Who Wants To Live Forever
Prologue: "Serve and die alone"
The Dogs trembled, and they would know the name of the king.
Raids on Diamond Dog mines weren’t unheard of, as rare as they were. It would often be the sensation of several newspapers all across of Equestria for a week or two, praising the Royal Guard as heroes and writing about compassion they feel toward the victims of said Diamond Dogs.
Indeed, such raids weren’t unheard of. But they never occurred beyond the Equestrian borders. Well, maybe once, when a really important royal thing – a phoniex, Celestia’s pet – was accidentally taken with its caretaker while going abroad or something like that, who the hell knows. Anyway, my point was, for lowly ponies like me and that other guy who is slowly dying from that poisonous crystal dust—there’d be no rescue. I always loved Celestia, but I sort of hated her now. She didn’t care for us anymore. Leave Equestrian borders and you lose all the protection she gives you, even if you leave unwillingly.
I shook my head slowly, some of the dust that I’ve been inhaling settling onto my nose and making me sneeze.
“Bless me,” I wheezed and picked up the pickaxe again. My neck hurt so damn much, and it cramped often, but what was an earth pony such as me to do? I didn’t have wings that could serve as appendages. I didn’t have magic to hold the thing within it. No, all I had was my mouth and hurting neck.
“Damn them all,” I cursed and struck the crystal again, chipping a particularly big chunk out of it while also releasing more of that green dust.
I coughed as I involuntarily breathed in more of it. That would be the death of me. Literally. You see, for those who lived long enough without turning their lungs into crystal sculptures often died from madness induced by said dust. I don’t know how it worked, I was, after all, only a stupid earth pony, but I knew that those furballs were willing to sacrifice dozens of slaves to get a piece of that crystal. They were probably like drugs to them, while it was poison to us. And another thing I knew—those crystals were possibly harder than diamonds, making it a pain in the ass to mine them even with their teeth and claws, and as such they had us do their work for them. Serve and die alone; such was the motto of us, slaves.
As soon as a shard of crystal clanged against the floor, a paw was there to swipe it with the speed of a Wonderbolt. I heard the diamond dog muttering as it coo’ed and hugged the crystal like it was its baby. I say, they’re all crackheads. Or should it be crystalheads?
“To work!” It shrilled when it noticed me staring. Then it marched off rather angrily. Well, at least he didn’t beat me up like the last idiotic furball that kept me company before this dog.
I wasn’t normally this mean, but the dust was playing games with my mind, the line between a nightly sleep and an eternal sleep was beginning to blur, and I was afraid that each night Mother Reaper would come and carry me within her hooves to Eternity. No one really knew what lay beyond, maybe Celestia or Luna did, but neither of them ever talked about it. And religions were unheard of in Equestria; after all, we had our eternal, benevolent princesses. Plus, no one ever wanted to talk about death in happy-no-slavery-land.
So, I went back to work, my tired body barely keeping me on my legs. But I dug anyway, until I couldn’t even do that, and slumped to the floor in utter exhaustion. I couldn’t care if they decided to beat me up. I wouldn’t even feel it. I didn’t care if they would kill me. It would be freedom.
But they wouldn’t, I knew that. They would drag you by your legs back to your cell. Then they waited until they felt it appropriate to wake you up to use you again. If you wouldn’t go, then violence would be used. And no matter where you were, the fear of death and oftentimes pain was rarely a thing to ignore.
I fell into such blissful sleep while I could feel someone dragging me across the jagged floor, only to be woken up two seconds later.
“Wake up!” someone yelled in their crude Equestrian, and slipped some bread and water through a small window that was set into the wall right next to the iron-reinforced wooden door. Then that someone slammed down some kind of metalling slate into the window, and left me with barely enough light that shone through five thick metal bars set into a small opening in the upper third of the door.
I fell about five times before my legs were steady enough to carry me over to the plate and jug, and I quickly started ravaging their contents. As I discovered, neither the food nor the drink were poisoned or drugged, which was probably smart. They needed all the strength out of us they could get.
The moment I finished, the door opened and a diamond dog dressed in a ragged jacket, its brown fur matted with crystalline dust, and its eyes as cold as the stone they reflected, stepped inside, a whip in one of its paws. I envied that creature, you know. At least we earth ponies could have gotten some paws from mother nature. But no, we didn’t even have that.
