The Brightest Shine

Chapters

Ch. 1 First Impressions
Ch. 2 Inauspicious Beginnings
Ch. 3 Along for the Ride
Ch. 4 Lest Darkness Fall
Ch. 5 Dim Prospects
Ch. 6 The Frozen North
Ch. 7 Freezer Burn
Ch. 8 Settling In
Ch. 9 Community
Ch. 10 To Light a Sun
Ch. 11 Into the Night
Ch. 12 A Light in the Dark
Ch. 13 The Power of Friendship
Ch. 14 A lot on her Mind
Ch. 15 Lest Darkness Rise
Epilogue

Ch. 1 First Impressions

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

(Link to the dramatic reading on YouTube)

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter One: First Impressions

The wind whipped through his mane as Steady Hoof reached the apex of his arc and swung around to get a better view of his enemy. Several hundred feet below him, the rest of his unit continued their skirmish with the demons, flashing in and out of the clouds as they struggled for supremacy of the skies. Tucking his wings in close he picked his mark and dove, his speed rapidly building as he silently prayed that white ethereal thing below him would not look up in time... It did not.

By the time it finally heard the rush of turbulent air around him and snapped its' head up, it was too late to dodge. For an instant before they collided he had a sharply clear and unwanted view of its hideous face. What at a distance appeared to be a pony's muzzle was revealed up close to be naught but a crude facsimile of a face, like a foal's inarticulate drawing forced into life against all nature's laws. The muzzle was stretched to more than double its normal length ensuring that the thing could never truly open its jaws, and as if to compensate for this upsetting deformity, its lips moved with a mind of their own, almost prehensile in nature like some kind of stubby tentacle attached to the end of the thing's mouth. Even the eyes were wrong, not just white and glassy but distorted. Where a normal pony's eyes were of a reasonable size and set forward in the face, the demon's eyes were huge, sticking out of the sides of its head as though to give warning against his coming strike.

This time, though, they were not enough, and forcing both hooves forward, Steady Hoof slammed into the side of the thing, feeling its cloud skin give and give and finally fail, shredding into tatters as he passed through its body and felt its cold penetrate to his very core. The scream it gave as it disintegrated was enough to send shivers down the spine of any pony within five miles, but the commander had learned early on that this was but a pale shadow of the numbing cold that clung to the victorious pony's bones after a strike.

Not that it would last. In a few hours of flight, or less with the aid of a warm hearth, he would feel like himself again and the demon would reincorporate not long after. Like all the others, his unit was fighting a losing battle against the winter demons that had been steadily encroaching from the north for nearly a year now.

The last winter had been colder than any could remember and when spring finally came, it came late and grudgingly. Summer never did come, and the weather teams were already turning back errant snow clouds by September, but that was only the beginning. Since then, it had only gotten colder, and now in early April, there was no sign of any warmer weather on the way.

With an unsteady wave to his second in command, Steady Hoof allowed gravity to have its' way, holding a steep glide towards the forward operations post not far below. The numbing cold left from the demon slowed his reflexes and he stumbled on landing, but managed to get to his feet before the two privates stationed outside could help him up. With a nod of appreciation, he shouldered his way through the outer and inner doors and the circle of ponies around the great hearth made way so he could join them in the fire's warmth.

“Damn, Steady, you've got icicles for eyebrows! You got another one?” He felt his tired expression lift a bit as Flare continued, “You keep this up and we're going to have to get you a heat pack and some pants to put it in!”

He smiled at the young Pegasus; while some mares preferred to work in all female units, Flare had requested the position in his unit and seemed to revel in the coarse humor of the camps. The story of her last encounter with an arrogant, sexist petty officer was still told around the campfires; it wasn't every day you got to see a full Sergeant blushing like a school filly.

“Thank you for your concern,” he replied as he felt the welcome heat of the fire warming his numb hooves. 'Not that it will matter, though.' His smile faded as he thought to himself. 'In six or eight hours, tops, that thing will be back and all this will have been for nothing. They only need cold and dissent to thrive and there's plenty of that to go around. Food and fire however...' His thoughts trailed off as he took in the meager stock of firewood remaining by the hearth and the near empty kitchen shelves behind the mess hall counter. The very fact they were in a hall on the ground was testimony to how the fight was progressing.

Steady Hoof was startled out of his thoughts by the blast of the assembly trumpets from the upper level of the building. Even in these dark days of biting cold, Commander Hurricane still refused to shelter on the ground, instead reserving the drafty upper floor for her private accommodation and war room. With a full body shake Steady Hoof dislodged the remaining snow from his mane and tail, spread his wings and followed the other unit commanders to the war room.

It was the Commander who had first suspected that somepony was tampering with the weather, and while she had still not completely ruled out the Unicorns as the culprit, the reports of various spies pointed to gross incompetence rather than willful malice on their part. She had been on her way back from some ridiculous council with the Unicorn Princess and the Eps when the howling of the blizzard she was flying through started following her. Any normal warrior would have flown for all they were worth, and indeed some did, but the Commander had not earned her rank by turning tail. She dove headlong into the clouds, following the noise until she came face to face with the horrible blank stare of a Windigo.

The resulting chase had gone on for hours until the 'death' of the demon. With the true cause of the winter finally discovered the Commander had led her entire army in the fight against the things, but as the weeks wore on, the cold deepened and casualties mounted, it became obvious something was wrong.

It had been a lowly Ep, one of the field hands, who first described seeing a discorporate cloud of smoke condense back into a Windigo, and though none of them really trusted the thick-skulled coward, it wasn't long before pegasus warriors started bringing back similar stories from their battleground high in the clouds. Talk around the camp fires was of retreat, and though he could imagine no other way out, Steady Hoof still had a hard time imagining Commander Hurricane giving that order.

“Attention!”

Every pegasus present snapped to as the Commander landed at one end of the table and shook the snow from her coat. She was not known for mincing words.
“Commanders, we have a crisis on our hooves. In the last six weeks of battle we have lost nearly eight percent of our warriors to injury and illness. A smaller but significant fraction of those ponies are never coming home. We have put up a good fight, but we have to face facts; Like it or not, without the Eps we don't eat, and those cowards fled south nearly six months ago. The useless Unicorns gave up and followed them a month ago and with these damn demons spawning as fast as we kill them it's only a matter of time before we're forced to follow.

“Commander Pansy and I will be issuing new battle plans for a final push. We haven't used all of our tricks yet, and if one of these can finally kill a Windigo that would give us a reason to fight on.” She sighed and seemed to deflate before finishing her speech. “However, the first waves of children and wounded will be heading south tomorrow. We cannot jeopardize their safety any longer. Dismissed.”

The murmur of conversation that followed was one of worry tinged with hope. To retreat was to admit failure, but at least they would be able to resume their lives and rejoin their families and foals. The larders could be filled again, the Eps rounded up and put back to work and their bellies filled once more. After months of fighting Steady found the idea... appealing.

“Steady Hoof!”

He spun about to find Commander Hurricane closing the distance between them.

“I have a special assignment for you; your unit has fought harder than most and I admire that, but I also know what it's cost you.”

He managed to conceal his flinch as he nodded, but she wasn't wrong. They had been spared any fatalities, thank the gods, but frost bite and broken bones had taken their toll. At this point his 'unit' consisted of only Flare, Squall, Sand Storm and himself.

“The other unit commanders will be carrying the fight on this one. I need your unit to investigate a lead one of our spy ponies sent in; she reported hearing talk of some kind of unicorn magic that holds back the winter.”

Steady couldn't help but raise an eyebrow. “You're sending us on a milk run, Sir?”

The Commander flashed her predatory smile. “I wouldn't exactly call infiltrating the Unicorn Kingdom a milk run. The place is nearly abandoned by now, but the rumor was that a few poor ponies were left behind with some kind of magic that holds back the winter. It can't work very well if they all packed their bags and left, but if it's good enough to kill a Windigo then we need it.”

'So there might be something to this after all...' he thought. “Very well Sir, I'll gather the others and leave within the hour. Anything else?”

There was that smile again. “Just make sure you get whatever it is they have and don't worry about getting your hooves dirty. The rest of that cowardly lot fled south weeks ago, and while I can admire a pony willing to fight the cold, I have no problem with 'persuading' them to help us.”

A shiver ran down his spine; 'No, she definitely hadn't earned her rank by running away...' Steady thought as he tried to hide his unease, stories of her past exploits suddenly fresh in his mind.

“I understand, Sir. Good luck to you.”

The last spells had finally been finished and with a sigh, Shining Mind released her magical grip on the saddle while Spec and Pie, her two subordinate researchers, took a much-needed break. This was the third such saddle, and with it done, they only needed one more to finally complete their task and follow Princess Platinum south to safety.

“Nice work, ladies. Ep! How about some cold water over here?”

The startled Earth Pony leapt to her hooves at the command and scurried outside to fetch drinks for all of them.

It was no easy task this close to the sun.

As Verdant Growth reached the exit to the cavernous stone warehouse they were sheltering in she paused to throw the thick coat and hat on before scurrying out into the blistering heat and blinding light. She knew better than to look at the source of the light of course, but by borrowing Shining Mind's goggles when she wasn't looking, Verdant knew exactly what lay behind her as she galloped away, trying to put distance between herself and the sun.

Their device had been a success! After countless weeks of labor the team of Unicorns had finally crafted a portable sun that held back the winter without exploding or breaking down. Unfortunately the device proved much harder to regulate then had been hoped, and within minutes of being ignited atop the highest tower of the castle, the sun had already set fire to several nearby buildings as the fire teams scrambled into action.

In the end the fire destroyed nearly four city blocks in all directions, and Shining Mind had watched as her triumphant achievement laid waste to the greatest Unicorn city the world had ever known. The Princess had been furious, and Verdant could still hear the rage in her voice;

“I told you we needed heat! I said we needed a way to hold back the winter and this is what you give me!?”

“I'm sorry, Princess Platinum, the first two prototypes were easier to regulate, but you saw how they both burned up. We needed a reliable design, and that means robust spells and obsidian stone which is more durable, but harder to work with. Once we get the sun turned down-”

“Turned down?! Turned DOWN??!! It doesn't matter what happens then because we won't be here! We held out here in the growing cold so your team of scientists could build us a way to stay in our home, but now you've burned it down! We barely have enough food and supplies to evacuate thanks to your idiocy!”

The princess's very eyes seemed to burn with a fire all too similar to that which had just leveled much of her city. Even as a lowly Ep, Verdant couldn't help feeling for Shining as she fumbled on.

“But with time, we will be able to regulate this new sun. Then we can rebuild the city and-”

“Rebuild?!” The princess rounded on Shining once more as Spec and Pie cowered behind her. “More than half of the city is GONE! The castle that supports the damn thing is melting into a pool of liquid rock as we speak!”

“Well, yes, but it will still be a month or so before it melts down to ground level and explodes. That's plenty of time to fix the problem and-”

“Explodes?!”

As barely more than a servant, Verdant was, for once, grateful for the insignificance of her position and the anonymity it afforded her at the back of the room.

“Well, yes, the sun is driven by spells that split water in the air to make hydrogen which it then fuses into deuterium and then helium. It has to be kept off the ground, because if it's dropped then it will start fusing lithium, silicon, and other elements in the ground, or, say, the hydrogen in a lake or river, either of which will drive the reaction to tens of thousands of times' greater intensity due to the greatly increased density of the available fuel source.”

Verdant had been wondering when her boss would get around to revealing this unfortunate design flaw. As an earth pony assistant she was trusted to understand enough of the basics to be helpful, but none of them took her seriously, and her hints at a shut off switch during construction had been ignored. Fortunately she understood enough of the forbidden earth pony magic to craft a safety of her own. She had woven it into the sun late one night after the others had fallen asleep in their lab, but when Spec stirred she had had to stop short. Her safety would shut the sun off should it ever go into free fall, a sure sign of impending doom, but Verdant hadn't had time to craft a formal shutoff command, and with the castle tower melting slowly away underneath it, her drop safety would do little to save them if the stone candle that was their ruler's castle was allowed to melt all the way down to the nub.

“Of course, the radiation conversion spells will still convert all the hard radiation back down into heat and light, but-”

“How big?” The anger was not gone from the princess's voice, but somehow the hard flat tone she was using now was even more frightening.

“How big is what?”

“The explosion when that thing reaches the ground.”

“About eleven thousand trillion Joules.” The gray unicorn answered simply.

If possible, her anger seemed to dissipate even more as, for the first time, it occurred to the Princess that the worst may not have happened yet. In a voice edged with fear she asked:
“Is that a lot?”

“It should excavate a crater about a mile in diameter. If the sun survives as it aught to, it will be launched in a high parabolic arc that should bring it back to the ground in a few minutes. Each impact will increase in intensity as it digs in deeper every time, and after a few more falls it should be blasted into orbit, at which point it will run out of fuel and burn out.”

Everything after the first sentence had been lost on the princess as her eyes opened wide in terror. After a surprisingly short time to collect herself she summoned her aide into the room.

“We're evacuating. Now. Tell everyone to take only as much as they can easily carry and begin the march south.”

The aide took one look at the faces of those assembled and practically galloped from the room.

“But Princess, what about our work? We can't just leave it behind!” Shining Mind protested with more passion than at any point thus far.

“Oh no, I wouldn't dream of it.” The princesses's tone had turned to ice. “You and your team will be staying right here to... contain the sun.”

Shining Mind shook her mane out in relief, completely oblivious to the looks of horror on her two subordinates and servant. “Excellent. We should have this wrapped up in a month or so. Thank you, Princess.”

...

That had been nearly twenty-five days ago, and each day their shadows cast by the sun became longer as the castle melted underneath it. Now as she ran, Verdant's shadow stretched for hundreds of yards ahead of her as she covered the burned circle that was all that remained of the city's once vibrant market district.
Once outside of the burned zone the heat began to fade, and Verdant peeled off her coat, enjoying a moment to herself in the false spring warmth. The section of the city she now walked through had once been closed to her kind, but with everyone else gone there were no more slurs, no angry disdainful glances as she walked down the street. She couldn't help but cringe as she opened the door to the ice cream and soda shop, but there was no outcry, no shouts of 'get out' or 'damn Ep'. There was no sound at all. Just the lonely silence as the wind whistled mournfully through the eaves of the empty building.

With an effort she shook herself out of the contemplative mood. It wouldn't do to be late with the refreshments. In a few minutes she had stirred up a pitcher of tea and a few other drinks from the meager stock that had been left behind in the evacuation. Looking out the window of the opulent second floor balcony, she could see the snow still falling in the distance, held at bay by their creation. The one-story buildings were already gone, and many of the two-story houses were starting to disappear under the white blanket as well. Shining Mind still planned to avert the explosion by snagging and carrying the sun with the four enchanted saddles she was crafting for each of them, and Verdant had to admit it should work. With each of them supporting a quarter of its weight they should have no trouble carrying it aloft over level ground. The plan was for each of them to act as one corner of a pyramid, their saddles sending out a beam of supporting magic a thousand feet up and to the side. In this fashion the four of them could carry the sun to their new home, but how well it would work over rough ground, up mountains and down rivers all while under the blistering heat... She shook her head again. At least if they dropped it it wouldn't kill them... Probably...

With the drinks mixed, Verdant washed up the dishes and put them neatly away, whether out of respect or habit she didn't like to think. As she clopped down the stairs and closed the door quietly behind her, a movement in the sky made her look up. Far off in the distance were a small cluster of dots, too large to be birds, and as she stared, they seemed to grow larger...

...

When Verdant returned with the news it practically put Spec into hysterics, while Pie suddenly looked very nervous and began keeping her eyes on the entrance and her backside pressed against the wall. It took them several minutes to pull Shining's head out of her notebook and explain to her why this was a problem.

“Shining, they're Pegasi!” Pie whispered while Verdant held a paper bag over Spec's muzzle.

“Well, yes. Dirty, warmongering barbarians, what of it?”

“Shining,” Pie tried to continue patiently as her eyes darted from her superior to the door, “Ep says they've been circling the city for almost an hour, that's why it took her so long to get back. They're looking for someone.”

Shining Mind raised an eyebrow as she tried to grab her notebook back, “Well, they're not going to find anyone they know here, what with the evacuation; we're the only ones left, now give me that!”

“Yes, and that's the problem! We've left tracks leading into and out of this place, and you insisted on the staying in the biggest building left standing in this part of the city! It's only a matter of time before they find us!”

Shining winced at the reference to her claustrophobia, but she continued to grab for her notebook. “And when they do find us we'll tell them to kindly bugger off.”

Pie seemed to resist the urge to face hoof, then tried again using small words.
“Shining, we're the last Unicorns in the city. We're all by ourselves. Ep says that the big, burly, smelly, armored, MALE pegasi are looking for us. In an empty city. With no police.”

For the first time it appeared that gears were turning in Shining's head that had nothing to do with higher mathematics. It took several seconds, but comprehension slowly dawned on her face and she swallowed visibly. Spec chose this moment to pull the bag from her muzzle and join the conversation.

“They'regoingtofindusandholdusdownandgangrapeusandslitourthroatsandleaveusfordead!”

Shining found herself unconsciously crossing her legs and swallowing hard again. She was beginning to hyperventilate herself when it all clicked together in Verdant's mind with such force and clarity that she blurted it out loud, in gross violation of social decorum.

“They've come for the sun!”

There was total silence for a moment.

“Oh.” Spec breathed with a trace of relief.

“That...” Pie said as though working it out.

“Well they can just buck right off, that's our work!”

Verdant found her jaw hanging open as Shining wrenched a wooden chest out of a tangled pile of equipment and nearly ripped the lid from it's hinges in her haste. A clatter announced the meeting of blades and stone as the weapons chest was rudely relieved of it's contents.

“All right! Pie, do you know how to spin a roulette?” Shining asked, a fire burning in her eyes.

“Uh, yes, my brother showed me how to once-”

“Good. I'll take the screamers.” She cut her off as she seized a pack of wicked looking steel frisbees, “Spec, what can you use?”

Spec looked like she wanted to start hyperventilating again as it was becoming clear they would now be seeking out the pegasi.
“Uh, I can't... I mean I-”

“Nevermind. You can spray water right? Ep, help her get that pot of water up into the sunlight to boil. Maybe a bath will get their attention.”

In a surprisingly short amount of time the scientists had strapped on what armor they had, hefted weapons and marched out into the clear space in the shade of the empty stone warehouse.

“There, that must be them.” Spec pointed a shaky hoof at a group of three black dots. As they watched, the pegasi circled around the sun, apparently not sure what to do next.

Verdant watched uneasily as Shining fished a particularly large parcel out of her pack and fit the ten interlocking razor-sharp boomerangs together into a wheel with a coiled spring in the center. Her brow furrowed in concentration as the pieces all interlocked, then began to spin faster and faster until the six-foot-diameter wheel was just a black blur vibrating slightly with a high pitched whine not unlike a huge circular saw. Spec hoisted the kettle of boiling water a few feet off the ground while Pie picked up the two roulettes and set them spinning about herself, then climbed a few feet above the others onto a low mound of rubble to afford them some protection.

“Okay... We're ready now... I guess.” Spec said to no one in particular, “So now what do-”

As she spoke, Shining Mind hoisted the rifle and carefully fitted the six foot death blade into its length. The device was little more than a four by four post with a gear track along one side, but when the gear teeth on the axis of the disk met those on the rifle, the disk would be launched downrange with incredible force. Normally, weapons held little interest for her; they were all little more than a competition to cram the most kinetic energy into the smallest space and time. Boring compared to her real work, but this design with all its interlocking parts and springs... 'It really is an elegant design. Probably the closest I'll ever get to art appreciation.'.
She couldn't help but grin as she lined up on the distant pegasi and performed a quick mental calculation.
'Let see, G-flat above the clef is release at three thousand feet and...' Planting her feet she nudged her rifle back an inch, taking the massive kick of the weapon as it thrust her backwards and down, her hooves actually leaving short skid marks in the charred soil. 'Let's see how bad you illiterate barbarians want it!'

All three of them stared with jaws open as the whine of the disk faded into the distance, climbing towards the pegasi.

“You shot at them?!” Pie finally managed. “We couldn't start with 'hi, nice to meet you?!'”

Shining picked up two smaller disks and began spinning them up in her purple magic as she answered simply. “They came to steal our work.”

The blade was only barely visible at this distance, but there was no mistaking the panic as the pegasi scattered in all directions. A second later the mainspring won its fight against centrifugal force and pulled the ten bladed boomerangs out of their interlocking slots, exploding all ten parts outward. The pegasi dodged again and seemed to be getting back into a more orderly group when one of them apparently realized the blades were coming back for a second pass. They dove in all directions as the razor-edged steel bars whipped by a second time, narrowly missing one pony and barely grazing the back armor of another. After a lot of yelling and pointing, inaudible at this distance, the pegasi came in warily on a long slow glide, landing several hundred yards away and covering the last distance on hoof.

As the two groups got their first good look at each other, the revulsion was near universal. Even as small foals, their parents had all warned them not to touch birds because of the diseases and parasites they carried. Now, staring across the dozen yards between them, Pie could actually see their feathered wings, and the mental picture of thousands of tiny crawling things moving about underneath them was enough to make her nauseous. A few feet away, Spec was seriously considering the effects of boiling water on wing mite infestation, while Verdant was trying to put on a brave front in the face of the three burly pegasi.

Ch. 2 Inauspicious Beginnings

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

(Link to the dramatic reading on YouTube)

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Two: Inauspicious beginnings

The flight to the Unicorn city had been long and cold, and with the sky perpetually overcast, navigation by the stars impossible, making the task harder yet. After nearly ten hours on the wing they felt they should be getting close, and as they all peered down into the gloom ahead and below it was actually Flare who saw it first.

“Hey! Anyone else see that glow on our nine o’clock?”

A quick detour to see what was up soon made it clear that this was not some farmer's burn pile they were approaching. As the sky ahead grew brighter they found themselves shielding their eyes after so long in the winter gray, and when they crested the last mountain ridge they nearly collided with each other.

Spread out below them was a city with its own sun! The outer edges were still covered in snow, but whole blocks of homes were actually green and blooming with trees and flowers they had not seen in weeks beyond bearing. The awed silence persisted as they flew lower, basking in the golden warmth of the strange, earthbound sun.

It was only as they got closer that they realized something was wrong. The charred center of the city was the first to become visible, and not long after, the total absence of movement or ponies completed the picture.

Flare spoke up first.
“Sir, what in Tartarus is going on? They build their own sun and then leave?”

Squall agreed,
“Something isn't right here. We need to find somepony who can tell us what happened.”

“What does it matter?” Sand Storm grumbled. “The fool Unicorns can't handle a little heat, so they pack up and leave. Let's just grab this thing and get it home.”

“And just how do you propose we pick up a sun?” Flare spat.

“With his huge balls, isn't that right, Sand Storm?” Squall chuckled, and Flare couldn't help but laugh.

“You know, you're right! Picking up a sun might be just the thing for his cold blue balls!”

“Enough.” Steady Hoof interjected, “Squall's right, we have to find somepony who can tell us what happened. If we can't find anyone in a few hours we'll head back with the news, but for now we keep looking. Fan out and search, we meet back here in an hour.”

It didn't take long for Squall to find fresh hoofprints in his quarter of the city, and following the charcoal marks led him on a quick tour of the town, into an ice cream parlor and through the mares' bathroom. Soon enough the grinning pegasus was back at the rally point, where Sand Storm and Steady Hoof soon joined him to hear what he had found.

“See, look at those tracks down there.” Squall continued as they shielded their eyes from the sun. “They lead in towards the sun at the center of the city. There's at least one mare left here, so with-”

He suddenly stopped, frozen in the act of listening to the soft sound of a whine that was growing louder.

“MOVE!” Steady bellowed.

They moved.

Every pegasus with any military training was familiar with the deadly spinning weapons of the unicorns, and it was not uncommon for fresh recruits to dive for cover at the sound of a mosquito. While ridiculous looking, this behavior was actively encouraged, because mistaking a shrieking blade for a mosquito was a mistake soldiers usually didn't survive.

The tiny speck was upon them in an instant and with a loud 'CLACK!' it exploded into multiple spinning shapes that narrowly missed the three of them.

“Well, whoever she is, she sure has a temper!” Squall observed. “Let's go say hel-”

“RANGS!” Sand Storm bellowed.

They moved again.

This time Squall wasn't quite fast enough to miss the spinning, hoof shaped blade, and its razor edge threw sparks as it sliced through his back armor, nicking his flesh as it tumbled by.

“You okay?” Steady asked the shaking stallion as the thing whirled back to earth.

“Uh... Yes. I'm... I'm fine. Just a scratch.”

Steady nodded, “We land. Now. Whoever is left apparently isn't happy to see us, and I don't want to rush in until we know what we're dealing with. Keep it respectful and keep your distance.”

As they glided slowly down, Steady found himself wondering what kind of mare would take a shot at a unit of armored pegasi. Unicorns were ground walkers, spoiled, deformed ponies born without wings, and while their magic gave them an advantage, their... deformity meant that although most pegasi respected them, there was little warmth between the tribes.

“I don't like this, Sir. We should attack them from the air!” Sand Storm whispered as they trotted closer.

“And if there are fifty more of them? Don't start a fight without knowing who you're fighting, Soldier.”

As the distance shrank, Steady could make out not one but three unicorn mares gathered together in a defensive posture on the open ground. He almost missed the Ep hiding behind the kettle of what looked to be boiling water, not that it would have mattered. Two of them looked scared, but their leader wore an expression of competent disdain, her black mane blowing in the breeze as she fixed him with a steady stare.

“Why have you come here?”

The question was clipped, and if its' tone alone wasn't enough to get their attention, the two spinning disks hovering in the field of her purple magic were. The white unicorn with the yellow mane stood a few feet back atop a small mound of stones, the roulette she spun orbiting her body looked like the deadly ring of knives it was. Steady chose his words carefully.

“We were sent here on a diplomatic mission by Commander Hurricane.” 'Not exactly true, but let's not break the bad news all at once...' Steady thought. “Our forces have been waging a valiant war against the oncoming winter, a war you have already benefited from.” He added with a pointed glance at their leader. “But we aren't winning this fight. We were told of an weapon that could change the course of the war, but... we never imagined something as amazing as this!”

Their leader seemed to be warming somewhat, the whine of her blades dropping a note as she thought this over.

'Bad as the Commander is going to want this, we've got no idea how to move that thing. I hope one of these mares will help us out voluntarily... The alternative...' He managed not to grimace as he continued, “It seems your tribe has already left for the safety of the south. Will you help us take the fight to the winter so that we might drive it back and thaw both our homes?”

The white unicorn with the deep blue mane gave the leader an anxious look and said something he couldn't hear. She answered, and the blue-maned one put down her kettle and trotted closer to continue their whispered conversation. A moment later, things got loud.

“WHAT?!”

More frantic whispering from the deep blue-maned one followed.

“She wouldn't leave us! I asked her to let us stay!”

This seemed to have hit a nerve, as the blue-maned mare was no longer whispering.
“Yes, and that's probably the only reason we aren't being tried for treason!”

“What are you talking about?!”

“Shining, your sun burned down much of the city and melted the princess's castle!”

“But we would all have been frozen out eventually! She can't be that mad about this...” The gray unicorn looked around her at the charred remains of the city core before finishing in a small voice, “can she?”

Steady didn't know quite what to make of all this, but he felt a strange urge to hug the gray unicorn who had taken a shot at them not three minutes ago.

However, before anypony could make a move, a white-orange streak fell from above and flattened the yellow-maned unicorn to the ground, knocking the wind out of her. With a startled 'ooof!' she lost her hold on the roulette orbiting her body, and it did what it was designed to do – explode. The ring of knives flew apart and over the heads of the ducking pegasi glancing off the kettle that the Ep was hiding behind. Two of them buried themselves several inches into the hardwood rifle Shining had lifted to shield herself, but impressively, no pony was hurt.

Steady held out a foreleg to stop any further reaction from his unit and resisted the urge to facehoof.

“Thank you, Flare, for that heroic display of bravery against a friendly civilian.”

The grinning mare looked suddenly indignant from her perch atop the gasping unicorn.
“Friendly?!”

Steady did face hoof this time, but made sure to wink at Flare before continuing. “Do I have to remind you that this is a diplomatic mission, or have you now conceived of a way to pick up a a sun that doesn't involve Private Sand's equipment?”

The tension that had threatened to boil over into violence seemed to subside as Steady publicly berated Flare, and upon seeing a mare in their ranks, the blue-maned unicorn unconsciously stood up straighter and stopped crossing her legs.
Flare climbed off the bruised unicorn with an apologetic smile and offered a hoof to help her up, but the yellow-maned mare struggled to her hooves by herself, images of crawling things hidden under feathers still fresh in her mind.

“My apologies for this misunderstanding,” Steady continued as he took a cautious step towards the gray unicorn who was still looking distraught at the news of her de facto banishment. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

Behind him, Sand Storm whispered to Squall,
“What is he waiting for? Why doesn't he strike? We need to win this fight!”

Squall gave the younger soldier a knowing look and whispered back,
“You don't get to the rank of commander by being a fool. I think Steady might yet get us what we need without a fight. Maybe even without hurt feelings... How much easier will this be if they help us willingly?”

Sand looked uneasy.
“But they're deformed! Just look at them! How can we treat them like pegasi?”

Squall just smirked.
“It's that kind of thinking that forced you to wear a cup for the first three months after Flare joined the unit.”

Sand grimaced at the memory.
“Kick me once, shame on me. Kick me twice... uh... what was it... I don't want to get kicked again.”

Squall just chuckled.
“No. No you don't, so let him work and follow his lead.”

By this point Steady had managed introductions of his unit to the unicorn leader, Shining Mind and her two fellow physicists, the blue-maned Specular Reflection (whom everyone called 'Spec,') and yellow-maned Pie, and since it seemed worthwhile to be gentlemanly, he'd even nodded to acknowledge the presence of their Ep. Somehow these crumbs of etiquette had convinced Shining to put down the blades. As everyone gathered around he gently coaxed out the story of what had happened. When all three unicorns had finished their parts it was Sand Storm who spoke.

“Huh, figures. What kind of morons build a sun with no off switch?”

The three unicorns glared at him, but before they could reply a timid voice answered.

“It's... It's not their fault! The Princess was pushing us all so hard to get it working that they just forgot.”

There was stunned silence as the seven ponies regarded the shrinking earth pony who had come out from behind the kettle.

“And they work with Eps,” Sand spat. “Commander, why-”

“Hey! At least she doesn't have a dick stuck to her face like you four do!” Flare objected as she stepped between Verdant and Sand. The three unicorns wore expressions of shock at the vulgarity, but Sand Storm just grumbled and backed off a few paces.

“Well!... At... at least we're not crawling with mites and vermin!” Spec sputtered indignantly.

Flare seemed honestly surprised by the hostile looks she was getting. “What? Sand Storm's a dick. You have to stand up to him sometimes, and I didn't see any of you about to.”

Spec seemed to be winding herself up further
“And this is not a... a phallus! It is a fine white horn, and the match of any of the Ladies of Court!”

“Whoa there, settle down now, I didn't mean any harm,” Flare placated as she held up a hoof and stepped back. “I thought you knew what we called your tribe in the force.”

Steady was shaking his head at Flare, trying to avert further disaster, but her vision was fixed on the indignant mare advancing on her.

“And just what, pray tell, are we called?”

The yellow soldier pony with the brilliant orange mane looked vaguely ridiculous as she shrugged in her armor and took another step back, all the while answering honestly. “Well, the boys are twin dicks, and you'd be a she-dick.”

There was an indignant scream of rage and Spec was on her, flailing and doing her level best to beat the pegasus mare into the ground. Fortunately for both of them, metal armor and combat training meant this had little effect on Flare, who was dodging quite well.

As Spec finally succeeded in wrapping both hooves around Flare's neck, a bemused Squall interjected;
“Hey, didn't you just finish telling us that we're crawling with vermin?”

Spec froze absolutely still as her eyes took in the sight of her own hooves buried in Flare's yellow fur. A second later Flare caught up with the conversation and rippled the feathers of her wing.
“Oh, don't worry, you get used to the itching.”

“EEEWWW!!!”

Spec leapt off and began frantically scraping her hooves on the ground, trying to clean them of contamination. A second later she caught sight of the kettle of boiling water. Pie realized where she was going just in time to dump the kettle out on the ground, cooling the water to merely scalding before Spec plunged her front hooves into the muddy puddle.

Steady had one hoof pressed firmly against his face as he asked, “You do know those tales about mites and vermin are just propaganda, right?”

“Really?” Pie asked incredulously.

“But I thought-” Shining paused as everyone looked at her, then forged ahead, “I thought that was why we tell little ones not to touch birds.”

Steady groaned, but replied, “That's something we tell our foals too. We tell them not to pick up baby birds because we don't want more pets around the house. Pegasi bathe regularly, and as members of the force, we hold ourselves to even higher standards of cleanliness. You won't find anything nasty on us!” he added with some disgust.

Pie and Shining looked somewhat embarrassed while behind them Verdant was still trying to coax a shivering Spec out of the mud.

“At any rate,” Steady continued as he shook his head, “what do you intend to do now? If I heard right, you wouldn't receive a very warm welcome if you follow your tribe south, and they wouldn't have need of the sun anyway.”

There was a long silence before Pie spoke.

“He's right, you know. If we go home now we'd be lucky to stay out of the dungeon. There's no guarantee that some grand gesture would save our skins, but if you pegasi,” she glanced sharply at Steady, “give credit where credit is due then we might stand a chance. Goodness knows we could all use some goodwill about now.” she finished, watching Verdant trying to wash the mud from Spec's white coat.

Steady smiled, “If your sun can save our tribe from the winter I don't think you need fear a lack of recognition. We certainly couldn't craft such a thing on our own. But there is still the matter of how we're going to move it...”

Shining perked up noticeably as the conversation worked back to matters she could handle, and she turned and led them back towards the building.

“Oh, well, there you're in luck. We've been enchanting saddles with special shielding and tow spells to enable us to pick it up, and we already have three of the four done, and the last nearly done.”

Pie's face took on a look of concern.
“Uh, Shining? I thought we agreed we still had one more to start.” She prodded with a gesture at the three heavy canvas lifting saddles sitting in a pile near the door. “We still have one left to start on.”

Shining sniffed, “Honestly Pie, I thought only Spec had such an inflated sense of fashion. We're all physicists and engineers here, and we're not on a designer's runway. Come along...Commander Hoof. I still need to put the shielding into place, but it's otherwise ready, and more capable in some ways than the others.”

She opened the door to the smaller side room where they stored some of their gear, and Steady noticed her seem to steel herself before stepping into the room, though he couldn't imagine why. Claustrophobia was a rare affliction among a tribe that might spend hours in the clouds, unable to see to the end of their own noses. He followed a moment later and paused, momentarily stunned with one hoof forgotten in the act of holding the door as she continued.

“I don't know what the others think is so wrong about this saddle; they all chose good sturdy ones that will wear well, and I can't blame them, but they don't have so much as a single pocket between the lot. This, on the other hoof!” She proudly pulled on the saddle and snugged up the corset laces in the sturdy fabric. “This has little straps and clips all over! I've got space for both my good hammers here,” she added as she slipped them into the loop of a wide strap on her right side south of the navel, “and there's a matching one on the left for a couple of spell books, and two more up front! There's even a place for my reading glasses,” She added happily as she clipped them into the garter-belt clip on her left flank.

Steady couldn't help it. He was absolutely beet red, and as she turned in his direction he let go of the door and sat down at a convenient table very quickly.

“Uh... It's very nice...”

Steady had no doubt at all that the silk and satin outer fabric would be comfortable, nor that the wearer would be able to exert herself extensively without discomfort; that was what the designer had had in mind when they added the wide buckle tie downs to the bondage saddle and corset. Unfortunately, the fact that this mare was apparently so oblivious that she had selected strappy fetish wear over more conventional clothing... he couldn't decide if it was adorable or upsetting. And regardless of his personal prejudices, he also couldn't get up from the table at present. Steady tried to recall the math section of his training from the academy.

“Well, I'm glad somepony likes it, I already spent days working on the lifting and holding spells so this one can lift the sun. It was the prototype, so I added some other spells as well, but when I showed it to Pie and Spec they started acting really strange and insisted on sending the Ep out for another boring saddle.”

“Uh...”

The door opened again as Flare joined them.

“Hey Steady, I've got Squall and Sand helping the others set up for this next spell thing they've got to-”

The only sound in the room was the slow 'creeeeeeek clunk.' of the door swinging shut behind Flare as she and Steady stared.

“What?” Shining asked.

“Oh sweet buck you look hot!”

Shining Mind just smiled, “Actually, it's surprisingly breathable and cool –that's part of the reason I picked it out.”

The look on Flare's face had become unmistakably predatory as Steady reached out and whispered firmly.
“Friendly. Civilian.”

Flare gave her seated commander a sour look, then stepped over and ran a hoof admiringly over the corset/saddle. “You know, we are in something of a hurry... You said it takes four ponies to lift the sun, right?”

Shining nodded, “I might be able to do it by myself with this augmented saddle, but the others are simpler, and the wearer has to bear the weight directly. Three can carry it if they have to, but four is much more sustainable. If I finish the sun shielding on this one we could leave in a couple of hours.”

Flare's grin was growing larger.
“And if we have to build another from scratch?”

“It'll take another two days.”

Flare spun around into the full brunt of her commander's glare. “Sir. I propose we leave as soon as possible with what we have. Time is of the essence!”

“Exactly.” Shining amended. “We probably only have four days left until the sun explodes.”

“Explodes?!”
“Explodes!?”

Shining looked quizzically at the two startled soldiers. “Well, yes. I did mention that's why they evacuated, didn't I?”

“No!” Flare replied, advancing on her, “No, you very much did not!”

And with that, Steady began to laugh, a deep hearty sound that soon had both mares' attention.

“Well, then, it looks like we really are in a hurry. We have no choice now, do we? The four of us will have to fly the sun out as soon as possible, and as that last saddle won't fit any of the stallions, I suppose you get to wear it, Flare.”

The sudden change from predator to deer in the headlights was so fast he almost feared her face might stick that way.

“Won't that be a sight to see? Why, when we show up with the sun, our pictures will be in all the newspapers! Thousands of friends and soldiers coming out to see us! In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the pictures wound up in the history books; the return of the four pegasi with the unicorn sun.”

It turned out that a yellow coat could turn white in mortification.

“I'll go help the others with that last saddle!” Flare squeaked as she galloped from the room, slamming the door behind her.

Shining gave the closed door a disapproving glance and muttered something about shallow ponies as she tucked another spell book into the front leg tie down. Steady sighed and finally managed to get up from the table.

“At any rate, we'll be back in a few hours. We'll work out the details then.”

An hour later, and for the first time in months beyond memory, the four pegasi had made beds for themselves in the warm, soft clouds above the shining sun, soaking in the warmth and getting their first sleep in nearly thirty-six straight hours.

Ch. 3 Along for the Ride

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

(Link to the dramatic reading on YouTube)

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Three: Along for the Ride

… One week later ...

The blurred shape of the monster flashed in and out of view as Steady drove it onwards through the clouds. It ran. They always ran. From the very first time Commander Hurricane had tracked one down and in every battle since, the hardest part had been finding and chasing the demons, fighting to get close enough for a strike. Then came the ducking of hooves, dodging the bite of those freezing teeth, and the chill to the very core when a blow could finally be struck and the thing dissolved.

Now for the first time their very flightiness worked to the pegasi’s advantage. Steady heard a high pitched whistle above and to his right, and answered it without thought. When working and fighting in the clouds the pegasi relied on a code of whistles to avoid collisions and carry out complicated formations. Not that this was a particularly complicated formation. A net required so little skill that even the young recruits were lifting their own weight.

The demon he was chasing dodged right and Steady countered, herding it ever to the south as the noise of other demons driven by other soldiers became audible all around him. A glance at his compass confirmed his direction, and around him, the impenetrable mass of gray clouds began to echo with more calls and sharp whistles as the soldiers drew the net ever tighter.

The ever shifting mass of gray shapes scrambled any sense of direction or orientation – it took long training to navigate in a soup like this, and only the whistles around him gave any indication of his real direction and speed. As far as is eyes knew he could be flying in any direction, five thousand feet above the ground, or just five; like the addled dream of an uneasy sleep, the clouds surrendered no clue about what lay just out of sight, only ten feet away.

In a flash, one blob of cloud resolved itself into the shape of a pony, and a familiar voice called out over the roar of the wind;
“Hey Steady! How many did you bring this time?”

“Three more! You?”

“Just three?” He shouted back, “You’re getting rusty, you old codger!”

Another windigo suddenly doubled back on them and tried to charge by over their heads, and Steady had to move fast to turn it back. The network of whistled commands was now quite loud, and he could begin to make out other pegasi flitting in and out of the clouds around him as the beat of their wings was joined by the growing thunder from the ethereal demons’ hooves. The clouds were thinning at last, and as they did, the massive size of the herd before them became clear to the awakening eye. Hundreds of the things rumbled through the sky, hemmed in on all sides by other soldiers like himself and driving ever onwards towards what end they did not know.

The pegasi knew. The days of watching these ice spirits reincarnate only hours after a battle were no more. The sun had seen to that.

As the last clouds thinned and fell away the true scope of the drive became clear; at least one hundred fifty pegasi drove the two or three hundred demons on into the warm, clearing air. The breakneck speed they flew at and the adrenaline rush from the drive kept them all going, windigo and pony alike as the clouds resolved themselves into a huge plane, miles and miles high, that they had just emerged from like some specks of dust falling from a grey stone wall. Ahead of them a bubble was carved out of the clouds, many miles wide and tall, and the ground was at last visible far below them, stretched out like a soft white carpet, dotted here and there with tall tree tops or the occasional roof.

The demons didn’t like it. They were creatures of snow and cloud, at home in the blank gray of the winter sky and the clear vista spread out before them spoke of exposure and danger. The pegasi’s job always became more difficult now, but after days of practice they were ready, and any strays were swiftly bucked and stabbed until they rejoined the charging mass.
The light around them grew steadily, but its source was still unclear. The open air grew around them as they left the sanctuary of the clouds further behind, and a dim ring of orange light began to show up ahead, like the outline of some great slumbering eye, dimly visible and flickering slightly at the edges.

Suddenly the eye opened.

Like some creature from the depths of Tartarus, blinding, burning light and heat poured forth, incinerating the first demons before they could even scream. The rest of them tried to flee, but by now they were far too close to the sun, and the sound of their shrieks echoed through the valley below as hundreds of them burned away into nothing, never to be seen by a pony again.

Steady beat his wings to gain altitude, shielding his eyes as the source of their artificial eclipse moved back into a lifting role. It hadn’t take long to find four of the heaviest lifters in the force, and they had been carrying the sun suspended beneath them for days now, trading off in shifts as the pegasi drove north into the homeland of the windigos. Each saddle not only supported the sun, but also shielded the wearer inside a reflective bubble that kept them from being roasted by the intense heat pouring off it. As Steady watched through squinted eyes, a different pegasus let her line go slack, and as the other three lifted the sun, this pegasus took up a position in front of the sun, projecting a cone of shadow against the northern cloud wall several miles away. The next group would be due in but a few minutes.

“Hey, Steady! How’s it feel to be on the winning side for a change?” Another friend called as he took up a station beside the commander.

The echo’s of the demon’s screams were only now finally fading away, and a shudder ran down his spine as Steady tried to smile.
“It feels a lot more productive. We should start to see some warming soon if we keep this up.”

“You know it! Leave it to Hurricane to turn a rout into a victory march. We’re burning them up fast, and they’re not coming back now. It’s only been a week and they’re already getting hard to find out there. Those first few days we could bring back three hundred in five minutes! How long were you out there hunting?

Steady turned, banking in a long slow circle above the sun and basking in the fierce heat.
“Nearly four hours. And they’re not just getting harder to find; the west and east teams are doing a run every two hours, but we’re having a rough time finding them to the north…”

“Ha! The fools must have left their homeland undefended, sent everything they had south!”

Steady remained silent as the other soldier grinned widely. “It’s like the fourth Ep rebellion all over again; Herd the fools together, a spear here, a kick there, and soon enough they’re nothing but a herd of mindless beasts and it’s raining ponies off the edge of the cliff!”

Steady grimaced and changed the subject.
“How are our guests doing?”

“You mean the pack of she-dicks they’ve got the green recruits shepherding? You worry too much. Hurricane’s making sure they stay out of trouble. We all knew she could lead, but who knew she was a diplomat too?”

…

Shining Mind looked out over the edge of the basket once more to clear her head. The small wicker basket was confining enough to put her on the edge of claustrophobic panic, but balanced against the miles and miles of open air in every direction it could be… managed. It had been as they were rudely hoisted aboard their new homes that everyone had discovered Spec’s fear of heights. The unicorn had spent the first six hours clinging to the bottom of her basket for dear life, and still insisted on keeping her head below the outer rim so she could maintain the illusion she was in fact in a large swing, only a foot or so above the ground.

The four of them were divided between the two baskets that had been designed for lifting supplies. The pegasi understood that an army flies not on its wings, but on its stomach, and from time to time, convoys of such supplies could be seen passing by far below them. Above them, a sort of mushroom shaped canopy had been strung, catching the hot air rising off the sun below and keeping them bobbing in the breeze. A couple of pegasi on duty with them kept the two baskets from hitting each other or wandering off, but showed little interest in the physicists.

Pie reclined against the back of the basket, her eyes half shut.
“I feel like we’re on some kind of never ending train ride. Every so often the conductor blows the horn,” she made a noise halfway between the windigo’s howl and a train horn, “and we’re just stuck here waiting.” She closed her eyes and put a hoof to her forehead. “Are we there yet?”

