There is Nothing Harder than Just Going On

Dusk pressed the officer for a few more minutes, asking questions about the size of the fort and locations where the unicorns might have put up some magical defenses to reinforce the stone.

Telling them enough of the plan to get his support, Dusk enchanted a stone in the cell so that it would ping him if it was touched. He then teleported back to the closet and pulled out the supplies he'd secured earlier before turning invisible and walking outside of the fort, unable to lift his head above his shoulders.

With his nose in the dust, he scrawled symbols on the outsides of the stone walls, not bothering to hide them when he noticed that the unicorns weren't even patrolling beyond the tops of the walls.

After he'd placed the eight runic circles on the outsides of the walls, he teleported back to his cell and knocked on the wall.

"Any issues?" he asked, calling quietly under his door.

"No," the officer replied before saying, "Come on over here, so we don't have ta' keep yelling at each other."

Dusk phased through the wall again, wincing as his wing clipped a strut before facing the ground between the stallion's forehooves. "I finished the circles on the outside walls. Once I activate them, they won't be able to send magic past the walls of the fort."

"Good," he sniffed, nodding. "After they can't send help, we'll break out the rest of my corps and give those unicorns what they've been giving us."

Dusk flinched.

"What," the stallion spat. "You think they deserve better?"

"I think every creature deserves better than this, yeah," he said, narrowing his eyes and glaring at the officer. "An eye for an eye makes—"

"Says the pony with two eyes," the officer snarled quietly. Reaching forward, he started to grab at Dusk's muzzle and say, "You look here, you useless bucking—"

He stopped when Dusk's corona seized the hoof. Not painfully, but firmly enough that he couldn't move.

"No," Dusk whispered, straightening his spine a bit. "My sins are mine to remember, not yours. I will do what's best for this country, not what's best for your petty revenge. If you'll agree to that, then I'll take you with me. Otherwise?"

Dusk's eyes, still slowly leaking saltwater, raised to gaze into the stallion's own.

"You can stay here."

The officer's tail flicked twice, hard enough to make an audible smack against his flanks before he gave Dusk a small smile.

"Fine," he breathed out. "I guess my temperament got the better of me for a moment. A month. Whichever. I'll follow your command then, or at least give you a reason if I gotta say no."

Dusk nodded. "Best I could ask for. Now, how many of the earth pony command here made it through the usurping?"

"Me," the stallion said grimly. "I was one of two, and they piled on the lieutenant early on when they saw he wasn't gonna take this laying down. Only reason I didn't join him was 'cause he gave me some final orders; take care of the rest of the corps."

Dusk nodded solemnly. "I'll get his name later once we can put it in proper stone." He blinked a couple of times. "Uh, speaking of names..."

"Oh, Steel Stance. Sergeant Steel Stance, or Steel."

Dusk dipped his head. "Sergeant Steel. That leaves it between us two. Before we go out, I'm going to have to hide my true form."

"Why," the sergeant clipped out, less of a question and more of a demand for knowledge.

"Because I'm not supposed to be here," he said, shaking his head. "I'm going to have to alter your memory anyways—" He used his magic to muffle the angry noise Steel tried to make. "So I might as well tell you the truth.

"This is going to sound like Thaumic-Fiction, but I was manipulating some material that distorted time, and during the experiment, it got out of my control. I tried to use a spell that allows me to rewind time extremely locally, and when the spell connected with the material, it created a, a..."

Dusk chewed his lip as he tried to think of a term.

"It was like a thaumic cascade. And since I put in all of my magical might, in a panic, it sent me back a thousand years into the past.

"That's why I wasn't going to get involved," he said, dropping the magical muzzle over the other pony. "I'm not supposed to be here, and the more I meddle, the more the future changes. I have—"

He blinked more tears away at the thought.

"I have some friends I really want to get back to," he murmured before shaking his head. "So I can't muck around too much, or I risk them."

"You're not taking my memory," Steel said.

"Then I'm going to have to create a geas and swear you to secrecy," Dusk said evenly. "I don't honestly care which, as long as I know for a fact you'll never tell another pony about me or my real identity."

Steel's eyes narrowed. "What's a geas?"

"Oh, uh, it's like a magically sealed promise," Dusk said, slipping a bit into mentor mode as he continued, "A geas is a spell that is speculated to have originated in the unknown lands, to the west of Pon— err, Canterlot. It places a magical seal over a pony with certain triggers, and won't allow those triggers to take place."

He looked at Steel's uncomprehending eyes, getting harder and flintier by the word.

