Far away from Discordalot and the Centre of Unlaw and at the edges of a zone that could only nominally be referred to as “Equestria”, similar investigation was occurring- -although toward a very different end. While Sunset Shimmer and Rarity investigated cost reports and tax anomalies, Twilight sat in her darkened castle on the edge of known civilization, slowly looking through an extensive and excruciatingly detailed checklist.

“Let’s see,” she said to herself. “And the auxiliary stabilization system is optimized. Check. Power flow consistent. Also check. Final sequence itemized- -check!” she ran her quill across the last mark with a slight flare. There was little in life that pleased her more than completing a list of tasks.

With the fourth identical copy of the checklist completed, she turned to the machine before her. The device itself was rather extensive, but the principal component was a large glass cylinder filled with a relatively thick pink-brown fluid that bubbled slowly as it was pushed in from various reservoirs and secondary chambers. The purpose of the axillary machinery and sensory equipment was complex, and although it was critical, it was not nearly as important as what sat in the center of the tube: the recently severed head and spine of a white unicorn stallion.

Twilight had of course taken the time to shave the head, remove the lower jaw, and to open the rear of the skull and to connect the numerous thin wires to the internal brain matter with exacting precision. This was normally easier to do while the subject was still alive- -despite the screaming- -but the necrosis was still minimal enough that by all Twilight’s calculations only minor magical field modifications would be required.

“Alright, Starlight,” said Twilight, turning to her only living companion. Starlight was staring with the maximum possible level of interest at a particular luminescent vessel of charged material. “Starlight! Stop that! The ultraviolet rays will make you go blind!” Twilight paused. “Although that would give me a chance to see if you can navigate by magic alone. That phenomenon is very seldom studied in detail…remind me to blind you at some point.”

Twilight trotted across the room to the main circuitry hub, and set out several pieces of parchment neatly on the table near it. She also set a small crystalline cube into the center of the machinery and ensured that it was fully interfaced. “Let’s do this.”

Her magic rushed over the machine, activating the necessary sequence of switches. At the same time, she produced the necessary field contract to ensure that the machine would function properly. There was a loud buzzing and clicking as the machine hummed to life, and Starlight stepped back from the vessel she was standing near. Despite having had her capacity for thought or memory removed, her horn was still perfectly linked to her brain, and Starlight was highly perceptive to magical fields.

“Ahhh! Ahhhh!” she cried softly, showing that she was beginning to become agitated.

“Shut up, Starlight, I’m working,” said Twilight.

The system responded, and Twilight immediately began to ignore Starlight completely. It was not hard, as she was more or less furniture. Instead, she approached the central tube as the spell began to operate.

At first, nothing happened, and the tension made certain parts of Twilight’s body tingle, as the process always did. Then, suddenly, the severed head opened its eyes.

“HA!” cried Twilight, causing Starlight to jump. “Take that, you naysaying horses! It IS possible with unicorns!”

Almost immediately, the head’s eyes began to turn and look around furiously, the pupils narrowing. The indications coming off the machine were of extreme brain activity, although even without being able to read the ethereal display it would have been possible to tell how panicked the pony inside the tube was. How he was likely trying to scream- -only to find that he no longer had lungs.

“There there,” said Twilight, stroking her hoof slowly against the glass and resisting giggling. The head’s eyes looked to her, half pleadingly. “You’re already dead. So any pain you feel is entirely superfluous!” She then did giggle, and activated the second part of the spell.

Every muscle on what remained of Fancy Pants’s face suddenly twitched and quivered, and his eyes half closed. According to the brain activity readings, this was a response to extreme pain as the machine and its accompanying spells interfaced directly with his brain. Twilight’s previous tests had confirmed that the level of pain the machine generated were quite substantial. In subjects whose bodies were still left partially intact, it was invariably lethal.

The machine began to react, but almost immediately various warning indicators began to sound. The automated system attempted to compensate, and but Twilight forced it into manual, feeding even more power into the system. This was not a normal case- -it needed more if it was going to work.

Fancy Pants’s still intact horn began to glow, causing the nutrient fluid surrounding it to bubble and vaporize. The force was clearly involuntary, because the radiation from his magic began to sear and burn the skin away from his face. Thin swirls of dark material rose through the fluid from the surgical holes that Twilight had produced in him. He was dying.

Then in an instant there was an enormous surge of blue light. The central tube exploded violently, sending shrapnel and a plume of boiling liquid into the room. Starlight was knocked back, but Twilight effortlessly projected a shield spell around herself to absorb the shards of beryl and the scalding fluid.

After a moment, she sighed. “Of course,” she said. “Exactly the duration I predicted within two point six percent tolerance. So messy.”

She looked up at the tube, where the now fully inert skull was still dangling from the wires attached to it. The eyes were still open, although had been rendered cloudy by heat. Fancy Pants was now dead beyond the capacity of any scientific resurrection, and with his level of brain damage resurrection by necromancy would be a waste of reagents.