The light from below cast odd shadows on the canopy over the basket, and the burning sunlight caused impressive avalanches and waterfalls far below as nearly a year of snow turned into a torrent of water, coursing through valleys and down mountain sides. The view above was even more spectacular. As the sun burned, it didn’t just thaw the land below, it also set up powerful thermals of warm rising air that went up and up and up, towering into the sky and sometimes even clearing the clouds directly overhead.
After nearly six months without sight of the sun or stars, more than a few ponies lingered in their tasks to look up at the small patch of sky cleared by the tremendous heat of the artificial sun. When it skipped across their skylight, the real sun seemed dimmer, but even more beautiful than they remembered, and the sky seemed to sparkle as though the world had been sprinkled with glitter, flashes of every color dazzling the eye as they stared high up into the blue. Indeed, during the three days that week where the sun had been visible high overhead, more than a few ponies had collided while staring at it, though even in late June, the high northern latitude apparently rendered the sun safe to look at.

The thermals also served to showcase the true might of the force gathered around them. The three tribes had known war before, but never before had the full might and fury of the Pegasi Command been airborne in one place. The rising thermals meant that all a pony had to do was spread and lock their wings, and the rising column of air would carry them skyward without so much as a wing beat. The sight of thousands and thousands of pegasi, many with weapons and armor circling over the sun in a huge column towering miles into the sky was something none of them would ever forget.

In the other basket a few hundred feet away, Spec and Verdant were enjoying lunch together, laying on their backs as the sunlight filtered up through the wicker, casting shifting points of light on the billowing canopy overhead. The usual unease Spec would have felt at being almost a prisoner in a cell with an Ep had been displaced those first few days by the sheer terror of the height at which they flew. The lowly Earth pony had done what she could to make the researcher comfortable, distracting her by getting her talking about their work, or, when she was too terrified even for that, by telling her stories of her home and family. A lot of it passed unheard, but with a captive audience, some of what she said got through, and as the first couple days had passed, Spec found herself opening up to her. She had even taken to calling her by her name.

Now, several days into their flight, boredom and homesickness had finally brought up the question most on her mind. The one she feared the answer to.
“Verdant? Do you think we'll ever get to go home again?”

The silence stretched on for a long time before Verdant answered.
“I don't know. If the pegasi succeed in driving back the winter spirits we'll be able to grow food again, to sustain the cities... But I don't know if it will really be home.”

“I know what you mean. All my life I've worked and studied to make something of myself, so I can fit in, go to the royal court and not feel out of place among all those important ponies. Now after what's happened...”

The silence stretched on again, so long in fact that Spec looked up to see Verdant staring at her with a strange expression.

“Spec... You're already more important than any member of the royal court, and... and you're a better pony than most of them.”

Spec looked confused.
“But I don't have any of their wealth, their prestige! Yes, I keep up with the court fashions, but I don't have the talent to make dresses like that. If I walked into a dance tomorrow they wouldn't even know my name.”

Verdant sighed.
“All of that wealth and power doesn't make them better ponies.” She seemed to think about it, then asked softly, “Do you remember the stories I told you about my mother?” Spec nodded, “Did you ever wonder why I never mentioned my father?”

“I... no, I didn't even think to ask...” Spec answered, looking sheepish.

“That's because my father is a member of a noble house. He spent his days in the marble halls you want so badly. And when the doctor discovered I wasn't going to be born with a horn he expelled my mother from the house to work the fields.”

For once, the usual, thoughtless reply would not come. Spec's unease showed on her face as she worked the usual accusation over into a question.
“But... I thought Eps – I mean earth ponies, were always trying to climb up the social ladder?”

Verdant held her gaze as she replied.
“Spec, I think you know that for the lie it is. My father beat and raped my mother, and if that doctor had found a horn on my head, then the only contact I would ever have had with her would have been as my wet nurse.”

Spec just stared in shock. One heard the stories of course, but they were just stories... weren’t they?
“I... I'm sorry, I had no idea...”

Unexpectedly, Verdant smiled and put a hoof on her shoulder.
“Don't be. My mother loved me very much. When I was younger I used to help her clean some of the mansions, and I got to see how unicorns like my father raised their children. He may have had money, but he displayed more love to his pets than to his children. I used to sneak into the library to study after the lights were out when I was supposed to be cleaning and some nights I could hear the crying through the wall.”

Spec's eyes were wide, “You mean they're really...?”

Verdant relaxed a little as she sat down next to her. “I'm sure they're not all as bad as my father was, but yes, that is considered normal in those social circles.”

Spec found herself shivering as it all began to sink in. Most of her life had been spent with her nose in a book, intent on her studies; there had been little time or reason to question social norms. In a moment of courage, Verdant took pity on the shaking unicorn, and put a foreleg around her shoulder.

“It's okay, Spec. It's not your fault.”

“Thank you for warning me. If I had known...”

Verdant just smiled. “Hey, what are friends for?”

The next several days had seen their friendship grow under the continued stress of their traveling situation. Every so often the pegasi would lower the sun towards some high spot on the ground below and hold it in place while the ground was cleared of snow, ice, trees, and anything that could be made to burn. The resulting clear spots became supply dumps and sleeping barracks for the soldiers coming off duty, but the same courtesy had not been extended to the four of them.

Using the small relief hole on the corner of the basket had been quite embarrassing enough in such close quarters, and though sleeping had not been a problem, the unwanted attention they had been getting from the soldiers was.
It turned out the pegasi's name for their tribe was not always used derisively, and it wasn't long before the three unicorns had to field some very... direct solicitations. When it became clear that they were not interested in bedding the entire command, some took the hint, but the more brazen pegasi began putting on very public displays of their equipment.

It was on that fourth day that Flare had flown up and landed on the rim of their basket, only to find Spec in near hysterics. It took several minutes and Verdant's help to calm her down, and as she began to explain, a particularly well endowed stallion with a dark green mane chose that moment to give them all a clear view.

“Oh, for the love of-” Flare muttered before bellowing in voice that would have shattered glass, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GRANDMA!”

The stallion blushed red enough to resemble a holly bush and flew off with his legs clamped tight together as Flare fell back into the basket laughing. As two very shocked ponies stared at the mare, she managed to get herself under control enough to explain.

“Sorry, girls, I forgot some ponies have trouble with this kind of crap.”

Poor Spec looked like she was about to explode.
“Trouble? Trouble?! In the last two days, you... barbarians have offered me every sexual act I have every heard of, and at least as many that I haven't! And when I made it quite clear that I wasn't interested, then you started flying by and flashing your genitals!”

Flare gave her a level look.
“They're called dicks, you know.”

If anything, this only incensed Spec further.
“They weren't all stallions!”

Flare's face suddenly brightened into a wide grin.
“Really?! Did you get their names?”

While Verdant's jaw fell open in consternation, Spec had suddenly begun to turn very red indeed.
“Um... No! No, of course not!”

An astonished Verdant looked back and forth between the blushing unicorn and the disappointed looking pegasus. After a moment, Flare brightened.
“Oh, well. At any rate, I think I have a solution for you.”

“You do?” Verdant asked shyly. “But we've already asked the ponies that bring us food and they just laughed at us.”

“Oh come on now, you girls have got to learn to stand up for yourselves. Here, let me go get some rocks and I'll be right back to teach you.”

“Teach us what?”

“How to use this, of course.” Flare replied matter-of-factly as she tossed the slingshot into Spec's startled hooves with a wink. “It's a valuable skill every mare should know.”

Blunt as the suggestion was, it had worked surprisingly well, and within an hour, Sand Storm wasn't the only pony with a deep respect for Flare's marksmanship.

…

As evening darkened the already dim day into total blackness, the sun was once more lowered to clear a new supply dump and camp site for the advancing force, sending up huge plumes of steam and smoke in the process. The the night teams were only just now straggling in with some ridiculous complaint about not being able to tell night from day, and bringing with them supplies taken from last night's campsite. Steady and his team had now been on the wing headed north with the sun for over a week, though his duties had kept him from checking up on its' creators.

He had already been at the end of a long shift when Commander Hurricane had summoned them for a briefing on the night's new strategy. Several scouts had reported a deep valley to the west into which they could lower the sun and hide it from the windigos, and she had already sent out the teams who would be driving their quarry in from a much wider area. If the plan worked, they would gather together every one of the demons within a hundred miles of the south, east and west, then raise the sun and end them all in one brilliant final battle. One young commander had asked why they would not be going north, only to be reminded that less than thirty percent of the original demons remained.
“Tempting as it may be to drive them out of their own homeland as they did to us,” Hurricane admonished, “with so few remaining, it will take decades before they can rebuild, and the survivors will keenly remember the power of the sun.
“The further north we go, the colder it gets, and it will become harder and harder to operate effectively. Let us leave the survivors with memories of the pegasi tribe flying high and proud, not shivering in the cold that is the windigo homeland. We have nearly finished what we set out to do. That is enough.”

Now, so near the ground, the sun still carved out a bubble of clear air around it, though Steady had noticed it was really more like an ellipse than a proper sphere, with the sun always north of the center no matter which way they were flying. Tonight, and this close to the ground, the ellipse became a bubble centered over the cluster of mountain peaks that came together to form a small plateau. What once must have been a beautiful mountain field had been frozen for over a year when they arrived, and now under the roasting heat of the artificial sun it was turning into a rocky lake.

“Hey! Where are the unicorns?”
Steady called out as he pulled alongside one of the guards responsible for their guests.

The young soldier laughed.
“They're over the sun where they always are. This is their usual bath time.”

Following his pointed hoof, steady caught a brief glimpse of the canopy that supported one of the baskets as its edge flitted in and out of sight inside the huge plume of steam coming up from below the sun.

Steady felt his face reddening.
“And just whose bright idea was this, Private?”

The soldier's jovial look disappeared in a flash as he remembered who he was talking to.
“Uh... None of ours sir!”

“Really?” Steady asked flatly while the younger stallion squirmed. “Then it was the unicorns' idea to go in for a steam cleaning?”

“Uh,... not exactly, sir.”

“Then exactly whose idea was it?”

“Well... The Sergeant only assigned two of us to herd the baskets, and... we couldn't lift them even if we wanted to. The unicorns have been asking to land, but we're not authorized to-”

“Private, who is your commanding officer?”

“Sergeant Drill, Sir!”

“And he has some forty ponies under his command, does he not?”

“Yes, Sir!”

“Then I suggest you go tell him that Commander Steady is going to want to meet with the unicorns in one hour, and that he expects to find them happy, dry, and on the ground. Is that clear?!”

…

An hour later, Steady landed on the plane of hard stone and smoking rocks that had once been a meadow. The sun had melted the snow into a torrent of water that had washed most of the topsoil and plant life down the mountain side, exposing a couple of long sealed caves in the process, and what little had been left behind caught fire and burned down to nothing in but a few minutes leaving behind nothing but stone. He wondered idly how long it would take before some bright young thing pointed out the similarities between this camp site and an enemy city.

Before him, a cross-looking grey unicorn with an unusually poofy black mane was irritably giving instructions to a harried looking Ep as they clumsily attempted to assemble a pegasus military-issue tent with less success than might have been expected from a couple of physicists. Next to them, Spec was attempting to run a brush through Pie's mane and tail which had puffed up to three times their normal size, making her look as though she had been struck by lightning.

“I told you, it does this every night, I just have a naturally curly mane!” Pie complained as Spec attacked her errant tail with the brush. “You just have to- OW! You have to wait until it dries out again!”

Steady resisted the urge to face hoof and coughed to announce his presence.
“Good evening, ladies. I apologize for not checking up on you sooner; the Commander has been keeping us all very busy these last few days.”

Pie and Spec paused long enough to give Steady dark looks, but it was Shining Mind who spoke up.
“It's about time you showed up! These conditions have been completely unacceptable!”

“Yeah!” Spec agreed as she cleaned a big clot of yellow hair out of her brush.

“We've been traveling for just over a week now, completely cut off from basic supplies!”

“Yea-OW!” Pie flinched as Spec came after her with the brush once more.

“And do you have any idea how long it's been since I finished my last book?!”

Pie and Spec, poised in the act of agreeing with her found their mouths hanging open as they tried to catch up. Instead, it was Verdant who suddenly joined the discussion.
“Yeah! You only let us take what we could carry, and it's been five days-”

“And eighteen hours since I finished the last book we brought with us!” Shining shouted in indignation as she finished Verdant's sentence.

The reply Steady had prepared suddenly didn't work anymore as he shook his head in an effort to clear it.
“My apologies, but the force travels light, and libraries aren't exactly easy to pick up and move.”

“You're moving a sun, aren't you?!”

Steady grimaced and conceded the point. “I'll speak to the communications chief when we're done; I'm sure he'll have something to keep you occupied.” And before she could rally again, Steady gave the answer to the question he had been expecting. “I must also apologize for the conditions of your lodgings this past week, I had understood that you were getting to sleep in the camps at night with the rest of the force. The baskets you have been riding in are the biggest we have, but they were never intended for a week-long trip. We still need you with us should anything happen to the sun, but you can trade off if you like, set up a day and night shift so you can get some time on the ground.”

The others appeared grudgingly satisfied by this, but Shining Mind wasn't done yet.
“And what do you intend to do about the training situation?”

“Training situation?”

“Yes! Before we handed over the saddles, I gave each of the pegasi who carries one a quick overview of the sun. Since then you've given more and more soldiers the okay to carry it, but none of them will listen to the basic information!”

Steady raised an eyebrow.
“How long was this 'quick overview'?”

“I kept it to only four hours!” Shining replied indignantly.

Behind her, Verdant, Pie and Spec all grimaced at the memory, though Steady didn't notice.
“Well, for the first time in nearly a week I actually have a few hours to rub together. The war is going well, and-”

“Has the temperature risen yet?”

Spec's question caught them all off balance, and it took him a moment to reply.
“I don't know if we've seen an increase yet, but it's only a matter of time now. By our estimates, we've done in about seventy percent of the windigo population, and though it has gotten colder, we've also been driving north into their homeland. Back home, I'll bet the snow is already starting to melt.”

Spec seemed unconvinced, but before she could prod him further he turned back to Shining.
“Now, how about I walk you over to the officer's mess and you can give me that same 'overview'? Maybe I can pass on some of the most important parts to the officer in charge of training?”

…

Two hours later as the cooks were closing up the portable kitchen for the night, and thirty hours without sleep was catching up with him, Steady was beginning to second guess his offer.

“Now as you remember from appendix 4C, the real sun generates its heat and light by nuclear fusion just as ours does, but the real sun does this by compressing and heating it's fuel using it's enormous gravity. It also doesn't do a very efficient job of it; if we could bottle a piece of the sun's core equal in size to our artificial sun, it would only put off two or three hundred watts, about the same as a compost pile. So while the operating principal is the same, our artificial sun actually has to generate pressures and temperatures well beyond that of our sun to achieve it's energy output. And while most ponies know the sun is nearly 333,000 times as heavy as our world, not all of them know that its surface gravity is only 28 Gs.”

Steady's eyes fluttered closed for a moment and he had to force them open again.
“You don't say?”

Shining was smiling widely as she hadn't since her first (and last) guest lecture as a visiting professor of physics at the university.
“Oh, but I do say! Gravity is increased by mass and decreased by distance, so though the real sun is huge, it's less dense than you would think, so that means greater distance between the surface and the mass itself, leading to a surprisingly low surface gravity!”

“Fascinating.”

“It is! The gravity of the star heats the hydrogen and other light elements until they lose their electrons and form a plasma, and then that plasma is heated still further until the nuclei of the atoms slam together hard enough to fuse into new elements. The reason they release energy is because of the balance of forces inside the nucleus.
“The electrostatic force comes from the protons, and that pushes other protons away over a large distance, kind of like two magnets pushing each other apart. The nuclear force acts over a ridiculously short distance, just a few protons or neutrons across, but inside that distance it's a way stronger attractive force. Now, if we slam these light elements together hard enough to push past the electrostatic repulsive force, then the nuclear force grabs the new atomic particle and won't let go. The total nuclear attractive force in these light atoms is stronger than the total electrostatic repulsive force, so the net result is a more stable, lower energy atom, with the difference given off as heat, light and motion.”

Steady shook himself and tried valiantly to grasp hold of something he could understand.
“Lower energy state?”

“Yes! Let's say you have a boulder on edge of a cliff. For the purpose of this exercise, we'll call it Tom. Now the repulsive force of the cliff and the air pushing up on Tom is exactly equal to the attractive force of gravity pulling down on Tom, so as long as nothing happens, the boulder stays still in a stable energy state.”

Steady felt like his eyes were trying to cross.
“Tom?”

Shining blushed slightly.
“I try to name things when I teach – someone once told me it makes them easier to remember. Anyway, if we come along and push Tom sideways, off the cliff, the attractive force of gravity is suddenly much stronger than the repulsive force of the air alone pushing up. Tom falls to the bottom of the cliff, and in the process of getting to that lower energy state at the bottom of the cliff, he releases a lot of energy in the form of noise and crushed trees and rocks. Atoms work just the same way, they just pack more of an energy punch than Tom does.
“So as long as the total attractive force is stronger than the total repulsive force, fusion will make energy, just like pushing Tom off the cliff, but after a certain point, element number 26, Iron, the repulsive electrostatic force starts to become stronger, so at that point, making elements heavier than iron actually takes energy, like lifting Tom back up the opposite side of the cliff. This has all kinds of implications for stellar cartography!”

“I thought we were talking about your artificial sun.” Steady half pleaded, making Shining blush sheepishly again.

“Right! Sorry. Now our artificial sun doesn't weigh much of anything, so we couldn't go the gravity route to get fusion. Our 'sun' is made up of thirty-eight obsidian stones shaped like log splitting wedges. We enchanted them with complicated magic, but the base principle is simple enough; each wedge floats at a specific spot in the network that holds the whole thing together and exerts a tremendously strong compressive force at a microscopic focal point in the exact center. Our first prototypes used other materials that were easier to work with magically, but they all failed under the heat. Obsidian is a volcanic glass that's really heat tolerant, but also really stubborn when it comes to magic; that's why we had such a time getting anything to change after we lit it. We still can't get close enough to shut it down...
Anyway, we put spells into it that direct the heat and light outward, and just like water flowing down a hill can be tapped with a water wheel to do work, we rigged a spell that taps the energy surging out of the core to refrigerate the thirty eight shards and generate the force that holds it all together.”

That last part had caught steady's attention.
“So... you didn't build in an off switch, and you can't shut it off when it's running. Does that mean that it's going to run forever?”

“Of course not. Spec, Pie and I have been working on a way to inject something into the core that would shut it down. Remember how any element heavier than iron takes energy to fuse?”

It was Steady's turn to look sheepish as she peered expectantly at him.
“Uh, yeah, didn't you say something about a cliff?”

“Exactly. Twenty-six protons is the bottom of the cliff. It's the perfect balance between the repulsive electrostatic force of the protons vs the attractive nuclear force of everything else. Anything with more than twenty-six protons has a slightly greater repulsive force, and hence is starting to climb back up the cliff wall. Go far enough, up to the radioactive elements like uranium with ninety-two protons, and you're so high up the cliff that Tom starts to slide back downhill on his own. The electrostatic repulsive force gets so strong that the atoms start to break up on their own, releasing huge amounts of energy as they slide back down the hill toward the bottom.” She paused and looked up thoughtfully,” There are even some unicorns who think that we could use this to create a power source, thought of course that's just silly. Uranium is incredibly rare, so unless someone finds a huge deposit and mines it, it could never happen.”

Steady felt like he had almost grasped what she was saying, only to lose her again half way through. Ponies had always respected his intelligence, but next to a pony like Shining he felt like a little schoolcolt again. Yet as hard as it was to follow her in his sleep deprived state, he still couldn't resist trying; it was a rare treat to meet a mare who was neither his superior, nor his subordinate, and yet who could still hold her own in an intelligent conversation.

“Our best bet at this point is to try to find pure krypton – it's a noble gas that won't burn easily, and it's atomic number is thirty-six, putting it well up the wall of the cliff. If we can get it to one of the sun's intake ports, it will fuse it, sucking all the heat right out of the sun and shutting it down. Then we just have to pick up the pieces and take it home. The only other way would be to drop it, which would cause that explosion I warned you about.”

Steady nodded sleepily.
“Yes, I definitely remember that warning.”

“Good. Because if the sun lifting pegasi cross the beams of magical energy suspending the sun, they'll cancel themselves out and then the sun will fall. I just hope they've been teaching each other everything I taught the first group.”

Steady's sleepy red eyes had suddenly snapped open as the last sentence registered.
“Crossing the saddles' suspension beams will cancel them out?!”

“Well, yes. Every unicorn knows you can't cross beams of force.”

“We're not unicorns!”

Shining Mind paused with a hoof halfway to her mouth and a look of dawning comprehension on her face.
“Oh... Right...”

Ch. 4 Lest Darkness Fall

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

(Link to the dramatic reading on YouTube)

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Four: Lest Darkness Fall

Steady was already up and moving towards the bunk area where the tents were pitched.
“We have to go. Now.” He gave a complicated, piercing whistle, loud enough to make Shining flinch as her ears laid back, and within thirty seconds Flare, Sand Storm and Squall had landed in front of them.
“Grab a lifting harness and fit her up now. We have to make an emergency run to the front.”

The order was followed, and in under a minute, Shining Mind found herself stuffed into a harness and rocketing up through the sky into the darkness. The sun had moved on hours ago and taken its' bubble of good weather with it, leaving behind a low ceiling of black clouds that were only barely visible in the light of the camp fires below.
For the past week, the night teams had been waiting for daybreak to pack up and take to the air, for while every pegasus soldier carried a simple map and magnetic compass, navigating by them was difficult enough during the daylight; at night it was nearly impossible. When working in units, specialized (heavy) navigation equipment made the job possible, with the rest maintaining position with whistled commands, but as the camp lights disappeared beneath them, Steady gambled that Shining would prove worth her weight.

“Shining!” Steady shouted over the wind rush, “We need you to guide us to the sun! Can you do that?”

The unicorn looked startled, then realized the point of the question and concentrated. A dim glow formed around her horn, growing brighter and brighter until, with a brilliant flash, it formed a nearly solid beam of blinding purple light that illuminated everything around them, stretching out into the distance and disappearing into the clouds.

All four startled pegasi looked at the unicorn suspended between them, her eyes still closed in concentration, but now with a wry smile on her face.
“What? I could never keep track of my keys.”

With a collective shake of their heads, they moved on, gathering speed as they followed the beacon onward into the night. The sun wasn't very fast, but it had more than a two-hour head start on them, and the plans for tonight’s new tactics worried Steady even more. Their previous hunts had never allowed the demons anywhere near the sun, but this night, with the sun rising out of a valley and being attacked from all sides, an accident was now frighteningly possible.

After only half an hours flight north east, the rumble of ethereal hooves on the sky became audible over the wind rushing though their manes, and soon the pegasi began to catch glimpses of movement deeper in the clouds with the light of their purple beacon.

“We must be getting close now!” Flare yelled over the rushing wind. “Shining, does that thing-” she pointed at the glowing beam, “go over walls?”

Steady hadn't thought of that, and with a start he realized that every whistled call he had heard so far had been from above.
“Climb!”

The five began to rise sharply, and within moments, a huge spire of snow covered rock whipped past on their right. They diverted even more of their speed upward until they were flying almost straight up, yet the air around them seemed to be slowing down, rising with them up into the sky. As the soup around them began to brighten rapidly, they suddenly understood why.

In an instant they had cleared the edge of the valley, bursting up into the clear skies and turbulent rising air coming off the sun. As their eyes adjusted to the blinding light after so long in the clouds, Steady squinted down and nearly quit breathing.

Below them, the entire valley floor was smoking and boiling as a year's worth of mountain snow melted off in minutes, washing island rafts of forests the size of city blocks down the mountainside, burning as they went. The air trapped between the mountains gusted and churned like a pot of boiling water, and the two pegasi lifting the sun were fighting to stay aloft.

Two...

A crater a mile across, that's what Shining had said. If they turned and ran right now they might be able to put enough mountain between them and the explosion to live...
Steady dismissed the thought.
“Land, now!” He yelled, picking out a precarious looking spot on the mountain stone below. “Shining, I need you to show us where the two saddles are!” He shouted over the calamitous noise from below and over the wind roar that surrounded them.” Squall, Sand Storm, you need to find the broken saddles and get them back to Shining right now! You can repair them, right?”

Shining looked like she wanted to object, but one glance at the sun, swinging wildly between the two pegasi, made her blanch and simply nod.

Steady took wing once more and was off, streaking towards the two mirror bubbles that shielded the two carrier pegasi. The noise deeper in the valley was deafening, and a few attempts showed that even whistled commands wouldn't work. Turning over in midair, he shot up and around, using the shadow cast overhead by the carriers to let him get closer despite the burning heat.
It worked. The two mirror balls seemed to start as the ponies inside looked up, then gratefully heeded the order and began to climb south west, up over the valley wall. The air began to calm somewhat as they gained altitude, and as the sun broke over the valley wall, the icy screech of the demons was music to their ears.

The small bubble of clear air that had been trapped in the valley began to rapidly expand, scorching and boiling off cloud and demon alike, and setting up a whole new set of violent currents and updrafts. There was no whistle command for 'Don't cross the suspension beams', so Steady settled for 'keep your distance'.

It wasn't enough. As he watched from above, the violent air threw one of the carriers left and down into the other's beam, and a bolt of lightning seemed to jump between the beams and saddles with an electric 'SNAP!' loud enough to be heard even over the roar around them.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Below him, the two carrier pegasi threw up their front hooves to protect their faces as their saddles failed and the mirror bubbles winked out. The sun dropped toward the outer wall of the valley, and Steady had just enough time to feel grateful that half the tribe would still survive back at the camp.

Curiously, the sun seemed to dim as it fell, its blinding light fading rapidly to a soft glow.

“Three, Two, One...”

The sun disappeared into a snow bank, and like a switch being thrown, it was the black of midnight once more.

Suddenly finding himself hovering in black empty space, he wondered for a moment if he was dead.
It was the howling of the demons and the frantic whistled commands in the distance that convinced him otherwise.
Dropping carefully towards the ground, Steady ignored the chaos, lit his military issue lamp, a dim green affair that worked by mixing two liquids, and eventually landed on the ground near the spot where the sun had gone down.

Above him, he could hear the windigos closing in from all sides, so outnumbering the caroling pegasi as to overwhelm them. From the sound of it, all order had broken down.

The tiny pool of green light from his lamp stick was suddenly outshone by a familiar beam of bright purple light coming from up the hill, and withing a minute, Flare and Shining came trotting into view looking very confused.

“What did you do?!”

“What do you mean 'what did I do'? What did you do?! I thought you said it would explode if we ever dropped it!”

“It should have!” Shining replied, wide eyed, “How in Tartarus are we still here?!”

Steady took a deep shuddering breath and exhaled slowly, trying to clear his mind.
“I have no idea, but I'm not complaining. We need to get everyone back together before this rout-” he gestured up at the howling, churning blackness overhead, “gets any worse. Can you give us a some kind of beacon to home in on?”

“What do I look like, a signal fire?!” Shining asked indignantly, “Finding my keys is one thing, but I don't know any spell for that!”

One of the demons swung low enough to pass a few feet over their heads, and all three ducked as the biting cold pressed down on them.

“Well, do something, will you?!” Flare shouted angrily at her, “We can fly by night with a full moon in good weather, but trying to navigate in this soup is just nuts! If we can't pull everyone back together...”

Shining thought briefly, then closed her eyes and as they watched, first one, then two, and finally four beams shot from her horn into different parts of the blackness overhead.
“That's all four saddles.”

“Good. With any luck, somepony else will follow them down to us.”

About a minute later, somepony did. The crunch of gravel on landing announced the presence of one saddle pegasus and a certain very angry Commander.

“What in the bucking name of Tartarus just happened here?!"

“Commander Hurricane!” Flare blurted out as she scrambled to attention with Steady.

“We've lost the sun commander. It turns out that crossing the suspension beams cancels them out, and after we lost the first two ponies, they couldn't hold it together.”

Hurricane wheeled on the gray unicorn behind her.
“You thought you could keep this a secret from us?!”

“NO!” Shining Mind shouted back, “I told all the soldiers that you sent me not to cross the beams! But somepony couldn't spare the time for proper training!”

The commander looked furious, but whatever she was trying to say next was interrupted as another windigo swooped down at them from above. Hurricane spun around and delivered a mighty kick through the face, her hind legs and haunches freezing up as the demon screamed and dissolved into a cloud of mist.

“Well, fi-fi-fix it!” Hurricane growled through suddenly chattering teeth as she gestured to the many holes melted into the snow bank where the pieces of the sun had fallen.

“Are you out of your damn mind?!” Shining shouted back, completely oblivious to the black, churning, howling vortex overhead, “It takes at least three unicorns a day to light the sun, and that's assuming it's still working! You idiots just dropped my work into a bucking snow bank!”

Squall and another carrier pegasus crunched down beside her as she spoke, and as more of her attention strayed from the beacon, the last beam of light channeled from her horn dimmed and took on a distinct red tinge.

“Do you have any idea how long it will take to repair a cold shock this severe?!” She continued, jabbing a hoof at the snow bank. “I'll bet all thirty-eight parts have cracks and flaws now, and repairing even one can be a day-long job!”

“You mean it's useless now?!”

“Of course not! I just need a few months to repair it, then it'll be good as new!”

Hurricane's rage seemed to peak as she glared at Shining, but after a long moment's tension, a slow smile spread across her face. A moment later she actually laughed.
“So be it. We've wiped out at least nine out of ten demons by now, and though they'll take their toll on us tonight, they won't be back for at least a generation. Our job here is done.” She stuck out a hoof, and a confused Shining Mind reflexively reached out and shook it. “Thank you, good unicorn, for your service to the pegasi tribe. Your ingenuity has driven off the winter and given us back control of both our homelands.”

Shining was having trouble catching up, but Steady could see she wasn't happy about that last statement.
“Wait, what-”

“Soldiers, we have about half an hour until this place turns back into a frozen wasteland, so drop the saddles, it's time we were on our way home.”

With a wing beat strong enough to throw gravel into the air, Commander Hurricane was gone, and with barely a backwards glance, the two remaining carrier ponies dumped their saddles in a heap and took off into the churning black storm clouds overhead from which a light snow was already falling.

Flare and Squall shared an uneasy look as a Shining stood with her mouth hanging open, staring at the place were Hurricane had been just a moment ago. The roaring and howling of the snow storm overhead seemed even louder in the sudden silence, and the last red remnants of the beacon from Shining's horn seemed to fade away to nothing as it all sunk in. She slowly turned to look at the three pegasi with wide eyes as she realized how many hundreds of miles north of the last settlement she was, and for the first time since they had met, Steady saw fear in her eyes.

“You wouldn't leave me too...”

Before anyone could respond, a golden brown streak blundered out of the sky and bowled her offer her hooves, sending up a spray of gravel into the blowing snow.
“Oh... OW!...” Sand Storm winced as he got to his hooves, “I got the saddle; why did you switch off the beacon?!”

Steady shook his head to clear it.
“It's a long story,” he stated flatly as he picked up one saddle from the ground and began buckling it on. “You and Squall are going to help Shining fish out all the pieces from that snow bank and then we are all getting the buck out of here. Flare; you take that last saddle.”

Squall, Flare and Shining all breathed a sigh of relief as they set to work, though Sand Storm grumbled a bit. Flare mouthed a silent 'Thank you!' to her commander before brushing the new snow off and putting her own saddle on to join them.
Half an hour later they had found all the parts, divided them between themselves, and Steady had strapped Shining carefully back into the lifting harness. The flight back was even more harrowing than the frantic dash out had been, as the remaining windigos harassed them with white out conditions all the way, and by the time the five of them touched down, they were all half frozen and the snow was already knee high.

The purple beacon Shining had used to guide them ended at the mouth of a large cave at the edge of the mountain plateau where a very upset Spec was waiting for them.
“Where have you been? We were worried sick!”

Shining tried to explain, but by now her teeth were chattering so hard she was having difficulty just standing up. The Pegasi were doing somewhat better for their military training, but after being awake and on duty for nearly two days straight, they were all badly in need of rest.

“There's been a change of plans.” Steady said simply as he dropped his load of obsidian stones on the ground.

“You broke it?! You bucking broke the sun!?” Spec shouted from the verge of hysterics.

Pie and Verdant had come back to the mouth of the cave by now, and from the looks on their faces, it was clear they weren't happy either. As Pie tried to find the words, it was Verdant who stated the obvious.
“But... we're so far from the last pony settlement... Even the Griffons don't live this far north... Without the sun...” She trailed off, looking fixedly at the pegasi's wings. She glanced at her own bare back and seemed to shrink in on herself as her situation became apparent.

“And where did everypony else go?!” Spec continued, “An hour ago they all just grabbed whatever they could carry and flew off! What's going on!?”

Steady held out a hoof for silence, and amazingly, Spec actually stopped.
“The rest of the pegasi tribe is on their way home. Commander Hurricane's job is finished and they're done here. My unit and I have been on the wing for almost two days without rest, and are in no shape to join them, so we need a place to sleep. I see you've found yourself a cave. How large is it?”

Spec and Verdant stared at him, mouths open, and Sand Storm seemed to perk up at the news. After a moment, it was Pie who answered.

“It's big enough for two ponies at the shoulder, at least for a while, but it hasn't been exposed to the elements in a long time. The avalanches cleared the mouth here, but I don't know how far down it goes.

Steady wearily shook the snow off his coat and pointed to a couple of large baskets that could still be seen sticking out of the snow.
“That's good enough for me. You three; get as many of these supplies into the cave as you can, they're useless to us if they wind up buried in snow. The rest of you; grab your sleeping gear and lets get inside. It's been a very long day.”

As the four pegasi went to dig their sleeping bags out of the snow and the unicorns grudgingly set to work loading the supplies, only Shining remained still, staring in wide eyed terror at the claustrophobic mouth of the cave.

…

“We're not unicorns!”

As she processed his words, a feeling of dread crept over her as all the implications of this made themselves apparent:
'They really don't know.' She thought, 'It's just a matter of time until they make a mistake and destroy everything! They might even think I kept it a secret on purpose... Not that it will matter if we're all dead. How can I fix this?! How can-'

“We have to go. Now.”

She followed Steady as he trotted quickly towards the camp and stopped to pull a large sack out of a box with a large red plus sign on it. Moments later, the other three pegasi landed next to him.

“Grab a lifting harness and fit her up, now. We have to make an emergency run to the front.”

The three ponies descended on her, unfolding the sack and rudely shoving each hoof through it's matching hole so that she found herself wrapped in something half way between a corset and a hanging basket. A grope in a particularly sensitive area made her straighten sharply and look behind her to find Flare giving her a quizzical look. The glare she gave the orange maned pony could have reduced a building to ash, but Flare just gave her a disappointed look before taking to the air with the last lifting rope.

The next moment, her hooves left the ground and she was rocketing up into the low hanging black clouds. She realized before they did that they needed her help to find the sun, and the shocked silence when she used her key finding spell (turned up to 11,) was very gratifying. Before long she could feel they were getting close, and after a near shave with a mountain top, the five of them flew straight up over the mountain side and into the clear air above the cataclysm unfolding in the valley.

She could only stare. Below her the mountain side burned as pine forests, here since time beyond measure, dried out and burst into flames sending up choking smoke as hundred-foot giants were reduced to ash. The snow cover built up over the last year was melting off all at once, sending huge avalanches of snow and torrents of icy water charging down the hillsides, sometimes with enough violence to tear the burning trees loose and send them tumbling down the mountainside like a foal's toothpick forest caught in a garden hose. The thunderous noise was beyond anything she had ever imagined, and suspended over it all was her work.

She had built this.

The machine that wrought this destruction, that was turning a verdant valley into a gravel pit, this was her work. The feeling of fierce pride was so strong that she could ignore all the nagging doubts. It took a moment for her to understand what Steady was yelling at her.

“Shining, I need you to show us where the two saddles are! You can repair them, right?”

'Saddles? Repair?' She thought, and for the first time she really looked at the two ponies holding up the sun. 'Two...'
She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck standing up as the realization hit her. A quick mental calculation on the weight of the sun vs the lifting capacity of even two large pegasi gave an alarmingly slim safety margin. It had taken hours to activate the saddles, but if she didn't get them fixed and fast, then her work would very definitively be the death of them all. As all the doubts and fears rushed back to the forefront of her mind, she grimaced, and nodded, lighting her horn and sending out the beacon call to the two missing saddles.

The commander that had brought them all here took off and flew straight for the sun, probably trying to warn them, though what good it would do at this point she didn't know. The fear of imminent annihilation was a strange one; a part of her was kicking herself for not putting in some kind of safety feature when they still had the chance, while another wondered if she would feel anything if it did fall. This led to a complicated calculation involving blast waves, speed of nerve transmission, and ended with the conclusion that no one within a mile would ever know what happened.

The sun was moving again. Beside her, Flare gave a triumphant yell as it began to rise and track towards them, its' rays bursting over the edge of the valley and setting off a chorus of howls from the windigo herds caught too close. She was almost starting to breathe when the wind picked up again, throwing the two lifting pegasi together. She watched their mirror shields pop like bubbles as the saddles shorted out and the sun fell.

“Three, two, one...”

All light stopped. The sudden darkness was complete, the sun had fallen, but after a moment's reflection, she was still here. 'What? How?! How am I-' The thought was cut off as she slowly registered that somepony was hugging her tightly and had their head buried in her mane. She looked down and gently lit her horn for some light, to find that Flare was in fact snuggling her, her eyes still clamped shut against the coming fire.

Maybe it was the whole not being dead thing, but Shining found she wasn't really mad, and settled for clearing her throat forcefully, then waiting for the embarrassed mare to let go.

“Um... sorry about that.” Flare muttered, before she thought for a moment, then asked accusingly, “Hey, aren't we supposed to be dead?”

“Yes, we are.”

Flare looked around her at the small circle of rock visible in the light of Shining's horn.
“I may not be the brightest lamp in the hall, but I'm pretty sure we're still on the mountainside.”

“Yes, we are.”

Flare was now giving her a dirty look.
“Okay, so what the heck happened just now?”

“I have no idea. Want to come find out?”

“Fine. I just hope you remember where it went down...”

Shining had already lit her homing beacon spell and begun following the purple beam over the hilltop.

While it was impossible to tell in the blackness, Shining could feel the warm clear air overhead rising away, pulling in the frigid black storm clouds. As the noise behind them died away over the curve of the valley wall, the howling overhead intensified, punctuated here and their by frantic whistled commands as the pegasi found the tide of the battle suddenly turning against them. In under a minute her purple beacon led them over a small rise to a snow bank where Steady Hoof was already waiting. Her rage at seeing her work in such a state was such that she hardly remembered the yelling match that followed, that is until their Commander finished with: “given us back control of both our homelands.”

It was as if the floor had just fallen away under her. She and her sun had served their purpose, and now they were going to be left to find their own way home if they could, or much more likely, to freeze to death in this wasteland. Her own tribe had already abandoned her. If they could...

“You wouldn't leave me too...”

The next thing she knew she was tumbling across the ground with some soldier pony who had lost his way in the clouds. He muttered something she didn't hear, but despite the blow to the head and over the ringing in her ears she heard Steady come to her aid. They even helped her pick up the pieces of the broken sun and carry them back!

On the freezing flight back to camp Shining had plenty of time to think.

He had helped her. More than that, he had saved her life, not allowing the others to just leave her to die
in the snow, and the careful way he had helped her back into the lifting harness...

Shining had little experience with romance; her choice of education and career hadn't made things easy, and a near obsessive interest in whatever project she found herself working on had discouraged most admirers. The few times she had felt something for another pony, the feeling hadn't been mutual, and after a few embarrassing attempts, she had more or less given herself to her work, reasoning that love would come in its own time.

Of course, she had never dreamed the pony might be a pegasus. The tribes tolerated each other at best, but intermarriage was extremely rare. Of course one heard the stories about flings of passion, or Eps used for more than manual labor, but what she was starting to feel for Steady... It didn't fit in either of those categories. What little time she had devoted to dreams always featured a devoted husband who shared her interests and who's own passions she could find joy in. Would Steady be willing to study the sciences with her? Could she enjoy... what was it that he liked to do?

Her thoughts were interrupted as they touched down at the snow covered camp, and her cold stiff legs nearly gave out underneath her. Spec and Pie had questions of course, but Steady soon had everyone working together gathering supplies and loading them... into the cave.

A cave.

Why did it have to be a cave?

In less than a minute the pegasi had all disappeared through the cave entrance, while Pie, Spec and the Ep busied themselves digging the supplies out of the snow and carrying them into the cave. Just looking at the black opening of the tiny space was making it hard to breathe, and despite the freezing cold and blowing snow, staying outside suddenly looked very attractive.

“Shining, give us a hoof here, will you?”

She jumped about a foot in the air as Spec emerged for another load.
“Yes! Loading supplies! Um... How about I dig out the supplies and bring them to the entrance for you?”

Pie gave her a concerned glance, but as the icy wind picked up speed she didn't argue. That bought perhaps half an hour of work, lifting heavy baskets of supplies and bringing them to the cave with the Ep, but soon Spec told her to stop.

“We've filled this place for nearly two hundred paces; it's too cramped and we can't fit any more in here tonight. Just leave the rest for morning and come on in, Verdant's already set up your sleeping bag.”

The darkness of the cave mouth seemed to be closing in and tightening around her throat making her pant for breath, and she took several steps back as she answered.
“But- There must be more to do! I... We haven't moved everything in yet!”

“And we don't need to. Come on Shining, its well below freezing out there, you have to come in.”

Her teeth were already chattering badly, but she clenched her jaws and managed to protest.
“But... But... I'm not cold yet! I... um...”

Spec was really looking worried by now.
“Shining, you can't stay out here all night; You'll freeze. Besides, we need to close up the entrance to keep out the cold.”

Shining shook her head violently.
“NO!... I mean... No, you... you go get some sleep. I... I have work! Work that I need to do! I'll be in in a just a little bit!” And before Spec could protest, Shining wedged a big basket of supplies into the open mouth of the cave and packed snow tightly around it with her magic. After a moment to make sure Spec had left, Shining wiped her brow and sat down hard in the snow.

'Crap!' Shining thought to herself 'Now what?! I'm freezing my tail off out here, but that tiny cave...' She shivered all over from the terror as much as the numbing cold. 'Come on Shining, you're a physicist. You have to stay moving to stay warm; What can you do until morning?'

As the idea came to her, she managed a chattery smile and set to work, scooping up snow and compacting the big wet flakes into large blocks by squeezing them hard with her magic.
'It has to be big enough to sleep in... Come on, you can do this...'
The black hours of night slipped by as block after block was formed from the snow covered ground and hoisted into place. Several times the claustrophobic panic threatened her, and she stopped to pushed the walls further apart, and as the supplies started to come in she was forced to do this several more times, but eventually the base was set and the walls spiraled up to meet at the top of the dome.

The darkness still showed no sign of lifting anytime soon, and the cold and exhaustion were beginning to catch up with her, even her best efforts, while tolerable, felt too small and cold to let her sleep.

'I know! I'll decorate! That's a thing I can do!'

Hours of hard work later she staggered into the igloo for a snack when the basket at the mouth of the cave shifted and was pushed out, releasing a surprising amount of warm air that shimmered in the light of her horn. Pie looked concerned as she approached.

“Shining, you look terrible! You stayed out here all night, didn't you?”

“Noo, Of coursse not!” Shining slurred as she wobbled on her hooves.

“Oh really? You came in to sleep then?”

“No, iss not morning yet. Iss still dark side out.”

Pie gave her another worried look, glanced around the igloo, looked even more worried, and began digging through a basket of medical supplies. A moment later she came back with some strange smelling dried fruit.

“Eat this. No arguments now; doctor's orders.”

The food seemed to sway slightly in front of her, but then so did everything else. She took a mouthful and smiled at the pleasant taste.

“Thatss really good. What iss it?”

“It's a powerful pain killer and sleep aid. Good, isn't it?”

The only sound that answered her question was a loud snoring.

Ch. 5 Dim Prospects

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Five: Dim Prospects

Steady Hoof woke in total blackness to the feeling of a scratchy military issue sleeping bag on hard stone. With a groan, he rolled over and fumbled for the lamp by his side, mixing in a fresh charge of chemicals and using the soft green light to take in his surroundings. There wasn't much to see.

The rough stone all around him brought the last day's events back in a rush. They had won the battle against the windigos, but the sun was lost, and Commander Hurricane had left the unicorns to die in the snow while she claimed their home for the pegasi.

And then he had decided to save them.

Steady got to his hooves and packed up his gear, tucking it into a crevice in the wall and stretching in the hot dry air.
'Well, I couldn't just leave them behind. Hurricane has her own goals, but she probably won't care what happens to them now, provided they stay out of her way. Of course there is still the matter of how four pegasi are going to lift a pony each and still carry enough food and supplies for eight...'

With a shake of his tail, Steady wormed his way down the narrow cave passage, passing Squall and Sand Storm before nearly tripping over Flare who had staked out the middle ground between the genders in more ways than one. Continuing on, Spec was still sleeping next to their Ep, but the last two spots were empty, and with a worried glance backward, Steady climbed the rest of the way up the tunnel to the surface.

“Hey, give me a hoof here.” Pie asked as she lifted the comatose gray unicorn in her magic. “She stayed out all night, and we need to get her inside to warm up and sleep it off.”

Steady's eyes widened as he knelt down to take Shining onto his back.
“She stayed up all night? I know she's been through a lot this week, but why? It's freezing out here!”