I was certain he was a male. Not from his posture, not from his body, but from the way he talked in his gruff, unforgiving voice every time one of us stopped to take a slightly longer-than-necessary break. His voice was bad news if it was directed at you. In fact, it was bad news for everyone who heard him, because as soon as he got on to punishing slaves, there used to be a lot of collateral damage on other nearby slaves that were doing that duty.
He was an asshole, so we all called him Asshole, and as far as anyone could tell, every one of us hated him. But he was also respected and feared which was I guess more important to him than our love or hate. It was what got the job done.
Slaves stick together. It was the only way to remain sane enough not to go crazy or completely mentally broken before the dust did that job for you. As such, I knew almost every slave comrade in this cellblock. Here, by my left side, as the Overdog Asshole walked me through the hallway, was someone we called the Jokemaster, even though she was a female and “Jokemistress” would be more appropriate. Her real name was some kind of elaborate nordic name with titles and things I couldn’t be bothered to remember because I wasn’t here that long, but I did remember her nickname. She was one of the only people that could make me and others laugh. Whoever said that gryphons were mean and had no sense of humor were idiots.
We passed her cell. She was watching me through the bars, flashing me a small reassuring smile, her yellow piercing eyes twinkling. She was generic brown, with a small chest puff of white colors with light brown tips.
She was here longer, and yet had more strength remaining than I did. What a brave gryphon she was.
The cells were built in a zig-zag kind of fashion, where on the left side there would be a cell, big block of wall, opposite of which was a cell on the right, while when there was a block of wall on the right side, opposite of it was a cell on the left side, and so on. Didn’t know why it was so, but space wasn’t really a problem for them. If they wanted, they could have another cell built in an hour of digging.
To the right side we now passed a really special someone. That cell belonged to a deer named Pun. We often joked and made puns with her, like “Be a dear…” and such. Deer were very much unheard of in Equestria. The same for neighbouring countries. To be honest, they were so unheard of that by some they were considered to be extinct. They either really managed to hide themselves well, or there just wasn’t much of them trotting around. Anyway, she wasn’t there right now, which was a shame. She was one of the few beautiful females in here, no offense. The sight of her would brighten my day immediately. Alas, it was not meant to be. I could only imagine her light brown fur, with a dark brown strip with white blots here and there running from her forehead to the very end of her short, black tail. There were also some light yellow, almost white spots near her legs and abdomen.
Another cell was on the left, where a periwinkle-maned, light gold-colored pegasus mare would try to commit suicide every now and then. I couldn’t blame her. She was a real softie, and a place where she couldn't express her artistic and vulnerable self was killing her. No, I wasn’t being sarcastic. I really pitied her, and tried to help her through this hard, and mayhap last chapter of her life. It was also the last cell before we entered the main area where the slaves would eat, loiter, and even, excuse the inappropriate vocabulary, take care of themselves, and to some extension, others. Indeed, there were some dark corners that, well, you know; a satisfied slave was, after all, a good slave. And the unsatisfied had to shut up and keep going, or be beaten to death.
You maybe noticed that every cell in this cellblock so far, except for me, had a female in it. It was true. While my cell was somewhere in the middle of the hallway (so we didn’t pass all the cells), the other cells had females in them also. Again, I knew not why they put me in here, but I had a nagging suspicion. You see, ponies, like dragons, were able to reproduce with almost everything and still get an off-spring out of it. While in both cultures it was social (but not lawful) taboo, offspring of, say, gryphons and ponies (hippogryphs, for the curious) weren’t unheard of. Which the captors probably wanted. To get a male pony like me and all these females together and hopefully get a healthy offspring that they could enslave out of it. Well, to be honest, I don’t think such an offspring would be alive long enough in this horrendous hellhole. Luckily for these females, and unluckily for my slavers, I wasn’t that kind of pony.
Anyway, as I was talking about the suspiciously private corners that weren’t in my opinion all that private, everyone knew not to try hitting on my friends or anything; friends being basically everyone in my cellblock. I could kick flank if I wanted to (and get my flank kicked in return, but that wasn’t the point).
The main room was rather spacious, a ceiling perhaps twenty feet high covered the distance of around a hundred feet across. It looked big, but with all these slaves packed together inside it, it didn’t feel such. Plus, half of the room was occupied by tables and chairs, or hay pillows, whichever the slaves prefered. This is where lunch and dinner were served—food in its barest, most blatant form ever cooked up by anyone, period.
