Guards and Monsters

“Marco!” I shouted into the cave entrance. The mountain-side was riddled with them, and they all led to the same network of spider caves. Not that these were digging spiders – all these tunnels had originally been Diamond Dog mines. And I suppose we were here to make sure that they were Diamond Dog mines again, although the Unicorn Range was pretty deep in Equestria, so it was kind of weird that it was any of the Diamond Dogs’ business. Maybe they had free run under the surface or something.

“Marco!” I shouted again, just in case somepony was close, but hadn’t heard the first time. I was shouting ultrasonically, hopefully out of range of the spiders’ hearing, although to tell the truth I wasn’t even sure that they had ears.

There was no response, so I moved on to the next tunnel. Pip and I had spent a good hour mapping out all the tunnels we could see. We scratched the map into the floor of Luna’s chariot with our wingblades. We figured she wouldn’t mind. Or that she’d make us sand it out after the mission. It wasn’t like the chariot itself was a magical artifact.

There were thirty seven tunnels. We were taking them in groups of six.

“Marco!” I shouted ultrasonically into the next tunnel, and waited.

“Polo!” came a faint voice back.

“Okay, wait there! I’m going to go get Pip!”

It took about fifteen minutes to chase him down, but he’d had no luck, so we headed back to the tunnel. “Marco!” I shouted again, just to make sure.

There was no response.

“Are you sure this was the one?” he asked.

I looked around, and went over it again in my head… yeah, this was the place. “It was pretty faint. If they had to move at all, they might be out of range. Let’s go in a ways and try again.”

We were pretty low on the mountain, and these tunnels didn’t have very many spider webs, and we didn’t run into any spiders before we got to the first intersection. “Marco!” I shouted, and while I didn’t hear anypony calling back to us, I did get some weird echoes from one of the side tunnels. I chirped properly down it a few times, and realized that it was a pretty short dead end. So at least we knew which way to go.

Down the dead end, of course, to see if anypony was hiding there. Nopony was.

The next intersection was a small chamber, with some rusting prison cells against one wall, and a stone table with a diamond dog skeleton stretched out across it. “You know, if we were playing Oubliettes and Ogres, there’d be some treasure on that skeleton,” I said. “Go check it for traps!”

Pipsqueak laughed, and poked at the skeleton with his spear a few times. It crumbled a bit, but there was no sign of treasure. “The spiders must have taken all the gems.”

“What would spiders want with gems?”

“They use them to lure in adventurers, of course,” Pipsqueak said. “That, or they eat them.”

“I’m pretty sure these spiders eat meat,” I said. “So, which way?”

We chirped down the tunnels, and went the way that gave the strongest echo, in the hopes that it was another dead end. It sort of was – it was a small complex of abandoned rooms and stuff, from when the Diamond Dogs had lived there. There was no treasure, and no spiders, and none of the skeletons got up and attacked us. We still made sure to leap into every room to surprise anything that might be lurking inside, and Pip poked his spear into every dark corner, just in case.

The next tunnel we tried led to a pretty standard mine shaft. The lift was long gone. It went down. “I don’t think we want to go down,” I said. “All the spiders we fought were up from here.”

“Marco!” Pipsqueak chirped down the shaft.

“Marco!” chirped somepony from below.

“You’re supposed to say Polo!” I shouted down at them.

“Polo!” they called back.

“I don’t like this,” Pipsqueak hissed.

“What choice do we have?” I asked.

We floated down the shaft side by side, flapping our wings slowly in a hover, but letting ourselves descend at a nice steady pace. There were levels where the Diamond Dogs had branched off to mine some seam of gems or another, and we shouted ‘Marco!’ at every level, but the response was always calling us down into the depths.

Eventually, it got dark enough that even our bat pony eyes couldn’t see a thing, and we had to chirp to see where the walls were. The thing at the bottom of the shaft – by this point I was sure that it was not a pony – kept chirping back at us, which interfered with our returns and made our mental map of the shaft go fuzzy.

