Spiral of Doom

It is well-known is Equestria rock farming works by an undisclosed method, but did you know that there was a field of research that is about literally farming and growing magical crystals? It has long since lost against rival procedures for creating similar gems but there was a time when it was considered a niche type of research that could save pony/dragon relations. Or, one pony thought it could do so.

See, a magical crystal is similar to a conductor for magic. You can pump magic into it and it redirects it in different ways. These manipulations of magic in-turn can be used to form crystals out of given materials. The aforementioned pony realized the applications of this: Create a solution that is effectively "liquid gems" and place a crystal inside of it. The magic emitting off the crystal will cause the surrounding liquid to solidify around it and in theory it can be done in such a way that the solidified liquid become more of the same crystal doing the same thing.

With this it is possible to create increasingly complex structures limited only by the starting energy and the amount of liquid. In short, automated unicorn horns. It is theorized that a great deal of the magical crystal-like artifacts in Equestria come from a lost but similar ancient method on account of many archeologists not realizing that I have much better ways of creating similar structures.

But I digress, this is a story about the pony that created modern crystal growing, not a story about me. The pony so interested in crystal growing was a very bright pony that went by the name of "Diamond Fantasy". His entire family praised intellectualism for a long time. The caretakers of the Canterlot library as a matter of fact. While Diamond spent most of his life after school researching the crystal growing magic, his older brother, Emerald Fantasy, studied for a job in archiving. This was much more profitable and respected than his brother's fringe research. As time went on Emerald became the "favorite child", even by his parents. Diamond's experiments were frequently interrupted by his parents asking when he was going to be as smart as Emerald. In Diamond's mind he was already much smarter and in retrospect he may have been right.

It's important to note that he never hated his brother, rather, he grew to hate his parents.

"Why does it matter if he records the past if I create the future?" he thought.

While living in Canterlot he found one particular thing to take his mind off of his so-called failings: A young filly by the name of "Shining Armor", A unicorn taking classes in shield generation. Being a fan of the military, Diamond naturally grew fond of "Shiny". They started to become close when Diamond began to educate Shining about the military and defensive spells. While Diamond was never in the forces, he knew a great deal about them.

Diamond was greatly bothered by Twilight apparently being the larger interest of most ponies. Something about "elements" or friendship. Diamond was under the impression that defensive spells would be far more important than whatever Twilight was training for. Shining didn't see a problem even when Diamond tried to explain it. As time went on it became more apparent that Diamond may have not been safe to have around young ponies. The long rants about Shining being the better unicorn didn't help.

The Sparkle Parents eventually put their hooves down and didn't let Diamond "hang out" with Shining anymore. After a very short period of time the Sparkles never saw Diamond again. They had assumed the problem was fixed, but it was far from over. In-fact, the continued existence of Canterlot was at stake.

If Equestria wasn't going to respect Shining's powers, Diamond was going to make them in a way that seemed sane to him: Create a weapon of mass destruction. Now, he knew Shining was far to young to create a shield to stop the device on his own but it didn't matter. As long as people realized that a proper shield spell could have saved them it didn't matter.

Diamond became a shut-in, rarely seen by anyone. Nopony seemed to know what he was doing in his "lab" for all that time, let along guess that it was an insane plot involving a massive orbital magical energy weapon that was part of a convoluted plot to ensure a young colt he vaguely knew would be respected as a shield-maker. Looking back, it's possible that Diamond was not of a sound mind on any level.

But back to the creation of the weapon: He had filled a vat the size of a small lake entirely with "liquid crystals" and placed a seed crystal in the very center. Using magic he created a highly complex device made of every color of crystal using more resources than all of his projects combined. After countless moons of perfecting the device, it was ready to take to the sky.

And that it did. Using an anti-gravity spell Diamond made the device "fall up" despite the surrounding population's confusion. After the launch the entire system was automated. It was one of the most complex things ever programmed into a magical crystal not counting Equestria's computers. Mechanically it was rather simplistic and had a few simple commands:

Fire at any approaching objects.

Hold an orbital course to above Canterlot.

Activate "top" thrusters upon reaching Canterlot.]

It had weapons, but the payload was actually rather mundane. It was simply going to drop to the ground and charge with highly toxic magic. It didn't actually need to generate the toxic magic, that was a product of it's battery. The battery was a large crystal in a constant state of decay which the craft used for thrust and if it needed to local weapons. Just in-case Celestia got crafty enough to try and shoot it down.

Diamond however didn't account for a secret machine from long ago in a deep Canterlot basement, capable of disabling the weapon's sensor array for a long enough time to send up a missle.

Now if only Celestia knew how to turn it on.