The Manehattan Anomaly

“You volunteered,” Cere said, dryly. “For this.”

“I did,” I said, watching the clouds go by.

By the sound of him scoffing and shaking his head, it seemed my answer annoyed him. Or he found it humourous. It was difficult to tell. “Well, shit. I’m following orders.”

I looked back at him. “Sorry.”

He shrugged and shook his head, his suit crinkling oddly as he moved. It seemed that was all there was to be said on the matter. My fur felt matted under my own suit, but with my hood down and the cold wind in my mane, I wasn’t too warm.

I went back to watching the clouds. They were passing just below us, a landscape of islands and voids, red and purple in the setting sun. They were wilder than usual, considering how close we were to the city.

“Ten minutes!” a voice called from the front, one of the carriage’s drafts. We were close.

Down below the clouds, forests and fields gave way to small settlements, rail lines, and roads. It was just getting dark enough to see pricks of light moving among them. Most were the orange lights of lamps, especially on the roads and around the sparse buildings, but some were chromatic magelight, and moving in groups. A cluster of hundreds surrounded a serpentine train, its locomotive belching steam at a tiny station, its windows glowing and active. A harsh light at its nose lit up the crowd where they had spilled out onto the tracks: ponies trying to board with what they could carry.

I tried to look closer, to understand the scene below us, but it was too far, and soon passed into the distance. I was left with an impression: the train was West-bound, pointed away from the city. All those little lights down there were trying to escape.

As we kept flying, the settlements below us became denser, and the skies darker, yet there seemed to be fewer lights.

“Five minutes!” the draft called back again.

I thought at around the five minute mark we would have been above the city proper, but our surroundings seemed too dim. But then we passed over a ribbon of water, broken by a long, industrial shape - the bridge. We were over the city! I leaned out of the carriage and looked ahead to the island, and saw the towers scraping against the clouds. Normally gleaming night and day, now they were only visible as shapes against the horizon. The only unnatural light was that of the fires, and lines of smoke rose from them to cut across the hazy skyline.

“Is this really Manehattan?” I asked myself.

“Not anymore,” Cere’s voice made me jump and nearly drop my notebook. He’d leaned over my side of the carriage, following my gaze, but he returned to his seat after my reaction. It was bothersome that I was getting so lost in my own thoughts, but I was nervous, and taking notes helped.

It didn’t take much more writing before I felt a lurch as we descended below the cloud layer, heading for the north end of the city. The draft called out, “Two minutes!” but Cere and I were already preparing, putting everything into our saddlebags, and zipping our hoods up.

The suit, once fully-sealed, was stifling but reassuring. Very much like armour. It was charmed to maintain its own air supply and resist puncture better than laminated fabric, while the all-around visor gave me an almost unrestricted view. Still, I could feel my breath bounce back into my face every time I exhaled.

The first thing we were supposed to do after sealing our suits was test the lockout system. I spoke my keyword, “Friendship,” and the whole world was cut out in an instant. My visor became pitch-black, letting not even a sliver of light through; the only sounds I could hear were my breathing and my heartbeat, oddly distant; and even the buffeting from the wind was lessened, smoothed over, a strange and sickening feeling. I spoke the second word, “Unlock,” and the whole world returned to me, relatively loud and bright and harsh.

Cere glanced at me before triggering his own lockout. He said, “Okay, -” and I thought I heard the beginning of his keyword, but when his visor went dark it was as if the sound was snatched out of my ears. An odd experience from both sides.

After that, we double-checked the two-way radio system. He read a series of words on a small card, and I repeated them: “Gate. Tiny. Appleloosa. Change. Seven.” - and so on, ensuring we could read each other loud and clear.

My attention gradually turned back to the city, as my eyes adjusted to twilight. Aside from the unlit street lamps and storefronts, I noticed wagons, carriages, and motor-cars sitting in the streets - some were parked in orderly fashion, others seemed abandoned in random places. A row of skinny carriages laid over each other like toppled dominos. The burnt wreckage of a dozen vehicles clotted an intersection. In another corner, a runabout had embedded itself in a fire hydrant, and the leaking water ran across the road and collected in the tracks of an unmoving tram.

“Hey.”

I paused. Something bothered me about the water, but I couldn’t quite place it. The unfinished thoughts were underlined in my notes:

Running water. Something wrong with that? …

“Hey, Twilight!”

Cere surprised me again, but then, so did the dark form of a building passing by within reach.

“We’re almost down,” he said, his voice low, bordering on a whisper. “Get your shit in gear.”

I rushed to put away my notes and sling my saddlebags over my back. My first idea at a response was to point out that we didn’t need to keep our voices down, but my inner critic recognized that as unhelpful. I settled on a silent nod, even though he wasn’t looking at me.

Our carriage descended and slid to a stop over an empty road, and we hopped out the instant it scraped the ground. I stumbled a little after landing, as my suit’s shoes settled themselves onto my hooves. In the time it took to steady myself, the carriage kept moving. I imagined the invisible threshold of the concealment spell passing through my body, and turned to look quickly, hoping I’d see it.

