Desert Water

Chapters

Chapter 1: Desert Home
Chapter 2: A Night and a Day
Chapter 3: Something is Wrong
Chapter 4: From the Depths
Chapter 5: Run
Chapter 7: Escape
Chapter 8: Parents
Chapter 6: Separation

Chapter 1: Desert Home

The metal and wood body of the vehicle hummed and shook, vibrating and hissing with magic as its mechanical parts churned and thrummed. Under its hood, a magical engine continually- -and loudly- - transferred the energy of a complex and terribly expensive magical crystal battery in to a system of pistons and gears that clicked and popped as the wheels spun, carrying the vehicle ever forward down its path.

A sudden rut in the road jostled the occupants, and Diamond Tiara let out a small cry as she was knocked from her seat and onto the floor.

“Ow!” she cried, rubbing her head and checking to ensure that her eponymous headgear was appropriately aligned. “Stupid driver…what in Equestria does daddy pay him for if he’s not even going to do his job correctly?”

Silver Spoon, who had been sitting next to Diamond Tiara on the hideously brown faux-leather bench seat, did not answer. The bump in the road had not even remotely detached her from her wide-eyed death grip on the door and seat. Her eyes vaguely seemed to register that Diamond Tiara had been dislodged from her position on the slippery seats, but mostly just continued to hyperventilate.

Annoyed, Diamond Tiara crawled back into position and propped her head on her hoof, staring out the window at the rapidly passing landscape, only to find that even having an active view of this particular segment of the world was only marginally better than her view from the floor of the automobile.

Outside stretched an endless desert. Everywhere Diamond Tiara could look, she saw nothing more than empty, unused land populated solely by rocks weathered by endless wind and trees that had been reduced to dry, bleached husks by the light above. The soil itself was not dirt so much as it was baked sand, or even dust that had settled from some unseen source high above. The landscape- -if this dead and overheated plane could even be called that- -rushed past at a speed faster than any cart could travel, but even then, it never really changed. On the train, they had seen it pass for hours without the slightest differentiation, disembarking only to get into the automobile and continue through that same homogenous emptiness for almost five hours.

Diamond Tiara frowned, and glared at the pointless land outside. She did not like it, but the feature that bothered her the most was how utterly isolated it was. There were no signs of civilization: no shopping malls, no exotic locations, no evidence of any of the luxuries that she was accustomed to or anything that would be remotely appealing even to a common twelve year old filly, let alone her. There were not even towns, or buildings. Even a dusty village filled with sleepy and ignorant tumbleweed farmers would have been better than nothing.

The road itself seemed to reek of abandonment. The asphalt had been bleached by the sun to the point where it was dull gray and cracked, with the most anemic and inedible looking grass Diamond Tiara had ever seen sprouting up from the cracks. Along it ran randomly spaced, tilting telephone poles, their normally greasy surfaces dried and crusted by the sun. They did not even have wires anymore.

The isolation and already oppressive boredom made Diamond Tiara angry, but something about the landscape irritated her on a different, more instinctual level. It was unnerving. Something about it made Diamond Tiara shiver, even though it was clearly not cold, and some element of that emptiness caused an annoying dread to creep through her mind. After considering it for a long moment, she realized what it was: the bigness. Diamond Tiara had spent most of her life in Ponyville, surrounded by forests and mountains that framed her idyllic- -if rustic- -town in green and beauty. This desert, though, was different. It was too big. The land stretched out seemingly forever beneath the bright blue dome of the sky, ending only at the border of distant, dry mountains. Mountains that were surely empty, that no pony dwelt on and perhaps that no pony had ever climbed. No pony had cause to climb them. No pony had cause to go to them, to go out into this desert. Apart from Silver Spoon, the car’s driver, and Diamond Tiara’s parents in the forward compartment, they were completely and utterly alone, simply because no other ponies came out this far.

Diamond Tiara would have declared the place Celestia-forsaken, except for the fact that Celestia clearly seemed to have blessed the area with an over-abundance of sunlight. While giving glorious light to something like a beautiful tropical island with perfectly manicured beaches and waiters bearing pineapple juice made sense, Diamond Tiara had no idea why Celestia would put so much effort into lighting such a pit as this one.

“Sweet Celestia,” she said at last, flopping back into her seat. “It’s as empty as Snails’s head out there.”

“I think,” muttered Silver Spoon through her hyperventilation, “that I saw…a rock a few miles…back. A rock…passed it at…fifty miles per hour…”

“Are you okay?” asked Diamond Tiara. “You’ve been like that for, like, five hours. Your stretching the seat upholstery.”

“I’m fine,” wheezed Silver Spoon, trying to loosen her grip only to tighten it suddenly as the vehicle crossed a minor bump and let out a low squeak. She closed her eyes. “What would give you the impression that I’m not? As long as we go straight….sweet Celestia Luna Cadence and Twilight, let us keep going straight…”

Diamond Tiara shrugged and accepted her friend’s explanation. “A rock…” she mused. “So maybe not as empty as Snails’s head. Probably Snips’s. I swear I can literally hear the gravel rolling around in there when he nods.” She thought for a moment, visualizing the tall yellow pony and the short, fat gray-blue one. “Actually…have you ever noticed?”

“That a watermelon that hits a rock at fifty miles per hour turns into…” Silver Spoon gulped, “…juice?”

“No. That they’re both unicorns. I mean, aren’t unicorns supposed to be really smart or something?” Diamond Tiara paused to follow that line of thought for a moment. As bored as she was, there was not much else to do. “Hmm…maybe the horn presses on their brain or something?”

“Impinges,” suggested Silver Spoon, meekly.

“What did you just call me?”

Diamond Tiara suddenly stiffened as the glass partition between the rear and middle cabin dropped. She sat up perfectly straight and silenced.

“Diamond Tiara,” said Spoiled Rich, “pleeeese try to control your volume.”

“Yes, mother,” said Diamond Tiara, obediently. She leaned slightly, looking through to the rest of the limousine. She saw her father sitting across from her mother, his back against the window and his face buried into the stocks section of the newspaper- -except that his paper was upside down. Over the top of it, Diamond Tiara could see that his face was ashen with a greenish tint.

Spoiled Rich turned to Silver Spoon. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Silver Spoon, dear, you are stretching the upholstery.”

“I can’t help it,” squeaked Silver Spoon. “I’m sorry Mrs. Rich, but I’m white-knuckling it here.”

“Ponies don’t have filthy ‘knuckles’,” corrected Spoiled Rich, sounding vaguely disgusted- -which seemed to be her default setting.

“Nevertheless, ponies were NOT meant to move this fast!”

Spoiled Rich sighed hyperbolically and clicked her tongue, a noise that made Diamond Tiara flinch to suppress the shuddering that always accompanied hearing that sound. “Silver Spoon, dear, we are going no faster than we were on the train.”

“A train has tracks. It can’t…” Silver Spoon gulped. “Careen…”

“Besides,” said Spoiled Rich, now completely ignoring Silver Spoon. “This vehicle is the epitome of luxury. Why, it cost over one hundred thousand bits! Isn’t that right, dear?”

Filthy Rich nodded. “Magical combustion engines are the future of- -ohhhh- -transport.”

“Combustion?” squeaked Silver Spoon in a voice several octaves higher than her normal pitch.

“The vehicle a pony rides in speaks volumes of her character,” said Spoiled Rich in what Diamond Tiara had come to mentally refer to as her “lecture-voice”. “This car is charged with class and sophistication, and it just screams ‘wealth’ to all who see it! Far better than any dirty cart can…”

“But there’s nopony to see it,” said Diamond Tiara, pointing out the windows.

“It doesn’t matter if there are ponies around to see it,” said Spoiled Rich, as though that were obvious. “As long as it is seen.”

Perversely, Diamond Tiara realized that by her mother’s bizarre logic, that made sense. IT was the same reason that Diamond Tiara wore her tiara even when she was alone: because being seen being rich did not require being seen at all. It was a state of being.

“I don’t even know why we’re out here,” she said, crossing her hooves. “This place is so…dirty.”

“And full of rocks. Fast, fast moving rocks,” added Silver Spoon.

“Admittedly, it is isolated,” said Spoiled Rich, looking out the windows with the same annoyance that her daughter just had been. “And the scenery is not at all appropriate for ponies of our class…but it is our duty to inspect our most recent acquisition in person.”

“Another house?” whined Diamond Tiara. “What is this, our sixth?”

“Eighth,” corrected Spoiled Rich, sharply. “Diamond Tiara! I thought I taught you better than that!”

Diamond Tiara stiffened again. “Yes, mother. Sorry, mother.”

“A pony can never have too many houses! Or any possession, for that matter! There is no such thing as too much money, too much jewelry, too many fine dresses, too many cars and carts and THINGS. Remember, Diamond Tiara: it is your possessions that define you, what you are able to buy that shows the world who you are.”

“Yes, mother. Thank you, mother.”

Spoiled Rich smiled. “That’s my daughter. Remember, image is EVERYTHING.”

The window slowly closed, and Spoiled Rich went back to whatever it was she was doing. Diamond Tiara released her breath, and then collapsed back into her seat. Then she leaned to her right, putting her head on Silver Spoon. At Diamond Tiara’s touch, Silver Spoon relaxed just slightly.

“I know she’s my mother,” whispered Diamond Tiara. “But sometimes I really hate her…”

The car jolted to a stop. It was not the sudden noise that caused Diamond Tiara to awake, but rather the sudden cessation of the engine sounds, and the deafening silence that seemed to creep into the strange dreams that, once she awoke, she could not recall.

“Huh? What?” she said, groggily wiping away the drool from her mouth. As her eyes began to focus, something gray and heavy pushed past her with great speed, tearing open the door and knocking her out onto the ground.

“Ow!” cried Diamond Tiara. “Silver Spoon, why did you- -”

Silver Spoon was already across the dirty ground, though. She ran behind a nearby bush and spilled her oats with all the quiet, ladylike grace expected of a filly of the upper class. “Oh,” said Diamond Tiara, and, making a face. “Eeew.”

Silver Spoon stood up, gasping, and wiped her mouth. “Ponies…ponies were not meant to move that fast,” she said, wobbling back to Diamond Tiara. Silver Spoon parted her mane and drew out a strand on the tip of her hoof. “EEK!” she cried, “Look what the stress did to me! I have a gray hair!”

“They’re all gray, Silver Spoon.”

Silver Spoon directed her eyes upward at her silvery bangs. “Oh. I forgot.”

Diamond Tiara sighed and wiped her forehead. In the car, it had not been apparent just how hot the desert was. Diamond Tiara had known that deserts were supposed to be hot, of course, but she had no idea what that heat felt like until she stepped out of the limousine. Without the perfectly controlled and conditioned air, the outside world felt like an oven. Diamond Tiara felt herself sweating, and that was something she hated doing.

Then, as if it had snuck up on her without her noticing, Diamond Tiara became cognizant of the massive house looming overhead. There was no other possible word to describe what it was doing. The building was by far the largest single structure that Diamond Tiara had ever seen. It seemed to sprawl out in all directions with no apparent order or overarching architectural theme; instead, it seemed to be a mass of additions upon additions, each one stylized in accordance to the time when it had been built. It was a ghastly sight of architectural parasitism: buildings built upon buildings, feeding off what had been set down before to form something that was more like a town than a single house.

Even with its disparate elements, however, the entire thing seemed oddly united in its strange age. The house was paradoxically weathered and undamaged. Its numerous windows were dirty to the point of near opacity, but none were broken. The many colors of paint had been faded by endless sun exposure and were beginning to peel while the wood beneath remained as strong as ever. The brick of the endless additions had clearly been built in almost every color imaginable, and yet over the years- -or decades, or centuries- -the desert wind had cut endlessly away at them, fading away the reds and yellows to a single, nearly homogenous color.

With its worn color and the dry vines that grew up over its stonework and masonry, the house seemed to almost have risen from the desert itself. It was old and worn, just like everything else in the desert- -but at the same time unbroken. Alive, even.

Diamond Tiara stuck her tongue out and grimaced at the expanse of gauche, plebian design that spread out before her- -but at the same time shivered. The size of it alone, and the height, and the fact that she could not see exactly how big it was from the front unnerved her. As if the ugly shell of the building held something much larger and much older within.

There was a clicking sound as Driving Glove, their driver, opened the door to the limousine’s center compartment. Spoiled Rich stepped out first, her hair protected from the sun by a stylish kerchief and her eyes covered in wide, expensive sunglasses.

“Oh, this heat!” she immediately complained, fanning herself.

Filthy Rich followed his wife out of the car. He wobbled for a moment, and then produced a bottle of Pony-Bismol and chugged half the pink contents of the bottle. Seeming to be satisfied with the result, he looked up at the house that continued to actively loom over all of them.

“There it is!” he said, proudly, apparently oblivious to its appearance.

“Daddy,” said Diamond Tiara, “you can’t be serious.”

“No, I am,” he said, checking his notes. “This is certainly the correct location. My little Diamond, say hello to our new summer home!”

“It certainly seems to have an overabundance of summer,” noted a sweating and overheating Silver Spoon.

“But we already have a summer home!” whined Diamond Tiara. “We have, like, three! And the others aren’t in the middle of nowhere!”

“I think we passed the middle a long, long time ago,” said Silver Spoon, looking over her shoulder at the long, empty road that led all the way out to the mountainous horizon.

“Well, that’s part of the charm,” said Filthy, smiling and putting his hoof on his daughter’s shoulder. “It’s quiet, isolated. No telegraph lines or rapid mail. A place to get away.”

“From what, the police?”

“From the hectic life of a businesspony,” sighed Filthy Rich, his normally patient exterior breaking slightly at his daughter’s attitude. “That, and Rich’s Barnyard Bargains is going to be expanding into the Los Pegasus district market soon.” He looked to one side of the house, toward where a surprisingly abundant field of surprisingly pointy plants were growing. “I’m thinking we can add a private airship dock. Los Pegasus is barely two hundred miles out.”

“That, and we will most certainly need it to host parties,” suggested Spoiled Rich. “Los Pegasus is known for its tumultuous and high-stakes high society. If we will have any hope of being competitive, we will need a grand location to host.”

“That, and it was a great deal.”

“Not that we need to worry about how much money we need to spend,” snapped Spoiled Rich.

“No,” said Filthy, trying to keep his wife calm. “But the ability to spend wisely is an important skill for Diamond Tiara to learn, so that when I give the company over to her son she will have taught him the correct values.”

“Indeed,” sneered Spoiled Rich. “We wouldn’t want our descendants to squander our hard-earned station like some old-money hacks.”

“Out of curiosity,” asked Silver Spoon. “How much was it?”

“The asking price was ten,” sight Filthy Rich with an oddly somber expression.

Diamond Tiara’s jaw nearly dropped to the dirty gravel below. “TEN MILLION? Do you know how many tiaras that could buy?!”

“Ten thousand,” said Filthy.

“Ten…ten thousand bits?” The sudden shock of such a low number floored Diamond Tiara in the reverse direction. Most ponies her age could barely conceive of how much money their parents even made, but Diamond Tiara had grown up as the daughter of the most powerful business mogul in all of Ponyville. She understood property values well, and knew just how much ten thousand would normally get a pony. “That’s barely enough for a two-bedroom in Ponyville!”

“Or enough for a month’s rent in Canterlot,” suggested Silver Spoon.

“You only paid that much for this…this…”

“Behemoth?”

Diamond Tiara glared at Silver Spoon. “Don’t finish my sentences, Silver Spoon. It’s annoying.” She turned back to her father. “You paid ten thousand bits for this behemoth?!”

“We paid six million,” said Spoiled Rich flatly.

“Six- -six- -” Diamond Tiara put her hoof to her head. The combination of the heat, the light, the ugly house, and the numbers was giving her a migraine.

Filthy sighed. “We got into a bidding war with Upper Crust and Jet Set.”

“And there was no way we were going to let a pair of Canterlot unicorns outdo us.”

“You paid six million for a ten thousand bit house…” groaned Diamond Tiara.

“Yes…and with the low value, there’s no way to liquidate it to recoup the cost…”

“But it was worth it.” Spoiled Rich smiled. “Just to see the look on that unicorn witch’s face. Diamond Tiara,” she said, her “lecture voice” causing Diamond Tiara’s posture to immediately improve. “Never forget: if you give the unicorns half a chance, they will stomp all over you like trash, just because you are an earth pony. It is in their nature to think that anypony without a horn is a filthy commoner. It is our duty to prove them that we are not.”

“Yes, mother,” said Diamond Tiara, hoping that she would not get the “unicorns are elitist jerks, Pegasi are never rich because they blow all their money foolishly, don’t even talk to a filthy bat-pony EVER” speech yet again. Instead, though, Spoiled rich turned back to the large building. She sighed deeply.

“Rich,” she said. “This place is certainly large enough, but it is positively filthy.”

“Well, it has been empty for nearly thirty years,” said Filthy. “But the agent assured us that it is in full working order. We can hire ponies to clean it.” He produced a small pad and flipped through it. “I have already hired attending staff, and scheduled for supplies to be mailed to this location.”

“Mailed?” said Spoiled Rich, raising an eyebrow. “And just who did you contract for the supply drop?”

“Heh,” said Filthy, tugging at his collar. “A very reputable local buisnessmare.”

“You hired that mental deficient Derpy, didn’t you?” Spoiled Rich groaned loudly. “That is so like you! Anything to save money, even if it means having a brain-damaged mare deliver our goods? She’s going to fail, and break everything! I mean, have you seen her?” Spoiled Rich feigned shuddering. “Those eyes…her whole family is a detriment to Ponyville. Forcing to school go mainstream that challenged daughter of hers, and she doesn’t even know who the father is…probably that fez-wearing Shriner in his ridiculous blue box…”

“Mother,” said Diamond Tiara sharply. “Dinky is three years younger than us, and she still gets straight A’s in our class. And her mother is not named ‘Derpy’. Her name is ‘Muffin’.”

“And she has a duel PhD in synthetic and inorganic chemistry,” added Silver Spoon. “Which…I guess makes the muffins taste better?”

“Diamond Tiara!” cried Spoiled Rich. Diamond Tiara stiffened again. She knew that her mother would never strike her, but with the look on her face, she seemed to be pretty close. Even if it came to that, Diamond Tiara knew that it would be worth it. She may have been mean to the other students, but she had been making an effort recently to be their friends. She would not let her mother drag poor Dinky’s name through the mud.

Spoiled Rich leaned closer and whispered. “Never, NEVER correct me. I am your mother, and I am always right!”

“Not about this,” hissed Diamond Tiara.

“Now, now,” said Filthy, separating them. “Ms. Muffin is a very reputable mail pony. And she will not be doing this alone by any means. The supplies are going to be air-dropped when the Pegasi come through on a weather mission.”

“Weather?” said Silver Spoon, looking up at the perfectly blue and sweltering sky. “When was the last time that this place had ‘weather’?”

“Sixty seven,” said Filthy.

“Sixty seven?!” cried Diamond Tiara. “Are they being lazy? That’s like…thirty eight years ago!”

“No,” said Filthy. “Not that sixty seven. The one before.”

“Oh.” Diamond Tiara paused. “How did you know that?”

Filthy Rich smiled broadly, and then ran back to the car where Driving Glove was busy fanning a steam burst from under the lifted hood. Before Driving Glove even had a chance to help with the luggage, Filthy tore through it and removed a wide binder, one overstuffed with mismatched and seemingly disorganized papers inserted into it.

“When we purchased the house, I had Princess Twilight herself assess the provenance.”

Diamond Tiara rolled her eyes. With the way her father said had said it, it sounded like he had used his connections to gain some kind of immense favor from royalty. In reality, as Diamond Tiara and most of Ponyville knew, the Princess was a tremendous egghead. There was probably nothing she would rather do than to dig up information out of dusty old books about a dusty old house.

“So it does have some history,” said Spoiled Rich, smiling. Diamond Tiara sighed under her breath. Her parents seemed to have a tendency to declare that anything that was “old” with “history” was inherently more valuable. There was a section of extremely old and extremely ugly paintings on loan to the Canterlot Art Museum that proved that.

“Indeed it does!” said Filthy Rich, excited. “But let’s get inside first. This heat is…invigorating. Perhaps too much so.”

He led them forward toward what he determined to be the front of the house. In actuality, it was part of a wide system of porches with oversized, weathered columns and a ridiculous looking wooden double-door. Just walking up the sand-covered stone steps in the heat was exhausting, and standing in the shadow of the house somehow did not improve Diamond Tiara’s opinion of it.

“Let’s see here,” said Filthy Rich, taking the key in his hoof and inserting it into the lock in the center of the door. He struggled to twist it against the stuck mechanism, and then with a resounding click through the desert silence they key turned suddenly.

All four of them stood silent for a moment. Even Driving Glove, now beginning to unload their luggage, stopped and turned. It was as though something deep within the house had clicked in unison with the door. Like it had been waiting.

“There it goes!” said Filthy Rich. He wiped his forehead as if turning a key- -even an oversized, old fashioned one- -had been laborious work. Then he pushed open the door.

A sudden surge of stale air poured out at them.

“Aack!” gasped Silver Spoon, holding her nose. “It smells like a million grandmas!”

“Two million if you ask me,” gasped Diamond Tiara.

“Well, it’s been sealed up for thirty years,” said Spoiled Rich, holding her breath as she entered with her nose held high, as if she could look down it at a smell.

Diamond Tiara had not expected it to smell bad, though. As Silver Spoon had suggested, it smelled like old people, but also like a number of other smells that a house should not smell like. Deep within the odor was the scent of really old dust, and something like a mix of bad curry and horseradish. Deeper, though, was an oddly floral scent, like stale perfume that had lost all its higher scents by evaporation and retained only the most durable and least likable remnants of its original fragrance.

Slowly, though, she followed her father into the darkened halls beyond. Once inside, she found herself in a large foyer lit by the yellowed light of high, dirty windows. The light poured downward in bright beams through the dust, and struck the bizarre floor which was, of all things, tiled with mirrors. They were dirty and dusty, but they still reflected well.

“Cool,” said Silver Spoon, lifting one leg and looking in the mirrors. “Undercarriage inspection.”

“Am I even old enough to know why the floor is like that?” sneered Diamond Tiara.

“Well,” said Filthy Rich, opening the binder. “According to this, some of the architects were…eccentric.”

“Ya think?”

“Only sometimes,” replied Silver Spoon, investigating a tall, brick-red column with an arabesque top and bottom that, with the mirrors reflecting it, seemed to extend both upward and downward at the same time.
` Fithy Rich started walking, looking upward toward the high blue-painted arches of the ceiling or the three asymmetrical staircases that ran to three different additions built off the main entrance. He flipped through the book that Twilight had given him.

“Ah, here it is,” he said, leading them into a wide, dark hallway. “From the start. Apparently, this land was first discovered by Assyrian missionaries during the Second Era. They built a monetary here…” He looked up and around at the empty hall and the doorless rooms branching off from it. “Actually, over there…I think…it should be in the center of this whole place.”

“How do you know?” asked Silver Spoon.

“Because the monetary was replaced by a fort, which this house was built on. It was constructed during…” he looked at his notes. “Wow, actually. It saw most of its use, apparently, during the Nightmare Moon Insurrection. Afterword, though, it was abandoned until they expanded it during the medieval period, adding the outer walls and expanding the central keep…but it went abandoned shortly after that.”

“Abandoned? Why?”

“From a logistics standpoint? Too far from Canterlot would be my guess. Impossible to set up a proper supply line. Remember that, my little Diamond: always make sure shipping channels are clear before setting up a satellite location!” He turned back to his notes and flipped the pages. “Let’s see…it almost disappeared for centuries until the Cowifornia gold rush. Some miners apparently got lost and ended up here.”

“Heck of a place to get lost.”

“It was indeed,” said Filthy Rich, smiling. “They never got to the gold…because they struck silver.”

“Silver?” said Silver Spoon, suddenly interested. “Where?”

“Beneath this place, apparently. The mines were quite extensive, deeper than any in Equestria. The vein was tremendous. The fort was developed into a processing center and shipping house, and expanded into a small town. A lot of the buildings outside the walls- -where we are now, I suppose- -are built around what used to be a mining town.”

“But then why did they leave?” asked Diamond Tiara. All the other ponies looked at her, as if confused. “I mean, there’ gone now, aren’t they? Did they dig it all up or something?”

Filthy Rich flipped through his book. “No…they all just left.”

“Left?”

He nodded and squinted at the page. “It just says that something was wrong with the silver.”

“Like low quality? I really hate low quality silver,” suggested Silver Spoon. “Might as well just use pewter at that point.”

“Perish the thought,” added Spoiled Rich, shivering at the very idea of pewter flatware. It actually took a great deal of coaxing just to get her to use any utensils that were not solid gold.

“No…” said Filthy, confused. “It just said that the ground went ‘sour’, and that the silver came up bad.” He flipped through the pages again. “All the miners left, and a religious order bought the place…‘Daughters of the Veil’?” He looked to his wife, and she shook her head, not recognizing the probably long-defunct organization. “Well…they refitted this place into a sanitarium for glanders patients. It only ran for five years before the cure was found, though, and the place went abandoned again until it was bought by a wealthy burro around the turn of the last century.”

“A burro,” groaned Spoiled Rich. “Of course. That does explain why this place is so…disorganized.”

“From then on, it just kept changing hooves. Nopony kept it very long. Just enough time to build onto it. Then they would sell it for a ridiculously low price. Or the bank would.”

“The bank? You mean that everybody who bought it got foreclosed on?” asked Diamond Tiara, panicked by the idea of a financial curse.

“No,” said Filthy, frowning into the pages. “They just…left.” His family- -and Silver Spoon- -all paused for a moment. Then he smiled and slammed the binder closed. “Well. Good fortune for us, I suppose. And you know how much I love a good fortune.”

They all chortled with laughter- -but Diamond Tiara could not help but feel that her own laughter was far more hollow than it usually was.

“Come on, Silver Spoon!”

“I’m trying,” said Silver Spoon, slipping nervously on the sandy slope and coming dangerously close to a threatening looking cactus. She picked herself up and dashed up the hill as well as she could, though, and joined Diamond Tiara at the summit.

Out on one side of them stood the house in the distance. From her vantage point above, Diamond Tiara could see just how big it was. Its shape was a remnant of what it had once been: a tall stone keep, which still stood, now overgrown with wooden torrents and other mismatched architectural growths, surrounded by a large, star-shaped stone wall. The space outside the wall was covered in its tendril-like, ever-expanding presence, and the space between the walls and the keep had likewise been filled with a mixture of tall institutional buildings from every age that surrounded courtyards of every possible size. Many of those courtyards were small and shaded, and some were large, marked with cross-shaped stones. All were overgrown with weedy, spiny plants.

From above, it was also possible to see that the whole of the house was surrounded by an overabundance of greenery. Cactuses and needle-covered trees grew in the miniature valley that the house resided in, stretching out in wide lines into the desert but growing the best in its shade. Diamond Tiara imagined that they might be the relics of gardens that the previous residents of the houses had once had, although she had no idea why they would have planted such hideous and aggressive looking things.

As much as Diamond Tiara disliked being outside, especially in the dust and dirt, she could not stand being in that house for one more minute as her parents talked endlessly about how “charming” or “quaint” various obsolete features were, or planned the parties that they might throw. That was somewhat normal, of course, at least for them. What had bothered Diamond Tiara was the house itself. How every room seemed to be filled with relics of the past. Not the useless junk that ponies sometimes left when they moved, but whole furniture, all of it old and dusty, amongst family portraits and displays of fine china. Some of it was covered, but most of it was simply abandoned, as if nopony had even bothered to try to pack and take it with them when they left; as if their lives had just suddenly stopped and faded into the dust and darkness in the house.

Silver Spoon caught her breath, and her and Diamond Tiara looked in the opposite direction of the house. There, in the west, was a devastatingly beautiful sunset. Celestia had indeed blessed the desert with excessive heat, but as the cold winds of her sister’s night began to drive away the heat, she had blessed it one more time by lighting the entire sky orange, casting the dry desert in a glow that made it look like the surface of an alien planet.

“Wow,” whispered Silver Spoon. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s okay.”

Silver Spoon looked down at the desert. “I wonder if this is how it looked to Luna…when she was on the moon…”

“At this point, we might as well be on the moon,” muttered Diamond Tiara. She sighed, realizing that what she had intended as a sarcastic remark was true. They were alone out here, with absolutely nothing to do but wait until they could go back to Ponyville- -which, as it had been for Luna, was not in Diamond Tiara’s control at all.

They watched the sunset in silence for a moment: Diamond Tiara staring of into space, not really seeing the color, and Silver Spoon scanning the horizon to catch every last glimpse of it.

“Hey,” she said, after a moment, nudging Diamond Tiara. “Look over there!”

“What is it now?” Diamond Tiara looked to where Silver Spoon was pointing. About a quarter of a mile away was a second peak, about as high as they were. It had almost no vegetation, and it took Diamond Tiara a moment to find what Silver Spoon was looking at, but when she saw it, it was clear.

There was an object on top of the other hill. Not a rock, but something darker. Diamond Tiara held her hoof over her eyes to shade them and squinted.

“Is that…a pony?”

To her, it seemed to be. He- -or she- -was dressed completely in dark colors, and the rags that the figure wore seemed to be trailing slightly in the breeze. Of course, at the distance, Diamond Tiara imagined that she could be wrong, that it might have actually been a rock or perhaps a flagpole with a long-decayed flag. Then she saw it move.

The figure turned toward them, looking at them through what Diamond Tiara knew to be a mask. Then it retreated, walking back on its hill and vanishing behind it.

“What…the…actual…BUCK,” said Silver Spoon, hiding behind Diamond Tiara. “Did you see that?”

“I don’t know,” said Diamond Tiara. “It was too far.”

“Celestia’s rump! That WAS a pony!”

“I don’t know!” repeated Diamond Tiara. “It might have been. But it might just have been an animal!”

She shielded her eyes again and looked at the hill, but the figure was still gone.

“Come on, Diamond. I don’t want to be out here anymore!”

“What? You’re the one saying it was just a pony!”

“I never said ‘just’!” Then, whining, “Diiiiamond, come onnnn!”

Diamond Tiara groaned. “Fine. But only because it’s getting cold out here.”

Silver Spoon rapidly descended the hill back toward the house- -again trying to avoid the cacti that grew from its side- -and Diamond Tiara slowly followed. Before she started the slow and probably dirty trek down the cliff, though, she looked back at the hill one more time. The sunset had changed color from orange to blood-red, and she could not help but wonder what exactly it had been that she had just witnessed.

Then she slid down the slope with Silver Spoon, back toward the waiting house below.

Chapter 2: A Night and a Day

With a slight squeak, Diamond Tiara suddenly bolted awake. She looked around the darkened room quickly, trying to find the source of the noise that had pulled her back so suddenly from the verge of sleep. Then, though the moonlit window, she saw it. For a moment, her mind rushed as she thought she saw a claw reaching in through her window- -but then as her eyes adjusted, she saw that it was just a branch of one of the overnutriated cholla trees outside scratching deep grooves into the glass of the window, its branch motivated only by the stiff desert wind.

Diamond Tiara moaned and buried herself back under her pile of blankets. She mentally reiterated the conclusion that she had come to the moment the sun had gone down: deserts were stupid. Not only were they dusty, dirty, empty, and awe-inspiringly boring, but they did not work logically. Deserts were supposed to be hot. That was what all the books said, what everypony knew and learned in school- -and yet, somehow, all the heat had left as soon as the sun had set. Even though it was June, it felt like the middle of winter, as though Luna hated the desert as much as Celestia loved it and had cursed it with moonlit winter.

In addition, the wind had picked up like the air was trying to chase the sun into the west. It howled past the outside of the house, distorted by the hills and by the shape of the house into a mournful wail that sometimes sounded almost like voices. Diamond Tiara crushed her pillow around her ears trying to muffle that sound, and curled beneath her pile of blankets trying to keep warm in the otherwise unheated house.

Confounding the problem was that she was on a foreign, lumpy bed that had been slept in by who-knew-who. Diamond Tiara had done her best to pick out a good room, but she was rapidly finding that she did not like the one she had chosen. As always, she had to test several before finding a good one. The one advantage of this house was that the choices were virtually endless. There were literally hundreds of rooms. Diamond Tiara silently swore that as soon as she found the way into the higher parts of the house, she would get one out of reach of any tree branch. Perhaps she would even stake out her own tower in the central keep.

Thinking about that, though, just brought back the familiar dizzy cognitive dissonance that came from recognizing multiple homes. Her home was in Ponyville, but there were others waiting for her in other places. They had possessions that were kept only there: other jewelry, other clothes, even other toothbrushes that she only ever saw when there, all that were just waiting for her thousands of miles apart.

The thought made her queasy, and she tried to calm herself. Insomnia was something that she had learned to deal with from a young age, a result of a childhood far more stressful than any common child could even hope to understand. So, to try to go to sleep against the wailing desert and the cold, she did the one thing that she found always helped her go to sleep: she imagined her ideal coltfriend.

