The Magic of Animosity

Chapters

Chapter 1: It's Been a While
Chapter 2: Boxed In
Chapter 3: Confrontation
Chapter 4: Dark Horse
Chapter 5: Recovery
Chapter 6: Subterrane
Chapter 7: Deeper
Chapter 8: Escape
Chapter 9: Royalties
Chapter 11: Get Your Bearings
Chapter 10: Here We Go

Chapter 1: It's Been a While

Twilight Sparkle woke suddenly from her nap when the train hit a small bump on the tracks. Startled for only a moment, she resumed her composure and took a glance out the window at the barren desert scenery. She looked over to her bag, half-open and its contents peeking out from within. The small, glossy black box was the only thing inside; Twilight was to bring it to Sheriff Silverstar in Appleloosa, a request made directly from Princess Celestia. Though Twilight had accepted the mission immediately, she still wondered exactly what was inside of this mysterious box—she had never been told not to open it, but the seal featured a large golden lock on the front, and Celestia had never given Twilight a key.

Perhaps I should’ve asked just what it is I’m delivering…though I didn’t want to be nosy… Twilight thought.

The train hit another bump, and Twilight and her bag jumped a few inches into the air. The box slipped out of the bag and fell onto the floor.

“Oh no!” Twilight exclaimed as she picked the box up with her magic. Closely examining each side of the pristine onyx box, she found that there were no scratches on it, and she placed it back into the bag and closed it tightly.

Unfortunately for Twilight, each of her friends was preoccupied with something else they had previously planned for today, and none of them were able to come along with Twilight for the trip. It was lonely for her, being the only one in the passenger car, but it certainly wasn’t going to be the end of the world just because she’d have to spend one day without any of her friends’ companionship.

Twilight heard the train’s whistle blow, and looking back out the window she could see Appleloosa closing in on the horizon. She picked up her bag and secured it around her waist as she got ready to get off the train at the station. As the train began to slow and Appleloosa became closer in the distance, Twilight stood in front of the door of the car; when the train lined up with the station and came to a stop, Twilight saw Braeburn waiting for her on the platform, wearing a wide grin.

“Why howdy there, Twi! It’s a pleasure t’ see ya here again in A~APPLELOOSA!” Braeburn exclaimed while rearing back and kicking his front hooves.

“Hello, Braeburn!” Twilight said gleefully. “How’s the apple orchard coming along?”

“Thanks t’ the treaty between the set’ler-ponies and the buffalo, we’re bringing in more apple trees and expandin’ our produce! Outta of the way of the buffalo’s track, of course.”

“That’s good to hear!” said Twilight, “Now where’s the Sheriff? I’m sure you’re here because of this?” She flipped open her bag to show Braeburn the small black box.

“Yessiree! Sheriff Silverstar asked me t’ come here t’ the station an’ meet up with ya when you arrived,” said Braeburn.

Out of curiosity, Twilight asked Braeburn, “Do you happen to know what is in here? The box, that is.” She asked this in a softer tone, as if she was afraid of being caught asking.

“Not a clue,” Braeburn confessed. “Heck, I only found out an hour ago that you’re bringing some little box, an’ that’s all the Sheriff had told me. So you don’t know what’s in here, either?”

Twilight shook her head. “Unfortunately, no; I’m kind of surprised that neither of us were told of what this box contains, since we’re the ones who are transporting it.”

“You an’ me both,” Braeburn said. “C’mon, times a wastin’; let’s get over to Sheriff Silverstar, he mus’ know what this here little box contains!”

Braeburn leading the way, the two ponies walked to the Sheriff’s office. Twilight took in all there was to see in the settler-ponies’ town. It looked as good as it did during her first trip to Appleloosa—before the enormous fight between the ponies and the buffalo, that it. While looking around, the sound of fireworks suddenly caught her ear.

“Do you hear that, Braeburn? Is there some kind of party going on right now?” Twilight asked.

Braeburn stopped and listened for the sound Twilight had heard. The whistling and popping of fireworks suddenly beginning again, and he turned to Twilight and said, “Oh, yeah, I forgot—there’s some new unicorn that’s passin’ through town, an’ right now she’s showin’ off somma her magic tricks.” Braeburn scowled a little. “Kinda showin’ off, if you ask me, but it’s keepin’ the town entertained for a while, I guess.”

Twilight had heard of something similar before. “What does this unicorn look like?”

Braeburn looked to Twilight confused. “Huh? Uh, I guess she’s kinda blueish with a light silver mane,” Braeburn said, thinking back to the few minutes he spent watching the unicorn’s performance.

“Oh boy,” Twilight said, sinking her head down.

“Som’thin the matter, Twi?” Braeburn asked.

“I was kind of hoping she’d changed her ways since the last time I saw her. I guess she’s still the same bragging, over-the-top Trixie,” Twilight said aloud, but more to herself than anyone else.

“Trixie!” Braeburn exclaimed, “That’s what she called herself! The ‘Great and Powerful Trixie’, actually. Like ah said, kinda tootin’ her own horn, if you ask me. Did you wanna go see her?”

“Uh, no, let’s just keep on to the Sheriff’s; I’d prefer to stay as far away from that unicorn as possible,” Twilight said flatly.

The two ponies continued on their original path, Twilight ignoring the obnoxious noises coming from the distant side of town.

Eventually, Braeburn and Twilight arrived at the office of Sheriff Silverstar. Walking inside, Braeburn called out to the Sheriff, “Hello, Sheriff! Come on down, Twilight Sparkle’s here with the package y’wanted! Sheriff?”

Instead of Silverstar, a mare with a cream-colored coat and deep-red, braided hair came walking down the steps to greet the two. “Oh, hey there Braeburn…and who’re you?”

“Paula, this is Twilight Sparkle; she’s a good friend’a Cousin Applejack’s and is bringin’ some lil’ box-thing to the Sheriff,” Braeburn said. Turning to Twilight, Braeburn introduced her to the other mare, “Twi, this here is my sister, PaulaRed. She’s working under the Sheriff right now as a deputy.”

“Hello!” Twilight said happily. She noticed the apple-themed cutie mark on PaulaRed’s flank.

“Hi!” Paula said. “Glad to see y’all made it here so quick, but ah’m ‘fraid the Sheriff’s out righ’ now,” she spoke with a thick southern drawl.

“Oh,” Twilight said disappointingly. “Well, Sheriff Silverstar told you about this box then, right?”

“Of course he did,” Paula replied, “he mentioned that he prob’ly wouldn’t be around by the time you arrived, Twilight, but he’ll be back within a couple’a hours.”

‘A couple of hours’ wasn’t what Twilight had wanted to hear; she really wanted to know what it was that she was supposed to be delivering. “Do you happen to know what’s inside of this box?” she asked hopefully.

“Nope,” Paula replied plainly.

Both Twilight and Braeburn sighed and lowered their heads. Their curiosity was really starting to get the better of them.

“I guess we’ll just have to wait for the Sheriff…” Twilight said in a defeated tone. She could still hear the theatrics coming from the stage on the other side of town. Sighing heavily, she said, “I guess we may as well give Trixie a visit; I’d like to see how much—if at all—she’s changed since we last met.”

“Here, I’ll come with ya guys,” Paula said, “Ah haven’t seen that unicorn’s performance yet, an’ ah’m told it’s really somethin’ special!”

“Oh, she’s special alright…” Twilight said beneath her breath.

A colt trudged back into the audience in a defeated manner, a large amount of sand still caught up in his mane and face. The azure unicorn on the top of the stage yawned to herself.

“Yet another challenger that was a piece of cake. Does that not cement the fact that The Great and Powerful Trixie is really the greatest unicorn—no, the greatest pony in all of Equestria!” Trixie announced as more rockets and sparklers shot off around her, mesmerizing the crowd.

They all cheered her name and demanded an encore. “Trix-ie! Trix-ie! Trix-ie!” They all cried.

“That’s the ‘Great and Powerful Trixie’ to you,” she called back smugly to the mass as she began for the backstage curtain.

They all roared into a loud cheer. “Great and Powerful Trixie!!”

The cheering suddenly died out when a stern voice called out to the magician onstage. “…It’s been a while, Trixie,” said a pony in crowd.

Trixie stopped dead in her tracks. She recognized that voice. Twisting around, she met the gaze of a purple unicorn that was making her way through the Appleloosians surrounding the stage.

“You...!” Trixie exclaimed in anger. “You’re that one unicorn from Ponyville that turned the Great and Powerful Trixie into a laughing stock!”

“You put that upon yourself,” Twilight replied dryly. “I see you haven’t changed a bit since then.”

“Hmph!” Trixie huffed, “My determination and strive to be the very best will not be wavered by the baseless attacks of some Ponyville ruffian that has no idea what true talent is!”

“I have a name you know,” said Twilight.

“Hey Twi,” Braeburn began, “who’s this mare, and why do th’ two’a ya seem t’ hate each other so much?”

“How long are you going to keep up this charade?” Twilight asked the other unicorn, ignoring Braeburn. Trixie glanced up at the rest of the crowd, all of which still standing around, all were watching what was happening. Trixie was beginning to become uncomfortable.

“Why are you compelled to follow me wherever I go and make a fool of me?!” Trixie yelled sadly to Twilight. “The Great and Powerful Trixie-”

“It was pure coincidence that I arrived here at the same time you did, Trixie. I was hoping you may have seen the error in your ways from before, and perhaps that you may not be such a boastful braggart like you once were; now I know I was expecting the impossible,” Twilight said to Trixie angrily. It actually surprised Twilight how hard she was bashing Trixie right now. Did Trixie’s arrogance and cocky attitude really bother her that much?

“The Great and Powerful Trixie has had just about enough of your badmouthing of her!” Trixie exclaimed. “Now be gone with you, or suffer the wrath of the Great and Powerful Trixie!”

“Please,” Twilight said, rolling her eyes, “You’ve seen what I can do, and you know very well that I can dish out tenfold anything that you may have in store for me.”

Trixie cringed and reeled back a few inches. Eyes wide, she looked upon the crowd that only minutes ago had been cheering her name. Now, they all whispered to each other, all looking at her with doubt in their eyes. It was all that stupid unicorn’s fault! Why does she hate Trixie to the point of following her to the ends of Equestria, just to make her look like a fool?

“You haven’t seen the end of this…” Trixie trailed off, as if trying to remember something.

“Twilight Sparkle,” Twilight said in an annoyed tone.

Immediately regaining her composure, Trixie announced, “You haven’t seen the end of this, TWILIGHT SPARKLE!!” In a large puff of smoke, Trixie fled behind the curtain and withdrew the stage back into a mobile trailer.

“…Well that was excitin’,” Paula said to Twilight after a long pause, the audience beginning to thin out as everyone went back to their normal activities.

Twilight was still staring at the trailer, a large scowl on her face. Finally turning away from it and back to Braeburn and Paula, she sighed loudly. “I guess she’s just as bad as she always was. It makes me sad to see a pony like her. She must be so lonely…”

“What was it she said she was?” said Braeburn, “That she had ‘determination and strive ta be the very best’? I s’pose if she wants to be really well-known, she ain’t gonna go and stop performan’.”

“It’s not what she does, Braeburn,” said Twilight sadly, “It’s just how she does it. Her attitude completely alienates her from the rest of the ponies, and she doesn’t have any friends! I remember when I hadn’t yet discovered the magic of friendship, and while I didn’t realize it at the time, that life was a dull and isolated one.”

“…Well, is there an’thing you could do t’ help her out?” Paula asked with general concern.

“Pfft,” Twilight replied with a roll of her eyes, “I’m afraid that pony is a lost cause. Anyways, let’s head on back to Sheriff Silverstar’s; hopefully he’s back in by now, and we can ask him about that box’s contents.”

The three ponies—Twilight, Braeburn and PaulaRed—all started for the other side of town to the Sheriff’s office, away from the packed-up stage parked out on the edge of town, and away from the pony inside the trailer, silently watching them with a sad look in her eyes.

Chapter 2: Boxed In

The little box was taunting her. It was always in her grasp, but she could not unlock its secrets. The only thing that lay between Twilight and the contents of the box was its smooth onyx surface and the round, golden lock secured on its side. Twilight was sitting at a table in Sheriff Silverstar’s office, staring down the box sitting on the table in front of her. Braeburn was looking out the window, and PaulaRed was pacing back and forth.

“UGH!” Twilight yelled suddenly, breaking free of the quiet that had fallen over the room for the past half an hour, “Where’s the Sheriff, PaulaRed?! Shouldn’t he be back by now?”

“Ah’m afraid I wouldn’t know,” Paula confessed, “He didn’t even tell me where he was headed off to ‘r what he was gonna do when ‘e got there.”

“Did you see which direction he went?” Twilight asked, starting to become desperate. She REALLY wanted to know what was inside that box.

“No. He told me he was goin’ out, said he’d prolly gonna be a couple’a hours ‘fore he got back, but that was a couple hours ago…” Paula trailed off.

“Y’think the Sheriff may’ve gotten in some sorta tussle?” Braeburn offered.

“Doubt it,” Paula answered, “Silverstar can cert’nly hold his own when the goin’ gets tough.”

Twilight whined loudly again. This day sucked. None of her friends being around, having to take a long train ride all the way from Canterlot to Ponyville to Appleloosa, just to deliver a little black box from Princess Celestia to Sheriff Silverstar, neither of whom thought it would be a good idea to actually tell someone what the hay was inside of it.

“Aw, c’mon Twi,” Braeburn said, trying to comfort the strained unicorn, “Just wait a lil’ bit longer, ah’m sure the Sheriff’s gonna show up any minute!”

Twilight wasn’t even listening anymore. Oh yeah, she thought; to top it all off, she got to meet ‘The Great and Powerful Trixie’ again. What a lousy day it was turning out to be.

Twilight’s eyes lit up as she came up with an idea. “Perhaps the Sheriff left the key to this box around here somewhere?” Twilight asked, more talking to herself than Braeburn or Paula.

“Twilight!” Paula said in an upset tone, “Don’t go an’ think that you can go an’ steal from the Sheriff and not have to deal with’tha deputy!” She clanged a hoof against the silver star pinned on her vest. Twilight had forgotten that she was working directly under the Sheriff.

The streets in Canterlot were bustling as always, and the castle was abuzz with all the high-end ponies living within the embedded city. At the top of the castle, Princess Celestia was sitting at her throne, accompanied by Princess Luna, who had recently had a throne made for herself.

“Do you think it was a good idea to send Twilight Sparkle by herself?” Luna asked her sister.

“I do not think it was a bad idea, Sister,” Celestia replied. “It’s not like she’s in any danger or anything, anyway.”

“I would think she is in danger if she carries with her that precious ‘cargo’,” Luna rebutted. “Did you even tell her what it was that she was sending to Appleloosa?”

“I felt that the time had not yet come,” Celestia said.

Luna cocked an eyebrow towards the Princess of the Sun. “Do you honestly believe that she would have taken the job had she known the potential consequences?”

Celestia returned Luna’s look with one of pouting disbelief, saying, “She is an excellent student and is extremely capable. If I were to trust that box with any pony in all of Equestria, it would be Twilight Sparkle.”

“If you say so, sister…” Luna replied as she turned away from her sister to look straight ahead and assume her regal form. Then, she quickly turned back to Celestia and started the conversation back up, “That Shadow is travelling faster with each town that it brings down; perhaps it was a bad idea to send Twilight and ‘that’ together to Appleloosa? I mean, it does appear to be ‘next on the list’, as far as location goes.”

“Do not worry, Sister,” Celestia assured, “By the time the Shadow reaches Appleloosa, it will all be too late for it.”

“I sincerely hope you are right,” said Luna.

Trixie was mumbling to herself as she brushed her mane in front of her mirror. Very little could be made out, save for when she gritted her teeth and hissed, “Twilight Sparkle…!”

Trixie honestly thought that Twilight was ‘out to get her’. The performance in Appleloosa was the first since her humiliation in Ponyville, and until Twilight came along, it was going nicely. Trixie was no stranger to the stage—she had performed in front of many crowds from across Equestria, all the while gaining her prestige and popularity. But her status, and her ego, had taken a large hit after word had spread about her lies and cowardice at the feet of an Ursa Minor. Trixie wasn’t sure what her next move should be now; if she left Appleloosa immediately, not only would that give Twilight Sparkle a sense of triumph over her, but she’d probably just follow her to the next town and make a laughing stock out of her there, too!

Giving up on ideas for the moment, Trixie plopped on the floor and heaved out a large sigh. She decided she may as well take a nap at the moment, despite it being the middle of noon.

Wait a minute, she thought. It's the middle of noon, so why is it so dark outside?

Trixie got up and looked out her window. A large, dark mass of clouds were slowly rolling in towards Appleloosa.

“Strange…” Trixie said to herself, “I don’t remember any clouds being in the sky half an hour ago…The sky was completely clear, so where did these clouds come from?” Trixie retreated back into her trailer and shut the window, then turned to her mirror. “Perhaps it’s those pegasi playing some kind of practical joke on the Appleloosians,” Trixie sighed to her reflection. If she had wanted to get out of town earlier, she certainly wasn’t going to do it now; it looked like a large storm was brewing, and there’s no way she’d let herself get caught in that.

Trixie glanced out her window again to see the storm, and noticed that it seemed a lot closer. “What in the…?” she said, perplexed. The clouds were rolling in much faster than they should be physically allowed to. In fact, the clouds themselves seemed quite different from any normal storm clouds. Trixie knew now that something was up. Looking down at the rest of the town, the civilians seemed none the wiser about the incoming mass of clouds. They were going inside their houses or putting on an umbrella, but nobody else appeared concerned about the ominous cloud fast approaching. “Perhaps it’s just me…” Trixie said to herself, and decided to forget about the storm and simply let it pass, not giving it a second thought.

Twilight felt a sudden twitch. Jerking her head up from the table it had been securely planted on for the past ten minutes, Twilight looked around the Sheriff’s room, to Braeburn and Paula, and finally to the window outside, where she immediately stopped. Slowly walking up to the window, and getting strange looks from Braeburn and Paula, Twilight looked around every corner of the window to get a good look outside.

Twilight turned to Braeburn and Paula and said, “When did it get so dark?”

“There was a mass’a clouds comin’ in from the north, and it’s blockin’ out th’ sun right now,” Braeburn replied.

“Well that was fast,” Twilight said, looking back out the window. “Only fifteen minutes ago, the skies were completely clear.”

“Meh, th’rain comes and goes, Twah’light,” said Paula, shrugging off the dark weather.

Twilight couldn’t help but stare at the clouds in the distance. They were coming in fast, that was for sure. Could pegasi be pushing the clouds in?

“Did Appleloosa schedule a rain around this time today?” Twilight asked the two earth-ponies.

“Uh, we don’t usually go so far as t’ request any rain unless we get a nasty drought, so I kinda doubt those clouds aren’t natural,” Braeburn replied.

Twilight was surprised at how little the two were concerned with these ominous puffs in the sky. You ‘kinda doubt those clouds aren’t natural’? They’re anything but natural. She turned to look out the window again and noticed the clouds were even closer now.

This isn't normal. This isn't normal at all.

“Hey, where’re ya going?” Braeburn called out to Twilight, who was exiting the door, “I thought we were gonna wait fer Sheriff Silverstar!”

“Hold on a minute,” Twilight called from outside, already out the door. She squinted at the clouds, as if to try and get a closer look at them. The dark mass in the sky was almost completely on top of the town, and it was still moving in the sky at breakneck speed. What perplexed Twilight the most was how the clouds could move so quickly in the air, while at the same time on the ground there wasn’t even a slight breeze; in fact, there was no wind at all—the air was completely dead. As Twilight continued to stare up at the sky, so did any other ponies that were still walking the streets, wondering what it was that the unicorn was looking at.

At the same time, on the other side of town, Trixie was standing just outside her trailer, watching with an unwavering gaze at the clouds moving overhead. Both she and Twilight were the only ones that felt something…out of place. Perhaps it was because they were the only two unicorns in town, and none of the earth-pony Appleloosians could “feel” what was wrong.

But suddenly, everyone felt what was wrong.

There was a loud boom in the sky, originating from the center of the dark mass above. Then, the clouds began to shift, moving around individually as quickly as they had on their way to Appleloosa; definable edges formed, and the cloud took the shape of a simple square. The square was right on top of Appleloosa, blocking out the sun behind it. The civilians, along with Twilight and Trixie, couldn’t believe their eyes. Everyone stood in silence and stared up at the clouds, of which had now stopped and weren’t moving; the square stood overhead, looming over the entire town, not making a sound. In fact, there was a dead silence throughout the entire town as everyone could only look up at the supernatural entity in the sky.

By now, Braeburn and PaulaRed had walked out of the Sheriff’s office and joined Twilight in looking up at the sky. They all were at a loss for words at what they were witnessing, and unsure about what was about to happen next.

“What the hay…?” Braeburn managed to whisper softly.

Suddenly, another boom resonated from within the cloud, followed by a large halo of light enveloping the visible square. The ring followed the surface to the corners of the square, where the light gathered into four small orbs of light, one on each corner.

There was another moment of eerie tranquility; the orbs floated motionless in the air, and the ponies below could only watch in horror at what could happen next.

