The Blank Pony

Far to the west, the sun was rising above Zephyr Heights. The pegasus city had been built high in the rocky crags of a vast mountain range, accessible almost exclusively to those capable of flight. Due to its height high in the mountains and its role as Equestria’s most technologically advanced metropolis, there had been little reason to expand outward into the surrounding hills. There was no point in farming on the barren slopes, and the city’s position on an enormous butte precluded expansion anywhere except upward. The rest of the range was rural, empty, and depopulated; filled with secluded rural villages with the populations long-since vanished save for the occasional raving hermit living in one of the numerous caves.

Even with the glow of light from the great city, the events of the night before had not gone unnoticed. Throughout the city, pegasi were at work gaining insurance estimates on the number of windows broken and the orders of glass that they would need to replace them. The guards were busy taking reports, but they all reached the same conclusion: that something brilliant and loud had come from the east, rising up from the ground in an arc before landing hard and with a deafening explosion in one of the higher, unoccupied mountains.

This event had so perturbed the queen—and so disturbed her poor, floofy dog—that she had dispatched a crew posthaste to the site of the impact to assess it for danger. The pegasus squad of eight was led by her personal guards, Thunder Flap and Zoom Zephyrwing.

The ascent was by no means easy. Although the weather had been clear the day earlier, it had suddenly begun to storm. The sky had grown dark and sparked with strange lightning that was sometimes silent and sometimes created a form of unfamiliar thunder that sounded more like distant voices than a booming rumble. Snow had begun to fall at the great altitude, but it was strange and discolored. Where it touched the guards’ armor, it left odd stains that did not wash away—and those that tried to eat it claimed it tasted like sour metal.

The impact had occurred high on a cliff, hundreds upon hundreds of feet vertically up an unexplored pillar of stone—unexplored because no pegasus in recent history had been able to fly. It was one of many mountains slated to be explored—this process had simply been expedited by the unexpected impact

Thunder was the first to reach anything reminiscent of a hoofhold, and immediately sprawled outward, gasping for breath.

“I’m cold in places I didn’t even know I had,” he groaned.

“I told you you needed to attend the weekly exercises,” groaned Zoom, pretending not to be equally tired. “And to wear the insulated coats.” She looked around, finding that they were not, in fact, standing on a natural shelf on the cliff. Rather, they were standing at the start of what looked like a cave—except for the cracks that led outward from it, across the cliff face. It looked like the entrance to an enormous tunnel—but it was almost certainly the entry point of where the object had struck.

She wrinkled her nose at the smell.

“Why does it smell like that?”

Thunder sniffed. “It’s like when you turn on a space heater for the first time in the winter,” he said, frowning. “Except you turned it on in the closet where your mom keeps a lot of polyester that she doesn't wash very often and forgot about it for about a day and a half.”

“That’s oddly specific.”

“What?" He shrugged. "It’s an oddly specific smell.”

Zoom sighed, finding herself unable to disagree. The other Pegasus guards were arriving, and Zoom took a step forward—but stopped, looking down suddenly.

“What?”

“These mountains are sandstone,” she said.

“Zeezee, this is no time discuss geometry.”

“Don’t call me that in front of the guys!” she hissed, rolling her eyes. “No, look!” She pointed. “This was molten at least a few hours ago. The rocks melted, somehow.”

Thunder’s eyes widened. “Are you saying...that the floor is lava?!”

Every pegasus present immediately jumped onto the nearest rock or piece of debris, avoiding contact with the ground.

“Not anymore, it’s just...” She looked back toward the hole and shivered. It was dark in there, and the air coming from within was hot. It would have been inviting against the cold, but it felt wrong somehow. The smell was rotten, and as she flipped on her light, she saw flecks of light in the air. Like the floating glitter that she was told would be produced if anypony were to punch a unicorn.

“Yeaaaah,” said Thunder. “We’re going to need backup on that one.”

He turned to leave, but Zoom grasped him firmly by the tail. He continued to trot, unable to move across the ground.

