Day Fourteen

Rose dunked her face into the bucket of ice cold water and gulped down as many mouthfuls as she could reasonably take without drowning. She kept drinking even as the water around her started to turn red from the blood on her muzzle and in her mane. It wasn’t until her lungs burned from lack of oxygen that she finally came up for air.

When they had made it back to Al’s smuggler headquarters she had done the same thing and it felt just as good a second time. The first time she didn’t have much time to even savor it, as sleep beckoned her. Both she and Tempest had passed out not even five minutes after they had dragged themselves out of the hole. It wasn’t even clear just how long had passed during their slumber as they didn’t know what time it currently was, or even when they had passed out. The lone window and omnipresent sun gave them no hints either.

Tempest had changed this place since the last time Rose had been in here. There were numerous boxes stacked up in front of the door and a desk had been found and set up against one of the walls with all kinds of maps and documents laid out on it. There was also the cot that Tempest had fashioned out of a bedroll put atop two boxes. That’s where the unicorn was now, still sleeping and without her bodysuit. That had come off before they passed out and was crumpled up in a corner.

Rose had slept on the floor.

There was one thing that Rose needed to do, it was the one pressing matter she had. The patchwork bandages on her back were soaked through with blood and they needed to be changed. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it needed to be done. The sneaky smugglers had to have brought some medical stuff in at some point.

After rustling through several boxes she found nothing. There was no real rhyme or reason to what was in what box, it was all just stuff put wherever it would fit to be sorted later. It wasn’t until she looked around the boxes Tempest was sleeping on that she found a saddlebag with pink and red hearts stenciled on them. On a hunch Rose picked them up and looked on the inside and found the sigil of the Royal Guard, Celestia’s cutie mark, stitched on the inside of one of the pouches. These belonged to one of their medics at some point.

“Great, we had some of our own pawning off stuff…” Rose grumbled and cursed the guard who had sold off their supplies. How deep had the corruption gone in their ranks? What all had been pawned off to smugglers so it could be sent somewhere else? It was sickening.

Inside the saddlebags were a few rolls of beige bandage wraps with some plastic fasteners next to them. Rose fished them out and took them over to the side of the room with the bucket and spigot. Twisting to get the bandages on her back off was difficult and reaggravated every injury she had sustained thus far, including the debilitating one she was going to attempt to dress.

After a few uncomfortable minutes and some light cursing, Rose eventually undid them all and tossed the once white bandages to the side. Now they were about the same color of her coat, if not darker since a majority of the blood had dried. They had been haphazardly plastered over the wound, but with the rolls she could just circle her entire barrel to help keep pressure on it. The only question was how to do it. She needed to be able to go around her entire body and avoid pinning down her one good wing. She wasn’t the most dextrous mare on a good day, and her best days were long behind her.

“Need some help…?” The other voice caught her off guard and caused her to jump, which in turn caused her back to tighten and shot that all too familiar pain across her body.

Tempest wandered into view and looked about as good as she did when they got back, albeit far less exhausted. She had a massive bruise around the base of her shattered horn, her usually slender face was swollen to the point that her left eye could barely open and her right eye was covered in dried blood from the reopened scar. All that mattered is that she was awake.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind it.” Rose gave a small smile to the mare and shifted a bit. “Let me just-” She reached out to the bucket and poured out the blood saturated water inside into the drain beneath the spigot. Then the bucket was filled up again from the faucet and Rose pushed it behind her. “-would you mind just trying to clean it first?” Tempest took a seat behind her and her hoof prodded the wound on the pegasus’ back. Rose heard her suck in air through her teeth in sympathetic disgust.

“Really just ripped the whole thing out, huh?” The unicorn mumbled before she got to work.

The process of getting it all cleaned was long and grueling and involved too much prodding a very sensitive and tender area. Tempest had insisted on getting the flaps of skin that had once been a joint together in one place so as they eventually healed they would fuse together in a somewhat normal way. That had been unpleasant but the water being poured around it had been a decent reprieve before the actual act of bandaging started.

