Aftersound

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Written by: Oneimare & Geka

Preread and edited by: Jay Tarrant, IAmApe

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canterlot:\tr.exe

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“Twilight Sparkle? Is that you?”

A mare uttered those words in a quivering and strange voice—like two ponies speaking at once; yet familiar. Slowly, as if afraid of me, she stood up, came closer and removed her hood with her hooves.

It had to be a mask—iridescent liquid metal covered the front of her face. Occasionally, the silver droplets would fall upwards from her face and after lingering in the air for a fleeting moment of indecision, drop back, sending little waves rippling over the everflowing surface.

She stared at me with artificial eyes of the deepest and most vibrant violet, a perfect imitation with irises almost imperceptibly moving—like the irises of a truly living being.

Her illusory mane coiled around an unusually long arcanium horn; not just a solid spike of metal—the hollows of spirals glowed softly with an amplifying crystal.

Plates of the same precious metal covered her body and not a single gap between the shifting segments betrayed the nature of this mare. She towered over me like a Jangwa zebra or a Saddle Arabian would, yet her constitution—lithe, far more slim and slender than the body of any equine—spoke of her not being a half-blood.

Her hood—cloak, actually—tattered and dirty, once purple to match her eyes starkly contrasted with the stunning quality of the rest of her gleaming ‘attire’, failing even to fully conceal it.

At her side rested a gun—the Gun—a hoofmade masterpiece. Its polished wooden handle shone with a rich matte-finished obsidian, a pink engraved treble clef adorning its smooth surface.

The most puzzling feature of that mare, her magic, emanated from her in erratic heartbeats and bothered me greatly. As if I had put my hoof in a river, expecting the water to flow in a certain direction… but it went sideways and felt so cold.

As I studied the mare, wracking my mind in an attempt to recognize her, she still looked at me with wide eyes shining with hope.

“I’m afraid, I don’t know who you are.”

The light in her eyes didn’t falter. She took another step closer and, smiling, pointed her hoof at herself.

“I know, I look different, but it’s me—Trix.” Seeing no recognition in my eyes, she added, “Trixie Lulamoon. Don’t you remember me?”

I had never... Was she that ever boasting annoying mare with a moon-sized ego from the years before the war?

“Perhaps…”

I was clearly missing something.

Trixie’s expression wavered, yet she let slip none of that in her voice.

“I thought you had died during the transference attempt. We all thought you dead,” Trixie spoke, smiling in relief. “I wish Moon Dancer were alive to see you, she’d be so happy.”

Her grin fell as I continued to squint at her in suspicion.

“Twilight, I know it’s you. Don’t you remember how we worked together? You, Pinkie, Moon and I?”

Aha—that strange voice in the recording.

Somehow Trixie had managed to live for five centuries—becoming a Former One... the Magician.

Except, that friendship had happened in another life and I only knew her as a nuisance.

“Trixie, I’m not exactly who you think I am,” I began; she looked at me in utter confusion, trepidation overtaking her features. “Apparently, Twilight had been leaving a very powerful imprint on her recording crystals, and when a filly from the Edge used them to create an equinoid they worked as a memory anchor. I took this body from the Royal Archives, but I have no recollections beyond the trial of the cybersuit.”

Her mask-face shifted into bewilderment, amazement and then settled on awe.

“All those years,” Trixie uttered, “we were beating our heads against the wall trying to make the True Transference happen, and you just… you just made yourself a lich without even knowing it!”

I closed my eyes, letting out a half-hearted sigh—why even bother?

“I never thought I’d ever see you again. You can’t imagine how glad I am, even though you almost don’t remember me,” Trixie went on, her eyes shining with more than just happiness—stalwart resolve. “And if you are alive, it changes everything.”

Motioning with her hoof she turned to the exit, yet I refused to move.

“Where are we going?” I glared at her. “And why is Pinkie Pie here?”

Trixie unceremoniously grabbed and dragged me out of the temple so suddenly, I couldn’t even protest.

“She isn’t going anywhere, but we’re going to my place. Don’t worry, Twilight, I’ll answer all your questions and more.”