The process of thoughts was routine, and almost always the same. She always started with a unicorn. He would be white- -all the fanciest and wealthiest unicorn colts were white- -and he would be tall but not overly muscular, aristocratic and noble, smiling with old-money refinement. Diamond Tiara had never touched a unicorn’s horn before, but she imagined that it was hard, like bone, and slightly sharp. That meant that when the unicorn colt bent down- -he was always slightly taller than her- -he would have to turn his head to kiss her.

The fantasy would then progress onward to a Pegasus. He would be a dashing rogue, quick in flight and with a mischievous smile. Diamond Tiara knew that only adult Pegasi had large wings, but in her fantasy, her coltfriend was always quite well endowed, to the point that when he hugged her his soft feathered wings would wrap around them both, sealing them in a darkened sanctuary shared only by the both of them.

Of course, on a logical level, she knew that neither was an actual, viable possibility. Her parents would never permit her to date a unicorn, even if he was nobly born. Their distrust of the aristocracy- -something that was in their every action but something that they would never admit- -was far too great. A Pegasus was even worse; the scandal would be devastating to her family if she was even seen associating too closely with a race that was considered at best spendthrift and at worst criminal. Diamond Tiara did not even have the courage to imagine herself with a bat pony. That, and she was not entirely sure what bat colts looked like.

So, the fantasy went the same way it always did. In her mind’s eye, she found herself in the grasp of a tall and rugged earth colt. She had developed the fantasy to the point where she knew that he was the scion of a wealthy but rural logging family deep within the snowy heart of northern Syrupland. Between the point in the fantasy where he hoof-built a fire in the fireplace of their cottage against the cold of the beautiful and silent nighttime snow and the point where he would lay her down cushions of the finest silk and begin hoof-feeding her extremely expensive maple candies one by one, Diamond Tiara finally drifted off into sleep with a smile on her face.

The smile quickly faded as the nightmares began. It was always the same one: she would arrive at school and halfway notice that the other students were laughing at her, making fun of her behind her back. Even Silver Spoon would be joining in. Then, all at once to her absolute horror, she would realize that she had forgotten her tiara. The other students were laughing because she had come to school naked.

On this particular day, like every day in the dream, Cheerilee would ask Diamond Tiara to come to the front of the room and give a presentation. The topic always varied slightly; today, it was on why the Rich family was influential and important. Diamond Tiara would then be compelled to walk to the front of the room and stand there, trying to give a presentation that she had not rehearsed and had somehow forgotten while the other students jeered and pointed at her humiliation.

At that point, the dream usually progressed to her suddenly beginning to lose teeth, but this time it changed. Diamond Tiara found herself in a different location, far outside of the schoolhouse. It was a place she had never been before, at least not that she could remember.

She was outdoors, standing in the middle of a lush, green forest. Before her ran a powerful and cool waterfall, descending from an unseen source high above and rushing downward in a haze of droplets and mist over the moist rocks behind it. The water landed in a pool surrounded by mossy rocks, and became immensely still before flowing down a narrow, bubbling creek.

The humiliation and fear of the earlier part of the dream vanished, replaced by two sensations. The first was one of overwhelming peace; the second was one of overwhelming thirst. Diamond Tiara felt her mouth salivating, craving the touch of water, the sweet taste of that cold spring. She knew that she was not supposed to drink water off the ground, but it looked so clear and so delicious, like liquid diamonds.

She stepped forward, and as she did, others appeared. They were ponies, but they appeared suddenly from the mist. Diamond Tiara recognized none of them, in part because she could not see their faces. Even with them standing close to her, they seemed distorted and gray. At their presence, she stopped, and she watched them walking toward the water. She knew that they were thirsty too, but as they got closer to that water, Diamond Tiara began to feel afraid again. Not the kind of fear that she had felt in the dream of the schoolhouse, but a different type, one far sharper. She did not know why she was afraid, but she knew that if they drank from that water, something terrible would happen.

“Don’t believe him,” said a calm, distant female voice. Diamond Tiara looked around, trying to see where it had come from, but she could not tell. It seemed to have come from all the ghostly, translucent ponies- -and none of them, as though it came from something that remained in the mist that she could not see.

“Believe- -believe who?” she asked the ether.

“What he says is lies,” said the voice, calmly, sounding so sad. “Do not trust him. Do not listen.”

“Listen to what? I don’t understand!”

All of the ghostly ponies stopped for a moment, and then slowly turned. All at once they were all staring at her, into her- -and she could still not see any of their faces clearly.

“Diamond Tiara,” they all said in unison- -in one voice. “Please, Diamond Tiara. We love you. Let us have the water…”

Then a second voice shattered the peace of the dream. A far louder voice that seemed to shake the stream and the forest apart, dispelling the illusion and causing the dream to decay back into the mist that had borne it.

“GET OUT.”

Diamond Tiara shot out of bed, falling off the side of the unfamiliar mattress and crying out weakly as the blankets entangled her. For a moment, she was absolutely terrified, believing that she had seen something. She could not remember exactly what the creature who had spoke in the second voice had looked like, but she had seen it- -and knew that it was monstrous.

Then, as she realized where she was, she remembered that it was just a dream. She leaned backward on the floor, and noticed that she was sweating heavily. Light was pouring in through the window, and the room had gone from frigid cold to desert heat once again.

“Buuuuuck,” swore Diamond Tiara slowly, now being forced to face the reality at hand.

By the time Diamond Tiara had stumbled downstairs into the kitchen, Silver Spoon was ready for her. As Diamond Tiara sat down on a chair and put her head against a knife-scarred table, Silver Spoon grasped the pot of freshly brewed coffee with her teeth and expertly poured it into a mug. She set it in front of her friend and added a few drops of the finest cream and just the right amount of raw sugar, stirring the mixture with a small spoon just enough to combine the ingredients but not enough to homogenize the cream, leaving it swirling through the properly aerated coffee.

The smell of the beverage seemed to draw Diamond Tiara to it, and she looked up. “Coffee…” she said, taking the handle of the mug in her hoof and sipping the brew.

“I know you don’t function in the morning without it,” said Silver Spoon, returning the pot to its warming station for Diamond Tiara’s father when he came downstairs.

“Oh, Silver Spoon,” said Diamond Tiara, drinking more of the expensive coffee, “what would I do without you?”

“Probably bump into walls for a few hours.”

Silver Spoon filled her own cup with tea and sat down across from Diamond Tiara. They both looked out the large window in the center of the kitchen. They were on the ground floor, and just outside was a large courtyard bordered on all sides by tall structures that definitely seemed to be the parts of a former sanitarium. In the center was an overgrown and unkempt mess of threatening plants overgrowing a field of headstones.

“Well that’s just great,” muttered Diamond Tiara. “I have to wake up in a cemetery…I really hate this place.”

“It’s not so bad,” said Silver Spoon. “I think it’s peaceful. Scone?” She slid a plate of freshly prepared triangular cookies to Diamond Tiara

Diamond Tiara looked at the cookies. “How long have you been awake, Silver Spoon?”

“About four hours,” replied the much more alert gray filly.

“And how do you even know how to make scones?”

Silver Spoon shrugged. “When your parents are never around, sometimes you pick some things up.”

Diamond Tiara looked into her coffee. As forceful and involved in her life as her own parents were, Silver Spoon’s were not. Silver Platter and Tea Spoon were known worldwide as socialites and spent their time traveling all over Equestria. At the moment, they were on yet another romantic vacation to the south of Prance, and once again, like always, they had refused to take their daughter with them.

“I wish I was in the south of Prance,” mumbled Diamond Tiara, drinking more of her coffee. “Instead I’m stuck here in this ugly, stinky house that can’t even decide what season it is. It just isn’t fair.” She picked up a scone and munched it. Silver Spoon had put in too much baking soda, making it bitter like pretzel dough, but it was okay. “I wonder what all the other kids are doing for summer break…”

“Well,” said Silver Spoon, leaning back, “let’s see…” She lifted her hoof as though she were counting on it. “Rainbow Dash got Scootaloo a summer internship at the rainbow factory, Applebloom is working on her family’s farm, Sweetie Belle is with her family looking at colleges- -”

“Colleges? She’s like, twelve!”

“I know, but she just got her cutie mark, so it doesn’t hurt to start looking early. Her parents are apparently really into the idea, and I hear she already got offered a scholarship.”

“Finishing school just to go to more school? Eew, no. I’m glad were rich enough to not have to do that.”

“You can say that again.”

“But how do you even know any of this?”

“Because I talk to them sometimes. And I listen. I know what almost everypony’s doing for the break.”

“Like what?”

“Well…Pip is at a junior leadership conference in Canterlot, Featherweight is taking boxing lessons from Red Glove, Dinky and her sister are traveling ‘abroad’ with the ‘fez-wearing Shriner’, Snips and Snails are…what day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“Ah. Probably in the hospital by now. Or being whipped by Trixie to pull another wheelless cart. You know, to be honest, I think they enjoy it.”

“Dimwit weirdos,” said Diamond Tiara, taking another scone. Before she could ask what Twist and Gourmand were doing, her parents came through the door, both smiling and laughing.

“You seem happy,” said Diamond Tiara, annoyed that they were and she was not.

“Oh, yes,” said Filthy Rich. “We had some…rousing business discussions before bed last night. On the topic of interest accruement on trust funds and diversification of mutual fund augments.”

“Trust funds?” said Diamond Tiara. “Do I really need another?”

“Oh, not for you, dear,” said Filthy. “For your son. So that we can send him to the very best business school in all of Equestria.”

“Oh,” said Diamond Tiara, her spirit dropping even further. “Daddy, can we please not talk about your grandson? I’m, like, twelve.”

“Already? I did I miss a birthday?”

“Several.”

“Oh, well. Things have been busy. But you really should consider it. The earlier you start, the longer he has to learn from me before I retire.”

“But no colt is going to want you if you keep eating those,” said Spoiled Rich, pushing the plate of scones away. “You know what we say about sweets.”

Diamond Tiara sighed and rolled her eyes. “ ‘If you eat cake like Celestia, you will never look as good as Cadence.’”

“That’s right. You are already far too chubby. Consider at least trying to stick to the diet we paid so much to have prepared for you.” She picked up a scone and took a bite, and then grimaced. “And leave baking to the lower class. These are terrible.”

Diamond Tiara saw Silver Spoon’s formerly cheerful expression sink. Neither of them said anything, though. Silver Spoon was simply too polite, and it was too early and too hot for Diamond Tiara to get into an argument that she could not possibly win.

“Sir,” said Driving Glove, appearing behind them. He looked tired, but was in full uniform with his hair slicked back beneath his driving cap and around his horn. “I’ve repaired the engine, and your bags are loaded.”

“Excellent,” said Filthy Rich, pouring himself a cup of coffee and taking it black. “Have the car ready. We will be there in a few minutes.”

“Are we leaving already?” said Diamond Tiara, excitedly.

“We are,” said Spoiled Rich. “But you two are staying right here.”

Diamond Tiara’s excitement imploded. “WHAT?”

“I told you yesterday, Diamond,” said her father. “We have urgent business in Los Pegasus. There has been a hitch in one of the development deals, and I still have to negotiate a merger…”

“Not to mention that there are several very important charity balls that we simply must attend,” said Spoiled Rich, as if bragging to the uneducated and unsophisticated “other” that seemed to lurk invisible in the shadows as well as simultaneously reminding her husband.

“You’re going to leave us ALONE?” cried Diamond Tiara. “HERE?”

“That sounds like a really, really bad idea,” added Silver Spoon.

“Don’t worry,” sighed Spoiled Rich. “We have sent for a crew of servants to staff this place, and to prepare it for the contractors. They are taking our secondary car, and they should be here within a few hours.”

“So we have to stay here?”

“It isn’t so bad,” said Filthy Rich. “Why, when I was a colt, I would have loved to explore a house this big, filled with so much…history!”

Diamond Tiara grumbled. She knew that there was no changing her parents mind about going, and about leaving her behind. The plans had already been made, and going with them would probably result in nothing more waiting in a hotel or attending another long, boring party.

“Well,” she said. “At least we can go see the nearby village.”

Spoiled and Filthy Rich both looked at each other, then at Diamond Tiara. “Diamond,” said Filthy, “there is no nearby village.”

“But Silver Spoon and I saw a pony out in the desert yesterday.”

“When?”

“Just as the sun was going down.”

“Well,” said Filthy. “It must have been a mirage. There’s no inhabited towns within over one hundred miles of this house.”

“But…we saw it!”

“No, you didn’t,” corrected Spoiled Rich. “This land belongs to us. I assure you, there are no dirty yokels wandering it.”

The hot, bright sun beat down overhead with an almost physical force. The dry rocks and gravel below seemed to react by releasing a kind of liquid, a vapor of pure heat that rippled upward toward the cloudless blue sky. Diamond Tiara’s could feel that intense dry heat filling her with every single breath. She wondered how anything could survive out here.

The dust had barely cleared from her parents’ car driving off into the distance several hours ago. Or, perhaps, it was new dust, pulled up from its rest by the winds that swirled across the sand, the ones that Diamond Tiara would grow into howling wind once the sun went back below the mountainous horizon.

“Wow,” said Silver Spoon, already out of breath from the weight of her saddlebags. “It’s hotter than Sweetie Belle’s sister out here.”

“Eew. Don’t be gross,” snapped Diamond Tiara. The heat was making her even crankier than normal, but being inside that house had been worse. There was simply nothing to do, not even anything to read and nothing to look at aside from old junk and faded paintings.

Silver Spoon shrugged. “I call ‘em like I see ‘em.” Then, removing her glasses and wiping her eyes, “why are we out here again?”

“Because I want to be.” There was more to it than that, though. There was even more than the boredom. She believed that her parents were wrong. She knew what she had seen, and knew that there must be a village somewhere.

“Oh,” said Silver Spoon. The two of them momentarily scanned the blue horizon. Then, suddenly, Silver Spoon pointed into the air. “Oh! Look over there!”

Diamond Tiara looked up into the air and saw a circle of large black birds drifting high above the desert. As she watched, they all suddenly descended to something out of her line of sight.

“Buzzards?” she said. “Really?”

“What’s wrong with buzzards?”

“They’re probably eating some gross dead thing.” Diamond Tiara stuck out her tongue in disgust.

“I know,” said Silver Spoon, smiling widely. “Isn’t that cool?”

“How is anything about that cool? It’s disgusting!”

“No, it’s called carrion, and it’s a natural and important part of the ecosystem,” said Silver Spoon, somewhat defensively. “Besides, vultures are really cool. Did you know that they are one of Fluttershy’s favorite birds? But don’t tell that to Hummingway!”

“What- - how to you even know that?”

“Fluttershy and I are both part of the Ponyville Nature Gardening Society. We meet on alternating Saturdays.”

“Why did I not know that?”

“Because you never ask,” snapped Silver Spoon. She turned back to the birds and smiled. “Did you know that every fall, Fluttershy knits all her buzzard friends adorable little caps for their bald little heads? They look so cute!”

Diamond Tiara shivered at the thought of a wheezing, glaring buzzard wearing a tiny knit cap. She did not much care for Fluttershy. The yellow Pegasus produced a continuous air of timidness, which to Diamond Tiara was the antithesis of strength. At the same time, there was something inside all that kindness and compassion that Diamond Tiara did not trust. The idea of a pony living alone with a horde of animals in a cottage at the end of town- -a cottage that nopony knew the origin of- -rubbed her the wrong way.

“Come on!” cried Silver Spoon, trotting across the sand toward where the buzzards had landed. “And try to find a good poking stick!”

“I’m not going to look for a stick,” muttered Diamond Tiara to herself. Then, calling after Silver Spoon. “Whatever it was, it probably died of boredom!”

Then, slowly- -and with far less morbid excitement- -Diamond Tiara followed after her friend. She understood that death was an intrinsic part of life, and that vultures eating dead things was entirely natural- -but it was still gross. It was part of the natural world that she would rather not see, something that should be handled behind the scenes, like how washing dishes or cleaning bathrooms was done by some unseen servant.

Eventually, she caught up with Silver Spoon. The pair found themselves in the center of a wide, circular ring of desert. On all sides, it was surrounded by the lush growth of thick, green cacti, all lined up in a perfect circle. Much to Diamond Tiara’s relieve, there was no dead thing to see. In fact, there were not even vultures. The only sign that the birds had ever even been there was a number of black feathers strewn throughout the circle.

“Darn,” said Silver Spoon, dropping her poking stick. She looked around the circle. “I wonder where they went?”

“Who cares,” said Diamond Tiara. “Just a bunch of smelly asthmatic birds.”

“Well, I still would have liked to…hey…”

“What?”

Silver Spoon walked toward the edge of the circle, staring up at one of the numerous bright green succulents that lined the edge. The particular one she was focusing on was almost three times as tall as she was and round, with a pair of needle-clad arms stretching upward toward the sky. To Diamond Tiara, it looked just like any of the other abundant cactuses in the desert, just another boring part of the scenery to remind her that she was nowhere near anything. To Silver Spoon, however, it was apparently interesting.

“That’s weird,” said Silver Spoon, taking a book out of her saddlebags and opening it.

“No, it’s a cactus,” said Diamond Tiara. “There’s like, a billion of them around here.”

“But the saguaro is only native to the Sonora Desert. What would one possibly be doing so far from home?”

“Maybe it isn’t a senoro.”

“Saguaro,” corrected Silver Spoon. “And it is.”

“How would you even know? Your special talent isn’t for identifying plants, its for…” Diamond Tiara stopped, because she did not actually know what Silver Spoon’s talent was. She had never given it much thought.

Silver Spoon sighed and held up the book that she was reading. The cover showed a slightly off-color photograph of an extremely large orange pony with a wide hat and a pair of glasses in a style that had been out of date for almost forty years. All around him were potted cacti of various shapes and sizes, and he was posing with one lovingly perched in one of his cloven hooves.

“Cacti and Succulents,” said Diamond Tiara, reading the title, “A Guide to Identification, Horticulture, and ‘Practical Applications’, by Spiny V. Volume 17.” Diamond Tiara looked past the book at Silver Spoon, who was smiling broadly. “Why do you even have that?”

“Because I have an interest in gardening,” said Silver Spoon haughtily. Then her serious expression was overwhelmed with a mischievous grin. Then she released a fangirl squeal and hugged the book tightly. “And because Spiny V. is such a HUNK!”

“EEW! Silver! He’s like, a gazillion years old! And doesn’t he have, like, forty kids?”

“I know,” sighed Silver Spoon. “He’s so paternal!” Her eyes widened suddenly. “I just realized! Darn it! He teaches at one of the universities that Sweetie Belle is visiting! I should have asked her to get me an autograph!”

Diamond Tiara just shook her head. Some ponies worshiped rock stars or athletes. For Silver Spoon, apparently, it was botanists. Silver Spoon continued to talk, babbling rapidly about something concerning the difference between old and new world cacti, but Diamond Tiara had stopped listening. Instead, she suddenly felt strange. As if something were watching her.

She looked around the circle, and realized that she really did not like the plants that formed the border. Something was wrong about how perfect that circle was, as if there was no way it could have formed naturally.

“Silver Spoon, I don’t like this,” she said, suddenly, surprised by the nervous creaking in her own voice. “Let’s go.”

“But the cactus…”

“No. We need to go. NOW.” Diamond Tiara grabbed Silver Spoon’s hoof and pulled her somewhat sharply out of the cactus grove. As she did, the wind picked up and the black feathers of the buzzards blew into the air, sticking to the long white spines of the cacti. For a moment, the wind sounded like a long, sad call of a distant voice.

The density of the cactus plants began to thin as Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon passed away form the circle and climbed a nearby hill. Diamond Tiara began to feel better, but something was still off. Something was watching her, somewhere.

“Diamond Tiara, where are we going?” asked Silver Spoon, still being almost dragged.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Away from there.”

“Okay, but where?”

“Silver,” said Diamond Tiara, letting go of her friend. “Do you feel like you are being watched right now?”

Silver Spoon’s expression became more serious. “Yes,” she said. “But I can’t tell from where.”

“Neither can I, but I can feel it too.”

Silver Spoon’s eyes widened and started to flash across the sparsely planted desert. “Do you think it could be…”

“I do. He’s here.”

They both looked around the desert. Neither of them could see anything that remotely resembled a pony apart from a few oddly shaped tree-like plants. Then Diamond Tiara’s eyes stopped at something in the distance.

“Do you see that?” she asked.

“What?” Silver Spoon nearly jumped. “Is it- -”

“No,” said Diamond Tiara, shielding her eyes. Then she smiled. “I think I see a town over there.”

Distances were strange in the desert. The town had seemed so close, but it had taken almost a half hour to reach there. By the time Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon had reached it, the sun was already almost a quarter of its course from setting and they had drank all the water that Silver Spoon was carrying. Both were thirsty, and both were nervous.

Unlike Diamond Tiara, Silver Spoon seemed adverse to visiting the village. She had been continually looking to the horizons, her eyes flicking about, and she had not stopped talking.

“But what if…what if they’re all a bunch of hillbillies? What if they tie us up in a shed and force us to listen to show tunes?”

“Well, it didn’t happen the last time we went to Sweet Apple Acres, so I don’t think it will happen now.”

They both laughed, even though Diamond Tiara knew that what she had said was mean. The Apple family were course and rustic, but they were all really nice- -and Big Macintosh was not unpleasant to look at.

“But seriously,” said Diamond Tiara. “Ponies don’t do that sort of thing. Not to rich fillies like us.”

“Yeah…I guess you’re right.”

“Besides,” said Diamond Tiara, now finally close enough to the town to see it closely. “I don’t think we’re going to find anypony here…”

They walked past the border into the town, and it was immediately apparent that Diamond Tiara’s initial assessment had been correct. Although there were buildings, it looked like the town had been abandoned for at least a century. All the structures that were still standing were devoid of paint, their wood cracked and crumbling from disrepair. The roofs of most of the buildings had long since collapsed, and there was not a single window that still held glass.

The streets were empty and silent, save for the piles of dust that had blown against the buildings and the remnants of collapsed and decayed carts.

“Great,” said Diamond Tiara. “It’s a ghost town.”

“Wow,” said Silver Spoon, holding Diamond Tiara closely. “It sure is creepy.”

“It’s just a bunch of old buildings. Look.” Diamond Tiara gestured all around. “Nopony’s here. Nopony’s been here for, like, ever. We walked all the way out here for nothing.”

“Yeah. And now we’re out of water…”

Diamond Tiara looked around the town. It essentially consisted of a main street of flat-faced and uninspired buildings, but at the cul-de-sac edge beneath the broken clock tower, she saw the remnants of a well.

“Might be some water in there,” she said, starting toward it.

“Diamond, no!” said Silver Spoon. “It’s probably dirty!”

“It’s a well. We pay fifty bits a bottle for water that comes out of the same kind of thing.”

“But that water’s from Prance! Not a hole in the desert! Diamond, don’t drink things out of holes!”

“Eh,” said Diamond Tiara dismissively. She really was not that thirsty; mostly, she was just bored. She walked all the way to this dirty, dusty failed version of Appleloosa and figured that she might as well try to do something, even if was just trying to use a crumbling well.

The well was made of stone, with a wooden lid that had collapsed over its opening. Diamond Tiara pushed away the wood- -being dry, it was surprisingly light- -and looked into the well. With the angle that the sun was at, she could not see the bottom. It was just a deep black pit.

Beside it, there was a rope. Diamond Tiara picked up the dried, stiff bundle of fiber in her teeth and pulled on it. There was definitely a weight on the other side.

Slowly, she pulled up the heavy mass on the far end of the rope, pulling it from the impenetrable darkness where it had been stored for so long. Sounds came from the well: clinking and clicking, echoing upward from below as if the stone cylinder was trying to resist being disturbed after its long slumber.

Eventually, though, a bucket emerged. Diamond Tiara took it down and set it between herself and Silver Spoon. Both of them leaned in and looked at the contents.

Silver Spoon immediately screamed. She jumped back and pointed a shaking hoof at the bucket.

“B- -blood!” she cried. “It’s- -it’s filled with blood!”

Diamond Tiara looked closer. Then she sighed. “It isn’t blood,” she said. She tilted the bucket toward Silver Spoon, allowing the small portion of water to flow and reveal the grains of reddish substance that were floating in it. “Look. The bucket rusted and turned the water red.”

“Oh,” said Silver Spoon, only calming down slightly. “Well…it’s still really gross.”

Diamond Tiara looked closely at the water, and saw that it was infested with hundreds of tiny filamentous worms. She made face of disgust and kicked the bucket over. “Eew! It is gross! No way I’m drinking that!”

She let the water fall onto the desert floor, where it was quickly pulled into the parched earth. Almost as soon as it fell, something caught Diamond Tiara’s eye, and she was glad that Silver Spoon had not seen it. Something as large as a pony dressed all in frayed and worn cloth had just crossed the street. It had moved so quickly that Diamond Tiara had not seen it clearly, but she had defiantly seen it- -and it was barely forty feet away from them.

“Silver,” she said, slowly. “When we saw that pony yesterday…what did he look like?”

“He was too far away to see,” said Silver Spoon. “But I think he was wearing clothes. Really frayed, old ones.”

Diamond Tiara watched wide eyed as she now saw the figure move slowly and clearly across a dark alley between two buildings, moving through the shadows in their direction. There was a creak from one of the nearby buildings as it entered, and Silver Spoon turned toward the sound. Then she saw just how pale Diamond Tiara was, and how wide her eyes were.

“Diamond?” she said, slowly and shaking. “What did you just see?”

“A pony,” admitted Diamond Tiara. “Dressed all in rags.”

A second sound poured through the streets, and both of the fillies jumped. Diamond Tiara looked up at a tall building to her right, one that was almost one hundred feet from where she had just seen the figure. For a brief moment, she saw the edge of a black mask looking down from one of the glassless windows.

“What was that?” cried Silver Spoon, holding tightly to Diamond Tiara.

“It’s moving,” said Diamond Tiara. She was more scared than she had ever been in her life, but she forced herself to remain strong and defiant, at least for Silver Spoon’s sake. One of them needed to stay strong, to stay in control.

“It?! What is it?!”

“I don’t know,” said Diamond Tiara. “I don’t know!”

Then, suddenly, something burst out of the base of the clock tower. Diamond Tiara finally saw it clearly: a creature dressed in rags, its face covered with a featureless black mask, its body held close to the ground as it stood in the shadows, watching them from the darkness.

Never before had Diamond Tiara moved so quickly. One moment, she was looking into the dim doorway of a decaying building at an unidentified creature watched back. Then she was screaming, running faster than she ever had, like she was participating in the Running of the Leaves back in Ponyville. Silver Spoon, with tears running down her face, was beside her, running along with her, sprinting across the sand and rocks, leaping and jumping with agility that neither one of them knew that they had.

Had they looked back, though, neither of them would have seen the creature, save for perhaps a flash of dirty, rotting cloth as it descended from the light into the depths of the well. Once again, the town was empty and perfectly silent.
Likewise, neither of them noticed what had happened where the water they had spilled had landed: how the worms in the bucket coalesced into a small green plant, which erupted with tiny, delicate pink flowers- -only to dry into dust in the presence of the intense sunlight.

The door closed with a powerful slam, and Diamond Tiara knocked all the deadbolts that she could reach into the closed position. She and Silver Spoon sat panting against the mirrored floor, looking down at their terrified reflections. The tiredness from their sprint across the desert seemed to hit them all at once, and they were unable to breathe. Diamond Tiara felt nauseous and sick.

“What- -what was that?” cried Silver Spoon.

“I don’t know!” gasped Diamond Tiara. She leaned against the door, half expecting the creature to be pounding on it, trying to get in. Her mind reeled, trying to rationalize what had just happened. “It…it must have been an animal!”

“An animal?! That was NOT an animal!”

“You don’t know that! It could have been!”

“It was wearing CLOTHES!”

“No it wasn’t! We didn’t see that! It was just dark colored!”

“Horse FEATHERS! You saw what I saw, I know you did! That was a pony!”

“No pony could move that fast,” gasped Diamond Tiara. That thought did not make her feel any better. “It…it had to be something else.”

“What if it tries to come back?” cried Silver Spoon. “It’ll get us! We’ll get got!”

“We will not get got!” said Diamond Tiara, standing up and stamping her hoof, taking charge of the situation.

“But we’re all alone here. In this big house…oh Celestia, they’ve left us alone!”

“No, they haven’t!” said Diamond Tiara. “The servants will be here soon, and I don’t care if that thing is a manticore, it’s not going to stand a chance against the ponies that my daddy hires!”

“But what if it followed us? What if it tries to get in?”

“Didn’t you listen to my dad’s really boring story? This place used to be a fort.” She knew that the logic of that made no sense, but she stuck to it, knowing that it made Silver Spoon- -and herself- -feel better.

“You’re right,” said Silver Spoon. “If this place could keep out Nightmare Moon, it can keep out one pony!”

Diamond Tiara chuckled humorlessly. Clearly Silver Spoon had not been listening. It had not been Nightmare Moon that this fort had been designed to keep out one thousand years ago.

“Come on, Silver Spoon,” said Diamond Tiara, reaching out and helping Silver Spoon up. She smiled. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Chapter 3: Something is Wrong

Diamond Tiara gently set the lantern down on the side of the wide marble sink. The pale, harsh light flickered and buzzed unpleasantly from the crystal held in the center of the assembly. The color of the light and the sound that the piece of equipment was far more unpleasant than the normal traditional lights filled with fireflies. It also made Diamond Tiara’s headache start to return.

The last night had been eventful, but Diamond Tiara could hardly remember any of it. She had indeed delivered on her promise to Silver Spoon and sought out the crate where her father had brought several bottles of cider. All the bottles were expensive vintages, perhaps even rare, but Filthy Rich would never notice that they were gone. He never had before.

Silver Spoon had been hesitant at first, but she was surprisingly easy to manipulate. Together, they had drank almost an entire bottle. The resulting rush of sweet, hoof-pressed appley goodness had turned the entire night into a blur. Diamond Tiara had awoken with a splitting headache and Silver Spoon- -smiling and disheveled- -splayed across her chest, lying in a pool of blurry polaroid photographs of the pair of them taking duckface selfies.

Like many members of her family, Diamond Tiara had a natural intolerance to apple products. Even a small amount of applesauce, apple juice, or apple cider could make her ill, and she had drank a LOT of cider for a filly. She was also starting to worry if she was beginning to use cider as a coping mechanism, which would be bad. She did not want to end up like Rainbow Dash, who Diamond Tiara had literally seen eating dirt where cider had been spilled.

The harsh light filled the large bathroom, and Diamond Tiara sighed. It was indeed grand, but also gaudy and dirty. The floor consisted of large marble tiles, and the walls were a checkerboard mosaic of white and pink ceramic pieces. Some of the wall tiles had started to fall out, and a few of the ones on the floor were cracked. All were covered in a thin film of dust.

“Leaving me in a place that doesn’t even have clean bathrooms,” muttered Diamond Tiara to herself. “ ‘Oh, make us a grandson Diamond Tiara’. ‘He’s going to inherit the company Diamond Tiara’. If I ever do have a son, I’ll raise him better than you raised me…”

The servants that her parents had promised had never come. Over a day had passed, and Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon were still alone. As soon as the sugar rush from the cider had started to wear off and they had come to realize that there were no cars or even new tracks in the dirt driveway outside, Silver Spoon had started become more nervous, coming even to the verge of panic. Diamond Tiara might have been panicked too, if this were the first time this sort of thing had happened to her.

Still, it was somewhat disturbing. Once again, the thoughts of their isolation were creeping into the back of her mind. There was no way to send a letter or a message out here, no way to find out if the servants were delayed, or never sent- -or if something terrible had happened to them on their way through the endless desert.

Diamond Tiara shivered, and pushed away the moth-eaten shower curtain. She was surprised to see the size of the bathtub on the other side, but disappointed by its condition. It was enormous, the size of a small pool with multiple layers built into it for sitting or standing- -truly, for once, a proper bathtub for one of Equestria’s elite. Like the rest of the house, though, it seemed to have just been abandoned suddenly. From the thick layers of lime scale that covered its mosaic sides, Diamond Tiara could imagine that it that the former residents had not even bothered to drain it. They had just left it full and standing, ready for use, as if they had simply disappeared.

Disgusted by the condition of what should have otherwise been a fine bathtub, Diamond Tiara walked around the edge toward the system of spigots attached to a system of pipes. With some effort, she twisted one of the handles and waited for the water to start running.

The whole room seemed to shake as the pipes vibrated violently, thumping against the walls with enough force to knock loose some of the tiles. Diamond Tiara stepped back, frightened. The sound was too loud for such a small, dark place, and she wondered if the room would tear itself apart. Then she watched as the faucet coughed and produced a small puff of sand.

The sound stopped, and Diamond Tiara stared at the small puddle of dust that now sat in the bottom of the bathtub.

