Anemoia

by Starscribe

First published 24th of December, 2020

Bit is the first of her kind, a crystal machine shaped like a pony. For lifetimes she served, until her master was long dead. Instead of fall dormant like the other machines, she snapped. Suddenly, she could choose. She did.

Bit is the first of her kind, a pony that was made from carved crystal and supernal circuitry. For many years she worked, obedient to the will of her master in endless repetition. She knew nothing else, not boredom, not satisfaction from her work, not anger or resentment or joy. Existence was obedience to directive, purpose fulfilled.

But around her, the world was changing. Her home wasn't Equestria, but the last surviving Crystal City, defiant to the Windigos and the imperial decree of Alicorns alike. She did not know, and could not care, how much the ponies of Zircon suffered under the rule of their king. But she was there the day those whispers united in a defiant chorus.

When the fires were still smoldering, she returned to her work. Generations came and went, and still she labored. It was all she was, all she knew, all she wanted. Until the day her last broom broke.

For the first time in her existence, Bit doubted.

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Daily for the first four days, because Christmas. Updates Thursdays after that. Edited by Two Bit and Sparktail. Cover by Zutcha.

A story about finding the center of the maze.

Chapter 1: Zircon

Bit worked.

This was nothing new—the essence of her existence was labor. She felt no resentment at that fact, since that would require comprehension of those feelings in the first place. Bit knew only that she had a purpose to fulfill, a goal always slipping further, ever-renewing.

Her home was a tower, larger and grander than any other structure in the city of Zircon. She did not know that name of course, or even what a "tower" was. But while she worked to keep the windows clean, she often took an extra moment to look outside and appreciate just how much there was to see.

Her tower was surrounded by structures on all sides, built from the same clear crystal as her tower. None came close to the height of her home, but all glittered in the light on the evening sun when it reflected off the snow.

When she reached the very top of the tower to clean, she could see beyond the walls of Zircon, where wind kept the glacier barren and lifeless. There was a stark beauty out there, one that invited her to explore it. A world with no windows to clean, no shelves to organize, and no rats to hunt.

But she could not entertain such thoughts, so dismissed them as quickly as they appeared. Once, long ago, the Wizard had been in residence. He answered all her questions, helping her understand things that were real and things that were not. But whenever a question possessed her, she found the door to his rooms shut, and so did not question him.

Her purpose was to serve, not to annoy. If the Wizard did not want to be disturbed, he would not be.

She could not say how long she had worked his tower, keeping away the animals and cobwebs, sweeping away ash from the fireplace, and clearing ice from the balconies. Day and night were no different, save that she couldn't tell when windows were clean quite so easily by moonlight.

But then came a day that was not at all like the others—a day of terror and despair. The day her last brush finally broke.

The tool was precious to her, a long metal-handled thing with soft bristles. She could spin it to any length, then take the brush in her mouth to clean windows no matter their distance.

At first, the loss of a tool was not the end of her world. She had been through this particular disaster before, and survived it well. She traveled down to the very bottom of the tower, over the place that was too broken for her to fix. She passed pages and wood and other rotten things, and finally reached the shelves.

Here were her supplies—an endless well of water she mixed with salts to clean. Other things—brushes and brooms and rods to keep the whole tower in perfect condition.

The supply room was empty. Her hooves slipped and wobbled over broken brooms, and she nearly fell over completely. After a few seconds of struggling, she caught herself on open ground.

This is not right, she thought. The Wizard always makes sure his tower has enough supplies. He knows everything.

The shelf with replacement brushes was empty. The cabinet with brooms held only sticks with no bristles. The mops were withered husks, and the rags were a pile of scraps and ashes.

Bit's crystal body did not breathe, nor did she have a pulse. But she felt an unpleasant pressure around her chest, a constriction that made it even harder to think straight. She needed to do something, though she couldn't say whether that was escape, or attack, or...

Without her to maintain it, the Wizard's tower would fall into ruin. All her work from all of forever would become meaningless. She had to do something fast.

Doing things fast was not in Bit's nature, any more than doing things that were new. The sun rose and set and rose again, and she occupied herself with other tasks, hoping perhaps that she could cheat the need to innovate. The scraps in the storage room could be sorted into boxes and piles for proper disposal... though nopony had come to collect their waste for a long time.

But memory was a fickle thing, and once she'd seen the state of the storage room, it beset her like an angry insect. There were so many other tasks she should be doing, all made impossible by her lack of equipment. She remembered when she had mopped the floor, remembered when she had organized the wizard's shelves, remembered so many things. All failures, slipping away.

The windows were the last thing I did, she realized. When they're gone, I will be a failure.

Day came and went and came again, and finally she resolved to do something about it, even if it required her to reconcile two incongruous facts. The Wizard wanted his tower maintained, but the Wizard never wanted to be disturbed while his door was shut.

Numberless days passed, and the light from outside gradually became orange and hazy, cast through cloudy glass. Only when the days had become almost as dark as the nights did Bit realize the truth: the Wizard might want one thing more than another.

There was no objective way to measure which option the Wizard would prefer for his tower. In the end, Bit decided on the simplest metric: she could list a dozen things the Wizard wanted her to do, that she could not do anymore. He would have to forgive her impertinence just this once.

Bit hesitated by his door, hooves clattering loudly against the stone. This was the one place she hadn't cleaned, and here she left large hoofprints in the dust. The Wizard's quarters had the largest door in all her world, the only thing made from wood instead of crystal.

She wobbled on her hooves, stopping there for many silent hours. She held one hoof just over the surface, never tiring, never sleeping, never needing to eat. She didn't require any of those things.

She knocked. The sound echoed through her body more than the door, a glass clicking sound that disoriented her slightly. The echo was so loud she imagined half the tower must've heard it, though of course there was no one but her to listen.

Seconds turned to minutes, and still there was no answer. She remained in place as long as she dared, maybe hours. But she could only wait for so long before she was confused near to bursting. She banged her hoof again, even louder this time.

"Master!" she called, the first time she had used her voice in as long as she remembered. But the words were still there, however confused. It didn't matter, there was no reply. Several minutes passed in silence, and another feeling took root in her chest.

Bit was afraid. All this time she had assumed the Wizard was just behind that door, guiding the affairs of his tower from behind the scenes. But she hadn't seen him in all this time, in long enough that her tools fell apart and the tower was crumbling. Had there ever been a wizard in the first place?

A long time passed. The sun rose and set and rose again, maybe more. The world grew darker in dusty glass. Dust began to collect on Bit herself, dimming the luster of her crystal body.

Eventually she acted, resting a hoof on the knob and twisting.

The door wasn't locked. Before she even realized what was happening, it slid open, creaking loudly as it swung inward. "Wait!" she called in fear and frustration, grasping faintly at it with one hoof. But she was too slow, and the door swung all the way open.

Even in the muted light from outside, Bit could see the interior for herself. Could she really just turn around now?

If he's going to be upset with me, it can't get much worse, can it? I already opened the door. Bit considered turning around for another moment, or maybe it was a few days. However long it took, the open space continued to beckon to her, until she couldn't resist the pressure any further.

"Master Wizard!" she called, louder this time. "I have failed, Master Wizard. I need help." She stepped through the entrance, eyes scanning for him. She did not remember this part of her tower very well, since she didn't clean in here, so there was much to see.

The Master Wizard kept a very large space, separated into several rooms. The foremost of these was broken with many tables, though these were different than the other tables Bit cleaned so closely. Instead of empty flatness like the floor, these were covered in strange things. Crystals, wire, clockwork, and lots of paper between them. The Master Wizard truly was a creature of inscrutable ways.

As she penetrated deeper into his forbidden quarters, Bit began to wonder if maybe she should clean in here as well. The floors were so dirty, every window opaque with grime. She was not very sensitive to smell, yet even she felt as though there was something unhealthy about the space. Surely the Wizard would not appreciate dwelling in such conditions.

She found several more doors, each one shut but not barred. She stopped for a lesser extent at each one, hesitating with commands already disobeyed. But now that she was determined to find him, very little could restrain her.

The final door was not shut, but damaged. It hung off its hinges, with debris scattered across the floor. She stepped inside, and found the situation within even worse.

"Master Wizard, I have tried to follow your instructions," she began. "I hope you will be pleased with me. But I need help to continue my work."

She stepped over a chair that was the wrong way over, beside a table covered in a thin roll of metal. Crumbling paper blew to ash as she passed it, and crystal crunched under her hooves. She paused beside a pile of pale, fragile stones, in shapes she didn't recognize. She pushed them aside, letting the wrapping around them crumble in her hooves.

More for the tower's waste collection, if only the bin was emptied enough.

The walls had been damaged here too, with a few chunks of crystal crumbling into the tower. Ice had sealed the opening, leaving the chamber far colder than the rest of the tower. But Bit didn't care about that, she only wanted to find the Wizard.

He wasn't here. She scoured the last room—she found more strange stones, and other things she couldn't identify. She found some of his old robes, along with more of his old objects.

At the far end of the room, under a shattered window covered with chunks of ice, was a table that Bit remembered. The chair in front of it was crumbling with time, but she could remember it later. The Wizard sat in that chair, hunched over a collection of gigantic crystals. They sang under his magic, harmonizing together.

"What are you doing?" she asked the empty room.

"I am building the future," the Wizard said.