After another several seconds of everyone standing as still as a statue, the cloud resumed its actions. The orbs of light shone brightly for a second, and then shot down bright white beams to the Earth, the impact creating a massive shockwave throughout the entire town. The places where the pillars met with the ground were so far away that they could barely be seen on the horizon. As the light continued to crash into the ground, everyone looked on as a black barrier began to form between each of the pillars. Like a waterfall in reverse, the pitch-black walls crept up the sides of the light pillars, towards the clouds high above. It was at this point that the entire town began to fly into a frenzy.

The villagers were no long hypnotized by the cloud’s mysterious antics, but rather in a panic over seeing their town being boxed-in from the rest of the world.

An earth-pony ran up to PaulaRed, exasperated. “Deputy! Where’s the sheriff? What the hay is going on?!”

“Ah don’t know!” Paula yelled back. “Twi!” she called to Twilight from over her shoulder.

“Huh?” Twilight asked, slightly in a daze over what was going on.

“Do y’all have any idea ‘bout what the heck this is?!” Paula asked desperately.

“No…” Twilight replied. “I have no idea what’s happening…”

The black walls completely covered each side of the box formed, and then they expanded upwards and connected together to create a ceiling, completely encasing the entire town of Appleloosa inside of it. Twilight stared blankly at her surroundings, her dulled senses only taking in half of what was happening around her. She tried to shake it off as she regained her composure, and was fully conscious again.

“Everypony calm down!” Twilight yelled at the top of her lungs to the wild crowd running about. Some of them actually stopped and turned to Twilight, waiting for what she had to say.

“Now while I’m just as confused about what has just happened as you all are,” Twilight said while taking another look around at their new black-coated prison, “running in circles screaming certainly isn’t going to solve anything! Now round up everyone in town and let’s all meet up back here at the Sheriff’s office!” With that, the crowd dispersed, now with a determined goal.

Yeah, this day was really starting to become the worst day ever for Twilight.

Chapter 3: Confrontation

Trixie woke up to the shaking of her shoulder. Opening her eyes and uttering a soft moan, she realized her face was planted into the dirt ground. She quickly picked herself up and dusted herself off, then noticed the mare that had woke her up.

“What is it you want?” Trixie sneered.

The pony gave Trixie a mixed look between confusion and concern. “We’re getting everypony together at the Sheriff’s office,” she began to walk in its direction and turned back to Trixie, motioning the way to go, “come on!”

“The Great and Powerful Trixie does not need to associate herself with the common folk of this town,” Trixie said with an air of arrogance, “she is far too sophisticated for that.”

The other mare cocked an eyebrow at Trixie in tired sarcasm. “Your face was halfway in the dirt a moment ago,” she said flatly.

“Never mind that!” Trixie quickly interjected. Actually, on that note, why had she been sleeping on the ground like that, she wondered? But after taking a second look around her, she suddenly remembered what had happened that made her faint.

The black walls were surrounding the town of Appleloosa, enclosing it in a snug cube. Trixie still couldn’t believe what she had witnessed, and she was devastated once she realized it wasn’t all a dream.

Trixie turned to the pony that had woke her up, “That was all real?! The cloud, the lights, the black things, all of it?!”

The mare slowly nodded her head. Trixie fell into a sit in disbelief.

“A unicorn has taken charge an’ is currently taking care of this whole mess, more or less,” the mare said to Trixie.

Trixie turned her head sharply. “A purple unicorn?” she asked. The mare nodded, and Trixie let out a loud “hah!” before walking the opposite direction. “I don’t need her to tell me what to do!” Trixie called out from behind her.

“It’s not like you have anywhere else to go, so you may as well come along,” the mare offered.

“Feh!” Trixie huffed, “The Great and Powerful Trixie does not need somepony else’s help—I’ll take care of this entire thing myself! I’ll find my own way out of this mess!”

Trixie began to walk out to the closest edge of the box that was surrounding the town. The perimeter was surprisingly large, compared to the size of Appleloosa, that is. The whole town covered only a fraction of the entire ground surrounded by the dark walls. It took Trixie a while, but she eventually reached the end of a side, and was face-to-face with the black wall—and face-to-face with her reflection in its surface. She was reluctant to touch it; just what the heck was it, anyways? But, she came all this way, so she may as well…

Trixie tapped a hoof onto the wall, and it didn’t even budge. She pushed harder on it, then began hitting it, and then punching it, but nothing happened. Physical attacks weren’t doing a thing to this dark barrier; it was time to bring out the big guns, Trixie thought—or rather, the big magic. Backing up a few feet, Trixie glared at the wall in front of her; she began to focus all her strength into her horn, making it glow intensely. She was prepared to blast a hole right through the wall, no matter how strong or thick it may be. It was going to be an all-or-nothing shot, as she was attempting to use as much of her magic as she could to deliver a powerful blow. After pooling as much power as she could into her horn, and her horn was glowing a bright azure, she let it loose to bring the attack upon the barricade before her. A massive blue fireball shot out the tip of her horn and exploded when it made impact with the wall, flinging Trixie back several feet; though she may not look it, she was a very powerful unicorn, yet undoubtedly not as powerful as certain others (Twilight Sparkle). Trixie couldn’t see the effect of her attack immediately because of the dust that was thrown up into the air. Getting up from the ground, and letting the dust settle, Trixie waited to see the fruits of her labor. But what she ended up seeing wasn’t at all what she had expected.

The wall was untouched, and pristine. Not only that, but the explosion had tossed up a couple feet of dirt directly beneath it, and Trixie could see that the barrier continued downwards into the ground. Digging beneath the wall hadn’t even occurred to her before, but now that she saw this, the idea shriveled away. Frantically, desperately, she began to dig at the already loosened soil, hoping that she would see a point in which the darkness stopped, and a path to the outside began; there was no such point. Instead, the barrier continued for as long as she dug, and after a couple of minutes of burrowing Trixie gave up, knowing that trying to dig her way out was useless. Feeling completely defeated, Trixie trudged back to Appleloosa to join with the rest of the civilians stuck in the same situation she was.

As she walked away, she didn’t notice the pair of pupil-less white eyes that were watching her from inside the dark veil.

The entire population of Appleloosa was scrunched into the area directly in front of and around the Sheriff’s office, the designated meeting area from Twilight Sparkle. A podium had been dragged out from a storage closet in front of the Sheriff’s building, with PaulaRed standing in front of it and glancing out to the audience, taking a quick head count to see how many civilians had come along.

“Alright, everypony, settle down now!” Paula yelled from a pedestal to the crowd gathered around the outside of the Sheriff’s office. “Twah’light Sparkle’s got some stuff she’s gotta tell us!”

The entire town hushed down as they watched Paula back away and Twilight walk to the pedestal—slowly, and with a sad look on her face. It was one of Twilight’s worst days, she could easily say that, but just because she was extremely strained didn’t mean that she shouldn’t try to help the rest of the town.

“As I’m sure you’re all very well aware of,” Twilight began, “there’s been some sort of barrier formed around the entire town.”

The crowd erupted, everyone suddenly talking at once.

“ATTENTION!” Braeburn yelled at everyone. The noise died down again.

“Thanks, Braeburn,” Twilight said to the colt, and then turned back to the crowd. “Now, I have no idea what this is or why it’s happening, but obviously we must do something about it.”

Everyone spoke up again, but this time in one unanimous “YEAH!”

“Honestly, I can’t think of a single reason why anyone or anything would go and cut off an entire town from the rest of the world, nor do I know how this was able to be done, but we’re going to find a way out of here. If all else fails, I’m sure it won’t take long for wind of this to reach Princess Celestia, and she’ll be able to do something about it. In the meantime, however,” Twilight glanced across the crowd, “We will all have to work together, and above all else, keep calm; I cannot stress this enough, everypony. Flipping the town upside-down in a frenzy will not get us anywhere, so until we come up with a plan on just how to get out of this place, we’re going to have to ask you all to keep about your daily routine; I know this is a bit much to ask for, but there really are no other options at the moment.” Stepping down from the pedestal, Twilight motioned to PaulaRed. Paula took the cue and walked up to the podium again.

“A’right, everypony,” she began, “I think y’all should take Twi’s words to heart as we work together to solve this mess. Twilight, Braeburn and I are all gonna be havin’ ourselves a brainstormin’ session here inside the Sheriff’s office; if anypony has any ideas to contribute or otherwise, we’d be much obliged. Also, I should note that Sheriff Silverstar hasn’t been seen since this mornin’, and he’s most likely outside’a the barrier righ’ now. News of our little predicament here will not take long t’ reach the Princess, ah’m sure. Meetin’ adjourned.”

Everyone stood still for a moment afterward, each pony looking around at everyone else around them. After a few concerned looks and awkward silences, the crowd began to disperse, and everyone tried their best as they continued their daily activities whilst ignoring the black border around their town that was blocking off the blue sky and sandy horizon.

“This is ridiculous!” Trixie muttered to herself as she slowly walked back to Appleloosa, dragging her hooves across the dry dirt floor, “And just my luck, too! Give me fifteen minutes, and I would have been out of this stupid town right now! Instead, I’m stuck here in this town of simpletons; it’s one thing if they revered and respected me, but now that that unicorn,” Trixie said ‘unicorn’ with gritted teeth, “has followed me here to defame me some more, everypony doubts the power and ability of the Great and Powerful Trixie!”

Sure, Trixie could certainly show off with the kinds of magic like what she had just used against the wall, but if she would, it would be a one-move performance—Trixie didn’t have the kind of stamina to use such powerful spells in rapid succession.

When Trixie reached shouting distance of Appleloosa’s outskirts, she sighed loudly and collapsed onto the ground. “Whyyyy…This is simply awful! And just why the hay is this all happening, anyways?” she asked aloud.

An Appleloosa resident noticed Trixie from the distance and walked up to her. “So, how’d ‘handling the entire thing’ go for ya?”

Trixie jerked her head up and noticed that it was the same mare that had woken her up earlier. “Leave the Great and Powerful Trixie! She does not need you to patronize her!”

“Hey, we’re all friends here,” the mare replied kindly, trying to open up to the unicorn. She offered a hoof out in front of Trixie. Trixie sighed loudly and grabbed it as the mare helped her back up.

“Thanks…” Trixie huffed underneath her breath.

As both the ponies began to walk back into town, each stopped suddenly. Their ears perked up, and they stood completely motionless. After a few seconds, they turned around to look at the source of the strange sound they were hearing. Their eyes nearly bugged out of their heads when they saw what the source of the sound was.

Bubbling out from the cracks in the dirt was a black mass; completely undefinable, save for the two pure-white circles blinking at them, what Trixie and the mare could only assume were the thing’s eyes.

The shape continued to rise from the ground, staring at the two ponies. Its body seemed to consist of the kind of goop you’d see being mixed in a witch’s cauldron. The black form was literally bubbling out of the ground, as if there were an unseen vein of oil that had just sprung below. Apparently fully raised from the ground, standing as high as the ponies that it was looking at, the bulk stood motionless a few yards from the two ponies; it a murky pile of black slime that was staring intensely at them, and it didn’t have any emotion in its eyes, nor did it say anything to the ponies. Then abruptly, the mass suddenly began to change shape; Trixie and the mare flinch a few inches backwards. As the gunk that made up its body shifted, pieces of it continued to bubble upwards, small spheres of total black fizzing off the surface of the thing and dissipating in the air. It continued to stare, at Trixie specifically, and the two ponies watching were shocked when the mass had finished its transformation.

What was a pile of dark slop a few moments ago now had a perfect profile of Trixie, an exact copy had it not been completely colored black. Trixie stood, dumbfounded at this thing. What was it? Why did it copy her?

Then, without warning, the fake-Trixie lunged at the real one, and Trixie managed to dodge to the side just as the thing nearly touched her. It stood motionless again, and slowly turned its head to the side to stare at the blue unicorn for another few seconds. Trixie could only stare back in horror, and the mare accompanying her fell to the ground, paralyzed with shock. The black mass squinted at Trixie again, knelt down a few inches, and dove at her again. Trixie preempted the second attack, and quickly dodged the creature, along with giving a swift kick of the back of her hoof square in the being’s head. The impact sent its head spinning freely on its shoulders, like a greased gear on a piston. As the black beast’s head slowed and it regained its bearings, it looked at Trixie again. Trixie took a battle stance, and the creature appeared to back off; it then looked over to the other mare, who only looked back in fear. The thing decided to go for Trixie’s company instead, and jumped towards her.

“DON’T LET IT TOUCH YOU!!” Trixie yelled at mare, whose name she had never even learned. Unfortunately, her warning fell on deaf ears, and the mare instead cowered behind her arms in hopes that it would deter the monster from coming at her.

The bubbling mass impacted her, and its body began to shape-shift again, this time overtaking her body; the black slime quickly coated every square inch of her skin, hair and face. She never even had a chance to scream before being covered by the creature’s form. Trixie looked on in dismay as the new pony rose up, the same white eyes as before staring back at her. Trixie took the battle stance again, but the creature didn’t attack this time; instead, it continued to look on, practically paying no mind to her, and instead appearing preoccupied with something else, going on internally. Unfortunately for it, though, Trixie wasn’t going to let it continue uninterrupted.

“YOU…!” Trixie screamed at it, “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING!? If you think The Great and Powerful Trixie is going to let you attack her, and then possess some Appleloosian, then you’ve got another thing coming!” With that, Trixie gathered any and all lingering magic back into her horn. Only minutes ago, she’d performed a very powerful attack, and she herself wasn’t even sure if she was going to be able to produce any powerful spells, but she couldn’t just leave this creature like this, not when it attacked and overcame another innocent pony! Trixie could feel magic gathering in her horn again as the horn began to glow; the creature started to take notice of its surroundings, and of the magical pony in front of it. Realizing what the unicorn was doing, the black pony-outline started to make a run for it, but it was already too late.

Trixie didn’t want to harm the mare that was inside of the black goop, assuming she was still alive; she used her magic to draw in as much water and moisture from around the surrounding area that she could—the surrounding area being a desert didn’t help very much, and strained Trixie more than she had expected. Water collected at the tip of Trixie’s horn and combined with the magic adjacent it. The dark pony took a single step away before Trixie unleashed the power from her horn once again. A massive spray of shimmering water pumped from Trixie’s horn in a fast, narrow stream straight at the creature. The collision between black pony and enchanted water created the distinct sound of bones cracking. Flying into a nearby house, the possessor was thrown up against the wall, helpless to the spray of magic that was tearing it from its possessee.

A few seconds later, completely out of breath, Trixie opened her eyes to see exactly what she had just done; the sound of bones cracking hadn’t exactly lightened her spirits.

What she saw was the mare from earlier, sitting upright against a house, apparently unharmed and soaking wet. The black goo from before was nowhere to be seen. Trixie ran up to the mare, relieved to see that she wasn’t hurt.

“Are you alright?” Trixie asked, concerned.

“Yeah,” the mare replied as she struggled to get up. Getting her footing, she stood back up and groaned as she stretched out her back, the same cracking noise as before being heard. “I think you kinda threw my back out with that blow.”

“Whoops,” said Trixie in apology.

“Hey,” the mare said reassuringly, “as long as we’re both alright, right?” The mare looked up at Trixie and smiled. Her smile quickly turned into a frown though as she said, in a more serious tone, “Now just what the hay was that…thing that attacked us…?”

Chapter 4: Dark Horse

Twilight’s reflection was staring back at her from the smooth surface of the little black box sitting on the table. Next to her, Braeburn and PaulaRed were discussing what could be done about Appleloosa’s current predicament.

“Do ya think the Sheriff has seen what’s happened, an’ is out gettin’ some help right now?” Braeburn asked hopefully.

“I dunno, Brother,” Paula replied doubtfully, “I mean—what’s going on outside’a these walls, anyways? This all started when a big ol’ cloud came above our city. What happened to th’ cloud? Why did it—no, how did it do all this? Ther’s just too many unsolved questions.”

“…Questions like ‘what the heck is in this box’,” Twilight interjected in a tired drone. “This was supposed to be delivered to Sheriff Silverstar, and he’s not here, and there’s no way he’s coming back anytime soon. There has to be some kind of key or clue as to opening this box somewhere around this office, now let’s make that our top priority right now!” Twilight’s curiosity was really getting the better of her—that box was the only thing she could think about anymore. Even the black walls trapping her and the rest of town were a distant thought compared to the black walls of the small cubic box.

“That should be the least of yer troubles, Twi!” Paula exclaimed, “Have ya noticed how we’re all trapped righ’ now in this town?”

“But what if what’s in this box could help us?” Twilight rebutted, “What if what’s in this box is supposed to help us?”

“Huh? Whattaya mean?” Braeburn asked.

“Well, this is just a hunch,” Twilight began, “but honestly, I don’t think it’s coincidence that I was sent by Celestia herself to deliver some mysterious package here to Appleloosa, of which ends up being boxed-in and cut off from the rest of Equestria the same day.”

“Wait…” said Paula, “are you sayin’ that Celestia sent’ya here on purpose so that you’d be trapped in here with us?”

“What? No!” Twilight quickly replied, “What I’m saying is that there’s something that Celestia and even perhaps Sheriff Silverstar knew that the rest of us didn’t, and Celestia made to send this box to Appleloosa so the Sheriff could use it to his advantage!”

“That’s a mighty interesting theory, Twilight,” Braeburn replied, “but until we figure out more about that box ‘r the walls surrounding us, or unless we find the Sheriff and ask ‘im ourselves, we’re still gonna be in the dark, s’far as info goes.”

“…Which leads me to my main point, again.” Twilight motioned with her head to the box sitting on the table. “We need to open this box.”

Paula sighed loudly. “Twi, even if I agreed with ya, there’s no way ta open that darned thing.”

Twilight groaned and dramatically fell backwards onto the floorboards. “Nothing’s making any seeeense…”

For the next few minutes, nobody said anything, everyone deep in their own thoughts and trying to understand just what is going on in Appleloosa.

Then Twilight’s ears perked up. Still lying on the floor, she tilted her head down and pressed her ear up to the ground. “Do you guys hear that?” she asked to the Apple siblings.

“Hear what?” Braeburn asked. But as soon as he had finished asking, he heard it too, and so did Paula. They knelt low to the floor and also pressed down an ear to hear it better.

It was a strange sound. It sounded similar to the sound of rushing water, except not exactly—not water, but it sounded as if there was something ‘rushing’ underneath the ground, perhaps several or a couple dozen yards below. None of the ponies knew what to make of this weird noise. As they continued to listen in, they could hear it begin to get louder, and louder, and louder…

And closer.

Twilight, Braeburn and PaulaRed only had a split second to make a run for it before the wooden floor of the Sheriff’s office exploded, splinters flying everywhere as the thing that had been traveling underground surfaced. Braeburn was knocked into Paula, who had flown into a wall, leaving a distinct pony-shaped depression in the drywall. Twilight had been propelled into the opposite side of the office, and she happened to go head-first into a window, shattering the glass completely and leaving multiple lacerations on her head and neck. The poor purple unicorn was knocked unconscious from the blow, and she blacked out.

As Braeburn and Paula began to rise to their hooves, Braeburn winced in pain, and he turned to notice a square of wood the size of a slice of bread half-embedded in his right side. He collapsed to the ground and groaned in pain as Paula moved closer to get a look at the injury. It took a couple of seconds for them to take notice of what had come out of the ground.

Braeburn and Paula turned around after hearing a loud, wet, slapping sound. They didn’t know what to say when they saw the large pile of bubbling black slop, twice as high as they were, moving slowly across the wood-sprinkled floor. It surveyed the room with large white eyes the size of trashcan lids; it looked at each of the three ponies lying damaged and hurt in the room. Then it began to move again, this time towards Braeburn and Paula. The two siblings backed up against the wall, Paula pushing Braeburn behind her, as he was more hurt than she was.

“You wanna fight?” she threatened to the pile. It didn’t react to her at all, and continued to slowly move towards her. Scared out of her wits, and determined to protect her brother, she attempted to attack it. Turning around and reeling her hind legs, she kicked the mass just as it was in range of her back hooves. The blow punched two holes right through the creature’s body, but the goo quickly reformed to fill in the gaps. The creature paused, and then began to shape-shift; Paula backed up again, realizing there was nothing she could do, as far as fighting back went. Braeburn and Paula were backed into a corner, Braeburn still feeling a sharp pain from the large fragment in his side, which was bleeding a fair amount. The two ponies watched the large mass bubble fiercely as it began separating into four smaller forms, even its two massive white eyes dividing, like a cell, into eight separate eyes—four separate pairs. The eyes then traveled across the shape’s surface in sets of two, each pair moving towards one of the four new, smaller shapes being formed. Three of the four began to change form again, and within a few seconds, what had been slimy black mounds were now the silhouettes of Braeburn, PaulaRed, and Twilight Sparkle. The black ponies surveyed the room again, using their newly-made legs to walk across the floor as they eyed the room carefully, looking for something.

“HEY!” Paula shouted at the one closest to her, which was also the one that looked like her. She had no clue why a bubbling pile of goop came crashing through the floor and then decided to copy her shape. Except for the colors, it looked exactly like her, right down to the two long braids of hair coming out from under her hat. It stopped its search and slowly turned its head to look straight into Paula’s eyes with its own pale-white ones. Paula’s anger quickly turned into fear, and she cowered closer into the corner under the copy’s gaze. Looking her over for a moment, it turned and began to walk towards her.

“GET AWAY FROM HER!” Braeburn yelled as he stood up to confront the creature, but he collapsed back onto the ground after taking the first step forward. He fell to the hooves of Paula’s copy, which ignored him completely and walked around him, straight towards Paula.