I was led through this room and into one of the many corridors that permeated the caves where the really serious dough was mined.
The slaver picked up a pickaxe, threw it at me, gave me a spot, and left me to my thing, before it was time for lunch or dinner. Mind you, we didn’t sleep until we fell exhausted, so it couldn’t even be called lunch and dinner. For all I knew, it could be breakfast and lunch, or perhaps even breakfast and dinner!
There was a small amount of time for the cellmates in a cellblock to chat and do things together every now and then, though. The dogs would often eagerly put me into a room with all the females that were there, bound and, well, awaiting their fate at my hooves. I would let them go every time. However, when I first entered that room, they were kind of fearful as to what I’d do with them. Now they just shrugged their bindings off while I was helping them, cursing the hell out of the DD’s (which was an abbreviation we used for diamond dogs).
Luckily for them, they didn’t yet replace me with someone who would be more willing than me. I heard they didn’t have any other male ponies or a dragon, and other same-species males were occupied with others in different cellblocks. I was the only male pony they managed to snag. How unlucky am I? By the high concentration of gryphons in the mines, I guessed I was probably somewhere in or near the griffon kingdoms, where few ponies ever ventured. Ponies like me. I was a dumbass back then.
Why they didn’t force me to do something, I don’t know. Perhaps they were waiting for us to bond naturally to give themselves less problems with misbehaving slaves.
I shook my head, reining my urges. All this talk and tied females in interesting positions wasn’t doing me much good. I was still a guy, and I was barely out of my teen years so hormones waged war with me at every sight of a female still.
“So, what do you want to play today?” I asked them while unbinding them.
“I feel like playing some cards. Do you still have them?” Jokemaster turned to another gryphoness who was as shy as the pegasus. That was pretty rare for a gryphon. I mean, every gryphon I met apart from those two were always so ferocious and talking in testosterone. She was also a good slave, never misbehaving.
So, as it was, no one really suspected her of being up to no good. But like they say: Silent mountains stand strong. She was a devil and no one that knew her would say otherwise. And she was the card player. So, everyone called her Cardmaster. I know, how intuitive.
Said gryphon pulled a card out from somewhere under her wing where no guard could apparently ever find anything, grinning.
There were seven of us in total. And from what I found out, every cellblock had seven slaves in them. Some with a female and six males, some with six females and a male, and some mixed randomly.
Everyone present (Pun was missing, but she was doing it a lot lately. She never answered where she’d been going all the time) gathered in a small circle. Well, almost everyone.
“Hey, Fluttershy, why don’t you come and join us?”
No, Celestia no. It wasn’t that Fluttershy. If it was her, we would be free a long time ago. The others named her so just because she was a female pegasus, and was timid, as was the famous Element of Kindness. She didn’t mind, though. Perhaps even priding herself on her nickname. Fluttershy, the Element of Kindness, was at the end of the day still a hero, no matter her social awkwardness. From what I heard, she wasn’t really all that alike to Fluttershy. Hell, she didn’t even have the same colors as her. But that apparently didn’t matter to others. So, Fluttershy she was.
“No, I’d rather paint,” she replied with a gentle smile, before she spat a bunch of crayons out of her mouth she stole from someone else. She said crayons tasted good, but for me it was all kinds of bleh. At least she didn’t try to swallow them in yet another attempt to take her own life.
If Cardmaster was the master smuggler, then Flutters was the master thief. If those two would ever get out, they could probably rob the Canterlot Archives right under the princesses’ noses and never get caught.
There were two other females there. One of them went by the name Keythong, and she was, well, a keythong. Which is basically a wingless gryphon. She had the color of steel grey with albino white fluff around the chest, neck, and the end of the tail. Her eyes were that of desert sand in hourglasses, slowly watching time pass by.
When I asked her about her species, she told me keythongs were the outcasts of griffon society. A rare anomaly that sometimes occurred. Many said it meant that the bloodline that spurred such an offspring was cursed, and more often than not were exiled so they wouldn’t infect others with this non-existent curse. It was kinda hypocritical, if you take into account that gryphons who lose their wings during life, depending on the way they lose them, are often pitied, granted great gifts from others, or revered as war heroes.