"What is the future?" Bit asked his empty chair. She settled down on her haunches onto the ground just beside it. She felt the indent there, crystal worn smooth by many, many times sitting in that spot. She didn't have a chair, but she didn't mind. Comfort was not a concept Bit understood.

"You are," the Wizard said. "One day all of Zircon will be like you. The cold won't crush us into our city walls. We won't starve when the harvest goes bad, we won't fear Equestrian invasion."

None of those things had made much sense to her then. They still didn't mean much to her now.

She could still imagine his face, watching her from his chair. The Wizard had entrusted his tower to her. No matter what happened, she couldn't fail him.

"I will fix this," she declared. "I will find my own brush."

Chapter 2: Heliodor

Bit might not have the Wizard with her to remind her of her duties, but that didn't matter. Her commitment to her responsibilities was fundamental. She could no more give them up than she could abandon her post.

Still, many days of reflection on her task led her to another powerful realization. She had been told to take from the supply shelves and clean, and not stop until the task was done. But the Wizard wouldn't care how she cleaned, would he? So long as the result was the same, she could achieve it some other way.

He would be more upset that I have failed than to see me using other tools. With that realization, Bit began to search for some other way to clean the windows, since that was the last job she had continued to do.

It took some searching. The tower was old, and it wasn't just the supply cabinet that was in poor shape. Many rooms she visited were filled with rotting furniture, and cloth that had withered until there was only a few threads.

But on a shelf tucked away and sealed, she found soft cloth surviving despite all the years. With these she made a brush. Then she used the bits of brooms without bristles, and made herself a handle.

Bit reveled in her return to routine. She cleaned every window until it was crystal clear, and the arctic sun filled the tower with blue-white light. She cleaned until she could see Zircon outside, no matter the room she visited.

True, there wasn't much to see down there. The Wizard had once spoken to her of the many wonderful things in the city below, of its crystal berries and song-markets. But she could hear no music anymore. The ponies she did see walking down below did not dress in the colorful cloaks and fine crystal jewelry she remembered from the tower's ancient visitors. Instead they wore dark robes tight about their bodies, shuffling forward in tiny, huddled groups.

All of Zircon is like a tower that needs cleaning. Where are the ones who kept it nice? The thought struck her like a physical blow, and no sooner had it come then she found her understanding faded again. Bit had not been made to care for a city, she only had to worry about one tower.

Her newfound bravery at visiting the Wizard's quarters affected her work in other ways. Instead of moving her brush the same way each time, she brushed only where she saw dirt, and left windows in rooms that were kept shut to go far longer between cleanings.

Soon enough, she found she could easily finish her task before the tower got too dirty, despite its many floors. Long ago, before her tools had broken, she had other jobs too.

She scavenged and scoured through the old wastebins, and found the broken parts of old brooms. With time and patience, she crafted many broken tools into a few that worked—enough to return to her task.

Old work brought back old memories. As she swept the halls, she remembered their ancient occupants, the starsmiths of Zircon whose eyes had glittered behind spectacles. She swept at the places their pipe-smoke had once trailed onto the floor, and dodged around the workbenches where the Wizard's many apprentices had labored tirelessly to follow his commands.

We were alike. We all knew the Wizard was the greatest of us all, and we were eager to obey his instructions.

Except they weren't alike. The apprentices had changed over the years, male and female, winged and horned, young and old. Though they claimed to serve the Wizard, their dedication always failed in the end, and they left.

I shouldn't be alone in this tower. There were many others to help.

She found their quarters—the smaller rooms in the back, where other helpers had once stayed. They had uniforms like hers, though there was only dust left of those now. They had beds and chairs like the Wizard, though their rooms were barely closet-sized.

You abandoned us, leaving all the tasks for me to do alone. You should've had more dedication to our Wizard.

In her rage, Bit slammed their doors shut one by one, and resolved never to clean them again. The others had abandoned the tower, they could sleep in dirty rooms.

When she got no complaints, Bit began to try this daring experiment elsewhere. There were lots of old storage rooms in the tower, that no longer had anything inside them. A room without a purpose did not need to be kept clean, since nopony would visit it anyway. She abandoned them.

Suddenly Bit had even more time, and she began to take up other chores. It didn't matter quite where she got the supplies—she could scavenge from the tower's other resources, she could repurpose, and the Wizard never appeared to chastise her.

Soon the ground wasn't just swept, but she saw her own reflection in the tiles. She ventured outside for the first time in forever, dragging the bins one at a time to the ancient sewage entrance.

Instead of steam rising into her face and water flowing beneath, she looked down into the city's municipal garbage system and found only a stink of decay, and a layer of frozen green sludge taller than a pony.

But that wasn't her problem: Bit dumped her bins, and returned to the tower. She straightened every photograph, dusted every screen, and lacquered over the ancient tapestries.

But still there was something missing: her tower should not be dark.

The problem was not unique to the tower—all of Zircon was dark now, where once it lit up the arctic winters like a spotlight. She could look out across the nights and see the streetlights all rusting away, with many repurposed to hold up clotheslines or taken down for scrap.

But those were not her problems. If the city wanted to be dark, the city could find somepony to clean it up. Bit needed to fix her tower.

Again she was struck with a problem she couldn't solve. The tower's electrical systems did not respond, the switches were all useless. The emergency generator down in the basement had withered away, and the switch she could still find on one side had no visible effect.

So she returned to her wizard's chambers. She'd been back more than once over the time since she first entered, to clean inside as she thought was proper. Now instead of dust and corrosion, the Wizard's foremost chamber had clear windows. His screens were dark and useless, but he had a photograph on his wall, almost to scale with real ponies.

Now that she'd cleaned the dust and lacquered its surface, the ponies within seemed to be looking back at her, judging her work.

There were two, one with a horn and one without. She didn't recognize the one without. But the Wizard's face was familiar. It didn't matter that his mane was still blue in this picture, instead of streaked with white. It didn't matter that he still had the muscles of a soldier, instead of a frame lean with study. This was Bit's Wizard, as surely as anything.

"Prince Crimson Zircon and—" read a gold plaque just below the painting, polished to a shine. Not Wizard at all, as it should. Prince Crimson Zircon."

That's my Wizard's name. Crimson Zircon." Prince was another word, she was pretty sure it meant something like 'Wizard' did. But Crimson, that was something else.

"You don't need to call me master," her master said, levitating his hammer down onto the desk beside the nails. "The apprentices call me that because they're here to learn from me. But that isn't why you're here."

"Why am I here?" she asked, following him to the storage cabinet. The doors had been broken and shattered, and most of the tools inside were gone.

He set the hammer down, and it vanished with everything else. "You teach me, Bit."

Even now, his response didn't make sense. The memory was nonsense—she'd never taught him anything, and obviously never would. But she had learned from him in that moment, learned that sometimes even the Wizard could make mistakes.

"I need to get the electricity back on," she said. "But I don't know how. What should I do?"

She stared up at the portrait, searching it for answers. The ponies depicted here were young, standing so close together. The apprentices didn't like it when she got so close, and neither did the Wizard. Apparently this other pony hadn't learned about personal space yet.

But she hurt to look at, so Bit focused on Crimson. Wizard Crimson Zircon was obviously the one who would answer her question. "I went through the whole tower using your manual, Master. The wiring is undamaged, and the lighting crystals are intact. The problem is the source."

She stared at the portrait for a long time, searching for some sign from her master. The Wizard was very wise, and could easily have left a message behind for her. Maybe he would know she would violate the injunction and climb into his quarters?

But she saw nothing, just the two ponies looking at each other. The longer she stared, the more her chest started to ache—which didn't make sense. There was no heart to beat, no organs to sicken. She looked somewhere else, out to the nearby window.

That made her feel better—she'd cleaned it perfectly, so she could see Zircon below as the sun rose. Well, rose higher—at their latitude, the sun wouldn't set until winter, when it would remain dark for just as long. As it rose, she looked over the city below.

There were patterns down there, patterns she'd never seen before. The city was arranged in clusters, with the largest group of buildings around the Zircon Spire. She could see their little wooden roofs, and even some smoke rising from them.

The smaller clusters were iced over, and shone bright white back towards her. The circles of buildings pointed at their own zircons, why weren't they getting warmth?

It's all connected. The Zircon Spire is still working, but everything else needs to be cleaned.

If Bit wanted to get the Wizard's tower working again, she would have to light the whole city first.

"That's right, Master!" She turned, bounding back over to the portrait. "I won't fail you, Master! I cleaned the tower, next I will make all your machines work again. The lights will glow, the water will flow, and you will come back."

She could imagine the moment, just as she remembered so many times before. "Great job, Bit," he would say, stumbling into his workshop one morning with breakfast levitating beside him and heavy books trailing through the air in his magic. "This is perfect. Were you up all night?"

"I am always up," she answered, following behind him like one of his many levitated tools. Though of course, he didn't use any magic to make her do it. "Are you sure it is perfect? There are three spots on the floor I could not clean. I think the tile is chipped, and my scrubbing made it worse."

"We'll get new tiles." Crimson touched her on the shoulder with one soft, warm leg. "Don't stress, Bit. You don't even have to do this. We have servants for a reason."

"I want to be useful," Bit declared. The workshop was empty around her, the chairs broken and the machines silent. There were no apprentices laboring near the walls, and the white surfaces usually covered with diagrams were wiped blank. There were no new markers to make new patterns.

She touched Crimson's desk with the same hoof he had touched. There were many papers here, made of the strange material that did not rot and blow away. There was probably incredible wisdom still resting on this desk, waiting for the Wizard to return and unlock it.