Groaning, I resigned myself to my fate—not like I seemed to be getting anywhere in the Deep Tunnels on my own. And it seemed five hundred years had done nothing to relieve Trixie of her obnoxious nature.

Despite Trixie’s enthusiasm, she exercised little consideration, forcing me to canter to match her long-legged and hurried gait. Though my lack of a respiratory system made my haste not as big an issue as it could be, I still struggled to gather my thoughts.

Other than still being irritating (at least she hadn’t spoken of herself in the third person—yet), Trixie gave me a few more reasons to doubt my luck of running into her.

The way she navigated the eerie tunnels—without any trouble whatsoever—suggested her being the sorcerer behind their ever-shifting nature. If Trixie’s suspicious navigating success hadn’t served as enough evidence, her magic ability, already proved unsettling, offered another hint.

That majestic horn of hers didn’t glow—the shadows, concentrated to pitch-black ribbons, swirled and bubbled around it. The display hurt my mind, actually—she created light through the absence of darkness.

Confronting her about those ominous skills felt unwise—for now; not that I didn’t have anything else, more important, to ask.

“Trixie, how did things get so… bad?” Сharitably speaking.

“Bad?” She chuckled, shaking her head; she also slowed down so I could canter by her side. “Claiming you aren’t the bonafide Twilight, yet still refusing to admit Rarity saved Equestria.”

“Forgive me,” I sneered, “for a moment I forgot Canterlot is a utopia.”

That remark earned me a peeved glance.

“Listen, I understand why you’re sore about what she did, but it was the right call.”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes, grumbling, “Be more concrete, would you?”

“She removed you from the post of Chief Scientist.”

“Well, the cybersuit project had failed—spectacularly.” Seeing Trixie shooting me a surprised look, I reminded her, “It wasn’t me whom Rarity removed.”

“Twilight…” Trixie said softly and patiently, shaking her head and looking at me with a pained expression, “it killed Rainbow Dash. You had spent a month in a coma and woke up blind and semi-paralysed.”

For a moment the memories of another life yanked at the reins of my emotions. However, they worked as an anchor, keeping me from drifting into the void—Isteered the vessel with the wheel of cold logic.

Five hundred years passed. Save for Trixie, everyone Twilight knew had long since died, even the supposedly immortal demi-goddesses. And she herself had ended up as a pile of ashes somewhere and a series of recollections in my head.

Anyway, what was the use of a cripple who’d failed a test when it actually mattered?

“Her decision was fair, then.”

Trixie stopped dead with a gasp; her mouth agape, she stared at me.

I met her utter disbelief with a level look.

Finally, she came to her senses, choosing to ignore my calm reaction, but not without giving me a final, concerned and somewhat offended glance. Then she continued, “Rarity didn’t demote you for failure. You tried to stop her from using those cybersuits.”

Faintly scraping, my brow slowly raised.

“Because they tend to explode?”

“They didn’t—you didn’t fail,” Trixie snapped. “They’re the only reason Equestria managed to finish the war.”

I shrugged, rolling my eyes at her again, “It doesn’t explain how Canterlot can put Tartarus to shame these days.”

My gesture incited a grimace, but her anger quickly faded, replaced by sadness.

“I wish you could remember.” Trixie stomped lightly and pressed her lips together. “She did everything that could’ve been done.”

“She,” I deadpanned. “There were the Princesses? Shining Armor? Anyone else? I can imagine the war left Equestria in shambles, but I refuse to believe it could be rebuilt only into that… shithole!”

“Twilight, all the cities in Equestria were destroyed,” Trixie pleaded. “The remnants of the Coven assassinated your brother the week after the war ended, Princess Luna sacrificed herself to annihilate the Hive and King Sombra executed Cadence the first year into the war.”

Once more a pang of heartache tried to transfix me but found only unrelenting iron.

“And the Former Bearers? What about them?”

Trixie paid me a pained look and whispered in a defensive tone, “Your friends listened to you and organised a revolt against the Crown, but it failed. They either were put in an asylum, exiled or… executed.”

