To Devour the Seventh World

The frigid wind blew harder, pulling up the dust from the lifeless land into swirls and spirals. Solar Spectra shivered, and used her magic to pull the tattered rags she wore tighter. The cold had become numbing, and then painful, chilling her to her bones.

She turned behind her an looked up at the mountain that loomed over them. It seemed profoundly out of place, a massive and lifeless stone crag protruding from the center of what should have been simple rolling hills. It also seemed oddly crooked, as if instead of rising from the earth with the strength of other mountains, it had formed haphazardly, failing to find an anchor in the ancient bedrock below. To Solar Spectra, the mountain seemed profoundly lonely.

“Sister,” said a weak voice from behind her. Solar Spectra turned back. “Not much farther sister,” she said, smiling.

Lunar Vision returned the smile, if only weakly. Solar Spectra reversed slightly and, using her magic, removed her own cloak and added it to Lunar Vision’s threadbare clothing.

“No, sister,” said Lunar Vision, trying to push the cloth away with her wing. “You need to be warm to.”

“I have my magic,” said Solar Spectra, reassuring her younger sister. “It shall keep me warm. Here.” She lowered her head, and forced as much magic as she could muster into her horn. It sparked with a warm glow, and then produced a tiny magical sphere of fire. The heat was minimal, but enough to provide a modicum of warmth to them both.

Solar Spectra cast the rest of the spell over her body, making her pure white coat glow even whiter. Even then, it was not enough. She could still feel the wind and the crystals of ice it held within. She had not eaten in three days, and she was using almost all her magic to cast the spell that was keeping them alive in the radiation fields.

Still, she resigned herself to bear the cold. She was already nearly a mare, but her sister was barely a filly. Lunar Vision had only recently received her cutie mark, and at an early age- -an image that could either be construed as a white crescent moon on a pure, clear sky represented by her deep blue coat, or an eye, staring into that same blue sky. It was a perfect complement to Solar Specrtra’s own, an image of a half-sun projecting light over a pastel rainbow emanating forth from it.

Neither of those celestial spheres were of any use to them now, though. Both of them hung in the sky, the orange-red glow of the sun providing no warmth in the icy wasteland, and the crystalline glow of the moon only exacerbating it.

“The storm is getting worse,” said Lunar Vision, looking back at the mountain and the vast, irradiated pit it its shadow.

“I know,” said Solar Spectra. “But I think I see a ruin ahead that we can wait in.”

“You’re lying,” said Lunar Vision.

Solar Spectra sighed. There was no use telling untruths to a pony who possessed the extraordinarily rare talent of telepathic sight.

“Then what am I thinking?”

Lunar Vision closed her eyes, and focused. If she had possessed a horn, it would surely be glowing and sputtering, but as a Pegasus, she had none. Still, she seemed to come to a conclusion.

“That the storm is getting worse,” she stated without emotion. “That we’re in real danger. But that you will protect me, no matter what even if…even if…” Tears welled in her eyes.

“Sister,” said Solar Spectra. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to see that part.”

“But I did see it. You were going to reduce the protection spell to surround just me, and then use the remainder of the magic to make the fire warmer.”

“I was considering it.”

“Do not do that.” Lunar Vision stopped. Solar Spectra turned back, and saw her sister’s dirty blue main swaying in the breeze. “Please, Solar Spectra. We are sisters. What we face, we need to face together. I cannot…I cannot do this alone…”

“Neither can I,” said Solar Spectra, pushing a stray bit of hair back off Lunar Vision’s face. “I shall not lower the spell. I will protect us both. But we need to keep moving. We must find shelter.”

They began walking again, crossing the wastes.

“Why did we come here?” asked Lunar Vision, without even a hint of criticism.

“Because the monsters cannot follow us here,” replied Solar Spectra.

“And because we cannot cross the territory of the Nations, because I have wings but you have a horn.”

“That is correct,” said Solar Spectra, smiling. That part, she had not cleaned from Solar Spectra’s mind, but from observations. Although the Pegasi and unicorns were allied, the tensions between them were as high as they always had been, and xenophobia was a powerful motivator toward violence. Solar Spectra could hardly count the number of times she had been beaten protecting her sister, both from her own people and from the Pegasi. Attempting to cross land claimed by the other five nations would be even worse. The only recourse was to travel through land that no nation could claim, the wastes. It was the only place where they could truly be safe.

