A young earth pony stallion stood at the base of the cave, his entire body covered in a black fabric designed to keep his body heat stable in even the coldest of weathers. Combined with his thick, black balaclava and red tinted anti-flash polarized goggles, everything about him would have screamed spec-ops to anypony who didn't know him. In truth, the whole outfit covering every inch of himself was simply to make sure he could survive the perpetually sub-zero temperatures of the dig site.

After all, Digging Deeper was not military, much less spec-ops. He despised the military- any military, really- and everything they stood for. War, chaos, and death were courted, while scientific aptitude and technological prowess were thrown down the drain. One could imagine, then, his shock and disgust when the Project's supervisor, Dr. Kassar, told the team that a representative from the Equestrian Naval Service's Department of Science and Technology was coming to retrieve this artifact they had worked so tirelessly to dig up. Their artifact. This thing was supposed to be helping! It was... How did the doctor put it? he asked himself. A warm light for all to share, his brain reminded him. What was the Navy going to do with that?

He knew, of course, exactly what they were going to do. They were going to use it to make a new Drive, which they used to power their ships, airships, and helicopters. Trivial stuff, unworthy of the artifact's true potential.

He dispelled those thoughts as best he could when he caught sight of a large chariot incoming towards the glacier, pulled by two Noctus Guards in their distinctive midnight blue armors. If anypony had been around, and if his mouth hadn't been covered, they would have seen his mouth hanging slightly ajar at the sight before he quickly slammed it closed and shook his head, chastising himself mentally. He half expected her to come by way of helicopter or Harmony-powered tilt-rotor (it was important, he believed, to follow the technological advancements of the military in hopes of adapting that technology to civilian life, despite his hatred for its origin), but of course she wouldn't have. Negative fifty degrees centigrade was far too cold to be running a Harmony II. An Embrace IV could have handled it, he supposed, but they were far too unreliable for transporting what might very well be something so precious as this chariot's quarry.

He started walking towards the now grounded chariot just as the mare he was supposed to be meeting stepped out. Admittedly, she could have chosen better attire for the occasion. Her white coverall was far too thin, evidenced by the distinctive shiver as she walked. She wore a balaclava over her face, like him, but had no goggles on, exposing her eyes to the cold. Plus, without the polarization, it was likely that the glare from the setting sun on the ice and snow had rendered her near blind. So much for military preparedness, he thought to himself. He knew he'd need to be more polite in conversation, but in his head, he could be as rude as he damn well wanted to be. It really was a shame these military types thought they were entitled to so much- it would have been fun to put her in her place out loud.

Alas, he reached the chariot, slowly dragging his boots through the snow. This was not a meeting he was looking forward to. "Are you Captain Lorem Ipsum?" Dr. Kassar had told him to be polite. Digging would have liked to think that his mentor would have been proud. In between shivers, the captain managed to nod her head. It was quite obvious that any longer than necessary and she would freeze to death. Regardless of her purpose here, regardless of his predisposition, the archeologist wasn't about to let her die. He stepped forward one last time, now standing next to the mare. He took her closest foreleg in his own hoof and wrapped it tightly around his own neck. He took her saddlebags in his mouth and spoke to the guards through the straps. "Come on, everypony. Let's get inside." He felt the shaking more than he heard it, but the stallion's brain was able to fill in the noise once he realized what it was. It wasn't more shivering. The poor mare was probably extremely hungry. "You guys like fish?" he questioned as he began walking back towards the cave.

The four ponies now sat around a small fire in a branch of the cave system that had been designated off as a hybrid living quarters/mess hall. Though the room was strangely empty, it was warm, both from the fire and the insulation enchantments that had been laid on the ice around them- something that Lorem was more than grateful for. In front of her sat a small metal dish which she was hesitant to name "plate". The circular piece of rusted iron didn't seem like it was supposed to be eaten off of. Across from here, the earth pony she'd met earlier held a frying pan in his mouth, masterfully cooking the fish placed atop it- swai, if she wasn't mistaken- to a perfect golden brown before sliding off of the pan and onto her dish. At least, he'd said that it was perfect, and having never tried any fish before, she had to take the archaeologist's word for it. It had been decided that she should be allowed to eat first, as she'd gotten rid of her lunch not four hours ago when a particularly brutal wind rocked her chariot en route.

