Guards and Monsters

The gates of Canterlot Palace were wide open, with only a pair of Royal Guards standing to either side for ceremonial purposes. Or maybe it’s so that any invaders would have somepony to demonstrate their power on before blasting a trail of destruction all the way to the throne room.

We were doing a good job of blending in with the steady stream of ponies walking in and out of the gate, until Diamond Tiara decided to ask for directions.

“Excuse me!” she said, to the guard staring stoically straight ahead. “My associates and I have an audience with Princess Luna. You may have the honor of escorting us to her presence.”

The guard broke his stance, and looked down at her. “May I see your invitation?”

“No you may not,” she replied haughtily.

“I’m afraid I can’t take your word for it, miss. I’ll need some sort of proof that you were really summoned by Princess Luna.”

“Eh, don’t worry about it,” Spike said, motioning for us to follow as he headed for the gate. “Come on, girls. We can find her without their help.”

“Halt!” said both guards in unison, their spears suddenly barring our path.

“What gives?” Spike asked, his tongue flicking out of his frowning muzzle for a second. “The Palace is open to the public.”

“You are not the public, young drake,” the original guard replied. “You are a group of suspicious individuals, who’ve expressed an interest in one of the princesses.”

“So, what?” I asked, looking around at the gathering crowd. It wasn’t that they found us interesting, so much as that as long as we were playing around with the guards they couldn’t get through the gate either. “Now you arrest us for not having the proper paperwork to visit a public attraction?” I could tell I was grinning, and why wouldn’t I be? We hadn’t actually done anything wrong, and you couldn’t buy this sort of publicity.

“They wouldn’t dare,” Tiara said, glaring at the guard and reaching up to push his spear aside. It didn’t move. “Get out of my way! Or do you want to answer to the Princess?”

“Princess Luna instructed us that she was not to be disturbed,” the other guard replied, shifting his spear to point right at Diamond Tiara’s chest. I’m not an expert on anatomy, but I’m pretty sure that pointing at the side of her chest wasn’t really the optimal stabbing location, since her shoulder and ribs were both between the spear tip and anything vital. The message was pretty clear, though.

“Back down, DeeTee,” I said, putting a hoof on her flank, since it was the part I could reach. “We can come back later.”

“I’m not coming back later!” she snarled, her tail whipping at me until I pulled back my hoof. “I’ve been summoned by Princess Luna, and I will not let these featherbrains make me late!”

“They’re going to stab you,” I said. “They are going to literally impale you on their literal sharp, pointy spears.”

She looked at me with disgust. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d probably get yourself off while you watched.” She turned back to the guards. “Is that true, big guy? Are you going to hold me down while your partner impales me on his big… pointy… spear?” The last three words spoken while she advanced on the guard whose spear was now pointing directly at her sternum, and poked him repeatedly in the chest. He had no choice but to lift the point, since he didn’t want to impale her.

“Literal!” I repeated, waving my arms at her. “Not metaphorical!”

She laughed. “They won’t lay a hoof on me.”

“If you step through the gate, we’ll have no choice but to use force,” said the first guard, now behind her, his spear held out to continue to block the path.

I lit my horn, lifted my lyre from my saddlebag, and started playing a catchy little tune I’d picked up from Twilight.

La la la… la la
La la la… la la
I see you’re trying to work together…
I see you trying to block the gate.
I’ve thought of something that is better,
to let you unleash all your hate.

Why should you have to have a partner
who’ll misinterpret all the rules?
It’s time to prove that you’re the hero
who’ll hold the gate against the fools!

Battle!
You want to win it!
Let’s have a battle!
Battle of the guards!

Battle!
Yeah, go all in it!
Let’s have a battle…
Battle…
Baaaaattmmmphle--

Suddenly, a pair of hooves covered my mouth, and Bon Bon wrestled me to the ground, choking off the music right in the middle of the chorus. The lyre dropped to the cobblestones with a metallic ‘clang’.

Have you ever been ‘in the zone’? I’m sure you have – everypony does it sometimes. I do it almost all the time when I’m playing – the music just fills me up and spills out into the world, and everything else is just… background.

Bon Bon snapped me right out of that state, and I suddenly noticed that at some point, both of the guards had shifted their spears to point at me instead of at DeeTee.

Yeah. That spell-song didn’t work for Unicorns either.

