Doctor Whooves:
The City of Pillars
By Double Deadline
"This was when Princess Luna burst into the room of squabbling chronologists and, stomping Her mighty hooves in frustration, declared in Her full Royal Canterlot Voice, 'THIS IS ANNO ONE!' Putting an end to the months of fruitless debate regarding the reformed dating system. This, of course, made the year Princess Luna was banished Anno -999 and the year She was returned to us 'Anno 0'."
~ Horology Tocksworth, A Brief History of History (Anno 1276), p. 23
"In short, my dear Clover, I am an old stallion with many regrets. Regrets as dark and numerous as the pillars of that nameless city where even the King of Dragons fears to tread. Learn from my mistakes, and grow from them. But, where I am going, do not follow me."
~ Starswirl the Bearded, Historionica Magicka (c. Anno -10,228), preface
Chapter 1: Sand
The Badlands
(Anno -27)
Little Octavia's breathing was laboured and heavy as she reached the top of the ridge, nostrils flaring. Her instructors, before they had died screaming, had told her to, whenever possible, breathe through her nose while they were in the desert, as breathing through one's mouth caused one to lose water faster. Octavia almost always did as her instructors told her, with a noted exception of the previous evening, when the Matron had said "HELP ME!" and Octavia had ignored her, running off into the desert until she couldn't hear the shouting anymore. She obeyed them in this case, however, and breathed through her nose rather than through her mouth.
Octavia had no way of knowing whether breathing through her nose was prolonging her life or not, or if it really helped her to retain water. As it was, her coat was heavy with sweat, dust clinging to the dampness as grime. She pressed forward, down the gravelly, dusty slope. The sun was going down, causing the ruins in the distance, the great City of Pillars, to cast long shadows.
Assuming the advance party was as dead as Matron Ratchet had assumed they were, the only source of more supplies were at the archaeologists' camp at the City itself. And, further assuming that nopony else had escaped the camp last night, Octavia was now the last surviving member of her family, the last of forty-seven siblings. She pressed on.
Octavia reached the bottom of the slope and came to a skidding halt in a shower of loose pebbles and gravel. Stopping only a moment to catch her breath, she started up the next incline, breathing deeply and deliberately, watching her hoof placement but keeping a lively pace. The sun was setting.
Her legs were heavy and shaky and her lungs were burning as she pushed herself harder and harder to get up the ridge faster. It would be dark soon. She threw a hoof over the crest of the ridge and pulled herself up, half crawling, and allowed herself to gasp through her mouth, collapsing on the dusty ridge-top, wincing as her empty stomach hit the rocky ground.
She pulled herself up on shaky legs and opened her eyes to look at the ruins again. She still had several ridges to go, several frozen waves of sand and stone, all radiating outward from the ruins. Octavia smiled. Then she looked down.
Her smile dropped. Her ears drooped. Her heart sank. Her eyes grew large and her breathing slowed. Below her, between the current ridge and the next, sat, squatting like spidery frogs, a thicket of walking cacti. The sun was setting. Octavia slowly started to back away, back down the ridge she had come.
A jolt and Octavia's front hoof slipped, she fell forward, tumbling down the slope of the ridge toward the bramble. She scrambled, flailing her hooves for purchase on the loose material, sliding ever closer toward the purple, writhing mass of vines and poison thorns. She screamed. She curled into a ball, bracing herself for the impact with the sharp, crushing coils. Then she stopped.
The sound of sliding rocks and falling debris continued around her, but she had stopped moving. She had slid onto a protruding slab of granite, sticking out just over the thicket, exposed by the sudden shift of material. Shaking, Octavia spread her hooves out to find a grip on the rock, steadying herself. She peered over the edge and screamed again. The cacti were uprooting themselves and beginning to climb toward her. She struggled up to her haunches, recoiling from their slow advance. Each cactus was the size of a pony, a columnar mass of leg-thick vines with hoof-long poison thorns.
She turned around, careful not to lose her balance, and jammed her hooves into the side of the incline, causing little rock slides of pebbles around either side of her little hooves. When they felt anchored into the loose material, she pushed herself up with her hind-legs, yanking out one fore-hoof and jamming it into the gravel higher up on the slope. She could hear the cacti now. Somewhere, deep within their mass of coiled vines, they had mouths. They were breathing, slavering, making scratchy, wheezing and crackling sounds.
Octavia ripped her hoof free and jammed it yet higher on the slope, waited for the shower of pebbles to stop, then pressed on. There was a cracking sound, tearing through the air, like a whip, followed by a shower of pebbles from her left. A big purple vine had lashed out in her direction, landing just a leg's length from her. It was coiling and retracting now, dragging material down with it.
Octavia felt hot tears on her cheeks and couldn't stop herself from sobbing, her breathing a mess of stutter-stop open-mouthed gasps. She gritted her teeth and took another hoof-step up the slope. Another crack and Octavia was certain she was done for – but this one was followed by a peel of thunder, echoing through the desert. Octavia looked up, then turned to look at the ruins, losing her balance and sliding back down to the rock where she had started, which the vines were now coiling around, either pulling themselves up or the rock down. Whichever gave first.
Octavia started up the slope again, faster this time, pushing up, and sliding down, desperate. Panicking. There were vines on either side of her now, and the rock she had thought solid was now starting to tilt and shudder as the vines continued to pull.
She shrieked at the uncaring stars that were just starting to appear in the evening sky. She screamed in anger at the harsh, relentless desert, punching the rocky slope, sending dust and gravel flying.
There was another peel of thunder, followed by a roar and the scream of tearing air. Something exploded and Octavia felt a sharp, stabbing pain on her flank, then on her hind leg, then burning heat. Her tail was on fire.
It had been a trap, of course. A distress signal luring his time-space ship to space-station Tartarus, orbiting the immense black hole the Eternals had called "The Howling." There had been a time, when the universe was much smaller, much darker, when the Old Ones and the Great Vampires roamed the stars, that the Eternals had used the Howling to banish horrible, terrible things to the Void between worlds. The Carrionites, the Hervokens, the Nightmare Child and the Court of Shadows – all banished through the Howling. So when he landed on space-station Tartarus, he scolded them for building their station in orbit around such a monster in the first place. Then, when he was separated from his ship, they intentionally sent the station hurtling toward the event horizon. They were all sent hurtling into the howling void.
But, because fate loved him, because his mind was sharp and his will to survive immense, he found a way to punch a hole on the other side of the void, and plummeted, along with the worst creatures in creation, from the dawn of his universe, into a new reality. He hit a planet almost immediately, and, even though he died on impact with the planet, after a time, the Doctor woke up.
Octavia coughed out a mouthful of sand and gravel. She had a pebble up her nose. When she blew the little stone out of her nostril it came with a bubbling of blood. She couldn't feel her hind legs. She was on her back, buried up to her middle at the base of a tall dune of sand and gravel. She scraped her hooves against the sandy ground, trying to pull herself free. It wasn't working. Her stomach was going numb. The numbness was creeping up her body. Octavia let herself fall on her back, sobbing, screaming up into the night sky, hot tears and mucus and blood turning the dust all over her face to mud. The sounds coming out of her mouth became garbled growls of animal fury. Her fore-hooves struck the ground weakly. The sun was setting. Her eyelids were heavy. Her eyes would not focus.
"Hold on! I've got you!"
Her eyes fluttered back open. The sun had set. Unable to focus, her eyes stinging and blinded with tears and dust, she couldn't see who the owner of the voice was or where it was coming from. Her throat was tight and clogged and burning with an acidic, bloody taste. A large, brown form was shoving at the rocks and gravel burying her lower half. Teeth gripped mane and tugged at her painfully, dragging her the rest of the way out. "Ow!" she rasped.
"Sorry! I... I can't seem to... I don't seem to have fingers yet. I think I'm still cooking."
"C-cook...?"
"I can't lift you. Can you try to crawl onto my back?" She could make out the outline of an earth-pony stallion. His face came very close to hers and he was down on the ground, and made a gesture with his head to his back.
Octavia shook her head weakly. "No..." She tried to push herself up anyway.
The stallion sighed and jammed a foreleg under her shoulder, pushing his hoof between her wither and the ground, lifting her up a few inches and began dragging her backwards on three legs. Octavia closed her eyes again. She was very tired. She didn't hurt anymore. She didn't feel anything.
Octavia couldn't remember her dreams when she woke up. Her eyes wouldn't open. She couldn't move. She wasn't breathing.
Panic gripped her and a bright light shone through her eyelids. For a moment, she could see through them, blue and purple afterimages dancing and pulsing across her retinas. She felt hot and cold at the same time. Sensation rushed through her, tingling, burning, tickling. Air burst into her lungs and she was panting, chest and stomach heaving, mouth and nose tasting of antiseptic and cold mint tang. Her eyes were open, but the afterimages were all she could see. She was on her back and her rear, her hindlegs were in front of her, her forelegs were at her sides.
Something went BING!, deafening her as it resounded in the small space.
"Hey," came a muffled voice, followed by the sound of a hoof tapping. "Hey, you okay in there? Are you alive?"
Octavia coughed and moaned weakly. "No..." she croaked, furrowing her brow.
"Humour! That's a good sign. Hang on, I'll let you out."
Octavia held her hooves out in front of her. Slowly, her vision cleared. She could see her hooves. She touched one hoof to the other – a raggedy gasp entered her. Her sore eyes were hot, and tears were falling again. She bit her lower lip and, shakily, reached her hooves up to touch her face. She could feel her face, and her neck, and her chest and shoulders. She hugged herself and cried. She was alive.
A loud hissing noise and the left and right walls of the enclosure slid away, allowing the cold night air of the desert to sweep in. Octavia curled into a tighter ball and sobbed. "Oh, oh dear – um..." the stallion's voice fretted. "There there?" he said, half reassurance, half question. He reached out a hoof to pat Octavia on the head. He did so, once.
As he lifted the hoof up to pat her a second time, Octavia bit him on the fetlock, viciously, burying her teeth down past hair and skin and reaching muscle before releasing him and dashing through the other side of the enclosure. The stallion screamed.
The enclosure was a white sphere with two portholes on either side that were almost as large in diameter as the sphere was tall. Octavia hid herself low to the ground on the opposite side of the sphere, waiting, wiping her eyes with the back of her hoof and licking his blood from her lips.
"WHAT WAS THAT FOR!" the stallion roared.
Octavia growled and clacked her teeth together, trying to sound menacing. She spread her hooves out in the sand, ready to run in whatever direction to stay out of his reach. She was in the shadow of the sphere as outlined by flickering firelight. The sphere and the stallion were between her and a fire. Fire would keep the walking cacti away, and attract other creatures.
"I'm not going to hurt you!" the stallion shouted. "I'm the one who saved you!"
Octavia growled again. It was a low, gurgling sound in the back of her throat. She had never been good at hissing or shrieking like some of her brothers and sisters had been, and she had no wings to make herself look bigger.
"Ow..." he said, sucking air through his teeth. "That really hurt!"
Octavia crept around the base of the sphere, careful to stay in the shadow, and peeked around the side at the stallion. He was standing there, cradling his wounded foreleg. His foreleg was...
Octavia rubbed her eyes with her hoof, blinking several times. When she looked again, she still saw the same thing. The stallion's foreleg, just above the hoof, was glowing. It surged with yellow light, tiny will-o'-the-wisps and glittering dust pouring out from the bite she had chomped into him. When the surging stopped, and the light died away, he shook his foreleg, rolling the hoof on the fetlock, and then stamping the ground with the hoof.
Octavia ran behind the sphere again, shaking.
"There we go," the stallion said, stamping the leg a few more times. "Good as new."
"What are you?" Octavia called through the sphere, risking to lift her head to look through one side and out the other, then ducking back behind the white metal base of the sphere.
"Well..." he hummed a moment. "That's sort of a complicated question at the moment. The short answer doesn't make very much sense, I'm afraid, but it's short, so I'll just lead with it: I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord from another dimension. I fell through all of reality in a Nekkistani emergency medical pod I nicked from a prison ship orbiting a black hole. I'm... sort of amazing like that. And you are?" He took a step toward the sphere.
"Stay back! I'll bite you again."
He made an exasperated sound. "Oh, for pity's sake! I'm not going to hurt you! How can I prove to you I'm sincere?" He puffed for a few moments, his breath slowing. "Okay," he said. "You can talk, so you're obviously intelligent. We're both intelligent beings, we can discuss this. You're scared of me. That's been established. Why? Why are you scared of me?"
Octavia frowned. She drew her hooves in closer together and sat, looking down at her hooves, her ears flicking occasionally.
"Well?" the stallion asked again.
"You're bigger than me," Octavia said at last. "And you're an adult."
"Am I? Well that's a relief. I would have hated to regenerate as a juvenile of the species, I like being able to reach high shelves – it's always where all the best stuff is at! Yeah?"
Octavia snortled in spite of herself. "You're weird," she said. "And you don't make any sense."
"Oh, I'm an expert at not making sense. Dangerous thing, making sense. Does nothing but get you into trouble. Are you in any trouble? Is that why you're scared?"
Octavia looked down at her hooves again, furrowing her brow. "I don't know."
"Are there... adults trying to hurt you?"
"Ha!" Octavia snarled. She rubbed her right foreleg with her left hoof. Startled, she jumped back, staring at her right foreleg. She moved into the puddle of light at the middle of the sphere's shadow, firelight shining through the empty middle where she had been sitting. "What did you do to me!"
"Why? What's wrong?"
"NOTHING!" Octavia shouted.
"Then what's the problem?"
"No! Nothing is wrong with my leg! That's the problem! My scars! The... my leg. It... it healed funny, when I was little. It's not... What did you do to me?"
"Uh, no... no no! Nothing! I mean, well, yes, something. I healed you! I mean, the machine, I used – that is, you see, I'm brilliant, very, very clever, so, I sort of found a way to save your life – which you haven't thanked me for, by the way, but-"
Octavia jumped up onto the lip of the pod. "What did you do to me!" she shouted through the pod at him, tears again in her eyes.
"This!" he waved a hoof at the pod. "This device, it healed you. Did you see the energy, the light, that was on my arm just now? Where you bit me? That's the same sort of energy that this pod used to heal you. Well! I say the same, and, in a way it is, but really it's a little more complicated than that - semi-intelligent syntheo-symbiotic nanogenes channelling my bled-off regenerative energies would be more accurate, but you get the gist of it." He sniffed, shrugging. "But, you know..." He sighed nodded to himself. There was a long moment of silence. He made a clicking sound with his tongue. "You were dying," the Doctor said at last. "I did what I could. I'm sorry if I upset you."
Octavia wiped her eyes again with her hoof, frowning. "You are... really weird." She laid down on the seat in the middle of the "pod", keeping her eyes fixed on the stallion.
"Yep, that's me."
