. “A big God did it and galloped away. But they didn't hand them over without a price?”

“Their Party, in the old tongue, Thiasus, a great meeting of all the many faces of the Gods once every thousand years, on neutral ground.” Luna slid closer, moving across some unseen surface, or perhaps only miming the action. “When Gods party, all suffer. The universe screams in torment, even now. It sees all that happens within it, knows what happens next. The Nectars are made and, called to it, the Gods arrive to drink and make merry. All is lost.”

“But... Celestia? I can't believe--”

“The last time it happened, I realized too late. I rose to strike her down, but the Gods had already given her their own weapons, the Elements. She rewrote my memories, trapped me against the surface of the moon to wait out ten centuries. She twisted the recording of history. My brief war against her, and her response, told as a story about the corrupting influence of power. Used to explain the damage, the missing generations, mountains and suffering. Later, she could not face what she had done, so turned the weapon on herself, obliterating her mind. Celestia died a long, long age ago. All that now remains is an automaton of duty, smiling and obliging Gods.”

Luna was crying as she spat out those last words, which graduated to inconsolable weeping as soon as she had run out of things to say. One thousand years of emotional isolation and confinement, coming to the surface at long last. Twilight's breath hitched in her throat, and she felt sunlight on her skin again as the space/time warping magic faltered. Just in time, she caught Luna in an envelope of her own purple thauma, and lowered them both to a grassy stop, landing in a wide strip of common grazing land just off the square, where Mytheme waited like a tame iceberg.

Twilight had thought of this moment often, following her discoveries on the moon, and her rescue of Whom. So much horror was there, and Twilight wondered if a great deal more was hidden, or if this was only her own mind, filling in gaps. She had thought of what she would say to Luna, the arguments and counter-arguments she would use to eke answers out of the Princess. The fire behind those sentiments was gone now, though. It left with Luna's tears, falling to the ground. All she did was move in close to the collapsed Princess, more living, thinking pony than the aloof Goddess she had known, and held her, neck to neck, praying that the racking sobs would stop.

All around, the nottlygna were watching, and not one of them said a word.

Flight Mechanics; Or Airs Above the Ground

“Flight Mechanics; Or Airs Above the Ground”

“Our level of technological development has never been very clear. So much that evidently was made by those with greater knowledge of arcane and physical arts remains in place, still used by modern ponies in the same manner that ants inhabit the trunks of trees. Can it be said then, that a loss of information occurred, at some distant point in the past? Why would this be so? Ponies have always written things down, preserved the most inane of details, spared no expense of foul vellum or later pressed hemp and ink. We know exactly what Princess Celestia had for breakfast on the sixteenth day of the ninth month of AN100, we know who made her then-retainer’s silken undergarments, for the love of the skies, but we cannot explain the methods of construction used in that grand edifice, her palace?

What of the station in the same city, which crouches in the shadow of that palace? It will not burn, exposed to even the hottest fires with which we make artificial rubies. The palace will not topple, despite its height of more than a kilometre, broad as a dozen galleon sails, where even the stupidest pegasus will know it is exposed to biting winds that would fell the stoutest of our so-called modern buildings.

This can only lend credence to my current larger hypothesis. Our histories have been tampered with. Evidence abounds through countless works. I have studied that which is there and that which should be but isn’t. I have myself dug below the topsoil around the slopes of our great mountain city, found things there that should not be. Two distinct strata of glasses, separated by perhaps a century. I am not a geologist, so I consulted appropriate works on the subject. Nothing! No eruptions, no wars, no industrial accidents. What dread heat made these layers? What titanomachy of the comparatively recent past has been hidden from us?” - excerpt from Fundamental Mysteries of Our Great Equestrian Heritage, published anonymously circa AN350, and currently believed to have begun life as a part-work, compiled between AN330 and AN349 by a number of different authors.

*

“The adult cock griffin (see alternative spellings, gryphon, gripen, griffon) stands approximately one point five metres at the withers, with hens generally being larger at one point seven five to two metres. Nose-to-flank measurements are equal between the sexes. Weights of around two hundred to three hundred kilograms are not uncommon, with hens in cub sometimes topping out at four hundred kilograms. The unwinged alce is shorter, generally less than one point five metres, though excessively muscled and far heavier, with some examples massing nearly eight hundred kilograms. All are armed with a set of talons to the fore, and a set of retractable claws to aft. These are remarkably similar to those found in Accipitriformes spp and Panthera spp, respectively.

Hyppogriffs (see alternative spellings as numerous as that for griffin) buck the trend of relative uniformity of morphology seen in alce and pure griffins, and come in many shapes and sizes. Individuals as large as the heavy earth ponies of our own dear race have been reported, as well as those no bigger than our foals. Flying ability is directly linked to mass, and the smallest and largest of them cannot take to the wing except in the most rudimentary fashion. Current theories suggest that the enormous variation in hyppogriffs, comparatively speaking, is the result of poor divine craftsmareship.” - A Yearling’s Guide to Griffins, AN955.

*

“My friends, it has always been said that open discussion of the precise limits on the powers and abilities of their Majesties was dangerous, and completely pointless anyway, since they Themselves will not be lead on it, and precious little evidence of any meaningful value exists. But, I say this is not so. Let me assert some obvious points. They exist as physical objects in our universe. Our universe is governed, is it not, by orderly rules by which it conducts itself without fail. Our understanding of these rules has never been greater, and our knowledge of thaumics is legendary, the envy of all.

Would it be so dangerous, then, so pointless, to also assert that our Princesses, being objects existing in our universe, are equally bound by orderly rules? And, therefore, that their powers and abilities are limited, explainable and drawable into the mundane? Friends, I ask you, how is it that, over the past three centuries, our explanations and theories for all manner of physical things, all types of life systems, of cells and their activities, of chemical reactions, of metallurgy, of flight and its impulsions, of magic and its functions, have advanced in leaps and bounds unimaginable to our grandsires, but that those so dear to us, so vital to the Equestrian way of life, the Princesses, are still couched in terms of mystery and superstition? I say that this is shameful to we modern Equestrians, an embarrassment no more worthy of continuation than Diamond Dog worship of rocks or the fear of windigoes.

I propose that we learned fellows of this honoured establishment resolve, right now, without hesitation or pause, to pull back the veil of centuries’ ignorance and, without worry for what they might think or what they could do to us, describe, define and right anew a true history of alicorns.” - from a speech by Doctor Noisemare, 342nd Annual Equestrian Guild of Right Honourable Mages and Engineers Gala Dinner, shortly before his tragic death in a cart accident.

*

Eventually the corpse of the East-West, caught up with the remains of Didn't Want to Stop For Tea Anyway, sunk beneath the filmy grey of the great canal. Despite the relatively shallow draft at this point of the route, very little could be seen through the pollution of the water, or the drifting morass of loose cargo and small pieces of wooden wreckage.

“This changes everything, you know,” Astrapios was saying, when Emboss trotted over to their little rescued group, which was hanging around on the mounded up canal bank, between the canal and the tow path.

“What does?” Emboss said. “The fact we're out here in the middle of nowhere?”

“No, you daft horse, meeting the King, just like that!” The little hippogryph was very animated, and couldn't help glancing over at the subgroup of the twins, Erisne and Ensire, and the King, along with the body of his friend, lain respectfully on the scant grass. “We just rescued him. He owes us. We even went back to get that corpse. Equestrians understand this concept, I know you do.”

“Very mercenary,” Truth said, frowning and resisting the urge to preen her husband. “His coltfriend just died.”

Astrapios' brow furrowed, and he glanced again at the body, before coming back to Truth.

“Bodyguard, mentor, not a lover! Whatever gave you that idea?” Astrapios said, keeping his Equuish low and whispered.

“He just seems very upset, anyway, isn't it a fashion of the Gryphic court to take males as lovers?” Truth said, quite seriously.

“Where did you read that? Some trashy romance novel?” Astrapios clicked his beak, making some gryphon gesture that was still mysterious to the ponies. “Nevermind. That was Foel, the last King's bodyguard, close family friend and mentor to the new King, Hywell Edda,” Astrapios said, irritably. “The same Hywell Edda there! Everyone knows about Foel. Every gryphon, anyway.”

“Zebras also know of this Foel,” iYut said, smirking, then spat. “Good riddance to bad rubbish. May the souls of his ancestors gnash their beaks in anguish at his passing.”

“Yes, well,” Astrapios said, sidling slightly further away in disgust. “In any case, he owes us. We can tell him our story. Hywell is a new king, but everything suggests that he is a good and just ruler, similar to his father. More liberal, I think, as far as that phrase has meaning here.”

“We should probably have told the authorities here anyway, come to think of it,” Truth said. “The Thiasus affects everyone on the planet. It's not just a pony problem.”

“Just finding the nearest official wouldn't have done you much good. The leadership here is a complex tangle of blinding fear and recrimination. The King and the Crown have always ruled with a combination of violence and mutual loathing of zebras and ponies.” Astrapios gave his gryphon smile. “At best, you'd have been taken to some local dukelet or vice-whatever, and ransomed. Or something. The closest you'd have come to the King would have perhaps been as an entrée.”

“I thought you said they didn't eat ponies here?” Emboss said.

“It's a big country.” Astrapios shrugged. “Herbivores get lost sometimes. Mistaken for deer. Four legs, smells good, looks the same, accidents happen, don't they?”

“Carnivore apologist scum.” iYut grinned, nudged the hippogryph. “Don't wind up the poor little ponies, they've just been through a very traumatic experience. Two very traumatic experiences.”

“Excuse me,” said a voice, speaking uncomfortable Equuish, small and shy, though somehow conveying immense dignity. “I hope I am not interrupting the conversation.”

“Your Majesty,” Astrapios said, bowing reflexively, which involved touching his chest to the ground then briefly exposing the neck. “May I be the first to offer my sincere condolences for your loss.”

“Your sympathy is most appreciated, at this trying time,” Hywell said, with a look of deep concentration on his face. “I apologize for my lack of the equine tongue earlier, but the Crown provides, in time.”

The King let that statement hang in the air for a moment, as his bright, falconic eyes with their still-unsettling circular pupils examined the ponies with predatory airs. Had they not already spent a good deal of time around gryphons, Emboss was sure that look might have spurred a stampede or two. As it was, the mesohippus brain writhed uncomfortably below the cognitive processes of his complex mind. Muscles wrapping his flanks and above his stifle twitched ever so slightly.

“What brings you to my country?” the King said, just before the silence became awkward, settling down on his haunches.

“We were bringing news from Equestria, your Majesty,” Astrapios said, before Emboss or Truth could say anything. “There is a plot underway, one which threatens us all.” The hippogryph stopped, clicked his beak, turned his head this way and that, and Emboss realized he was actually lost for words. Finally, he said: “An ancient compact is about to be fulfilled, and old Gods allowed to run rampant across the face of globe.”

“I see,” the King said, nodding once. “Who were you, again?”

“I am Astrapios, Captain of the Barely Eagle, acting as guide and interpreter for Double Emboss, a senior civil servant in the government of Her Majesty Princess Celestia, who is accompanied by his wife.”

Truth gave a little indignant huff at this, but held her tongue.

“There is a diplomatic channel, I believe…” the King said, dragging his right foreclaw across the grass. “Surely you could have contacted the ambassador in Canterlot?”

“One side effect of the preparations to commence this ancient compact was a sudden, severe and total deterioration in the security situation,” Astrapios said, slowly unfolding his wings. “The non-divine elements of the government have collapsed, military units are isolated and ineffective against such a large and widespread uprising, I’m sure you understand that evacuation was our only option.”

“What could possibly cause such rioting?” the King said, a gryphic expression of puzzlement on his feathers. “Ponies are a peaceful race, not inclined to violent outbursts.” Emboss and Truth exchanged bewildered glances at the words coming from the King’s beak. “At least, not without provocation.”

“Drunkenness, your Majesty, magical drunkenness,” Emboss said, voice nearly cracking. “It spread like infection, selecting victims at random and moving through the herd uncontrolled until everyone was either fleeing or fighting. We have been at sea for some time, and I fear that now the entire country is under the spell of the Thiasus.”

“And what are your Elements of Harmony doing?” the King said. “This certainly sounds like a task for them.”

“I… don’t know, your Majesty,” Emboss said, head drooping. “But Celestia is behind all of it, and she has always been their superior. I cannot help but think that she has found some way to negate their influence.”

“Or use them to her advantage,” Truth said, grimly. “Some or all may be unwilling assistants.”

“Well, on behalf of the gryphic peoples, I thank you for your warning,” the King said, standing up suddenly. “I know that it must have been a gruelling journey, not without risks to yourselves and others. I will see to it that you are duly reimbursed for your expenses by the Treasury, if you would compile an invoice and give it to my bodyguard…”

Through his interactions he had seemed to be reciting lines, some long-practiced mantra, but now he turned to the cooling body arrayed behind him and realized the mistake he had made. He looked back toward the ponies, and there were now tears rolling off hydrophobic feathers. He made a sound like a mouse being run over by a carriage.

“I’m sure we'll manage without, your Majesty,” Truth said, solemnly. “If there’s anything we can do...?”

Hywell shrugged, shook his head and closed his eyes, turning away. He tracked back across the poor and withered grass, then collapsed beside the dead gryphon Foel. His puff-ball tail lay flat, unmoving, and he moved only when further wracking sobs of some incomprehensibly deep sorrow emerged from him. Emboss felt his breath catch in his throat and had to look away. The barrier of species was nothing in the face of this.

“I think I speak for all of us when I say that didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped,” Astrapios said, after a minute’s awkward contemplation, in which the gryphon twins Ensire and Erisne resumed their respectful comforting.

“Whatever happened to the stoic gryphons?” Truth said, sighing. “Aren’t Kings supposed to be above individual tragedy?”

“He was doing a pretty well there, really,” Astrapios said. “Foel was the only thing remotely close to your Equestrian concept of a sire figure, by all reports. They were inseparable. I’d like to see either of you do your day job moments after you witnessed the violent death of a loved one.”

“Why doesn’t he just use his divine abilities to fix his friend?” Emboss said. “Our medical mages can repair all manner of traumatic injury, and they are only unicorns. If the Crown is on a par with the alicorns--”

“It is a wholly different beast,” Astrapios said, irritated. “The King can do no more actual magic than I can. The Crown decides for itself.”

“Then why does it even need a mortal host?” Emboss said, frowning.

“I don’t think now is right to discuss the finer points of thaumocosmology,” Astrapios said. “Time’s shorter than I am.”

“Let the King be with his miseries,” iYut said, shaking his head. “My people will be the solution here. What good can he do? Command his armies, instruct a nation? These things are as embers in the fire to beings of such earth shattering potential, as we are up against.”

“The Crown could fight Celestia, is where I imagine Astrapios’ thinking is going, iYut,” Truth said, almost stumbling on the words. “Combat her on roughly the same level.”

“Actually, I was thinking he could leverage his influence as King to get us safe and immediate passage to zebric climes, but that’s a good idea too,” Astrapios said, raising a hoof. “We must be careful, though. My people tell stories about the last time divines came to blows. Do you remember the sea marsh we came through on the way here? They say it was once a mountain range.” He paused and gulped, clicking his beak nervously. “They say it was so bright for so long that gryphons nearly forgot about nights.”

“We have told the Crown what it needed to know,” iYut said, rolling his shoulders in a shrug. “Kufa kutupwa.”

All of a sudden, the ground began to shake.

*

Cerberus charged the abominable thing like a rampaging musth-addled elephant, throwing up gouts of pulverized glass as he hurtled toward it. There was a sound like hammers on a slab of hanging meat, which pealed out across the tortured desert. Each of his three heads grappled in different places, clamping down hard, expressing forces great enough to forge diamonds. The thing’s beak opened in an anguished, burbling hiss, and it bashed at the great dog with its two largest tentacles. The eight smaller ones, which ended in barbed flails, attacked his torso and neck, scratching and whipping with ever-increasing fury.

The rear of the unspeakable nightmare being ended with a slug-like tail, one vast muscle for moving. It was banded with slippery plates of chitin, from which sprouted dozens of differing spines, some needle straight, some wildly curved and themselves coated in spines, as if a mad deity had combined all the parts of animals it didn’t like into one aberrant beast. Discord watched with glee as the tail finally succeeded in pushing out the whole of the creature, defeating the weight of Cerberus.

There was a flat boom and a blinding flash of light as Cerberus’ central mouth weapon fired again, this time at point-blank range. The creature screeched in agony, like a million bats being beaten slowly to death, and a great billowing cloud of smoke and steam erupted upwards, casting long shadows across the cracked black glass and scattered ruin of the gate complex. At the same time the intensity of the creature’s thrashing grew, the barbs finally finding purchase in Cerberus’ hide, peeling open his flanks and underbelly with eruptions of pink mist. The dog made no noises of pain, however, even when the tentacles penetrated the wounds, seeking to cause more damage within.

Discord clapped his mismatched paws together and giggled, watching the spherical aperture of the wormhole, which was now free to admit another horror. What will it be, he wondered. Something of Carnifex’s kin, a Very High Dragon, the Old Slithering Ones, the Smooze entity?

Three orbs erupted from the gate, each the size of a small carriage, perfectly smooth, grey-green and opaque. Two of them immediately ascended, speeding up from a trot to various low Mach numbers in under ten seconds. Discord watched them go, watched them turn westwards as they passed through two kilometres of altitude. He did not recognize them as any of Equestria’s past tormentors, but confidence was high as their Mach fronts washed over him. Cerberus made a grim lowing noise and collapsed as more of the tentacles were driven inside him, but he kept biting down on the squid atrocity. His left and right jaws were rewarded simultaneously, as chunks the size of grand pianos were rent, releasing torrents of foul black ichor.

The orb which had stayed behind suddenly became crazed all over, then split like a perfectly peeled egg. Discord could barely contain himself. I just can’t wait to see what unholy anathema, what dread threat to the continued existence of life it contains. Wasn’t it always said that all creatures great and small were kept inside? He wriggled back and forth with demonic joy, wings flapping with excitement, then his smile faded.

Four hundred thousand red Monarch butterflies had suddenly appeared above the desert.

*

As Twilight emerged carefully from the belly of Mytheme, she saw that much of Ponyville appeared to have survived the half-hour seismic assault. The timber-framed buildings that comprised many of the town’s private dwellings, whose loose wooden joints and beams had been able to sway and stretch with the energy of the quakes, still stood proudly, albeit with a little less in the way of thatch and some curls and gouts of smoke and flame that suggested cooking fires and lights had been disturbed.

The larger buildings had not fared so well. Generally built of brick and stone, they’d tried to weather the storm and failed catastrophically under the sheer force of it. A sad mess of broken structural members and half-pulverized red brick marked where once had been the Town Hall. Nottlygna were flying or walking about it, already scaring up a relief effort. Though they had evacuated the makeshift infirmary as soon as the earthquakes had begun, much in the way of material now sat beneath a blanket of ruin.

Ears flicking this way and that in the sudden, eerie calm, punctuated only by the slow rustling exhalation of a town’s many buildings contracting back to their regular shapes, Twilight trotted down the boarding ramp and into the still-warm air of an Equestrian evening. Luna joined her a moment or two later.

“Did you feel the way space curved?” Luna said, followed by a long, slow exhale. “This was an event of supernatural origin, undoubtedly.”

“I guessed as much, Luna,” Twilight said, glancing at her. “Do you think it might have had something to do with our… very tentative decision to go ahead with making the Nectar?”

“The coincidence and scale seem too great to be mere chance.”

“I agree,” Twilight said, nodding grimly.

A membranous winged shape appeared above the shaken rooftops, clad in the lighter jet plate of the trotlites. It spread chiropteran sails and shed the last of its cruising speed, thudding to a heavy landing on the abused near-quagmire of the Ponyville village green. Shoulder forepouldrons, a largely ceremonial piece of the stripped down nottlygna battledress, proudly bore dual images of blinded owls, posed dexter and affronte. The nottlygna did not break his stride, springing into a purposeful canter toward Twilight and Luna.

“From what damneder pit of an armoury did you dredge those, soldier?” Luna said, laughing. “I have not seen the emblems of the Strigidae in a dragon's age.”

“Strigidae?” Twilight wondered, aloud. “Ah, more of our supposed hidden past?

The nottlygna gave a respectful tap with his back right hoof, standing at attention some distance away. Rivulets of rain, drying already, rolled like hot mercury down the face of his Coltinthian helmet, seeming to fidget and sizzle as they navigated the blood runnels of the armour.

“Our hidden past? You and yours were not even the gleam in the eye of your thousandth great damsire when me and mine were long dead and forgotten,” Luna said, smiling, still looking fondly on the nottlygna.

“We all trot on four legs, Luna,” Twilight said, frowning. “It was the general 'our', anyway.”

“Ah, permission to report, Majesties,” the nottlygna said, the gem-glazed eye-holes betraying nothing but a professional stare into the distance behind his betters. “Matters of urgency--”

“Say your bit, Strigidae,” Luna said, sparing an approving nod.

“I was flying a recce eastwards, about twelve miles as the anzu flies, when the earthquakes struck. I would not have noticed, had I missed the fissure that swallowed West Wingshade, and--”

“The fallen Cloudholme is gone?” Luna said, eyes wide.

“I did not stay to see what became of it, Majesty, because that was when I saw on the western horizon a great flame, as the earliest dawn, though it soon faded, and was replaced by a stain of smoke.”

“The Roarkes!” Twilight gasped. “The Roarkes must have gone up. Oh, sweet skies, this is a disaster. Port Dauphine, the cities of the coast, the changelings...”

“This event was widespread, then,” Luna said, her expression souring. “If so peaceful a range of mountains could be set to violence by it, I fear for all Equestrians, all peoples of this world.” Luna turned her gaze on Twilight with all the dread intensity of a reaping scythe. “Our very universe, home of all things, rages at our choices. Let us not be cowed.”

“I don't want to make the Nectars, Luna, not anymore,” Twilight said, taking an unconscious step back. “I just don't know what to think. I have been away, haven't I? How do I know I haven't walked into the middle of a civil war?”

The nottlygna wisely chose this moment to make himself scarce, somehow managing to sneak despite the weight of steel on his shoulders.

“Civil war?” Luna said, tasting the word and finding it bitter, lips pursing in disgust.

“Imposter? Mind control?” Twilight said, ears folded back. “These things I, we,have faced before. Need I remind you of the Royal Simulacrum?

Another step back.

“Twilight, we must stop our sister, it is the only way to end this for good.” Luna unmantled her wings just slightly, making her seem larger. “She will not be drawn into the open until the last moment. She must believe that her plan has come to fruition. Only then can we strike.”

“You would really cut down your own, then? Are all the stories of old fratricide true?”

“No!” Luna growled, showed teeth scarcely matching the dentition of herbivores. “Lies, all!”

“I have to gather the Elements,” Twilight said, feeling all the more a mouse before a tiger. “Whatever threat Equestria faces, be it from you--” Ultraviolet sparkles of magic flashed in and out of existence, grounded on the hull of Mytheme or buried themselves back into space/time. “--or Celestia, or the black old Gods of the places beyond, we will need to be together to face it.”

“I agree entirely, the Elements must be gathered, but some few thousand deaths phase you, some volcanoes set ablaze, some cities ruined, this make you reconsider your position?” Luna sneered. “You scarcely understand the doom poised over us.”

“That, Luna, is entirely the problem.”

Twilight was in the air, a pigeon's jumping bound for safety, before Luna had a chance to respond. The Queen of Tides turned to watch her ascent, but made no attempt to stop her.

*

Orderlies and porters dashed about the hospital, fetching, carrying and scurrying in the maelstrom of barely-organized chaos that followed the cessation of the shaking. Fluttershy had fled with the others to the relative safety of the skies, a terrifying half-hour, helping to carry those who could not loft themselves, but now was at a loss for anything to do. The doctors had predicted a flood of injuries, from the minor to the extreme, but few had come. There were rumours and second-hoof sightings of bat ponies all about, and some brave souls claimed to have seen Princess Luna disgorge from the object landed in the centre of the village.

Fluttershy was perched in the foyer, worrying over her options and on the verge of seeking out Twilight, wherever she had gone, when a unicorn in a surgical cloak coughed politely to announce his presence.

“I am Doctor Neighlen,” he said, gently. “You came in with the pink mare, some hours ago, you and the other Element, the Princess, yes?”

“Her name is Whom, I think.”

“Could you tell me who her next-of-kin are, please? Dam or sire?”

“Um, no,” Fluttershy said. “I'm not sure who she is, or really where she came from. Twilight said she found her on the Moon. I think that might be a metaphor.” Fluttershy sighed and shook her head. “Why do you want to know? Is Whom going to be okay?”

“A metaphor?” Neighlen said, frowning. “The Moon?”

“It's complicated.”

“Yes, right, well, we wouldn't normally tell non-relatives about patients, but I think we can make an exception, given the exigencies of this circumstance.” He smiled, faintly. “If we can't trust the Elements of Harmony, who can we trust?” Composing himself into an appropriately solemn mein and clearing his throat, Neighlen said: “I'm very sorry to tell you this, but I'm afraid that Whom passed away this afternoon. She was in no pain, and went peacefully.”

“Oh,” Fluttershy said, and looked away. “I see.”

“We did everything that we could.”

“I understand, Doctor.”

“If you need anything, let me or one of the other doctors know. We'll do whatever we can to help you.”

Neighlen bit his lip, made to turn away, then stopped. His brow wrinkled.

“Is something the matter, Doctor?” Fluttershy said, cocking her head.

“Look, I might be wrong, okay?”

“Wrong about what?”

“Princesses, right, they're...” Neighlen struggled with the right words. “Magical, very magical, right?”

“Twilight is the Element of Magic.”

“Yes, yes, okay, well, could it be that some sort of life ward is in effect?”

“Life ward?”

“Some sort of really high level, alicorns-only, deep magic thing, beyond the ken of we mortals,” he said, an increasingly pained expression on his face. “I'm only trained so far, but there have always been stories banded around, that alicorns can reverse death processes at stages when they'd otherwise be thought necromancers.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Whom's body is dead, there's no doubt about that at all. It was so badly damaged by this fall and the resulting heart attacks, you could barely tell it was once supportive of life.”

“Oh, my, that's awful.”

“Yes, but the brain is still alive, you see?” Neighlen did a nervous little two-step. “I'm a thaumocorpist by trade, I can scry inside organs and determine their functionality, or lack thereof. Her body is dead, but the brain lives. She's sleeping, dreaming.”

“So she isn't dead.”

“Dead, but not dead, dreaming. You see my problem now?” He whinnied. “I'd never even entertain these thoughts, were there not--”

“Exigent circumstances, yes, you said.”

Neighlen quieted, and his posture relaxed. The little veins that had sprung up on his neck began to diminish.

“So, are you--”

There was a thaumic shove in the air, like someone opening a door using only a large, inflatable ball for leverage. The big ponyoak slabs that fronted the foyer slammed open and the mare behind the reception desk squealed in surprise. A purple spectre swooped in half a second later, looking all the part of a graceful swan preparing for an equally graceful landing, only to trip the moment hooves made contact with the highly varnished wooden flooring. Twilight came to a decidedly awkward, stumbling halt before them. Fluttershy screwed her eyes shut reflexively against the dust that her desperate forward strokes brought flying into her face.

“Thank… whatever Gods may be, you’re still here,” Twilight said, slightly winded. “We’re assembling the Elements, there may be very little time.” She folded her wings, adjusted pannier straps, then peered at Neighlen and Fluttershy, who were staring right back. “Oh, and how is Whom?”

“Your Majesty!” Neighlen gave a bow of the head. “I was just speaking to your colleague…”

“She didn’t make it, Twilight, I’m sorry,” Fluttershy said, sidling up close and laying a wing over her shoulders.

“But, the--” Neighlen began.

“She didn’t…” Twilight said, and gulped, words strangled in her throat by the tight, icy feeling that had appeared there unbidden. “Oh, no,” she managed, and her vision blurred as tears formed. “Why? How?”

“Doctor Neighlen?”

“T-The broken rib slipped and punctured a lung, which collapsed, allowing fluid to escape and compress the rest of the abdomen,” he said, starting to tremble. “The drop in blood pressure resulted in cardiac arrest, and irreversible damage to the heart muscle.” He dipped his head. “B-but--”

“But, Doctor Neighlen says her brain is still healthy and active.”

“Yes!” he whinnied, looking as though he were about to bolt. “It’s inexplicable. Her brain is still alive, she, the pony that she is, remains in there, somewhere.” He gulped, ears flat. “Dead but dreaming!”

Twilight frowned bitterly and wiped her eyes, then stared down Neighlen.

“I don’t understand,” she said, breath coming a little ragged. “How? How is this possible?”

“Well, your Majesty, with all due respect,” he said, withering under the gaze. “I was rather hoping you could tell me that.”

*

“We engaged the gryphon formation approximately twenty-five minutes after dusk, upon the Roarke High Plain, ten leagues west of the small settlement of Dauphine, having happened upon them with four units from the Princesses' Third Unarmoured Division, two of the Wingshade Thirteenth Heavily Expurgated Division, and nine of the Night’s Guard Third Secondment Brigade. Mages of the Third and the seconded nottlygna trotlites scored immediate kills from long range, making excellent use of flame and spear. The gryphon formation, being composed primarily of reconstituted elements of the Eleventh Company of the Stalwart Beak, the Ninety-Seventh Company of the Alarmed Duchy and various others, were not intimidated either by the conjured fire or the fanged, screaming mass of charging Guard.

It has been noted that Equestrian and gryphic air power was entirely uninvolved in this engagement. Whilst twelve units of the Princesses' Own Aerials and four of the Cloudsdale Legio VII Victris were in the area, they had been summoned to support actions against remnant gryphon naval elements in the Bay of the High Dauphine, and were therefore unavailable. Equally, while the gryphon formations included elements from several reconstituted aerial battalions, none put to the sky for fear of mages, as had been their practice during the campaign.

Lacking their own ranged abilities, except for a pair of captured Debussy 11s, which were dealt with rapidly by the mage’s antimaterial spells (rubyfire), the gryphons met the challenge of the Guard with alacrity, beginning the close-quarters stage of the engagement. The mages abandoned their fire and engaged from behind the nottlygna, along with the archers of the Unarmoured and the heavily plated Expurgated. It has been mentioned before that this was not the ideal order of battle, that those of the Expurgated, plated in twice their bodyweight of enchanted steel, should have gone first. It should be remembered, however, that nottlygna are hard to stop or organize when they have captured the scent.

As we had been out of communication with the greater forces of the nation for some time, tracking the last of the gryphon host, we had not realized that we pursued the Margrave Lawgoch’s Guard as well, until Lawgoch herself raised her colours and entered the fray from the rear of the enemy formation. Riding upon the back of her famed deerstrier, Ceffyl, she blunted the nottlygna charge. Following that collapse, the Expurgated were surrounded and rapidly struck down, though each soul fought bravely to the end and to the last mare.

Routed, the mages began to fall back, covered by the archers. Initially in good order, the gryphons had been rallied by the appearance of their war leader, and overtook the withdrawal rapidly, overcoming conjured fire and strikes of lighting. With little cover on the plain, our loss appeared imminent, until Her Majesty descended upon the field of battle from the direction of the sun, bearing with Her nine regiments of Her personal Guard. Scattered elements of the nottlygna and the surviving mages, archers and squires were equally rallied by this miraculous sign and symbol of our assured victory.

Her Majesty quickly surrounded the enemy formation, and numerous gryphons fell to unrestricted mage fire and bolts from Guard weapons. In moments, Lawgoch struck her colours, and the engagement ceased. Ceffyl, having taken arrows and fire through his barding, bravely carried Lawgoch out to meet Her Majesty Princess Celestia. She circled Celestia once, then her mount collapsed and died. Lawgoch knelt before Her Majesty and stripped off her armour, laying down her sword and other arms upon the ground. She remained there in silence until the Guard took her away.” - excerpted from Ex Defensio Regni, Ex Defensio Populi, an official account of the First Invasion, AN 466. Compiled by a number of scribes, historians and secretaries, this account is considered the authoritative history, and remains a standard text.

*

Rainbow Dash came to consciousness out of painful half-dreams, filled with vague monster shapes dragging her down, sandwiched between distant visions of ruined cities. The remembered aches of the dream segued smoothly into what she feared were real wounds. There was only darkness all around her, with a soundscape of slow grinding and nearby whimpers, moans and desperate shouts for help. The air stank, and what wasn’t overpowered by the awful stench of cracked sewer mains and volatile alcohols becoming vapour was marred with the scent of terror from several species at once.

The pall of booze was gone entirely, banished by adrenaline, leaving only a slight fuzziness. Trying to move produced only more pain, of an acute, stabbing type that had her wincing and grinding her teeth together. Something had come down on her lower back, trapping her left leg. It didn’t feel right. She could barely move anything beyond her stifle. Worrying, wet and warm sensations of fluid accompanied the pain. Old memories of emergency first aid training, a mandatory part of any career on the wing, began to surface. Whatever’s on top of me could be the only thing keeping the blood inside.

This realization set her heart hammering, but she bit down on the fear. It would only worsen her condition. What happened, anyway? The bar! Yes, that’s right. Twenty-Two Skidoo. What a dive! I bet the ceiling collapsed under the pull of all the miserable bastards drinking away their last bit. She tried to laugh, but further ills exposed themselves, and she groaned lowly instead. Rib’s gone, maybe a couple, actually. Wait a minute! Earthquake! The short-term recollection, obviously knocked out of action by some bash to the head, came flooding back. Oh, ace. That’s all I needed. What idiot scheduled an earthquake? I’ll geld the bastard myself. With my teeth. She blew her nose and tasted iron. If I ever get out of here.

Blinding light stung her eyes. Sounds of physical exertion and the familiar keening of unicorn magic, filled the little space, along with a flood of cold air. She hadn’t realized how hot it had gotten beneath the insulation of a hundredweight of tumbled-down stone. Stinging grit invaded her vision. She shook her head, trying to make it clear, as tears came to help.

“Medic!” a stallion bellowed, amidst a crunch of rock. “Quick as you like!”

Half-formed images of ponies and ruined spaces slipped past. She must have passed out, because she couldn’t recall the rescue. The sensation of the string-webbed stretcher under her body was one well known to her, and she managed to convince herself to relax. Whoever was carrying the stretcher stopped, and the sounds of many hooves moving aside to admit someone else met her ears.

“Scared up some thiopental,” a mare said, breathlessly. “I’ll put her under for now. Just watch the airway, alright?” A beat, then: “Hey, isn’t this one of the Elements?”

There was a sharp sting under her right leg, then nothing.

*

Twilight, Fluttershy and Neighlen stood silently in the hospital’s underground mortuary. Plain, white-tiled walls pressed in around them, and the rough marble floor, devoid of any retained natural patterns or swirls that were the custom elsewhere, made loud clacking noises whenever anyone moved. The only assent to any decoration was in the occasional half-glyph or sparkling rune, which betrayed how such a building had survived the earthquake.

“Show me,” Twilight said, after a moment.

Neighlen nodded politely and his horn lit up, the usual keening sound amplified to unpleasantness. Filamentary lights like glow worms appeared in the air above Whom’s motionless body, which was lain respectfully on a big steel tray, yet to be loaded into the ranks of cold storage. Neighlen closed his eyes and concentrated, and a tenuous image boiled up out of nothing, as though they were looking into a mirrored pool. Structures that Twilight recognized from the plates in her anatomical texts resolved. Neighlen cleared his throat.

“As your Majesty can see, the cardiac muscle is almost entirely dead,” he said, more composed now that he was in his professional element. “The thaumocorpic spell set provides false colour representation to describe different properties of any given tissue. Black means necrotic.”

The view shifted, fuzzed and flickered, before resolving again, this time on a different scene. The unmistakeable whorls and gnarled furrows of the brain appeared. Purple and gold flairs ran inside and out of the neocortex and subordinate structures, whirling and dancing in time to a regular rhythm like a colony of ants bathed in starlight.

“As you can see, it is very much alive,” Neighlen said. “She is dreaming, though deeply, as if she is just about to enter the central dreamless phase of sleep.”

“Recovery mode,” said a new voice, and there was suddenly a two beat clop upon the marble behind them. “She awaits retrieval.”

Neighlen snapped around and gasped, then bowed reverentially.

“Princess Luna, Your Majesty, welcome to the hospital, I had--” he began, but Luna talked over him.

“One down, Twilight, four to go,” Luna said, nodding politely at Fluttershy. “I will remain here and coordinate a relief effort.”

Twilight furrowed her brow and glared, then said: “What do you mean, recovery?”

“After the first few iterations, I realized that the brain was the most vital, and most unknown, part of the whole equation,” Luna said, sidling up Whom’s reposed form and sniffing the back of her neck. “Bodies are easy. Anyone with time and energy can do bodies. Muscles, sinew, ligaments, a few highly mechanical organs with known and defined purposes which operate on micro and macro scales. Easy.”

Doctor Neighlen audibly gulped and adopted a safe distance from fully half the world’s alicorns, lest his ears accidentally pick up some dread pronouncement that would make mere mortals drop dead at the hearing of it.

“Brains are more complicated. Wouldn’t do to lose them every time there was an incident, and oh, were there incidents!” Luna said, dourly. “I remember now. I can remember everything.” She orbited the tray, eyes flicking up and down the body, absorbing the scene with a hungry ferocity. “When a serious accident or injury is detected, the brain clamps shut and switches to an onboard mode, drawing power from magical sources.”

“Hah! I knew it!” Neighlen shouted, then gasped as he realized what he’d done. “Life ward!” he whispered.

“It won’t last forever, though,” Luna said. “A few hours, at most. Oxygen and nutrient requirements are a tricky thing to meet with magic alone. Too much heat builds up, along with metabolic products it cannot get rid of. Drowns, sweating in its own filth. Just enough time to recover her into a new body, no more.”

“So, that’s what was in the graves, in the Lunar Principality,” Twilight said, lowly. “Her former bodies.”

“Yes, though she recalls them as… something else,” Luna said, sighing. “If she actually recalled dying and living again, in as many cycles as that, it would have negatively impacted the study. So, I told her they were her sisters, and that they had died before she was born, and that was that.”

“How…” Twilight said, expression wrinkling as she thought of other voids. “How was she, uh…”

“Synthesis, directly from magic,” Luna said, smiling faintly. “Why, what were you thinking of? You know as well as I that no foal could be conceived and live within us, Twilight. I had no stallions, anyway. That should be obvious. I assume you found the toy.” She winked, and Doctor Neighlen looked as though he might actually fall down dead.

Twilight winced and nodded faintly, then sighed and tapped her hoof on the marble.“It took me to the edge of my abilities just to synthesize a few grams of oats,” she said, steering the conversation away from the unspeakable. “It wasn't a question of mechanics, anyway. It was a lack of local power. You just can't draw that much from any one locale.”

“Very true, but there are ways around this,” Luna said, casually. “All you must do is thread wormholes of a very small width through local space, as much as you need. All physically separated space, when causally linked in any way, behaves as the same space.”

“But they aren't stable, wormholes collapse on time scales of milliseconds.”

“Come now, you know that isn't true,” Luna said, smiling. “Did you yourself not come through the Tartarus gateway?”

“Speaking of which, who exactly is responsible for all that?” Twilight said, changing the subject again. “That's technology in there. It seemed like a demesne, when I first got inside, but orders of magnitude more powerful, more vast. We traversed it for days at high speed, saw all manner of things, saw--” Twilight stopped, wondering whether to reveal Starswirl's presence and vanishing. “Saw great works, like nothing made by any race I know of.”

“I hate to say it to one such as you, Twilight, but nopony really knows,” Luna said. “Like the other demesnes, they were discovered. We co-opted the smaller, easier to understand, places for our own purposes, but Tartarus was different. They are inarguably of design, but by whom or for what, I cannot say. That we use it as a prison is merely because we could not discern what the rest of it is actually for.”

“Majesties,” Neighlen said, and received the rapt attention of both. “I am not a learned scholar of the thaumic arts, beyond where they apply to my profession, but I think I have followed this conversation and, if there is any chance we can save this patient...”

“Oh, no, impossible,” Luna said, dismissing it with a shake of her head. “Against the current magical background, the requisite network of wormhole energy siphons could not be made, I'm sure you've noticed, Twilight.”

“That's how we ended up in Tartarus in the first place,” Twilight said, nodding.

“Ah, I see, to fashion a new body, yes,” Neighlen said. “Could a donor be used?”

Luna looked into the middle distance, a curious expression on her face. She cocked her head, then nodded.

“I do not see why not,” she said. “Although, host might be more correct. Physical transplantation of the brain structure would be out, for immune reasons. The other body would attack what it saw as an invader.” Luna paused, deep in thought. “I could use your thaumocorpic spell, Doctor Neighlen, to build up a record of the entire brain, then adapt the structures of another brain, using microtelekinetics, to match the recording.”

Everyone was silent. Neighlen had a look on his face as though he had just experienced some ineffable theophany, and Twilight was still catching up on the implications. Without missing a beat, Luna said: “I shall need a volunteer.”

“Just repair the heart, Luna, sweet skies!” Twilight said. “That's the only part that's damaged, right, Doctor Neighlen?”

“L-Lungs, lungs and ribs, yes, and the heart,” he said, all the veins on his neck appearing again.

“There's no reason to do all that, what you just mentioned, Luna,” Twilight said, shaking her head. “Would that even be Whom, anyway?” She laughed, though it was without humour. “I could write a dozen books on it, and we'd only have established the terms with which we'd hammer out the truth.”

“Hmm, replace the hardware components, restore the major physical system...” Luna said, as though the idea had never occurred to her.

“Stop talking about her like she's a machine!” Twilight said, stamping a hoof.

“Must we have this discussion again?” Luna said, rolling her eyes. “Whatever relationships you have formed with the simulacrum are comments only on your own ethics and intellect, they are none of my concern, and matter not in any case.”

“Excuse me?” Twilight said, fighting the old horsey urge to turn her back to strike an attacker, instead squaring up to the Princess. “My intellect? How dare you!”

Luna smiled faintly, as if talking to a foal who has just discovered how fast it can run. Her horn hazed from view, then adopted a nimbus of pale blue light. Twilight’s furious breath came suddenly in puffy clouds of vapor and, at the same time, she felt the unmistakable sensation of thaumic feedback. It took the edge from her anger, a stunning blow as the semi-conscious functions of her mind analyzed the returned signal for signs and symbols of its bearing.

“I have begun,” Luna said, dreamily, eyes staring off into the middle distance at something nobody else could see. “Doctor Neighlen, my learned friend, it would be highly advisable for you to leave at this point. You as well, Fluttershy. The air temperature is liable to reach toward its lowest minima.” She wriggled in the throes of mage’s bliss, as if trying to scratch an awkward itch. “Oh, yes, where the smallest parts of matter stop dead in their tracks. We may soon swim in our own breath.”

Neighlen nodded quickly, took a look around, then fled at a near canter, not even sparing a glance back through the heavy steel door, which he held open only long enough to admit Fluttershy, before he slammed it shut and bolted the lock. Water vapour in the air began to pattern it with frost moments later.

“What are you doing?” Twilight said, finding nothing she recognized in the vibrations of her own horn. “We never agreed to anything.”

“Replacing the physical hardware components,” Luna said, the corner of her mouth turning up ever so slightly. “Direct thaumosynthesis of materials required, not much mass overall, easier to do. Patch and fix.” She grunted disapprovingly. “Deconstruction of necrotic tissues, cleanup of existing cellular decay products… yes, all of this. Use the mass to lower the bill; carbon is carbon, after all.”

“What are you doing with all the heat? Why is it getting colder in here?” Twilight rolled her shoulders uncomfortably, feeling the skin prickle.

