Motion was an unnecessary anachronism. Thebe was aware of this; she knew that there was no real need for her to ever move from a single position. Most of the time, she did not. She simply stayed in one position, a central hub in the core of so many of her spells, her neural structure linked directly to her facility and to Equestria at large. Sometimes she would stay there for days, months, decades- -for her, there was little difference; her mind was so vast that a physical body was only tangentially required.

Some spells, however, could not intersect with the core magical nexus, either do to sensitivity or danger of interference- -for those, Thebe would need to move. That was not the only reason she maintained a mobile, physical body, however- -part of it was nostaligia. It harkened back to the days when she had been a young and confused unicorn, long before she had gained wings and far longer before she had sealed those very wings beneath steel.

For this instance, she had chosen to translocate herself. She passed through space and emerged in a small room, one of the many chambers she created as a reservoir for magically charged colloid that had since been drained. Her will caused the room to shift, expanding it vastly, the walls disassembling and reassembling to form a tremendous warehouse-like building that was completely empty, save for the equipment that would be more difficult to move, which was mostly rotors and coils of the decompression cooling systems- -some of the few components of the Pyramid that were purely physical and not fully constructed from magic.

The Grand Magus, though a fool, had actually managed to rouse her interest. He was an overly sentimental being committed to obsolete ideology- -likely, Thebe reasoned, from having spent so much of his youth with the “Princess of Friendship”. He was, however, the only living being who even approached Thebe’s power, if only distantly. She hated him, at least as much as a god could be bothered to hate a mortal- -and was amusedly annoyed at her embarrassment that she was following the lead he had given her.

Thebe had reached out into Equestria to learn the situation. Most information that came back was not relevant. One of her key Incurse spies, for example, had supposed the presence of a “time traveler” that Vale was currently investigating. That was hardly anything new, though. Time travel was not inconceivable; there were several known time travelers: a green pony with an antler horn, a sorcerer from the end of the Horn dynasty, and a certain brown pony with his derp-eyed sidekick. None of them were relevant. Thebe did not bother with time travel- -her experiences with it had proved that it was largely useless, constrained by looping causality- -but she did note that time travelers always came from the past, and never the future. That always made her wonder.

The information that had returned, however, was report of a crash in the Frontier Zone. Backward triangulation showed that the crash site as well as a destroyed village and the Changeling Hive had been in a straight line- -as if something had simply marched across the land in one unwavering direction.

Crashes of things from the Beyond were not unusual. Most ponies did not bother to realize the fact that “Equestria” was not the only life-containing zone in Painbios. There were many lifeforms outside, most so strange that most ponies would not even recognize them as living things. There were the coral-like Rotali, the stone-like T’Rv, the living magic that called itself the Incurse, and countless others. Things sometimes fell through the holes in the firmament, bits of civilizations above- -often, though, of civilizations that had not darkened the sky in eons.

Thebe’s magic condensed in the empty room, forming objects and giving them color and the illusion of mass. It resolved into a physical representation of the three-dimensional records of the crash site that she had acquired- -including the body and severed head of an unfortunate Pegasus.

The image itself was poor, and incomplete. Thebe began processing it through her own mind, correcting it as necessary, using algorithm spells as support to resolve the image. As the image resolved and cleaned itself, she floated over it, her robe flowing beneath her.

The pieces were badly damaged. She recalled having detected something entering the atmosphere. As was procedure with any unauthorized Beyonder vessel, she had brought it down. Theoretically, nothing could have survived the blast- -let alone the ship. Whatever material it was made of was remarkably durable.

As she moved over the simulated wreckage, she suddenly noticed a symbol on one piece of the wreckage. She separated a copy of the symbol from the piece of metal and displayed it in front of her. It was complicated and convoluted- -but she recognized it. The spells that parsed her memory immediately began pouring through the countless insignias and designs that she knew, searching for corresponding images which scrolled through the air to the right of the image she held. Within milliseconds, three appeared.

“Interesting,” said Thebe to herself. The three symbols, according to the annotated elements in her memory, were the respective symbols of the Brontasi, Argasi, and Aurasi, the three related races of metallic, Pegasus-like ponies that had been rendered extinct during the First Choggoth War over a million years prior.

That alone was not the interesting part. The interesting part was the obvious progression of symbols. Each one was a version of the one prior, with complexity increasing from right to left. The most complicated symbol was that of the Brontasi, the lowest caste, their bodies being made of bronze. Then came the Argasi middle class, with a less complicated symbol, and then finally the Aurasi ruling class, with their symbol almost basic- -a symbol Thebe knew well, as it adorned many of the lower machines that allowed her Pyramid to float, just as they once had for the flying mountain Olympus. The unknown symbol, however, was even simpler than the Aurasi symbol by far.

That alone was unusual. Thebe did not know why would that be, until something she had read in passing so long ago occurred to her.

“Adamantasi,” she said, smiling. She picked up the virtual wreckage that held the symbol and shifted the visual image, repairing it as necessary. Aurasi did not see in normal colors, and were far more sensitive to polarized light than organic ponies. Thebe shifted the image to resolve it into the colors that an Aurasi might have seen, and found that the insignia was covered in writing.

As she had suspected, there were, indeed, words surrounding the seal. They were mostly not readable- -in part because the camera used to take the image had not recoded properly, and in part from heavy damage from the impact and from being shot down- -but it was clear that something was written in ancient Aurasi.

That, of course, produced its own problem. Ancient Aurasi was the deadest of dead languages- -not even the Aurasi themselves would have known how to speak or read it by the time of their eradication. Thebe could still read some of it, though, and understood its structure- -and it seemed to be an epithet. It spoke of those who were pure rising to become new again. Beyond that, though, there was little she could glean from it.