With no other way to go, Paula made to kick the creature straight in the face when she turned around again and belted her hind legs behind her. Despite still being made of the same black slime as when it was shapeless, the impact this time had a much more sickly cracking sound; the head of the black pony had almost completely severed, hanging only by a few strands on the back of its neck; the colliding force had fused the back of the head with the back of the body. Unfortunately for Paula, the creature was unfazed—the head sunk into its body, and a second later emerged from the stub of its neck into a completely-healed head. It began to move towards Paula again, and its body started to spread outwards around her.

But before the black slime could envelope her, Paula noticed from the corner of her eye a blast of lavender light that compacted into a stream and shot straight through the fake-Paula’s head. This was the first time that those blank white eyes had shown any noticeable expression, and it was an expression of surprise—at least, that’s what it looked like just before the head was splattered against the adjacent wall. Paula winced from the explosion, some of the goop getting on her face as well. She turned to look at the source of the light, and she saw Twilight standing there, horn aglow with magic, wearing a bloodied game-face and ready to deliver another attack.

The other two fake-ponies turned to look at Twilight, just before the fourth pile of slime that hadn’t transformed also took a direct hit of lavender light and blew up in a spray of black sludge all over the floor. Upon seeing this, the remaining two made a sprint for Twilight, attempting to tackle her down. Twilight lifted a table with her magic and threw it towards the two; the Braeburn copy jumped over it, while the Twilight copy dodged too slowly and was tossed against the floor by the flying furniture. The Braeburn copy jumped in front of Twilight and swung its back hoof in a circle to roundhouse Twilight. Twilight caught the leg in her hooves, but she wasn’t strong enough to completely dampen the blow; still grasping onto the leg, she was swung around and kicked into a chair. The real Braeburn made to get up again, but his injury wasn’t ready to let him fight, and he fell once again to the ground. Paula, who wasn’t majorly hurt but rather suffering from extreme shock, only stood and watched bug-eyed at the battle between Twilight and these strange beings that had come from the ground below—there was still a gaping hole in the very middle of the room, leading down into shadows.

Paula’s watching of Twilight distracted her from noticing the black gunk sliding across the wall, down to the floor to join up with the heap reforming at the headless body of the Paula-copy. As the battle between the black ponies and Twilight raged, the Paula-copy began to regain its head, and it slowly rose back to its hooves, the white eyes opening again when the head finished; the eyes were staring blankly as always, but there was a sinister malice about them now. Braeburn noticed it, and he cried out to Paula to get her attention. He was too late though; by the time Paula turned her head, she was already half-covered in black, the fake Paula trying again to envelope her. Braeburn watched in horror as Paula was wrapped in solid sludge. The fake-Paula, now completely formed around its host, turned to Twilight and ran in to join the battle; Braeburn’s yelling for his sister fell on deaf ears.

No one had the upper hand in the battle between Twilight and the black ponies. The purple unicorn was certainly holding her own against them, but she was becoming drained as well. As the fight progressed, the copies began changing tactics from head-first to standing their ground. Twilight was much more powerful than anything they had experienced. As the Paula-copy walked up towards Twilight, the unicorn lowered her head and prepared to hit it with another attack, before hearing Braeburn yell to her.

“Don’t attack it! Paula is inside of that thing!” he yelled through a dry throat. His wound wasn’t fatal, but it certainly was painful, and it put a large strain on the settler-pony.

Twilight turned back to face her new third adversary, and instead of attacking, leapt to one side to avoid it. She didn’t want to hurt Paula.

The black ponies took notice of this, and immediately devised a new strategy. The other two began rushing around the room again, continuing to look for what they had been searching for earlier, and the one possessing Paula went directly for Twilight. Twilight attempted to go for the other, non-pony-controlling forms, but the Paula-copy cut her off and backed her into a corner. It didn’t do anything else to her except stand in her way, as the other two ransacked the room in their search. Finally, the Twilight-copy had apparently found what they were looking for, and held it up to the light to get a closer look at it as it pulled it out from under a shard of timber. Holding it up to the light, the fake looked at each side and every corner of Twilight’s little black box, examining it closely.

“HEY!” Twilight screamed at her copy. Twilight had had enough of this; fed up with what these things were doing, she belted the fake Paula in the face and made a run for her own fake to retrieve the box; but the Braeburn-copy tackled her to the ground, and a struggling Twilight watched her fake—and the black box—descend back down into the large hole. She was pinned on her back, and she couldn’t move at all from her position.

“Ungh…Let me go!” Twilight yelled to the foe restraining her. The pony paid no mind to her and only watched the black box go down the hole. Waiting several more seconds—assumingly giving the other a head start, quickly got off Twilight and jumped down the hole with the Paula-copy, which still had the original beneath its black layers. The strain of battle was beginning to sink in; Twilight could only drag herself across the floor to get towards the hole. Looking down it, she saw nothing but a bottomless pit. Her spirits had dropped tenfold after everything that had just happened.

“They have the box…” Twilight struggled to say as she began to feel the small cuts across her face and neck bleeding profusely.

“…And my sister!” Braeburn added, not even attempting to get up anymore. “We have to go after them!”

“Yeah, sure,” Twilight said sarcastically, “just give me five minutes to catch my breath.”

“We have to do something-”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Twilight said forcefully. “Not yet, at least…” she gasped for breath and looked up to the front door, hearing footsteps.

The door swung open, and an azure unicorn came rushing in and began speaking, “I just encountered the most peculiar…wha—what in the…?”

“How’s it going?” Twilight managed to utter to an astonished Trixie just as Twilight’s eyelids started to droop and her vision began to blur. Just before blacking out again, she could hear in the far distance a pony shouting “Help! We need help in here immediately, some ponies are hurt!”

Everything went blank, and Twilight’s head hit the floor.

Chapter 5: Recovery

She could hear voices, multiple voices, all around her. She couldn’t see a thing, though…oh, wait, it’s because her eyes are shut. She didn’t have the motivation to open them though, so she decided to continue lying quietly on what felt like a bed. She wondered what the ponies around her were talking about. What had happened, exactly? She couldn’t really rememb-

“OW!” screamed Twilight.

Finally getting the strength to open her eyes, Twilight’s first sight was a sharp shard of glass being held in a pair of tongs right in front of her face. Apparently, the pain she just felt was from a doctor pulling said glass out.

“Ah! You’re awake, Twilight Sparkle,” the doctor began. The voices in the room died down, and the several ponies that were there with Twilight turned to look at her. Twilight turned her head slightly to get a better look at them, but not too much, as it hurt her neck to do so.

“How’re ya doing?” a pony nurse asked Twilight.

“I’m…ugh, well enough, I guess,” Twilight replied, feeling a throb in her head and the cuts lining her face and neck. She suddenly remembered the fight that went on in the Sheriff’s office, and the black figures, and Braeburn and Paula getting hurt and attacked. “Where’s Paula?!” Twilight jerked up into a sit on the bed, ignoring the intense pain she felt when she did; “How’s Braeburn? What happened to the black goop things? Did they get away with the black box?”

“…So you did meet the same things as Trixie did,” a voice spoke in the corner of the room. Everyone turned around to look at the caped blue unicorn sitting up against the wall. Her head was staring up at the ceiling, but she was looking at Twilight from the corner of her eyes. “We all heard the whole story from the yellow stallion with the southern drawl earlier, but I wanted to hear it from you before I believed it.” Mentioning Braeburn, Trixie motioned over to Twilight’s right; the purple pony turned and saw a lump from under a couple of blankets on the bed.

Relieved that Braeburn was alright, Twilight collapsed back into the bed, some of the metaphorical weight on her shoulders lifted. Twilight brought her attention back to Trixie. “So you were attacked by them, too?”

“Yes, the Great and Powerful Trixie was, but she made quick work of the creature, and without getting a scratch on herself,” Trixie smiled crudely and added, “unlike you, apparently.”

Twilight was not going to let Trixie belittle the turmoil she and her friends had just faced. She was getting extremely sick of Trixie’s attitude, and the mocking of what happened to her and the others at the Sheriff’s office made something snap, ever so slightly, in Twilight’s head. Trying not to speak through gritted teeth, but instead talking in a very cold tone, Twilight asked the unicorn, “Oh, really? Now tell me, just how many of them did you face?”

Trixie seemed afraid to answer the question. “Um, just one…”

“Just one?” Twilight smiled to herself sarcastically. “Just one…” she silently stared down at her covers for several seconds, then began to speak again, “Well…Braeburn, Paula and I were ambushed by a massive blob that turned into four. What kind of an…‘entrance’ did your attacker make?”

“‘Entrance’?” Trixie asked. “Well, I guess we saw it bubbling out from the ground.”

“Ah, I see,” Twilight replied, still using the same sad, matter-of-factly tone of voice, “When our attacker entered, the floor exploded and sent everything—including us and many large splinters of wood—flying across the entire room. Perhaps you may have noticed Braeburn’s injury, or maybe you were wondering why my face appears as if it were thrown through a glass window?” Twilight gave Trixie a small smile of resentment. Trixie didn’t say another word after that.

“So now we’re getting attacked by something from underground, plus we’re still trapped within the walls around the city?” a random colt asked.

“I…I don’t know,” Twilight replied, wincing as her head throbbed hard, but she appeared to regain warmth in her voice. It was hard for her to think clearly, and she wasn’t sure she was in her right mind right now. “If anything, I’d say they were coming up here in search for something.”

“Th’ black box from Princess Celestia?” Braeburn asked from his bed. Twilight turned back to look at the yellow stallion who had just popped out from under the blanket. He seemed fine, just very drained of stamina. “Before we started fighting them, they’d completely ignored us n’ were searchin’ for something around the office. Since they left righ’ after finding it, I’d say that was their target in th’ first place.”

“I couldn’t agree more, though this raises the question of why one went for Trixie, who I can only assume was a fair distance from the Sheriff’s office…?” Twilight glanced at Trixie for confirmation, and the other magical pony looked back apprehensively. After a few moments, Trixie responded.

“Yes, I was on the town’s outskirts,” she stated softly.

“Hmm…” Twilight was deep in thought. Then she turned to the Appleloosians in the room with her. “Have there been any other reported attacks?”

“Ah don’t think so,” one of them replied.

Twilight frowned slightly at her bed sheets. “They only attacked twice, and one of the locations had exactly what they were looking for. If that’s the case, shouldn’t they have only attacked the one place where they thought the box was? Why bother randomly attacking some random pony outside of town?”

“The Great and Powerful Trixie is not ‘some random pony’,” Trixie said in offense, “She performs amazing and mesmerizing acts of magic and wonder for all the commoners to witness in awe!” She spoke highly of herself while pouting in the corner of the room, still taken aback by Twilight’s attitude earlier.

Twilight rolled her eyes at Trixie’s comment and continued to think about these perplexing questions. But then inspiration came to her, in the form of Trixie’s previous backlash, no less.

“Trixie!” Twilight outburst at the other unicorn in the room. Trixie jumped from this, partially afraid that Twilight was going to attack her or something. “Did you ever perform any magic after Appleloosa was surrounded, and before you were attacked?”

Trixie thought for a moment. “Actually, I guess I did. Whilst attempting to break a hole in the wall, Trixie did perform a single spell; just the one, though.”

“That’s all it takes,” Twilight replied, speaking as she began to delve back into her thoughts; she started to make an outline of what has probably happened in these past few hours…

Assuming these ‘things’ arrived in Appleloosa at the same time the black walls did, that means that they had the chance of seeing Trixie perform magic in an attempt to destroy the wall. They saw her as a threat, and attempted to eliminate her before their initial attack on the Sheriff’s office. Despite failing with Trixie, they went ahead with the plan, perhaps thinking they could get it done before Trixie reached the Sheriff’s, seeing as how she was so far away. Never having seen me perform magic, they mustn’t have seen me as a threat. After I had used magic, though, they once again went to kill the unicorn using it. They see magic as a threat to their plan. But what plan is that, exactly…?

“You okay, Twi?” Braeburn asked Twilight, who had her eyes closed and was muttering to herself.

…Okay, think, Twilight: timeline of events. The Princess has me bring a black box to Appleloosa—to Sheriff Silverstar, to be exact. I arrive, the Sheriff said he’d be gone but should have been back by then. A dark cloud appears above town and entraps it. Trixie uses magic to destroy the wall, fails, and is attacked by black figures. Finally, more of them appear in the Sheriff’s office and take the black box…

“…Doctor,” Twilight came out of her trance to ask the question, “am I fit to leave yet?”

“Leave?!” the doctor exclaimed, “You’re severely banged up! Heck, you were attacked only an hour and a half ago!”

“Wait, I’ve been out that long!?” Twilight exclaimed back, “There’s no time to sit around! It was one thing when Appleloosa’s biggest problem was being caged in by some unknown force, but now that ‘force’ is attacking us, and we have to fight back!”

“We can fight back on our own, Twilight,” Braeburn replied, concerned for the unicorn, “We don’t need yer assistance.”

“Yes, leave that to the Great and Powerful Trixie.” Trixie got up from the floor and whisked around Twilight’s bed, her ego apparently recovered. “Besides, you earth-ponies don’t stand a chance against these things without my help.”

“Wha’s that supposed to mean?” Braeburn asked in offense.

“Well, in all honesty, the only thing that keeps all of you simpletons from being completely destroyed by these shadows is the magic of a unicorn—you can kick them all you want, but it will do you no good,” Trixie replied arrogantly; she was right though, and had learned this firsthand during her battle with her own copy.

Braeburn thought hard for a moment about what Trixie said, though he had a scowl on his face from her insult. Then Braeburn got up and out of the bed, groaning slightly as he stood as firmly as he could on all four hooves. “If that’s the case, then I guess we don’t have much of a choice. Trixie, was it? You and Twilight Sparkle are going to have to team up and stop this menace!”

“Wait, WHAT?!” both unicorns shouted at the same time.

“I saw myself what Twi’s capable of, and adding another unicorn into the mix will surely give you guys the upper hand,” Braeburn continued, unaware of how much the two despised each other.

“The Great and Powerful Trixie will not-”

“Oh for crying out loud,” Twilight interrupted, “will you stop it with the third person already? It’s getting really, really annoying.”

“Don’t interrupt Trixie when she is speaking!”

“As if you have anything important to say!”

Trixie’s eye twitched. “TWILIGHT SPARKLE! I have had just about ENOUGH of you!”

“Oh, so I’m wasting your time?!”

The other ponies in the room looked back and forth between the two unicorns as they continued to chew each other out. Braeburn had had enough of this nonsense. “Quiet, both o’ you! What in tarnation is wrong with ya? Appleloosa needs the BOTH of you to get over yer own little issues between each other and fix this mess! Remember the whole ‘town is trapped’ thing goin’ on righ’ now?”

Twilight and Trixie stared down at the ground in shame.

“So what are we supposed to do?” Trixie asked.

“That’s up to you an’ Twi,” Braeburn replied. “Since both the Sheriff, and my sis’re gone right now,” Braeburn’s eyes looked distant as he said this, “I’m basically in charge of town; I give both you and Twilight complete freedom t’ do as you see fit in Appleloosa, if it means fixin’ this problem and savin’ my sis.”

“You mean the two of us have to agree on a plan?” Twilight asked hesitantly, afraid of the answer she might receive.

“Twi, you still need to get some rest, so this Trixie girl here is gonna be doing most of the legwork, but it’s your teamwork that’ll help solve this whole ordeal. I suggest you two warm up to each other and devise some kinda plan.” He waved out the crowd in the room, and crawled back into bed after they left; he too needed to rest his body after what happened. “If either of you need any assistance from Appleloosa, it’ll be as simple as askin’.” He lowered both his head and his tone when he said to Twilight, “Twilight, please—save my sister.”

“Don’t worry,” Twilight assured, “Trixie and I will get to the bottom of this!” Trixie made a very loud and clear ‘tch’, accompanied by a rolling of her eyes.

Twilight turned her attention to the azure unicorn, pointing a scolding hoof at her. “And YOU had better get an attitude adjustment, and fast—you’re helping, whether you like it or not.”

“Trixie will certainly comply, but only because she has to.”

Twilight ignored that last statement for the sake of saving time. “So then, what’s the first thing we should do? We sure don’t have much to go on, and I don’t know how much longer that doc expects me to stay in here, but I’m leaving no later than an hour from now."

Braeburn acknowledged to the two unicorns, "Well then, Trixie, I suppose you should just patrol Appleloosa’s streets until Twi's fit enough to leave, and you can make sure no more of those shadow-blob-things show up again.”

"Ugh," Twilight interjected. "Can we please stop calling them this thing and that; 'shadow', 'blob', and 'goop' are kinda getting old."

"What, you want to name them?" Trixie asked judgmentally.

"Beats what we're calling them right now," Twilight replied.

"Pray tell, what would we call these black, evil pony-imposters?"

"Hm..." Twilight pondered for a moment. "How about…’Odium’?”

“Odi-what?” Braeburn asked immediately.

Twilight elaborated, “If I’m not mistaken, it’s Latin for ‘hatred’. I know how everypony says ‘hate is a strong word’, but I’m feeling some pret-ty strong negative feelings for them.”

“Takes a bit of effort to say, don’t you think?” Trixie once again felt that this was just Twilight trying to show off her vast knowledge of trivial facts, but even Trixie knew that now wasn’t the time to start up an argument, so she let it slide. This time. “Whatever floats your boat, Twilight Sparkle. If you seriously want to call them ‘Latin Hate’, be my guest—I’ll even play along.”

“Fine by me,” Twilight replied, “just get out there. And why not try mingling with the citizens while you’re out?” Twilight said encouragingly to Trixie as the capped unicorn made her way out the door. “Instead of focusing on making everyone you meet adore and worship you, perhaps you could try and make some actual friends!”

Trixie rolled her eyes again at the comment, not that Twilight could see from behind her.

Trixie was lying up against the base of the clock tower, watching the different ponies that walked by; despite trying to go about daily life, everyone looked nervous, and they were always looking up at the sky. After having walked for five minutes, Trixie gave up and decided to sit back and relax. It’s not like anything is going to happen anyways, she thought. Every once in a while, a pony may glance up at her and stare for a few seconds—the caped, capped, dark-blue unicorn certainly did stand out from all the country-folk of Appleloosa. Not wanting to make any more eye contact with gazers, Trixie pulled down the rim of her hat to the point where she could only see the dirt ground right in front of her. She was considering taking a nap, when out of nowhere a pony walked up to her and spoke to her.

Trixie could barely see the hooves of the mare standing in front of her. “Excuse me?” the other pony asked hesitantly.

Trixie considered whether to acknowledge her, or to just pretend to be asleep to spare herself the trouble of small-talk. On a whim, though, Trixie lifted the rim of her hat and looked to the mare asking for her? “Yes? What do you want of the Great and Powerful Trixie?”

“Well…I heard that you and Twilight Sparkle are working together to save Appleloosa?”

“More or less,” Trixie replied in a bored drone, unaware of the irony in her statement.

“Well…” the mare began again, “I have this here, for the both of you.” Turning to her side, Trixie only now noticed the saddlebags on either side of her. The mare took off the bags and set them on the ground for Trixie. “I’ve been hearing a lot about you two in town, and that you’re planning on going down that hole in the Sheriff’s office, so—”

The unicorn was taken aback by the last part of that sentence. “We’re going to WHAT? Terribly sorry, but Trixie believes you are mistaken. We have no current plans to go down into such a place.”

“Oh…” the mare seemed somewhat disappointed. “Well, you could still make good use of the stuff I packed in those bags, whether you do go in or not. I put in some food and basic supplies, so it would be pretty useful in a cave like that, I think.”

“Um, well, thanks,” Trixie finally said, wanting the awkward encounter to end as soon as possible. She gave a nod and a small smile to the mare before taking the bags, which made the mare look pretty happy with herself, and she gave a large grin back to Trixie before going off on her own way.

Ugh…hurry up, Twilight Sparkle, Trixie thought to herself.

Chapter 6: Subterrane

Trixie sighed hard. “Yes, yes, just add it to the pile, please.”

The colt tossed his personal lucky horseshoe onto the ever-growing pile of gifts and supplies. The poor little wagon Trixie was given to carry it all in was now bending in at the middle. Trixie had to use her magic plus a little muscle just to get the wagon’s wheels to move. In only one hour, well over half of Appleloosa came by Trixie to give her and Twilight their regards and to pray for a safe journey down into the dark pit still in the Sheriff’s office. Twilight had said she’s be ready to go in an hour, so Trixie was slowly making her way back to the hospital; honestly, it was more of a wooden house with some basic medical supplies in it than it was a hospital.

The hospitality of these ponies was starting to get on Trixie’s nerves, not to mention the rumor that spread like wildfire that she and Twilight were going to brave the odds and venture down into the deep pit created by those ‘Odium’ creatures. What are they, nuts? Trixie had never considered even attempting to go down there, but the more and more gifts she received, the more and more it appeared inevitable she and Twilight were going to have to do so. Going down a black pit is one thing, but to go down accompanied by only Twilight Sparkle? It wasn’t a pretty thought for Trixie.

By the time Trixie reached the front door of the hospital, the pile on the wagon was twice as high as she was, excluding the hat. Half a dozen ponies had followed behind her, cheering her on and putting back anything that fell out the wagon behind her. Trixie was just about to open the door before the handle glowed a purplish-pink, turned, and opened up to show one battered Twilight Sparkle. She looked no better than she did an hour ago.

