Resonance

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Written by: Oneimare

Preread and edited by: Jay Tarrant

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Arc 2 – Lies Chapter 1 – Cecity

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“Why am I not surprised you’re involved in this?” Wire shoved the speechless Kirin from her way to face the mechanical deity. When she refused to answer, the unicorn all but spat, “Now, get lost.”

Machine Goddess met scorn with a calm, almost mocking gaze.

“This matter holds my personal interest,” she retorted levelly.

“I don’t give a fuck,” Wire snarled. “This investigation is under the Swarm’s jurisdiction—and nobody has invited you!”

The newly-appointed commissioner opened her mouth to correct her, but the features of the arcanium mask shifted almost imperceptibly and at that moment the already dim tunnel got invaded by even more shadows.

“Equinoids got killed.”

Night tugged on Wire’s armour, but she slapped the frantic hoof away, scoffing.

“You can just always put them into new bodies, big deal.”

Emotion slipped into the reverberating voice of the goddess.

“Not this time.”

The unicorn frowned and fell silent; when she spoke, the bitterness partially abated from her words, “We aren’t getting rid of you, are we? But if you suggest anything like the last time, I’m either going to blast you to the Moon or die trying.”

“I’d like to see that.” A slight smile played on Machine Goddess’s lips. “I promise not to give you a reason today.”

“Don’t try to make your refusal to incite fillicide sound like an achievement.”

“The situation is different this time.”

She pivoted, confidently heading to the intersection leading from the dead-end. After a few steps, the deity stopped to tilt her head in invitation.

With a grimace and heavy sigh, Wire motioned for the pale Kirin to follow, as she trotted after the artificial alicorn; grumbling, “Care to share any details?”

“In time.”

Wire couldn’t help but groan loudly.

The hope that Hope would one day outgrow its low limestone dwellings resulted in the vast tunnel system being created underneath to support that dream in advance. That, and the rock had to come from somewhere—the quarry that housed Stalliongrad’s basalt foundation could only provide so much building material.

However, the city had utterly failed to develop in any direction but width. As such, the underground network continued to sprawl offering more than enough ground for the strange trio to cover, even though it had but a single level.

“Miss Wire,” Night Wind eventually dared to speak, almost inaudibly, “maybe you shouldn’t taunt the Machine Goddess?”

Yet the fuming unicorn didn’t share her inclination to keep their voices down.

“What’s with that sudden bullshit? Drop the ‘Miss’, Night. Or are you afraid of her?” She rolled her eyes and said purposely louder, “You can kick her stupid metal ass if you want—the moment she attacks the police chief of Heterocera’s aide, the Citadel is done for.”

“But she is a goddess!” Night hissed, fearfully glancing at the entity in question.

Whilst the alicorn paid no attention to the conversation happening right behind her back, Wire rolled her eyes.

“I’ll give you a ninety per cent chance of that just being one of her Harbingers. And stop whispering—she could hear you from across the world if she wanted.”

A clear, yet nonchalant voice echoed through the tunnel, “Statistically it is only a sixty-four point two per cent chance of encountering one of the Twelve.”

“Shut up, will you?”

The Kirin winced, but upon seeing Machine Goddess shrugging off any of Wire’s mockery, began to relax—as much as it was possible considering the circumstances. She had heard about the enmity betwixt those two—mostly Wire-sided; a knowledge common in Hope but she never imagined it being so vehement.

“You’ve known her since before she ascended, haven’t you?” Night carefully pried both out of curiosity and boredom.

“So what? You could say the same about Heterocera, but I don’t hear you asking about her.”

Obliviously ignoring Wire glaring daggers at her, the Kirin went on rambling, “I just can’t wrap my mind about it—an actual god, greater than a changeling queen and she’s the most impressive equine I’ve ever seen…”

“I’ll make sure to pass that to De… Heterocera.” Wire snorted, then her expression hardened and her glare shifted to the alicorn. “That’s because the Machine Goddess is no equine—it’s in her name.”

