The train station wasn’t very big. No building in this town was, and Trench Digger preferred it that way. None of her work involved big buildings. Big meant famous, blatant, noticeable, all things she disliked. She did her best work under wraps. Luckily, thanks to some quick thinking by an operative here, wraps were still what the incident was under, rather than the glares of reporters’ flashbulbs and the scrutiny of the public eye.
This particular town, Rocky Point, was in the region of Manetana, out in the middle of nowhere with a lot of hills and scrublands. The sort of quiet, homey place you never planned on staying in during your cross-country vacation, but vaguely liked all the same. Everypony knew everypony, which was vital when there wasn’t another town this side of the horizon. She’d arrived during sundown, so at least it was cool.
With a glowing horn and a slight twist of magic, Trench once again gave her coat the tiniest of tugs to set it a little more off-kilter as she stepped off the train. She was paranoid, sue her. Perfection was memorable. Meanwhile, everypony had those days where you just couldn’t be bothered to spend a minute straightening out the wrinkles in your shirt. She wasn’t perfect, so nopony would look twice at her. Thankfully, her coloring was ordinary as well: blue and off-white.
But at the same time, too much non-perfection was memorable. If somepony was the most average person on the planet except for a massive scar on their face, you’d remember them. Trench still managed to escape notice in that respect, as long as she hid her limp. It hurt, but she’d gotten good at it.
It’d rained not long before; a few pegasi were still bucking the last of the clouds to mist. The roads were wet, reflecting every little glint in every little sign back at Trench as she walked to the police station. Any given puddle, no matter how small, had its own little inverted world inside it, yet nopony ever stopped to think about it, much less look. They walked on through and carelessly stomped it out. Sometimes, Trench wondered if what the Bureau studied was the remains of something incomprehensible stomping its way through Equestria, the remains of some metacosmic roadside picnic.
“Reality” was just a curtain. No one liked looking behind the curtain. No one liked acknowledging the curtain even existed. Magic couldn’t control what was behind the curtain.
The RBC aimed to change that.
The police station sat ahead, too small and short to loom. An officer was standing outside, glancing this way and that. She was a pegasus, a bit old, a bit tall, orange mane, red coat. She matched the description of Trench’s contact, but Trench wasn’t going to just walk up and start talking to her. You couldn’t be too careful.
As Trench approached the police station, the pegasus noticed her. She kept looking around — they weren’t supposed to know each other — but there was a slight pause in the way she looked around. Too small to notice unless you were looking for it, thankfully. The pegasus waited until Trench was a little bit closer, then hop-flapped up to her. “Uh, hey,” she said, smiling. “You’re the magic expert, right? From the Crown? Officer Allium.”
Name checked out. “Yes. Trench Digger.” Trench couldn’t resist a slight reprimand. “How’d you know I was the one?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Allium chuckled. “This place is so familiar to me, the new stands out like a beacon. Why, I still remember a day several years ago clearly because, that night, I was passing the park, and there I found a tree not known to me.”
A bit awkward, but how in Tartarus were you supposed to hide a passphrase like that? At least the cover story was swift. Trench gave the first countersign. “Maybe a draconequus is twisted in its bark.”
Allium shrugged. “Maybe. Many things are present yet remain unnoticed.”
“You can see all if you but look.”
Immediately, Allium scowled. “Sweet Sisters, I can’t believe we’re still using those passwords,” she muttered under her breath. “They’re supposed to be secret, not…” She trailed into silence.
“Blame the bureaucracy,” said Trench. “It works, so there’s no need to change it.” She looked up at the police station again. “Are they still here?”
“Oh, Celestia, no, it’s been over a day!” scoffed Allium. “I couldn’t ask them to wait in a cell until you came along! No, I paid for a motel a few blocks away. They’re probably getting restless, but they haven’t tried leaving yet and I don’t think they suspect the truth.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”
Allium gestured towards the door. “We should talk to the sheriff first, just so she knows you’ve arrived and you can get some better details.”
“Lead the way.”
Light gems weren’t supposed flicker, but these had been used for so long that they did so nonetheless. Sheriff Slate Quarry had heard that that might be a sign of the magic breaking down and that she should get them replaced before the leaking mana made her start to glow, but she’d been putting the replacements off until tomorrow for the past year and a half and nothing in her office had even twinkled.
Above her, the fan’s blades swooped through her office’s torpid air; a long-forgotten cup of weak scotch sat near one edge of her desk. She kept chewing on her pencil and staring at the report in front of her, even though she’d memorized it hours ago. Words blended together, each sane on its own but confusing in this order. Not meaningless; she just couldn’t find out what that meaning was. She had that slight hitch in her thoughts that kept telling her she’d almost gotten it. Quarry had long thought she knew this area, but this… This was something else. If this was right, she didn’t know a thing. Or maybe she did know the area and this was new. She couldn’t say, and that was the worst part.
Quarry looked up when Allium leaned into her office. “Ma’am?” Allium asked. “The, the specialist’s here.”
“Good.” Quarry spat the pencil out and put it back in its cup. “Send her in.”
A unicorn with a sharp manecut and a rumpled suit beneath a worn coat entered the room and sat down opposite Quarry. “Ma’am,” she said, inclining her head slightly. “Trench Digger.”
Sheriff Slate Quarry was not a paranoid mare. Rocky Point didn’t support paranoia. It was small, out-of-the-way, friendly. Everypony knew everypony, and for each pony they didn’t know, they knew somepony who did. No one who passed through here had bad intentions, hadn’t for the past eleven years. Sheriff Slate Quarry tended to trust ponies, locals or otherwise.
So it meant something when Trench made Quarry’s coat stand on end.
She wasn’t sure what it was about Trench that did that. No one thing was off about her. She didn’t have sunken, staring eyes, or a gravelly voice, or a nervous gait, or even a sinister wardrobe choice. The only real thing was the speed of her arrival, and that could be explained in any number of ways. But there was something that seemed to cling to Trench, move within and around her. Maybe it was her attitude; it was plain, bored, and entirely inappropriate for the situation. Like a soldier desensitized to violence. But then, an agent used to strangeness that much was probably what this investigation needed.