“Ma’am, were you attempting to use a magical compulsion on us?” one of the guards asked, his expression grim.

Bon Bon took her hooves off my mouth, and gave me a worried look. I smiled back at her, as if to say ‘don’t worry, I’ve got this’ as I climbed back to my feet, the spear points following me up.

“Yep! Did it work? You look more aggressive, although you were supposed to direct it at each other.” I stretched my neck forwards to peer closely at one of them – I wasn’t crazy enough to pull Diamond’s stunt where she made them move their spears. He didn’t actually look any different from before – still stoic, still humorless. “I guess it still needs work.”

The guard frowned. “Ma’am, using mental magic on a member of the guard with the intention of subverting their duty is a serious crime.”

“Really?” I blinked. “I guess it’s a good thing that siren magic doesn’t work for unicorns, then, or I would have been in trouble.”

“I’m afraid that I’m going to have to ask you to come with us,” he continued.

“No,” Bon Bon said.

The guards turned to look at her. “What are you holding in your hoof, miss?” the other one asked.

It looked like a mottled purple and green crystal. “Rock candy,” Bon Bon replied, popping it into her mouth.

She bit down, and with a crackling noise like a bucket full of gravel pouring out into a ditch, her body shifted into a purple and green rock candy golem. She also grew to be about ten feet tall. “Let her go,” she said, her voice deep and gravelly.

One of the guards panicked, and tried to stab her, but his spear point only penetrated about an inch before it got stuck. She leaned forwards, snapping the shaft with her weight, and lifted her hoof over his head.

Spike, who’d been keeping a low profile, breathed a thin trickle of flame at the other spear-point, still pointing at me even though the wielder’s attention was on Bon Bon. It melted in less than a second, the molten metal puddling on the ground between my hooves. “Come on,” he said, grabbing my foreleg and dragging me around the guard. “This is our chance!”

So, yeah. That’s how we all ended up in the Canterlot dungeons.

Well, not all of us. Me, Spike, and about ninety percent of Bon Bon, since they’d smashed her rock candy form into little fruity pebbles. Grape flavored – and perfectly safe to eat, since it was the original candy that had been enchanted, and this was just magically created, perfectly ordinary, no-longer-animated sugar crystals. Spike still wouldn’t eat any of it, for some reason.

After an hour or two – time is kind of weird in prison – it all vanished, and Bon Bon popped back into existence. A bit later, there was a knock at the door, and the jailor came in, with Princess Luna in tow.

Luna was not amused.

“When I told you to come find me if you wished to accept my invitation, I expected more subtlety,” she said, her mane and tail swirling around in the air behind her, giving her a halo of night from which her frowning face stared down at us.

“But you told me to make a fool of myself,” I protested.

“Ah. So I did,” Luna replied, her tone never shifting from the same semi-emotionless drone. “Then the fault is mine. Guard, release them.”

The jailor wasn’t very happy about his first prisoners in ages being unceremoniously released. “With all due respect, princess, the charges against them are –“

“Irrelevant,” Luna replied. “Nopony was seriously hurt. Consider them pardoned.”

“Yes… princess,” the guard said, with something trying very very hard to be respect but falling flat on its face. But he let us out of the cell, so I’m not complaining.

What surprised me was that Luna wasn’t complaining either.

===

We passed through the hallways of the castle in silence, and saw few ponies as we walked. I wasn’t feeling quiet brave enough to start chit-chatting with Luna if she wanted to keep herself company in her own thoughts, so I took out the book full of maps and tried to find out where we were and where we were going.

“You’re holding it upside down,” Spike said helpfully. He and Bon Bon were flanking me, as I trailed in Luna’s wake

“I’m trying to line it up with the direction I think we’re going,” I said. “You lived here, didn’t you? Do you recognize anything?”

Spike spent the next few minutes staring at the tapestries on the walls, the colorful patterns on the windows, and took a nice long look down the cross passages when we came to an intersection. “Eh, I got nothing,” he said at least. “This whole place is a maze.”

“Indeed,” Luna replied evenly. “It was designed to baffle intruders, and lead them away from anything important. Were this a time of war, it would be reinforced by magical misdirection and fog, but in peacetime it is protected only by the architect’s insanity.”

“It seems like we’ve been walking in circles,” I said. “How do you find anything in here?”