Octavia laid her head down on top of her forelegs, burying her muzzle under her hooves. "And you really aren't going to eat me?"
"Eat you? No!" he scoffed. "If I did that I wouldn't have anyone to talk to! And besides, I've got plenty of food here, came equipped with the pod, survival kit, 's got lots of food packets."
Octavia's guts rumbled. She sat up and glared down at her treacherous stomach.
"I've got plenty to share if you wanted some," he said, moving away from her. "I'll just be over here by the fire if you want any."
Octavia pulled her lips back from her teeth. She looked out into the dark expanses of the dunes. She stuck her nose in the air and sniffed. The chill night air carried the smells of sand, dust and death. Walking, shambling, skittering death. Her stomach rumbled again.
"Sorry, did you say something?" called the strange stallion. "Or was that your stomach?"
Octavia stood up and growled low in the back of her throat. She crept around the base of the pod and glared toward the fire. "Hey!" she said. "Those are mine!"
The stallion, the "Doctor", looked over his shoulder at her, holding Octavia's sun-goggles in his hooves. "Oh, these?" He spun them around his hoof by the strap. "Well, here, why don't you come over by the fire and I'll give them back, and you can have some of this food while you're here?" He waved a shiny packet with his other hoof.
Octavia narrowed her eyes to slits. "Throw them."
"What?"
"You just want to punish me for biting you. I'm not coming over there."
The Doctor tossed Octavia's sun goggles toward her. They landed half way to her with a thud in the sand. Holding the silvery packet with both hooves he tore the bibbly edge of the packaging with his teeth and tossed the opened packet half way between them as well. "Suit yourself. I'm not going to hurt you, either way."
Octavia looked to him, then down at the food, then back up at him. She made a dash for the food and the goggles, pausing only briefly to snap them up in her mouth and run back to her hiding place at the base of the pod. The Doctor didn't stir. He poked at the fire with a flimsy stick, and threw more bramble on the burning mass.
Octavia's ears stuck up. "Where did you get that wood?"
The Doctor turned to her. "It's not wood, it's brush. Found it yesterday when I got bored. Over there, about two minutes meander away. Couldn't go very far while you were here. Didn't know when you might wake up or if the pod might have needed prodding."
Octavia looked to where he pointed. She couldn't see past the light cast by the fire. "How long was I asleep?"
"Three days." The Doctor turned to look at her, smiling. "Glad to see you up and about."
Octavia didn't answer. She sniffed the open food packet. There was a hard, brownish-red bar inside. She licked it. Then she tore the package apart with her hooves and crammed the entire bar in her mouth, chewing sloppily with her mouth open, swallowing it down after only a few chomps, licking the package for any stray particles. Then she tried tearing at the silvery package.
"No-no-no! Don't eat the packaging!" The Doctor shouted, scrambling up to his hooves and taking a step toward her.
Octavia dropped the packaging and dashed to the opposite side of the pod.
The Doctor sighed. He returned to his fire. "Great..." he muttered.
After a few minutes he turned to grab another "hoof-full" of bramble. "AH!" he shouted, falling backwards when he saw Octavia stealing another food packet from beside him. Octavia jumped and dashed away, dropping the food packet. "Oh this is just silly!" he shouted. "Have I done anything to indicate I had hostile intentions? Anything at all? How much of a timid bunny rabbit are you?" The Doctor sighed.
"I'm not a bunny rabbit!" Octavia shouted, startling the Doctor again. She was on the other side of the fire from him.
"Apparently not." He tore open another packet and tossed it over near her.
Octavia hesitated, then took the offered food, eating it slower this time, chewing the processed food bar thoroughly.
"Here, this is your canteen, isn't it?" he set it down a little ways away from him. "I refilled it. Survival pack has an emergency supply."
Octavia stopped eating and looked at the Doctor from across the fire. "Why are you being so nice to me?"
"Why shouldn't I be?"
Octavia looked down at the food between her hooves and, after another moment of silence, started eating again. When she had finished, she licked the inside of the packaging for any crumbs she could find. Then, watching the Doctor as she moved, she walked halfway around the fire toward him. She laid down and drank from her canteen. "Did you need some?" she said, holding the canteen out by the strap.
"Yes, thank you." The Doctor got up and moved slowly the few steps toward Octavia, and extended a hoof. Octavia flinched slightly, but did not run. The Doctor took the canteen and poked at the lid with his hoof.
"Ugh," he said. Repositioning the flat of his hoof over the cap and twisting the cap while applying pressure. "Just about... there..." The cap dangled from the chain that connected it to the metal bottle, and the Doctor took a little swig. Then, touching his hoof to the cap, he laughed out loud, startling Octavia to her hooves. "Sorry."
Octavia settled down again.
"It's just – it's amazing! I want to pick up the cap, and it just adheres to my hoof!" He replaced the cap and gave it a twist. "And when I want to put it down, it just falls away! Brilliant!"
Staring at him, Octavia blinked once.
"Well, I guess it's all old hat to you. Thank you," he put the canteen on the sand between them. "But to me this is all quite new!" he continued. "I've only been in this body three days."
Octavia cocked her head to the side, furrowing her brow.
"Oh, well, I don't want to panic you again, but I'm an alien, I came from outer space, I only look like your species because that pod decided to make me look like the local population – probably homed in on you specifically because you were the only advanced animal life-form in the vicinity of the landing area. Sorry! By the way. For crashing so close to you."
"That was you? The fire from the sky?"
"Well..." he puffed out his cheeks... and released it. "Yeah. Again, sorry about almost landing on you."
"You landed on the monsters."
"Monsters?"
Octavia nodded but did not elaborate further.
"Hm. Good for me, then." The Doctor threw another clump of brush onto the fire. "So... what were you doing out here in the desert? Do you live out here? I saw a good chunk of the planet on the way down, looks fairly green elsewhere."
Octavia took a deep breath and exhaled heavily, looking at the fire. "What's an 'alien'?" she asked after another moment, not looking away from the fire.
"Oh... well, an alien is a being that is from a different planet than you, I suppose."
Octavia said nothing for several second. "What is a 'being'?"
"You know, a creature, a living thing."
"Oh. What's a 'planet'?"
"Oh, come on!" he said, making Octavia jump half way to a standing position, looking at the Doctor again. She frowned at him. "Sorry!" he whispered. "You have to know what a planet is. A world – a round ball of rock and dirt, the thing you're standing- er, sitting on!"
Octavia looked at the ground. "So, Equestria is a planet?"
"If that's the name of this world, then yes. No if 'Equestria' is the name of the desert or a country we happen to be in."
"Equestria is a realm – a union of small kingdoms and republics, ruled over by a single monarch."
"Well, that sounds rather like a country or empire to me. Not a whole planet. Are there countries and governments outside of Equestria? Other monarchies and republics?"
"Mm-hm," Octavia nodded enthusiastically. "There are thirty-two recognized foreign powers, and several more sparsely populated regions – I can name all of them if you like."
"Sure!" the Doctor said. "Go ahead, I'm listening."
Octavia started to name the other realms of the world and giving the basic facts of each one, and how they related to Equestria. There was the Kingdom of Trottingham, an island kingdom to the north east, a cold, rainy group of islands that had a long seafaring tradition and often traded with Equestria. South of Trottingham was the lands of griffons and hippogriffs. They had a number of kingdoms and principalities and republics and confederations which little Octavia listed in great detail, including their capital cities, their type of government, the titles of their heads of state and heads of government. She also listed their suspected military strengths and dispositions to each other and to Equestria and Trottingham.
Octavia continued listing adjacent territories and regions and nations, the lands of the zebra tribes, the towering city states of Saddle Arabia, where horses dwelt, and the lands farther east, where dragons, ponies, horses and all sorts of creatures all lived together in a vast empire that Equestria only heard of second or third hoof in stories and rumours.
"And where are we now? Is this Equestria?"
"Um..." Octavia looked off to the side. "In a way... These are the Badlands. It makes up the southern border of Equestria, but nopony really lives here. Not for a really long time."
"I see," the Doctor nodded. "I guess that would explain the really old ruins on the horizon." He gesture over his shoulder in the City's general direction, though it was too dark to see past the ring of light cast by the camp fire.
Octavia's ears drooped. "Yes," she nodded, looking at the fire. After a few more minutes, Octavia turned wide, pleading eyes up to meet his. "Doctor?"
"Yes?"
"Can I have some more of those food packages?"
The little filly was curled up under a thermal blanket from the survival kit, sleeping snuggled up against the Doctor and his own blanket. The Doctor was watching the stars, frowning. Strange stars rolled across the heavens in the shapes of constellations from his own universe. They were not the same stars, however.
The Doctor's ears perked at a noise just outside the ring of firelight. He had burned all the bramble, and so was left only with the dim flicker of the fuel tins from the kit. He looked into the darkness, squinting. At his side, the little filly was muttering and twitching under her blanket, rustling the empty food wrappers she had nested herself on top of after she had licked their insides clean.
The Doctor had warned her that she would give herself a stomach ache.
The filly kicked her hind legs under her blanket, whimpering and panting, her ears and forelegs twitching, her teeth gnashing and her eyes squinting tightly shut. The sounds from outside the ring of firelight resumed, the sound of clattering pebbles and rocks. At his side, the little filly's fevered mutterings became louder, and, every few seconds, the muttering formed words such as "No" and "Stop" and "Savart" and "Nacht". The Doctor turned his eyes away from the edge of the darkness surrounding them to look down at the little filly pressing her back against his side. Her hooves were kicking to her side, running in bursts, then flailing sporadically. Then rocks started to bubble up out of the sand.
Small white pebbles surfaced from underneath the fine grains and rolled in small circles. Some pebbles jumped and adhered to the bottoms of the filly's hooves, and then were propelled into the darkness as she failed her limbs. Some of the stones began to coalesce into a rough pyramid shape. Larger rocks rolled in from the darkness, spiralling and gimballing on the sand as the little pony muttered and fretted at the Doctor's side.
The sand was moving. Waves rippled through the sand in the firelight, rolling like the waves of an ocean, breaking on a shore of pebbles on the pyramid that became an island. Then the sand swallowed up the pyramid, forming a blob that shaped and moulded itself into the shape of a pony, a pony with a horn – a unicorn. A second sand figure appeared, a smaller one, a filly, without a horn. Then a flurry of sand tentacles burst out of the ground and tore the sand unicorn into pieces, the sand filly ran from the scene, falling apart after it left the area of the waving sand. The doctor heard the flesh-and-blood filly at his side muttered the accusation "you're dead", full of spite and spittle, followed by a growl. "You're weak... dead... s'no'more... Savart..."
Then something else started to grow out of the waving patch of sand. Something with eyes. Something with gnarled horns. Something with a mouth as wide as the Doctor was tall, full of teeth as long as the Doctor's leg.
"Wake up," the Doctor breathed, his eyes fixed on the seething apparition of sand. "WAKE UP!" he shouted, jumping to his hooves.
The filly's eyes snapped open and the creature collapsed into dust and sand grains, its outstretched arm and hand crumbling to a pile of dirt at the Doctor's hooves. The filly by his side leapt up and ran beneath the Doctor. She was panting, her head craning in every direction, turning around in circles, looking out to the darkness. She poked her head out from beneath the Doctor's chest, looking up at him. "What?!" she shouted. "What was that!"
"I... think... it's gone."
The filly stepped out from under the Doctor and walked around the fire.
"You were having a bad dream," the Doctor said. "I think... we both were."
The filly poked at a rock with her hoof, staring at it for a moment. Then she looked up at the Doctor. "You... have scary dreams too?"
"Oh yes," the Doctor said, his voice low and pointed.
"About... monsters?"
The Doctor chortled. "No," he shook his head. "I'm not scared of monsters. Monsters are scared of me. No, there are worse things than monsters to be scared of."
The filly stared at the Doctor, studying his face. She walked toward him, her eyes fixed on his. She sniffed in his direction, then cocked her head to the side, blinking. "My name's Octavia."
"Hello, Octavia!" the Doctor said, grinning broadly. "Very nice to meet you!"
Octavia narrowed her eyes. "You're weird."
"Oh yes." The Doctor confirmed. "Come on, we should get ready to get going." The Doctor sat down in front of the huge metal survival kit, opening it and pulling out a pair of folded backpacks. "These aren't the best for hooves, ergonomically speaking, but – make do and carry on! Work to be done!"
The Doctor fumbled with the zippers and gave one to Octavia, and began loading his own with supplies. Octavia loaded her pack with the remainder of the food packets and clean packets of water and little else besides her sun goggles. She slung one of the shoulder straps over her neck, took two steps, and tripped over the second should strap. Her face slammed into the loose sand as she toppled forward.
"Whoa! Easy now!" the Doctor helped little Octavia up. She spit sand and shook her head, blinking. "Here, let me help you." He showed her how to wear the back-pack.
"How am I supposed to reach things when this is behind my head?" Octavia walked around in a few tight circles, trying to reach the zipper with her teeth.
"Well, it's not really designed for quadrupeds, I'm afraid. But like I said, it's all we've got handy."
Octavia stopped spinning around and looked up at the Doctor. "'Handy'?"
The Doctor sighed. "All that we have 'on hoof', as it were."
"Oh," Octavia said, scrunching up her brow.
The Doctor struggled his pack on over his back and went through a mental list of the supplies they had packed. His ears swivelled about, startling him. Then he smiled, poking at his directional ears with a hoof. He turned his head in the direction his ears had been turned. Octavia was staring in that direction already, out beyond the ring of firelight. Her head was low, her ears were back and she was backing away toward him slowly.
The Doctor sniffed.
"It can't be," he muttered.
"Don't run," Octavia whispered.
The Doctor stayed still and let her walk backwards underneath him, half hiding her face behind his foreleg.
"They'll come up through the ground if you run," she continued.
"I know," the Doctor said, straining his ears. The slithering, rustling, spitting noises of the plants filled the darkness beyond.
"You've seen these before, haven't you? That's why you're alone."
Octavia's voice was so low and so quiet that if her head hadn't been pressed against the Doctor's leg, he may not have known she was speaking at all. "Yes."
"And... I am so sorry."
Little Octavia looked up at him. "Why?"
"Because... I brought these here – they come from my universe, from a place called Skaro. We call them Varga plants."
"I don't care," Octavia said, shaking her head. "Let's just leave – very, very slowly."
"Good idea."
They walked backwards from the fire. In a moment, they could see more writhing, spiny vines crawl and drag their way into the firelight. It was a very long, very slow march into the desert until they could no longer see or hear the carnivorous plants any longer. Then they turned and ran into the night toward the ruined city.
In the cool and dark of the night, Octavia was in her element. Her violet eyes dilated, her huge black pupils devoured the meagre light, her ears scanning the world around her of their own accord, her hooves easily found steady purchase on the moonlit sand and rocks. The Doctor was watching the skies.
"Are there a lot of ponies up there?" Octavia asked.
