Unbroken

GUARD

Shining Armor sighed. Once again, there was panic in the streets. The dark cloud had struck again only a night before, on a new moon, as always. Whoever was behind the disappearances was a clever pony, to use the darkness of night so well. It struck him as somewhat ironic that many ponies would watch these orphans starve to death without a second thought, but if those same orphans started to simply disappear, citizens panicked. It was ironic, but it was his problem to deal with.

As Captain of the Guard, it was his duty and his responsibility to keep order within Canterlot. Every new moon, he failed, as had his predecessor before him. On the streets where the darkness roamed, ponies shivered in terror. These ponies feared the unknown darkness.

Shining Armor knew exactly what was going on. There was a pony responsible for this, and he would find that pony and bring the monster to justice. The fact that no bodies were ever found only made it worse. It could be a serial murderer, it could be slavery. There were some ponies without morals, ponies who would sell others into servitude to the griffins, the diamond dogs, or worse. He'd heard that most of the ones sold to the dragons ended up as lunch.

The previous captain had done very little to identify the foalnapper, concerning himself far too much with trivial matters. Petty thievery, drunken brawls, and the like. Shining Armor was going to change that. Nopony would live in fear, not in his city.

The new captain walked down to the districts where the darkness had been seen. There was no obvious sign of its passing, save in ponies' behavior. Everypony was silent as he passed, the people watching him carefully.

"Hello?" he called out. "I'm with the guard, here to talk to you about what happened last night!" Windows slammed shut and bolts slid home in doors. This was getting nowhere. He returned to his office, defeated.

☾

Shining Armor looked over the papers before him. Nopony had seen the pony behind the disappearances. When it appeared, the dark fog would always billow out from some alley, rarely the same one twice, and then pass down the street, engulfing anyone it passed in inky blackness.

It would then wander around the city, mostly the poorer parts of town but sometimes creeping into the streets of the well-to-do, before eventually passing through the main gate. The guards there reported feeling like they were frozen, unable to move as the darkness passed out of the city. Shining Armor knew that holding spells were not difficult ones, and left almost no magical signature. The darkness itself, on the other hand, did. Unfortunately, it was one that Shining Armor couldn't make any sense of. He'd sent a letter to his sister Twilight Sparkle, requesting assistance, but he wasn't sure whether she'd received¬–

The door opened. "Hi Shiney!" Never mind. She had.

"Hey, Twilight! How's my little sister been?"

Twilight responded with something ending in an incredibly long explanation of the inefficiencies in Starswirl the Bearded's original amniomorphic spell, most of which her older brother couldn't understand.

"…and then I realized that in the later version, by changing the sub-level spell matrices Starswirl was able to increase efficiency by almost eight percent, which means that I could…"

"Twilight, please, you're making my head hurt. It's great to hear what you've been working on, but I have a spell I need you to identify."

As he'd expected, the violet pony jumped at the chance to see a new spell. "Lead on, brother!"

Against his instincts, he led his sister down to a run-down street where the darkness had appeared. A few minutes passed.

"Shining?"

"Twilight?"

"Why did we stop?"

"Oh! We're here, silly. This is where the spell was."

Closing her eyes, Twilight focused hard on the spell trace, her concentration evident in her expression. It was amazing, she thought to herself. Strands of magic twisted this way and that in convoluted patterns. Ordinary spell traces were simple things, which you could use to do all sorts of things, from identifying the caster to discerning the function of the spell itself. This one, though, this one was a work of art. There must have been at least six different magical effects within this single spell, all of them of different kinds. Twilight stopped for a moment, just to revel in its incredible complexity. Releasing the trace, the unicorn opened her eyes.

"Well, Shining, I don't know what this spell actually does, let alone who cast it. It's a magical masterpiece, though. Somepony worked on this spell for a very long time. I'd love to meet whoever created it."

Shining Armor didn't have the heart to tell her that whoever created the spell might also be a serial murderer, of foals no less, and that he would never allow such a pony to get within so much as shouting range of his sister. He settled for something a little gentler. "I don't think that's likely to happen, Twilight."

The purple pony misunderstood him completely. "Oh, don't worry! That doesn't mean we can't figure out what the spell does! Watch this!" Closing her eyes again, she hooked a tendril of her own magic into the spell matrix and fed it some power. She felt the matrix twist in her magical grasp as her own spell took hold.

"This should produce an image of the original spell's effects, so we can look at it and-"

Shining Armor yelled, "Twilight, you blinded me!"

Twilight lost her concentration, and the spell slipped out of her control. She watched as the matrix rapidly consumed what power she had fed it, twisted in on itself, and vanished.

"Twily, please never, ever do that again," moaned Shining Armor. "I can see again, but I thought I was cursed or something! Celestia herself might have had to come here to dispel it then, for all we know!"

Twilight glared at him. "I said it was an image, Shining Armor. I would never cast a replica of a spell I didn't understand, certainly not one like this. Furthermore, even if it had been a curse, we would have just seen an image of a cursed pony. This spell made darkness, so that's what we saw. As far as I could tell before you made me lose my concentration, this spell made a cloud of darkness tied to the caster. I'm pretty sure it had some other effects too, but any chance we had at finding out what they were is gone now. When I lost control of my spell, it consumed the trace and vanished."

Shining Armor had the sense to look contrite. "Sorry, Twilight, I guess I over-reacted a little. I know a lot about barriers and other magic for guard use, but not a lot about this kind of thing. Illusions and images aren't something I'm used to dealing with."

Twilight looked back at her older brother. "That's what you have me for, BBBFF." She smiled, before continuing, "This was a pretty amazing spell, though. Thanks for calling me up here to see it." Twilight frowned. "I should get back to Ponyville. There's no knowing what mischief Spike may have gotten into while I was gone."

Remembering the little purple dragon, Shining Armor nodded. "Yeah, I bet he can be a real handful. I'll walk you back to the train station."