The last one was a zebra. Her name was too complicated to pronounce and remember, so we just called her Ulimi, which meant tongue in her tribe’s language. She was black and white, like every zebra. Ulimi didn’t talk much, but she did grunt a lot.
We played cards and Flutters painted even though as soon as we’d leave the room a cleaning unit would come and scrub the walls and floors clean, to make sure the next group of inmates wouldn’t get… distracted.
So on the routine went, day after day. Days turned into months.
And Luna knows, months turned into years. And like flowers without sun, one by one we soon withered into ashes.
I only attended a funeral twice in my whole life. There had been this unicorn and an earth pony who both died in an accident. I hadn’t even known them. A lot of ponies hadn’t known them. Yet they had all attended the funeral. We had been there. They had been part of our village, after all. And everyone in our village stuck together like brothers and sisters.
To be honest, I hadn’t wanted to go there. But my parents’d made me.
And so I’d learned the respective funeral rites for an earth pony and a unicorn.
But never for a pegasus. So, I gave her the one I remembered the most, the one closest to my heart. A watered-down version with a lot of things I made up on spot, sure, but it was at least something.
“This world didn’t deserve her. These damned sons-of-bitches’ bastards didn’t deserve her.” My voice shook as sobs bubbled up in my chest near the end of my speech. There were soft whimpers and silent tears all around me, but I was at their center.
“May the Mother bring you to peace. She knows you deserve it,” I said, then continued. “May the earth be light to you, and the roots soothe you to rest everlasting. May you return to earth from whence your life began.”
The others were repeating, and as they finished, I continued, “And so shall it be.”
“And so shall it be,” the voices rung, each underlined with grief and sorrow.
I softly nudged Pearl “Fluttershy” Winkle’s body over the edge, and into the deep, wide ravine where her body would be forgotten. Where she’d be forgotten, like everyone who died in this hellhole.
But it was better this way. At least she’d not serve as a dinner to DD’s.
She couldn’t bear it anymore. With a three-word sentence that stunned me for a few moments, her life ceased to be right in front of me. Overdose on the crystal dust. One deep breath of a hoofful of it, and it was all over.
“No more will she paint the walls,” I hiccuped and fell to my knees, as if to make me closer to the body that disappeared into the darkness below. No more would she liven up the caves, our room where we’d meet now and then.
A soothing voice, a gentle smile. A single reassuring word, a gentle “It’ll be ok.” Gone.
Gone was her withered form, her suffering in the paws of the demons.
I lay there at the edge, tears freely flowing and falling into down into the pit, and I contemplated joining them. I was this close to freedom from torment. To jump and be done with it. Empty thoughts I knew I would never realise, but thoughts that came to my mind all the same
I couldn’t do it. There were others, and as long as I had them, I would carry on.
We’d carry on.
“Crystals, crystals, on the wall. Who’s the miner of you all?”
I dropped the pickaxe as it struck and released another cloud of dust. A heavy fit of coughing hit me immediately.
They’ve been getting worse lately. My instincts screamed at me my time would come sooner than I wanted. Even after – what? Three years? I don’t even know, I’ve stopped counting after two hundred days – in this hellhole, I didn’t want to die. The survival instinct in me was just too strong.
When the coughing and pain finally receded, I picked up the pickaxe once again and went back to work. That’s all there ever was these days. Work. Even the pauses for group meetings and such were getting fewer and sparser. The lunches and dinners; food in general, dwindled. Something was going on, I could feel it in my crystalised bones.
With another coughing fit, a small piece of crystal parted with the large, unsightly lump before me. And not a second after it fell, a paw was there to pick it up and carry it away into the darkness. Well, relative darkness. The damn crystals shone, you know? But I flinched when it came. You learned to fear the paw. You learned to fear them. It was an instinct by this point, an unquestionable thing to do.
Coward. That’s what I’d become, I thought grimly, remembering how I would stand up against them at first. Now I hunched like everyone else.
Coward that’s alive.
My gaze swept over the crystals. Beautiful, green crystals. Shining with preternatural glow like small stars that shone in the sky of a stony cave. I smiled, their shine reassuring me that what I was doing was good.
I shook my head. “Don’t,” I reprimanded myself. “Nothing in here is good,” I reminded myself. I had to if I were to remain sane.
