Chapters
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A year passed.Rarely if ever did they ever see other ponies. Only once a month were they let out, walking around dark stone rooms while ponies replaced the straw. They were offered no clothing, no blankets, nothing but loneliness and the vague cycle of day and night visible through their windows.Drones grew up much faster than queens did, and very soon every other drone dwarfed Chip. This wasn’t to say that they beat her, that she had to struggle for food or anything. The drones understood their place in…-
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The world passed before Chip in a timeless eternity. She saw very little, felt almost nothing, moved hardly at all. She had been something once, but now was barely anything. So small her mind could barely string together thoughts, so cold that it took an eternity to reach each one. She wanted to grow, to expand, to mature, but found she could do none of those things. The icy chill all around her kept her small, obscured the world in a thin sheen of frost. Once she felt the whole world shake, and…
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"So, you're saying... there's an Alicorn coming?" Joseph couldn't keep the annoyance from his voice—any time he had to spend away from his research was time he would never get back. It didn't matter that he was practically ageless, didn't matter that he could (and had) devoted centuries to his experiments. Once something broke his concentration, it could take hours to get it back.Had the pony who interrupted him been anyone else, he might've had to resist the temptation to turn them to stone, or into…
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“Exactly what kind of training is this?” Trade Wind asked, her voice more than a little nervous. She shifted uncomfortably as she surveyed the room—almost entirely empty, except for the crystals set into the walls. The spells in here looked even more complex than Mystic Rune’s teleportation spells, and those were easily the most advanced magic she had ever personally witnessed. The crystals here were much smaller, which indicated less power was involved, but the number of runes carved into…
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Jackie landed in the old library, her hooves settling on the crystal of the roof with a rough clatter. It had been a long time since Jackie had visited this ancient place. Until comparatively recently, this old library near the height of the reachable Dreamlands was a monument to decay: evidence that even the best could be defeated and that virtue was doomed to failure. Why bother trying in a universe that simply didn't care?She had watched its crystal structure turn chalky gray and start to crumble around…
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The hall of the Golden Emperor was a different place now. Joseph’s magic had consumed the fungal mat, consumed the rotting corpses left where they had died by those too sick to carry them away. Trade Wind no longer saw the faint shimmer of her shield as it cleaned each breath she took. They had defeated the plague.“I want you to deal with this,” Joseph said, pointing towards the throne. Atop it, the pony was no longer covered with his own slimy wraps, and there was nothing in his eyes but interest.…
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"Alright." Joseph cleared his throat loudly, stepping forward towards the throne. It was an impressive construction, larger than anything Alexandria had ever had for certain. It was set on several tiered platforms, each one inlayed with something else rare and beautiful. Jade, mother-of-pearl, silver, then finally gold. It was a shame a thin layer of pale fungus had begun to coat everything in here."I don't understand," Trade Wind said from beside him, her voice only slightly distorted by the shield she…
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Joseph stood in the center of his vault, appreciating the quality of his work. In all the world to his knowledge, he knew of no creatures anywhere who had seen the potential of magic like he had. Even Archive, holding all of it in her mind at once, had stopped several steps before the really interesting discoveries. Yes, self-recharging lights and using weather magic to feed gravity-driven power plants were an interesting innovation. But they were only a sliver of what magic could do.Before Mystic Rune,…
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Time passed in the strange, alien place beneath the ground. Trade Wind couldn't have said if she rested a few hours or a few days. True to the words of the stranger, her joints felt sore and stiff and strained whenever she moved them, as though too sudden a gesture might tear the new leg right off her body. Nothing about what had happened to her made any sense, and her constant delirium did little to bring clarity to her.There had been many contradictions, though one seemed chief among them: the plague. It…
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Joseph Kimball knew something was wrong when the water stopped flowing into his lab. It had taken him over a week to notice this—the secret channels cut into Alexandria’s water system far above had never been discovered, even after hundreds of years, and his lab was always the first to receive the water pumped from above. Joseph hardly ate anymore, but he still needed as much water as any other organic being.Am I organic? I might want to consider that question at some point in the future.Joseph Kimball…
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