“Y’need anything from me?” Quarry asked. The truth would come out eventually, one way or another. Might as well get it out of the way.
“Just one thing. Can you give me a rundown of the… incident?” Trench asked. She pulled out a notepad and pen.
“Sorry, but I don’t know a thing you haven’t heard already.” Quarry shrugged. “That kinda deal. Still wanna hear it from me?”
“Different perspectives are valuable. Yes, please.”
Were spooks supposed to be that polite? Well, Quarry figured that deserved some politeness back. “So it was late last night, just after 10.” Already, Trench was scribbling things down. “I’m workin’ late to get these last few reports filed away when one of the townsponies, she busts in here, says these two mares just came into town screamin’ for help. I go out to look. One of ’em, a pegasus, she’s pullin’ an earth pony in a cart, and the earth pony’s just screamin’ her dang head off, I mean, she just won’t stop. We manage to get a story from the pegasus, she tells us all about this inn three or four miles outta town. They’re travellers and stopped for the night, but there weren’t any staff about, even though the place was open.” She batted at one of her ears. “You’d hear the details better from those two, but the earth pony fell into some sorta… coma? Fugue? Dunno. And the pegasus couldn’t wake her for roundabout four minutes, and when she did, the earth pony kept babblin’ about voids and creatures of thought when she wasn’t screamin’.”
She leaned over the desk and saw Trench tense in anticipation; even her magic became jerky. “Thing is, there ain’t any inns near where they were. Never been. Allium, she’s a night-shifter, she knows that, so she volunteers to go out with some cops and take a look at where the inn was. They follow the cart tracks and…” Quarry sighed and shook her head. “It’s just too weird, mare. No inn, but they find where the mares stopped. Got pictures of the tracks, any fool could tell you a cart stopped and got unhitched. But the mares are shocked when they hear this, they say, no, the inn was totally there. So it’s gotta be magic, and me, do I look like I know how to handle magic on this scale? I’m about to write a letter to Canterlot askin’ for help, but Allium, she says she knows a gal, can cut through all the red tape. Twenty-four hours later, here you are.”
Trench nodded. “Here I am.” She hadn’t moved much, to respond or otherwise, but she was listening quite intently.
“So how’d you know about this so fast?” Quarry asked, leaning back in her chair. “I mean, you’re here, great, but if you came in by train, you’d’ve heard about it, what, this morning?”
“We worked together in Manehattan,” said Trench. “Friends in the government bureaucracy. Eventually, she wanted to get away from the… insanity of the city, so she left. We’ve got some enchanted objects to keep in touch. This sounded important, so I had it fast-tracked.”
Vague enough to be a cover, vague enough to be true and waste no time. But Allium, of all ponies, had known her. She couldn’t be-
Trench didn’t give Quarry much time to think it over, accidentally or otherwise, instead moving on without a beat. “Do you have anything else to add?”
“Not besides Allium offerin’ to pay for a motel for the mares. Rider stopped screamin’ after she slept last night — wonder if Luna did somethin’ for her — but she’s still shaky, so be gentle if you talk to her, okay?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t do it any other way.” Trench flicked the notepad shut and stowed it away with the pen again. Standing up, she said, “Thank you for your time, as brief as it was.”
“Sure.” Quarry nodded at Trench. Trench nodded back and turned to leave.
A sudden, panicky thought ran through Quarry’s mind. If her senses were right, if Trench was some sinister G-mare, the two mares might get vanished. She needed to make sure they left a trail. How? Maybe- “Hey!”
Trench stopped. Not the freezing of shock; just stopping.
“Let me know when they leave, alright?” said Quarry. “They seemed like such nice mares, I’d hate to not know if they got this sorted out.”
“If all goes well, they’ll leave tomorrow morning,” Trench said, “and I’m afraid I’ll be gone by then. But-”
“I’ll tell you,” said Allium. “They’re using my money for the motel, so I’ll need to see them anyway. I’ll see if I can get them to talk to you, okay?” She smiled.
And just like that, Quarry’s worries vanished like water in a kiln. “Good. Thanks.” She could trust Allium. Allium was honest and reliable. Quarry figured that if those two mares showed up tomorrow, or specifically Allium had an excuse for why they couldn’t be there, then she’d’ve been getting paranoid over nothing. “I hope you can get this mess untangled.”
“So do I, Chief,” Trench said as she left. “So do I.”
Sunkiss thanked Celestia the hotel room she was in was big and clean and modern and brightly colored. That meant it looked nothing like the room. She’d had nightmares about that room last night, and she’d bet money that she’d have them again.
She found herself pacing and constantly flexing her wings. Her restlessness had nothing to do with her being a pegasus. Soon, soon, they’d be talking with somepony about this, somepony who could shed some light on that motel. Would that calm her nerves at all? Sunkiss honestly wasn’t sure. The image of it was still there in the back of her mind, waiting to come back out whenever something jogged her memory in the wrong way. Knowing what had happened wouldn’t change a thing.
Seaborn was sitting on the bed, staring at the clock. She’d calmed down from this morning, no longer having sporadic panic attacks, and her little nervous twitches were gone. Maybe that cop’s breathing exercises really had helped, or maybe Seaborn could bounce back well. Maybe both. Sunkiss sat down and leaned against her; Seaborn returned the favor. “Is there anything I can get you?” Sunkiss asked.
But Seaborn shook her head. “No, I’m alright.” Her voice was a little quieter than usual, had been ever since the motel. “I’m just tired of waiting but there’s nothing we can do about that unless you want to go to the bookstore or something but it’s getting close to the time when that specialist is supposed to arrive, so that’s not a good idea.”