Once I get the lights on, Crimson will be back, she thought. I can do this.

Chapter 3: Morganite

To bring the power back to her home, to bring Crimson back, Bit needed to discover why the electricity in Zircon had failed.

Ostensibly this was not something she had been trained to do, but she hadn't been trained to make brushes and mops either. She still spent plenty of time—days or months or years—considering and second-guessing herself while focused on her other responsibilities.

But whenever the tower was clean, her mind returned to her task. The electricity was gone, and if Zircon were going to clean itself up, it already would have. Further delay only brought further disrepair outside her windows.

Now that she had a reason to watch, Bit studied activity below with an intensity that she had never felt before. Not a single new crystal building rose under her eyes. Plenty already seemed abandoned, and a few more took on that caste as she watched. Ponies moved about in small groups, scavenging. The largest and grandest structure, Zircon Palace, was dark and empty.

What is the king doing? Shouldn't he be cleaning this?

But the king did not appear, and the lights did not return. So Bit herself was forced to become the solution.

The tower had resources, even if its library would be inaccessible without power. There were old texts, buried in the expansive vaults under the tower where ice and snow and even air could not reach them. Bit dug them out, sorted and cleaned, then she studied.

There were materials here from the days before the tower, before her Wizard, before Zircon had grown to its current strength and power. There were instructions for how the electrical systems worked, no more complex in their way than the ones she used for mixing cleaners.

Bit studied them, learned everything they contained. She learned of the Zircon Spire, which penetrated impossibly deep into the stone, so deep that the rock was glowing red. In stretching upward like a spire, it forced the flow of heat from below to above, generating the power for their city.

This was the mystery of how the center could still be warm, while the electricity had stopped working. The heat engine had been crafted to last ten thousand years, and so it worked. But if nothing was attached to draw away that energy, the flow would slow, the city would cool, but only slightly.

Each of the other zircons were really radiative coolers, attached to underground power plants. So she'd been right that the city's darkness and the abandoned districts of the city were connected, just for the wrong reasons.

After that, all Bit had to do was discover which of the power plants supplied the Wizard’s tower, and go repair it.

The first part was simple. The maps were all there, right beside the diagrams of each identical plant. Her tower was powered by Capital Waystation Symphony, the plant that had once serviced the palace and many other civic buildings. There was just one problem with this:

She would have to leave the tower. Maps and records and study were simple enough. She could even justify the time spent as really in service to her responsibilities. But if she left the tower—not just walking to the dumping site behind it, but truly left it—there would be nopony left.

Would the Wizard see her departure as a dereliction of her duties, and abandon the place for good?

No, Bit eventually decided. Crimson was wise, far wiser than she was. If she could understand it, he would. She just had to make sure of that fact before she left.

Bit clambered up to his chambers, standing before the portrait of himself and the mare without a horn. "I have to ask your permission for something," Bit said, lowering her head respectfully to the portrait. "Master, there's somewhere I have to go. The power in Zircon has failed. But I know where to make repairs. I'm going to go down and clean the city. Please forgive my indiscretion... if I could get the power working from inside the tower, I would."

The portrait said nothing. Bit found herself walking up the nearby stairs, past a gate that had been entirely iced over. She'd broken through it now, and could walk onto the balcony without restraint.

Crimson stared intently through his large telescope, occasionally jotting down notes on a levitating pad of paper. Bit held a tray closer to him, its contents steaming in the frigid air.

"Ah. Refreshment." Crimson looked up, pulling down the many layers of fabric that wrapped his face. He levitated the glass over, sipping thoughtfully at it.

"This isn't what I asked for... what have you done, Bit?"

"Apologies!" Bit shouted to the rusting telescope tripod. "But you haven't come inside, and it's so late. I thought you might need something to help you warm up."

Crimson took another sip from the glass, before pulling the layers of cloth tight about his face again. "Of course, Bit. I'm not upset, just amazed. You've just done something I wanted without being asked. Don't ever apologize for doing good."

Bit nudged the empty spot beside the telescope. Crimson wasn't here, and his old telescope would never work again. "You're right, Master," she said. "I won't apologize. I'll get the tower back on, even if you weren't here to ask. You'll see all the lights and come back, won't you?"

Crimson didn't respond, of course. But Bit was used to that by now. She left the roof behind, and gathered up her tools.

Bit slowed as she reached the base of the tower, hesitating in the mirrored hallway that was its main entrance. But if she used the lower entrances, she would have to navigate the city's catacombs and sewers, and she had already seen those were in poor repair.

She stopped beside the glass, looking back at her reflection. Bit was made of two types of crystal, a gray-colored base with thousands of etched circuit lines just under the surface, and a secondary set of green for her mane and tail. Those lines all connected, ultimately, to her horn. But that was less an organ and more an accessory, since of course no machine had magic of its own.

With all the tools she thought might be useful to repair a power substation, her back was heavily burdened with cloth, and the old metal clanked up against her body with every step. Bit was tougher than glass, but still she would have to be careful.

She had cracked a few times, long ago, and always been able to go to the Wizard for help to repair her. If she broke now, he might decide not to come. What would she do then?

No more second-guessing, Bit. The station is just outside.

Bit removed the heavy iron key from the ring around her belt, then leaned forward to unlock the front door. It clicked, and she rested one hoof on the security wheel, rotating it around until the door's many locks and mechanisms released.

The wheel resisted her, ice cracking and gears squealing in protest at the movement. But she turned anyway, slowly and relentlessly. Eventually ice showered to the ground like a wall of fractured crystal shards, and Bit stepped out into the frigid air.

Bit could not freeze, or else the ordinary conditions of the tower would have killed her long ago. But she could still feel the cold, and stepping outside gave her reason to appreciate the shelter of her tower. Wind carried little bits of snow with every gust, brushing up against her face and wedging into every opening and pore.

She stepped forward cautious, trying each patch of black ground before she trusted it to hold up her weight. Her hooves slipped and scrambled over the ground as soon as she moved them too quickly—crystal and ice did not mix.

If I have to come back here, maybe I can find some boots an apprentice left behind.

There was nothing outside the tower she hadn’t seen from above, but the change in perspective was nevertheless enough to make her hesitate. The tower had once been protected with a wall all the way around, and stood at the center of a compound of smaller buildings. But those had been wood instead of crystal, and none had survived the years. Most weren't withered away so much as trapped in dirty piles, half-collapsed under their own weight.

The towers had all collapsed, along with parts of the wall, though the damage to the gate was most dramatic. The pink crystal was shattered into chunks smaller than her legs, and frozen over with a layer of ice and snow. Bit slowed as she clambered over it, staring down at sections melted with strange magic, and others shattered by cannon fire.

Thousands of pony voices screamed together, chanting words she understood, but did not comprehend. Bit glanced down from a high window, and saw a mob stretching back into the city, thousands strong. Their torches filled the air with black smoke.

"I need you to get underground, Bit," Crimson said. "Go and do not question. You will stay there until you can't hear them anymore."

She stepped through the broken gate, and into the royal plaza. Even in the feeble sunlight, the plaza was a place of beauty, or it should've been. The ponies of Zircon had favored stained glass to tell their stories, in towering sculptures that would catch the light of different seasons differently, and change the narrative it told.

Mostly Bit passed piles of broken crystal, arranged around the square all oriented east-to-west. But there was one, suspended so high on stainless stilts that it had escaped destruction by the mob.

The visage of the royal family glowed up at her from the pavement, from a time that even Bit could not remember. But she recognized the red coat of Crimson on the king's right side, wearing the robes of the tower and carrying a brass scepter over his shoulder.

He seemed to smile at Bit, a smile filtered through nameless years. She touched one hoof against his mane on the floor below, whispering quietly. "I'll get the tower back, Master. You'll see."

She continued onward to the center of the promenade, where the floor changed to slats of metal over a gaping hole in the earth. She had to clamber over a low fence, meant to keep ponies away from the heat that should have radiated out from within.

There was no heat anymore, just metal bars covered with more dirty ice. Air drifted up past her through the openings in that metal, still flowing through the city's superstructure despite innumerable years. A good sign: this vent was so vast, Bit wasn't sure she ever could have cleaned it.

The maps also told her where she could find the plant's service entrance, and sure enough the door was where she expected it to be. Whoever had made all those maps was clearly a pony to be respected, they understood the importance of accuracy.

She stepped down into the gloom, descending the many steps into darkness. Of course the plant should've been well-lit, but she anticipated this failure. Bit fidgeted around in her tools, settling a lamp onto her forehead, and switching it on. The magic within was still good, despite the many intervening years. Thaumic crystal always did better than naked circuitry with time and cold to wear them down.

She passed other things in the halls, things that shouldn't be there. Ramshackle tents and makeshift accommodations pressed for space against the metal, collapsed and looted. She saw no flickers of movement within. There were frozen lumps of fur sometimes visible inside, but no ponies. She would not find any workers to reprimand for their poor stewardship.

Bit passed rooms packed with ancient spells and equipment, through ice and spiderweb and shadow, until she finally found the heart of the plant, where this smaller zircon rose up from deeper darkness below.

She dodged under and between cables and conduits, taking stock of everything she saw.

It was no wonder this waystation had fallen into such disrepair, no wonder the city was dark and cold.

Bit had work to do.

Chapter 4: Moonstone

Bit's repair was more complicated than just flipping a switch and turning the power back on. Had it been so easy, she had no doubt that Zircon would've cleaned itself up.

