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"Wes!"

Once again, I resurfaced from unconsciousness.

"This is getting ridiculous." I mumbled. "Just how much time am I going to have to spend knocked out this month? I've hardly been free for a week and I feel like I've hardly gotten to enjoy it."

I looked up. Twilight was standing over me, her horn clear of the parasitic magic. I groaned and sat up. We were still in the same room. The door was still blocked. I rubbed my eyes, trying to get brain back on track. We needed to get out of here.

"Are you OK?" Twilight asked, concern evident in her voice.

"Um, I think I will be. That was...extremely unpleasant. I don't know if those dreams were my worst fears, but they were definitely a runner up." I shook my head and tried to dismiss the unpleasant visions. "The decor here doesn't help." I frowned at a nearby crystal and then down at the dark streaks that swirled underneath my skin. "And this is somewhat worrisome."

"Yeah." Twilight nodded in agreement. "I'm still not sure what it is, but I don't think its doing that is good. I appreciate the rescue, but...really, are you sure you're going to be OK?"

"No." I said. "But it needed done. We had no options."

She looked a little dubious, but nodded her head reluctantly.

"Right." Twilight said. "You claimed this place looked like, what did you say, the 'Nexus'? part of the changelings fort?"

"Yeah. It's where I got...." I tapped the gem in my chest. "This thing. Anyways, it's very similar. Crystals, colors, that sort of stuff. Although I don't think I've seen the same room yet, which means I'm not really sure."

"Well," Twilight bit her lip pensively. "I took your advice, and I've been trying to locate us. I don't think we're actually that far from Ponyville. I don't think we're in the changeling's fort, unless they're a lot closer than you thought."

Realizing something, I unbuttoned my shirt and exposed the gem. It was still purple and the glow didn't seem to be any more pronounced. "Hum." I said. "It doesn't seem to have re-connected to the Nexus, either. So, unless whatever your spell did has broken the connection completely, we're not close enough." I sighed in relief. "I didn't want to face that again." I said with feeling. "Now, how do we get out of here?"

"I'm not sure." Twilight admitted. "This stuff-" She rapped a hoof against a crystal, "Whatever it is, is very resistant to magic. I've tried burning, blasting, unraveling, unmaking, unpatterning, and even retconjuration, and nothing had an effect."

"Can't you just teleport us out?" I asked.

"That would be horribly unsafe. If anything goes wrong we could be telefragged!"

"Um." I stood silently for a second, turning the problem over in my mind. "We might need to chance it anyways. In a time-limited scenario like this, it's often better to seize the initiative and do the wrong thing than to do nothing at all. Sombra will be back eventually."

Twilight nodded slowly.

"Wait, how about this?" I asked, as a thought occurred. "Can't you teleport something out and back in to see if it's safe?"

"Nope. I need to see what I'm 'porting, so it would be one way. Anyways, if it wasn't safe, it would just get stuck in the wall or something, and we'd never get it back."

"How does that work?" I asked, curious. I seemed my come-and-go magic knowledge wasn't helping me right now.

"Well, it just gets meshed with the thing it hits." She said, shrugging.

"Like...they actually intersect?"

"Yeah. I mean, if you consider the composition of matter, it's mostly empty space anyways. There's some hard radiation emitted, and maybe a few odd atoms are created, but it mostly just ends up as denser matter."

"Would it be less magically resistant?" I asked, hope in my voice.

"Hmmm...." her eyes narrowed, as she considered the question. "It might, at that." She trotted around the room, inspecting everything. "Here!" She grabbed a chain in her teeth and gave it yank, pulling it free from a pile of junk. "I think this will work." She laid it out on the floor in front of us. Her horn glowed for a second, there was a flash, and the crystal of the door lightened slightly. Looking at it closely, I could see the linked pattern of the chain showing through the dark crystal. "Now, let me try again..." She touched her horn to part of the new pattern and it pulsed once.

CRACK.

There was a dull crunching noise and a jagged rip climbed the door, shattering along the lines of the inset metal.

"Yes!" She exulted. The iron links of the chain showed through the crack, but they quickly crumbled into rust. I walked over to the pile and tossed what looked like a brass bar in front of her. She flashed it into the door and in a second another crack had appeared, running crosswise to the first.

It only took us a few minutes of work to demolish the barrier.