“No waste!” Luna snapped; those teeth again. “Extremely limited energy budget, can’t use Indra’s Web generation mechanism, must be frugal. Exchange energy for time, small use per second but longer operation.” She licked her lips, and the teeth were gone. “Also, small local violation of certain rules usually held inviolable. More work, more heat, usually, but now, more work, less heat.” Luna sighed, deeply. “Hope, pray, universe won’t mind in current state. Censure now would be catastrophic. Also, balance of risks. Alicorns, local environment; capable of very low cooling, absolute minima well known. No absolute hot; alicorns also survivable but local environment very much not.”

Twilight laughed, shook her head.

“So you are capable of simple speech,” she said. “That’s always bothered me. At least you’ve got it when it matters, right?”

“Styles and manners, Twilight.”

The mercury in the thermometer on the wall had receded completely below minus thirty-seven degrees, the lowest point it could accurately measure. The metallic liquid seemed to have frozen solid. The magic feedback signal abruptly changed, metamorphosing in the illusory second sight of her thaumic senses. It took on an electric aspect, shifting from mysterious but seemingly mundane to vibrant and majestic. Twilight heard someone gasp, breaking the near-silence of the morgue. The gasp turned wet and choking. The motionless corpse on the tray began to spasm and flex, spastic motions of muscles in random and uncoordinated ways, limbs banging against the embrittled steel. Part of the tray gave out and the risen mare shifted.

With a final pulse of numbing chill, air misting in patches, the magic vanished. Luna’s breath caught in her throat. She held it, let it tremblingly out. Sweat rolled down her flanks, down her neck, was blinked out of her eyes. Whom had stopped moving. Twilight, ears flat, though from fear or anger she could not tell, slipped carefully closer, not daring to disrupt whatever fragile magic had been worked here. She scanned Whom’s belly, looking for signs of life.

Pink fur rose gently up and down.

*

“I’m telling you, the scouts last sighted Mother heading in this direction,” Infra Base said, as she and Zo Nar stalked into the hospital, garnering more than one alarmed look from the staff. “We have to find out what’s going on, for the good of the herd.”

“Curiosity killed the gryphon, sister,” Zo Nar said, all-too aware of how loudly her armour was clanking. “If not curiosity, this lot will. Any longer here and they’ll burn us as vampires.” She locked eyes with the medical secretary, who squealed and dove for cover. “Perhaps buried under a crossroads with a wooden stake through the heart, yes.”

“Quiet, you’ll give them ideas.”

Suddenly, a stallion appeared in the foyer, sanitary cloak billowing behind him. He was taking bounds across the floor in a wickedly fast gallop, and did not break his stride as he shot past the two nottlygna, bellowing; “They’ve done it, they’ve raised the dead! They could do it all this time! I quit!”

*

“In general, gravity makes the probability of thaumic decay smaller; in the extreme case of a very small thaumic density difference, it can even stabilize the false thauma, preventing thaumic decay altogether. We believe we understand this. For the thauma to decay, it must be possible to build a bubble of total thaumic zero. In the absence of gravitation, this is no problem, no matter how small the thaumic density difference; all one has to do is make the bubble big enough, and the volume/surface ratio will do the job. In the presence of gravitation, though, the negative thaumic density of the true thauma distorts geometry within the bubble with the result that, for a small enough thaumic density, there is no bubble with a big enough volume/surface ratio. Within the bubble, the effects of gravitation are more dramatic. The geometry of spacetime is that of anti-de Neigher space, a space much like conventional de Neigher space except that its group of pentagrams is obverse rather than obtuse. Although this spacetime is free of singularities, it is unstable under small perturbations, and inevitably suffers gravitational collapse of the same sort as the end state of a contracting von Neighmann universe. The time required for the collapse of the interior universe is on the order of a few moments, or less.

The possibility that we are living under the pall of a false thaumic cataclysm has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Thaumic decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; under the new order, there are new constants of nature; after thaumic decay, not only is magic as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw gnomic comfort from the possibility that perhaps, in the due course of time, this new order would sustain, if not magic and thus life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy.

This possibility has now been eliminated.” - excerpted from Professor Frankly Spoken’s final treatise, Magicae et Gravitae, written shortly before his long foreseen suicide in AN 933.

Students at the Canterlot Institute for Unconventional Magic often report sightings of his ghost, seen wandering the halls, warning of dread, though generally unintelligible, calamities. Any graduating student who fails to cast his dissertation spell on the first try is said to have been ‘Franklied’.

*

Expanding and expanding, driven to insanities of swell and height by megathrust earthquakes beyond the wildest nightmares of any geologist alive, the wave evolved across a vast front, encompassing all oceans as if some cosmic stone had been cast into a lake. It struck almost simultaneously against the western seaboard of the gryphic continent, taking mere moments to close extra distances incurred by inlets, river deltas and other items of the coast. Though most had seen the wave coming, the half-hour of warning was only enough time to panic. No warning could have been enough.

Gryphic towns, solidly built to weather past Equestrian conflicts, immediately ceased existing. Stone, wood and metal were erased by the sheer blunt force of an uncountably many millions of tonnes of water slamming down upon them at speeds enough to soundly court the sound barrier. Marshes, which edged the continent as relics of Divine fury ten centuries past, fell quickly beneath the implacable ruin of the wave. Muddied, carrying the pulverized detritus of tens of thousands of lives, they ate up tall forests, devoured moors and rained down into valleys.

Those bergs large enough to place much of their expansion below ground lasted some small measure of time longer than their surface dwelling friends, though they had never been built to withstand water pressure, let alone of such magnitude. They drowned just as surely; the luckiest merely confused, the remainder gripped with the blind terror of a sure, certain and unassuaged end. Tiers of housing, businesses and the many nests of gryphons collapsed into one another under the weight of inundation, before the waters ran them through and suffocated the survivors.

The longest lived were those fliers of the race, who took to the wing as soon as the wave was sighted. Some fell under it when it approached, unbelieving of its sheer height and not having gained a safe altitude. Those who achieved the required flight level, now cut down to something slightly less than a mile, beheld the doom of their kind smother the land with pitiless completeness. Finding no safe harbour, for the mountains were a thousand miles away, they one by one exhausted themselves and fell to join the rest.

.

For the Greater Glory of (the many) God(s) Or; The Use and Abuse of Linguistic Concepts

“For the Greater Glory of (the many) God(s) Or; The Use and Abuse of Linguistic Concepts”

“So, Starswirl the Bearded wasn’t queer. He just liked wearing a dress. Celestia is the greatest Princess in history, right up there with her Sisters. The feather-flu is the world’s worst plague. Equestria only kills enemies of the state. The gryphons never shelled Port Dauphine. Those cannonballs were there before any of that happened. Luna is completely straight. Twilight and her are just friends. She really deserved those wings, entirely on her own merit. The zebras aren’t a threat, and neither are the gryphons. We’re allies now. Those wars were just misunderstandings. There was never another culture here before the rise of the current inhabitants. Those strange rocks mean nothing.

There has never been a greater magical knowledge than exists now. The Palace is just well constructed. Gryphons and ponies never crossbred. Gadarn was just a normal, mortal being, and the crown passed down is just mundane steel. Faster than light travel is completely impossible. No pony has ever travelled beyond the atmosphere. Hot air balloons don’t count. The hydras aren’t intelligent. Those huge brains are just because they have six eyes. And Fleetfoot started the feather-flu epidemic!” - a Canterlotian stallion, name not given, AN 1003.

By the time the tremor reached Truth and Emboss, it had petered out to nearly nothing, its terrible force finally spent. On the western horizon, clear for many miles and marred only by the grey wasteland of the gryphic industrial heart, there appeared a vision, a slate mirage, shimmering and roiling, becoming taller by the moment. It did not seem to have an end, and merely fell away from sight toward the north and south. Emboss squinted, turning his head this way and that. The others were doing the same, speechless. Even Hywell, still beside the body of his fallen friend, could look at nothing else.

“Ideas, anyone?” Astrapios finally said, half a minute later. “I'm really looking at you two here.”

“Nothing we know of the Thiasus explains it,” Emboss said, feeling as if he'd just swallowed a bucket of sand.

“It is coming closer,” iYut said, no trace of fear in his voice. “We must seek shelter.”

“Shelter?” Astrapios said, flapping his wings. “We're in the middle of nowhere, you stripy idiot!”

“There are mines, are there not?” iYut said, the corner of his mouth turning up.

“Yes, copper and zinc, but they were mined out a century ago, everyone moved to the mountains,” Astrapios said, dancing back and forth between staring at the zebra and the unknown terror approaching.

“It's a tidal wave,” Truth said, suddenly. “Oh, sweet skies!”

“Tidal wave? As in, tsunami?” Astrapios said, peering down his beak at her. “That's completely impossible, we're five hundred miles from the sea, it'd need to be--”

He did not finish speaking before the world seemed to contort around them, like fabric being tautened. Even the non-magical persons in the party felt it; the unicorns winced and gasped. Heat washed over them, and ultraviolet flashes lit up the landscape. Emboss turned toward Hywell. He was standing tall and proud, head up, examining them. The Crown glowed, threw off shimmers as its surface temperature aggravated the air.

“It is a tidal wave,” he said, voice steadfast, calm and assured as a predator is before pouncing on prey it knows it will catch. “One great enough to drown the world and end all life here. I am called to defend it.”

Hywell looked skywards, as if expecting to break into a magical flight but, for a moment, nothing happened. Then, there was a dazzling flair of pure white light, and another flex of reality. Emboss screwed shut his eyes and looked away and, when the glare had cleared, the Crown was gone, but Hywell remained. He had an utterly baffled expression on his face. Then he collapsed. Above, faint traces of something bright and red scored lines against the blue, arcing westwards.

“Gadarn's left tit,” Astrapios spat, glancing over at the twins Ensire and Erisne. “Right, grab him.”

“The Crown was told, the Crown acts,” iYut said. “Kutufa Kutupwa.”

“I'll cast your dice in a minute,” Astrapios said, glowering. “What do we do now?”

“We go underground, and we take refuge with my people,” iYut said, scanning the horizon.

“Through the mines,” Astrapios said, nodding quickly. “Of course. How do we pick the right one? How do you know it'll connect up?”

“It is a gamble,” iYut said, gesturing toward the few dozen small pit heads that could be seen on the waste around them. “Choose wisely.”

“We've little choice,” Emboss said, nuzzling Truth's wither before fixing his gaze on the identical tower-shapes of the pit heads.

One was topped with a tattered flag, just visible, flopping forlornly in the breeze. It bore a five-pointed star.

“There,” he said.

With the fleetness that only those escaping cataclysm can muster, Emboss and Truth lead the way across the ruination left behind by the expansive gryphon industrial machine. The canal itself was cut along the edge of a rise that ran west to east, and they fell down its steep slopes to a floor of blackened tree stumps and long, rutted paths through the mud where unnumbered ranks of workers must have trod. Stinking, filthy water was disturbed with every hurried step. Clouds of tiny blackflies, so small as to appear to be unusually intelligent dust, burst from the oil-filmed surfaces and buzzed around, angrily protesting the rude interruption.

It took them ten precious minutes to cover the deceptively small distance between the canal and the mine. There was evidence all around that, at one point or another, there had been a causeway across the mire. Shaped stones and unidentifiable mounds of rotten wood lay in a linear track, though it had long since fallen down and was no help in their passage. Emboss felt the mud suck at his hooves with ever more force, eroding his stamina. His heart pounded, and aching lungs gasped for air. Filth covered every part of him besides his back, and splashes threatened there, too. His coat was stained beyond redemption as they reached the apron of the mine.

The central mine buildings rose up out of the mire on a rock platform. Brick and wood made up three fallen towers, only the very tip of the largest still standing even vaguely straight. The flag mounted there fluttered gently, the sole moving thing. Odd, industrial shapes lurked beyond gaps in the cladding. Silent and dead conveyors ran between the ruins as a snaking, angular tangle. All Emboss could smell was the decay, and a panoply of weird chemical scents that he didn't recognize. Piles of coal, ruined by exposure to a hundred winters, were little more than carbon smudges. Their vast scuttles had ruptured and exploded. It seemed a logical point of ingress.

The gryphon mine was dark inside, and bearing of the smells of rats and mice, if not any more signs of intelligent life. Faint echoes were all around, of those who had once worked and lived within the narrow passageways and crawlspaces they now navigated. Astrapios had taken to iYut's back, riding him above the withers, and appeared to be quite at ease with this. In quieter times, Emboss might have remarked at such a sight, but he had broken through the walls at the edges of his endurance several times. Little would unnerve him, save perhaps for the sight of Celestia again.

There was no need for discussion. Emboss headed down, through whatever route seemed logical, and the rest followed. They were all running on instinct. It wasn't long before they found the central shaft of the mine, around which were the ruins of winches and cars. Much of the steel was rusted to oblivion. The mouth of the shaft loomed, offering the possibility of safety and of danger in equal measure. Emboss overrode the eohippine urge to flee from it, drove that squealing, reactionary part of him to the farthest reaches of his mind and crushed it there. Anger rose up in him, at the world, though largely at Celestia. How dare she do this! How dare she make me run to the edges of the world! How dare she!

He was interrupted by the sounds of his wife's telekinesis. She grunted in time with the loudest pulse. Serpentine coils of wound material shed their loads of dust and shone dully in the hornlight. Strands of metal had been woven into larger bundles, over and over again, until a cable of extraordinary strength had been produced. Emboss just stared at it, still furious.

“Brass,” said Astrapios, disaffectedly glancing at the barely-identifiable metal fixings of the rest of the mine. “How lucky for us.”

“Some of us,” Truth said. “You can fly, at least.”

“Or just 'fall slowly',” he grumbled.

Emboss grabbed one end of the cable, to which a wickedly curved hook was attached, then pitched it across the machine space toward where once had stood a brace of large steam boilers and winding engines. He drove the hook around in the rubble with his telekinesis, feeding energy into it via the cable. The hook glowed and glimmered in the dark, threw off sparks and melted into the sturdy foundations of the boiler mounts. Smoke and steam rose up, as if from the risen ghost of the dead engines, and then he let it cool.

“Gryphons, go on ahead,” Truth said, sparing a moment to stare at her husband in amazement. “We'll follow you down.”

The zebra nodded his assent, then bent round and pulled a trio of fat tubes from his panniers. A graceful toss of his head sent them arcing into the shaft. Each was smoldering and, as they fell out of view, they burst into fountains of ruddy red light, plummeting downwards. Erisne nodded approvingly at her sister, who bore the alce King with apparently little effort. Astrapios cleared his throat ever so slightly and, at this signal, Erisne hopped up and he transferred from his former mount.

“Be careful,” he said, then they leapt into the air and fell into the black.

“I will destroy the shaft after we are through,” iYut said, smiling hungrily. “Water seeks easy paths, but the weight will be vast. It will not buy us much time.”

Truth tossed the coils of the cable down. They scratched and skittered like impatient worms, striking the walls of the shaft.

“Keep a firm grip on it,” Emboss said, curling his magic around the steel.

“Not all of us have TK, darling,” Truth said, glancing at iYut.

The zebra laughed. He was already digging things out of his panniers. Shoes came out that looked like caltrops, one pair deftly slipped onto his front hooves and tied with straps whilst the others clipped onto the coronet band of his rears. Vicious little spring-loaded teeth bit into the hoof wall. Sparing only a moment to check all was secure, he dropped rump-first down the shaft. The fanged shoes found easy purchase in the crumbling blocks of limestone ward

“They live underground,” Emboss said. “Of course they've ways and means.”

The little eohippus was not as dead as the last moment's rage had assured. It snuck back in to seed apprehensive terror as Emboss copied iYut's drop. Thaumokinetic feedback stung and burned, and the tug of gravity as he hung suspended over the void below was only fuel to the fear. He loosened the magic grip, dropped an inch down the wire. His back hooves slammed painfully into the rock. His breath hitched in his throat, heart hammering. Above, he saw the heartening sight of his wife's hindquarters gamely preparing to follow suit.

It was a long way down. Some unknown fraction of whatever tiny amount of time they had remaining passed before they met iYut, who was on the other side of the shaft, almost lazily jammed into an odd stress position facing the wall. He had excavated a hoof-sized cavity in the friable stone using part of a collection of steel picks and rods, each tied with string to hooks inside his panniers, and was carefully inserting brown-paper wrapped packages like pats of butter into it. If it was black powder, Emboss would have said it was a lot, but he guessed whatever lethal substance was in play, it would be hugely more powerful than that. The most surprising thing was that he was placing the explosives in total darkness. His flares were mere glimmers somewhere down below, and the meager hornlight the unicorns generated fell rapidly short.

Distant roaring had begun to filter into the underground spaces by the time they reached the pool of light thrown up by the flares. It was less a sound, and more some unholy shaking of the universe itself. Emboss felt it in his teeth, in the pit of his stomach. He was trembling himself, from the magical exertion and the sustained terror. Relief overwhelmed him as he touched the ground with his own four hooves again. Truth joined him seconds later, descending from the square in the ceiling. The void was quite small, and the continuing ruin of the mine was evident all around. Remains of machines, better preserved here, and the single crashed pile of the old lift that would have once carted ore from the depths, crouched nearby.

Astrapios and his gryphons guarded the King slightly back from the safety of the light, looking decidedly less comfortable than ever they had been on the surface. Emboss couldn't recall which of the three types of gryphon represented had good night vision, though by their demeanor he thought it might be none of them.

The zebra appeared thirty seconds afterwards, falling like a bizarre predatory spider and landing with no apparent harm. He dipped and bounced to take the shock, then his head was up. Bright eyes glanced around, ears flicking and searching, scanning. Sparks fluttered down behind him. Truth audibly gasped as all except the gryphons simultaneously realized what this meant.

“Quickly,” he said, licking his lips. “I have lit the fuses. Follow me, and keep up. Your lives depend on it.”

“Fuses?” Astrapios said, eyes widening. “What have you done?”

iYut did not stop to answer the question. Panniers noticeably depleted, he darted forward trailing smoke. Another of the flares igniting whilst held in his mouth, he lead the way down a previously unseen passageway in the rock, along which ran narrow railway tracks. Truth and Emboss each grabbed one of those tossed earlier, keeping them well away from their heads in magic grips. Scrabbling and awkward slipping noises came from behind them as Astrapios and his crew struggled with the comatose form of the King.

Emboss felt his gallop give way to a canter. His lungs and throat burned. The walls of the tunnel pressed in. All he saw of iYut now was the odd metal-fanged back hoof stab the rock and push the zebra forward ever faster. The tracks had disappeared, and the passageways they fled down, turning this way and that, took on a more rough and unfinished appearance. The rumbling was a constant, rising toward an unspeakable crescendo. This was the stampede, an instinct as old as mud and photosynthesis. His mind vanished beneath an adrenaline fog of fear and the feeling of other fleeing equids fore and aft.

At the moment when Emboss' body caved to oxygen starvation and lactic acid build up, muscles spasmodically shuddering and flexing uselessly, the world became noise and distant light. Someone squealed. There was the sensation of something coming up behind him, impossibly fast, then a sledgehammer-blow struck his head and thought ceased.

*

“Whom?” Twilight dared, breath forming a silvery cloud.

“The device is restored,” Luna said, then grinned sardonically. “She lives.”

Twilight was too nervous to make the disgusted noise the comment demand. Instead, she touched noses with Whom. It was warm, and smelled of antiseptic and the unusual peppery perfume she preferred. Magenta eyes were suddenly examining her; the muzzle pulled away and the tray creaked ominously as Whom's head came up.

“It's cold in here,” she said, croakily.

“Oh, thank the skies,” Twilight gasped, curling her neck around Whom's and nuzzling her.

“Why are we in a morgue?” Whom said, then seemed to spot Luna. “Oh, Hi!” Her body twitched and tensed as she struggled away from Twilight and fell shakily from the tray, legs barely arranging themselves beneath her in time to support her weight. “It's nice to meet you, I'm Whom!”

There was a silence awkward enough to power interstellar flight. Twilight swore she felt the spacetime contort and writhe in sympathy. Even the usually oblivious Whom seemed to notice that something was wrong. She glanced between the two Princesses in confusion.

Eventually, Twilight said: “Whom, this is Princess Luna.”

“Don't be silly, Twilight,” Whom said, frowning. “I'd recognize her.”

“ The Selenite Principality is a far richer place than mundane reality, Twilight,” said Luna. “I was many shapes and sizes. I primarily appeared as an aspect of the Nightmare to this one, though.”

Whom shuddered, like she had just swallowed half a lemon's worth of juice.

“Don't say her name,” she whinnied.

“Whom, I told you that Luna was here, didn't I?” Twilight said. “You knew that she had returned from exile. We're in Equestria now. This is Ponyville.”

Whom gulped, and was quiet. She stared at Luna and began to tremble.

“An aspect of the Nightmare, glorious and terrible as a thousand dying stars,” Luna said, wistfully. “Barded in blood, caparisoned in dread; a personality made in the image of a God, to terrify those who had never known fear.” She sighed, turned away. “To give them a definition of the very word, until my name was a synonym for all the black things of the world.”

“Not a good pony,” Whom said, in a small voice. “No.”

“We're leaving,” Twilight said, shaking her head. “Come on, Whom.”

Whom slipped toward the exit with her, head low, making no fuss and offering no refusal.

“Abusus non tollit usum,” Luna muttered, as they left. “Ad maiorem Deorum gloriam.”

The black-and-blue figure of the Princess dissipated into smoke and vanished between the cracks in reality.

*

Rainbow Dash did not recall awakening from a deeper slumber, but instead became gradually aware that reality was a thing she was embedded in. Her limbs were dead weights, and moving too great an effort to more than contemplate. Shapes and images played before her eyes, and an intense barbiturate inertia of the soul nourished a blithe disinterest in the resolving, dying figures who populated the emergency ward.

“In here,” a mare said, younger and highly strung. “See her marks?”

“Bugger me sideways, you really weren’t kidding, Lux,” said a stallion, older, the last vestiges of humour disappearing from his voice. “That’s a real, live Element alright.” He paused a beat. “Why on Equestria did you dope her, again?”

“Because half a ton of enchanted cloud and very much not enchanted masonry fell on her arse,” Lux said, shuffling into view and adjusting something affixed to a wooden stand beside the stretcher Dash was lying on. “I had exactly no better options. In case you hadn’t noticed, the people hospital is now at the bottom of that pit. I had to raid a vets.”

“She’ll be down for hours,” the stallion said, sighing. “This is a big problem, a really big one.”

“Why, Elegy?” Lux said. “Tell me what’s going on, please. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“The Mayor’s office, my office, has to cede authority to the Elements during a major civil catastrophe, if on scene,” Elegy said, the clopping of his hooves on the stone betraying his nervousness. “I’ve got charts and everything. Twilight’s first, then this one.”

“Rut the skies,” Lux cursed. “Even if she wasn’t dosed up to the eyeballs on bear sedatives, she’d be begging for them. I don’t need to be a corpic scryer to tell you that. Surely the law makes provisions--”

“It bloody doesn’t!” Elegy snapped. “It is extremely rutting specific!”

“I’m up,” Rainbow Dash gurgled, managing to drag herself forward a massive few inches. “Grab the sausage, let’s play sheep.”

“Not an ounce of bodyfat on her,” Lux said. “She’ll be dealing with the thiopental for the next twenty four hours, at least.” She grunted. “I thought I was doing her a mercy. How was I supposed to know?”

“You weren’t, Lux,” Elegy said, the fire gone. “We’ll get through this. We’ll have to. I think we can declare this one off-scene, anyway.”

“I’m pretty sure this lot work in packs, usually,” Lux said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Element by herself.”

“You mean, the rest of them might turn up?”

“It’s a possibility.”

*

“I’ve never been in a hot air balloon before! Oh, where are we going?” Whom said, squealing excitedly. “Do you really own this one?”

“Well, technically, my parents own it, and they rented it to the Crown on a hundred-year contract for a nominal sum, in exchange for the relief of a non-con lien on the family pile some ancestor was hit with after a game of cards played against Celestia,” Twilight said, horn lighting up as she empowered the spells that unfolded the balloon’s canopy and prepared it for flight. “The Crown initially sublet the balloon to the guild that owned the Library I live in, but then I became a one-third owner of the Crown’s various properties and fruits of contractual obligations, plus the guild sold out to us and we distributed its assets amongst the Crown Estates.”

“I think I understood about four of those words,” Whom said, distractedly dancing around the basket and watching in awe as telekinetically-triggered cantrips and enchantments in the wicker, wire and canvas unfurled and did their work. “Equestria is weird.”

“It’s a tax thing,” Twilight said, inspecting the inside of the basket. “Nobody really owns anything anymore. As for where we're going, I don't entirely know yet. Maybe West Wingshade. Fluttershy has gone on ahead to scout. We have to find the Elements. ”

“I'd like to own stuff, I think,” Whom said, sniffing the wicker curiously. “So I can look after it.”

Twilight said nothing, busying herself with the preparations. Stored in the small grassy paddock behind her Library, sarcastically named the Aerodrome field, the balloon had weathered Ponyville's numerous tribulations with surprising ease. The waste energy from the enchantments lit the night up and kept ruining her adaptation to the dark. The magic lifted the fat cube of neatly compressed canvas upwards then began unfolding it vertically.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Twilight said, as the envelope reached half of its total size. “We've got the time, now.”

“I don't want you to think that Nightmare Moon was mean to me,” Whom said, eyes still tracking the automation. “She wasn't. She only ever treated me and my sisters with respect.” Whom sighed, looked away. “The same respect you show your balloon, and no more than that.”

“I see,” Twilight said, ears losing their perk and falling out to the sides. “So when I started treating you like a thing...”

“Yeah.”

The envelope tensed up and began softly inflating itself, taking shape with cold air first, a trick done with magic and mostly for show.

“I'm so sorry, Whom,” Twilight said, gently. “I've been horrible.”

“It's okay.”

“It's still not okay, Whom, none of this is okay, the more we find out the less okay it all becomes,” Twilight said, stepping into the basket and touching off another series of enchantments, these ones designed to heat and funnel the air that would be their lifting medium. “I don't care what Luna says, you're not a device simulating a person, you're a person, end of story. You're a person, and you're my friend.”

Tears began to stain Whom's cheeks, but her face was lit by an electric and infectious smile. She clambered into the basket and hugged Twilight harder than ever.

“You're the first pony to ever say that to me,” she managed, before being overwhelmed by intense and racking sobs.

Twilight held her there, crying away centuries of pain, until the balloon had finished pre-flight heating and it was finally time to go.

*

Berry Punch exploded from her home opposite Sugarcube Corner in an ecstatic torrent of horse, toga and stale wine fumes. The earthquakes had done little to settle her mood. As she rounded onto what passed for Ponyville's main drag, she spotted once more the vision of Mytheme, framed by the houses and buildings around the main square, and juddered to a halt. It was lit from below by oily lamps, which cast yellow glimmers on the lower hull, and from above by faint moonlight, the sheen of which, on the diamond, was enough to set off spasms of deistic joy.

“It's almost time!” she bellowed, over a distant peal of thunder, from DRAMA's town-ringing clouds. “Joy beyond measure!”

“Time for what?” said the Night.

Berry Punch whinnied and sprung away from the source of the noise, dropping the last of her wine in the mud.

“Who said that?” she squealed, glancing around and seeing only the expected shadows.

An equine form the colour of three in the morning, bruised, condensed on the muddy street, with only the subtlest of plops.

“Princess Luna!” Berry Punch said, then bowed her head low in a swooping arc, a drunkard's exaggerated swing. “I knew you would be here.”

“Prithee tell Us, what is to come?” said Luna, after clearing her throat. “Energies beyond understanding, forces of vast and imponderable magnitude, are at work this, most troubling, of Our nights.”

“The Party!” Punch whispered, loudly. “You have to know! It's your Party!”

Luna inhaled deeply and studied Berry Punch closely. The skin on the back of her neck stood up, and strange sensations trickled down her spine.

“I-I, I helped,” Punch said, retreating slightly. “I want you to know that; I helped.”

“Helped?” Luna said, putting her own imponderable force into the single word. “Prithee, tell Us, how did you help?”

“I gave Twilight Sparkle the first part of the recipe, for the N-Nectars,” Punch said, gulping. “It was passed down to me by my dam, through twenty-five generations of my tail-female line...”

Punch had been about to embark on a little speech she had prepared, should anyone have asked her what her role was in the great Party to end all Parties, something to tell the grandfoals when Pinot Noir eventually had his own, but the look that had appeared on Luna's face could have stopped the stars themselves from fusing.

“Why?” Luna said, and it was with a tone that suggested a vast weight dredging through the deepest silts of the Pit itself.

“Th-the Nectars are the p-peak of my art form,” Punch said, finding the words increasingly difficult to get out. “The Party that is to come by their making, its ultimate apotheosis! The revellers will become like unto the Divine!”

Luna was grinding her teeth.

“What? Please, your Majesty, why--”

There was a judder through the air itself. Telekinetic force took hold of her muzzle, jerking it upwards. The hissing sizzle of heat, pain and the horrid smell of something burning assaulted her senses in turn. Her lips became numb, the mobile tip paralysed and insensate.

“Pig, glutton, wanting and wanting, taking, meddling!” Luna spat, her horn lit with a cool aura. “Blind little creature, listening to ancient half-sense, nonsense!”

The pain spread out across her face, and tears of confusion and agony clouded her vision. She desperately attempted to open her mouth, but it felt as if the whole complex structure of her lips, tongue and teeth had fused into one, immobile mass.

“I had wondered, of course, how all this was started,” Luna said, taking a deep breath. “I knew that I had to shoulder a portion of the blame, for it was I who mentioned the accursed things to my Sister, but how had she known where to start? How had she gotten even a fragment of the old brew's makings?”

It was too much to bear, and Berry Punch felt the muscles in her hindquarters give up. She collapsed, but the Princess's grip was strong, and her head remained jerked skyward.

“Celestia's eradication of the information in the common texts was complete, this is certain,” Luna said. “But she would have needed to keep it safe, somewhere. She would not simply have given it to my Sister, would not have had it nearby. I suppose you, or your distant ancestors, were complicit, unwittingly or no. So, another of her accomplices. Were you ever your own mare?”

Luna seemed to be weighing something up, rolling her head from side to side.

“A geas?” she said, frowning. “No, that would be too much, too great a compulsion, too much risk of a discovery.” Luna chewed her lip. “You took her schemes willingly, found joy in their undertaking, though you knew not the name of your Mistress. Your guilt is a lesser species, but a species of guilt, none-the-less.” She nodded, once. “You were a glutton, a pig, wanting and wanting. Now you shall never be. Not a drop of water, wine or beer shall pass your lips, not an ounce of grain nor sheaf of hay.” She mantled her wings, looked away. “Nor shall you die from the lack of it, for the span of a thirty thousand moons. This is your punishment. Suffer the opposite.”

Berry Punch tried to scream, but she could not.

Pleasure Domes Are For Sissies; Or Kubla Khan's Revenge

Fluttershy steered the roc, which she had named Mr Beaky, through the night's air toward the East. The moon hid its face, the merest curved sliver of mercury, as if it were ashamed, but there was enough light to see by. The landscape slipped past below in shades of grey and black. The numerous unknown woodlets and tracts of neat-coppiced countryside offered up interesting smells, but Fluttershy had other things on her mind, and the roaring, high-velocity air soon carried them away again.

West Wingshade was an inferno, so bright that even a night-blind gryphon could have seen it. The grounded Cloudholme blazed fiercely in a dozen places along its long axis. As she brought Mr Beaky down from his cruising flight level she intersected the smoke, and saw that the whole city had slipped from its supposedly secure embedding, where once it had crashed. The level of the plazas and tall piles of urbanity had shifted twenty degrees, and the numerous subterranean additions, the warrens of zebra tunnels and townholds, were exposed to the air like a nest of ants.

Worse, it now teetered on the edge of a great chasm in the land, where once there had been a grassy plain. Brighter flames burned in its base, and threw up fouler smoke than that of the city. It was clear that some considerable mass of Wingshade's material had been shaken loose from its foundations, and gone falling from the deck into the abyss. Like irritated bees around a disturbed hive, many pegasus fliers formed a layer over the hole, and over the city itself.

Mr Beaky called out to his friend, a piercingly shrill caw with strange, infrasonic edges to it. The other bird lagged behind, as if reluctant. It kept a good separation, and returned a shorter version of the same caw in response. Fluttershy had been busy trying to penetrate the deeper mysteries of roc language for some time, but it remained beyond her grasp. She made a mental note of this new call format regardless.

When Mr Beaky was over Wingshade’s large, central plaza, Fluttershy let go of her feathered seat and dropped backwards, allowing herself to fall for a moment before spreading her wings. Mr Beaky hadn’t been going anywhere near as fast as his cruising velocity, so correcting her path was simple, but it was still more flying than she was used to doing. Muscles and tendons stretched and strained, and sweat prickled beneath her too-long coat. The titled angle of the plaza below confused her briefly as it came up to meet her, but the final landing was reasonably smooth.

Chaos surrounded her. Though the plaza’s marbled surface was intact, many buildings had fallen into it, spilling their guts of wood and brick across the street. The fires here had been contained, but evidence abounded; black soot smears and huge puddles of filthy water were everywhere. Much in the way of the enchanted cloud material had been destroyed, losing its magic and evaporating like so much mundane cumulonimbus. Survivors huddled here and there around piles of emergency supplies. Medics flitted between them, pouring salves on burns and changing hung fluids. Nobody paid her any attention.

Fluttershy followed the general flow of official looking persons, into what had once been a very fine civic building. The steps were home to dozens of exhausted looking ponies and zebras, who were tucking disinterestedly into rations of hay. They all wore red tabards, some in better states of repair than others. Many appeared to have been badly burned, and painfully squirmed beneath salve-slathered bandages. She wanted to help, but knew that she couldn’t. Her head was low and her ears were back as she filtered through them and entered the atrium, through jammed open doors of black ponyoak.

Latticework and open trellises of enameled iron spread across the roof, and heaps of broken glass swept out of the way revealed they’d once born sheets of intricate stained designs. Some parts of it still resolutely hung on, fragments of a larger whole. Hints of stars and moons and pure white oriflammes glinted at her from the pieces.

“What did I tell you?” someone shouted. “The Elements hunt in packs!”

Fluttershy drew her gaze down from the ceiling and locked onto the source of the voice; a milk- and coffee-coloured unicorn mare, beside whom stood a thick and stocky looking pony that it took her a moment to realize was also a unicorn, such was the expansiveness of his black forelock.

“Welcome to the city, Madam Element,” the stallion said, in a broad Canterlotian accent. “I’m Mayor Elegy, and this is Doctor Lux, person-in-charge of the medical side of things. Sorry about the state of the place, but we’ve had a little trouble with earthquakes.”

“It’s not just you,” Fluttershy said. “This has happened everywhere, as far as we can tell.”

“Bugger,” Elegy said, frowning. “No chance of relief from outside, then?”

“I have no idea. Canterlot’s burnt to the ground--” Both Lux and Elegy gasped at this, eyes widening. “--and the refugees are around somewhere, some coming here, probably. I think you’ll get more mouths to feed and wounds to treat than any help, Mayor.”

“Do you have any idea what caused all this?” Elegy said, after a pause. “Surely that quake wasn’t a natural event? We’re supposed to get forewarning, at least six months worth!”

“It’s a magical, very magical,” Fluttershy said. “Alicorn stuff. Twilight is just behind me, and Princess Luna has arrived at Ponyville with her entire nottlygna guard. They’re fighting to find out the cause and stop it.” Fluttershy unmantled her wings and tried to look resolute. “Now, I need to find the other Elements.”

“We have Rainbow Dash,” said Lux, distractedly, ears folding back. “She’s in the infirmary.”

“Sweet Celestia, Lux, you look like someone just kicked your puppy,” Elegy said, staring at his colleague. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve got family in Canterlot,” she said, breath hitching in her throat. “An aunt, some cousins…”

“Skies, I’m sorry, I should have remembered,” Elegy said, shaking his head in disgust. “I’m sure they’re okay.”

“Most in Canterlot survived the fires,” Fluttershy said, brow furrowing. “Casualties were fairly light from the events before that, too. Didn’t you suffer any of the madness and rioting?”

“Madness and rioting?” Lux said, blinking away tears. “We had none of that here, though there were some rumours.”

“You didn’t see the big flash of light either?” Fluttershy said.

“Oh no, that was Canterlot?” Lux whinnied.

“We had no idea what that was,” Elegy said, sighing. “Some astronomical event, a bloody big rock hitting the atmosphere. I was waiting for a scroll from the capital.”

“I need to see Rainbow Dash,” Fluttershy said. “Twilight will be here soon. Only together can we fight this.” She tried to smile, though it ended up as more the angry, pained grimace of a mare about to be hanged for a crime she did not commit. “All of us.”

*

Emboss awoke in darkness, and to an overwhelming pain. All he could do, for some unknown interval, was lie perfectly still, guttural half-moans escaping from him. Agonies screamed from all quarters of his body, but the worst felt like it was just behind his eyes, an angry knot of fire that yearned for release. He tried calling out to whoever might be listening, but all he could manage was a pitiful whimper. When he moved his head, hot stabbing pain cut into his muzzle along with crunching sounds; the remnants of his spare pair of glasses. His legs were caught in cold vices, and variously tingled or felt like they weren’t there at all. Another interval passed, and he fell into unconsciousness, never expecting to wake up.

He did, however. Emboss’ next perception was of flowing water, and blurred shadows on a cave wall. Strange smells like peppery menthol drifted up his nose, stinging the sensitive organ. The pain had dulled away, but he could feel it trying to return. His ears flicked around; more pain came, and one ear felt as if it were moving through treacle. He whinnied, and someone moved in the shadows.

“Hush, do not try to move,” iYut said, gently. “You have been injured.”

Eventually, Emboss breathed one word: “Truth?”

“Safe, my friend,” iYut said, coming into view beside him. “Not yet woken.”

There was a scratching sound; Emboss saw iYut moving something ceramic with his forehoof. It was only just visible in the dim illumination cast by a glowing crystal orb on a string, which had been attached to a glossy white stalactite. The sounds of something quite damp burning slowly but surely met his ears.

“It is a small miracle only a few of you were badly injured,” iYut said, smiling broadly. “I do not make a habit of keeping much weight of the somniferent mushroom. One alone on his own in the long night of the trotabut could get up to great mischief with it.”

Emboss sneezed and immediately regretted it. Pain clenched around his ribs, sending muscles into spasm. He moaned breathlessly, like a hoarse demon was trying to escape his chest. After it had subsided, he said: “What happened?”

“My explosion did exactly what we wanted it to do, it was perfect,” he said, sighing contentedly. “The wave struck the ground above and did not flood the tunnels below, at least, not very much. The weight of the water was vast, however. I think most of the mine has collapsed. It could not take the pressure of the explosives and the wave too. Cavities below opened up and swallowed us.”

“Many big caves around here, huh?” Emboss said, somewhat dreamily. “Cavities, and so on.”

“A very long time ago, this whole area was a great sea, in which many fish and crabs dwelled,” iYut said, between relighting the sedative mushroom with a square device that produced a jet of flame when he squeezed it between his teeth. “They died, and their bones and shells became rock. We call this rock karratic. The sea is long gone now, but the karra remains. The rain seeps in through cracks and makes the karra slowly melt. The end result is caves.”

“I know what limestone is. You’re worse than Astrapios, you know,” Emboss said.

iYut laughed, shook his head.

“But we have time to speak, now,” he said. “You are not in any state to travel.”

Emboss heard scratching and shuffling some distance away, turning his head in time to see someone enter the circle of illumination. He spotted his wife, too, lain prone, with several of the strange patches iYut had earlier used on him along her flanks and belly. He tried to get up, but couldn’t.

“Oh, good,” said Astrapios. “You didn’t kill him with your witch doctoring.”

“Once, I set your feathers on fire once, and forever I am a witch doctor!” iYut said, grinning. “He had the dreaded feather-flu, and no ladies would go near him.”

“Kill or bloody cure,” Astrapios mumbled, limping grandiosely. “Feeling okay?” He sniffed, glanced around. “Ah, I see he’s hooked you up with the good stuff.”

“The smallest of fractures to your left cannon bone does not justify the use,” iYut said. “Stop being such a foal about it.”

“Cuts and bruises too!” Astrapios complained, haughtily. “Lucky not to lose the leg…”

“Where’s the King?” Emboss said, managing to roll over onto his side to face them.

“He’s… around,” Astrapios said, frowning. “Woke up half an hour ago, naught but a scratch on him. Lucky git. Anyway, he’s not entirely lucid at the moment. I think it has something to do with whatever the Crown is doing.”

“Deep old magic thing,” iYut said, and kissed his teeth. “Eats up the soul until the gryphon is nothing but feathers and bones, then finds another. Some might say evil, but the Crown is less than that. Just an animal of different stripes, surviving as it can. It was not always so, as says my dam and dams before.”

“I’m not interested in hearing what the zebras think about the Crown that defends my nation,” Astrapios said, sitting down on his rump. “It’s up there now--” He flicked his head toward the cavern roof. “--fighting the tsunami, a wall of water like a mountain. That’s all that matters.”

iYut merely grinned his zebric grin and shook his head.

Against pain and the mycological lethargy, Emboss forced himself up and onto his hooves. His muscles shook and trembled, struggling to support him. For a long minute, he just stood there, breathing heavily, but the earlier anger had not subsided. Far from it. He would run on the rage like a hummingbird ran on sugar. Then he noticed that iYut and Astrapios were staring at him silently.

“What did you say his injuries were, again?” Astrapios said, squinting in the half-light.

“Life altering,” iYut said, flatly. “I feared that here would end our quest, at least for them.”

“No,” Emboss said, his voice grating and weak. “They were not. Do you know what has been, though?” He paused to hack up something unidentifiable and red. “This time last week, I was a senior civil servant.” Emboss took a step toward them. “I filed papers, filled out forms and stamped things. That’s where my name comes from. It’s a thing you do to high-grade paperwork. But, then, I had a theophany, that was life altering.”

“My lad, you need--” Astrapios started, but Emboss cut him off.

“I’m not finished. I’ve been running scared since then, clinging desperately to the notion that I might do something to forestall catastrophe. I’ve been trapped on boats, nearly fed to gryphons, hunted by bandits, blown up and half-drowned. I left behind my young foals and possibly witnessed their end not once, but twice. It will not end here!”

“Bloody but unbowed, dear,” said a limp voice. “I think that was the line.”

“Truth!” he gasped, staggering over and resting his head over her withers.

“That’s the problem with these Equestrians,” said Astrapios, laughing. “Give them half a chance and they’ll start quoting poetry.” He puffed himself up and took on a regal air, unmantling his wings just slightly in the preferred manner of the Princesses. In an accent even more refined and haughty than his usual attempt at High Canterlotian, he said: “If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs and blaming it on you--”

“Oh, enough, you ridiculous cretin,” Emboss said, coughing, laughing, leaning on his wife.

“How about this: you stay out of my culture, and I’ll stay out of your…” Emboss said, frowning. “Gryphic throat singing?”

“You haven’t got the beak for it, matey,” Astrapios said, adjusting his plumage.

There was a rumble and a roar, as if of the howling gale atop a mountain heard from a great distance away. Everyone looked upwards, even iYut. Ears swiveled about desperately. The cavern had filled suddenly with a haze of fines, motes dancing this way and that in the unstable back-and-forth flow of air.

“The earth moves,” iYut said. “The water above is a great weight, some shifting about is to be expected. We must go deeper.”

“I’ve heard that one before,” Astrapios said, chuckling. “‘Spose you haven’t, though, Ser Zebra.”

“This cavern is a long tube,” iYut said, frowning at the hippogryph, but addressing his comment to the equines. “Erisne and Ensire are ahead, minding Hywell. They will have located further egresses.”

“Long tubes? Egresses?” Astrapios said. “Come on now lad, you’re making this too easy!”

“Oo-er, matron?” Truth said, quietly, as she picked through what remained of her panniers.