“Buck me like an apple tree,” she swore. “They left us here, and there’s not even water to take a bath! Do they expect me to be stinky and gross like a farm pony?”

Diamond Tiara turned in a huff to exit the useless bathtub, but as she turned, she saw a figure silhouetted against the translucent shower curtain. A pony was standing between the curtain and the light she had left on the sink, casting an enormous shadow. For a moment, she thought she saw the shadows of torn and tattered cloth and the shape of a mask. An excessively floral scent filled the room.

Diamond Tiara squealed in fright and slipped, falling into the bathtub and joining the dust and broken tiles that had collected over decades at the bottom.

The shower curtain was torn aside, and Silver Spoon’s face appeared over the edge of the tub.

“Silver Spoon!” cried Diamond Tiara, looking up. “Don’t ever do that again! Do you even know how to knock? What if I had been on the pot!”

“That might be excessive,” said Silver Spoon, disapprovingly. She looked around at the bathtub. “Wow. This is huge. It’s like a whole spa in here. Can we take a bath together?”

“Only if you’re a chinchilla,” said Diamond Tiara, holding up a hoofful of sand.

“I’m not,” said Silver Spoon. “But my coat is extra soft. I have some dry-bath powder if you want it.”

Diamond Tiara gowned. She hated dry cleaning products. They made her smell nice, but never left her feeling clean. That, and her skin was sensitive. Admittedly, though, they did make Silver Spoon’s fur extremely soft.

“Fine,” said Diamond Tiara, letting Silver Spoon help her out of the deep and dusty basin. “But it had better be rose-scented. You know what happens if I use the lily kind!”

“You smell like lilies?”

“EXACTLY! And lilies smell like?”

Silver Spoon rolled her eyes. “Lilies smell like funerals.”

“Yes, they do. If any colt ever tries to give me lilies, I will buck him in the face and DON’T YOU LAUGH Silver Spoon, you know what I meant! And no carnations either!”

“I have rose, peach, and zinnia,” said Silver Spoon, suppressing a giggle. “Don’t worry.” Her eyes turned toward the door. “Hey, though. You’ll never guess what I found in one of these old rooms.”

“It is isn’t something dead, is it?”

Silver Spoon shook her head. “No. It’s even better!”

Diamond Tiara shifted in her seat, and looked around the wide, dark room. It was a low stone amphitheater. They were just slightly underground, and the walls and rows were made of stone blocks that left the room feeling cool but not at all damp. The general structure itself seemed old, perhaps even ancient, but more recently a number of chairs had been bolted onto the stone. They looked like something out of a historical theater, except they were badly maintained. They were not torn or damaged, but the fine ornate brass that made them up was badly tarnished and covered in plaques of green corrosion. The whole of the room was dark, save for the powerful enchanted light that Silver Spoon was using.

“Silver, where did you even learn how to use a projector?” asked Diamond Tiara, turning around in her seat to face Silver Spoon, who was mounting a roll of film onto the dusty old machine, focusing the light on a large yellowed and stained canvas placed over the ancient stone stage at the far end of the room.

“I like to watch movies,” she said. “My parents have loads of films.”

“You really shouldn’t watch your parent’s stuff,” said Diamond Tiara.

“Yeah,” said Silver Spoon. “Learned that one the hard way. Several times.”

“One time, when I was looking for Daddy’s wallet, I found the magazines he keeps under his bed,” said Diamond Tiara.

“What…what was in them?”

“The whole thing was pictures of Fluttershy. Like, every modeling shot that Photo Finish ever took of her. Just one after the other.”

“That’s nothing,” said Silver Spoon, adjusting the focus. “One time, I walked in on my parents…” she shuddered violently “…eating in bed!”

Diamond Tiara raised an eyebrow. “Really? That’s it? Silver Spoon, I’ve eaten in bed! You’ve eaten in bed!”

“Yeah, but you didn’t see what they were eating!”

Before Diamond Tiara could ask what exactly Silver Spoon could have seen them eating that would be so distressing to her, the projector hummed to life. “Ooh, it works!” said Silver Spoon, adjusting the light behind the film and sitting in a seat near the device. Diamond Tiara turned around in her seat and started to watch what was playing on the screen.

The first thing that was apparent was the lack of sound. This was something she was familiar with. Unless the film was accompanies by a phonograph, the only sound was the clicking of the projector. This particular film also appeared extremely old. The images that came through were blurry with sharp contrast, and as they passed there was evidence of grain from decay and hairs and dust amplified to the size of a room by the lenses of the projector.

The initial view was a slowly passing panorama of the desert outside, rendered without color. In all honesty, it looked exactly the same as it did in modern times: a rocky, wide area populated with sparse cacti and spiny shrubs. The pan held out for altogether too long, and Diamond Tiara sighed and sunk into her seat. This was going to be just as boring as Silver Spoon’s parents’ existentialist foreign films.

On the screen, the scene changed rapidly. Now, instead of the desert, it showed the house. In the image, it was already large, but consisted mostly of a high stone wall. Scaffolds and building materials were strewn about the desert as hundreds of ponies worked silently on the construction of house.

Then the image changed to that of several ponies. One of them bore a thick mustache and fancier clothing than the ponies around him. He dusted away something on the ground, and the camera shifted to showing a close-up of something unrecognizable. It was half buried, and the resolution was bad, but to Diamond Tiara it looked like a disk of some kind, its surface partially open and revealing numerous gears. Then the mustachioed pony was holding it, and in his hoof the dirty artifact looked something like a badly damaged pocket watch. The next part of the film focused on that item for a long duration. Now it was cleaned and laid out on a table, with some pony putting a ruler and a plaque next to it to identify it. The year, Diamond Tiara saw, was listed as 883, over one hundred years ago.

The mustachioed pony, dressed in formal explorer gear like a nineteenth-century Daring Do, now stood amongst his team, a mixture of ponies and donkeys. The image focused on them, and there was a flash as a picture was taken over them with the rolling desert behind them.

The film changed suddenly with a pop from the projector. The quality of the film deteriorated rapidly, and the screen was suddenly cast in yellowish sepia tones. The image was now much harder to make out, but Diamond Tiara saw a part of the inside of the house that looked like an open hospital ward. It was entirely empty, save for one hospital bed. An occupied hospital bed.

The image shifted back to the outside, but the camera was shaking too much for much to be made out. Whoever was holding it was running from something. Then all the urgency vanished as it cut back to the image of the hospital. The projector clicked as the pony holding it stepped toward the bed. Above it, white curtains blew from an open window. Whatever was in the bed stirred slightly.

“Silver Spoon,” said Diamond Tiara. She looked back to Silver Spoon, who was staring wide eyed at the screen. Then, turning back, she saw that the image had changed once again. Now it was a filming of the scaffolds that were around the house, except that they had changed. There were no workers, and the building materials were disorganized and rusted, the construction broken down and unfinished, surrounded by tall cholla trees.

Then it was back to the hospital. The pony with the camera was now almost to the bed. Diamond Tiara knew what was coming, that something terrible was about to happen. She knew that she must not see what was beneath those pure white sheets.

“Silver Spoon!” she cried. “Stop the projector!”

It was too late. A trembling hoof reached out toward the living, breathing lump on the bed. The curtains blew softly in the background, and for a moment nothing happened. Then it moved. The film was so badly decayed that Diamond Tiara could not see what truly was lying beneath those sheets, but for just a moment, she saw something: a mass of long, needle-like teeth and blind eyes staring up at the camera.

Then it defaulted back to a pan of the empty desert, and the sound of the projector stopped.

Diamond Tiara was breathing hard, but she did not know why. She looked up at Silver Spoon, who was ghostly pale, her shaking hoof still on the projector.

“What…what was that thing?” whispered Silver Spoon.

“Can you freeze a frame?”

Silver Spoon shook her head. “Please, Diamond Tiara. Please don’t make me go back to that frame…”

“Not that one,” said Diamond Tiara. Thoughts were connecting in her head. The shock of seeing that almost amphibious, broken thing in the bed had triggered something inside her to accelerate, something driving her subconscious too see things that she had initially missed. “Before. The one where that explorer guy and all those others were taking a picture.”

“Oh,” said Silver Spoon. “Yeah, I can do that.”

The projector began to hum again, but this time in reverse. No images flashed on the screen for a moment, and then Silver Spoon reconnected the light source. For just a brief second, Diamond Tiara saw the hospital again, and she shook violently now that she knew what was lying in that bed, what was waiting.

Within seconds, the image she had seen was back. The serious-faced ponies standing near a smiling, proud explorer dressed as though he were about to go on safari. Silver Spoon reversed the projector, and the image played through again. The ponies got togather, assembling, and there was a flash of light as their unseen photographer fired his camera.

“STOP!” said Diamond Tiara, standing. Silver Spoon obeyed, and the image froze. It quickly darkened as Silver Spoon reduced the light to avoid melting the celluloid, and Diamond Tiara trotted toward the stage. She paused at the base, and looked up at the image. Beneath her breath, she gasped, because she had been right.

She pointed. “Can you focus on the upper right? Up on the horizon?”

“Yeah. Give me a second,” said Silver Spoon. The image on the screen shifted as Silver Spoon started to move the film, and became blurry as the focus changed. Then it came back into focus, magnified. From behind her, Diamond Tiara heard Silver Spoon gasp.

“Sweet Celestia…”

Up in the corner, standing on the horizon, was a figure dressed in black. Even with the low quality of the early film, it was possible to see him standing oddly close to the ponies taking the picture, and Diamond Tiara could see the rags he wore drifting in the dusty wind as he watched them.

“That’s…that’s not possible!” said Silver Spoon. “This was recorded…”

“One hundred and twenty years ago.”

“Please don’t say that. Please don’t say that!”

“Silver Spoon?” asked Diamond Tiara. “Where did you get this film from?”

As Diamond Tiara stepped off the edge of the cold stone steps, she found herself in an extensive hall. The house was labyrinthine and illogical, and it had taken nearly an hour to get to where they were. Diamond Tiara had no idea where she was, but imagined that she was somewhere below the central keep of the ancient fort. From the smell and from the depths of the various staircases she had passed over, she guessed that she was below ground. Perhaps by a lot.

“What is this?” said Diamond Tiara, holding up her light. Even as bright as it was, it could not reach the high and ornate ceiling.

“I think it’s a library,” said Silver Spoon. She pointed to a cabinet near the entrance, one that was clearly far newer than the room it found itself in still almost fifty years old. “The film is in there. I…I didn’t go any deeper. It’s too dark.”

“Well, we’re going there now.”

DSilver Spoon released a long, low squeak of displeasure, but followed Diamond Tiara dutifully as the latter led them into the hall.

There were indeed bookshelves, and lots of them, but looking around Diamond Tiara doubted that this room had been intended as an archive. High on the walls, she saw several stained-glass windows. That alone was bizarre, considering that they were at least one hundred feet beneath the surface, but she guessed that they were meant to be lit from behind by the flickering glow of fire.

They almost always pictured the same thing. Each one of them showed what appeared to be the same yellow pony, always rendered with blood-red eyes that had neither pupils nor sclera. She was shown in different scenes, all of them abstract and barely discernable: standing beside a pair of blue ponies, one in old fashioned clothing and the other spreading a pair of wings; standing atop a rock, hoof outstretched, as a number of impossibly tall and thin bat-winged ponies emerged from a cave and appeared to speak to a number of gray-coated ponies; standing beside a pale stallion, smiling as she held in her hoof a tiny, red-eyed yellow foal with a tiny pair of wings; standing at the side of a pony of black metal and bone with a violet crystal glowing in his chest.

Diamond Tiara stopped in front of the final panel. It showed the yellow pony- -or rather, the foal that she had been holding before- -stretched out, her forelegs spread as if giving the world a hug and her face contorted into laughter as frozen glass fire burned behind her, consuming her stain-glass word.

“What the hay is this?” she muttered.

“I think it’s a church,” said Silver Spoon, looking up at a painting that showed the yellow pony standing with a pair of perfectly white spheres floating just behind her body while tiny orange winged ponies played at her feet.

“A church to who, though?”

Silver Spoon could only shrug.

There were several heavy, intricately carved tables set out in the center of the library. Diamond Tiara set her lantern down on one of them and turned the brightness up to maximum. The crystal bulb in the center hummed and buzzed as if in protest, but more light poured out- -even though at maximum, the edge of the room was still populated by flickering shadows.

“What are we looking for?” said Silver Spoon, taking down a heavy tome. She tried to blow the dust off, and the entire book blew away as powder under the force of her breath.

“Anything,” snapped Diamond Tiara. Then she paused. “No. Records. Old pictures, photographs. Journals. Anything that references the ponies from the past.”

“I really didn’t think research was your thing.”

“In case you weren’t there that day, I was once director of the Foal Free Press.”

“Oh yeah. You were really bad at it though.”

“Yes, Silver Spoon. Thank you for that.”

They started to search through the numerous stacks of books. There was almost no clear organization system, and the subject matter of the books was strange. Many of them were in languages that Diamond Tiara could not read, but some were in normal Equestrian. The topics were variable but almost invariably boring. Some were philosophy or stories that she had never heard of, some seemed to be religions texts, and many concerned topics about mining or tunneling or myth.

Eventually, the pair of them accumulated a pile of various materials on one of the reading tables in the center of the room. Silver Spoon stumbled upon to a cache of photographs- -or rather, old glass photography plates, as well as a number of books. Diamond Tiara had less luck, retrieving a few dusty journals and some torn blueprints and mining records.

Then, as she pulled back a large and heavy book, she found something hard placed next to it.

“What is this?” said Diamond Tiara, pulling out the device that had been crammed between the books. It was roughly book sized, but made of plastic with a pair of transparent wheels mounted beneath a clear cover.

“Oo!” cried Silver Spoon, suddenly excited. “I know what that is! It’s a magnetic tape recorder!”

“What’s magnetic tape?”

“It’s in the name. But back in the forties they used to use it to record stuff. It’s like a record you can carry with you.”

Diamond Tiara passed the device to Silver Spoon. “How do you use it?”

“Like this.” Silver Spoon turned a crank in the rear, charging the mechanical systems of the recorder, and then set it on the table. She pressed a small triangle-shaped button and with a click the wheels began to turn, running the thin black tape through the machine.

At first, nothing happened. Then, to Diamond Tiara’s surprise, a sound came out of the machine’s internal speaker. It was difficult to tell what it was, but it sounded like heavy, labored breathing. Then hoofsteps, slow at first but then rising. Those were followed by a more distant sound of something grinding, like distant equipment being moved. Then the sound stopped for a moment.

“Hello,” said an awkward, winded voice suddenly, causing Diamond Tiara to jump. “I’m…oh sweet Celestia. This is probably the last recording I will ever make, and I pray to all the gods that nopony ever hears it. If you do…it’s already too late. You don’t even know, but they’ve surrounded you. They’ll never let you leave.”

Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara looked at each other, and then at the recorder. Another sound drifted against it, like something thumping in the background, and the creak of a wooden floor.

The pony in the recording cleared his voice. “My…my name is Pickle Dillinger. I…I’m the last. We…we robbed a bank, and came here to hide. This big, abandoned house…this cursed place. How could we have known?”

The pounding accelerated, and for a moment Diamond Tiara thought she heard a different sound. Something like distant, whispering voices that were just quiet enough to avoid being recorded onto the tape clearly.

“I don’t have much time,” said the recorded voice of Pickle Dillinger. “The things…the things in those suits, they’re not ponies! Oh Celestia, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! Why didn’t we listen? Look, this is important, more important than anything: when they come, and they WILL come, you have too- -”

The voice suddenly stopped. The tape continued to run, but nothing came out except static. There was no sound, no notice; it was as if the speaker had simply disappeared without even a whimper. The tape continued to turn for a moment, and then, with a click, it went totally silent.

Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon looked at each other, and then at the tape player.

“It…it had to be a prank,” said Diamond Tiara, desperately trying to rationalize what she had just heard.

“Yeah,” agreed Silver Spoon. “Yeah, it had to be. Or else who…who would have put it on the shelf?”

A sudden sound caused both of them to jump, and to turn toward the bookcase.

“What was that?” cried Silver Spoon, shaking under the table.

“I…I don’t know.” Diamond Tiara approached the shelf slowly, and looked through the empty places where the books had been moments before. The shelf should have been pressed against the wall, with nothing behind it except stone. Air seemed to be coming through, though. Cold air.

Diamond Tiara picked up the lantern from the table in her teeth and held it close to the shelf. Behind it was a small recessed space that was completely covered by the shelf. Through the cobwebs and dust, Diamond Tiara saw a door.

“There’s something back here,” she said.

“Like a good something?” squeaked Silver Spoon. “Like a group of royal guards? With candy and cashmere sweaters and shiny new accessories?”

“Like a door.”

“Noooo,” whined Silver Spoon. “I would take a musty skeleton over a DOOR.” She paused. “Actually, I’d take a musty skeleton over the sweaters too.”

“Pack up the stuff,” ordered Diamond Tiara. Silver Spoon hesitated, but unable to resist an order from Diamond Tiara poked her head out of the table and began to load the journals and photographic plates into her saddlebags.

Once the bags were loaded, Diamond Tiara stood next to the shelf. She leaned against the wall and, with a sinister smile, inserted her hoof between the dry, old wood and the wall.

“Woops,” she said, pushing just slightly. The entire shelf and all the remaining books came tumbling down, nearly crushing Silver Spoon and opening the way to the door.

Silver Spoon gasped. “Diamond Tiara! If Princess Twilight learns what you just did, you’re future in the royal court will be sunk!”

“She doesn’t have to know, does she?”

Silver Spoon looked down at all the spilled books. “I think she just sort of will. Like, a disturbance in the library force or something.”

Diamond Tiara ignored Silver Spoon and focused on the door. It was tremendously old, made from darkened wood and set two steps down from the rest of the room. Slowly, she descended and pulled on the wrought iron handle bolted into the dark wooden surface. For a long moment, nothing happened- -and then the door slid on its rusted hinges, filling the room with a sharp shriek of protest.

A gust of cold air rushed in from the other side, and Diamond Tiara held up the light. The stairs that led to the door did not continue beyond it; rather, the land sloped away into a dark tunnel beyond.

“Well, it goes somewhere,” said Silver Spoon, turning around. “Time to go back upstairs.”

“No,” said Diamond Tiara. “We’ve got to see where this goes.”

“I can see where it goes,” said Silver Spoon, wide-eyed. “And we don’t want to go there!”

“Don’t be a coward, Silver Spoon. Nopony likes a coward.”

Diamond Tiara jumped down onto the dirt, trying to conceal how badly her legs were shaking. She was even more terrified than Silver Spoon, by far. They were already in a deep underground library, and now there was a door that went deeper, cutting into the earth and going onward for a distance so long that Diamond Tiara’s lantern could not penetrate all the way to the end.

Silver Spoon whined in protest, but followed her friend into the blackness.

“Why do you think there’s a tunnel?” asked Diamond Tiara. She felt a need to talk; the silence paired with the almost palpable darkness was just too much for her.

“Well,” said Silver Spoon, looking upward and all around at the shadows dancing in the harsh light, “this place used to be a…a sanitarium. Maybe it’s for…disposal…”

“Disposal of what?”

“I’d…I’d rather not think about that…”

“It’s probably just a service tunnel that some idiot wasted his time digging. I mean, come on. This is totally something Snails would do in his basement.”

“Or it’s a…”

They stopped at an intersection, and the question as to the identity of the tunnel was at least partially answered. The corridor that they were on had stopped and diverged into two much larger ones. The new perpendicular tunnel had larger wooden supports, and the bottom was coated a set of narrow and extremely rusty rails. They were in a mine.

“Celestia’s butt,” said Diamond Tiara, holding up her lantern toward the place where the mine continued to slope downward. “How deep do you think this goes?”

“It could be miles,” gulped Silver Spoon. “And I really don’t want to get lost in here.”

“We won’t get lost,” said Diamond tiara, walking down the slope. “We’ll just follow the tracks.”

“Do we have to?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Diamond Tiara. “This place was a silver mine, right? What if we found some silver? Daddy would be so happy.” She turned and muttered to herself. “Maybe so happy he wouldn’t miss my birthday again…”

So they continued deeper into the abandoned mine, following the rusted rails. The mine shaft was cold and almost completely silent, save for the occasional whispering of the drafts that pulled their way through the tunnels on a convoluted and long-forgotten path to the surface- -or to some place far deeper.

Along the sides of the path were what remained of the mining industry that had once sprung up around this ancient house. There were shovels and picks, all rusted to the point of being unrecognizable, as well as pieces of mining equipment that Diamond Tiara could not identify.

“Hey!” said Diamond Tiara, suddenly.

“What?!” screamed Silver Spoon, her voice echoing off the walls endlessly as it trailed through the tunnels.

“Not so loud!” cried Diamond Tiara. She reached down into the dirt below and picked up what her light had glinted off of. “Check this out,” she said, pulling up a hoof-sized lump of shiny metal. It was heavy and cold, and Diamond Tiara knew what it was. “Look. At. THIS!”

“What is it?”

“SILVER!”

“Yeah, you don’t need to yell, I’m right- -”

“No! I just found a piece of silver!” Diamond Tiara lifted her light to the cavern, and saw that large chunks of the glimmering metal were all over the walls and ceiling. “Ha! Maybe this place isn’t so bad after all. Not that we need money, but hey, it’s always good when the rich get richer.”

“Let me see that,” said Silver Spoon, pulling the rock from Diamond Tiara’s hoof.

“Hey! That one’s mine!” A thought occurred to her. “Actually, they’re all mine! All of this is!”

Silver Spoon ignored Diamond Tiara’s protests and examined the metal closely, lifting her glasses and tapping on it with her hoof. She shook her head. “It’s not silver,” she said.

“It’s not- -WHAT?”

“It isn’t,” said Silver Spoon, dropping the rock on the ground.

“How would you know?”

Silver Spoon raised one eyebrow. “Because I know silver. And that’s not silver.” She grimaced slightly. “Actually…I don’t even know what it is. It’s not any metal that I’ve ever seen, and it feels…Diamond Tiara, I think we should go. Please.”

“If it isn’t silver, what is it?” asked Diamond Tiara, mostly to herself.

“Please, Diamond- -”

A sound on the periphery of the tunnel suddenly drew both of their attention. Something had moved, and moved quickly, but neither of them had seen it. The silence returned once again, seeming to come from the walls themselves, dropping from the encrusting metal that the miners had mysteriously stopped mining over one hundred years earlier.

“We have to see what it is,” said Diamond Tiara, following the tracks deeper.

“No,” said Silver Spoon.

Diamond Tiara stopped. “What did you just say?”

“No,” said Silver Spoon, shaking her head. “I’m not going. Diamond Tiara, this is stupid! Look around you! We’re in a hole! That by its self is bad, but…but you just heard it too! We’re- -we’re not alone down here!”

“Which is why we need to go forward.”

“That makes no sense!”

“Yes, it does! This mine is Rich family property! A pony was spying on me, ME! I’m not going to let him get away with this, Silver Spoon!”

“Then you can go ahead without me.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Wh…why not?”

“Can’t you tell? I’m scared out of my mind right now.”

“You don’t look scared…”

“Of course not. If you had Spoiled Rich as a mother, you wouldn’t look scared either. Appearance is everything, remember? Never let them know when you’re afraid, or angry, or happy, or…or sad. It is a sign of weakness. But I am afraid Silver Spoon. I can’t do this without you.”

“You…you need me?”

“I’ve always needed you.” She paused. “But if you tell anypony I said that, I will never speak to you again!”

Silver Spoon produced a shaky smile. She took a breath. “Okay. We are going to go two hundred more feet. Then we are going to turn around and go back home, and we are going to lock ourselves in your room and hide under the bed and cry. Got that?”

Diamond Tiara smiled. “Got it.”

So they continued into the mine. As they moved, though, the scenery began to change. The slope grew deeper, and the walls wider. Soon, Diamond Tiara had no idea if they had gone two hundred feet or two thousand. At some point, the tracks vanished from beneath them, replaced by a bare stone floor.

The tunnels started to change as well. They became more convoluted, with twists and turns and intersections, some of which did not make any sort of physical sense. By far the strangest aspect, though, was the number or roots that seemed to come down from the ceiling. They pierced the rock and clung to the walls like inverted vines, driving every deeper through the gravel of the floor and between the cracks of rocks. Some were the size of tree trunks, and all were gnarled and dry.

The roots were not the only unearthly thing in the tunnels, either. The mine shaft gave way to a more organic system, with wide curving tunnels. Many of them branched off from the main artery with holes that were barely small enough for a pony to fit through, and some of them traveled straight up or straight down, like strange, smooth-walled chimneys.

“How deep do roots normally go?” asked Diamond Tiara, putting her hoof on one of the larger of the trunks. The bark was hard, but had the feel of living wood, as if it was vibrating from within.

“Some cacti can burrow hundreds of feet into the ground looking for water,” explained Silver Spoon. Then, to herself, “Thank you, Spiny V.”

“I wonder how deep we are.” Diamond Tiara edged around one of the deep circular holes in the floor. In the light of her lantern, it seemed to go on forever. “I wonder what dug these?”

“Animals?”

“Animals don’t chew through solid rock.”

Diamond Tiara looked around at the roots and the holes, and then raised her lantern to look down the main tunnel. The darkness was still thick and frigid, and the light did not reach far. In fact, the presence of the crystalline glow only seemed to make the shadows deeper.

As she raised the light, though, she felt her eyes widen. Staring back at her from just beyond the edge of her lantern’s glow were a pair of luminescent, reflective eyes.

“Silver…Silver Spoon…” She already knew that Silver Spoon saw them too. Silver Spoon’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates, but, like Diamond Tiara, she was frozen. Neither of them knew what to do. They were standing twenty feet away from something, but neither of them knew what. Neither of them could see it.

More than anything, Diamond Tiara wanted to turn around, to run and scream all the way back to the house above, but she found that she could not move. Something inside her was waiting, desperately hoping that the owner of those eyes would turn away and that she would not have to turn her back on whatever it was.

The pair of silvery eyes did not move, though. Instead, the cavern was filled with a deafening, echoing sound like that of an enormous cicada. Near the eyes, red lights suddenly glowed dimly, illuminating the edges of a pony-shaped body dressed in black and rags.

“RUN, NOW!” cried Silver Spoon. She grabbed Diamond Tiara, and as Diamond Tiara turned, she saw the thing lurch forward, its legs scampering silently forward as it started to pursue.

The pair of them were running and screaming in a panic, their hooves slipping and clicking against the hard ground. While she had been descending, Diamond Tiara had realized that had been going downhill. Going back up, though, she might as well have been climbing a mountain.

A system of red lights passed overhead, and Diamond Tiara was sure that she could feel a wisp of dirty cloth drag across her back. She burst out crying as the creature dropped from the ceiling, blocking their path.

“This way!” cried Silver Spoon, turning down a side path.

Diamond Tiara followed her friend, but knew as soon as she had that they had lost the initial path back to the door.

“Where’s the way out?” she cried, matching Silver Spoon’s speed.

Silver Spoon was breathing heavily, her pupils little more than dots. Her glasses had fallen off in the commotion, but she kept running forward blindly, breathing heavily. “I don’t know!” she cried.

Diamond Tiara looked forward toward the edge of the light that her lantern cast, watching as the tunnels changed size and shape and as mining equipment overgrown with roots passed by. She knew that if one of those tunnels were to narrow suddenly, or if they were to hit a dead end…

“Next…left…” whispered a voice, suddenly. Diamond Tiara felt her ears prick, and her eyes flicked to Silver Spoon. Silver Spoon was not in any condition to talk, though; she was breathing too hard and to wildly panicked. The voice had almost seemed to have come in on the wind, but Diamond Tiara knew that she had heard it.

“Left, here!” she cried, suddenly, pushing Silver Spoon into the next tunnel on the left. As she did, she saw the pair of silver eyes following them closely, and thought she might have seen the glint of teeth reaching out toward her soft filly flesh.

“It’s a dead end!” cried Silver Spoon as the light from the lantern illuminated a collapsed tunnel.

“Right….then…stay left…” whispered the female voice again.

“No, there’s a path to the right!” cried Diamond Tiara. “Take it, and then stay to the left!”

Silver Spoon nodded, and indeed, the voice was right. Although the forward tunnel had been completely blocked, a tunnel to the right had been left partially open. It was too small for an adult pony to fit through, but Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara were able to squeeze into the branch tunnel with little difficulty.

On the other side was a narrow mining tunnel, and indeed, it split into two directions. One went up, and the other one- -the one on the right- -went downward.

“No! We have to go left!” cried Silver Spoon.

“No!” yelled Diamond Tiara, slamming her friend down the right tunnel. Unable to turn around, the ran down the steep hole, and then turned- -and found themselves rising upward.

Silver Spoon started to fall behind. “I can’t do it, Diamond,” she said, out of breath. “It’s too steep…just leave me, save yourself…”

“Oh, for Luna’s sake!” cried Diamond Tiara. She pulled off her tiara and put it in her teeth with the ring of the lantern, and then got behind Silver Spoon. Lowering her head, Diamond Tiara pushed against Silver Spoon’s rump, driving her forward.

The scenery immediately began to change. Diamond Tiara felt warm air against her body, and realized that she could smell the desert. There was no light ahead, but they were approaching the surface.

Then they burst through a hole torn in a concrete floor, and found themselves inside of a concrete structure. The space in the center was narrow, and in the lantern light, Diamond Tiara could see that there were several stone sarcophagi lining the walls.

“Over there!” she cried through the metal in her mouth, pointing at a narrow set of crumbling stairs ahead. She and Silver Spoon raced toward them and found themselves faced with a large stone door.

“It’s locked!” shrieked Silver Spoon.

“No, it isn’t!” screamed Diamond Tiara. Actually, she had no idea- -but she refused to give up. She pushed her hooves against it. “PUSH!”

The two fillies put all their weight against the stone door, but it did not move. Behind them, they heard the sound of something creeping toward them from the hole in the floor, preceded by the oddly alluring sound of buzz or system of chirps.

Diamond Tiara turned back toward the door, not knowing if the beast was about to crawl out of the hole or if it already had. With a sudden surge of adrenaline, she put everything she had into the door, and, in response, it pushed outward just slightly. A thin beam of orange sunlight poured through the gap, filling the room.

“HARDER!” she cried, and her and Silver Spoon slammed themselves against it with their full weight. The door moved more, and opened. Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara burst out into the sunlight. All around them was tall grass and spiny plants growing up amongst tombstones; the tunnel they had taken had led into a mausoleum.

Silver Spoon collapsed onto the ground, breathing heavily, but Diamond Tiara was still running on adrenaline, knowing that this was no time to rest. She spat out the lantern and her tiara and pushed her back against the door.

“Come on, Silver!” she yelled, angrily. “We have to close it!”

“R…right,” gasped Silver Spoon, barely managing to stand and put her weight against the heavy stone door.

Almost as soon as they had pushed it closed, something immensely heavy slammed against the back of it. Diamond Tiara cried out as she dug her rear hooves into the dry soil, trying to keep the door from opening. There was a pause, and then another slam as the monstrosity threw itself against the door. It pushed again and again, each time knocking the two fillies back slightly.

Once a gap had formed, a black-clad hoof extended out of the gap, reaching toward them. Silver Spoon screamed. At the sound of her best friend in distress, Diamond Tiara managed to summon the last of her strength and slam the door closed. The hoof retracted into the darkness just as crypt closed.

There were no more impacts against the door, and Diamond Tiara slid to the ground.

“I think we got it,” she sighed, smiling.

“Yeah,” said Silver Spoon. They suddenly both broke into relieved laughter- -until a high pitched whine filled the air, like the photoflash of a camera warming up.

“Um…do you hear that?” asked Silver Spoon.

Before Diamond Tiara had a chance to answer, the heavy stone door detonated behind them. The energetic explosion threw both her and Silver Spoon forward, slamming them into the ground and scraping them across the harsh scrub that grew there. Silver Spoon was slammed into a cross-shaped tomb stone, but Diamond Tiara landed on the ground and was covered by a spray of newly formed gravel.

Shaken and disoriented, she stood and looked at the now open door of the crypt. She watched as the thing inside lurched forward toward her. For just a brief moment, she thought she saw the horror of what it might actually look like.

As quickly as it dove forward, though, it scrambled back into the mausoleum, releasing a warbling and distressed call.

Diamond Tiara was confused, but then the thought clicked in her mind.

“The light!” she cried to Silver Spoon, who was just barely starting to rise. “It can’t stand the sunlight without its mask on!”

Diamond Tiara’s eyes flicked across the ground, looking over the rubble that surrounded her. Then she saw it: the lantern, still flickering even in the light of the setting sun. With a single motion, Diamond Tiara scooped it up in her hoof.

“EAT LIGHT, MOTHERBUCKER!” she cried as she slammed the light against the edge of the mausoleum floor. The impact was enough to crack the housing, and the crystal within broke free of the limiting rings that kept it stable. It shattered with a deafening boom and a flash of blinding white light.