"Hmm." I gathered up a handful of heavy chunks of metal, large pieces of scrap that looked easy to carry. "How much energy does it take to work that spell?" I asked.

"It takes a good bit." She was sitting on the floor, panting a little.

"Well, if we run into anyone hostile, maybe you could telefrag them?" I said, holding out the handful of ammunition I'd gathered. She nodded silently, but grimaced. I caught her wary expression, and mentally kicked myself. Fool. Of course she's not going to be OK with using lethal force. "But we might need them for another door, too." Her expression relaxed a little at that.

I stepped over to the broken slab of crystal and kicked it a few times, knocking it out into the hallway. My hiking boots were getting pretty beaten up by now...huh. I probably couldn't get decent leather anywhere in this nation of herbivores, or I'd try and make myself something else to wear. Maybe if I used felt? I guess I could try for a pair of sandals, or clogs. These tiny pastel horses used metal shoes, so it's not like I could just go find a cobbler.

I stepped out into the passage, absentmindedly scratching at the black discoloration on my skin. The magic I'd absorbed hurt less now, but it was itching and burning enough to be distracting. I looked down at it worriedly before dismissing it from my attention. I'd deal with it later.

"Stay behind me." I stopped for a minute, trying to figure out what sort of plan-of-attack I should use. I decided to run it like a maze; we'd done those in the arena, sometimes even in pairs. A tall labyrinth where the audience could see us hunt or be hunted clearly, but we stumbled around in the dark. The trick was to track down your opponents before they managed to ambush you.

Move forward cautiously. Support one another. I started forward smoothly, my body falling into a loose stalk.

"Twilight, if we get into a fight, hang back and support me. I'll try and keep them off you by bottle-necking them in these halls. Don't get separated from me, whatever you do. I don't know what we're up against, but keep an eye out. Check behind us every few seconds. If you watch our backs, I can concentrate on moving us forward."

She nodded determinedly and we slunk off down the crystal hallway.

I had already started to explore this place, when I was trying to find Twilight. As we worked our way along, I scratched marks into the walls of tunnels I'd already explored. The place was large but not impossibly huge, and the fact that there was a pretty decent variance in the texture and colors of various tunnels allowed me to navigate without worrying about getting lost.

We worked slowly, carefully and quietly navigating our way through the maze. A half-hour or so in we had mapped what seemed to be most of the section we started in. The crystal cave was full of caverns, mostly dimly lit by the same crystal glow that had crudely illuminated Twilight's cell. As much as we'd explored, though, we found nothing of interest. Most everything was mouldering in decay, rusted in wrack and ruin. We left footprints in the rust and dust sprinkled finely across the floor wherever we went.

"What is this place?" I asked Twilight quietly, as we moved away from another dead end.

"I'm....not really sure. it seems like an outpost of some sort." She thought for a minute. "I did some research on Sombra, but there are very poor records about the Crystal Empire, and even less about him. There's an important part there, though. It was the Crystal Empire. From what I read, the kingdom proper was very small, not even the size of modern Equestria. But before the rule of the Solars, the Crystal Kingdom was arguably more powerful than even the Ever Free City. This may have been an outpost of some kind. I'm not sure where it is, or what it's made out of...but I think that might be why it was built. An outpost of the Crystal Empire. Some of these are the sorts of things you'd find in a long-term military post."

I nodded at that. We'd passed through what seemed to be a forge of some sort a while ago.

"However, I think that Sombra used this place as a personal refuge as well. I have no idea how he managed to escape his imprisonment, or if he has more reasons to be near Ponyville than the Elements, but this place seems to have been elaborately prepared. And this crystal?" She tapped the blackish material "I highly doubt that this is what the building was originally made from."

"That makes sense. Um, sorry to ask you questions and then shush you, but we need to be quiet again."

She nodded, and we fell back into silence.

After a while, I started to grasp the layout of the place we were in. It was made of several layers, with three or four staircases, arranged radially around a central room. As far as I could tell we had broken out of one of the side rooms and started on the bottom floor. We had slowly worked our way around the underground tower, looking for some way out, until we covered the whole floor and made our way up a level.

Now we were on the third level and it seemed to be as high as we could go. I was hoping that we would find some way to escape soon. If we didn't, we would run out of places to search and have to try something drastic. It's possible that the only way out was through the same teleporters that had brought us here, but I was trying not to even think about that too hard, unless my attention made it true.