Pie trotted ahead and pushed the box further out of the way so Steady could enter the cave at a crouch.
“She's always been claustrophobic, but I didn't realize it was this bad. This cave must have terrified her! I had to drug her to make her sleep.” Pie sighed and continued, “She'll be out for at least twelve hours, but I don't know what we'll have to do when she wakes up.”

Steady gently deposited the snoring unicorn on the sleeping bag and paused to brush the clinging snow from her coat before tucking her in. Her beautiful black mane spilled out around her head as he propped it up with a pillow, and he couldn't help but feel protective of her. As a soldier, he had done things he wasn't proud of, and dated more than a few mares, but Shining was... different. He couldn't follow a lot of the technical details of her work, but he found he really wanted to, and now that he wasn't a sleep deprived mess, he had hoped to learn more. Unfortunately, it didn't look like she would be in shape to hold up her end of the conversation for a while, and they had a lot of ground to cover when the dawn finally came.

Steady carefully turned and squeezed past Pie as he headed back to the cave mouth.
“Has the dawn come yet?”

“I don't know, I just woke up myself and found Shining in that condition. Did you get a look at what she built last night?”

With a start, Steady realized he hadn't noticed a thing about the outside world; he had had eyes only for Shining.
“Um, no, actually. It must have calmed down some though because it felt warmer and the snow and wind seem to have stopped.”

Before he could say more, the two of them emerged from the cave entrance into the cold outside air. In the dim glow of his lamp, it took him a moment to realize that the mouth of the cave wasn't outside any more.

Rising up, more than two stories overhead, the dome of the biggest igloo Steady had ever seen stretched up to its peak. The construction appeared at first glance to be seamless, but as he took a step closer to the wall, his mouth hung slack as he made out the outline of huge blocks of ice, each the size of a pony or bigger laid out in neat rows. All the supplies the pegasi force had left behind had been cataloged into rigidly straight alphabetical rows.

“How did she...? Why would she...?” He shook his head to clear it, then turned to Pie with a look of real concern. “She did all this in just one night? All to avoid going into the cave?”

“It looks that way.”

“Then we need to be well underway before she wakes up. If she can lift blocks like that...” He trailed off as he looked around the dim green interior of the dome. “Where is the entrance?”

The door turned out to be a sort of depression under the wall of the dome which had been plugged up with another ice block. As soon as Pie lifted the heavy block out of the way, a gust of even colder air began rushing in. The two of them quickly scurried down the shallow dip and outside into the howling snow.

If anything, it had gotten significantly colder since their return, and the darkness was still unbroken, the only light coming from Steady's green lamp.
“How can it still be dark outside? Did we sleep all the way through the day?”

Pie shook her head, a motion difficult to discern in the poor light and over the movement of her yellow mane billowing out behind her in the icy blast.
“I don't think so. If I had to guess, it should be about two in the afternoon.”

The snow gusting around them in the darkness was no longer the big wet flakes left in the wake of the sun, but tiny, hard points that stung as they pelted their coats and blew into drifts like sand in the bitter cold.

“But how can that be? I know some of the commanders were late getting into camp this week, but I though they were only making weak excuses when they said they couldn't tell day from night!”

Pie didn't look happy about this, and had already begun to shiver badly, even after only a few minutes in the icy wind.
“Can you still fly in this?”

It was a valid question. Had this been a training exercise with a group of green, well fed recruits he wouldn't have hesitated to take them out for a half hour flight, telling them all the way how lucky they were for the good weather. But this wasn't an quick joy ride with empty packs. They wouldn't be landing to a hot meal in warm quarters at the end of thirty minutes. When they set out, each member of his unit would have to carry not just the supplies for themselves, but for eight total ponies and each one of them would be carrying a pony's worth of dead weight as well. While this was possible over short distances in good weather where one needn't carry supplies, the prospect of lifting all that weight, on an endurance run for days, sleeping in the snow when they could, and navigating in total darkness by compass all the while? Steady didn't look away as he spelled it out.

“Not for the distance we have to go. If we set out in this, we could wind up lost, separated and frozen to death in the snow. The trip back is going to be difficult enough as it is, and it would be foolhardy to start out in these conditions. Besides, the Commander was right about one thing; with ninety percent of the windigos wiped out, it's only a matter of time until things start to warm up again. If we stay put for a week, we might even see the first buds of green starting to bloom.”

For the first time in quite a while, Pie smiled.
“Oh, that will be lovely! It's been frozen now for so long...”

“You got that right.” Steady agreed with a shiver. “Even the pegasi tribe was nearing the end of our reserves. If there hadn't been a way to take the fight to the winter, even we would have had to give up and travel south soon.”

Pie scowled.
“And after all we did for her tribe, your Commander is planning to just take over everything?”

Steady flinched.
“She didn't get where she is by running away. In a few years, things will settle down again to they way they were before. None of the tribes is in shape to fight a war, so they'll be negotiations and such, but eventually everyone will get home again.”

“Even us?”

Her expression was so sad and yet hopeful that he couldn't help but smile.
“I think so. The mess with the sun will fade with time, though it's not likely anypony will ever hear what really happened. It wouldn't look good in the history books if the mighty Commander Hurricane had to ask for help from the unicorns.”

Pie's shocked expression was clearly visible in the dim green light.
“You mean she's going to take all the credit too?!”

“Well, yes. Any idea that works is hers, and any plan that fails either was someone else's idea, or it didn't happen at all.” Pie was still scowling into the darkness, so he awkwardly tried to change the subject. “Say, I don't remember a path here last night...”

Pie looked down at the raised ice road leading off into the gloom and sighed.
“Well, Shining was out here all night; I guess she built more than just the igloo. Want to see where it leads?”

“If you can give us some better light.” Steady ribbed gently as he tried not to shiver.

Pie lit her horn and they began trotting along the path which wound left and right before doubling back on itself. Along the side, large basins, like ornamental ponds had been cast into the snow, some of them connected with ice waterfalls, and a few even had snow 'fish' suspended in icicles as if in the act of jumping. The two of them couldn't help but stare.

“They're beautiful...” Steady breathed.

“In a messed up, sleep deprived, 'have to keep working or will freeze' kind of way.” Pie replied.

The path began to climb as it returned, and it actually wrapped once around the dome of the igloo as it spiraled to the top.

“Holy... is that a lightning rod made of ice?!”

“She really didn't want to go into the cave.” Pie replied, eyes wide.

“Look at that! There are rain gutters and down spouts carved into the surface!”

“She really, really didn't want to go into the cave.”

The two of them paused to share a worried look.

“We need to make sure she stays asleep for a while.” Pie stated worriedly

“If she could lift blocks like this? Yes. We need to find a way to keep her calm so she doesn't collapse the whole mountain on top of us.”

...

A few hours later, after the others had woken and caught up on what was happening, Shining had become the topic of discussion. Nopony in either tribe was sure how strong the cave was, but they also didn't want to find out via unicorn panic attack, and a fervent whispered argument had broken out between Spec and Sand Storm.

“Even if you do put a bunch of warm coats on her, she still can't stay outside forever!”

“Well what do you suggest?!” Spec replied angrily.

“We've got a mountain of supplies out there; there must be a stockade somewhere.”

“We are not going to lock her up! First of all she's our friend, and secondly, she's claustrophobic; her fear of confined spaces is why we're worried in the first place! How would putting her in a different small box make this any better?!

“No, you don't get it.” Sand Storm replied irritably, “If we have a stockade, then we have straps and horn caps.”

Spec and Pie both shared a quick worried glance at the mention of the name. The prospect of sharing a tiny cave with a bunch of burly pegasi wasn't too bad given that Steady was trying to save their lives. The casual mention of a binder that rendered any unicorn defenseless, and the notion that they were readily to hoof...

“I don't think Shining would appreciate waking up to find herself tied into a ball and gagged.” Pie replied uneasily.

Sand Storm looked disgusted.
“You can keep your sick fantasies to yourself, unicorn. If your boss is going to cave the ceiling in when she wakes up then you need to put her in a horn cap until she calms down.”

Sand Storm turned and trotted up the slope of the cave towards the exit, presumably to produce the restraint, while Spec and Flare followed behind. After a short search of the inventory he dug into a basket and came back with a tapered cap that had several straps dangling from it.

“There. Problem solved.” He stated flatly, tossing it at her hooves. “Now if you'll excuse me.”

As he walked off, Spec ground her teeth as she tried to think up a good enough retort.

“Easy there,” Flare admonished, putting a hoof on her shoulder. “Sand Storm's just an asshole.”

“I just... I can't believe he would suggest something like this!” Spec fumed as she held up the cap. “Magic is a big part of what makes a unicorn a unicorn!”

Flare scratched the back of her neck uneasily.
“Well, I hate to say it, but... I think it might still be a good idea.”

“What?!”

“Just until she calms down you understand.” Flare continued, holding up a hoof for calm. “It would just be a for a few minutes, right? Long enough to get her out here into the dome where she can think?”

A certain part of her had to agree that, however distasteful, it was safer than hoping Shining could hold it together and not drop the roof on them all, but she wasn't going to admit it to this... this pegasus!
“You wouldn't understand! It just isn't done.”

With a dismissive swish of her tail, Spec turned on her hoof and ducked back under the cave entrance, only to stop dead in her tracks as she felt something splash across her back. She blinked, then slowly turned back around to face Flare.
“Did you just spit on me?!”

Flare raised an eyebrow.
“What are you talking about?”

Spec felt her anger building as she advanced on the orange maned mare.
“I'm talking about the fact that we're on top of a mountain, its way below zero outside, and the only source of heat is coming from us. What is-”

Her rant was cut short as a second drop of icy water struck the end of her nose. She stared cross eyed at the end of her own muzzle with a ridiculous look of confusion on her face for several seconds until Flare began to giggle.

“But... How...?” Spec paused to give Flare an indignant look that only made the snickering louder. “I don't understand; how is their liquid water here?”

“You science mares are so adorably cute when you're puzzled!” Flare ribbed as she brushed past Spec to inspect the wet spot on the ice wall. “See, it's just dripping ice, and barely a drip at that. Whats the big deal?”

Spec found herself blushing as she answered;
“The big deal is this place has been frozen solid for a year, it's been dark and snowing since we got back, and the sun has been gone too long to have provided the heat to melt the ice. That means...”

Flare raised an eyebrow once more as Spec's face lit up and she scurried back into the cave mouth and took off down the tunnel without a word.
“Hey! Wait up!”

They wormed there way around the others they passed in the tunnel, Spec leading them ever downward and deeper underground by the light of her horn, and as they went deeper, Flare noticed it getting hotter.
“Hey, where are we going anyway?”

Spec spun about with a look of childlike glee on her face, gripping Flare by the shoulders.
“To find the source of the heat! Did you notice how the three mountains seemed almost like one big mountain? And how the meadow between them was almost round? You know what that means!”

While Flare found herself enjoying the chase, Spec's explanation had cleared up nothing.
“What are you talking about? Heat from what?”

“Why, the volcano, silly!”

“The what now?!”

Spec was practically beaming by now, reveling in the moment of discovery.
“The volcano we're in right now. It must have been dormant for a long time, but I bet there's a magma pool or some hot springs down here somewhere!”

“And you want to go deeper?!”

For the first time, Spec really looked at the mare behind her and made out the worry on her face.
“Well, yes, we need to see what we're dealing with. Sorry, I didn't stop to ask if you were okay with this.”

In addition to her unease, Flare was beginning to sweat in the increasing heat rising up through the tunnel around them.
“Hey, I'm no chicken, but I am a pegasus. We aren't exactly built for work underground...” She added as she fluttered her wings in a familiar fashion.

Spec couldn't help but smile.
“Hey, if I can get used to the itching...”
She couldn't see Flare's blush as she turned back, but she did notice the pegasus mare seemed to be following closer than before as they continued down the tunnel slope.

The original tunnel seemed to be getting wider as they continued, twisting and turning as they past other branches headed up in other directions. Spec had to stop at each split and carve a number into their original route, lest they get lost on their return, but eventually, they came to a small cavern, perhaps the size of a room, where there tunnels came together and the path ahead was blocked by a cave in.

“Well, I guess that's as far as we go...” Flare said hopefully.

Spec didn't seem to hear her, and began to reach out with her magic, carefully shifting one rock at time as she cleared a path. Within a minute, curls of steam could be seen drifting up through the thinning obstruction, and when the last big rock was pried out of place, a wave of wet heat like a sauna washed out over them.

“Ewww... It smells like rotten eggs.” Flare complained as she wrinkled her nose.

“Well, yes, but it's not that bad. Come on!”

Spec's blue tail gave an excited flick as she disappeared through the hole in the rubble, and with a worried sigh, Flare shook her head and followed.

Even by the light of Spec's horn, the dense clouds of steam made it hard to gauge the size of the cavern they had found. It seemed that the rain water from above had been collecting here for millennia, heated by the magma far below, and settled into pool after pool of clear water. Some of the pools bubbled and boiled under the heat from deep below, and the hottest of these were colored deep blues and greens.

“Wow... These are beautiful...” Flare murmured as they stared into the clear cyan depths of the bubbling water.

Instead of the excited reply of science she had expected, Spec just sighed in relief.
“They are. I feel so much better knowing these are here.”

Flare raised an eyebrow at that.
“Uh, don't get me wrong, they are pretty, but what difference do they make to us?”

Spec gave her a worried glance before trotting off in a different direction. They climbed slowly uphill for a dozen yards before Spec dipped a fore hoof into one of the more shallow pools, sighed, and began to climb in.

“What are you...”

The white pony gave a long sigh as she lowered herself into the warm water, her mane and tale spreading out around her on the surface. After a moment she opened her eyes to look at Flare.
“We've been on the road, er, wing, for more than a week without a shower. Do I really have to explain the geology of hot springs to you?”

Flare blushed again, but shrugged to hide it and, dipping a hoof in the waters edge, soon climbed in as well, relishing the warmth.
“Ah... Is this what a spa is like in your tribe?” She asked lazily, her unease at being so deep underground temporarily forgotten as she stretched out.

Spec giggled.
“Well, normally the décor is a bit more refined.” There was a pause before she continued, the worry returning to her voice as she spoke.
“Flare, something is wrong.”

The soldier in her was immediately awake, a hoof already reaching out for the armor she had left up high above by her sleeping bag.
“What's wrong?”

Catching her alarm, Spec put a calming hoof on Flare's shoulder.
“Sorry, nothing like that. We aren't in any immediate danger down here, but I'm still worried.”

Her heart rate dropped a bit as she turned to ask in annoyance.
“Okay, then what's wrong?”

Spec looked at her as though thinking about something, then just spat it out.
“It's getting colder outside.”

That got a raised eyebrow.
“No it's not; We've driven back the windigos; It just feels colder because we've been traveling north.”

“Flare, this isn't a recent problem; it's been getting colder for nearly a year and a half now. Seven months ago I helped install a bunch of temperature sensors back home, with a few up the sides of the nearby mountains. We used a powerful, long distance spell, and even at this distance it still works. This past week, all the fighting you did... it hasn't gotten any warmer.”

That made Flare sit up sharply, the steam rising from her wet mane as she processed it all.
“But... how can that be?! We know we got most of them; at least nine out of ten...”

“I don't know, I don't understand it either, but its getting worse. I went back over my notebooks last night: The rate of cooling has been picking up, the temperature's dropping faster and faster! Whatever is causing this is accelerating.”

“If you knew all this, why didn't you say anything before now?!”

Spec looked hurt as she replied,
“I tried to ask that night we got to land, but nopony wanted to listen; you were all so set on killing the windigos.”

Flare had climbed out and was trotting nervously around the edge of the spring, the water still dripping from her orange mane and tail.
“But how can this be?! We know the windigos are spirits of ice and disharmony!” When she got no answer, her attention was drawn back to a very worried looking Spec.

“I don't know, but you can see now why I'm happy we found this place.”

Despite the heat and steam all around her, Flare felt a shiver run down her spine.
“How... How cold is it going to get?”

Her answer was level, but her voice shook a little as she spelled it out.
“The average temperature has been below 0º C for the better part of a year now. About six months ago it fell to -20º C, and it's only been sliding down faster since then. The last good reading I got put the average back home at around -45º, and though we've been enjoying warmer temperatures from the sun, with that gone, it may soon get even colder here...”

“But I thought it was getting colder because we were going north?!”

Spec shook her head, sending a fine mist of droplets flying.
“It was, but not within many miles of the sun. It was putting off so much heat that we were able to hold off the bitter cold, and even after it failed, the effect would still have offered some protection for a day or so.”

“But now that it's gone...”

Spec shivered visibly in the warm pool.
“Now it's going to get very, very cold.”

Ch. 6 The Frozen North

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Six: The Frozen North

Shining felt her world swirling gently around her as the dreamscape dissolved gradually back into the waking world. She was dimly conscious of the scratchy sheets around her and something caught on her horn, but the most pressing feeling came from her bladder. With a low groan she sat up, and the draft immediately chilled her exposed back and shoulders, making her shiver. She reached out groggily to shut the window over her bed, only to feel her hoof strike something solid that felt oddly like rock. Still only half awake, she stood up to look around, only to hit her head on the low stone ceiling. The darkness around her was nearly complete, and as her mind woke up she realized where she was.

Inside the tiny cave.

Her breath was already coming in rapid gasps as she felt the tightening feeling around her throat, cutting off her air. She managed a single strangled shriek and was dimly conscious of sparks flying from the end of her horn as a steady voice called out,

“It's okay, just calm down and follow me. The door outside is this way.”

She just about bowled the pony over in her rush to get out, and in a moment she burst through the wicker door and out into the free air! As her mind slowly calmed enough to permit rational thought, she looked around to see she was inside the igloo she dimly remembered building last night. The green light source following behind her was totally inadequate for a room this large, and without thinking, she tried to light her horn.

Nothing happened.

“Easy there, let's get that off you.” Steady admonished as he quickly undid the buckle under her chin and pulled off the horn cap.

Light streamed out from the tip of her horn now, showing the huge igloo more or less as she remembered it from her sleep deprived state. She gave Steady a long searching look as her brain tried to catch up with the events of the last thirty seconds.

“Wow, look at that.” Steady whistled softly as he eyed the mangled end of the cap, “You nearly melted it! Looks like you really could have brought the mountain down on us all.”

The accusation died before ever reaching her lips, and the still air around her seemed even colder than she remembered. With a shake of her head that flung out her black, sleep tangled mane, she asked simply,
“Could you please point the way to the facilities?”

Steady looked uneasy, but pointed to the ice capped door in the outer floor.
“We've been going outside for now, but I'm not sure you'll want to; it's really cold out there...”

Without a word, Shining turned, made her way to the door, and opened it with as much dignity as she could muster. The icy blast that came howling in as she shifted the ice block stole her breath away, and it took everything she had not to turn back, but her imagination of the smug look on his face was enough, and she slammed the ice block behind her.
Outside she would normally have trotted some distance for privacy, but the utter featureless blackness of the landscape was alarming enough without the intense biting cold. She was no stranger to winter, but this was a cold unlike anything she had ever felt before; It actually hurt just to stand still! She did her business as quickly as she could, but before the door was closed again everything had already frozen, and she was shivering badly.

Steady was waiting as she stumbled back in and by planting his front hooves he was able to buck the ice block back over the hole to seal out the cold.

“I wasn't kidding about the cold, you really need a proper coat and then some! Are you okay?”

Shining couldn't help but smile at the concern in his voice, though he didn't seem to notice over her shivering. The inside of the igloo was still below freezing, but it felt balmy after the cold outside.
“Yess, I-I'm O-Okay...” She paused as he wrapped a blanket around her, “Shoulddn't it be w-warmer out there by now? And shouldn't w-we have l-left alreaddy?”

The worried expression on the face of the same stallion who had flown into a blast zone to avert an explosion made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
“You were out for quite a while, and we've learned a few things. We should go talk to the rest of the group...”

The look of fear on her face as she stared at the impromptu door they had built over the cave entrance made him pause.
“I'll... tell them to bring their coats.”

…

Half an hour later, eight warmly dressed ponies were gathered around an ice block table near the center of the igloo under the green light from one of the lanterns. Their plans for an early start with the dawn were long dashed, and no pony had been sleeping very well, leaving the entire group irritable and snappish. The basic facts had been explained, but beyond the increasing cold and their inability to travel, nopony could agree on much of anything.

“Okay, slow down for a moment,” Shining objected, holding out a hoof, “If I'm hearing this right, it's not too cold to fly, but it is too cold to fly very far, right?”

“Yeah. I just said that.” Sand Storm grumbled.

Shining ignored the interruption and continued.
“And according to all of you, it's been getting colder and darker as we've traveled north, culminating in the current nipple freezing blackness out there,” Shining jabbed a hoof at the door as though the cold was a personal offense to her, “and yet nopony has any idea why?!”

“Of course we do! The few demons that survived the war must be hounding us.” Sand Storm explained, “We just destroyed their forces, and now they're out for revenge.”

“Oh for buck's sake, haven't you listened to anything I told you?” Spec fumed, brandishing a notebook, “I have detailed temperature records for nearly a year, and the temperature is still falling! Our sun and your war didn't make any damn difference!”

“But that's not possible!” Squall objected, “We put everything we had into this war! With the aid of your sun, we won! How can that not matter?!”

Shining was looking downcast and suspicious as she responded, “Well, how do we know they're connected?”

“That what's connected?” Steady asked, eyebrow raised.

“The windigos and the cold... All this time we've been taking it for granted that the windigos cause the cold weather, but did anyone ever actually check?”

“They're demons of ice and cold! How can they not be the cause of this?!” Sand Storm objected.

Pie was starting to look suspicious as well as a nasty thought occurred to her, “Fish are creatures of water, but only an idiot would try to stop a flood by killing all the fish...”

“You think we transposed the correlation and the causality?” Spec jumped in, clearly not happy about where this was going.

“We might have, though I'm not sure how we could find out...” Shining trailed off with an unhappy look. “But regardless of who or what's causing this cold, what's more important is how they're doing it. Do we have any idea why it's gotten so much colder as we've traveled north?”

“Sure I know why.” Sand Storm replied irritably, “It always gets colder and darker as you go north.”

The other pegasi nodded while the unicorn physicists looked stupified at this juvenile answer, but before they could reply, an unexpected voice lashed out in frustration,
“It's high summer, you dolt! The sun should be nearly overhead at noon at this latitude, and you've seen it up there, just where it should be at least twice in the last week!”

All seven of them looked in surprise at Verdant as she glared at the golden brown soldier pony.

“And just what would some dumb Ep know about the sun anyway?” Sand Storm spat as he came around the table towards her.

“We dumb Earth Ponies know plenty about the sun; it's only the single most important factor in growing food! We all know the basic information like sun angle above the horizon on a given day at a given latitude. You don't seem to have any problem telling us all about solar mechanics, even though you don't know the first thing about it!”

Sand Storm had now rounded the table and shrugged off his coat to show off his armor as he tried to stare Verdant down.
“And you think you do?”

Verdant seemed to have finally reached the end of her patience, and for the first time in her life, she was mad enough she didn't back down, instead taking an aggressive step towards the armored stallion.
“Well, we're only here because we built a bucking sun!”
As she closed the distance between them, something strange happened. Like all earth ponies, Verdant showed deference to members of the other two tribes, and growing up in that culture, it showed even in her shrinking posture.

No more. For the first time she could remember she was standing up straight, shoulders forward as she advanced on the stallion before her. A stallion who was suddenly reminded that for all his military training and armor, even being male as a pegasus meant he was still physically smaller than the very angry, very large earth pony advancing on him.

“Uh, well yes... you did help with that...” Sand Storm muttered as he took a hesitating step back.

“Yes, I did! In fact I saved all your lives!” She continued as she swept a foreleg to indicate everyone at the table.

For once, no one lashed out to tell her she was wrong, and to her surprise, Spec actually took a step over to stand beside her. After a long pause, it was Shining who asked in amazement,
“You mean... You added the safety shut-down to the sun?!”

Verdant nodded. If they had all been staring at her before, their looks of shock now were unprecedented.

“But... you're an earth pony! How could you...”

“Have none of you ever been to a rock farm?” As they all exchanged vacant glances Verdant sighed as her anger seemed to ebb. “Earth ponies can make things grow and bloom, but that ability isn't just limited to plants. Some more talented earth ponies can use our magic to make rocks and stone grow, and though it takes far longer, we do have some ability to imbue magic into stone, just as we can into plants.
“You were all working so hard to get the sun to burn at all, none of you thought of how to turn it back off. I was able to build in a shut-off that would kick in if the sun went into free fall, and that's why we're all still breathing right now.”

The expressions around the table ranged from astonished to alarmed, and Verdant could feel the dread of accusation, forgotten in a moment of passion, returning all too quickly.

“Thank you so much!”

Spec's hug caught the earth pony completely by surprise, and her mouth fell open as the physicist continued,
“I was so worried when they told us about the danger and flew off with Shining! We waited and waited, but they came back! They came back because of you!”

To Verdant's utter astonishment, Shining extended a hoof to shake hers.
“It seems I have underestimated you; I had no idea you were so capable. Please accept my apologies, Ms...?”

It took her a moment to realize what Shining meant. In nearly eighteen months of daily work together, this was the first time her boss had bothered to ask what her name was.
“Verdant, Verdant Growth.” She replied, a smile slowly spreading across her face.

For their part, Steady and Squall and Pie stared slack jawed at the earth pony before them as they tried to process the fact that, directly or indirectly, they owed her their lives.

“But, how can you-”
Whatever Sand Storm was about to say was cut off by a dark look and whispered word from Flare that made the stallion take another step back and cross his legs protectively as she continued forward.
“I guess I owe you an apology too.” She added warmly. “I've never had the opportunity to work with such a capable earth pony before. You just don't meet many up in the clouds.”

Steady cleared his throat loudly and, after a moment, continued.
“Thank you, Ms. Verdant. Unfortunately you still haven't answered the original question: If the sun is high in the sky where it should be, how is it still so cold?”

There was a pause as Pie, Shining and Spec looked at her expectantly, making her blush. Not every unicorn was involved in raising the sun and moon, and Verdant suddenly found herself the expert in the room.
“Well... There could be a number of causes...”

“Such as?” Steady pressed.

Her face took on a frown as she thought about it.
“Well, given that the sun is still in the right place, but it's getting colder, there are only a few options that make any sense. One way or another, less sunlight must be reaching and staying at the ground, so that means either we're getting less sunlight from the sun – maybe the sun is getting dimmer, or further away from us, or something is getting between the sun and our world, blocking or reflecting the sunlight before it can warm us.”

Even Pie was getting interested now, their differences in rank already forgotten as they worked on the problem as a team,
“Is that even possible? That the real sun could dim or move away?”

“Well, yes, but I can't imagine a way it could have dimmed this fast. A dimming like this is absolutely possible, but it should take many thousands or millions of years. And as to moving away, that would almost certainly involve some kind of major change in the orbit of our world which would have split continents and sent up huge volcanoes unless the unicorns knew about it and managed the catastrophe...” She trailed off as she looked at Shining.

“I don't claim to know all the inner workings of the sun raising team, but there is no way they could have kept something that big a secret.” Shining stated flatly. “But regardless of the speculation, how are we going to figure this out?”

“We need an experimental test!” Spec said excitedly.

“Exactly! What if we were to measure the intensity of the sun's rays and compare that to what they should be?” Pie agreed enthusiastically.

“Well, we would need a device capable of monitoring the power output of the sun. It should be about one thousand watts per square meter.” Verdant amended.

“Yes, but that will only tell us about the sun; we also need to measure the brightness of a known star, something that hasn't changed so we can compare the two readings. The north star should be clearly visible this far north, shouldn't it?” Shining critiqued thoughtfully.

“Of course, but we'll have to get a picture of each one using the same camera and the same film with a known filter for the sun. After we develop the pictures, we should be able to calculate out what's going on.” Verdant said with a grin as she turned to looked across the table at the pegasi, “Please tell me you have a camera in one of these baskets.”

There was a long pause as the soldiers tried to catch up with the rapid back and forth that had just taken place, but to everyone's surprise, it was actually Sand Storm who answered.
“Yes... we have a couple... They're in that basket over there.” He stated uncertainly, his eyes never having left Verdant.

“Could you show us?” She asked with the beginnings of a self-conscious smile.

…

It took them several hours to gather all the parts, setup the developing lab near the warmth of the cave and put everything in readiness, but eventually the camera was fitted with it's sun cap and set before them on the table.

“Excellent!” Shining beamed, “Now we just have to take one night and one day photo. Volunteers?”

Three unicorns and one earth pony turned as one on the four pegasi, each wearing an expectant and slightly unsettling expression.

“Uh... why don't-”

Steady sighed.
“So you need a pegasus to fly above the cloud cover and get the photographs, right?”

“If you want to have any idea what's going on? Yes.” Shining replied as though this was obvious.

There was an uncertain exchange of glances among the pegasi.
“Hey, I don't mind flying high, and normally, a job like this would be a breeze, but its really cold out there!” Flare complained.

“Then we draw for it.” Steady gestured at a basket full of hay. “Short straw gets the job.”

A moment later, an annoyed looking Squall stood holding the shortest piece, and with a grunt of irritation he ground up and swallowed the offending stalk.
“Fine. I'll get suited up.”

A few minutes later, Squall stood before them bundled up to the ears and took the camera out of Pie's hooves to swing it around his neck.
“Now I just snap a photo of the north star or the sun right?”

“Yes, and remember to use the filter if its the sun, but please hurry okay? It's really cold out there...”
Pie said with a bit more concern than might have been expected. Squall paused in mid step as he noticed her tone, and turned see what might have been the slightest hint of a blush.

“And don't forget to work the horizon into the shot if you can.” Shining butted in, completely oblivious. “I'll keep the beacon on so you can find your way back.”

The ice block was moved, and Squall pulled his goggles into place before disappearing outside in in a blast of icy cold so intense it made their sub zero igloo feel like a warm hearth.

The minutes ticked by as they waited.

And waited.

Before long they were all beginning to feel the pressure and Pie had started trotting in a circle around the outer wall. After her twentieth circuit she shook her head and blurted out,
“Shouldn't he have been back by now? How long does it take to climb above the clouds?!”

Her answer came with the sound of grinding ice as the door block shifted with the impact of a pony's buck. Pie nearly sent the two hundred pound ice block flying as she reached outside, grabbed Squall and yanked him back in. Shining shifted the door block back into place and helped Pie get the shivering pegasus to his feet.

“B-B-Bucking B-B-Balls itt's c-cold out t-there!” Squall managed as he tried to wipe the snow from his face with numb hooves. Shining relieved him of the camera, passing the device to Spec for development, and then helped Pie guide him towards the cave mouth. While the modest warmth blowing from the mouth of the cave felt wonderful after hours in the cold, Shining could already feel the tightness around her neck as she stood near the entrance, and she let the two of them go in on their own.

Spec's white coat was hard enough to see against the igloo wall, while her deep blue mane was almost invisible as she worked on the chemical baths. After some time, the ponies waiting eagerly by the table could see her approaching with a look of worry, the photograph held in her magic. She laid it on the table for them all to see.

“Well, that's the sun all right...” Steady said simply.
It was actually a pretty good photo, the disk of the sun had several darker specs in one corner, the sun spots clearly defined. Unfortunately, Spec's worried look had rapidly spread to Verdant and Shining as they stared at the picture in alarm.
“What is it? What's wrong?”

Shining looked up slowly, a numb expression written across her face.
“This was taken without a filter.”

It took a moment for that to process, but a quick glance back at the photo showed no sign of clouds, fog, or the telltale red of their filter. Squall had been well clear of the cloud cover, and had been able to take a clear photo. Of the sun. Without any need for a filter.

The deathly silence stretched on for several seconds before Flare demanded,
“Well?! What does that mean?”

“It means that our sun's output has fallen well below life sustaining levels.” Shining stated with a far away look.

“What? What does that even mean?!” Flare shouted in mounting alarm. Spec stepped around the table and put a calming hoof on Flare's shoulder, a tear running down her cheek as she spelled it out.
“It means that, unless we do something, we may be the last generation of ponies.”

Ch. 7 Freezer Burn

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Seven: Freezer Burn

The wait for evening was a long one. The ponies wandered listlessly around the igloo or went back into the cave as the whim took them. With a stock of supplies and the heat of the cave, the eight of them might survive the coming cold for a long time, but their thoughts quickly turned to their friends and families. If they were right, even the tropics wouldn't provide protection for long, and the images of their tribes retreating southwards with a icy wind at their backs kept them awake in the cold darkness as they waited.

None of them had seen Pie or Squall since his return with the photo, and a quick search showed Steady there was no sign of them in the upper reaches of the cave. His thoughts soon turned back to Shining, still cooling her hooves in the igloo, and with a twinge of guilt, he left his search to go offer her what comfort he could. On the way back up he pasted Flare and Spec, huddled together in a small alcove, their eyes red from tears as they looked up at him.
Shining was working at the table as he emerged from the cave, her black mane and gray coat making her difficult to see, especially next to Verdant, whose green coat stood out brightly in the dim green illumination of the lamps.

“Where's Sand Storm?”

Verdant looked over to the door block in irritation,
“That fool is out there testing some new coat he found in a basket of officer's clothes.”

Shining, for her part, didn't look up. Laid out before her were pages and pages of drawings and calculations, and she was feverishly scribbling something down with one of the pegasi's military issue pencils, the temperature in the igloo being too cold for ink and a quill. Steady shook his head and, picking up the camera, walked to the exit, wincing at the bitter cold as he stepped out and levered the block closed behind him.

The wind had died down somewhat, and what snow was still falling was now coming in the form of tiny specs that sparkled green when they caught the light of his chemical glow lamp. The clouds were still invisible overhead in the darkness, but if possible, it felt even colder than before. Sand Storm was decked out in a full snow suit with insulated wing covers, a mask with goggles, a plethora of medals on the front and sleeves all the way down to the built in hoof boots. Steady couldn't help but smile.

“What do you think soldier? Is it warm enough?”

Sand Storm jumped at the unexpected voice and turned about, pulling the mask back so he could see properly.
“Sorry Sir, I didn't think the Commander was going to need it any more...”

“Relax Sand, you're right on that score.” He replied with a smile. “Want to give that thing a proper test?” Steady asked, holding out the camera in one hoof.

Sand Storm thought about it, then reached out and slung the camera over his shoulder.
“Might as well. This thing is warm! If the damn goggles didn't fog up it would be the perfect cold weather suit.”

“Thanks for finding it; I didn't know the Commander kept a special stash.” Steady smiled, “I'll see if I can dig out any more for the others. You know what Shining's beacon looks like and how to follow it home right?”

Sand Storm grimaced at the memory as he pulled the mask into place.
“Sure; The last time she cut it off I almost crash landed in front of Commander Hurricane. Just make sure she keeps it on this time.”

With a powerful wingbeat, Sand Storm was off, climbing towards the clouds as his green lamp grew smaller and smaller, before winking out as he disappeared into the invisible clouds ceiling overhead.

With a shiver, Steady turned and bucked the door block open, ducking back into the warm air of the igloo that was only ten below zero C. Shining was still working on whatever it was she was doing as he approached and looked over her shoulder. The calculations and scribblings were utterly unintelligible, so after a moment he turned to Verdant to ask quietly,
“Do you have any idea what she's working on?”

“She's trying to find a way to modify the sun. Right now the protective spells shield us from the sun's hard radiation by converting it back down into heat and light, but it still sets things on fire if you get too close. She's trying to design a sort of... evener. Something to spread out the heat equally over an area, regardless of distance from the sun.”

Steady though about that for a moment.
“Why would she want to do that?”

Verdant gave him an appraising look.
“Which is easier to live in: A home heated by a raging bonfire, or one heated with a steam boiler?” Steady looked at her in confusion, and with a sigh, she continued. “Right. Pegasi live in the clouds.” She shook out her mane and continued “A steam boiler heats a home evenly and to the thermostat set point, so you're never too hot or cold, no matter which room you're in. They're the latest thing among the unicorn upper class. A bonfire will burn you if you get to close, and it leaves distant rooms cold and drafty. We still have to repair whatever damage has been done, but if we can build in these modifications, it would mean we could carry the sun on our backs without being burned.”

Steady nodded politely.
“That would be nice, though I don't understand why she-”

“With everything freezing out there we could hardly light the sun outside, and what do you think would happen if we re-lit it in here?”

An image of the igloo collapsing around them, two ton blocks of ice dropping from overhead while a cloud of boiling steam cooked them all to a crisp came unbidden to his mind.
“Oh... Right. Sorry, I'm kind of new to this line of work.” He shook his head and put a hoof gently on Shining's shoulder. “Shining?” She didn't seem to notice, so he tapped harder, “Shining; we need your beacon for Sand Storm.”

Shining responded as though he had woken her from a sound sleep.
“Huh? What?... Oh, right!” She started for the door, only to have Steady stop her.

“Hold on a sec; why don't you put on something warmer before you go out?”

She grinned up at him, concentrated, and Steady jumped back in surprise as a transparent, gently glowing bubble formed around the mare.
“I've been working on this for a while. It's not very strong, but its enough to seal in heat and warm air to keep a pony from freezing.” She smiled at him self-consciously, “This looks like as good a time to test it as any.”

Steady raised an eyebrow, but followed her to the door block and endured the icy blast long enough to watch the landscape outside lit by the brilliant purple beacon of her horn. As he ducked back inside and closed the door he caught sight of Pie and Squall, their heads both hanging low as they made their way towards him from the mouth of the cave. It was no accident that as the attrition of the war with the demons had whittled his unit down, Squall had always managed to come out on top of any fight. Now, as he closed the distance between them, Steady could tell from his posture that something was very wrong.

“Sir, I... I must request you relieve me of duty.”

Steady had no idea what he was talking about, but there was a sinking feeling in his stomach as he asked,
“On what grounds?”

Squall actually sniffled, and Pie stepped over, the white fur of her face stained by the tracks of her own tears as she wrapped her hooves around him in a tight hug.
“I... am no longer qualified to serve.” With a gentle nudge he pulled back his coat on one side to extended a wing, and it was all Steady could do not to gasp.

Squall's wing looked fine, all the way out to the tip, but at the very end the usually smooth feathers were in disarray, and the bandage on his wing tip left little doubt as to why. His usual military demeanor collapsed as he asked in shock;
“Squall, what happened?!”

When he didn't reply, it was Pie who answered in a choked voice.
“Frostbite. He knew he lost control and crash landed, but we didn't know why... when he warmed up, but still couldn't feel his wing tips...” she cringed. He must have explained it to her; like any bird, the pegasi steered with their wing tips, and just as clipping the wing tips of a bird rendered controlled flight impossible, so the same was true of the pegasi. The freezing temperatures must have penetrated even the thick insulation of his feathers. At a single stroke he had fallen from the upper echelons of the military, to that of a street beggar, doomed to menial labor and asking others for transport from one cloud to another.

“I can't fly, Sir... I... can no longer perform my duty.”

Steady steeled himself and put a hoof on Squall's shoulder, waiting until he raised his head.
“Squall, you are one of the finest soldiers I know. I don't know what the future has in store, but right here and now I need all hooves on deck. You are a member of the best military on the planet, and we don't leave our ponies behind.” He glanced significantly at Pie who was still holding on tightly as he continued softly, “You aren't in this alone. A soldier has to be strong for those who love them.”

A careful eye would have seen several different emotions wash over Squall's features as he processed that last statement; confusion, astonishment, and finally, something like grateful relief as he returned her hug and held Pie close.
“Thank you, Sir.”

Behind him, Verdant smiled warmly at the three of them as Steady continued,
“Of course. We all have to stick together, or...” he trailed off as a nasty thought crossed his mind. “Squall, did you linger at the top at all?”

The soldier looked up in confusion,
“No Sir. It was way too cold to stay for sight seeing.”

Verdant could see the spreading dread on Steady's face and asked in alarm,
“What? What's wrong?”

He was already galloping for the door,
“It's Sand Storm! He just left to get the other photograph!”

The door block was sent skittering across the floor as Steady bounded through into the bitter cold. Shining Mind turned at the noise, her beacon illuminating the whole mountain meadow a vibrant purple from inside her bubble.
“Is something wrong?”

“We have to call him back! Squall froze his wing tips off and if we don't get Sand Storm back the same thing could happen to him!”

Shining's eyes narrowed as she processed what he was saying.
“Don't you pegasi need your wing tips to fly?”

“YES!”

“Oh...” Shining murmured, her expression mirroring his worry, “But how can I call him-”

“Fade your beacon, then turn it back up, then fade it again.” Steady coached as the shivering set in. “He'll hurry back as soon as he sees the beacon fading.”

“On it.” Shining replied as the purple beam from her horn began to dim. After a moment she glanced over to see Steady now shivering badly, and with a hoof she called him over. “What are you doing? You'll freeze out here! Get inside my bubble this instant!”

Steady tried to clamp his chattering teeth together as he hesitantly reached out to touch the surface of the transparent bubble Shining had formed around herself. His hoof met light resistance, then seemed to push through, and as he stood exploring this strange wall of still air, Shining frowned and grabbed his hoof, yanking him inside with a strong jerk that nearly sent him sprawling.

“Wow...”
It was all he could manage. The inside of the bubble was a balmy twenty-five degrees C (77 F), and though the gentle glow from the bubble obscured some distant objects and fine detail, the overall effect was not unlike being in an overturned fishbowl.
“You came up with this all on your own?” He asked in awe.

Shining's attention was still focused on pulsing the beacon, but she looked over long enough to explain.
“It's an old military spell that never worked; it wouldn't even stop an arrow, and the glow was a dead giveaway, so it never saw use. I worked it over to make it easier to use, and for keeping warm air in, it works fine.” She paused to shift her weight, “It feels kind of like holding up a two-kilogram weight; I can keep it up for a long time, but after a while it starts to feel heavy if I can't put it down.”

Steady nodded appreciation as he warmed up and took in his surroundings. The purple beacon from Shining's horn illuminated the entire landscape; even some of the closer mountains and the cloud ceiling were dimly visible, though there were no signs of the windigos to be seen. The snow had nearly stopped now, and only a nearly imperceptible rain of tiny ice crystals floated slowly down in the still air.

“At this rate, those clouds won't be around much longer.” Shining commented as she looked up. “This cold is just too intense for them to last much longer. They'll soon be wrung dry, but that also means that any warmth they've been trapping will just waft away...”

Despite the warmth of their bubble, Steady shivered and unconsciously moved closer to her.
“Shining... How cold are we talking about here...?”

“Have you ever seen a 'Second Snow'?” she asked grimly. Steady shook his head and she continued, “That's when the cold gets so intense that the carbon dioxide starts to freeze into flakes and fall out of the air as frost and snow. Dry ice snow.”

Steady swallowed hard.
“Can we survive that?”

Shining's beacon began to dim again as she answered worriedly.
“Deep inside a dormant volcano, with lots of supplies? Yes. Can the average pony out there?” She gestured to the bitter cold all around them. “Not a chance.”

An image of Commander Hurricane trapped in a tiny cave, slowly freezing to death flashed unbidden to his mind, and Steady shivered again.
“Is there anything we can do?”

The beacon thrashed about in the clouds as Shining shook her head.
“You mean can we save everypony? No. But I believe we may be able to modify the sun to protect a few of us. If I'm right, if we can repair the damage, we may be able to create a much bigger version of this,” She gestured to the bubble surrounding them, “to save what's left of our tribes.”

There was silence as Shining took a step closer to Steady, rubbing up against him to share her body heat. Steady looked up with a start, but before he could speak he caught sight of something falling from the sky.
“Shining, is that...”

The dot resolved itself into the form of a pony, weaving back and forth as though having great difficulty following the purple beam to it's source. As Sand Storm closed in, Steady whistled out the greeting and collision avoidance calls, and with the practice born of long training, Sand Storm followed the cues and landed heavily in front of them.

“Nice work Sand Storm! Lets get you back inside.”

Shining dropped her bubble, letting the freezing air back in, and they quickly ducked into the door opening, Sand Storm apparently having some difficulty following them. As soon as the door block was back in place, Verdant, Pie and Squall all gathered around, Pie taking the camera and film for processing in Spec's absence.

“There, that should take care of that! And what was the big idea with turning the beacon on and off like that?! You nearly gave me a heart attack up there!” Sand Storm complained as he began peeling off the cold weather suit.

“Sorry soldier,” Steady explained, “But we just found out Squall's exposure to the cold up there... well it froze his wing tips.” Sand Storm stopped midway through puling a sleeve off, apparently staring at them in shock. “We didn't find out until you left, and we couldn't risk you, so we did the only thing we could think of that would get you back down here quick.”

Sand Storm shook out his wings, went into a controlled hover, then landed with a huff.
“Well, it looks like the snow suit works, anyway. Tell Squall I feel for him; that's just not fair.”

The assembled ponies looked at each other in confusion for a moment before Squall spoke up.
“Thanks Sand, but I'm right here.”

Sand Storm gave a grunt of irritation as he kicked off the suit and pulled off the cold weather mask.
“Well, how am I supposed to know who's here if we're all standing in the dark?”

As the others glanced at the lamp over the table, Verdant gasped.
“Sand, your eyes!”

The others looked, and most cringed at what they saw.
“Sand? Did you take the photograph with the cold weather mask off?” Squall asked in trepidation.

“Well of course I did! I could barely see out of that thing on the way up, and it was even worse on the way down!”

Verdant had tears in her eyes as she pulled off her scarf and carefully wrapped it around his face.
“Sand? I need you to follow me into the cave where its warm okay? And I need you to not touch your face until we get there. Can you do that for me?”

“Wait, why would I-”

Steady stepped close and put both hooves on Sand Storm's shoulders.
“Soldier? You took an injury up there, and Miss Verdant thinks she can help you. I need you to follow her and do what she says, got that?”

