Memory Collective

The light of Amber’s horn dimmed.

“And now, awaken.”

The lanky, mustard yellow colt opened his eyes and winced. Drawing a surprised breath, he squinted through the brilliant blue light of the chamber. A pattern of noise that could only be an alarm droned continuously in the distance, muffled through walls.

“What’s going on? Who are you?”

“I’m Amber, and I’m getting you out of here,” she explained. “I’m sorry, but I had to leave you asleep during what I just did to us. We’ll be back to normal in an hour or so.”

Snails stood up, looked around and then back at her. They stood on a ridge of immaculate white fabric, surrounded by a vast landscape of wrinkles: the surface of the stasis bed. He gave a nervous smile, which softened into a confident grin. “Okay.”

“Not afraid of being shrunk?”

“It took me a second to realize.”

“Realize what?”

“Now I’m...I’m small enough to have some real fun with them.”

Amber smiled at him. “You have the right idea. I enchanted a cranefly that will carry us out of the building while the climate control is disabled.”

“I didn’t know you could talk to bugs too.”

“No, I can enchant them, silly. I don’t have your gift.”

Snails lowered his eyes and sighed.

“What’s the matter?”

“You know, I used to hate it when no one knew that.”

“Tired of the attention?”

“Everyone called me names. Not even my best friend believed me, and soon even he stopped defending me. I actually wanted to go here soon as mom showed me the letter.”

“And now that you’ve spent five months here in the School for Uniquely Gifted Youths?”

“I wish I could go back to being the dumb pony and not have to answer so many scary questions.”

“You’ll get a chance.”

“Will that chance be worth all this? What the lab guys said they’d do tomorrow didn’t sound so bad, but this way we could get squashed or something.”

“They didn’t tell you everything. It is imprisonment.”

A weak shadow danced over and past them, and then again. They looked up, squinting into the light. The shadow of the cranefly passed over them again, and then again, and again.

Amber narrowed her eyes. “Hey! Down here, mote-brain! Forget about the light!”

“That’s not how you talk to bugs.”

Amber ignored him and muttered curses. “The spell might have diminished when I shrunk us. At this scale nothing I cast will work unless I’m at close range. Maybe if you—”

Snails had closed his eyes, and his horn glowed a barely-visible yellow. The cranefly immediately descended, its wingbeats becoming audible and growing to a thunderous whirr. It halted abruptly with a gust of micro-scale turbulence, touching down directly over them and puncturing the white horizon with its spindly legs.

“Okay, great!” Amber looked up the underside of the insect as a mechanic spot-checking an industrial apparatus. “Now that she’s here, I really think you should leave this to me.”

Snails ignored her and kept his eyes closed.

“I know you can commune with them, but that’s not the same as controlling them, which is what we need in order to—”

The cranefly stepped forward so they were between its hind legs and lowered its abdomen.

“Well then, bug-whisperer, one way or another, we should get on—” There were the sounds of shouting and a door opening at the end of a long hall. “—Now!”

The two ponies clambered up its back, slipping a little here and there on the smooth, translucent ridges of the abdomen. They stopped at the thorax, and Amber promptly nodded, gracing both their hooves with a wave of purple magic. She tugged at her hooves and found that she was unable to lift them; Snails followed suit.

“It’s so that we can hold on. So, then, can I have her back? I have a pretty tight plan that we need to follow!”

Once more he closed his eyes and ignored her. The cranefly’s long, slender wings rhythmically shredded the air, and it hummed upwards through the cavernous white expanse of the chamber. It homed in on a thick hexagonal lattice grate of glyph-bearing, malachite-studded platinum.

The fly landed on the grate with the two minute ponies attached to its back upside-down, their manes and tails pulled out by gravity. At that moment, two unicorns, colossal by comparison, burst through the door. They looked around the chamber, shouting about a shrinking spell that had been detected. The fly pulled its legs inward, front to back, and squeezed through a hole in the grate, taking care to ensure that the two passengers would fit through between its body and a hexagonal vertex. One of the unicorns looked straight up at the grate and pointed.

“There!”

A burst of magic rattled at the magic-deflecting grate, and the cranefly lurched back, stuck in the hole.

Snails winced. “She lost a leg!”

There was a crash and shouting below as the spellcaster was tackled.

“Obs, you imbecile! You might have killed them!” cried the assailant.

“I was only—”

“They’re vulnerable on that scale! You know what happens to air when magic passes through it!”

“You’re not in charge here!”

Amber looked back nervously. “Come on fly, fly!” The end of the cranefly’s abdomen was coated in a thin black film of singed chitin. A diffuse blue haze lingered in the air below, but terminated in a sharp plane where the hole in the grate began. Further below, the two staff argued.

“I knew exactly what I was doing! We should re-enable the air—”

“And kill one of the Institute’s great assets even more violently?”

The cranefly lurched up into the duct with its remaining legs. The moment its wings cleared the grate, it promptly lifted off. Behind them the vent shrank to a pinhole of light before they banked into a junction and it disappeared. The ducts twisted about like the dark, convoluted intestines of a mechanical beast. Amber cast illumination from her horn and peered ahead through the darkness, while Snails’ young horn continued glowing its subtle yellow.

“Snails, you don’t know the way out! Ask her to stop so I can enchant her again.”

“She knows the way good enough! I can hear your magic echoing in her brain. I told her to follow the echo.”

Amber finally relaxed, hopeful. The continuous rush of air, the coarse murmur of the insect’s chitinous wing joints, the turbulent thrumm of its slender wings and the dark of the duct meant one thing: helping Snails escape was succeeding, albeit not as she’d thought it would. Minutes drifted by. Their long flight was punctuated by turns, patches of stray light from other vents, clumsy bumps against the walls of the duct, and the occasional twisted flit through a complicated metallic obstacle whose complete form and function were masked by shadow. Those would make Amber’s stomach turn over. Her heart would stop with every change in light, and she silently hoped that Jade’s redirection strategy would continue to work as well as it had.