"Hm? Where?"
"In the sky," she pointed. "You came from there."
"Well... Technically I'm from another universe entirely. This sky is all new to me..." he said, trailing off.
"Oh." She did not ask what the word "universe" meant. "The sky is new to me too." She looked up at the twinkling stars the Doctor was staring at.
"Really?"
"Mm," Octavia nodded. "I grew up underground. I didn't like it."
"Understandable."
"I like the sky. It makes my stomach feel funny – all tingly, and makes my head feel all dizzy, like I'm going to fall up into it." She looked straight up and turned around in circles, then trotting and jumping in circles, eyes on the starry sky.
The Doctor smiled at the little skipping, twirling filly. Watching her, he almost tripped over a rock, and turned back to watch where he was going. His face soon grew more neutral, verging on serious. "So, Octavia, the Varga plants – those were the monsters my pod landed on?"
Octavia stopped twirling and came up alongside the doctor, trotting at an even clip. "Yes. We call them walking cacti. They're from the Dragon Wars."
"Dragons? You have dragons here?"
"Well, they were driven out of the Badlands – they don't nest here anymore, but they still migrate through here."
"I meant on the planet – we're talking about the same things, yes? Big scaly lizard thing with wings and the fire-breath, yeah?"
Octavia nodded. "Uh-huh. They're mean."
"Well, I'd imagine. Still I've met a nice dragon or two in my time."
"Really?"
"More or less. I remember this one time..." The Doctor trailed off and came to a stop. Octavia was no longer by his side.
She was standing several paces behind him, stone still. Her forehooves were spread apart and the front of her body was held low. Her eyes were wide and round, eyebrows pushed up nearly to her hairline, her ears flicking about in mad little stutter-stops. Her breathing was coming in tiny, quick half breaths through her parted lips. As her breathing became faster and shorter, her mouth opened farther, her teeth catching the moonlight. Then her lips formed a single, short, quiet word. "Run."
"What?" said the Doctor, quirking his head to the side.
"RUN!" Octavia screamed, bolting past him. The Doctor frowned, watching her as she fled.
Then he felt the rumbling beneath his hooves, the skittering of small rocks and sand grains across the ground, the shifting of the dunes. "Ah! I see! Yes. 'Run!' Excellent idea, Octavia!" He yanked his hooves out of the sand they were rapidly sinking into and ran after her. The little filly was too far into the near darkness to see, the sound of her pounding hooves drowned out by the roaring of shifting sand and stone. The Doctor tried calling out her name, but found his voice was totally lost in the sounds of the enraged desert.
As he had done all his lives, as every adventurer across time and space had done before him, he ran – galloping into the night as the ground beneath him shook itself into a fluid consistency. It was often said about the Doctor that he ran and never looked back. There were several things said about the Doctor that weren't entirely true.
The Doctor looked back over his shoulder as he ran.
The creature rising out of the ground was tall enough to blot out the moon and the stars. Its eyes, each large enough to drive a train through, cast a mucus-yellow glow across the desert before it. Its mouth was a cavern filled with pale green flames. The stone giant pulled one leg completely out of the dunes, its craggy body grinding and rattling, bits of shale falling off like scales.
"Magnificent!" the Doctor said before turning his eyes back around to front, galloping with all the speed he could manage, hearts thundering in his chest. The world was illuminated in flickering green light and waves of heat washed over the Doctor. Again turning, he saw a wall of green flame rushing toward him, licking at his tail and scorching his rear-hooves. "HOT! Hot-hot-hot-hot-hot!"
The wave of flame ebbed like the tide, plunging the doctor into near total darkness. He did not see the gigantic stone hand come crashing down around him. A cutting gust of sandy air, displaced by the giant's palm, slashed through the Doctor's coat, scraping hair and skin raw. His shoulder hit the ground first. He skid in the sand until his head slammed into the side of the giant's splayed fingers. Light exploded behind his eyes, swimming the world in multiple directions at once.
The Doctor coughed a mouth and nose caked with sand. His limbs flopped and flailed and the giant raised his hand back up into the air. The yellow-green light flooded over the Doctor once again. A burst of light popped a pony into existence beside the Doctor. His wobbly vision drifted upwards, burred and doubled he could make out the rough outline of the pony by the yellow-green light. She was looking up toward the giant.
"What...? Who...?"
"You're in a state, eh Doc?" the other pony said, putting her face down close to his.
Before he could focus on her face, something on her forehead started glowing, and then surged with brilliant blue light that popped them out of existence just before the giant's palm came crashing down again.
Twilight watched the giant from the top of a crumbling minaret on the edge of the City. When she saw the flash of the teleport she charged her own horn with energy and began counting down. "Four... three... two...one..." Minuette and the stallion popped into existence behind Twilight "Zero!" Twilight shot a bolt of energy into the keystone at the top of the minaret. The keystone glowed with energy and a shield fizzled to life around the city in a bubble of light that glittered for a moment and then faded to transparency.
The giant looked up toward the minaret and roared, green flame shooting from its mouth and crashing into the invisible shield around the city. The shield flickered and strained, fizzling. The giant stared straight at the minaret, its face a still, slack-jawed, blank expression.
After another few moments of vacant staring, the giant turned and lumbered off into the night and the desert. Twilight released her breath, sitting back down, hoof over her thundering chest.
Minuette leaned close to Twilight's ear and said: "The shield should hold-"
"AAH!" Twilight yelped. "Don't do that, Colgate!" she scolded, standing and facing the taller, bluer unicorn mare. She reached up a foreleg and wrapped it around her mentor's neck and shoulder, hugging her tight and nuzzling the top of her head against Minuette's jaw and chin, the side of her horn rubbing against Minuette's fuzzy blue cheek.
Minuette snickered and petted Twilight's streaky mane with a forehoof. "Bit jumpy, Twi?"
Twilight gave Minuette's chest a light punch. "YOU!" she accused. "You could have been killed!"
Minuette snortled and drew breath for a witty retort when the Doctor groaned.
"Ah, right," she said, turning toward the fallen stallion. "Help me with this lug, Twily. You know how Earth ponies react to teleportation."
Twilight and Minuette, between them, managed to lift the Doctor up with a foreleg over either of their backs and helped him down the spiral stairs of the minaret to the dusty city street below. "Who is he?" Twilight asked, struggling under the weight of the fully grown stallion.
Minuette guffawed.
"Colgate!" Twilight shouted.
The Doctor winced, Twilight having shouted almost directly into his ear.
"Oh! Sorry, sorry," Twilight whispered. "Are you okay?"
"I had..." the Doctor started. "I had... a friend with me... a filly... where...?"
"She ran into the city ahead of you, I lost sight of her, but she's on this side of the barrier, she's safe... um, safe-ish, anyway. Magog didn't get her."
"Oh good... What...?" the Doctor trailed off, made a noise that was exactly not like a hiccup, and slumped forward, his hind legs going slack.
"Whoa!" Minuette said, followed by another brief laugh. "Well, that's typical. His companion's safe so he passes out, expects us to carry him!"
"Ugh! Who is he?" Twilight said, repositioning his foreleg around her shoulders with a grunt.
Again, Minuette laughed. "Oh, if only you knew. Hm, let's just say a once and future old friend?"
"Colgate!" Twilight shouted, coming to a stop, causing Minuette to stagger as the Doctor's limp body nearly slipped out of her grip. "Cut out the mysterious time-pony nonsense! It's not cute anymore!"
"Alright, alight," Minuette surrendered. "Twilight Velvet, meet the Doctor – and, incidentally, the very stallion we've been waiting for."
"Wait... the Doctor? You mean... the Doctor? The one you're always on about?"
"The very same."
Twilight Velvet blinked her blue eyes repeatedly, staring down at the unconscious stallion. "I thought he'd be... I don't know... taller?"
"What are you two doing out here!"
"Oh, hello," Minuette said, turning toward the dark beige stallion. "Help us with this guy, Cabbie, I don't think Twily is up to it – no offence, hun."
Twilight grunted. "None taken."
"Who is this!" the stallion demanded, snorting loudly. His dark, bushy eyebrows furrowed down over his eyes in a piercing glare. "We don't have enough supplies for tourists!" He trotted down from a pile of crumbling brickwork that totally blocked a side-street off the main thoroughfare. His coat was tawny and closely shorn, but bristly. He wore a khaki vest and a pith helmet, and his face bore a five o'clock shadow and a permanent scowl.
"Calm down, Cabbie, he's part of Matron Ratchet's group, with one of the packages we've been waiting for."
"Finally," Caballeron sighed, his face coming as close to not frowning as it was able. "I have no intention of dying in this place."
"Package?" Twilight cast a glance at the Doctor's backpack, then at Minuette, then she looked at Dr. Caballeron. "What package? I thought we were waiting for a linguistics specialist?"
"That too, darling," Minuette said, nudging the unconscious stallion between them. "The Doctor here speaks every language known, and some that aren't."
"Bah!" Caballeron huffed, pushing Twilight out of the way to take up the Doctor's body with Minuette. "Nopony speaks every language! I hope his actual skills are not as overblown as your bluster, Colgate!"
Minuette only smiled.
Twilight lagged behind the other three, looking around at the darkened sandstone buildings, the empty doorways and windows, the innumerable black obsidian pillars that lined every street. "Should I stay behind and look for that little filly? She's probably terrified."
Caballeron gave a dry, mirthless laugh. Minuette glared at him. She looked back over her shoulder at Twilight. "No, hun, we should stick together for now."
"But, she's just a little filly, won't-"
"That filly is not just a filly," Caballeron spat.
"Cabbie!" Minuette warned. Her voice softening, she turned to Twilight. "Hun, have you ever been to an orphanage school?"
"Of course, I used to volunteer at the Royal Canterlot School every week."
"Well, Matron Ratchet's school is nothing like that – it's a... military school."
This caused Caballeron to snort and chuckle again.
Minuette ignored him. "That little filly will find her way to us soon enough, don't worry about her, hun."
"But-"
"Don't. Worry. Hun." Minuette said with stern enunciation.
Twilight made a pouty frown but fell into step behind them, sparing only the occasional glance toward the black, doorless doorways and deep, inky shadows. In these shadows she failed to see the small form of the grey filly, eyes glinting dimly in the moonlight, trailing them back to their camp.
Doctor Whooves:
The City of Pillars
By Double Deadline
"Time. Even mountains and stones bow before time. Time has a way of catching up with us all. But we still run."
~ Taurus Nebogipfel, Time and Again (Anno -110)
Chapter 2: Stone
Nameless City Ruins, Badlands
(Anno -27)
Twilight Velvet climbed the narrow staircase. The cool blue light of her horn cast dancing shadows along the ancient, crumbling sandstone passage. At the top of the stairs she stepped over the sill of the window and into the cold, coarse desert sand—the sand that choked the streets of the city, burying most of the buildings up to the second or third storey.
The city outside was bathed white under the light of Celestia's moon, and Twilight let her horn flicker out and paused to catch her breath and let her eyes adjust. The weight of the dozen full water-skins strapped to her back made her hooves sink into the sand almost to the top of her fetlocks. She trudged forward into the night, between the rows of looming black pillars and the tops of squat, decaying, sandstone buildings.
Unseen eyes, gleaming with purple luminescence in the moonlight, watched the white unicorn from the darkness. Tiny hooves moved with unnatural stealth over the stone roof as Octavia followed the over-burdened mare. The little grey filly's ears pivoted and turned in all directions as she stalked her prey.
Twilight stopped short and perked up her ears. She turned her head in several directions, her white and violet-striped mane swishing around her head and neck as her tail twitched from side to side in nervous flicks.
Octavia dropped to her knees and tummy, lowering her head below the edge of the roof.
The unicorn's heart was thundering faster the longer she stood there, listening, slowly sinking into the sand under the weight of the water strapped to her back. Octavia's heart beat slow and steady, her breaths coming seconds apart.
Overhead, a griffin swooped out of the darkness. Twilight's head snapped up at the rush of air as the armoured creature flew overhead in its patrol of the city. She made a quashed laugh and shook her head, slowing her startled breathing. She yanked her hooves out of the sand and plodded onward toward the temple at the centre of the city.
Octavia lifted her head and slowly scanned the skies, looking back toward the deeper shadows for several seconds. Then, she looked again to the skies, straining her ears. With a sigh, she looked down at the white unicorn, trudging off down the sandy street, tracking her. Octavia waited until the white unicorn was farther off before pushing herself to her hooves and following along the tops of half-buried buildings. The little filly jumped the narrow gaps between roofs with ease, landing in near silence other than a gentle skidding of sand against stone under hooves.
When Octavia reached a wider gap between buildings, she paused. There was a black pillar in the alleyway between the structures; in some places, these pillars were sprouting through the roof of buildings from the inside, but most were outside, reaching to about the second storey. The pillar in question was cracked at the top, a jagged, angular split, and Octavia trembled as she attempted to centre her vision at the space between the sides of the deep crack.
She shook her head, ears pressing back against her short black mane. She sank to her knees, pressed her hooves against her ears, shut her eyes tight, gritted her teeth and grimaced. "Ow-ow-ow!" she whispered, hissing and snorting as she shook her head a second time.
Her stomach growled loudly. She opened her eyes and they glowed red for an instant before returning to their natural purple. Her eyes refocused to the low light, glowing purple once more. She forced herself to her little hooves and sidled over to the edge of the roof, looking for the unicorn.
Taking a deep breath and rebalancing herself, she focused on the roof on the other side of the alley and pillar. She rushed the edge of the gap between buildings, leaping into the night air. Her hooves hit the top of the pillar and she kicked off of it, sending red and purple sparks from her hooves as she skipped off the black surface, chipping off shards of the smooth black stone. Octavia's hooves hit the roof and she skidded to a stop.
The sparks from the pillars still clung and crackled in her coat. She stomped her hooves as the red and purple sparks coiled around her legs. She bucked and hopped and slapped at her legs with her forehooves until the sparking ceased.
She coughed and trembled, the short hairs of her coat standing on end. Her head jerked side to side as she half fell to her haunches, gasping. She panted and looked back to where the pillar had been. Octavia blinked, getting back to her hooves. She returned to the gap and looked down. There was a circular depression in the sand where the base of the pillar had been.
Octavia's eyes began darting about, her sides heaving as her breathing sped up, her ringing ears pivoting in rapid stutter-stop.
She flinched and focused on the depression in the sand. The sand was shifting.
Something black and glinting pushed its way up out of the depression and slapped the surface of the sand. Then it began pulling itself out of the ground.
Octavia ran.
The city's central temple—what could be seen of it above the ever-encroaching sand—was a titanic structure visible for miles outside the city. Its chief feature was its dome, a lattice of limestone fitted with mica-glass panes forming an enormous, sectioned window with a flat lens oculus at its centre. The dome was fixed in an octagonal structure without windows that soared above the desert sand. The doorways to the temple were all buried deep beneath the sand, save one particularly tall doorway that had once served as a gate for processions. The very top of this doorway was still accessible above the sand, if one was willing to do a little digging.