I did. The carriage disappeared out of my left eye a fraction of a second before it disappeared out of my right eye. And then, just down the road, a faint column of steam rising out of a sewer grate momentarily disappeared, then re-emerged, turbulent. How fascinating!

Cere was also looking in the direction of the now-concealed carriage. I asked him, “Did you see it?”

“See what?” he asked. “Over.”

“The carriage disappearing.”

He looked back in that direction again, then shook his head. He was sighing when he opened the channel again. “...We should stay on task. You recognize the street? Over.”

I hadn’t thought of orienting myself, so I scanned the area. We were in a neighbourhood of staggered row-houses, taller than the average building in Ponyville or even Greater Canterlot - by my estimation - but still squat and low enough that I could see darkened towers to the south. To the north, I could just barely make out the hilly mid-rises of our destination - the Heights.

The name and number of the street didn’t come to me, not exactly, but I could place myself on a mental map confidently. I answered, “Five or six streets south, two streets east of the rendezvous.”

Cere considered that for a moment, then: “Okay. Then let’s start the sweep, this way,” he pointed east with a hoof. “Over.”

“Sure. How about I take this side, you take that side?”

“Sure,” he agreed. Then added, “...Over.”

An hour had passed, we were barely down the first street, and we were already passing our second fire. A house-row laid half-collapsed on Cere’s side of the street, smoldering, with wisps of smoke carrying out of the windows of the next house in line. Wherever the houses had collapsed, the blackened skeletons of trees lined the sidewalk.

There was no use checking the rubble for survivors, but we double-checked the front and back doors of all the remaining houses on that row, just to make sure nopony was boarded up somewhere that might catch fire an hour from now. Of course, we didn’t find anypony.

What intrigued me about the scene wasn’t anything about the fire, per se - it was more about the design of the buildings. The firewalls between adjacent units were disconnected, and separated as each collapsed, revealing a rough sub-wall of structural bricks, grout, and wood beams, not fit to endure the elements. When one fell, the rest were sure to follow in a few years. Considering these must have gone up the better part of a century ago, it was truly a shame.

I chuckled to myself. Where had my perspective gone? I was standing in the empty shell of one of the great cities of the world, the site of an anomalous disaster that, by the last estimates I’d heard, must have claimed the lives of tens of thousands of ponies, and here I was lamenting the fate of some things.

But… That was pessimism, leading to despair. I couldn’t let myself go back there.

“It’s a shame we can’t extinguish the fires,” I spoke into the channel.

Cere was still checking some doors around the corner, but he answered, “No magic, Twilight. Over.”

“Wouldn’t have to be magic,” I supposed, as I levitated my notebook and quill back into my saddebags, before he returned. “We could find a hose, open a hydrant just a bit, and just leave it running through the basement window of this smoker here. Might save the rest of the row.”

He made his way back from the rear doors, and I could see just enough of his eyes to note that they rolled. “You know why we’re not doing that.” Just then, he lifted a hoof to check his suit’s embedded timepiece. “Over.”

“I know,” I sighed. “Can’t leave any evidence we were here.”

He spoke, but I didn’t hear it. I cocked my head as he waited for a response, then he gestured to his fetlock - where the timepiece was - and then pointed at his ear and rotated his hoof - indicating the rotation of a dial. Right.

I checked the time, and adjusted the transceiver to the frequency we were using for this time slot.

Cere’s voice crackled in, “-eck, radio check, over.”

“I can hear you. Sorry, the frequencies keep slipping my mind. Not something I’m-”

Just then I heard the double-click that indicated Cere had forced control of the channel. He said, roughly, “Stop talking about this shit!” I apologized again quickly, but he didn’t hear it. “You clearly know the rules, so it is very frustrating to hear you constantly ignoring them. Over.”

I forced myself to think before just speaking again. I agreed, fundamentally, with his point. It was all a matter of informational hygiene. Nopony could know we were here now, and nopony could know we had been here, once we were gone. Part of that was leaving nothing behind. Another part of that was obfuscating our communications, and not discussing that obfuscation.

“I understand,” I started, and I left the channel open as I thought, mainly so Cere wouldn’t call me out for not saying ‘over’. The desire not to continue upsetting my partner for the next five hours fought with the desire to speak honestly, until I came to a decision. “But.”

Cere’s eyes snapped to me, but he didn’t take over the channel again. That helped.

“But our comms are already encrypted. These things only have…” - I avoided saying a number, for his sake - “... so many meters’ range. If anypony was listening in, they would have had to follow us, and we’ve been paying attention, haven’t we? We would have noticed. There’s nopony listening.”

Cere stared at me, and I remembered with a flush to open the channel again and say, “Over.”

He spoke immediately, though with less acid than before, “You don’t know that. Over.”

“That’s true, I don’t know,” I agreed, “but I’m not worried. I mean, have you even seen anything here? Anything alive? Over.”

That gave him pause, enough that he stopped and looked around. The front of his visor settled pointing towards a tree with bright orange leaves, one of the few untouched by fire.