Tempest made sure the bandages were tight to Rose’s barrel. They were uncomfortably snug, but Rose didn’t know enough about medical stuff to tell if it was correct. It had hurt at first but after a few minutes the constant pressure around most of her torso felt good. It might not feel good in a day or so when they were soaked through with sweat or blood but it was already better than what she had before.

“I wish we had some ice for your face.” Rose lamented. “All of the ice in the city has probably melted by now…”

“I’ll be fine.” Tempest reassured her with a nod. The unicorn then dumped out what water remained in the bucket and filled it once more. Then she took long deep gulps from it in an effort to rehydrate herself.

“How’s your head? You were really out of it…” Rose wanted to say ‘yesterday’ but she still didn’t know if that was right or not. Instead she opted to let the sentence hang.

“Better.” Tempest answered curtly as she wiped her mouth with a hoof. She then picked up the bucket and dumped the rest of it on her head and let the water saturate her entire body. A pleased sigh escaped from her muzzle and Rose even spotted the hint of a smile.

Rose got up and trotted around the small space so she could test out the bandages. Moving still hurt but rest had softened it a little. The pain wasn’t as stabbing when she trotted and she could even raise her left hoof a bit higher without her body protesting. It was a little progress.

“Rose…” Tempest sighed as the name fell from her mouth. Rose turned to face her and found the dripping wet mare on her hooves. Her dark pink make was slicked back to go down her neck and water dripped to the floor and collected around her hooves in pools. A slight hint of red colored the pool. “I want to say…thanks. For what you did yesterday.”

“Hey, you did the same for me.” It was that simple. Tempest had gone looking for her, found her, and had been there to lean on when Rose was at her breaking point. “You saved my life too. It was only right for me to return the favor.”

There was a war behind Tempest’s eyes. It wasn’t often that something could be seen on the mare’s face, but the last day or so had worn down usually stalwart defenses and a hint of indecision and guilt spilled forth from the cracks. The cracks were swiftly filled in and Tempest returned the sentiment with a nod instead of whatever she wanted to say.

“So what do we do now?” That was the question of the decade as far as Rose was concerned. They had accomplished their goal and gotten the message out to the Crystal Empire, so now they had no immediate plan. “Your escape plan, what is it? You said you had some sort of way out of here.”

“We need the tunnels.” Tempest said with a shake of her head. “It’s a grotto down at the bottom of the mountain behind one of the waterfalls. There’s a boat, it’s how I was supposed to get out of here.”

“So if those things keep digging up the tunnels…”

“Then it’s non-viable.” Tempest finished. “We need to wait until they lose interest in the tunnels or until we can find another way out. Until then, we wait.”

Day Sixteen

They had found a bag of oats in one of the myriad of crates that dotted the little headquarters. It was a good thing because all of the food they had smuggled from the kitchen the night the princess turned had gone bad. Oats were something that would at least keep them going, but they weren’t exactly nutritious.

After that very unpleasant meal, Rose decided to go up to the roof. Tempest had initially called for her not to, but Rose wasn’t going to listen. They needed to see what the city was like and if there was an avenue out beyond just the tunnels. Rose also needed to get out of the stuffy room.

After some difficulty with the ladder, Rose finally emerged onto the rooftop. She could still see Soarin and Spitfire as they came into the city. She could still see them fly off towards the castle. It replayed in her mind over and over again as she stood in the same place she had that day.

There was not a doubt in her mind that she had done the right thing, though. Running had been the correct course of action. Even if Spitfire had not died, she certainly had not made it to the tower. If not even a Wonderbolt could outrun the princesses, then Rose would’ve been doomed from the jump.

Even though it wasn’t the reason Rose was up on top of the little fort in the city, she couldn’t help but look up at the sun. The familiar revulsion came back and made her stomach roll and turn. She grimaced and brought her one good wing up to cover her eyes. The connection she had once felt to the star was still absent.

That was odd because she decidedly didn’t feel abandoned by its blessings. Something had helped her get out of the castle. Something had woken Tempest up when she needed to. Something had given her the necessary strength to keep going, to push through everything that plagued her. None of it made any sense, not with what she knew to be true.