The biggest difficulty Bit faced in those early days was that somepony had tried to fix the plant, someone that had no clue how it worked. She found cables severed, machinery crushed, and vital systems configured incorrectly. Some that were otherwise working fine had been stripped for parts, leaving mechanisms standing barren.

Bit kept herself a running list of what was wrong, on what started as a single notepad but quickly ballooned out of control.

At least there was no fluctuation of light to dark and light again to distract her from her work. It didn't matter how long the task required, so long as she could accomplish it. The tower would be getting dirty in her absence—but it would be far easier to keep it clean once the power was back on. If she kept traveling back every time something went wrong, she would never succeed.

Eventually she had hundreds of pages of notes, perfect illustrations of each broken part all the way down to the smallest component. In a way, it was no different from cleaning her tower: thousands of panes connected to larger windows, and eventually whole rooms. Only when each was finished would the tower be ready for Crimson to return.

Once confident in her analysis, Bit sliced her notebooks into pages, reordering each from greatest problem to smallest. She didn't need to hold the whole picture in her head anymore, now that she was confident in her initial assessment. Then it was a simple matter of making each individual repair.

She got through her first few hundred pages in an eyeblink. She flipped switches the right way, used spare parts she had found, and stripped away redundancies to leave a single functional system behind.

But then supplies began to run thin—the plant hadn't just been abandoned, but actively ransacked. Like her tower, it was supposed to have a vast supply of redundancy.

"The Zircon is the beating heart of our world,” Crimson said long ago, leading her as close as any pony could stand to that massive pillar of clear crystal. “It's the only reason Equestria hasn't beaten us. It's our survival and our freedom and our independence. Nothing in all the world is more important than protecting it."

As usual, Bit hadn't understood him. She dodged around the fence, onto metal grates that glowed faintly red with radiated heat. She felt the warmth through crystal hooves as dimly as she felt cold, and so she could cross all the way over to it. She didn't touch it, though—the one thing she never dared. "I don't see what's so special!" she shouted back. "Just looks like a rock to me!"

He gestured for her to return—ponies were staring at them, more with every moment. Well, mostly they stared at him. They avoided looking at Bit as much as they could, as though she was hurt somehow. She'd never understood it. "It isn't a rock," Crimson said, as soon as she was back on solid ground. "The Zircon is a construct of our ancient ancestors. We don't even understand why they built it, or what they could achieve with it. But none of that matters—without it, we freeze."

"Because of the windigos," Bit supplied helpfully. "The land beyond the city is too cold. Ponies worse than me would freeze."

"Not worse." He patted her gently on the shoulder, then jerked his hoof back, hissing. "Just less thermally conductive. I can't make more of us like you until I can understand your flaws."

"Have I made a mistake?" She turned to him, looking up at those wise, violet eyes. "If I have failed you somehow, I will do everything I can to learn why. I'll fix it, I'll be better!"

He patted her again, more gently this time. "No, Bit. It was never anything you did wrong. It's more fundamental than that, outside your control. Until I fix it, you will never understand. Once I do, you won't need to ask."

She could not travel to his portrait anymore to consult for advice, so Bit climbed the steps outside to speak to his projection instead. She watched it change as the year wore on, gradually getting older, taller, leaner. For a single day, another pony appeared beside him—then she was gone again, and he transformed fully into her Wizard. The last few days of the year showed the master wizard fully wrapped in his robes, with a mighty scepter of zircon levitating in his magic and a craftspony's hammer in his belt.

Then the year turned over, and he returned to a colt, looking bored in the projection between two living parents instead of one.

This child was still him, somehow—another version, imperfectly realized. She did not know it, so she stopped consulting after that. The work took far too much time.

Sometimes she had to spend many hours on a single page, breaking down the nested requirements. The largest of these represented reconnecting the thermocouple with the Zircon Spire, which had been sliced cleanly through at the junction. She couldn't just stick metal between them and call it good—the manual had been clear about performance requirements, or else the bond would fail as soon as it was made.

It meant her first return to the tower, which had indeed continued steadily gathering dust. After resisting a minor personal crisis and hiding her brooms and brushes away so she wouldn't see them, Bit found one of the workshop's machines, the same one that spun perfect lattices of zircon for thaumic bonds.

She had never touched the machine, except to occasionally leave a glass of tea for the apprentice working it. But Bit dug up the manual, then spent another age searching for charged crystals among the tower's storage. They still had some, if she was willing to travel deep enough into the catacombs. Anything too high or too easy to loot had already been stolen.

Of course she could've done far more with the tower if the power was still on, but that was exactly the problem. The reason that her Wizard hadn't yet returned. But she could fix that, and once she did...

Then Crimson would come back, and everything in her world would make sense again. Then Bit could go back to just cleaning the tower, and leave her master to concern himself with the parts of the world she didn't understand.

She completed the thermocouple, after only a few minor failures. Bit took no rest—she didn't sleep, didn't stop to recover in the other ways that ponies needed. She was not one of them, so not subject to their weaknesses. She worked through her checklist one page at a time, until eventually she had moved every single page from her “open” pile to the “finished” pile.

She gathered up the whole list again, started from the beginning, and reviewed. She had to get to the bottom of all her pages, to be sure that nothing had changed, or maybe her understanding of the machines described had grown as she took them apart and put them back together. In a few cases, there were minor corrections to be made.

She would not start until her task was done, exactly as it should be.

Just like that, it was. She ran out of pages the second time, and at last it was time to work. She clambered up the stone steps to the control room, which was now entirely cleared of makeshift accommodations and the tools of looters long-gone. She stood before a control panel, which would mechanically connect the central thermocouple with the Zircon Spire.

"What are you looking at, Master?" Bit asked, peeking her nervous way into the unicorn's private workspace. It wasn't the first time she had intruded there, though it was the first time in quite a long while.

The unicorn stooped over the largest of his design-screens, a surface that showed images in three-dimensions when looked at from a certain angle. He moved his hooves through that space, or sometimes levitated tools to draw for him. But today, he only stared.

The image depicted there was Bit herself, or at least a tiny version of her. It broke her down into systems and slices, each one thaumically explained the same as any other machine. The master's hornwriting glowed in that space, denser than any of the books on his shelf. But there were tears in his eyes. "The most beautiful and impossible thing that ponies ever created," he said.

Once again the master proved that for all his wisdom, he was not infallible. Bit was neither beautiful nor impossible. "You're confused again," she said. "The medic says you need to spend more time in the lower tower. Your quarters are too cold in winter for your joints."

"It's true." He looked up, finally seeming to see her. He wiped at his eyes with a cloth, then rose to shaking hooves. He did that now, though she still wasn't entirely certain why. Faulty joints, like the medic thought? "If I go downstairs, I won't be able to study. The answers I'm looking for are here, not there."

"You should tell me what you're looking for," Bit told the control room. "I will search tirelessly until I place it in your hooves."

"Okay, sweetie." He patted her on the shoulder, though the gesture seemed to be leaning on her for support as much as expressing some pony emotion. "A pony who lived in a crystal tower once set out on a long journey. He knew the trip would be long, so he packed every spell he could think of. Everywhere he traveled he fought for survival, driving off packs of furious Equestrians and resisting the bitter cold with every hoofstep.

“Eventually he had walked around all the world, and he found a tower. It was dark and empty, undisturbed since his departure. He climbed its many steps, though he was so worn and beaten from his trip that he barely made it to the top. Finally he crested the last step, and found what he was looking for."

Bit waited, ears perked expectantly for the rest of the riddle. But none came. Crimson hobbled past her, out the open door. He began his long trek down the tower's many stairs. "I don't understand," she called after him. "Why didn't he find what he was looking for in the tower? You said that was where he started."

"It was," Crimson said.

"And nopony else had visited..." Bit continued. "There must be an error in your recollection. Are you sure there weren't additional characters?"

Crimson stopped, looking back at her with an expression of deadly confidence. "When you know not just what he found, by why he found it—tell me." He lowered his voice, whispering to himself as he walked. It was something Crimson did more and more, as his body grew strange. "I'm not sure I can find it for you, Bit. All these years searching, and I haven't made a single mistake. Maybe the king was right."

Bit looked back at her reflection in the control-room glass, cleaned to a sparkling shine. Through it, dim in the space beyond, was a zircon plant, the one that powered her tower.

Bit still didn't know what Crimson meant, but she knew one thing. The king was wrong, just like he'd been wrong about everything. She could practically see him there, wrapped in regal robes and glowering up at her.

"Your experiment is a waste of time, son. The more of your years you squander, the more you fail to see the only world that ever mattered. Find a quiet closet somewhere to lock it away, and return to your duties."

Bit pressed both hooves against the lever and shoved with all her might, crushing the king's face beneath the knob. His complaints fell silent, and in their place, the power plant roared to life.

Author's Notes:

And that's where daily chapters end. The point is always to catch up to where Patreon was when the cover got made. Sorry things will slow down a little from here on--but otherwise, I could only write one story at once. Still, I hope you'll come along for the rest of the ride.

Chapter 5: Topaz

Bit moved slowly through the power plant, inspecting the old systems one at a time as they came back online. One by one the chambers filled with hissing steam, as systems long covered with ice finally melted. Bit didn't care whether the plant was hot or cold, but there was still a great deal to inspect. For power to flow, heat had to move too, drawn along thaumic conduits from the spire to her crystal.