Twilight was surprised to be greeted with Trixie lugging a wagon full of miscellaneous objects. “What’s with all the stuff?” Twilight asked the magician.

“We haven’t even done anything yet, and we’re local heroes,” Trixie sighed.

Twilight glanced behind the wagon and saw several ponies cheering for her and Trixie. The purple pony smiled. “How have you been enjoying yourself? Everypony here is pretty kind, aren’t they?”

“Pft,” Trixie replied snidely; she lowered her voice a level before saying, “Nopony will leave me alone! This is getting really annoying! I’d tell you to pull the wagon for a bit, but…” she looked Twilight up and down, “you look simply awful. I wouldn’t want you to get any worse than you are right now.”

Twilight couldn’t tell if that was supposed to be a nasty comment or a generous act. Considering Trixie, perhaps it was a little of both; or maybe she was trying to be snide, but ended up accidentally generous because of it. “Did anything happen while I was in bed?”

“Nothing interesting. Although, everypony here is apparently under the impression that we’re going to brave that lightless hole-in-the-ground at the Sheriff’s office.”

“What? They think we’re going to go in there? You couldn’t even see the bottom!”

“Glad to hear you share my opinion,” Trixie replied. “I was worried you were actually going to take a liking to the idea.”

“Well…” Twilight began, putting a hoof to her chin.

“The Great and Powerful Trixie will NOT, I repeat, NOT, be going down there! It’d be suicide!”

“You don’t know that.”

“Look at yourself!” Trixie waved a hoof at Twilight’s battered body. “That was only from four of those creatures, and you had two other ponies with you! I lucked out with the one that attacked me, but we have absolutely no idea how to fight these things, what they’re capable of, or just how many lurk deep underground!”

Twilight’s plain expression curled into a smile. “You just acknowledged that you lucked out with the Odium you fought.”

Trixie jolted upright, but immediately collected herself and became calm again. “It was just an expression, Twilight Sparkle—a figure of speech. Besides, there’s no such thing as ‘luck’. There is only skill, which I have plenty of.”

“Yeah, sure.” Twilight shoved the matter aside to discuss more important topics. “If we aren’t going down the hole, what are we going to do? The most we can do for this town aboveground is protect it from another attack, not that anything else is actually attacking anyways. Trixie, we need to get that black box back; I know it has something to do with everything going on, and if we want to solve this mess, we have to get it back!”

Trixie knew that Twilight was right, but she didn’t want to admit it. Nor did she want to venture into a pitch-black, unknown cave with no one except Twilight Sparkle for company, but it wasn’t as if Trixie really had a choice in the matter. “If we’re going to do so, we need to make a plan.”

Twilight perked up a bit after seeing that Trixie was actually being cooperative. “Yes, a plan…a plan…um, how many Odium do you think may be down there?”

“I’d rather not think about it,” Trixie replied dryly. The potential of sheer numbers really was their largest concern, but again, it wasn’t like there were any other options besides pursuing their perpetrators. “I think we should just assume that we’ll have enough ability to keep out of sight. Besides, we’re unicorns—magic is commonplace to us, and there are certainly a large amount of stealth spells out there!”

The two unicorns began to walk towards the Sheriff’s office, which had by now been boarded up to keep any curious onlookers from entering. Trixie was still lugging the wagon behind her. “There are probably one or two useful things in this heap of junk,” Trixie said while looking behind her at the load, scolding it with her eyes; she didn’t enjoy all the kindness and generosity of this town’s ponies. “We should shuffle through all of this and leave behind all we don’t need—I have no idea how long we may be down there, so…”

Another problem that hadn’t really been considered until now. Twilight looked down at the ground. “There’s no telling what lies beneath this town. If I were to take a guess, based on the sounds of their movements underground that I heard earlier, it’s most likely a complex of random tunnels—like what you’d find in an ant farm, or something.”

Trixie gave Twilight an amused look. “Oh really? ‘Based on the sounds of their movements’? You seriously overdo the whole ‘brainiac’ routine, Twilight Sparkle.”

“It’s not a ‘routine’,” Twilight snapped back. “It’s called logic, Trixie; perhaps you could try it out sometime instead of having me do all the thinking between the two of us.”

Reaching the sealed-up door of the Sheriff’s office, Trixie stopped pulling the wagon and collapsed onto the ground with a large sigh. After giving herself a minute to rest, both she and Twilight began to go through the small mountain of gifts. Unfortunately for the girls, just about nine out of every ten items were all but useless—many items were good luck charms, novelties, or even the exact same item that they just looked at. If they had a bit for every length of rope or crowbar they found in that pile of junk…

Twilight cocked an eyebrow at some of the things she and Trixie were pulling out from the pile. “Exactly whose idea was it to give us a stained-glass mug?”

Trixie looked up from the poem she was reading to look at it. “It, ah, certainly is…uh, hm.”

“Do they think we have an actual use for any of these novelties?” Twilight asked aloud. Trixie only shrugged and went back to the small poem written for her and Twilight, though Trixie read it as if it were just for her. Twilight gave the mug another once-over before placing it in the rather large ‘don’t bring’ pile. “Do half these ponies even know what we’re even doing? Then again, I suppose it’s best that everypony doesn’t freak out. That would only make things worse.”

Trixie picked up a fuzzy pink quill from the junk pile and scribbled out a certain unicorn’s name several times throughout the poem before folding it up and stuffing it into one of her saddlebags; she was carrying the two bags given to her by the soft-spoken mare earlier, the one that had started this whole ‘gift-giving’ business. “I’m surprised that these ponies have taken the fact that they’re sectioned off from the rest of the world with no more than a grain of salt. Just look around.” The two glanced up from the little fortress of junk they’d created to look at the passersby. Most citizens looked no more than a tad bit fearful; most looked a little annoyed.

“I think they don’t realize how deep of a situation we’re all in,” Twilight replied. “But ignorance is bliss, and I don’t see any reason to snap them out of their delusion.”

“Hmph,” Trixie huffed. “What annoys me is that they all expect us to fix everything. They're taking us for granted, probably because we’re ‘all-powerful unicorns’ or some dumb thing like that.”

A few more minutes passed without any conversation, and the two unicorns had all but a very small assortment of useful items to bring with them, half of it being food. Twilight slipped on her own saddlebags from when she came to Appleloosa, and she and Trixie split the load into their respective bags.

It was only this morning that I entered Appleloosa, Twilight realized, and now it feels as though days have gone by.

Trixie tossed aside the ‘DO NOT ENTER’ sign tacked to the planks covering the front door of the Sheriff’s office. Encasing the nailed-in wood with her magic, Trixie slowly yanked the planks off from the wall. She removed the last plank and opened the door. The lights inside were off, and there was no natural light coming in through the windows, which were boarded up as well. The main reason this had been done was to prevent anything that may come out of the hole from getting out of the Sheriff’s office.

Trixie dipped her head past the doorframe and looked around inside. Seeing a light switch inside right next to the door, Trixie flipped it on, but nothing happened. I suppose that fight destroyed all the lights in here. It certainly looks like a brawl went down. Trixie had seen the room earlier, but had only gotten a quick glimpse of it. Now that she had a better look at the room, plus the darkness it was shrouded in, made Trixie uneasy.

She turned back to Twilight. “Are you positive you want to go through with this?”

“Of course I am,” the scratched-up purple pony replied. “I made a promise to Braeburn—to Appleloosa, to Princess Celestia! We have no other choice, Trixie. We’re GETTING that box BACK.”

Trixie looked back into the dark room uneasily, then she turned back to Twilight, and then back to the room. “Very well, let’s go! We’re not making any progress sitting here!”

Trixie lit her horn as she walked inside, sidestepping large splinters of wood and a shard of glass here and there. Not far behind was Twilight, who also lit her horn upon entering. Trixie was walking around the room, taking in all there was to see. Twilight, on the other hand, didn’t look like she wanted to familiarize herself with the sight.

“Can we please continue down?” Twilight asked to Trixie, who was on the other side of the hole. There was a slight pain in her tone of voice.

Trixie looked over to Twilight, then down the hole. “I doubt we can simply jump down—who knows how deep that hole is?” Glancing around, Trixie noticed a piece of wood about the size of her hoof and picked it up with her magic, then moved it over the large hole and let it go. Both she and Twilight gave a small sigh of relief when they heard the clunk of wood on rock not two seconds after it had dropped down.

“Well, that’s not too deep; think we can jump down?” Trixie asked her studious associate.

Twilight didn’t like that idea, especially considering how she was already pretty banged up as it was. Looking around the scraps on the floor, Twilight eventually laid eyes on the planks that Trixie had removed just outside the entrance. Picking them up with her magic and placing them edge-to-edge, Twilight effectively made a floating platform. Jumping on the platform while supporting it with her own magic, Twilight then moved it over to Trixie. “We don’t have all day,” Twilight replied, beckoning the magician to get on board.

Hesitating at first, Trixie eventually made a leap for the platform, almost knocking Twilight off when she landed. “Whoops,” Trixie plainly apologized.

After giving Trixie the stink-eye for a moment, Twilight began to descend their support to the floor of the tunnel below. Thankfully, the attackers from earlier had apparently escaped the same way they had come, so there was only one way to go deeper into the tunnel. Twilight continued forward using her magic stand to transport her and Trixie onward. The tunnel was slanted downward, and the deeper they went, the colder and damper it seemed to become. Trixie got a slight shiver; “In hindsight, I suppose we shouldn’t have tossed that knitted blanket…” the azure pony complained.

The tunnel itself was a winding tubular hole, the sides of the cave being round and rather smooth, as if it had gone through years of erosion, but it also had a fair amount of bumps and waves to it. How on Earth did they dig a hole in this way? Twilight thought. Condensation built up on the ceiling and the walls, and every so often a stray cold drip of groundwater hit one of the ponies’ faces.

Five minutes after they had initially entered the hole, Twilight stopped suddenly. There was no longer only one way to go; the unicorns had found themselves in a four-way junction between tunnels, none of them looking any different from the other.

“Great,” Trixie immediately began to grumble, “now what do we do?”

“Perhaps if we just stay here for a bit,” Twilight began, “we’ll hear or see something at the end of one of the tunnels that’ll hint towards where the black box is.”

“Are you hearing yourself?” Trixie replied crudely.

Twilight glared at Trixie, then dispersed her magic on the platform, causing the two to fall a yard onto the ground. “Fine, then—YOU take control, and choose which way we go.”

“Erm…” Trixie began to stutter, but was immediately interrupted by a massive groaning, coming from deep within the tunnel on their left. It was a very haunting sound, a mix between a cry of pain and bark of malice. The very sides of the tunnel shuddered with the long noise. After it stopped, Twilight and Trixie paused and looked back at each other, wide-eyed. “…Let’s NOT go there.”

“Oh-ho,” Twilight replied amused, as she re-took control of the platform and turned to the left tunnel, “we’re DEFINITELY going there.”

“Twilight Sparkle, you are insane.”

“We’re here to investigate, Trixie, and there’s no better place to look than towards the big creepy groaning noise!”

“You’re testing fate with every passing minute!” Trixie lowered her voice as sounds of industry in the distance hit her ears. “Do you hear that? How are we supposed to blend in there? By the sounds of it, there must be hundreds of those creatures working down there!”

With a roll of her eyes, Twilight’s horn became engulfed in another layer of her magic, and her body and the platform’s visibility was instantly halved. Trixie looked slightly astonished, and Twilight looked over to her from the corner of her eyes. “Do you want me to do you, too?”

“Trixie can take care of HERSELF, thank you.” Turning away from Twilight, Trixie looked up at the ceiling as she tried to remember how exactly an invisibility spell was produced. Guessing on a random choice, her horn glowed bright blue and she too became only half-opaque. Trying to one-up Twilight, though, Trixie was noticeably…less noticeable.

The sounds of breaking of rock became louder and louder as Twilight and Trixie neared the source. They both turned off the light from their horns so as to not draw attention, and they put more effort into their invisibility spells, turning completely invisible by the time they reached the tunnel’s exit.

What little the two unicorns could see made their jaws drop.

Not a single thing could be seen amongst the pitch-black of the cave, save for the hundreds of thousands of pairs of white, pupil-less eyes moving amongst the apparently massive cave. In the distance, behind the multiple small, pony-sized eyes was a single pair of enormous ones, staring emotionless at the activity going on around it.

To get a better look, Twilight and Trixie gave their eyes a night-vision enchantment. The cave was huge, and thousands of black, pony-shaped Odium were moving, marching, and digging. There was a lot of digging going on, all done by the bare hooves of the black beasts. At the other end of the cave, donning the massive white eyes was an equally massive sphere of pure black spite. It was one huge ball, its surface completely smooth and flawless. There were only three protrusions on it—a wavy, tail-like base, which flowed into the ground below it like smoke; and two twig-like arms, which on the end of each set a gigantic, four-fingered claw. Despite its massive size—from top of the sphere to the bottom, at least five stories—it appeared weightless, and hovered twenty feet above the ground, only supported by the wisp of smoke tipped on the very surface of the stone floor. There was a considerable space surrounding it, and the walls by its left and right appeared scratched up to the point of collapse.

“Trixie…” Twilight whispered, at awe at what she was viewing, “I think this is going to be much harder than we ever imagined.”

Chapter 7: Deeper

The clink and clang against stone never stopped. Rocks ranging in size from pebbles to boulders were being pushed along designated paths and out to some unknown place. Exactly where the rocks were being taken wasn’t of any interest to Trixie and Twilight. Still using their magic to make themselves invisible, the two were slowly and carefully making their way across the massive complex to investigate everything going on. It was a pretty challenging feat, considering just about any room to walk was already being used by an Odium digging in the cave.

The smooth, gray rocks were damp from moisture in the cave. This interested Twilight. There must be a natural well down here somewhere, whether or not they dug it up on purpose, I can’t say. The question is, would these creatures even need to drink any water? Twilight stopped suddenly when she stepped on a small section of clay. Trixie bumped into her backside a second later, having not seen the invisible pony stop.

Trixie wanted to tell Twilight off, but she knew that speaking right now wasn’t an option—those black pony-copies were working but a few yards from her and Twilight. Trixie wanted to talk, because she wanted to ask Twilight just why the heck she stopped out of nowhere, and where the heck she was planning on going now. Only now did she realize that the two of them wouldn’t have many opportunities to be able to communicate while down here in the cave. ‘Hindsight’ seemed to be a word regularly popping up in Trixie’s head as of late, but her question was answered suddenly in a way she didn’t expect.

Writing was magically being carved out of a patch of clay on the ground in front of her and Twilight. Trixie continued to watch the letters appear; she knew it had to be Twilight writing the message in the clay for her: ‘Suspect water source nearby. Odium may need water, food. Let’s try and find a well/stream.’

Trixie dug her hoof into the same patch of clay, and wrote a single confirming ‘okay’ to Twilight. After biting down on the tip of Twilight’s tail again—to stay together—the unicorn duo continued down the path they were already on. Compared to the one large room of the cave, they were currently in a deep, narrow ditch. The cave itself was a good several stories tall, with a circular ceiling and floor. Within the floor of the cave, there were plenty of said ditches dug deep down, and bridges connecting the upper floors over the ditches. Despite looking very random and chaotic upon first glance, the digging method was actually quite well planned out and articulate.

Each ditch branched down and out of the main cave; into where, Twilight and Trixie did not know. There must have been thirty horizontal ditches sown into the floor, and they were randomly trying the closest one to them. Hopefully, either all the ditches led to the same place, or the unicorns were lucky enough to have chosen the right one first.

Twilight and Trixie continued down the small tunnel, every so often bracing against the wall to avoid an Odium walking up or down the same path. After a couple minutes of slowly and carefully making their way down the slippery dark trail, an exit to another room was within sight. The unicorns picked up their pace a bit to see what was ahead.

The two trotted out the tunnel and into the new room, which was even larger than the dug-out one they had entered from earlier. Twilight was awestruck once again as she tried to take in the entire sight, and Trixie couldn’t help but utter a soft “wow…”

Instead of the horror they had just seen before, with all the black creatures digging away at the cave’s interior, this place was much more serene. There were very few Odium here, and unlike the excavation site from before, this cave appeared to have been naturally formed. The cave had a massive underground lake and was full of stalactites and stalagmites; a very warm, relaxing steam was emanating off the surface of the water. The two unicorns were thankful that they were invisible; someone otherwise would’ve seen how frizzy the steam was making their manes.

“I knew it,” Twilight replied softly, to herself more than to Trixie. Trixie could hear just by Twilight’s voice that she was pretty proud with herself.

The azure unicorn took a look around to make sure none of their enemies were too close nearby. After seeing the cost was clear, she came closer to Twilight and whispered, “I can tell from here that this water must be pretty hot. Why on earth is it so warm here, and yet so cold throughout the rest of the cave?”

“I don’t know Trixie,” Twilight honestly replied. “But let’s take note of this, and of anything else we find out down here. Now’s not the time for answering the questions, anyways; we can do that once we get back out of here and recollect our thoughts in Appleloosa.”

“If you say so…”

Though the two had tossed the stained-glass mug, Twilight did happen to bring along a glass jar, which she and Trixie had been given among their pile of junk (Celestia knows why a jar…), and she took it out of her bag and dipped it in the pool, holding onto the jar with her magic. After filling the jar halfway, she sealed the lid back on and quickly brought it back into her bag. Their supplies, like them, were completely invisible, but Twilight still tried to disturb their surroundings as little as possible. “What now, Trixie?”

The young magician mare glanced around the natural spring. The entire floor of this particular cave was part of the lake, save for ten feet of shoreline that spread out parallel to the wall. On a quick inspection, Trixie found that there were holes lined up among the wall—all the ditches on the left side must lead to the spring, for whatever reason. “I think, if we’re here to investigate, we should watch these pony-imposters for a few minutes; see exactly what it is that they’re doing.”

Twilight nodded. “Good idea.”

They walked down the narrow shore of the lake, toward the other end, where the dimly glowing white eyes of some Odium could be seen in the distance. As they neared their subjects, the two unicorns stopped talking altogether, and they slowed their pace, trying their hardest not to make too loud a noise when placing their hoof onto the damp stone floor. There were three standing right at the spring’s edge, and they hadn’t moved a muscle since Twilight and Trixie had first laid eyes on them from the other side of the cave, almost three minutes ago. They appeared to be staring out at the lake, though it was hard to tell for sure, considering how they had no pupils.

Their behavior was confusing Twilight. What in Equestria are they doing? They haven’t even budged. Shouldn’t they be working right now, digging rocks or whatever? It was pitch-black in the cave, and the only reason Twilight and Trixie could see right now was because of their night-vision spells, but how were the Odium able to see in this darkness? Were they actually able to see, or were they simply using their other senses to guide them? Far too many questions were buzzing in Twilight’s head, and not even one was any closer to being answered.

Out of nowhere, the three black creatures began to move again, and like a robot suddenly being flipped on, they walked back into one of the tunnels, ready to work again. The unicorns glanced around to make sure there were no other Odium around, and after seeing the coast clear, began to talk to one another.

“What was that all about?” Trixie asked snidely, as if insulting the Odiums’ recent actions to be very stupid.

“Don’t know…” Twilight glanced up the tunnel that the three had entered. “Let’s follow them, up this tunnel. It’s the farthest on the left of this wall here, so if I were to guess, it’d also be closest to—“

Trixie didn’t need Twilight to finish her sentence. “We’ve done many a stupid thing today, Twilight Sparkle, but there is NO WAY you’re getting me to go anywhere NEAR that massive black Odium thingamajig. Perhaps you didn’t realize when you first saw it that it is FIVE STORIES TALL and sports TWO GIANT CLAWS that are THE SIZE OF A HOUSE?!”

“It looked really slow to me,” Twilight replied defiantly. “Not the brightest bulb, if you catch my drift—our chances of getting caught won’t increase just because we go near that…that ‘Odious Maximus’, if you will.”

“Didn’t you see the huge scratches dug in the walls around it?! That’s all pure brute force!” Trixie had taken a lot of crap from Twilight today; the purple unicorn had made all the important decisions, and the poor magician had little choice but to comply. Trixie had no choice but to draw the line at some point. “The Great and Powerful Trixie is NOT going to become your personal henchmare, Twilight Sparkle!” With a snobby ‘humph’, she twirled around to face away from her companion. “You can go ahead without me. Simply come back when you’re ready to go somewhere that isn’t there.”

Twilight growled at Trixie at first, then she turned back to face towards the tunnel and away from Trixie, giving a ‘humph’ of her own in retort. “Fine, I’ll go without you. Just try and not get caught, Trixie—we wouldn’t want you to mess anything up.”

The two invisible ponies took a moment to make several faces at the other, unaware that the other was doing the same thing. Afterward, Twilight began up the tunnel to more closely investigate the Maximus they had seen earlier.

Trixie hadn’t actually taken Twilight seriously; she thought that if she were to disagree with the stupid purple unicorn, that she’d have no choice but to do what Trixie wanted. Instead, they were now splitting up, and the thought of being alone down in the dark, desolate cave unnerved Trixie. Not even the warm, relaxing steam off the spring could calm her, but she’d much rather stand there idly than follow Twilight into a death trap.

