“Turtledove!” you yell out.

A full minute of complete silence follows your declaration. Then the blindfold is pulled from your face, allowing you to see. You are indeed sitting in the Lodge, bound to a chair opposite the head of the table. Sitting at the head of the table is a pony in a dark cloak and a hood with a mask pulled over their face. The flickering, dancing flames from the fireplace and the candles cast them into eerie half-shadow, half-light.

They glare at you for a moment, then tug the mask and hood from their head, revealing Turtledove herself. “How did you figure it out?” she snarls, her face a picture of furious amazement.

You swallow and start to speak, barely believing your own daring. “Your chair. It has long legs, which means it’s meant for a short pony. Also, the ashes and matches next to the chair, which you left behind from smoking your pipe.”

Turtledove glares at you for several seconds, her frowning mouth sitting atop her steepled hooves. You hardly dare to breathe, thinking that every beat of your heart that now resounds in your head will be your last.

“You know, of course, that I can’t let you leave town alive,” Turtledove speaks quietly.

You swallow again. “But on the other hoof...you could be of great use to the Court,” Turtledove continues. “You are of the proper mind...few connections…”

She thinks for a moment more, then her horn alights. You flinch, but to your surprise, you feel the ropes loosening from around your body. You slowly sit up, rubbing your forelegs where the cord bit into the flesh.

“You’re coming with me,” Turtledove states. A beam of magic snakes out of her horn and wraps around your neck. “This is a leash spell,” she explains. “If you try to run away, I’ll do this.”

The leash glows with energy and pain rockets across your entire body. Your legs quiver and nearly give out, your jaws clamp together and white flashes across your vision; the agony is so great you can’t even scream, only silently beg for it to stop. The pain disappears as soon as it came, and you collapse to the ground, panting.

“Let’s go,” Turtledove orders, moving to the door. The leash of magical energy tugs on your neck and pulls you after her. You exit into the cold, dark mountain night. The stars far above your head gaze down at you pitilessly, and the shadows of the shivering, whispering trees reach out towards you, as if trying to seize you and pull you into the eternal abyss.

Your bike is sitting outside, waiting as though in fright. Turtledove swings herself onto the seat and gestures for you to get on. You pull yourself onto the seat behind her, reluctantly placing your hooves around her waist. She kicks the engine to life, and the bike responds with a roar, as if displeased at its new passenger. Turtledove guides the vehicle up a different pathway, a thin, more disused path heading further north, climbing further up the mountain. The trip is passed in silence; you battle futilely against your shivering all the way up.

Finally, she pulls the bike over a rise and you stare at the destination appearing before you. A great, three-story mansion stands in a clearing, majestically staring down at the land that it rules, faintly illuminated by the stars and the moon. But it no longer looks anything like the photograph; the pyramidal peaks are crumbling and have holes in them, and many of the windows are cracked and broken. But the door is the same as it was when you saw it in the picture: the great raven with its wings spread in preparation for flight, glaring down at you as you approach.

Turtledove turns the bike off and drops the kickstand. “Come on,” she barks, pulling you off the bike and pushing open the doors. You follow her inside. The doors close behind you, and you feel as though they are closing down on your life.

Turtledove lights the lamps hanging on the walls as you pass by, providing a faint glow as you advance deeper and deeper into Blackfeather Quill’s ancient home. Dust rises from the floor with every step. Paintings, many of them bird-themed, decorate the walls, all of them faded with time and dust.

As you proceed down the hallway, you become aware of a distant sound: what sounds like loud, raspy, distorted breathing, slow and deep. Turtledove opens a set of double doors and enters a brightly lit room. You follow inside and stare in a mixture of astonishment and horror at what the room contains.

Most of the room is taken up by a huge mass of machinery covered in dials, switches and blinking lights, from which the hissing, breathy noise is coming from. Tubes and pipes that glow with pale silver energy connect great black boxes to one another. A great web of wires are connected to a large cushioned chair, which sits in front of a desk with several books on it. Sitting in that chair is a corpse, hooked up to the tubes and wires. The body is of a black unicorn, bald and with mere tufts remaining of his coat, so wrinkled with age that it looks like a shriveled up grape. The body’s cutie mark is familiar: a raven sitting upon a desk.

A gasp of horror rises from your chest as the body suddenly opens its emerald eyes and rises up, fixing its gaze upon you.

“Grandfather,” Turtledove announces with a look of deep reverence as you both approach the desk. “This is the detective I told you about.”

Grandfather? you think, but your pondering is interrupted when the withered pony opens its mouth and speaks.