“But it’s too spooky!”

“That’s the point. Come on!”

He grumbled as the pair of them took flight and as the group followed them—deep into the hole, floating in the hot and acrid air as they ascended upward.

It was not long until they came to it. None of them knew what they were expecting—but wreckage was not high on the list.

The heap inside was mangled, and badly. Various beams of silvery metal were exposed, as well as a far darker substance that Zoom had earlier taken for carbonized parts of the cave. She could roughly understand the shape of it, but only partially. Parts of it had been melted and bent, and some areas were still smoldering in unnatural colors.

Thunder stared at it and nodded. “Yup. We found it. Time to go.”

“We can’t go yet.”

“Yes we can. It’s right that way. Behind us. Where we came in.”

Zoom looked at him grimly. “We have no idea what this is. There could be ponies on board. They could be hurt. And what, do you want to tell Queen Haven we found debris...and didn’t even check?”

“Zeezee...”

“I said don’t—”

“We just came in a deep, scary cave where the floor is lava.”

“It’s dried.”

“Still super spooky! And we’re not exactly equipped for this.” He pointed at the remains of whatever enormous vehicle had somehow both crashed and managed to melt its way nearly fifty feet into a sheer cliff face. A vehicle that was at least that in terms of width. “That’s super spooky. And I feel super-spooked, and if you make me go in there I'm going to cry, and you hate it when I cry.”

“You're afraid, then.”

“Um,” said one of the other pegasi. “I think we all are?”

Zoom groaned. “So none of you are willing to go in?”

They did not answer, but none of them could look at her.

“I think they’ve voted,” said Thunder, turning to leave—only to be pulled back by his tail.

“Since when do we live in a dang democracy?” Zoom glared at the guards. “This is an absolute monarchy! And if you won’t do it for me, won’t you do it for her?”

Thunder’s eyes widened. “For...”

“FOR THE QUEEN!” screamed one of the guards, rushing forward.

“FOR THE QUEEN!” said another, racing forward with uncontrolled momentum and bouncing off an exposed beam.

“Do it for Queen Haven!” cried Zoom. “Show her you’re all big, brave ponies, and she might even congratulate us personally!”

“Yes! YES! Approve of me, queen-mommy!”

“NOT YOU!” snapped Zoom. “You in the back, don’t make it weird!”

“S...sorry.”

Zoom shook her head and released Thunder’s tail. He freely floated for a moment, looking at her and at the damaged hulk of metal—and then groaned.

“I have your back,” she assured him.

“I know you do. And that’s the only reason I’m even brave enough to do this.”

Zoom nodded, and the pair of them approached the wreck.

Unfortunately for them all, gaining entry was not difficult. Whatever it had once been, it had been badly damaged from the impact, sheered and crushed long before it had penetrated the cliff face. Several viable holes had been opened in the surface, large enough for a pegasus to slip through.

And so they entered—and as they shined their lights into the dim, dusty darkness, they were no first struck by the sight of the room around them but the sound.

“Do you...do you hear that?” asked Zoom, barely at a whisper.

“No,” whispered Thunder back. Even at the lowest volume he could muster, it sounded as though he were on the verge of screaming.

“Exactly,” said Zoom, slowly, turning her light toward the walls. “It’s silent. Perfectly...silent.”

She felt her heart race at the sound of it—or rather at the oppressive lack of sound. As soon as they had entered, as soon as the walls of strange silvery metal and dark, unidentifiable nearly organic plating blocked them from outside, the wind ceased. The air refused to move. There was no draft. Only stillness and a hideous, terrifying silence.

It was a vehicle. It had to be a vehicle. It had flown, and flown faster than anything anypony had ever seen—and yet, as they stepped inside, those sure and concrete assertions immediately began to crumble.