Rose shook her head and turned her gaze back to the city. The monsters still milled about, their snouts to the ground as they tried to sniff out hidden prey. The streets weren’t packed anymore, not like they had once been. The majority of the beasts were probably in the castle trying to dig out the tunnels.

What was the closest possible exit from here? It had to be the south gate, the one that would take them down the mountain and straight to Ponyville. It was now a major road thanks to Princess Twilight’s new castle. Did they really want to go there though? That’s where all of this seemed to have started.

As she mused over possible escape vectors from the cursed capital, she was suddenly interrupted by a brutal and guttural howl from the direction of the castle. Rose’s head whipped in that direction, expecting one of the princesses to burst forth from the structure and scream right at her. That didn’t happen though. Instead the northern side of the throne room superstructure seemed to fail all at once and it crumbled with a cacophonous crash that ejected white marble dust into the air. The debris did not settle though, instead it started to sink into the mountain below.

“Rose, what’s going on?” Tempest appeared right beside the pegasus without a sound. Normally that would’ve startled Rose, but her golden eyes were too transfixed on the castle to even be surprised. “What…what are they doing…?”

Rose was trying to piece that together too. This was more than just the tunnels they used, or at least that was the immediate gut instinct. Piecing together the puzzle with what she knew and what she was seeing now took a minute, but slowly the picture began to come together.

“The crystal caverns…” Rose muttered the words and then turned to Tempest. “Celestia moved all of the unicorns in the castle down into the crystal caverns when they figured out that only the unicorns were turning…” The guard didn’t even know how to get down to the caverns, the princesses had expressly forbidden it before the Changeling invasion and doubled that order afterwards. There had been some minor quakes after the invasion and Rose had no doubt that was due to the alicorns blocking off the caverns completely. “...they’re freeing them.”

“More unicorns is less of a problem than them disrupting the tunnel system. They had to have cut them off by doing that.” Tempest tapped her hoof in thought as she spoke. She opened her mouth to add something else but was cut off by a chorus of howls from the thousands of unicorns all across the city.

It sounded like a victory cry.

Day Seventeen

Rose couldn’t get comfortable.

Tempest had her little cot, but Rose was still left with the floor. She had sort of finagled together a simple pallet out of some of the tops of crates and some bolts of fabric that had been laying around. The one good thing was that they didn’t need blankets thanks to the constant sweltering heat inside of the little stone box they were effectively trapped in. When they were both awake and alert they would open the hatch on the ceiling and allow the mountain wind to carry what resembled a cool breeze overtop of their little pillbox. When they slept, it stayed shut and they were free to bake.

It also didn’t help that she couldn’t sleep on her back or left side. She was relegated to her right side or stomach, not positions she would usually sleep in. So now she was learning a completely new way to get comfortable along with trying to ignore the constant ache that emanated from her back. It was the small agonies that really compounded the misery of the monotonous day to day they lived in.

“I was going to let him kill you.”

Rose’s heart skipped a beat and she sat up in her makeshift bed and turned to look up at Tempest, who had been starting right at her. Maybe that was why sleep would not come, somepony had been staring hard enough that she could feel it.

“What?”

“Bulwark, I was going to let him kill you.” Tempest restated it flatly.

Rose felt something stir in her chest, a certain tightness. It constricted her heart and it hurt more than the missing wing on her back. It was a deep wound that no bandage could cover or heal. Yes Bulwark had gotten one good hit in and a kick, but Rose thought Tempest had been just as surprised as she had been herself.

“What…? W-why…?” Why in the world was she tearing up? She didn’t know Tempest at all. Everything that she knew about the other mare was inferred or just guesswork. They didn’t know anything about each other, so why did she care what this pony thought about her?

“Because I was going to kill him right after.” Tempest once again spoke in the cool calm tone she was known for. “There can’t be any witnesses that saw me here. None. Nopony can know I was ever in Canterlot.”