“Hello, detective.” His voice is like a slow bubbling coming up from a deep, murky swamp, horrible to your ears. “Do you know who I am?”

You gulp and nod. “Blackfeather Quill,” you reply quietly.

“Yes,” Quill nods. “You see this machine I am hooked up to? This machine is what has been keeping me alive for the past one hundred and twenty-seven years. It, and the sirenium from my mines that power it.

“Yet, I am wholly dependent upon this machine; if I am disconnected to it for even a moment, I will die. And worse yet, it is starting to break down.” As if to confirm his statement, the machine groans and a jet of steam blasts from one of the pipes.

“Gold Elixir built this for you, didn’t he?” you ask, receiving a nod in reply. “That’s why you and the Court brought Idea Spark here, to help you fix it.”

“Yes,” Blackfeather confirms. He slowly reaches forward and picks up a worn, leatherbound notebook from the table. His joints creak and crack horribly as he moves, placing the book in front of you. You open the book, only to find that its pages are covered in incomprehensible gibberish, bizarre riddles and strange drawings.

“That journal has been the bane of my existence for over a hundred years,” Quill states. “It belonged to Gold Elixir, who has been the source of my rise, and my ruin. He made these machines that were powered by my sirenium, granted me extended health and life. Yet his own gift drove him mad towards the end of his life. He would only speak in riddles and codes. Somewhere in that journal is the information that I need to fix this machine, and to grant me immortality, yet I cannot comprehend a word of its pages.”

“And that’s where the Court comes in,” you conclude. “You find the ponies that are best at puzzles and bring them here to try to decode the journal.”

“And also to weed out anypony that may interfere,” Turtledove adds with a rather nasty grin. “You probably already figured it out, but Sheriff Hawkdive is loyal to us. No brains at all, but he’s good at obfuscating information that we do not want to be discovered.”

“Beneath us is a machine that I helped Elixir design,” Blackfeather continues. “It sends out energy that affects the thoughts of the ponies below, causes them to develop a quiet obsession with riddles and puzzles. We can also use it to control the ponies to obey our instructions without question.”

“But it does worse sometimes, doesn’t it?” you add, remembering Sunrise Glow.

Blackfeather narrows his eyes. “Some ponies are more...vulnerable to its effects than others. And some ponies, despite our attempts to keep them under our control, resist us. Idea Spark was one of them; he attempted to escape and warn authorities, so we had to kill him. If he…”

Blackfeather’s voice suddenly trails off and he slumps in his chair with a low gurgle. He stares blankly at you, a line of drool running down from out the corner of his mouth.

“Uh…” you stammer to Turtledove. “Is he okay?”

“Give him a minute,” Turtledove replies patiently. “He’s just dead.”

The machine buzzes to life and gives a great groan as energy races through the pipes and tubes. A jolt of power runs down the wires and into Blackfeather Quill’s body. He throws his head back and gives a long, loud, violent scream that echoes throughout the entire room as more and more power is pumped into his body, his limbs shaking violently. The whole thing lasts for over a minute, and he screams the entire time. When it’s finally finished, he collapses into his seat. His eyes snap to you, filled with a mixture of agony and rage, and he lunges forward, seizing you by your lapels and pulling you up into his face.

“Every time I die, it’s always for a little bit longer, detective!” he screeches. His breath reeks of decay and rot, and his eyes burn into yours. “I have crossed over to the other side a thousand times! There is nothing there!” He releases you suddenly, panting as though exhausted, but continuing to glare at you with the same intensity. “You will help me, detective, or I will send you to follow Idea Spark!”

Your heart is trying to jump out through your throat and your breathing is rapid and shallow. The desperation that pervaded Blackfeather’s speech is infecting you as well.

“You will begin right now,” Quill speaks, his voice lower and feebler as he sags into his seat. “Turtledove, take them away.”

Turtledove tugs on your leash and pulls you away from Quill. The elder’s eyes burn into you as you are dragged through a different door and down a dark hallway. You fight to keep calm and pay attention to your surroundings. The stone walls are too close on your form, the shadows cold and suffocating.

You pass by a door on your right. This door is solid oak and is locked with a combination lock. A strange, throbbing hum can be heard through the wood; as you pass by, a piercing pain stabs into your skull and what sounds like dozens of hissing, whispering voices fill your ears. You stumble against the wall.

“Move!” Turtledove snaps, shoving you down the hallway. The pain fades and the whispering ceases as you move away from the locked room. She opens up a different door and pushes you inside. A bare bulb hangs from the ceiling, illuminating a small, cell-like room. A cot with thin sheets is bolted to the floor. Next to the bed was a table and a chair with several papers and pencils. Notes are scrawled over almost every sheet.