“Not plants,” I clarified. “Animals. You know, dogs, cats, birds. Over.”

“No,” he said. “Not one, but I wasn’t looking for animals. No birds is strange, sure, but it’s late in the year. And you don’t normally see cats and dogs around the city, do you? Over.”

I had never lived here, so I wouldn’t know, but that did match with my experience in Canterlot. I voiced my doubts, “No, you wouldn’t. And it is getting to be that time of year, so maybe some of the birds have started migrating. But-”

I scanned the road to find the nearest alley, and trotted towards it.

Cere was behind me. “What do you see? Over.”

I didn’t see anything, but a thought had just occurred. If there was some kind of toxin or harmful magical effect that had killed so many and caused so much chaos, then maybe the birds had died or escaped, too. But… In the alley, I grabbed an over-full trash can and threw it onto the sidewalk, spilling its contents. I kicked a few bags along with it, and, while I was at it, tossed a wooden pallet to the ground.

“What-” Cere began, but he did a double-take as I spread the garbage out in all directions. “What the hell?”

“Rats,” I explained. “Over.”

“What?”

I gestured to the pile, notably lacking in movement. “There are no rats, Cere. No bugs, either, as far as I can tell. There’s nothing here.”

He examined the pile for a moment. “That’s… true. I guess. But, Twilight, what’s the point? Over.”

I lit up my horn and prepared a spell that gave me a sense for living things nearby. I had not used this spell very often, but something very much like it was common as a primer for teleportation, so it felt familiar. I attuned it for animals and gave it as much energy as it could stably handle, and then let it go.

A sphere expanded out from my horn, drawing interwoven beams that filled to create the rough shape of a creature. I felt blinded by Cere’s shape, even though my eyes were closed, and I wasn’t actually seeing anything. But after that, nothing else lit up - not in the alley, not in the street, not in the many houses surrounding us. The sphere expanded for dozens of meters, and then hundreds, before losing pressure and mixing into the static aether. Dark all around.

Nothing alive. Nothing recently dead, even. There was an answer here, but I was missing something. I flipped through my notes, trying to find that page - right. Running water.

I added to it:

Running water. Something wrong with that? …

No life anyw—

Cere suddenly kicked my notebook away, leaving a streak of ink where the quill had just been. He pressed his visor against mine, and said, through teeth, “That was unwise.” Beneath the radio, his voice rumbled through my visor.

I backed up. “There’s nothing here!”

“We know that. That’s why we’re here, that’s-.”

I took over the channel. “I mean there’s no life in the city, none at all! Nothing-”

He took it over again, almost at a scream, “We know that! Be quiet, filly!”

I was quiet. Not because I wanted to let him speak, but because I couldn’t think of anything to say in response. Filly?

I could hear Cere breathing in my ear as he approached and jabbed a hoof into my barrel. His eyes were hard, and he spoke in monotone. “Everypony knows the city is dead, Twilight. I’d prefer if we didn’t end up the same way. But you,” - he jabbed me again - “keep running your mouth about our procedures, about our frequencies, fuck - you even located our evac point!”

At this point, he had gotten himself so worked up that he wasn’t even looking at me anymore. Rather, he paced in front of the alley as he continued, “And, yeah, I get that you’re some kind of unicorn prodigy. You can solve all your problems with magic. But you just sent out a flare for anything that happens to be watching. Shiiit!”

He refocused on me, and seemed to smile, but there was that same hardness in his eyes. It was then that I recognized it as fear. “Assuming we even make it out of here alive, we’ll probably be considered vectors. I would like to see my family again, Twilight! Wouldn’t you? Over!”

It seemed he wanted me to speak. I tried controlling my breathing for a moment.

Some kind of unicorn prodigy.

Running your mouth.

Filly.

I considered informing him that I could easily teleport him a kilometer underground if I wanted to, but, alas. I didn’t know the geology of Manehattan Island well enough to get the depth exactly right. And if it couldn’t be exactly a kilometer, there was really no point to it. That left only diplomacy.

With a final calming breath, I sighed. Cerulean was as afraid as I was, and he was only following orders. I needed to keep that in mind.

I looked down the street, towards the rising moon. “We’re here for the same reasons. We both want to learn more about what happened. Over.”

“Agreed,” Cere said. I glanced at him. He was also looking at the moon. “Let’s move on. Over.”

“But,” I started. He didn’t budge. “I don’t just want to do what we’re told, pick up a few scraps here, a few clues there. I want to blow this wide open.”

That caught his attention. He opened the channel, remained silent for a moment, and then sighed again. “I suppose you’ve got some ideas. Over.”

“Yep!” My notebook floated back to me, and I picked up where I left off. Running water, no life anywhere, right. “Now, where’s the nearest sewer?”

He looked at me with a screwed-up expression. “What?”

“I don’t see a point to this. Over.”

I groaned, though not into the channel. “Just watch it, okay?”

A few seconds passed, and he clicked the channel open for just a moment. Seemed like silent assent - like he was telling me to just get on with it, in so many words.