Twilight ducked as she passed through top of the doorway into the temple, entering a wide gallery. She half slid, half walked down the slope of sand to the chamber floor, her hooves clacking on dusty marble as she reached the bottom. Now completely lost to the cool light of Celestia's moon, she lit her horn and started her way down the vast, echoing gallery, her hoofsteps resounding off the ancient walls and alabaster columns. The light of her horn cast angular shadows across ancient statues, their features worn down by millennia until they portrayed only the vaguest suggestions of ponies.
Lantern light glowed at the end of the gallery, shining from the tremendous central chamber. Twilight passed the final set of statues, their worn, eyeless faces staring into eternity, and came into the light. The chamber was round and massive with the translucent domed ceiling of cloudy yellow mica slabs high above, set in their limestone fittings. Over the countless ages, the limestone had begun to decay and became pockmarked and brittle, large stalactites appearing to ooze from the fixtures.
As Twilight's eyes adjusted to the brighter light of the wood-spirit lanterns she let the light fade from her horn. Looking up, she watched as a griffin guard climbed in through an enormous hole in the mica dome and spiral down toward their camp. The central chamber of the temple held a forest of towering black pillars, thicker than the largest pony from nose to tail, and standing in concentric rings moving out from the central alter in the middle, directly under the centre of the dome. Either by accident or design, there were several large gaps in the formations of pillars, creating clearings. It was in one such clearing, far from the centre of the chamber near the wall, close to the gallery of statues, that the expedition had made their base camp.
The camp consisted of a ring of tents surrounding a ring of tables and crates, surrounding a collection of low wooden pallets. At the very centre was a beacon, made of salvaged mica-glass slabs and lit with three wood-spirit burning lanterns. It was their principle light source, though it did not penetrate far into the indoor forest of pillars, and cast the expedition's base camp in an orange, dusky glow.
"Miss Velvet," one of the griffin guards acknowledged in a deep, scratchy voice as Twilight Velvet approach.
"Klaus," she nodded back to him. "And please, call me Twilight." Twilight levitated the water-skins two at a time off her back, another cloud of telekinesis untying and re-coiling the rope that had held them in place.
Klaus slung his halberd into its loop under his wing and took possession of one of the water-skins, hefting it up under his foreleg. "Miss Twilight," he affirmed. "Why don't you levitate the water here from the spring? It has to be less exhausting than carrying it here on your back."
"It's not, really," Twilight shrugged, a sheepish grin tugging at the corners of her mouth. Her striped straight mane was dusty and tussled, her white coat matted with sweat and grime, her sides heaving with exertion from her trek across the abandoned city. "Telekinesis is just like another set of muscles, but it bears all the weight down on my forehead," she gestured toward her horn with the tip of her hoof. "Imagine trying to lift a ton of grain with a bone sticking out of your head—that's what it feels like to lift something heavy with magic."
The two walked into the middle of camp, where another griffin was sitting beside the ring of pallets. "But I've seen unicorns lift huge boulders, gigantic crates, cannons, parts of buildings even," Klause continued. "Colgate lifted that fallen statue out of tonnes of sand just yesterday."
Twilight shrugged as she lifted the last water-skin off her back with her magic, floating it over to the second griffin. "True, and I could probably do all of those things too—it wouldn't kill me or break anything, but it would hurt. Colgate says I need to learn how to counterbalance magic in my body without giving myself magic-burn... which is like, um..." she tilted her head to the side.
"I think," the second griffin said, pouring water into a wooden bowl, "Corporal Klaus can learn about your pony magic after he's completed his duties."
"Yes, Sir," Klaus said, saluting the Lieutenant.
"Sorry, Lieutenant Pearl." Twilight blushed.
The Lieutenant rolled her shoulders and fluffed her wings, the griffin equivalent of a shrug. "You're fine, Twilight. Corporal, I want you to go down and check on Sergeant Pallas and the ponies—the Commander is going to want a combat readiness report when she gets back."
"Sir," Corporal Klaus saluted again, pivoting on a hind leg.
Twilight watched Klaus weave through the camp and into the forest of pillars beyond. She turned to Lieutenant Pearl as the latter began peeling the bloody bandages off of one of the wounded. The innermost part of the camp, clustered around the light of the beacon, was composed of low wooden pallets, piled with blankets, upon which the wounded and dying were lain. Not a one of the fallen griffins had a complete complement of limbs, and only a few of them had escaped having their eyes burnt out of their heads. Out of the forty griffins the expedition had begun with, only eight—including Commander Jabe herself—were still in fighting condition. Private Kern groaned as the Lieutenant peeled the bandages off his charred body. "We're almost out of bandages," she whispered.
Twilight looked toward one of the crates of medical supplies they had salvaged from the airship. "Maybe if we burned the crates we could boil the used bandages in water at the spring? Reuse some of them?"
"Maybe. It would be better if we could reach the ship." She began reapplying bandages to the Private's wounds. "Are your two unicorns supposed to have magic nonsense for sterilization or something?"
"I certainly don't know any spells like that," Twilight said quickly.
The Lieutenant paused and gave Twilight a look.
"No, I don't think Professor Colgate does either... at least, it's never come up... I'll ask."
"Thank you." The Lieutenant continued attending to her patient. "I think the private here had a pretty good chance. Comparatively speaking." Her eyes flashed over some of the adjacent pallets. "Other than that, I think Tonni might be the next most likely to recover, she might be able to fly out of here if we can keep infection out of her burr hole for long enough." The Lieutenant signed.
"How's the Doctor?"
"The little brown guy you brought in? Still sleeping. At this point, he'll wake or he won't."
"Thanks." Twilight turned toward her table of books and scrolls.
"Did you have a bath?"
"Sorry?" Twilight turned back to the griffin medic.
"When you were at the spring. Did you find time for a bath?"
"No time," Twilight sighed. "I need to get to work on these translations."
"Don't work yourself to death."
Twilight grunted and turned back to her books. She slung a saddlebag and a blanket roll over her back, and began filling her bag with books, scrolls and notebooks. Though she was on her last bottle of ink, there was no shortage of quills. She circled the camp to the opposite side of the central beacon from Lieutenant Pearl. Finding an unused pallet she hunkered down on the pile of tarps and blankets. Depositing her saddlebags beside her and unfurling her blanket over herself, she snuggled up and pulled her writing desk out of its custom sleeve in her saddlebag.
Levitating a quill-knife and a long griffin flight feather, she began dressing the end of the feather into a nib using quick, practiced cuts. Against the glare of the wood-spirit beacon in the middle of their camp, the griffins that still had eyes had loose blindfolds put over their faces to allow them to sleep. Occasionally they twitched and kicked, fever or pain rousing them to movement, straining against their bandages or their restraints.
Twilight no longer jumped or cringed at the sounds of bird-like keening or lion-like growling. She opened her notebook and her reference works and began transliterating word by painstaking word of text copied from the temple's inscriptions.
The sound of powerful wings made her cast her eyes up just in time to see three griffins leaving through the gap in the dome, high above. She watched the last of them squeeze through the narrow gap and disappear into the night, and as her eyes travelled back down, they lingered on the still, silent form of the Doctor, lying on his side, blanket pulled up to his jaw, his head pointing toward the beacon, his hindquarters pointing toward Twilight.
She turned back down to her translating, but after a few more lines, she sighed and turned to her saddlebag to dig through her books for a specific volume.
A loud bang made Twilight jerk her head up and drop her quill. She scanned her surroundings, eyes and ears swivelling. She spotted the Doctor, lying on his side, head pointing toward her, hindquarters pointing toward the beacon. He had somehow flipped himself around and was now lying on top of his blankets.
Twilight narrowed her eyes and slowly rose to her hooves, her blanket sliding off her back to the pallet. She took one step forward, stepping over her books and writing desk. The Doctor wasn't moving at all—his sides weren't even rising and falling to indicate he was breathing.
She took another step forward, her ears focused tightly on him, straining to catch any sound. She leaned forward—
"GHUUUUUUUUU!" The Doctor jumped bolt upright, gasping for air.
Twilight screamed and tumbled over, tripping over her writing desk as she attempted to flee. She kicked her hind legs in the air and squirmed around, getting her legs under her. She sat up and instinctively levelled her horn at the Doctor.
The Doctor was pounding on his chest with a forehoof. Twilight lifted her head, and raised her eyebrows. The Doctor continued pounding on his chest, his jaw levering open and closed until at last he belched.
Twilight jerked her head back in disgust at the gargling, wet sound, but her eyes widened when a bright, dusty yellow cloud of vapour trailed out of his mouth. It spiralled in front of the Doctor's face and circled his head before shooting up toward the ceiling, where it was absorbed into the round mica-glass centrepiece of the dome.
Twilight looked back down at the Doctor, who coughed and cleared his throat. "Oh! That is really much better! Ah, that's been stuck in my throat for days!" He stood up, kicking the blanked off his hind leg. He smacked his lips, frowning, and stuck out his tongue. "Bleh! That did not come up easily, did it?"
Twilight blinked. Then she remembered to breathe.
The Doctor wheeled around at the sound. "Oh! Hello, who are you then? Where am I?" He looked around himself, eyes dashing around as he panned his head about, taking in everything. "Whoa... love this architecture... We're underground, aren't we? Well, at least lower than the surface level of the sand. Temple, isn't it? Huge vaulted ceiling like that." He stared straight upward as he walked, but deftly stepped over an unconscious, burnt griffin wrapped almost entirely in bandages on the pallet beside him.
"Sort of reminds me of the Royal Palace of Peladon... or maybe the caverns of Voga... hm... well maybe Voga in the 40th century..." He turned back to Twilight and gasped. "Oi!" he shouted, running over to her, putting his face very close to hers.
Twilight squeaked and backed up, her hind hoof missing the edge of the pallet. She staggered backwards, straight into a table piled high with artefacts in various stages of categorization. She winced as her hindquarters bumped the wood and lowered herself closer to the ground, horn again pointed at the strange brown stallion pushing closer. Twilight whimpered. "Stay back!" she muttered.
"Oh my goodness!" he exclaimed. "You're a... unicorn!" His eyes went wide, and his grin stretched his mouth to its limit. He leaned down even closer, staring at her horn and pressing his face closer to it. He sniffed. "Doesn't smell like keratin, what are you made of?" He tapped Twilight's horn with the tip of his hoof, lowering his nose and sniffing it again.
"AAAAH!" Twilight screamed, her hoof shooting up to punch him square in the throat.
"GHH!" The Doctor staggered backwards, hoof clutching at his neck.
"MINUETTE!" she shouted as she dropped to the ground, backing under the table.
Brilliant light blazed and Minuette appeared beside the table, her horn burning with furious energy. "Twilight! Where are you? What's wrong?" Her eyes fell on the Doctor, one hoof pressed against his throat, coughing and gagging and choking for breath. "Oh my gosh! Doctor!" She ran around the table, and started pounding the Doctor's back. "Are you choking, Doctor? What's wrong?"
The Doctor shook his head. He tried to mouth something, but only a low rasping came out.
"Oh sweet Goddess! You're choking!" Minuette said, failing to notice the Doctor's head waggles. "Don't worry, Doctor, I've got this!" She moved behind him and, rearing up on her hind legs, draped herself over his back, wrapping her forelegs around his torso—mounting him in the proper position needed to compress his barrel and squeeze an obstruction out of his wind-pipe, had there been an obstruction. Minuette squeezed the Doctor's body, the effort lifting his fore-hooves off the ground and making his eyes bulge.
The Doctor wheezed and coughed and shook his head in frantic motions, but Minuette squeezed again, and the Doctor made the same noise as a broken accordion.
Catching her breath, Twilight's face shifted from panic to confusion, until she snorted a laugh, shaking her head at the scene before her.
"STOP!" the Doctor finally managed to shout, smacking Minuette's hooves away. She let go and he dropped back down to his hooves and shrugged Minuette off of him. He took a moment to catch his breath, panting.
"What's wrong, Doctor? Are you okay?"
"No!" he shouted. He spent several more moments panting before he said "She punched me in the throat!" and pointed an accusatory hoof down at Twilight.
"Twili!" Minuette dove down to Twilight, both forehooves reaching out to embrace the smaller unicorn under the table. She nuzzled Twilight's mane briefly before pulling her head back and assessing her. "What happened?"
A look of disgust spread over Twilight's face. "That stallion was touching my horn! And sniffing it and—and—and I sort of punched him."
"What?!"
"Well, I..." Twilight stuttered.
Minuette stood up, gritting her teeth, eyes tightly closed. "Doctor...?" she growled. "Is this true?"
"I think..." the Doctor managed, still panting and coughing. Walking up behind Minuette, he said, "I think we all need to calm down and—"
Minuette's hindlegs shot up, bucking the Doctor in the face.
Sheen Goldenclaw circled the area again, gliding down lower, closer to the ground. His eyes focused on a small area between two of the larger buildings, where shadows were moving in the moonlight.
He flapped down to street level and unslung his halberd. "H-hello? Identify yourself!" he called into the dark alleyway. His eagle eyes dilated until his pupils were the size of plums. There was a wingless figure standing in the shadows. "Show yourself!"
The figure quivered, stumbling to the side and righting itself. It shambled forward a single step.
"That's right, come into the light," Sheen commanded, fluffing out his feathers and wings, puffing himself up, making himself look bigger than he was. His claw gripped the staff of his halberd tightly, axe-head raised up, ready to strike. "This city is now under the jus—under the jurisdiction of the Holy Halcyon Empire!"
The figure in the shadows took another heavy step forward, limping, its left foreleg stiff and unbending. It groaned.
Sheen took a step back, readjusting his grip on his weapon.
The creature took a step into the moonlight. Its body was a matte black, pocked and pitted and porous. Its black, empty eye-sockets began to glow red as it trudged toward the griffin. It was a bulky black pony, without horn or wings, made entirely of stone—and yet, it moved with the suppleness of flesh. The exception was its left foreleg, which was rigid and dragged in the sand as it moved.
Its mouth fell open and sparking red liquid dribbled out, along with a gurgling, suffused moan. There was a crack running across the top of its head, a jagged, angular split, running from the top of the left eye socket to its missing left ear. The split was large enough to allow a talon to pass through without touching the edges.
"Mother Siris preserve us!" Sheen gasped.
The creature shambled toward him. Its eyes were sunken pits of red fire, "Ghaaahahaaaaa... shaaaquuuu... maaah-raaaa...!" it hissed. "Shiiiiiiruuuuuush..." Its shambling became faster. Red flickering light, a red, glowing drool, began falling from its mouth.
"STAY BACK!" Sheen shouted. He roared and flapped his wings, raising his halberd higher.