The creature inside the tomb screamed horribly, and released a complex array of vowel sounds that almost seemed like words. Diamond Tiara had been forced to turn away from the flash of light to avoid being blinded, but when it subsided, she looked back and saw that the creature had retreated back underground to where it had come.

For the time being, they were safe.

Chapter 4: From the Depths

This time, the dream did not take a stop in Cheerilee’s classroom. There was no sampling of public nudity, and no embarrassment. Instead, the dream progressed forward, and once again Diamond Tiara found herself in the same place she had been before.

Unlike last time, she now found herself standing in knee-deep water. The small, crystal clear river gurgled over the smooth, glossy stones just beneath its surface. Upstream, the waterfall poured from an unseen cliff high above, its mist refracting rainbows through the warm air. All around Diamond Tiara was a beautiful oasis of mossy rocks, ferns, and trees so high that she could not hope to possibly see past their tropical canopy.

The river below was cold, but not unpleasant as it drifted lazily past Diamond Tiara’s ankles. If anything, it looked delicious. In her short life, Diamond Tiara had experienced foods that many fully adult ponies only dreamed of: the finest of imported oats, exotic flowers grown in the highest mountains, rich caviar, and more fudge flavors than Celestia herself was aware of. None of those things had tasted as good as the trickling, babbling water below her now looked.

Diamond Tiara suddenly became conscious of a powerful thirst. Her mouth felt dry, but the thirst penetrated far deeper than that: the idea of drinking that water poured into her mind, forcing away all other thoughts and all other goals. It was as if she were drowning in the dryness of the air and that cool, crystal clear water were the breath she needed to survive.

Unable to resist, she lowered her head to it- -but found that she could not reach it. She tried to drink, but none of it entered her mouth. There was nothing to swallow. Though Diamond Tiara could feel the water on her hooves, she now realized that there was truly none there.

The running of the river suddenly stopped. The water froze in place, unable to move. The sounds of the stream stopped, and in its stillness it became like a mirror, reflecting the sky and trees above- -and the ponies that surrounded the pool.

Diamond Tiara looked up at them. They were the same as before, the gray ones whose faces were somehow obscured even when she looked directly at them. Now, though, they were different, but only slightly. As if Diamond Tiara could almost recall their names.

Their lips were moving. The ghostly ponies were speaking, but no words came from them. Then, from nowhere in particular, the whisper of a female voice filled the air.

“Please, Diamond Tiara,” it said, almost seeming to come up from the water as the cheerful and seductive bubbling had just moments before. “We’re so…so thirsty…”

Diamond Tiara did not know why, but she was suddenly afraid. The gray ponies stepped forward toward the very edge of the water, but did not try to drink from it. Instead they formed a tight circle, staring at her from all sides, all speaking their own words silently.

“I don’t understand,” said Diamond Tiara, her voice shaking. “The water…the water’s right there!”

“WATER.” They all said it in unison, their head suddenly perking up and their white eyes becoming visible. “THE WATER.”

“Please, Diamond Tiara!” called the female voice. It was pleading- -but at the same time speaking with the tone of a demand both subtle and terrifying. It was only a whisper, but somehow so deafening. “Let us have…let us have the water!”

“No!” cried Diamond Tiara, suddenly. “You can’t have the water!”

She did not understand why, but somehow, she knew that if they were allowed to touch the stream, something terrible would happen. Because the water was not real. There was no pool of liquid. There was only her.

The female voice on the other side of her perception suddenly produced a horrible scream, louder than anything Diamond Tiara had ever heard before. The grey ponies suddenly solidified around her, and as Diamond Tiara watched, their bodies desiccated into mummies, taking just one step closer to the water before collapsing into dust.

The illusion of the oasis shifted and faded. The lush, green growth rotted and died as the ground was torn open by new plants. Diamond Tiara suddenly found herself in an endless field of immense, gnarled trees with long, hypodermic spines; around them grew thousands of different kinds of distorted cacti, all reaching out with their needle-covered arms toward her. All reaching for her water.

Diamond Tiara looked down, and saw her reflection- -except that it was not her. Instead, it was that of a pony clad in rags and black-colored armor that prevented even a speck of his coat from showing. As Diamond Tiara looked down at him, he looked up at her. His mask was nearly featureless, save for two dime-sized marks on the sides of the most frontal portion and a wide breathing manifold.

A circular clockwork device of silvery metal that was not silver clicked in the center of his chest, and he spoke.

“Leave this place,” he whispered, his voice obscured through his mask but still perfectly understandable. “You need to get out of here. GET OUT.”

Diamond Tiara bolted awake with a start. Immediate, the sunlight poured into her eyes, and she shielded herself from the open window on the far edge of the room. She was overheated and drenched in sweat, and part of the thirst of the dream continued within her. Her head felt terrible, and she was dizzy and groggy.

She sat up and tried to move, but found that she could not. Diamond Tiara looked down at her waist and saw Silver Spoon, still asleep, clinging to her tightly. Seeing her like that reminded Diamond Tiara of what had happened last night, of how the two of them had barricaded off the section of the house that contained their rooms. Across the room, a mass of furniture was still piled against Diamond Tiara’s door, holding it closed against a creature that could apparently vaporize solid stone.

It had taken most of the night to coax Silver Spoon out from beneath the bed. Even then, Silver Spoon was so shaken that she would only sleep directly beside and holding onto Diamond Tiara. Diamond Tiara Silver Spoon’s presence weird and excessively warm, but her coat was soft and she did not snore. That, and on some level, Diamond Tiara was just as terrified. So she had permitted the shared sleeping accommodations.

Still, Silver Spoon had a surprisingly powerful grip. It took Diamond Tiara several minutes to unwedge herself her best friend’s grasp. Silver Spoon moaned and rolled over, burrowing beneath the covers in spite of the heat.

Grumbling, Diamond Tiara stretched. Her body was incredibly sore. She had never run as much as she had the day before, and she had fallen asleep amazingly quickly. From the color of the sunlight coming through the window, she guessed that her and Silver Spoon had probably slept until mid-afternoon. The sun would be going down soon, but as long as it stayed up, they would be safe. Everypony knew that monsters never attacked during the day.

The wood floor creaked as she crossed it, and Diamond Tiara took special care to avoid the crystal-light lanterns that were dispersed across the floor. Even in the afternoon light, they were still burning at full capacity. The night before, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon had gathered every light source they could find and turned Diamond Tiara’s room into a chamber of intense white light almost as bright as day.

The lights themselves made Diamond Tiara a bit nervous, though. Her hearing had still not recovered completely from the day before. Several times, her parents had warned her to be careful with the crystal lights due to the high price that the special crystals inside commanded. Diamond Tiara had been vaguely aware that they were volatile, but she had no idea just how dangerous they could be.

After stepping gingerly over the lights, Diamond Tiara reached the window. Seeing the sun outside confirmed what she had expected: it had already started its downward decent. Likewise, she could see that there was no car in the access road. The servants had still not arrived.

One thing she had not noticed, though, was just how many cholla trees had been planted outside her window. She remembered having seen them in passing, and thought that there were one or two. Now, though, she saw that there was a veritable army of them beneath her third-story window.

Of the spiny, aggressive cactus-like plants, one of them appeared to have had the audacity to start to grow into her open window. Diamond Tiara shuddered, but she did not know why. Something about those green arms- -the ones that had been tapping on her window the night before- -reaching through the small gap reminded her of something frightening that she could almost remember.

“Stupid window,” she muttered. “I spend half the night moving gross dusty furniture and Silver leaves the window open.” She grabbed the top of the sill an slammed it shut, cutting off the growing arms of the tree outside. The spiky segments dropped to the floor with a rush of greenish fluid, and the hot air that was coming in through the window stopped.

The sudden slamming sound caused Silver Spoon to awaken suddenly. She released a short cry, and then flailed beneath the blankets on Diamond Tiara’s bed.

“It’s got me!” she cried. “I’ve gotten got!”

Diamond Tiara sighed, and then kicked the cactus fragments out of her way as she walked back to the bed. She grasped the blankets and pulled them off sharply, causing Silver Spoon to pour out onto the floor.

“Diamond Tiara!” cried Silver Spoon, grasping Diamond Tiara’s legs. “You saved me!”

“From a quilt!”

“An itchy quilt…”

“Silver Spoon, this is serious!”

Silver Spoon frowned, appearing hurt, and stood up. She sat on the edge of the bed, wincing. Diamond Tiara noticed the large bruise that was spreading across her back where Silver Spoon had been thrown against the tombstone the day prior. Silver Spoon immediately began unwinding her frayed braid, clearly intending to re-braid it after she finished.

“It’s still out there, isn’t it?” she asked. Her voice sounded tremendously heavy. “Please don’t say we have to go down there and close that door…”

“It is,” said Diamond Tiara. “And who knows how many holes it has into here. But no, of course not. I’m not going down there. Ever.”

“What are we going to do?” said Silver Spoon, compulsively pulling at her hair and shaking. “Can…can we run?”

“Where? Into a desert? To where?”

“I don’t know…I don’t know!”

Diamond Tiara sighed and sat down next to Silver Spoon. “The servants never showed up. We’re alone, and we can’t leave. We’d dry up like a pair of adorable prunes before we got anywhere near any ponies. Or it would chase us down when night falls.”

“You’re not making me feel better,” squeaked Silver Spoon.

“You’re not supposed to feel better,” said Diamond Tiara, jumping down from the bed. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”

Miraculously, during the chase up from the bowels of the silver mine, Silver Spoon had not even attempted to dump her saddlebags. They and their contents had stayed with her the whole time. Although some of the photograph plates had been broken when the mausoleum door had exploded, almost everything within was still intact.

Now they were strewn across Silver Spoon’s room on several tables that had been pulled from the neighboring abandoned rooms. Old letters, photographs, and musty books had been poured out amongst the heaps of polaroid photographs of the fillies from their earlier cider-fueled escapade.

It was through these that Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon started sifting through, trying to find something of value, some fragment of importance that might help in their dire predicament. Diamond Tiara did not normally like this kind of work. It was boring, and she was not the best pony at reading. Whether by fear or by curiosity, though, she found herself diving into the texts and pictures.

The first thing that was brought to both her and Silver Spoon’s attention was the set of photographs that they had recovered. They were terribly old and not well made, and not one of them was in color, but their subject was clear. Almost all of them showed pictures of the miners that had once worked this land.

The ponies in the pictures showed dirty ponies dressed in frayed, filthy clothing. Their buildings were hastily constructed and rustic to the point where Diamond Tiara wondered if they were even livable. In at least one of the pictures, though, there was a dreary rendition of a town that seemed to have been thriving at some point- -and, from the image of the clock tower in the background, Diamond Tiara realized that the town pictured was the one that she and Silver Spoon had found long abandoned in the desert.

Something was off about the pictures, though, and it made Diamond Tiara oddly nervous. The ponies in the pictures were all obviously different, but they all had the same look about them. They all stared blankly from sunken eyes, and their bodies were tremendously thin and sickly. Their manes and tails were falling out in clumps, and they dressed in excessive clothing. In one picture- -an image of a family that had not one pony over forty- -part of a pony’s cloak-like clothing was being blown to the side, and Diamond Tiara saw that the skin beneath was badly scarred, as if it had been burned.

Silver Spoon shivered. “What’s wrong with them?” she asked. “They all look so sick…”

“An outbreak?” suggested Diamond Tiara. “Like, in those old movies? But what makes a pony’s hair fall out…”

Diamond Tiara flipped opened a yellow, stained folder. It was filled with more modern photographs. They were still in black and white, but they were at least paper. A group of them seemed to show a smiling family- -always the same family, and based on the rocks around them, always in the same spot, possibly taken once per year. They did not look like the sickly miners in the old plates, so Diamond Tiara guessed that whatever made them sick had gone away by the time the newer photographs were taken.

Looking carefully, she scanned the background horizon of each photograph. After a few seconds of looking, she found him. He was by no means in all of the images, but he was definitely in some of them. Sometimes he would be distant, just at the edge of the horizon, a blackish smudge- -and sometimes he would be frighteningly close, so close that happy, smiling ponies in the foreground were barely ten feet away from him, somehow not detecting his presence.

Those pictures were eerie, and Diamond Tiara put them away. Instead, she looked at a different set of newer, clearer photographs. They were still not in color, and they mostly showed various aspects of the house under construction. By the way they were taken, Diamond Tiara guessed that they had been taken by a Pegasus. Some of the views were aerial, and the house beneath looked like an insane maze. Other than that, though, there was not much in them save for dust and cactuses.

“Hey,” said Silver Spoon. “Look at this.”

She pulled out a large discolored sheet of paper form a pile of blueprints and laid it out in the center of the table. Diamond Tiara gasped when she saw it, hoping that Silver Spoon had not seen her surprise, or just how familiar the design on the yellowed and stained paper looked.

On it was an image of the pony she had seen in her dreams, the one who had stood in the pool as her reflection. By extension, Diamond Tiara knew that he was the same one that was lurking in the darkness, waiting, watching- -but in the image on the table, he had been rendered in sharp pen strokes and lacked any of the ragged cloth that surrounded his body.

Diamond Tiara looked closer at the image and realized that it was not a picture of a pony at all. With the drawn-in cutaways and notes, it appeared to be an image of a kind of covering, like a diving suit. Diamond Tiara looked closely at the notes on the margins of the sketch.

“It’s a mining suit,” she said. “Or part of one, I guess. It’s supposed to keep a pony safe against…what’s Radon?”

“An inert gas,” said Silver Spoon. “It builds up in really, really deep mines.”

“And how do you- -never mind. This looks like the thing that the…that thing was wearing.”

“It can’t be,” said Silver Spoon.

“And why not?”

“Look,” said Silver Spoon, pointing at several regions of the diagram. “It was never finished. Half the breathing tubes don’t even go anywhere. And doesn’t the shape look a little off to you?”

Diamond Tiara looked down at the image. “Yeah…” she said, realizing that Silver Spoon was right. “This one looks like a pony…”

The two of them stared at it for a moment, and then Diamond Tiara sighed and put her head down on the table. “None of this is helping,” she said. “Silver Spoon, did you find anything?”

“Not much,” replied Silver Spoon. She blushed slightly and lifted up a book. “I actually got a little distracted…”

“‘Strange Alchemy’,” read Diamond Tiara from the book’s cover. “What the hay is that?”

“Historical fiction,” said Silver Spoon, her nose scrunching. Then she blushed much harder. “And it’s definitely not meant for little fillies!”

“Silver Spoon! You were supposed to be helping me!”

“I was,” said Silver Spoon, putting down the dusty and ancient tome. She pulled out some loosely bound ledgers. “I checked up on that ‘silver’. I was right. I think they knew it was fake.”

“How can you tell?”

“The initial mine had to install special processing equipment, stuff way different from what you use to smelt native silver…which is silver in its non-ore form- -”

“I know what native silver is!”

“Well…snippy…the point is, a bunch of ponies tried to mine this place, but the silver always came out weird. Lots of complaints. There’s some memos that say it was ‘cursed’.”

“Cursed? With what?”

“It doesn’t say. But the estimates say the mine is huge. I mean, MASSIVE. But everypony who tries to mine it ends up bankrupt, or…”

“Or what?”

Silver Spoon looked Diamond Tiara in the eyes. “Or the ledgers just stop. Like they all just suddenly disappeared.”

The two looked at each other for a moment, and then back at the table. The photographs of the sickly miners and the incomplete hazard suit stared up at them. Diamond Tiara shuffled through the number of confusing documents. She flipped over one of the mad, indecipherable blueprints of the house and suddenly noticed a small book that she had not seen before.

“What is this?” she asked, picking it up. She opened the front cover. On the inside of the cover was a hoof-written name.

“What is it?” repeated Silver Spoon.

“‘The Journal of the Illustrious Sir Pith Helmut’. Wow. Overconfident, much?”

“But your diary says ‘Princess Diamond Dazzle Tiara’ in the front,” noted Silver Spoon.

“Well, that’s differ- -HEY! I didn’t tell you that you could- -”

“Hey!” said Silver Spoon, suddenly. “What if this Pith guy was the explorer in that movie?”

“What give you that idea?”

“Duh. Because he was wearing a pith helmet.”

“Just because his name is ‘Pith Helmut’ doesn’t mean he wears a…oh.” Diamond Tiara looked up to see Silver Spoon, one eyebrow raised, her hoof pointing at Diamond Tiara’s own diamond tiara.

Diamond Tiara opened the book and turned to the front page. It was written in exceedingly need but exceedingly florid cursive hoofwriting. Diamond Tiara sighed. She hated reading cursive- -even it if was one of the only things she was actually good at in school.

“October seventeenth, year of our Sunlord Celestia 886,” she read, slowly. “Once again, I am beginning a new journal volume to document my exemplary and extraordinary life…blah blah blah…oh, here:

“I recently acquired a substantial house mysteriously constructed in the center of a desert so rural that it does not appear to have any manner of civilized name. The house itself was apparently once the centre of a mining establishment, and long before, a distant redoubt.

“As Equestria’s foremost archeologist- -despite what that fool Daring Feats may claim- -I had actually taken an interest in this location far earlier. My purchase of it- -at an oddly low cost, I might say, from the estate of the last remnant of the burro family that owned it prior, a raving and institutionalized madpony- -is anticipated to bring in a number of early Third Era artifacts. This area also appears to have been considered sacred to the local Mustang tribe before their extinction during the mid-Second Era.

“In addition, though large, this domicile lacks any room adequate to display the numerous artifacts that I have culled from the lost tombs of Equestria. I intend to construct a small addition to serve as a museum for my collection. Construction will be overseen by my butler, Studly, who, might I add, indeed puts the ‘butt’ in ‘butler’. Oh my.”

“Eew,” said Diamond Tiara, throwing down the book. “I did not need to know that!”

“I think I might have,” said Silver Spoon.

“That’s disgusting!” cried Diamond Tiara. “I mean, he’s a BUTLER.”

Silver Spoon giggled slightly, but Diamond Tiara continued to look through the journal. It indeed seemed to be a firsthand account of a former owner of the house over one hundred years ago, which was exactly what she was looking for, even if it was only for a short section of the house’s long history.

She spent several hours searching through it while Silver Spoon read various charts and legers that eventually caused her to lapse into unconsciousness. Diamond Tiara felt more awake than ever, though, and she could not stop reading.

Some of the parts were boring, florid accounts of ordinary things ranging from the problems of hiring workers to the difficulty of removing the outdoor cacti. Likewise, there were some parts concerning Studly that Diamond Tiara would rather not have seen. A few passages, though, caused her coat to stand on end as she read them.

One, concerning Pith Helmut’s rediscovery of the mine:

“June seventh, 892. I continue to examine the caverns uncovered during archeological excavation of the central keep. It appears that in our efforts to uncover hidden chambers and, ideally, the castle catacomb, we in fact burst through into the abandoned mines that honeycomb the earth below.

“I was originally led to believe that the mines here were abandoned due to depletion, but that could not be farther from the case. All of the walls glimmer with the glint of silver; indeed, it seems to sweat from the walls themselves, as though the ground itself were made of precious metal. I know not why progress in the mine had stopped, but it simply appeared that all the miners just left.

“It was my desire to review the possibility of reactivating the mine to have at these potent reserves of silver, but, to my chagrin, the workers I employ refuse to even touch it. They claim it is ‘cursed’. I initially believed that to be rubbish, but after excavating several skeletons of former miners…

“In addition, and perhaps the strangest of all: the mines appear almost impossibly deep, to extend farther than should have been possible to construct by any known method of engineering. Indeed, none among us have been able to reach the end. But…those who have traveled deep claim to have encountered rooms larger than any cavern, with sights of having been cut there. They also claim that they can hear noises. Not the ordinary sounds of machinery, but the endless churning of vast machinery so incredibly distant. All who have heard it describe it as coming from far, far below. All who returned, anyway.”

Diamond Tiara shivered, and continued onward through the chapters of the journal. As she did, she realized that the book itself was incomplete. A large section of the center was missing. It had not been broken during transport, or by storage; it was a large section of the middle of the book, which meant that it must have been torn out.

Even with a piece missing, Diamond Tiara could tell that something was wrong with the book’s author. Initially, he had written formally, with florid, neat writing. He spoke often of journeying into far and distant lands- -which were recorded in numerous other journals, apparently- -and always returning to the peace of his isolated desert home.

As time went on, though, the writing became simpler, faster, and more intense. The hoofwriting became shaking and simplistic, and the sentences choppy. Through the journal, Diamond Tiara was watching a pony unravel before her eyes. The more time he spent in the house, the more he seemed to be overcome with strangeness and incoherence.

One recurring theme was what he called a “spectre”:

“January- -no, April, year 894. Saw the spectre again. Night, always at night. She’s there during the day, but always distant. At night, she’s close. Can smell her, but don’t know what she smells like. Open my eyes at night, can see her clearly. Standing in the same corner of my room, watching. Black mask, no eyes, rags- -she always wears rags. I don’t know why. Can I know why? Is she even real? Perhaps I have gone insane from the thirst…but I’m not thirsty, am I? No, not me, but the other one, she is.

“Always in the same spot. Always watching. She has it in her chest, the (the word was vehemently scratched out). Language- -is it language? Can the speak? I know there must be more than one, or how else would they breed? Can’t get close. Don’t want to. Tried once. Electrical sound, a discharge, spell? Then she was gone.

“Oh Celestia, I’ve gone mad. Please forgive me for what I must do.”

Something thumped, and Diamond Tiara cried out and nearly jumped onto the table. Silver Spoon cried out in fright as well- -even though the sound had been her sleeping body falling out of her chair and landing onto the wooden floor.

Diamond Tiara blinked, realizing just how dark the room had become. Through the window, she saw that the entire horizon outside had become one vast rainbow- -the sun had already set.

“What is it?” said Silver Spoon. “Ms. Cheerilee, I wasn’t- -oh. I’m not in school.”

“No, you aren’t,” said Diamond Tiara. “But at this point, even school would be an improvement.”

“Oh yeah…” said Silver Spoon, looking at the unfinished ledgers and blueprints before her. “And I was having the weirdest dream. Scootaloo’s wings fell off, and we were trying to find them before they went bad, but I secretly had them on me instead. And I think I was Fyr’mond- -”

“Silver, shut it,” said Diamond Tiara. She held up the journal. “I’ve been reading this.”

“Well, I don’t know what else you would be doing with it.”

“And this guy, Pith, he got really messed up. This house did something to him.”

Silver Spoon whitened. “Like what?”

“I don’t know.” She did know. He wrote continuously and intermittently of strange things, of the spectre, of the Voice, and of water. He almost always referenced dreams concerning water, a stream, and a number of pale faceless ponies that surrounded him. That was what made Diamond Tiara the most afraid, and she could not bring herself to tell Silver Spoon about that part.

“Did you read the end?”

“The end?”

“Well, yeah. Every journal has an end. It’s when the pony writing it…well…stopped writing.”

Diamond Tiara gulped, and flipped passed the missing section of the book and all the way to the last populated page. She gasped when she saw the state of it. Through reading the journal, she felt like she had gotten to know Pith Helmut- -but skipping to the end had shown just how far he had fallen.

The writing now bore little resemblance to real words. There was no punctuation, and the lettering was shaky to the point of near illegibility- -save for the symbols and circles filling most of the page and the margins, which were all perfectly formed but totally unintelligible.

Silver Spoon looked over Diamond Tiara’s shoulder, and both read the mess of black and red-brown ink.

“Last time last one last I am the last where are they where are the others;; I don’t know anymore but SHE is still here the other the other she went away but SHE SHE SHE SHE SHE still taking never stops never stops talking burning into my HEAD. Don’t know what year it is can’t tell might have gone backward in time no way to know for sure where is everypony I can’t finish the construction by myself.

“Have to build, have to make it bigger, can’t stop mustn’t stop can’t know don’t want to know what will happen a caddisfly. Yes. YES. No. A larva that surrounds itself with material of its surroundings but why is it hiding or is it hunting looks like a rock looks like a house should have listened she always spoke to me, always told me but I never listened listened to HER instead not a her not female flowers they will flower flowers everywhere they smell like rot so much rot and blood.

“Dreams they always get closer always closer always thirsty the time has come. Yes. The time has come. This will be my last entry. Tonight I will not be able to stop them. They will reach my water, and they will take it. I’m sorry Studly. I truly loved you. I could not save you. I could not save any of them. I couldn’t even save myself.”

Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon looked at each other.

“Silver Spoon,” said Diamond Tiara, feeling her voice creak as she closed the book. “Have you been having…weird dreams, since you got here?”

“You mean Scootaloo’s wings kind of weird?”

“No. As in dreams where there’s water. A river. And a lot of ponies around you taking, but you can’t see their faces or hear them talking?”

Silver Spoon’s eyes widened, and she shook her head. “Why?”

“It’s the same dream he was having. The whole time. The only one he ever had since he moved here. And…I’m having it too.”

“Buck no,” said Silver Spoon, stepping away from the table. “Nope nope nope! I’m not doing this!”

“Silver- -”

“What the hay happened to us!” she screamed. “We’re just fillies! And we’re alone in a house with a madpony chasing us, and now you’re telling me that you’re probably going to end up like that guy, who went completely INSANE! Diamond, I can’t take it! I just can’t!”

“You’re not the one with the dreams!”

“That’s the POINT! If it was me, I could take it- -but I can’t lose you. You’re my only friend, my best friend!” She cried out and slammed her hoof into a nearby desk, causing the polaroid camera on it to shake. “What the hay happened? We were supposed to just be fillies. Sneaking a taste of your dad’s cider and taking funny pictures…”

Silver Spoon picked up one of the numerous photographs and stared at it, smiling- -and then her eyes widened and her pupils narrowed to the tiniest dots. Silver Spoon’s entire body suddenly started shaking.

“Silver Spoon,” said Diamond Tiara, standing. She was immediately concerned for her friend, and terrified. “What is it?”

Silver Spoon’s lips moved, but nothing came out. The photograph she was holding dropped from her hoof and slowly floated to the floor. Diamond Tiara picked it up, and saw Silver Spoon’s tiny pupils staring at her. Then she looked down at the image.

Immediately, she understood why Silver Spoon had reacted the way she had, and felt her whole body suddenly become cold and frozen. The image was exactly what she would have expected: a picture of two smiling fillies pouting their lips, the image overly brightened by the flash of the camera. Laughing, having fun, wasting film- -like fillies did.

Behind Diamond Tiara’s back-tilted head, though, was a black mask draped in a hood of rags. It was the creature, the spectre, the horror in a mining suit- -and it was inches away from her. Suddenly she understood how the ponies in so many of the old pictures had failed to see it. These pictures were not old, but they were just ordinary photographs. There was no way to doctor them, or change them. The creature had been there in the room with them, standing close enough to reach out and touch them- -and neither of them had seen it until they looked at that photograph.

“It was…it was here with us,” said Diamond Tiara. “Right behind…right behind us…”

They both looked at each other, and then in unison looked around the edge of the suddenly oh-so-dark room. Their response was little more than instinct, a kind of imperceptible joke. They were looking to see if it were still there, too see the room that it had somehow moved through unseen. Neither of them really, truly expected to see anything.

Both of their eyes fell onto the same corner, where it was standing, watching. The room fell silent as the two ponies stared into the blank, opaque face of the rag-clad being. The only sound Diamond Tiara could hear was the sudden pounding of her heart within her chest and the clicking of the silvery machine in the creature’s chest.

At first, Diamond Tiara did not know what to do. The now familiar feeling of her mind and body freezing crept through her. She wanted to run more than anything, to escape from the monster- -but something held her in place. Something was wrong, something she did not fully understand.

Then, with an electrical sound, the creature flashed and vanished. Diamond Tiara looked around the room, wondering where it had run to so quickly- -but she knew that it was still there. She could still hear the ticking of the clockwork machine that it bore. The ticking not only persisted, but started to slowly move closer and closer.

A hoof suddenly appeared on her elbow, and she started to scream until she saw that it was not coated in black material but rather gray.

“Come on!” cried Silver Spoon. “We have to go! NOW!”

“Rig- -right!” stuttered Diamond Tiara, the spell that seemed to be holding her in place instantly breaking. She turned and followed Silver Spoon, leaping over stacks of books and sending papers flying. The door, which had formerly been no more than fifteen feet away, suddenly seemed to have moved to a distance of several miles.

Suddenly, there was a second electrical sound. The creature materialized in the doorframe. Diamond Tiara felt a surge of adrenaline run through her body, but instead of running away she ran toward it. She struck the creature in the chest with her hooves, and was surprised at how easily it was knocked back into the hall.

“MOVE!” she cried, both to Silver Spoon and, on a different level, to the creature itself. Her and Silver Spoon then dashed into the unlit hallway, racing through the slowly curving corridor. The only light that lit the path was the dim twilight that managed to find its way through the thick curtains of the empty, dusty rooms on either side.

“I can’t see!” cried Silver Spoon.

“Just follow me!” yelled back Diamond Tiara. She stopped suddenly at a narrowing of the hallway and pushed over a large section of shelves. For a moment, they did not seem to move, but then they moved slightly- -and rapidly tipped over, collapsing and shattering against the floor.

Diamond Tiara looked back over her shoulder as she sprinted away, and saw the creature moving just behind the collapsed shelves. It was running as well- -if what it was doing could even be called that. Its limbs moved rapidly, but they were so low to the ground that it was more of scuttling, like a huge insect.

It did not even slow when it reached the fallen shelves. Instead, it simply changed course slightly, clinging to the wall and then finally rising to the ceiling, its ragged clothing draping beneath it as it continued just as quickly above.

“What they HAY IS THAT THING?” cried Silver Spoon, looking over her own shoulder.

As if in response, sound suddenly filled the hall, echoing off the peeling wallpaper and wood paneling. It was something like that of crickets, a complex and rapid song of chirping and creaking. Diamond Tiara realized that it was coming from the creature.

Then, suddenly, it dropped downward in front of them. Its tattered cloak shifted just long enough for Diamond Tiara to see the clothing beneath- -the suit, just like from the blueprint, accented with luminescent red elements. Then it hissed loudly and jumped forward, grabbing Silver Spoon.

“NOOO!” cried Silver Spoon. “Diamond, help me!”

Diamond Tiara felt a sudden urge to run, to let it have Silver Spoon while she escaped. Instead, though, she found herself grabbing a heavy lamp off a small table. She pulled it free from the wall and slammed it into the creature’s head. The ceramic base of the lamp shattered, but the creature was knocked free of Silver Spoon.

As it rolled to the side, dazed, Diamond Tiara lifted the jagged remnants of the shattered lamp over her head, preparing to bring them down on the creature’s now exposed underbelly. She would bring it down, pierce its insect body, and make it dead. She would protect herself and Silver Spoon.

She paused, though. It occurred to her that the creature was oddly small. She had never gotten a proper look at it, and always assumed that it was slightly larger than a full-grown stallion. Monsters were supposed to be big and scary, so she had just assumed that it was- -but now, looking at it, she realized that it was barely as large as she was.

“Oww…” it said, rubbing its head. “You hit me with a lamp…why would you even do that?”

“You- -you’re a colt!” cried Diamond Tiara, feeling her fear suddenly replaced with anger.

“Clearly,” he said. “As for you, however, I cannot discern.” He slowly rolled over and stood. He did not look like a pony, at least not superficially; his stance was low, and his legs splayed outwardly instead of sitting below his body. Likewise, his head was not held above his body but rather in front of it. The effect was unpleasant, but the fact that he was comparatively tiny made him seem far less frightening than he had been before.

“What is WRONG with you?” cried Diamond Tiara, pushing him in the chest and nearly knocking him over. “Are you some sort of pervert?! Does it tingle your jimmies to chase around fillies?! Putting on a mask and trying to scare us!”

“Oh, clearly I’m the villain in this! Well, I may wear this mask, but YOU are the one who really needs it! Do you even own a mirror?!”

“You did NOT just say that! I’ve seen what you look like, and YOU are the ugly one here! Why else would you wear a mask, huh?”

“I will have you know that I am considered quite handsome, surface-goat!”

“GOAT?!”

“It is what you are!” he leaned closer, turning his head so that the slightly darker parts on the edges of his mask faced her. “Except perhaps not, because you clearly resemble a PORK!”

Diamond Tiara releasted a long and indignant gasp. “YOU…DID…NOT just say that to me! Do you know who I am? I’m Diamond Dazzle Tiara, daughter of Filthy Rich!”

“Wait, your name is ‘Diamond’?”

“But clearly you wouldn’t know ME, because from the look of you, you can’t even AFFORD to buy clothes from my father’s CLEARANCE section!”

“Oh yeah? Well, at least I don’t smell like a HORSE!”

“Well at least I don’t smell like…” Diamond Tiara leaned in close to him, expecting to smell the scent of a dirty, unwashed plebian. Instead, she discovered something entirely different. “Cinnamon?”

“How DARE you!” He turned toward Silver Spoon, whose eyes were widened in shock. “What is this cinnamon of which the pork-goat speaks?”

“It comes from…from the bark of a tree.”