For the first time, worry seemed to make itself heard over his usual bluster as Sand Storm reached slowly up to his face.
“Why?... What happened to-”

“DON'T TOUCH IT!” Verdant yelled, and Sand's hoof snapped back to the floor. A moment later she continued in strained tones, “Sand Storm, you can't see properly because you've frozen your eyes. If you touch them before they've had a chance to thaw, you'll make it even worse than it already is. I need you to follow me, look straight ahead,... and don't let go of me.” She finished, gently taking his hoof and placing it on her shoulder. Moving very slowly, she led the blind pony across the igloo and into the cave as the others watched them go.

After what seemed like a long time indeed, Squall asked,
“Does he have a chance?”

Shining shook herself out of her stupor and looked evenly at him.
“A week ago I would have said no, but since then I've learned we have an earth pony with us who can make rocks grow. Until I ask Verdant, I won't know for sure.”

Squall sighed.
“So all we can do is hope?”

“No. What we can do is get on with the business of fixing the bucking sun!” Shining spat. “That photograph should help explain what's going on, but I would never have asked if I suspected the cost would be this high!” She sniffed as she walked over to the basket where the obsidian stones of the sun were kept and lifted them out with her magic. “Regardless of why this is happening, we're going to need the sun to get home and save our tribes. It must be repaired, and that's going to take a long time...”

Pie trotted up to the table, the photo of a nearly imperceptible white speck held in her magic. She laid it next to the photo of the sun, and with a glance, Shining said exactly what she had been thinking.

“Obstruction. The size and place is right, but they're both equally dimmed. Something is blocking out the sky.”

“Blocking out the sky?” Steady asked in consternation, “But what in the world could-”

“It could be the ash cloud from some huge volcano, it could be an interstellar dust cloud we're passing through, but we won't know until we have more information, and at the moment it doesn't matter. The point is, every scenario I can imagine is going to get worse and take years, decades, or centuries to pass.” Shining looked slowly at each of them as she continued. “As of right now, we're in this for the long haul. We're the only group of ponies who can build a sun, and that means that, whether they know it or not, we're the only hope our tribes have of survival.” The silence stretched on as she walked to the table and placed one of the obsidian stones on it. “Squall: I need one of you to go find Spec and get her up here to help. Repairing a broken spell stone is hard enough with three ponies, and we can't do it with just two. Pie; I need you to fetch a nest of rocks to form the cradle for the sun stone. It won't do us any good to mend the cold shock, only to put the red hot stone down on an ice table. Steady?” Her breath caught in her throat as she saw the way he was looking at her, but she coughed and continued, “As soon as it's possible, please ask Verdant to come join us. I don't know exactly what she can do yet, but it's going to take weeks to mend all thirty-eight stones and we need all the help we can get.”

Ch. 8 Settling In

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Eight: Settling In

Shining rolled over in her sleep, the hard ground digging into her back, even through the sleeping bag. Her mind wandered through dreams of sweltering jungles and stone cities, until gradually, she opened her eyes to take in the sight around her.

Steam. The world seemed to be full of it, and though she could see the ground around her, everything else was invisible, lost in the drifting green steam like some enormous sauna that smelled of... rotten eggs?

“Hello?”

“Oh, good, you're awake!” Steady's voice answered from somewhere to her right. A moment later, the soldier appeared out of the steam before her, looking somewhat sleep deprived and a bit worried. “Are you feeling okay?”

Shining thought about it, then nodded.
“Aside from a crick in my back, I feel fine. Where are we, anyway?”

Steady looked at her carefully before answering,
“Underground. The cave widens out into some large chambers with hot springs, hence the steam and the smell. Are you going to be able to handle this?”

Shining felt some nervous tension as she looked around, but even looking carefully, there was no way to tell how big the room was: The steam clouds illuminated by the green chemical lamp made it impossible to see the walls.
“Uh... I think I'm okay, actually...” she replied, noticing as she turned her head that something was dangling under her jaw. With a raised eyebrow, she reached down and undid the buckle on the horn cap.

“I'm glad you're doing better.” Steady breathed in relief. “Your team got one of the stones repaired before everyone called it quits to get some rest. I'm sorry, but we had to drug you again to get you down here to safety. The igloo you built is impressive, but the cold is starting to seep in even there.”

Shining passed the cap to Steady as she agreed,
“The walls are nearly as thick as I am long, but as cold as it's going to get, they won't stay warm forever...” She cringed as another memory occurred to her. “How are Squall and Sand Storm?”

Steady's face fell.
“Not well. They're both okay physically, but their injuries have them very depressed, and I can't say I blame them. Verdant has read some medical texts, and she thinks she can help, but we have no idea how much, or how long it will take.”

Shining hung her head.
“I'm sorry Steady, I should have known, but I didn't think of the risk in time...”

Steady took her in his hooves as he tried to console her.
“It's okay... you didn't know, and neither did anypony else.”

She shook herself and stood up,
“Their injuries are going to be the least of our worries if we don't get the sun repaired soon. The rest of our tribes are much further south, but the cold is coming for them, and we have to beat it there if we're going to save anypony. I assume we won't be sending anypony else outside after this?”

“Not without your glowing bubble. How long will that spell work anyway?”

“As long as a pony can hold it. It works as a crude boat too, so it should be good down to any cold we can survive in here.” She paused with one hoof extended in the act of reaching for a tool. “Uh, could you show me the way to the workshop? We'll need to get Pie, Spec and Verdant up here too.”

Steady chuckled softly.
“Pie and Verdant are already waiting, and if I can find Flare, I'll find Spec. Those two have been inseparable lately...”

A quick walk following a line scratched in the cave floor soon led them to the work site where Pie and Squall stood watching Verdant in fascination. The earth pony was concentrating hard, her eyes tightly closed, and a small mound of earth was growing in front of her.

“What is she-”

“Shhh...” Pie chided gently, before adding in a whisper, “She's trying to get us some better heat to work with.”

As Shining watched in amazement, the small mound of earth began to open at the top, splitting apart like the peddles of a flower and revealing a core of bubbling molten magma that slowly expanded into a pool about the size of a basketball. When the growth slowed to a stop, Verdant sighed deeply and relaxed as she opened her eyes, looking a bit sheepish as she realized the others were watching.

“You can grow a volcano?” Shining asked in astonishment.

Verdant waved a hoof dismissively
“Not a very big one.”

“Not a... Seriously?! You can grow a volcano, but you don't think its a big deal because it isn't large enough?!”

Verdant was blushing now as she replied,
“Well, no, the magma is really near the surface here, so it's not that hard. I couldn't do this just anywhere, but growing a lava tube out of a volcano isn't that difficult.”

After a long silence Shining turned to Steady,
“Could you please go find our missing teammate? We'll need Spec to get started, though,” she added in admiration, “It will be a lot easier going with a steady heat source.”

Steady soon returned with the two mares trailing behind, Flare smiling once more while Spec seemed to be doing her best tomato head impression. Verdant had also gone to fetch Sand Storm, and had carefully led him to the edge of their impromptu meeting circle.

“All right, ponies, it's about time we sat down and laid out our plan for the next month or two.” Shining
announced, “We still have 37 stones to fix, and I'm going to need all of your help to craft the evener I'm designing.” She added, holding up a notebook full of calculations. “It won't do us any good to re-light the sun and burn ourselves up in the process.”

“How long do you expect this to take?” Steady asked respectfully.

Shining felt that familiar swell of pride and... other things, as he waited for her answer.
“If we work diligently? A little over a month. The repairs to the sun might take less time, but we need the evener to work before the sun will do us any good. Just imagine trying to carry it by hoof; even the reflective shields wouldn't help us at the center of a tornado made of fire.” They all winced as they remembered what the sun had done when brought near the ground.
“And while we unicorns and earth ponies will be busy down here, don't think your team is off the hook.” she continued with a smile at Steady. “We'll be relying on you to bring down the supplies, cook meals, keep an eye on the cave and monitor the conditions outside.”

There was a clopping sound, and they all turned to turned to Sand Storm who, for once, looked reserved, even unsure as he called out to the darkness,
“Meaning no offense, but... why would we look around the cave? It's not likely to change is it?”

Shining shook her head,
“I hope you're right, Sand Storm, but I'm not giving your team busy work. We'll need at least one way to reach the surface once it's time to light the sun, and until then, we need to keep the warm air and water in here with us. That means following all the different tunnels until we've got a decent map of this place. I've already shown Pie how to do the bubble shield, and we'll make a trip out to the surface every few days to keep track of what's going on. In the mean time, I suggest the three of you find some paper and start mapping this place. We may need to block or use some tunnels in a hurry soon, and we'll need to know where.

…

The days underground passed slowly. Dropping the sun into a snowbank had indeed caused deep and pervasive cracking through the sun stones, necessitating re-heating and sealing work, as well as patches to the spells within.

Three days into their repairs, Pie and Squall took the long tunnel up to the surface, but one attempt to move the door block showed it was frosted tightly in place.

“Don't,” Pie held out a hoof to stop Squall as he lined up for a hard buck, “Let me form the bubble and we can teleport to the outside.”

Squall looked at her in surprise,
“You can do that?”

Pie shrugged sheepishly,
“Well... yeah. There wasn't a lot to do in that basket while we were flying with the sun, so Shining taught me a few tricks. It takes a lot out of me to go very far, but for a short hop to the other side of a wall? That's nothing.”

Squall snuggled up next to her as the glowing bubble formed around them, and with a 'snap!' they teleported outside.

The landscape looked very different than they had expected. The green glow from Squall's chemical lamp cast a small circle of light around them, but for the first time since the lost of the sun they found they could really see the landscape. The clouds were gone overhead, though some still lingered far away on the southern horizon, and the mountain side around them was bathed in a soft moon-like light.

They both knew it wasn't moonlight.

Instead of a ghostly white light of sun reflected off of the white moon, the light around them now was tinged a sick yellow. The source of the light looked about the same size as the moon, but when they stared hard the truth was clear to see. This was the light of the sun, but stripped of all power to warm or even light their world. The air outside their bubble was almost perfectly clear, but a careful eye could catch the tiniest of snowflakes, seemingly appearing out of the air itself and drifting southward, always southward as they floated slowly to the ground.

“So it's really happening... That's... that's dry ice snow...” Pie finished in a whisper as she rubbed up against Squall. “It's got to be at least seventy-five degrees below zero out here!”

Despite the heat of their little bubble, both ponies couldn't help but shiver as they took in the frozen scenery around them under the weak light of their dim sun. After a long moment, Squall spoke quietly,
“We should go back down and tell the others. We have to hope we can get the sun going before this reaches all the way south...”

Pie looked up at him, her eyes watering as she tried not to cry,
“But what if we can't?! What if we get done too late?! I... I'm scared, and... and I don't know if I can do this.”

As she turned away, Squall gently put a hoof under her chin and brought her face up to his,
“You can do this, Pie. I've met a lot of ponies in my life, but I've never seen any mare as brilliant and capable as you.”
Bringing their muzzles together, he kissed her, long and slowly, and after a moment, her wide eyes closed and she returned his affections.
“Thank you, Squall... That... means a lot to me right now.”

The two of them stared into each other's eyes a moment longer, then vanished with a 'Snap!', leaving behind a small round depression in the snow cover where they had stood.

...

The calm warmth of the steamy cavern was shattered by loud cursing as Shining hurtled another failed evener stone into the mist.
“Buck it all! That's the third one we've carved today and the damn thing still won't channel a spell properly!”

Pie, Spec and Flare were dimly visible, leaning against a wall, their exhausted expressions beginning to register irritation.
“Shining, we've been at this all day! Let's leave it until the morning and get some rest.”

Shining wheeled on Spec, her anger raging as she shouted,
“Morning?! What morning?! We're trapped down here, hiding in this cave while our friends are out there, trying to stay alive!”

“You think we don't know that?!” Flare spat back as she stepped protectively in front of Spec, “She's doing the best she can, but your raging and working everyone until you can't see straight isn't helping!”

Shining glared at the pegasus for a moment, then closed her eyes and took a deep, slow breath.
“I'm sorry, it's... It's just... hard.”

“Why don't you let her try?”

All those assembled looked in surprise at Sand Storm, his one hoof resting on Verdant as he led her forward towards the sound of their voices.
“She's been working with me on re-growing my eyes, and I can already see blurry shapes again... She's really amazing, and I think she can help.”

The sight of Verdant leading the blind soldier around was one they had gradually grown accustomed to as the days had turned into weeks, but to see him leading her forward, blushing with embarrassment... that was something new.

“Please Sand, I... I don't know if I can-”

“Hey, now, none of that.” Sand admonished softly, feeling for her head, then turning it to face him. “You are special. You're the most special pony I've ever met, and I don't care who knows it. Just ask Shining to explain what she needs, and I'll bet you can help them.”

Shining's expression had changed from irritation to thoughtful contemplation as he spoke, and as Verdant stepped slowly forward, Shining grabbed her sketchbook and began leafing through it.
“Okay, the basic principle we're using is based on the spell of averages: we need the heat of the sun to be spread out evenly over large area.”

Verdant nodded,
“Well yes, that shouldn't be hard, we just need two orbiting spherical moon stones.”

“Good, you're getting this now. But think of what would happen if we rigged it to heat evenly over an area?”

Verdant's brow creased in thought, then her eyebrows shot up.
“Oh! If we heat evenly, then we'd wind up cooking ourselves too!”

“Now you've got it.”

“So we need the evener to cap out at body temperature or just below?”

“Yes, good, but what happens if you walk into the field with cold hooves?”

“Well, they'd instantly heat up to body- oh... yeah, that could cause serious damage, like dunking a hypothermia victim in a hot tub.”

“Exactly, so it has to stop heating around, say, 20 to 25 degrees, or about room temperature, but it also has to be controllable. Let's say you were trying to walk across a frozen lake?”

“Okay, so it has to heat to 20 to 25 degrees C, but we have to be able to change the output of the sun too.”

“You got it.” Shining stated grimly, “We need a thermostat control, a shape and area size control, and a total power output control. We had one buck of a time just getting it to light back home, and we forgot the on/off switch. This is going to be a very complicated control spell, and it also has to last.”

Verdant was looking daunted now as she asked,
“How long?”

Shining looked at her levelly.
“If this dimming of the sky is caused by an interstellar dust cloud, then this sun may have to burn without failure or breakdown for several hundred years. The penalty for a breakdown could be the extinction of our species.”

Pie snorted.
“No pressure, right Shining?”

Verdant missed the comment as she seemed to be thinking quickly.
“What about a ring?”

“A ring?”

Verdant was picking up confidence as the continued,
“Yes, a ring! A large flat disk around the entire diameter of the sun! We could load it with all the main spells, then introduce or remove the moons as a way of controlling the details. That way, the ring acts as the interface between the easily programmable moon stones, and the stubborn but durable obsidian sun stones.”

Pie was nodding approval as she stated slowly,
“That could really work...”

Shining was still fixing the earth pony with a level gaze.
“Yes, it definitely could, and we would help you program the spells. But we can't make an obsidian ring in the size we would need, let alone with enough precision to carry that many spells.”

Verdant smiled warmly at her.
“Well, I can. It will take a couple of days, and I'll have to bring some of the right magma to the surface, but I can definitely grow you an evener ring.”

Sand Storm felt his way forward and put a foreleg around her shoulders.
“That's the mare I know.” Pie and Spec smiled at the two of them as Sand suddenly swept the larger pony off her hooves, dipped and kissed her. The slight tremor in Sand's forelegs was the only sign he gave of her greater weight, and Verdant relaxed and returned his embrace.

…

That evening, after most of the others had wandered off to their beds, Shining gave a long yawn and finally put down the slightly soggy notebook she had been sketching in. It had been a long, productive day, and it had left her exhausted as such days usually did. The fact that they were beginning to lose touch with the celestial rhythms as they sky grew dark, and that this 'day' had been almost twenty-six hours long didn't help matters.

With a groan, she pushed herself to her hooves, lit her horn, and walked down the trail to the right, marked here and there with small colored stones to keep a pony from getting lost in the endless steam. Before long she came upon two sleeping mats laid a pony's length apart.

“Time to call it a night?” Steady asked as he quickly tucked a borrowed textbook away under his mat.

Shining nodded and collapsed onto her own bed in a heap,
“Yes. I know better than most how long this is going to take, but some days...”

Steady smiled softly as he fished for something in his saddlebags.
“Some days you look at the work ahead of you and want to throw up your hooves and go home?”

Shining sighed and rolled over to look at him.
“I know, I know; we're doing this so we can have a home to go back to... It's how I can keep up these hours, but that doesn't make it easy.”

Steady found what he was looking for and pulled the horn cap from his bag, eliciting an obstinate look from Shining.
“Hey, I'm not thrilled about this either, but are you really willing to risk all our lives on making it through the night without another nightmare?”

Shining glared at him for another moment before lowering her head with a sigh, grumbling;
“They're not nightmares, they only happen when I wake up.”

Steady walked over and slipped the horn cap into place, gently buckling the strap under her chin as he asked,
“I've been wondering about that ever since we met; You're one of the strongest ponies I've ever met, yet your claustrophobia...” She looked up at him again, her stern expression somehow more tender for the strap dangling under her chin. “I'm not trying to pry, I just... I'd really like to get to know you better. I've worked with a lot of mares before, but you're... different.”

Shining tried to hide her smile and maintain her stern expression as she asked; “Different?”

Steady blushed, but continued,
“Well, yes. Do you know how rare it is to meet a mare who's smarter and more knowledgeable than I am, but who doesn't outrank me, or look down on me for my family?”

A look of confusion crossed her face as Shining asked,
“Your family?”

“They were weather ponies,” he replied, a little defensively. After a moment he seemed to register her blank stare, and his own expression softened as he explained.
“The weather ponies that bring the rain to the Ep- er, earth pony farms are on one of the bottom levels of pegasi society, mainly because we have to have extensive dealings with earth ponies. Some weather ponies hold their prejudices close to their hearts, and they refuse to talk with the earth pony farmers, blaming them when things go wrong without taking any responsibility. Our family had one of the best crop yields in the valley because we listened and worked with the earth ponies to deliver the right amount of water to the right place when it was needed. They taught us what kind of weather and how much sun was best for each crop, and we gave them what they needed to succeed.”

He sighed and sat back down as he continued,
“Of course that meant a lot more work for us, and even some of the other weather ponies hated us for it. We broke with tradition and shamed them with our results. The long days also meant that while the foals of military families could attend school for the whole term, I had to complete the whole term in a fraction of the normal time. My parents were always there to help with the homework, but the planting and harvests weren't going to wait, so we all made sacrifices.”

He smiled at a pleasant memory as he continued,
“Now, eventually, all that rushed studying proved invaluable. When I applied to the force, I was lumped in with a bunch of other green recruits, but by the time we finished our entrance exams and courses of study, I had already earned two promotions, and that kind of set the stage for everything after that.”

Shining found herself smiling as she looked up at him,
“That sounds like so much fun... hard work and sunshine during the day and studying at night with a family that loved you...” She shook her head and her smile faltered as she continued. “My parents were both wealthy aristocrats, but money doesn't always equate to a better life. Since the time I was old enough to remember, my mother despised my father, and my father had a well-earned reputation for drinking and chasing anything on four legs. Mother did what she could to ensure I would have a future despite his... proclivities, and that meant schooling. Endless hours of schooling and tutoring so I could make myself desirable to the rich stallions at court.”

"Education makes a mare attractive to unicorn stallions?" Steady sounded favorably surprised.

"Not exactly. Her theory was that my father had...well, she called it a devil inside him. When it made his poetry famous, that was all well and good, but when it made him erratic, impulsive...well, not so much. She thought that she could educate it out of me. If poetry and art made a pony into the biggest horndog this side of the Diamond Crater, well, surely pure mathematics and theoretical physics should leave a pony calm, collected, sensible...even loyal to one's family. Everything my father wasn't. That's the kind of mate she wanted me to be attractive to, so I could have a better life than she did."

Shining smiled ruefully as she continued.
“As you can see, things didn't go quite according to plan. It turned out I was good at physics and math. Really good. Before long, I had left the rest of my class long behind and was soaring off into higher maths, particle physics, nuclear chemistry, you name it. Stallions weren't attracted so much as, well...terrified. The same devil that made my father a hard-drinking sybarite with a taste for wenches, I have it too, but my drink is coffee and my wenches, such as they are, are theorems, proofs and experiments."

"I hardly think that's the same thing."

"Isn't it? I neglect people for my work the same way he neglected people for his poetry and mares. I have the same outbursts, the same black moods and giddy highs...it's just that within academia, that sort of thing passes for normal a bit better than it does at the Royal Court."

"I don't think that's a fair assessment. I've never seen you in a black mood yet, unless this one counts, and if ever a pony had a damn good reason..."

"I manage them by working, Steady. I work until I can't feel the pain anymore, and sooner or later I make a breakthrough and that's enough to justify the resulting highs to others. What began as an interest grew into a coping mechanism, then a way to hide in plain sight, then a lifestyle. And somewhere along the way I made a career out of what poor Mother intended to be an elaborate pickup line.”

Her face fell as she went on.
“I don't think either of them really understood what had happened, or who I grew up to be. I worked hard to make them proud of me, but the closest I ever got was the time in high school when I developed that lever-action wine bottle opener. Father carried it with him everywhere, and was always going on about his smart daughter who had invented it, but by that time he was on such a downward spiral that he didn't have many friends left to tell... The damnedest thing was, I ended up getting a patent for the thing, and until all this started,” she gestured at the cave around her, “I was still getting royalties from the design.”

“What kind of opener was it?”

“The one with the two arms that flap up and down as you move the plunger.”

Steady whistled in respect,
“Commander Hurricane has one of those! I had no idea you designed that!” He thought about it a little longer, a hoof under his chin as she smiled. “But I have to confess I still don't understand...” he trailed off, gesturing to the horn cap she wore to bed.

Shining sighed, but didn't dodge the question this time,
“You can thank Socks for that.”

Steady hadn't been ready for that segue.
“Socks?”

“My pet cat.” Shining clarified. “When I was still little, I found this adorable stray cat wandering the grounds, and I brought him into my room to feed and bathe him. He was little more than a kitten at the time, and in pretty poor shape, but I took care of him and nursed him back to health; I read all about cat biology and started sneaking him table scraps when Mother wasn't looking. I kept him secret for almost three weeks before my mother discovered him; she told me to put him in a pet carrier with a sheet over it and the servants would get him to the vet for a checkup. Well, Socks was a lot smarter than I was at the time, and he absolutely would not get into the carrier, so, the simplest solution to my mind was to climb into the carrier to show him it was okay.”

Shining swallowed hard and looked away as she continued,
“Well, when the servant came to take the carrier away, I thought it would be a fun prank to go instead and find out what a vet was like, so I stayed quiet while he loaded the carrier onto a cart with me in it and drove off. The 'vet' he took me to turned out to be an animal shelter. With the dogs and cats making such a racket ,I started to get scared, especially after he set down the carrier on a shelf in the back room and left me there. I couldn't see everything through the little air holes in the carrier, but I could make out the white walls, floor, and a lot of other carriers lined up next to mine with kittens and puppies in them.
“It didn't take long for the animal warden to return, and I watched as he took the cat out of the first carrier and put her into the gas chamber. I listened as the scratching got weaker and weaker, and then stopped altogether, her little tail giving one last twitch before she closed her eyes forever. The next one was a puppy, and the little thing practically leapt from his crate to lick the unicorn. He looked so sad as he put the little thing into the next chamber and moved on to the third carrier. I couldn't move, I couldn't make a sound, all I could do was huddle in the back of that tiny space, shivering in terror and watching as the little gray puppy scratched plaintively at the glass, and whined, then whimpered and eventually stopped moving.
“When the animal warden reached out to open the door on my crate I screamed. I don't remember all of what happened after that, but they say the explosion embedded pieces of the carrier into the ceiling and singed the walls black as I ran for cover. It took them quite a while to figure out what had happened, but they eventually discovered me in a tree outside, some three stories up, hanging on for dear life and crying for my mom.”

Steady's eyes had gone wide as she finished,
“Sweet buck!”

“My parents weren’t much help either; when I had turned up missing, they each blamed the other for losing me, and by the time the animal warden had recovered from his heart attack, brought me down out of the tree and taken me home, the two of them were railing against each other with everything they had. He dropped me off with the servants and left it at that, though in retrospect, I can't really say that I blame him.”

She turned to look at him again,
“So that's where I got my claustrophobia from. Academically I know what happened, and that it has nothing to do with our present situation, but whenever I get into too tight a spot I can feel that mindless terror just pushing at the back of my mind. I do what I can to be strong, but I don't know if I'll ever get over this.”

Steady reached out and gently took her hoof in his.
“Thank you for telling me this, I know this can't be an easy story to tell, but I'm glad you trust me enough to let me know.”

"Well, and they did let me keep my cat after that," Shining smiled. "Provided I met them at the door to my room with enough completed homework or finished research to use up all the available interest they had in me for the day, they wouldn't even see him. I negotiated with the servants for his food and found enough other students who needed homework done for them to cover the expense of his veterinary care, and after that, things were much better."

"How did you negotiate with the servants? Wouldn't they just bring you cat food if you asked?"

"I thought of that, but then Mother might have seen the line-item in the budget. So I approached the butler and housekeeper with an offer. No more sliding down banisters, I'd tidy away my own breakfast and tea things and bring them downstairs rather than requiring a maid to get them and I'd stop ordering meals. They could just prepare whatever the downstairs staff were having and the savings in preparation time and ingredient cost, as well as work hours, should free up enough to conceal the expense of Socks' little cat dinners."

"And they accepted that?" Steady smiled, imagining a studious little filly approaching a stern, pompous butler.

"They did. Of course, Mrs. Chatelaine pointed out that I had ordered the same thing for tea for the past three years and Pennyworth said that nobody minded the banisters, but that's just the kind of ponies they were. I wanted to thank them, so after I'd gotten Socks' vet needs taken care of, I saved up and got Mrs. Chatelaine some new scissors, exactly the kind the maids said she'd been looking at in a catalog for a year or so. Thing was, they cost more than I expected, and I wanted to have something for Pennyworth, so I took my science fair project on levers and screws, reworked it a little and took the drawings to a blacksmith in Iron Street and paid him to make me one."

"That was the wine-bottle opener?"

"Yes. Pennyworth loved it, said it made things much easier. I know now that he was struggling to hide his rheumatism, and the opener bought him more time, I think, though after my father's worst debts came to light, Mother would never have given Pennyworth the sack, not when he hadn't had a raise in so long. Anyway, the dear old chap persuaded me to submit it for patent, even brought me the forms and personally bought the stamp, and what with a long career in butlering, he knew just which companies to submit the notion to. It was in production before too long, and even if my father didn't open his own wine until, well...until things got the better of him, I think he was still pleased to have a bright daughter." She sighed a little. "But it was really for Pennyworth, come to think of it. I actually miss him and Mrs. Chatelaine a lot more than I've ever missed my parents."

"I do have to ask one question, Shining," Steady frowned a little. "You still remember your old butler and housekeeper, how is it that you didn't even know Verdant's name?"

Shining blushed.

"That is a failing of mine. I'm not very good with names, and when I know people in a work context, I don't always take the time to get to know them as well as I should. There's also been a bit of a problem, probably also my fault...I've had a bit of turnover in terms of assistants."

"Turnover? You mean the inventor of the artificial sun, who forgot to mention not to cross the beams, let alone building in a fail-safe, has trouble keeping an assistant?"

"I've had them last longer than four months before," Shining frowned defensively. "Verdant has been the most loyal, though, and she's really amazing at what she does. After awhile, I actually felt too embarrassed to ask her name. She had been with me so long, and I really did feel more comfortable with her than the silly unicorn undergraduates the university used to send me."

"I feel embarrassed we called her 'the Ep' for so long."

"Well, I tried not to, but when I used the servants' names at university, ponies used to make fun of me. Servants one knew, it's okay to use their names, of course, but learn the name of your scout at Oxford and you're either hopelessly lonely or sentimentally liberal to your classmates."

"Your scout?"

"Kind of like a maid-of-all-work in a university setting."

"...What's a maid-of-all-work?"

"You know, not a ladies' maid or a chambermaid or a kitchenmaid, but one who does a little of everything. I had a maid-of-all-work after leaving the nursery and never gave her up. Mother said I might keep her if I liked, but I could never have a ladies' maid. They might be able to style your mane, but I've never met one who even knew how to clean the beakers and flasks without making a ghastly mess or an explosion."

"That explains a little about you, I suppose."

"What do you mean?"

"Verdant was going to steal your clothes last night. Pie stepped in and did it, since she knows how to sew a button as well and we really can't waste Verdant's time with the laundry, not when she's our only CB."

"Oh. Did they need a wash?"

"You'd been in them for a week, they were missing six buttons and one of the elbows was actually worn transparent."

"...Oh." Shining went red. "That. I do have a bit of the poor-little-rich-girl incompetence."

"I think you just forget to change clothes, or eat, or anything when you're working."

"I really do. It was so much easier when I had Sylvie."

"Sylvie, your ladies' maid?"

"Maid-of-all-work, she'd remind me, but I liked her as much as a ladies' maid," Shining sighed. "But then I would've had to call her by her surname and that simply wouldn't do. 'Growth' sounded too much like asking a tumor to please see to the acetylene burner and brush the dust out of the wind tunnel. Sylvan was just amazing when it came to laboratory work, and considering my room back home essentially was a laboratory, well...I was close to her. She made my father nervous no end and Mother seemed to quite like how uncomfortable he was with an earth pony maid helping his daughter with her studies. It was like Mother enjoyed it. Sometimes at meals she'd ask how Sylvan was working out and I'd just gush about how much I liked her...sometimes it'd even make Father leave the table."

Steady Hoof was now staring at Shining Mind in shock. Could she actually be that dense?

"So this Sylvan, your maid, she was an earth pony?"

"Yep. Worked on our family's manor, as had her parents before her. My mother hired her and had her trained as a maid-of-all-work a little after her child arrived."

"Her child." Steady's voice was stern, irritated with how Shining seemed to be missing the obvious.

"Yep. Whose name I never could bring myself to ask," Shining Mind sighed. "It was bad enough that the half-sisters Father acknowledged wanted nothing to do with me, but knowing my best friend in that house had a little filly just a little older than I was, whom I'd never be allowed to play with or get to see, well...it stung less if I didn't know her name. That way I could imagine how strong and brave she'd be, how she'd always love to hear about my experiments and care what I was up to. In my imagination, she was like a real sister, a big sister, and I'd sometimes tear or burn the covers of textbooks so Mother would buy me another and Sylvie could take the damaged ones to her daughter.

"I thought when I finally met her, that we could be friends, that she'd be everything I'd ever imagined...and somehow, in all the wonderful things I was imagining about her, I completely forgot she'd be an earth pony. So when the university said I could have my choice of earth pony assistants for the fall term, I was expecting just another Ep, and in walked the younger double of dear old Sylvie...well, Sylvie without the scar.

"I knew she knew who I was and she knew I knew who she was. I had hoped she would greet me by name, we'd be friends in a minute and...she just looked at her hooves and waited for me to speak to her. Like I was no better than my parents, no different from any other damn unicorn who wouldn't know a Fournier transform if he met it in the street and needs a compass and a team of Sherpas to find his own asshole with both hooves!

"So I just said 'let's get started,' and put her to work without saying anything. I was so disappointed that the pony I'd always imagined was just another Ep, beaten down and just as ignored as I was, but instead of making a new home with science, just...accepting her fate."

"...But then she stood up to you," Steady smiled.

"Yeah, she did," Shining sighed, a sad smile on her face. "And by now, it is far too late for us to ever be friends."

"Not necessarily," the pegasus officer patted the bookish unicorn on the withers. "Suppose we do get the sun up and running again, you two will be heroines. Maybe then you can go back, find Sylvan Growth and-"

"She died the year I got tenure," Shining's head went down. "Verdant showed up for work ten minutes after Pennyworth's letter came, eyes red, but still, she set to work preparing the things for the morning's experiment. Like my stupid experiment mattered more than her own mother's funeral. I lost my temper and told her to get out and go home for the day. She looked at me like I was nuts and saw I'd been crying too, and...well, and then Pie and Spec came in, so I acted like I was angry about revisions and gave everyone the day off with pay." The gray unicorn sighed, her dark mane tangling around the horn cap. "If I could've just stopped being such a...such a stupid sparklefart!"

"...A what now?"

"It's a bad word for unicorn. If calling an earth pony an 'Ep' or a pegasus a 'featherbrain' is bad, this is...I think it's roughly on par with 'digger' or...or 'flappybutt.'"

"Flappybutt?"

"You've never heard that one?"

"No, I cannot say I have ever heard a pegasus called a flappybutt. Not outside of a preschool," Steady snorted, ruffling Shining's mane a little. The corner of her mouth turned up a little bit underneath her sad eyes.

"...I'm not good at swears."

"You're not good at certain pony skills, is all. You're good at science, mathematics and working hard. If you're on a team with someone else who can handle the pony skills part, you'll be okay," Steady smiled, a little sadly. "And you are trying. You're getting better than you were when I first met you, and if there's one way to tell the value of a pony, it's whether or not they can improve."

"I'm just doubtful as to whether I'll be able to improve fast enough to get the team through this. I mean, we've got a lot riding on the ring for the sun just now. Only the entire future of our entire world. It's...I just kind of wish a better pony could've gotten the job, is all."

"You'd rather be dead in your home city while some spikehead with more people skills than brains bucked the dog up here?" Steady frowned. "Far as I know, you're the best pony for this job, and while you don't know it, you're a lot better than you know."

"You clearly don't see what I do to ponies around me," Shining glared down at her own hooves.

"I clearly do see what you inspire the ponies around you to do. We all struggle to keep up with your working pace, you're quick to take over for others when they're feeling the strain and now that you and Verdant are on an equal footing, the two of you are doing more than I've seen a science division get done, and in half the time." The pegasus frowned. "And the sooner you realize that you're worth something, not for who you were back there or for what you've been trying to be, but for who you are, right now and what you mean to these ponies, on this mission...well...that's when I think those black moods of yours will get a little more manageable."

"You aren't trying to tell me they'll magically go away?" Shining smiled ruefully.

"You're not the first pony to have that hereditary devil somewhere in your family tree, you know. If it makes any difference, I think you've found one of the healthier ways to deal with it I've ever heard of."

"It does tend to make things work...until I drop."

"So drop, if you need to. That's why I'm here...to catch you."

Their eyes met and held...for just a second.

"Now get some sleep, sparklefart. That's an order." And Steady Hoof marched off to his own sleeping bag, wishing there was some way to comfort the claustrophobic unicorn without risking the collapse of an entire mountain if things went wrong. Or worse...losing their working relationship.

Shining Mind wasn't exactly good at swears, but the metaphors she growled into her pillow about ornery flappybutt pegasi commanders were pretty explicit. So explicit that after a few minutes she stopped cursing, blushed violently red and drifted off to sleep still trying to figure out how you could resent someone so much and still feel so strange every time he was anywhere near her, let alone where these bizarre thoughts were coming from.

Ch. 9 Community

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Nine: Community

The next morning, Shining awoke slowly, instead of with her usual hard jolt from sleep to 'awake and in third gear.'

Something smelled unbelievably good. She also couldn't see...and for some reason, didn't care.

"H'lo?" she asked, feeling at her eyes with a hoof. "Oh. M'blindfolded. Mmkay."

"It's me, Shining," an accented voice remarked. "Squall and Pie woke up early and baked something."

"Whadizzit?"

"Nopony's gone to find out. Last I heard, they were still talking and laughing in there, and I, for one, wasnae going to interrupt them while they sounded like that."

Shining rubbed a hoof against the side of her head and unclipped the horn cap, leaving the blindfold in place and just loosening the strap of the protective item on her forehead.

"Wha'd they sound like?"

"Like two ponies who are one snog away from a kitchen accident."

Shining sighed.

"Not again. I always felt weird eating the cinnamon rolls after I found out the butler and housekeeper..."

"You knew about them, too?" Verdant asked, incredulous.

And there it was. Their unspoken history, the divide that had kept them so close and so far apart for years, finally acknowledged aloud.

There was a silence and then, blindfold still on, Shining snorted.

"Well, yeah. They were kind of obvious from space."

"I used to be right scandalized by that, before my mum explained that the 'Mrs.' was Silver Chatelaine's courtesy title and not for real."

"I used to ask father to get evening theater tickets, so Pennyworth could have the same night off as Mrs. Chatelaine."

"How did that work?"

"Oh, Mater invariably threw a fit about my being too young to go out to anything after dark, they'd get into a row, dinner party would be cancelled after Mater ran off to visit school friends in the country and father went off to his club, which left me the run of the library, the junior staff an evening out and our butler and housekeeper a secret date."

"I wonder if that's how Mum got them," Verdant mused. "Just a few times, she'd come home and tell me to put my best hat on, we had tickets for the lower gallery, and we'd go out and see a play."

"Most likely. Mater tended to give theater tickets they weren't using to Pennyworth, and I suppose he converted the box seats to gallery ones."

"You could send fourteen people to the lower gallery for the price of two box seats."

"That's what I told Mater, but did she listen? She used to ask me whom I'd seen in the box at the children's matinees she sometimes sent me to with Nanny and was disappointed when I never brought home any gossip. You couldn't see the play as well from way over on the sides."

"Did you ever tell her you'd switched the tickets for the gallery and sent all the junior maids' children?"

"No, but I did get caught. And grounded. And she confiscated my slide rule for an entire week."

"If it makes you feel better, 'The Lost Treasure' and 'The Secret of the Breezies' were both worth it."

"I liked the Breezies, but 'The Lost Treasure' was so historically inaccurate."

"It was a fairy tale! They're not meant to be accurate!"

"But they might have made an effort! Still, the costumes..."

"Aye, the costumes..."

And they sighed, identically.

"So...do you need me to lead you out of here so you can get that blindfold off?"

"Yes, please," Shining smiled. "I'm sorry to be such a bother with this damned claustrophobia."

"I think I know why you've got it, though. Mum told me about the time with your little cat..." Verdant trailed hesitantly off, Shining following beside her.

"That's it in one," the physicist agreed neutrally. "I did get to keep my cat, though."

"So Mum said."

"...Did she ever give you the books I burned or tore? I tried not to mess up the important part."

"Every one of them. She kind of had an idea you were doing it on purpose."

"I was. I resented my father for what he did, I resented society for not letting us meet and be friends, I...well, I was at that age where you really only have two emotions, 'resentment' and 'ooh, shiny!'"

"'Ooh, shiny'?"

"You know, like when you learn a new application of a theorem or discover a specialty, get all obsessed on it and can't talk about anything else for weeks?"

"Like when I first read about geothermal energy, or that torsional vibration phase I went through, I bet."

"You went through a torsional vibration phase?"

"Did I ever! I actually built a wee engine and tested it with different offset weights." Verdant smiled at the memory. "It was good enough to power a floor buffer, that's how I got the scholarship to the university's service training school. And then there was my particulate matter ignition phase, that ended almost as badly as yours did..."

"...Your poor mother. She was dealing with two of us!"

It was pretty startling to Spec and Flare when Verdant and Shining appeared, reminiscing and chatting like old friends, but there had been so many weird things already, it seemed easier not to question it...especially when some scientific or social reference caused them to crack up into peals of inexplicable, joyous laughter. Nopony wanted to jinx it by asking what had changed, and after about a week, hardly anypony remembered what they were like before. Verdant soon grew comfortable with giving orders the way Shining used to do, albeit in a nicer tone, and Shining got used to tactfully asking insightful questions about others' work the way Verdant had had to hint and insinuate before, lest she get an earful.

The strangest, though, was when Sand Storm accidentally got them confused, putting a hoof on Shining's shoulder and following her for a few minutes before she asked him if he wanted to help with an especially fiddly aspect of the evener. He went absolutely scarlet, Verdant was at his side a moment later and once he heard them speaking, it was easy to tell the Earth pony from the unicorn.

"How could you possibly confuse those two, even without your sight?" Squall ribbed him that evening, near their sleeping bags.

"It was a mistake, okay?" Sand Storm grunted. "They're the same height and their manes feel the same."

"Well, all right, but they sound so different!"

"Only their accents do. Their voices are actually similar. Listen to them talk with your eyes shut sometime, it's kinda hard."

"If they are so alike, how were you telling them apart before?"

"I have a cold, okay? Normally I tell them apart by smell!"

"...By smell?" Squall suppressed a snicker. "So you know how they smell, then?"

"Well, yeah. Shining Mind smells like coffee, books and impatience. Verdant smells like...like sunshine, and the way the air smells when it's just stopped raining on a hot day. And orange leaves."

"...The orange ones have a particular smell?" Squall was only avoiding the giggles through the application of military discipline, and even that couldn't keep the smile out of his voice.

"The autumn ones, you know, like when it's just starting to get cold and the leaves start to fall, plus there's cider and warm sweaters, friends and family coming to say hello, lots of cumulus moving in from the eastward breeze, fluffy enough to hide in with your special somepony -shut up, Squall!" poor Sand Storm objected as his comrade burst into hysterical laughter. In a wounded tone he whispered, "She smells ...nice."

"I do not doubt you, my friend," Squall barely controlled his glee. "It is just that a poetic description from you is a bit like an erotic dance from Commander Hurricane. You might be able to imagine it, but actually witnessing such a thing is an experience it takes significant alcohol to recover from."

"...Do I even want to know?"

Of course, the shoe was on the other hoof by the next morning. Squall and Pie had somehow become the de facto quartermasters of the mission, and while they got along swimmingly, the hours of close-proximity work had led to an unusual problem, possibly the first of its' kind in the little, multispecial community they had, however improbably, formed from the disparate groups.

"You've seriously never had a cold?"

"Not for more than a few hours," Squall explained proudly. "And neither will anyone else here, provided I can find what I need for poor Sand Storm."

"I don't believe you," Pie remarked, half-admiringly, but with a playful challenge in her voice and her raised eyebrow. "You've actually got a cure for the common cold?"

"I would not call this a cure," Squall clarified. "It merely soothes the symptoms and accelerates the body's natural ability to resist the illness, causing recovery to occur in a greatly reduced interval."

"...Which would be a cure."

"As you say," the earthbound pegasus replied. It was a phrase he used frequently, and one which Pie was beginning to have a slight problem with. Specifically, the combination of respectful acceptance of her opinion, so rare from male unicorns, and his gentle, slightly exotic accent, were causing her to feel what could only be described as an inconvenient crush on her coworker.

And it was inconvenient! Some of the dreams she had had about him lately...well, it just wouldn't do to think too much about it and risk damaging their working relationship. After all, working with Squall was rapidly becoming the thing Pie looked forward to every morning when she woke up.

...Which was exactly the kind of thought she was trying not to have.

Dang it.

She realized she'd been silent for awhile and quickly plunged her snout into a bag of supplies, then emerged with the first thing she pulled out.

"Iff thiff it?" she asked. Squall looked at the small metal tin clamped in her teeth and raised an eyebrow.

"Not exactly, no, but I can think of something else that will be very useful for."

"Really?" Pie put the tin down and looked at it. "Cocoa powder?"

"Yes." Squall smiled. "My grandmother uses it to make hot cocoa. As most ponies do."

"Mine, too!" Pie smiled back. Their eyes met, and lingered. Too long. She had to cover this lapse somehow, so she stammered a followup. "I, erm, how does she make it?"

"Oh, the usual. Steamed milk, a little cane sugar, cayenne pepper."

"Really?" Pie blinked. "Cayenne pepper? In cocoa?"

"Of course! It adds to the warmth of the beverage and truly brings out the flavor. How does your grandmother make hers?"

"Steamed milk, brown sugar and sometimes fresh, crushed mint leaves."

"Mint leaves?" Squall perked up. "That does sound very good! I think we have both of those spices, even if they won't be as fresh as we might wish them. However did she get fresh mint leaves in the wintertime?"

"She keeps a little window box herb garden," Pie explained. "Every fall she brings it inside to keep warm, so it's never really winter for her fresh herbs, and she's never without something she might need for a recipe."

"My grandmother would like her, I think," Squall nodded thoughtfully. "She keeps an herb garden, but my grandfather made her a greenhouse with a little woodstove, so it is always as warm as her homeland no matter how cold it gets outside."

"Her homeland?" Pie asked.

"Isn't it obvious?" Squall elegantly gestured to his cobalt-gray coat and winked one of his slightly more teardrop-cornered eyes. "My Naniji is a Zebra."

"Oh, really?" Pie's smile was fascinated rather than puzzled. "That might explain how different and delicious your cooking is."

"As you say," Squall nodded. "Naniji is one of the finest cooks I have ever known, and as a traditional healer, she has accomplished things even the finest doctors Pegasopolis has to offer considered impossible. It was how she found acceptance after marrying my grandfather, when there was still such prejudice and fear of Zebras. There still is, but there are many pegasi who respect her now because she has proven her skill and her generosity." The grounded flier's face took on an expression of solemn pride. "Even our commander Steady Hoof, have you noticed the trust with which I am honored?"

"I have."

"He and I were once in what soldiers call 'a bit of a jam,' and afterward, he wasn't quite himself. I stayed at his side and helped him until all was right again, but it was taking him to Naniji for her medicine that made the great difference. I could never have accomplished what I have without her wisdom. She taught me all I know about healing, understanding the pains of others, running a bountiful kitchen no matter how strained your resources or how limited your equipment and especially good cooking."

"I hate prejudice, don't you? All that ugliness to each other, but especially poor Verdant."

