Broken Wings, Scattered Dust

Silent is What’s Left Undone

Canzonetta gazed down at us with two lucent voids, brows furrowed, scales screeching like shearing steel with every movement.  Shining white light spilled from the chasms, and as she focused her concentration further I saw little glimmers of darkness twinkle inside the luminous depths, as though they were portals to another plane of existence.  Shades of blue flickered around the edges, where her scales only intensified the light, yet staring directly at her eyes caused not the slightest twinge of pain.

The dragon’s eyes flashed even brighter and she snorted; on her command the water droplets shifted, amorphous blobs giving way to little jagged squares and triangles.  I heard a sharp intake of breath from Azimuth’s direction, but I was beyond amazement.  The droplets were bending moonbeams in ways even Whimsy would have a hard time imagining; Canzonetta manuevered and manipulated the beams with an expertise that would’ve knocked Father flat on his back.  She growled, and the refracted light sharpened, moved towards each other, and with only the merest hint of hesitation, they converged.

At once a brilliant halo flared to life, a blazing silver-white corona that completely washed the surrounding area of color and left nothing but grey.  The ring of light bent and contorted itself with every blink of Canzonetta’s dazzling eyes, every slightest flick of her tail; she conducted the halo with an elegance and poise that I didn’t think dragons capable of, and with that feral grace, with a single fluid motion that seemed without end, she coaxed the light into a single, tiny pinprick and whispered softly.

“Before.  Only one.”

And the pinprick exploded, shattering into innumerable specks of light before my very eyes, but its core remained, resting at the center of the droplet globe, still irrevocably brighter than all the newly birthed stars.

“From one came all.  Small, at first.”

The dragon manipulated the moonlight projection, isolating a single star and expanding it so that its surface was dimmed to a dull sheen, like frosted glass, mere inches away from my face.

“But time turned few to many.”

More light-specks crackled to life on the star’s surface, giving it a thin coating of what looked like snow.

“And many to legion.”

The light-snow thickened, and the star took on the appearance of being a very shiny cotton ball.  I could hardly see Canzonetta or Azimuth for the newborn star suspended in midair before us, writhing and swirling like she’d trapped a full-scale tornado inside a glass ball.

Then the realization hit me.  The star-snow was jittering sporadically, but the spots’ movement was not without purpose.  They spread out in some areas and congregated in others, and—in what I now knew to be an accelerated recreation of the history of the universe—the jittering instantly slowed to a crawl, and all that was left was a modern-day Earth, complete with Equestria, Draconia, and every land beyond, none of which I could name.

With a twitch of her tail, Canzonetta enlarged a small part of the projection until we were looking at a perfect facsimile of three glowing stars arranged in a neat triangle.  One of the stars was gently pulsing an icy blue, another glowing a steady, vivid emerald, and the last was this dim grey that kept flickering white, like a dying candle.

“That’s new,” Azimuth said belatedly, but in a tone of more puzzlement than awe.  The small corner of my mind not entranced silently applauded his failure to be mesmerized by spectacle alone.  His eyes were all I could see of him; they were hard, attentive, and above all, analytical.  The dim grey star was visible in his eyes, still occasionally loosing bursts of white light, as though there was a burgeoning thunderstorm behind his eyes.

The projection slid from the three stars to something that was unmistakeably the nearby archway.  It was substantially dimmer than the stars had been and would’ve been practically invisible if it were next to them, but it glowed nonetheless, a faint but exact phantom replica of the gate, complete with runes and all.

Azimuth nodded and stepped forward into the projection.  “If you’ll look here, er...Forbearer, was it?”

It was bizarre to hear the name in a voice that didn’t breathe with the world, but the alternatives were either set myself up for later suspicion by using my alias, or just letting the cat out of the bag.  Neither would do, so I remained silent.

Azimuth pointed to a spot below the ghost-gateway.  “Even the earth and plants do not glow as we do, but this gateway does.  This is primal magic at its peak, invoked by ancients that predate any form of history we have records of.”

I had a fleeting vision of the first speck, the one that exploded into many and legion, and it occurred to me that it might just have been Lucifa giving birth to the cosmos.  I peered around the gateway and caught Canzonetta’s eye, white voids staring into my soul.  My voice sounded utterly pitiful after hearing that of a dragon.

“Mother?”

Azimuth nodded and closed his eyes.  “Lucifa.  Said to be the ‘origin of all that is good and mother to us all...’”

