Feeling Pinkie Keen - Extended Cut

by AdmiralSakai

Rating: teen
Tags: Princess Luna, Mystery, Spike, Fluttershy, Adventure, Violence, Pinkie Pie, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Alternate Universe
Length: 65094

A serious fantasy adventure based on the Season 1 episode 'Feeling Pinkie Keen'.

Nightmare Moon has been defeated and Princess Luna restored, and Twilight Sparkle is well on her way to rewriting the entire history of the Lunar Rebellions.

It’s a shame nothing the Princess has to say makes any sense whatsoever.

A serious fantasy adventure based on the Season 1 episode Feeling Pinkie Keen.

Co-written with Serketry.

Published 2021-06-16 16:30:00 UTC
Last updated 2021-06-29 01:09:36 UTC

Wake Up. Run Tests. Rewrite History.

(♫)

Dear Twilight:

I’m sorry, you told them WHAT??

We don’t even know if this journal of Luna’s ever actually existed, much less whether or not it survived. What are you going to do if we can’t find it? What are you going to do if we can find it and it’s not legible, or it doesn’t say what you think it says?

– Your loyal (if slightly terrified) assistant:

Spike

Spike:

I realize the journal might not exist, or is contents may fall short of seismic, but I’m convinced that anything less than a full account of Nightmare Moon’s takeover of Princess Luna, with all the gory details and straight from the horse’s mouth (as it were), is not going to convince those Cabinet ponies. They’re awful! I don’t know why Celestia ever let them into the city, much less allowed them to take government positions! I’ll see if I can find where the transcript of our meeting went, and send it to you.

As such, consider promising the journal to be a calculated risk.

–Twilight

Dear Twilight:

I don’t think that’s how a calculated risk works. And Celestia wouldn’t have appointed those ponies if they weren’t good at their jobs. In fact, the idea of a pony with zero social graces and a comprehensive knowledge of a very narrow field being given great authority sounds familiar to me for some reason… I’m sure I’ll think of it sooner or later.

– Your loyal assistant

Spike

Spike:

Well if you don’t take this a bit more seriously we’re guaranteed to fail, because Celestia has another meeting in ten minutes and where she goes, my firelink connection goes! Can you please just send me what I asked for?

–Twilight

It was a six-hour train ride from Canterlot to Fillydelphia. Twilight sprung for first class, and spent the whole trip effectively sealed in her cabin, reading voraciously. She’d be speaking with actual witnesses to the Lunar Rebellions soon enough, of course, but she wanted to be able to ask the right questions. She began in more or less chronological order. Spike had helpfully flagged several entries in Paper Clip’s journals with red sticky-notes color coded as “context”:

Throughout the spring and early summer of 98 CE, Clip and his co-conspirators had grown increasingly concerned about the influx of Lunar scouts and untransformed, covert troops into the city of Everfree. He’d feared, correctly as it turned out, that such a buildup of forces might have been prelude to an all-out attempt on the capitol- a decapitation strike after which the outlying Equestrian provinces might very well rally en masse behind Luna’s banner, against the hated Council of Five Hundred.

With a great deal of work, some of the newly-arrived Lunars became the Cabal’s own informants. They told tales of a major encampment of regular troops -or the closest thing the Lunar Rebellion got to regular troops, anyway- some ways outside of the city outskirts. The clerk, however, was skeptical: “I have next to no confidence in the reconnaissance and intelligence capacity of Celestia’s loyalists- after all, I’m still here and fully employed by the Council Staff despite having committed high treason a dozen times over. But the idea of an entire encampment of thousands (or even tens of thousands) of Lunar troops having escaped notice directly outside of the largest city in Equestria would strain even the military’s incompetence!”

A week later, another entry touched on the same topic:

“Escritoire has conveyed my skepticism to her sources, and to a mare they all claim we cannot spot the camp because a spell has made it invisible. Of course, none have actually been to this camp and witnessed its properties firsthoof; these are, by and large, Everfree natives inducted into the Rebellion by more veteran operatives. It’s possible this whole ‘invisible camp’ is just a tale concocted by still more senior Rebel leaders to drive ponies like ourselves off their trail. If so, it doesn’t seem to be working, as my friend on the Council confirmed the Intelligence Committee has no knowledge of any encampment whatsoever. It wouldn’t be the first time the Lunars’ ruses have proven too subtle for their own good, however…

Will contact supporters at the Mages’ College tomorrow and see if they can determine whether such a spell is even thaumatologically possible.”

The next few pages were a mishmash of equations pertaining to various types of illusion spells, in a few different varieties of mouth- and hornwriting. The methods were simple and archaic, but Twilight agreed with the anonymous mages’ conclusions: she wasn’t sure how a pony would go about concealing such a large military encampment for so long now, much less using only the magic available one thousand years ago.

After that, though, as Last Seed ticked into Sun’s Height, Clip became a bit more circumspect: “I find myself returning once again to these suspicions of a Lunar camp outside the city, hidden by some unusual means. Magic is always surprising me… who’s to say what is and isn’t ‘impossible’? Were the Lunars to have such a capability, their sudden appearance in great numbers during the riots in Baltimare and Cloud’s Dale would in fact be a great deal less inexplicable… I think it’s worth reexamining.”

The very next day included the first entry Twilight had seen flagged as referring to Luna’s journal directly:

“Firefly found this mare, oddly enough! A second-hoof story, like the others, although this one includes an unusual amount of detail. The mare says her contact speaks more than he should. I’ve forwarded the meeting-place details to a Watch constable we can trust, but what interests me is the description of Princess Luna. If our source is to be believed, she is indeed in residence just outside the city, but has been spending less and less time among her troops. Rather, she disappears to some yet more remote redoubt for most of the night, bringing along only a few of her closest generals if anypony, and it’s here that she keeps the diaries I remember so well. There is even some sort of ‘challenge’ she has set for her officers to find her at this place, in favor of some reward, although our source’s source said nothing about what exactly this involves.”

Ultimately, however, Clip and his co-conspirators had elected not to take action:

“We have no solid, incontrovertible evidence this camp even exists, and if it does we don’t know where it’s located, and even if we did I’m unsure what we could do about it. Our Dayguard are in no condition to confront ten thousand Lunar veterans in a direct assault. Should we instead arrange for the Loyalists to come across their location, they would no doubt attempt to crush the Lunars immediately under a tide of overly-equipped, poorly-trained bodies. The Lunars would in turn retreat, and continue to prolong this conflict- and if they are anywhere near a populated area, the collateral death toll could be substantial. There simply isn’t a good option here.”

After that, Twilight skimmed through the densely-packed entries leading up to the Battle Of Everfree proper. References to Luna herself were few and far between in that period, and mostly in the abstract, the Cabal growing less and less concerned with the alicorn’s personal location than they were with what her next move was going to be. Only in the aftermath, with Luna banished and Everfree City now the Everfree Forest, did the scale of the Lunars’ attack offer incontrovertible proof that a major encampment had indeed been somewhere nearby. Twilight thought it was to Paper Clip’s immense credit that he never once stopped to blame anypony for his mistake, and instead pushed forward with interviewing the Lunar survivors who had fallen into his care:

“Questioned separately, all ten of the messengers tell the same story. Not only was the encampment hidden from visual detection by magical means, but there was supposedly a sort of mnemonic or ‘psycho-mantic’ spell over the entire area. Anypony who had yet to take Luna’s Oath would forget the exact location of the compound not long after leaving it. Supposedly, a similar but more powerful enchantment was applied to the redoubt where Luna herself is said to have spent most of her time. While (to our witnesses’ knowledge) no explanation for this measure was ever given, I don’t have much difficulty figuring one: a pony who doesn’t know the location of the encampment can never reveal it even under the most severe torture. After all, the Council did indeed hold captive in Everfree, at the time of its collapse, some few hundred suspected Lunar agents- and perhaps five or six were in fact the genuine article!”

This, finally, was where Paper Clip’s interest in Luna’s final writings truly developed; he filled entire pages with speculation of what may have caused the Princess to “turn” in those final, few, fateful weeks before the attack on Everfree commenced. His interviews led him to a region of farmland west of the city’s ruins, known as the Hardfrog Valley- a large area to cover, but small compared to the whole of Equestria, and as precise as the curious amnestic spell over the camp allowed.

Unfortunately, it had been hit hard by the Fall: as space inside Everfree twisted and the ground beneath it buckled, the Snowbourn River that ran from Canterlot down through the City started running right back out again. Pages of maps and hydrological diagrams described with an engineer’s clear, clinical detachment the calamitous flooding that followed. In less than a day the rich farmland of the Valley was all either submerged or washed away. Even more refugees poured into the sprawling camp outside of Everfree, already-strained food stores suddenly had no means of resupply- and any remaining traces of either the camp or Princess Luna’s final redoubt were buried.

Years passed, preserved for Twilight as ledgers and organizational charts. The water receded somewhat, but Paper Clip’s interest in the site never fully went away. He considered sending the government’s engineers to drain it, once he had the authority to order projects on that scale, but the technical challenges were daunting and resources were needed more urgently elsewhere. Twilight was no expert on geomancy, but she doubted the Hardfrog Valley could be reclaimed with modern techniques, much less those of a millennium ago. Paper Clip didn’t give up, though, and he didn’t forget. The very last entries Princess Celestia had on file, written in 126 CE just before the stallion had retired from government business and gone back to teach at the mining school in Frankpferd, contained one more mention of it:

“I realize it’s likely that nothing has survived save, perhaps, for a few forgotten blades that are even now quietly turning to rust. But the Lunars have surprised me before, and questions about who might one day read the last coherent words of Princess Luna continue to trouble me. It galls me to leave any job half-finished, but I’ve told Celestia a thousand times that we can’t spend the rest of our lives (hers of course being effectively boundless) chasing after the ghosts of what was. We need to focus on the ponies alive right now, and on generations to come, and I’d be a fool if I didn’t heed my own advice. In any case, working and studying covertly at the site has become untenable, as the area around it has started to acquire something resembling settlement once again. I hear that now, the locals have abandoned the original name and started calling it ‘Froggy Bottom Bog’…”

It was a start.

(♫)

There wasn’t much to the station at Fillydelphia Harbor, really: just a big open stone platform near the tracks, covered by a wooden roof. Before the Lunars had taken up residence, it had been used mostly to offload cargo and the occasional massed group of sailors, as part of the facility’s original function as a naval yard. The establishment of a dedicated stop along the Canterlot-Fillydelphia circuit, and the special Government trains now running directly from Ponyville every six hours for the exclusive use of project staff, probably constituted more traffic in a week than it had seen in its entire previous existence.

Twilight Sparkle set hoof on it a little after ten in the evening. Forward March was waiting for her, perched on one of the newly-installed wooden benches.

“Twilight! ‘Bout time you bothered to show up…” The medic called out, then laughed and cantered over to Twilight’s section of the platform. “My crew’s been worried you’d forgotten about us.”

Twilight shook her head, and as the train behind her wheezed back into motion she started across the platform to meet Forward halfway. “I really wanted to come up here a week ago, but… things in Ponyville’ve been kind of chaotic, and then all this stuff up in Canterlot started happening, and…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know how it is…” Forward grumbled, then waved with one hoof towards the ramp at the end of the platform. For the first time, Twilight noticed it was flanked on either side by a pair of blue-armored, gray-coated Lunar Guards in beaked helmets, the first on each side holding a halberd topped with a dark blue banner showing a white crescent moon. “After you?”

They started walking.

The area immediately surrounding Twilight wasn’t very interesting- mostly empty grass and cobblestone, staging areas that currently had nothing to stage. Beyond that, however, sat a neat little assembly of smart white clapboard buildings intermixed with generous green space, which had up until recently likely been administration centers or officers’ quarters. Now, they housed the two-hundred-and-change survivors of the Lunar Rebellions. Ordinary ponies in Academy sashes and military uniforms mingled in roughly equal numbers with their slit-eyed gray charges- who, after all, were indeed nocturnal and had every reason to be out and about at this hour. Some cleaned armor and weapons; or mock-fought against dummies, Army grunts, and each other. Some were reading, or engaged in games with cards and dice- some conventional, and some that Twilight only recognized from historical texts. Some just sat on the grass and talked. Forward March had seen to it that they were allowed complete liberty to move around the compound, although on more or less the honor system they had agreed not to leave it without some kind of modern-era escort. Everypony, Lunar or otherwise, wanted to avoid soldiers picking a fight with one of Fillydelphia’s trolley cars or similar misadventures.

All of that did, however, make Twilight quite curious about the function of the big heavy chain-link fences, complete with wide upper sections to deter fliers and fully-armored Army guards every few dozen meters.

“So, can I see Princess Luna?” she finally asked Forward March.

“I don’t think you could avoid seeing her much longer. She’s been asking about you every day- or, well, every night, I guess- since she set up shop here.”

Twilight nodded. Princess Celestia had been calling on her sister about every four or five days, which was about as much as the older alicorn’s schedule could possibly allow. Luna had also been offered a suite in the government complex in Canterlot, which was the closest thing Equestria had any more to an actual palace, but insisted on remaining near her followers, and so in Fillydelphia she had stayed. Now that Celestia was on her way out of the country, it made sense that Luna would be making use of the time to catch up with other business.

They were passing one of the main entrance gates, now, and conversation necessarily had to stop on account of the sheer din being generated by the ponies crowded on the other side. Twilight wasn’t entirely sure whether to call them fans, demonstrators, or cultists. Some wore replica Lunar military gear of wildly varying quality; some had dyed their coats gray and their manes black, and some of those had gone to the extra effort of contact lenses or glamer spells to give themselves slitted yellow eyes. Nearly all brandished some sort of moon-related icon or symbol or a copy of this or that ancient portrait. There were also more than a few signs- “LET OUR BROTHERS GO” and “CHILDREN OF THE MOON SHOULD NOT BE UNDER THE YOLK OF THE SUN”[sic] were among the more readable.

Twilight recognized the sentiment, from the letters to the editor the Times of Canterlot for some reason felt compelled to publish over and over again despite their all containing basically the same content. She wondered if any of the ponies agitating for the Lunar survivors to be “granted greater autonomy” and released from the “Fillydelphia Zoo” realized that those survivors had little if any modern money, and some couldn’t read. They were also, it had been discovered, carriers of any number of different diseases -from dourine to feather flu- that had run rampant in the First Century but were all but unheard of in modern times. Forward and the other medics had even speculated that their transformed nature had increased their resistance; like real bats, they developed mild symptoms where other creatures would have died. Intensive treatment had already resolved the worst of it, but there were still enough Lunars sick with enough things that putting them in contact with the general population -especially the sections of the population that didn’t listen when sensible ponies in authority told them to stay away from things-could easily spark some kind of epidemic.

That explained the fences, at least. They weren’t to keep the Lunars in; they were to keep the rest of Equestria out.

As Twilight and Forward passed closest to the gate, one particularly determined pegasus mare in a horrible brown suit tried to shoulder her way to the front, and the more-or-less organized chanting briefly disintegrated into shouts of protest. “Watch where you’re going, dumbass!” the newsmare snapped in a vaguely familiar voice.

“Fie, and double dumbass upon thee!” replied a bat-winged stallion sitting on the curb nearby. In fact, there were a lot of Lunars sitting near the entrance, and watching the proceedings with apparent amusement. Twilight found herself wondering if the Fillydelphia pamphleteers were in fact right about this entire compound being a zoo, and simply mistaken as to which side of the cage they were on.

“Well, at least we aren’t giving the Lunars a falsely idealistic impression of modern society,” she muttered, once they were far enough away from the mob that she could hear the sound of her own voice again.

They finally stopped in front of a somewhat grander building- perhaps an Admiral’s quarters, originally- with the front door flanked by two beak-helmeted Lunars as well as a pair of Royal Guard MPs. Forward March stepped up to the Guardsmare with a Corporal’s stripes, waved something on an official-looking piece of paper under her muzzle, and then nodded. “Yeah. OK. Good.” She flicked a wing at Twilight, then at the door. “Princess Luna’s expecting you. Down the hall, to the right. Umm… have fun?”

One of the beak-helmeted Night Guards opened the door for her, and Twilight stepped inside. She followed the yellow-eyed soldier down a short hallway paneled in fine dark oak and laid with deep blue carpet that smelled brand new, to a spacious study that seemed to be half bookshelves and half grand bay windows. Princess Luna sat at the desk in the center, every spare millimeter of its polished surface covered in books at least two layers thick. Most of them were reference texts on history, thaumatology, geography, and a thousand other subjects, although among them Twilight also spotted more than a few popular novels. For just a moment she sought out her mother’s name on any of the spines, and was briefly disappointed when it proved to be completely absent. Perhaps somepony had decided that alternate-historical fiction would be a bit much to handle for a mare who was still trying to catch up to the real thing.

Even after having read Forward March’s detailed reports on Luna’s recovery, Twilight was nonetheless shocked by how healthy the Princess looked. When they’d first pulled her out of the Castle of the Two Sisters, there had been quite a few doctors wondering if Luna would make it through her first night. Now, to Twilight’s admittedly cursory examination, she just looked like a smaller, rather bony alicorn with a cornflower-blue mane, sitting upright in a chair entirely under her own power.

Luna looked up as soon as the door opened, and called out in a firm, clear, and surprisingly musical voice: “Twilight Sparkle! Aye, thou hast… umm… you have at last deigned to visit Us?” She reached up one hoof shod in dark blue metal and tapped the simple, elegant collar that hung at her neck. Both, according to Forward’s reports, were modeled after First Century originals and forged according to Luna’s own exacting specifications by the Guard armory works on this very base. “We praise thee for thine generosity and forbearance in accommodating Our followers and Ourselves,” then she laughed, “We imagine thou hast more than thine share of questions for Us. It is only appropriate that We do Our best to answer.”

“Hello, Your Grace,” before anypony could prompt her, Twilight bent her forelegs into a deep bow, silently thankful for the thick carpeting. “I wanted to come here earlier, but there’s been… complications. Has Major Forward told Your Grace about the situation with the Cabinet?”

Luna laughed again, “Thou needst not hold thine self so formally, Twilight Sparkle. Thine way is simpler, and We shall need to learn it… sooner… or… after?”

Now it was Twilight’s turn to laugh, as she pulled herself back up onto all fours. “Close enough.”

“But… aye. We have heard of Tia’s troubles with her Cabinet. Perhaps some things have not changed overmuch from Our era…”

Twilight shook her head. “I wouldn’t quite go that far… but I do think I could use Your Grace’s help to get them to come around.” That, and maybe a few blasting-crystals.

Luna nodded, and then her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Verily, we understand. Shall We tell these august bodies of Our sleepless weeks in the field, of visions and whispering, of shadow-stuff worming its way down Our throat and pressing against Our eyeballs? Will that be enough to convince them?”

“I… don’t think that’ll be necessary,” the scholar quickly amended. She could already imagine Firelight’s anonymous ‘analyst’ sneering at that sort of testimony as… perhaps, ‘the hallucinations of a deeply mentally unstable mare coached into a marginally more coherent form by Twilight Sparkle’s team of revisionist psychotherapists’. “I’m more looking into First Century textual sources. Things that can be dated and shown to have come before me, or anypony else who’d ever considered restoring Your Grace to power.”

“Aye… such things would be much harder to accuse of bias, We think.” The Princess’s eyes slid half-closed, and she leaned backward in her chair. For a moment Twilight thought Luna had fallen asleep, but then she continued, “’tis fortunate that a senior clerk of Ours, well before the Rebellions, imbued in Us the habit of constantly writing things down.”

Twilight smiled as Luna sat back up again. “His name wouldn’t’ve happened to be ‘Paper Clip’ would it? Because he wrote the journal that told me about your journal.”

The warmth seemed to return to Luna’s expression all at once after that. “Oh, did he now! How is it that one quaint quote went? 'The more things change, the more they stay the same'?"

“I was just wondering… since, you know,” Feeling suddenly awkward, Twilight shifted her weight from one hoof to the other, “Clip was in Everfree for pretty much the entire Rebellion, and didn’t have a lot of information on your movements, if… well, if you knew where you’d put your notes just before the raid on the city? They might not be there now any more, of course, but that’d give us a good place to look, at least…”

“Aye- umm… yes!” Luna paused, and leaned back in her chair again, and after a few seconds began nibbling on her own lower lip. “We… We doth not recall. We remember the struggle to bring Our ponies near to the city unseen, and the nights We spent preparing, alongside them, at Our encampment, but… beyond that…” For the first time, she seemed to show real concern. “Twilight Sparkle… dost thou believe… the Elements may have done this to Us?”

“I… don’t know,” Twilight said, and she really, genuinely didn’t. She thought she and her friends had used the Elements’ power to selectively edit out all the parts of Nightmare Moon that weren’t Luna, but… how could she truly be sure that was all they had removed? Or, perhaps, if the stories about mind-altering magic surrounding the Lunar encampment were true, had Luna simply fallen under the sway of her own spell? “But if you… uhh, if Your Grace would be willing to let me talk to some of your troops about it, I might be able to get you some answers.”

“Then it shall be done.”

“Verily, hidden we were,” said Lancepesade Smoky Mirror. To Twilight’s mild surprise, she had found the unicorn swordstallion back behind one of the dining halls, divested of his armor and covered up to his knees in rich black soil, tending to a small vegetable garden. “’Twas, perhaps, Our Luna’s greatest working, before… errm…” he shifted awkwardly in place, the trowel he was holding in his telekinetic field drifting off slightly to one side, “all that happened in the City.”

“Do you have any idea how it might’ve functioned?” Twilight prompted.

“Nay, not as such. All I know is that from outside, none could see or hear our presence in the field, and that upon leaving one was… confused, for a short while, as though sleep-walking, and upon waking could not recall the way in. It was ended the night we made our push into Everfree, that we could leave as a force without our senses being muddled, and then it was restored. I remember the whole camp fading away again behind me.”

“So, even though the enchantment eliminated both information and whole chunks of experienced time from your memory… you were aware of when it was operating?”

“Aye,” Twilight thought she saw the unicorn shiver slightly, despite the warm summer night, “and ‘twas not an experience I am anxious to repeat.”

That was interesting. Princess Luna had complained of no such symptoms, and should have known more about the spell than anypony, so it was unlikely her memory loss was a result of falling victim to it. Unless it worked differently on the caster, perhaps…

“Don’t worry. I don’t care how powerful it was, that spell has to have faded away by now. If there was any trace of it left… counter-illusion magic’s advanced a lot these last thousand years. We would’ve detected it,” was all she said aloud.

“’Twere… strange,” recalled Sergeant Catseye, “a General might spend hours or half a night seeking Luna’s perch. When she came back, sometimes she was badly hurt, or stumbled about as though drunk. Some seemed… giddy, perhaps, certainly more joyous than our lot warranted… some would stumble back to their tents and sleep for the whole of the next night. But when they recovered, ‘twas as though they were… reborn, almost. They spoke more freely with Our Sovereign, and understood her when we could not. We were forbidden to ever speak to them of their ordeal, but some did, and I heard some say none could remember the path they took, nor what they got up to at its end, nor the path they took home.”

“Thank you, Captain, for agreeing to meet with me.”

Captain Vortex hovered about a meter above the parade ground, forcing Twilight and the pair of Army medics overseeing his progress to look up in order to meet his yellow-goggled eyes. “Tis… no trouble,” he said, in between breaths. He kept awkwardly drifting from side to side or up and down, and the young scholar had to stifle the urge to apologize. The last time they’d met, after all, she’d been the one to break both of his wings in three or four places each. If he was at all bothered to be talking to her now, though, he gave no indication of it. “I hear thou… seekest infor… mation on our hide-away… outside of… Everfree?”

“That’s correct. I guess we’ll start with the basics- do you know where the camp was located?”

Vortex’s leathery wings finally gave out, and he dropped to the ground with a definite thud. One of the medics hoofed him a canteen, and he downed the entire contents before getting back to all-fours. “Three… leagues north… of the oxbow bend… in the Snowborne river.”

That was progress. There was a swamp where the river used to be, now, but there were also ancient maps that charted its course and could be converted into modern coordinate systems. “So I take it you weren’t affected by the mnemonic spell over the place?”

Vortex’s eyes narrowed behind his goggles. “I never heard tell of any… ‘mnemonics’ about in our camps!”

“The spell that made ponies forget the location,” Twilight amended.

“Nay, none of the Shadowbolts were. ‘Twas one of our tasks to lead back those who had strayed from the place, when Our Luna’s signposts and riddles failed.”

“Signposts and riddles?”

“They were meant to show the way to Our Luna, I think, for there were many times towards the end of our stay there when she went to some other location. I know not where.”

“Do you remember what they… you know, looked like?”

“Some were simple. Signs cut into stones and the like. But there were also… pillars. Small, about wing-height” he held one leathery, bat-like wing straight out to the side as a demonstration, “and intricately carved.”

“Do you know where they were?”

“… Nay. In fact, I do not think I was supposed to see as much of their construction as I did. ‘Twas the domain of the illusionists and geomancers, and we were by chance billeted not far from their workshop.”

“Any could undertake the search,” said Rain Chaser, “for the reward of Our Sovereign’s favor. None who had yet to take the Oath could make any headway, though, and few of us who had taken it could make much more. The Generals could find the way, but not commonly. I went out twice and saw nothing. Some… went out and did not come back.”

“I’d like to talk with you about some of your non-combat duties, actually,” Twilight told Mage-Ensign Foxglove. The chubby little earth pony was one of several Lunar mages to have taken up nearly full-time residence in the Yard’s hastily-assembled library, and was currently surrounded by college-level geomancy and botany texts. “If I’m remembering correctly, wasn’t a lot of the basic construction of fortifications and concealment and things left up to geomancers?”

“Yes. All of us were expected to assemble our own portion of the camp, though plans were given to the officers from Our Luna.” Foxglove’s ears had swiveled in Twilight’s direction, but his eyes and muzzle remained pointed squarely at the page in front of him.

A pony after my own heart, I see! “Do you remember making any kind of… guideposts, I think they were supposed to be. Carved stone pillars?”

“Nay, though I saw them made. We were not told much that did not relate to our own duties, and I fear those who were tasked with making them… did not survive.”

Twilight paused, unsure of what to say, and finally settled on, “I’m sorry.”

“’Tis the way of things.”

“Umm… right. I know this is kind of open-ended, but, did you ever get any construction orders that were… strange, or didn’t make sense?”

That got Foxglove’s eyes off the book and refocusing out in the middle distance. “Hmmm… Aye- sorry, yes. Yes, in fact. Much of our earth-moving… many of the officers complained there was no point to our defenses, as no attacker would be able to position herself in such a way as to come up against them. And the instructions to build them were more detailed than any simple fortification ought to be.”

That almost sounded like a map, similar to the Lunar Cairns that had encoded the location of the prophecy describing Nightmare Moon’s return. Twilight reached into her saddlebags and extracted a pad of graph paper. “Can you draw them out for me?”

(♫)

“FLYING ALONGSIDE THIS THING IS AMAZING!” Rainbow Dash yelled over the roar of the Lapwing’s engines as they both soared over Froggy Bottom Bog. “IF THIS IS HOW ARCHAEOLOGY WORKS THEN GO AHEAD AND SIGN ME UP.”

“Rainbow! Rainbow!” Shouted Twilight from her seat on a crate in the airship’s cargo bay, sandwiched between a foldout plotting table and a precision airspeed meter, “You need to hit the rune on your helmet for us to be able to hear you!” She leaned out of the open bay door as far as she dared- which wasn’t very far, really, what with the undefined greenish treetops slipping past at dizzying speed below her- and tapped at the rune on her own borrowed Guard helmet as way of demonstration.

“I SAID, IT’S AMAZING TO FINALLY FLY ALONGSIDE ONE OF THESE THINGS.”

“Yes.” Twilight leaned back inside and telekinetically moved a few leather straps to keep her charts from blowing off the table. “I can tell.”

“I’M SORRY, WHAT WAS THAT? THIS AIRSHIP’S ENGINES ARE EXTREMELY LOUD.”

“THE RUNE ON THE LEFT CHIN GUARD ON YOUR HELMET. IT’S COLORED RED. YOU NEED TO TOUCH IT,” screamed Pinkie Pie. Twilight had offered the entire Town Council and all six of her friends spots on the Lapwing’s first reconnaissance fight. Rainbow Dash and the baker were the only ones who had accepted.

“OH. YEAH. OKAY, I CAN DO THAT.” There was a momentary pop in Twilight’s ears as the enchantment adjusted, and then she nearly jumped off her crate when she heard Dash scream at full volume right next to her head, “OKAY, IS THAT BETTER?”

“Yes. And… you really can just talk normally,” Pinkie admonished. “Please?”

“Hmm. Mayhap this infernal contraption hath its charms,” interjected Princess Luna, “but We do not overmuch trust it yet.” They had needed to launch a dedicated relay balloon midway between Ponyville and Fillydelphia in order to make her communication possible, but Twilight thought it was worth the effort. That sort of setup was ordinarily used for important, long-distance diplomatic summits, and likely would have been what Celestia was using now if she hadn’t felt the need to bring herself, her flagship, and several elite divisions to the Parrot Isles in a show of concrete force. However, Twilight thought that if Luna could both see and hear everything they were doing in the swamp, and be able to speak to the expedition team in turn, then it might just be possible something would jog her memory of the events that had happened there a millennium ago. The fact that Ponyville was now entering the record books as the site of either the fifth or sixth longest-distance clairauditory link in Equestrian history was just a bonus.

“I don’t really see what the problem is,” Twilight answered her, then shifted on her crate as the Lapwing pulled into a sharp turn, “I mean, it’s working, isn’t it?”

“Aye, but thou sayest this strip of electrum and crystal can do what We can do?” Luna continued, “‘Tis absurd. There must be some trickery to it, some pony beyond Our sight performing only the Moon itself knows what crafty science, and We should like dearly to speak with her. We suppose ‘tis natural that, Our having been absent for so many years, others would arise who promised to do what We have. Nonetheless, they are but pale imitations and must be recognized as such.”

Twilight shook her head, aware that Luna could pick up on the motion through her visual feed. “No, Your Grace, I’m completely serious, it’s really just a collection of ordinary spells.” She racked her brain for an appropriate First-Century analogy, and then remembered that Luna and some members of her messenger corps had recently toured the Fillydelphia regional headquarters of the Equestrian Post Office. “It’s just like the firespell used to send letters, only with images and sound.” In fact the system wasn’t much like that at all, and more similar to a focused divination spell, but Twilight decided she had best keep things simple to start out with.

Over the audio link, Luna harrumphed. “A likely story. We promise thee, Twilight Sparkle, some evening We shall show thee the true majesty of the Realm of Dreams, and thou willst be able to see these trifles as the falsehoods they are.”

“Uhhh… sure. Twilight, let’s just go with that, OK?” Pinkie Pie suggested.

Twilight was about to reply when the Lapwing made a particularly sharp turn, leaving Rainbow Dash completely out of sight, Pinkie Pie standing calmly on the deck at a forty-five-degree angle, and herself madly scrabbling with her telekinesis to corral assorted papers.

“Hey,” called out Rainbow Dash once she drifted back into position outside the port cargo door, “Why do we -haff- gotta go so -haff- fast anyway?”

“We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time to do it in,” Twilight answered, gesturing out the bay doors to the late afternoon sun and then to the brass-and-crystal contraptions that filled up most of the cargo bay, “But it turns out that if you speed up the aperture wheel, and add a second amplification circle to increase the sensitivity on one of these ground-penetrating thaumochromatic spectrographs, they work just fine at over a hundred kilometers per hour. I even had Leafspring connect the drive shaft on the main engines to the primary timing gear, so the aperture period automatically adjusts to match changes in our velocity!”

“That’s great -haff- Twilight, but what’s -haff- a ground-paralyzing thaumospotter?”

“Oh!” Twilight abandoned her calculations for a moment. Finding the Lapwing on another relatively level run across the Bog, she stood up from her crate. “It’s actually a couple of different devices all synchronized. This,” she waved at a hexagram of fine gold wire affixed to a rune-inscribed ceramic disk floating in a vibration-dampening pool of mercury, “is a multivariate, multidirectional thaumograph that records mana impulses. It’s basically a collection of six thaumoscopes all pointing in different directions and sharing a common reference pole. If there was any kind of large-scale enchantment on any part of this swamp a thousand years ago, this machine will tell us right where it was and also a little bit about what it was originally supposed to do. And this,” she tapped a vertical column of crystal wafers, “is the chromospectrographic component. It’s able to detect different types of materials in a geologic environment down to a depth of about fifty meters. We’ll be using it to try to identify metal and bone buried underground, and any other signs of a major military encampment out here.”

“Uhh… cool!” Rainbow Dash began to slow down in spite of herself, and drifted back towards the engine section.

“And what sort of signature could a spell or a sword have, that can be seen and felt from the air at such great speed?” Luna demanded.

“Actually,” Twilight continued as she returned to her crate, “Any thaumic field is going to have some effect on living tissue simply because we’re all made out of matter, although it’s certainly not going to be perceptible or… make anypony sick, or whatever the tabloids are saying these days.”

“But…” some of the regal bearing disappeared from Luna’s voice, and Twilight thought she actually sounded genuinely confused, “then how dost thou knowest they are there?”

“The equipment’s complicated, but the concept is really quite simple. Anything that… well, exists, whether it’s a thaumic field, or a physical object, or whatever, has to interact with other real objects. It might not be something you can perceive with the naked eye, or feel on your skin, but it’s there. Once you know what it is, you can figure out how it behaves and how to magnify it…” in her telekinetic field, a roll of tickertape displaying natural background magical signatures floated in front of her helmet where Luna could see it, “and make it as plain as a line on a piece of paper. In this case, we amplify magical fields using resonance in a crystal or a wire, like the blasting crystals you remember, but contained. A thousand years ago, a lucky pony might be born with the ability to ‘sense’ a certain type of material- hopefully a valuable one- through an interaction with her natural magic…”

“Aye,” the alicorn said, “the seers. Our host employed several, but none took the Oath for fear that their blessing would desert them. But… a seer experiences and interprets signs. How can a pile of crystals possess that knowledge?”

“Well, the signs were mostly association- individual superstitions,” explained Twilight “Nowadays, we know those ponies were born with a keratic -or, more rarely, cranialis or palmar- nerve that’s unusually close to a sensory nerve. The two thaumically couple and the resonance is perceived as visual artifacts or sensation. We’ve just taken the pony out of the equation and created the same process in a box full of crystalline lenses.”

“Twilight Sparkle. We understand that many of the taboos of Our day have faded away in thine. Mayhap, even, thine ponies are better off without them. Yet…” The Princess’s voice became as clear, sharp, and deadly as broken glass, “Thou meanest to tell Us… this pillar of crystal is what remains of a pony?”

Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash both laughed, uproariously. So did their pilot, and Sergeant Leafspring back in the engine compartment. It took all of Twilight’s willpower not to join them. “No, no, nothing like that!” she finally stammered. And I need to remind Forward to brief Luna very carefully on the regulations surrounding the medical use of cadavers. “It’s just magic. A precisely structured equation of energy and materials set up to achieve a desired effect. It’s not… I don’t know, some kind of power that some ponies have and some don’t.”

Luna was silent for a moment. Then, “We… are not certain of the difference.”

There was a long pause after that where the only sound was the continuous muffled roar of the engines and rattling of equipment. “So, Twilight?” Pinkie Pie finally asked, “If a tree falls in the Everfree forest, and nopony’s around, can this stuff tell us if it makes a sound?”

“Pinkie,” Twilight smiled, “this stuff’ll be able to count the rings.”

The tension seemed to loosen at least a little bit.

“Hey, we’ve got a tail. Six o’clock, 200 meters.” Rainbow Dash finally cut in.

Twilight fished for the relevant section of sensor readout and briefly scanned across the printed tickertape, analyzing by eye the marks that other ponies needed a reference table and a pad of note paper to fully comprehend. Whatever was behind them was mostly organic material, and a small amount of metal and glass with stronger-than-usual thaumoabsorbtive properties: likely a pegasus with a camera. A joint edict by the Ponyville Town Council and the Royal Academy forbade the press from getting within five hundred meters of any Project operations or harassing the townsponies, but that didn’t stop them from trying.

“Whaddaya think I should do, fire a warning shot past her muzzle?” asked their pilot, a stallion Lieutenant named Palisade, “Oh, wait, that’s right, I can’t!” They had needed to take out all six of the Lapwing’s guns in order to make room for the instrument package.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her…. umm… him? Can’t really tell,” Rainbow Dash declared as she peeled off aft. “And with all these scopes, rangefinders, and whatever, you'll be able to set up an instant firing solution!”

“Yeah, for the exact angle we can chuck one of these adding machines,” Palisade snapped.

An audible pop indicated Rainbow Dash had passed out of range of their limited clairaudient network, and Twilight scribbled a few notes on her graph paper. After a second pop, she mused, “You know, it’s not going to see combat on its own, but a dedicated sensor ship like this could provide a lot of targeting information to more heavily armed craft, and those in turn could defend it… there might be something to this idea! I should run it past Shiny.”

Twilight’s quill described lazy loop-de-loops in her telekinetic field as they made yet another long bank, and Rainbow Dash drifted back into view, “That reporter landed as soon as I got close, and I still didn’t get a good look at him…” said the pegasus, “So, how’d your target-ship get those orders to the gunships, though? Clairaudio’s too unstable, and signal flags’ll take too long!”

“Lean out the window and yell?” Pinkie Pie suggested.

“… thanks, Pinkie,” said Twilight, and then returned to her analysis. There was something irregular about the patch of bog they had just flown over, its coordinates already stamped on the paper readout. There was bone buried underground, which wasn’t uncommon in a swamp filled with creatures great and small; and pure metal with a faint spell signature, which also wasn’t uncommon in a swamp at least occasionally traveled by ponies. However, this was the first time Twilight had seen the two together in the same place. “Hold on a second. Palisade, can you turn this thing around and hover over the spot… say, a hundred meters aft? I think we’ve got something!”

(♫)

“Whoa up there, a cragadile’s got good meat and good hide on it! Y’all really gonna just push it back into the water like that?” Applejack demanded of the Royal Guards currently shoving the corpse of a five-meter-long animate rock feature back into deeper water with the blunt ends of their polearms. Although ponies were, for the most part, herbivorous, they made frequent use of animal byproducts from leather down to gut and kept up a lively trade with other, carnivorous species.

“Sorry, ma’am, the Guard doesn’t get hunting permits,” explained Captain Marigold, “It’s gotta be put back in its environment.”

Applejack nodded. “Well, Ah’m still glad y’all’re on our side either way.”

Corporal Subtle Spark looked up from what he was doing and blinked a few times, confused. “What… other side would we be on?”

“Y’all know what? Never mind.”

Under Academy direction, Applejack and others from the town had been digging on this little grassy excuse for an island -one of several protruding from the seemingly endless expanse of brown water and reeds that made up Froggy Bottom Bog- for the last two days. Arriving on site on the morning of the third to find a cragadile having taken up residence had caused some consternation, but Marigold and the Guards had taken care of that problem with a minimum of fuss. At least the skies had remained mercifully clear of any more vultures with cameras.

“So,” Twilight Sparkle cantered over to one of the trenches they’d dug, marked with little red canvas flags. There were several at various locations across the island, but Spike had led her specifically to this one. Twilight had considered overseeing the entire dig herself, but after the first day the heat, humidity, and overpowering sameness of the bog had proven more than she could comfortably tolerate. Spike didn’t mind at least the first two of those, although he’d made her promise to take over for him again once winter rolled around. “What are we looking at, here?”

“Bones. Equine, we think,” Spike answered, and waved a clawed hand at the far end of the trench. Despite the early-morning shadows, the dirty-white shapes of ribs, vertebrae, and what appeared to be a jawbone stood out clearly against the surrounding dark soil. “We haven’t found any of the metal you picked up just yet, so this might be… I don’t know, just somepony who wandered in here and got lost? In fact, this might even be a deer jaw, we’ll need to find more of the skull to be sure.”