“Those who live here quickly learn the proper turns to take to get between the places they need to travel. Few need memorize more than two or three routes.” Luna stopped at the next intersection, looking around, and then noticed I was holding a book. “Is that a map? I have rarely had need to visit the dungeons, and my methodical search pattern seems to be leading us in circles.”

Between Spike, Luna, myself, and the map, we managed to eventually find our way to one of the kitchens, where Bon Bon forced us to ask directions. The servants there knew the way to the bureaucrats’ cafeteria, which Spike had eaten at once when Twilight was dealing with some ‘boring princess stuff’. From there, we found our way to the library, which Spike and Luna both knew well.

“So, if I’m reading this map right,” I said, holding the book up at an angle to align it with the library shelves, “we just need to find the second door from the west at the far end of the library, go down the hall and take the second right into a bigger hallway, follow that main passage around three turns, and then look for this little sally gate that opens onto the exercise grounds.”

Luna gave a snort. “I know the way from here.” She led us up to the second floor of the library, where a door opened out onto what had looked like a balcony on the map, but was actually more of a patio. It would have been a straight shot from there, if we’d had wings, but even sticking to a route with stairs it was basically impossible to get lost, since we could see the crumbling tower of the lunar barracks the entire time.

Luna directed us to the lounge where the other recruits were already waiting, and told us to get acquainted while she made some final preparations.

Diamond Tiara was waiting for us, of course, sitting on a couch and looking very bored. Pipsqueak, of all ponies, was on the other half of the couch, facing the other direction and scowling at the wall. Apparently they really weren’t an item.

“There you are!” Spike shouted, pointing at her. “You just ran off and left us!”

DeeTee rolled her eyes. “I snuck off to find the Princess while you idiots were creating a distraction. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be in jail. You’re welcome.”

“If it wasn’t for you, we could have just walked through the gate,” Bon Bon pointed out, as she hopped onto one of the other couches.

I hopped up next to her. “It all turned out for the best, right?”

“For the best? Are you crazy?” Spike said, flailing his arms around with careless disregard to how close his dangerous claws were getting to various ponies’ faces. “I’ve been arrested! By the Royal Guard! I have a criminal record now! Those things are permanent!”

“Please don’t fight,” came a soft little voice from behind Tiara’s couch.

Spike narrowed his eyes, then walked over and put his claws on Tiara and Pipsqueak’s backs as he leaned over the couch to see who’d made the noise. “Fluttershy?”

===

Luna returned a bit later, floating a huge chest in her magic. It settled to the ground with a heavy ‘thunk’. “I am pleased that of the five ponies I invited to join me here today, six of you have shown up on the very first day. Spike, candy pony, please explain your presence.”

“I’m here for moral support,” Bon Bon replied, with a suspicious glare. “If what you’re asking Lyra to do is immoral, I’ll remind her that she doesn’t need to say yes.”

“And I’m here to stay out of Twilight’s hair until she’s feeling better,” Spike said, pausing the backrub he’d been giving Fluttershy in an attempt to calm her down. “You said you wanted monsters, right? Firebreathing dragon, right here.”

“I invited them,” I said. “So, blame me if they’re not supposed to be here, although you didn’t say you were inviting anypony but me, and you didn’t give me any sort of physical invitation to show the guards so that they wouldn’t arrest us or anything.”

Luna fixed her gaze on me, and in the black depths of her pupil, I could have sworn I saw the end of all life and hope. “Indeed,” she said, as I sat there fascinated. “My handling of this matter was not without fault.” She gave a deep sigh, closed her eyes, and looked away, and I felt my fur suddenly lie flat from where it must have been standing on end as I was released from her stare. “And, as it happens, they may indeed be suitable. Nothing has been promised yet on either side, and nopony will be accepted into my service without being tested.

“Spike, candy pony –“

“Sweetie Drops,” Bon Bon said.

Luna nodded, and continued. “I would be pleased to extend the offer I was about to make to the ponies I invited to you two as well. There is no obligation – at any point, now or during training, up until the final oaths are sworn, any of you are free to withdraw and return home, with no fear of reprisal or dishonor. But it would please me greatly if you all would consider my offer, because my need is great.”

“We’re listening,” Diamond Tiara said. “Get to the part where we get to be part of your entourage?”