Again, Sunkiss berated herself for not going to the bookstore earlier, but she’d wanted to be sure Seaborn was okay. After an episode like last night’s, you couldn’t be too careful. “Do you want to stay here tomorrow or keep moving?” Sunkiss patted Seaborn on the hoof. “I’m okay with staying if that’ll make you feel better.” At the moment, she barely cared about herself. Seaborn needed the comfort more.
Seaborn chewed on her lip. “We’ll see, but I think I want to keep moving and get away from here, and getting on the road again is the best way to do that, but please, no more random motels on the side of the road in the middle of the night, okay?”
Sunkiss giggled and felt guilty for doing so.
She twitched when the door opened, but it was just the officer who’d rented the room for them (Allium? Yeah). “Hey,” Allium said. “Are you two feeling alright?”
“Been better. Been worse.” Sunkiss shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Because if you’re ready, the specialist is here to talk to you.”
Already? But- Never mind. “Are you up to this now?” Sunkiss asked Seaborn. “I know you’ve been through a lot, but-”
“No,” Seaborn said, sitting up. “No, I, I can talk.”
Sunkiss put her hoof on Seaborn’s. “Are you sure?”
Seaborn wrapped her hoof around Sunkiss’s. Her limbs weren’t shaking. “Definitely. Yeah.”
“Good,” said Allium. “Hang on a sec.” She exited the room for a moment; when she came back, she was followed by a stone-faced mare in an ancient coat walking with the casual precision of confidence. Part of Sunkiss wanted to be suspicious about convenient government employees, but most of her just wanted this all to be over. “Sunkiss, Seaborn, say hello to Trench Digger.”
“Ma’ams.” Trench inclined her head slightly. She took a seat across from them and levitated a notebook and pen out from the depths of her coat. When she looked at them, she didn’t make any movements she didn’t need to. “Time is precious, so let’s not waste it. If you don’t mind, I’d like to begin the questioning now.” Her voice was flat, professional.
At least she to-the-point. Sunkiss couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing or a bad thing; she settled on good. She glanced at Seaborn; when she received a nod, Sunkiss said, “Uh, sure. I’m Sunkiss and this is Seaborn.”
“Married?” Trench didn’t look away as her pen scratched across the page of her notebook. Allium hovered in the background, near the door.
“Our first anniversary was less than a week ago,” said Seaborn.
A bare hint of emotion crept into Trench’s voice for a single word: “Congratulations.” Then back to that interview voice. “So, Sunkiss. You pulled Seaborn to Rocky Point after the incident, correct?”
Memories flashed through Sunkiss’s head: blind running through the dark across unfamiliar roads, not knowing when she’d finally find somepony else, an inconsolable Seaborn in the cart behind. “Y-yeah.”
Trench stayed expressionless. “Could you tell me what happened?”
“Um, uh, sure.” Sunkiss swallowed. “S-so, uh, me and, Seaborn and I, we decided to go on a cross-country trip just to see Equestria, and we were going to stay off the main roads to see some of the less common stuff. We were doing fine until…” Another swallow. “It was… It was late last night and we were on one of the back roads out in the country…”
When darkness fell, it fell, especially out here on the plains. Shortly after the sun had set, Sunkiss hadn’t thought it was that dark. Less than half an hour later, it felt like she couldn’t see her hoof in front of her face. (She could, of course — starlight meant a lot this far from cities — but it still felt that way.) But Seaborn kept plodding along the road of packed dirt, undeterred by weariness or low visibility or the weight of her cart. She said it was an earth pony thing, but Sunkiss suspected it was a Seaborn thing.
Sunkiss’s watch was glow-in-the-dark. She squinted at it, fighting against the motion of the cart. Twelve was at the top, so… nine-forty-ish. They’d seen their last town hours ago, when the sun was still up, and they’d both thought they could keep walking for a while, because they had to run into a roadside motel eventually, right? But now, with stars and a half moon as their only light, with a cold wind whipping across the landscape, with the next town still at least two miles away, with no inn in sight, Sunkiss wished they’d stopped.
She flapped over the side of the cart and trotted up next to Seaborn. “Seaborn, are you sure-”
But Seaborn just laughed. “Sunkiss, Sunkiss, sweetie, has there ever been a time when I’ve lied to you about being fine?”
“No.”
“Because when I’m not fine, I’ll say I’m not fine, and I’ll let you take over, but I’m pulling the cart now, and I’m fine, and I’ll be fine for a while, and I know you want to help, but, really, I’m fine, so let’s keep moving.”
Sunkiss reluctantly flexed her wings. “Alright.” She looked up at the sky; during the day, she’d’ve wasted away boring hours like this by going for a short flight, but in the dark, there was a very real chance she’d get lost and be unable to find the road again. Even right now, the main way she knew she was on the road or off it was the feeling of packed dirt or grass, not sight. She settled for walking. At least she’d get her legs moving.
Then she saw it: a harsh orange dot piercing through the dark. It was still a ways off, but the light was unmistakable and right along their path. Sunkiss’s boredom-induced fatigue immediately lessened. An inn. It had to be. “Hey. D’you see that?”
Seaborn’s head moved an inch forward; Sunkiss couldn’t see, but suspected she was squinting. “Orange light? Yeah.” She coughed and picked up her pace a little. Sunkiss’s wings fluttered as she did the same. This late, the light wasn’t just light, but a beacon in a sea of black. As they inched ever closer to it, the blocky shape of a small building slowly slid out of the darkness and the lights finally sharpened into letters of twisting neon that burned the night away: Wayfarer Inn. Rooms were available.
“What do you think, honey,” said Seaborn, “because we could keep moving to whatever the next town is, but it feels like it’s midnight and even if it isn’t, it’s dark, and I don’t want to be out here in the dark, so-”
“Let’s give it a shot.” Sunkiss stretched, extending her wings to their fullest extent. “I want something soft to lie on.”
“Like me?”
“You deserve something soft, too.”