She instead picked up the remainder of the wreckage and began to attempt to reassemble it. The algorithms in her mind and magic accelerated, and drew on her own creativity and mechanical knowledge, pulling the pieces together and projecting supposed elements between existing ones. As more pieces were added, the transitory elements changed, shifting or being removed, and the entire structure flowed around itself rapidly, repeatedly attempting to reconstruct in different ways.

It took her several hours to create an accurate reconstruction- -or at least one that was reasonably close. She had managed to rebuild part of the ship that had crashed, at least enough to extrapolate what it might have been. It had not been especially helpful, though. The “ship” was not really a ship at all- -it had no known space-faring architecture. There were no engines, gravity generators, or even life support. The walls were thick, though, and seemed to be meant to connect to something inside. Thebe could not tell if she were looking at a prison or a sarcophagus.

She set the model down, and floated backward to examine it from a distance. She was getting nowhere with it- -so she chose to project something else. To her side, the memory chip that the Grand Magus had provided her with appeared, and she read it. As she did, an image formed beside her, cast out of translucent red magic. Beside her appeared the image of what the Grand Magus had seen, projected at life-size.

Thebe contemplated it for a moment. There was slightly more detail on the large scale. Thebe could see the way its armor was connected, how it seemed to lack any sort of logical joint system yet still moved fluidly, and how it only appeared marginally symmetrical. She took special note of the posture, and the way it stood- -and most importantly, the helmet. From the image, she imagined that its featureless faceplate was probably partially translucent, or at least the parts of it that were not connected to the various machines that surrounded it. From the distorted image, however, it was impossible to see what kind of face lurked beneath that mask.

“What are you?” asked Thebe as she watched the projection move on a loop, continually marching gracefully forward, looking toward the “camera”, and then flashing back to its original position and repeating the motion. The image was too distorted, though, and nothing more could be gained from it.

So Thebe moved on. She displayed a large, miniature overlay of the descent of the craft, and continue her work. From this, she extracted information on its trajectory. The image enhanced, displaying the crash site without the wreckage, and Thebe hovered over it, looking for further clues as her mind correlated the object’s descent with potential courses that it might have taken through the Beyond, and what it might have passed- -and who out there might have encountered it before she had.

This took time, and the whole while, something was bothering her. She did not know what it was, but something seemed wrong about the whole situation; something did not add up. A wave of anxiety was washing over her, but it had no clear source.

Eventually, it got to the point where she was nolonger getting useful work done. She turned and floated off the projection, passing the strange projection of the alien life form that was now standing perfectly still beside the image of the wreckage.

That was when Thebe stopped, and for the first time in centuries, felt the cold pleasure of fear run through her gut. She realized what was wrong: she had never set the projection of the creature to stop looping.

She looked toward it, and its head turned toward her, as if in response. Then, slowly, it turned, and took a step toward her.

Thebe dropped to the ground and her robes separated, forming tentacles to shield herself from any potential attack. Her mind raced, and she wondered how she had not noticed what was happening. Now she felt it clearly, though. Foreign magic was infiltrating hers, spreading through lesser processes and rewriting them, establishing an external connection.

The figure somehow looked so clear now, and its armor seemed to glisten and glint as it moved- -and its eyes were now glowing with white light instead of Thebe’s red. That was not the only problem, though; Thebe could feel it pouring through her magic, its strange tendrils reaching outward through her, pulling back quantities of data that even she would not have been able to retrieve so fast.

Thebe did not know how it had happened- -arguably, it should have been impossible, but she was definitely isolating the presence of a virus within her spell architecture. It had somehow been encoded within the image that the Grand Magus had been given her, even though that should have been impossible- -the magic associated with the data would need to have been linked the instant he had seen it, in his eye.

“The eye of an Aurasi,” said Thebe, suddenly realizing what had happened.

The thing that was lurking in her mind was powerful, but Thebe was not weak. She did what she imagined it would never have expected- -she opened the portals it had generated even wider and reached into its mind.

She instantly knew that she had miscalculated. It had placed no protections on its mind, as if it had wanted her to see what was within- -and what was within its mind was horrifying. Thebe saw endless fire and pain and sundering of flesh by machines and magic. She saw a dead world of crystal, and the soldiers who marched across it with unfathomable weapons toward power. She felt a desire for power linked to a mad desire for destruction, a hatred that was entwined with a perverse love- -and screaming fury enclosed by singular, cold logic.

Within it, she saw the era before the Aurasi, of a world ruled by dragons and dotted with massive blue-lit machines that could not be comprehended, and saw the formation of the first from nothing through something black and pure and unfathomably beautiful.

Even for her the memories were too much for Thebe. Her mind rebelled as it tore too deeply, reaching into memories that even she could not know- -and she struck it down with a single blast of magic that purged her entire system.

The red-light figure stayed for just a moment, and for a fraction of a second, as it reached forward with its five-fingered hand, Thebe thought she heard it say something in a language she may once have known. Before she would even imagine what it was saying, though, it flickered and Vanished.

Thebe caught her breath, and slowly lifted herself into the air once more. The room behind her collapsed around her, returning to what it should have been. She had just made a critical mistake, but for some reason, she could not stop smiling.

For once in so long, she had encountered something new. There were only so many arcane texts she could steal and pour through, and the progress of scientific and magical research was painstakingly slow- -but this was something she had not ever witnessed. The way it had moved through her, the way it had performed its spells that were clearly augmented by strange types of magic that even Thebe could not know- -it was beautiful. For once in so long, she had finally found an opponent, one with things that she wanted.

And, she decided, that thing and all the secrets it held within it must belong to her.