“Hmm.” The trench was a good eight feet deep, and the bones Twilight could see were clearly assembled in a roughly anatomical pattern; not scattered. That indicated an intentional, if hasty burial. Due to the tendency of the Lunar Army to reuse equipment, it wasn’t unexpected that a dead Lunar would be buried without her gear, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be traces of enchantments. Twilight muttered the incantation for a magesight spell.

For a few seconds, nothing much was visible aside from the general background magic of the swamp, the ponies -and dragon- around her, and the Royal Guards’ various gear. The pit itself seemed utterly amagical. Then, the bones themselves began exuding a faint corona of magic that her spell colored a pale blue. That signified the sort of energies ponies themselves naturally produced, although this was only perhaps half as bright as the glow that surrounded Applejack or Twilight herself. She began to back away as the false-color mist grew denser, first pooling around the remains in a region roughly one meter wide and then piling upward to form a sort of thick column. It continued to build until it was level with the sides of the trench, and then the top of it started to bulge. The bulge began to take on color and definition over the course of a few seconds, growing a neck and haunches and solidifying into an equine form in the act of getting to its hooves.

She muttered another cantrip and banished the magesight. Without the false-color highlights obscuring her vision, the hazy figure of a bat-winged Lunar stallion in dark blue armor stood on thin air where the soil over the trench had once been. He looked downright ill, thin and sweaty with a whole section of coat -and more than a little skin- along his lower belly missing outright. Twilight recognized the symptoms of dourine, and recalled that disease to be particularly common within long-term Lunar encampments.

“Hmuhh… what, nay…” The ghostly stallion rasped in a faint, tinny voice that seemed to come from a long distance away. He shook his head as though waking up from a brief nap, leaning on the ethereal halberd that had materialized with him as his sole means of support, his slitted yellow eyes fixed straight ahead. “I will keep my watch… I must keep my watch…”

Spike rapped Twilight on the shoulder as they both backpedaled, eyes fixed on the ghostly stallion. “Twilight?”

“I see him.”

“Twilight, it’s a… it’s a…”

Twilight’s eyes narrowed, “I’m not going to do the stutter, Spike.”

The shorter dragon frowned. “Spoilsport.”

Quite suddenly, the specter seemed to become aware of them, staggering forward on trembling legs and using his polearm as an impromptu crutch. “Halt! Who goes there?” he rasped, the hollowness of his voice not quite hiding the fact that he was slurring his speech as though drunk, “I say, halt or in the name of the M-Moon I sh-sh-shall r-run thee through…”

Applejack looked to Twilight and, briefly, stopped backing up. “Wait wait wait. He can’t actually hit anythin’ with that pointy stick a’ his, can he? I mean, he ain’t solid, right?”

Twilight kept on going, now putting herself roughly at the same distance as the Royal Guard squad, who were brandishing weapons but doing the smart thing and not approaching. “No,” she said, “But physical con- uhh, I guess passing through him or having him pass through you could cause frostbite or even expose you to disease, so it’s a good idea to keep our distance.”

For whatever reason, talking about the ghost seemed to get his full attention. He snapped his hazy ears forward and shifted his halberd into a striking position. “Intruders!”, he rasped, “Sound the alarm!”

With surprising agility given his disease-ravaged frame, the ghostly watch-stallion leaped straight at Applejack, halberd pointed forward with killing intent.

Twilight caught him square in the emaciated barrel with a psychodisruptive exorcism blast.

He didn’t even have time to react as he disintegrated in midair, winking out of existence and leaving behind nothing more than a glob of clear ectoplasm that splattered to the ground a meter from Applejack’s front hooves.

By the time anypony had the wherewithal to react, even that had already sublimated in the building midsummer heat.

“He’ll be back,” Spike warned. “Until we can find what’s picked up his psychic impression, that halberd, maybe, we can only really disrupt him temporarily. We should be careful, where there’s one ghost there’s usually more.”

Applejack gave a low whistle, reached up, and carefully re-settled her brown leather hat. “Y’all… do this all the time?”

Twilight shook her head. “Not commonly, no, but it’s not unheard of to run into ghosts at archaeological sites like this, either. I’ve never seen one myself before, but one of my professors at the Academy did, and I’ve read a lot of after-action reports. This poor rutter probably keeled over on watch one night and was in too poor shape for Nightmare Moon to bother raising him.”

Applejack shot her a sideways glance, “Ah… guess that makes sense? Golly. Right now Ah probably look… well, Ah probably look like Ah’ve seen a ghost!”

Leaving the farmer to recover in peace, Twilight turned back to her assistant. “Still think we might not’ve found the right place?”

Author's Note

I love writing Paper Clip. He gives me the chance to riff my own background story, in my main story.

Determining the distances between locations in Equestria, and the consequent travel times of different modes of transportation, is a surprisingly thorny issue. We have a fair amount of wiggle-room since the maps I am consulting aren’t really to a precise scale. However, I still want to keep the relation of places to other places roughly intact, and don’t want to make Equestria smaller than an IRL city or larger than the IRL Earth or something.

Originally I had considered making Equestria fairly small, on the scale of a European country like Germany or France, but there were two major problems with that. The first is that Equestria takes up a fairly large space on my source maps, so if Equestria is small then the whole Known World must be tiny. The other major problem was that Equestria seems to contain a lot of different geographic and political regions, which are themselves quite large, and if we are going off of a correspondence of place names contains cities from many different places on Earth. I wound up settling on a relatively wide range where the country is at most as large as Russia and at least as large as half the United States.

After that, Serketry ran the numbers and, assuming Equestria is on the low end of that size range, the stated travel times (6 hours to travel a distance of about 950 km from IRL Indianapolis / show Canterlot to Philly/Filly) are about in line (or even on the slow end) for modern passenger trains and aircraft. Obviously the vaguely Victorian designs the trains and airships in the show are based off of were not capable of that, but I figure Equestria’s engineers have access to enough magic to compensate. It’s a pretty mountainous route, which ordinarily would cause problems for trains, but we see a lot of really big subterranean constructions in the show so magic also probably helps with drilling more, longer tunnels at much lower cost.

The tabletop game master in me initially wanted to “balance” the trackbound nature of trains by making airships slower than trains, and that does indeed seem to be where I am heading, although it should be noted that airships are substantially more expensive. How expensive? Probably not the sole domain of the ultrarich and government officials, but probably also not as cheap as modern airliners (although they likely still give a damn about passenger comfort, too).

Based on what is seen in the show, I don’t think ponies are completely herbivorous, but I also don’t think they are fully omnivorous either. They eat eggs and are on a few occasions shown to practice fishing, buteggs and fish are easier to digest than full-on red meat. Some authors interpret the (supposed!) herbivorous nature of IRL horses, as ponies being super-vegan-hippies opposed to the very concept of eating meat. I suppose thatcan be done well, but it very rarely is. Obviously I decided to go a different route, but EC ponies still prefer plants and cannot digest beef, pork, venison, etc. very well. Differences in diet might’ve even become politicized to some degree, with racist ponies claiming all sorts of things about carnivorous species because the food they eat is “weird”, but I don’t think many have a problem with the animal part in and of itself.

Of course, thanks to the rise of the middle class and international commerce in Twilight’s day, there are also now quite a few ponies who decide to sample all sorts of things they really have no business ingesting.

IRL horses do eat bugs and rodents and chew on bones, and Serketry pointed out there may actually be an evolutionary reason for “My Little” ponies to have engaged in limited carnivory. Fish and eggs are both higher in the sort of fats needed for brain development, and ponies have brains (presumably) as outsized in proportion to their bodies as human brains, so eating those foods might have evolved in tandem with high intelligence. Chemistry in EC doesn’t work at all like the terrestrial version, but food seems to be pretty similar. While they are technically prey species (I think everything sapient except possibly dragons is, the Known World being full of giant monsters and all) ponies thus developed a predator’s curiosity about what could and could not be eaten.

Serketry also speculated that “ML”-type ponies likely have the ability to vomit, something I did not know IRL horses lacked. In fact, as he explained to me all of the many, many ways IRL horses can expire (being fed too much, eating something poisonous, being fed and then watered in quick succession, developing diabetic symptoms and their feet then falling off -yes, really!), I found myself wondering just how any have ever survived. It seems to me they should by all rights just collapse into mush in the fields whenever there is a loud noise. Serketry, on the other hand, thinks that it's not a miracle that horses exist; it's a miracle humans domesticated them without driving them extinct. We ultimately concluded that while ponies probably had a distant ancestor very similar to an IRL horse, that ancestor was likely quickly out-competed by the more durable, inquisitive ML-ponies once they arrived on the scene.

Very possibly some of the aforementioned adventurous middle-class ponies have read about the evolutionary theory above, and concluded that eating nothing but red meat will make them or their children geniuses. Most have likely then landed themselves in the hospital with severe gastrointestinal distress.

So it goes.

This of course assumes that cows, deer, etc. aren’t sapient, or at least that the ones on farms are not. The early seasons say otherwise pretty unambiguously, but the whole presentation was just so weird that I couldn’t think of a way to square it with the wider Extended Cut canon that didn’t turn into some sort of massive rabbit hole with socio-political implications I really don’t want to get into. So that got changed.

In fact, it’s already come up in passing that ponies use deer as disposable equine-analogues for research, the same way that humans use pigs or (more rarely) various types of monkey. Serketry suggested they were the most likely candidate from the available species I was committed to making at least partially nonsapient. That may change depending on exactly what the evolutionary history of ML-ponies ends up looking like, but since pony origins (and, in fact, the origin of life in general) are of such obvious mythological/cosmological importance I don’t feel comfortable expanding that out just yet.

Moon Logic

(♫)

“Well?”

Twilight Sparkle looked across the card table. Past its many maps sat an older, pale-gray earth stallion with an immaculately combed pale-green mane. A pair of round golden spectacles perched on his muzzle above a neat little handlebar mustache. Slaked Lime, head of cartography for the Central Mountain Dominion, was both a doctor of geomancy and a Colonel in the Equestrian Army, which in the modern military was becoming increasingly common practice. The Royal Guard had been one of the few holdouts in requiring even advanced technical specialists to go through the full routine of basic combat training, at least until Shining Armor had been promoted Commander and established commission policies more similar to those of the mainline Army and Navy. Apparently, there had been quite a bit of protest from veteran Guardsponies who feared the “watering down” of the officer corps. The EUP Special Platoons were still holding out, and likely always would.

Eventually, Lime abandoned the detailed reconstruction of the Lunar encampment spread out before him, and looked out past Twilight to the expanse of Froggy Bottom Bog. The unicorn wasn’t entirely sure what he planned to learn from that investigation, as beyond the tiny mud-hill upon which her team had set up their canvas awnings there wasn’t much to see. As far as Twilight’s admittedly non-geomantically-trained observations could tell her, Froggy Bottom Bog consisted of nothing but greenish-brown water, greenish-brown grass, and greenish-brown trees as far as the eye could see- which wasn’t very far, given the omnipresent greenish-brown haze.

Finally, Lime shook his head. “It’s as accurate a reconstruction as anypony could realistically put together given the quality of the scans- which is, I’d like to add, extremely high.” His voice was a warm, even baritone, its natural roughness smoothed over by a posh Trottingham accent. “But I’m just not certain what your team is expecting to find here.”

“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t… really know.”

Sensing that the older stallion was through with her for the moment, Twilight cantered back to the long table they’d set up under another awning to accumulate the last three days’ collected artifacts. They’d discovered two more skeletons, eight swords, miscellaneous preserved tent-pegs and cloth, three badly corroded iron stewpots, circular stone arrangements suggesting many closely-spaced firepits, a large moon-shaped silver monstrance, and the remains of a sizable field forge. That left little doubt that this was, indeed, the site of a significant concentration of Lunar Rebels. Their conjecture was backed up by the presence of residual thaumosignatures, suggesting numerous regenerative spells had been employed in a very close area over a long period of time, indicating the likely location of a hospital tent.

But as far as “signs and guideposts” went, they had retrieved only two candidates. The first was a round stone about a hoof’s-width wide and a third that thick, carved with something resembling a banner or military standard on one side. They’d found it by digging where Foxglove’s own map claimed there was once a heap of turned-up earth, which had never had anything more obviously useful put inside of it. The second was also a round stone of almost the same size, this one inscribed with a scepter surrounded by radial triangles in a sun-like motif. Berry Punch claimed her grandmother had discovered it somewhere “in the Bog” and had been happy to donate it, although unfortunately for Twilight the location had never been written down with any more precision than that.

It wasn’t a great deal to go on, which wouldn’t have been such a problem if Twilight wasn’t acutely aware of the Ministers sitting up in Canterlot eagerly awaiting results- and soon.

Back behind her, Lime had fallen back into conversation with Pinkie Pie, his designated tour guide and minder for the duration of his trip to Ponyville. “So, is it Doctor Lime? Colonel Lime? Doctor-Colonel Lime?” the baker was asking.

“Well, my dear, when we’re in the field, my official title is Colonel Lime. But, if you were to visit me at the Academy, you’d address me as Professor Lime.”

“Oh. I see. That makes… really no sense at all.”

Twilight twisted her head back around over her shoulder and called out, “Pinkie, is this really necessary?”

“Not really? Just making conversation. You know, that thing ponies do when they aren’t sitting around fractionating gigathaums or whatever?”

“Sorry?” The unicorn turned back to her examination. When they’d first realized that the camp was likely one big map, they’d been hoping that the meaningful components of it -the clues, as it were- would include some sort of enchantment as part of their function. This would, again hopefully, make it possible to pick up traces of them on the thaumoscope.

Instead, the “clues” had turned out to be carved onto ordinary rocks and other detritus. And there were a great many ordinary rocks and other detritus in Froggy Bottom Bog.

“So, when can I just call you Doctor Lime?” Pinkie Pie asked.

“Only if you yourself were another professor.”

“Ugh, I’ll have to have my sister explain all of this one day.”

Pinkie ambled away, and Twilight ambled back over. She waved her hoof in a circle that encompassed the whole of the reconstructed map. “I… suppose I was just hoping your geomancers could tell us something about what features in the original area were natural versus unnatural, what served a tactical purpose and what didn’t, maybe how some of this was built…”

“I’m afraid that’s not really how this works, my dear. I can make guesses about construction techniques, but I can’t really determine intent or significance just from the physical nature of these features. To be perfectly honest, it… doesn’t really look like a map of anything to me- well, aside from a First Century military encampment, of course.”

“I think we are on the right track here with the map-in-a-mundane-collection-of-objects trick,” Twilight muttered, “but what features correspond to what?” She peered at the reconstructed blueprint, then Paper Clip’s map of the pre-flood Hardfrog Valley, then the modern map of Froggy Bottom Bog, as though suddenly some correspondence would become obvious to her on the sixth attempt that hadn’t appeared on the previous five. “The riddles leading to the prophecy and the safehouse under the Golden Oaks were pretty intuitive, once you learned to pay attention to Lunar iconography, but this just doesn’t make any sense. Was there some sort of a paper that had a key on it, or some kind of word-of-mouth component?” None of the Lunar survivors had mentioned any such thing. “I have no idea how anypony was able to solve this thing fairly even when it was new!”

“Oooh, maybe you should… flip it turnways?” Pinkie Pie suggested, “Or try moving the slider!”

“What in Tartarus is that supposed to mean?” Twilight demanded.

“I dunno, but it got you to stop worrying over those stupid symbols, dinnit?”

Twilight was about to remand the baker for sticking her muzzle into things she was completely unqualified to consider, when the absurdity of the whole situation wormed its way into her skull and all she could do was chuckle. She staggered out from under the awning- it provided shade, but not much at this angle, and did nothing against the humidity; maybe the heat was roasting her brain- and sat down further up the flat dome of the island. According to Lime’s reconstruction and the Night Guards’ testimony, this had once been a tall hill near the dead center of the Lunar camp, where Luna’s top generals had held their war councils. Those councils had always been open for viewing by any Lunars who had taken the Oath, and a day ago Twilight had been optimistic that such a key location had to contain some important clue. But there was a lot of ground to cover, to an uncertain depth, and much of it was below the waterline. They had the budget -barely, but they had it- to rip the whole hill apart in an afternoon, but unfortunately the kind of heavy magic that would require ran a high risk of obliterating anything buried underneath.

She sighed, got up, and began walking along the shoreline, then almost jumped out of her skin when Luna’s voice echoed out of her borrowed Royal Guard helmet. She had forgotten the alicorn was still in contact and watching their proceedings. In fact, she’d forgotten she was wearing the helmet at all. “Mayhap thou art thinking too literally, my good Doctor Twilight Sparkle,” Luna chided. “Relax. Think metaphorically, in the language of meaning. Attune thyself to the spirit of the Lunar cause and mayhap clarity shall come to thee.”

“Well, can you give me any hints about what the ‘spirit of the Lunar cause’ might be? Or did you end up forgetting that too?” she snapped.

There was a long, heavy silence on Luna’s end of the connection. “I’m… I’m sorry,” Twilight amended, “That was unfair of me, that was way out of line…”

“Aye,” Luna practically hissed, “Indeed thou werest… ‘way out of the line’.” Then she continued, her voice at least superficially level, “We… I know the severity of my situation- our situation. But thou must understand: the world appears before me in a haze, like the last remnants of a dream, upon waking. Today's ponies, their government, their institutions, they all feel like...”

“… Like what?” Twilight prompted, more gently.

“Cheap knock-offs. Counterfeits of what I first envisioned when I raised the Lunar Army against my sister and her Council. But that is not all!” The remaining hostility left Luna’s voice all at once, replaced by rawness and fear. “I've been told I am responsible for social and military reforms I have no memory of ever enacting. The chronicles speak of grand stratagems I devised, yet I myself cannot understand them. My Guards tell me of brave comrades who fought and fell alongside me, and I cannot remember their deeds. I cannot even remember their names! Pamphleteers in Canterlot scream of monstrous acts committed in my name, and I cannot dispute them because I. Do. Not. Know. It is… terrifying." She paused, and pulled in a long, deep breath. "And now… I too must apologize. Even the words I speak are wrong, it seems.”

“It’s alright,” Twilight continued her path along the muddy shoreline, thankful for Rarity’s donation of a new set of boots. “I hope I can help you figure this out. Do you… not have any memory of the encampment?”

“I remember… some things. I remember what it looked like, from when I flew watch above it, and thine maps are indeed very much like what was once here. I remember visiting my troops, the injured and sick above all. I remember… the memorial for the watch-stallion thou hast seen as a wraith, his name was Greywacke and he hailed from Canterine… but of the design and plans? Naught. ‘Tis a… a horrible, gray space in my mind where I see myself shouting orders and issuing edicts, but the words I speak are gibberish and there is no writing upon the pages.”

“Okay.” Twilight kept walking. She wished she were back in her office in the Golden Oaks, or better yet in Fillydelphia talking to Luna face-to-face, but this would have to do. “Let’s step through it piece by piece. What was the last thing you remember that’s related to… well, here, this hill?”

“Hmm.” Luna went silent again for another few seconds. Then, “I remember… flying above it with General Silver Shade. Very skilled at archery on-the-wing she was, and in all my time in Everfree and in the field I had never mastered that skill. We had… set targets down the hill, before, where everypony in the camp could see…”

“Alright. Silver Shade. Do you remember if she ever completed the challenge?”

“Verily. She hit ten targets to my four, over a half-dozen gliding dives.”

“I meant the challenge to find your hidden redoubt,” Twilight corrected, still trying to keep her tone as gentle as possible. “‘she disappears to some yet more remote redoubt for most of the night … and there is even some sort of a ‘challenge’ she has set for her officers to find her at this place, in favor of some reward’. That’s how Paper Clip described it.”

There was another, even longer pause. Something on Luna’s end of the connection went squeak, and then fell silent again. “Naught. I remember… no such thing.”

“Ok, then let’s try something different,” said Twilight, “Do you remember where this General Silver Shade eventually ended up?” Paper Clip had mentioned a Lunar officer named Silver Shade only occasionally, and had confessed to having no idea of her final fate- a rare failure in his campaign to track down high-ranking Lunars following the Rebellions. Modern researchers hadn’t found the name Silver Shade in any cemetery, or any of the Cairns, either, and she certainly wasn’t among the survivors now living in Fillydelphia Harbor. It was as though she’d simply dropped out of the Known World not long before the Battle of Everfree.

This time there was no pause. “I remember… Or… nay. Perhaps I foresee… woe and strife. I… thou must believe me, Twilight Sparkle, when I warn thee dwelling overmuch on this mare’s fate will bring only tragedy.”

“Umm… Alright. You don’t have to talk about her if you don’t want to.” Twilight was just about at the halfway point of the island’s circumference right now- the point of no return, appropriately enough. “How do you think we should proceed?”

“I would rather… thou keepest walking. Consider the trees and the play of the wind. Think of this place when it was alive. Or, better yet, do the same at night, and gaze up at the stars.”

“Okay. Umm, if you think that’ll help…” Twilight began making her way back uphill to the campsite. “We’ve got a bunch of First Century and modern astronomical charts I can show you, and even an illusion projector that’ll create a three-dimensional dome…”

“’Tis not the same.”

Twilight pulled up short. “Hmm?”

“’Tis not the same as being there, Twilight.”

“I’m… just going to go ahead and grab the projector. I’m sure you’ll like it, it’s a really neat device, my brother gave me one as a present for my tenth birthday…”

“Halt!” Luna barked, quite suddenly.

Equally suddenly, Twilight halted. “Umm… yes, what?”

“Here. Dost thou not seest the signs in the swaying of the reeds and the wheeling of the stars? Something is hidden here.”

Twilight looked around her. The reeds were reeds and no stars whatsoever were visible. The sky was also mercifully clear, although that didn’t mean the media wasn’t there; just that they weren’t currently detectable.

“What’s going on,” Pinkie Pie asked as she half-scampered half-slid down the muddy hillside towards Twilight’s location. Twilight had forgotten the baker had also been loaned a helmet and could thus communicate with Luna just as well as the scholar herself.

“Just Luna being Luna,” she muttered, taking care to twist her helmet so that her muzzle was well out of range of the clairaudio rune.

“Super, extra Luna-y today…” Pinkie muttered back.

The Princess was muttering something, too quietly for Twilight to stand much chance of making out words. That concerned her greatly, but if Luna really was undergoing some kind of schizoid episode, the staff at Fillydelphia Harbor would be taking action right now… right?

“Twilight to Lapwing,” she finally called out, “Can you get us some astrological readings? Tell me if there’s… any local deviation from the baseline for this time of year?”

“Uhh… no. All the instruments are showing minimal change,” Doctor Daycaller replied.

“Nay… ‘tis nothing thine crude instruments could sense. Thou must dig down,” Luna admonished.

Twilight backed away slightly. “I don’t really see how you could possibly-”

“Nay, this must be the place,” the Princess snapped with surprising ferocity, “All of the signs are here!”

From behind her, Colonel Lime barked an incantation that set the earth vibrating beneath Twilight’s hooves.

“Colonel, wait!” The scholar shouted, but it was already too late. She hastily backpedaled as the vibration developed into churning, then roiling. Over the course of a few seconds, everything larger than an earthworm was pulled up to the surface, completely destroying any strategraphic record in the process. After a few more seconds the activity ceased, leaving behind a round pile of stones and scrap wood about half a meter in diameter.

Twilight peered at the accumulated detritus, unsure of what she was expecting. Then Pinkie Pie stepped forward and began sorting through the debris. “Twilight?” She asked, unusually subdued, “Look at this!”

The rock in Pinkie Pie’s hoof was the same size and shape as the other “keys” they’d found- and the same size and shape as a million other, utterly unremarkable specimens scattered throughout the surrounding countryside. This one, however, was carved. The marks were shallow, irregular, and filled with mud, but there was no denying that somepony with a chisel had deliberately incised a crescent moon into the bottom surface.

Twilight looked at Pinkie Pie.

Pinkie Pie looked back at Twilight.

“Super, extra Luna-y today, you said…”

(♫)

That evening Twilight sat before an enchanted mirror, propped up on her desk in the Golden Oaks. One thousand kilometers away, in her study in the admiral’s residence at Fillydelphia Harbor, Princess Luna looked back at her. For the first time, Twilight was struck by the fact that Luna had apparently abandoned her nocturnal habits to observe Twilight’s expedition during normal working hours. Right now, she wasn’t certain whether she should feel flattered or concerned.

Luna sat there, blinked, and once leaned forward to peer so intently at the mirror that Twilight was worried her muzzle would collide with it. However, she made no attempt to speak.

“So… I’d… really appreciate it if you could just… shed some light… on how exactly you were able to locate that rock?” the young scholar finally asked.

“’Twas a sign,” said Luna, her blue eyes shining and her expression taking on a strange, euphoric quality. “A genuine sign. We never thought Ourselves to possess the gift, but… were We mistaken, all these years? Or is this something new? It matters not. We have been granted a sight beyond sight, a knowledge beyond what the mortal senses can reveal, and with thee as Our witness We shall relay its blessings completely, humbly, and faithfully…”

“You’re… sure you aren’t actually just remembering things you saw and did a thousand years ago?” Twilight interrupted. She recognized Luna’s speech as a paraphrased version of the Seer’s Oath, a mystical text that had existed in somewhat variable form since at least the Second Century BCE. Some versions of it were quite long indeed, and she wanted to keep Princess Luna focused on the problem at hoof.

Luna fell silent for a few seconds at that, and then shook her head. “Nay. ‘Twas exactly as We explained to thee. Suddenly, as though We stood beneath a cloudy sky and then the stars shone through, We understood the significance of the wheeling of the birds and the rustling of the reeds. ‘Twas a sign, exactly as the seers in Everfree described when We were but young. We can no more explain it to thee than we can explain reading to a blind mare, or music to a deaf mare. It simply… was.”

Twilight leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and ran through the entire conversation on the island again. “Wait a minute, you said the stone was your first ever experience with seer phenomena; that you’d never possessed any abilities like that before. But just before you found the stone, you said you… ‘foresaw’ some kind of bad luck if we kept talking about Silver Shade. Wasn’t that a sign too?”

“This was an omen, not a sign,” Luna explained, as though the distinction were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Luna…” Twilight continued, as gently as she could, “towards the end of the fourth century, an Abyssinian psychomancer named Coover performed what we’d call a statistical analysis on the signs reported by seers. He found them to correspond to the actual predictions made no more than they would by chance, and that seers were ignoring the same stimuli when there wasn’t a result. The whole seer movement pretty much died out by the year 450. Ponies don’t interpret signs any more, Luna. They never really did.”

Luna’s eyes narrowed, the brightness in them turning sharp and deadly. “Aye, verily, there may yet be no seers in this cold and prideful age… but they were all too real. We have with Our own eyes seen practitioners find springs of pure water and veins full of ore. Dost thine Abyssinian sage believe this to be mere chance?”

“No, no, no, what you don’t understand is that by… by the time Coover conducted his research, physicians had already developed the nervous theory of material perception…” Twilight realized she was speaking far too fast, her heart hammering in her chest. She stopped to remind herself that Luna was in fact many kilometers away, and couldn’t actually reach through the mirror to strike her. Then she wondered why in Tartarus she was even thinking about that at all. There was just something about the alicorn that seemed… off-kilter, now. Her speech had slipped back into a more antiquated pattern, and she seemed to bounce between intense emotions almost at random.

“All Coover needed to show was that the signs weren’t important; there was already a… a material explanation of how the seers functioned. A thousand years ago, Rarity might’ve been… propped up as some kind of… of gem-seer or something, but now we understand she just as a sensory ability other ponies don’t, like perfect pitch or verifiable thaumosensitivity. So she gets to live a normal life, as a well-understood, perfectly normal mare with a well-understood, perfectly normal condition that lets her detect certain types of buried matter. She doesn’t consult- or invent- any kind of ‘signs’ because she knows she doesn’t need them.”

“Aye,” Luna snapped, “she struggles as a seamstress in a tiny hamlet in the shadow of Canterlot, unaware of the gift she hath been graced with because none remain to speak of it!” The venom drained somewhat from the alicorn’s voice after that, replaced once again by that strange euphoria Twilight had first observed. “Mayhap… this is the reason for Our long exile, and Our mysterious blessing… to bring back the ways of the seers to a world that has forgotten them…”

“What, would you rather ponies treat Rarity like some kind of… like something supernatural?” Twilight snapped. “Cut off from ordinary ponies her whole life? Under pressure to blind herself to enhance her abilities when that was… was totally unnecessary to the actual process? I know for a fact she could be making ten times what she does now as a surveyor with one of the big mining concerns down South; she works as a tailor because she. Likes. Tailoring. Do you want her to not be able to do that?”

Luna reeled back from the shared surface of their mirror, but Twilight kept right on speaking.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because what you did wasn’t something that Rarity could’ve ever done. The ponies they used to call seers only ever detected specific materials and physical characteristics, as much as they liked to pretend otherwise. What you did was completely different; you picked a rock out from among a dozen other rocks. Don’t you want to know how that happened?”

“We knoweth perfectly well… ‘how that happened’,” hissed the alicorn, “thou dost not believe because thou dost not understand. Instead, thou placeth thine faith in soulless assemblies of gold and crystal, forgetteth the equine spirit of the arts, and gapeth when thine contrivances fail thee.”

If Twilight had been less dead-set on regaining control of the conversation, she might’ve pointed out that Luna now seemed to be butchering even her own Old Ponish. “No, that’s not true at all, Luna, just because you don’t understand the principles of modern thaumaturgy doesn’t invalidate them, ask a dozen educated ponies and they’ll all agree that there’s no such thing as signs and our sensors should’ve worked. If you would just give me one straight answer about why-”

“ENOUGH!” Luna’s voice fizzed and crackled, overloading the clairaudient spell by sheer volume as her lips pulled back into a thin snarl.

Now it was Twilight’s turn to flinch backwards in her chair- she wouldn’t have believed it was physically possible for a pony to be so loud on her own. “We hath given thee all the answers thou needest, and it is thou who cannot understand them. Run thine ‘tests’, and consult thine ‘instruments’, Twilight Sparkle. We shall seek thine treasures in Our own way. And all of Equestria shall learn who seeth more clearly.” There was a sharp, hollow snap, like a Hearth’s Warming ornament being struck with a hammer, and Luna’s image dissolved into incomprehensible blobs of color.

Twilight tapped the plain wooden frame of the mirror a few times. “Luna? Princess Luna?!” Nothing materialized, and the unicorn leaned partially around the door to her office. “Spike, is she receiving us?”

From his seat against the far wall, her assistant peered at the assembly of luminescent gems set into an improvised spell circle. “CA stream’s good, there’s just nothing in it! That sounded nasty… I think she might’ve actually broken something, on her end. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Forward or one of the others can fix it… if she even lets them go near…”

(♫)

The next morning, Twilight Sparkle awoke to black coffee, toast, and a photo of herself holding the carved banner stone on the front page of the Times of Canterlot. She had no idea how that could possibly have been acquired without her knowledge… unless somepony on the excavation crew had been responsible.

The headline read “PRINCESS LUNA REVEALS BURIED TREASURE”. Twilight herself was only mentioned in the photo caption: “Royal Academy archaeological researcher Twilight Sparkle presents artifact for inspection.”

She skimmed over the beginning of the article, which was mostly just a rehash of the general purpose of the expedition and its difficulties in identifying the location of Luna’s hide-away. However, a few sections gave her pause. For one thing, the paper claimed that “the Royal Academy’s most sensitive instruments were unable to detect this splendid carving”, when Twilight thought “splendid” was a bit of a stretch of imagination. More importantly, the Lapwing’s instruments had been able to detect the rock just fine; they were only confused by the presence of a hundred thousand other, superficially identical rocks. Finally, while the article did not explicitly say that the stone had been discovered apropos of nothing during a search of the whole of Froggy Bottom Bog; it certainly seemed to give that impression by not once mentioning the detailed reconstructions performed by Doctor Lime’s unit and the identification of a key area to narrow the search. To hear the paper tell it, the rock was simply sitting out in the middle of an otherwise completely un-excavated field somewhere, and Luna had led them to it all the way from Fillydelphia.

After that, there was a statement from Princess Luna herself:

“There may yet be no seers in this cold and prideful age… but they were all too real. We have with Our own eyes seen practitioners find springs of pure water and veins full of ore. A thousand years ago, a mare of my acquaintance named Rarity would have been recognized as a gem-seer, but today her blessing is reduced to a mere ‘condition’. She struggles as a seamstress in a tiny hamlet in the shadow of Canterlot, unaware of the gift she hath been graced with because none remain to speak of it…” The paraphrasing went for the entire rest of the column, before degenerating completely into an exploration of emanations and hesychasm and other ideas that hadn’t been seriously considered since the end of the Rebellions.

Twilight squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again.

The words remained on the page more or less as she had originally read them.

Luna, apparently, did not quite understand the modern concept of what a “statement” was supposed to be. That had to be the explanation. The alternative- that after failing to shout down Twilight in private, the Princess had known damn well what would happen were she to retry the same argument in the press- was best not even seriously proposed without Celestia to back her up.

Once her breakfast was consumed, the paperwork for the day signed off on, and Spike sent off to Froggy Bottom Bog with the necessary instructions, Twilight trotted over to Rarity’s shop. Finding it closed for the day, she then set out on the winding road to Fluttershy’s cottage on the edge of town.

The last time she had been up here, she’d been fleeing for her life both from Nightmare Moon’s revenants and a mob of angry townsponies, and hadn’t had much time to take in the scenery. Now that she had the time and light to appreciate it properly, the whole place proved to look like something out of a storybook, all sun-dappled grass and low, lush trees. She couldn’t see Fluttershy right away, but she could hear the pegasus well enough, singing some kind of lullaby from inside an open window.

“Hush little baby, don’t say a word,

And never mind that noise you heard.

It’s just the beasts under your bed,

In your closet, in your heaaaad…”

Well, okay then!

Twilight stepped up to the cottage and rapped gently on the window frame.

There was a quiet yelp, and Fluttershy’s head jerked up into view for just a split-second before dropping back out of sight. Then she reappeared once again, and this time stayed in place, resting her forehooves on the windowsill. “Oh! It’s… it’s just you, Twilight.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. Can I come in? I think I might need your help.”

“Oh my, yes, certainly!” Fluttershy flicked a wing at the door. “It’s not locked, just let yourself in…”

This Twilight did, and finding Fluttershy already perched on one of the cottage’s old-fashioned velvet couches, she immediately took up position on the opposite one. “So… Fluttershy… have you been reading the papers?”

The yellow pegasus nodded, and flicked a wing at the issue of the Cloudsdale Plain Dealer sitting on her coffee table. “Mmmhmm. Horrible, really.”

“Hmm?” Horrible, Twilight thought, was a bit of a stretch. Conceited and melodramatic, yes. Borderline plagiarism, possibly; she wasn’t sure how the law applied to misquoting another pony’s unpublished spoken words. But horrible? It wasn’t as though Luna had brought down an airship, after all. “You wouldn’t happen to know how Rarity’s taking this, do you? I went by to check on her, but the Boutique’s closed up.”

“Oh. I saw her earlier this morning,” Fluttershy volunteered, “She said she was going to spend some time ‘working on her designs’, and she didn’t want anypony to bother her.”

Twilight nodded. “I don’t blame her.”

“She also said something about not struggling, owning her own store, being a member of the Ponyville Small Business Board, and still finding time to save Luna’s own bony ungrateful derriere… but I mostly just remember it because of the last part.”

Twilight nodded again. “I… don’t really blame her for that either.”

“Do you think we should… do something?” The pegasus asked after a long pause.

“I’m getting to that, yeah,” said Twilight. “I just wanted to make it clear what I think the root of the problem is. I’m positive that even if she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, Princess Luna’s contaminating the site we’re working in right now with remembered information. I can understand why she’s doing it, I think Nightmare Moon did her a pretty bad turn and she was under immense strain even before that. Add to that the really alien future she’s been hurled into, and… it makes sense that she’d do and say things that don’t make a lot of sense. But it’s still a problem for two reasons:”

“The first is that she’s not doing it in a vacuum,” the unicorn continued, “there’s a whole… cottage industry of ponies who’re going to jump on every weird thing she says about signs and auspicious places and make it sound as stupid as possible for their own reasons. That’s not helping Luna adapt, or her case as an Exarch. Also, when some crazy mare decides she saw a sign she’d recover from a festering hoof wound on her own and doesn’t seek medical attention, or stabs herself through the eyeball to bring her seer powers out, I don’t want Luna getting blamed when that mare ends up dead.”

She straightened in her seat. “The other big problem is that, if Luna keeps doing things like this, or getting ponies to mess around at dig sites for her, she might damage something important. And then we’re all in the kind of trouble that committing some additional mare-hours to the excavation can’t fix.”

“Have you tried… well, talking to Luna about this?” Fluttershy asked.

Twilight leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Yeah. It… didn’t go well. In fact, it didn’t just not go well, it pretty much directly precipitated that stupid press release. I’ve thought about trying again a couple of times, and I can never even think of what to say. ‘Hey, Princess Luna, sorry about lecturing you before, now can you maybe try not be so weird all the time?’”

She pulled in a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “I have to keep reminding myself that back in Luna’s day, the kind of… high mysticism that came out in her statement was a lot more common in what we’d think of as hard academic fields. Everypony had their pet theory and philosophy and circle of students, and the idea that any of it had to be objectively evaluated was kind of an afterthought. It wasn’t until a century after Starswirl the Bearded disappeared that his experimentalist concepts started to be considered by the scholarly community. Luna never saw that; a month ago -for her- she was still living in a world where admirals and merchants routinely called off naval voyages because of ‘ill omens’. It’s going to take time for her to realize something that was such a huge part of ponies’ lives has been discarded, and we don’t really have that kind of time right now.”

Now it was time for Fluttershy to lean back and shift in her chair. Twilight’s gaze roamed around the cottage’s rough-hewn wooden bookshelves, and she realized there were quite a few records stashed in between the field guides on Equestrian birds- Talk Down The Timberwolves, Metallicorn, and Luna’s Priest among others. Fitting, really.

“Well… what do you want me to do?” Fluttershy finally asked.

“We need to get this project back onto four steady hooves, and to do that we have to find out what real signals Luna’s been picking up on. A few weeks ago, I read an article in an archaeology journal about sending in druids to communicate with local animal populations, to get topographical information on a cave system in the Griffish Isles. Those druids deliberately released rats, but Froggy Bottom Bog is already crawling with all sorts of birds and insects and… I don’t even know what else on its own. I was wondering if it might be possible for you to get them to… scout the bog for us? And write down the instructions you gave them?”

“Oh, wow, that… does sound like a lot of work. But… I’ll see what I can do.”

(♫)

Once again, Twilight gazed out across the expanse of Froggy Bottom Bog. It remained, as always, brownish-green and sweltering. Her helmet didn't help- she wasn't entirely sure why she was still wearing it. Routine, perhaps. She’d expected to have scores of trenches dug by now, and train cars’ worth of artifacts sent back to the Station for reassembly. Instead, after four more days of searching, she had the same three carved rocks and a ‘positive diet specialist’ -whatever that was- in the Hoofington Post crowing about her inability to explain the supposed prophetic abilities of the Lunar Host. Most gallingly, at the moment, that columnist was entirely correct.

“So is something supposed to be… happening?” Twilight asked Fluttershy, then turned around to find the pegasus sitting in the middle of a half-circle of assorted birds. Her eyes were closed and she periodically made odd little tittering noises that a pony had no business whatsoever making. “Wow. I can’t decide if that’s adorable, or horrifying.”