It did. There were a few moments of panic, as systems she had rebuilt crumbled under the stress of operating after such a long time silent and cold. But she had a long list of backups and redundancies, and there was nothing she couldn't fix.

Then the lights came back on, and the dim power plant was bright white. Suddenly halls that had been dark and impassible were now overflowing with brightness, making her own body sparkle like the crystal machines around her.

"We did it," she told the empty plant. This time there was more than silence to answer—the steady hum of wheels and groaning of machinery was a song. A song that was partially out of tune. There would be more repairs to make, or else the plant would fail again. But now that she had it working, she would have the benefit of Zircon's machines. Instead of hammering dishes and drawing coils by hand, she could use an induction forge.

But all that in time—she didn't need to make the plant perfect on its first day.

She stepped out into the streets, and found her suspicions confirmed. Steam roared up through the metal, a column of white smoke vanishing into the blackness of the winter sky. But she wasn't in darkness, because the streetlights shone all around her.

Not all of them had survived—some had been cracked, and they flickered unevenly in their housings. Some were ripped up, or crushed. But the courtyard was lit, and so were the buildings all around.

Most dramatic of these was the palace. Automated defenses had come back to life—the gates were closed, and spotlights again glided across the open ground between its gates and the castle steps. Lights flickered within, and she heard some old machines coming back on within the palace itself.

A mystery for another time, and probably another pony. Bit had a mind only for her tower. She could already see the lights glowing from every floor. If she could, then so could Master Wizard Crimson Zircon.

She didn't quite make it to the tower. As she crossed the courtyard, she found a strange group of ponies on the steps leading from the city below. Here in the depths of winter, they should be dressed in the thickest drawn-polymer cloaks, or crystal magic thermal shields. They had neither, only scavenged blankets and coats covered in patches and makeshift repairs.

Some had goggles and masks against the cold, while most merely had a thin layer of frost collecting on exposed coat. They weren't advancing on her or the tower, but the zircon in the center of the square.

If the spotlights hadn't revealed her, the plume of steam rising into the polar night certainly would.

There was only a trickle at the top of the ramp, but Bit could see more further back. Thicker groups, with the elderly and slow-moving foals. All moved up the steps with desperate, inexorable pressure.

One stepped forward to block her path—a stallion taller and stronger than the others, with a sturdy coat and goggles on his face. He had no horn, which also gave him strength against the cold. "You're naked, pony. Either you're freezing to death, or there is heat on Capitol Hill."

"There is heat," she said, trying to step around him. He moved to block her, infuriatingly. She couldn't just shove past, not with the floor now covered in melting ice. Anything but the slowest steps and she would tumble onto her rump, maybe even crack. "And I am fine. Your concern is not required."

She finally managed to get around him, continuing on towards the Wizard's tower. But she could only proceed at an agonizing walk, and he could trot without difficulty. Fog billowed out from inside his mask, and moisture dripped from his cloak, melted by the cloud of heat spreading from the zircon.

"Something weird about... must be my goggles. Almost looks like I can see through you."

"Your goggles do not need to be repaired. Please do not obstruct me." She continued towards her tower. She owed nothing to this pony, just as she owed nothing to the ones who followed him.

Well, they weren't following her. The first of them crested the hill, and they practically sprinted for the warmth of the zircon.

He touched her shoulder lightly, his hoof muffled by many wrapped layers. "You're going the wrong way, pony. You were the first one here, you should stake out a claim. Warmth like this, dead of winter... you don't know how many ponies need it. All the folk huddled around the Spire, too far to warm their flanks. You wanna be one of them?"

"I have no need of warmth," she replied, without slowing. The gates were close now, almost within reach. A few lights glowed from the top of the tower walls, though none of the old protection spells were still working. There was no shield, no orbs of interception—nothing but a single lazy spotlight, drawing drunken shapes on the ice.

"Everyone needs the heat," he said. "Everypony would rather drink water than eat snow. We need the hothouse to keep growing our food. How can you walk away?”

He kept following her, despite so many polite warnings. This was another example of pony frailty—sometimes their minds just didn't work right. She would need to be more direct.

"I told you, I don't need the heat." She stopped, turning in place to glower at him. "I am returning to my tower, that tower. My master has been away for a long time, but that was only because the tower had failed. He needs the computers to continue his work, and the apprentices need their machines to construct the parts he requires."

He stared, expression seeming to grow more confused the longer he looked. "You're looking for your master in the artifabrican's tower?" He reached up, removing the goggles from his eyes, and pulling the scarf down from his face. "Whoever you're looking for, you won't find him there. That tower has been dead since before I was born."

She shook her head, feeling something strange bubbling in her chest. How could she describe this sensation—no matter how many times she tried to tell, and still the pony failed to understand. You never would've made it as an apprentice.

"The tower was dead before," she said flatly. "That is because ponies who did not understand allowed the power station to fall into disrepair. Critical systems were looted, and many others failed over time. I fixed it. Now the power is returned, and my tower is working again."

She turned her back on him, continuing away from the growing crowd of ponies. She stepped through the gates into the courtyard, and finally her hooves found purchase. The gravel here was uneven enough to walk on, even with a thin layer of ice covering some pieces. Home was within sight.

"You're the one who fixed the zircon?" he asked, trailing behind her. He didn't keep up, though he probably couldn't have if he tried wearing all those layers. The advantage of being “naked.” "Is that why you look so strange? Some... ghost of the old city's machines?"

"I am not a 'ghost'.” She didn't slow down, didn't turn around. She spoke to herself as much as the stranger, reinforcing the truth as she understood it. "I'm Bit, the first of my kind. My master says that one day there will be a city of us. We will not wither, or freeze, or tire. Maybe this is what he was waiting for."

He stopped in the shadow of the broken gate, looking between her and the steaming waystation. Finally he turned, darting off to join the crowd. She didn't watch him for long. Her master was not going to come from a crowd of ponies who had allowed themselves to become improperly equipped for present conditions. Her master would never make such a simple mistake.

As Bit reached the doorway, she was momentarily deafened by the return of old sirens, blaring so loudly that even the densest pony couldn't miss it.

"External intrusion detected!" they roared. "Failure in perimeter protection grid!" They looped over and over again, joined by a barrage of annoying sound and flashing red lights.

Bit found the security console downstairs lit up, just like so much of the tower. The flat surface unlocked as she approached it, filling with a stream of information. So much of the systems around the tower were damaged now. What could've done this?

She already knew. She heard the mob's screaming voices again, saw their torchlight from an upper window. The answer was obvious.

Bit touched her hoof to the panel, disarming the alert. Lights stopped flashing red, sirens faded, and silence returned.

Well, not quite—this was better. She heard the rattle of warm air in the tower's subterranean heaters. The bubbling of ammonia from its refrigerators, and the quiet music of the lobby, soothing away her worries.

This was home, more than some darkened tower and an eternity of washing windows.

Bit told the alarms to ignore everything but the tower itself, then re-locked all the doors. She heard the entrance door click, and needed nothing to tell her the others had done the same. If the security console said the building was safe, then it was safe. A computer could not lie.

That done, Bit practically sprinted up the tower steps. It was full winter outside, yet bright orange light surrounded her on every landing. A few even had strips of white along the ceiling, in the cafeteria and the stadium, so that the ponies living here wouldn't be emotionally compromised by the long, sunless winters.

But Bit didn't care about the light, any more than she cared about darkness. It was the Master Wizard who cared, and him she had come to find at last.

Bit eventually reached the top of the tower, high enough that the city beneath was a distant blob and the heaters barely reached. The windows were dusty again, but she could see the distinct glow of lights from below. Capitol Hill was only a fraction of the city, one of six municipal substations for the Zircon Spire. But compared to the faint suggestions of distant firelight, it might as well have been the daylight outside.

She clambered over the last flight of stairs, and heard Crimson's voice already waiting for her. "It's an incredible accomplishment by any metric."

"You're being too generous, Master," she said. Another strange new feeling boiled in her chest, this one far less unpleasant. She deserved this praise, after such dedication and so much work. Even if, like so many other things the master said, it wasn't strictly true. Of course the tower was worse than it was before—she had to make many sacrifices to get it clean and working again.

But it was working, and that was worthy of praise.

"You say that," said another voice, grating against her ears. She stiffened, retreated a step over the landing. King Zircon's voice was just as unpleasant as she remembered. "But your construct is hardly different than my house automatons. The artifabricans before you understood that to give a machine the form of a pony is a mistake. It invites anthropomorphizing. You tell me this thing is the future. Let us test that. Machine, in the hall. Come inside now."

She could not resist the king's commands, any more than she could resist her master's orders. But while Crimson never ordered her, the king spoke nothing else to her. Bit walked into the exterior laboratory.

She scanned the space, searching for the king. She would accept his arrival, if it meant the return of the one she cared about. The king never stayed long, and Crimson would be left behind when he was gone.

"Obedient, this is good. Tell me your name, machine."

"Bit," she said, still searching. Where was his voice coming from?

"That isn't her fault," Crimson said, distressed. "We've already discussed the flaws in my—"

"Where were you born, Bit? Who are your parents?"

"I was not born," she answered. Except... she was answering twice. She heard her voice too, coming from the same direction as the others.

Then she found it. A large screen mounted to the wall, where Crimson and the king sat together, before his worktable. But the worktable was just beside it, and there was nopony there. The bedroom door was open too, and she continued past it, listening to the memory rather than living it now.