"I cannot hate it. I can only pity the ponies with such ugliness in their hearts. And it is not our dear earth pony colleague who is to be pitied, but...well...any stallion or mare who underestimates her. The way she has Sand Storm nibbling out of her hoof these days, she reminds me a little of Naniji."

"That's right, Zebras don't have wings, either, do they?"

"They do not need them," Squall shrugged. "Their culture is not so aloof as my grandfather's or that of the unicorns toward other beings. If a Zebra wishes to know what it is to fly, she has only to ask the birds and the butterflies, to hear their songs and gaze upon their colors, and in the dreamtime, they can fly just as we do...well, did, in my case."

"...Is...is that how you're coping so well with your injury?"

"I am not coping. I am in constant pain."

"Oh, no! Squall, why didn't you say something, I can get you some-"

"It is not that kind of pain, my sweet Pie. Physically, I feel only a little ache, and that not often. It is the feeling of disappointment, knowing that the sky may well be closed to me without pain, just as the caverns and small rooms of this world are closed to our poor Shining without fear. I know that my wings may well recover, but there may be permanent damage, and while I hold out hope that my family is well and that my Naniji will know something to help heal me physically, in the meantime my heart is sick. I was once capable of so much, and now I have so comparatively little to offer my brother soldiers and our new friends. It is painful to me."

It was startling how matter-of-fact his tone of voice could be when he spoke of his own troubles.

"I'm sorry, Squall. Is...is there anything I can do, to make it easier, or just to take the edge off of it?"

"You are already helping to bind up a wounded heart," the pegasus officer smiled. "When I work beside you, and we talk, we laugh, it is like the sky."

Pie...didn't quite know what to say to that.

"I...I'm glad I can help with that."

"And I am glad that even in this place," Squall gestured to the basalt around them, the simple chemical lamps giving everything a not-unpleasant glow, "even in this place, it is possible for ponies to speak of their families, to trade recipes from home and to miss their grandmothers a little bit."

"I bet she misses you, too."

"Don't they always? I have been writing letters, of course, even with no way to mail them, and that helps."

"So have I, actually," Pie smiled, before sighing. "I don't even know if my grandmother is okay."

"I have faith that they are and shall be well, with the help of this team."

"If anyone can save us now, Verdant can."

"As you say," Squall nodded. "And it is very nearly the same as having dear Naniji here. You are a talented medic, and your cooking could make the Pegasus High Command overlook your wings."

"...I don't have wings."

"For apple tarts like you made last night, they would insist you did and that you were simply an intelligence officer who was good at concealing them," Squall's smile was just a little silly and Pie smiled back.

"My grandmother taught me to cook, like yours did." Pie explained. "She's the head pastry chef at the palace of Unicornia, you know."

"A pastry chef?" There was an impressed, rather than the usual bemused or disgusted tone in Squall's reply. "Pastries take years to master. You must be proud of her."

"You know, I am, rather." Pie's smile was genuine, if still a little shy. "A lot of ponies don't think chefs are very prestigious."

"If ponies could eat prestige, I could perhaps understand that idea. Pastry tastes much better."

"That's a good point, you know."

"Is that how you got your name?" Squall asked. "I mean," he blushed slightly, "your cutie mark -not that I was noticing on purpose...no offense..."

"None taken," Pie smiled. He noticed my cutie mark! "It's kind of a funny story, actually."

"We have time," Squall smiled. He looked like he might have been wondering what a figure-eight on its' side with a pie in each circle meant.

"I'm sure you've heard the expression 'humble pie,' haven't you?" Squall nodded and Pie shrugged. "It's kind of true. Pie was considered a peasant food for many years. It was considered so lower-class, for so long, that most nobility and essentially no royalty had ever even heard of it. My grandmother entered a competition for a place as a kitchen assistant at the Palace when she was a girl, and the rivalry for what was basically an unpaid internship got especially fierce. Some other filly or colt stole half her ingredients, so she improvised, making the best she could with what she had on hand to work with."

"She baked a pie?"

"Right in one!" Pie grinned. "Queen Argentum and King Aurum had never tasted such a thing, and Grandmama always was an amazing chef. She was hired immediately as the first specialist pastry chef in Unicorn history, given a salary and a small apartment in the Palace, and in due course, she married my grandfather. He started out as a hall colt and worked his way up to Palace Butler before he retired."

"So your family is known for pies."

"Very much so. My uncles and aunts each had their specialties, and Mama is a confectioner. I was the first grandfilly, though, and since Mama was working so hard on her own career and Grandmama had so many ponies working under her, she wound up looking after me the majority of the time."

"Aren't grandmothers wonderful in that way?"

"They really are! Did you spend lots of time with yours?"

"Practically every minute I could."

"I bet they would be friends," Pie smiled. "Grandmama taught me all kinds of things about pastry, but it was the measuring and estimating I really liked. I learned the customary, the imperial and the metric systems of measurement, how to duplicate and halve recipes, how to do the figuring to extrapolate how much of every given ingredient we'd be needing even weeks in advance, the precise deltas of increasing and decreasing temperature to make the most effective use of the ovens and equipment, the exact dimensions needed for every dish...I loved it."

"It seems to me that mathematics are really your greatest love."

"They really are, and I suppose I can admit that now," Pie's brow furrowed a little bit. "If I ever see my family again at all, it'll be because of my math skills, not the flakiness of my crusts or the caramelization of my glazes."

"I get the feeling we're getting to the part of the story you regret a little."

"I wouldn't say I regret it, exactly," the mare scratched her mane thoughtfully. "It's one of those stories where they tell you you'll look back and laugh, and I'm getting to the laughter now, but it was a long time coming."

"What happened?"

"Well, Grandmama decided to trust me with making a simple pie, a recipe of hers that she'd made hundreds of times, one of the Princess Platinum's favorites. Very basic, very straightforward, something even royalty recognize as pure comfort food. She was having an 'at home' with just a few select courtiers, so it wouldn't even be noticed in the Great Hall, and wouldn't matter if it wasn't quite a hundred percent perfect. Ideal assignment for a little filly just starting out, eh?"

"Sounds like it."

"That, and Grandmama had also prepared her famous rolled butter scones and a selection of berry tarts, so the pie would never be missed if I failed completely, but I didn't know that, you see," Pie sheepishly continued. "I was a basket case. I was convinced that I'd make the pie too big, or too small, or I'd make a perfect pie and it'd go missing, all kinds of things. So I decided, just in case, I'd better make a backup."

"Quite sensible."

"But then I was worried that I'd make too much and then we'd have a surplus of pie. It has to be eaten before it goes bad, you know, and there is only so much room in the iceboxes. Plus, I might use up too many ingredients, make the wrong flavor..."

"Stressful pie for Pie," Squall patted her hoof with his.

"Yep," Pie sighed. "So I decided to mathematically calculate exactly how much pie was appropriate. I took a standard Palace-issue pie plate, measured from the center to the rim to figure out the length of a slice, then I started trying to work out just how many pies I would need to feed everypony at the party at least one piece, but not more than three pieces. I started baking while I worked on it, trying to find out the exact amount of pie necessary, which is really a kind of surface-area problem, but then the fact that pies are round got into it, and while I came up with a number I could use to define the question, anyway, well..."

"Well?"

"It didn't stop, Squall. It just kept going. I kept finding more and more digits, getting closer and closer to true precision. I was so excited, too, finally having a number I could use to estimate the proper amount of pie, or any circular pastry, really, from desserts to entrees to aperitifs, even tiny little hors d'oeurves, if they were round, I'd be able to figure out just how much I needed to make the exact right amount, with no wasted ingredients, no unused oven time, no futility, no waste, no excessive strain...just pure, mathematical perfection. It would be the pinnacle of all culinary engineering, a basis for all future chefs to work from, and my name would someday be as famous as Grandmama's."

"...I am sensing this train of thought rolled away with you."

"It did," Pie sighed, smiling even as she blushed. "I was so focused on getting even more digits in my special number that I completely spaced on the fact that I was making crusts, preparing fillings and even putting finished pies into the oven."

"How many digits did it have?"

"Ultimately? I have no idea. Grandmama came and found me somewhere in the middle of the second thousand."

"How many pies had you made?"

"Fifty-one. The Palace ovens that weren't in use, I had completely filled."

"...Wow," Squall breathed, visibly impressed.

"I had prepared thirteen different flavor bases and was trying to accomplish something like four different specialized spice profiles for each. Grandmama stopped me before I finished, though."

"What happened then?"

"Well, my mother was furious, but Grandmama stepped in and saved the day. She had the kitchen colts put together a tiered pyramid, cut the pies and placed them on plates she numbered with a chocolate glaze on the side, then arranged it all beautifully and put sheets of numbered list paper onto silver clipboards for the Princess and each of her guests."

"You mean she-?"

"Invented the Royal Festival of Dessert, yes. On the spot and just to keep me out of trouble. The Princess and her guests spent all night and fourteen different ballots selecting a favorite, then Grandpapa announced a charity auction for the various recipes, as well as antacids and pink bismuth. It raised an impressive sum for the orphanage, as I understand, enough that Mama revoked my grounding early."

Pie smiled, a little sadly, at the memory.

"And that's how I got my cutie mark."

"...You miss her very much, don't you?"

"Don't you miss your grandmother as well?"

"Every day. What we are doing, though, may be what ensures there even is such a thing as a grandmother in a century's time. That is what motivates me to keep going...that, and one other thing."

"What is that?" Pie asked. Squall reached up with a hoof and cradled her chin.

"I'm curious to meet your grandchildren."

"...I don't have a family of my own, Squall. I mean, I have a family, obviously, but...I'm not even seeing anypony, and it doesn't seem likely that I'll..." She trailed off, looking into the deep blue eyes of the pegasus she thought about every night before she went to bed and woke up every morning wanting to see. "You know, I really never asked to have a crush on you. This is most inconvenient."

"Inconvenient?" The cobalt pegasus looked at once delighted and a little puzzled. "What can be ill, if you return the esteem, the affection I feel for you?"

"Well, we have a really great working relationship, and it's just so complicated to feel...wait. You...I..."

"I have held you in great esteem since you nicked me with that roulette. That respect has grown to affection and I feel that even if we were not here beneath this mountain, even if all were well and we had only to step outside to return to our homes and our families...I do not think I could do so if it meant losing you." Squall took her hoof in his. "I am the grandson of a pegasus who left the clouds behind to be with the Zebra he loved. Is it so hard to imagine, a unicorn and a pegasus?"

"Squall..." Pie breathed, wanting so much to close the distance between them, but still afraid, and not for her own feelings. "You're grounded for now, because of your injury. We're in a pretty unusual situation here, and there's no guarantee that we're even coming out of this mess alive. If you and I start a relationship, then you get your wings back, I get my place at the university restored, maybe even a shot at tenure for saving the world and all...how would we make that work? The day would come when one of us would resent the other for taking their world away."

"My clever friend, I am well aware. It is difficult even for pegasi from the same hometown to form a life together. But there will be clouds above your university, there will always be weather to look after, and even if we must make the best of what is odd about how we met, I think we have every reason to hope for our days, however few or many may remain, to be together and happy, if that is what you wish."

"...I definitely have feelings for you," Pie admitted. "I just worry."

"I worry, too, but it is strange how even the worry about whether we will live to see tomorrow has had to join the back of the queue, compared to the worry that I might die without telling you how I feel." Squall held Pie's hoof a moment longer and sighed. "I admire you. I take joy in your every word. I long for your company whenever we are parted. I find that I have more to live for in your smile than in any endeavor of wings or hooves. Even if you cannot return my every feeling, even if the love you bear me is that of friends, merely to know that there is something in your heart for me, that is more than I have ever dared to ask for."

And for the first time since the sun fell, Pie felt hope growing in her heart, and realized that there was already something else there with it. She held Squall's hoof just a moment longer, then pressed it to her heart.

"It may have started as respect for a good, decent pegasus and grown into the love that I bear a friend," Pie breathed, barely able to believe this was happening, "but what I feel for you now..."

Squall was gentlecolt enough to spare her having to speak her answer aloud. It was already in her eyes.

Steady stuffed another bag of oats into the bulging saddlebag, shivering beneath two coats and grumbling as he hoisted the heavy bag onto his back to begin the trek back down with lunch. As the frigid cold outside had begun to gradually seep in through the walls of the igloo on the surface, it was becoming less habitable by the day, and so far, his requests for help had fallen on deaf ears. After dropping off the supplies with Squall, who, it had turned out, had a better grasp of culinary construction than most of the mares, Steady went to find Shining and her group.

Shining, Spec, Verdant and Pie were still gathered around the lava pool where he had left them, a single obsidian stone rotating slowly in their collective magical fields as Verdant made small changes to her miniature volcano to keep the temperature right. There was something reassuring about watching them work, a kind of matter-of-fact confidence that radiated from the group as they worked to seal the cold-shocked stones and repair spells with names he couldn't even pronounce.

At length, Squall appeared with steaming bowls of fresh oats and dried strawberries, spiked with just a touch of spices that would have been worthy of note at a proper restaurant, let alone hundreds of meters underground, working with nothing but military fare. As the scent wafted across the work circle, eyes closed for hours in concentration twitched, stomachs growled, and Pie stood up and stretched her legs.
“Oh, thank you, Squall, that smells wonderful!”

One by one, the other mares abandoned their task, set down the stone in its heated cradle, and trotted over to where Pie had nuzzled up to Squall and begun helping him pass out the bowls. Once everyone had tucked in, Steady broached the subject that was foremost on his mind.
“Shining? I know how important the work you're doing is, but we can't delay any longer. I need to borrow a couple of members of your team this afternoon; The small trickle of heat coming out of the cave mouth isn't enough to keep the igloo warm, and I need help to divert some of the larger steam tunnels up to heat the place.”

Shining looked up from her meal with a frown that was usually reserved for uppity graduate students.
“Out of the question. If we're to have any chance of finishing the repairs in time, I need everyone. You'll just have to make do.”

Steady shook his head in irritation.
“We can't. Flare and I have been working on this with some help from Squall when we can get it, but digging and diverting tunnels isn't easy for Pegasi, and some of this will involve handling the super heated steam coming from deeper below.”

The strain of laboring so long began to show in her voice as Shining shot back, “So it will take a little longer. If we postpone the repairs, the cost in lives could grow even larger outside!”

Steady's own irritation, exacerbated by nearly twenty five hours without sleep egged him on as he stood up and closed the distance between them.
“And if we don't do something soon, we won't have food to eat for much longer! It's getting dangerously cold inside the igloo, and I won't risk my ponies again!”

Shining got to her own hooves as she shot back,
“So then divert the steam tunnels yourselves; we can't stop working, and we can't stop eating either!”

Shining's horn was now the only thing keeping the two of them from butting heads as Stead fumed,
“And just how do you suggest we move clouds of boiling steam without magic to shield us? You have to lend me several ponies now to fix this, or I'll need one of you on a regular basis once it gets too cold to go up on our own!”

There was a strained silence as Shining and Steady glared at each other, each searching their sleep-deprived brains for further arguments to win the point. However, before either of them could find their next point, Verdant broke in with a look of exasperation.
“Oh for the love of... Did neither of you stop to think how we're going to go about lighting the sun once it's ready? Did you plan on carrying it up the tunnels while it was burning? I was already planning to divert a lava tube up there for the eventual lighting, and if it's getting that cold already, then I had better do it sooner rather than later.”

She passed her empty bowl to Squall as she stalked off,
“Honestly, you two have been going at it for days now! We'd all have a lot more peace around here if you'd just snog each other already!”

Steady watched her go with an uncomprehending frown, while beside him, Shining's expression slowly softened into one of surprised understanding.
“What is she-”

Steady's question was abruptly cut off as Shining suddenly closed the distance and kissed him, his eyes shooting open in the most ridiculous startled expression. After a moment, he seemed to catch on, and followed her lead as Shining wrapped her hooves around him. The others around the circle couldn't help but exchange smug glances for a moment, but eventually, they each picked up their bowls and wandered off, leaving the two of them alone in the steam.

…

Though the other couples had long ago marked out sleeping areas for themselves in more temperate areas, Shining's claustrophobia meant that she and Steady remained confined to the steamy main cavern, not far from the hot springs. The entrance to one of the tunnels provided some relief from the stifling heat, but after tossing and turning for nearly an hour, Shining finally gave up and gently prodded Steady.
“Hey, you awake?”

The pegasus rolled over and snuggled up closer to her, ignoring the heat.
“Mrrmfmf... Do I have to be?”

Shining sighed.
“I can't sleep tonight. I don't know if its the heat or this rash...” she trailed off as she bent around and scratched herself in a very unladylike manner that made Steady smile.

“Well, I'm not surprised. You have a lot on your mind, its hotter than Tartarus down here, and given that you never leave, you're working on a bad case of jungle rot.” He rolled over and stood up. “Its been more days than I care to remember. How do you feel about a trip to the surface?”
The change in her posture and breathing was instantaneous as she tensed up, but he continued. “You do fine down here with the steam hiding the walls. Do you think you could make a little bubble full of steam just around your head? You'd only need to hold it for a few minutes.”

The fear was obvious in her voice as she replied,
“I... I don't know...”

“Hey, come on now, I'll be with you the whole way.”

“But... But what if I lose it?! If I have a panic attack in those tunnels...”

Steady gently took her in a tight embrace.
“But you won't, because I'll be right there with you the whole way.”

If possible, her eyes widened further,
“But... I can't! I can't risk losing you!”

“And you won't, because I know you would never hurt me.” Steady replied calmly as he leaned back and kissed her gently.

Shining returned his kiss, and after a moment she opened her eyes again, but the meticulous researcher within her couldn't help but ask in a wry tone,
“And that time we first met?”

Steady actually laughed.
“Well, what love story doesn't have its rocky moments? I still want to take you up.”

“You would risk that... for me?”

“To prevent you from becoming Tarzane, queen of the jungle? Yes.” He ribbed her gently. “Now come on, put that bubble together and let's go for a walk. We have to work on this fear eventually, and now is as good a time as any.”

Shining sighed, but after a moment she closed her eyes, concentrated, and formed a small bubble of steam and vapor just around her face.
“Like this?” She asked, looking blindly in his direction.

“That's it.” Steady approved as he reached out and took her by the hoof, “Now just hold that for a few minutes and we'll be at the surface in no time.”

The trip to the surface took almost fifteen minutes as Steady had to guide Shining around and over every obstacle, but with kind words and great determination, she eventually felt the frosty air against her coat once more as she stepped from the cave and dropped the blinder bubble.

“I did it... I did it!” Steady was practically beaming as she bounced up and down with joy. “I actually did it!”

Steady nuzzled her cheek affectionately, and applauded her,
“You found a way around your fear, and that's a start. I'm proud of you, Shining.”

The frozen air felt so good against her face she found she didn't really mind the cold yet, and after weeks below, always trotting carefully to avoid walking into something in the steam, Steady watched her break into a gallop as she made a joyful circuit around the inside of the igloo.
“Oh, that feels so good!”

“I'll bet, we've all- OOF!” Steady managed as the mare tackled him to the ground and snogged him.
When she finally came up for air, his usual expression was tinged with concern. “Shining... You know I love you, but... are you sure this is the best time?”

Now it was her turn to look down on him with that wry smile.
“Don't tell me you've gone puritanical on me now? Doesn't your own military have provisions for when a mare is with foal?”

Steady nodded, still not entirely convinced,
“Well, yes, what military wouldn't? I know you'll be just the same mare I love today, I'm just worried about what happens eleven months from now...”

Shining leaned in close and rubbed noses with him, a smile never quite leaving her face.
“Steady, our world is dying, and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend what could be the last months of my life celibate because of what might happen. In eleven months we'll either be back with our tribes, or we'll all be dead, and...” she paused to nuzzle the inside of his neck, “and I don't want to go, wondering what I missed.” She lowered her body onto his, heedless of the icy ground. “I love you, Steady, and if this is all the time I get, well... I want to spend it with you.”

Steady relaxed beneath her with a sigh as he wrapped his hooves around her and smiled wryely.
“Well we certainly won't be the first. I think Flare and Spec are the only ones left who aren't expecting, though it certainly isn't for a lack of effort.”

“Well you know what they say about soldiers...”
Shining murmured as she kissed him again.

Some considerable time later, the cold finally got the better of them, forcing Shining and Steady off the igloo floor in search of coats. Shining returned wrapped up in a white parka that perfectly showed off her black mane and paused to strike a somewhat ridiculous pose, as she asked provocatively,
“Ready for more?”

Steady, wearing a drab blue and gray military officer's coat couldn't help but laugh,
“Hey, give a stallion a minute, okay? Besides, didn't we come up here for an actual reason?”

An itch on her hock chose moment to make itself known, and Shining paused to grind the offending skin against the ice wall, all the while wearing a pouty expression that looked at once absurd and adorable on the physicist.
“What? Sex is a reason.”

Steady made a show of putting hoof to face as he reminded her,
“The weather? Spec keeps us up to date on the temps back home, and while they're still falling, they haven't gotten anywhere near as cold as we have. Don't get me wrong, I could buck the ice block out of the doorway, but it's no easy task getting it sealed properly again, and the diversions we made in the cave down there are doing a pretty good job of keeping it temperate in here.” He trotted over and placed a kindly hoof on her shoulder. “I need you to teleport us out there long enough to make our log entry. Besides, there's still plenty of night time left.”

Shining rolled her eyes. “Oh, very well. But I'll have you know that since we've been stuck down in that cave, our work days have been getting longer and our nights staying about the same. Did you know we were awake thirty-one hours yesterday?”

Steady's brow furrowed in consternation,
“Really? It felt like a normal day to me...”

“I suppose I should have expected it; without the sun to set a day-night schedule, this is usually what happens.” She paused to kiss him slowly, finally pulling away to finish, “I just resent anything that impinges on our time together.”

A low rumbling boom echoed across the igloo, freezing both ponies to the spot. For a long moment they stared at each other in silent confusion.

“Was that... thunder?”
Steady asked, a sliver of hope creeping into his voice. Shining looked alarmed, but she forced down her worry and straightened up. With an effort, she formed the softly glowing bubble around her and illuminating nearly twice the area of their small green chemical lantern.
“I don't know, but until we're sure, don't leave the shield.”

With a 'Snap!' the bubble containing the two ponies appeared outside the wall of the igloo into total blackness. Another crack of thunder ripped through the sky invisible overhead, and as the booming echos faded away, Shining lit her horn and stabbed her beacon upward, revealing a low ceiling of clouds.

“What in the world?” Steady muttered to himself. “I thought you said all the water was already wrung out of the sky?”

A single drop of rain fell with a splash on the ground next to them, then another, and soon as they watched in astonishment it began to rain in earnest. Another clap of thunder boomed in the blackness above them as the rain began to steam off the ground and run into puddles just outside their bubble.

For the first time in weeks, Steady felt himself really relaxing as he sighed;
“So that's it. We're finally out of danger.”

As he looked across however, Shining's eyes hadn't left the rain outside, and her expression was one of deep mistrust bordering on terror as she asked,
“Steady? Do you still have the notebook with you?”

“Of course, it's right- Hey!”

Shining jerked the notebook from his hoof, ripped out and crumpled up the last blank page, and set the paper wad on fire with a burst of magic.

“What in the world are you-”

With a flick of her magic, the wad of smoldering paper flew outside their bubble and landed in a large puddle.

'FFOOOOOSHH!!'

Shining and Steady both leaped back as the fireball flashed nearly a meter into the air and disappeared an instant later. Steady's eyes were wide as he looked from the puddle to Shining and back again.

“Take the reading.” She stated in an alarmingly flat tone as she proffered their thermometer. Steady took the device and after a look back, carefully pushed it through the bubble into one of the puddles that had formed against the edge of their bubble. After a moment, he pulled it back in and took the reading with a look of confusion.

“I don't understand; I can't get a reading... did we break-”

Shining still hadn't turned her head away from the small ring of light in the darkness that surrounded their bubble, and as she spoke again in that flat voice, Steady felt a chill run down his spine.
“There is nothing wrong with your thermometer. You can't get a reading because it's no longer warm enough to register on that scale.”

“But it's raining! How can-”

“Steady, the temperature out there is now over one hundred and eighty degrees below zero C.” She finally turned to look at him, a look of real fear in her eyes as she explained, “Because that's about the point at which oxygen condenses into a liquid and falls as rain!”

There was a long silence as the two of them stared at each other in the dim glow of bubble and lantern. Around them, a careful eye would note that the puddles had begun to boil as the frozen water ice gave up what was left of its heat to boil the oxygen rain back into clouds of vapor.

“This isn't going to last...” Shining finally said, her alarm building. “Oxygen may condense first, but nitrogen and argon are only a few degrees away, and when they start to rain out...!”

“What?” Steady asked in alarm, “What happens then?”

“Steady, the atmosphere is only made out of oxygen, nitrogen and a bit of argon! If it all rains out, then in another few days we'll be breathing vacuum out here!”

Steady's eyes had gone wider still as he processed what she was saying. “You mean we won't be able to breathe?!”

There was another long pause, but when it was over Steady snapped to attention facing her.
“What do we have to do?”

The question jarred Shining out of her trance, and her eyes flicked quickly back and forth as she spoke rapidly.
“We need to keep a reserve of air. We have heat and water down below, but if all the air runs off this mountain, I don't know how long we can last.” A gurgling sound in the darkness made her head snap up, and she lit her horn to reveal one of the gutter channels carved into the igloo disgorging a steady stream of oxygen onto the ground.
“The pools! We need to get Pie and Spec up here right away and channel the runoff into some of the pools and low spots! Verdant can help open up underground channels to deliver the liquid into the cave, but we have to hurry! I don't know how much-”

An ear-splitting 'Crack!' followed by a deep rumbling growl sounded from somewhere further up the mountainside, and fearing a landslide, Shining and Steady spun about, directing the light of her horn at the noise. They weren't far off. A short distance away and a hundred feet up, a slide of boulders and gravel had broken away in the intense cold opening up the mouth of a shallow cave. The rock slide had stopped well short of them, but as the dust cleared, they could make out strange white shapes rushing downhill towards them.

“Windigoes!”

Steady dropped into a fighting crouch and spread his wings, only to feel Shining grab him in her magic.
“Don't! Wait...” She gestured with a hoof. “Can't you see?”

Steady looked. The windigoes were running on the ground, their usual moans now howls of pain as the rain drove down into them, sending them stampeding in all directions. The oxygen rain was eating into them, burning holes in their skins of liquid water mist, and sending off a shower of frozen ice pellets as they ran. One of them had seen their bubble and came running towards them, desperate for any shelter, only to put a hoof into one of the puddles a few yards before them.
The effect was like a pony sticking a leg into a crucible of liquid steel; its' leg simply went into the three inch deep puddle as though it was a bottomless hole, and the creature screamed and stumbled as it slid across several more puddles, each taking large chunks out of its wounded form. Steady watched in horror as the thing came to rest a few yards away, spasmed violently, then lay very still.

“It really wasn't the windigoes...”

Shining slowly released her magical grip on him as they watched the ethereal form gradualy begin to freeze.
“No, they can no more survive in this cold than we can, they probably hid in that cave for shelter just as we did. Steady, it's one hundred and eighty degrees below zero out here! That's cold enough to kill even the oldest trees and all their seeds! The only green things that will ever grow here again will be what's carried back here: only mushroom spores can survive this level of cold! Buck's sake, even if we flipped a switch and fixed this right now, it would be decades before the grass and weeds started to come back, and we'd have to bring all our own crops and trees with us! These old growth pine forests all around us? We may be the last ponies alive who'll remember they were ever here.”

The last of the screams and sounds of the avalanche had finally died away, leaving only the comforting sound of a soft spring rain. The two of them stood staring out across the snow covered forests of pine that would never bloom again for a long time.

“We'd better get going.” Steady managed at last. “You and your team have work to do if we're going to survive this.”

Shining shook herself and agreed.
“Yes, I'll send you down to get the others at once while I stay up here and begin trenching out some flood channels and-”

A loud splintering 'KRACK!' from down the hillside interrupted her, and in her horn light, Shining caught a glimpse of a particularly huge pine disappearing from view over the edge of the mountain side. As it fell, it struck other trees, which fell against more trees yet, and soon the entire north side of the mountain was nothing but one huge roaring landslide as the frozen trees fell, splintered into shards, and tumbled down the mountain sending up a huge cloud of frozen wood dust into the oxygen rain. The noise was so incredible the two of them just stood and listened as tens of thousands of trees were swept from the mountain and ground into hoof sized chunks by the fall and the cryogenic cold. Steady took a tentative step forward, but Shining blocked him with a hoof.
“We may have to run in a moment...”

“What are you-”

They saw the blinding light from the explosion a moment before the blast wave raced back up the mountain, and Shining teleported them back inside the safety of the igloo. Even from nearly a kilometer away and behind huge blocks of ice, the blast was deafening, and flakes of water ice rained down from overhead.

“HOLD ON!” Shining screamed as the blast died away. Steady held her tight, not understanding what was going on, but trusting her judgment. A moment later, the first of the new landslides started by the blast ignited in the oxygen rain, starting a cascade of fresh explosions, fresh avalanches, and fresh clouds of highly flammable wood dust that formed a chain reaction and spread down the mountain side and up the next mountain. Hundreds of huge explosions rocked their mountaintop igloo, and only the absurdly overbuilt structure protected them from the hurricane of fire outside that rapidly laid waste to anything even remotely flammable.

Shining and Steady clung tightly to each other until the explosions began to grow softer and more distant. As they climbed unsteadily to their hooves, all the ponies who had been down below came racing out into the igloo in a panic.

“What the buck is going on up here?!” Flare shouted over distant booming.

Shining just looked at the assembling ponies, and with a thought, formed a much larger bubble around the entire group.
“Come on, girls, I'm going to need your help for this.”

The wide eyed unicorns shared an unsteady glance, then lit their horns to link up, and with a 'Pop!', the entire group teleported outside, onto the edge of the mountain meadow overlooking the valley below. There was a collective intake of breath as they all took in the burning hellscape around them.

Where, only moments before, the land had been frozen and dark, the only light under the clouds coming from their own horns or lanterns, now, the very land was burning. The static spark that had ignited the wood dust cloud had started a conflagration that was already spreading out to the edge of their vision, many kilometers distant, and the huge booms of entire mountain forests igniting at once were clearly audible even at this distance. The harsh red light of their immediate surroundings now came mainly from the towering infernos in the valley floor. The oxygen rain had been falling long enough to run down the hillsides and form deep pools and streams on top of the frozen ice of the original mountain streams. While the explosions of dust and small wood scraps had been incredible, most of the flammable wood chunks had finished tumbling down the mountain side where they came to rest, smoldering, in the pools of liquid oxygen. The resulting fire now towered into the sky, higher than the mountain they stood on, and only their combined shield held back the intense heat that was scorching everything around them sending up clouds of water steam. The harsh red light coming off the fires along the valley floor was punctuated now and again by a fresh white flash and loud rolling 'Boom!” from somewhere off in the distance.

They all stared out in silence for some time, but within minutes the fires began to shrink and the icy wind return as the modest amount of water melted by the fire began to fall again as snow. At length, as the darkness began to return once more, a despondent Flare asked,
“So is that it? Is there any reason to hope anymore?”

Steady shook his head in shock,
“Nothing could have survived that. The only reason we're still here is that igloo and the kilometer of bare rock between us and the nearest scrap of wood.”

“No, you're wrong!”

The group slowly turned inward to look at Spec, who was pulling a notebook out of her saddlebags.
“I won't be silent about this twice! I still have the temperature recorders back home in the unicorn kingdom, and they're still working. It's cold back there, and getting colder, but it's nowhere near this cold!”

“But... that's not possible...” Pie stated in confusion, “There are limits on how large a temperature difference there can be across a distance like this!” She grabbed the notebook in her magic and compared the local temperatures with those back home. “This isn't possible! If there was really a difference this big, we'd have a huge hurricane on our hooves as the cold and warm air tried to mix and even this out. There must be something wrong with your recorders!”

Spec whipped around to face her.
“With all three hundred and twenty six of them?! No. The data doesn't lie.”

Verdant stamped a hoof in frustration as the mix of snow and ash began to fall more heavily around them.
“But then how?! The only way that could be true is if...”

The unicorns had all gone silent as a far away look washed over them leaving the pegasi confused and worried.
“What? If what?” Sand asked worriedly.

“If something was affecting the weather, preventing the normal exchange of warm and cold air...” Shining said slowly. The pegasi suddenly found all eyes on them as she asked. “Have you noticed anything... odd about the weather lately?”

Sand raised an eyebrow as he asked,
“You mean besides the ball freezing cold?”

Spec had caught on as well now, and she prodded Flare gently.
“Yes, beyond that. Flare, which way has the wind been blowing the last few weeks?”

There was a pause as she thought about it, then,
“From the north I guess. It's been blowing almost due north ever since we started this trip...”

Shining held her gaze.
“Flare? Which way is the wind blowing now?”

“Well, in a fire like this, it'll be blowing in every direction.” Flare stated matter-of-factly. “The updrafts and currents are always chaotic, that's what makes forest fires so difficult to handle.”

“Then why is the wind still blowing steadily from the north?”

There was a long pause as they all took another look at their surroundings. Now that they looked, every wisp of flame, every trail of smoke, all of it was drifting up, but also southwards, always southwards. Suspicion was building on her face as Shining held out a hoof.
“Somepony give me a feather.”

There was an awkward shuffling, but Steady plucked a modest wing feather from his wing with a wince and passed it across to her. The air inside their shield bubble was still, shielded from the winds and fire outside, and holding the feather high aloft in her magic, Shining let it go and watched as it drifted slowly back to earth.

A meter south of where she had let it go.

There was a long silence as they all stared at the small feather laying on the ground, but at length, Shining spoke,
“We've had it wrong this whole time... This is no natural dust cloud...”

Even Squall looked startled as he figured it out.
“But it must be! How in the world could this be-”

“Artificial?!” Shining almost shouted. “I don't know, but look at the evidence: The temperature has been falling for months, maybe years without obvious cause. The sky is blocked out overhead, and the further north we go, the worse it gets. When we finally stop here, it gets even colder, and now we know that some kind of magic is driving the wind ever southwards, making this intense cold possible in the first place.”

Spec and Flare shared a worried glance,
“But, who would want to freeze the entire world? Nothing can live in this extreme cold!”

Shining thought about it, then pointed a hoof north, over the dieing fire in the valley.
“I don't know, but I have a feeling if we follow this 'wind' north to it's source we'll soon find out.”

All of them strained to see anything in the direction she pointed, but nothing was visible save fire and darkness. After a long moment steady broke the silence,
“Then it looks like we have a different destination once the sun is repaired, but at the moment, we still have other problems. Shining, is there any reason to think it's going to get warmer now?”

“No. We've just burned every scrap of firewood for kilometers, and you can already see the snow returning.”

“Then we have work to do, don't we? You said it yourself; if it continues to get colder, it's only a matter of time before all the oxygen rains out of the air, and when that happens, we're going to be in bad shape if we don't save some of it now.”

This seemed to bring them all back to the present, and, turning their backs to the dying flames in the valley, Steady and Shining quickly doled out the work. With three unicorns providing the bubble shields, the team was soon put to work diverting every drop of the oxygen rain into the pools and low places in the former meadow atop the mountain. In a short time the igloo was permanently sealed up to trap their air inside, and soon the pegasi were at work sealing off the tunnels below.

Outside, Pie and Spec dug rapidly with their magic to divert the increasing rain into a basin as Shining carved out huge ice blocks and set them in a ring, trying to turn the entire meadow into a lake. Fortunately, the meadow already had a mild depression in the center, and with a few dozen blocks in a couple of low spots, the stage was soon set for a mountaintop lake.

As the last of them teleported back into the igloo, Verdant was still at work growing the hollow tubes that would deliver the liquid where they needed it. The pegasi army's wealth of combat supplies had not included cryogenic valves and piping accessories, so as long as they stayed on site, Verdant was now the only pony who could operate the stone plumbing and keep them all breathing, a fact they were keenly aware of.

“I think we're done outside.” Spec breathed heavily as Flare swooped in to steady her, “Any rain that falls out there now will stay on the mountain top.”

Verdant paused in her work and opened her eyes.
“Good, now we've got a fighting chance. I've got the first two pipes grown, but I've a question to ask, and none of the others know: do I draw from the top or the bottom?”

Pie looked confused for a moment before Shining clarified.
“Ah, she has a point. Oxygen begins to rain out at one hundred eighty three degrees below zero C, but argon is going to follow when it gets to one hundred eighty six below. Argon is less than one percent of the atmosphere, so it doesn't really matter, but nitrogen starts raining at one hundred ninety six below, so in another thirteen degrees, we'll have both oxygen and nitrogen in the ponds we just built.”

Steady had been working very hard to keep up over the last few weeks, even reading some of Shining's books that might help out, and now he spoke up proudly as it all clicked into place.
“And when that happens, Verdant needs to know which will float to the top! Hold on, I've got this!” He called as he pulled out one of her chemistry texts and began skimming through. “Ah, here we go! Liquid nitrogen has a specific gravity of point eight, while liquid oxygen is one point one.”

There was a pause as everypony stared at him.

“What? Shining's been tutoring me on this: The specific gravity of water is one, so anything greater than one is going to sink, and anything less than one is going to float on water. Given that nitrogen is point eight and oxygen is one point one, the oxygen will sink to the bottom of the pools, and you can tap into them at the bottom.” He finished with a gesture to Verdant.

Shining had been listening with growing interest, and now as Steady finished, she stalked over with a wicked grin.
“You... You've been practicing...”

“Well, yes. I-”

With a lunge she knocked him over and snogged him as the others smiled or groaned.

“Aww...” Verdant murmured

“Not again.” Spec lamented. Flare arched an eyebrow back at her partner and kissed her as well.
Spec's squicked-out look gradually gave way to a dreamy gobsmacked expression as Flare finally came up for air.
“You're done out there, right?”

“Uh... Yeah...”

Without another word, the white orange pegasus scooped up her partner and flew off for the cave mouth while the other couples quietly left as well, secure in the knowledge that they were safe with each other.

Ch. 10 To Light a Sun

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Ten: To Light a Sun

It took several more days for the oxygen rain to finish, but before it had completely tapered off, the nitrogen began to rain out as well, and soon the world outside their igloo was one torrential cryogenic downpour. The liquid levels around their igloo had risen quite a way up the outer walls by now, so when Flare and Spec came up to do their observation, they trotted over to the mark on the inside wall that gave the position of the ramp which wrapped around the outside of the dome. Spec gave Flare a meaningful glance as she used the now familiar spell to form a bubble of soft white light around them,
“Please remember now, it does take some concentration to hold this in place, and if you startle me too much, I might drop it by accident.”

Flare smiled and kissed her softly on the cheek,
“And we don't want to both end up as pony popsicles, so I need to restrain myself.”

Spec smirked as she replied,
“Well, it is your turn, but my horn will be busy for the next few minutes.”

Flare feigned a pouting expression.
“Only with keeping us breathing...”

Spec rolled her eyes and tried to hide her smile as she concentrated on the jump, and the pair disappeared with a soft 'Pop!'. Outside, their shield flashed into existence half way up the ramp overlooking what had become a large shallow lake of liquid air that stretched as far as the dim light of their bubble could show them. The downpour continued from the very low cloud ceiling overhead, the nitrogen running in sheets down the outside of their bubble, blurring and distorting the scene around them. Spec took the necessary readings and jotted them down while Flare idly kicked a loose chunk of water ice into the lake a meter below, watching as it slowly sank in the dim light. The lake itself was so clear that it was actually difficult to see from directly above, and the ice chunk remained clearly visible as it sank, until, with a puff of blue, it splashed into the oxygen layer beneath and came to rest, floating on the light blue liquid. In the middle distance, the little ripples and flaws in the surface of the lake made it easier to discern where the surface actually was, while below her, only the blue layer of oxygen could be readily seen. A few meters away, this gave the strange illusion of a lake of clear liquid that disappeared into nothingness a few meters off, hovering over the light blue sea.

“There, that's it for this spot.” Spec stated from behind her notebook, breaking Flare out of her reverie, “Follow me up to the top?”

Flare nodded and the two turned and trotted up the ramp and around circle of the igloo dome. Within a few dozen meters, they had climbed up into the cloud ceiling, the view around them nothing but a gray fog. As they trotted on, mindful of their step on the narrow ramp, the gray around them seemed to get thinner and further away, until suddenly, they found themselves above the clouds near the top of the dome. Intent on her notebook and the path before them, Spec didn't notice Flare's awed silence or the sight around her until she came to a stop at the top where the second observation was to be taken.

“Wow...”

The two ponies stood atop a small dome of ice emerging from an endless sea of cloud stretching out in all directions just below them. The light of their shield cast everything in an unearthly white glow, but only illuminated their immediate surroundings.

“It's beautiful...” Spec breathed, “Like a cloud city under the moonlight...”

“It is...” Flare agreed her voice trembling with longing and loss as thoughts of home suddenly stabbed her heart. “But it isn't real... It's as cold and dead as the moon, and we'd both die in moments if you dropped this shield.”

Spec stepped close and hugged her love, trying to banish her fears and uncertainties with her embrace. As far as she knew, she was the only pony who ever saw Flare's softer side.
“We will get through this Flare... We will see our families again: this isn't the end.” There was a soft sniffle, and to her astonishment, Spec felt something wet drip onto her foreleg beneath Flair's muzzle.

“But we don't know that... they could all be gone by now...” The unicorn held her closer as Flare's form shuddered beneath her. “You're so smart and brilliant, and you have magic to keep us safe... I don't even have a sky to fly in anymore!” She sobbed as she turned and buried her face in Spec's coat.

Spec held the shaking pegasus while she cried, trying her best to console her.
“Come on Flare, it's not that bad... We still have each other...”

Flare actually sobbed harder at that,
“But even that's wrong... I know we try not to talk about it, but...” Spec gently stroked her mane as Flare sniffled and waited for her to continue.
“But every other mare here is already expecting a foal! I love you so much, but even if we survive this, we're as useless and barren as everything else!” She exclaimed with a gesture at the dead clouds around them. “I've always been so careful... I've never let myself fall for somepony because I knew this is how it would have to be...”

Spec couldn't help but look down at her in shock.
“Flare... I... I'm sorry, I didn't know... I had just thought we would adopt somepony's foal...”

Flare sniffled again.
“I know... I know how selfish it is to want what everypony else has when there are orphan foals out there in need of parents... but I don't want just any foal! You're the smartest, most amazing mare I've ever met, and I want to have your foal!” She looked up into Spec's eyes for a moment before hanging her head once more. “Is that really so wrong?”

Spec didn't have an answer to that, and as she hugged her lover, she felt the first of her own tears fall as Flare's words bit home. The two of them held each other for a long time as the light from their shield dimmed and faded away to almost nothing.

After what seemed like a very long time indeed, Flare raised her head and kissed Spec softly once more.
“I'm sorry Spec, I can be so strong around everyone else... I don't know why...” There was a long pause as Spec looked quizzically down at Flare whose brow had furrowed in confusion.
“Uh... Spec? Can you see that?”

It took Spec a moment to process this abrupt shift in the conversation, but after a moment, she turned around to see what Flare meant, and as she did so, the shield which had nearly dimmed out lit back up, it's dim light nearly blinding them after so long in true darkness.

“Gaah! No, don't light it up again!” Flare complained as she covered her eyes with a foreleg.

“What are you... Oh!” Spec said as she realized what Flare was getting at. It wasn't easy, but with a bit of feeling around she grasped the emotions she had felt when the bubble dimmed, and concentrating hard, she gradually brought the light output of their bubble down to almost nothing. As their eyes began to adjust to the true darkness once more, Spec realized that she could actually see further without the light of their bubble shining in her eyes. At first, the nearby mountain tops began to come into focus a few kilometers distant, poking up into the vacuum through the nitrogen clouds below them. A moment later the scientist within her asserted that this light had to be coming from somewhere, and she looked up to try to find the sun or moon, but what she saw in the sky left her mouth hanging open in astonishment.

Stretching out from the north towards the south, a series of faintly visible straight lines of light, spanning every color of the rainbow were radiating outward towards the horizon. As she watched, each line seamed to receive a surge of power, one line after another in sequence, and each one glowed brighter at the source as the glow shot rapidly from north to south, sending out what could only be described patches of lightning into the surrounding sky. The distance in hard vacuum made it tough to guess at the height, but Spec would have sworn it was higher than any cloud she had ever seen, maybe even low orbit, but the most unnervingly part about the display was the lightning. It kept disappearing!
Beyond the obvious fact that hard vacuum couldn't support lightning in the conventional sense, these arcing bolts that had to be many kilometers long seemed to be weaving in and out of an invisible cloud that completely hid their light when they bolts penetrated it.

“What in the world is that?” Flare asked in awe.

Spec could only stare as her eyes were drawn slowly back towards a point just over the horizon where all the lines seemed to converge, and where the sky seemed to be lit from underneath by some strange light. A deep suspicion crossed her mind as she reached out with her magic and plucked a feather from Flare who let out a surprised yelp.

“Ow! What was that for!?”

“Hold on, I want to try something.” Spec said as she lifted the feather up and out of the bubble into the vacuum with her magic. She waited until the next pulse of light was coming up, then let the feather fall, both of them watching as it drifted south, and actually accelerated southwards as the pulse of light and lightning spread out countless kilometers over their heads.

“That seals it then. There's no air out there, and your feather is still getting blown south by the 'wind'. I'd wager tenure that whatever is causing this is at the end of... whatever that is...” She trailed off with a gesture at the lights overhead.

The two of them stared at the rigidly straight beams of lights overhead for another long moment before Spec climbed to her hooves and shook out her mane, the bubble going back to its former dim glow again as Flare groaned at the 'bright' light.
“Come on, the air in here isn't going to be good for much longer, and we have to get back and tell the others.”