I reached over and flushed the toilet. Then I waited for the cistern to fill, and flushed it again, then waited and flushed a third time. “Done. You should see it. Over.”

I was almost out of the house when he replied, “Got it. Not the one I expected. Over.”

Emerging from the door we’d kicked in, I spotted Cere down the street, standing next to a grate in the road, looking back to me. A tiny amount of steam rose out of the grate, dissipating just above the neighbourhood roofline.

“Fascinating,” I commented. My mind was elsewhere - where else had we seen a steaming grate? At the landing site. In front of the school. Near the first fire. Was there a pattern?

I blinked, refocusing. “Let’s head North, see if we see anything. Over.”

“Fine,” Cere said, shaking his head as he followed me. “We should be heading North anyway. But I would appreciate some explanation, at some point. Over.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just hard to explain.”

Surprisingly, he let that be. It was unsatisfying - wasn’t he curious? Didn’t he want to understand? Maybe he was giving me time to think of an explanation. Or… I hadn’t said ‘Over’, and he was taking it personally again.

It didn’t seem right to just conclude the thought and be done with it, so I gave it my best shot: “Okay. What happens when you flush the toilet? Over.”

Cere stopped walking for a moment. I stopped to let him catch up, and in that time he ventured, “Shit goes down the pipes. Over.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

I sighed, even though I knew I wasn’t doing as good a job of this as I wished. “Just follow me on this. When you flush the toilet, waste goes out, water goes in. The waste goes into the sewer, and when it’s cold out, it can create steam, right?”

“Like we just saw,” he said. “I’m following. Over.”

We’d reached the next intersection, and I looked up and down the avenue both ways. No steam. We continued north, up to the next street we would have been searching.

“So,” I continued, “the water entering the toilet has to come from somewhere, before it gets to the cistern.”

“Water mains, I guess. Over.”

“Exactly. The city pumps water through the mains. Pressurized. In a city this big, it’s probably distributed from a few centralized pumping stations. I didn’t think to check the maps for it before we sortied, but I suspect the stations are mostly in the south end of the city, where it was all first developed. I’d say that-”

Cere nudged me, and opened the channel when I let it close. “You’re losing me, over.”

I felt my ears flick back. I’d been rambling. I looked around, realizing we’d crossed into the next street, and spotted what we’d been looking for. Thick steam poured out of a grate only a short trot away.

Cere was still right next to me as I headed there, and glanced over with an eyebrow raised.

“Right, sorry.” Trying to explain my thoughts with speech made me feel like an idiot - writing had always been so much easier. “The water is still pressurized, but the city is dark. You saw how dark it was on the way in, right?”

“Eerily dark,” he agreed. “Over.”

“Yes! There’s no power anywhere. But there’s still water! Uh, over.”

I looked over at Cere, and he looked over at me, and we kept going. I could tell I hadn’t captured his imagination, the way this all had captured mine, but he was still along with me for the journey. That was enough. Right?

We arrived at the grate. It was only as wide as a pony, but as long as a carriage. The steam was thick and opaque, and rose from it quickly. I stuck a hoof into the column and felt some warmth, saw moisture bead off the skin of my suit.

“It’s hot,” I mumbled. Then I remembered I hadn’t even opened the channel. “It’s hot,” I told Cere. “That’s really weird.”

Cere looked around the grate, and, picking a corner, let a rear hoof fall down onto it. I wasn’t quite sure what he was doing until his second attempt, where he performed a strange sort of bucking motion, aiming down. The impact sounded like an old-fashioned gunshot. The grate, amazingly, flipped up a few centimeters on the opposite side, before settling back to its original position with a thump.

That was more effect than I would have imagined - the thing could have easily weighed a ton. Perhaps two experienced earth ponies, working together in rhythm, could put enough energy into these grates to lift them?

“Impressive,” I told him.

He shook his head. “Whatever. Use your magic. Over.”

It crossed my mind, as I was lighting my horn and building the chroma around the bars of the grate, that I could make it seem like lifting it took a lot of effort. But Cere would probably, correctly, tell that I was faking it. So I didn’t.

He watched as the massive grate shifted in place, then elevated, and swung through the air before setting itself down on the adjacent sidewalk. As my chroma dissipated, he chuckled into the channel. “Okay, well, have fun down there. Over.”

I peered down into the vent pit, knowing I’d never be able to see through the steam, yet I felt in my stomach that it was a long way down. A cloudwalking spell came to mind, but that was too complicated. And there was a surface down there - I just needed to reach it without breaking something. I lit my horn again as I stepped off the edge, felt my chroma surround me and penetrate my suit, slowly, then stick to my skin and hair. I was only falling for an instant before the featherfall spell took hold, and I descended lightly the rest of the way.

It was almost too slow, but I only thought that because I was essentially blind for the first few seconds. Gradually the air thinned as I got lower, and I could see a dim reflection in the water and wet concrete below. It was still hot, and I could feel the moisture stick to my suit, but it seemed the clouds were only forming on contact with cool, dry air above.

