Chapter Fifteen
Panic

The crates survived the transit in better condition than I'd expected. They slumped and crumbled a bit but were still recognizable when they arrived on the floor of the cornucopia building.

"Let me do this, Twilight," Jigsaw spoke up, "I know the way these crates are put together."

I stood back and watched as she gently brushed away the decayed wood and iron top of the first box, revealing a thin sheet of lead. She probed carefully with her magic and then peeled away the soft metal like she was pulling an old quilt off of a bed.

Books.

The crate had been tightly packed with scores of books. Okay, I admit it—I squealed like a school-filly. Jigsaw grinned and gave me a look. "Weren't you hoping for a priceless golden idol or the dreaded Eye of Argon?"

"Oh, please!" I snorted. "I'd trade the legendary treasure of Queen Majesty for another crate like that one!"

Jigsaw's grin got even wider. "Okay then..."

She went to work on the second crate and soon revealed another trove of books, then a third. "Breathe, Twilight," she admonished me as she continued working on the boxes, carefully peeling away the sides. "Oh by the way, that's one Queen's Hoard you owe me."

I started to reach out with my magic but had to take a moment to stop the field from wavering. I gently touched a volume that had been in the first crate and was surprised to find it in pretty good condition. "Sharphoof's group must have done some conservation work on these before they packed them up," I guessed.

Jigsaw nodded. "That's pretty much standard procedure for delicate items, and it looks like the lead was good protection." She lifted a thin black book out of the pile she was working on and flipped it open. "Hey! I think we're in luck!"

"Yes?"

"Yep! Standard procedure also calls for making a catalog of items sealed up for transport." She waved the little book at me. "And this appears to be it."

"It's like Hearth's Warming, my birthday, and my coronation all wrapped up together!"

Jigsaw laughed and floated the catalog over to me. "Happy birthday, Princess!"

It got even better.

According to the catalog, the books were mostly on Magical Engineering and specifically about the particulars of the infrastructure of the city. There were scores on crystal growth, management, and charging; more than a hundred on practical and theoretical application spells; at least a dozen on autonomic control schemes for dissimilar magic devices; a few that had puzzling titles; and exactly one on "Military Applications."

Thanks to the excellent organization of the boxes, I was able to locate that last book in a matter of moments. I opened the book and my throat tightened as I read the title page:

"Twilight? Are you alright?"

I shook my head. "I just discovered where an old enemy learned his craft, that's all. A bit of a shock."

"Are we going to have to worry about this enemy showing up? 'Cause, what with the changelings and all, our dance cards are getting kinda full..."

"Oh, no," I assured her. "Cadance burned his rotten soul away, back when the Empire returned."

Jigsaw's grin turned a bit sickly. "Uh... the Alicorn of Love did what, now?"

I shook myself out of my reverie. "Oh, no! It wasn't exactly on purpose... more of a side effect of replacing the Crystal Heart. She's really a very sweet pony!"

"More crystals..." Jigsaw said, thoughtfully. "I'm beginning to think that messing around with crystals leads to a short life-expectancy."

"More like dark and light magic not playing well together," I said, just vocalizing some half-formed thoughts of my own. "Engines and batteries of incompatible types..."

"You seem to be able to do both pretty well," Jigsaw observed.

"Mmn." I really didn't know what to say to that. As far as I knew, Celestia, Luna, and I were the only ponies in the modern age to be able to work with both forms. Dark Magic wasn't exactly evil, it was just unconstrained, which made it very difficult to control.

Thinking about magical control led me to the bronze device around the base of the "Great Crystal Engine." One of the books must have information about it. I almost put aside Sombra's book before something my brother had once told me popped into my head.

One snowy evening during Winter Break from the Guard Academy, Shining Armor had badly trounced me in a pillow fight by making my toys and books dance around the room, distracting me from his fluffy missiles. At that point, my magic was very well-developed, stronger than his, and I could have easily taken him in an honest feather-filled slugfest.

"It's all about threat-assessment, Twily!" He grinned at me as I spit out clumps of goose down. "Take care of the spear... uh... pillow that's headed your way before looking anywhere else!"

"Thanks for the advice, Shiny," I said sourly.

"No problem, Sis!" He grinned smugly.

"Oh, hey!" I said, turning to my bedroom window. "Is that Cadance? She said she'd drop by sometime this week!"

"Really? Where?" Shining Armor rushed to the window to look down at the street.

I walloped him solidly in the back of the head with my favorite pillow.

I always was a quick study.

"I think I should start with this one," I told Jigsaw. "Why don't you go through the others and see what you can find? The sun is setting and we only have until a couple of hours after dawn to read undisturbed."

"Sounds good to me!" She didn't quite have the same relationship with books that I did, but she sounded pretty eager to pull an all-nighter anyway.

I turned to my own book and pretty soon I was having a hard time keeping my temper. I'd disliked Sombra just for what he'd put the poor crystal ponies through. After reading his own words, and having it shoved in my face how bigoted, arrogant, and down-right callous he was, I thoroughly loathed him.

And that was just the foreword.

In the body of the book, Sombra advocated for more unicorn-only settlements, laying out a plan for settling or conquering crystal-rich areas and building more of the dark crystal engines, until all of the "pathetically misguided" lands were under unicorn control. He named Equestria specifically, noting that it would be wise to surround the kingdom with crystal outposts before attacking it directly.

Suddenly, a unicorn king of an earth-pony empire made a lot more sense.

The text began to go into details and I steeled myself to plow through a lot of unpleasantness. The first paragraph in the tactics section made my head swim. I couldn't take it in. I had to re-read it, and pause for the full horror of the words to sink in.