Rose immediately stood up and backed away from the mare. Tempest stayed seated but her intense eyes kept burrowing right into Rose’s. She couldn’t escape that gaze and the more she looked into the other mare’s eyes the more the walls seemed to close in around her. Could she make it to the ladder in time? Could she make it into the tunnel before Tempest could close the gap? If escape was impossible, was self defense viable?

“I didn’t, though.” Tempest’s voice broke its haunting monotone and a dollop of genuine emotion fell into it. “Maybe I should have, I don’t know.” Her voice fell to a whisper and ended in a deep frustrated sigh.

“Why didn’t you…?” That question now hung in the room and weighed down on everything. Rose would not be comfortable around the mare until she knew exactly why the unicorn had spared her life, or why she hadn’t killed Rose when she had the chance previously.

“When I was a filly-” Tempest ran a hoof through her spiked mane and closed her eyes in thought. “-I was playing with my friends and we went into a nearby forest. I got lost and came to a cave, one that had an Ursa Minor inside. It broke my horn and gave me this scar.” She pointed to the newly reopened and still raw mark that ran vertically over her right eye. “My friends thought I had died…even when I fully recovered they still looked at me like I had died. Even my own parents looked at me like I was a freak after it.” One of Tempest’s eyes twitched and her nostrils flared as a long and intense anger gripped her words like a vice. “I guess…some part of me saw you half dead and without a wing and I…” Tempest finally broke off from staring straight into Rose’s soul and looked around the room. “...I don’t know.” She did know, she just didn’t want to say it.

Rose relaxed. She understood even if Tempest didn’t want to say it. That was fine, sometimes it was hard to say what you needed to say. The best thing to come of the admission was the reveal that there was a pony underneath that hardened exterior. It felt good to know that they could connect over something.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that.” Rose trotted slowly back to her little bed and sat back down.

“I don’t need your pity.” Tempest spat.

“It’s not pity.” Rose shook her head and smiled up at the other mare. “Why would anypony pity you? Look around, you’re still alive. You’re not one of those monsters. Why would I or anypony else pity you?” Rose felt her heart soar as an old familiar light filled it. “You’ve survived! You survived that Ursa Minor, you survived long enough to get here and you’ve even survived all of this!” Rose couldn’t help but take to her hooves and gesture around with a hoof. “You shouldn’t feel pitiful, you should feel blessed.”

“Do you feel blessed?” Tempest got up from her bed and pointed at Rose’s vacant wing socket. “You’ve lost what made you a pegasus, you went through all of the same stuff I did here. So give it to me straight, do you feel blessed?” Tempest scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Because I’m feeling pretty cursed at this point in my life.” She then began to pace around the room. Her lithe figure cut through the thick swampy air like the bruised ribs and slightly swollen face were of no hindrance to her now. “Celestia did that to you, you understand that right?” She pointed to Rose’s missing wing “Your god mutilated you and left you to die! How can you feel blessed?!”

“Because I’m still alive.” Rose had been grappling with the very questions that Tempest was demanding answers for. She didn’t have a comprehensive answer, but she had the bones of one just waiting on a little more meat. “I…when I first woke up I felt cursed. I was so…despondent. I felt abandoned. I asked for a sign, then I got one. The explosions you set off convinced me to move, to start back towards the radio tower. I asked for a sign and I got-”

“-you got me instead, sorry.” The unicorn’s stance changed: her shoulders fell and she lowered her head a bit.

“It led me to you.” Rose continued her thought and ignored the strange outburst of self-deprecation. “Then we pulled through together. I feel blessed because I’m sitting here right now. If I wasn’t then you would’ve let Bulwark kill me, then you’d be here alone.”

“I did that.” Tempest stamped her hoof and glared down at Rose. “Nopony, not a god or some sun or anything else, made me do that. It was a decision I made.” She took a long deep breath and held it for a few moments before she let it out slowly. “Whatever. I’m not arguing with you. You can feel however you want.”

