Strange Alchemy

The clouds pressed around Pegasus as he ascended rapidly. His wings pumped again and again against the air, and he felt his heart racing. Never before had he felt so free, and never before had his mission been so clear.

In an instant, he burst through the cloud and soared vertically into the yellow sky above. With the rush of countless wings, hundreds of his followers burst through the clouds beneath him, following his lead upward into the sky. They swirled around him in a vortex, and he could feel their combined strength pushing the entire flock upward toward their goal.

The air started to grow thin and cold. Pegasus felt his breath accelerating as he tried to bring more oxygen into his body. Even with his modified lungs, the edges of his vision were beginning to gray. He felt his wings icing, and wondered for a moment if he could even keep going.

Then he drove upward even faster, pumping his wings against the gravity that had for so long bound his kind to the world below. He pierced through the frigid, rarified atmosphere, ignoring the pain within his body. He could not turn back, not with them counting on him. Not when he was so close.

Behind him, numerous ponies started to fail from the altitude. Some could no longer keep up, and they turned back. Others continued to push themselves after their leader, to the point where they exceeded their own abilities. They passed out and fell, their descending comrades catching most of them as they dropped.

Out in the distance, Pegasus became aware that he could see all of Equestria stretching out below him. It curved out into the distance to the seemingly endless round horizon where it met the yellow sky, which faded to blackness beyond. His eyes continued to scan forward, though, searching the haze of the firmament for his target.

His course was perfectly selected, and he cut through the high-atmospheric winds with precision and strength. Not all were as strong as he, though. Some of those who had survived the thin atmosphere and bone-chilling frost were blown off course, toward the Spheres that sat on either side of Pegasus’s course. Those who flew to close to the sun watched as their wings burst into flames. They fell, burning, to the earth below, plummeting to their deaths. Those who were drawn too close to the moon, likewise, were afflicted with its madness, driven insane by its crystalline white light. Many simply closed their wings and fell, laughing with manic delight and absolute terror as they fell to their demise.

Then, all at once, the air suddenly seemed to vanish. There was nothing left to breath. What had been left in its place was a powerful lack of pressure, and Pegasus felt it pulling at his eyes and flesh. Yet, still ponies flew beside him, unwilling to leave their leader on his destined course.

For a moment, Pegasus began to lose hope. He saw the firmament that made up the border between Panbios and the void beyond, but he did not see what he had come so high to find, what the ancient legends had spoken of. In that moment of panic, he wondered if he had been wrong, if he had expended the lives of his compatriots and dear friends for nothing.

Then, suddenly, he saw it. His keen vision detected the tiniest of distortions against the firmament, and he took one final breath of what little air he could gather and raced toward it. As he did, he saw the speck expand, and the joy at the sight made him rush forward even faster in one final sprint.

There, high in the sky, was a large structure of yellowish steel and gray synthetic stone, a windowless city of machines imbedded within the firmament itself. It was just as the stories had said: that the stars that might occasionally be seen on clear nights were, in fact, the vestiges of a long-extinct civilization.

Pegasus and his comrades descended onto the city. They folded their wings behind them; with such thin air, there was little need for them. Now free of gravity, though, they simply drifted through the massive towers in the sky, grasping the smooth sides of the angled machines until they found the doors.

Near the base, Pegasus found his. He pressed his hoof into the panel on the side, and the circular door shifted, its convoluted but elegant mechanical systems unsealing the space within. As it opened, Pegasus extended his hoof and helped another pony: a mulberry colored mare who had held firmly at his five position during the entire ascension.

Once inside, the door behind them closed. It shifted, and air hissed around them. Pegaus gasped, releasing the breath of air he had held for too long. The air that surrounded him was by no means of good quality: it was more frigid than the coldest mountain nights, and it reeked of metal and oil and the ancient staleness of a long-forgotten tomb.

The second door suddenly engaged, its revolving mechanical components shifting. Then it swung open, revealing a long, straight hallway beyond. Pegasus finished catching his breath, and then entered.

As he did, there was a clicking sound as the systems within the satellite began to activate. There were a series of distant mechanical sounds as the U-shaped lights that were spaced in the wall of the corridor ignited with electrically driven energy.

The pony beside him stepped forward beside him, and shook away the ice from her wings. She looked down the hall with suspicion, but without a trace of fear. Her cropped black hair seemed to glisten in the artificial light, and in that moment Pegasus wished he knew how to paint, to capture Medea’s visage as she stood there in this ancient installation. The severe burn scars that covered much of her upper body and half of her face only made her look more beautiful.

“What is this place?” she asked.

“A relic of a more advanced age,” said Pegasus as he started to walk down the hallway.

“An empty city, built in the furthest point of the sky? Empty? I do not like this. It reeks of sorcery.”

Pegasus smiled. “I assure you, it is not.”