“This isn’t one of our friends,” I said. “We should go back up.”

“Yeah,” Pipsqueak said, continuing to descend.

I continued to descend as well. I knew that I wanted to go up, instead, but I couldn’t clearly form the thought of how to move my wings to make myself do that. “Okay, we’re totally bucked,” I said. “Suicide time?”

“Sounds good,” Pipsqueak said, but we couldn’t do that, either.

At the bottom of the shaft was a vast dark web, which quivered in our echolocation like a fluffy field of grass. We might have been fooled if it wasn’t for the giant spider looming in the center of it.

Ah, little ponies, I wondered what manner of creature was stirring my children to such heights of terror. Tell me, little ponies, what brings you to my parlor?

“We’re hunting your children,” I said, unable to even remain silent. In a way, this was familiar – it wasn’t the first time I’d had my mind stolen from me. But the changeling queen had been gentle by comparison. I’d been tricked. This time, I knew what was going on, but my thoughts were not my own – my mind was a puppet on the spider’s strings. “The Diamond Dogs want their mountain back.”

Well they can’t have it! I’d tell you to send them a message, but I don’t think I care enough to let one of you go and deliver it. It’s so rare that anyone comes all the way down here to meet me in person. Tell me about yourselves. What do you do? How can you best amuse me? Ponies each have special talents, right?

“I’m an adventurer!” Pipsqueak volunteered, against his will. “I hunt monsters, and protect the weak!”

Boring, and useless, the spider queen replied. If I want monsters hunted, I can have my children swarm them. Still, I can always use you as a puppet. Pipsqueak flew around the room, at her direction, doing aerobatics that he wasn’t really skilled or flexible enough to pull off – and when he failed, he’d jerk to a stop in midair, as if suspended on physical strings, and not scream at all even though his wings were contorted into painful positions. And when you break, I’ll lay a clutch of eggs in your brain. Pony-fed children are always the most intelligent.

She turned to me. And you?

“I’m a musician,” I told her. “I play the lyre, I sing, I even compose music. I don’t have my lyre with me, but if you’d like, I could sing a song for you?”

Ah, now that is something novel indeed. Go on, little one, sing me your song. But make certain that it pleases me, or your skull will make a lovely nesting place for my next clutch.

Singing is a creative endeavor. You can try to do it by rote, if there’s a song that you’ve memorized and sung a thousand times, but that’s not the same as a song from the heart. The spider knew this, and when she felt me wriggle in her web to try to come up with the perfect words to sing her praises, she let her strings loosen, just a little. I still couldn’t have killed myself, or tried to leave, since she had specific orders in place about that, but I could decide what to sing.

And I knew just what to sing. I started out quietly, in a conspiratorial tone. A minor-keyed tune, with just a hint of urgency. The song was going somewhere, and I needed for her to follow.

Down in the darkness
Underneath the stone
Nesting in its web
The spider makes her home

The queen of all she senses
All that wriggles in her web
The tiny creatures trapped like bugs…
They wriggle ‘till they’re dead

But don’t think her a monster
We all have lies we tell
We all have webs we spin
We all would cast that spell

We usually never notice
We never, ever tell
We barely even whisper
To ourselves…

La la la, la la la, you didn’t notice you fell
La la la, la la la, and now you’re under my spell
La la la, la la la, you didn’t notice you fell
La la la, la la la, and now you’re under my spell

Blindsided by the music of my heart
That wound around your puppet strings, so gentle at the start
You didn’t even notice you fell...

You felt it creep around your legs and tickle at the hair
You started swaying to the beat that you and I both share
And now you’ve fallen under my spell…

I’ve got the music
Makes you move it
Got the sound that makes you lose it
Lifts your soul so very high,
Look above you, there’s just sky.

I’ve got the music
Makes you move it
Got the sound that makes you lose it
Drags you down into the deep,
Look below you, there’s the sea.