Much like the road, a section of dirt had been beaten down in front of the inn, a sort of lot for carts. There weren’t any others at the moment. As Seaborn unhitched herself, Sunkiss stared out into the inky dark. She could see a lot by the stars and moon, a lot more than she had expected, but there were still plenty of places for something to hide. It was like there was a veil over the world; she could make out vague shapes, but she couldn’t always say what they were. When something was distinct enough to make out, she’d probably mistake it for something else.
She took an unconscious step back towards the inn, towards the light, and twitched when Seaborn said, “Alright, I’m out, let’s get inside.”
Inside… well. She hadn’t been here before, but Sunkiss was struck with a strong sensation of déjà vu. The Wayfarer felt… archetypal, for lack of a better term. It was like bits and pieces had been taken from every roadside inn across Equestria to make it. There was the half-broken vending machine of overpriced snacks, here was the waiting couch next to a side table piled high with year-old magazines, here were the walls plastered with different travel posters, there and there were the hallways that went to the rooms, and on and on. Everywhere she looked, Sunkiss knew what she’d see before she saw it. The decor was at least a quarter of a century out of date, with sanguine carpet and wooden wall panels and cylindrical lamp covers that just screamed dorky-old. The place was silent as the grave; if not for the lit lamps, throwing their murky, flickering light across the carpet, it might’ve been closed. It was practically a set on a stage more than an inn. Good thing the only thing Sunkiss cared about was the bed.
The desk was empty, but there was a bell. Ring for service. Seaborn immediately did so. “Hello?” she said, not too loudly. “Anypony there?”
Sunkiss stretched again. She couldn’t do much to get her legs working in the cart, and if she didn’t work the tension out of them, they’d keep her up all night. She trotted in place for a moment, certain she could feel the blood rushing through her veins. When nopony showed up at the desk, she ambled over to the left of the two hallways. The lights were even dimmer down here than in the lobby, but it was just bright enough for her to see six doors, three on each wall, before the hallway dead-ended.
She took a few steps down the hall, then listened. Tight hallways like this always had interesting acoustics, making strange echoes with the noise piped down them. Except for this particular hallway, evidently; the sound vanished into the aether. Maybe it was getting absorbed by the carpet. Sunkiss glanced at the number on the first door, 222, then continued on down-
Sunkiss nearly ran back to the first door. 222. She looked at the door across from it. 225.
What?
Seaborn was still waiting, so Sunkiss ran outside. The light from the sign was enough to see that, no, the inn still didn’t have a second floor. Where would the stairs be, anyway?
“Honey?” Sunkiss asked as she re-entered the inn. “M-maybe we should keep moving.”
But Seaborn shook her head. “It’s late and we’re out here and there’s a vacancy and I want to go to bed and I’m willing to wait another few minutes if we get a room and is anypony in here?” She rang the bell again; her ears were fluttering in annoyance.
Something in the echoes made Sunkiss’s coat stand on end. “B-but… this place is…” She shook her head. Maybe she was just tired, too.
She glanced at the left hallway, then at the right. Maybe the doors in the right hall made more sense. She trotted over, glanced to one side-
No number. A vertical line, enclosed within a rectangle, within another rectangle, within another.
Sunkiss blinked and stared at it. What in Tartarus would that mean? It wasn’t even embossed like the numbers had been; it was painted on, the light glinting off it strangely. She delicately reached out and poked at the door. The ink was dry.
She looked at the door opposite her. Again, no number; a picture like a venn diagram, the circles on top of one another, with a dot in the middle.
Something was wrong here.
“Seaborn,” Sunkiss said, galloping over, “I don’t think we should stay here. Look at the doors.” She dragged Seaborn over to the left hall. “The numbers don’t make any sense.” She jabbed a hoof at the first door. “Why is it three digits when there aren’t even a dozen rooms, why is the first number a 2, why-”
Seaborn gave the door a quick glance, then sighed. “Honey, I’m tired,” she said, “so unless you have a better reason than numbers to leave, I’m staying, because they probably have it like that to make this place memorable on a tight budget, because Celestia knows nothing else sticks out.” She walked back to the lobby and rang the bell again. “Except for the lack of staff and guests even though the lights are on,” she yelled, “and I try not to ever get angry with employees, but I want a bed!”
“It’s not just the numbers,” Sunkiss said. She pointed down the right hallway. “Seaborn, come to the other side, it’s even-”
She stopped.
She saw light down the hall. Light that hadn’t been there before. One of the doors was open.
“Even what?” asked Seaborn, turning to look at her. Her ears twitched when she saw the light. “Huh. Was that open before?” She trotted down the hall towards it.
“Seaborn!” Sunkiss darted in front of her and put a hoof on her chest. “Look, I, I know you’re tired, but something about this place just isn’t right. The map says we’re not that far from a town. Do you want me to pull the cart the rest of the way? I can.” Anything to get away from here.
Seaborn lightly pushed Sunkiss’s hoof down. “It’s not just that I’m tired, I’ve also been walking down the road for hours and I’m bored, and I’m still fine with pulling the cart, but can I just look in that room before we leave so I can remember something?”
“I- Alright,” Sunkiss heard herself say. What was she doing? Why couldn’t she speak up? Was it just because this was easier? Because she was tired?
Seaborn pushed open the door a little. “Hello?” she asked. Then her ears twitched. “What in the…” Before Sunkiss could say anything, she’d entered the room.
Reluctantly, Sunkiss walked in after her. She glanced at the door; the “number” was an equilateral triangle, upside-down, completely black. Sunkiss shivered.
The room beyond was small, just large enough for a couple to spend the night and not much else. The lamp on one of the bedside tables glowed an aged yellow, providing the light they’d seen outside. The colors were the same muted ones they’d seen outside and the air was dry, stale. A light switch cord dangled from the ceiling, although Sunkiss couldn’t see what it connected to. A queen-size bed, apparently made a while ago, took up most of the space of the room. In short, it looked exactly like any other motel room Sunkiss had seen.