Using her now stabilized magic, she reached into her saddlebags and grabbed a small fork. It wasn't that the team didn't have forks of their own, but if they were anything like the plate, they likely couldn't be trusted. She cautiously prodded the "food" before her before looking up at Digging Deeper (she'd only learned his name after she'd mistaken him for Dr. Kassar), still poised over the fire, now cooking up another slice of fish.

"At least try it, would you?" He was trying very hard to be polite, but the captain wasn't helping matters. He'd just saved her life, for the goddess' sake! The least- literally, the least- she could do was try his cooking.

The reaction to the question went much better than he'd expected, as Lorem shrugged slightly before taking a small bite with her fork and putting it in her mouth. The reaction to his cooking went much worse, however, as almost immediately afterwards spat out the barely chewed material straight into the fire. Adding insult to injury, she stuck her tongue out and, looking cross-eyed at it, started scraping it off with her fork. When she was done, the crimson-maned mare looked up to see the chef staring at her. And he was not happy. Still, nopony could really blame her- that stuff was disgusting! "Ponies actually eat that?" she blurted out without bothering to think about her words.

She shot a hoof to her mouth, as though that would somehow take those words back, but they obviously failed to do so. She glanced back up rather sheepishly, only to see her host with a half smile on his face. "It's a pegasus thing, really. Their semi-avian nature causes them to get some pretty strange cravings sometimes; fish are just one of them."

"But you're not a pegasus."

The captain had a point- Digging Deeper was not a pegasus. She was smarter than she looked. Which, considering the ENS patch and silver eagle embroidered on her jacket, wasn't saying much. "I guess it's just an acquired taste, then." He let out a small chuckle before walking to the other side of the room. He opened a small ice box and pulled out some apples and several bags of preserved flowers. He took them back and set them in front of the captain. "Give it to one of them, then," he said, pointing at each of the guards with a hoof. "But you still need to eat something."

The stallion finished cooking and the four ate their meals in relative silence, the only sounds being the constant chewing and the occasional much stranger noise. Every minute and a half or so, a low, muffled boom would shake the cavern. It reminded the captain of the Harmony-class destroyer she'd commanded not to long ago before her transfer. As such, it naturally frightened her (those guns aren't something she ever wanted to spend time around, and she hated being reminded of them). When she had finished the last of her apples, she couldn't take it anymore.

"What is that noise?" It wasn't quite a shout, but it was certainly loud enough to get her point across.

"First things first." Deeper stood up and walked around the fire. In his mouth, he took his guest's plate and walked them over to a makeshift washing pot and placed them in. He turned, came back, and repeated the process for the guard's plates. At least they had liked his cooking- they were just as spotless as they were before the meal. When everypony's plates were taken care of, if not cleaned, he said sternly, "Follow me, Captain."

The four walked slowly through the twisting and turning passages of the interior of the glacier. Like clockwork, the pulses continued, unnerving the sailor more and more with each step. The archeologist, however, only seemed to walk with more determination. It was a surprisingly long walk before the magical barrier cutting the artifact off from the rest of the impromptu compound came into sight.

"The file Dr. Kassar sent back to the university didn't contain too much information. Care to elaborate on anything?"

The break in the silence was unwelcome, especially from the mare who had come to steal Deeper's entire future career. Well, he couldn't prove that, but he had a feeling. This artifact was supposed to mean good things for him, not... whatever the Navy wanted with it. "That's because we had barely any information on the Core at the time." The tone was less than polite, but it couldn't be helped. Inside the confines of his subconscious, the stallion's mentor nagged him. It was taken out of our hooves, and we're not really in a position to be arguing with the military over this. It didn't matter anymore, though. He was done being polite.

"The Core?"

The earth pony had almost forgotten that this mare would have had no idea what he was talking about. "The Ascendant Core. That's what Dr. Kassar called it."

"And where is Dr. Kassar, anyways?"

The four ponies reached the barrier when the guide stopped in his tracks. He pointed a hoof off to his left, into a side chamber down a ways from the magical door. Lorem followed his hoof to be met with a rather startling sight.