"Uh, you promise not to talk about me, and I cast a spell that makes sure you won't."

"Nothing bad happens if I try?" he asked carefully.

"You might drool a bit, but basically. It just won't actually come out as anything recognizable."

Steel stared at Dusk for a while before snorting and giving a quick nod. "If it keeps you out of my brain, then fine. I'll swear."

There was a bit of a ceremony to the geas. Still, Dusk kept it minimal and quick, only limiting the stallion from talking about alicorns other than Celestia and about the spell itself. After testing the geas and nodding when it successfully tied (not literally) Steel's tongue, Dusk continued laying out the plan.

"Alright, now I'm going to have to do something pretty risky," he sighed. "But I can't go out in my earth pony form and use my horn for long, or the extra magic will dissolve the illusion. Instead, I'm going to have to cast a memory filter around myself." Seeing Steel's head tilt, he sighed. "Anything that sees me will forget having seen me as soon as it looks away."

"You can just reach into pony's heads like that?" Steel asked, frowning.

"Just is a bit of an understatement," Dusk said with a frown. "It takes a lot of energy to upkeep, more if there’s more than one pony actively looking. And it's just a really light touch, on the surface level of thoughts. Just enough to make me extremely forgettable."

The sergeant snorted. "Good thing you're alicorn, then."

"Oh, that's the only reason I could even think of keeping the spell up for any length of time," Dusk snorted. "Okay, so I'll get you out of here and back into the barracks, where you'll gather up any of your crew you can before sorting out all of the new ponies being flooded in here. While you're doing that, I'll be grabbing everything I can carry out of the armory, but you shouldn't need it once I start stifling the unicorn's magic."

"You can do that?" Steel asked, narrowing his eyes.

"One at a time, but if I make a couple of alterations, I think I can make it jump from horn to horn," Dusk said with a nod. "It'll be an untried enchantment, but at worst, the spell just fizzles, and I'll have to recast the original spell."

"You can't just make the spell bigger?"

Dusk let a breath out before shaking his head and reminding himself he was talking to an earth pony a thousand years in the past.

"I could pour some more power into it, but that would just make the spell last longer, which would be useless because it uses the unicorn's own magic to upkeep the spell. And casting in an area would require time since I'd have to lock it onto each unicorn's specific aura individually.

"The way I'm planning on altering the spell already basically just widens the window in which it recognizes magic from ponies. It may catch some earth ponies with deeper ties to magic, but a couple of slightly weaker earth ponies should be worth a fort-full of unicorns that can't cast."

"Earth ponies don't—" Steel started to say before breaking the sentence off and looking at Dusk.

He slowly nodded, and Steel looked down at his hoof. "I have magic?" he whispered.

Dusk looked sadly at the officer for a moment before he pawed at the hard-packed dirt floor. "Here, let me see your hoof for a moment."

The sergeant slowly offered out the limb, and Dusk gently placed his own against it and untangled the dense field lurking just under the pony's frog, almost exactly like he had for Lilly.

"You can feel the field now?" Dusk asked, watching the stallion nod slowly. "Alright, keep your attention on it."

Dusk slowly lowered both of their hooves to the soil and reached out with the overlapping nets of his and Steel's magics. Finding that little spark, he wrapped the fields around it and gently poured the energy in before pulling their hooves away from the ground.

Steel stared at the four leaves of the clover for a silent minute before he glanced up at Dusk's muzzle.

"We could all...?"

Dusk nodded.

Steel gazed between his hooves and the plant for a long time before he physically shook himself, as a dog would after finding shelter from heavy rain.

"We can get into that later," he said, looking into Dusk's eyes. "How are we getting me to the barracks without alerting the unicorns?"

Dusk's lips quirked before returning to his poker face.

***** ***** ***** ***** *****

"Yeah, AJ never liked it much either," whispered Dusk as he gently patted the sergeant on the back, the pony trying to keep his retching dry-heaves as quiet as possible. "But it was either teleport or having to recast invisibility on us, and—"

Steel shook his head, pushing his hoof against Dusk's muzzle as he took a few more heavy breaths.

"You're just lucky I didn't get to eat anything before they threw us in solitary," he muttered, spitting into the trench that led out from the bathrooms to the cliffs. "Now, you go on to the armory, and I'll get to talkin'."

"Make sure the guards don't see you," Dusk whispered before he was alone with the toilets.

Peeking out of the door, he watched Steel duck past the limp, bored gazes of the pair of guards keeping 'watch' over the barracks before he sighed and teleported into the hidden area in his chosen closet.