The creature was undeterred. It shambled closer, still hissing "Shirussss!"
Sheen chopped down with his halberd, hitting the stone pony creature in the shoulder. The creature tumbled sideways, kept upright only by its ridged leg propping it up as the damaged limb dug into the sand under the weight of the blow.
A blast of red energy spewed from its mouth and bathed Sheen Goldenclaw in blood-red fire. His burning feathers flew in every direction, and his blackened bones fell into a pile on the sandy street.
Octavia licked the inside of the food wrapper, savouring peppery seasonings and savoury, oily flavours. Sighing, licking her lips, she rolled over onto her side and rubbed a hoof over her belly.
Her eyes drifted skyward, above the temple. The Mare in the Moon was glaring down on the world. Octavia's eyes drifted back down to the temple itself, and the cold moonlight that bathed the temple walls in a chalk-white sheen. Octavia waited.
Ears twitching, she looked up in time to see three griffins leaving the top of the temple, high above the sandy streets. She sat up in the shadow of the weather-worn pony statue, stuffed the food wrapper back in her saddlebag, and slung the saddlebag over her back. She didn't get up, but watched the griffins wheel in the sky as she waited. She licked the last of the savoury flavour off her lips.
When the soldiers were out of sight, she got to her hooves and climbed down from the high dais in the middle of the broad, empty area adjacent to the temple. She dashed across the sand to the temple wall and dove for the triangular entryway she had seen the white unicorn enter earlier.
Safe in the shadows of the building's interior, she caught her breath and let her eyes adjust to the low light. Then she set off down the sloping sand to the marble floor. Her hooves made no noise as she stepped cautiously down the dusty gallery. Outside, the statues were worn down to nubs—roughly hewn slabs in the overall shape of ponies. Here, some of them still had the remains of faces. She could see the demarcation between hooves and fetlocks. She could see their necklaces and sashes, caved into stone countless generations ago. There were no unicorn statues, no pegasi statues, only ground ponies like her. Ground ponies who had once walked the same stone floors.
Octavia was silent as she crept into the light of the central chamber. The light flickered through the forest of pillars, making shadows quiver and reach.
She stayed by the archway and looked up at the underside of the huge dome, at its gaps and the stalactites hanging from the limestone spider web. She dashed toward the light, weaving between the thick black pillars, never touching them.
She could hear voices. She froze.
When the screaming started, she dashed back several pillars and ducked low to the floor, hooves spread out, ready to bolt in any direction.
"MINUETTE!" came a shriek.
There was a flash of light that made the back of Octavia's mane stand on end. Then there was more shouting.
Octavia circled around, through the pillars to get a better vantage. The blue unicorn was there: hitting the Doctor, pounding him on the back. He coughed and retched with pain, and then she grabbed the Doctor and was squeezing the life from him, pulling his forehooves off the ground.
"STOP!" he shouted. She let him go, then ran to a pony hiding under the table.
Octavia pressed closer. The hiding pony was the same white unicorn she had followed through the city to the temple.
Then the blue unicorn bucked the Doctor in the head, knocking him over.
"Sweet Celestia, Colgate! Did you kill him?" The white unicorn rushed out from under the table.
"Probably not," the blue unicorn shrugged. "Are you okay?" She put a forehoof on the other mare's cheek. "He didn't...?"
"No, I mean... he did touch my horn—"
The blue unicorn kicked the Doctor in the shoulder.
"Colgate!"
The blue unicorn grumbled, but didn't kick him again.
"I'm fine," the white unicorn said, putting a hoof against the taller unicorn's cheek and turning the other's head to look at her. "Really. And thank you. I'm sorry for shouting your real name like that," she whispered.
"You were right to do it. Never be afraid to call me if you're scared, Twilight." The blue unicorn pressed her lips against the shorter mare's mouth. The white unicorn, Twilight, tilted her head up and the side to better accommodate the kiss, leaning into it, one foreleg encircling the blue mare's shoulders.
Octavia made a disgusted face watching the adults engaging in their mushy, sloppy kissing—as adults were wont to do when they thought nopony else was watching.
The blue unicorn pulled away and pressed a cheek against the side of the other mare's head, stroking her lavender and white-striped mane with a free hoof. "Let's get some rope to tie him up."
Octavia backed away, out of the camp, further into the shadows.
The Doctor's eyes fluttered open. "Ugh... what in the blistering hells...?" The Doctor winced, gritted his teeth, and struggled against the ropes binding his legs together. After a moment of struggling, he relaxed his body and closed his eyes again, groaning.
"Hello again, Doctor," Minuette said. The Doctor opened his eyes to look in the direction of her voice. She took a sip of water from her canteen. "Thirsty?" she offered.
"Yes, please," he croaked. She floated the canteen over to his mouth and allowed him to drink for several seconds. When he nodded, she pulled the canteen away from his mouth.
He swallowed and caught his breath. "How long was I out?"
"Before or after you molested my little Twilight?"
"Molested!" The Doctor jerked his head up and whimpered in pain, setting his head back down gently. "What did you do to me?"
Minuette stood up and examined the Doctor's head with a delicate hoof and a sceptical eye. "You'll be fine—Time Lord or no, you still have the thick skull of an earthie in this universe."
"Hm," the Doctor hummed, his brow furrowing. He tugged at his restraints again. His forelegs were tied together from fetlocks to elbows, his hindlegs were tied together from fetlocks to hocks, and both his fore- and hindhooves were connected by a short rope that left him very little play to move his limbs.
He looked up at Minuette. "I don't think we know each other well enough for me to be tied up on your bed, Miss Talking Blue Unicorn."
Minuette settled down next to the Doctor on the pallet, her face hovering over his, her voice hushed. "It's not my bed. And I don't think you know me at all."
"Which gives you the advantage, it seems, as you obviously know me."
"Oh." Minuette poked the Doctor's shoulder. "I think there are a few things that give me the advantage in this situation. Where did you park the TARDIS?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"Survival. Right now you and your TARDIS are my best chance to get Twilight out of here alive."
"Not a very good bargaining strategy – laying all your cards on the table like that."
"I'm not trying to negotiate, Doctor. I'm asking for your help... Despite my better judgement, that is. I've seen what happens to half the creatures you try to help. The fact is, I just don't have any other choice at this point."
The Doctor's eye drifted down to the pallet and blankets he was lying upon. "She's special to you? Your friend?"
"Twilight? Yes," Minuette breathed. "Which is why," she said in a louder tone, "if you ever touch her in an inappropriate way again, I'll kick you much harder and in a place far less pleasant for a stallion."
He locked eyes with Minuette. "Yeah, understood—but really, okay, understand: I've only just arrived on this planet, I don't know exactly what is and is not appropriate equine behaviour. I was only curious." He blinked and looked away. "I've never even seen a unicorn before today..."
"So this is your first pony body, then? I mean, you only just arrived in this universe?"
"Well, 'just arrived' is a relative term, I—hey, do you think you could untie me?"
"No, keep talking. You were about to tell me where you parked the TARDIS?"
The Doctor grunted and closed his eyes, struggling at his restraints.
Minuette continued, "I searched your saddle bags. You had a few bits of alien technology, but no TARDIS key, no sonic screwdriver, no psychic paper, not even a banana. And you were coming in off the desert. So... you know what I think?"
"You're... going to tell me anyway, so you might as well just say."
"I think you've lost the TARDIS again. But you know it's somewhere nearby—otherwise, how could you understand me? Your TARDIS is translating for you."
"Oh! Yes, very good," the Doctor grinned, opening his eyes. "You are a clever one, aren't you?" He nodded at Minuette, his bonds forgotten. "Still though—absolutely ridiculous! I never lose my TARDIS." He sniffed in indignation. "Just... I mean, 's never happened before."
Minuette leaned her head back and made an incredulous quirk of her eyebrows. "Pompeii with your friend Mel; Duruga XVI and the incident with the psychic weasels; Calcutta and that farce with the Emerald Tiger entity—all incidents of you losing your TARDIS. And that's just the stories I believe and that I can recall off the top of my head. Do we really even need to mention the Thomas Brewster affair?"
"Crikey, you are well informed."
"You tell stories when you get drunk. Half of them contradict the other half, but..." Minuette closed her eyes and shook off the notion. "The point is; I know where your TARDIS is. Now that I know for a fact you don't know, you're going to do what I say."
"Oi! How do you know 'for a fact' that I don't know where it is?"
Minuette pressed her face closer to the Doctor's, causing him, on reflex, to lean his head back as far as he could. Minuette's eyes bored their gaze into his eyes. "I know you, Doctor Schmidt," Minuette growled.
The Doctor was silent for a moment. "What?" he frowned.
"Doctor Johan Schmidt." She pulled her face back from his. "It was the alias you used to introduce yourself when we first met—by my perspective, at any rate."
The Doctor's vision drifted off again. "Hm."
"You can call me Colgate by the way. Not my real name, of course, but it's the one you gave me."
The Doctor pursed his lips to comment, but stopped as his ears perked at a rumbling thrum, echoing through the floor. The thrum repeated, a deep, low pounding. "What is that?"
"Damn." Minuette stood up and looked up toward the dome. "Here's the deal, Doctor: we find your little friend, find the TARDIS, you take Twilight and I away from here, we all live long enough to regret ever coming here."
"And the rest?" The Doctor gestured with his chin to the closest wounded griffin.
Minuette shrugged. "Save them if you can, but they're not part of the deal. Twilight is the priority."
"I don't make deals under duress."
Minuette stomped her hoof and snorted.
The Doctor turned his eyes to where she was looking. A stream of griffins were coming in through a hole in the dome.
"No time," she grumbled. "I'm just going to trust you, Doctor. Your name is Doctor Time Turner, you're a member of the earth-pony tribe. Don't mention that you're an alien. You are fluent in every pony language. Do you understand?"
The pounding coming through the floor was growing louder, more vigorous and frequent, the slamming noises overlapping in haphazard bursts.
"Untie me," the Doctor said in level tones.
"Do you understand!" she yelled through clenched teeth.
"Yes! Untie me!"
The knots untied themselves, sparkling with blue energy, and coiled on the pallet beside him.
"Are we interrupting anything, Professor Colgate?" the griffin in gold armour asked as she touched down.
"Doctor Time Turner was a bit muddled after his accident, but I'm confident he is more lucid now, Commander. Did you find the filly?"
"No," the commander said, observing the Doctor as he stood up and rubbed his fetlocks. "Was this pony able to tell you what happened to the rest of the relief team?"
"We hadn't—"
"They're dead," the Doctor interrupted, cutting Minuette off. "I'm sorry. Octavia and I were the only survivors."
Commander Jabe scratched her talons against the stone floor in a reflexive twitch. "Unfortunate. But not entirely unexpected. Unicorns tend to die rather easily when they step outside their gilded palaces."
Minuette cleared her throat. "Indeed we do," she said in cold, even tones. "The matter remains, however, there is still one foal left, somewhere in the city, if it comes to that. But there still might be something the Doctor can find in the mural room."
Jabe regarded the Doctor, looking down her beak at the brown stallion.
"Hello, there!" the Doctor offered. "My, you are a beauty, aren't you! Lovely plumage! Razor sharp beak—and such powerful wings! I bet you could lift a rhino off its feet!"
Minuette punched the Doctor in the shoulder.
"Ow! Again with the hitting!"
"He's at least an observant little thing, I'll give him that." Commander Jabe repositioned and refolded her wings, feathers puffed out, her head turning from one side to the other, beak in profile to the Doctor and Minuette. "It will be interesting to see how he stands up to Doctor Caballeron's translating skills."
"What... if I may have permission to ask..." the Doctor hesitated, looking up at the Commander with his head lowered.
"You may," Commander Jabe gave the Doctor an approving nod.
"What is it, General—"
"Commander," she interrupted. "I am Commander Jabe Razorwing, of the 5th Century of the 17th Legion of the Holy Halcyon Empire"
"My apologies, Commander. But what is it, exactly, which requires my translating expertise? Something important—vital even—to our mission here?"
"You could say that," the Commander said, looking at the Doctor with one of her large, eagle eyes. She turned to look at the two ponies with her other eye. The pounding in the floor started up again, louder and faster. "Since it sounds like the evening attack has started down below I think you'd better take him there. Professor Colgate, see if he can help Caballeron with his puzzle."
"Attack? What attack?" The Doctor wheeled on Minuette, eyes wide. "It sounds like digging or—are we under siege?"
The Commander gave a snort of laughter. "This should be interesting. Still, I'm going to be in my tent." She addressed the latter to all present, including her griffin soldiers. "I want everyone who has already completed three patrols tonight to catch a few hours sleep, and everyone else to get out there and find that filly!"
"Aye!" came a multitude of griffin voices speaking in unison.
"Corporal Jessop? Have you seen Private Goldenclaw? None of the others have seen him since moon's zenith."
"Come on, Doctor." Minuette guided the Doctor away from the griffins and into the rows of tents.
The Doctor followed, though his head, and then only his ears, remained fixed on the griffin commander as he turned and followed the unicorn, until they were out of earshot.
"No, Commander," Corporal Jessop reported.
As he walked away with Minuette, past the rows of tents and into the forest of pillars, he did not hear the Commander's reply, but did hear her talons scraping against the stone floor.
The Doctor looked ahead at his guide as they weaved through the black stone pillars. The Doctor stopped. "Colgate?" he said. "Or whatever your name is."
Minuette stopped but did not turn around. "What?"
"What are these? I could see these from miles away, up in the city. They're down here too? But bigger? Or... or they're all the same size and the ones outside are just mostly buried in sand. What's the point of them?" He tapped the pillar with an explorative hoof.
"Nopony knows," Minuette said, turning to face the Doctor. She looked at him just in time to see him licking the pillar.
"Bleh!" he said.
"What is it?"
"It's stone."
Minuette was silent. She glared at him and sighed.
"No, wait..." he smacked his lips. "Carbon... Carbon-silicate... hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus... some interesting trace elements: potassium, sulfer, sodium, chlorine, magnesium... zanium? Zanium-chlorite... Zanium-helicon-chlorite—that's bazoolium... mm... and something else, something I've never tasted before... a monocrystalline structure on a polycrystalline construct..."
"Yeah, Doctor, I'm not a geologist and I'm pretty sure real geologists don't lick things to tell their atomic composition."
"What are these used for? There have to be theories, legends, hypotheses, myths about them?"
Minuette made an exasperated sound and looked at the floor. Her ears twitched at a thunderous rumble of slamming noises from far off and away. "Can we walk and talk—I really want to get back to Twilight and make sure she's okay." She turned and started off toward the catacombs again without waiting for his reply.
"Wait... wait-wait-wait!" the Doctor said, running around the pillar. Then he ran around the pillar beside it, and then the one beside that. "There are inscriptions at the base of these!"
