“Hey, are you awake?”
The voice was far away and flat, as if she was hearing it through water.
“Are you alright? Can you hear me?”
She stood up slowly, her legs and back aching. In her blurred vision, she could barely make out a grey-coated pony before her. Above its head, a dull, dark glow caught her eye. She lifted a hoof, her ankle crying out in pain, and began to take a step towards it.
“No! Stop! Don’t move!”
Her hoof struck the floor noiselessly.
“Stay where you are. The rest of the floor is cloud. If you move from that spot, you’ll fall.”
As her eyes focused, she could see the edges of a rough stone slab under her. They extended only a hoof’s reach from under her on any side, after which they gave way to a sea of cloud. The grey pony stood only a few paces away on a similar stone slab. Stone doesn’t just float; they must have been pillars, extending all the way to the ground.
Unicorn, actually; that’s what the glow was. There seemed to be a harness over his horn. She followed his stray glance sideways, where she saw a pair of pegasi, clad in cow-hide barding and spear-harnesses, flanking a cloud door. The doorway stood two ponies high, above which the celling domed inward, ending in a small, circular opening far above the two prisoners. The blue light radiating from the skylight signaled mid-morning, and the grey light radiating from the guards signaled that the metal horn-harness on the unicorn was woefully ineffective.
“What’s wrong with them? What are you doing?” she asked.
“They’re unconscious. And, knowing the pegasus military, they’ll both be too afraid to ever mention that they ‘fell asleep’ on duty.”
That was a relief. Possibly.
“I’m Starswirl,” the unicorn said, “and your name is?”
“Mute,” she replied.
“That’s your full name?”
“I don’t care for my full name.”
The two stood silently for a moment.
“I know this will sound strange,” Starswirl sighed, “but could I read your memories, just for a moment, just to get some information about this place?”
“I wasn’t even conscious when they brought me in here.”
“But you must have seen some of the place before that. Anything will help. They brought me all the way up here in a sack.”
“No.”
“I won’t pry, I just need to see where we are, what some of the outside looks like. When I get us out of here, I need to know as much as possible,” he smirked, “you might say I’m spying.”
“For the unicorn army?”
“I didn’t mean to get in this deep, but now that I’m here, I might as well bring back some useful information.”
Mute took a small step back. “Fine,” she muttered after a few seconds, “but no snooping around.”
“I’ll be discreet,” Starswirl assured her, as a layer of overglow appeared over his horn, and Mute’s vision melted into a recollection of the previous day.
The view was low to the ground, as if her head was hung, and her steps short and irregular, as if walking with two wounded legs, and two chained. Her vision was filled by the vegetation around her and the forest-green coat of the pony ahead of her. Nothing was said nor heard through a haze of hunger and exhaustion as she marched in a column of earth ponies, breaking through the edge of a forest and into the sunlight falling on the plains. Before her, about the edges of a huge shadow, hundreds of earth ponies, clearly there against their will, worked the fields under the watchful eyes of armed pegasus supervisors. Her heart dropped in her chest as she followed the shadow upward to a city of clouds, almost directly above.
The next hours were a blur. At some point they trudged into a holding pen, herded inside by their pegasus captors, and left for the night. She did not sleep; her wounds were too painful for her to find comfort on the hard ground. The next morning, she was unchained and shoved onto a lift, where she watched the ground fall away below her as she failed to find the strength to yell the name of her foal, or her mate. Two pegasi pulled her off of the platform, across a courtyard of cloud, towards a giant hall of pillars. To its right was a large dome. In all other directions, what looked like open-walled apartments covered the uneven cloudscape surrounding the square.
The rest of the morning was again a blur, but she remembered a violet pegasus with a yellow mane, fully clad in battle attire, personally serving her food, wrapping her wounds, and reprimanding one of her guards for her roughness. Immediately afterward, as she was being pulled towards a large dome, she passed out from exhaustion.
“I’m sorry for the intrusion,” Starswirl said humbly, the overglow dissipating from his horn, “I realize that must have been hard to see again.”
Mute fell on her rump and hung her head.
“The information will help, though.”
She wiped a tear from her cheek. “You said you can get us out of here?”
“Yes, I just need to…”
Starswirl looked away quickly as the door began to screech open. Immediately, the glow disappeared from around the guards, and his horn, as he returned them to consciousness, and he curled up on the stone slab, pretending to be asleep.
From the dark hallway beyond stepped a violet pegasus in military garb, her mane fed through the crown of the helmet to produce a yellow crest atop. She waved off her guards at the doorway, and proceeded forward, seemingly only followed by her shadow.
Mute could see that Starswirl was watching through a half-opened eye, and like her, he seemed tense.