“This is a copy of the journal,” Turtledove states, pointing to a stack of papers on the desk. “You keep working, you stay alive.”

And with that, she closed the door behind her. You hear the sound of a lock clicking, and realize that you are completely trapped. You sink down onto the bed, numbly considering your options. All of them end in only one way: the mines. And nopony will ever know what will happen to you.

With a defeated moan, you collapse down onto the bed, covering your eyes with your hooves. Your body starts to shake, and you force yourself to gulp down air to try to stave off the growing panic.

Suddenly, you notice something on the wall next to the cot. A symbol is carved into the stone: a pyramid with a spark held in the center. A small arrow points down the wall to a small crack. Inside the crack, you see a corner of a piece of paper. Carefully, you extract the paper and unfurl it. The message is written in a quick, desperate, scrawling hoof.

If you are reading this, then I am probably dead. Which means it’s all up to you now.

When I came here, I thought it would be a simple job working at the factory, helping them to maintain their equipment. But then the Court found me. I was good with magical engineering, and good at puzzles; I was an irresistible prize to them.

Hawkdive brought me into the Court, and when I passed their tests, they set me to work with other members, helping them solve the journal of Gold Elixir. From what they told me, he had gone mad from sirenium exposure and started writing in riddles and codes, and they needed help decoding it. Initially, I was happy to help.

But then I started figuring out what the Court was really capable of: the ponies that they had killed, what they did to keep their secrets. When I attempted to leave, to contact my wife in Chicoltgo, they threatened me to keep me here; Hawkdive told me of the things that he had done to outsiders, brought me to the shallow graves where the bodies were kept, and told me that if I attempted to leave, he would pin these on me.

I had no choice. I had to stay, to stay quiet. At one point, I managed to figure out that Turtledove was their leader and followed her up to the Quill Mansion. And I saw her grandfather. I saw Blackfeather Quill, and the unholy thing he was hooked up to, and I realized that all of this—all the blackmail, all the murder—was to keep a madpony alive.

Unfortunately, Quill caught me, and they locked me up in here. As of this writing, I’ve been stuck here for two days. In the room next to me is a machine that they use to control the populace, the mind machine that causes everypony here to become obsessed with riddles and puzzles.

Here there were several lines that were crossed out, followed by a frantic scribbling:

It’s affected me, too: I can barely think clearly with all the puzzles racing through my mind.

But there’s been an upside. Quill brought me out of my room once, and I managed to see the combination lock for the room into the machine. I also managed to fix the lock on the door of this room so that it won’t close properly.

You need to get out and destroy that machine. While it is active, nopony can leave this village. Everypony in this village will be doomed to insanity, all because this madpony wants to live forever.

The code is…

Here there were more scribbles and lines that were crossed out, then:

A: I am having family over for dinner. I will be hosting two grandparents, four parents, one father-in-law, one mother-in-law, one brother, two sisters, four children, two sons, two daughters, three grandchildren, and one daughter-in-law. What is the minimum number of settings I’d need to place?

B: I was with my three friends, counting the number of bits between us. We discovered that my three friends had sixty bits between the three of them, and I had three coins less than the average number of bits between the four of us. How many coins do I have?

C: There is a group of ponies in a room. Five of them are blind in the right eye, four are blind in the left. Three can see in their left eye, two can see with their right, and one is sighted in both eyes. What is the minimum number of ponies in that room?

D: If one apple and six bananas weight the same as a pineapple, and three apples and a pineapple weigh the same as ten bananas, how many bananas weigh the same as the pineapple?

D is not the first, nor the last. B comes right after C, but before A.

I am sorry I can not make this easier, but the madness that consumes me won’t let me just tell you what the answer is.

I will attempt to destroy the machine myself. But should I fail, it falls on you. If you succeed, please tell my wife, Wind Whistler, that I love her and that I will miss her.

Good luck, my friend.

Idea Spark.

You stare at the message for several long minutes of silence, then slowly reach into your pocket and extract the Pinnacle Club pin. The spark seems to glimmer at you, like a small star plucked from the sky to guide you forward.

Your heart continues to beat rapidly, but no longer fearfully. You know what you have to do.

Solve the combination.

Author's Note

This is it, readers. Let's bring in 2017 with one last puzzle!

Everything hinges on this. This is your one and only chance of getting out of Raven Hollow alive. Good luck!

Hints: A and C are not as simple as you may initially think. D is similar to a previous puzzle.

Congratulations to Everfree Pony, Magic Step, The Villain in Glasses and themouthofmush for solving last week's puzzle! Good luck with our last puzzle!