It had architecture. It was bizarre and strange in a way that, in its stillness, forced it to cut so much deeper into their minds than it should have. It was, at least superficially, almost punishingly gothic in design. To Zoom, it reminded her of the ancient cathedrals half-buried under Zephyr Heights. Temples of unbreaking dark stone with ominous idols, dedicated to forgotten gods that ruled over crystal and unquenchable fire. To Thunder, it looked to him like a 3D version of the layouts of the old Horsetlevania games he had played as a colt with really, really good shading.

Except that it varied. In odd ways. Where traditional architecture would dictate an obvious place for a swooping arch or a strong, vertical line, the columns would suddenly veer at strange angles informed by some unthinkable asthetic parameter—angles that, as the group moved behind them, were revealed to hide distinctly and almost blasphemously organic elements and motifs. As if they were all walking down the great aisles of a great and terrible beast claiming with exacting but half-hearted precision to be a cathedral.

It was far from empty, though. Structures had been assembled within it, occupying the space that normally would have held either pews or internal organs—shelves, desks, and stationary equipment, some of it still intact but much of it shattered and broken across the floor. None of it was recognizable to the pegasi present, nor would it have been recognized by any living being of their world.

Thunder seemed to be on the verge of tears, but still approached one of the walls. As he shined his light up, several headlights joined it—revealing that the walls were not made of the same eerie brown-black stone as the rest of the room. Instead, they were covered in artwork—at once a mosaic and, somehow, a form of stained glass.

Zoom shuddered at the sight of it but could not bring herself to look away. It should have been beautiful. The material was like cut gemstones and, although they were in a cave, it somehow returned more light than was given to it, creating the impression of either glowing from within or being, truly, a window. But the mad sprawl of shapes that had been cut into it disturbed her to such a degree that her eyes ached to weep. That materials so beautiful could be rendered so hideous.

The shapes were abstract to an extreme degree. Pointed and strange, although they repeated—again and again. The central and largest motifs stood at the epicenters of their vortexes—marked with what might have been a language in luminescent silver. Below them, the other shapes took on scenes that were wholly indecipherable—and yet left an impression.

A story unfolded, and although Zoom could understand none of it, she saw war. Battle. Pain. She saw the shapes converging on two—one brilliant white and edged with glass that glowed like blazing fire, the other a black that shimmered as light struck it—and unmoving ebon in its center.

She followed with her own light. She saw the colors they took—the central motifs, the ones that repeated hundreds upon hundreds of times over in overlapping vignettes. Pale yellow. An almost cyan blue. Earthy brown-orange. Crystalline blue white. Garish pink. And, finally, her light stopped upon the largest of them all.

She took a step back in the horror of it. Violent, hideous purple—a shade that she could only barely comprehend, rendered in a material that had a quality her eyes could almost not witness it directly. Violet, and streaked with blood-red. An abstract representation that struck her as the battles end, and an indication of the victor. Indecipherable by the mind, but obvious to the heart. An image of a deathly, violet alicorn.

“For...for the queen,” she squeaked, trying to raise her courage—but still feeling her knees shaking.

She felt a hoof around her and recoiled—only to remember that it was Thunder.

“It’s just a creepy window,” he said—even though it was clear he felt the same way. “Maybe this place was...”

“Don’t say it.”

“Say what?”

“Thunder. How could this place possibly be a church?”

“Hey, boss!” called on of the pegasi. Both Thunder and Zoom turned sharply toward the forward-center of the room—and saw several of the pegasi looking down at what Zoom had initially took to be a kind of central table.

As she approached it, though, she realized it was not a table at all. It was some kind of machine. It was circular and wide, with a surface oddly well-crafted. Inscribed with what were either images or runes of some sort, sometimes in several different metals and tones. Wires and tubes extended from it, feeding into the floor—which Zoom realized was far less ominous than the rest of the building but still peculiar It was stone, but did not feel like stone.

“What was this thing?” asked Thunder.