“Solar Spectra,” said Lunar Vision. “Can you…can you tell me a story?”

“Of course I can,” replied Solar Spectra. “Which one do you want to hear?”

“Can you tell me the one about Lord Pegasus?”

“Of course.” Solar Spectra began the story, adjusting the tone of her voice to try to make it sound like a real story, even as her body was wracked by shivering. She told the legend of first winged pony, or at least the parts of the story she knew, making up the rest as she needed to. She told of how Pegasus had been born an earth pony, a strong stallion with a remarkable rainbow mane, and how he had worked the fields in the distant past when the skies were empty and unclaimed, save for the birds and the war-like and fearsome griffons.

Then, one day, Pegaus encountered a dying god- -although in Solar Spectra’s story, she use the word “spirit” and “wounded”. The god had lost his ability to fly, and could no longer serve his divine duties. Pegasus, without hesitation, began to care for the god, attempting to heal him. This took time, and Pegasus’s fields withered and died, and he began to starve. Still, he gave what food he had to the god, and still managed to hold the defense of the god’s cave, protecting him from the monsters that came to steal his power.

Even through all his help, though, the god ailed and weakened. One day, the god spoke to Pegasus, and asked him:

“Why do you protect me, earth-pony?” said Lunar Vision, filling in that part of the story by heart. “Why do you risk everything to preserve my life, even by a fraction? Do you expect me to grant you my power, or perhaps you intend to take it when I die?”

“In truth,” said Solar Spectra, mimicking what she imagined Pegasus sounded like, “I have no desire for you power. I know that I will barely outlast you, if at all, for I am weak and injured now as well. But all I desire is to protect those who are in need, and those who, like you, have become my friends.”

The god, at that point, smiled. He took from his own back his pair of wings, which were made from perfect golden feathers, and placed them Pegasus’s back. “Then you are indeed worthy, he said,” said Lunar Vision, mimicking the deep voice of the god, “you will do what I can no longer. Take my wings, for you shall now be a hero of your people, and shall be remembered for all eternity.”

Solar Specra sighed, and looked up. The scenery had changed; in the distance, it was now possible to see strange towers, decaying buildings of built by long-forgotten ponies, the last remnants of some society that had long since vanished from the face of Equestria. Solar Spectra waited for Lunar Vision to ask for more stories about Pegasus, like how he had once defeated the griffon warlords in a race from the moon to the sun, where their wings had burned away but his golden wings had not, or how he had once tricked the queen of the dragons out of her treasure, or even the unicorn story about how Pegasus had been humiliated and defeated by Third Horn, the grandson of the equally mythical Single Horn.

She considered how she might work the ominous monolithic towers into her story, but before she could speak, her vision swam and she felt the ground accept her as she fell.

“Sister! Sister!” called a voice. It was distant, though, as if under water. The ground felt so comfortable, and Solar Spectra realized that she was freezing to death. She had reached the limit of her magic, and she cried as she realized that Lunar Vision would be alone now. At least as a lone Pegasus, she would be accepted by her people, even if only as a servant or conscript or concubine.

Her vision faded, and she felt herself falling into the nothingness.

Suddenly, a vision flashed into her mind, searing the inside of her mind. It was of a shape, one of unbelievable complexity, consisting of a square and numerous circles, triangles, hexagons, and other shapes that probably had bizarre and exotic names, all of them marked on a sickly pink organic surface.

She cried out weakly, and became aware that a tiny blue form was dragging her toward something, something dark colored. It looked like a bulkhead of some sort, or the very edge of something vast and spherical, just barely emerging from the ground.

Solar Spectra awoke with a start, almost crying out. She looked around, looking for her sister, and suddenly realized that Lunar Vision was lying over her, her wings outstretched, their mutual clothing covering them both. Lunar Vision did not have the ability to use magic, aside from her ability to sometimes see into other pony’s minds, so she had used the only source of heat she had available: herself.

“Sis..ter?” she said, rising.

“I am here,” said Solar Spectra, putting her foreleg around her sister. “I’m here.”

They embraced for a moment, and then Solar Spectra looked around her. She was not aware of where they were, or even what they were within. It seemed to be something carved out of stone of some sort, although the material was far smoother and darker than any stone she was aware of. The air was also surprisingly warm, and seemed to blow from somewhere far deeper in whatever structure they were in.

“Lunar Vision,” she whispered, “where are we?”