The deity chimed into the conversation despite being out of earshot, “Strictly speaking, the Kirin are more dragons than horses, and nor are the changelings less than half insect. But I get your point, Wire, and you aren’t entirely wrong.”

“So, you admit to being a heartless machine?”

The Goddess laughed—a melodious sound clashing with the dusty ugliness of the crude warrens chiselled from the unwelcoming soil of the Badlands.

“Machine? That is in my name for a reason, indeed.” She stopped and turned to smile at her ‘mortal’ companions. “Heartless? Hardly.”

As soon as the queen’s aide came alongside her, she snapped, “Then would you bother to tell me why you didn’t warn us about Oracle? I’m sure you made your calculations.”

The arcanium equine resumed her unhurried long-legged gait, trotting by Wire glaring at her and eventually dignified the unicorn with a reply, “Her leave was inevitable, nor was her presence as favourable as you think.”

“In one fell swoop, she left Hope with a fifth of its population. Even the Swarm is threatened now.”

“Isn’t she just a sham?” Night piped in.

To the Kirin’s horror, Machine Goddess gave her a long inscrutable look. However, her tone was only amiable when she replied, “Oracle certainly isn’t what everyone thinks she is. However, that filly is shrewd enough to use her ability in the most resourceful manner.”

“You just couldn’t stand the competition.”

A rare sound came from the alicorn—a deep sigh.

“If her ego hadn’t matched her wit, she would have been a great asset. Her approach differs greatly from our mathematical models—she compliments the Unity, not rivals.”

Wire fell silent for a heartbeat, then her eyes grew wide and she hissed, “You’ve spoken with her.”

The subtlest of smiles graced the metal muzzle.

“Maybe I have.”

“You know something!”

That grin grew and the Goddess’s voice gained an almost teasing quality.

“Maybe I do.”

“Stop playing games,” the unicorn practically growled, “we’re already neck-deep in sh—” Her head whipped to an adjacent passageway, her artificial eye flashing. “I saw something.”

The trio abruptly stopped, tensely peering into the shadows.

“There is nothing,” the alicorn commented; yet her voice bore a certain wariness.

To Wire’s discontent, her colourless magic picked up the arcane lantern and it flared with its revealing glare again. A beam of pale light cut through the inconspicuous darkness, yanking leaking pipes out of black, setting the motes of dust on fire. But the spotlight showed no magic traces, save for stale signs of welding or other repairs done weeks ago.

Then it caught a vaguely equine-shaped outline, crouched low.

With a tearing sound, the silhouette lost any resemblance to a pony, bloating to extend itself to Machine Goddess as a whirlwind of shimmering silver particles. A crushing blow snapped her arcanium neck like a twig, crumpled the magic metal as if it was tin, and effortlessly ragdolled her massive form into the limestone.

By the time the lantern exploded into shards from the careless landing, a barrage of spells was already flying at the source of the eldritch wave.

Wire formed faintly wisping spears of incandescent gold and flung them at the pony, regaining its form coated in the glimmering halo. The sunlight lances warped around the maelstrom of twisting force and metal, fizzling against the stone. A protrusion of the same preternatural power reached for the unicorn in retaliation, but she had already retreated to the cover of intertwined pipes, joining the Kirin who had only one spell going—night vision.

“When I spoke about not being prepared, I didn’t actually mean that,” Wire spat, gasping for breath. “Any ideas, since you were so eager?”

Night shivered in her horseshoes, yet she replied unwaveringly, “I have one.”

Bolstering herself she stepped out of their hiding place, followed by a wide-eyed gaze, only to witness the arcanium body of the Goddess rise from the ground, despite tremendous damage done to it, and charge through the darkness at the quivering silhouette, almost solidified into a pony.

Sending sparks in its wake the metal bulk rushed through the cramped tunnel only to completely miss the mysterious attacker. Without missing a beat, the alicorn swerved and threw itself at them again. The pony-shaped apparition easily dodged the lunge and answered by becoming a wave of physical force again, slamming Machine Goddess into the wall so hard, limestone shrapnel whistled like bullets, sonorously pinging from the pipes.