“How am I supposed to know?” snapped Zoom, leaning in closer. It seemed like it was broken. There was a space in the center that something was supposed to be connected to but that was now little more than a broken container that had spilled out all its liquid several hours earlier, leaving wires and tubing dangling in every direction. Zoom looked up and saw that over it, most of the cathedral had been torn off. The roof was gone, and all she saw was familiar Zephyrstone.

“I think this is the back of the place,” she said. “It think there’s two levels. Maybe a...a crypt, I guess, below.”

“Zeezee no not a crypt...a crypt is where you keep the unalive ponies..."

Zephyr pointed. “The rest of it split a little. It’s over there. Come on.”

They all approached the gap and jumped, fluttering through the air to reach the forward half of the structure. This half had impacted badly, giving the floor an unpleasant list—which made the angular structure of its overly gothic architecture even more unpleasant.

The new area was not terribly unlike the first—but more narrow. The equipment, likewise, was more intact. To the point it overwhelmed the structural columns, intertwining with them—and interfacing with them, in a way. It was more massive and had survived the impact better. Some of it looked like it still might function—masses of unknown metal, riveted and bolted together, welded at other places with steams inscribed with micro-runes. It all opened into a wide circular area. The air was thick with particles that seemed to flit and move out of the light as it touched them, but even in the distance, it was possible to see that there had been a door on the far side—but that part of the area was twisted and mangled, the passage forward fully impassible even by the most flexible and smooth of pegasi. Any areas forward of that room had been crushed flat on impact.

“If it...if it was a church,” whispered Thunder. "Then..."

“It’s not a church,” hissed Zoom. “Nopony flies a church.”

“But if it was...hypothetically...” He paused at the machine in the center of the room and looked to Zoom, his eyes filled with cold terror. “What were they worshiping?”

Zoom did not want to answer—but she almost jumped at the sound of her own voice, as if somepony else was answering.

“Alicorns.”

Thunder shivered and took flight. He approached some of the rigid tubing and conduits that surrounded the largest and most central piece of equipment. “But this is all...metal and stuff.” He poked one of the devices, and as he did, something within it clicked.

From within, a small crystal dropped down a battered pipe and splashed into a tube of fluid. It was met by a violent roiling, forming bubbles and steam in an instant as it ignited with light. Zoom cried out as she was nearly blinded, but the liquid quickly absorbed the glow—converting it to a powerful fluorescence in pink. The fluid flowed down one of the glassy pipes at unnatural speed, falling into the machine in the center where several turbines immediately started to spin—revving up with deafening screams that quickly ascended to a level of noise that was fully swallowed by the silence of the room before they passed beyond the range of pony hearing.

The machine in the center turned. Pink fluid separated, moving through intersections and splits, these linear arteries feeding each individual piece of equipment—and the whole of the room seemed to vibrate as the machine came to life.

It pushed itself upward, disengaging its internal locks as it separated and opened—and as it did, the machine at its core was revealed. A system of flexible tubes linked to what seemed a pile of opaque gray stones, like a cluster of prismatic crystals emerging from a single point. As it fed upon the fluid given to it and as the turbines accelerated further, they began to vibrate. This new sound was far below pony hearing, but they felt it. Deep in their chests. It froze them in their tracks as the prisms separated.

Something glowed in its center. A glass orb, suspended in distorted air. A strange kind of eye that stared at them. Then it screamed.

“Iai-ai’i-i’aa.ae, Ia-a-ia’a’i.aae’e, i’a.e.”

The sound was mechanical and so incredibly grating that the ponies were forced to cover their ears.

“THUNDER! What in the queen’s name did you DO?!”

“Why is it making that sound? MAKE IT STOP!”

“You made it mad, you made it—”

The noise suddenly ceased, followed only by silence. Then a strangely accented female voice spoke from nowhere in particular.

“User language identified as High-Primakk. Language settings have been updated. Would you like to keep this setting?”

Zoom and Thunder looked at each other. Then, her voice quavering, Zoom spoke.

“Yes?”

She felt a vast source of attention turn to her, even though she could not see from where.