“In due time,” Luna replied smoothly. “As you may have noticed, when I must be seen in public, I have been under the protection of the Royal Guard. Even when, for ceremonial purposes, my own guards are needed, they are merely on loan from Celestia’s Royal Guard. If you were to ask her, she would say that maintaining a separate guard for my own exclusive use is expensive and unnecessary, and that it sends the wrong message about the unity of our government. After all, I don’t require my own maid service, or my own staff.”

“I would be proud to serve in your guard!” Pipsqueak said, leaping to his feet and kneeling before the Princess. “You have always been the Princess – no, the pony that I hold dearest in my heart. For you, I would swear any oath, face any foe!”

“Unfortunately, I am not afforded a guard unit of my own,” Luna replied. “And if loyalty were the only quality that I sought in my new attendants, I would gladly swear you to service on the spot. However, it is not.” She stomped her hoof, and the ‘clack’ when it hit the floor thundered through the room, and would have sent Fluttershy back behind a couch if Spike hadn’t held tightly to her.

“So, officially, the only position I am able to offer is that of a hoofmaiden. For those of you who wish to live with me here in Canterlot,” she looked at Diamond Tiara, and Pipsqueak, “that is the capacity in which you will be employed. For those who have other obligations,” she looked to Fluttershy and Spike, “you will continue to live as you always have, save for when I have need of you.

“But in truth, you will become the ponies with whom I will safeguard Equestria from the threats that the Royal Guard is not prepared to face. When I hunt the creatures that lurk in the darkness, you will be my fangs!”

“Eeee!” I said, leaning forwards. “Really? We get to be secret agents?”

Spike was less impressed. “Isn’t that already Fluttershy’s job?” he asked. Fluttershy said nothing, her face hidden behind her wings as she tried to burrow underneath Spike and hide.

“I don’t know,” Diamond Tiara said. “This sounds like a lot of work.”

Luna raised an eyebrow at her. “Did you really think you could ingratiate yourself with me without proving your worth?” she asked.

“Fine,” DeeTee said, rolling her eyes. “But if I go fight monsters for you, you’re going to take me out to all the fancy parties.”

Luna looked a bit uncomfortable. “I may be able to arrange the occasional appearance.”

“At least once a week,” Tiara insisted. “Or I’m leaving right now.”

Luna’s nose scrunched up in disgust. “Ugh. Very well, if you can survive the training.”

“We could die in training?” Fluttershy asked. “You didn’t say we could even die in training!” Spike tried to hold her down, but she squirmed out of his grip and fluttered randomly around the room in a panic. “Thank you for the offer but I really have to get back to my animals and I’m sure you’ll find plenty of ponies to go do horribly dangerous things with horribly frightening monsters and thank you so much and I’m just going to be going now!”

She froze in mid-flutter, surrounded by Luna’s aura. “Be calm, dear Fluttershy. Did I not assure you that this would be perfectly safe?”

“It doesn’t sound safe,” Bon Bon said. “It sounds like you want us to go be adventurers. That’s not safe, that’s suicide.”

“I went on an adventure, and I didn’t die!” I said, nuzzling her.

“Yes you did,” Bon Bon said.

“Well… Pipsqueak didn’t die,” I said, motioning to the young colt who’d helped fight off the dragons I’d ran afoul of, once Ponyville decided they were being too much of a nuisance. “He kicked the dragons’ tails, and got the girl and everything.” I didn’t even look in DeeTee’s direction, but I could feel her staring daggers at me. “And I didn’t really die, thanks to you. Did I ever tell you that I love you?”

She didn’t take the bait, and instead addressed the Princess. “Luna, this really sounds like the sort of thing for trained guardsponies, not over-eager idiots like my roommate.”

“You will be trained,” Luna insisted, and set a foot on the chest she’d brought. “And in addition –“

“Yeah, but they already are trained,” Spike said. “I mean, they totally wiped the floor with us.”

“They are trained to protect, and to guard,” Luna said, with a scowl. “They do not hunt, they do not venture into the wilderness beyond our walls unless escorting royalty, and only as a very last resort do they kill. They are not worthy. You… may be.”

Her horn lit, and she opened the chest, revealing a tangle of armor plates and helmets, all done up in silver and blue. “Don the armor and join me in the training grounds, and we shall see.”