The Grey Path of Arcane Gears

Age 18

The night was just like the last night, just like the night before that, and every single one for the last fourteen years. Silver Badge once had dreams of being a detective or at least a beat cop, but sometimes fate gives you the short straw and plops you right into the grave.

Well, around the graves at least.

Crickets chirped as the gentle spectrum of purples and deep indigo slowly swayed behind a canopy of brilliant stars above his head. The only other sound being the light click of slate under his hooves as he made his way down cobbled pathways between angelic statues, stone stars, and squat name plates all marking the final resting place of those long gone. True, it wasn’t glamorous, but it was pretty darn peaceful once you got used to the creep factor.

With every third or fourth step Silver Badge swayed the torchlight in his hand to run its beam over the headstones. Over the years he grew used to the effect of shadows crawling over tall objects. He knew every statue and grew familiar with the almost-living silhouettes that stretched as the light’s angle shifted. An angel reaching up to the sky could become a shadowy demon about to grab your ankles if you didn’t know any better.

A low wall of marble and silver inlay marked the transition from middle-tier graves to the obscenely rich. These statues carried an absolutely eerie realism down to fur texture and hoof detail. The graves were made of rare crystals and letters made with gold and other precious metals. Further in we’re the mausoleums of very wealthy and very old families such as the oddly named ‘Pudding Head’ clan. The large stone structures housed catacombs of the oldest families known to Equestrian history.

Silver Badge didn’t worry about grave robbers, however. What he couldn’t see, but knew, was the shimmering magenta bubble of magic that those expensive walls gave off. The entire wealthy section had wards that blocked attempts to teleport in. The statues were not just decoration. Once in a while Silver would feel his heart skip a beat as a stray sparkle of magic would make those marble golems shift. Most of the time it was just a turn of the head or the bending of a finger. That didn’t make watching stone come alive any less terrifying.

A very quiet sound made Silver pause mid step. Stone rubbing stone. He turned his flashlight trying to find which of those creepy sentries had come to life and why, but no angel or armored soldier was moving around in blasphemous animation. He couldn’t see, nor would find the figure behind the marble wall carefully dismantling the cemetery’s defenses.

Anyone watching would have seen the most ineffective graffiti artist crouching behind a low marble wall. Hidden in shadow a hooded figure gently stroked her silver stylus against the stone, a clear crystal no bigger than a grain of rice at the tip not even making a scratch.

Through her eyes was a white canvas dancing with odd shapes and colors. Entire sentences written from right to left in runes floated freely until her stylus tip trapped and pulled it closer. With a sweep of her little pen a single rune burst into flecks of starlight as she hastily stroked a new symbol in its place. With every minor edit she could see the bubble of magic quiver and shift from magenta to rose, so dangerously close to a fully active red. Slowly, carefully, she reassigned mastery of this ward from its author to the holder of her tool. Of course she wasn’t stupid enough to write her own name there. Her eyes were gifted, but there were ways for talented mages to do the very same thing.

She stood once the edit was finished. A few rows of headstones ahead she could see the beam of a flashlight. Now or never. She brought the stylus tip to her lips like a tiny microphone.

“Phimao”

She uttered the old word for “to muzzle”. In that instant the bubble shifted to a green hue. Hoping this meant the alarms were silenced she stepped inside.

She let out a sigh as the statues remained still. With another command that was remedied. The dull clink of marble hooves came out of the shadows and stood at attention. Two muscular stallions in Roman armor held a silver gladiolus and shield in their hands.

“Good Goddess, put those down. Do you seriously try to use those on trespassers?”

The statues looked at each other before answering her with shrugs.

“Oookay… put them down. Get the guard, be gentle.”

The metal clang made Silver Badge leap in the direction he just came from, his beam landing on two stone soldiers walking shoulder to shoulder. Behind them was a figure, but her hoodie and the statues in front of her made it impossible to make out. Without warning the statues grasped his wrists and cupped his shoulder. There was no hope in wiggling free, not in a grip of solid stone. As his panic set in he had a mind to shout for help, but nobody would be around in the dead of night.

“Don’t worry. Nobody is going to know this happened. Not even you.”

Her gloved right hand slid out of the pocket of her jumper. The fingerless glove was oddly decorated with delicate lines of gold running up the fingers and below knuckles. Across the back of her hand was something that looked like a compass, but inside was seven concentric hollow gears around a central stone. Each gear had a tiny crystal mounted along their edge. With bends of her fingers and pivots of her wrist the rings turned clockwise and counterclockwise. It looked like planets orbiting a tiny sun, and as every orbit paused a spark traveled from the outer stone to the center. Every spark formed a unique pattern, or glyph.

Just below her knuckles were four oblong stones mounted in gold. The one under her pinkie knuckle began to glow softly at first, but with every completed glyph a sickly green color grew brighter.

Her hand stopped gesturing as she held it up, her eyes locked with the terrified guard. Thumb and index finger pressed, and with a snap of her fingers that green gem burst like a spent fuse. She hissed in the air and cradled her hand. She knew it would hurt but was a little surprised at how much. Still, it worked.

The Guard’s eyes began to glow that sticky green hue, lavender fog swimming in the eerie magic.

“You fell asleep in your break room and had one very weird nightmare. It’s okay, In Two hours you’ll wake up and nobody will be the wiser.”

“Sleep… none the wiser.”

Silver mumbled the words back to her, most of them impossible to make out.

“Okay, boys. Carry him to his office and make sure he’s comfortable. After that, grab your weapons and get back into position.”