Minuette stopped. "Yes. We've not been able to translate them. All we know is that each one is different."
"'Will anypony remember us?' 'This is the end.' 'How can they still be burning?' 'Why does it still hurt?' 'Why can't they leave us alone?' 'What will happen to us?'" the Doctor read off several inscriptions, running between them, around them, touching each one in turn and drawing his hoof in the direction the inscription faced. He ran over to another pillar. "'I can't feel my' and then it's cut off with a dash or something. Hm."
"Of course... of course you can read them," Minuette said to the floor, chastising herself. "Okay, Doctor," she turned to face him. "What do they mean?" she said to his receding hoofsteps. "Doctor?" She set off in the direction he was trotting, through the pillars, toward the centre of the chamber floor. "Doctor! Don't go that way!"
"All the inscriptions are facing a single point, all of them are positioned on the sides of their pillar that face that point, they radiate outward around the area under the centre of the dome, maybe all the pillars in the city do likewise, you just haven't been able to see the inscriptions because they're buried under the sand! Whoa..." The Doctor came to a sudden stop.
Minuette reached the stone ring at the heart of the temple, at the centre of the forest of pillars under the dome. She looked around her until she spotted the Doctor examining a statue. "Don't cross the granite ring on the floor, Doctor."
At the centre of the room was a gigantic raised platform, an altar, laid out with gold and silver candle holders and blocks of multicoloured marble, at the centre of which stood a towering stalagmite pointing toward the central oculus of the dome. Around this stone platform was an area of red stone. There were lines of gold dividing the red stone slabs and radiating outward from the altar like beams from the sun, the ring of polished granite surrounded the red and gold from the rest of the chamber floor. Around this ring, going outward as far as the distant walls, in clumps and clusters, the pillars stood, their inscriptions all facing the altar.
"Why not?" the Doctor asked, standing on the smooth stone ring.
"Because he did." Minuette pointed with a hoof. The statue, an earth-pony dressed in the uniform of a Neighpoleonic soldier, had stepped one forehoof beyond the granite ring. His face was a mask of abject horror, the rest of his body leaning back from that hoof.
"Interesting. But... maybe not quite so obvious as all that? Maybe just a fanciful warning to keep out?"
"That's what Professor Jasmine and Private Avery thought too." She pointed further down to where a cluster of statues stood, just inside the smooth, mottled gray band in the floor. There, on their sides, with limbs and bodies cracked and in some places shattered, were the stone remains of a griffin, still wearing his gold armour, and a pegasus with a curly mane, now made of stone. "When the Professor started to turn to stone she tried to fly away but... And then Private Avery tried to save her from falling by flying in and not touching the red stones but it looks like no matter what, if you cross the gray ring... it gets you."
The Doctor stepped off the gray ring onto the safe side, away from the red stones bordered in gold, and walked around the edge to get a closer look at the broken statues. "What gets you?" he muttered, squinting for detail at the pony and griffin statues. The pounding beneath them was making tiny pebbles on the red stone slabs, parts of the broken statues, shudder and skitter about with the vibrations of the blows.
"The altar," Minuette said. "It's some sort of defence mechanism. Around the other side there are statues of all sorts of previous visitors to the city, from just about every era."
"Hm..." The Doctor laid down on the granite and brought his face as close as he could to the demarcation between the granite and the gold outline. He hummed again and scooted back, examining the polished granite itself – licking it. The pounding in the floor intensified once again.
"Please, Doctor, we need your help translating something in the control room below."
"This isn't really a temple, is it?" He stood up. "It's a weapons facility, isn't it?" the Doctor said, meeting Minuette's eyes. "Some last grand effort by a long dead race?"
Her frown lessoned in intensity the longer the Doctor's sad, penetrating gaze bored into her own. "How did you piece that together?"
"Just a feeling, really... a civilization under siege, building weapons of unimaginable power into their cities as a final act of desperation. Terrible, mad schemes, mutually assured destruction, but buoyed up by the desperate hope that something, anything, will survive when the dust settles? I know what that feels like. The words carved into these pillars—they're not the laments of the dead, they're the pain of the survivors..." The Doctor heaved a sigh.
"They're—" Minuette broke eye contact with the Doctor. "You've mentioned your homeworld before. Will mention it... I'm sorry."
He looked up at Minuette. "Me too." The Doctor's smile belied the sorrow in his eyes. "Ah." He stood up and shook his head, as though shaking out his mane. "Below, yes. Where all the pounding is coming from. Lead on, Colgate. Come along! Allons-y!" The Doctor started off at a gallop, away from the central altar.
"Doc-! Doctor!" Minuette shouted after the receding brown stallion. She sighed. "Wrong way..." She set off after him.
Sparks crackled off the magical barrier as it was struck by stony fists, and the keystone at the centre of the room sparked and popped with every strike. Twilight jumped, a tiny squeak escaping her lips, and Doctor Caballeron's ears twitched but he did not otherwise react to the assault.
Sergeant Pallas' eyes never left the barrier, his muscles tense and his claw tightly gripping the shaft of his spear. A crude compression explosive was lashed to its head in case the stone creatures finally shorted out the keystone.
The mural room was a half sphere with smooth obsidian walls and a mosaic floor of coloured tiles, swept clean of the sediment of eons by the archaeologists—which numbered four now, if their student assistants, Twilight Velvet and Clara Netta, could be considered such.
Otherwise, there were only two archaeologists left alive, Professor Colgate and Doctor Caballeron. Clara, a young earth-pony with a maple leaf cutie mark, was on the periphery of the room, sketching out the patterns in the floor mosaic. Doctor Caballeron was pouring over his notes and scrolls at the central dais, beneath the unsteady glow of the keystone. Their sole griffin guardian, Sergeant Pallas, stood in front of the sagging archway with the barrier crackling in its frame—their only shield against the clamouring, two-legged stone monsters.
Twilight was standing at the central dais, where books were scattered across the round, raised platform. The dais itself was covered in carved symbols, icons, letters, and characters from dozens of extinct or nearly extinct languages—some bearing similarities with Zebrabrian or High Draconic or any of half a dozen ancient Haysian languages, but none of them fully known or recorded, and some of them completely outside any of the references they had brought with them from the university.
Twilight jumped as the keystone sparked again at the monsters' pounding. Except for exceptionally hard blows, the banging became just background noise after a time, white noise like the pounding surf.
The creatures had no mouths, no eyes, no faces of any kind. They were walking rubble piles with two arms, two legs and, in some cases, a lumping of irregular stones between their shoulders that gave them the semblance of heads.
Sometimes the creatures pounded on the barrier until their arms broke and shattered. When this happened, they would slam their bodies into the barrier until their bodies completely shattered and they stopped moving, and other stone creatures would clamber over the rubble to pound on the barrier in their place. When the corridor became choked with the rubble of shattered stone monsters, there would be a break in the assault as the creatures silently cleared away the remains of their fallen comrades. Then they would regroup somewhere deep within the bowels of the catacombs before resuming their frenzied efforts to breech the magical barrier, seeking access to the curved black room with the circular dais at its centre.
"Miss Velvet!" Caballeron barked.
Twilight's head snapped forward. "Yes!" she squeaked. She cleared her throat. "Yes, Doctor Caballeron?"
"What in the name of Celestia's mane do you expect to accomplish by staring at the specimens instead of your work?"
"Sorry, Doctor Caballeron, I was just—"
"Just nothing! Now, I need you to cross-reference these Zebrabrian words with medieval Fancy—from both the Whisper Dark and Cosmic Dance lexicons." He scooped up a stack of loose papers with both hooves and plopped them down across the dais in front of Twilight. "We're actually starting to get somewhere on canto three. If this keeps up we should be able to translate the entire set of Galvonic Tablets when we get home."
"Yes, Doctor Caballeron."
"Don't get ahead of yourself, Cabbie," said Minuette as she entered through the archway opposite the one under assault. "We have to survive first."
All the ponies present turned to look at the new arrivals; Sergeant Pallas, meanwhile, continued to watch the stone creatures besieging the barrier.
"So grumpy!" the Doctor scolded, coming up behind Minuette. "Is it me or is she just the grumpiest unicorn you've ever met?" He giggled a bit, suppressing his tittering laugh.
"You know, I think that's very close to the first thing you ever said to me back when we first met, Doctor," Minuette said. "From my point of view, that is." She shrugged.
"Hm. Well, something to be said for consistency's sake, at any rate."
"Ah, your translator has stopped his useless lounging about, I see, Colgate," Caballeron said, grinning.
"Oh! Hello!" The Doctor trotted over to Doctor Caballeron, while Minuette put a reassuring hoof on Twilight's shoulder, leaning down to whisper in her ear.
The Doctor said brightly, "I think we met briefly on the outskirts of the city before I passed out—I'm the Doctor! Now, I understand you need some help translating some ancient text down here—oh! Hello! What's this now?" He ran past the griffin sergeant to the pounding, walloping stone creatures. "You're the ones making all this noise, I see." He pressed his face close to the barrier, ignoring the fact that it surged and strained against the creature's violent assaults. As the Doctor watched, the creature slammed into the barrier with sufficient force to shatter its shoulder, its thick, stony arm falling to the floor. The keystone behind the Doctor sparked and sputtered violently with the impact against the barrier field. "They don't seem to have much of a sense of self preservation, do they...?" the Doctor trailed off, furrowing his brow.
Caballeron's frown deepened and he shook his head. "You have the Prench accent of a peasant." He turned back down to his own work. "If your translator cannot even speak Prench correctly, Colgate..." he trailed off, picking up his pencil between his teeth.
Twilight cocked her head to the side, then turned to Minuette and drew breath for a question.
"He's not speaking Prench, Doctor," Clara Netta interjected.
Minuette nodded. "She's got a point, Cabbie."
"Yeah, sounds like he's speaking Equestrian to me," Twilight said, puzzled.
Caballeron spit out his pencil. "Of course he's speaking Prench!" he roared, throwing his head back. "Or are all of your so stupid that—"
"Oh!" The Doctor interrupted, spinning around. "Télépathique matrice de translation. Désolé, je ne l'ai pas mentionné?"
"Telepathic?" Caballeron scoffed.
"Oi! You lot!" The Doctor said, turning around. "Stop it! We're trying to have a conversation here!"
The rock monsters stopped.
"Thank you. Now wait right there, we'll get to you in a minute." The Doctor pointed an accusing hoof, pointing to his eyes, then pointing at the rock monsters before walking back over to the circular stone table. "Now, what do we have here—oh! Look at all the pony languages! A regular Rosetta Stone here, isn't it?"
"What..." Caballeron muttered. His eyes were wide and his jaw went slack, then began moving up and down mechanically without forming further words. Clara Netta, Sergeant Pallas and Twilight crowded around the Doctor in silence, and Caballeron managed to choke out, "How—!"
"Now, Miss Twilight—I have got the naming convention right, yes? First name is surname? Yes? Good. Oh, sorry about the bad-touch situation earlier—so many cultural norms, so many species. Anyway—why don't you tell me the basics of what you're trying to accomplish here and we'll move from there, yes?"
"You made the rock monsters stop," Twilight said.
"Uh, yes, I did? Didn't I? Well, what I did was communicate with them in a language they could understand. I have no idea what they actually heard," he swept his hoof over the table of written languages. "And they don't seem to have mouths to speak..." The Doctor turned over his shoulder to look at the creatures. "The larger version of these creatures, out on the outskirts of the city, at least had eyes and a mouth, though... I suppose it used its mouth more for spitting fire than communicating."
"They're constructs," Clara said. "Golems, some ponies call them. The tribe that built this city had powerful magics that could manipulate rock—spells infused into living rock, like a keystone." She pointed to the keystone in the middle of the table.
"Oh, yes... I saw one of these when I was being chased by the stone giant. That's what's maintaining the force fields around here, yes?"
"It looked to me that you were too busy fainting to notice anything, Doctor," Minuette cut in.
"Grumpy," the Doctor responded. "That's all I'm saying, Professor Grumpy-Hooves." He leaned his elbows on the stone table. "And, yes, I did suffer a rather traumatic head injury, hence the healing trance earlier, thank you very much for asking, I'm much better now, though this regeneration is taking a little longer to stabilize than normal—hence all the extra energy. Now!" he clapped his hooves. "You!" He pointed a hoof at Clara Netta without looking at her, rubbing his eyes with his other hoof. "What is your name?"
"Clara, Clara Netta." Clara was a pale orange earth-pony with a chestnut-brown mane. Her tail was cut short and her cutie mark was a very detailed brown leaf outlined in a darker shade of orange, streaked with yellow-orange and bronze.
The Doctor looked at his own flank—at the hour-glass cutie mark, then at the similar mark on Minuette's flank. Doctor Caballeron, a light beige stallion, had a gold pony skull as a cutie mark with gems for eyes. Twilight Velvet had three purple stars. "Sorry!" he put a hoof up, silencing what Clara was about to say next. "Shh! Sh! Sorry. Okay, pretend I'm stupid." Minuette snorted a brief, derisive laugh. "Pretend..." the Doctor continued, "my head trauma's made me forget some very basic information and tell me—what do these markings on our rumps mean?" The Doctor turned his eyes askew, forcing them to look in Clara's direction.
Twilight and Clara exchanged looks.
Minuette just frowned.
"Translation matrix...? Telepathic translation matrix?" Caballeron said to himself, not making eye contact with anyone.
"Yeah," the Doctor said, waving a hoof at the stallion. "Not helping. Please shut up." He turned to look into the faces of the griffin sergeant and Twilight. "Remember, tell me as if I've really got no idea, like you would tell an alien creature that's just dropped out of the sky and looks nothing like any pony you've ever seen before."
There was silence, though the Doctor held up his hooves making encouraging gestures. "Come on."
"Cutie marks," Clara said.
The Doctor rolled his head back as if someone had hit him. "Whoa, okay, that did not translate well—I basically just got a lot of horse noises. Say that again?"
"Cutie mark," Twilight said slowly.
"Nope—just whinnying, neighing... noises. I think I got 'mark', though, I'm just going to call them marks. Okay, what are they for? What do they stand for?"
"Different things," Sergeant Pallas said, speaking for the first time. "Ponies use them as a sort of caste system, a means of organizing their society. Any time after puberty when a pony discovers they have a talent for something deeply fulfilling—right?" He looked to Minuette, who nodded. "They appear and denote specialization."
"So, mine means...?" the Doctor asked. "Something to do with time, obviously."
"It can mean a lot of things, Doctor," Minuette said, lowering her head and her tone. "The hourglass can denote horology, chronology, chronometry, a perfect sense of time."
"So it's subjective," the Doctor puzzled.
"Doctor, this isn't—" Minuette started.
"Shush!" the Doctor said, then pointed at Twilight. "Twilight, what does your mark denote?"
"Magic," Twilight said.
"And Cabbies'?" He pointed a hoof over his shoulder.
