The Blank Pony

Sunny lay on her back, staring up at the sky. The air was still cold, but with the heat of the fire nearby and snuggled into her sleeping bag, she thought that the temperature was fine for sleeping under the stars—or for at least getting a good look at them.

Pipp was back in her chair, drinking a small cup of freshly brewed espresso and scrolling on her phone. Izzy and Misty were both in the nearest tree, the latter looking up at the stars and the former decorating her branch with a combination of pinecones, small crystals, and glowing fungus.

“There’s so many,” said Misty, staring up at them.

“Just wait until the fire gets low,” said Sunny. She smiled. “You can’t see them like this from Maretime Bay. Even with the new light pollution laws that Hitch and I wrote.”

Pipp looked up. “You can’t see them at all from Zephyr Heights,” she said. She lifted her phone to try to take a picture, only to review it and frown. “Dang...can’t photograph them. Hold on, the exposure time setting is in here somewhere...”

“We try not to look at them in Briarwood,” said Izzy. “It’s like looking into the sun.”

“Really?” asked Misty. “They don’t look so bright.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just...kind of Jinxie. If too much gets into you, you get...wrong. Starlight, I mean. Some old story about starlight that nopony remembers. We can’t even use it as a name.”

Sunny took a mental note of Izzy’s ramblings, adding it to her long mental list of quasi-religious superstitions held by her and ostensibly by her species. She continued to look up at the stars.

“I used to look up at them with my dad,” she said. She smiled, the fond memories coming back to her. “He said that they’re like our sun, but very, incredibly, impossibly far away. That the light of the nearest star takes ten years just to get to Equestria, and some of them...well, we’re seeing light from millions of years ago. Some of the ones we see don’t even exist anymore. We won’t know they’ve gone out until a million years after they’ve gone away.” She paused, a thought occurring to her. One she had long ago asked her father, on many occasions—but one that she very much wanted to hear what her friends had to say. “Do you ever think there’s others out there? Equestrias, I mean?”

Pipp looked up from her phone. “You mean, like, space aliens?”

“I don’t know. But look at them. There’s so many, one of them has to have planets. Maybe a lot of them. And maybe there’s somepony on those planets, looking up and seeing our sun as a tiny little dot and wondering the same thing.”

“Deep,” said Pipp, pausing and looking up. “And weirdly? More spooky than that dumb foal’s tale about the Bonestealer.”

Izzy looked up, confused. “But the sun’s not here right now. How would they see it?”

Sunny sighed, not wanting to explain astrophysics to a unicorn. Not when there were so many stars to look at.

“Ooh! OOH! One of them is coming to say hi! HI STAR!”

Izzy waved frantically at the sky, and Sunny searched the heavens to see a thin trail of light.

“A shooting star! Pipp, look!”

“ACK! My exposure times, I can’t—how am I supposed to—”

Sunny pulled herself out of her sleeping back and looked up in awe. “They’re not actually stars, but pieces of debris. Falling down to Equestria from somewhere else. Little iron-containing rocks.”

“It’s getting awfully close,” noted Misty, retreating under the canopy of the tree she was perched in.

Sunny chuckled. “There’s no record of a pony ever being hit by a meteorite. And besides, most of them are only about the size of a pebble or...” She looked up and, to her horror, realized that Misty was right.

The atmosphere seemed to suddenly explode with sound—like deep and terrible thunder, followed by a hissing, buzzing sound Sunny heard deep in her teeth. Izzy and Misty both cried out, reaching for their horns, and Sunny winced—only to see several streaks of light flying backward in rapid succession from the descending rock. Toward another rock trailing in desperate spirals around its tail—not falling, but actively moving.

She had to look away from the pain—and was lucky she did. The sound of distant thunder was suddenly replaced by a tree-shaking thud that picked her off her feet and threw her back, and all around her the forest was lit as though it were day—and as she fell backward, she saw several objects pass over her. Two shot long into the distance, their courses changed as if they had struck each other and been repelled by the impact—but something small and incandescent descended downward far closer, and even through the roar and whine of the objects Sunny heard an impact deep in the woods.

