Delaying the Inevitable

Chapter 6

‘Hey, wake up!’ I heard the voice of Navorse whispering to me. I rubbed my hooves in my eyes, blinked them a couple of times and stood up.

‘It’s daytime, Omega,’ he spoke.

I looked outside but it was still pretty dark.

‘The Everfree Forest is always dark here, it would be useful if you know a unicorn spell to light up the area?

But I nodded: ‘I’m sorry, I’m not that good in magic.’

‘That’s not a problem, just mind your hooves and head. You don’t want to bump against anything.’

We got out of the tent and Navorse folded the tent and put it back in the bag pretty quick. Both of us put our bags on our back and we continued through the woods.

The ground was muddy and the roots of the trees stuck out of the ground and I stumbled over them quite often. It wasn’t really cold, but it felt like it was. There was no particular pathway, it was just walking between the trees. Sometimes we met an open area, but they were not that large anyways.

‘Alright,’ Navorse warned me: ‘mind your head because there are a lot of vines incoming.’

I bowed down my head to avoid them, there were a lot of vines and they started to block my view. I continued to walk straight forward in the hope that I would eventually see Navorse again. But after I left the vines, I was not close to Navorse at all. I was standing in between two mossy boulders and a steep hill in front of me. I tried to shout to get Navorse attention: ‘Navorse! Where are you!’

My voice echoed all the way, but it took a while for him to respond: ‘Omega! Don’t worry, I’ll try and locate you using sound, so say something!’

‘I’m right over here, ...’ I started screaming.

But then I heard rustle from above the boulder. And I quit screaming when I felt dirt and small rocks falling on my face. I looked up and a wolf-like beast was standing there. It looked like he was made from wood and it was staring at me with foam coming out of his mouth. I took a few steps towards the steep hill and the wolf dropped down to my level. I turned myself around to try and run my way up the hill. I managed to do it with the aid of my magic, but the wolf had bitten me in the tail in an attempt to bring me down. I tried to kick him away with my back hooves but the only thing I was doing was kicking away a couple sticks from his body.

‘Omega, where are you!’ Navorse shouted and it seemed like his voice was closer by than before.

‘Here, I’m here! There’s a wolf behind me!

I heard hoofsteps coming this way, but the wolf was putting so much force on my tail that I dropped down. The wolf was looking at me and some of his foam landed onto my face. He stretched out his mouth to try and fit me in there, but it was at that moment I saw Navorse dropping a torch down right onto the wolf. Because he was made out of wood, it started to burn. It tried to flee but he fell apart a couple of meters from us.

‘I’m sorry not to tell you about that, but those are timberwolves. They are the most common here in the Everfree Forest but they’re easily fightable.’

He stretched out his hoof to me so I could grab it and pull myself up.

‘You seem pretty scared, aren’t you?’

I swiftly nodded.

‘Then you can be glad it wasn’t an ursa major.’

Both of us got back through the vines. Now I had Navorse’s tail in my mouth so I wouldn’t lose him.

We finally got out of the vine maze, it seemed we were confronted with a ravine. I spit out his tail and tried to spit away the hay from my tongue.

‘We’ll never be able to pass over this?’ I whined at Navorse.

‘You’re right,’ he said and stared at a log in the forest, ‘but it’s not impossible.’

He walked to that log and tried to carry it towards the ravine. I helped him carry it with my magic, it was very heavy though. When we got the log to the ravine, I tried to launch it to the other side so it would form a bridge, but it unfortunately didn’t make it and it dropped down until it hit a little platform on the side of the ravine. The log was set sideways, but it has to do I suppose.

Narvose tried to balance himself on the log without letting it roll and then walked to the other side. At the end of the log, he tried to jump to the main level and he did, but the log rolled and fell in the ravine. It made a loud crack sound when it hit the boulders down below. I looked at Narvose, he was still trying to stand on four hooves again. Once he stood up, he looked at me: ‘I’m sorry about that, maybe we should go and check for another pathway!’

Both of us walked to the left side of the ravine without many objects blocking our path. After quite a long walk, I stopped when I saw a bridge hanging there. That’s quite odd, but not that odd when I saw where it was leading to: an ancient building. The bridge itself looked quite stable so I decided to cross it, still with much care though. The wooden planks below me were making crack noises and I started to feel less confident about it being in tact.

When finally reaching the end, the ropes of the bridge did in fact rot down and the bridge collapsed in half.

‘It seems like we don’t have much luck with crossing ravines today, do we?’ Navorse remarked.

From now on, it was easy to walk towards that ruined building as there was a nice path laid towards it.

And then, we finally came close to the building. It looked like a castle to me. There were no other buildings around it or at least they are not there anymore.

‘I believe this can be a great source for your project?’

I couldn’t stop gazing at the size of the thing.

‘You bet it will,’ I said after a while.

‘But, are you really sure this castle hasn’t been discovered recently?’ I added.

Navorse was already getting closer to the castle: ‘I’m very certain nopony has ever entered it in millenia.’

We both got closer to the castle. I tried to get through the door but Navorse put me to a halt.