Now swirl around with me…
Floating in eternity…
Sinking slowly into sleep…
Sleep…
Sleeeeeep….

I took the spear out of Pipsqueaks hooves. He didn’t resist me – he was asleep as well. The spider‘s spell was still wound around my mind, keeping me from leaving, but it didn’t stop me from approaching her, even with a weapon. She’d never ordered us not to attack – we were insects to her. Nothing we could do could hurt her.

So I plunged the spear right into her stupid eye. The largest one, on the left. There was a bit of resistance at first, but the spear was sharp, and the body I was wearing was strong. I drove the shaft all the way in, into her brain, as deep as I could until the end of the handle was buried in the gooey slime where her eye had been – and she screeched, horribly, waking to agony and flailing around with her limbs…

So, no, it didn’t kill her. But it did break her spell. Pipsqueak and I flew out of there like a pair of bat ponies out of Tartarus, and didn’t stop until we were back in Luna’s chariot.

“We need to go higher,” Pipsqueak babbled. “Luna, take us higher. She can jump! She can jump this high, Luna!”

“She can’t even fit up the mine shaft,” I said. “She’s huge. Luna, giant demon spiders from the pits of Tartarus can’t squeeze through tiny tunnels large enough for two ponies to fly up side by side, can they?”

Luna stared back at us, and rested a wing on each of our heads, calming us as if by magic. “So that was why the spiders seemed so organized. There is a mind behind them, after all.”

“Spider,” I said. “Demon spider. Giant demon spider!”

I felt the wave of calm redouble its effect, and sunk to the ground. I was calm enough to notice that Spike was there, watching me nervously, and that two other bat ponies were hovering nearby. So the gang was all together, at least.

“I should not be surprised that this infestation was not the result of random chance. The Diamond Dogs dug too greedily, and too deep, and broke through into Tartarus.” Luna paused to sigh. “Again.”

“Does this happen a lot?” Spike asked.

“Constantly,” Luna growled. “Why do you think there is peace between our peoples? They rely on my sister and I to seal the breaches. Wait here, and I will close this gate. It is never safe for mortals to approach a denizen of Tartarus – few are strong-willed enough to escape with their sanity intact.”

Luna was gone for a while. We sat and/or hovered around making small talk, and comparing notes on the fight with the spiders. Pip and I told them about the Demon Spider Queen, and we didn’t exaggerate at all. I’m not even sure how we could have!

I sang them the song I’d sung to her, but nopony fell asleep or got hypnotized in any way. Spike guessed that it was her psychic link to me that had made her vulnerable to it, since I didn’t have mind magic of my own. “It’s like when Twilight was fighting the Sirens – she and her friends were able to sing a counterspell, even though they never would have been able to hypnotize the students out of the blue like the Sirens could.”

Then I sort of dozed off, because I was bored. I think Bon Bon and Spike started playing tic tac toe on the floor of Luna’s chariot.

The sun was glowing on the horizon, politely asking the moon to please give way so that daylight could begin, for almost an hour before Luna returned, looking absolutely exhausted. She was wearing the tattered remains of some sort of magical armor, and collapsed in a heap in the middle of the chariot, breathing heavily. Her hooves and the edges of her wings were trailing off into smoke, as if she was on the verge of dissolving completely.

“It is done,” she said.

Her horn glowed briefly, and the moon dropped from the sky like its strings had been cut. The sun rose majestically into place, and Luna fell asleep, her eyes closed and her chest rising and falling peacefully. Every so often, she’d stir and give a loud, un-ladylike snort, or kick at the air with a single hoof.

When we got tired of giggling at her, we took turns dragging the chariot back to Canterlot. It was really a job for a two-pony team, but since Luna had pulled the chariot out to the mountains it was only fitted with a single harness. When we got in range of the Royal Guard patrols, we let them take over, and headed back to the barracks, because it was closer than the Crystal Empire.

“We’re going to have to go back and finish off the rest of the spiders tomorrow, aren’t we?” Bon Bon remarked. Everypony groaned.