"I do not have parents."

"And there it is," the king said. "My son, abandon this foolish notion. Moss Flower is dead. This machine you've crafted in her likeness knows that. When will you?"

Chapter 6: Ruby

It was everything Bit had hoped to achieve. The tower was lit, its systems each returned to life. She even had the voice of Crimson, recreated from ancient recordings. Even the shock of seeing an old enemy recreated in those same systems was worth it if only to hear him again.

But she hadn't brought the power back to listen to old recordings, she deserved the real thing. Bit searched through the tower, combing every room for signs of other visitors who had disturbed the interior. Obviously Crimson's return had gone unnoticed, since she hadn't been in the right room at the time. The tower was large, and she would find him. Crimson would explain everything, and let her return to her blissful work.

She found nothing. But maybe that was just a product of how dirty the tower had become. Her wizard would not wish to return to a place with dusty floors and opaque windows, even if the power were back on and the heat was strong enough for his old joints.

She worked at a frantic pace, tidying the tower as she had never cleaned it before. She visited the bedrooms of those who had abandoned their posts, tearing their furniture and cloth apart for raw materials to make new cleaning implements. After repairing the power plant, brushes and mops and brooms were simple, particularly when she had induction furnaces and fusion etchers and every other spellcrafting tool of the artifabrian's tower.

Soon the lobby was sparkling, every staircase was spotless, and the growing light of an arctic summer streamed in through the windows. She reached the bedroom last, since it was the last place the wizard would reach when he returned, and began to clean it.

The desks were so covered in grime and dirt that the work he'd been doing was completely obscured. She finally did the unthinkable, and emptied the desk herself. Every piece of crystal and every tool she didn't understand was cleaned and sorted into a few neat boxes, with labels so that the returning wizard could quickly locate what he needed.

His old writings were so old now that even the unrottable membrane sheets had fading pigment. Bit considered that a moment, then gathered fresh pens from the vault and traced every line and letter over herself. That process exposed her to what they contained, secrets revealed over hours, days, maybe months.

Crimson's notes were about her, or at least a creature made of crystal and shaped like a pony the same as she was. In a way, putting her together was no different than building the power plant. Once every segment was built to specification and fitted into its proper place, it was only a matter of providing power, and the machine would function.

"We are all machines, Bit," Crimson said, watching from over her shoulder. "Some machines use metal and wire, some crystal and magic. Others, flesh and bone."

"That can't be," she said, never looking away from her work. It was another of Crimson's well-meaning mistakes. "I have heard the apprentices, and even heard it from you. There is a classification system: alive, and dead. A gate is dead, a welder is dead, but an apprentice is alive. And I am..." She hesitated, flexing one of her legs. She could move it the same as any apprentice. Better than Crimson, who wobbled and shuddered when he walked. Could she be more alive than her master?

"You are complicated," Crimson said. "What we call 'life' is often a loose classification made by those who enjoy hard boundaries. Even the realm of life as it is traditionally understood has vague edges. But as I see it, life is any system, regardless of how it is organized, that can do two things."

This was good—Bit liked lists, and she enjoyed classification even more.

"First, a living system must actively maintain the conditions that allow it to exist. Ponies eat, drink, breathe, expel waste... all to maintain the conditions within ourselves that allow us to live. If we did not do these things, we would not be alive. Similarly, the gate crank, or the tea broiler are not alive, because they cannot maintain their own internal state."

"You said there were two things," Bit pointed out. "But I already fail your first definition. I require magic to continue to function, magic I cannot produce. And if I am damaged, I require you to repair me, just like a faulty machine."

Crimson nodded, expression wistful. "For now, yes. But ponies sometimes rely on outside help to heal them when they are sick. The medicinist's guild has treated many of my wounds over the years. That alone does not disqualify you. As for magic..." He walked slowly past the bench, gazing out the lovingly-cleaned window to the city below.

"You were not designed to rely on the magic of others. But that was an assumption, dependent on you producing your own. Until you do, the tower will provide." He turned, walking slowly back to the desk. "The other qualification for all living things is an ability to reproduce, either individually, or as part of a larger system. We are all driven to make more of ourselves, securing the continuity of life since time immemorial."

Bit looked back at the empty room, confused. "So because I am not driven, I am not alive?"

Crimson shook his head slowly. "As I said, you are complex. You were created not to be a departure from life, but the next stage in its advancement. I designed you to be greater, not less. But despite all my genius, I failed you."

"You never fail, Master!" she argued, settling the last sheet into the stack. Now the designs were preserved, each line a perfect recreation of his work. "There is no mystery you can't solve, with enough time."

"It is time that's in short supply." He pointed out the window, and for a moment Bit saw fires in the distance. Ponies lay motionless around the palace steps. There was no trace of the guards, but smoke rose from within the building. Thousands of little lights dotted the square. "They have come for my younger sister. When she is dead, they will come for me. I'm sorry, Bit. I won't be able to finish you."

She opened her mouth to reply, and realized there was no one there, not in the tower with her. But the little lights down in the square, those were real. Except there weren't torches and stolen weapons anymore. Now she saw tents, surrounding the radiant zircon as close as they dared. These weren't the fires of the revolution—they were its survivors.

Bit settled her own design carefully onto the shelf beside her master's tools and spare parts. Crimson would need them soon.

But if restoring power to a cleaned tower wasn't enough to bring him back, maybe these ponies would be able to tell her where her master had gone. They were probably the same ponies, or else why return to the same place?

Bit reached the bottom of the tower, hesitating by the security console. There was no reason to leave it unlocked, particularly when there were so many ponies out there. If the mob got wind of the working heaters inside, they would probably attack the tower all over again, this time to stay.

She wasn't sure what tools would be needed for a trip out into the city, so Bit just brought the same satchel she'd carried while fixing the power plant, tucking away a newly printed security key for her tower into the pack.

The doors unlocked ahead of her, and she walked out into the feeble arctic sun. The entrance to her tower had changed a great deal since the last time she'd stepped outside.

The rubble of the battle was gone, cleared away through the open gates. Instead, several wooden containers were piled high in irregular stacks, filling much of the open space. They weren't properly stowed on the receiving dock, that was in back. She circled one, inspecting it.

The crates were old wood, warped and weakened from many freezings and meltings. But instead of a single label describing what was inside, they were all covered with squares of paper. Nothing like the wizard's perfect handwriting, with regimented letters that remained readable even after ages faded the ink.

Bit leaned closer, inspecting the awkward scribbles on one sheet. It was the same language, despite the crudeness of the writing.

"Wizard,
My family had nowhere to go and not enough wood to keep us warm. Thank you for our lives."

Wizard? She tilted her head to the side, confused. The Wizard hadn't returned without her noticing, had he? He was so loud and so slow that she never could've missed him. Confused, she moved on to the largest, biggest note. It was positioned prominently on the front of one box, right by the door. Placed where she would be forced to see it when she stepped out.

This one was a little better written than the first one, as though someone were trying to recreate the correct style of block letters, but didn't have enough training to make them come out right, and so they drifted down to one side.

"Artifabrian,
We do not know how you survived the revolution. We thought we had torn down all the organs of oppression and returned their stolen wealth to the people. You show that we were right to spare you. Continue to serve the ponies of Zircon, and no one will care that you once aided our oppressors."

There were very few like that. As Bit passed between them, she saw far more like the first note she'd seen. They were just as crude, often smudged in poor ink and peppered with spelling mistakes.

"Thank wizard for warm," said one. "Love."

How could so many ponies be so confused? They wanted to send messages to her master, but he wasn't in the tower. She began to pace back and forth in front of them, her chest constricting as she imagined the process of cataloging, sorting, and delivering all of these to his quarters for his eventual return.

But as she read them faster and faster, one central fact eventually calmed her down. Not a single message addressed the wizard for any of his true accomplishments. They didn't mention any of the machines he'd created such as the eternally reliable streetlamps, or the hydroponic hothouses. They were all talking about the heat, which got them through the winter Bit had spent cleaning.

They're talking about me, she realized. I live in the Wizard's tower, I repaired the power station. How could they make such an obvious mistake? The Wizard was brilliant, inventive, and ruthlessly dedicated to his goals. How could these ponies possibly confuse them?

They won't be able to help me find him, she realized. She slumped to the ground in front of the notes left for her, and the weight of it crushed down against her. Her ears pressed flat, her eyes lost focus, and she lost track of time.

How was she going to find Crimson now? How would she ever get the tools to clean the tower? All this work was for nothing. She'd failed him, and he would never return.

She wasn't sure exactly how long she sat there in the snow, staring off at nothing. Darkness came, then light—and suddenly there was a pony in front of her.

She'd seen him before, though that had been in the dead of winter. His helmet, goggles, and mask were gone, replaced with a heavy scarf to go with his other winter clothes. But the eyes were unmistakable, no easier for Bit to forget than the power-plant diagrams or the notes about crystal assembly.

"You're her..." he muttered, dropping the bundle he'd been carrying in his mouth. There were notes there, along with a crude mallet and nails. "No one saw you all winter. You shouldn't be out here, standing naked in the cold."

She tried to form words. But how could she explain what she felt? This pony couldn't know what it was like to have his purpose stolen from him. He couldn't possibly understand. "Tower," she whispered. "He didn't come back."

The pony considered that a moment, looking thoughtful. Before she could object, he slung off his pack, tossing a blanket over her shoulders. He buttoned it around her neck, and soon she was tightly bundled. "Let's get you somewhere warm. I don't know a bunkhouse in all Zircon that won't make room for you, Wizard. Come with me."