Twilight shivered hard. As the tunnel’s gentle slope rose, the temperature quickly fell. As she continued to walk, the warm humid air from down below quickly turned into cold moisture that stuck to her body. The sounds of striking stone began to ring again, and Twilight quickly found herself back in the first cave she and Trixie had first entered. She was in another ditch, and could see three Odium working away at the walls. They must be those three we just saw earlier. I still don’t understand what they were doing by the water, but I suppose that isn’t important right now. As Twilight crept out from beneath a stone bridge up above, she could suddenly see the same giant beast from before. Since she was standing in a fifteen-foot-deep trench, not much of it could be seen from her angle, but what was seen was massive, smooth, and pitch-black, an ever darker black than that of the cave it was residing in. Twilight continued down the pathway, dodging the occasional Odium here and there as she went; she was trying to find a way to get even closer to the monstrosity. Perhaps it’s a good thing Trixie didn’t come along. If she hadn’t objected when she did, she definitely would’ve by now.

Twilight continued down the one-way ditch, all the while keeping a watchful eye on the black ball hovering not too far overhead. It barely moved at all, only occasionally nudging its body to the left or right; most likely to get a better look at something going on in the distance. Unfortunately for Twilight, it appeared there was no way to get closer to her target—she ended up on the other side of the cave after two minutes of walking and scanning the trench she was in for an escape up to the upper level, but instead she ended up in front of another tunnel, just like the one on the opposite wall. Twilight shrugged to herself. Well, there isn’t anywhere else to go.

Unlike the tunnel to the underwater spring, this tunnel was slanted high upward, at a much steeper angle. There weren’t even any steps for Twilight to get a foothold on. How do the Odium manage to walk up such a steep incline? This must be at least a sixty-degree angle!

Almost as if on cue, Twilight heard steps from down below. She turned her head to see an Odium walking up the slant as if it was nothing, but Twilight quickly realized why. There were no sounds of hooves on stone as it walked, but rather a kind of squishing sound; Twilight could easily see the bottom of the creature’s feet turn to goop as it pressed down on the rock. Duh, Twilight—these things are still made out of black slime. But in that case…why do they all look like a bunch of different ponies? Every single one had a different silhouette, and there seemed to be absolutely no purpose for doing so. Yet another unanswered question for Twilight; the lack of answers was really beginning to get under her skin.

Twilight stood still to let the Odium pass, and then she returned to her own efforts at getting up the incline. It took a fair amount of effort, but she eventually reached the top of the steep hill; it was only about twenty feet above the floor of the trench. She had entered a small room; it was domed, like the inside of an igloo, and was about thirty feet from one side to the other. There were four different openings, leading to four other tunnels, and there was a fair amount of traffic going through this specific area. Twilight had just heaved herself up a sixty-degree incline, and trying to mask her heavy panting wasn’t exactly easy. In order to put some space between her and the unaware Odium passing by, Twilight exited the room through the hole that led back into the main cave. Now, she was on the upper level above the trenches, and she could easily see the massive black Odious Maximus, sitting stoic on its stone pedestal.

The cave itself must have been at least seventy feet from ceiling to floor, not including the deep trenches dug out of the ground; Twilight was about level with the base of the Maximus’s wispy tail. There were very few of the smaller black beings on the top floor, and Twilight took advantage of such by allowing herself to breathe a little louder, and walk just a little faster. Curiosity was really getting the better of her, as she was eager to closely examine the wide-eyed black ball only twenty feet away from her. Twilight trotted over bridge after bridge, slowing down while crossing each one, until she was finally up close with the enigmatic shadow. She didn’t know what to say or do next. You’ve gone all this way, Twilight. Now what?

Thankfully, her question was answered when something near the Maximus’s tail caught her attention. As Twilight walked up to the floor where the tail met the stone, she found that it didn’t actually touch ground—instead, there was a hole, not but four feet wide, that the tail continued down into. Surrounding the hole was a spiral staircase, leading down into the unknown. Twilight was just about to start down the steps until a thought grazed her mind. Trixie. I can’t just leave her back there. But to go back now and bring her all the way back over here would take way too long, and who’s to say she’d even come along? I could waste valuable time going back for her! Let’s make this quick, Twilight—check down the hole, leave and get Trixie, and then we can get the heck outta here!Granted, they had made no progress so far on getting back Paula, finding the Sheriff, or even locating the black box, but Twilight and Trixie did have useful tidbits of information that could prove helpful to the civilians of Appleloosa. Also, she’d been using far too much of her magic, and she was getting low.

Twilight hurried down the staircase. She wanted to know where the creature’s tail ended, that’s all she wanted to know. She’d simply find out what it was, and then leave—

When Twilight reached the bottom of the staircase, she promptly stopped in place, and had to plug her mouth with her hooves to cut short the loud gasp she let out.

It was a small room, and it differed substantially from the style of the rest of the cave. Rather than the smooth, wet, gray stone of the cave’s norm, this room had flat walls and straight edges. This was an actual room; the walls were carved out in bas-relief with diverse pictures and ancient writing, and one or two vines had somehow braved the odds and managed to thrive in this pitch-black, cold environment. But it wasn’t the room that startled Twilight; it was the little black box, sitting on a cylindrical stone table two yards away, and a hole in the ceiling directly above with a wisp of black smoke descending from it, wriggling down and into the keyhole on the locked box.

Twilight’s half-gasp alerted the two Odium in the room as well. They had been standing off to each side of the table in the shadows, perfectly still and staring forward, not moving an inch. The smoke had broken off into three separate streams, and while one went into the black box, the other two were going straight into the heads of the Odium. It took Twilight only a second to recognize their silhouettes as belonging to PaulaRed and Sheriff Silverstar.

It took only another second for the two possessed ponies to make a move for Twilight, attempting to drive her into the ground.

Chapter 8: Escape

Trixie was becoming impatient. Where on Earth did that unicorn go off to? Trixie wanted to go and look for Twilight, but not only was it a bad idea to wander when you’ve said you’d stay put, Trixie really didn’t want to get any closer to that behemoth in the other cave. About five minutes had passed without a word, and Trixie’s began to feel a little weary. Crap! My magic is beginning to get low! Both she and Twilight had been coating themselves with invisibility for the past hour or two, and Trixie knew that she wasn’t going to be able to last much longer. Since entrance into the underground spring was sparse, Trixie took any opportunity she could to give herself a moment’s peace and become visible—whether or not the Odium could even see her or Twilight in the dark, they didn’t know, but didn’t want to take the chance.

Trixie was mulling over her life choices when there was a sudden, rumbling groan, emanating throughout the cave. She didn’t have to think twice to know where it came from. The azure unicorn quickly coated herself in her invisibility spell again, and she bolted for the tunnel on the far left of the shore, where Twilight had entered.

What did you do, Twilight Sparkle?! Trixie thought as she charged up the slippery slope of the tunnel, making sure to dodge any Odium in her way. They seemed to take notice of the sounds of hooves clicking and clopping against the hard stone floor, but after seeing nothing, they stopped paying it any mind.

When Trixie reached the ditch in the main cave, she could just barely see the massive black ball shuffle in its place, looking disturbed by something. Trixie’s head darted around as she looked for something to use as steps up the damp, ninety-degree-angle of the ditch. In her quick look around, she saw several large boulders still un-cleared from the ditch, and noticed a pile of cobblestones placed a little too close to the edge of the ditch. She knew it was a big risk to take, but she also knew that Twilight was in some kind of danger. She grabbed onto the cobblestone pile and threw it into the ditch, filling the hole a third its height. Next Trixie grabbed hold of one of the boulders and, with a fair amount of effort, pushed it to the top of the cobblestone pile. The Odium nearby looked sorely confused, and Trixie took the opportunity to leap up the pile, struggle up onto the top of the boulder.

There was still another seven feet between her hooves and the ground above, and the increasing movements of the massive white-eyed Odium in the background wasn’t comforting Trixie at all. Then the magician remembered a rope she had stored in her bag; taking it out and quickly tying a loop, she flung the rope up to the top, the short rope just barely reaching over the edge of the ditch. The rope didn’t grab anything, and it fell back down, but that didn’t dispel Trixie; she flung the rope up again, and this time it grabbed a sizable rock. Quickly pulling the rope to test its strength, Trixie proceeded to bite down on the end of it and lift the rope up with her magic. With every action she performed with her horn, she became that much more drained, but Trixie reached the top and sprinted towards the bottom of the giant Odium ahead of her.

Trixie’s ears perked up; she heard noises coming from another hole, and upon closer inspection, the unicorn saw a very small opening right beneath the giant Odium, where its smoky tail continued down into. Trixie listened in again next to the hole, and she heard the muffled grunts of Twilight. Twilight Sparkle, you moron! Getting yourself into something like this! Trixie could have taken the spiral staircase surrounding the hole, but she decided instead to simply take the quick way and she jumped down what she guessed was a fifteen-foot-deep pit.

Unfortunately for Trixie, the pit was more around the lines of thirty-five feet deep. Luckily for her, the fall was cushioned by two ponies who were encased in a familiar black shadow.

Trixie got to her hooves and brushed herself off, and then she saw Twilight, half covered with the bubbling, shadowy goo that had tried to take the mare Trixie had met only a few hours ago. Trixie stood in shock for a moment, but regained her composure and she focused her magic into her horn. She realized then that she didn’t have very much magic left to give; as her attack gained power, she could feel the invisibility spell and even the night-vision spell wear off, but Trixie didn’t need to see to be able to aim at the motionless lump of black and purple on the floor.

With a burst of azure flame, Trixie ignited the goo on Twilight; the darkness burned away into the air, leaving a dazed Twilight completely unharmed.

Darkness. Pure, utter darkness. She couldn’t see or hear a thing—it had covered her eyes and ears. She could feel her body losing mobility, but not because it was paralyzing her. The darkness was sapping her of her willpower, her strive to get up and move, to fight back. Her last sentient thought before falling into a lackadaisical lump-on-the-ground was I’ve failed…

…

Suddenly, movement. Light, and sound, too. There was a warm sensation throughout Twilight’s body as the darkness covering her burned away, and she felt motivation once again. She scrambled to her hooves and used her magic to give herself night-vision again; what she saw was Trixie standing in front of her, and squinting so hard you couldn’t even see her eyes.

“Trixie!” Twilight exclaimed as she leapt at the blind unicorn and embraced her to the ground. “You just saved my life!”

Trixie pushed the joyful purple pony off of her. “Twilight Sparkle, now is NOT the time for that! There’s still two of those Odium things here, aren’t there? I wouldn’t know, since I can’t see anything anymore!”

“What!? Oh no, you ran out of magic, didn’t you?” Twilight asked, extremely concerned for Trixie’s sake.

“Don’t patronize me!” Trixie exclaimed. “They all know we’re here now! We have to get out as soon as possible, before reinforcements come!”

Twilight turned around, and she saw PaulaRed and Silverstar get back up. Their expressionless white eyes were searing with anger. Twilight crouched low to the ground, ready to strike or be struck.

“What are you doing?” Trixie questioned hastily. “Oh no, you’re going to fight them, aren’t you? We don’t have the time for that! We need to make a run for it!”

“Braeburn’s sister and the Sheriff are underneath those black veils!” Twilight exclaimed, “I can’t just leave them here like this!”

“I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to!” Trixie didn’t want to take any chances; she had seen how many of those ‘Odium’ were moving about in the cave, and if they were to all attack at once, Trixie knew she’d never see the light of day again. “We can always come back for them, but right now we have to worry about ourselves!”

“That’s selfish, Trixie!” Twilight yelled as she prepared to blast her opponents with a magic attack. Trixie’s pupils struggled to adjust to the sudden bright light that was coming off Twilight’s horn as the purple unicorn readied her attack. There was a flash of bright lavender that nearly blinded Trixie as Twilight circled purple streams of magic around the two black ponies, encasing them completely in the light. Twilight didn’t hear it because of how hard she was concentrating, but Trixie did hear the loud wailing groan all too well, and it sounded like it was coming right out of the ceiling.

Stepping back to see her handiwork, Twilight was now standing in front of Paula and Sheriff Silverstar, both of whom looked completely unharmed, but very dazed and confused.

“Ah…wah, Twilight…?” Paula asked in a very lax tone.

“Told you I could do it!” Twilight replied to Trixie, half happy, half smug.

“Yeah sure great, now let’s get THE HECK OUT OF HERE!” Trixie took a blind leap and grabbed onto Twilight’s backside. “You now have to lead THREE BLIND PONIES out of this massive cave, Twilight Sparkle. Good luck.”

Twilight grabbed a rope out of her backpack and handed a section of it to the other three ponies. “Here, grab onto this, and I’ll lead you all out!” the unicorn yelled back to Trixie and the two earth-ponies, of which looked like they were half-asleep. Twilight headed the rope line as she ran back up the spiral staircase, but not before first grabbing the all-important black box that had fallen on the floor.

It was getting harder and harder to keep level footing, because the entire cave was rumbling so hard. It was like a constant shockwave emanating throughout the dark stone hole, or perhaps if a twenty-foot subwoofer were turned up to eleven and simply left on next to your feet. When Twilight reached the top of the staircase and looked out from the stone dais beneath the giant black beast above her, it took only a single glance towards the exit far up on the other side of the cave to know that the traditional exit wasn’t going to work here. “Oh, crap,” she said out loud.

Trixie didn’t need to be able to see to know that they were royally screwed. They stood right beneath the Odious Maximus, who thankfully wasn’t moving—most likely because it too knew that its hundreds of thousands of minions below were going to make quick work of the two unicorns.

“Hey Twi…whai can’t I see athing…” Paula sounded like a drunk, the way she was slurring her words. “…Thers so many white dots everywhere…”

Twilight couldn’t have put it any better. Nearly filling up the floor of the cave, the Odium were all standing, waiting, for the four ponies to make their way down; the white light from their eyes was very concentrated and didn’t shine out very far, but with that many next to each other, there was enough light to illuminate the floor.

Trixie was just about to give what she expected to be her very last insult to Twilight Sparkle, before the purple unicorn took a step back and began to focus her magic.

“Are you nuts, Twilight Sparkle!?” Trixie yelled over the loud sounds coming from the Maximus above, “We don’t stand a chance against so many of them! I doubt you have any spell to counter what they have in store?”

“I don’t,” Twilight replied. Something came into Trixie’s vision; there were two glittering blue strands of magic slowly swirling around and enveloping Trixie. Looking over to Twilight, the magician could see that the same was happening to her. The spell continued to cover her body, and eventually Trixie’s eyes became obscured by the glowing blue. She had no idea what Twilight had in mind, but she trusted the unicorn enough to allow the spell to continue.

“That’s why we’re making a bolt for it.”

A bright flash made Trixie have to cover her eyes. Slowly opening them again, Trixie could feel that she had some magic flowing in her again. She was confused as to why, but she nonetheless used it to give herself night vision again, her horn glowing purple as she activated it. After everything came into view, Trixie was confused again when she saw her view slowly bob up and down. Then she became aware of the light breeze fluttering against the back of her neck.

Turning her head around, Trixie saw that she had a giant pair of beautiful butterfly wings connected to her back. She raised an eyebrow at her newfound appendages, but Twilight’s yelling snapped her out of her little world.

“Trixie, what the heck are you doing?!” Twilight yelled. Trixie turned around and saw Twilight with a similar pair, and the unicorn was struggling to keep up the rope that was now tied around a still-dazed Paula and Silverstar. “Help me out here, these two are heavy!”

Trixie rushed to aid, grabbing the other end of the rope; the two unicorns made their way to the other side of the cave as fast as they could, to the tunnel at the top that led out from where they had come.

But the Odium weren’t going to let them leave that easily.

The Maximus nearly broke the unicorns’ eardrums with a screech that caused some stalactites to fall from the ceilings. The other black ponies on the ground scrambled to try and jump fruitlessly to the two winged ponies, who were thirty feet off the ground and quickly making their way to the other end of the tunnel. With another loud cry, the Maximus shot one of its giant claws at the ponies, extending its arm beyond its original length.

“TWILIGHT SPARKLE, LOOK OUT!”

Twilight barely had time to look behind her. She just barely moved out of the way of the house-sized black claw rushing towards her. Missing, the claw continued on its trajectory and collided with the cave’s ceiling, causing even more large rocks to fall to the ground, the Odium standing at where they landed just barely making it out of the way. In her effort to quickly dive out of the way of the claw, Twilight had lost her grip of the rope.

All the weight suddenly put on her, Trixie almost dropped her side of the rope as well; held her grip. “Augh! I can’t keep hold of this for very long!”

Twilight swooped under the Maximus’s arm and grabbed her side of the rope again. “Sorry!”

The Maximus was struggling, trying to get its arm out of the rock. Giving up, it instead used its other arm to try and bring the ponies down. This time, though, it was craftier; rather than wildly shooting off its hand, the Maximus crept its hand up the arm that was stuck, masking its claw as it snaked up its other arm.

The two unicorns didn’t even see it coming.

The four-fingered claw struck like a python at its prey. In a split second, Twilight and Trixie suddenly found themselves deep inside the giant grip of the Maximus, squeezing them hard enough to not allow them to move, but just light enough to keep them alive.

Trixie wasn’t going to allow them to get eaten, or crushed, or turned to slaves, or whatever the heck this thing had in store for them. The azure unicorn collected all she had into her horn, making it glow a bright purple again, and then she unleashed a brilliant silver pulse of magic that entered the Maximus’s claw and reverberated down its arm and finally into its body. The shockwave left it seizing for a few moments, and the claw let go of the four ponies. Twilight was left dazed for a second, unsure of what just happened.

“Trixie!” Twilight suddenly exclaimed, “Where’s Paula and Silverstar?!”

Then they both heard the thud twenty feet below them.

The unicorns looked down, and saw the two earth-ponies on the ground being swarmed by the Odium, their bodies once again becoming surrounded by the familiar black goo.

“NO!” Twilight screamed as she began to dive for the two, but she found herself being held back by Trixie, who was grabbing onto her leg.

“LET GO OF ME!” Twilight screamed. “WE HAVE TO SAVE THEM!”

“There’s nothing we can do, Twilight Sparkle!” Trixie yelled back. “Do you want to get us killed?!”

Twilight didn’t listen to Trixie. Instead, she growled and flailed the leg Trixie was holding, kicking the azure unicorn in the nose. When Trixie let Twilight go to hold her bleeding snout, Twilight continued down to the save the two earth-ponies, only to see that they were nowhere to be found—they had been re-assimilated into the massive crowd of Odium that were still trying to jump up and grab her.

Twilight looked on helplessly at the Odium swarm before Trixie swooped down and grabbed ahold of the back of her mane and dragged her through the air, to the tunnel entrance at the top of the cave. Twilight noticed the wooden planks they had used earlier were still at the tunnel’s entrance as they passed over it and entered the hole. Behind them, another loud, angry rumble filled the cave.

By the time they reached the four-way intersection again, Twilight was flying on her own, though she still wished she could go back, go back and save those two ponies…she’d let Braeburn down…

Her thoughts were cut short when they got to the small space of the four-way intersection, though, when both the unicorns suddenly found themselves surrounded by Odium that had been waiting for them from the other tunnels. Trixie, having gone first, was also first to be smacked down to the ground when they jumped and grabbed onto her legs. Within seconds, they were already beginning to surround Trixie with the black goo.

Twilight had had enough of this nonsense. The unicorn faced the large crowd of Odium squished into the small cave, and she brought into her horn her magic, anger and adrenaline. The light she gave off was blinding, and with a flash of light and a shockwave of sound Twilight sent a rapidly-expanding ball of pure-white magic into their enemies, disintegrating all traces of the malevolent slime.

But what Twilight and Trixie saw after that, they hadn’t prepared for.

For every Odium that had just been flown back by Twilight’s spell, there was now a pony sitting there, confused and dizzy. They all were simple-looking earth-ponies, all of whom matched the silhouettes of the Odium that had just been attacking the two unicorns. There were tired groans and the sound of ponies struggling to their hooves as the scene continued, looking like the morning after a very heavy drinking party.

As Twilight helped Trixie back up, the two unicorns continued to simply stare at the ponies, then to each other, then back to the ponies.

“All these Odium are…actual ponies?” Trixie said under her breath to Twilight.

“I…suppose so…?” Twilight replied.

Both the unicorns took a fighting stance when a rushing sound was heard coming from the tunnel they had just exited. The only thing they had time to do was take a leap backwards as a massive claw swarmed out from the tiny tunnel and engulfed everything around it in a black sludge. In moments, the ponies were turned back into the familiar Odium, their piercing white eyes looking over to Twilight and Trixie.

“Oh crap…” Twilight said, as she and Trixie got back into the air with their damaged wings, and began to fly down the tunnel that led to the Sheriff’s office. “Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap…”

Both unicorns continued up the tunnel, every so often shooting a bolt of magic behind them to slow the mass of Odium slowly gaining speed, and the massive claw slithering closer, only twenty feet away.

“Twilight, I think I see the end!” Trixie said hopefully. “Yes, it is!”

They got a second wind as Twilight and Trixie gave it their all, and their last bit of strength, to get up and out the tunnel, flying over the lip of the entrance and finally flying through the open door and into the bright light of Appleloosa, which was still enclosed in the black walls. Everyone stopped what they were doing to immediately rush to the two unicorns’ aid.

Trixie and Twilight coughed and strained for breath through their dry throats, and their butterfly wings turned to dust. They finally had a chance to rest for a second, and they became aware of just how tired and beat up they were.