She got up, dazed.

“Izzy...Misty...”

They looked up. They had fallen out of the tree but landed in a pile of leaves. Sunny looked around. “Pipp?”

“Holy mother-snuggling ROAD APPLES!” swore Pipp. She had been knocked out of her char and landed on the ground, face up—and was holding her phone to the sky. “DID YOU SEE THAT? Because I DID! That was a UFO! And I got it on—oh, if I had been streaming, but this is better, I can edit the video, I can do vocal commentary—or, no, wait, I can do a reaction? But like a narration-reaction, maybe colab with someone to do the—I can’t believe—”

“We’re fine,” said Misty, helping Izzy up. “What...just happened?”

“I have no idea.” Sunny dug through her pack and grabbed a compass, trying to remember which direction they had gone—only to find that the compass refused to point in the direction she knew to be north. Instead, she was forced to gauge where they had gone by eye.

“The bigger part went toward the mountains,” she said. “In the direction of Zephyr Heights, but the other...at that speed, it must have hit the ocean.” She paused, frowning. “And the third piece hit...” Her eyes widened. “HITCH! ZIPP!”

Hitch had wandered a distance into the woods. The pain was increasing in intensity, as well as the urgency.

“I barely even had any cider,” he moaned. “And this is what happens...” He sighed, and found a tree that looked adequate. From the distance—and not nearly an adequate distance—he heard a call.

“Ah...well, I’m done,” called Zipp.

“Zipp, come on, don’t talk to me when I’m trying to do important business!”

“Opps. Sorry. I’m over here. Not watching. That you know of, anyway.”

Hitch groaned. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath—only to hear a loud question from overhead.

“MY BONES!” he cried, only to look up and see an owl staring down at him. Or, rather, in the general direction of him; the eyes where looking in both directions. “Oh...sorry,” he said. “I’m...um...”

“Who?”

“Y...yeah. Sorry, I didn’t know this tree was occupied.”

“Who.” The owl turned its head around.

“What? No, now that I know you’re there—”

“WHO.”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“WHO.”

“No, I wasn’t accusing you of trying to watch.”

“Who who who...”

“What do you—how did you know I was drinking cider?!”

“Who.”

“But you’re an owl, you don’t have a sense of smell—”

“Who.”

“Oh—no, I don’t mean to be ableist, it’s just—an owl fact—”

“Hitch, are you talking to an owl?”

“ZIPP STOP TALKING TO ME I’M TRYING TO TAKE A PONY-LOVING LEAK—”

His interjection was interrupted by a sudden surge of brightness—followed by a blast that knocked him off his feat and sent him flying as something rushed over his head at tremendous speed, tearing through trees with a thunderous explosion.

“EEEEEEEP!” cried Hitch, flailing as he was thrown into the dirt. He lay there, feeling the dampness as he regained his breath, hearing, and composure. Then he slowly tried to stand, and felt a pair of hooves helping him up.

“Hitch!”

“What was—Mrs. Owl, what—”

“I got her,” said Zipp, holding out the terrified creature. “First time catching an owl. Pointier than I expected.”

“Who.”

“I don’t know what that means,” she said, releasing the bird—and turning her attention to the trail of small fires through the destroyed trees near them. “But that was incrediblyawesome! Come on!”

“Wait, Zipp—”

Zipp stopped, hovering. “Oh. I’ll go look. You can stay here and finish.”

Hitch sighed. “I think one problem solved the other.”

“Oh. Eew.”

“Yeah. But that, whatever it was, it might be dangerous, what if it—”

“If it’s dangerous, that makes it even cooler!”

“Zipp, wait!”

She had already flown off—and Hitch sighed again, only to suddenly feel a hoof on his back. He screamed.

“DON’T BONE ME!”

“Eew. Hitch, no, you’re like my brother.”

“Sunny?” Hitch turned, seeing that the rest of his friends had arrived. He pointed. “Something exploded over there and I am extremely perturbed!”

“We noticed.”

“I actually may have blinked,” admitted Izzy. “Can we maybe do it again?”

