Descent of the Seven

The Seven’s Fall

Written by iAmSiNnEr

Co-written by: Serene Gust

One

Beneath Twilight’s glowing lamp, Tirekian ore shone like the brightest crystals in the darkest mines. Her heart leaped as she unearthed a vein as wide as her hand. It was one of the most valuable minerals in all of Equestria.

Twilight shifted her hair away from her brow and glanced at the other miners, searching for any movement. But their pickaxes continued to swing against stone. They weren’t close enough, which meant that they couldn’t see what she had found.

“Sweet Faust…” her little brother, Spike, muttered as he wiped the sweat from his face and lowered his pickaxe. “That’s a whole vein of the ore.”

Twilight pressed a finger to her lips, although she was smiling. “Shhh,” she whispered. “You know better than to attract the attention of the other miners. Remember last week? We almost had to hit one of the other miners with a pickaxe before he would stop trying to steal our finds.”

As Spike nodded, Twilight handed him a chisel and wedged her own into the stone crack, striking it with her hammer, and the lode crumbled into chunks of hardened clay and mineral.

Twilight grinned at Spike, excitement flowing through her. They were never this lucky. Too often she left the mine sore, with nothing to prove for her hard labour. Their mother had used the last of their flour this morning. They needed bits, or their family wouldn’t eat that night.

She knelt and reached down. As her fingers touched the ore, a wall suddenly came in between her powers and her. She grimaced, and quickly picked it up. It was as beautiful as it was crippling, suppressing her magic, just as it would suppress the magic of every Mageborn in the kingdom.

Hatred for the mineral rose inside her, but Twilight quietly reminded herself that she was lucky. Just the presence of the metal should have doused her powers entirely, but she was stronger than the other Mageborns. Spike called it a resistance.

The moment Twilight dropped the ore into the bucket, she could feel her powers again, and she smiled slightly as she twitched her fingers, and willed the bucket to rise in the air a little. As the bucket rose slightly, Spike nudged her hard, and Twilight lost her concentration. The bucket dropped on the ground with a soft clang, and Twilight glared at Spike.

“Stop that!” he hissed. “Do you want the guards to arrest us?” He sounded like their father. Faust, the older he became, the more he looked like their father too, caution etched into his every feature. Even his threat was as mild as a lullaby.

“The handle on the bucket is broken,” Twilight argued. “No one will see me.”

“I’ll carry it.”

“It’s my birthday,” Twilight smiled slyly.

“No. Once a guard sees you using your powers,” Spike hissed, “You’ll be thrown into a jail cell faster than you can say, ‘I didn’t do anything’.”

Twilight let her hand fall to her side. Spike was right; magic was as forbidden as Tirekian metal was coveted, the minerals drawn from the deepest mines to be crushed, smelted and gilded onto every surface in the kingdom. Protection against the likes of Twilight and her kind- Mageborns, who had magic and powers that the rest of the kingdom feared.

And yet Spike was also wrong. Twilight knew no one was watching them, because she was always careful. No guard paced their tunnel.

She could argue with him a hundred more times and it wouldn’t matter, so she changed the subject. “What do you think this is worth?” she asked, “Fifty bits?”

“At least,” he replied. “Rumour has it that our benevolent Queen Celestia raised the price of Tirekian metal, just for you.” He winked at her.

“Just for me?” Twilight clasped her hands.

“She wants you to have a birthday feast,” Spike joked.

She gasped dramatically. “Such mercy! What fortune!”

“Shhh- keep it down,” Spike looked over his shoulder. “Next thing I know, you’ll be Celestia’s newest advocate.”

Twilight wrinkled her nose. “Never. Cross my heart and spit on Faust’s grave,” she pointed at the remainder of the lode. “Shift’s about to end. Hurry!”

She and Spike had only gotten half the vein when the bell sounded. Twilight rammed her chisel into the loosened rock and cursed when falling ore nicked her hand. She examined the wound in the lantern light before wiping her blood-stained knuckles on her trousers.

Spike tossed the ore into the bucket. “Be careful. Dad won’t like it if you come home injured,” he warned.

“I’m fine,” Twilight muttered as she grabbed her backpack and stood up. A full bucket was well worth a few cuts and scratches.

Spike covered the bucket with a dirty handkerchief and picked it up, hugging the ore close to his chest. Twilight kept an eye on him as they fell in line with the others, slowly making their way to the mine’s main artery. The shallow chambers of the mine had been picked clean, and miners like Twilight and Spike had been burrowing deeper for years now, the snaking tunnels shored with fresh timber balances.

The line of tired workers stretched endlessly before and behind them, the air stinking of salt and sweat. Five years in the mines and the crawl to the entrance was still as antagonizing as the first time. At least Twilight’s nightmares about being buried alive had stopped.

At the conflux of two tunnels, Twilight almost collided with Rarity, a girl whose family lived two doors down from them. Despite having been working in the mines for hours, Rarity’s hands and hair were somehow mostly free of dirt and clay.

“Any luck?” Rarity was clutching her own bucket with delight.

“A bit,” Spike said immediately. Twilight sensed her brother’s eagerness at seeing Rarity and smirked. He jabbed her in her ribs.

“Where are your sisters?” Twilight asked, frowning. Rarity was never alone.