I dug some more. Hours didn’t matter at this point. Not even days did. The only time we counted were months and years.
“Excuse me,” someone said behind me and I froze. There were no other prisoners in here. There never were, not anymore. There were less of us than when I’d… arrived. That meant that a diamond dog was behind me. But a DD that said “Excuse me?” That didn’t add up. However, my mind didn’t follow up on that thought.
I could already feel the phantom pain crawling my back and sides, awaiting another beating I couldn’t do anything about. My first instinct was to run, and my legs were already trembling with an unspent energy of running.
I was a coward, but I tried to put on a facade. Bravado. Not trusting my voice to betray my fear, I grunted instead in Ulimi’s familiar fashion, not even turning to look at the hovering form that cast shadow all over me and my crystals.
“Where can I find… prisoner block number twenty seven?”
That was my block. And why did he need to ask a slave for directions? A new dog, perhaps? We didn’t get those anymore.
But I didn’t glance back. They didn’t like it. It was like a challenge to them and their authority. So, with fear that if I left the post even with a DD on my tail I’d still get beaten, I croaked a silent “Right this way,” and started walking the labyrinth that were these caves, the hulking form always keeping behind me while I had my head hanging low, trying to look as small as possible. This dog was big. Like my previous master, who died fighting another dog for a pawful of crystals. Asshole deserved the gruesome death.
Then I noticed something through the haze in my mind. There were clicking sounds each time the DD moved, and there were too many of them. I mean, DDs are silent as hell and they only walk on two legs, rarely on all four.
That was no damned diamond dog behind me.
I jump ahead of me, the farthest I could, and immediately turned around to whatever was following me.
There in the hallway stood the most magnificent creature I had ever seen. Only Celestia or Luna could match the aura of… something that felt reassuring, like this creature.
It was a stag, various colors of brown adored the hide, while a white, wide and big puff of softer fur grew at the base of its neck and chest. It carried itself with pride, standing in the hallway as if all belonged to him (I was sure it was “him”), and yet felt benevolent all at the same time. He regarded me with a piercing yellow eyes, unsettling yet fatherly.
But the thing that really drew my eyes to him were his antlers. They began at the top of his head near his ears, and grew up over him in a sort of a “U” shape. Or better yet, a reversed omega symbol. And from these two main antlers, smaller grew like the branches of a tree. That had the effect of a magnificent crown sitting on his head, while growing above him in a beautiful shape that just screamed authority at me.
And he smiled, clearly amused.
My knees buckled beneath me at the sight. Where did he come from? He didn’t look like a prisoner and he didn’t look like a slaver. A sudden thought hit me with the power of a battering ram, but I dared not to hope. I dared not to believe that he was here on his own volition, perhaps to save us. But where was the army? Where was anyone else but him? Were they searching the complex and I came upon a lone soldier?
But he didn’t look like a soldier. He didn’t have anything about him; no weapons, no bags, no armour. And he looked like the lone-wolf kind of type. Someone that is used to operating alone or with others beneath him.
I felt that he was alone in here. But how did he hope to defeat an entire army of Diamond Dogs himself? Or perhaps he was willingly here to get himself captured? But why in hell would anyone wish that? And stealth, for such a large creature, was as foreign as it was for a rat to move a giant boulder.
“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” he said. He didn’t even bat an eye, he didn’t move to help me as I fell to my knees.
“I… you… save us?” With the last two words my voice broke and tears welled in my eyes. I haven’t seen anyone else beside other slaves and slavers for many years. And yet, here he was, a stag so majestic that my knees buckled at the sight of him.
Then, I noticed something. There were small red and brown spots around his head and on his antlers. Small things, really, but I saw them and immediately knew what they were. I’ve seen it a lot in the past few years.
Blood.
He inclined his head, looking like he contemplated what I had said. Then he nodded at me while saying, “Maybe. If you show me where prisoner block number twenty seven is. Do you know where it is? I would presume so, because it looked like you were taking me there a minute ago.” He talked in the same note and voice, not rising his volume, no trace of any other emotion but patience.
“M-maybe? You haven’t come to save us?”
He started laughing. It wasn’t anything harsh. It wasn’t even all that loud. Yet it pierced the air on a level that even if the world would come crashing around us, I’d still hear him with the same clarity as I did in this silence, now filled with his gentle laughter.