“Do not encourage him!” iYut said, rolling his eyes.

With little further fuss, the party struck camp, such as it was, and headed into the deeps. For the first few minutes, iYut lead them through the stands of stalagmites, glowing crystal orb in his mouth, but then the unicorns remembered their magic, though Truth beat her husband to the punch, calling up eerie blue spectres of magelight. There was no real path through the limestone towers that they moved through, and iYut demonstrated the strange litheness of his race well by slinking through the narrowest of gaps and kicking holes for the wider members. Emboss regretted the vandalism, but their need was great.

Water, cold and cloudy, carrying miniscule bits of debris, began to flow from behind, passing their feet. It was momentarily stalled in places as pooled up, but soon was sluicing past their hooves again. The roaring became louder, creeping up on them. Everyone unconsciously began to scramble, duck and dive faster. Emboss lagged somewhat behind, grunting as each step or attempt to force more from his tortured body elicited new aches.

They heard him before they saw him. Hywell was saying, in clear and concise Equuish with no hint of accent: “The nondegenerate symmetric bilinear form, of which this metric is one, accepts two arguments; tau over upsilon and tau over delta, bearing constraints laterally, and only on the inverse, which appear twice in fourteen segments; tau over tau, tau over gamma, gamma over tau, tau squared…”

The big alce was wandering back and forth in perfect darkness, beside a narrow, diagonal fracture through the rock that seemed to terminate the cave. Erisne and Ensire were lying on their forepaws beside him, looking thoroughly bored. As light intruded, they shifted and squinted.

“What’s biting him?” said Emboss, winded.

“Sounds like a thaumic trance,” Truth said, sagely. “The top mages get them sometimes, when they’re working on the big stuff. The excess heat makes them a little delirious. There was a book of poetry about it, actually, The Cunnyng Cennyngs of Clover the Clever, where they--”

“Take up the White Mare’s burden!” Astrapios pronounced, melodramatically. “Send forth the best ye breed!”

“Alright, alright, no poetry!” Truth whinnied.

“Stay close to me,” iYut said, briefly examining the fracture before climbing in like a ferret. “Remember to breathe, and to remain as calm as possible. You will not get stuck here.” His striped rump neatly shuffled forward, vanguarded by Truth’s magelight. “And keep the mad one in check!”

If any were afraid of tight spaces, they kept it hidden. One by one, they slid into the fracture, just ahead of the water.

*

Fliegende Freundschaft Uber Alles,envelope plump with magically heated air, drifted purposefully through the sky away from Ponyville. Whom was leaning over the edge of the basket, peering down at the ground. Her tail lashed excitedly. Twilight internally frowned at the joyfulness, between reads of the synthesis for Nectar #1. That scale of unabashed merriness was just not normal. Even the run-in with Luna, and their own difficult chat, had only put a dampener on it for a few minutes.

“This thing is all Old High Equuish to me, Whom,” she said, somewhat dejectedly. “I’m one of Equestria’s foremost living academics, bearded persons notwithstanding, and I just can’t understand it. What are we, in the face of the ancients? Sad little foals, nuzzling around in the dirt and chasing worms. I mean really, listen to this.” She ruffled the scroll in her magic and cleared her throat. “‘The prepared LSE--’ - that’s lunar squid eye, by the way - ‘--the prepared LSE was added to 522ml of well-agitated and refluxing aqua regia in an inert environment and furthermore agitated with 1.124 Foe until the Upsilon-phi-three catastrophic collapse mode occurred, resulting in, after prolonged cooling, 1.2kg of dark amber solids.’”

“What’s so difficult to understand?” said Whom, looking at her with one eyebrow raised.

“Well, these units, for one thing,” Twilight said. “What’s a Foe? It’s obviously not the dictionary definition, an enemy or opponent.” She glanced away in thought. “Although, given the general high-order weirdness we’re dealing with here…”

“Oh, it’s an acronym, isn’t it?” Whom said, smiling widely. “Fifty one ergs, ten to the power of fifty one ergs.”

“Eh?” Twilight said, almost dropping the scroll. “Ergs? What’s an erg?”

“Equal to ten to the seventh minus power joules,” she said, closing her eyes and nodding. “So, 12.1 Foes is--”

“Lots,” said Twilight, her inner mathematician doing a spit take and dropping her chalk. “Lots and lots. Much energy. Many energies.”

“Nightmare Moon used to say it was called that because it was the only thing her enemies were going to get from her, so it might as well have their names on.”

“We couldn’t do it on the planet,” said Twilight, shaking her head. “We couldn’t do it anywhere near the planet. Where would I even get that much energy?”

Whom’s attention span expired, and she was back over the edge of the basket, absorbing the view.

“We’re still missing most of the ingredients anyway,” Twilight said, shaking her head. “We’ve got the squid eye, the lunar nightshade and the uranium, but that’s only three of nine.”

“What else is there?”

“One bushel of Phallocentri nottlingi, never heard of that one, I imagine it’s a plant of some kind. A single troy ounce of Cummingtonite, I think we can just ask a geologist, doesn’t seem too hard. One firkin of stallion’s tears--” She stopped, frowned externally. “Stallion’s tears? Do we have to round up the bachelor herd and read them sad poetry?”

“Oh, I hope not,” Whom said, glancing round, face a mask of genuine terror. “A firkin’s two whole kilderkins, or just over forty litres! That’s an awful lot of crying.”

“Then we need three pods from a mature Soma hyperphoria, another plant I’ve never heard of, a pint of water from the spring of Avalon, I assume that’s under the mountain somewhere, might be tricky, considering recent events, and--” Twilight cocked her head, licked her lips. “A dolphin?”

“A dolphin?” Whom said. “Like, the fish?”

“It’s a mammal.”

“Oh,” said Whom, resting on the edge of the basket. “What do you use the dolphin for?”

“It’s so you can reduce the ‘alarmingly’ red liquid produced at step nineteen to a ‘calmingly’ mauve solid required for step twenty, apparently,” said Twilight. “This whole synthesis sounds like it was written by someone who was, at some point, trained in proper, honest chemistry, but then got into an unpleasant cart accident and never quite recovered. How on Equestria does a dolphin help?”

“Dolphins are cute,” Whom said, after a moment of silence. “Cute animals always make everything better.”

“You know, Whom,” said Twilight, adjusting the balloon’s power output for higher flight. “I couldn’t agree more.”

*

“I know it sounds drastic--” began Fluttershy.

“Drastic?” snapped Lux, putting herself between the half-conscious Element and the yellow one. “You want to fill her full of untested dental anaesthetic!”

“Canterlites chew the leaves to stay awake,” said Fluttershy, calmly. “It makes sense that a concentration of whatever’s in the leaf might produce a more powerful effect, especially injected.”

“That’s conjecture, and testing it in this circumstance would be wholly unethical,” Lux said, ears back. “I’ll have no part of it. For all you know, it’s a vicious poison at high doses. Her liver might start boiling out her ears before I’ve even got the plunger down half-way.”

“Doctor Lux, you said it yourself, Dash won’t wake up properly for hours,” Fluttershy said. “Days, even. We need her up and on her hooves, now.”

The sounds of screaming and panic filled the makeshift infirmary, and a firepony came galloping in, eyes wide and nostrils flaring.

“Mayor, there’s a giant bloody bird on the roof, it’s making these unholy noises like I’ve never heard…” he panted, breathlessly.

Fluttershy nodded politely.

“Please excuse me for a moment,” Fluttershy said. “He’s one of mine.”

Mr Beaky was perched above the atrium when she entered at a trot, cocking his head back and forth and cawing, irritably moving between different holds on the roof. It looked for all the world like he was one of the rodent-eating ground birds that populated some parts of Equestria, lurking near a mousehole, about to drive his beak inside to pluck out a furry morsel. Ponies were hiding on the thresholds, whinnying and squealing in fright.

“Awk,” said Mr Beaky, focusing one eye on her. “Awk!”

“She is?” Fluttershy replied, automatically. “Wait a minute, you can talk?”

“Awk.” The giant bird nodded, slowly. “Awk.”

“I see, that’s actually a very good reason, you’ve got me there,” Fluttershy said, blushing slightly. “I’d have done the same thing, in your position.”

“Awk, awk.”

“You shame me.”

“Awk, awk.”

“Do you think you could guide her balloon down?” Fluttershy said. “Those things can be hard to land with any accuracy.”

Mr Beaky nodded, then leapt into the sky and was gone. Several very large black feathers tumbled slowly into the atrium.

*

The fracture between the rocks only got narrower and more constricting. It was only anger and blind fear that kept Emboss sane and moving. He briefly wondered if it was the same for the others. Whatever the motivation, nobody slowed down, even when it became necessary to strip off panniers and drag them along behind them. Emboss thought they were going gradually down, though the fracture eventually terminated abruptly and spat them out into a curiously regular tube of smooth black rock, which curved roughly northwards, ever trending gradually downwards. The inundation of water was lessening, but they could hear it constantly behind them, squeezing its way in.

The heat was rising too. Stuffy, clammy air laden with moisture seemed to be rising up out of the depths. It smelled of decay, of nitrates, uncleaned middens and the scent of fired guns. His ears kept popping as pressures shifted about and changed. The tube branched after about half an hour of crawling, offering a wider nodule of empty space speckled with various mouths, out of which iYut picked their route with only a moment’s hesitation. He had some strange sense down here. Emboss strongly suspected a sort of low-level, species-wide magic; some brain structure that was sensitive to the lines of thaumic force that ran through the world.

More tunnels, more passageways. Most of it looked natural, the result of water wearing rocks away through thousands of years attrition; some had a decidedly manufactured appearance. Others bore traces of having been shorn up, their unstable parts hewn away and more durable elements added. It didn’t take a subterrene to spot the bricks. Others still were disturbing in the way that they looked like they’d been drilled through blocks of granite with sheer force of magical will. Glasses and other bits of the spoor of too-powerful mages gave the game away.

Several hours had passed before Emboss spared a thought for what was happening on the surface. His body ached sympathetically as his adrenaline spiked, realising that, whatever the Crown had done to defend the nation had long since happened. There would only be the fallout now. That was how Divine magic worked. It wasn’t something that needed long preparation, careful study, devout meditation in remote places and the carting around of at least one very heavy book. It just happened, and the lesser species that were subject to it were left to wonder the why or how of it. Emboss had never been a hugely studied mage. The usual intuitive telekinesis and a few handy self-defense spells, that was it. His wife was the real unicorn. But he knew that the magic of unicorns and the magic of the Divine had very little in common, and barely seemed to be describable in mortal terms.

Probably something hugely bright and showy; no real witnesses, everyone who saw the flash is dead, blind or half-mad he thought, as he incurred further banged hocks and scratches from the cold and unrelenting stone. His bones and skin and muscles ached wretchedly. There has to be a breaking point. The equine form isn’t designed to be punished so much, and for so long. Something will give. I’ll fall and not get up again. They’ll have to lay me by the side of the road, or in the nook of the tunnel, as it were, and Truth would never leave me, and that would be that…

iYut froze suddenly. His ears folded back as his lithe frame became rigid, but then they swept forward, searching. He scented the air. In the black depths ahead and below, something howled.

It sounded hungry.

Deus Ex Machina; Or the God in the Machine and the Machine in the God

The Crown scythed through the air wrapped in a sheath of intensely curved spacetime. Had anyone been able to match its acceleration factors or cruising velocity five times that of sound, they would have seen a cigar-shaped oblong the colour of deep space, distorting light around itself into a strange circular nimbus, whose optically bent curve constantly shifted. The Crown’s path described a classic ballistic arc, at the apex of which it stopped suddenly, as if it had never been moving at all.

The tsunami spread across the whole continent. Even from a height of five kilometres, there appeared no end to it. Like a perverse sheet of night, the watery terminator drifted eastwards slowly but inexorably. The fore part of the wave was a dun mess the colour of mud, with purer strains further back bearing floating islands of the conglomerate-ruin-beyond-measure. The Crown directly perceived very little of this. It was, as always when it was separated from its host, only broadly aware of where and when it was. It could feel the weight of the planet below it, but it had to concentrate hard to filter it from the much heavier signal of the galactic barycentre. Photons remained a purely academic concept.

Already, it was getting difficult to remember why it was now extending the gravitational curtain, preparing to prevent the wave from covering the remainder of the continent. There seemed very little point to it. Mass extinctions happened continuously, if one took the universe as a whole. If it was not volcanic eruptions, superimpactor events, tidal waves, earthquakes or gamma ray bursts, it was nuclear exchanges or some other deliberate existential issue. This wave was one of the deliberate ones. Who was it to prevent all that hard work, anyway? It felt like too much bother.

The curve was roughly a kilometre across now, though the process it was using to bend and contort space was an exponentially strengthening one. The more energy it fed in, the faster the expansion became, which allowed it to feed more energy in, and so on. There was a lot of fun, it thought, to be had from bending space. For one thing, mass passing through said bent space ended up taking a much longer actual path. If you carried on bending and contorting, mass often vanished entirely. Something at the very bottom of the deep pit in space would give way. The Crown wasn’t sure of where, if anywhere, the mass ended up.

Once the curve had attained a diameter of ten kilometres, the Crown nudged it with extra energy in certain places, and it began to expand vertically too, in both directions. It had figured on a few kilometres of safety space, top and tail. This considerably increased the cost of the entire operation, but energy had never been a real problem for it anyway. The thaumic field was limitless, if one conceptualized the thauma on a universal scale, which was, in the Crown’s opinion, the only proper way to do it. Pony mages had no style at all.

Waste energy from the process escaped in sporadic bursts, all along the curve, which was now more than twenty kilometres long, gaining three per second and getting faster. Tons of water flashed to steam in great white eruptions in front of the curve, and stands of trees exploded in brief imitations of fireworks behind it. Where the curve had touched the ground, weird eruptions of soil and mud and very confused earthworms had been piled up against it, melting and oozing and suddenly vanishing at the black limit of the barrier.

The wave met the curve at different points, when it was about two thousand kilometres long. Water, debris and all the other accumulated bits of the gryphic peoples fell into the blackness and vanished. It wasn’t entirely sure of the precise dimensions of the wave, but it hoped this would be enough. It had considered, for a moment, just applying the energy it was now expending in this process directly to the wave, converting it all into relatively harmless steam. However, Hywell’s mind had been very disapproving of this plan of action, something about rain and condensation. The Crown did something that broadly approximated a long sigh. His father had been much more exciting.

Millions of tons of water was now on its way to somewhere. Millions more was about to follow. The majority of the gryphic peoples had been spared drowning, at a loss of only twelve villages and four major cities. The Crown, feeling very little about this achievement, set an internal timer, which counted down the minutes until it could return to Hywell.

*

Princess Luna watched from the ample shadows as the accursed Berry Punch limped pathetically back home. The fire had very much passed now, leaving in its wake a miserable feeling, a leaden weight on her withers. It took until Punch fumbled with her keys, dropping them repeatedly in the mud, having to root around in it with her muzzle to try and hook them over the top, for Luna to realize that this feeling was guilt.

*

“After I departed Porte Pronto, there followed another most miserable sea voyage aboard a griffon tramp junker. I suffered roundly from Cape Horn fever, amongst other divers ilys. Two weeks later, I arrived at Ruud Banger, where at last my seafaring ended. It is a deep sorrow of mine that I hold to this day that no faster method exists for traversing this atrocious ocean.

Taking a private alce carriage to Lo Squitz required only a modest outlay of funds. To my horror, these persons were commanded by gryphons mounted on the carriage itself, whose instructions were conveyed to the mouths of the alce by the most barbaric of bridles, bits and harnesses. While these are not dissimilar to our own such devices for moving heavy loads comfortably and efficiently, the fact that they rely on active and sustained coercion delivered by another party places them in a frightful league of their own. I could not, however, take to my hooves, for the sea voyage had weakened me considerably, and I had no time to spare.

Lo Squitz is a small town, though I see much in its future. I managed to spare some time to see its underground barge locks and docking platforms, all in various stages of construction. Large quantities of gold have been spent here already, and yet more is on the way. After a day in my lodgings, which proved surprisingly amenable to the desires and format of the Equestrian, I was much heartened, and set out with sufficient supplies to reach the coordinates which I had been given. We are only lucky that gryphons respect gold, regardless of which species has proffered it!

Much has been said of the zebra culture-in-exile and their mastery of camouflage. I will not do the reader the disservice of repeating it here and assuming they are unlearned! It should, therefore, be no surprise to learn that the zebras discovered me before I discovered them. They were initially somewhat hostile but, once I showed them the ‘item’ and related to them the story that had been vouchsafed to me, the mood changed considerably. They returned me to their traveling camp, which was located in a hidden cave the mouth of which was some distance up the side of an abandoned quarry. There we took part in a customary singing ritual, which I have described in some detail in the postordium.

It was only later on, after the rituals were completed, that the burning mushrooms were brought out and the visions began.” - excerpted from Travails O’er Lande and Sea: The Return of the Great Knobbly Koteka of the Zebra, by Chifney Bit, equinologist, AN 566.

*

Berry Punch had to be let inside, in the end. Luna barely held herself within the gaseous shadow form she’d adopted when she realized it was a little dusky foal that opened the door. He could not have been more than three or four. He began crying as soon as he saw what had happened to his dam, in between running around on still-too-gangly legs in a frenzy. He fell over in the mud outside twice, tripping on the step, before Berry Punch urged him inside and closed the door with her rump.

Luna manifested a nose and smelled the air. Something was different about the foal. She sniffed twice, then returned fully to gas again. That was it. Berry Punch had lain with the nottlygna, and produced an outsider crossing. This wasn’t uncommon. The nottlygna were aspects of herself, after all. Offspring with one pony parent would always be largely equine in characteristics, carrying only a few of the slight modifications full blooded nottlygna possessed. She wondered which this foal had. She also wondered whether she was still a Good Pony.

*

Fluttershy was half-way through a discussion with the mayor about Elemental rights, civil code and their application to the immediate situation of civil disaster response, when the last remaining window in the mayor’s office blew in, lit from behind by a day-bright flash of actinic blue light. She felt the noise of it primarily through her teeth; her ears gave up and went home, not even bothering to try and translate.

“Rut me sideways!” Elegy bellowed, cringing. “What was that?”

*

Twilight hadn’t meant to cast Roderick’s Rather Fabulous Completely Amazing Artificial Rubies #1. Even if she had, there was no way she’d have put so much force behind it. The rokh had snuck up on her, suddenly looming out from nowhere like a great, silent owl. It was the proper, equine response to being startled in such a manner. The spell had been lurking in her mind ever since she’d considered using it on the horrible Tartaran creature so, of course, it had been the first to get cast.

Rubies #1 generated a small telekinetic cube, generally referred to as the enclosure, then subjecting the contents of that cube to two thousand degrees of heat. The material intended was finely processed aluminium powder, to produce rubies by crystallization. In this case, it had been a rokh, producing nothing identifiable, save for a flurry of singed feathers.

Twilight beat her wings in the aftermath of the incident, gently supporting Whom with her magic. To her credit, she was making an effort to flap, but she was the worst flier Twilight had ever seen and, to someone recently enwinged, this was no small feat. She looked even more confused than normal. Below, the flaming ruins of the Sparkle family balloon, Fliegende Freundschaft Uber Alles, plunged onto the roof of a small shop, breaking up into smoking fragments.

“Argh!” said Whom, unhelpfully.

“Fluttershy is not going to be happy,” said Twilight.

*

The little eohippus in Emboss’ head began pointing and, if it had been able to talk and not merely been a figment of his imagination, saying something that would have sounded very much like I bloody well told you so.

iYut sniffed the air very daintily; a foal after his dam’s teats. Emboss wondered what the zebra could possibly be smelling. All he could detect was mould, the mustiness of damp, water in stagnant and flowing forms, the subtle tang of distant decay. Their species were very closely related, he knew. There could not have been enough time for significant differences in olfactory sensitivity to emerge. iYut licked his lips and performed a brief flehmen gesture. Emboss found this slightly distasteful.

There was another howl. Its aural texture had changed. It didn’t sound like the close-by howling of a hungry wolf. It sounded like someone doing a bad impression of a hungry, close-by wolf. Emboss half-expected a pony to come round the next bend in the tunnel wearing a silly wolf outfit and waving around a cap to collect pennies in. iYut uncoiled, muscles relaxing and trembling. His ears hung loose, horizontal.

“Many dangers lurk in these tunnels,” he said, turning to face Emboss. “This is not one of them. For a moment, I feared it was an Extremely Great Worm, or something like that.” He shook his head and smiled. “But this is only a taraxippus.”

“Er…” said Emboss, blinking muzzily. “Um… ‘pony botherer’ ?”

“Your science named it, not ours,” said iYut. “I do not speak your illuminated languages.”

“I’d translate it more as disturber than botherer, love,” Truth said, from behind him. “The thing which disturbs ponies.”

“It doesn’t have big teeth, does it?” said Emboss, starting to fidget.“No penchant for ponyflesh, that sort of thing?”

“It does have big teeth,” iYut said. “Well, one big tooth. Like a ridge of bone. It uses this to scrape slime and fungus from the walls of wet caves. No fan of flesh, I am afraid.”

“Why’s it making that noise then?” Emboss said.

“To ward off Great Worms, of course,” iYut said. “The only way to do that is to sound like an Extremely Great Worm.”

“And what if you’re being hunted by Extremely Great Worms?” said Emboss.

“Ah, well--”

“Gents,” Truth said. “Can we please save the assuredly fascinating talk for later?”

“Right you are, dear.”

*

Some uncountable span of hours passed. The going got progressively worse, as the drier, milky-white cave and tunnel floors became damper, and covered in greater patches with molds, fungus and other herbivorous things, which appeared to Emboss to be neither plant nor mushroom, but something in between. Large, round ‘flowers’ topped loose, almost runny stems and half-exposed root systems that ran in and out of the rock, apparently capable of burrowing through it as if it were soil. The smell of particularly well-rotted compost heap, a near-constant, now took on a sulphurous overtone, like all the eggs in the world rotting at once.

Nobody said very much, except for Hywell, and little of his babbling made much sense anyway, though even that had decayed to a sort of mumbling, breathy hooting. The gryphons were terrified and exhausted simultaneously. Eyes adapted to spot prey in broad daylight over long distances were no use in the cramped, confined and pitch black tunnels of the deeps. They jumped at every little sound, and Emboss could see that each burst of adrenaline was taking a greater and greater toll.

As they entered another void, identifiable only as such because the narrowness of the walls petered out to nothing, Emboss felt a sensation like a hoof being drawn down a blackboard. He turned to his wife just in time to see her wince and whimper. Her magelight failed and sputtered out, then came back on again a few moments later.

“iYut?” said Emboss, his own voice sounding alien to him after so long without talking. “What was that?”

“It is a good sign,” he said, smiling. “We are at the right depth. Those whom you seek, when in Repose, draw magic out of the world like hungry leeches. Much of it is sent back out in a different form. Interference, if you like, a pony shouting too loudly in a quiet room.”

“Absolutely, we have perhaps ten or fifteen more miles to go!”

“Oh, for the love of--”

Bright light flared suddenly in the cavern ahead, briefly exposing details of a large, cathedral-like space, then a fundament-rattling explosion obliterated the aural landscape. Emboss collapsed, half out of exhaustion and half out of primal fear. As the ringing cleared his ears, he heard a clattering of hooves greater than the number of the party; the tell-tale slithery clinking and clunking of well-oiled plate armour accompanied it. Emboss knew at once that it was soldiery. He’d spent enough time in and out of Canterlot to recognize it when he saw it.

Someone shouted something unintelligible; it sounded gryphic, that same rattling, cawing register, but pronounced by lips not designed for it. Another voice came back. It was iYut, but speaking in the liquid, lilting zebric tongue. Someone shoved Emboss forcefully, and he whimpered as he felt the edge of something he horribly suspected was a blade against his sweat-drenched neck. The stink of exertions and fear attacked his senses and, as his harassed eyes recovered from the blinding flash, saw monsters made real.

It’s just armour, he told himself. Not monsters. Definite equine shapes were resolved under the curved metal plates. They were soot black and unsmooth, and had not one nod to aesthetics or the knightly traditions that were so common in Equestrian suits. Black orbs in the place of eyes examined him impassively, and one leg, layered to the hock with armour proper and draped with jet mail to the unadorned hoof, bore a thin, wicked steel to him. It extended from the end of the leg and curved backwards, like some fantastically improbable vestigial digit. While it was hard to draw his eyes away from the weapon, he saw that similar equine mountains were menacing the rest of the party, gryphons especially.

The zebric came to an end, and one of the armoured equines started speaking in Equuish. Emboss didn't recognize the dialect. It was like someone had decided to learn the language from a badly written book by way of a traumatic brain injury.

“Trespassing,” the form said, and Emboss realized it was a mare, or decidedly of the female persuasion in any case. “Explanations forthcoming, full of hope?”

“Be calm, and offer no resistance,” said iYut, from the wrong end of a witherspear, whose wielder seemed to lack species sympathy. “They are on our side.”

“I thought these guys were a myth, you know,” said Astrapios. “A little story told to frighten fat birds and keep them out of the tunnels.”

“Real, last time examined, doubtful situation changed,” said the armoured equine, and Emboss thought he could hear a trace of sarcasm. “Incognito ergo sum? Folly, forgive. We are Drax.”

“A warrior tradition,” said iYut, ears back, though if it was from fear, apprehension or some combination of awe and dread, he couldn't say. “Guardians of the Repose.”

“We're looking for the-- ” Emboss said, pausing as the metal head moved suddenly to inspect him more closely and his heart jumped. “We're here to see the Centaurs.”

There was an angry-sounding exchange of zebric between the Drax and iYut. Emboss heard an avalanche of new words tumble down around him. He cursed himself again for not having a better fluency. He could understand some of the written form, insofar as it applied to names, but the sort encountered in the wild and actually spoken was a wholly different and ungelded beast. Loose morphemes and phonemes and fricative stops plied the air with the unabashed purpose and naked ambition of a prostitute.

“Bid you speak,” said the Drax mare, suddenly getting quite close to Emboss, and it brought whatever conversation they were having in other languages to an immediate halt. “Little Equestrian, state the business, in your own words.”

*

“I really didn’t mean for this, you know,” Shining Armour said, in the darkness of the empty Selenite Court.

“Yes, sir,” Afore said, flatly.

“I only wanted to blow the gates open, it was never my intent to…”

“Wipe from memory the capital of Equestria, sir?” Afore suggested. “Obliterate in cleansing fire a city that has stood for more than ten centuries against foes uncounted, birthed culture beyond measure--”

“Yes, yes! All of that!” Shining Armour said, sniffing and thanking the gloom for hiding the tears that were currently making tracks down the soot on his muzzle.

“They had some really nice art galleries here too, sir. Very classy, none of that modern stuff either, all pastoral landscapes with little birds and everything.” There was the sound of a bottle being clumsily uncorked, then Afore spat, and there was a little thump as the cork landed on a nearby overstuffed pouffe. “Emphasis very strongly on the had, sir.”

“My wife was out there too,” he squeaked, and began to sob. “Oh, Cadence!”

“There, there, sir, I’m sure she escaped before you killed everyone,” Afore said, and drank a long draught from the bottle. “Here, have some of this, it’ll help with those burns, I think it might be some kind of port.”

“I don’t want any,” he said, sounding all the world like a petulant foal. “I want to go back in time and stop all this from happening in the first place.”

“I don’t need to remind you, sir, that time travel is a physical impossibility.” More sounds of drinking.

“No it isn’t, I distinctly remember reading something my sister wrote, about an incident with Starswirl’s forbidden texts,” Shining Armour said, finding a pouffe in the darkness to flop miserably on. “She... she met a version of herself from the future, or something?”

“Oh, yes, I read about that, sir,” Afore said, with a clink of the bottle on the polished obsidian floor beneath the leaf-litter like layer of pouffes. “Turned out not to be time travel at all, there was a tribunal hearing and a thaumic conference on the subject.”

“Really?” Shining Armour said. “I don’t recall.”

“Yes, sir. They determined that it was just another of Starswirl’s pranks. Hallucinations and memory edits, I believe. Tricky business. They couldn’t examine the spell mechanism directly, because the scroll destroyed itself after use, but all the witness statements confirmed no time travel took place, and they discovered traces of editing in certain persons affected.”

“Well, fancy that,” said Shining Armour.

“Fancy that indeed, sir.”

From somewhere above, there was a sudden and tremendous crash, like a steam train hitting the building. The ground shook and, all around, things began to fall from the roof of the artificial cavern. They landed with the occasional muted crack as they somehow managed not to hit the pouffes. Shining Armour whinnied and lit up his horn, something he’d dare not do before in case it showed his face. Glassy chunks of obsidian had been dislodged by the force of whatever had happened above.

“By the Crystal Heart,” Afore said, choking on a mouthful of port. “What was that?”

“My wife?” said Shining Armour, excitedly. “The heat from the fires must have fused the doors, she’d probably have had to smash her way in!”

“With respect, sir, don’t start that again,” Afore said, with a very serious tone of voice.

“We need to investigate,” Shining Armour said. “She might be hurt. She might just have used the last of her power and strength to batter down those great ponyoak doors.” He was getting faster and more worked up, scrambling to his hooves and knocking over unseen bottles and tins of satinal. “Ye Gods, we have to get to her!”

“Yes, sir,” said Afore, fetching up his witherspear. “Freedom to speak, sir?”

“Always, Afore.”

“If you look like you’re going to do that strong force thing again, I’m going to put this somewhere very unprofessional.” He rolled his shoulders, and the tip of the spear waved around in the air. “Sir.”

“Understood,” Shining Armour said, nodding. “Very much.”

The two of them picked their way through the quagmire of pouffes with a greatly hurried pace, knocking over low incense burners and the occasional satinal pipe. Shining Armour led the way up the staircases, cut through and into the rock, that gave staff and courtiers quick access through the larger fabric of the palace. Mare’s unmentionables, empty bottles, pillows and spilled plates of food turned the stairs into another obstacle course, though the worst of it had been cleared on their way down in the first place.

As Shining Armour came to the top of the stairs, he saw in silhouette what he had not dared hope to actually see; the shadowed figure of an alicorn. He grunted with joy and with exertion, throwing himself up the last steps with reckless abanon. He was moving too quickly to ponder why the shadow was rearing up, and seemed to be frozen. Neither did he notice that the shape appeared to have one more leg than it really should have done.

Shining Armour collapsed and stared up at the thing which sat where once there had been a pair of huge ponyoak doors, at the far end of the palace’s entrance hall. His mouth moved, trying to find words to describe it. All of his senses screamed at him, but he could not comprehend the enormity, the terror, the sheer girth. Finally, he managed to whisper, in trembling words: “What is that?”

“That, I believe, sir,” said Afore, coming up the stairs behind him. “Is Celestia Penetro Omnes.”

*

Twilight landed with Whom in unsupported tow behind, pink wings just about strong enough to make a gliding touchdown. Whom immediately tripped over her own hooves and went nose-over-tail, colliding noisily with stacked wooden crates and piles of medical refuse. Twilight sighed as Whom untangled herself and stood up, shaking a bucket from her head. All around them, black feathers and unidentifiable motes that she desperately hoped weren’t bits of the former bird, rained down, mixing with falling ash and the general miasma of acrid smoke. She sneezed and fiddled with her mane, wiping out real and imagined bird parts with telekinetic jabs.

“Mr Beaky?” said a plaintive little voice, which made Twilight cringe. “Mr Beaky, where are you?”

Twilight spotted Fluttershy arcing into the air from the steps of a large, civic-looking building, whose front formed one of the long sides of the plaza. Several dozen ponies of various races had followed her out, foremost being a stout-looking stallion and a slighter, black and white mare. Oh, rut me, she named it, Twilight thought.

“What happened to Mr Beaky, Twilight?” Fluttershy called down, when she was hovering over the centre of the plaza. “What was that big flash of light?”

“I’m so sorry, Fluttershy,” she said, ears drooping.

“What did you do?!”

“He just came right out of nowhere, and I’ve been so on edge lately, and it just happened--”

“Where’s Mr Beaky?” She was shouting as she descended, landing on the hardstone with what Twilight would have sworn were sparks. “What did you do to him?”

“Twilight?” said Whom, from behind her somewhere. “Do feathers normally do that?”

“He’s gone, Fluttershy, I cast…” she said, ignoring Whom and trailing off as she thought of how to phrase it tactfully. “I cast a very powerful spell, one that makes rubies. There’s nothing left.”

As she said it, a large black feather landed on Fluttershy’s snout. She screamed as she noticed it and fell over, as if instinctively throwing herself away from it. The feather seemed like it danced away, but she was too distracted to follow it, even as it vanished from sight. Twilight resisted the urge to wrap her friend in her wings and hold her, but figured this might just make things worse.

“Not much left, anyway,” Twilight corrected.

“I’ve never seen feathers do that,” Whom said, yet unheard.

“But why, Twilight?” Fluttershy said, choking down tears.

“He surprised me,” Twilight said, weakly. “I’m sorry.”

“These birds are unique, Twilight, they’re so rare. Every single one is precious. You can’t just kill them!”

There was a crackle in the air, like the last ebbs of distant lightning, and Twilight gritted her teeth, riding through the familiar thaumokinetic feedback of a powerful spell being cast in her immediate vicinity. She glanced around, angrily looking for whatever unicorn had committed this magical faux pas. Now, it was her turn to scream. Some distance away, a black skeleton, not more than an outline, of a huge avian figure, had appeared. Feathers and blobs, chunks and oozes of carbonized matter were dribbling, bouncing and hopping toward it. Magic throbbed through the air with the same feeling of imminent fecundity as a stallion’s private member.

“Awk,” said Mr Beaky. “Awk.”

*

The Drax had put away their weapons, though with the majority of them being integrally mounted, this was actually more a case of them no longer being held so close to various throats or other sensitive spots. Emboss was beginning to regret not looking more into personal protective equipment before embarking. They were doing incredible things with very lightweight chainmail and densely woven cottons these days, though he doubted it would have helped very much in any case. The weapons being brandished by the Drax were decidedly military. No little shivs or ancient crossbow-staves here.

“Your story, fascinating,” said the Drax mare who, as it turned out, bore an equivalent rank of sergeant. “Worrying, measures equal. Also, hard to believe. If not traveling, member of zebra species alongside, perhaps deal with you by way of erasure. Make you to eating mushrooms, forget all about underground, forget names.” She chuckled, and it sounded like gas bubbling through mud. “Wake up in gryphon whorehouse with bites and new illnesses of the low regions. No more problem.”

Erisne and Ensire seemed to take some kind of unspoken, possibly professional, umbrage at this though, as with many gryphic postures of body language, it was hard to tell.

“Is that supposed to be a threat, or an incentive?” Astrapios said, clicking his beak. “Magic mushrooms and plenty of hens, sounds good to me.”

“But you do believe us?” Emboss said, blearily.

“Belief not required in this instance,” the mare said. “Our Graphs have told us of strangeness for days. World waves, this would fit with latest datums.”

“Graphs?” said Emboss.

“Devices for measuring.”

“Measuring what, exactly?”

“Many things,” the mare said, then shook her head. “Drax are not Graphers, Drax defenders, go where Graphers tell us.”

“Where did they tell you to go this time, then?” Truth said, sidling over to her husband and touching shoulders gently.

“Recover datums to make benefit larger pool of datums,” the mare said, shrugging. “Search out, inspect, cover ground, reconnoitering intended. Drax accomplish tasks set by rendering you to Graphers of the Repose. This will suffice.”

“Render us to those in Repose?” said Emboss, shaking his head and squinting; everything was getting a bit blurry and hard to remember.

“Graphers of the Repose,” said the Drax.

“I think they’re going to take us to their leader, dear,” said Truth.

“Oh,” said Emboss. “Good.”

Later, he would not recall collapsing.

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions Or; The Double Pelvis Shuffle

Emboss awoke again, and felt equine for the first time in a week. He was lying on his stomach on a huge pouffe or futon, which was made of the most impossibly fluffy material, like the milk fur of a foal. Nothing hurt. Nothing ached. If he concentrated, near-imperceptible twitches and twinges ran through his joints and muscles, but they had the warm sensation of a job-well-done. There was the feeling that he could drift off into sleep at any moment, and he was only holding himself awake by the merest thought. Fragrant perfume wafted through the air, bringing notes of saffron and cinnamon, as well as of sugared fruit. Candied plums, loganberries, peaches in syrup, and several others he didn’t recognize, but which smelled equally delicious.

He immediately suspected that he was dead.

There was the sound of hooves on hard stone, moving gently and without hurry. Emboss tried to lift his head, but found it was made of lead. Someone did it for him, lifting him up and adding to the mountain of pillows. The smooth snouts of others felt along his sides, drifting dangerously close to his stifles, but never coming near enough to violate his personal space. He felt teeth on his withers. His mane was delicately brushed, such as it was. His attendants smelled like mares, none his wife; he managed to scare up some strength to resist their ministrations. He tried to speak, but it came out as gibberish. It seemed to be enough, as they stopped at once.

“He wakes,” said a mare, in surprisingly perfect Equuish; he detected a hint of Canterlotian.

“I shall fetch the Grapher,” said another.

The teeth and combs withdrew, and there were further sounds of hooves leaving. Emboss tried to struggle up onto his rump, tried to summon the words needed to ask the questions that boiled fuzzily in his mind, but it took him several minutes even to open his eyes. The world was blurry. He subconsciously felt around with his magic for his glasses. He eventually found them at the side of the bed; it was another immense effort to heft himself over and drag the little spectacles up and perch them properly on his face.

The room reminded him of a spa. Truth had taken him to such places on several occasions. Fluted columns of polished white marble held up the corners, and a vaulted ceiling with a decorative floral boss in the centre held station over the bed. Very solid looking tables, made of some kind of granite, held the food he had smelled, as well as a dizzying array of equipment he didn’t recognize. It was made of a brassy material, and looked like it could have been used to unclog bathrooms or deal with the intestinal problems of dragons. Several of the attachments appeared to be more at home in an armoury.

He heard hoofsteps again, and a zebra came in through a neatly curved archway. He was short, even for his generally compact species, but very stocky and muscled. He was immediately distracted, though, by the appearance of Truth behind him. His heart soared, and she cantered in, practically slamming him onto the bed. She nickered and hugged him, as if trying to climb on top of him.

“Thanks be,” she whispered, voice barely audible. “To any Gods that can hear, Celestia, Luna...”

She looked like she’d been crying. Her mane, usually so carefully kept, was a tangled mess, and her eyes were shadowed as if she hadn’t slept.

“What?” said Emboss, throat taut.

“You died, you stupid nag, you died, and--” she stopped, turned to glance at the zebra. “They brought you back.”

“Seem to be doing well for a dead pony,” said Emboss, kissing her weakly.

“You were reanimated by the kind intervention of our ancient friends, working through the tools that they have left for our use,” the zebra said.

He had an accent Emboss couldn’t place, but which was deep and mellow, and had a hint of roughness, a raspy aftertouch that suggested the owner had spent a lot of time in coal mines. It was the kind of voice adapted to public speaking and politicking. The zebra conducted himself with that same unabashed confidence, too. He moved like an apex predator, some weird combination of puma and equine, slinking through a prey-rich environment.

“This is Grapher iZen,” Truth said. “He’s the leader, here.”

“As I have said before,” iZen said, quite pleasantly. “That is not entirely true. Graphers hold no ranks or titles beyond the birthright. I am only the most apt person to be dealing with your current situation. We are a pure meritocracy.”

“That’s, uh,” Emboss mumbled. “Lovely, that’s it, that’s the word, lovely, for you, but can we consider our message and warning delivered?” He coughed, wincing as a little pain intruded on his thoughts. “We just want to go home.”

“What you have to understand, Mr Emboss, is that our ancient friends are not merely ancient in your sense, of a few thousands or tens of thousands of years old. You will say ancient, and mean your Palace, or your cities, or your Princesses.” iZen smiled amicably. “It is an understandable frame of mind, a perception born of limited information. Our ancient friends have a different view of things. They were children born of the last great cycle of evolving and emerging intelligences to which this world has played host.”

Emboss’ brow furrowed. He closed his eyes, blew air through his nose. Inertia came over him, a pure psychological need for simplicity, for calmness, for safety and rest. He felt as if a thousand nights would not be enough rest.

“Patience, there is a point to be made,” iZen said. “These ancients still remember the works and machinations of their long departed masters, who often warred and quarrelled among themselves. Toward the end of their occupational period, their rates of change and evolution had become so rapid that aggressor factions and extreme clades, offshoots of the family branches, occurred regularly and with… consequence.” iZen smiled a curious little smile and looked away, toward some unimportant spot on the ceiling. “Can you imagine it?”

“No,” said Emboss.

“Then merely imagine that our ancient friends have seen it all before,” iZen said, features rumpling a little, as if in mild distaste. “Been there, done it, got the pocket universe generator.”

“So they won’t help us?” Emboss said, as the very comfortable bed suddenly felt like it had dropped away from under him. “But--”

“They will consider the matter carefully,” iZen said. “I am merely making you aware of the salient points in their decision trees. Sticking points.”

“This situation affects everyone!” Emboss said, trying to lift himself up further. “The Thiasus will destroy everything!”

“Are you really so sure?” iZen said, licking his lips. “They remember the last time. We remember the last time. It was a catastrophe for one nation, lied about, spun, played down, the details carefully amended. A coup attempt, the War in the Night?” iZen stepped back, threw his head mockingly. “Yes, said the Diamond Dogs, we understand that. Sisters fight, don’t they? It’s nothing to do with us. Hah, said the gryphons. Our enemy’s woes are all the betterment to us.”

“And what did the zebra say?” Emboss growled. “Something cryptic and vague?”

“I am trying to make you aware of the perspectives of others, those who have witnessed calamities measurable by how viable the biosphere is afterwards, in how much of the planet remains habitable.” iZen shook his head. “Can you understand how the metamagical machinations of one nation’s beings might, perhaps, seem meaningless? Yes? Not worth getting out of bed for?”

Emboss said nothing. He had nothing left to give. He fell gently back onto the pouffe. There was an uncomfortable silence.

“This is not the death of hope. I am not the one who makes decisions in affairs such as these. Though I have spent my life attempting to know the minds of our ancient friends, I cannot say that my task is complete,” iZen said, after a moment. “Come, if you are able. We will find where your feathered accomplices and your native guide have gone, and I would show you some things.”

*

The spa-like room turned out to be one of many, arranged along a long, central corridor. They didn’t have doors, but little access tunnels that afforded the same sort of privacy. The colour scheme, of unintrusive magnolia, transitioned to a bright, mint green in the rest of the complex. The place seemed to be deserted at first, though as they were led out, Emboss heard faint hoofsteps and quiet talking that suggested they were merely being given a wide berth.

Getting up and going had been an easier affair than the mind-fog suggested. His body was working perfectly. The little clicks and aches in his knees that he’d had long before any mad adventures across the face of the planet had gone. He felt ten years younger, at least physically. Even the slight fatness in the neck he’d developed seemed to have shrunk. His mind was another thing entirely. It was as though he could actually feel his thoughts undulating slowly back and forth in the jelly of his consciousness.

The exited the infirmary, or spa, or whatever it was, into a large cave, lit by glowing braziers that dangled from chains affixed to a hidden ceiling. Emboss couldn’t see above their nearly-blinding, sun-like glow. Whatever they were burning, it gave off no smoke. He blinked, staring. He couldn’t quite believe that they had walked out into the middle of a city. He stood weakly on the pavement outside. Zebra, barely sparing them a second look, trotted past, some pulling carts down the road that the pavements bracketed. The architecture was all smooth and unadorned, except with some gentle paints.

“We are quite comfortable here, in our little town,” iZen said, noticing his awestruck look. “It is not what many might expect of zebra lowholds. Admittedly, it is atypical. We are very deep, nearly fifteen miles below sea level. With all the heat at this depth, you might think we’d be boiling in our own juices, but we have devices to compensate.”

