The Twin Mountains

The wind was a raucous, violent howl near the top of the mountain summit, and the cold air bit viciously at Arid Amulet's skin even through her several protective layers. She was at such a height now that the clouds weren't just a dark blanket above her but an ominous fog that permeated the mountainside. It was a shame, really, because if the fog hadn't been present or if the cloudy night had allowed more than just a fraction of the starlight through the veil, she knew she would have been treated to a spectacular view.

Amulet ground to a halt again, clenched her eyes shut, wheezed, and coughed horrendously. The coughing began two days earlier in her journey up Mount Celestia. It was harder to breathe, and she was always short of breath, as if there was less air around her, and an old, familiar pain was throbbing in her forehead. She opened her eyes again and continued her labored climb.

It was cold up here, dangerously so, and she knew it. She hadn't been prepared for these freezing temperatures, but no amount of snow or ice could keep her from her pilgrimage. She was determined to reach the summit, to be the first pony since Celestia herself, and to meet the princess, the only pony to do so in thousands upon thousands of years.

That summit was close. Amulet was certain of it. She was so certain that she knew, for a fact, that if it weren’t for the fog obscuring her vision and blocking the light from the moon and the stars, she would be able to see it clearly. At this point, in fact, she wished she were a unicorn, so she could simply magically light her path, but the foolish wishing was just a distraction from the cold.

Before long, a dark, looming mass became just barely visible through the fog. At first, as Amulet got closer, she thought that it was a rampart, that some magical castle had been built on the mountain, but instead she was just greeted with more emotionless rock. The cliff face climbed well beyond her admittedly limited sight, but there didn’t seem to be any other upward path she could take, so she ruefully flipped off her pack—all nearly forty pounds of it, minus the food she’d eaten en route— wiped off the accumulated snow with a gloved hoof, and retrieved the climbing gear therein. Amulet had never climbed a rock face before she began her ascent nearly a week ago, but since then she had gotten several opportunities to practice. However, those opportunities were all during clear, warm days, before the air got so cold and thin and the surfaces of the rocks so slippery.

A few moments later, Amulet carefully wrapped a complex series of rope belts and sashes about her body and tied them through the loop of a piton crafted by a particularly-skilled blacksmith in Canterlot. She gingerly reached up, piton in mouth, and groped along the frozen stone for a hoofhold. Finding purchase, she pulled herself up, exhibiting the natural, part-magical, part-physical strength inherent to earth ponies, hoof over hoof, until she felt that she reached a height from which, if she fell, she would surely die.

She brushed her hoof about the smoothness of the rock until she felt a crack that would serve, if it weren’t completely cemented with solid ice. Grumbling incoherently and perhaps insanely to herself, she drew the small ice pick—also a product of the Canterlot blacksmith—and swung it against the frozen fissure until it hung of its own accord. With a few strikes of her hammer, the pick was sufficiently buried in the ice, and she withdrew it, replacing it with the piton, which, with a few more hammer strikes, was strong enough to support her weight. The tedious, menial task was one she’d have to repeat every few paces until she reached a point where she could climb without risk of falling to her death. As she climbed, it became much more apparent why no unicorns had tried to make the exhausting climb up Mount Celestia before her.

A blast of biting-cold wind pushed against Amulet as she hung from the piton, sufficient to set her swinging back and forth below the metal spike like a pony pendulum. She hadn’t had to deal with such powerful wind in her previous climbs, nor had she been so high or the air been so cold for the ice to steal her hooves from her, but now it would difficult even to rest along her climb.

Although it would take only the most devout Celestian to try to make her pilgrimage, Amulet made a whispered, grateful prayer to both Celestia and Luna as the wind died down enough for her to reattach herself to the rock face. Steeling herself, she reached up and climbed another distance she deemed sufficient before pausing to strike another piton into a similar crack.

As she chipped away at the icy crevice, another powerful gust of wind hit Amulet broadside, forceful enough to fling her off of the cliff and out, hooves flailing, into the foggy air below. For a moment, the piton held, and Amulet’s rope went taut, pulling her back towards the stone, but the combined weight of a fully grown earth pony and her encumbering pack was enough to rip the piton from the ice, and Amulet crashed into the wall before falling down into a heap on the hard-packed snow, solid ice, and sharp gravel below.

The wide streets that had dwarfed Arid Amulet in Crystalwell on her way east were perhaps half the size of the massive patchwork of cobblestone she currently stood on, and the two track ruts that served as roads back home in Rosegate, barely wide enough to suffer a chariot cramped passage, were smaller still. Wide-eyed, she studied the ornate rocks and smooth gravel at her feet and slowly looked up, drinking in the overwhelming visage of the bustling throng of ponies, all the way to the great white castle that was built on the side of the eastern mountain, Mount Celestia, and sprawled all the way down the mountain and several miles out into the Equestrian Valley.