...

The mood in the caverns was different now. The stress of work and living together had seen them cope as best they could, pairing off, and actually finding love in this frozen landscape. The honeymoon had not even had time to wear off before this latest crisis thrust a new urgency into their work. Where before the couples had sought out the cooler tunnels nearer the surface, now these were all blocked off, their entrances passed with ears cocked, listening for the telltale whistle of their air leaking away into the frozen vacuum outside.

The sun was finally nearing completion, with perhaps a week of repair work left before they could ignite it once more, though with the evener ring complete, they all hoped this lighting wouldn't be quite as hair-raisingly dangerous as the first time.

That night, after another long day of mending stone after stone, the group found themselves all sitting around Verdant's volcano forge, the heat source they had begun using as the communal camp fire when it wasn't serving as a industrial tool. Squall had made a meal based around an oat and barley blend, and while they reclined on the stone couches and chairs that Verdant had grown out of the cave, the conversation gradually turned to matters of family.

“So, have you found out what you're having yet?” Sand Storm asked in Squall's general direction. Verdant had been spending a little time each night on his eyes, and now he could see well enough to navigate a room and identify a pony, though faces were still beyond his abilities.

Pie blushed a bit as she and Squall shared a knowing look.
“We... asked Shining to check for us and she taught us the spell to see inside and look. We did as she taught us and... We're having a little pegasus colt!” She finished in a rush as she and Squall both seemed to swell with pride.

Verdant grinned widely as she trotted over and hugged Pie warmly,
“That's great news! I'm so happy for both of you.”

“Thank you, we certainly never imagined things working out like this, but we've talked it over, and we wouldn't have it any other way.”

“And thanks to your healing touch,” Squall replied as he spread his healed wings and made a deep bow to Verdant, “someday I'll be able to fly with our little one. Are you and Sand Storm expecting as well?”

Verdant just smirked as she waited for the response Sand Storm had been dying to give.
“We're having a little earth pony mare!”

Squall and Steady couldn't help but share an uncertain look.
“And... you are okay with this?” Squall asked.

“Of course we are!” Sand Storm retorted with visible pride, “Our little mare is going to be the best smith any pony has ever seen, and if she takes after her mother, she'll be a force to be reckoned with as well!”

Even Spec couldn't help but smile at this adorable reversal of prejudices as she asked coyly,
“Oh dear, you two are going to bring her up as a little hell raiser aren't you? I can only imagine what it will be like when she starts dating...”

Sand Storm had a completely straight face as he said simply.
“All good fathers have a crossbow.”

All the pegasi and several of the unicorns enjoyed a good laugh at that as he continued, “We've put up with hatred and discrimination for far too long. If I had listened to what my own parents had taught me, I would never have met Verdant. Soon, I'll have two beautiful earth pony mares to care for, and I'm not going to let the world abuse them.”

Squall and Pie nodded sympathetically,
“I must agree, if we make it out of this alive, we must teach our fellow ponies what we have learned. None of this would have been possible without all three tribes working as one.”

There was a general murmur of agreement until Flare spoke up, the sarcasm dripping from her voice,
“That's right, we can teach all our children about the magic of friendship that made all this possible, and they can take that great lesson and use it to build a utopia where all three tribes live in harmony. ”

A few of the ponies exchanged concerned glances, but Verdant actually smiled as she turned and fished something out of the bag by her seat.
“Well, I don't know about building a utopia, but somepony came to me a few days ago with a very unusual request, and” She looked significantly at Spec, “I think I might have something you could use.”

What Verdant pulled out of the bag appeared at first to be a huge seed, but as Flare got up for a better look, she realized she was looking at a carved stone.
“You carved us a seed made out of rock?” She asked incredulously.

Verdant just smiled as she held it out to the pegasus,
“Actually, I grew it, using some very old earth pony magic. You already know that earth ponies can make crops grow, but that kind of fertility magic isn't just for plants...”

A ray of hope seemed to flit across Flare's features as she asked,
“You mean... Spec and I...?”

Verdant smiled and put a hoof on Flare's shoulder. “That's right, you're going to have daughters.”

“Sisters, you mean.” Spec amended happily, “Two mares assures that much at least.”

“Verdant, that's... that's wonderful!” She jumped forward and hugged the grinning earth pony as Spec wrapped a foreleg around each of them. After a moment she let go and examined the heavy stone seed in her hooves. “Uh... what are we supposed to do with it?”

Verdant's smile only grew.
“Well, seein' as it's really old magic, it only works right in the presence of intense affection, so I'm afraid you two are going to have to make mad, passionate love to each other with this enchanted seed. Do ya think you can handle that?”

Spec couldn't help but laugh as that now familiar predatory grin settled on Flare's features.
“Oh, I think we might find a way...”

Even Verdant couldn't help but laugh as she continued,
“Very well, just don't break it, all right? It took me the better part of a week to grow, and besides, it's bad luck to shatter it.”

“Bad luck?” Spec asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Yes. The tradition goes that the happy couple is to use the seed, and then plant it at their home so that it may grow and blossom into a beautiful tree and bless the children that follow.”

Flare couldn't help but smile at Verdant,
“Well, with the weather going the way it has lately, our next 'home' might be the mouth of a cave at the bottom of a valley somewhere, but what the hay, we'll certainly give it a try.”

Spec was practically bouncing up and down with joy as she asked,
“Oooh! What do you think they'll be like?”

Flare chuckled,
“Well, I sure hope they're pegasi so I can take them flying.”

Spec took her hoof as she smiled back,
“I would love that, but I hope at least one of them is a unicorn so I can teach them all about physics and science.”

Verdant couldn't help but laugh.
“As wild as you two can be, it would serve you right if you got both.” She smiled at the idea, “Imagine a little foal that could get into everything with her magic, and fly up to the highest shelves at the same time.”

Flare snorted in amusement,
“Is there even a name for a pony like that?”

Spec brushed the question aside,
“Never-mind what tribe they belong to, what are we going to call them?”

Flare leaned back against the wall,
“Oh, that's easy. All my brothers have fire names like Flame, Sundancer, Pyro, Sun Spot, you get the idea. We can just choose one like that, maybe, 'The Equine Torch'!

Spec nearly choked at that, but managed to be diplomatic,
“Maybe we should work on the names together...”

“Sure, what did you have in mind?” Flare asked obliviously.

“Well, I've always liked my name, but Specular Reflection Jr would be a mouthful, so,-”

“Hey, what does that even mean, anyway? Everyone just calls you Spec.”

Spec smiled self-consciously,
“Its a physics term for a coherent reflection – essentially a mirror. My mother used to talk about my being a mirror for all that's good in the world...”

Flare snorted,
“So we should name our daughter 'Vanity'?”

“No!” Spec objected with feigned indignation, “But, I've actually had a name in mind for some time now... How does 'Diffuse Reflection' sound?”

“Dear, you know I love you for your mind... and other parts,” Flare jabbed with a grin, “but maybe we could give the physics textbook a rest? What is a diffuse reflection anyway?”

“Well, I've always liked the soft glow of moonlight at night, the way the harsh yellow light of the sun is reflected off as a cool white light that lights your path without driving off the stars overhead... The sunlight bouncing off the moon doesn't come down as a mirror image of yellow sun, it's a diffuse reflection, carrying the light of the sun, but with the qualities of the moon.”

There was a short silence before Steady commented,
“Wow... That's a surprisingly beautiful idea...”

“Yeah, but all that for “Diffuse Reflection”? Flare chuckled, “Let's just call her 'Moon Princess' and be done with it. At least most ponies can spell that.”

Spec quietly facehoofed.
“We'll work on the names together...”

...

At long last the day had come. After months underground as the world froze around them, the Sun was finally whole again, thought at this point, still disassembled in several packing crates. Working together, the seven of them carried the pieces up through the narrow tunnels, one load at a time, before sending Steady back down to help Shining up with her foggy blindfold. When, at last, he led the shaking unicorn up and out of the tunnel, Shining took but a moment to collect herself before beginning the inventory.

“Right. Spread out all the pieces on the straw mat there and get the moon stones out. We're going to try to ignite the sun at it's lowest power output and with the shield on, so please select those two stones, Verdant.”

The green earth pony nodded and went to fetch the stones in question while Steady brought Shining a jacket. The small pool of magma that had been keeping the igloo warm had been widened considerably until it was almost a meter across, but the igloo was large enough, and the temperature outside cold enough, that as yet, no droplets of water were to be seen.

Squall landed beside them, asking
“What's going to happen now?” with evident concern, having seen the worry in Pie's face.

“They're going to pour their magical energy into the sun, getting it charged up to ignite. This is really the hardest part for them,” Verdant explained as she took up her place managing the lava pool, “It will take six to eight hours before they put in enough energy to light it. It's utterly exhausting work, and if they try too soon, they'll have to start over.”

“And we have to be ready to sever our connections right after the sun lights up, lest we get caught up in the feedback.” Shining amended. She paused to look at the three slanted obelisks evenly spaced around the circle that Verdant had grown for them. Each was a crude flat plate of stone, nearly thirty millimeters thick and more than wide and tall enough to protect several ponies. Right at head height, a hole was carved for their horns to protrude through so they could each work on the sun, yet remain protected from its violence.
“That's very nice work you've done Verdant! That much stone should protect us from just about anything the ignition could send our way.”

Verdant blushed slightly at the compliment,
“Well, after those metal shields on the castle burned up in under a minute the last time, I wanted something a bit stronger. These aren't electrically grounded like the metal, but they're definitely thicker and stronger.”

Shining gave the nearest obelisk an experimental thump with a hoof, smiling as she received only a dull 'clack' in reply.
“Yes, this will do nicely. Is everypony ready?” Seeing generally affirmative nods from her team, she took up her position, her horn the only part of her body sticking through the stone slab as she reached out with her magic.

The three unicorns each began to pick up the pieces and levitate them into place over the magma, drawing on it for heat. As the pegasi watched, all thirty-eight stones, the ring and two moon stones were fitted into place and a slow but steady hum began to emanate from them.

The minutes ticked slowly by as the pegasi milled uselessly around the outside of the igloo or talked amongst themselves. Squall fetched water and assembled some simple snacks that Verdant and the others all gratefully accepted, but as the hours ticked slowly by, there was little else to do.

Some three hours after they began, Squall fluttered to a landing next to Pie's station with a fresh cup of water, but when he ducked under the stone to offer it, her disheveled appearance pulled at his heart. The unicorn mare was sweating heavily, her mane and tail matted and bedraggled as she breathed hard and her whole body quivered from the stress of exerting so much magical energy for so long.

“Pie... Are you all right?”

She shook her head as much as she could without letting go of the sun and managed a weak smile,
“It's okay, this is just really hard work.” She opened her eyes to give him a reassuring glance, saw the water and exclaimed, “Oh! Thank you!” as she grabbed it and twisted her head sideways to gulp it down.

Squall took the cup back when she was finished, and soon returned with towels to mop the sweat from her brow.
“There, is that better?”

Pie smiled and held out a hoof to him, her eyes still closed. Squall took her hoof in his and squeezed it gently, offering what support he could.

Unexpectedly, Shining spoke up from across the circle;
“Pie, I don't know what you're doing, but you need to slow down. Your output just about doubled, and you know you can't maintain that for long.”

Pie opened her eyes to share a questioning look at Squall, who was smiling as he held her hoof, and, inexplicably, had begun to breath harder.
“Uh... I think I'm okay actually...” There was a momentary pause, the only sound coming from the growing hum of the sun before she continued, “Squall is... helping me.”

Shining's response was nearly flat, but with just a hint of confusion,
“Squall is a pegasus... How is Squall helping you?”

“I don't know, but... Steady? Could you go hold Shining's hoof and lend her your strength?”

Steady shot a questioning look in their direction, but after hours of standing around, he wasn't about to argue. With a flutter of wings, he landed beside Shining's stone and ducked underneath. A moment later they all felt Shining's magic contribution suddenly surge to nearly twice her previous output as Steady whistled respectfully,
“You've been working this hard for three hours?! When we make it home I think I can promise you a job drilling new recruits in the force if you want it!”

Squall and Pie grinned at each other as she called out,
“You too, Flare! Spec could really use your help if you're able!”

Flare landed beside Spec's stone and ducked underneath, pausing to lick her lips as she gave her lover a long look up and down, her eyes following the curves of her flank and the sweat dripping from her mane.
“Damn, you look hot!”

Spec opened her eyes to see Flare circling around her with a familiar predatory expression, but with a roll of her eyes, and surprising speed after such a long workout, she reached out and snatched Flare's hoof up in her own, coupling her directly to the reactor's draw. Flare's grin vanished in a flash as she almost collapsed under the load, and within moments she was breathing deep along with Spec as her own energies were tapped.

“How did you do that?!” Flare managed to gasp as she sat down unsteadily next to Spec.

Spec just grinned,
“Unicorns have always been able to help each other out like this, and while I've read smutty romance novels where the forbidden lover helps out in a pinch, I didn't know if it was really possible...” She wrung the sweat from her mane while casting an affectionate look back, “I guess you really do love me unconditionally. If you'd had any doubts, your internal walls would have been up, and I couldn't have drawn on your strength so completely.”

Flare looked up at her with a loving respect as she answered simply, and for once quietly,
“Of course I love you, Spec. Like I've never loved anypony before.”

The two shared a long kiss, Flare managing some considerable contortions to reach Spec as the unicorn could barely move her head.

The minutes ticked by faster now that they weren't working alone, and in a surprisingly short time, six sweaty ponies from two different tribes had nearly finished charging up the sun. As the power levels approached their target, the sun's background hum had grown in both volume and pitch.

“All right everypony, great job!” Shining called out to the tired soldiers and researchers, “Just a little bit more and then cut your connections.”

Under the third stone, Flare was drenched in sweat and breathing hard as she held tightly to Spec's hoof, but instead of relief on hearing this, a troll's grin spread across her features. Without letting go of her hoof, Flare stood up and began nibbling on Spec's ear, pausing to kiss her here and there as the startled unicorn gasped and her magic surged.
“Flare, what are you doing?!” She squeaked.

The pegasus chuckled as she moved lower, nibbling her neck and working her way south.
“Hey, we need a little more, right? If holding hooves was good, what happens if I do... this?”

Spec gasped again, and the sun quivered slightly as she struggled to maintain control.
“Flare!”

From across the circle, Pie, ignorant of how she was doing it called out,
“All right Spec! We'll have this done in another minute or two at this rate!”

“See, I told you I would help.” Flare teased with that troll's grin as Spec chewed her lower lip and struggled to hold still. With a wink and a smirk, Flare took up a position behind her and fished the stone seed out of her saddlebags.

“Flare! We used that three times last night! Do you really- ohHHH!”

Pie and Shining felt the power output jump again as they kept the sun in place with considerable effort. “Spec? Are you okay?”

“I... ARRGG! I'm fine!” Spec gasped through gritted teeth as sparks flew from her horn where it emerged from the stone slab.

“Good, because we've hit our mark!” Shining replied, “Ignition in ten seconds! Get ready to drop your connections!”

The power flowing through the connections was becoming choppy as the hum of the sun rose from a whine to a scream and small bolts of electricity began to jump in all directions. Verdant, her job complete, abandoned her place at the magma pool and galloped for safety as white light began to pour from the sun. Shining and Pie both severed their connections to the sun with a loud 'SNAP!', but Spec, her mind otherwise occupied, didn't react in time.

The switch from magical energy output to feedback input occurred in a flash, and an enormous blinding bolt of white lightning shot from the sun to Spec's stone slab exploding it into smoke and jagged rubble as it channeled through her horn.

Gradually, as they all blinked away the after-images, everypony emerged one by one to see that it had worked! The sun with it's ring and moon stones was burning as intended! Instead of a blinding light and heat that scorched everything around it to ash, the sun now shone brightly, but cool enough to be approached, and whats more, the large glowing bubble it projected shone softly in its' own right. Several of them cheered and hugged each other, basking in their success before Verdant spoke up;
“Hey, where's Spec?”

With the last of the smoke dissipating, the missing third slab stood out starkly against the neat circle around it. In a flash, they had all descended on the pile of debris, some digging with bare hooves as the unicorns flung large loads of stone away, but before they could get far, a rumbling beneath their hooves made them all pause in mid task.

The pile of rubble was suddenly heaved aside in a flurry of white sparks by a blue and white canopy of leaves that spread and grew, blooming outward from a huge, angular tree that kept climbing until it threatened to scrape the ceiling high overhead. Spec and Flare appeared from below, their unmoving bodies raised up in a tangle of roots as white and blue lightning arced from their bellies into the surrounding tree.

As suddenly as it had started, it all stopped, the tree vanished in a white and blue flash, and Spec tumbled to the ground next to Flare, their eyes gradually flickering open as they both groaned.

“Holy buck! Spec, Flare, are you all right?”

Without looking up, they both answered on their own;
“That was a terrible idea!”
“That was a great idea!”

There was a short pause as they both sat up enough to look at each other, Spec's disbelieving grimace matched by Flare's troll grin. There was silence for a moment as everypony watched, before the stone seed laying beside Flare gave off one last electric jolt, right into the pegasus' backside, sending her leaping into the air with a yelp.

“Anyway!” Spec managed, her face still beet red, “I believe we're both fine. Don't we have a sun to inspect?”

Ch. 11 Into the Night

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Eleven: Into the Night

The day's work had left all of them tired, and though they badly wanted to set out at once, they voted to spend one last night in the igloo fine-tuning the sun and enjoying its' warmth.

After months split between the dark freezing igloo and the black steamy hot-springs in the cave, the sun's new shield proved a delightfully bright, warm, dry place to sleep, and after adjusting the bubble to a size so that it wouldn't melt the walls, they all enjoyed some of the best sleep they had had in months.

By now, morning and night had completely lost their connection to anything beyond everypony's sleep schedule, the never ending darkness outside giving no clue as to the true time of day. After a restful night's sleep, the delightful smell of Squall's kettle bubbling over the lava pool woke them all to a fresh breakfast of oatmeal and tea. As Steady finished his bowl, he and Shining shared a meaningful glance before he took up the subject.
“All right, everypony, today is the day we've been waiting for. Shining has asked me to bring everyone up to speed on the plan, so here it goes: The sun's shield will keep our air in and seal out the cold so we don't freeze our hooves off on the cold ground out there, but that doesn't mean we can just go romping anywhere we please. This thing,” he gestured to the sun behind him, “will even keep us happy and breathing even if we walk the shield bubble onto a lake, but if you push through and out of the shield then you had better have one of your own up already.”

Pie and Spec nodded as he continued,
“Now, this is going to be a much longer trip, so we're packing our own air. Verdant has grown us some stone vacuum bottles, and we're bringing several days of oxygen in liquid form. If we run low, we'll go looking for a lake or basin to top up from, but we should have enough to make it.”

Shining stood up, putting a hoof on his shoulder for a pause,
“Thank you, Steady. Now, as to transportation, we have built a number of moon stones for a variety of different purposes, including a power tap for boosting a unicorn's teleportation spell. For those non-unicorns among us, we are normally limited in our distance, and how much we can carry by how much magical energy we have, or how rested we are. Just as four pegasi couldn't fly us all the way home with the sun, even if there were still any air out there, three unicorns cannot jump us more than a short distance without draining ourselves and bringing down the shield in the process. If we use the sun's power tap however, now, jumps of nearly any range and volume are suddenly possible.

“We will be jumping from mountain top to mountain top using a clear line of sight to avoid crashing into something, but what we are doing is still very dangerous.” She reached into her saddlebags and produced a moon stone the size of a billiard ball formed from brilliant orange granite. “If things get out of hand for whatever reason, we won't have time to talk things out in an hour long meeting. Pie, Spec and myself each have one of these emergency stones. If our lives are in danger, we will load one of these stones into the sun, and that teleports everyone who's inside of their own shield as far south as possible in one enormous jump. I am warning you of this, because while a jump that long is very possible, aiming it is not. If we are forced to load one of these into the sun, we will each have a short time to throw up our shields and get everyone inside them before we find ourselves thousands of kilometers south, and two or three kilometers above the ground. If that happens, we are counting on the pegasi to give us a soft landing, and any equipment will have to fend for itself.”

Sand Storm puffed his chest up as he wrapped a foreleg around Verdant.
“You can count on us Ma'am.”

Steady couldn't help but rib her,
“Wow, this is a lot of planning from the same mare that once forget to warn us about crossing the beams.”

Shining turned and fixed the pegasus with a serious look, while just a hint of a smile touched her lips.
“And we have all come a long way since that day when our lack of planning nearly killed everypony. I am determined not to make that mistake again: If it is within my power to say so, everypony here is going to make it home alive and in good health.” She turned back to the others as she continued, “And to that end, all of our pegasi need to know one other thing about these emergency moons. Even though it will take a lot longer to jump back the normal way, there is a good reason we don't want to use these unless we have to. An unguided, marginally controlled teleportation of that magnitude is going to gather debris from any launch site and scatter it and us over a huge area: if we used it right now, we would shortly find ourselves falling from the sky far to the south, along with hundreds of metric tons of rock, magma, and who knows what else. The teleportation will grab our three shield bubbles, but also random pieces of the stone and magma beneath us, the walls around us, and anything in the sky above us in a sphere several kilometers across.

Squall's eyes had grown larger as he muttered respectfully,
“So, we must be ready to dodge. Thank you for that warning.”

“And let's hope there is no one below us if that happens.” Pie agreed, before a quirky idea crossed her mind, “Though the confusion it would cause geologists...” She smiled at the thought, “Random pieces of stone from the far north, inexplicably scattered across the south? I'll bet they would never figure out how it got there.”

The rest of them shared a confused look before Steady coughed and continued.
“At any rate, our first goal must be to investigate the strange light beams coming from the north. As nearly as we can tell, they're the source of the cold and the wind, and while Spec's temperature probes back home don't show anything like the kind of cold we're dealing with here, it's only a matter of time until it gets there. If we do nothing, we'll get to watch as the entire world freezes and dies just like the lands around us have.”

Flare spoke up, stamping her hoof into the ground as she asked,
“Do we know who we're fighting? Some kind of unicorn sorcerer?”

Steady and Shining shared a worried look,
“We don't know. If we can survive this cold, then it is possible others could if they set out to cause it, but Shining has told me it would be a massive undertaking to pull off something like this. It is possible that some kind of 'darkness' or 'night' cult could be causing this, but it's hard to imagine why several hundred powerful unicorns would want to drive the sun from the sky and bring on eternal night... Personally, I hope that isn't the case,” Steady continued with a shake of his head, “because I've fought in wars against the truly crazy, and I have no desire to do so again.” He added with a shudder.

Sand Storm looked back and forth between their blurry faces, trying to read their expressions as he asked,
“Well, we're going in prepared, right? Full armor and weapons?”

Shining shook his head to clear it of haunting memories and replied,
“Of course, but our best weapon in all this may be the sun itself. Whoever's doing this probably won't have any knowledge of it, and we've all seen what it can do at full power.”

There were respectful nods around the circle of ponies as Shining picked up,
“No one here wants to see the sun burn down and explode as it nearly did last time, but that doesn't mean we can't put it to good use. Right now we have it in the lowest power mode, giving off only a tiny amount of its full light and heat, with most of that contained inside the shield. This,” she held out an oval stone with a bright red dot in the center, “is a keyed moon stone that will lock the sun in place and into its full output and bubble size until shut off by all three unicorns now present. Unless all three of us work together, the sun will be immovably stuck in place and at full output. I don't know what kind of cold magic would be necessary to freeze half a continent, but it's a safe bet that it's not compatible with balmy twenty degree weather. Unless something changes, our plan is to find whatever is causing this, and light the sun up right on top of it.”

Verdant still looked worried as she asked,
“And if that doesn't work?”

Shining's expression hardened, and she tapped the red circle on the oval stone meaningfully.
“Then we press this symbol, and that gives us a very short window to get out before the sun explodes and excavates a crater five kilometers across and one deep. That's a last resort though, because if we do that, and we're wrong, we've got nothing left to work with. There's also no guarantee that the emergency moon stones will work with the sun burning into overload, so lets all hope it doesn't come to that.”

The group exchanged nervous glances and several of the couples snuggled closer together as Steady continued,
“Very well then. We all know the stakes and what has to be done. Everypony meet back here in ten minutes with whatever you're taking with you and we'll be off.

…

The group flashed into existence on top of the igloo, most wearing full armor with various weapons tucked into their saddlebags, and Shining began fiddling with the shield settings, soon adjusting it to allow them to see out without being blinded by the reflected light of the sun. As their eyes adjusted once more, Shining brought the light output of the sun up gradually until they could see the mountainsides and valleys around them, and the sight gave all of them pause.

The last of the atmosphere had rained out by now, leaving an unnatural crisp clarity to the landscape that not even the driest, clearest day could match. Those with good eyesight could make out the smallest features on even distant hillsides, every rock and frozen stone standing out in stark, unearthly relief. In the valleys below they could see tributaries and streams of liquid air trickling and flowing through the frozen landscape, while immediately beneath them, the lake of liquid air they had built on the hilltop remained absolutely still, and reflective like a mirror.

It was that stillness that was most unnerving. The sun's new tuning meant that it made very little noise, just the occasional soft hiss or crackle, like an abandoned campfire in the hours before the dawn. From the vacuum outside came... silence. Absolutely nothing could be heard, the streams and rivers below moving as though in a dream. Sand Storm, who had by now learned to rely more on his hearing picked up a loose stone and threw it out of the bubble, watching as it bounced off the steep slope of the igloo wall below and hit the lake with a splash, all in total silence.

The view was both serenely beautiful in its clarity and threateningly alien, as all of them knew very well what would happen to them should their shield fail. After another minute of fiddling with the controls to tap into the teleportation moon, Shining took the offered telescope from Steady, sighted in the next mountaintop and jumped.

The landscape shifted abruptly, tilting slightly as the purple afterglow faded and their bubble settled onto the uneven ground of the mountaintop. Their jump had taken them a dozen kilometers at a stride, but while the details were different, the landscape remained depressingly familiar.

“Say what you will about vacuum,” Shining muttered as she sighted in the next jump, “at least it makes this easier.”

The group jumped again and reappeared on a lower hill, the mountains beginning to fade into the distance behind them. Over the next few hours, the mountains disappeared completely, and their jumps shortened as they hopped along the flat terrain. Periodically, Shining would pause long enough to dim the bubble so they could see the strange straight lines of rainbow light growing brighter and nearer overhead, and as they got closer, a dim column became visible in the distance, linking the lights in the sky to something on the ground.

Soon the flat prairie gave way to low rolling hills, and the column linking the lights in the sky to the ground began to resolve itself. There was now no question that the lights flowed through something, as the column appeared to be composed of some strange smoke that absorbed all light that touched it, and could be seen only when it billowed out, over the lines of light, obscuring them from sight. The same lightning visible in the sky overhead flashed back and forth through the column, appearing and disappearing as it arced between the different colors and flowed through the smoke. By now, the light of it all had grown strong and near enough to cast an eery, flickering glow over the frozen landscape, and they could tell they had nearly arrived.

Shining sighted in a distant hilltop and closed her eyes in concentration as she called out,
“We should be coming into view in the next jump or two. I've dimmed out the shield and set the sun as low as it can go, but we'll still be visible to anyone looking for us. Be ready.”

The landscape shifted again as the purple afterglow of her magic faded, and the assembled ponies looked around to find themselves in the shadow of a low hilltop. The rainbow light and lightning was now bright enough to provide a dim illumination of the surrounding landscape on all sides, but for the modest pool of darkness provided by the hill. Steady whistled the command for a march, and the other pegasi fell in behind him as the rest caught on and followed, their bubble traveling with them as they walked toward the oddly flat plane that sparkled in the dim light.

The sound of a deep and threatening “CRACK!” followed by splintering and snapping made them all jump after traveling so long in silence, but before anyone could ask, the bubble abruptly fell about a ponies height before bobbing to a new equilibrium as jagged shards of nitrogen ice scraped against the outside of their shield a little above knee height.

“It's okay...” Shining managed in a shaky voice, “We just broke through the surface of a nitrogen lake. The shield was built for this, we just have to keep walking and row ourselves out into the light so we can make the next jump.”

With a few nervous nods, the others began trotting forward, the bubble's surface transferring their motion into a forward paddle that rolled them onward, snapping and breaking a path through the layer of nitrogen ice that had formed on the liquid nitrogen lake. As they rolled out of the hill's shadow into the dim rainbow light, each of them turned to see and was transfixed by the sight before them, their bubble gradually drifting to a stop as it bobbed slightly on the surface of the lake.

It was huge. Their first impression couldn't help but be of the sheer scale of the thing before them. The shape was vaguely reminiscent of a mountain or a pyramid, but beyond that any analogies failed them. It seemed to build up in fits and starts to the column of rainbow lines that enclosed and confined the smoke emerging from several huge craters or stacks spread across the top. As each line of light pulsed and brightened in sequence, pieces of the thing the size of towns would light up in unearthly colors, sometimes before and sometimes after the lines themselves pulsed, briefly illuminating the surface of the thing and sometimes seeming to shine from deep within, as though hinting at some massive glowing power source deep within the structure.

The surface and shape of it was actually difficult to make out, as light didn't seem to illuminate it as it should. Here and there, spires or bulges jutted out at odd angles; in some places, flat planes seemingly covered in ten meter tall grass transitioned into sheer vertical cliffs, while their textures and colors continued on, long after the mind said they should have stopped. There was a long silence as they all stood staring at the thing that pulsed and glowed in this flat spot between the low hills.

“What in Tartarus is that thing?” Flare finally asked, worry warring with awe in her voice.

Shining didn't turn from the sight before her as she answered,
“I have no idea.”

Not burdened with a scientist's mindset, Steady fell back on his military training, simply calling out what he could see.
“It's definitely a made thing... It might even be alive somehow, but it doesn't look like anything a pony would build...”

Spec pointed to a cloudy patch about half way down the right slope,
“Is that... Steam?”

As they all watched, another revolution of the light pulses came around, this time making the area glow a bright green from deep below and showing what appeared to be streams of liquid air running down the side and into the thing, only to emerge back through a series of holes as a fine mist of vapor that flowed down the slope, gradually condensing back into a liquid and collecting in a wide pool near ground level.

“It almost looks like some kind of weird factory...” Pie wondered aloud.

“Perhaps, but I do not see anything that looks like a door or window... It looks closer to a coral reef than a building...” Squall muttered.

Sand Storm had been gazing at the dull multicolored blob as patiently as he could with his poor eyesight, but at length he could bear it no more.
“Yes, I'm sure it's all very pretty and such, but why are we still standing here gawking? We came here to save the world, so let's get on with it!”

Steady turned to Shining,
“Can we break that thing? I was counting on some kind of magical trinket or stone, not an entire bucking mountain!”

Shining shook her head to clear it and brought the telescope up to her eye,
“I don't know. Let me get a little closer before I start making promises I can't keep.”

Their surroundings shifted again as the group looked around to find themselves down on level ground looking up at the thing towering into the sky before them. The usual stony ground around them was punctuated here and there with strange house-sized projections of ice or crystallized material that jutted out of the rock beneath their hooves as though it had grown up from deep below. The shards tended to be sharp, with jagged edges, and often cool blues or greens in color. Shining, one of the few ponies who had forgone armor in favor of tools, pulled a thermometer from her saddlebags and pressed it through the wall of the bubble and up against one of the crystals.

“Well, if the entire thing is made of this stuff, we might have a problem... I don't know what this is, but its almost eighty degrees below zero C. In this landscape, it might as well be white hot steel straight out of the forge!”

“Wait, those things are hot?” Pie asked as she surveyed the field of jagged crystals around them, thinking hard. “Shining... it it possible those things are superconductors?”

Spec and Shining both turned to look at her, their own brows furrowed in thought as they worked it all through.
“Maybe... We've never seen a superconductor that would still work at so high a temperature, but...” Shining looked up at Verdant, “Could you pass me a cup of oxygen? I think I know how to test this...”

Verdant's face lit up as she caught on, and she dispensed a small stone cup of the steaming air which Shining took in her magic and poured out on the crystal, some distance from the thermometer.

“It worked!” Spec shouted from where she was watching the temperature, “Look how fast that dropped; this thing is a superconductor!”

Flare put a hoof on Spec's shoulder,
“Hold on there, what's a superconductor?”

Spec turned on her with a giddy light in her smile as she explained,
“A superconductor is a material that transmits electricity and heat without any losses, and at incredible speed! They're really neat materials that have all kinds of potential uses, but they only work in extreme cold. You look at this field full of crystal spines and see a bunch of rocks: I see a field of cooling fins!”

“Cooling fins?”

“Of course!” Verdant answered as she caught on, “This must be a heat dump for some huge machine... Maybe even the one that's running that.” She gestured up to the column of smoke overhead as her brow furrowed once more. “Speaking of which... Shining, could you teleport a sample of that stuff down here?”

Shining thought about it and nodded, a hoof sized sphere of the stuff flashing into existence just outside the bubble as the pegasi glanced warily around. Shining shown the light of her horn on the smoke, and blinked at the bright reflection as the stuff turned into a perfect mirror, reflecting the light back into her eyes.
“Ow... Well that answers that. Whatever this stuff is, it's designed to reflect sunlight back out into space, and apparently, it's pretty damn good at it. That's why we haven't seen the sun or moon in months now: they're still up there, but this... smoke, is blotting them out!”

“How are we supposed to deal with that?!”

“Let's not throw our hooves up yet. When it comes to breaking things, never underestimate what a team of determined pegasi- er, ponies can do. Let's get a little closer and see if we can find a way in.”

Shouldering their weapons, the group set off through the field of crystal blocks, pausing now and then to examine something of interest and continually looking over their shoulders. So far there was no suggestion that anypony knew or cared about their presence here, and they all felt anxious to keep it that way. The most direct route forward soon took them up the side of a low ridge, and it was Pie, leading the way who saw it first.

And screamed.

The rest of the ponies reacted in a moment, forming a protective ring around their position, their weapons bristling outward as they scanned the sky and the horizon for anything moving.

Nothing came. After several tense moments, the eery silence broken only by the sound of their breathing, Squall whispered something to Pie, and followed her pointed hoof up to the crystal spire overhead, his face going ashen as he saw it.

Encased in the light blue crystal was a brown pony, or at least what had once been a pony. While the armor and wings made it clear he had very recently been a member of the pegasi force, those details now seemed much less important than his present condition.

The frozen body in the crystal had been sheared into pieces, like a real life version of a biology textbook's cut away illustration. While the head was more or less intact, its' one whole eye fixed in a frozen stare up into the sky at the mountainous thing high above them, the other eye had been bisected as well, as had two of the legs, one wing and the entire trunk after the shoulder. The shifted sections were further split and segmented, with individual organs isolated and sometimes cut neatly apart as well, a myriad of thin green threads flowing through the crystal and connecting everything together.

“Was... was he one of yours?” Shining finally managed as she tried to get her racing heart under control again.

Stead nodded dumbly, his eyes wide as well as he stated simply,
“Flying Phoenixes, third unit... He must have gotten separated during the fight with the windigos and wound up freezing to death out here...”

Squall's eyes were still very large indeed as he held Pie close to calm her shivering,
“I have never seen ice do that before!”

Without any speech, the deafening silence of this desert moonscape fell once more. After some time, Sand Storm prodded them again.
“Not that I don't feel for the poor bastard, but we can't do anything to help him now, and we still have a job to do.”

Steady shook his head to clear it,
“Yes, you're right. Come on, we're getting close to the outer... layer, so let's keep going.”

As the rest of them turned away down the slope of the hill, Spec couldn't help but linger a moment, holding Flare's hoof.
“What could have done that to him?” she asked softly, staring up at the frozen body, its' one good eye looking down at the ground where they stood as though watching them.

“I don't know, but... wait... wasn't he looking up at the sky a second ago...?"

The hairs on the back of their necks were beginning to stand up on their own as the two scrutinized the frozen corpse staring down at them. Spec took a tentive step backwards as she asked,
"I... I thought it was... but... I must have been wrong..."

"Yeah..." Flare shakily agreed as she backed away wide eyed, "We must have... imagined it." A quick glance down showed the bubble's edge coming at them as the others and their sun walked down the hill behind them. “Come on, let's get going.”

...

Their path soon led them outer edge of the thing, and as they came to a stop beside it, it still wasn't clear what they were looking at. Overhead, it towered into the sky, but at ground level, a kind of crystal barrier separated the surface from the rocky soil. Where they stood, the surface looked smooth with long thin spikes emerging and curving upward in clumps like some kind of plant growth. The material making up each texture appeared to be the same though. Cautiously, Shining reached out with a geologist's hammer in her magic and delivered a gentle tap to one of the long spines which broke off and fell to the ground where it shattered like glass, those pieces that landed on the bare ground slowly beginning to melt.

“That's more like it.” Shining said with simple satisfaction. “Whatever this thing is, it sure can't take heat, so our sun should make short work of it. Verdant, could you pass me a cup of water?”
Shining took the offered cup and flung the contents out through the shield where they fell in a rain on the clumps of spines before them.

The result was like throwing liquid steel onto an ice sculpture. An explosion of boiling vapors filled the air as frozen chunks of the hill fell all around them, sizzling where they touched the ground. Almost immediately, a soft orange light shown from under the surface, and as they watched, the spines and surface features began to gradually re-grow like a plant viewed through time lapse film until, several minutes after the last vapor cleared, the area had grown back as though nothing had happened.

As they all watched in fascination, Steady said simply,
“Right. So we won't have to destroy the sun; just turning it on should be more than enough to kill this thing.”

“That's true,” Shining amended, “But look at the size of it! If we light up the sun right here at the edge, it won't be big enough to get the entire thing!”

“What if we teleport to the top and set it off there?”

“Still not big enough. At full power the sun is going to cover a huge area, but this thing is widest at the base, and just look at all these projections coming up from underground! Do you want to take the chance that we wouldn't get it all?”

Steady fervently shook his head,
“No way. There's no telling what will happen after we light up the sun, but I very much doubt the locals will come running out with flowers and champagne. That means we have to find a way inside and set it off in the center, just a little below ground level.”

“Exactly. That way, if we don't get high enough, it won't matter. Anything up above will fall down into the bubble after it's supports boil away.” She turned to address the other ponies behind her, “We need to start looking for a way in. If we're lucky, there may be caves or tunnels around here. If not, we'll have to teleport out a sphere of rock from underneath and try to get the sun in there without bringing the whole thing down on top of us.”

As she turned away, Verdant spoke up with a question that had been nagging at the back of her mind,
“Shining? We haven't seen any sign of anypony else around here, so whatever this is wasn't built by us...”
Shining waited patiently for her to continue,
“And it can re-grow itself. Steady, I think this thing is alive.”

To her surprise, Steady simply nodded,
“It certainly looks that way, yes.”

“Well...” Verdant rubbed the back of her head uncomfortably, “shouldn't we at least try to talk to it before we decide to kill it?”

There was a long silence as the ponies looked back and forth between the alien mountain and Verdant, but no one spoke.

“I mean, we wouldn't just kill somepony before you know why they did something, right?”

The silence had become distinctly uncomfortable as all of them could remember times when members of their tribes had done exactly that to the earth ponies. Steady cringed as he remembered a superior officer's words from years ago; 'Who cares if this is the one that stole it, just let her drop! She doesn't even have wings, so she's hardly entitled to pegasus justice.'

At last Shining spoke up again, looking Verdant directly in the eye;
“I don't know if we even can talk to it, but if the opportunity presents itself, I promise you I will try.”

Verdant smiled back at her, and without further issue, the group set off around the base of the thing, looking for some kind of imperfection in the ground that might indicate a tunnel. It only took a few jumps and one quarter of the thing's diameter before they spotted the cloud fog billowing from an underground pipe that emerged from the ground at a forty five degree angle. A quick check with the thermometer confirmed Pie's suspicions.

“This is mostly nitrogen. It's only a bit above the boiling point, but its just warm enough to flow out like a fog.”
The rocks and stones around them were sweating visibly in the fog as the air condensed back into liquid nitrogen and ran in trickles down to the ground. Pie formed her own bubble and walked out around to the far side of the opening, staring down into the blackness below.
“Okay, this might lead in the right direction, but how do we get down there with the shield up?”

Unexpectedly, the ground beneath their hooves began to vibrate, and as they watched in astonishment, the narrow opening began to grow wider, revealing a larger tunnel below from which other passages branched off. It took a moment for them to realize that Verdant had closed her eyes and was smiling broadly;
“Wow, I've never seen stone like this before!” The others stared at the green earth pony in astonishment as she opened her eyes. “I don't know what this crystal is made out of, but it's amazingly responsive! It's almost as though it was designed to respond to my magic...”

Shining and Pie shared a look of concern.
“This is the same stuff we saw used as cooling fins a few kilometers ago, isn't it?”

“It seems to be.”

“Verdant, have you ever seen this stuff before?”

The earth pony put a hoof against the side of the light blue crystal surface and concentrated, the others watching in amazement as a crystal star slowly grew from the stone in front of her. “Sorry, but no. I've read up on almost every kind of stone and glass there is, but I've never seen or heard of anything like this stuff...” Her eyes followed their own as they looked up at the mountain that dominated the sky, “I guess it must have come from that thing...”

There was a long silence as the implications of that sunk home.

Once more, it was Sand Storm who broke the silence.
“So when we're done, we'll turn this place into a quarry and charge admission. Lucky us. Can we please get on with it?”

Spec agreed with a shiver,
“Yeah, this place gives me the creeps.”

Pie walked back around the hole that Verdant had widened, and gestured for the earth pony to join her,
“All right then, I'll keep my shield as small as I can, and I think I can make it fit, but the rest of you will have to wait here for me to send back a beacon. With a little luck, we can make a space under there big enough for the sun, and then you can lock onto my beacon and teleport in.” She turned with a flick of her tail and looked down into the black abyss that threatened to swallow up the light of her horn. “Come on, Verdant; lets get moving!”

Ch. 12 A Light in the Dark

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Twelve: A light in the Dark

The slope of the tunnel was steep enough that even ponies had to be mindful of their footing on the smooth crystal. All around them, the thin mist of nitrogen fog blew steadily by, accelerating around the obstruction caused by their bubble, and giving a low moan as it passed. The only illumination in the dark tunnel came from Pie's horn as she lighted her way, though occasionally, Verdant thought she could see tiny flashes of colored light, just at the edges of her perception. The slope soon ended over a sheer vertical drop to the larger tunnel below, the ventilation tunnel obviously never having been intended for pony traffic. As the two of them teetered on the lip of the drop, Pie closed her eyes and with a 'pop!' their bubble teleported to the floor of the larger tunnel below, coming to rest with a splash in the shallow stream of liquid nitrogen running along the bottom.
Down here in the larger tunnel, the boiled nitrogen fog seemed to be moving faster, and the moaning of turbulent air around their bubble increased in pitch as they continued forward. Before and behind them, the tunnel disappeared into absolute blackness in the distance, as though to hide some secret horror from their eyes, but mercifully, it showed no signs of narrowing, and even when they paused to look and listen, nothing moved in the darkness.

After walking on in silence for several minutes, the ever-present moan of the wind and the slosh of liquid nitrogen around the edges of their bubble in the vast darkness began to grate on both their nerves. Finally Verdant spoke up, if only to hear another voice;
“Don't get me wrong, I'm happy this tunnel is here, but why is there a convenient tunnel right to the heart of this thing?”

“My guess? I think we're inside a huge cooling duct.”

“A cooling duct?” Verdant asked, her raised eyebrow invisible in the dim light of Pie's horn.

“Yeah, think about it: Whatever this thing is, it seems to like this extreme cold. If we take that as a given, then maybe this tunnel is the equivalent of a steam output pipe on one of those new steam engines.”

Verdant considered what little she had seen of steam engines,
“Pie, the tubing you're talking about is usually only five centimeters across. If this is serving the same purpose...” She trailed off looking up at the ceiling lost in the blackness high above their heads.

Pie followed her gaze up, then back down into the black distance ahead of them.
“Then we have a long way to go.” She shook out her mane with a grin. “I'm sure Shining will worry if we're gone for too long. Do you feel up for a gallop?”

After months of living inside cramped quarters, Verdant hardly had to be asked twice.

Many minutes later, the two of them were still galloping at full speed, the physical exertion lending strength to Pie's light and giving them a better view of their surroundings. The tunnel had not shrunk, as they feared, but continued to grow larger as more vent tunnels branched off above and to the sides. The darkness had also slowly given way as soft colored lights began to become visible overhead, and the tiny flashes of light Verdant had seen earlier grew in strength as well, showing themselves to be traveling along wires or pipes that twined together through the crystal walls, invisible until illuminated by the pulses of light. Beneath their hooves, the stream of liquid nitrogen had become a powerful torrent, flowing swiftly back downhill into the heart of the thing.

“Pie?” Verdant called as she pounded along, trying to keep from panting, “How are we going to know when we're at the center?”

Pie smiled as she galloped along,
“Don't worry! The other half of the beacon stone I left with Shining tells me how far the jump is. We can guess at how big this mountain thing is, cut that number in half, and that should tell us when to stop.”

Verdant suddenly put a hoof out to slow her, causing Pie to look ahead and gasp.
“Or, we could just wait until we stumble across that.”