The pegasus stopped halfway into the chamber, her shadow still rippling against the cloud floor behind her. As if they had rehearsed the act, two of the pegasus’ escorts lifted off in unison, and landed flanking Mute. They each grabbed one of her forelegs, and carried her towards the pegasus commander, who was already exiting the room, her shadow stretching before her.
The doors slammed shut behind them.
“That’s all that happened?” Starswirl asked.
“That’s it. Hailstorm asked about how I nearly freed my herd, made sure I would cooperate, and had me brought back here.”
Apparently, ‘cooperation’ and ‘participating under duress’ were now synonymous. Starswirl had reddened with anger when he viewed the memory of Hailstorm threatening the life of Mute’s foal.
“You know, ‘Muted Hoof’ isn’t that bad of a name.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Silence.
“Would you mind if I saw…”
“You might as well,” Mute said.
Starswirl’s horn lit in overglow yet again.
Mute lay in the shadow of a log, the moonlight illuminating the underbrush enough for her to see the guards nodding off on either side of the mouth of a cave. Inside, she could see the shadows of two more guards dancing across the wall in the flickering firelight.
She waited, trying not to shiver, until the guards were sufficiently out of it. A few years ago the temperature would not have been a problem, but recently everything north of the Crystal Mountains had been getting colder, mirroring the relations between the three races. On some nights, as tonight, frost had begun to cover the ground in the nighttime hours.
She crept along the ground silently, the guards not noticing her near-brown coat approaching in their stupor. Once through the cave’s mouth, she peeked around the corner, seeing the two guards inside watching over the sleeping forms of the earth pony prisoners, and their pegasus captors, with their backs to her. With a single motion, Mute leapt forward, spun around on her forelegs, and delivered a single blow to one’s skull with each of her hind hooves. The crack of their bones dissipated in a moment, failing to echo in the chamber.
She heard one of the guards get up with a start outside, and plod into the cave mouth. As it rounded the corner, she ended it with another blow of her hooves. She slipped back outside and struck the last unconscious with a quick blow to the temple.
Mute grabbed daggers off of two of the guards and slipped back into the cave, where she crept around the sleeping guards to where her herd laid, their legs bound to each other to make a chain of earth ponies.
She put a hoof over the mouth of her mate as she woke him, muffling a confused whinny. She dropped a dagger in front of him and took the other in her mouth, using it to cut his bonds. Together, they began to loose the rest of the herd.
A sudden ringing caught Mute’s attention, and a quick glance revealed that the stallion’s dagger had snapped in two, the blade ringing against the stone floor.
“Arms!”
The pegasus troop was on their hooves with blades in mouth instantly, and a blue-coated pegasus strode towards Mute. 'Maj. Hurricane' was emblazoned on her chest plate.
“You’re new,” the pegasus noted, through clenched teeth.
Mute’s jaw went limp in fear. The dagger clanging against the floor, she backed against the cave wall as the pegasus approached, blade ready.
The pegasus held the sword to Mute’s neck as she looked her over. Seeming to come to a decision, she dropped the sword and turned away.
“Bind them”
They both sat on their stone slabs, silently.
“Now that you’ve seen the last two days of my life, how about you tell me something?”
“Of course.”
“Why haven’t you unicorn cowards tried to free us earth ponies from this place yet? Where are all of you?”
Starswirl sighed and looked about uneasily. “After the pegasi attacked Stonehorn, they broke through the dome of the keep to find that all of the unicorns had been teleported away…”
“I know that. Everypony knows that. I want to know why you haven’t been doing anything since then!”
“But we didn’t teleport away at all.”
Mute squinted at him.
“We built a stronghold under Stonehorn. A huge underground chamber, large enough for farms and with housing built into the walls. It even has a fortified antechamber to defend it if the pegasi ever get in. Luckily, we got everypony inside and the passage in sealed before they broke the dome. The military, including every sorcerer and conjurer fit for battle, have been preparing to fight back, but the king is stalling. Regretfully, at the advisory of my own apprentice. He might never approve of us emerging. He thinks, since the pegasi don’t know we’re there, we’ll be safe as we are forever.”
“How are you surviving? Unicorns don’t farm.”
“The earth ponies that lived in the area around Stonehorn took refuge there before the pegasus army arrived. They’ve been working the fields in the stronghold, under an artificial sun, to grow food for all of us. I don't know how the pegasi think we teleported ourselves and all the earth ponies out during the battle, but I am thankful that they're convinced of it.”
“And you left the rest of us on the surface, to be captured and enslaved by the pegasi.”
“We couldn’t risk opening the passage down until we could defend it, and even if we could, there isn’t room for any more ponies. There was nothing we could do.
“We’ve been preparing to fight back. That’s why I was close enough to this place to get captured; I was scouting. I’m one of the only unicorns that could hold my own against a pegasus troop.