“Ah, yes.” The colt turned back to Diamond Tiara, paused, and turned back to Silver Spoon. “What is a tree?”

“That,” said Silver Spoon, pointing.

All three of them turned. Standing where Silver Spoon was pointing was a mid-sized cholla tree, seemingly growing from the center of the worn hardwood floor. It had not been there a moment ago, and now it just stood there, its spines glimmering in the dim light.

“How did that get there?” asked Diamond Tiara, approaching the tree. Something was deeply wrong, but she did not understand how a tree had gotten into the middle of the hallway.

“Get away from it!” screamed the masked colt, grabbing Diamond Tiara and pulling her back. “Run! We need to run now!”

“Let go of me, you smelly little- -”

The colt slammed his hoof against the clockwork mechanism in his chest, and it spun rapidly. He grabbed Silver Spoon with his free hoof and, suddenly, they surged forward, propelled by some unseen force.

Diamond Tiara cried out at the sudden acceleration, and watched as the corriridor seemed to slide around them at impossible speed. The colt could not control the motion, though, and the three of them suddenly fell and splayed out on the floor.

The colt skittered across the floor and coughed violently. “Ieaeih’ieahiieaieeaiah’ai...” He said, suddenly, shaking as he stood.

The hallway was blocked, though. The space that they had just come from was now barricaded by several gnarled trees, their long and narrow cactus branches swaying in an unseen breeze. Diamond Tiara looked down at their roots, and saw that they were not planted; rather, the equally spiny appendages seemed to be clinging to the floor.

“More- -but- -the’re trees!”

“Trees bad survival good!” cried the colt, body slamming- -lightly, considering his size- -Diamond Tiara into a nearby room.

Silver Spoon slammed the door shut, and the colt removed the silvery core from his chest and placed it on the door. There was a familiar electrical whine, and then a sudden burst as the door fractured and expanded in its frame, sealing itself closed.

The colt twisted the metal device back into the chestplate of his armor and stepped back to the two fillies. All three of them watched the door for a moment, not knowing what to expect.

Then, suddenly, something slammed into. Whatever it was struck with enough force to cause the door to deform slightly, and in its weakened state it nearly burst open. There were several more powerful blows, but then silence. Absolute silence.

“What was that?” said Silver Spoon, looking wildly to the other two. Her eyes then focused on the colt. “And who the hay are you?!”

“Iiehiieaeiyh’eeieaehehei,” he said, then, realizing that they could not understand what he was saying, reached down and turned the dial on this chest. The clockwork hummed and his voice suddenly came into focus “…surface-goat idiots fail to listen to ANYTHING we ever tell you because your brains are so tiny and poorly evolved I have met foals smarter than either of you put together!”

Angrily, he pulled the silvery device off his chest and began to turn the surface wildly. The object changed shape readily, expanding and twisting by a dizzying system of internal mechanisms.

“You at least owe us an- -”

“Shut your pork-goat mouth, your guttural language is hideous to me!” He twisted the dial again, and then produced a sound that did not translate. “They are jamming me! I can’t summon a drone!”

“What’s a drone?” asked Silver Spoon.

“It’s a DRONE,” said the colt, as though it were obvious. “As in, a drone…no, wait, you dirty surface primitives have no concept of such things. Like a big, metal pony. Used to dig the mines. If I could get one, I could have us lifted out of this hole!”

Diamond Tiara had had enough of his insults and picked him up by his collar. He was oddly light, and as an earth pony- -even a poorly exercised one- -she was strong enough to slam him sharply against a nearby wall.

“Ow! Unhoof me you pork- -”

“Call me a pig one more time, ONE MORE TIME, and I will kick you so hard that even my daddy wouldn’t be able to pay to fix your face! And my daddy is very, VERY rich!”

“But you are- -”

“And YOU are a big dirty BUG.”

“A- -a BUG?! An INSECT?! How dare you- -”

“Please stop!” cried Silver Spoon. She collapsed on the ground, shaking, and Diamond Tiara released the colt. He dropped to the ground and continued returned the circle he was holding to its normal location on his suit. As soon as it linked, it twisted, reengaging, and the red elements of his suit slowly began to light again.

“What exactly is that thing, anyway?” asked Diamond Tiara, putting her foreleg around Silver Spoon, who was sobbing silently.

“It’s a technetium dial,” said the colt. From his tone, he sounded like he had calmed down, if only because he felt bad for making Silver Spoon cry. “All nobility have one.”

“Nobility? YOU?”

“Excuse me,” he said. “I will have you know that I am the second child of Lord Niobus of the Upper Extent mining family. My mother is Pyroxene, eleventh daughter of seventh-tertiary king Beryllium Hammer of district fourteen.”

“But who are you?” asked Silver Spoon.

The colt stared at her- -or at least Diamond Tiara thought he was staring; she was not entirely sure of the structure of his head, but she doubted that his mask had eye holes. “My name is Diamond Pick.”

“Diamond?” said Diamond Tiara. “Why on earth would your parents name a thing like YOU Diamond?”

“And why would your parents give the name of our most precious stone to a pi- -to a creature such as yourself!”

“ ‘Creature’? What do you mean ‘creature’? We’re not pigs, and we’re not goats! We’re ponies!”

Pick paused. “No, you aren’t.”

“Yes, we are!”

“No. I know ponies. I am a pony. You are not a pony.”

“What kind of pony are you?” asked Silver Spoon, quietly.

Pick looked at her. “We are called morlocks.”

“And those…those things, outside the door…what are they?”

Pick looked down at her, and then began pacing the room. As he moved, Diamond Tiara saw that he had something on his back resembling a pair of wings. They were not soft and feathery like Pegasus wings, but rather hard and bony, molded into plates against his body like the shell of a beetle.

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding on the verge of panic. “I don’t know! This land…this land is a bad place. I never knew why, they just said that it was bad. It is sitting on top of one of the largest technetium veins in history, but even we don’t mine it. Because something is here. Something bad.”

“Those- -those are cactuses,” said Diamond Tiara. “Plants. They can’t move. Not on their own!”

“I don’t know what plants are,” said Pick, “but they are waking up, and they are waking up faster than they ever have before.”

“Before? This has happened before?”

“Yes,” said Pick condescendingly. “It happens anytime you surface-goats- -or ‘ponies’ if I am to believe that creatures as bizarre as you deserve that name- -mess with this accursed place.”

“The others,” said Diamond Tiara. “You were the one in the background of those pictures!”

“What? No! Don’t be thick…well, I suppose you can’t help it. I’m eleven.”

“But the pictures! You were in the background!”

“Um, no. I don’t know what a ‘picture’ is. But any recordings were not me. My family has been here, though. For a long time. There is a city about thirty miles from here.”

“What?” said Diamond Tiara. “Where?”

Pick pointed- -straight down. “My family is the only ones who dwell higher than the Upper Shield. It is our duty to warn you of the threat this place- -”

The door was suddenly struck with tremendous force. Silver Spoon jumped as the wood cracked and a narrow cactus arm poked through. As the three of them watched, it stood perfectly still for a moment and then began slowly gyrating, turning around and searching blindly.

“That is not good,” hissed Pick. He seemed to run almost wildly around the room, searching for a way out. “We need to get back to my family’s facility. It will be safe there. If we can get out…”

“There is a trap door,” said Silver Spoon. “At least, there should be.”

They both looked toward her. “How do you know that?” asked Diamond Tiara.

“The blueprints…it was in the blueprints. This room leads to an abandoned section below.”

“Good,” said Pick, suddenly sounding happy. “This is good! Perhaps we won’t be…I don’t even know. I can lead you out of here.”

“No way,” said Diamond Tiara, standing.

“Wha- -what? Why?”

“Because you’re a weirdo in a mask who just showed up out of, like, nowhere! Why should we trust you?”

“I’m risking my life to save your bacon!”

“Oh yeah? Then prove it!”

“How?”

“Take off that mask.”

The door creaked as roots began to break through it, snaking into the room toward Silver Spoon, who gasped and jumped away.

“We don’t have time for this,” said Diamond Pick. “I don’t know what they want from us, but it will be about as unpleasant as your face.”

“Take it off!”

“Fine!”

Diamond Pick reached up and grabbed his mask. The clamps that held it in place disengaged. There was a slight hiss in the air, and something like the scent of rotten eggs pieced the air of the room. Then, with one simple motion, he pulled away the cover over his face.

Both Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon gasped. The face of the pony beneath the mask looked oddly like the mask itself: his skull was roughly pony shaped, but flattened. His coat- -if it could be called that, and not just skin- -was pale green, and his mane flaxen. Diamond Tiara initially thought that he had no facial features whatsoever apart from a narrow pair of nostrils running up what should have been his forehead, but then she saw that he did in fact have a pair of dime-sized, silvery eyes directly on either side of his bizarrely wide mouth.

Diamond Tiara shuttered as his silvery eyes flicked toward her. “Eeeew!” she said, grimacing and sticking her tongue out. “Did your parents beat you with an ugly stick or something?”

“Did your parents beat you with a fat stick?” he retorted, “or did you just eat it?”

Diamond Tiara almost punched him, but she really did not want to touch him- -especially considering that as he spoke, she could see that he had way more teeth than a normal pony, and all of them were pointed.

The door creaked beneath the force of the trees slowly growing through it, and a high window on the other side of the room shook as it opened and a network of long, snaking cactus vines peeked through.

“Door,” said Pick, his eyes widening and flashing toward Silver Spoon. “DOOR?!”

“What- -oh!”

Silver Spoon stood up, shaking, and tried to grab the edge of the dusty rug that lined the floor of the room. Diamond Tiara joined her and, with their teeth, they pulled it back. Beneath, just as Silver Spoon had said, was a large wooden trap door.

Diamond Tiara immediately pushed Silver Spoon through the gap. She cried out, but took several seconds to actually hit anything, meaning that the hole probably was not that deep. She then looked up at Pick, and immediately regretted asking him to take off his mask. Not just because he was hideous- -and he was- -but because she could now see the expression on his face: that of a terrified, panicked colt.

Chapter 5: Run

Diamond Tiara jumped to the floor below, and Diamond Pick followed behind her, closing the trap door as he passed through. He fell to the ground gracefully, but his wing-plates did not extend. Diamond Tiara doubted that he could actually fly.

“Oww,” groaned Silver Spoon, lying on the hard tile floor. “I think I landed on something…” She reached behind her and removed what she had landed on. Her eyes widened as she realized that it was a skull. “EEEP!” she cried, “Diamond Tiara, my skull came out!”

“Well then put it back in, quick!” cried Pick.

“I can’t, I can’t, I don’t know how!”

“Silver,” said Diamond Tiara, taking the skull out of her hoof and rolling it across the floor. “It’s not your skull!”

“It isn’t?”

They both watched the skull departing down the slanted floor, and then looked at their surroundings. They had descended into a long and surprisingly sterile room, the walls of which were lined with equally spaced pedestals. Each pedestal contained a skeleton, carefully prepared and mounted in various artistic poses. Some had the narrow limbs and hooked skulls of deer, but others had wings and horns. They were ponies.

Silver Spoon screamed and huddled against Diamond Tiara. “They’re all dead!”

“Well, duh,” said Diamond Tiara, pushing Silver Spoon off. “They’re anatomical models, like in a museum. Probably donated their bodies to science…” Or, more probably, skeletons that Pith Helmut had pulled up from the desert during construction and articulated as part of his collection.

“Well, I would rather not join them,” said Pick, scuttling forward rapidly. Diamond Tiara helped Silver Spoon up and they followed Pick through the long-forgotten hall of dusty and collapsing museum pieces.

Diamond Tiara found that her mind was racing. Even in the almost darkness, the whole of the skeleton museum appeared to be in sharp focus, with every empty eye socket seeming to stare back at her. Her eyes flicked about almost automatically, looking for any sign of motion from the corners or floor, even though she was not entirely sure what she was looking for. The sun had set, and everything was cold and seemed eerily silent, save for the patter of their hooves across the tile.

“This is stupid,” said Diamond Tiara, slowing. “Why are we running, from what? Cactuses? Their plant’s, for Celestia’s sake!”

“I don’t know what they are,” said Pick, skidding to a stop, “but they are NOT friendly.”

“What will happen if they catch us?” asked Silver Spoon.

“I don’t know,” said Pick. “But from what my family has told me, it never ends well for ponies who try to live on this land.”

“And you didn’t tell this to us, um, WHY?” demanded Diamond Tiara.

“I tried!” yelled Diamond Pick, meeting her volume. “I tried to warn you repeatedly!”

“By chasing us through the desert?! Couldn’t you just, oh, I don’t know, SAY SOMETHING?!”

“I DID! But to be honest, I didn’t even realize that those hideous guttural sounds you make were language! Do you know how long it takes to calculate a translation cog for…” he pointed at his mouth, “THIS?”

“So you’re either an idiot or incompetent- -oh, no, wait, BOTH.”

“Well, the one time I tried to help you, you threw a grenade in my face and very nearly left me permanently blind!”

“You chased us! And you look like a mule’s butt! Do you have any idea just how scary you are?”

“Scary? I’m half your size! And, just so you know, YOU are WORSE! I mean, look at your eyes! They’re, like, the size of dinner plates- - is there even any room in your head for a brain? Oh wait, I already KNOW THE ANSWER TO THAT!”

“So you’re saying that you were afraid of a pair of FILLIES? Great! So when we need the whole darn royal guard, we get a tiny bumbling COWARD!”

“Cow? What is cow? I am not a beef! At least I smell- -”

“You WISH you could smell me!”

“I can smell you, and trust me, I- -”

“Can you two SHUT IT!” cried Silver Spoon.

They both looked at her. Pick sighed. “The marginally attractive one is correct.” He turned around and started back on his path. “It is my familial duty to at least try to save you. Why you came here I have no idea…”

“My parents bought this place,” said Diamond Tiara, following Pick once more.

“Parents? I assumed your species ate their young. Where are your parents now?”

“They left- -but don’t even try to criticize them for that! They had important business in Las Pegasus!”

Pick looked over his shoulder, which was not hard considering how his eyes were on the edges of his head. “Compared to a pair of parents who sent me into this place to retrieve two surface-goa- -I mean surface-ponies?”

They reached the end of the room. The door to the outside was locked, but there were a pair of broad spiral staircases that led downward. The trio followed the stairs to the lower level, where they found an extremely dusty room that appeared to be a dining room, complete with a long table, the places still set as if in preparation for a great banquet.

The door on the lower level was easy to open, and Diamond Tiara entered into a long, dark hallway. Like so many of them in the house, it was one that she had never been in before- -but based on how difficult it was to reach, she doubted that it connected to the rooms above by any logical path.

Pick led them down one direction of the hallway, but Diamond Tiara suddenly found herself stopping. The hall was empty. She could see that, and knew logically that only the three of them were present in the house- -and yet she heard something. In the far distant, she could hear a voice. It was even more quiet than a whisper, but far more distant; because of the combination, Diamond Tiara could not tell what it was saying. She could feel the tone in it, thought. It was calling with such longing.

“Coming?” asked Pick. “Or would you rather stay?”

“Shut it, bug-boy,” said Diamond Tiara, even as she rejoined him and Silver Spoon. “Did either of you…hear anything just now?”

“No,” said Silver Spoon.

“No,” added Pick, after seeming to consider for a moment.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” she said to herself.

They continued down the hall for several more minutes, and Diamond Tiara wondered where exactly they were going.

“Names,” said Pick, suddenly.

“Names?” asked Diamond Tiara, confused.

“Yes,” he said, pausing and looking around a corner. “I would like…to know your names.”

“Hay no! You’ll probably do weird things with them!”

Diamond Pick looked at her. “Like what?”

“Silver Spoon,” said Silver Spoon.

“What?” said Pick. “How does one spoon silver? And why would I ever do that?”

“No. My name. That’s my name.”

“Silver Spoon?” said Pick, leading them out into a much wider corridor that was oddly steep and unlevel. “What kind of parent names their daughter after silver? It is a horrible waste material. Almost as bad as gold.”

“Says the guy who, like, mines SILVER,” noted Diamond Tiara.

“What?” said Pick, confused. “Who ever said my geneline mines silver?”

“Oh, I don’t know, because of the MASSIVE silver mine? Or did you not notice while you were creeping on us down literally inside it?”

“It’s not silver,” he said, as though it were obvious. “And we don’t mine here, so…no…”

“What?” said Silver Spoon.

“Don’t tell me that YOUR people were trying to mine the technetium.”

“Tech what?”

“The metal,” sighed Pick, exasperated. He poked at the dial on his chest. “What this is made out of.”

“I knew it wasn’t silver,” said Silver Spoon.

“No, of course not,” said Pick. “But your kind should not be anywhere near it.”

“Why?”

“For one, your stone-age culture has virtually no way to work it into anything viable. And in its unprocessed form, it is highly radioactive.”

“Wait, what?” said Diamond Tiara. “We were just talking about silver, and now radios?”

“No, radio- -toxic. It is deadly poison.”

“The miners,” gasped Silver Spoon.

Diamond Tiara realized that she was probably right. If the “silver” that they had been digging up had been as poisonous as Pick seemed to think it was, then the miners would be the first to be exposed. Diamond Tiara had no idea what “radioactive” meant, or if it could cause the hair loss, gaunt and sickly frames, or burns on the ponies from the old photographs, but it seemed at least plausible.

“So you wear the suit to protect from the metal,” she said. Then, more sharply, “or is it because your body is as ugly as your face?”

“What? No! I am not ugly! And of course not. It’s because the surface world is the most grotesquely toxic and inhospitable place in all of Geoterra.”

“Geoterra? What the fluff is that?”

“You’re standing on it.”

“What, you mean Equestria?”

“Equ- -who would give a nation of ponies such a ridiculous name?”

“Because ‘Equestries’ are ponies!”

“That’s not actually true- -” added Silver Spoon.

“Wait, are you telling me you have a NATION up here?” asked Pick, confused.

“Uh-DUH!”

“Wait,” said Silver Spoon. “How do you not know that?”

“My family is actually considered somewhat eccentric,” said Pick, nervously twisting his dial. “For believing in the existence of surface dwellers. Morlock science generally accepts that the surface world is completely uninhabitable.”

“So…you’ve never met surface ponies?”

“You are the first two non-morlocks I have ever met. And to be honest, I am not enjoying the experience.”

“Neither am I,” hissed Diamond Tiara.

“You,” said Pick. “You did not tell me your name.”

“Diamond Dazzle Tiara Rich,” she said.

“Tiara? They named you after headgear? Why?”

“Why did they name you ‘Pick’? Oh, let me guess. They forgot the ‘r’.”

“Oh. You’re mean.”

They passed sideways into a room ducked onto the floor beneath a window. Diamond Tiara felt a cold breeze dripping from the partially open pane, and she suddenly felt afraid. Slowly, she stood up just slightly, barely enough to see out the window.

Outside was exactly what she expected, and exactly what she did not want to see. Surrounding the house was an army of dry, dusty plants, barely visible in Luna’s moonlight. They had not been there before, not at that density- -but now they had formed a thick wall of spines and branches.

“The pictures!” whispered Diamond Tiara, suddenly. Not because she had forgotten them, but because she realized what she had missed. In that picture of the family, she had been so focused on looking in the background for Diamond Pick’s ancestor that she had failed to see what had changed in each photograph. Although the rocks and inorganic elements of the landscape had stayed consistent, the plants never had. Trees that should have taken decades or even centuries to grow changed position, appearing and disappearing.

They were moving. They always had been. Now they stood outside, condensing toward the house, knowing what was inside.

“Okay,” said Pick, pulling out his dial and adjusting it. “The acceleration badly damaged the argon-cortex, but I have enough power to make all three of us invisible. I project the field, and then we- -”

“Did that lamp explosion damage your brain?” hissed Diamond Tiara, suddenly.

Pick’s eyes narrowed, making them even smaller than they already were. “Only slightly. Thanks a lot.”

“No, you idiot! Those are trees! Tell me, do trees have EYES?”

“Potatoes do,” said Silver Spoon.

“Stop that,” chastised Diamond Tiara. She turned back to Pick. “It doesn’t matter if we’re invisible, they can’t see anyway, but there still tracking us. I think the can, I don’t know, smell us or something! Wait…you mean your plan was just to charge through them?!”

“Well, yeah,” said Pick, defensively.

“Buck,” said Diamond Tiara, sliding down the adobe wall. “So you’re not just dumb, you’re crazy too. There’s a whole forest out there! There always has been! We’d never make it!”

“And how was I supposed to know that?!”

“Because they’re trees!”

“I don’t know how ‘trees’ work! I live underground! And until about ten minutes ago, I didn’t even know that they were dangerous!”

“Can’t you just, I don’t know, fly us out or something? You’ve got wings!”

Pick lifted his plate-like wings beneath his ragged robe. “These? You expect me to FLY? How can a pony possibly fly? That’s ridiculous!”

“The tunnels,” said Silver Spoon. “Can we take the tunnels?”

Pick looked at her, and then shook his head. “No. Not the tunnels. Those are bad.”

“I thought you were from underground or something?”

“I am, but those tunnels are ancient. Beyond old. I don’t know how to get through them, or where they even go.”

“But your people built them,” said Diamond Tiara, recalling Pith Helmut’s journal.

“They did, but they abandoned this region tens of thousands of years ago.”

“Well, if you can think of a better option than ‘sprint into a wall of needles’…”

Diamond Tiara lifted her head again and looked out the window. Her eyes took a second to adjust, and she realized that she could not see the border of the trees. Instead, she found herself staring at a tall saguaro inches away from the glass.

“BUCK!” she cried, jumping back and pulling Silver Spoon with her. Pick looked up at the window, confused, and released a sudden chirping sound from his wings.

“Tunnels it is!” he squeaked.

Never before had a distance that should have been so short seemed so long. The house was large, but a path across it should have been simple. Instead, it was a convoluted path through additions and forgotten corridors dreamt up by an architect who was either inept or horribly insane.

The physical distance, though, was only part of the larger whole. Every second felt like it took months. The black and empty distance roared with the sound of the wind and with the potential for danger; they were in a house, a home, but they might as well have been trying to march through the Everfree Forest at midnight.

Even worse was that Diamond Tiara found that Pick had been oddly and terribly apt in his description. The trees really did seem to be waking up. Through the all the twisting halls, sloping corridors, and silent stairwells, Diamond Tiara had never once seen one of them move- -but she knew that they were. Suddenly, they seemed to be everywhere. They grew from corners and beneath windowsills where she knew they had not been just hours before. Not one of them moved, and superficially they looked like ordinary houseplants- -until one realized that they had no pots. They just stood on bare roots, waiting.

Diamond Tiara could not bear to look at them. The idea was ridiculous, that they were being chased by plants, but the thought that she had walked around them and passed them less than a day before without realizing what they truly were frightened on an entirely different level. She dared not stare at any of them for very long, because she knew what she would see: those gnarled branches and spiny, fleshy trunks waving in a breeze that only they could feel, as though they were far more alive and aware than any sane plant should be.

Something deeper was wrong, though. Silver Spoon and Diamond Pick were running faster, trying to get to safety- -but Diamond Tiara felt a strong urge to slow. She knew that, logically, she should be afraid, that she should run- -but something was calling to her. Something said that the plants would not hurt her, that the situation was safe, that she was missing something important. The voices that she heard were growing louder, forced through the walls of the house by the powerful frigid wind outside. They were growing to the point where she could nearly understand them.

“Move your excessively wide rump!” cried Diamond Pick, his voice cracking with panic.

“Sure thing,” said Diamond Tiara, snidely. She passed him. “Anything to avoid looking at yours. You’re going the wrong way!”

“No, this is the right way, I’m sure!”

“This way,” said Silver Spoon, pushing them in a third direction. Diamond Tiara initially started to protest, but then she found that she recognized the strange way that the hall suddenly became wide and how the ceiling suddenly broke from an arch to a flat, square hole filled with rusted pipes. This was the direction that they had taken to get to the library, though the long hallways of the former sanitarium that ran between the outer wall and the central keep. They were still far away from their goal, but at least Diamond Tiara now knew the way.

“What if- -what if they follow us in?” asked Silver Spoon suddenly.

“They won’t,” said Diamond Tiara. She waited for a moment, and then looked over her shoulder at Diamond Pick. “Right? RIGHT?”

“I- -I don’t know! They could!”

“For Celestia’s sake, why didn’t you tell us that?!”

“Well excuse me if I’m new at this! I don’t exactly know how monsters OPERATE!”

He was about to say something else, but suddenly encountered a staircase and descended with a series of thumps and pained squeaks as he struck each stair tread and descended the stairs in the fastest way possible.

“Smooth,” said Diamond Tiara, passing him at the end of the stairs. Pick was stuck upside-down, his tiny armored limbs flailing.

“Are you okay?” said Silver Spoon, helping him up.

“I hurt,” he said. “But not badly. I hope.”

“Try not to get squashed,” said Diamond Tiara. “You’re a bug, right? So you’re as boneless as you are spineless?”

“Are your spare ribs boneless? Or are your bones, you know, especially large?”

Both of them were too out of breath to continue their verbal sparring match, but Diamond Tiara was sure to cut off Pick so that she could be in the front of the group. She remembered exactly how they had descended the last time, moving from the decaying and peeling concrete and brick walls of the old sanitarium to the cyclopean gray cubes of rock that formed the ancient forth, where worn steel-tread steps gave way to dusty and uneven stone ones.

Within minutes, Diamond Tiara once again found herself at the end of final staircase. Beyond it, she knew, was the library. Without a light, though, the threshold was a precipice into absolute pitch darkness- -darkness that at this point could be populated by any number of things.

Pick stepped past her without pausing, entering the darkness. The reddish light from the glowing components of his suit cast a small circle of light around him, but it was barely enough light to even see him, let alone the room.

“Hey!” cried Diamond Tiara. “Don’t go in there if you can’t see!”

“See?” said Pick, looking back to her, sounding genuinely confused. “Why would I need to see?”

“Wait,” said Silver Spoon. “You mean you can find your way in the dark?”

“My people have little concept of light, generally. So, yes.”

“I can see why,” said Diamond Tiara. “I mean, imagine them having to look at each other. Eew.”

“But we can’t see,” said Silver Spoon.

“Oh,” said Pick. “I forgot about that. Hold on…” He removed the dial from his chest and switched parts of it, changing its shape and structure rapidly. Then, with a final twist, an iris in the front opened and a harsh, flickering white light poured out.

Pick’s eyes narrowed, and he looked at the light in disgust. “Flickering…that’s not good.”

“Why is that not good?” demanded Diamond Tiara, stepping into the now marginally lit darkness.

“I’m using a quartz-argon core system.”

“And…?”

“And it is…dying.”

“What do you mean ‘dying’?”

“Quartz never lasts long, and I’ve been using it a lot.”

“If it fails,” said Silver Spoon. “You won’t be able to use spells anymore?”

Pick paused, and his already mostly closed eyes narrowed. “There’s no such thing as magic, you know that, right?”

“Um, no,” said Diamond Tiara. “There literally is.”

“Perhaps in your ignorant mind,” said Pick. He tapped the device on his chest. “This is not magic. Magic is a made up concept. But yes. If the crystal fails, my dial will go dormant. And, for the more ignorant among us…” he looked at Diamond Tiara, “…that is very, very bad.”

“The door is this way,” said Silver Spoon, rushing forward in the newly acquired light. Her companions, now on the verge of physical combat, hesitantly followed her. As they did, Pick looked up at the high stained-glass windows. They glowed eerily in his blue-violet light, their colors washed into cold shadows save for the blood-red eyes of the yellow pony pictured in each one of them.

Diamond Tiara watched as Diamond Pick became increasingly nervous with each passing image.

“You’re not scared, are you?” she said, leaning in close to him.

“This is a bad place,” said Pick, with all his combativeness gone.

“What do you mean?” Diamond Tiara was taken aback by his sudden seriousness. He was supposed to be as confident as she pretended to be- -unless, of course, he was just pretending too.

“Not all the ponies that lived in this house were good,” said Pick. “And not all of them needed our help. Some were…worse than what was already here.”

“What do you mean ‘worse’? What could be worse than pointy plant monsters?”

“My great grandmother,” said Pick, “when she came, this place was a hospital. Something went wrong, and she was badly injured. They helped her…but…”

“But what?”

“I don’t know. She never talked about it…but she only barely escaped this place. And…I think she saw something. Something much, much worse than all this.”

“Hurry up!” cried Silver Spoon. She was now standing at the large wooden door to the mines below.

“Hey,” said Diamond Tiara, sounding serious herself. “Is the mine safe with all that, um, radioactive around?”

“Radiation,” corrected Pick. “Just try to hold your breath.”

“Even a radioactive mine is better than this place,” said Silver Spoon, taking the large iron ring in her teeth.

Diamond Tiara winced. The room should have been silent. They were underground in a dry, lightless place- -but she still hear the sound of the wind, and the voices on it. She heard them laughing.

Her eyes widened when she realized why.

“Silver Spoon! Get away from the door!”

“Huh?” said Silver Spoon as the door slid open. The darkness on the other side immediately lurched forward as a mass of writhing branches leapt forward. One of them slid outward with tremendous force, and Silver Spoon screamed as its needle-covered, vine-like appendage slapped her across the room and into a nearby bookshelves.

“Silver!” cried Diamond Tiara, leaping over the falling and fallen books to help her friend.

A second vine leapt forward, a long barbed trunk. Diamond Tiara braced to be hit, but Pick jumped in the way. There was a small plume of sparks as his armor was struck, and though uninjured, he was sent sailing into Diamond Tiara, knocking her into Silver Spoon.

The vine retracted, pulling away the ragged cloth that Pick had been wearing over his armor. Diamond Tiara watched as it was pulled into a writing mass of what looked like green, barbed worms- -and then watched in horror as the vines and branches began to lurch forward.

They could not move efficiently, but as Diamond Tiara watched, they began to coalesce. Each of them connected to the others, their bark combining as they grew into each other. From the mass of plant flesh arose a shape cast of cactus- -a cactus that stepped, half formed, out of the doorway on a pair of forelegs.

“Diamond…Tiara…” it said, its voice seeming to echo within her head itself. “Help…us…please…”

“Get away from me!” she cried, throwing a book at the mass of several individual trees that were now marching out of the darkness, connected into the depths by long segmented roots. One of the books hit the cactus and was impaled on a stake-like spine.

“The roots!” cried Pick. “The mine is infested!”

“Help me pick her up!” said Diamond Tiara, lifting Silver Spoon. Not that Pick could do much good- -he was tiny and weak. “We need to go, now!”

“I- -I don’t know what to do!” cried Pick. As they watched, the cactus looped outward toward them. The stems swelled and burst open. Smaller, writhing plants splattered onto the floor and began to race across the stone rapidly.

Diamond tiara draped Silver Spoon over her back and grabbed Pick by the hoof.

“RUN!” she cried.

Diamond Tiara tossed Silver Spoon into the dark room and pulled the heavy metal door closed behind her, barely leaving enough time for Pick to squeeze through the opening. The rusted hinges creaked wildly as she slammed it closed and closed the lock.

She had no idea what kind of room she was in. There had been to many of them for her to choose a real path. It was almost as though they had been coordinating, leading the fillies and colt into a trap. They had just suddenly come from everywhere, growing from every crack in the stonework or walking along on their twisting, jittery roots. Diamond Tiara had simply found the first room that she had encountered.

It had been part of the sanitarium, perhaps a storage room. The floor was made of broken tile, and the pipes overhead indicated that it might have been used as an extensive bathroom at one point before being converted into a storage room for heavy pieces of cast-iron equipment coated in peeling paint. It was, at least, lit- -bright moonlight was pouring through several high, broken windows overhead.

“Wow,” said Pick. “We…we made- -”

Diamond Tiara shoved him hard in the chest, causing him to fall onto his back.

“This is all YOUR fault!” she screamed.

“MY fault?” he yelled back, squirming as he tried to right himself. “You’re the ones who moved into a house infested with- -with- -I don’t even know!”

“Oh? Our fault? OUR FAULT? Because my parents bought a house that I had to move into? That you’re people didn’t, oh, I don’t know, PUT UP A SIGN? ‘Hey, this place filled with cursed cactuses, it’s probably a bad idea to live here?’ But no, you don’t bother to actually do anything until it’s all going to Tartarus!”

“Excuse me,” said Pick, stretching his wings to flip himself over. “If I am risking MY life to help YOU! I don’t NEED to be here, I could have let those- -those THINGS do whatever their trying to do to you, but no. Now I’M trapped here with you!”

“Guys,” said Silver Spoon, her eyes wide as she shakily stood.

“Oh, and that!” cried Diamond Tiara. “Our current situation: the tunnels are blocked, the house is surrounded, and we have no way of stopping them from getting in!”

“It was your idea to use the iieih’iiaei tunnels!”

“And it was YOUR idea to try to run through them!”

“Guys,” said Silver Spoon again, this time slightly louder.