I knew practically nothing of that period, but I could easily understand why Twilight had a problem with Rarity, by her words alone. The government she’d created—the Crown—seemed to preserve its practices intact.

“Don’t you think their call was right?” I hissed. “Have you spent the last five centuries literally living under a rock!?”

“Stop being so obsessed with the present! Thousands of cripples had no homes to return to, hundreds of thousands had theirs turned into ruins. Rarity found a way to house and feed them all, even if they were unhappy. She used your’s and Moon’s research to alleviate their disabilities—”

She scrunched her nose when I interrupted her, “Let me guess, that way is called the Transcontinental Company, isn’t it? Did you know it runs labour camps outside the city?”

Trixie silently glowered at me, then suddenly the ire on her face melted—literally—into a melancholic smile.

“Twilight… You haven’t changed at all, you know that?”

I opened my mouth, but her raised hooves stopped me.

“Just… just let me speak, okay? I know things aren’t exactly well right now—we... we didn’t know where those choices would lead us. But there is no point arguing about the past.”

Her hooves ended up on my shoulders.

“The present, however… That is why I said your… ‘reappearance’ changes everything. And that is why I’m so happy to see you still bearing that spark in you.”

Shrugging off Trixie’s limbs to her disappointment, I grumbled, “Humour me.”

“After… After you ‘died’, I travelled across Equestria, and found a great friend in the ruins of Manehattan. Together we’ve journeyed past the Badlands and we saw her. Princess Luna might have died. But Nightmare Moon… she still lives.”

My eyelids tiredly closed.

No wonder Trixie didn’t mind in the slightest the nonsense-spewing, deranged ponies keeping her company.

When I opened my eyes, I expected her to admit it as a stupid joke, but unfortunately, an intent look met me, bearing the same hope from before.

“What exactly did you see?” I practically groaned.

“The entire Badlands were one huge alarm spell—I’m sure it still is. We learned that only after running into it.” Trixie shuddered. “The night, it descended on us, claiming we were changelings. I don’t know how we made it out alive—both of us lost our bodies.”

That made things no clearer; not that it mattered.

“You do realise I can’t use the Elements, right?”

“We aren’t talking about the Nightmare Moon. She hasn’t brought eternal night or anything like that. I’m pretty sure if she were to meet somepony she knows, her mind would clear up.”

An anachronism—a single pony would come and magically fix everything; or six of them. And it had only worked twice, with catastrophic results when the pattern suddenly failed to continue.

Yet, hearing it from a pony born to that epoch caused me little surprise; the miserable conditions Trixie seemed to be a captive of, too, would offer a fertile ground for such a naive belief.

Though I had no intent of indulging her, the return of Princess Luna might be necessary. Canterlot would fall and with it, whomever of the Crown held responsible for the control of the firmaments.

Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my immortal life under a scorching Sun or in complete darkness, it required my involvement.

That’s, if I assumed it wasn’t just a figment of Trixie’s imagination. But left in those maddening tunnels with a semi-stable dark mage was the last thing I needed.

A heavy sigh escaped my mouth and this time it brought no relief.

“When are we leaving for the Badlands?”

“That’s the spirit!”

For the third time, my eyes rolled at the misinterpretation of my ‘enthusiasm’. At this rate, I’d whittle them into nothing before the journey even began.

“Right now!” continued the excited and oblivious equine. “Though before we do, I need to visit my place to grab the map and a few things. And I’m taking you to the worksh—”

“No. Before we go anywhere, I’m visiting my friends at the Junkyard. And thank you for the offer, but I’m good.”

“Well… the Junkyard is on the way.” Slightly taken aback, Trixie gave me a curious look, then recovered. “It’s not about maintenance. You’re going to need harder horseshoes—you’ll grind these to nothing halfway.”

I only shrugged—she’d made some sense for once.

She began to trot in the direction we came from.

“Erm, Trixie… How do you orient yourself in these tunnels?”

“How did you find the Temple of the Forgotten Deities?”

“Some lunatic showed me the way.”