“Are you the current user?”

Zoom looked back to Thunder, then to the eye. “Yes?”

“Information entered. Assembling interface. Please wait.”

The ground below Zoom suddenly began to shake—and then to vibrate at a furious pace. She jumped back as what she had taken as stone suddenly burst forth with what seemed like thousands of tiny, wrigling worms that reached up, crawling, grasping, and screaming in silence—until they disintegrated entirely into a plume of sand. The stone below dissolved and progressed upward with unnatural speed, rising as a plume of colorless powder—illuminated from within by a beam of light from the central eye. Then, with a crushing sound, it compressed into a perfect smooth model of a pony.

Not just any pony, though. It was Zoom—in a way. The eyes were too far apart, the pupils left to an extreme degree of dilation, staring into space with an empty expression. At nothing at all—and yet, somehow, into them all.

When it spoke, its mouth moved—and the voice that came from it was Zoom’s.

“Settings updated. Status update: detecting substantial damage ship-wide. Primary reactor in critical failure...engaging emergency make-safe procedures...procedures complete. Quantic-Incursion engine secured. Sentience level at point-zero-eight Turings. Auxiliary power active. Prototype systems nonfunctional, registering critical damage. Multiple hull breaches detected.”

“Was anypony hurt?”

The construct paused. “Checking. Reading: one of one survivor, present. Warning: detecting minor injuries. Preparing to administer medical treatment. Please wait.”

From above, a long and thin robotic arm dropped down—one of several. Pegasi cried out and ducked back, but the arms did not reach for them. Rather, one progressed forward, down a rail that led to the damaged area in the front of the vessel. It was flexible enough to fold and to pass through, where it vanished into the crushed area for a moment. It seemed like hours before it came back.

Zoom felt the blood drain from her face when she saw what it was carrying. The object was small, and her mind did not want to recognize what it was. It was a single, badly-charred front hoof. The rest of its former owners was nowhere to be seen.

“Survivor recovered. Preparing to administer medical treatment. Please stand by.”

The ground below them distorted and the pegasi took to the air, stepping back before it collapsed into a system of interlocking plates that retracted—allowing an assembly to rise up from the mechanical level below. A compressed package that split and separated into hundreds of thin, grotesque robotic limbs.

The construct stepped to the side as a system of screens and controls appeared before it. It did not interact with them; rather, they seemed to activate on their own volition, the arms assuming their positions at the ready as the first arm lowered the hoof into position.

“Print-heads loaded and passing all checks. Beginning reconstruction.”

Everything moved at once. The arms spread and contracted, pressing forward with an insect-like cadence of motion and extreme precision. They carried objects toward the damaged limb, stripping off the damaged portions and the fragments of burned clothing with lasers. Then other parts began to move—back and forth, back and forth—again and again, speeding up with every passing second.

Zoom watched with rapt attention, unable to bring herself to look away—and at first, she saw nothing. Then, much to her significant dismay, she realized that it was growing.

The arms were depositing material. With every pass, they added another layer. As they accelerated, the material was deposited at an even faster rate—the change in mass and volume becoming far to visible to ignore. Shapes began to emerge: bones printed layer by layer from the end of the hoof, and pale muscle tissues spun up them by spiraling sets of thin, alternating arms.

“What is it...” began Thunder, although he did not need to finish his question. They all knew what it was doing—and not one of them knew what to do. They had no urge to stop it, their minds to befuddled and horrified for the thought to even make an attempt to abort the construction to occur to them. They had, perhaps, an urge to run—but none did. They simply watched in silence as a pony was assembled tissue layer by tissue layer before them.

Something heavy clicked in the ceiling, like the sound of great cogs and chains—and containers dropped from above, tethered by numerous red-hot tubes and thin cables of luminescent pink. The ponies stepped out of the way as apertures in the floor opened and as these were slotted into them—revealing that they were filled with silver liquid. Thunder was closest to one and leaned near it—only to recoil from the heat when he realized that the silver substance was molten metal.