Braeburn pushed aside the crowd to get to the center. “Twilight! Oh my, are th’ two of you alright?”

Twilight coughed again before uttering, “We brought company…”

The ground shook, and everyone flew into a panic as several dozen Odium and a giant black claw shot out of the hole in the Sheriff’s office, tearing the wooden building into a shower of splinters and lumber.

Chapter 9: Royalties

A gleaming white pegasus flew swiftly, but urgently, into the Princesses’ throne room. His eyes were a bright silver, and he was donned in golden Equestrian pegasi armor—he kind of looked like the average pegasus guard. He appeared out of breath, and gave himself a moment before walking up any closer to the princesses.

Celestia smiled. “Ah, Blanc Shimmer, hello. Any news as of late?”

Blanc huffed a few more times. “…Yes…but it isn’t…good news…”

Celestia’s warm smile vanished, and she quickly rose. “What do you mean? Is this about—“

“Appleloosa, yes.” Blanc had finally regained his composure. “The shadow has reached the town and has reportedly formed its nest.

“But certainly Twilight Sparkle has already taken care of the problem, yes? If she met up with Sheriff Silverstar as I said, there shouldn’t have been any issues.”

“Well then, Princess, I suppose she didn’t meet up with your sheriff,” Blanc replied.

Luna stood up as well, and she leaned in close to Celestia’s ear to whisper, “If that shadow continues onward un-checked, it will level Equestria. We have no choice anymore, Sister—we have to take the battle to it.”

Celestia calmed herself, and relaxed the tense muscles on her face. Closing her eyes, she said coolly to Blanc, “I suppose we don’t have much of a choice. Blanc Shimmer, I hereby put you and Ferrous in charge of the Crown’s duties; send for Dreamcatcher and each of her unicorn divisions, and enough of your pegasi to send them all off. Tell Dreamcatcher to bring the soldiers to Castle grounds, and we’ll continue off from there.”

Celestia and Luna began to walk out the room, but then Blanc started up, “Celestia, you can’t be serious. Have you forgotten Decree Twenty-Seven? ‘The ruler(s) of Equestria cannot leave their duties unless the cause for doing so is for the greater protection of Equestria’s subjects.’ Your subjects should come first—just let Dreamer handle it all, she's capable enough.”

“Blanc, this shadow is one of the greatest threats Equestria has ever faced,” Luna replied behind her shoulder. “If this does not qualify for Decree Twenty-Seven, I do not know what would. We’re going to need all the firepower we can get, and that includes both my sister and I.”

On that, the two alicorns continued out the room to the Castle grounds. Blanc stood still for a moment, then regained his energy. “Don’t just stand there,” the shimmering white pegasus said to the soldiers around him, “Ferrous and I are the substitute kings—or princes, or whatever now, and I suppose that means you’re taking orders from us. Now get out there, find Dreamer, and hurry up before this whole shadow business gets out of hoof!”

The guards scrambled out the room to find both unicorn Dreamcatcher and earth-pony Ferrous. Along with pegasus Blanc, the three made up the second-ranking officials just below the Princesses themselves: the Head Captains of Equestria, who were powerful in their own right and often helped the Princesses with problems they faced.

For example, the shadow currently looming over Appleloosa.

The dark-green unicorn looked around at the one-thousand unicorns all lined up in rows and blocks, all squished into the large—but not large enough—Canterlot grounds in front of the castle. The unicorn’s eyes were a light purple, and her fluent mane was jet-black. On her flank was depicted a picture of a traditional feathered dreamcatcher. Three guesses as to who this unicorn was.

When her wandering eyes landed on the two alicorns speaking between each other just below the castle balcony, she immediately ran up to them. Luna’s face lit up when she appeared.

“Ah, there you are, Dreamcatcher,” Luna said with a small smile on her face, “Are your divisions prepared? I know we didn’t give you much time to prepare. Actually, we still haven’t briefed you, have we…?”

“We can do that on our way to Appleloosa, Princess,” the dark-green unicorn replied. “I know whatever this is is urgent, so we should be on our way as soon as possible.”

Luna nodded, and Celestia flew up thirty feet to get a better view over the massive platoon of unicorn soldiers, all adorned in silver Equestrian armor—specifically made for unicorns and their horns, of course. The brilliant white alicorn cleared her throat. “ATTENTION, EQUESTRIAN SOLDIERS,” she spoke with her powerful ‘Royal Canterlot Voice’, “WHILE WE HAD HOPED THE NEED FOR MILITARY FORCE WOULD NEVER ARISE, IT HAS THIS DAY. WE ARE TO FACE AN EXTREME THREAT TO EQUESTRIA, AND AS SUCH YOU MUST ALL BE PREPARED TO FIGHT TO YOUR LAST BREATH.”

There was a massive cheer from the unicorns, and the few pegasi that were coming along.

“THEN LET US BE ONWARD, TO APPLELOOSA!”

“Everypony prepare for takeoff!” Dreamcatcher shouted to her magical militia. They all bustled into long, bus-sized carts parked behind the grounds; each cart could hold twenty ponies, and required two pegasi to pull it along in the air. With all of Dreamcatcher’s one-thousand unicorns, and Blanc’s one-hundred pegasi, it was a perfect ratio. Within half a minute everyone was stationed in or in front of a cart, and the soldiers were all ready to go. Dreamcatcher shouted again, “Princesses Celestia and Luna shall guide the way; pegasi, follow them in flanks of three, side-by-side. Be prepared for anything as we round Appleloosa.” She turned to the alicorns on the other side of the large field, and they took off into the pale-blue afternoon sky. Dreamcatcher jumped up onto the front of one of the carts. “ONWARD!” the unicorn shouted.

The pegasi gained momentum as they charged across the flat grass, both them and the carts taking off the ground by the time they ran halfway across the field. Immediately as they got into the air, the pegasi arranged themselves into three cart wide rows, and a minute later Princesses Celestia and Luna were gracing the bright blue sky, followed by a massive convoy sixteen long and three wide of wooden carts, with one extra heading the group just behind the Princesses; it was also the one that Dreamcatcher was stationed at the front of. The dark-green unicorn motioned for the pegasi pulling the cart to move up closer to the two princesses flying on either side of them.

“Would the two of you mind explaining exactly WHAT is going on now?” Dreamcatcher yelled over the rushing wind, trying to catch either Celestia’s or Luna’s attention.

“…We have no idea where it originated from,” Luna began, talking over the air whistling past her and the other ponies, “but there is this…creature…that was recently awakened in the mountains to the north of the desert region…”

“The HELL you doin’, Grind?!” the burly earth-pony yelled at a unicorn standing in front of him who was lifting up a sizeable chunk of rock with his magic. The rock looked like a type of sedimentary shale, with alternating layers of grayish-black and dark-red, though it was somewhat hard to tell the colors from the yellow-green aura surrounding it, from the unicorn’s magic levitating it in the air.

“Sorry, sir!” The pale-green unicorn colt called ‘Grind’ immediately lowered the rock to the ground. “I—I saw it falling out the corner of my eye, and—it was just instinctual! I didn’t want it to fall on the ground—”

“Dammit, I knew it was a foolish idea t’ let unicorns into my mine!” the earth-pony yelled out again over the constant sound of chisels and drills. “It would’ve been better if that ore’d fallen from the damn SKY and make a big ‘ol crater in the ground, than have some magic touch it!” He walked over to the shale; the bands of color on it had turned into a neutral gray. Scowling at the rock, the earth-pony picked it up and tossed it as far down the tunnel as he could, nearly hitting one of the other miners in the process. “Don’t you dare let me catch you doin’ that again, boy. That lump uh rock there—you just destroyed all value it held. Hope yer happy.”

The unicorn was small, and he had a meek build. He was practically crying after having been chewed out. “I said I’m sorry, sir…!”

“Dammit, boy, get yer act together! This ain’t the place where you can make mistakes without any consequences! Were ya even payin’ attention during the seminar?” The burly stallion walked over to a nearby mine cart filled with similar rocks, all a moderate size and having the same pattern of red and black, and picked up one to examine it. “This ain’t no simple shale—this here’s what the chemists call ‘comoinium hypocarbonite’; only rock to have ever been found with naturally occurring ‘comoinium’, dat weird element with no protons ‘r whatever. Extremely magic-potent, this stuff is; refined ore can be used fer jus’ ‘bout anything you set yer li’l unicorn mind to, boy.” He tossed the rock back into the cart and began to walk away from the colt; he didn’t look back as he said out loud, “Around here, we jus’ call it ‘rake’—cause it rakes in the dough! Now don’t eff stuff up anymore!”

“Y…Yeah, sir…” the unicorn finally uttered, after the earth-pony had already left his sight. The tunnel was dimly lit, as the mining crew had ended up going down much deeper than they had expected, and hadn’t brought sufficient lighting for it all. Grind wasn’t used to not using magic at all—that was the policy here, since any magic that came into contact with ‘magicade’—that was its 'real' common name, anyway—would immediately turn the enchanted shale into a simple gray lump.

Grind picked up his pickaxe again, with his mouth, about to dig at the vein of ore rich in red and black streaks that was in front of him, when someone down the tunnel caught his attention.

A pony came from around the tunnel’s corner and said to Grind, “Hey, I heard the foreman around here—is he still around?”

“I’m afraid you just missed him,” the pale-green unicorn replied with a shrug.

“Well, perhaps you could take a look at this instead,” the colt said, tugging at the unicorn’s arm, “It’d be better if we had a unicorn anyways; could probably figure it out better than the foreman, anyways.”

‘What a stereotype. Just because I’m a unicorn doesn’t automatically make me a super-smart bookworm,’ Grind thought as he was being dragged along by this colt that he didn’t even recognize—well, he knew his face, sort of, but he’d only seen the guy around once or twice.

The colt stopped suddenly next to another, stronger-looking and older pegasus, standing next to a tunnel branching off the main mine shaft. Grind took a single look at the extra tunnel, turned to the two ponies in front of him, and said, “We’re not supposed to dig branches from the main tunnel.”

“I know that,” the first colt snapped. “Drillbit here just unearthed this tunnel, ‘twas already here. Go ahead,” he stated, matter-of-factly, “take a look inside.”

With a bit of hesitation, Grind slowly trotted into the small cave. It definitely wasn’t one of the mining crew’s tunnels—the stone was much too smooth and rounded, like it hadn’t been chiseled, but rather carved over time with running water. He also noticed, even in the near pitch-darkness of the tunnel, that all the magicade that should have been surrounding him was instead a smooth, gray stone. “The heck happened in here?” Grind called out from inside the small tunnel.

“We were hoping you’d know,” the first colt replied from the entrance, “Looks to me like a unicorn had a bit of a magic rampage around in there.”

“How far does this go?”

“Dunno. Neither of us’d even gone inside it yet.”

Grind stopped suddenly, and his expression mellowed out to an irritated frown. “So, what—I’m your guinea pig or something?”

“Hey man,” the pegasis replied, “nopony ever said you HAD to go in there.”

Grind was mumbling something under his breath, but he continued forward—out of interest, if not anything else. He stopped again, after the tiny bit of light from the tunnel’s entrance left him, and he couldn’t see anything. ‘I suppose magic won’t hurt, given that all this magicade is already a lost cause.’ His horn glowed a yellow-green to illuminate the way, and ahead of him he saw what looked like a larger room; he picked up his pace to investigate. He halted abruptly when he reached the edge of the tunnel, which was a drop-off with a very steep curve down; it was a spacious, capsule-shaped room, circular in width, taller and deeper than it was wide. Grind’s eyes slowly moved down to the bottom as he took in the view; his eyes widened when his light revealed a massive black ball resting at the bottom of the cave. It had to have been at least one-hundred feet wide, and it was a perfect sphere, too. Even in the terrible lighting, Grind noticed near the bottom of the cave a wispy black tail coming out of the ball, and upon a very close look and a very hard squint from his vantage point, he saw some small kind of light-gray round stone where the tail ended. It was as if the tail was going into the small rock, or maybe originating from it.

Hesitant at first for obvious reasons, intrigue eventually took over the unicorn and he decided to pick up the ball that was dozens of feet down near the cave’s bottom. The rock became encircled with his yellow-green magic, and then the tail on the stone broke suddenly.

And then there was a loud groan. It sounded like a giant yawning after a decade-long slumber. The whole tunnel shook, and Grind had to brace himself up against the tunnel’s wall to keep himself from falling down the steep angle of the cave. He continued to bring the small rock closer, except now he was doing it much faster so he could get out of that place as soon as possible.

“The heck was THAT?” the colt’s voice echoed from the tunnel entrance. Grind finally brought the gray sphere close to him, and he made a bolt for it down the tunnel as the rumbling became louder.

“I dunno, but we’d better get the heck outta here!” he yelled, jumping out of the tunnel to meet up with the two other colts. The entire mine was shaking and the lights were beginning to flicker. Behind him, it sounded like something was coming up the tunnel.

Grind began to run from the branch tunnel’s entrance, but the other colt and the pegasus only stood there, scowling at the unicorn. “What in Equestria did you—”

He never got to finish his sentence. Grind turned around and saw nothing but an amorphous blob absorbing the two ponies. Grind faced back in the direction he was running and picked up his pace, the other miners in the tunnel only giving him weird looks as he yelled at them to make a run for it, and seconds later they got hit with the black claw snaking its way up the tunnel, trying to get a hold of Grind and the stone he was carrying; every second, the claw got closer and closer and closer…

“…Only a few made it out alive,” Luna said. “One of the ponies brought forth a peculiar item he found that the black sphere had been connected to.”

“So this ‘shadow’ is the black sphere that was found in that mine?” Dreamcatcher asked.

“Yes. After having been woken, it proceeded to make its way through the old mine tunnels, going from town to town, each time attacking the citizens and turning them into its henchmen. Magicade is an ore that was only recently discovered, but mining efforts for it has skyrocketed. The abandoned tunnel systems span out far and wide throughout the vast desert, and it stops right around Appleloosa.”

“But what of the black walls you mentioned?” Dreamcatcher asked. “And the clouds?”

“That creature feeds off of two things and two things only: willpower, and magic,” Celestia replied solemnly.

“…Care to elaborate?”

“We don’t know why, but anypony that becomes covered with the shadow turns into its personal puppet—it feeds off of their willpower and energy, turning them into a lifeless doll that it then manipulates to do its bidding. They aren’t killed, though,” Celestia quickly added, after seeing Dreamcatcher’s face, “the shadow has to keep them alive, actually. The brain of any creature is constantly working, and as such will continue to try to regain consciousness, to regain willpower to fight back, but the shadow only uses this to continue to feed. As for the clouds and the barrier, it gains greater and greater magical power as it advances through the unearthed sections of the mines, converting the magicade ore straight into pure magic for its own use.”

“It’s attacked three cities so far, not including Appleloosa,” Luna said. “We had believed that we’d found a way to counterattack it, but it seems Celestia’s plan to have Twilight Sparkle handle it herself didn’t exactly go as planned. With each city the shadow attacks, it brings along all the citizens there to the next destination, and so it continues to gain more and more slaves.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do about that?” Dreamcatcher asked.

“Hopefully. One thing we do know is that that big black sphere has to actually use up part of its own body to overtake a pony. Though it isn’t much—just enough to give its victim a thin coating—the numbers eventually add up, and the shadow is less than half its original size by now, considering all the ponies it has possessed.”

No one said a word after that. No one had anything to say. The sun was already on its way down the horizon; the platoon had started its nonstop flight at noon, and it was now two o’clock. Appleloosa was getting close.

“Sister, I see it, on the horizon!” Luna yelled suddenly, pointing far ahead with her right hoof while shielding her eyes from the afternoon sun with her left.

“Finally,” Celestia sighed. The town couldn’t be seen, but it was quite noticeable with the massive cloud high above, and the four black walls coming down from the cloud all the way to the ground around Appleloosa. “It appears the shadow isn’t finished with the town. If we’re lucky, nothing bad has happened yet. Dreamcatcher!” the alicorn announced suddenly; the unicorn sitting on the cart straightened up her posture and looked straight ahead. “If could, please try and scan the ponies behind that wall as we approach. Hopefully you’ll be able to pick something up.”

Dreamcatcher nodded confidently. “You can count on me, Princess.”

Every unicorn had a specific forte of magic. In Dreamcatcher’s case, this was just about anything involving the mind. Memory charms, electroencephalographic enchantments, and even invasive-thought spells made her a very formidable unicorn foe for any enemy of Equestria. Not even Celestia and Luna had as much ability in mind magic as Dreamcatcher.

As the black walls became close enough to overtake a majority of one’s view, Dreamcatcher started up her magic, and her horn became surrounded in a sparkling white aura. Her eyes shone pure white as she started to scan the town beyond the barrier. She could see them, much like how a shark would ‘see’ its prey with its ‘sixth sense’; the brainwave activity going on in each of the civilians’ brains shone as an oblong white orb that slightly flickered in junction with a pony’s thoughts. “It appears the Appleloosians have yet to be overtaken by the shadow,” Dreamcatcher said, still glancing around the town with her endowed eyes.

“What of Twilight Sparkle?” Celestia asked hastily. “Can you locate her?”

Dreamcatcher stopped using her spell and turned around to look at the princess. “Do you mind if I get invasive?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

Celestia paused for a moment. “Whatever works,” she said after swallowing.

Dreamcatcher looked back at the city and worked her magic again. This time, she zoomed in on a mind’s white light at random and entered it. She quickly and efficiently scanned each major memory or thought in the past three hours, back to when the barriers had first formed. Dreamcatcher’s mind spells were something, but her own mind was something else entirely; taking in all the data from the Appleloosian, Dreamcatcher went over each and every bit, storing what was relevant into her own memory and tossing out anything unrelated or personal, completely forgetting the unwanted information in the process. Within ten seconds, the past three hours of thought that that pony had experienced had been fully examined by the Unicorn Head Captain. Dreamcatcher did this another two times with another two ponies, to get more reliable info.

After about half a minute, Dreamcatcher stopped her spell and faced the alicorn sisters. “Twilight Sparkle is currently in the mines as we speak,” she said in a serious tone. “But she is not alone. Another unicorn—don’t know who she is, never seen or heard of this ‘Trixie’ mare—is accompanying Twilight down into the tunnels. They apparently had left roughly an hour ago.”

“Do you think you could try and detect Twilight and the other unicorn underground?” Celestia was trying to keep the desperation out of her voice.

“It’s worth a shot,” Dreamcatcher replied, and looked down at the dirt ground of Appleloosa, her horn and eyes once again streaming white. She continued to look around, trying to make something out, all the while Luna and especially Celestia leaning in anxiously at the unicorn. “…I’m afraid I don’t see anything. I’ll continue to look, but do not get your hopes up.”

Celestia slumped down onto the bench of the cart next to Dreamcatcher and sighed hard. “Well, I suppose we should ready the troops.” Luna nodded at her sister and flew up above everyone.

“Everypony,” Luna announced, “let’s settle down to the ground and form ranks. Soon enough, the shadow shall rise from the ground of Appleloosa, and that’s when we strike.” Luna hovered down to Celestia and talked, much softer, “And how are we going to go about taking down these walls?”

“Just about everything’s been tried on them, apparently,” Dreamcatcher said without looking back at the alicorn, her magic-filled gaze still glancing around the town. “Even the other unicorn mare had given an all-out attack and didn’t leave a single dent, according to what she said, at least—I still haven’t detected her nor Twilight Sparkle.”

Celestia put her face into her hooves. “I've sent Twilight to her doom,” she said softly.

“Don’t worry, Sister,” Luna said reassuringly, putting an arm around Celestia’s shoulders, “I’m sure everything will turn out just fine.” She took a step back and landed on the ground slowly, along with the carriage, which Celestia was still moping on. Luna smiled to her sister and cleared her throat a little, as if she were to start a large speech. “While I know that there is much that—”

“Hey, I think I see something!” Dreamcatcher shouted, her head leaning in a few inches to try and get a better look at the two distant orbs of brainwave activity. A second later, a few dozen more orbs appeared in her view, but they were just extremely dim—whoever they were, their minds were about as active as a pony who has just been knocked unconscious. “I see them, both of them, and if I’m not mistaken, I think the shadow’s grunts are hot on their trail…”

Celestia leaped off the bench and stepped next to Dreamcatcher, as if being closer to her would somehow allow Celestia to see them as well. “Where are they?!”

“They’re quickly reaching the surface, and there’s enough zombified ponies right behind them to take on a good portion of the town’s civilians. We should get in there. NOW.”

Celestia jolted up into the air a few stories to get the unicorns’ attention. Not everyone had even gotten their hooves back on the ground yet. “The shadow is fast approaching—we NEED to get through this barrier!” Celestia yelled to the soldiers. “Ready yourselves, and prepare to attack the wall!

“…Prepare to attack this menace, head-on!”

Even through the thick black magical walls, the soldiers could hear what sounded like a house shattering into a thousand pieces of wood and splinters.

Chapter 11: Get Your Bearings

Trixie watched in horror at the sight rolling past her vision. With each street Dreamcatcher ran through, Trixie saw more and more destruction and chaos. There was always at least one or two Odium being fought back by one of the Equestrian unicorns, donned in their silver armor and horns ablaze with magic. Trixie glanced back at an unconscious Twilight, who was surrounded in the same cloud of white shimmering magic as she was, courtesy of Dreamcatcher, who was sparing no time in getting the two unicorns to safety.

