Daring Do and the Shroud of the First King

'Sweet Celestia…' Dust uttered, horrified. 'What happened?!' Before her lay the site of an apparent massacre. Skulls lay all around in small piles, all crowded around a small shrine of some kind. Dark, dried blood coated the once-pale stone skin of some kind of statue in the shrine’s centre, and by the looks of it, some of the viscera was still virtually fresh. For certain, the torches sitting in the braziers to either side of the statue were lit, and must have been lit recently. The most disturbing sight of all was the freshest victim of the apparent sacrifices; the pale, thin, sickly-looking corpse of a colt, dangling upside-down from a wooden frame standing over the statue, dark blood staining the slice made directly across his neck. Inspecting closer, Dust noted that the statue below the body was holding a bowl – in which the blood had collected and overflowed onto the soil around.

'Some kind of ritual sacrifice…' Dust noted, looking about the scene with some understandable disgust. 'But who or what does this statue represent?' She queried. The bowl-holding statue was that of a mare, with long and slender, almost skeletal limbs. Her head was held down as if in shame or anger, and a bloodstained cloth had been draped over the statue’s head, obscuring its face. A shroud. Dust instantly made the connection. 'The Shroud of the First King… There must be a connection. But who was the first king?' She mused to herself, lifting her hoof to the statue’s head and withdrawing the veil. She almost gagged at the sight beneath. The face of the statue had been worn away badly, and over it was… A mask of sorts, made up of dried skin and small, interlocked, tied-together bones. She shuddered to think at what depraved acts had rendered such a mask into being.

There was a rustling in the foliage behind her. Dust’s eyes widened, and she whipped around, withdrawing her battered pistol from her saddlebag and readying to take a shot. With ruthless precision, someone within the undergrowth fired off a shot. Dust was too late, the shot hitting her in her hind leg. She doubled over in agony, her leg burning in pain as she finally caught a glimpse of her attacker – and his allies. A group of ragged natives, clad in what looked like ancient robes, tatters of military uniforms, and various pieces of armour, emerged from the foliage at once. They maintained an unnerving silence, approaching deftly on their hind legs and holding a mismatched armory of weapons between them; knives, axes, and some First Era matchlock rifles – one of which she had taken a shot from. The tribe halted their advance as she aimed the pistol, but continued it as she tried to fire off a shot – and the firing mechanism jammed, a bullet stuck somewhere inside the weapon. The weapon must have suffered damage during the shipwreck. One of the natives called out.

'Bind the outsider! Bring her to the Citadel!' he roared. The others also began whooping and yelling out obscenities, some of them forming proper words and others simply screaming incoherently. Quickly, many members of the tribe tossed weighted ropes over Dust, tying the ropes tightly around her form. The final thing she saw was a hooded figure looming over her, swinging a club down on her head.

The journey to the Citadel was a broken affair for Dust. Her consciousness returned in fits and bursts, revealing portions of the journey as she was carried along by the throng of mumbling, chanting natives, passing out over and over due to lack of oxygen from her tight bindings and simply due to recovery from the blunt force trauma caused by the clubbing. Jungle passed her by, with low-hanging vines and tall, shadowy trees. Then, the world faded again. It returned, and she observed a rickety, broken old bridge spanning some great chasm, as the tribe carried her across the creaking wooden planking. Blackness returned again, then replaced by views of a narrow stone staircase which extended upwards through a cavern, breaking out into the light of day to reveal… A huge, ancient fortress, constructed of rough stone bricks and ancient rotten wood planks, nestled in the belly of a great canyon. Presumably, she reasoned later, the fortress had remained buried in that gulch since the First Era or before, but she had no way of knowing. The next time she awoke, the natives around her were gone, and in their place were the rough, dark stone walls of a pitch-black cave which extended upwards to meet a flat roof littered with bodies – and with a large circular grate of some kind set into it which extended beyond into darkness. It took Dust merely a few minutes to realise that she was not in a vertically-reversed chamber, but hanging upside down. Looking down, she was unnerved to find that she had been tightly locked in a rusted, barred cage of some kind which enveloped her body rigidly. Her hair was matted to her scalp, and her wide eyes stared all about the chamber as she searched for an escape, the blood starting to rush uncomfortably to her head. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light level, she observed something moving around in the grate on the floor below. She presumed that the grate must lead to a lower level of the cavern; a basement area, or a tunnel system below. Squinting, she could just about make out another figure as it passed below in the dark recess below the grate in the floor. It was the undeniable form of a pony, emaciated and quickly shuffling past.

'Hey... Hey you!' Dust managed to wheeze out, the cage around her restricting her breathing. 'Please, help… I’m… I’m stuck!' She cried out painfully. Below, another couple of figures passed by without taking heed. But finally, one of the pale, gaunt figures looked up at Dust through the grate above him. A colt, barely any older than nine years old, with matted hair, scars across his face and wide, darkness-blinded eyes stared up, holding a pickaxe in his mouth and mumbling some incoherent and unintelligible gibberish before shuffling along and going about his business. “What is going on here?” Dust hissed in a horrified stupor, letting herself go as limp as she could considering the cage around her sweat-soaked, dirt-covered body. The discomfort of her situation had not hit her quite so badly before. But now, she felt every piece of clothing sticking to her coldly and wetly, her hair dangling in stringy clumps when it was not clinging to her head, and her aching joints screaming out to be allowed some form of movement, some form of release from the cage binding her.

All at once, she was shocked by a multitude of events. There was a loud creaking of wood above her on the roof of the cavern somewhere, and a great creaking and grinding of some ancient mechanism. The cage she hung inside began to ascend out of the cavern through a narrow, natural stone vent, lifted by a heavy metal chain. The narrow rock walls scraped against the cage, some ragged patches of rock grazing her limbs and abdomen on the way upward through the small opening in the rock. Spiders and other insects scuttled along the walls around her, some dropping onto her skin and causing her to shudder in revulsion. The narrow walls of the cavern widened out again then, and she found herself being pulled upwards and out into a small stone room with a large mechanism in the corner which wound the chain to pull her cage upward. A hunched, beaten figure turned a crank on the machine slowly, and finally came to a stop as the cage was lifted by hand onto the solid floor beside the opening from which it had just ascended. The cage was lay down on its side, and Dust was roughly pulled out onto the floor of the chamber by a dark figure which loomed over her - presumably one of the natives, by the look of the armoured, beraggled tunic she wore. The mare gave the now-empty cage a swift kick, sending it sliding across the floor of the room toward the hole. The cage dropped quickly through the narrow opening, presumably back down into that prison cavern below which Dust had so recently spent time in. There was a scuffing sound as the emaciated figure trying to hold the mechanism’s crank in place was thrown across the floor by the sheer force as the cage reached the end of its tether, the chain connecting to the machine pulling taut and spinning the crank unexpectedly. The unfortunate, battered slave lay wheezing on the floor. Dust could do nothing but watch in horror, exhausted physically, as events unfolded. The native mare strode toward the fallen worker, shouting incoherently at him. The worker babbled what sounded like maddened apologies as the mare grasped him by the throat in her jaws, and then tossed him through the opening in the floor. Dust heard the sound of his screams dying away, then the heavy clang as he hit the hanging cage – and then the eventual thud as his near-dead, broken body hit the stone floor in that dank, dark cavern below. The native mare turned back to Dust with a cold expression in her eyes, and opened her mouth, straining to make her words clear.

'You follow. You follow… Or you die.' And with that, she led Dust slowly out of the stone room and into a maze of corridors beyond, into the heart of the Citadel.