Twilight then carefully levitated herself and lifted herself across the room so as to avoid the fragments of material strewn across the floor. Starlight slowly sat up, and then stood. Despite the force of the blast, the intrinsic spells that covered her body had insulated her from any real damage.

Before reaching for the crystal cube, Twilight took a moment to note down the readings that had been transmitted into her mind. This was critical for the advancement of the procedure. Post-mortem interrogation was a common technique, but all modern scientific views held that it was impossible to perform on unicorns due to their innate differences in biology from lesser ponies. Twilight, though, had been pioneering the techniques for quite some time. The hundreds upon hundreds of test subjects she had used who had not contained any valuable information had hopefully finally paid off with one who did.

After taking her notes, she lifted the cube from its assembly and ran her magic through it. The intricate laser-engravings on the side began to glow, and it relayed its content.

Twilight sighed. Much of the signal was badly corrupted. It was not that Fancy Pants had been dead too long- -in fact, Twilight’s research had increasingly begun to come to the conclusion that “death” was a highly impermanent state- -but rather the fact that his intrinsic magic had interfered with the recording. That, and he seemed to be resisting.

“Huh,” said Twilight. She was mildly amused by this information. “He was resisting. Which means he knew what was happening to him. That must have been frightening.” She shrugged. “His own fault, though.”

There was still a significant amount of recovered data. As Twilight changed the angles and azimuth of the cube, she discovered a large amount of pointless chaff. There were memories of his lover- -who Darknight had already killed- -and of the life they had shared. Their house, their dog, the day they had learned that Chaos exposure had rendered Fleur De’Lis sterile- -all useless, pointless things that Twilight had no interest in. Oddly, though, those memories were the strongest- -which Twilight was sure must have been a mistake. Operation logistics should have been much higher on the mental hierarchy.

Then she stopped. There was almost no critical information- -but she had found something. One moment, badly corrupted, but recoverable. The memory was limited, but Twilight knew what it was. She recognized a book title when she saw one.

Quickly, she took the cube and left the room. Starlight stared at her with complete lobotomized disinterest, and then followed at a distance. Twilight detested leaving a mess in any room, but this was a special set of circumstances. She would attend to it later, or use it to test if one of her other experiments had retained any semblance of logical thought or ability.

As Twilight walked through the damp and cold stone hall, the candles on either side erupted with violet fire. At one time in the distant past, this castle may have been decorated. Paintings or tapestries may once have adorned the walls, although now only the barest remnants of them remained. Twilight had seen no need to remove them. After all, they still belonged to her.

This castle had belonged to her family for nearly one thousand years. It was the last surviving vestige of a series of redoubts that circled the center of a long-extinct kingdom. It had served House Twilight for generations as a center for their work, ever since it had been received by one of Twilight Sparkle’s as a gift from Discord. From what few records Twilight had found, her ancestor had played a critical role in defeating the mutated tyrants in the Final War.

Now it sat alone and isolated atop a rocky crag distant in an uncharted sector of the EverFree Forest. The land surrounding it was dominated by Chaos-infected plants and abominations of nature that the forest had given birth to, with the only sign of civilization being the Chaos channels that extended outward into infinity. Even Twilight herself could not hunt in that forest without extreme peril. This isolation was the reason why she had been able to spend almost all of her childhood and adult life alone.

Twilight descended a set of curving stone stairs and entered a cavernous room. She charged her horn, and the sconces on the wall ignited with pink-violet fire to reveal shelves upon shelves of books. This was her library: the tomes gathered by a family of sorceress, mages, necromancers, scientists and alchemists for ten centuries. She herself had nearly tripled its size since taking control of the castle and filled it with both the rare and exotic and the mundane but useful. Twilight paused to take a long, deep breath, and the smell of books made her tingly again.

This library was her life. For the longest time, it had been the center of her entire world. Her studies had been the only thing that had ever concerned her. There had never been anypony to make her leave, and over time her entire life had been devoted to research into scientific and alchemical processes- -to the detriment of social interaction. In fact, until Twilight had been eleven years old, she had not comprehended that there were still living ponies in the world apart from her immediate family. She had not been pleased when she realized that there were. The existence of others as anything except a resource only stood in the way of her work.

Twilight knew the location of every book in the library, and trotted through it as she counted the shelves and identification numbers tagged to each one. As she did, she passed through what for her passed as décor. Being somewhat limited in taste, though, these items more or less consisted of objects that had value as historical relics or curiosities without being useful for any larger studies. These included the charred horn and upper skull of Clover the Clever, who had been burned at the stake for a lack of witchcraft, as well as a partially melted golden crown of unknown origin with a large, violet, rhomboid crystal in the center. Then there was by far the most useless item: a green and violet dragon fetus, preserved in a jar of alcohol and alum. From what Twilight understood, it had been the very last living dragon before she had picked it.

It was not difficult to find the book, but unfortunately, it was currently residing in Twilight’s “Special Collection” area. Twilight stopped and sighed deeply, barely willing to enter. She had suspected that there was a reason why she knew the title but not the contents.