“What’s so bad about birds?” Pinkie Pie asked, emerging from the shadows of one of the smaller tents. “Are birds not allowed up in the ivory spires of Canterlot? Or did a woodpecker-wielding mugger kill your parents in a back alley or something?”

“What?! No! It’s just that those birds aren’t… doing anything! They’re just sitting there. Watching. It’s weird.”

“Pigeons do that all the time, you know. Sit and watch, I mean.”

“Oh. Yeah. We do have pigeons in Canterlot. I guess I just never really paid attention to them.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

It was only then that Fluttershy stirred, and her eyes slid open. “They’re doing something. You can’t see them, but they’re all over the swamp. Still, I thought they would’ve found something by now.”

“Okay. Now that was creepy,” Pinkie Pie muttered.

“I just don’t get it.” Twilight began walking a path that would take her in a circle around the perimeter of the camp, consciously avoiding the patch of disrupted soil where Luna had discovered the third symbol stone. “Magical cloaking could confuse animals easy enough, but then we’d be able to pick it up with the Lapwing’s sensors. And all three of the stones we’ve identified so far have been completely amagical! It just makes no sense!”

Then she rounded the corner of one of their big crate-piles and stopped short. On another island about fifty meters to the South, connected to hers by whatever a sandbar was called when it was made out of reeds and barely-submerged mud instead of sand, was a small copse of gnarled trees. Gathered around them were what had to be most of Captain Marigold’s infantry platoon, as well as a distinctively dark blue pegasus who could only be Dr. Proper Verse.

Twilight set out through the shallow water. As she drew closer, she realized that each pony was sitting in front of a specific tree, with their eyes closed, humming. Periodically, one would get up and move to another location, but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to how they positioned themselves. Some trees would be “observed” for only a few seconds, and some had remained under closed-eyed surveillance for the entire time it took Twilight to cross over to them. Sometimes the Guards -and Verse- visited new trees; sometimes they moved back to ones their fellows -or themselves- had just been in front of previously. The overall effect was of the sort of precision parade maneuvers the Guard sometimes put on for show at Hurricane’s Green, as choreographed by a somnambulant eight-year-old.

“Excuse me?” Twilight said as she approached Captain Marigold. The Guardsmare didn’t respond. “Excuse me? What in Tartarus are all of you doing?” And why didn’t anypony tell me you were out here doing it?

“Active Focusing, si- uhh, Doctor,” Marigold answered, without opening her eyes, “For Princess Luna. It’s an old seer’s technique to enhance Distant Awareness.” Twilight fancied she could, in fact, hear the capital letters in the Captain’s voice.

“Distant what?” Twilight shook her head. “Listen, she found one rock. One rock!”

“Um, so, actually…” Twilight jumped a little as Doctor Verse stepped up beside her. She’d thought the pegasus was a lot further along the beach. Distant Awareness indeed! “It’s-it’s really interesting. This research group in Baltimare’s documenting all kinds of incidents where Princess Luna predicted important future events before her banishment!” Verse rooted around in her saddlebags for a few seconds and produced a thin booklet with a bright, abstract cover. “Take a look!”

Twilight gingerly picked up the booklet in her telekinesis. It certainly looked like an academic publication, and even had the emblem of the University of Mareland Press stamped in one corner, but the authors were actually listed as belonging to something called the Center For Lunar-Equestrian Studies. Twilight had never heard of such an organization, although she found the name disturbingly -and suspiciously- similar to that of the Center For Lunar Studies, a respected astronomical society spun off from the Royal Academy a century ago. However, that group did not perform archaeological or historical research of any kind. Also, very much unlike academic publications, which were usually distributed on a mail order basis, this had a price tag on the back cover- stating it had cost Dr. Verse forty-five bits!

She quickly fanned through the pages, noting the cheap, pulpy material and monochrome printing. The text did appear to cite sources, although a quick scan through its bibliography revealed nearly all of them to be either high school history textbooks or other CLES publications. None of those were dated before the thirty-first of Sun’s Height, 1097, presumably because before that point the Center For Lunar-Equestrian Studies had not existed. In fact, given that Luna had only acquired a reputation for predictive abilities six days ago, this particular “report” had to have been assembled extremely quickly. Or the Center’s operators, whoever they were, had been pursuing the Luna-as-prophet angle well beforehand and waiting for just the right opportunity to go public. Twilight wasn’t sure which option made the whole exercise seem more dubious.

She paused on one of several sticky-noted pages. It contained a sort of table. On one side, excerpts of a speech given by Princess Luna in 96 CE were presented. On the other, basic facts about the changeling attack on the independent city-state of Trot in 453 CE were arranged to “correspond.” For instance, when Luna spoke of a “city of great wealth despoiled by the Changeling swarms”, a bullet point mentioned that Trot was the wealthiest of the post-Rebellion independent pony states.

“Doctor,” Twilight said, as calmly as she could, “Don’t you think it’s the least bit possible that Princess Luna wasn’t predicting the Changeling attack on Trot, just memorializing the Changeling attack on Timbucktu? Timbucktu was also a wealthy, conspicuously monotribal trade city infiltrated and destroyed by changelings; and that was only a few decades before Luna gave this speech. Before, I want to remind you. Not after. This is like saying the newspaper coverage of the Chicoltgo Fire predicted the Great Canterlot Fire. It turns out that in the grand scheme of things, one big fire’s a lot like another, and once and a while big fires happen.”

“Okay, okay, maybe, but check out Page Seventy-Four!”

Dutifully, Twilight leafed forward to another sticky-note. “Luna says ‘I fear one day my sister’s adoration for the Sun will lead to her being consumed by it, before ten-score years have passed.’ They say this predicts the assassination attempt that delayed the Summer Sun Celebration in 358?”

She let the booklet flip down and close itself in her telekinesis. “Okay, so, first of all, getting firebombed isn’t the same thing as being ‘consumed by the sun’. This says Ambassador Godfrey later described the explosion as having ‘sun-like intensity’, and I think that’s an accurate quote, but Luna didn’t say her sister’d be consumed by something like the sun, she said it’d be the sun. Second, can you guess how many times Celestia interacts with the sun or sun-like things in a two-hundred-year period? A lot more than once a day, obviously, at least, so that’s hundreds of thousands of chances for something weird to happen. It’d be surprising if in those whole two hundred years, there wasn’t some kind of an incident where… where a flag fell on her or something… you know what, never mind. I shouldn’t even have asked about it.”

Twilight was about to just let the book fall out of her telekinesis and onto the muddy grass below, before she remembered it was still Dr. Verse’s property and floated it back over to the pegasus. “Just… please tell me nopony here is supposed to be on duty right now?”

Back behind Verse, a shockingly white unicorn in Guard armor- “Private Parhelion”, if Twilight remembered correctly- shifted in her seated position and went “Uhhm.”

“Actually, I enlisted their aid,” Princess Luna’s voice explained over Twilight’s helmet.

It was not lost on the scholar that Luna had not bothered to speak up when she was being falsely credited with predicting the Battle of Trot, or the Disturbance of 358. Nor had she made any attempt to explain her statement to the papers. Fine. If she wants to just go on like it never happened, Twilight decided, then I can certainly move on to bigger problems too.

“Well, that’s not really something you can do, Your Grace,” the unicorn snapped, then turned back to the assembled Guardsponies to make sure Luna had a good view of them. “As long as they don’t break any laws or interfere with the operation of the dig, anypony here can get up to whatever sort of weird, silly, nonsensical business they want. That’s fine. But their duty hours are paid for by the government, which ultimately means they’re paid for by Equestria’s taxes -you remember how that works, right- and I don’t want that money going to something that isn’t productive.”

“Not productive, aye? Then mayhap thou shouldst examine the tree Doctor Verse is standing before?” the alicorn replied.

“Luna. It’s a tree. There’s a million like it all over this swamp.” She stepped closer to the assembly, and stamped the ground a few times to get their attention. That tactic proved approximately fifty percent effective. “Has everypony taken complete leave of her senses out here?”

Back in Dr. Daycaller’s small laboratory in the Station, out of the heat and humidity, with Twilight’s hooves planted firmly on newly-installed gray carpet and the shelves around her stuffed with brass-and-glass analytical equipment, the whole thing did indeed seem rather silly. Unfortunately, that didn’t make the slit-eye emblem outlined on Daycaller’s photographic plate any less real.

“It’s… not unusual for this type of tree to live well over a thousand years,” the earth pony scientist explained as he fiddled with the equipment on his desk, “and it’s grown a lot since the First Century. I would… guess that this was carved into the outer layers, just below the bark, between nine hundred and one thousand one hundred and fifty years ago? The tree has since grown outward and there’s nothing externally visible. All I’ve done here is to highlight the change in grain using N-ray diffraction, and then refocused the pattern into a viewable image.”

“I think we can date it a lot more precisely than plus-or-minus a hundred and fifty years,” Twilight muttered. “Are you sure you’re not getting any kind of mana potential in the wood… in any of the other tree cuttings? Any of the samples we got back at all?”

“Umm… ahh… no. It’s… an ordinary piece of wood. I’d say the symbol was cut into it with an iron-tipped blade with sharpness typical of First Century craftsmareship.”

“I mean, obviously we know it exists,” said Twilight, “what I want to know is how Luna managed to find it.”

“’Tis… not something thou wouldst understand,” said that same damned infuriatingly serene voice, this time from a little gold amulet sitting on the edge of Daycaller’s desk. According to Forward March, Luna had in fact smashed the visual scrying focus on her side of the connection. They had since decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble of physically shipping another to Ponyville to pair with Twilight’s mirror, and then all the way back again. Thus for the foreseeable future, Luna would be able to see Twilight and anypony else with a paired helmet, but nopony in town would be able to see her. That suited the scholar just fine.

“I hath seen in the shape and placement of the trees,” Luna continued, “and in the way thine troops moved about them, and in the wheeling of the birds above, signs that something of true meaning lay under the Circle of the Moon. There is no more, and no less, to it than that.”

“That’s not how astrology works,” Twilight snapped, already heading for the door. Luna could pester Daycaller all she wanted if he was willing to put up with her, but Twilight herself had more important things to do. “Meaning isn’t something that the stars ‘understand’, they don’t recognize symbols, they operate on physical forces like weight and energy. Astrological forces might influence how trees grow, or even how birds behave, but that’s not something you can see just by looking at them- there’s precise and really non-intuitive calculations involved. And astrological forces certainly wouldn’t be influenced by a pony having carved something in a tree a thousand years ago versus the tree just being cut. It’s ridiculous.”

“Twilight Sparkle.”

More or less against her will, the unicorn stopped halfway out the door. “What?”

“If Our astrology is so without worth, how do We know there is something of great importance a third of a league due north of where thine maps place the upper right corner of Grid B-7?”

Once again, Twilight knelt down on her front legs and peered into the trench. Once again there was a skeleton curled up at the bottom, but this one was more a disordered tangle of bones than a body that had been properly laid out for burial. Intermixed among the bones were a few broken glass bottles, heavily degraded metal loops of the type generally used to construct chainmail, and a large rusty lump that was still more or less sword-shaped. Judging by the depth of soil they’d removed, and the deposition chart Colonel Lime had been kind enough to fill out before departing back to Canterlot, the body probably dated back to about the middle of the Fifth Century. By then the Equestrian Army had largely phased out chainmail as light armor, and in any case their mystery pony did not appear to possess any of the gold rank clips that had been used in that era. Thus, they were likely some sort of treasure-hunter or adventurer. Possibly they had even been looking for something Lunar out here.

Without more analysis which only the lab back at the Station could provide, it was hard to say exactly how they’d ended up where they were. Had they been attacked by wild animals? Jumped by some rival or turned on by comrades who didn’t want to split their find? Trod on the wrong patch of muddy grass and slipped and fallen and broken their neck? Analysis would also be needed to determine if the mystery pony had picked up anything genuinely Lunar in the course of their explorations, but Twilight doubted it. Her scans had picked up a faint magical residue on the bottles and the sword, but no other enchantments- and no astral steel or paper products.

It was, in summary, an utterly unremarkable find.

Twilight turned back away from the pit, to where Applejack was sitting on the grass beside an open icebox filled with bottles, provided by Pinkie Pie and the Cake family for the benefit of the digging crews. “So, AJ. You ever hear about anypony having… you know, found or taken anything from this site?”

“From the swamp? Or from here, specific’ly?”

“From here, specifically.”

The farmer shook her head. “No-siree. Not even any a’ them spook-stories ‘bout these parts, either. Really, this whole part of the Bog’s ‘bout as far from anythin’ ‘miss-teer-ee-us’” She waggled the forehoof that wasn’t currently holding a bottle of Clydesdale in a vague approximation of quotation marks, “as a pony can reasonably get.”

That meant the entire hot, sweaty, bug-infested, unreasonably early morning trek out here had been wasted… and Twilight Sparkle couldn’t be happier. Princess Luna’s unaccountable streak of revelations had finally been broken, and one way or another the entire project would soon be getting back on track.

“An item of great significance, you said,” Twilight asked aloud, addressing both the assembled digging crews and the alicorn she knew was listening through the spell on her borrowed helmet.

“Well, I mean, that body’s probably significant to somepony,” Pinkie Pie suggested around the shovel in her mouth, one hoof raised, “Like, I don’t know, her family?”

“Don’t you start, too,” Twilight admonished.

“What, worried I’ll start writing those booklets?”

In fact, she wasn’t entirely certain how Luna had found the skeleton. It might not’ve been Lunar, but it wasn’t a rock or something like that. One couldn’t just dig anywhere in Froggy Bottom Bog and come up with a dead Fifth Century treasure hunter. In fact, it was equally puzzling that they hadn’t found the skeleton when they’d been scanning with the Lapwing- they’d even been paying particular attention to any traces of bone. But those were problems that could be solved later. For the time being, it was up to Twilight Sparkle -and nopony else- to manage the hunt for Luna’s redoubt the way it should always have been conducted- sensibly, methodically, and logically.

Author's Note

Generally, the episodes that I select for Extended Cut tend to fall roughly into two general categories. Some episodes are good enough that seeing more of their plot, with the additional elements that come from not being bound by ratings and time constraints, is inherently interesting on the plot’s own merits. Others are bad enough that I have a clear idea of how they should have gone instead, and it’s entertaining to see an alternative. While it’s not bad in the same way that, say, Power Ponies or the infamous Mysterious Mare-Do-Well are bad (what is it with MLP:FiM and utterly mishandling superhero tropes, anyway?), Feeling Pinkie Keen I think does fall squarely into the latter category.

I was barely aware My Little Pony was even a thing back when the episode was first released, so I only extremely dimly remember the controversy that followed it. For a good long while I figured Feeling Pinkie Keen can’t have been that bad, that its messaging was pretty indirect, and the Internet was just being the Internet and overreacting to things. But then I re-watched the thing as part of a wider search through Season 1 for EC-worthy episodes, and… yeah, it really was that bad. I still give the creators of the thing a lot of credit for admitting they screwed up instead of just demonizing their critics, but the fact is they did screw up and produce an extremely didactic and awkward script. Feeling Pinkie Keen is also severely impacted by issues that are pervasive throughout the earliest parts of the show, including overexaggerated sight gags, large sections of runtime dedicated to random screwing around unrelated to the actual plot of the episode, and Pinkie Pie being more annoying than funny.

Really the hydra fight at the end was the only thing about it that at all caught my eye- I was seriously planning to transplant that as the climax of either another unrelated episode or even a completely homebrewed story, and leave the rest of Feeling Pinkie Keen out of “ECanon” entirely. However, Serketry was… not adamant but very persistent in arguing that something could actually be done with the main plot of the episode. After he and I binge-watched some of the best episodes of (appropriately enough) Star Trek: The Next Generation together I started to see a way to approach this kind of content in a way that was serious and interesting. That way involves Luna instead of Pinkie Pie; both to tie into the various other plots I have set up relating to her, and because she articulates her position with a lot more gravitas than an absurdist character like Pinkie Pie does. I get the sense that in EC, as she was in the show, Pinkie Pie will be most effective in small doses.

Attentive readers will also note that the manner of the pony in question’s prophetic abilities have changed. Pinkie Pie had externally visible physical responses that preceded events; here Luna says things that seem to make no sense and then dispenses information she says she learned from them.. The very original reason why I made this change was that Pinkie’s behavior was more cartoonish and I did not think fit well with the (somewhat!) more serious atmosphere of this episode; once I decided to change it I realized that was also helpful for a number of different things:

To a significant degree, Luna’s speeches and ramblings are better suited to a written work than Pinkie’s physical reactions, which obviously are easier to communicate in a visual one.

They are more akin to how IRL psychics and mediums operate.

Physical reactions are closer to what Twilight talks about with her scientific explanations of seerdom. Luna’s ‘signs’ are more interprative and postmodernist, based on the idea that even the natural world can be viewed through a symbolic and anthropomorphic (hippomorphic?) lens; this trend shows up a lot in the squishier side of a lot of IRL mysticism. It’s also used as a kind of a crutch by lazy authors who want to add fantastical/mystical elements to their stories, but don’t think them through logically- for instance, I remember reading one Mass Effect fanfic with an afterlife that served the entire galaxy… and it had buildings in it; not constructed there from the memories of the deceased or anything, pre-existing and all looking like medieval European castles. How would a fundamental flip-side of the universe even know what a building is, and why would it choose castles despite presumably existing before the actual castles on Earth did? That’s kind of a nitpicky example, but it’s also so weird I don’t think anything else can communicate the fundamental defiance of logic that Luna is supposed to be displaying here nearly as well.

Physical reactions are also something that Twilight could easily lock onto as verifiable and real, and immediately pursue. That’s ideal for a 22-minute episode, but I wanted to make her journey a little more challenging, so all she has are Luna’s garbled explanations and the incontrovertible results of some kind of information being gained.

Madness to the Method

(♫)

Twilight sat beside Spike at the counter in Sugar Cube Corner, her morning bagel and coffee sitting to one side of a special expose in the Times of Canterlot.

“Pinkie?” she asked.

“Hmm?” The baker abandoned the scrubbing she was previously engaged in and sidled over.

“What in Tartarus is a ‘Lunarkin’, and why are they being granted interviews?”

Spike cocked his head like a bird, clearly confused. “Doesn’t the article tell you?”

“I read the whole thing and I still don’t know!” cried Twilight. In fact, the entire article seemed predicated on whoever was reading it already understanding an entire passel of terms like “sidereal dysphoria,” “egg theory,” and “transtemporal gnosis anticipation,” which Twilight had never heard of before and could only guess about the meaning of.

“Well,” Pinkie continued, crossing her forelegs on the counter, “You know about the paragriffish community, right?”

“… no?”

“Adult foals? Fictives? Marekeys and monkeysonas? The ‘on every level except physical, I am a wolf’ colt?”

“Still not ringing any bells, sorry.”

The baker clucked her tongue disapprovingly. “You need to read more of the good newsletters, not just those boring scientific ones.”

“Hey! I subscribe to What the Rut is Wrong With You…”

Spike idly flipped through one of the magazines Pinkie had left out with the morning’s mail, settling on a complicated chart-like illustration that purported to explain which members of the Canterlot Small Business Association had secret diamond-dog ancestry. “I think I’ll stick with comics, thank you. They’re more grounded and believable.”

The baker just shrugged. “Anyway, umm… the paragriffs are the ponies who wear prosthetic beaks and claws and make you call them ‘Girard’ and stuff. Sort of like Lenny Redtail, but dumb.”

“There’s a dragon version of those, too,” Spike cut in, the magazine temporarily forgotten, “Pray you never meet them.”

“Oh! Right!” Twilight did in fact remember the group, although she’d never heard the term ‘paragriffish’ used to describe them before. In Canterlot circles, the more common term was ‘beakfacers’. “But… I sort of thought that was, like, a racist thing?” In fact, one of the reasons why Shining Armor was now Commander of the Royal Guard was that, in 1092, several up-and-coming young officers had gotten themselves caught on camera wearing false beaks at a Summer Sun party in Baltimare. Shiny had been one of the few not to bother attending, and had thus escaped the resulting purge with his rank and credibility intact.

“Well, the Lunarkin are basically like that,” Pinkie continued, “But with, you know, being Lunar Rebels.”

Now Twilight understood. “Oh. So so it’s just a stupid name the paper gave historical re-enactors!” Her mother’s literary career had brought her into contact with them at a fairly young age. Some were a bit ‘out-there’, politically, especially the ones who followed more modern conflicts like the Saddle Arabian Campaigns or the bigger counter-piracy operations around Minos; and as with any hobby, there were some who practiced it far too seriously. Overall, however, they were fairly ordinary ponies, and she experienced a brief twinge of anger at how badly the Times had misrepresented them.

Spike whistled briefly and made an odd gesture, swiping one claw over the spines on his skull without actually touching them. Twilight had seen pegasi do that on occasion. Some day, she’d take the time to look up what it meant.

Pinkie Pie, for her part, just smiled and nodded. “Yeah, you’re pretty close, just without the acting part. They think they’re actual reincarnations of Lunar Rebels. Or survivors of the original Rebellion we’ve somehow never ever heard of before now, who didn’t even know themselves until Luna ‘awakened’ them.”

“Oh.” That, perhaps, explained the whole section of the article on ‘dancestral guidance’. “So, they’re crazy.”

Spike nodded. “Pretty much, yeah.”

Twilight’s eyes narrowed and she jabbed a hoof at the paper. “And, you know, as soon as I even mention Starswirl the Bearded, it’s ‘oh, well, looks like that cuh-raazy Midnight Sparkle’s finally snapped’…”

“Well, in your colleagues’ defense, you never do really just mention Starswirl the Bearded,” Spike admonished, a little more gently.

“They’re harmless, the article says, ‘just like you and me’.” Twilight flipped the paper over, to reveal an entire two-page spread worth of advertisements. Some hawked Cowija boards with the Minotaur lettering replaced by lunar phases and gibberish extracts of Old Ponish. Some offered sit-down appointments or mail-order consultations with ‘seers’ of every description, who could supposedly advise on investments, locate one’s biological parents, or save failing relationships. Some sold replica armor, wingblades, swords, and the like. Roughly half sold books, on any number of topics. One in particular promised to teach anypony how to focus her third eye -unless that pony was a unicorn, of course, since her horn was a deliberate blinding tool jammed into her skull by the All-Mother to punish her sins of arrogance. “I think they’re a scam.”

“And what do you expect me to do about it,” Pinkie Pie asked, “mail everypony who bought something a ‘CONGRATULATIONS. YOU’VE BEEN SCAMMED!’ cake?” She spread her forelegs impossibly wide, teetering behind the counter for a moment before leaning forward and bracing herself again. “Because I do have those.”

“You served me my coffee and Spike his mineral water,” Twilight explained. In fact the drink in question was a supersaturated mineral solution heated far beyond boiling, which was why Pinkie’s was the only counter in town willing to prepare it, “so that makes you my bartender. That means you’re obligated to sit here and listen to my sob stories.”

“Actually, that makes me your barista. Words matter, Twilight. But I’ll listen, anyway.”

“Thanks, Pinkie,” Suddenly convinced there would be nothing else in the paper worth reading, Twilight shoved it over into the pile with the rest of Pinkie’s junk mail. “I guess I can always count on you to make my day… well, manageable, at least. Thank Harmony Luna’s not going off on anything else.”

Both ponies -and the dragon- looked up suddenly as the chime on the bakery door rattled. Fluttershy froze mid-step, half-in-half-out of the shop.

“Umm… Twilight?” the pegasus finally said.

“Hmm?”

“I’ve… we’ve… I mean, well, I did exactly what you asked me to, and…”

“Fluttershy… is everything alright?” Even on a bad day, the little pegasus wasn’t usually this nervous- there were only the four of them in the shop, after all.

“Oh!” Fluttershy jumped a little in place, then stepped the rest of the way inside and let the door close behind her. “Yes, yes, of course. Everything’s fine. It’s… you know the creatures you asked me to send out? I… think they’ve found something.”

(♫)

As usual, Marigold’s Guardsponies were the first out to the site the next morning. Twilight and her friends followed once the area was secured. The location Fluttershy had suggested- based on a big pile of response templates and quadrat samples and other Druidic gobbledygook Twilight only vaguely understood- was a big, flat, predominately clay-based hill that sat just below the waterline. The digging crews who had been working at the site the day before had laid out a circle of long, thin waterproof canvas sandbags to keep the top of the hill dry, but something appeared to have flattened several on the eastern side. Whatever it was, it was big- reeds had also been bent downwards, some were uprooted, and there was a visible sort of scrape in the mud underneath.

“Whoooeee!” Applejack whistled, “What’d y’all tangle with that did that?”

“Actually, that was there when we got here,” said Marigold as she stepped out of the circle of relative dryness and sloshed her way towards the newcomers.

“It wasn’t here when we stopped digging yesterday, though,” Spike added.

“Do you think we should be posting sentries around here at night?” asked a brownish-gray pegasus stallion in Guard armor. His nametag helpfully informed Twilight that he was a First Sergeant and was named Chamomile.

“That’s gonna be a shit detail for whatever poor rutter draws it…” Marigold warned. Both she and Chamomile looked ahead to Twilight.

“Have we gotten any indication actual ponies are coming out here, or just wild animals?” the scholar asked, thinking once again of the distant specks that were all she’d ever seen of the outside world’s prying reporters.

“No sir. Uhh… no, Doctor,” said Parhelion.

“Then it’s probably not worth the trouble,” Twilight concluded, “Fluttershy, did your little friends tell you anything about what might’ve made this?”

“No…” Fluttershy was walking well behind the rest of the group, and Twilight had to twist her own head around nearly a hundred and eighty degrees to catch the pegasus shaking hers. “Just that there’s something, umm, hurt here.”

“That’s a funny way to put it,” Applejack muttered.

“Creepy is more like it,” replied a blue unicorn with a crossbow slung across his chest and a nametag reading “CPL SUBTLE SPARK”.

Twilight, for her part, made another vow not to let the druid’s strange language and behavior get the better of her, and stepped across the sandbags to dry land. “Well, let’s see it!”

Applejack grabbed one board weighing down the tarpaulin that had been spread across the very top of the hill, and Spike grabbed the other, and together they flipped the entire structure backwards.

Underneath was a square hole about a meter deep, still mostly dry. At the bottom sat two lumps of stone that had clearly once been a single structure- a square pillar maybe twenty centimeters wide and a meter tall, tapering slightly with height. At some point in the past it had fallen over sideways and broken in half- Twilight wondered if the round, natural boulder visible just underneath the break, coupled with the pressure of layers of silt piling on up above, might’ve had something to do with that. A quick magesight spell confirmed it to contain not a trace of residual magic. The stone appeared to be the same type found in the mountains around Ponyville, cleared of patina to bring out a deep midnight-blue coloration. That sort of craftsmareship had been on display in the Lunar Cairns as well, and as a result Twilight was almost certain the artifact in front of her was, in fact, Lunar. Or a very convincing and recent forgery…

The surface appeared quite rough, and as Twilight knelt down and carefully snaked her neck down into the hole, it resolved itself into a series of intricate carvings. Of the three sides she could see, one was divided into three clear segments or panels. The first of those depicted a swarm of blank-eyed equine creatures possessing both curved horns and rounded, insectlike wings, locked in combat with pegasi in traditional Timbucktu armor. Below them was a vague cityscape outlined in flames, into which a larger insectoid figure tossed a pegasus in particularly regal-looking armor. At the very bottom an alicorn with Celestia’s cutie-mark and several other robed ponies -notably all unicorns- sat, some with goblets held in their hooves and mouths open as though conversion, looking in every direction but up. The left side of the pillar was a single image. Earth ponies and pegasi, with manacles around their hooves and collars around their necks, were prostrated beneath another portrait of Celestia and several robed unicorns, standing atop a representation of the Everfree Council Hall. Finally, on the right, Celestia stood before a pile of books with a lit torch held in her telekinesis, while below her a skirmish line of unicorns in mages’ tunics marched out from the distinctive mountain-supported spires of Canterlot. They advanced on a collection of earth ponies and pegasi wearing the traditional First Century garb of physicians, alchemists, geomancers and druids.

“It’s the grievances that started the Lunar Rebellions…” Twilight muttered to herself. “The Changeling attack on Timbucktu, Celestia’s promotion to Speaker of the Council, the rise of unicorn-supremacists and the forbiddance of necromancy. I bet if we turned it over, the far side would have something to do with the war against the Crystal Empire.”

“Wouldn’t they know all this, though?” Spike’s voice suddenly echoed from behind Twilight. She jumped backwards, narrowly avoiding scraping her horn on the clay side of the pit. “Sorry. Sorry. But think about it. These are supposed to be Lunar officers making this trek. If anypony knew what grievances kicked off the Lunar Rebellions already, it’d be them.”

Twilight nodded. “And out of all the Lunar forces, they’d also be the most literate. One picture or even just a few sentences would probably be enough to get the idea across, and take less time to carve, too. This seems more like…”

“Like a propaganda pamphlet,” Spike finished for her, “Or a kids’ book. ‘Look at big bad Tyrant Celestia, being so cruel to everypony. Here’s as many gory details as we can fit on this rock. Doesn’t that make you feel angry? Don’t you want to be a rebel?’.”

“Yeah…” Twilight trailed off, and then recalled that in every picture Celestia had been holding a ceremonial mace or standard of some kind. She quickly dug into her saddlebags and extracted her booklet of maps, unfolding them all at once in her telekinesis and marking the mace symbol they’d found on one of the stones over the pillar’s location in the Bog. Then she scanned for the corresponding symbol on their smaller map of the Lunar camp itself before remembering that it was the only one they had been unable to locate in situ. “I think the stones and pillars do correspond,” she said aloud, “and that’ll let us compute some kind of homography between the miniature ‘map’ in the camp and the real countryside. But to do that… we’re going to need to find more pillars. Fluttershy? I’m confident you can do this. Take as long as you need, I’m just happy we’re finally making progress without relying on mysterious signs from above.”

She just wished the ponies surrounding her looked a little more convinced.

(♫)

They tramped through more weedy, muddy not-quite water, heading for a particularly dense grove of trees that, according to Fluttershy’s Druidic reconnaissance, contained a second pillar. Supposedly, it was even aboveground this time, if badly overgrown, which was why Twilight was already heading out to the site herself without assembling the usual digging crew first.

It was close to nine in the evening, the sun already hovering near the mountainous horizon, and the Guards walking ahead of Twilight carried folded-up crystal spotlights strapped to their armor. The information leading Fluttershy to the pillar had come late in the day, and Spike had argued for waiting until next morning before surveying it, but Twilight -and, unexpectedly, Fluttershy herself- had both voted to proceed immediately.

“Hey. Twilight?”

The scholar jumped a little when she heard Fluttershy’s voice behind her. Even thinking explicitly about her, she’d forgotten the pegasus was even there. She tended to keep to the rear, after all, and it didn’t help that Froggy Bottom Bog got noisy as the sun went down. It did not, however, get any less humid or any less hot, nor did the insects inhabiting it get any less inquisitive. Twilight wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to comb all of the mosquitoes out of her tail. Perhaps she’d invest in some kind of alchemical repellent before their next outing.

“Umm, Twilight?” Fluttershy called again.

“Yeah?”

“I was wondering, since, you know… this project’s been going so well… if, maybe, you could… help me out a little?” At no point did Fluttershy seem interested in getting any closer to Twilight’s position. The unicorn wasn’t exactly one to insist on eye contact during conversations, but talking to somepony who was always some ways directly behind her was proving to be unreasonably difficult.

“Umm… sure. I mean, whatever you need…?”

“Well, Twilight, you see the thing is…” Fluttershy paused for a while, and Twilight was just about to ask her if she was alright when she continued all in one big long breath. “The big pond in town is getting really overpopulated with frogs, and I was wondering if I could maybe move some of them out here, to the bog, where they’d have more living space?”

Twilight laughed. “Fluttershy, you don’t need my permission to move frogs out here… unless the frogs are also reporters.” Given the recent, impressive demonstrations of Fluttershy’s druidic capabilities, that wasn’t necessarily something Twilight was willing to dismiss out of hoof.

“Oh.” There was another long pause as they made their way into the grove proper. The neat wedge formation of the Guards in front of them lost some of its cohesion, as ponies had to wind their way around gnarled trees and protruding roots. “Still, I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, sure. And if you need any help… corralling them, or transporting them, or anything, I’m sure I can stop by.” Twilight moved to rub the sweat off her muzzle before recalling that her forehooves were currently encased in leather boots and about three centimeters of mud. “Why are they overpopulating the pond, anyway? Is it, like, their breeding season or something?”

“It is, or was a few weeks ago, but this doesn’t happen every season,” Fluttershy explained, speaking in what Twilight recognized as something approaching her normal tone for the first time since they’d set out, “Ordinarily fish will eat eggs and tadpoles, and then bigger predatory birds’ll keep the adult population balanced. But I haven’t seen many of the bigger birds around town lately…”

“That’s interesting. I’ll do some reading and see if I can-”

“Twilight Sparkle…” echoed an all-too-familiar voice in Twilight’s borrowed helmet.

This time Twilight really did jump a little in place. Ever since she’d failed to locate her first pillar and Fluttershy had started producing more actionable results, Princess Luna had effectively withdrawn from any kind of communication with Ponyville. Twilight had actually considered cutting off her communication link for good, but had decided there was little point. “Lunamania” didn’t need her help to continue dying its quiet, unassuming death.

“- beware. There is… the wind, the birds, the rustling of the reeds… their sounds fill Us with a sense of a great and imminent danger here. Thou and thine fellows must all move with great care.”

Twilight waved at the Guards continuing to advance ahead of them, confident Luna would still be able to see in the low light. “Your grace, we’re always being careful. These ponies are more than capable of responding to any sort of-”

At the very head of the formation, Private Parhelion whinnied in surprise and suddenly dropped out of sight.

(♫)

There was a great deal of crashing and rattling as Captain Marigold called out “Quickmud! Everypony keep back!”

Twilight and Fluttershy both bolted forward, dashing over a low grass-covered berm to find Parhelion sunk up to her neck in muddy brown water. Disturbance on the surface suggested the Guardsmare was paddling furiously, but she didn’t seem to be gaining any buoyancy.

“Aww, shit, I’m sinking, somepony help me outta here!” she shouted, in between quick gasps for air. With that much mud pressing against her throat and chest, it had to be a struggle to breathe even with her head well above the surface.

Twilight pulled up short and stared, wide-eyed. That can’t be right. Mud’s denser than water, even with her packs and armor she should float, there must be some kind of current underneath to generate undertow…

Before she could sink any further, Twilight wrapped the struggling mare in her telekinesis, concentrated on lifting her- and then bit back a curse as the field shifted and slid and failed to find more than a fraction of the purchase it should have. With everything else that had gone on, she’d never had herself keyed into the company’s telekinesis-repelling wards.

Fluttershy glided forward, one forehoof outstretched. “Here, grab on.”

Parhelion grunted, shifted slightly, and then sank still further, eyes going wide under her helmet. “I can’t!”

It was hard to tell with all of the bobbing she was doing as she struggled, but to Twilight it looked like the Guardsmare was sinking down more than she was floating up with each cycle. An earth pony might have been able to form some kind of solid purchase in that muddy soup and pull herself out, but not a unicorn like Parhelion.

“Really missing Colonel Lime right about now…” Muttered Marigold as she pawed furiously through her saddlebags.

Think. What would Rarity do in a situation like this?

Twilight grabbed a thick vine off of a nearby tree in her telekinetic field, twisted it several times, and guided it to Parhelion’s grasping jaws. The Guard grabbed hold and Twilight pulled- and then the whole vine snapped cleanly in two, spraying mud and sap over both Parhelion and Fluttershy.

Mud was up to the back of Parhelion’s head now. A few more centimeters, and it would start trickling into her mouth.

Fighting the panic building up in her chest, Twilight hurriedly scanned the trees around her and caught sight of three more vines. She ripped them away all at once, and twisted them together into a crude rope perhaps half a meter long. She tossed one end at Parhelion, and the other at Fluttershy, and kept the middle in her telekinesis. “C’mon, pull!” she demanded.

They both pulled.

There was a moment of fierce, sucking resistance before Parhelion’s entire upper half rose out of the muck. Fluttershy dove down and grabbed ahold of her barrel a moment later, and the unicorn half-swam and was half-dragged forward to more solid ground. Marigold immediately bit down on one of the front straps on her armor and dragged her the rest of the way across the muddy bank. She lay there for a moment, breathing heavily and coughing up muddy water. Her saddlebags and the spotlights she’d strapped over them were gone, but she herself didn’t appear to have suffered any harm.

“Wow. That was close,” she muttered as she hauled herself back onto all-fours, “Thank the Sun for Princess Luna!”

(♫)

By the time they actually made it to the site, wielding the long poles of their disassembled spotlight tripods as impromptu sounding rods, and carefully cleaned enough vegetation off of the pillar to make the carvings on it halfway intelligible, it was nearly ten in the evening. Turning back, however, was the farthest thing from Twilight’s mind.

In between the spotlights and her own magelight, she had a pretty clear view of the pillar’s inscriptions. This one’s exposed location had subjected it to weathering that its buried, broken counterpart had been spared, leaving fine details like horns and feathers more or less illegible, but it was still obvious that the carvings were entirely different.

All four sides were roughly similar in composition. The upper thirds depicted, respectively, an earth pony standing in front of an empty field, watching a cart laden with some sort of unrecognizable plants depart off to one side; a pegasus in armor hovering alone against a line of griffons with claws outstretched; a pony that was likely a unicorn standing beneath another image of Canterlot with a pick and shovel floating nearby; and Princess Luna herself -identifiable by her cutie mark, eroded though it was- standing in an empty Night Court in Everfree City. The middle sections depicted each of the three mortal ponies imbibing some variety of potion beneath a starry night sky as Luna stood against Princess Celestia with a banner held in her mouth. Then the lowest section of each side included the representative ponies as full-scale portraits in Lunar armor with slitted eyes, batlike wings, and a curved horn,with the fourth panel depicting all three marching behind an armored Luna.

Twilight nodded, extracted her much-abused map, and marked out the banner symbol over her current location. Two down. One to go. Hopefully.

It was odd, though. This pillar was hard to find but it wasn’t completely unreachable or invisible. Even overgrown, it was clearly recognizable as an artificial structure from some distance away. Given the number of treasure hunters who had apparently searched Froggy Bottom Bog, and Paper Clip’s own more organized search efforts right after the valley had flooded, it was in fact somewhat unusual that the artifact in front of her hadn’t been discovered before now.

“Twilight?” Fluttershy stood at the very edge of the spotlights’ glow. Despite the grove being covered in thick vegetation, she hadn’t heard the pegasus approach.

“Fluttershy?” She folded up her map again and slipped it back into her saddlebags.

“Can I… talk to you about something?”

“Sure! I’m just about done here, actually, and I’m thinking about maybe calling it a night.” She muttered the cantrip of her standard mage-sight spell, concentrating on teasing out any traces of magic from the pillar despite the heat headache that immediately started to worm its way into her skull. The pillar remained utterly inactive, which rendered poor Foxglove’s original assertion that mages had been involved in the thing’s construction more and more dubious. Even using geomancy to shape the stone would’ve left traces Twilight’s fine-tuned spell would be able to detect.

“Actually, it’s… umm. It’s about the locations I gave you. This one and the other one,” Fluttershy continued as she stepped up beside Twilight.

“What about them?” Twilight asked, her headache receding somewhat. She unlatched her saddlebag again, ready to extract the map if necessary. Another major breakthrough by Fluttershy was, in fact, exactly the sort of thing that could tie up this whole mess of a project.