Except for a wide painting along one side. A painting of a hotel room. This hotel room. Complete with the painting inside.
Complete with Seaborn looking at the painting.
“What the hay?…” mumbled Seaborn. Apparently looking for some better lighting, she worked her hoof onto the hook of the cord and tugged. Nothing happened; Seaborn twitched and looked around. “Sunkiss, are you seeing this?” she asked.
“Yeah. Seaborn, you saw the room, can we-”
“No, hang on a sec, just let me-” Nothing happened again and Seaborn twitched again. She frowned as she looked around. “Seriously, what’s up with these lights?” She pulled the cord again.
And collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.
“Seaborn!” Sunkiss raced over to her and turned her over. Seaborn stared blankly out into space, her eyes glassy, her limbs limp. Sunkiss slapped her, lightly. No response. Again, harder. Not even a twitch. “Seaborn!” Sunkiss screamed, shaking her.
Nothing.
“Oh no, no, no no no no…” Sunkiss’s heartbeat sped up. “Seaborn, come on, get up…” she pleaded. “I… You can’t be…”
A switch flipped in Sunkiss’s head and her brain began spitting out actions before she could think. Okay. Breathing? Yes. Chest moving up and down. Hoof in front of mouth. Wind out, warm, wet. Wind in. Wind out, warm, wet. Shallow. Still definitely there. Heartbeat? Hoof on neck. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Strong. Good. Still alive. But-
“Hey!” Sunkiss raced out of the room and pounded on the opposite door. “Is somepony there?” Nothing. She tried the knob, Locked. Next door. “I need some help!” Her hoof sounded like a hammer pounding on an anvil. Next door. “Please! Anyone!” She was screaming her throat to shreds. Across the lobby, other hallway, next door. Locked. “Sun blast it, isn’t there anypony here?!”
When she stopped screaming and her echoes faded, the only sound was that of buzzing neon.
“YOU’RE ALL STOTS!” Sunkiss screeched to the empty building. “ALL OF YOU!” She was reeling when she returned to the room. Seaborn was still there. Still down. Still breathing. “Come on, come on, Seaborn…” Slap. No change. “Don’t, please don’t leave me here… Please…”
Swallow. Sunkiss lowered her head and worked Seaborn’s too-limp body onto her neck. Staggering from the physical and emotional weight both, Sunkiss carried Seaborn out of the inn and back to the cart. “Okay, let’s get you in here… We’re getting help, you are not dying here…”
She hitched herself up in record time and before she knew it, her hooves were beating out a steady galloping rhythm on the road. Her lungs burned and her legs ached and none of that mattered if Seaborn died. There was a town a few miles away, Rocky Point. She would make it.
She had to.
Time and space blurred. Every foot looked much the same in the darkness, every second the same as the one before and the one after. Still Sunkiss ran. She didn’t know how long she had left to go, but even if it’d been a thousand miles, she would’ve kept sprinting and she wouldn’t’ve stopped until she reached that town.
About two minutes into the trip, the cart shifted a little. Sunkiss didn’t think much of it. Not until Seaborn started screaming.
In the middle of a dark, deserted road, miles from anywhere, Sunkiss ground to a halt. She unhitched herself, fumbling with the straps as she did so, and ran to the back of the cart. “Seaborn?” she yelled over the other’s screams. “Seaborn, I’m here! What’s wrong?”
Seaborn didn’t seem to recognize her. She curled up in a ball and held her head in her hooves, still howling like a mare possessed.
“It’s alright, Seaborn!” Blinking tears from her eyes, Sunkiss pulled Seaborn close to her. “I’m here, it’s going to be okay! P-please, I-I…”
Still Seaborn wailed animalistically into the lonesome night.
Sunkiss wiped her face down and rocked the two of them back and forth. “I-I’m getting help,” she whimpered. “It’s… You’re gonna be okay…”
Was she?
When she hitched her shaking body back to the cart, Sunkiss stared at the horizon with wet eyes. Then she saw it: horizontal cluster of lights. A town. The shaking immediately stopped and a fire ignited in her heart. Seaborn was going to be okay. She was sure of it.
In the dark, alone, miles from anywhere, Sunkiss dug her hooves in and ran.
“-and then,” Sunkiss continued, her voice shaky, “we made it to town, and a cop found us. Allium here offered to pay for a hotel for us and we agreed to stay and wait for you. And… yeah.” She swallowed. “That’s about it.”
“I see.” Trench had been writing things down the entire time, frantically at some points. But her face and ears didn’t betray any emotion. “Thank you for that.”
“Do you… know what happened?” Sunkiss asked quietly.
“Not yet.” There was a surprising amount of unspoken resolution on that yet. “Seaborn, can you tell us what happened to you?”
Seaborn twitched and her breathing picked up. “W-well, um,” she said quietly, “I, I mean, I can, but it was… kind of a hard thing to, um, go through, and I’ve… got some bad memories of it-”
Sunkiss wrapped a wing around Seaborn and pulled her close.
“-but if you think it’s best,” Seaborn said, more loudly, “I can, I can give it a try.” She swallowed. “So, um, it was, like Sunkiss said, it was last night, and we were on the road and we stopped at that inn, it was really ordinary, like, if it’d been a normal inn I would’ve forgotten about it in a few hours on the road, and Sunkiss explored it while I rang the bell and waited, and she wanted to leave but I was just tired so I was okay with waiting, and nopony came after I rang the bell a few times, but this door opened and I wanted to take a quick look, the door had a black triangle on it, and it was just this normal room, except that the lamp was already on and there was a light switch cord hanging from the ceiling and there was a painting of the room on one wall, and-” She blinked a few times, shook her head, and continued, “-and it looked like the painting was me looking at the painting, but it was hard to tell, so I pulled the cord… a-and I fa-”
“Wait,” said Trench. “This light switch cord. Can you remember anything about it? What it looked like, how you pulled it?”