It took Rose a few minutes to gather her thoughts. She had been used to masking her feelings and thoughts for so long and somehow she had let it slip. That was her worst outburst in years, and all it did was serve to alienate Tempest and make her angry. Rose couldn’t afford that anymore. All they had was each other right now, and if either of them wanted to make it out of Canterlot in one piece then they needed to get along.

“I don’t need you to believe.” Rose spoke quietly. “I just need you to let me believe. I know…I know it seems silly or illogical to you.” Rose tapped her hooves against the floor and thought of what to say next. “All I wanted my whole life was to have other ponies accept me for who I am and not try to change me or hate me for it. That’s the difference between us, I guess. I can hide it. You’re not so lucky…”

Day Twenty

Tempest and Rose had said nothing to one another for a few days now. They had just gone about their business: sleeping, eating, washing, and checking outside to get an update on things. A few hours ago-had it been hours? The bell stopped ringing at the top of every hour a long time ago now-Tempest had left. She had gone into the tunnel without a word.

If Rose was lucky, Tempest would come back. If she wasn’t, then there would be one less pony in the city now. Of course Rose had her money on the unicorn having gone to her escape route, that would be the sensible thing to do. The monsters outside hadn’t been focusing on the tunnels since they collapsed part of the throne room, now they were focusing on getting to the crystal caverns to free their trapped brethren.

Maybe their digging served both purposes. It would let them get to the monsters trapped below the castle and it would cut off the tunnel usage for Rose and Tempest. If they were as smart as they seemed, then that seemed like the right choice. They didn’t know that the tunnels came out this far into the city, or it didn’t seem like they did. They weren’t digging out here, after all. Hopefully that meant the little hideaway the two survivors had was nowhere on their radar.

Rose couldn’t sit down in the sauna that was the little brick fortress anymore. She had to get out into the fresh air. So that’s what she did. Up the ladder she went and out of the hatch on top. She made sure to leave that hatch open just in case she needed a quick escape.

It was sweltering outside. Worse than any summer day that Rose had ever felt. Even in the south, where she was from, it never got this bad. Maybe she had just gotten acclimatized to the chilly mountain climate and wasn’t used to the heat anymore but this felt different. It felt malicious.

She had been mulling something over for a few days, but she needed some sort of confirmation before she came to a solid conclusion. To test her hypothesis she looked up at the burning ball of light in the sky and closed her eyes, then reached out with all of her faith and prayed. It wasn’t praying for anything in particular, it was just an attempt to see what she felt.

The air still felt wrong on her tongue as she muttered some words. It tasted like rancid soup and was just about as thick. The heat beating down on the mountaintop was vicious and unceasing. Rose could feel it through the bandages on her back. Then there was just something else, something ineffable.

“Do you feel it? Take a deep breath, relax. Tune out the rest of the world.” Her father’s voice rang in her ears and she followed his old wisdom. “Block out all of your senses, but focus on the air. Don’t worry about its smell or the sound of the wind in your ears. Focus on what’s underneath. The magic.” She did so. She closed off her mind to all senses but that one so seldomly used by all other races except unicorns. Even though she couldn’t use the magic around her, she could still feel it if she tried. “All things are connected through it. From the dirt to the heavens above.”

It felt like sludge.

When she was little there was a silkiness to it. It was soft, gentle and inviting. It always felt so warm and ready for use. Now? Now it was like a hot tar that burned Rose’s proverbial hoof when she concentrated on it. The whole world was truly poisoned.

How far up did the rot go? Had it gotten to the sun? Had it reached the firmament above and poisoned the very heavens? Rose looked to the castle and thought of the two royal sisters somewhere inside. They were the links to that unknowable place. They had tethered the heavenly bodies and controlled them

Those tethers had surely spread this plague somewhere it should’ve never been allowed to go. Rose’s mind was awash with horror at the conclusion she arrived at, one that made the fateful decision from weeks ago at this point haunt her a little more.

Those tethers needed to be cut.

Author's Note

AND THAT'S 50K WORDS FOR THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER! I COMPLETED NANOWRIMO IN 13 DAYS!