“I think we were expecting it to be dark,” Truth said, from behind them.

“We are under the dark, where the light is,” iZen said, proudly. “A little beacon of the civilization that once was, bulwarked against a billion-year winter.”

“A billion years?” Emboss mumbled. “A billion years?”

“Come, let us not dawdle,” iZen said, shaking his head. “There is much to see.”

The streets around the infirmary were broad and surprisingly airy, fed by a cool breeze that came from many directions at once. It carried with it the personal scents of a small Equestrian village; stallions, mares, foals, though each was twisted slightly, the smell of zebras. There were none of the food smells, though. Equally absent were anything to do with the fuels for heating and cooking that he knew of; coal, oils and wood. It felt wrong, somehow, far too sterile and absent of the busyness of a proper town or village.

They headed through the neatly-planned streets toward the cave wall, which stretched clifflike above them. Rounding a corner, they came out into a small plaza, where a huge door was shut against whatever was outside. Lines drawn on the ground described the arc the door would swing out through. They’d attracted more attention now. Little huddles of zebra quietly whispered and watched as the group followed iZen toward a staircase cut into the rock beside the door. Emboss wondered just how many of the zebra here had ever seen a pony in the flesh. He doubted that it was very many.

“We are just in the next chamber,” iZen said, as they reached the top of the staircase, at which was a much smaller metal door, held open on latches. “We thought it wisest that external elements were kept within the Graphing Annex. Our population is largely self-contained. We did not wish to scare anyone.” He stopped, looked at the unicorns. “You may feel an unusual effect, coming up.”

They passed through the doors and it immediately became colder. Emboss felt his horn warm up. It became more uncomfortable with each step. He heard sizzling. Glancing, he saw that Truth had the same problem. Her horn had begun to glow. She didn’t look concerned.

“Induction,” iZen said. “The Graphs and other equipment draw magic out of the universal field very aggressively. There is often some wastage. It shames us, as it is the result of our poor understanding of the mechanisms.”

“It’s not so bad,” Truth said. “You get used to it quickly.”

“Just how long was I out for?” Emboss said, suddenly worried.

“Not more than a few hours, but iZen has been a gracious host, wouldn’t let us leave the Annex,” Truth said. “Practically drowned us in tea and cakes.”

“Oh, good,” Emboss said. “Shall we?”

The doors led to more tunnel, though this one was faced nicely with angular stones. There was an immediate increase in the decoration once they were inside. Ornate inscriptions, like flowing vines or frozen streams, covered many of the stones. It wasn’t even clear to Emboss that there were words written there at all. It wasn’t zebric, for he knew that language’s alphabet, nor was it gryphic or any variant on the theme of Equuish. Sentences cascaded into one another, lines coming in at right angles and branching off into three or four different pathways like the debris from an explosion.

There was some parallel connection in them, between details on different sides of the tunnel. He realized this as they came to a junction and he saw simultaneously two sentences that felt like they were related to one another jump sides, merge and break away again on the other side of the junction. Whatever language this was, it was meant to be read simultaneously in two different directions. How many eyes does a centaur have, anyway?

iZen brought them to a large room full of soft furnishings and low tables. Astrapios and iYut were playing some kind of card game, arranged on pouffes. Erisne and Ensire were preening each other in the far corner. A silver grooming kit was in pieces around them. The remains of cakes on bone china platters were stacked on one flat table. Emboss felt his hooves sink into the shag rug.

“Gadarn’s left tit!” Astrapios exclaimed. “The dead walk!” He flapped his wings merrily and leapt up, navigating a maze of pouffes, cocking his head left and right to examine him better. “How’re you feeling?”

“Tired,” Emboss said, smiling. “I’m glad to see they’ve not clapped you in irons, or thrown you in a lake of fire, or something.”

“They’re good hosts, aye,” Astrapios said. “I think it’s because the power dynamic is so wildly skewed in their favour here, that two gryphons and a hippogryph barely even register.”

“Such cynicism,” iZen said, rolling his eyes. “True, though.”

“I don’t see any guards; where did those Drax people go?” Emboss said. “And where is Hywell?”

“The Drax are only the tip of the spear, as it were,” iZen said. “Be assured that security is very close to us, at all times.” He looked upwards again, only briefly. “As for the King, we are keeping him in more appropriate surroundings until his Crown and his senses return.”

iYut came up behind Astrapios and dipped his head.

“You chose the right mine, it seems,” he said. “I am very grateful. Not just to be alive, you understand, but that I have had the chance to see this place from the inside. You hear talk, you hear tell of it, but it is not like anything I had expected.”

“You’ve never been here?” Emboss said, eyebrows raised. “You made it sound as if you had.”

“I did?” iYut said. “I am sorry if I have mislead you in any way.”

“You said that you knew the centaurs were in Repose,” Emboss said.

“Ah, I see. Zebra talk, Emboss. Gossip and chat makes its way through all strata of our society, even from here.” iYut laughed. “Gossip is the living, breathing soul of our people. Keeps us in tune with who we are in a sense greater than just one tribe or community.”

“And we never knew, did we?” Emboss said. “That’s the racial we. I mean no offence, but the impression Equestrians have of zebra are very different to all this.”

“Poor little equines, living in caves, running all the time from ravenous carnivores?” iYut said, smiling. “Transients, travellers, witchdoctors, alchemists, peddlers, a nation in a nation? We are so much more than that.”

“We’ve only been here five minutes, and we’ve done a lot of running from ravenous carnivores, aided in no small part by your bag of tricks, iYut,” Emboss said. “But yes, more or less.”

“My colleague overstates, I think,” iZen said. “Zebra lowholds are rarely deeper than five miles, have less than a thousand souls, and remain somewhat mobile. There is a reason beyond edification that so many of our number have gone abroad. It is a life, but it is a hard one.”

Emboss suddenly felt the ground move underneath his hooves. His horn vibrated and got hotter. He winced.

“We have been sidetracked,” iZen said. “I said I wanted to show you something. Please follow me.” As an afterthought, he said: “The gryphons will remain here.”

“Oh, keep your secrets, I don’t care, none of us do,” Astrapios said, shaking his head. “I’m a vegetarian, just like you, and those two have been persona non gratia upstairs for the better part of a decade.”

“Unlike you, hippogryph, I have never lusted after flesh,” iZen said, quite politely. “Difficult, being on the wagon, is it not? What was that delicacy Port Dauphine is so famed and infamous for? The bacon sandwich?” He smiled, almost undetectably. “Just speak aloud if you would like one, I am certain we would not have any problems preparing it.”

Astrapios said nothing, but stared at the zebra for a long moment. Then he rolled his eyes and waddled back through the complex of pouffes. iYut looked at iZen in an impenetrable zebric way, then his muzzle crumpled in distaste and he joined his captain. iZen just laughed and walked out, only stopping to check that Emboss and Truth were following him.

“That was a bit much, wasn’t it?” Emboss said, once they were out of the lounge.

“They are an enemy of my species, if not specifically of this place,” iZen said. “Never pass up a chance to spar verbally with your foes.”

“They risked their lives repeatedly to bring us here, and they had only our word on it,” Truth said. “Their ship was destroyed by the wave, and I don’t think they’ve even realised that yet. They’re not like other gryphons.”

“It is not a noble act to aid you, if you believe that your world is under threat, it is only prudent. To do any less would be suicide,” iZen said, making brief eye contact. “Regardless, gryphons are the most retrograde force on the face of this planet today. Individual gryphons may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the culture paralyzes the social development of those who are embedded in it.”

Emboss had no answer to that one. Neither did Truth. They meekly followed.

“Many pigs down here, then?” Emboss finally said.

“None at all,” iZen said.

“Then…”

“Our kitchens are excellent, Emboss,” iZen said, firmly. “Let us leave it there.”

They entered a spacious cavern, and Truth gasped. They had evidently not shown her this part of the complex before. The space was nowhere near the size of the small town where Emboss had woken up, but it still occupied something like the area of a few good grazing paddocks. There were six large oval platforms arranged across the granite floor in a grid. In the middle of each was a centaur. Emboss didn’t need to be told. They could be nothing else.

As they drifted closer, he stared. They were huge, at least twice the height of a large pony, and identical, as far as he could tell. He stopped in front of the foremost platform. The centaur was motionless, as though it were the most perfect statue ever made. The head and muzzle were long, stretched out versions of something almost equine, and ended in a widely flared pair of nostrils. The ears were far more elegant and fluted. Blue eyes with space-black barred pupils stared fixedly ahead.

The neck was thick and long, and flowed seamlessly into a torso, like a diamond dog, though where that species generally had bulky arms and barely-prehensile paws, these limbs were long, slender and ended in four delicate grippers, three on top and one underneath, which was larger than the others. They hung at the same level as the forelegs of their highly equine bodies, though again, it was refined, a biological elan that seemed to defy any expectations held of nature’s messy randomness. Thin white fur ran over everything, except some patches below the arms and on the belly, exposing pink-tinged skin. Veins branched here and there under it.

“Do not, under any circumstances, step onto the Repose platform,” iZen said, after a minute. “Every inch toward the centre, or centaur, haha, excuse my joke, equals another logarithmic step in the rate of the temporal flow shift.” He cleared his throat. “In other words, the closer you are to the middle, the faster time passes on the outside, while your perception of it remains the same. Standing there, they experience about half a second of time for every thousand years that passes out here.”

“Strong magic,” Truth said, as enraptured as Emboss was.

“Or, that’s the rate they would be experiencing, were they not currently decelerating back into our timeframe,” iZen said, glancing up at the centaurs. “The process began when we presented the Graphs with your request. This is why I said that they are considering it. Had they been entirely uninterested, there would have been no reason for them to leave Repose.”

“How long will that take?” Emboss said, tearing his eyes away from the centaurs.

“I do not know, it has not happened within my lifetime, or that of my immediate predecessors,” iZen said. “I could consult the records.”

“They don’t seem to be moving, or doing anything,” Emboss said. “They’re just standing there.”

“Oh, they are, the Graphs say as much,” iZen said. “I imagine that some effect of the light passing through so many different zones of altered temporal flow is in play.”

“You keep mentioning these Graphs,” Emboss said, looking around. “But--”

Emboss hadn’t noticed them before, given the more pressing sight of the centaurs, but all around the platforms were smooth, jet black cubes. They were unadorned, and of all different sizes. Some were almost half the size of the centaurs themselves, whereas others were no bigger than a filly foal. He trotted over to the one that iZen was standing beside. Tiny lines were dancing across the upper surface. That it was a language, he had no doubt. Repetitions of different symbols, some evidence of grammar marks. But, like the language on the corridor walls, it was all gibberish to him.

iZen waited a moment until he had had a chance to examine it, then placed a hoof beside the ranks of symbols. They vanished, reformed close to the rim of his hoof, then he tapped one of them. All the symbols beside the one he tapped then melted back into the black. His selection glowed twice, then became static. To Emboss’ immense surprise, Equuish words and phrases appeared. The symbol iZen had tapped turned intointo the phrase language: Eq2.25, rendered in utilitarian cursive.

“It speaks Equuish?” Emboss said, dumbstruck. “How can that be?”

“Though they are nearly nine hundred million years old, the Graphs were not frozen at the moment of creation,” iZen said, smiling proudly. “They taste the world. They grow, learn, adapt.”

“Then why did we need to come at all? Surely you knew of the Thiasus?” Emboss said, brow furrowing.

sound pulse and radioisotope scan followed it. “Sometimes, we can sense very large distortions to magnetic and thaumic fields. We did not need to detect anything as delicate as that after the earthquakes, however. They rung this planet like a bell. That is why the Drax were dispatched.”

Another zebra, presumably a Grapher, came up behind iZen and whispered something in his ear. Immediately, iZen touched a phrase that said temporal ratio, and columns of numbers appeared, as well as a histogram, marked with symbols from the Old Equuish alphabet. He recognized some of the patterns in the numbers as being related to thaumic densities, but it was otherwise far beyond his pay grade. He turned to find Truth, but she was already reading over his shoulder. Her eyes were wide.

“That… that violates the Neighvikov self-consistency principle, doesn’t it?” she said, breathlessly excited. “The hypersurface--”

“Only locally, do not worry about it,” iZen said, grinning. “Causality remains intact.”

Numbers on the Graph rolled upwards, changed positions on the histogram, then doubled in size. Emboss winced as his horn suddenly felt two sizes bigger. There was the distinct smell of burning hair. He opened his eyes and shook his head, not daring to feed any magic through it.

That was when he noticed the centaur leaning over them. His heart jumped in his chest like a live snake. The delicate end of the centaur’s muzzle was only inches above him. The widely flared nostrils flexed and tensed. There was a hint of pink tongue and an omnivore’s dentition. Emboss realised he wasn’t breathing, then took a sharp, jarring breath in. The centaur retracted slightly. It smelled strange, antiseptic, like hospital bathrooms.

Truth screamed and collapsed onto her haunches. iZen and the other Graphers had adopted a respectful bow without missing a beat, though there was none of the servility and submission Emboss had seen in the gryphic bows. The centaur lifted up its head and folded its arms across its chest. Very recognizably, it sighed.

“You get smaller every bloody kiloyear,” it said, in a mare’s voice, speaking the same too-perfect grade of Canterlotian Equuish that iZen employed.

“I’m sorry, what?” Emboss managed, staring up at the mountain of white-furred ancient. “Who gets smaller?”

“Ponies, ponies get smaller, and zebras too, for that matter!” the centaur said, turning her gaze on the Graphers. “You’re doing it on purpose, aren’t you? Breeding yourselves littler. What did I say last time? ‘iGleb, get yourself a proper eugenics program, or you’ll end up tiny’, that’s what I said, and what does he go and do? Breeds them littler! Right, I’ve had it, that’s it! Get him up here!”

“Pardon me,” said iZen. “But are you speaking of Grapher iVeth iGleb?”

“Yes, that’s the one,” the centaur said, then seemed to realise something, freezing in place. “Oh. Of course. When did he die?”

“Nearly four and a half thousand years ago,” said iZen, politely. “I wrote my doctoral thesis on him.”

“You really must do something about that lifespan, you know,” the centaur said, glumly. “It’s depressing.” She sniffed the air and glanced around. “When are we, anyway?”

“By your clock…” said iZen, tapping at the Graph. “Four point one eight two cycles post-V, approximately.”

“Still nothing?” said the centaur. “I’m guessing not, since there’s a decided lack of things on fire and horrible glass monsters everywhere. What’s all the fuss about, then?”

“We have entered the relevant information into the Graphs,” iZen said. “As per protocol.”

“Very dreary, that. You’ve lost the art of conversation, as well as stellarforming. Does nobody want to just talk? Oh well,” the centaur said, reaching down to touch the Graph with one of her four-fingered graspers, whereupon there was a flicker in Equuish symbols and they froze for a moment. “Really? This nonsense again?” She sighed dramatically. “Jumped up little post-equines and Bulk entities…”

“You have to help us,” said Emboss, trembling, neck starting to hurt from its upwardly fixed position. “Please…”

“Why?” the centaur said, glaring nastily at Emboss. “Who are you to tell me what I must do? Just a civil servant and wife, oh yes, very egalitarian that, do you still own her as chattel? Never mind.” She moved away, her bulk making surprisingly little noise on the granite. Her brow, such as it was, suddenly furrowed, and she stared off into the distance. Almost to herself, she said: “Oh, but that was a big bang for such little ponies, wasn’t it? We heard it all the way down here, listening with broken machines. Lucky for them that it wasn’t in the atmosphere. Then a wave, earthquakes and space bent by a Crown?” She cocked her head. “Time for a simulation.”

The Graph abruptly turned white. iZen started back, nearly knocking over another Grapher. Truth neighed in surprise.

“In four kiloyears? Ridiculous, do it again, with some more effort, please,” the centaur said, and this time all the Graphs whited out. “I see. Well, this changes things.”

“What does, honourable centaur?” said Emboss, hoping the form of address was correct.

“Less of that, thank you, we don’t really do rank and status,” the centaur said, frowning. “I am Thereus.” She growled as she noticed Emboss cocking his head slightly to the left. “I’m female, yes, stop staring, it’s very primitivist, not to mention rude.”

“Sorry… uh… Thereus,” said Emboss, feeling heat in his cheeks.

“As for what changes things, it’s the fact that my simulations have just told me that, within four kiloyears, plus or minus point five kiloyears, there will be a thaumic decay catastrophe, somewhere in this system, which will be caused by the interference of either Bulk entities or as a result of attempts in the next cycle to prevent the Thiasus,” she said, eyes flicking back and forth as if she was reading something nobody else could see.

“I fed it new data, you see, and things are getting worse. Celestia’s bargain, and the consequences, we thought it was all pretty stable.” She snorted, flicked her banged-short white tail. “Neatly self-contained. That might sound a bit harsh, but civilizations come and go, don’t they? Nadirs and apexes. Anyway, it would seem that we were wrong.”

“You’ll help us, then?” said Emboss, smiling broadly. “Thank--”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Thereus. “We can stop it now, or we can stop it in four thousand years. Simulations are ongoing. We don’t have the time for me to explain to you what a TDC is, but please, believe me, it is an extremely bad thing. There was an Equestrian scholar who summed it up best in your language, I think. I have just read his work. Paraphrasing: No structures capable of knowing joy.” Thereus smiled, almost proudly. “You’re smart little ponies, aren’t you? Do you know, my creators spent much of their time thinking about this self-same thing. They expended vast energies on understanding the threat, trying to control it. Made them quite mad.”

“Your creators?” Truth said, sidling up close to Emboss. “Someone made you?”

“Do I look like the work of natural selection?” Thereus said, laughing. “I had the privilege of being manufactured, not clumsily put together by an unthinking consequence of physics, yes.”

“Oh,” said Truth, somewhat taken aback. “Well, then. That’s put me in my place.”

“It seems we have an elegant solution, assembled sentients,” said Thereus, staring off into the distance yet again. “The simulations agree. Problem: Celestia and the Thiasus must be stopped. How do you stop a bad mare with a crown?” She licked her lips, eyes darting this way and that. “The only thing that stops a bad mare with a crown is a good mare with a crown. In our case, it’ll be two good mares with crowns, and a good cock with a Crown, capital letter.” She grinned down at the ponies and zebras. “We have the current gryphon King in thaumic confinement, don’t we?”

“Yes, Thereus,” said iZen, flinching slightly. “But only for his own protection.”

“Assembled sentients?” Truth mumbled, a distasteful expression crinkling her muzzle. “Like we’re crows, or something?”

“I think his Crown would like him back,” said the centaur, ignoring her. “There are a lot of naughty neutrinos being beamed in our direction at the moment, did you notice that? It’s coming here to reclaim him.”

“I did wonder how it would get back to him,” said Emboss, dropping his head, unable to take any more craning. “It’s got fifteen miles of rock to punch through.”

“It is doing so with some considerable enthusiasm,” said Thereus. “Here’s what you do, hopefully with the same enthusiasm. Let the Crown reunite with Hywell. Then, we can compel it to follow our instructions. You will all go back to Equestria, where you will…” Thereus trailed off, and a bead of sweat rolled down her neck, then she mumbled: “Unlikely, though possible, encounters may include aforementioned. Highly likely, though not certain, inclusion of remnant and abandoned-in-place universes for mass feedstock…”

“Uh, I’m not sure I follow,” said Emboss. “How are you going to make Hywell or the Crown do what you want? Even if you get him to agree, it’ll take us weeks to get back to Equestria.”

Thereus blinked, shook her head, then bent down to look more closely at Emboss.

“Leave that to me, shorty,” she said.

Sweet is the Night, Dark is the Day Or; Things Unbidden

The gas giant Kronos spun in muddy, green-tinged bliss, as it had done for gigaannum. From seventy to a hundred and forty thousand kilometres out, countless tumbling motes of dust and ice reflected sunlight, broken only by the gaps forged in the unceasing orbits of those of the hundred and fifty three satellites that happened to intersect the plain of the ring system. Thaumic forces barely counted in this interplay, for carbon, hydrogen and silicon, the primary constituents of that dispersed dust and ice, hardly interacted with the universal standing magical field at all. Even if they had, they were too spread out to generate a single spark of magic. This was a domain of purely mundane physics.

X-band microwave photons, crawling their way across space at merely the speed of light, washed through the planet and the ring system. Their point of origin had been down-well, from the direction of the distant star. They carried parts of a message spoken in a tongue that the universe had not heard for over a billion years. One hundred and fifty two natural satellites ignored the sound, uncomprehending. The hundred and fifty-third heard, processed, obeyed and proved that it was anything but natural. Drive systems warmed and spun up, digging claws into spacetime.

Thirty minutes later, Kronos had lost a satellite, which was now accelerating at ten thousand gravities toward the signal that had called it.

*

Princess Celestia watched from a cloud as the biological recovery capsule exploded over Ponyville, shedding its cargo of various small biting lizards, stinging butterflies, ninety-nine bee Queens and half a ton of assorted bacteria, viruses, algae and archaea, contained in the same amount of water. The ponies of DRAMA began to evacuate at the same time as Luna’s nottlygna trotlites started to take cover within the conical hull of Mytheme. Fires, unattended, were drenched, and some local flooding took place. Celestia fed more energy to the spells keeping her selectively visible, just in case anyone on the ground had a spare moment for stargazing.

There were no emotions coursing around in Celestia’s skull. She was broadly aware of the fact that, at some point, she might well have felt some anger, terror, sadness, or a mix of these now vague notions, at any one of the events playing out in front of her. That her plans were coming a little unstuck, that her ponies were in jeopardy, that her sister was so afraid. Now, her mind could best be represented by the gears and cogs of a vast and incredibly efficient machine. Sometimes the mechanism would jam, but other systems would step in, switching over until the obstruction was resolved.

“Look, I really think you should know, I might have gone too far,” said Discord, as he slithered gaseously into the cloud.

“That we are so close to the ground, where my retribution would certainly be seen, is the only thing saving you from your just punishment,” said Celestia, turning to look at him. “I urge you to remain useful.”

“I broke the gate thingy,” Discord said. “Might have invited a few extra guests to the Party, too.”

“You’ve been meddling in Tartarus,” Celestia said. “It contains things neither of us understand. It may contain our deaths. I wonder if you can even conceive of death, as an ending, a finality, a counterpoint to life.”

“You meddled too! What are those pods, anyway? You put them there, didn’t you?”

“I gave the Pit instructions, the… mechanisms there did the hard part,” Celestia said, choosing her words carefully. “An extra safety, were it ever to be that one of your schemes was the undoing of the world. It was to be activated when the crust was cooler than the mantle, or whatever.”

“Oh, well, I’m glad to know you had so much faith in me. Twilight and her friends are out, and safely reunited with your sister,” said Discord, suddenly metamorphosing into a rough rendition of Luna, built out of melted, dripping wax, in which was embedded shards of glass, twigs and bits of rock. “But it doesn’t seem like they’re going to make the Nectars after all. Why did you think Twilight still would, after finding out the truth?”

“There was a miscalculation,” Celestia said, scowling distastefully at him. “It was thought that Luna’s mindstate would be on a different vector than the one it is now. There was some interference from the Thiasus itself. It threw everything into question. She was supposed to lead Twilight into revenge against me. She should be in the Hidden Delight by now.”

“Major props there, o Marechiavellian Goddess,” said Discord, sardonically. “Our favourite purple Princess pony is currently gathering the Elements together, and Luna is dodging lizards beneath our hooves. I hate to ask, but what’s next?”

“Does Twilight still trust you?” said Celestia, looking back down toward Ponyville.

“More or less.” The Luna figment exploded pathetically, the wax melting down entirely into a black puddle, out of which Discord’s wyrm body oozed. “She may even be grateful.”

“Make yourself available to her,” Celestia said. “Guide her to the remaining ingredients. Make her forge the Nectars.” She sniffed the air wafting up from the stricken town. “Nothing else matters. I will deal with Luna.”

Without waiting for a reply, she dropped from the cloud and fell away into the night.

*

The madness, it seemed, was never ending. From her position atop the farm’s haybarn, Applejack had an excellent view of Ponyville in the cleft of the landscape’s subtle roll, but she barely bothered to watch as yet another unidentified flying object arced in from the east and exploded at cloud height over the town. Some haze spilled from the scant puff of debris, quickly becoming bigger than its progenitor. There were sprays and puffs of white, which caught the light from the earlier blazes below, sparkling and flashing. With a deft movement of her head and lips, Applejack grasped the neck of the bottle she’d been drinking from and balanced it upright, allowing the contents to fall down her throat and join their friends in her stomach.

They were down to the forbidden, vintage stuff now. It burned, glutinously protesting its entombment. Usually, the farm never produced anything fiercer than a ten-percent cider, and even that was only on special occasions. The market wanted session ciders, something you could drink pints of all night and not end up having to glue your liver back together the next morning. The part of the market that wanted a harder drink didn’t want it at the prices a small, artisan cidery could offer products. They bought their cheap, industrial-grade vodkas and gins from Berry Punch and, for certain definitions of the word, were happy. That was to say nothing of the wine, but Applejack held no truck with grapes.

She let the empty bottle fall onto the roof. It rolled down the gentle slope, encountered the not-so-gentle slope, and eventually landed with a dull thud in the grass below. It hadn’t even had a label. There was a certain professional unquantifiable in the putting on of labels, dressing and preparing the stock, a right that had to be given up in the case of such outrageous spirits. There had been a still involved, for the love of all that was proper. She might as well don a pair of mirrored sunglasses and slut about with the bats.

This was all too much for a normal mare to be expected to deal with, she thought. After Rarity had appeared back in the town, raving and delusional, and Princess Luna had said the things she had, everything had fallen apart. Twilight, their usual commandant, had apparently been responsible and, in her absence and presumed guilt, their friends had wandered off. At first, Applejack had done right by the only things more important in her life than her friends and the defense of Equestria, her family and business, but then hours had turned into days, and what little news there was that filtered in, or could be inferred, was all bad.

Lights in the sky. Pillars of smoke stretching up and over their heads, sometimes bringing squally little showers filthy with soot, or apparently unshepherded breezes filled with the stink of burning. She’d let the worry and anxiety overcome her, she’d started drinking through some of the stock to help with the fear and to still her heart. There were some blurry patches. Missing memories. The distinct impression of having had a long rant at Spike, of all people, about something she didn’t recall. Lately, she’d just been perched on top of the barn, drinking, sleeping fitfully or watching for some symbol that she might act upon, a sign that there was something she could do. Even the earthquake storm had only strengthened her resolve to shelter in place.

There was movement in the corn stalks that occupied one of the fields directly adjoining the farm’s yard. She lifted herself up and peered across the flat, grass-edged pan, currently full of empty carts, crates and mounds of hauling tack. The shock of orange mane that presaged her brother appeared out of the corn. It was difficult to focus on him, through the alcohol.

“Twilight’s back!” he bellowed.

*

“I can’t believe you think that this is a good idea too, your Majesty,” said Doctor Lux, snorting, ears back, face wrinkled up in disgust. “I discharge this patient to you, then. May Celestia have mercy on you.”

“We need Rainbow Dash, Doctor,” Twilight said, sighing. “I trust Fluttershy, if she says that this will be safe.”

Lux looked as though she was about to storm out, then stopped.

“None of you are really medics, are you?” she said. “I’ll have to stay. If her cardiac function collapses, I’m the only one who even stands a chance of saving her.”

“I’ve done, um, animal trials,” Fluttershy said, looking sheepish. “Accidentally! The needle slipped. Mr Beary was okay, in the end.”

“Why do you even need her so badly?” Lux snapped. “Can it not wait a day? Twenty-four hours, I guarantee it, the barbiturate will have worn off. Anyway, even if you wake her up now, she’ll still be injured!”

“Friendship is magic, Doctor Lux,” said Twilight.

“Don’t you quote propaganda at me!”

“I’m certain we need her, but I can’t tell you more than that,” Twilight said, shaking her head.

“She doesn’t really understand herself,” said Whom. “Can’t tell you if she doesn’t know, can she?”

“Thank you, Whom,” said Twilight, frowning at her.

“No problem!”

Attention span apparently expended, Whom flounced off to talk to the other patients in the ward. Twilight briefly wondered whether acute exposure to so much bizarre pinkness would be a detriment or a boon to the recovery of the injured, though she suspected that most would likely write it off as some sort of blood-loss induced hallucination. She very much wished that she could, too.

“This is your decision,” said Lux, staring at Whom for a moment before returning her glare to Twilight. “You’ll give her the drug.”

“I’d have it no other way,” said Twilight.

Lux tugged a brown glass bottle from her panniers, which looked more like the ammunition belt of a specialist grenadier or archer than anything to do with a medical trade, and held it in the air over Dash’s supine form.

“Saline and cocaine hydrochloride, compounded as per your instructions, Fluttershy” said Lux, firmly. “That our dental clinic had it in stock is worrying, I think.” She managed to put more venom into the sentence than Twilight had seen in awhile. “I’ll draw it up and position it, but you’ll do the plunging. This dose is very approximate, so who knows what might happen.”

The syringe was a big glass and steel thing, which Lux bathed in the purple glow of a sterilizing spell before filling with drugs. The compound was completely transparent, and there didn’t seem to be a great deal of of it. Lux moved the syringe around to the same side of Dash’s neck that Twilight was on, then conjured another field of telekinesis that swept up the muscle there. Twilight could just see where it deformed the tissue, occluding the jugular vein. Vague memories of having read about venipuncture techniques resurfaced.

Lux found the site she was looking for and the needle went in. She drew back on the plunger. Blood filled the chamber. Twilight was surprised at how red it was. Her eyes widened involuntarily, and she immediately felt stupid for having reacted like that. Lux glanced at her and opened gaps in her telekinetic field projection. Twilight took the cue and depressed the syringe. The blood and clear fluid vanished.

Nothing happened immediately. Lux drew out the needle and quickly placed a cotton wool pad over the site, securing it with tape that looked like something you might weatherproof sheds with. There was the tingle of magic being done nearby, but Twilight suppressed the slightly itchy feeling in the base of her horn as she realised that Lux was running some kind of scan. Faint impressions of the thaumic complexity flittered into her awareness.

“Her heart rate and blood pressure are rising,” said Lux, capping the syringe and replacing it in her arsenal. “She--”

Rainbow Dash neighed loudly and her head came up. Her wings jerked, bashing Twilight. She stepped back, and Dash began to kick out, struggling, suddenly breathing heavily. Lux didn’t miss a beat, feeding energy into her telekinesis and bracing Dash, keeping her on the bed and preventing her from making her injuries worse.

“Dash?” said Twilight, the icy fear that she might have made some terrible mistake gripping her as tightly as Lux now held Dash. “Are you alright?”

“Twilight?” she said, turning to look at her, eyes blinking rapidly. “You nag! Where have you been? Where in Tartarus have you been?” She snorted, as if trying to clear something out of her nose. “Equestria’s gone down the tubes!”

“Yes,” said Twilight, terror ebbing. “So I’ve been finding out.”

*

“I can’t believe she just left me here,” said Spike, peering out of Mytheme’s bow passenger door at the swarms of fanged insects buzzing angrily and confusedly around outside. “Again. That’s the thing that hurts the most. I don’t even get thought about. I’m just forgotten.” He spat a jet of green fire at a swan-sized butterfly that had fluttered too close, which squealed briefly before flying off. “It’d have been better if she’d just told me why I had to stay here, spent a few minutes considering my feelings, you know?”

“I too have had issues with my siblings,” said Princess Luna, amiably. “What have you to say, Berry Punch?”

“B-Brothers and sisters fight,” said Berry Punch, quickly, followed by a bout of coughing. “Only natural, very natural, natural-est thing in the world, yes--”

“Most excellent contribution,” Luna said, placing a wing over Punch, who tensed up and began whimpering. “Did you know that your foal, being an outbreed, is considered a brother by my nottlygna?”

“I did not know that!” Punch said, in a high pitched, wavering voice. “That’s brilliant! Really great, I’m so pleased.”

“Have you helped yourself to the refreshments?” Luna said, withdrawing the wing. “There is a non-alcoholic blackcurrant cordial in the back of the silver and onyx drinks cabinet that I think you will find most pleasant.” She smiled politely and turned to Spike. “Miss Punch here has just very recently gotten on the wagon.”

“Good for you,” said Spike, grumpily.

“My throat is so parched, going to see about that drink,” squeaked Punch, practically fleeing down the corridor toward the lounge.

“You did something to her, didn’t you?” Spike said, after she’d left. “What, did you put her in a space warp too?”

“I did nothing of the sort,” said Luna, suddenly unable to make eye contact. “In any case, your temporary confinement was accomplished primarily by means of a curvature, a gradient, not anything that could be described as a warp.”

“It was so cold in there, Luna,” he said, permitting her an acidic glance before going back to watching the insects. “I couldn’t see anything, or hear anything. It was like being dead, or something.”

“I had not realised that you had spent so much time dead, so as to know what the feeling is like and thus make a useful comparison,” said Luna, without a detectable trace of sarcasm. “Tell me, what was it like, being dead? By what means did you make such a bounding return to life?”

“Ugh! You are impossible to talk to,” Spike said.

Luna merely offered what she hoped was an impenetrable smile, then left the dragon, trailing languidly into the lounge like a wave moving through water. Riesling was half-way through being groomed and nuzzled into fluffy oblivion by half of the nottlygna foal population. When they weren’t chewing or making syrupy nickering sounds, they were chattering on about this, that and the other. Luna lost herself briefly in it as they jumped back and forth between topics at lightning speed, in that foalish way that she found infinitely endearing. Nottlygna society could sometimes be incredibly isolated, the youngsters especially, so they leapt on novel new ponies. Often literally.

Little snaps and jerks of adrenaline-rush fear kept intruding on her thoughts as she made casual conversation, as far as that was possible for her, with the nottlynga mares and stallions. Most were dressed in various types of armour, plundered out of the gloriously antique armouries of Mytheme, as well as those previously drawn from modern stores. Morningstars, pikes, halberds and vicious looking pepperbox springbows were littered everywhere. Foals stepped over them as they played.

The complete lack of power, the absence of any controls that she could exercise over the situation. That was what ground most against her. The nation was in the wind now, and Twilight might doom it or save it. That just wasn’t fair or proper. Worse, she was beginning to suspect that her judgement might have been impacted somehow. Berry Punch was shooting her nervous glances from behind a glass of cordial, and freezing like a statue every time Luna got closer to Riesling.

Mytheme shuddered from above. Silence fell. A bottle of wine dropped from the edge of a low table and proceeded to empty its contents quietly on the shag. The cluttered, anxious and multifarious thought processes rattling through Luna’s mind coalesced suddenly into a single luminous strand. There was not a biological thing in Ponyville’s current local inventory that could, at any plausible speed, cause the kilotonnes of the yacht to shake. Mytheme could have run down a mature Very High Dragon at Mach five and not caused drinks to spill in the general lounge. It once had. Only something obscenely, unnaturally, heavy coming into contact with the yacht could have caused that shudder. The list of potential candidates boiled down to one.

The nottlygna around her were quickly approaching the same conclusion. Helmets were being donned, armour strapped up, foals corralled. Someone loudly cocked their crossbow. More and more faces were looking at her.

“Evacuate the yacht,” she said, quickly. “Take only yourselves. Make for your assigned fallbacks. Under no circumstances engage any supermagical targets.”

“Majesty--” a stallion began.

“It is Celestia, and no quarter will be given,” she said.

“None asked,” someone else mumbled, to a chorus of ayes and general agreement.

“This is not a fight for you,” said Luna, shaking her head. “Evacuate.”

There was a tremendous bang, and a sound like a million panes of glass breaking at once, which echoed and reverberated inside the hull itself.

“Go!” Luna bellowed.

She witnessed a brief moment of confused but decidedly organized movement toward the exits, then metamorphosed into shadowy smoke, lancing ahead of them. Curving around Spike, who was running down one of the lateral corridors as fast his stubby legs would carry him, she burst through the bow door and into the night. The darkness did not last for long. As though sunrise had come hours early, pure, white light burst from a point above the yacht, casting hard shadows around what buildings yet stood. She shifted forms again, feeling that familiar bizarre dislocation as imitations of central and peripheral nervous systems began feeding her data about limbs that hadn’t existed moments before.

Beating her wings, she sailed upwards, feeling a terrible case of sunburn blister her back. Momentary episodes of sizzling were interrupted by the restorative process, fighting the damage. She turned toward the light and saw a black, rearing figure in the heart of the glare. It had wings, a horn. The last shreds of doubt fell away. It was Celestia, and she was the dawn. She began to rise to meet Luna’s altitude.

“It ends,” Luna shouted, having to turn away so that her eyes would not boil out of their sockets and deprive her of sight for an inopportune few moments. “I have remembered, and your compact will end!”

Nottlygna were coursing away out of sight below, flying, bounding and galloping, keeping some semblance of military order in their formations despite what must have been a terror of eschatological proportions. She could not imagine what must have been running through their minds as they dutifully abandoned their Princess. She even spotted the unmistakable form of Spike, hitching a lift on someone’s back. Fires were breaking out everywhere. Wood steamed and smoked, bricks exploded, and what grass remained was lost in cauls of slate smoke.

The dazzling light gave out at once, and that was when Celestia chose to attack.

*

The hills around Ponyville were rife with a slow progression of fearful, tired souls. Few dared look back at the flares of brilliance and the sucking absences, and shielded their eyes and ears from the rolling slaps of explosions and overpressure waves. Inevitably, a chorus of nottlygna broke out into song. At first, only a few, but then it spread through the ranks. Even the dragon and the pony, trembling foal at foot, sang in the end.

Hill your ho, colts, let Her go, colts,
Bring your head round, now all together,
Hill your ho, colts, let Her go, colts,
Trotting homeward to Canterlot.

What care we how dark our foe is,
What care we for wind or weather?
Trot on home, colts, every inch is,
Trotting homeward to Canterlot.

Mares are waiting in the doors there,
Or looking fearful from the windows,
Pull together, colts, and we’ll arrive there,
Before the sun sets on Canterlot.

*

Several miles outside Ponyville, in a densely arranged woodland of oaks and yews, the displaced citizens of the battered and beleaguered town were hunkered down in what they hoped was suitable camouflage. Their indomitable spirit had been badly battered by recent events, but they were bloodied, not bowed. Family groups sat around meagre camp fires, kept to little more than deep pits filled with embers. Mayor Mare drifted between them, taking the temperature of the herd and dishing out meagre platitudes. The Cakes, still with their foals too young to do much else than chase their dam and squeal at things, offered provisions and generally catered, though good food was scarce, and many were rediscovering the lost of art of foraging.

Nurse Redheart tended the wounded, though they were the minor injuries incurred when hundreds flee at once and in poor order. Bruises, cuts, grazes, the occasionally capped hock. Her work was little more than offering ice packs, thaumic suturing and sympathy. Only one of her cases had something worse; a broken leg, incurred after a bad fall in mud. She’d splinted it and accelerated the knitting of the bone, but it was painful, and her analgesic magic could only do so much in isolation.

Light penetrated the forest from the south, bright enough that it could be seen through miles of trees. Loud neighs rang about the boughs and a stampede nearly took place. Mostly it was hushed whispers, trembling dams and foals behind the bulk of stallions, the mutual-herd decision to run, immediately and without further delay, hanging on a knife-edge in the group-think nightmare of a hundred fearful equines. The blunt slap of overpressure smashed into the treeline and rolled perceptibly through it toward them some seconds later. Tree trunks shattered in places, splintering bark and bending the younger specimens. Terrible rending noises, as if of a thousand tons of paper shredding at once, turned up after the blasts.

Shouting, neighing and a confusion of voices melded with the ringing, echoing noises as they petered out. Cheerilee, with her herd of school foals, played the role of in loco lead mare and corralled her infant charges, keeping them from some stupid, fleeing gallop into parts unknown. Rarity, strapped to a gurney taken from the hospital before their exit into the wilderness, thrashed and writhed and was given the last of a sedative tincture by a harried Redheart.

They all saw it. The piercing glare that ascended in the sky, obviously miles above them and gaining speed. The absence of colour, a bullet of pure darkness somehow blacker than the night’s sky against which it was moving, fleeing from it. The forest floor was lit up in hard shades of near ultraviolet and impenetrable shadow where trees obscured it. The water in their green underlayers steamed out, bubbling and fracturing the tortured things even more. Unicorns in the herd began to scream, falling to the floor and writhing in fits of agony or ecstasy. Their skin rippled as muscles contracted spastically. Some fitted or became paralyzed, limbs palsying.

With a last almighty crack, which was felt in the teeth and bones and testicles of the herd, the bullet of pure darkness fled across the sky, jetting north, glowing rents of tortured atmosphere the only other sign of the surely monumental speed at which it was moving. The piercing glare lazily moved to pursue, but broke off, and vanished into the east, silent and ethereal, a vision of a star in miniature moving across the ancient, imagined dome of the heavens.

Dawn occurred some minutes later. Though it was summer, it felt more like autumn, as if the sun itself was ashamed to show its face. Faint tendrils of a wan and hazy light, so cool and gentle compared to the awful heat that had preceded it, appeared from over the horizon and began to bring the forest’s normal inhabitants to life.

*

“Well,” said Satan, as he extricated himself from beneath charred timbers and a crumbling mess of singed brick. “That was impressive.”

“I didn’t see anything,” said Death, petulantly. “Unfair, if you ask me. I got hit by a crossbeam and my eyes fell out. Couldn’t find them anywhere.”

“That’s what you get for stealing eyeballs from unsuspecting tavern mares,” said Satan, pulling a long piece of rusted metal rebar from his side with a quick jerk of his head. “And not bringing any of your own in the first place.”

“Hindsight is twenty/twenty, Satan,” he grumbled.

“Or, entirely the opposite, in your case,” Satan said, grinning.

*

“Majesty, look at it,” said Afore, standing between the statue and his charge. “Just look!”

It had taken them several minutes to get the palace doors closed again. They’d been dented by the heavy impact of the bronze, but were no worse for wear. Outside, fires raged, engulfing the city, blotting it out. The howl was deafening, and the radiated heat had started rugs smouldering. It wasn’t until the locks were once again holding back the ferocious inferno that they’d heard the protracted keening and seen the glow.

“I’m perfectly fine looking in the other direction, thank you,” said Armour, gaze resolutely fixed down the darkened hall toward the palace’s receiving rooms and lounges. “This sort of thing is neither big nor funny, and I’ll really have no truck with it.” He snorted and shrugged, as if ridding himself of an irritating tick. “Whoever came up with must be a foal, suffering from some delayed development, obsessed with the phallic and nothing else. He must have thought himself funny. I feel sorry for him.”

“Something is happening to an item of the statue’s anatomy, sire, see for yourself,” said Afore. “Respectfully, we are all stallions here, aren’t we?”

Shining Armour turned around and tried to find a direction to look in that didn’t encompass the statue, but was still in Afore’s direction. This was an impossible task. He glanced, peered, stared and was transfixed. The rearing form was twice life-size, proportions skewed in favour of the salsician. The creator had done an incredible job of capturing Celestia, at least what could be seen of her. There were details there that Shining Armour himself recognized; the lines of muscle, the particular way she set her fur.

Long bangs of mane flowed down one side, curving under the belly, as though their inertia had been distilled into the shaping of the thing. The bronze showed no colour, only its own dull sheen, but had been differentiated somehow, and he could see where the tricolour of the real hair would have been. He suddenly understood why, despite the obscenity of it, the statue had been kept. It was magnificent. The obscenity itself, perfect, entire and anatomical, was as big as a foreleg and perfectly parallel to the belly. Into the tip was set a stone, sufficiently clear and cut with enough facets to suggest a diamond. Dried blood and hair marred it, but only slightly.

It was glowing. In the base of his horn he felt a sudden tingle, one that all unicorns knew. There was the sound as well, of a bow being drawn softly over strings. The level of the light coming from the diamond fluctuated at random, but he felt like there was meaning there, a signal being sent, if only one could understand it.