With a whoosh and a painful change of pressure, the air around the boiling silvery mirage ignited, wrapping the amalgam of energy and shattered metal into coiling tongues of blinding flame—another of Wire’s spells. At the same time, half of the alicorn’s body splintered and thin threads of arcanium crisscrossed the narrow corridor whilst the skeletal remains rose, the semi-disassembled head swivelling around.

Wreathed in searing fire and dripping incandescent metal on the floor, the pony tore through the inferno and the net set by the deity. Arcanium slivers swished and one of them pierced the veil of silver energy sheets, momentarily revealing the equine inside, a glistening fabric hiding their entire body.

However, the next moment they disappeared behind a corner and none dared to try their luck chasing them.

Keeping her candlelight spell powerful enough to banish shadows from the entire section of the tunnel, Night watched, enchanted by how Machine Goddess knitted her body back. Wire sat by her side, chugging a magic-restoring tonic and clutching her head with the other hoof.

Finally, the last chipped off piece of arcanium floated from the dust to land on the alicorn’s head and finish her mask bearing a deeply concerned expression.

“I think, ‘in time’ has come, don’t you?” Wire wryly croaked, crumpling the aluminium can in her hoof.

“You are unexpectedly forward in admitting your ignorance.”

“While I’m glad to see something render you useless instead of harmful, I’d prefer it to happen when I’m not fighting alongside you.” The unicorn bristled and her hoof pointed to the ominous darkness of the underground. “What was that?”

The Goddess stared in that direction for a long time and then uttered, confused:

“I don’t know.”

Night gasped, but Wire’s glare only intensified and she venomously quipped, “An entity that can see beyond this world, read minds and basically do anything she wishes doesn’t know something.”

“I can’t sense that pony by any means, can’t even see or directly affect them—they might as well not exist for me.”

“Bullshit!” Wire’s accusing hoof jabbed the arcanium chest. “You led us to it!”

“The Unity analysed every murder and was able to roughly predict where the next one would happen. That’s all I have.”

With her hoof still at the wide chest, the mare continued to glower at the alicorn, opening and closing her mouth, but nothing came out of it. The deity carefully moved the limb away and slid past Wire to the cooled down metal droplets stuck in the dirt.

Her magic levitated one of them to the unicorn; even dull, it still had the trademark iridescence.

“Deaf arcanium.” Wire twirled the metal fragment in her hooves; then her glare returned. “Shouldn’t be a problem for you.”

The omnipotent being looked distinctly lost—a somewhat disturbing sight.

“No, it shouldn’t.”

They both snapped their heads to Night when she quietly commented, “One of their devices must be interacting with it somehow.”

She momentarily faltered under the Goddess’s intense gaze before continuing, “I caught a glimpse of them—that pony had a lot of contraptions on their suit—it looked like industrial-grade protection; I’ve seen those before, at the Edge.”

Wire squinted at the Kirin mare, but addressed Machine Goddess instead:

“Another cutie mark?”

Night fearfully offered her theory, “An assassin?”

The alicorn slowly shook her head, though her expression remained dark. “Why also target organic life and prompt an investigation? And it’s not a cutie mark that grants them insight on how to deal with me—certain forces of a higher order are involved in this.”

All three exchanged worried glances with a sombre silence settling upon them.

“What do we do now?” Night broke the spell.

“We can’t let them inform whoever is interested in their success.”

“And how are we supposed to stop that pony?” Wire scoffed. “You’re as good as blind.”

The Goddess smirked, even though that smile didn’t reach her eyes.

“I have you.”

A swarm of arcanium specks followed the trio of investigators cautiously traversing the underground. Tiniest motes came and went, flooding every tunnel with probes, barely distinguishable from regular dust, controlled by the Unity with power lent by their Holy Mother.

