Moondancer

Moondancer was out of breath again. Her legs were tired. Her breasts ached from the running, and her arms hurt from trying to support her breasts. Twilight didn’t look to be in much of a better state. Moondancer was leaning against a wall, looking down the corridor behind them for a tell-tale light. It wouldn’t be long, but it might be enough time to catch their breath.

They had been eluding the shadows as best they could, but it was hard. They were making too much noise, and Entice’s conjurations seemed capable of hearing them from some distance.

Twilight was leaning against the wall next to Moondancer. Unable to run, she had to think instead.

Entice was careful where she put her minions. They were probably being herded somewhere, most likely to Entice herself. She had mentioned baths earlier, and a bath would be most welcome right now. And food. Backrubs from non-scary shadowy minions. Chatting. And then…

Surrendering would be so nice. No! Bad Twilight! No backrubs for you!

Twilight touched Moondancer’s arm and started a whispered conversation.

“I think we’re being herded towards Entice. She’s playing with us.”

“Yeah, that sounds likely. It would explain why we haven’t been caught yet.”

“And I think Entice is going to either be in either the baths or the kitchen, waiting to give us a hot bath, or a hot meal, or foot rubs, or something.”

“The fiend!”

“So we need to get out of here. Thing is, we probably want to find either of those places, because they’re just the right places to find a garderobe.”

“A what?”

“Medieval toilet. And wardrobe. It’ll have a tiny chute that will drop into the moat. Well, canyon in this case.”

“You want us to go down the toilet chute? Naked? Ew!”

“It won’t have been used for a thousand years, Moony. Do you have any better ideas?”

“Well, surrendering sounds pretty tempting right now…”

“No! No surrender! Not even for foot rubs.”

Moondancer sighed resignedly. There was a light coming from the corridor behind them. It was time to get going.

“Okay, I’m in. When offered warm baths, hot meals, and foot rubs, go crawling down a toilet instead. That’s my new life motto. Let’s go.”

For the first time that night, Twilight was delighted to see a dead-end ahead of them.

Entice’s fiendish abilities of temptation seemed to include cooking delicious-smelling meals. They had followed the scent once they found it, careful to avoid the patrols, and had soon come upon an open door with bright light streaming through. Inside they could see a simple table, with two steaming bowls resting on it, and a loaf of bread beside each bowl. Twilight’s stomach had rumbled. There had been no-one in sight.

Steeling her resolve, Twilight had turned away from the light and took the short side-passage. Which led to an (empty) pantry. Thankfully the garderobe had been down the other short corridor.

They peered down the chute. Even with Twilight’s night-sight spell, it was too long and dark to see.

“That’s a very small chute,” observed Moondancer.

“Too slow. Entice can’t be far away. Time for Plan B. Gimme the wand, and step back.”

Moondancer wordlessly complied. Twilight was getting better at controlling the wand. The gaping hole in the wall that opened out to the canyon was almost neat, and just the right size for them to crawl through. The noise was thunderous.

Not waiting for Entice or her minions to show, Twilight and Moondancer ran to the hole. Twilight helped Moondancer through and followed closely behind. They started to climb down as swiftly as they could. It was soon apparent that there was a problem with Twilight’s plan.

“Uh, Twilight? It’s a sheer hundred foot drop, and I can’t fly.”

“Um, I was hoping for more footholds. Or handholds. Or conveniently placed trees. Um.”

They had scrambled down a few body-lengths onto a small ledge, but didn’t look like they’d be able to get any further. Going back up looked equally difficult.

Twilight looked around desperately for anything that might help. The walls of the canyon didn’t have the convenient ledges, tree-branches, or other climbing aids that she had imagined. She could just make out the bridge across the canyon, high above and some way further down.

“TWILIGHT!” came a voice from the hole in the wall. It was Entice, and she sounded terrified, “Don’t move! Don’t move! I’ll come and get you! Everything will be fine! I promise. Just don’t move.”

Twilight looked to Moondancer in a panic, gripping her shoulders.

“Moondancer! We need to get out of here!”

The hole was large enough for a young woman to slip through. It was far too small for a large, winged, succubus. Fearful that masonry might fall on the women, Entice began pulling stones out of the wall and throwing them behind her. The hole was getting bigger, fast.

“How?!” asked Moondancer, her panic rising to match Twilight’s.

“Teleport! There!” shouted Twilight, pointing at the bridge, “I don’t have enough magic. You’ve got to do it. Fast.”

They could hear the crack and clink each time Entice pulled a stone out of the wall and threw it behind her. She was working fast.

“Twilight, I can’t teleport.”

Crack Clink

Twilight pulled Moondancer close and stared into her eyes.

“Moondancer. You can. I’ve seen you cast. You’re easily good enough to teleport. Your only problem is that you hesitate, double-check your casting, giving time for the S-T matrix to collapse. Moondancer, you can do it. Trust yourself. Trust me. You can do it!”

Crack Clink

“Twilight…”

“You can do it!”

Crack Clink

“Hold on! I’m coming!” shouted Entice from the hole, now big enough for her to climb through.

Twilight hugged Moondancer close.

Moondancer teleported.

Twilight stumbled. They had fallen a few feet onto the bridge, Moondancer landing with her usual grace, Twilight with a little less poise.

Moondancer laughed in triumph, and punched the air before Twilight tackled her with a hug.

“I said you could do it! Brilliant!”

“I am magnificent!” shouted Moondancer.

“Yes, you are, but we need to get moving before Entice finds us.”

The girls ran inside the walled compound, to their camp. The clothes that Twilight had teleported away were placed neatly on the sleeping bags. Moondancer scooped up the sleeping bags and the clothes in a great double armful, while Twilight shoved an armful of apples into Moondancer’s backpack, before they both ran to the library with their prizes.