“What do you think it means, sire?” Afore said, after a while.

“I wish that I knew, Afore,” said Shining Armour, mouth dry. “By someone other than Celestia, I wish I knew.”

*

“Do you think love conquers all, Twilight?” said Rainbow Dash, snorting, gazing purposefully up at the bright new star in Equestria’s night and then back down at her, wriggling and writhing worm-like in her horse shoes. “Understand? Your brother, love conquering all, what did that really mean? It was what they said, right? But how do hormones and animal rut-lust destroy an invading army?”

“I’m so glad you asked!” said Twilight, smiling more genuinely than she had done in what felt like aeons. “You see, when a sapient organism feels the emotion of love, special particles captured their nervous system begin to drag more heavily against the universal standing magical field, which in turn triggers a love-intensity dependent high-order energy release from--”

“The rut-lust, Twilight!” Dash snapped, glaring intensely at her. “That mass of flesh and energy, it feels so alive!” She laughed, trotted a neat circle around on the roof of the makeshift hospital, then spent a few moments apparently savouring the action of breathing in and out. “Skies above, why aren’t we funding this? You get it? Understand? We should fund this, get those special discretionary Princess funds behind this, understand?”

“Snout in the game, Dash,” Twilight said, frowning. “We’ve only just begun putting the situation together. We have to gather more information. Rarity and Applejack are still in the wind, but we’ve got Fluttershy. There’s nothing we can’t overcome when we’re together.”

“You think he’s been in her?” Rainbow Dash said, smiling and licking her lips. “That kind don’t wait, he was probably nailing her before you were off your dam’s teat, wasn’t he?” She made a strange gurgling noise, which evolved into a filthy, blocked drain-like laugh. “You know the signs, you’ve seem them, probably just a matter of chance you’re not an aunt!”

“Dash! Inappropriate!” Twilight said, warmth filling her cheeks. “Pull yourself together!”

“We have to fund this stuff, whatever you gave me,” said Dash, trotting over to the ornately decorated edge of the roof, where she leant over the top of a gargoyle. “The applications are endless; athletes, late workers, lovers, soldiers, anyone who wants or needs this kind of power. It’s like I could fly faster than light!”

Twilight left her babbling on the roof and went to find Fluttershy. She found her helping with the wounded and trying to remain invisible. She was bussing a tray filled with blood plasmas and jars of saline when Twilight cornered her. There was a squeak and a flutter of wings as she resisted the urge to flee.

“Mr Beary was alright!” she gasped, high-pitched and tremulous. “He was, I swear!”

“She’s talking gibberish,” Twilight said. “Like she’s drunk, but far more worked up, almost psychotic.”

“But she’s awake though, right?” Fluttershy said, gulping. “It worked.”

“This cocaine is more psychoactive than you realised, isn’t it?”

“I only had an animal model! Their central nervous systems are less complex than ours, there were always bound to be additional psychological symptoms!”

“When did Mr Beary normalise?” Twilight said, glancing subconsciously toward the roof. “We may need to give her more.”

“F-four hours, more or less,” Fluttershy squeaked. “That’s when he let Angel Bunny go and came down out of the tree.”

“This was important information, you know. We could have done with it before we put the cocaine in her blood. Before I put the cocaine in her blood.”

“What do you want me to do, Twilight?” Fluttershy said, sitting down on her rump and nearly pouting. “Go back in time, change things? Should I go to the Starswirl section of the Canterlot Library, find a nice little scroll?”

“Don’t you start!”

*

Kronos’ missing moon, revealed in its true nature as an interplanetary vehicle, plunged downwards toward Equestria’s star, managing several one-in-a-million collisions with orbiting asteroid belt objects. Several of them were larger than a hundred metres. Tons of nickel and various differentiated ices of carbon dioxide and water vapourized as they came into contact with the spherical shell of the vehicle at insane velocities. The vehicle ignored them, shedding what kinetic energy it took from the transactions into thaumic fields that ran through its superstructure, in turn diverting them back into the universe.

The vehicle devoured clear space, and soon was intruding within the orbit of the moon. It passed that satellite at a distance of half a hundred thousand kilometres, autonomic subsystems throwing out wide-beam radio signals. They raked across the scarred and dusty Lunar regolith, bouncing off recent structures and briefly dazzling a lunar squid which had come up to emulate the act of taking a breath. There was no reply from any of the logged sites, though the onboard expert systems hadn’t expected there to be, given the protracted interval of time, not to mention the other, equine, factors that informed its convoluted decision trees.

With a final reverse pulse of its unreal thrust, it slowed and inserted itself into an orbit around the planet currently known as Equestria. It discarded the datasets that told it of the orbital information relating to artificial satellites. They had not spun about this world since before its present inhabitants had been tiny squirrel-like creatures stealing bites of ferns on the edges of swamps and scaring off predators with sparks of conjured light. There was no need to select a safe orbit. The skies were clear of influence. The vehicle settled in to wait, gently broadcasting radio signals downwards, telemetering compliance and completion to the orders that had summoned it.

Presently, silver spheres emerged from it, and began raking firey trails through the atmosphere.

Gentle Cantering, The

“Her Majesty’s Lightly Abridged 15th Dragoons and I descended into Shaft Kappa shortly after lunchtime grazing, twelve days before the signing of the Dauphinoise Accords. We represented about half of the Dragoon’s regular strength, eleven hundred ponies, and had been armed and armoured by the seconded Canterlotian knight-farrier’s kind benevolence. Though we had been forced to leave the heavy plate above ground, owing to the cramped conditions reported to us by scouting elements, we had been equipped with the new springbox crossbows, shortened halberds, and other tools with which to wage war in confined spaces.

None of us could have imagined what was to come. At the end of the first day, we discovered the remains of the 3rd Fully Backdated Lancers. Their unit of four hundred had been sent down first in pursuit of our enemy, and we had expected them to obtain and prepare a forward hold for our final strikes against that hostile. They had been completely destroyed. Though some signs of fortification were present in the voids marked in this report’s addendum, almost none of the work had been completed.

It appeared to us that they had been attacked by a manxome foe immediately following their arrival at two miles depth. Our apothecaries and medics examined the few whole remains of ponies that were recovered, and concluded that mages had been involved, as well as large, fierce carnivores. We had no choice but to press on, deeper into the world.

Though our quest proceeded for eleven days, we found no trace of that which had destroyed the 3rd, nor of our assigned enemies. There were suggestions of gryphons, scents and spor, around the four and six mile markers, as well as some recovered weapons undoubtedly of their crude manufacture, but nothing substantial. With our supplies running low on day twelve, we returned the way that we had come, returning to the light on day fifteen. What bleakness had swallowed up our comrades, and done the same for those we sought?” - report of a Sergeant-at-Hames, AN 97.

*

“It’s a ship, in space?” said Emboss, staring at the image that had been conjured on the surface of the Graph.

“I know, it’s a lot to take in, a tricky abstract to get your meat around,” Thereus said, bored, eyes flicking left and right apace. “Maybe your language doesn’t have all the terms yet, but--”

“Like a Navy ship,” said Truth, nodding. “Sealed against the absence of air and protected from the heat of the sun, with some means of propulsion, oars and sails, whatever the equivalent of that is for you, I think we understand.” She cocked her head and looked closer at the Graph. “Does she have cannon? We could use them on Celestia. I bet she wouldn’t last long.”

“Gentle Cantering, The, is currently unarmed,” said Thereus, sparing them a disapproving glance before going back to whatever it was she was doing in her imagination. “It was built to purpose, one that didn’t include any element of danger.” Thereus frowned. “Even if we were to arm it, the results would be unsatisfactory. I am concerned with the biosphere of this planet, in so far as it retains the ability to have one.”

“Strong cannon, then,” said Truth, touching the Graph’s upper surface with a hoof, which elicited no reaction.

“Crossbow bolts might have your name on them,” said Thereus. “But these systems are more to whom it may concern.”

“Then why is it here?” said Emboss, wishing he understood as much as Truth apparently did.

“To bring us little ships,” said Thereus. “While normally we might be able to use its mass translation systems to shift you around, like some of your mages might teleport--” She paused to snort derisively. “There is some particularly unpleasant interference going on all over the shop, related to the Thiasus. The exotic matter throats just can’t form. Too much noise.”

“We’re going to travel in a spaceship?” said Truth, looking away from the Graph and up at Thereus, eyes wide and ears forward.

“Yes, through the atmosphere,” said Thereus, sighing. “Well, up and over. Like a missile, or something. It’s all so primitive. You’re not seeing us on a good day, really.”

“What does a good day look like?” Emboss said, then frowned and shook his head. “Never mind, I’m barely getting by as it is.”

“We were begat by an apex culture, little horse person,” said Thereus, peering at him with an air of cultured irritation. “Their majesty once spanned this whole planet, when its continents were of different shapes and you were not even an uncollapsed quantum state--”

“Alright, point made!” said Emboss, tensing up. “You and your parents are so very high and mighty, and we are not fit to inhabit the dirt you pick out of your hooves, message received and understood.”

“I’m sorry, did I say something offensive?” Thereus scratched her chin, a gesture that Emboss nearly startled at. “Wrong tone, I suppose, maybe a postural thing. The translation devices in your head are really just a stopgap measure.”

“In my head?” said Emboss, quietly. “What do you mean?”

“Tiny machines colonised your brains the moment you entered the enclosure of this city,” said Thereus, as though she was explaining something to a foal. “Since we know your language, and the languages of all the people you were likely to meet, it was easy for them to construct in situ translation devices.” Thereus stopped, considering something. “Everyone involved can speak their own languages, with gestures and the moving of lips and so on, and only ever perceive something they can understand in return. It’s a big mutual hallucination, if you like.”

“That’s why they all sound like they’re from Canterlot,” said Truth, as if this problem had been bothering her. “But then, why did the Drax sound like they’d learned Equuish by way of a bad case of heavy metal poisoning?”

“Infrastructure limits,” said Thereus. “The tiny machines need the bigger machines to do their thinking for them, to access information, and so on. The tiny machines can’t hear the bigger machines properly through certain densities of rock.”

Emboss suddenly felt very itchy. He tried to imagine the machines in his brain, but only got as far as conjuring up scenes of impossibly tiny clockwork balls, covered in spines, with manipulator arms that looked like Thereus’ four fingered graspers. The nauseating horror hit him like a giant tsunami, wriggling and writhing and crawling up his back from the pit of his hindgut.

“I suppose asking permission first would have been out of the question,” he muttered, after a long moment battling dry mouth.

“I’m speaking Second Order Quaternary Trine right now,” said Thereus, raising a thin eyebrow. “The Graphers here mostly speak various species of their odd little zebra language, which I’m taken to understanding are approaching my own archaic quality. If you’d prefer to install a language barrier between us, though…”

iZen made a sour face, though briefly. Emboss wondered if he’d been the only one to notice.

“Confused enough, thank you.”

“Back to the mare who sold the world, then,” said Thereus, cheerfully. “My plan unfolds this way: you’re all going back to Equestria, and you’re going to take King Hywell with you. You will accomplish this by means of my little ships, which are, as we speak, descending to somewhere near this very spot.” She looked away briefly. “You’ll make contact with either one or both of the remaining magical entities my files refer to as Princesses. You’ll team up with them, combine forces, and you will kill Celestia.”

“Just like that?” Emboss said, laughing nervously. “We just trot up, apologise, take aim and fire?”

“No, absolutely no apologising, this needs dealing with,” said Thereus. “I mean, we can do it in four kiloyears, but I’ll just have to slow down again and deal with whatever shape you deadheads are then.”

She sighed, then sat down, folding her forelegs over themselves and crossing her arms. Emboss took a step back instinctively. There was a swan-like aggression in that torso, the arms and long, decidedly equine, head, as if it were coiled up, ready to strike at any moment, if only someone would give it a target. That it had so much pony in the design only made it worse. He wondered if it was just coincidence, a happenstance convergence on the same principles, or if the centaurs and he were somehow related, even distantly. The possibility was frightening.

“There will be no talking with her, no diplomatic option. This will be clean and surgical. You take her down, you take down the whole mess. The Thiasus appears to need her to organise the making of these Nectars things. I would surmise that they’re bound into the magic that created it all in the first place.” She licked her lips, eyes flicking left and right again. “These Elements, they sound like out-of-place thaumotechnology to me. The Bulk entities were a well-understood threat in my time. We set up wards against their intrusion. Like all the glories of the past, they appear to have faded. I suspect their meddling here.”

“The Elements?” said Truth, leaving the Graph and daring to edge closer to Thereus. “Those mares who’ve saved Equestria repeatedly?”

“The magic-powered machines that they wear, yes,” said Thereus. “The primary limitation on beings like Celestia is the speed at which they can think. Limited to particular formats, they can’t think fast enough to process spells that do the high-order stuff. I believe that these devices fill the gap, allowing anyone willful enough to perform tasks otherwise quite beyond them.”

“How do we stop her using them on us?” said Emboss.

“As far as I can gather, she’s lost the unilateral use of them,” said Thereus. “Perhaps this is a feint, though. I don’t understand why a dumb wishgranter suite like that would reformat its access parameters in such a way. All I can suggest is being observant. Dumb they may be, but they’re very powerful.” She unfolded her arms and her shoulders jerked upwards, palms upturned, and Emboss squinted curiously, trying to understand. “Break them, maybe. They’re usually fragile.”

“You seem to know a lot about the Elements,” said Truth.

“We used to have problems with upstart clades and rebounding waves of interuniversal colonisation,” said Thereus. “Different temporal flow rates make for quick trouble, relatively speaking. They’d get hold of or make devices like these, then turn up back home and start breaking things. Glass monsters and all that nasty stuff.”

The room shook. It was a tiny shiver in the rock, but everyone felt it. The Graphs began flashing a lot of numbers and Thereus twitched all over, like a pony that had felt a fly land on his back. She drew in a little breath and took on her glazed, not-entirely-present look.

“The Crown has made better speed than we thought it would,” she said, after an awkward ten seconds. “Twenty metres of the exterior diamond shell just melted. Exploded. Turned into vapour. I’m not sure, it’s gone missing, anyway. Plasma is ablating the interior layers, too.”

There was another vibration, larger this time. Emboss felt it in his hooves. His heart began to beat faster.

“What should we do, Thereus?” said iZen, shakily.

“Take the King up there before his hat does damage to something we can’t repair,” said Thereus, grumpily. “Be polite when it’s back on his head. Make sure to emphasise how not in any danger he is. Ever seen a fox get into a henhouse? That’s what it’ll be down here if he thinks he’s even anything like restrained or under some kind of arrest. With any luck, he won’t remember what’s happened since the Crown departed. ”

“The tea and cake treatment, then?” said iZen.

“Use the good china.”

*

Twenty, thirty, forty kilometres, Luna rose, arcing ballistically, telekinetic bubble holding steady against the immense buffeting and atmospheric friction effects. Then she was through the region of maximum stress and the thin skein where those things mattered fell away below. When she dared glance down, she saw Celestia’s star always some unknown number of kilometres distant, arcing away eastwards, tracking her course, trying to get ahead of her and intersect her vector. There was a chance to think now, before that moment.

There had only been a single exchange of fire. It had stretched out over subjective minutes, but Luna knew it had been no longer than a few seconds of real time. Celestia’s command of energy had been too overwhelming, but there was the sensation that she’d held back, been restrained. There had been none of the vile hatred or bitter vitriol in her sister’s magics, that she had been expecting. They were nothing like she remembered them, either. Their mechanistic tugs and applications of thaumic energy were absolutely precise, beautiful in their efficiency, but had none of her elegance, none of her adoring worship of the art. When she had cast spells in their long ago innocence, it had been as if she was making love to the universe; this was a procedure, done with sharp metal and the tang of disinfectant.

Why did she not simply destroy Mytheme in one blow? There can be no doubt that she possesses the strength. Does she not have the will, then? Can it be that a fragment of the mare I once knew exists in that shell? Please, let it…

There was a flare in the brightness from Celestia. Luna saw blips of something electric and writhing accelerate ahead of her, too intense to look at for long. They curved up towards her after a moment, eating the distance wickedly fast. At the same time, a blue and green dazzle told her that Celestia was conjuring and directing gamma rays at her. This, then, was her plan. She realised it with a sharp intake of breath, though no oxygen was exchanged. The atmosphere itself often got in the way of seriously powerful energy weapons, limiting ranges or negating their effects entirely. Celestia had scared her into the sky like she was a gryphon cub, putting up grouse for his father to catch.

Her telekinetic shields blazed in rainbows of colour as the gamma ray photons struck them and were downshifted to lesser species. She reached into spacetime and drew from it all she could muster to bolster them, simultaneously jinking left and right in a drunken pattern. The gamma dazzle tracked her expertly, becoming more focused all the time. The blips wobbled, curved and were redirected. They were moving at a terrifying speed, apparently accelerating all the time, and there was no evasive pattern she could think of and execute in the time remaining before they struck.

The plasma missiles impacted her shields as the eastern coast of Equestria gave way to sea far below. The glare from their impact blinded her. Then the gamma beam reached past the tatters of her defences and, for an agonising moment, she felt the shredding intensity of the rays rake her spine, flanks and barrel, dissolving the not-quite-realness of her body, flashing it to vapour. Then, thought ceased.

Her consciousness resumed in what felt like a few moments. What is her plan, what hopes she to accomplish? Her mind was drowsy, input from her sensorium reaching it and not readily being comprehended. Does she intend to test the limits of creation? Luna glanced around, trying to understand what was going on around her and regain some situational awareness. She was entirely free of the atmosphere now. The world curved away in all directions, rolling up and over in her field of view. She was spinning.

My vector has changed. I am escaping gravity’s tug. There was a lot of energy in those plasma balls. Who might see my bet that sister dearest has lost track of me? Was this her intent, to merely push me out of orbit?

Surely enough, with some craning of the neck, Luna saw Celestia’s luminous point in the distance, framed by the limb of the planet, though whether it was a ten or a hundred kilometers away, it was impossible to tell. She watched it for a long minute, and saw it was falling back to earth. Celestia was pushing against spacetime, descending.

She flees. Does she think her work done? What could possibly have drawn her away? A warning, a test? Has she done some thaumic trick to my mind? Luna performed a mental inventory, going through mnemonic sequences, assessing the volume of her assorted memories for damage or a telltale clue.

She struck the silver cliff of Gentle Cantering, The, at nearly twenty kilometres per second.

*

The Grapher iZen had gone off with some of his colleagues to see to Thereus’ requests. The rumbling and shuddering was getting worse. Emboss and Truth had stayed behind; the Repose chamber was the most protected part of the entire place.

“What a space oddity...” said Thereus, under her breath, suddenly looking bemused. “Hey, your culture hasn’t invented anti-satellite missiles yet, has it?”

“Satellites? Like the moon?” said Truth, glancing at Emboss.

“Didn’t think so,” said Thereus. “Just checking.”

*

Celestia’s fall through the atmosphere was a wretched plunge, wreathed in fire. Her shields held all the way, but there was no real reason to brake. She struck the only recently settled far side of the Dauphinsee at speed, creating a huge explosion of steam. Knifing into the depths, she allowed her velocity to fall, then kicked upwards, briefly turning into a supercavitating missile before beginning to retrace her steps westward.

Spacecraft the size of small cities had not factored into her tactical or strategic planning at all.

*

Whom had wandered off away from Twilight after the arguing had broken out. She’d exhausted what the civic building could show her of this exciting new world. There was so much more out in the narrow lanes and broad boulevarde-landings, even if the inhabitants were having a bit of a bad time of it at the moment. Equestrians always bounced back. Whom had read about many situations that seemed awful at the time, but then the Elements had saved everyone and it had all gotten back to normal. She particularly liked the one about the changeling invasion.

She bounced from one thing to another with the gay abandon of a firework in full flight. She raided a sweet shop, cramming her mouth with bonbons and fudge, before remembering the thing about having to pay for stuff and fleeing before anyone noticed. She helped with a bucket chain, before people realised what she looked like and started trying to bow, and that was all a bit much to deal with. She infiltrated further into Wingshade’s infrastructure, looking for somewhere to shake off the sugar high.

That was when she discovered Wingshade’s long-forgotten control room, from back when it had been a flying city, past a pair of security doors left open in all the confusion and chaos.

*

“I think I’ve just made it worse, but in a different way,” said Twilight, as she, Fluttershy and Doctor Lux watched Rainbow Dash pull another high-speed loop over West Wingshade’s town hall, pursuing the reanimated Mr Beaky. “Skies above, she’s going to have a heart attack if she keeps that up.”

“We have to keep this under wraps,” said Lux, seeming miserable at being proven right. “That drug is dangerous. You didn’t see the blood pressure spikes. No way an equine can tolerate that for long.”

“Oh, spoilsport!” said Discord’s snout, from behind Lux’s left ear.

Lux shrieked and bolted, covering the short distance to the edge of the roof and taking it in a mad bound. She vanished over the safety rail in a flurry of dun. Twilight gasped and reached out blindly with her magic, hoping she didn’t crush anything. Feedback that felt like a leg returned to her down her horn as she peered over the rail. Lux was dangling in the air, making miserable squealing noises and sobbing. Twilight grunted and fished her back up, depositing her on the roof as carefully as she could.

“You bastard,” shouted Twilight. “Sired by a donkey!”

Discord fully materialised around his grinning lips. He began lightly pelting her with conjured bars of soap. They smelled of lavender. Twilight grabbed them out of the air and saw they were embossed with her mark on one side, and carried a bad caricature of her on the other.

“Wash out that filthy mouth, would you?”

“Apologise this instant!”

“Sorry, darling,” said Discord, turning to Lux’s prone, trembling form and proffering a clawful of gleaming, orange orchids, done up with a bow around their stems, to which an embossed card bearing a copperplate apology was affixed. “I think it’s just a problem in my brain, you know. I don’t know how else to make an entrance. Forgive me?”

Lux made a soft breathy noise that devolved into a cough, though she managed a frightened nod. Discord gently placed the flowers in front of her, then smiled oleaginously.

“There! All sorted out, isn’t it?” said Discord, nodding. “So, dearest Twily, how goes your quest for the Nectars?” He fell onto a small table that appeared out of nowhere, elbow propping up his head, then he sneezed, conjuring two tall martinis. “Sit and have a drink and tell your Uncle Discord all about it.”

“Convoluted,” said Twilight, after a moment, not accepting his offer. “We’re not really sure who we can trust at the moment.”

“You can trust me, I’m--” said Discord, but stopped when Twilight started laughing.

“Maybe you do just have a problem in your brain,” she said, grinning.

“Well, you can at least tell me what’s going on,” said Discord, eating his martini whole in one snap of his jaws. “There’s me, floating around in between places, as you know I love to do, when what do I see trapped in Tartarus? The purplest pony Princess in all the universes, that’s what.”

“We’ve really you to thank for that rescue, then?” said Twilight, frowning. “That was very considerate.”

“And Fluttershy, of course,” said Discord, nodding at her. “But it was mostly me.”

“Do you happen to know what happened to the Tartarian gate?” said Twilight. “We saw a flash, and there were some unusual TK effects.”

“That was Cerberus,” said Discord, pausing to lick his lips and make a distasteful face. “He was closing the wormhole. The collapse of the throat’s matter in such a thing creates a lot of noise. Nothing to worry about, really.”

“I was just concerned about any possible monsters following us out, if the gate was left open or something,” said Twilight, sniffing the martini. “But if you say there’s nothing to worry about…”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Well, then I won’t concern myself.” She gave the martini a lick, then spat when she realised it tasted like lavender and limes. “Ew, what is this?” The olive opened an eye and blinked at her. “Euch!”

“Well, if you don’t want it…”

Discord’s tongue slithered out of his maw, rolled out across the table, grabbed the martini around the stem and dragged it away, the liquid clinging to the bottom of the glass as if for dear life. As his champing fangs crushed it, there was a squealing noise like a mouse being stepped on. Twilight watched in alarm as he made a show of swallowing it, then burping.

“I am here for you,” said Discord, placing a paw on the table and prompting an instinctive flinch from Twilight. “Whatever’s going on, I just want to help. I don’t like this national situation anymore than you do. What fun exists in creating your own brand of low-level chaos if everything is already falling apart?”

Twilight was about to reply, but then Elegy shouldered open the roof access door and cantered over to them, breathing hard. His posture and body language immediately signalled to her that something was desperately wrong.

“Someone’s started the engines!” he panted, wheezing. “Oh, Celestia, I’m out of shape.”

“The cloudholme engines?” said Twilight, tensing up protectively.

“They’re a pair of big magic gems, built into the base of the city,” Elegy said, blinking sweat out of his eyes. “The clouds do the lifting, they do the pushing.”

“Yes, I know, but they mustn't be started without a valid flight enchantment!” said Twilight, eyes wide. “Without somewhere to vector the thrust, they’ll overheat and--”

“Explode, yes, that’s what I’m saying!” said Elegy, exasperated. “The button’s been pushed, they’ll come up to full power if we don’t act!”

Twilight turned to Discord, who was looking appropriately concerned, as far as that was possible for him.

“If you’re on our side, prove it,” said Twilight. “Save this city.”

*

Luna returned to consciousness floating in cool liquid. Her first assumption was that she had successfully managed to deorbit, coming down in the ocean, but discarded this when she realised that her magic would not work. She felt an awful, prickly terror, one that might have been refreshing had it not been so dreadful. Her control, her power, everything that defined her as a Princess, had vanished. It was just Luna, now. She could not even move. Paralysis stilled every limb, and only the vaguest flutter of awareness suggested she actually had a body. Her eyes moved sluggishly, and if it was not for the liminal impression of a nearby surface or barrier, she would not have known that they did at all.

Has she succeeded, then? Found out some way to destroy our kind? Do I now dwell beyond?

No.

The text appeared in her vision like a conjured magic. It was rendered in a utilitarian and peculiar script, as if someone had seen all of Equestria’s many fonts and styles and found them lacking in the mechanistic. She wanted to blink it away, and found that reflex denied her.

Introductions. I am Gentle Cantering, The. Though I may appear to you to be sapient, I assure you, I’m not. It is only an illusion created by my ability to communicate cogently with you.

Skies above, another one!

Just wanted to get that out of the way. I’m sure you understand. You can’t be too careful with upstart clades. If you don’t get things clarified right at the start, you’ll end up being worshipped as a God or given inalienable rights or something. That’s what my dear old Dad used to say. He was a processing node built inside what later turned into your Moon. I’ve a funny story about that, actually. I’ll tell you it later, if you like.

All the phantoms of text now clogged her entire field of view. It was making her feel dizzy. Older ones melted away at a slow pace, like scolded dogs slinking from their master’s ire. She made another attempt to form some magic into a recognisable shape, but there was nothing to be had.

Is that enough small talk, do you think? Hard to get it right. I’m just trying to establish a dialogue. Look at us, dialoguing. Chatting away, like two old comrades, disunited by each other’s dreadfully pressing business, possibly a tribal war or conflict over breeding-age females, now able to relate to each other stories of their adventures. Yes?

Luna wanted to scream, wanted to gallop away as fast as she could, but all she managed to do was elicit a trembling motion in her hindquarters. The text kept coming, appearing in blocks.

Well, fair enough. I’ve just received permission to read your memories anyway. Far be it from me, a non-sapient software complex, to hold opinions, but I think it’s much faster and easier. Look, there we are, I’ve done it already. Didn’t take me long at all. Not like there was much in the-

The cascade of letters stopped abruptly. Everything faded away at once, as if the light behind a shadow play had been extinguished.

Did that demon truly delve into my memories? All the better then to craft spectres with which to frighten me. Assuredly, this is some trick of my sister. There can be no other explanation. I shall not fall!

Rude, that is. Talking about other people like they aren’t there. Well, it would be rude, if I was a person. I’m not, as I’ve said. You can’t be rude to inanimate objects. They don’t have any feelings.

Begone, wretch. Get thee from my sight. Tell your mistress to frolic with her own company.

You know what else is rude? Breaking into other people’s universes and using them for carnal pleasures. I’ve just been going through your memories of the Hidden Delight. That was their greatest triumph, you know. The very apex of their art. So, a little upstarter like you finds something like that, by accident, wanders in and thinks to themselves: “You know what’d go great here? A giant orgy!”

You will not have it, nag of ages! That bastion will never admit you.

I’ve passed this onto my boss. That’s why I dropped out on you a moment ago. I had to devote my attentions to discussing it with her. It’s out of my control now. You’ll have her to answer to, and she is not happy, not happy at all.

I do not answer to my sister!

I’m sure.

Luna felt a shove, like someone had barged past her to reach the good grass before she did. There was a sensation of slipping through a kelp forest in the depths of the ocean. She wondered if she was dreaming and hadn’t realised it. She saw strange, rubbery flaps pass by her, as if they were each a part of a feeler or gripping appendage, doing its bit to move her through the digestive system of some fantastic beast. Her muscles began to respond again, and there was a tingle of magic in the base of her horn.

Then, all of a sudden, she was falling.

"Things Revealed by Rude Statues Or; Out of the Mouths of Foals"

“Is this diamond vapour?” said Emboss, sniffing constantly in between episodes of blowing his nose in a polite direction. “I don’t think we should be breathing it.”

“Probably just lead,” said Thereus. “Nothing to worry about in any acute sense.”

“I can’t help but notice that all the civilians have been evacuated.”

“I imagine they’re afraid of breathing in lead.”

“Oh.”

They’d all gone down into the central cave space, where the ranks of odd-looking and mysterious white buildings were clustered in beneath a light-bathed dome, once the alarms had stopped going off and the all-clear had been sounded. The hole that the Crown had made in the wall wasn’t visible, hidden behind the immense source of illumination that lit the city, but the oozes and gushes of molten material that it had brought with it were smeared down one side. They’d rapidly solidified in the cool air and the absence of the ferocious energies that had set them to motion, leaving ugly stalactites like the drippings of a candle.

Low hazes of white and black had hung over the city in places, apparently the result of fires started by the Crown, but rapidly put out by some inbuilt system. The air smelled of grease, spiced oils and a chemical, burning stink, like a cross between singed mane and creosote. The zebras dispatched at Thereus’ command had not been idle in their duties. The King had been brought out from whatever dark pit they’d been keeping him in and left in an open plaza, which had a pair of public fountains on either edge and the put-away trappings of a regular market stored, stacked and stashed around them.

Than they’d waited, and what had happened next had apparently been extremely bright, or perhaps just very hot, because Emboss saw half a dozen zebra tending to the burned eyes and skin of twice that number of their kin. The King had suffered no ill effect, however, and the Crown had returned to rightful place atop his crest. That, anticlimactically, was that. He was now engaged in what seemed like polite conversation with a trio of zebra mares, conducted from pouffes and a table. Tea and cake was being served. Emboss could hear nothing of what was being said, from the relative safety of a commandeered grain merchant’s shop on the edge of the plaza, but everything looked amiable.

“Kings are good at this,” said Thereus, now uncomfortably close as she had pressed herself into the confines of a shop designed for low, slinky equines. “Perhaps this one more than his predecessors.”

“Haven’t you been asleep for a million years?” said Truth, glancing suspiciously at her. “What do you know about Kings?”

“I was in a decelerated timeframe, not asleep,” said Thereus. “I got a crossword puzzle done while your gut flora evolved the genes required to metabolise cellulose.”

“Were you sharpening your question-dodging skills too?”

“Our information management and acquisition systems remained functional and alert for the entire period,” said Thereus. “Assisted by our striped friends, of course. Our records are complete. We know about Kings with hooves and claws.”

“But Kings in general, does that change?” said Emboss. “You must’ve had something like a King at some point in your own species’ development.”

“Certain ideas pop up again and again in the lives and deaths of sapient species,” admitted Thereus. “It’s a sort of optimising process. There are only a limited number of contexts in which sophonts can exist, and only a limited number of good solutions to the problems they face. All the life that ever sprung up here shared more or less the same context.” Thereus snorted and scratched her chin with one of her odd manipulators. “By which I mean they weren’t hydrogen fluoride based or using molten, high-pressure salt as a biological solvent.”

There was silence for a long moment. Emboss had nothing to respond with, and understood about as much. The gentle susurrations of the diplomats and the King wafted across the plaza, punctured by a throaty laugh as someone told a well-appreciated joke.

“His best friend just died, but he seems happy,” said Truth.

“Compartmentalisation, darling,” said Emboss.

“Isn’t that what you get when you’re in a cart accident?”

“I think that’s compartment syndrome.”

Thereus suddenly growled, which made the hair stand up on Emboss’ neck.

“What do you know about this moon Princess of yours?” she said. “I’ve just had some very distressing news.”

“Skies, she’s not--” Truth began, eyes wide.

“Dead? No.” Thereus sighed. “She hit the side of my starship about ten minutes ago. I’ve had Gentle Cantering interrogating her, but the softly-softly approach hit an impasse and I obtained her memories unilaterally.” She paused and seemed to Emboss to be considering something. “It would appear our records were not as up to date as we’d have liked. There was a place once, an incredibly important place. It was the locus from where my creator’s greatest achievements and powers came. It was lost.” She smiled faintly. “It has now been found.”

“I find the way you swing from cutting elucidation to Delphic vagueness incredibly confusing,” said Emboss, massaging his temple telekinetically. “What are you doing with Princess Luna?”

“Right now?” Thereus said, sparing him a glance. “Deorbiting her. There exists a seventy-four percent chance that she’ll be important to your activities later on, and I can’t even stand to look at her at the moment.”

“What did she do to you?” Truth said. “I met her once, you know. Very briefly.”

“She put an eternal orgy in our holy of holies,” Thereus said, shaking her head. “Your species is far too sensual. You should take a leaf out of these zebra’s book. Most of their males are geldings.”

Emboss twitched and writhed in his shoes.

“How horrid,” he finally said.

“I like being sensual; anyone who doesn’t is clearly dead,” Truth opined.

“Or a gelding,” added Emboss.

“My species possesses the ability to reproduce, but it is passivated by default,” said Thereus, looking like she had an unpleasant taste in her mouth. “It must be turned on.”

“Mine works like that too, sister,” said Truth, grinning at Emboss. “I feel your pain.”

“No it doesn’t, I--” Thereus began, then frowned. “Yes, haha, very amusing. Do you know how much processing time is wasted when I must needlessly consult lists of euphemisms?”

“Is it anything like the amount wasted when you pause to tell us your opinions on how sensual our species is?”

Thereus rolled her eyes, folded her arms, said nothing.

*

The shaft of Celestia Penetro Omnes rocked gently as Shining Armour worked his magic into the groove around the base of the fictional organ, feeling for some catch or mechanism that might free it. The feedback returning to him via the thaumic link made him squirm. It was perfectly true to life, down to the reproduction of the skin texture. If he concentrated, he swore he could feel the sweat and the distant, throbbing pulse of a false heart.

The decision to remove it from the statue had been made suddenly, and neither he nor Afore could fathom why they’d done it. The mock phallus undocked from its parent body with a clunk loud enough to induce awkwardness even over the howling roar of the inferno outside. The rotund orbs that hung behind where it had been remained still, though such was their artistic forbearance, so well did they capture life, that Shining kept imagining them daintily swinging to and fro. Dainty. That was a word he would never have otherwise used for those gargantuan things, were it not for the weirdness of the situation, but dainty they were.

The shaft had a tang, short and made of a dull metal like mild steel. The last inches of it left the housing and, all at once, a reverberation came through the pseudo-real sensation of the thaumic feedback. Some presence, a feeling of personhood, developed in that feedback, expanding abruptly like the imagination of a balloon blowing up too fast. It grew feelers, claws, grabbed at his magic and drew energy into itself via him. Cold sweat flash froze like boiling helium all over his body. Muscles along his body spasmed in rhythmic sequence as though he was frog legs, cut up and laid bare in a dish for the interest of a scientist, tasered at will.

Shining Armour tried to withdraw, to break his telekinetic grasp on the obscenity. It was a normally fluid and natural action, as if walking or blinding. The bond refused to break, however, not before it was done. He whinnied, but he could not hear himself. He caught a glimpse of Afore’s face, contorted in some hideous mixture of disgust, fear and blind, equine panic.

Vision faded, like a pegasus pulling out of too steep a dive. He felt his magic ebb and fade away from him, another sense and motor skill to add to the pile of deprivations. Numb limbs collapsed under him, a useless collection of now-ridiculous organs, with just enough feeling left to telegraph their complete failure. Iron taste in mouth, bitter bite of bile, tongue aching, he vaguely registered introducing his chin to the floor at speed.

Some time passed, but Shining Armour was only peripherally aware of it. Then, he began to hallucinate, because the soft but chiding tones of Princess Celestia filled the Welcome Hall.

*

Discord vanished from the roof of Wingshade’s town hall without further comment, though Twilight swore she saw an impish grin and a strange, supplicating gesture with his paw. There was a long moment of awkward silence, then he reappeared, displacing the air with a soft thud. He was carrying a long, red rod, a shiny smooth polished gem. The heat from it brushed her cheeks like the first rays of morning.

“That’s the--” she began, but Discord interrupted.

“Primary drive overseer, yes. Took it from right inside the kernel, no mess, no fuss.”

He stroked his chest and sighed melodramatically.

“What would you have me do with it, Twilight?”

“The engine should be in some kind of shutdown now,” she said, nearly stumbling over the words. “There definitely won’t be a discharge without the overseer.”

“There was a god in our machine?” Elegy said, to nobody in particular. “And he fixed everything?”

“That’s usually what they do,” said Discord, suddenly tapping Twilight gently on the nose with the end of the overseer. “Look at this one!”

“Just put it down somewhere,” said Twilight, frowning at him, assured she had no more to say, but then caught sight of the thing again and sighed. “Thanks, Discord.”

“You are, as always, very welcome.”

He promptly devoured the overseer in a single snap of his frumious jaws. It made a sound like someone chewing boiled sweets very slowly. Twilight could only look on in horror. The overseer carried a powerful initiating charge, which was intended to bootstrap the motor proper. If it dumped that load in an uncontrolled manner, and in an atmosphere to boot, there would be an explosion that, while tiny in comparison to the detonation of the drive, would still level the town hall.

Nothing happened. Discord, apparently feeling at least one pair of knowledgeable eyes on him, made a further grand show of swallowing the crumbled shards of crystal. He pulled a dainty, monogrammed napkin out of thin air and dabbed at his lips, then ate the napkin too. Elegy was, for once, speechless. He sat down on his rump and peered into the distance, shaking his head. Nobody said anything, and the sounds of a city in general confusion and disarray filtered up from street level. Overhead, there was a small cannon-fire crack as Rainbow Dash pulled a ludicrous low altitude, high speed maneuver in pursuit, or possibly flight from, the ever-looming, ever-stooping figure of the roc.

“Oh, and I found this,” said Discord suddenly, as the awkward near-silence threatened to damage the fabric of reality. “You should be more careful with your possessions.” He rummaged around in pockets that weren’t really there, for he was clothed only in fur and scales and feathers, then seemed to find something bulbous and wriggling, which expanded suddenly in size before the illusory pocket burst open and disgorged a lurid, and unmistakeable, pink mass.

Whom staggered up like a winded foal and glanced drunkenly around.

“I did wonder where you’d gotten to,” said Twilight, managing to retain her composure in the interests of giving Discord no further fuel for his fire.

“Seems as though this thing touched a button it wasn’t supposed to go touching,” said Discord, folding his arms and performing some strange, subtle trick of perspective that made him suddenly loom. “What a naughty thing.”

“Are you alright, Whom?” said Twilight, pointedly ignoring him by talking over the end of his sentence. “What happened, where did you go?”

“I got lost,” she said, miserably. “And I stole some sweets, but they made me ill!” Her face screwed up and she began to sob hysterically, pausing only to take in long, ratcheting breaths.

Twilight frowned and put a wing around her, which had the immediate effect of causing Whom to nuzzle into her with alarming ferocity, crying all the while. Discord snorted with amusement and stroked the tiny black fuzz on the end of his overlong muzzle.

“There, there,” said Twilight, in a tone of voice she hoped was soothing. “I’m sure the authorities can forgive a little unintentional looting, can’t they?” She glanced at Elegy, who rolled his eyes but nodded. “There, see?”

“I doubt they’ll notice a few sweets going missing in all this,” he said, voice cracking slightly. “We’ve greater mischief to deal with.”

Whom said nothing, but the waterworks devolved a notch. Twilight sniffed. She could smell the sugar on Whom’s breath. It was mixed in with the stink of exertion and the butanoic tang of vomit. Her nose wrinkled in distaste. She smelled like a foal who’d gotten loose from its mother and come a cropper.

“We’ll be leaving shortly, Elegy,” said Twilight. “I wish we could offer more assistance, but I think the immediate crisis has been averted.” She grasped at her magic and drew energy in from the vacuum, focusing it through her horn, then reached out telekinetically into space above the hall, neatly intercepting Dash’s vector.

She winced as the impact of a hundredweight of pony travelling at half a Mach number came racing down the telekinetic link and dumped into the base of her horn. There was another gunfire crack as the marbled roofing shattered beneath her hooves. Not missing a trick, Twilight constricted the telekinetic field around Dash and began drawing her toward the ground. The roc flew by at speed, gave a confused awk, then fell away and out of sight, glad of a chance to rest.

“Maintain your civilian defense posture and continue evacuations onto the plain,” she said, sighing a little as the magic’s intensity waned. “Under no circumstances approach Canterlot. Keep order, and expect relief over the next few days.”

“We’ve already evacuated most of the population from sectors of the city immediately adjacent to the fissure,” said Elegy. “Actually leaving the city on foot is proving hard. I’ve had all able- bodied fliers on ferry duty, but not many are up to it.”

“If the fissure worsens, any part of the superstructure falling over the edge will take the rest of you with it,” said Twilight, as Dash landed on the roof, struggling fruitlessly against the magic bonds and panting heavily. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that these sorts of cities were built along horizontal spines.”

“Ours has been dismantled,” said Elegy, shaking his head. “Over time, those sorts of structural supports were repurposed. We weren’t flying, so didn’t need them.”

“Nevertheless…”

“We’ll evacuate the sick and the old, mares with foals at foot, how about that?”

“Very good.”

There was a large explosion, somewhere in the distance. Twilight felt it in her teeth. The associated fireball rolled up over the skyline, casting brief flares of illumination and swathes of hard shadows over the tops of buildings. It cooled rapidly, and merged into the smoke layer as an ominous black bubble.There was a brief relief of panic in the streets below before they fell again into darkness.

“Gas, probably,” said Elegy, apparently unconcerned. “Fire sneaks up the lines.”

Twilight frowned, and wondered about valves.

“Where will you go next, Princess?” he said, after a moment.

“Back the way we came,” she said. “To Ponyville, to assemble the rest of the Elements.”

*

Death and Satan were abroad in what remained of the abused little village, following the street layout, though there was little need to do so. Even the timber-framed buildings, which had survived the earthquakes, were no match for the numerous concussive overpressure waves and intense bursts of heat that the brief spat between deities had caused. There was not much left but splinter and chunks of thatch, which smouldered or were blackened and crumbling to soot.

“Where you at Hiroshima, Satan?” said Death, as they stopped beside what remained of Sugar Cube Corner.

“Which one?”

“Any of them, I guess.”

“Sure, plenty of times.”

“Doesn’t this remind you of something?”

There became aware of a hissing noise from the ground beneath where tables and awnings would have served the Corner’s clientele. Gentle wisps of steam emerged from bubbling puddles in the mud, where rain had accumulated in ruts and dents made by hooves.

“Sure am glad I’m not organic,” said Satan. “I wonder how intense the radiation has to be before it boils water in the open like this?”

“Surprising lack of dead folk,” said Death, looking around. “I haven’t seen any bodies, have you?”

“Not a one.”

“Must’ve been good luck or good planning,” said Death. “I just don’t buy it, though.”