Wire trotted ahead, using her prosthetic to see through the darkness, whilst a fidgeting Night kept the alicorn company, rendered almost skeletal as her arcanium flesh scoured the passageways.

Ultimately, her curiosity overcame reverence.

“Those forces you mentioned…” she gingerly began and glanced at the Goddess; a tilted head met her, prompting to go on, “Who could they be?”

No reply followed that question for a full minute which almost convinced the Kirin that she had misinterpreted the gesture and was now on Machine Goddess’s blacklist. Yet the alicorn answered in the end, “Someone who possesses private knowledge of the gods’ nature and is willing to share it.”

“The Former Ones?” Night squinted at her thoughtfully, then hissed, “Have we got a rat?”

“No. It could only be other gods.”

The mare practically jumped at that, frantically looking around, but her rising panic was abruptly culled by a chuckle from Machine Goddess.

“Fear not. We can’t directly confront each other.”

“Most likely the Goat Gods.” Wire joined their conversation. “They are pissed off at us and know there is a limit to what they can do until you intervene.”

The Goddess suddenly snapped her head to the wall as though she could peer through it.

“We’ve located them.”

Night turned into a spinning top once more and even Wire couldn’t keep herself still.

“Where?” she asked, nervously glancing around.

The arcanium particles condensed into a shimmering cloudy tendril, disappearing into the darkness of the ducts.

“A sewage collector three intersections to the East.”

The rest of the arcane dust formed a simple outline of the nearest tunnels, a pulsing dot marking the wide room where numerous corridors converged. The map rotated in the air gaining one more dimension and revealing the chamber also being deep, taking up two floors.

“It’s an ambush,” Night muttered after studying the schematic for a few moments.

“We aren’t getting anything else,” Wire grimly barked; then turned to the Goddess, her waving hoof pointing at the half a dozen exits. “Can you cut them off?”

The alicorn shook her head. “Only when we set off the trap, and it’ll work both ways.”

“We need a plan,” Night spoke again.

“There might be no time for this—I ran all the data by the Unity again and it suggested the culprit is capable of long-distance teleportation.”

The Kirin’s expression fell and she uttered despondently, “So we just charge blindly into the trap and hope for the best?”

To the Goddess’s chagrin, Wire sent a gust of magic wind, scattering the map.

“Fits the city, doesn’t it?”

Three mares crouched by a doorway.

No sound betrayed a pony laying for them inside—unsurprisingly. Only the soft taps of leaking pipes reached from the vast space flooded with shadows and tense silence.

The passageway that led them to the trap offered the same refuge to the darkness as none of them dared to ignite their horns; only the soft gleam of Wire’s prosthetic reflecting on the arcanium and Night’s eyes defied the black domain.

The investigators hesitated, even though acutely aware of the clock ticking.

Tongues of blue flame blossomed in the void, snaking across and around the lithe body. Night’s manedo became undone, becoming fire, and her eyes flared up, deathly white with boiling fury.

“We won’t see it burn,” she whispered.

Then the Nirik burst into the sewer collector, a roar both of her conflagration and throat reverberating through its emptiness.

A cacophony of rending metal instantly answered her battle cry as a wave of eldritch magic and a storm of arcanium rushed to meet her. Yet the blazing mare had already bound off to a catwalk, sending the rickety grid rattling. The horrendous force hammered the girders, snapping and twisting them like dry branches, but it only found molten hoofprints—Night kept leaping, a comet of purple soaring across the room.

The magic that knew little limits forced tonnes of stone to surge from the floor at any escape route. The horrendous sound of enormous lime rock slabs thundering against the ceiling caught the raging maelstrom off guard and in that moment Wire hurled a fireball at it.

The whirlwind greedily devoured the spell, the torrents of arcanium glowing as the heat dissipated into them, but refusing to liquefy. The pony-shaped figure lost its form and lunged at the unicorn skidding on the slippery floor, but before the wave of death could descend on Wire, a barrage of debris—chunks of stone and warped rebar—intercepted it, buying the mare some time.