“Well, you see, the thing is, Twilight,” Fluttershy stammered, seemingly trying to fold herself up behind her own long, pink mane, “I wanted to tell you sooner but Luna didn’t think it was a good idea while you and she weren’t getting along so well, and…”

“You talked to Princess Luna?” Twilight interjected, genuinely shocked, then when Fluttershy backed away a few steps amended, “I mean, you have every right to, you’re an important part of this project and you’ve made huge contributions and it’s not like you can’t talk to or write to Luna for your own personal reasons regardless of the work we’re doing… I just didn’t think she’d be willing to talk back.” You know, since you basically replaced her.

“Well, you see, that’s the thing…” Fluttershy stepped closer again, almost invading Twilight’s personal space. “I was searching over the bog for so long and I wasn’t getting any results, and I know this whole project is so terribly important for everypony. So I… decided to let Princess Luna commune with the animals too.”

Twilight stood, mouth half-open, a dozen questions burning through her mind in rapid succession- Why did you ever think that was a good idea? Were you ever going to tell anypony? How long did Luna know about the mud? When did she tell you about the mud, if ever? Why did you even think of this to begin with?-and were quickly stifled. Finally, more or less of their own accord, her vocal cords produced something appropriately inoffensive: “Does Luna know that kind of spell?”

“Umm… yes?”

Idiot. Of course Luna knew that kind of spell. There were a thousand well-documented instances of her communing with bats, owls, and similar creatures to reconnoiter for her forces, fueling superstitions that were still getting innocent wildlife killed well into the Third Century.

“And then they found the pillars,” Twilight continued, still feeling half-numbed by shock and confusion.

“Mmm-hmm..” Fluttershy now seemed to be trying to hide herself behind the pillar Twilight was looking at now.

“Did… did she at least write down what she did?”

“Not… really? I didn’t think she could do any harm…”

Twilight turned away, and scuffed at the muddy, root-riddled ground with one booted forehoof. Her shock and confusion were slowly but surely hardening into something that burned hotter than frustration but held denser and sturdier than any of the usual sorts of anger. “Yeah. Nopony ever does.”

“Twilight, I really wanted to tell you-” Fluttershy continued on behind her.

She turned around and stepped back over to the pegasus. She dipped her head down, the curious feeling still present but pushed aside for a moment by concern. “I know. I’m… I guess I understand why you didn’t, too. Nopony talks about it, but… with all those followers around her, and so many ponies who want to do what she says and nopony really knowing what she’s going to do next, and now all of this stuff about her supposedly having powers, Luna…”

“She’s… kind of… intimidating?” Fluttershy mumbled.

“Yeah.” Twilight nodded, thankful she'd removed her hot, surprisingly heavy borrowed Guard helmet a little less than an hour ago. “And I don’t like her intimidating my friends. Tomorrow I’m going to write up a recommendation to Major Forward and see if we can curtail Luna’s activity a little to teach her a-”

Something in the foliage rustled.

Twilight wheeled around, horn already illuminated and the first words of a heavy stun spell on her lips, half expecting to encounter a bat-pegasus -or possibly even an actual bat- with bladed wings aimed directly for her throat. Instead she found only Sergeant Chamomile, panting and covered in sweat but otherwise nonthreatening. “Doctor Twilight! Doctor Twilight!” He gasped, “We’ve been tryin’ to reach you, something’s happened! The gravesite… there’s another pillar back there!”

(♫)

Twilight stepped out of the Lapwing’s troop bay onto more or less solid ground. She continued forward and stared. There was now a pillar sitting in the bottom of the trench in front of her, perhaps a meter away from the flag marking where the treasure hunter’s skeleton had been removed. “When did this happen?”

“I don’t know!” Spike answered, “I was out at… uhh, the broken one, E-5, with Applejack, trying to figure out how we could get it moved back to the Station. It was starting to get too dark to see, so we decided to head back to the base camp and grab more lights. When we came past here…” he waved his claws in a vague sort of ‘surprise’ gesture, “… there it was!”

Beside him, Applejack spoke up. “Ya know, there’s been all kinds-a stories circulatin’ bout this place ever since mah granny’s day. Treasures a pony can find that ain’t there the next mornin’, weird lights ‘n sounds… ‘moon ponies’ meetin’ out here for all sorts a’ rituals that’re supposed to let ‘em talk to Nightmare Moon…”

“Wait, I thought you said there was nothing worth talking about out here?” Demanded Twilight as she passed the farmer.

She shook her head. “Ah meant right in this spot. Ah even asked’cha if that was whatcha wanted to hear ‘bout. Whole swamp’s s’posed to be haunted, though… Listen, Ah’ll write down everything Ah can remember for ya when Ah get back into town.”

“Thanks, Applejack. That’d… actually be really helpful.”

Carefully, Twilight stepped down into the trench and examined the ‘new’ pillar. One side was mostly occupied by a vaguely serpentine creature seemingly assembled from a variety of different limbs -Discord, most likely. The figure’s lopsided hands grabbed hold of a cresting wave, which towered over a collection of unicorns with outsized Sun- and Moon-Raisers’ pendants around their necks. The next side -the pillars always seemed to be arranged in a clockwise fashion- depicted a unicorn with a voluminous beard and traditional mage’s hat, with his forehooves raised up and outward. Below him, a representative of each of the three pony tribes knelt in apparent reverence, and above him floated the two Royal Sisters, depicted with shorter manes and foal-like proportions. On the third, both sisters were depicted as adults again, surrounded by six hexagonal objects that were likely the Elements of Harmony, and below them the Discord-figure was depicted curled in on itself and surrounded by exquisitely-carved chains. Finally, the fourth side was broken up into two distinct segments. In the upper, Princess Celestia stood before the bowed ranks of the Sun-Raisers, a pile of pendants at her hooves; in the lower, the same scene was repeated with Princess Luna and the Moon-Raisers, only they faced the opposite direction and there was a large crescent moon included overhead.

Perhaps more confusingly, there were still traces of soil clinging to the carvings, and no signs of weathering. The pillar had obviously been underground for some time… or at least most of it had been. Roughly the top three centimeters had clearly been worn down substantially- and it was exactly those three centimeters that protruded up above the lip of the trench. “So, what?” she asked, mostly to herself, “We dug this up ourselves and didn’t realize it?” Gritting her teeth against the headache now coiling up behind her eyes -wearing her helmet again seemed for whatever reason to make it immeasurably worse-she once again muttered the cantrip of her reliable magesight spell. Once again, it revealed precisely nothing- no illusion or cloaking spells, no teleportation, and nothing that could’ve conferred motion. “I don’t get it. I don’t get it!”

“Twilight Sparkle.”

Twilight wheeled around by pure reflex, momentarily expecting Princess Luna to have physically arrived behind her. Of course, there was nopony there save for a bewildered Applejack, Spike, and Captain Marigold standing next to the lip of the trench. “Oh, rut me, what is it this time?!”

“Twilight, thou must leave this place, and not return ere the Sun rises again. Thine probing and meddling hath awakened something of great danger.”

“Danger. Dangerous how?” With some difficulty Twilight managed to haul herself up over the side of the meter-deep trench.

“We do not know, but if thou dalliest thou willst soon find out!” Luna practically snapped.

“There’s nothing here, Luna, just a big carved rock.” Twilight muttered the chant of a moderately powerful disjunction spell, directing pulse of silver energy directly into the pillar. The stone remained stone. “See?”

Behind her, Applejack and Marigold both gasped, and took a few steps backwards.

“Twilight?” said Applejack, suddenly sounding very concerned, “Don’t make any sudden movements or anythin’, but one a’ them ghost Lunars is standin’ right behindja and she dun’ look too happy.”

Slowly and carefully, Twilight twisted her head around and peered back into the trench. It remained completely and utterly empty, both in mundane vision and through her magesight. “I don’t see… there’s nothing there,” she said aloud.

“Yeah, I don’t see anything either,” Spike added.

“Thou dost not see because thou dost not believe…” Luna’s voice admonished her.

Twilight shook her head as though she could physically dislodge Luna from her helmet. “You keep saying that and then you never explain anything, dammit! If a ghost is visible to one pony she’s visible to everypony, I’ve never ever read about one having any kind of… of… selective invisibility…”

“What’cha talkin’ ‘bout, she’s right there in the trench, she’s goin’ on ‘bout Princess Luna and evil unicorns…” Applejack shouted.

“Wait, wait, yeah, I… I heard something,” Spike continued, shifting around in place and then stepping back closer to the Guards, “It’s Old Ponish but it sounds, distant somehow, I don’t know, like a bad recording…:

Beside him, Captain Marigold stepped forward, shortsword clenched in her jaws in a parrying position.

“Fine. Look. OK.” Twilight muttered another spell and projected a quick amniomorphic shield between herself and the trench. “This thing can stop a Shadowbolt’s lightning spells, so I don’t think a ghost has any chance of-”

“Twilight Sparkle, thou must flee. Thine fellows may follow, but it is thee the spirits doth seek!”

“I still don’t see anything,” Spike cut in, now sounding more than a little confused- in fact, confused was hardly the right word; he sounded about ready to panic. “There’s just that voice, I can’t even tell where it’s coming from…”

“Lapwing, this is Twilight. Are you seeing any of this?”

“Nothing on any of the instruments,” confirmed Sergeant Leafspring a moment later.

“What are you talking about? I can see it out the window, plain as day!” interjected Palisade.

“Doc, you’d better back away, that thing’s armed…” muttered Marigold around the sword clenched in her teeth.

“I don’t see it, I can’t see it, there’s nothing there… is there?” Spike stammered, backing away with his claws raised up in front of him.

Twilight looked from one confused face to another, then back again, consciously avoiding turning to face the pillar, the ache in her skull building all the time. It didn’t help that she was being absolutely buffeted by old-fashioned dialects, with Luna on one side and Applejack on the other. “I don’t get it. It’s like something’s dampening our instruments, but the magic to do that didn’t exist a thousand years ago. Ponies wouldn’t even know where to start… could a natural phenomenon be possible? Something they stumbled on and worked into the pillars… but why haven’t we ever recorded anything like that before, and how would First Century ponies even know they’d-”

“Twilight, I sense that thine very life is in peril for as long as you stay in this place,” Luna’s voice was icy cold, “Please. For thine own sake, leave. Now.”

“Luna, I’m trying to think!” she snapped.

“Twi, this really ain’t the time,” said Applejack, “Ah can see that mare plain as day and she just stuck a hoof through yer shield like it wasn’t even there…”

Twilight looked back at the shield. It remained intact and utterly unperturbed.

“Still not picking up anything on the scope…” confirmed Leafspring.

“Ah’m tellin’ y’all, she dun look happy, she’s got a mace in ‘er mouth now…” warned Applejack.

“Unless…” Twilight paused, summoning all of her experience in ignoring other ponies to focus solely on the evidence at hoof. Something was bothering her about this whole affair, something very obvious and very wrong, but she still felt she couldn’t quite grasp what it was.“ It’s doing things a ghost can’t ordinarily do because it’s not a ghost at all, it’s some other kind of mag-”

“DammitDoclookOUT!”

Captain Marigold charged forward and caught Twilight in a rough tackle from the right, just as intense, searing pain blossomed in the unicorn’s left rear leg. Twilight dimly registered being hurled sideways into the muddy soil, landing hard and sliding with the weight of Marigold’s armored form bearing down on her, as back where she’d been standing the site erupted into shouts of alarm.

Marigold rolled off of her a moment later and she tried to stand, but every tiny movement sent a fresh jolt of pain through her limb and she couldn’t do much more than thrash uselessly in place.

“Capt- wha- did you just break my leg?” she demanded, between breaths.

It was only as the fireworks behind her eyeballs gradually died away that Twilight realized she was being dragged. Dragged in the opposite direction that everypony else seemed to be running.

Very faintly, she thought she heard Applejack’s voice, now a long way away. “Can somepony double back an’ get Fluttershy? Ah think Twi’s hurt awful bad…”

(♫)

The examination light beat down on Twilight like the noonday sun, doing nothing to assist with her continuing headache. She’d only taken a few sips of the analgesic potion the doctors had offered her, and was already feeling sleepier than she’d’ve liked, but it seemed to be having no effect on her various scrapes and bruises.

“Well, that looks like a mace wound if I’ve ever seen one,” declared the most recent physician to take up residence in her little whitewashed room- a greyish pegasus with the name “Coldheart” embroidered over the front pocket of his coat. “Deep hematoma, one hairline fracture to the left tibia, and one displaced fracture along the fibula.” He favored Twilight with a particular look: as near as the scholar had ever been able to determine, doctors throughout the Known World were led into some hidden chamber on their final day of medical school and taught in great secrecy how to execute it to exacting specifications.

You had to go out on an Adventure, didn’t you? That look said, more eloquently than any speech, And on that Adventure, you discovered that you were, in fact, a pony made of flesh and bone just like everypony else and not an immortal titan. So now you’re here, taking up my time and making use of my stocks so that I can repair the wages of your hubris. Don’t you feel foolish about the whole thing now? “If that Guard buddy of yours hadn’t pushed you out of the way, this could easily have crushed your entire leg.”

“Can you tell us anything about the weapon itself from the injury?” Spike asked from his spot lurking in the corner.

Coldheart pulled a long strip of thaumosensitive photographic paper from its spot under Twilight’s bed, held it between both wings, and peered at it for a while. “Not in any real detail, no. It’s not like there’s an arrowhead embedded in the wound that we can take out and examine.” He tossed the paper dismissively onto a nearby counter, and waved his wing over the wad of bandages he’d just wrapped around her leg. “However, these specks of necrotic tissue have appeared so quickly that I’d wager the weapon was enchanted with something similar to a vitalistic draining or disruptive mechanism.”

“That’s consistent with the weapons given to elite Lunar troops,” Spike confirmed, entirely unhelpfully. “And completely dissimilar to the types of damage usually inflicted by contact with ghosts.”

Seemingly satisfied with his bandaging work, Coldheart grabbed a pen in his mouth and began sketching a few basic runes onto the surface, peering every so often at a thin reference book he’d fished from some unknown location. “That’s a pretty serious enchantment. These glyphs’ll prevent it from necrotizing your entire leg or anything drastic like that, but… I’m afraid the usual thaumo-osteotic regimen is going to have to be heavily curtailed to compensate.”

Twilight let her ears flip back against her skull. “Curtailed… how, exactly?”

“You’re going to need to keep that cast on, and walk with a support brace, for the next… I’d say about a week? In fact, I’d prefer if you spent the rest of the night here for observation, to make sure there are no lingering effects from the enchantment.” He turned, swept all of his equipment and supplies back into a thick black leather medical bag, and headed for the exit, calling out over his shoulder “That means no more gallivanting around out in the swamps, either.”

“Gallivanting, he says.” With some effort, Twilight managed to extricate her hind legs from the complicated rest the nurses had placed her in. She levered her way back up into a sitting position, moved to slip off the hospital bed- and then yelped in pain as something akin to a white-hot knife suddenly found its way into the very center of her leg. Somewhat reluctantly, she lay back down, albeit on her side in a more natural posture. That hurt, too, but to a more manageable degree.

Spike relinquished his chair in the corner and stepped closer. “So… umm… do you… want me to get you something to read or whatever?”

“Don’t worry.” It was well past one in the morning, and Twilight was tired- which was about the only way a pony could get any sleep in a working hospital anyway. She reached out with her telekinesis -that was still working, at least- and dimmed each of the lights in the room in turn. Then she paused, considered, and brought a few of them back up again. There was something she’d figured out, or thought she’d been about to figure out, back in the swamp, but she couldn’t remember what it was.“ Actually, if you could grab some paper and quills, there’s a few letters I still need to write.”

“Umm, yeah, okay. I’ll see if I can get any from the nurse’s station down the hall.” After that, Spike left as well, easing the door closed behind him.

Twilight stared at the ceiling, tried her best to ignore the bustle in the neighboring rooms, and planned her next move.

Thank the Sun for Princess Luna indeed!

Author's Note

It wouldn’t be Feeling Pinkie Keen if Twilight didn’t get physically harmed for asking too many questions, now would it?

I know the quickmud here does not function like IRL quickmud does, nor do I have any idea if Twilight’s “undertow” explanation is remotely geologically possible. I figure that since the actions of ponies are needed to make plants grow, rain fall, and the sun move, it doesn’t really need to work like IRL.

The Fillydelphia Experiment

(♫)

Come morning, the hospital staff fitted Twilight with what they called a “dog’s wheelchair”- essentially the wheel-and-axle from a small cart, attached to her barrel with a padded wooden yoke. It kept the pressure off her bandaged left hindleg -as well as her perfectly functional right hindleg- and permitted her a sad parody of locomotion accomplished by more or less dragging herself around by her forelegs. There were enchanted versions of the things available that added some of their own motive power, of course, and could even levitate up stairs, but not in a town like Ponyville.

After completing her many, many discharge papers, Twilight wheeled herself directly from the hospital to the train platform, and caught the 12PM dedicated to Fillydelphia Harbor.

Once again, she rode first class -she needed the extra space to be able to lay on her side- and made use of the trip to write free of distractions.

Her first task was to prepare a memo, officially directed at the naval yard’s government staff, but written in language she was sure Princess Luna would understand. It restated that she, Twilight Sparkle, had been given final control over the entire ‘onboarding’ project by Princess Celestia in her capacity as sole Exarch, and that Forward March and the other staff were technically her subordinates. It listed, for reference, all of the services the Lunars were currently being provided courtesy of the Imperial Republic and the Equestrian taxpayer. Then, it explained that it was Doctor Twilight Sparkle’s judgment that Luna’s full participation and support for any experiments relating to her newfound ‘prophetic’ abilities was absolutely essential for the continuance of the integration project. The memo did not explicitly state that, if Luna declined to participate, her loyal Night Guard would find themselves on the streets of Fillydelphia without a bit to their collective name instead of sitting for literacy classes and dining on roast oats, because that would be untrue. However, the implication was quite clear. If anypony found that difficult to believe, they’d have to ask Celestia herself to clarify -this project being run from the top levels of the Office of the Exarchy, after all. With Celestia out of the country, that currently meant going through either Kibitz, her personal secretary, or her Chief of Staff Raven Inkwell. Twilight knew both of those ponies personally, and most importantly knew neither was particularly fond of Princess Luna’s sudden intrusion into Canterlot affairs.

As she signed the document, Twilight experienced a brief and unpleasant sensation of guilt. This was how ponies like Harshwhinny and Wind Rider were said to operate, not upstanding Academy types like herself. One might even go so far as to call what she was doing extortion.

Then she remembered Fluttershy, shivering and looking over her shoulder in an empty bog in the middle of the night, and any trace of guilt immediately vanished. As Applejack might put it, what was good for the goose was good for the gander.

Once that bureaucratic chore was dispensed with, she pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment and began considering hypotheses:

Princess Luna can, in fact, identify images or structures that are symbolically meaningful to ponies. This would presumably be through some form of divination, perhaps cast unconsciously, or a sensory channel ordinary ponies lack; we can begin trying to explain the methods once we’ve determined the essential nature of the process.

Princess Luna is able to ascertain the age of objects remotely, and thereby assess their provenance (the same methodological concerns as above apply).

Princess Luna is using conventional divination methods (again, perhaps unconsciously, or at least without understanding the significance of what she’s doing) to scry through the access link we have set up to Froggy Bottom Bog.

Princess Luna has been partially affected by her own memory spell, and is remembering information about the campsite without being aware of it.

Princess Luna is suffering from some form of endogenous memory repression, not mediated by any mnemonic spell, and is remembering information about the campsite without being aware of it.

Princess Luna is able to detect magical fields on a level far more sensitive -and discriminative- than any current instrumentation (c.f. thaumoperception in birds, conspiracy theories relating to ideopathic magical hypersensitivity and Maregellons Syndrome, etc.)

She paused, tapping her quill against the underside of her muzzle for a while. Then she went ahead and added

Princess Luna remembers perfectly well everything she did in that valley, and is lying.

She sipped her tea and watched the Fillydelphia suburbs blur past outside her window.

This time, there was no honor guard waiting for her on the train platform, just Forward March. Twilight wasn’t sure if that was because she’d arrived during the daylight hours, because she’d arrived on such comparatively short notice, or simply because she was no longer honored. Probably some combination of all three. She didn’t particularly care.

Twilight took a few foreleg-driven steps out onto the platform, wincing as the wheels strapped to her rear half bounced down the few centimeters of elevation from the floor of the car she was leaving. She unlatched her saddlebag, extracted the vial of diluted poppy tears they’d given her at the hospital, and took a quick gulp. The manufacturer had added a flavoring: something akin to cherries, as envisioned by somepony who might once have seen a photograph of the fruit in question, for a few seconds, many years ago. She quickly added the experience to the mental list she was maintaining of everything to thank Luna for once this was all over.

Major Forward strode over, and for a second seemed about to extend a wing and physically help Twilight across the platform, but she settled for laughing nervously and telling the unicorn, “Hey. Wow, you… kind of look like shit.” They both started walking, slowly. “I got Spike’s letter, but… are you sure you want to go through with this? Because I’m not sure you want to go through with this.”

Twilight nodded. “I want to go through with this. In fact, I think we should’ve done this a long time ago, back when Luna first started her… whole seer thing. We’ve been pretending it’s not a huge problem for way too long, and it’s past time we got to the bottom of it.”

“What if there’s… not a bottom to get to?” Forward suggested, speaking slowly and carefully. “What if it just… is what it is?”

They crossed the courtyard slowly and laboriously, in strained silence. There were far fewer Lunars out and about in broad daylight, which suited Twilight Sparkle just fine at the moment. She couldn’t tell if the mob at the front gate was any less expansive; if they’d been backed up five blocks versus three today, they would still have looked exactly the same from her vantage point.

“Twilight, you know, I’m just… not sure it’s good for you or for Luna, long-term, to be effectively coercing her into participating in these tests of yours,” Forward finally said.

“Forward, you know I hate having to pull rank on you…”

“But you’re pulling rank on me.” Forward dipped her head downward. “I get it.”

“Yeah. And…” Twilight scuffed at the ground with one foreleg, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “… I think I’m also going to need a place to stay for the next few days, so if you could maybe look into that, too…”

“Yeah, I’ll… I’ll see what I can do. I think there’s some spare junior officers quarters still open, on the ground floor too, if you don’t mind sharing a wall with the medical staff. But… Twilight, I think it’d be better, for everypony, if I’m actually the one working on these experiments with Luna, and you stick behind the scenes to observe and direct.”

Twilight stopped and closed her eyes. She wasn’t exactly looking forward to another face-to-face conversation with Princess Luna after everything that’d happened, and it was probably a good idea to make sure the experiments she’d be running were double-blinded anyway. “Deal.”

Twilight sat in a dark little alcove lit only by the glow of several magic circles, watching the therapeutic psychomancer -whose name she wasn’t sure she had ever been told- fiddle with this and sketch out that. She understood the theory behind it all just enough to know that this was very powerful magic indeed, the sort of thing generally used in cases of total amnesia or deliberate memory-scrambling by malicious parties. Back in 1085, a leading mnemonic therapist at the Cloudsdale Clinic had taken to stabbing coworkers who’d made various imagined slights against her. She was detained several times over the course of six months, but had always gone to the trouble of planting ironclad alibis in the minds of patients, family members, and -in one spectacular case- the detective overseeing her own interrogation. Then an earlier version of this very spell had brought back full recollection of her tampering to three witnesses in as many hours.

Twilight doubted that any first-century memory spell, no matter how sophisticated or far-reaching, could stand up against it.

On the other side of a sheet of enchanted one-way glass, in a plain little room made of whitewashed brick, Forward March presented Princess Luna with the remains of ten different swords. Three were genuine Lunar weapons recovered from Froggy Bottom Bog, cleaned of any remaining soil. Two were genuine Lunar weapons recovered from other, distant sites by other archaeologists who had no relationship with Twilight or her project. They had also been freshly cleaned using the same methods. The remaining five were forgeries assembled by Dr. Proper Verse and a few Academy alchemists. Dr. Daycaller had been asked to sort them from the real versions, and had admitted to being completely unable to do so without the use of deliberate divinational magic- which Luna was currently forbidden from using and which would be easy enough to pick up in such a controlled environment. Neither Forward nor Twilight knew which were which, and Forward didn’t even know how many of each type there were. The technician who’d laid them out had been sent out of the building entirely, leaving behind only a chart. That, in turn, was sealed in an envelope and set on a table in the corner, in Twilight’s side of the chamber.

Luna just looked at the samples for a good long while. The thaumosensitive bands cinched around her hooves, wings, and horn remained pure white. She tapped one blade, and seemed about to sniff at another before she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Without opening them, she reached out with a wing and pushed one blade a few centimeters forward, then another, then another.

Twilight grabbed the envelope in her telekinesis and tore it open with more force than was probably necessary. She unfolded the chart inside, squinting at it in the dim light. All three of the swords Luna had selected were the ones taken from Froggy Bottom Bog.

Twilight turned back to the psychomancer. “Anything? Any… associative register at all?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

They ran the same test a dozen more times, using different psychomantic methods. Sometimes they included fewer authentic swords, or more. Sometimes they included no genuine swords at all. Mid-way through, they elected to switch to pieces of armor, then to cookpots. Luna identified the camp artifacts -or lack thereof- with unerring accuracy. Their spells and equipment never registered anything at all.

The next night they moved out to the parade ground, forcing Twilight to observe through a tiny scrying pool hastily set up in one of the outbuildings. Fillydelphia Yards’ engineering corps and small complement of geomancers had churned up ten pits full of ordinary mud. They had then pulled up groundwater into three until the consistency was more similar to quickmud. Finally, they’d given each a light dusting of dry soil to make sure each pit looked basically identical from above. Once again, this had all been done out of sight of Twilight, Forward, and Luna, and the ponies who had done it were currently located in a completely different part of the complex. The records of their work had, once again, been slipped into a sealed envelope in Twilight’s hide-away. Memory spells wouldn’t be of much use in the outdoor environment with its numerous other ponies and miscellaneous natural phenomena, but Twilight had kept the thaumoluminescent paper bands.

“We can sense… nothing, here. There are no signs, of danger, or otherwise,” Luna said, after a long period of staring off into space.

“Umm… uhh… just try your best?” Forward March prompted.

Luna walked up to the edge of each pit in turn, from right to left. Then she turned around and went back the other way. Finally she returned to where she’d started and extended her left front hoof. “Here. Here. Here… and here.”

It was hard to see through the pool and in the dark, but Twilight thought the bands remained pure white. She had slipped one onto her horn and tested it by generating an extremely weak illumination spell before beginning the experiments, and that had caused it to immediately turn pitch black.

Next, she opened the envelope.

Luna had identified four pits when only three were dangerous. That, in and of itself, was discouraging. Now that she had the chart in front of her, the unicorn could see that Luna had in fact identified only one quickmud pit and three containing regular mud- no better than chance, and certainly nothing like her previous performance with the artifacts.

Twilight was surprised by how excited that made her.

They tried again the next night, with Luna scrying on the parade ground through a communication link similar to the one they’d set up to Ponyville, on the theory that her methods somehow relied on the pre-existing divination magic it provided. They employed single and multiple loci; fixed loci on poles and movable loci carried around by Academy staff; photographs, audio links, video links, and every combination thereof.

The whole time, Luna employed none of her own magic, performed no better than chance, and offered no explanation whatsoever as to why.

The medics in the Yard’s hospital wing finally saw fit to release Twilight from her horrible half-cart, and fitted her with a more manageable single-leg brace. Walking on it still hurt, more than she was willing to admit, but that was what the poppy tears were for.

On down the list they went.

The next night saw Forward and Luna moved back indoors, presented with an assembly of ordinary rocks. Some had been collected from Froggy Bottom Bog, others from various locations around Fillydelphia. Using magical scans, they had been dated according to the last time they had been exposed to direct sunlight for a significant period- some had been buried for a millennium or more, and some were more recent.

Luna not only identified the rocks from Froggy Bottom Bog under double-blind conditions without producing so much as a speck on her thaumoreactive bindings, but she sorted them from oldest to youngest.

The night after that, Twilight made use of the Yard’s workshop and had all of the samples ground down to identical spheres.

This time, Luna again performed no better than chance. Twilight found that fact incredibly fascinating.

Another night and another test saw Luna presented with closed boxes containing a fresh set of artifacts. Some of these were genuine, ancient Lunar inscriptions. Some were comparably ancient but not Lunar- a collection of early Minotaur and Griffish emblems sourced from the Royal Academy’s archives. Some were modern but in the Lunar style, helpfully provided by the introductory stonework and sculpture class at the Fillydelphia Institute of Art. Some were modern and genuinely Lunar, manufactured by the surviving artisans resident at the Yard using their preferred First Century techniques. A final group were etched with completely abstract designs by the Yard workshop.

Once again, it was up to Luna to identify the genuine article.

Once again, her performance gave every indication of picking boxes completely at random.

Luna had fallen out of the habit of saying much of anything during her tests, and Twilight had fallen out of the habit of paying much attention to her reactions when they weren’t an explicit part of the experimental protocol, but at the end of this most recent battery, when Forward March read off the results, she thought the Princess actually seemed confused.

The final test that Twilight had found the time and mental energy to dream up involved bones- specifically, some of Lunar soldiers, some from modern research cadavers, and some taken from First Century but non-Lunar digs.

Luna could identify the Lunar bones with perfect accuracy no matter how they were shifted or shuffled, as long as she could see them- the only thing Twilight couldn’t do was damage the remains, so that precluded grinding anything into identical unrecognizability as she’d done with the rocks. However, there was one other peculiarity that emerged, in test after test: Luna was, for the first time, consistently getting false positives on a small number of their samples. None of the bones for which she showed this behavior, a set of four, were modern in provenance, but they dated from the First Century up through the Sixth, and all of them had been confirmed to come from ponies with zero connection to any surviving Lunar movement.

Twilight found this of intense interest, since it was the first time they had witnessed Luna engage in any behavior that wasn’t either complete, inexplicable success or perfectly ordinary failure.

Then, by chance, she happened to encounter the medical officer who’d sourced the remains, over lunch in the service staff cafeteria. She asked him where, exactly, they had come from, since thanks to the double-blinding requirements of the tests she had deliberately avoided learning that information while they were running.

He’d told her that they’d had a difficult time finding suitable candidates. Most museums and private mortuaries had strict requirements for the exhumation and transport of equine remains, that a project to examine the behavior of an anachronistic Royal Sister did not meet. As such, he’d sourced the four unusual cadavers from Twilight’s own operation, by way of Spike- all of them were adventurers or treasure-hunters who’d been found in the course of the excavation of Froggy Bottom Bog.

(♫)

Twilight sat at one of the wooden mess tables across from Fluttershy, Applejack, and Spike. For her, now thoroughly adjusted to the Lunar schedule kept by the rest of the support staff, this counted as an early breakfast; for everyone else it was a late dinner.

“We’re heading back to the Midnight Sparkle era, I see…” Spike quipped as he sprinkled ground glass- his seasoning of choice- onto a bowl of mushroom stew. “Wait. Maybe she’s secretly a Lunarkin!”

Everypony laughed, except for Twilight. “Not today, Spike. Or… well… tonight. Whatever.”

“So, umm, how’s it all going?” the dragon asked, more evenly.

Twilight squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then opened them again. “It’s… weird. Every time we run something past Luna, she behaves as if she’s operating off of incredibly detailed memories. But every test I’ve tried to positively prove she’s operating off of memory comes up inconclusive at best and completely negative at worst! And what’s more, her ‘memory’ seems to extend out into at least the Sixth Century if not later, well after the point where she was banished! Or it’s just completely random and happens to be suggesting trends where there aren’t any, I don’t know.”

“I still don’t see what’s so inexplicable about this, though,” Spike countered. “I mean, a month ago we weren’t having any problem following a prophecy that predicted things a thousand years in the future. While you’ve been up here I’ve been reading up on conventional divination, and I’m pretty sure there’s spells that can duplicate each and every single one of Luna’s… signs.”

“Yeah, I’ve been reading up on that too,” said Twilight, “but those methods would all require Luna to be actively casting them, when we know she isn’t, and in any case most of them weren’t developed until centuries after she was banished.”

“Maybe it’s… innate?” the dragon suggested.

“Spike, magic like that isn’t something that just… happens to a pony. It’s something you study and practice, it only happens when you decide to do it, and it’s meant to make something specific, that you choose to happen, happen!” Twilight realized that she was standing up from her bench with her forelegs on the table, and quite a few of the Harbor staff were looking at her. She slipped back down, took a quick sip from her vial of poppy tears, and washed it down with a paper cup full of strong black coffee.

“Well, Luna’s… actually been really busy in between your experiments,” prompted Fluttershy after a long silence.

“I’m actually surprised by that,” said Twilight, “I just thought she went back home and did… I don’t know, Luna things in between the tests, actually.”

“Well Ah’m surprised you’ve been givin’ Luna any time between yer tests,” muttered Applejack.

“They live a block away from each other now and she still doesn’t have any idea what Luna’s doing.” Spike flung his arms out wide before an imaginary audience, “Twilight Sparkle, everypony!”

Twilight laughed along with the others this time, then looked around to make sure that the only slitted eyes currently focused on her were Spike’s. Then she leaned low across the table and whispered to Fluttershy, “Luna’s not been… bothering you, or pressuring you or anything anymore, right?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” the pegasus whispered back, “Actually, she’s been really polite.”

“Fluttershy found some kinda’ tracks out there in the bog,” Applejack explained, “Some kinda’ big animal with claws, looks like, but Ah couldn’t make much else outta’ ‘em. Luna sure does like ‘em, though. Keeps sayin’ we aughta’ follow ‘em.”

“That’s a little different from Luna’s usual M-O,” said Twilight. Usually, Luna seemed to produce her ‘advice’ apropos of nothing at all, not in response to any recognizable external stimuli. Her ‘signs’ were usually objects or activities that happened to be occurring around her, with no logical connection to what she was attempting to do. “We aren’t actually following them, are we?” Twilight asked Spike.

The dragon shook his head. “No, we’re still working on security around the sites we’ve already dug at, just like you told us.”

Applejack and Fluttershy both nodded. “Your pal’s been doin’ a pretty good job keepin everythin’ ship-shape while yer gone,” the farmer explained, “we ain’t had a lick a’ trouble.” The implication that trouble followed Twilight Sparkle could not have been clearer.

Spike took a long sip from his own coffee cup, so packed with saltpeter that it verged on the consistency of mud. “It’s nothing. Growing up with Midnight Sparkle’s pretty much convinced me that sleep is… pretty much optional.”

“Thanks, that… actually really means a lot to me.” Twilight floated her now-empty cup over to the nearest trash can, and spotted a piece of paper sticking out of the bin with a telltale abstract pattern. She extracted it, uncrumpled it, and spread it out on the table. It proved to be another pamphlet bearing the now-familiar insignia of the Society for Lunar-Equestrian Studies. A few penciled-in transliterations in Old Ponish suggested one of the genuine Lunars had made an attempt to comprehend it. The annotations ended after the first page, suggesting that attempt had not been successful.

The centerpiece of this particular publication was a grainy, low-contrast photograph of the broken pillar Twilight and her friends had discovered. The text alongside it claimed its inscriptions ‘accurately predicted’ both the fall of Timbucktu and the war with the Crystal Empire, seemingly completely unaware that both events had, in fact, happened decades beforethe pillar had ever been constructed. The ‘whole story’, the last few pages advertised, could be found in a groundbreaking new Society report available by mail for only fifty bits.

FIFTY BITS! What is this, Blitzfeed?

“It’s good to know at least some ponies- and dragons- haven’t completely lost their minds,” was all she said aloud.

“Can I… have that, actually?” Spike asked, “I’m going to tell Captain Marigold to start posting round-the-clock guards when we get back, and I’d like to show her that picture when I do.”

“Sure.” Twilight slipped it across the table to him; he grabbed hold of it, folded it neatly, and slipped it into the leather messenger bag slung over his shoulder.

“So… when do you think you’re going to be heading back to Ponyville?” asked Fluttershy.

“Well, first and foremost I’m waiting until my leg heals up and I can go back out into the field,” semi-consciously, Twilight shifted the offending limb from side to side. The medics had finally disassembled her brace a day ago, but the cast would remain for an indeterminate period. And, of course, it still hurt. “But other than that… I really don’t know. I’ve more or less eliminated every hypothesis I had about how Luna is doing her… seer thing, and I don’t really know where to go from here.”

“’Cept for one, looks like,” Applejack corrected, tapping at the now heavily-crumped piece of note paper upon which she’d written her original hypotheses.

7. Princess Luna remembers perfectly well everything she did in that valley, and is lying, Twilight read.

“Yeah… I guess.” It would certainly explain the fact that the only results to come out of Twilight’s experiments had been contradictory and frustrating. Natural phenomena didn’t anticipate the motives of an experimenter to alter their behavior, but intelligent beings- especially ponies like Luna, a seasoned guerilla commander- certainly could. And even the most powerful psychomancy currently available had a difficult time reliably determining when a pony -of her own free will and without any magic whatsoever- simply elected to say something different from what she understood to be the truth.

But as near as Twilight could determine, Luna had nothing to gain from a lie like this. She could’ve been fishing for sympathy, renown, or money, but she already had more of those things than kooks and bottom-feeders like the SLES could possibly offer her. Even disregarding the government funds currently being sent her way, Luna had returned to find herself creditor to a number of extremely old debts, as well as having free access to Celestia’s extensive personal fortune. More importantly, it was in Luna’s best interests politically for Twilight to find her journal- and to do so quickly. Did she not want to be Exarch? If so, Twilight found it hard to believe she couldn’t just say as much. The idea that Celestia would respond to Luna’s stepping down with anything other than absolute support strained credulity. Or, perhaps, Luna already knew that whatever was inside that book would absolutely not exonerate her, and was stalling for time. But time to do what?

“I really hope that last one isn’t the answer…” was all Twilight said aloud.

“We won’t know until we try it,” said Spike.

Twilight nodded, and policed her silverware and plate back into something resembling a portable arrangement. “I guess we won’t. How long do you think you can stay out here for?”

(♫)

“All right,” said Twilight, “Just try to relax, and make sure not to blink more than is strictly necessary.”

“Aye. That, We hath much practice in.”

They were back in the improvised psychomancy lab where they’d first run their memory tests, although Twilight had brought most of the instrumentation out into the same room that Luna was occupying. For this next round of experiments, the unicorn would need to do more than just observe.

The Princess lay on her haunches on a gurney in one corner, surrounded by spell tags and inscribed circles designed to pick up on the slightest hint of magical activity. In addition to the thaumoluminescent paper wrapped around her limbs, an enchanted leather-and-brass harness around her barrel would monitor pulse and respiration, and the assembly of crystal and fine gold wires held just past the length of her eyelashes would record pupillary movement and dilation. Not only was all of this being recorded on the paper-reel machine in the opposite corner, but Twilight had also ensorcelled the sensors into a feedback system linked to several psychically resonant crystals. Those crystals were designed to provide distracting random stimuli if Luna employed any of the mental processes generally associated with imagination- or lying. Nothing analyzed this way would be considered definitive if, for instance, Luna were to be charged with something in court, and in fact Twilight wasn’t entirely certain this exact combination of tests had ever been employed before, but she was convinced it would put an end to the question of Luna’s honesty one way or another.

“Do we have audio?” Twilight asked, then spotted Forward March motioning her over with one wing. She limped over to where Spike and the medic were fiddling with one of the crystal stands, a complicated affair of brass rods and rubber grippers sitting on a specially-leveled table. “What is it?”

“I… just really wish you’d give me a script or something to read off of,” Forward muttered, “and do this remotely like we did all the other tests. Even just having you in the room might be more distressing for Luna than you’d think…”

“I think Luna knows I’ve been watching her the whole time,” Twilight countered, also being careful to keep her voice low. “And, given what we’re trying to do… maybe a little distress might not be such a bad thing.”