Of course, once we are able to get her within range, we can easily dispose of our greatest enemy by removing the safety restraints on the cornucopia and commanding, May I have the heart of Princess Celestia, please?

I dropped the book, turned my head, and vomited out everything in my stomach.

"Twilight?" Jigsaw dropped her own book and stood up. "Twi, are you all right?"

I couldn't reply. I was still dry-heaving and sobbing and shaking and nearly paralyzed by the sheer evil of it. That the crystal below us could have so violated the constrains of pure magic as to—to—No! Not could have—but still could! The device that constrained it, so that a careless or angry pony couldn't get it to do something damaging, was nearly corroded away. Anypony—or anything with the knowledge, could go down to the cavern and kick it apart—and—and—

Jigsaw approached me slowly and tried to put a leg around my shoulders. "It's okay, Twilight. Tell me what's—"

"No!" I shoved her away from me. "No, you don't understand! It's evil! It's not just wrong... not just theft! The whole city is evil!" I swung a hoof around in a wild, dramatic gesture, "They were all bad ponies!"

Jigsaw backed away and stepped on the corner of Sombra's book. She glanced down and then raised it up, no doubt wanting to read what had sent me off into such a fit of temper. I wrenched the book out of her grasp and then stared around me at the piles of books.

Magical Engineering.

Mana Control Systems.

Crystal Growth.

With those books, any half-way competent team of unicorns could create another dark crystal engine. With Sombra's tactic, they could wield the most terrible weapon known to ponykind. Facing an avenging army? "May I have ten thousand pegasus heads, please?" I nearly vomited again.

I turned to Jigsaw. "What did you read?" My voice sounded desperate and strained, even to my own ears. "What was it?"

"W—water magic." She flinched back from me. "Hydraulic spells to pull water up from deep below the desert, if I understood it right." She backed away a couple of steps. "Twilight, please calm down! Just breathe, okay? Deep breaths..."

I did breathe deeply, then. She hadn't seen anything important—no clues as to how the core structure of dark magic worked or how crystals were created. But I didn't calm down much.

"Threat assessment!" I nodded. "Yes! Shining was right, I have to eliminate the threat!" I wrapped all the books in my magic and lifted them up, gathered them close to me.

"Twilight!"

"No! I have to do this, Jigsaw!" I don't know if she understood my words fully, because I was half-choking on my own sobs. "I have to save her!"

"Please, Twilight! Just tell me—"

I teleported away.

As I watched the books burn among the ruins, I couldn't help the near-instinctive urges that jolted through me like electricity. My horn blazed to life several times by pure reflex, and I had to fight to damp it down again. I desperately wanted to save the books, even though I knew they were the key to a monstrous evil. The bonfire threw blood red light up across the sculpture of two unicorn stallions, fighting to the death. I was violating my dearest beliefs to keep safe my dearest—

"Twilight!" came a voice from the darkness behind me. "Twilight! Where are you?"

I groaned. How was I going to justify what I'd done to Jigsaw? "Over..."

I broke off and coughed until my throat was free of smoke. "Over here, Jigsaw!"

She'd probably seen the light of the fire. Maybe she'd spotted some of the burning pages as the updraft had taken them into the sky. She was a very smart mare, after all.

She was also a good friend. She didn't say anything when she saw the bonfire, she just stared at it for what seemed to me to be a very long while. Then she walked over to me and sat down close beside me. I leaned against her.

I didn't cry. There were no sobs. It was just my eyes—they wouldn't stop leaking all over everything.

When the fire began to burn down, Jigsaw used her magic to mound it up, pushing half-charred books into the center to make sure they were all completely consumed. She didn't even know what was going on—she was just helping. Much later, she stirred the ashes, getting air to the last bits of glowing paper and canvas. Then she turned to me and wiped my face with a clean cloth she'd pulled from her saddlebags. "Back to the library, now. I'll make you some chamomile tea and then tuck you in."

"I can't sleep."

"I'll sit with you until you can."

"I had to do it."

"Okay."

I started to protest, to tell her she had to understand. But, of course, that's the one thing I didn't want her to do. Nopony could understand. Nopony could know. And nopony would know, because the knowledge was gone. All that remained—

"The crystal!" My head shot up in alarm.

"Shh!" Jigsaw tried to soothe me. "The crystal will still be there in the morning, Twilight. You need to rest."

"That's the problem! The crystal! We've got to destroy it!"

"How?"

That was like a kick to my gut. I had no idea how to destroy it. I couldn't just drop another meteorite on it. The amount of dark energy bound up in that gigantic crystal would do incredible harm if released all at once. Yes, we were in a nearly-uninhabited desert, but uncontrolled dark magic could do worse things than kill living beings. A few scattered ounces of Discord's "seeds" had made the whole Everfree Forest into a malignant entity with the power to capture the two most powerful ponies in Equestria. What horrors could hundreds of megathaums of undirected, maleficent magic do? How much magic was bound up in that crystal, anyway? I just couldn't do the math in my head. I needed to sketch out an amplituhedron, but I couldn't remember where I'd put my notebook and quill.

"Twilight," Jigsaw said softly.

I jerked my head around to stare at her. "What?"

"Is it urgent? Does it have to be done right now? Are we in danger?"

No," I said. "Well... no. Maybe." I shook my head, which gave me a brief dizzy spell. "No... I guess not. Not right now."

She nudged me in the direction of the library. I took a step and then stopped. She shoved me until I began walking. "Tea, then bed," she insisted.

"But, I—"

"Tea," she said, quietly, but firmly. "Then bed."

The tea was good. I don't remember falling asleep.