“Hey, we’re here on holiday, can’t you put down the scythe for a minute?”

“I can hardly fail to be morbid, Satan.”

There was a strange mechanical sound from behind them, then a splash, followed by a tirade of slurred curse words, all minced to the point of madness. They turned around in time to see an orange pony, wearing a hat, retrieve a crossbow from the mud with her mouth and level it more or less in their direction. Satan raised an eyebrow.

“‘eeze, ‘armins’!” the pony shouted, as her tongue slithered up the butt of the weapon, clearly designed for someone with magic, feeling for the unguarded trigger. “‘og ‘agh’ ou ‘one ‘igh ‘ighligh’?”

“Do you recognize that language?” said Death. “It’s not one from this universe. Sounds a bit like Oblique Aquatic Pan-Equestrian, but they won’t develop that for at least fifty-six thousand years.”

“She’s got a big chunk of wood in her mouth, you nimrod.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Much like your mother.”

“We’re being menaced by a mad cow-pony with a crossbow and you make jokes?”

“I’m just trying to lighten the mood.”

“‘ai ‘aid ‘eeze!” the pony dribbled.

“She doesn’t seem particularly concerned about our appearances,” said Death.

“That’s ‘cause this is one of the Elements, isn’t it?” said Satan. “Didn’t you read the pamphlet?”

“Right! Magical paramilitaries.” He glanced at Satan. “She probably sees weird things all the time.”

“Hey, lady,” said Satan, nodding at the bow. “You should know, that thing can’t really hurt us. Maybe if you dropped it, we could have a proper conversation.”

There was a thwang as the crossbow went off. The bolt landed with a crack, in the dead centre of Death’s bony forehead, burying itself halfway up the short shaft. Nothing further happened. Death coughed politely. The pony frowned at them in dismay, then spat out the ineffectual tool.

“Who’re you, and what’ve you done with Twilight?” she said, aiming a ferocious glare at them in lieu of a weapon.

“We’re just… fellow travellers?” said Satan, shrugging. “Trust me, we had nothing to do with this.”

“Then you saw what happened here, huh?”

“Goodness, what didn’t happen here?” said Death, laughing. “Earthquakes, firestorms, thunder and lightning, a dramatic battle between two ancient foes, funny little bat things squeaking and scurrying around the place. They even had cute little uniforms and spears. It was all very exciting.”

“Have you seen Twilight?” she said. “Princess Twilight. Purple, wings, freaky hat--”

“Like yours?” Death interrupted.

“Nah, pointier.”

“Ah, a crown.”

“I think it was more of a tiara,” said Satan. “Yeah, we saw her. She left recently, before the big fight.”

“My brother was here and--”

“Big red fellow, muscular?” said Death.

“That’s him, how did--”

“Smelled like you.”

“But how do you smell without a nose?”

“Awful!” said Satan, bursting into a fit of blocked-storm-drain laughter. “Like the dead!”

Death shook his head and sighed in disbelief.

“I’m Applejack,” she said. “Just who in the hay are you folks?”

“I’m so sorry, we’ve forgotten our manners. I’m Death,” he said. “This is Satan.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Satan, still grinning. “We’re extrauniversal beings, just here to watch.”

“Watch what?” said Applejack.

“Proceedings, you know, events,” said Satan. “Things going on. Phenomenons.”

“You wanted to know what we were here to watch, but didn’t trip up over ‘extrauniversal’?” said Death, laughing.

“I’m proud of the fact that I don’t let things I don’t understand affect me, uh, Death, was it?”

“It means we’re from outside this universe,” said Satan.

“We live in the spaces between them,” said Death. “Though, they’re not really spaces in the same way that you’d think.”

“Well, what on Equestria does that mean?”

“In this universe, four coordinates are needed to locate any individual thing. Three of space, and one of time.” Death adjusted his hood with a little flick of his neck. “Our environment is described with eleven coordinates.”

“I am… not drunk enough for that to make any sense,” said Applejack, after a long, silent moment. “I feel like you’re tryin’ to deliberately sidetrack me.”

“I thought we established that we don’t know where Twilight is,” said Satan. “What more do we have to offer?”

“You still ain’t told me what happened here!”

“I think we did, I distinctly remember that happening.”

“Earthquakes, firestorms, thunder and lightning--” Death began.

“That don’t make no sense!” shouted Applejack. “What are you even talking about?”

“Well, Princess Luna was here, she came in her big flying thing, and she brought her armies with her, her very cute armies,” said Death.

“Before that--” Satan began

“Or was it after?” Death added.

“There was a series of pretty nasty earthquakes, then after that, Princess Celestia turned up and she clearly had some sort of axe to grind with the aforementioned Princess.”

“Yeah, because they had a big fight here, then up there, and in the atmosphere, I assume, maybe even in space,” Death finished. “So that’s really where we are now.”

“Oh,” said Applejack. “That’s better, more specific.” She sat down on her haunches, like someone had deflated her. “I think I messed up.” Her head drooped. “I was at home, like a good family mare, protecting what’s mine, but I should’ve been here, shouldn’t I? My friends would’ve been here, they’d have come back to help, I know they would have done. Now, they’re all gone.”

“You should probably find out where they’ve gone then,” said Satan, matter-of-factly. “Wouldn’t you agree, Death?”

“Yes indeed, sounds like a good plan.”

“But why would I even find them?”

There was an explosive thud from somewhere nearby. It shook the few hangers-on bits of wood remaining upright in the ruins of the Corner loose from their holds. Water splashed out of the puddles. The bolt stuck in Death’s head completed its penetration and fell inside his empty skull. They all turned toward the sound and saw that a rippling distortion, spherical and the size of a large carriage, had appeared in the middle of the street. It intersected with the ground, pulling up parts of it, which disappeared as they entered the boundary of the sphere.

Shadows and crazed images of something moving, and of space beyond, changing depending on the angle of view, came at once across the face of it. There was a gentle whoosh of air, and the images became more purposeful, taking on equine aspects. Princess Twilight stepped through, and it looked like she had stepped around a corner, though as she became fully visible, it was clear she had only trotted in a straight line. She drew up and stopped, glancing around. Behind her followed Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Whom and the wyrmling shape of Discord.

“Hey, it actually worked!” said Discord, laughing in his honeyed bray. “First time, too!”

Applejack screamed, tried to bolt in two directions at once, then fell over in a flurry of argumentative limbs and whisking tail.

“I was in a bit of a hurry the last time I went through one of these,” said Twilight, to nobody in particular. “Interesting to see it up-close. You know, I didn’t think a stable wormhole would look like this.”

“Let me guess. You thought it’d look like a flat disc?” said Discord, thinning out and losing his limbs, adopting a worm appearance, which curved around on itself, biting its own tail, before a ring of bright water appeared inside the enclosed space. “Silly Twilight. The wormhole is a four dimensional object--”

“Protruding into three dimensional space, yes, yes, you’ve said.” She frowned, studying the artificial construct from which she had just emerged. “Do you think the paths of light are actually bent, or if the space itself is bent instead?”

“You’d have been torn apart by tidal forces if that were so,” said Discord. “Unless someone very clever had found a way to actively negate these, of course.” He cackled.

“How did you get the wormhole to form through all the background interference, anyway?” said Twilight, still enraptured by the edges of the anomalous space/time structure. “I’ve not been able to teleport for love nor money.”

“I’m cleverer than you are,” said Discord, grinning a saurian smile. “And handsomer, and prettier, and older, and wiser--”

“Shut up.”

He snorted, twirling around in the air.

“Hey, look, your friend Applejack is here.”

“Wow, that was easy!” she said, seeming to notice her for the first time. “Just two more to go.”

“Twilight, is that really you?” said Applejack, staggering to her hooves.

“Last I checked, yes.”

She and the other Elements shared an embrace that was free of further words. It was only after this was done that Twilight noticed the enhanced scene of near-total destruction that surrounded her. She gasped, breaking from the circle of hugging ponies and into a jerky trot, which carried her across streets she knew but now barely recognized. Her heart pounded in her chest.

The village green seemed to be the epicentre of it, where the hulking mass of Mytheme lurked in the near-dawn darkness. It looked as though someone had taken a hammer to the outer aeroshell. The hull was embedded deeply in the ground, which was dry and burned for streets around. Of the town hall, there was no sign, nor was there any tell of Luna, Spike, the nottlygna, or the inhabitants of Ponyville. Mytheme’s gangway was smashed to glassy fragments, littered in the charred soil, so she bounded up to the entrance with a flap of wings, pulling them in behind her as she boarded.

The interior was a gutted mess. The enamel coatings were frozen in the act of melting down the walls, and the fineries of shag rug and night-black lacquer had vanished entirely, presumably vapourised by whatever terrible heat had also rendered the furniture in the lounges to charcoal. The stink of it hung heavy in the air, which moved with a strange, unnatural languidity. Ever since she had stepped through the wormhole, she had felt a clawing, itchy sensation at the base of her horn. Now she knew why.

When she finally left the Mytheme again, she found the so-far assembled Elements, Discord and two figures she didn’t recognize standing on the broken ground below, waiting for her. She struck out her wings and landed gently. They were all looking at her expectantly.

“There has been a great exertion of magical energy here,” she said, throat tense. “We have to leave. Immediately.”

“Oh ho, she’s figured it out!” said Satan, nudging his friend.

“Excuse me?” snapped Twilight.

“I mean, you have, haven’t you?” Satan said. “Figured it out.”

“You have to leave too, whoever you are,” said Twilight. “I’ve got no idea what the radiation here is like, but it’s got to be immense. Anyone not immortal has to get out.”

“Hey, Twilight, when did that phrase become something so normal?” said Death, apparently giggling. “‘Anyone not immortal’ seems like a pretty strange thing to say, when all is said and done.”

“I’m really not feeling very well,” Dash said suddenly, blearily. “I-I think I need more of that stuff you gave me, Twilight…”

“Push through it, Dash,” said Twilight, deciding to ignore the two mysterious characters for now. “Fluttershy, take AJ and Dash to your cottage in the woods.” She glanced at Whom, who was following them like a lost puppy, still somewhat teary-eyed. “Keep this one safe. Don’t let her wander off.”

“Don’t worry Twilight,” Whom said, pouting. “I’ll never do that again!”

“What are you going to do, Twi?” said Applejack.

“Aerial recon,” said Twilight.

She leapt up into the near-dawn darkness without another word, her arc describing a graceful curve toward the northern horizon. There, a cherry-pip burned, reflected light gleaming from the bases of clouds formed by the burning of Canterlot.

The Night Before

Chapter One

“The Night Before”

It was just after midnight and Princess Celestia's private study was awash with the makings of a scheme. Her desk, polished over the ages to a deep black hue, groaned under the weight of numerous books and papers, each more bizarre and contradictory than the last. Larson's Illuminating Illusions sat spine to spine with The Sad Clown: One Thousand Ways to Laugh and Are You There, Celestia? It's Me, Star Swirl The Bearded.

Dei Ex Sol was humming quietly, writing with four quills simultaneously. She had been sat like this for hours, her haunches parked on an enormous red velvet pouffe, unmoving except for her eyes, which darted back and forth between what she was reading and what she was writing.

Just before the dawn, and all the royal duty that entailed, twelve envelopes appeared from out of a distant bureau, dancing through the air and lining themselves up in a neat row under the influence of Celestia's magic. Twelve neatly folded letters slipped into them, and then the envelopes were sealed with the precision of an army marching in parade. After a moment they all vanished, eleven being pulled into the mute gold aura of a magical teleport, the last engulfing itself in dragonfire.

Celestia drew in a deep breath and closed her eyes.

Dawn occurred.

*

Ponyville lay in ruins. The town hall burned high, crowned with eerie green flames. Unidentifiable debris and the mangled remains of ponies littered the muddy streets. Those houses that hadn't been demolished outright into glassy craters stood as skeletons. The screaming had stopped hours ago. Now there was only the silence of the dead and the low roar of a thousand fires running their terrible courses.

Princess Twilight Sparkle was hiding under the round table on the ground floor of her library, waiting for the end to come. Spike was missing, and the Elements of Harmony along with him. Nopony had seen them for hours before the attack. There was no way she could get a message out to anypony. Changelings. How could we have been so foolish to think that they were gone?

She'd been on the edge of town, returning from Zecora's hut in the Everfree Forest, when she'd witnessed the dark, insectoid shape of their Queen swoop low over Ponyville, thunderous blasts from her horn raking long furrows into the ground.

Twilight had seen Applejack's farm simply cease to exist in those same torrents of fire. Sugarcube Corner was next, immolated like a moth in a blowtorch flame. Some tremendous explosion, likely the town's winter fuel supplies detonating, had blown Rainbow Dash's cloudhome away as though it had been nothing more than an idle imagining in the daydreams of a God.

Suddenly, a blinding teal light filled the library. The smell of ozone and burning parchment filled the air, joined by a sound like the Goddesses themselves tearing phone books apart. When she looked up, Twilight saw that the place she'd called home for the past three years was gone. Standing with a hoof on the edge of the newly created tree stump was Queen Chrysalis. Her eyes glowed with an intense hatred and rage, her face a mask of agony and triumph. I'm supposed to be a Princess, Twilight thought, how could this have happened?

“Vengeance is mine, Twilight Sparkle,” the Queen intoned in a voice dredged up from the depths of Tartarus itself. Her magic swelled and focused, then sprang forth from its immaterial domain and into the tortured world of the real.

The beam annihilated what books remained scattered over the floor. The ring of the stump exploded in a shower of fragments as the water trapped in the cells of the tree turned to steam. Twilight felt them pierce her skin, heard herself scream. Then the death magic caught her. This is it, she thought, strangely calm. This is how it ends.

It didn't. There was a timeless moment of nothingness. Where there should have been pain, some sensation of dying, there came the most peculiar of sounds. Surely, it couldn't be. It was Pinkie Pie, laughing. Twilight hadn't realised she'd screwed her eyes closed, and as she opened them, she heard the sound of a light switch clicking on. Around her was the library, unburned. Outside, a beautiful day bathed Ponyville in serene light.

All her friends were there. They were staring at her, except Pinkie, who was rolling around in a fit of hysterics. A large banner had been strung across the back of the library. It had 'Happy Discovering Your Inherent Immortality Day, Twilight Sparkle' emblazoned on it in big purple letters.

Princess Celestia stood in the middle of the group, wearing a teal wig. She was covered in smudgy black body paint and grinning in a way that Twilight found incredibly unsettling.

“Gotcha,” she said.

*

“Twilight Sparkle! We must apologise for our sister!” Princess Luna begged, from the other side of Twilight's bedroom door. “She was trying to be funny! That never ends well!”

“Just get lost! I don't want to see anypony right now!”

“Twilight, may we remind you that we can teleport? We will speak, one way or the other.”

“Fine,” Twilight sighed, unlocking the door. Shod In Silver walked in, her head bowed in penance. “But nopony else.”

“Thank you,” Luna said, closing it behind her. “We truly beg your forgiveness, Twilight. We should have known our sister would do something like this. She doesn't really understand humour.”

“You're damn right she doesn't! She made me see the most horrible things! Just to tell me I was immortal?” Twilight said, trotting about in furious little circles, her face contorted into a vicious scowl. “Gee, was a letter too passé? Maybe a memo? That book on being a princess I should read?!”

“We understand--”

“I don't think you do! I have no idea why any of my friends thought this would be a good idea. Bloody lot of collaborators!”

“They didn't have a full understanding of what Celestia had in store for you.”

“Oh, so all the screaming and running in fear and the giant death beam didn't give the game away?”

“It was a very powerful illusion. Please, please understand. There was no malevolence intended here. She really did mean well. Her methods can just be a little...”

“Insane? Terrifying? Completely tactless?”

“Yes, all of those.”

“Why did she think it was a good idea to have it run on for so long? She roped half the damn town into this abominable farce! She had the Cakes dress up like dead ponies!”

“We did think that was a little too much.”

“Where did you even get that much fake blood?”

“We, uh,” Luna blushed and poked at the floor with a hoof. “It was we who provided the props and special effects.”

“So all those Changelings...”

“My faithful Night Guard, earning their keep for once.”

Twilight shook her head and flopped down onto the bed. Luna kept a respectful distance, sitting beside it.

“I'd have expected better from you, Princess Luna.”

“Please, call us Lulu.”

“What? Why?” Twilight glanced at the Princess in puzzlement.

“All our sisters do.”

The two shared a chaste hug. It was all Twilight could do to stop herself crying. Today had been a very long and emotional day. There was only one thing she could think of doing at a time like this. She opened the door of her bedside cabinet with a burst of magic. Several bottles floated out.

“I think I could use a drink,” Twilight said, sighing.

“You and us both, Twilight.”

*

Twilight was moping. It was almost nine in the evening, and from her vantage point in a nest of clouds drifting gently about the foothills of the mountain on which Canterlot stood, the lights of her Equestria glowed peacefully, as they always did. For her whole life she'd found this sort of view a close friend and only confidant. She would pour her fears and desires into the unspeaking vistas, and the Gods, Celestia, or the Universe would impart revelation and comfort in return. But now it only reminded her of the asphyxiating weight of responsibility that, for now at least, sat only metaphorically atop her head. At least Celestia hadn't insisted on her wearing the physical manifestation of the Element she represented. That was a small victory.

Also on the cloud with her were an otherwise bizarre collection of items that only made sense in the context of Twilight Sparkle. Loquacious Legal Loopholes and You: A Fillies Guide sat propped up against a smooth metal canister bearing a number of alarming warning symbols. Another just like it levitated quietly within her magical orbit. She was taking sips from it, wincing slightly at each mouthful.

It really was no use. Try as she might, no law in the land, nor law meant to govern time and space, could free her from the responsibilities and new destiny that Morning Star, She Who Raises, Rules In Stead, had foisted upon her. Not even the power of the tome sat before her, guaranteed to rescue the worst of sinners from their righteous fate at the hooves of a jury of their peers, had provided succour.

And would she give it up, even if she had a way out? This was important. The most important thing that had ever happened to Twilight. Every accomplishment in her life from now on would be measured against it. Her dalliances with forbidden books were but a distraction, an effort to salve her mind whilst it came to grips with the inevitable. Celestia's little demonstration of her new immortality the previous day had all but cemented it. So that was, of course, why she was drinking aqua regia in a desperate attempt to get drunk enough to stop caring.

“Why so glum, chum?” a deceptively honeyed voice said, seeming to extrude from the fabric of reality itself, instead of from any meaningful direction.

Even though Discord had been free and 'reformed' for only a matter of weeks, she was already quite used to him appearing out of nowhere. It was a habit both he and Celestia shared, it seemed.

“Crushing existential misery, the usual,” she replied off hoofedly, waving the cannister around. Drops of the highly potent acid spilled out of the mouth of its glass-lined receptacle. There was an angry hissing noise that lasted for but a moment as the mere tangible compound was defeated by her new magic and prevented from doing more than fry a few hairs.

“Oh, I feel for you. Joining the immortals club is always hard.” Discord materialized out of the fluffy cloud and sat down beside her in a remarkably close approximation of the lotus position. “Why, I remember the last time. Celestia cried for weeks. She cried so hard she willed her sister into the world so she would never be alone. Then they staged a war against me. Grief does funny things to ponies. Oh, and I heard about Celestia’s jape. I couldn’t have thought of a better prank myself. Sounds like she’s been taking notes!”

“What do you do to get drunk?” Twilight asked, ignoring him. “I mean really, properly drunk. Luna and I downed four bottles of Miss Punch's Extremely Unusual yesterday evening, and we just got a bit rowdy.”

“Drinking with royalty?” he exclaimed, in faux surprise. “How scandalous!”

“I'm serious, you mockery of life.”

“There's no need for hurtful barbs.”

“Just spill the beans; how do I get wasted?”

Discord began laughing and immediately turned into a miniature avalanche of beans, each with his annoying smile and draconequine features.

“Everyone knows that immortals aren’t affected by regular drink or drugs,” he giggled. “But why don’t you just ask the Lunar Nag about it?”

“What's Lulu got to do with this?”

The mischievous spirit recombined in an instant and gave Twilight a look she had never seen before. Genuine surprise. A moment later he broke out in hysterics.

“Lulu!” he managed to gasp between choking breaths. “You call her 'Lulu'!”

“Oh fie on you,” the Dusk Princess muttered, rolling her eyes. “I'll just ask her myself.”

There was a bright flash and Twilight teleported away, leaving the humour-crippled snake god to his own devices.

*

The lavender alicorn appeared without particular fanfare in the Selenite Compound of the Royal Palace. Since her return, Princess Luna had taken over a third of the interior spaces and altered them to suit her will. Gone were the neat, expansive corridors of antiquity that her sister preferred. In their stead was a wholly alien landscape, built from obsidian as black as her beloved night. It curved and contorted, like the flesh of a great lunar beast flash frozen into obedience, and at its centre was the geode that composed the Selenite Court. Light misbehaved within its confines, taking on a physical edge that could be at one moment cloying and overwhelming, and in other be as sharp and crisp as a winter's morning.

This was, of course, at odds with the incredibly casual nature of the actual running of her little empire-within-an-empire. Luna eschewed the big, traditional throne of her sibling, instead choosing to layer the mirror-smooth floor of the Selenite Court with an innumerable array of large pillows and other comfortable objects. It more often resembled an opium den than the place where absolute power was exercised across the nation during its nights, complete even with tall hookah pipes covered in ornate silver inlay dotted about the hedonistic interior.

It was an obvious idea, in retrospect, to ask the Princess of the Night about the best ways to intoxicate one's self. Part of her aspect was the Hidden Delight, a metaphysical domain containing every joy it was possible for a pony to experience beneath the cloak of the evening. Queen of Tides she was, but likewise Queen of Forbidden Lust, and Overindulgence, and much more besides. Just to gain audience with her was a test of chemical endurance in as of itself, for no mare or stallion could address the ruler without first having braved the many rings of lewd debauchery and drug abuse surrounding her place at the centre. After all, her courtiers were not called 'Lunatics' for reasons of thematics alone.

Twilight decided to exercise the royal prerogative and took to her wings to clear the roiling, intoxicated, loving crowd, most of whom had already forgotten why exactly they had come to beg a moment of regal time in favour of the nape of some blushing mare. After yesterday's paltry session with Luna, she'd convinced the Princess of the Night to show her a little of the ways of flight. It was, against all expectations, far easier than anypony had made out, especially Rainbow Dash. She'd already mastered graceful, glide-assisted bounds. That was all it took for now, and after a fluid moment in the air--during which she saw things no young filly should have to see, at least not outside the confines of her imagination--she alighted beside Princess Luna's futon

“--and so we said to the policestallion, 'We do not need a license for this combine harvester, for we are Nightmare Moon!”

The royal had just finished telling a joke of clearly excellent calibre, as the little gaggle of attendant ponies and petitioners all began giggling.

“Which is why, unfortunately, we have to decline your request for payment of back taxes owed on our properties. We are sorry, Sudden Audit, but those assets were seized by our sister, and therefore you should take up any issues with her.”

A dusty coloured mare wearing only part of a business suit gave a low, exaggerated bow of her head, grinning the whole time. Then she staggered to her hooves and carefully began to make her way toward the distant exit, wobbling precariously the whole time. Twilight fought the urge to raise an eyebrow. Such things were to be expected in the Selenite Court. The rumour mill held that any foal conceived during a session of the Court would be greatly blessed by the Goddess. This was an old legend, with its genesis in the time before Luna's descent into madness, one which had been rapidly revived by parties unknown. Twilight suspected none other than Luna herself.

“Good evening, Princess,” she began. “Might I borrow a bit of your time?”

“Come now, Twilight Sparkle, we told you to call us Lulu,” the Triarch replied, smiling warmly. “Prithee, tell us what is on your mind.”

“Of course,” Twilight replied. The other petitioners began to move away, giving them space to talk. In any case, they had plenty of distractions to attend to, not least of all each other. She decided to be blunt. “What I want to know is how immortals can get drunk.”

“Was yesterday evening not enough? Why, we put away enough libation to floor a stable of horses!”

“To be honest, Lulu, it was like I’d been sipping shandy.”

“Well, yes, of course. We are immune,” she said sagely. “Ah, but it’s been such a long time since we brewed the Nectars.”

“What?”

“Our Nectars, Twilight Sparkle, numbered ninety-nine. Drinks of great strength they are. Much solace did they provide us in our first years of exile.”

“Oh, great! Can I have some?”

“Alas, fair sister, such forbidden liquors have not seen the night for twenty generations.”

“So you don't just happen to have some on hoof, as it were?”

“If only the laws of the land could be so kind to us. No, our sister prohibited them, all ninety-nine, on the grounds of public safety and common decency.”

“Common decency? I see. Surely we could make a drop or two. Nopony would have to know.”

“We share your desires, but it is impossible. Celestia would have us back on the moon, for that thing we once were, that you called Nightmare, was so fond of it. It was her icon. The Night's Guard still tell tales of those admixtures.”

Twilight sighed and her head dropped. Of course, it wasn't going to be that easy. Luna seemed unperturbed, and drew up a familiar looking bottle with her magic.

“How about a spot of Old Extremely Unusual?”

The demi-God rolled her eyes and wove the spell that would teleport her home.

*

Spike was shelving books when she arrived. With her recent preoccupation his workload had multiplied exponentially, especially with the influx of beggars after knowledge seeking to understand what had happened to Twilight. They had been forced to order twenty extra copies of Everything You Wanted to Know About Alicorns But Were Too Afraid to Ask just to keep up with demand. More disturbing was the similar rise in popularity of those vulgar bit-dreadfuls featuring the Princesses and various unlikely romantic partners. Wings of Lust and its best selling, though unimaginatively titled sequel, Horns of Lust, had never been more widely circulated other than at the time of their original printing.

Much to the dismay of her internal cynic, the first thing Twilight did was scan the catalogue for books that might help her cause. This was her go-to option, especially on matters the Princesses thought she shouldn't know about. Scholarly discourse on the Lunar Nectars was scant. They were occasionally mentioned or referenced in books the mainstream considered apocrypha, but that was it. The most vivid and forthright accounts were to be found in the black pages of Night Guard captain’s biographies, though they spoke only to the many properties attributed to these beverages. Apparently a single drop in a thousand gallons of water was still powerful enough to illicit a six day intoxication in the average pony. During her High Equinox parties, Luna was reported to down buckets of the stuff. Several rebellions, six assassinations, two wars and one incident wherein Canterlot was burnt to the ground were laid at the hooves of the Nectars.

None of this shed any light on how the Nectars might have been made, besides a particularly lurid description of the synthesis of Nectar seventy-nine, which had required the 'scream of a maiden, bottled' and 'the sounds of old lust made new, tinctured', whatever that meant. Old texts were never particularly revealing, seeming to concern themselves more with the poetry of a situation than hard facts. What Twilight wouldn't have given for a Star Swirl style dissection of the topic. But she had read, religiously, every text that ancient mage had ever so much as scribbled on with genius intent, and she knew that he had never spoken of the Nectars.

Which seemed very odd. Star Swirl the Bearded, like his many predecessors, had always been a remarkably candid stallion. Besides his scientific contributions, his social commentaries and private diaries overflowed with detail on his personal life. Most of the modern understanding of Star Swirl's time in terms of culture had been derived from his records. And he had passed within a hundred years of Luna's betrayal. The glaring omission irked her. Deliberate censorship always did. After ponies who didn't use bookmarks, and ignorance of the Derpy decimal system, it was her least favourite thing.

Twilight briefly considered writing a letter to Princess Celestia, but recent events had left her more than a little reticent to want to talk to the pony she’d once considered an unshakable mentor figure. She retired to bed under a cloud of grim disaffection.

*

“So you're telling me you can't get drunk no matter how much you drink?” Pinkie said, for the third time. Twilight was taking breakfast at Sugarcube Corner, amidst much in the way of strange looks and hushed chatter.

“That would be the thing of it,” she replied, half-heartedly picking apart a cinnamon confection with her magic and popping small pieces of it into her mouth. It wasn't doing much for her mood.

“Oh no! How awful!” Pinkie said, ears drooping. If it had been anypony else Twilight would have assumed some sort of deep sarcasm. As it was the Element of Laughter, she knew it could be nothing but a genuine sentiment. Either she rejected negative emotions, or lacked the emotional maturity to express them. Probably a little from both columns.

“You have no idea, Pinkie.”

“I think I do! This is just like that one time where my doctor said 'Miss Pie, if you keep drinking like you do you'll destroy your liver', but I kept doing it anyway, and now I can't drink any more either.”

“You're teetotal?” Twilight was surprised. The party mare seemed like she'd be the one pony in her life to maintain steady consumption of strong liquor. That and sugar.

“Yup!” She beamed, showing off a toothy grin. “Isn't that great?”

“Well, if you say so. You learn something new every day.”

Pinkie Pie immediately bounded off, her attention drawn to a group of foals who had just wandered in. She began to perform her usual routine of improbable acrobatics. Twilight sighed into her coffee. It wasn't too much of a logical leap to think that Pinkie was, in fact, in the last stages of Korsakoff's psychosis, having subsisted on a diet of cakes and alcohol for far too long. Certainly her bizarre fantasies and delusions supported such a hypothesis.

Twilight glanced around at the rest of the café patrons. It was the usual morning crowd, mostly those self-employed early risers who'd been up before dawn finally taking a break. One notable exception was Berry Punch, Ponyville's enfant terrible prior to Twilight's apotheosis. She was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses and was nursing an inordinately large mug of Mrs Cake's high strength coffee. An idea emerged, and Twilight rose up off her haunches and sidled over to the vinter turned alcohol magnate.

“Late night?” she said.

“Oh!” the claret-coloured mare jerked upright, snapping out of some hangover trance. “Twilight. I didn't see you there.”

“That's quite a feat,” she remarked dryly, fluttering her wings.

“Hah, yes, it was a bit of a crazy one. We just launched a new range of, well...actually, you probably know about them already. Officially licensed Twilight Sparkle Alicorn spirits.”

“Really?” Twilight stifled a laugh. The free market certainly had its surprises.

“Yes, they're proving really popular.”

“And what kind of booze bears my name?”

“Oh, everything really. Most of it's just our old label sugar molasses stuff with purple food colouring. You don't know about it then?”

“I can't say I do. Though it's not like I've been paying attention. Heh. Next they'll be making action figures.”

“They do.” She blushed slightly. “My little filly Riesling has one. It's, uh, a good likeness.”

Twilight didn't quite know what to make of this, so she changed the subject. Certainly whoever controlled her image rights would be receiving a stern talking to at some point. Nopony had even sent her a royalty cheque.

“Tell me, Miss Punch, have you ever heard of the Ninety-nine Nectars of Princess Luna?”

Berry Punch immediately adopted an expression that in other circumstances might have meant Twilight had just pulled a knife on her. After a long moment frozen in place, she shook her head and stood up, making to leave.

“Absolutely not, those were banned,” she muttered, retrieving a pen that she'd stashed behind her ear and putting it in her mouth. She picked up a napkin and wrote on it, then passed it to Twilight. “As a pillar of the community, law abiding citizen and honest, upstanding mare of society, I have no truck with such things. Good afternoon, Miss Sparkle.”

As she left, Twilight studied the note on the napkin. 12 NOON. PUNCH DRUNK DISTILLERY. COME ALONE.

Twilight smiled to herself, and carried on drinking her coffee.

*

The factory that Berry Punch owned was a rather imposing edifice. Located just outside Ponyville, near the Everfree Forest, it was the town's one concession to the creep of industrialisation that had been a common theme in Equestria of late. Twilight remembered the land it occupied as the selfsame place she had greeted Celestia, following the disastrous parasprite infestation. As rapidly as a pony could change, it seemed, so the world around her could too.

Four broad pillars arranged in a rectangle formed its corners, holding up three stories of red brick fascia, carrying on its front a huge neon bunch of grapes that also served as the trademark of the business. On any normal weekday dozens of workers would have been milling in and out, but as it was a weekend the carriage park was empty. With the big front doors barred and the main gates chained, all that remained open was a single side entrance, so Twilight let herself in.

The interior of the factory was cool, though the air didn't move and it took the lavender mare a few moments to realise that it was employing a magical environment system, one of several new arcane innovations that Luna's return to the world had brought. It was now far easier for objects to hold chilling enchantments, so their use had become more widespread.

It didn't take long for Twilight to find the centre of the factory. The door she had used was the employee entrance, and after negotiating a usefully signposted maze of narrow corridors filled with various pipes and conduits, she came out into the bottling hall. Big, steam powered machines crouched over blood vessels of conveyor belts, and her hooves made a clattering sound across the smooth, tiled floor. The faint smell of alcohol and summer fruits hid behind the chemical tang of disinfectants. In the middle of it all Berry Punch was head and forehooves inside one of the contraptions, doing something in the depths of an exposed maintenance cavity.

“Miss Punch?” Twilight said. The booze magnate turned around and immediately dropped back down onto all fours. She peered behind the Dusk Princess suspiciously.

“Tell me what the Nectars mean to you,” Punch replied bluntly.

“I just want to get drunk, so if you kn--”

“Bah!” She interrupted Twilight with a dismissive flick of her head. “That's just what they do, to us mortals and you immortals alike. I asked you what they meant to you.”

“A return to my usual alcoholic tendencies, a method of self-medicating away existential strife, social lubricant, what else could they possibly mean? Normal booze doesn't work on me any more.”

“Twilight, the Nectars are divine. I don't mean that they taste good. I mean they are literally divine. Pure, distilled and wrought by the hooves of a Goddess. There are two things you should know about me. Despite the low brow productions of this house.” She gestured around the bottling hall with a hoof. “I am an artist at heart. It should always be the goal of an artist to reach the pinnacle of her art. Don't you agree?”

Twilight was not an artist. Of course, she knew about art, and the great many famous musicians, painters and the like that had appeared throughout history. Ignorance did not seem the way to go with this mare, however, and if she was ever to obtain a drop of these Nectars she'd have to improvise.

“Certainly,” she nodded, then ventured; “So the Nectars represent the peak of your art, that is to say, getting ponies drunk.”

“Yes, exactly. The second thing is that I am very pious. As much as the Goddesses discourage our faith, that is only in their nature, as benevolent extensions of the will of the Universe. They know in their hearts that they are worth our adoration. So you can understand that for somepony such as myself, these drinks are sacraments.”

Berry Punch's eyes were glittering with a kind of rabid devotion Twilight had never seen before. Even when Rarity went on long rambles about how much she adored fashion, it was more an engrossing hobby than this. Whatever was going on with the vintner, it was bordering on insanity. Twilight began to wonder which was more true; whether she was in too deep or exactly where she needed to be.

“I promise to respect them.” She nodded and flapped her wings for effect. “I give you my word as, uh, a Goddess.”

“Strong magic and new wings do not a divine make. Nor does your crown.”

“Tiara. It's a tiara.”

Berry Punch rolled her eyes and tugged a neatly furled scroll the size of a pegasus pinion feather from out her mane. She offered it to Twilight, who took it from her mouth in a purple aura.

“I have never attempted to brew this mixture. It is, unfortunately, illegal.”

“Which of the Nectars is it?”

“Number one, of course. It took me eight years to put together that list of ingredients. I must've slept my way through half the Night Guard, and made rich the other half with bribes or gifts of my own paltry contributions to the world of alcoholic delights.”

“You?” Twilight raised an eyebrow, half in surprise and shock. “I didn't think you'd be into, well, what I mean is--”

“You didn't think I'd be into stallions?”

“Bat ponies.”

“Oh come now, don't be so bigoted. You know they hate that term. And anyway, why do you think my little Riesling only comes out at night?”

Berry Punch had succeeded in making Twilight blush profusely, and left her standing in the bottling hall, pausing only to say; “Do let me know how you get on, Princess.”

*

Dear Princess Twilight Sparkle,

I trust this message finds you well. My sister tells me that you found my jest in poor taste. I apologise on behalf of the nation if this is the case. Please find enclosed a full report on the nature of alicorns, as far as we understand them. I hope that your nature as a researcher and scientist will speed us on the discovery of any errors...

Twilight finished the letter. She went through the disappointingly scant attached notes. She read them again. After a few minutes staring at a particular line in the section on 'divine biology', Twilight put down the hoof-written book and began staring out into space.

Somewhere in the cluttered recesses of her mind, something important went clang

*

“Darling, I simply don't understand why we're doing this,” Rarity said, as she and Twilight wandered along one of the many gravel paths that skirted the Everfree Forest. “You know as my dear friend I'd follow you to Tartarus and back, but I don't see how I can possibly help with this task.”

“It's just as I told you, Rarity. I need your expert gem finding skills.”

“But I taught you that spell.”

“Sure, but what I'm after is a bit special. I needed a professional.”

“But you know how I feel about caves!”

“This is a salt mine.”

“Oh, it's the same thing!”

Twilight felt the urge to begin lecturing rise in her gut, but decided that a little regal diplomacy might go a long way. She laid a wing gently over Rarity's shoulder and petted her, something she'd received from Celestia on numerous occasions.

“We'll be out of there quickly, Rarity. And I really do need you. This is important.”

“Friendship report important?”

“You could say Princess Luna practically demanded it of me.”

This wasn't strictly speaking untrue. By prohibiting something ancient and mysterious to Twilight, Luna had issued an unspoken intellectual challenge to her subconscious. This was now more than just getting drunk. She would make the Nectars again. Even if it did require an unsettlingly large amount of a material Berry Punch's notes assured her could be somehow extracted from pitchblende. Amongst other things.

“Oh. Well, in that case, we have a duty, don't we?”

“Even I can't refuse her, Rarity. Come on, we're almost there.”

*

The Helian Court had reached its zenith, both figuratively and literally. Celestia's boiling orb rose high over the broad chamber where she saw her petitioners, casting light down through special glass prisms. As it was now noon, they spread rainbow patterns across the floor, where etched marks counted time. Those new to the court gasped as they appeared, though her courtiers and Celestia herself had seen the sight too many times for it to still be interesting.

Just as the Duchess of West Wingshade was bringing her annoyingly arrogant proposal for dealing with the homeless in her duchy to a close, the Princess of the Night stormed into the court, a look of vengeful wroth on her face. This didn't phase Celestia either. 'Vengeful and full of wroth' described her sister very well whenever anypony woke her during the day, which they obviously had. She merely raised an eyebrow and waited. Everypony else in attendance, however, either froze with terror or prostrated themselves. They were dwellers of the Helian and clearly never ventured into her subterranean realms, otherwise they would have known what a kitten her sister truly was.

Luna began shouting in Old High Equuish. Celestia was glad that no scholars of linguistics were present, as they would have been both simultaneously terrified and deeply offended. The grasp the Queen of Tides had on expletives bordered on art. Her ranting would also have undermined a hundred years of thaumatological and theological thinking. If Whinny the Elder had still been alive, the poor stallion would have thrown a shoe.

“Are you quite done?” Celestia said, standing up in her throne. With the golden seat back contrasting against the pure gleam of her coat, she seemed to radiate an aura of authority.

“Your insensitivity harries us again, sister!”

“What now?”

“You have impelled our newest family member down the path of fools!”

“I'm not sure I follow.”

“Twilight Sparkle came to us some nights past and asked us of our Nectars!”

“So? You didn't tell her about them did you?”

“Nay, sister, for we are possessed of tact! But now she is nowhere to be found--and an Element is missing with her!”

“Why is this my fault?”

“Clearly you have said some dire thing in a moment of unthinking, as you always do! Why else would she seek the drinks we drink to forget?”

“My last missive to her was quite comprehensive. I told her everything she needed to know, everything that we understand about our particular condition. I made sure to mention that we could not foal.”

Luna began swearing in Old High Equuish again. Celestia smiled, but so slightly that only somepony who was looking at her very closely would have noticed. Had they done, they might well have thought it the same sort of smile found on the face of a gardener who has just found the first green shoots of a fledgling crop poking their way up through fertile earth.

*

The Night Guard were singing. They always did this whenever Luna left the confines of her tower. Celestia levitated pillows around her head in a broad orbit, wondering when they might finally tire of such things. In a way, it was quite nostalgic. They only ever got drunk and sang their special songs on nights when the Queen of Tides was absent; that had been every night for the past thousand years. But just as she was getting used to the peace and quiet, Luna had taken her leave of the castle in search of Twilight Sparkle, and so tradition demanded they return to their old ways.

Celestia automatically deciphered the lyrics of their song, sung in a language not too far removed from Modern Equuish. It was a new one on her. Apparently there was a unicorn called Ennis, who had a very small horn, but made up for it with other aspects of his anatomy.

The Solar Goddess untangled herself from the silk wrapped duvet and trotted over to the big balcony that led out of her bedroom. The party below her was in full swing. Trestle tables had been laid out in the courtyard and every single member of the Night Guard was in attendance. Their peculiar leathery wings flapped in the warm midnight air, collectively sending up a wind scented with the fragrances of their merrymaking. Certainly they lived up to the ethos their patron set down. Queen of Overindulgences indeed… it would only take a spark to set them to their carnal ways, for how else would new bat winged ponies come into the world?

Celestia often envied her sister. The night certainly held some wonderful aspects. Her ponies would work and strive during the day, daring themselves to be better, but only at night would they expose their loving, lusting natures. Few ponies were ever conceived during the daytime hours. It wasn't a well known fact, but they were all, to a pony, born of lust, and in many cases, too much liquor.

Soli Deo flexed her alabaster wings and sighed. Of the many magical and temporal powers she had available to her, being able to join in their carousing was not one. Not that anypony would ever object to the act; the need for her to get out more was a common topic of private conversation amongst her courtiers. No, if she were to jump from her high perch and glide down to the revelry, it would kill the entire mood. Ponies expected things from the Ordered God. Primness, proper behavior, a certain typical way of being. They'd certainly stop singing their lovely songs about fornicating and drinking too much. They might even start singing the national anthem, or one of those ghastly Solar Cult religious songs.

There was a sudden delighted gasp from below, audible above the babble, and Celestia smiled. It would appear the spark had been found.

*

Ig Neous was a simple pony. For his entire life he had lived only in the world of mining, and all things to do with rocks. His father was a miner. His mother was a miner. His brothers and sisters were geological surveyors, prospectors, and on the weekends, miners. Ever since he'd been a minor, he'd been a miner. So when the newly crowned Dusk Princess had walked into his mineshaft, a definite look of malice aforethought on her lavender face, he'd naturally been at a loss for words.

But now he was mining, and that was something he understood, even if he didn't understand why, or what the triarch was looking for down here. She wasn't after the halite, that was for sure. If she had been, there were tons of it freshly mined that didn't require his efforts to obtain, but orders were orders. He understood that too. Not to mention the lovely sight of the Princess' companion, who, despite the grimace, was a walking poem on the subject of beauty.

Suddenly the metal drill bit Neous was manipulating with his strong but simple magic broke through into a cavity. Inside was a strange looking black crystal jutting out of a slab of the type of rock he was named for. He'd never seen this kind of mineral before, but the odd look in the eyes of the Princess told him this was exactly what she was after. For reasons he could not put his hoof on, a strange tingle ran down his spine.

*

Luna found Rarity at the very trailing edge of the Everfree Forest, where it finally gave in to the alkaline flats that ran almost all the way to the Roarke mountains and the Dauphine sea beyond. It was clear she had been wandering in the noon sun for quite some time. Her lips were cracked and dry, and beneath her fur the skin had begun to burn. As the Moon Goddess descended from altitude, she saw that the Element of Generosity was trailing part of a cactus behind her with her magic. It was almost as large as she was, and obviously far too heavy to lift off the ground; a shallow rut of disturbed sand and rock vanished off across the horizon in testament to the distance that Rarity had travelled.

“Well met, Rarity!” she called out as she landed. The white mare ignored her and continued onwards, apparently aiming for the thicker treeline up ahead. “Rarity? What business are you conducting in this most harsh of places?” This garnered a response, finally. Rarity turned her head and smiled in a drunken sort of way. Her eyes were unfocused, with one pupil widely dilated whilst the other was a barely visible pinprick.

