Ungula

"First the air, now this? What is Rainbow doing up there?"

Fluttershy suppressed a sigh. She and Twilight had run into each other in the corridor – Twilight on her way up to the cockpit to see what was going on, Fluttershy poking her head out from the garden to see if the lights were out everywhere.

She really would have preferred to stay in the garden instead of being dragged along with them.

"I know we're not out of the asteroid field yet, but really! What if the next one takes out the engines?!"

Truthfully, Fluttershy wasn't even that bothered by the darkness. There was enough thestral in her that she could see well enough.

She still couldn't get the hang of the echolocation thing, though. All she'd managed this time was convincing Twilight that she was scared of the dark by making a high-pitched E that sounded more like an eep.

Hence Twilight sticking to them like glue with her horn casting the surroundings in rosy light.

So far all the hornlight had illuminated was ordinary corridor. Piping, wiring, paneling – as an experimental custom-designed ship, the ESS Fire of Friendship didn't hide these things away, but kept them out in the open for easy access.

Not that any of those things made clear why the lights were out. The gauges said power was flowing, nothing was sparking or on fire, there weren't any shattered tubes…

"How did they even manage this? Applejack said the backup lights should be working fine, but nothing happened even when she turned them on manually!"

"Um, Twilight…"

As Twilight brought up the backup lights, Fluttershy's gaze had naturally gone to them. The backup lights were old-fashioned incandescent filament bulbs, about as simple and low-tech as it was possible to get in order to ensure that nothing but electricity simply not passing through them could interfere with their function.

The filament was red with heat.

All three of them stared for a moment. The lights were working. It was just… dark anyway, save for the magical light of Twilight's horn.

Something was wrong.

"It's… some sort of darkness spell, maybe? You two get back to the garden and hole up, I'm gonna get to the bottom of this."

No! Fluttershy wanted to say, because something was wrong. But the darkness swallowed it up.

Something was wrong, but even as the two of them separated from Twilight, she couldn't tell what.