Phasing through the wall, he restored the invisibility spell before unlatching and gently pushing the door open.

Slipping out, he just barely made it past a unicorn in armor, who glanced into the room and shrugged before shoving it closed again. He started to walk away but paused and looked over his shoulder.

Dusk held his breath and stood there, sweating and hoping that this guard wasn't sensitive enough to feel the magic field around the alicorn in the hallway.

"Hello?" they asked before moving in a straight line down to the other end of the hall.

Dusk watched him walk past before slowly sneaking the other way on the tips of his hooves, back towards the officer's quarters where he'd grabbed the spell components.

His ears perked up as he heard muted conversation, and his heart sank when he rounded the corner to see a trio of unicorn officers talking with the two guards he'd made his way past earlier.

"I'm tellin' you, sir, we heard a noise like something heavy rattling down the hall, but I couldn't find anything down that way," one of them was stressing, waving the hoof not holding a spear at the other T intersection. "He was the one at the door, but he was keepin' his eye on me in case somethin' grabbed me!"

"So what you're saying," started one of the officers, somepony who looked like a drill sergeant and spoke like one about to insert some knowledge into a trainee, "is that you, a private in his Majesty's—"

Dusk's ears strained hard when he heard that.

"—Royal Army, decided that your ass," the officer hissed, poking the guard in his peytral, "was worth more than everypony and everything you two were supposed to be guarding?"

The guard flapped his gums for a moment, no noise reaching Dusk's ears.

After a moment, the officer sighed before levitating something round out of his bag.

"No, wai—"

The unicorn went silent when the officer slammed the device over his horn, the spear in the guard's field dropping to the floor with a clatter. The officer's field then washed over the guard, stripping him of the light armor and leaving a pale blue pony shivering in the middle of a flower of metal.

"Two days," the officer said, whipping his hoof out and pointing down the hall towards the barracks that had been taken over for the earth ponies. "If you're still alive after that, then you can start on your month of latrine duty."

The guard tried to talk for another moment before shuddering as he was picked up and tossed down the hallway, skidding towards the invisible Dusk. Scrabbling, he got his hooves beneath him and looked over his shoulder before slinking the rest of the way down the hall, where Dusk had made sure to cross the entry so he wouldn't be in the way of the chastised pony.

The officer sniffed before looking back at the other guard.

"You can spend the rest of your shift here before you go right to the shit-can duty as well," he said dismissively. "Since you stayed where you were supposed to, at least, I'll even let you keep your horn for the scrubber."

The guard gulped and squeaked out a "Thank-you-sir" before returning to attention beside the door.

"Now," the officer said, looking to the other two, who'd been snickering through the latter half of the dressing-down, "we need to go over the records and figure out what and how much went missing. Besides the bucking lock," he sighed, gesturing for the guard to open the door.

Ducking his head behind a wall, Dusk quickly padded his hooves with magic before bolting silently down the hall, praying that the officers would be too involved with the conversation to notice him getting so close.

Holding his breath and standing on his back hooves, Dusk just barely managed to squeeze through the door before the last officer kicked it shut.

There were two changes to the room from last time he'd been here; there was nopony sleeping in the cots, and the door to the materials room was wide open.

The only ponies (visible) in the room were the three officers.

They walked into the room, and the main commander snagged a large, worn book and flipped it open. Leafing back, he nodded to the other two. Nodding back, they started to call out materials and their amounts, one at a time. The commander started taking notes on the clean page as they worked.

Dusk promptly began ignoring them, looking through the room for any armor or weapons he might have missed on the first pass through the room. Frowning when he didn't even see another door, he walked back out and swore silently at himself.

He'd assumed the weapons and the magic would've been in the same armory, but apparently, they were different store-rooms. Chewing on his bottom lip for a moment, he glanced back at the officers.

Making sure they were deeply engrossed in their work, Dusk waited for one to call out his canister of powdered dragon's teeth, then quickly cast a very simple misdirection spell with a thought attached to the end.

"I wonder," the almost chubby officer said slowly, "if we shouldn't look into the armory as well. It's close enough, right?"

The commander snorted.

"We'll check that one after, I told you," he said, not even looking up from his book. "It's not like a unicorn has any use for the spears, and it's got the metal plates in the walls so they can't be dug into." He then blinked before looking up at the other officer. "Did you seriously just ask if the armory is close? Did talking with the idiot from before get to you, or did you finally eat enough for your brain to get fat too?"