Forward didn’t respond to that right away. She and Spike just shared a long, intense look that Twilight had a hard time reading anything into. Then they both nodded and Spike said, “All right. Okay. Let’s get this over with.”

“Good.” Twilight limped back into the center of the lab, stopping in one of the few regions of floor space not packed with chalk inscriptions or instruments. “So, if we’re finally set up and nopony else has any objections, we are going to proceed. Spike, start the recording.”

She grabbed a clipboard off of one of the nearby tables in her telekinesis, quickly reading through her own hornwriting: “Luna, I’m going to ask you a series of questions. I need you to do your best to answer simply, factually, and honestly. That includes telling me if you are confused or don’t know the correct answer.” After that, in Spike’s writing, the sentence You’re free to stop this test at any time, or refuse to answer any question, if it makes you feel uncomfortable or unsafe had been penciled in. Twilight skipped over it. “Do you understand?”

“Aye.”

Twilight flipped the page over. “What’s today’s date?”

“The eighteenth of Sun’s Height,” Luna answered immediately, then paused, “1098.”

“Do you remember working with a pony named Paper Clip?”

“Aye. He was the head of clerks in Our Night Court… while there still was a Night Court,” Luna answered. The continuously-scrolling line of ink indicating her aggregate stress level wobbled ever so slightly, then returned to its baseline.

“What was the last thing you did with him?” Twilight asked. Supposedly, Luna knew this information, but only secondhoof- she’d claimed to have no direct memory of the clerk’s fate.

The line oscillated again, slightly higher and for a slightly longer time, before once again returning to its neutral position. “I kicked him into a wall, and left him for dead.”

“What is your relationship to Princess Celestia?”

“She is my sister.” This time the stress monitor barely shifted, but the aggregate mental activity indicator crystals lit up like a Hearth’s Warming tree before dimming again.

“What is your name?”

If, in the worst case scenario, the Elements of Harmony had proven ineffective and Nightmare Moon had never been properly separated from Luna at all, Twilight was hoping that even such relatively simple questions might trigger a noticeable response. But, instead, the inked line shifted upward only very slightly before returning. “I am Luna, daughter of none, ward of Starswirl the Bearded.”

“Do you desire to be an Exarch in the Imperial Republic of Equestria?”

“Aye.”

“Have you ever killed another pony?”

“… Aye.” The monitor line ticked upward ever-so-slightly again before falling back to baseline. That was an encouraging indicator. It’d take a true sociopath to have no response whatsoever to a question like that.

That did it for the baseline questions. Twilight flipped another page over on her clipboard. “Recently, you communed with the wildlife in Froggy Bottom Bog. Can you tell me what you instructed those creatures to do?”

“I instructed them to seek out signs, symbols, and omens of the presence of artifacts of great meaning. Beasts are perhaps wiser than thou mayst believe.” Despite this being the longest continuous statement Luna had made all evening, none of the ink lines so much as drifted.

“How did you find the stone carved with the moon symbol, on the island in Sector K-7?”

“We saw signs in the circling of the birds and the rustling of the reeds.” Again, Luna’s answer was accompanied by no physiological response whatsoever.

“Do you remember placing that stone a thousand years ago?”

“Nay.” There was, once again, no response.

Twilight paused, and let the clipboard drift to one side, temporarily forgotten as she considered an unforeseen loophole in her questioning. “Do you remember anypony else placing the stone for you?”

“Nay.” Luna’s outward response -her posture and her tone of voice- seemed to be the same as it had been when she’d delivered her previous answer, but this time both the stress and mental activity lines described a few sharp waves on the paper. One of the amplification crystals pulsed with a brief surge of violet energy, and then faded again.

Twilight decided to probe further. “Is the pony who placed the stone for you still alive right now?” The unicorn had a pretty good answer to that question -none of the Lunar troops currently staying here had come forward- but was curious to see how Luna herself would react.

“We… I… I do not recall.” Just as Luna’s mouth opened, all of the indicator lines shifted farther from baseline than they ever had before. Twilight quietly thanked herself for positioning the readout where Luna couldn’t see it. This time, all of the crystals pulsed at once, and remained glowing faintly for a few seconds afterward.

The unicorn closed her eyes. Think, we were talking about Luna’s interactions with her officers just before she had her first… episode… “Luna, did General Silver Shade place that stone for you?”

“I do not recall.” There was another intense, prolonged upward movement in each of the stress lines, perhaps a full second before they returned to somewhere just above their previous values.

“Let’s go back and talk about the… umm… the archery contest.”

“I have already told thee everything I remember…” Luna sounded almost… pleading.

Twilight paced in a tight little circle in her narrow patch of free floor. Her hind leg was aching again, so she grabbed her bottle of poppy tears from the table and took a drink. “Let’s go through this step by step, okay? The sooner you answer these questions, the sooner everypony gets to go home. After that competition, what happened?”

“I recall… nothing, nothing after our last glide,” Luna was visibly breathing more heavily now, her gaze darting from Twilight to Spike and Forward March and back again; the instrument readouts shifted constantly, far above their baseline values.

The crystals pulsed in a slow, regular, steady pattern, and ever-so-faintly Twilight’s ears began to register a low buzz. She heard Spike whisper something to Forward March that sounded like “… crystals might be stimulating each other, I think we should move them apart.” She looked at the dragon and shook her head. Then she turned back to her subject.

“You have to remember. Luna, before you told me you remembered the score. You made four shots and Shade made ten, right?”

“We… I… but… I do not understand…” Luna stammered. Twilight watched, fascinated, as the readings climbed higher and higher. The hum was clearly audible now, the entire lab bathed in slowly pulsing purple light that grew a little brighter with each cycle.

“Twilight, I’m not gonna lie, this is givin’ me the creeps,” said Forward March, “we’d really better-”

“We do not… we cannot…”Suddenly, Luna’s head dropped forward and her eyes slid shut. For a moment Twilight wondered if the alicorn had passed out, but far from declining her mental and physical activity lines continued to climb until they bumped into the mechanical limits of the plotting machine.

Forward and Spike both sprang towards Luna, but Twilight gave them a quick telekinetic push back away, fearful that they might tread on something important. “Let her be. Luna, what happened after that last glide?”

“Our score was… tallied up… and we landed…” Luna muttered, in between gasping breaths, “I bade Silver Shade to walk with me, out to the… edge of the campsite… I called out to the sentry and bade him to give us our leave… and asked General Shade of our plans to liberate Everfree City…” the alicorn paused, then continued all at once, “Shade told me she feared the bloodshed that would follow should we destroy the Council Hall in the morning, when it was most occupied. But that was the only time we could be sure that Celestia would be attending…”

The pace of Luna’s breathing increased, putting her on the verge of hyperventilating, and every so often she made odd little whimpering noises. Her eyes remained closed, but Twilight could see intense movement beneath the lids. The hum of the crystals had increased in pitch, becoming a strange sort of buzzing whine that Twilight could feel tickling at the back of her skull.

“Twilight, this is… this is messed-up…” Spike said, as he made to climb directly over the table holding the feedback system towards Luna and herself.

The unicorn raised her forehoof in front of his snout. “Wait!” She grabbed a pad of note paper and began scribbling down everything she’d just heard Luna say, but the alicorn wasn’t finished:

“Shade… Shade wished to move against Celestia later, once we held the City, but she… she doth not understand… every night spent out here, hiding like a feral beast from Celestia’s armies, watching her move the Sun and our Moon… living in her shadow just as before… is an insult that We cannot abide…”

“Twilight, stop, let her go…” Forward March practically growled.

“How? I’m not restraining her, she’s doing that on her own…”

“Celestia has already taken so much from us, she doth not understand that Celestia must die… Celestia must die soon… and how dare Silver Shade fail to comprehend this… to comprehend our struggles and pain…”

“Twilight…” Spike hissed, barely audible over the buzzing of the crystals.

“Let her talk…” The unicorn was writing as quickly as she could, struggling to record both the wild fluctuations of their instruments and Luna’s continued rambling.

“Twilight, stop!” Forward barked. Twilight ignored her.

“Shade… wishes to leave, and speak again come morning… presumptuous…” Luna muttered, tears leaking out from between her tightly-closed eyelids, “She dares to exceed me in our contest, and then to dictate when we will speak… dictate to me, the Princess of the Eternal Night! She is afraid, I can see the terror on her face, she says she will fetch one of the healers and moves to go, as though there is something wrong with me… the coward… the blackguard… traitor… she turns to treason against the Moon rather than face Our pain… I strike out with my hoof… her helmet crumples and her jaw with it, the bones in her neck give way-”

“Twilight THAT’S ENOUGH!” Forward March shouted. She burst through the unicorn’s telekinetic field, swept out a wing, and knocked one of the feedback crystals clean out of its mounting.

(♫)

There was a deafening bang as the crystal hit the floor and shattered in a burst of luminescent smoke, reduced to fifty thousand bits’ worth of finely-calibrated shards. Twilight reeled backwards, landed awkwardly on her cast-wrapped leg, and ended up flat on her belly. Luna jumped as though kicked in the barrel, ripping the tracking rig and several of the thaumoluminscent bands apart as her wings suddenly unfolded, then slumped back down, openly sobbing. “Silver Shade… oh, brave Silver Shade, what hath become of thee…”

The pegasus medic sprang forward, half-flying and half-galloping, scuffing several of the chalk inscriptions in her path, and stopped in front of Luna’s prone form, cradling the Princess’s head in her forehooves. “It’s OK, I’ve got you, we’re done… are you all right? Don’t try to speak, just nod your head if you can hear me…”

Luna did nod, and opened her eyes, tracking Forward’s outstretched wing as the pegasus moved it from side to side. She shook her head as though clearing it and began to climb back onto all-fours. Spike slipped over to the far wall and rapped on it twice, and immediately two more Royal Guard medics with full packs stepped through the lab door. They took up positions beside Princess Luna and carefully escorted her back out into the hallway.

Twilight hadn’t even known they’d been waiting. That sort of thing was supposed to be included in the written experimental protocol.

Next, Forward March loped over to the prone unicorn and extended a forehoof. Twilight grabbed ahold of it and was hauled roughly to her feet, and afterward Forward did not let go. “What in Taratus do you think you were doing?” the Major demanded, her muzzle centimeters from Twilight’s own.

Twilight looked down to where her notes had been scattered over the floor. Most of them were barely-coherent scribbles. “I… I don’t know. I’m sorry, I guess I wasn’t… I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

“I can tell,” Spike snapped, then continued with a normalcy that almost sounded convincing, “If anypony needs me, I’ll be cleaning up the instrument room.” He promptly disappeared into the darkened back half of the lab, even though they’d already moved all of the equipment they’d needed out into the front.

Forward March just sat down on the floor and shook her head. “Twilight, I never had much patience for all this talk about super-ids and displaced actualization something-or-others and Chrysalis complexes and psy-cho-dy-namic what-have-you. These shrinks, they ask you to tell ‘em your whole life story and then they come up with some convoluted explanation that only ever fits once, for you, and never gets brought up again. I’m a medic. I look for symptoms. Show me heatstroke, show me dourine, show me a sword in your barrel, show me shell shock, and I can have you fixed up in short order, because those are all problems that a pony can recognize. And what just happened to Princess Luna? That wasn’t anything strange and… and otherworldly. I know shell shock, and that was shell shock. What you just did… I wouldn’t wish on Discord himself, going through that.”

“Okay, so, if this is a posttraumatic condition, how come our original scans didn’t pick up any incised memories?” Twilight snapped.

“Damned if I know. But I’ll believe one of my patients over some fancy psychoscope any day.”

“Yeah, you and everypony else…” Twilight muttered, and turned away. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about any of this?”

“Yeah, actually. In fact, it bugs the living daylights out of me! But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna start… interrogating a deeply traumatized pony just for answers.”

“I just asked her a few questions-”

“Yeah, and that… ghost or spirit or whatever it was just tapped you on the leg.” Forward laughed, bitterly. “I’m done. We’re done. No more tests, and I’m willing to go straight to Celestia to make sure it stays that way- if that means I have to fly out to Minos all by myself.”

Twilight’s mouth opened, but she herself had no idea what she was going to say. Eventually, she settled on “I guess we’ll just have to live forever in uncertainty, then,” which certainly sounded final, even if she wasn’t quite sure what exactly it referred to in this context. She wound her way through the now somewhat disrupted tables full of equipment to the door, and shouldered past the clusters of gawking Naval Yard staff in the corridor beyond.

As she made her slow and unsteady way across the green outside, Twilight realized that both Spike and Forward March were following her at a respectful distance. She assumed they’d assumed she wouldn’t notice, although obviously their attempts to be covert had been unsuccessful. In the big, open parade ground, there weren’t many places for them to hide. Fluttershy and Applejack had probably already taken one of the earlier trains back to Ponyville, and Luna, mercifully, was still nowhere to be found.

Twilight spotted a bench up ahead, looking out over the darkened harbor, and sat down. For a long time, nothing happened. Then her ears caught the faint sound of clawed feet on the grass behind her.

“Look. I’ll admit it. I’ve been… extremely stupid tonight, and caused Luna a lot of pain without needing to,” the unicorn said. “If I ever propose anything like that again, anything that makes the ponies I’m working on uncomfortable or that makes you uncomfortable, or… anything, really, I want you to come out and tell me right away, all right? I promise the next time, I’ll listen.”

Very quietly, Spike slipped onto the bench beside her, drumming his clawed fingers against the wooden surface. “Okay. Yeah, all right. I… didn’t think this was going to happen either, and I can understand why you were a little slow to react, I guess. I should’ve done something too. It’s late… or, I guess, early, and that stupid thing on your leg can’t be fun to walk around on. How about this- I’ll clean up things over here, and… I’ll also tell Luna everything you just said. The six AM train to Ponyville leaves in half an hour. Why don’t you go ahead and take it, spend a day or two away from… this mess. I think it’ll do you good.”

Twilight’s entire body suddenly felt immensely heavy, and it was only then that she realized she had slept perhaps six hours out of the last forty-eight. “… Okay.”

She didn’t remember stopping by the Yard infirmary to have her cast removed, only that she’d gotten off the bench with it on, and boarded the train with it gone and with a fresh flask of poppy tears in her saddlebag. She sat down and extricated her much-abused notebook, intending to massage her fragmentary records of Luna’s most recent outburst into something remotely comprehensible… and then was jolted awake by the insistent prodding of an earth pony mare in a conductor’s uniform.

“Miss? Miss? I think this’d be your stop.”

It was, indeed, her stop. Twilight dragged herself off the platform and down the road to the Golden Oaks. Captain Marigold had left a note on the table in the main room, informing her that the communication link to Fillydelphia had finally faded away. As she slowly climbed the stairs into the loft, shucked off her saddlebags, and collapsed into bed, Twilight breathed a quiet sigh of relief that there would be no more interference when she finally mapped the pillars to the sigils and, maybe, hopefully revealed where Luna had been hiding all those years ago. She’d decided she much preferred archaeology when the ponies involved were not currently alive and could not talk back.

Leap of Faith

(♫)

“Twilight?”

“Urrrhg.” Dimly aware of the sunlight burning against her closed eyelids, the unicorn fished blindly with her telekinesis for the drapes she’d installed over the loft window.

“Twilight, I really wish I didn’t have to wake you up…” Spike’s voice rasped through her brain like sandpaper.

“Ah. Uhmm. Fine. Fine.” She rolled over and opened her eyes to see the dragon standing beside her bed, nervously twisting his claws together. “Whatimeizzit?”

“It’s four in the afternoon. I was going to just let you sleep all the way through the night, but… we’ve got… kind of a problem, out at the Bog.”

Twilight dragged herself out from under her blanket and landed unsteadily on her feet, floating the bottle of painkillers off of her nightstand more by reflex than anything else. “Okay. Okay. Crisis. Right. Just… let me… umm… shower, first. And maybe get another coffee.”

As they walked down the road to Froggy Bottom Bog, the first thing Twilight noticed was the crowd. It was large by Ponyville standards, perhaps a hundred townsponies gathered in a rough U-shape around something Twilight couldn’t see, and strangely quiet. Then as she and Spike drew closer, cresting a small hill, the mysterious focus became visible. Princess Luna stood, dressed in her full regalia, before a line of five ghostly Lunar soldiers in various types of poor condition- Twilight even recognized the distinctive patchy coat and halberd of the dourine-crippled sentry among them. All of them were clearly aware of Luna, and tracked her movements, but made no aggressive actions either towards her or to the crowd around her. As Twilight watched incredulously, Luna knelt before the closest ghost and spoke out loud. “Private Polestar. Thou hast served the Lunar cause well and faithfully. With the blessing of the Moon I now release thee from thine oath. Go freely now, and seek thine fortune where thou wilst.” The Princess lowered her head until her horn was nearly inside of the ghost’s skull, heedless of the frost that was already beginning to form on its surface, then repeated the same almost-contact with the leading feathers of one wing and with her right forehoof.

Amazingly, the ghost’s appearance began to change, its curved horn flexing back to a more ordinary shape, slit pupils expanding into round ones, and gray coat taking on a bright red-orange color; even as it became less and less substantial and finally faded away completely. There wasn’t even a trace of ectoplasm left.

As Luna moved on down the line, Twilight scanned the crowd in more detail, and to her chagrin spotted the golden reflections of Royal Guard armor in more than a few places. One of those sets of armor belonged to an ocher pegasus with medic’s markings- Major Forward March.

Twilight slipped along the outer edge of the crowd, Spike loping along behind her, until she was within speaking range of the medic. “Forward, what in Tartarus is- I mean, I said we could stop testing Luna, I don’t know why you’d have her doing… whatever this is. She could get seriously hurt out there!”

Forward stepped back away from the rest of the crowd. “Actually, this was Luna’s idea. We’ve got Guards watching the crowd and watching the ghosts in case anything dangerous does happen, but I don’t think it will.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “You realize Luna’s not anypony’s prisoner, right? She can go where she wants, when she wants, as long as she’s not breaking any laws, just like you or me. And I don’t see any reason for her not to come out here, specifically. In fact, I figure the change of scenery’d probably do her some good.”

For the second time in as many days, Twilight wanted to reply but had no idea what to say. Eventually, she backed off and left Major Forward to her own devices- whatever those devices might have been. She scanned the crowd again, this time paying more attention to specific ponies she recognized from around the village, and found alongside them a suspicious number of unfamiliar faces- how many of whom were honest tourists and how many might’ve been mentally drafting sensationalist headlines or waiting for the right moment to pull out a camera, it was impossible to say. More alarmingly, although she was able to locate Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and several of the lower-ranking members of Marigold’s company in and among the crowd; Applejack, Fluttershy, and the Captain herself were nowhere to be found.

She slipped her way through to the front, where Pinkie Pie was located. “Pinkie, what’s going on?”

“What does it look like is going on? Luna’s talking the ghosts into dying for us so we don’t have to deal with them anymore.”

Twilight shook her head, feeling another headache start to build. “Fine. Okay. They aren’t… really my problem anymore. But where’s Applejack? Where’s Fluttershy? Where are the rest of the Guards?”

“They went off to follow those tracks.”

“The tracks that Luna kept saying were important?” With each word, the pain behind Twilight’s eyeballs kicked up slightly in intensity.

“No, the tracks that nopony ever noticed or cared about before now, but that I still figured you would know about.”

The unicorn squeezed her eyes shut, and took another long drink from her bottle of analgesic potion. “Did they at least say when they’d be back?”

The baker cocked her head like a particularly fuzzy bird. “About… an hour ago?”

Twilight’s mind quickly filled with visions of cragadiles, and ghosts, and reporters where reporters had absolutely no business being, and whatever had made that big scrape in the mud on Island E-2. “Pinkie, Spike, can you come with me back to the Station?” she asked, “I think this is a job for a full-on search party. And the Lapwing.”

“Yeah, that’s totally them,” Palisade told Twilight through the audio spell in her helmet. “Still got nothin’ on instruments, but I can see ‘em clear as day, ten o’clock, about…. a hundred-and-fifty meters away.” The Lapwing banked hard to port, giving Twilight a good clear view through the open bay door of Applejack, Fluttershy, and four Royal Guards. From this height they looked more like action figures than real, live ponies, although the illusion disappeared a moment later when they looked up and started to wave. Twilight couldn’t pick them out on the chromospectrograph in front of her, but it was possible the equipment had simply drifted out of attunement over the last few weeks. They had, of course, set off immediately, and bypassed some of the usual technical checks.

“Is there any place nearby you can land us?” Spike asked.

“I don’t think that’d be a good idea,” answered Palisade, “This whole place looks waaay too muddy. But I can go down and hover, and drop everypony off.”

Twilight stood up from the crate she’d been sitting on and tried to negotiate the shifting deck. “Make it s- gaah!” A sharp jolt of pain informed her that she’d twisted her left hind leg between two other crates. She took another swig from her bottle of painkiller, and settled for “Yeah. Okay. Please do that.”

“Twilight, it’s only been half an hour!” Spike admonished.

“Yeah, well, my leg still hurts!”

“It shouldn’t,” the dragon continued, more gently, “the cast’s off, and the doctor said the tissue damage is all gone…”

Twilight scampered back to her seat after that as the Lapwing pulled into a tight, descending spiral. When it stopped, they were hovering about a foot above the surface of the water- which was clear enough for reasonably solid ground to be visible a few centimeters below that.

Spike and Pinkie Pie both leaped off of the deck and began to wade their way towards their wayward companions without so much as a how-do-you-do. Twilight stepped down with a good bit more caution, surprised that she was able to negotiate the drop successfully, readjusted her helmet, and followed along a few meters behind.

“Fluttershy! You’re okay!” Spike called out as soon as he was within easy speaking distance of the pegasus.

“Of course!”

“What else would we be?” Applejack asked.

“I’m so glad everything’s all right!” Pinkie Pie cut in.

Behind them, the Lapwing’s engines buzzed and the craft climbed back up to a somewhat more reasonable altitude.

Catching sight of Twilight, Captain Marigold pulled off a quick -and rather muddy- salute. “I… wasn’t expecting an Academy visit all the way out here,” she said, “I hope you weren’t also expecting us to’ve found anything yet, because we haven’t. Sun’s going down, so we were just about to head back anyway.”

“No no no,” the unicorn shook her head, “I was just… a little concerned.”

Applejack’s ears pivoted forward. “About what?”

“Mostly that you didn’t tell us where you were going,” Spike explained, “and somepony out here is going around grabbing photos of things they really shouldn’t be.”

“Well, you did tell me,” Pinkie Pie cut in, “But I’m not very important, so it doesn’t really count.”

“It’s…well, nopony here is doing anything like that,” Fluttershy explained.

“Of course not,” continued Twilight, “But I was worried you might run into the ponies who are responsible, and then things might get nasty, and it’d be one more headache for everypony to deal with.”

“I am… entirely convinced thou wilt find naught but what thou seekest on this journey,” Princess Luna interjected, over Twilight’s helmet.

Even out here she won’t leave me alone! Twilight thought to herself, but all she said was, “Well, Your Grace, I’m just making sure.”

“And I’m pretty sure my girls can handle anything this swamp has to throw at us,” Captain Marigold added.

“Funny you should, uhh, mention that,” Palisade spoke over their helmets a moment later, “Because I just saw something really big moving through the deeper water towards your position.”

Almost by reflex, Twilight and the others slipped behind Marigold and her three Guards, who drew their weapons and fell into position flank-to-flank.

In the treeline some ways in front of them, something very large and very heavy creaked.

“Lapwing, can you see what it is?” Twilight asked. She was fairly certain she could see the tops of the trees in front of her shift and rustle. She was very certain she could hear several of them snap.

“Uhhh, negative, ma’am. It’s not showing up on instruments, it’s just a big blob down in the deep water shifting plants around. Might just be a swell or something, I don’t know…”

Twilight could see it up close now. She was fairly certain they all could. Entire trees shifted as it moved- whatever it was, it had to be bigger than the entire submerged hillock they were standing on.

“Ah got a bad feelin’ ‘bout this…” Applejack muttered.

“Oooh, wow, you think?” Pinkie pie asked.

“We… I… I do not understand…” Twilight heard Luna muttering, “This was… not what the tracks foretold…”

“Sorry,” she whispered back, packing as much bitter sarcasm as she could manage into her voice, “I know it’s not nice to gloat, but…”

Directly in front of them, the entire pool of deeper water seemed to explode upward all at once.

Twilight reeled backward, catching only the vaguest impression of flabby, scaly, dull-orange hide through the clouds of sunlit spray. An ear-splitting, oddly harmonious roar shook the mud beneath her hooves, and she struggled to maintain her footing.

Little by little, the cloud sank back downward. Above it bobbed a flat, triangular head with sickly luminescent green eyes and a mouth filled with triangular, razor-sharp, shark-like teeth- and another, and another, and another, all of them panting hot breath that reeked of stagnant water and putrefying flesh. Each was supported atop a thick, serpentine neck easily twenty meters in length, and all of those in turn fused together into a single, titanic blob of a body that disappeared below the waterline.

“So that’s what made those tracks…” Fluttershy whispered.

Captain Marigold was already hauling herself up onto two legs in a perfectly executed pivot. “Run! Get to higher ground!”

(♫)

They ran, Guards and civilians alike, Twilight’s position at the rear of the group suddenly transmuted into the lead. They had made their way to the very edge of the bog without realizing it, and perhaps a hundred meters up ahead the seemingly endless water lapped at the shores of a collection of sharp, gray, rocky hills. She pointed herself towards them and did not look back.

“Hey, Ah -hff- thought the Royal Guard never backed down -hff!- from a fight!” Applejack called, somewhere behind her.

“Yeah, well, look at it, it’s ruttin’ huge!” Corporal Subtle Spark countered.

Twilight risked slowing down ever so slightly and looking back over her shoulder. The hydra had, if anything, closed some of the distance to them. How can something so big move so fast? She concentrated, snapped the incantation to the most powerful direct-force spell she knew, and unloaded five bolts of sizzling magenta energy over Applejack and Pinkie Pie’s heads, directly into the creature’s towering bulk. Four hit their target and blasted smoking, sizzling, bloody craters in its hide. It howled in fury and pain but kept right on coming, the wounds already beginning to seal themselves closed.

“I… don’t think I can talk this one down…” said Fluttershy.

“Yeah, and blades ‘n bolts aren’t gonna do much more than piss it off!” added Marigold.

“Take care…” Luna cut in over her helmet, infuriatingly calm.

Twilight didn’t have the breath to reply. All of her energy was focused on keeping her hooves beating against the slippery marsh bottom, shoving herself through the ankle-high water. Little by little, the others were all pulling ahead of her.

“Y’know, this is usually the part where we call in our air support!” shouted Sergeant Chamomile.

“Yeah, to do what?!” snapped Leafspring, over Twilight’s helmet “In case you didn’t notice, somepony took all our guns outta the gunboat!”

“Don’t worry, we gotcha!” shouted Palisade. With a roar of propellers the Lapwing shot overhead, then pulled up remarkably quickly over the hill and began to descend. “Everypony, up here, double time!”

When Twilight’s hooves met dry rock, the others were already climbing into the troop bay- Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Chamomile, Marigold, Spark, Parhelion, and… “Wait!” she called out, “Where’s Spike?!”

“Here, I’m over here, I’m stuck in a Sun-damned tree!” she heard the dragon call out, from a dense thicket perhaps ten meters to her right, followed by a small bloom of lime-green fire.

“Hang on, I’m coming!” Twilight skidded to a halt half a body-length from the bay doors and wheeled herself around, dashing back towards the trees with whatever desperate energy was left in her scrawny frame.

“Whatever yer gonna do, make it quick! That thing’s darn near on top of us!” Applejack shouted.

Twilight skidded to a halt just at the border of the grove where she’d seen Spike’s signal, and hurriedly scanned for any trace of purple scales. She caught just a glimpse of a spade-tipped tail as the trees around her began to shake, grabbed a hold of it in her telekinesis, and yanked. Spike yelped and shot towards her in a cloud of leaf litter and severed vines, but she was already turned back around and heading the other way.

“Sorta’ wishin’ we had the rest of the company to back us up,” Private Parhelion muttered through her helmet.

Twilight pulled up short. The hydra now stood directly between her and the Lapwing, supporting itself on dry land atop four thick, stumpy, elephantine legs.

“Really wishin’ we had the rest of the company!” Shouted Parhelion.

“Think… what would Rainbow Dash do…” Twilight muttered, as multiple sets of sickly green eyes tilted downward to focus on her. “Spike?”

“Yeah?”

“Hang on.”

“I don’t really have much of a choice…” the dragon shouted, but Twilight was already moving, charging right towards the creature in front of her. One serpentine head dove down and snapped at nothing but gravel, then another followed it, jaws almost closing around the tip of Twilight’s horn- and that’s when both she and the dragon in her telekinesis winked out of existence in a flash of magenta.

When they reappeared behind the beast, just to one side of its surprisingly long, saurian tail, they kept right on going. Unable to turn nearly as quickly the hydra stumbled and slid, flipping half-over on the gravel beach, and then armored hooves were wrapping around Twilight’s shoulders and back, hauling her into the Lapwing’s troop bay while Spike floated along near her head.

“That’s everypony!” Captain Marigold slammed a hoof twice into the door to the pilot’s compartment, “Take off, take off!”

They began to rise, engines humming, but the hydra looked to be nearly on top of them already. The only thing visible through the port-side hatch was a wall of scaly flesh, and the air reeked of swamp life and decay.

There was an almighty crash of metal as something large and heavy slammed into them from port, just aft of the troop bay, and to Twilight’s horror she thought she could see, just for a moment, a double row of triangular teeth sticking sideways through the hull. Their craft bounced and shuddered, engines screeching in a decidedly unhealthy fashion as something else hit them further back. Palisade and Leafspring kept up a constant stream of profanity, some of which Twilight didn’t even recognize, as the entire compartment shook and rattled and squealed. Little by little, the floor Twilight was lying on began to tilt to port, passing thirty degrees, then forty-five and pushing up against sixty. Before long there was simply no purchase for her scrambling hooves, and the fabric straps on the roof of the compartment already much too far away to do her any good.

Twilight felt herself fall back out of the open bay door, alongside the others and quite a lot of unsecured instrumentation. Hitting the gravel beach didn’t hurt nearly as intensely as she’d expected so much as it simply made everything go all blurry and muffled for a few seconds, and when she regained her senses she realized Pinkie Pie was half-shoving-half-rolling her further up the beach. Behind and above her, the Lapwing bounced and jostled, struggling in the vice-like grip of two of the hydra’s heads. Another head made a grasp for the prone Private Parhelion, who barely rolled out of the way in time to avoid being bitten in half. The last jerked backwards from Marigold’s position, roaring in fury, a bloody line sliced across its snout.

“Up! Up! We gotta move up!” the Captain shouted.

Twilight was already on her hooves and backpedaling, heading for the top of the hill, but neither she nor any of the others were willing to turn away completely from the struggling Lapwing.

“Get outta here, we can -gah- take care of ourselves!” Palisade called, “Awww, sweet Harmony that reeks!”

“C’mon, you big dumb lizard-squid,” shouted Sergeant Leafspring as the ground party began scaling the hill, “You want your dinner? I got’cher dinner right here!” The Lapwing’s port engine nacelle began to whine at an ever-higher pitch, propeller spinning faster and faster just past the hydra’s second set of jaws. Then it burst in a cloud of flame, shrapnel, and magical arcing, sending the Lapwing lurching in one direction and the hydra reeling in the other, minus most of the scales on two of its heads and more than a few teeth. “Yeah, you like that?!”

The Lapwing drifted off, smoking and listing but still gaining altitude. The hydra stumbled again, bellowed… and charged straight for the ground party.

(♫)

Twilight struggled to haul herself up the rocky hillside, practically choking on the creature’s noxious breath. It seemed to be deliberately exhaling towards them, and Twilight fancied that she could see the result as a wavy, faintly greenish miasma that coiled up in her lungs and stung at her eyes. The others ahead of her were clearly flagging; they stumbled and slipped and gasped for air.

“If I can’t see, then it can’t see,” Twilight muttered, then snapped out another incantation. “Everypony? Duck!” This time, she fired only a single bolt, at an angle much higher than any of the hydra’s heads. All eight of its sickly green eyes tracked the glowing orb’s ascent- and Twilight made sure to look away and cover her eyes with her foreleg, right before it burst into a disc of deafening noise and brilliant, searing magenta light.

Once again the creature roared, and stumbled backward, and once again Twilight made good use of that time to run. The gray stone beneath her hooves grew steeper and more treacherous, and quickly her efforts to put as much distance as possible between herself and the hydra led to her path bending sideways back over the swamp. She caught up to the others at a deep furrow in the hillside -more of a cliffside now, really- spanned by a few precarious rocky shelves.

Applejack waved a hoof across to what appeared to be a relatively level path jutting out from the cliffs on the other side. “Ah don’t think that overgrown varmint’s gonna be able to get across here!”

“I don’t know if we can get across it!” Pinkie Pie added.

“I’m the lightest! I’ll go first!” Spike called out, already winding his way across the protruding shelves. “It’s stable, or… umm, I think it’s stable…”

Twilight looked back over her shoulder, just in time to see the first of the hydra’s heads snake around the curve of the hill, hissing and spitting. “Well it’s not like we have much choice!”

“It can climb, too?” Subtle Spark demanded, “This just isn’t ruttin’ fair!” He snapped off a rapid crossbow shot that sent one head jerking back for cover with blood trickling from its right eye. Then he followed after Spike, leaping from one outcropping to the next with surprising dexterity.

“Go on, civilians first!” shouted Marigold around the sword in her mouth, as she stepped back down the trail alongside Parhelion and Chamomile. “We’ll hold it off!”

“You don’t have to tell me twice!” Pinkie Pie dashed across the near-vertical side of the mountain, no more than two hooves ever making contact with the cliff face at a time. Applejack followed after her by the same route Spark had taken- and then wound up leaping the rest of the way all at once when one of the outcroppings halfway across gave way under her slightly heavier frame. Twilight watched, horrified, as her trajectory bent inexorably downward; the farmer slammed chest-first into the rock and yelped in pain, her fall only arrested when Subtle Spark grabbed hold of her forehooves and hauled her back onto firm ground.

An orange triangular head swung around the hillside. Parhelion and Marigold both lashed out with their blades, carving deep furrows in its scaly hide, but then stumbled backwards as it struck towards them like an oversized snake.

“Okay!” barked Sergeant Chamomile, “Looks like we’re gonna have to fly the rest of the way!” He immediately threaded his hooves through the straps atop Parhelion’s armor and lifted her off the ground, heading for the far side of the cliff.

“Oh dear, I don’t know if I can carry another pony…” Fluttershy stammered.

“It doesn’t matter, just go!” shouted Marigold around the blade in her mouth.

“But what about Twilight?” the pegasus asked.

“I’m fine, I’ll be right behind you!” Twilight spotted the motion of another head just as it dived towards Marigold, mouth wide open. She concentrated and fired a single beam of force that drilled directly into the hydra’s upper palate- it lurched back again and roared, but Twilight had been expecting that spell to easily penetrate all the way into its skull. Something wasn’t right.

She spared just a moment to watch Chamomile more or less throw Parhelion onto the far side of the cliff, before diving back again to grab hold of Marigold. Behind them, the entire body of the hydra lurched into view, clinging to the diagonal side of the mountain and bracing itself against the slightly flatter path below. It moved slowly and deliberately like a spider, and Twilight wondered if that was because it realized they had no place left to run.

“Okay! That’s everypony!” Twilight shouted, then channeled her dwindling magical reserves into one final teleportation spell. She disappeared in a flash of magenta-

-found herself floating in a cold, airless, interstitial darkness shot through with millions of tiny streaking stars-

-and rematerialized perhaps a few centimeters further along the path.

“Wait, no, that doesn’t make any sense!” she snapped, “the only time something’s interfered with a teleport like that was…” Was when Nightmare Moon wanted to keep me somewhere…

“Twilight Sparkle…” Luna whispered in her helmet.

“Luna, I’m busy!” Twilight screamed aloud, weeks of bottled-up frustration and more than a little suspicion powering her voice. “We are all busy trying not to die! So unless you want to teleport over here and kill this thing yourself, kindly rut off!”

“Hold on, just hold on!” shouted Chamomile, tossing Marigold onto the far ledge and wheeling back around. He dived for Twilight- and the hydra slammed itself hard into the side of the cliff, shaking loose more rocky debris directly over their position. Chamomile snapped out his wings, braking hard as he was pelted with rocks and gravel, and then cried out when a particularly heavy piece of debris landed squarely on his back. He wheeled around in an unsteady glide and landed back on the far ledge, skidding along on his barrel for a good half-a-meter, cursing the whole time.

“Putting those four brains to use, I see!” said Pinkie Pie.

“Pinkie, not now!” Applejack yelled.

“Actually,” Fluttershy muttered as she helped Chamomile scramble to his hooves, “It’s brain is in that hump on its back…”

“Twilight Sparkle,” Luna whispered again, “Thou must jump the chasm.”

“Have you completely lost your mind?” Twilight snapped, “It’s way too far!” Applejack had barely made that jump, and even if her rear leg wasn’t currently about to buckle underneath her, Twilight Sparkle was no Applejack.

She felt Parhelion and Subtle Spark try to lift her telekinetically, but the familiar slippery-tingly sensation seemed distant and muted. She rose perhaps a centimeter off the ground and then dropped back again, leaving the other unicorns to back away, confused.

Every few heartbeats, she also felt another of the hydra’s slow, deliberate steps, each one sending more and more debris rattling down the slope.

“Twilight Sparkle,” Luna continued, a sense of genuine pleading entering her voice for the very first time. “Even if thou hast never believed me before, thou must believe me now! Over that gap… I see only thine landing safely. Everywhere else… only death awaits thee.”

Twilight hauled herself over to the very edge of the crevice, and looked down to find only sharp rocks and murky water. Even if by some miracle she managed to survive the impact with her mobility intact, she doubted she could outswim the hydra in the open swamp. It could simply decide to let itself slide downhill after her.

“Twilight,” Luna was practically begging now, “Thou must!”

One of the creature’s heads lashed forward, and at full extension its jaws snapped shut just a meter from Twilight’s face. The stench was overpowering, and she backed up as close to the ledge as she dared. “I… Luna, I can’t!”

“Twilight…”

Seemingly frustrated, the hydra lurched forward again- and the cliffside began to crack and shift beneath its stupendous weight. Twilight watched in mute horror as a fissure running radially past the section she was clinging to widened, the entire end of the trail beginning to cleave away. She wouldn’t have to jump to her death anymore- even if she stayed right where she was, the lateral motion of the rock would smash her against the far side with enough force to grind her bones into slurry.

“Twilight! I beseech thee! Please, jump now!”

Twilight took one last breath, whispered a quick prayer to whatever forces might be listening, and jumped.

There was a long moment of almost photographic clarity as water and jagged rocks drifted past beneath her, her body hurled far forward by the momentum of the tilting cliffside in a manner not unlike the lever of a sideways catapult. The unforgiving stone on the far side rushed towards her, her friends standing above it, horrified… and then she landed, in the dark, on something hard and level.

(♫)

She felt herself bounce and skid- against horizontal stone. She smelled rocky dust, and felt blood already welling from great patches along her flank and shoulder. She struggled to her hooves over the course of perhaps thirty seconds, listening to the sounds of the rockslide continuing behind her. She could also hear the others calling out above her, and hauled herself up to the entrance of the… cave? she had landed inside. “I’m okay, everypony, I’m okay!” It hurt to yell, but she did so anyway.

At the bottom of the now substantially-realigned cliff face, she watched the hydra burst upwards out of a pile of debris with an ear-splitting roar, charge up the mountainside- and then slide back down again in a cloud of dust and stone fragments as the loose rock shifted. It kicked up another enormous plume of spray as it hit the water beneath, bellowed once, and then lay still.