“Yeah, Pinkie acts like a magnet for them.” Trixie chuckled ruefully. “The secret is that you have to know exactly where you want to end up and to want it. No directions are needed, only confidence—follow your heart, if you aren’t afraid to be corny.”

“Why?”

That is, if she told the truth.

“Nopony knows. Dr Hooves says it’s a tear in time and space caused by some very powerful magic, but he says a lot of crazy things.”

“Dr Hooves is a Former One? Like you?”

Trixie grimaced at the ‘like you’ part, but otherwise nodded.

“How many other Former Ones are in Canterlot?”

“Less than fifteen are left and you may even know half of them. Sunburst, though he spends most of his time recovering books from the ruins of Neighponia; the mare who was called Raven Inkwell back in your days—Fotia Koraki now; Soarin, once a Wonderbolt, now a Lobster; Octavia Melody, but... she isn’t in Canterlot right now…”

Trixie abruptly fell silent and deflated.

Somehow I got the impression there would be no chatting for some time.

The solemn silence interrupted only by the clop of our hooves offered me a great opportunity to reflect on the staggering amount of knowledge I had just received. Other than ruminating on the intricacies of the events unfolded after the fated incident and wondering how to learn more about them without getting into another verbal duel with Trixie, I vainly fought a nagging sensation of missing something extremely important.

In an effulgent flash of intuition two fragments found each other, two pieces of the puzzle:

“...You had spent a month in a coma and woke up blind…”

“...Cast into the darkness, She ascended from the coils of mortal flesh…”

“Coincidence is a lazy word for lazy ponies,” Starswirl the Bearded once said.

Hoping that the bout of sorrow had released Trixie’s mind from its fangs, I asked:

“What do you know about the Machine Goddess?”

Startled, she glanced at me and surprise momentarily ceded to confusion. Then melancholy overcame her expression once again and she spoke so softly, I barely heard her:

“I was living in the Tunnels when Pinkie managed to escape from the asylum and find me. Sometime after, you and Moon learned about her and started to visit us.

“You worked on the enchantments, Moonie was a prodigy when it came to the mechanics, Pinkie was the best moral support any pony could wish for. And I… helped whatever way I could.

“After your ‘death’, Pinkie passed away in her sleep. Moonie went mad with grief and stole your body from the Palace. I still remember her face when you… it… didn’t recognize Pinkie. Moon just let the Royal Guard take her away, never to be seen again.

“I was left alone and… ran away. By the time I came back, the Tunnels had already become a sanctuary to runaway equinoids. They had learned of our lives and departures second-hoof and wove them into a cornerstone of their faith.”

The Machine Goddess never existed but wasn’t a lie either.

“Between the two of us left alive, only you deserve such a title, heh.” Trixie mused with a mirthless laugh. “You were the one who created the Prime Code, the only thing Moon refused to submit.”

Whilst she found that fact amusing, it hit me like a tonne of bricks.

Twilight Sparkle had created equinoids—what was I supposed to make of such inheritance? Yes, inheritance—the irony didn’t evade me; it had to be an enchantment of hers that had turned her recordings into my anchor. In some sense, I was her daughter as much as I was her.

The torrent of emotions and questions threatened to flood my mind and drive me crazy, but I cleared my consciousness of any thought but one—I didn’t know enough to make any conclusions.

Yet.

Trixie’s abode turned out to be a surprisingly modest single room carved in the rock.

Save for two flat large stones—a table and bed—it had no other furniture. A workbench gathered dust in the corner, cluttered with rusty spare parts. However, numerous shelves cut in the uneven walls presented a staggering plethora of little things—knick-knacks, crystals of all sizes and colours, ancient folios, dilapidated scrolls…

Out of sheer curiosity and to pass the time, I asked her permission to take a closer look.

“Sure,” came the muffled answer; Trixie rummaged through the scrolls, surrounded by a thick cloud of dust around her. “Just be careful.”

My magic tugged at the nearest book, yet as soon as it came into my view, I dropped it with a shriek.

A flattened pony face glowered at me from the floor with empty eye sockets, the toothless mouth agape in silent eternal agony. Black ribbons of shadows enveloped it and gingerly put it back with its leather-bound brethren.