"Telepathic?" Caballeron muttered, a faraway look in his eyes.
"His is for treasure hunting," Clara supplied.
"Okay—basic but it makes sense. Archaeology." The Doctor used the word with a head waggle and a tone that suggested distaste. "So that begs the question, what does Clara's cutie mark mean?"
"What?" Minuette asked, glowering at the Doctor. "Doctor, that has nothing to—"
"Shush!" the Doctor interrupted.
"You know, that's sort of a good question," Sergeant Pallas admitted. "I was sort of wondering that myself." He looked at Clara.
"It is a good question, isn't it? But here's a better question. All of our marks are basic, primary colours, solid colours with fairly basic details—broad strokes, if you will. So was Octavia's—and while I know I'm using a pitifully small sample size—it strikes me as odd that Clara's looks painted and with far more colours and detail than I've seen so far. And, most importantly of all," he turned to Minuette. "You haven't looked at her once since you've entered this room.
"You've literally looked everywhere but at Miss Clara Netta, and I... have been having the same sort of problem—my eyes just don't want to centre on her, don't want to focus on her. And I get it, I get perception filters, you even have one around that device you have strapped to your foreleg, 'Professor Colgate'."
Minuette's right foreleg snapped forward to cover a spot on her left as the others craned their necks to look for what the Doctor had indicated.
"But why," the Doctor continued, "would there be such a selective perception filter around a whole creature, so selective it only works on ponies with a very specific caste marking." The Doctor looked at Clara out of the corner of his eye, then full on. "Who are you?"
Clara opened her mouth to speak.
"Who are you?" Caballeron interrupted, addressing his words to the Doctor. "What is your name? What gives you the right to accuse my student?"
"I'm the Doctor. My name is the Doctor."
"Doctor who?"
"I'm a slightly psychic alien from another dimension, a Time Lord, and I dropped out of the sky into the desert three days ago. Colgate is a time traveller and apparently knows me from the future. Who are you?"
Caballeron stared into the Doctor's eyes.
Then, Caballeron struck out a hoof and knocked over the keystone generating the barrier.
"No!" Pallas shouted, spinning around toward the barrier.
The keystone clatter to the ground and fizzle out, causing the barrier disappear and the room plunged into darkness.
Twilight and Minuette lit their horns immediately and all eyes turned toward the now open archway.
The stone creatures did not move.
"Return! Reset! Go back for repairs! All of you!" the Doctor shouted at the stone creatures. "Please."
After several seconds, the creatures turned and walked back down the hallway from where they had come.
A collective sigh of relief went up from those clustered around the stone table, not least of all from the Doctor himself. "I am so glad that worked."
"What are you doing?!" Pallas shouted, pointing his weapon at Caballeron's face. "Are you trying to get us all killed?"
"I was testing a theory. Are you trying to get us all blown up?" Caballeron pointed to the explosives strapped to the end of Pallas's pole-arm.
"Sergeant, was it?" the Doctor said. "You've all been using explosives to fight these stone creatures, haven't you? That's how the griffins in the central chamber got injured, isn't it? How they got burned."
"Yes, sir," Pallas said, removing his spear from Caballeron's face, but not taking his eagle eyes off of the stallion. "I lost a lot of good friends before we were able to get down here and set up the keystone barrier."
"Okay." The Doctor scratched the back of his head with a hoof. "This is all fascinating, it really is but it's quite silly and honestly I'm bored with all of this. I'm surrounded by a bunch of very angry people all on very important missions and I am just sick of being knocked out, dragged around and tied up. Colgate, the griffins obviously are blackmailing you to be here and you just want to get away and protect Twilight, Caballeron is here for glory and riches, the griffins are here for some nefarious military purpose, Twilight is following Colgate around like a lost puppy and Clarinet or whatever is some sort of shape shifting, time travelling she-beast or some such."
"Hey!" Twilight and Clara said simultaneously.
"Colgate, Minuette, whatever your name is—tell me where my TARDIS is and I'll take both of you away from here. I'm bored."
Minuette blinked. "Yeah, sure."
"Professor?" Twilight sidled up against Minuette. "How does he know your real name?"
"You shouted it loud enough earlier, love. I mean, in his face and everything. As you were punching him."
"Oh yeah."
There was a clattering of claws and paws on stone, along with the rattling of armour.
"Oh great," the Doctor groused. "As always, the military blunders in—whoa!"
As the griffins rushed into the room, Clara hooked her foreleg around the back of the Doctor's neck and gripped him in a tight headlock, pulling the tall stallion down to the smaller mare's shoulder level. "My name is Clara Netta! I'm from the village of Ozwall at the heart of the Whitetail woods! My family have been royal foresters of the Whitetail for six generations so I will thank you not to call me 'some sort of she-beast'! Or even some sort of anything! My family has served the crown for too long not to deserve a little respect from a swaggering, pompous aristocrat like you! Do you understand me?!"
The Doctor gurgled and smacked a weak hoof against the leg clamped around his throat.
"Good." Clara released him.
"GAAAH!" the Doctor breathed violently and coughed. "Sorry—!" another fit of coughing. "Yes, rude of me, I guess... sorry. Stress, I think. I died four days ago in screaming agony falling through a fissure in reality at the bottom of a black hole. You know how it is."
"Yeah, I can relate," Clara said. "Sounds pretty much like how I feel taking midterms from this one." She waved a hoof toward Doctor Caballeron, before going to retrieve her sketch book and supplies.
"Fair enough," the Doctor managed, coughing again.
"Excuse me!" Commander Jabe interjected. She stood with her wings fully extended, flanked by four griffins with halberds lowered toward the ponies. "What is going on down here? Where are the golems?"
"The Doctor told them to go repair themselves," Twilight said in hushed reverence. Clara cast Twilight a glance before sitting down next to Professor Caballeron, watching the others in silence.
"I see. Doctor," Jape regarded the brown stallion with new eyes, looking him up and down as though seeing him for the first time. "Can you tell the golems to deactivate the defences around the altar?"
"No," the Doctor said, rubbing his throat. "They're too simple for that. Their function is to lift and carry and to smash intruders. I don't think they can even repair themselves, hence the order to go back to their... I don't know, repair bay—it's probably an automated system, just like them. They have to have one, I saw them literally breaking themselves against your force field. If they didn't have one you could have just waited for them to smash themselves all to pieces."
"Yes, that was the initial plan. But, like you said, there doesn't seem to be any end to them."
"I told them to initiate their repair cycle early, simple commands in the language they were designed to listen to. Without anyone left to countermand the orders they default to the only ones they've received in centuries."
"Then we're ready. Doctor, you've translated the murals? Do you know how to deactivate the temple's defences?"
The Doctor looked up at the griffin and met her eyes. "No."
"You haven't translated the mural?"
The Doctor looked down at the mosaic on the floor below his hooves. "Oh, I've read it. But it's not what you think. I mean, I get it: you're focusing on this room because you realize it's important, and it is. But it you think this room has the secrets of how to control this facility, but you're wrong. This is a history. A history of the... I guess a history of the ponies who used to live here. A story of what happened here. Of everything, right up until the final battle. This room is a time capsule in case it didn't work..." He trailed off and didn't look up, a dark look falling across his features.
"How does that help us, Doctor?" Jabe leaned her head back, looking down her beak at the Doctor with incredulous, predatory eyes.
"Because," he said, looking up at her slowly. "It tells you that it didn't work—the weapon you came here to claim for your 'Halcyon Empire.' It's a bust. It killed every living thing in this city!"
"It sounds like the definition of an effective weapon to me."
The Doctor sighed.
"What does it say, Doctor?" Clara asked. "It's just that I've been working on deciphering this mural by its images for weeks now without getting anywhere."
"Eh, yeah, it is a bit symbolic," the Doctor said, without looking at Clara. "Tell me, Colgate, about you unicorn lot. Have you always controlled the artificial sun around this planet?"
Minuette made a face. "I wish you'd stop calling it 'artificial'. And no. The Unicorn Queen Solara was the first. One of the legendary queens, from before recorded history."
"And who controlled it before that?"
"Uh, nopony did. It was the time of chaos—the age of the Dragons and Draconequui. And, I guess, before that it was the Creators who controlled the sun and the moon."
"And this Solara, why did she gain control of the sun? For what purpose?"
Minuette groaned. "Um... oh." Her expression changed from annoyance to shocked comprehension. "To combat the Darkness."
"Bit inflammatory." The Doctor leaned his head to either side, then shrugged. "I mean good for propaganda, calling your enemy 'the Darkness', especially when you control a sun as your ultimate weapon."
"This city was the home of the Darkness?" Clara puzzled.
"Well... not really. According to the carvings in that table over there they called themselves the Dominion of the Land, a collection of three 'tribes', the Crystal Ponies, the Stone Ponies and the Soil Ponies?"
"I like to call them Dirt Ponies," Minuette smirked.
"Hey!" Clara objected. "It's 'Earth Pony', thank you!"
"Right – oh! So one of the three survive even today? Well, it's not really surprising, really. From this history," the Doctor tapped a hoof on the floor, "it appears that the Earth Tribe were something of an underclass, and they joined the invaders against their former masters first chance they got. 'Betrayed, battered and besieged' is how they describe themselves in their... final days. They were the heroes of their own story, of course, and Solara was the enemy—an invader, a conqueror. Imagine what it would be like having the sun turned against you? Hovering over your city, turning the forests and grasslands into deserts, boiling away the rivers and lakes—"
"We in the Empire don't have to imagine such things, Doctor. The Unicorns still control the sun! The tyrant, Celestia, has turned the sun against us twice in our history. We live under constant fear of her wrath, Doctor!"
"Yes, I understand," the Doctor soothed. "And I'm sorry. But you'll find no countermeasure here. According to this history, the ponies who lived here used their earth magic to dominate all the other species on this planet—they created crystal and stone giants to smash through all opposition—even the dragons bowed their heads to them. Until the Queen they called the Destroyer started obliterating their cities and colonies with the power of the sun itself."
"But then," Jabe argued, "they created a system by which they could wrest control of the sun from Solara! To save themselves and to again take control of the world!"
"Then why didn't they? Colgate, was Solara ever defeated?"
"No," Minuette confirmed. "She defeated the Darkness and her royal house ruled the Unicorn Kingdoms for four thousand years – longer by some accounts."
"Exactly—because, according to this, it wasn't a means to take control of the sun, but to create a barrier from the sun. The inhabitants of this city created a magical barrier that would shield them from the sun's rays and strengthen their physical bodies against the heat and dehydration from the change in climate. This was a means by which they could send the city into siege mode, defend against Solara's superweapon while they tried to defeat her conventional armies in the field."
"It sounds perfect for our needs," Jabe said. "Concordia City would be defended against Celestia's tyranny for all time! An unbreachable citadel!"
The Doctor frowned again and turned away.
Jabe drew her wings against her body and turned her gaze down to look at the Doctor with both eyes. "And you, Doctor, wherever you come from, whatever your real reason for being here—because I know you were ever part of the Ministry—will be the one to save us from the mad tyranny of the sun demon Celestia. You will help us find peace at last."
"Oh, will I?" he said with his back still to the griffin. "And why would I do that? Why wouldn't I, just as, I don't know, a hypothetical, call back those golems and have them stomp you into a gooey, feathery paste?"
"I don't doubt you could do that, Doctor. But those golems are slow. My soldiers are very quick. They could kill you dead in two seconds flat. All of you. Though I'd prefer not to."
"Of course, not. Colgate?"
"Yes?" Minuette had positioned herself between Twilight and the griffins, having backed the younger mare and herself slowly away from Jabe and her guards.
"Where was that thing you and I were just discussing?"
Minuette looked between Jabe and the Doctor. "Down in the catacombs, below the temple. According to Neighpoleon's war diaries, they tried to reach the control mechanism of the altar from underneath. But a dragon or a drake had made its treasure hoard in the caves below the altar and he was never able to explore further before his resources ran out and his army needed to move on. But he described the treasure and the relics the dragon had gathered very explicitly, including a peculiar blue..."
"Wait, did you say a dragon?!" the Doctor spun around to face the griffin. "Are you prepared to fight a dragon, Commander Jabe?"
"If need be. I've faced dragons before, Doctor. Though I would prefer not to. Do you know a way to disable to petrifaction field around the top of the altar?"
"No... like I said, it doesn't say anything about the operation of the system, just the history."
"Then we go down into the catacombs to see if we can succeed where Neighpoleon failed."
"Alright. Colgate?" The Doctor turned to Minuette.
"I need my bag from the camp."
"Professor Colgate is not going anywhere," Jabe snapped. "What is it you need, Doctor?"
"I have some special equipment in my bag."
"Such as?" the griffin queried.
"Specialized tools for modifying machinery and breaking codes, it might help us if we get down below the altar," the Doctor lied.
Jabe considered a moment. "We'll wait ten minutes," Commander Jabe said to all those present. "Send your assistant, Professor Colgate," she said to the blue unicorn. "And be quick about it."
Minuette glowered up at the beaked face. "Twilight," she said, turning to the younger mare. "I need you to run up to camp and grab something for me."
Twilight retraced the winding path back up to the central chamber of the temple. The corridor was wide but with a low ceiling, only large enough for an adult stallion to walk through if he lowered his head. The stone golems would have had to crawl or otherwise move on all fours to get through—which they had. Twilight shivered.
Reaching the end of the corridor as it opened up into the central hall beneath the dome, Twilight paused. There was no sound, and only a slight breeze, which was normal, and yet she paused in the stone arch. She swivelled her ears about and scanned the darkness ahead of her. There was the distant glow of the camp, reflecting off the far wall. She looked behind her, back down the tunnel, the light from her horn casting odd shadows. She turned and stepped out into the central chamber, and crossed the short distance to the edge of the forest of pillars. The floor was smooth, cold and sandy. Her hooves tapped and crunched along, echoes quavering back and forth through the pillars.
A shiver ran down Twilight's spine. She stopped and looked around, swivelling her ears. She saw nothing. She heard nothing, other than the thundering of her own heart and the slight hum of her horn as it cast soft blue light about her. She remembered to breathe.
She started walking again, her hooves clacking against the ancient stone floor. Her walk soon became a trot, and then a canter as she raced through the pillars toward the general direction of the camp's glow. She was galloping by the time she burst out into the light of the wood-spirit lamps and skidded to a shaky stop. She looked around.
Nopony was immediately in sight. Though, given that there were only two able-bodied members of the expedition not in the mural chamber—Lieutenant Pearl and Private Goldenclaw—and that all the wounded were lying on pallets blocked from Twilight's view by tables and crates and tents, this was not entirely unexpected.