“Hey!”

“Ammy!”

“Oof!” the filly gasped and was thrust skyward by a warm, all-enveloping embrace, landing with a gasp on her mother’s shoulder. Amulet coughed violently, and a few light spatters of blood sullied Lace Sketch’s otherwise snowy fur.

“Keep a good hold on that filly, or she’s liable to get herself run over!” the chariot driver yelled back at the mother and her daughter as he rode off. Lace turned to confront the stallion, but he was too far away. The pastel purple glow faded from her horn in synchronization with the matching aura around Amulet as she set her still-hacking daughter back down onto the pavement.

“Arid Amulet! You have got to watch where you’re going!” Lace snapped, but relaxed and regained her maternal grace when she saw the sorry state that Amulet was in, eyes-clenched and choking. “Oh, Ammy…” The mare put a hoof behind Amulet’s head and pulled her into an embrace in the middle of the street.

“Lacey! What happened?” yelled her father, Onyx Flint, as he galloped upon the scene.

“Oh, Amulet wasn’t paying attention and almost got hit by a chariot, and now she’s having another coughing fit.” Lace’s lips tightened against each other, and she squinted at Amulet as she came down from the fit.

“I-I’m… okay!” the filly squeaked, her voice still raspy. When his fears had been assuaged, Onyx’s face donned a look that can only be found on a father with his child, one of incomparable joy in which a stallion forgets all the troubles in the world and focuses all of his attention in a way unattainable for normal tasks.

Onyx leaned down and lowered his head to the ground, and Amulet scrambled up onto his back, taking a seat on his shoulders and peering out from above his scraggly, whitening mane.

“Well, that’s good!” He chimed as the family joined the countless ponies running about the streets. “If you got smushed by a chariot, me and your mom would have to walk all the way back to Rosegate by ourselves!”

“Daddy!” Amulet scolded her father, giggling, and Lace Sketch rolled her eyes but couldn’t contain a smirk.

From her heightened vantage point, Arid Amulet could see the whole city instead of the legs of a thousand busy ponies. Even from a head above an adult pony, the buildings seemed to sprawl around her, and the giant double doors carved into the mountain a world away were seemed somehow larger in the context of how all the giants of history, even the princesses themselves, must have seen them.

“Did you get the papers, then?” Lace asked.

Arid Amulet stared down curiously at a passing gaggle of gray-robed ponies, all unicorns evidenced by the horns sticking out from under the hoods that otherwise concealed all of their faces. As she craned her neck behind her father-mount, she watched one of them stop, and his companions continue on obliviously. He turned around to look at her, pulling down his hood with an inaudible-but-visible crackle of magic. His eyebrows furrowed into a deep, analyzing scowl, and he brought a hoof to his chin to stroke his whitening beard. Before more than a moment had passed, his colleagues had noticed his absence and were calling after him to join them. With a shake of his head in Amulet’s direction, he returned to them, and they disappeared into the large gray doors of a church.

“Yes, and the old Celestian coot—” Amulet noticed a couple of ponies within earshot frown when they overheard her father, “—just about chatted my ears off in the process. ‘The high priestess’s time is not to be disturbed lightly, if this is just another child with a bump on his forehead, she will not suffer it, blah blah blah’.” Lace Sketch’s own mouth furled into a frown at her husbands tact, or lack thereof.

A quartet of soldiers, clad in the blue, green, and gold leathers of Windport, filed by, tall, reaching pikes and polearms tucked under their wings. Sometimes, Amulet would dream of flying around in the skies like a pegasus, zipping around faster than the eye could see, fighting windigos and—

“Daddy, what are those doors for?” Amulet asked after they disappeared from sight, blocked from view by a closeby two-story building. Her old train of thought had departed as quickly as the new one had arrived.

“Dragons.” He responded, completely serious.

“Dragons?” Amulet said incredulous and giggling. “Come on, Daddy, even I know there’s no such thing as dragons.”

“Well, of course there’s no such thing as dragons… around here!” Onyx glanced back at his daughter to see her bemused at best. “What? Do I have to know everything?” He cocked an eyebrow and smirked.

“Yes.” Amulet deadpanned.