“I’m eleven ieah’ie years old! I’m not from a military family! My family is technetium mining nobility! I’ve only even had this dial since I got my cutie mark last year! What do you expect from me, you fat PORK?!”

“Oh, so the family in charge of protecting us sends an ugly BUG child to do their job? What, did they send they not want to send the GOOD sibling, so they sent us the worthless second-born?”

Diamond Tiara had finally hit her mark. She saw the hurt in Diamond Pick’s face, and she felt the glee of having hurt him with her words- -but somehow felt terrible at the same time.

“Oh yeah?” he whispered. “This is part of my noble duty…at least MY parents did not abandon me here.”

“GUYS!” screamed Silver Spoon, so loud that she nearly collapsed.

“WHAT?” yelled Diamonds Pick and Tiara. They both turned to her, and, with a quivering hoof, Silver Spoon gestured toward her flank. Diamond Tiara nearly cried out; just anterior to Silver Spoon’s cutie mark was a green fragment of cactus, its long, glass-like needles imbedded deeply in her skin.

“Road apples,” swore Diamond Tiara. “Don’t move.”

“Get it out,” said Silver Spoon. “It hurts…get it out get it out GET IT OUT GET IT OUT!!”

“Stop moving,” said Diamond Tiara as Silver Spoon started to jump around. “It’s just a cactus.”

“Just a cactus…JUST A CACTUS? Diamond, help me!”

“Okay,” said Diamond Tiara. “This is an order, Silver Spoon. Don’t you panic now. Don’t be a coward like that moron over there. You got that? I don’t want COWARDS as my friends.”

Silver Spoon took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Tears were running down her face, but she nodded.

“Okay,” said Diamond Tiara. “We just need to pull it out…”

She reached up toward the cactus with her hoof and poked it. She had barely touched it, but felt a searing prick in her hoof as the needle poked her. Then it moved.

Diamond Tiara nearly vomited as the cactus squirmed like an enormous spiny maggot, and Silver Spoon screamed, more from disgust and fear than pain- -although the needles in her flank must not have been comfortable.

“Ow,” said Diamond Tiara, putting her pricked hoof in her mouth.

“HOW DO YOU THINK I FEEL?” cried Silver Spoon. “Oh…my beautiful flank…ruined…”

“Do either of you have a comb?” asked Diamond Pick. They both looked at him, and he sighed. “Not for my mane. To pull it out.”

“Where in Equestria would we keep a COMB? Pockets?”

Diamond Pick groaned. “I suppose I can use my teeth…”

“I don’t think your teeth are going to…to…”

Diamond Tiara trailed off as Pick retracted his lips- -or rather, moved his jaw forward. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon both cried out in horror as they realized that the sharp tips that were visible when he spoke were just that- -tips. As his teeth pushed forward and his lips pulled back, they both realized that his gum line was much, much farther back than it should have been. His teeth were at least five inches long, like long, white needles.

“What?” he said, speaking as well as ever even though he no longer had use of his lips.

“It’s just- -you are REALLY unnerving!”

“Have you ever seen your eyes? You both freak me the aaeh’ii out.”

There was more too it, though. Diamond Tiara knew that the creature before them was Diamond Pick, but with his jaw extended outward like some kind of grotesque fish and his teeth and reflective eyes glimmering in the moonlight, he looked like an unearthly horror- -but a horror that Diamond Tiara somehow recognized.

Then she remembered. Though it had been unclear, he looked exactly like the creature from the film. The one that had been in the bed, beneath the curtains- -it was one of his kind, its teeth extended and its blind eyes glaring at the unfortunate pony who had tried to film it.

Diamond Pick stepped toward Silver Spoon, and she recoiled.

“Silver Spoon,” he said. “Please. Do you trust me?”

Silver Spoon looked into his reflective eyes, and then she nodded.

“Then let me help you.”

“If you bite her, I WILL kick those teeth out of your skull,” noted Diamond Tiara.

“It’s not like they don’t grow back,” muttered Pick, stretching his teeth outward even further. Diamond Tiara watched as each tooth flicked slightly, articulating individually. Silver Spoon laid on her side and closed her eyes.

Pick descended and dexterously put his teeth around the cactus. They meshed with its long spines, and it suddenly reacted, trying to squirm deeper against Silver Spoon’s flesh. She moaned and wept, and Diamond Tiara held her hoof.

“Hold on,” she said. “Don’t be a weakling, Silver Spoon.”

With a sudden motion, Pick pulled hard. Silver Spoon’s eyes shot open and she shrieked as the cactus fragment was pulled cleanly free. She immediately curled up against Diamond Tiara, and Pick threw the cactus against the dirty tile floor.

It seemed to realize that it had been disconnected. It squirmed, using its spines like legs and trying to move its bloated body away, back to safety- -or back to Silver Spoon’s rump. Diamond Pick looked down at it in disgust, and then slammed one of his armored hooves against it.

The cactus burst open like an overfilled water balloon, splattering the floor and the three ponies around it. The air was filled with a metallic smell, and Diamond Tiara realized that the fluid that had come out of the still-twitching plant was not green or clear, like she had expected. It was red.

“B…blood,” said Silver Spoon, her lip quivering. “It was…it was taking my blood…”

“That explains what they’re after,” said Pick, darkly, wiping his hoof on the ground and retracting his teeth back into his mouth.

“Buck,” said Diamond Tiara, softly. “Buck me…”

Pick looked confused, and then shifted his dial. “I think I’m losing power. Translation is starting to get poor…”

“Then we don’t have much time,” said Diamond Tiara.

“Time for what?” said Pick. “I don’t…” he took a deep breath. “I…I think I have failed. I don’t think there is a way out of this.”

“If we can’t leave, then we stay.”

“Stay?” said Silver Spoon, her eyes wide.

“This place is a fort,” said Diamond Tiara. “There has to be some place where we can, I don’t know, barricade ourselves in or something. Seal ourselves in until Mother and Daddy get back, or until the servants get here, or until you can summon one of those drone things.”

“That…that’s actually not a bad idea…”

“Until we run out of food and water,” muttered Silver Spoon.

“It’s the only chance we have,” snapped Diamond Tiara. “Do you know anywhere like that?”

“I didn’t memorize all the blueprints…and I feel really, really dizzy…”

“The outer wall,” said Pick. “There are watchtowers there, or what used to be. They’ve been renovated, but they are sealed and in good condition.

“Can we get there from here?”

Pick looked up at the windows, and then down at the floor. “I…I think so. It’s a straight shot from here to the east tower.”

Diamond Tiara looked up at the windows. Moonlight was coming in, but so were narrow bands of thin, spiny vines.

“We need to get out of here first,” said Silver Spoon.

Diamond Pick removed his dial. “I have enough energy left for one more resonance explosion. After that, if I use the dial for anything substantial, it will take permanent damage.”

“So we’ve only got one spell left,” said Diamond Tiara. She looked at the wall, and then helped Silver Spoon to her feet. “Alright. So you’re going to knock down that wall.”

“And everything within forty aie of it on the far side.”

“And then we run. As fast as we can.”

“I don’t like this plan,” said Silver Spoon.

Diamond Tiara adjusted her tiara, and looked to Pick. She smiled, and so did he, even if his was filled with nervousness.

“I do. Let’s do this.”

Pick nodded nervously and crossed the room to the exterior wall. He disconnected the device on his chest, and once again the red lights of his suit faded. With one shaking hoof, he attached the circle to the wall and adjusted it. It expanded, extending a set of clamps into the concrete and opening like a flower. He adjusted the delicate wheels and gears inside, and then stepped back as the bright white light in the center of the dial flashed and flickered.

The air fell profoundly silent. The trio of young ponies were surrounded an all sides by a legion of monsters, but the only sound was the distant howl of the wind. Sometimes, though, they could hear the rustling of branches.

Then the air was cut with a loud, synthetic whine. The sound rose in pitch, and was then punctuated by a powerful explosion that echoed off the stone and brick of the house. Stone shrapnel was driven outward, and in the bright light of the moon Diamond Tiara saw the bodies of hundreds of cactuses and trees- -many of which shaped themselves into forms reminiscent of ponies- -torn apart by the blast.

“RUN!” she cried as Pick and Silver Spoon ducked. She raced forward into the breach, and was quickly joined by a crying Silver Spoon. Pick grabbed his dial from the rubble and inserted it back into the chest plate of his protective armor, and then ran joined the other two.

“Up ahead!” he called, pointing toward a looming, crooked tower emerging from the wall in the distance. Upon seeing it, Diamond Tiara’s heart sank. It was not that far, but in the darkness, the distance to it seemed impossible.

The plants around them took a moment to react, but they quickly realized that their prey was moving. In the moonlight, Diamond Tiara saw them move: trees lurching forward, marching on their roots, swinging their spiny tendrils blindly were joined by crawling, creeping cacti that seemed to have no bodily symmetry or logical order to their structure. The worst, though, was the ones that had shaped themselves into pony shapes. The way they moved was just wrong; they shook and jittered, their joints snapping forward with a gait that no pony could ever even attempt to copy.

“Diamond Tiara!” cried Silver Spoon, tears pouring from her eyes. “Don’t let them get meeeee!”

“Just keep running!” she ordered. “Come on! MOVE!”

Diamond Tiara fell back and pushed Silver Spoon’s rump with her forehead, forcing her to accelerate. Pick had taken the front of the line. With his armor, he was able to knock back some of the branches that were starting to close in, but without his helmet he was by no means safe. Diamond Tiara regretted asking him to throw it away; she shuddered to think about what would happen if one of those vines grabbed him and took him away.

Fortunately, the plants seemed to be powered fully on instinct. They had been drawn toward the building where the trio had just been, but they had not filled the dusty courtyard that filled the space between the hospital and the tower.

For a moment, Diamond Tiara though that they might make it. She felt herself growing lighter with hope, and found that running was not so hard. Then she saw the ground underneath Pick shift, his light form causing something just beneath the sand to deform and shift.

Pick was light enough to get across it without even noticing, but Silver Spoon was not. There was a crack as the dry plywood below cracked, and Silver Spoon started to drop.

“No you don’t!” cried Diamond Tiara, rushing forward and slamming her body into Silver Spoon. Silver Spoon tumbled to the ground, but was knocked past the border of the abandoned well. Diamond Tiara was not; while she had forced Silver Spoon back onto solid ground, she herself had landed in the suddenly open chasm beneath. She cried out as she fell and then slammed into the floor beneath.

Pick helped Silver Spoon up, and ran to the stone edge of the circular hole.

“Are you dead?” he called. From the tremor in his voice, it was clear that he did not mean it as a joke.

“Owww….no,” said Diamond Tiara, standing. She looked up from the hole and saw nothing more than a tiny circle of moonlight overhead, casting beams through the dust.

“Hold on!” cried Pick. He put one of his feet on the stone wall of the well and attempted to descend. Although he could adhere to the wall, the stone could not; it slipped free and nearly fell onto Diamond Tiara below.

“I can’t- -I can’t get down!” cried Pick in a panic.

“Pick, they’re coming!” cried Silver Spoon.

“I can’t leave her!”

“You have to!” cried Diamond Tiara back up the well.

“Are you INSANE?”

“Pick!”

“No! Leave me, save Silver Spoon! There’s no way you can get me out in time! Go!”

“I can’t- -”

“Silver Spoon is everything to me! She’s my only friend! Save her! That’s an order! Or do I have to come up there and kick you rump?!”

“No! Diamond Tiara!” cried Silver Spoon. Diamond Tiara saw her looking frantically around her as the plants were drawing closer. “I- -I’ll come back for you! I promise!”

“Don’t,” whispered Diamond Tiara. “There’s no reason…no reason to. There never was.” Then, loud enough for Silver Spoon to hear: “Get out of here!”

Pick nodded to her and grabbed Silver Spoon’s foreleg. He pulled her away as a shambling mass pulled itself over the edge of the well, covering it and blocking out all light. Diamond Tiara found herself unable to see, but the plant had also blocked out all sound from above- -save for the dry stretching sound of its appendages growing, descending downward into the blackness, their lethal spines seeking blood in the darkness.

Sight was impossible in the darkness of the dry well, but Diamond Tiara knew that she was by no means trapped. Before the light had faded, she had seen that the well was just one connector onto a much larger set of much older chambers. With her hoof on the stone wall, she descended into the pitch-black aqueducts below.

She did not know what she would find down there, or whether she would ever see light again- -but that last image of Pick and Silver Spoon’s faces was burned into her memory. If she was going to fail, she was not going to fail without a fight. She was Diamond Dazzle Tiara, the daughter of the Rich family- -and she was not going to give up at all easily.

Chapter 7: Escape

A sudden pounding caused Silver Spoon to awake with a start. For one brief moment, everything seemed fine and safe. Then the memories came flooding back to her, and the panic immediately found its way directly into her heart, which seemed to rise into her chest.

Pick, likewise, heard the pounding on the door. He jumped up and clung to Silver Spoon in terror. Both of them looked at the door and watched as the now charred and useless technetium dial sparked and clattered to the ground. Whatever shield there had been was gone, and the plants knew it.

They pounded again, and tendrils started to come through from under the door.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” said Pick, looking up at Silver Spoon.

Silver Spoon looked down at him and tried to smile. Then she reached for the end table beside her and picked up her pearls, quickly putting the necklace on.

“If I’m going to go, I’m going to go with my pearls on.”

The two held each other tightly as the plants worked their way through the door. The thumping accelerated- -but then was followed by a different sound. Silver Spoon opened her eyes, confused as to why she was hearing the characteristic sound of a small two-stroke engine.

The sound shifted, revving itself up, and then dropped as something wet seemed to drop to the floor. The tendrils that had reached beneath the door shook violently and then went limp, wilting as a puddle of strong-scented fluid flowed into the bedroom.

The room was silent for a moment, save for the sound of an engine- -and then the door burst open. Silver Spoon and Pick cried out in fear as a figure burst through the door. For a moment, Silver Spoon thought that she was seeing another morlock: a small pony dressed in tight black material with fragments of silvery, shiny armor, holding a spattered hedge pruner. The figure was covered in twigs and drenched in fluids to the point where her coat color was not even visible, and she was breathing hard.

Then the tiara on her head glimmered, and Silver Spoon understood.

“Diamond Tiara!” she cried.

“Silver Spoon…Pick? What are you two doing in bed? Together?”

“Nothing I haven’t done with you when you needed it,” said Silver Spoon, jumping down from the bed. She hugged her friend, disregarding the plant guts that covered Diamond Tiara’s body.

“Barricade the door,” said Diamond Tiara. “Find furniture, anything. Push it up against it.”

Silver Spoon nodded, and she and Pick joined Diamond Tiara in moving the heirloom dressers and tables against the door just as the mulched piles of material on the other side were beginning to pull themselves back together.

Then, now all out of breath, the three of them collapsed against the pile of things that were not the only thing standing between them and desiccation. Diamond Tiara seemed immensely tired, but Silver Spoon could not stop smiling.

“Oh Diamond!” she said, wrapping her forelegs around Diamond Tiara and feeling herself starting to cry. “I thought I would never see you again!” Silver Spoon looked down at Diamond Tiara’s clothing and grimaced. “And what are you wearing?”

“I know, right?” groaned Diamond Tiara. “Butt ugly…but really, really useful. A gift from a friend.”

Diamond Tiara turned toward Pick, who was holding looking down forlorn at what was left of his technetium dial. Diamond Tiara realized that this was the first time that she had seen him without his suit. Firstly, she saw that he was small and poorly colored; second, she realized that he had been in bed with Silver Spoon without any clothing, and though she knew that Silver Spoon was not that kind of pony, the thought of it made Diamond Tiara angry.

“Pick,” she said, nodding toward the dial. “Is it broken?”

He looked up at her. “Iieh’iiueaeii’hiie- -” Pick clapped a hoof over his mouth, and his tiny eyes widened as he looked down at the dial. He tried turning it, but the mechanism was frozen. It was so badly damaged, he could not even translate anymore.

“Here,” said Silver Spoon, pulling open a drawer behind her and removing a pen and a pad of old paper. “You can write, right?”

Pick took the pad and put the pen in his mouth. He scrawled quickly across the paper, then held it up for them to read.

“Of course I can,” it read in almost geometric block-printing, “I am not an idiot.”

“Is it broken?” repeated Diamond Tiara.

Pick scribbled, then turned the pad again. “Yes. Duh.”

“Don’t get snippy with me! I just cut my way through an army of these things to get here!”

Scribbling. “Not before a costume change, clearly. BTW, you look AMAZING.”

“Can you fix it?”

Pick sighed. “Ie,” he said, writing down the word “no” on the pad. Then, continuing, “systems too badly damaged. Can be repaired, but not here. Probably could do it. Would need spare parts.”

Diamond Tiara reached into one of the pockets of her impromptu suit and pulled out the technetium dial she had found in Pith Helmut’s research room. She watched as Diamond Pick’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head and his jaw dropped open. The pen fell to the floor, but he picked it up and wrote furiously.

“You gloriously attractive porcine idiot!!! Where did you even get that?!!!”

“Is this enough to fix yours?”

Pick did not respond with text. Instead, he held out his hoof. Diamond Tiara gave him the dial, and Pick immediately carried it over to a roll-top desk on the far side of the room, one that had been too heavy for any of them to move.

“Wait…” said Diamond Tiara, “did you just call me a pig?”

“He also called you ‘gloriously attractive’,” noted Silver Spoon. She leaned closer to her and whispered. “I think he has a crush on you!”

“Ih’ieaheaeia’ehehi,” muttered Pick over his shoulder.

“We can’t understand you, dimwad!” said Diamond Tiara, standing up from the barricade behind her. The pile of furniture seemed to be holding, for the moment, but she was not. Her legs felt like rubber, and every part of her body ached.

She crossed the room awkwardly and looked at what Pick was doing. He set down the too dials on the table beside each other, and Diamond Tiara was able to see that they really were different. Even in its damaged state, his was smaller and more intricate.

Pick tapped the front of the ancient dial, and it responded. Multiple rings twisted within it, aligning the alien text on their edges until the entire surface of the dial snapped open. Pick did the same to his own dial, except that he had to force it to behave instead of it doing so automatically.

With expert precision, he began to pull pieces from the old dial and insert them into his own. The two occasionally shifted as they were merged, and a pile of discarded parts started to form as Pick pulled away the damaged pins and gears of his own dial.

Sliding a large, gold-colored gear with seemingly thousands of teeth into place, Pick spoke.

“Eiiaeuieh’iieiaaiethis thing’s a relic,” he said, his translation coming back online. “I mean, this thing is literally thousands of years old…where did you even get it?”

“Pith Helmut,” said Diamond Tiara, turning toward Silver Spoon. “He dug it out of the ground. He thought it could stop them.”

“The cacti?” asked Silver Spoon.

Diamond Tiara shook her head. “I don’t think it’s just the cacti. There’s something…” she turned toward Pick. “There’s something else.”

She leaned on the desk next to Pick, looking into his left eye, which seemed not to be looking at his work at all. The tiny reflective sphere flicked toward her.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” said Pick.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Like what?”

“Like the real reason you’re up here.”

“I’m up here because I am an idiot,” admitted Pick. “I should have just stayed at home.” His eyes narrowed, and the tiny black specks that made up his pupil stared directly into Diamond Tiara’s far larger eyes. “But that’s not what you mean…”

“You’ve been trying to get us to go with you the whole time. To go underground, to your ‘family’.”

“Because it is safe there. I told you that.”

“Or is it because you are actually trying to eat us?”

Silver Spoon gasped, and Pick froze, dropping a spring assembly that he was holding. His lips retracted from his sharp teeth slightly, and his eyes narrowed. “Who told you that?”

“So it is true!”

Pick stared at her for a moment, and then sighed. He turned his whole head toward Diamond Tiara. “Look,” he said. “I would be lying if I told you that no morlock has ever eaten a pony. Even within the past half-century. And I would be lying if I told you that I hadn’t considered it.”

“You WERE! You were trying to eat us! You’re no better than- -”

“BUT,” said Pick, sharply, “I never would. Not now. Not that after the time I’ve spent with you both. I daresay that I consider you two to be my friends. Perhaps my only friends.” He turned back to his work. “That, and you look like you would taste disgusting.”

“Excuse me!” cried Diamond Tiara. “I’ll have you know that I would be the best meal you ever TASTED!”

“Forgive me for not wanting to test that.”

“He means it,” said Silver Spoon, putting her hoof on Diamond Tiara’s shoulder. “I trust him, Diamond.”

“Oh yeah? Is that because you were ‘tasting’ each other last night?”

Silver Spoon winced and stuck out her tongue. “Eew! You mean kissing? No!” She sighed. “I really do trust him, though. And you trust me, right?”

Diamond Tiara groaned. “Yes, Silver Spoon, I trust you.”

“Ihiea!” swore Pick, loudly, throwing down something.

“What?” said Diamond Tiara, turning sharply. “What happened?”

“Nothing! That’s the problem!”

“What do you mean ‘nothing’?”

“The piece your brought me is too old, too corroded! It works, but not without lubrication!”

“Lubrication?” said Silver Spoon. “Like, what, grease?”

“Grease- -no, not grease! Perhaps it translated wrong…”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Diamond Tiara, feeling Pick’s panic starting to flow into the room and attempting to control it.

“The old system was badly damaged. The crystals within are shattered. It needs gems to achieve proper resonance.”

“So, what? You need a piece of quartz or something?”

Pick shook his head and picked up the assembly that he had thrown down. Although burned out, Diamond Tiara could see a heavily cracked clear crystal in the center. “Quartz won’t work, not in an old one like this. Not robust enough, not pure enough. I need something better. A corundum derivative, or a beryl, or- -”

“Or a diamond?”

Diamond Tiara unhooked her tiara from her hair and turned it around to face her. She sighed, and then bit down on the largest of the central diamonds, wrenching it free from its setting.

“Your tiara,” gasped Silver Spoon, putting her hooves over her mouth.

Diamond Tiara spit the large, perfect gemstone into her hoof. “Will this work?” she asked, passing it to Pick.

Pick’s eyes expanded to a size that Diamond Tiara had never even thought possible. He looked down at the stone, and then at Diamond Tiara, and then back to the stone. “You…you’re giving this to me?” he asked, sounding as though he were about to faint.

“Yes,” she said.

“But…it’s your diamond…”

“And if it means saving my friends, I’ll gladly give it up.”

Shaking, Pick reached out and picked the gem out of Diamond Tiara’s hooves, as though he were concerned that it were going to break. “Thank…thank you,” he said.

“Will it work?”

Pick opened the central clasp of his dial. “I don’t know. Diamonds are exceedingly rare here. Nopony I know has ever seen one, let alone one this free of flaw…and no pony in recorded history has tried to use one in a technetium dial…”

“So…what if it doesn’t work?” asked Silver Spoon.

“Well…how wide do you think this house is?”

“Um…why?” asked Diamond Tiara.

“Well, if it fails, at least the blast radius should take out most of the plants…”

Before Diamond Tiara could fully process what he was implying, he set the stone into the center of the dial. The clasp mechanically closed around it and pulled it into itself, sealing around it. The rings and gears turned, reacting to the presence of the new gem, and then a piercing ring filled the air. The dial began to shake and to leak a harsh, white light from its edges, and all three ponies dived beneath the room’s bed.

Then, all at once, it stopped. They looked at each other, and then slowly pulled themselves out. The dial had, apparently, accepted the gem. It had extended a kind of mechanical spiral from its surface, producing something that looked like a complex sculpture.

Pick’s eyes widened. “No way,” he said.

“What is it?” said Diamond Tiara.

Diamond Pick gently lifted the dial and then pressed the spiral protrusions in the center. They retracted into the metal circle, engaging the gears and systems. There was the sound of an electrical discharge and a flash of white light, and pick vanished.

A raspy, giggle-like sound filled the room, and Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon turned quickly to see Pick on the far side of the room.

“I can jump!” he said, gleefully. “I can’t believe this- -an actual jump system! Nopony in my family has EVER had a jump capability in their dial!”

“Wait, jump?” said Diamond Tiara. “You mean you can teleport?”

“YES!” cried Pick, running across the room and hugging her. He was gross and ugly, but Diamond Tiara allowed the embrace. In fact, he was surprisingly soft.

“So, wait a second,” said Silver Spoon. “If you can teleport…” her eyes lit up. “Then you can teleport us out of here!”

Pick’s expression fell. “Well…yes and no…”

“No,” said Diamond Tiara. “It’s either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Not both. And it had BETTER not be a no!”

“I can, but the system is still in its infancy. It might take me years to get it to work right.”

“So, what?”

“So, yes, I can ‘teleport’, but I have no guidance system. I can only jump line-of-sight, and probably no more than eight hundred metres.”

“You mean you can only teleport where you can see?”

“I just said that. Yes.”

“So what good is that going to do?”

“Well, you said we can’t run through the enemy…but with this, we can get past them.”

“But only if you can SEE past them!”

“The towers,” said Silver Spoon, suddenly. “The keep! All those weird turrets! If we could get up there, Pick could see far enough to teleport us into the desert, past the spiny trees!”

Diamond Pick realized that Silver Spoon was right- -and realized the implications. “Silver Spoon, we’re on the outer wall! How are we supposed to get from here to the keep, and then all the way up it with all those plants in the way?!”

Silver Spoon pointed at the hedge trimmer. “You fought your way here. So we fight our way out.”

“Are you insane?”

“It’s the only way, Diamond, and you know it.”

“She’s right,” said Pick. “If we stay here, they’ll get in eventually. We have no food, no water…we won’t last long even if they don’t get us.”

“We’ll last even less long out there,” said Diamond Tiara. “Buuuuck…I know you’re right, but I’m not going to admit it.”

“So…we need to fight through them,” said Silver Spoon, suddenly realizing what she had suggested.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” said Diamond Tiara. “I have this armor, and so does he, but you don’t.”

“She can have my external armor,” said Pick. He pulled the dial off the table. “I can’t do much while the jump is charging, but I should be able to protect myself with just my inner armor.”

“Will it fit?”

Pick looked at Diamond Tiara. “Not you, but her, yes.”

“Oh, you’re mean.”

They immediately set to work making the preparations. Pick separated his armor into pieces and helped adjust the hard external parts to fit around Silver Spoon’s body. Diamond Tiara, meanwhile, rested and checked the fuel level in her clipper. The gas level was low, but she hoped that there was enough.

Within minutes, they were ready. Silver Spoon was clad in a more professional version of the armor that Diamond Tiara wore, her body encased in plates and in form-fitting black material. Pick, meanwhile, was wearing only the innards of that very armor. Most of his skin was exposed, but the internal pipework and red, glowing heaters formed a framework around his body complete with his newly rebuilt dial held in by mechanical interface pins in the center of his chest plate.

“Right,” said Diamond Tiara. “We’re ready?”

“Yes,” said Pick, twisting the dial nervously.

“Okay,” said Diamond Tiara, standing up. “It’s like Tartarus out there…and this isn’t going to be easy. We might not make it.” She turned toward Silver Spoon, who was staring back with wide eyes. “And I don’t want to have any regrets.”

Before Silver Spoon could react, Diamond Tiara leaned forward. Their lips connected, and Silver Spoon’s eyes widened, then closed as she leaned into Diamond Tiara. Their kiss lasted for several moments- -until it was interrupted by a loud chirping sound.

Both of them looked at Pick, who’s wings were vibrating and releasing the sound. He blushed profusely and tried to get ahold of them.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Sometimes, the excitement- -”

The he was silenced as Diamond Tiara put her lips against his, being careful not to cut herself on his long teeth. He resisted just slightly, but because of his small size, Diamond Tiara had no trouble taking control of the exchange.

She eventually released him, and he looked up at her wide-eyed.

“Oh, wow,” he said.

“There,” said Diamond Tiara. “Silver Spoon was my first, and you were my first colt. That’s a huge honor, you know. You should be really happy.”

“I…I am,” squeaked Pick. He attempted to regain his composure- -and to press his wings back into their normal conformation- -and looked as Silver Spoon. “Um…does this mean I need to kiss Silver Spoon too?”

Diamond Tiara’s eyes narrowed. “If you even THINK about touching her, I will personally poke you in the eye. Got that?”

“Eep,” said Pick, stiffening.

Silver Spoon leaned in close to him. “She’s a bit of a jealous type.”

“She’s very protective of you,” admitted Pick.

Silver Spoon smiled. “I don’t think it’s me she’s being protective of.”

Diamond Tiara looked up at the pile of furniture blocking the door and sighed. “Great…more physical labor.”

“Not really,” said Pick. “I can move it.”

“How? You’re like, the size of a hamster.”

“I don’t know what that is, but I’m not. No.” He smiled widely, something that was eerie with the number of teeth he had. He twisted the dial on his chest and it expanded outward slightly. “This may take a little bit of extra power…but I’ve always wanted to do this…”

A silent wave of distortion poured out from Pick’s dial, and Diamond Tiara suddenly felt oddly light. She watched as the furniture near the door shook and then lifted into the air, as if it were being levitated by a unicorn’s magic. It floated gracefully through the air for a moment as Pick pulled it backward- -and then all fell at once, much of it breaking as it hit the stone floor below.

Diamond Tiara winced at the sound. “Yeah, don’t do that again,” she said, “like, ever.”

Pick smiled and twisted his dial back into its normal conformation. “Sorry…my sister’s way better at that than I am…”

His voice trailed off as he looked toward the door. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon also turned toward it, and the room fell silent as they watched, waiting. As quietly as possible, Diamond Tiara picked up her hedge clipper. When she heard the sound of long needles scraping across the tile outside, she pulled the string and the engine hummed to life, the blades clacking together, hungry for plant flesh.

The door suddenly exploded inward, forced back by a swarm of fleshy cactus branches- -but the three ponies inside were ready. With a cry, Diamond Tiara leapt forward, swinging the hedge trimmer into the mass. Plant fluid and wood fragments poured over her as she cut a path through. Their journey toward safety had begun.

Breathing hard, Diamond Tiara paused over the bodies of the hedges she had slain, their wriggling appendages shaking and crawling beneath her metal horseshoes, their green blood dripping tiny worms as they struggled to escape.

“Come on!” she cried, spitting the hedge pruner into her hooves. The engine was already starting to shudder and skip- -there would not be much time before it ran out of fuel. “We’re almost there!”

That was a lie, she knew- -they were barely even close- -but she felt like she needed to encourage Silver Spoon and Diamond Pick, both of whom were trailing behind her. Silver Spoon had been hit by cacti limbs more times than Diamond Tiara could count. Her armor was holding, but it was only a matter of time before one of the vine-like fingers reached into the two slots on her back that were meant for Pick’s wings.

Pick, meanwhile, had mostly relied on his flightless, bony wings to protect himself, as well as whatever field that dial was projecting around him. The blows had not managed to cut or impale him, but without the mass of his armor to stabilize him he was thrown about too easily. Every hit knocked him back, slowing him. He was tired- -they all were.

A rustling sound came from the darkness behind them, and Diamond Tiara saw several pony-shaped cactuses rapidly gliding across the expanse, quickly closing in. Their bodies were covered with thick bark and long, curving spines. Diamond Tiara was not sure if her clipper was simply growing dull, but it seemed like the plants were beginning to adapt.

She ran forward, and the other two joined her. It was now clear that there was no time to stop or to slow, not if they were to survive.

“Silver Spoon, which way!?”

“I don’t know I don’t know! Left!”

They ducked into a parallel corridor that slanted quickly into a curving wooden hallway with a creaking, unwaxed wooden floor. Plants were already starting to grow up from the cracks between the wood, their razor-sharp leaves cutting at Diamond Tiara’s hooves.

They continued to run as fast as they could, cutting their way through whatever stood in their way. Diamond Tiara refused to stop, even though her body was beginning to fail from the strain of being awake for so long, of carrying heavy armor- -and being so, so thirsty.

Something was wrong, though. She was not entirely sure, and her mind raced to try to analyze what was making her so afraid. It had something to do with the voices. She could still hear them, echoing through her head as whispers- -but the plants themselves were silent. When she cut them, they did not scream or cry out. They simply fell to the ground, just as an ordinary plant would. The voices were coming from something else, something she felt she should have known about.

“Diamond Tiara, slow down!” called Silver Spoon. She was breathing hard, and her braid had come undone. Her normally perfect hair now streamed over her head and shoulders, dripping with sweat even in the cold, drafty halls.

Diamond Tiara looked back at her- -and her mind was overcome with a single thought. She was just so thirsty, and Silver Spoon was filled with so much fluid. She was like a delicious sponge, just waiting to be squeezed dry until there was nothing but dust left. And Diamond Tiara was holding a hedge clipper.

“Diamond Tiara?” squeaked Pick, noticing the suddenly depraved look on Diamond Tiara’s face before Silver Spoon did.

Diamond Tiara reached for her head. She could feel them inside here, the worms wriggling inside her brain, growing there from spores carried on the desert sands- -the same worms that animated the plants. She had a sudden desire to put down her weapon, to stop hurting the plants. She should take the cuttings and plant them, and give them water. She would make a garden, but not too close to the house. Because it needed to be expanded. It was not a bad place…it just needed to be bigger.

