I have tasked Anastasiya with setting up a testing ground for the area-of-effect version of my spell to be completed by the end of next week. This will require much more work than just moving ponies into my cells as I plan to test the spell at a number of ranges, and so will require regularly-spaced intervals of cells across miles so I can accurately judge the effect of the spell with distance. I also want to test over a variety of terrains and elevations, so I’ve given her some time to do the proper survey work and transport the test subjects.

In the meantime, I have a meeting with Cyneweard Stangaet. I met the stallion briefly at one of Ambrosius’ parties. He was a military strategist exiled from Wittenland for tactics dubbed “too extreme”. Now that I’m in charge, he wants to speak regarding my party trick. I recall the one he refers to. I entertained a group of nobleponies by making part of a town “disappear”. In reality, I destroyed the earth beneath the town to create a sinkhole, but certainly from the viewpoint of the balcony we were on, it appeared as though everything disappeared.

This meeting will most assuredly be about the military applications of my magic now that I am much more powerful. I’ll admit, I’ve had some ideas myself. I haven’t done anything too taxing since destroying Dunburh, and I long to make use of my full power again.

Cyneweard and I are at the edge of a mountain across from the ruins of Dunburh. I teleported us here to test the effectiveness of spell ideas we have on a city. This way, we can see its effects on buildings. Many are destroyed, but the ruins remain the largest collection of buildings in Viirad, at least for now. Of course, I could repeat the nuclear chain reaction I used to destroy Dunburh in the first place in every situation, but it would be good to have a variety of spells from which to choose from.

The first idea is related to my sinkhole trick - an earthquake. As I increase my awareness of the earth around Dunburh, I note how far my magical influence can now reach. Without scrying, I am still able to feel across the entirety of Dunburh in my grip as I simply shake everything.

Unexpectedly, Cyneweard and I feel the shaking from here miles away from the target- the ripple effects of my vibration must extend beyond my direct actuation of the ground. To see the results, I use the air as a scrying media to gain a view of the city. Usually scrying requires a reflective medium, but my mastery of the craft and sheer power let me use anything now. We observe the intact buildings shake and fall. Larger brick structures prove more vulnerable to damage as they seem to collapse at a much higher rate.

I also do want to see the effect this has on ponies, but the city has basically completely died since I destroyed it. The ponies didn’t seem to understand the concept of magical radiation, and many died from radiation sickness in the fallout of the blast. The ones who lived realized the danger and moved out. I suppose the effect on ponies is obvious. While the ground shaking does not directly kill, collapsing buildings do.

As I stop shaking the ground, the number of buildings still standing irks me. Most of the buildings, even in our former capital, are one to two story wooden houses, which have shown themselves to be naturally earthquake resistant. Cyneweard notes that taller buildings are more vulnerable, and that wood, being flexible, can withstand vibration much better than materials like concrete and brick.

It is a fact of our world that these short, wooden buildings are the most prevalent kind of building. Not being able to destroy them is not acceptable. I do have a spell, however, that may help. Mildgyd’s Magnet is a spell which works like a reverse magnet. It also works on things other than iron. The boring way to use the spell is to refine ore, but I sense a fun way to use it here.

I briefly teleport back to my library to grab a book with the spell before teleporting back. Cyneweard is quite startled by my sudden disappearance, but I explain to him my idea. The spell was designed by Lady Mildgyd to be used in cannons, but the story goes that the magnet repelled the gold of her jewelry, blasting her away never to be seen again.

If I tune the spell to repel all metal and then cast it over a town, I imagine I can get the spell powerful enough to rip the nails and screws from walls and bring down wooden structures in a thunderous blast. Luckily, the spell is well documented, and I am able to quickly prepare this variation for casting.

Moving the scrying window to a relatively intact row of houses, I pump a large amount of magic into the magnet before releasing the electromagnetic shock. The wave of force itself is invisible but is indirectly observable as the houses collapse one after the other. The effect on the streetlights is especially entertaining as the structures nearly instantaneously hit the ground in a crumpled mess. Cyneweard notes the buildings in the distance of the scrying image are still standing. For this to be useful on a strategic level, I will have to cast it with much more power.