“Oh. Well, I guess if someone has to do it, it’ll have to be my moon to bear.” Onyx put on his best theatrical voice. “A long time ago, back when Celestia and Luna were here in Canterlot, dragons used to roam the valley with ponies, but mostly they lived up north, past the mountai—”

“Oh!” Amulet interjected. “With the crystal ponies? Did the dragons live with the crystal ponies?” Crystal ponies were her favorite. She loved to dream of being a shining crystal pony north of the mountains even more than she loved to dream of flying as a pegasus.

“Oh, yes, of course.” Onyx humored. “Today they all live up there, but back then they lived down here with the rest of us, too. Then, one day, an evil sorcerer unicorn cast an evil spell of evil eviln—”

“Daddy!”

“Oh, sorry,” Onyx said with a smile that said he wasn’t. “Where was I…”

“The spell!”

“Oh, the spell! The evil unicorn cast a spell on all the dragons in the world, turning them all evil like him.”

“How were they evil? What did he do to ‘em?”

“Oh, easy. Before the spell, the dragons… never… ate little fillies named Amulet!” Onyx stopped dead in the street, whipped his head around, and play-chomped on his delightfully-shrieking daughter’s hoof.

“Hey! Act your ages!” Lace Sketch scolded, though she couldn’t hide her own laughter very well.

“Yes, mom.” Amulet and Onyx said in tandem.

“Okay,” Onyx began, “so, when Celestia and Luna saw that all the dragons had turned evil, they sent all the dragons north of the mountains and cast a powerful magic spell so that they get back in, like your mom does when she keeps me out of the pantry. Except even more powerful. Slightly.”

Lace grunted, and one corner of her lips curled up.

“So, why do they need the big doors?” Amulet pondered as said big doors returned to view as the family rounded another corner, ever closer to the large, castle-like buildings at the base of the mountains.

“Well, one of the dragons didn’t turn evil, and he needed a door big enough that he could get through it without having to fly over and get squashed against the barrier.”

“Could the princesses just have made the spell so that that dragon could get through, but not the evil ones?”

“Nope.” Onyx responded. Amulet, however, wasn’t having any of it.

“Why not?”

“Magic reasons.”

“That doesn’t sound like very good ans—”

“You’re the one who said I have to know everything!”

They rounded another corner, and the leviathan doorway returned to view, its imposing enormity towering over them like a giant. The clouds above previously concealed by the top of the mountain drifted lazily into view, the difference in motion lending Amulet the illusion that as she craned her neck up at the portal, it was slowly toppling over, its impending, impossible weight about to crush her and what seemed like half the city.

The doors were monochrome. The one on the right, carved from deep obsidian into the mountains that rose up to the east , was a gray so heavy that it seemed almost black, but upon closer inspection, even darker miniscule whorls and loops patterned the surface; the door on the right was immaculate marble, showing no signs of the impurities that would normally plague such an otherwise elegant stone.

According to her father’s questionable narrative, the doors were designed to allow a dragon entry, yet it seemed to Amulet that even these enormous doors were poised at any moment to burst open and flood Canterlot with a swarm dragons a thousand strong. The idea that the monolith before her was built with only a single dragon in mind as astonishing, to say the least.

Flanking the doorway on either side and matching their respective colors were two magnificent castles, the largest buildings Amulet had ever seen. They were, of course, miniscule in comparison to Canterlot Castle just a head’s turn away and up the mountain, but the castle was far away and irrelevant with its smaller cousins front and center in Amulet’s vision.

On her right and to the east was the scale likeness of Canterlot Castle but for the fact that this smaller building was pure marble instead of the trademark yellows, purples, and whites. The castle was much less magnificent without the opulent decoration, but there was a certain austerity and functionality that came with the simplicity.

Conversely, on Amulet’s left and to the west was a complete stranger of a building. The architecture was stout, blocky, and entirely unlike that of every other building in Canterlot. Where any other building had tall towers, domed ceilings, and colorful, shingled roofs, the black building had blocky battlements. Instead of the upward-spiraling mode of everything else, there were simply three square levels—a dark brick, on a larger brick, on another, largest brick, all shoved partway into the side of the bottom of Mount Luna, where it met its larger twin.

As the approached the tall, pristine doorway to the white castle, Amulet’s father informed her that the twin castles were named the Sun and the Moon, which didn’t make much sense to Amulet. If the Sun was named after the sun, shouldn’t it have been yellow, and the Moon white?

Before she could finish her line of thought, Onyx leaned forward and shrugged his daughter off his shoulders so he could open the tall doors into the Sun. Built into the side of a mountain, the Sun’s main hall, the center of Celestia’s worship in Canterlot, had no windows and, therefore, no natural light even in the middle of day. Instead, it was kept illuminated by thousands upon thousands of individual candles suspended in their candelabras near the ceiling by some force of nature or magic Arid Amulet couldn’t see.