Laying in the chamber were eleven very distinctive lumps, covered by a large, black tarp secured with what looked to be duct tape. A project team of eight, four guards... And only one survivor. "What happened?" The voice was sympathetic, almost. It showed a genuine mourning for the dead. The two Noctus walked into the chamber and started checking the bodies over, though she could no longer see them.

"He tried to touch it," the other deadpanned. "Don't make the same mistake."

Suddenly, there was a shadowy figure standing next to the pair. "Ma'am, we'd like to attend to our fallen. You may proceed without us." Lorem nodded in response, and the Noctus walked off.

The remaining stallion turned around and placed his hoof on the magical wall. The barrier dispelled, allowing the two ponies access to the central cavern.

It was an almost perfectly semi-spherical room, only a few tiny stalactites made of sparkling ice penetrating the otherwise flawlessly smooth surface. And there, in the center of that room, was the artifact. Though, looking at it now, Lorem supposed "artifact" wasn't really a proper word for it. Artifact would imply it was pony-made, and this thing was far too flawlessly crafted for that to have been true. In and of itself, it was a simple, metallic grey, but that certainly wasn't what made it beautiful. Circling the sphere would be the occasional streak of bent light, colored in all the forms of the rainbow, switching so fast it seemed as though it occupied the whole spectrum at once. Then, just as quickly, it would be gone a few seconds later, replaces by beams of pure shadow and bright green- dark magic, she realized. While the colors arced around it, just barely not touching, the black shadowy streaks more resembled lightning bolts, flying around the air and devouring any light it encountered, only to be gone just as fast as any natural lightning.

In the end, though, there were really no words to describe it. Beautiful and flawless never even came close. In the end, the Ascendant Core simply was.

"What can you tell me about it?" the captain finally spoke up.

The stallion never took his eyes off of it. "Well, you felt the pulses. That's how we detected it in the first place. Field tests of the ambient magics in this room conclude that it's been giving them off for about three hundred thousand years." Even without turning around, Deeper could see his guest's jaw drop. "Analysis of what little material we could get from it without frying ourselves dates it at approximately the same age. The magical radiation is harmless, as far as we can tell, and it doesn't like to be touched." He paused for a moment, considering. "And know you know everything we did."

As the captain walked around the room, inspecting the Core, the stallion found himself with probable cause for questioning his mental sanity. He heard something, a voice in his head. A voice he didn't recognize. Suddenly, he found he couldn't take his eyes off the artifact before him. She wants to take us away... The strange voice echoed in his head. She wants to take us from you...

In that moment, any question he had vanished out of his mind, replaced by resolve. The Core didn't want to leave here, obviously. So it was decided. He wouldn't let it.

Slowly, he reached back onto his belt and felt what he was looking for- a small leather strap that fit around his hoof perfectly. Attached to that strap was a small knife he kept around in case of emergency.

"One more thing," he began, causing the intruder to turn around. "You can't have it."

With that, he lunged forward, quickly closing the distance between himself and his quarry. The mare brought up her hooves to brace for the impact, knowing full well she wouldn't survive the blade. She readied herself, knowing she wasn't ready for death. Her life flashed before her eyes, and she could honestly say she was disappointed with the show.

Her self-loathing was cut off, however, when she realized that death never came for her. Slowly, she opened her eyes and peeked out from in between her forelegs. She almost immediately regretted that action. There in front of her, she say an intense knife battle unfolding between her "host" and the stallion of her guard. The archaeologist was obviously injured, as though he'd just been slammed into (which she figured he was, given the sudden arrival of her guard).

The Noctus was standing on his hind legs, using his wings to prop himself up like the mythological bipeds of old. The other was doing the same thing with a frightening proficiency. Their hooves moved like lightning, far too fast for the captain to try to analyze the situation. She grabbed her own knife from her belt using her magic, and slipped it onto her hoof. She stumbled to a standing position and was met with a horrifying sight.

One wrong move, and her guard showed a weak spot which was instantly exploited by his sparring partner. Blocking the bat-pony's thrust, Digging Deeper swiftly stepped into his dead side and brought his own blade hoof quickly up from the base of the Noctus' wing, immediately separating it from his body. But the archaeologist-turned-combat-specialist didn't stop there. With the more experienced of the two disabled, he brought up his knife again, and used his other hoof to push the airpony to the ground. With a swift motion, he took the blade across the throat of his captive, permanently taking him out of the fight.