“Warned you.”

I chose another shelf to study.

Most of the things shared the disturbing nature with my first discovery, if less pronounced. A set of basalt daggers—bloodstained. Weathered stones engraved in eldritch runes. Inky shadows swirling inside glass spheres. Vials full of murky liquids. Tiny strange clockwork mechanisms. Dark crystals, both bare and encased in metal.

Though Trixie busied herself with carefully choosing gems to put into a cloth bag in her hooves, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.

I twirled around and my eyes fell on it.

A shelf in the far corner housed a pony head that was giving me the most baleful glare I had ever received.

The mare’s head floated inside a cylindrical tube adorned with dark pulsing stones and fortified with oxidized vertical metal bars. If not for the lack of coat and its colour drained by time, she’d have made… ugh… heads turn.

She incited as much pity as abhorrence—why not just put an end to her misery?

“Meet Mordant, the bitch who decided to play a dark mage and thought that it’d be fun to kill everyone who lives in the Tunnels.” Trixie suddenly spoke, accompanying her words with a literal growl. “Took me an entire year and three bodies to take her down.”

“Why do you keep such a thing in your home?”

“She’s a Former One and a lich, like you. This moron had made, like, a hundred phylacteries and hid them everywhere, so I have to keep her alive.”

Perhaps, my judgement of Trixie asked for some deliberation. Despite what her ‘stage name’ implied, somehow I doubted she had spent the last few centuries showing tricks to anypony.

When the assortment of objects in Trixie’s bag amounted to what a new set of hooves would supposedly be worth, we exited her dwelling.

She kept glancing at me with some sort of anticipation and I decided to oblige:

“I’ve met Spike.”

Trixie winced and asked, incredulous, “And he didn’t attack you?”

My head shook.

“I’m afraid, I know no more than you. After the Great War Rarity appointed him an ambassador to the Dragon Lands and he returned only during my absence, already acting like that. I did try to help him, but only lost my body.”

“I’m going to help him,” I stated in a hard voice.

Trixie looked at me with concern and then nodded resolutely.

“I’m with you, but it isn’t going to be an easy task—we need to find him first. I suspect he knows how to avoid me.”

Dragons of his size and age had hoards—that would be a start. And Princess Luna might help—her sister had always shared a special bond with dragons; one more reason to resolve that issue.

Eventually, Trixie stopped using her ‘unlight’ spell. Besides our surroundings gaining lighting on their own, they had lost the appearance of something lost in time and space; signs of civilization—like trash—gradually appeared, bringing the trademark smell with them.

Then we began to meet equinoids, ponies, zebras and whatnot; they gave us a wide berth, glancing warily at the Magician.

The tunnel opened into a place she called a Well.

Beyond the rusted railing, the floor abruptly ended in a vast vertical shaft, its bottom claimed by impenetrable shadows. A giant cluster of catwalks and metal scrap hung precariously in the lumen, defying any reason and safety measures—like a huge spider had woven a web from twisted rusty metal, catching countless fireflies in it, and then passed away in that web, its corpse now being swarmed by tiny ants.

Every underground dweller who happened to be in our path yielded it to Trixie; their expressions ranging from deep respect to outright disgust or fear. And as such, navigating the cramped catwalks posed no issue.

After we passed a small eatery selling translucent noodles and grilled rats, we came to a shack apparently on fire—thick curls of smoke poured from the open door and every numerous crack.

As we waded through the fumes, I discovered it was a sort of artificial fog smelling of medical herbs. The wall of steam let us into a tiny room with two cots and tables, glowing screens set on the latter.

Two figures sat at them, back to back.

A goat and a llama.

A huge brown woolly worm hunched over a tablet, pen in their mouth scribbling furiously. The grey goat in glasses no less vigorously typed on the keyboard; judging by the device appearing in the cloven hoof every so often to be drawn to the lips, the credit for all the vapour went to the caprine.

Since a set of headphones screeched from behind the curved horns, only the llama paid attention to Trixie when she loudly cleared her throat. The towering figure straightened, almost scraping the low ceiling, and bent towards its horned neighbour to slap the back of his head, sending the pair of glasses sailing from the goat’s muzzle.