Finally the air temperature tapered down as they entered a long, vertical shaft. The cranefly soared to the end and up between the blades of a massive, immobile fan. After clearing the blades and a loose grate above they soared out into the open air, and the imposing gray surface of the building receding below them.

“We did it, Snails!”

Snails’ horn still glowed, but he was trembling.

“Look! We’re free—”

A roar from beneath them overpowered the hum of the cranefly and her feeble shouting, and the rush of air suddenly changed direction. They were being drawn back down into the maw of the vent. Amber shrieked in despair, but could not even hear herself above the cataclysmic din. Within an instant, the cranefly’s wings failed, the spell cast on their hooves dissipated, and an enormous black object collided with them from the side. The two ponies were in freefall, but the same object then lunged at them again while the cranefly was drawn helplessly down into the fan.

They then found themselves pinched together in the mandibles of an immense beetle. The roar of the fan faded away, replaced by the husky, basso buzz of the insect, and they shook with the exoskeletal reverberations of the beetle’s wings. As they steadily flew over the garden outside the institute, which was brightly illuminated by floodlamps, they finally felt safer.

Suddenly, a deep and powerful thud rocked the air. Far off to their left, a massive orange blob of incandescence lifted into the sky like a fiery balloon.

Amber gasped. “The terrarium!”

The beetle wavered in its flight but it continued, nonplussed, while Snails remained in silent communion. Away they buzzed into the deep forest, leaving the secluded research center behind. The darkness and coldness of the forest enveloped them like a ravenous mouth, and the beetle put additional distance between itself and the ground. Soon the cloying darkness of the forest made it impossible for Amber to judge the distance to its floor. Boughs of the canopy passed by like rough dew-bearing clouds, and she began to ponder how much longer her shrinking spell would last.

The glow of Snails’ horn suddenly grew twice as bright, then stopped. Finally he opened his eyes, wide and fearful, drew a deep breath, and shouted, “Could you do that same spell you did earlier, with the sticky hooves?”

“I don’t think we need it right now!”

“The bug said we’re being followed!”

“Really? Then why would it help?”

“Please, just do it!”

“Okay, I need to concentrate!”

“Now!”

With their awkward configuration of bodies and Snails’ panicked squirming, she shoddily cast the spell, and the wave of mana came out wavering and blue.

The beetle’s wingbeats halted. A different and far harsher sound — of the beetle’s chitinous armor crunching under immense pressure, and of organic fluids oozing through breaches in its exoskeleton — reverberated through the beetle’s body, and it gave a great arthropodal screech of mortal agony. Its hardened mandibles opened wide, releasing the two ponies into the care of cold air, gravity, and a thick, dark oblivion of evergreen needles.

Amber turned over in her freefall and saw the dying beetle between the pointy white teeth of an enormous bat. As the fear passed over and through her in a brief moment of careless abandon, she observed the bat fly off in search of more prey, masticating the beetle as it flew. She felt the sensation of weightlessness replaced by persistent cushion of air, and knew she had then reached terminal velocity.

A blunt object struck her lower back. She spun, the world a maelstrom of pain and rushing air and alternating textures of darkness. For a moment she lost consciousness, and from deep within herself, heard a voice from her years as an acolyte in the Stained Glass Order.

“There will be no panic in your final tests of skill,” it spoke confidently. “There should be none. In case you have forgotten, confronting fear is not a matter of seeing circumstances correctly, but of seeing yourself correctly. It takes the perspective of yourself as a predictable and weak being to manage irrational emotions. If you only look outward, you’ll lose sight...”

Air friction had slowed the spinning of her broken body, but not her eyes. Through an undulating veil of vertigo and windblown tears she scanned the darkness around her but saw no trace of Snails. He’s gone. She blinked, still straining to see. Biting back her despair, she thought of what had just happened to her, and came to a realization: He should be below me, if his free-fall was unbroken. She looked into the darkness below. A feeble yellow star, barely visible, flickered and wavered in her distorted vision. Alive!

With all of her will and strength, she collected her thoughts, conjuring a streamlined wind barrier around her. She felt weightless again as she accelerated; her limp body twisted freely in the liberty of the silent, dagger-shaped cocoon of air. Pain shot through her upper back, thwarting her concentration, while nothing below a point halfway down her back gave any response. The yellow light grew brighter, and soon she could distinguish four soft blue dots of light.

A plan assembled and ran through her mind. Get beneath him. Use the rest of my strength to remove the shrinking spell. First, wait for the low terminal velocity at this scale to take us to a safer height, but not too long. We must be full size before impact for the transformation to happen properly, and it will take several seconds. I will cushion his impact, and he will survive.

She shot past Snails and released the barrier about her body. The rush of air returned and she decelerated. However, her concentration was broken when the blast suddenly seemed to lose its power, and she accelerated further. She then felt a carpet-like surface of flexible, silky-smooth fibers cradling her body. Snails descended and touched down directly over her, his legs anchoring him to the surface around her.

“I’ll hold you safe!”

The surface then pushed up with great force, and the wind was knocked out of Amber as the two of them were smashed together. A muted, wavering hum of rhythmic turbulence replaced the roar of freefall. Feathery, jet-black planes coated in silky hairs flapped and vibrated to either side of them. The air passed by gentler than before, infused with the scents of the nocturnal forest floor.

“Where are we going?”

“We need to see someone.”

The giant black moth alighted, and everything became as silent as it was dark.