At once the projection twisted and the ethereal gateway vanished, and the moonlight reformed into what was unmistakeably an alicorn.  It was neither Celestia or Luna, but an alicorn I had never seen before who could only be Lucifa.  The colorless ghost looked like any other alicorn—tall, slender, graceful—except for one detail; her mane did not flow like those of the sisters.  I committed her appearance to memory.

Canzonetta drew a long breath and the projection receded, moonlight ghosts fading to a weak glow, then to nothing.  A swish of her head caused the droplets to return to the wall, rejoining the passing torrent as smoothly as falling snow on a hill.

“So the gate is primal magic.”  I let my voice assume its grating edge; it would be safer to keep my endeavors from scrutiny.  “What’s that mean?”

“It does not abide by the conventions of modern magic,” said Azimuth simply.  “Nor will it listen to our pleas, let alone understand them.”

I resisted the temptation to ask for Equestrian, but instead bade them a somewhat sullen good night and flew back to the tower, mind still ringing with echoes of the dragon’s performance.  Even if dragons could breathe the elements of nature, since when could they manipulate them like that, with that level of precision?  Even including Descant showing off, I’d never seen a dragon actually control their element once it had left their maw.  Canzonetta was something else...

A thought occurred to me as I neared the opening.  The Eyrie, the place where magic roams free...if it had guardians, dragons to contain it.  Would they not require more magic than most to fulfill that role?  Perhaps...perhaps Canzonetta’s extensive abilities were a result of that magic, which would make her an Eyrian guardian...and also a direct beneficiary of Lucifa’s spark.

I cleared the opening’s edge to find the three guards were lying in their bedrolls, apparently fast asleep.  Deluge alone sat on the tower’s lip, wide awake, the cloudbare moon reflected clearly in her eyes.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked quietly.  She shook her head.

“I...never got to say goodbye.”  She looked up.  “To Meridian.  I came back from a work trip one day and...and he was gone.  Nothing left but dust.”

I sat down next to her, but not too close.  If it were up to me, I would’ve bailed years before Deluge felt comfortable spilling her secrets to me.  I was trusting the Calamus, this odd shrine in the middle of nowhere, and its bizarre machinations to guide me to Lucifa.  It—Dad—had told me to grant resolution to Deluge, and I had assumed that would get me closer to Lucifa.  The Calamus was of her, after all.  So I sat.  And I listened.

“No note, no word from his friends.”  Her eyes hardened, soft blue turning cold with ice.  “He was loyal to a fault, but I swear to Celestia, if he ran off with another mare...or got himself killed...”

I suddenly wished I’d done a little more digging into what Caelum’s mission was, but as it was I could do little but sit and look impassive, trying to hide my apprehension.  It wasn’t obvious in the slightest how my influence was supposed to help their relationship, let alone not wreck it.  It was a field I knew nothing of, and I had no desire to change that.

“Look,” I said.  “We’ll get past the wall soon, and then you can ask him yourself.”

“That’s the problem.  I don’t know if I can.  His loyalty was something he prided himself on.  To question that...”  She looked up to the black sky, the void of empty space.  “It’d be the same thing as doubting him.”

“He left.”  Eve appeared behind us, for all the world a silent ghost in the night.  “Not with, but for, another mare.  More than that I cannot say,” she preempted Deluge.  “Not because I hate you, but because I literally cannot say.”

Deluge opened her mouth, but I beat her to the punch.  “Don’t bother pressing her.  Soldiers like her take magic oaths of secrecy that they cannot break.”

The dark unicorn looked at me oddly, but instead turned to Deluge, who was still gazing at the night sky.  “The sky is beautiful, I know,” Eve said.  “But you’re really going to need the rest.  Trust me.”

I bit my tongue before I could mention that tomorrow might involve fighting a dragon if we did manage to bypass the wall; it didn’t seem something I was supposed to know.  Instead I gave voice to something that had been bugging me for a while.

“Why does your magic look...different?”

She sighed.  “You’ll find out tomorrow, if you survive.  Good night.”

There was little left to do but oblige.  My mind was still full of Canzonetta’s display of finesse; I could hardly muster the energy to scarf down a few dried prunes.  Thinking coherently was impossible with the unruly night winds woven in seamlessly with the gentle breathing of the mare I could have been, and when I finally did find sleep, stars made of moonlight were still dancing behind my eyes.