“Is it dead?” Asked Pinkie Pie up above.

With an almost surreal deliberateness, the hydra flexed, shifted, and rolled its massive bulk back over upright. It pawed at the cliff face a few times, failing to acquire any purchase, and then roared once again.

“All right, guess not!”

To Twilight’s untrained eye, it didn’t look like the hydra had much of a chance of climbing up to within neck’s reach of her cave, nor did she think any of its heads would be able to fit through the opening, but… “Girls?” she called out, “I’m gonna go a little deeper into this cave, just to be safe.”

“Uhhh, all right?” Marigold called back, “we already can’t see you, so… I guess it’s up to you, sir. We’ll just… sit tight up here, I guess?”

Twilight was already inching her way deeper into the cavern. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, and as more and more of the interior became visible she gasped out loud. There was a worked stone pillar sitting in the center of the cavern, of exactly the same shape as the Lunar guideposts they’d found throughout the Bog. This one, however, was easily three times that size, and covered not in pictorial carvings but in a dense array of runes that glowed a faint teal blue in the darkness. Some were familiar to Twilight, and some very much were not. The floor for a good six or seven meters around it in every direction was smooth and flat, artificially so, and underneath the accumulated dust she began to be able to discern fine inscriptions that from some angles resembled an astrological chart and from others took on the qualities of a topographical map. A similar pattern spanned the whole of the domed ceiling up above -although not the same; Twilight couldn’t put her hoof on exactly why in the dim light, but the one below seemed less natural and more… schematic.

Her contemplation was interrupted by Applejack’s voice from up above. “Twi, if’n you do wanna come up, we can run a rope down for ya…”

“Umm, thanks,” she shouted back, “but I really am fine down here. In fact, you might want to come down to me! Especially Spike and the Guards: there’s a Lunar… structure down here that I could use some help trying to figure out…”

“That’s great and all, really,” Applejack replied, “But where in tarnation are you? It sounds like yer right under us, but Ah can’t see a Gaia-damned thing!”

“Just a moment, I’ll send up a flare,” said Twilight. She limped back to the ledge that served as the cave entrance, concentrated, and cast another light spell, this one tuned to be less explosive and more stable.

“What in Tartarus?” Captain Marigold called out.

“All right, so, Ah def’nitely saw that,” Applejack continued a moment later, “but it didn’t come from anywhere, it just shot right outta’ the rock face, plain as day.”

“What? No… look, there’s a good two meters’ worth of ledge out in front of me, can’t you see it?” Twilight stepped further out of the mouth of the cavern, no longer concerned about the continued presence of the hydra lurking below. Halfway out she witnessed a brief, all-encompassing shimmer not dissimilar to heat haze, and her entire field of vision was briefly tinted pale blue. She looked back behind her, and was treated to the somewhat surreal image of her head and neck protruding from what appeared to be just another section of jagged, rocky mountain.

“Illusions!” shouted Pinkie Pie. “I am so sick to death of illusions!”

“Luna, are you seeing this?” Twilight demanded, “Luna?” She reached a hoof through the immaterial mountain and pulled off her helmet. Most of the right side was scraped and dented, but the audio rune on the left cheekguard appeared perfectly intact. “Dammit, the one time I actually want to talk to her, and she isn’t around!”

“Actually, none of us can talk to her,” Spike shouted from up above.

“Can’t get to the Lapwing, either,” Chamomile added.

“Wait a minute, do you hear that?” Fluttershy asked, and everypony fell silent. Little by little, the sound of off-kilter rotors began to become audible, and not long afterwards the little airship slid into view. It was listing slightly and trailing intermittent puffs of nasty-looking black smoke, but at least it was still airborne. Below them, the hydra stood and watched, all four heads waving back and forth.

“Hullo down there!” Palisade shouted, simultaneously through Twilight’s helmet and the craft’s onboard amplification spell. “Everypony alright? Wave if you can hear me!” The voice from her helmet sounded tinny and very far away, and lagged behind the amplified one by a good half a second. Twilight knew the range on this kind of communication system was limited, but it wasn’t this limited- they’d only been able to hear Palisade at all when he was practically right above them.

“Pipe down, we can hear ya,” Applejack replied, also audible normally and through Twilight’s helmet at the same time, “What’re you gonna do?”

“I dunno,” Leafspring grumbled, “We can hear you now, but we lost contact with Ponyville a little ways back. It’s like… our effective clairaudient range is shrinking the closer we get to that mountain, or something- never seen anything like that before.”

“Maybe the spell’s damaged?” suggested Marigold.

“I dunno, maybe. It wouldn’t be the only thing. I wouldn’t even wanna get close enough to the mountain to pick you up, with the state we’re in.”

“Actually… don’t worry about it,” the Captain continued, “I think… I think we’re dug in pretty good up here. If you need to go back to Ponyville and reequip… we can probably stick it out the whole night.”

“How long do you think it’ll take to load your weapons back on?” Twilight asked, retreating back behind the illusionary shield.

“If we work the whole night…” Leafspring mused, “Well, actually, it’ll probably take the whole night. We’ve gotta fix that port engine and some leaks in the envelope, too, you probably can’t see from down there but I can tell we’re starting to lose altitude a little at a time.”

“You think y’all can get yerselves outta the Bog in one piece?” Applejack asked.

“Yeah, probably,” Leafspring replied, “worst case scenario, we ditch somewhere near your farm and roust up some of the locals to help drag us back to the Station.”

“That might be best, actually. We can hold up here until morning,” said Marigold.

“Captain, are you sure about this?” asked Chamomile.

Twilight watched the hydra give one final roar and slip off into the darkening treeline. Then she spotted Marigold looking over the ledge at where she herself had just been standing. “Doctor?”

“I… I guess we’re… going camping tonight?” she finally said.

“You’re the boss,” said Palisade as Lapwing drifted out of sight, “If you run into any trouble, just send up another one of those flares. I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to see that from town.” Little by little, the trail of smoke and the sound of rotors also faded away, leaving only the calling of insects and birds and the lapping of waves against the cliffside.

“Hey, there ain’t no way further up the mountain from here, but Ah reckon there used to be a bit of a path headin’ right to that cave of yours. We can probably come down to you a lot easier than you can come up to us.”

“Yeah,” Twilight nodded, even though she knew nopony could see her, “Spike, you’ll love this.”

The dragon was, indeed, the first to slither down to her a few minutes later. He paused on the ledge right in front of the illusory cliff face, then tentatively slipped a claw through it, followed by his head and then his entire body. She watched his slitted eyes widen in the dim light, and heard him whistle in appreciation. “Twilight, do you think this might be… it? Do you think this might be Luna’s redoubt?”

The unicorn shook her head, once again surveying the bare rock walls of the circular chamber. “I doubt it. There doesn’t really seem to be anything that a pony would need to, well, live in here, much less manage a rebellion. I think it’s just another clue.” She wondered how Luna’s own officers were supposed to have found this cavern, back in the day. Even if they’d been able to solve the relationship between the guide pillars and the symbol-stones to determine the approximate location-which Twilight seriously doubted was actually possible with only First Century techniques- the illusion of the cliff face seemed to be permanent. Had Luna expected her generals to dive at every section of the mountain in the hopes that one would prove to be immaterial? In the modern day, had Luna even known the cavern was there when she’d asked Twilight to jump across the cliff?

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Spike continued, “Even if everything in here that wasn’t stone’s already rotted to powder, there should still be… some kind of traces, right?”

Twilight made a noncommittal little mm-hmm noise, and turned back to the pillar in the center of the room. The runes covering it seemed to be glowing much brighter now, more than she’d expected just from the continued darkening of the cavern as the sun set. Most of the symbols that she could recognize had been in common use during the First Century, pertaining mostly to illusion and concealment spells. However, they were never far away from others for which she had no reference whatsoever, and there were entire blocks of inscription that contained no understandable spellcraft at all. Whatever it was, it was quite sophisticated, well beyond anything anypony should have been able to achieve in the year 97 CE. It was thus doubly impossible for Luna to have created such a thing- and then excavated an entire cavern to put it in- all by herself. “What I don’t get is how there could be an active illusion operating out here at all after so long,” she finally said aloud, “much less one that could frustrate instruments an entire millennium ahead of itself.”

“That’s what’s happening, though, isn’t it?” asked Spike, “And in retrospect it explains a lot about why we’ve been having so much trouble detecting things out here. I wonder if all the pillars are actually magical like this one is…”

Twilight was about to reply when the sound of fresh movement at the cavern entrance cut her off. Applejack and Marigold had made their way down the path and stepped inside, followed moments later by Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy. Sergeant Chamomile appeared next, fluttering into view briefly with Private Parhelion secured on his back, then returned perhaps a minute later carrying Subtle Spark. He winced and staggered as soon as he let the unicorn archer go, landing in a heap with his wings stuck straight out. Fluttershy slipped over and began carefully unbuckling his armor, sliding off the dented saddle-plate to expose an extensive patch of bruised and swollen flesh right between his wingjoints. She wasted no time in opening a small leather healer’s kit and wrapping the area with gauze.

The Sergeant kept quiet for the most part, but every time the bandages cinched a little tighter around his particularly swollen right wing Twilight saw him suck in his breath and bite down on his lower lip.

She unbuckled her own saddlebags, and fished out the bottle of poppy tears the medics at Fillydelphia Harbor had given her. It was still about a quarter full and had miraculously survived the impact with the cave floor- in much better condition, in fact, than the mare it was intended to treat.

She floated it towards Chamomile. “Here. I… think you might actually need this more than I do.”

The Guard pegasus twitched a wing towards it, growled in pain, then grabbed it out of the air with his teeth and drained it in a single gulp. “Awww, shit, cherry,” he muttered, then looked back at Twilight. “But… seriously. Thanks.”

Twilight floated a few rolls of bandages over to herself as discreetly as she could, and wrapped them loosely around her shoulder and flank- less because she thought they would do her much good, than because she didn’t want to bleed on anything of historical value.

Spike moved up next to her, "That gash on your shoulder looks really nasty, are you sure you’re alright?"

"I'll be fine, but it's going to hurt like Tartarus tomorrow morning"

At the other end of the cavern, Pinkie Pie and Marigold were busy conducting a rudimentary inventory of various equipment on a slightly less dusty patch of floor. “We got rope, we got lanterns, we got four canteens…” Marigold called out, “shit, did everypony remember to pack rations?”

“We also don’t have any wood,” the baker added, “so I hope you were feeling like cold oats.”

“Shucks, and Ah didn’t even think to bring mah fiddle,” continued Applejack.

“I don’t think it’d burn very long, anyway…” said Corporal Spark.

“To play, you idiot!” Pinkie Pie shouted back.

“Oh.”

“And is… is Sundog the only one who actually brought a bedroll?” asked Chamomile as he ever-so-slowly folded his wings back at his sides.

“I remember you asking me about that when we set out, too,” Private Parhelion chuckled. “Now who’s being silly?”

Twilight left them alone for a moment and returned her attention to the inscriptions surrounding the pillar. They too seemed to glow a cool blue, ever-so-faintly beneath the dust, and Twilight felt a brief surge of vertigo as she realized she recognized them. On the floor beneath her, an ordinary star chart had been superimposed over a schematic representation of the whole of the Lunar encampment, while on the ceiling above that same chart shared space with a detailed topographical map of the entire Hardfrog Valley.

“Ah’ll pay you fifty bits for that bedroll,” Applejack called out from behind her.

“Do you take credit?” asked Pinkie Pie, “Because when we get back to town I can pay you seventy-five.”

“I’ll gladly pay you two hundred of Twilight’s bits for it,” Spike cut in from the far side of the map-circle.

“Yeah, well, you all can rut off ‘cause it’s mine,” laughed Parhelion, waving an accusatory hoof at nopony in particular. She unfolded the roll of military-green cloth near the opening of the cave and lay down atop it, forehooves crossed demurely in front of her. “But of course, if either of the gentlecolts present are interested, I wouldn’t particularly mind sharing…”

“There’s, like, ten other ponies in here,” Pinkie Pie scolded, half-seriously, “Gross!”

“Sorry,” Subtle Spark chuckled, “I’m married.”

Chamomile sat bolt-upright, wincing slightly. “Wait, you are?”

“And what am I,” Spike demanded, “chopped liver?” Then he raised his claws in a vague sort of warding-off gesture. “Actually, you know what, no. Forget I said anything. If you want another warm-blooded mammal crowded up against you as you slowly roast to death in that bedroll, you go right on ahead.”

“Alright, that’s enough, all of you,” snapped Captain Marigold. “Lock it down and see if we can figure out a watch schedule.”

Leaving the ponies to bicker in peace again, Twilight motioned to Spike to follow her back over to the map circle. She pulled out her much-abused pad of graph paper and began transcribing the inscriptions as best she could. Three of the largest “fixed” stars- Whinnius, Cantropus, and Bitel- directly overlapped the positions of the sigil-carvings on the upper map and the positions of the guide-pillars on the lower; they were marked with the corresponding symbols- moon, scepter, and banner. The space occupied by the actual Moon was dead-center in both maps; on the lower the pillar covered it, replacing what looked more or less like their current location, and up above it was occupied by the smaller depiction of the Lunar camp within the wider valley.

Twilight let her notes drift to the floor in her fading telekinesis. “Well that explains… everything, and also nothing at all.”

Spike knelt and snatched up the falling notebook, leafing through it and then scratching under one of the fins that ran across his scaly cheek. “Yeah, I know, right? Now that we’ve finally gotten here, we learn the secret of exactly how we were supposed to get… here.” He tossed the pad off to one side and squeezed the sides of his muzzle with both claws. “I’m starting to really hate Nightmare Moon, Twilight. I really am!”

“D’you think we can maybe just make a hike for home, now that the hydra’s gone?” Asked Subtle Spark.

“Ah don’t think that’s a good idea,” chided Applejack, “Y’all might not see it but that thing’s still out there; the nearest settlement’s miles away through mud, ‘n shallow water, and water that looks shallow ‘till ya put’cher hoof into it ‘n realize it ain’t; and it’s already gettin’ mighty dark. We’d be sittin’ ducks.”

“Yeah, let’s try to keep things a little bit more ‘Camper Wagon’ and a little bit less ‘Deliverance’, okay?” Pinkie Pie chided.

Across the cave, Parhelion cackled. “Sooooeeeey, pigpigpig!”

The baker shot her a venomous glare. “Not on your life.”

There was a little bit of laughter after that.

Twilight took one last look at the double maps. One additional symbol existed only on the lower, on the edge of the raised platform where the pillar sat- a slit-pupiled eye. What that meant, she had absolutely no idea. She sighed and walked back over to the others at the mouth of the cave. She telekinetically reshuffled the contents of her saddlebags -pretty much entirely loose paper- slipped them off, and lay down atop them. It wasn’t comfortable, exactly, but it beat bare rock.

All around her, the Guardsponies began ripping open cans of field rations- oats, biscuits, and something ominously labeled “Vegetable Medley”. Marigold tossed a tin of the latter over to Twilight. She grabbed a glob of it in her telekinesis, tentatively guided it into her mouth, and discovered that it did not, in fact, taste all that bad.

(♫)

“Anypony bring a deck of cards?” Pinkie Pie asked once they were finished.

“Yeah,” Parhelion nodded, “But I can’t hardly see ‘em. Sparky, do you think you can grab a few of those lanterns?”

“Actually…” Twilight cut in, “Don’t bother getting up.” She muttered a few quick incantations, and another globe of light shot from her horn out to the roof of the cave- this one a warm white that suffused the entire area and didn’t fade away.

“Oh, wow, that’s cool…” Parhelion muttered.

“How long’s it going to last for?” asked Marigold.

Twilight scratched out a few calculations in the dust in front of her. “Without any more input from me, assuming there’s nothing special about the mana seep through the cave walls… about eight hours? And it’s just light, it won’t generate smoke like a fire, or make the part of the cavern where we are any hotter.”

“But the core’s pretty hot,” Spike added, “And the color attracts insects, so they’ll all fly up into it and get incinerated.”

“That’s pretty neat,” Chamomile opened another tin of biscuits and slid them over to where Fluttershy was sitting next to him. “They teach that kinda’ shit at the Academy?”

“Actually…” Twilight swallowed another bite of Vegetable Medley, “I came up with this myself, based on another spell that wasn’t nearly so versatile. It’s actually the same spell I used to signal you, and to blind the hydra, given a few different parameters.”

“Hey, that was pretty badass,” interjected Parhelion, “Especially the part were it blew up at the end.”

“Yeah, but there was a lot of trial and error involved in getting it to work. One time an orb even went off right in my face and I ended up totally blind for about a day. Spike had to call an ambulance and everything, and we were both terrified it was going to be permanent. I only published the finished version about a year ago, just before I started studying, well, this whole prophecy-about-Nightmare-Moon business.”

The sun had well and truly set now, and Twilight found herself looking out over a sea of shifting reeds and water that sparkled blackly in the light of the rising moon. Every so often, something darker still would dart across her vision, giving the vaguest impression of sleek, curved wings spread out wide, and call chee-chee-chee-chee. It all would’ve been quite striking, had she been observing it from a couch in a climate-controlled hotel and not a pile of canvas and paper in a sweltering, humid cave.

It was about then that she realized the temperature and humidity had, in fact, become almost tolerable again. She looked around to find Fluttershy and Chamomile standing to either side of her at the cave entrance, wings outstretched and slowly beating. The amount of cool air they were able to summon was impressive, and every so often one or the other would pause, tilt a wing downward, and let a stream of clear water dribble off into an open canteen.

“You… don’t have to keep doing that,” she said, “I’m sure we’ve got more than enough water.”

“Oh, it’s not any trouble,” Fluttershy replied, “After you set everypony up with that light and everything…”

“Yeah, that was really, really cool,” Subtle Spark added. “And that part where you got the hydra to flip over, what was that, a decoy spell or something?”

“Oh, no, no, no. Just basic teleportation.”

“’Just basic teleportation’, she says!” Chamomile laughed, “Is that really what you Academy types do all the time when you aren’t out here giving orders? Just sit around and dream up really kick-ass magical shit?”

“That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but… I guess?” Twilight continued, tentatively. “It’s not an either-or thing, though. What I’m doing out here is also extremely important to the Academy’s wider mission.” The pegasi ceased their efforts with the cavern nearly at room temperature, and sat down again off to one side. They kept looking at Twilight, though, and with a quick look around the unicorn realized the same could be said of Applejack, Pinkie Pie, and the other Guards. She reached over and floated her empty tin of Vegetable Medley into the center of the group.

“So, did you know the Royal Academy also developed these preserved rations? It used to be that anything that had moisture in it was at risk of spoiling, so… maybe two hundred years ago we would’ve had the biscuits for dinner, and some dried-out oats, and not a lot else. That was all alchemy, not anything I’ve ever ended up working in, but… it’s still kind of an interesting story.”

Applejack waved one forehoof in a quick ‘go on’ gesture.

“There’s a type of worm in Saddle Arabia and what’s now Southern Equestria called a Dwarf Tatzlwyrm, and ever since there’s been ponies down there they’ve known that carcasses the worm kills with its venom don’t spoil. Nopony ever thought there was anything else to it for, oh, maybe eight hundred years, but then an alchemist named Lee Pasture decided to figure out why, and brought some specimens back to the Royal Academy to study. He not only figured out how the process worked, but also found a way to replicate it safely. Now the Pasture Treatment’s used all across Equestria to manufacture canned goods. Expeditions like this one… this hunt I’ve been leading you all on, to try to find out more about Princess Luna’s… ‘inexplicable’ abilities? That’s just how all the useful spells and enchantments and whatnot start.”

Now ponies were nodding and looking to each other. Twilight kept going. She felt eight years old again, curled up on the sofa in the living room one drizzly gray Hearth’s Warming with a thick, leather-bound tome in front of her, fragments of wrapping paper still clinging to the cover.

“The very first section of the Academy’s charter comes from the forward of a book called The Foundation. In it, Starswirl the Bearded wrote that ponykind has existed for nearly twenty-five-thousand years, but only the last four thousand have been of any significance. What did we do for those other twenty-thousand years? We huddled in caves and around small fires, fearful of the things we didn’t understand. We struggled to bring up the sun and send down the rain, and we lived in terror of enormous birds with the heads of horses and rocks that came to life. We called them ‘gods’ and ‘demons’, begged them to spare us, and prayed for our salvation.

Little by little, though, we learned what made the world that way, put names to it, and figured out how to trick gods and demons into becoming millstones and blades and… and stay-fresh field rations. In time, their numbers dwindled and ours rose. The world began to make more sense, and there were fewer things to fear.

The unexplained can never truly go away, as if the universe demands the absurd and impossible. Whether that’s something as… as great and terrible as Nightmare Moon, or as simple as a mare who sees signs and omens where we just see a pile of rocks, we must meet our demons head-on, pull them out into the light, and bring them to heel. Ponykind must never go back to living in fear. That’s my job.”

The ponies around her all nodded.

“That’s all… really great,” Pinkie Pie said, much more quietly than usual, “But… riddle me this, Doctor Twilight Sparkle: How long did it take other ponies to start reading Starswirl’s books? Like The Foundation and the Principia Magica?”

Twilight let her eyes drift closed. “It took decades, centuries, really, after he disappeared. There were… there were debates and violent arguments; sometimes ponies took to the streets in mobs; important scholars who supported his theories lost their positions… some got arrested or even executed! Even after the end of the Lunar Rebellions, Princess Celestia didn’t formally add Starswirl’s work to university standards until the year 262…”

“And that’s… how many years after he disappeared?” the baker prompted.

“Umm, let me see here, that’d be two hundred and forty-one.”

“And… how many years have you been talking to Luna about her seer powers?”

“About two weeks, so one twenty-sixth or a little under four percent of a year.”

“And to get Luna to give up her secrets in that time, that’d make you… how many times better an investigator and orator and all-around amaaaaazing pony than Starswirl the Bearded was?”

“Well we can multiply two-hundred-and-sixty-two by twenty-six to produce a factor of six thousand, eight hundred and… oh.”

Pinkie Pie nodded. “Didn’t Starswirl the Bearded also say that science doesn’t always work overnight? Didn’t somepony else have to finally finish his big model of celestial mechanics thingamajig… four hundred years after he was gone?”

“Actually,” Twilight corrected, “It was closer to five hundred.” Then she slumped down with her muzzle between her forehooves and exhaled a big long breath. “I’ve been thinking incredibly highly of myself this entire time, haven’t I?”

Pinkie Pie nodded again. “You’ve been being really… Twilight Sparkly, yeah.”

Twilight also nodded, as much as her supine position currently allowed. “I guess… I think I felt… threatened, almost. Not just for control of this project, or by those ministers in Canterlot, but that didn’t help. I thought that… if I couldn’t explain Luna, then… the whole effort, the whole system I’ve based my life on… that it’d all start to unravel. And when ponies like that idiot Society started to show up, it looked like it was unraveling. I might’ve been proud of doing my job, but… I wasn’t doing it properly. Starswirl the Bearded lived in a world filled with things he couldn’t explain, and… he never let that stop him. He just wrote down all the problems he couldn’t solve, put them aside for the scholars who’d come after him, and moved on to other things. I… I don’t know how I forgot that before, and… I don’t think I ever want to again.” With great strain on her protesting muscles, she hauled herself back up into a proper sitting position. “Thanks, Pinkie, for… talking to me.” Then she paused. “Wait, why do you know all that about Starswirl?”

“Hey, don’t worry about it.” The baker shrugged. “I sit behind a counter most of the day. Listening to ponies spill their guts about weird esoteric nonsense I wouldn’t possibly care about otherwise is just part of the job.”

“So, umm, uh… that’s nice and all, but… where do we go from here?” asked Spike.

“Well, right now we sit here and we wait for our air support to come back,” Marigold replied, then looked to Twilight. “After that?”

“After that… we'll bring in some more ponies and some more equipment and see what we can figure out about this room. Given, well, everything, it’s very possible there’s something obvious about it that I’m just completely missing right now.”

“And if -well, let’s be realistic here, more like when- that doesn’t work?” Spike asked again.

“Then… I suppose we’ll have Princess Luna take a look at it, and see what she can tell us. This time, all I ask is that she writes down exactly why she thinks what she thinks, and also everything that just comes to her and she doesn’t necessarily know why. We’ll work from there.”

Around the circle there was some bickering that Twilight didn’t quite catch, but by and large ponies were nodding again. “That sounds… that sounds like a plan,” Applejack finally said.

“Good. Now, if nopony has… umm, any other questions, I’m going to go ahead and start going over my notes, see if I can get things a little better organized.”

Twilight was asleep again before she’d made it past the second page.

> Luna: Remember

(♫)

Twilight dreamed of maps and star charts. Standing next to the pillar in the center of the cave, she saw the entire inscription cleared of dust and half-superimposed over the modern, false-color maps she’d left back in the Golden Oaks. She knew that she was in fact asleep, but her situation didn’t feel dreamlike in the slightest- rather, with the stinging of her lacerated sides and the dull ache of her leg gone, she felt more alert and lucid than at any point since she’d traveled out to Fillydelphia.

She traced the symbols connecting the waystones and pillars, her pencil scribblings magnified to fantastic detail around the faded star-patterns connecting them. She added in red pen and starlight the other features of interest her search parties had found- the bodies of adventurers and Lunars alike, the patch of quickmud that had snared Parhelion, and the camp artifacts that Luna had identified. Feeling almost weightless, she leaped up to the top of the rune-pillar and surveyed the entire map at once from a single vantage point, and then she paused.

In the entire time she’d been puzzling over Luna’s ‘signs’, she’d considered each incident on its own- a single, discrete anomaly that emerged spontaneously and disappeared just as suddenly, never to be recaptured again. In that whole investigation, she hadn’t once bothered to simply graph out everything Luna had done on a single map. Now, with the sum total of it spread out in schematic form around her, she saw Luna’s predictions separated into two distinct categories. She only ever predicted the presence, absence, or nature of objects- never the actions of ponies or natural events. Sometimes, that meant elements of significant importance at the time Lunars were actively encamped in Hardfrog Valley. Those she mentally discarded, and they vanished from the map. Everything else- the quickmud, the bones, the damage to the second pillar- had developed later, during or shortly after Luna’s millennium-long exile. But, there, in each and every case, whatever she ‘foresaw’ was physically located within about ten meters of one of the pillars.

The pillars which they had only been able to discover at night.

The pillars in whose proximity Twilight had sustained an inexplicable attack from a seemingly invisible entity.

The pillars that, apparently, were heavily enchanted despite zero indication from the Lapwing’s instruments that they were in any way magical… and, in fact, seemed to possess a limited capacity to bedevil their magical communications. Just as there was zero indication on any instruments that Luna remembered any of the information about the past that she produced.

They weren’t dealing with First Century magic at all. The runes on the pillar proved that well enough. They were dealing with Nightmare Moon, of whose nature and capabilities they had extremely little knowledge. And if all bets truly were off and her instruments could not be trusted… Twilight would go with the simplest explanation available, until some sort of evidence appeared that suggested otherwise.

“Luna does remember,” the scholar said aloud, “we can’t pick it up and she isn’t aware of it, but all the information is still locked up somewhere in her head- and not just locked up, but updated by some sort of watch-spell on the pillars.” She looked around the empty dream-cavern and shook her head. “I… sort of wish I could tell her about this. And… also apologize.”

“Twilight Sparkle. Speak, and We will decide if thine words hath any merit.” said Luna’s voice behind her.

Twilight spun on her perch to find the cornflower-blue alicorn standing calmly in the mouth of the cave, nothing visible beyond save for a night sky full of stars. She stepped inside, and then faded away into the shadows that gathered around the cave walls. Suddenly finding herself fixed in place, Twilight felt the pillar sinking beneath her hooves as the starfield in the cavern entrance swelled to encompass her entire field of view.

“Thou speakest of Our memories, and Our secrets,” Luna’s voice hitched, ever so slightly, and the stars surrounding Twilight began to flock like luminescent starlings into recognizable shapes, taking on color and texture. “But what of thine own?”

The unicorn found herself, still rooted in place, looking out from what had to be Luna’s own point of view at a bat-winged pegasus in ornate armor, a steel-shod forehoof stretching out from below her vision to strike at the mare’s jaw. The perspective of the entire scene seemed horribly distorted in ways that didn’t quite make sense. Luna’s foreleg seemed a dozen meters long, but the other mare’s look of surprise and raw, animal terror was hideously magnified as the hoof drove through her armored chinguard in excruciating slow-motion. Whatever the dark background might have been was pushed out to the edges. The detail was incredible, but at the same time the entire image seemed unreal somehow, as flat and lifeless as a picture in a textbook.

“Dost… dost thou seek to blame Us for the death of brave Silver Shade, or offer thine absolution?” Luna continued, from what sounded like directly behind Twilight’s own head, “because thine accusations will not bring Us any lower than We have already fallen, and thine forgiveness hath no power to absolve.”

“I don’t plan to do either, Luna, because you didn’t kill Silver Shade. Nightmare Moon killed Silver Shade.” Her unseen body still fixed in place, Twilight settled for tracking her eyes over Luna’s memory of her own hoof, and the spiderweb of black shadow-matter that had filmed overtop. She stared intently at the reflections visible in Shade’s helmet, and managed to pick out the image of Luna’s head. The alicorn’s mouth was open, shouting or just screaming it was impossible to say, exposing bright white fangs. One eye was half-covered by a clinging membrane that gave the impression of a blue iris and slitted pupil, but clearly possessed no depth; the other rolled off to the side, wide and unfocused. “She’s the reason you can’t remember anything,” the unicorn continued, “and she’s also the reason you’ve been seeing those signs.”

There was a long pause before Luna replied. “Tell Us… verily. How dost thou know this.”

“I’m still trying to figure it out as I go along, so we’ll start with the basics,” said Twilight. Suddenly, they were both standing side-by-side in the psychomancy lab at Fillydelphia Yards, watching as a second Twilight Sparkle shouted silent questions at a second Princess Luna, while a horrified Spike and Forward March looked on. Twilight reached up to brush whatever was causing the horrible cold, sticky, itching sensation from her forehead and muzzle, found nothing there, and realized she was experiencing Luna’s own sense-memories of the instrumentation rig. She forced herself to ignore the sensation and continued.

“While the exact mental and physical processes that drive memory still aren’t well-understood, it’s generally accepted that the ability of a pony -or any other intelligent creature- to recall memories is relational. We remember things, by relating them to other things that we also remember. That’s called ‘indexing’. Since you have no recognizable memories of the time you spent as Nightmare Moon, and were unresponsive when you were first freed, I -and all of the rest of your doctors- assumed you were just unconscious, comatose, for that entire period. Meanwhile, that skin was moving your body around like a suit of armor in reverse.”

She looked around the laboratory. “But now… I think something was actually using your brain that whole time, just not you. Nightmare Moon’s memories actually exist alongside yours, but the indexing she used to organize them is so foreign that you ordinarily have no way of recalling them. What you experience as memory loss before Nightmare Moon asserted herself completely, were actually just periods when she took on partial control and pushed you out of your own head.”

The lab fell away all at once, and Twilight found herself flying alongside Princess Luna -flying, with leathery bat-like wings protruding from her sides. Below her stretched a sea of tents and cookfires, populated by little purple-armored ants, and on the hill up ahead an array of archery targets had been set up. She could hear distant laughter, and marching-songs, and smell dewy grass and roasting vegetables on the wind. Her wings seemed completely insensate and moved entirely under their own power, feeling more like a harness or saddlebags than a part of her own body. The overall sensation was a disquieting one, and she wondered if this was Luna’s revenge for the memory of the laboratory. If so, she was fairly certain she deserved it, but she continued nonetheless.

“The only way that you can access Nightmare Moon’s memories is if your brain re-indexes them more or less by accident- like if you see a clump of reeds that just so happens to look like the arrows in a target Nightmare Moon took a shot at. It isn’t hard, the equine brain is always looking for things to associate with other things, but it has to happen in just the right place at just the right time, with a memory that’s ready to be connected. Then it feels like you’re suddenly seeing context- seeing meaning- in something that, in fact, isn’t itself meaningful. It feels like a sign.”

Luna was quiet for much longer this time, long enough that Twilight worried her dream-form had somehow gotten stuck flying a remembered path with no actual intelligence remaining inside of it. But she spoke again. “Pray thee, continue.”

Twilight nodded. “Let’s use your last sign as an example.”

Suddenly they stood in broad daylight on the rocky trail above the mountain cave. Twilight’s wings were gone, now, and Luna’s were folded neatly at her sides. Twilight reckoned they were located about where Captain Marigold had been standing during the last leg of their flight from the hydra, and figured the Captain’s helmet was the one Luna had been using as a focus for the visual component of her observation spell. However, this time the clifftop was empty. Then, in a strange sort of double-vision she saw the same cliff, at the same time, bathed in gentle moonlight with a much wider path leading across the U-shaped crevice and right to the entrance of the cave.

A strange, chimeric-looking equine figure cantered up that path. It had Twilight Sparkle’s head, coloration, and cutie mark, but the broad wings, lengthy horn, and powerful frame of an alicorn. Princess Twilight Sparkle. No there’s a ridiculous thought. It moved stiffly and deliberately, like a puppet in the hooves of a novice puppeteer or a foal not far past learning how to walk, and its eyes were blue and slitted and conveyed not a trace of depth. It paused, looked across the looping path, and seemed to reconsider before taking off from the ledge with a single, inequinely-powerful leap. It passed neatly through the illusory rock face and disappeared from view.

“Is this what the sign looked like to you when it happened?” Twilight prompted.

“Aye… nay… We… I saw nothing like this then, but… it is familiar, I remember…”

“You remember Nightmare Moon walking this way, using your legs,” Twilight prompted again, as gently as she could, “you remember her making that jump and surviving it, a thousand years ago.”

Beside her, Luna’s eyes narrowed, and her ears pivoted forward. “But… what of Our other signs? Not all of them were ancient. We foresaw the damage to the pillars, and good Parhelion’s misfortune in the swamps, and thine peril before the pillar in the hills.”

In a flash, the dreamscape shifted again. Twilight watched as another Twilight Sparkle stood before the reappearing pillar at sunset, stammering without the faintest whisper of sound, blissfully unaware as a ghostly figure in Lunar armor advanced ever closer to her. She couldn’t place the position she was watching from for a moment, though, and then realized with a shock that she was in fact looking out from inside the pillar itself.

“I think the pillars are enchanted,” she explained, “Nightmare Moon set them up to hide themselves based on certain criteria, and also to report back to her through some… channel, I don’t know what kind, what was going on around them. I bet you’re still receiving all that information, but… but since it’s meant for Nightmare Moon, it just kind of… fills in the Nightmare-Moon-shaped hole in your memories instead of being anything you can understand!” Awfully scientific terminology, that…

“And… what of the spirits thou couldst not see?”

“We’re getting increasingly into speculation here, but… I think they might actually be some kind of magical construct, not ghosts at all. My shield would’ve stopped a ghost, and either everypony would’ve been able to see it or nopony would. This… this is more like a defense spell. If you do the wrong thing near a pillar, it activates and attacks. That’s what killed those adventurers- it explains why we found all of them right next to the pillars, they must’ve found the pillars themselves and the pillars decided they weren’t supposed to do that!” Twilight reached a hoof out towards the specter, “See, look, her armor is in much better condition than any real Lunar soldier’s would’ve been at this point in the War- to say nothing of the condition the other ghosts were in.”

She realized she was wandering further and further from Luna’s original question. “As for why I couldn’t see it… I remember scanning the pillar just before it started acting strange. We know these things can hide themselves from magical scanning -never mind how, but it’s possible Nightmare Moon somehow anticipated magic Equestria didn’t have in the First Century, or maybe there were analogous spells wherever she originally came from. And we also know that the pillars can hide themselves from a pony’s regular senses when they aren’t set to appear, too. I think… I think the pillar might’ve actually jammed me somehow, when it saw I was scanning it, like it thought my eyes were an instrument! I bet that if anypony around there had been wearing vision-enhancing goggles, like Rainbow’s flight goggles, they would’ve seen the same thing…” Which would be an interesting thing to test, assuming we can get the pillar to produce another sentry without endangering anypony.

“And thine dragon friend?”

The dreamscape shifted once again, placing them in one of the Royal Academy’s spacious, oak-and-red-velvet lecture halls. In the row of seats directly in front of them, a thirteen-year-old Twilight Sparkle sat alongside ponies easily half-again her age, furiously scribbling notes on the subject of draconic biology.

“Spike’s eyes work differently than a pony’s- he, like all dragons, partially sees heat instead of what we’d consider color. He can recognize most hues pretty well, but not different shades, and when he was younger he’d actually get different Academy staff with similar manestyles mixed up. Whatever criteria those pillars use to blind creatures, he might’ve fallen into it because of that. This is all… really, really speculative, of course, but… I think it’s the most logical explanation that fits all the currently existing evidence.”

“But… thou dost not know.”

Twilight shook her head.

“Then… why should We believe thee?”

(♫)

They sat across from each other on the dusty stone floor of Luna’s tower in the Castle of the Two Sisters, surrounded by the shredded remains of Nightmare Moon’s astral steel armor. Outside, there was nothing to see but stars and a brilliant, full moon.

“Luna, I… made a big mistake by doubting you. I thought that because I couldn’t explain the signs you were seeing, they… didn’t matter, or weren’t worth discussing, or couldn’t really exist. Obviously they do. But that goes both ways. Back when we were first trying to relocate your camp, you couldn’t understand how the thaumograph worked either. But that didn’t mean there was no such thing, and I don’t think we would’ve ever found the camp if we didn’t make use of it… if we didn’t know how to use it, properly, which means knowing how it works. Now, even though I’m not sure, I think I know how the signs work, too. And we do have to understand them, Luna, we can’t just take them as they come.”

The view through the tower’s great bay window became that of the crevice in the mountainside, rendered like a drawing in one of Twilight’s old introductory physics textbooks. A purple, cartoon unicorn stood on the left-side ledge and jumped off over and over again, each time describing a mathematically-precise parabolic trajectory behind her as a dotted line. Each and every time, regardless of her angle or position of takeoff, she missed the cave opening on the other side, and either crashed into the cliff face with a little cartoon ‘splat’ or disappeared into the water below. Finally the rock face itself started to move, on a flat arc that started mostly horizontally, and the vector describing the cartoon Twilight’s forward momentum nearly doubled in magnitude. Only then did her trajectory finally line up with the cave mouth. “Luna, if I’d just taken your advice without questioning it, and jumped over that gap before the cliff started to collapse… I’d almost certainly have died. Some of my friends might’ve died, too, trying to save me.”

Luna stared at the diagram for a few seconds more. Her mouth opened and she inhaled as though about to speak, but then she closed it again, swallowed hard, and nodded.

“Again, I’m… not asking you to abandon everything you believe and follow me mindlessly. I’m just telling you that I have an explanation for where your memories went, and why you’re seeing… meaning, in things that might really be meaningless. It’s up to you how much of that you want to believe, but… we need explanations and systems like this if we’re going to be working in circumstances where ponies’ lives might be at stake. We… we can’t just follow the tracks into the swamp blindly, and assume there’s no monster at the end of them.”

Now they stood in a gorgeous stone cathedral draped with purple and blue cloth, populated by bent-horned unicorns in ornate robes that Twilight recognized as Moon-Raisers. A small blue alicorn filly -as if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms- walked alongside a much older gray unicorn with a voluminous white beard and a traditional mages’ hat embroidered with dozens of small golden bells. Starswirl the Bearded, in the flesh! Or, at least, about as close as I’m ever likely to get!

The filly walked up to a dais at one end of the structure, gawking at a trio of positively ancient Raisers who sat on high platforms, twitched spasmodically, and hollered gibberish, their eyes wrapped tightly in bandages. She leaped back as if startled, and Starswirl wrapped a hoof around her shoulders and gently but quickly guided her away.