The hair along Twilight's spine was bristling and itchy with an almost electric crackle, and her heart was pounding faster still with each tentative step she took toward the middle of camp. Dowsing the light from her horn, she noticed as she passed the first tent that there was a smouldering mass of metal and broken glass lying on the ground, with black char, the puddle of glass shards and soot stretching out from it like vines. A metal handle and fittings identified it as a wood-spirit burning lanterns which had shattered on the stone ground and burned itself out.
Twilight held a hoof over the wreck and then pulled it back from the unexpected heat right away, yelping and cradling her hoof against her chest.
She looked around again, her eyes focusing on the closest table. There were books, scrolls and broken pottery shards on the ground, some of the pages slashed and crumpled by paws and talons, and Twilight began walking toward the mess. As she went, she saw more items cast about the floor of the camp—halberds knocked over from their racks, a water sack trampled and burst, a griffin helmet lying discarded beside a small bag of personal effects.
Next to these was the saddle bag with the hour-glass cutie mark Minuette had sent Twilight to find. She levitated it and strapped it onto her back, pulling the belt tight around her middle. She looked over the items strewn in a trail of destruction through the camp.
Then she saw the hoofprints.
Twilight's breath caught in her throat. She coughed and retched, but managed to keep her last meal down. She followed the path of the bloody hoofprints as it looped around, under or beside the scattered objects. The hoofprints were small, a colt or filly's hooves, but were trodden upon by paws and claws in places, with short stretches of bloody claw and hoof prints trailing from these intersections. She followed the hoofprints back to their origin, careful to make slow movements, trying to make the clacking of her hooves as quiet as possible on the resonate stone floors. Her ears and eyes darted up and down and side to side as she went, glancing down at the hoofprints every few seconds as she went.
She forced herself to breathe slower, deeper breaths. As she passed the last row of tables, she saw the pallets where the wounded griffins had been laid.
The source of blood became obvious, the wounded griffins' bandages torn open along with their skin, organs and flesh exposed to the light of the wood-spirit lanterns, gleaming and wet in the orange glow. There were large chunks of masonry and bricks lying beside some of them, covered in splattered blood. All but two of them had had their beaks and skulls pulverized and their throats torn open, huge chunks of flesh missing from their necks and chest. Gnawed on. Torn at. Pulled apart by small, insistent tugging, muscle tissue frayed and stretched and hanging out in strings of red and black. White vertebrae and breastbones were pink in the muck of cloying flesh.
Twilight fell to her haunches and threw up, an entire day's rations, splashing onto her forehooves and the floor beneath her.
She kept herself from falling to her side, gasped for breath, shuddering, choking back sour, rancid bile. She wiped her face on the back of her foreleg and struggled to her hooves. She couldn't help but whimper, but could not muster the breath to scream.
Movement in the corner of her eye made her stop breathing altogether.
She turned her head, a slow swivel on a neck gripped in tight, locked muscles. The little grey filly, a pair of sun-goggles hanging around her neck, was walking toward her with slow, careful steps, her head held low to the ground, below the level of her shoulders, looking up at Twilight with wide open, red, glowing eyes.
She moved like a cat. And her hooves, though they looked like the hooves of every other filly Twilight had ever seen, and left hoofprints like any other set of hooves, were silent as they stepped across the stone floor. The filly's face was calm and curious, ears straight up, but her eyes were strained open to the point of bulging, bursting with red light that hovered and swirled around the large white orbs. Her little forelegs and shoulders and neck and face and mouth were covered in browning, crusting blood, her coat matted. Her head cocked to the side as she drew closer.
Twilight turned her body to face the filly head on and started backing away.
As she took her first step back, the filly darted forward three steps, and then froze. In turn, Twilight almost lost her balance and had to stop and catch herself.
The filly's face was growing stern, her ears pressing forward, and she was starting to bear her teeth, blackened with something wet, hot and chunky. A few drops of red dribbled out of her open mouth, and steam puffed out with each quick breath.
"O-Oc-ctav-ia?" Twilight managed.
The filly's ears went back up and she rolled her head to the other side, never taking her unblinking eyes off of Twilight.
"Oc-c-ctavia?" she said again. "T-the D-Doctor is v-very w-w-wor-rried ab-bout you... sweetie," she lied.
"Where is he?" the filly said in a low, gravelly voice. "What did you do with the Doctor?" she asked, her voice returning to how a filly's voice was supposed to sound, high and small and girlish.
"N-nothing!" Twilight said, again beginning to back up.
Octavia's ears went forward and she began stalking toward Twilight. "Liar..." she hissed, spitting the word out.
"I-is the Doctor y-your friend? Y-you came here with him? From space?" Twilight was shaking hard enough to make herself dizzy, and she was starting to have trouble focusing her eyes.
"He is like me," Octavia whispered. "It's why you captured him—why you tied him up. You made him in the Green Place, like me. But he got AWAY FROM YOU!" Her whisper grew into a shout as her face contorted into a jagged, frenzied expression, all teeth and eyes and tortured facial muscles.
Walking faster forward toward Twilight, she shouted, "You're not taking him back—neither of us will EVER go back there!" She slowed again, her ears straight forward and her lips peeled back from her teeth entirely. "He's going to take me with him to the sky," she whispered. "And you will never..." She was just outside of Twilight's striking distance when she came to a stop, her whole body lowered almost to the ground. "YOU WILL NEVER HURT US AGAIN!"
Octavia charged forward and Twilight jumped back. The little filly's hooves still connected hard against the unicorn's jaw, just missing her neck. Twilight bucked and kicked wildly, but never touched the filly. Sharp pain bit down into her hock and she screamed, bucking again as the little filly's teeth slid into her flesh and began to rip and tear.
Then running. Twilight didn't remember how she had come to be running, but she galloped through the pillars, hooves slamming forward, blood and bile filling her nose and mouth, eyes threatening to pop out of her skull. She couldn't hear the filly following her. Searing pain, burning, endless, fathomless, was washing through her, warming her against the icy black that threatened to close in from around the edges of her vision.
Her eyes snapped into focus and she skidded to a halt just before the grey granite ring around the altar. She spun around, bracing herself.
There was nopony behind her.
She turned back toward the altar. There was a new statue on the red inner ring of stone. Lieutenant Pearl, frozen in a frantic running stride, fallen over on her side, bloody hoofprints staining the clean grey stone her body had been turned into. Squinting, Twilight could see that there were drying bloody hoofprints all around the statue on the red stone floor, as well as crossing over the granite ring in both directions—small, filly hoofprints.
"Join your friend," a filly's voice said from behind Twilight.
Twilight spun around to see Octavia glaring at her.
The filly spit out bits of Twilight's white hair and scrapings of skin and a spattering of the unicorn's blood. "You're bleeding to death anyway." She took one step forward.
"M-MINUETTE!" Twilight shouted, invoking the panic spell the older unicorn had given her.
Octavia jumped back, bracing herself.
Nothing happened.
Octavia looked around. Then she snapped her eyes back to Twilight, glaring.
Twilight dashed off around the edge of the granite ring. Octavia sprinted after her with silent, even strides, cutting through the stone circle, crossing the granite ring and the red ring, gaining on Twilight.
"I'm... I'm sorry." The Doctor was looking down at his folded forelegs on the floor in front of him. It was easier than looking directly at Clara Netta.
"I just feel stupid for never noticing," Minuette said. She was sitting between Clara and the Doctor in a half circle. "I've encountered lots of perception filters in the past; I use them, for Goddess's sake. And I've always known my spells and TK tend to loose cohesion when I'm around you—I just always thought it was because of how much you annoyed me."
"Gee! Thanks!" Clara snapped.
"Just being honest," Minuette grumbled.
"Well, you know what? Do me a favour: lie to me."
"Girls—" the Doctor soothed.
"Don't call me that," Minuette scolded, meeting the Doctor's eyes. "Even if you are centuries my senior I am still a fully grown mare and you do not get to condescend to me like that."
"Got it," the Doctor nodded. He reached up a hoof and rubbed the side of his head. "Sorry, do you think you could scootch back a bit, Clara, I think your biology is giving me a bit of a headache."
Without a word, Clara scooted back a little.
"Where are you from, Clara? Is it normal to have a mark with that much detail? I can see the veins in the leaf and little holes where bugs have nibbled on it—Colgate and I just have... basic colour and broad strokes. Twilight just has coloured geometric shapes."
"It's not unheard of," Clara shrugged. "Especially not in Ozwall. This cutie mark is the symbol of our village; a lot of ponies have it."
"The village really is known for odd cutie marks," said Minuette. "In fact, a lot of couples from Ozwall intentionally try to get pregnant and have their foals in another village so their children won't be 'cursed' with a strange or ambiguous talent."
"What's it like?" the Doctor asked, looking straight at Clara again, wincing. "This village of yours?"
"Well..." Clara thought for a moment. "It's surrounded by a huge emerald wall—ozite emerald, made from solidified spectra. It's in the middle Whitetail forest, where there's all kind of crazy magic. The Discord really messed with the magics left behind by the Whitetails themselves."
"The Discord?" the Doctor queried.
"An ancient beast of chaos," Minuette supplied. "Said to have been vanquished about a millennium ago by the Princesses Celestia and Luna. Any time you get a village or town that has unexplained phenomena, the locals make up some sort of legend about it being Discord's fault—gives them a sense of being part of a legendary history, a shared national mythology."
"It's true!" Clara slapped the flat of her hoof against the floor. "How else do you explain all the ozite emeralds?"
"Alchemy," Minuette huffed. "The Whitetails were said to be skilled alchemists. Ponies probably found the wall long after whatever was inside of it decayed or eroded away and made up a legend to explain it."
"What happened to them?" The Doctor asked. "These 'Whitetails'?"
"Discord," Clara asserted.
Minuette grumbled something inaudible, then looked over at her shoulder at the griffins. "I should have asked one of the soldiers to escort Twilight," she muttered.
"Nope," the Doctor groaned, putting his hooves to the sides of his head. "Head's still pounding. Do you think you could turn off your perception filter, Colgate? Maybe the two fields being in such close proximity are causing some sort of psychic feedback or something."
Minuette looked down at her forelegs and sighed. She touched her hoof to her foreleg and the area around her hoof blurred and distorted.
The Doctor and Clara blinked and rubbed their eyes. There was a square box strapped to Minuette's foreleg, small crystal lights set into a smooth silver metal casing. At the same moment, a long, rose coloured crystal on a string became visible around Clara's neck.
"My crystal!" Minuette hissed, jumping to her hooves. "Give it to me!"
Behind Minuette, the griffins were looking at her, and Commander Jabe had gotten to her feet.
Clara retorted, "No, it's mine—Neeza gave it to me!"
"Well, wherever you got it, it's what was casting the perception filter over you," the Doctor exclaimed.
"You give that to me right now, you dirt-pony sow!" Her horn glowed, and she yanked the crystal off the other mare's neck and stripped off the string wound around one end of the crystal's slender body. She slid it into a vacant hole in the box strapped her foreleg. She gasped and looked up. "Twilight!"
"Light your horn again and I will cut your head clean off, Professor," Commander Jabe said, halberd raised. One of her guards held another to the side of the blue unicorn's neck.
Minuette's eyes were narrow and sharp as she turned her head to look up at the Commander. "Something is attacking Twilight at the camp, she's calling to me!"
"Give me that crystal back and you can go and see to her."
"Fine!" She tapped a buckle on the back of her leg and the whole box came off. She caught it in her fetlock and gave it to a third griffin. "Let me go! Please!"
The Doctor stood, observing the situation in silence.
Commander Jabe watched as her soldier stowed the device, then nodded to her other soldier to remove his halberd from the pony's neck. As soon as he did so, Minuette disappeared in a pop and a flash.
"Can I have my jewel back, Commander?" Clara asked.
"Didn't Neeza tell you never to show it to anyone else, little pony? No, now that Colgate knows to look for it around your neck I'll need to find a new hiding place for it."
"Oh," the Doctor said, his smile not holding the least bit of actual mirth. "So, that's what you're holding over her? A component of her... I don't know, vortex manipulator or whatever it is?"
"It need not concern you, Doctor," Jade dismissed before seeing to the device.
Minuette teleported into the temple's forest of pillars with a burst of blinding white light. Horn still charged, her hooves hit the floor splayed out from her body, ready for attack from any direction.
Yet there was only silence, save for the echoes of the teleport.
"Twilight!" the blue unicorn shouted in a commanding voice. She let the echoes die out over several seconds. "Twilight!" she called again, her voice cracking. She circled the closest pillar, the light from her horn making the shadows quaver and dance.
There was blood on the floor. Streaks and drops, a splattered trail. Minuette followed the trail to Twilight's still body, lying in a widening pool, shining in the light of Minuette's horn.
Minuette spun around, jerking her head about, staring into the darkness, backing up toward Twilight's prone body.
Then she saw the eyes—red, glowing and a ways off, they were small and low to the ground. They moved toward her, slinking in the darkness.
Minuette's horn flared in a light spell that left the little creature staggering and blinking.
It was Octavia.
Minuette fired a tight beam of energy from her horn that sliced through the air between them, sizzling as it hit the stone floor where Octavia had been standing a half second before.
Minuette fired again, hitting a pillar Octavia had been standing in front of a quarter second prior. Her next shot hit another pillar, and another, then the floor again—always a split second off from her target as the little filly dashed in an arc around the two unicorns.
Minuette stopped her attacks, sweat pouring down her coat, panting, straining her eyes to see where the filly had gotten to. She couldn't hear the filly's hooves on the stone—she listened for breathing.
A sharp pain exploded in Minuette's flank as the filly jumped on her back and sank her teeth into the mare's flesh.
Minuette bucked and reared up, kicking all four of her legs and spinning around. She managed to fling the filly off, but Octavia landed on her hooves and skidded backwards. Minuette fired her horn at the little grey creature to drive her back, and succeeded in making the filly retreat into the shadows.
Minuette charged her horn and dove over Twilight's body, teleporting them both away.
Octavia skidded to a halt on silent hooves at the edge of the puddle of blood, sniffing the air, ears lowered. After a moment, Octavia lowered her muzzle to the puddle and began lapping at the still-warm blood.
In the near darkness, the pillars, which had been hit by Minuette's magic, were glowing, light radiating outward from the points of impact, and then sweeping up the columnar structures. The four pillars began to melt as they glowed with energy, shifting from blue to red. Octavia looked up from the blood and licked her lips. As the pillars began to melt the little filly scampered off into the shadows once again. The pillars melted into four red blobs, the size of ponies.
They solidified into matte-black bodies, pony bodies, their eyes sunken pits, their stone flesh pitted with cracks and pockmarks. They began to stagger about, red magic spilling out of their mouths and eyes. One of them belched out fire at a nearby pillar, causing it to glow with red energy. The other staggering stone ponies did likewise to other pillars.
The pillars began to melt and form red blogs the size of ponies, solidifying into more matte-black bodies who began belching fire at other pillars. The forest of pillars began to burn. It began to walk. And it began to groan.