Seaborn flinched back, as if surprised, but decided it not worth worrying over. “Um… It was a, well, it was just a light switch cord, pretty ordinary and it was one of those long ones, with a hook for you to, um, hook your hoof onto, but it was hanging in the middle of the ceiling and I didn’t see any lights it was attached to, but I still gave it a tug because it had to do something, like, just a normal tug, and then the light turned all purple-”
“It did?” Sunkiss asked, sitting up a bit straighter. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Well, it did,” said Seaborn, “but I didn’t see where the light was coming from, so I gave it another pull, and the light turned all orange, and I still didn’t see where it was coming from, so I pulled it again, and-” Her voice stopped suddenly, like the words wouldn’t come. Sunkiss didn’t blame her. “And th-then I wasn’t i-in the inn anym-more because-”
“So you would say you pulled the cord three times?” interrupted Trench. “You’re sure?”
Seaborn blinked. “Y-yes. Positive.”
“I see.” Trench’s face didn’t change. But whatever she scribbled down, she double-underlined it. Viciously. When she was done, she looked at Seaborn as impassively as ever.
“So I pulled the cord one last time,” continued Seaborn, “and the light went weird and I… I… think I… l-lost myself…” Her hooves began shaking. “…b-because my body s-stopped… f-feeling right a-and… I w-was…”
Sunkiss pushed one of her rear hooves over a few inches so she and Seaborn were touching. Seaborn immediately stopped quivering.
Seaborn took a deep breath. “I w-was on a… kind of structure, I guess, made of uneven chunks of this strange black stone, it had all these golden veins running through it, but it wasn’t a big structure, smaller than this motel, and the sky was b-blank, white as undisturbed snow, with this inverted black pyramid hanging over everything-”
Catlike, Trench’s pupils dilated.
Sunkiss didn’t think Trench knew it’d happened. Seaborn definitely didn’t. But this government mare knew something. She didn’t just know something, she’d recognized something. Sunkiss tensed up.
“-and, well, I guess it wasn’t the sky,” continued Seaborn, “but we were in this v-void, and the void was white, and the structure was floating, and-” She suddenly winced and grabbed her head; Sunkiss patted her on the back. “Sorry, this keeps happening, it’ll pass-”
“I see,” said Trench blandly. She wrote something down. “The structure, then. Was-”
Suddenly, Allium sucked in a quick breath. She blinked. Her ears both turned forward. She stepped forward and cut Trench off. “What keeps, keeps happening?” she asked.
“My headache,” said Seaborn, “and it’s not that bad, but it hasn’t stopped since-”
“When did it start?” Allium asked quickly. “At the inn?” She leaned a few inches forward.
“Yeah, it’s been going on ever since I woke up again, and it…” Seaborn clenched her eyes shut and rubbed her temples. “It’s weird, it goes away if I think a lot, but if I think about the same thing too much, it comes back and it gets worse, or maybe that’s me, because I can’t think-”
Allium cleared her throat and turned around to face Trench. “Um, uh, Trench?” she asked. Her voice got lower with every word. “Can, can, can I talk to you for a second? Alone?” And was the color draining out of her face? “Like right now, dammit.”
Sunkiss bit her lip. It wasn’t just Trench who knew.
“I’m sorry,” said Trench, standing up, “but if you can excuse us for a second…” Allium practically dragged her to the bathroom, and Sunkiss heard the lock shut with perhaps a louder thud than was usual. Low, anxious voices Sunkiss couldn’t make out drifted from behind the door.
“Are you still doing okay?” Sunkiss asked, scratching Seaborn on the back.
“Yeah,” Seaborn said. Her nod was a bit shaky, but it was still there. “I’m fine and I feel like getting it out will help me…” A long pause; Seaborn chewed on her lip. “…get over it, and it might get worse, but I think I can handle it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Well.” Sunkiss pulled Seaborn close. “I’m here if you need me.”
“Yeah.” Seaborn put her head on Sunkiss’s shoulder. “Thanks.”
The clock on the wall tick-tick-ticked away, the only sound in the room besides the voices from the bathroom. Sunkiss stared at the door. What did they know? What did they know?
The door banged open and Allium nearly smashed the front door off its hinges as she galloped into the hallway outside. The sounds of her hoofsteps were already fading before Trench left the bathroom.
“What…” Sunkiss pointed at the door. “…was that?” After two people had a secretive conversation, one of them suddenly running for the hills was… unsettling.
“She just realized something,” Trench said vaguely and too calmly, taking her seat again, “and after some discussion, I gave her some things she needs to pick up. It’ll help with your headaches,” she said to Seaborn. “She’ll be back soon.”
“So do you know what happened?” Sunkiss asked, a bit more quickly than she intended.
“We’re slowly getting an inkling,” said Trench. She set pen to paper again and looked at Seaborn. “Now, where were we?”
Trench thought she had a good handle on what was going on. She thought she knew what Seaborn had seen behind the curtain. She thought she knew what was up with the motel.
And that was why the things she was frantically scribbling down had nothing to do with what Seaborn was saying.
She was writing down numbers, equations, magic circle diagrams, desperately trying to figure out if Allium’s plan would work. It had to. Otherwise, the damage could be catastrophic. Beyond catastrophic. For all she knew, Rocky Point might be levelled. But Seaborn and Sunkiss couldn’t know that. Trench had to keep them calm. So every now and then, she would say something like, “I see” or “oh, really?”, nod, or ask a relevant question. It was all just delaying tactics, anyway, praying that Allium would get back in time.
Luckily, Trench was good with the relevant numbers. Add this, multiply those, take the logarithm of that, subtract this, and hope to the stars you get-
… = 3
Trench blinked. That was… If her math was right, that was very, very good. She bought herself a few extra minutes by asking, “And you think that sphere was attracted to your thoughts?” She went over the equations again, one at a time, inspecting them with the care of a jeweler. No problems revealed themselves and-
… = 3
Okay, okay, good. Quite good. Seaborn was still talking, so on a whim, Trench attacked the problem from another direction, with different methods. Methods more available at the Bureau’s HQ than in the field, but if the math worked out, she’d be okay.