They found a corner, deep amongst the arrays of law books a thousand years out of date. Twilight tried to organise their new campsite with some care while Moondancer used her wand to place several new, much larger, wards in strategic positions. They then at last had a moment to rest.

“Phew,” said Twilight as she dressed, “That was far too close. I don’t think Entice saw where we went, she was climbing through the hole feet-first when you teleported. She’s probably going to search the canyon first, before looking elsewhere.”

“So we have some time. Good. But do we have several days? It’ll be some time before Princess Celestia comes to look for us.”

Moondancer fished around in her pack, and offered Twilight a bar of chocolate, an apple and a bottle of water.

“Thanks,” said Twilight before munching on the apple, “Mm, this is good. But yeah, we probably don’t have more than a day before she finds us here. We need to implement the next stage of the plan: trap Entice inside the castle dungeons.”

“How are we going to do that?” asked Moondancer between bites of her own apple.

Twilight brightened up even more.

“Research! Yay!”

Twilight carefully coaxed the Moon Reader the ghostly librarian from his phylactery. Once he realised that he was being called on to find some books, he couldn’t be more helpful. It didn’t take long for them to find a ‘reasonably up to date’ plan of the castle, some blank paper, an inkstick, an ornate bronze inkstone, a selection of quills, and a few weighty tomes of wards and demon binding.

The plan was probably only missing a few of the secret passages and trapdoors the sisters loved to build, but Twilight was assured that it would do.

Twilight lugged all their finds to a reading desk inside their warded area. Moon Reader returned to his stone. Moondancer lay on her back on one of the tables, softly singing songs to the star-spangled sky.

“Okay, I think I’ve got it.”

“I’m all ears,” said Moondancer. She rolled over to face Twilight, propping her head on her hands.

“Right. So we need to ward Entice up inside the dungeons. That either means asking her very nicely to stand still while we put up a ward around her–”

Moondancer laughed at the idea.

“Yeah, let’s call that ‘Plan F’. Other option: find a deep, buried room that we can seal. It’ll need a thick wall all around, and a thick ceiling, so that Entice can’t easily tunnel her way out. It only needs to hold her for a few days until Princess Celestia can get to us.”

“Sounds good. Found any candidates?”

“Well, nothing perfect. The best option is this room here. It has thick walls, thick ceiling, the floor is bedrock. The plans don’t say what it was made to be; maybe it was a flood control room, a final refuge in case of invasion, or maybe explosive weapon test area. Whatever it was, it is almost perfect for us…”

“Almost?”

“I, uh, blasted a hole in its ceiling with your wand. While engaging in sexual activity with a she-demon.”

“Oops,” sang Moondancer.

“Even so, it’s still the best option. The room below was some vault of some kind, but it was directly above the sex dungeon. The walls are mostly bedrock. The doors are solid iron. The ceiling is thick too. You recall how deep the pit Entice was climbing out of was.”

“And you’re not worried about her just climbing out again?”

“Not if we ward that hole too. Here’s the plan. The hole in the ceiling is just small enough for us to put a triple-banded spirit seal around it. We can walk through, demons can’t, her shadow creatures can’t either. We then lure Entice into the vault. Well, I lure her into the vault. She seems to be more interested in me than you, I’m afraid.”

“You’re just that tasty, eh?”

Twilight shrugged. She tried to hide a smug smirk behind a straight face, and failed.

“Well, whatever reason she has, we know that she’ll happily chase me. So I run into the vault. She chases after me. You close the doors, and then place a final seal on the door. I run up the slope of rubble and out the hole, leaving Entice trapped.”

“Uh, Twilight, it would take me an hour to put a seal in the doorway. How long do you think she’ll spend banging her head on the seal on the ceiling before she tries the doors?”

“That’s where we need to get creative. We need to use a wax seal. Look, here.”

Twilight turned one of the books so that Moondancer could see the image covering one of the pages. The seal looked highly-complex and was titled ‘Falling Star’s Celestial Seal’.

“Oh, I’ve heard of that one in lots of stories–”

“I know, I know. You can break them, of course, but it takes weeks. Unless you’re divinely attuned to the astral plane. Which Entice isn’t. So we make two halves of this in wax and put them together on the door and hey-presto, one sealed door. It’s illegal, but I’m sure Princess Celestia will understand, and ask the police to not prosecute us. Or at least go easy on us. They’ll listen to her.”

“That’s comforting. If I end up going to prison, my Dad’s going to force me to join the family business for sure. When I get out at least.”

“So, what do you think?”

“Sounds great. How are you planning on luring her out of the castle so that we can seal the sex dungeon without attracting her attention? Oh, and how are you going to attract her attention after we’ve sealed the dungeon so that you can lure her to the vault?”

Twilight smirked openly this time, “Oh, that’s easy. And fun. We do know one thing that attracts her attention, after all.”

“Oh right. Sex.”

“Yup. So, I have not yet thanked you properly for saving my life and soul back in the dungeon, at great personal risk–”

“I said before–”

“Don’t want to hear it,” said Twilight, lifting herself onto the desk, straddling Moondancer. She stole a quick kiss before continuing, “The plan is this: we study the map, prepare the seals, and so on. Then I surprise you with ‘thank you’ sex. You like to try new kinky stuff, right?” Twilight waited for Moondancer’s silent nod, “So I get you to orgasm. Big time. Then we wait outside until we see Entice enter the library. She’ll spend ages looking for us in here, giving us time to get to the cellars. We do something similar once the ward is up in the dungeon, maybe use the stuff there, if we can find some quick-releasing manacles. Otherwise, um, you don’t mind vanilla, do you?”

Moondancer grinned, “I like your plan, Twilight.”

The girls set to work.