The mysterious pony shrugged off the rubble and decapitated the arcanium alicorn with a single lash, tearing into the rest of the body and ripping it into two halves. That display of tremendous power concluded in Night strafing by the re-coalescing equine, submerging them in the inferno coiling around her.

The Nirik cried in agony as incandescent arcanium pelted her, no longer controlled by the murderer, but still keeping the inertia. Caught off-guard, she stumbled—right into the wall. Glowing eyes widened in fear as the swirling metal and magic started to rapidly lose the equine form.

A tsunami of fire slammed into them, engulfing everything in the ardent undoing.

In a thunderous explosion the stone melted into slag; pipes trickled onto the floor, boiling; water hissed angrily as it billowed to the ceiling.

Night broke through the chaos of desolation, a pony in a smoking suit grasped by her hooves.

She tussled with the equine on the singed floor; coals scrunched as they rolled, throwing punches at one another. Whilst the commissioner possessed little threat as a brawler, the wrath-fueled Nirik-form gave her enough advantage to overpower her opponent and she wrapped her hooves around the massive gas mask.

Neither the insulated fabric nor the anguished lament of the ravaged collector room could muffle the sharp crack of broken vertebrae.

Night fell beside the still body and immediately began to crawl from the blast zone—the anger began to abate and her Kirin body would offer no protection from the sheer heat still lingering there. Still, when she reached Wire, burns marked her coat, where the unicorn’s spell had even chewed through the kevlar uniform and her fire-resistant nature.

Though Wire had managed to stay out of the lethal area, she’d paid the toll nonetheless. Her horn smoked badly, emanating the choking smell of burnt bone; she lay muzzle down in a puddle of blood trickling from her nose, eyes and ears. Either the spell itself or the searing breath of the inferno she’d birthed had singed the hairs of her muzzle.

As the Kirin slumped by her, breathing heavily and clutching wounds, Wire regained consciousness; coughing she rose to her hooves—after a couple of failed attempts.

Grimacing and clutching her head, she groaned, “Not gonna lie—I’m impressed.”

“Thanks,” Night rasped.

“I meant myself.”

The Kirin rolled her eyes.

“You could’ve killed me with that, you know.”

“Not sure how I survived.” Wire spat out a clot of blood. “And you signed up for it yourself.”

Both mares watched rivulets of arcanium run amidst the smouldering remains of the chamber’s section, forming into an alicorn. Even before Machine Goddess rebuilt herself, she strode towards them, her magic digging into the corpse on her way.

Incredulously, the suit had barely sustained any significant damage, yet it couldn’t withstand the precise cut of an arcanium scalpel.

Night and Wire recoiled as a stallion, reeking of burnt flesh, slipped out of the thick folds.

Whilst the stallion had little unusual about himself—a fellow unicorn with a shaved off mane, his suit inscribed with runes got the immediate attention of the Goddess. She scrutinised the elaborate setup of devices taking up half of the bloated gas mask; the backpack had even more gadgets of an arcane nature to uncover.

Yet not a minute passed as she commented, “Those are not of Equestrian designs, just as I predicted. But it was made in Equestria.”

With Wire barely able to hold herself from passing out, Night spoke for both of them, “How’s that possible? You said it’s not the work of the traitors.”

The alicorn’s magic tore something from one of the complex metal components. The object floated to the Kirin and she gaped at the stamp of painfully familiar design.

“But Canterlot is frozen!” she managed to stammer only on the third try.

“The Windigos wouldn’t linger over nothing or, rather, over something that has less strife than Hope.”

Leaning on Night’s shoulder for support, Wire blustered at the Goddess, crimson spraying from her lips, “And you’re telling us this only now!?”

An expressionless mask met her bloodshot glare.

“Forget it, Del must hear about this immediately.”

The unicorn tried to hobble away, but an invisible force stopped her, also preventing her from falling.

“Don’t hurry, by the time your paths cross again, it’ll be the least of her worries.”

Author's Note

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

Stay awesome.