“Preparing,” said the construct. “Fabricating implants.”

Several arms suddenly shot back, twisting and repositioning themselves over the vats of metal—and their narrow, jointed fingers slid into the metal. When they retracted, the metal slid away from them, condensing into complex fragments that were not quite metal. They looked like machines—to Zoom, almost like the circuit boards manufactured in Zephyr Heights for cell-phones. Except that they were more complicated—and their surfaces were twisted and bent in strange ways.

The arms brought these assemblies to the body they were constructing, which had now developed to a complete skeleton with partial musculature—while a wide and complex assembly below was knitting and inserting internal organs. The arms began to connect the machines to their creation.

A large rotating arm turned, scanning the body as it did and stopping at the forward end. It then rolled forward, unfolding, and secondary sets of arms from it and from above began assembling separate pieces. Bone was knit into complex forms, and delicate nerves threaded through it along with wires and cables.

An arm dropped down to a large glass sphere, filling it with a hissing and bubbling pink solution. It began to coagulate, and several lasers began to cut a complex pattern into its surface. Forming the wrinkles of a brain.

Thunder leaned forward near one of the other three bone fragments built around the periphery of the brain. They did not fully have form yet, but as he approached, the eye on one of them opened. He squeaked and jumped back, the eye moving in its half of a skull to trace his motions. Below it, where the mandible had been assembled on several gossamer posts, a tongue lolled out over a set of lower teeth.

The brain container opened, disgorging its newly fabricated contents, and and it was promptly wired to the halves of a skull, which was pulled back to the spinal connection. Several arms hissed as they connected them, using precision print heads to bind the halves together, the jaw on, and the head to the body. One arm pushed the tongue back in and held the jaw closed.

The eyes, though, continued to turn in their location. Moving from each pegasus to the next. They were wide and gray—and seemed utterly terrified.

A set of arms dropped downward, inserting a strip of metal covered with thousands of points into the brain. Another lowered the skull cap over it, gray mane already installed, but held it in place. The rest of the arms were finishing their work, with white skin now covering the entire body save for the chest and the numerous small apertures and ports that were connected to a variety of tubes and wires.

“Injecting fluid. Establishing circulatory integrity.”

A dark liquid flowed downward through the tubes—and Zoom watched as the exposed heart quivered and began to beat. The construct seemed pleased.

“Circulatory system passing primary validation parameters. Respiratory channels passing validation. Brain stem activities are within accepted parameters.”

An arm pushed the ribcage forward, and another attached the ribs with a snap as a small tool followed behind, erasing the separation with perfect, scarless white skin. The same was done to the skull as several additional ports were placed directly into the brain.

“Biological systems are fully functional,” noted the construct. “Preparing to load archetype.”

She paused—and Zoom felt it before it happened. How the lights suddenly dimmed, the consoles suddenly filling with red lights. High-pitched alarms sounded from various locations as more and more warnings appeared.

“Warning: archetype protocol not found. Warning: autobiographical data corrupted. WARNING: archetype data incomplete, cannot safely upload. ERROR: personal identity not found. Attempting to bypass. Warning: disengaging ethical safeguards. No present user contains administrative permission to disengage Asenian protocols. Unable to abort rebirth process. Warning: creation of abomination inevitable. Please stand...stand...stand...”

The construct’s head suddenly twisted violently, producing a terrible cracking sound as if her neck had been broken by a sudden and uncontrolled convulsion. One of her wide eyes stared directly into Zoom’s, and she spoke again. In a voice devoid of the cold urgency of before—a voice that was not quite Zoom’s own, and seemed, somehow, to be on the verge of laughter.

“Praise be unto the One True Princess...”

Then her light flickered out—and the flesh of the construct decayed to dust, returning to the floor as her dull-brown artificial skeleton collapsed to the floor. The dry synthetic bones clattered and lay still in the construct’s own dust.