“Do thine arts tell thee… if these ‘signs’ will ever go away?” Asked the adult Luna beside her. Twilight wondered if that constituted a tacit admission that the alicorn did, in fact, believe her theories now.

“If my model is correct, eventually Nightmare Moon’s memories will either fade away completely, or your mind will reindex all of them and they’ll seem like any other information, or some will go one way and some will go the other, but… I really don’t know. Since these signs happen when you reindex Nightmare Moon’s memories, and there are only so many memories there, I think they’ll stop one way or another. I just don’t know how long that’ll take.”

“And willst thou… seek to probe Our memory again?” This time, Luna sounded genuinely fearful.

“I…” Twilight paused, swallowed, and then continued. “It’s up to you. In the short term, I know the process is painful, but in the long term it might actually turn out to be helpful in clearing up the confusion Nightmare Moon left behind her… or it might make that harder. We really, truly don’t know. I also won’t lie to you and say that it won’t ever be helpful to our work to know what Nightmare Moon was thinking when she cast a particular spell or set a certain trap. It might even keep ponies safer, knowing that kind of information. And… you’d give us a chance to push the boundaries of our understanding of how memory works. Maybe -just maybe- some insight we find here could turn into something that’s helpful for ponies who are struggling with dementia, traumatic amnesia, learning disabilities, and all sorts of other conditions. Or, we might discover it was all a huge waste of time. Ultimately, though, Luna, those memories are in your head, by right of forfeit from Nightmare Moon if nothing else, and it’s your decision what we do about them.” Twilight paused, then continued. “I do have to warn you, though, out of all of Nightmare Moon’s memories we could’ve found…”

They stood in her office in the Golden Oaks, in front of the bulletin board where she kept information relating to the last days of the Lunar Rebellions- only now it had grown to encompass the whole wall, full of tapestries and mosaics and illustrations that Twilight was positive she had never even seen before. Old and new materials alike showed details that were frankly impossible for paper to accommodate- painted blood ran wet, woven flames flickered, and Twilight fancied she could half-smell-and-half-taste burnt flesh in the back of her throat.

“… killing General Silver Shade was probably one of the mildest. If… if you’re interested, we could even… see if we can eliminate or suppress those memories entirely. That’s not without its own risks, of course, but psychomancy’s progressed a lot in the last thousand years.”

Again Luna nodded, silently.

Around them, the cave in the mountain slowly faded back into existence, this time properly populated with the sleeping forms of her friends and colleagues- and herself, Twilight realized. She looked down beneath her, and found another purple unicorn curled up on a saddlebag full of loose paper. She wondered if she could wake up simply by kicking herself. Outside, across a moonlit valley dotted with small farmsteads, a cluster of tents sat beside a bend in a fat, slow river and sparkled with the lights of dozens of campfires.

“Thou hast… given Us much to ponder, Twilight Sparkle,” Luna finally said, “And We have… choices to make and promises to keep. We shall seek thee come morning, and set right what We can. Fare thee well.”

Outside, the moon dipped below the horizon and the sun rose, then itself fell, the cycle growing faster and faster with each repetition. A great force of ponies in dark blue armor filed out from the camp on the river and left it nearly empty, and Twilight fancied that she could just about make out a larger figure with a midnight-blue coat at the very head of the column. The sun and moon bobbed and weaved madly in the sky for just a few moments, then resumed their circling. In a flash the river overran its banks and merged with an even greater deluge pouring back in from the east, instantly swallowing the camp and the farmsteads and all the rest. The cycling of day and night became a strobing, so rapid that it was painful to look at, then passed the speed equine eyes could recognize entirely and blended itself into a sort of perpetual dawn. Reeds spread like brownish flame and trees grew thick and gnarled as the water level slowly settled. The path to the cave crumbled a little at a time, one tiny rockslide flashing past after another. Cabins and small settlements popped into existence, grew, were abandoned, and crumbled back into the mud. On the horizon, ever-so-faintly, vast cities declared their presence with smoke and hazy auras of lamplight. Very quickly a railroad appeared, snaking through the mountains far away to the north, individual trains no doubt blurring past far too quickly for sight to register, and not long after that the contrails of airships began to flicker momentarily across the sky. The frantic wheeling of the sun and moon began to slow, and Twilight watched as a set of canvas tents and piles of containers appeared on the large island where the center of the Lunar camp had been. Reeds were cleared away in strips, trenches cut through the boggy soil, and little blobs of artificial construction appeared around them. Trees shifted, a vast form of orange hide and flabby flesh with too many heads chased eight ponies, a dragon, and an airship along the beach, and at last a small purple unicorn landed in the mouth of the cave after jumping away from one final rockslide.

At last, the motion of the heavens stopped completely, or at least became so slow that it was imperceptible, and Twilight Sparkle was left lying on her saddlebags with the very first rays of the rising sun shining directly in her eyes.

Attempting to move revealed two very important pieces of information. The first was that there simply wasn’t such a thing as a comfortable way to sleep the whole night on two saddlebags filled with loose paper. The second was that during the course of that same night, her pain medication had entirely worn off. Nonetheless, after much stretching and tentative stumbling, move she did, circling around the cavern to hunt for anything at all she might have missed previously. More or less on a whim, she positioned herself so that she was facing the cavern wall at the same angle as the eye symbol on the pillar, pressed herself against the seemingly solid material… and slipped right through.

The cave on the other side was pitch-dark. She muttered the incantation of her multifunction lighting spell- and as soon as the light left the tip of her horn, she developed an intense, squeezing pain just behind her eyeballs, and the glow immediately winked out.

She thought of invisible guardians and unseen traps, and remembered that Nightmare Moon was more than willing to kill ponies who made the tiniest mistakes along the path she’d set out- and bringing light into the inner sanctum of the Empress of the Night was probably not a tiny mistake.

She slipped back through the false wall and sat down near her saddlebags again. The redoubt had been there for a thousand years already. It could wait a few days longer, for Twilight Sparkle to come back with a proper work crew and proper guards and night-vision goggles- assuming those would even function properly here.

(♫)

The Guardsponies and Applejack awoke only a few minutes after that, more or less all at once. About an hour later Fluttershy followed, and then Pinkie Pie and Spike later still. They discovered they’d used up their rations the previous evening, and Twilight decided to experiment with generating edible material by accelerating the growth of several different types of moss near the entrance to the cave. The unanimous consensus was that the end result tasted terrible, and it was promptly discarded. Fluttershy had somewhat greater luck compelling the local wildlife to gather materials for them- mostly grass and acorns, but it was better than nothing.

“Can’t you make soup out of those?” Spike had asked.

“Yeah, with a skillet, stock, and a couple hours,” said Chamomile.

By Twilight’s admittedly imprecise estimates, it was around 0900 by the time the Lapwing returned, its engines whirring evenly now and its sides bristling with heavy guns. Once again communication proved impossible until the airship was practically hovering overtop of them, despite the entire clauraudient system having been replaced with a fresh one at the Station. The expected introductions were exchanged, and then the hunt began in earnest.

Twilight had worried that they would need to search most of the bog in order to find wherever the hydra had gone, which would’ve been a complicated task given the current unreliability of all of their instruments. However, all they’d needed to do was hover at low altitude over the same patch of deep water where Twilight’s party had encountered the beast originally. After only perhaps ten minutes, the reeds began to shift again, and the hydra announced itself with another ear-splitting bellow and titanic column of spray. She wondered if it still remembered the Lapwing as that one, unusually fat and aggressive bird that had managed to get away.

This time, though, they were ready for it. As soon as characteristic swell had started, Palisade had backed off and gained altitude, keeping his craft well out of the range of the beast’s stinging breath and snapping jaws. It dragged its tremendous bulk back onto the beach with surprising speed, seemingly about to make another attempt to scale the mountain or possibly searching for loose boulders to throw.

It never got the chance. The Lapwing spun around to face the hydra broadside, and all three guns opened fire at once with a noise that made the creature itself sound like a Summer Sun firecracker. Two rounds met two heads, obliterating both at once in a cloud of red fog and bone chips. Twilight didn’t initially see where the third had landed, but then the hydra made a sound like sandpaper being dragged at high speed across cobblestone, and pitched forward to reveal a bloody crater where the hump on its back was supposed to be.

It gurgled a few times, and twitched spasmodically, but that was all. Within only a few seconds, the four eyes it had left were already starting to film over.

“Hot damn! Turns out these thaumoscope doodads make for pretty neat gunsights,” Leafspring called over their helmets.

“I still don’t wanna risk getting too close to that mountain,” Palisade continued, “I think I’m gonna set down a little ways up the beach where it’s more solid. Think you can make it to us?”

“Yeah, I think we can make it. Unless there’s any more of those hydras out there,” Marigold replied.

“Don’t worry. We’ve gotcha covered,” Leafspring called back as the craft drifted east and downward, her voice already starting to hollow out and fade.

They filed out of the cave in more or less the same order as they’d come in, with Twilight bringing up the rear. She hadn’t bothered to look at the trail leading up from the entrance before, and realized it had most definitely been constructed to be navigable- if hard to spot- some time ago. Once again, she wondered exactly how Nightmare Moon had managed to assemble this entire system herself- or, perhaps, Nightmare Moon had in fact had help, and there was an entire corps of Lunar artisans somewhere who had either suffered inexplicable memory blackouts, or ended their service buried in a shallow trench. At this point, Twilight wouldn’t put anything past the entity.

“It’s a shame I never did find a good place out here to transplant those frogs,” Fluttershy was saying as she walked alongside Sergeant Chamomile, “But I think they’ll be back to normal soon. All this digging probably disturbed the hydra- they hibernate, you know, sometimes for decades at a time- and the hydra’s what’s been eating the birds that usually eat the frogs.”

“Did you know that there’s spiders that eat frogs?” Chamomile asked, more loudly, “I didn’t.” He glared at Fluttershy, “But now I do, and so now everypony else is gonna have to know that along with me.”

To Twilight’s quiet relief, the narrow path finally bottomed out and merged with the wider gravel beach. They watched the Lapwing glide past overhead, Leafspring waving at them from the open troop bay, and dip down out of sight just on the other side the half-submerged body of the hydra. It smelled even worse dead than it had alive.

“Watch yourself around the heads,” Fluttershy warned as they negotiated the narrow strip of beach left on the mountain-ward side of it, “They have enough autonomy that they might still try to bite.”

“Wait, wait, so, what, we’re just gonna leave that whole carcass here?” asked Corporal Spark.

Applejack looked over her shoulder at him, confused. “Probably, yeah. Ah mean, it’s too darn heavy to pick up and move anywhere… what else’d we be doin’ with it, anyways?”

“You’re sure you don’t wanna eat it?”

The entire party pulled up short and twisted around to look at Subtle Spark.

“Eat it?” Spike demanded. “Listen. The hydra’s a reptile. I’m a reptile. While dragons and hydras aren’t that closely related, they’re similar enough that it’d be like one of you eating a deer! I don’t even want to think about what kind of diseases it might be carrying.”

“We’re tool-using equines, Spike,” the Corporal reassured as they started moving again, “We’d cook it first!”

“Oh, and that makes it so much better.” Applejack gave the mass of scaly flesh a parting kick as she stepped out from alongside it.

“’I shall prove my dominance via ingestion’,” continued Twilight in as close as she could get to Sparky’s coltish Trotston accent, “yes, really high-functioning sapient life out here, yes sir-eee…” She was, of course, the last to round the hydra’s corpse, and on the other side the patched-up form of the Lapwing had never looked more welcome.

“No, no, seriously!” the unicorn with the crossbow continued, “When I was with the naval infantry patrolling the Griffonstone trade route, every time we took down a roc or something the sailors’d haul it down to the galley, clean it, cook it, and serve it to us with… some kinda’ booze, I don’t really remember.”

“Yeah, well, do I look like a griffon to you?” Parhelion demanded, and then paused. “Actually, on second thought… don’t answer that.”

“See, now, Sundog, the difference is, I’d bang a griffon,” Sergeant Chamomile snapped back.

“Can you all please talk about literally anything else?” Palisade demanded over their helmets as Marigold -at the head of the column- climbed into the troop bay.

“You all need to get out more!” Pinkie Pie admonished.

There was about half a meter of clearance between the ground and the Lapwing’s deck. Twilight managed to haul herself up it without assistance, but then immediately felt the strength start to trickle out of her legs. She staggered over to a crate of ammunition -properly strapped in place this time- and sat down heavily.

“You doin’ okay there, Doc?” Marigold asked.

“I’ll live.” Tartarus, I’ll do more than that. No Royal Guard’s ever called me that before, not even Shiny. The Guard call their corpsmares ‘Doc’!

“We don’t have hunting permits, and… well, to be honest,” Fluttershy stammered, “the hydra would probably have that kind of tough, chicken-like flavor other reptiles do…”

“Yeah, I think I’ll wait until we’re all out of acorns first,” Parhelion replied.

“Actually, by this time next week, the surviving buzzards will have torn open its hide; larger waterfowl will have eaten away most of its muscle mass, allowing the smaller birds to eat the remains; the fish will eat the submerged mass, and its bones will form an ideal spawning ground for generations to come.” Fluttershy looked around the compartment, blue-green eyes sparkling. “Isn't nature fascinating?”

“It’s dead,” Applejack struck her hoof emphatically on the deckplates, “’n that’s all Ah need to know.”

“Although… maybe it’s just a little more important that we’re not?” suggested Pinkie Pie.

“Good point.”

With a slight lurch, the ground began to fall away beneath them. “So, uhh, Doctor Sparkle… where do we go from here?” Palisade asked over her helmet.

“Back to Ponyville, first of all. I… think more than anything, we could all use a shower and a hot meal right about now. Real food, too, not moss and acorns.”

Everypony cheered at that, and Parhelion and Chamomile both stamped hard on the deck.

Pinkie Pie looked back to Twilight. “I’ll run a bath for you! You look like you got thrown into a muddy ditch or something!”

Spike and Twilight both stared at her in bafflement.

“It was a lot more than a ditch!” the scholar finally said, “But why would I go to Sugar Cube Corner just to bathe?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Hmm. You know, when you put it that way the whole thing really doesn’t make all that much sense.”

Acceleration pushed Twilight and her crate back against the wall of the engine compartment as they sped over the Bog. She could look out through the open side hatch and see nearly all of it at once now- tents, trees, trenches, mountains, pillars and all. For all of the insects and grime that lurked at ground level, from the air it really was quite beautiful. Twilight wondered what it would’ve taken, a thousand years ago, for that land to still be a thriving agricultural center today. Then she wondered if, with the magic and industry of later years, it might become such once again. Finally, as the reeds below her gave way to grass and a few dirt tracks, she decided she was content to leave those questions in the hooves of others. She had her own responsibilities to pursue.

“Spike? AJ? Marigold? Once everypony’s sufficiently… recovered, and we’ve cleaned up what needs to be cleaned up, do you think we can organize one more big digging crew? And… do you know if Luna’s still in town?”

(♫)

They did, indeed, assemble another digging crew. Security was a concern, since Marigold’s company didn’t have the marepower to provide what she considered sufficient protection at the cavern and also continue to guard the other locations throughout the swamp. However, the Captain found her numbers supplanted from an unexpected source- volunteers from the Lunar camp in Fillydelphia. Few if any of the transformed soldiers had much experience in the proper methods of archaeology, but they learned just as quickly and eagerly as the townsponies who worked alongside them. They were also arguably more familiar with the secretive Lunar iconography than Luna herself, at least for the time being.

Avoiding Nightmare Moon’s defensive constructs was relatively simple, as they were only active at night. However, it was also only at night that the other elements Nightmare Moon had installed in the caverns were visible. While the construct theory gained additional support from Twilight’s experiments with different vision-enhancing spells, even with Doctors Daycaller and Proper Verse assigned to basically nothing else a means of reliably detecting and analyzing the specters remained elusive. Twilight refused to let that bother her. Instead, they settled for performing most of the manual labor by day, recording their observations at dusk, and then retiring back to Ponyville to analyze what they’d found and plan their next move.

The constructs proved to be more numerous than Twilight had anticipated- they occupied an entire system of branching tunnels deep inside of what was beginning to be called Mount Hydra, standing at intersections blocked by illusory walls and offering a variety of riddles. Some- for instance ‘what must become of the Tyrant Celestia’- had clear enough answers. Others -like ‘what is the proper rank for a producer of conduits’- seemed utterly nonsensical even to the Lunars themselves. Most were historical or ideological in nature; some were magical, and a sizable subset of those referred to theorems that had been developed well after the First Century or simply had no known solutions at all. The list Twilight kept of questions and answers grew to a dozen, then two dozen, then three. Without their instruments it was impossible to truly tell, but she was convinced that at least some paths inside the maze led in circles with the same sentry asking different questions each time.

Applejack wanted to skip over the entire process and tunnel directly through the mountain to where they estimated the center of the complex lay, especially after they began encountering tunnels that were flooded or collapsed, but Twilight wouldn’t hear of it. They had come as far as they had by playing, more or less, by Nightmare Moon’s rules, and she wasn’t about to risk damaging anything just yet.

Princess Luna visited Ponyville three more times. On the first she physically bowed down before Fluttershy and begged forgiveness, which was of course granted. Her later visits were spent simply walking the site with certain members of her Night Guard, holding conversations which Twilight wasn’t privy to but doubted were much more than reminiscence of times past. She experienced only one further ‘sign’, on her third and last visit, this one leading her to a section of bog far away from her camp and in the opposite direction from Mount Hydra. Twilight and her crew excavated it in due course, and found only the skeleton of a pegasus mare, most of her skull shattered by a single powerful impact, buried in what would have at the time been a shallow and unmarked grave. Since General Silver Shade had no identifiable descendants- or, more accurately, in the intervening millennium her bloodline had thinned to the point where most ponies east of Trailhead could call themselves her descendants- she was buried alongside the other Lunar war dead at Zwhicker. Twilight didn’t think it appropriate to attend the ceremony, but she heard it was a quiet one, involving only Princess Luna and the dozen or so of Shade’s troops who had survived.

The work continued.

As always, it was the simplest approach that proved to be the best. One thing Spike had noticed early on was that the sentries did nothing to actually impede the movement of ponies through the tunnel system- they simply offered questions, revealed a path if the answer was correct, and attacked violently if it was not. So Twilight simply had the crews spill a thin layer of liquid dye, lay down a grid of notecards, collect them, and then sort through them again at a remote location far from the influence of Nightmare Moon’s lingering illusions. Any cards that didn’t get dyed had landed on something other than the floor, and anything that wasn’t recovered at all had landed somewhere unseen. It was slow, it was tedious, and it gave Private Parhelion endless opportunity to share tales of her stint as a table dealer in Las Pegasus before she’d signed on with the Guard. Thus, the troops rapidly grew to loathe it. However, it was also one hundred percent effective and very, very safe.

Little by little, night after night, over the course of a week, they made their way further into the caverns.

Finally Twilight Sparkle, Princess Luna, the Canterlot staff and the dignitaries from Ponyville all stood in front of an ornately carved, arched door- in the middle of the night, of course, because otherwise it would have appeared to be just another dead end.

The carvings were not at all dissimilar to the ones that had decorated the pillars, depicting the same historical scenery, seemingly rigged to slide over and across each other in three concentric rings. Twilight turned to her alicorn companion. “So… any ideas.”

“I fear not.” Luna then extended a hoof to the two Lunar-like figures in impossibly perfect armor standing on either side of the door. “And I suspect this riddle is not one where wrong answers will be tolerated.”

“Well,” Applejack added, “If somethin’ does go wrong… Ah’m right behind’ja.”

Twilight nodded and stepped forward. She scanned over the more familiar images- Luna’s assumption of the Moon-Raisers, the war against the Crystal Empire, the ascension of Celestia to Speakership of the Council, and all the rest. On the pillars, events had always followed a strict progression- top to bottom, then clockwise in chronological order. She grabbed the stone depicting the tidal wave summoned by Discord in her telekinetic aura, feeling it slide freely on some hidden mechanism, and placed it at the very top center of the structure. It slid into place with an audible click, and the guardians remained where they stood.

She repeated the process with each panel in turn, one after the other, and then paused. Three panels remained, which she had never seen on any of the pillars. One depicted Princess Celestia’s head severed from her prostrate body, with Princess Luna standing before her. However, this depiction of Luna had sharp canine teeth and slit-pupiled eyes; and while every single other carving had been a simple bas-relief, this figure was inlaid with another type of stone entirely- jet-black obsidian, carefully sculpted to imitate bone structure and muscle that such a dark coat would have naturally concealed.

Another panel featured transformed Lunars engaging in a variety of common tasks. Four earth ponies tilled a field, four pegasi shuttled rainclouds, and four unicorns in cooks’ aprons attended to four foals- one of each tribe and one that appeared to be a miniature alicorn. One figure from each group -including the alicorn foal- was also inlaid with obsidian. They in turn were overseen by the same dark Luna-like creature from before, under a black basalt sky filled with so many carved stars that it looked at first glance to simply be pumice or some other form of naturally porous stone.

The final panel featured a single, front-facing portrait of what could only be Luna herself, one side inlaid and the other plain. The eye on the plain side was closed, while the one surrounded by obsidian was open and featured a familiar slit pupil. The portrait’s mouth was also wide open, revealing a single sharp fang, and despite the incredible detail with which the whole panel was constructed Twilight found herself unable to decide if its expression was meant to communicate fury, terror, ecstasy, or some perverse combination of all three.

“Luna is taken over by Nightmare Moon,” Twilight said aloud as she slid the portrait symbol into the topmost position, “Nightmare Moon kills Celestia,” she slid the corresponding piece just below, “and then… what? Everypony just lives happily ever after in the lovely Lunar Republic?”

Behind her, Pinkie Pie braced herself against the side of the cavern and slowly clapped one hoof against the other. “Heh. How’s that for a prophecy?”

“’Twas no prophecy,” Luna replied, her voice ice-cold and -Twilight thought- just a little bit afraid. “’Twas… a statement. A declaration of what that creature meant to do. To pass through this doorway, our generals would need to see this… understand it… and agree. Blessed Moon, what was done to them in this place?”

“I… wouldn’t read so much into it,” Twilight murmured, “We’re looking at these images with a full -or at least more full-understanding of what Nightmare Moon was, and what your being host to her involved. Your officers didn’t have that knowledge. For all they knew, going off of only what’s here, Nightmare Moon might’ve just been a more powerful state you yourself could enter.” Then she paused, scratched her muzzle with one forehoof, and continued. “Still… this whole path that they had to travel through over and over again, night after night, in some kind of heavily altered mental state…That doesn’t sound like a test of ability to me, at least not one that would be useful on creatures more intelligent than rats and the like. It really does sound more like some kind of conditioning.”

Before she could lose her nerve, she slipped the final stone into the last remaining slot.

The sentries on either side both saluted and then flickered out of existence, and with the grinding sound of stone on stone, the entire set of concentric rings slid downwards into the floor.

The room on the other side was expansive and open to the night sky above, looking more like a crater that occupied the whole top of Mount Hydra with a chest-high stone lip around its border. Idly, Twilight wondered if they really were standing on top of the mountain now, and the rocky peak visible from outside was nothing more than an illusion; or if it was in fact the sky she was looking at now that was illusory and they were still somewhere deep underground. From what she could see from the entrance, the room was even furnished, complete with a bed, dresser, desks, and a washbasin all constructed from dark oak with accents of astral steel.

Luna made to step forward, and Twilight held up a hoof to stop her. “Princess… you should be careful. There might be more booby-traps or sentries, even in here.”

“Aye. Indeed there are.” Luna nodded, and stepped right past the incredulous Twilight. She paused in front of what proved to be a small painting of herself and Princess Celestia as fillies, perhaps eight years old, tussling over a toy wooden sword. “Here is a powerful sleep spell that works through vision.” She moved over to a map of Equestria on one of the desks, “to read the names of the divisions here will leave a stout mare paralyzed until sunrise two days hence,” her gaze moved to an innocuous-looking leather book sitting beside it, “and opening this spellbook will strike one blind. All of these things… I know of them, though I cannot remember seeing them ever before.”

“They might also be monitoring the area, like the pillars,” Twilight mused, “feeding you information meant for Nightmare Moon.”

Luna ignored her, and walked slowly across the stone floor to a particularly large desk directly across the room. “Twilight Sparkle. Thou willst wish to see this. Walk directly towards me, and look only straight ahead, and nothing shall harm thee.”

With some trepidation, Twilight did as she was told, wishing with all her heart that she had any reliable method to detect spells that may or may not have been targeted at her. Nonetheless she crossed the room without incident, at least as far as she could determine, and came to a halt beside Princess Luna. Over the stone ‘lip’ of the crater, out across the bog, she could just about make out her base camp on the old generals’ hill. A thousand years ago, she guessed the entire Lunar camp would’ve been visible from here, as well as most of the path a pony would follow from one guide-pillar to the next. There was something written on that crater lip, a faint smudge of mostly illegible Old Ponish lettering arranged in vaguely mathematical fashion. In the dust that had gathered on the floor below, equally faint, were a trail of downright reptilian-looking footprints that terminated at the edge- Was this what Luna was looking for when she found the hydra’s tracks? On the desk itself, the dust was ever-so-slightly thinner in a small square patch about the size of a book directly in the center, but other than that the surface was completely empty.

“This is where I kept my journals,” Luna said, beside her, “Including the very last. But what became of it after I left for Everfree… I truly do not know.”

(♫)

Twilight Sparkle sat at her desk in the Golden Oaks, a quill held in her telekinetic grip, a clean piece of paper and a full pot of ink set out in front of her.

Y. G. Exarch Ce- she wrote, then paused. That was far too formal. She switched out the page for a clean one and began again: Princess Cele- No. That was too impersonal. She grabbed a third page, thought for a good long while, and then began once again:

Dear Princess Celestia:

I regret, first and foremost, that my report cannot contain news of the recovery of any of Princess Luna’s writings. Indeed, I write to you posing any number of questions for which, currently, I lack any answers: What is the origin of the tracks we’ve discovered in Nightmare Moon’s redoubt? What is the significance -if any- of the writing left nearby? How does the magic that conceals it function, and what is the correct interpretation of the inscriptions on the door? In more mundane matters, what are the goals and organization of this ‘Society for Lunar-Equestrian Studies’, and how are outside elements able to so easily recover information and even photographic evidence of our operations?

I may never be able to find answers to some or all of these questions. Many of them are, quite simply, beyond my areas of expertise. However, that does not make any of them unanswerable. It may take time, and it may require substantial revisions to established magical theory, but magical theory is made to be revised. In no way does that revision invalidate the exercise. Indeed, our willingness to revise- our willingness to be wrong- is what separates us from the seers and street-mystics of your foalhood, whose signs were vague enough to account for any outcome and, thus, accounted for nothing at all. As long as the Imperial Republic is willing to fund and support my explorations, I will continue searching, whatever I may encounter.

Even if the journal is, in fact, never located, I no longer have any doubt that the attempt will amass so much other physical and historical evidence of Nightmare Moon’s existence as an independent entity as to render the rest irrelevant. The results of our memory experiments, and the inscriptions on the redoubt door, I suspect would be sufficient to convince any sane, rational pony by themselves.

Alternatively, of course, we must consider the possibility that Minister Firelight was, in fact, correct all along. While the likelihood of Luna perpetrating some deception seems to me to be incredibly slim, more improbable things have happened before and will likely continue to do so. Nonetheless, if that is indeed the case, we are still better-prepared for a betrayal from Luna now than we were before we understood so much about her. We gain nothing by denying the possibility, but we gain everything by continuing on and acquiring more information, to anticipate and prepare. Thus, I consider the roughly five hundred thousand bits expended thus far, to say nothing of the voluntary contributions of Ponyville’s citizenry and many members of the Night Guard, to be money and time well-spent.

In particular, both Forward March and myself have noticed a significant improvement in Princess Luna’s mental condition following her expeditions to Ponyville. Your sister is now interacting more frequently with modern ponies as opposed to her fellow Lunars, has displayed a greater tolerance for modern customs which she had originally found distasteful, and appears to be more alert and coherent. She is now planning trips to other historical sites throughout Equestria, accompanied by her troops. Indeed, it is my understanding that she plans to spend the next few days in Canterlot, and hopes to be there to greet you upon your return from the Parrot Isles.

She has also asked about retaining a public-relations officer to manage future interactions with the press. I would recommend assigning Kibitz or Raven to Fillydelphia for the foreseeable future as a dedicated political advisor, as a prelude to establishing the full administrative staff appropriate for a candidate to the Exarchy.

Her para-diplomatic exorcism method has proven to be between fifty percent and seventy-five percent effective against local spectral activity, although this data of course comes from a sample of ghosts that Luna knew personally as living ponies. Attempting the process on completely unrelated haunts, poltergeists, and specters would most likely fall to her skills at ghost psychiatry, in general. Nonetheless, the process is still more effective than the generally-reported success rate of a single pass with brute-force magical exorcism. Should the opportunity to test a combined approach involving both magical and psychodynamic exorcism present itself, I suspect it could approach 100% effectiveness. If so, our models of spectral memory and response behavior may also need to be revised.

In summary, the Cabinet will likely seek to interpret recent events as wasteful- the expenditure of half a million of the taxpayer’s bits on an ultimately futile program to chase mystic signs, and failure to accomplish the one thing it set out to do- recover Luna’s notes.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact that we have found things we cannot explain- that we now know what questions to ask- is a tremendous leap forward in our studies. The fact that there are so many unanswered questions further suggests to me that the gains from investigating them will be tremendous, and absolute worst thing we can do is ignore them. Whether that’s something as great and terrible as Nightmare Moon, or as simple as a mare who sees signs and omens where we just see a pile of rocks, we have met our demons head-on, pulled them out into the light, and brought them to heel.

Ponykind will never go back to living in fear.

-Your faithful student

Twilight Sparkle

Author's Note

This is probably the closest to a straight-up “Dear Princess Celestia. Today I learned…” that Extended Cut is ever going to get. We might see more of these reports as episode-closers in the future or we might not; it’ll probably depend on the pacing and tone and logic of each individual episode; but if I do do them I am very sure I want them to be more musings on the unfolding mystery of what exactly happened a thousand years ago than having any particular “moral” to them.

If we were being 100% realistic, Twilight probably would not get her theories about the strange phenomena she’s witnessed right on the first try- or ever. That would, as Twilight herself said, probably be the work of others, potentially generations later. But if Twilight didn’t figure it out here, I didn’t really have a way for us, the readers, to ever get an answer. And I wanted her and Luna to have some closure after their mutual wigging-out. Call it artistic license if you must.

Where do I go from here? We’ve been seeing a lot of Twilight Sparkle recently, so probably a greater focus on other characters doing other things. Feeling Pinkie Keen EC was very much written with a purpose in mind, which is all well and good, but not every story has to revolve around one single central theme. I feel like I’ve dropped enough different plot threads around here that the narrative can split up and explore different aspects of them with different characters. We shall see.

Friendship is metal.

Principal Investigator Twilight Sparkle

(♫)

In her newly-assembled office just off the main room of the Golden Oaks Library, Twilight Sparkle paced in an endless circle. Her horn aglow with a telekinetic field, she slid and twisted a pair of glass inkwells in a complicated pattern that wound up leaving them more or less where they had been originally.

“Spike, do you think it’s more imposing to have two quills next to my name plaque, or just one?”

Her assistant looked up from a thick hardbound catalog of thaumatological equipment he was currently examining. Much of what they’d originally planned to move down from the Observatory in Canterlot turned out not to be able to fit down the basement stairs, which meant it all had to be replaced with more portable models. “I don’t think it matters because I don’t think Forward’ll even be able to see them. She’s going to be sitting in front of you, facing the window, and your desk is going to be directly behind you.”

“Good point!” Twilight quickly floated both quills aside and began shifting the placard- commissioned from the same Canterlot specialty workshop that made them for Governors and Cabinet ministers- so that the embossed copper letters reading “DR. TWILIGHT SPARKLE” reflected the morning sun most effectively. It was only once she had it just about right, that she realized her meeting with Major Forward March was scheduled for ten o’clock and the sun would be coming from a noticeably different angle by then. She grabbed a sheaf of reasonably unimportant-looking paper and began working through the necessary astronomical calculations to compensate.

“What happens if Forward’s late?” she asked out loud. “Do I wait for her to apologize, or… what, exactly? What happens if she’s early? Do I make her wait?”

Calculation completed, she shuffled a few other reports and scientific articles into a different configuration. She didn’t want her desk to look messy, but she also wanted to avoid the appearance that she wasn’t doing anything. She was, in fact, doing a great deal, but Spike was annoyingly persistent about keeping her papers in their designated drawers and binders. Normally she appreciated the effort, but today called for a different approach.

“Also, Spike? Do you think you’d look more official working on something in the main room?” Her frantic circling paused just long enough for her to grab a nearby coffee cup in her telekinetic field and take a few quick sips. “Or do you think I have time to move your desk out by the door?

Spike closed his eyes, sucked in a deep breath, and set the catalog aside. “Twilight, it’s me. Forward March isn’t going to be impressed by me either way because Forward March’s known me since I was three. Forward’s known you for about as long, too. So stop shuffling all my stuff around, and just. Relax.”

A little too late, Twilight realized the scratch paper she had filled with her calculations had originally been an inventory of some kind. Spike’s neat claw-writing was still faintly visible in a few of the areas she hadn’t written directly over. “Look, Spike, I’m… I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath, a long drink of coffee, and set the now-ruined inventory aside. “I guess I just… I mean, this is the biggest thing I’ve ever been in charge of before, there’s other ponies working under me for the first time ever, and… I really want to do this right.”

Spike nodded, and slithered up one of the nearby stools so that he could look her right in the eye. “Listen, Twilight, I know this is like telling a rock it doesn’t need to roll downhill, but… you really don’t have to worry this much. You’re. Going. To. Do. Fine.”

The ocher pegasus with the short, dark-blue mane and more than her fair share of freckles leaned back on Twilight’s sofa, and took another sip of her tea. “… and, yeah, I think that’s about the size of it.”

Sitting across from her, the unicorn scholar nodded, and tapped a few lines on Forward’s reports with a quill. “Well, I for one think you’re taking exactly the right approach. They’re not exactly asking for round-the-clock room service and deep tissue massages here… I think it’s entirely appropriate to take some basic steps to focus on the Lunars’ comfort and entertainment. I think Celestia’s going to be extremely pleased with this.”

Forward laughed, and adjusted the collar of her Guard dress uniform. “Yeah, wow, that’s… actually that’s a huge relief hearing you of all ponies say that.”

Spike laughed right along with her, “Well, I did have a talk with her before you came here. Someone certainly had to.”

“Did she decide to reorganize all your papers again?” the Major chided.

“No!” Twilight shook her head, “Ok, well, maybe a little. One page can hardly matter, right?”

“I wasn’t even ever allowed to touch your papers!” Forward downed the remainder of her tea, “‘One page can hardly matter’, indeed!”

It was at about that point that Spike opted to sneak a look at the wall clock and gave a little hiss. “Forward, look, I hate to cut this short, but your train…”

“Oh, rut it, you’re right!” Forward scrambled about to gather her reportsand galloped for the door. “Hey, uhhh, say hi to Shining Armor for me the next time you see him, OK?” she yelled over her shoulder on her way out, narrowly avoiding a collision with another mare in Royal Guard armor waiting just outside.

(♫)

“Hey, Twilight Sparkle, right?” The newcomer asked, “I’ve been looking for you!” She tapped a hoof against her armor. “I’m Captain Marigold.”

Captain Marigold, appropriately enough, proved to be an incredibly yellow mare with an orange-tipped mane and extremely dark brown eyes. Although clearly an earth pony she was built like a pegasus, skinny and fast. Judging by the lines starting to form around her muzzle Twilight would have guessed that she was perhaps pushing 40- on the older end of what was generally reasonable for a Guard officer of her rank.

“Umm… right, yes…” Twilight said out loud, while internally she reviewed the next few days’ agendas and tried to find a place for this particular mare.

“I’ll be serving as your head of security and… military liaison?” Marigold prompted once a noticeable pause had developed.

“Yes! That’s right!” Shining Armor had long ago informed her that he'd assigned a downsized, independent company of Royal Guards to support her work in Ponyville. Now Twilight remembered he’d also said he’d promoted an experienced junior officer to command them. There was originally supposed to have been a corresponding chief scientist position as well, to be filled by one of the two Royal Academy faculty who had also signed on for the project. Twilight, however, had decided that it would be both easier and less political to simply manage the scientific side of the excavations herself, which would also keep both junior professors on relatively equal footing.

“Congratulations on your promotion, but the way,” was all Twilight said aloud. Back before Nightmare Moon’s return had left Ponyville under effective occupation by the re-awoken forces of the Lunar Republic, Marigold had still been a First Lieutenant.

Marigold shrugged, her polished gold armor shifting slightly. “I don’t see what was so impressive myself, you know,” she continued, “All I did was talk to those bat guys.”

“Well, if you hadn’t I don’t think any of this would be happening.”

“Yeah, about that…” the Captain shifted back into a position more similar to parade rest, “I just got back from talking with the construction team over at the Station. I think they’ve just about gotten everything set up… wanna head over and take a look around?”

It was only in the early 1020s that Ponyville had actually become Ponyville instead of just another nameless inn-and-wheelwright-and-general-store stopover. When that happened, the Equestrian Rail Service had decided- for reasons known only to itself- that the tiny little one-platform shunt which nowadays served perfectly well as Ponyville Station, was entirely insufficient. Instead construction began on a grand three-track enclosed station just south of Sweet Apple Acres. Construction then stopped the following year as soon as more sensible heads prevailed, leaving only a wrought-iron frame and brick exterior walls behind. Nopony had given the place much thought since then, save for the few generations of bored country teenagers who’d found it an ideal location to drink and smoke and get up to Starswirl knew what all else without supervision.

As a result, the Town Council had had no reservations at all about turning the structure over to the exclusive use of their guests from the Royal Academy. It had been checked for structural soundness, leaks had been patched, basic plumbing put in and many, many different sorts of refuse cleared out. Barracks for Captain Marigold’s company of Guards had been assembled first, then dormitories for the Academy staff who’d been unable to get a hold of other accommodations in Ponyville proper. Then had come storage, both for equipment they were bringing in and anything particularly valuable they might recover from the Everfree; workshops and laboratory space; and a neat little office for their small contingent of administrative clerks.

Twilight Sparkle gave a low whistle. When she’d last been here three weeks ago, they’d still been shoring up the ceiling and setting up the first interior walls. Her only regret was that the detachment of the famous Equestrian Army Engineering Corps that had made it all happen weren’t an official part of their expedition. Rather, the Engineers had originally been brought in to repair the not-insignificant damage Nightmare Moon’s forces had done during their occupation of Ponyville, and once their current job was done they’d be shipping back out to parts unknown.

The majority of the Station by volume had been given over to a small hangar bay. It was currently occupied by a tour group of schoolfillies and more than a few adults gawking at the compact little airship that sat on a wheeled takeoff sled in the middle. Twilight instantly recognized Rainbow Dash as well as Cheerilee, Ponyville’s industrious schoolteacher-and-councilmare.

“This right here’s the RES Lapwing,” explained a short, light-green unicorn in a Navy mechanic’s uniform with a grease-stained red bandana around her neck, “she’s a Black Swan class multifunction gunboat with a top speed of one hundred and fifty k-p-h. She carries a flying crew of three, plus two ground crew, and has a maximum range of a little under eighty-six hundred kilometers- but we’ve only got one set of pilots here and they gotta eat and sleep, so I don’t think we’ll be getting anywhere near that range.” The mechanic grinned, and swept her hoof towards the craft’s big sliding doors like a Las Pegasus stagehoof. “The main bay’s completely re-configurable: we can ship twenty-four hundred kilos of cargo and equipment, twenty fully-armed troops, or six one-oh-two millimeter breech-loading cannons on swivel mounts, with their crews!”