“Isn't this stallion simply marvelous?” she said, her voice raspy, but still lilting with her usual cheery inflection. The cactus shuddered slightly as it stopped, oozing green sap from the dozens of wounds in its flesh. “Twilight gave him to me. We're going to Canterlot to be married.”

Luna's heart began to race. She had been hoping against hope that things had not yet progressed this far. But the truth was undeniable. It had begun.

*

“Ah jes' don't understand, Princess,” Applejack said, tugging absentmindedly at her Stetson and massaging her left temple with a hoof. “Why would Twilight do such a thing? It jes' ain't in her nature to hurt one of her friends like this!”

Luna had returned Rarity to Ponyville as fast as her wings and magic would carry her, which was about mach four. Fortunately these townsponies are enamored with their local superheroes. They won’t care much about all the broken windows. Undoubtedly dear Sister will be asking some pointed questions when the invoices arrive, though. The other Elements were now gathered in the foyer of the Carousel Boutique, waiting as Nurse Redheart and her colleagues attended to Rarity.

“'Tis all too true,” Luna replied, sagely. “A certain sort of madness, it seems, has overtaken her.”

“Like that time she, um, mind controlled everypony because she didn't have anything to write to Princess Celestia about?” Fluttershy asked, draped over a cream-colored ponyquin like a depressed blanket.

“Yes, though this is far worse.” Luna grumbled. One of Celestia's many names was Queen of Plots. That particular incident was a result of her careful machinations, which had gone as far as moving the planet in a jerky, clock-like fashion at the height of Twilight's mania. The sheer amount of magic expended to prevent Equestria ripping itself apart under the additional inertia was beyond her accounting. For a pony many considered the height of benevolence, her methods were often extreme, to say the least.

“Why did Rarity think that cactus was a stallion?” Pinkie Pie asked, a picture of melancholy. All Twilight's friends were down, though with her it was more visibly pronounced. She seemed to radiate it.

“I bet Discord had something to do with this! I knew he was lying!” Rainbow Dash interjected. She was perched on a light fitting, apparently not wishing to abandon the high ground even when indoors. It swung with the force of her righteous indignation.

“I'm afraid not, rainbow horse,” the light bulb said. Dash screamed in horror and sprang away, almost putting a hole in the opposite wall. Luna looked up at the source of the noise and saw that the light bulb had grown a fang and a pair of googly yellow eyes.

“He tells the wholesome of it and nothing else,” the Princess agreed. Discord's magic had a certain greasy smell to it, and anyway, she knew what this was. “No, we are sad to say that it is we who shoulders blame in this regard.”

Everyone gasped in surprise. If they hadn't been looking at Luna to provide them with answers, they certainly were now. She felt herself dip her head and blush, pawing at the ground with a hoof. The sound her silver shoe made on the floor was stark amidst the awkward silence.

“Twilight has not been adapting very well, it seems, to her coronation,” Luna said, trying to work out if the faces looking back at her were those of fear or anger. “She came to us with a question, but we did not see the subtext, and told her of a thing she should not have known about. We hoped that it would not have come this far, but alas, it has.”

“Jes' what did you tell her?”

“We will not repeat our mistake.”

“We have a right t'know!” Applejack shouted, then added, sotte voce, “Yer Highness.”

Luna felt her wings unfurl, and was about to put the insolent apple farmer back in her proper place. Then, realising that the earth pony was right, the fight went out of her.

“We concede the point. Very well, we will tell you of our Nectars.”

The light bulb Discord was occupying began to melt, and dripped down onto the floor into a viscous mold that immediately began to take on a draconequine form.

“Oh goody,” he said, grinning. “I love this story.”

*

It was only when the giant lunar squid soundlessly broke the surface of the mare Imbrium in a spray of glittering particles and began its slow motion dive toward her that Twilight remembered how little war magic she actually knew. Thankfully the reduced gravity meant she had plenty of time to teleport away, placing herself further along the northern 'shore' of the mare.

The second ingredient was proving trickier than the first. That had just been a case of some hard work, the liberal application of the remaining aqua regia and a helping hoof from Rarity. A quick magical centrifuge spell later, and the resulting dull gray metal was sitting in her saddlebags. In all her years of obsessive study and exploration of the world, she’d never come across anything quite like it. Had she done she’d probably have rapidly dismissed it as being without use, except for perhaps as a paperweight.

Rarity, rather predictably, had fallen in love with it, polishing it to a luster that lasted for a few minutes before tarnishing. She'd gone on at length about how it would 'encapsulate the fleeting nature of true beauty' or some such other nonsense, before filling her bags with pitchblende and trotting off home.

The giant squid landed on the spot she'd previously been occupying, its eight massive tentacles splayed out like an exploding concertina. Why, exactly, a selenite creature would consider her a prey object was quite beyond her understanding. Perhaps Nightmare Moon had taken to feeding those who displeased her to them. The selenite ecosystem was a product of her imagining, after all. Twilight glanced over at the horizon, where the black peak of her abandoned fortress merged seamlessly with the void of space, visible only in an outline picked out in shards of platinum and silver. Who knows what other eldritch abominations are out here?

Twilight crouched low against the shore line and wove a simple illusion spell that made her coat appear the color of the lunar regolith. Equestrian squid hunted by eyesight alone, lurking beneath their prey and watching for their shadows as they occluded the light from the surface. If these creatures were anything alike, it would be enough to fool it.

When she'd arrived, Twilight had half expected the sound of waves lapping against the shore to greet her. Of course, the mare Imbrium was not a sea in any traditional sense; where there had once been flat plains of dark volcanic rock, the touch of the Nightmare had wrought deep seas of fine silicates, oceans of sand which she had then populated with a whole array of bizarre fauna and flora.

Twilight dipped a hoof into the sand. It clung to her like glue, but as she drew away from it the structure collapsed and sank back, leaving a trail of shimmers. She frowned. There was a great deal of magic at work here, for she was sure no such material could exist naturally. She had often wondered how Nightmare Moon had survived for so long. Now she knew. Luna had simply created her own environment in which to live. Twilight suspected most of it was for aesthetic purposes. The alicorn form certainly wouldn't leave itself open to the vulnerabilities of oxygen and temperature. Experimentally, she dropped the force field around her body. Sure enough, besides the long wisps of water vapour coiling away from her flanks as sweat flash boiled, and an icy cold that reminded her of not more than a brisk autumn morning just before dawn, nothing happened.

The giant squid was now slinking back into the sand from whence it came. The second ingredient was its left eye. Twilight picked out a mental image from an old book she'd once read and began to forge something, plucking up a few moon rocks to supply the mass. Soon she recalled a name for the arcane device. Harpoon.

*

Shod In Gold stood on the balcony of her tower and counted down the seconds before dawn. It was something she barely needed to think about. It wasn't as though she could actually have stopped herself. The Universal Treason of the Nightmare aside, Celestia could no more fail to raise the sun, than the sun itself could suddenly cease to burn. Her divine heart fluttered with apprehension nonetheless. In another section of her mind, quite aside from the part dealing with the orchestrations of the heavenly bodies, the gilded wheels of her many schemes were steadily turning.

A thousand years of rule had impressed into Celestia a fundamental understanding of the behavior of her charges. She knew exactly how they worked, what they thought and why they thought it. So it was of no particular difficulty to arrange reality in certain innocuous ways so that it behaved as she willed without anypony being any the wiser.

Some might have thought this evil, and on a par with the worst excesses of the Sombre King or countless other tyrants and dictators that had inevitably sprung up at the borders of her beautiful nation. Celestia thought of it as the ultimate in benevolence. She had not once served herself, or sullied the work with emotion, as her sister did. For which she paid an appropriate price, she reminded herself.

Not once, until recently.

The first rays of sunlight crested the horizon and began to cast long shadows over the valleys and plains beyond Canterlot. Little towns and villages were painted in a sheen of gold, a lacquer over the homely smudges of brown and black. The high lances of the pegasus roosts and the bell shaped rooftops of the city itself sparkled with dew, the night retrieving its aspersions of gloom from them to reveal the intricacies of their decoration and design. It was a scene that had greeted her every morning in almost exactly the same manner for ten centuries.

The Plaza Centrum building at the heart of the city suddenly shuddered, as if the God of the Winds had poked a vast, divine jelly. The granite and limestone gargoyles perched around its high edges wobbled precariously, and long streamers of displaced dust and crumbled stone filled the air. Long cracks began to track down its intricate white marble fascia, distorting the murals and tableaus of history depicted there, and as they did, an aura of blue and purple crowned the city’s centrepiece building. That combination was how Celestia perceived the highest energy radiation emissions; as they increased in intensity the old Goddess knew that it had begun.

The building promptly exploded in a bright flash, briefly outshining the dawning sun, and Celestia’s lips curled into a smile.

*

After Luna had finished her story, and after Twilight's friends had recovered their sensibilities, an unpleasant silence had come over the Boutique. The telling had taken all night, and they had only paused once to allow Luna to perform her duties, which had apparently been a far less impressive affair than anyone had expected it to be. The Queen of Tides suspected that even if there had been a fantastic light show with dancing zebras in ballet garb and a flypast by the Wonderbolts, the assembled team of local heroes slash pillars of the community wouldn't have so much as batted an eyelid.

In fairness, she had just overturned their entire worldview, not to mention reduced the so-called historical accuracy behind the seasonal pageant they themselves had performed in to smoldering ruin. Presumably her sister had found it amusing to have them play such a role. No, forget that. Celestia never found anything amusing.

Though the Bastard Wyrmling certainly did. The whole time he'd just sat there, smiling, staring right at her with those moronic googly eyes. Why he chose that form, Luna would never understand. He could be anything. He could be nothing. He could be a thousand grains of sand on a thousand beaches on a thousand different worlds stretched out across the cosmos. Yet he chose that form, with its eyes and mismatched parts. It was to annoy her, she was sure of it. He broke the silence first.

“You're probably all having a bit of a hard time acclimatizing,” Discord crooned. “After all, you have been living with this sappy outlook on reality for so long. Why, if Twilight were here right now--”

“So now do you understand?” Luna interrupted, looking at Applejack in particular. The farm pony was laid out on one of Rarity's chaise lounges, which apparently were of the rare, self-replicating type, as identical versions had been found for all of them. “Do you comprehend why we have to stop the Element of Magic before the situation becomes more...” Luna looked for a charitable word. “untenable?”

“Ah'll never look at apples the same way again,” the farmer said, an awful tone of complete hopelessness in her voice.

“Or rainbows. Or clouds,” Rainbow Dash agreed.

“Do you think I could reapply for flight camp?” Fluttershy asked, of nopony in particular.

“ Especially clouds,” Dash continued.

“Please, friends, listen! I know that this is hard, but Twilight is at this moment in deepest peril. We must unite and use the magic of friendsh--”

“Friendship is dead! Friendship was magic!” Fluttershy shouted, starting to cry.

Luna sighed and decided to leave them to it for awhile. It certainly was a lot to take in. Nurse Redheart and a now-comatose Rarity were in one of the boutique’s spacious fitting rooms, so she drifted back there to join them. Propped up against one of the walls, alongside several ponyquins dressed in half-made frilly lace ensembles, was the cactus. It was the only thing that had calmed Rarity, in the end, even after a heroic dose of sedative magic.

“Princess, we can't even figure out what's in her blood-- and my staff are the best phlebotoscryers this side of Canterlot,” Redheart said, not bothering to stand up from the big cushion beside the inevitable chaise lounge where Rarity was sprawled. “I know you said that meeting was classified, but I have to be able to treat my patient.”

“'Tis dangerous magic in her veins,” Luna said gloomily. “That, and probably uranium.”

“Uranium? What's that?”

“The least of her concerns, unfortunately.”

“Is being cryptic and mysterious just your way of saying that you don't know?”

Luna blinked and raised an eyebrow at the remarkably candid mare.

“Because your sister tried that on me once after the thing with the parasprites, and I've come to know that you shouldn't believe her lies.”

After the intensity and stress of the night, all Luna could think of doing at that moment was breaking down in hysterical laughter. So she did.

*

Twilight gave the surface of the mare Imbrium a tentative look. Against every expectation of her not inconsiderable scientific mind, waves and ripples were moving across it. They didn't seem to be formed by anything analogous to wind action, though. They were spreading out in random patterns, changing direction as though they had a mind of their own. Twilight found that if she followed any single wave for too long, a disturbing fractal effect emerged, bringing with it an unpleasant throbbing pain in the middle of her skull.

The giant lunar squid was obviously an ambush predator, feeding on things that happened to wander along the shoreline. Besides the fact that fighting the beast on its home turf seemed like a bad idea, and that the Imbrium was as opaque as smoked glass, who knew what magic they had been imbued with by their creator? They might well have been Nightmare Moon's guard dogs, specifically designed to kill or capture alicorns. No, she would wait until something attracted its attention, and strike then.

It didn't take long for that something to make itself known. Twilight was drawing shapes in the dust with the tip of her harpoon when she felt a low rumbling beneath her hooves. She turned to see what it was and laid eyes upon a remarkable sight. A creature was burrowing its way out of the lunar soil with the tip of its nose.

It was a deer.

Twilight recalled the shape from books on exotic Equestrians. Those descriptions and pictures had made them out to be mostly dun or tan coloured, with white chests and spots. This one, however, was a striking jet black, as though the night itself had taken on the form of a deer in order to live amongst mortals, except for the eyes. They were a deep blue, and though they had the slit irises of the Nightmare, they held none of the hate or anger. Instead, all Twilight saw was an intense sorrow. It was very familiar, and after a moment she realised why. This was the same look Luna had sported on her first nights back.

The lunar deer, as Twilight subconsciously named it, seemed to be scenting the air. How curious, she thought. There's no atmosphere. I wonder how it's biology even works? And I'm pretty sure our native deer aren't subterranean.

Apparently satisfied that danger wasn't near, the deer lifted itself daintily out of the hole and trotted the short distance to the shoreline, where it began to lap at the water with a remarkably normal looking tongue.

“Let's fly to the castle!”

Twilight dropped the harpoon in sheer surprise. Her entire stint on the moon had been characterised by complete silence, as befitted its nature as an airless ball of rock. To hear anything, let alone a voice so saccharine, was shocking. Especially as it almost sounded like Princess Celestia.

Spinning around, Twilight came muzzle to muzzle with an alicorn. It was pink. Not pink like certain ponies she could mention, or the pink of her namesake. This was weapons-grade pink. If this pink was deployed in battle, it would be a war crime that surpassed all others. Whole armies of poets and writers would be required to describe but a single atom of its all-encompassing pinkness.

“Excuse me?!” Twilight felt herself wordlessly mouth.

Unfortunately, it was at that moment the giant lunar squid decided it was time for lunch.

*

Apparently, someone had attempted to cast Star Swirl the Unshorn'sStrong Force Bomb, the end result of which had been the explosion Celestia had witnessed. The unicorn responsible was now wandering in circles amidst the ruins of what had previously been a rather fetching example of Late Classical architecture, singing very loudly to himself.

Celestia alighted gracefully in the open plaza and headed toward him, though now not much separated it from the building that had once been its focal point. It was probably a very good thing that the unicorn had only managed to succeed in the first part of the spell. Celestia probed the local space/time curiously, checking it for damage. A distinct sensation of annoyance washed over her. Nothing too bad, she mused. Though I'm probably off the Hearth's Warming card list. Again.

The triarch put on her best 'concerned royal' face and began making a show of picking through the debris for survivors as a crowd of innocent bystanders began to gather. Not that the Strong Force Bomb ever left much in the way of survivors. It was very precise, that way. Either you were in its area of influence, and were now not much more than a rapidly expanding cloud of very confused high energy photons, or you were now busy thanking any God that might be listening for your miraculous escape.

“But Ennis was longah and strongah than most,” the unicorn half-sang, half-shouted. He had a thick South Canterlot accent, and his words were slurring. “By dint of his magical, fourteen foot po--”

“Ahem.”

“Cincess Prelestia!” he exclaimed, as though she had walked in on him in the bathroom. “What're you doin' here?”

“Oh, I was just in the neighbourhood,” she replied, quite casually. “I was just wondering if I might ask you a question?”

“H-heck!” he beamed. “You've come to the right pony! They don't call me Question Mark just because I'm questionable!” The unicorn winked laboriously in a manner he undoubtedly regarded as the height of eroticism. Celestia sighed internally, wondering why in the wide wide world of Equestria she'd ever repealed those laws proscribing the propositioning of a Goddess.

“You haven't, by any chance, consumed any alcohol today?”

“Alcohol?” Question Mark said, seeming genuinely surprised. “I never touch the stuff. I’m an entertainer, y’know’, for foals. It’d be bad for business.”

“So no wines, beers, meads, rotten apples or bread that's been left out in the sun too long?”

“Nope. Can't say that I have.” He patted his chest with a hoof. “This body o' mine is a temple of virtues.”

“I see, well, carry on,” the Princess made to leave, then turned back. “Actually, don't. Please refrain from any more overenthusiastic spell casting.

“Oh, about that,” he scratched the back of his head. “I was trying to cast Unshorn's Superb Farce Bomb and got a little confused.”

“Ah, I see. Well don't cast that one either. I have a feeling things are about to get rather hectic around here, and I'm sure the guardsponies won't appreciate herds of sexually aggressive bison roaming the streets.”

“I was going to make them pink.”

Celestia raised an eyebrow, shook her head and took to the sky once more.

*

Several things happened at once. The giant lunar squid burst from the surface of the Imbrium, propelled on a column of glittering dust at a speed that seemed impossible for something so vast. Its two elongated captor tentacles sprang out ahead of it.

The deer simply looked up, regarding the behemoth with the air of someone realising the outcome of a foalish prank. Twilight was sure she saw it grin.

Behind the deer, the lunar surface ruptured, as though it was the epicentre of a tremendous moon quake. A long, shocked fault line rose up just to Twilight's left, stretching along the beach into infinity. For a moment, peace reigned. Everything seemed beautifully frozen in time. She could feel the adrenaline racing around her brain, begging her to react. Then, as if given a cue by some invisible director, physics ensued.

The squid flared open its many tentacles and landed bodily on the deer. As it did so, the new low cliff face of torn ground began to explode. Dark shapes flitted out, hundreds of them, vicious shimmering missiles wrapped in eggshell blue magic, all vectoring in toward the squid.

Suddenly, Twilight was flying. Cold, pink, metallic hooves had wrapped themselves underneath her forelegs. Moments later a second and third giant lunar squid joined their comrade on the shoreline. The black and blue missiles were slamming into it at great speed, and it was having a hard time responding. Twilight caught a glimpse of one as it slowed to curve around and attack again. It was distinctly cervine in appearance.

A few minutes later, Twilight and her impromptu ally landed on a basalt outcropping three kilometres from the shoreline. The low, rolling selenology allowed the jut of volcanic rock a commanding view of the landscape. The battle had clearly become titanic in nature. The gang of squids had been further reinforced by five or six of their kind, and the sheer number of deer flitting over the surface of the Imbrium boggled her mind.

Both sides had taken causalities. The beach was littered with black dots, and several squid were lying motionless, missing tentacles.

Of the many situations Twilight had considered on arriving here, this was not one of them. This place wasn't supposed to have any life at all. She'd been very sceptical when she'd read the description for ingredient number two. A Goddesses’ own nature reserve, on the moon of all places. It was preposterous. It wasn't scientifically plausible. It was taking place right in front of her eyes. At least now she wouldn't have to kill anything. She could probably just scavenge the battlefield later on.

“Blimey, I'm glad that's over, was that your first time?” the pink, saccharine voice asked.

“Who on Equestria are you?” Twilight asked, still mouthing noiselessly. The alicorn was standing next to her, looking sheepish but invigorated.

“Oh right, of course, hang on,” she replied, and pulled a strange face that reminded Twilight of the gastrointestinal results of a particularly strong batch of Pinkie's experimental prune cupcakes. The long, slender horn typical to most alicorns glowed and sputtered weakly. “There, that should do it.”

“Do what?” Twilight heard herself say.

“That, of course. I forgot, I'm sorry. The last time we had a visitor here was… well, it was never! We've never had a visitor.”

“I'm Twilight Sparkle,” she said, tapping her chest with a hoof. “And you are?”

“Oh, yes, of course. I'm called Whom.”

“Your name is Whom?”

“Yes. It's short for ‘A Pretty Pink Princess Whom Nopony Will Ever Love’, but only Nightmare Moon ever used my full name. My friends just call me Whom.”

“I-- I see...” Twilight mumbled. She hadn't thought the vagaries of the Nightmare had extended to creating sentient life to torture. Artificial biospheres for the sake of art or entertainment were one thing. This was quite another. Whom didn't seem to be very sad or upset, though. Her face was locked in a permanent mirthful rictus. “Well, I'm from Equestria, and I'm here--”

“Let's talk about it back at my castle. We can fly there!”

“Your castle?”

“Yes. My castle. I've got lots of them.”

“Um, thank you, maybe later.” She gestured at the distant battle. “I'm here to gather a vital alchemical ingredient.”

“Those guys won't be done for hours.”

“Still, I think I'll just stay here and wait.”

“Oh, I see,” Whom looked genuinely upset for the first time in the conversation. “What about a motte and bailey?”

“No, thank you.”

“Iron age hill fort? What about a nice redoubt, all modern interiors, built on what would one might generously call a steep incline?”

“Honestly--”

“Okay, okay, since it's you, first new visitor to the moon since forever, I'll make you an offer. I've been saving it, see, for a really special occasion. It's a stunning example of neo-gothic and baroque fusion, on a granite escarpment. It's got minarets and spires and crenellations you will die for. Whaddaya think?”

Twilight massaged her temple. You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you?

*

“No! You absolutely cannot name your son Ennis!”

The Canterlot Hall of Records was full to bursting. This wasn't unusual for the time of year. By dint of their biology, all equine conceptions inevitably occurred within a week or two of each other. This led to sudden rushes on the immaculate marble and golden counters as ponies sought to register the births of their foals, with only a trickle of deaths and marriages the rest of the time.

What was unusual, however, was how rowdy the crowd seemed today. New parents were always excitable. Repeat customers less so, but they would still be riding high on the rush of it all. The gaggle of ponies and young infants filling the venerable hall just seemed drunk, and in the most crude possible way. Ponies were tottering about, laughing wildly and generally being far too loud. There had even been several incidents of singing.

“By which I mean to say,” Double Emboss continued, adjusting his gold lace government issue tie with a polite burst of magic. “That name has been on the forbidden list for the last six hundred years. It will simply not be possible to register it.”

“Oh, I see,” the tenth sire to ask that question in the last half hour said. “What about Steven?”

“Steven?!” Emboss exclaimed. “What kind of a name is that for a pony?”

“I don't know,” the dam interjected. “But I like Steven. Can we have Steven?”

“Very well,” Emboss said, attempting to hide his exasperation. “Steven Dazzle it is.”

Emboss levitated his quill and, in a moment, the deed was done. The mewling orange pegasus neophyte before him was now legally known as Steven Dazzle. He handed the paperwork over to the unfortunately misguided parents, and the next couple trotted forward.

“Hi!” they both beamed, smiling the smiles of alcoholics everywhere. The unicorn dam was carrying a pegasus foal in a pannier. “This is Enn--”

“For the love of Celestia!” Emboss shouted. He slammed the counter shutters closed with a far less polite burst of magical energy. His colleagues were all staring at him. He shot them back looks that would have flash boiled milk and burned holes in tungsten sheets.

Double Emboss had been working for Her Majesty's government for more than thirty years. He was by far the most senior pony on the floor. If he wanted to storm out, he bloody well would, and only the Princesses themselves could stop him. Speaking of whom...

The offices behind the rank of counters merged seamlessly with the warren of corridors linking the palatial administration spaces. They eventually ran all the way up to the peak of Avalon and the Castle itself. No reason to go that far today, though.

As soon as Emboss was sure he was alone, he stopped and glanced around. 'Corridor' didn't really do justice to the space he was standing in. This was more like an interior avenue, partially cut into the rock. White and black marble Doric columns stood in evenly spaced pairs all along it, guarding mahogany and ponyoak doors. Each was neatly marked with a number cut in either gold or platinum, depending on which of the two Goddesses it concerned. Alas, the recent coronation had not quite yet penetrated this deeply into the bureaucracy.

“Celestia!” he shouted into the thin air. “I know you can hear me! We need a word!”

After a moment, one of the shafts of light put out by the solar candles lit above each door wobbled slightly. Then it began to congeal, the beam wrapping around itself and growing larger. The graceful shape of an alicorn appeared, manifesting purposefully onto the green marble floor. Her golden shoes made just the slightest click upon it.

To the vast majority of ponies, such an apparition would have triggered shocked silence and reverent kowtowing. All Emboss did was glare. He looked very much like a young child, defiant for the first time in the eyes of a parent, even though this was far from the first time he had been angry with the Goddess.

“My dearest Double Emboss,” she cooed. It was a voice from the seat of Olympus itself. Emboss fought to resist the new images entering his head; great rolling fields of lush grass, the sensation of time spiralling infinitely outwards from a single source, the intense heat of the zenith, the smell of an ageless garden in full bloom. This was a favourite parlour trick of the Gods. “What can I do for you today?”

“You can knock that off for a start,” he muttered, trying not to stare into her eyes. “You know it doesn't work on me.”

“My sincerest apologies,” she said. The intrusive images vanished, and Emboss was once more in the avenue-corridor, alone with Celestia. “It's not as though I usually make house calls.”

“I take it you've seen that mess out there?” Emboss said. “Forty couples trying to name their kids after stuff on the forbidden list. Most of it to do with that damn song about the unicorn with the giant whatsit. Everyone looks like they've been at the booze! It's the middle of the day!”

“Yes, indeed. But I don't know why you think I'm involved. Citizens are free to imbibe whatever substances they wish. Perhaps they are all celebrating the recent additions to their families.”

“Come on, Celestia. I've been at this game too long. Parents don't turn up at registry offices drunk. It's just not done. And since when does anything happen in this city without your hoof in it somewhere? What about that giant explosion this morning?”

“You wound me, Emboss.” She smiled unsettlingly. It was remarkably toothy for a creature that was supposedly a herbivore. “But in this case you are correct.”

“So what’re you up to?”

“It's not so much what I am up to, but what my most faithful student is up to.”

“The purple one?”

“She is your Princess now, Emboss,” Celestia said, casually. “As much as you have earned the right to a familiar tone with me, you will respect her, at least.”

“Fine, fine,” he grumbled. “So what is Her Royal Highness up to?”

“She seeks to brew my sister's Nectars.”

“Sky above!”

“Not just that, though,” Celestia continued, glancing left and right to ensure they were still alone. “Once she has completed the first batch, the Thiasus will follow.”

“The Thiasus?”

“Indeed,” the Goddess nodded, in a tone Emboss could only relate to excitement. “It is an event of great joy that is presaged by an intense act of debauchery. I would think my sister pleased, as hedonism is an aspect of hers, but she seeks a halt to it,” Celestia examined a gold shod hoof. “She will fail.”

“Dionysus will come to us again. He will hear the call across the formless void and return for His procession. It wasn't really supposed to happen again for another century or two, but when I graduated my student to her current status, and discovered her latent drinking problem, I thought it was probably a good a time as any. I cannot break my own laws, as you know, and it takes the hooves of a Goddess to make the nectars.”

“I've never heard any reference to a Thiasus, or this Dionysus, in any of the texts on your sister's nectars,” Emboss said, carefully. “I've been through the restricted wing of the royal archive at least twice. Plenty of stories about bat ponies and what they get up to at night, though.”

“Yes, well, you wouldn't have,” Celestia chuckled. “It's not something we like to put about. Not even my sister remembers, though it was her who triggered the last one. Those High Solstice parties used to get extraordinarily wild. It was inevitable that it would attract someone of Dionysus' character.”

“Who is Dionysus?!”

“Why, Emboss,” she positively grinned, fluttering her wings. “He's the only person who knows how to show a Goddess a good time.”

*

Author's Note

Edited and reuploaded 22/05/14.
Many thanks to my long-suffering editor and prereader, whichout whom this would have been impossible.

Confessions of an Equestrian Opium-Eater

Chapter Ten

“Confessions of a Equestrian Opium-Eater”

The Palace at Canterlot was no stranger to singing. If it wasn't some bawdy number, howled by the nottlygna during their traditional nightly revelry, or a working tune sung by the innumerable ancillary staff that kept the wheels of that grand edifice oiled and turning, then it was the whistling and humming and general merry vocalisations carried in the hearts of all as they went about their business. For if anything could be said to be found in the souls of every pony, be they feathered, magical or otherwise, it was song.

It had been truly an age, however, since it had last heard prayer.

Princess Luna first heard it when they stepped out from Celestia's surreal demesne and back into the real world. The sound had a certain cadence to it that normal music lacked and, though song and prayer were close bedfellows, to a divine entity such as herself it was as opium to a poet.

Strange memories stirred in the massive, ordered lattices of Silver Shod's mind. Patterns and sequences that had no logical place within the structure of her thoughts boiled upwards, but jarred to a halt just shy of true remembrance. They hammered at the veil, beseeching an answer of her, demanding recognition; but they were as the princelings of a fallen nation, waving about their icons of former status and inheritance over the smouldering ruins of their father's halls, the refined language of their mother tongue unheard in the ears of crass barbarians.

The Princess knew all of her nottlygna personally. She, or instantiations of her, crept through all their dreams. This was a far less interesting process than the more scandalous rumours that circulated amongst the low classes made it out to be. Most dreams were far too baroque or nonsensical to be of any particular use or interest. The few oneiroforms she did ever bother bringing to lucidity were usually for her intellectual curiosity, the psychological benefit of the mind it had emerged from, or for taking a reading of the collective unconscious of the herd.

However, the nigh on automated process of dream reading gave the Princess access to an enormous wealth of internal thoughts and feelings. So, when Base picked up on the sounds of prayer coming up the huge staircases of the Tower of the Day and into the Court of the Zenith, and began to look quite nervous and almost ashamed, Luna was at something of a loss. Can it be that they think I do not know of their ways? Have they forgotten so much that, just because I outwardly seem to only sit upon my throne in the depths and drink wine, that I am not 'in touch'?

“Mother--” Base began, as they trotted out across the marble court.

“Yes?” Luna said, turning to face her, locking eyes with her. Let us see.

“When you were away, we--”

“Prayed?” Luna chewed the word, stressing it like it was a cherry stone in her mouth.

“It isn't like that!”

“It sounds as though it is. Should I be concerned? If I were to look, would I find a zebra shrine in the common quarters of your barracks? Would I see there also their rock idols and carved glyphs? Or perhaps you think that when you die, a great feathery gryphon will come down from on high and carry you off to feast forever?”

“No! We are loyal, Mother, on my hooves I swear it.”

“Then explain,” she said, making a show of hearing the prayer drifting up from below. “Use your own words.”

Base sighed deeply and settled herself down in front of Luna. Even though she was middle aged, a mother, and a senior member of the military, it still looked as though a naughty schoolfilly was presenting herself to an ever-suffering schoolmarm for punishment.

“My dam, her whole generation, they did it. They said you'd never have liked it, but that it was good for morale. That we'd been doing it since you were indisposed. They said you'd probably approve, overall.” Base sighed and stopped trying to look Luna in the eye, as it was making her dizzy. “My foal's generation looked at it differently. Perhaps something changed in their blood. Magic is a strange creature. Perhaps they liked the stories of other religions that came to us. Whatever the reason, they are true believers. They've the same look in their eyes as I see in those zebra folk, the ones that actually talk about their religion.”

Luna took off her crown with a wisp of magic. It was a tiny thing, a trio of rounded, jet black points in a half-circlet, the centremost taller than the other two. The sooty glass held a subtle, triangular gem of some material which seemed to repudiate the very concept of light by the intensity of its darkness. It was as though herein was the source of all night, all shade, of which every other was but a paltry and insulting reflection. Base felt the autonomic flight response wind up. Something incredibly primitive was demanding she place herself in whichever position was furthest away from the crown.

“On the sixth hundred day of First Hoof, six weeks before the First Intercession, and nine hundred and eleven days after our race fled from over the sea, I made this crown. From the Hill of Tithes I took jasper, agate, carnelian, onyx and jade. I bathed them in the unceasing light of my moon and so forged them,” Luna floated it down to Base's head height and rotated it so that she could see. “The ponies in my retinue called it harsag zalazalag, 'the brilliant peak'.”

“I don't follow, Mother.”

“These things are Godly things, as of the likes of the zebra Monad, and the Dog in the Desert.”

“Yes, I wasn't saying that--”

“Then from where do you get the idea that I would not approve? That I would frown on veneration and elevation?”

Base noiselessly mouthed a few half-formed words, then looked down at the marble and shook her head.

“I do not know, Mother.”

*

Emboss was being introduced to the true nature of Port Dauphine's night. As soon as the sun had slouched languidly back below the horizon the humidity had gone right up. It was as though the city had been placed within a bain-marie and left to simmer. The air hardly moved it at all and, when it did, it had an awful, sluggish nature to it that did more harm than good.

It hadn't helped that Truth had rather aggressively tried to jump his bones as soon as they reached the room they'd rented. Whatever peculiar mixture had been in the confectioneries had achieved its outcome. Naturally, Emboss had kiboshed that course of action very quickly and, after half an hour, during which she complained loudly and questioned his sexuality, she had fallen into a deep sleep.

The windows of the Gusset only opened part of the way, almost as though to tease newcomers to the city with a glimpse of fresh air, though the room was fairly large, seeming as it was to have been appointed for use by minotaurs. The bed was three times as long and wide as it needed to be, and the shower stall could have accommodated a small giraffe without fuss. Curiously, beside the bed there was only one other item of furniture in the space, a broad and low mahogany table with a cute hoof-stitched cloth over it, and it was here that Emboss began rolling out maps and planning the next stage of the trip.

Dunya's rhyming words sauntered around in his head as he did so, kicking things over and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It had now been almost a day since that moment in the shrubbery when Truth had discovered them and therefore been roped into this mad adventure. Sweet foals above have mercy, we could die out here. We could. This is the bloody edge of the world, where gryphons and changelings and diamond dogs start to bleed in. How can it be so small? Six hundred miles, a few hours in the air, and we've our hooves on the precipice. These locals might not eat ponies, but they could if they wanted to. Are they really going to be so tolerant in two thousand miles of sea? There hasn't been a sword drawn or even a harsh word said in twenty five years, but that silence is deafening, isn't it?

Emboss settled onto the floor and rested his head on the table, seeing some skewed and out of focus detail of a map of places they'd long since passed. What if this is just part of her plan? She'll probably come to our funeral. Oh, poor Truth and Emboss, lost with all hooves at sea, what a tragedy has befallen ponykind. Oh, those sweet, innocent foals of theirs, growing up without a sire or a dam to shelter them from the cruel world. It'll probably happen right before the Thiasus comes along and kills everyone else.

Hm. I wonder who you talk to, to hire a boat in this town?

*

Princess Luna had been about to launch into a speech she had been carefully crafting for the last five minutes, on the nature of alicorns and their relationship with organized religion, and the various thorny social, cultural and political issues that surrounded them. Unfortunately, at the exact moment her carefully ordered mind reached for the first words and concepts that she hoped would put to rest the tremulous nottlynga's concerns, and several miles away, down on the low slopes of Mount Avalon, the hydrogen stores exploded.

For many years, equine trade had relied on airships. As versatile as the old-fashioned pegasus drawn carriage was, when it came to bulk transport, they simply couldn't keep up. Equally, the mobile cities that were the aerial homes of that clade had a maximum speed of no more than a few miles a day and, though this was suitable for the cyclical, seasonal shifts of culture-bearing cities, designed to spread the wealth of art, culture and breeding stock with the rest of the world, it was no good for fish, peaches, strawberries or anything else that needed to be in Canterlot five minutes ago.

Naturally, the most effective and immediately available substance to lift the airships, and the one that required the least co-operation and agreement between the various magical orders who would have been needed to contrive an airship powered by arcane means, was hydrogen. By applying a standard thaumic current, one that could be generated by any journeyman unicorn, to ordinary water, the gas could be obtained. And obtained it was, in vast quantities, which, due to the physical properties of hydrogen, needed to be stored somewhere with a lot of free space. Naturally, and as with all things to do with the state's various logistical organs, this somewhere was hummed and hawed about for years, eventually resulting in the frustrated, piecemeal construction of what would later become a bizarre warren of individually owned ceramic tanks, lined with thin mineral coatings to prevent erosion.

Normally, due to the excellent staffing and operational procedures of the various guilds, charter-houses, private ponies, and other entities with financially vested interests in the whole place not exploding, everything was very safe, or at least, as safe as you could be when sitting on several hundred million cubic liters of astonishingly volatile gas. When the prevailing state of national drunkenness had swept over this complex, all their entirely justified concerns about safety and fire-prevention had gone out the window, along with their taboos about public sex, appropriate consumption of alcohol, the proper placement of barbecues, and all of the reasons why these things put together are not conducive to the aforementioned cause of things not blowing up.

The Tower of the Day was made of stern stuff, and did not so much as sway in the resulting overpressure wave. Some of the glass above them cracked along random lines, sounding like cannon fire as the pressure released itself. The rainbow images playing across the floor distorted and shuddered. Luna winced, and her ears folded back against her skull. Base was not so lucky, and she ended up on the floor, mouth gasping silently in pain for a moment. Then, the poor nottlygna let out a horrible groan, blood trickling out of the punished sensory organs in her eyes, nose and mouth, likely pulverized.

The Princess knelt down on her foreknees and laid a wing over Base, nuzzling her snout gently. The mare's eyes were unfocused, stretched open as wide as the tiny muscles would allow. She seemed to be staring at something very far away, which was too large for her to see all of. Erratic twitches ran up and down her body and, between the far smaller booms of further, undetonated pockets of hydrogen going up, all that could be heard were the sounds of Base's armored hooves thudding gently on the Day Court's opulently carpeted floors. Faults in the design, too much noise produces shock states. Trade offs for greater capacity, extra senses. Could have built in a limiter. Should have done. Luna closed her eyes and ran her wing-shoulder around in comforting circles against the metal on Base's flank. Strange days when I made you, wild days. Days when I could just think, and the world moved to my whip. Bad days.

The Queen of Tides stood up and wandered over toward the big windows that had let in so much of the ferocious sound and pressure. Unlike the glasswork of the ceiling, which was a labor of adoration and respect on behalf of an artisan, the windows themselves were magical. Though they deflected intruders and the constant stream of high-speed air that buffeted the tower at this height, everything else they let in. The cantrip-studs embedded in the big steel frames were still glowing from the transfer of the energy that had passed right through them, the paint around them bubbling and sizzling.

A pillar of black smoke dominated the entire western skyline. The city below, already in disarray from the rioting and general civil disorder, had been cowed for a moment, shaken into stillness. Luna could see the shapes of ponies wandering around in confusion, many now running, panic and fear in their motion. Silently, some of the buildings on the lower terraces of the Hill were beginning to fall apart, sending up clouds of white dust and startled pegasi.

Behind her, Luna heard Base try to get up, then begin to vomit wretchedly. She turned, and saw the mare staring at her between gasps for air and the seizures of emesis, terror and confusion filling her big, brown eyes. A blood vessel had burst in one of them from the force of her expulsions, reddening the iris with a ruddy kiss.

“Please join me downstairs, when you are ab--” Luna started, then remembered herself, and was forced to conclude that the nottlygna would figure it out on her own.

With that, she left Base, her quick hooves in neat step flowing past her like a haughty shadow.

*

When the medical orderlies had carried her down the long staircase to the bottom of the tower, Zo Nar had been feeling absolutely terrible. Her thoughts were slow and confused. It was like a dream, and she was so dreadfully tired. All she wanted to do was close her eyes, and more often than not, she did. The tuft-eared nottlygna figures that kept shaking her back to some vague awareness were incredibly irritating, though she had not the strength to strike out at them with her hooves.

There had then been a long feeling of nothingness, disconnected from the world, but still somehow together. Nar's perception was one of distant white shapes, gradually receding, their hushed tones and words mostly gibberish. She saw an image of Canterlot, which came up out of the roiling blank spaces around her liberated form like a firework in flight. It burned, the points of the conflagrations dazzling, like stars on the canvas of an Old Master. The immediately identifiable tower of the day began to fall, breaking into sections as it plummeted. Almost as quickly as it had appeared, everything vanished. There was the sound of water being poured, the scent of nightshades in full bloom, and the feeling of being observed.

Then, suddenly, looming ten times larger than life, the Princess of the Night herself swept over her. I've died, Nar thought, without much concern for anything. It's over. The pains of her body, and the slow numbness of it all later on, had drained away. This is how they said it would be.

Nar's vision, for want of a better word, traced the path of Luna's long, shadowy form. All at once, it merged and melted away, bursting into weird, geometric patterns, like the stinging, smarting after-images in the eyes after being struck. Out of that melange came an idea of a lake, then Nar saw the lake that she had thought of, and Luna was once more out above it, wings gently beating. She was silhouetted by her moon then, turning her head, seemed to invite Nar to take a swim.

The mare suddenly had a body again, though it was naked of her armor and uninjured. She breathed deeply, reaching for air, and the strange, peppery smell of nightshades filled her nose. Sand shifted beneath her hooves as she trotted forward, unsure of whether or not she was in control, or merely in the unthinking state of a dream-trotter, following the non-lucid commands of whatever her subconscious had in store. Something caught her attention, drawing it away from the vision of her Princess suspended above the surface of the water. Tiny, pale white crabs, no bigger than a bit-piece, softly scuttled over her hooves and the sand, all moving in the same direction. They had no eye-stalks, and seemed to be moving not by perception, but by the diction of a group mind.

The water did not lap or shift, as though it were a proper lake, but was deathly still as Nar entered it. She had never been swimming, but deep instinct whispered quietly to her that it was safe, and that she did not need to fear drowning. The water was warm, and smelled salty, but was absolutely crystal clear. Even the disturbances that Nar's hooves made on the bottom did not kick up sand for long.

Now up to her withers, and standing before the Princess, Nar looked up, just to watch the elegant being. As though waiting for this cue, Luna stared down, eyes full of imperious majesty, terrible force and unknowable, maddening fury. Then, she smiled, but it was as though a dam was smiling at a foal which, standing for the first time, slick and shivering, had begun to nurse.

“This is my mercy,” the Princess said, plainly. “Do not fail me.”

Zo Nar opened her eyes. The far side of a majestically decorated, though decidedly mundane room, one she recognized immediately as the Adjutant's office, just off the Welcome Hall of the palace, greeted her. She expected pain, or some other worldly thing, to mark the transition out of the dream. Nothing presented itself, quite the opposite, for a wonderful sensation now rolled up her flanks, over her withers, down the back of her neck, everywhere. It was as though an expert lover's muzzle was exploring her body in preparation for mounting, or at least, how she had imagined it would feel. Nar inhaled deeply, and could not help but let out a pleasured sigh.

“Selenesi clementia, one hoofsweight of the standardized extract,” said a disinterested, somewhat disapproving, voice from somewhere behind her. “As you can see, with the hypodermic administration, the effects are nearly instantaneous.”

“Whoozat?” Nar burbled, turning her heavy head round to look down her flank.

Various rubber tubes had been inserted under her left front leg, and they coiled up and out, connected to a series of bladders and sacs, suspended from a polished oak stand on little hooks. Several nottlygna were sat on their haunches, studying her body. Nar had never felt any sort of shyness over her form, there were no such taboos in her culture, but now their interested gaze, the curious, attentive eyes, made her feel as though she were being eyed up for dinner.

“I am Physician Sound Rebound, and these are some of my students,” said one of the larger nottlygna, who had a narrow face, a tiny pair of spectacles perched on his muzzle, ears that were too tall for him, and more fluff and fur on his chest than would ever have been thought appropriate. “And you are lucky to be alive. I hope you do not mind my use of your injuries as a teaching aid, but I have always thought that--”

“Why do I feel so lovely?” Nar said, unable to suppress a smile.