The unicorn drew himself up a little straighter but bit back the reply and just picked up the next container.

Dusk sighed quietly before walking away from the door and casting a spell on himself.

Blinking for a few moments, he squinted as the walls slowly became translucent. Staring at a texture that was suddenly papery-thin, he looked over the moving silhouettes of moving ponies until he found a place that wasn't see-through, a large box blocking the light he could see.

Noting its approximate location, he let the vision spell fade before glancing over his shoulder to ensure the officers hadn't stopped their inventory.

They hadn't, so he once again pulled some magic up into his horn and phased through one of the walls he hadn't seen anypony passing before throwing up the invisibility again. Panting a bit from the quick spell-use, he looked around the empty hallway he found himself in before starting to walk towards where he'd seen the box that blocked his magic.

Turning a few corners, he frowned at what he saw, whispering a quiet, "Buck," under his breath.

There was little doubt about what waited behind the double doors, thick beasts of dark stained red oak slabs and heavy iron hinges. There was a standard iron latch handle, but the lock had been plated with enchanted gold, and Dusk could see the slippery gleam of the spellwork from here.

Also, the earlier intrusion had definitely been noted, and instead of a duo of guards, there were five fully outfitted unicorns; two with their back to the door, one across the way, and the last two a few feet away and keeping watch towards each other, so that the other three ponies and the door were all in their eye-line.

Backing a little down the hallway, Dusk bit his bottom lip as he ran over his options in his head.

He could stun all of them, probably. But there was a question of the fortitude of the unicorns then, and he couldn't afford to rouse any sort of suspicion or let them raise the alarm. He could cast silence over the hall and then deal with them, but it'd be a struggle to keep concentration over the field and cast other spells as well.

Taking a moment to consider some other options, his lips curled slightly when he thought of how AJ and Steel had taken his teleportation.

Marking the cobblestone he was standing on, he teleported out of the fort again and looked around at the surrounding areas. Turning away from the forest that led up to the cliff, he smirked when he saw a small island, barely more than a sandbank, about half a mile into the sea.

He reappeared a couple of minutes later in the hallway, water dripping from his invisible form onto the stones in the hallway.

Running a basic levitation spell over his fur, he pulled all of the water off and teleported it back before walking back into the hall with the guards. Scraping the walls a little as he skirted the two look-outs, he got in between the two on the door and the pony opposite them before lighting up his horn.

The guards had enough time to perk up at the light gathering, and one had a silver whistle nearly at his lips before they all disappeared into space. Dusk waited a moment before nodding to himself and taking a closer look at the lock.

Sighing, he surrounded the mechanism with his field. He teleported the whole thing away, as the enchantments had only been focused on not letting lock-picks or magic into the internal mechanisms and didn't actually affect what was essentially the magical equivalent of a sledgehammer.

Pulling one of the doors open, he nodded to himself.

"This should do just fine," he muttered, walking in and closing the doors. Grabbing a nearby cloth sack, he scattered the caltrops on the inside entry before giving it a high-capacity but short-term storage field that extended beyond its material constraints.

Using his new tiny-and-relative-dimensions-in-space bag, he began scooping up piles of armor and bundles of spears, grabbing almost everything that wasn't literally nailed down.

The only things he hesitated with were the unicorn-based weaponry, several sharp chakrams, and some specialized four-bladed daggers that could only really be wielded with magic. With a shrug, he dumped them in anyways. If nothing else, it was taking their weapons away.

Taking a moment, he looked around the nearly emptied room and nodded to himself before flicking his horn at the doors and casting a shielding field on the inside that only he could walk through.

Going back out into the hall, he reinforced his shield so that the doors couldn't be opened again.

Sighing, he decided to take the straight route and cast the phasing spell before concentrating and layering in the heavy bands of illusion and enchantment magic that made up the field of Forgetfulness, the spell that made him unmemorable. Shaking his head to release some of the tension from his neck, he pressed a hoof into the wall to make sure everything was working before striding carefully through several walls towards the prisoner barracks.

He arrived through the west wall, to a scene of Steel Stance speaking to a room full of earth ponies. A glance showed the two unicorns on the floor beneath his hooves, unconscious but thankfully still breathing.

"And here he is," Steel said, gesturing to Dusk Shine. "Our savior."

The entire room turned to Dusk, who sagged slightly underneath the sudden drain on his magic. "They can't remember me right now," he called, tossing the sack to Steel. "Get outfitted.

"We have a civil war to stop."