… = 3
Allium, Trench decided, was a very, very smart mare.
“-but b-before it could,” said Seaborn, “I… I woke up in the cart, and- and-” Her voice caught; Sunkiss pulled her a little closer. “-and I just- s-started screaming.”
“Understandable,” said Trench. It really was. Seaborn’s reaction wasn’t overblown at all.
“I remember Sunkiss saying something to me, but-” Seaborn winced and rubbed her head. Trench glanced up at the light bulb. It was steady. “But I couldn’t say anything,” Seaborn continued, “and she- She took me here.”
“Mmhmm.” Trench scribbled nothing in particular at the bottom of her paper and underlined it to make it look like she was doing something.
“So…” Sunkiss asked, “do you… have any idea… what it could be?”
“Maybe,” said Trench. “But I’d like to wait until Allium is back first. She should be here any second.”
She’d barely spoken before someone knocked on the door three times. Trench stood up. “If you’ll excuse me…”
Allium was indeed at the door, panting, almost sweaty. Her saddlebags bulged with paraphernalia of all sorts. Before Trench could say anything, Allium breathlessly asked, “Did you run the numbers? What’s the attunement magnitude?”
For the first time that night, Trench smiled. “Three.”
Allium twitched and her voice dropped even more. “You’re positive?”
“Absolutely. I double-checked my work.”
Laughing in relief, Allium released enough tension to hold up a suspension bridge. “Oh, thank the fates. Three.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, the apothecary had ninety percent of everything we needed for any variation on ritual 32 and the hardware store had most of the rest. We can’t do E, though, I couldn’t find-”
“We won’t need to. The lights aren’t even flickering yet.”
Allium glanced up. “Huh. They aren’t.” She leaned to one side to glance at Seaborn. “Who is that mare?”
“Somepony very lucky. Which ritual do you want to use?”
“Let’s just go with B. We have the time, it’s easy, and I don’t think they’ll notice much.” Allium dug a few thin strips of bark from her bag. “Willow, to start her off. Even better, it’s fresh.”
“Perfect.” Trench took the bark from Allium and turned back to Seaborn and Sunkiss. “Apologies,” she said, “but there was an urgent matter that needed handling.”
“Was it handled?” Sunkiss asked, her voice oddly low.
Trench almost tensed up at the thinly-veiled suspicion. It was probably too much to ask that the mares notice nothing, but still. Keep calm and don’t look her in the eye for too long. “Of course,” Trench said. “In fact, Allium here got a natural painkiller for your headaches, Seaborn.” She held the bark out. “Willow. Just chew it.”
“Oh, Celestia, thank you.” Seaborn grabbed one of the strips and began chewing. “Huh. Not bad,” she muttered through a full mouth.
Behind Trench, Allium rapped on the wall three times. Step 1.
“I heard they make aspirin from willow,” said Sunkiss. She looked Trench in the eyes. “Couldn’t you have just gotten aspirin?”
Trench kept her gaze level as she returned Sunkiss’s look. Not too aggressive, too not cautious. “Not in this case. Headaches from natural magic require natural remedies. Making aspirin drains the willow of its background magic, so it wouldn’t have been as effective.” Trench quickly went over the script in her head. No gaps that she could see. “Have you ever heard of ley lines?”
Quarry was at work early because she was an early-bird type of pony (even though, yes, she was also a night-owl type of pony). She’d slept… alright, though her dreams had been ones of paranoia and lies. But she woke up fine, and she got to work fine, and if she saw the mares before they left, the day would be fine.
Trench hadn’t left any sort of contact information. Good? Bad? Neutral? Probably neutral. She wasn’t supposed to stay for very long, so why bother? She was probably gone before the sun rose today. Allium wasn’t around the station, but she didn’t start until after noon. Quarry just had to wait until the mares came in to see what was going on with them. If they came in at all.
Which they did, around 10 AM.
Quarry was so engrossed in filling out a certain report that it wasn’t until the third set of knocks that she realized the knocks were on her door. “Come in,” she said.
One of the mares — Seaborn, if she remembered correctly — leaned in. “Um, you’re the sheriff, right?” She pushed open the door the rest of the way; Sunkiss was standing right behind her. “Because that officer who paid for our room — Allium, I think — said that you wanted to see us off before we go, and we’ll be leaving soon, so here we are.” She smiled in an unsure sort of way. “We talked with that magic expert, I think her name was Trench Digger, and she assured us we were okay and have nothing to worry about, and I feel better, and we’re free to go, so we’re going.”
“Thank you for, um, accommodating us,” said Sunkiss. “It really meant a lot to us that night.”
A huge weight lifted from Quarry’s chest. Seeing Seaborn like… that, two nights ago, and being unable to do anything about it, had been nerve-wracking. Then there was a day of not knowing anything, with the image of that screaming mare fixed in her brain. But now, at least she knew that they were okay, that her paranoia over Trench had been for nothing. “Sure thing,” she said. “Glad t’see you’re both doin’ alright.”
Seaborn laughed. “Oh, well, it was just a hallucination, nothing to worry about.”
Quarry frowned. “Really?” That was too… neat, too tidy. Seaborn had been inconsolable that night. And suddenly it was ‘just’ a hallucination? Something where anything could happen because, oh, it wasn’t real. Something that the two mares just happened to share. “What makes y’say that?”
“Trench said that,” said Seaborn, “and there were probably ley lines out in that area, and all sorts of weird magic can happen when they cross, and it must’ve gotten into our heads, and since, y’know, we were tired, we saw a motel and-” She blinked and twitched. “You know the rest.”