‘Mind everything here, you never know if there could be traps in it.’

I gently put my hoof on the stone tiles of the castle’s floor. Nothing happened. I gently wandered inside the the castle. It was a large main area with ripped banners hanging on the walls. Navorse was following me and checked the area for possible threats. I looked above me and saw two more banners hanging there. One banner had Princess Celestia drawn on it and the other one had a dark alicorn on it who I couldn’t recognize. Above Celestia there was also a Sun, the dark mare had a moon drawn above her.

‘Hey, maybe we should go and check out those hallways here’, Navorse suggested.

He was talking about the six hallways, three on each side. In front there was also a staircase up, but we decided to go through the first hallway on the right. In the hallway, there were rusty pony armour  stands decorating it as well as some paintings. I saw Navorse gently touching the armor and then signified with his hoof that I could continue to walk. Once we got through that hallway, we came out on a staircase upwards, but it seemed that the staircase was made out of wood and it wasn’t well maintained.

‘We better don’t go upstairs through here,’ Navorse advised and we returned to visit another hallway, the second one on the right this time. This one came out on what looked like a storage room as there were many crates filled with clay bottles. They were all empty of course. I put a couple of those clay bottles into my bag and took out my notepaper.

‘What are you going to do with that?’ Navorse whispered curiously.

‘I’m going to make a map of the castle on what we’ve seen so far.’

I only drew the two hallways and the main hall as well as the gate to the outside. When I had finished that, Navorse and I returned from the rather cold room.

The third hallway on the right was blocked with lots of spider webs that didn’t allow us to get any further.

‘You don’t know what kind of spiders those might be, they can be dangerous,’ Navorse warned when walking away from it.

The first hallway on the left got us back to a rotten staircase, the second got us to what looked like some kind of barrack for guards and the third lead us to a cellar which was also connected to the third hallway on the right. And just as that hallway, most of the cellar was filled with spider nests that seemed to be empty. None the less, Navorse didn’t want to risk exploring that more.

So then it was time to get up to the second floor using the stone stairs in the main hallway. That lead us to many more rooms and hallways as well, but what I instantly noticed was the library on the first door of the right side, it was still even filled with books.

‘Wow, now that’s finding a treasure,’ I remarked.

Navorse however didn’t really seem to be all too interested in the books, but he did come with me to check if the library was safe. Afterwards, he went to check the other rooms while I was browsing through the books. Most of the shelves were emptied, but many books remained.

‘Hmm, ‘After Starswirl.’ That title reminds me of something.’

And it was, it was the same title of the book the librarian told me it was written down two hundred years ago. It had the same cover and cover art as it had in the Canterlot Library. Of course, this one had way more dust on it. I took the book and went to a table closeby. I was wondering what this book was doing there, but I didn’t start reading it yet. I first wanted to know what this castle was all about and who was the owner of it. And I did find a book named ‘The Everfree Castle’. That must refer to this castle. I took it from the shelves and got to that table again and started to read in it.

‘Once harmony was brought to the land, the two Royal Sisters decided to settle themselves in the beautiful forest of the Everfree.’

Beautiful? I wondered. Let alone the ‘two Royal Sisters’, who are they?

‘This was because the two sisters found this forest fascinating as the nature here all goes by itself without the aid of ponies.’

The rest of the book talked about the architecture and how the subjects of the Royal Sisters responded to the fact that they were located so far away from their own villages and towns.

What really fascinated me was that the two Royal Sisters were actually Princess Celestia and a so called ‘Princess Luna’, the raiser of the Moon. Apparently she changed into a wicked mare named Nightmare Moon. She was eventually banned away to the Moon and became known as the Mare in the Moon.

Is this a joke? The Mare in the Moon is just a ponytale, a coincidence. I looked through the window towards the Moon as it was turning night-time already.

‘So the Mare in the Moon is true? Or is it just another lie in the book’ I whispered. The Moon shone unusually bright for just a second. I turned my head back to the book and my notes and wrote everything down.

I continued to read the last few pages and found out one more interesting thing and that was an explanation on how to enter one of the Royal Sisters’ secret room in the library here. You opened it by tilting the chair that was in front of me and so I did. A row of shelves suddenly started to roll open and Navorse who just got into the library startled because of it.

‘What is that noise?’ He whispered loudly.

‘Look here,’ I told him and pointed my head towards the secret room.

‘It seems you have amused yourself during my exploration of the rest of the castle.’

‘Oh, there’s much I can tell you that I just found out. Ever heard of Princess Luna?’

He looked at me with a questioning stare: ‘Princess Luna, what an odd name.’

‘Well as far as I am concerned, she used to be Princess Celestia’s sister.’

I entered the secret room and left Navorse with a confused look.

‘So, what is this castle then?’ He asked.

‘I believe this place must have been where Princess Celestia and her sister used to live before moving to Canterlot.’

In the secret room, there was a pedestal with a book lying on it, unopened. It looked pretty important so I took a look at the title: ‘The Journal of the Two Sisters.’