“How fast can they shoot, Missus Officer, sir?” asked a little brown-and-white colt with an incongruous Trottingham accent.

“Well, a good crew can fire off about ten rounds a minute. And just one of those can take the head off a full-grown roc half a klick upwind, if you know what you’re doing!”

“Miss Leafspring,” a vaguely familiar white unicorn filly asked, “do you think that means rocs are gonna be coming around here?”

“That’s Sergeant Leafspring, remember?” Cheerilee gently corrected her.

“Sergeant Leafspring, sir,” Rainbow Dash added.

“Aww, you don’t have to ‘sir’ me, I work for a living,” Leafspring chuckled. “And I figure we’ll mostly be using the Lapwing to assist those Academy eggheads for a good long while. Aerial recon, transporting equipment, maybe some close-in ground support. No rocs around here!”

The filly seemed visibly relieved by that, but if anything Rainbow Dash looked disappointed. She glided over to Leafspring and asked, “Hey, has this ship seen any action down South?”

“She’s a boat, not a ship,” Leafspring admonished, “And she’s new, but I’ve been down South for a few tours. My last assignment was anti-piracy down in Hippogriffia, actually, and I’d say we got into some kinda’ shooting pursuit… maybe once or twice a month?”

“Awww, cool! Is that just for fire support, or did you actually drop troops?”

As Rainbow Dash led the Sergeant back closer to the Lapwing’s cockpit, Cheerilee found herself attempting to keep her increasingly enthusiastic charges in line all by her lonesome. “Sergeant Leafspring, why don’t you explain for the class how the engines propel…”

If the mechanic had even heard, she gave no indication of it. “Yeah, a couple of times when we knew they had hostages we’d actually have to drop troops under enemy fire, and that’s when I started to figure out why they make these girls with the extra armor plating nowadays. Let me tell you… I know some of the pilots still complain about losing, what, a few k-p-h? But- Aww, shit!”

Twilight watched, aghast, as three of the most precocious students burrowed into the Lapwing’s cockpit like tiny entropic cruise missiles, and moments later there was a tooth-rattling crash as one of them dislodged an entire crate of explosive cannon shells.

That finally got Leafspring and Rainbow Dash’s attention.

“All right, show’s over,” the Navy mare called out, “Now kindly step away from my boat before somepony winds up getting seriously hurt!”

(♫)

“Carefully…carefully…” Twilight watched with some interest as Rarity coached a mixed group of Guards, Academy staff, and local pegasi through the removal of a massive hanging banner from its resting place in the Castle of the Two Sisters. “No, no, don’t fold it, it’s much too stiff, you’ll tear it! That’s gold thread, it’d be fragile even if it were new!”

Twilight turned back to Doctor Daycaller, the pony still at least nominally in charge of the proceedings. He was a somewhat pudgy gray unicorn with a thick, closely-curled brown mane, a thick, closely-curled brown beard, and thick, not-visibly-curled black glasses. He was young, quiet, new to the Royal Academy’s faculty, and entirely unassuming, which was exactly why Twilight had picked him to head up their operations on Castle Rock proper and its surrounding environs.

She pointed back to where Rarity was now informing one of the Ponyville pegasi- Thunderlane, or possibly Cloud Chaser, she didn’t have a good handle on names yet- of the difference between a tapestry, an arras, and a wall hanging. Spike had gone over to join them, somehow without Twilight noticing, and was now listening with rapt attention. “Is she… sanctioned to be out here?”

Daycaller just laughed nervously, and waved his hoof out over the sprawl of waxed canvas tents and big pony-sized crates that had taken over the Castle courtyard. “Well I’m not exactly going to… turn away qualified help right now, you know!” Twilight supposed he had a point: the Castle Rock outpost was extensive and there would simply never be enough Academy graduate students to meet the demand for their services.

Most of the inventory and categorization of artifacts was being done on-site. Everything was then being sent to the Station, but only the most interesting pieces were actually being kept there for further analysis. The rest ended up on a train, forwarded to Canterlot. Those were destined for the Academy’s significant vaults given over entirely to things that were too historical to be discarded, but of little practical worth. There might be some bidding for such pieces among the museums and private collectors once the serious work was over, though- and Spike had already factored that into their operation’s budget.

“We’ve basically cleared out Firefly’s camp by now,” Dr. Daycaller continued, “There are a few bodies still in holding that we aren’t sure how or where to repatriate, but they’ve been moved offsite to the town hospital- we’re lucky Firefly kept such copious records before he had to abandon Everfree!” In fact, the old general and his “Cabal” of ministers -the future government of Equestria, following the Lunar Rebellions- had even set up a small cemetery for Lunar war-dead in distant Frankpferd. That was where most of the bodies would eventually be heading. “But I’m afraid it’s going to be a lot slower going from here. The lower levels of this castle are an absolute maze, and many of the plans -those that have even survived- are, I suspect, not especially accurate. Even if they were, the last thing that happened here was for it to become the target of a full-scale siege. Where we expect to find a connecting passage, or a servant’s corridor, there’s more often than not a pile of rubble. Add to that the fact that many of the wooden components have dry-rotted into powder -and we are still trying to determine what factors preserved some elements while others decayed normally- and it all adds up to a very slow, painful process.”

That was actually about what Twilight had expected. She looked around again and saw Rarity disappear into a nearby tent as Spike made his way back over to their delegation.

“Have you found any outright booby-traps yet?” the dragon asked. The recently declassified notes of the Cabal’s leader, Paper Clip, had claimed such things existed, while most other First Century sources denied they were ever installed. That left both cause for caution, and another avenue by which to substantiate the old minister’s claims.

“Thus far, no, but we’re keeping our eyes open.”

“Good work, Doctor,” Twilight concluded, “But I don’t want you to get too bogged down focusing on just the Castle. I’m actually more interested in what you might find under the old Council Hall- I want to see if there were really prison cells underneath it,” that was another claim effectively unique to Paper Clip, “and especially if the Lunars might actually’ve opened them before they blew the place up.” Paper Clip doubted they had, but admitted that he himself was unsure. If he was wrong, that was another black mark removed from the history of the newly-returned Princess Luna.

“Yes, I think that makes sense. Umm, Councilmare?” He turned to one of the larger crates, which somepony had opened up and converted into a neat little office space for the gray pegasus who ran the administrative half of Ponyville’s weather team. “Do you think you can spare a few ponies to fly watch over that site while we’re clearing rubble? It should only take a day or two.”

Derpy Hooves nodded. “Should be able to, but that means we won’t be able to respond quite so fast if Doctor Twilight orders any sharp changes in the weather schedule.”

Twilight looked at Spike, then at Derpy. Then she grinned. “Wait a minute. You’re telling me that I get to make changes to the weather schedule?”

The Councilmare just nodded again. “I mean, within reason? We need permission from the Domimmuh… Domida… Do-min-ion Go-ver-nor in Canterlot if you want to keep it from raining more than fourteen days. I know that’s what everypony asks.”

“Huh. Can I make it rain all the time?”

Both Derpy and Dr. Daycaller cocked their heads and whinnied, confused.

“What? I like the rain. Keeps the merrymakers indoors where they can’t bother me. Helps me think.”

“Ummmm…” the Councilmare pulled a clipboard out of her saddlebags with one wing, peered at it intently for a second or two, then flipped it a hundred and eighty degrees and checked it again. “I think I can give you… five straight days?”

“Perfect.” Twilight noticed that more than a few of the workers had stopped what they were doing and following the conversation with growing dismay. Philistines.

“You won’t be saying that when we actually need to go out into the field and dig for things,” Spike warned.

“Spike, given the convoluted path airships have to follow just to land here, I don’t think falling rain can actually reach this deep into the Everfree.”

“And I don’t think Rainbow Dash’ll like actually rounding up that many rainclouds,” Derpy added.

Twilight’s ears folded back against her head. “Yeah… you’re probably right. We’ll keep our hooves off the weather schedule unless there’s a legitimate operational reason to change it, all right?”

She wasn’t certain, but she half-thought she saw Spike quietly mouth “thank you” to the Councilmare.

When Twilight had first explored the Lunar Cairn on Sweet Apple Acres back before Nightmare Moon’s return, it had been in a rather sorry state. It’d been forced open by the locals about a hundred and fifty years back, ruining whatever spell had preserved its original Lunar inhabitants. Then it had been looted, filled with litter, and finally the entrance was half-heartedly filled back in with a pile of boulders. In the three weeks since Twilight’s Academy compatriots had taken over the site, Ponyville’s later additions had been largely cleared out, and as much of the surrounding soil as was practicable excavated. Now, it looked like a proper structure, and the unfortunate Lunars inside had been reburied alongside their fellows in Frankpferd.

“So… what even do we have left to do here?” Spike asked.

Twilight looked to the second Academy professor currently assigned to her operation: Doctor Proper Verse, a tall, rail-thin, navy blue pegasus with a pale green mane cut even shorter and straighter than Twilight’s own. “Do you want to explain this, or should I?”

“Oh. Yes, yes, yes, right,” Verse paused, then continued all at once, “What we’re doing is we’re trying to get more information on how the Lunars’ preservation spell worked. There are Cairns that were opened properly an- and released their charges, and some that were opened much earlier by natural accidents, and we’re trying to identify, uhh, discrepancies between them that could form an identifiable pattern an… and help us model the underlying spell.”

Twilight nodded. “Exactly!”

It was about then that Applejack surfaced from one of the trenches, talking around the shovel in her mouth like an oversized hayseed. “Well, Ah wouldn’t say we’re done here yet either, ‘till them Riches give back all that Lunar gear they been’ holdin’ onto. Rarity’s already turned over all a’ hers.”

“Hmm.” As far as Twilight knew, that case was still grinding its way through the courts and likely would continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Just about their only solid victory had been an order for Filthy Rich to repatriate his grandfather’s “collection” of Lunar equipment on the grounds that it was vital to the work being performed by the Academy expedition. However, without a clear deadline attached the family had made excellent progress in dragging their hooves in appeals and counterarguments. That had probably already cost them far more in legal fees already than the horde itself could possibly be worth, but Twilight supposed it came down in the end to pride and principle. “You know, maybe I could have Captain Marigold and some of her troops come along with me the next time I pay them a visit.”

“Heh. Yeah,” Applejack nodded. “Hey, ya think I can come’n watch?”

“Probably not, but I’ll see what we can do.” Twilight turned back to Spike, who was now holding a scroll still glowing with a few lingering specks of green flame. “So, what’s next?”

“Actually… I think Princess Celestia wants to see you up in Canterlot. ‘At your earliest convenience’, it says…”

(♫)

The train ride up to Canterlot was just as Twilight had grown to expect- uneventful, and supremely comfortable. Thanks to the great city’s fondness for multiple train stations, great vaulted atria, and glass-walled bridges, it was commonly said that a well-to-do mare could travel from her manor in Foaledo all the way up to the receiving office of Princess Celestia herself without once setting hoof outside.

This was untrue.

There was in fact a full ring of exposed outdoor courtyard that cut off the Day Court, Exarchic Quarters, and Governors’ Forum from the entire rest of the city, for no reason that Twilight Sparkle had ever been able to discover.

In the films and comics aware of this quirk, if government meetings needed to be conducted during a rainstorm -which, rain being dramatic, was quite often- a double row of Royal Guard battlemages would take up position in that courtyard and project overlapping bubble shields for Celestia to walk beneath.

This was also untrue.

In reality, government meetings were never conducted while it was raining, because at the faintest whiff of important business the Canterlot Weather Brigade was sent out and any rain instantly stopped.

Today, however, the Royal Guard were indeed out in force, along with a good portion of the Canterlot Watch, because somehow word of Twilight’s arrival had made it into the rest of the city and that little ring of courtyard was absolutely packed with other ponies. Some cheered. Some booed. Some waved incomprehensible signs. Some brandished steno pads and shouted questions. One of that last group, a cream-colored pegasus in a truly horrible brown suit, somehow managed to push herself sufficiently free of the surrounding crowd to be able to take off. She rocketed over the wooden barricades keeping her earth pony and unicorn comrades at bay, and dived right for Twilight.

“Dr. Twilight! Dr. Twilight! Is it true that Princess Celestia plans to step down in light of what you’ve revealed about her mishandling of the Lunar Rebellions?”

The unicorn cocked her head, confused. She’d never heard of anything like that even being suggested before. “… No?”

“Dr. Sparkle, what’s your analysis of how the influx of twenty thousand Lunar ponies is going to affect the international trade balance?”

“There’s less than three hundred Lunars, and I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Can you give us any information on the current whereabouts of the Elements of Harmony?”

She caught a glimpse of the emblem watermarked onto the mare’s steno pad. “Can I give Blitzfeed, of all the papers, any information on the Elements of Harmony? Yes. Will I? Absolutely not.”

Finally, a pair of burly unicorn Watch-stallions managed to wrap her in overlapping telekinetic fields. “Miss, you can’t fly here!” The one on the left said firmly.

“Well, I’m not flying now,” the reporter shouted, “I’m an Equestrian citizen, I know my rights!”

“That’s not how that works…” Twilight snapped, dashed the rest of the way to the government complex, and did not look back.

Her actual meeting was to be held in Princess Celestia’s private study- all oak bookshelves, gold velvet cushions, and sweet, merciful quiet. The Princess herself was, just as she had been the other times Twilight had come here, seated on the big leather desk chair facing the great bay windows. Somewhat less typically, there were two other ponies occupying the less imposing but equally comfortable armchairs in front of her.

One was Fancypants- former Mayor of Canterlot, former Governor of the Central Dominion, and former Minister of the Interior. He’d retired from that last position some years ago, of course, but his decades of public service seemed to have left him a close personal friend of absolutely everyone currently in power.

The other was Princess Mi Amore Cadenza. That was doubly unexpected- the last Twilight had heard, Cadance was still handling some kind of labor dispute up near the Frozen North.

The young scholar immediately backed away and reentered the room, this time loudly declaring “It’s not true. It’s bullshit! I did not hit her. I did naaat. Oh hai Cadance!”

“Oh hai Twailaait,” Cadance laughed. Celestia and Fancypants both managed to at least chuckle. This might’ve been an official meeting, but Twilight still saw no reason not to keep up tradition. They’d been greeting each other this way since Twilight had been twelve years old.

The scholar took another, unoccupied armchair and immediately a cup of strong hot tea floated over to her in Cadance’s blue hornglow. “So… I guess we can get right down to business; I know that all three of you are, yourselves, extremely busy ponies, and wouldn’t be able to come here to talk with me if it wasn’t important. What’s going on?”

“Perceptive as always, Twilight,” said Celestia, “Are you aware of the situation currently developing in the Parrot Isles?”

“Umm, vaguely?” Twilight answered, “I know it has something to do with the minotaurs being angry about something, but… the minotaurs are always angry about something.”

“To be just a smidgen more detailed,” Fancypants continued, “Minos has decided to annex several harpy-majority islands near its territorial waters. A confederacy of harpy chieftains has formed to oppose the minotaurs’ claims, and we believe it’s very likely everyone involved could come to blows over the affair.”

“That… sounds like a real mess, but… what am I supposed to do about it?” the unicorn scholar asked, taking another sip of tea.

“Well, nothing, directly” answered Princess Celestia, “I just wanted you to be aware that Cadance and I will traveling out to the Isles to try to restart talks- or, if that fails, take direct action to resolve the dispute.”

“Shin- Commander Shining Armor will also be accompanying us,” continued Cadance, “given the delicate nature of the whole region we wanted our expeditionary force under the direct supervision of a member of Equestrian High Command, and since most of the force is comprised of Guard units, he was the logical choice.”

“I think I’m starting to see the problem,” said Twilight, “That’s also everypony I’m supposed to be reporting to…”

“… and communication is going to be very erratic for most of our expedition, which could take a month or more.” Cadance finished.

“Now, none of us doubt your ability to continue your work without direct contacts here in the capitol,” Fancypants spoke up, “but we thought you would appreciate the heads-up.”

Twilight nodded.

“There’s also one other… small political complication, that’s developed,” continued Princess Cadance, “We’re confident we can handle everything up here, we just wanted to make especially sure you’re aware…”

“Three Cabinet Ministers are currently objecting to Luna’s promotion to Exarch, and we don’t currently know if we have enough votes in the Chamber of Governors to override them,” Fancypants finished.

“Oh. Wait, really?” Twilight asked.

Unlike most of the Known World, Equestria had no single document that anypony could point at and call “The Constitution”. Rather, its governance was based on a patchwork quilt of different Acts and administrative procedures that, through particular longevity and utility, had found themselves elevated to quasi-constitutional status. What was officially -and somewhat confusingly- titled the “Imperial Republic of Equestria” wasn’t built on some grand, sweeping statement of the aspirations of ponykind; it was built on flow charts and tables. Even Princess Celestia herself, it was said, didn’t fully understand the whole of it.

One peculiarity was the way in which the Republic conferred the powers of head of state. Princess Celestia was, in fact, a “Princess” at all only because she was an alicorn, and thus entitled to certain traditional modes of address dating all the way back to the Three Tribes period. Equestria had no legal recognition of nobility; rather, her authority as head of state came entirely from her position as Exarch.

That office could, and not infrequently had been, occupied by multiple ponies simultaneously who ruled by committee- indeed, the time Celestia had spent ruling alone totaled up to a little under fifty percent of the last millennium. Sometimes, she shared the Exarchy with ponies who were capable leaders in their own right; in a few cases when she was urgently needed somewhere else doing something else, she’d even stepped down. She was so recognizable not necessarily because her rule had been uninterrupted, but simply because she always came back in the end.

Thus, there was technically nothing new about the possibility of sharing her power with Princess Luna, save for the fact that the arrangement was being touted as something near permanent. Luna was immortal, and clearly had ambitions that Cadance and those who had come before her lacked. Once Luna was integrated into the Imperial Republic’s politics, she might not ever leave again.

Ordinarily, the confirmation of potential Exarchs -and, theoretically, the ouster of sitting ones, although in one thousand years that power had never been used- fell to a majority vote in the Equestrian Chamber of Governors. However, should a member of the Exarch’s own Cabinet- which was notoriously and at times pyrotechnically independent- find something about the candidate alarming to his or her specific area of expertise, there was also a sort of veto power available. One Cabinet Minister’s veto pushed the required vote among the Governors to two thirds; two Ministers pushed it to three quarters; and Twilight couldn’t even remember off the top of her head what three would do.

The scholar had always found that particular bylaw highly unusual, at least before she’d read Paper Clip’s notes. Now that she knew Equestria had begun with Princess Celestia effectively controlled by a self-described “Cabal” of her own ministers, even if those ministers’ purpose had been nothing but benevolent, it made a weird sort of sense.

“So… why are we forcing the issue?” she finally asked, “Does Luna really need to be Exarch right now, when she’s barely had time to learn how the modern world works?”

“Well, I did promise.” Celestia turned away from her guests and looked back out the windows. For the first time, Twilight realized just how many members of the crowd outside were waving portraits or drawings of Luna herself. “And, you might call it a political instinct more than anything else, but I really do think that now is the best time to move on this issue. Ponies are fascinated by Luna and the Lunars, thanks in no small part to your great work in documenting their struggles. If we let that enthusiasm fade, Luna may never- we may never have even this much of a chance again. Equestria, for all of its virtues, I’m afraid to say often has an unwarranted fear of change.” Her mouth turned up at the corners, ever so slightly. “And I suspect that, in the grand accounting of things, Luna’s outside perspective and unfamiliarity with the way things are… the way things have grown to be in the modern world, will be her single greatest asset as an Exarch.”

Twilight wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. Finally, she turned to Fancypants. “So who exactly is objecting to Luna… among the Ministers, I mean”

“Ah. Yes.” The older stallion cleared his throat. “As we’d expected, the Ministry of Operations and Budget has lodged an objection, and the Ministers of Defense and Culture as well.”

“Are they in Canterlot right now?”

“Ermm… yes, I believe so?”

“Can I talk to them?”

(♫)

It wasn’t a formal hearing, so they didn’t make use of any of the formal hearing rooms, but even in a bland little windowless conference room on the fifth floor of the Day Court building, Twilight Sparkle was feeling more than a bit intimidated. After all, it was only a badly scratched pinewood table that separated her from what were, arguably, three of the most important ponies in Equestria next to Princess Celestia herself.

She understood the presence of Defense Minister Wind Rider well enough- the Manehattan Times had been right on the money when it described the former Wonderbolt’s entire political outlook as consisting of “a noun, a verb, and ‘risk to Equestria’s security’.” He was a light-blue pegasus with a carefully-combed gray mane. Although somewhat famous for wearing cold-weather combat gear to official functions, today he had -for whatever reason- opted for his old blue dress uniform. Budget and Operations Minister Harshwhinny sat beside him in a crisp, immaculately-pressed purple suit which nonetheless clashed horribly with her chestnut coat and short yellow mane. Her presence was similarly explicable, mostly on account of her legendary contempt for anything that even slightly altered the Government’s various accounts.

Rounding out the group was Culture Minister Firelight, a purple unicorn stallion with a somewhat long, somewhat unkempt mint-green mane. He was also wearing a proper suit, although the dark brown wool it was made of and the style in which it was cut, made it look to have been carefully preserved since at least the 1010s if not earlier. That was somewhat puzzling, since the pony inside it -while not by any means young- did not himself look nearly that old; rather, Twilight would have guessed him to be in his early seventies at the oldest, roughly the same age as Wind Rider. In fact, what he was even doing here was something of a puzzle as well. Amid sprawling outfits like Defense, Transportation, Health, and Operations, the Culture Ministry was something of a sleepy bureaucratic backwater. Their primary responsibilities involved funding and support for the arts, coordinating public festivals religious and secular, enforcing Equestria’s few obscenity laws for published media, and curating anything of particular historical importance. That last area did include some power to oversee archaeological sites, but even if Firelight had some problem with the way Twilight was excavating the Everfree that wouldn’t translate into a problem with Luna herself… would it?

There was a long silence as everypony stared at each other and shifted in their seats. Papers were shuffled, and then shuffled back again. The little enchanted wax-cylinder recorder at one end of the table whirred quietly to itself, and the transcriptionist sitting beside it tried his best to look unobtrusive. Somepony -it might’ve been Twilight herself, who could say?- went “ha-hem,” very quietly.

Then Minister Harshwhinny flipped open a thick manila folder in front of her and began speaking all at once. “Doctor Spar-kle, I’m afraid I just have some serious concerns about how an Exarch Luna might impact the Equestrian economy. What we’ve been able to piece together about her labor and commercial policies, points to a pony who made changes far out of line of accepted economics, even in her day, more or less on a whim. Reorganizing- dissolving, in some cases- entire professional organizations, tampering with the values of currency… I think I’d have more to criticize about her overall plans if I had any idea what her plans might’ve been. You… wouldn’t be able to shed some light on this, would you?”

“Well, of course a lot of Luna’s policies might seem strange to somepony from the present day. You have to remember that she lived in a very different era, where guilds existed primarily to fix prices, ‘hard currency’ was the watchword across most of the Known World, and structures like central banks simply didn’t exist. Obviously her earliest attempts to resolve those issues might seem… at best rudimentary, unpolished; and at worst downright strange to a modern observer. But if you look at Treasurer Escritoire’s reports from the years 98 and 99 CE, which I have copies of here, there’s only about ten pages-” Twilight reached telekinetically into the saddlebags she’d left beside her chair, extracted the relevant materials in a thin manila folder, and slid them across the table, “the connection between Luna’s original programs and the later reforms implemented at the beginning of the Second Century is pretty clear. Thus, I think it’s likely that Luna will be able to bring herself up to speed very quickly in this area, and certainly won’t be working to undo Celestia and the Cabal’s policies.”

To her credit, Harshwhinny actually did begin reading the documents, but before she was past the first page Wind Rider was already speaking.

“I’m also just a bit skeptical of how Luna would be able to transition into managing a world-spanning peacekeeping force when, again from what your archivists have been able to dig up, she previously had very little interaction with anypon- umm, anycreature outside of Equestrian borders… verging on isolationism.” Idly, Twilight wondered if -given what she herself had just learned about the impending conflict in the Parrot Isles- the Minister of Defense really had nothing better to do with his time at the moment.

She let her ears flip back against her skull. “Do you all know something I don’t? As far as I know, Celestia isn’t going anywhere. We’re not talking about Luna taking over, we’re talking about her doing the same thing Vetiver and Stovepipe’ve done. She might present some policies you disagree with, but that’s just how the government works. She won’t be in complete control of everything.”

Minister Firelight watched, sipped his tea, and said nothing.

“That might be the case,” Wind Rider continued, “But we are talking about a pony who raised an army in rebellion against Equestria and killed any number of innocent, non-combatant ponies- and some of that information comes from the sources that you cite. I’m aware that Exarchs receive security clearance automatically as a matter of procedure, but if that wasn’t the case I’m not sure I’d be comfortable authorizing access to military documents to a pony with a record like that!”

“What those sources explain,” Twilight shot back, “is that Luna didn’t kill those ponies, Nightmare Moon did. If you look at the archaeological record and the contemporary accounts by Cabal sources, you’ll see a sharp uptick in the number of civilian deaths right around early Sun’s Height, 97 CE. We’d estimate that was around fifty to seventy-five percent of the Lunar-inflicted civilian casualties over the whole Rebellion- before that, the fighting was actually cleaner than some portions of the Saddle Arabian Campaign.”

The Defense Minister’s mouth grew just a tiny bit narrower at that, which was very much why Twilight had brought it up. It was an open secret in Canterlot circles that Wind Rider idolized the architects of Equestria’s invasion of Abyssinia two hundred years ago, and stubbornly held onto the sentiment that Celestia should not have sought peace and instead ‘gone all the way to the Southern Sea’.

“Well,” he finally said, “that may be the case, but Luna and her forces also killed or maimed a huge number of pony soldiers!”

“As have you, Minister. ‘Peace through power,’ isn’t that how it goes?” Had this meeting been public, Twilight might’ve thought twice about being so blunt. But it wasn’t, so she did not. Wind Rider also had a reputation for appreciating “straight talk” from his deputies; Twilight supposed now she was going to determine whether or not that was true.

“Those were pirates and slavers, operating outside of Equestria’s borders,” the pegasus snapped, eyes narrowing and ears pivoting forward.

Apparently his tolerance for bluntness was greatly exaggerated. Or perhaps he simply didn’t extend the privilege of speaking plainly to anyone outside of his own department. Either way, Twilight figured that he was now losing a lot more credibility with whoever might be listening than she was. “I see, so it’s the Equestrian part that gives you problems,” she continued.

“Are you condoning the Lunar Rebellions?”

“Are you condoning the Council of Five Hundred? Because their soldiers, in a lot of cases, were just a gang of bandits in nicer uniforms. I’m condoning the act of rebellion against them, I suppose, and I’m condoning what came after. You’ll have to take the middle up with Nightmare Moon.”

It was not lost on Twilight that, as Wind Rider grew more and more sharp with her, the topic of Luna’s policy positions as opposed to Twilight Sparkle’s had receded ever further into the background.

Firelight continued to say nothing.

It was at about that point that Harshwhinny completed her studies of Twilight’s data and looked up. “Getting back on track…” she glared at Wind Rider, “I have some questions about how this whole ‘permanent night’ business was supposed to work. How would, for instance, a farmer know when it was time to wake up and feed her chickens, if ‘day’ no longer existed?”

“I believe the early Lunars sold their system as ‘you can wake up whenever you want to, go to sleep whenever you want to, and work whatever hours you want to’,” said Twilight, glad to be back on sound historical footing, “In practice, they seem to have wanted to implement what were for the time fairly rigid work schedules… what we’d call a ‘clock-in-clock-out’ shift system. This of course never advanced beyond the planning stages, and would’ve been pretty difficult to manage in an era when precision timekeeping wasn’t really available to the common pony, but impressive regardless when you consider-”

“What about the livestock?” Harshwhinny interjected. “Were cows and chickens expected to keep this kind of sched-ule, too?”

“Well, possibly, actually,” Twilight conceded, “You have to remember, this was an era where what we call druidic magic was just beginning to become a proper, codified science. Ponies on both sides of the political divide were incredibly optimistic that magical techniques providing an unparalleled level of control over the natural world were just around the corner…”

“Even if that was the case…” Wind Rider spoke up again, somewhat more levelly this time, “and as I understand it a lot of what those ponies promised still isn’t possible or practical now… the cost would be huge! And what would that mean for ponies already living hoof-to-mouth? Ordinary frontier farmers who never even heard of Luna’s rebellion until the sun and moon began duking it out in the sky?”

“I mean, well, yes,” Twilight said, “a lot of the Lunars’ original policies had some… substantial flaws, but… the point I’m trying to make here is that Exarch Luna isn’t going to try to recreate them! Something you could learn easily if you just asked her yourselves-”

“You’re correct, of course,” said Harshwhinny, and for just a moment Twilight thought she might actually be making headway, “any of these policy issues, individually, might not be fatal to an Exarchic candidate, especially one as close to Her Grace Celestia as we understand Luna to be,” the young scholar’s early optimism began to deflate as she realized that, although Celestia and Luna were both alicorns, Harshwhinny was notably applying the traditional honorifics to only one of them, “But overall, aren’t you worried about Luna’s… temperament? Hers simply weren’t policies put together with a great deal of… well, thought. I’d even go so far as to call them dangerously reckless, and Equestria does not need dangerously reckless leaders.”

“I think,” said Twilight, “that you’re reading a great deal into the actions of a pony who was, at the time, being slowly taken over by a hitherto-unknown entity that could at best only roughly approximate equine cognition and actively fed on her her jealousy… and… rage…”

Wind Rider smiled a toothpaste-ad smile, far too white and far too slick for his weatherbeaten muzzle. Twilight half-expected to spot fangs. “Do go on?”

“Oh, horse-apples,” The scholar muttered under her breath. She wondered if they’d planned this all along, ever since she’d requested the meeting. She wouldn’t put it past them.

“I think that is really the crux of the issue…” Twilight briefly looked around to see who had managed to slip into the conference room without her noticing, and then realized that the unfamiliar voice belonged to none other than Minister Firelight. “… and what I myself am most concerned about. Doctor Sparkle isn’t disputing that the Lunar Rebellions ended in a very… well, unsavory fashion. I don’t know how she could dispute such a thing. The historical record is extremely clear on that point, particularly when it comes to Luna personally. But we’re expected to believe a… a strange sort of historical revisionism where Luna and… I suppose what we’d call Nightmare Moon are actually two entirely different creatures.” Twilight noticed that Firelight didn’t even seem to be looking at her. More than anything, he seemed to be directly addressing the transcriptionist. "This kind of… of radical surgery on our heritage I think is very perilous to the fabric of Equestria, especially when it’s as blatantly politically motivated as this seems to be, and especially when there’s so little proper evidence for it.”

She was about to respond when the other unicorn reached into his own saddlebags and telekinetically extracted a thick, black, three-ring binder. He set it on the table with a definite thunk and cracked it open to a page marked with an orange sticky-note. “I’ve taken the liberty of having some of our own experts here at the Ministry of Culture review Doctor Sparkle’s findings. Much of it is, indeed, very solid scholarship, but frankly not that relevant to the issue at hoof. And when she decides to address issues relating to this… pet theory of hers, this Nightmare Moon business… well…” He began to read aloud, slowly and carefully:

“It is effectively impossible to confirm the existence of the Nightmare Moon entity to any reasonable degree of scientific certainty. While the anomalous matter identified in and around Tower 3 in the Castle site is certainly unusual, and the medical examinations of Princess Luna show signs of significant internal and external injuries, there are other confounding events. The Elements of Harmony and the means by which Luna was transported to the Circle of the Moon and back again are themselves poorly understood, and indeed have received comparatively little attention from H.G. Exarch Celestia’s supposed ‘investigative commission’. Until these alternative causes can be ruled out, and proper, positive evidence of an independent Nightmare Moon’s existence provided, the ‘possession’ theory remains without any real support. A simpler and more elegant explanation remains that Princess Luna suffers from a mundane psychological condition- possibly some form of dissociative personality disorder, schizophrenia, or alternatively atypical narcissistic personality disorder.”

Twilight leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Then she tilted forward again and rested her hooves on the table.

Firelight looked at her, half wary and half just confused. “Well?”

“I think your ministry needs better analysts, Mister Firelight. Not only does this report ignore the clear psychomantic mana traces found in Luna’s system immediately after her return, but it also completely disregards how any information relates to any other information.” The Ministers looked at each other, and for the first time Twilight realized they looked concerned. You’re on my turf now, you sharks in expensive suits.

“Individually, yes, we could only classify the evidence I’ve presented as a collection of anomalies. They’re strange things that don’t fit, things we can’t explain. But that’s just the beginning of science. Nightmare Moon is… well, she’s still a theory. A hypothesis, actually. In a scientific context a theory means something slightly different. But she explains everything we currently know where your analyst has to find multiple different explanations- and not even very good ones. This isn’t a comic book, Minister, dissociative personality disorder doesn’t cause a pony to change shape, grow half a meter, and gain fangs.”

“Yes… about that. Your original report described this… Nightmare Moon entity as… some sort of a skin, something that was covering the actual Luna. We’re still waiting for an explanation as to how such a thin film could cause Luna to grow in height either. Rather, if you consider the use of illusion magic…”

Twilight sucked in a big barrelful of air and then slowly let it out again. “No, I don’t know how that would work. In fact, I might even go so far as to call my own report somewhat unreliable- it was dark, everything happened extremely quickly, and I was trying not to die at the time. But that doesn’t mean you get to pick details out of it that support your position and ignore the rest. Maybe there was more to Nightmare Moon than that skin. Maybe it did use illusions to make Luna appear taller; that doesn’t mean the entire creature is fake. We do know very little about it, but that doesn’t mean we have to… to give up. Just because I can’t answer all of your questions, now, doesn’t mean I won’t ever be able to.” She thought back over Paper Clip’s notes, and Celestia’s, and Luna’s own writings. “In fact, at the conclusion of my work in Ponyville I will produce for all of you, right here, unambiguous First Century corroboration of Nightmare Moon’s existence as a distinct entity. Would that satisfy your concerns, Minister?”

Firelight blinked a few times, looking for all the world like he’d just been rapped atop the muzzle by his schoolteacher. “I… suppose so?”

“Then if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to get started.” Twilight stood, grabbed her saddlebags, and trotted out of the conference room, and none of the stunned Ministers lifted a hoof to stop her.

Author's Note

All right! Back in action! This submission puts me in a fairly exclusive club here on Fimfiction: people who attempted to rewrite My Little Pony and then actually made it past the first two-part episode. I think the category of people who attempted to rewrite My Little Pony and the result turned out not to suck is still narrower, but whether I am granted entry to that one is not really something I am capable of objectively determining by myself.

The overall plan and concept for this story came together extremely quickly, alongside basically all of the rest of Season 1, in the last few weeks of September 2020. Then after that massive breakthrough I sat down to focus more on the specifics of this particular episode… and it wandered off into Outlining Hell and did not reemerge until the middle of 2021.

If there is such a thing as a cursed project, this is it. Everything that possibly could delay the process of finishing it, did. I lost files. I lost a computer. I got enmeshed in a consulting gig for a robot arm company that was extremely cool but also a huge time-suck. I riffed a legendary badfic that was extremely entertaining but also also a huge time-suck. I had to spend a week remaking an entire spreadsheet of grades for an introductory computer science class because the solutions I was grading against were incorrect, which was a huge time-suck but not remotely cool or entertaining. I got in bureaucratic fights with my health insurance company that took up entire days. I contracted a mysterious illness that had all the symptoms of a moderate case of COVID and exactly the two-week progression of a moderate case of COVID, but which three different COVID tests insisted was not COVID. My coauthor Serketry got caught in the Texas snowstorm blackouts and was completely incommunicado for the better part of three days just as I was trying to nail down the final draft. AmarthGul, who I rely on for cover art, had the audacity to go and get a job. But now it’s finally coming to fruition.

As I had previously outlined in my Expanding Season 1 blog post, Feeling Pinkie Keen EC is going to be a much less literal recreation of the source episode than Friendship is Magic EC was. The ratio of completely new material to material that was adapted from the original episode is much higher, and even the material that has been adapted is more generally similar than explicitly identical. I think that’s a very good thing over all, since I am generally shooting for a reaction along the lines of “oh, hey, this scene is kinda sorta relatedto a scene from the show”, and not transcribing it even to the degree that EC usually transcribes and then reinterprets things (save for a few very short passages that are particularly ‘iconic’).

That said, the stuff that is more directly connected to the original episode has turned out to be a good bit less “in name only” than I was originally expecting, in that superficially similar events do happen in roughly the same order as opposed to there just being small “callbacks”. However, it happens in many cases with completely different characters, completely different actual events, and a background of other, completely original elements. There are a couple of different reasons for this which I will get into when those events actually start to occur.

A lot of these original events arepart of the overarching plot and arc I wanted Season 1 as a whole to have (beyond just “occasionally mention that the Grand Galloping Gala is a thing”). They also do a lot more to drive and provide context for the episode stuff than I was initially expecting, though, which I am very happy about, even if it does take a little while for anything immediately recognizable to actually show up.

Tonally, I am also shooting for something a little different from Friendship Is Magic EC. While that story was never exactly grimdark it did get pretty dire towards the end and had a lot of emphasis on scale and stakes. Conversely, while Feeling Pinkie Keen EC isn’t exactly a comedy, it’s lighter in its environment and the stakes of events are honestly a lot lower. That’s not to say nopony will be in any danger of dying horribly, or that nothing will get blown up in spectacular fashion, of course- this is still Extended Cut, after all. But we’re definitely looking more at Star Trek: The Next Generation than Homestuck Act 5 Act 2.

A lot of people also complained about the long, interconnected sentences in FIM: EC, so I am working on breaking them up. This is probably going to turn out to be a gradual process.

I kind of had mixed feelings about having so many OCs here and less of a presence from the Mane Six, but I decided that it makes sense Twilight wouldn’t instantaneously integrate into Ponyville right after the NMM incident. Instead I plan to make her bonding with the townsponies and the rest of the Mane Six a bit more gradual process over the whole of Season 1. She probably won’t get as close to them as she is throughout most of the show, until the end of that season.

The Lapwing’s design is based on a hybrid of the Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunship (NATO calls it a “Hind” because NATO sucks at naming things) and a WW2 PT boat. The cannons are based off of cannons on the 1860s Union ironclad Monitor, although the Monitor’s were muzzle-loading and not breech-loading. I have no idea if those would have the accuracy and lethality Leafspring describes, or even if the ship would hold together under IRL aviation principles, but I figure everything about the basic physical processes involved in flight in Equestria is so different that I can basically do whatever I want.

I originally wrote out a fairly simple, elegant system for Equestria’s government based on a few founding principles. Then I showed it to Serketry, and he came up with a bunch of completely different suggestions, and after about an hour of back-and-forth that plan morphed into an unrecognizable mishmash of ideas and assumptions. That actually suited my purposes just fine, since the end result looks like something that was indeed added and altered and abused for a solid millennium of changing social and technological conditions. Now, instead of the single brief outline explaining everything that was supposed to go here, I think I will just create new rules as the plot demands, under the assumption that nopony- not even Celestia herself- actually understands the Equestrian political system in its entirety.

And yes, Harshwhinny, Wind Rider, and Firelight are indeed that Harshwhinny, Wind Rider, and Firelight.

Thanks, as always, to Serketry for rewriting between half and a third of my dialogue, solving the Big Puzzles, reading all of this crap before it’s been edited, and otherwise generally being a coauthor.