After a few repeated casts, it is clear to me we are reaching diminishing returns. Due to the inverse square law, strength declines quickly from the point of casting. The spell is also not directable, causing a lot of energy to be wasted as the field expands in all directions equally. The proper way to use this in the future will be repeated, relatively small, casts of the spell targeted across infrastructure. Cyneweard says, in a tone much too enthusiastic, that when the Kasan army resists us, their supplies will take much longer to arrive with railroads warped beyond recognition and buildings and roads damaged. While it isn’t as fun as using the spells to commit mass murder, which they obviously can, I see the strategic benefits.

Another spell I wish to test is also a variation of my party trick. In order to conceal the town falling into the sinkhole, I conjured a black fog over the region. With a small alteration to the spell, I could conjure additional particulates in the spell and cause everycreature engulfed in it to die. Cyneweard feels it is basically mustard gas with extra steps and it comes with all the related downsides. However, I believe it can have strategic benefits for Viirad.

With scrying, I can cast this spell at an almost unlimited distance. A blanket of this cloud over the capital of the opposing nation should prove quite effective. I move my scrying window to a nearby settlement visible from my vantage point.

I perform the normal conjuration of the fog over the settlement, and then add a second conjuration of dust and wind. I could do poison, but that would be a much more complex particle. Besides, suffocation with a side of lung damage is much faster. I stay lazy with the dust, as that should help the particles form with irregularities that make them better at cutting through flesh.

The visibility through my scrying medium becomes low, and I can only make out shapes for a few blocks. I adjust my scrying window to be closer to the ground. Through it, I see a group of ponies run by, dashing indoors to avoid the dust. One pony doesn’t make it. His barely open eyes are marked with the red of irritation. His pace is slowing, coughs growing in frequency. The coughing grows stronger and stronger before then slowing down as he slumps on the side of a hay bale. Blood flows freely from his mouth as he stills.

Across the street, a mare bangs on the door to a home. The homeowner looks in fear at the mare from the nearby window while holding her 2 young foals. The mare appears to beg the mother to open the door, but she knows she shouldn’t. Dust storms are common in Viirad, though definitely not this aggressive, because of the magical energies of the machine warping the climate, and every family knows not to open the door during one of them. Young foals are especially at risk, as they are sensitive to the dust, and it could cause lifelong damage.

As the mare begins to violently cough blood over the door, the homeowner looks like she can’t bear watching her suffer any more. She opens the door and pulls the mare inside as fast as she can before closing the door. Her indecision has taken years from the mare’s life.

The mechanics of wind make it difficult to affect creatures indoors. Even if I were to develop a poison variant, the dosage of poison would likely be too small to kill before most got indoors. Regardless, there are many good reasons to still use this deadly air even if it doesn’t kill everyone it touches. It is a massive impediment to any logistical activity, as low visibility and dust damage can eat into efficiency. Also, the danger outside forces ponies to stay indoors, and the costs related to medical care add up and can put stress on a healthcare system already strained by war. Cyneweard also notes factory production decreases as creatures cannot afford to physically exert themselves as much with all the dust in the air. Overall, this result is satisfactory, and I will be sure to remember this spell combination.

As our meeting concludes, Cyneweard wants to discuss a spell idea that will be more useful in direct combat. Using magic to cause fission reactions is a useful skill, but the large-scale nature of the explosions mean they are better used away from the front. The magical radiation also poses issues across a wide area regardless of allegiance, and I would prefer something more one-sided.

I could perform a standard beam spell and lay down devastation from above, but there are several problems with that. Firstly, I have to aim it at targets individually. While it will sometimes happen, I doubt my enemies will line up their tanks nicely for me to destroy. Even if they do at first, doing this once means my opponents adapt and then stop being so stupid.

Secondly, this is not very efficient. Aiming from such a distance takes time, and then the actual killing takes time. What if they are in a building? Or hiding in a cave? If I were to kill one pony every 10 seconds, I would only be able to kill 360 ponies in an hour - a paltry figure. My time is much better spent with larger scale spells rather than individually trying to target each one.

I could reduce targeting time if I were closer to the action, but the final problem is that the nature of the horizon dictates I must be high in the air to see further. However, my back of the hoof math tells me if I were a half-mile in the air, I would still only be able to see about 40 miles in the distance. If the front is a thousand miles long, I’m not really affecting the greater battlefield.