“You got so cold, and you stopped moving, so I brought you in here even though…even though…”

“Though what?”

Lunar Vision leaned close, and Solar Spectra could see the fear on her face. “Even though this is a bad place.”

“Perhaps so,” said Solar Spectra, “but at least it is warm.” She summoned her magic, and projected a tiny orb of light. Even though there was some amount of light in the dark, moist hallways that seemed to come from sum unseen source, Solar Spectra suddenly found herself curious.

As soon as the sphere materialized, though, something groaned from deep inside the structure, and Lunar Vision squeaked in terror. All around them, the stone structure seemed to retract into itself, responding to the magic and reconfiguring itself. The hallways changed, condensing on the light, forming new corridors and sealing old ones, momentarily exposing peculiar stone-based machinery deep within the structure of the walls themselves that likewise changed for and repositioned itself.

“Sister,” moaned Lunar Vision, pulling herself closer to Solar Spectra.

Solar Spectra, though, was not afraid. In fact, somehow, deep within her, she was somehow overjoyed. Her special talent was purely in magic, something that was rare even among her people, but as a clanless pariah, she had received no formal education in its use. She had raw power, but knew only a few spells that she had either created or found in outdated, discarded tomes she had managed to salvage. For once, though, something was responding to her magic. She could feel the structure of whatever it was they were in reacting to her, repositioning itself in a way that was not entirely random.

Focusing her magic, Solar Spectra forced the unstable, unusable hallways to converge into a well-lit corridor. She smiled, and something from the distance seemed to be calling her, drawing her in like the sweet smell of the food that herself and Lunar Vision could only ever hope to steal. For the first time, Solar Spectra felt at home.

She stood up, feeling Lunar Vision clinging to her. The place itself seemed not only to be responding to her magic, but be producing its own. It was humming and flowing with it; Solar Specrtra could feel vast channels of it being pumped into something that was surely miles below.

“Come on, Lunar Vision,” she said, almost bursting into laughter. “Perhaps whoever built it left food somewhere.”

Lunar Vision hesitated, not wanting to leave where she was familiar or to approach the shifting hallways around her, but her stomach growled. Hunger was indeed a powerful motivator.

The sphere seemed to go on forever. No matter where Solar Spectra turned her magic, she could generate new hallways. If she wanted to, she felt she could even extend them hundreds of miles long, or produce spiral staircases that descended into the blackness below that would take hours to descend.

She was not sure when she had decided that the bunker was a sphere, or how she had reached that conclusion. It seemed to be something that she simply knew, perhaps from having walked round its circumference and instinctively determined the structure’s shape, or perhaps from the flow of the magic that became increasingly powerful as Solar Spectra moved deeper into the machine.

There were, of course, rooms that she could not easily shift. Some of them were massive, larger than the greatest of clan-palaces, designed with seemingly no intent to be filled with any kind of workers and filled completely with machines of unclear purpose.

Most of the machines seemed to be active, at least to some degree. They seemed to hum or vibrate distantly at an almost mixture of frequencies. At other times, though, the corridors were completely silent, the sepulchral emptiness interrupted only by occasional distant sounds that were not repetitive and mechanical- -as if somepony were pushing equipment somewhere far below in an inaccessible and unseeable region of the sphere.

“I wonder how deep it goes,” mused Solar Spectra. She hardly even noticed that Lunar Vision was shaking behind her, and not from cold.

“Sister, we should not be here,” whispered Lunar Vision. “It is not a good place…and…it is making me see things…”

“What sort of things?”

“An eye of many shapes,” said Lunar Vision, clearly having no idea what it meant.

“Just a little further,” said Solar Spectra. “Just a little…little further…”

Then, suddenly, she came to another vast room. It was immediately clear to her that it was not the same as the others, though. The structure of the room resisted change, as if it were profoundly heavy, but it was not filled with machines engaged in some obscure task. Instead, there was a clear floor, but it was not just a floor. It appeared to consist of coencentric, interlocking plates, many demarcated with symbols that Solar Spectra could not read. Further, it was scattered with the first debris she had seen in the entire place: remnants of metal and stone pieces, and bits of scroll.

The room appeared round, and something was glowing in the center. Solar Spectra began to approach.

“Do not go in!” cried Lunar Vision.

Solar Spectra could not help herself, though. She illuminated what she could of the massive room and approached the center.