Around them, the tunnel had suddenly widened, while a dozen meters ahead, the flow of liquid nitrogen suddenly disappeared over a fall. Sticking to the side of the tunnel, the two of them made their way carefully to the edge and looked down.
Below them, the liquid nitrogen fell ten meters into a huge round basin, the bottom of which was invisible, owing to the rolling boil of the liquid as large bubbles rose up through it, causing the surface to rock with the turbulence. Pie held her breath and stored up her energy before giving off a blinding flash from her horn that briefly illuminated the side of the space they found themselves on.
While the ceiling was high, some six to eight stories overhead, it sloped down towards a low point in the middle of the room, forcing the vaporized nitrogen to flow up and out of the chamber. The walls of blue crystal sparkled for a moment as the light passed through them, giving the impression of some high spike or spire of crystal that towered invisibly into the ceiling over their heads.

“Do you think this is close enough to center?” Verdant asked, her mouth hanging open at the scale of the place.

Pie was fiddling with her beacon stone, but after a moment, she looked up and nodded.
“If I'm right, this chamber is actually slightly off center. We just need to clear a flat spot for them to land, and we can bring the sun in right here.”

Verdant smiled and walked out towards a flat spot along the edge that was just big enough for her, then, planting her hooves firmly, she closed her eyes and reached out to the crystal with her will. Around her, the wall began to recede, and the floor extend as she opened and flattened the place she stood so that it could receive the sun. Pie looked on in concern as Verdant began to sweat, and tons of crystal receded out of the way as she brought her magic to bear, but as the effect faded, and Verdant tottered, Pie put a shoulder under the earth pony to steady her.

“Wow, that was incredible!”

Verdant smiled weakly,
“Thanks.”

Pie gently lowered her to the ground and fished the beacon stone out of her saddlebags, lifting it up in her magic, and giving it a strong jolt. The stone flashed and shown for a moment, and with a loud 'SNAP!', six ponies appeared in their midst, the light of the sun nearly blinding them after working for so long by hornlight. As everyone's eyes adjusted, there was a general intake of breath as they all took in the crystal cavern before them.

“It's beautiful!” Spec breathed.

The others nodded dumbly, Steady reaching out and taking Shining's hoof as they stared in awe. Even Sand Storm couldn't help but gawk for a moment, but time continued to tick by, and after listening to the deep rumbling boil of the liquid nitrogen below, he looked up with a sad expression.
“This place is incredible. I never thought I'd actually regret burning something to the ground.”

That seemed to snap them out of it. Shining turned and began preparing the sun to rise, while the others each fished out their orange stones.

“Wait!”

All eye turned to the green pony by the wall, just at the edge of their bubble. Verdant had one hoof pressed against a thick strand of crystal threads that pulsed with red light and throbbed as they watched. “I think I've found something!”

Shining paused in her work to share a concerned glance with Steady before walking over.
“What is it?”

Verdant looked up, the thrill of discovery written large on her face,
“I think this is some kind of nerve, or mind link! I was able to expose it by moving the crystal out of the way, and I can almost hear it! Listen!”

Shining cocked her head to one side, and to her surprise found that she could hear something. It was faint, like the humming of insects in a distant tree, but she could feel it as a kind of tingling in her skin, and especially in her horn.

“I can't tell what it is, but you have proper magic.” Verdant added as she looked expectantly at Shining. “We've all seen what this thing has done, but we still don't know anything about it. Doesn't it make sense to at least find out what's going on before we kill it?”

The other ponies shared nervous glances, but this time, Sand Storm stepped closer and wrapped a foreleg around her.
“She has a point, Commander. We're already here, and we've got the sun set up to burn. Whatever this thing is, it isn't going anywhere; we've got it right where we want it, so let's do the right thing. If we can find out what it is, we should at least try.”

Memories of everything that had happened over the last two years flashed through their minds; the hardship, the hunger, the ice and cold that never let up, but balanced against that were the unanswered questions, of guilt or innocence, or simple curiosity. Questions about the thing's origins, who built it, what it was, whether more would come. Questions which they would never know the answers to if they burned it now...

With a sigh, Steady asked,
“Is it possible to put the sun on a ten-minute delay?”

Shining studied the moon stone in her hoof and nodded, her magic flowing into the stone and making minor adjustments. “Yes. Spec? Please put a similar delay on your emergency stone: we'll use it to get out of here.”

In a couple of minutes they were ready once more, and Shining turned to the assembled ponies.
“All right, the clock is ticking now: Verdant, Sand Storm? You go with Squall and Pie. Put as much distance between us and yourselves as you can. If things get nasty, we don't want you immediately available to be coerced into turning off the sun. Flare, Spec? You two take a different direction down one of the other tunnels. Steady and I will wait here and try to talk to this thing. Just remember: when you start to feel the sun's heat, you MUST have your bubble up, because that's what the moon stone will lock onto to teleport you south. Is everypony ready?”

“But isn't that really dangerous?” Flare asked with surprising concern, “I mean, what if you're so busy with that thing you don't get your shield up in time?”

Shining just smiled.
“Don't worry, the sun will kick on a few moments before the teleportation, so we'll have plenty of warning. Besides, just look at this place,” She added with a sweeping gesture, “If anypony is still here when all those millions of tons of cryogenic ice start to melt, they'll be crushed like a bug, shield or no shield. I'm not taking any chances about getting out when the time comes.”

“Well... I guess this is it then...” Spec said as she held out a hoof to shake Shining's own.

“Oh, don't be so melodramatic.” Shining admonished gently. “This will scatter our three groups over several hundred miles, but we all have somepony to take care of us,” She added as she rubbed affectionately against Steady's side, “And it should only take a couple of weeks to find each other again in the south. Remember the plan: we'll leave messages at the top of the tallest mountain visible from the largest pony settlement we can find. That should make it a lot easier, especially if we check in every few days.”

Spec blushed sheepishly as Flare threw a foreleg over her shoulder.
“Well, in that case, let's hope this works, and I'll see you all in the south!”

There were hugs and goodbyes all around, and soon Pie, Squall, Sand Storm and Verdant were shrinking into the distance down the tunnel they had come from, just a faint point of light in the vast darkness. Spec and Flare had teleported to another tube and waved once more before disappearing from view, their own horn light soon lost from view. Shining and Steady remained silent, hoof in hoof for a moment, taking one last look.

“Are you ready?”

Steady chuckled softly.
“Ready to see the back side of the worst winter we've ever known?” He leaned in and kissed her softly, “Yes, I think I'm ready for that.”

Without another word, Shining stepped up to the sun and loaded in the two moon stones, starting the countdown on the sun as they both slid into place and locked with the magic equivalent of a 'Click!”. With the task done, Shining trotted pensively over to the exposed strand of crystal filament emerging from the wall and gently placed her hoof on it, feeling the throb of energy through the specialized crystal.

“Are you ready?” Steady asked with just a hint of worry in his voice.

“As ready as I'll ever be. Stay close and keep an eye out; this might take all my attention, so don't let anything sneak up on us okay?”

Steady nodded and kissed her again before turning around and adopting a rigid, somewhat ridiculous sentry position from the force, his absurdly stern expression making her smile as she brought her horn into contact with the fibers, closed her eyes, and reached out with her magic.

…

With a jolt, Shining felt herself floating in a crisp black sky studded with stars much like the night sky back home, and her stomach lurched and protested as gravity took it's leave. As she put a hoof to her midsection, the motion sent her into a slow spin, the startled pony now breathing harder as the stars began rotating around her and she tumbled through empty space.

'Wait a second...' She thought, 'Empty space?' Shining took a deep breath, held it, and let it go. 'Okay, so if I'm breathing, then this isn't real.'

Shining had taken only the most basic courses on telepathy, but she knew enough to recognize what had happened; She was inside another mind, and what she was seeing was most likely the thing's home. With a thought, she reached out and grabbed onto nothing, stopping her tumbling action so she could look around. No one and nothing was visible besides the stars, but with a start she realized sky was... different... brighter and more vibrant somehow... It took a moment for her to sort it out, but the broad swaths of dim color around the galaxies, and the insistent static helped it all click into place: She was seeing through the things eyes!

The stars that had appeared superficially similar only appeared as white points if she glanced over them. Focusing her attention on one star, a distant sphere of its solar wind came into focus, the bow shock distorted and compressed by the background radiation pressure of the surrounding stars. As the view enlarged, she could make out the arcs and solar flares blasting off the surface of the star. She could even hear them! As she watched, an enormous arch of plasma fire lifted out of the surface of the star, writhing and twisting in its turbulent magnetic fields before letting go with a thunderous 'CRACK!' that nearly deafened her. She pulled her view back, and found she could see the radiation coming off the star, and its neighbors, floating like a greenish bluish haze around the edge of the galactic plane, and intensifying to a vibrant red and white towards the center of the disk.

'I can... no, this thing can see radiation! It can hear the solar wind! What kind of creature is this?!'

She couldn't help but stare for a time, lost in the beauty of a sky she had know all her life, but was only now able to see. In the distance, a pulsar chattered away, and out beyond the edge of the galaxy, several smaller satellite galaxies orbited like floating city’s. A strange sound found her ears, and turning her attention toward a distant speck of light, she realized she was looking at a galaxy that was incredibly distant, and... falling?

Through some feeling she could not explain, she knew the entire thing was falling away from her, accelerating off into distant blackness, and as she learned to listen for the lower pitched static, to see the red specks, she began to notice the same pattern on all the distant stars and galaxies; The universe was coming apart... She could see it now through this things eyes, and her heart beat faster as her mind tried to wrap itself around the truth; something was devouring the distant stars and galaxies, pulling them away into oblivion. These were not worlds, or lone stars, but entire oceans of stars and planets, falling and falling, faster and faster until, her mind told her, they would disappear from view forever, never to be seen again.

The magnitude of it all left her head spinning, but with supreme effort, she pushed the issue from her mind. The fate of the universe would have to wait for another day; She was here to save her friends and her world, and to do that, she had to find whatever lived here, though on some level, she felt like it was already watching her...

“Hello?”

There was no echo, though the idea of sound vibrating around in a vacuum was already strange enough that it threatened to give her a headache. Inside another mind, everything one saw was at the whim, and usually through the perspective of, the host. A visitor like herself could impose her will over some matters, but the class had mentioned it was always a gamble as to how much control a visitor would have.
'All right, let's try something else.' And with a thought, she built up her energy and let out a blinding flash of white light from her horn, hopping that there was someone or something here to see it. A moment later, another voice called out from her left.

“Hello?”

Shining spun around to see a brown pegasus pony floating beside her, his wings slowly beating, apparently out of habit, as there was no gravity here and no place to fall to.

“You're a pony?!”

He looked back at her in confused delight,
“Well of course I am, but who are you?! How did you get here?”

Shining shook her head, sending her black mane floating out in all direction, the effect looking as though she were at the center of large black nebula.
“What do you mean who am I? Who are you!? And if you're really a pony, then what in Tartarus happened to you?!”

The pegasus scratched the back of his head in embarrassment,
“Uh... I think I died. This isn't exactly what I expected to happen after though...”

Shining had fixed him with a glare that could have set fire to a snow bank.
“Really?! You didn't expect that when you died you would turn into some kind of frozen ice mountain thing?! I'm pretty sure that part was a surprise to everypony!”

“Wait, what are you talking about?” his confusion showed clearly for a moment before understanding dawned; “Oh! No, that's not me. I'm just a private in the third unit of the Flying Phoenixes, or, at least I was...”

Shining's eyes had grown very wide as she remembered the stallion in the crystal they had seen only hours before.

The brown pony tilted his head slightly,
“Hey, are you okay? You don't look so good...”

With an effort, Shining forced her bile down and tried to focus on the task at hoof.
“Sorry. I'm okay...” She swallowed hard and looked at him again. “You said you think you died?”

“Well, yeah. I got lost in that big storm after the windigos broke loose, and in all the turbulence I lost my compass and got separated from the others. I flew for as long as I could, but eventually I was too exhausted to keep going; I know you're not supposed to go to sleep in the cold, but I was just so tired I couldn't help it...” He paused to look at the stars all around therm. “But then, next thing I know, the Darkness woke me up, and I'm in here.”

Shining was struggling to make sense of all this as she held up a hoof for him to slow down.
“Wait a second. The darkness woke you up? You mean it was daylight when you landed?”

The stallion looked at her oddly,
“No, I haven't seen the sun since those first few days of the campaign. I meant Darkness woke me up.” he seemed to think about it a moment, “I think it was curious.”

The hair on the back of her neck was suddenly standing up on its own.
“You mean, all of this,” she gestured at the stars around them, “isn't you?”

“No, of course not. As near as I can figure, we're inside of Darkness. It saved my life, and I'm grateful for that, though” He added wistfully, “it does get pretty lonely in here with no other ponies to talk to.”

The feeling of being watched had become overwhelming, as though she were standing naked in the center of a stadium packed full of silent spectators. Her voice had taken on a worried tremor as she asked,
“Is that what that huge cryogenic mountain thing is called? Darkness?”

“That is the designation/title/identifier this fire-life-self has used to describe self.”

The voice didn't seem to come from anywhere so much as it boomed from every atom in her body, making her jump and setting her spinning. Shining winced at the volume, but between trying not to wet herself or throw up, it was almost a minute before she was able to stop her spin and address the emptiness around her.

“Where are you?”

There was no response. After a moment, the brown pegasus answered her instead.
“That's the first thing I asked too. I don't think it understands what we're asking, because it doesn't really have any body, at least none it's ever shown me.”

Shining shook her head, sending ripples out through her main as it floated around her.
“How can you not have a body?! What are you?!”

“Self is intelligence/thought/consciousness. All else is stars, dust and gas. Self moves through space/vacuum/emptiness; consumes/absorbs/metabolizes dust and gas to grow.”

Shining winced again, but looked to the pegasus for an answer,
“This thing is from outer space?!”

The pegasus thought about it, and his face suddenly brightened as realization hit.
“Hey, I bet you're right! It must be an alien!”

Shining stared at the stallion in disbelief.
“I thought you said you had been here for a while! How did you not realize that?!” The pegasus looked confused again, as Shining began to remember how many ways his frozen body had been cleaved; some mental damage would be inevitable after that many slices.

The silence that followed gave her some time to collect her thoughts.
'Okay, so the thing is a bucking alien! Great, just bucking great! Think!'

The brown stallion seemed to have forgotten the last question as he commented,
“That's the nice thing about talking to Darkness. It always gives you plenty of time. I don't think it's very used to talking to anyone else.”

“Most recent prior communication with not-self occurred 1.2 galaxy rotations in the past.”

If Shining had been sitting in a chair, she would have fallen out of it.
“That's two hundred and seventy five million years ago! How old are you!?”

“Self separated form former-self and became autonomous twenty two revolutions in the past.”

Shining felt like her eyes were bulging out of her head.
'This thing is five billion years old?!'
“How is that even possible?! Our entire planet isn't that old! How can anything survive for that long!?”

The stars around them began to shift, taking up a new pattern as a strange shape coalesced in front of the two ponies. The shape was hard to define, as various protrusions, spines and dish-shaped craters were scattered across its surface. The thing floating before them had no color, a side effect, Shining realized, of their extreme distance from the nearest star. A quick look around confirmed her suspicions.

'There's no sun out here. How can this thing survive without a sun?!'

A piece of the thing about the size of a house broke off from the larger form and floated away as they watched, their view point shifting to follow this new object. The 'parent' thing drifted off and was soon lost from sight as the stars around them swirled and the new form ducked and dodged between them. The effect was not unlike riding in the back seat of a cab through the most bustling part of a city during rush hour. Stars from dim red dwarfs all the way up to titanic blue giants swirled and orbited about them. As she cringed from the speed of it all, she watched a yellow sun swing into view to her right, suddenly expand to hundreds of times its size, burn briefly as a red giant, then collapse back into a brown dwarf as it disappeared into the distance. Throughout this mad dash, the house-sized thing had gradually grown until it was almost ten times its original size, and that shocked her for a moment before the truth of their time scale hit her.

'I just watched a sun burn out in seconds! This thing's perspective on time is ridiculous! Millions of years to it are like minutes to us because in the emptiness of space, it takes eons for anything to happen...' Another thought came right behind, 'But if this thing has lived it's whole life in space, it's never known a sun or air or gravity or anything! How the hell do I talk to something for which 'up and 'down' are new concepts?'

The mad dash continued for a while longer until suddenly a large portion of the thing disappeared in a flash of blinding white light sending their view tumbling wildly.

“High energy meteor impact caused catastrophic/severe/life threatening damage. Continued normal operations would result in termination/irreversible shut down/death through raw material starvation. Extreme/unorthodox/unprecedented action required for survival.”

The uncontrolled spinning quickly subsided, and one of the nearby yellow stars began growing brighter and brighter, the injured creature limping towards it. As the sun grew ahead of them and soon took up station far off to their right, they could feel the temperature rising to unbearable levels. Both Shining and the pegasus had begun to sweat profusely, and she would have sworn it was at least eighty two degrees C (+180 F), yet the temperature at this distance from the sun couldn't be higher than two hundred twenty degrees below zero C, a temperature at which liquid nitrogen would freeze solid!

“Gas/dust/food density greatly increased. Continued exposure to high temperatures near the light impossible. New defenses developed for survival.”

As they watched, a layer of reflective crystal began to grow on the sun facing side of the thing, and soon the temperature the two ponies endured began to fall, leveling out at a scorching but tolerable forty degrees C (+105F). Around them, the creature had begun to grow at a much faster rate, and it's metabolism seemed to have increased as a result, their mad spinning around the sun slowing (at least in the thing's perception) as it made use of the denser food source to spend more time awake.

“Abundance of food tempted/interested/intrigued self. Increasing intelligence/awareness/wakefulness possible as direct result. Energy expended to modify self for high heat conditions/situations/environments near the light.”

Shining found she could actually feel the changes the thing was making to itself. More and better crystal heat shields began to form across the thing, and it's internal structure began to change as well, veins of liquid helium diverting into cryogenic heat exchangers that used other higher temperature liquids to dump heat opposite the sun facing side. As the three of them spun on and on about the sun, making perhaps ten revelations a minute, the ponies began to cool again, falling back to a pleasant twenty degrees C (+70 F) as the changes began to work. Throughout all this, the creature continued to grow, until it was now the size of twelve houses, larger even than its pre-injury state.

“Self moved closer to light in search of greater/increased/enlarged supply of gas/dust/food.”

A distinct feeling of the thing's hunger flowed through them both as the creature began to drift closer to the sun. As their orbit became smaller, and the temperature warmer, the creature's shielding continued to develop. Several times it had to back off as it worked out new ways to cool itself, but each time it reacted faster, seeming to grow smarter and quicker after each new problem. By now it had more than doubled in size and grown more in the last ten thousand years than it had in the previous hundred million, but it wasn't to last. As the ponies watched, a green/blue dot appeared in the distance, and suddenly, the entire creature lurched violently, several long protrusions snapping and breaking away.

“Extreme/violent/chaotic gravity distortion emanating from light! Unable to break away!”

They were spinning again now as the world grew rapidly from a dot to a bright green planet, and both ponies could feel the strain as the creature fought the tidal forces that were tearing pieces off it. It's panic and desperation flowed through them as it tried to draw itself together and extend its protective shielding to cover all of it's sides. Then, to their amazement, it managed to stabilize itself: What had looked like certain destruction became an erratic, but survivable orbit, and though the distortions continued to pummel the creature, it adapted once more, becoming much more compact and enclosing itself completely in the reflective crystal heat shielding.

For several minutes of their time, and hundreds of years of real time, the creature managed to ride out the gravity distortions, struggling to build up it's orbit and escape, but stopped again and again by small changes in the timings of sunrise and sunset. The crystal around it hardened into a shield that was both insinuative, reflective, and ablative as it gambled that it would escape, but worried of what would happen if it didn't. It had almost made it out again when its' doom came.

The planet below them rotated sharply and held position, then oscillated violently back and forth, and Shining gasped as she realized what she was seeing;
“This is the ancient war between the Unicorns and the Pegasi tribes! The unicorns tried to deny sunlight to their enemies several times before the conflict was over!”

The creature narrating all this didn't seem to care about the intricacies of equine politics and ignored Shining as the world around them began to spin again, the planet growing larger and larger as they barreled towards it at break neck speed. The creature knew it could no longer escape, and did it's best to aim for the pole as it went in, but soon the ragged edges of the atmosphere began to touch the outside of the shielding, and all vision and external perception burned out in the fire of reentry.

Blind now, it burned a trail across the sky, coming in to crash at a shallow angle in a frozen ice field far north of the equator. The heat shielding had protected it from the short inferno in the atmosphere, but now it's real fear was realized; It was drowning at the bottom of a deep ocean of boiling fire! The place was so hot that nitrogen, used now as a super high temperature heat transfer fluid, was vaporized into a burning gas!

With its' eyes ripped away, the world around the ponies was absolutely black, and as the heat rapidly increased, the creatures fear coursed through them as it desperately tried to stay alive. Shining screamed with the creature as her skin began to burn and her coat caught fire in patches in the hellish heat of the frozen ice field. They writhed in pain as the heat began to destroy memory and burn away pieces of the thing's mind, and Shining could feel it beginning to shrink, its thoughts becoming sluggish as it fought to survive.

The creature didn't go down without a fight though. After eons of gathering traces of dust and gas in the interstellar vacuum, it now found itself immersed in a treasure trove of raw materials, and it used them to expand its crystal heat shield at a speed that would have been impossible before. Within weeks of its crash landing, a thick crystal block had formed and begun to sink into the ground as it struggled to pump away the intense heat of this hellish world. In a month, the first multi-stage heat pump was functioning, and as the pain receded, Shining gradually found it possible to think once more.

Darkness seemed to be forcing its' perspective on her own avatar, and Shining looked down, horrified at the terrible burns covering her body. The temperature was still unbearable, but no longer lethal, and gradually, it expanded and grew, learning more about the black burning hell at the bottom of this deep ocean.

It wasn't long before it discovered magic. The crystal shields surrounding it began to absorb bits of magic from the air and soil, and Darkness recognized a new tool it could use to survive. The first crude transmitters didn't work well, but in time it learned to construct curved, horn-like crystal spikes to better control the magic around it, and soon it had formed a series of reflective domes over itself, and devised a magical 'breeze' to keep out the heat.

As the temperature fell, Darkness grew at a phenomenal rate in this wealth of raw materials, and as it grew, the reflective domes grew with it. Before long, for the first time since their crash landing, Shining felt the temperature fall to eighty two degrees C (+180 F), and she gritted her teeth as her sweat stung the raw burns all over her body.

“The ocean must be drained/frozen/cooled for survival. Self developed reflective magic to extend above the ocean, make habitable.”

A growing spire of the now magically infused crystal took shape on four long legs, rising high above it and beginning to launch clouds of reflective particles into the air. One by one the multicolored magical beams began to take shape, propelling the reflective smoke upwards and suspending it above the atmosphere where it began to reflect the sunlight back. Several years passed in the next few minutes as Shining panted for breath and the sweat dripped freely from her scorched coat, but gradually, what started as glitter in the sky began to work. The unbearable heat began to wane, and slowly, the form she had seen with her own eyes began to take shape.

As the atmosphere finally rained out leaving behind a vacuum, Darkness was at last able to grow properly, and her vision returned at last as the boiling sea was no longer around to vaporize its eyes. The large hill grew rapidly now into the mountain she had seen. As her burns healed up, the thing's hunger coursed through Shining once more, and looking out over the immense wealth of materials available to it she couldn't help but mutter;
“Yeess... Materials...”

As Darkness continued to expand greedily, one of the superconducting cooling fins grew around something that still had lingering traces of complex magic. Unsure of what it was looking at, the creature spliced open the oddly shaped blob, trying to figure out what it was, and in doing so, it discovered a strange network of systems, some of which resembled it's own mind. The conclusion was as inevitable as it was shocking.

“Other life/not-self/minds exist at the bottom of the fire ocean! Repair and reassembly commenced.”

The not-self now embedded in the heat sink was the strangest thing it had ever seen! The thing was made of liquified stone, and as far as Darkness could tell, it was built, not just to tolerate the hellish heat of this world, but to actually pump the fire ocean in and out of itself! The main component of its body was a hard rock, dihydrogen monoxide, sometimes used for bearings due to its durability, extremely high melting point, and friction-reducing properties under pressure. With careful tinkering, Darkness managed to emulate enough parts of the blob to restore its' mind, and, eventually, to converse with it.

With that, the playback ended, and Shining found herself once more floating in the blackness of space, staring at the brown pegasus across from her. She looked down at her body, but saw no sign of the burns that had been there a moment ago, and with a supreme effort of will, she forced herself to focus on the subject at hoof.

“You have to stop expanding! We cannot survive at the temperatures you need to live!”

“This not-self survives/adapts/thrives. As other fire-life is found, Self will restore function/operation/life.”

Images of the pegasus's body frozen into the block of crystal and split into shards jumped unbidden to her mind, and Shining tried not to throw up.
“We can't live like this!”

“Negative/false/wrong; self has improved integration process, and your integration/freezing/suspended animation is proceeding without incident.”

Ch. 13 The Power of Friendship

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Thirteen: The Power of Friendship

“Shining! Shining! You need to wake up! Damn it, wake up!”

Steady's voice floated back into her consciousness as her eyes snapped wide open in terror. She turned to see what was happening, but only one of her hooves moved, and she nearly twisted an ankle trying to get up again.

“Shining! Thank goodness you're finally awake! The walls are growing!”

Steady wasn't kidding. The floor had grown up over the tops of his hooves, cementing him in place despite this best efforts to take off again, and she could see the same thing had happened to her as well. She had been holding one hoof off the floor during the conversation with Darkness, and now this was the only one not stuck to the floor as the crystal's growth began to speed up, climbing up her hind legs to her flank with a deep crackling sound.

“It's trying to freeze us like that brown pegasus we saw! We have to get out of here!”

“I can't! You have to teleport us! Now!”

Shining screamed as several of the green lines running through the crystal pierced the skin of her belly, the numbing cold beginning to seep in despite the warm of the sun. As rational thought returned once more, she focused her magic for a jump, but for some reason, her head wouldn't move. Her eyes snapped open to see her horn embedded in a crystal stalactite that was growing rapidly down from the ceiling, and as she watched, the crystal began to run down her horn, touching her forehead as it flowed down her face.

She was just a little filly again, trapped in that tiny pet carrier as the puppy in the box gave one last feeble howl and collapsed from the gas as she watched.

Rational thought was gone. The constriction around her neck tightened like a vise even before the crystal had grown that far, and her bloodshot eyes darted about in terror as more green lines pierced her skin, the pain utterly lost as she screamed and thrashed, sparks and lightning shooting uncontrolled from her horn. Her loose hoof flailed uselessly against the hard crystal, finally coming to rest against her un-moving chest as a single thought penetrated the haze of terror.

'I'm not breathing anymore!'

She opened her mouth to scream again, but her lungs were frozen in place, and no sound would come. In a moment, the crystal grew up her chest and over her last free hoof, cementing it immovably in place as more crystal flowed around her jaw and up towards her eyes. Deprived of her lungs, her mind acted on its own, pouring fourth a torrent of fear and magic into the crystal in a desperate scream that drastically accelerated the growth of the crystal and turned it utterly black in an area several meters across, blinding her completely. All that remained of the two ponies now was a jagged lump of solid black crystal several meters across.

“Interesting/intriguing/tantalizing; this fire life contains functional machine for self-replication.”

With a loud 'KLACK!' the last time ticked away and the moon stones activated, the output of the sun skyrocketing as it went into overdrive. Miles distant, two bubbles full of ponies felt the very ground shudder, before everything around them flashed a blinding white and a new landscape suddenly appeared... thousands of feet below them.

As the sun's output soared, the bubble within which everything would be heated to at least twenty degrees C (+70 F), expanded as well, absorbing hundreds of tons of cryogenic flesh in seconds.

Darkness screamed.

It's flesh began to liquify and flow away, huge banks of solid nitrogen memory turning to slush and bursting through the levels below. The vents that used to cool the creature began to belch and sputter as it's innards began to boil, fountaining out through the crystal tunnels that were the only pieces heat-tolerant enough to remain solid at this hellish temperature. The flow of smoke from the mountain top sputtered and stopped as the cryogenic matter that made up the thing began to melt and slide away from the crystal spire at its center, the four legs of the crystal spire coming into view once more in the center of the boiling lake of liquid air. Overhead, the rigidly straight lines of colored pulsing light began to bend, then fragment, and finally to dim and begin dancing across the sky like long bolts of colored lighting as the driver circuitry burned away in the inferno below.

“SURVIVE!”

Darkness did the only thing it could. The tip of Shining's horn glowed a bright red as the creature forced itself down into her mind, writing as much as it could into her as fast as it's collapsing body would allow. Outside, the reflective dust began to lose cohesion and fall from above, its substance turning back into dust without a continuous source of magical power, and for the first time in years, sunlight began to shine upon the ground.

Shining didn't even register the intrusion as the last salvageable parts of Darkness trickled in, and the line flashed one last time and fell dead. Her mind was little more than a foal's terrified screaming, but as the power died, the systems keeping her alive slowed to their lowest ebb, and consciousness winked out.

…

Flare and Spec would never forget that first week; The teleportation had dropped them over a snow covered ravine, and in the fierce ice storm, they both sought shelter in a cave at the bottom of the cliff face. Soon however, the sun appeared in the sky once more, and, it being nearly June, the heat of the long days soon sent the storm clouds running as the snow melted away and the grass turned green.

Every day, the two ventured out to look for food, watching as the world came back to life, and searching for any other ponies who might have survived as well. It only took a few days to find them.

During the terrible winter, the refuges had huddled together for survival, and while they had bickered and argued at first, on the day Flare and Spec arrived, strange crystal stones had rained out across the land, and one enterprising young earth pony by the name of Smart Cookie had found a large chunk, and crafted the pliable material into a crystal heart that used the magic of friendship to hold back the cold. When the sun came out the next day, and the snow began to melt, it didn't take a genius to put two and two together. The windigos had been feeding off their hatred and squabbling, and the magic of friendship had saved them all from a cold grave. The resulting political climate gave everyone reason to celebrate, and while some of the hard-liners retreated to their old homes to the north, most stayed put and began to build a home in this new land.

When Flare finally caught sight of another pegasus high above the clouds, it didn't take long to find her way back to the camp and to her family. The reunion was a joyous one, with all of her brothers alternately hugging and ribbing her as relief swept through the group. The next day, when Flare landed atop their cloud home with a certain blushing blue-maned unicorn, it took a moment to explain the cloud walking spell, but instead of hatred, Spec was met with open arms, and before the day had ended, she was already fending off joking passes from several of Flare's incorrigible brothers. Fortunately, a few black eyes soon straightened that out.

Several months later, and to the delight of all, the happy couple gave birth to two adorable foals who were not named 'The Equine Torch' and 'Moon Princess'.

…

The six of them were gathered once more atop the small meadow near the top of the mountain overlooking the growing town of Canterlot, the warm summer sun soaking into their aching joints. When they had just arrived, the three pegasi had checked the mountain top for messages daily, and it had helped the two groups meet up just as they intended, but as time went on, and no word came from Shining and Steady, the mountaintop checks had become weekly... then monthly...

The turbulent years after the warming had seen them all pick up parts of their old lives or start new ones, but even as the years rolled on, and it became obvious their friends were not coming back, they still made it a point to meet here, on the same summer day they had escaped, now so long ago.

“Hey Sand Storm, you old codger, how's your new grandson doing?”

“Ha! The little blighter's an early bloomer; he's already flying loops around his mother. She's had to cut back the shop's hours some, but her husband is helping out, so she's not losing too much sleep.”

Pie and Squall smiled as they shared a warm hug with Verdant and Sand.
“What about yourselves? I hear your grandchildren have been causing some mischief at school.” Verdant replied with a smile.

Squall laughed.
“A bit, yes. We were both so worried that they would be teased for having an earth pony and a pegasus as parents, so when we heard about the fight, we feared the worst. It turned out however, that it was just a small scuffle between normally good friends. Something about a colt I'm told...”

Pie chuckled,
“Well, with nearly a three to one ratio of mares to colts, not all the young mares will get as lucky as we did.”

Flare shook her head and smiled.
“Well, not all of our daughters have that problem.”

Squall rounded on the older mare with mock irritation and a wide smile,
“Hey! All we ever hear about is what your children are up to; you have to give the rest of us a chance to brag too, you know.”

“Yeah!” Pie joined in with a feigned glare at Spec, “Why, I remember when those two were still getting lost in trees and eating paste.”

Verdant had begun to chuckle as she held a hoof over her mouth to keep her dentures in.
“Do you remember that time when the younger one overheard you two talking and scared us all half to death asking some really bad questions?”

Sand storm nearly doubled over in laughter as the memory came back,
“Yeah, she said it sounded like so much fun, and she kept asking our little ones to try it with her! Do you remember her expression when Flare finally explained what it meant?”

Spec tried to maintain a stern expression, but one look at Flare's grin soon had her giggling as well.
“Well yes, it did take them some time to grow up...”

They continued to share their memories and catch up for a while longer before Verdant finally took the floor.
“All right, everypony, thank you all for coming up here one more time on this warm day in May. We've been gathering here without fail, every year on the anniversary to remember those who were left behind.” She continued as she walked over to the base of a cliff covered with a sheet.

The meadow they stood in was only just big enough for the six of them, and a few meters above them, the mountain top was still crowned in white snow, even in late spring. Around them, the snow covered ground sloped steeply away, yet this small space stood alone, green and bright in the still morning air. With a swift pull, Verdant tugged the sheet from the cliff face that rose up into the mountain top just above them, and a respectful silence fell as they took it all in.

Into the cliff face, Verdant had carved the likenesses of Steady and Shining standing over the sun, and the inscription below them read simply;
“In loving memory of Steady Hoof and Shining Mind, the two ponies who made all our happiness possible.”

They all stood silent for some time as a gentle breeze began to rustle the flowers and grass around their hooves, and at length, Verdant drew their attention to a small carving below the sun that looked like a set of numbered obsidian wheels set into the cliff face. Working carefully, she turned the first wheel until it read zero, the second one to three, and the last one to eight, pausing to press her hoof against the sun as she finished.

“Thirty eight stones made up the original sun. It will only open once a year, today, on the anniversary.”

A small opening appeared below the wheels and Verdant took a dog-eared diary from her saddlebags and slid it gently into the safe before turning back to the others.

“Did you bring the diaries?”

Pie and Spec nodded, stepping forward to put their own diaries into the safe beside Verdant's. She gave the wheels a spin, and the stone door slid shut once more, blending into the cliff face as though it had never existed.

“Do you think anyone will ever find them?”
Pie asked softly.

Spec put a hoof around her shoulder and pulled her close.
“I don't know, but we owe it to them to record the truth, even if we never shared it. This new civilization is doing better than we could ever have hoped, and it's because of the magic of friendship. If we told them that their tale of Hearth's Warming Eve was just a happy coincidence...”

Pie slowly nodded.
“I guess you're right. Most of the grandchildren don't even remember that it happened in late May, they think we celebrate it in the cold of winter because that's when it happened.”

Flare laughed.
“Well, in a sense, they're not wrong. It was most definitely winter as far as I was concerned. Who cares about the details as long as they remember the important part. Yeah, we saved the world, but its a completely different world because of what they discovered in that cave on that last dark night.”

“You really think they'd all forget if we told them what really happened?” Sand Storm asked quietly.

“Not all of them.” Spec smiled. “Our children know, but they also know why we've stayed quiet. Perhaps, some day they'll tell everypony else, but does it really matter? We've had good lives, and the three tribes are living in harmony for first time. Whatever that thing was, it's gone now, and it's never coming back.”

Squall smiled at that.
“I guess you're right. From what I hear, the band of earth ponies that left all those years ago has turned the thing's corpse into a city. They put their crystal heart into the twisted remains of the tower, and it serves as power source for the old colored lights, or whats left of them. On a clear night, you can even see them dancing over the northern horizon this far south.”

Sand storm chuckled.
“I told you we should have turned it into a quarry and charged admission.”

...

The two earth ponies grumbled as they worked. The Princess herself had given the order that more storage space must be found for her wardrobe, but the royal stores and warehouses were already packed to bursting, so they had been given the order to enlarge the old tunnels that ran beneath the crystal slab that supported the castle's four huge legs.

The job of tunneling through crystal was back-breakingly hard work with a pick and shovel, but fortunately for them, Princess Fabulosity's out-of-control fashion sense actually worked in their favor this time, as the usual overseers were already stretched to their limits with other tasks, and none could be spared to watch them. Freed from the usual constraints, one pony stood watch while the other used the forbidden earth pony magic to expand the tunnel around them and bore deeper in.

“Hey, you ready to trade off? You've been at this for nearly an hour; you've got to be tired by now.”

The other stallion wiped his brow with the back of a hoof,
“Yeah, I think I'll take you up on that. I could use a little rest.”

Despite the nature of the hard underground labor, both stallions had perfectly cropped manes done up in the latest styles that clashed ridiculously with their dirty coats.
“I still can't believe she's tampering with the Crystal Heart to enforce her fashion views on everypony.” He complained as he pulled a ribbon from his mane, only to have it magically shoot back into place with a snap.

“Hey, at least she isn't using it to enforce any other views. My wife's been complaining for years, and the Princess has only gotten around to male fashions in the last few months. It could be worse, you know...”

The two of them shared a dark look; they had lived through several of the Crystal Empire's previous rulers, and they knew exactly how much worse it could be.

The Crystal Empire that was founded so long ago by displaced earth ponies looking for a better home in the aftermath of the great winter had become their own utopia for a time, but it hadn't lasted. Within a generation, the all earth pony population had given birth to its first few unicorns and pegasi foals, and in time the upper echelons of the kingdom were soon dominated by them. In a few generations, the old problems had all returned with a vengeance as the two tribes once more established themselves as the only legitimate royal houses and forced out the very earth ponies who had founded the city. The pegasi soon dominated the Royal Guard, while the unicorns ruled from on high, and after being ruled by fools and tyrants for generations, the dream of a utopia where earth ponies could live and work as valued members of society seemed further away now than ever.

The two sat in silence for a time, enjoying the relative peace of the dark tunnels, one leaning against the wall while the other lay on his back, looking up into the ceiling above.

And then he saw something.

It looked like the tiniest pulse of colored light, but it seemed to come from the crystal just above their heads.

“Hey, did you see that?” He asked as he turned up the wick on their shared lantern.

“See what? We're a hundred meters underground; what could there possibly be to see? And turn that wick back down! You know how stingy they are about the oil; I don't want to catch hell from the overseer for 'wasting Empire resources'.”

The younger stallion was only half listening as he adjusted the beam of their lantern upward into the blue crystal, and caught sight of something strange.
“What in the world is that?!”

“What?”

“Look up there! There's something black in the crystal right over our heads!”

The outline of a black stain was indeed visible when the light was held just right, and the two stared for a moment before the first stepped forward and placed a hoof against the wall.
“I'm going to find out what that is.”

The ceiling began to enlarge as the crystal flowed out of the way, but with a start younger stallion suddenly pulled away in shock.
“There's something wrong... the crystal is... tainted!”

“What are you on about?” The older stallion asked suspiciously. When no answer was forthcoming, he put his own hoof to the wall, only to pull back as though struck. “It's... it's terrified! Whoever grew that crystal must have been in a mad panic when they did it!”

“Do you think we've found some rebel stronghold?”

“Under the center of the city?! No. This crystal feels old... as old as it comes...”

Against his better judgment, the younger stallion mustered his courage and put both his hooves back into contact with the black crystal that was now exposed overhead.
“Come on, lend me a hoof. I can't keep working on this damn tunnel without some kind of answer.”

The older stallion gave him an uncertain look, but with a sigh, decided to join him, both of their magic pouring into the crystal, easing it out of the way.

Then something snagged.

Without warning, the blob of black crystal grabbed hold of their magic and began draining it from their bodies, sucking it down like a parched pony at an oasis as the two stallions writhed. Green lines throughout the stain suddenly flashed to life, two still hearts began to beat slowly, and blood that had not moved in centuries began to flow again. In a flurry of sparks and shattering black crystal, the two stallions were thrown back down the tunnel, the place where they stood suddenly half buried in crystal shards... and two disheveled ponies.

“Fabulosity's garter belt!” The younger stallion groaned as he got back on his hooves, “What was that?!”

The older stallion picked up the sputtering oil lamp from where it had skittered to rest and directed its light back down the tunnel and onto the two forms that lay atop the rubble.
“Never-mind that... who are they?!”

…

Shining Mind stumbled through dark dreams, her mind trying to force itself awake, but clouded by a dark fog. Her body ached as though she had fallen asleep on a pile of jagged rocks, and she was dimly conscious of a great number of loud voices echoing as they shouted from some deep cave. She felt herself heaved onto something softer, then bounced about as though somepony was carrying her off, to where she did not know.

“-found them in the tunnels! We have to get them to-”

The bouncing continued as her mind swam in and out of consciousness, and as her eyes flickered open, she could see some kind of tunnel running through the crystal base of the creature.

'Did we lose?' She wondered 'Who are these ponies?'

The light around them grew gradually brighter, and at last they emerged into a larger room with bright lights and a variety of carts and mining equipment strewn about among the piles of crystal chips and mounds of mined shards. Her stretcher was loaded into the back of a cart, and another stretcher set down right beside her.

She reached out and grabbed hold of Steady's hoof, holding on tightly as her mind drifted away again. The cart jostled about as it was pulled up the ramp to the surface, then through the quiet streets at a breakneck pace as they made for the hospital. Buildings carved out of crystal flew past on both sides as the stars shown brightly in the night sky overhead, and while Shining's body did not stir from her comatose state, her right eye snapped open of its own accord, the iris dilating to an impossibly large size. The eye's motion was jerky as it took in the stars, flitting from one to another unit finding a familiar sun, then referencing its location vs several other stars. A calculation took place, tracks and velocities were broken down, and the current date derived to within a few years, then her eye snapped shut once more and relaxed.

Author's Note

My thanks to GaryOak for writing the hilariously funny (and clean) short; 'Sweetie Belle Discovers Scissoring'. It just fit so well I had to link to it as a part of the story!

Ch. 14 A lot on her Mind

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Fourteen: A Lot On Her Mind

The world swam slowly into focus around her, and Shining groaned as she rolled over on the soft bed, her head still stinging as she rubbed a temple with her right hoof. The large room appeared to be a hospital, various machines and medical tools laying about on the crystal counter by the door.

'Crryysstal...'

The room was made of crystal.

Her eyes opened wide in shock as she recognized the light blue crystal of the creature's skeleton. In a flash the thin hospital blanket was flung off as she raced to the open window and stared out in disbelief.

Outside, shimmering in the moonlight was a city made of crystal! Block after city block of crystal buildings and green plants stretched off into the distance under the dimly shimmering dome that seemed to encompass the whole city. Outside the dome of the sun's influence at the edge of town, a thick blanket of snow lay on the ground, shimmering brightly in the light of the full moon.

Her hind legs slumped into a sitting position as she stared open mouthed at the sight before her, idly remembering what Sand Storm had said a few hours ago: “So when we're done, we'll turn this place into a quarry and charge admission. Lucky us.”

“Never mind a quarry,” she muttered, “some ponies decided to live in this thing's burned out corpse!”

'Yeessss... Crryysstal ponies...'

A closer look at the ponies walking under the street lights below showed the truth of the statement. They were actually translucent, the flickers of the street lights reflected and scattered by their bodies as though by glass.

Shining shook her head in disbelief as she turned to look behind her to see who was talking to her.

The large room was empty.

The hairs on the back of her neck had begun to stand up as the crystal beneath her began to shine with a chilling blue light of its own, the glow seeming to come from the places where her hooves and skin touched it. A deep, resonating call came from the crystal itself as it called to her, the sound echoing in her mind like a lonely wolf howling in the darkness.

Shining yelped and jumped a foot in the air when the door across the room suddenly opened with a bang! The doctor burst in and flicked on the lights, drowning out the cold blue light around her as he announced;
“Oh good, you're awake! I'm glad to see one of you is doing well.”

Shining shook her head, her eyes still wide as she turned to see the brown unicorn.
“Who? What?”

He smiled apologetic as he walked over to her, and extended a hoof.
“Oh, where are my manners? I'm Doctor Pleura. I was assigned to your case after your story started to spread.”

Shining was trying to concentrate on what he was saying,
“Story?”

“Well, of course! The story of Sleeping Beauty and her Prince Charming is as old as these crystal spires, and it isn't every day the kingdom gets to see the real thing.”

The crystal beneath her hooves was still calling to her, the sound low but persistent at the back of her mind, making it hard to concentrate. It took real effort to break out of her monosyllable replies, but she managed to compose herself enough to ask the obvious questions.

“Hold on. Stop. What empire?”

“Why, the Crystal Empire of course!” his face lit up as he realized what her ignorance implied. “My goodness! You mean to say you've been frozen since the before the founding of the empire?!” A moment later his face fell as the other, morbid implications of that statement caught up with him. Shining's face was a study in shock and loss as she worked through to the same conclusions. With trepidation, Dr. Pleura gave the present date and year, cringing as Shining's mouth fell open.

Centuries.

She had been frozen for hundreds and hundreds of years! Shining swayed on her hooves as the obvious implications caught up with her.

Everyone she had ever known: Dead.

All her life experience and trade skills: suddenly useless and laughably outdated... she hoped. The only alternative was even scarier.

She sat down hard on the smooth crystal floor, and immediately the call of the crystal increased in volume, the long low howl making her hair stand on end as something in her mind that wasn't her translated the message: 'Home! Come home!'

With a yelp, Shining leapt back to her hooves, staring around wide eyed as the call diminished again.

Ignorant of what was happening, the doctor sighed sadly and slid a hoof under her shoulder.
“Maybe I should help you back into bed.” With his help, she climbed back onto the fluffy mattress, and as soon as the last of her hooves left the floor, the call of the crystal diminished to a whisper, her mind clearing somewhat.

