Ponies of Fayra — Legend of Harmony

After Runa and Cedar disappeared into the cave, Cozy turned to Zeph and Kira.

“You two understand you’re just hanging out in front of the cave, correct?” Cozy stared intensely at Zeph.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Correct?”

“I’ll stay here. Don’t worry.”

Cozy flapped her wings and hovered above the ground. “Kira, you’re in charge. Make sure she doesn’t go anywhere unless absolutely necessary.”

With that, Cozy flew off and started surveying the area. The Everglow was always a tricky place to find magic from above. It was, to put it simply, like trying to find a needle in a field of grass. If the shimmer happens to catch your eye just right, you’re in luck; otherwise…

Seeing an unusual cluster of magic particles, Cozy flew low and followed its trail until she landed near a section of mountain that, without the ability to see magic, would have appeared completely black. But in Cozy’s case, she could see thin green lines of magic leaking from the cracks.

“Strange, there seems to be dragon-style magic behind here… Now if only I had an earth pony.” Cozy shrugged. “Suppose two pure magic sources, a levitation charm, and a small boulder, should work in lieu.”

While concentrating magic, Cozy picked out a boulder that met her needed size requirements. Once she believed she had enough magic, she chained two bursts together to send the boulder crashing into the side of the mountain, which formed a crack just large enough for her to see inside.

Peering into the crack, Cozy could see a hallway etched with a complex matrix of dragon magic on its walls.

“One more boulder should get me a hole inside. Though I wonder if I shouldn’t try to look for another way in first. Nah, I doubt I have—that much time.”

As before, Cozy concentrated power until she had located a suitable boulder. Aiming carefully, Cozy hit the previous crack dead-on, causing a modestly sized hole to form.

Squeezing inside the hallway, Cozy was careful to stay hovering and avoid touching any surface as she studied the faint magic flowing through the walls.

“It doesn’t look like there are any traps here. Still, best not to touch anything. Whoever made this had a deep understanding of dragon magic. It’s more refined and intricate than anything I’ve ever come across before.”

Flying through the hallway, Cozy came to a large room filled with bare shelves and dust.

“Something tells me a lot of this dust used to be books. You’d think someone, or ones, capable of carving hairline magical webs in walls would use something that stored longer than paper.”

As Cozy finished her sentence, she noticed magic coming from the shelves. Brushing off the dust from a section of it, she studied the engraved magic for quite some time.

“Maybe they did… What if… The bookshelves themselves act as storage? They’re clearly not engraved with tiny text of any sort, but is it possible that these minuscule magical patterns are actually being used to store information somehow? When you think about magic that plays a song, for example, that song is stored in the artifact as a series of interconnected circuits. Each one containing a note and duration. There’s really no reason that the same system couldn’t be used to store text. Though even if that were the case, without a known starting point there would be no way to translate the circuits into text. With sound, you can activate the circuit and hear the results. With text, activating the circuit would likely do nothing at all… Unless there’s something made to display the results…”

Cozy looked around the room for anything that might be used in the way she imagined, but found nothing. Feeling pressed for time, Cozy continued deeper into the ruins until she found a room covered in symbols unlike anything else in the ruins, along with a mess of fresh black hoof prints.

“These look an awful lot like Cedar and Runa’s prints…”

After studying the prints for several moments, Cozy followed the trail down the hallway and out a hole in the wall that also seemed fresh and covered in fragments of the type of crystals they were looking for.

“Strange… They clearly came in, but never came back out… There must be a trapdoor in that room.”

Cozy flew back to the strange symbol room and hovered in the center as she studied the remnants of magic particles in the room along with the hoofprints.

“They came into the room, stayed close to the door they entered from, walked around a little, and then slid or were dragged to… where I’m hovering…”

Cozy flew to the side of the room and looked towards the center.

“I disturbed it—a lot—but it looks like there was a focal point of spatial displacement magic there. The symbols on the walls themselves are magically inert , but there does seem to be magical residue on them. Which means they are probably a control circuit.” Cozy sighed. “I’ll continue this later. I’m not going to be figuring this out anytime soon, which means I need to let Zeph and Kira know what’s going on. Which would be made easier if I knew what was going on… I’ll fly back through the caves and make sure these tracks actually belong to Cedar and Runa. Maybe it’s just a strange coincidence.”

Once outside of the ruin, Cozy landed on the ground and followed the trail of inky hoof prints through the cave, flying over the streams.

“Suppose I should have just come with them and flown over the streams. I thought about it… I should have… I just wanted a little time alone. Is that so much to ask? Runa had been here before; she knew what she was doing, and yet, here I am.” Cozy muttered to herself as she came around the corner that revealed daylight.

Making her way out of the cave, she found Zeph, Argon and Kira sitting nearby nibbling glow berries.

Zeph looked to Cozy bewildered. “Didn’t you fly that way?” Zeph pointed off to her left.

“We have more pressing matters at hoof, Detective.”

“Huh?”

“It seems in Runa, we have found you a rival in mischief-making.”