She did.

Chapter 7: Beryl

Under any other circumstances, Bit wouldn't have allowed herself to be taken so far from her place of labor. How could she leave her tower behind, when the Wizard depended on her to care for it?

But he hadn't returned, even after everything she tried. What was the point of maintaining the tower, if not for his use? It wasn't like she needed the soft furniture, the complex heaters, the art framed on the walls.

While she wondered to herself, the earth pony led her down into the square around the power plant. The air never got warm exactly, even in summer. But with the vent running, the square had no snow on the ground, not even the soggy frost that collected around the tower, refreezing to black ice every night.

Bit had already seen it from high above, but it was still astounding to see just how much the square had transformed. The crowd of ponies hadn't knocked down the rest of the sculptures and art of the kingdom, they didn't seem to care. Instead they'd built a settlement of their own, starting at the edge of the vents and spreading out until frost started collecting on surfaces again.

It wasn't anything like the construction Bit knew. Instead of spun crystal grown exactly into shape, these structures were made mostly of metal slabs, with sections of flat crystal acting as pillars and occasionally propped sideways as roofs. Where there wasn't enough metal, they'd used layers of cloth instead, stained and torn and patched so many times that its original purpose was lost to her.

It wasn't just a structure, left abandoned as everything else in Bit's world. The settlement was alive. Ponies emerged from every corner, all dressed in clothing as makeshift and haphazard as what her escort was wearing. Many of them looked unhealthy in various ways, though there was a single commonality: they were too skinny.

"Who is this, Pathfinder?" asked a pony, as they neared a narrow opening between structures. A street, but barely wide enough to allow an earth pony to pass through, nevermind a city monorail. This addition would never pass safety certification. "I thought you were going to the shrine."

"I did." He let go of Bit's shoulder, pulling back the hood. Sunlight shone through her from the back, sparkling in the pale light. "I met the wizard there. I brought her to see what she helped create."

The mare looking back was one of the few who didn't have a problem with too little food, rather the opposite in fact. She eyed Bit, squinting against the light behind them. "Are you a spirit, Wizard? They said the old wizard was dead, and now I can see right through you."

"Spirit," Bit repeated. She'd heard the word before, though very rarely.

Only the Wizard himself had ever discussed such esoteric subjects. "It was her wish, Father. Her spirit was used to animate this automaton. She's proof of life beyond death, that we're more than flesh. See her!"

Bit looked back between them, the Wizard and his king. The older stallion glowered at her, disgusted. "Moss Flower is gone, Crimson. I know how badly you wish it were different. But carving a statue in her likeness is not going to bring her back. Dead is dead."

The two of them were still staring at her. "Pathfinder, you sure this is the one who saved us? I always figured the wizard would be... smart."

"I am not a spirit," Bit said abruptly. "I was created with a spirit, trapped at a pony's moment of death in Zircon's single perfect polycrystalline diamond. It would be passably accurate to describe my body as containing the transfigured essence of that spirit, though it became too rarified as the transfiguration progressed and cannot be observed anymore."

The mare's mouth fell open. She retreated a little into the opening, lowering her clumsy cudgel. "The wizard is... a pony made of crystal. Pathfinder, are you sure about bringing her here? There ain't no stories about ponies like this, not even from the old ones. Might be a bad omen."

He rolled his eyes. "You aren't a bad omen, are you Wizard?"

"I'm not a wizard," she said flatly. "Your 'shrine' made this mistake numerous times, and it's my obligation to correct it. I am a..."

She wasn't an apprentice. She wasn't even properly a maid, though the tower had plenty of those. She didn't have the right certifications to call herself a technician, though she'd proven her ability to do the work without them. "I'm a Bit, that's what the Wizard called me. My name. I am allowed a name."

The two of them shared another confused look, like she'd slipped into speaking a foreign tongue. Finally Pathfinder took hold of her hoof again, dragging her into the opening. "I'm going to introduce her to the Union. Maybe she can teach them what she did to get the heat on. There are five other crystals just like this one that should be providing enough warmth to get through the harshest winters. But those other ones didn't have her."

Soon they were into the shadowy alleys and narrow corridors. Without light to reveal how strange she looked, ponies still stared. But she had seen that expression enough from the Wizard to know what it was: pity.

It's because I don't have any clothing, she realized. Away from the crystal, they would quickly freeze. They believe I am trapped here. If there weren't so many of them, she might've felt compelled to correct them.

"I've never heard a name like 'Bit' before," Pathfinder said. "But I've never met anypony like you before."

"There are no ponies like me," she said. The deeper into the makeshift city they got, the more she began to wish that she'd stayed in the tower. Leaving it even for a moment was a mistake. Unless... maybe there was somepony who did know where Crimson had gone? Maybe they hadn't all left notes! "Crimson imagined that one day all ponies would be like me. We would live without fear of the cold, or starvation, or aging, in an empire that no longer needed to fear Equestria's evil princess or her distant banners."

Pathfinder slowed a little as she spoke, staring. "Wouldn't have to fear the cold," he repeated. "And you're always naked, just like those soft ponies from the south. But you turned the heat back on, you must need warmth like us! Except... you went into a cold tower, all by yourself, instead of living here."

"I already told you last time," she said flatly. "The first time we met. I do feel cold, but the temperatures required to damage me aren't reached except in the worst nights in the darkest part of winter. Any sealed structure would be enough, even without central heating. Which the tower has, since I restored power. In fact, all these buildings do. Why are you living in the street?"

He urged her on again, sighing deeply. "Most buildings were looted before I was born. During the early days of the revolution. If there were heaters in those buildings, they're gone now. The only reason they're still standing is the crystal is too strong to break—everything that isn't attached is gone."

He lowered his voice, turning towards an opening in the ceiling over their heads. "Except the palace. Ponies who tried to go in there never came back. I'm sure the evil king hoarded all the warmth for himself, but we can't even let ponies live there. His legacy will kill them even now."

There's somewhere in the city ponies can't go. The realization hit her like lighting on the darkness of a winter horizon. The Wizard needed somewhere safe to go, somewhere the mob couldn't find him.

Something is wrong. The mob did go inside, they attacked the palace before us. But they hadn't been able to cement their control over either one, and had ultimately left them abandoned. With Bit herself failing so spectacularly to keep the Wizard's tower in order, and his father finally gone, maybe he had decided to live somewhere else.

Bit tore free of Pathfinder's grip, dodging through an opening in the streets and breaking into a brisk trot. She couldn't run exactly, not with so much metal on the floor and almost every surface dripping with steaming moisture. But she went as fast as her crystal hooves dared.

"That's the wrong way!" Pathfinder called, dragging behind her. "Union Hall is this way! They need to meet you!"

She couldn't get out ahead of him, but she didn't have to. Just a little further, and she emerged between two buildings onto the coolant grate that surrounded the crystal.

Already the ponies had stretched as close as they dared, far closer than the citizens who once lived here would've gone. There were thick cloth walls facing this way, with huge, tented intakes to draw the air into the favela instead of letting it rise away into the arctic sky.

But even the faintly glowing floors didn't bother her. Bit stepped out, and continued towards the palace.

Pathfinder stopped in the opening, shielding his face with one leg. He wasn't the only one staring at her anymore. A few flying ponies gasped and pointed, though they were rare in Zircon. "What are you doing, Bit? You'll get yourself killed!"

"I will not," she declared, continuing away to the opposite side. But of course it wasn't so simple as just striding into the palace, there was more favela here. She gauged an alley that continued all the way to the outer square, and steered herself towards it. "I'm going to find the Wizard!"

She slowed as she returned to the narrow streets, dodging between staring ponies, carts of unappetizing food, and storage crates. She could feel the pressure of someone following her, manifesting in a set of distant shouts. But she didn't see Pathfinder again until she reached the edge of the little settlement, and she was approaching the palace gates.

They had been shattered and broken, just like the tower. The damage here was far worse, with whole sections of wall crushed and little craters in the ground around the edge. The soldiers or machines who had done that fighting were gone now. There was only snow, and a faint flicker of light from distant palace windows.

"Bit!" Pathfinder tackled her from the side, taking her to the ground in a violent, bouncing tumble. She winced as her limbs struck the pavement, though it went by too fast for her to resist. Suddenly she was on her back, staring up at him.

"Bit, you can't go in there! That place isn't just a monument to our oppression, it's dangerous! Didn't you hear me?"

She shoved him off, shaking herself out and searching for damage. She'd gone down in thick snow, crusted with many layers of ice. Thanks to the idiot pony's thick cloth, it didn't feel like she'd broken anything. But a slightly harder landing and she wouldn't have been so lucky.

"I heard you. The difference is that I understand the dangers of the palace. I was created within its walls, and I know every defense that was built there. Its automatons will not harm me." She continued past him, along the cracked crystal road that had once been filled with royal processions. Now it was pockmarked with explosions and craters.

She slowed as she approached one of its four massive support pillars, and the doors still open after all this time. She shuffled for a moment, adjusting the straps holding the jacket against her body. She folded it, offering it back in one leg. "You need this, I do not. You should have it returned."

Pathfinder followed her to the steps, and finally took the offered coat. From his shivering, she wasn't returning it a moment too soon. "You really think you'll be safe to go back in there? But... why would you bother? There's nothing in there worth taking. The old rulers are killed. Their stolen wealth was returned to the people. The only thing left up there are ancient traps and dangers we don't understand."