“Thank you...” she said shakily as she lay back again.

“Of course. It's probably my fault anyway for pushing so much on you all at once,” he added apologetically as he pulled a clip board and pencil from his lab coat. “Now, if you don't object, I'd like to examine you. I've never seen a pony who's been frozen in crystal, so it's only prudent to make sure you're recovering well.”

Shining nodded absent mindedly, and the unicorn began to poke and probe her with his stethoscope, pausing now and then to ask questions and jot things down. After nearly half an hour of this, her addled mind brought up that which should have her first thought, and she sat bolt upright as the question came out in a shout.

“Steady?!”

The doctor paused to rub his ears where the stethoscope had jabbed him.
“Ow! What now?”

“Steady! Where's Steady Hoof?!”

His puzzled expression resolved into a grimace of concern as he figured it out.
“Is that the name of the stallion you were found with?” Her expression was enough and he continued, “Your Prince Charming didn't fare quite as well as you did. He's in the intensive care wing of the hospital; stable, but not yet awake.”

Shining's mind was still swimming as she tried to process everything.
'How was that not my first thought!? What's wrong with me? It feels like I can't think straight...'
“I want to see him.”

The doctor looked at her critically, but eventually nodded and offered his hoof to help her back out of bed. As soon as her hoof touched the floor however, the call of the crystal was back, howling in the back of her mind, and she jumped and whisked her hoof off the floor as though burned.
“Uh... doctor? Do you think you can find me some shoes?”

…

Everything was wrong. Darkness was but a fraction of it's former size, it's mind shattered, broken and forced into this tiny shell, competing for resources with this being of living fire. It's memory, once spanning the birth and death of stars was mostly gone, along with large portions of its mind and personality.

Darkness had no choice.

It adapted.

The missing portions of its mind and personality were transcribed and modified as much as possible from the mind it found itself sharing, and gradually, thought became possible once more. The living fire it rode in walked through the inferno at the bottom of this fire ocean as naturally as Darkness had once navigated between the stars. Its' odd blob shape that had so mystified it before made sense now, not just through observation, but through long memory. Darkness remembered what legs and hooves were, what a mouth was, a tail, a nose. And as it remembered these fresh experiences, it took in it's new surroundings.

All that remained of it's old body was the heat-resistant superconducting crystal of its skeleton, but now, at this hellish temperature, even the indomitable crystal was a superconductor no more. The fire creatures had carved it, tunneling and boring through it like... insects... The memory of roaches in a bathroom came to mind, familiar and foreign all at once, and for the first time, Darkness knew revulsion.

Bulges that had once supported memory nodes and through processing were eroded and broken, their edges and connections all broken off and their cores hollowed out to serve as dwellings for the burning creatures . A reflection in a nearby structure showed the hospital its new body walked through, and it recognized the heat dump and metabolism center that once served as its... heart... Large parts had been torn away, and grotesque bulbous additions made around the base, all carved full of holes and tunnels.

For the second time in five minutes, and the second time in millions of years, Darkness experienced a new feeling. The memory of it was scattered throughout the fire creature's short existence, but it stood out, clear and blood red: hatred. Darkness hated these creatures.

Shining began to fall behind Dr. Pleura as her eyes flickered and began to change, the white of her eye turning green as the iris became blood red. Images of horror flashed before her eyes as her mouth opened in shock; her own body, immersed in an ocean of boiling water, screaming as her flesh turned to pulp and sloughed of in chunks, the fat liquefying and floating upwards. The outer skin lasted a bit longer than her internal organs, but soon, as her innards began to boil out through her eye sockets, her flesh too tore apart and floated off on the current. As her skeleton collapsed in on itself, tiny crabs and sea creatures began to move in, rearranging her bones and boring holes in them to suit their needs.

Shining started screaming.

It took Darkness a moment to realize what was happening; it's own thoughts and anger were apparently perceptible to the fire life that carried it, and if its' memory of this high pitched sound was correct, Darkness's thoughts were causing it distress.

Another new feeling; satisfaction...

…

“Ma'am? Miss Mind?!”

The doctor had turned about and grabbed her firmly by the shoulders to shake her, and this seemed to break the spell. Her eyes returned to their normal color, the green disappearing in a few blinks as the real world around her came back into focus.

“What... What happened?” She asked in bewilderment as the hospital staff looked on in worry.

“I don't know, you just stopped walking and stood there. I was about to ask if you were okay, but then you started screaming! What in the world is the matter?”

“I... I don't know...” Shining stated in shock, “That's never happened to me before...”

The doctor looked her over with obvious concern.
“Maybe we should take you back to your room...”

That brought her back to the present enough to act.
“No. You told me you found a stallion with me, and I want to see him.” She smoothed her ruffled mane down as best she could and stood up straighter. “I'm sorry for whatever just happened, but I assure you, I am fine. Please lead the way.”

The doctor eventually conceded, and turned once more, leading the way to the intensive care ward. As they made their way through the big hospital, something obvious nagged at her mind, but it wasn't until they had found the wide, opulent spiral staircase that she got up the nerve to ask.
“Doctor? Where are all the earth ponies? We've passed wards of beds and dozens of nurses, but I haven't seen any earth ponies at all...”

The doctor paused on the stairs to give her an indulgent smile.
“Well of course you haven't. This hospital is strictly for those of the upper classes such as yourself. The charity hospital is on the opposite side of the city.”

'Charity hospital...'

They hadn't learned anything! She was about to lash out at him, but before she could speak, a thought occurred to her that stopped her half way up the steps.
“Wait a moment... I know... knew, an earth pony who could shape and form crystal with her magic... The shape of this building, the perfection of the stairs and doors... earth ponies built this city, didn't they?!”

Dr. Pleura shrugged with disinterest.
“Well, yes; Eps grow our crops, cook our food, and last night I called one in to unclog the toilet in the master bath, what of it?”

There was real anger in her voice as she advanced up the stairs.
“Earth ponies built this city, and you just swooped in and stole it from them?!”

To her surprise, he actually laughed.
“Hardly. The empire's defenses are quite effective at keeping invaders out. The Crystal Heart is triggered by our light and love, and draws its power from some power source that burns deep within the crystal. In hundreds of years, we have never suffered an invasion.”

Shining's face registered confusion as the doctor turned and continued up the stairs.
“But... if the unicorn kingdom didn't invade...”

From somewhere above her she heard him scoff.
“Unicorn kingdom? They haven't had an real power for hundreds of years now. No, Ms. Mind, the unicorns that rule this city, and the pegasi that defend it are the native born elite. We make up but one pony in twenty, and our rarity is simply further proof of our strength, wisdom, and inherent right to rule. Not like those hippies in the southern kingdoms...” He added darkly.

Shining felt like she had been slapped. 'Their own children!'

The doctor continued on obliviously as Shining hurried to keep up,
“It's true what you say; Eps did build this city. Our oldest founders fled the aftermath of the great freeze, leaving the warm southern lands behind and striking out boldly into the north in search of a new home. They built this place from nothing, and founded an empire so we, their rightful rulers, could appear to lead them to greatness.”

Shining had to fight down some unusually specific violent thoughts that welled up unbidden from the back of her mind as she struggled to keep up in the new shoes the doctor had found for her. They didn't completely silence the calling of the crystals, but it at least they kept the floors from shining whenever the lights were out. So far it had only happened while she was alone, but she had no interest in showing anypony else what was happening until she had time to figure it out herself.

The two of them emerged onto the wide upper floor a moment later, and the doctor escorted her to another large private room where a familiar stallion lay on a bed by the window hooked up to an IV and several monitors.

“Steady!”

The doctor raised an eyebrow as she ran to his side.
“His name is 'Steady'?”

Shining took his hoof in hers as she watched him breathing slowly, his eyes still closed. When she finally replied, her voice threatened to crack.
“His name is Steady Hoof, he was one of the top officers in Commander Hurricane's force, and he... he saved all our lives.”

The doctor scoffed once more,
“Yours perhaps. Whatever he did centuries ago will be of interest to historians, but it hardly matters today.” As he rambled on, he failed to notice the green cast of Shining's eyes as her rage built behind gritted teeth. “He's still out but should come around in a day or two. For such a burly stallion, it doesn't seem to take much to bring him down.”

He never saw the red magic lash out and grab him, turning his blue eyes a bright green as some of what Shining had been through played out behind his eyes.

He was standing exposed on a small hill near the edge of the city, but it was a city no more. A huge mountain towered into the sky where the city he grew up should be, pulsing with light and power in the total silence. The doctor tried to gasp, but no air would come in the vacuum and he frantically clawed at his throat as he stumbled around, his body collapsing into a shallow puddle of liquid nitrogen that hissed and steamed as his flesh froze and he tried to scream.

'Self would have spared your lives,' breathed a menacing voice.

As his lungs burned and his body spasmed and thrashed on the hard ground, his eyes fixated on something in the crystal before him; a brown pegasus frozen into the blue crystal, its body sheared into slices revealing its bones and internal organs. Slowly, ever so slowly, it's one good eye rotated to look at him.

Doctor Pleura began screaming. In a flash he turned and ran into the wall, stumbled back and fled down the corridor, knocking into alarmed nurses and patients as his eyes flickered between green and blue. It took a moment for Shining's own eyes to return to their normal color, leaving her feeling angry and confused, her memory of what had just happened far from clear. She slowly lifted her front hooves to her face.

'What was that?! What's happening to me?!'

Without really thinking, she took one shoe off her front hoof and placed the bare flesh against the crystal wall, watching as bands of cold blue light began to flow through the crystal where she touched it. The low, howling call was back once more, tugging at her mind; 'Home! Come home!'

Slowly, and with mounting horror, all the pieces clicked into place. This crystal bone yard had never been her home, but there was one who had lived here...

Darkness hadn't died... It was still here... in her head!

'Yeesss...'

Shining yanked her hoof away from the wall and staggered backwards, her head whipping right and left trying to see something that had no substance; “What... What do you want!?”

Her eyes flashed green once more as an image of Darkness's former glory towered into the black vacuum that suddenly surrounded her.

'The night... to last... forever!'

Shining was panting in terror as her heart raced, but help came from an unexpected source. The vision of cold and dark was suddenly pierced by the light of the morning sun, and as her eyes returned to their normal color, she turned to find the same morning sun shining in through the window of the hospital room. For the first time in a long time, hope fought with fear in her heart.

“You can't, Darkness. You've lost!”

A vicious anger wrenched at her soul as her eyes, still staring into the sunrise, flashed green once more. As Shining watched, the moon raced across the sky and eclipsed the sun, a dusk beginning to fall across the landscape outside as a horrible cracking, grinding sound of stone splitting seemed to come from the growing moon.

'The lights that stopped me will turn to stone!'

A complicated equation flashed before her eyes, and with a sinking dread Shining recognized its' relation to lunar mechanics. She had no idea how it intended to use it, but it was clear this was no idle threat. The breaking of rock and splintering boulders became deafening as the ring around the moon grew thicker and darker, the sun fading out as the sky turning black while it bellowed;

'The lights that stopped me will turn to stone!'

Shining was done talking. Summoning up all her strength, she poured all her magical energy inward, forcing the Darkness inside her down and down until she could think clearly again. Here eyes returned to normal once more as she gasped, and reaching out, she pulled a chair over to Steady's bedside, being careful not to brush up against the crystal with her magic as she collapsed into it, panting. She didn't know how long it would last, but at least it would buy her some time.

Moments latter, a unicorn nurse stuck her head in the door,
“Are you okay, ma'am? I thought I heard shouting in here.”

Shining forced a smile as she looked up, never letting go of Steady's hoof.
“Oh, we're okay. Sorry to bother you.”

The nurse nodded uncertainly, and was about to leave, but she seemed to find her courage as she addressed Shining once more,
“Oh, and I don't know what you did to Dr. Pleura, but thank you. He's had that coming for a long time.”

As the door closed once more, Shining couldn't help but smile as two voices joined in the nurse's laughter.

…

The hours passed slowly in the large empty hospital room as the sun climbed up the dome of the sky. From time to time, Steady seemed to stir, but he never quite woke completely, and the the nurses chided her to let him sleep, so she sat still by his side, holding on to his hoof and waiting.

The call of the crystal was still dimly audible in the back of her mind, but with shoes to separate her body from direct contact with the crystal, she was able to block it out. Darkness, however, had only been banished for a few hours, but its' return was more subtle this time. Shining's eyes flickered green, and outside the sun grew dim once more as the grinding of stones rumbled in the distance. It's tone actually felt conciliatory as Shining saw her body frozen in a crystal block, while her consciousness roamed free in the vast expanses of darkness's mind as it had just before the sun had ignited.

'You will be-' it struggled through her memory, looking for a word to describe this state of frozen existence 'dreaming... when they are gone.'

The sun outside crumbled and turned to stone as Darkness repeated again, trying to convince her,

'you will be dreaming when they are gone.'

She didn't turn or move, simply holding on to Steady's hoof as she stated, “No.”

The word was said with finality, and while she felt its' burning anger within her, it seemed to retreat again, her eyes changing back as the late afternoon sun reflected in through the open window behind her.

“Shining?”

The sound was so soft that for a moment she wasn't sure she had heard it, but as she raised her head, she saw Steady's eyes beginning to flicker open.

“Steady!”

The stallion blinked as he brought a hoof up to rub his head.
“Oh, OW! Did somepony drop a mountain on me?”

She couldn't contain her smile as she leaned in and kissed him on the forehead.
“More or less. Oh, Steady, I'm so glad you're back!”

He squinted in the reflected orange light of the sunset.
“Glad to be back here... I think.” He sat up groggily and took in the crystal room around them. “Where is here anyway? It doesn't look like we left at all...”

Her smile faltered as she looked sadly down at him.
“We didn't. Something went wrong, and we were both frozen when the sun lit up. We've been out for a long time...” Steady finally got his eyes to focus properly, and she watched sadly as they went wide as he took in the city outside their window. “A very, very long time...”

There was silence for several minutes as he took it all in.
“They're all gone, aren't they... Verdant and Squall and everypony... Even if they got out, they're all gone by now...” He turned slowly and looked at her, “Did they learn anything? Has anything changed?”

She bit her lip, not having the heart to tell him her suspicions.
“I... I don't know. I've only been awake a single day myself, and most of that at your bedside.”

“Oh, Shining!” Steady reached out and pulled her close, patting her back as she shuddered. “It's okay, whatever happened, we still have each other.” He chuckled a little as he added, “If you think you can lose me by freezing yourself in crystal for a hundred years, you don't know me very well.” She couldn't help but laugh at that as a tear ran down her cheek. “All the same though, let's let somepony else handle the next alien ice monster, okay?”

Shining suddenly grimaced, her expression invisible to him as they held each other, but whatever she was about to say was cut off as the door opened to reveal a nurse escorting a very official looking guard pegasus.

“Good evening! I'm glad to find you both awake and well.” The pegasus in fancy armor said quickly, stepping past the nurse without a backward glance. “I come with a message from the Queen; You are both invited to attend the the annual Ceremony of the Crystal Heart tomorrow as honored guests of her Majesty.” He passed them each a fancy invitation written in gold ink, before pausing to look critically at them down his nose. “I would suggest you show up at least an hour early so the Queen's attendants can find suitable clothes for you.”

The stallion turned on his heel and was gone without another word as the two of them stared first at each other, then at the nurse still standing in the doorway.
“The Queen wants to see us?”

This seemed to finally break the nurse out of her trance, and she shook her head with a sigh.
“Princess Fabulosity has been making some unpopular decisions over the last few years and support for her is at an all time low. A few weeks ago she declared herself Queen, thinking the change in title would somehow solve all her problems, and from what the papers say, she's been getting more and more ticky about everyone using her 'correct' title.”

Steady and Shining looked at each other uncertainly, then back to the nurse.
“What sort of decisions?”

The nurse stared at them for a moment, then sighed again, reaching up to a small jewel tucked unobtrusively into the neat bun of her mane under her cap. With a swift jerk, the jewel came loose, and a flash of white light erupted around the nurse as a miniature tornado of wind sent every lose object in the room flying. When the light faded a moment later, the mare before them was sporting a towering hair style that sparkled with dozens of jewels and ribbons, while her face was perfectly made up in the latest style.

There was a long, strained silence as the two ponies stared in disbelief at the sparkling crystal pony before them while various round objects that had been sent flying slowly rolled to a stop on the crystal floor. Eventually Steady spoke up in confusion;

“The Queen is a professional hooker?”

It had been a long time since either one of them had seen a pony laugh that hard.

“Oh my goodness, you're really not from here are you?” She finally managed as tears of laughter left ridiculous tracks through her perfect makeup.

Shining could only shake her head in disbelief,
“No... No, we're really not...” She turned to survey the mess the spell had made of the room, “Is that sort of spell safe?”

The nurse's smile vanished and anger dripped from her words as she answered,
“The hospital had to craft special high strength gems like this one and add them to the code of uniform after one of the mare's gems fell out while working in the OR a month ago. One pony lost an eye, and they still haven't found all the scalpels yet.” Shining and Steady cringed in sympathy as she continued, “And that's before you get into the sanitation problems, the risk of bits and bobs falling into places they shouldn't or getting caught in things. I'm just lucky I work here and not at one of the factories...”

They both continued to stare at her with a mix of interest and foreboding, and after a moment she elaborated.

“'Queen' Fabulosity has been tampering with the Crystal Heart that defends the Empire, imbuing it with fashion spells to make all the mares in the empire fit her standards of beauty without ever bothering to ask any pony whether they wanted that. This isn't some amateur spell cast by a little filly on her pet cat that her big sister can undo with a few minutes and scissors, oh no, this spell has power behind it. She's cast it into the most powerful magical artifact we have for crying out loud!”

Shining shrugged apologetically,
“I'm sorry, I was never one for assaulting small animals with beauty products...”

The nurse shook her head, the effect not unlike a miniature brass band turning a corner, banners waving and sparkling all the way.
“When a foal does this to a cat, it wears off quickly, and the poor thing can usually get away. This spell can only be countered by gems like this,” she added holding up the small gem from her uniform, “and it changes without warning day and night at her whim. She's been piling on more and more styles for over a year now, and half the mares in the city are ready to strangle her!”

Shinning nodded.
“I can see why! But didn't you say something about a factory?”

The nurse blanched,
“Yes. The papers are calling it the Great Ribbon Explosion of Aught Nine. The factory was totally destroyed, several ponies were badly injured, and the owner is suing the Crown for everything she has.”
The two stared at her in trepidation until she continued; “One of the earth pony mares working at the cotton processing factory lost her protective jewel at a very bad time, and her massive hairstyle formed part way inside a high powered machine. The thing tore her scalp and mane clean off in an instant and shredded the hairstyle in with the rest of the cotton for processing, but as awful as that was, remember, this spell was cast into the Crystal Heart. The destruction of the hairstyle kept setting off the spell, over and over again until things got totally out of control; half the cotton in the place wound up in buns and bangs exploding out the access panels and equipment, and when it all caught fire, well, Fabulosity had taken the time to ensure her hair styles wouldn't be ruined by a little mistake on the part of the weather team. The sprinklers flooded that factory until ponies were being swept out the second floor windows, but her damn spell kept that abomination of a hair style dry and burning for seven hours until they finally managed to disconnect it from the crystal heart.”

There was a long silence as they both mulled that over.

“Uh, can I get one of those gems?” Shining asked at last.

The nurse gave her a sympathetic look and fished two out of her saddlebags, passing them over with a warning.
“It takes a little time to become crystal ponies like the rest of us natives, but as soon as that happens, you'll need to have this in all day, every day. And you too,” she added with a glance at Steady, “she's just gotten into male hair styles in the last couple months. Your gender is no protection anymore, I'm afraid.”

Steady nodded in appreciation, as though receiving intelligence at a briefing on enemy strategy.
“Thank you, nurse.”

She nodded and resumed her well practiced demeanor, taking their vitals and recording the information on the cart at the foot of their bed. In a few minutes she had finished her work and turned for the door.

“Well, it was nice to meet the famous Sleeping Beauty and her stallion. You two get some rest tonight; the ceremony is at noon, and after what that guard saw, you'll probably be woken up at the crack of dawn to begin trying on clothes.”

The door closed behind her with a soft click, leaving the two of them alone once more in the falling shadows of the evening. The sun had set a few minutes ago, and the hospital lights soon clicked on of their own accord, Steady and Shining staying up well into the night talking of bygones and what they planned to do next. When sleep finally took them, Steady wrapped his hooves around Shining, spooning up against his love in the soft bed until their snores were the only sound to be heard in the room.

Ch. 15 Lest Darkness Rise

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter Fifteen: Lest Darkness Rise

The concept of 'sleep' was a foreign one to Darkness, the normal existence of its species lived so far from any light that the concepts of 'day' and 'night' were equally meaningless. Out of the jumbled parts and pieces that had survived the destruction of its mind, this trait was apparently one of them. Once Steady Hoof had fallen asleep, Darkness crept out of hiding, putting up some insulating barriers so its' actions did not waken the sleeping fire-life in which it rode.

Its' first attempt to operate the bizarre collection of limbs and joints resulted only in driving a hoof into its eye, and experiencing the concept of 'pain'. Without the luxury of growing up in such a body, it had all the finesse and control of a racing squid.

It rapidly decided that in order to get anywhere, it would have to do things its own way. A black smoke began to flow from Shining's horn, enveloping the unicorn and gently lifting her out of the bed. While Shining slept, Darkness peered out through her green eyes at the city sparkling in the moonlight below, her body floating freely in the black smoke that concealed all but her face. After staring for some time, the black cloud of shadow poured through the seventh story window and floated down to the ground, flitting from shadow to shadow as Darkness made its way out into the city of bones.

It needed a plan, and to make one, it had to learn more about the present it found itself in. A few twists and turns soon took it around a corner and brought the crystal palace into view. Darkness could only stare in horror.

The massive power broadcasting antenna had been transformed into some kind of dwelling, bored full of holes and severely broken. The cryogenic plant that had manufactured the reflective dust cloud, as well as the heart and energy center that had powered darkness were all gone, boiled away into vapor in this sea of fire.

With trepidation, it flowed closer to survey the damage to the surviving crystal antenna, and to its surprise, found power still flowing through it. Under the base of the antenna/palace, a heart made of crystal acted as a primitive control circuit, channeling energy from below up and through the broken mechanism, resulting in dancing beams of light that skipped and flitted across the sky. The original power circuits that had sustained the reflective cloud had been composed mostly of crystal, and amazingly, they still functioned after a fashion, even though their flammable components had long ago burned to a crisp.

Darkness flowed back out of the way to hide in a dark shadow as it tried to puzzle this out; while the original antenna offered several options, it could not figure out what kind of power source fed the system, it's demands being quite considerable, even in this crippled state. Darkness reached into the sleeping mind it carried with it, checking to see if it knew anything.

The result shocked it to what remained of it's core.

The sun. The power source that burned beneath the crystal city and held back the winter was a fusion reactor that this fire life had used to kill Darkness! On purpose!

In its' native habitat, communication with anything else was rare, and so while the concept of 'helping' usually meant simply sharing information, the concept of 'attack' or 'kill' didn't really exist in a species that never had any reason to, even in the rare instances where two might share the same solar system.

Its' new mind flailed about for a response, and finding nothing in it's existence to judge this by, turned instead to the fire-life's mind.

Betrayal: Darkness had expended energy to preserve these creatures!

Anger: After all the work and growth it had amassed, this creature had nearly destroyed it!

Rage: These creatures hadn't just taken advantage of its' death, they had actively sought it out for their own gain!

Something inside Darkness began to change. It's passive, analytical reasoning processes that had guided it across the empty void for billions of years were obviously ill-equipped for this new situation.

They were overwritten or pushed to the background.

In their place, new personality rules and guidelines were established. Murder, a foreign concept that made no sense to Darkness, had nearly resulted in its' death. It would loom large in the new personality's worldview.

Emotions beyond that of hunger for materials and fear of death had been unknown to Darkness, but now, these too were hard-coded into it's new mind.
Hatred: the feeling these 'ponies' often had for others who were different.
Fear: a feeling directed at threats to life and health, and any shadows that might conceal them.

These were the tools they had used to reduce Darkness to this sorry state. They would now be the tools it used to return to its' true form.

It?

The concept of gender was unknown to a species that lived in the vast depths of space, but here and now, Darkness found itself in a 'female' body, one already in the process of producing another fire life.

She. Darkness mulled the word over, its' new mind getting a feel for the new idea. She would set this right, and freeze out this ocean of fire. She would make these creatures... these ponies, pay for what they had done to her.

As of yet she had no fixed plan. The antenna could still be salvaged and used to several aims, but not while it was still swarming with these creatures, and she doubted she could clear them all out on her own. She would need time to re-form the antenna to its new task, and this new body would still require other 'ponies' to bring it raw materials and fuel. To make this work, she would have to become the..

Her mind once more found itself at a loss for words, and dug into Shining's memories once more.

Boss? ...Commander? ...Dictator?

Queen! A position of power in which she could command these 'ponies' to do as she bid! Best yet, the memories showed the social position was frequently established through violence and coercion, and could inspire fear as well as obedience! More searching revealed that Darkness's bones were currently ruled by such a pony, and that her standing was in question, her power unstable.

Darkness made her decision; she would replace this queen who ruled over her bones, and once established, she would have these ponies stand aside as she worked to freeze the fire ocean once more.

There was much yet to be learned, much to be done, but it was nearly time for the light to rise above the horizon, signaling an end to the coma in which her host's mind lay. As the sky to the east turned red, Darkness flowed back through the shadows and into the hospital where this creature's mate lay.

…

Shining and Steady were both jarred awake that morning as the 'Queen's' fashion designers burst through their door with dresses and suits of every description.

“Rise and shine, shine, shine!” a cheery crystal unicorn exclaimed as she threw back the curtains, letting in the blinding light of the early morning sun. “Today's the big day, and you're our most important guests! So important in fact, the Queen sent us here to see to your dress personally!”

Shining groaned and pulled the covers over her head while Steady sat up and stretched with a smile; military life did occasionally have its' advantages.
“Good morning to you. Did anyone think to bring coffee?”

The bubbly unicorn gave him a quizzical look.
“Why would we do that? The sun has been up for hours, and it's time to practice my art!”

Steady shook his head with a grin,
“Well, if I were you, I would go find some coffee for Shining. Unless she wakes up in a cave, she's not much of a morning pony.”

“Oh, nonsense! The day is young and full of promise!” said the one Steady had decided must be the head fashionista, as she grabbed Shining by the tail and dragged her out from under the covers.

It was hard to say what happened next; there were several loud bangs and bright flashes, and then the two salon ponies were huddling in the corner of the room, while their leader had a black eye and no visible mouth.

“HHMMHH!”

Steady looked casually over at the very angry, very awake gray unicorn sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Good morning dear. Sleep well last night?”

This was met with something unintelligible and probably obscene.

“Glad to hear it. I believe those two unicorns in the corner were just leaving to get your coffee.” The two took the hint and fled the room in a hurry as their boss continued to yell through her nose and paw at her face. Steady leaned over and kissed her on the cheek before asking; “Did she really deserve to lose her mouth for waking you up? You never had any trouble waking up underground.”

Shining wiped the sleep from her eyes and finally managed a smile as she watched the unicorn before them having a fit.
“I hardly think waking up in a panic every day for weeks on end sets a good precedent. And besides, she hasn't lost her mouth, I just moved it.”

Steady raised his eyebrow higher,
“You ...moved it?”

“Well, there was just so much room in her large intestine, it seemed a shame to waste it.”

The unicorn's eyes were bugging out of her head and she gave a nasal scream as Shining's eyes flickered green and she chided her,
“Now, now, it's not that bad. I'm sure a pony of your standing can figure out how to make a lipstick suppository.”

The offending unicorn fled the room as Shining laughed heartily, and a little deeper than what her usual voice would lead one to expect. Steady had not lowered his eyebrow, and was only looking more concerned.
“Shining, I admit it was rude of them to wake you, but don't you think that was a little excessive?”

There was silence as Shining turned to tell him off, then stopped to think about it. She had never been a morning pony, but the more she thought about it, the more alarm showed in her face.
“Steady... I think we have a problem...”

“We very well might if that pony finds a doctor with an X ray before you reverse that spell.”

With a grimace, Shining lit her horn, and from somewhere down the hall came the sound of incoherent shrieking and spitting.
“Steady, I didn't tell you last night, but...”

She now had his full attention.
“What's wrong?”

The whole story spilled out as Steady listened with wide eyes; Darkness, the plan to 'preserve' the ponies, the thing's near-death, waking up with it still in her head, all of it.
“I'm sorry Steady, I just...”

Steady pulled her back onto the bed, hugging her tightly as he shivered himself.
“I've been trying not to think about it myself. We came so close to losing everything, and now you're saying this thing has survived by hitching a ride in your mind?”

Shining shivered in his arms,
“Yes, but... it's worse than that...”

Slowly, Shining put her hoof against the wall, wincing as the howl of the crystal echoed louder in her mind. Steady's eyes went wide as what looked like blue flames flickered in the wall before them.
“It's mind is stuck in me, but not all of it is dead!” she added as tears welled up in her eyes, “The crystal seems to remember who made it, and it's constantly calling, calling, calling! It wants me to come home, but I'm not Darkness, Steady, I'm not, but it won't listen!”

As she cried into his shoulder, the two fashion ponies peeked nervously around the edge of the door, the cup of coffee held out before them in shaking hooves like a sacrificial offering. Steady gestured them over and gently offered the mug to Shining who took it gratefully.
“Thank you!” She seemed to notice the two worried-looking unicorns for the first time, and managed to put on a weak smile. “I am so sorry, I'm just not much of a morning pony.”

Steady kissed her gently on the neck, whispering in her ear. “Are you going to be all right for a day? There's at least a chance the Princess might know someone who could help us...”

Shining sniffled,
“Maybe... I've never dealt with anything like this...”

Steady sighed.
“Neither have I, but powerful ponies tend to have ways of getting things done,” he shuddered at a memory of the late Commander Hurricane, “and right now, she's the most powerful pony we know...”

The rest of the morning was a blur of activity, outfits, makeup and grooming, that ended with Shining and Steady being herded out to a waiting carriage in full regalia to be whisked away to the ceremony. As they sped through town, Steady asked their driver the obvious question.
“What's the Ceremony of the Crystal Heart?”

The driver stumbled and nearly fell when he heard that.
“You mean you don't know?” Steady shook his head while Shining shrugged in her gown. “Wow. I guess you guys really were frozen like they say.” He cleared his throat and picked up speed as he explained:
“The Ceremony of the Crystal Heart is held every year; everypony gathers for the fair and has a good time, and at the height of it all, we all send our light and love into the crystal heart to keep us safe for another year.”

“Huh, that does sound kind of fun...” Steady conceded with a smile at Shining.

“It used to be.” the driver grunted, “But for the last few years its been all about beauty and pretty dresses. The Princess decided the fair food was too fattening, and now all they serve is 'diet water,' and you don't even want to know what happened when the royal quilting bees got out of their hive last year!”

Shining looked startled,
“Quilting bees? As in bees, the insects?”

“Yes, as in actual stinging insects that quilt things.” Their driver growled, “Since Fabulosity took the throne, everything has been about fashion, clothing and looks!”

Shining was still trying to puzzle that out as their carriage began weaving between salons and hooficure tents.
“But how would you even-”

“Something about a spell that mixed animals. I think they were mostly bees and spiders.” He shuddered. “So many legs! It took nearly a week to get them all out of my wife's closet...”

Shining and Steady shared a worried look.
“But why would she want a-”

“Why don't you ask her yourselves? We're here.”

The carriage door was opened by a well-dressed stallion who helped them out and hurried them along to the back of a large stage draped in red silks and satins. As Shining ducked under a low-hanging lace curtain she couldn't help but snicker.

“What?”

“It's like that time dad...” She lowered her voice to whisper in his ear, “It reminds me of the places where they photograph mares for stag postcards!”

Steady thought about it and answered with an absolutely straight face,
“Maybe she really is a professional hooker...”

Their guide gave them a dark look as Shining shook with suppressed mirth and chewed on her own hoof while Steady pretended not to notice. They were shown to their seats just behind the podium and left to wait for the ceremony to start.

This turned out to be a surprisingly long wait.

Almost forty-five minutes after the scheduled kickoff time, the crowd around them began to murmur and point, and following their hooves, Steady made out what appeared to be a blond sailing ship, complete with rigging, sailing its way between the ponies below.

“Is that a tall ship made of hair?!” Shining asked, not quite sure is she was astonished or disgusted.

Steady could only stare as the mane cut made it's way towards the stage, eventually breaking into the open, revealing a pretty young mare in a shimmering blue gown that reminded him of ocean waves... Her escorts lifted her up onto the stage and set her down before the microphone, a length from where the two of them sat.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlestallions.”

Half the audience glanced at their watches, which now read 12:30, then back up to their Queen.

The speech went rapidly downhill from there.

By the thirty minute mark, Steady was already having trouble staying awake, and by the one hour mark as Fabulosity droned on about the future of lace and its' use in the collar, Shining was apparently unconscious along with a significant portion of the audience.

Then her green eyes snapped open.

This 'Queen' did not deserve to rule. Even by the low standards these fire creatures set for themselves, this one was obviously suffering a serious mental malfunction. The Queen would be overthrown!

Darkness clumsily shifted the padded cushion out of the way, bringing her skin into contact with the bare crystal of the stands, the flickering blue light nearly invisible under the full glare of the noon day light.
The crystals in the Queen's necklace began to grow, linking together and cinching tightly around her neck as she idly tugged at them with a hoof. Slowly, the Queen's necklace grew thicker and tighter, looking less like jewelry and more like a slave's collar. She managed another few sentences as it got harder to breathe, but by now, those in her audience were so desperate for a diversion, most had no trouble writing it all off as a prank.

When the Queen finally paused in her speech to ask for her mirror, the look of horror on her face as she saw the black crystal restraint was priceless.
“It's hideous! Get it off! Get it off!” She wailed as she staggered about the stage, before tripping over the edge and splashing face first into a huge punch bowl of 'diet water.'

While the audience roared with laughter and most of the Queen's advisers hurried to help their queen out of this latest fashion disaster, the master of ceremonies saw her opportunity and took the microphone.
“All right, everypony! Let's charge up the Heart! Let's hear it for the Queen!”

Ponies all throughout the fair went to their knees and poured out their strength, their light and love into the heart which began to sparkle and spin rapidly in its pedestal, even as Darkness surrounded herself with black smoke and began flowing up behind the mare at the microphone.

Several things happened at once. A number of ponies screamed, the Crystal Heart flared like the miniature sun that powered it, and Darkness burst into flames. The force radiating out from the circuit controller was like nothing she had ever experienced! Her very essence burned as she writhed and shrieked in agony, the black smoke surrounding her host rapidly scorching away in dark clouds of sooty smoke.

She was about to die! Again! The light and heat pouring off the heart left no shadows to hide in, no safety to run to! The crystal ponies shone brighter as their bodies bent the unbearable light around themselves, making it look as though they were glowing.

'Around themselves!'

It was her only chance! The fire burned brighter and closer, her thin layer of protection rapidly failing, as Darkness burrowed in, deeper and deeper, desperately trying to escape the light.

'The Von Neumann machine!'

...

The light swam before her eyes as consciousness gradually flowed back to Shining's mind. She was dimly conscious of somepony holding her hoof as the hospital room gradually came into focus.

“Uh... What happened?”

When no answer was forthcoming, she slowly sat up and looked around, careful not to move her head too fast as she took in her surroundings. The sun outside the window was setting, and she was still wearing the ridiculous gown from that morning, albeit, looking somewhat the worse for wear. Sleeping in the chair next to her bed was Steady, his head tilted back and tongue hanging out ridiculously as he snored.

Shining couldn't help but smile.

“Steady?” She asked as she prodded him gently with her magic.

“Huh? Oh!” He exclaimed as he leapt from the chair, nearly hitting his head on the ceiling. “Oh Shining, you're awake!” Steady swooped down and hugged her tightly, making her cry out in surprised pain. “What? What's wrong?”

Shining gasped a little, but didn't push him away,
“Sorry, I just ache all over for some reason... It feels like I got in a fight and lost... Oh, OW!” She winced as she straightened up. “Steady, what the heck happened today?”

He looked worried as he explained,
“Well, by all accounts, the Queen nearly strangled herself with an outfit, and some kind of black smoke creature made an appearance just after, only to get burned up by the crystal heart. Shining? Are you okay?”

She thought about it. The presence that had been brooding at the back of her mind was absent, and try as she might she couldn't feel it anywhere. She slowly reached out with her bare hoof and pressed it against the crystal wall, ready to yank it back, but... Nothing happened. A wide smile spread across her face.

“I... I think I really am! It's gone! We're finally rid of that thing!” She exclaimed as she grabbed him in her magic and hugged him.

There was an “EEP!” as she remembered her aching body, but even as Steady let go, she was still smiling.
“Oh Steady, you have no idea how good it feels to be alone in your own head!”

Steady had finally begun to relax as it became clear the danger had finally passed, and he smiled ruefully as he ribbed her,
“Said like a pony who never had to share their bedroom with seven cousins during the planting season.”

Shining grinned, and was about to come back with a retort of her own when the door of their hospital room opened, and a fresh doctor trotted in with a clipboard suspended before his face.
“Good evening, Ms. Mind, I'm doctor Osteo. It says here you took a bit of a spill at the festivities today? Something about falling off a stage?”

Shining looked a bit sheepish as she brushed her mane out of her eyes, so Steady answered before she could invent an excuse.
“I'm afraid so; when everything started happening she took a bit of a spill. She just woke up, and we need you to look her over.”

The doctor nodded and began a quick examination,
“Pupils look good... normal response to light...” He lit his horn, the glow encompassing her whole body as he checked for broken bones or unusual swelling. “Nothing broken...” The glow of his horn left her as he jotted some notes down on his clipboard, “You may feel a bit sore for a few days, but I don't see anything that would be a serious concern to you or your son. Just take it easy for a few days and you'll be fine.”

Steady and Shining shared a gobsmacked look.
“Son?”
“Son?”

The doctor paused, then smiled.
“Yes, your son. He looks to be a few weeks old and seems quite healthy. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to give away the gender. You didn't know?”

Shining squeezed Steady's hoof as tears formed in her eyes,
“We had been trying, but...” She sniffed as Steady kissed her forehead, “He's healthy?”

“Very. His heartbeat looks strong, and it won't be long now before you can feel him kicking. Congratulations!”

The doctor excused himself as the two startled ponies hugged each other and tried not to cry, all the stress of the last year pouring out at once as they finally realized they had made it.
“I'm... I'm going to be a dad...”

Shining wiped the tears from her eyes and sniffed a bit,
“And I'm going to be a mother...” There was a long delay as they both sat holding hooves and it all sunk in. “What do you think we should name him?”

Steady couldn't help but smile as he shook his head,
“After all the hell we've been through in the last year? How about 'Sunshine Happy Sparkle the First'?”

Shining couldn't help it; it hurt to laugh, but she laughed anyway, long and heartily until her sides ached. “Oh, OW!” she reached out and smacked Steady playfully on the back of the head. “You know it hurts to laugh! Why would you do that?”

Steady just smiled back at her as he held her other hoof,
“Sorry, I just love the sound of your laugh.”

“You...”

Reaching out, she dragged Steady close and kissed him, long and slowly. When they eventually came up for air, Shining was still smiling.
“But seriously, you want to forget everything that happened?”

Steady cocked his head,
“You don't?”

Shining thought about it,
“No...” she said slowly, “No, I don't. We had a real adventure together, we saved the bucking world, and I met... I met the stallion I'm going to spend the rest of my life with.” She gave his hoof a gentle squeeze as she looked into his eyes. “I want his name to be something that reminds us of what we have, and how far we've come.”

Steady smiled sheepishly,
“Well when you say it like that...” He looked thoughtful, “But honestly, what could we call him that wouldn't sound ridiculous? Ice flow? Doom and gloom?”

Shining placed his hoof gently on her belly.
“I think we should call him 'Somber Sky' ”

Author's Note

And now we reach the conclusion we've all known was inevitable. The link at the end is to Sombra's Song, which was written into the story and influenced its direction. If you've made it through 15 chapters, please take a moment to listen to the story's inspiration.
The story isn't completely over yet though; we know the outline of what must now come, but the causality vs correlation may yet surprise you...

Epilogue

The Brightest Shine

Written and read by Cozy Mark IV & Jan. McNeville

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Epilogue

The palace was dark, shadows lurking in the corners and making even a slow trot treacherous on the uneven floor. They said the king could see in the darkness as in daylight, but the conditions of the palace were no longer foremost on the page's mind as he made for the royal chambers bearing the message.

They were coming!

Throughout all the death and deceit, through all the purges and torture they had kept their distance, but now that the king had seized the moon, they could ignore him no longer.

It had started with yet another round up, ponies being put into chains, but this time, they were made to walk in endless circles about the palace, weaving through a complex pattern etched with strange runes set in the crystal pavement. All those forced into the march felt their strength being used to guide some powerful flow of energy, and the entire palace hummed with power, though to what end they could not at first discern. Only as the eclipse began, blocking nearly half of the sun did they finally understand.

Sombra had seized the moon and was holding it in front of the sun, somehow tracking it wherever it flitted across the sky. Several times those in chains had felt an enormously powerful force try to break their hold, wrenching at their bodies in the process, but the efforts had been for not. The king's grip had held.

Now, as the slaves continued their endless circles, a huge ring of dust was growing around the moon, fanning ever outward as dust and rock was pulled from the surface and sent into orbit around it, blocking out more and more of the suns rays. The last several days had already been colder than any could remember in the month of May, and nearly every Ep in the city, himself included, had been praying that the Princesses of the southern utopia would save them from the king's madness.

He hadn't counted on being the one who had to deliver the bad news to the king.

As he rounded a final corner, two distant voices became audible from the closed door of the kings chambers.

“You can't keep doing this! If the sun doesn't shine the crops won't grow and we'll all starve!”

A deep and ominous laugh interrupted the first, frightened voice.
“You know better than most how little that will soon matter. In a few weeks the north will be a frozen wasteland, and the southerners will have run out of firewood and be burning their food to heat their homes!
You predicted I couldn't hold the moon with my slaves.” he heard the king spit, “None of you fools even knew of the Lagrangian points! The Princesses can not understand how I can hold the moon against their will and gravity at once; I know that I need only fight them to win.”

The second voice sounded even more scared now,
“You've underestimated them! They're pure of heart! They can stop you!”

The king's evil laugh made the page's skin crawl as he eased up to the door, peeking through a crack, only to see the king standing alone in the spartan room...
“Just as you are? When was the last time your brother and sister slept in an unlocked place?” his voice hissed as the king jabbed a hoof down to the royal dungeons. “And besides... even if I cannot coerce them, there is always the other way...”

As the page watched in alarm, the king slowly removed a shoe and placed his hoof back on the floor while the other voice gasped as though in pain. A cold blue light spread from the king's hoof, rapidly radiating out into the walls and down the corridor the page hid in, his hair standing on end as the crystal walls themselves seemed to howl out mournfully in some ancient tongue.

“It won't work! They won't fall for your trick!”

The pages eyes went wide as he realized the voice was coming from the king himself! His green eyes had turned to a normal white color as the voice spoke, but the change was short lived.

The king's eyes flashed green again as he chuckled,
“While Celestia may not have, it seems you have too much faith in Princess Luna. Wresting her moon from her seems to have shaken her confidence, and she was only too happy to accept the enchanted blue crystal armor the kind smith crafted for her.”

The kings eyes flickered between green and white as he laughed and the other voice cried,
“NO! Luna has ruled over an entire country for decades! She's no fool, and she won't be tricked into serving you!”

This only made the king laugh harder, a sickly smile settling on his features,
“Oh really? How many 'ponies' know the real reason for all this? Those fools still think I'm trying to shade out the world so my armies can take it over. They assume that if they lose, they need only submit to the Great King Sombra, and he will restore the light.”

The page was actively turning to run back down the corridor when a last glance back showed the room to be suddenly empty. He whipped around and just about collided with the huge gray and black stallion towering over him.

“You have seen how the call of the crystal can wear a pony down, eating into their sanity as it twists their reason and motives to match its own.”

The page's eyes were wide in terror as he realized the barehoofed king wasn't speaking to him...

Bare hoofed?

A quick glance down showed the cold blue light flickering outward from his hooves like a run away fire spreading from four small sparks, and in seconds, the entire corridor was ablaze in blue light, the howling of the crystal deafening in his mind. As all thoughts beyond terror flitted away, the king looked directly at the page and asked simply;
“What do you want?”

As he fumbled for an answer, the page found his mind filling with a cold, inexplicable anger. The two ponies stood still in the corridor for several seconds as the blue light danced and flickered around them, but when the page finally raised his head to answer, there was no longer any fear in his eyes. The king smiled as the lowly Ep page stood, all four hooves planted on the howling blue crystal and looked straight into his eyes.

“What. Do. You. Want?” Sombra asked.

The answer that came was delivered with all the conviction of a true zealot.

“I want... The night... To last... Forever!”

Author's Note

And now it finally becomes clear; why would a seasoned ruler with decades of experience suddenly lose her mind and fall off the deep end, pursuing a goal that would destroy everything, kill all her subjects and reduce equestria to a frozen wasteland? Because it was never her idea in the first place.

Sombra Song - a different performance of the song that inspired this story.

'A tale of one shadow' - a wonderful animation by Nastasia Solitude that bridges the gap between this chapter and the last.

'The Fall of the Crystal Empire' - a brilliant animation by 'Silly Filly Studios' that chronicles the effects of the armor on Luna, and how it didn't work out quite the way the king had hoped.