Rarity’s face fell. “They’ve gone to find my brother.”

“Is he well?” Twilight pressed, sensing Rarity’s worry. Rarity’s older brother had been reassigned from the mines to one of the farms. Before he left, he was a cheerful companion in the mines, even on days he found no ore. His smile was a welcome change from the dullness of the mine.

“The farms were destroyed. The cottages are nothing but broken splinters, like the worst storm you could ever imagine passed through. No one could explain it. Most of the workers are missing. My brother, and my aunt…”

A chill numbed the tips of Twilight’s fingers, and she clenched her fists. There had been rumours for the past year about strange disturbances beyond the city’s gates, structures crumbling to dust, farmers disappearing. Twilight had heard the stories only through echoing conversation within the mines, workers had picked up word from the farms in the vale. Queen Celestia had yet to make an official announcement.

But this was real not a rumour. Rarity’s brother was someone Twilight had shared a pickaxe with. He’d offered her a shoulder when a cart had run over her boot last spring, before he was reassigned.

“I’m so sorry,” Twilight whispered. Beside the mines, the farms were the only other places that Mageborns were sent to toil. Rarity’s brother could have been someone from her family. He could have been Spike, or her father.

“My sisters left this morning to help and try to find him,” Rarity said, “I don’t even know if they got a permit to leave the city.”

“I’m sure they did,” Spike exchanged a glance with Twilight. Twilight knew what he was thinking. As soon as the farms were repaired, Celestia would assign another batch of Mageborn to tend the land, like they were nothing but bodies. None of Twilight’s family had been reassigned yet, but the strands of luck she clung to were disappearing beneath her fingers.

Spike put his hand on her shoulder, and Twilight knew he sensed her fury.

Anger changed nothing. Not in this damned gilded city.

The chamber widened, and Rarity was jostled into another line. Spike and Twilight only had time for a quick farewell before they found their own line to the ore buyers. She was still reeling from Rarity’s tale.

The farms may have looked like it had been destroyed by a storm, but Twilight knew better. She had heard rumours of destruction magic on that scale before, many years before, of a young girl who destroyed an entire village in the foothills. Celestia had that girl executed.

If the same thing was happening again, then perhaps a Mageborn was to blame. But destruction magic wouldn’t explain the missing harvesters.

“You think it’s magic from a Mageborn,” Spike said. It wasn’t a question.

“I don’t want to think it’s magic,” she replied, ignoring the butterflies flying around in her stomach that told her otherwise.

The cavernous mouth of the mine echoed with the conversation of hundreds of miners. Twilight sensed the usual feelings of anxiety and worry. They were nervous to see how many bits they could bring home.

“Where are the guards?” Spike asked, craning his neck to see.

The ore buyers’ table were always accompanied by a handful of city guards, but Twilight didn’t spot any today. Normally she would be grateful for their absence-- she hated the way their eyes followed her particularly close, but now it was disturbing.

“I’m surprised a riot hasn’t broken out,” Spike said.

“Don’t give them any ideas,” Twilight muttered. When riots broke out, Celestia’s soldiers converged at the capital and many Mageborn died. The last was a year ago, the memory still raw in her mind, the haunting smell of flesh and blood still potent.

Anyways, she had no intention of rioting against the buyers. It was the guards who knocked the hilts of their swords against her head when she wasn’t walking fast enough, the guards who visited Mageborn homes to reassign mothers, fathers and children to the farms, tearing apart families with glee. Twilight had entertained fantasies about Mageborn rising to use their powers against them. They were powerful-she was powerful.

They approached the buyer’s table, and Spike dropped their bucket on the table. A small man with thick spectacles glanced inside, his eyebrows raised. He made some scratches in his ledger. From his coin purse, he counted out twenty-five bits and placed them in Twilight’s outstretched hands.

Twilight stared at the buyer. “That’s too little,” she said.

The buyer shrugged and shooed her along with a wave of his hand.

Twilight’s pulse beat in her ears. She ached to use her powers with a flick of a hand, to break something. Maybe the buyer’s spectacles.

Spike muttered a word of thanks to the buyer, shoving Twilight away and up the steps to the mine entrance.

Twilight took a few deep breaths of the dusty air. It’s not his fault, she thought until the beat of her heart slowed. Buyers had no control over the wages. Only Queen Celestia did.

“Tomorrow she could drop the price of ore to a quarter-bit per ounce,” Twilight said, “The mines would be filled with starved corpses because all of us would have to work until we keeled over-”

“Stop.”

Twilight turned to Spike, flustered.

He was smiling, which surprised Twilight. “What’s in your hand?”

“Twenty-five bits, Spike. You were standing right there with me.”

“Exactly,” he put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Flour, meat, salt, oil… All of that will be fifteen bits at most. That’s ten left over.”

“Ten bits left over for what?” Spike’s giddiness, as intoxicating as it was, annoyed the heck out of her.

He laughed. “Don’t play daft. For your birthday, or did you forget already?”

She didn’t forget. Seventeen felt odd. She should save any leftover bits, that was the responsible thing to do. But Spike was right. She deserved something nice, and so did their family. Those bits were for them.

“I guess this could mean only one thing.”

Spike followed her up the steps to the entrance, satisfied. “Cake.”