The candles’ light flickered off of the walls, just barely revealing the densely-patterned black sketches on the walls. From the cathedral-style ceiling to the thick, heavily-oiled oak floorboards, pencil thin lines looped about in mystifying patterns, some depicting archaic symbols, others elaborate drawings, and more still random designs and ornaments.

Two diagonal rows of several dozen ornate, wooden pews lined the room, almost intersecting in the center and forming an aisle wide enough for four ponies to walk abreast. Someone in a gray-white leaned forward at the end of the aisle, tending yet more candles on steps up to the altar: an elaborate white slab of marble with golden crenellations and and a carved depiction of Celestia sitting regally and looking over the pews with opulent mane flowing in a powerful wind, the thin, chiseled lines filled with a rainbow of dark pastels.

Amulet’s mother and father strode down the center aisle, paying no attention to their awestruck daughter as she broke off and stared, dumbfounded, at the reverent beauty of the hall. They went to converse with the robed pony, mistakenly confident in their ability to exclude Amulet, who was now gravitating slowly toward a particular large mural depicting the history of the Equestrian Valley, from the conversation with hushed, hurried tones.

“You’ve arrived.” The pony, a mare of dubious age and race.

“We couldn’t travel quickly.” Onyx Flint’s voice lost its youthfulness when he spoke with other adults. “We had to avoid large roads, and… it gets worse when she travels.”

The scrawls on the wall in front of Amulet weren’t as beautiful or pleasantly-colored as the Celestian altar’s visage, but they rather consisted of thin lines of solid black. Beginning from the right hand side, a towering picture of the royal sisters sat neatly against the corner, Celestia standing a head taller and in front of her dark, younger sister. Under them, a miniature Canterlot sat devoid of life. Both of their horns flared in unison, bolts of magic flying to the left and meeting in an explosion of sparks. Three solid black figures were silhouetted in the flash against the browning marble, three ponies, one horn, and two wings.

“Perhaps she should have suffered the hastier journey.” The robed pony deadpanned.

“She might have died.” Onyx and Lace’s scowls were practically audible.

“She may die anyway.”

There was a small space after the creation scene, immediately after which the three ponies were seen leaving Canterlot as Celestia and Luna, both still towering above, tended to a herd of others in the city. The unicorn didn’t go far, into a smaller city similar to Canterlot: Crystalwell. The earth pony went further, into the fields of the Equestrian Valley, a city composed of dozens of barns and fields with a ring of seven broad oak trees: Seven Oaks. Finally, the pegasus flew the farthest, up into the clouds near the southern end of the valley, a city made entirely of clouds and fog: Windport.

“The church has been looking for you, Onyx.” The robed pony said after a pause, without any inflection. Lace flinched.

“That’s why we avoided the roads.” Onyx said, grimacing.

“The church is more cunning than you think. Would you honestly believe it mattered what route you took?”

Further down the wall, Celestia’s head was juxtaposed with a nose-sized cloud mere inches away from her glowing horn. Her eyes glazed over, she cast a spell and sent a pegasus soldier plummeting from a cloud. Next, a dark mass loomed over a mountain, and its namesake monarch stood upon Mount Celestia in a mirror image. Her head drooped, six jewels floated around Celestia as she prepared a spell, firing it ov—

“Come.” The robed pony, an old purple unicorn mare, was standing over Amulet’s shoulder, startling the filly and sending her into another coughing fit. The mare tapped a hoof implacably before turning back to the parents, who were watching through downcast eyes.

“Come, child.” The robed pony grabbed Amulet by the hoof with an aura of purple magic and began to drag the filly none-too-gently through an opposite door.

“Mommy! Daddy!” Arid Amulet half screamed, half coughed as the door slammed shut behind her.

In her few panicked moments of flight, Arid Amulet had expected a crippling amount of pain when she hit the ground. Instead, her back hit the top of a small boulder with a sickening snap, and she rolled off and fell onto her side into the deeply packed snow.

She noticed it immediately. Amulet’s entire body was numb, and she no longer felt so cold. She tried to turn her head to look herself over, but her neck muscles wouldn’t respond to the orders her mind screamed at them. Her eyes shot wide with shock as she came to a sudden, terrible realization.

Eyes flitting about frantically, searching for help that some deep part of her knew was never coming, Arid Amulet screamed internally as flakes of snow began to hover from the sky and cover her in a blanket of cold she could not feel.