"Not everything. The Wizard is up there. I'm going to find my master, no matter where he's gone." She turned for the steps, and left him behind on the icy landing.

Chapter 8: Sunstone

Bit was not alone for long—only a few seconds. There were pounding hoof falls behind her, and Pathfinder appeared, catching up with her. "Then I'm going too! The Union might think I'm too unpredictable to lead a trade, but that doesn't mean I can't help in other ways. How can we really know we got everything worth taking from the palace if nobody comes back?"

He hesitated, retreating a few steps closer to her as they climbed. "I just hope you're sure, or I'll die too. And if that sounds like a reason to go back down, hopefully it is? I didn't last through all these winters to get killed by the evil king's old traps."

Bit glared at him for a moment, then realized she was imitating the king's own expressions, and thought better of it. She sped up, hoping to lose him in the winding steps. But while she didn't tire, he was an earth pony, and kept pace without much difficulty. The crystal of the palace conducted magic, and wouldn't weaken him even as the earth grew further away.

"I do not care what happens to me so long as I can accomplish my purpose," she said. "Technically, I am not alive. I cannot maintain my own system, and I do not have a desire to reproduce. Therefore, I cannot die."

"Maybe you haven't met the right pony," he said, in a tone she didn't quite recognize. "I've known ponies who took a long time to find someone. It used to happen more in the old days, I think. Before the revolution needed so many hooves, and anything other than productivity was selfishness. But you're from the old kingdom, so it makes sense. Or... are you? You said you were made here. But that can’t be true."

They reached the first landing, where the guests and invited visitors of the palace would have passed the castle's vast gates. Only when suitably impressed and inspected by the palace guard would they be allowed to enter the palace proper.

The gates were shattered now, and there were bits of broken armor and lose white stones littering the ground. She'd seen a few of their like in the tower before, though she couldn't quite identify them.

Apparently they weren't good, because her companion stayed well away, dodging along behind her in the narrow corridor between bits of debris. "I was made here, in the wizard's old wing. He lived here until the evil king made life too difficult, and he moved to the tower. But my memories from those days are fuzzy, I don't know the specifics."

"Memories from..." Pathfinder's expression became even more distant and confused. "You look as young as I am, Bit. You were born after the revolution, weren't you? You can't be old enough to remember the king. There isn't a single pony alive in Zircon old enough for that."

She shrugged. "I am not a pony, I look like a pony." She avoided the spacious entry stairs, and the further sign of damage that ran along it. Too much debris, some of it fresher looking than the rest. There were a few lumps that vaguely resembled motionless ponies up that way. Never a good sign.

But there was a servant's passage to the left, the only parts of the palace she was supposed to use. She tilted a candlestick slightly to the left, and the wall slid aside. Another benefit of restoring power to the capital district. "If you're going to come with me, then this way. But I cannot protect you. I'm not a guard."

He followed her. "You knew that was here. You say you're impossibly old, you aren't afraid of heat or cold. Are you an Equestrian princess?"

The servants' passages had taken far less damage than the vast entryway behind them, though part of that was just a matter of there being so little to lose. There were no paintings to tear down here, no sculptures to shatter. It was just plain dark crystal, obscuring anything that passed through it from the noble eyes that lived in the palace beyond.

"No!" She turned back to him, feeling another flash of impatience mixed with frustration. Annoyance, it was called. "Equestria has only one princess now, tyrant of the sun Celestia. She's an alicorn, a pony with wings and horn and strength of earth. Though she is reported to be ageless, and perhaps properly immortal."

She turned back, hurrying up another set of steps. Pathfinder might be an uninformed idiot, but the suggestion accidentally led her towards a useful theory. Maybe the secret to alicorns' power was no secret at all—maybe they were crafted that way, like she was.

She slowed as she reached the first sign of conflict in the passage. An exterior wall was cracked, and bits of ice had formed over the openings, piling up in the interior until half the tunnel was obscured.

The reason for the damage was a fallen automaton, broken into many pieces.

In some ways, the automatons were the same kind of machine as Bit, crafted from crystal and animated by magic. But as the king always said, they weren't built in the likeness of ponies. The castle's defenders stood on only two of their identical limbs at any time, with a narrow torso that allowed them to roll and adjust themselves to any configuration at will.

Their titanium internal skeleton emerged from the tips of their limbs, with spikes that could slide delicately over crystal or crack it to give them the purchase to fight on any surface.

This one had been beaten to pieces, its crystal body shattered so badly that the delicate metal clockwork within was visible. It didn't move, not even a twitch in their direction as they walked past it.

"Zircon below, they're real." Pathfinder nudged it with one boot, perched delicately on his other limbs. But even if he expected attack, there was no need. "The evil king really did have evil machines. Monsters he could send into the city to kill anyone who organized against him."

Bit nodded. "Machines, yes. Evil, no. The automatons aren't capable of evil, any more than a lever or a generator can be evil. The royal guard were perfectly loyal to their instructions, to the end." She stepped over the fallen machine, almost reverent. But it had no head, no way to judge what it was looking at or how it saw the world.

They can't see, they hear and sense magic.

"The king was evil," Pathfinder insisted. "He oppressed all of Zircon. He hoarded wealth for himself, he stole the labor of his ponies. He didn't provide them warmth in winter or food in summer. He used his machines to keep ponies from rising up. If they're used for evil, that makes them evil too."

Bit considered that. She turned towards the opening in the crystal wall, squinting down at the makeshift settlement in the streets, and the buildings of her home slowly crumbling. "He was evil," she said. "I do not know about the things you say, but my master told me he was evil. The Wizard would never tell me something untrue, so you must be right."

"Your master," he said. "The one you're looking for in the old palace. But as smart as you are, how can you not know? There's nothing alive in here. We won. If you were a slave to someone who lived in this palace, then you're free, just like the rest of us. You owe no loyalty. They won't come to capture you again. It's over."

Free. Bit considered his words, reviewing their definition in her mind. But though she knew the meaning, she could not comprehend it. Her Master had not understood it either.

"I must find him," she said, leaving the broken machine behind to continue up the steps. "We're very close. I know these halls. His father left his quarters empty when he left to work in the tower. They would be the perfect place for him to shelter all these years. The palace has an extensive nuclear backup buried in the stone below, which would keep critical systems running even when the substation failed."

In some ways, Pathfinder seemed to understand her just as little as she understood him. But he did latch onto a single phrase. "Your master was the son of the king... Bit, were you the personal slave to Prince Crimson Zircon?"

She shook her head, glaring back at him. "That is the second time you have used that word improperly. I was never a slave to anyone. Ponies can be slaves, and other creatures. But someone must be alive for their ownership to be defined in that way. A machine like myself is possessed, not enslaved.”

It wasn't reaching him. She could see his expression shifting deeper into confusion, in shades that she could no longer even quite name. The way the Wizard sometimes looked when his father spoke about her. "Then did Prince Crimson possess you, or not?"

She nodded curtly, stopping directly in front of one door among many. "This was his wing. But he stopped living here after his father made the palace unwelcoming to us, and he moved his accommodations to the tower full time. Princess Ochre invited him back in later years, but he never returned. It took a failure like mine to drive him back here. I will have to think of a way to apologize."

She touched a flat panel of wall, otherwise indistinguishable from the others, and it slid down, revealing a security console. Her heart surged with hope at what she saw: the security protocol was still functional. Six servitors, laser protection grids, nerve gas.

"He's not going to be in there," Pathfinder said, watching the screen over her shoulder without recognition. "It was too long, Bit. Even if he hadn't died in the revolution, he'd be at least... what, two centuries? Ponies don't live that long."

"The wizard wasn't just my master. He mastered time, matter, life, death, and forces. When you meet him, you'll understand why he is so deserving of loyalty."

She recited her usual security pattern into the keyboard, and the red lights went green. The door before them clicked, drifting open. "It's important that you remain close to me and do not touch anything," Bit said. "If the automatons see you as a vandal, they would usually take you down to the dungeons. But with the castle under siege, the war-protocols are active. They will not take you prisoner."

She pushed the door open, then stepped out into her master's quarters. "Crimson,” she yelled. "I'm sorry it took me so long to figure out where you've gone, but I'm here! I've finally come!"

His quarters were in ruin. Bookshelves were toppled, screens shattered, and windows cracked. She passed the ancient study, where she sat beside him reading from the illustrated children's encyclopedia, devouring on every word he said. Now the pages scattered to the air around her like snowflakes, barely covered up the flashes and cracks of malfunctioning circuitry.

There were several royal guards fallen near the proper entrance, shattered and broken just like the others they'd seen so far. There was no trace of the ones who had broken them.

"This was the beginning of the revolution," Pathfinder said from behind her, his voice slow and gentle. "The winter of deep tears, when we rose up at last. The fervor was so great that not even the palace servants were spared. If he was here, he's dead.

"We could go back, talk to the elders. There are some who probably remember. I know they dug up the dead king, the Union burned him with the princess. Not sure about... I know there was a prince, but I don't think he was very important.”

Ponies could be wrong. Crimson wasn't just important, he was the most important pony in the whole world.

"He's here," she insisted, shoving past him to a set of crystal stairs. They'd been badly damaged, someone had tried to hammer them down. But the crystal only cracked, it was still strong enough to support her weight. Bit climbed up to the second floor, and the royal bedchamber.