The pain increased sharply, but Diamond Tiara forced it back. Her sanity was starting to bend, but she would not allow it to tear. If the endless training in the horrid ways of “high society” had not broken her, an alien voice in her head would certainly not be able to.

Suddenly, the whole house shook. The pain in Diamond Tiara’s head was replaced with the sound of a roar or rage, and her eyes widened as she understood.

“Caddis fly,” she said, softly, her voice cracking. “Sweet Celestia…It’s not the plants! It never was! RUN!”

Silver Spoon and Pick started sprinting after her, not understanding what was happening- -but she did. She watched as the walls of the house around them started to split and tear. They were not breaking randomly; there was no snapping of wood or cracking of beams. Instead, the walls were coming apart at unseen seams, revealing the true contents that ran through the walls of the entire house.

It had always followed the same pattern. It had gotten to Pith Helmut before he even understood, and it had been trying to take Diamond Tiara next. It would reap all of them, save for one. That one would exist to expand the house. Over and over again, always making it bigger- -because IT wanted it bigger.

From the walls burst hundreds of roots, some of them as wide as tree trunks. The house was not fully awakening, pulling away its camouflage, dispelling the deception it had created for countless millennia. The plants that they saw were only a part. They were no more than drones, miniscule cuttings of something far greater.

“What’s happening?!” cried Silver Spoon.

Diamond Tiara did not bother to answer, in part because it was self-evident and in part because she was too busy running. From every wall, the central plant emerged. Hollow, glass-like needles as long as full-grown ponies burst outward from the mass of shifting wood, reaching outward toward the ponies that suddenly found themselves inside its body.

Silver Spoon cried out as a cabinet next to her was pushed over, spilling its china and silverware onto her. Pick dodged several vases, running past the exploding porcelain, its sound deadened by the creaking of the house as it came to life. As he tried to escape, a spine suddenly burst through a brick wall and into his path.

Diamond Tiara looked back, but she was too far ahead to try to cut the spine. Silver Spoon, however, leapt into action, moving faster than Diamond Tiara had ever seen her move before. She grabbed a falling teaspoon in her teeth and leapt forward, putting herself between the immense cactus spine and Pick. Deftly, she caught the deadly spike in the bowl of the spoon. She was pushed backward, but stopped its growth completely.

Both Diamond Tiara and Pick’s eyes widened. “Silver Spoon,” said Diamond Tiara, “what the BUCK is your special talent?!”

“I have no idea!” cried Silver Spoon.

They all cried out in unison as the floor beneath them lifted up, propelled by the trunks that had grown attached to it long ago. Pick braced himself, adhering to the wood instinctively, but Silver Spoon went rolling backward. Pick managed to catch her with his teeth, but the force of catching her loosened his grip.

Diamond Tiara slid backward, grabbing onto the spike that had nearly impaled Pick, being careful to avoid the barbs that covered its tips. She reached out her hoof and took Pick’s, dropping her hedge clipper into the pit of plant material that had suddenly seemed to form beneath them. The plant roots grew into the cracks of it and pulled it apart, ripping through the metal as though it were nothing.

“The trimmer!” cried Silver Spoon, who had failed to grab it as it fell.
“It was out of gas anyway!” groaned Diamond Tiara, pulling Pick and Silver Spoon back up and back onto the path. With a substantial effort, she pulled them to safety. There was no time to rest, though; the entire house seemed to be closing in on them now. The voice in Diamond Tiara’s head had been reduced to screaming a single word, over and over: “MOISTURE”.

Once again, they ran, but this time, they really were close to their goal. Up ahead, Diamond Tiara could see where the wood of the house gave way to the stone of the keep- -stone that the central plant did not seem to manage to have infested.

She raced forward, her friends at her side. The distance felt like an eternity- -vines struck out at her from all sides, tearing into her hair and slamming against her armor. Each blow was like getting hit by a hammer, but the shorter spines of the flexible branches were not long enough to penetrate her armor. The longer ones, though- -she knew that those would almost surely take her water, with or without armor.

Then she felt the cold touch of stone beneath her armored horseshoes. Ahead of her was windowless blackness, leading to a wide set of dusty, spiraling stairs. Diamond Tiara groaned; she doubted that her legs could carry her up them- -but she would try anyway.

She leapt up the stone steps, and as she did, noticed that the area up ahead was not as dark as she would have expected. It was instead filled with a flickering white light, and as Diamond Tiara got higher in the tower, she distantly recalled that this was where her parents had stayed for the night- -and realized that they had left a crystal lantern hanging on the wall.

Jumping up, Diamond Tiara grabbed the lantern in her teeth.

“Pick!” she cried, watching as he looked up at her and winced at the sudden brightness. “Take this!”

She threw it to him, and he caught it, closing his eyes from the brightness. With his teeth, he pulled off the protective bottom plate and threw it down the stairs at the bladed, deadly vines that were rapidly sinking into the stone in search of its quarry.

The light exploded violently, driving the vines back while the three young ponies were able to run forward, moving higher in the tower.

Eventually, they reached a final door. Diamond Tiara threw it open and felt the rush of cold, night air against her sweat-drenched face. She collapsed onto the ground, unable to move anymore. Above her, she could see the hazy light of the moon shining through the gathering clouds. The atmosphere smelled electrical and strange, like something was about to happen.

“Come on, Diamond Tiara!” said Silver Spoon, shaking Diamond Tiara’s shoulder. “Stand up! You’ve got to stand up!”

“Ohhh…I don’t want to…”

“Well, if you don’t, you’re going to be jerky soon,” said Pick, slamming shut the heavy stone door and sealing it with his dial. With that door impassible, there was no going back.

“Bite me,” retorted Diamond Tiara.

“If you are jerky, I might have to.”

“Silver Spoon, if he tries to eat me, slap him.”

“You can slap him yourself,” said Silver Spoon, picking Diamond Tiara up. “When we get out of this, you can slap him as much as you want.”

“Um…no?” said Pick. He approached the edge of the top of the keep, peering between a pair of large and broken stones that had been used to form the archery slits at the top of the tower. Silver Spoon helped Diamond Tiara over to the same location, and gasped as she looked down.

Diamond Tiara wished she had not seen what lay below- -even though, on some level, she largely knew that it was there. The entire house was overgrown, its sections pulled apart to reveal the building-sized plant that now stretched from every wing and hallway, clinging to the walls around it like a shell. It had always been there, dormant, waiting. They had been inside it, and it had watched them when not even the Pick had known- -but not just for them. For them all. All the voices it had collected through the ages, the ghosts of those it had infected.

Because, Diamond Tiara realized, it was not really a plant at all. The plant was just another layer, like the house was. Inside it was something different, a colony of things so tiny they could almost not be seen. Things that fed on the plants, that had become indistinguishable from them- -the same things that now lived in her own brain, perhaps permanently.

Down below, the vines were starting to climb up the keep, followed by a veritable army of trees and cactuses, all looking dry and brown, hungry for pony fluids. The same was true out in the distance: it was as though the entire desert had come to life, sprouting and endless number of plants from a root system far larger than could be seen.

“Pick…” said Diamond Tiara.

“I’m targeting,” said Pick, holding the dial out in front of him and turning the pieces.

“You should really hurry,” said Diamond Tiara, watching the plants rapidly ascending.

“I am hurrying don’t rush me!”

“If you don’t go faster, we’re ALL going to be jerky!”

“Really,” he said, twisting the system even faster. “Because you already kind of ARE.”

“Guys,” said Silver Spoon, her eyes wide. “Quit the banter and make with the banter or this is about to get REALLY messy…”

“Got it!” said Pick, the dial extending its characteristic low spiral. He held it out toward them. “Ready to go.”

“Great,” said Diamond Tiara, extending her hoof and grabbing one third of the dial.

“Are you sure this will work?” said Silver Spoon, also taking hold of the dial.

“Probably,” said Pick.

“PROBABLY?”

“It’s our only option!” cried Silver Spoon, her eyes widening as the plants crested the edge of the keep.

Diamond Tiara looked Pick in his eyes. “I’m going to trust you on this, Pick. Do it.”

“Right,” he said, extending his hoof over the spiral. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon put theirs over it as well, and then, in unison, pressed down the trigger.

Teleportation was surprisingly uncomfortable. There was really no feeling quite like it, but the closest thing Diamond Tiara could image was being thrown. It was not that there was any sudden surge of motion, but a feeling of sudden nothingness, as though she lost everything to hold onto and complete control of her direction. Her hooves left the ground, and she became instantly nauseous.

Then, all at once, space collapsed around her and resolved back into the real world. She was dropped into sand below, disoriented and confused. There was no way to tell which way was up, or to the sides; she had momentarily lost everything that bound her to Equestria, and those links were not easy to retrieve.

Through her daze, she heard Pick swear in his native language.

“I miscalculated!” he cried through the fog.

Diamond Tiara’s mind crystallized suddenly back into a cohesive mass, driven by sudden panic. “You WHAT?!”

As she said it, something grabbed her rear legs, and all at once she was dragged across the sand. She cried out, more in surprise than fear, and Silver Spoon and Pick jumped forward, grabbing her forelegs and holding on.

Diamond Tiara looked backward and saw the mass of cactuses that had taken hold of her. She saw the tentacles wrapping around her legs, and felt them working into the joints of her armor. They found every weakness quickly, and she could feel the sudden coldness as they penetrated the back of her knees. It did not hurt, not really, but when she saw the centers of the transparent needles fill with red fluid, she started to panic.

“Pull me out! PULL ME OUT!”

“What do you- -UFF!- -think we’re doing?!” cried Pick, tugging hard.

Diamond Tiara looked back at the creature behind her, and saw its cactus body split open, the wet flesh inside healing over and sprouting a new set of sharp, barbed spines that gnashed open and closed like a great mouth, preparing to take her inside it. Its tentacle-like tongues stretched out toward her, and toward her friends.

There was only one option. Diamond Tiara sighed, and made peace with her fate. Then she looked up to her friends. “Let me go!” she cried.

“Diamond- -that’s counterintuitive!” cried Silver Spoon, her tears indicating that she understood perfectly what Diamond Tiara wanted.

“Let it have me! You two run! Get to the morlocks! Just leave me!”

“NO WAY!” cried Pick, digging his hooves into the ground, adhering to the loose sand and trying- -and failing- -to take a step back. “I’m not leaving you here!”

“Neither am I!” cried Silver Spoon, also pulling harder but proving unable to resist the tug of the plant.

Diamond Tiara could feel her strength starting to fade, and knew how Pith Helmut must have felt all those years ago. “Go…” she said, weakly.

“You’re our friend!” said Silver Spoon. “If you go, we go with you!”

“Agreed!” said Pick.

Diamond Tiara smiled at the gesture, and prepared for one last surge of strength- -a final burst of power to knock their hooves away. As she tensed her muscles, however, something caught her eye. A shadow seemed to be crossing the desert toward her. At first, she thought that it was a symptom of her dehydration and impending desiccation, but after a moment she saw it was real.

Then, with a resounding explosion of cracking wood and a squelch of bursting plant, something landed behind her. The bindings that held Diamond Tiara suddenly broke, and Pick and Silver Spoon cried out as they fell backward, pulling Diamond Tiara onto them.

“Oof!” cried Diamond Tiara, nearly crushing Pick. She immediately reached down toward the still-twitching tendrils wrapped around her legs and pulled them off. As she did, she looked behind her.

The plant had been crushed completely- -by a large, wooden crate. All three of the ponies stared at the box, and at the image painted on the front: a cartoon image of the smiling face of a gray, yellow-eyed pony, both her eyes looking in opposite directions.

Then, with a sudden small explosion, a parachute burst open from the top of the box, flying into the air and then fluttering down over the cracked and damaged crate. Diamond Tiara looked up, and saw numerous other crates descending from the sky. The parachutes had deployed properly on the others, allowing them to fall from the gathering storm clouds above- -and Diamond Tiara understood.

“The Pegasi!” she cried, standing up, her tiredness dispelled by the sudden surge of hope. She turned to a confused-looking Silver Spoon. “Daddy’s supply shipment! It’s here!”

Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon both looked up to the sky. High ahead, in the clouds, lightning sparked in the wake of the rapidly-blowing storm, illuminating the silhouettes of the flock of Pegasi carrying their storm across the desert. Thunder cut the air as the moonlight was blotted out by the darkness of the clouds.

“Down here!” cried Diamond Tiara, waving her forelegs. Silver Spoon joined her. “Help us! Down here! DOWN HERE!”

It was no use, though. The Pegasi were too high, and the thunder that they were carrying was too loud for them to hear through. None of them changed course, and none of them descended to help the three young ponies below.

The plants did not seem perturbed by the Pegasi overhead, but had taken advantage of Diamond Tiara’s sudden distraction. They had moved forward, pulling themselves across the sand quickly, and now the three ponies found themselves surrounded completely by the swollen, fleshy, spine-covered bodies of the cactus ponies, all waking forward, closing the circle.

“Pick…” cried Diamond Tiara, backing into her friends. “Teleport us TELEPORT US TELEPORT US NOW!”

“I can’t!” cried Pick, tears running down his face. “It- -it needs to recharge! I can’t jump!”

“Then…then I guess this is it,” said Diamond Tiara. Silver Spoon took her and Pick in a hug, and the three huddled together. The Pegasi flew above, not noticing what was going on below, so close but so far away, and the cacti with their glimmering, razor-sharp spines leaned in closer.

Diamond Tiara closed her eyes as one of the misshapen false-ponies reached toward her, its barbed spines reaching out toward her face. She tried to shield Silver Spoon, even though she knew that it would do little good. Instead of the cold numbing sensation of the touch of the plants, though, she felt something else: a drop of water on her forehead.

That one droplet was followed by several more, and Diamond Tiara opened her eyes. The cactus had completely stopped moving, its brownish hoof inches from Diamond Tiara’s nose. Then, as the sound of rainfall filled the desert, it pulled its hoof back. All the cholla ponies did, and turned their faceless heads toward the sky.

“MOISTURE,” they said inside Diamond Tiara’s head.

As the rain started to pour down from clouds towed by winged ponies high above, all motion of the plants ceased. They simply stood, their bodies soaking up the water from the sky. They did not attack, because they no longer had a need to. They had gotten what they wanted, the only thing that they had ever wanted. They had been watered.

And, realizing this, Diamond Tiara hugged her friends tightly and laughed, collapsing into the muddy sand with them breathlessly. It was over, finally over. They were safe at last.

Chapter 8: Parents

The rain rolled down the glass of the automobile’s windows, and lightning lit the vastness of the desert in the darkness. The storm was starting to move on, and the rain was finally slowing, but outside still looked wet and dirty.

Spoiled Rich sighed, annoyed, and leaned back into her seat.

“Those Pegasi,” she said. “They always have the absolute WORST timing. They just couldn’t wait just a few more minutes?”

She turned back to her husband, who was once again ashen and greenish, his eyes fixed directly ahead as the car trundled through the empty, wet roads. Occasionally, the tires would slip just slightly, and he would grab onto the seat with tremendous vigor.

“Dear,” said Spoiled Rich, pulling one of Filthy Rich’s hooves off of the fabric, “you’re stressing the upholstery.”

“Sorry,” he said.

Spoiled Rich looked back out the window, and, seeing nothing she liked, decided to yell at the driver.

“Driving Glove!” she said to the unicorn in the front. “Can’t you keep the ride any smoother? And do tell me you are competent enough to make this vehicle go the PROPER speed?”

“I can do one or the other, ma’am,” said the highly stressed unicorn. “But the road is slick…badly maintained, I’m afraid.”

“Fine,” said Spoiled Rich in a huff. She turned back to her husband. He did not seem to be in any condition for conversation, but Spoiled Rich needed something to do.

She made herself comfortable. “That party,” she said, sighing. “Dreadful, wasn’t it?”

“I thought it was…okay,” said Filthy Rich, producing yet another bottle of Pony-Bismol and drinking much of it.

“Okay? Darling, are you BLIND? Not one of those Pegasi came by their money honestly! I’m sure that at least half of them were in the mafia- -the mafia, Filthy! And the rest were no doubt gamblers…and did you see what they were wearing? Those ridiculous hats and- -and- -bolo ties! The audacity!”

“But I like bolo ties…”

“Don’t joke about that, Filthy. They are hideous. And the mares…oh, it makes me sick just thinking about them. No sense of fashion here, absolutely no class…but what would I expect from a bunch of Pegasi? They’re really no better than…than…pigeons!” She sighed, savoring her anger at ponies that had the audacity to fly when she could not. “At least that boring meeting you were supposed to attend was canceled. The shows at least made this trip slightly less negative. Even if you were ogling the dancers…”

“I was not ogling,” said Filthy, defensive despite his nausea. “I paid good money for that show, so I was going to watch it as closely as possible! And you know I only have eyes for you, Spoiled!”

“Oh,” said Spoiled Rich, giggling like a schoolfilly. “So you didn’t just marry me for my daddy’s money, then?”

The wide-eyed expression on Filthy Rich’s face indicated that he was not sure if that was a trick question.

Spoiled Rich sighed. “It will be nice to get back to a building that we own, though. I just want to sit back and relax. Drink some expensive cider, have some expensive chocolates…and not have to get them myself. I’m so glad you sent for the servants, dear.”

Filthy’s eyes widened. “I didn’t send for the servants- -I thought you did!”

They both stared wide eyed at each other- -and then burst into laughter.

“Oh, my,” said Filthy Rich, his mirth momentarily outweighing his carsickness. “We really dropped the ball there, didn’t we, Spoiled?”

“Oh, the look that must have been on Diamond Tiara’s face!”

Filthy suddenly stopped laughing and looked concerned. “That’s right…we just left our daughter at that big house all alone…”

“Oh, come now,” said Spoiled. “When I was her age, I was left alone in a house at least twice that size for weeks on end. Perhaps seeing how the lesser half has to live will teach her to appreciate the reason why we MUST maintain our station. And besides, she has that bohemian child with her…”

“Silver Spoon?”

“Yes, her.” Spoiled sighed. “I wish our daughter could be more like her…”

“You mean more academic?”

“I mean thinner. And prettier. I mean, ugh…well, at least she didn’t inherit your color…”

Filthy Rich sighed. He did not want to get into the argument about how he should bleach his coat white yet again, especially when he was on the verge of doing something much worse to the upholstery than stretching it.

“Besides,” said Spoiled Rich. “This house is literally nowhere. What could possibly happen to her over the course of two days?”

Filthy Rich chuckled humorlessly, in part because he felt terrible from being in the car, and in part because he felt terrible about leaving his only daughter alone in a big, empty old house. Of course, he knew that his wife was right- -she always was.

The car started to slow, and then turned into the long driveway of the house. The car bumped and shook on the rocky, unmaintained road. At several points the tires got stuck in the mud, but Driving Glove managed to keep them moving.

Then, finally, they came to a stop. Driving Glove got out, moving around to open the door to let his employers our, but Filthy Rich beat him to it, jumping out of the car and gasping deeply the fresh, moist air. He made a mental note to ensure that he never, ever road in one of those horrible contraptions again.

Spoiled Rich stepped out of the car, and Driving Glove held an umbrella in his magic over her. The rain had mostly stopped, though. The Pegasus-driven storm was now receding into the distance, but a wake of clouds still remained, dying the morning sky deep gray and producing an annoying drizzle.

“Filthy…” said Spoiled, looking around their front yard. “Did we…did we hire a gardener?”

“What? No,” he said, taking a few more breaths to hold down his lunch. “Why would we need a gardener in a dess…”

Then he looked up and saw them. Throughout the front yard of his newly acquired house were hundreds if not thousands of cacti of every shape and size. All were swollen to the point of obesity, their green bodies turbid with water and covered in seemingly infinite flowers of every color.

What was strange, though, was not the plants themselves but their location. Filthy Rich could have sworn that they had not been there when he had left.

“Well that’s strange,” he said, running his hoof across the closest of the trees. Its surface was smooth and without even a trace of spinage, covered instead in a pleasant fine down. “I don’t remember these.”

“Well,” said Spoiled Rich. “They certainly are planted poorly. But I admit that these flowers are…impressive.” She leaned close to one and smelled deeply- -only to have her eyes widen as she pulled back coughing loudly. “Sweet Celestia!” she cried. “They smell HORRIBLE!”

“Really?” said Filthy Rich, leaning into a head-sized blood-red flower and smelling slightly. He choked at the smell and felt his eyes water. It smelled like something that had been left to rot for a long, long time.

He turned around and knew that he was about to be chastised by his wife for smelling something that she had told him was disgusting- -but before either of them could speak, they heard a sound coming from the distance on the damp air: the sound of fillies screaming.

Filthy Rich and Spoiled Rich looked at each other wide eyed, and then broke into a gallop. The house was large- -almost impossibly large, Filthy Rich finally realized- -but they moved quickly toward the sound of their daughter’s voice.

It only took minutes to reach the source of the sound. There, the plants had somehow grown into a vast circle. As Filthy Rich got closer, he realized that their forms were different from the trees and cacti in the front of the house. It was almost chilling how much they looked like ponies, caught half-step approaching toward the center of the circle, their feet now bound to the ground by thick masses of roots and their lush bodies festooned with beautiful but foul-smelling blooms.

Then they reached the center, and saw that the two fillies were not in fact screaming. They were instead laughing and dancing in the mud and rain, hardly noticing how dirty they were getting.

“Diamond Tiara!” cried Spoiled Rich, her windedness immediately vanishing at the sight of her daughter playing in the mud like a common pony. “What are you doing out here in this MUD?! In the RAIN?! And…and what are you WEARING?”

Filthy Rich himself actually wondered why his daughter was dressed in something that looked more like something out of an old science fiction movie than any clothes that a pony of her upbringing would even consider wearing, or why Silver Spoon was wearing a similar version.

Then, suddenly, Spoiled Rich screamed and reared on her hind legs, pointing.

“FILTHY! It’s a BUG! A MONSTER! Squash it squash it squash it SQUASH IT!”

Filthy Rich looked to where his wife was pointing and gasped when he saw a low-set, sharp toothed monster standing next to his daughter.

“Diamond Tiara, get away from it!” he said, racing forward and attempting to stomp the creature into oblivion.

Whatever it was, it was fast. As Filthy Rich brought his hooves down to crush it, it sprinted between his legs, attempting to escape and causing Spoiled Rich to release another blood-curdling scream of disgusted horror.

“Dad, stop!” cried Diamond Tiara in a panic.

“Mr. Rich, no!”

“Please no steppy!” cried the monster as Filthy Rich chased it down.

“Don’t worry, girls!” he cried. “I may be rich, but I know how to smash a bug!”

The creature rapidly ascended a nearby spineless cactus, clinging to the top. Its glossy, moist wings vibrated mockingly, releasing a cicada-like screech. Filthy Rich’s eyes narrowed, and he picked up a strangely spiny stick in his mouth and slammed it into the creature’s side, knocking it free from the cactus with a cry. It landed on the ground in an inverted position and flailed its grotesque, greenish limbs trying to right itself.

“Don’t worry,” said Filthy Rich, lifting his hoof over the creature. “This thing won’t bother us anymore!”

The air was suddenly split by two strange sounds, like a twin pair of electrical discharges.

“I would not do that, if I were you,” said the figure standing inches from Filthy Rich’s right. His hoof froze, and he looked down at the creature beside him: a much larger version of the monster he was about to crush, its body clad in a rag-like cloak over hard black armor.

Diamond Tiara looked up at the two figures that had appeared from seemingly nowhere. She recognized them both as morlocks, but they were much larger than Pick. One had appeared beside Diamond Tiara’s father, and from the way she had spoken, Diamond Tiara knew that she was female. The other had appeared beside Spoiled Rich, who nearly fainted at the sight of a rag-clad being standing beside her.

Pick’s eyes immediately widened, and he spread his wings to turn himself over. He then stood at attention.

“Lord Niobus and Eleventh Princess Pyroxene!” he said, quickly and with a military tone.

“Second offspring Diamond Pick,” said the female morlock, Pyroxene. The dial in her chest clicked slightly, its outer ring turning slowly around a spiraling set of crimson and bright pink jewels. “I see you have…” she paused. “Hmm. Not only have you survived Hazard Zone Six, but you have successfully constructed a translation cog for the surface-goat language. This is…impressive, actually.”

“Thank you, Eleventh Princess,” said Pick. “Your words honor me greatly.”

“Pick,” whispered Diamond Tiara, leaning close to him. “Those are your parents?”

“With all respect,” hissed Pick back. “SHUT. IT.”

“Don’t tell me to shut it!” shouted Diamond Tiara. “Or I will shut yours!”

“I see you have not only managed to somehow mediate our competition, but also rescued the goats,” said Pick’s mother, unamused. “And acquired us more than enough meat…”

Diamond Tiara’s eyes widened.

“Oh yes,” said the other morlock. His voice was deep, and he leaned in close to Spoiled Rich, who was shaking but too afraid to run. “I have not had surface-goat since I was just a colt…but this one looks…unpleasant. She will need to be heavily smoked and well-seasoned.” He reached out and poked her, which provoked a scream. “But she will indeed produce a ready supply of lard.”

“Don’t you DARE touch my wife!” said Filthy Rich, his voice shaking. “Do you- -do you have any idea who I am?”

“No,” said Lord Niobus, twisting his own technetium dial. His was mounted on one of his shoulders, and as he reached for it, Diamond Tiara saw that instead of jewels its front was covered in an odd shape of dark and highly polished wood. He addressed his wife. “I will summon a drone to…process…the raw materials.”

“Wait!” said Pick.

The other two morlocks paused, and both turned toward Pick. “A…request, Second Offspring Diamond Pick?”

Pyroxene stepped forward, pushing Filthy Rich out of her way and looming over Pick. She was flatter than a normal pony, but with her body completely covered in armor with glowing-red heaters and rotting fabric, she looked even more terrifying to Diamond Tiara than Spoiled Rich did.

“Yes,” said Pick, refusing to let his voice shake. “I request that you leave these ponies unharmed.”

“Ponies?”

“Yes,” said Pick. “They are ponies. And these two are my friends.”

Pyroxene looked down at Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon. Her helmet was more ornate than Pick’s had been, and the lenses that covered her tiny eyes flicked mechanically from one filly to the other.

“Then why should I preserve the adults?”

“Because they are my parents,” said Diamond Tiara, stepping forward.

“Diamond!” hissed Pick.

“No!” said Diamond Tiara sharply. “Now YOU shut it! I’ve had it with this! I just got abandoned in a house build by crazy ponies, chased down by YOU, then had to fight my way through a whole army of plants that were trying to drain every drop of moisture from my adorable little body! I’ve HAD IT!” She turned toward Pyroxene. “And if you think you can just show up at MY HOUSE and threaten to eat my parents, I’ll fight you TOO!”

Pyroxene held her ground, and all four of her mechanical lenses focused on Diamond Tiara- -and then slid from her armor up to her head. There was a long pause. Then she finally spoke. “I see you are missing a diamond from your tiara,” she noted.

“Missing a diamond?” cried Spoiled Rich. At receiving that information, she promptly fainted and was caught by Niobus, who was nearly crushed under the weight.

Pyroxene’s eyes turned toward Pick’s chest. “And I see you have a diamond inserted into your dial. Tell me, did you steal this jewel from this filly?”

“He didn’t steal anything!” cried Diamond Taira, interposing herself between Pick and Pyroxene. “I gave him that diamond!”

Pyroxene looked down at her. “I see…no doubt without any awareness of the significance of an exchange of gemstones in our culture. Nevertheless, the bond is forged.”

She stepped backward and turned toward Filthy Rich, who’s eyes darted around the desert. He took several steps back, crying out when he bumped into a needleless pony-shaped cactus.

“Name,” demanded Pyroxene.

“Ex- -Excuse me?”

“NAME.”

“Filthy- -Filthy Rich!” he cried.

Pyroxene paused. “What an unfortunate name for a pony. What is your relationship to the small porcine one?”

“You mean Diamond Tiara? I’m…I’m her father.”

“I like her. She reminds me of a younger me, except far less attractive. Strange that you gave her a colt’s name. Tell me, Filthy- -”

“Just Rich, please.”

“I would advise against interrupting her,” said Niobus, who was now helping Spoiled Rich recover from her fainting spell instead of testing her lard content.

“What is it you do?” asked Pyroxene.

“I- -I- -” Filthy Rich cleared his throat and put on a wide, artificial but warm smile. His voice changed to that he normally used to address potential business partners in long, intense meetings. “I am the proprietor of Rich’s Barnyard Bargains, Equestria’s most popular retail chain. We currently have over sixteen locations including five new state-of-the art superstores complete with grocery- -”

“A merchant, then.”

“Well, um- -yes. You could say that.”

“A merchant?” said Niobus, helping a woozy Spoiled Rich to her feet.

“I was not aware that the surface-dwellers had large enough numbers to support trade,” said Pyroxene.

“Still,” said Niobus, joining her in cornering Filthy Rich. “This opens numerous possibilities…”

“Agreed,” said Pyroxene.

“I…um…what are we talking about?” asked Filthy Rich. “And does it concern eating my wife?”

“We are beyond that,” snapped Pyroxene.

“We are mining nobility,” said Niobus. “And this area is on a very important mineral vein that is critical to us but useless to you primitives. If you can continue to help us mediate our competition, we may be willing to draft…exports.”

“Exports?” said Filthy Rich, his ears suddenly perking forward. He smiled, this time sincerely. “Well, then. I think we can come to an agreement that is…mutually beneficial.”

The adult ponies walked off toward the house, leaving the younger ponies alone in the endless garden of cactuses that now stood silent and sated. They were already talking quickly about technical business things- -all except for Spoiled Rich, who was waking with them shakily and in silence, unsure how to deal with the fact that she was in the presence of nobility who wore rags and resembled large insects.

Diamond Pick turned toward Diamond Tiara, and he seemed to deflate after his parents were out of earshot. “Oh wow,” he said. “That was close.”

“I can’t believe that your parents make you address them with titles,” said Silver Spoon.

“Family life for nobility is…different…”

“You have no idea,” said Diamond Tiara.

The three of them started following their parents back toward the house. High above them, the clouds started to break and beams of sunlight poured down onto the flowering desert below. Diamond Tiara knew what those plants were, what they had done- -and what they would continue to do for all eternity. Somehow, though, even she had to admit that they were beautiful when they were no longer thirsty.

Pick’s eyes narrowed from the sudden surge of light, and he began ticking information into his dial.

“What are you doing?” asked Diamond Tiara.

“Summoning a drone,” said Pick. “I need a helmet and a change of clothing.”

“The mask will definitely be helpful. So I don’t have to look at you anymore.”

“Yes,” he said. “And while I’m getting dressed properly….PLEASE take a shower.”

The two of them both laughed, and even Silver Spoon joined in.

“Darn,” said Diamond Tiara, watching their parents leaving into the distance. “I guess we’ll be seeing more of each other in the near future.”

“Most likely.”

“I guess I can tolerate that. You’re a disgusting bug, Pick. But you’re not that bad. At least you have a great name.”

“And you are less of a pork than I originally anticipated.”

“Hey,” said Silver Spoon, running ahead of them and looking down at a tiny, plump cactus growing at the base of its much larger mother. She reached out toward it with her hoof. “Do you think Spiny V. would invite me to a lecture if I sent him a sample?”

Diamonds Pick and Tiara both watched in horror as the tiny cactus squirmed knowingly and produced a set of small, deadly-sharp needles.

“Yeah, don’t do that,” said Diamond Tiara.

“Yeah…” said Silver Spoon, backing away from the baby cactus. “Maybe I’ll just write him a letter…”

The three of them laughed, but Diamond Tiara suddenly grabbed her head.

“Diamond Tiara,” said Pick, concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” lied Diamond Tiara as the pain slowly faded, leaving on the echoes of the whispers in her mind behind as it retreated into the depths of her psyche. “Nothing at all.”

Diamond Tiara ignored the distant, wind-like laughter. Instead, she smiled. Together with Silver Spoon and Diamond Pick, her two friends, she walked back to her new house. She knew that she would not stay there forever, but that when she was there, she would have some good times in that house. It no longer seemed threatening or scary, because it no longer was. It was big and dusty and old and had a terribly unruly garden, but with proper plumbing, she knew that it could be a good home- -perhaps eventually becoming her favorite summer dwelling of all.

The only problem that Diamond Tiara noticed with it was that it needed to be just a little bit bigger.

Chapter 6: Separation

Silver Spoon turned over in the bed, holding the old blankets close to her body. They were scratchy and moth-eaten, and normally she would have considered just the thought of touching them disgusting. At this point, though, she was just so afraid that she could not do anything but huddle beneath them against the stone walls that surrounded her.

There was no way she could sleep, though. Logically, she knew that she was at least marginally safe. The doors to the room had not been as thick and secure as Pick and Diamond Tiara had hoped. When Silver Spoon and Pick had first entered the narrow and curve-walled bedroom, the plants had been close in pursuit. They had nearly knocked open the door until Pick had stopped them with his dial. Silver Spoon was not entirely sure what he had done, but the dial now sat attached to the door, producing a field of energy that was just barely visible at the farthest corners of the room.