“Ow, fuck!” The goat tore his headphones off, blindly pawing the keyboard for his sights. “I can’t believe you’ve done this.”

The llama pointed his thick pointy nail at us.

“Ah, the Magician, didn’t see you. Came for the usual?” He squinted at her. “You still haven’t paid for the last maintenance.”

“I’ve brought the crystals.” The bag in her hoof jingled; she motioned her head at me. “Just needed something for a friend.”

“Did you find your friend under a rock or something? She keeps staring at me like I’m going to start invoking the Elder Ones at any moment.”

“Are you not?” Trixie swatted a tendril of mist away from her face. “I thought we’d come in the middle of some ritual.”

The llama produced a dissatisfied unintelligible grunt.

“Very funny,” the goat grumbled. “What does your buddy need?”

“Just hardened hooves.”

Trixie threw the bag into the goat’s hooves and he instantly buried his muzzle in it to return later with a satisfied grin full of yellowish teeth.

“Going for a walk outside, are we?”

Without waiting for an answer, the goat hopped off the chair and headed to a curtain separating the living room from the small workshop.

The moment I entered it, the goat rudely tugged at me by hooking his horn under one of my plates, then just as unceremoniously yanked one of my limbs to his muzzle, intently studying it.

Dropping it and ignoring my glare, he commented, addressing Trixie, “One of your crazy friends—that old hag—came looking for you the other day. She didn’t say what it was about, though, only that it’s urgent.”

“You could show some respect for Fotia, you know.”

“I would if she didn’t act like a huge jerk,” the mechanic barked back, sliding a metal container out from under the rack.

Trixie glowered at him—to no avail.

“Has anything else happened since my last visit?”

“A couple of weeks ago the Calamity Bystanders came for supplies. Said they’ve dug into a huge cavern system with lots of arcanium veins.”

The goat emerged with a sort of horseshoe on his horn—much bulkier and thicker, meant to almost entirely replace the hooves. The caprine mechanic tried it on me, scowled and returned to the boxes.

“They say that every time,” dryly commented Trixie. “Anything else?”

“Only the usual. Though, the Church has been stirring up shit lately.”

“Why?” the question slipped out of my mouth before I even thought.

It earned me an unreadable glance from the goat and before trying another horseshoe on me, he scoffed, “Jumping on the bandwagon, I guess. The winter is in the wind, so everyone goes bats. Almost the entire Edge has, for sure.”

“I’ve heard the Junkyard still can’t get their arse into gear.”

“Uh-huh. It’s been more than a week already, but that’s not the funny part.”

A week!

“What is it then?” I joined their chat again with another question.

“The TCE has yet to give a single fuck about it.”

A lone horseshoe sailed through the air and landed not far from me with a loud bang.

“I can’t remember a time when they let a gang war last for more than three days or let a furnace blow up. Could be the Pinks, of course.”

“And what about the other sectors?” Trixie took her turn in asking.

“You haven’t heard about the Industry?”

“Which one?”

“That’s the thing—they are united now, the Heavy and Light Industry sectors.”

“What? They hate each other’s guts.”

Another two horseshoes landed by me—I had to dodge one—and the goat approached me, the last one swinging on his horn, a screwdriver clenched in his jaws.

“Some kind of ‘prophet’ has managed to unite them,” he spoke through it, working on my limb. “That’s why the TCE has turned a blind eye to the Junkyard—it smells like a riot is cooking there.”

The atmosphere in the room changed drastically with pregnant silence claiming the workshop.

Slowly and carefully, Trixie uttered, “It’s going to be a hard winter.”

The mechanic, his lips bristling with screws, met her eyes and nodded sorrowfully.

Their sombre expressions infected me worry and I could hear the rest of the phrase hanging in the air, unsaid:

“Let’s pray it won’t be another Winter.”

Author's Note

Special thanks to Jay Tarrant.

I hope you've enjoyed reading this story so far.

If you notice any mistakes sneaked in through the editing, let me know.

Stay awesome.