“Um, guys!” called Zipp, through the trees. “You may want to come see this!”

The ponies looked at each other—with an odd degree of nervousness in each of their eyes. And yet the thought of not seeing what had fallen occurred to exactly none of them.

The path was not hard to follow. The meteor had cracked through trees effortlessly as it had fallen at a surprisingly shallow angle. An angle that, to Sunny, made little sense. Meteor fell from above, usually at a steep angle—but based on the path of destruction, this one had fallen almost horizontally, and in line with how the other two objects had moved—as if they had pulled up at the last second to even out the descent.

The damage itself was also unusual. It was not initially apparent, though; Sunny had dismissed it as ordinary until Misty and Izzy had turned their horn-light up to the trees, or toward some of the larger rocks that had been impacted by the descent. As Sunny looked up, she felt her hoof touch something unusual and painful—and quickly pulled it back to see that she had stepped in a pile of cubes.

“Blocks?” she said.

“No, those look more like what cheese looks like when you make crudite,” said Izzy. “Which despite it’s name, is not a mineral.” She chuckled nervously. “Won’t make that mistake again. Also, where do we get the milk to make cheese? Also also, do I really want to know?”

Sunny picked up a hoof-full of the cubes. They were made of wood—and some were made from rock. Perfectly sliced, all to the same size. She looked up and saw that they matched the damage of the descent. Instead of just knocking its way through trees, contact with the object or areas around it had been dissolved into piles of perfectly cut cubes.

Zipp called from the forest.

“Guys!”

“Coming!”

Sunny broke into a trot, her friends following her—only to suddenly come to a clearing.

The trees had been knocked down and cubed around what was now a long streak of dirt terminating in a sizable crater. Sunny had expected the area to be warm, but it felt the same as anywhere else in the forest. It was totally ordinary, and in the dark, almost totally unnoticeable.

Pipp turned her phone-flashlight toward Zipp, who squinted and covered her eyes from the glow. “Pipp, my eyes!”

“Sorry.” Pipp approached her sister and landed. “Did you get hurt?”

“No, it missed us, but it was pretty dang close.”

“That’s such a relief,” said Sunny, galloping to her friend. “We saw it come down, it must have...”

She trailed off when she saw the look on her friend’s face. Zipp, usually so alluringly confident, seemed—for the first time Sunny could recall—concerned.

“You’re going to want to look in the hole.”

“Why? What is it?”

“I don’t...even know.”

Sunny gulped, and she turned to her friends. All of them had been so eager to reach the crater—but as if in mental unison, not one of them wanted to step forward toward the hole. As if some instinct told them that their curiosity had been profoundly misguided. That they needed to turn away. To run from whatever was down there.

“You...got close to it?”

“Yeah.”

Sunny nodded, slowly. “I need a light.”

Misty winced. “I’ve got it,” she said, increasing the light output of her horn and joining Sunny. Sunny nodded in turn, and then stepped onto the edge of the crater. Zipp followed her, floating in the air.

“I need to take a picture,” said Pipp, holding up her phone—only for it to release a hiss. “What the...I just had service! Come on, phone, please!”

“What’s wrong?” asked Hitch.

“It’s just...static, and weird symbols.”

Sunny felt an even greater urge to stay out of the hole—but she heard Misty gasp, and she could not help but turn. And as she did, she saw it.

The immediate effect was one of fear—but also of confusion. She had, on some level, expected a rock. Even a fancy space rock was still, at its core, a rock—but what she saw was something different. Something that seemed to penetrate her mental defense and horrify her on an unexpectedly deep level. Even if she could not initially identify what it was, exactly.

It very closely resembled, at least superficially, a skull. Sunny had of course seen pictures of pony skeletons in old copies of the Grey Mare’s Anatomy, and she knew them from Nightmare Night decorations—but this looked nothing like the pencil drawings in the medical textbook, nor like the cartoony smiling decorations of the spooky holiday. It was somehow much more distorted and threatening.