Stupid, I know, but hey. I was a little stressed.

We were approaching the final area we hadn't explored and unless it yielded another staircase, we were either going to find Sombra or an exit.

Or maybe both.

I was standing near the doorway to the last area. I'd managed to scavenge a shiny piece of crystal in our exploration, adding an arm by wrapping a wire around it. I was using it as a mirror, inspecting the inside of the room.

It contained both the tall, dark stallion, and what seemed to be an exit. A tall doorway, wooden planks bound with corroded iron, stood at one end of what seemed to be a lab of some sort. At least, Sombra seemed to be doing some sort of magic research or creation. He was fiddling absentmindedly with an odd array of nicknacks. Every so often, his horn would glow and they would re-arrange themselves, or a spark would jump from one to another. He was humming.

In the corners loomed things that might have been crystal ponies, if ponies were made from slabs of black glass and had no faces. I eyed them suspiciously. They didn't move, but their bodies glowed fitfully with an inner radiance. My senses were telling me to watch them, so they might be constructs. Or maybe I was becoming paranoid. Either way, we needed to get past at least one, maybe three, huge ponies. One of which was an ancient sorcerer, with who-knows what sorts of evil magic to draw on.

I stepped back and motioned Twilight forward to use the mirror. She peered into it for several minutes, her ears twitching nervously, her tongue caught pensively between her teeth. Finally she nodded and we withdrew to what seemed to be a safe distance for talking.

"So." I said, hunkering down on my heels in the hallway, back to the wall. "What do you think?"

"This is going to be tricky." She stopped and thought for a bit. "We can try and escape, or we can wait for rescue." I started to say something, but she held up a hoof. "Just let me talk this out. Sometimes I process things better when I'm speaking." I shrugged and nodded. "OK. So. We can attack, or we can wait. Attacking is going to be tough. That door is magically sealed, as well as being made of stout oak. Those two statues are magical in some way. At the very least, they're alarms. At the worst, they're advanced golems, and will obstruct us as best as they can. That's three magical defenses we're going to need to get past. The biggest worry, however, is Sombra."

"Right." I nodded, fully agreeing with her assessment so far. "However, if we're quick, I think we might not need to fight him. If we can rig a distraction, I think we con get him out of there. It might-might be long enough for us to open the door, get past the guards and escape."

She considered my comment for a bit. "Yeah, that might work. But, let me finish thinking this through. The other option is to stay where we are, and try and wait him out. Our friends are going to be coming. We do have an advantage, in that he doesn't know you're free, but if we stay trapped in here...I don't like our odds. Things would have to fall out just right for us to come out on top if we play a waiting game."

"Not to mention," I said, "That we're pretty much just handing the initiative over to him. If we've escaped from the cell, but don't do anything to capitalize on it, it's barely better than just waiting for him to enact his plans. If we had some sort of guerrilla objectives I might caution a waiting game, but we don't gain anything from that."

"...yeah." She agreed reluctantly. "I don't like the idea of going up against Sombra. But I think it's the best option we've got. If we can distract him, we might be able to get out."

"OK." I nodded. I'd been thinking about traps for a while now. "I think I have an idea for a distraction."

Twilight and I crouched in a side corridor. I was gripping my club, a piece of metal I'd scavenged from a broken-down machine. It had a spike on the end, nearly making it into a war-hammer. I worked my hand on the 'grip', the end where it had broad threads worked into the metal. It wasn't the most comfortable but I was pretty sure I wouldn't drop it.

We had rigged a trap for Sombra. More than a distraction, hopefully it would-

CRUNCH.

And there it went. A sound like dropping a dozen eggs, and a trickle of black smoke worked it's way along the ceiling. We both froze.

clip-clop, clip-clop, clip came towards us. clop, clip-clop, clip-clop faded away from us. As soon as it seemed that Sombra was well on his way, we moved out. I jogged silently, my equine companion was a bit more noisy.

We stepped into the lab. Twilight cast her eyes across the nicknacks and we set our plan into motion. I stepped forward and touched the door, before leaping backwards and raising my club.

With the surprisingly beautiful sound of crystal chimes, the two statues stepped forward.

I hate it when I'm right. The only good thing about pessimism is the surprises.

Behind me, I heard Twilight's horn hum as she powered it up. I swung the club up from my ready position into a striking pose and stepped into the fray.