The dark clouds high in the sky were still looming, the same clouds that had created the once-impenetrable wall of black. Trixie couldn't see a single fire within town from her vantage point, but smoke was still preeminent, and the atmosphere was tinted with a depressing shade of dark-red. Appleloosa had been reduced to a battleground, and the city was not going to get out of the fight unscathed.

A flash of a glowing, bubble of pulsating green energy twice the size of Dreamcatcher suddenly flew past the unicorn's face, just barely grazing her snout as she skidded to a halt right in front of the attack. The Head Captain turned and glared at the unicorn several feet away to her left, who had just shot the attack and was looking like she was about to pass out from what she’d just done.

“Oh! I—I’m so sorry, Captain, I didn’t—”

Realizing it was nothing more than a mistake, Dreamcatcher calmed down and unclenched her jaw; her eyes closed for a moment as she quickly collected her thoughts. “…It’s fine, just make sure you know what you’re hitting before you shoot at it.”

The mare promptly sat and saluted the unicorn. “Yes, ma’am!”

Dreamcatcher nodded to her subordinate and continued on her marathon for the crack in the south wall. It surprised her how much this small town of Appleloosa had grown in the past few years since it was first constructed. In fact, business seemed to have boomed right after the buffalo incident that occurred, despite it destroying a majority of the town; it was almost as if the wrecking of the town is what made it grow so much faster. ‘If that’s the case, this town is going to turn into a metropolis after what’s happening here…’ Dreamcatcher mused sarcastically.

It wasn’t too much farther to the south wall, where the defenses were strongest and ponies were on stand-by to help any Appleloosians who were injured or ponies that had just been freed from their Odium jail. Dreamcatcher had assumed she was home free; she was deep in the Equestrian side of the battle, having already passed the front line a while ago, surprisingly enough without having to do battle with a single enemy.

Unfortunately, Lady Luck proved to be a bitch, as always; Dreamcatcher, who had had uncanny fortune in not meeting up with the shadow, stopped dead in her tracks when a familiar house-sized claw randomly slithered past her in the crossing street, blocking her way forward as it moved forward on its own path. At first, the arm didn’t even noticed her, but it froze seconds after its head passed her and turned back around to immediately strike at its enemy; the fact that it didn’t first see her amused Dreamcatcher, seeing as how it didn’t have any eyes in the first place, but could still somehow recognize her presence.

It was still missing its thumb; only the three fingers on the top of the claw remained of its massive hand. As opposed to the sludge-like form and movement of the usual Odium, the arm—more specifically, the claw—was more like the hard glass that made up the four walls surrounding town. With a charge and a screech, the claws came straight at Dreamcatcher with the intent to kill. It really hated her, and didn’t even want to turn her into one of its minions—after what she’d done to it, it only wanted her dead. Diving its open maw into the dirt in an attempt to crush the unicorn, Dreamcatcher swiftly dodged the attack. She was still holding on to Twilight and Trixie on the side, and Trixie looked about ready to have a heart attack.

“What on earth—why is the Maximus’s arm alive?!” the azure unicorn exclaimed. She was covered in a cold sweat as she continued to watch her savior do battle with the giant claw. Trixie wanted as much as she could to help Dreamcatcher out, but not only was she stuck in the unicorn's white magic, but Trixie herself had no magic to give.

“The what?” Dreamcatcher questioned, giving herself but a moment to look at Trixie with a questioning brow. Her attention was brought back to the arm though as it struck like a python at her a second time, and she leapt out of its way again. She continued trying to speak with Trixie as a cone of white magic shot off her horn and sent the hand reeling several yards backward, making it flip upside-down and wriggle like it was convulsing. “Anyway, have you two had any progress with the shadow? Heard you went down a dark hole in the ground after it.”

“We, uh…oh! We recovered the black box,” Trixie said, remembering the small cube Twilight had recovered in the cave. “Any idea what’s in it?”

“Sorry, but—augh!” Dreamcatcher nearly got stuck down when the Maximus’s arm swung itself into an arc in the air and body-slammed the ground, taking out what was left of a nearby house in the process. “…I have no clue what you’re talking about. Neither Princess mentioned anything about a black box to me. They did say tha—hyah!” A beam of light blasted out Dreamcatcher’s horn and blew a hole in the arm’s side, discombobulating it for a few seconds so she could speak properly. “They did say something about Twilight Sparkle having to send back some artifact to Appleloosa, something they had rigged up for the shadow—a trap of some sort. But since Twilight Sparkle never met with the Sheriff, I suppose the trap failed.”

Trixie thought hard on what Dreamcatcher had just said. “You don't say…” the magician said, impressed at the idea of this apparent ‘trap’. “But yes, the Sheriff is currently one of the Odium creatures; the last we saw of him—Twilight Sparkle and I—was deep in the bottom of this one cave under Appleloosa.”

Dreamcatcher surrounded herself with her own white aura, and she charged straight into the arm, which had just begun to get back up from the ground. The arm rolled on the ground several times before sliding into a house, demolishing the front side. It deep voice squealed in pain, despite having taken the other, harder hits previously without complaint. “Odium?” Dreamcatcher asked before saying anything else. “Anyways, we have to get the Sheriff back. Apparently he has the other half of the artifact that the Princesses were referring to. Why this is, I have no idea, but he does, and if he’s a slave to the shadow that can only mean that his half of the artifact is with the shadow as well. By the way, you didn’t happen to see any magicane while you were down in that mine, did you?”

Before Trixie could answer, a very loud cracking noise nearly split her and Dreamcatcher’s eardrums, and the two unicorns looked to the north and saw Luna, a tiny speck flying distant in the air, sending a barrage of different magical attacks straight at the Maximus. Its arm was split down the middle into five pieces, then its eyes were blown out by two giant cones of dark-blue energy, followed by the earth rumbling just before the Maximus itself was covered with Luna’s magic, and with an explosion it promptly collapsed into the ground; apparently, a pit had been formed just underneath it, and it screamed from an unseen mouth as it quickly fell down the chasm.

Trixie and Dreamcatcher turned their heads slowly to look at each other in the eye, dumbfounded by what they had just seen. Twilight started to shuffle slightly, waking up from the sounds the Maximus had just been making.

“Hmm…? What in the…?” Twilight was confused as to why her sight was slightly obscured by white. Then she saw the dark-green, purple-eyed, black-maned unicorn standing nearby, her horn glowing the same tint of white. Immediately connecting two and two, Twilight spoke up, rather confused, “Dreamcatcher? What are you doing here?”

Dreamcatcher emitted a noise that sounded like a mix between a groan and a sigh, just as the Maximus’s arm made another swing at her again. “There’s no time for me to explain again, okay?!”

“What in the—what’s the Maximus’s arm doing here?!” Twilight exclaimed.

“That’s nothing!” Trixie yelled excitedly, “You should’ve JUST seen what Luna did to the Maximus! She sent it flying down a giant hole, I think. The sonic boom from her attack hurt my ears!”

Twilight rubbed her own ear with her hoof. “I was wondering why my ear was ringing…”

Dreamcatcher charged up a small speck of white light at the tip of her horn and sent it off, the speck filling up into a pony-sized orb of blinding radiance just before it hit the claw and sent the first few layers of its ‘skin’ spraying across both her and the ground around her. “Y’know, not to extol myself, but I think perhaps what I’m doing here is somewhat important…”

“I’m far too drained to be of any help to you,” Trixie replied nonchalantly.

“We don’t even have any magic left in us,” Twilight added, though she sounded much more concerned for the Head Captain than Trixie did.

One of the claws of the Maximus clipped Dreamcatcher’s left shoulder when it charged down for another attack. The unicorn was gripped in pain for a moment, but quickly brushed off the wound and said to the now-frightened mares near her, “That’s why I was wondering if you’d found any magicane down in the mine. That stuff is a massive magic reservoir—have a unicorn like yourself touch one kilo of it, and you’ll be completely replenished. Absorb a few more kilos, and—augh!” she tripped over her own leg, her shoulder injury beginning to hurt more and more, “…and you’ll feel like you’re on top of the world, with the amount of magic you’d have.”

“I like the sound of that,” Trixie said absentmindedly. She was still concerned about Dreamcatcher’s bleeding wound.

“I’d give you two some of my own magic, but…well, you can assume that I don’t have much left to give.” The claw was putting up a fight like nothing Dreamcatcher had ever faced before. It could dish out attack after attack, and at the same time take any hit she could throw at it and get right back up. It wasn’t natural, the amount of stamina this thing had—but she knew very well why. “The shadow has been consuming ridiculous amounts of magicane, and you two need to do the same!” she yelled at the two unicorns floating helplessly in her white aura, watching her fight a losing battle with the serpentine arm of the Maximus.

“How the heck are we supposed to do that?!” Twilight exclaimed. “If all that gray rock in that cave used to be magicane, then there’s no way there’s any left—the Maximus must have found it all and taken it!” Twilight knew plenty about this newly-discovered rock, but she hadn’t considered that that was what the source of the smooth gray stone in the cave had been from.

“And why us, anyway?” Trixie said snottily. “I can barely move, and you want to send us back into the cave to go on a treasure hunt?! It’d be a different story if I could actually gain the energy to walk straight, but I don’t have that at the moment!”

“Twilight Sparkle,” Dreamcatcher said powerfully, “I have no idea what Celestia and Luna had planned, but that plan is now scrapped. You and your friends have accomplished a world-saving feat not just once, but twice. Granted, none of the other Elements of Harmony are here with you—all you have is this…‘Trixie’ mare…” Trixie huffed at the way the Head Captain had said “Trixie”, “But there is no other pony better suited…for saving Equestria, a third time…” Dreamcatcher was getting out of breath. “I’m afraid I’ve sent you two as far as I can. Make for the crack in the south wall—that’s where the unicorns have set up a makeshift camp. Refresh yourselves, and then get back into the fray!” She turned to face the claw, which was getting back up once again from one of her attacks, and it snarled at her as it stared her down. “Now go—I’ll hold this thing back!”

“But—”

“GO!”

The dark-green unicorn catapulted the two mares up and over the Maximus’s arm using her magic, aiming them towards the south wall. She turned her attention back to the creature facing her. “Good, now I can fight you without any distractions. Now come get some!” she said heavily and angrily, panting hard and dirt sticking to her hot, sweating body, beckoning another strike from her opponent.

The hand screeched and dove for her again.

Twilight and Trixie landed with a thud, a considerable distance from Dreamcatcher and the Maximus arm. Only several houses were standing between them and the end of the great black wall, which now sported a massive fracture. The two ponies slowly trudged to their hooves; in the distance, the sounds of spell after spell being cast could be heard, as well as the constant colorful lights flashing from every which-way, diffracted from the pillars of smoke that were rising from demolished houses.

Twilight took a single step forward, and tripped over her own leg. “Augh! Trixie…I, I’m completely worn out. Not a single shred of magic is left in me…”

Trixie stood up and didn’t move, not wanting to humiliate herself by tripping the same way the purple unicorn just did. Trixie looked down at Twilight, and a small, sincere smile actually grazed her lips. “Don’t worry, Twilight Sparkle. We only have another block to go before we reach the outside world. There must be Equestrian soldiers around here—there should be, considering how close we are to the wall…”

“I…I don’t see anypony,” Twilight said in a defeated tone. “Even when—if—we make it to the other unicorns, I don’t see how the heck we’re supposed to regain enough energy to fight properly. Didn’t you say yourself though, that Luna had taken care of the Maximus already?”

“I doubt it’s finished off for good,” Trixie said ominously. “Take a look around, at the Odium that are attacking this town. Certainly by now, you can tell that they share—”

“—a hivemind, yes, I had assumed so myself,” the brainiac said.

Trixie shot the unicorn an annoyed look for having interrupted her. “…Yes, and since all these Odium ‘puppets’ aren’t falling to the ground like an electronic with its cable cut, one can only assume that the Maximus is still alive, controlling its minions deep down in that pit.”

“…and we’re gonna have to kill it, once and for all.” Twilight tried to get back on her hooves again, but this time she couldn’t even muster the strength to bring herself onto her front hooves. She grunted softly as she continued the fruitless struggle with her depleted body. “…If only we had some magicane with us…!”

Trixie looked on sadly; she was still standing perfectly still, the only thing keeping her upright was her knees, locked in place to keep gravity from getting the better of her. Suddenly, she looked straight forward, and with a gasp her pupils dilated almost past her irises. “Twilight Sparkle! We may actually have some with us!”

Twilight cocked an eyebrow at the unicorn. “What are you talking about? I didn’t see a single shred of the rock in that cave, and we didn’t bring any along, nor did any of the Appleloosians give us any—I’d know magicane if I saw it, since I’ve been rigorously studying it since its discovery.”

Trixie rolled her eyes at the stubborn unicorn. “Twilight Sparkle, think for a moment: from everything we saw in that cave, what was the one thing none of the Odium had touched?”

Twilight gave Trixie a look; she had no idea where the unicorn was going with this, and she had no clue what the answer was, either. “Trixie, there wasn’t a single thing they…wait…” Her eyes widened and her head darted to her saddlebag.

“Exactly,” Trixie said, knowing Twilight now knew the answer as well. “At first, we figured it was some strange quirk about them, but know you realize—they won’t touch water. When I used a water spell on an Appleloosian mare that was being taken by the Odium, the sludge completely disappeared.”

Twilight added, “Now, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that they’re water soluble, but one fact does remain: they don’t like water.”

“But why were those three just standing at the water’s edge, staring at it?” Trixie asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Twilight glanced at her bag, giving Trixie the answer in a single look. She grabbed the bag with her hooves and swung it over her head so it was in front of her. “Perhaps…they were looking on…longing for something that it couldn’t touch…something they couldn’t reach.”

Trixie smiled at her and Twilight’s own problem-solving skills. “If I’m not mistaken, magicane is a type of shale, a sedimentary rock? Again, if I’m not mistaken, sedimentary rocks are the most…water soluble…?”

Twilight brought out a glass jar half the height of her arm, and just as wide; it was half-filled with water. Twilight held the jar up in front of her eyes and grinned. “I wonder just how much magicane is sitting under that underground lake?”

Trixie’s smile waned when she saw the telltale jar. “…There doesn't seem to be very much…actually, there doesn't seem to be any in there.”

Twilight looked up at Trixie and chuckled. “Oh, believe me, Trixie. We don’t need anywhere near ‘very much’ when it comes to magicane. There’s probably only a minute amount, but a small trace…and yet, that will be enough.”

Trixie cocked an eyebrow at the purple unicorn. “Enough to take on the Maximus?”

Twilight shook her head. “Enough to get more.”

On that, Twilight gripped the tightly-closed lid on the jar and tried to pry it open with her hooves. She wasn’t used to doing things without any magic.

“Uh, here, allow me…I think I have enough left magic to open a jar.” Trixie puffed out her cheeks in concentration, trying her hardest to bring out any reserve-reserves of magic left in her. Her horn gave off two tiny sparks of blue light, and like a car starting it flickered just before glowing. With an egotistical grin of poise with herself, Trixie used her magic to grip the lid that was currently halfway in Twilight’s mouth, snug in-between a set of teeth, and she popped the jar open.

Twilight didn’t move for a second; she only stared at the open jar of water. Then she looked up at Trixie and let a sly grin slip onto her face. She held the jar up with her hoof for a toast. “To…agreeing to disagree.” She put the mouth of the jar up to her lips and tilted the jar back, letting the spring water flow down her parched throat. After downing half the jar, she handed it to Trixie.

Trixie didn’t even say anything, she just brought the jar up to her mouth and chugged the remaining liquid. At first she didn’t feel any different.

But then, the trace amounts of magicane took their effect.

Trixie felt a cool breeze blow from inside her body; a contrast to the warmth one feels after taking a drink of wine, though it was a good feeling, and the freshness of it gave Trixie a chill down her spine. The pain on her joints, muscles and back felt as if they were literally being washed off of her, the wintry sense feeling much like a nice shower after spending a day in a sandstorm. As the cold traveled up her spine and reached her head, the pounding immediately went away, and she felt a stream of energy flow through her vertebrae and directly into her horn; she let out a relaxed sigh as it happened. No longer having to lock her knees to be able to stand, Trixie adjusted her hooves and stood up erect and proud. She couldn’t even see any of the mystical magicane in the water she just drank, and yet what she had just felt from that minuscule amount was…pure ecstasy.

Trixie looked over to Twilight and noticed that the unicorn looked considerably less enthused with the magical element flowing through her veins. “Is this some kind of a drug?” the magician half-joked, half-honestly asked. “I’m not going to develop an addiction to this, will I?”

Twilight chuckled. “No, what you just felt was your body first adjusting to the magicane. You’d better cherish that feeling, because each time you use it now, the feeling will be but a fraction of what you just experienced, if anything at all. I can feel the energy flow back into me, but it's nothing compared to what you've felt—judging by your expression, at least," she added with a grin.

“Wait, you’ve used magicane before?”

“Well, duh! I did say I rigorously studied it, didn’t I? That kind of implies that I at least tried it out first-hand once or twice!”

“I feel…completely restored, brand-new,” Trixie said, dumbfounded at the effect the magic rock had on her.

“We both still look awful, though,” Twilight said backhandedly, glancing over the gray-and-yellow-plastered unicorn.

“TWILIGHT SPARKLE!”

Both unicorns were startled by the booming voice overhead, and both looked up to see Princesses Celestia and Luna descending down to the ground. Celestia had never looked so relieved to see her faithful student. “Thank goodness, I was afraid I’d lost you!" Turning away from Twilight after looking her over and seeing she was fine—and overlooking how raggedy the pony looked—she saw the azure unicorn next to her for the first time. I take it this is ‘Trixie’?”

“That’s ‘The Great and Pow—unagh!”

Trixie was cut short from a very powerful kick in the rib. Celestia had blinked, and only caught a swift blur of something purple that had shot straight into the magician’s side, making her crumple to the ground and force back tears. Celestia gave Trixie a very worried look. “Trixie, are you alright?!”

“Don’t worry about us, Princess,” Twilight said enthusiastically, while also wearing a very fake smile. “The two of us are more than capable of handling the Maximus on our own.”

“I highly doubt that, Twilight,” Celestia said sternly. “The shadow is much too powerful, and there is no lone spell powerful enough to take it down. That’s why I had sent you to bring the fixed half of the artifact to the Sheriff, but I now realize that it was a foolish idea to send you off on your own like that. The plan couldn’t have gone any more wrong, and I’ve put you and your friend in grave danger.”

“Oh, nononono, this mare’s not my—anyway, you gave me a task, and now it’s expanded a bit to a different job, but I still expect to see it through, Princess Celestia. No matter what may get in our way!”

Luna cocked an eyebrow at the purple unicorn. “Are you seriously suggesting you and this…Trixie,” she glanced at the other blue, silver-maned unicorn hunched over on the ground, “are going to try and take on the shadow yourselves? You’re mad.”

“Actually, we think we understand a fair amount about this ‘shadow’,” Twilight said confidently. “For example, we’ve learned that it has a weakness to water.”

Celestia interrupted, “While water does have the strange effect of turning the shadow into vapor, that is nothing more than a setback for it, much like every other spell one could think of to throw upon it. And vaporizing the shadow isn’t the brightest idea, either—you certainly don’t want something like that freely travelling with the wind.”

Twilight was slightly let down by her mentor’s negativity. “Nonetheless, Trixie and I are going to take on the Maximus and his fleet—we know how to get the strength to fight it!”

“Oh?” Luna asked, intrigued. “Did you happen to find a spare reserve of magicane down in the mines?”

“I suppose you could say that,” Twilight replied.

“Well, as much as I’d like to go there myself and regain some lost fuel, I’m afraid Celestia and I don’t have the time.”

“Twilight…honestly, I don’t think you have the capability to take on the shadow…” Celestia said, “But if you are really that confident in yourself, I suppose I can be, too.” She gave a weak but encouraging smile. “Go on, you and Trixie—go and fight back the shadow; Luna and I will continue efforts aboveground, freeing any ponies still under its control. Also…” she looked up at the burning houses and increasing amount of smoke in the village. “…we’d better contact Canterlot and tell them about the damages…”

“Well, with your blessings, we’re now off!” Twilight exclaimed eagerly, and grabbed a still-reeling Trixie with her regained magic, encasing the unicorn in a pinkish-purple aura. She was about to start on her way, back to the center of town, but she stopped abruptly, remembering something. “Oh, Princess! I just remembered—Captain Dreamcatcher! She saved our lives, and she was fighting off one of the Maximus’s arms! I don’t know if she’s okay…please, go find her and help her!”

The alicorns’ eyes widened at this news; neither had expected the severed arm to actually come to life. “On it,” Luna immediately said, and jumped off into the sky to search for the dark-green unicorn and long black arm, which shouldn’t be that challenging of a feat.

“I certainly hope she’s okay…” Celestia said softly as she watched Luna speed off into the air. The alicorn then looked back at her student. “Twilight, please be careful. I cannot stress this enough.”

“Thanks, Celestia, but I don’t really have time for a lecture at the moment,” the unicorn teased, and with Trixie in tow, she used her magic and vanished in a flash of light, teleporting closer to the massive pit in the center of town.

“Oh, Twilight…” Celestia sighed. Then her expression hardened as she remembered something. “…Twilight? Twilight Sparkle!” Celestia flew high up in the air; she saw Luna already down near a long slender black tube snaking through town, but she was looking for someone else.