The white pony at the center of the machines suddenly started shaking, her eyes opening wide as some of the machines disconnected and she dropped to her knees.

“Gosh dang it,” swore Zoom, flying to her side to catch her as she fell. “Medic! We need a medic!”

The medic-pegasus approached, even though he was quite clearly at a loss of even how to describe the situation—just as the white pony suddenly, now in the midst of a seizure, opened her mouth—and let out a scream so quiet that it was barely a squeak. Then she collapsed into a heap.

“Thunder, get over here!” ordered Zoom. “We need to get her to a hospital!”

“But she—she—”

“We can ask questions later, we’re the Royal Guard for Queensake, we—”

Zoom suddenly felt a tightness around her midsection. She was being squeezed, but there was something else. A strange, quivering heat. Like an electric current. And, as she watched, orange light traced around her, almost instantly forming the outline of machine parts that slid together and clamped around her. The same enclosed Thunder, and he was—with a girlish scream—thrown violently upward, slamming into the machines that had descended from the ceiling.

Zoom was wrenched forward—toward the white pony that was now standing, the wires and tubes falling from her ports. She was an earth-pony, and the deep-seated fear that Zoom had tried to outlast suddenly chilled her to the bone. The stories about how the earth-ponies would steal pegasus bones and use them to make flour—and then bake cupcakes from said flower, badly.

Except something was wrong. The proportions. The perception. Zoom had met earth-ponies. Numerous times. This one felt different. It felt wrong. And as the machines twisted her wings, she understood. This monstrosity was no earth-pony. It was hardly even a pony at all.

It stared into her eyes with its own. The fear they held before was replaced by utter nothingness. They were blank and empty, gray eyes that matched a short gray mane, placed on a body that was the dullest possible shade of paper-white.

It opened its mouth. What came out was not exactly words.

“A’ae,iiaie...ieyae,a,eaii-i-ai...ia’a.e?”

“She’s grabbing our friends! GET HER!”

“Wait wait WAIT—”

The ponies charged forward—and the translucent images of machines around Zoom shifted, engaging into new systems as she was knocked hard into Thunder. The blank pony turned her empty eyes toward the other pegasi, clearly enraged or confused, and her holographic constructs detonated with a deafening plume of artificial lightning. The pegasi cried out and collapsed, sparking and shaking, and some slightly smoldering.

“Ia.a’ae!” cried the pony, jumping past them and charging toward the exit at full speed, grabbing something from one of the shelves as she left.

“Wait!” cried Thunder. “Hold on, I...”

As Thunder was released, he moved to help Zoom—although her constraints were already fading as well. They had escaped the shock and looked at each other, wordlessly understanding that they needed to give pursuit—and they did, chasing after the pony.

They did not see her until they reached the cave—and saw the light of the gray clouds beyond.

“Wait!” cried Thunder. “It’s a sheer cliff!”

Zoom and Thunder took flight, the pony looking back to them—just as she went over the edge. A look of surprise crossed her face as she tilted—and then, as if in slow motion, flopped over the edge and began to plummet.

Thunder and Zoom accelerated, prepared to rescue—but as they reached the end, they saw her body already surrounded by holographic images of mechanical parts. As they assembled, they slammed together—and with a rushing, thunderous sound, the pony corrected course and rocketed toward the east, powered by several sizable and translucent engines on her back.

“Should we...”

Zoom watched her go, then sighed.

“How can we? She’s too fast and the others are hurt. We need to get back.” She shook her head. “And I don’t even know where to start for the paperwork on this...”

“But what if she...”

“Yeah,” said Zoom, darkly. “You go back to the castle. I’ll bet bits to beans our radio got fried, if it even works up here at all. Go as fast as you can and get to the Queen. She’ll know what to do.”

Thunder gulped and shakily nodded—and then dashed off down the cliff, on his way back to Zephyr Heights proper.

Zoom watched him go—hoping that she was right and not wanting to even consider what she might have just unleashed into Equestria.