A large channel ran along the entire length of the cavity, and continued into a tunnel in either direction, but the sewer was fed by other openings higher up on the walls, as well. I wondered - where was the heat coming from?

Cere spoke into my ear, “What if they have generators? Over.”

I wasn’t following. “What?”

“I’m saying, the reason there’s water pressure here - the pump-houses could be getting power from their own generators. Over.”

“Maybe. But then wouldn’t we have seen something? Lights, smoke?”

“...Right. It’s weak. Just thought you’d appreciate the effort. Over.”

That made me smile. “I do. Over.”

At the bottom, I let my hooves sink into the water, feeling unusually buoyant, and the featherfall effect gradually dissipated. I was thankful that the water only went up to my knees as I levitated my notebook out of my still-dry saddlebags and tore a page out from the back. Separating it into thin strips, I held each in front of an opening in the vent cavity, hoping to determine a draft. Maybe I could have remembered or brute-forced a spell that visualized air currents, but this was just simpler.

There - a strip flew back, caught in the wind coming out of the main sewer channel, upstream. I tried to visualize it. West? North-west? Where did that lead?

“Cere, I’ve got a strong draft. I think it’s coming from -” I looked up, pained that I still couldn’t see through the clouds of steam. Then I remembered I could evoke a compass with a thought. “West-north-west. Over.”

A pause. “Roger. That’s down the street. Over.”

Yes, that made sense. But then, that could lead anywhere. We couldn’t just wander around the city hoping to map out the sewers from ground level - we needed a direct approach. But walking through the sewer channels wasn’t a good idea either.

I was conscious of the risks, of Cere's warning that it made us a target, but magic seemed like the best available solution. I called upon the life-sense spell, re-imagined it so that it would trace the empty space within the sewer system, and let it go.

The burst of chroma only illuminated a few meters down the channel, but seconds later the sensory sphere expanded past that, like an inflating balloon pressing up against the wall of the tunnel, ignoring the water and the air. I more felt the geography of the system than saw it. A large vent cavity - that’s where I was. Half a dozen thin openings up above - those I ignored. A channel, running east to west - that I focused on. It ran for a kilometer or more, stretching out and just barely dimming, before finding the second vent cavity and expanding through that, where it regained the strength to continue further. That all seemed fine, but there was an anomaly - a crack in the channel. The spell fizzled out beyond the crack, as if it had reached open air or water with no surfaces to cling to.

I killed the still-expanding sphere and cleared my mind. Trying again with something that would expand more selectively, but give me a better sense of the detail and composition of the surfaces it touched, I sent it heading west. This time it expanded past the concrete cavities and pipes, into the crack, and found another tunnel with walls that felt - or smelled? - like wood, but in the shape of a natural, wormy cavern. It extended north some kilometers, widening and collecting branches as it went, but the spell faded out before I could tell its destination.

That was strange.

“Cere, there’s something down here. Something under the city. Over.”

I listened to static.

“Come in, Cere?”

More static came, but it faded into a voice: “... ing, in the sky. Strange lights. Shit. You copy?”

“I copy. What’s going on?”

There was a rattling sound, like Cere was running, and bursts of static washed over his voice. “There’s something … … sky. All kinds of colours. I don’t thi… …al. Over.”

That was also strange, and worrying, but I felt I was close to something down here. I couldn’t just leave.

“Cere, find some shelter - some place to hide,” I told him. “Repeat, find some place to hide. I’ll be up soon. Over.”

Only static returned to me. I told myself that that was only because of the distance and earth between us, or whatever magical effects were causing the lights, and tried to refocus on my purpose.

I prepared another modification of the sensory spell. This time I made sure it was directed in a tight cone, and forced it to originate from the junction between the sewer channel and the cave network. I set it off and felt the network expand in my mind. Everything nearby collected into a single branch, coming from the north, reminding me of a root system. But it couldn’t have been - it was too large, and the spell fell out of range before I could make out the source.

Was I taking the wrong approach? I’d designed all these spells to trace tunnels and cavities, ignoring the materials within, but maybe they weren’t empty. I started again from the life-detection spell and cast it again, but I saw nothing, except for Cere, laying flat somewhere. I would have worried about his position if the spell didn’t tell me exactly how alive he was, and there were no problems there.

Still getting nowhere. I considered other combinations of spells, other things to focus on, that might tell me what these caves meant, but I had to get out of here soon, at least to check on Cere, and-

No trees. The thought hit me before I even knew why. Earlier, I had balanced the life-detection spell to exclude plants, meaning even though it illuminated Cere, it didn’t illuminate any of the trees along the street. There was no reason to keep that exclusion now, since there shouldn’t have been any plants in the cave network anyway, and… It did remind me of roots.

I cast it, and my heart sank. Cere and the trees above were microscopic in comparison. The roots lit up for kilometers in every direction. Even with all the power I could muster, I was no closer to seeing their source. And, sticking up from the nearest branch, a shoot was growing right under Cere’s hooves. Threatening to burst through the street.