“Twilight!” she yelled out. “The artifact! I didn’t tell you about it…! Oh, for Pete’s sake…”

The alicorn grit her teeth and reluctantly let the issue go as she joined her sister again, close to the ground to continue the fight.

Chapter 10: Here We Go

Rational thought wasn’t an ability the Maximus exactly had. It wasn’t mindless, but it certainly couldn’t think, either. It was more like…instinct that drove it, rather than thought. Sure, it could problem solve or make a split-second decision, but at the same time, it didn’t have the ability to actually ‘think’ about something. In fact, trying to understand the Maximus’s thought process is something that none of us exactly have the ability to do. Perhaps that’s what makes explaining what goes on in its head so difficult.

Nonetheless, the Maximus was ‘thinking’ about the two creatures that had just escaped its grasp. It had never seen a unicorn previously, but it didn’t take long for it to ‘realize’ that ponies with horns on their heads were a serious threat—it had ‘known’ ever since it saw Trixie try to destroy its barrier.

It needed to feed. It had an endless appetite that constantly required filling. Having reached the end of the already-dug-out mines, the Maximus had to begin digging out the magicane itself. But after what it had experienced with the purple unicorn in its cave, it began to ‘wonder’ if it even needed magicane anymore—the energy it felt when it consumed the unicorn’s body was just as strong as when it absorbed the non-renewable rock it was constantly searching for. It ‘hoped’ that there weren’t any more unicorns to challenge it, but at the same time it also ‘hoped’ that there were more—perhaps more that were less cunning, though.

That aside, it ‘knew’ that the two ponies needed to be dealt with. And it was prepared to make its attack on the small town that it had trapped above its hive, paralyzing the place for when the Maximus was finally prepared to strike.

And so it dragged itself across its massive cave, pulling itself along with the claw that was already extended so far that it had reached the surface, and like an octopus it squeezed its black body into the tunnel, stretching out and cracking the sides of the small opening as it did so.

“LOOK OUT!”

Braeburn yelled out to the ponies closest to the shattered Sheriff’s office, advising them of the large chunks of woods that were falling back down from the sky—as if the ponies weren’t aware already, what with the large crunching noise that accompanied when the massive black claw shot out of the hole in the demolished building.

Both Twilight and Trixie were extremely exhausted. They had just been through a living hell trying to escape and neither had any usable magic left in them. Despite the earth-rumbling splintering of the Sheriff’s office, Twilight had passed out and wasn’t waking. Trixie, on the other hand, had just enough energy left in her to keep herself awake, but she found that she was far too weak to move.

Trixie gritted her teeth and grunted hard as she made another attempt to scramble to her hooves. She dug her front hooves into the hard dry dirt in front of her and pulled in to move, but the saddlebags strapped to her back felt as if they weighed a half a ton each, and she only got more dirt on her belly and the back of her cape as she scraped against the ground. Both she and Twilight were dirty and sweaty; the dark-gray and yellow dust thinly coating their skin was only cleared away in thin strands by the thick drops of cold sweat that had accumulated and ran down their foreheads and necks. Both ponies’ manes were mangled, and there were multiple strings were sticking out wildly in different directions.

Braeburn heard the magician grunting behind him, and he darted around to see Trixie struggling on the ground. He quickly offered the mare a hoof to help her up, but Trixie used what little strength she had left to swat it away.

“Trixie doesn’t need your patronage!” she said weakly.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Braeburn scolded. “You two need help, and so do we! You two’re th’ only ones that can take on those—”

The stallion cut short when he heard the massive hand hit the ground, demolishing another house that was in the path of part of its arm. The hand gripped into the ground and looked as though it was trying to lift up the earth, pulling with all its might. Meanwhile, the Odium that had made it ahead of the hand were spreading out and looking around at the town, quickly analyzing what there was to see.

Trixie looked to her left to see Twilight unconscious on the ground next to her. “Twilight Sparkle!” Trixie said loudly, but to no avail. ‘Drat. What the heck are these Appleloosians supposed to do now?!’ Trixie was trying her best to consider her options and think about how to combat the incoming Odium in her condition. ‘Wait a minute. Twilight Sparkle said something to the effect of…what was it? The Odium consider us a threat—because we’re unicorns! That’s it! I don’t know if this will help…I only have a tiny bit of magic left in me…!”

“Hey, simpletons!” Trixie yelled out at the townsponies nearby. This got their attention—and their contempt—long enough for her to say, “Get over here, I have a quick illusion spell that may keep the Odium at bay!”

The settlers gave a quick glance to the black ponies slowly—threateningly—making their way over as they shape-shifted to match their soon-to-be victims’ bodies, and without a second thought the Appleloosians hustled up in front of the azure unicorn. Trixie guessed there were a good fifteen or so; she could only hope that she had enough magic for all of them. It was a pretty simple illusion spell, but Trixie was trying to run with the meter literally on ‘empty’.

Trixie groaned slightly and closed her eyes hard while trying to get any remaining magic in her into her horn. A few seconds later, the unicorn’s horn glowed a deep blue, and so did the foreheads of every earth-pony in front of her. Then, in a quick flash of light, each of the settler ponies looked up at their heads…to see that each of them had a horn on their head.

“Well, I’ll be…” Braeburn said softly, glancing at the new appendage sticking out from his flowing mane. Granted, it wasn’t a real usable unicorn horn—one could pass a hoof through it and see that is was just as tangible as a hologram—but it looked very convincing.

And it was quite convincing for the Odium, too, when the earth-ponies turned back around with confident looks on all of their faces, and they glared at the black copies of them with evil grins while the Odium froze in place. They didn’t understand what had just happened—they could have sworn that only a second ago, these ponies did NOT have the all-powerful horns on them. While having the eighteen of them under the Maximus’s control would have been fantastic, they knew that, since they had had so much trouble with only two, there was NO WAY they could take on another dozen and a half. The Appleloosians took a unified step forward at their adversaries, and the Odium quickly took a single step back. Just as the settlers were confident enough to take on the black ponies, the claw that had been a block away lifted back up from its earth-pulling and hovered over to the fake-unicorns’ aid.

Braeburn and the other ponies stopped mid-step and stared wide-eyed at the story-high black claw. “Uh…Trixie?” Braeburn started, but he turned around to see that Trixie had also succumbed to exhaustion, and she was lying on the ground, eyes-closed, looking almost calm; unlike Braeburn, who was starting to freak out as the claw lifted higher into the air, getting ready to smack-down the unicorns in its view.

The earth-ponies made a run for it, dispersing in all directions just as the giant claw collided with the ground, making the ones that were right near it when it landed trip over the shaking earth and land face-first into the ground. The claw made a move to grab the ponies that were closest to it, when a sudden noise made it freeze.

*CRACK*

Everyone slowed down or stopped in their tracks. The Odium all darted their heads to the south, while the claw stood motionless in mid-air as if someone had just pressed the ‘pause’ button on it. Nearby ponies that saw the Odium also turned to look to the south, and then they saw it.

There was a long vertical crack in the barrier’s surface; it looked like a lightning bolt had been frozen into the black wall. The crack was as thin as a hair, but the white light emitting from it could be seen from the opposite side of town.

*CRACK*

The fracture began to split, and more hairline cracks formed off the edges of the main break. The claw regained life, but instead of going back on the offensive, it slammed into the ground right beneath it and appeared to be pressing down on the ground as hard as it could. Through the pony-sized fault in the barrier, all of Appleloosa could hear the commanding voice of a familiar princess.

“ONCE MORE, WE’VE ALMOST BROKEN IT! READY…FIRE!”

In a blinding flash of every color of light imaginable, the immense collective power of one-thousand unicorns blasted through the futile black barrier, which apparently was a slab of darkness over ten feet thick. Giant chunks of the barrier shattered like glass and fell down to the ground below as the crack widened and continued to take out pieces of the wall. By the time the shattering stopped, a massive gap was showing in the center of the south wall, up to eighty feet wide near the center, and it gave a clear view of alicorns Celestia and Luna, both flying high above a massive fleet of unicorns whose population exceeded that of Appleloosa itself.

Before the princesses could even fly into Appleloosa, the Maximus finally made its appearance. The claw had been pushing down with all its might to get the giant Odium to the surface as fast as possible. The ground that the wooden remains of the Sheriff’s office stood on began to bulge, and then a long, thin strand of dark amorphous material with two massive white eyes shot out of the ground, taking larger and larger portions of the earth with it as it widened with its ascent. A fifty-foot diameter of dirt around the epicenter of its arrival turned a darker and darker shade; the black goo started to bubble out of the ground as if someone had just struck oil. It was taking too long for the Maximus to complete its rising from the ground—with so much mass and so little room to maneuver in, trying to come out of the stone and sand was like trying to force a loaf of bread through a spaghetti strainer. Even so, it met eyes with the two alicorns staring it down from a distance. It had seen a flying pony before (when Twilight and Trixie were bolting), but what concerned it were the large horns on their foreheads. The Maximus ‘knew’ just by looking at them that they were the most powerful of any of its enemies.

It was still emerging from the ground, but the Maximus lifted its house-sized claw and shot its arm at the alicorn sisters. Luna squinted her eyes angrily at the incoming projectile and flew towards it. Just dodging one of the four fingers of the claw, Luna continued to fly alongside the slender black arm rushing by her as she made her way to the Maximus’s body. Celestia, who stayed behind near the barrier, stayed still in the air and waited for the claw to come to her. Just before the attack hit, Celestia’s horn glowed a pale yellow and she vanished in a burst of light, appearing a second later on top of the Maximus’s arm. Her horn was still flaring angrily with magic, and looking down at the arm, her body enveloped with a deep-red roaring fire, and Celestia took off from the arm into the sky. The Maximus had been too focused on the incoming Lunar Princess, and didn’t have time to dodge Celestia as she darted back down and collided with the black arm in a burst of rose-fire, swiftly and cleanly slicing the arm in half.

The Maximus didn’t appear to be all too concerned with its loss of an appendage, and instead redirected its attention to Luna. Unfortunately for it, Luna by now was almost in its face, and her dark-blue magic flared as she propelled faster and faster towards the monster. Luna’s magic coated her entire body, and she used it to giver herself an added push as she barreled down straight into the giant white eye of the Maximus.

Like a bullet, Luna charged through the putty-like body of the giant black glob, entering the eye’s surface and coming out through the back of its head in a stream of black splatter that sprinkled the houses and ponies beneath it.

It didn’t move at all after Luna’s attack, except for the slight swaying that occurred from the small amount of wind that was trying to blow in from the crack in the southern wall. For a second, many of the Appleloosians had thought that the battle was over—that the Maximus had been killed. Celestia and Luna knew better, though. This creature, it had no brain, it had no heart, it had no organs or thought or feelings or intelligence or life. It only had an insatiable hunger that it didn’t even know WHY it had.

It only ‘knew’ that it must continue to feed.

After having come out of its shock, the Maximus refilled the large gap in its body. The long arm that was sprawled across the grounds of Appleloosa came to life, and like a giant serpent it started to slither around the houses and buildings, trying to find any ponies that it could consume, and turn into more of the Odium that served it.

The hole in the Odium barrier was widest in the center, and near the ground the crack was only a thin slit that the unicorns couldn’t immediately get through. With a bit of effort and another barrage of attacks, though, they sent the remnants of the barrier flying, creating a large archway for them to walk into Appleloosa. Dreamcatcher didn’t waste any time getting inside the town, and immediately she started out on finding Twilight and Trixie, which Celestia had tasked her to do. While Dreamcatcher was able to track the ponies’ minds earlier, she couldn’t feel as strong of a presence from them, which the dark-green unicorn knew meant they must be either passed out, or dead—hopefully, not the latter of the two.

She was making her way to the location of the Sheriff’s office, where she had last detected the two unicorns, when from around a corner a giant black arm slithered around, the claw being only ten feet from Dreamcatcher. It paused for a moment, but then it made a beeline for her. Dreamcatcher scowled at the dark hand that was trying to take her; she spread out her legs and she dipped her head down to brace herself, and her horn glowed white.

A torrent of fist-sized, shining white bubbles then shot from the tip of her horn and impacted the claw, hitting it as hard as if the bubbles had been rocks. Each successful hit made the claw flinch and recoil a few feet farther away from the Head Captain. Just before the attack finished, some of the magical froth managed to break off the hand’s thumb, inducing an abrasive cracking sound before the thumb snapped and collapsed to the ground. The arm didn’t appear phased from the loss, but it did back off from Dreamcatcher before slithering away in the opposite direction.

Dreamcatcher noticed a large crowd of Appleloosians making a run for it, but they were going the wrong way. “Hey! Make for the break in the barrier! We have plenty of soldiers there that will protect you and escort you out of town!”

They stopped and immediately made for the south wall without a second thought. Dreamcatcher nodded to herself in satisfaction before continuing to Twilight and Trixie.

There was far too much going on in the small town of Appleloosa to be able to give a detailed explanation of it all. The Maximus had finished its ascent from the ground and was a smooth black sphere once again, floating only a few inches over the ground of Appleloosa; after clearing out of the tunnel, the Maximus was now out of the way of the other Odium behind it, and they were swarming out of the hole in the ground, hundreds of them; the unicorn platoon were swarming out their own hole, the gap in the south wall, half working on escorting out the frantic Appleloosians, half fighting back the Odium that were trying to take down as many ponies as they possibly could; Princesses Luna and Celestia were giving the Maximus their undivided attention, shooting fireball after light beam after explosion right into the mindless creature’s face to keep it at bay. Appleloosa was slowly being turned into a disaster zone; the right arm of the Maximus wasn’t helping, as it continued to swallow pony after pony that was unfortunate enough to scramble in front of its maw.

The ratio of ponies to Odium was keeping relatively the same. Each time the Odium claimed another victim, an Equestrian unicorn would clear away the evil sludge from a different Odium. Unfortunately for the Equestrian side, anyone that was cleared of their black prison was in no way ready to fight their adversary, or even run away; they all had been fed off of for far too long, and required a fair amount of time to completely recover from having their brain sapped. Nonetheless, the unicorn soldiers were hard at work, making their way around the small town and finding any Odium or dazed ponies they could.

Celestia and Luna were still giving it their all to keep the Maximus from joining the fight on the ground, flying around its head and shooting off spells like annoying gnats to the giant black sphere. The Maximus made a few attempts to ignore the alicorns, but each time it made to give a pony its attention and attack it, it suddenly found a quarter of its head blown off into a shower of thick black droplets that splattered across the adjacent ground. If it had ‘nerves’, the sisters were certainly getting on them right now.

Dreamcatcher was darting around like crazy trying to find Twilight and Trixie. She kept going closer and closer to the Maximus, and she knew she was tempting fate. Thankfully for her, any stray Odium that met up with her immediately ran away, most likely because of what she had done to the Maximus’s arm earlier. Dreamcatcher was getting dangerously close to the fifty-foot-tall monster swatting at the Princesses flying high overhead, but she felt safe enough, considering how it seemed too preoccupied to notice her. From the map she was able to develop in her head from other Appleloosians’ knowledge, she knew she wasn’t very far from the now-destroyed Sheriff’s office, where she could only hope the unicorns still were—alive.

The Maximus was practically overhead as Dreamcatcher rounded the final corner, around a building that had been reduced to a pile of logs and splinters. There, she saw them: Twilight and Trixie, laying out in the middle of the open square of ground in front of the Sheriff’s office. They almost looked peaceful, were it not for the scene around them. At this range, there were no other ponies, and all the Odium had moved down to the frontlines where the fight was going on. Nonetheless, the evil darkness hovering above, the shattered buildings all around the flailing Maximus, and the terrible condition the two unicorns were in made the scene look terrible.

Both Twilight and Trixie were lying on their sides; with their coats covered in dark-gray dust from the mines below and the yellow sands of Appleloosa, Dreamcatcher could barely tell that this ‘Trixie’ mare was a deep-blue color underneath all the dirt. ‘Trixie’ was wearing what Dreamcatcher considered to be a completely ridiculous outfit, with a crunched-up pointed wizard’s hat, and a star-studded cape that had lost a lot of its luster, looking no better than the mare who was wearing it. ‘Who on earth is this girl?’ Dreamcatcher thought.

Her own thoughts aside, the dark-green unicorn captain lifted up the two ponies with her magic and quickly brought them in close to her. ‘It’s a miracle the shadow didn’t take these two. Perhaps it’s because they were already knocked out, and wouldn’t be of use…? Eh, none of that matters right now—I gotta get back to the others!’

With her new cargo in tow right behind her, Dreamcatcher made off for the south wall, which still had the massive crack in its middle. The Head Captain didn’t take notice of the two ponies as she brought them along, and Trixie was slumped over at an angle, her neck twisted so that her head was upside-down, and her tongue was hanging out of her mouth. The azure unicorn’s breathing was becoming somewhat strained; by chance Dreamcatcher looked behind her for a moment and saw Trixie’s awkward position, and quickly readjusted the unicorn, flipping her rightside-up and accidentally making her chin smack into her chest. This happened to wake the exhausted unicorn, slowly but surely.

“Hnuh? Youlbllabkld…” Trixie sounded like she was trying to reason with somebody, with her tone of voice, but Dreamcatcher couldn’t tell what the heck she was saying, so she slightly knocked the unicorn on the back of her head with a bit of her magic. “Bgth—OW! What in the name of—why is The Great and Powerful Trixie being bounded by some lowly unicorn?!”

Dreamcatcher shot Trixie a very cold look, and the magician immediately shut up. Unfortunately for Dreamcatcher, Blanc, and Ferrous, the Head Captains—despite their high rank and prestige—were virtually names unheard of outside of Canterlot Castle. “Right now,” the dark-green unicorn said, “I’m the one who’s saving your life, so how about you shut it?”

Trixie nodded quickly with her lips pursed together tightly. Even she realized when it wasn’t appropriate to insult a lesser pony—or at least whom she considered a lesser pony. Which also happened to be everypony.

Meanwhile, high up in the sky, Luna and Celestia continued their midair waltz with the Maximus’s massive claw. At this point, it was all they could do to keep its eyes fixed upon them and not the town below, which was constantly flashing in a random area with a unicorn’s spell. Combine the lightshow below with the buildings that were continually being leveled, and one would think a fireworks show had gone awry, and that the pyrotechnics were going off without being shot into the sky. It was distracting for the Maximus, to say the least.

Celestia was keeping one eye on her enemy, and one on her sister as she flew over to Luna to speak. Luna noticed her sister flying in towards her, and made her way over as well, meeting in the middle. Celestia called out several feet away, “Sister, we cannot keep this up all day! The shadow is getting bored with us! Eventually it will set its sights on the Appleloosians, no matter what we do to it!”

Luna cocked an eyebrow at her sister. “Oh really? You really think that nothing we do will keep it at bay?” As she said this, her alicorn horn shone with her royal-blue aura, and then another layer appeared over it, then surrounded the two layers with a third, and a fourth, and then another three, before there was a gradual layering over a yard thick of seven coats of Luna’s magic centered around her horn. She gave Celestia a cocky smile and she nodded her head towards the Maximus, just as its claw started to reach for the two.

“Don’t go showing off,” Celestia scolded. “We may have a massive amount of magic, but there’s no point in wasting so much at once.”

“Too late,” Luna replied childishly. Luna aimed the tip of her overcharged horn straight at the Maximus, and at the claw that was only several yards away from her and Celestia and gaining ground.

And then she unleashed all the energy right at the shadow.

The layers of her magic shot off in quick succession, with the first forming into an arrow-tipped lightning bolt of lunar aether. It connected with the palm of the claw, and without even pausing, the attack continued straight through the arm, peeling the limb into five sections that split off to its sides. Just as the initial arrow left the arm and went into the Maximus’s body—all of this happening in milliseconds—the second and third layers turned into massive shining blue cones that fired into the giant white eyes of the creature, drilling straight through the Maximus and leaving behind two triangular holes. The arrow of the first attack then exploded inside the malformed sphere, and a ripple effect clearly showed on the outside of its body. Then the fourth layer shot off, and instead of hitting the Maximus, it hit the ground beneath it—coating the sandy ground with Luna’s telltale dark-blue magic. With a rumble and a quick shockwave, the circular area of ground the magic was sitting upon gave way; the earth fell into what looked like a bottomless pit, as the bottom couldn’t be seen and the sand was never heard hitting a floor. The fifth layer went off, and it surrounded the Maximus itself—which now looked like a shapeless mass, with two massive holes drilled into its head and its arm peeled like a banana down to the stub—with Luna’s glittering magic, just before the sixth layer shot at the creature and exploded in a bright flurry of stars over a misty fog of night sky, sending the Maximus spiraling down into the hole beneath it; it was the perfect size for it, too. It scraped up against the hole’s sides and bounced back and forth between walls as it quickly made its descent down into the dark. Luna’s seventh layer appeared to disperse from her horn unused, but when it did the sound of another splatter-filled explosion could be heard deep down in the hole. Luna closed her eyes for a moment to breathe, and she turned back and faced her sister with a sly grin.

“I think THAT will keep it at bay for a while,” the princess of the moon replied.

“You’ve only made it angrier,” Celestia said, irritated, “But I suppose you’ve managed to buy us all some time. Come; let’s find Twilight Sparkle, and the other half of the artifact!”

Luna regained a serious disposition, and with a nod the two sisters swooped down near the ground to begin searching for Twilight as black smoke began to rise out of Luna’s newly-created hole.