The form was longer than a pony’s, extended forward into a mouth filled with perfect white teeth. Teeth that were oddly pointed, not like the flat incisors and molars of ordinary pony teeth. It was strangely narrow and dark colored, and in the Misty's hornlight it seemed to be either a strange dark matte black or very deep purple.

The eyes, though, were by far the strangest part. The sockets were not empty, but they also did not have eyes either. The closest analogy Sunny could think of were the eyes of the fossilized skeletons of the vast extinct fishes that hung from the ceiling of the Zephyr Heights Natural History Museum. Fish from an age when those high mountains had been the bottom of a deep ocean.

“It isn’t right,” said Zipp.

“You’re telling me,” noted Sunny.

Zipp shook her head. “There’s no external damage. Not even a scratch. It’s missing the auditory canals and there’s no skull sutures. Just one solid piece. No sign of cranial nerve apertures. The mandibul is tiny and I...I can’t even figure out how it’s jointed. Not without picking it up.”

“That’s not the half of it,” said Misty, standing on the far side of it. Zipp and Sunny looked at each other, and slowly moved to the other side. When they did, both gasped.

Even in the dark, lit by the slowly pulsating light of Misty’s horn, the symbol was obvious. Contrasting against its unblemished black surface, a symbol had been inscribed across the top of its face, across the muzzle and the forehead and extending upward to nearly the crest of the skull. A perfectly symmetrical six-pointed violet star with small white points between each of its limbs. The cutie mark of Twilight Sparkle.

“What in the name of Celestia...”

“Sunny,” said Misty. “I’m scared.”

“Don’t touch it,” said Hitch, standing at the edge of the crater—although from how pale he seemed, it was clear he had seen it to. “Just leave it here. I mean...I should report this, there must be somepony I can call...this is way out of my jurisdiction.”

“But it has Twilight’s symbol,” protested Sunny, still staring at it. Her every instinct screaming at her not to touch it.

“You said you saw this fall from the sky?” asked Zipp.

Sunny nodded, but then stopped. “I...thought I did. But I...” She looked around. “Maybe it didn’t. Maybe the impact just dug it up.”

“Sunny,” moaned Hitch. “That’s worse...”

“Because, one,” said Izzy, “it means that thing was buried here. And, two...” She looked around. “It means whatever landed didn’t exactly stick around.”

Sunny felt every hair on her back stand on end.

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” said Zipp. “But I don’t...” She looked at Sunny, her eyes pleading. “Sunny...you know what I want to do.”

Sunny nodded. It was more than apparent that Zipp’s every detective instinct was tingling with maximal intensity. “And I...I don’t think we can leave it here. Not if it’s related to Twilight Sparkle. It could be really important. Or dangerous.” She looked up at Hitch. “Too dangerous to just leave here.”

Hitch winced. “I know. It has to be reported properly and I—I need it for evidence. Even if it’s super, incredibly gross...”

“Also I need a backup phone, STAT,” moaned Pipp. “I need a picture of that for Spooky Season! I’ll be cross-promoting across multiple taste profile demographics with that!” She paused. “OOH! I should do a photo-shoot with a cute archaeologist costume...or maybe a tasteful suit jacket? Like, the ones with elbow-patches.” She looked to Hitch. “Is it culturally appropriate to wear the jacket without trousers? Because a full suit might be too much.”

“I always wear a bracelet,” said Izzy, holding it up. “I can’t stand being nude. It’s weird. And I think Hitch would probably arrest me. Again.”

“Sneaking into jail doesn’t qualify as...” Hitch shook his head, turning back to Sunny. “Sunny, please just...just wear gloves or something?”

“I think Misty can lift it with her magic.”

“Except I’ve been trying to since I saw it,” said Misty, the fear apparent on her face. “It’s like...I can’t get a grip on it. It’s mentally slippery.”

Sunny groaned—and she was the first to step forward. She reached into the wet dirt and pulled it out. It felt strangely cold in her grasp—but almost seemed to move when she touched it. She turned it around in her hooves, finding it almost impossibly heavy for its size—and she could see that although it appeared to have teeth, the jaw seemed to be totally fused closed.

And yet, somehow, as she held it, it seemed to be smiling at her regardless.