“How did you even know about this place? None of our intelligence recovered any mention of this, or anything…” Medea looked at the metal-plated walls and the conduits that ran through them. “Anything remotely like this…”

“There was a legend in my village,” explained Pegasus, “passed down from the ancient times through my people. Through my family. The stories spoke of the cerorians, and of their deeds.”

“Cerorians?”

Pegasus nodded. “They were the contemporaries of our Aurasus ancestors, and great allies with them. Like the golden-winged ponies of old, the cerorians bore no magic.”

“I find that difficult to believe,” grunted Medea, her inky eyes shifting around the hall before her as their hoofteps against the metal below echoed through the emptiness. “Considering our current location.”

“No,” said Pegasus. He gestured to the base around them. “Not one piece of this facility was built by magic, or with magic. The cerorians were inventers, engineers, makers of technology beyond any pony’s wildest dream. More than that, though. They were proud, brave, noble soldiers. With their technology, they were able to overpower the ancient trihorns, and with the Aurasi, to keep the users of magic at bay.”

“Clearly they did not do a terribly good job,” muttered Medea, not nearly as enamored with the idea of noble warriors as her lover was. “Considering that there are none of them left.”

“Because they were betrayed. The trihorns knew that they could not defeat the cerorians directly, so they instead turned to subterfuge, just as they used trickery to destroy the Aurasi. They incited civil war within the cerorian society. The cerorians ended themselves.”

Pegasus stopped at an area he knew to be a door, labeled with a barcode. He pressed his hoof against the manual activation panel, and the door clicked from within. Then it slid open.

On the other side, more lights ignited, filling the armory within with light. Pegasus and Medea stared in awe at the weapons before them, and at the armor, built of thick gray material for quadrupedal creatures far larger and wider than any living race of pony. All of it was aligned and ready for deployment, as it had been countless millennia. Weapons specifically intended to slay the users of magic.

Behind them, a pony appeared in a nearby hallway. He fluttered through the cold air, and then came to a rest on the metal plated floor, held firm by artificial gravity. His poorly built artificial leg clicked as he looked to the two ponies before him. One of his golden eyes looked at Pegasus, while the other looked in the vague direction of Medea.

“Derpus Maximus,” said Pegasus. “Have you inspected the facility?”

“I did, Commander,” said Maximus, one of his eyes shifting slightly and his prosthetic limb releasing a puff of coolant gas. “The central core mainframe is still fully operational. We have recovered the locations of the other facilities.”

Medea turned to Pegasus wide-eyed. “There are more of these?”

“Yes,” said Pegasus. “Some still survive on the surface, buried and forgotten. The unicorns destroyed a great many of them.”

“Why?” asked Maximus. “Why destroy this? With what it can give us?”

“Because they fear what they do not understand,” spat Pegasus. “Because even the shadow of the truth is seen as heresy amongst them.”

“The truth?” asked Medea, raising a black eyebrow.

“That the magic that they claim makes them superior is actually worthless. Only by making those without horns weak can they make themselves strong.” Pegasus’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Maximus. “As for the device?”

Derpus Maximus nodded. “It is indeed here, as you predicted…but…”

“But what?”

“This entire place is impossibly old. The weapon has degraded, badly. And even if we can repair it, the munitions are almost entirely depleted. We can only fire one barrage.”

“We only need one,” said Pegasus, putting his hoof on the older pony’s shoulder. “I trust that you can repair it. And when you have, lock the targeting coordinates on Equestria’s zero point.”

Maximus’s eyes widened. “Yes, Commander Pegasus,” he said, hesitantly. He then spread his wings, and flew down the oversized hallways to oversee the execution of Pegasus’s orders.

“You do understand the implications of what you asked,” said Medea. “The city has a heavy population of earth ponies. If you fire it, many of them will die along with the unicorns.”

“The earth ponies are no longer my concern,” said Pegasus, harshly. “The power that gave us wings gave it to all of those who would stand beside me, to all of those who are truly loyal. Those who do not have wings only demonstrate their complacency to unicorn rule. They are traitors to our revolution, and they will die. Only the Pegasi matter to me now.”

Medea wrapped her hooves around Pegasus and kissed him. He kissed her back.

“Now that is the pony I fell in love with,” she said. She reached into a holster that was attached to her body and produced a narrow blade cut from spiraling bone.

“My dagger,” said Pegasus.

“Take it,” she said. “Take it, Pegasus, and rule the our new race.”

Pegasus contemplated the blade for a moment. A relic from the first unicorn he had slain. Then he took it, promising himself that the next unicorn whose blood it would taste would be that of Third Horn himself.

The children of the Aurasi with the technology of the cerorians, declaring war against the spawn of the trihorn: Pegasus knew that it was now time to end the tyranny of magic and finish what the ancient races had started. With the Pegasi at his side, he knew that nothing could stop him from building a new and just Equestria atop the ashes of unicorn civilization.