My time is not best spent killing individual creatures, so the solution is instead using it to debilitate my enemies’ entire front. Giving an army of a hundred thousand a few percentage points of advantage has far more effect than me doing everything. The armies of today run on guns, cars, and tanks. I suppose Viirad’s doesn’t yet, but it will soon. A spell to disable their mechanical contraptions will ensure my forces can always have the upper hand.

Cyneweard’s suggestion is a time spell, revealing just how bad the universities outside of Equus are. I ask him what he means, and he describes the process sometimes seen in fiction where the experience of time for an area is accelerated and the things inside age and break. A ludicrous concept, but he doesn’t seem to understand why. It seems I’ll have to demonstrate.

Such spells that increase or decrease the speed of time in a given area do exist. Star Swirl the Bearded wrote much on the subject, but most of his work evidently didn’t make it to the Riverlands if it is still so poorly understood. Improvising based on my past readings, I conjure a bubble of time acceleration in front of the flight path of a nearby bird and then direct Cyneweard’s attention to it.

As observed from our region of normal time, the bird flies at a normal speed. Once the bird enters the region of accelerated time, it instantaneously begins to travel at double speed before just as quickly returning to its old velocity when exiting the region. While I could use an inordinate amount of energy to accelerate time to be much faster than twice the normal rate, it would actually help the enemy. From their perspective, they would perceive time as normal, and have more time in which to act. Yes, from our perspective they will age a century in a minute, but that means they will gain a century of time to, say fire one bullet a year which would be a hundred bullets in that minute from our perspective.

The real answer with a time spell would be to slow down time for our enemies, but creating just the small region I just did as an example was mana-intensive enough. I do, however, have a better idea.

When Cyneweard speaks of aging, what does he really mean? He means the natural processes of being in the world eventually take its toll. That toll, for most modern mechanical parts, is rust, or more generally, oxidation. There is no need to try and literally age our enemies when we can perform the same process that causes aging to be harmful. A large-scale, weak transmutation spell can remove the electrons necessary in just enough of a volume to break most machinery.

The spell already exists, called simply “Decay”, but it usually isn’t cast on such a large scale. I prepare another scrying window over a more intact street of Dunburh and perform a naive scaling method to increase the area of effect of the spell. Cyneweard looks appreciatively at the red tinting forming on the abandoned carts. Based on my mana output, I believe I can cast this over a very, very large area. It may not kill, but it is certainly not healthy to be in. Also, while it isn’t very dramatic, increasing the failure and turnover of enemy equipment will be very useful for helping my less well-equipped armies take on enemies with fancier guns and radios.

It was nice to take some time to let loose my full magical might for a change, but there’s something so impersonal about these strategic spells. I suppose it is just how the world is that, in order to effectuate large-scale change, one must be detached from the individual. There are simply too many creatures in the world to think about each one. Although, that being said, I can get my enjoyment when I zoom in like I had to with the deadly air. I’ll have to be sure to watch the individual effects of my mind control spell in the future once it becomes more a job of casting it over towns rather than the personalized soul experiences I cast now.

Author's Note

The backstory for the in-game spells Groundshock, Electromagnetic Shock, Deadly Air, and Decay.

My calculations of the horizon being 40 miles away at 0.5 miles in the air is based on an assumption that the EaW world is half the radius of Earth, which I took from the EaW map being smaller than the base game world map.

Also, I had to look up what units of measurement are used in the show, so I scraped the transcript of every episode. I found everyone uses customary units except one time that Pinkie says "centimeter".
One of the lines I found also gives me a headcanon that Twilight Sparkle invented nonstick pans. In the swamp fever episode, a sleeping Twilight mumbles about a "9 by 13 inch pan" before waking up and yelling "Nonstick pans!" Teflon was invented in 1938, right before WWII. This means, taking the relative time together, Twilight lived at the perfect time to invent nonstick pans, at least in the EaW universe. Of course, maybe she's just thinking of an article she read about the new invention, but the specificity of the dimensions of the pan suggest to me that she's thinking of designs, as if she were designing it herself. (Ignore the baking scene from earlier in the episode)