I teleported up to the street immediately, and arrived with my face nearly touching a motor-carriage. Cere was prone beneath it. With telekinesis I grabbed the carriage and lifted it straight up, as high as I could, and shouted into the radio, “Lockout! Now!”

Cere’s eyes, glancing up at me, were only visible for a moment before his mouth moved, and his visor went dark. A crack appeared in the pavement right next to him, and a dark, thorny vine poked out of it, reaching for him.

I prepared to teleport again, finding the highest point in range, touched Cere’s back with a hoof, let go of the carriage, and spoke, “Friendship,” just as the spell went off.

Blood pumped in my ears. I was breathing hard. My whole body shook, causing a noisy crinkling throughout the suit.

It had been a mistake to use so much magic so quickly. We were still hours away from an evac. I needed to conserve what I had left.

Cere sat on the roof next to me, looking out at the skyline, now choking with smoke. The strange lights had slowed, but the fires, especially the fire I’d started by dropping that carriage, were growing. We could barely see the other skyscrapers anymore.

“Talk to me,” Cere said. “What’s causing those lights? And what did you find down there?”

I tried to slow my breathing enough that I could talk sensibly. “Lights aren’t… related. They’re chromatic.”

He cocked his head, and looked out in the direction we’d last seen them in. I was able to take several deep, controlled breaths before we saw the next one - a sequence of white-green bursts, mostly at ground level, casting harsh shadows against the surrounding buildings. But it was mostly obscured by the smoke.

“Oh,” he spoke, through some fading static - an after-effect. “You mean magic.”

I nodded, annoyed at myself. I’d forgotten that most ponies didn’t have any education in magic. “Yeah. I think those bursts are from other ponies on the ground.”

“Other search teams.”

I nodded, breathing.

He went quiet. I could imagine his conclusion well enough, if it was the same as mine: the other search teams had been attacked, like us, and were defending themselves.

That naturally brought Cere to his other question. “What did you see?”

I searched for the correct word to describe it. “Some… enormous root system. Larger than anything I’ve ever seen.”

The stallion turned to look at me, but didn’t comment. He wanted me to keep going. As if I could explain it!

I breathed some more, and tried. “I don’t know exactly how big it is. From what I saw, I’d guess it’s grown under the entire north end of the city. So, hundreds of square kilometers, bare minimum.”

Cere turned around to look North. “The first reports came out of the north end.”

“Makes sense,” I said, “And the roots were more aware than they should have been. A vine was coming up from the ground, about to ambush you.”

“Thanks.”

It took me a second to figure out what he meant, but then I just shrugged.

“So… what, it eats ponies?” he wondered. “It grew under the city, and ate everypony it could find? It tried to eat us, and it’s trying to eat them?” He gestured south, in the direction of the lights.

I shrugged again. “I guess. Carnivorous plants are nothing special.”

Stupid. That wasn’t the whole answer, couldn’t have been. It explained the water, the dead zone, and the individual attacks, but it just didn’t seem possible for a mere plant to take over a city like Manehattan. And for it to do so without anypony knowing, without even the slightest rumour of vines coming up from the ground? Without any pegasi or griffons escaping with eyewitness accounts?

We were missing something. I wanted to say as much, but I didn’t think I could put it to words with a steady voice.

Cere kept looking North, and asked, “Did you see any of the… you know, the plant part?”

“The plant part?”

“The plant part. You know, the part above ground, the green part with leaves. I mean, if it’s an enormous plant, it can’t just be roots, right?”

I shook my head. “You’re assuming it works like a normal plant. Maybe it is just roots, like a fungus. I don’t know.”

“Well, that would be even worse.”

That made me snort. “Hah, yeah. I guess that would be worse.”

It didn’t quite match with what I’d seen, but I imagined an interconnected mass of living tissue, spreading out underground from all angles without any central point. If that was what it was - what could we do? It was already so large and so deep that nothing conventional could hope to destroy it, and a fear settled into my heart: maybe nothing magical could destroy it, either.

Well. No. There was something. I just didn’t like to think about it.

I was considering what I’d say to Cere, how I’d try to explain things, when there was a crunch in the air - the sound of a hoof stepping on gravel. Cere and I whipped around - another pony stood on the roof.

She was a unicorn with short hair and cold, unexpressive eyes. It was too dark to get an idea of her colouring, and I couldn’t see her cutie mark from my angle. But she looked unkempt, dirty, and tired.

A survivor?

How had she gotten onto the roof without us noticing? Had she always been up here?

I was frozen, but Cere stepped forward, in front of me. He said, firmly, loud enough to be heard outside of his suit, “Stay back.”

The unicorn didn’t react.

Cere went on, paraphrasing the words we’d memorized: “We can’t take you with us. But we can give you some food and supplies. If you’ve found a safe place, stay there and wait for rescue.”

The words seemed so hollow, now that we knew more about what we were dealing with. Cere had still spoken them with conviction. But it provoked no reaction.

Crunch. Another hoof-step on the roof, this time to the unicorn’s left. A pegasus wearing a dark outfit, bulky with armour. Where had this one come from?