“They found out where I was, and waited until I took shelter for the night. They grabbed me while I was asleep. I don’t know what you know about magic, but you can’t teleport while being physically restrained, you need to know exactly where your body will be when the spell goes off, and it takes time to get ready.
“By the time they got this lead thing over my horn, I saw that it was a chance to get more information. They think it stops me from using magic. Lead stops physical radiation, not magical. You need an alchemically pure metal for that, like silver or gold. Somepony gave them false information, and I could use it to my advantage. I let them bring me up here, and with the information you provided, I know everything we need about this place.”
Mute sat silently for a moment. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
“It’s fine.”
Starswirl released the guards from his magic. They opened their eyes, seeming to ignore that they thought they had just been asleep.
The doors opened, grinding against the ground noisily, despite the fact that they were made of cloud.
Hailstorm entered, flanked by her escort. Her shadow ebbed behind her for a moment, and then began to move forward. Into Mute and Starswirl’s view hovered a small, green, winged… insect…
With a horn.
Starswirl nearly backed off of his stone platform. “A changeling?” He spat, “you’re harboring a changeling? Are you mad?”
“No,” Hailstorm replied, “just resourceful.”
The changeling’s horn glowed a sickly green, and Mute’s head was momentarily engulfed in a bubble of energy. As it dissipated, Mute said, flatly, “got it.”
“Restrain him,” Hailstorm commanded, and her entire entourage swarmed around Starswirl, lifting him off the stone slab by all four legs.
“What is going on? Put me down!”
“So that you can teleport away? I don’t think so.” Hailstorm said. “Chrysalis, go with them. Make sure he can’t do anything useful.”
“Fine,” the changeling sighed dramatically.
“You did well, now just make sure he stays put until he can be dealt with.
“Oh, and Starswirl,” Hailstorm said, “Thanks for telling our collaborator here everything we need to know.”
“No! I read her memories! She’s not…”
“Do you know how we control our prey, unicorn boy?” Chrysalis asked, “You can read memories. Do you really think that they can’t be changed? Change ponies’ memories as they happen, in the right way, and you can make anypony do whatever you want. It's called mind control.
"Compared to that, this was simple. What I spliced together from her memories and her foals’, cutting out the parts where we had some little chats, was simply editing it wholesale. It was foals’ play.”
Mute watched as Starswirl was carried out of the room, screaming, followed by a taunting changeling foal, until they were out of view. Then she turned to Hailstorm.
“Don’t look so grim, you and your family will be treated like royalty for this,” Hailstorm assured her, “now let’s go somewhere where you can be comfortable while we talk.”
While crying in protest and flailing violently, Starswirl made sure to keep his eyes planted squarely over his shoulder. His guards held his limbs firmly, and Chrysalis babbled away arrogantly, uselessly, beside him.
“Really, I can’t believe you unicorns haven’t figured it out yet. Memory is really quite malleable, not the iron scroll you always treat it as,” she mocked, “Sadly, you won’t be around long enough to crack the case yourself.”
From Mute’s memories, the city was at least 300 meters off the ground. He would need six seconds for the distance he needed, plus another two, so eight. Gravity is a constant. They would be fine; they would have plenty of time. But for him, to pull it off in one go, it would be close…
Tens of seconds after being hauled out of the cell, he saw a plum-tree colored blob floating out behind him. Turning its back to his party, it floated away and rounded a corner, headed towards the lift.
Now that they were out of view, Starswirl decided that he had carried his act quite far enough.
In a dull explosion of light, the pegasi and changeling were frozen in place. A grey haze coated their bodies. The cloud below drew back like a curtain, and Starswirl’s stomach rose to his throat as they all plummeted like stones.
He withdrew his legs to escape the statuesque hooves of the guards. He focused all his energy 180 meters below him, and counted…
6…
The ground rushed upwards, too close and too quickly for comfort.
5...
To his side, headed groundward at a significantly slower pace, Starswirl could see Mute and Hurricane riding a platform of the lift. He instantly felt disgusted and amused; there was no way the traitor could not see what was happening.
3…
He saw Hurricane jolt with recognition, and take to the air.
2…
The pegasi and changeling flailed to life, the grey glow disappearing from their bodies. They rose above him, their descent slowing, in a whirlwind of wings.
Starswirl could almost taste the ground.
1…
Now.
He felt his teleportation spell peak, and poured all his energy into it.
He jolted.
For a moment he saw and felt nothing. Then his chest rested softly on a welcoming bed of rock, and a grey crag of rock appeared, towering in the distance. Sighing in relief, he climbed to his hooves, still wobbly with vertigo.
He could see a ring of stone before him, two concentric walls circling an enormous, hollow pyre, half collapsed. Around the walls were littered the ruins of trebuchets and flying rams; the ground was peppered with pastel mounds, streaked with red. The air itself hung lifelessly around him, the sky matching both his coat and the stones under his hooves in color.
Stonehorn.