He would have regretted that action, if he had had enough time to do so. No such luxury was granted to him, though, as Lorem ran her own blade through the base of her enemy's spine, severing his brain's connection to everything. He fell limp on top of the other body as the knife was withdrawn.

Lorem took a few steps back, her body still trembling from the brief moment of the fight she'd participated in. She'd gotten her commission specifically so she'd never need to kill anypony, and now here she was, gazing at her first kill- a civilian, nevertheless. She was snapped from her thoughts, however, when she heard the shouting coming from the now resurrected barrier: her other guard.

She made her way over there slowly, then used her magic to dispel the barrier. Before the Noctus could say anything, though, she quickly and preemptively interrupted her. "I'm done with this place." She pushed the other out of the way and kept walking, intent on making it back to her chariot.

There was no response from the other mare, however. Taking a moment to listen, there was no sound at all. Except one. Still standing in the doorway, Lorem turned around to see her surviving escort crouched over her fallen comrade, forehooves pressed together as she wept upon his body. "Well, shit," she mumbled to herself. Slowly, she turned around and began to walk back to the scene of the fight, unsure of how to proceed.

When she distanced about two meters from the Air Force sergeant, she was able to hear her whispering to herself. "Luna dilectissime, custodi animam ejus, qui non diligunt mundum, ad oram maris, a quo factum est, ad portas, et quod in ultimo, ut possit ab domo Cerberus Elysium oculos." A prayer to Luna, then, the officer thought. Why the Noctus still spoke in Eldish she would never understand, but when used in that kind of context, it was beautiful in it's own right. Even if she couldn't translate. The older mare was snapped from her thoughts by the slight sound of clinking metal, only just audible over the sound of crying. Lorem looked down at the scene to see that the noise had been the sergeant taking off the fallen airpony's dog tags.

As the younger mare stared at the two shiny pieces of metal in her hoof, she became vaguely aware of another's hoof wrapping gently around her neck. She instinctively flinched away from it, not yet ready to face the world outside of what was just her and her brother. The hoof made another attempt, and the bat pony soon found herself weeping into another mare's shoulder. As she wept, she repeated to herself, "I'm so sorry, brother," over and over again.

The captain gently brushed some of her crimson mane out of the crying pony's face, all the while observing her carefully. She seemed to be greatly comforted by having a shoulder to cry on, which Lorem figured was would be the origin of the saying. She said nothing, however, resorting instead to gently brushing the surprisingly soft fur she found pressed against her in an effort to comfort the Noctus. I really should just learn her name, she thought.

After about a minute or so in that position, the saddened pony closed her eyes slowly, then opened them again, surprising the captain with the absence of tears. She removed her head from the shoulder next to her and put the dog tags into a pocket on her armor. Then she stood and simply said, "Are you still ready to go, Captain?"

Lorem figured it was really best not to question whatever just happened. She glanced at the Ascendant Core, noting how asking questions could have dire consequences. "What do we do about this thing? There's no way you can carry it to Canterlot alone."

"You're right," the other replied. She brought a hoof to her chin, the universal symbol of thought. "I could make it to Tykis, though."

Outpost Tykis, along the border of the Crystal Empire, was not somewhere Lorem ever wanted to return to. It was way too cold, the food wasn't nearly good enough, and the soldiers stationed there had no proper respect for authority, rank, or the chain of command. However, she reminded herself, it didn't seem like she had a choice. The mission had to come first. "Then that's what we'll do," she replied. She cast a safe spell, then secured the Core for transport. She caught the Noctus bringing her comrade onto her back, intent on bringing him home. "We'll send for the rest of them later." She stole one last look at the deceased archeologist on the ground.

"This had all better be worth it," she said, more to herself than anyone else.

Author's Note

For the reason I call them Noctus, refer here. Welcome to Ascendant. Comments are open, tell me what you think. I'd once again like to thank iisaw and CogWing for the pre-reading. This wouldn't be possible without them. Also, I'm apparently obligated to thank my sister for editing this. At least, I think she edited it. She said she did, but I know how she is. If you find some typos, please tell me!

If you'd be interested in prereading or editing for this story, you can sign up here.

I must say, I do believe I'm going to have a great deal of fun writing this.