Crunch. To the unicorn’s right. An earth pony, steam rising from her breath.

We hadn’t just noticed them now. No, they were appearing. Dropping out of concealment. This was a coordinated group. A threat.

I barely had a second to think of my options before the unicorn’s horn shone a brilliant orange, I heard - felt - the sound of a crack of thunder, and my perspective changed. The air left my lungs. My left foreleg bent in the wrong direction, my stomach lurched, the horizon spun out of control, my hooves flailed with no ground beneath them. Air rushed past me.

I’d been shot off the roof. How had she cast a spell like that so quickly? It must have - no, that didn’t matter!

I reached out with my magic, found Cere where I’d left him. All three of the strangers were converging on him. I couldn’t teleport us both at the same time - we were too far apart. I settled on getting him out of there first. He appeared below, on a lower roof.

I could cast the spell again in a heartbeat, but I’d already fallen past him, and the ground was approaching quickly. There was no time to properly adjust for my velocity, I just-

“-hah!” My breath left me. I teleported onto the roof, and briefly flew upwards, before falling back down and landing on my injured side, a saddlebag pressing awkwardly into my shoulder. That uncomfortable, wrong feeling in my left foreleg bloomed into agony, and the pain gurgled out of me. It took a moment before I remembered to breathe, but when I did, it only hurt more.

“You hurt?” Cere asked, through the radio, as he came to my side. The answer was obvious. “Shit. We need to-”

Crunch.

“-go.” Cere looked behind me, at whatever pony had just appeared. I wasn’t waiting this time. Reaching out towards Cere with a back hoof, to eliminate any distance penalty and give us the most range, I teleported us in a random direction.

We landed, softly this time, in another part of the city. Asphalt was beneath us. It didn’t matter - I was already casting the teleport spell. Damn the reserves, we needed to leave.

This time I had a direction in mind: West, towards the bridge. The topology was already coming to mind, selecting a safe spot for us.

The destination was locked in, and we had already disappeared, when something pulled. It was a nauseating feeling. Like being forced through a kinked hose. I’d only experienced it once before, during an experiment. Somepony was intercepting us. In the midst of the process, I could hardly think, let alone defend my spell, and it bent to the interceptor’s will.

We appeared somewhere else. My mind swam, but I blinked through it. Grass. Trees. Not a bridge, but a park, with a pony in the distance. The chroma around their horn was just dissolving. They were the interceptor - I knew it.

The ground near me split open, and a vine emerged, angling a dark red bulb towards me. Cere had the awareness and strength to throw me away from it, but I wasn’t in any state to catch myself. The pain seared. Again.

I heard a struggle, some panicked breaths, crinkling of a sealed suit, and, in the midst of it all, I felt something change. It was subtle, like the hair on my neck standing up. I didn’t know what to make of it, and it wasn’t helping my mental state.

More ponies landed out of sight, coming in on hooves and wings. They, and the unicorn who had intercepted us, were watching as Cere fought with the vine and I suffered from my injured leg and pounding headache.

They weren’t survivors, I took it. Or at least not just survivors. They were working with the plant-thing, serving the same aims. Maybe they were trying to feed it or keep others from discovering it. Maybe they had done this for the last three days.

That didn’t make sense. They would need hundreds, if not thousands, of collaborators, to do this to a city of this size. What end would attract so many?

Maybe they were changelings, supporting an experimental bio-weapon.

That didn’t make sense either, but it was something I could disprove, at least. I could modify the life-detect spell to reveal illusions and sympathetic charms. The pounding in my skull objected, but I forced through it, made the alterations, and cast it.

There was a web of illusions radiating out from every pony around me, as well as from the vine. I didn’t understand the result, at first, and feared that I’d wasted precious energy on something worthless. But then I started to see it. The webs changed as the ponies moved, acted, thought, all in sync with the plant.

Not illusions.

Thralls.

The web had just reached Cere at the moment he stopped struggling. He’d been thralled, too, and he began to step towards me, dragging the vine with him.

He started saying, “Twilight, it’s-”

“Friendship,” I muttered, and I was cut off from the world. The lockout system would give me some resistance to whatever magic was involved here. Not enough, surely, but some.

What options were left? I couldn’t teleport - the unicorn would intercept it.

My head pounded. I could barely think straight.

Options! Something that granted mobility, like wings. Some way to hide from the vines, from the thralls, like the concealment spell.

But then, they had concealment spells. They could probably dispel concealments too. And wings were too complex. I could do it, but I couldn’t keep brute-forcing my way into things. I needed to draw on what I had already prepared, at least as a starting point.

A weight pressed against me. It was distant, but real. The plant-thralls were doing something to me - my time in the dark was running out.

Life-detection. Teleportation. Featherfall. Imprinting. Airfont.

I could suck the air out of their lungs, or stamp ink over their eyes, or - no. Too slow, too complex, even if it did anything.

Telekinesis. Light. Heat.

Simpler. Better. But where could I go from there?

The pounding in my head was made worse by a sudden pounding on my head. There was a second impact before I could properly react, and my visor exploded into my face. The lockout spell disturbed, I saw Cere over me, following through to stamp down and grind the shards of glass deeper.