“Oh no, child. I cannot save everyone. But there is indeed someone I came to save. And that someone is in block twenty seven. Maybe if you follow me, you’ll be able to get out of this… hole.”
I… I didn’t know what to say. What could be said after that?
Irrational anger began to boil in my chest.
“What do you mean? You’ll just leave us here while you save a single… someone? And how do you even want to do that with an entire army of diamond dogs behind every corner?!”
He just stood there, taking it all in stride. He again inclined his head to me, a reprimand sort of gesture that yet bore no trace of anger what so ever. “No, I never said I would leave you here. Anyone who wishes can follow me out. Now, would you lead me to the prison block?” he said more than asked, a statement that held true and I had no other choice but to obey. So powerful was his presence.
I gulped and clambered up to my hooves and legs. Then I started to my prison block, where my cell awaited, cold and empty. I had a suspicion of who was the one he was trying to save.
There was, after all, a certain deer occupying the same prison block as me.
Then, a diamond dog came around the corner. I had to give the dog a credit. He wasn’t as stunned as I’d been with the stag, and he immediately drew his weapon upon seeing the unknown creature behind me.
The stag, in response, hopped around and somewhat even over me, his head keeping low to not hit the ceiling. The dog was fast. But the stag was faster. His antlers shone with a sudden metallic sheen that somehow reflected itself and things around it in a myriad of soft colors. Then, the antlers slashed through the diamond dog like he was a piece of paper. And just like that, the dog was no more and the stag’s antlers stopped shining.
It stepped aside, revealing the messy thing now splashed around the floor. He slowly motioned with his head down the hallways where we were headed while saying, “Come on. I’ll follow.”
There wasn’t much point in keeping someone who managed to do that in a split of a second waiting. I slowly, if somewhat disgustingly, stepped around the remnants of the diamond dog. I wasn’t disgusted by the mess. I was more disgusted by what the damned creature represented.
And then I smiled. It indeed represented.
Revenge.
Thirty dogs later, we entered the mostly-barren meeting/dining hall, from whence one could access all the prison blocks. Mine was straight ahead, luckily on the same floor as the main room. It meant I didn’t have to climb any stairs up or down. That would kill me every time I woke up or went to bed. Or more like was dragged to bed. Bed being a pile of hay, but whatever. Better than the cold hard floor.
The slaves that were there, though, looked up at us. Or rather, the stag. He politely ignored them while some slaves started laughing, some crying, some just stared and some ran off. Not one of them, though, dared to say anything.
We crossed the huge hall, slaves parting to keep themselves from our way.
“Here,” I whispered, my throat dry and scratchy from the day’s work and the long walk. That had me go into another coughing fit. He politely stepped around me, while also tapping my back lightly. I nodded a thanks while still coughing and trying to get it under control.
After a few more coughs, we went in, a familiar corridor that I’ve walked through many times before, but one I was adamant on not walking through ever again.
Pun was in her cell, and the stag immediately went on hacking her out while I ran down the corridor. Keythong and Cardmaster were in their cells. But Jokemaster and Ulimi were missing.
“Dammit,” I hissed and went back to Pun’s cell.
She was bowing and crying, while the stag was telling her something in another language. She nodded and stood up, a mix of happiness and awe waging war across her features.
Then he looked at me.
“Two of my other friends are down the corridor,” I pointed with my right hoof further into the cellblock.
He nodded a slight nod, before walking causally to each occupied cell and freeing the prisoners. Cardmaster and Keythong seemed to be wary of the stag that was larger than them. But as soon as they noticed me, they went to me and we hugged, because that’s what friends do, right? Even Pun joined us.
“Who is it?” Keythong asked with a whisper after we parted.
“I have no idea, but he’s going to rescue us,” I answered silently, then looked at him.
“There are two of my friends missing, probably working the mines,” I said, before resorting into another coughing fit.
He waited patiently, then said without malice or sadness, with that omnipresent smile of his, “I am afraid I can’t risk Meadow Dew’s life for rescuing your friends, I am sorry.”
He was not.
“I won’t leave them,” I said defiantly, while rising my head to meet his eyes.
He just nodded understandingly. “That is your choice.” Then he turned to Pun, said something, and started to walk away.
Pun said something, tears still in her eyes. The stag looked at her, before irritably flicking his head to me. His annoyance, though, vanished almost instantly, replaced by imperceptible amusement.