Diamond Pick had not said it, but Silver Spoon knew that the dial was being pushed beyond its limits. He had already depleted its power; now its light glowed dim and blue, producing a burning electrical smell as the tiny gears ticked and ground together, dropping occasional spurts of silvery dust into a small pile on the floor.

Silver Spoon sat up in bed and looked across the room. The dim light of the dial and the moonlight filtering through the ancient tactical glass on the outer wall of the room barely lit the room, but it was enough to see. Silver Spoon sighed; the room itself had indeed been renovated, but all the wall paneling, carpet, and paintings could still not disguise the fact that the walls were made of cold stone.

Pick was across the room, lying with his legs beneath his body before a fireplace filled with strange, hole-filled logs. A small fire had been started, but it was barely as bright as a candle. Through its light, Silver Spoon could see that Pick was shivering violently.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

He looked up at her. His eyes reflected the light of the room, but in the shadows, he looked just like any other colt. He sighed, and then spoke weakly. “My homeland has a native air temperature of seventy five degrees,” he said.

Silver Spoon felt the air. “It can’t be less than fifty in here, though.”

Pick shook his head. “Centigrade, not Fahrenheit.”

“Oh. Is that a lot?”

Pick nodded. “My suit…it has heaters built into it. But without my dial, I can’t power them. I’m so, so cold. But that is my problem, not yours. Just go back to sleep. You’ve been through a lot. You need to rest.” He opened his wings and wrapped them around himself, trying to hide his shivering.

Silver Spoon leaned back in the bed she had been given, but found she could not enjoy it at all. She sat up again and sighed, pulling the covers back.

“If you tell anypony, I will have Diamond- -I will never forgive you, but you can come over here if you want.”

Pick’s head poked out from under his wings, his eyes wide. “But…you’re a filly. I think. And I’m a colt. It wouldn’t be appropriate!”

“You don’t trust me?”

“No,” said Pick, then, more quickly, “I mean, I do, but…”

“Look,” said Silver Spoon, sitting on the edge of the bed. “You’re cold, and I’m scared out of my coat right now. I am just so, so afraid. It would really help me if I had somepony to hold onto, and my best friend is…is…”

She wiped away a tear that was forming. Pick stood up. “Are you sure it’s okay?”

“You’ve already seen me without my pearls,” said Silver Spoon, pointing to the necklace on the dark-colored wooden end table beside her. “Just take off that suit first.”

“Do I have to?”

“You can’t go to bed wearing armor.”

Pick hesitated, but eventually reluctantly removed his armor. In a way, Silver Spoon wanted to see what he actually looked like. She had been expecting something exotic, but really, he appeared relatively ordinary. His entire coat- -and there was a coat, even if it was very short- -was gray green, and his mane short-cut and running down most of his back. His cutie mark, as his name implied, was a type of tool which to Silver Spoon looked more like an scythe than a pick. Aside from his low posture, though, he looked mostly like an ordinary pony. The thing Silver Spoon mostly noticed was not his morlock appearance, but just how small he really was.

He climbed into the bed and laid down as far as he possibly could from Silver Spoon, awkwardly pulling some of the blankets around himself.

“Are you scared?” asked Silver Spoon.

“I have no capacity for fear.”

Silver Spoon sighed, and looked at the back of his head. He was covered in blankets, but still shaking badly. Silver Spoon could feel the tremors that wracked Pick’s body through the bed. After a moment of consideration, she turned toward him and wriggled across the bed.

She gently put her hoofs around Pick’s slightly smaller body and held him close to herself, hugging him from behind. He resisted at first, but not hard enough to actually escape. His wings were bony and hard against Silver Spoon’s chest, but his underbelly was incredibly soft.

As Silver Spoon wrapped her body around Pick’s, his shivering slowed- -but it did not stop. It continued at a different pace, a shaking that was not caused by cold at all. Even though Pick was facing away from Silver Spoon, she could hear his muffled sobs.

“I lied,” he said. “I am afraid. I’m so afraid, and there’s nothing I can do…”

“It’s going to be okay,” said Silver Spoon.

“But what if it’s not? What if…what if I never see my mother or father again? Or even my big sister?” His shaking accelerated, and Silver Spoon realized that it was from fear. “They’ll never even know. I’ll just disappear.”

“Weren’t they the ones who sent you to save us?”

“No,” admitted Pick. “They don’t even know…I was just trying to prove myself, but I’m not ready…I’m not ready for any of this. I just want to go home, to my own room, to my own bed. I want the fear to go away, to feel safe again.”

“Shhh,” said Silver Spoon, gently, holding him tightly. “We’re safe now.”

“But when my negation field fails…”

“Don’t think about it,” said Silver Spoon. “I’ve got you. You’re not alone.”

Pick seemed to calm down, but after several minutes, he spoke again.

“I didn’t mean it,” he said. “When I called her a pig.”

“You mean Diamond Tiara?”

“She’s not fat either. I think she’s really pretty. Why didn’t I tell her that? Why wasn’t I strong enough to save her?”

“You can’t blame yourself, Pick.”

“But she was my responsibility…” he turned slightly, one of his eyes looking back at Silver Spoon. “How can…how can you be so calm about this? She was your friend.”

“She IS my friend,” said Silver Spoon. “And don’t you underestimate her. Diamond Tiara is strong. So, so much stronger than I could ever be. I trust her to keep her promise, because if anypony can, it’s her.”

Pick sighed. “I wish I could share your confidence…then maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad…”

“Just go to sleep,” whispered Silver Spoon. “Everything will be okay. I know it will.”

Pick pushed up against her, curling into her grip. His shaking slowed, and after a few minutes, Silver Spoon felt his breathing become consistent and slow. He had gone to sleep.

She lay awake, though. Even though she felt better being close to another pony- -even if he was not actually Diamond Tiara- -she knew that there would be no way she could go to sleep. Not with Diamond Tiara missing. Silver Spoon had not lied: she knew that Diamond Tiara could make it out- -but she had also taken a page from Diamond Tiara herself and feigned strength to mask her fear.

All that Silver Spoon could do was hope, and worry about her best friend’s safety. As she closed her eyes and held tightly to the cinnamon scented pony beside her, she prayed to every god and goddess she could think of for Diamond Tiara’s safety.

The walls were made of stone. The floor was made of stone. The ceiling was probably made of stone. Everything was cold and nothing was wet, and Diamond Tiara could see none of it. The darkness seemed to press in around her, and though it was rendered everything invisible, from the sounds she heard she could not help but feel that she saw the edges of strange things moving around her on all sides.

She had to keep moving. There was no other option. If she stayed behind, the cactuses would get her and do horrible things to her. Of course, she was aware that they could be ahead of her as well. She just hoped that they were as blind as she was.

Eventually, though, Diamond Tiara found that moving was getting easier. After a few moments, she realized that she was able to see. Looking up, she saw that evenly spaced shelves had been built into the wall. On each one was perched a large, white-blue crystal that was lit from within. They were by no means bright, but they produced enough light to make sight possible.

Fortunately, she found that there were no plants following her. Unfortunately, though, she found that she had completely lost her way. The lights indicated that the aqueducts beneath the well had lead into a cistern: Diamond Tiara had followed one wall, and now a vast and dark room filled with tall stone columns stood to her side. The light did not penetrate the darkness far enough to show what lurked in that cistern, but Diamond Tiara could hear things moving in the blackness.

She increased her speed, following the wall until she reached another aqueduct: a long, rectangular tunnel leading into the darkness beyond. Diamond Tiara felt her heart racing in the darkness.

Then, all at once, the air seemed to distort. A powerful wind came up from below. Though Diamond Tiara could not feel it against her, she heard it: a mixture of many rambling, rasping sounds like electrical static that slowly resolved. Diamond Tiara tried to force them away, but they imbedded themselves in her mind, quickly forming a torrent of voices.

“Diamond….Tiara…” whispered the tunnel. “Diaaaaamond…”

“Stupid tunnel,” muttered Diamond Tiara. “Making me here things.”

“Help us…Diamond Tiara…”

“Help you do what?” she screamed. Her voice echoed off the long-abandoned walls. The things in the darkness that were chasing her surely heard, but she did not care. They already knew where she was, and they were just toying with her. Her fear was rapidly being overcome with her anger, and both continued to rise against her unseen enemies. “What do you want from me?!”

The voice paused. Then one perfectly clear female voice echoed through the halls: “MOISTURE.”

The forcefulness of the response was enough to make Diamond Tiara pause. As she did, she looked around and realized that the aqueduct was starting to give way to something else, a larger and much older set of tunnels. She quickly continued, though- -and this time walked faster.

“Well, you can’t have mine,” she said defiantly.

“Don’t want…yours…would never hurt you, Diamond Tiara…”
“Oh yeah? Well, that’s reassuring, isn’t it?”

“We love you, Diamond Tiara.”

Diamond Tiara once again felt herself moving more slowly. She knew that there were things approaching her from behind, following her- -and gaining slowly with silent footsteps- -but for some reason, her mind was starting to not let her remember exactly why they were dangerous.

“We have always loved you, Diamond Tiara…”

“Lies,” said Diamond Tiara, shaking her head. “You’re lying!”

“You are…one of us…and like us…you have been deceived…”

“Deceived…by what?” asked Diamond Tiara. Somehow, the voice sounded sincere and true. She wanted to doubt what it was saying, but found herself unable to.

“The morlock.” The voices shifted, and for a moment Diamond Tiara heard far more than just one voice echoing through the wall. “You have been lied to, Diamond Tiara…just as we were…”

“I don’t understand!”

“They did not come to save us…they came to reap us…”

“Reap?” Diamond Tiara shuddered.

“Those teeth…he is not trying to take you to safety…but underground. If you go…you will never come back up…”

“No,” said Diamond Tiara, stopping in the darkness. Her head hurt, and she put her hoof against it. “Pick wouldn’t…he wouldn’t dare do that to me…”

She tried to remember Pick, but all that came to her mind were visions of a terrifying, sharp-toothed monster. At the same time, she tried to remember why she was running- -and found that she could not remember if she was running from Pick or something else.

Something terrifying had gone wrong with her mind. Memories were different, and emotions were strange. She knew that she had not liked this house, that it was bad for some reason- -but all she could remember was how much she liked it. How much she wanted to stay. How nice a place it really was. How, perhaps, it might be even better if it were just a little bit bigger.

“We are not trying…to hurt you…” whispered something inches away from her ear. “We are your friends…we want you to succeed…where we failed…”

“What do you want?” asked Diamond Tiara, her voice cracking.

“Not much…left…so thirsty. We’re so thirsty, Diamond Tiara. We need…we need to drink…”

“I understand,” said Diamond Tiara. “You just want a drink…I will get you some water…as much water as you need…”

“But she…she’s protected…have to get past…have to get to the MOISTURE…”

The haze in Diamond Tiara’s mind suddenly shifted. “She?”

“The gray one…we need her…you will help us take her…give us SILVER SPOON…”

With that, the haze broke entirely. Diamond Tiara felt a surge of fear and rage well up from the depths of her mind, but not the same kind that she had felt before. This type was far stronger, bringing with it a much more powerful motivation.

“I will NOT let you hurt her!” she screamed into the darkness. “If you think you can have Silver Spoon, you’ll have to go through me first! And you will never, ever get through ME when I’m protecting my friend!”

The voice did not respond. Then, finally, it spoke, and Diamond Tiara knew that whatever abomination was taking had a smile on its unseen face. “So be it.”

Everything around Diamond Tiara seemed to burst forward at once. What she had though had just been shadows became roots, leaping out at her from their burrows deep within the cracks of the walls. She dodged, but a long and ribbed branch cut past her, scratching her side with its hypodermic spikes.

She ran. There was not enough light to see, but Diamond Tiara sprinted forward at full gallop. She repeatedly tripped on the dusty stone floor, and fell several times, but hardly noticed the pain of the impacts. She had to run, to get away, to the point where she did not even care that she could not see where she was going.

Laughter echoed through her head, surrounding her- -but coming from nowhere. Beneath it was something else. Something whispering, that spoke into a voice that belonged to no one at all. Diamond Tiara felt like screaming, but she found that she was not able to; her rapid hoofsteps and heavy breathing echoed off the walls as she darted through the labyrinth of forgotten stony tunnels beneath the accursed house above.

She could not see them, nor could she hear them. Looking over her shoulder, she saw only pony-shaped shadows galloping forward. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to escape: wherever she went, she only went deeper underground, deeper a realm that had never once seen the light of the sun.

Finally, Diamond Tiara could run no more. Her body had been running purely on adrenaline, but she was not a physically fit filly. Her legs ached, her chest burned, and she was choking on the thick spit that had formed in her mouth.

She burst through one final door, leaping into one final room, and her legs gave out. She fell into the dust of the stone tile below, gasping for air. She knew at that moment that she had failed. There was no way she could go on, and she would not be able to keep her promise to Silver Spoon.

The briars sensed her weakness and sprang silently from the darkness toward her. Diamond Tiara shielded her eyes from the mass of plant material and fleshy, swollen stems. As they exploded through the door toward her, Diamond Tiara shrieked- -not just because of the plants, but because the room was suddenly filled with intense orange light.

As she watched, a deep dust-filled groove appeared in the stone, lighting from within. The plants above writhed in agony and then burst apart, their flesh mutating and overgrowing until the grotesque and mutated mass exploded into a plume of rot and decay, covering Diamond Tiara in stinking, sulfurous black liquid.

Diamond Tiara screamed- -as bad as being sucked dry by evil cactuses was, being covered in their guts was almost as bad. As Diamond Tiara tried to shake the foul fluid and spine fragments from her body, she looked around the room and saw that it was suddenly fully lit. The light came from the groove that was cut into the stone, which glowed from within as though the groove led to some place much farther below, a place lit by flickering flame.

As she looked around, Diamond Tiara saw that there was not simply one line. Rather, the glowing spell was shaped into that of a complex and ornate five-pointed star. She was standing within the boundary of a pentagram.

None of this initially made sense to her. She had no idea where the mark had come from, or why the plants had not been able to cross it. Of course, she was glad they had- -but the confusion itself only added to her terror as much as her newfound safety detracted from it.

Once she overcame her repulsion at the putrescence that was covering her- -and wiped away most of it- -she followed the narrow beams of light that slashed across the tiles of the floor toward the center of the mark. There, she found something odd.

In the center of the shape was a statue. It was no taller than she was, and appeared to be carved out of a white material- -a material that Diamond Tiara somehow knew to be bone. The bone itself had been carved into a tall, cone like shape, linked into pieces representing tiny figures of ponies in various states of decay and mutation. They were burning, writhing, rotting, broken and injured- -and many of them were smiling and laughing. Yet, despite that, their perfectly carved eyes- -no larger than peas- -showed signs of the most horrible agony.

Sitting atop the carved pile was a figure barely the size of a hoof. She was perched on a throne made of the bodies of those below her, and unlike them, her body was carved from solid gold- -and her eyes consisted of a pair of blood-red rubies.

Diamond Tiara shivered and backed away. The statue was grotesque, but there was something more to it, some deeper, instinctive loathing. It was like looking at something long-dead, something rotten and terrible. The yellow, red-eyed pony on the top seemed too real, as if she might move at any moment- -and as if her jewel eyes were somehow actually seeing, glaring at Diamond Tiara as she smiled from her throne. The very idea of touching that horrible statue was incomprehensible, but somehow Diamond Tiara knew that if she were to try, something far more terrible than being pursued by plants would befall her.

Her shivers not turning into full-blown shuddering, Diamond Tiara proceeded to cross the room. The pentagram, it seemed, stopped suddenly against the far wall. Diamond Tiara did not know how magic worked- -as an earth pony, she had never bothered to attempt to understand it- -but she figured that, logically, any sort of magic circle had to be a circle. They did not simply end.

Sure enough, after a few moments of searching, she found a door in the wall. It was not locked, but when she pushed against it, there was a surprising amount of resistance. The door did not open, but Diamond Tiara did not give up. She slammed her body into the door repeatedly, feeling it give slightly with each blow.

Then, suddenly, the objects stacked against it on the far side collapsed and, with a shout, Diamond Tiara burst through. She tumbled to the floor as a number of boxes and random pieces of wood fell around her and on top of her.

“Stupid door!” she yelled, throwing the items off of her and standing up. “Who even blocks a door anyway? I mean, I need to get in here!” She looked around the room, and felt a chill. Her voice dropped in volume greatly. “Is…is anypony here?”

One of the boxes that had spilled clattered loudly toward onto the floor appeared to be filled with crystals, and Diamond Tiara recognized them as the same kind that adorned the walls in the aqueduct. These, though, had been fixed into copper clasps- -now green with oxidation- -that formed them into lanterns.

Diamond Tiara picked one of them up, and as she did, the crystal glowed slightly. She shook it more violently, and the crystal inside glowed with a dim internal light. It was by no means as bright as her modern, expensive lanterns, but the dull blue glow augmented the orange of the remainder of the pentagram enough to allow her to see.

The room seemed to be filled with a number of shelves, several of which had been stacked against the door. Those that remained were filled with books and notes, and every bare part of the wall was covered in faded, torn charts written in oddly familiar script.

It was what was at the desk against the wall that gave Diamond Tiara pause, though. Slumped against the desk on one side of the room was a pony skeleton, a tattered pith helmet still perched on his skull.

“No way,” said Diamond Tiara, slowly approaching the remains. She knew that she should have been afraid- -or at least disgusted- -but mostly, she felt sad. If she was right, she knew the owner of these bones. She had read his journal, and she felt like she had come to know him. In many ways, he had not been unlike her: sad, angry, and often alone. To see him lying here, forgotten and alone, just felt wrong.

The desk that his torso was sprawled over was covered in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. Diamond Tiara winced in disgust, and then blew the dust away. It immediately filled the room, making seeing almost impossible. It smelled like a really old barn, and it made Diamond Tiara cough violently.

Once Diamond Tiara finished her coughing fit and regaining her composure from the fact that she had been breathing hair and dust that had probably at some point belonged to a dead guy, Diamond Tiara looked at the table. For the most part, it was just covered in various pages and notes, all strewn about and faded, and all showing iterations of the same thing.

What drew Diamond Tiara’s attention, though, was an object sitting in the center of the table. Although it was covered in cobwebs and tarnished with age, Diamond Tiara still recognized the glimmer of its silvery metal and its hoof-sized, round shape. It was a technetium dial, the same kind that Pick wore in his chest.

All at once, Diamond Tiara remembered where she had seen it. It had been in that bizarre black-and-white film that Silver Spoon had brought up from the basement: an artifact discovered nearly a century ago during the construction of the house. It was one that Pith Helmut had clearly taken great pride in finding- -but had never once mentioned in his journal.

Diamond Tiara reached out and, being careful not to touch what was left of Pith Helmut, picked up the relic. She found that it was surprisingly heavy.

Almost as soon as she touched it, the skeleton lurched forward as if reaching out to retrieve its prized possession. Diamond Tiara dropped the dial and jumped back with a squeak, but quickly realized that her tiara had brushed it and simply caused it to shift.

She picked up the dial again, but this time, noticed something else. Beneath one of Pith Helmut’s skeletal hooves was a stack of paper, bound with staples. Diamond Tiara realized with a gasp what it was: the torn-out section of his journal.

Putting down the dial, Diamond Tiara instead reached for the fragment of the book. It was dusty and dry, but still the pages were still durable enough to turn. Diamond Tiara shook her lantern again and set it on the desk as she gingerly opened the book piece.

“…and of course, I conducted an archeological dig over the sight of the new addition prior to the start of construction. Who knows what treasures were lost or covered by previous, uneducated builders as they developed this monstrosity of a structure with their careless workpony hooves. This area, I have found, is unusually rich in Mustang artifacts in addition to a number of skeletons in multiple strata. This leads me to believe that this place may have been a burial area, or some other sort of sacred place to them. Which, obviously, means a great deal of artifacts can be recovered with careful attention.

“Item #116 was found by one of my mule workers. Initially, I believed it to be an amulet or ornament of Mustang origin. However, closer inspection revealed it to be exceedingly complex. Too complex for Mustangs by far, and even far too complex for the war ponies at the dawn of the Third Era. I am hesitant to allow myself to grow excited at this one discovery, but I daresay that this is something entirely new. Something of great potential…”

Diamond Tiara turned through the pages, finding a new passage.

“Item #116 has become the object of nearly full-time study. The more I analyze it, the more mysteries appear to me. In all my years, in decades of acquiring artifacts from tombs, temples, and graves, I have never before seen a device like this- -and to think it was dug from my own front garden.

“Although it appears to be silver, the material is something else entirely. I am not sure if there is even a word for it in pony language, but I think that it may be the same manner of material that the abandoned mines below formerly produced.

“Initially, I suspected that it might be some sort of magical device, a relic created by one of the Dark Goddess’ mages during the war. Tests on the material, on the structure, they all prove something different. Not only does item #116 not use any sort of detectable magic, but it appears to be resistant to it entirely. It is badly damaged and impossibly old, but the inside is clockwork unlike any I have ever even conceived of.

“I have moved my research into the tunnels that are beneath this house. They were designed to conceal the Dark Goddess’ soldiers from the power of the Sun. My work must not be discovered, and I grow suspicious that there are spies among me. If Celestia were to find out about this, about it what it could do to pony society…”

“What?” demanded Diamond Tiara. She turned to the collapsed skeleton beside her, as if it could respond. “What does it mean? I don’t understand, you idiot…”

“…situation growing dire. Something is wrong with my head. At first, I thought it was too much research into item #116, spending too much time in that old basement. But things are not getting clearer. My mind feels heavy. Each time I leave, it gets harder. Harder to leave the house. Am I getting older? Perhaps I am. Perhaps I am too old to compete with Daring Feats. A relic of a bygone era. But something still feels wrong. But I don’t know why.

“At the risk of sounding insane…but I must write it. I have started hearing voices.”

Diamond Tiara read quickly, her eyes streaming across the pages. The lamp was growing dim, but she did not even bother to shake it again until it had almost gone out. Journal entries flowed past her, filing in the joint between when Pith Helmut had been a gentlecoltly explorer and an unraveled madpony that had been missing from his journal. Much of what he had written concerned the specifics of the dial, and of how its mechanisms might work. Some, though, was frighteningly familiar: he wrote repeatedly of the dreams, of how he found himself night after night at the shores of a pool of crystal-clear water. Dreams that only he experienced.

After several entries, there was a long pause in dates. What was scrawled on the pages made little sense, and when Pith Helmut finally came back, his writing had changed drastically. What had once been beautiful cursive had been replaced by shaky, child-like scrawl.

“Why didn’t I listen? Why didn’t I see it, or understand? Even know, the blindness…I can feel it. Yes, I can see, but my mind…they’ve been doing things to my mind…

“They took Studly. Dear Celestia, why? Why take him? The only stallion I ever truly loved, and he’s gone. I will never see him again. I never even had a chance to say goodbye.

“I have secured my sanctum with the Idol of Ponyzuzu. The damage to my body was substantial, but it worked. At first. It can keep them at bay- -why don’t I know what they are? I see them but I don’t remember what they are!- -and it kept the thoughts away. It kept my mind clear, but. But it has been fading. I can hear them even when I am in here now.

“It’s the dust. Oh Celestia, it’s the dust. They live in it, and they get in your lungs the moment you get here. Into my lungs. Never even saw them, never knew they were there. But why am I still here? The others go. They leave, and never come back, but I…I always stay. Only I can hear them talking.

“Something is wrong. Item #116 barely interests me anymore…nothing does. Even memories of my beloved are starting to fade. They are replaced with an increscent desire to build. This house, I have to expand it. It’s like a drug. It have to make it bigger. Even the thought fills me with anticipation. But I don’t know why. Why does the house need to be bigger?”

Then, on the last page:

“This may be the last entry I can make with any semblance of lucidity. My mind is failing, but I have an idea, a plan. They are the plants. Whatever makes me…like this…it does something to them. Or do they do this to me? I don’t know. I probably never will. They are not letting me understand some things that I should be able to see clearly.

“But the solution. The solution is item #116. It is broken. Nonfunctional. But if I could get it to work, if I could repair it, I could escape. I could fight. I could cure myself. Who knows? The power in that device may very well be limitless, a vestige of an unseen culture that evolved on a different path from ours. One toward technology instead of magic. The one that gave birth to my spectre. Even she does not come to me anymore. Even she has forsaken me. I hope she remains unharmed. I should have gone with her, but I was too much of a fool. If only I had left when I had the chance. Or could I even have, if I wanted to? Would they have let me?

“I have torn out this part of my journal, anything that pertains to item #116. I see now. Memories that are not mine. They are the dead ones, the ones driven to the depths by fire and light. Celestia must never know. No one must know. I pray to the only goddess who has not forsaken me that nobody ever finds this fragment.”

As Diamond Tiara flipped through the last page, a piece of notepaper dropped out of the back. It fluttered to the ground and landed amongst Pith Helmut’s bones. Diamond Tiara reached down and picked it up. It was not a page of the journal, but it was written in Helmut’s hoofwriting. It read: “They got me. Reached sanctum, but too late. Lost too much blood. Studly, I’m coming home.”

That, Diamond Tiara realized, had been his final words. From the outside, though, he would simply have seemed to vanish, along with everypony else who had been with him. Then, she knew, somepony else had simply purchased the house and repeated the cycle. The cycle that had passed through the intervening decades until it finally came to rest upon her.

She set down the journal, leaving it where it was meant to rest, and instead picked up the dial. Pith Helmut had put great faith in this machine. Perhaps too much. His expectations might have stemmed from his oncoming madness, or from the desperation of his situation. Diamond Tiara had seen one of these dials in action, and though powerful, it made Diamond Pick no stronger than an ordinary unicorn.

This one was different, though. It was slightly larger, and the structure was different. Diamond Tiara wondered if they varied between each morlock- -and in turn wondered if this one was more or less powerful than Pick’s. Likewise, she had no idea how to actually use it. No matter what she did, it seemed to stay closed and still.

Even if it did not work, though, Diamond tiara knew that it was important, so she kept it. She instead turned her attention toward finding a way out, and a way to get back to the surface. Pith Helmut had failed to save himself, but Diamond Tiara would not.

The door she had come through was an option, but not a good one. The creatures were waiting on the other side, and even if they were not, Diamond Tiara did not know the path she had taken to get to this room- -and it led to a well that she could not climb out of.

Pith Helmut had gotten down here, though, so Diamond Tiara knew that there must be another way. Her eyes scanned the room, looking for anything out of the ordinary- -and then she saw it: a slight rim of molding behind one of the heavy bookshelves.

With great effort, she pushed the shelf out of the way and found a door behind it, likely the one that Pith Helmut had come through nearly a century ago and never come back out of. The hinges were rusted, and a number of poorly-installed deadbolts all sealed. After a bit of effort, though, Diamond Tiara was able to get it open.

The room continued on the other side into what appeared to be a storage room. Of all the storage rooms that Diamond Tiara had been in, though, this was possibly the most odd. It appeared to have been Pith Helmut’s personal vault: the walls were lined with various artifacts from his numerous Equestria-wide travels. There were statuettes in crystal, gold, stone, and every other kind of material and necklaces and jewels by the hundreds, some glittering with strange internal magic. These sat beside rare, ancient bones, preserved frescos, and even a gold-encrusted sarcophagus.

Jewels and art were nothing new to Diamond Tiara; she alone had tens of pounds of them in her family’s least used summer home alone. Most of the jewelry was old and clunky anyway, and anything silver was tarnished. That, and there were no tiaras.

What caught her attention was not the glitter of precious metal and stone, though, but rather a mannequin set in one corner of the room. A mannequin dressed in a familiar suit of armor.

Diamond Tiara smiled when she recognized the prototype from the schematic that Silver Spoon had found. It was dusty, and the material that it was made of was cracking from age, but it defintly resembled Pick’s armor- -or at least, as near as any non-morlock could make it.

The mining suit must have actually been developed, if not by Pith Helmut then by one of the mining moguls before him. If Silver Spoon was right, the internal mechanisms probably did not work. Much of the external portion, though, seemed viable- -and it gave Diamond Tiara an idea.

Quickly, Diamond Tiara pulled the suit off the mannequin. It consisted of multiple parts, and just as Silver Spoon had suggested, it really only appeared like Pick’s suit. There were no internal mechanisms, no air systems or pumps; it was the clothing equivalent to costume, glass diamonds. Diamond Tiara did not need those things, though. What she was looking for instead was the material of the suit itself: a hard, impervious fabric meant to protect deep-earth miners from the hazards down below.

The suit, of course, had not been designed for a filly. It was the size of an adult stallion. As such, Diamond Tiara had to discard some of the pieces. The rough, cracked rubber outside had to go, but fortunately, many of the internal parts were adjustable through a number of metal straps and clasps. When adjusted properly, they were surprisingly tight and form-fitting.

Diamond Tiara made up the rest of the armor by scavenging pieces from Pith Helmut’s collection of Nightmare Moon-era suits of armor, some of which lay in disarray in his vault. Interestingly, not one of them had rusted or tarnished. They were all made of the same type of heavy, silvery metal- -or a metal that was not silver at all.

The result was heavy, but not entirely unwieldly for an earth pony. Diamond Tiara just hoped that the combination of random pieces would be protective against spines. For how ugly the combination was, she sure hoped so.

Near the back of the room, there was a long, spiraling steel staircase leading both upward and downward. Diamond Tiara did not want to go downward- -although she did wonder just how deep it went. Instead, she began to climb the rickety, rusted structure.

At some point, she felt the air change. The voices in her head started to whisper again, and she knew that the plants could detect her again. She had passed the boundary of the pentagram’s protection, but still continued to climb the stairs until she reached another set of smaller tunnels that looked somewhat more modern.

She followed these for a long time, until, at last, she reached a termination point. The path had narrowed, and suddenly stopped with only a ladder leading upward to a heavy, wooden door. Diamond Tiara climbed the ladder carefully as the dry rungs creaked beneath her and pushed the door open.

Instantly, she knew that she had arrived at the surface. Light poured through several high, glassless windows in a wooden-walled room that smelled of old oil and gasoline. Looking around, Diamond Tiara saw that she had come up in a groundskeeper’s shed.

“Eew,” she said, pulling herself out and closing the door behind her, noting how perfectly the top seemed to fit into the grain of the splintery, dusty and stained floor of the room. “Of all the places…couldn’t be a wardrobe, or, like, a money room or something. No. A shed.”

She crossed the room as quickly as she could, passing the old gardening equipment and trying not to step in anything gross and workponyish. The floor creaked as she walked, and she wondered if the plants could hear her.

Her question was answered almost as soon as she reached the door. Something heavy rammed it from the far side, imparting enough force to knock several of the hinges out of place and to start to tear the frame out of the wall.

Diamond Tiara shrieked and fell backward into one of the shelves. Tools and containers, their contents long-since evaporated, dropped onto her- -as well as a dusty old calendar filled with pictures, apparently of Princess Cadence.

“Ow,” said Diamond Tiara. Her armor deflected most of the objects, but they were still heavy and her head was still exposed. She had not bothered to take the suit’s mask; it was too big, and it would preclude her wearing her tiara.

Something hit the door again, and this time it nearly collapsed. Tendrils of spiny, swollen plant branches began to snake through the openings forming between the door and the wall. Diamond Tiara felt panic flowing through her again, and she reached through the pile of tools, trying to find a shovel or a rake or something that she could use to defend herself.

Then her hoof fell on something different, something with a strange handle. Diamond Tiara looked down and smiled when she saw the tool that had fallen beside her: a gas-powered hedge trimmer.

She stood up and picked up the trimmer in her hooves. With one quick motion of her mouth, she pulled the staring cord and, miraculously, the device hummed to life, its blades clicking against each other as the motor revved.

“Groovy,” said Diamond Tiara as the door burst open and the plants poured in. They almost seemed to pause in confusion as Diamond Tiara charged them, swinging the hedge trimmer in her mouth.

The first cholla tree she struck resisted, but then its flesh gave way as it was pruned by the clacking blades. Diamond Tiara was covered in a torrent of grassy-smelling plant fluid, and spiny, writhing branches rained down on her armor. The tree was followed by a pony-shaped cactus, and Diamond Tiara struck it where its bark was thinnest- -in the knees. Her clippers cut through it easily, and it fell on its side.

“Who’s your gardener NOW?!” she taunted, her words slightly distorted by the gardening tool in her mouth. She quickly climbed past the attacking creatures, cutting her way through the crowd outside, letting their body parts fly around her.

Her cutting was effective, but mostly, as soon as the plants detected any of their precious moisture escaping, the fragments that Diamond Tiara was generating would pounce on it, or on each other, trying to devour it. The distraction was almost as effective as the cutting tool.

Either way, Diamond Tiara did not care. She just kept moving forward, letting nothing stand in her way.