“I see.” Although Quarry wasn’t a unicorn, she knew that there was more to the magic than the vague “stuff happens” mindset a lot of pegasi and earth ponies (and unicorns, honestly) fell into. It was rare that magic wasn’t directed or controlled in some way, harnessed by some form of magical creature. And here was this hoof-wavey explanation about ley lines that relied on “weird magic”, and it didn’t sit quite right with Quarry. Especially with the way the two seemed so relaxed about it. But she wasn’t going to keep this couple in Rocky Point to grill them on what could be a lot of nothing, so she just said, “Well, take care.”
“Will do,” said Sunkiss. “I don’t think we’ll be able to not.”
After the couple had left, Quarry stared across the room at the back of her door. Ley lines. Ley lines. Something was off about that, but she didn’t know what. All that came to mind about ley lines was that they were currents of magic in the ground, running the way winds did in the sky and water did in the sea, but beyond that… They didn’t seem like the kind of thing that happened all the way out here, but you never knew. Maybe the land had been surveyed some time in the past.
She stopped by the town hall over lunch break and dug through what records she could find. Old, moth-eaten cartographers’ maps, usually. They were brittle, yellowing, and needed careful handling; in some cases, the ink seemed ready to peel off. But she recognized the land from the contour lines alone. Sometimes she found reports of surveyors, dryly-written things that were meant for a very specific audience that wasn’t her. At one point, she even stumbled upon a report on the local magical fauna from some big-shot university. She sifted through all that and more. But regardless of what resource she looked through, Quarry consistently came up with one fact.
There were no ley lines, major or minor, anywhere near Rocky Point.
In Manehattan, there is a skyscraper. It’s nondescript, archetypal, looking like every skyscraper. In spite of its size, it manages to hide. The government agency inside claims to study magic. They do not; they already understand magic.
Inside that skyscraper are rooms. Naturally. Rooms upon rooms upon rooms. More rooms than could fit inside, it seems. But it’s probably some architectural trick and clever planning.
One of those rooms is an archive, filled with letters, missives, documents. Internal papers. In spite of being deep within the bowels of this skyscraper, the most compromising details have been blacked out. Can’t be too careful.
One of those letters was sent the day after Trench Digger interviewed Sunkiss and Seaborn.
To Dr. ████, Head of Research,
The following is a preliminary report concerning the early stages of the ███████ investigation.
At roughly 9:50 PM on ██/██/10██, Sunkiss and Seaborn, two mares on a cross-country road trip, stopped at a roadside motel, the Wayfarer Inn, outside the town of ███████. Although the lights were on and the sign claimed vacancy, no staff were at the desk, nor were any guests seen. Both mares described the decor as drab but also somehow familiar or archetypal, saying it felt like every roadside inn they’d ever been in. Sunkiss claimed that the doors were oddly labelled, with numbers far higher than they should have been or symbols in place of numbers. Seaborn, convinced that the staff were merely out of sight, rang the service bell three times across various attempts to get their attention. Upon the third ring, a door with a █████████ opened. As the mares were very tired and unwilling to look for another place to rest, they investigated. Behind the door was a motel room that was plainly furnished, with two exceptions: a light switch cord hung from the center of the ceiling and a wide painting was displayed along one wall. The painting was recursive, of Seaborn looking at the painting.
In her attempts to properly light the room, Seaborn pulled the cord three times, after which (from Sunkiss’s perspective) she collapsed and could not be roused. During this time, Seaborn claimed she was transported to a world I recognized from her descriptions as █████████. (The full details will be included in a later report.) Meanwhile, Sunkiss loaded Seaborn into their cart and pulled her to ███████, desperate for assistance. Approximately three minutes into the trip, Seaborn awoke, thoroughly traumatized by her experiences in █████████, and was unable to be consoled. Under later questioning, she claimed that she had spent at least twice as long in █████████ as the time it took to wake her; it is unclear if this estimate is due to stress or ███████████.
The two arrived in ███ shortly after 10, where they attracted the attention of the local police. By luck, ███████ was home to Field Agent ████, who theorized that the mares may have been caught in an ████████████ related to ███████████ and volunteered to lead a team of officers to investigate. (Note that Seaborn was still unfit for questioning at this time, and so Agent ████ only had Sunkiss’s side of the story.) The team found no evidence of the Wayfarer at the site, which matches with local maps of there being no inns in that direction; Agent ████ considered her suspicions confirmed. Sheriff ████████ thought the incident was merely magical in nature and almost wrote to Canterlot for assistance, dissuaded only when Agent ████ claimed she knew a friend who could avoid the red tape. Agent ████ then contacted the Bureau, who sent out an advance team to investigate the location of the Wayfarer and myself to interview Sheriff ████ and the two mares within twenty-four hours.
During the interview with Seaborn (the first time her experiences were told), she was found to be unwittingly housing █████████ that had journeyed back with her. Thankfully, Agent ████ and I were able to ████████████ and dispel it with no harm done; amnestics were administered to prevent it from returning. Following some persuasion from myself, both ponies now think they merely suffered a shared hallucination brought on by a minor leyline confluence. While I do not think any further action is required on their part, in the case of Seaborn, it would not be out of place to try to recruit her. Her possible ██████████████████ and unconscious subjugation of █████████ for more than twenty-four hours clearly demonstrate ███████████████, especially since she is not a unicorn.
The advance team did not find much at the former site of the Wayfarer, but they found enough that I would recommend a more comprehensive examination, just to be safe. █████████████, ████████, and ████████████ all had noticeably higher readings than base levels. Field agents are █████████████ as I write.
As a personal note: the rapidity and degree to which the situation was contained was largely responsible to Agent ████ and her quick thinking. She strikes me as somepony who will attempt to downplay her involvement out of humility, one of those “just doing my job” folks. Perhaps she was just doing her job, but she was doing it exquisitely.
Investigation is ongoing. I will notify you of any changes.
Agent █████████
Royal Bureau of █████
This letter is the first in a series of documents analyzing an empty plot of land on a backwater road in Manetana.
A series of documents with everything blacked out.
Some things, the public isn’t ready to know.