“Very well,” was all he said before turning around and walking out of the cellblock. We followed him silently.
And I immediately stopped in the doorway, blocking everyone behind me from coming through them.
There were about a hundred and one diamond dogs, each one armed to the teeth, weapons drawn and pointed at the stag in front of me, now standing in the great room.
“Hey, why do you-”
I turned around immediately and shushed Keythong. We stayed in the shadows of the corridor still. I didn’t have any illusions that they couldn’t see us, but at least I didn’t want to draw their attention to us. No, scrap that. No way in hell did I want to bring attention to us. My knees were already shaking as they were. I probably wouldn’t be able to run if they started hunting us down. Not like there was anywhere to run.
One diamond dog, not particularly bigger than the rest, but one that was dressed in a finer armor, stepped up from the half-circle the DD’s created around the now-vacated mainroom.
“It’s over, intruder! Yield and we might make you a slave!” he barked a harsh, yet calm voice that was clearly used to commanding others around. The boss, then.
Scarlet rage blinded my mind for a few seconds, replacing the freezing fear. Before the stag stood the one behind our suffering, the one behind Fluttershy’s death. I almost made a step out of the shadows, I almost ran screaming incoherently against the boss.
But as I was about to make that step, the stag turned around, a small reassuring smile gleaming white, and a twinkle to his eye that would melt the greatest of angers. And it did quell mine. He nodded a little, then went back to watching the horde and its leader slowly closing in on us.
Then he leapt without much effort, sailing gracefully through the air straight toward the leader. And when he was close enough to be within the dog’s weapon reach, he rolled in the air, his antlers shining with unsung glory.
Then the leader was no more and the others followed.
After half of them were down, the dogs lost their morale and started to panic, trying to run away from the stag’s reach, but each time they would try to run, he’d leap effortlessly straight to them, not giving them a single chance, not showing any mercy.
When it was all over, we stood stunned as the stag calmly walked through the massacre of blood and flesh toward us, his entire head drenched in drying blood. He didn’t seem fazed by it at all. In fact, he seemed to be unfazed by this tremendous physical effort. Maybe he was breathing a little harder but not much.
So we stood there in awe, speechless. Only Keythong managed to give a little “Wow!”
“Let’s go,” said the stag, not caring for our mental state. We silently shuffled behind him as we began the search for my friends.
The slaves revolted, and they paid dearly for it.
When the witnesses, the slaves that hid in the shadowy places of the main hall, went to their brethren to tell them of the killer and death of the leader, they took up their chances.
But while many of the dogs were slayed back there, many still remained. But now, at least, the numbers were even.
We crossed the many corridors, cavernous halls and tracks for pulling wagons of crystals, bodies of both slaves and slavers littered the ground. Fear began to settle. Were my friends alright?
The sound of fighting rebounded through the narrow infinite pathways and turns, mined into the rock by slaves. Yet, all we were finding were corpses and the stench of blood and other secretions choking the air.
Then, we found them.
I knelt down by them, my legs giving out. Their blood was already cold. They must’ve been the first to attack, the first to fall. I hadn’t expected any less of them, to be honest.
Silent tears trailed down my grimy face, falling onto the ground as I sat between my friends, now gone, for the last time. Ulimi and Jokemaster… were gone.
“May the Mother bring you to peace. She knows you deserve it,” I recited, emotionless. I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything, not right now. Perhaps I was in a shock, and the tide of sorrow would come later. I never cared for psychology. “May the earth be light to you, and the roots soothe you to rest everlasting. May you return to earth from whence your lives began.”
And so shall it be.
Just like before, I could hear the held-back sobs of my friends standing behind me. I turned around while getting up, and I beheld their sorrow. The stag looked on impassively, saying, “I am sorry for your loss.”
He wasn’t.
“Thank you,” I replied, though. He nodded and went further down the cavernous corridor, standing aside to give us time to cope. It took us a while, but we managed to get ourselves together before slowly shuffling away, leaving the bodies behind. There was nothing we could do, there was no place to bury them.
But then I picked up a single torch from the wall, and I slowly sat their worker rags and their feathers on fire. Wasn’t exactly a funeral pyre, but better than leaving them here to rot and serve as food to maggots or some surviving dogs.
We moved away, leaving the burning dead behind.