As the room filled with light, she suddenly gasped, and for just a moment understood what Lunar Vision meant. In the center of the room was a platform of some kind, surrounded by a mechanical device that appeared to be controls. Slumped against the controls, still gripping them, was a skeleton.

The fear passed quickly, though, as it was replaced with curiosity. Endless war and death were as much a part of Equestrian life as were ponies themselves, and Solar Spectra had seen a great number of dead and dying in her short life. This skeleton, though, was unlike any she had ever seen.

The most noticeable aspect was that relatively little of it was actually made of bone. A significant portion of it consisted of metal, both in the form of robotics and the tubes and wires that had once penetrated its organic torso, feeding the organs within. That was not altogether unusual; cybernetics were not unheard of in Equestria, especially among the wealthy. The architecture of these, though, was completely foreign.

What was most strange about the skeleton was its head, though. Where there should have been a wide-eyed pony skull there was instead something far more reptilian, almost dragon-like. It had a wide mouth filled with a number of tiny but razor-sharp teeth. It also had horns- -three of them, arranged in a line, protruding from its forehead.

As Solar Spectra stared at it in amazement, though, she thought for just a moment that she saw something move. Deep within its long-empty eye sockets, something shifted. Something pink, covered in lines that formed a pattern of complex shapes.

Suddenly, the room started to shift. The area was illuminated, and Lunar Vision screamed as the ceiling began to close inward, shifting, becoming something different.

In the center, Solar Spectra’s eyes focused on what she had seen glowing. It was a single piece of clear crystal, surrounded in a mesh framework, forming a sphere roughly the size of her hoof. Above it, two more spheres appeared, held in place by metal supports attached to vast gyroscopes and other clock-like instruments of incomprehensible detail. One glowed red and warm, the other white and cold. Both of them stopped and hovered at equal distances from the crystal-centered sphere, hovering together in perpetual stasis, as did the sun and moon over Equestria.

The ceiling continued to change, extruding and shifting. It began to represent itself with symbols and mathematical parameters that were far beyond Solar Spectra’s ability to comprehend, and it stretched out things that resembled needles. There were thousands of them, all pointed at that center crystal, reaching toward it before locking themselves in place at various distances, their purposes threatening but unclear.

Solar Spectra felt something in her horn vibrate, and her whole body felt warm and tingly, as if somepony were brushing her all over. Pink sparks began to arc from her horn, and for just a moment, she thought she heard a voice speaking to her in a familiar but incomprehensible language.

The voice resolved itself quickly, though:

“Sister!” cried Lunar Vision.

The feeling cracked and shattered, and Solar Spectra found herself standing in the center of a darkened and empty room, lit only by a model of the sun and one of the moon, her sister crying behind her.

“Lunar Vision!” cried Solar Spectra, galloping across the now stationary, lifeless room toward her sister. It no longer felt warm and welcoming, but somehow so cold and sterile, like a crypt or some other ancient place that had been forgotten so long that no life managed to remain, a place that should have stayed that way.

“I am sorry, sister,” said Solar Spectra, putting her forlegs around the tiny winged filly, wrapping her in a hug. “I did not mean to worry you. We need to get back to the part near the surface. Come.”

“And when Harmony ignites for the third time since the defeat of the Dark Princess, he of the two triangles shall awaken,” said Lunar Vision, somehow sounding distant and empty. Solar Spectra pulled herself back from the filly, and to her horror saw that her eyes deep turquois, with slit-shaped pupils. “And he shall be called Oblivion, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

“Lunar Vision!” said Solar Spectra, shaking her sister. “Wake up!”

Lunar Vision blinked, and her eyes returned to their normal state. She looked confused.

“Sister?” she asked, confused. “I was…I was somewhere else…”

“Come with me, sister,” said Solar Spectra, smiling. She ignited her horn, and shifted the halls of the sphere to make a path back to the surface. “Come. I should never have ignored you. But I think the storm will be over soon.”

“Ignored me?” said Lunar Vision, confused.

Solar Spectra only smiled, and led her sister back to the light.

The wind had decreased, and the coldness had decreased marginally. Even so, both the sisters knew that it was time to start moving again. They left the dark edge of the strange sphere in the center of the dead city, trotting across the lifeless land to continue their journey, regardless of where it would take them.

Solar Spectra looked back for just a moment, though. She could not help but recall what had happened there, and the curiosity still burned within her. She was not even fully aware of it, but she had already vowed that she would one day return.