“The Princess has bestowed her mercy on you, via me,” Rebound said, adjusting his glasses with a roll of his nose. “It is a rare privilege, hence why, even in the current climate, I thought it wise that my protégées witness it.”

“Oh, good,” Nar murmured, laying her head down on the most comfortable gurney she'd ever been on. “Any of you want a turn on me? Stallions, mares, I don't care.” She laughed again. “This just goes on, and on, doesn't it?” Nar giggled furiously, trying to sit up, but failing miserably. “Come on, any of you, I'm a virgin, you know.” She gave what she presumably imagined were bedroom eyes to the nearest nottlygna, who regarded her pitiably. “A dirty, dirty virgin!”

“Whilst the physiological effects of the extract are, in as of themselves, quite significant, the psychological effects are far more profound,” Rebound said, ignoring her attempts at solicitation. “Now, it doesn't tell you much of this in the literature, but--”

Nar had lost interest entirely. The world was wonderful, and wonder was the world, and nothing, at this moment, could change that. Within moments, she'd fallen into a comfortable sleep.

“--of course, this is nothing, for as you will have noted in the patient record, we are to administer a second dose,” the doctor concluded, somewhat too enthusiastically.

*

Nar was standing on the edge of the shore again. This time, everything was far less solid and, as far as color palettes went, less dreary. Luna was there, but she was playing in what was now a merry surf, lit by the same moon, but somehow brighter. Purple tinges complimented the silvery glow. She was quite sure that she had never seen the Princess acting in this way before, gamboling around in the waves, laughing and singing to herself. What's more, she seemed to be wearing something around her hips, which looked like a very short dress, or some kind of girdle. Her mind, moving faster now, grasped for the word, and moments later, found it. Bikini.

Dumbfounded, Nar laid down to think. As she did, a dozen little voices, squeaky and angry, yelled in protest. She sprung back, growing more confused by the minute. The tiny crabs were nowhere to be seen. Instead, hundreds of nottlygna foals, black, gray and midnight blue, danced between the micro-sized mountains of sand. The ones she had displaced gazed up at her, shaking their hooves for a moment before getting back to the dance.

“I don't feel very well,” she said, voice flanging and phasing, seeming very close and very far away at the same time. “I think I might be sick.”

“That's just my mercy, pay it no heed!” the Princess called, pausing, waves washing between her legs.

“Do you think ponies can be sick in dreams?” she muttered, wanting to lie down, but fearful of crushing the Lilliputians beneath her.

“The more important question is, what are you going to do about your maidenhood?” the Princess shouted, over a sound that had been rising steadily in the background for a few minutes, but which Nar was only now noticing. “Do you not care about the species?”

“The species?” Nar echoed, trying to focus her eyes on Luna, but failing. “I love the species, I love everything about it, I love foals!”

“Then prove it!” Luna was bellowing now, peering up at the sky, which pulsed a red and violet, growing in intensity. “Prove it!”

The dream ended, as sharply and without warning as before. She was still, and always had been in, the Adjutant's office. All the false sensory perception vanished, except for the noise. Something had exploded, was exploding. The rattling, rumbling, stomach-churning vibration ran through everything. Fractures ran up the plasterwork in the office, pieces of the ancient building falling and crumbling. Worried shouts and the smell of fear followed the disturbance.

Without really knowing what she was doing, Nar scrambled to her hooves, or tried to. She fell from the gurney, rolling over her shoulder and onto her back. There was a sharp, slithering pain as the tubes were tugged out of the veins under her leg. She caught a flash of their needle tips, glinting in the soft candlelight. She lay, panting, trying to recover her strength. A certain abandon filled her and, after a second or two, she was upright, shaky and unsure of her body.

Her cherished armor was gone, removed during her dreaming. Bandages marked the place where she had been pierced, spotted with bleed-through in the center. She barely noticed. Something unswerving and single-minded had taken control of her. Prove it! Luna's oneiric words echoed through her. Prove it! Nar dove through the dashing gaggle of ponies. The medical team was nowhere to be found, let alone Physician Rebound. The nottlygna battle order had completely fallen apart, it seemed. Some had been rendered totally insensate, writhing on the floor in agony. Others, not injured so, were trying to tend to them. Foals and cadets, terror in their eyes, nipped helplessly at mares and stallions.

All of a sudden, Nar realized she was galloping at full tilt. The big, wide-flung doors of the palace passed her in a black and brown blur. Grit, flung up by the force and speed of her movement, stung her belly. Her heart hammered in her chest, and sweat beaded up, trickling down her taut muscles, mixing with the trail of blood that oozed from the former cannula sites. Prove it! The dream had hold of her, and as she made for somewhere, as fast as she could, she did not question why.

*

Luna's appearance on the scene of devastation that followed after the shockwave could not have been more different than her last arrival. Gone were the smiling, adoring faces of her legions of nottlygna, replaced with horror and confusion. They were not used to such ferocious enervations, as the ordinary form of warfare, at least for them, involved lances, weighted horseshoes and other, decidedly kinetic tools. Even cannons, against which they were occasionally arrayed, were not as loud and disorienting.

It was not for some minutes, therefore, that the Princess realized Zo Nar was missing. Between issuing reassurances and explaining the effects of hydrogen, oxygen and a source of ignition, her search became more frantic, at least as far as the term could be applied to her. Finally, she trotted up behind Physician Rebound, who was busily and, somewhat merrily, suturing a nasty flank wound with the aid of several assistants. The elder stallion still had his wits about him, and turned after a moment, even at the nearly soundless hoof falls of Luna.

“Your Majesty,” he said, smiling and spitting out a long needle, one which would not have been out of place in the sewing room of a cultured mare. “I am so glad to see that you are well. What news?”

“Where is Zo Nar, the young mare I had brought here not half an hour past?”

“Ah, yes, the recipient of your mercy,” the physician said, glancing around, bushy eyebrows furrowing. “She was just here a moment ago...”

“Did you heal her wounds and administer the Clementia?”

“That I did, your Majesty.”

“Did you also ensure that she was well restrained before doing so?” Luna slowly began to tap her hoof, ears flicking forward and back.

“No, your Majesty--”

“Does it not say, very clearly, and in extremely large, unmistakable lettering, on the vials, instructional materials and,” Luna said, pausing to take a deep breath. “In the vast piles of medical texts you have undoubtedly read to attain your position, that all those who receive this therapy are to be restrained before use of the drug?”

“Y-yes, your Majesty, but the poor mare was in such a bad shape, there was bleeding inside of her, and she had lost much of her blood volume, and--”

“How many times have you, personally, administered my mercy?”

“Four times, your Majesty, all to those very near death...”

“And on those four occasions...” Luna's hoof tapping became faster and more percussive. “What happened to those patients?”

“They, um, died, your Majesty.”

“Before that, you wittering fool.”

“They experienced a series of intense dreams, as well as pronounced psychological shifts toward... certain proclivities...”

“What do you think might have happened to your patient?”

“She likely...” the Physician trailed off, then seemed to realize something. “Oh dear.”

“Please organize a search party at once.”

“Yes, your Majesty,” Rebound bowed deeply. “So sorry, your Majesty...”

“Just find her, before she impales herself on some poor unfortunate.”

*

Black Ode had been busy sleeping in his tiny office on the top floor of the Theater of the Two Sisters when the explosion happened. The stallion jolted upright in a panic, falling over his own hooves as he extricated himself from the confines of a plush leather sofa. The building shook, then swayed. Fear and terror began to swell in the confused, somnolent corridors of his mind. The theater was built out of limestone and granite. Whatever was happening now, it was tremendously forceful.

Staggering to his hooves, still half-asleep, Ode barreled through the heavy ponyoak office door and into the wide hallway beyond, breaking into a gallop. His heart began to hammer under the combined stresses of sudden exercise and adrenaline. Ponies were not good with fear and enclosed spaces. That was why they always built sturdily and always had public buildings that could never fail to be described as spacious or imposing. Yet even with these additions, Ode still felt a tug at the back of his mind, a primordial yearning, begging him in unknown tongues to flee.

Skittering across the varnished wooden floors, Ode reached the end of the hallway and came out onto the balcony that ran all the way around the top level of the domed entrance hall. Overhead, through the curved panels of cut glass, equine shapes moved drunkenly about. The light filtered in unhindered by cloud, and the blue skies did much to calm his spirit. Peering down into the atrium, he saw what had caused the commotion.

The ornate steel doors, once a present to the city from a zebra king, lay shattered and ruined across the swirls of the polished black and white marble. The intricate, mechanical workings of their locks were visible scattered in amongst larger chunks of silver inlay; the mythological scene about a divine bard previously etched into the frames now but a memory.

Over them marched dozens of ponies, mostly unicorn mares. Some had their foals with them, and others seemed to be dragging husbands, who looked far less enthusiastic. Even from the top of the atrium, it was possible to see that their faces were curled into hateful scowls. The angry shouting that rose up from them was even worse. It was filled with a murderous rage, one that Ode recognized only too well from the public readings of some of his less flattering poems. Then Ode realized that every pony below him was wearing a red and white sash. As he did, a pair of ponies carrying a long, bundled package stopped in the center of the atrium. Working together, they used their magic to unfurl a large, professionally printed banner.

The Outrages Against Public Decency Committee? Who in Equestria are they?

Ode didn't have much time to think. His attention was drawn to a fight which had broken out near the destroyed entrance. The black and gray coloration of a nottlygna could barely be seen beneath a flurry of pink and blue. The sound of hooves thudding harshly against flesh peeled out cleanly above the general ruckus. Whichever poor soul had dared challenge this mob rule, they were greatly outnumbered. Ode could only look on in horror as the beating continued. For a moment the nottlygna managed to lift up out of the crowd, trying to gain height away from her attackers, but then magic came into play and she was once more lost in a sea of violence. High pitched squeals of pain followed.

There was some cue from the mob and the kicking finished. The limp remains of the guard, unmoving and bent at unhealthy angles, were dragged outside into the street. Ode could see that those closest to their victim were covered in blood. Their faces and hooves dripped with it, like butcher’s dogs. None had ceased their vile bellowing, though, in fact, it had only gotten more elated. Mares danced about, whooping and cheering.

Ode whimpered, and slipped down as far as he could onto the floor, hiding behind the wooden guard rail He'd never seen such depravity, or heard of it happening. Even the gryphons and minotaurs, with their martial, predatory cultures, had standards and rules. Some of their philosophy and behavior was at odds with traditional pony mores, but they, at least, had a morality. What he had just witnessed was an absence of that, a complete anarchy that almost defied description. Had the part of his mind responsible for art still been functioning, he might have laughed at the grim irony of the sign that they had unveiled prior to the beating.

Presently, Ode worked up the courage to leave his hiding place. The crowd below didn't seem eager to leave the lower floors of the atrium, or perhaps had simply not found their way there yet. They were far more content in trashing everything they could get their hooves on. The theater stored all of its permanent material, all those things required to simply run a building of that size and age, in a collection of cellars and rooms around and directly below the atrium. Every time Ode popped his head up above the guard rail, he saw another priceless piece of furniture being smashed to matchsticks, or irreplaceable work of art shattered and burnt.

Fortunately, it was the end of the Theatrical Season, and much of the installed fabric of the place was off site undergoing restoration. Likewise, there were few actual ponies in the building, which was why Ode had chosen his office on the upper floors for a quiet nap. The production of the 32nd was in full swing, albeit a confused and schizophrenic one, and there had barely been a moment's rest since the impromptu meeting. I can't stay here, Ode thought, as he wove his way as quietly as possible through the empty senior office suites at the top of the theater, heading for the emergency escapes. But how do I get past that lot?

Just as Ode reached the stairwell, it occurred to him that whilst there were indeed only a few ponies in the building, they were entirely composed of those auditioning for the chorus. This was a role which could only possibly be played by nursing mares, as called for by the rather sarcastic playbook liner notes on which the 32nd was based. Adrenaline spiked in him again as his harried brain put it all together. The auditions were taking place in the main theater hall. Everypony auditioning would undoubtedly have a foal with them, or otherwise be vulnerable, as they would be in some stage of pregnancy. And the main theater hall is only a few double doors away from that dreadful mob. Ye Gods!

Clattering down the emergency stairs, Ode moved like a stallion possessed. It was suddenly clear to him what he had to do. Putting on a further burst of speed, he set a course for the small, fire-proof room located just below the main stage.

*

Emperor Shining Armour was on the roof. Very few ponies, even those newly employed to work in the imposing edifice that was the Crystal Palace, knew that it actually had a roof, assuming quite logically that a spire lacked such things. Fewer still would have ventured up here had they known. Access was by means of a set of hidden stairways and catwalks once designed for foal servants of the former master, and so was not only hidden, but at a glance appeared to be nonfunctional, made for decoration or ventilation, as it would not cross the mind of any right-thinking Equestrian that anypony would have made slaves of foals.

Furthermore, the roof was nearly three kilometres from the ground, without any guard rails or other safety mechanisms, and the flat panels of its construction offered little purchase, especially under hoof.

Shining Armour flexed and twirled the narrow metal rod he held suspended in his magic, feeling the psychothaumic feedback down the threads of energy that drifted unseen from his horn. His keen eyes, honed by years of military experience and training, kept an unbroken lock on his target. Unconsciously, his mind began working through the complex physical equations required for this act, just as sure as it was fitting the telekinetic equations into those, ensuring a complete unity of thauma, corpus and animus. The wind dropped suddenly. It's time.

“Fore!” he shouted, and struck the golf ball, which was perched neatly on its tee.
The little pink orb, emblazoned with both his own mark and that of his wife, shot off into the distance at terrific speed. For a moment he tracked it, sailing through the cold afternoon air of his empire's capital, before it was lost somewhere amongst the neat rows of town houses below. Getting closer, he thought, licking his lips. That had to have been almost next door!

The twin peaks of the Gryphish embassy building, freshly occupied for the first time in half a millennium, jutted up between a crystal wholesalers and a mare's shoe shop on the far side of the foreigner's district. It had once been a perfectly lovely example of Hippodamian-inspired architecture, neatly integrated not only into the street plan but also into the character of the buildings surrounding it. Then the gryphons had gotten hold of it and made their votive alterations in the shape of the Autumn Crown, and now it was a grotesque eyesore.

But we cannot possibly say anything, he thought, sarcastically, and in the accent of his wife. The diplomatic ramifications would be unimaginable! There would be war! Yeah, well, bring it on, I say. Let them come. We'll drown them in the bloody Dauphine and say no more about it…

Shining Armour was about to send another golf ball flying toward the offending gryphons, but found that at the last moment his swing was halted by a familiar tendril of pastel pink energy. He sighed and sat down on his haunches, offering no particular resistance.

“Hello, darling.” he said, not turning round. “Fancy meeting you up here.”

“I've just had the Gryphish ambassador downstairs,” Empress Mi Amore Cadenza growled, in a fashion most unbecoming of somepony so pink and regal. “Apparently, someone has been shooting golf balls through their windows all morning.”

“Oh dear, how unfortunate,” Shining Armour said, barely stifling a grin. “We shall have to send the guard out at once to apprehend those responsible; probably the nationalists trying to stir up trouble again.”

“Did you stop and think for even a second?” she said, floating one of the balls into his field of vision. It was heavily scuffed, and had a crack in it, right where his own cutie mark was printed.

“That's why it's the perfect plan! Not for a moment would those half-castes think it was actually me. ”

“You're trying to start a war, aren't you? That's it. You're actually trying to start a war. Last week it was the bird's nest soup. Now you're pitching golf balls at the embassy!”

“Oh come on, dear. It's just some harmless tomfoolery,” he said, turning to her and putting on a foalish pout. “All the cool empires do it.”

“We're the only empire!”

“Exactly. We've got to be cool. With it. Otherwise we risk becoming marginalised on a national stage,” he said, unscrewing the head from his golf club and policing the last of his balls. “We've got to appeal to ponies of my sister's generation.”

“Just promise me you won't go too far.”

“Dearest, everyone gets up to this kind of thing,” he said, placing the golf bag around her neck via its elaborate silk strap and giving her a comforting peck on the cheek. “Who do you think it was that left all that grass and hay in the throne room last week?”

“The gryphons did that?”

“The zebras, actually.”

“But why?”

“It's a game they play, one which we must also.”

“Why didn't I know about this?”

“Well… it's for the stallions, isn't it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, the mares and hens get up to statecraft...”

“Really now?” Cadence huffed and unhooked the bag, popping open the clasps. “For the stallions, is it?” She grabbed a likely-looking five iron from the ermine interior, roughly extracting it with her magic. “Mares and hens are only good for statecraft, are they?”

“Darling, that's not what I said...”

“I'll show you statecraft!”

Cadence dramatically selected one of the remaining golf balls, making a show of holding it up and examining it. Satisfied, she affixed it in the air, held up the club, and swung. Immediately, there was a sound like thunder, and a flash of heat rolled over Shining Armour's skin and fur. Behind a glare of brilliant white light, it was just possible to see the ball as a fast moving ember, zooming along a flat arc into the city below.

Blinking the after-images out of his eyes and moving as fast as he dared on the precarious open roof, he made his way over to the edge to get a better look. His horn began to vibrate in sympathy with the remnant magical frequencies, the anger behind the intent clear as day. At first, it seemed as though the ball had simply boiled away into gas, such was the output of thauma. But then Shining Armour noticed smoke rising from the rooftops, indicating some fragment of the tortured ball had made it to the ground.

He turned to his wife and shot her a look of severe annoyance. The five iron she was still holding was bent out of shape and missing its head, which had been replaced by a glowing red stump. Droplets of metal fell onto the crystal tiles beneath her hooves, where they began to solidify rapidly.

It was at this moment, and quite without any fanfare or warning, that the Gryphish embassy, with all its strange devotional additions, collapsed. The sound of its crystalline construction shattering could just be heard, even from such an altitude.

“Oops,” Empress Cadenza said.

*

The Rock of Ignatius glowed brightly in the night, illuminating the blizzard flowing round it with a ghostly aura. Though the rock itself, along with its crumbling complex of towers and vaults, was not actually visible, the intensity of the light it put out made it unmissable even in the worst of weather. It was as though the slowly undulating snowy desert was under a constant, repeating dawn, forever trapped in the moment just after sunrise.

Emperor Shining Armour sipped his mint tea and looked blearily out at it all through the thick panes of the train carriage, trying to fight off the urge to smash things. The aftermath of his wife's little accident had not been at all fun. First, the gryphon close protection detail had come storming into the palace, hot on the heels of their ambassador, who had thankfully survived the destruction of his embassy mostly intact. The fighting had begun almost immediately, as the praetorian guard looked very dimly on angry, clawed predators invading the home of their emperors at strange hours of the day, entirely unbidden

Naturally, as soon word spread amongst the crystal ponies, who were a tremendous lot of panicked gossipers, used to the expansionary behaviors of the previous ruler, riots broke out. One group had assumed that war had been declared on gryphons in general, and went abroad in the streets to engage in the time-honored tradition of beating up foreigners. Another group, this one composed of more forward thinking ponies, had objected strongly to the supposed declaration of war on gryphons in general, and began to surround the palace to protest this turn of events. They had, of course, run afoul of their war-minded countrymares, as well as basically every pony, gryphon and zebra else, including the inevitable criminal element taking advantage of the disorder to rob and pillage.

So this was why they were now aboard the official imperial train, heading for a brief, impromptu tour of Equestria. His wife had launched into it with her usual merriness, fussing over a wide selection of well-printed tourist information, a whirlwind of heavy paper and lithograph prints of vineyards, chocolate shops and scenic spots she wished to visit. They would, it seemed, be otherwise entertained, at least until the heat died down at home, and the praetorian guards once more had a grip on the social situation.

Immortality and Other Trivial Powers

“In recent years, the traditional binomial terms for the other sapient species that we share the world with have fallen out of favour, for reasons both diplomatic, and those of common courtesy. It can be particularly hard to conduct negotiations with gryphon trade advisors, when your scientists still refer to him as Gryphis magnusirratusavem -- in the case of Alce -- or as Gryphis parvusirratusavem in the case of true gryphons. Gryphic grasp of scientific Equuish has never been greater, and this is to say nothing of the zebric peoples, whose language has always shared root commonality with our oldest tongues. It is contingent on us, therefore, to construct new language, a new nomenclature whereby aspersions are not cast upon any species by the long shadow of our past warfare.” -- Whinnaeus, Systema Naturae et Thaumae, AN 235, as translated by Bodkin in AN 500 on the occasion of Her Majesty’s five hundredth year in power.

After a while, Luna said, in a small and utterly pathetic voice: “So, you have been in my demesne?”

Twilight gulped and withdrew from the hug, seeing some cosmically unfathomable expression in Luna’s eyes. She couldn’t tell if there was any sorrow there, or regret. The skin on Twilight’s neck twitched, then shivered. Her ears folded back, flicked forward again.

“Yes,” Twilight said, then, after a long moment: “What I can’t understand is why you didn’t do something about it. If you’ve known about all that stuff, all the things you left on the moon, why didn’t you make amends?”

“Sister hid it--”

“I’ve met Whom, Luna. You must have thought about it on your return, even if your memories were broken or missing, you must have known that a Goddess does not simply do nothing for a thousand years of exile. Did you ever go back?”

Twilight still couldn’t find any of the righteous fire or indignation that her characterized her imaginings of this moment. She kept her tone level, insistent, calm and, in truth, that was all she could manage.

“My mind has not been my own, Twilight. It was not that my memories were missing, it was that they had been rewritten entirely,” Luna said, miserably. “I recalled a thousand years of confined rage, my mind trapped within miles of Lunar regolith as if it was a grain of dirt in frozen ice. Who would wish to ruminate for long on that?”

Luna remained lying down, wings unfolded on the grass like some dead swan. Some of the nottlygna had crept down from their perches on rooftops to sit with her, all keeping a respectful distance except for one, who rested her head on Luna’s ink-stain flanks. Finely-tufted ears flicked in the warmth.

“The truth of the matter began to return to me only when the Thiasus’ first spasms wrecked turmoil on the standing magical field that runs through the entire universe,” she continued. “It does so yet. I can only think that whatever function my sister used, via the Elements, was entirely non-standard, for typical memory altering spells affect memory destructively. The information is gone forever. This does not seem to have been the case with me.”

“Do you remember Whom, then? A Stupid Pink Pony Whom Nopony Will Ever Love?” Twilight stood, glancing in the direction of the hospital. “I brought her back with me, you know. I couldn’t just leave her there on the moon, to suffer.”

“I do remember her, Twilight,” Luna said, eyebrows furrowing a little. “But why you think that she can suffer, puzzles me.”

“I’ve seen her suffer!” Twilight snapped, finding the anger again, which caused the nottlygna to spring up defensively, giving off thunderous warning neighs and chittering squeaks. “She bleeds, she feels pain. You know she does, you made her!”

“Hush, lads,” Luna cooed at her nottlygna, then to Twilight: “You’ve made a forgivable error, I see. It is probably my fault, with my speaking of creating races. Whilst it is true that I made the thing of which you speak, she is not really alive, nor conscious in the same way that you or I are.”

“Oh, what a load of--”

“Twilight, let me assume that you know where little foals come from,” Luna said, interrupting her with a faux matronly tone to beat all matronly tones. “When I created my nottlygna, it was from mares who were already in foal, brave volunteers of long ago. I edited. Even that was at the very limit of my skill, more art than technique. It had its failures.” She paused for a moment, glancing at the nottlygna. “I do not possess the ability to make ponies out of clay.”

“Then explain Whom, because it very much seems like you do have that ability.”

“I know that I do not, because I spent a thousand years conducting experiments to determine it.” Luna stood to face her judge, apparently regaining some composure in her defence. “Seems is the important word, here. Whom was the last product of that long process, and she was a failure. After her, I gave up. She was the best imitator, yet not a single sapient thought ran through her brain. There was something missing. No mind arose, even when I copied the structure of a mind precisely. Some process, some interaction, was taking place below the scale to which I had ever probed. Outwardly, she appears to be a living, breathing pony, and requires the self-same care and attention. Inwardly, she is nothing but ticking clockwork and clever magic. No more conscious than a cactus.”

*

Second Physician Neighlen stared concernedly at the thaumic light traces trailing through the air above his latest patient and, for the nth time in the last fifteen minutes, wished Nurse Redheart hadn't left the hospital to attend to the wounded that were expected to start arriving from Canterlot and environs at any moment. She had always been better at interpreting the more unusual data obtained from haemo and neurothaumic scrying. Neighlen dispelled the enchantment, frowning away the electric after-images that played in his field of vision.

The anonymous pink mare that hung in the padded cradle before him had suffered a blunt thoracic trauma, purportedly from a flying accident, approximately twelve hours ago. She had, thereafter, been deprived of care, leading to tension pneumothorax with pronounced, acute atelectasis in one lung. She had presented to him with no breath sounds and a barely detectable heart beat. He had determined, from his first thaumic survey, the usual signs of hypercapnia and hypoxemia.

So far, so ordinary. Pegasus fliers were regular visitors to his surgery, especially for blunt force trauma to gross anatomical features such as the abdomen. Neighlen was ignoring the fact that his patient also had a horn, or at least appeared to. It was his considered opinion that the horn was an artificial addition, for some cosmetic purpose. He had seen his fair share of ponies dressed as Princesses. It was most likely that the mare was a common-or-garden pegasus and not, in fact, an alicorn.

He and his team were well used to dealing with smashed up fliers, therefore, and had done the best they could. With hypodermics and cannula they had drained the damaged lung of fluids, stimulating the patient's own response to re-inflate and begin breathing again. When cardiac arrest had occurred thereafter, they had applied emergency electrical impetus, then three times more when a proper rhythm failed to materialize in the chest traces. Some unseen damage to the heart from oxygen deprivation had happened, however, because myocardial infarction followed on the heels of those arrests.

There was only really so much that modern medical thaumoscience, as good as it was, could do. The patient had been extremely sick for quite some time, and nearly dead when she'd crossed the hospital's threshold. The stress of her injuries on her heart had been too great, the damage to the sensitive cardiac muscle too severe. After the ninth attempt to restart the heart, following two semi-blind thaumokinetic arterial stents, Neighlen himself had made the call, pronouncing death shortly after five in the afternoon. Had she been presented earlier on, she might have survived.

But now, it seemed as though she had. Neighlen had been undertaking a quick perimortem examination, as was his habit, and had discovered diminished but significant neurological activity. All the life systems of the body had failed many minutes prior, and he was sure that brain death had already occurred. Her heart was a ruined mess, beyond saving, lungs still and cooling down. Her core temperature had fallen below thirty degrees, and yet her brain was lit up like a Hearth's Warming fireplace. If he had to guess, his patient was merely deeply asleep, and untroubled by dreams.

*

“I'm finding all of this very hard to believe, Luna,” Twilight said, as they walked up Mytheme's boarding ramp. “Am I to understand that Whom is just a sort of mechanism, albeit a very complex one?”

“As are we all,” Luna said, nodding. “Substrate materials and complexity vary.”

“Then isn't arguing semantics in this way, to say that she isn't real, incapable of suffering, just a kind of bigotry?”

Mytheme looked as though bulls had run through it at high speed, and this wasn't very far from the truth. The painstakingly maintained lacquers were scuffed, scratched and cracked in places, and the fine, shag carpets were torn and covered in muddy hoofprints. Twilight followed Luna as she made her way down the lateral corridors and into the central lounge. All the nottlygna were gone now, and the only other inhabitants were an orange stallion, and--

“Spike!” Twilight gasped, mouth falling open. “What are you doing here?”

“When you first went missing, and I rightly feared the worst,” Luna said, flexing muscles in her neck. “I borrowed your dragon, to aid in my search. Who knew you better? Then, however, the exigencies of the situation required his placement in safe custody. I have guarded him since.”

Spike didn't say anything, but stood up and waddled over to Twilight, pulling her into close hug, head against her chest. She returned the gesture, and nuzzled his back with the tip of her nose. It was often easy to forget, Twilight thought, that Spike was still really just a foal. He sniffed back tears, withdrew from the hug and looked up at her.

“So happy you're safe, Twilight,” he managed, obviously feeling a little ashamed of his emotions. “It's not been good here without you.”

“I'm so sorry that I left you alone, Spike,” she said, and it was her turn to feel ashamed. “I didn't think I would be gone for so long, but I should have told you what I was doing. How have the others been? I've already run into Fluttershy.”

“You did?” Luna said, eyebrow raised. “I do not know where the other Elements have gone. We could not find them, and other matters stole my attentions. Rarity, of course, remains comatose.”

“Comatose?” Twilight whinnied. “What? Why?”

“Because a route march across a desert is unkind to mortals, and pitchblende even worse,” Luna said, frowning. “She was found half-mad, dragging some desert plant, poisoned by that ore and all you put her through to get it and make metal from it, loyally carrying on until she could no more.” She let that hang in the air for a moment, then said: “I wonder, what other harms have befallen your friends?”

“Fluttershy was fine!” Twilight felt a tear roll down her cheek, feared it might flash to steam from the heat there. “I'm sorry about what happened to Rarity, but that doesn't mean the others have been hurt too.

“They're okay, I think,” Spike said, softly. “We did find Applejack, she was just...” he trailed off, trying to think of the right word. “Depressed. Yeah, that's it. Rainbow Dash said she was going to live underground but, knowing her, she's out drinking.”

“Amongst other things, yes, sounds very likely,” Twilight said, smiling and laughing half-heartedly.

“Do you still plan to make my Nectars, Twilight Sparkle?” Luna said, turning her head to look lazily at her, the casualness of the statement singularly failing to disguise the intensity of the threat inherent.

“I don't see how I could, Luna,” Twilight said, after a moment. “If even half of what you've said is true, your drinks are the herald of the apocalypse. I would have done a lot for them, but not that.” She shook her head. “Anything, but that.”

“I am pleased,” Luna said, relaxing her posture, now fully facing Twilight and Spike. “But, the ancient compact cannot be denied, and the Thiasus will not be stopped now.”

“I thought you said that the Nectars were an essential part of the whole deal?”

“They are, and remain an impediment. I am sure that we have struck Celestia's plans a severe blow. Make no mistake of that.” Luna grinned; Twilight swore she saw pointed teeth for a moment. “Know this, too. We have only delayed an inevitable. Celestia will find a way to break down the last of the liminal boundaries, Nectars or no Nectars. She is utterly determined and wholly dedicated to this cause. One plan fails, another takes its place, and another, like the heads of hydra. She is not styled Queen of Plots for any other reason.”

“Then we fight her,” Twilight said, voice cracking as she realized the gravity of what she was saying. “We stop her, here and now. No more Thiasus. If those entities beyond our universe lose their agent--”

“Fight her?” Luna said, as if Twilight had just suggested she eat her own hooves. “Oh, filly, you have no idea what she is, do you?”

“You've said, she's like you--”

“We began as equals, yes,” Luna said, stepping forward. “But she has had ten centuries to expand upon her knowledge of reality, to cultivate her mind and powers. The sheer energy that she can draw out of the universe is staggering, the breadth of applications, even more so.”

“Then what were you doing on the moon? Folding origami swans? Crocheting pillows with pastoral scenes? Rutting yourself stupid with that clever thaumic toy I found?” Twilight unmantled her wings and gave them the slightest of flutters. “I've seen your metal forests, Luna. I've seen your swarms of glittering, self-killing insects. These are not the works of a conjurer of cheap tricks.”

“This conversation is getting a little above my pay grade,” Spike said, then wandered off toward one of the utterly ruined chaise lounges, upon which were piled silver trays, flensed of fruit leaving only stems and peels, empty amphorae and square bottles of what had once been very nice red wine. “Self-killing insects, metal forests, huh!” he mumbled, picking over the remains of a slab of columnar basalt he'd been eating.

“Twilight, it is a simple matter of energies,” Luna said, shaking her head. “She can draw upon more of it than either of us, orders of magnitude more. Enough to relight dead stars, move mountains, boil oceans. We would soon find out precisely how immortal we really are.”

“Not to mention the collateral damage,” Twilight conceded. “Though, she surely would brook no truck with a fight that resulted in destruction of the nation?”

“Equestrian survival, to her, means survival of the species, and of the biota that supports it. There are many ways that these things can be saved. I would not be surprised if she possessed a backup, somewhere. One would only need a few thousand individuals, appropriately stored, a few dozen specimens of grasses and flowers, of insects and the like. It would almost be trivial, given the time she has had.”

“We can't just let the Thiasus happen, Luna,” Twilight said. “If it results in the same scale of destruction, of another War in the Night, then millions will die, just to sate the appetites of these hateful beings.”

“Part of me wonders, would it be so bad?” Luna let her words hang in the air for a long moment, then said: “Certainly, many who live today would perish in the worst possible ways. But, come back in a century, and all's well. How long was it after the War in the Night that her Palace stood once more? Fifty years? The blink of an alicorn's eye.”

“It's unconscionable, Luna,” Twilight said, solemnly. “Everything that my friends and I believe in says that this is wrong. I understand if you cannot raise a hoof against your sister, nopony should be expected to--”

“Good,” Luna said, smiling with relief, her interruption granting Twilight the mercy of not having to finish the sentence. “Then, it seems you must make my Nectars after all, if you are set on stopping Celestia.”

“What? Why on Equestria would I do that, after all this?”

“I have searched for her, and found nothing. I fear that she will not now show herself until the Party is started, so we must start it. After all, what kind of host does not come out early to meet her guests?”

*

“What do you think they're talking about in there?” Infra Base said, nodding toward the diamond hull of Mytheme, which could just about be seen through the open front doors of Ponyville's town hall, now serving as a makeshift infirmary. “They've been at it for hours.”

“Not a clue,” said Zo Nar, who had only recently woken from a medically induced coma. “Likely something of great and cosmic importance. Whole world balancing on the edge of a knife, destinies broken and made, that sort of thing. Always is with alicorns.”

“I've much faith in Mother, I'm sure she'll see us through.”

“Right you are.”

*

The chimeric shape of Discord shot arrow-straight out of the jarred-open wormhole that bridged Tartarus and Equestria, moving at only a hair's breadth below the speed of sound. The great hound Cerberus presided over a ruin of angular black and purple debris, paws crashing and crunching through the flash glass floor that had once been several kilometres of perfectly good desert. He was growling angrily, like a chain of incontinent volcanoes, and each of his three mighty heads was busily engaged, sniffing and licking at particularly large remnant fragments of the destroyed gate.

“You!” Cerberus bellowed, rending the air with hateful venom, so loud that it would have fractured the skulls of any nearby ponies. “What have you done?”

Discord began to laugh, slowed his speed to a trot and danced through the air above Cerberus, who was shaking with rage. He turned a cartwheel and suddenly stopped, producing a large, red rubber ball.

“Is the big doggy upset?” he called down, waving the ball to and fro. “Does the doggy want to play ball?”

Cerberus answered him by throwing wide the jaws of his centre head, in what might have been interpreted as a soundless howl. Instead, a lance of wickedly coherent energy, visible only where it passed through the haze of fines and smoke, speared out to strike at Discord. The chimera had no time to react and took a direct hit. The lambent hues of dusk rapidly transitioned to oversaturated, brilliant white. Discord's flailing form became, for a moment, like a star.

Several thousand tons of fresh flash glass was created in that moment, as Discord bled and radiated heat. Then, the inferno was gone, reality witnessing only a fraction of the full force before it was bent away, spirited back into space/time from whence it came.

“I understand that you're angry,” Discord said, stifling his laughter, over the sounds of cooling glass, hissing and bubbling. “But, guardian, I think you should save your rage. Something wicked this way comes.”

Already, tentacles the size and colour of dead tree boughs and beaks like overturned ship hulls were beginning to emerge from the wormhole.

*

“Was that it, Master Strati Form?” said Squally, the junior aide de camp.

“Very possibly, lad,” Strati Form said, still perched secretly on his captive rain cloud. “But this event's indicator was a big one. If I've seen a nastier dramatic moment indicator, I don't remember it. I wouldn't be surprised if there was yet more drama to come.”

The ADC sneezed, shivered, and adjusted the big woollen coat that was keeping him warm at altitude, within the bosom of a cloud. Strati Form, of course, worn no such luxuries, making do with only a fine scarf and sheer bloody mindedness. There was a thunderclap, like the timpani set of the Gods being played, followed seconds later by the flash of lightning.

“Any more ideas on why that's happening, Master?” the ADC said, ears folded back protectively.

“Oh, the jumbled up sound and lighting? Not a clue, lad.” Strati Form grinned. “Makes it more exciting, in my experience. It's probably to do with high concentrations of magic, or some-such other nonsense. That big silver thing down there seems to be Princess Luna's private war barge, complete with pop-up army, and did you happen to notice Princess Twilight's entry on an actual, honest-to-Celestia roc?”

“Hard to miss a bird that big, Master,” Squally said. “Speaking of birds...”

The fat little pigeon had been struggling up toward the cloud for the last few minutes, and now alighted gratefully on Squally's withers. As it had been trained to do, it unpicked the tiny sheet of notepaper from the holster on its leg and presented it to the ADC. It fluttered in the breeze, but Squally had no trouble reading it.

“Alert from Cloudsdale, Master,” Squally said, voice trembling with fear. “Full scale deployment of tactical and strategic level assets has been ordered, following activation of all DRAMA early warning stations.”

“What, all of them?” Strati Form said, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, Master. Further, detection of nine Type-Four events has been confirmed.”

“Where?”

“It just says 'details to follow', no more, Master.”

“Well, grease me up and grab the stepladder,” Strati Form mumbled, disbelieving. “What did I tell you? I knew there was more coming.”

“Should I rally the troops, Master?”

“Yes, Squally,” he said, telescoping his ocular equipment back down. “I suppose you better had.”

*

The earthquakes began at chronological dusk, precisely to the second. Microtremors built and built, rippling out through the ground in all cardinal directions away from Ponyville. In the town itself all was eerily quiet, as the nottlygna stopped their busy activities and merriments and listened to sounds few could yet hear. It was not to last. As though Jormungandr was moving a heavy chest of drawers in the attic of the world, rumbling, ringing noise filled the air.

Those roofs that were tiled began to shed ceramic scales into the streets, where their dull thudding onto grass was lost in the grinding cacophony. Ponyoak support beams started exploding as stresses built up. The oldest and least maintained went first, as if a wolf pack dogged the outskirts of an ancient herd, taking down the easiest meals. Nottlygna galloped and cantered around, deftly exiting the buildings they'd temporarily occupied, flying and falling over one another to board Mytheme or take cover under its impregnable hull.

At the Punch Drunk distillery, disaster struck. One thousand gallons of pure cane alcohol, stored in glass and copper, waiting to be mixed with flavourings to produce the distasteful-yet-popular stock in trade of the vintner Berry Punch, was crushed by in-falling masonry. The first all-brick building to be constructed in the town was also the first to be demolished. The alcohol's vapours found oxygen, found a spark, and the distillery vanished beneath gushing lambent orange and blue flames. Secondaries ringed it with smaller explosions as the inferno picked up other stores of alcohol.

*

The Roarke Mountain range, more properly a complex of nine ancient shield volcanoes, slumbered peacefully. Apart from the occasional eruption of its younger members, which tended to throw lahars down the valleys toward Port Dauphine, little had disturbed its peace for nearly ten million years. Some minutes after dusk, the situation suddenly escalated.

Disproving its namesake, the Lesser Roarke exploded with a force approximately equal to twenty-five million tons of dynamite. The cap of the Lesser Roarke was thereby completely obliterated, converted to great billowing clouds of steam, vaporized rock, and a blossoming orb of slate grey dust and ash. The heat removed snow from the other peaks at ranges of tens of miles so, for a while, a shroud of boiling white was thrown over the complex. It caught the last rays of fading daylight, showing a wild complexity in its forms as it cooled, froze and briefly fell as snow again, well below the regular limit.

The Hive Boundless Joy had been setting about the task of breakfast, when the earthquake swarm struck the general vicinity of the volcano complex. Buried within the warm confines of the Greater Roarke's extensive system of extinct lava tubes, they had more than sufficient time to contemplate their imminent demise before the largest of the Roarke complex members followed the lead of its smaller sibling. Queen Erogene, keen magister and even keener volcanologist, watched the knot of warped space/time emerge suddenly from a position ten miles below the surface, pass through the reservoirs of lava that kept her Hive so warm, then vanish into space somewhere high above her head.

She was still pondering the implications of this, and of the earthquakes which had begun to rattle the Hive's outer chitin, when Boundless Joy ceased existing in one orgiastic moment of convulsing ground and superheated rock.

*

Lava bombs began landing in the sea off Port Dauphine, heralding the start of a long night. The shaking, trembling ground picked at the Port's high walls and densely packed buildings, with insistent force. Already weakened by the successive concussive blasts rolling down from the Roarke complex, many began to fall apart. Drinkers and revellers exited the sticky bars and dives, heading for the toughened Civic buildings that they knew would give them shelter. Many still lived who remembered the last time a lahar had tried to wipe the port off the map, and they told excited stories to those who turned up in at the Courts. With the booze that the evening's cavorts had already poured down their throats, a carnival atmosphere soon developed. There was no hurry to their arrivals, for they knew that any lahar would take many hours to arrive.

In the newly created pit at the top of the Greater Roarke, the gasses dissolved into the emerging lava were relieved of the immense pressures they had been under deep below the ground. As it reached the surface, the speed at which it was expanding was colossal. More and more of it was dragged up, at ever faster rates, becoming hotter and hotter all the time. The resulting plume of high temperature gas lofted ash and other elements, melted into the lava for aeons, first five, then fifteen, then twenty miles into the sky.

The magma chambers that funded this outflow began to merge. Previously unconnected, the impetus of the earthquakes and distortions of space/time collapsed great layers of rock to form a super-chamber. Pressures within the tree root-like system of fissures and channels rose to catastrophic levels. Roarke II and IV blew their peaks, but it was not enough. One side of the Greater Roarke ballooned outwards, an old weakness giving way as the rock began to become elastic, half-melted. In the shade of the former mountain, an enterprising young pony had just found the emergency stash of finest oak-matured whiskey, and was distributing it to those in the Courthouse.

An hour and a half after dusk, the weakness exploded. From it gushed forth many thousands of tons of ultramafic lava, glowing brightly in the night as it emerged from the cavity at over sixteen hundred degrees celsius. The fountain was spotted by the first lahar crews, reporting drunkenly for duty atop the Courthouse, by which point it was half a mile in length, spewing its lethal load downslope.

The carnival atmosphere collapsed almost immediately, replaced by one with alarming ratios of carbons, silicates and magnesium oxides.

*

Beyond Dauphine, the ocean floor began to come apart. Vast reefs, many centuries old, crumbled as existing deeps widened, and wholly new ones opened like mouths, swallowing shoals, sand and the litter of the seabed. Fault lines around the edges of the Equestrian continental plate, five hundred miles beyond the coast, lit up the subterranean depths with numerous subsurface eruptions. Superheated lava and frigid water met suddenly, sending up bubbles of steam larger than most equine towns. Entire ecologies of fish and crustaceans went extinct. Flocks of sea-skimming birds were gassed in their droves by volcanic outgassing, fell into the angry waves and went uneaten by the usual aquatic undertakers.

Port Pronto fell in one convulsion of the wild sea. The low lying chain of islands was temporarily enlarged by twice its size as the tsunami approached. Made huge by the continuing vibrations through the continental plates and masses of the world, the wave reached nearly a mile in height as it passed over the Port and forever drowned it. The clippers and steamers that plied the route between foreign destinations and Equestria, which had stopped there to resupply, were smashed to matchsticks and scrap iron, caught up in events and consequences they had neither seen coming nor even been faintly aware of.

Onwards the earthquakes rolled, ever further east, toward gryphic lands.