I inhaled at the shock, closed my eyes, curled my legs towards my body. My left leg was still bad in a way I didn’t fully understand. My left eye felt warm with blood. Other cuts stung, feeling cold in the open air.

It sunk in, then, that I was really, really hurt. This realization only made the pain harder to ignore.

“Let’s not prolong this,” Cere said, through the radio. “Open your eyes, Twilight.”

I almost did as he said. That was Cere’s voice. He sounded normal. Calm, if a little frustrated. Familiar. A voice I could trust.

I didn’t. He was a thrall. I screwed my eyes shut even harder, squeezing through the pain.

Why did he - it, the plant - want me to open my eyes?

I felt a tingling over my right eyelid. My good eye. Somepony was trying to force it open.

I heard the vines growing in my direction, towards my face. I saw a faint red light through my eyelids, like the rising sun.

“Just-”

Cere jumped on my stomach. I gasped and threw up in a spasm, then broke into a coughing fit to clear the acid out of my throat and nose.

“-open!” he shouted.

I kept them closed. It came together - the plant took control of ponies through the eyes. Knowing that didn’t help me fight them, but it helped.

A reduction of options.

To survive this, I just needed to keep my eyes closed.

The spell was easy enough. A burst of light, as bright and fast as I could make it. I felt some pride as it erupted, and there was so much energy in it that it even made a cracking sound, like lightning. It wasn’t enough to deafen them, but certainly to blind them. Maybe permanently.

Even with Cere between me and the burst, with my eyes screwed shut, I felt blinded. Good.

There were no shouts of pain or alarm, as I had hoped, but I had to assume it had worked, and moved on to the next spell. Telekinesis as a starting point, but with instantaneous force and limited insight. Eliminating the biggest threats.

I hit Cere, and he was sent tumbling through the grass. With what little control I had, I tried not to send him into a tree. I was not so merciful with the interceptor unicorn, who I remembered was behind me, in the seven o’ clock position. After a brief roll, their head struck something. Hard. Unconscious at best.

Some others were converging on me, but now there was nothing keeping me in the park. Hoping for solid, unpopulated ground, I teleported West.

The range this time felt less than normal. It could have been the migraine boiling in my skull, from using so much complex magic in such a short time; or it could have been the distraction of my burning lungs or screwed-up leg or lacerated eye. That would have been manageable.

I realized the true cause when I reappeared on an empty road, and tried teleporting West again: there was a barrier in the way.

Not just here, on the road. The invisible line bisected the buildings around me, and the ones in the next street over, and so on. With insight from the teleportation primer, I could trace the lines all the way around until they met behind me. I was still somewhat blinded in my good eye, but I could see the other side, dimly, in black and white. Nothing magical could reach across the line, and nothing could get over or under, either.

No way out.

“Nuuuhhh,” I moaned, hearing others approaching.

If I was thinking straight, had more energy, I could have figured out a way around it, or a way through it. Find and disrupt the source. Invert the field. Something.

But I was strung out. In pain. Exhausted.

The others were surrounding me.

I almost thought they would kill me, now, to spare themselves the trouble.

But then, whump. Total darkness.

It almost made me laugh. What now? Why bother?

I tested it - the same kind of barrier as before, but more. All the way up, all the way down, but only a meter or so from edge to edge, just enough that I could feel it against my head and back legs. I realized with annoyance that, when it formed, it had sliced through my mane, narrowly avoiding my horn.

That - the futility of it - actually made me laugh, and though it hurt, it brought me some welcome clarity. I suddenly had time to think, but I was under no illusion that that time would last.

Why had they - the plant-thing and its thralls - trapped me in a dark tube? The first thing that came to mind was suffocation, but that would be slow, especially with the amount of air they’d given me. The second idea made more sense: they wanted to prepare something on the outside. Some enthrallment that I couldn’t possibly avoid, or just some way to kill me without too much collateral damage.

Well, I wouldn’t give them the chance.

It pained me to even consider the magic cost, the consequences of scraping that metaphorical barrel, but I set that aside and began preparing something I’d only before considered as a joke.

The barrier went all the way up, and all the way down.

A kilometer was a bit much, practically speaking. But 200 meters?

I needed to create a pony-sized cavity first, then a standard airfont so I could breathe. I felt the ground rise beneath me as I worked, felt my ears pop as the pressure changed. And then, with a thought, I was down there.

My body resettled in the round cavity, my left leg banging against the hot stone wall. Pain. Pain for days. I laughed at that, too, and my eyes watered.

Somehow, my saddlebags were still with me, along with most of their contents. I set a light, pulled out my notebook, a map of Manehattan, and a hoof-sized spell reference book.

The words on the pages were blurry nonsense. My light was dim, my telekinetic grasp shaky. Every application of magic might as well have been a hole burning its way through my skull, at this point. Every breath sent a fire through my left side.

But I kept going.

I had to.

Sooner or later, the plant-thralls would lift the barrier - and I would be ready.