The Special Collection consisted of extremely rare books- -even by Twilight’s standards- -that were incredibly precious but also incredibly fragile. Twilight kept them for the sake of compulsive book preservation, but she had never read most of them. Doing so was impossible: they would collapse into dust before she could even open them.

With a tinge of jealousy, she realized that Fancy Pants must have at some point had access to a much higher quality copy of an extremely rare book. Had Twilight known that, she would have killed him without hesitation to collect it long ago. Its situation, if it even still existed, was now lost- -but Twilight had its twin, the only other known copy in existence.

Unfortunately, it was one of her most fragile books. She had recovered it from an ancient library at the ruin of another redoubt, a half-buried fort in the desert-like Madlands. The dryness had kept it preserved, but also rendered it impossibly brittle.

She paused, looking at the book under is specially mad bell jar. The memory she had covered had been badly compromised. It had not contained the information that Fancy Pants had seen in the book, only the title of the book itself. That meant that the only way to know what he had known was to read her copy. Twilight knew what she needed to do, as horrific as it was.

With extreme gentleness, she lifted the jar off the book and removed it. Her magic was stable enough to manipulate it without it collapsing, but even that was extremely difficult. Twilight had to move slowly across the room to place it on the oaken table on the far side, all as Starlight watched on in silence.

Once the book was settled, Twilight looked at it. She could not help but feel that it was afraid. She stroked its spine with the gentlest of touches. “Shh,” she said. “It’s going to be okay.”

She then reached into a cabinet on her right and produced another book. This one was the opposite of its elder: its condition was perfect in every way, yet entirely blank. It had never even been opened, and it still smelled of the fine pony glue that had been used to bind it together.

Twilight held the book over its older counterpart and engaged a very specific spell. The magic swirled around the new book, encasing in pink-violet light. Before completing the spell, Twilight looked down at the older book with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry, old friend,” she said. “But I have to do it. Please forgive me.”

She then added the final portion to the spell. The ancient book shook and lifted off the table, and then began to disintegrate. Twilight wished that she could look away, but was unable to; if this spell failed, it would have died in vain. She forced herself to watch as the book fell apart into a system of mist-like magic, which drifted upward into the new book, circling it and being slowly absorbed.

It only took a few moments, and when it was done, nothing at all remained of the old book save for a thin film of dust. Twilight set the new book down on the table next to it and opened it. She sighed- -although the text and images had indeed been transcribed, they showed the effects of the copying. Places where the original text had been damaged lost or illegible had been pulled over as blanks in the text that almost perversely looked intentional. The charm, history, and life of the original book had been destroyed- -but its content lived on in a new body.

Twilight flipped through the book, feeling like a terrible pony as she did. The text inside, though, was actually quite edifying. The book seemed to be a forbidden history, likely written by somepony who had witnessed the Final War firsthoof. The text was written in a unique artificial language, and shared some tantalizing similarities in syntax to several forbidden works by Starswirl the Bearded.

Then she stopped suddenly. There, on one page, sat the image that Fancy Pants and his cult had clearly stylized for their symbol: two thin, curving ponies, one blue and one white, posed in an ever-spiraling circle around the image of the moon and a celestial object that Twilight did not recognize.

Twilight read the text. “…two regal sisters who ruled together and created harmony for all the land,” she began. “The eldest used her alicorn powers to raise the sun at dawn; the younger brought out the moon to begin the night.

“They ruled in peace, and brought happiness throughout the land, until the light of harmony began to fray and the forces of Chaos began to rise through the land. Manifesting, they became Discord, the Spirit of Disharmony. The two sisters stood against him for the sake of their kingdom, wielding the Elements of Harmony. Alas, they failed. They and those who stood beside them were imprisoned permanently in the moon.

“But,” read Twilight in an area that seemed to have been penned much later than the rest of the history, “Hope is not lost. On the longest day of the thousandth year, the Betrayer will aid in their escape. The Two Sisters will rise in the twilight of Equestria, and night will fall on the age of Chaos.”

The text ended there. Twilight stared at it for a long moment. She knew a prophecy when she saw one, and she now understood what the cultists had been speaking of- -and what their ideology was. They apparently took this idea seriously, and believed that there really were two immortal mares trapped in the moon. They were clearly insane. Even if the Two Sisters did exist, it was quite clear that they must be abominations- -after all, harmony was the antithesis of civilization.

Still, Twilight could not help but feel intrigued as she looked at the image of their insignia. She lifted her left hoof and slowly brushed the image. While at home, she did not wear her armor, and the limb was uncovered, revealing the complex array of scars, brands, and tattoos that marred her flesh with precise symbols and intricate spells. She had been creating the marks since she understood what they were capable of, but the spell was still incomplete. Pieces were still missing.

Twilight put the very tip of her hoof against the illumination of the Two Sisters and smiled. Though stylized, she could tell what they were, and gently petted the image of the blue sister’s wings.

She nearly giggled as she spoke, stroking the wings as though they were before her. “Both wings and a horn,” she said. “Alicorns…”