The two statues carried the guard off leaving her alone amongst the opulent graves. Still cradling her hand she made her way down cobbled pathways. For ten minutes she took in the silence and did her best not to look past the low walls. Beyond them was a tall and wild tree line, and peering between the trees were glowing eyes. Despite the manicured lawn and architecture she couldn’t forget she was deep into the Everfree. A place so wild no pony or civil creature would dare call it home.

Ten minutes crawled by as flawless new statues transitioned into ones more faded by time and weather. Vines could be seen curling around statues and headstones. The deeper she walked more layers of brown and dead vines could be seen overlapping their more vibrant replacements.

She stopped in a place that looked decrepit yet somehow still regal. Tall statues celebrated heroes that died thousands of years ago, and tallest of all was a cathedral that still glimmered under all the dinge and dirt.

It looked like a small mansion made of stone with two tall steeples and stained glass windows depicting a closed fist clenching a hand scythe. Past the stone double doors was the family resting place of the Pudding Head clan. Despite the silly name, their history was peppered with amazing deeds and betrayals. They saved the world from famine and negotiated a peace between Unicorn and Pegasi. Later, the Unicorn families that caused that war twisted laws and stripped the Earth Clan out of their rights. Things didn’t get any better until Celestia’s father fell sick.

The stone double doors before her were solid marble, but runes along the edges suggested a way to make them open. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time to decode this one.

“Well shit. I was really hoping to avoid this…”

Her hand moved in a series of practiced motions as she sized up the door and estimated the thickness. In the past she saw unicorns that screwed up their calculations and found themselves half way into a wall or, worse yet, the same intended distance directly into the ground.

The second gem slowly began to glow a violet hue with every completed glyph, though this one seemed twice as long as the mind control spell used minutes before. Naturally, this one was far more complex, which made it far more likely to backfire.

She sighed wearily as her hand lifted and hooves began to step toward the solid marble likeness of a door. With a silent prayer to the moons she snapped her fingers. The Violet stone popped with sparks as her body flickered out of existence.

Her stomach lurched as the world flickered in a split second. For that first instant it felt as if her body and the very rotation of the planet had to reacquaint themselves. Even as that adjustment was made a lingering nausea persisted.

The musty stale air served as a decent distraction. She was in a moderately sized room with a giant stone plaque above a downward staircase. She didn’t bother reading the plaque and made her way down a passage that twisted left before finally ending in an underground hallway. The high domed ceiling extended north and south quite a ways, but pale blue illusionary fires in silvery braziers let her see the dead end in the south. North it was.

Her foot clips rang full and hollow on the marble floor, her path lazily zigging and zagging as dim runes appeared in her vision to warn her of traps and alarms. Along the walls were paintings of mares and stallions wearing garb from the 1970’s, puffy Afros and polyester. Minutes down the hallway the styles grew more and more antiquated. The relaxed 60’s. The pragmatic 40’s. The dazzling 20’s. The old-world 00’. Eventually it was puffy collars and knights garb.

She paused for a moment at a wide painting. In the center was a lavender Alicorn dressed in a simple robe and long curly hair decorated with an olive leaf laurel. Behind her was a pristine version of the Everfree when it was known as Canterlot, or should one say ‘Old Canterlot’. It was so beautiful before the land reclaimed what was her’s.

Near the lavender Alicorn was the adolescent form of Queen Celestia herself. On the other side was an Earth Pony wearing golden bracers, the mark of a royal slave. Her eyes were Milky blue with white sightless pupils.

“Silent- no. Ancestor, maybe.”

Arcane shook the notion out of her head. It was a weird coincidence and nothing more. The eerie atmosphere was getting to her.

It was another eight minutes of walking down the dusty hall before the space opened up into a large domed room. Above was a large chandelier with tiny braziers and that ghostly blue light. Looking around, Arcane realized three tall arches led to corridors in every cardinal direction including hers.

“Well, that makes things a little easier.”

The four catacombs of Earth, Unicorn, Pegasus, and Alicorn shared this space as a junction point. Of course they would be right here in the center of it all. Five statues stood in the center, and at each of their backs the sarcophagus holding the represented corpse.

The fur on the back of her neck began to rise as she felt the sensation of eyes. The Statue of Pudding Head had her back to Arcane, but looking past the earth pony statue was the blank marble eyes of Celestia’s father, King Astra. She could swear he was judging her from beyond the grave. He would be right to do so.

“Lord Astra, Lady MorningFall, Chancellors. I’m not sure if you can hear me…”

She made her way closer and gently touched the lid of Pudding Head’s sarcophagus.

“But if you can, then I’m sorry. If this makes me the villain then I’m willing to accept that, but-“

She couldn’t shake the idea they were listening. She could sense something was there, like a sort of conscious magic.

“A few years back one of my dad’s fellow soldiers said the phrase ‘The fireflies have a door’. I didn’t give it much thought for two years. Later, I learned the fireflies were dragons, and the door was a portal like the one locked up in Celestia’s castle. I don’t think I have to tell you more than that. Dragons can barely keep a leader for more than a year without a violent coup. I don’t want to imagine what they would do with access to unlimited alternate realities.

So we tried to destroy it. My dad told me after it all went wrong. The team she trained to secretly steal or sabotage the mirror was caught. It devolved into war, and since then we’ve been at it.

So, I bet you’re wondering what that has to do with a strange earth pony trespassing at your final rest. Well, the dragons are not killing their captors. They send them back with very specific wounds, ones that do more damage than any scar normally should…”

Arcane’s voice became weak as the memory came flooding back. No matter how hard she tried, all those same terrible feelings managed to return as fresh as the day they were made.